OK everybody, thanks as ever for sticking with us, and thanks especially for the feedback, this all becomes exponentially greater when there’s conversations with the conversations, so to speak. We’re fast approaching having as much material as in Bass, Mids, Tops the book itself (new printing of that on the way very soon, by the way!), so in the few moments of downtime we get, we’re starting to think about What It All Means: the plan was always to show the connections between the lives and subcultures we’re depicting, so maybe it’s time to do some conspiracy theorist type giant charts of those connections or something.
And talking of those connections, it’s fitting that interview no. 23 - that most conspiracy woo-woo mystical of numbers - should go to someone who both played in that most 23-centric of bands, Psychic TV, and has managed to join dots through underground culture to a mind-boggling degree - while being ridiculously prolific musically too - in the 40+ years since then. David Harrow has stories for days, and I mean that very literally. That’s why for the first time, we’re going to be running this one in instalments.
I’ve known David personally for some years; I started becoming aware of his sparse, spare solo electronic dub productions on his workhousedigital label in the 2010s, got really into them, linked up and hung out with him in his long time hometown LA when I went over there to interview Skrillex in 20141, and since then have been social media friends and regularly caught up for weary dad chat. So I knew he was a great raconteur with lots of interesting insights - but even so I wasn’t expecting quite the volume of stories I got this time.
I sat down for a Google Chat call with him, and before I realised it 90 minutes had gone and I had to go and cook the kids’ tea, but already we’d been around Cold War Berlin, Billy Childish, Hot Chocolate, drum’n’bass, Throbbing Gristle and so much more - and crucially, hadn’t even talked properly about Psychic TV, let alone his work with Andrew Weatherall (which is where I first became aware of his name) or Adrian Sherwood, his writing of one of the biggest dance hits of the 90s, or his 21st century inroads into the dubstep scene… all of this in his almost showbizzy transatlantic accent that occasionally swings back to deep cockney to underline a point.
Obviously we couldn’t afford to send Brian to LA either, so in another first, we’ve done a remote photoshoot - which I hope you’ll agree is pretty striking. So… well… here he is!
OK David, you’ve been around the block, you’re now a teacher and family man - but do you still feel part of the music world?
Sometimes. I’m still releasing music. I was 60 in June and what with Facebook being like a mausoleum, the ideas of mortality really begin to creep up on you. I've been trying to make this just a something year. I've been releasing a brand new piece of music every single month this year. I've set up my entire studio so it's all online, so you can see various cameras around the room2. My productivity is greater than ever, what can I say? I've been putting out music, whether other people have been listening to it is... an exercise in humility, if nothing else. But I feel, to a certain extent, we're back to like when I started. I remember we used to do a couple of tracks and then go to Porky's Prime Cuts3 and print up what we could afford, like 250 copies, then sell those around the few record shops in London. I used to drive around in my little Ford Fiesta and go: “Wow. We’ve sold 500 records. That's great.” I'm, on a certain level, back to that right now.
Obviously the big thing is some new James Hardway4. The last few years, it seems most of your albums have essentially been modular dub, ambient, techno… that kind of thing… in that zone. With James Hardway, it’s bigger, bashier, more instruments …
I put James Hardway to bed for a while. In some ways, James Hardway is the reason I'm here in the States. Back 20-plus years ago, when I was still touring as James Hardway, and I'd been on the end of a 10-year grind of going from one side of the world to the other, doing James Hardway shows and DJing as James Hardway too. I spent so much time in Australia and New Zealand and that part of the world, I thought living in LA would be a good halfway point between the two. I had a nice record deal with James Hardway with Ubiquity5 that I always loved as a label and who still put out some great work. The guy that owns it still a good friend.
I felt I’d mined the seam of drum‘n’bass as far as I felt I could go. It got a little bit samey, so I was trying to broaden it out a little bit. That's why to Cuba and working with the Cuban musicians was the beginning of that process. I had signed to a label in the States to fund all that stuff, did what I thought was an amazing album6 on Ubiquity, blew most of the budget on strings and horns. You get this opportunity to do things like that, you're like: “I really want to take it.” It's an amazing educational experience. But the album just disappeared without a trace.
And that was the first thing I think I'd ever done in a while that just didn't sell. It was a kind of: “Oh, what happened here?” It was not anything I could really put my finger on. I think the music industry was changing then. This is 20 years ago, right? And things were changing. There's a LA band called Visionaries. One of the rappers lived in my street and was the only raster I'd ever see around, or at least a guy with dreads. We bonded going into the Low End Theory7. Pete from Pressure Sounds8 said: “If you want to do some kind of project, I'll happily fund it.” And I thought: “Oh, this may be a great kind of crossover, dub, hip-hop, reggae kind of mix” and made a great album9 which was universally hated by both camps. We thought: “The hip-hop heads will love it and the dub reggae heads will love it too.”
