Made In Heaven

Marriage is the original social networking site. When acerbic Noo Wave legend Wreckless Eric pledged his troth to acclaimed and equally acerbic Pittsburgh-born songwriter Amy Rigby, the union didn’t just produce a humdinger of an eponymous album and touring partnership, it also resulted in numerous unlikely inter-marital connections.

“It’s funny,” says Eric (real name Goulden), speaking on the phone from the pair’s home in southwest France, “when you get together with someone like Amy, she then has a connection with Andrew Weatherall or Bruce Brand who played with Billy Childish, and I have a connection with Maria Doyle Kennedy or Laura Cantrell... it’s good.”
Released almost two years ago, Wreckless Eric and Amy Rigby often sounds like Burt Bacharach meets Spacemen 3 in the year 2021. Eric’s out-there sonic sensibilities (everything from psyche-out space rock to free jazz) effectively complement – and sometimes contradict – Rigby’s wry songwriting chops.
“Amy wrote most of the material and I kind of took care of the engineering and producing,” Eric says. “When we started we didn’t have any songs, it was very funny. Amy thought, ‘That’s the heat off me’, and I’d be thinking the same thing. Other groups, the members are fighting to get their songs on the record, and with us, we’re kind of like, ‘Have you got any?’ I think the worst thing about songwriting is I always thought there was a manual that everyone else had read that I hadn’t. I feel like I don’t know how to do it. Amy knows how to do it but she won’t tell me!”
Well, whatever way you shake it, the resulting album exudes the glee of a bunch of 20-year-olds in the studio for the first time.
“Everything that I ever heard that was arresting in some way bordered on offensive, even to a young person,” Eric considers. “When I first heard the Beatles at the age of eight it sounded alien, it wasn’t immediately, ‘Ooo, that’s nice’. It was more, ‘What the fuck is that?’ Old people couldn’t adapt as easily as young people, so they would say, ‘What a horrible noise’. Or the Rolling Stones, this kind of abrasive sound. And with Led Zeppelin, even before the first album came out, when they first started doing John Peel sessions, it was the most eerie sound. It was a thrill because it wasn’t pleasant. It was the same with punk, with something like ‘White Riot’. Hip hop, rap, techno stuff, I loved it because I hated it. I thought, ‘I can’t get my head around this. This is good’. You had to dig for it. Now there’s so much coming out, everybody wants to be immediately attractive, and the way to be immediately attractive is through bland.”
And Mr and Mrs Wreckless don’t do bland. Ask Amy Rigby what the hardest part about living with another songwriter is, and she says this:
“We both have trouble writing songs these days, so it’s almost double the frustration I guess. There’s this other mind going all the time in the house, and it can be a little hard to hear yourself think when there’s this other person thinking in close proximity. Eric does not believe in playing it safe, and I can definitely be pushed in a reckless direction and I embrace that.
“He seems to like to work, and I might lean towards being a slacker at this point. I had a lot to do for a long time, and now I tend to not want to do anything unless I’m forced to do it, so I guess he’s more like the slave driver. But touring is fun, we just have a good time driving around and it’s nice to have somebody else there who understands. Neither of us has any idea of how to go on holiday!”