An edited version of this interview was first published in fRoots No. 395 May 2016
This year of 2016 got off to a truly wondrous start with the arrival of Everything Sacred - the fruits of a collaboration between singer-songwriter James Yorkston, bassist Jon Thorne, and singer and sarangi maestro Suhail Yusuf Khan. James Yorkston kindly met me for a chat about Yorkston Thorne Khan, and this crazy old business we call folk music.
‘Jon’s played with me for a long time - since about 2009. He’s a very melodic player and a lot of my guitar playing is very thumb-heavy and very rhythmic. My two main guitar playing influences are Mississippi John Hurt and D’Gary - the Madagascan guitarist. I was primarily an electric bass player until I heard Malagasy Guitar, and that inspired me to buy my first acoustic guitar. Suhail and I first met backstage at a show after I’d done my soundcheck and I was just idly playing away. He took out his sarangi and started playing along with what I was doing and it just sounded great and really apt, straight away. I said to him, “you should just play with me on-stage, this evening - is that ok?!” After that we just kept in touch as much as we could and every time he came into the UK he’d come up and play with me’.
‘Jon and Suhail are genuine, world-class musicians, and they could play with anyone and not be out of place. I’m a different guy - I’ve come up from Punk and stuff. Jon is hugely influenced by Danny Thompson but I’ve never really explored folk-rock, although my first-ever show was with Bert Jansch who was extremely generous and lovely. In The Fence Collective you’d play your own songs, your pals’ songs, some traditional songs and and it was all just songs. Then suddenly I’m getting called a “folk musician” and for me “folk” is traditional music - it’s never meant a guy with an acoustic guitar. The reason why I called my 2009 album Folk Songs was to show that these are what folk songs are. The next songwriter album was going to be called Pop Songs, but stuff happened in my life and I kind of grew out of that idea.’
All three contribute memorable and moving new compositions, including Yorkston’s Broken Wave (a Blues For Doogie), Khan’s Sufi Song and Thorne’s haunting title track.
‘Jon brought his song in and I played nyckelharpa and Suhail sarangi, and it’s just lovely. There’s something about that take that just has a magical sound - it’s not my song, so I can say that honestly!’
The album also includes two striking cover versions in Ivor Cutler’s Little Black Buzzer and Lal Waterson’s Song For Thirza.
‘I’m from a tiny village where we had no music except for what came through the radio - mostly via John Peel, Janice Long and Andy Kershaw, so Ivor Cutler was big part of that. I heard him all my life, and now it’s the same with my kids. Lal Waterson is my favourite-ever song writer. When her Once In A Blue Moon came out I borrowed it from the record library just because I was an Anne Briggs nut and knew the song Fine Horseman was by her. I remember listening to it and I couldn’t understand why it was so damn good! Her songwriting has stayed with me ever since. Doing an Ivor Cutler song and a Lal Waterson song was just an obvious thing to do - you take the stuff you love and work with it’.
Does that pretty much sum-up the the philosophy behind Yorkston Thorne Khan, I wonder?
‘There was no thought behind this! As a touring musician you meet a lot of other touring musicians, but to have the kind of magnetism between people that you want to keep on playing with them even though one’s in Cellardyke, one’s in Delhi, and one’s in the Isle of Wight… that’s a special thing. You couldn’t plan this. I’ve seen the kind of acts where you have four names who have been put together and it’s perhaps a bit grinny and: “Hey! Look at this! We’re all really good!” Some of that stuff is good to watch but it’s like when you go to a session and it’s full of youngsters and they’re playing at a million-miles-per-hour. That’s nice to hear in the same way that watching a programme about the coast of Ireland is nice to watch, but it doesn’t really suck you in. The Irish music that I love is people like Seamus Ennis, Willie Clancy and Bess Cronin. Her singing is one of those things, like Lal Waterson, that you hear and go: “Woah! What is that?!” That’s what I prefer - the individual and the unique’.
