Crack

Mates who get bored doing the same thing are indefensible. If you are bored and tired, do something about it. End of argument. Then there are mates who make you wonder how it all fits in. These are the people that get bored easily. Their time becomes so full with ideas and projects their fluid existence becomes a credit to their time organisation and energy. You wonder how it all works.

Geoff Barrow is in the latter category. Founding member of Portishead, art gallery curator, record producer, Invada Records head honcho, father and now in new band project Beak>. No, that greater than sign is not a type error.

Inadvertently making you feel like a lazy sunbather is a potent side effect of Geoff’s projects. There is a lot going on in his head. The other two members of Beak> are handpicked from the Invada Records roster. Billy Fuller from Fuzz Against Junk and Matt Williams from Team Brick fill the Beak> line up to form a band rooted in experimental sensibility.

This is confirmed by the gig Crack witnesses in Geoff’s newly opened Friend And Co Gallery on Park Row. Taking over the frontal space that was formally The Level nightclub, Beak> are playing an early Saturday afternoon slot for invited audience members and friends. It’s unbelievably refreshing to watch a gig at this time. Perhaps the most entertaining element is watching the reaction of people when they walk past and hear loud, low bass and dark brooding noise. This really isn’t the soundtrack to do your Saturday shopping.

Beak>’s ethic is to poke, mould, fiddle and finger the model. This is primarily done out of their own frustrations with modern music. Which is a brilliant reason to get annoyed and do something about it?

By their own admission the gig was as rough and ready as it gets, especially considering it was Billy’s wife’s birthday the night before and he was feeling fragile. This is where Crack picks things up.



Crack: Do you think there was a connection between how rough it sounded and your state?

Billy: “I’m rough anyway.”

Geoff: “It was a rough sound in there wasn’t it?”

Billy: “It was very abrasive in that concrete room.”

Crack: Is that the style of sound you prefer to have when you play live?

Billy: “I think our set up without a PA and just us in a room going through an amp is a lot better than doing a big club with a massive PA.”

Geoff: “We’re playing Rough Trade East on Wednesday and that’s the first time we will have played live through a PA. The gigs we’ve done so far have been a record shop in Berlin, a restaurant in Berlin and a small café/bar in Paris. It’s a case of just playing in a room like you saw it in the gallery.”

Crack: There is a certain amount of rawness generated by playing in that box style room. You get to hear the contrast between the louder and quieter aspects of the sound much easier. How do you guys find it?

Geoff: “The thing about UK audiences is that if you play quiet it’s just a key for people to talk, whereas if you play in France or Germany they just listen?”

Crack: Are they a more appreciative crowd?

Geoff: “Well I think they are. The English attitude to gigs is like, ‘let’s hear the one off the radio’. It’s a social thing. Take The Gossip for example, they play Standing in the Way of Control and after they’ve played that, the crowd just want to see their mates and have a chat. You could even see it when they played Glastonbury. For the rest of the time the crowd are on the phone to their mates to tell them The Gossip had just played that Control tune.”

Crack: So I suppose that means picking your venue quite wisely in Bristol?

Billy: “No not really, it’ll still be a social.”

Geoff: “It’ll definitely still be a social. They’ll be loads of mates there who haven’t seen each other all year, that’ll just turn up and chat all the way through.”

Crack: “Are you bothered that might be the case on the tour?

Geoff: “The London Garage gig one is on the first night of ATP, so basically anyone who is going to be into tunes like that are going to be in Minehead, so it might be like us and a dog.”

Crack: When you were recording you had a very raw approach where you were all in one room with one take.

Billy: “We just set up our gear, put up some mics and pressed record. The first track on the album, Backwell that was the first time we started playing in a room together.”

Crack: When you started Beak>, was it a conscious decision to record that way?

Billy: “It was the only way it was going to go, because apart from getting together that day and setting our gear up, we hadn’t even chatted about it.”

Geoff: “We hadn’t even had a beer by then. We’d been promising to have a beer with each other for about three or four years and it was a similar scenario with Matt (the other member) even though he doesn’t drink beer.”

Billy: “He just smokes loads of Marlboros …”

Geoff: “… and drinks coffee. So really there hadn’t been much discussion between us. We liked what each other had done individually. I find music can be so fucking chatty. I think all of us have got to an age where we’ve out-talked music.”

Billy: “Talking about music is like dancing about architecture … Frank Zappa said that.”

Crack: So when did this beer actually take place then?

Geoff: “It didn’t. I was watching Billy on the stage play with his band Fuzz Against Junk and someone rang me up and basically said they were looking for a bass player to play with Robert Plant. I saw Billy playing brilliantly so I rang him back and told him I’d found someone and then he went on tour with Robert Plant for three years.”

Billy: “I finally managed to buy him a couple of lagers to say thanks.”

Crack: So is Beak> a case of let’s see where this goes, through jamming?

Geoff: “It’s just writing on the spot. Radio really controls everything. Press doesn’t sell records anymore. High celebrity and radio does. The main thing you used to concentrate on was getting a record that sits well on radio. Because radio has been taken over by lots of careerists who don’t care about music they don’t want to play a record that stands out too much because they’ll get into trouble and they won’t be able to further their careers. I think that Cheryl Cole and the Kaiser Chiefs sound the same. It’s a completely different world, but you put it on the radio and they both sound the same.”

