No Fear of Self: A Gramsci Interview

PAUL MCLANEY of GRAMSCI: No Fear Of Self

An interview by Bridget Herlihy.

The great David Bowie once asserted that “Ageing is an extraordinary process where you become the person you always should have been”. In and of itself this is a profound observation from an artist whose vast musical contributions and changes in personna were integral to the nature and evolution of his artistry. Bowie exemplified the fundamental creative odyssey that many artists aspire to; a journey of exploration, experimentation, and ultimately realisation and acceptance of the authentic self.

Paul McLaney’s own musical journey has spanned over three decades, and counting. Since picking up the guitar at thirteen years old, his talent and prowess as musician, songwriter and composer have continued to flourish as he has undertaken his own epiphanic journey of musical discovery. During this time he has predominantly released music under three monikers: Paul McLaney (live acoustic), Impending Adorations (electronic music outside of traditional instrumentation) and Gramsci. The common thread running through each of these outlets has been to push the boundaries of musical expression. Yet Gramsci, McLaney muses, is the embodiment of the sound of musical ambition; a ‘cauldron’ where all of his musical explorations and projects merge.

After being put on the proverbial backburner for fifteen years, Gramsci made a triumphant return with the release of ‘Inheritance’ in 2020; an album McLaney considers to represent the conclusion of his “musical apprenticeship”. The new Gramsci album ‘The Hinterlands’ (featuring the powerhouse rhythm section of Greg Haver on drums and Marika Hodgson on bass) thus marks the beginning of a significant epoch in McLaney’s career; an era where for the first time he is ready to embrace his true musical identity as a guitarist who sings, not vice versa. ‘The Hinterlands’ is the culmination of a lifetime’s worth of musical curiosity and introspection; a musical and personal exploration into the often unfamiliar terrain of the vast emotional landscape. It is the album that McLaney has wanted to make since his adolescence.

McLaney has big plans for Gramsci in 2022. Fed by his ambitious creative genius, ‘The Hinterlands’ has continued to evolve since its release in early February. Not only does the album deliver a tremendous sonic experience, but now also a stunning visual companion piece.  Entitled ‘HERE’, this short film, directed by renowned filmmaker Richard Bell, features a trio of tracks from the album, offering the viewer a rich and valuable space for mindfulness and contemplation.  A second short film, ‘THERE’, will arrive in late May. Plans are also underway to release the first three Gramsci albums on vinyl for the first time (complete with new artwork), a book written by McLaney, as well as live shows once gatherings of a reasonable size can feasibly take place. There is also the forthcoming collaborative track ‘The World Don’t Feel The Same’ with Pacific Heights (A.K.A Devin Abrams of Shapeshifter) which is set to drop in June. Suffice to say McLaney is currently riding very, very high on a strong wave of creativity.

Having a keen interest in how we construct and perceive both real and imagined exterior and interior spaces, and having spent time living with(in) the Gramsci albums, the following conversation with Paul McLaney provided a valuable and intriguing opportunity to discuss not only the making of ‘The Hinterlands’ and his path to self-actualisation, but to delve further into the intricacies of the internal emotional landscape.

The themes running through the album resonate with me on two different levels; one being a personal level, and the other relating to my own research about interior and exterior acoustic spaces. I compiled a cultural history of how putting things in or around the ears mediates the experience of sound, creating a sense of interior acoustic space within the head or the body. I traced it right back to the story of Odysseus. So when you talk about the interior and exterior landscapes, I sense a connection.

It touches on it in that movie ‘Interstellar’, quantum sort of stuff; the idea of an emotional quantum mechanics as opposed to a time-space thing. I don’t know if you have read the Harry Potter books, but there is a central concept in those books where Voldemort hid his soul in seven objects, and each of those objects is called a horcrux. Until all of the horcruxes are destroyed he can’t [be], as part of his soul lives in these objects. I was thinking that there are certain key records that could talk to that; I listened to so much when I was a kid that I poured so much of myself into them. Records that the first time I listened to them I was like “uh, I don’t know what I think about this, but it must be my fault because it’s meant to be a great record”. I worked at it and eventually it unlocked its secrets to me. Now when I listen to those records I am sort of communing with my 14 or 16 year old selves; I’m totally in tune with that emotional aspect of my personality at that age. I know that everybody has those records or those songs in their lives. But the interior thing… it’s not a lockdown record but it was written in that period. I was writing those songs anyway and I think I have always been quite fascinated by that concept. I am very compelled by the idea of a vast interior emotional landscape, like a far reaching horizon, and as big as the world is outside you, it has to be bigger on the inside because that is how you process it. Then you have imagination which is fundamentally what separates you from any other creature on the planet. When you talked about Odysseus before, was that around the Sirens?

