Last Sunday afternoon I had an interesting
chat with a band about old music and new music. Nothing unusual in that, you
might think. Except that the band in question were the legendary Penetration,
the old music that we discussed was the shifting of tectonic plates that was
punk rock and the new music that we chatted about was Penetration’s first new
album in 36 years.
I started by asking the most obvious question
of all. Why record and release a new album now?
Rob “On the last lot of gigs it became
apparent that we were becoming almost our own tribute band. We’d been out doing
shows now since 2002 and not done anything seriously in the studio; a couple of
7” singles came out but that was it. After the last lot of gigs we felt that to
make ourselves a proper band that we’d make a record. It kind of brings you
together really, it unites you as a team when you make a record in the studio.
I knew that we’d make a good record as well because I had it in my head how I
wanted it to be.
”
Neil “Was then album ready to go when you
announced the Pledge campaign to record it?”
Rob (firmly) “No” (they all laugh.)
Neil “Was it a leap of faith?”
Rob “It was, in a way. Pauline did some solo
shows in Australia and when we came back we kind of made our minds up. The
thing I liked about the Pledge campaign is that you give yourselves a deadline
and if you don’t do that you would never get an album finished.”
Pauline “Once we pressed that button for the
Pledge campaign at the end of January and the counter started going around like
that (Pauline makes a clock hands gesture at this point) and it got to 100%
quite quickly, I thought ‘Oh my God, shit’. At that point all we had written was ‘Guilty’,
we’d already done ‘The Feeling’, we’d already done ‘Sea Song’. ‘Two Places’
we’d had for quite a while but hadn’t really done anything with it and we had a
few little ideas kicking about. The drummer that we had had left, so we were
drummerless at that point as well. Rob had the idea of a team of people to put
together, he’d already gone into asking John Maher, Fred (Purser), all of
that.”
Rob “I knew exactly how we wanted it to be. I
knew we wanted to work with Fred, we wanted it to be a Penetration album, we
wanted to have that sound. So I sat down with Fred and we had a couple of
nights talking and chatting about what the album would sound like and where we
were going with it. I can hardly remember anything about recording the first
album, or the second album to be honest with you, but he knew the whole process
so we compared notes as to how we were going to do it.”
Pauline “It was an absolute team effort. At
that point we had the basic chords for ‘Just Drifting’ but we had no lyrics. We
had the basics of a song that became ‘Betrayed’. I always knew that we would
come to a sticky point three quarters of the way through. John came down, he
lives on the Isle of Lewis, maybe four consecutive weekends to do the drums.”
Paul “There wasn’t any panic though, I was
really confident we could make a good album.”
Neil “Does it feel like a natural progression
because it certainly sounds like one? It doesn’t feel like there’s a gap of 36
years.”
Steve “I’m interested in you saying that
because it was always a big thing was that it was going to be ‘the next
Penetration album’ .”
Pauline “We needed to retain the essence of
what Penetration is. I stand back in the writing so that the guitarists or
whoever can come up with the chords because that’s the way Penetration used to
do it and then I shoehorn into that. You’ve got the two guitar thing going on,
you’ve obviously got Rob who’s there from day one, you’ve got my voice from day
one but you’ve also got a wealth of experience to draw from as well.”
Neil “I find this an interesting concept,
bringing a wealth of experience to, what was on those early albums, as much
about youthful exuberance as anything else.”
Pauline “Oh yes.”
Paul “I think experience can bring its own
problems, because what you don’t want it to sound is contrived or planned with
an eye on a certain area, but it was so natural the way that the album was made
that very quickly that issue just disappeared.”
Pauline “And it unfolded as it wanted itself
to. We just did whatever we thought was necessary and it didn’t matter if it
fitted in that bag or that bag. We wanted to make an album, not a series of
tracks, we wanted to make it a whole thing, a whole listening experience.
Originally we wanted a lot of the tracks to run into each other because we
didn’t want the scenario that you have these days where you have the download where
you go ‘oh, I’ll have track two. I like track three’ where they never know the
titles. We wanted it so that it should be listened to as a full album.”
Paul “I think that’s right, down to the fact
that we thought of it as two sides as well. We were thinking of a vinyl album,
the length of a vinyl album, well some of us were.”
Pauline “We wanted to make a proper
album.”
Neil “If we can backtrack almost 40 years, is
it true that you formed after seeing the Sex Pistols perform live?”
