Between Writers
Damien Mahoney (Caulbearers) / Kirsty McGee Interview

Caulbearers are one of our favorite Manchester bands. An 8-piece heavy-groove orchestra, they produce music that is hard to describe - intricate yet sprawling, improvised but tight and well wrought, led by the distinctive voices of Damien Mahoney and Julie Gordon. Mahoney's songs are strong lyrically as well as rhythmically though, and deep within the grooves of his tunes lie thought-out lyrics with a social conscience. The band shares its drummer (Rob Turner) with the Hobopop Collective, and their saxophone and keyboard player Will Lenton joined us at the album launch show for Kirsty McGee's No.5 record.

Caulbearers also form a part of Manchester's Single Cell Collective, and have contributed to their first compilation album, Six Rivers, which can be downloaded for free or for a donation here.

Damien took the time out to have a conversation about songwriting with Kirsty recently, and wrote up the result for us to kick off this week's series of 'between writers' pieces.

Between Writers - Damien Mahoney (Caulbearers) / Kirsty McGee Interview

D: Are there common themes you feel compelled to write about ?

K: Things come in clusters. I started out writing love songs. I don't tend to write straight love songs now - there's usually a pay back or a kick to them. I try not to make so obvious, you have to dig to get to the dark bit. Most recently I've been writing a lot of heaven and hell songs, fire and damnation, its nice to get your teeth into. There's a lot of imagery associated with the Devil and God: What I'm interested in is what sticks to people - we've grown up with a lot of imagery and mythology, we've lived with lots of images of heaven and hell from different sources and I am interested in how people construct ideas about what happens after life. Recently I've been writing lots of songs that are pithy and dark, in an attempt to bring people into this dark universe that we all have in common.

D: Is that for personal reasons or a reflection of the times we are living in?

K: I definitely react to what’s going on around me, and the times we are living in are very hard for a lot of people, not only financially but also psychologically. I don’t really believe in heaven and hell but I’m interested in the idea of them. The standard view is that God is good, but what if God is not good, if God is really horrible? The way that relates to my writing at the moment is via these mischief figures which come up again and again and have always existed in mythology, but there are present day examples like big oil corporations... the rape and pillage of the earth.

I've written a song very recently called Alligator Teeth, that talks about cultural pillaging, the taking of ideas and artifacts. For example, in the Manchester Museum they have a big glass case that is full of stuffed birds with red breasts from all over the world: They look very different from each other, but they have all been called Robin. Seeing that was a sudden realisation for me of what Empire meant, what it meant for English people and white people and how we went all over the world and imposed our ideas on different cultures and different places. It struck me as incredibly arrogant and got me interested in cultural imperialism. That's been simmering away since then.

D: It is interesting, the whole apocalyptic thing, the possible death of society and what might come next.

K: As a culture at the moment we are more insecure than we have been. There was a book by Mikhail Bulgakov that pursued me for many, many years called the Master and Margarita. It's a satire about the Devil coming to Russia with this 6 foot cat and a naked woman and causing absolute chaos. It's another example of how the Devil appears in culture and society when people are insecure, and its an interesting take on the idea of madness.

How people react to the negative things that are going on in their society and culture is really interesting to me. I guess tend to write a song and do my research afterwards. For instance, I've just been writing about the idea of Pandora's Box. I knew what my cultural interpretation of the idea was, which is very primitive, and I read up a little bit about it afterwards. What was really interesting was that it tallied up very closely with what my own ideas were.

I guess all these things float around in the Universe all the time, and you pick up on them and develop a huge library of resources in your head you can pluck ideas from. We know instinctively what we don't realise we know ourselves.

D: Do you think its important to have a narrative that can be followed by an audience?

K: I don't think its important to have a narrative, I think its important to be coherent enough to let people in in some way, but sometimes there are universal themes that people pick up on. On my second album, I had a song called Plane Vapours [Kirsty Mcgee – Plane Vapours] that was very popular: There was one line that almost everyone connected with - "I put my small hand into your large hand". People at shows would come and talk to me about that line as something they could respond to because they had all had that experience. It takes you into a very personal space, a thing songs are very good at. Being able to access that space is an important position to be in. Maybe as a writer you have a responsibility to an audience to take care of them, to position them in that way. I try to do it with details like that.

