The Teenage Fanclub Podcast

It shouldn’t work but it does. Andrew Hamilton chats to Gerry Love about the multiple-personality-disorder which is Teenage Fanclub.

Gerry Love has seen his share over the last 20 years. From those big- label days, when even Kurt Cobain thought they were the best band in the world, to their more recent endeavours, when the Scottish three-piece-plus-a-drummer began to live less in each other’s pockets and more in each other’s work schedules. That’s why, when he says that the band is still close - and it’s the music and not their personalities that keep them together - you’re inclined to believe him. “If we are touring, if we are in each other’s close proximity for a while then we do share music and talk about what we are into now and things like that. And more often than not it turns out that we are still into the same things. But we don’t really communicate, in some ways, in terms of actual words. If someone just puts down some music, then the rest of us know they are doing okay. We don’t really sit about talking - we talk about football and world events - we don’t really ask each other how we are getting on. But somehow we each know how the rest are getting on [without talking]. It’s sort of a weird, intuitive sort of relationship. Although Norman is living in Canada now, it doesn’t really feel that he is that far away. I live near Raymond and Francis but I probably see them as much as I see Norman. But that’s fine, we all have our own lives now. When we meet up in a place to do what we do, it still feel very natural. I think even the fact that we can still make music and people still like it tells its own story, regardless of whether we go for a pint with each other or something. The fact that we can have a harmonious relationship together in a musical sense is quite a deep feeling," he said.

cpiarchive2010a@gmail.com · #130 The Teenage Fanclub Podcast

The Adrian Crowley Podcast

With a growing reputation and a Choice Music Prize-winning album under his belt, Adrian Crowley is an artist on the rise. Andrew Hamilton chats to the late-bloomer of Irish music.

By the age of 25 most people are packing in their teenage dream. Too old to play for Man United, too lacking in star quality to be an actor, too much of a grown-up to be a rock star. Yet it is at just this age that the world first began to hear the name of Galway musician Adrian Crowley. While Crowley is certainly a late developer from an “industry” point of view, his music and song-writing is something aged and matured over many years. It was a long journey, but one that, according to Crowley, that had to be made. “I think the music brought me there itself. I didn’t start out with too many great expectations of making a career out of it. The way I approached it was that when most people would have been out there looking for gigs I started working on my first album. I took an unusual approach to the whole thing. So, the momentum started growing slowly over a few years so when I finally decided to go full-time it just happened by itself. I wasn’t really a decision that I would try and make a go of it but there was one year when it all just started coming for me and I went with it. I was doing music to satisfy something that I was striving for - I had no idea what people would make of it and I wasn’t trying to sell it to anyone. I think that had an influence on the music that came out on the other end. People are always telling me how unusual my music sounded and different from what they might have heard before.” 

cpiarchive2010a@gmail.com · #128 The Adrian Crowley Podcast

The RSAG Podcast

Andrew Hamilton chats to Jeremy Hickey aka Rarely Seen Above Ground (RSAG) about success from the sidelines and his latest album, Be It Right Or Wrong.

Jeremy Hickey never set out to be a one-off. After learning his trade behind the kit, the Kilkenny drummer plied his skill in small venues around the southern coast of Ireland, learning and experimenting as he went. When a borrowed four-track recording presented him with a window into life as a solo recording artist, a giant light-bulb went off in his brain. He hadn’t got there yet, but with this new discovery - and the new moniker of Rarely Seen Above Ground (RSAG) - he finally knew what road he had to take. When his second album Organic Sampler was short-listed for the Choice Music Prize in 2008, he knew he had almost made it. But despite his success and critical acclaim, there was still a large slice of doubt in his mind. It took 10 long years to get there, but there was still a very real chance that people just wouldn’t get it. “I probably still get a lot of that, I’d say. Definitely. When I started out, everyone thought that it would work. Some people backed away from me going ‘I just don’t know about this’. There was a long, long time when people were very stand- offish. But when it really started to get going and we got happier with the visual side of RSAG, then it changed. The music was always there but the idea of presenting it live was the tricky one. I think after a while people just got used to it - you know, the idea that what I was doing was a little bit different,” he says. 

cpiarchive2010a@gmail.com · #127 The RSAG Podcast

The Walls Podcast

Five years after the release of New Dawn Breaking, The Walls are back with a new strut to their step. Andrew Hamilton chats to Steve Wall about protest songs, fresh plans to conquer America and the problem of being your own worst enemy. 