An edited version of this interview first appeared in fRoots No. 405, March 2017
Brooklyn-based Steve Gunn is a musical renaissance man, equally adept as a solo guitarist, a singer-songwriter, an improvisational and experimental musician or leading his band through a set of killer rock songs - as heard to full effect on his latest release, Eyes On The Lines. He’s also the producer of 50, the new album by Michael Chapman which might just be the best-sounding record of the Yorkshireman’s entire half-century career.
I met up with Steve backstage in London’s 100 Club, where he and his compadres Cian Nugent (guitar) Jason Meagher (bass) and Nathan Bowles (drums) later delivered an exhilarating show that began with a solo banjo set from Bowles and concluded with Gunn on his knees, turning all the guitar pedals all the way up. The venue, with its photograph-festooned walls documenting the entire gamut of rock ’n’ roll, seemed an entirely apt environment for Gunn - a self-confessed music obsessive and record nut, who’s ready and willing to talk music. Being just six days after the U.S. Presidential election, he talked a bit about politics, too. But let’s begin at the beginning.
“I started playing music as a teenager,” Steve tells me. “My parents weren’t musicians per se, but they were very musical. My mother was really steeped in the soul and R&B scenes and she saw all the Motown artists that came through town. My dad was more of a rock ’n’ roller - he was really into Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and all that stuff. Music was a huge part of their life and their culture and how they related to the times that they went through.”
“it’s sometimes key for musicians that they have an older sibling to look up to, and I was lucky enough to have a sister who was into lots of the bands that were playing smaller cubs, coming both from the States and from England, and I just soaked all that up. As I got a little bit older and interested in playing, my parents were pretty supportive. By the time I was twelve or thirteen years old I got less interested in playing sports and primarily just wanted to be in a band.”
“My first instrument was the bass, then the following year I got a guitar and took lessons. Through my high school years I discovered local scenes and different bands who were very politicised and DIY - distributing their own records and setting up their own shows. After a while I got interested in bands that were more progressive as I realised a lot of the punk and hardcore groups I’d been listening to were very formulaic, and I really needed to discover things that were new and mysterious to me.”
“When I went to university, this whole world opened up to me through jazz radio programming and going to a lot of record stores. I moved into a house with some guys who were older than me and had extensive record collections. That’s when I discovered pre-war blues and some of the older British folk stuff and some extremely experimental jazz, and also when I started getting really interested in the acoustic guitar. When you’re that age and listening to everything, you connect things that aren’t necessarily on the same timeline, so I discovered the pre-war blues at the same time as John Fahey and Sandy Bull, and those two musicians really affected me in terms of how I wanted to approach the guitar. Discovering those two opened-up the guitar for me in terms of open tunings and fingerpicking and in how much they were influenced by the structures of folk music. Once you get to recognise the signposts you can correlate the ideas of meditative music with Indian Classical, with bluegrass, with Moroccan music…”
“I was in college and really trying to soak all this stuff up when I met a very important person in my life in Jack Rose. Jack, to me, represented someone who was really working hard at his craft and someone who wood-shedded for a long time before he stepped back out and reinvented himself. He was about ten years older than me - such a good guy, very friendly and also very inspiring and supportive to me. He really showed me how to work hard as a guitar player and also to demand respect for it. He was always standing up for others and standing up for himself too, and I feel musicians really need to do that.”
Jack Rose
“When he passed away we were all like: ‘holy shit, now what do we do?’ For me, and for Nathan and some others it was a point where we said: ‘Okay, we really have to do this now.’ Luckily, I got a load of solo shows around that time, and that was a really formative time for me as a performer. I was travelling to Europe, riding on trains by myself, playing to people I didn’t know in cafes and just getting by. I wasn’t really a natural singer so it took me a while to find my voice and get comfortable with it and learn to project, and all that stuff. I found that touring was the way to get better at everything, and in between I’d just work on songs and record stuff at home. Jason owns a studio called Black Dirt Studio, and that’s where I made Time Off, ” in 2013.
