David Lance Callahan - Frescoes of urban folk

David Lance Callahan is an extraordinary character and musician, co-founder in the mid-80s of the Wolfhounds, who took part in that iconic compilation called C86, and later the creator of Moonshake, who, alongside other bands on the Too Pure roster, helped shape a kaleidoscopic post-rock scene in Britain with vivid imagination. After successfully reforming the Wolfhounds a few years ago, the pandemic led David to revisit many songs he had prepared and to release, after more than 30 years of activity, his first, splendid solo album: “English Primitive I”. With a mix of joy and emotion, I had the pleasure of having a truly enjoyable exclusive chat that touched on many topics: from the C86 scene to British post-rock in the 90s, from the changes in his approach to sound to his stylistic references, through to the genesis of the new album and his various future projects. Here's what he told us.

The Wolfhounds are one of the few bands that were part of the famous C86 cassette released by the NME to still be active. What was the scene like back then, and what do you think now of the legacy left by the C86 scene? After all, the cassette featured very different groups from one another, and the Wolfhounds were never a jingle-jangle pop band.

Well, we did have a few jangly songs for a brief period! But in truth, until the cassette came out, there wasn't really a proper “C86 scene”. We never really liked the song we chose for the cassette, because it was an old castoff and we didn't expect it to get the attention it ultimately received. Some bands – Primal Scream, The Bodines – were wise enough to put their best song on the cassette. Others – including us – were a bit foolish and wasted the opportunity. So the scene, up until the cassette, was largely a loose network of bands and fanzines around the UK that were all radically different from one another, but who helped each other out with organizing gigs, recording, and promotion on a targeted, low-cost basis. Then it became a genre and lost everything that had been interesting about it. We loved post-punk (everything from Throbbing Gristle to Postcard Records), 60s garage, 70s reggae, early hip-hop, American post-hardcore, 60s/70s weird-folk (Tim Buckley, Nick Drake, John Martyn, etc.), and even Impulse-era jazz. These influences fed our basic musical vocabulary and, hopefully, gave us a bit of individuality. My tastes haven't changed much, to be honest.

Could the breakup of the Wolfhounds in the early 90s have been caused by the lack of press and radio promotion, or by your gradual infatuation with the sampling process and the resulting different approach to sonic material? Or perhaps by both factors.

No – we got a lot of coverage from the press but no success (that should have been our slogan!). In the end we had no money left and were emotionally and creatively exhausted. We'd been offered potential deals with Creation (UK) and Homestead (US) but were tied up by a contract with Midnight Music and couldn't take advantage of the opportunities. That was very frustrating and unsatisfying. But I'd fallen in love with sampling technology and rightly thought I could use it in a way nobody else was doing. I'd already met Margaret Fiedler, because she'd answered an ad in Melody Maker to join the Wolfhounds, but the band split up abruptly, and she agreed with my ideas about sampling. The Wolfhounds at the time would never have agreed to explicit sampling, so I went ahead with my own project. Luckily Dick Green and Alan McGee at Creation had enough faith in me to let me develop things over the following year and release the first Moonshake record.

I've loved a great deal, and still love now, that British post-rock scene of the '90s tied above all to the Too Pure label. Moonshake, Pram, Long Fin Killie, Laika and also Stereolab managed to create a universe of enormous musical creativity with no stylistic limits or boundaries. A scene that has always reminded me of the energy and genre-blending of some post-punk-era bands like Stilts, The Pop Group or Rip Rig + Panic. What was the spark that led you to create a group so different from the Wolfhounds, and what was it like, back then, living from the inside that scene which, thirty years on, still feels so incredibly modern and relevant? Despite the stylistic differences, were the various bands of that era connected in some way? Have you kept up a friendship with Margaret's Laika, born out of Moonshake's ribs?

Most of the bands knew each other and often played together, and it was incredibly exciting to be part of that scene. Not only was everyone making innovative music, but we also had enough interest from the music industry to fund most of our ambitions. The ideal situation for any musician! Many of us were, in fact, heavily influenced by the post-punk era and modeled ourselves on some of those ideas. Since I'd told Margaret to leave Moonshake, mainly because of problems arising from our lack of communication, we didn't speak to each other for many years, though we're on good terms now.

Why did you decide to end the Moonshake experience, and what happened between the end of Moonshake and the Wolfhounds reunion? I won't hide the fact that hearing your voice again on Chris Cole's Manyfingers' splendid "The Spectacular Nowhere" was as wonderful as it was unexpected a surprise.

