Tone Glow 127: David Lance Callahan (Moonshake, The Wolfhounds)

An interview with the UK singer-songwriter about Moonshake's discography, finding interesting ways to incorporate samples into his songs, and his experiences with birding in countries around the world

David Lance Callahan

Photo by Joel Goodman

David Lance Callahan (b. 1964) is a singer-songwriter born and based in the UK. In the 1980s he founded The Wolfhounds, whose jangly “Feeling So Strange Again” appeared on NME’s legendary C86 compilation. The band would release multiple albums, including Unseen Ripples From a Pebble (1987), Bright and Guilty (1989), Blown Away (1989), and Attitude (1990). After disbanding at the turn of the decade, the group would remain inactive until reuniting in 2005, eventually releasing another studio album with 2016’s Untied Kingdom (…Or How to Come to Terms with Your Culture). After the group’s initial breakup, Callahan would go on to create the experimental post-rock band Moonshake, whose songs would reflect his wider interests in outré music. He and Margaret Fiedler were the group’s principal songwriters, and their debut EP, First, was released by Creation Records in 1991.

Moonshake’s eclectic debut album, Eva Luna, was released in 1992 on Too Pure. The LP was the result of concerted efforts to steer away from modish styles, and to incorporate samples in novel ways. The album has recently been remastered and reissued with additional tracks—culled from the Secondhand Clothes (1992) and Beautiful Pigeon (1992) EPs, as well as their November 1992 John Peel session—by Beggars Arkive. Fiedler would eventually depart from the band and start Laika. Callahan, however, would continue with Moonshake, releasing The Sound Your Eyes Can Follow (1995) and Dirty & Divine (1996) before calling it quits. Throughout its existence, Moonshake toured Europe and the United States with acts like PJ Harvey, My Bloody Valentine, Stereolab, Codeine, and Th’ Faith Healers.

Callahan has since released music under his own name and is an accomplished nature writer. He has written multiple books related to his interest in birdwatching, including A History of Birdwatching in 100 Objects (2014), Where to Watch Birds in East Anglia (2021), and Where to Watch Birds in Southeast England (2024). Joshua Minsoo Kim talked with Callahan on November 22nd, 2023 via Zoom to discuss the history of Moonshake, his interests in birding, the pride he takes in being a good father, and more.

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Joshua Minsoo Kim: How has your day been, David?

David Callahan: Moderately productive (laughter). What about you? You’ve just got up, haven’t you? 

Yeah, I just got up. It’s 9am here. I’m a high school science teacher and we have the day off today, tomorrow, and Friday because it’s Thanksgiving. I wanted to ask, where were you born? 

I grew up in the suburbs, on the Essex and London border, which is kind of to the east along the Thames Estuary. It’s a bit like being from New Jersey or something like that, if you’re in New York.

Can you tell me about what it was like to grow up there? When were you born?

1964. I guess it was on the edge of the countryside, but it still wasn’t too long to get into central London as well. I kind of had the best of both worlds, really. I could go to gigs and go walking in the farmland as well. 

Did you often spend time in nature, going out and exploring? 

Yeah. Quite a bit. I’m a parent myself now. I think parents now are very protective—and I am too—but especially in the summer holidays, or half-term, I used to leave the house at about nine and not come back till six or seven. We just used to wander around, sometimes with friends, sometimes on my own.

Does anything stick out in your memory as particularly dangerous or beautiful?

A lot of it was beautiful. But I do remember running into a rival gang of kids and getting beaten up, so that was quite dangerous. 

Oh no. How old were you when that happened? 

I must have been about 10. It was a Stand By Me (1986) type thing without the dead body.

What was the rivalry about? 

I don’t know if kids are still like this, but it was just a kind of, “You’re on your own.” They were picking on the weakest zebra in the herd. There wasn’t anything particularly deep about it, really. They wanted some money, so I led them back to my street where, fortunately, there were lots of friends of mine so they got beaten up in return (laughter). So I exacted some delicious revenge.

Were you an easily agitated, hostile kid? 

No, not particularly. I don’t think I was any more unhappy or happy than an average boy or girl growing up. I learned to enjoy my own company, which I still do. I mean, I’m a parent and I’ve got a girlfriend and I’ve got friends and family. But I’m very happy in my own company. I can happily sit around for days. I don’t feel like a hermit. I’m not like the Unabomber or something (laughter). I’m happy pottering around on my own. When I got into music, it was kind of ideal for that: sitting around for hours playing guitar. And then later, just before I joined Moonshake and while in it, I’d mess around with the sampler all day.

Was guitar your first instrument? 

Oh yeah, definitely. 

When did that happen?

I hadn’t really thought of music at all until a vulnerable age. I guess I would have been 12. I saw the Sex Pistols on TV and that fired me up. I managed to get some vouchers for a Christmas present and I got a Dr. Feelgood, a Who, and a Beatles LP. And then, like with all British musicians, I discovered the John Peel show which is on the national radio station, Radio 1. But it was on late at night so—again, it’s a common story—you’d listen to it under your bed covers when your parents thought you were asleep. The first one I listened to had sessions from The Damned and This Heat. Do you know This Heat at all?

Oh yeah. I saw the reunited version live a few years ago. They were phenomenal. 

This Is Not This Heat, right? (laughter). They’re great. The first one I listened to had studio sessions from The Damned and This Heat. At the time, I thought that was punk rock, both of them. I still view it that way. 

It’s funny because I’d listen to a lot of these bands when I was in high school, but when I went back to listen to the original punk rock groups, I was like, “Oh, this is far more tame than the sort of reputation that punk rock has.” 

It’s funny you call it tame, though. Because what it is, is more lo-fi and amateurish, a lot of it. Which, in a way, is not tame anymore. It’s quite wild. Nowadays, it’s what everyone does. It’s so easy to do well-produced or overproduced music that when you hear something played rawly it sounds quite wild, even if it doesn’t sound as powerful. It’s like how Green Day are far from the best punk rock band, but they’re probably the best produced punk rock band. They’re much more loud and powerful than hundreds of bands that I would consider better. I still feel a bit like that now.

So you picked up your guitar at 12, or that’s when you saw the Sex Pistols…

That was on TV. I wasn’t clever enough or old enough to go to the gigs, of course. But that was enough, and after that I became an obsessive fan and was tracking down music. By the time I was 14, I was already listening to John Coltrane and Astrud Gilberto and Throbbing Gristle—I was all over the place, really discovering stuff. Friends of mine were into Northern soul, so I’d got into ’60s and ’70s soul a bit. Miles Davis, there was all sorts of stuff. I still really liked pop stuff as well, guitar pop. It was all blending in there.

Was there a specific record store that you remember from that time?

The main medium was vinyl records and cassette tapes. The 8-track thing didn’t really happen in the UK like it did in the US. It meant that there were loads of record stores in the local big town to me, which was Romford. There were at least three that sold early independent releases, including imports from the States, and they stocked older records that were interesting like Love and The Velvet Underground and Tim Buckley and odd jazz things. I could go into my local downtown records, which sold Michael Jackson and Genesis and all that big stuff, and I could track down Ornette Coleman and No New York. All this stuff was also in the racks.

Even the local Woolworths. I remember going in there with my pocket money and getting two Ornette Coleman LPs and Kill City (1977) by Iggy Pop because it was in the sale bin. It was astonishing, the stock they had. It was just odd. You would buy 7-inch singles in corner shops, sweets shops. There’d be a box on the counter, and I found The Birthday Party and Cocteau Twins for 50 cents. It was really in your face. It wasn’t as easy now, where you can just go on YouTube and find out what everything sounded like and looked like. You had to use your imagination, but you could find some records. And there were some older guiding hands behind the counter. When I went out and bought my first Tim Buckley LP, the guy behind the counter said, “Oh, you should hear this, this, and this.” And then the next time I went in there, he had a load of cuttings of Tim Buckley interviews from the early ’70s that I was obviously too young to see. People used to help you out that way. They’d just spread the word, which was great.

I just started going to gigs. The first gig I went to, I would have just turned 13. It was a band called Eddie and the Hot Rods, and a band called Doctors of Madness were supporting. Eddie and the Hot Rods had Rob Tyner from MC5 come on. This is just in a small football stadium in Essex. For some reason Rob Tyner from MC5 came on the stand with them (laughter). Just randomly, I don’t know why he was there, I guess they were friends or something. But then I just started going to gigs. The next gig I went to was Buzzcocks and The Slits. 

