A new Scaramanga Six album is always a cause for celebration round these parts, and with the band celebrating their 30th anniversary this year they’ve blessed us with not one but two new LPs (and an EP, Bad Time Music, between the two). The second part of this brace of new albums, Dearth, led Joyzine’s own Andrew Wood to implore our dear readers to “Buy this album, buy all their albums, and go and see them live. You can’t fail to be impressed.“
With that in mind, we asked the band to share their guide through the twisty, turny delights of their recent LP, and they kindly obliged with the following:
LAST PHONEBOX IN THE STREET
Paul Morricone (vocals/guitar) – Our last album GLUT had an overall theme of maximalism and the consumer life. It was an external album. This is the opposite. DEARTH is full of internal stories and insights into us. Many of the songs explore what we do, how we think and why we exist. ‘Last Phonebox in the Street’ is an ode to memory, the kind of obscure memories that linger after years then jump out on you when you least expect it. Everything you regret, playing at once from a tiny cassette recorder, in the middle of the night.
Steven Morricone (vocals/bass) – Though conceived as an epic and expansive opener, we still seem to have a knack (pardon the pun) for shoehorning in the ‘My Sharona’ riff wherever we can.
Gareth Champion (drums) – This is one for those with Scaramanga Six Bingo Cards, we don’t go through many albums without making use of the ‘My Sharona/Pump It Up’ beat. We’ve done it before and we’ll do it again!
WAITING FOR THE RABBIT
S – Some people have an innate habit of self-crippling with responsibilities and weighing themselves down with stuff. I saw a woman once with pretty much an armful of those Pandora bracelets, each bursting with dangly and cumbersome charms – don’t get me wrong, I actually quite like them in a magpie kind of way (as my missus will vouch), but where do you draw the line? Does your need to take on more actually outweigh practicality? This song highlights the regret of needless complications as personified by a demonic bunny.
S – Musically this is a rare example of an embryonic song in pieces, knocked together in 10mins spare in the studio rather than being fully formed and rehearsed prior to arrival. This was then further cut up and mucked about with by our Julia who is wholly responsible for our brief foray into drum & bass + all the squelchy stuff at the bottom end.
G – It feels like we always get everything ready for studio sessions by the skin of our teeth. But we always get there prepared. This song was different! It was pretty much half an idea when we were in there, it certainly wasn’t a full song and we certainly weren’t prepared to record it. It was very much finished on the hoof and then stitched together by Dave Draper. If I’m honest, I wasn’t convinced this would work, but it’s turned out really well and will be in the live set very soon.
PIPECLEANER MAN
P – Let’s address the elephant in the room straight away. It sounds a bit like ‘Absolute Beginners’. We don’t know why, but it just felt like an appropriate song to rip off. Anyhow, that aside, this is actually as autobiographical as I’ve got in writing a song. It addresses the continual spin cycles that go round and round in my brain, whether I like it or not. My mind is doing acrobatics pretty much every waking second, with whatever idea I have in a loop like a stuck screensaver. People try talking to me but I’m miles away replaying a word or a phrase or a sound like a scratched record. It is a life-sentence. And we are in a life-sentence band, acting through compulsion. Why do you think we didn’t just give this up years ago? Because we simply cannot.
S – I think it was Billy Connolly who comedically observed that when a man gets to a certain age, doctors start to pay particular attention to your arse. I always thought this song was about that.
G – We can usually retrofit some bum/scatalogical reference into most of our songs. You’ve really not got to try very hard with this one.
OUR LITTLE SECRET
S – The riff for this one has been knocking about for well over a decade without being fully realised. It seems that now was the right time to make something of it, and our album re-jig was the perfect opera-tunity. The end result captures us in full-on post-punk mode, especially with the addition of flangey/chorus bass.
S – This is sung from the point of view of an advertising algorithm. If you could imagine an anthropomorphic piece of malware, this would be its song.
ANOTHER SONG
P – This is a song about writing another song. When we decided to rework DEARTH, we took a few tracks off it then gave ourselves a brief to write 4 new songs immediately. This appeared within 24 hours of Steve and I deciding we were going to do this. I am usually unsettled by things that weigh on my mind and can often pinpoint it to one decision I need to make, or one unpleasant thing I have to do. Once I do that, it’s all fine. Then I feel released, and my brain starts turning over on itself again until another song pops out. And that’s usually what it takes to feel better. But as I get older, the small things become bigger and start to feel more like mortal predicaments. So in effect, this is a song about recognising your own mortality and knowing that all it takes is another song to cure you. Hooray for music and hooray for us.
S – I know the feeling well, but I suffer from creative constipation most of the time.
MIND CONTROL
P – This is actually a completely socio-political song. Aimed squarely at anyone who is easily influenced, and right now, that seems to be a growing number. If things are repeated enough to these people, then they start to believe it, whether it is fact or fiction. That’s when you get people making idiotic decisions and cutting off their noses to spite their stupid faces. It’s an ideal situation for anyone wishing to divide a nation and divert attention away from other activities. A famous component of the art of propaganda once said “It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle. They are mere words, and words can be moulded until they clothe ideas and disguise.” It is what is known as “The Big Lie” and that, friends, is fascism.
S – THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS!!
G – Another one with a really satisfying shift from verse to chorus, the orchestral arrangement on this one really makes it, I think.
