The Legendary Pink Dots talk about their forthcoming UK shows

by John E Smoke

Anglo-Dutch experimental rock band The Legendary Pink Dots are gracing the UK with two live dates in April 2014. This here DJ/reviewer was particularly taken with their last studio album ‘The Gethsemane Option’ as were much of the press who showered it with praise.  John E Smoke set out on a mission to enter the wild and fruitful garden of The Legendary Pink Dots to find out a little more. Edward Ka-Spel awaited….

Thank you for the opportunity for a bit of a natter with us at Rivetheads/Dark 3rd Radio. How are the Pink Dots today? Feeling Legendary?

Mythological more like it. A relic from some bygone age when power-mad surgeons ripped out children’s tonsils caring little about the consequences. You got it, I’m recovering from tonsillitis even though said tonsils have been missing for decades.

Legendary Pink Dots formed back in 1980. Your career is quite frankly awe inspiring and perhaps bewildering in scope and scale. As hard as it is to imagine, for someone who has never heard the Legendary Pink Dots, would you suggest they start with you most recent album or would you point them elsewhere in your back catalogue?

Tough one. Latest album is as good a place as any as that’s how we sound right now…and the Dots remains an evolving entity.

The title ‘The Gethsemane Option’ and the songs within bring to mind skewed biblical themes, also perhaps perceptible in the album artwork. Would you care to enlighten us to the themes of the album? And please tell us about the concept behind the artwork.

Artwork conceived by an artist friend (Vera) in Russia who listened intently to the music and drew her own conclusions.  Personally I find explaining the deeper meaning of an album akin to pulling the wings off a butterfly. Better to form your own interpretation.

Your music over the years has spanned many styles and themes including psychedelic rock, industrial, synth-pop, avant-garde and so on. It must be gratifying to be able to plunder such a range of sounds under the umbrella of one band and perhaps liberating too?

It’s liberating. A lot of wild wonderful music has been made over the centuries…I guess my starting point was psychedelic music which I hope we are able to expand upon.

When it comes to recording a new album, do you have a particular direction in mind, or perhaps aware subconsciously of a direction it might take?

It’s always a subconscious thing, but we tend to record fast and it means a certain consistency as well as an inner sense to the whole creation.

You have two UK dates coming up in April. Legendary Pink Dots do not appear to be shy of touring but we don’t see you much in the UK, despite you having formed here. Is it the food or the weather?

It’s the weather.

I’ve never had the pleasure of seeing you live, describe a typical LPD show, if there is such a thing. What can your audiences expect of your two UK dates?

Depends on the mood we’re in.  I’d just be careful if it looks like we’re in a friendly mood.

Perhaps unusually I came to learn of the Legendary Pink Dots through your collaborations with cEvin Key under The Tear Garden banner. Do you class this project as still being active? Can we expect any new studio material from The Tear Garden?

Very active…recordings planned for later this year.

What is next for The Legendary Pink Dots when you leave our grey and murky shores?

A few more Euro shows plus a couple of obscure vinyl releases concerning the 10 beings who rule The World.

Thank you muchly for your time. Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?

A pleasure. Considering the illness I’m emerging from, best I share as little as possible right now.

http://www.midlandsmetalheads.com/the-legendary-pink-dots-talk-about-forthcoming-uk-shows/

Interview source: The Quietus

Lovers of the strange! The Legendary Pink Dots are back with brilliant new album The Gethsemane Option. The band’s Ed Ka-Spel runs through the strange world of their history

June 15, 1980: Stonehenge Free Festival

This marks the first significant event in the illustrious career of myself and The Legendary Pink Dots. To be precise, it was inside a tent at the Stonehenge Free Festival.

It was 3am, maybe 4am and the whooping sound of a Korg synthesiser was bouncing across the field, reminiscent of the emanations created by one of those machines from The War Of The Worlds. I threw on a coat and dived out of the tent, as did Phil (Knight) and April (White)… it was pure cosmic synchronicity. We walked to the source of the sound – a three-piece band in a far-off corner with a full-on light show and an audience of just us. I never did find out the name of the band, but they planted a seed.

I bought a Korg MS10 and a cheap drum machine on hire purchase on the day after our return from the fest, and a band formed with Phil and April perhaps one month later. Our friend Mick Marshall taught us the rudiments of playing keyboards and then he joined The Dots as well.

Boxing Day, 1984

All my wordly possessions in the back of an estate car, in the hope that there would be no customs officer asking for some kind of document.