D: Is there a freedom to take people to places they weren’t expecting to go?

K: I think its important to prod people, I still do tender and gentle songs but more and more I've had the urge to poke. Its nice to put people into a comfortable space with your songs and lyrics, to offer a sense of security, but its also good to shove people a bit. In some ways its bringing politics back into songs, even an esoteric kind of politics, pretty much the politics I've always had, the politics of the heart and mind: I am interested in how culture and society shapes people. The way people are abused by certain parts of culture and society does worry and upset me. I believe fundamentally that people should treat each other with respect and I try to get that across in my songs. I do have strong principles of ethics regarding how people behave towards each other, to the natural world, and I guess I would like those strong beliefs to be there in the songs. I don't want to let people off lightly. I don't want to hide my head from those things and a nudge towards them is probably the best I can do as a songwriter. It is interesting to work with politics in a gentle way.

D: Paul Morley wrote an article asking whether the protest song is dead, what do you think?

K: I think the protest song has changed shape rather than died: I hear references in songs a lot of the time. How about you, is much of what you write political?

D: Politics influences a lot of what I write. A lot of the songs are about a desire, or a desperation for something to change, both on a personal and societal level. They're often about ideals and the failure to reach them, a frustration at the self and the world around us. I really like bold, direct messages, like the commentary of a lot of Jamaican music - it can be specific to an event or issue, and there's no ambiguity as to what is being said: At the same time, I love that ambiguity that songs can allow - different meanings to different listeners, and the writer can easily move from one space or idea to something totally different, like dreams. The music can be the link, not necessarily a linear narrative. A surrealist approach to political issues is really interesting in art, because the mind isn't so linear, it's all a bit more mixed together in our understanding of the world, I think:
Do you like a more esoteric approach to songwriting?

K: That allows people to let themselves in if they want to. For me the best anti-war song was Tom Waits' 'The Day after Tomorrow' [Tom Waits – Day After Tomorrow]. It's a really important song, from the point of view of a soldier in Iraq or Afghanistan, and he is thinking about his home and his family, he is about to be shipped back to the States and he is musing about what it is to be a soldier. Its written like a letter and its powerful and beautiful and human and humane. He puts the point of view of the soldier forward and it's not at all aggressive. With my song Gunsore [Kirsty Mcgee – Gunsore] I was influenced by that song because the best way to get across what is going on in a conflict is the point of view of someone in that conflict. As soon as politics become polemic then people switch off.

D: It depends who you're writing on behalf of as well, you're not always writing with your own voice are you?

K: Do you write as other voices? Is it like a conversation?

D: Yeah, sometimes the perspective changes within the song. There can be a kind of Greek tragedy element, where the chorus is like a choir of voices and fills in the gaps or contradicts the main narrator's story. There's no set pattern though.

K: You write for different voices to sing. Is it like a conversation?

D: It only dawned on me recently that a lot of the songs are duets! The effect of the words can be changed just by the delivery or from male or female narration, as the singer embodies so much meaning themselves.

D: Maybe political songwriting has become more knowing?

K: One of the other songs that has affected me over the last few years is by a songwriter called Karine Polwart - she writes political songs that are very feminine and she wrote one song called Waterlilly [Karine Polwart – Waterlily]. It's a song about a man who had gone to Sarajevo on a relief mission and met a woman and fallen in love. He intended to marry her and take her out of the conflict, and he went one day to get the passports and when he came back she'd been killed: She is an amazingly powerful singer and she pulls me apart, even just to talk about her songs makes me emotional. She is a very humane writer and she writes very simple songs about politics, but takes a very gentle way in to it.

D: Sometimes you don’t want to expose yourself to that kind of emotion, you feel vulnerable, it feels too deep.

K: There are some films that do that to me, like Cyrano de Bergerac, Leon or The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.

D: There is some music that is actually positive and hopeful that has always affected me deeply, like some of the early house music that has a very open, gospel feel to it. There was often a clear message - a call for togetherness, peace and the value of community. To me, those songs were both celebratory and political but also sad, because they revealed the best of human intentions in the context of a world that often seemed to crush those hopes. I felt similar emotions in Copenhagen at the climate summit recently, seeing a really global, diverse range of people come together for non-violent direct action and remaining peaceful and defiant in the face of police violence and brutality. That context of the best and worst of human action always affects me strongly.

