Monster Bobby-Gaps-Hypnote

GENRE: POP/GLITCHTRONICA
One of the earliest artists and “musical activists” in the Brighton scene that has spawned so many great bands of recent years, including several he has played in, it’s actually amazing that Monster Bobby has only just completed his debut album. It’s a full-blown studio experience far beyond that which fans of his solo shows or singles are used to. Expect the same endearing humour, dry wit, willfully obtuse song titles, unruly samples, emotional directness and of course catchy melodies, except done in a proper studio (OK, so it was mainly done in his mate’s bedroom…). Much unlike his live shows, which basically involve Bobby with a guitar versus Dr. Sample, his electronic foil which seemingly also has a formidable mind of its own, the album instead features an ambitious studio assemblage of musicians and instrumentation (bassoon, glockenspiel, tuba, cornet for a start). The album takes the pop sensibilities for which he is well-known and a bit of the “oddball singer/songwriter”, whilst channeling in the spirits of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, the groundbreaking consortium of electronic music pioneers that Bobby has extensively studied and interviewed over the years and will be essaying the topic amongst those contributing to the upcoming book “Hauntologies”. According to Bobby, “so the irony (not foreseen at the time I came up with the title) of an album called Gaps is that one of its notable features will be, precisely, the almost complete absence of any gaps between tracks, each one segued into the next with the aid of field recordings and other assorted noises and soundscapes.” Monster Bobby was able to help breathe some badly-needed life into the Brighton music scene, beginning in the late 90’s with a series of DIY club nights called Totally Bored or “TB”, Monster Bobby bristles at the idea of being tagged as a Promoter in any sort of pejorative sense: “TB started with a bunch of people in bands in Brighton being pissed off with the local music scene—in particular, the current state of the local indie radio show ‘Totally Wired’ (hence – Totally Bored)— and one or two local promoters. “The bands that were initially involved in TB were The Feltro Media (who soon changed their name to the Electric Soft Parade), British Sea Power, The Tenderfoot, No Bardot (who after some changes in line-up and sound became Restless List), The Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster and my old band Ice-Nine, and all these bands crystallised around a studio called Mockin’ Bird Studio, which was like our clubhouse.” Run by Marc Beatty, bassist in Ice-Nine and keyboardist in Tenderfoot (and later, member of the Brakes, who is also heard playing a bit of bass on Gaps), the nights eventually spread along with Monster Bobby’s considerable academic interests to London’s New Cross where it grew into a zine and a radio show.

Monster Bobby is also starting his own label called Little Other Records, which will be available exclusively though Hypnote Recording Concern.

“A curious fellow”, “A bit of a spazzer” , “Svengali”, “Joe Meek”,
“Frankenstein”, “Phil Spector-esque”, “simple but heavenly pop
hooks”, “quite charming”, “charming, endearing and often
downright funny”, “pop impresario”, “mastermind”,
“Promoter”, “Manager”, “a bit, um, different…”
– various

“Monster Bobby injects mechanical beats with supreme
organic emotion and all this without the need of a carefully
choreographed dance routine.”
– Jed Shepherd/AudioJunkies

“Frantic lovesongs and witty observational pop”
– Drowned in Sound

“Proving that you can sound different without losing grip on
popular appeal is a difficult thing in these pre-packed times
but I think this guy may just have managed it.”
– Indigoflow.co.uk

“His sound is more a conceptual and offbeat route that is at
times interesting but is an acquired taste.”
– Lumino Magazine

“incredible, hummable and melodic dreamy Pop songs that seem
too shy and modest to show off with overly glitzy productions.”
– Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before