Mick Marshall did the driving. We travelled by way of Belgium into Holland where I intended live and hopefully thrive in the years to come. I quit my day job at a local rag days before and had amassed a princely sum of 8000 pounds  which was meant to see me through for at least say 10 years. I’d fallen hopelessly in love with a woman in Amsterdam, it seemed that the Dutch were the only people who ‘understood’ me and the UK was in the grip of the evil Thatcher and her cronies. Go East young man….

Well, those savings lasted a few weeks. I had to leave my temporary home in Arnhem as there was a marital war going on all around me – I was being used as a plate tossed at the wall by whoever was the angriest. Ultimately I fled with a synth under my arm on a train to Amsterdam – I literally had to break into the old house with a few band members in order to rescue the remains of my worldly possessions a few weeks later. I slept on the floor of a friend for a while, then found a squat… These were the hard times. The cheese on toast on alternate days times. The “Actually we only release records by Edward Ka-Spel as an act of, you could say, CHARITY” times. Amazingly the rest of the band (bar one) also took the boat to Amsterdam so we could all be poor together.

1987: The Skinny Puppy Tour

I opened for the Puppies on a 30 show tour of the US. Just me, a keyboard, a cassette deck and a microphone. A taste of that rock & roll lifestyle. A nightliner that Bon Jovi had used weeks before, a real road dog for a driver named Rick; roadies accidentally abandoned in desert truck stops, a near lynching in a truckstop in Alabama (don’t believe what they say about how Americans love that cute British accent). Hallucinations in Delaware and a build-up to the recording of Tired Eyes, Slowly Burning – the first Tear Garden album.

Of course, songs resulted from this great adventure,notably the epic ‘You And Me And Rainbows’ – composed during the course of one night with Cevin, and ‘Cloud Zero’ which is about feeling utterly displaced, disorientated and longing for a home that sadly didn’t exist at that time.

1988: Shock! Horror! Legendary Pink Dots SPLIT!!!!

It was one of those tours. 43 shows. Fond memories of sleeping on a bench in Carpi, Italy; cops pulling the power at midnight in Rome; traversing the entire length of the Alps in order to pick up a forgotten floppy disc; stalkers, psychos; a resignation within the band at the Swedish border on the eve of a (gulp) two day drive. But… just the FIRST resignation. “I can’t take it anymore” became as familiar as cheery morning greeting as The Dots found themselves reduced to TWO.

So what’s it to be then eh brother? Phil and I recorded an album (well… half an album) and planned another tour. A sax playing buddy (Niels) who owned the caravan lived in at the time joined the band, went with us to the USA a few months later and stayed in the Dots for the next 21 years.

1991: POPULARITY!

Well seemingly so….The record company (PIAS) actually liked The Maria Dimension and promoted the hell out of it, with maybe 30,000 flying from the stores in the first few months. We sold out sizeable venues, Warner Brothers approached us…and, well that was it. The record company hated the follow-up Shadow Weaver and despised the sister album Malachai even more. Maybe it was the track with the creaky floorboard or the 20 minute ever-changing opus that paid tribute to David Lynch and Carl Orff.

1991: Bob Pistoor RIP

We lost our finest musician and firm friend, Bob Pistoor, to lung cancer. A wonderful guitarist and a good man who, in his youth, had been asked to stand in for Syd by Pink Floyd when the former went AWOL on a Dutch tour. Bob was the co-writer of some of the Dots’ most appreciated songs – ‘I Love You In Your Tragic Beauty’ and ‘Belladonna’ (the lyrics for the latter were written by me while standing ankle-deep in the Aegean Sea wearing a cape).

1995: El Woodstock!

…well… nearly. We were invited to Mexico City for a show in an outdoor volcanic arena. No ordinary show either- Cevin Key was guest second drummer and a week’s holiday was thrown in for good measure. In fact an estimated 2,500 showed up, although more than half crept through the rocks in order not to pay. It was almost my last ever show as someone enthusiastically attempted to pull me offstage – a seven foot drop onto solid rock. Happily my survivalist instinct kicked in just in time.

My guardian angel worked overtime during that tour. On a run through New Mexico deep in the night we encountered a ghost rider just as we were overtaking a truck. Thankfully the merciful trucker slammed on his brakes and we swerved inwards as Phantom Frank speeded on his way for his presumed appointment on the other side.

1998: LPD At The Fillmore

Holy shit… I kid you not mes amis – we headlined at that immortal space. It’s  just that sense of history..the feeling that Miles, Zappa, Floyd, Airplane, The Grateful Dead had all commanded that stage, eaten cheese sandwiches in that dressing room, and handed over a chunk of money in commission for sold merchandise.

