There aren’t many bands still actively making new music that have been around longer than Joyzine, and fewer still continuing to innovate and keep their sound fresh. One such band are confusingly named Sheffield quartet The Scaramanga Six, who are celebrating their 30th anniversary this year by releasing two new LPs. The first, GLUT, was released this month to glowing praise from Joyzine’s own Mansell Laidler, who in his review of the album declared it “a wild, smart, and brilliantly executed album”, and rightly so. It will be followed in July by its counterpart, DEARTH.
The Six can always be counted upon for a compelling narrative, and GLUT is no different. Set in a dystopian near future where consumption and convenience rule and effort is anathema, the album matches witty social commentary with at times frankly bonkers musical theatrics.
We asked the band to walk us through the album, track by track.
HAVE YOUR CAKE & EAT IT
Paul Morricone (vocals/guitar) – When we set out on this album, the overall theme was to set it in the near future. A time where today’s obsession with convenience becomes an infatuation and the world ends up eating itself. A place where everything is monetised, and nothing is valued. This was always intended to be the opening track. Have you ever been on LinkedIn recently? It is full of people who are gleeful opportunists, trying to get your attention with their amazing offers. Without any self-respect, these people will milk any cow that comes along. In the near future, children will be taught to ask ‘what can I get out of this situation?’ and every transaction in life will need to be about creating leverage in order to get the best deal. This is now playing out on a grand scale, regardless of consequence. The message is ‘you can have your cake and eat it’.
Steven Morricone (vocals/bass) – Our dear friend and still part-of-the-band-by-the-skin-of-his-teeth rock colleague Stuffy Gilchrist described this one as sounding like a cross between Cardiacs’ ‘Fiery Gun Hand’ and the theme tune to euro game show ‘Going For Gold’. I don’t think he’s far off.
Julia Arnez (guitar/vocals) – This is about greedy bastards, isn’t it? In the future there will be even more of them, and none of them will be intelligent enough to appear on Going For Gold to win a delightful holiday in Mauritius.
P – Our musical approach for this album was ‘maximalism’. That was actually the proto-title for the album. We’ve kept the four-piece guitar band line up at the centre but then pushing things around a bit. My guitars are chopped up and placed in stereo like shreds. Julia appears in the centre with her sledgehammer guitar to whack you over the head. Steve and Gareth deftly anchor the rhythm section in an upbeat shuffle. Then we layer in slabs of other things – brass sections, pianos and our gang vocals. This track feels more upfront and cleaner than usual for us, yet it has all the intent and energy we wanted. Intent is everything.
HULLY GULLY
S – One of our favourite records for any post-gig knees-up is the Bug Out Volume 1 – Sixteen Itchy Twitchy Classics LP. This is a compilation of 1950s American novelty dance records and includes such greats as ‘The Flea’, ‘Chicken Back Twist’ and ‘Beetle Squash’. I strongly suspect we may have very heavily leaned on this record for title and part of the content of this song!
P – I’m not actually sure whether there is any actual meaning in this song at all. It is merely a method to call out some dance moves. That’s why it is so fun. In the near future, where this is set, no songs will have any real meanings anymore. They will simply be generated and we will be made to dance.
J – The one thing that goes round and round is the opening line in my head. I think of Gareth Hunt with his coffee beans having a hernia whilst shouting the ‘how many beans do I have In my hand?’ line as loud as he can in a Coffee advert at scared children.
S – This one is for all the ‘Gareths’ out there – especially our drummer.
BAD TIME MUSIC
P – Have you ever tried to get your work colleagues to your gig? They only usually come once, if at all, then realise what a mistake it was. How do you explain the thing you make to people who are genuinely not interested and would rather have some background ‘feelgood’ music on at an inoffensive level. Now imaging finding yourself in a business networking event full of lots of people – and when you make the mistake of mentioning you are a musician, your heart sinks when they ask ‘oh, what kind of music do you play?’. How do I describe this to a real estate entrepreneur looking to expand their portfolio or a raiki healing consultant…I make bad time music, foreground music and it is constantly blaring out in my mind, even now as you are talking to me.