That was about the use of wax to block the ears of the sailors so that they couldn’t hear the songs of the Sirens. It is one of the earliest examples of using a prosthetic device, although rudimentary, to change an individual’s acoustic perception.

​​It’s interesting because on ‘The Hinterlands’ one of the key aesthetic choices is how the drums sound, especially the toms, and that sort of gated reverb thing which is a nod to things like ‘Intruder’ by Peter Gabriel and more obvious things. But it’s not a real sound; to gate a reverb means that you are cutting the tail of the reverb trail. But for me, it’s not meant to be real. As soon as you put headphones on and listen to a drum kit it’s not real. The drum kit should be coming at you, not inside you. My personal preference for listening to music is through headphones; I like to immerse myself; I like to be marinated in it. I like to live inside it.

Speaking of living inside of an album, I have been listening to ‘The Hinterlands’ quite a bit; you could say that I have been marinating myself in it. I have been wondering since we last spoke – before the ‘Inheritance’ ASB Theatre show in October 2020 – how you could possibly top that album. And then when I heard ‘Ourselves’ for the first time I had goosebumps for ten minutes afterwards. It is a phenomenal track. I am struggling to find the words to describe the emotional effect that ‘Inheritance’ and ‘The Hinterlands’ have on me. If I could play the guitar I would play you a solo…

[laughs] That’s what I was saying, Roger Waters tells you what he’s thinking and David Gilmour just shows you.

​​It can be difficult to describe something that affects you not just on a psychological and emotional level, but also a physical one. The albums are just perfection. How do you do it?

Thank you. I have been making records for a very long time. Obviously there is a 15 year gap between ‘Like Stray Voltage’ and ‘Inheritance’, but the 15 years in between I made something like 16 or 17 albums. So, it was almost like doing my doctoral dissertation. I went deeper into the acoustic stuff and I went deeper into electronica; I went deeper because I wanted to explore the periphery. I wanted to see what the parameters were; what it is that my expression actually is. I think there is a great line on the back of ‘Hail’ by Straightjacket Fits that says “you have got to try on different clothes to see which ones fit”. And I’ve been doing that. All of my engagements around that brought me to an understanding that what I like to listen to in music, and therefore what I am trying to connect with in music, is an emotional expression. For me it has to be the manifestation of an intent; of an emotional intent when the head and the heart are connected. It’s like lyrics themselves, you know? A sung lyric is different from a piece of music – a melody – and it’s different from a bunch of words written down. Somewhere in between those two is the conjuring. That’s why I’ve come back to rock music. For me it is THE music that conjures. There is a magical aspect to rock music that really doesn’t exist in other music. Like when you see a great rock band. I saw The Cult at The Powerstation, and I thought “Oh, this will be good”, and it was like there was something else happening in the room. That’s for me the magical thing there.

The main difference between ‘Inheritance’ and ‘The Hinterlands’ is that Greg [Haver] was on board from the beginning, and I had a very, very strong aesthetic idea about the record. There are certain records like ‘Wish’ by The Cure, which is like a potpourri, or a smorgasbord. There’s things like ‘From The Edge of the Deep Green Sea’ and then there’s ‘Friday I’m In Love’ and there’s ‘To Wish Impossible Things’, and then there’s ‘Open’. It’s all over the place. There’s ‘Doing The Unstuck’… there’s so much stuff going on. But then a record like ‘Seventeen Seconds’ or ‘Disintegration’, it does one thing and it drills into it. A big record in my life was ‘Seventeen Seconds’ by The Cure; I just loved the cold emotion of it all. And I like the clinical approach to guitar playing. The thing about rock music again is that it is so easy for it to be… I think this is why I was exploring electronica so much because a lot of rock music is like a big red brick wall; it’s the riff, and it’s this heavy thing.  But what I love about listening to things like Boards of Canada or Four Tet or Burial is the nuanced detail, and the vast landscape of sound and colour that you can look into. I like it when that is a part of rock music. Radiohead obviously does it, and the way that Johnny Marr approaches guitar playing is like that. The same thing with Jimmy Page; every riff song by Led Zeppelin – something like ‘Ten Years Gone’ or ‘Achilles Last Stand’ – there’s these more epic, nuanced, sophisticated chordal things. 

I started learning the guitar when I was 13, and I started teaching guitar when I was 16. When you are teaching guitar, or teaching anything, you unpack it because people ask you questions like “why do you do that”, and you are like “I don’t know, I’ve never really thought about why I do that”. And you have to think about it and you formulate an answer. But there are certain guitar parts that you are always teaching. Because rather than going “I’m going to teach you exercise three or exercise four”, I’ll say “what music are you into”? So I’d be down at the music store in Whangarei buying a Cat Stevens record and a Metallica record because that’s what students wanted to learn. I’d listen to them and go… “okay, what is on here that is within your ballpark of being able to learn?”. But there are always certain guitar parts that you are always teaching, and that’s the point I was going to make: classic guitar parts feel great in your hands. There is a beautiful symmetry, like they should have always existed. It’s a bit like those Michelangelo sculptures when he sees a piece of rock and he just had to get rid of the rough bits and the sculpture was already there. 

