PAUL MCLANEY of GRAMSCI: The Start of an Epiphanic Journey
An interview by Bridget Herlihy.
At the dawn of 2020 revered musician and composer Paul McLaney had an epiphany; one that resulted in the resurrection of the much-beloved Gramsci after a 15 year hiatus. ‘Inheritance’, the band’s fourth album, dropped in June to critical acclaim; an album that sees a distinct shift in sound from the band’s last album ‘Like Stray Voltage’ (2005). Whereas ‘Like Stray Voltage’ was predominantly grounded in the rock genre, ‘Inheritance’ effortlessly straddles genres, incorporating elements of McLaney’s vast array of awe-inspiring musical prowess. It is an album that offers a sonic journey; an aural awakening that captivates not only the imagination, but also the mind, body and soul, as McLaney’s exquisite soundscapes wash over the listener like the most inviting of waves.
Gramsci, which includes bandmates Greg Haver and Jol Mullholland are poised to debut ‘Inheritance’ live in its entirety at the ASB Waterfront Theatre on Friday 16 October, which promises to be a very special theatre performance that will not only be a feast for the ears, but also the eyes.
A belated congratulations on the release of ‘Inheritance’. The album has been met with widespread acclaim, and quite rightly so. You have said that it was a long and winding road to the completion of the album; is that due to having had an abundance of ideas percolating since Gramsci’s last release 15 years ago?
The actual process of making the album was a bit of a eureka moment to be honest. I think three of the songs of the album were written in the same morning. Gramsci played the Big Day Out in 2005 – I think it was – and the band itself had been through a whole bunch of dramas; not quite Fleetwood Mac, but in that vein of drama. And then… I suppose standing there on that stage and playing, I realised that I had become disenchanted with that direction, where you are part of some sort of corporate mechanism that sells t-shirts and nose piercings and tattoos and what have you.
For me the love affair with music has really been about the sanctuary and space that great music has afforded me all of my life. I moved once when I was seven, and then we moved around a lot, including to New Zealand at the age of 12, and I was moving schools and had upheavals. From around about 12 [years old] headphones and lyric sheets and vinyl album covers became places of sanctuary; places that didn’t lose the mood where you can go and listen to that same record. A lot of records for me are like the Harry Potter books, where you listen to them so much that part of you lives in them. So when I listen to ‘Animals’ by Pink Floyd, or if I listen to ‘Minstrel In The Gallery’ by Jethro Tull, or whatever it is… it might be Fugazi, some of these records I can instantly commune with the emotional state of my personality at that age; my 14 year old self or 15 year old self, my 12 year old self, my 21 year old self. Things like ‘Disintegration’, The The and The Smiths… at various points in your life there are bands and particular albums and particular songs, and they are sort of safe places. In this sort of environment too, I mostly find that if you feel that the stress levels or the anxiety levels are rising, my engagement and love of music allows me these places to calm my nerves.
I realised that all of the records that I love the most are ambitious, they want to push it; they want to take you somewhere else. When you close your eyes – not to imagine old guys in a room playing guitar, bass and drums – it is to imagine vistas and landscapes and alternate realities. It’s that escapism that music is capable of. At the end of that Gramsci phase in 2005, it felt like the adventurism wasn’t there. It was more like a career thing, and which box did you need to tick to maintain a career. We fed everyone else’s expectations.
My favourite artists are Burial and Bjork, and things like that. People who are trying to push the boundaries and expand the language and the space in which music can happen, rather than trying to sound like something else. Everyone is taking their inspiration from something, but to try and place your own conversation or your own viewpoint or personality into that space, then give back to the thing that gives so much.
I suppose over the last fifteen years I have just really been off exploring. I have dived really deep into electronica, and I’ve dived really deep into acoustic music and neo-classical sort of stuff, and lots of theatre soundtracks and working with highly creative others. When I got involved in theatre, my music friends were saying ‘what’s that like?’, and I said that in a way its less narcissistic than the music industry because you are working from a script, so you have all of these talented, talented people who look at the script and they are asking ‘how do I take that essence and wash it out through my talent and give it to the audience’? It’s all about the other; it’s all about empathy. Those are the fundamentals of music now; music without empathy is just noise.
I have been exploring all of these different niches, and I had an epiphany at the end of last year, that what I had always imagined Gramsci would be when I started was the cradle for all of my musical interests. And I realised that in the last fifteen years I had ring-fenced; electronic over here, and acoustic over there, rock music over here, and theatre music over there. And I was like… surely my ambition early on was the right one; where I had one space for all of these things to lurk and all rub shoulders with each other. That was the epiphany for bringing the Gramsci name back and making the record ‘Inheritance’, which has elements of so many different genres.
