News
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- 19th Jan 2008 -
The 3rd Album!
For your pleasure we are pleased to anounce the release of the third
colllection of songs by Robert and Charles entitled "The Forgotten Wings That
Brought Me Joy", it was recorded in Dublin during the Summer of 2007. A special
thank you to J.P and Lenny for their help in the recording process, and to all
of you who have sent such kind messages of support over the year. |
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- Sept 2007 -
The Dublin Recordings
Robert and Charles have been recording some new songs at a fan’s house in
Dublin. I went with them to help with the carrying and offer moral support, and
thought it would be fun to try to write up some of what happened at the
sessions.
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Week One
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Tuesday 7.20 p.m.
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Charley’s in a foul mood. He’s spent three hours this afternoon trying to
tune a banjo he bought in Grafton St for €70, and every time he gets close,
Robert tells him it’s not in concert pitch. They’ve got the tuning from some
website, but the banjo pegs are sliding every which way, hang on tone just long
enough for Charley to finger a chord, before glissing atonally. Robert’s not
even looking, clicking random boxes on Cubase with the expression of a man
who’s asked for a haircut and ended up with extensions. I almost feel sorry for
him, even though he made me carry the amp from the airport, on the bus (no
money for taxi). Charley lives in Dublin now, working on one of the dozens of
construction projects going on all around the city. But we’re not at Charley’s
place – he lives in some squalid dump out in…well, I don’t know where it is,
but I know I’m not going back there. Went yesterday. Up eight flights of
chipped stone stairs that stank of piss, to Charley’s front door, from where I
discovered the stench was actually coming. Glance inside – crusted jeans
hanging from the light bulb, curtain of flies, some shape on the sofa that
could’ve been one person or could’ve been two very close together (difficult to
tell), but either way was in urgent need of some Persil. Charley does in fact
possess a box of washing powder – it was the specific reason we had returned to
his flat in the first place. He keeps his plectrums, screwdrivers and snooker
chalk herein. Also some Mars Volta CDs, which he insists on playing before we
leave.
Compared to that, today is almost fun. Robert has calmed down from his flight.
Charley has got most of the guitars strung and tuned. And girls are popping in
and out of the house on various errands. To say Charley has a way with women
would be distorting things – none of them appear to be past or putative sexual
partners, and for some reason he has them running round doing favours for each
other. All the while Robert Googles ‘banjo chords’.
Bobby’s own personal life is a crossword without clues. He’s lost weight, yes,
but doesn’t even talk about women, or men for that matter. It’s almost like
that adolescent thing where you don’t talk with your friends about sex if you
aren’t getting it and they are, and get so used to not talking about it, you
don’t say anything even when you are getting some, because it feels strange to
be participating in the conversation. Yes, with Robert you wouldn’t even know –
nervous with pleasure. Never happier than when he’s got something to be unhappy
about.
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Thursday 3.00 p.m
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| And now, how many, twelve, thirteen takes of some slide part Charley’s
attempting to record whilst watching Wimbledon with the sound turned down, not
trying to be nonchalant (he’s not a good enough musician), just genuinely more
interested in some zeroes hitting a ball over a net. Takes get blown by mobile
phones ringing, guitars slipping out of tune (not one instrument here worthy of
being even a My First Guitar gift for some eager virgin-fingered 12-year old
who doesn’t know his Zoot Horn Rollo from his last Rolo), the Cubase crashing,
being asked to hold far too much information than its geriatric memory can cope
with, the computer anyway stuffed mostly with Asian porn, a little corner of
RAM tucked away for the Peacefulls, but not a take goes by without error
messages flashing agitatedly. Robert (who knows nothing about PCs) curses,
sweats, prods, pokes, shouts, kicks and shakes the machine, take after take
after take before exploding ‘fuck it’, giving up, going to the pub, coming
home, listening to Lester Flatt, trying again, and for some reason the computer
accepts it this time first try. In such a way, sessions proceed
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Friday 1.40 p.m.