With ‘Inheritance’, that was me sort of finally coming full circle and owning up to my guitar playing and that being my primary tool of expression outside of the voice. That gave me the confidence to make something like ‘The Hinterlands’, which is like a pure guitar workout from start to finish. There’s hardly any synths on the record; I think ‘Make Up Your Own Mind’ and ‘Epiphany’ are the only things that actually have synths on them.  Everything else is guitars. I really wanted to make one of those records like the golden age of hi-fidelity in recordings. If it was like Talk Talk or Japan or Tears for Fears even; there is a real pride in something being as sonically…. oh, especially Peter Gabriel… those records today are still better than the sound of records that come out now.

The sound of The Hinterlands is phenomenal; it is just so clear and everything sounds so crisp. The bass seems to be quite prevalent as well; I know you have recruited Marika Hodgson on bass for this album. Rather than the bass being buried somewhere in the mid-section it is right up front.

When you’ve got someone like Marika playing the bass you put a spotlight on it, right? She’s phenomenal. A bit more of the back-story about that… so I demo everything. I’m thinking about doing one of those PJ Harvey things where you release the demos, because the whole album is demoed in much the same way that ‘Inheritance’ is the demos. For this one we decided to go into the studio and do it from scratch, but we had my demos and I sent them to Marika. We were meant to go and rehearse for a week, and then we went into a lockdown situation again, so we only basically had one day. We went in on the Monday and rehearsed the album for about four hours, and then we met on the Wednesday and started recording it. So we lost some time, but Greg and Marika… they’re just like this juggernaut of a rhythm section. That’s inspiring as a guitar player, especially when you are doing guitar solos, to have that behind you; for that to be the propulsion behind what you are doing.

I don’t know what it was about the first twenty odd years of my musical career, but I was very backwards in coming forwards about my electric guitar playing. I always seemed to be quite comfortable with the finger-style acoustic stuff, but I feel like maybe it had done its dash at that point for a little bit in terms of what I was capable of expressing to an audience. But over the years if you find yourself coming back to the same thing… so for me, ‘Dogs’ by Pink Floyd is one of those pieces of music that I always return to; the widescreen ambition of it all and the emotion. I think there’s about five guitar solos in that song, and each of them explores a different sort of attitude. I feel that this record is the record I promised my 16 year old self who was listening to ‘Seventeen Seconds’ that I would make. It just took me a bit longer to make it than I thought it was going to…

​​Hindsight can be an interesting thing; if you hadn’t gone through those different stages of your musical career and evolution, you wouldn’t be where you are now.

No, definitely. And that’s the thing; I’m a far better guitar player, singer, writer, composer than I’ve ever been. It’s interesting, this culture of youth that overshadows everything these days, when really we are the first epoch of human civilisation that deifies youth over wisdom and experience. The definition of the hero’s journey is the young Luke Skywalker meets Obi Wan Kenobi, right? That’s how it works. I feel like I’ve just finished my apprenticeship. I feel like I finished it with ‘Inheritance’; that was my graduation, and this is like my doctorate or something.

I have always had a bit of an issue with honorary doctorates, because I went through hell with mine. But looking at your canon of work, I would say that you are fully deserving of a doctorate.

[laughs] I have explored those emotional themes before, but I finally have the space between the language and music. I think that balance is finally correct.

Clearly you have got a fantastic chemistry going with Greg and Marika to be able to achieve that?

Definitely. And we were all on the same page. If you are recording guitars like that – clean – you have the capacity to do something incredibly cleverly sonic. There is no competition for frequencies, so you can have the bass loud because it is not robbing the guitar of anything; they’re not fighting for space with big clouds of distortion or anything. That’s why something like ‘Seventeen Seconds’ sounds the way that it does, because there is a clarity around what each voice is doing.

Everything is in its own space and it all comes together to form the whole listening experience. Nothing is being hidden or obscured.

Exactly. And the voice is very, very present at the front of the mix. But it takes a few years to get to the point where you are happy to hear your voice like that. A lot of people like it to be layered and use effects and reverb and things, or buried in the mix. I’m saying some very, very precise things across that record and I don’t want there to be any misunderstanding of it. I just feel that it is the record I have been trying to make my entire life.

​​Do you listen back to your own albums once you have completed them?