Listening to Gramsci’s last album ‘Like Stray Voltage’, and then listening to ‘Inheritance’, the musical evolution between the two albums is significant. Each of the albums has a very different feel, and seemingly grounded in different genres. You have referred to ‘Inheritance’ as being the culmination of your apprenticeship and the start of an epiphanic journey. Is this culmination your vision of Gramsci being that cradle or outlet for your experiences from all of your other musical projects that you have had over the last couple of decades?
Definitely. It’s like walking around a perimeter and touching all of those things individually, or different windows, or what have you. Now I feel like I’m at the centre of the room and there is light shining through all of the windows and into the middle, you know?
There are three Gramsci albums. The first is me, an acoustic guitar and a computer. And that’s when I met David Holmes, my producer on all three albums. I was making those at home and bringing them into the studio, and basically things like ‘Give Me Strength’ and ‘Complicated’ were done, and all I needed to do was come in, put the acoustic guitar on and sing with it; he programmed everything else. And then I got really into the digital, revolutionary recording. My previous record had been recorded on an eight track reel-to-reel. And then to have the unlimited digital realm to play with and layer up vocals – things like ‘Easy’ with like 48 vocal parts – and you see that real shift in ambition.
We made those first two records, and by the time we got to the third one, which is the big rock album ‘Like Stray Voltage’, David really lived up to 50/50 in terms of the writing. He really wanted to become part of the live band, because he would be in the studio and it would always be a different band, and he really wanted to get involved with that as he was getting really interested in various pedals and things and wanted to know if could use some of those electronic textures, but on a guitar. So we dove pretty deep into that rock thing, which – you know – I’ve always listened to rock music and I love rock music, but that was me stepping further past the line than I would do on my own merit. I’m not as bigger fan as David [but] somewhere in the middle we will meet. And that record was definitely that epic rock thing, and that stuff is enjoyable to sing, but sometimes for me, listening back to it… you know… are you serving the song or are you serving some sort of intention?
It’s really interesting to me if you look at all of the records I have made post-2005, post-that record [‘Like Stray Voltage’] I don’t really raise my voice very much. This is the first record; not because its not there, because the textures are primarily acoustic or electronic, and didn’t really invite that sort of performance. None of the lyrics were really angry and weren’t exploring those boundaries of passion, whereas because of the subject matter of ‘Inheritance’ it felt like I was going back to the first thing, where all of the colours were out; all of the tools that had been amassed over the last 20 years that had a utility in the creation of this particular record.
Jeff Buckley singing – as powerful as he was – he wasn’t on 11 the entire way through; he goes from a whisper to a scream. And I think this Gramsci album is the most successful in terms of the singing because this bit goes down when the emotion goes down, or when the lyrical content goes down. Its not just there to be “Hey, look! I can sing loud” and make all this noise. It has to be in service to the song, and I think the last 15 years of exploration have just been me sharpening all of the tools in my shed. I wanted to make somewhere you could go to; somewhere you could put on headphones and you wouldn’t have to ‘pop out’. Each individual song, but also the full 45 minutes, would reward that engagement.
I must admit I have been listening to it through headphones, and have found that I am not doing anything other than sitting still, closing my eyes and just listening to each track intently. The album commands the listener’s attention in a very beautiful way.
Thank you. The other thing is that when you are a young musician coming through, or when you are a young person, people talk about guilty pleasures. But I think that after a certain point in your life you just don’t have guilty pleasures anymore; you are like “fuck it, I don’t care if you don’t like what I like. I don’t care what you think. I think Dire Straits records are really, really good”. You know, if you are a real Nine Inch Nails fan you’re not really going to talk about how good ‘Making Movies’ by Dire Straits is because its not in the same realm, you know what I mean? The reality is that when I was eight years old and I had heard ‘Tunnel of Love’ for the first time, the outro guitar solo on that record made me cry, you know? And I think on a subconscious level it is reaction to this idea of… I’m listening to this as an eight year old on the other side of the world, listening to a man from pretty much the area I was born in saying goodbye to his home town and saying hello to New York; you know, “from Cullercoats to Whitley Bay, and to rockaway” – that’s from the north-east of England, Newcastle, to New York. And then when he goes into that guitar solo, the one that made me want to play the guitar, it’s such an emotional space, and I love that.