Then I discovered my local youth club, which put on gigs. There was a local mod revival band, one of the better ones, called Purple Hearts, who played a lot. And just local punk bands who no one’s ever heard of. And things like Alternative TV would come through on tour. I don’t know what the American equivalent is, but your local youth club is just a community center that had pool tables and some grass outside for football, and a kind of jukebox or record player. It was that kind of thing where kids would just hang out and smoke and just kill time. And they started putting on gigs at the local youth club. I did my first stage appearance when I was 15 there.

One of the local punk bands was a bit more improvised. I’d started writing—pretentiously—poetry by then, and they asked me to come on and do some vocals. I’d never sung before in my life. I just went up and recited a couple of poems on top of their kind of free form stuff. It was out of tune and couldn’t really be played. And I was reciting stuff over that. In a way, it was just a natural osmosis. You came out of the audience onto the stage. It wasn’t like anyone gave you a hand or anyone pushed you. You were there. And someone’s like, “Oh, you do words, don’t you?”

And I guess you knew whoever was at this place, so it didn’t feel like there was a lot of pressure. Is that what it felt like?

No, because I didn’t go to the club apart from gigs. I went on my own because in my small town, Harold Wood, I was kind of the only punk, new-wave kid in the entire town. And I had the bruises and black eyes to show for it. But when I went to the youth club, a mile’s walk up the road, suddenly there were all these other kids, a lot of whom were a bit older than me from neighboring towns. Suddenly you had this crowd. I made friends and got girlfriends and all that stuff started happening just in my local youth club. You’d read about a band in the music papers, and then they’d be at your youth club. It was astonishing, really, to look back on it now. 

So I didn’t have any friends. I just turned up because I had the kind of confidence of naivety. It was kind of scary, but I went anyway. I was already a little Artful Dodger. I was already smoking and drinking at 13, which kids don’t really do now, which I’m kind of glad of, really (laughter). But I had the advantage of looking old for my years. There were a lot of bars I could order a drink in at quite a young age. They certainly never checked your ID at the local—we call them off-licenses—liquor stores. And smoking was just everywhere. 

What was it like for you to perform for the first time with that punk band? Do you remember what you were feeling during it? What did you feel like afterwards? 

I haven’t really thought about it much. I guess it was intense, in a good way. No one had ever looked at me, I was always in the background, milling around; I was one of the younger kids, and suddenly I was up there with all these older kids. Earnestly, I don’t even know what it sounded like. I presume it did not sound like singing, I’ll put it that way (laughter). Not rapping. Something like Mark E. Smith—just kind of intoning. But it certainly felt good. It felt like something I should do and that perhaps I was even born to do. But it still took a while. All the other kids were older, they’d formed bands that I wasn’t invited to join. And then they were all off moving away to college and getting jobs. 

Some of them became quite successful. There was a guy called Mike that I used to hang out with. He was 19 when I was 15. He formed a band called Department S, and about a year later, they were number one on the charts. And then there was this other band, Purple Hearts. Again, I hung around them like a kind of mascot. They got a lot of attention and did tons of touring. And I met Terry Edwards who plays sax and trumpet now. But I still have him on my records. He plays with Gallon Drunk and PJ Harvey and people like that. He’s even toured with Tony Visconti. It was all these little scallies, and some of them went on to be pretty successful.

It must have been a very encouraging thing at such a young age to see these people succeed.

Yeah, I joined a couple of bands, and it didn’t seem like joining a band was a waste of time, or something that you might just do for six months before you got back into real life. It seemed like it was real life, which encouraged me to focus. I had lots of jobs just in shops and working on building sites. Just laboring and working in shops, that was all it was. I didn’t really feel like I had much of a prospect.  I did a year at a polytechnic institution, which was kind of like a poor man’s university kind of thing. And at that time, my first band, The Wolfhounds, started getting attention in the music papers. Even though we had no money at all, I thought, “Well, this is going somewhere, I should drop out of college,” which was kind of a dumb thing. I could have got a degree no problem and still managed to do all the gigs and recording and stuff. But it was that thing where you’re like, “I’ve got to commit myself to this.” 

It’s interesting hearing you talk about all the different artists you were listening to from these record stores because, to me, all that comes to fruition with Moonshake. When I first listened to The Wolfhounds, it seemed a bit more straight ahead. How did The Wolfhounds start? What sort of things were you trying to do with your music? To me, Unseen Ripples from a Pebble (1987) seems a lot more straight ahead than the later stuff, Attitude (1990), for example, which has a more noisy, jam quality.

Much though I loved and still love Miles Davis and John Coltrane, it’s way out of my reach to play that way, even now. I don’t have the training and the musical ability, so it was never in the cards to do something quite like that. The post-punk thing only happened for a couple of years. All those bands like The Slits, The Pop Group, The Fall—all those really interesting, creative bands, only lasted for a couple of years. And at the same time, you had more pop-oriented bands like Orange Juice, Josef K, and The Fire Engines. Me and my little gang loved that. 

And then suddenly, there was what you might call a ’60s garage revival. All these things happened so quickly, as well. There was a ’60s garage revival, which sounded a bit more interesting than a lot of punk rock, but was still within our ability to play. So we got a bit influenced by that and started doing cover versions of The 13th Floor Elevators, The Seeds, The Standells, Love, and stuff like that. In a way it was great because I discovered all those things. But in a way, it kind of slowed me down creatively; I was kind of stuck with the three-chords, four-chords, making-a-bit-of-noise, three-minute songs kind of thing. 

We were starting to do lots of gigs, and we were getting a bit of success from doing that. So we carried on doing it. It wasn’t a cynical thing. We were inspired by that. But of course, because some of us had wider interests, you started getting a bit more creative. So after the first album, which I found really disappointing… we were operating as a kind of democracy then, which I don’t think is good for art a lot of the time. It’s great if you can, and you’ve got distinctive musicians who are vying with each other, but if you’re a bunch of inept losers from Essex… (laughter). 

But we lost a couple of members and it became me and one or two other people who were focusing. And by that time we discovered, not only a bunch of British groups who were doing odd stuff around that C86 time, like Bogshed and Big Flame, but also the American bands were starting to filter through. Sonic Youth and Big Black and things. We started mushing all that stuff together and really enjoying that. That was the way we saw it. We were already using weird guitar tunings; we were already dabbling in that. I guess the only other band in Britain who were really doing that thing with any success was My Bloody Valentine. We kind of came up at the same time as them. I guess they were doing their kind of dreamy, proto-shoegaze thing, which I love, but we were doing a much more in-your-face, almost-protest post-rock thing.

When I initially listened to The Wolfhounds, I immediately thought, “Oh, this is David’s parallel track with My Bloody Valentine’s own trajectory.” You have the simpler, fun, pop rock songs, some jangly stuff, and then you sort of broaden your horizons to the more experimental stuff.

It was the same thing at the same time. And we were pals as well. When we played one of our first London shows, My Bloody Valentine had just got back from Berlin and supported us in a place called Hackney, in London. We always used to hang out with each other. They had notorious parties in Camden and stuff, which I went to quite a lot of. We were just mates, really. I guess we saw ourselves going into more of a Fugazi direction. It was a bit more polemical. I think the music’s just as interesting. I can listen back to it now. It’s of its day, but it’s easily as forward looking as My Bloody Valentine and a few other people. 

Were you guys familiar with A.R. Kane at that time? 

No, they were surprisingly not very well known in Britain. I think I ignored them because they were called “The Black Jesus and Mary Chain” in the way that the music papers wrote things. I felt, “Well, I’m not that bothered about the white Jesus and Mary Chain” (laughter). I kind of ignored them for a while, and then later, at about the time we were starting Moonshake, I heard some of their records. “A Love From Outer Space,” things like that. I thought, “This is actually really good.” I don’t think they were doing the sampling thing like us. They were more doing the kind of effects. They were kind of a noise version of the Cocteau Twins with a bit of a dance beat in the end, which I liked.

I actually interviewed one of the members recently, and that was really interesting to hear about because, while they’re pulling from their own influences, there’s overlap between you two in the clear love for dub reggae. I hear it in the basslines for so many songs—“City Poison” and “Beeside,” for example. I’m curious as to where all the reggae influence comes from. Where was this, in Moonshake?