Somewhere over the Indian Ocean, a book caught hold of Joe Wall. When he had finished, he passed it to his brother Steve and before they touched down in Australia, both had walked The Road with Cormac McCarthy. That book, like every great piece of art, has a way of lingering. Three years later and the shards of The Road began to resurface. Mingled with thought of recession, and the generations of Irish who carried their fire to every corner of the world, an idea sparked at 30,000 feet became the hopeful, up-temp song of the summer. “We went to Australia three years ago to do some support for Crowded House and it was on that long flight that we all read The Road. Joe read it first and then passed it to me and I remember not moving out of my seat until I closed the last page. Joe took that line from the book - the idea of carrying the fire. He must have made a mental note of it and it came over into the song. One thing which is interesting about it is that he has taken the phrase and brought it into the Irish context. The lyrics are about the Irish diaspora post-famine. I don’t know of many other Irish pop songs that namecheck Oliver Cromwell or the people in the coffin ships. So it’s
a bit like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road meets Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea but in a pop song - that’s the best way I can describe it," said Steve.

cpiarchive2010a@gmail.com · #126 The Walls Podcast

The Ocean Colour Scene Podcast

There was a time when Ocean Colour Scene was the hottest band in the world. Andrew Hamilton talks to frontman Simon Fowler about the new folk revival, being happy on the fringes of Britpop and how being unfashionable has become the key to their success.

Down the years, the sleepy village of Knebworth has become accustomed to a certain amount of action. Sat lazily in the northern end of Hertfordshire, just to the south of Stevenage, Knebworth is a village unremarkable in just about every way. Except, that is, that every so often it plays host to some of the most important concerts ever. It started in ‘79 when Zeppelin came to town; Queen soon followed and then Deep Purple chose it as the venue for their first gig in more than 15 years. But there was no bigger night than August 11, 1996. On that day, Oasis were joined by Ocean Colour Scene for the second in a set of two concerts that would re-write history. Close on 400,000 people saw Ocean Colour Scene perform live over those two balmy evenings, but more - 2.6 million more to be exact - requested tickets for what has since been recognised as the largest free concert ever to take place. But that was just the start for Ocean Colour Scene. Eight months later, their third album Marchin’ Already would push their mentors Oasis off the top of the album chart, making them, for a while at least, the top dogs of Brit pop. Yet despite the massive help that it gave his band, Britpop was never something that sat easily with Simon Fowler. “I think Oasis changed the perception of what popular music really was at that time. We had been doing the same kind of thing for years and then suddenly they come along and say that, actually, they do like The Beatles and they don’t have to make excuses for it. So we would have been in their camp and in Paul Weller’s camp but really I would have seen Britpop as more about Blur and Pulp and the NME, and we weren’t really linked with that. We certainly weren’t welcome in the NME club,” he says.

cpiarchive2010a@gmail.com · #125 The Ocean Colour Scene Podcast

The Cathy Davey Podcast [2010]

After releasing one of the Irish albums of the decade, no one expected Cathy Davey to be dropped by her record label. Ahead of the release of her third and most implicitly personal album ever, she spoke to Andrew Hamilton about getting over her musical embarrassment and being forced to really sing for her supper.

The gloves have finally come off. After eight years of writing very personal yet heavy veiled music, Cathy Davey has found a way to be herself. While the confidence garnered from the success of Tales of Silversleeve was certainly a help in this new awakening, more important was her new method, or even the concept, behind the making of this album. Make no mistake, Cathy Davey’s third album, The Nameless - due for release this week - is a concept album. While concept albums have often been used as a means for the artist to take an alternative look at the world, the journey of this record is one of self-discovery, of finding a way of describing what in the past has remained, well, nameless. “I think I’ve always been personal [as a songwriter] but I probably didn’t have as much experience. Interesting things happen as you get older and it would be a shame not to be as candid as you can be. With this record, I was able to get past my own censorship because of the theme of ‘The Nameless’ which I had running through it. The Nameless is the woman in these songs and she is always an exaggerated version of me. So whatever I was going through, I was able to multiply it by 10 in order to go along with her story,” she says. 

cpiarchive2010a@gmail.com · #124 The Cathy Davey Podcast

The Sandi Thom Podcast

No punk rocker: Chewed up by pop, Sandi Thom was a 25-year-old musician with a career obituary ready to be written. Andrew Hamilton chats to the Scottish singer-songwriter about going back to basics and overcoming the crisis of confidence which almost finished her career.