2009: SHOCK! HORROR! Legendary Pink Dots Split

It was a hard journey back from an otherwise spectacular London show in 2009 as first, long term guitarist Martijn de Kleer quit The Dots, and then Niels ended his tenure in the band.I guess it was all becoming a bit hard again. Tours were crawling through Latvian and Slovakian outposts as it was the only thread that was keeping us alive. The 12 hour drives in a tiny van didn’t do much for the sanity  of the passengers or the driver…What did we do? We recruited guitarist extraordinaire Erik Drost back into the fold and recorded an album, after a brief road tour of Romania, Greece and some Czech and Slovak outposts.

2013: The Gethsemane Option

Thirty-three years and maybe we got it right this time. We found ourselves a new label – the estimable Metropolis Records from Pennsylvania and are trusting them with the release of The Gethsemane Option which took just over one year to create, produced perhaps 5 radically different mixes for every song and a handsome collection of outtakes that will eventually see the light of day in another project.

And now it’s time to hit the road yet again. We keep telling ourselves that i’ll be the last tour of America… but somehow that continent always lures us back – even (perhaps especially) those ‘weird’ little places where the audience crunch cockroaches as they stomp to that irresistible beat… well, if they’ve had a few.

Edward Ka-Spel :

Edward Ka-Spel, born 23 January 1954 in London, is an English singer/songwriter and musician residing in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Edward Ka-Spel is best known as the lead singer, keyboard and electronics player, songwriter and co-founder of the band The Legendary Pink Dots, in which he was initially known as D’Archangel, Prophet Q’Sepel and other pseudonyms. He has also released numerous solo albums (initially featuring other members of the Legendary Pink Dots) and has worked in various different projects besides The Legendary Pink Dots, including The Tear Garden (with cEvin Key of Skinny Puppy), and Mimir (with Phil Knight, Christoph Heemann, Jim O’Rourke and others). Ka-Spel’s solo albums range from abstract electronic noise to more traditional pop songs, incorporating diverse elements of psychedelia, industrial, avant-garde, experimental electronic, art pop, classical music, folk (nursery songs), sampling, noise, collage, music concrete, etc. His lyrics have been described as intensely mystical, incorporating recurrent themes from his own personal mythos. Ka-Spel’s songwriting has been compared (usually favourably) to that of Syd Barrett and early Pink Floyd, though the artist describes the comparison as being a coincidence, not a direct influence. Ka-Spel often appears on stage barefoot, wearing a long scarf and either pink or black optic glasses.

The Interview : 

Complicated Sounds had the opportunity to do a interview with Edward Ka-Spel. One of the most interesting and exciting interviews i have ever done. Hope you enjoy reading it as much as i did doing it….

[Complicated Sounds] : Could you tell a little about how you got started making music. Did you have any training or are you self taught?
[Edward Ka-Spel] : It was a serious dream from childhood. When I was small I listened intently to the radio and in my imagination songs I heard became larger, somehow more fantastic, otherworldly.  I simply wanted to contribute and expand that universe but I’m self-taught..no training at all.

Source: Peek-a-boo magazine

It sounds like a daily event, but The Legendary Pink Dots have just released their newest album Chemical Playschool 15 on the Italian Rustblade-label. There are no surprises, just an unique beauty. Why changing a winning team anyway? Three decades this British band are offering us psychedelica which is added with a touch of darkwave. Peek-A-Boo is very proud that they could interview this icon, with a big thanks to Rustblade for realizing this.

Dear Edward, let’s go back into time. You started out in 1980. That’s more than three decades making music, how would you describe them and what are the highlights?
It’s odd to place myself back in the world of 1980 when even sitting here typing on a computer bordered on the unthinkable. Here I sit, with a stack of hard drives on the table containing thousands of albums from the last five decades, married to Alena, who is Russian, mobile phone switched off…

None of this would have been possible in 1980. For a start Russia was the Soviet Union then. It’s been a great ride and I hope it continues to deliver such delights.

Highlights? Well, headlining the Filmore in San Francisco must count as the sense of history was overwhelming. Playing on a stage carved from volcanic lava in Mexico City was another, being scared to play the test pressing of our first vinyl album comes to mind.

33 years is a long time and I count myself lucky to have shot the shadow of a conventional existence through the heart all those years ago. I’ll never tire of this however much of a struggle it can be to survive sometimes (you know, there’s always a way through).

From highlights to lowlights is a small step. The last year were not easy. There was the departure from Martijn and I read a manifesto of you in where you said it was hard to get gigs. And still you’re not giving up, do you never get tired of it?
How can anyone grow tired of a life that constantly throws up fresh challenges? It is harder to find shows these days, mostly because of the recession. Even so, it means more time for recording and perhaps that’s an even greater joy. I was sad to see Niels and Marty leave, and happy to report that the friendship is still very much alive. But it meant a fresh start for the Legendary Pink Dots with Erik Drost rejoining, and there is a fresh energy about the band these days.

