anglo-dutch psychedelia? join the dots
By Sergey Chernov, Staff Writer
With 30 full-length albums in 23 years, a relocation from England to Holland and a huge cult following all over the world, the Legendary Pink Dots have certainly earned their name.
Based in Amsterdam, the seminal Anglo-Dutch band has stretched the bounds of musical style with its signature blend of psychedelia, industrial music and goth. This week, it brings its legendary sound to St. Petersburg.
“We are working on fairly recent songs for the Russian shows, because we really enjoyed the tour that we just did in America, at the end of last year. We’re adding a few extra things,” singer, keyboard player and lyricist Edward Ka-Spel said by telephone from his home in Amsterdam last week.
Over two decades, the band has gone through a series of lineup changes, with its list of former and current members numbering around 30 – as well as various “guests and friends.”
The current members include keyboardist and group co-founder Phil Knight (a.k.a. The Silverman), saxophonist Niels van Hoorn (a.k.a. Niels van Hoornblower), who joined the band in 1989, and recently-added guitarist Eric Drost. Consolidating the lineup is Raymond Steeg, responsible for the sound.
Having grown up in east London, Ka-Spel moved the band to Amsterdam in 1985 for personal and political reasons.
“I had a Dutch girlfriend at that time … one very big motivation for me,” he said. “I also didn’t really like the way England was. It was the time of Margaret Thatcher, and reflecting on the British Empire again, which is long dead and I’m quite glad for that. There was something very unpleasant in the air back in the middle of the 1980s in Britain.”
He said the move was productive for his work.
“In Holland, I just took a big jump and tried to live from music alone,” he said. “I was squatting for the first few years there in a house in Amsterdam … I could focus completely on just making music. That really helped. That sort of put me on my feet. … In England I don’t think it would have really worked.”
The political events of the last few years, such as the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, made a particularly strong impression on the Legendary Pink Dots that can be seen in the band’s most recent albums, “All the King’s Horses” and “All the King’s Men” (both released in 2002), which Ka-Spel described as “brother and sister.”
“It was like the world had turned upside down, and you can’t help being influenced by such enormous events as those,” Ka-Spel said of the Sept. 11 attacks. “As frightening and uncertain as the world became, it also meant there was a plenty of food for thought. I wrote furiously after that event, still am. It’s almost as though there isn’t enough time to say what you have to say.”
While the band’s 2001 album, the three-CD “Chemical Playschool, Vols. 11, 12 & 13,” is, in Ka-Spel’s words, “our ultimate psychedelic release … a 3 1/2-hour psychedelic journey,” the 2002 discs are gentler and more melodic.
“We wanted to present the lyrics in a very forthright way,” he said. “So perhaps they were little less psychedelic, but very, extremely direct.”
The Legendary Pink Dots gig at B2 in Moscow on Thursday was not the first Russian performance by the band, which played a much less publicized concert in Kaliningrad in 1999.
“That was a great experience, I absolutely loved that show,” said Ka-Spel.
His own Russian experience goes back to even more distant past – to the late 1970s, when he came to Moscow and St. Petersburg by train.
“I felt a little lonely, as I knew ten words of Russian, I tried them all out. And people were very kind to me,” he said. “There were odd things, like the phone in a hotel would ring in the middle of the night, but I think it was down more to a faulty phone service than anything more sinister. I basically walked around Moscow and St. Petersburg just to explore … to get a feeling of the two cities.”
Although Ka-Spel did not meet with Russian musicians on that first visit, he said he later had brief contact with ZGA (“fantastic group”), an experimental band from Riga, Latvia, that moved to St. Petersburg in 1991. He also boasts a collection of albums by the late local experimental composer Sergei Kuryokhin.
“Kuryokhin [is] someone I admired very very much,” he said. “I have a lot of records that he made when he was alive. [Kuryokhin’s band] Pop Mekhanika is wonderful, actually.”
With over two decades of music-making behind him, Ka-Spel, whose favorite acts include Krautrock bands from the 1970s and Sid Barrett-era Pink Floyd (“Barrett was absolutely fantastic!”), insisted he is in no way looking backwards.
“There’s obviously many people who speak in a way that things are not what they’ve used to be, etc. etc., but frankly I’m not one of those,” he said.
Instead, he sounded very positive about the current rock music scene.
“There’s a hell of a lot of interesting music around,” he said. “One of the most popular bands in the world is also one of the greatest bands that I’ve ever heard – Radiohead. … They are the proof that the music hasn’t died.”
The Legendary Pink Dots play Red Club at 8 p.m. on Saturday.
