PRING HEEL JACK vs. SPACE AGE BACHELOR
“For f#$*’s sake, it’s a Thursday night and if you are that desperate that you have to have it pounding continuously,and if you can’t let anything else into that inner sanctum ...”
One half of Spring Heel Jack, Ashley Wales, is complainingabout people leaving one of their DJ sets after he spun Sun Ra, or maybe it was the combination of both the NewTrumpet and the New Flute records at once on the Nonesuch label that made them go. Sometimes, the greatest mastersof filling the floor are also the greatest masters of clearing it.
I’ve never been to a Spring Heel Jack DJ set but by the sound of their own records, I imagine it is one where thebest of Moving Shadow or Wall of Sound and other famous drum’n’bass labels must happily co-exist with Mouse OnMars, the second Viennese score, Terra Galla (sic), Miles Davis, Esquivel, and Ennio Morricone.
Crunch the numbers, and hear the possibilities. Spring Heel Jack’s other half, John Coxon, says, “Once you’ve gottwo decks, you know you can do something that’s never been before. Like that Terra Galla record, and play it withanything and I know it’s never been done before. That’s the great thing about DJ-ing you have this infinite, impossiblecombination of things, that no one can ever really know what you’re going to play. Like if you’ve got a box of50 records, then what are the possible numbers of combinations for those records? Isn’t it like 2 to the powerof 50?”
Enough for now about the possibilities of other people’s records though, because Spring Heel Jack has enough tocontend with in their own music. Calling it drum’n’bass would be a minor misnomer, because like the title of theirfirst album suggested, there may be bass and drums, but there’s also strings, trumpets, mad pianos doing unnaturalthings, and other unrecognizable disturbances. Not just taking samples and scattering them about as embellishmentsto the drum’n’bass, Spring Heel Jack do mad things with these, making pianos and horns perform in ways they’venever been performed before, like the piano note that is echoed and forced into the beat in “Take 2,” while inthe background piano rolls get severely EQ-ed, and turn into zooms. Or in “Suspensions,” one piano note is supposedto hang there, stuttering in parts, speeding up, spacing out and bunching up, but this one piano note just won’tquit, until eight minutes later at the end of the song, it finally gives way into a tiny roll soaked in the deterioratingechoes of strings, and the track’s over.
Says John, “The pianos are just suspended, hanging there. You know eventually the bottom’s going to drop out, butyou don’t know when. And that’s why it’s called ‘Suspensions’.” Or else, take “Dawn of the Dead” on their firstalbum, There Are Strings. Ashley says, “Well, we wrote that piece of music, and I thought it sounded like thisdrunk Mariachi band in Mexico, in the Day of the Dead festival. Like they’ve been out all night playing Day ofthe Dead, and they’re just staggering home in the morning, and they’re all boozy and woozy, and the drummer’s justtrying to keep it together. A bit like Miles Davis, like that track ‘He Loved Him Madly,’ where Henry Williamsis just about keeping a pulse of rhythm, and you think ‘how can he do that for like 30 minutes’, when the wholething is just about falling to pieces, and he’s just barely keeping the rhythm in there. I mean that’s pretty good,because he was like 16 or 18 or something at the time. I like the fact that it’s just about hanging in there. Likethe mariachi band struggling home almost hallucinating from tiredness and sheer fatigue.”
Spring Heel Jack’s music is all about the setting up of these tensions -- the juxtapositions of speed, of volume,of the amount of things in the mix, the beat coming in and out, the intense pressuring of sound that causes youto disbelieve that this event is actually leaving your stereo -- though Spring Heel Jack insist that the ironyof the matter is that people’s home stereos have a better capacity for sound than the equipment most music getsrecorded on.