Not really. But I’ve got total recall on all of them, because at the time that I do it I am obsessed with them; I live and breathe them. I think just prior to the ASB gig I did listen to the first three Gramsci albums and re-familiarised myself with what other peoples’ idea of me might be [laughs].

​​So you were trying to see yourself through other people’s eyes, or ears…

Like I was saying before, if I can listen to ‘Minstrel In The Gallery’, or ‘Dusk’ by The The, or ‘Disintegration’ by The Cure and reconnect with my 15, 16, 17 year old emotional self, I should be able to do it with my own records. There is an artisan, craftsman sort of angle in all of that too. My main thing with all of those earlier records is that as a younger singer I was so intoxicated by the power of what the voice could do. Looking back at it I put the foot down a lot more than I would do now. Just because you can go to eleven doesn’t mean that you need to start at eight. So now, I would start at about one and get to eleven. The only sort of moment on ‘The Hinterlands’ where I really use that sort of singing is in the background vocals to ‘Into The Hinterland’. The bit of singing that I am most proud of is on ‘The Beginning’ because [the line] “if we could wind the world back to the beginning” is a powerful bit of singing in terms of volume, but it’s moving seamlessly between head voice and chest voice, and it’s a really technical thing. For me that’s more impressive than all of the high singing at the end of ‘Fall To Earth’ or ‘Easy’, or something, because it’s being utilised for a purpose rather than like a magic trick or at a party. It’s like shredding on the guitar; Steve Vai’s amazing, but once you’ve heard about six minutes of it you are going “okay, well…”.

I had to go back and listen closely to each track on ‘The Hinterlands’ to identify exactly which tracks had a guitar solo in them. They are integrated so seamlessly into the storytelling. There is nothing gratuitous or ostentatious about it. Each solo is giving an additional voice to the song, carrying the narrative into another realm.

It picks up where the voice leaves off. It is sort of how songs work in musicals; people talk until they can’t anymore and the emotion is too big and they sing it. I can’t really stand musicals, but that’s the premise of it. And then there’s the thing where once you can’t sing it you dance it. The greatest example of this, and it’s constantly pointed to as being the greatest guitar solo, is the last guitar solo on ‘Comfortably Numb’. They talk about it being a great solo in terms of its technique and its emotional whatever. But the reason it has this power, apart from the fact that it’s beautifully played, melodic and ferocious, is that the entire song is about emotionally shutting down. That’s the entire concept of it; going all the way back to childhood and the things that have been done to you, or the experiences that you had mean that you have had to put a protective layer around yourself and close off the world and not try and feel anything. That guitar solo is the complete opposite of that. For me, it’s the sound of self-actualisation. I have this memory of being 16 years old at Whangarei Boys’ High and I had my Walkman, and I had ‘The Wall’ in it, and the bell went for fourth period after lunchtime, and that guitar solo hit, and I’m standing in the middle of the quad as it hit, and tears start streaming down my face. My memory is all these boys running in every which direction to get to the next class, and I’m frozen in this sort of moment recognising the sound of this person’s self-actualising. And I think of a young Dave Gilmour, ten years old sitting on his bed listening to The Shadows, or Hank Marvin, or Chet Atkins, and having that ambition to do something with this instrument. That guitar solo is standing on top of that mountain, and expressing all of those things that you are trying to shut down. The lyric of the song is saying ‘shut it down, shut it down, I don’t want to feel this way’, all that sort of stuff. And then the guitar shows you what it is that he is trying to shut down, and how impossible that would be.

For me, the guitar solo in ‘Ourselves’ … that song is really about self-loathing I suppose to a certain extent, or the things that stop us from reaching our full potential because of self-worth and self-esteem. Those two guitar solos are just like the middle finger, you know; just saying “fuck it, here you go – this is me without the lid on”.

​​How autobiographical is ‘Ourselves’? You have spoken before of your dislike of being in front of the camera, and yet you have recently embraced that and did a wonderful shoot with photographer Nick Paulsen… and it’s taken you 20, 30 years to say “okay, I am fundamentally a guitar player – that’s who I am, here I am, accept it”.

It’s completely and utterly 100% autobiographical. Again it comes back to the reason I go on these excursions into other musical territories; I wasn’t quite ready to step up in front of it all and go “this is me” until I was confident it was me. And now I am 100% confident that is who I am as a musician. The ‘Heaven In A Wildflower’ video is the completion of that ownership. When you see it that is what it is, going… “Here I am, this is what I look like, this is my music, this is me”. And up until then I’ve liked the separation. The Impending Adorations is completely about that separation; it’s meant to be what the sound of imagination is like, so there are no real instruments in it. It’s the sound of imaginative thought. You don’t go “oh there’s a guitar, there’s a bass, there’s a keyboard”; it should just be sonic. It doesn’t have a skeleton or a visage like I do. A guitar solo is played by somebody, the bass is played by somebody, and the drums are played by somebody. And that’s why there are three photographs on the back cover of the album; there hadn’t been any photographs of anybody on a Gramsci album ever.

