_465_706_int.jpg)
Since much of Renaldo & The Loaf’s work experiments with time, it makes a funny kind of sense that, on 2017’s Gurdy Hurding, the duo picked up right about where they left off with 1987’s The Elbow Is Taboo. Perhaps, like all the tapes they’ve run backwards over the years, their music really does borrow from the future. In the early days especially, they liked to play songs unsinging themselves, the sound of speech sucking itself back up through the lungs to its point of origin in the brain. And wouldn’t it be wonderful, inhaling song and speech out of the environment into your nervous system?
You would be unlikely to mistake Renaldo & The Loaf’s music for someone else’s. The sound, an emergent property of Renaldo Malpractice and Ted the Loaf’s decades-long musical friendship, is entirely homemade, but ingeniously fitted together and sturdily constructed—each song a miniature feat of engineering, built to last. “Primitive modernism,” Ralph Records called it in 1981, announcing the release of Songs for Swinging Larvae.
So while the timbres and harmonies can be bracingly unfamiliar, Renaldo & The Loaf’s songs teem with earworms, and probably brain- and spineworms, too. In fact, let me take this opportunity to recommend that the songs themselves be classified and studied as new zoological discoveries. (These days, when I listen to Klanggalerie‘s pristine and greatly enlarged editions of the Renaldo & The Loaf catalog, I often picture the menagerie of intergalactic pilgrims in Clark Ashton Smith’s “The City of the Singing Flame.”)
Alex Wroten’s excellent new documentary 23rd Century Giants, out March 8 on Blu-ray and streaming platforms, tells how two teenage Tyrannosaurus Rex fans from Portsmouth became the weirdest band on Ralph. Along with Renaldo Malpractice and Ted the Loaf themselves, the documentary collects testimony from the Cryptic Corporation’s Homer Flynn, Jay Clem, and the late Hardy Fox; the visionary director behind Renaldo & The Loaf’s Songs for Swinging Larvae video, Graeme Whifler; veterans of the Ralph and T.E.C. Tones labels, and patient recipients of my adolescent correspondence, Tom Timony and Sheenah Spece; album illustrators Poxodd and Steven Cerio; and DEVO archivist Michael Pilmer, among others.
Some highlights follow from my recent conversation with director Alex Wroten and the two learned rotcods.
Renaldo & The Loaf, 1982 (courtesy of Well Dang! Productions)
Is this the first time the two of you have been in front of the camera very much, Brian and David? The “Backwards Film Study” that’s in there seems to come from the early Eighties—
Brian Poole (Renaldo Malpractice): Oh, you’ve seen that, have you? [Laughs]
Well, I’ve just seen the little bit that’s in the documentary. I’m looking forward to seeing the full thing on the Blu-ray.
David Janssen (Ted the Loaf): That’s it. It’s only very short, that’s all there is.
Brian: Basically, yeah. Three minutes, that’s it!
David: And no, we’re not really used to being in front of the camera much. There’s that three-minute thing; there’s, I suppose, the filming we did for the “A Convivial Ode” video…
Brian: And that’s it, really, isn’t it?
David: I mean, unintentionally, the stuff that was filmed live. I mean, that was just, someone happened to film it, so we weren’t really conscious of being in front of a camera.
This is the Vienna show you’re talking about?
David: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I suppose Alex’s documentary is kind of the longest we’ve ever been under the lights of movie cameras.
Brian: Yeah, that’s right. But of course, we didn’t have to do makeup or anything like that, or costumes. [Laughs]
Alex Wroten (director, 23rd Century Giants): Well, not totally true, ‘cause there’s the part where you’re wearing the glasses [designed by Poxodd], so you did a little costumes.
David: And the masks.
Brian: In answer to your question, no. We’re really not used to being the center of attention, if you like. There have been stills done. Up in the Eighties and that, we did sort of go into a studio and have some photos done of us, but apart from that, no. In fact, the material that Alex asked for—I mean, obviously, as the documentary was coming to fruition and that, he wanted to say “What visual material do you have?” And it was a very, very useful thing looking through the archive, which, fortunately, I’ve got it here, our stuff, because I haven’t moved house, and it’s just here. So I was able to find quite a lot of stuff, but, you know, there’s some creative stuff that Alex had to do in the film to illustrate certain things, let’s say.
Renaldo’s clip-on glasses by Poxodd (courtesy of Well Dang! Productions)
Brian: There was something else which I mentioned to Alex recently. It’s a story that we’ve told before, but I didn’t realize we hadn’t put it in the film. Dave, it’s the hot tub incident.
David: Oh, God, yeah!
Brian: It would have been quite fun to have had in the film.
David: Whose book was it in?
Brian: It’s in Ian Shirley’s book.
David: And it’s in Riggsy’s piece, wasn’t it?
Brian: Yeah, the interview with us for Mr. Riggsy. You tell Oliver, Dave.
David: When we went to San Francisco in 1981, we were invited one evening round to one of the Residents’ houses for dinner. And after dinner, he said “Would you like to see my hot tub?” Well, in 1981, I’ve never heard of a hot tub, and I’m thinking: why does he want to show us his washing machine?
[Laughter]
And then, so, we all ended up stark naked in the hot tub, and another one of the Residents very dryly said, “Now you’ll be able to tell people that you can recognize the Residents by the shape of their penises.”
[Laughter]
Renaldo & The Loaf, 1980 (courtesy of Well Dang! Productions)
Brian: This is true! But no, that was a very memorable evening. You know, several bottles of beer. And I think there’s one other thing they said which I’m not sure has been put anywhere, but it’s that they were saying how Talking Heads had expressed interest in doing a cover of “You Yesyesyes.” But it never happened, of course, but they were chatting, so maybe they shared a hot tub with David Byrne, I don’t know.
