Flexing A Different Muscle: A Lawrence Arabia Interview

JAMES MILNE of LAWRENCE ARABIA: Flexing A Different Muscle

An interview by Tim Gruar.

Believed by the artist to be ‘the latest and best of a recent plague of anniversary vinyl re-release tours’ Lawrence Arabia has decided to ‘do’ his classic sophomore album ‘Chant Darling’ live (streamed), celebrating the thirteen year gap since the release of the first ever Taite Music Prize winning album, and a whole eighth of a century in the market.

Co-mastermind of the last years Chabs & Milky audio-visual extravaganzas, Lawrence Arabia aka James Milne is ‘again’ returning to what he calls his ‘career highlight’ with a live stream celebrating the ten plus years since the release of ‘Chant Darling’. This is the tour that was supposed to kick off in September last year but …. Well, you know!

“How are you,” I ask. James does a bit of a sniff. “You know I’ve just taken my daughter for a Covid Jab”. Ironic, we agree, given that his own tour has been delayed by the dreaded lurgy. Last year, he’d just started, doing shows in the South Island and was about to head back out when – ‘dah dah! It happened. “The rest had to be cancelled due to that last big lockdown, they were pushed to this year.” That must be so frustrating. “It is, when you re-release and old album. It starts hanging over you in a way. I was happy to do (the tour) but you can’t hold on forever, trying to breath life into an album that’s so many years old. You need to complete it and move on.”

Milne says around the time of the tenth anniversary of ‘Chant Darling’ he was putting out the ‘Singles Club’ album/collection. So, plans to put out vinyl and do a national tour got shelved until it’s twelve and a half birthday last year. “It’s a little bit confusing anyway because the New Zealand release was March 2009 and the international release in January 2010. So, it’s a little bit of a complex anniversary in that regard.” And now, thanks to Covid, it’s thirteen years – lucky for some!

‘Singles Club’ was more of a drip feed, with individual songs coming out over a period of months. Whereas, ‘Chant Darling’ was released only as a CD, in its completed form. “I always envisaged it coming out on vinyl, but CD was king at the time. It got stuck in the nether-zone, vinyl wasn’t a big thing yet.”
I have to ask if he’s a vinyl junky. “Yes, and no,” he says. “I have reservations because of the cost. But yes, I’ve always liked ‘old fashioned music’, and the romance of vinyl. The way it feels and the tactile nature of the product. To me it’s a great embodiment of music.” He agrees that when music is down on vinyl, you really have a legitimate piece of art – like a printed book or an exhibition in an actual gallery. “There’s something metaphorically pleasing about the way the record is cut, the playback and the vibrations – I like the directness of it.”

When I first heard ‘Apple Pie Bed’, I wasn’t sure I liked it, I tell him. There was way too much ‘Abbey Road’ and ‘Sgt Peppers’. At the time I was exploring techno and funk, it wasn’t my bag. But then I saw Lawrence Arabia perform at Puppies, A Lum Hum owner Blink’s tiny bar in upper Tory St., Wellington, and I was transfixed by the cleverness of the musicianship I saw on stage. I was struck by the skilful musicianship, and how clever and complex the song is. Your realise that each time you listen to it.
It’s quite an achievement, don’t you think? “Thanks. That’s one of those things where the technical achievement is masked by the effortlessness of the writing and the origins, which were so simple and crude. It’s actually a pretty simple structure. But”, he says, “he can see how it can come across as complex. It’s like a puzzle, which you are trying to solve. In this case, it was about following my instincts to the right place from verse to the chorus.”

Milne says he was living in a flat in Grey Lynn, around June 2006 when he originally wrote the song. He was inspired by his girlfriend who saw him moping about, depressed, lethargic. “The song was dedicated to her, a wake-up call, get up and get motivated.” Those lyrics – “Apple Pie Bed, when my body’s full of lead.”

As is his song writing process, he left the song unfinished, intending to come back to it at a later time and write a second verse. You can hear how crude the unfinished piece was on his Soundcloud posting. So, what made him go full ‘Brian Wilson’ on the final version? “At the time I was making the record, the Beatles and Beach Boys and Bowie’s ‘Hunky Dory were my influences – all those fairly ‘maximalist’ productions. I was into 60’s and 70’s ‘over produced’ pop music. That’s was what was flying into it.”

