No. 27: Dot Allison

And when it is dark, there are ghosts, that give me hope....

Hi-de-hi, campers and thanks as ever for sticking with us. It’s been a bit of a time, won’t bore you with excuses, but the fact you’re continuing to sign up and subscribe means the world to us. I can see from the website stats that a lot of the early interviews are relatively unread in comparison to the more recent ones, so if you’re new to BMTatR do go and have a look because they’re all strong stories and our intention is always that they work cumulatively to help map out This Thing of Ours…

Dot Allison certainly helps that cumulative act of dot-joining - her lifelong meander through the stranger corners of pop culture has seen her touch on as broad a range of styles and collaborations as you could imagine. She’d be assured cult status if she’d left only Morning Dove White, the 1993 country-dub-tronica enduring “comedown classic” she made with One Dove, her trio with Ian Carmichael and Jim McKinven and the first LP to be fully produced by the late Andrew Weatherall. But since then she’s touched on everything from haunted electroclash to elegant alt-rock ballideering to covering Scott Walker - and latterly, following a nine year break between albums, she came back with a splash with the double whammy of 2021’s Heart Shaped Scars and 2023’s Consciousology which feature possibly her most confident songwriting yet and the most mind-blowingly lush and deluxe psychedelic arrangements. She’s lately been working with Anton Newcombe from The Brian Jonestown Massacre, first on soundtracks and then as All Seeing Dolls - and, as you’ll see, as ever, has plenty of irons in the fire.

Brian photographed her in The Social in London (fitting, as The Social’s founders Heavenly released her first solo album, Afterglow in 1999, and Sonic Cathedral who put out those last two albums have done many, may gigs in The Social), and I interviewed her by video call from her home in Edinburgh, where she was sitting in the most striking deep navy blue painted library / office room which made absolute sense as we were talking about the sense of sanctuary and total immersion she has put into those recent albums. We were talking therapy within seconds and got through Akai filter sweeps, Éliane Radigue and (fleetingly) quantum physics before the end, so safe to say this was a good one. Get in to it!

Hi Dot, what's happening with you?

I'm kind of waiting for this album I've done with Anton Newcombe to come out. So doing a bit of writing at the moment, I'm just letting ideas take shape and thinking: “God, what will the next thing be like?” I kind of want to make something electronic and then I also want to do something really raw and folky and lyrical, and I’m wondering if maybe they’re different things – well obviously they are different things. So I'm just writing bits and bobs. This All Seeing Dolls album will be out in February. I'm working a bit with Mark Peters¹. I’ve done a couple of things with Andy Bell². So have you got a few things kind of kicking away.

You seem to be busier than ever lately, would that be right?

You know what, I did a lot in the lockdown. I got really prolific in the lockdown and it's almost like… well, I just made quite a lot of music then, whether it was sitting on my phone on a voice note or recorded in a home studio properly. So I've got a bit of a backlog to work through. It's always a plate-spinning act because I've got kids as well, so I sort of fit everything around them. It's very much that way around. I sort of fit everything around being a mum.

I found when my oldest was born that I was capable of so much more in the day than I ever thought.

Oh yeah so much so.

My therapist at the time said: “If you want something doing, give it to a busy person.” And that catchphrase kind of stuck.

True. Oh God. Yeah. I find therapy very useful actually, just to chime in on that one. It’s like forced productivity in a way, parenthood. I'm forced into early mornings. I mean, I'm a bit of an owl, so you’ve got to drag yourself out of bed and get on the school run or whatever, whether you like it or not. It's forced me to be more productive, I think. It's so true.

I guess as life goes on as well, certainly I've found, and you know, a lot of the people that we interview for this have had long and varied careers, shall we say. And so many people seem to find that you, I don’t know if care less is the word, but are just more willing to jump into things without concern of where they might fit or whatever.

I totally know what you mean. It's like things have less... in a weird way as time goes on, it's less definitive of you. The more you've done, the less the one thing defines you, if that makes sense. So it's less pressure, I suppose.

That absolutely makes sense. But also, there’s the youthful thing of finding your place and therefore wanting to fit in.