David: Well, yeah, they did, because there was the John Gill incident.
Brian: Oh!
David: John Gill was a British music journalist who used to write for Sounds magazine, then he went on to, I don’t know, popular music editor for Time Out magazine. And we became friends with him. He reviewed Songs for Swinging Larvae and gave it kind of a mixed review, and he did say to us later that, actually, when he reviewed it he’d only heard it once, and that he actually liked the album a lot more than how it came across in the review. Which I guess is quite a common problem for reviewers: they’ve got so much stuff to review and so little time, they just have to go on maybe their first impressions, which, not always how they eventually feel about the piece.
But we were talking to him; when we went up to London, we’d occasionally meet up with him, go for a drink and have a chat. And he said, “I’m interviewing David Byrne next week.” And we said, “Ask him what it was like sharing a hot tub with the Residents.”
And he told us about it afterwards. You know what David Byrne’s like, he’s a very kind of a nervous, twitchy—you think of “Psycho Killer” and the way he sort of enacts that, a very sort of twitchy person. And John said, “Well, I got him settled down, the interview was going really well, he was relaxed, we got through it all, it was great,” and right at the end, just as he was leaving, he said, “So David, what was the experience of sharing a hot tub with the Residents like?” [Twitches, looks around anxiously] “What? What? What?”
[Laughter]
Brian: Well, it’s the best place to do deals, I suppose. I don’t know. But that was something else, that was.
Alex: If you really wanna trace it back, in 2004, when I was still in high school, I made a little movie called The Human Elbow. And while I was working on making the soundtrack to that movie, I thought—I had, about two years earlier, discovered Renaldo & the Loaf via the Residents’ Icky Flix DVD. I saw [Graeme Whifler’s Songs for Swinging Larvae] music video, I was like, “I don’t know what is going on here, this is amazing.” I went on eBay and bought the first two albums and then Struvé and Sneff and Title in Limbo, all on vinyl, before the vinyl resurgence occurred, so I got ‘em for like seven bucks a piece, and I was captivated by it. At that point, I reached out—I don’t know how I got Brian’s email address, but I reached out to Brian, and was like, “Hey, would you work on collaborating on this song for me for my stupid high school movie?” And he was very gracious and did it.
So I started working on a new website for them and a couple years later realized that Dave and Brian had gotten back in contact. I did the same thing again in college, I made another movie and I was like, “Hey guys, do you wanna do some music for my movie?” And we made a little kind of special feature documentary that was just done over Skype at the time, so in the back of my mind I always thought, “I really want to do something better than what we have done here, this little kind of documentary.” We put it on YouTube, and people had enjoyed it, you know, they put positive comments on it on YouTube now and then, but it was just this little thing—basically an interview like this.
So in 2019, my wife [23rd Century Giants co-producer and co-editor Lindsay Wolfe-Wroten] and I were planning to go to Europe to do some interviews for another documentary we’ve been working on since 2015, and I thought, “We’re already going to have our cameras; what a perfect opportunity to see if we could film a little short with them. Like something where we could interview them in person. You know, I’ll intentionally interview them separately and then together, so we can have that visual reuniting, but we’ll make a short, or whatever.”
Brian: Yeah, well, that’s pretty accurate, I think. We’ve known Alex for a long time. We did, for the film, the second one which he did, Kirk Mannican’s Liberty Mug, he asked us to do some music for it, which we did. Dave, was that the first thing we actually recorded when we got back together?
David: God, my memory on things like this is not fantastic, but possibly.
Brian: I think “Aria Meica” was probably about 2007?
Alex: That’s right. I think it was the first thing you guys had done.
David: Yeah, it probably was, then.
Brian: So it sort of like broke the ice for us, really, doing those. There were three tracks in total, and we’ve been in touch ever since. And as Alex said, we did the Skype interview thing, with some bits of film—was there some bits of film and stills in it and things? I can’t remember now, I haven’t watched it—
David: I’ve got no memory of that whatsoever.
[Laughter]
Still from ‘23rd Century Giants’ (courtesy of Well Dang! Productions)
Alex: The original goal behind what we were gonna do was just to make a little short thing, something that was probably ten to twenty minutes long. Just kind of show, here’s what they’re up to, here’s the live thing. We had gone to England in early September 2019, we had done—and I’m sure Brian could tell you more about the whiz-bangness of how quickly we did all the interviews—but we were there only in Portsmouth for like a day and a half, and got some footage, again, toward the goal of doing something short, we didn’t think we needed a ton more, and then we came back to the States, and were able to interview Homer Flynn, and we interviewed Poxodd and I was able to get ahold of Graeme Whifler, and just able to get some stuff banked.
And then we started editing, and where this is all going is: we asked all these questions just totally out of order. There was no chronology to how we asked questions to Brian and David, it was all kind of thematically connected. But as we started to cut it together and then really realized where the emotional beats were, especially in the kind of twenty years apart and stuff, and watching Brian and David’s body language—even though totally independent, and totally not chronologically filmed, right?—and then having, I would say, Dave’s Zen-like poignance that pops up here and there, those were the things that emotionally anchored the narrative to it to a degree where then it was kind of one of those things where we went, “Yeah, this can’t be a short thing. We can’t visualize a short thing anymore now that we know this stuff exists.”
The only thing we knew for sure was that David was funny enough to find the final joke about dog farts, that was the only thing we knew was going to be the same. But everything else we absolutely discovered later. This project really became what it became because of what we captured, not because we went there to capture that particular thing.