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| Charley, just out of bed, bacon sandwich in hand, recording one of the
lamest, polyester vocals this side of Travis and insisting that that is the
take, the perfect version. Robert, not slept much I don’t think, plunking
guitar most of the morning, or at least when I staggered up from couch to
toilet he was there, not tuning the thing, not even properly playing it, just,
well, fucking plunking. The sort of thing that musicians do in between takes at
rehearsals, when their fingers are bored, in no way compositionally or
harmonically directed. He uncharacteristically yells at Charley – “I fucking
want it to sound boring”. Apparently he has this idea (that Charley has
contemptuously christened “MeTwee”), the essence of which being endless songs
about that girlfriend that wasn’t quite a girlfriend, or that trauma that
wasn’t even quite a trauma, or that cock up that wasn’t anywhere near being a
cock up, hmmm. According to Bobby the only way to even bother to attempt to
perform MeTwee is not to try to project out, you know, the
listen-to-the-artist-suffering approach of countless sobbing simperers, but to
accept that it is all so far inside that it is utterly uninteresting to anyone
but your own self, no not even to whichever poor female unwittingly prodded
your creative juices into life. Hence the plunking. Fine. Great. Whatever. But
does he have to be so deliberately dull?
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Saturday 9.05 p.m.
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| It should be noted, if not obvious, that the Peacefulls are not precious.
They would say they are just victims of circumstance. Take Robert’s vocals.
After a week of trying to record and mix and write and eat and sing and reboot
the computer, Robert gives up and takes to his bed. Charley busies himself with
watching highlights of tennis matches that he watched live earlier in the day,
and adding outlandish digital effects to guitar parts already on the Cubase,
most of which will be removed later.
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Week Two
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Wednesday 5.10am
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| Strange and unsettling. Following over three days in bed Robert emerges from
his mini- retreat, glassy eyed, baggy faced, string haired, greasy cheeked,
rind lipped, blackhead nosed, dirt nailed, scab skinned and grubby necked, pads
past myself zonked on sofa as usual, lights up computer, sets up microphone by
VDU glow and – slumped in chair with mic in hand – zums through vocals for all
six of his songs, before snapping off the PC and returning to bed without
another word.
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Friday 4.15 p.m.
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Titles. Robert is brooding over the merits of ‘The Getting Low’, for him as
much a statement of fact/intent as a gentle broadside towards the recent Bonnie
‘Prince’ Billy recording. Charley wants to call this set of songs (he refers to
them charmingly as an LP) ‘Plunderphonics’, but I know for a fact that’s just a
fancy name for ripping off other people’s stuff, that Charley got from reading
about Neoism. It’s appropriate though. The squeaks and slimy retainers of
blatant theft run through many a tune put down, either a lyric, or a chord
progression or a whole piece of someone else’s recording that the brothers have
haplessly lifted. When our house host raises this with Robert, he (R) actually
has the effrontery to claim permission for the stealing, going into some
blather about having emailed LaMonte Young and received the great man’s OK for
the unadorned wholesale relocation of one of his pieces into the Peacefull
corpus. Charley, equally bizarrely, chips in that he himself has recently
assented to a QP sample being used by The Books.
They will make even odder assertions. A process of removal, or reframing as the
NLPers might have it. If you nick a chord sequence from musician A, mix it with
lyrics from musician B and adorn it with recorded segments of musician C, is it
still possible for your own personality to come through, and what does it say
about a personality that is more accurately expressed by this form of
sewn-together ‘creativity’? And then, within this melange, you jumble things up
even more by dropping displaced fragments of your own compositions into the
slop without rhyme or reason, appearing incongruously inside tunes they were
never intended to fit, the whole plethora resembling nothing so much as random
tunings across an FM band (a sound which actually appears in one of the songs).
It’s an extension of Charley’s stance on boredom – the Peacefulls have such low
attention spans, they channel surf in their own songs, with no intention of
assuaging or (God forbid) entertaining the listener, instead replicating the
bored lassitude and thumb-flicking remote control restlessness that is Robert’s
standard evening and, one suspects, is often Charley’s lot, too. It is music as
soap opera, a complete patchwork of million times told stories, glossily put
together (glossy never being an adjective previously applicable to QP, but
they’ve gone and got ambitious on this set), a background which becomes a
foreground when the vicissitudes of ‘lived’ life offer up no other meaningful
distraction.