Crack: Wasn’t that what John Peel’s show all about? There isn’t a show on the radio like that anymore.

Geoff: “In the sixties and seventies people used to sound different. I liked Enola Gay or Joan of Ark by OMD because no one sounded like that. At that point put that next to something like Abba it all sounded different.”

Billy: “At that point the Birdie Song sounded different in its own unique way.”

Geoff: “The Crazy Frog was like the new Birdie Song.”

Crack: Crack has a real soft spot for things that are so bad that they come out of bad and straight back into good again. Things like Cheryl Cole are much more offensive than The Birdie Song or The Crazy Frog.

Geoff: “There is a lack of novelty songs.”

Crack: Maybe Beak> should fill that void?

Billy: “We’ve got plenty of novelty songs. Don’t worry about that, we’ve got loads up our sleeve.”

Crack: Where did you get the name Beak>?

Billy: “It thought it was a really good word.”

Crack: And why did you add the > sign?

Billy: “Because it looks like a beak.”

Crack: When we send it to various people they think it’s a type error.

Geoff: “When we first did it we didn’t realise it was a greater than sign, we just thought it looked like a beak.”

Crack: We know you’ve done some production work with The Coral and The Horrors. Is this wholly different?

Geoff: “Production is just about your relationship with the band and their trust in your ears. With Beak> I didn’t even produce it. I’m a member of a band with three people. We did a few tweaks on the production desk, but that was about it. It made it really refreshing as we were all coming from the same place. There was no sense you had to bend or do anything. The more out there it went the more we got into it. There was no commercial expectation, because we didn’t even know we were releasing a record. When you a record for a major label, they expect a record at the end of it, we just went into a studio to make a load of noise.”

Crack: Was there a point when you knew it was going to be a record?

Geoff: “When we played Backwell. We looked around at the end and we were all smiling. We ended up doing 25 tunes in 12 days.”

Crack: There are lots of names on the album that are local places in and around Bristol.

Billy: “I’ve spent my whole life here and I think the music reflects things like my past memories of growing up here.”

Geoff: “Portishead gets so much press. It’s time to big up all the other little towns.”

Crack: On that note is Portishead on the back-burner?

Geoff: “It’s a band that when it feels right to start writing again, we’ll do it. We’re working on an album and will start again when we’ve finished touring. Beth’s up for doing it and Adrian’s up for doing it. There’s a lot of chatting and business involved with being in Portishead and doing Beak> has reminded me of being back when I started playing music. There is a lot of pressure for Portishead to come back out and play music as were in 1995; which would be completely wrong.”

Crack (to Billy): Between Beak>, Fuzz Against Junk and Robert Plant you’ve got an amazing roster of projects going on at any one time?

Billy: “Yeah, they are all totally different, but I don’t know anything else. I was skint last year and I ended up driving a van for six months starting at 5am in Avonmouth and by the end of it I was like 'fuck this!'"

Geoff: “That’s why we get so pissed off with people illegally downloading the record. Yeah, you can download, but the reality is Billy’s got to drive a van because people keep doing that. So it’s alright for you to be sat in your fucking plush little flat downloading it, but the reality for the musicians is much different.”

Crack: How is the best way to counteract it? Is it to play with the model like Radiohead and ask the customer pay what they can afford for the record?

Geoff: “Radiohead can afford to do it because they are millionaires. Not being funny to them, because I really like them as musicians and people, they can afford to do it. They may still have continued to do it that way, even if they were skint. I understand why people download illegally, but there won’t be independent records, you’ll just end up with Cheryl Cole. The people think the increase in live music means musicians still make money are wrong. If you haven’t got record sales to fund your tour then you can’t do anything.”

Crack: What is the best way to stop illegal downloading?

Geoff: “People making music that’s important and means something to galvanise the music buying public. It’s all linked up with attitudes in popular culture. Music was in a weird spot before Nirvana came out and then it all ended up coming back to this bloke who was an idol and didn’t give a fuck about anything other than making some tunes. People related to him and it’ll happen again. People will end up relating to a band or something that has substance and isn’t some fucking idiot celebrity.”

Geoff: “We were at Coachella last year with Portishead and people just wanted to film stuff with their mates just to prove they were there. In reality they weren’t really there. They were watching through a little screen.”

Geoff: “So other than everything being shit, things are pretty good.”

Crack: It’s nice to see a band go against the grain and play a gig on a Saturday afternoon in an art gallery.

Geoff: “Rock’n’roll is a cliché. A rock’n’roll gig is a cliché. You show up at night and you have a sound check and you perform your gig. It’s a boring trend and a tested concept. We’ve described our tour as average musicianship and feeling.”

Crack: Does the feeling compensate for the average musicianship?

Billy: “We’re making excuses for ourselves already. Spirited with a nice character. Not good looking.”

Here endeth the lesson



Tune: Ham Green

http://www.myspace.com/beak2009

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