Tom Ronan

Originally published in The Cambridge Student in 2015

The Wave Pictures have been together in one form or another since 1998, touring relentlessly, collaborating widely and making numerous recordings of their prolific output. I caught up with them before their storming set at the Portland Arms to discuss their songwriting methods, their new album and life on the road.

People often comment on the fact that you grew up in a small English village. Do you feel that ‘Englishness’ is part of your musical identity and something you consciously write about, or is that just lazy journalism?

I think that is lazy journalism, actually. I’m English and I live in England, but I’ve never been particularly interested in skewering the English psyche, like Ray Davies did. Coming from a small village can make you insular and small minded, and it means you don’t get involved in scenes or interact with other bands much.

Why do you choose to record your albums in live performances, without using overdubs or lots of takes?

We have a way of working that is very fast. We’re on tour most of the time, and the recordings are only a short, exciting part of each year. Those are the types of recordings we like to listen to, where people are live in a room, so that’s what we’re after.

What can we expect from the gig tonight? Have you planned a set list?

We don’t use set lists, I’ll just play the songs I think I can remember. There’ll be some old ones, with new ones mixed in, no plan. Johnny always wants to make a plan, but I hate it because it makes me nervous to think about it too much in advance. 

You have a new album out soon – Great Big Flamingo Burning Moon. What can you tell us about it?

It’s different kind of collaboration; we wrote the songs with Billy Childish and he produced it. It’s his equipment, his sound, and his mixing, but it’s my voice and my lyrics. It’s a great departure from what we’ve done before. The melodies are quite different from anything we would have come up with on our own. It sounds fresh and exciting to us. It was initially a little project Billy was interested in doing. We recorded, mixed and mastered everything in five days. Billy and I would literally write the music for some lyrics in 20 minutes and record it. To write it probably took a couple of days, and a few rehearsals, so it was very, very fast. We didn’t know that we were going to release it until we nearly finished it, and we were so excited by it that we decided to make it our next album.

You wrote the lyrics to City Forgiveness on the go in America, quickly laid them down in the studio. Do you usually write songs in a burst of inspiration, or are there times when you labour over a song?

It’s always a mix. I can fill a notebook up with lyrics, but it can take a while to turn them into songs. In the case of City Forgiveness, the lyrics were written over the tour, and I sat down with an acoustic guitar when I got home and turned them into songs. Then we recorded it very quickly, like the new record. But there is a song called ‘I Thought Of You Again’, and the first time we tried it as a rock song, but it took a while to find the right melody for it. We settled on doing it as a ballad, but it had already been through a few changes. Generally it’s very quick, but sometimes a song doesn’t work. I’ll often take the verses from three or four songs that didn’t work and put them together into a new song. So there’s a mix of being spontaneous and considered, but there’s no slaving over anything.

Some Joni Mitchell lyrics seem to share your eye for detail – has she been an influence?

I tried to get into Joni Mitchell three or four years ago, but I couldn’t. It’s not because she’s not great, I just don’t like the way she sings. It isn’t a reasonable, considered opinion, I just couldn’t get over what she does with her voice. The thing of details you notice in many songs and artists. So when Neil Young says he’s going to “find himself a place to get some good country ham” it suddenly seems real, and you’ll always remember it. It’s something The Mountain Goats are very good at. It’s all very real, which is not true of rock or soul. I like to sing things which seem surreal to people or that seem very psychedelic, but actually involves everyday stuff. So if you sing “Frogs sing loudly in the ditches, dragonflies hover overhead” it sounds crazy, but that’s something I read on a tourist information board in Rye. I like that kind of thing, where the normal and mundane sound psychedelic.

On one of your recent collaborations, Stanley Brinks sings “the radio sucks balls, I don’t relate to any of the music they’re playing at all.” Is that an opinion you share?

Yes, to a huge degree. We’re always on the lookout for a new band or something we can get excited about. We meet a lot of great people, but I can’t remember the last time I heard some new music that I liked. If I ever listen to the radio I am always shocked and disappointed by the standard. Club music is just the pits. It’s difficult to tell if we’re just getting old and grumpy, or whether there is genuinely something terrible going on. It’s that bad now that it could make you miss the 90s or Oasis. You can’t even believe the hits are even hits.

How about Radio 6? Did you enjoy your residency there?

We get on really well with Marc Riley, he’s fantastically supportive of us. We’ve kind of become mates with him. We did our residency, then went out and played darts with him, which was really good fun. We love doing radio sessions. Marc will play a Thin Lizzie track, then a Gene Vincent track, then a new band you haven’t heard of. He has complete control of what he plays, which is how it should be for all DJs across the board. You can trust him because he’ll only be playing something if he likes it. Otherwise, what’s the point?

What effect did the US have on you as an artist?

America’s not like a country, it’s a lot more like a continent. You can have a great show in San Francisco, Portland or New York and there’d be Waves Pictures fans, but most of the shows you’d play to pretty much nobody. You drive for nine or 10 hours a day and it costs a fortune because you don’t really get paid. America’s just the worst to tour. It’s a great experience, but it’s really hard work and we literally can’t afford to do it unless something changes. We’ll play New York to like 400 people who know the songs, and it’s like “great, we’ve conquered America”, but New York is like a European city on the wrong side of the ocean. I’d dearly like to go back and play there again, it’s one of my favourite places in the world, but even the visas are too expensive. You just need a five star Pitchfork review or a song in a film or a stroke of sheer of good fortune, then you could do it.

How about this new 2015 tour? There are quite a few dates in Spain – do you have a large following there?

This is the first date. We’ve played Cambridge five or six times before, and we’re really pleased because this is the first time we’ve sold out here. With Spain, it’s not even like we’re huge there, just a bit more popular than we are here. But they took to us straight away. We played there on our first tour, and when we went back all the rooms were full and everybody was very happy. They like to rock out and jump around. They’re not analytical about it in anyway, which is fun, playing to people who are dancing and having fun. It would irritate us too; when we’d play a quiet song people would always talk over it. We relied on Spain to make a living for last five or six years. The UK has actually been our toughest country to tour in, outside of London, but now we’re finally getting there.