The Caretaker: Ballroom Eternal

Ahead of his performance in the Blackpool Tower Ballroom during last weekend’s The Black Lights festival, James Leyland Kirby spoke in a rare interview about the unlikely viral afterlife of his dementia-themed project, The Caretaker.

For followers of James Leyland Kirby’s work, it might seem like he’s been resting on his laurels. Under his own name or one of his many aliases, nothing has been officially released since 2019. That’s quite a pause for someone responsible for a multi-million-streaming internet phenomenon and a dizzyingly vast catalogue of DIY releases reaching back to the mid-90s. But Kirby’s motivations are not the same as those of the average artist with 38 million plays on their most famous work. In the wake of the viral success of his closing statement as The Caretaker, Everywhere at the end of time, the UK-born, Poland-based artist has been forced to navigate the murky world of modern music distribution to arrive at a place of relative peace.

Beaming out of his new attic studio space in Kraków, the image Kirby presents is a bright and breezy one. He could pass for an 80s metal singer, albeit with an affable northern showbiz patter that belies his roots in Stockport. His full head of ginger ringlets hangs down past his shoulders, and his shades stay firmly in place as he articulates the bizarre experience of becoming an online sensation. After years slogging away in the underground, he is now in a comfortable space with the time and means to create on his own terms.

“I was so prolific back in the day out of necessity, of survival,” Kirby relates. “Selling 500 copies of little seven-inch singles would keep me going another month. The one thing [The Caretaker’s success] gave me was time, without the pressure of having to put something out. I can just explore what I want to explore.”

Kirby has maintained his position as an entirely independent artist responsible for his own affairs, but it could have been very different – he recounts a sliding-doors moment meeting the head of Domino Records at the British Library to discuss signing to the label. “I would’ve had access to the British Library archives to do something there, which would’ve been fantastic,” Kirby recalls. “I think most people would’ve done that. I don’t know why I didn’t do it. When I look back, I think it’s a bit crazy not to do that, but The Caretaker is full of strange things.”

It feels natural that The Caretaker should have an uncanny lore around it. The project’s main impetus is Stanley Kubrick’s horror masterpiece The Shining, in particular the ghostly ballroom scenes and haunting echo of 1930s ballroom music echoing through the abandoned Overlook Hotel. When it began in 1999, with Selected Memories from the Haunted Ballroom, The Caretaker was just one of over ten different aliases Kirby was exploring. You’d be just as likely to see him cavorting around on stage miming to liberally mangled pop hits and indulging in abrasive, glitchy sonics with a punk streak that placed him outside of the more critically courted outsider rosters of labels like Warp, Rephlex and Skam. The Caretaker, however, tapped into something different that grew a life of its own.

“I always loved that sound,” Kirby says. “There’s something very beautiful about slowing down these ballroom tracks, putting them through cavernous reverbs, adding extra crackle, getting the texture just right. The first album was called Selected Memories…, so it was always memory referenced, and that grew into, ‘Well, let’s look into memory more. Let’s read a lot more about memory. When it goes wrong, what happens?’”

Across a run of albums through the 2000s with evocative titles like Theoretically pure anterograde amnesia and Deleted scenes, forgotten dreams, Kirby developed The Caretaker by processing rips of shellac and 1930s ballroom jazz, moulding it into compelling, subtly unsettling ambient music. He took further cues from music of the same era used in the grim 70s British drama Pennies from Heaven, along with Mark Fisher’s cultural theory around our complicated relationships with the past and future. But it was with the launch of his History Always Favours the Winners label and 2011’s An empty bliss beyond this world that the project seemed to sharpen in focus. In 2016, he introduced the first stage in the project’s closing statement, Everywhere at the end of time, a clearly mapped-out concept evoking the steady deterioration of someone suffering from dementia across six stages, culminating as a full six-and-a-half-hour spiral from swooning, nostalgic romanticism into abyssal noise.

The work was acclaimed, and it had already reached some prominence. There was a live performance at the Barbican in 2017, where Kirby and visual collaborator Ivan Seal sat in leather armchairs sipping whisky, looking at projections of visuals by Weirdcore to a unique soundtrack of bottomless drone – a tribute to early supporter, Mark Fisher. Few could have predicted that, in the upheaval of the pandemic in 2020, The Caretaker’s final stage, released in 2019, would become a viral sensation among 15- to 24-year-olds. The enforced slowdown was the perfect scenario in which a thoroughly online generation suddenly had all the time in the world to take an extended trip into sonic dementia, share their experiences and challenge others to do the same.

“It was totally unexpected,” Kirby states. “The crazy thing for me is, because it went on streaming, I actually got to see some of the demographics. It’s a very young audience, which surprises me, because this was a project never made for that audience at all. I find it really strange that it resonates so much. It’s probably down to a lot of YouTube usage, more than anything, and [the music’s] association with Backrooms.”