It was Rose, via his vinyl collection, who first introduced Steve to the work of Mike Cooper, with whom he recorded Cantos de Lisboa, also in 2013. “Jack pulled out a copy of Trout Steel and then, from that, all that Village Thing stuff by Dave Evans and Ian Anderson opened up to me too. Back then it was pre-internet so you had to come across this stuff in record stores and it was like finding gold! I became a real record fanatic and luckily I lived in a city that had great record stores with very cool owners.”
“The album came about when the RVNG label did a series of collaborative projects where they asked artists who, in their wildest dreams, would they want to make an album with, so when they asked me I said ‘Mike Cooper’. They contacted him and sent him some of my music and I told him about myself. We decided that we should make the record in Lisbon which was great because I had friends there and knew a studio, so we were able to spend a week playing together. I’d love to do more as I feel that was still only really touching the surface of what we could do.”
More regular collaborators are the Appalachian old-time, heroes of drone-folk, the Black Twig Pickers. In 2015 they combined forces for the Seasonal Hire album.
“That was really just the culmination of me and the Black Twigs getting together socially and jamming on some songs. They’re so inspiring too - there’s a really interesting work ethic with those guys. They’re serious about what they do and they’re not caught up in any bullshit. They can really play and they really connect with their audiences. Mike Gangloff is an incredible musician and an inspiring figure to all of us.”
The Black Twig Pickers & Steve Gunn. Seasonal Hire, 2015
There’s a discernible Anglo-Celtic undercurrent in much of Gunn’s work that manifests in the acoustic, DADGAD guitar parts of otherwise all-American rock songs on Time Off, Way Out Weather and Eyes On The Lines.
“I got into The Smiths as a kid and I love the playing of Richard Thompson, Nic Jones, Bert Jansch and Davy Graham. I soaked all that up because I was really interested in Fahey, but also really interested in singing, so when I discovered Bert Jansch and Davy Graham using more jazz voicings within a folk tradition I was like: ‘wow!’ Mike Cooper, Michael Chapman and Bridget St John told me all their stories about Les Cousins which seems like such an interesting time and place. Bridget lives in New York and I see her quite a bit.”
The just-released Michael Chapman album features Steve on guitar and drums and Nathan Bowles on banjo. It sounds like the fruits of an ideal symbiosis between an artist and a producer who really respect and trust in each others talents.
Steve Gunn, Michael Chapman, Nathan Bowles, Jimmy Sei Tang
“I’m so proud of that record! Michael’s such a hard worker… that shit is not easy, especially for someone of his age. He flew to New York and it was a hard couple of weeks but we realised that we had a great batch of songs that were sounding incredible and his voice is still sounding good. Michael was really generous with the songs in letting us do our own take on them. You can hear in his voice that he’s older, but that’s such a real part of the album. I think Michael picked the songs very carefully and the sequence of the record really works. I’m really happy for him - it’s exciting!”
When I ask Steve how the European band tour is going and what his forthcoming plans are, talk turns, inevitably, to ‘the event.’
“We played in Rotterdam the night of the election and we were all really anxious, but sort of jokingly anxious - not really thinking that this would actually happen. We thought it was impossible. Then this slow, shocking realisation that Trump was getting elected started settling in and we were just a mess. It’s so shocking, but it’s been building up for a while, so it was kind of crushing. The one thing I was feeling was such disappointment that people just aren’t aware of what’s happening around the world, and all the racism and sexism that’s really affecting people’s lives in a really big way. There’s such a large part of our population who just aren’t consciously aware of other people’s problems.”
“I’ve lived in a city pretty much all of my life and it’s a different existence - there are separate realities within the United States. The fact that this election slipped through the cracks is a huge deal. People are slowly realising that organising and representing, making your voice heard, being out on the streets and being close to your community are really important things.”
“After this, I’m doing a solo tour with Lee Ranaldo and Meg Baird. We’re going to pack up a mini van with acoustic guitars and hit the road around the States. Lee is extremely political as well, and I’ve spoken to Meg about this election, so we’re having a concert on inauguration day in D.C. We’re all fired up!”
Steve Gunn’s Eyes On The Lines is on Matador Records
Michael Chapman’s 50 is out now on Paradise of Bachelors
