On February 16th 2020, shortly before a certain virus would drastically change our lives, I sat down with Edward Ka-Spel, singer and songwriter of experimental Psychedelia group The Legendary Pink Dots, right before the band’s concert in Vienna. We talked about the current Pink Dots album, the band’s music making process, what current music Edward listens to, and much more. After almost two years, the band has released a new entry in the Chemical Playschool series, and an album titled The Museum Of Human Happiness has been announced, with a short teaser being available on Bandcamp for a while, but it has apparently been taken down again.
How’s the tour going so far?
Really good, we sold out a couple of shows which we didn’t expect to. Because, you know, the tour has this tag of the 40 year anniversary, which is getting a lot of people out to see us. Also, we don’t tour Europe so much these days, so I think that’s making a difference.
Any major hiccups or did everything go well?
Just technical stuff, here and there. The technology’s sometimes very challenging. But, you know, we usually get it to behave, after a while.
You already mentioned the anniversary – congratulations on that by the way. So, we already got the live album, and The 40 Year Scratch, is there anything more planned release-wise?
Oh yeah, we’re actually halfway through the next Chemical Playschool edition, which has actually taken quite a long time. Originally, we wanted to release in time for the American tour, but it just wasn’t really working. Got a couple of guest player on that one as well, got Patrick (Q. Wright) playing on a couple of tracks, and a friend from Paris, Quentin on a few tracks, but it needs a few months still. Because the Chemical Playschools are like new albums, we put as much time and craft into those as any new album.
You actually worked for two years on Angel In The Detail, that’s a pretty long time for you, how did it come to that? Was it planned or did it just happen?
It’s the perfectionist instinct in the band at the moment. I suppose it did take two years, but there was a time when we basically put it on ice for a little while, and we worked on other projects. We also had the tour in 2018, and everything stops for that. But indeed, the first note was struck two years before it came out. There was a pool of something like 40 songs I think, and we zeroed in on the ones we wanted to develop for the new album. There’s a lot in the can, actually.
Can you describe your process of making music a bit? Do you still improvise a lot in the studio?
Oh sure, it’s one of the nicest ways to make music, very heavy editing goes on after the improvisation. You can improvise for an hour, and then you might just extract three minutes for the album, but if it’s three glorious minutes, then it’s worth it. I work on music every day, usually, for about six or seven hours, so a lot must come from that.
For sure! What I’ve noticed is that the album seems more structured overall, compared to the previous albums. You have some straight up Pop tracks. How did it come to that?
Yes, we’re out here at that moment, nothing more contrived than that, really. It felt like a strong record that we were making here, and indeed, these psychedelic Pop songs are kind of fun, we hadn’t done anything like that for a lot of years, so it was nice to work on something that constructed, maybe something like The Kinkswould’ve made. So, there was that element involved as well. But there’s also the stranger tracks too, it’s a voyage.
One track from the album which kind of stands out to me is Red Flag, it’s probably my favourite on the album. What inspired it, how did it end up being so long? Where is that woman’s voice from?
That track is my favourite as well! We’re gonna play it tonight as well. I cannot actually tell you what the lyrics are about because I don’t know it myself. It feels deeply personal, it’s a scenario, like putting myself in a place, in a world that’s empty, and I was part of the reason for that emptiness, as everybody else is the reason for that emptiness. It’s a song for this time, but it’s a very bleak view of the world’s situation right now, and where it all goes.
You have that sample of a woman talking somewhere in the middle of the song. Where is that from?
That is a piece of extreme editing of a Christian woman reciting the 23rd psalm. We placed the words in a different order.
I heard on the live album that you’re actually saying those worlds yourself on stage, would you say they’re essential to the song?
Oh, absolutely, 100%. That was very deliberate, it goes with the theme of the song.
You release seasonal specials for Halloween and Christmas every year, how long do you usually spend and these, and how long do you record them in advance?
They usually start months before, for the 2019 Halloween special we were actually on tour when that came out. So, I prepared that when I was on holiday. The 2019 Christmas special was much closer to Christmas, we were actually looking for a good Christmas story, but from being on tour in the American desert, my head was full of black images. It was very prominent in my memories, and it felt like this is the way, this is the scenario that I want Christmas to be.
Do you find it easy to come up with stuff for the specials?
Sometimes it just drops right out of the sky, like Chrystopia (from the 2018 Christmas special) that was a very spontaneous story that I wrote. Sometimes you have to works harder on it, because every story has to have a very original twist to it, something has to happen as a complete fluke. I think this song to Santa was something my little daughter said, she basically misspelt Satan and I was like “woah! I like that”, so that was the story.
Thats great! Sometimes you get inspiration from where you don’t expect it.