Brian at work, 1986 (courtesy of Well Dang! Productions)
I wanted to ask about the division of labor in the band. Of the two of you, Brian, are you the archivist?
David: Yeah, Brian is very much the archivist.
Brian: Yeah, I’m a magpie, squirrel, whatever. [Laughs] Yeah, it just happened. As I say, I just had the space, and it’s just accumulated. So yes, because I’m a collector of stuff, not just Residents stuff but, you know, various other things; I’m more of a collector mentality, whereas David’s not, in comparison, anyway. So yeah, I’ve boxes and boxes of stuff, which in fact very recently I’m just in the process of rationalizing, putting various things together that should be together so I know what I’ve got. And I am throwing out a few things, but nothing valuable. But getting everything into boxes so that I feel more comfortable that I know where everything is.
Alex: When [Lindsay and I] first put a cut of the movie together, we just constructed it from the perspective of, like, what’s the story, what do we want it to be? And then, sometimes that involves tightening an interview in a way that maybe, like, you can’t really show somebody on camera for a second because you’re cutting out some “ums” just to kind of get the spacing right. So we would have little gaps [where] we were like, “We really would like to illustrate this, we’ve been on this person’s head too long,” you know, et cetera. So I think the first version that Brian and Dave saw was like: interview, interview, black thing saying what we want, black thing saying what we want. It just had so many visual holes in it, and I remember the first email from Brian back, like, “I don’t know if I have that much stuff.” But lo and behold, after multiple weeks and months of him digging through his archives and scanning things, we slowly got to fill it all up.
Brian: It surprised me what I found. I mean, I’d completely forgotten about a lot of it. So it was useful as an exercise to digitize it anyway, a lot of the stuff. But, you know, there are original lyric sheets, as it were, when we were working lyrics out for songs, where they changed, and then mixing notes for the albums, and all that sort of thing, which are not done in any conventional sort of logical way, like you get track sheets and everything that people do in studios—it’s nothing like that. They’re just on A4 sheets of lined paper, because it only needed to be used for that one instance and then put aside, it was done.
Renaldo & The Loaf, 1981 (courtesy Well Dang! Productions)
But they do seem to become more complex as the movie goes on, and you move to the eight-track recorder. By the time of The Elbow Is Taboo it seems like those have filled out quite a bit.
David: That’s probably true. I mean, the eight-track opened up a whole extra field of opportunity. Twice as many tracks to play with, and if you’re doing a mixdown as well to two-track, you’ve got about a dozen tracks, maybe.
Brian: Yes, I watched this afternoon to refresh my memory, and there’s something that David says in there about the eight-track. He said, it did take us a long time to work because there’s a lot more tracks to fill up, as it were. But I think if you look back at our earlier stuff, the layerings that were in it would be of that order: it would go to eight parallel tracks, but of course we didn’t have a machine to do it. We had to do it by bouncing.
David: Yes, one interesting thing about that that’s only really just occurred to me: almost unconsciously, we had a rule about how many times we would mix down, because we were concerned about compromising the audio quality. I think some bands would have mixed stuff down and mixed it again, and maybe ended up with more tracks. But we always had this kind of elaborate rule, that we’d fill up the four tracks, mix down to two, and maybe in some instances mix down to one, and then overdub. But that kind of would be it; we wouldn’t do a further bounce.
Brian: We were conscious not just of hiss noise, the surface noise that you get when you do multiple things, but also you’d lose the fidelity of the sound. But also, of course, working in that way—in many ways, it’s very refreshing to work in a way where you don’t go backwards. You basically commit to something—
David: [Laughs] Well, sometimes we did go backwards!
[Laughter]
Brian: We did go backwards! But in an audio—oh, it happens it was in an audio sense. [Laughter] But you know what I mean. It’s like, we would say, “That’s sounding alright, okay,” and then we’d put a dub on top of it, that we thought, “Oh, yeah, that’s really good.” But you couldn’t say, “Oh, if only we brought the drums up a little bit more there on the original”—we couldn’t do it. We had to go with what we had.
David: You’d committed yourself at a fairly early stage, whereas nowadays, one, you’ve got almost infinite undos with software, and you don’t have to mix down to the last bit.
Brian: [Picking up paper and pen] I’m gonna write that down, ‘cause that’s quite a good title, “Infinite Undos.” Quite like that. This is what happens, just write down phrases. If you see in a future thing, “the infinite undos,” you’ll know where that came from.
Alex: “Infinite Undos” is a structure where it starts off very dense, and slowly things get removed from it as you undo it.
Sneff’s Surgery, 1978 (courtesy of Well Dang! Productions
Were those constraints helpful in any way? I could imagine that since you’ve gotten back together, working with computers, the infinite possibility could be, in a way—you never have to commit to anything, you can always go back and change it.
Brian: I don’t know. I think when we did it, at the time, everything was expedient for the time it was done, and we had no other choice. But we made the best of what we had, and as Dave’s pointed out, we were sensitive enough to know that we could destroy our own work if we’d been too greedy. And so we perhaps worked it out like, “Okay, let’s put the vocal on,” because the vocals usually are the last thing, and then, “That’s it, done, boom. Off to the side and on to the next thing,” or whatever.
I think now, yeah, of course. But there are certain ways in which we work, I think, that since we don’t actually sort of physically sit together and do music anymore—say Dave sends me a sketch idea, and it’ll be a stereo WAV, sometimes an MP3, which I’ll put into one of the programs and start working an idea out along with it. But we don’t always go back to the original sketch and unpick that for the mix. I think even on Gurdy Hurding we didn’t do that that much. So we tend to commit to certain things at quite an early stage, if we want to.
David: Mm.