​​But what about the cover of ‘Like Stray Voltage’?

Well, they are silhouettes aren’t they?  You wouldn’t recognise them. That won’t be the cover when it gets re-released. That was a compromise; we had an argument with the record company about that. Dave [Holmes] and I had chosen three different options that we loved, and in the interim we had also done a photo shoot, and the record company said that “we want you to use this photograph”. And they sat us down and said “you know statistics prove, and studies have been done that you will sell 70% more records if you have a picture of the band on the cover”. And I was like ‘Really? Like ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’ or ‘Seventeen Seconds’ or ‘Brothers In Arms’ or ‘Hotel California’?’ It’s a crock. But they were so heavily invested in us at the time that they had leverage. I’ve just been waiting for the day that I can replace those covers.

And the day is coming. It sounds like this year is going to be extraordinary for you and Gramsci.

It feels like I am ready to pull out all of the stops now. I’ve arrived. That’s what I feel about that sensation of having graduated. I’m ready to present it all. I’ve done my research…

I’ve done my research! That sounds like conspiracy theorists watching YouTube. [laughs] I’ve put the hard yards in and I know that this is me, and as much as it is inspired by lots of other things, I know that I can 100% say this sounds like me. Someone said ‘Seventeen Seconds’ and ‘Avalon’ the other day, and somebody else said Tindersticks and The Police. [laughs] But these are quite diverse things that people are mashing together which means that it must sound like you. Because it doesn’t sound like Tindersticks and it doesn’t sound like The Police, and it doesn’t sound like The Cure, and it doesn’t sound like Roxy Music, but it does sound like all of them. For me it was really important to achieve that. Some people have it out of the box… or maybe I just think about things too much.  But I have always been able to play the guitar well. I just chose to explore a different aspect. I was more into song writing to be honest than I was guitar solos. But now I can see what the purpose of them is; what they can do to a piece of music emotionally.

​​In terms of writing lyrics, how do you think you have evolved over the last 20 or so years? It seems that with the lyrics on ‘The Hinterlands’ you have stepped up yet another level.

I was just trying to get better. [laughs] There is actually a lyric on ‘The Hinterlands’ that I wrote in classical studies when I was 16. They come from all over the place; there’s not one timeframe of things. I’m a huge fan of Tennyson and obviously William Blake, and there’s references to all that stuff. What I used to love about rock music too was that it was through The Smiths that I learnt about Oscar Wilde, and W.H Auden through ‘Cemetery Gates’. And it was through Led Zeppelin that I found out about Bert Jansch and about Aleister Crowley. Rock music always had this intellectual aspect to it; a sophistication. Even the lyrics of Chris Cornell point you at this book or that book, and ‘Senseless Apprentice’ by Nirvana; I read an interview with Kurt Cobain and he was talking about this book ‘Perfume’ by Patrick Suskind which I went out and bought, and is one of my favourite books. If I was to list all of my favourite books I would have found them through music.

​​Lyrically I am trying to get into that rarefied space which is not quite poetry, but better than, you know… ”yeah baby” lyrics. The litmus test of a great lyric has always been would you write it on your pencil case? I used to take the lyrics to ‘Heavy Horses’ by Jethro Tull to school and copy them out until I had them memorised. These days rather than trying to be just inspired by a clever line, or pockets of lines here and there, I generally try to pull it straight out of me. I had a breakfast with Ian Anderson about five years ago and we spoke about lyrics and writing lyrics, and he says that he is not particularly well read, and he talked about ‘A Passion Play’ when it first came out and everyone thought he must have been reading T.S. Eliot  ‘The Wasteland’, and he said “I’ve never read T.S Eliot’s ‘The Wasteland’ – it was coming out of me”. He was recognising it in the moment. It’s like good friendships; some people have a frequency. I always think its about songlines in Aboriginal culture, and it’s a bit like scalextrics or slot cars; the car doesn’t go unless the needle is in the groove, and when you recognise that you are in the groove, and that electricity and that charge is occurring, then you really just get out of the way. For each of those songs on ‘The Hinterlands’ the lyrics were written in about an hour, I suppose. They weren’t laboured, once I knew what the song was about it was pretty easy for me. I wrote it all using first person this time, which is a bit different for me too.

​​The lyrics on the album are beautiful, and are really up at that level of poetry. There is no sense of them being at all contrived.

Thank you, that is a difficult line to tread. There is a track on the new Tool album, is it ‘Invincible’? That’s got very good lyrics. Every now and again a lyric comes along and you go “that’s a really good one’.

