The troubadours of perception

Joe Chester is well-known as a solo artist these days but in the past he has played in bands such as Sunbear and Ten Speed Racer, while his production credits include Future Kings Of Spain, Nina Hynes and Nick Kelly, among others. His 2005 debut album A Murder Of Crows won huge plaudits on its release and its successor The Tiny Pieces Left Behind has just hit the shops.
David Turpin has just released The Sweet Used To Be, a quiet masterpiece of sublime electronic pop and one of the most critically acclaimed Irish debuts of recent years. What these three artists have in common is that they are all full-time, gigging musicians. Despite their dramatically disparate backgrounds, each has embraced the new reality with tracks available for download, MySpace pages, videos on YouTube and the like.

HOW DID YOU BECOME INTERESTED IN MUSIC?
Pete Cummins: I started playing around 1965 when I got a guitar. The Beatles had changed everything. I remember their first record, ‘Love Me Do’, being played on Radio Luxembourg and going into college the next day and saying to the guys, ‘Did you hear that last night?’ It was the topic of the day. I don’t think it would have the same impact now.
Joe Chester: I left school in 1990, so around ‘89/‘90 I was very much into shoegazing stuff like My Bloody Valentine and Sonic Youth and listening to the Dave Fanning Show when I was in school and hearing Talking Heads. There was definitely a scene in Dublin – there was the well-documented singer-songwriter one, while concurrent with that there were bands like The Idiots and Luggage – noise bands.
David Turpin: I’ve always been into films and got interested in songs from Snow White and Bambi and things like that, sad narrative songs. The dance scene in the ‘90s never quite did it for me. I never got into that crazy drug music, that fast frantic stuff. It always kind of frightened me. I was interested in Massive Attack because there was a cinematic quality to it. Otherwise, I don’t really remember what the people of my generation were listening to around the mid to late ‘90s. I recall music being a part of a scene which was sort of, ‘You like band X, so I’m entitled to beat you up’. I went to an all-boys school and everybody seemed to be more interested in sport and communal things. Music has always been a private thing for me. I’ve always listened on headphones.

WHAT MADE YOU DECIDE TO GO INTO MUSIC AS A CAREER?
Pete: Well, the word ‘career’ wouldn’t have come into it at all – it was just something you were compelled to do. One would have ambitions to make a record, but for me it was easier to start gigging. When I started playing, within about six months I was making about three times the amount I had been making in the day job. It was much easier to make money back then. Nowadays it seems much harder, unless you’re at the top end of the scale, in which case you make a huge amount of money.
Joe: When I was a kid I thought about music as a career. It seemed possible to do that back then. There had been a lot of talk of how the infrastructure of music had changed since U2, but I quickly found out that was horseshit. There were studios and rehearsal spaces – but as soon as anything got serious, you couldn’t do anything here. I was in a couple of bands and we signed deals that went sour. In Ten Speed Racer we had this record that we poured everything into and we spent so much money on it – something of the order of £80,000 sterling. Then the label said they couldn’t afford to release it. We were pleading with them to release us from our contract because we had other offers – but they said they’d invested so much money they couldn’t afford to let us go. It was an embittering experience for us.
David: My background is more in fine art and video art and becoming interested in music through Laurie Anderson – who to my ears is a pop musician but considers herself, quite rightly, to be an artist. I was interested in making films, but I discovered that there are ten different people doing ten distinctly different things and that everyone’s opinion matters as much as everyone else’s and you had to shout the loudest. I don’t do too well in that kind of situation, so music was something I thought I could do alone.

HAS THE REALITY OF BEING A MUSICIAN LIVED UP TO THE DREAM?
Joe: It’s harder than ever to make money from music. It’s been put across that it’s a good thing that everything has been handed to the artists, and in many ways it is. In my view, the record company system is kaput and it’s a matter of ‘when’ not ‘if’ it disappears. But there were things that major labels have done that no artists can do. Damien Rice is an exception.
David: My album came out in April, but it took about three or four years to make. I have to do everything I can to enable myself to make another record, which means playing live. I always wanted to make a record but I never really thought about playing live until I had made the album. I always thought, ‘The Pet Shop Boys didn’t play live so why should I?’ I love it now – but, for me, the recording and writing process is the same thing.
Pete: In the ‘60s a band could get very well paid and the gigging scene was good – there were a lot of tennis clubs, cricket clubs and then the beat clubs opened up. It was a much healthier live scene then, than it has ever been since. People think the music business started here in 1980. But back then it was a golden age of music in Dublin.

IS THE INTERNET HELPING OR HINDERING ?
Joe: I think there’s a war going on and there are attempts from all quarters to devalue music – and it’s up to people like us to stop it. It’s up to artists to make something that people will value instead of harping on about why they should give it away for free. People should bide their time. I think it’ll come around again to a stage where music is really valued.
Pete: The MySpace/YouTube thing is a great tool but I think in many ways it’s another distraction. Nowadays you’ve got to do so many things to get the word out: there are more radio stations, more media, more everything. Everything is fractured, and you almost have to put an ad in the newspaper to say, ‘Look at my website’. What help is that to anyone?
David: I think the more it becomes about downloads, the greater extent to which you lose some of the secondary values that the music has outside the song. All my old David Bowie records that I got in flea markets, most of them have names written on them. People got these in the ’70s or ’80s and loved them so much they wrote their name on them. I don’t know if people feel the need to intensely love their records now. In that regard, something has been lost.

HOW IMPORTANT IS IT TO MAKE AN ALBUM?
David: I don’t have an iPod. I have a hi-fi that plays records and I have a thing under the bed that plays tapes. I don’t like the idea of the iPod as a way of listening to music. I believe in the integrity of the album and the order of songs. I don’t want to be constantly surprised by what’s being played into my brain. I want to hear an album the way it was intended to be heard, not in a collage of ten disparate things.
Joe: I don’t have an iPod either. I have a radio that’s all. There is this manic thing going on when it comes to listening to music. But I like being surprised – I was at the Electric Picnic last year and I saw bands I would never have thought I’d see.
Pete: David’s point about an album as a piece of work is very valid and it’s being lost through the download. When you listen to a record the track you like least at the beginning can become your favourite track after a while. With downloading you hear the key tracks and you lose the experience of the album as the artist intended. I don’t think an album is a collection of songs, I think it’s a work of art in itself. But it’s a wonderful technology that you can download a song onto a computer and it’s around the world in minutes. I have to say that’s astonishing from where I came from.

KNOWING WHAT YOU KNOW NOW – WOULD YOU ADVISE ANYONE TO GO INTO MUSIC FULL-TIME?
Joe: I would not advise anyone to go into the music business to make a living. Do it for fun or do it because you have to do it. Through years of trying and failing to make a living, and quitting music three or four times a year, I actually realised that it wasn’t a living for me – it was a vocation. I couldn’t stop doing it. It would have been easier to make money in McDonald’s or Starbucks. It’s a funny old time. It will be interesting to see how it all shapes out.
Pete: The artist’s life is uncertain. You’re dependent on your own wits. I think I’ve been fortunate. I starved a lot. I never had any real money, but money was never a big factor for me. When I worked with Donovan, I saw all the Mercs and the Range Rovers and the private planes. But I saw it as a trap. I’d no interest in being a rich rock star. I would like to have success, so that I can continue to do what I love. So many times I ask, ‘Why am I doing this?’ But you don’t do it by choice. It’s poison in the blood.
Dave: I don’t know yet. I’ll have to wait and see. People seem to be interested in what I do and I hope they buy the record or download it. Legally of course!