Michael, you're appealing to your fans to help you release your next album 'Thought Becomes Reality'. What will they be contributing to?
That's going towards the album cover artist. I'm working her really hard because she's got to do lots of pictures for this album. She's doing the main cover and also the main craft on the inside cover. She's also going to draw six different pictures for singles, as I plan to release 3 singles before the album's out. The whole thing is going to be a big visual treat! We're also thinking about putting clues in each of the pictures, and if you can put them all together they'll be a fantastic treasure to discover at the end of it.
They're going to be vinyl, some of the singles?
This is what the appeal is for really. We already have a distribution and package deal for CDs, with Voiceprint. Vinyl will be a money loss I think, however, we want do it because that what it's all about. The appeal is just so they'll be a vinyl. And the artwork will look so brilliant on the vinyl...
The good thing is that these days, you CAN produce something independently; the routes to market are so much more varied these days, with the web, as well as word of mouth, making it feasible to do just that...
Yes!
It looks like you have a new line up...Will Summers is still with you though isn't he?
Yes, Will and I make a lot of music together, we play in various bands together, we do a lot of strict early music together. Will doesn't listen to anything modern or pop and never has done, he only listens to music pre-Bach, so he pushes that, and I push the more modern stuff, but we're both always there together. And then Will and I have a little pirate band as well, we play on the Golden Hind called Princes in the Tower...
I read somewhere that the crumhorn is the loudest one he plays?
The crumhorns are quite gentle. The loudest one he has is a rauschpfeife (noise pipe), but he also has a shawm, which is a kind of indian reed instrument, which really hurts your ears if you're too close to it!
There's a real renaissance of early music at the moment isn't there? How important do you think it is to be actively playing and reconstructing that music to keep it going?
It's just a delightful thing really, when there's people going to all that trouble and expense to recreate this authentic, ancient music that not that many people care about. I'm a real early music head and I just love it. There should be more of it really....
There are bands around that are still influenced by it....
It was a really big influence when David Monroe was bursting on the scene, he was influencing people like Dr Strangely Strange...
The instruments, it must be quite hard to source them or get them made?
Everyone that sees Will playing the crumhorn thinks 'oh what a fantastic sound', but they are very expensive so I'm looking into getting a village in china to make some plastic crumhorns that we could throw into the audience! You try and buy a plastic crumhorn on the internet and they are like $300!
You and Will are very much the core of Circulus....where the songwriting is concerned, is it just you, Will too, or do you bounce off the other people involved in the band?
It's just me, I'll come up pretty much with an entire song, but then I leave it as a kind of open palette that other people can colour in...so Will will embelish his part but I come up with the actual drawing of the song.
The new guys in the band, have they recorded all the new stuff with you?
We have a new bass player, Tom Goldsmith, and he's been a great help, because of him we were able to mix the new album ourselves, on a computer, as we couldn't afford a studio to mix it in, so we did it all for free, which was lucky, as which would have cost us about £3,000 in a studio. There's another chap called Anthony Elvin who plays percussion, who's just a wacky character, you'll see him on TV in The Mighty Boosh quite a lot, he's one of the Boosh people. We have a singer called Holly Jane Shears, who is also in The Mighty Boosh, there's a bit of a Mighty Boosh thing going on, but then they did rip us off in one episode where they took music as retro as they could.....
Since you've recorded the first two Circulus albums, you've also done a lot of production and collaborative work with Marian Segal and Thistletown. That creative process must influence the way you work?
Yes, it's all a really good learning curve. I looked at producing those albums in the way of 'who can I get to play on them that will make it as sound as good as possible?' So with Marianne Segal I got the band together, people like Bill Steer and then Amy May to do the string arrangement...luckily I'm in a position where I can pull in favours from people....but I'm really happy with the Marianne Segal album, it's great....
I thought it was fantastic. The track 'Swallow' (on the Circulus album 'The lick on the tip of an envelope yet to be sent') is still one of my favourite songs of all time, it just works so well, it's just perfect. Did you know Marianne before recording that?