When your debut album sells one million copies, the temptation must be to think that’s that, you’ve made it. But that’s not the way the music industry works. Just two years after Sandi Thom’s debut album, Smile, It Confuses People, became a worldwide number one, the call came down the line from the top brass at Sony - “I’m sorry, Sandi, you’re finished.” A difficult second album, one which the artist herself admits was rushed, was all it took, then suddenly the best-made plans of Sandi Thom had come and gone. In the months that followed, Thom contemplated much. Hurt, and with her confidence on the floor, the idea of packing it all in was one that came up more than once. “Confidence was a big thing. I think anybody can relate to it. It’s like losing your job, getting fired - it’s the same feeling, that same sense of rejection. I think no matter who you are in life, that is something that hurts. Your pride get bruised, your confidence take a beating and that hurts. So my confidence did take a knock. In a way, you build a family around you when you are with a label for a while and if you get dropped ’s like finding yourself out in the cold. It look me a few months to come through that, to shake it off and remember why I was in this business in the first place. It took me a while to get that back again. The thing about me is that I was relatively uneducated in the music industry and when things started to happen for me before the first album I didn’t really know what to do. That was a swift learning experience for me, especially dealing with the media.

cpiarchive2010a@gmail.com · The Sandi Thom Podcast

The Carlene Carter Podcast

If American music had a royal family, Carlene Carter would be crowned princess. Andrew Hamilton talks to the country legend about her struggles with drugs and a childhood spent with June Carter and Johnny Cash.

Life brings with it an endless capacity for reinvention. Carlene Carter understands this better than most. After spending half a lifetime in the limelight, the Nashville singer decided at age 41 that the time had come for a change. She had money and a family - why not say goodbye to the endless nights on the road and retire? By the age of 50, Carlene had buried her mother and her fiancé and music producer Howie Epstein (who died tragically after a heroin overdose). She was battling her own drug addiction and had even done a stretch behind bars. But the wheel kept turning, and three years later she was back where she belonged, writing and singing. Her 2008 album, Stronger, was a triumph not just for an artist on the comeback; it was a life restarted. “I think at that stage I was trying to get my life back together. I had had problems with drugs, I had some problems with the law - I was in all of this crap and music had just taken a back seat. It’s what happens when you’re just trying to get through the day. I really thought I was going to be able to retire. I had gotten really burnt out on the road. One year I only spent 23 days at home. I was living in the back of a bus, and I just decided that this wasn’t how I wanted to live my life," she said.

cpiarchive2010a@gmail.com · #120 The Carlene Carter Podcast

The Mugger Dave Podcast

Primal screams: It’s been a long time coming but Mugger Dave are about to arrive. Andrew Hamilton chats to Simon Noble, frontman of one of the most exciting and in-your-face bands to emerge from the west of Ireland in recent years.

Decide in haste, repent at leisure. That would seem to make sense, right? Well, unless you’re an artist, a musician let’s say, with near endless options and all the time in world to walk down each avenue and see just how it feels. For these poor souls, the moment of decision can be a fleeting one - a delicate butterfly being pushed ever farther by the winds of creativity. The result, I’m afraid, is near complete inertia. It has taken Galway band Mugger Dave more than 18 months to record their debut album - roughly the same time it took The Beatles to release Yellow Submarine, Abbey Road and The White Album. It’s an experience that frontman Simon Noble will not be repeating. “This album has been finished about three or four times in the last few months but now we’ve finally put a full stop behind it. It took a year and a half to record this album, which is far too long. We will never record an album in this way again. Next time we’ll book a studio for two weeks and when we leave the studio then that will be it. Some people say that you never really finish a song, that it’s just a version of a song at a particular time, and I guess that’s true. But this is our full stop for now for these songs. Both myself and Sean had been playing in bands before so we knew the process of getting together and playing music with new people so it didn’t take long to gel. We decided that we wanted to record very quickly into our time together so we went into the studio to record that first EP when we had only been together for about eight weeks or so. I think you can hear in that record that we’ve only been playing together for a short time but, still, you can hear the bones of what went on to be our album there too,” he said. 

CPIArchive2009D · #118 The Mugger Dave Podcast

The Fionn Regan Podcast

CPI Archive 2009: Army of one: “Write in recollection and amazement for yourself” - that was Jack Kerouac’s advice to the world. As he returns from his own American odyssey, Andrew Hamilton caught up with Fionn Regan.