Oh, she can inspire a lot of things, she did a painting recently called “The Museum Of Human Happiness”. I love that theme, so now there’s a song called that, which is not released yet.
You had a very productive phase from the early 2010s onwards up to 2016 or so, with four albums released in 2013 alone. Are you taking things slower now?
It’s not that we’re actually taking things slower, what’s happened now is every bit as much as there was back then, we’re just waiting to put it out, we don’t want to overload people, cause it does get a bit like that sometimes. It’s like, the next thing, and the next thing, and people can’t take all of that in at once. So, on our Bandcamp page, there is a line, where the private releases are, it’s like our vault. And it’s crammed with music.
Are you still happy with the current lineup?
It’s my favourite, actually! Everybody’s just so committed, I feel it gets stronger and stronger. It’s ten years now with this lineup, there’s a great understanding, everybody’s on the same page.
How do you select songs to play live from your vast catalog? Do you have any favourites?
I tend to really wanna play the new things, because they’re so fresh, and they’re so vibrant and exciting. If something is really going well, like an old song, that still hasn’t reached its peak, and is building and building, a song like Disturbance – we’ve been playing that a couple of years now, that song really seems to be rising, which is strange – we’ll keep playing it. And once we reach a peak, then we go on to something else. We’re playing just the live song in the current set, because the lyrics just feel relevant. Otherwise we tend to not compromise much in this way, with the old songs. It’s just what we feel like at the moment.
So, you have no particular favourites, it’s just situational, what you feel at the moment?
There are songs I really want to play live one day, songs we’ve never played before. Like, You & Me & Rainbows, or Stoned Obituary. It would be good to try, that is a little bit of a project in the background, to put these songs in a live context.
How important is playing live to you? Would you say you prefer it to studio work, or do you have no preference either way?
No preference, really. I love playing live, it’s really different to working in the studio. I love the communication live. The show last night, in Prague, it was the best of the tour, by a long way, because we got so much back from the audience. That’s something you can never have in the studio. But I do love the experimentation in the studio. It doesn’t matter what you do in the studio. Sometimes, an apple falls from a tree in the studio, and you know, this apple has to be consumed. And when something sounds like it could be good, but not right now, I’ll put it on the backburner, and I’ll return to it when it feels like the right moment. And that works for me, because often when you do go back to something, you think it’s not really there, you get this eureka moment, like: “what was I thinking, putting this on the backburner! I should’ve worked on it back then!” But you shouldn’t have, actually, because now it’s the right time, now you’re excited. Whereas you weren’t excited back then, when you came up with the idea.
Since it’s your anniversary right now, do you think about the future? Do you think you could still release music and play live, in, say, ten years?
I’d give a shot, why not.
Alright, I have a more detailed/niche question about a song from The Crushed Velvet Apocalypse (Play It Again Sam 1990), The Pleasure Palace. The lyrics for that are pretty strange and weren’t included in the booklet, why is that?
The lyrics were completely improvised. We improvised every night, it was whatever was going through my head, hence you get these odd little snickers like “don’t hit me with the wooden fish” because we had a wooden fish in the studio, a percussive instrument, I was spotting it and it just seemed like a reasonable comment at that particular moment.
About the Chemical Playschool series: there are some gaps in the numbering, and I’ve heard that you consider the missing numbers unlucky numbers. Is that true?
Yes, it’s true, there is a number that I cannot mention, nothing has that number in our history. I’m a superstitious person. There was a Chemical Playschool 5 & 6, but it got broken up, spread across other releases at that time, I’m not sure why. It couldn’t be released as Chemical Playschool any longer, because some things went onto Basilisk and some went on to other cassette releases around that time.
Let’s talk about collaborations. You’ve mentioned in the past that you want to collaborate with David Tibet, is there any chance of that still happening?
I love David and his music very much, but there are no plans for a collaboration. There never really has been. We’re too much in the same phone booth, we’re both singers, both writers, and want to hang on to our own words. With Steven Stapleton, yes, there actually will be an album with him one of these days, we’ve talked about it a lot.
Would that be a solo or with The Dots?
Just me and Steve, solo.
Since you’re constantly making music, do you still find the time to check out new releases? And if so, do you have any favourite albums from the current or last year?
Yeah, a band I’ve been listening to lots recently is 65daysofstatic, I really like them.
I do try to listen to a lot of things. I listen to a lot of Supersilent, from Norway. I do indeed keep my head to the ground, it’s a really good time for music right now, interesting things are happening. I also love Chino Amobi, Paradiso, it’s insane. It’s come out of Hip Hop, in a way, but it’s Sound Collage. That fascinates me, when a genre twists into something so radical.
source: Benjamin Steinacher
https://fffffg.home.blog
December 3, 2021
