‘Spirit of Eden’ and
‘Laughing Stock’ are both astonishing albums, but in terms of being mentioned as
an influence by other musicians, ‘Spirit’, perhaps simply because it came first,
is way out in front. When I first heard ‘Laughing Stock’ upon its release in
1991, I was baffled because it sounded too freeform, but the more I’ve listened to
the album, the more I’ve realised how carefully constructed it is, and I would now
say that I not only prefer ‘Laughing Stock’, but have been influenced by it far
more than by its predecessor.
Mark Hollis has mentioned Miles
Davis’s collaborations with Gil Evans in the late 1950s, particularly the album
‘Sketches of Spain’, as an important influence on his own music, but when I
listen to ‘Laughing Stock’, I am reminded of a later Miles Davis work, ‘In
a Silent Way’ (1969). This was one of the first albums to be partially assembled from
fragments of recorded music; tape edits were used to stitch repeats and variations of
certain sections into the fabric of the compositions, adding to their luminous,
otherworldly quality. A similar but more extreme balance between composed melodies and
improvised then re-edited musical textures is the basis of ‘Laughing Stock’;
parts recorded with one song in mind ended up being used in another, for instance.
By the time my band Gramophone
started work in late 1995, advances in affordable digital recording and editing technology
had made this experimental cut-and-paste approach commonplace in many areas of music, but
I still felt that its manifestation on ‘Laughing Stock’ had a special quality
which I wanted to capture in my own music if I could.
Much of that special
quality is connected with the overall sound of the album, for which credit must go to
engineer Phill Brown. The instruments on ‘Laughing Stock’ were recorded using a
variety of unconventional techniques, in particular extreme distance miking - Lee
Harris’s drumming was captured by a microphone placed thirty feet away, pretty much
the opposite of ‘textbook’ drum recording.
The drum sound on ‘After the Flood’ is one of my favourite recordings of
acoustic drums, and as a drummer, I was keen to experiment with distance miking myself
once I found out that this was how it had been achieved!
What I love about the
overall sound of the album is that it celebrates the ‘artificial’ nature of
recording - it would be impossible for a live ensemble to replicate the balance between
the electric and acoustic instruments - but sounds very warm, organic and natural at the
same time, a sort of miniature parallel universe with its own internal logic. This
quality, the creation of a ‘sound world’ in the mind of the listener, is one
shared by all of my favourite recordings (and hopefully some of my own).
In discussing the
album’s influence on me, I must mention one specific musical part - the John Lee
Hooker-like guitar riff which opens and underpins ‘Taphead’. This became one of
the vocabulary of phrases which I would unconsciously start playing whenever I picked up a
guitar, and the Gramophone song ‘Mercury’ is heavily indebted to it.
Of course, the most important thing that musicians
can take from other musicians’ work is not technical, but emotional and
inspirational. More than anything, ‘Laughing Stock’ produces a certain emotional
response in me which I find hard to articulate, but understand completely when listening
to the music, and value very highly. The hope of evoking a similar response in other
people is the main reason why I make music myself.