After Moonshake ended I found myself once again in a state of emotional and creative exhaustion, with the added bonus of creative block and depression. I didn't make much music for a couple of years (although for a while I had an occasional multimedia project called The $urp!u$ that never really took off). I also had young children and needed a more secure, reliable income for a while. Still, interest in my earlier work strangely and unexpectedly continued, and Bob Stanley (Saint Etienne) asked me if the Wolfhounds could play at the ICA in 2006, and we really liked the idea. I never stopped writing songs and pieces of music, and it seemed logical to use them with the band. Then people seemed interested in reissuing our old catalogue and even in hearing new music. Chris Cole (Manyfingers, Movietone) is a longtime fan and asked me if I'd sing my lyrics on his LP, and the results were excellent, I think. A bit of a step forward from Moonshake. My lyrics are much closer to what I've always wanted to write, but strangely they seem to have brought things full circle with the diary excerpt on the back cover of "Cut The Cake", the Wolfhounds' first record.

In your lyrics you've always expressed your social and political convictions without filters. What do you think of current British politics, from Brexit to the handling of the pandemic? From a distance, my impression is one of general confusion among people, who are still mainly trying to work out how to come to terms with leaving the European Union.

I find the current state of the UK (and the world) deeply worrying. It feels like we're going back to the 19th-century social order, with incredibly rich people doing whatever the hell they want and a complete lack of freedom for anyone who works for a living. On top of that there's the lack of a free press (given that it's controlled by owners who favour this new social order). Italy introduced this situation with Berlusconi, but we've taken it much further! Wealthy opportunists manipulated public opinion to secure a Brexit that almost certainly won't help anyone – quite the opposite, in fact. But we have to respect a democratic vote, otherwise we'd plunge even further into authoritarianism. On top of that, in 2017 and 2019 we turned down the chance we had for a green revolution that probably would have dealt effectively with our climate and economic problems, at a time when we can't afford to delay our global responses to these issues.

Recently, some major artists such as Neil Young or Joni Mitchell have heavily criticized Spotify, prompted by a podcast spreading fake news about pandemic management, and have even pulled their music from the platform. But many others, in recent months, have complained that the streaming giant pays very low, if not laughable, royalties to artists. What do you think about this issue and about streaming music in general? Clearly for our generation it's a totally different way of listening to music, but nowadays we have to reckon with new generations who, I'm afraid, will very rarely set foot in a record shop…

I always like having a finished physical product after I've finished recording something, because it feels like I've created something real. And it's right that people should pay for it. Streaming is far from the ideal way to experience music, but honestly the amount of money paid hardly matters to me, since I've never been paid much anyway. I really have no idea what to do about it. But as for the content of that podcast, I think internet platforms are publishers and are therefore responsible for the false or dangerous information they spread. They should be held accountable for it.

Let's start talking about your first solo work. "English Primitive I" was highly anticipated and turned out even better than I expected. Maybe that's one of the few upsides of the pandemic? In the sense that during lockdown you finally had time to work on material you'd probably had lying around for a while?

Yes, this first album and the next one are a mix of songs I'd been working on for a long time and others that were written very recently during the pandemic. But they work well together. I'm self-employed but don't have enough work to get too much in the way of the creative process, so I was able to write and record these two LPs, and I have enough material for another two that I haven't started yet. Recording with others has been a problem for most of this time, though, for obvious reasons.

Is there a concept the album is focused on? I found different suggestions in the lyrics, from feeling insecure at the start of a relationship to a soldier returning after the war. What do you mean by "English primitive"? Is it something that refers to the situation in the UK? Perhaps to the fact that the British government has started outsourcing parts of the NHS and the Welfare State to private companies?

I have a somewhat melancholic but optimistic view of the world, and that's what ties all the songs together. "English Primitive" is a phrase that sounded good in my head, but it also seemed to suit my "non-musician" way of writing and playing (even though over time I've picked up some skill on guitar – though even now I can't play anyone else's songs). It also fits the lowest-common-denominator states of English culture and politics, similar to what we did after colonization. I'm very proud to have been born in an era when we have the welfare state, which I think is humanity's greatest achievement, especially in terms of benefiting an entire society rather than just the wealthy.

What is there of Wolfhounds and Moonshake in your way of composing for a solo album?

With the Wolfhounds, I (and sometimes Andy Golding) tend to send finished songs to the others and let them work out their own parts. Then we polish them in the studio or work them out live. With Moonshake the compositional approach was much more rigid and structured, since many of the songs were electronically sequenced and had to be played by the band members. I still use samples, but I've rejected that inflexible way of playing. As a solo artist, I tend to write songs on an electric guitar tuned in a unique way, record them, and then ask drummers and other musicians to add parts, or I play samples by hand on top.

Who are the musicians playing with you? I remember Daren Garratt from Pram and one of the many line-ups of the Fall, but I don't know the others. I can say, though, that I love Katherine Mountain Whitaker's voice.