Maynard Keenan has been writing since he was twelve; he comes up with some beautiful lyrics.

It’s really just recognising the writers that you like. I mentioned it before, but The The ‘Mind Bomb’ and ‘Dusk’ were two really big records for me lyrically. It had great turnarounds like “was our love too strong to die or were we just too weak to kill it”, things like that. That’s something I would write on my pencil case. I had the lyrics to ‘Disintegration’ on my university wall. Writers who quote other writers, like Morrissey “in the midst of life we are in death”, etc. Then you go and find out where it’s from, all these quotes. The song ‘Into The Hinterland’ has a nod to ‘In Memoriam’ by Alfred Lord Tennyson. Most people wouldn’t care, but there might be someone in Whangarei, like I was, doing a deep dive on that stuff and then finds that man’s poetry and that blows their mind. And it goes on and on. It should be like an invitation. That’s what David Bowie was so good at, wasn’t he, all the time. How many people only heard of Kraftwerk because of David Bowie, or only heard of Brian Eno because of David Bowie, or Scott Walker. His generosity as a fan… there is an interview with him somewhere where he talks about it. He’s just a fan; he was a fan of rock n roll and he wants to show everybody this shiny new thing that he’s found. It’s like if somebody reads this interview and hears about a record called ‘Seventeen Seconds’ by The Cure that they have never heard of, they are in for a good time, right?

​​Absolutely. In fact reading material about Gramsci has sent me off in different directions exploring music and words. I have been listening to things I haven’t listened to before and broadened horizons in terms of my knowledge and understanding of music.

It’s so easy to go back to something that you do know because you have an emotional investment in it. And it’s reassuring and reinvigorating. But it’s really important. For me the whole music thing is really about legacy. I was reading a quote by Mads Mikkelson recently and he said that he just makes whatever he is doing the most important thing. He doesn’t think about career, but he figures that by the end of it if everything he did was really important then he will have had a good career at the end of it. [laughs]

That feeds into something that you have said about your own career; that you have existed around the periphery. This process of self-actualisation about who you are as a musician – that is priceless.

A lot of musicians who are my contemporaries – we started at the same time – were a little bit trapped by early success. They call them golden handcuffs. Every time you play it’s the same six songs until you die. I mean it’s nice to share and give people that experience, but if you’re not evolving as a human being inside those pieces of music… some people can find that space. I’ll give full credit to someone like Jordan Luck; every time he sings those songs he’s very conscious of what he is giving to the audience and what they want from him. And he is very happy in that exchange. When he sings it he sings it like he means it every single time, because he does mean it. He wants them to feel it.

Interestingly enough since we finished ‘The Hinterlands’ I haven’t had any impetus to write. Well, I don’t feel like I have; I’ve found a few things on my cell phone. I have done one collaboration with Pacific Heights which will come out soon, but that was an invitation and I took it. But in terms of what the next thing is, for the first time I don’t have impetus to move forward because I feel like I have arrived.

And what a beautiful arrival it is. You can’t, or shouldn’t, write just for the sake of writing; just for the sake of producing something. There needs to be some sort of inspiration or drive, something that ignites the desire to create.

Exactly. So I’m just waiting for that. I’m not going to seek it; I’m going to let it find me. I feel like the metaphor of the landscape is a shared cultural metaphor. It’s something that we can all speak to; we all can see the landscape. It doesn’t require specialist knowledge to understand the difference between the land and the sky and the horizon, and what a mountain is or what a vast plain is or the ocean. I was reading a great book called ‘William Blake vs The World’, and it talks about a character in mythology called Urizen, and that’s the limit. It’s interesting to me that the first lyric on the song ‘Ourselves’ is “pull towards the horizon, and the deep ocean”. That’s the limit and the limitless. It’s interesting what your subconscious is trying to tell you. I find that with songs all the time, that you think it’s about one thing and then two years later you go “oh, obviously it’s about this”! [laughs]

That’s the beauty of it; it’s a journey of discovery isn’t it?

The discovery is taking ownership of oneself. ‘The Hinterlands’ is fundamentally all about that. It’s about becoming me. Completely.

​​I cannot applaud you enough for what you have accomplished and what you have produced. The album is absolutely stunning. It has brought me to tears a couple of times.

It’s the ultimate applause! [laughs]

It’s not tears of sadness by any means; it almost feels like reaching a higher realm.

There’s a moment on the record – it’s the outro of ‘Watershed’ – when I do the guitar solo and the chord changes. For me that sounds like entering into the gates of happiness or whatever you want to call it. It has some sort of regal quality to it.

For me, this album, and ‘Inheritance’ for that matter, are like the sonic equivalent of watching the most beautiful sunrise; but rather than looking at something that mesmerising, I’m listening to it.