The tension of possibilities is best evidenced by an imbetween album single called “Double Edge Dub” (releasedwith “Oceola” and also on the first Macro Dub Infection compilation) -- apparently there were like ninety versionsof it, and Ashley, the keeper of the SHJ memorabilia, claims to still possess nine unreleased versions of the track.It’s dazzling to hear these rushes of drums that seem to keep colliding in the strangest places -- literally twoedges to the dub, and these pressures that make you think the song will explode. Says Ashley, “Well, it’s niceif you can do that. That’s really ideal, if you can get it to sound like you’re pushing everything up against thewall, and then suddenly remove the wall. It’s quite difficult to do, but if we’re getting that effect across, thenit’s good.” And John says, “Well, that effect with the piano bursting out is up to the EQ’s. You have some soundgoing in, and there’s these big reverbs, well you turn up the EQ full, and then you sweep through all the frequencies,so it just goes ‘WaaAHH.’ You can go from a really dull sound to a really piercing sound in a matter of a second.So it bursts.
We did that a lot of that on ‘Double Edge Dub’.” Says Ashley, again, “The digital desk has a really crisp sound.On most of the last tracks we’ve done, we’ve distorted the tracks at the line input on the mixer. We turn it upas far as it can go, so the line input is right in the red. That’s how I like to play my records.”
It’s appropriate then that at different times in the interview, they complain about not being able to hear classicalor jazz at the proper volume, which for jazz would probably mean bursting speakers and for classical somethingjust a little softer. Says John, “Ashley has a good attitude towards the hi-fi system. He likes to distort it athome. He uses a cheap amp to distort it, so it sounds loud and it gets that edge.”
Though still liking their first album, There Are Strings, they now complain that the drums aren’t quite enough,and that it sounds soft and mushy when played next to a banging hardcore track. With their second album then, 68Million Shades, Spring Heel Jack come back with a vengeance, constructing a sound big enough that sounds like it’ssqueezing through my hi-fi, as if it’s more than the speakers and amplifier can manage to project. There’s is amusic of big reverbs, popping speakers, massive EQ explosions, collisions of sound, and other stereophonic wonders.
Mostly, they credit the size of their sound to their reverbs, and the startling effect this produces to their judicialuse of the feature, which explains the dynamics. Says John, “We were getting quite clever with different kindsof reverbs, and doing live dubs, so as the track’s going down you’re constantly playing with the size of the reverbs.
When you’re listening to things, the psychoacoustic effect of it is -- well, if you hear something that is kindof small and you turn it up on your hi-fi, and suddenly this big crashing reverb comes in, you think ‘bloody hell,that’s cinematic’! But if it starts cinematic, then it doesn’t work. It’s all about light and shade in the amountsof reverb you use. Like if you listen to ‘60 Seconds’ on 68 Million Shades, that sax part is very dry and rightthere in front of you, and before that is ‘Midwest’ which is like huge amounts of reverb opening out before you.It’s like light and shade, isn’t it?, like going from things that are really small to really big suddenly.”
Minus the tasteless qualities, Spring Heel Jack reminds me a lot of a space age bachelor pad version of drum’n’bass.And I don’t mean that as a self-reference, but more directly to the after-the-fact named music of people like Esquivel,Ferrante & Teicher, Perrey & Kingsley, amongst others. One of the things I’ve always considered to be thedefining traits of space age bachelor pad music (and these are the same standards and qualities I seek in the newmusic I write about -- see Mouse On Mars article for more of these qualities) are the out-of-wack volumes withinthe arrangements where things are not in the mix where they typically should be. Ashley agrees, “That’s great.Like an Ennio Morricone thing, the way he uses sound effects in films. Like the creaking door, or the creakingsiren, which is so fucking loud over top of the music. And the cracking floorboards just going ‘CRAAACK.’” Andthis is a better metaphor for SHJ’s arrangement of instruments than any I can think of.
This is also a quality shared with dub (again, I write about these connections between dub and space age bachelorpad music in the Mouse On Mars article). So it’s appropriate that Spring Heel Jack did an album of dub versionsfor 68 Million Shades entitled, well rather obviously, Versions. It’s unfortunate though in my opinion that theyretained the drum’n’bass sound and speed with this. As an alternative to the album, I would have prefered somethingslower and more spacious, which is why I tend to play Versions on the slowest speed possible on the record player-- and then it’s luxurious and lush and so relaxed, and the drums sound more like King Tubby. Two traits SpringHeel Jack shares with dub would be first that they give the track room to in many ways create itself, and secondtheir use of distortion, which I hope you’ve already been enlightened on enough in the previous paragraphs. Inthe issue six interview I did with Spring Heel Jack via fax, they said, “Technically speaking, if the equipmentdoesn’t break, then you’re not abusing it. By any means necessary.” In terms of letting the track create itself,what they do is give over the reins in places, give the track space. Accidents happen and they can work. John says,“You can’t just say, ‘we’re going to do something that sounds like this.’ You just have to do it. You can kindof say you want to do a bombastic track, but yesterday it just turned into this sort of miserable, scraping thing.You can’t decide what you make.”
