Good morning,
Welcome to the weekly freebie New Cue fix, brightening up your Monday morning since 2021. Today we’ve got an interview with electronic trailblazer Mark Pritchard, who has just released an excellent collaborative record with Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke. It’s called Tall Tales. Why not have a listen whilst you read?
A pioneering force in techno and ambient music, Mark has been putting out music under his own name since 2009, but before that, he’d built up a body of aliases in both solo and group projects that Jason Bourne would be proud of. He’s released under the handles of Global Communication, Reload, Harmonic 313, Harmonic 33, Troubleman, Africa Hitech, Shaft, Jedi Knights and more.
An affable fella born and raised in the West Country, Mark now lives in Sydney, from where he spoke to Niall over Zoom a few weeks ago. The idea was a for a zippy Release Valve Q&A but thankfully he’s a chatty guy, meaning we got a proper deep dive into how Tall Tales came together with some RV questions at the end.
This edition, as you will see, is free for all to read. But it would be nice if it wasn’t free to put together. Money doesn’t grow on trees. Not even digital ones. You can help keep The New Cue sliding into your inbox by becoming a paying subscriber here:
Thanks very much, enjoy the edition.
Ted and Niall
Start The Week With… Mark Pritchard
Hello Mark. How are you?
Yeah, not too bad. I’ve been doing quite a lot of interviews, but I’m spacing them out and trying to say different things each time. You want to keep it interesting otherwise it will just be the same answers, but it’s good.
What’s been the most recurring question you’ve been asked?
Nothing too bad, to be honest. I thought people might be trying to get Radiohead intel or Thom intel. In one of the early interviews, somebody tried it, they were like, ‘So what do you know? Do you know anything about Radiohead?’ As if I had that information I’d pass it on! Thom would never speak to me again, and he doesn’t tell anybody the information, quite rightly so, bar the people that are involved in the project. But I guess fair enough for trying.
Haha. The record you’ve done together is great. I read about how it came together over a few years of back and forth between you both. What was the impetus to get it to the finish line?
It was kind of tricky, because there were songs that felt like they worked and there were certain things you could tell that needs looking at here and there. In general, it was like, ‘I know I can do this and it’s gonna work’. And then there were some songs that needed to have back and forth, songs where you’re going to have to add new things, take things out, try and find out how to get this song to work. I guess we focused on those ones first because there was four or five tricky ones.
All the music from my side was basically written already, because I sent Thom the demos, and some of them needed development but the writing side was 80% done. I had to write new melodies and react to what Thom was doing here and there but I guess I was in production mode.
What was the biggest surprise to you about the collaboration?
I didn’t think all of them would work. There was a couple that I was worried about, like Happy Days was getting worked on right up to the end. It was pretty much the last one I put down.
On every project I’ve done, there’s at least one or two that I really wanted to be on the album and I just couldn’t get them right no matter how hard I tried. I’m amazed that all the ones that we that we were working on did make it.
What’s your favourite?
That moves around. After I finished it, I disconnect from it all, which is a weird feeling because it’s something that I was working on for a very long period, two or three years at least. But I was still working with Jonathan Zawada on the film and I found that I could watch the video and listen to the songs because they take on a different thing. To me, some of the songs work in a better way, like Gangsters. I was unsure about that song for a long time. I liked it but I wasn’t sure whether it would fit but when he did the video to it, it made more sense to me.
The videos do take these tracks into a different realm.
Yeah, they’re absolute bonkers, a march of these weird characters. Jonathan was working on the visual element from when Thom sent me the demos. I’d already sent the instrumentals to Jonathan early on, when I sent them to Thom, and I said, ‘I’ve sent these to Thom. I don’t know what this is going to be. It could be an EP, could be a couple of tracks on an album that I’m doing, he might want to take a couple of tracks. I have no idea’. But when Thom sent me back the first vocal sketches, I shared those with Jonathan quite quickly and he started working on the visual side of this project in the background.
How were you and Thom communicating?