Thank you. I have a very synaesthetic relationship to vision and sound, so it’s always curious to me people’s responses in terms of what they feel or see, or attach it to. Sometimes the artwork can be a palette. It was important to me that ‘The Hinterlands’ artwork was monochromatic to a certain extent; it comes down to that one clear thought, and you colour it in as you want to. The majesty and chaos around sunsets and sunrises… they are unrepeatable. You will see another sunrise and another sunset, but they’re not designed. It’s just the World being the amazing World. All the way through the writing of that album I was walking around Mount Eden every morning and watching the sunrise, so I’m sure that all feeds into things. I’m sure there’s a correlation.

I was reading the conversation that you had with Richard Bell about colours and shooting in black and white. For example, Joy Division is best suited to black and white, whereas Gramsci can be either monochromatic or in colour. You also mentioned that when you are playing you can see images?

Have you seen that movie ‘Until The End Of The World’ by Wim Wenders? You know, they record dreams. It’s more like that. Through those guitar solos I do have a sense of horizon; that’s the image when I’m playing them. It’s a bit like that star gate moment in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’. It’s like with ‘Inheritance’, and with you mentioning Odysseus before, that album is about mythology. Mythology is that space between truth and legend. There’s a cave in Ithaca where red seaweed comes out, so obviously back in the day before they could get into that cave they thought that three wise old nymphs had sewed this stuff, or they thought that there was a monster that lived in that cave, rather than it just being a tidal cave. So they made up a story for the absence of tides. [laughs]

​​The monochromatic thing is both in sympathy to the music where it is one clear aesthetic musically across the whole album.  It’s meant to sound like the same band; there’s one guitar sound for the main parts and one guitar sound for the solos.  It’s a lot like ‘Seventeen Seconds’ or ‘Disintegration’ where there is one unifying aesthetic rather than a cornucopia of something like ‘Inheritance’. It’s clear thought; it is all about the individual’s response. It’s about one person’s interior, not a collective interior. We use a collective metaphor to explain our interior selves, our unique interior selves, but we need language. We need metaphors to generate empathy.

I don’t know how many times I have listened to ‘Inheritance’ or ‘The Hinterlands’; it’s a lot. I never tire of them; there is always something new to discover in these albums. It’s like peeling back layers.

I’m really enjoying this new sonic journey as well. I feel like ‘The Hinterlands’ when you put it on it commands your stereo or your headphones; it’s so sonically muscular. There’s quite a few things coming up around ‘The Hinterlands’, because we are in this strange situation where we can’t really play gigs, so it’s a good provocation to think outside the square. And because I’m not in a massive rush to make the next thing, the album can continually be a feedback loop of inspiration for me. Like working on this short film and then the next short film, and then there is a book coming that is attached to the project. It’s not lyrics or anything, but it is in the slipstream of the song ‘Happiness’; it’s effectively a parable. It’s a simple sort of poem really.

There’s two movies; one’s called ‘Here’ and one’s called ‘There’. But that decision wasn’t made until we were on the journey to film. Then the titles were invented, and the idea of drawing the word was invented on that drive as well. It was really great working with Richard and being down in the South together, and so many of the ideas came together on the drive down to the Lindis Pass. ​​Richard said that he would like to have these interstitials – the bits of narration in the film – between the songs.  He said “could you write something that feels like an excerpt from the third chapter, the seventh chapter and the twelfth chapter of a book that doesn’t exist, and have them be in some way in sympathy to the general themes of the album?”. And they came very quickly, and it has triggered that idea of perhaps writing more prose. I’m a massive fan of ‘And The Ass Saw The Angel’, Nick Cave’s first book, which for me is a companion piece to the album ‘Henry’s Dream’, because it sort of seems to live in that same world; somewhere in between the Wild West and the Australian Outback and a William Faulkner novel.

You have previously mentioned that the music videos for ‘The Hinterlands’ is where yours and Richard Bell’s individual artistry meet.

​​The music videos that we have made are in resonance with the emotional intent of the music. This approach to music video making with Richard this time with a dream narrative sort of thing is completely in-line with the interior conversations that are being represented on the album itself. So there is a real sympathy between the visual and the music for me.  That is borne of true collaboration; the way that it is with Richard is that they are true collaborations in terms of the intent of the piece. There is an artistic vision at the centre of it all.

The first short film, ‘Here’, clearly goes back to the element of mindfulness that weaves through the album.

That’s the intent. When you are sitting there staring at a mountain you’re not really thinking “mountain mountain mountain”; you’re thinking about something else in your life. You are just using that still space to access a calm response.

​​From a viewer’s perspective I think it is the perfect visual accompaniment to the album; it meshes together so well.