Right. It's like life, certainly if you have done a bit of work on yourself, which a lot of people don't do, but if you have, I think you kind of become more comfortable with not needing other people to help you find yourself, if you know what I mean. Like, you just are like, this is me, I'm not perfect, you know, whatever. You sort of sit in your skin a bit better, I think. And then maybe it doesn't... it's like you're less on the outside looking in.

Well, no question that those last couple of solo albums have – you know, for me looking from outside anyway – a proper clarity of identity.

Oh great. That's great.

Really!

I think that comes with the process of finding your own kind of writing process as well because, years ago… I suppose there's no sort of auditioning to how do you access what you're actually capable of? And you don't know what you're capable of until you kind of do it as well. So you're sort of blindly trying to mine, thinking, like, I dunno… there's no guarantee you're going to find that sort of apex or whatever. So at that point it's just important to keep trying and keep experimenting. But I feel like with me, over time I've found a way to write that is more, I don’t know, it's like I have successfully found my process more over time. And so now you can sort of hear that more hopefully. Yeah.

One of our running themes, we talk about subculture in a lot of these, but I really want to talk to you about sound because one of our other running themes is how the specifics of sonics transmit subcultural ideas and artistic ideas and the importance of soundsystems and stuff. And on those last two records, the sound is just so crafted. I DJ here and there in those kind of audiophile spots, in Spiritland and Jumbi³ down in Peckham. And the records just sound huge on a really amazing sound system. Have you always been someone who focuses in on detail and sonic arrangements?

I think for me, I've been very focused on, in the first part of my song writing career, on the composition, but I think as time's gone on, I've really become fussy and more valued retaining a depth of field to the mix and this sort of sonic image and how do you sculpt that sound? I'm not an engineer as such, but I'm involved in the kind of… I do programming, and I co-produced these albums with Fiona Cruickshank⁴ – because I'm a bit scatty and sort of a bit a ADHD-ish and so the idea of having to hold, like the sort of housekeeping aspect of the whole thing in my head is completely overwhelming to me. So I was like, I definitely want to co-produce with someone, especially if you've got orchestras involved or it's just the scope for like forgetting something or it's just scary.

Fiona came recommended to me as an engineer, as a sort of mix engineer, because she was just getting kind of really good feedback and I'd heard her work and was like: oh my god, it's absolutely beautiful. I think to give credit to Fiona as well for that, because she is sitting with her hands on the desk and I'm sitting at the desk with her. But, you know, she's like a Tonmeister⁵ trained mix engineer who actually I presented with her first award at the MPG - Music Producer Guild - Awards. They were playing “The Haunted” when I handed her the thing. So it must've like been off the back of Heart-Shaped Scars to a degree accumulatively with the rest of her work.

It’s very much about sort of being able to… I suppose it's like me finding someone who I think has that amazing ear and that understanding of the physics of sound and that sonic image. I suppose finding someone like that and then being able to communicate what I'm looking for from the sort of hands on, the actual sculpting of the waves and the frequencies, the image of the mix and everything. And having that meeting of minds with Fiona and me playing her lots of records and going: “I love the sound of this record.”

We did what I called a “mic-off”. We got a bunch of studio microphones and tested my voice and all these different microphones and we ended up deciding to go with the, with the Neumann U 67, which is a bit of a classic⁶, it's just magic. So taking a real interest in the sound, and I think really if things are beautifully recorded with the right microphone for the signal and if you start with that, you're starting winning and you don't need to do as much in the mix.

The more I get into some of my favourite, older recordings, you realise that whether it's old jazz ones or Paul Simon or Dr John or whatever, you start reading about what they were doing and it was all about like where things are in the room and …

Oh, a hundred percent. And also I record at Castlesound Studios in Pencaitland [in Edinburgh] and Stuart Hamilton there is an amazing engineer as well⁷. So for “Double Rainbow” from the last album, I produced that. That was not so much a co-production, just because I did actually record quite a lot of that, but Stuart at Castlesound came in slightly later and was part of it. I think it's always working with the people that understand how to mic up, like you say, the actual distancing and the positioning of all of the microphones, the type of microphones, and the room and the resonance of the room, knowing where to put you in that room, all that kind of thing.