I don’t know whether this is good or bad. A virtue out of a necessity? Well, QP
music has never had much of either virtue or necessity, except inasmuch as it
keeps Charley out of trouble and Bobby on an even keel (an ample ‘ish’ to both
of those). A load of old bollocks? More than likely, but whose to say?
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Sunday 7.50 p.m
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| The last day of recording (Charley’s fortnight off work is up), everyone is
unusually clear-headed, and they manage to pull out a song I can there and then
appreciate. Nailed on the first take (after apparently several abortive
run-throughs the previous night, when I was down Temple Bar), piano-tinkling,
wistful cuckold epideictics that each brother claims is about his situation. I
can say now, I don’t know if it’s Robert’s Korean girl or Charley’s Spanish
one, or even if it’s about a girl. To cover up, I flick mashed potato at the
piano after the song finishes. Bobby closes the lid, and conscientiously
removes the food globs from the carpet. Charley cuffs me around the head.
There’s a moment of silence. I can hear the TV coming though from the next-door
neighbours. The cuff was not a gentle one. I have become the centre of
attention.
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- 3rd Dec 2006 -
New Songs!
We are pleased to announce the arrival of the second collection of songs from
Quarter-Pounder. It is entitled "You Seek It Like A Dream But When You Find It
You Become Its Prey" Recorded over two days in early September it is now
available for free download. The Peacefull brothers would like to say a special
thankyou to the Mile End boy for the use of his unique recording facilities, so
making this collection possible |
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- 1st June 2006 -
Interview with Robert
On the 20th May this year, I travelled up to Peel, on the Isle of Man, where
Robert is staying with his parents, to show him this website and the one at
myspace. The conversation was recorded and is transcribed below.
Q: Bobby, how are you?
A: I’m OK. How’s London?
Q: The same. I think they’re about to extend the congestion charge zone.
A: Glad I failed my driving test [laughs]
Q: You heard from Charley at all?
A: Not recently. You?
Q: I think he’s in Peckham, or Camberwell, or somewhere like that…
A: Only Fools and Horses country? [laughs]
Q: Yeah.
A: I think he got Mayumi [Shuoko, Robert’s ex-wife] to ring up, see if I
was OK. So he knows where I am.
Q: Fair enough.
A: …
Q: So what do you think of the website?
A: Great, really good. I mean, it’s basic, but there’s not much to say
about us, is there?
Q: You’d be surprised. You’re getting lots of good comments.
A: Oh really? Such as? [some of the comments posted on the myspace page
are read out] Jesus. Is that real?
Q: I guess so.
A: …
Q: …
A: Well, at least it seems they like my stuff more than his [laughs].
No, fuck, that’s amazing. I don’t want to get too, you know, excited about it,
but it sounds great. Thank you.
Q: You’re welcome. Why not get excited?
A: Well, fuck, if I look at myself in the mirror and think, “You used to
be a musician,” it depresses me. If I look into the mirror and think, “You used
to be a meat packer,” it cheers me up. That’s how I like it. Ex-meat packer.
Q: They haven’t got websites for meat packers.
A: Oh come on. I’m sure they do. Some chatroom or something.
Q: Can I ask about songs?
A: What songs?
Q: The ones I put on the website. Butchered Sweetness, Chet Carter all
that.
A: Oh, them. Do we have to? I mean, it’s nice people are saying nice
things about them, but I just cringe when I hear them. Acoustic wrist-slitters
about the ex-wife. Yuk!
Q: …So, have you been writing any new stuff?
A: Yeah. Acoustic wrist-slitters about the ex-wife [laughs]. Well, what
else am I going to do? Write techno?
Q: Is Charley going to play on them?
A: We had a bit of a sit-down a while ago. He’s got a number of
wrist-slitters of his own [laughs]. Better than mine, to be honest. Far more
likely to make you want to top yourself. [laughs] We played a bit, I dunno
what’ll happen next. I’d like to record some more, but the problem is where.
Sometimes, Charley can be more trouble than he’s worth.