S – I hear tapes have made a bit of a comeback in recent years. These chunks of plastic with their flimsy wound ribbons of joy were the staple medium of musical consumption and mind-expansion when I was a teenager. Swapping tapes and painstakingly making compilations was a true labour of love – I can’t overstate the impact these things had on my outlook on life. Only the most special content was reserved for the expensive ‘chrome’ ones and only the most personal statement of your own weirdness/misery/self-indulgence was absolutely necessary for inflicting on anyone who may be in earshot of your crackly distorted stereo cassette player. This commitment to ‘art’ may be carried on into adulthood and played out to a greater degree by forming bands and attempting to persuade disinterested family and colleagues to partake in your own brand of unlistenable dirge.
J – I love tapes. I really enjoyed the chanting on this as well. I imagine people revving at the start of a big race when we do that.
CONSUMER CONSUMED
S – Not long back, I visited the British Museum and was privileged enough to handle a real Paleolithic flint hand-axe. Though the axe was fashioned and used by a man over 300,000 years ago, it fit perfectly into my modern hand. Not only was this mind-blowing, but for me was a perfect illustration of just how slow a process evolution is – this ancient guy would have probably been about my size & shape and would have experienced the world with exactly the same senses and mental capabilities as his modern-day counterpart, yet look at the absolute mind-fuck life being a human being has become in just a few recent decades. I wonder whether he would be able to adapt and survive if born today, let alone in the near future? Anyway, this song paints an imaginary picture of rapidly accelerated evolution where our species has physical and mental adaptations for the sole purpose of mindless consumption.
J – This is another song about lazy bastards, but in the future. The very near future. Unless you are physically disabled or live in the Antarctic, there’s no excuse for ordering those ready-meals. A world of people with absolutely no imagination or mind of their own.
P – For me, this is the centrepiece of the album. The world has now eaten itself and the consumer is consumed. The lyrics are playful, if a little blatant, but tell the story of how humans will devolve into a single purpose – to consume.
SOMEONE ELSE’S PROBLEM
P – The other issue with consumption is the mess you create doing it. And in the future, the things we throw away may become so sophisticated they could have souls of their own. So this is sung from the point of view of a piece of rubbish. I hate the idea that by simply chucking something away, you are absolving all responsibility for it. Another song that addresses this theme beautifully is ‘Broken Household Appliance National Forest’ by Grandaddy.
S – So this song is set somewhere between that one and ‘Nothing but Flowers’ by Talking Heads then? I think this could also be interpreted as a reference to Douglas Adam’s ‘Somebody Else’s Problem Field’ – a sci-fi cloaking device devised to hide something logically irksome in plain sight.
AND YOU’RE BACK IN THE ROOM
P – In this song, I am narrating the life of the future consumer. It has been a very long time since they questioned anything they do and they simply go along with whatever is presented to them, much like a blind mole rat stumbling upon a worm in darkness.
S – Much like many of our other songs, this one contains a great many layers of arrangement and texture lifted directly from the original demo version and then incorporated into the ‘proper’ studio version. Dave Draper was very enthusiastic about this method (also used quite extensively on our previous album Worthless Music) as, despite the often crude approach, it allows us to retain the magic of creation. The delay on the bass is a nod to Stranglers La Folie album and the studio recording features both Gareth and Paul on full and partial drum kits recorded together.
GIMME ADULATION
P – This is a song about sycophants. Imagine the Sex Pistols had succeeded. As they boated down the Thames, people actually stopped and decided upon anarchy. A British revolution then ensued and all of the monarchy were eliminated. This immediately put all the royal correspondents and commentators out of work, along with butlers and gamekeepers alike. They all needed somewhere to go, so they then made lords of all the punks to create a new punk rock monarchy. Now, the commentators, journalists and general hangers-on could reinvent themselves as punks and appear whenever someone important died again. The mourning could be played out, along with any photo opportunities, to the admiring public who demanded these acts of national sorrow. There’s always someone they can wheel out to commentate on things when someone dies.