It was always in the background for me. When I was growing up, you obviously had skinheads around, and at the time they were the guys who were into reggae. But also, in the first few shows I started going to, I saw The Slits play, and they were massive reggae heads. I’d also gone to the Notting Hill Carnival a couple of times and heard sound systems there, and bought Dr. Alimantado and Culture and Dillinger LPs with my pocket money, then got ripped off for some dope seeds (laughter). Went through the proper trial by fire. But reggae was always in the background there.

When The Wolfhounds finished, I just felt that I hadn’t really done what I wanted to do with The Wolfhounds. It was always a bit of a compromise with the other members of the band, most of whom were a bit more rock-oriented. I like rock music, but there were so many other things I wanted to do. In the back of my head I just thought, “Well, I’m going to do everything now, I might never get the chance to do it again.” And Creation Records went, “Okay, we like The Wolfhounds, and you never really got your due. We’ll basically pay for some rehearsals, buy some equipment, and look after you.” Creation nurtured us a bit. 

We had already started discussions with The Wolfhounds that we were too mannish, too alpha male. It’s too laddish. We need some female input in this. We put an advert for a female guitarist. I didn’t like and still don’t like the way I sing now, so we wanted someone to kind of soften my voice and make it more interesting, perhaps even do harmonies. So I put an advert in the Melody Maker, and the only person to answer was Margaret Fiedler. 

And the funny thing was, I said, “Look, I don’t know if you like it or not…” We were basically doing some shows headlining a small venue called the Falcon in London. We did a two or three night residency. I said, “Come down, check us out, see what you think.” I know she was there, but I didn’t hear anything back from her. I was like, “I wonder why that is.” So I rang her up again about a week later and she said, “Well, I came in and you came on stage, and I didn’t see that I could add anything to it. It was all a bit rockabilly.” It turned out she had seen the support band, Gallon Drunk (laughter).

We were doing the Rough Trade shop about a week later. So I got her down to see that and she quite liked it and said she was interested. So that was good. This all happened really quickly. I had all these ideas because we’d used the sampler in the later days of The Wolfhounds. I really loved the potential of that, and it just seemed to me that no one was fulfilling that potential. I wanted to compose things with it rather than just have loops or beats. I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to do that in the Wolfhounds. We still weren’t selling any records; we were rehearsing in a bedroom or garage, and we were doing lots to support big bands and still never getting any kind of real following out of it. I think we’d kind of given up and I just thought, “Fuck this.” I went in to see Alan McGee because Creation had offered us a deal by then, and I said “I’m not gonna do The Wolfhounds, I’m gonna do this new thing.” And he said, “Yeah, do it.”

How’d you decide to name yourselves after the Can song?

It was kind of a joke suggestion. I wanted us to be called Skyscraper for a while, which I’m glad we weren’t called. But we did like Can. There’s clearly an influence. Now I kind of regret the name because we went on to make music that wasn’t very Can-like at all. And it sounds like we’re some kind of tribute band or something. So I kind of regret the name, but we were stuck with it. And we kind of needed a name because we had a couple of gigs booked and we didn’t have a name for them (laughter). We basically had to say something. And it’s not a bad name or anything, I just think it pins us down to the Can thing too much, which wasn’t the idea. We weren’t a democracy. It was me and Margaret calling the shots creatively. At least initially. While John [Frenett] and Mig [Moorland] were great musicians, we suggested beats to Mig and we wrote basslines, mostly, for John. The demos would come with basslines already attached and an idea for a drumbeat.

I’m curious about the initial EP, First (1991), on Creation. The song “Gravity,” to me, really sounds like shoegaze. But the songs on that EP make a statement of how vast your interests are. On “Coming,” you have the hand percussion and it’s very groovy. “Coward” sounds like it’s influenced by Indian raga. 

It’s interesting. When I first met Margaret and decided to do Moonshake, we’d go to each other’s houses and play each other’s songs and would get impressed with what each other was doing. My initial idea for Moonshake was to have PiL’s Metal Box (1979) with samples, and the harmonies of The Byrds over the top, which I still think, even now, sounds like a fantastic band (laughter). When I saw what she was doing on her own, I knew it wasn’t going to be like that. Because she was kind of writing really good, almost folk songs, which is what “Coward” is. And I think “Coward” is an amazing song. It’s probably my favorite on that EP. That and “Coming” have our first real dabbles in sampling. There’s the weird Central Asian flute on “Coming,” and “Coward” has some weird slide guitar samples.

In a way, we made a big mistake having “Gravity” as the A-side there. A lot of people really liked it, but it was really too much on trend. And our main thing was to avoid that; we wanted to start our own trend. We should have really had “Coming” or “Coward” as the A-side and we wouldn’t have got slagged off for being shoegazey bandwagon jumpers, which we weren’t. 

Did people say that?

Yeah, I remember that time as being a whole clusterfuck. We got really bad reviews in the music press. The record sold rather well because a lot of people liked weird head-fucky shoegaze stuff. I’ve never done it myself, but I’m told lots of people really enjoyed tripping and listening to it. There’s lots of stuff going on in the stereo and the speakers with different pans and stuff. People were getting quite freaked out with it. But it was too close to what a lot of other bands were doing, as far as I was concerned. We were supposed to be heading out on our own, and we kind of made a faltering step. 

There’s a funny story. Creation just didn’t think we were going to do very well. They said, “Look, you spent a lot of money recording this, we’re not going to pay for a video because it’s just not going to sell very well.” And then the record came out, and suddenly we were at number five on the indie charts and we needed a video, but we didn’t have one. We ended up having our promo shot sitting on national TV for three minutes with the record being played over the top of it at the wrong speed (laughter). At which point I kind of threw a bit of a fit, really, and rang up Creation and said we were leaving. I just thought it was ineptitude. They’d offered us a chance and they had really good bands, but we used to go in on a morning for a meeting and the secretary would be snorting a line of coke off her desk. I just thought, “This is not how I want the record company to be when they’re dealing with my future.” They did great, of course, but the impression it made on me was that I didn’t want to put my life in their hands. 

We had already started to be managed by Paul and Richard, who went on to start the label Too Pure, because we kind of knew him from the local gig scene and they seem to be doing quite well with Stereolab and people, who were friends of ours. We thought, “Well, we’ll get managed by them, we’ll get a new deal.” They went to every record label in the country and didn’t get anything. And all the time under our noses, they had their own label which we were perfectly fine to be on, and we said “Well, we’ll do the next record with you, then,” and it all took off from there. 

We were determined, as well, because we’d made such a false step with the Creation EP. The next one should really be a leap. And it was, because we did “Secondhand Clothes.” We spent a long time in the studio kind of dismantling that song and putting it back together. Margaret spent most of the session with headphones, on a sampler, just trying to match things to the music. She turned a song I wrote into something a bit more forward-looking. It was just written in my front room in Hackney and taken to rehearsal, and when they went out to have a cup of coffee, I basically wrote the bassline in the studio. I gave it to John and said, “Play that,” and suddenly it was working. And then when we got to the studio, we took it apart more. It was all about deconstruction and putting it back together in different ways. And it worked really well.

I love “Secondhand Clothes.” Thinking about the chronology of Moonshake, I feel like that song is the moment where you realize that this band is going to do some crazy, interesting things. 

That’s the leap forward. That’s what it was. That’s what we wanted it to be, and that’s what happens. 

You were talking about how you and Margaret were the creative engine for the band. I'm wondering, what sort of things do you feel like you brought to the band that she couldn’t? And what things do you think Margaret brought to the band that you couldn’t?

Well, clearly, if you listen to the lineup with her and me, it's a schizophrenic band (laughter). It’s got a dual personality. We did occasionally write songs together, but we were mostly flipsides to each other. There’s an element of surrealism to what I do, but mostly, it was quite urban and desperate. Whereas she was a bit more playful and surreal. And some people like her stuff more than mine, some people like my stuff more than hers, some people could do both. But because of all those differences, it meant there was quite a lot there for a lot of people, so that’s why we started to catch on, I think.

I remember reading an interview from around this time, where you guys said you were trying to play with this dynamic between you two, because your voice is a lot more intense, there’s some anger there, and with her, it’s a lot more hushed. It’s funny because your brain has to reconcile the two, to find the connection between these different songs.