Sooner or later, most musicians will tend towards solitude. Whether in their creative or personal life, the lot of many creatives can be an isolated one, a world peopled only by their own thoughts and ideas. For many, this is the nature of the beast - a price to pay for the creative process. “For me, it’s about ploughing your own furrow. Everything seems to work for me when I take the reins and take all the decision-making away from a committee situation. I have to go off into my own world to create something. It’s the same sort of feeling as you get from a lot of directors when they talk about their films. I need to see everything from the artwork right down to the very last tambourine hit. I have my own way of doing things - everything is cut live in the room and it has its own little world to it. If there were more people involved, they might find it maddening. With this record, I wanted everything to be on show, I wanted people to be able to hear the nuts and bolts of it. I didn’t want the edges to be smoothed out. I didn’t want it to be pasteurised or to sound like something it wasn’t... 

CPIArchive2009D · #115 The Fionn Regan Podcast

The Delorentos Podcast

CPI Archive 2009: 2009 was the year that almost broke Delorentos. Andrew Hamilton chats to front-man Kieran McGuinness about the break-up, reformation and the winter of discontent that almost tore the band apart.

Blanchardstown is depressing at the best of times. But on hopelessly dark January evenings, when the rain and traffic transform the Navan Road into a World War One trench, all within the shadow of the Connolly Hospital is morphed into something reminiscent of one of Dante’s circles. It was on one such evening that it all came home for Kieran McGuinness. That record contract, the big one which had promised worldwide distribution, had just vanished, almost overnight, into this air. The band, sick with exhaustion from almost two years of non-stop touring and recording, was on the brink of collapse. And then, as if by some sort of sick slapstick joke, the company that distributes their records just happens to go bust. For Delorentos, a band which operates their own record label with no big industry assistance, this meant a trip to the Blanchardstown Shopping Centre, to personally pack the car with thousands of their own CDs, their lives’ work, and bring it home to gather dust in an attic. Is it any wonder that two weeks later, singer and guitarist Ronan (Ro) Yourell decided that enough was enough? “It was a strange couple of months - a strange whole year really. We had had a great run with the first album. We played all over Ireland, we sold out venues that we never even dreamed or playing, and all the accolades that we got were humbling and brilliant. So we decided to go away and start writing the second album. As we did that, we started to get a lot of interest from record labels...

CPIArchive2009D · #114 The Delorentos Podcast

The Eleanor McEvoy Podcast

Eleanor McEvoy is on the cusp of something new. Andrew Hamilton stumbles upon the hidden verses of this woman’s heart. 

Set in the centre of the East African Plateau, Uganda rises like a great wild plain from the rocky shores of Lake Victoria. A troubled land - beset by political corruption, war with its neighbours and hunger - Uganda remains one of the poorest countries in the world. Yet for Eleanor McEvoy, it is also a land of hope. After visiting the country with Oxfam last year, McEvoy was moved by the happiness of spirit of the people she met. It moved her and, like all emotional moments, it helped shape and form the direction of her music to come. “My aim when I went out there was to do something for charity, to do a good deed. I wasn’t going out there to enjoy it but when I went there I was amazed by the beauty of the country and the warmth of the people. When I thought of Uganda, in my ignorance, I didn’t think of a very beautiful country but it was. That said, it was very harrowing, without a doubt - seeing the conditions that a lot of these people were living in and hearing about the atrocities that they had experienced. But in a funny way it was also very up lifting. I was looking at this extraordinary power of hope and this sense of community that they all had. It was a weirdly mixed experience. I think experiences like that can’t but feed into how you do your job as an artist. As long as I can remember, and I started writing songs when I was five or six, it’s always been the case. When something dramatic happens in my life, it comes out in my songs. But that’s not always a good thing and sometimes it can be quite frustrating," she said. 

CPIArchive2009D · #112 The Eleanor McEvoy Podcast

The Director Podcast

CPI Archive 2009: After the hype, inevitably comes the calm. Andrew Hamilton chats to Michael Moloney, lead singer of an older, wiser and more confident Director. 

In many ways, 2007 belonged to Director. Young, exciting and with the song of the summer safely tucked away in their back pocket, the road ahead looked rosy for the Malahide foursome. But something was not quite right in the state of Director. The failure to crack the UK led to a split from their then label, Atlantic, and a major rethink for songwriter and vocalist Michael Moloney. Two years of thinking, deciding and thinking again have led Director into a new space. Older and happier in their skin, the band have emerged from their ponderings with a second album, I’ll Wait For Sound, streets ahead of the first and with the confidence to go it their own way. “It is and it isn’t different. It’s definitely a bit rockier and a bit heavier - maybe a bit more instinctive musically. I think on this album we got a bit adventurous, for better or for worse,” says Michael.

