Flaming Tunes interviews

Here are the complete transcripts of Tony Herrington’s interviews with Mary Currie, Andrew Jacques and Mick Hobbs, who discuss the CD reissue of Flaming Tunes, the 1985 cassette written and recorded by the former This Heat member Gareth Williams in collaboration with Currie.

Mary Currie interviewed by Tony Herrington, April 2009

TH: The songs on Flaming Tunes sound like they were made on the spot, and laid down on the fly. Was that the way it was?

MC: Not exactly on the spot. The earliest ones, for example “Beguiling The Hours”, began with a fragment of a tune – found on a little Casio keyboard – (a melody?) expanded on and grew… Things would go back and forth. “Golden Age” was the sum of many parts – literary and musical, and was offered to [former This Heat member] Charles Bullen to add another dimension. All the tunes grew from fragments – mine or his. Some stuff was captured in the moment with a tape machine ever ready, whereas other stuff evolved through more time-intensive processes.

As you say on the Flaming Tunes website the music emerges from a very different energy to This Heat. Could you elaborate on that a bit? I mean, how did you view the songs and music? Where did they come from?

Gareth and I had renewed our friendship after some time apart. We had both had life-changing experiences in very different ways. Gareth experienced incredible discipline in India which focused him [after leaving This Heat circa 1981, Williams moved to India where he studied Kathakali dance]. Repetition – attention to detail – counting – steps – beats – stories – legends. Lots of detail. I had a child, which was an event no one could prepare you for. Exciting, and also demanding and focusing. Although Gareth had been creative through dance, he had missed making music. He invited me to collaborate on a project with him. I had sent him cassettes of singing which he liked a lot. Gareth always valued what I brought to Flaming Tunes, though I had previously never thought of myself as a musician, a position Gareth must have once found himself in with This Heat. Having been around This Heat and sharing some years with Charles Bullen, I had been exposed to a huge amount of music and musicians. It was only in this new context of Flaming Tunes that I felt I began to find my own musical feet. Gareth took charge of technical and structural concerns, but always consulted with me over my preferences. He always encouraged me to look for more, never assumed a superior position. As it says in “The Best Weapon”: “Beware of the friend who becomes a master.” It was a very relaxed time – less harsh than the days before his departure for India.

Are you surprised people are still interested in the music, nearly a quarter of a century on?

I never thought people (apart from friends) were interested back then. We didn’t seem to be looking for external interest. But equally we felt like it needed to extend beyond the living room of [Williams’s house in South London, where much of the music was recorded]. I was certainly surprised to stumble upon an internet discussion forum in 2003 with a Flaming Tunes thread. The contributors were unclear as to what they’d heard – was it This Heat or something else? Through this I made contact with Acute Records in New York City, and realised the extent of global interest in Flaming Tunes. There’s a current revival of interest in domestically produced English music of the 1980s, and listening to it again this week it’s actually quite good!

Have you heard the Diamond Age cover version? What do you think of it?

Love it, intrigued by it – he’s really found the essence and built it up in the same way as we did. Mr Leer [M Leer, the Texas-based musician who recorded a complete cover version of the Flaming Tunes cassette and issued it in 2007 under the name Diamond Age], it seems, has used Flaming Tunes to make some discoveries of his own, and we’re both excited to have come to each other’s attention, albeit at different places and times.

What did you do after Flaming Tunes? Did you continue making music?

After Flaming Tunes – a group?/a cassette? – we worked on many more tunes, with input from Dave Bernez, who contributed as a player but also offered the use of some more sophisticated equipment. That continued until about mid-86, and after that I got into domesticity and more children. My relationship with Gareth became less close and collaborative. Two or three years (maybe more) before Gareth died we did some further collaborations, but the relaxed and special time of the mid-eighties had perhaps gone. There’s still some stuff there though!

Elsewhere and since I’ve contributed to a Kevin Coyne tribute, played in a steel band orchestra, sung at Gareth’s memorial concert, and currently take part in a local singing group and enjoy duetting and harmonies with a friend, still developing a voice!