But we’d also play with it more and have really noisy bits in her quiet songs and occasional really quiet bits in my noisy songs. The whole thing was meant to blend. There were definitely a lot of contradictions there, but that’s interesting in a band, isn’t it? 

Of course. I know with “Secondhand Clothes” in particular, you said it was a song about the snobbery of doing anything for money.

Yeah, there’s a bit of that to it (laughter). Most kids have grown up and they buy clothes in what you call thrift stores there, we call them charity shops here, but I remember there was an attitude amongst people I knew of an older generation who would literally say, “I wouldn’t be seen dead in secondhand clothes. Dead men have died in those shoes.” This kind of thing. We didn’t have much choice but to shop in those stores. It was an interesting attitude to explore. I have no judgments on it, really. 

It was also a double thing. It was also a statement of us saying, “We’re not going to sound like anyone else as well. We’re not going to be seen in secondhand clothes. We’re making our own.” It was nice that it had that angle to it as well.

Yeah, that makes sense. Did you see your lyrics as polemical? Was that something you tried to make clear during live shows, for example, when performing this song?

I don’t think it was didactic. It wasn’t like lecturing people. I was trying to have fun and be creative with what was around me, and we weren’t living in the best of situations, really. There was no money and places were kind of squalid. It’s what you do to be in a band a lot of the time. But it was just reflecting… the city of London seemed to be decaying.

We used to put up quite a few American bands when they came on tour in the UK. They’d sleep on our floors and sofas and things. Some people from Tortoise were staying, and John McEntire was in the front room, and he said, “We’ve got a recession in the States, but you guys have got a depression here.” (laughter).

When did that happen? 

I guess that would have been when they started, so it would have been ’92. 

I love the earliest stuff from them. On Beautiful Pigeon (1992), a song like “Home Survival Kit” feels like post-rock, especially the instrumental passages. So it makes sense to hear that you were around Tortoise at that time.

We were always slavish fans of other music. When Slint’s Spiderland (1991) came out, I was like, “Oh, it‘s better than Tweez,” and we already had heard Tweez (1989) two years earlier (laughter). We knew about music. We always wanted to hear what was new and what was going on. And there was so much good music coming out, especially in the early ’90s, and hip-hop especially. I’m still catching up with it now. I really didn’t like acid house and baggy and all that stuff that was going on in the UK; I thought it was rubbish. But hip-hop really had it going on, and so did some of the American bands particularly in the late ’80s. When it got to the 90s, I wasn’t so keen on grunge, which just sounded a bit like stadium rock to me. But I still liked a lot of the experimentation of some of the US bands. I remain a fan to this day.

How did that interest in hip-hop work its way into Moonshake’s music? Was it more direct, or more in terms of inspiration and philosophy? Is there a specific song you can point to that had a particular influence?

We were certain that we weren’t going to rap (laughter). It just seemed like such an American thing to do and it would have just sounded so silly. And when we heard British people trying to rap, it just sounded pathetic (laughter). Now, there have been some pretty good UK rappers but back then, I didn’t really like much of what I heard. But it was more the music, the investigation that a lot of hip-hop producers did—slowing things down, playing the stereo one bit slower then the one bit faster, running things backwards, playing the samples like an instrument. All that stuff that started with Gang Starr and those kinds of people, we really loved that. We thought, “Well, we can do the same and perhaps we can write songs with this stuff.” That was the idea and to some extent, it was a failed experiment but I think a lot of it worked. And I think it sounds contemporary now, which shows we were doing something right.

Just to be clear, the Beautiful Pigeon EP came out before Eva Luna (1992)?

Yes. It was all recorded at the same time, though. By the time Beautiful Pigeon came out, the album was finished. It was a proper record company thing. We’d put out a single first, see if we can get some attention. And we got on MTV which was nice and then—hit them with the double whammy—the LP came out after that. 

What sort of things were you and the band thinking about when going into the studio to record the songs, now that you already made the first EP, and you knew that it wasn’t what you wanted to be?

We were determined not to make any of the mistakes we've made on the first EP. By this time, we’d also started renting our own rehearsal room jointly with the band Silverfish and Th’ Faith Healers. We’d basically hired a room above a futon factory. We used to rehearse almost like a 9-to-5 job. Three or four days a week, we’d get there at 10 and not leave till 6. We’d just be bashing things out. And Guy [Fixsen], who ended up producing the thing, we got along to discuss arrangements, drum sounds, all this kind of stuff. We were just making absolutely sure that when we were in the studio, we were gonna waste no time. We had a good budget and we had plenty of time in the studio, but we definitely wanted to make sure that everything was there for this to sound like our statement, because we might not get to make another one. We worked very hard on making sure we knew exactly how things were going to sound, leaving a bit of room for messing around and improvisation and creativity. But really, all those songs were set in stone: the length of them, what every every person was playing, what samples they were going to be on them.

Some of them we played live for a while and we knew they worked, like “Spaceship Earth.” But some, like “Bleach & Salt Water,” were kind of just done in the rehearsal studio and then taken to put on the LP, and we only started playing them live afterwards.

“Bleach & Salt Water” is the one song where I can really see the Can influence, just in terms of the rhythm and the jamming going on.

It’s more Margaret’s song than mine, but the repetition of it and the weird kind of electronic noises definitely have a krautrock influence.

When you went in the studio, were you trying to capture what it was like to perform the songs live? Or were you thinking more about doing things available to you specifically in the studio?

Both. We would make sure that we got good live drum takes for a start. There would be some click tracks sometimes and there would be a bit of cut and pasting, but you really couldn’t do a lot of that then. You had to do a good drum take. Dropping someone in to continue a take was about the best you could do at the time. So those are live drums, most of them. One or two are loops off a sampler, but we tried to confuse it so you wouldn’t know which was live and which was a sample.

But also, one song in particular, “Wanderlust,” was mostly Margaret’s music but with my bassline and my singing over the top. We wanted that one more open ended so we could experiment with it in the studio. But for a lot of it, you’d play these songs live, take them in the studio, and realize some parts weren’t working. You’d have to think on your feet. There was quite a bit of waiting around and playing Sonic the Hedgehog as well (laughter). But that was just waiting for someone to do a good take.

What was funny is when we went in to record the first EP for Creation, we went to the same studio, First Protocol, which I don’t think is there anymore. And My Bloody Valentine had just come in to record Loveless (1991). And when we went in there to record Eva Luna, My Bloody Valentine was still in there recording Loveless (laughter).

It was a very popular studio. You always think of these kinds of things as movements—all the post-rock bands all know each other and they’re doing similar ideas. But when we were in the studio, everyone from My Bloody Valentine to The Boo Radleys to Suede to Lush were all in the same studio—all different kinds of independent music. And we all knew each other. It wasn’t as separate as that as the publicity would lead you to believe.

It’s funny how that happens, where music journalists want to group bands together because of their sonic qualities, which leads people to believe in a certain separation from other groups. I remember reading an interview where you responded to a journalist by saying, “Oh, this is an intelligent question. I don’t usually get these because I usually get interviewed by NME.” (laughter). Did you have an animosity toward the British press?

It was more of a mickey-taking type thing. We got the occasional bad review, but I view them as character building, really (laughter). But sometimes you could predict it. Because they ran a bit like tabloid newspapers, where you’d have a reason to put a band in the paper other than just that they were good. So sometimes it got a little bit comical and it would wear you down a little bit. It was a favor they were doing us, but I remember Melody Maker did this feature, a small feature every week for month after month after month, called “The Strange World of Moonshake.” Wherever we’d been out that week, whichever gig or club or or other thing we’d been to, they would write about it and make up some ridiculous story to try and make it newsworthy. Which is nice that people are hyping you like that, but the whole thing was nonsensical as well. You find yourself getting weary of it after a while, and the way the whole thing works is very tabloid.

I feel like it’s sometimes like that today. People want an angle. 

I guess that does make it more interesting, at least for the journalist and the editors. I’m not sure if the public’s that bothered about whether there’s an angle to it or not. I think nowadays you can bypass all that with the internet. You just need to point someone to where they can hear you, and they either like it or they don’t.

I love what you were saying about “Wanderlust.” It makes so much sense that that song was open-ended, because two-thirds into it, the dissonant guitars come in after hearing all this hand percussion. It’s cool that that just unfurled in the moment at the studio.

Yeah. I mean, it wasn’t for the sake of it. We were very concentrated on what we thought the song needed. It was very focused, the whole thing. And the same thing with every record that came out under Moonshake’s name.