K: Yeah, I agree with that.

D: Could you tell me something about your songwriting process. Who is involved at what stage?

K: I write on my own. Ideally, when alone in the house. I like to have that headspace. When I've got the full song I'll get Mat to listen to it and I usually know what he's going to say! Often it's that its too long! The weak verse that I'm hanging onto because of one good line will be exposed and I'll know I have to do more work, or lose some of the weaker material. But I sometimes write down good lines that might get used for something else.

I'll usually know quite quickly if a song is worth keeping, and even if Mat disagrees with me, I'll persevere and insist that we keep that one. We have an interaction where I'll try and get away with doing as little work as possible and come back to him with it, but he'll say 'no, no, it still needs work'. Eventually we'll get to a stage where we're both happy with the structure and he'll start to write with me. The first thing we decide on is what instrument he's going to play. There's a lot of choice because he plays fretless banjo, banjo, guitar, tenor guitar, ukulele and more.

After that its deciding what tuning he's going to work in, then he'll keep playing and working out the part. Its usually just a case of playing again and again until we've nailed it. Then we'll take it to the band, but we'll probably test it on a few gigs as a duo, especially if we're really excited about it, because you do want to share it with other people.

D: What's your ratio, then?

K: I guess my quality control has changed over time. I write a lot but realistically I'll probably write ten good songs a year out of about 40. So probably one in four are worth persevering with. How about you?

D: I don't think my quality control is all that good! Sometimes they're just sketches. If it does become a full song, I usually think its quite good: I'm not very prolific.

K: I do write to completion on everything - to the end of the song. I'm quite lazy with playing the guitar, my parts are often just the bare bones. I'm not a guitarist, per se. I'm someone who uses the guitar to write songs, as a tool. I used to write more songs, but I think my hit rate is better now. Certainly there are songs that have sat there for a couple of years and I'll go back to a notebook and find that there's something I like, and you can start again or try the idea in a different way.

Single Cell collective are currently mid-residency at the Zion Arts Centre in Manchester, and Caulbearers are set to record their first full album next month. Kirsty McGee's No.5 album is out this week on Hobopop Recordings.

Top Ten Loners

London-based singer-songwriter Matt Hill, who records under the name Quiet Loner has just finished working on his second album with the Hobopop Collective's Mat Martin in the producer's seat. Following the first album, Secret Ruler of the World, which bagged the honour of Americana-UK album of the year in 2004, there are plenty of eager ears who have been waiting a long time to hear what this new album will sound like.

For now, we're keeping our cards close to our chest, but in the meantime Mr. Loner has agreed to let us into his world with a top ten of Loners - historical, fictional and factual.

Quiet Loner : Top 10 loners

“He was a quiet loner who kept himself to himself”. So goes the media news reports as they explain the latest serial killer or lone gunman rampage, almost as if a withdrawal from society was reason enough to explain the murder and violence.

As a species we’re sociable creatures, so what about the ones amongst us who go their own way and won’t join in the party games? As the news reports show us, loners are feared, we are suspicious of them and we expect the worst from them. As a society we seem to find it hard to accept that someone might not want to belong.

In the last 30 years as we increase our knowledge of Autistic spectrum disorders like Aspergers Syndrome we offer up a medical model for some of the character traits and social awkwardness we often associate with loners. As if we fear it so much it is now something that needs to be “cured”.

Yet we also admire our loners. Author Tom Robbins thought them brave, he said “Courage is required to reject the secure blessings of society, in order to woo the unpredictable ecstasies of the solitary soul”. Loners say what the rest of us dare not to say. Their outsider status allows them to think the unthinkable and say the unsayable. Or it would do if they would only come out of their bedsits and talk to us.

Here are my top ten loners :

Shamen (historical)

In cultures across the world from the frozen wastes of the Arctic circle, to the deserts of central Australia, to the lush rainforests of the Amazon, Shamen were the original outsiders. Their journeys to otherworlds, through the use of psychoactive plants, and their contact and dialogue with the ancestral dead, placed them apart yet also at the heart of those societies. They were relied on for advice, counsel and for healing the sick. These early loners were essential: Respected, feared and revered.
Read: A lengthy Wikipedia entry.