And the other quality that reminds me more of dub than is typical of most drum’n’bass acts is the constant progressionin the Spring Heel Jack sound, the continual breaks, the ever expanding horizons as everything fights to get insidethe mix. I’m not quite sure if linear is the best way to describe it, but most drum’n’bass sounds to me like it’ssetting up this sort of marching groove, hence names like techstep, and following it through to the end. John cansee what I mean: “Well, I suppose a lot of the tracks, they set up a soundfield or soundscape or whatever you wantto call it in the first minute of the track and then it stays there. We like to set something up, and then keepon pushing it back ... Well, it’s difficult. We don’t really recognize what we do. We don’t really think aboutit a lot. It just happens. We don’t talk about it.”
The other thing about Spring Heel Jack records is that they’re very evocative, complete records in themselves.There Are Strings turned down low on the volume seems to please lots of people I know that don’t like drum’n’bass,and 68 Million Shades is fully charged, but produces incredible images, scenery, emotions. They’re records that’llfill the floor, but functional anywhere really. Of course, this isn’t something unique to Spring Heel Jack amongstdrum’n’bass acts -- but it’s also true that the more drum’n’bass I hear the more it sounds like it’s becoming self-referential.I’m lucky if a drum’n’bass record evokes anything in me other than the desire to grab my record bag and go buyanother 12”. So much folds back on itself. Says John, “Well what was it Robert Christgau called them -- candidlyfunctional records. We’re both quite fond of candidly functional records. It is itself a drum’n’bass record --it doesn’t evoke anything but drum’n’bass. Like Nico said something about these half records -- if they get playedby a really good DJ, it’s fucking awesome. But you can’t just play it at home. It’s a record to DJ with. It’s afunctional record. We don’t really make functionalrecords. We make whole records. You’re a DJ, andyou need a tool, and your tool is a functional record. And if you get another functional record, and it’s an incredibleperformance. And if you’re a bad DJ, it’s crap. And if you’re a good DJ, it’ll be amazing. That’s what I mean byfunctional records. And some records would sound the same if a deaf person played them. You don’t need to be agood DJ to play it. It exists in itself. It is its own thing, has its own meaning. It’s not designed to be playedby a DJ at high volume in a club.”
And fuck it anyways, if all it evokes is drum’n’bass, I guess. “It’s not such a bad thing,” says John. “Sometimes,that’s what we love in itself -- drum’n’bass, big clanking drums.” But, there’s so many similar sounding recordsthese days. It can’t really go on forever, or it’ll just become like house, and they don’t want to be a part ofthat do they. “Yeah, well, that’s up to us, and the individual people who have imaginations to take it somewhereelse.” My philosophy is once it can be put in a box, and safely tucked away, then do that and forget about it.Says John, “Well, that’s quite a good thing as a journalist, if you simply say, ‘I’m interested in what kicks againstanything which seems to be becoming some kind of establishment.’ And I think we’re pretty similar in our actions.But you must reserve the right to do whatever you want.”
And that’s something like what Spring Heel Jack did in aiding Everything But The Girl along the way to their reinventionfrom wimpy, folk pop group to a wimpy combination of drum’n’bass, house, beat electronic, or whatever you wantto call it. Spring Heel Jack’s one production on that album was probably the exception to this wimpy rule. ToddTerry’s house version of “Missing” previous to the album gave EBTG a new swagger, but SHJ made them sound fierceand forlorn for the first time with “Walking Wounded” -- a top ten in Britain. While agitating and making the typicallysoft beats crueller, SHJ even mixed Tracey Thorne’s torch vocals low. But still it was such an unfashionable thingto be involved in, even though the EBTG album is still probably better than most of the albums made by people whowere complaining about it -- several times I’ve seen them ridiculed in the press. So did they get any flak forthe track from the cooler-than-thou crowd? Says John, “Well not from the hardcore side of drum’n’bass. Nobody’sreally worried about it at all.”