The reggae guys hated it because it was too hip-hop, and the hip-hop guys hated it because it was dub. I threw two albums out that I thought were some of the best work I'd done, and watched them disappear. At that time I was still doing some sync work here in the States, doing music for TV and films and stuff like that, and that stuff paid really well. We'd, we'd license 30 seconds of a James Hardway track and I’d say to the Mrs: “We're good for the next six months.” So it wasn't such an essential thing to be doing. I did one more James Hardway album for Ubiquity, contractually, and was going: “Well, I don’t know what to do with this.” You don't have to quit. You can just put things to sleep for a while. But it's always been on the back burner and it's interesting to hear new music, go to Beatport and check out what the new drum ‘n’ bass heads are doing.
Which came first? Thinking: “I'm going to revive James Hardway?” Or “I’m going to get back into drum ‘n’ bass?”
I've made so much music that to a certain extent, I just think kind of in tempos. Once you get up to that kind of tempo, it sort of heads in that direction. I'm in the studio every day trying things out, putting things together. And every now and again, you think: “Oh, that might be something.” In a hard drive to the side of me, there's been a James Hardway folder for quite a while. So every now and again when I did something, I think: “Ah, that might be interesting. That might be something going there.” There's probably – I wouldn't say an album's worth – but there's definitely another EP’s worth of things that are going to be looked at depending on the reception of this one.
What other sounds are you working on? Because you said you are going to be prolific this year. What else is coming?
Well, I'm trying to clear out all the hard drives. I'm trying to clear out anything that I've missed. I'm pretty prolific. I learned from the best people. Early on I learned to work in the studios at a time when studio prices were really expensive. So you learn to be quick and you learn to build batches of things and release them in batches at the same time. It's still a process I sort of do today. I teach at Point Blank here in LA. Students work on tracks for three months. I don’t want to put them down or anything, but I'm going: “Well, you started that track three months ago. I started an album on Monday and it's Thursday and I think I'm about done.”
As much as anything, it’s still refining a process. I've always been in awe, every time I've gone to Japan, looking at the way the Japanese work and a man who makes noodles, and he's been making noodles for 25 years, but he's still trying to make it better and refining this economy of movement. Doing something just once and then every time you do it again, you look at how you can refine it and how you can make it more efficient and quicker. I love that kind of stuff. The the one I'm really proud of … There's an album called Ocean View Park10, which is Santa Monica, the beach side of LA. We did this thing called “Modular On the Spot”, which is a collective of modular people that get together once every couple of months. We have a solar powered sound system. And the idea is you bring your little case of just modular equipment, no computers, and make something from scratch and do a live improvised performance. And I have a little setup so I can record it on an app on my phone. So you do this performance just once and it's totally improvised, recorded, just once. I brought it home in the evening. I did a little mastering session on it. I, I'd taken a photograph of the sunset. That became the cover and I released it on Bandcamp the next day. I love that. It's so freeing.
And it is a lovely album.
I wouldn't be able to repeat it. I could do something similar to it, but I definitely wouldn't be able to do it again. Maybe that's that old jazzer thing, but I kind of like that improvised stuff. I really try and learn and try and simplify and go back to the essence of what makes what makes great music.
Were you always into craft? Did you always want to pick stuff up and work out how to do it as a kid?
As a kid… I was always interested in weird stuff, that's for sure. My family, on my father's side, were all market stallholders - proper East End dodgy, cockney racists in Whitechapel. They had markets, on Petticoat Lane, and then we moved to Croydon. There wasn’t a lot of art. When I was a kid, you had to be careful around men, you would watch yourself because there was a lot of drinking and toxic masculinity. My artistic ways didn't go down that well. But, you know, my old man tried. He got me forms to join the army, that's what he wanted me to do. But I was really lucky. I had a teacher at school, our art teacher… I pretty much stopped going school about 14. I used to get beaten up all the time. It was pretty rough. I would go in for art and sit in the arts lab and she'd be in her room doing what I realise now was oil painting, commissions. She was always doing boats and horses and things as a little side hustle.
And for some reason she liked me and took it on herself to apply to art college on my behalf, Reigate Art College, which was really fancy and high-end. It was where they made all the stained glass for Winchester Cathedral. Reigate College, every year they had two, what was termed “charity cases”. So two people got full scholarships and stipend to go to art college. I didn't know anything about any of that stuff at the time. All I knew was Mrs Rae said: “Oh, here, get your mum and dad to sign this.” And I was like: “All right.” Sign whatever it was, and then the next year I was going to art college.
What set you onto liking art? Was it the practice itself or did you have aesthetic stuff that you were into and wanting to aspire to?
I could always draw. I can remember people in the family saying: “Go on, draw that” and I’d draw it, and they go: “Wow, that looks like that!” And that was quite a thing. At that age, when you’ve got nothing, if you had something, anything, you cling onto it. I could knock out a drawing a Snoopy pretty quick. I could copy record covers. Going to school at that period of time… This was the year after the 11 pluses dropped11, so all the good teachers made a mass exodus out of public education and you're just left with the dregs in these secondary modern prisons.
Teachers used to walk around together in pairs. I just stopped going and no one noticed. I can remember walking past the room and looking in through the door, going: “What's going on in there?” There were people playing instruments. The teacher came to the door and said: “What do you want? Clear off.” The kids from our school were ball boys at Wimbledon, but you didn't even know. I remember looking at Wimbledon on the TV and going: “Is that Martin? What the fuck’s he doing there?” That was for the good kids. A lot of people just went by the wayside.
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