I was talking to Jeff Boyle from Jakob, and he was one of my confidants when I was playing in this record, and he said “all of the people that you like, like Richard Thompson and David Gilmour and Mark Knoffler – all these guitar soloists – they are all very much storytellers in the way that they shape their solos. You have ‘Comfortably Numb’, where you have this song about emotional dislocation and shutting down emotionally. Pink Floyd have that… especially David Gilmour’s voice – has that very English reserve to it. But when you get to that solo at the end of ‘Comfortably Numb’ there is nothing emotionally reserved about that. It’s climbing Everest and self-actualising at the top of the mountain. And I looked at my recorded output over the last fifteen, twenty years and I thought “there’s no guitar solos”, and I grew up listening to that stuff. What handbrake has been on? What sort of imaginary taste-beliefs have been restricting me from being able to express myself that way? If you have the facility to express yourself with an instrument, sometimes the lyricist – unless you are Leonard Cohen or Joni Mitchell – the facility to wrap words around an emotion is incredibly difficult. And that is why we laud the people that are so good at it. But to set up a question lyrically, and then answer it musically, that is a really fascinating space in music.
So it wasn’t a conscious decision that you made to step away from doing guitar solos; it was something that just happened?
I never did them because I didn’t think that they were on the market for Gramsci, which in 1995 you were sort of at the tail-end of grunge and alternative rock; a guitar solo on a Sonic Youth, or Soundgarden, or even a Radiohead track were not like a guitar solo in the ‘70s, or a Pink Floyd situation – that lyrical expression. That’s what the lyrics in ‘Hitting My Stride’ are about; when its fashion was it all worth it? I think that great music should sit outside of fashion, because fashion is a trend, and each day becomes tomorrow and then you are onto the next thing.
It’s funny because I mentioned to somebody that this record had guitar solos in it, and they were like “oh that’s cool, because guitar solos are cool again”. And I was like… “thats not the reason I’m doing it”. That moment in ‘Dogs’ on [Pink Floyd’s] ‘Animals’ when the harmony guitar solos start, its still breathtaking to me; it’s just that no one has done it lately. Its become some sort of a niche place where you have a guilty look at a Steve Vai video, or someone sends you a link to a Joe Bonamassa track, and you don’t tell your friends but you have a quick look. Generally solos are the infectional thing about it, and the actual song writing is a way to get to the story, rather than it being an integral part of the composition.
The title track from the album is an instrumental piece, and for me as a listener you are very clearly telling a story through the guitar composition, and it is a very beautiful story that just draws you in. It seems that a lot of modern music does not resonate in any significant or memorable way.
I think that pop production is really impressive on a technical aspect in this day and age, and do listen to that stuff. But the sound of clever people with clever programmes on computers and things, the thing that is missing is a human expression by a performer inside of that. That solo [from the track ‘Inheritance’] is actually the first thing I played to set up the atmosphere; that was the first thing I wrote guitar-wise.
And for me it is really interesting looking at it as the first note is a release bend, which means that the string is already bent up to the note, and it releases and it is like a sigh – that I finally get to do this thing that has always been my personal expression of music and mental obstacles, or second guessing, or just silly games that you play; your inner critic and all that sort of stuff that I had prevented myself from doing.
This record to me is such an ultimate expression of my entire musical vocabulary of things that inspire me. I also think that becoming a father, you want to be living at capacity in terms of your emotional wellbeing. If you are happy, then everyone else around you is going to be happy, and if you feel that you have a vehicle for expression, regardless of what your art form is or your trade is, use it.
From its inception, you imagined ‘Inheritance’ as being a live performance as well as an album. Did those two elements evolve simultaneously, or was it a case of recording the album and then turning your attention to translating or morphing it into a production to be performed?
At the same time that I was writing – I woke up one day and the whole idea of the self-mythology and inheritance concept arrived. I was also the Musical Director on the World of Wearable Arts, and I was in the middle of producing this full-scale arena, audio/visual/lighting performance. I had also just been to see the Roger Waters ‘Us and Them’ tour, and I think the David Byrne show was around then too. And I was thinking that the ambition in the presentation of popular music, and I suppose loosely you would call it art-rock, and in New Zealand we have people that make that sort of music but their resources to explore theatrical presentation historically have been very limited. So our contemporary popular music scene, for want of a better catch-all phrase which includes all of the Flying Nun bands – that whole scene has sort of been ghettoised into the pubs and bars of New Zealand. So you have got theatre on one side, occupying these beautiful theatrical spaces where you spend weeks on lighting plots an stage positions, and development. And then in musical performance you are in a bar, where sometimes they will leave the rugby on in the corner. I’ve never seen a production of Shakespeare where they have left the rugby on.
So one of the reasons was to make that leap, like Aldous Harding, and test that space. It’s a huge leap from Whammy! Bar and then three months later to be at The Civic. I knew this record was going to be ambitious in terms of its emotional scope and it’s production scope. To me – when I close my eyes and listen to that music and I imagine it – I don’t imagine it in a pub. That’s not where it lives to me. I would love to do it in a forest, with projections onto the canopy of the trees. I would really like to develop that, and use those venues around the country that are traditional theatre presentation spaces, and be more attuned to connection between musicians and audiences.
