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Plays: 994
Views: 1170 |
Formed: 1956
Official Site: www.chrisscottblues.co.uk
iSound Site: www.isound.com/chris_scott___bluesdevil
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Interview with Chris Scott
© Palmer Eldrich 2002
Who is Chris Scott? In this world of being bombarded with new artists in all possible markets, young, trendy, each with their own peculiar marketing quirks, the funny one, the serious one, the weird one, the |
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Interview with Chris Scott
© Palmer Eldrich 2002
Who is Chris Scott? In this world of being bombarded with new artists in all possible markets, young, trendy, each with their own peculiar marketing quirks, the funny one, the serious one, the weird one, the one with the funny hat, who cares who and what this virtually unknown middle aged man is and why should we?
Well we should. We should care because for twenty years he has ploughed his own furrow, doing it his way, never giving up no matter what life has thrown at him; we should care not because his has been a story of endurance, but because of his vision, his search and because of his stubborn refusal to be anything other than his own man. Because for some people sometimes, only something of Chris Scott’s will do, because for some people his songs touch home in ways which only his songs can do, and because of what he is and who he is and because somehow, through his music, he helps us define things to do with ourselves. Because he has his own voice, his own unmistakeable style, and in the same way that only Neil Young is Neil Young, and only John Martyn is John Martyn and only Joni Mitchell is Joni Mitchell; only Chris Scott is Chris Scott.
Three years ago he had just returned from North America having filmed a TV series with Crawdaddy for HTV there. Due to be screened the following year we waited for the series and following PR push to elevate him into the limelight of a higher public profile. The series came out, was critically acclaimed, ‘Hope’, the acoustic live session album was released and……..nothing. Far from the anticipated increase of public presence we got a big black hole of virtual silence. Apart from a handful of occasional non-publicised gigs, Scott seems to have retreated into a state of near-recluseiveness. Why?.
Palmer Eldrich caught up with him in his local watering hole, the Sugar Loaf.
You’ve been very quiet recently. The last time I saw you every thing was going great guns with the series and the album just about to come out. What happened?
Hah! I had to make some money! I lost thousands on Crawdaddy, of my own and other peoples and I went broke. I had to deal with that thing.
What have you been doing?
Hmm…this and that.
So it hasn’t been a petulant withdrawal because the industry ignored it then?
Ha ha..no, but I did feel I got fucked up the arse a bit, I mean, what a wind-up, all that money and energy, it was a five year game plan you know, and then for them to do that….
What was that?
Well, bringing the transmission dates forward…they knew I was running a campaign around it with the CD and the press and gigs and stuff, and they gave me one set of transmission dates and so I organised everything, buying manufacture dates and PR slots, organising outlets, gigs, co-ordinating everything so it would all happen together and I’d just got it all set up and then they phoned me and told me they were bringing the dates forward six weeks…SIX FUCKING WEEKS! I just couldn’t pull things forward by that amount…and so instead of everything going off with a bang, it was like fizz, pop, pop…..They didn’t even tell the production company (Skyrock) of the change in dates either. They were running their own campaign and I went there for a meeting and to get some printed PR stuff from them and I’m looking at the stuff and I say ‘you know these are the wrong dates on here’ because they had the old dates on see, and they say ‘no, that’s right’ and so I say ‘Well, I think you need to make a call…..’ They were pretty pissed off but there was nothing we could do, we just had to live with it. And I got so little help from the press, I had to fight for every scrap of space….Ah fuck ‘em, it’s just too boring…
Are you bitter about all of that?
Well, I’ve got to say I was pretty fucked off for a while, it was good work, good music you know, and a good campaign, it just seemed like such a waste…and then getting so broke I had to get day jobs….I delivered curries for a while and you know, one of the first drops I did the door opened and the guy said ‘bloody hell, my curry’s being delivered by Crawdaddy’…..hmmm. But I don’t know, it’s given me a chance to take a step back and have a think about what I’ve been doing. I’ve stopped dealing with any business about it now. That feels like a good decision, I think all that business shit fucked my head up for a while, like I stopped being able to play something without thinking how it could be marketed, you know, not being able to play just for the sake of it’s own thing, and I think that’s bad, it’s not music, it’s product, and thinking like that is just death for the creative thing. I’d rather be skint and creatively viable than like that.
So you’re not handling any of your own management now then?
No, I can’t. It just gets in the way of the important stuff. That’s why it’s been quiet recently. Nobody’s been on the case.
So what have you been doing? Anything happening? Is Crawdaddy still going?
Yes, Crawdaddy’s still going. It’s now and again at the moment. I still get a great kick out of playing with it, despite the whole project taking such a tumble. Payney’s such a tasty bastard round the fretboard and we still lock in really well with each other. I can’t put that round the pubs though. I’m hoping to put some shows together in the Spring for the folks who got into that one. But decent venues. Proper shows. It deserves it.
Anything else?
Yes, I’ve just about finished recording a solo album, just me and an acoustic guitar, very intimate, stripped back, very…..essential. Its ok, It’s a nice body of work, its captured some nice moments, but of course, you know, I’m never totally happy.
Are you aiming to release that at any time in the future?