Brian: Well, that’s true, isn’t it, really. ‘Cause sometimes I’d cut pieces up and do a bit of a rearrangement, like, in Cubase.
David: Yeah, yeah.
Brian: But seldom go back to the original thing, unless there’s something disastrous, and we need to do it. So we’re quite happy to commit to certain things early on, if we want to.
’Hardly Gurning While the World Is Turning’ (via Poxodd)
Brian: I’ve got to admit—we put Hardly Gurning together—the people that were approached to do remixes, it was a very organic thing, it wasn’t like this big project idea, initially, at all. We had the “Hardly Gurning” track that we’d put on the vinyl of Gurdy Hurding, and we thought “Well, we’d like to release that sometime.” But then to make it sort of, “Well, how about…” Andrew Liles had done a couple of remixes. He asked us not long after Gurdy Hurding came out, and he said “Oh, I’d like to have a go,” and we sent him the stems for a couple of things, and he did these two remixes; we used one of them on the CD, and that sort of sowed the seed.
But it was usually from when we sort of like met somebody that we knew. Like going over to Vienna, and various things, like our live thing, and then I went over a year afterwards, as well; and just sitting in a pub talking to people, saying “Oh, do you fancy doing a remix of one of our songs?” And they’d say, “Yeah, sure.” And that’s how various things like Section 25 got involved, and Eric Random as well. And Erik Stein from Cult with No Name is a friend of mine from way back, he’s a Residents fan, so I’ve known him a long time. And it just sort of came together in bits and pieces, and then, as Alex has said, there was this “Wouldn’t it be interesting if all the actual songs did get remixed in some way?” And I reached out to the Residents, and because of the pandemic, they had time. And so we got the Residents, and then [Residents producer] Eric Drew Feldman emailed and said “Oh, can I do one?” And then [Residents guitarist] Nolan Cook said “Oh, why didn’t you ask me?” So it was like just sending the stems out, and it just came together in that way.
But the weird thing was, apart from—I think The Music Is Taboo is perhaps the only time, Dave, we would ever consider that there was a remix of our songs.
David: Well, that was Charles Klee in America, it was his idea to do that, and he started off coordinating the whole thing. And then I can’t remember what happened, but I ended up collating the whole thing in the end. Yeah, I mean, that was an interesting project.
Brian: Well, they were like cover versions, weren’t they?
David: Yeah, yeah.
Brian: Not so much like a remix as, “Oh, here’s the stems, mess around with them,” so they’re slightly different. So perhaps it was the first time our stuff had ever been remixed, that we knew about, on that.
The ‘Hambu Hodo’ single (via Discogs)
Does “Hambu Hodo”—I always think of “Hambu Hodo” as being your sort of dance song, since it has that insistent 4/4 beat—
Brian: Almost.
[Laughter]
Sort of. But that was a twelve-inch single, wasn’t it?
Brian: Yeah. Well, it was our own remix—well, it was our own mix of the album track. Which I must admit, Dave actually did all the mechanics of putting the pieces [together], ‘cause it was all on tape. And so we were working out, like, “Yeah, that bit, that bit,” whereupon now you’d just lift bits out and glue them together and whatever, you had to physically record and cut them out as tape and stick it together and then listen to it, say, “Does that work? Now what about if that’s round the other way?” Dave’s editing skills were amazing on tape.
Yeah, a dance one. You know from the film, Dave was the best man at my wedding, yeah? At the party afterwards, the reception, I’ve got all my family, and businesspeople that I know I’ve invited, and friends, and all that sort of thing, and, you know, elderly aunts, and we’re all sitting there, and the disco’s going, and all of a sudden “Hambu Hodo” comes on! David brought it and put it on. And it’s so strange to see all the people I knew who had never heard it anyway attempting to dance to it! [Laughter] Hence the almost 4/4, ‘cause it’s not. They did a conga in the end.
Design by Brian Poole, 2003 (courtesy of Well Dang! Productions)
I wanted to ask about dice. It seems like the dice evenings were such a big part of Renaldo & the Loaf, but also I have a sense that you’ve used dice in recording—well, I guess maybe for you, writing and recording are the same process, that’s another question—but before asking about dice evenings and that group, I wanted to ask about how you use dice in your creative work.
Brian: We don’t really do it now, do we?
David: Do you mean now? What I use now within the software I use, if I’m making up a melody, there’s a randomizer function which, I use that. Sometimes it will come out, and I think “That’s great as it is,” then other times I think, “That’s great, but I’ll change this note.” So that’s the closest I get—it’s not with dice, but it is kind of a chance process.
Brian: Yeah, so I forgot about in Fruity Slicer, the random thing, yeah. That’s pretty amazing. But as regards the dice, throw-a-six sort of thing, I think we only sort of used it…
David: Couple of times on Elbow, wasn’t there?
Brian: Couple of things on Elbow. That was probably the most interesting musical time.
David: The rhythm of “Hambu Hodo” was done with that, and I think the track “The Elbow is Taboo,” we decided what instruments we were gonna use on the roll of the dice, and hence we end up with drum machine, mandolin and harmonica. [Laughs]
Brian: Yes, that’s right! I found that, by the way, when I was looking, the actual thing where we drew a matrix, and we had all the instruments, and how we actually went down and whittled it down by odds and evens and things like that with dice, so we ended with, as David said, a menu of a very select number of instruments. Like harmonica—neither of us could play the harmonica, all we could do was make noises with it, but that came up, and so we had harmonica on it, and… was the rhythm done, as well, by dice?
David: I can’t remember.
Brian: Sounds like it was. It sounds a little bit random, so we may have been on that one.
David: Maybe, yeah.