Were there any songs from that LP that were especially challenging to record?

Because we were so well prepared, not too many. “Wanderlust” was open-ended, like you say. I remember struggling with “Seen & Not Heard” because there were so many guitar overdubs. Trying to get all those different noisy guitars to sound separate from each other, but somehow still the same, was a challenge. It was a lot of fun. I remember sending some demos to Terry Edwards—he played the horns on it—and he came in and I just said to him, “Can you do some kind of free jazz on bits of it? And can you do an Ennio Morricone trumpet thing on the third verse?” I just thought he’d do something kind of token, but he came and did these amazing horn parts, and it just really lifts the whole song. I’m a big fan of The Saints, the old punk band, and they introduced horns on their second album, but I think we do the thing on what is a noisy, Stooges-inspired song on that, but it just takes it so much further, almost into jazz. I’m just really happy with the way that came out. It was such fun to hear someone doing such good parts on your songs. I couldn't recommend it more, to farm it out to people like Terry (laughter).

I feel like a lot of the music on the album does have this quality of sounding like something I’m familiar with, but then going off into something else. “Spaceship Earth” sounds like a shoegaze song, but slightly askew. Even “Tar Baby,” to me, feels Stereolab-ish, and then it goes off in its own direction.

Some of those things we knew. I mean, we certainly wouldn’t have copied Stereolab. But there were certainly some similar influences going on. Things like Stooges and stuff would have been in your DNA by then. But more the way-out Stooges of Fun House (1970), where they had Steve Mackay playing sax. We wanted to emulate that in some respects on “Spaceship Earth.” Not emulate it, but enter that territory and then run with it.

What was it like to perform concerts around the release of the album?

It was weird. There was still a bit of tribalism amongst audiences. When we played with people we liked and respected, we’d go down very well. But we also did a month-long tour with The Wedding Present around that time to promote Eva Luna, which I think was a massive mistake. Not just for us, but I think for them as well (laughter). I remember, we played the Brixton Academy, sold out, to 4000 people. My memory of it is that there was just silence at the end of every song. There was probably a little bit of applause, but I didn’t hear any. We’d finish a song and people would just be staring at us. I remember leaving the place going, “Fucking hell that was terrible.” We played really well. This huge bouncer came up to me and said, “Well, I thought you were fucking brilliant mate” (laughter). But the audience just stared at us. And around the country, we went down well at about two of those shows. It was just appalling, really. The audiences were also quite football-y and a bit violent. I remember the t-shirt girl getting beaten up once in Leeds. It was just horrible, the whole thing. I had no fun or enjoyment at all.

What had happened, I think, is that The Wedding Present wanted Stereolab and Th’ Faith Healers to go on tour with them, and Too Pure said, “Well, you can have them as long as you take Moonshake.” And then when the tour actually happened, Stereolab and Th’ Faith Healers pulled out and they were left with just us (laughter). I think the whole thing was a big mismatch. We got on with some of them well enough—it was okay. But it was a mismatch between band and audience and it just was terrible. But then we’d play with other people, like PJ Harvey, and it’d go down a storm. Them’s the breaks, you know? 

I wanted to ask about how it was to play with PJ Harvey. What were those shows like? 

Well, her first London show was supporting us at our first ever gig which I thought we were terrible at but she swore we were fine (laughter). What was really funny is that we got her to play after Too Pure had said, “We’ve got this woman to support you, we’ve just got this demo. Listen to the tape.” And we said, “Oh she’s great, we’ll have her.” And then on the night I was thinking, “Maybe she’ll blow us off or something.” (laughter). But she was only really young, and just came out from Dorset, this little county on the South Coast.

I remember being in the room and she played a couple of songs. There must have been 10 people in there. It was a sold out gig, maybe 250 people, but no one in the room was watching her apart from me and a few other people. For a couple of moments, I just ran out into the backyard and said “You’ve got to come and see this woman, she’s fantastic.” And everyone just blankly looked at me and carried on talking, so I just went back in and enjoyed a set almost on my own. But I bet a lot of those people would be saying, “Oh yeah, she was great.”

Had Dry (1992) already come out on Too Pure?

No, no, this was before she’d had any records out at all. This was before the first single and everything.

You mentioned earlier that you guys played shows with My Bloody Valentine. Was that during the late ’80s with the other band? Or was this ’91?

I toured with the Valentines on the Isn’t Anything tour with The Wolfhounds, then by the time they did the Loveless tour, I was in Moonshake, and we did the tour of the country with them. That was good. One where the bands got on with each other really well. We had really good fun. Backstage, they’re really unpretentious people and just nice. And they had a massive rider that they didn’t want to drink so we kind of helped him with that a bit (laughter). And we were more of the audience’s cup of tea.

When were these shows?

It would have been late ’91, maybe ’92. I think they would have waited a while to tour it because I think Loveless was a slow burner. Isn’t Anything was as well. And then we went and toured the States, or at least part of the States, with PJ Harvey the same year. And we did our own kind of East Coast tour. The first time we went over to America, us, Stereolab, and Th’ Faith Healers all went over together and did some East Coast shows with people like Velocity Girl and Drop Nineteens supporting us. It was kind of a little package tour, about five or six dates. Then we did the New Music Seminar. I don't know if that still goes on in New York. It was a CMJ kind of thing. 

We came and did a label night, which was completely sold out. I remember we had problems with the sampler we had hired and this funny little geeky guy came out of the audience to help us fix it, and it turned out to be Moby (laughter). He didn’t have a toolkit or anything but he got us up and running again, which was nice.

We used to be over to play the States quite a lot. It was much easier to get work permits and come over and do small shows there then than it is now, to be honest. For three or four years, we’d probably play the States as much as we would Europe.

Do you feel like there was a difference between the reception that you guys had in Europe versus in the States?

We found the American audiences, at least at that small level, much more open-minded. I think they’d had enough of grunge and all that kind of stuff. The major audiences, obviously, were still moist for it (laughter). But we were finding these audiences that had been into post-hardcore in the late ’80s and were tired of mainstream rock and seemed to be waiting for bands like us to come along and go a bit more out there. We found, particularly, that like minds like Tortoise were very receptive to us and very friendly. So we toured there a lot.

I’m wondering, how did you and Margaret both feel about Eva Luna? Did you come out of it thinking the album was exactly what you wanted it to sound like?

We knew we’d done something really good. I don’t think we  had an absolutely overarching, “It must sound like this” kind of thing. We were more concentrated on individual songs. But we knew we’d focused on something. We didn’t have a manifesto, but we would discuss what the point of the band was and what we were doing a lot on, at least when we started. And we thought the Secondhand Clothes EP and the LP had everything the band should be about on it. It had everything. We certainly thought we’d done something that was true to us that would either be ignored for being too out there or would make an impression. And, fortunately, it made an impression. 

What sort of things did you two talk about in these discussions?

We wanted it to be both weird and have songs. We wanted it to have an upside-down kind of layering. It needed to have big bass and drums, like some dub or funk records, but we also wanted to find ways to incorporate the samples in a way that didn’t sound like they were sellotaped on, like so many other bands. We wanted it to be completely enmeshed in the songs and the music. And I think we succeeded with that. It doesn’t sound awkward. So many rock bands were starting to use samples by the time it came out, and it just sounded like they were playing their rock song, and someone was playing over the top of it with a sample, which sounded dreadful.

So we created this environment for all of our sounds. And that was the idea— to incorporate these electronics and make it sound as natural as playing guitar. We kind of got that, I think. It also marked the beginning of the end for that lineup of the band. Margaret probably had slightly more songs than me on the first LP, and was feeling that she really needed to record with just her and Guy on her own, and she said as much to me in a meeting. I started to feel like maybe I was getting edged out of my own band. 

We’re mates again now, after all this time. We both think we probably had a couple more really good LPs in us. I think about what I did afterwards, what she did afterwards with Laika—you could combine a lot of that stuff and maybe make some interesting Moonshake records with it. But she wanted to record with Guy, who by that time was not just the producer, but her partner. So it was very much a sewn-together kind of thing. Whereas I was still out on my own. 

I felt like I lost my creative partner. Stupidly, I kind of rashly just rang her up once and said, “I don’t want you to be in the band anymore,” and she was really fucking upset. I felt quite bad about it. It was my fault for not being a very good communicator at that age. I’m great now, and I’ll let you know exactly how I feel. But at that age, I was in my late 20s, and I wasn’t a very good communicator. I still suffered a bit from what you could call impostor syndrome—a lack of confidence in my own abilities.