OONIE SMOONIE
S – This follows on perfectly from the subject of the previous song. For these very same people everything is binary with no space for nuance. One solution has to be at the expense of another without even the merest consideration that issues can be addressed in parallel, or with any kind of subtlety. This song is sung from the point of view of such a simplicist who just happens to also sound like Bryan Ferry. My lyrical contributions to this band tend to be the result of cut-up sections/phrasing that have a ring to them but sometimes are not directly linked. In this one the verse subject seems to jar with the bridges, which are more related to childhood experiences and nightmares. Perhaps they are actually related after all?
S – Also, the ‘Oonie Smoonie’ colour is a kind of browny, purpley, grey that you usually end up with when you clean your paintbrushes in a glass. When me and Paul were children many many eons ago, we decreed that if you ever saw the oonie smoonie colour, you would DIE! To this day, there is still every chance that will happen.
VOMIT CLOCK
P – This is a companion piece to ‘Pipecleaner Man’, describing the dichotomy of wanting everything and nothing at the same time. I believe you can be introverted and extroverted. I definitely feel that way. Also, a Vomit Clock is a particularly gaudy style of mantlepiece ornament made popular in the 1950s -70s where you set a load of random items in a type of acrylic resin and plonk a clock in the middle. A perfect visual analogy of my mind. Take a look at them, they are horrific yet strangely beautiful.
S – I believe that Julia recorded her lead guitar part in two goes – once for the even number of notes and once for the odd counterparts, when put together sounding like a more complex and proficient single part!
I ENJOY SITTING IN MY CAR AT NIGHT WHEN IT’S RAINING
P – Another autobiographical snapshot of the life of a middle-aged man, sat regularly wondering what the point is of all the soulless things he is asked to do. As you get older, your ability to care about how egg-shaped a 2D cartoon egg should be or the font size of the heading in accordance to the brand guidelines starts to diminish in favour of simple pleasures in life. I’ve found myself going to places where I can concentrate on one thing at a time and fully enjoy it. Sitting at a table in a restaurant, being engrossed in a delicious meal and not looking up until it is finished. Parking my car in a quiet street under a streetlight, switching off the engine and listening to the elements as the pearls of rain trickle down the windscreen.
S – The musical idea heist on this one includes sounds and motifs stolen from Sparks, AC/DC and Roy Budd of all things.
GROUNDED
P – This is a silly song about middle age where we’ve tried to be stupidly playful with the words. There’s nothing deep about this, other than at times you look at a jellyfish washed up on a beach and envy it, knowing it hasn’t a clue what it’s doing, where it is or how it got there.
S – Why do we stuff our lives so full of duty that it actually stops us living? Why do we persist with joyful creative endeavours when every factor of ‘normality’ pulls at you like the hooks in Richard Harris’ chest in ‘A Man Called Horse’? Why do we insist on shoehorning in the melody from ‘Too Good to be True’ by Andy Williams? So many questions.
Julia Arnez (guitar/vocals) – The only thing I’m going to say about this whole album is that I copied the tune to ‘Save A Prayer’ by Duran Duran and put it in the guitar part to this song.
THE SORTING
P – Following on from ‘Mind Control’, here’s a fictional story rooted in realism. What if everyone randomly changed colour? Would we all find a kind of togetherness where our differences no longer matter? Or would it simply lead to a whole new level of fuckery? Look where we are currently heading and you may find the answer to that.
S – I love a good story in a song and this one is possibly my favourite on the album. The inherent cynicism of humanity is laid bare, augmented by some seriously triumphant rock theatrics. Kind-of trope-tastic for us.
G – I really like the contrast between the angular/awkward feel of the verse and the euphoric nature of the chorus. Then to top it off, the triumphant ending, which, musically speaking, owes more than a small debt of gratitude to Mr T. Smith. Probably my favourite to play.
SLEEP LIKE THE TOLLUND MAN
S – Despite mostly being in our 50s and being riddled with grown-up baggage, we still can’t help but be addicted to mind-melting volumes, gnarly guitars and rampant energetics with no sign of mellowing. However, there are occasional anomalous moments of subtlety. This one sees us in one of those rare musically gentle moments, but this seems to allow a great deal of potential for creeping intensity. The main body of the song was written on the ‘tongue drum’ – a new-agey percussion instrument my son chose as his present from a trip away.
S – This song was one of the quartet of tunes written to augment the album and was specifically written as a prologue/segue into the final track, with a similar time signature and tempo. It also acts as another of these companion pieces in that the subject matter flows into the last song. Though on the face of it, it seems to be a direct telling of the possible life story of the most famous Danish bog body, is actually more analogous to a modern day experience of self-sacrifice and acceptance of your ‘lot’ coupled with a massive dose of defiance. Read into it what you will.
JUST LIKE REGULAR CHICKENS
P – The album needed a closing song, so when we wrote the new tracks, this was written with that exact brief. It needed to be a bombastic drone with a sense of finality. We make every album and we play every gig as if it is our last. That is our urgency. There is a happy/sad reason behind this, and this is in tribute to our hero Tim Smith of Cardiacs.
We got to record with Tim many times in the noughties and made the trip down to Wiltshire in a series of ropey vans past the shed and into the den of mice. It was amidst our third album there that Tim fell ill. We’d spent two years in short bursts sprawled out over months picking away at things, stupidly being distracting by things like jobs and careers. I selfishly wish I could have gone back in time to spend as much time as humanly possible there, to cherish the time and finish what was abandoned. But in actual fact, I’d go back in a flash to tell Tim to ditch that and finish his record and a lot more things besides. Of course, hindsight is a wonderful thing. But one thing I’ve learned is there is no time to hang about. Live your life, create something and don’t stop until you finish it. Then do some more. Music and love is the most important thing in the world and don’t let anything distract you.
DEARTH is available now via Bandcamp
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Introduction by Paul Maps
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