Brian: But we like chance. We always mention about the happy accident happening with the music, and if we can devise a method whereupon we allow those things to happen, there’s nothing like the delight of something really pretty cool coming out of a random effect or something. We’re not frightened to say, “Yay! Let’s keep that in, that sounds great.”
Unused promo shot for ‘Songs for Swinging Larvae’ (courtesy of Well Dang! Productions)
I’m struck by something David says at the end of the movie, about how the idea that things could happen differently than they have happened is just an idea. And I wonder if in a way the roll of the dice—it’s like, if everything is determined, the roll of the dice somehow gives you access to—
David: Well, it’s not that it’s determined, because that kind of suggests that there’s a before and an after. I’d say it’s more, things happen as they happen, but that is totally spontaneously within the moment, it’s not like it’s predetermined. It’s just spontaneously happening, and the idea that, I don’t know, you do something and you think afterwards, “I wish I’d done that instead”—it’s just an idea. Things happen as they happen, and that’s it, really. [Laughs]
Brian: Yeah! ‘Cause time is just like, there’s a moment, there’s a moment. I think saying, “Oh, I wish”—well, perhaps “wish” isn’t the right word, but you can learn from certain things, if you see what I mean. I guess you can learn that that exact moment will never happen again, ‘cause it’s gone, but you can always, I suppose, get experience from certain things.
That’s actually quite a poignant part of the film, isn’t it, that statement?
Be Seeing You
David: Alex, this is something that I only remembered fairly recently. You know you interviewed Melvin [A bonus feature on the Blu-ray—Ed.], and he told the story about how he turned up at my house and we were friends ever since? I don’t know if you’re familiar, there used to be a TV series in Britain called The Prisoner. It was kind of a cult thing—
Brian: Patrick McGoohan.
David: —which was filmed in North Wales. It was very much a cult thing. Anyway, Melvin went one year, they had a Prisoner convention for fans of The Prisoner, they got together in Portmeirion where it was filmed every year and had a get-together and talked about the program. And Melvin went there one year, and he was walking along, one evening, the street of this, it’s a village, really; it’s not really a town—but he was walking along, and he came across two people sat on a wall, and they were singing the “Kimbolton Gnome Song.”
[Laughter]
How surreal’s that?
Teatime at Sneff’s Surgery, 1982 (courtesy of Well Dang! Productions)
It’s right there on the cover of Struvé and Sneff, but before I saw this documentary, I never really made the connection with The Dice Man.
David: The dice evenings actually only occupied quite a short period of time. I don’t know, six months, maybe? Maybe less than that, when we actually did the dice evenings.
Brian: Yeah.
David: That was just a group of friends, some of whom liked the idea, some of whom had actually read the book, and we’d go out on a Friday evening. We’d decide where we went, what we’d wear, what we’d do when we got where we were going, all on the roll of the dice.
Brian: Yeah. So it’s like, we’d choose six pubs, but within walking distance, sort of thing.
David: Not necessarily.
Brian: Oh, did we do far-flung ones, did we?
David: We ended up getting the train one time to some little station between—it wasn’t Emsworth, it was beyond Emsworth.
Brian: Oh, Warblington or something like that. [Laughs]
David: Somewhere like that, yeah, and there’s nothing there. We got there, and thought “Oh, what do we do now?” [laughing] And just got the next train back.
[Laughter]
Still from ‘23rd Century Giants’ (courtesy of Well Dang! Productions)
Brian: That’s right. There’s one I remember, ‘cause we used to sort of like throw dice [for] how we would enter the pub, and one of the things that came up, we would all walk in backwards, in a line. There must have been about ten or twelve of us, and we’d all walk in backwards, waving, and if anyone had a hat, they’d wave their hat. And we’d all go in—and it was the Mermaid where we did that, I remember we did that in the Mermaid—and they knew we were harmless, we weren’t going to create trouble or anything. I remember the people used to say, “Oh here they are!” like sort of thing, and we would go in, and then we would throw a dice for what we were gonna do. And I can’t remember many of them. And there used to be things about throwing fashion poses, wasn’t there, as well. Do you remember that one? Like, catalog models.
David: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Brian: You’d be standing around having a drink and all of a sudden, someone would just go: [freezes in “catalog model” pose], like a catalog model or something. And I remember we were all sitting at tables in the Mermaid. We listened to Ivor Cutler and Phyllis April King. “There are sheep on the moor, says Lambert, his left ear pressed firmly to the wall,” like that, and it’s a piece of Ivor Cutler and Phyllis April King. But ten guys would just do it at the same time. So it was all sort of a bit off the wall.
David: One of the funny ones I remember: there was one pub we went into, and we all decided that, Luke Rhinehart was the author of the book, we were gonna go in and ask for a Rhinehart cocktail, which was actually just rum and lime juice. And we went in one at a time and all asked him for the same drink.
[Laughter]
Brian: That’s right!
David: And after about the third person had gone in, someone came up to me when I came and said, “Just ask for rum and lime juice. The landlord’s getting really pissed off.”
[Laughter]
Cover art for ‘Behind Closed Curtains’ (courtesy of Well Dang! Productions)
Brian: It’s all a bit strange, a bit silly, but it kept us amused, anyway. But that’s where we got our dice names from, which is what’s mentioned in the film. Everybody that went on one of those things had a dice name as well. I keep saying this, but one day we’ve just got to write them all down while we remember them.
Yeah, I don’t know. It was just a sort of a way of expressing ourselves, to alleviate the boredom or whatever. I remember one particular one, going to the Mermaid, we’re all in there having a drink, and all of a sudden Dave said “I’m going to the gents’,” and he disappeared and he never came back. It’s because while he was in the gents’, he threw the dice to decide whether he’d just leave or not, and it came up that he should leave.