Pauline “I think we were already sort of
formed before that, because we were practicing and we were doing complex stuff
like ‘Roadrunner’ and ‘Pills’ by the New York Dolls and I think that was
slightly before or around about the same time. But seeing the Sex Pistols you
knew that something new was going on, you knew that that was the past and this
is now. We probably started to form the band slightly before.”
Rob “Yeah, I think you’re right, although I
wasn’t part of it then. I was the mate with the car.”
Neil “But it’s very obvious when listening to
the original Penetration albums that you had influences that were earlier than
that.”
Pauline “Oh, absolutely. I was going to see
bands from the age of fourteen. I was very, very lucky.”
Neil “Where did you go to see them?”
Pauline “Mainly the City Hall, or The Mayfair
or Middlesbrough Town Hall. I even travelled, I saw the New York Dolls at York
University, Lou Reed at Crystal Palace Hall when I was about fifteen. I saw all
the great bands that passed through, Bowie when the City Hall was three
quarters full, Bowie at Sunderland Top Rank, Roxy Music, Cockney Rebel. I saw
all of that early ‘70s stuff, and I mean all of it, anything that was worth
seeing. Prior to the punk thing I saw Bruce Springsteen’s first gig in this
country, prior to that you started to get the American stuff coming through,
Patti Smith’s ‘Piss Factory’, ‘Little Johnny Jewel’, those sort of independent
releases, Ramones, Jonathan Richman. So that was prior to the Pistols really. I
was very influenced by that New York, American scene prior to punk and I think
what you got in this country was the attitude. It was like ‘we don’t give a fuck’,
like ‘hey we’re young, this is our world, you lot have got it all wrong’. It
just felt like something that we could claim. To me punk was about being
inventive, following your own muse, doing something that was unique to you. So,
yeah, I was really switched on and (to Rob) you were as well.”
Rob “Yes, from thirteen, fourteen, there was
stuff we’d go to see. We’d go to the same gigs.”
Steve “I started going to gigs in the late
‘70s. I was going to gigs in Sunderland, I remember going to Sunderland Mayfair
to see The Stranglers.”
Pauline “I was really lucky, I was fourteen
and I had an older boyfriend who was four years older than me and he was really
switched on. I was so lucky; I was young to be going out seeing all that stuff.
I had very understanding parents, looking back.”
Neil “I feel that this album messes with my
concept of what came next because it was always the Pauline Murray and The
Invisible Girls album that came next for me, yet this new one seems to somehow
fit in between.”
Rob (to Pauline) “You had that theory, didn’t
you, that this is the missing link?”
Pauline “Well I actually think that. I think
this album is the missing link between the third Penetration album and The
Invisible Girls.”
Steve “It’s jumbled into one isn’t it? We set
it up within the framework and idea of it being a Penetration album and tried
to put the certain elements in place, but then all the stuff that you’ve done
in the past gets thrown into the pot as well.”
Neil “So who do you find exciting musically
now?
The response is a brief silence, then nervous
laughter.
Pauline “Ha, a resounding silence.”
Paul “I don’t like a lot of contemporary
stuff, but that said I do listen to a lot of radio 6. I hear it and there’ll be
something that I’ll like. It’s almost like you know too much, like ‘well I know
where that’s come from’ and for me I’d rather go back and listen to where it
originated. Since Penetration split and since The Invisible Girls album we’ve
had this thing called post-modernism and it’s changed everything. And we’ve had technology and that’s changed
everything. It’s a different listening experience, a whole different experience
of how we take in popular culture now. I think it’s a more superficial activity,
even for younger people, not just for us. I do think White Stripes made some
brilliant music actually, but I don’t really go out and buy the records. It’s
around and if I hear it I hear it.”
Pauline “There’s a lot of good original stuff
around, there really is but it never gets out there, that’s the problem.”
Rob “There’s a lot of people from around the
‘80s that’s still making great music. Nick Cave is still making great albums,
and Morrissey is still making great albums I think.”
Paul “That air of cynicism just used to go
through pop music and those commercial areas but now that cynicism goes through
the independent scene as well and the alternative scene, or the left-field
scene and you just don’t feel there’s an air of authenticity. Look at Mumford
and Sons, that hideous band, their latest album suddenly they’ve gone all
electric. You know it’s a marketing issue; it’s not a creative issue. It’s like
‘well you know we’ve done that folk thing that people are starting to not
really like as much, we’re a bit uncool, we’ll make the next one electric.’”