Q: Come on. You wouldn’t record anything without him.
A: Actually, nearer to the truth is that I couldn’t record anything
without him. You know, that guy only let us record at his place because Charley
threatened to break his legs?
Q: I think that’s an exaggeration.
A: Fuck you what you think. I was there.
Q: He was a friend of yours.
A: He was a friend before the session started. I haven’t heard fuck all
since. This is why we haven’t got anything ready to put on the site.
Q: Hang on, you said session? Just the one?
A: Yeah, just the one session. What you think? We’re not exactly Pink
Floyd.
Q: Hmm. You know I could almost believe that crap about Charley
threatening that guy. I’ve seen him do some stupid stuff before. Thinks he’s
out of The Sopranos.
A: Minder, more like. Yeah, I envy him that – if someone calls Charley a
cunt, he thumps them. Someone calls me a cunt, I go home and think about it and
figure they’re right. I envy Charley his knuckles [laughs].
Q: Maybe you should get him to teach you some moves?
A: Don’t need ‘em here, do I?
Q: I was going to ask about that. Here, I mean. Peel. How much longer?
A: Will I be here?
Q: Yeah.
A: …I dunno. The older I get, the more nervous crowds of people make me.
Thinking about all the clubs we used to go to, way back when, I can’t believe I
did that shit. It’s like I was a mountaineer, or something, you know, a
different life that I was trained for then, but could never get back in shape
for, now.
Q: A mountaineer…?
A: I know. It’s the first thing that came into my head [laughs].
Q: I like that bit about training.
A: Well, fuck, I hate people who go on about age, but it can seems
sometimes that once you get past thirty, you gotta train for everything all of
a sudden, things that came naturally, before: Fucking, dancing, jamming, even
eating, in my case.
Q: How are things with that? You do look a bit slimmer.
A: Very kind. I’ll keep the razor blades under wraps for another day
[laughs]. Actually, when a fucker as fat as me wants to top himself, he doesn’t
do it with razor blades, he does it with cheeseburgers.
Q: Quarter-pounders…?
A: [laughs] Very good. There’s some tonker-toy psychology there
somewhere, isn’t there?
Q: Somewhere. Let’s leave it for someone else.
A:Sensible.
Q: Can we talk about influences? Some people are mentioning Daniel
Johnston…
A: I’ve met him, you know. I don’t mean to suggest there’s some secret
society of fat, musical fuck-ups that we both belong to [laughs]. No, he does
his thing, but I don’t think we sound like him.
Q: You met him?
A: Well, “met” is probably too strong a word. I saw him play a gig in
New Orleans, and it was just gobsmacking. I went up to him afterwards and asked
him to sign a CD and he did.
Q: What did he say?
A: Fuck all. [laughs] I said something to him, I don’t remember what,
but he didn’t say fuck all back. He was just surrounded by girls. About the
only famous person I’ve spoken to, if you can call him famous.
Q: Well, they just made a film about him.
A: You’re joking! About Daniel Johnston?
Q: Yup.
A: What, with actors?
Q: No, no, a documentary.
A: Fuck, when’s it out?
Q: Now, I think.
A: Jesus. D’you think people’ll go and see it?
Q: I guess so.
A: Jesus. I suppose I should get it when it comes on DVD, or something.
Q: Come to London and see it.
A: Yeah, I should do. If for no other reason than to try and get some
sex. They don’t even have whores in Peel, or none that I found. [laughs]
Q: Do you see Mayumi much when you’re in London?
A: Not much. No. She works in an office, or something like that. I dunno
where.
Q: What about Paul [Goswell, Robert’s longest-standing boyfriend]?
A: No, he’s trying to be straight again. You know, he’s got a family,
kids and all that? I met ‘em once, nice kids. He veers around, you know what I
mean? When I met him, he’d veered into queer. [laughs]
Q: Anyone else?
A: One or two others. Mainly girls. I stay in touch with them and say
nice things, and they think I’m nice, but I just want to fuck them. I mean, I
am nice, and I say nice things to lots of people, but with them, I say nice
things more…strategically.
Q: It’s nice to be nice.
