https://wickedspinsradio.org/wsr2012

Martin Bramah (Blue Orchids) Interview for Wicked Spins Radio
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https://www.facebook.com/blueorchidsband/

By Phlis – Alteria Anarchy 

WSR – Blue Orchids are set to re-issue a lot of their back catalogue, which album or EP reminds you of the best times of Blue Orchids and why were they so good?
Martin – I think ‘Mystic Bud’ was maybe the most fun album to record. I had no band at the time and was asked by LTM Records to make a new Blue Orchids album, so I hired some recording equipment and made the album at home, with the help of a few friends. It took a couple of months in the summer of 2003 – no rehearsals or anything like that – one day I just pressed the record button and said ‘today I start the album’ – fun with next to nothing!

WSR – You are known for your lyrical mastery being very intelligent with your wordplay, have you ever managed to get something across in a song without actually saying directly stating it?  Maybe a criticism of someone or something for instance but yet without actually saying you suck.

Martin – I do tend not to state things directly, as you say, because to me music and words make an art-form best used for evoking moods and emotions and painting mind-pictures to be pondered by the listener. I don’t write criticisms of people – although Mark E Smith did once ask me to name the song I’d written about him… I was a bit puzzled as I hadn’t written a song about him as such – so trying to be helpful I said, do you mean ‘Dumb Magician’ or ‘The House That Faded Out’ maybe?
Years later though I did write the song ‘Shining Brow’ for Mark.

WSR – No I’ve lived in Manchester and to me it’s industrial and its music scene has always been vibrant, but what was the experience like for you of Manchester in the 70’s and 80’s?

Martin – In Manchester back then we had a well educated working class. We were an industrialised western city with full access to the latest trends in the entertainment and arts media – but at the same time we were a cultural backwater. We needed to reinvent ourselves as a city – or at least we felt a strong urge to do so.

The music grew out of that. We were obsessed with American culture, but we weren’t American. We were hip, but we were different. It was an intense time of exploration, discovering what we were and what we could become.

WSR – There is a story, almost a legend about when the Rolling Stones playing in Prague that they were horrified the Castle wasn’t illuminated so they paid for the castle to have lights.  Do you know of any music stories or legends and if so what, are there any Blue Orchids myths and legends too?

Martin – You would have to ask other people about any Blue Orchids myths and legends – as I’d be one of the characters in said fables.

WSR – Music is a way of expression with minimum restrictions, but over the many years have you ever been restricted when you have tried to express you feelings in a musical way?

Martin – Generally speaking I’m only restricted by my own limitations (some self imposed and some imposed by nature) – the exception being elements of my work in The Fall, some of which was curtailed for the greater good of the cause.

WSR – The Once And Future Thing is a very beautiful album and shows that the life within Blue Orchids is as strong now as it has ever been, is there a song on the new album which you could say is pure Blue Orchids in every sense and if so which song and why?

Martin – If I have to choose one song I’ll say ‘Feather From The Sun’. I think it has all the elements of a classic Blue Orchids track. It went through a lot of changes before we got to this version, the original title was ‘The Pauper & The Prince Of Peace’, but listening back to the recording, which was improvised live in studio around a prearranged theme, I had a new idea for lyrics and so ditched what I had written and started again. The band were pushed to their limits to get a good live take and you feel that focused energy here.

The whole album was played live in studio, by the way – but with my vocals and some mandolin and acoustic guitar added later.

WSR – Many bands over the years have covered Blue Orchids songs, of all the covers you have heard which is your favourite and why?

Martin – I’m a big fan of Crystal Stilts, they’re one of my favourite American bands of recent years, so when I found out they had covered ‘Low Profile’ I was very keen to hear it – and it is a cool version. The Dust Devils also did a great take on that song too, in ’96 I think? And I must add ‘A Year With No Head’ as reworked by Slovenly.

It’s always good to hear people playing stuff you made up, right?!

