It was six months to the day after the version of Severed Heads that made the yet to be released “City Slab Horror” album split up. It was a very hot, very windy Saturday afternoon, so Paul, Gary and Tom, who made the record, plus Steven who is accompanying Tom to England with the same “Severed Heads”, plus a photographer and a writer, descended into a rubble-littered section of an underground car park. After the usual pleasantries, comments on the suitability of the site for a Nada performance, and a short play with a coin machine superball, the interview got under way.
‘Given justice, this record should have come out September last year’ says Tom, ‘But communicating with the English Record company …’ Paul continues. ‘It’s just really boring having the music sitting around when it should’ve … It’s not as if it gets dated because I think it’s a different area of research to what most people are doing but it’s still really annoying’.
The area of research spoken of, thought Tom denies so lofty a term as “research”, is related to that of a thesis of Tom’s some years ago on what he called “perseverative principles”. Put simply, it is about how when a sound is repeated several times although we still are hearing the same sound, we perceive it differently the 200th time to the first. Paul says that on the new record ‘That sort of thing is still in operation in that they’re sounds that have been stripped of their original meaning and context and placed in context with a whole set of other sounds to create a new meaning’. Garry – ‘The cycle is used mainly to break down the audience’s way of perceiving sounds in that sort of situation just so they become more vulnerable to what’s going on.’
‘During the “Slab Horror” period’, says Tom, ‘we had this facility set up where you really could translate any audio signal into control voltages and triggers to run the synthesiser. It’s an incredibly flexible system. It just takes a hell of a lot of time to set it up to do anything, It had a lot of potential but it used to give me the shits so I abandoned it, I sold it to Garry, he loves it’.
Paul continues. ‘There’s a lot of care put into the actual sound it’s not all synchronisation. On “Cyflea Rated R” for instance we spent ages working out the snare sound and ringing sound on that. It would have taken us hours to work out each sound on that track’. Why? Ask Tom. “Each element on that track has got a human voice mixed in it somewhere, which is quite a feat I think’
It becomes very obvious that Severed Heads are highly dependant on technology. Paul explains – “It is technology dependant but in a very different way to – well the best example is the “Art of Noise” which although it has a couple of nice moments, is utter crap because it’s just somebody that’s got hold of a Fairlight, stored as many sounds in it as they could and come up with one really good idea and that’s the sort of “Beatbox” rhythm. It’s dependant on very high, very expensive technology. People seem to get the misapprehension that the Severed Heads are working with all this incredibly expensive sophisticated gear but we’re not. We’re just using the junkyard of musical technology to forage around because all the people with lots of money are very boring and move onto new technology before they’ve explored the old technology. People go up to you and say “Where would you be without your synthesisers, where would you be without your drum machines”. They’re just another instrument really, they just happen to be the most malleable and flexible instruments that have ever been devised’. Tom – “They are also cheaper than drum kits or guitars. A drum machine is a cheap alternative to drums. not the other way around”
Synthesisers and drum machines, once the realm of the experimenter have become commonplace now amongst the most commercial of recording bands. Many techniques and sounds that once could only be found on obscure records by ultra progressive bands are now on million sellers like Rock Steady Crew and Malcolm McLaren. Do Severed Heads feel a need to keep ahead of dance music? Paul – ‘It’s never been a matter of keeping ahead because as I said we were scabbing around in a junk heap of left behind technology. There’s gonna be a big backlash against that stuff soon it’s fairly obvious. All the trendy people are rather concerned that it’s become mass property – you go into disco city now which is sort of a hot shit import disco shop and it’s just like the mid-70’s all over again. That music’s very linear, there’s not that many atmospheres expressed in disco music. It’s basically either fucking or having a good time. Cabaret Voltaire seem to have made the mistake of trying to keep up and keep one step ahead and if you read what they say these days they just seem to have completely lost direction because they’re trying to keep up and they’re trying to be one step ahead and basically they’re just doing it themselves’.
Those who are familiar with the Severed Heads’ last album “Since The Accident” will find few similarities between it and the new album. More snare drum noises” and “less tape loop songs” and “better equipment” are mentioned by band members as differences before they start talking about the music rather than the techniques Paul – “There’s a very different sound on it. It’s a lot darker sounding than “Since The Accident”. Garry – “I think there is a lot of variety on the new album.” Tom ‘It kicks off in a very deceptive way. There’s a track beginning of it that sticks out a bit. Listening to the track by itself you could be lead to expect something that doesn’t come about. The way that the latest LP works is that a lot of things are obtrusive – there’s less communication between the tracks. It’s more of collection of various ideas, various periods of recording, There’s lots of various camps of ideas battling it out’.
Such discord in the band is not counter-productive. ‘During the period that we worked together it was almost all argument which is in terms of coming up with stuff, very good. Good results often come from that sort of process but at the same time it can also be incredibly aggravating’. Gary –
‘You don’t work in collaboration because you agree with each other’. Paul ‘Quite the opposite really’.
The feature of Severed Heads’ sound that is common to all their albums is the poaching of voices from the various broadcasts and records that make up the mass media. The sources range from religious radio stations to Korean classical music. Visions of long hours listening to boring music in the hope of finding the right sound to use are inevitable but it really doesn’t pain them at all. Paul – ‘All of us would probably listen to those records just for enjoyment anyway and you just happened to stumble across a sound that strikes you as suitable for using within a different song structure’. Tom – ‘Copyright becomes more of a concern every day. It is alright if you’re doing a 200 run cassette for the city shops but if you start doing records which are going to come out in all sorts of places and you’re hoping for a certain amount of commercial success, that’s more people who are going to pick it up and say “Ahh, that’s Liberace of such such a record – I claim my $5”. Things that were a worry on both albums and single (12″ “Goodbye Tonsils” recently released) we resorted to a sort of heavy handed harmoniser treatment on a couple of the voices’.
The only other clearly recognisable feature of the sound is the synchronisation of several rhythms at once to create a very busy sounding product. Don’t imagine though that it is some high minded attempt to portray the modern industrial environment with its myriads of little rhythms and cycles, Tom would merely answer ‘That’s a load of wank. It’s because we’re trying to show off how clever we are that we fit so many rhythms interlocking with each other’.
Severed Heads projects for the future, apart from the imminent release of “City Slab Horror” are a video for their 12″ “Goodbye Tonsils”, another Tom Ellard video of epic 35 minute proportions, a cassette album near the middle of the year, and the resurrection of that infamous cassette label, Terse Tapes, in England.