At Swim Two Birds - Diary of a Sentimental Killer

Roger Quigley, a musician of long standing, a member of the Mongolfier Brothers and deus-ex-machina of At Swim Two Birds, has a reputation as an introverted and reflective artist, given to melancholy and to a biting, sometimes cynical sarcasm. It is with a little trepidation, then, that we prepare to face the interview with Roger, on a cold and rainy winter evening.

What happens instead is something we could hardly have expected: the person we find ourselves in front of, in the dimly lit and rather noisy Roman venue, turns out to be far removed from the cliché of the depressing, depressed musician. Affable, brilliant, full of the desire to communicate and open up, in the company of young cellist Sophia, Quigley, in a long interview granted exclusively to Onda Rock, talks about himself and about his music, his ideas and his projects (one of which, "Before You Left", is now a reality).

The name of your project is taken from the novel of the same name by Flann O'Brien: what's the reason behind this choice?

My father's brother teaches in Ireland, and for some reason he often used to bring Irish books over for my father, and among these were also O'Brien's. Actually I never really appreciated them until my best friend, Richard O'Brien, who runs the Vespertine & Son label, pushed me to read them, telling me they were fantastic novels. So I read several of them, "The Poor Mouth", "The Hard Life", "The Third Policeman" – in my opinion the best one – "The Dalkey Archive". But "At Swim-Two-Birds" was the one that inspired me; if I'd called the band "The Third Policeman" maybe we wouldn't have become famous... I'm joking! At Swim Two Birds seemed to work, it evokes the name of a place, literally it means "near Swim-Two-Birds". There's something odd about it, it's quite hard to pronounce but easy to understand, and we liked it – Swim-Two-Birds seems to work even though it's a strange expression, but I like it, since I like difficult things.

Beyond the literary origin of the name At Swim Two Birds, are there other authors who have influenced you in some way?

Sure, although I always get confused with names. "A Kind Of Loving" by Stan Barstow, of course. But I remember it more for the TV series and the film based on the novel. I like John Braine's books, "Life At The Top" and "Room At The Top". When the nouvelle vague was happening, we had "kitchen sink drama" (films based on all three of the novels mentioned fall within this definition, ed.). There were a lot of great films around at that time and I watched many of them, more than I read books. Generally speaking, in fact, I pay more attention to the visual side of things, so I'm more influenced by films than by books. Oh, I also love Magnus Mills's novels a lot.

One last literary question: the Greek quotation on the frontispiece of the novel "At Swim-Two-Birds" reads "for all things change, making way for each other". Would you say you share this idea?

Definitely, I think it's this book that says that "every book can have a different ending", I think it's the same thing. We can all have, and I'm obviously living proof of it, the chance to live the life we feel we're meant to live. There are so many possible choices... unlike women, who seem to me to be more open, I get the impression that men, as they grow up, feel like "oh, I have to make my own choices by myself". And they do it by closing their eyes and ears in a way, making their own choices only for themselves.

In an interview of yours from some time ago you said, among other things, that you always manage to tell things from your own point of view, that you always have your case for the defence ready, that you're never the only person present "at the scene of the crime", that you're always as guilty as the other person for the end of a relationship, with the only difference being that you're the one who chose to talk about it publicly: is this why you write music? Is this the root of your poetics?

In a way, neither one nor the other: the way I work is more like keeping a diary, so I choose to open it up to whoever might be interested in it. I think each of us, me and all of you here, have things we shouldn't tell anyone, but I'm foolish enough to write them down and sing them. What I might call the great love of my life was a musician: she's now back in Sweden, but I find it interesting that, while I was working on "Returning To The Scene Of The Crime…", she was writing an album too; so I'm sure a great album will come out one day in Sweden, in which her music will show the other side of the coin, her point of view.

For me it's like a blessing to be able to sing my diary while I'm here in Rome or when I go to Spain or Sweden or many other places.

A few years ago, in another interview, you said that women and men aren't meant to be in the same room. That interview was four years ago: do you still think that, or has something changed in the meantime?

Probably it's me who shouldn't be in the same room as a woman! I don't know, if you think of books like "Room At The Top" or "Life At The Top", they're about people eaten up by ambition, by the drive to get to the top. I, on the other hand, have never had ambitions, these fortunate things just keep happening to me. I'm forty years old now, and I let things happen; if I'd really tried hard artistically, maybe I'd have reached the point I'm at now back when I was 28. But I don't mind, I'm enjoying watching things unfold, and I think it's the same with my relationships with women — I'm very open to the female world, I'd really like everything to go well, but at the same time I might not have the deep-down will to make those relationships work all the way through. I think that's why I said I'm not meant to be in the same room as a woman, unless I'm there precisely to write an album about it.

Your songs often seem to look to the past, to nostalgia for something that's no longer there, to dead and finished relationships: do you consider melancholy and emotional suffering to be a prerequisite for creating a work of art?

