Following the release of their new EP NOTOFEARTH, Reshma Eyafe exchanged some words with London blues punk band Colossus.
Reshma: If not Earth, then where? And more importantly, why?
John: For some time, my methods of escape have been a new TV series or a video game. Lately, due to extreme shifts in our geopolitics, such blue pill activity has been less possible and hard to justify, even if it’s understandably human.
Rob: Maybe there’s a bit of “anywhere but earth” going on because of all the bad stuff going on in the world at the moment. Maybe there’s this desire for something else.
John: The real world is a reality soaked in US propaganda that runs through Hollywood and Western media. Realising this can drive a person to lose themselves in their art. The real task is to wake up to how one’s imagination is soaked with imperialist fantasy. Being black in the music industry definitely opens one’s eyes to that. So, beam me up Scotty… but only for a while, because there’s a lot to do on Earth, even if I don’t wanna come back.
Reshma: You are actively involved in numerous campaigns here on Earth. The most recent is to pressure The Great Escape to return the money Barclays Bank gave them to host their new music festival. How much money are we talking about, and what would you like to see happen?
Rob: The little I have had time to look into does indeed seem worthy but I haven’t seen enough to suggest Barclays are specifically worse than other big banks and hedge funds. You never know if other corporate entities are using this as a way to damage a competitor. So, I still need to investigate the interests behind each source of information.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting anyone else is just towing a line. I’m certainly proud of the band for being involved, and I hope the campaign applies the pressure needed to make a difference.
John: As far as I’m aware, the focus of the campaign is for The Great Escape to drop Barclays as a sponsor. I wasn’t aware of the emphasis being the returning of any money.
Barclays is keen to pink wash via events such as Pride. Such a PR move isn’t easy to sell to an audience that has become ever more cynical about capitalism, the Occupy movement being a significant moment of realisation. How Barclays will attempt to blood wash this growing threat to their brand is a big question.
How To Catch A Pig is a platform providing a list of festivals that have ethical sponsors as well as events that do not. The good news is that there are multiple options for artists, labels and audiences to congregate and share art without associating themselves with the likes of Barclays.
It’s constructive to exit a partnership where two or more parties do not have a shared goal or are pulling in different directions in order to achieve it. Barclays has a mission statement of acquiring capital, seemingly with no line being drawn at the sponsored killing of uncountable lives. And so, I stand with any endeavour to shine a light on what needs to be dismantled.
There are artists who are drawn to the aesthetics of rebellion rather than the ongoing practice of organising, but we must train our imaginations to conjure images of working with others in order to manifest results.
Also, there’s never enough time to research everything completely, as something or someone closer to home will understandably require our immediate attention. That’s why organising into teams (for research, marches, book clubs etc) is effective.
Reshma: Speaking of teamwork; as we have covered the fluidity of the Colossus line-up in our video interviews last year, can you talk us through the new collaborations. The EP artwork appears to mark a new aesthetic for the band. Are your superhero days over?
Rob: Superheroes are lots of fun but they feel like a solution for a simpler time. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll not be giving up on being a nerd any time soon, but I think we’ve grown a little tired of the whole straight up good guy/bad guy dynamic. Real life is a little more complicated and nuanced.
In terms of the collaboration, we still work with a range of musicians and producers and love mixing it up. NOTOFEARTH features five other musicians, none of whom appeared on The Gods Hate Colossus, and most of the tracks are with a new producer, Dave Mountain (The Attic Sounds). John and I still form the foundation of the sound but there are other influences on there.
As you point out, we also got to work with a visual artist. Emma Steele is an incredible photographer that we know from putting on shows with back in the day. She was kind enough to let us use some of her artwork for the EP cover.
It’s really worth people taking a look through her instagram, it’s super otherworldly, so I think we got really lucky being able to collaborate like this.
Reshma: As you both express, collaboration and teamwork makes life that much deeper. Are there any collaborative tools or sharing platforms that you use or that you’re excited about? Are you satisfied with the way in which you’re able to connect with your audience?
John: We use Instagram and Twitter a lot.
There’s a Palestinian journalist called Wizard Bisan who reports directly from Gaza. It’s so important that people exercise the ability to platform voices from the ground as we often view news through a Western lens, not to mention the bias of a news channel.
That said, there are some Western pundits, commentators and artists who make Twitter worthwhile. You, Chardine Taylor Stone, Owen Jones, and Caitlin Johnstone are prime examples.
Facebook isn’t a good place for debate these days. It’s rife with bad faith arguments and ever since 2020, people are less willing to engage there, for good reason.
Reactions to our posts vary wildly. I have a few ideas as to why. I’ll always be more satisfied with offline encounters.
Reshma: What’s your preferred platform for audience members to purchase your music, and why?