“But the trendy places, like Time Out magazine,” says Ashley, “who wouldn’t give drum’n’bass the time of day threeyears ago. When everything was happenning, none of the papers in Britain would give that music the time of day.It was almost ridiculed. People tried to ignore it. But it wouldn’t go away, so suddenly they decided ‘oh, it isquite good,’ and then they decided that they almost discovered it, they almost invented it. And so they had toturn around and say to you like, ‘Ooo, look Spring Heel Jack have done an Everything But The Girl track, and theyused to do ‘this’ beforehand,’ or ‘this guy used to sell vegetables at a marketstore.’ And you think well what’sfucking wrong with that!? He’s selling vegetables. What are you supposed to have done? Like, you’re supposed tohave spent all your childhood spraypainting and tagging, and then all of a sudden you invented drum’n’bass. Youweren’t really allowed to have any other life. It’s only the fucking papers, or stupid journo-wankers that writefor papers like that that think they’ve discovered that. They like that mystique of that. They expect everyoneto be tagging and mugging and God knows what -- being badboys, or having pirate radios in their house. But it camefrom all sorts of different areas, and different people, and different parts of the country ... We were quite happyto have done a collaboration with Everything But The Girl, but we spent a day of our life doing that, and we spentall of our time making instrumental music. It would never cross our minds basically. Instrumental music is whatwe want to do.”
I was surprised to see SHJ at number two in Jon Savage’s Top Ten of 1996 list in Art Forum. He selected “Midwest”as the specific track of interest, and from what I could recall of the article he made SHJ sound a bit America-obsessed.At the time I interview SHJ, “Bank of America” is also their new single, so it seems like the issue should be addressed.I take SHJ unaware on both counts -- they don’t even know about the Jon Savage listing, and they haven’t seen theirsingle yet. But what about America, then, land of the beautiful and also the fat? Says Ash, “‘Midwest’ is basicallydriving a bus across middle America listening to Patsy Cline while crying into your beer. Of course, it soundsnothing like the Patsy Cline, but it has the feeling of that. We didn’t think of that when we did the track, butafterwards we played it back, and it reminded me of that time we were driving through Wyoming, and the scenerydidn’t change for two days. It was only when we got into Washington State and got to the Columbia River, then suddenlyit turned into Switzerland or something.”
Spring Heel Jack seem to trace their tracks back to certain experiences. “Eesti” from 68 Million Shades is titledafter a place in Estonia, where SHJ have played twice, and actually just come back from when I interview them inan East London pub. “Crash Dub” from Versions was recorded live on a radio station in Liverpool. The sinister “Bankof America” evolves from their reading on the side of superpower politics’ heart of darkness.
To me, personally, Spring Heel Jack has always struck me as something a little like jungle for the jetset. I’mspeaking just for one of course -- after recording in East London and driving around in buses across America, Idoubt they see it as glamorous. But for me, it’s bachelor pad drum’n’bass. Like the skyscrapers that adorn theircovers -- the apartment block on the Sea Lettuce EP is where Ash lives, and the block from the Where Do You FitIn? EP is at the end of John’s street -- I always picture bright lights, cool drinks, big cities -- maybe it’sthat combination of cool fifties jazz with jungle’s fast living sounds, I don’t know. And I don’t think SpringHeel Jack does either, but as it turns out I’m not the only one who sees it that way either.
Says Ash, “Well, it’s funny the time before last we were in San Francisco, Susan who used to work for Island asthe press officer had this kind of listening thing for the local press, and we were in the starlight rooms in theFrancis Drake hotel at the very top and this beautiful cocktail bar, and it was really posh like you said, andthey played the whole album in there, and so it was kind of glamorous. And we just felt sorry for all these likehoneymoon couples looking out the window and having to listen to ‘Suspensions’ going ding-ding-ding. We were justlaughing.”
Says John, “We had these little sushi things and cocktails. It made a change from Kenny G anyway.”
And it does. It really does make a nice change from Kenny G.
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