Did you two not speak much while she was doing Laika?

At that age, if a problem came up, I had a tendency to resort to flippancy and mockery. I should have had a bit more of a listening ear. I can’t speak for her. But, ostensibly, as the person who put the band together, I should have had some more leadership qualities, as they say in work things nowadays (laughter). But on the other hand, Big Good Angel (1993), the mini LP that came out after Eva Luna, has some of our best stuff on it. It’s fantastic. But that was largely recorded separately. I recorded with Mig and John, for the most part, in a studio, and Margaret did a lot of her stuff at home with Guy, and just brought it into a studio to mix. She scrapped one of her songs as well, and we had to come back in again so she could do “Two Trains,” which I think was pretty much entirely written and recorded at home.

This new reissue of Eva Luna that came out has some of these other tracks from the EPs. I’m wondering what it was like to revisit the album. You can tell the mixing is different.

I hadn’t listened to it for years. I was expecting a cringe fest (laughter). I still hate my vocals. Margaret still thinks her vocals are too quiet, which I kind of agree with. But overall it just sounded great. And even the B-sides were worth listening to. There weren't any duff ones. The one thing I was pleased about is when we got the tapes for the John Peel session and listened to them. We did most of that live, all playing as a band apart from the vocals. On “Mugshot Heroine,” we were playing along to the sampler, but it’s pretty much all live with one or two overdubs. You can hear a band there that’s at the top of its game and has been playing live a lot. We were really on it for the Peel session. I’m so pleased that it sounded so great as a live band as well as as a studio thing. The version of “Coming” on there pisses all over the one on the Creation EP (laughter). I just love it. At the time, I would have just gone, “So what? We’ve done another version.” But now it puts chills up my spine. I think it’s fantastic.

So it was a pleasure more than a chore. Margaret’s more pernickety about remastering than I was, but I think she was right. Because I think, if anything, it sounds better on vinyl than it did when it first came out. Now you can master things just that bit better. 

It really felt like I was hearing new things in these songs with the remasters.

That was the idea. I’m glad. I mean, it cost a lot of money, which probably means we won’t make any profit out of the reissue (laughter). But Margaret was right. I was much more like, “Can’t we just do a quick balance of things and put it out?” And she was like, “No, let’s take some time.” She was right to do that. 

I want to start asking about the other studio albums. PJ Harvey is on multiple tracks on The Sound Your Eyes Can Follow (1994). That album’s interesting to me because it goes further into your interest with the sampler. I’m thinking of “Joker John,” but there’s all these big arrangements that feel like you’re in a wind tunnel or something. “Into Deep Neutral” and “Shadows of Tall Buildings” remind me of what you’re doing on Eva Luna, but made more expansive.

I wanted to change direction. The Sound Your Eyes Can Follow was meant to be my kind of White Light/White Heat (1968) or Trout Mask Replica (1969) where it was not as hi-fi as the earlier stuff and a splurge of creativity. I didn’t like the studio and I didn’t really get on with the engineer, but somehow we managed to do something. It’s kind of weird because it’s really forward-looking in places and quite retro sounding in others. It’s a very odd record. On the back of the Eva Luna reissue, I listened to it again and found it wasn’t as cringeworthy. With all these things, I’ve been going, “This is going to be awful,” but I listened to the whole Moonshake back catalogue a few months ago and I thought “Actually, none of this is that bad.” Even that last LP, Dirty & Divine (1996), has one or two tracks I don’t like, but I think a lot of it sounds great. 

I have to say, The Sound Your Eyes Can Follow came out nothing like I wanted it to (laughter). I definitely had plans. We were using this big room at a studio called Blackwing that the Cocteau Twins, The Family Cat, and others had used before us. I had hundreds of sheets of paper over the wall with—because I can’t read music—mixing and arranging diagrams of horns and samples and whose vocals went where. “Into Deep Neutral” has about eight vocalists. I had all this stuff written out on scraps of paper and stuck to the wall. It looked like a hoarder’s front room. In the studio I’d say, “I want a double bass on this.” And I’d try to find a double bass player on the phone in the studio, and they’d come in the next day. It was all quite chaotic, and it sounds chaotic because of that. I could have carried on recording that for months. In a way I wish I’d got an actual producer in to make a bit more sense of it, but a lot of people like the chaos, so who am I to say?

With Margaret out of the band, you ended up having so many different vocalists with this next record. There’s Polly, Katharine Gifford, Molly Burnham on “The Grind,” Claire Lemmon and Lee Howton on “Into Deep Neutral.” You’ve said that you don’t like your own vocals—what was it like to work with all these different vocalists on this album?

It was my chance—and I don’t think I succeeded in this— to go partly back to my original idea for the band, which was to have harmonies. Unfortunately, at the time, my voice wasn’t the kind of voice you could harmonize with (laughter). Certainly, it wasn’t the other vocalists’ fault; I thought they were great. It seems like every day we were just ushering people through the door, getting them to do a couple of hours, and ushering them out again. But I know we had fun. 

I remember the guitarist from The Family Cat showing me the proper way to play “Marquee Moon” by Television. Even though there’s no guitars on The Sound Your Eyes Can See, there was still one lying around in the studio. He kind of solved the mystery for me, and it was much simpler than I thought it was. But that’s a sidetrack. There was a constant flow of people through the doors.

I might redo one or two of the songs, just to cover myself at one point or other, because I still have all the samples tucked away. I put them on my laptop from the discs before I threw the discs away, so if anyone ever wants to remix these things, that can be done. But that’s less interesting than forging ahead. Some of the best songs I’ve ever written are on The Sound Your Eyes Can Follow and they haven’t come out how I wanted them to. But a lot of people seem to like them, so that’s great. 

Is there a song on the album where you were really happy with how it came out?

No (laughter). But I do think for “Joker John,” “We’re Making War,” and “Just a Working Girl”—I will probably never write any songs better than those. So I’m just glad they’re there. I just wish they’d been recorded or arranged a bit better. If anything, I should have toned down the yelling and sung things more gently because the music’s rough and weird enough. I don’t need to be all angular over top of it. 

Were you inspired by specific vocalists? Was Mark E. Smith, for example, someone you were looking to in terms of this loud, yelling style of singing?

When I was growing up, I liked Smith, I liked Nick Cave and John Lydon, but I also liked Frank Sinatra and things like that (laughter). I’m more than happy to listen to Bing Crosby. And I love a lot of female singers as well, who have a depth to their voices I will never have, like Joni Mitchell. I’ll never be able to sing like that. Even Polly’s voice is still fantastic even now.

Was the aggressive style your default mode?

It was my factory setting, yeah (laughter). I think I sing a lot better now. It’s partly because I smoked, as well. The moment I gave up smoking, I started singing an awful lot better. 

When did that happen?

2007. I stuck it out for a long time with the cigarettes.

What was it like to play shows with the new configuration on The Sound Your Eyes Can Follow?

Mig recorded the record and then did a few shows, and then left to join Moose, who at the time were having a little bit of success and doing more touring, which is what he wanted to do. He wanted to tour Europe. We ended up doing tons of touring, too. There were one or two people like Ray Dickaty who were constants from then on. But it really ended up being like The Fall or Stereolab, where there were constantly people coming in and out of the band all the time, which is not how I wanted it. I wanted a core that we could work with all the time. Maybe those bands wanted a core they could work with. I think Stereolab wanted a core line up, but they never had it.

Was it hard, then, for you to do these shows? Were you frustrated by them?

I had to audition people all the time, and then we had to do more rehearsals. Every time someone new came in the band, we’d have to rehearse. Often, we were playing to clicks and samples that were rigidly looped. And that meant that we had to be rigidly rehearsed, and the drummers had to wear headphones and really be locked in with the samples, which takes quite a lot of work.

Laika did the opposite thing, where they pared down the samples a bit and then started triggering them by hand. That was a wiser way of doing it. But unfortunately, a lot of the samples I’d be using were very rhythmic, and you couldn’t really play them by hand because then they’d be out of time. So I was stuck. A lot of the things I was doing had seven or eight loops all programmed to be in and out of time with each other at certain points, and the poor drummer and the rest of the band had to try and cope with that. Michael Rother and Kevin Bass came in afterwards, but both managed to do that very well. We did Lollapalooza to promote Dirty & Divine, and I asked Tim [Gane] from Stereolab if we should do it when we got the offer. He said, “If you don’t mind playing to four people kicking a football around in front of you, then do it” (laughter). I thought he was joking, but he wasn’t.