David: I climbed over the wall and went to the next pub, and nobody showed up!
[Laughter]
Brian: Nobody knew!
David: Maybe that was it, yeah, could be.
Brian: There we are, that was the dice thing, yes.
And when it came to an end it just fizzled out?
David: Yeah, I think so, yeah.
Brian: I don’t know if we threw dice to decide to stop it or not. [Laughter] I don’t know, really; it just stopped. And I think then we tended to go down to the Portland, didn’t we, Dave?
David: Yes.
‘South Specific’ (courtesy of Well Dang! Productions)
Brian: That was the musos’ pub in Portsmouth. Actually, I remember, since we were on South Specific, the Portsmouth compilation, and we got to know various bands, and they said, “Oh, we’re going to the Portland Friday.” “Oh yes, see you there.” And that’s where all the bands used to hang out, and that probably just took over from it, I don’t know. We went there for a certain amount of time and then didn’t again.
David: Who was the guy—was it the guy in the Chimes who always used to come up to you and say, “Hello girls!”
[Laughter]
Brian: Because of “Scottish Shuffle”? Well, I don’t remember that. All these details. The strange thing is, we’re back in touch with a lot of those people now from the reissue of South Specific and all that, and one thing and the other—
David: And doing the interviews for the documentary.
Brian: For the film. A lot of our friends, obviously, Alex interviewed them.
David: Yeah, people I’d not seen for thirty years, probably. It was great to meet up with them again.
David Janssen and Brian Poole, c. 1971-‘72 (courtesy of Well Dang! Productions)
This is sort of a boring bookkeeping question, but I count five total Renaldo & The Loaf performances? [Brian and David look puzzled] Well, ‘cause you mention the three youth club performances in the movie.
David: Well, yeah, if you want to say the total number of times that Brian and David have been together on a stage performing, yes, that’s probably correct.
Brian: But Renaldo & The Loaf, I mean, basically we had no name back then. Did we have a name?
David: Were we Galapas back then?
Is that the Bali Hai show you’re talking about, or the youth club shows?
Brian: No, no, no.
David: Bali Hai was Renaldo & The Loaf.
Brian: It was about 1972 we did the youth club things.
And what was your name?
Brian: Galapas.
David: There’s a book by an author called Mary Stewart who wrote about Arthurian legend, and in the book The Crystal Cave, Galapas is the magician who taught Merlin.
Brian: So, all very sort of tied in with the Tyrannosaurus Rex-y, sort of wizardy sort of stuff and all that. But then that was that.
Brian and David c. 1972-‘73 (courtesy of Well Dang! Productions)
Brian: We almost did [a show] in 1985—by that time, we’d sort of got a bit higher profile in the UK. And we were in touch with Doublevision, and also Stevo of Some Bizzare, and Doublevision were promoting a live thing to show Residents videos at a theater in London, and they asked if we’d like to do a live performance, interlude sort of thing. And we said yes. We worked with various people at the art college in Portsmouth who were helping out, just to bounce ideas around, what we were gonna do. We were gonna do three or four songs with backing tapes, so it would be a backing tape with live vocals—
David: What songs were we gonna do?
Brian: I knew you were gonna ask that. There was “Hambu Hodo,” “Elbow Is Taboo”—‘cause “Elbow Is Taboo” was the first song that we’d recorded for that album, so that existed—and “Kous Kous Western” and “J.P.W.B.C.” That would be the intro music, “J.P.W.B.C.” And we were gonna have dancers to dance to it, and the guy that we were working with at the art college, I think his brother was in Rip Rig + Panic, a UK band, but through a line or whatever, he knew Neneh Cherry. And he said, “Oh, I’ll have a chat with Neneh. Maybe she could get a couple of her friends and she’ll do it.” We said, “Okay.”
So on one occasion, we went up to London. We saw the theater. It was brand new, it had only just been built, and it hadn’t got its license yet, but we went there, saw the stage, doing designs for how we’d be laid out and all that stuff, and we met Neneh Cherry. And she said, “Yeah, okay, I’ll do that” sort of thing. And the theater then found out it couldn’t get its license because of certain fire problems still, and so it all got canceled. And then about six months after that, Neneh Cherry got really big! But Neneh Cherry almost danced for us. [Laughs] But that was an almost one.
The Bali Hai thing, yes, we were on a stage, but it wasn’t like—it was an improvisation, of course, that we did. So I think that the Vienna thing was our first proper live performance, like, worked out what we were gonna do, this that and the other, all these videos were made. It’s sort of a moot point; two, one-and-a-half times we’ve done it, or something. But I think as David says in the film, we were asked numerous times if we would play various festivals and things like that, but it really wasn’t something that we were directing our energy at generally.
So, yeah, five, if you’re gonna be pedantic.
[Laughter]
Renaldo & The Loaf, 2018 (courtesy of Well Dang! Productions)
David: Vienna happened because Walter [Robotka] from Klanggalerie asked us, and Walter’s a good friend.
Brian: It was the twenty-fifth anniversary of his label. He sort of asked before, because when Gurdy Hurding came out, he said it’d be really great to have some sort of performance. And at that time, it was not like “No no no no no, we’re not gonna do it,” but Dave and I discussed it, and it was like, if it was local to Dave, it might be a possibility. ‘Cause remember, we went around, didn’t we, looking at venues around your town?
David: Yeah, yeah.
Brian: But the logistics of trying to work it out, to get PAs and all that, and how to get fans coming to a small market town in the middle of Wales, how to do this, that, and the other—anyway, in the end, it just got so complicated that it was all sort of just dropped. But I think arguably you could say that there had been a sort of little niche carved in the wall of not playing, that we had sort of semi-considered it before, but it just couldn’t work out, and then Walter asked.