The other thing about being in pubs and bars is that instantly you are saying that nobody below the age of eighteen is allowed to come to that show. So you might have a fifteen year old drummer who just loves the drums on ‘Inheritance’, but isn’t allowed to come and see the show because it is in a pub. Or you have got someone who’s over fifty or sixty who isn’t really interested in standing for two hours. But if you make it accessible in terms of seating it’s more encompassing. And I think that is the point of the art practitioner – to create these safe spaces for congregation and shared empathy.
So, to answer your question, it just doesn’t sound to me like it should be in a pub, and when the music was written… I knew how I wanted to present it, and the primary reason that we are playing at the ASB Waterfront Theatre is that they have the gauze screen technology, which you would have seen utilised – Nine Inch Nails use it a fair bit – where it is a see-through gauze that is in front of the band and the projections go onto that. And the band are lit so they sort of float, and the projected stuff becomes the primary lighting source. And I suppose what you are really trying to achieve there is something that is completely immersive in the same way that the music is attempting to be. It is a visual representation that is exploring the same ideas of immersion.
You have mentioned that the upcoming show at the ASB Theatre is “the backbone of the next chapter of ‘Inheritance’. How are you planning to continue the development and evolution of this project?
I am planning to develop Gramsci further. ‘Inheritance’ feels like the end of my apprenticeship. I now have this vehicle and colleagues and a team of creatives who are on the same page artistically and want to explore the same ambitions that I have. It’s the first gig, and its testing the waters to see if I’m not just projecting my ambitions onto other people; that this is something that we all want to share together. If I do these shows would you like to see them – you know?
The next album is written. And the design around that piece of the show… I sort of imagine the next phase of this whole thing is that each of these are contained performances that we can perform. So ‘Inheritance’ is a show, and the next album will be a show, and we could play them as combined things; tonight we are going to play this repertoire and this repertoire. I love that when you see The Cure do ‘Seventeen Seconds’ or ‘Pornography’, and they are going to do that. Because those are albums, and you know people talk about the death of the album and that albums are over and that people only listen to individual tracks. That’s poppycock. There has always been singles and as soon as people started making albums as a complete artistic statement, it’s like saying that people suddenly won’t read books anymore. If you make an album as a complete artistic statement that has a performance aspect to it, then people choose to engage with it on that basis. And that’s how you should write them, and that’s how you should make them I think. If you were just making singles, then that is fine too. An album can be a collection of singles. But there are just certain records that are albums that… you know that its 23 minutes per side on a piece of vinyl or a 45 minute trip that you want to go on and you want to live in that space for a bit; maybe to be like a house that you get to wander around in.
I feel that there is a bunch of stuff that is rearing to come out and that collision between theatre, performance and musical aesthetic is something that I want to keep exploring and digging deeper into. It may be that the visual content for the shows evolve over time; I’m sure it will as the resources become more readily available. One of the silver linings in the current situation is that due to border restrictions and the level of stimulus funding that there is around we may be in a situation here in New Zealand where we get the chance to enter into an artistic renaissance and actually have those resources to develop more ambitious performance opportunities and cross palatalizing peoples’ skill sets.
So what can the audience expect to see, and of course hear, at the show?
The performance will be a live presentation of the album ‘Inheritance’ as a complete piece. The audio-visual content is taken from… I got really fascinated by the earliest existing animations. And this idea of inheritance; inheritance as a species. We look to cave drawings, and we always draw pictures. And then you get to a later nineteenth century – beginning of the twentieth century, moving into expressionism and impressionism. And the very beginning of film; the very earliest colour films are moving paintings; so before you got into coloured photography you had coloured filmmaking via animation. I love the idea of that artist inheritance through a line of someone taking something that is over 120 years old and repurposing it; playing something from 1904 and playing it in 2020 in a completely different context.
But the emotional intention is exactly the same; to represent ourselves or our interior selves via artistic expression. I want the evening to be a celebration of shared congregation, and hopefully a place where the audience are invited to engage with their own response to the music without distraction, without interruption, without competition. To just engage.
Gramsci will be performing ‘Inheritance’ live in full on October 16th, 2020 at the ASB Waterfront Theatre in Auckland. Tickets are still available from the ASB Theatre Website.
We also have a double pass to the show to give away! Head on over to our Facebook page and answer the skill question to get yourself into the draw!
PAID CONTENT: Gramsci & Blackout Music Management LTD provided 2 x passes to the upcoming Auckland concert to Ambient Light to give away as a part of this interview.
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