Dead 60s - London, UK - Spring 2005
By: Thomas Hannan
Oh Liverpool, so much to answer for. Not to mention so much to overcome - the 'B' word, for one.
Ben Gordon: 'There's still the odd news article in the local papers about John Lennon.'
Charlie Turner: 'They're always finding long-lost diaries or Paul McCartney's toenail clippings in Aunt Mimi's flat or something.'
It's a legacy that's difficult to overcome, but something the Dead 60s (numbering Ben and Charlie on guitars and bass respectively, Bryan Johnson manning the drums and Matt McManamon taking up frontman duties) rile against with every fibre of their collective being, from look and sound right down to the name they swagger about under.
CT: 'It's funny, Liverpool in general is a little obsessed with the sixties. But we didn't feel part of that, the Beatles tours going round and everything, we wanted to say we were part of something new. It's a Liverpool phrase as well, saying something's 'dead 60s'.'
So that's it then. This isn't just one decade's mid-life crisis. The sixties are dead. Just to make sure that we don't get all too Boris Johnson on you, to avoid an editorially ordered trip to Merseyside to apologise to the city personally, it should be pointed out that this nostalgia and reactionary tendency in music extends way beyond the north of England. It's omnipresent, in every chorus of every song of a mainstream guitar act, and has been for as long as most of us can remember. Great songs, etched into international culture for all time. But people, this was forty years ago. Did punk teach us nothing? We can do this for ourselves! Get off the Magical Mystery Tour - it's your stop. The sixties are dead. Let's quit mourning and get on with it.
Bryan Johnson: 'It follows us, that. It's right by where we live. The Magical Mystery tour goes past our houses. It's forced down you.'
Then, perhaps for all time, Matt McManamon ends the Fab Four's current relevance in one devastatingly apathetic swoop -
MM: 'They were amazing, blah de blah they were really good, like.'
CT: 'But that just wasn't what we were into when we were starting up this band. When we started the Dead 60s in our garage we weren't thinking about the Liverpool scene. We got into dub and punk, the Sex Pistols; as we got older, The Clash, The Stranglers, stuff like that."
The dub influence especially is particularly prevalent in the quartet's sound, much more so they argue than the ska tag so commonly attached to them. Not that it's an entirely unfair one, just as will become clear, it comes with its pitfalls - so much so that, somewhat perplexingly, it's been about as popular amongst the indie community as a mass burning of 'The Queen Is Dead'.
CT: 'It's a bit of a stigma, as soon as you start playing ska people say you're a 2-Tone revival. But 2-Tone was massive due to the social situation and that's not happened again, and I can't imagine it would happen again, so it's something we don't tackle. We're not a 2-Tone revival band. The real problem is the Americans did it.'
MM: 'Badly.'
'As soon as you say you play ska people think you're going to be like Reel Big Fish or something,' says Bryan, cringing. 'On the album definitely there's more of a dub influence than ska. The first two singles have had a bit of a ska thing, but that's just one part of the sound.'
Does that make you feel misrepresented by them at all?
BG: 'No, not really, I think everything will still sound like us just because of the way we approach it. We don't really see the point in doing one thing.'
MM: 'We've got pretty short attention spans!'
BG: 'Looking for a reaction is a big part of it. As far as guitar bands are concerned you either watch or you jump about. We wanted to get people to dance again.'
CT: 'We got bored of rock, these standard f**king beats.'
MM: 'We went a bit offbeat mad.'
And how has that gone down, what with sharing a stage with so many predominantly indie bands?
BG: 'It was great, a lot of the audience on those tours were young and wouldn't have heard of The Specials or The Clash, so to them it was really fresh, like 'What's this thing they've come up with on their own?!''
So you milked that?
BG: 'So we milked it.'
'It's quite accessible, I'd say, quite upbeat and groove orientated, not so different that it sounds mad. I don't know why the indie scene's left it so alone. I reckon it might just start coming back in,' says Charlie, deftly predicting the current quiet but steady flow of ska-flavoured ditties entering the minds of the indie conscious via the likes of The Ordinary Boys and Hard-Fi that's happened since our chat.
But kudos must come their way due to that fact that whilst certain expensively groomed contemporaries are at pains to hide a past more reliant on the offbeat than the synthesizer and an appointment at Toni & Guy, the Dead 60s both embrace it and manage to make tunes that are far more exhilarating, far more relevant to people who can't afford eyeliner.