Q&A for Monster Bobby

How have your first few days on the (North) American roads treated you?
Very well, thank you. by way of conforming to some sort of gross english stereotype though i feel i must complain about the weather. The first two days the air was so hot and thick it felt like breathing inside an old sock and since then it’s just pissed down with rain, so…and the streets are all too long and straight. i think it was Dickens who found himself in the USA thinking he’d give half the world for a crooked road..but the gigs have been good and the crowds have been lovely and smoosh have been amazing and there really are some great second hand bookshops in toronto… so i’m not really complaining (much)…
You’ve been described as a “musical activist” in the Brighton scene. In your opinion, what exactly does musical activism entail?
hmm…well, i don’t think that’s a term i would have used myself but i guess it just means i do stuff or have done stuff. i have been ‘active’ in some way. i’ve been putting on gigs in brighton and playing in bands and doing zines and things for about ten years now so i suppose that constitutes some sort of activity. Now touring the world, you‘re obviously spending less and less time in Brighton. What’s it been like to leave behind a scene that you’ve played such a prominent role in for so long?
Unfortunately it would seem that brighton has somewhat left itself behind. so many good venues have closed down recently due to noise complaints and licence issues or being bought up by boutique hotels and converted into private members bars for local ‘celebrities’…Ever since getting the city status a few years ago brighton has been turning to shit really. There used to be this great little area called the North Laine which was full of independent cafes and record shops and book shops and so forth and now there‘s a starbucks and a wagamamas in the middle of it and the good shops are getting driven out because they can’t keep up with the increase in rents. and this is indicative of a much wider malaise. you can’t really call it gentrification as brighton has always been pretty gentrified, never had any real industry or economic purpose, but something’s been going wrong. and BIMM hasn’t helped (the Brighton Institute of Modern Music that opened up a few years ago in order to teach kids how to ‘make it’ in the ‘music industry’….)
Having championed bands as a promoter and lent your talents to other projects as a songwriter and musician, how does it feel to finally have your own “debut” album coming out?
bloody great. it’s been really nice to do something just the way i wanted to without having to appeal to anyone else’s tastes and sensibilities.
Has Gaps been finished long enough for you to view it objectively? What are your thoughts and feelings on the album at this time?
well no not really.. i don’t think i can ever really view anything i’ve done objectively – in fact i’m not totally sure that the very idea of an objective viewpoint on anything isn’t something of a myth. aren’t our perspectives on the world always somewhat partial and engaged? need that necessarily impair their truth status? but i think it’s a good record, i’m pretty proud of it and it’s turned out pretty well exactly how i wanted and expected it to. i’ve no idea what anybody else is gonna think of it though…
There seems to be a good deal of humour in your songwriting. Would you agree that the Brits are more adept at credibly integrating humour into pop music than their American cousins? If so, any idea why?
no i don’t think that’s necessarily true. i mean one of the biggest influences, in terms of humour, is Tom Lehrer. and there’s just as much dreadful chest beatingly earnest cock rock in the uk as there is in the states. only in england we call it indie for some reason…what i’m aiming for i suppose is to get that same sort of mix of humour and pathos as you might find in a charlie chaplin film, perhaps there is something english about that.
What attracted you to an upstart label such as Hypnote?
surely the question is what attracted hypnote to me. i’m a musician, i take what work i can get. it’s not like there was some sort of huge signing war over me. but david’s not such an upstart – he’s been doing all sorts of stuff for years. he knows what he’s doing.
What can you tell me about Hauntologies, your upcoming book? It’s come to my attention that the BBC Radiophonic Workshop was responsible for the original Dr. Who theme. Was this an early introduction to the Workshop for you?
there’s a bit of confusion here. hauntologies is the working title of a book being put together by my friend Mark featuring essays about a number of subjects by a number of different people, including one short piece by me about the workshop. I wrote my masters dissertation on the radiophonic workshop and i was lucky enough to be able to interview a lot of the people who worked there from the fifties to the nineties. i think a lot of the music for dr who was some of the strangest music that has ever been on television and had a massive, if somewhat subterranean, unconscious, influence on the course of british music ever since. i think strange synth sounds were accepted as ‘normal’ in britain a fair bit easier and earlier than elsewhere partly because of the creeping influence of the workshops music, not just for dr who, but for countless schools broadcasts, radio serials, interval signals and other quite mundane spaces.
Would it be safe to assume that the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’s brand of sound effects has influenced the bleeps and chirps that colour the tracks on Gaps?
yeah, sure. i mean the two areas that i was really consciously drawing on whilst making the album were that kind of era of quite primitivist electronics, not just the RW but also old KPM library records, Moog novelty records like all the Wendy Carlos stuff, the Sonic Arts Union, the musique concrete of Schaeffer and Henry in France and so forth; and also traditional english folk music, of the anne briggs, topic records school.
There’s been mention of your “serious composer” aspirations. Is the additional instrumentation on the album – bassoon, tuba and cornet – indicative of this ambition?
What’s the next stage in this pursuit?
i’d been thinking about getting brass and woodwind instruments involved in my stuff for a while cos i’d been toying with the idea of having some sort of ‘band’ to playlive with me that didn’t involve yer tradional drums and bass n so forth and actually i think the choice of these particular instruments was more due to my interest in the pre-pop, or pre-rock pop: popular singers from wartime like al bowly, and the old swing big bands. as for being a ‘serious composer’ well to a degree that implies that i don’t take what i’m doing now seriously which would not be true but i will say that i probably wont be writing two minute pop songs all my life, or at least not just two minute pop songs. i guess i’m still searching for the kind of musical language that any major departure from what i am doing now would take though. it would be very hard for me to assimilate the kind of hyper complex musical language of the composers who i’m currently most fond of, people like Iannis Xenakis, Michael Finnisy, Penderecki. but there’s already been an element of some of John Cage or Cornelius Cardew’s ideas in the way i’ve been doing things…
You were once quoted as saying that most interesting music is made in a “collective fashion.” Given this, what made you choose to pursue the staunchly solo route (if we don’t include Dr. Sample)?
i’d be curious to see the context of that statement. i’ve certainly always been fascinated with the kind of factory style production of motown or the brill building or studio one in jamaica, or the kind of decentred polyphony of balinese gamelan music or west african drumming. i make music on my own for largely practical reasons – it means i have to cancel fewer gigs and spend less money on rehearsing in studios or hiring vans. but i is already a crowd, my subjectivity as a songwriter and performer is very fluid and polymorphously perverse. i think you can hear that particularly in the voice – i’d say i’ve got at least three or four different voices on that album.
The knowing humour in your lyrics (and song titles) seems to toy with the traditional notions of pop songs. Would it be fair to suggest that you’re actively playing with the established framework of pop music and distorting it to your own whims rather than seeking out something wholly original?
i’m sorry but i fail to see the difference. how else would you come up with something “wholly original” as you put it (which seems already like something of a mythical proposition) without playing with and distorting the currently existing forms? can you give me a single example of something being created ex nihilo? i think this would require a belief in god, no? any kind of originality requires a careful and patient study of the existing forms ro else you will find yourself unconsciously replicating them in the most boring and pedestrian manner.
questions © Curtis Woloschuk, Tooth and Dagger
http://www.hypnote.com/monsterbobby.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_Bobby
http://www.myspace.com/monsterbobby