It’s not hard to see why The Caretaker’s unsettling ambient makes a neat fit with the yellow-hued nightmare of the internet’s favourite empty office space, but what’s striking is that, in an age of disengaged streaming and automated playlists, the very nature of The Caretaker’s virality is rooted in active engagement. Perhaps teenagers daring each other into creepypasta legends seems detached from the project’s original intention, but it is much more intentional than sticking Spotify on autopilot and letting the algorithm do the rest. For Kirby, the unexpected surge of exposure left him battling with his desire to keep the music off YouTube and other services versus other uploaders monetising his work. 

“I don’t really want it to go on streaming,” Kirby clarifies. “Not because of streaming rates, but more out of solidarity with all musicians, certainly independent ones, because you’re not getting a fair crack on these services. It’s impossible to find audiences. The algorithms stack for the big artists. It’s about visibility and how a lot of these streaming services devalue music in many ways.”

The Caretaker phenomenon kicked into gear in the early 2020s, boosted by Lana Del Rey riding out of her Coachella 2024 performance to a full brass band rendition of It’s just a burning memory. As a result, Kirby found himself trapped in a mire of issuing takedown requests – he describes it as “the ultimate game of Whac-A-Mole” – and dealing with services like DistroKid to try and resolve the issue. As a purely independent artist with no label or management behind him, Kirby was left powerless to address the issue on his own terms.

“There’s nothing in place, still, for musicians,” he explains. “Now, if something goes big and you’re really anti these corporations, you can’t keep work off there. It’s impossible.

“What [DistroKid and Spotify] couldn’t understand when I was speaking to them was that I wouldn’t want to have the work up there. ‘Why wouldn’t you want this there?’ I’m like, ‘Well, I don’t know. I just don’t want it.’”

Admin aside, the official streaming of the project has now provided a steadier foundation for his own life as an independent artist, some seven years after the supposed ‘death’ of The Caretaker. Much like the film it took initial inspiration from, the project has repeatedly displayed a strange set of phenomena that seem to insist on its existence.

“By around 2010, I was just gonna finish it,” Kirby reveals. “It was only because I was in New York this one time and I picked up a series of records. I was so hungover and didn’t even want to go out. I was there with the Demdike Stare guys and they carried on record shopping after I went back. They came back and said, ‘Oh, it’s really crazy, because we walked into the next shop and they were actually playing Caretaker music.’ And to this day, I’ve never heard that played anywhere when I’m out.

“I got the records back to Berlin. At the time, I was thinking, ‘There’s nowhere else I can go.’ I was recording stuff from the records on the turntable in my flat, thinking it was all recording perfectly. But when I went to listen back later, all the audio was broken, and it gave me half the sound of the Empty bliss… album. It’s very strange.”

Post-internet infamy, The Caretaker has crept back for select live shows. Kirby insists he would do more, subject to conditions, but that he doesn’t get many invites. Playing the David Geffen Hall at New York’s Lincoln Center in 2023 was a highlight: “It’s like an out-of-body experience, just being on this big stage, looking out and going, ‘Wow. How has this made it here?’” Now Kirby is revisiting the project, along with visual works from Ivan Seal, for an impossibly perfect pairing with the Blackpool Tower Ballroom as part of the programme for The Black Lights, a festival curated by the team behind Manchester’s soon-to-close counter-cultural bastion, The White Hotel.

“There’s very few places at the moment I’d like to perform in the UK, to be honest,” he says, “but Blackpool Tower is probably number one. It’s a massive inspiration. It’s an unbelievable space. The last time I would’ve been in there was maybe 1995, and since then it’s undergone a massive restoration.”

The plan to bring The Caretaker to the north-west coast’s premier ballroom has been a discussion between Kirby and The White Hotel team for many years, so there’s a great deal of anticipation around the performance. 

“For me, it’s about the space, and also thinking about the people that are no longer there throughout the project. Obviously, you lose relatives, you lose friends, there’s other people, and it’s about that as well. So a lot of ghosts… It’s more thinking about this, really – the ghosts and some of the classic Caretaker tracks. More than, ‘Oh, this is a new thing we’re presenting,’ it’s like, ‘No, this is the best space to listen to this music in.’

“I don’t like going on a stage and not doing much,” he adds. “It’s hard to present The Caretaker in a way which would not be, ‘I’m putting a vinyl on, and it’s going through some effects.’ I’ve never done that. There’s been some kind of performance angle to it based around where I’m playing. With this one, the venue is probably more important than even what I’m doing in there, to be honest.”

That said, Kirby will have other opportunities to indulge his theatrical instincts. Elsewhere on The Black Lights’ programme, he and visual collaborator Ivan Seal will be presenting a site-specific installation across a whole bed-and-breakfast in Blackpool, and he will also be delivering a V/Vm performance that should prove to be quite the opposite of The Caretaker’s hauntological reverie.

“When I was younger, I was always rolling around on stages, rolling down stairs, just to change the energy of a place and wake people up a bit,” Kirby explains. “Maybe people think I’ve gone soft since the old V/Vm days, so in Blackpool, I’ll be doing my own The Hitman and Her show. I want to channel my inner Pete Waterman for that, get a suit on. I’ve had the idea for years. I want it to be this corrupted fever dream. It won’t be what people want; probably lots of annoyance in there. It’s gonna be the hair, The Hitman and Hair – that’s how we get around the copyright angle, so we don’t get a cease and desist from Pete.”