THEY’RE nice boys, really. So they like taking innocent bits of taped sound and tormenting them into undreamed-of noises tacked to the most obscure messages. I always thought Belgium was the sole source of stuff like this, but l was wrong. Who but good ol’ Sydney lads would put the Pope’s message to Australia over tape-looped choral arrangements punctuated by a recognisably male voice that seems to be actually saying ‘Brassiere, in Rome’. In And then they plant the macabre story of a murderer’s treatment of a corpse in the most catchy rhythm since New Order’s Age of Consent.
Under questioning, they admit they’re not musicians. they’re not artists, what they like is fun! Ladies and gentlemen, a big hand for Severed Heads!
Four years and four albums (Ear Bitten, Clean, Blubberknife cassette, Since The Accident) on from their dim beginnings. Severed Heads have hit top gear and are about to be released on an unsuspecting British public, complete with video single and the works. What’s their secret? They love what they’re doing. They love manipulating noise. And after four years at the Heads’ helm, Tom Ellard should be good at it. He describes the various permutations of the band: “The obvious thing would be to have a whole new band every year. just keep the name, but it takes too long to learn the ropes so I need to be standing there. If someone is not dealing with the band in a way that I like, I tend to act the heavy a bit.”
Despite the procession of names, he maintains that he’s easy to work with. Tom’s certainly easy to talk to. He overflows with enthusiasm for the kind of noise music that Severed Heads create so skilfully. But there are problems in working with a “synth band’, “it’s not as though you can pick up an instrument and say “I am the bass player’ or “I am the sax player’. It’s to do with having to share the same equipment. We might have to use the same keyboard. I tend to mainly do the music and the others” (currently Paul Deering and Stephen Jones) “tend to mainly do the noise.
Umm, I think by noise he means ‘rhythms’ and loops’ and things. He goes on to describe how the upcoming single, Dead Eves Opened, derived its melody by running up and down the black keys on a keyboard.” It’s easier with the black keys, there’s less of them. Don’t be fooled by the seemingly anarchic approach. These boys are serious about what they do, and are very critical of bands we might be tempted to shelve them next to. Tom suspects Them’ of being more concerned with haircuts than with noise, though Paul’s tastes lean more in the metal music direction.
Tom says: “I’m the one who goes for the simple little tunes. My favourite radio station is 2CH. People like Collapsing New Buildings. there’s nothing in it! It has no joy in it. It’s just a lot of people hitting things and going ‘Ooh, aren’t we intense?!’ Intense’ isn’t a word that means anything to me. Mind you, it’s a purely personal thing”. Severed Heads like to do things with human voices as noise There’s nothing like a voice to provoke a response, they explain, even if it’s echoed, tape-looped and generally mucked about with. Tom describes with glee how the structure of one track is provided by an old Liberace record being hand-turned backward and forward and made into a tape- loop. Other finds include a 78 record broken in half with a stylus leaping on and off the ‘vinyl’, a piece of Arabic saxophone. an air compressor. The boys are quite aware that. written down like this. it sounds like a pretty stupid way of going about making music. Tom believes fiercely that it is only serendipity that can make memorable songs. “All these sounds find places for themselves. They have a big punch-up and then they find their way”.
Much of the new LP. Since The Accident, was lying around on fragments of tape for years before the appropriate setting was found. Building noise-scapes in this way is a very complex process, although the pieces of technology are slowly becoming accessible – that simplifies things considerably. At present, however, this stuff doesn’t exactly lend itself to live performance. In the flesh, Severed Heads are static and dull to watch. Apart from the dangers of compromising the music, Tom hates playing live because. .. It’s such a bloody hassle. To play at the Trades, I’ve got to get up at nine in the morning. Can you imagine how many wires a synthesiser band needs to connect up before they can play? And when you finally get onstage and things go wrong, you say to yourself, ‘Who would do this but an absolute mental defective?’.
In one aspect of live performance, Severed Heads are leading the field. Part-time band member and video-wiz, Steven Jones, provides food for the eyes in the shape of a monitor with video camera aimed at it, thus creating semi-controlled visual feed. back. They are probably the first band in the world to be experimenting with video synthesisers on stage. Impressed? Well you should be, because even though this technology is at a fairly primitive stage of development, the fruits of these experiments will soon be popping up on every rock clip from here to Iceland and back again. Meanwhile, on the recording front, Since The Accident is due for March release in Britain after being in the can for nearly a year. Tom and Paul are a little surprised that Red Flame and Virgin apparently think they can make money out of Severed Heads, but they’re quite happy to play along. Besides, Dead Eyes Opened is so catchy that there’s no reason why it shouldn’t pick up a respectable amount of daytime airplay. Incidentally, the LP will come complete with a manual explaining the origins and techniques used to create the noises. So, as we leave the human components of Severed Heads cheerfully pulling the wings off Liberace records, we can rest assured that we haven’t heard the last of them. Not by a long shot.
WANDA JAMROZIC