But sometimes we’d play to a couple thousand people, and we’d go down a storm. Even when it was raining. I remember one show in Vermont where they wouldn’t let us leave the stage. It was fantastic. It was all weird stuff. There were lots of odd venues. We went back and played a bowling alley in Detroit twice when we were going round after Lollapalooza. We did a couple of months of club shows. I think we were touring solidly for three months in the States for Dirty & Divine. We did a tour with New Kingdom. We did the East Coast with them. We did a tour with Codeine and the Grifters as well, who were fantastic bands.

We played with a lot of people. It was nice to get such a good reception of American bands. I love New Kingdom and I love Codeine and the Grifters were fantastic as well. Playing with all these different people was really eye opening because in the UK it was starting to dissipate again. There were less people to play with. I was glad to do the States when we did.

I do want to ask about Dirty & Divine. The band was even more pared down, but you’re still experimenting. It’s interesting, I think of Moonshake as such a Too Pure band, and “Nothing But Time” has a trip-hop feel, and there’s “Aqualisa.” It reminds me of Seefeel, to an extent. What was your goal with this album?

I think the first ones—Eva Luna, Big Good Angel, and The Sound Your Eyes Can See—are all quite cluttered. I wanted to empty it out a bit. I was still aiming to fulfill my goal of actually writing songs with the samples, which I probably did the most on Dirty & Divine. Sometimes, on The Sound Your Eyes Can Follow, I’d make up a bassline, put some words to that, and then try and fit a lot of the samples around it. On Dirty & Divine I started off just combining samples that I liked and playing with them. The songs are all written that way. They start from the connections between the samples before the band gets to play on them. You mentioned “Aqualisa.” I think that’s one of the weaker ones. But there’s still some great songs on there. I loved working with Mary and Kath on the vocals. And my old friend Kate [Blackshaw] came and did “The Taboo.” People never mention that song. That’s one of my favorites on it. 

I love “The Taboo.” I love that “Exotic Siren Song” is the opener, and with “Cranes” right after.

On those songs in particular, rather than just buying old easy listening records to sample, you can hear the influence of me actually sitting down and listening to those things (laughter).

I do get that feeling. The sampling becomes less of a textural, rhythmic thing and more as something considered for what it actually is. 

That’s exactly right. Texturally, it’s there. But on “The Taboo,” I’d have this one harp sample from a crackly old record going “doo doo doo doo,” but if I played it on three or four keys, then suddenly from the opening note of that sample, you’ve got a bassline. And then you can put some drums to that bassline. I got someone to play flugelhorn on that and it worked really well. Live flugelhorn! You’ll have some other horn stabs that you’ve slowed down and the whole thing starts going together like a jigsaw puzzle. You’re just being given a piece at a time, and you’ve not actually seen the finished picture. You’re just being handed one jigsaw piece at a time.

What made you put an end to Moonshake? What was the deciding factor?

It was kind of run into the ground. I fell in love with an American woman and wanted to move to America, which meant that my British band could pretty much not exist. I moved to New York and suddenly found that I couldn’t really operate there. It wasn’t the place I thought it was. I don’t really believe in artistic block, but I felt I had one then. I started suffering quite badly from depression as well. I couldn’t get it together, and it just ended, basically. It fizzled out, which I’m sad about, really. But you are where you are in life, at certain times. And there’s nothing I can do about that.

You eventually had The $urplu$ with Anja Büchele, which I knew about initially because she’s in a band that I’m a fan of called Triple Negative. You mentioned artist’s block. What happened with this one $urplu$ CD?

Nothing really happened with it. We did a few shows, including a show in New York, as well as a bunch around London. It never quite took off. We were running a club at the time and we never really got any focus in it. Some of the songs are really good and I’ve recorded some of them in the last couple of years but it just remained unfocused. We weren’t really sure what we were doing and that’s basically why that didn’t really work. You’ve done very well to track Triple Negative down (laughter).

I love Triple Negative. They’re one of my favorite rock bands right now.

I keep missing their shows. They don’t play very often, but they’ve played a couple recently and I keep missing them, unfortunately. 

So what’s been happening for you for the rest of the 21st century? I know you have the English Primitive records (2021-2022) and then you had Strange Lovers (2019) on Slumberland.

I had two children, and that takes up a lot of your time. I couldn’t really do it because the amount of money I was earning from music was barely enough for one person to subsist on. And then when I stopped doing it, there was virtually nothing, and I had to get a job. So that’s what I did (laughter). 

What job did you get?

I worked in a warehouse for a while, which was kind of manual labor, but it was arty manual labor, because it was sending film reels to festivals for a film company. But it still basically involved stacking boxes and was paid minimum wage. But the perk of it was I occasionally got sent to film festivals, so I went to Cannes a few times, and went to Hawaii and Milan and a few places like this. But I couldn’t say I did anything glamorous there. I maybe coordinated a couple of parcels and then sat on my ass (laughter). When I was a kid, I used to go bird watching and because I had nothing to do in Cannes, the second time I went, I took a pair of binoculars with me and got a boat over to one of the islands off shore and got back into nature, really. 

I was stuck in this warehouse and I was like, “Well, what am I going to do with my life? Am I going to work in a warehouse forever?” So I started doing a degree at night school, which was really funny, because I started doing the degree at this place called Birkbeck, and immediately, there were three or four other people from other indie bands who’d come to a similar point in their life. I’d keep bumping into people in the lift or on the stairs and going, “Bloody hell, what are you doing here?” (laughter). That was pretty cool. I ended up getting a degree and then getting a Master’s in Taxonomy and Biodiversity, basically zoology. I needed a job and I couldn’t find anything in academia because I was too old. But I wrote to a birdwatching magazine that I read and suggested some articles. I didn’t hear anything back for six months while I looked for other work. Then I got a letter back saying, “Why don’t you write an article for us?” So I did that, and it got the front cover, and the editor offered me a job. So I started working for the magazine for 10 years, and that made me enough contacts and enough of a name that I could go freelance, which is what I do now. I write for various wildlife and bird watching magazines over here. Sometimes in other countries, but mostly here.

In the meantime, I reactivated The Wolfhounds. We did a couple of reunion shows that went really well. Andy [Golding], the guitarist, asked if I’d got any songs and I said, “Well, maybe 200.” This is the thing: I tried to avoid being a musician. I had children, I had to get a job. But I’d got so much into the habit that I’d wake up in the middle of the night and have to write lyrics down, or I’d have to pick up a guitar. I’d suddenly find myself writing a new song. There’s a comedian over here called Stewart Lee, who I know a little bit, and he said to me, “Your art, basically, is a life sentence” 

I love that you’re into birding. And on the topic of Stewart Lee, of course, he’s such a huge music nerd. I love that about him. 

He claims I am. I reckon he is. (laughter).

Can you talk to me a bit about birding? Are there any favorite birds that you’ve been able to find?

I just enjoy it and try and see what I can. I’ve been birding in New York a bunch now and Texas and so forth. The magazine used to send me on trips, which was great. I went to Australia with them. And on my own kind of holidays and money I went to the Gambia and Madagascar and places like this. The only continent I haven’t been to yet, weirdly, is South and Central America. I’ve never been anywhere there and I’d really love to go.

But there’s no favorite. I just try to enjoy it. It’s like most things you get into. You get into music and suddenly you’re into all the obscure stuff and you’re trying to find rare records and hear songs that haven’t been released yet. It’s the same thing with birding. You start to identify the most tricky-to-identify species and go to the most obscure ends of the earth. Birding’s taken me to much weirder and way-out places than being in music ever did, and I’ve met way more interesting people as well. If you’re in a band, you only ever meet musicians and people in the record business. I went to Turkey last year on a family holiday, but I had a few days to go birding. I ended up in the mountains in central Turkey drinking homemade yogurt with this goat herder, trying to communicate with the three words of English that he knew and the two Turkish words I knew. That’s so much more fun than drinking some beers with an indie band that you half-like one of their songs (laughter).

Where’s your favorite place that birding has taken you?