A: Yeah, but strategically? I mean, some of the Nazis were probably nice
to the people they were taking into the ovens.
Q: That’s a heavy analogy.
A: Yeah, I dunno where that came from. I don’t mean to imply that
sleeping with me is akin to being gassed to death. [laughs] I just want to, I
dunno, make things obvious sometimes.
Q: Is that what this website’s supposed to be about?
A: No, nothing so blatant. Not as far as I’m concerned, anyway. I just
wanted people to hear the crap we do.
Q: There must’ve been a time in your life when you wanted to be famous.
When you were in The Gifts?
A: Yeah, of course. Everyone does, don’t they? I always thought anyone
under the age of 27 who didn’t want to be famous lacked imagination. And anyone
over the age of 27 who did, lacked brains. [laughs]
Q: Is that why you just wanted all the songs put on the website?
A: Yeah, I mean, for me, turning the corner, freeing the shackles,
however you want to put it, is when you stop caring about “making it”. You
know, the record deal, the tour, the TV shows. I stopped wanting that ten years
ago and stopped caring about it five years ago.
Q: . . .
A: So, no stupid shit – no T-shirts, no gigs, no records, no money
changing hands, no mythologies, no photos: just a bunch of songs. In years gone
by, we’d have just recorded them on cassette and played them to friends. But
with this new-fangled internet thing [laughs] …well, anyone who wants to can
listen, make their own CDs. It’s fun.
Q: Do you do much, here?
A: What, writing, playing?
Q: Yeah.
A: A little. Like with Charley a couple of months back, but mainly it’s
uninspiring here. Too quiet.
Q: Yeah, quiet is certainly the word.
A: I don’t like being on the island too much, truth be told. It’s like
living in a pair of jaws, waiting for them to close. That nostalgia thing –
people shouldn’t go back to where they grew up until they’re old. Your memories
blur, and you know that particular bit of street corner reminds you of
something, but you don’t know if it’s from when you were 4 or 34. [laughs] It’s
disorientating.
Q: Do you have friends here still?
A: Yeah, there are people, but mainly I try to avoid them [laughs].
There’s a guy at the supermarket down the road, the assistant manager, I think
– I used to go to school with him.
Q: Friends in high places.
A: Him or me? [laughs] Whenever I go in there, he looks at me like his
football team’s just beaten mine 4-0. I mean, he’s got a pretty wife, pretty
kids, nice house and is probably happy as Larry, so who am I to sneer? He’s
happy – he has won. I’m unhappy for some fucking reason half the fucking time –
I have lost. It’s as simple as that. But I tell you, fat fuck that I am, I
wouldn’t swap my life with his. How can he be happy? I don’t see what he has to
live for [laughs].
Q: People have different priorities.
A: So the doctors tell me [laughs]. Perhaps you should prioritise
happiness, money, that sort of thing. I never did, not cos I’m any kind of
suffering artist or selfless saint, just some prick who didn’t realise that the
people who get on in life are the ones who can be good at things they don’t
enjoy. Fuck that. I’d much rather be bad at things I do enjoy [laughs].
Q: Isn’t loneliness a problem?
A: No, I kind of think loneliness is the solution [laughs]. I dunno what
good the world ever got out of someone being happy.
Q: What good did the world ever get out of someone being obese and
depressed?
A: . . .I dunno. Fuck. [laughs] To tell the truth, I would swap it all –
but not for a supermarket and kids and a car. Just for silence – the smell of
her hair, after she’s showered. Her waist. Twenty years of that – her hair, her
waist and silence.
Q: I think you’d get fed up of it after twenty minutes.
A: Oh, without doubt. Not twenty seconds and I’d be thinking of the tits
and arse [laughs].
Q: I think that relieves me, in some way.
A: Well, what you think? That I’m some kind of fuck-up? [laughs]
Q: Do you want to carry on, or . . .
A: Actually, would you mind if we cut it short there? I’m starting to
feel like I’m in a job interview. [laughs]
Q: Fair enough. We have been going on.
A: Listen, if you’re going out, could you get me some milk and things?
The mother never buys enough, and I can’t stand to face that smug bastard in
the supermarket any more…
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