The thing was that, because of our roles, David’s role and my role in the band are such—you know, I’m singing, it’s a lot more, there you are, it’s extrovert kind of thing on the stage and all that, and David is very studio-orientated in the production of our stuff. Quite rightly, David said, “I don’t want to just sort of sit there with a laptop.” And also the songs that we do should be not just a slavish copy of the original album track, but something refreshed and something interesting and different, as it were. And so there was a period of time for working on that—
David: That was the interesting creative challenge about playing live, was how do you take songs that are, what—‘81—nearly forty years old and reinterpret them in a way that makes them still sound interesting, but also kind of modern and not antiquated.
Brian: That had to happen, and also David learned to use the MIDI clarinet thing as well, to actually physically play something onstage. And so it took a bit of thinking about, but I’ve got a note somewhere, I found it recently, it’s actually got the date when you told me, Dave, “Yeah, okay, let’s do it,” and then it was another week before we told Walter. In fact, you told Walter, didn’t you, Dave?
David: I think so, yeah.
Brian: So Walter was like mega-excited, and then it was like, “Oh shit! We’re gonna be doing this, aren’t we?” [Laughs] And so there was sort of another six, seven months of quite intensive sort of backwards and forwards-ing, and rehearsing. We rehearsed—I went over to Dave’s place and I stood there and sang it, and I think before doing the show I’d only managed to go through the whole shebang twice without making a mistake. And part of the thing was, would my voice be able to do it? Because I’d never sung, I don’t know, fourteen songs one after the other before, I’d never done it. I also decided that I needed to lose weight, so in that time we were doing this, I lost four-and-a-half stone of weight so that I could breathe properly and feel more confident on the stage.
So there was a lot of preparation that went into that one night! And on the night, I did cock up: I left a verse out of “Medical Man,” which I apologized for on stage, and then I repaired it when we got back, I sang it here instead for the live CD. But it was amazing! It was lovely to feel the adrenaline, and we had a great time in Vienna, it was really nice.
David: Extraordinary. Lovely audience.
I feel like you waited a long time to get the response from an audience.
Brian: Yeah, it hadn’t been something we craved. I mean, a response from the audience was somebody saying, “Oh, I really liked your album.” And that’s it.
David: It really made me appreciate why a lot of performers, the whole thing of going onstage and the response from the audience, why they do it and why they found it addictive. It was quite an interesting insight to get.
Brian: Yeah. But we never did it again!
[Laughter]
Once was enough?
Brian: I’m still in therapy for my addiction of being on the stage, and I want applause!
[Laughter]
Marking the 40th anniversary of ‘Struvé & Sneff,’ 2019 (courtesy of Well Dang! Productions)
David: There were offers at the time for a number of performances, and were we to play live again, that would have been the time to do it, because we were rehearsed, everything was in place, and it would have been relatively easy to go and do it a few more times within, say, six months of Vienna. But we didn’t, and kinda the impetus has gone out of that now.
Brian: Well, we actually agreed before we did it that—I don’t think we necessarily agreed, “Oh, this is the only time we’re ever gonna do this,” it was like: we’ll have a break after this. Remember, you said you wanted, and I did too to a degree, like three months off or something, just step back after all that effort and stuff. And of course what happens is that you go off the boil—
David: Well, I found that I was reluctant and resistant to actually going in the studio and going anywhere near the computer. I didn’t actually go as far as physically locking the door or anything, but certainly I noticed there was a resistance to going in there.
Brian: It was a period of hard work, you know, of doing that for that instance as it were, and then once that instance had happened, we didn’t have plans afterwards. Because we didn’t even think about it, in the sense of, we didn’t know that we would be approached to play. We had offers in Europe. London, Dallas—
David: Dallas?
Brian: San Francisco. Yeah, there was an offer to play in Dallas. We could have gone to America and done a few cities in America. They were so keen because they’d seen it on the YouTube thing, anyway, and it was such a unique experience for a lot of our fans that this actually happened. And so there were emails coming from various places, “Would you consider…” “Now, I could get you a show in New York…” But it was all academic. And I remember writing back, ‘cause we’d agreed, “No, we’re taking some time off to decide what’s gonna happen next.” So I put them all at arm’s length, these things, ‘cause I knew it couldn’t really happen.
But yeah, there could have been a world tour! [Laughs] But anyway, we’ve got the T-shirts.
David: We’ve got the world tour T-shirts.
Brian: We’ve got the T-shirts, and it says “Renaldo & The Loaf World Tour 2018,” but it’s got one venue on the back.
[Laughter]
Renaldo & The Loaf, 1980 (courtesy of Well Dang! Productions)
Do you have any memories of Snakefinger?
Brian: Yes. Probably you met him, Dave, didn’t you, you met him after the Mole Show.
David: In ’81, yeah. You actually played with him. My memory really is just what a really lovely guy he was. That’s it, really.
Brian: My memory’s, of course, from the recording of Title in Limbo, and it was interacting with him exclusively in the studio. We didn’t meet socially, outside or anything, for the bits he laid down for that album. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned—it’s not in the film—about when he came in, and he sat down, and he said “Oh, hi,” and that sort of thing. And while Hardy was doing something with machines, he said, “Shall we jam?” [Laughs]
Intimidating!
Brian: I just sort of sat there, “Mm, okay…” I can’t play an instrument that well. I had a bouzouki, I took my bouzouki over to San Francisco. So basically I just ended up doing a drone thing on the bouzouki while he noodled on his guitar. He was just limbering up, you know, or whatever. But he was a perfect gentleman. I think he did it for about two minutes. But he didn’t embarrass me, but I embarrassed myself sufficiently, I think. [Laughs] But no, really very softly spoken, as David says, a real gentleman.