John: Giving musicians 100 percent of the profits on #bandcampfriday makes Bandcamp our preferred choice (below is the featured track from NOTOFEARTH – Joyzine)
We’ve yet to take advantage of the opportunity to connect with fans on Bandcamp, and admittedly people are more aware of us on other platforms. However, we look forward to having physical releases and connecting with fans over the platform of a real life merch desk, ha! That being said, we have some way to go before that demand legitimises a supply.
Reshma: If you wish to speed up that demand by inviting listeners to buy your EP, how best would you sell each song in a single sentence?
Rob: Great question and exercise. I hope I don’t have too much fun answering!
Fine Sky Night
Feeling overwhelmed by the daily stresses of late stage capitalism? Try taking a walk amongst trees to see if maybe some fresh air can lift those trodden on spirits!
The Mothership
Ever had a feeling that maybe the world isn’t where you should be? Try our new alien abduction experience! Sure to impress!
Sad Little Soul
Love can be many things. Fun, exciting, mournful, or even forlorn. With ‘Sad Little Soul,’ you too can feel disconnected and out of sync with the flow of the universe. Cue that sweet, sweet vicarious nostalgia!
Green Card
A great mind once said ‘just because you’re paranoid, don’t mean they’re not after you.’ He really meant it. They actually might be after you. Make sure you’re ready.
Goo
Feeling blue? Has the world got you down? Don’t worry, it’s nothing compared to the inner turmoil, detachment and fragility of the mind described in these lyrics. You’ll feel better knowing that at least someone else out there knows what you’re going through. We’re all down here together you know.
Well, I’m sold – but, of course, I already was. Thank you for indulging me… So, those are the narratives; let’s talk music composition. You define Colossus as a ‘blues punk band’ – please talk me through this.
John: The idea of using a loud guitar to shock an audience out of apathy or grab their attention for a heartfelt lyric is increasingly hard these days. As a global culture we’re accustomed to that trick. I think using blues structures to give people a false sense of security helps to freshen up the punk genre.
‘Green Card’ is an example of how we do this. That intro is nothing like what happens in the song’s main body. Arguably the juxtaposition works because of the cross pollination of blues and sneering punk occurring in my vocal. Rob’s voice appears in each bridge which has a character all of its own and yet, despite him not drawing from the blues, it’s easiest to label ‘Green Card’ as a blues punk tune.
Colossus and the blues go way back actually.
Rob and I used to attend regular jam sessions in a bar on Kingly Street called Ain’t Nothin But the Blues. I would go up to the microphone and make up lyrics and figure out different ways of phrasing across various blues forms. When I wasn’t singing I’d be in the audience taking notes.
This was eighteen odd years ago. After about a year our interests in other genres such as psytrance would take over our social activities. We used to dance in fields for hours. My voice in particular held onto a lot of the ideas located in blues, particularly Chicago and Delta.
If you look at our song ‘The Mothership’, the seemingly wild punk approach is really a blues idea in plain view. I for one wanted the same vibe as Nirvana’s ‘Aneurysm’, but with a repeated vocal refrain that wouldn’t be out of place at Ain’t Nothin But the Blues. The use of the labels punk and blues are more of a mission statement as to the parameters of the vocals. I owe Muddy Waters and Kurt Cobain a lot.
I love the note bends and the exasperation in Cobain’s voice, especially on a number of cuts off ‘In Utero.’ You can hear how he was inspired by John Lennon in those choices, who in turn was lifting those expressions from Little Richard.
I love deciphering the translations of blues via popular artists. My guitar solo in ‘Fine Sky Night’ gives away how much I’ve listened to Robby Krieger of The Doors. Sure, not a strict blues musician but that genre runs deep in his work too. It always goes back to the blues.
Muddy Waters had a distinctive vibrato that influenced my own. It sounds like I’m laughing, especially on quiet songs such as ‘Sad Little Soul’ – which is a special one. We’re so glad it fits on NOTOFEARTH, as it’s the first song we’ve put out that is secure enough to stay chilled and reveal more of our blues influence.
Reshma: Blues and punk are traditionally against the status quo. There’s often talk about how awful the music industry is, and I like the idea of independent artists – but I also think we can and should change the industry from within. Do you have thoughts on this?
Rob: I’m a fan of building things up to be better than their current state, rather than burning the current thing to the ground in the hopes that some phoenix will rise from the ashes. It’s usually not a phoenix, it’s more often some sort of bully figure that uses chaos as a weapon to monopolise.
Napster burnt it all to the ground and then Spotify swooped in to “save the day” – heralded as the “saviour of the music biz”, ending the record label gatekeepers’ iron grip as the arbiter of music distribution, and allowing independent artists to publish their own music and “fight back” – well, that worked out great.