That's certainly true for me: I couldn't write anything while I'm happy. While I'm happy in a relationship I only think about what's happening in the moment, but perhaps when things are about to end I start to feel the melancholy, and that's the spur — that's the moment when I can sit down to dissect things and put the pieces back together. I need that melancholy in order to write, and I think it's the same for a great many artists, even though I'd wish otherwise for them.

And yet, there doesn't seem to be sharp pain in your songs, but rather a serene acceptance of a suffering you consider inevitable.

That's true, and it's also because I've listened to a lot of country western music, where there's no anger or bitterness, it's almost just the plain telling of a story. I grew up, unfortunately not literally, with Morrissey, so I like to keep saying the same things. It's a matter of empathy, Morrissey didn't need to say "what have we done, I'm desperate tonight" or things like that; it's about knowing that someone else might have lived through the same state of mind. Or I also draw inspiration from my mother's record collection, Charley Pride, Chip Taylor and others like that.

Why did you decide, before writing a new album, to rearrange and reinterpret your older songs? Do you have a different approach to music now compared to when you wrote them?

No, it's just that I'm older. You can read a book when you're sixteen, and when you reread it at twenty you see different things. If you open an old diary and read what you wrote at twenty, now you might think "Oh... no way!".

It even happens when you write music and rework the melody... I keep using the example of "In Bed With Your Best Friend", which at the start is very joyful, almost a kind of comedy, but then it becomes monotonous. There's no anger, but it turns dark and repetitive.

Compared to the earlier versions, a lot of songs sound sadder, maybe because you've grown up...

Yes, exactly, that's how it happens. I don't know, maybe you go watch Morrissey play and you hope he'll play "Barbarism Begins At Home". Then maybe he actually does play it, but he plays it really badly and you think "no, it would've been better if he hadn't rearranged it", but he has to do it, it's impossible not to give new form to things written a long time before as time goes on.

On "Returning To The Scene Of Crime..." there are old songs, but they sound very current, maybe because the subjects of your songs are eternal: a relationship ending never goes out of style; maybe because you're not talking about something that happened in the past but something that keeps happening?

I don't know, I didn't record it thinking "I want this to sound modern". The instrumentation I used has changed, I smoke a lot and maybe my voice has changed too, it's deeper.

Anyway I didn't try to modernize anything, once again it's a kind of reaction, a process of enriching the songs as I listened to the demos. I thought it was a good way to move from "Quigley Point" to the new album, which is very 50s-60s, quite dark. Here too there's a lot of my mother's record collection, and "Returning To The Scene Of Crime..." is a sort of bridge between the two sounds. I never thought about adding a touch of modernity, everything came from recordings upon recordings that, literally, led the sound to develop in this direction.

The lyrics of your songs are always in the first person, but are there other subjects besides your own life? Do you ever talk about other people's lives?

The only thing that comes to mind is the track "I Need Him" on "Quigley Point". That song is based on a note I got from an ex of mine, which started with "I need him more than I want you" or "I want him more than I need you". The words were almost perfect, and I didn't care that they didn't rhyme, it just took a little work and I turned it into a song. But apart from that, they're all first person, or maybe there's another one, but I can't remember it.

That was a letter the same girl wrote me, but I think everything else is first person; I think... I could be wrong!

Is there still a relationship between the evolution of lifestyles and pop music? In the '50s and '60s, pop music was very close to people's behaviour, but now it doesn't seem to be that way. Do you think everything in pop music now is more tied to the personal sphere?

I think it's actually something cyclical. Because maybe in the '50s and '60s the distribution and sale of records were fairly marginal, you can imagine, for instance, how complicated the situation was in the States. So playing live was very important. People were more involved. Think of someone like Elvis, always on tour. That's how he became so popular. And now, for different reasons, the same thing is happening, record sales aren't as important anymore, but playing live is, which brings us a bit back to the past in terms of how people approach music. There will always be plenty of bands like me, playing very introspective stuff, like shoegaze, or musicians who "see everything in black", but for every artist like me there will be thirty or forty others making light, upbeat or dance music. In a way it's right that it happens like that, there will always be bands playing cheerful music and others playing sad stuff. There will always be music for socializing and music for being alone!

Your arrangements are simple but very rich and carefully crafted, as well as perfectly suited to your songs: how do you work on this aspect of your music?

It's quite strange, because, for example, for the Mongolfier Brothers songs, Mark Tranmer gives me a piece of music, or more than one – maybe twenty – and I write the words. When I work alone, I write like putting together a mosaic: in small pieces, while I'm watching a film, or smoking a cigarette, or drinking a coffee, a line for a song comes to mind and from those words I start developing a story. I don't think about the music straight away, I don't even try to think of the two things together. Later on I might start thinking about the melody, I might have two different things in mind that slowly come closer and merge together.

So you don't have a precise method...

No, things simply happen.