Fuck, I don’t know, I mean, I’ve got no label or anything at the moment. I’ll probably run a few copies up and give them to people who might like it, but other than that who knows? Maybe. But like I said I’m not dealing with that stuff anymore. I might do a few shows with it.
I heard a rumour that you were working with a DJ.
Yes, that’s fun! It’s a little experiment with something different. It’s really in it’s infancy at the moment so I don’t want to talk too much about it, but it’s going to be…what’s the word he (Scoob, the DJ) uses?…BANGING! It’s my same old thing though, you know, the hot spot thing, I’m using that as the working practice again.
So how will that work then? As far as I understand how you’ve described this ‘hot spot’ thing to me, it revolves around putting musicians in a state of relative uncertainty and encouraging them to spontaneously interpret what’s going on in a live situation. How would that work in a field that is so studio based?
Well, there’s ways and means…you know I work on instinct, we’re working on how we do that now, you know you try things, see how they work, try different ways of working, see what feels right. It’s an organic process, instinctive. There’s a lot of kit now that allows that kind of freedom in the digital realm. So far, so good. It’s a BIG sound!
Are you aiming to do that live?
No, I don’t think so. I don’t know. Right now were just trying to get it to feel right and maybe put a few vinyl white labels out through the clubs. Technically it would be quite complex to do it live and I hate working with those kind of restraints in a situation where you need fluidity and flexibility. But who knows? Maybe. Maybe if we can get that allowance in that kind of situation it would be fun.
And Jack the Dripper?
Woah, you have been sniffing around! Yeah that’s something else again, isn’t it? Delta blues and Be-bop jazz giving each other a good shagging! Yeah, pretty much all out on the edge again, it’s lots of fun. It came together by accident you know. Brendan (Whitmore, saxes and harp) had a gig booked with a band he was with and they fell apart, had a bust up or something, and so he gave me a call trying to round up a crew so as not to blow the show out and we just jammed it round the old Delta blues tunes I knew from the Blind Lemon Beefcake days. He couldn’t find a bass player and so I had to cover both (bass and guitar) with what I was doing. Ha ha, it was a perfect hot spot situation you know, just drums, saxes, and me, and I thought, yeah, let’s get this cranked up here and we had a great time, nice and loose, no pressure, nothing to lose, ended up a great show and so afterwards we just said ‘Well, let’s do this again’ and it’s just carried on. We did some stuff in the studio this summer and I had to get them so wrecked just to stop them thinking about that we were in there that everybody literally just crawled out of there on hands and knees! Great result though. You can hear the session sequentially and hear them getting more and more loose. Fabulous. Some of that is getting mixed right now with a view to putting it around. That will be somebody else’s job though. Not mine. I’m done with that shit.
So how about the writing then? Is it all new stuff on this solo album? At times in the past you were writing about a song a week. Are you still as prolific?
No, no, that’s one of the things that really took a hammering with having to deal with all this business crap. I mean I’ve always written a lot when I’ve had shit going down, like when my marriage was breaking up it was like I couldn’t stop, loads, I got loads of great tunes out of that. Ha! Just about all I did get, it was like therapy or something, you know, I was doing that Delta re-interpretation thing at the time and doing good business with that and writing all this other stuff as well, that stuff really saved my life, I was totally fucked but I was writing like a bastard. But when the Crawdaddy thing went down, I was like just really numb. It was so scary. I would write a couple of lines and the manager head would kick in and I would just start thinking about tailoring what I was doing right from the word go. That’s when I knew that I had to get right out of the business side of things. Now it’s not so bad. I’ve written a few things this year I’ve been really happy with without feeling that pressure on. I’m slowly coming back to being a musician.
Are they on the album?
Yes, they are.
Is it all new stuff? And why did you decide to do something so sparse?
No, it’s not. It’s a mix of stuff. How it came about was that I needed to do things to try to strip away all these layers of crap from around the process of music making, and one of the deliberate strategies I tried was to re-interpret tunes from a very basic standpoint, like with just an acoustic. And so I went back through my whole back catalogue and re-did some of them like that just to try and get some kind of sense out of them – not with any plan for them or anything, it was just something I had to do for some reason. I was recording them on mini-disc in order to be able to assess them, to see if I still had something as a player, you know, you worry about shit like that, and I ended up with a collection and then I started to write again, so I just recorded the new stuff like that as well. It’s a nice pure way of working. It feels good. It’s like it’s easier to capture some kind of mood or feeling like that. So it’s a mix. There’s stuff on there that’s twenty years old and there’s some from this year. And all points in between.
So how do you feel now?
Well, not too bad really. I’m making the rent by doing a couple of other things now, which takes the pressure off having to play every crappy little pub and club gig just to survive. It’s a tough circuit that, I mean, I learnt a lot doing it but I’d done it too long, I’d overdone it, but now I can get back to playing for it’s own sake, like, when I play, It’s for the music, not for the money or anything. Because that can really fuck you up as well, it becomes like another day at the office, and that’s no good, music’s too important a thing to be like that, it has to mean something, it has to be valid in some way spiritually, it has to say things, not just to me but to whoever is out there and listening. Otherwise it’s just noise.
Another beer?
Why not?
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