CPIArchive2009D · #111 The Director Podcast

The Horslips Podcast

CPI Archive 2009: In a special extended interview, Andrew Hamilton, chat Johnny Fean about the rise, fall and eventual reformation of Horslips.

Johnny Fean was the first kid in Ireland to hear The Supremes. The year was 1961 - Kennedy was in the White House, a fledgling RTÉ was getting ready for its maiden broadcast and, in the small townland of Rineanna, something special was brewing. Factories were being built; factories which needed workers and workers who needed homes, shops and family. The Clare goldrush had begun. The Feans were one of dozens or maybe hundreds of families who made their way to Shannon in 1961. They came in search of a new life and found exactly that. Foreign investment meant foreign children and, for a teenaged Johnny Fean, this meant a vast melting pot of music. “My dad was a great jazz fan and he had a lot of recordings - a lot of 78’s and old recordings. Because he worked in the airport, he used to get a lot of records from the pilots coming in from America so I had access to a lot of great stuff. I was the first-born in the family and the very early days would have been me listening to the likes of Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole as a baby,” says Johnny.

CPIArchive2009D · #110 The Horslips Podcast

The Spider John Koerner Podcast

CPI Archive 2009: On a balmy summer evening in 1959, John ‘Spider’ Koerner first turned Bob Dylan onto folk. Andrew Hamilton chats to the legendary American about life as a musical maverick and being a blues man in a folk world.

There were never fans inside the Ten O’Clock Scholar. Even in August, the Minneapolis heat would besiege the walls of the grotty student haunt, mingling and scheming with the whistling steam of endless coffees, bewitching all who entered with the twin lures of free love and marijuana. To those inside, the sun-stricken world would slowly dissolve and melt, almost becoming translucent under the weight of heat, noise and smoke. It was in this den of 1960’s Americana, that John ‘Spider’ Koerner first met Bob Dylan. Koerner, an engineering student with a talent for folk and blues riffs and a voice built to frighten, liked the young Dylan - and slowly began to introduce him into his world. Starting, of course, with the music. “I had no idea about music or anything until I went to university in Minneapolis. I was there for a year and a half as an engineering student. A friend of mine invited me up to his house to listen to some music and it was folk music. He had a few records and could play himself and it was really interesting. He loaned me his guitar and a folk music book and somehow, within a few weeks, I was able to play a few tunes. That was the beginning of it,” says Koerner. 

CPIArchive2009D · #109 The Spider John Koerner Podcast

The Red Stick Ramblers Podcast

CPI Archive 2009: Andrew Hamilton talks to Linzay Young, fiddler and head vocalist in Louisiana Cajun and swing band, The Red Stick Ramblers.

Along the clay banks of the Mississippi River, just south of Baton Rouge, the catfish still burrow in the mud. Encased in their silt-walled fortress, four sets of razor teeth await anyone - opportunist fisherman or farmer - who fancies a cheap meal. Yet for those who get lucky, the taste of the catfish is sublime. In an odd way, this treacherous standoff between man and beast is analogous to the world of Cajun music. Both wild and beautiful, comforting and dangerous, it’s something even the most experienced of musician can’t quite control, even if she wanted to. “I grew up in the Cajun area of Louisiana and I was instilled with a pride and an appreciation for the culture and the music since I was very young. It’s not just the music, it’s the whole way of life - the hunting, the cooking, the family, all of it. My folks were all country people, very very traditional and everywhere we go we try and instil a feeling of that into people. We try to let people know that it’s not just the music - it’s a whole way of life that we life,” says Linzay.

CPIArchive2009D · #108 The Red Stick Ramblers Podcast

The Clive Barnes Podcast

CPI Archive 2009: Andrew Hamilton chats to Clive Barnes about burning his musical influences and the lap-slide guitar that saved his life.