Andrew Jacques interviewed by Tony Herrington, April 2009

TH: The Flaming Tunes reissue feels like an emotional project for all involved.

AJ: Inevitably it has been, yes. Almost everyone involved in the CD production was a friend of Gareth’s, and it's always been looked at as a tribute to him rather than just a regular reissue project. It entailed a lot of scrabbling around for old photographs, watching old videos and listening to lots of the music again and again. I think this brought up quite a number of old memories for all of us.

It was also begun when Gareth’s partner Nick [Goodall] was still alive, and as he also died [in 2007] before its completion it became a tribute to them both, which is shown on some of the images Mary selected for the booklet, which bring the issue into the present - an idea Nick was always very keen on too, including elements from their recent past rather than just archive. The selection of images and arrangement of the booklet was something Mary was very much pro-active on.

The tape itself began to get re-appraised just after Gareth died. I did some MiniDisc and CD-R copies from a cassette dub Gareth had done for Howard [Jacques], cleaning it up a little bit and adding some EQ. This was passed to Nick and then copies started circulating among various friends.

When Gareth was working with Howard and myself on This Heat projects he always downplayed Flaming Tunes and he was often critical to the point of dismissing his own recordings. We'd be played excerpts of things now and then, [but] anticipating a lukewarm response they would get turned off halfway through and snatched out of the way. Howard and myself were dubbed ‘The Taste Police’ by Gareth and I think he saw us as this pair of hardliners who sat listening to 50Hz buzz at 100dB all day and wouldn't be interested in his melodic material. But Howard eventually coaxed a copy of Flaming Tunes from him after convincing Gareth of his melody-appreciation credentials!

When [in the late 1990s] some bastards put the whole thing out on a bootleg CD and called it ‘This Heat’s final demo recordings’, I suggested to Gareth that we should rush release it officially, to counter act the damage done, but he was just too angry and upset to consider it. When the industry came too close Gareth would always back away and disappear out of view, and this was a good example of how wrong things could be done. It hurt him a lot as it was then stamped with the ‘This Heat demos’ tag and he was always saying to Howard and myself about Flaming Tunes and any other projects, “It's not like This Heat", delivered as if he was really saying, “You won't like it…”

Despite how pleased he was that This Heat received this continued attention and each successive version of the reissues got a wider audience, he was very conscious that the This Heat audience would be expecting a certain role from him, this intensity of overdriven organ, fuzz bass and the shouting from Paper Hats. In this context his consideration of releasing more poppy or melodic material would get put to one side and then shelved altogether.

I guess another element that made it quite a struggle for everyone was the obvious fact that our producer wasn't here. When working on the This Heat CDs Gareth was always very meticulous and precise with detail, even small things that people wouldn't really notice, typography ‘jokes’ that weren't in any way obvious, but there anyhow: the insert for Repeat, which myself and Gareth worked on for weeks, was a very precise construction and actually contains a kind of code in the grid. The presentation had to be 'just so'.

When we came to a first attempt at assembling a CD we found there was no edited master tape still in existence. Trawling through Gareth’s archives eventually revealed two of three original quarter inch reels which contained a lot of material but not many versions as they appeared on the tape. Songs were split into sections pre-splice, quite a few were longer and needed topping and tailing, “Raindrops From Heaven” was just the rain! In the end we had to use a cassette copy as a guide and reshape the materials we had to fit that, literally, in Logic, with the cassette copy on one track and all our assemblage of sections underneath being visually and aurally compared. Tracks had to be re-tuned/speed-corrected, spliced, and the end result is from three different sources using the best available audio from either the reels or first generation cassettes of mixes. Some other adjustments were made at the mastering stage but we always felt that staying true to the feel of the cassette and not cleaning up too much was important. Some sections of songs have a great increase in hiss through the process of successive bouncing on four track, and although we could have removed a lot of that it felt like we'd be sucking the grain and the character out of them. Gareth was interested in process as a method and a lot of the Flaming Tunes recordings are very unselfconscious in their headlong embracing of that quality. It's part of what makes it such a warm album.