Milne says he made most of ‘Chant darling’ in the “basement room under the stairs in the flat I was in, in Shoreditch, London. There was a variety of locations. That was the first ‘studio’ I ever had. I called it the ‘Wall of Shit’, which has been the name of my studios ever since. It was kind of a storage room and I’d just piled up all the boxes against the wall so I could have a couple of square metres to set up in. It was tiny, just able to fit a drum kit in there.”

The original performances were recorded in “a bunch of different places” and then brought back to the ‘Wall of Shit’ to be worked on. “There was a rehearsal studio down the road from me, in Shoreditch. And a few other random places. But the main recording, Matt Eagles and I went to Stockholm and we did a lot of the drums for the record there. It was like an old bunker, an old recording studio, used for a Polytechnic at some stage. It was under a basement in an old building. All the buildings in Stockholm have bomb shelters in them. The room we used had no ‘acoustic treatments’ in it. Just this big echoing room.” You can hear that best on the song ‘Dream Teacher’, which was recorded live. It has this echoing resonance, as if Milne is performing in an empty subway. He refers to it as this ‘huge, beautiful echo chamber’. Does this sound like a Bowie ‘Low’ moment? “It wasn’t Berlin but yes, maybe it was the ‘Cold War’ vibe of the bomb shelter.”

How does Milne feel about these songs now? After all this time, is the memory and the vibe still there? “There’s a big energy to the record and that time of my life. It’s a striving, ambitious time. At this point, it’s the peak of my career. Those songs will always be the core of my sets. This album and the Reduction Agents album (The Dance Reduction Agents – 2006) are probably the two strongest sets of music I’ve written, as a body of work. They’ll always hold strong to me, apart from the nostalgia of that time, the mission in my head at the time. Because of the time and the place, there’s an extra potency that you can’t have with the material that comes after that, when your career is in a ‘gentle decline’, like mine.” It sounds a bit defeatist but what I think he’s saying is that ‘Chant Darling’ captures a creative moment made with the youth and energy of a younger, expediently ambitious performer at a time in his life he’ll never replicate again. It’s certainly a document of which he’s the proudest of. “it’s a natural phase, when every artist is striving to achieve, and when that happens, there’s a moment that can never be repeated, not like that pinnacle moment, anyway.”

Milne acknowledges that he’s a changed man these days, a responsible parent with commitments and all the trappings of a modern family. “I can’t be as selfishly determined with my career as I was when I was 25 years old. And now, Covid or no Covid I wouldn’t be investing as much as I did when I was 25 because my attentions are puled in so many other directions. It would be selfish and delusional to have an international music career now (at this point in my life).” Why does that make me think Milne is putting on slippers and a dressing gown, lighting his pipe, gathering the young ‘uns and spinning yarns of his days on the road?

Is he really saying that with age and commitments artistic creativity gets stifled? “No, but it does mean that you can’t invest all your energies and effort like I did when I was that 25-year-old. There are other commitments and timings. You can’t endlessly tour when there’s kids to pick up from school.”

Milne, it seems likes to record in some interesting locations. Aside from the Stockholm Bunker and a grungy London flat, he’s created music with Mike Fabulous under a plastics factory in Lower Hutt’s Gracefield industrial centre and various other makeshift studios. “I never recorded an album in a proper studio (except for a short stint at Roundhead with Liam Finn in the group Barb). My work process doesn’t really work in those situations. I’m a little scared of committing to artistic decisions under great financial pressure and stress of time. I tend to dribble out creativity over a longer period of time and not have to commit to spending $1500 a day and make decisions on the spot.”

So, Mitchell Froom won’t be producing his new album at the Brick Room any time soon. “Not something I’ve gravitated towards.”

Milne has been exercising other intellectual muscles of late, writing a book about Auckland’s volcanos. “There’s an article in the latest Metro Magazine – a prototype of the work I want to do.” He’s not giving up music, just exploring other creative avenues. Perhaps a song may come out of this, too. “During Covid I was thinking song writing wasn’t flexing certain creative muscles, the process was a bit formulaic. I was not enjoying it as much. I wasn’t getting those moments of epiphany or discovery. I was thinking of other ways that I could explore my creative side. It was liberating not to worry about timing, meter, melody, tying words to a melody. Crafting language in different ways. I’ve always enjoyed writing. This opened that up. As I say, flexed a different muscle.”

But Milne is not putting away the instruments completely. He’s still hinting that he’ll be writing more music. And for now, he’s gearing up to perform that live streamed show from the magnificent subterranean venue WHAMMY! Bar this Friday, 4th March, which can be viewed on his website.

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