The Legendary Pink Dots always have lots of different members which is normal for a band that exists for 30 years. How do all these people got involved? Are they knocking on your door or do you search them yourselves?
In the early days we tended to go looking. Since the first albums came out the knocks were on our door. In fact the changes became much less since 1988, which was a long time ago now.

I’m afraid I’m quite wrong but I often tend to think that The Legendary Pink Dots is a music collective in where Edward and The Silverman are the leaders.
Not so far from the truth if you consider the history. There have been spells where that “leadership” was more spread through the group (Bob Pistoor and Ryan Moore also contributed a lot musically).

Quite soon in your existence you decided to move to Holland. Why was that?
I fell in love and followed my heart. Holland also looked like a promised land from the UK where Thatcher was exerting her evil influence. I’m back in London now and commute to The Netherlands every few weeks as the rest of the band is there, but it’s possible because of those much maligned budget airlines.

If I don’t count some classic industrial bands I must say that you sound very unbritish, I guess the reactions over there weren’t that cool.
I tend to disagree with that assessment. Still, I felt we were underappreciated in the UK in the beginning. Ironically this has now changed and London has become one of our best cities to play.

There are so many ways to describe your music, but who was influenced you?
The truly psychedelic souls…Pink Floyd should be mentioned, Can, David Allen, VDGG , Pierre Henry….All played a role.

Strange question perhaps, but anyway, do you listen to The Legendary Pink Dots yourself?
I have to as my wife Alena insists.

I really must ask this is as a fan. I listened to your music a lifetime (!) but in all honesty I don’t understand one word of your poetry as the music speaks for itself. Do you think it’s possible that everyone can interpret The Legendary Pink Dots in his way?
Absolutely. Music and words should be a totality – a sum of the parts. That’s why I can listen to an inspired band from Finland and love what I hear. I hardly speak a word of Finnish.

Your newest album Chemical Playschool 15 is released on Rustblade. How did you got involved with them?
They wrote to me just over a year ago. I liked their enthusiasm and passion.

I somewhere read that these Chemical Playschool-albums are improvised songs, is that true?
Partly, but Chemical Playschool 11,12 and 13 was one year in the making. Sometimes I claim unfinished pieces and apply the final brush strokes , a voice and ten the mix.

Edward, you also keep on making solo records. What’s the main difference in them and the material with The Legendary Pink Dots?
The solo music is maybe even more indulgent than Legendary Pink Dots, sometimes I like to dot all the I’s myself.

I want to finish with two questions I always ask. What’s your favorite record of all time and please state why.
Hard one, but I should say “In the Court of the Crimson King”. I heard it on the radio at a tender age and everything changed during those 9 minutes.

With whom wouldn’t you mind to be alone with in an elevator for 8 hours and what would you do then?
My wife Alena is the only person I would want to be alone in an elevator with 8 hours as she’s the one person who could calm me down.

A special message for the Peek-A-Boo readers could be?
Never write that idea off as just a dream.

Didier BECU
11/03/2013

Mr. Edward Ka-spel is the front man for an underground yet epic band known as the Legendary Pink Dots.  He’s also a solo recording/performing artist extraordinaire and contributor to numerous side project bands including The Tear Garden (with cEvin Key of Skinny Puppy renown).  The Dots have been well loved by fans ‘in the know’ for over thirty years for their distinguished style of psychedelically experimental electronic rock.  To say that they have recorded a prolific amount of albums and toured non stop is an understatement.  There’s a passion for output here that few musicians can match.  There’s also an online cornucopia of information compiled by devotees to document the band’s goings-on, which can be explored in the link at the bottom of this interview.

Recently Studio Wormbone corresponded with Mr. Ka-spel to talk about gear, lyrical content, family, and other fantastically critical items of interest.  Read on to find out more about how Edward is currently diving head first into Ableton Live, and was propelled toward the pursuit of music at an impressionable age by non other than King Crimson.  Without further ado let’s discover what drives Mr. Ka-spel to provide the world with such a uniquely creative vision:

[SWB]  Let’s start with the nuts-and-bolts behind your music.  You mentioned recently that you’re exploring musical software . . . is that due to personal preference or do you see software as the wave of the future?

I’d always been wary of making music on the computer, not so much as a Luddite (I’m not) but because of the fear of not understanding the technology and of having too many choices.  I guess I was just used to working for days on that one special sound or texture while the various software on hand just sounds so good right away.  Daunting …but it’s just a new challenge after all.  Still, anything that makes sound is valid – the path into the future is as much about rusty strings as ones and zeroes.

[SWB]  What programs currently strike your fancy?