Captain Fantastic

Turntables turning, clocks being wound, swings being swung, a book thrown smack! onto a table, while strings dreamily sing and horns mournfully intone over doleful harmonium murmur-scapes you re in the charming, burbling, playful, noisy, wordless-yet-chock-full-of-everything other-world of Daniel Figgis Skipper, six years old and more fresh and original than most of what s been released this year.

Eaten alive first time round in the noisy post-grunge/proto-Britpop wilderness, its reissue this summer has reintroduced it to a post-rock world that s, perhaps, a bit more ready for it. Ridiculously, painstakingly complex, yet rich with childish innocence and surreal, poker-faced absurdity, it s based in samples, yet is more tactile, human and alive than a thousand efforts to keep it real from yawningly unplugged songwriters.
Figgis declines to be formally interviewed, suggesting instead we speak via email but not before he takes hotpress on a ramble round the sprawling parklands and twisting back roads of Ranelagh, his geographical touchstone, and occasional aural source material, during the recording of Skipper.
Over the course of several hours, he tells us about his childhood as an actor, including a stint with Peter O Toole in Waiting For Godot at the Abbey; his various past lives spent investigating philosophy, recreational pharmaceuticals and other musical incarnations; and, more recently, the multimedia installations which have, among other things, helped bring his music to the wider audience it now enjoys.
Later, away from dictaphones, distractions and all that pesky fresh air, we email each other.

KP: Why is Skipper only now getting a (so to speak) 'proper' release?
DF: Last time around, despite a remarkably positive response to Skipper from those "in the know", Rough Trade were experiencing certain difficulties and most releases from that period fell through the cracks. I had always conceived of the album as one that would find a far wider audience a more mainstream audience and Geoff Travis [at Rough Trade] shared my view. So when we got together to discuss recording the next album we both felt that the general climate was right for this reissue. We were right, thankfully!
It must still be representative of what you're about musically, even six years later.
Well, it feels six years old to me at any rate a lot has happened in that time but I am very pleasantly surprised by how well it stands up. And why shouldn't it? We seem to expect an inbuilt ephemerality which doesn't chime with my experience of pop music.
I'm particularly interested in the fact that your samples are all taken from tactile, human, real-life sources rather than being computer-generated. When, and how/why, did you first begin to use found noises in your writing?
I started to use systems for composition that I derived from work with truth tables while studying philosophy at college but found the results mind-bogglingly dull, not to mention unplayable, and have ever since employed traditional compositional technique.
The "why", though, that's a trickier one to answer. For some time I eschewed real-time playing for tape, but have recently, largely as a result of the live shows, sought to reintegrate the two methodologies. Ironically, the results are to my ears more machine-like in the best possible sense while remaining very emotive more emotive than ever, in fact. I've no idea if that answers your question.
You've told me that very little, or none, of Skipper was recorded in real time, and none of the instrumentalists ever even met each other during the recording. Was this isolating at all for you?
It was anything but an isolating experience making that particular album. In fact the studio became gracious host (unwitting prey) to a literally unending procession of reprobates on one occasion I think I counted twelve "guests" including one screaming infant in the control room personally, I'm a great man for reading the paper, phoning home and mixing or recording all at once. I'm just glad nobody thought to bust the studio.
You showed me around some haunts of yours, like Bushy Park in Rathgar and the Dropping Well. What did growing up in Dublin mean to you?
The Dropping Well? What will people think? In fact, I believe an ex-classmate owns the place free advertising may enhance my credit-rating.
Actually I'm inordinately attached to the Dodder River and its environs. From Ranelagh through Rathgar to Rathfarnham Elysian fields. And now you have the full measure of my education: the Three Rs.
You told me a wonderful, life-affirming story about when you first submitted Skipper to your record-company guy and he didn't ring you for two weeks. Can you tell it again?
Wel,l you must understand that in 1994 to have made a record of this nature had started to feel at best foolhardy in the extreme and at worst...well I leave it to your imagination... the words "commercial suicide" spring to mind. But I really believed in this work, while feeling like an extortionist. So when Geoff went awol well, absent without my leave certainly I briefly feared I'd shot myself in the foot. I'm not good at wonderful and life-affirming, so the punchline is that he'd been on his honeymoon. Apparently I'd been told all about it, but nothing registered at that stage but the album, and when he told me how he loved it, I cried.
Tears of... what I'm not certain.

Skipper is out now on Black Burst Records