The main instrument is usually the guitar.

The main thing is the words, which sounds silly but... I'll bring up cinema again: when I write, it's as if I were thinking about making a film. I don't immediately think about who's going to act, who's going to take care of the scenes and what the background music will be: the storyline is the raw material, I can't just pick up the guitar and, playing around a bit, try to come up with words to fit the music – that doesn't work for me. The storyline is the main part, the music is a consequence.

Your solo paths and Tranmer's differ quite a bit: he seems more devoted to exploring sonic experimentation that doesn't shy away from electronics. You, on the other hand, favour predominantly acoustic sounds, yet on your last tour you played with the support of a laptop: what's your relationship with electronics?

I find it essential right now when playing live. Just me on guitar and vocals, Sophia Lockwood on cello – without the electronic instruments, a lot would be lost. On "Before You Left" we composed the music differently, so it will need to be played live in a different way: we won't use the computer, and there will be an extra guitar and voice instead.

But on the last tour we couldn't have played these songs that way, so we relied on the laptop... which is also very useful when you're working without being close by. Sophia lives five miles from me in Manchester and, while we were recording the new album and writing the cello parts together, the computer was necessary.

How would you describe the differences between the Montgolfier Brothers songs and At Swim Two Birds? Do you write differently?

I think the only difference is that the words of the Montgolfier Brothers are the kind you'd say to your mum, whereas with At Swim Two Birds the words are for a lover or a best friend you tell everything to.

After the release of the new At Swim Two Birds album, do you still have any plans with the Montgolfier Brothers?

Mark is really happy with the work he's doing with Gnac, he'd put out a new record every five days if he could! As Montgolfier Brothers we were thinking of doing a kind of "best of", because it's quite hard to find our old records, and maybe including two odd live recordings, one from São Paulo and one from somewhere in Australia.

And what can you tell us about your new album, which is coming out soon?

It's all based on an orchestral Frank Sinatra album called "Man Alone". A more "orchestral" album. And there are no songs with drums on it... no wait, sorry, that's on the album after the next one... yes, I'm an optimistic kind of guy!

How do you manage to find the "melody" in your unusual guitar progressions? And what is your ‘guide’ note?

Complex question. Maybe the chord A minor (ed. note). If you listen to any song from the second period of the Cure, for example, they use A minor, like in "A Forest". I write music faster than I write lyrics, it takes me a long time to write the words, while as you've already said the music is very simple. I use recurring themes a lot, in a way vaguely similar to Philip Glass or Michael Nyman. I record a guitar line and then I keep listening back and filling in the gaps, trying to add strings, listening back and trying again - I wouldn't say it's mathematical but it's... you could say I just move my hands around here and there...

In your songs every line seems new, the words don't follow any structure, so how do you give structure to the sound?

As I've already said, I don't spend much time on it - sometimes the words rhyme, sometimes they can be read as if they were in a book. I don't rely on a structure, I don't have a book of easy rhymes. Sometimes I do it just by looking at the lyrics, sometimes I work on it a bit. I like it when the rhyme turns up, say, five lines later, and maybe that's where you can see the influence of Flann O'Brien. I like the structure of a song to lead somewhere.

Do you enjoy playing live, do you feel at ease on stage? Another musician - I think it was Bobby Wratten of Trembling Blue Stars - said that as you get older it gets harder and harder to be on stage without looking more and more like a complete idiot.

Personally, the older I get the more I enjoy playing live. It's rather strange, maybe five years ago it wasn't like that and I don't know what happened - maybe I've become more brazen, or more grown-up... but I like being on stage. It still makes me a bit nervous, but my brother is an actor and I wonder if in the end his love of the stage rubbed off on me. I find it amazing that people come to listen to the things I write.

I saw you play at Benicassim with Montgolfier Brothers, five years ago, and I liked that show, but you seemed very shy to me.

I think that was one of the worst shows we've ever played, sound-wise - there was too much feedback. We'd had a great soundcheck, but once we got on stage there was terrible feedback which made me quite nervous, especially since that night some old friends from the bar near my house in Manchester had come to see me!

You've also said you don't listen to music anymore, except for what Otto Smart and Mark Tranmer have given you. Do you still not listen to music now? Does this influence the way you write?

No, actually it's the opposite - I'm extremely easily influenced, and that's why I don't listen to music. When we're in the car or on tour, Sophia has her iPod and listens to music I've never heard before! Which really makes me feel old!

Are you still able to make a living from music alone? Now that you no longer record for Poptones, are things better or worse?

I didn't make much money with Poptones! No, I still have a part-time job in England and I can still keep my head above water. It's the same for Sophia too, and we're happy being able to do both things - if we had full-time jobs we wouldn't be able to afford all this travelling around.

Sodastream had to give up music because they couldn't afford touring in Europe and had to quit. It's sad to hear that, so hang in there!

We're trying!

Translated by Enrica Chimienti

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