And it was great to see him actually in the studio recording. His contributions, he’d listen to the track through, then he’d listen to it through and just sort of do a bit, and then he’d just do it. Perhaps he’d heard it three times, and that was it, he’d lay it down. And then he played violin on one as well. I was standing behind him so I couldn’t really see what he was doing. I got some photos which are in the film; they’ve never been published quite like that before.
Still from ‘23rd Century Giants’ (courtesy of Well Dang! Productions)
I love the lockdown singles that you produced, I love the reunion album and the remix album. Are you still working? Can I look forward to new stuff in the future?
Brian: Potentially, yeah. The thing is, we’re very relaxed about it, really. I’m probably the logjam on it, because David’s prepared a number of sketches that could make potentially pretty good Renaldo & the Loaf pieces, which I need to work on, and I haven’t really found the time to do a great deal of late. But I don’t know; I like to think so, yes. We’ve spoken about it before, and yeah, another Renaldo & the Loaf album would be nice. But, as ever, we just don’t know when.
It’s a bit like with Gurdy Hurding. We’d done a few songs but with no intention of what exactly we were doing with them, and it’s only when you get a critical mass and you think, “Oh, what if?” And we haven’t reached the critical mass yet.
David: To me, it also feels a bit like we felt when we were recording Arabic Yodelling. It’s kind of the difficult second album syndrome, in that it’s fair to say we both feel that we set the bar quite high with Gurdy Hurding, and we want whatever comes next to be of that standard. So we’re being quite critical, I think.
Brian: Yeah, I think that’s fair. I think that’s fair, yeah. It is that sort of feeling, it’s in the back of your head, as it were, you know? When you listen to Gurdy Hurding, it was a surprise for everybody, ‘cause we never announced it. And it was one of those things where it was recorded by us with a mindset that was like, we didn’t know when it was gonna happen, or if it ever was. And it’s like done in that innocent bubble again almost, like Larvae was.
With Gurdy, this medieval vibe, which is actually something which we initially chatted about many, many years before, that was something which could offer inspiration, if you like, and guidance. Like, “let’s explore in that direction,” in this sort of folksy, medieval-y kind of thing, but obviously clashed with electronics and modern stuff. What we’re doing now, there’s no rules. There isn’t sort of this guiding thing at all. It’s like wherever it wants to go.
David: I don’t know that there really was with Gurdy Hurding. We’re putting that context on it after the event. Those rules weren’t there at the time.
’Gurdy Hurding’ (via Poxodd)
Brian: But there was a lot of medieval-y stuff, ‘cause we were all into the crumhorns and hurdy-gurdies.
David: We never said, “Let’s record a medieval album.”
Brian: Oh no, no, we didn’t, no, no. But there was this vestigial thing from the past—
David: Sure.
Brian: —which was something to explore. No, no, it wasn’t like there’s a big poster on the wall, “This is medieval.” The inspiration—singing English medieval songs on it, there’s an instance where that happens. And the subject matter, which, Poxodd’s imagery helped feed some of the things, and the way she showed these things—inspiration for words, really. It’s what you’re gonna write about, what you’re gonna do the lyric about and sing about. And for that one, I found it easier, because there was, I don’t know, this imaginary world of… well, whatever. It’s not all about medieval stuff, I mean “Pessimistic Song” is not, “Optimism” isn’t, and that, so it’s not exclusively. But it had that sort of vibe.
But yeah, I suppose you’re right, Dave. We didn’t really preconceive it that way, no. And we haven’t got a preconception for this one. A couple of times we chat and it’s like “Wouldn’t it be sort of fun if,” kind of things, “What about exploring that, just for a song,” or something, and a feel, or whatever. But I think really, it’s whatever comes out, and as long as our quality control says, “Yeah! Like that. That’s alright,” then go on to the next thing.
There’s a couple of songs, a couple of things sort of done now. But they’ll probably all go along in parallel, all of a sudden things will get finished off in one big lump, probably. Yeah. Yes! Yesyesyesyesyes. They will be. Hopefully. [Laughs]
Is it fair to say the lyrics and vocals come last in the process?
Brian: Sort of, not exclusively. I mean—Dave, the work you do and you send me, they’re not conceived as songs.
David: Well, they’re conceived as having the potential to be songs.
Brian: The potential, that’s right. So the structure is not—it’s a certain flexibility. And if something can inspire me with some words, until there’s words, I can’t work melodies out. Apart from sort of like doing idiot words, or “la la la”-ing something. And words do take a long time to come out. Dave and I have had chats about this. I mean, we talk every week anyway, of course, and [we’re] trying to think of chance stuff or random stuff or word game kind of stuff to create vehicles for a voice, which may happen, may happen.
So, yeah, the words are important in the sense that it gives the vehicle for the melody, but then that can move around to how the arrangement ends up and other things added afterwards. So I’ll do a sketch vocal for placement, and then I might go back and do it again later, after I’ve absorbed the song a lot more.
The Ladder of Law Has No Top and No Bottom
Brian: If it weren’t for COVID, the friends, ‘cause a lot of the people that are interviewed, like the Brits, are in the Portsmouth area, and normally I’d invite them round in a group and then show them the film. But because of COVID, we’ve not had groups, not having people round and all that, which has rather sort of stymied it.
David: You should have sent it to Downing Street. It would have been okay to show it there.
[Laughter]
Brian: Of course, yeah! I could have said, “It’s a work event.”
‘23rd Century Giants’ will be released March 8 on Blu-ray and superior streaming platforms.