We started on email and I found that difficult because straight away there was some issues. I think I said I really liked something and then the way I worded it, he took it that he wasn’t sure whether I liked it or not. And I was like, ‘No, I really like it!’ Then I was like, ‘OK, let’s just move it to Zoom.’ I’d work on something, he’d send it back, I’d mess around with it. If there was something we needed to discuss, we’d have a Zoom on a Sunday, Sunday morning his time and Sunday night, my time. It was instantly easier to communicate because I’d met Thom one time in person at this point and then the rest of our communication was over email. So I didn’t know him that well. We’d email each other music, and not just our own music, other music. If I found music that I thought he might be into, I’d send it to him. I guess it’s much easier to communicate with somebody when you can see their face, especially where you’re discussing things that are potentially delicate. But Thom’s very straight up, I’m very straight up so all that stuff was really easy. We trust each other and we weren’t afraid to say what we felt because at the end of the day there’s no real wrong or right. We’re both old enough and have been doing this long enough to know how you collaborate with people. We would just say, ‘I’m not sure about this, what do you think?’ Sometimes I’d try something and push it one way, and he would just go, ‘No, you’ve lost it, you’ve lost the vibe’. Sometimes I was right, sometimes he was right. But there was no kind of, ‘No, I’m right!’. We were both moving forwards for the same goal.
You performed Back In The Game live with Thom when his Everything solo tour came to Sydney. How was that?
Pretty surreal for me, because I’ve never really played live that much. I’ve done a couple of things where there was an improvised band and I would take a synthesizer and just add weird sounds and melodies but I’ve never really played live in a band. I’ve DJ’d my whole life. I don’t like being in front of huge amounts of people and always have a lot of stage fright. I was unsure about whether I wanted to do the gig, because I hadn’t been DJing for a while. If I haven’t DJ’d for ages and I have a gig, that first gig is usually quite touch and go. Nerves hit me and I get shaky. So when he said, ‘Do you want to come on stage?’, I knew it was the right thing to do, but I was just like, ‘Fucking hell, that’s not a small gig, that’s 6000 people in front of the Sydney Opera House!’. And then I got asked to DJ before.
Now you’re making me nervous!
Yeah! I like doing those sets where it’s a warm-up set, it’s about the whole night and building something. I thought, ‘Well, if I’m there and I’ve got a DJ set and I can get through that, then going on stage for him for one song, I won’t feel the same nerves, I’ve already stood there in front of people’. I got through it. I knew people are there for him. I’m just going to come on and tweak a synthesizer for one song. Walk on slightly uncomfortably and head down. I mean, I had to focus on what I was doing. We had two run throughs and discussed what I could possibly do. He said, ‘Well, you can just come up and tweak one of the synthesizers?’ He showed me how this modular synth worked and we did two run throughs in soundcheck and then and I got a handle of what I needed to do. Then he just said, ‘All good?’. And I was like, ‘yeah, see what happens!’ I’m glad I did it. I knew I needed to do it. I mean, he asked me to do it, he wanted me there and that’s enough of a reason to do it, aside from all of my fears of going on stage and fucking shaking and having a panic attack, but yeah, I really enjoyed it.
Is there any possibility of a proper Tall Tales shows?
I said to him, ‘If you do want to do anything live at some point, I could see there is a way to do it’, because we’d been discussing it for a while, like ‘How the hell are we going to do this?’. There’s really weird synthesizers on this record and you can’t really bring them all out. Those things are temperamental enough in the studio, let alone flying them around the world and touring with them. You’d need to take a studio tech with you to fix them all the time, basically. But seeing how he did his show was definitely an eye opener. I was like, ‘Yeah, I could see this could be fun and enjoyable and a challenge each night’. I never really wanted to go up and press play on a laptop.
Let’s move on to some of our Release Valve questions… what was the first record you loved?
I think it was The Specials, the first style of music that was my own thing where I got really into them. Unfortunately, I was too young to have seen them but I did see Fun Boy Three. My mum and dad knew I liked The Specials and they must have clocked that Terry Hall was the singer so they took me to see them.