Rob “And get our hair cut!”
Paul “and you just think ‘oh, fuck off!’”
Pauline “I think people just aren’t turned on
to music any more. They’ve become very distracted by what the mass people are
interested in. Money, how big it is, if everybody wants to go to it, coffee
table band music really. They’ve even turned on to Nick Cave now ‘oh yes, we’re
going to see Nick Cave’”
Rob “Nick Cave at the Sage. Oh dear!”
Paul “The metropolitan media elite, they
decide suddenly that someone like John Cooper Clarke is the nation’s
favourite. We knew that in 1977”
Rob “He’s doing nothing different to what he
was doing back when there was only 200 people turning up to his gigs.”
Paul “It’s interesting because I think that
people say that the music business is in trouble, and it is, but the media are
more in control of the whole thing now, than they ever were when punk broke.”
Pauline “With the punk thing people took
ownership of their own movement, but it was soon infiltrated and used by
others.”
Rob “And there was great journalism as well.”
Pauline “You don’t really get writers like
that any more, where people will analyse something. They cut and paste your
press release now. You think ‘well could you not get your own angle on that,
what’s the matter with you?’”
Paul “There were some writers at that time
that tended to over-analyse and be pretentious but that was part of the fun of
it, you could always pull them up if you thought they were going too far.
Certainly that kind of analysis of music, there’s a lot of that disappeared
now.”
Neil “When we lost John Peel, did we lose the
last of the pioneering disc jockeys?”
Rob (as if to egg Paul on) “Go on.”
Paul “That fucker was well past his sell-by
date! I think this thing about John Peel, he’s held up as some sort of hero and
he wouldn’t have had a show without the music. He made a decision to start
playing punk music when two months before he was playing Jethro Tull and Yes
and things like that and it was really the bands that made the music.”
Neil “Was there a switch flipped that changed
things from Pink Floyd to punk?”
Pauline “Oh, there was.”
Paul “There was a proper paradigm shift and
that should never be forgotten. It happened within days.”
Pauline “I saw it happen before my eyes. For
instance I went to see the Doctors of Madness at Middlesbrough Town Hall, and
I’d been to see them quite a lot, they were a left-over from the Glam era which
I loved and the Sex Pistols supported them and they made that band obsolete
there and then. And that was it for that band. It was as quick as that, and a
lot of those old bands were frightened by it because they knew their time was
up.Young people were out there, making their mouths go and those people had had
it good. Whoever hadn’t behaved themselves right were turfed out. Some people
made it through, like Iggy Pop made it through, Bowie made it through, Lou Reed
made it through, some people did make it through; Marc Bolan did to an extent.
He embraced punk and they embraced him, but a lot of the excessive early ‘70s
people were laid to waste overnight and it was definitely an immediate type of
shift. You just turned your back on them, and I’d loved a lot of those bands.”
Paul “All those people who talk about when
punk hit it was like they were out at sea and there was a fucking storm and the
ones that knew how to sail, this is a terrible analogy isn’t it, that knew what
they were doing, who were experienced and clever, they saw it out and they
found calmer waters.”
Rob “A lot of people just went to ground
didn’t they? Just disappeared off to Bermuda for five or six years.”
Paul “And I think history has proved that we
were probably right as well.”
Pauline “Nobody can put their finger on it
though. They try to analyse punk again and again. They’ve picked over it so
much that there’s nothing left to analyse. But they still can’t get a handle on
it.”
Rob “It was a point in time as well wasn’t
it?”
Steve “I don’t think that our age can ever be
recaptured though can it? The people who were being outraged were the ones
who’d came through the war and were looking for an easier life and the youth
were coming up and wanted to kick against this easy life that everybody had. The
people in power and local politicians were people who’d been in the forces, so
they were easily outraged by these kids who were bored and constrained. And
you’ll never recapture that kind of outrage. There were questions in Parliament
about punk rock. You’re never going to get that about any music culture again.
That outrage can’t be replicated.”
Pauline “And the hippies were put in their
place. All the sixties people who had pioneered for this and that had suddenly
turned into the capitalists of the day.”
Paul “We had a tailor-made enemy with the
hippies.”
Pauline “Never trust a hippy. Malcolm McLaren
said that and no truer word was said. I will always use that as a yardstick.