S – The title also has a ring of proto-punk legends, The Stooges don’t you think?
DIMINISHING RETURNS
S – Imagine if you will a society that turns a blind ear to those that profit from crisis to the point that they will allow those same people to engineer crisis in order to create profit. The true motives of these engineers are often concealed by a barrage of bluster and distraction from those in their pay – sound strangely familiar? This one is yet another hangover song from a recent national act of self-sabotage that brought massive short-term gains for those that knew what was coming and could afford to gamble without real consequence.
S – Musically, we have culturally appropriated the samba rhythms of Brazil, but using socially-driven percussion instruments gathered from a life-changing trip to Cuba. Personally, I would like to cut off the ballbag of every hedge fund manager and fashion them into maracas.
J – I wanted to invoke the spirit of my favourite James Last Polka Party albums, where you hear people singing along or shouting ‘oi’ on the recordings but so far away that they are barely audible. We love James Last. It is all so joyfully mild and you can imagine our older relatives in the seventies dancing about the living room with party hats on to his records. So we regularly do this at home. This is why I did a big ‘oi’ as far away from the microphone as possible at the end of this song.
CULTURAL CANNIBAL
P – Rubbish is not just physical, but also cultural. I remember reading many articles about one of our favourite bands several years ago. At the time, the general stance from journalists was not just to slate them but to absolutely bury them. There seemed to be an ongoing diatribe against anything that wasn’t deemed to be within a certain accepted bracket of landfill. Looking back, no-one remembers it seems. All of the unspectacular music lauded has dissolved away and will barely register in anyone’s memory. Yet, the brilliance of some music will stand the test of time, even if it wasn’t fully appreciated when it was first created. And some of the very same people whose job it was to destroy are ready to reappear and salute when it is finally run up the flagpole. Go back to your cultural slag-heap and choke on it.
J – This is my favourite song on the album, despite it being a painful subject. It was instantly easy to think of a million parts to put on it. I can hear things in my head every time we play this and want to add more.
SNOWFLAKE
S – In this epic, we attempted to initially harness (another term for ‘wholesale rip-off’) the ambient genius of the late great Harold Budd, with a dash of Eno, a smattering of Robert Wyatt and a big dollop of Steve Reich. But as ever, it all ends up a massive unsubtle loud rock mess once it’s all been run through the Six meat-grinder. Structurally, this one builds over a repeated form with layer upon layer of instrumentation such as saxes, Egyptian drums, flutes and twinkly keyboards added for lavish effect. The heart of our band is still there though – unusually we have two guitar ‘solos’ in this one: The first being from Julia and the second from Paul.
P – I love this song and the musical textures within it. We had such a wonderful time recording this album at The Old Cider Press with Dave Draper. It felt like we could try anything and our ideas just flowed and flowed. Dave is an excellent engineer and producer and completely allowed us to fly off in all the directions we wanted to go in.
S – Funny how you can oppress and insult someone for displaying basic traits of humanity. The derogatory term used in the title should be worn as a badge of honour, not shame. In the death throes of neoliberalism and the scramble for resources, why do we seem to be actively choosing barbarity?
SERVING SUGGESTION
S – This uses the mute-bass (big bit of foam stuck behind the strings) to try and emulate a 60’s vibe underneath what is essentially a musical homage to Drums & Wires era XTC.
P – This final track is a brief summary of the theme of the album. A bit of a call to action – stop living as suggested and start thinking.
S – As you might know, this album is one of two we are releasing in quick succession in this, our 30th year of existence. The other is called DEARTH and is out in July – this is going to be a little less conceptual and more all-over-the-place stylistically & we are sure you are going to dig it. The original concept was to be a trio of albums called ‘Eat’, ‘Shit’ & ‘Die’ but for everyone’s sakes, we trimmed down to just the two this year.
GLUT is out now – get your copy on CD or digital download via Bandcamp
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Introduction by Paul Maps
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