I've known Daren since he was in Pram (a band I loved) and later in the Nightingales. He's always been an underrated drummer and has an incredible sensitivity for the internal rhythmic workings of a song, as well as being a great improviser and a fast worker. Katherine was in a band I saw a couple of times, called Evans The Death, and she's always had a voice that rose well above her peers. When I first asked her to sing on one of my songs, it was really satisfying to hear how well our voices blended. I gave her a song to sing on her own on the next record and she did an amazing job. Terry Edwards plays horns on some of the songs, and I've known him since I was 15, when he was one of the mascots the local punks let hang around. He's always been a great musician and played on "Eva Luna". I can't remember how I met Alison Cotton, but it was probably somewhere in London's nightlife. Her solo LPs are fantastic, as is her band, The Left Outsides. She makes a kind of dark, tormented semi-folk music that fits really well with some of my songs. Iskra Strings did some work with Leaf Library that I liked, so I asked them directly, and the same goes for Dan Fordham, who did the string arrangements.

Since we've just touched on it, I think it's wonderful to give more visibility to artists like Katherine Whitaker and Alison Cotton, who you just mentioned, and consequently to their projects Evans The Death and The Left Outsides. Who are your current favourite artists, and who really inspired you to become a musician?

I'm just a fan, and I like working with people I admire and who I think can add something good to what I do. Most famous people wouldn't be seen dead with me, even the ones I know, so I always enjoy digging up new talent. That said, they give me the same visibility I give them, but that's not why I do it. I just want to find collaborators for my solo material because there are instruments I can't play, and of course I can only sing with a male voice. There's always good music out there, old and new. Right now I'm listening to Ben Lamar Gay, Benefits, This Is The Kit, Lou Reed's Rca demos, Stick In The Wheel, Lankum and Oumou Sangaré. But that's just a snapshot of what I'm listening to today.

As you'll have gathered from my review, I really loved "English Primitive I". Where do you draw inspiration for your lyrics from, and in particular, what inspired you to write "One Rainy September", perhaps my favourite track on the record?

Inspiration, as always, comes from my mind wandering when I've got nothing to do. I'm always thinking "what if...?". Everything I think about somehow finds its way in, even if not always in an obvious way. And it always ends up being some kind of generalised political critique and/or makes me think that the past is always with us, and that we keep repeating the mistakes of the past in new ways, while still somehow managing to survive. There's always an element of magic realism, I think, given that I'm constantly torn between the mystical and the concrete. "One Rainy September" is a dialogue between an absent military father and his daughter, and the misunderstandings that arise between them because they're too caught up in themselves to take the time to understand each other. It's a very sad song, but maybe it can apply to a lot of parents in different contexts too. That said, the lyrics just came out that way, and I only thought about other possible implications afterwards.

The tracklist includes a few very long tracks, 7 or 8 minutes. Was the record planned that way, or did the songs just sound so good that it made no sense to shorten them?

The latter. Every song is as long or as short as it needs to be. At least I get to have that freedom.

I found the mix of folk, psychedelia, and Eastern touches fantastic, always with roots firmly planted in garage and classic songwriting, with tracks of different lengths and different moods. Will Volume II be out soon? Will it be made of the same ingredients?

I listen to everything. My only criterion is "artistic rigour", so I like commercially successful music as much as the avant-garde. I've always seen rock and pop (including its indie subspecies) as a continuation of popular music, and I still don't really understand separate genres all that well. I also don't really understand copyright law, given that music evolves by stealing and copying, and then gets screwed up because there's nothing you can do about it. Vol II is noisier and more psychedelic than Vol I, but it still has a similarly eclectic range of influences. And I still listen to 60s garage and classic songwriters, especially when they're sung by 50s torch singers.

I'm curious to know how the album artwork came about. It's a striking image. I love the stained glass and the medieval touches, and I was wondering whether Pinkie Maclure created it based on your instructions, or whether you simply found it fitting for the record's atmosphere.

I've known Pinkie since around 1990 and I've always admired her voice (she's part of Puma Jaw with her partner John Wills, who was in Loop). I find her stained-glass work breathtaking, and it seems to fit my work so well - as you say, it looks like it was commissioned specifically for it, but it actually wasn't. She's building an international reputation as an "outsider artist", but her work is far better than most artists who actually studied.

What are your future plans as a solo artist and with The Wolfhounds?

Well, these are my future plans. As I said before, "English Primitive II" is finished and in production, and it will be both very different and very similar. I've got enough songs written for at least two more LPs, and I'll try to demo and record them soon. I'll be touring the UK for the first time in years starting from October. Europe and the United States (and other parts of the world) are currently a problem for every British musician, really. I'm also writing a novel and another book about birds, but these are, as always, long-term projects.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google