Never trust a hippy. I’ve found it to be very true on a lot of occasions.”
Neil “I’ve recently seen Penetration described
as a ‘first wave’ punk band?”
Paul “There’s no argument that Penetration
were a ‘First wave’ punk band. They played The Roxy, I think it’s very
important that the single came out in 1977.”
Pauline “Musically everything comes from
something else. The Pistols were very like ‘60s, Small Faces, traditional
really.”
Steve “They were souped-up Mods really.”
Pauline “The music was pretty traditional
when you think it was coming from something that already existed, as Jonathan
Richman would have been coming from The Velvet Underground. Everything is connected;
nothing is set on its own. What set The Pistols apart, because musically they
were fairly conventional, was the lyrics and Johnny Rotten’s delivery of them. And his look, his intensity. I’d never heard anybody sing ‘God save the
Queen, she ain’t no human being, she made you a moron.’ I had heard something
like ‘Pretty Vacant’ previously in something like ‘Blank Generation’ but, lyrically
some of the things that he was coming out with, he would have been hung, drawn
and quartered in another century, uttering those words out into the open like
that.”
Paul “But to them that was very natural, that
wasn’t contrived either.”
Pauline “It takes a lot of courage to come
out with those things when no-one’s ever said them before. I can’t think of
anyone who’d said stuff like that about the establishment.”
Paul “I don’t think even they realised how
inflammatory it was. I think they were just doing what they were doing; they
were having fun. I think even they were taken aback.”
Pauline “What did they have to lose? What did
any of us have to lose? We were all from working class backgrounds; what did
any of us have to lose? Nothing really. We just saw it as a bit of fun at the
time, a bit of a laugh. I didn’t think 36 years later we’d still be sat here
talking about it.”
Neil “I know that you’ve played live gigs
recently, but it must feel different playing to promote a new album.”
Pauline “Ooh, it’s going to be really
different. We haven’t started bloody rehearsing yet and we’ve only got four
weeks to go. And we have a drummer who’s in the Isle of Lewis, we can’t get him
down here all the time. It’s going to be very different to the last time we
went out.”
Steve “There’s a lot of tracks which were
just worked out in the studio. We’ll have to re-work them out and see which
tracks work best live.”
Neil “How much of the new album are you going
to play live?”
Pauline “Quite a lot, I would say.”
Rob “We’ve sort of worked out a set list and
it includes most of the new album.”
Neil “Was it important to you to have a ‘physical’
release?”
Rob “The record buying public is going back
to physical purchases. This was mixed in a studio to be listened to on a hi-fi
system.”
Neil “It’s true that most people now don’t
listen to music on particularly good systems.”
Steve “They listen to it on shit! Most modern
music sounds shit. Most modern music players sound shit. MP3s are shit, by
their nature. It nearly all sounds shit and it’s on shit players everywhere you
go.”
Paul “And we asked Vaughan Oliver to design
the sleeve as well, because it’s a whole physical package and we wanted that
quality and that kind of experience.”
Steve “It’s the people who wanted the
physical package who enabled this album financially.”
Rob “The Pledge campaign didn’t have a
‘download only’ option, we made sure it didn’t. It was always going to
available physically, on CD, or, if you buy the vinyl you get a download code.
It was never intended to have just a download option.”
At this point I thank the group and wish them
good luck with the album’s release.
Paul “We know it’s a great record so any
criticism is like water off a duck’s back. You’re always going to get that. The
most frustrating thing to me would be to be ignored. It’s better to be hated
than ignored. I think that quiet confidence that we all had throughout it is
key.”
Rob “And the live gigs are going to be more
exciting for us because this adds an extra element playing brand new songs.
It’s just going to add to the tension, to the excitement for us.”
Paul “We’re not idiots; we’ve all been to see
bands where we’ve sat through the new stuff, just waiting for the classics. We
know that, but we think that at least 50% of the set is going to be new stuff
because we’re excited about playing it. That will come across. I think it will
also help the old material as well. I’m just ready to start stuff now, my
fingers are itching.”
Pauline “We want as many people to hear it as
possible because it’s all done for the right reasons.”
Please don't forget that you can download and read 'The Great Cassette Experiment' and 'Writing About Music' from Amazon and Google Play Books.
Please don't forget that you can download and read 'The Great Cassette Experiment' and 'Writing About Music' from Amazon and Google Play Books.
