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Siren (Issue 2), 1991
Reaching album status, CRANES seems even more confused than ever. (They simply can't find Jane Austen in the phone book)
For the average indie band, television exposure should be a 'fun'
experience. The outlets may be severely limited, but at least with
the likes of 'Snub' and 'Music Box', the young guitar-grippers work
with relatively young, like-minded souls who have more enthusiasm than
dull professional talent and more credibility than money. Cranes,
however, have seen both sides of the TV coin. And they still haven't
quite recovered from the experience...
"We went up to Newcastle and worked with a whole production crew
from Tyne Tees," whispers a wide-eyed Alison Shaw. "There
was a proper lighting director and grips and a floor manager and none
of them were under 55! Even the producer had a cigar and a cravat!
And they'd built us this set."
"They were so proud of it," groans drumming brother Jim.
"Some bloke had spent all night building it, but it was a gothic
monstrosity!"
"We thought we were going to be playing in this empty warehouse
above the Riverside venue," continues Alison, "but when we
got there they'd built this Miss Haversham's [sic] Last Meal sort of
gothic, cobwebbed table covered with rotting food, and when we saw it
our faces just dropped! We explained to the director that we couldn't
stand in front of it, we were trying to get away from being called
goths..."
"And he was saying, 'It's not gothic at all'," helps Jim,
"and they were spraying more cobwebs on as he spoke! We were
gonna get moderately dressed up in suits and stand in this
fantastically big, empty place...but if we'd worn the suits in front
of this table we'd have looked like The Munsters!"
Jim Shaw appears thoroughly, unpleasantly aggrieved. Blasted by the
kind of abnormally hot London day that causes taxi drivers to moan
about the ozone layer, the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the brevity
of Italian tourists' skirts ("S' not good for me ticker,
mate,") all in the same breath, Jim's falling apart in the
sunshine and striving to piece together the Cranes' debut album in the
spare moments between the myriad of business meetings and press
interviews set up by Dedicated Records.
They've finished a tapeful of tracks. Now they just have to rearrange
them, remix them and give them titles. Cranes have also gone over
budget and over the deadline for completion, thus potentially
disrupting future release dates, tour schedules and executive lunch
plans.
"We've probably messed up everyone's lives now," giggles
Alison.
Guitarists Mark and Matt have buggered off back to Portsmouth, leaving
the Shaws to muse over Cranes' notoriously painstaking method of
working. Jim used to have all the time in the world to create on his
bedroom 8-track. Now they've got the pressures of a state-of-the-art
studio to contend with.
"It can still be meticulous," says Alison, "although
the first week we were in there we recorded eleven songs straight
away, really loosely without any clip tracks. Jim wrote a complete
song in two hours the other day. I sang on it in about three
minutes!"
"And it was crap!" beams Jim.
"Yeah," agrees Alison, "but it amused us!"
If 'Adoration' pointed towards a smoother, silkier Cranes, the album turns the signpost back towards the hammering rhythmic intensity of the early releases:
"'Adoration' is like the extreme of the new style," explains
Jim. "Other stuff on the album is going that way, but not so
much. Although one of the songs is definitely more extreme - it's a
blatant pop song, hahaha! 'Adoration' appeals to a broader audience
as well. That's what makes a Good Song, I suppose. Even Mark's dad
likes it! And his classic quote is, 'Why do you have to have
distortion on your guitars?'!!"
Nailing Cranes' music down is about as easy as hammering an aardvark
into a wombat-shaped hole. Call them foreboding and they'd disagree.
Say that 'Inescapable' is a claustrophobically apt title and Alison
will say it means precisely the opposite, it's supposed to be an
expression of freedom. All this confusion is hardly surprising when
the band have such an addled perception of themselves.
"I think we misunderstand ourselves a lot of the time without
really knowing it," frowns Jim.
quot;We're not really that clear about what we're doing or why we're
doing it," ponders Alison, hopelessly.
If - being hypothetical for a moment - a French journalist wandered in and asked Cranes if they were the sound of New Rock, Alison would titter. Jim would cough politely. Both would frown. Qu'est-ce-que c'est le rock nouveau?
"Who else would be New Rock?" pipes Alison. "Is it a
genre?"
It's a platform for the barrier-breaking, ground-raking adventurous musical elite.
"Oh. Yeah! We'd like to be that!"
"I dunno if we necessarily are, though," grumbles Jim. "Although if a song really does sound like someone else we'd usually ditch it. But that's almost always by coincidence. We never set out to sound like whoever."
"We aim to be individual," nods Alison. "But Jim says there's no point in sounding completely original if it's crap and no-one wants to listen to it, like being experimental to the point of useless noise. Not that all experimental music is useless noise, but...it's got to have some sort of value, some sort of emotional content."
"There's been a few bands over the past five or ten years that
I've thought have been experimental, but anyone can make a
noise," says Jim. "But there are some experimental bands I
really like the sound of. They haven't got anywhere, they're just
bands I know in Portsmouth or wherever doing totally what they want to
do, not in a commercial sense at all. That's got real value to it,
they're really committed to what they're doing."
Cranes broke out of pure bedroom-bound experimentation with the 'Fuse'
cassette in the middle of 1989, when John Peel picked up on them and
the press promptly leapt on them. Yet even though Dedicated signed
them for what they were ("They don't want to change us
into a pop group") and the subsequent singles have hardly
suggested that Cranes are desperate to join the orthodox rat race, the
band still fret about their idealistic intentions.
"A few people have said that we've lost 'it' since the early days," glowers Jim, "although no one said that 'Adoration' was too poppy, which is what I fully expected. Sometimes I worry that commercialism is becoming part of our driving force, but then again what we very nearly released as our last single was the most uncommercial thing you've ever heard. Completely experimental!"
"Commercialism isn't our motivation at all," insists Alison.
"f we've got to do a single - which we have - then it's got to
have a point. We don't just want any old song, it's got to have some
sort of validity to us, otherwise I just wouldn't be able to face it.
There wouldn't be any point."
Hell, so deep-rooted is this fear of selling out that Cranes are planning to cover John Lennon's 'War Is Over (Merry Xmas)'. Sounds tacky, doesn't it? Sneer not, hardliners - the cover is part of a proposed BMG Christmas album, chockful of the corporate's 'alternative' acts roasting old Yuletide chestnuts.
As Jim sagely notes, it will probably be released next February.
There'll be tours of Britain, Europe and America, a live EP culled from the band's 'Snub' appearance, and while Jim knuckles down to the task of writing a second album (much to the astonishment of Alison, who simply wants a holiday), his sister will be grappling with 'a real bastard of a bassline' which Jim invented and will probably take Alison months to learn.
In between all that, Cranes will be plotting how to avoid the
potential pitfalls of life in the nation's record racks.
"Maybe we should just release an anti-album," wonders Jim, "with no songs and therefore no tour. Or maybe we could release a plank of wood in a record sleeve, just to see how many people actually go out and buy it...."
- Reviewed/Interviewed by Simon Williams.
© Siren, 1991.
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