What was the last record you loved?
Ecuatoriana - El Universo Paralelo de Polibio Mayorga 1969-1981. In the period of doing our record, I was really blown away by this Ecuadorian music that Analog Africa did a few compilations of. I couldn’t believe how I’d never heard this music before. I spoke to a couple of heads in London about it, like, ‘How come I never fucking heard anybody play this music in clubs through the whole of the 90s?!’ A couple of people were like, ‘Yeah, people were playing bits of it’, but I’d never heard the stuff with the weird Moog bleeps. It’s all of the things I like. It has this mad Moog bleep riff as a lead line, there’s some kind of space element, there’s a kitsch Hammond organ thing.
Which musician did you grow up most wanting to be?
Johnny Marr. I was a huge Smiths fan and a huge fan of his guitar playing. As the years have gone by, he’s stayed still very cool, so it’s ended being kind of nice. I was fascinated by his guitar playing and I could never really work out why it sounded like it did. I later found out he was really into the Pentangle guitarist and I eventually became a huge fan of Pentangle.
He’s carried on doing interesting things all the way through his career and then he’s still going doing his own thing now, singing, writing songs, still contributing to lots of projects.
Who would feature in your fantasy band?
I’d say Carol Kaye, bass player who played on a lot of Motown music. I guess I’d have to put her with Earl Palmer, because he was the drum. He’s one of my favourite drummers and they work together a lot. I’ve been trying to think of my favourite vocalists and I keep coming back to Willie Nelson. I’ve always loved his voice, it’s so distinct. On guitar, I’ll have Joe Pass, I’ve been checking out his stuff recently again.
What’s the greatest gig you’ve ever seen?
One of the most interesting gigs ever saw was Sonic Boom when me and Tom Middleton were supporting as Global Communication. I liked Spacemen 3 a lot, I don’t know whether they’d stopped working by this time. Maybe Jason had already started doing Spiritualized. It was a solo show from him, he had some guitars on stands, maybe a bass and a keyboard, and then he would sing, and he would just get the guitars feeding back, go up to a guitar and strum it or hit one and it would start resonating and feeding back and building up drones. It was phenomenal.
What’s the greatest gig that you’ve played?
There was a really unusual gig that I had in Japan, I think it was in Nagoya. It was some guys that had something to do with The Big Chill, they were putting on ambient parties. They put on this gig and it was me and Pete Lawrence from The Big Chill. I’d no idea what to expect. Quite often, I would get the odd gig where they would say, you can play ambient music and you’ll turn up and then there’s no way you can play ambient music because people want to hear club music. But they were like, ‘No you can, you can play ambient music here'. I turned up and it was so well organised, a really amazing sound system and a choice of styluses taped to the back of the deck. People lay on the floor and just listened or sat there for the whole time with their eyes closed and then they had a few artists doing art pieces on the wall, two or three artists reacting to the music. That was very memorable.
What song do you wish you’d written?
I think I’ll say ‘Til I Die by The Beach Boys. It’s an unbelievably heavy song.
What film do you think everyone should see?
At the moment, I guess I’m leaning more towards comedy because the world’s fucked, so to have a break from the madness of looking at stuff online, Withnail & I.
Who’s the person who’s making your favourite music in the world right now?
I really like Richard Dawson. A good friend of mine put me on to him six or seven years ago. The first time I heard his music, I was like, ‘This guy’s amazing!’ but I wasn’t quite sure, like ‘I like this… but I don’t know’. But then it was that amazing thing where something keeps telling you to keep listening and I kept going back. I got even more obsessed and then thrown by the fact that he does lots of different things. I like the folk storytelling thing that was a bit more traditional but then I really enjoyed subsequent records where it was not that at all, really interesting pop but with lyrical, poignant lyrical messages, sometimes playful, sometimes heavy punches being hit in the songs. I really love what he’s been doing.
What one thing do you think would improve music?
More messiness and rawness right now would be a good injection. There are people doing that but I think we could do with more of it.