All those places, really. There’s always a new place. There’s great places in Britain, too. But I love Madagascar, and I only ever saw the north of it, really; I’d love to see the whole island. Even though I’ve been to New York a few times, and been to Texas, I still haven’t birded in North America properly. I’d love to do Alaska right down to California. I’ve toured there, and I saw pelicans out of the tour bus window, but I’ve never actually been there just for the sake of seeing wildlife. 

So I enjoy that very much, and I make a substantial part of my living writing about that stuff now, which is a meager living, but I get by. And weirdly, because of all the reissues and the constant new releases and royalties coming through, it means I can make part of my living out of music now, which was a dream when I was doing it the first time around. I can justify doing music now. And the solo stuff, which I’m really proud of, is going really well.

It’s a more limited world now, in some respect. Even though the internet has opened the world up, the world is shrinking as far as being able to play. It’s so much harder, because we had Brexit. I used to just hop on a ferry and tour Europe for months. I cannot do that now. America is a lot harder, and it costs thousands to get work permits for America, whereas you lucky guys can come and play here for about $25 (laughter). There’s a kind of imbalance there, which is annoying because I got so used to playing in America. I feel like a big part of my audience is missing and doesn’t know about what I do now. And I wish they did, because I’m very proud of it.

I’m kind of trying to reinvent folk and blues. It doesn’t sound like anyone else, I think. But you can hear other influences that weren’t in Moonshake coming through. I don’t know if you’ve listened to it at all, and you don’t have to.

I have heard it. It’s funny hearing all this because you have a song called “The Parrot,” and I didn’t even realize you were such a wildlife person. 

Yes, but “The Parrot” is not about a parrot. It’s about a kind of client journalist. It does creep in though. Even in that song, “The Parrot,” which is about client journalism, it does mention magpies and kites and so forth. My interest in nature has definitely encroached on the music, but it’s also tempered by the fact that I’ve only ever lived in the city or in the suburbs, so it’s always kind of polluted. It’s never the wilderness or anything. It's always something that’s touched by mankind.

Do you feel like your experiences with birding and this profession have reoriented how you think about making music?

Yes. I feel like I’ve gone back to when I was 11 years old, when I’d just discovered music, but I was also wandering around the fields seeing lizards and birds. I used to have a little menagerie when I was about 10 or 11 years old. I had newts, what you’d call salamanders. I had a slow worm, which is a kind of legless lizard. I had a bat at one point, I had a gallinule at another, and I had a stoat. I basically had little buckets and tanks with different creatures in them. And at the same time, I was discovering music. I kind of feel like as an adult, I’ve regressed back to that and it feels like what I’ve always been doing makes sense now.

A lot of The Wolfhounds songs are set in childhood and describing times in parks. And some of the stuff in Moonshake feels like it’s pointing in that direction. I feel like I’m kind of culminating what I do now. Even the solo stuff, even though it's got all that folk and bluesy stuff and maybe even African influences, I’ve still got samples going on there. I’ve still got guest vocalists. It’s kind of like an organic version of Moonshake. If you listen to them altogether, you could hear a thread going through it, or I can anyway.

I think it’s exciting for you to recognize that. In certain ways, you’re the same person that you have always been, and it’s just come out in different ways in different projects throughout your life. 

Yeah. I’ve got focus now. In a way, I feel like I had so little of it sometimes. But what you are still comes out, whether you like it or not. I know that now and I’ve got focus, so I sound more like me and no one else than I have before, which is quite pleasing. It’s what you’re aiming for in any creative endeavor: to get something out of yourself, not adopt things from other people.

Is there anything that we didn’t talk about today that you wanted to talk about?

No, because the thing I always wanted to talk about in interviews is what we just talked about. Those last few sentences, really, about how you can combine the influence of the natural world into your ostensibly electric, urban music. I’m doing what I did instinctively, just more consciously now. I’m bringing folklore and history into it, having all these influences bonded together in songs. And having sets of songs that all go together, but all sound different. That’s what I’ve always wanted to talk about, but now I can because I actually do it (laughter).

One question that I always end all my interviews with is something that I ask my students. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?

People always think that artistic people are in love with themselves and narcissistic. I have no love for myself really, at all. I really don’t. I’m not one of those people who gazes at themselves in the mirror going, “You’re brilliant.” (laughter). So I don’t have anything I love about myself. I have things that I’m proud about. My tenacity. I wasn’t always tenacious. I’m proud nowadays that I manage to balance being a full-on creative person with bringing up children. There’s a lot of artists out there that are useless parents. I think that my proudest thing is that I’m a good dad, and I still have had the output I have, at the quality that I put into it. I’m proud of that. I know it sounds boring.

Nah, it’s such an important reality for anyone who is going to be an artist. 

There’s a quote from a famous writer, Cyril Connolly. I can’t remember exactly how it goes, but basically, he says that the pram in the hall stops his creativity. I’m like, “Not really, work ‘round it” (laughter). As an artist, you are selfish. You want time to yourself, you want time to think, you want time to work, but you wouldn’t have anything to write about if you didn’t interact with the world.

That’s the thing that’s confusing to me about people who want to be an artist and nothing else. You miss out on so many other experiences life has to offer. I’m a music and film critic, but I would never consider doing that as my main career, because I learn so much as a science teacher. Last year, I was able to go to Belize to research bats, which is not something you could ever do if you were just a music journalist.

I’m looking around, I’ve got a copy of the birds of Belize somewhere (laughter). Which I was given, but I’ve always had my eye on it, thinking that I’ll go and use it one day.

I have to say, I have so many friends who haven’t had children because they’ve made that decision. They say, “I’m not going to have children, I’m going to concentrate on my creative life.” And I think that’s a much harder decision for a woman to make. I’m different from a lot of people. I’m quite a hands-on dad. I’ve been very involved with my kids, but you can’t help but think, no matter how much you try, it’s always a woman who’s bearing the child, it’s likely to be her who’s nursing and looking after it initially, while you go off and earn some money for the child and her. And that takes up much more time. I might find a few hours on a weekend where I can play guitar or write some lyrics, but a mother is going to have to try a lot harder to find that space and time. That’s not because of any intention to foist work onto a mother. But I think that, initially at least, the woman has got more work to do when the child’s first born, partly because she’s going to be nursing it. That’s the unfairness of it. I probably know more women musicians and artists and writers who’ve given up the idea of having children to do their art because they know that the job of being a parent will be just that little bit harder for them than it will be for a father. But even so, I know plenty of women who have had kids and still create.

I’m really excited about this birding aspect of your life.

I don’t know what it’s like in America, but nature writing in Britain is going through a bit of a renaissance at the moment. It’s become quite popular and there are a lot of professional nature writers, most of whom I don’t like, if I’m honest. I’m more old school. I like Jared Diamond and Barry Lopez and these people. There are some good new ones like Helen Macdonald, but most of them seem to have an idyllic, Garden of Eden view of nature, which says to me that they probably don’t spend much time in it. Because what nature is, is dirt and shit and filth and blood. Most nature writers, I do not get that from. But it was there in some of the older stuff. I’m not saying that you’re out there being a macho man amongst all the tigers bringing down baby elephants (laughter). I’m just saying that if you watch birds and mammals and other creatures long enough, you see them injured, dying, eating each other, shitting, and fucking. I don't see that reflected in nature writing. I see how the mist envelops the old oak tree, and that kind of rubbish (laughter).

It’ll probably be a while, and I’ll probably regret saying this, but I’ve been trying to write stuff that’s more reflective of what I see in nature myself. I don’t get paid to do that, so I have to find the spare time to do it, which takes quite a long time. But I don’t see the nature I’ve seen all over the world reflected. I’ve been in rainforests that are full of life, and I looked down and it’s nothing but fucking plastic and condoms and abandoned toys and stuff all all over the leaf litter. It is in some books, but a lot of them are kind of wishy-washy and hippie-ish.

Moonshake’s Eva Luna has been remastered and reissued by Beggars Arkive. David Callahan’s solo music can be found on Bandcamp. The Wolfhounds’ music can also be found at Bandcamp. Callahan has written multiple books that have been published by Bloomsbury, including A History of Birdwatching in 100 Objects (2014), Where to Watch Birds in East Anglia (2021), and Where to Watch Birds in Southeast England (2024).

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Photo by Joel Goodman

Thank you for reading the 127th issue of Tone Glow. Birders… it’s our time.

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