That there's more of a rhythmic emphasis to their work than a melodic one is pretty clear. Ben may dismiss it as 'no harder than just playing together, getting something we all think sounds good and then just, well, shouting', but the mere tapping of the foot can truly be the start of something great. With this quartet, it seems such a free and open process yields nigh on everything.
BG: 'With jamming, you know when you've got something good and something that's not.'
BJ: 'When it's not you just quit. No point going over something for weeks and weeks.'
BG: 'We're not getting into 'Pet Sounds' territory or anything!'
Well, after all, where's the fun in being so laborious?
BJ: 'It's a vibe thing. If the song's right, it happens quickly, if it's not right you find yourself working on it too much and you have to leave it.'
You do however need, quite literally, both sides of the story. It's an organic process, one that perhaps never sees a definite end. Flip over any of the Dead 60s singles to date and you'll find nothing to be set in stone. Once something's been deemed 'finished', it's almost immediately time to mutate it into something else.
BG: 'The way it works with Potential Murder System (the ever mysterious producer of all their output to date - we probed with little success) is we'll finish mixing the song 'properly' and then go to town on it. It's where half of the dub versions come from. Some start as straight up dub jams and sounds great, others we take an original some and have some fun with it.'
CT: 'We're thinking of doing an entire dub remixes album, release it as another record."'
A number of things seem immediately clear. One - this is a group of friends playing music. They banter like friends, they argue like friends, something that happens when you've been playing gigs together since you were 14. Second up - they're loving it. You don't get this with older bands. You should - it looks like the greatest job in the world. But this is proper enthusiasm. Whatever they're doing, however polite and amiable they're being, you get the impression they'd rather be playing (or maybe 'jamming') around with some sounds. Hitting stuff and seeing what happens when they play it backwards at a quarter of the speed. Thirdly - any label giving them the opportunity to spend studio time to fanny around doing just that must be top chaps. Few, it seems, have bad words to say about Deltasonic, but the story of how the allegiance came around seems deceptively simple...
CT: 'We just said we've started this band, the Dead 60s, do you want to come and hear it, they said 'yeah', and that was it, like! They're only round the corner from us; this lot were walking past the office every day on the way to rehearsals.'
MM: 'It didn't take a lot of courage to go in. First stop, really.'
BJ: 'They were one of the first people to show interest in us and it snowballed after that, we were on their wavelength the most I think.'
BG: 'With a label like Deltasonic, they work so closely with the band and give you a lot of support. You feel like you're close to the people instead of just a faceless name.'
Supportive then, but you suspect to give this lot a completely free reign would be chaos. A close eye is indeed kept focused on their activities. For example, the hardly frenzied scenes that heralded the arrival of signature tune 'Riot Radio' in the UK Top 40.
BG: 'We were just in the studio, recording. We put the Sunday chart on to see if we were in, and there it was...'
CT: 'Yeah, number thirty man, fantastic! But immediately the record company were like, 'where's the next one, lads!?''
MM: 'Yeah, we want another three of them, come on!'
So without even time for a 'Hi ho, hi ho' it was off to work once more. And if this pre-album chat is anything to go by (and we don't think they're having us on, they look like a trustworthy bunch), it was a particularly broad-minded labouring process.
BG: 'It's definitely not one kind of thing. People shouldn't expect a load of ska. We try to tie in as much of what we like to listen as possible. It's a real mixed bag.'
A mixed bag, you say?
CT: 'Well, some old-school punk, dub, Eastern European disco. Somehow it all works well side by side. There's so much good music out there that during the making of the album we were getting in to different things all the time. We were listening to Can, Kraftwerk... Big bands, obvious bands, ones you don't necessarily listen to until you start doing something like this.'
BG: 'I'm not saying we sound anything like Kraftwerk, but it's weird how one thing can set you off. If you just take influence from one little thing from each band...'
Which needn't necessarily lead to you sounding like any of them...?
BG: 'Exactly. You'll end up with something special. We don't see the point in doing a carbon copy of anything, just taking a lot from everywhere.'
How long did it take?
CT: 'I think we started at the end of last summer, but we were back and forth with touring. We managed two or three good stints in the studio.'
BG: 'But in a way the touring was a blessing. We'd go out, play, get a load of new records and come back with a fresh approach to what we were working on. That aided the whole process, made it a more diverse album, having the opportunity to go back to things. Doing an album's quite hard, you know.'