In 2004, I started recording 'Lick on the tip' and Richard Allen was going to put it out, and I was teaching guitar to someone's son, and the dad was a recording studio builder, and he got us in to a studio that he built, which was all still analogue. So we spent about 7 days and recorded most of 'Lick on the tip' but then Richard Allen recommended I do a track with Marian Segal from Jade and I heard the Jade stuff and thought 'yep, brilliant' so i drove down to Worthing and hung out with Marian for a while, and I asked her to play me some of her unreleased stuff from the early '70s. She gave me a bunch of stuff and then she played me 'Swallow' and I just said 'that's the one...let's do that one Marian'
So what's the direction of the new music? You're saying it's different. Is it still twisted mushroom pixie rock?
It's beyond that! That was just an introduction. What it is, it's kind of 'love songs to flying saucers'. I must warn people about writing love songs to flying saucers as they listen and they will reply to you, as they have done to me. There's a song called 'Within You Is The Sun' which is trying to tell people the power is inside of you and not outside of you, and then there's a lot of reworkings of medieval and elizabethan ballads...and that's what the album is basically.
As ever, it sounds like it's something different and exciting. This offers a whole new avenue for stage sets and costumes for you. Have you started down that avenue yet?
Yes, we have. I've been having these kind of encounters with extra-terrestial intelligence...
Is this in Plumstead Woods?
No, I'm just a gypsy troubadour now! So, the ideas are just coming to me now, every day I get some great ones. We just played in cardiff, and I'd just seen all this really weird stuff going on in the sky a few nights before, all these beams of light that could shrink on themselves and go into laser beams. We played at this place called The Point, an old church, and I spoke to the lighting guy there and asked him to recreate what I'd seen in the sky, which he did, with smoke machines and these beams of light. When we actually did the gig it felt really magical and I felt really empowered and felt like I had to tell people 'This is serious, this is going on, you have to listen, you have to look at the sky...we're in trouble'...What I want to do with this album and getting people on board the craft is to wake them up, let them know that what's going on is a big illusion, and I can prove this to them, and they have to wake up if they're going to make it through 2012...
Are you going to be able to get that message across to people through gigs as well as the album?
I hope so. The thing about Circulus has always been this 'twisted mushroom pixie rock' jokey side, but there's always been a serious message with it too.
Yes, with anything fantastic, you have the fantastical side as well, don't you, which I think is important. Certainly with satire or humour, you can prick people's conscience or deflate pompousity..
it's actually the only way because if you come over too serious, you just come over as a drip...
That is it, but also, anyone that has ever come across you knows that you're totally serious, you're not having a laugh at other people's expense, and it's the same with your music. That's the fantastic power of music, hearing a song can change your life, or your direction or make you look at things differently. A song can't change the world, but it can change someone's perceptions and attitudes. When are you aiming to release 'Thought becomes Reality'?
Probably about mid-March. We're planning a tour and and I'm going to try and arrange it so that 'Winter Flowers'do all the dates with us. They're a bit like Dr Strangely Strange, very gentle people from L.A. And they're kind of friends with Becky Stark from Lavender Diamond, I'm in awe of her, so anything that will draw me closer to Becky! We're also going to try and do four castles on this tour.
I also have a couple of side projects planned - one is to do an album of songs of John Dowland with Christophe from 'Winter Flowers' who's a big Dowland fiend. There's very few people in the world that like early music but also like acid folk, so we're going to do a kind of acid folk rendition of his songs, just to make them sound really beautiful.
That sounds fantastic...
Then the other project is an astrological album, which is about medieval and elizabethan astrology, all that stuff is really powerful, and it really works. We're going to record a song for each planet, which will be recorded according to the astrological chart.
They both sound like fantastic projects! I think the whole allure of Circulus is the big creative process you can see going on. That's as much a part of it as the songs. Best of luck with it all and we hope to see you on tour soon!
Iain Hazlewood
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