Questions and Answers – Graeme

 

Q1) Your band clearly has a striking visual style. Your photography takes place in some beautiful places, why were the locations chosen?

 

A1) The locations in our early videos were chosen because the technology we had available was absolutely risible, so in the absence of being able to do impressive visual effects, we focused on shooting videos in stunning locations up and down the West coast of Scotland. In fact when we rendered the half hour Pretty Girls Make Graves trash-movie, the computer was so under-powered we had to open it up and blow desk fans at the CPU to stop it overheating and shutting down.

 

Q2) There is a lot of religious imagery in the songs. How have you been inspired by religion?

 

A2) Religious establishments have made clever use of reverb and echo in imparting power and space to music and sound for thousands of years, with buildings created that sometimes had very specific acoustic properties in mind. In terms of my own beliefs I'm not a particularly religious man.

 

Q3) What genre would you define your music as?

 

A3) Since we’re not exactly a household name no one ever came up with a name for our musical style. I would describe it as a brutal style of production but with major note intervals used in the place of the minors and diminisheds you might hear in black metal music, which is to say we use happy chords and scales instead of angry and despondent ones. I don’t know what would be the right genre classification for it. Apparently Gylve Nagell from Darkthrone is the man to ask about that, he knows all about rock and metal genres. It’s certainly influenced by bands like Type O Negative, The Sisters of Mercy and 69 Eyes.

 

Q4) Who are your heroes? Who do you admire and why?

 

A4) I admire Yingluck Shinawatra, ex prime minister of Thailand, who took money from the urban elite and redistributed it to the impoverished rice farmers. She had to be removed by a military coup because she kept romping home in all the general elections they made her hold. I also find Alexndria Ocasio-Cortez very impressive, a lonely beacon of reason in a political establishment corrupt and twisted beyond all recognition of anything that belongs in a civilized society. Outside politics, Alan Moore, not only because his work is awesome but because he’s so utterly non-conformist and has a very irreverent attitude towards commercialism of his work. Haruna Ono, partly for the same reason as Alan Moore, and the fact she’s absurdly good looking doesn’t hurt.

 

Q5) What did your parents want you to do with your life?

 

A5) They enthusiastically encouraged me to study biochemistry, which is actually a fascinating subject, but the course managed to turn it into a horrendous daily grind. There are only so many times one can calculate the enthalpy of formation of molecular bonds in organic compounds before one is driven mad, so I dropped out half way through after switching my research focus to apathy, alcoholism and disillusionment.

 

Q6) Road hound or Studio tan?

 

A6) Studio Tan. I was born for studio work. I'm a studio engineer to trade and feel in my element on either side of a mixing console. Besides, I’ve only been on stage a handful of times in my life, so to claim I enjoy being on the road would be a little bit of a stretch.

 

Q7) What's it like to work with Gwen?

 

A7) We have a good arrangement where I don’t interfere with her lyric writing and she leaves me alone to do the production of the backing tracks. It saves us having to sit at opposite ends of the studio and communicate via messengers like the Rolling Stones. Gwen is a prolific lyricist and I’m a prolific composer, so between the two of us we can rattle off a lot of tracks in a short space of time. Also, it’s always fun doing the photo-shoots.

 

Q8) What’s your idea of a good weekend?

 

A8) A good weekend for me would consist of locking myself away with just one or two well chosen friends and a bottle of the cheapest, nastiest sherry, wine and scotch from the local Morrison’s. I may also, if alone, have bizarre sex with someone in Second Life. My days of going to pubs, clubs and high-octane parties ended some years ago.

 

Q9) What's the weirdest thing about yourself?

 

A9) Not sure. I’d already started to realise I was weird by the time I was about six or seven years old.

 

Q10) What influenced your production decisions?

 

A10) Spending my youth doing the kinds of things musicians love to do that are very bad for you, over twenty years of sitting behind mixing desks working with a motley crew, no pun intended, of musicians. I loved music from a young age and used to write songs in my head even as a kid.

 

Q11) What do you wish you’d known starting out that you know now?

 

A11) I wish I’d known that the tone of a video has to be consistent. We spent a lot of hours shooting videos and editing them only to put them in the recycle bin. By the time we did the original Gothic Kisses video, which was about eighteen months in, we were beginning to get some understanding of how videos are pieced together.

 

Q12) How do you define Gothic?

 

A12) That would be an ecumenical matter. Personally my favourite is the Victorian / Edwardian type of goth subset. I like old ruined castles, buildings and graveyards. There are a lot of these that provide a link to the past in the part of Scotland I live in. A lot of my creative work is inspired by the local landscape and history.

 

Q13) Favourite films?

 

A13) The Wicker Man, Withnail and I, Devils Advocate, Solaris, Aces High, 2001, Vanishing Point, Laurel Canyon, Sunshine, The Warriors, Satan’s Slave, Asylum, any Hammer Horror film... There are just too many great films out there to name. I've been a keen movie buff for years now, particularly horror and sci-fi.

 

Q14) To war or not to war?

 

A14) I am unabashedly anti war and would only condone it if there were a demonstrable threat of invasion or destruction.

 

Q15) Are there hidden messages in metal songs?

 

A15) Maybes aye, maybes naw. I dare say someone will have done it. I know we did on a couple of tracks, but only by way of a gag.

 

Q16) Favourite Drink?

 

A16) Vodka, bourbon, scotch, rioja and sherry. Not all in the same glass obviously.

 

Q17) What local legends do you identify with?

 

A17) Local oral tradition has it that the woodlands surrounding the village where I live are haunted by a white lady. Also, when I left school I worked in a local hotel where one of the rooms was allegedly haunted by a grey lady. A castle nearby, now ruined, is said to have been inhabited by an eccentric lady called Susanna Montgomerie who trained the rats to come out of the wainscoting and eat dinner with her. She was also reckoned to be the Marilyn Monroe of her century, famous for her sharp wit and good looks. I always liked reading what little is known of her. Also I recently read a biography of Robert Burns that I picked up in the Burns Museum in Alloway that was exceptionally good. Burns happened to be born in my local area.

 

Q18) Best experience with the band?

 

A18) Although we didn’t have the technology to get half the shots the way we wanted, and only two of the people involved had any acting experience, filming Pretty Girls Make Graves was probably my favourite thing we did. We visited a lot of superb locations and met some weird and wonderful people. While we were filming at Kilchurn Castle we had fun when a bus-load of German tourists rolled up, opened up the castle, and invited us to take the tour with them. We drank so much Glen’s Vodka while writing and recording the PGMG album that we should probably have considered giving John Glen a production credit.

 

Q19) What are you reading right now?

 

A19) Right now I’m reading Cryptonomicon by Neil Stephenson. I don’t get as much chance to read now as I did in my younger days when there were less distractions, but I do always have a book open. I just finished reading The Peripheral by William Gibson, the man who coined the term cyberspace. I also have a copy of The Historian and a biography of Kerouac open at the moment, both of which I intend to finish reading in the fullness of time. I particularly love reading cyberculture and vampire novels.  I also have to read a lot of theory books on audio to keep myself in the loop.

 

 

Q20) Sinful music in your collection?

 

A20) You Are Alive, by Fragma. It's catchy as hell.