WSR – What was it about The Fall that just didn’t fit with you?  I mean you left then returned and left again but yet you helped establish the band.

Martin – We started The Fall as friends who gravitated toward each other through a common interest in music, poetry, art, movies, books etc, a feeling of alienation and a drive to make a statement. I left after two years (the last of the original gang to leave) when The Fall started to be run as a business with MES as managing director, he was signing stuff without bothering to even tell band members what he was up to – that attitude just got boring and quite insulting really.
I rejoined ten years later, a lot had happened in between, and I hoped we would have all grown up a bit in the mean time. I felt I had something to contribute to The Fall, which was losing momentum after Brix left.

But what I found was that the group had become a crazed dictatorship and I began to think that Mark had only rehired me so he could punish me for having left ten years earlier. Still, we made some interesting music and had some wild times, until I was finally fired on tour in Australia after a year of service, as has been well documented elsewhere.

WSR – Who was it who described your sound as ‘Phil Sector meets the Velvet Underground under Blackpool Illuminations’ and has there every been anything said about Blue Orchid since that is memorable in a good or bad way?

Martin – That was me! I wrote that in the sleeve notes for a reissue of The Greatest Hit on CD, if remember rightly. It was meant to be a tongue in cheek remark…
Hmm, ‘The Cult Band’s Cult Band’ has also kind of stuck as a tag for the band – but we get called all kinds of things, good and bad.

WSR – Why wasn’t The Battle Of Twisted Heel released until quite recently, how did it seemingly become lost and where did you find it again?

Martin – Its first release was wilfully obscure. I was tired of dealing with record labels at that time and so I self released it via our website as a mail order only CD. No surprise it didn’t sell many copies then. But over time people were telling me it deserved to be better known and appreciated, so a vinyl pressing was the obvious way to re-launch it to the wider public.

WSR – Something that never did get recorded was ‘I Want Some Drugs Or Something!’, why did it never get recorded and at what stage in your life and music career were you at when you wrote that song?

Martin – Ha! That was an early Fall song written by Una Baines, not me.

It was really just a mantra sung over a ‘Waiting For The Man’ hammered piano drone – a statement of intent, if you will. No real lyric though. lol

WSR – Drugs are there and to some people they experience new things and they change their view of the world to open their eyes and ears, yet with some people drugs destroy them completely.  What were your experiences with drugs and what effect did it have on you?

Martin – My first experience of an illegal drug was at the age of sixteen when I tried ‘microdot’ LSD with three close friends of mine. LSD was doing the rounds of the Manchester club scene at the time, as were we, so we bought some but waited till the next day to take it in a big green park we liked to hang out in at the time.

Of course our minds were blown and we were never the same again.

As for people being destroyed by drugs… well, life is tough and one must be made of stern stuff, with or without puny drugs.

WSR – Your guitar playing is amazing, you are left handed and also self taught.  What is it you personally love about the guitar and how do you thing you view music being self taught rather than someone who knows lets say the science behind the music?

Martin – Well part of being self taught was figuring out my own science of music and finding what worked for me and going with it – trusting my own discoveries.

I came across an old idea awhile ago called ‘The Law Of False Relations’ used in medieval music, which chimed with me, blending minor with major scales, it seemed I had always had something of this in my work – using discord as part of my pallet of expression.

I see myself as part of a kind of folk tradition, in that I’m not part of the classical school and I haven’t been trained at university. But not ‘folk’ in the fashionable sense of the word – more ‘of the people’.

I think what first attracted me to the electric guitar was its potential for cacophony and the ability to bend notes and slide about on the strings – it’s been a good instrument for pushing the boundaries of music – and rules must always be tested!

WSR – Thank you so much for giving Wicked Spins Radio this interview, any final thoughts?

Martin – Thanks for taking the time to put these questions together – and I’d just like to say to anyone who has managed to read to the end of this interview: thank you, you are a special kind of human being.