That said, I think there is something to be said for going off and just making something new and better and different, and just playing a whole other game entirely. We could do this with governments and borders right?
The current systems are really straining at the seams and I haven’t heard any alternative ideas that I feel confident in. It’s mostly just different sides of the same coin, an ideological opposition to the poor state of things, rather than a true alternative.
I’ve been thinking about tribalism a lot lately and how even when we are aware of our bias and limitations, we are still weaponised on a daily basis. Some perverted abstraction of self interest spread out over a population and turned into a kind of sports event.
I constantly feel like I’m asking myself, where are the grown-ups that are supposed to be in charge?
I’m a technology guy, so I think that makes me an optimist, but I feel like the rate of technological advancement in AI at the moment “may” give us some better tools… if we can manage to not screw it all up of course.
I watched an interesting TED talk by Mustafa Suleyman (CEO of Microsoft AI) the other day, about the future of AI. He was talking about how you could have AI agents managing and streamlining many parts of our lives soon.
An example he gave was that let’s say you want to arrange a social gathering for an elderly neighbour, this could be automated with a community AI agent for the neighbourhood which can interact with every member of the community’s personal scheduler bots which are then privately checking in with the personalised and family mental wellbeing bots to see whether such a gathering is viable and beneficial, making all the arrangements based on the needs of the community.
The point is to enable the abstraction of interaction and understanding without losing the details. I think a lot of the time this is where things go wrong. A politician says “your life is hard because of immigrants. I will fix the immigrants by sending them to Rwanda”, and people listen because they feel squeezed (whether culturally, economically or politically) and they hear an abstracted reasoning as to why they feel bad and what can be done about it. Abhorrent rhetoric aside, it works because we need an abstraction of interaction. We’re not well equipped to live at the scale of society that we do. Evolution doesn’t work that fast. So we need the abstracted problem framing, and we need the abstracted solutions, that’s all we really have capacity for and that’s okay, we’re only human. The issue is that the detail gets forgotten about and ignored and swept under the rug, so we become very easy to weaponise.
If we had a system of managing the detail in a way where every stakeholder is advocated for at many levels and in an automated way, where all they have to deal with consciously is the simplified abstraction (but with a level of transparency where the details can be observed and critiqued at whatever level makes sense for every member of society), then that would be pretty cool.
To be clear, I’m not saying this would actually work in practice. Humans are selfish greedy creatures, and it’s important to see that the companies and nations who are building these technologies are out for themselves and are primarily interested in securing their own dominance and power, so it’s not a panacea or anything. I just feel like we aren’t doing a great job at the moment and it’s important to try and look forward with hope and optimism, rather than just looking backwards and thinking “Left” or “Right” or “my side” and “their side”.
John: So, to answer the first part of your question, Reshma – sure, there is merit in an ‘infiltrate and reform’ mindset. My main bugbear with that is that to get into positions of influence, the good faith actor has to gel with people already in power.
The music business is as hierarchical as the film and comic book industry. Imagine a workplace dependent upon getting drunk or doing drugs with the right people in order to make headway?
People don’t want to talk about this much, but a teetotal musician has quite a few more hills to climb, not to mention the racism. I relate to English Teacher’s ‘R&B’ track on that last point. Alternative music has some way to go before it can pose as the summit of progressive action.
Freelance lifestyles often intersect rather haphazardly with self-destructive tendencies, which often end up being a way of life. Now, imagine what happens when those people get power? How do you reform such a state of affairs when the culture has normalised toxicity, and actively celebrates it.
Rob is right regarding Napster, and if only the right people were in control of that great leveller. I do however find later comments disagreeable, although they are understandable:
‘I haven’t heard any alternative ideas which I feel really confident in.’
No protest group or ideology is tailor-fit for everyone. That’s why a constant search is useful, and when I talk of that discovery, I’m talking about organising in real life. Only in person can these ideas become more nuanced, to ensure the strongest of foundations for solidarity.
Natalie Wynn a.k.a Contrapoints recently tweeted about empathy for the students on campuses in regards to people critiquing from the sidelines. Not that Rob was doing this, but, (and our friendship can take such a critique as we’ve got twenty years of nuanced in-person contact), Rob’s reluctance to organise with a pressure group is seemingly born from awaiting the perfect one to join.
The trick would be to locate a few shared goals and discuss more effective ways to achieve the mutual goal as one sees fit.
Without any experience of such organisation, one’s preferred reality can become this abstract homework that one will never get round to beyond essays, videos, books and films. Who knows, the movement to make the world better could use some innovation that fresh minds – especially tech minds – are potentially equipped to offer.
We can chat about what ‘left’ and ‘right’ is whilst we work shoulder to shoulder.
Social links: Colossus | Emma Steele | How To Catch A Pig
Photograph: Santosh
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