Bill Hicks (1961-1994)

American comedian Bill Hicks was one of the 20th century’s greatest artists. As a jobbing stand-up Hicks travelled relentlessly playing in small clubs to audiences that mostly failed to understand him. Increasingly Hicks came to see himself as an old Wild West gunslinger riding into town tackling fear and injustice and blowing away the bad guys. Hicks the loner railed against mainstream culture for it’s superficiality, mediocrity and banality, seeing these traits as oppressive tools of the ruling class designed to "keep people stupid and apathetic."
Watch: We can't find something on YouTube that isn't too offensive. You'll have to do your own search.

Mark David Chapman (b1955)

Having just fatally shot John Lennon and seemingly unaware of what he’d done Mark David Chapman calmly sat down on the pavement and staring reading his copy of Catcher in the Rye, patiently waiting for the police to arrive. And so Chapman became the archetypal “quiet loner” of the media. He didn’t fit in, we shunned him so he got bitter and killed our hero to spite us. The truth of what happened to Chapman is a little more complex and remains elusive.

Greta Garbo (1905-1990)

According to a very knowledgeable friend of mine, patriarchy demands that women cannot be loners. The lone woman is feared as a witch or condemned as sexually predatory. No surprise then that the classic loner type is usually male. Yet occasionally there is a woman who bucks that trend. Swedish actress Greta Garbo was one. She is remembered for her famous line "I want to be alone” – so unusual and beguiling it became as famous as she was. Almost as soon after her career took off, Garbo became known as a recluse. And that mystery only made her more desirable. Throughout her lifetime she refused to do press interviews, she never signed autographs, she didn’t go to social functions and she never answered fan mail. The beautiful loner intrigues us.
Watch: The first of many parts to this TV documentary.

James Bond (fictional)

Ian Fleming’s creation is a man who works alone. He has very little human contact outside of his work. He shuns company, seeks women purely for sex and is generally contemptuous of human beings. This makes him a great killer, and that’s what James Bond is – a hired killer. Yet despite his loner status we see rare glimpses of his humanity – his friendship with Felix Leiter, his admiration for M, and briefly his love for Tracy his wife. When Tracy is killed he becomes the loner again. Detached, cold and driven by his desire to avenge his wife’s death.
Watch: Any number of Bond movies, from 1962 onwards.

Brian Wilson (b1942)

Brian Wilson is the classic artistic loner genius. At the height of the Beach Boys' fame in the sixties he refused to go on tour and had to be replaced by Glen Campbell. Increasingly paranoid and frightened by the world, Brian retreated to the studio where he wrote and recorded his masterpiece “Pet Sounds”. By the next album “Smile” in 1967 he had retreated even further – to a sandpit under his piano. He didn’t come out until the 1990s.
Listen: The Beach Boys – Pet Sounds (1966)

Travis Bickle (fictional)

Travis Bickle is Robert De Niro’s lead character in Martin Scorcese’s 1976 film Taxi Driver. One of cinema’s most iconic characters, Bickle is a loner. A former Marine who served in Vietnam, Bickle has problems fitting back in to society. He is socially inept, and doesn’t have any friends. He takes a job as a night time taxi driver in dangerous neighborhoods where his customers are pimps, drug addicts, and thieves. He is disgusted by them, and begins fantasising about "cleansing" such "filth" from the streets. It can only end in tears.
Watch: Original Taxi Driver trailer.

Nick Drake (1948-1974)

Singer Nick Drake died tragically young after battling with depression for years. He didn’t tour much, he recorded very little and towards the end of his life retreated to his childhood bedroom at his parents home. And so Drake is often portrayed as a loner. His music has a wistful sad and indeed lonely quality to it. Yet friends speak of a gregarious and outgoing young man who was popular and sociable at school. Behind every loner cliché is a more complicated story. 
Listen: Nick Drake – Pink Moon (1972)

Scott Walker (b.1943)