So we gather. Did you find that taking them out on the road changed the songs at all?
MM: 'They got faster!'
CT: 'Well, and a little bit tighter. But most of the songs on the album we actually wrote in the studio, not on tour, lots of jams that were first takes.'
BJ: 'It was good having that artistic vibe going on, rather than having it all rigidly planned and bashing out each song. It was quite creative in there.'
MM: 'F**king hell, we've turned in to a prog band...'
It's their baby, alright. But like your kid on the first day of school, you've got to dress him up to look smart before you let him scuff up his trousers playing football in the playground, if only for the nervous photo on the first morning. At this stage, the band was just buying their eponymous debut its uniform.
MM: 'The artwork and packaging are just coming together. Its sound, we can be involved as we want to be. We're looking at loads of art...'
BJ: 'We've got good people, we'll give them an idea and they'll come back to us and say 'what do you think?''
And is it ever pretty crap?
CT: 'Oh yes. But we won't name names.'
MM: 'Shall we name names?'
Let's not go there, perhaps. Do you have a similar involvement in the videos?
BG: 'Yeah, we do. The last few videos, it's been quite obvious what the idea is because they've fitted the songs so well, the run down seaside towns and everything.'
They all seem pretty bleak to us...
'It's f**king dark, man! Well, we're just trying to get across who we are, really...' says Matt, with the words least dark grin on his face.
CT: 'The last video was funny. We were stuck in Margate, and the premise for the video was basically 'what the f**k are we doing in Margate?!' We'd only had a couple of hours sleep and that was all we were thinking, 'what the f**k are we doing in here?''
BG: 'We look like a living document of the night we had before. We went out to the bars and the arcades. There were a lot of weird people around, man. It is what it says on the tin, that place. It is a bit mad. A good laugh.'
What did you think, Matt?
'Cold.'
But you especially seem like you really enjoy acting up in them?
MM: 'Oh yeah, I actually really enjoy them because I basically just get to mess around in front of the camera.'
BJ: 'It's part and parcel of the job, you've got to enjoy it. We've only done the three so it's still fun. Each time you do it you've just got to think of a cool idea and have a laugh.'
Then Matt confirms another suspicion...
'Come on, we always have a laugh...'
BG: 'It's not like we're at work or anything; you've got to approach it like that.'
So you don't think of this as a job?
CT: 'Oh no, I still can't believe we're doing as well as we are. It's like we just concentrated on playing music for so long that we somehow came out of the end of it. We do our hard work in other places.'
BG: 'Like doing gigs when we were a lot younger and stuff, playing gigs to no people. You go out and you expect people to turn up, but they never do. Breaking out of that is a massive thrill. It's a massive buzz, getting something back from it.'
So what's been the best part of the story so far?
BG: 'Well, we went to Japan, which was pretty cool. And getting to go to New York just to have a little mess around.'
CT: 'Those and the headline tour are always special, knowing people have come down to see you 'specially.'
BJ: 'We're mad for this tour. We expect a lot of late nights, a lot of driving, little sleep. It's going to be good; all the gigs are selling out.'
CT: 'We've got a nice high energy set.'
And what should people brace themselves for?
MM: 'A taster of the album, really.'
CT: 'A taster of us. We'll bill it 'The Songs of the Dead 60s'. We keep people interested, none of that boring shoegazing...'
Kevin Shields might disagree, but hey, he only managed a couple of albums just staring at his sneakers and making a racket. Sights here are set a little more long term.
BG: 'Ten years time, hopefully we'll still be doing this, you know, if we haven't killed each other by then...'
CT: 'In some kind of rehabilitation centre!'
Is that an aim?
CT: 'Maybe...!'
If not yourselves, what about the sound?
CT: 'It'll evolve, touch wood. We've only just learnt how to make records, so it'll get better.'
MM: 'We're still learning, learning every day, picking up on new music.'
CT: 'So, in theory, it shouldn't be a problem.'
So where would you look to next?
MM: 'Come on, it's a bit early to talk about the next one. It might all be done on Casio keyboards.'
CT: 'I might want to make soundscapes out of internet dial tones and garden gate noises. You never know.'
We exchange pleasantries, and they leave spontaneously breaking into a chorus of Nick Cave's 'Where The Wild Roses Grow'. Diversity isn't going to be a problem. And with a collective enthusiasm like this, hopefully very few things for the Dead 60s will be.
Artists in this article: Dead 60s