The 1990s were the decade of the Irish singer-songwriter. From Paddy Casey and David Gray (he’s wishes he was Irish, you know) to the Devlins and Damien Rice, this cult of whinging Paddies - each crawling over the other to be first to share his broken feelings with the gushing public - almost took over the world. It was a musical bubble, inflated by ego and endless hot air, pumped to within an inch of good taste. And when it finally popped, there would be no soft landing. Yet for a time, the youngsters of Ireland abandoned the rock bands which had served them so well in the past, trading their distortion pedal for a harmonica and a hard luck story. In 1999, right at the peak of the singer-songwriter mania, Clive Barnes had already smelled a rat. After trying, and failing, to make an impact doing what everyone else was doing, he decided to call it a day. He left Dublin broken, and returned to his native county to regroup. A sailor, cast on the rocks by the beguiling whingers, destitute and depressed, ready for a new way home. “I had been playing on the whole singer-songwriter scene for a while and for some reason all of that just didn’t sit too well with me. I was just getting worse and worse up there. I was pretty much destitute so I decided to move back to Wexford and have a think about things again,” says Clive. 

CpiArchive2009c · #107 The Clive Barnes Podcast

The BellX1 Podcast

CPI Archive 2009: Ahead of the launch of his second solo album, Andrew Hamilton chats to BellX1’s Dave Geraghty about the value of sunshine and the highs and lows of going it alone.

Nothing can grow without sunlight, but in the dark there is space for much to fester. From the dark recesses and hidden corners of his ultra-moody debut album Kill Your Darlings, Dave Geraghty has emerged anew, ready to step into the light. After spending much of 2007 recording in a long forgotten sub-suburban lair, the BellX1 man decided to take a different tack when putting his latest album, The Victory Dance, together. “The first album was pretty much put together in this little room that I was renting out. It was underground, there was no daylight and the toilets kept backing up. It was pretty grim and it didn’t bode very well for nice, sunny, bright energies to be flowing,” he says. “But this was totally different. It was June, we were in this lovely gaff with this great flowing lawn out the front and a river running right down beside the house. It was beautiful. And that did add to the album. I think this time I was able to share in the joy of making the record. 

CpiArchive2009c · #106 The Dave Geraghty Podcast (2009)

The Stereo MCs Podcast

CPI Archive 2009: Before the Chemical Brother and Fatboy Slim, there was Stereo MCs. Andrew Hamilton chats to Nick ‘The Head’ Hallam about birthing an entire genre and the battle with PolyGram Records which almost ended his career.

1992 was the year of Stereo MCs. After conquering the UK, and with their third album Connected selling hand over fist, the fathers of British electro hip-hop crossed the Atlantic and were welcomed with open arms. But all was about to change. The sale of Island Records to PolyGram had brought an end to the world’s first great independent record label, but it had also called a halt to the gallop of Stereo MCs. The band was too edgy, too different for PolyGram - and in the blinking of an eye their career was to enter freefall. “America was amazing. We went there so many times and played many weird gigs. I remember playing a lowriders show in Los Angeles with Hispanic people in cars jumping in the air. There were loads of Spanish rappers on the bill with us. We did some weird shows but it always worked for us somehow. It was interesting, exciting. But then it all went a bit pear-shaped, just when Island sold out to PolyGram,” says Nick.

CpiArchive2009c · The Stereo MCs Podcast

The Lightning Seeds Podcast

CPI Archive 2009: Band member, producer, solo artist — Ian Broudie has done it all. Andrew Hamilton chats to the brains behind The Lightning Seeds about the different strands to his musical bow and the conflicts that live in his musical machine.

Over 10 months, spanning 1978 and 1979, Liverpool punk band, Big in Japan, produced one EP and wrote just seven songs. As news of their breakup filtered out across Merseyside, there were no tears. In fact, few in the music fraternity batted an eyelid. Yet, it was the most important event in Liverpool’s music history since the formation of The Beatles. Big in Japan were the typical band that launched 1,000 bands: a super-group in reverse, as John Peel might have said, and from their numbers, decades of music would be forged. There was Budgie, later of The Slits and Siouxsie & the Banshees; Bill Drummond who went on to form The KLF; Holly Johnson of Frankie Goes To Hollywood; and Ambrose Reynolds of Nightmares In Wax. And then, of course, there was Ian Broudie. Along with his solo records and work under the name The Lightning Seeds, Broudie continues to launch band after band through his work as one of Britain‘s most sought after producers. In recent years, people like The Coral, The Subways and The Zutons have all received a point in the right direction from Broudie. “Producing is always a collaborative process and it’s different every time. I know that sounds vague but that’s what makes it so great - that’s why it’s an art form. That’s why I love it, I suppose. I’m a music junkie, me, I’m always listening for that new song that you just can’t stop playing and I always wish I was in that band. That’s always been the inspiration for me, both as a producer and as a record-maker myself,” he says. 

CpiArchive2009c · #104 The Lightning Seeds Podcast