Happy New Year and is that pop itch finally scratched?

So a happy new year and all that. Anyone paying attention will have noticed that in the last 9 months or so the Sanderson Snatch Tapes output has gone all 'long form', shifting away almost completely from the 3 minute pop song based format of Rumble of The Ruins and Closest Friends to a more musique concrète focus on noise sound (to use the Russolo term). 

 

Though this hasn't come completely out of the blue - the Ice Yacht releases have been all instrumental you could make a case that this is a return to something - maybe the more electronic days of early Storm Bugs but I'd prefer to see it as a forward rather than reverse gear. In truth the noise sound thing has been there all along but to get to the current location the pop itch had to be scratched. 

 

For the first ten years of my life music played very little part. There were no instruments at home aside from a mouth organ on which my father could play a tune but rarely did. My mother watched Top of The Pops and there was a mono dansette but it rarely got switched on, my parents had maybe 20 LPs - probably less. My convent primary school which I attended from 1963 to 1971 had many virtues but music education was not one of them. 

 

Come eleven  and a a move to a new school, mix in some stirring hormones and I rapidly became intoxicated by pop music. I can recall a party at my next door neighbour's hose in 1972 in which alongside ice cream and jelly a couple of T.Rex singles were played over and over. Soon I had a copy of Slider and the infatuation was in full flow. 

 

Of course one wanted to not only consume pop music but be consumed by it and make one's own. This remember was when Ziggy Bowie shaped the agenda and when pop music offered not only the three minute rush but the promise of a total reinvention of self. "Gotta make way for the homo superior" 

 

I was bought an acoustic guitar for my birthday. it was a spanish classical guitar with impossibly high action and a wide fretboard which I could barely get my hands around.  There was also a guitar book that promised you the pleasure of after a couple of weeks being able to play Greensleeves. I did learn the basic chords but the acoustic guitar didn't really inspire or rather I was more captivated by the idea of pop than learning how to play scales. 

 

There was also something else going on and that was a nascent interest in sound and electronic music. There wasn't much to go on. Stockhausen may have recorded Kontakte in 1960 but you'd be hard pressed to find a copy in the Medway Towns or anything else similar. What one did have was Faust, Neu, Kraftwek and of course Eno all radical in their own way though perhaps more musically conventional than one thought at the time. 

 

Alongside lamentable strumming on the acoustic guitar I also began "plugging inputs into outputs" experimenting with old reel to reel tape machines bough at the market and making the first steps towards something. Without any guide aside from what sounded interesting to my ears I began recording some nascent noise sound tracks. These were decidedly not pop songs even if that was the wider frame of reference or the field of activity. I had already recorded quite a few 'noise' pieces before hearing Throbbing Gristle but it is fair to say that TG made a sense of it all, somehow melding electronics and song.  

 

And thus we have the ingredients for Storm Bugs 1978-81 a sometimes curious combination of sound exploration colliding with or tainted by a pop sensibility. There was an early peak with the Second Storm Bugs single a kind of industrial rockabilly powered by a drum loop, but a ridiculous sleeve, non existent marketing and an absence of live gigs meant it all but disappeared without trace. 

 

Steven Ball (my fellow Storm Bug) and I took things a step further in the early 1980s when a session to record a local (to the Medway Towns) guitarist to play along to a VCS3 track we had made at West Square ended with almost a year spent making jangly pop music as Swoon Baboon. And so it would continue throughout the first half of the 1980s - on the one hand I would make occasional forays into noise with David Jackman and the boys from Alien Brains and The New Blockaders but then would spend the best part of 1985 working on pop songs in a flat in Islington with one of Nigel Jacklin's old school chums.

 

Ironically the best music from this period wasn't the pop music (which was with the exception of one or two tracks was mostly just competent) but the little bits of film music I did for arts school friends.  By 86 I had tired or even exhausted myself trying to make pop music and/or become a pop persona. Experimental film and then installation projects beckoned and I made no attempt at pop music for another ten years. 

 

But still the itch needed scratching and when I got a Mac in 1997 and began again to make music for its own sake though the majority of the output was short electronic pieces I was to an extent still beguiled by the three minute song, a soaring melody and a rousing beat. 

 

So in the last ten years the odd song began to creep in both with the rebooted Storm Bugs project and my solo output.  By 2000 with Rumble of The Ruins and the 2001 Even my Closes Friends the releases were predominantly song based. It is too simplistic to say that this was the music I had been striving to make in 1986 for there had been a lot of listening to all manner of songs in between. I had always know that pop music is inherently simple even simplistic but that is part of the beauty and appeal. It just took a long time to make something I was happy with.

 

Neither Rumble of The Ruins or Even my Closes Friends was any kind of commercial success and maybe just as well as I would have had to tour my sorry self around venues playing them and the whole live thing always seemed a lot of work - not the playing to an audience per se that can be quite enervating, but all the arranging/travelling/staying in hotels stuff. So the afore mentioned releases are not really pop as really pop music should be on some level popular but musically they finally scratched the pop itch to my own satisfaction - it only took 40 years. 

 

Since then it has been a process of clearing my head and making the space for some new noise sound music.