Hopefully we will get the chance to do the whole record. The idea is that this is all feeding into what will be on the screens when we play as well. So taking this opportunity with the pandemic and the ridiculous rules around congregating. Thousands of people can go to a rugby game but 201 people can’t go and see a gig. It’s mad. You can’t underestimate congregation. And I understand the culture around sports and what have you, but it’s not the only congregation, you know?

Don’t you think that it speaks volumes in itself that this material comes to you so easily?

I think it’s like that idea I talked about before of being in the songline or in the groove of the slot car. I definitely have a sensation of arrival into some sort of considered philosophical space, and I do find it’s easily recognised and I feel when I’m in it and when I’m not in it. And when I get into it, it is like the current of a river, and you just go with it, you know? When I started writing those three things I had no idea what I was going to write about; they just sort of fell out of me.

​​I find that when I’m writing sometimes if I’m not consciously thinking about the subject matter, I will have an epiphany and something will come.

The thing I find is that there is an intoxication as well about that idea of a perfect sentence. I know Ernest Hemingway was big on that  – perhaps not to the same extent as Ezra Pound – but that perfect sentence that has clarity without too much ornamentation, but is a perfectly balanced sentence in terms of its meter, and there is enough sophistication in the language without it being impenetrable to an everyday reader. It’s a real rush of creativity at the moment, and it’s intoxicating that’s for sure.

I hope with the music video that there is a sense of contemplation and the empathy of struggle; you know the empathy that everyone’s dealing with stuff. And that’s the thing about those calm shots where I’m looking out across various vistas; you never know what’s going on in someone’s mind. From a distance someone may look utterly tranquil. The naked eye can’t tell the difference between prayer and a thought. You know that lyric in ‘Ourselves’; you never know what someone’s considering when they appear to be wistfully looking out to sea or across the mountain range. You don’t know what their actual concerns are. And everyone is going through a bunch of things at the moment.

The pandemic has been challenging for everybody for different reasons, but these albums are like safe places to immerse yourself in; they are essentially sonic beacons of hope.

That’s very kind of you to say, because music has always been that for me, so to hear that something that I have been involved in creating is offering a similar sort of safe harbour is phenomenal.

​​You have said that you want to keep playing and living with ‘The Hinterlands’ for some time to come, so the breadth and magnitude of this work serves this purpose very well.

There is this strange thing… there is an evolution happening I think. There is this idea that when you release new music it instantly becomes old.  You work all of this time on a record, and you put it out on a Friday and instantly all of those songs are now old. I think what is happening now is that the whole idea of ‘new’ is a fallacy in and of itself anyway, because if you’ve never heard The Beatles before then they are new. And you have got all of these young kids coming into music and hearing Pink Floyd for the first time, or hearing The Beatles for the first time. If you look at the Spotify profiles of those artists it’s not Dave Gilmour what he looks like now; it’s a picture of Dave Gilmour when he’s 28 and the other guys as well. It’s them at the peak of their artistry, and they are shoulder-to-shoulder with the new Mastodon record, or the new Perfume Genius record. Everything just is, and the only difference is bands like Floyd and Genesis and Led Zeppelin and The Beatles and The Doors, they have a legacy; they have a cultural footprint already in play. They come with a mystique; they come with a mythos. With a new band I think it is better for them to come with a mystique; the less information about them the better. Something like Burial is the perfect example of that; he is so mysterious – who is this guy? There is only one photograph of him that exists, and he’s made this groundbreaking thing. That for me is one of the most important records of the last 20 years. But what is very real is maintaining attention on something, because people just chomp through popular culture… the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. It’s new to them until it’s not new to them. But how do you reach all of those people who haven’t heard it? If the tree falls in the forest… if the record plays on the turntable and there is nobody there to listen to it, did it really exist?

That is a profound observation. I hadn’t thought of it like that before.

How do you keep expanding the opportunities for people to access an opportunity to hear that music and then make up their mind? At the end of the day all you want as an artist is the opportunity to be heard. You can’t control whether or not somebody is going to like it; obviously you like it because you made it. But someone who is into Justin Bieber and The Weeknd and Busta Rhymes probably isn’t really going to be into the new Gramsci record. But if you like Pink Floyd, The Cure and Roxy Music and all that sort of stuff, chances are you would find something there that you like.

Some of the most compelling art and music is that which is thought provoking and encourages you to expand your mind and introduces you to new things. Music that makes you think and creates that sense of mindfulness.

Exactly. That’s my primary ambition in art and music.

Well, you have succeeded. But whatever you do, don’t retire now.

Okay. [laughs] I have got inklings of something. I think I have the opening line of the next record. The intention is to do something towards the end of the year…

Gramsci’s album ‘The Hinterlands’ is available now in both physical and digital formats via Bandcamp, or via your favourite streaming service. For more information on Gramsci you can check out their website here.

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