After a critical peak in the late sixties by the mid-seventies Scott Walker was back in caberet playing Working Men’s Clubs in the North of England. Then after 1978’s Nite Flights album he began a slow retreat into a period that saw him release only three  albums over the next thirty years and earn himself a reputation as a Garbo-esque reclusive loner. More recently we have seen that this wasn’t quite what it seemed and that Walker is actually quite a sociable and funny man driven by his art but dismissive of mainstream pop culture.
Listen: Scott Walker – Scott (1967)

Veronia Sawyer (fictional)

Portrayed by Winona Ryder in the 1989 film Heathers, Veronica Sawyer is your classic misunderstood teenager. She doesn’t fit in at a school where a powerful clique called “the Heathers” top the social pile. When she meets Christian Slater’s character J.D. she unwittingly gets embroiled in a spate of killings that spirals out of control and that only she can stop. Her loner status is assured when having witnessed Slater blow himself up with a suicide bomber belt, she walks to his smouldering remains and lights her cigarette on the flames and walks away alone.
Watch: The most 80s trailer you're ever likely to revisit.

K C McKanzie - Berliner Luft (Berlin Air)

Berlin based songwriter K C McKanzie is often mistaken for an American artist - the mysteriously unexplained stage name, the english language writing, the Americana style of music - all of these factors would suggest as much. She is, however, fond of her heritage and very aware of how it shapes what she does. She has taken the time to write about what it means to be an Americana musician in Berlin, and how it affects the music she makes.

K C McKanzie - Berliner Luft (Berlin Air)
We (Berliners) are probably known better for distinct punk culture, heavy and blood freezing electro-experiments and (oh God!) the undried red wine stain on our clean white subculture shirt: The Loveparade.

But the world forgives us, because Berlin has always been the cradle for many colourful forms of arts and music, literature and plays.

Berlin is a lazy whore, I say. It's cheap, poor and wickedly sexy, to mis-quote our Mayor Klaus Wowereit. The perfect soil to grow a bunch of relaxed folkies, and for folkies from around the world to strike their roots into Berlin's sandy grounds.

It's easy to make a living here. The rents are midpriced, the food is good and cheap, we've got many parks and lots of space for kids and dogs. These relaxed circumstances give you time, which is the most important ingredient to make a lazy folk artist.

But Berlin changes the music you make. We don't have a thriving folkscene here. No bluegrass jams (sadly!) and no big acoustic festivals. This city, and this country, will always make me feel like a musical outsider. But that's the other ingredient you need to make a lazy folk artist: Make them feel like they're loners, something special, you know?

Berlin is my home.

I feel safe on the train among a bunch of juvenile hooligans and smile back when the native taxidriver barks his berlin accent at me. My few musician friends live here. We met during little DIY organised bandfests and concerts, or on the street, staring at each other's guitar cases.

If you want to organise something cool here, you are very welcome: Me and my bass player Budi, even before we started making music, were the hosts of an open stage for about 2 years in a beautiful little theatre. I learned almost everything about live music in this old church cellar. I saw many acts: Professional musicans, well known, came to test new material on an unprepared audience,  a hobby skiffleband started a spontaneous reunion after 15 years, a young punk-balletdress-clownlady kicks off with a funny and loud tune and ends with beautiful and sad little quiet ballads about her horrible teenage life, the leader of a musical circus act howls his catchy lyrics into his megaphone, a young girl sings an old english heartbreaking tune in a pure and innocent vocalstyle, a german "Liedermacher" describes in a song how depressing her job at a retirement home is, a tattoed clownface takes his guitar and sings the daily news.

Artists from all over the world, singing their beautiful songs to a stunned audience and to me. My place was behind the counter, I sold beers for 1 Euro and charged everybody 50 cents entrance. But Budi and me, we always played the first song.

I learned to overcome my stage fright by playing little folk tunes,. If not enough acts signed up, I played three of my own songs: trembling shy voice, sweaty palms, nervous giggles in between.
Berlin was treating me very fair. I started all over again if I wanted to. I tried all kinds of stuff before I decided which way to go. I doubt if every city provides this chance for musicians.

I complain a lot about Berlin, of course I do, I live here! But I know and appreciate that this city with it's famous air always gives me the chance to breathe in and out slowly, and I can concentrate on the music I want to create.

Click here to read an interview with K C McKanzie that was published here on Spiral Earth earlier this year.