A Chat with Harry Stafford (17.09.23)
Transcending the barrier of time with an obscure brand of genre-diverse music, singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Harry Stafford captivates audiences with a masterful flair. We speak with Stafford about his new album We Are The Perilous Men (created with Marco Butcher), AI in music, music videos, sub-genres and much more!
OSR: What made you decide to become a musician and what inspired you to join forces as artists?
Stafford: In 1977 I listened to Pink Flag the first Wire album and suddenly music, via punk, became an achievable if chaotic musical ambition. Before that, I thought it belonged in the realms of the exalted virtuoso musician who was a talent for the Gods of procrastination and navel-gazing. Wire though were the messengers of hope, with their pared-down three-chord explorations into the human condition delivered in two-minute bursts. At the age of 14, I was suddenly set free of the constraints of sheet music and piano lessons and indeed any need to be a flashy musician.
The Clash, UK Subs, Damned, and Pistols all did something similar and urged me onwards. By the time I formed my first proper band, inca babies in 1982, we were in the throws of post-punk where the echoes of my first inspirations were turning to more sophisticated adventures, where we were discovering the Birthday Party, The Cramps and The Gun Club.
OSR: You just released your video for ‘Rules of the House’ and your full album We Are the Perilous Men. What can you tell us about this record?
Stafford: With regards to ‘Rules of the House’, Marco, who lives in Walkertown South Carolina, sent me an instrumental of the tune. Normally when I receive some music, I put it into a programme and start to rearrange it and add other instruments, such as piano or organ, or something like an FX piece of percussion etc. But I took one listen to his track and was absolutely blown away. It had such a driving power that I didn’t dare touch it for fear I might dislodge some of its explosive force. All I had to do was to put a vocal on it. As it turned out I wanted to do a really stalwart job, so I went to 6db in Salford – Simon ‘Ding’ Archer’s Studio (bass player for The Fall and PJ Harvey) – to get him to record the vocals for me because it was such a rocking track, and this kind of work is his forte.
The rest of the album was recorded in a similar way in our own studios but in two periods. Marco would send me the music and I would add instruments and vocals then he would master the tracks. After we had accumulated about 20 songs, we literally sat on them for a year deciding which ones made the cut and whether or how we could improve them. Eventually, the first 11 were chosen, and examined for their full potential, for example, a Hammond organ added to ‘Spectres’, space loops added to ‘King of all Moves’, disco beat added to ‘Perilous Man’, jazz flute to ‘Edge of music’, etc. until we were happy that all was well in the world and our album, and we could release it.
The theme of the record was to try and create a smoky jazz blues punk kind of vibe that would fit as happily in a David Lynch Film as on a Cramps or Barry Adamson album.
OSR: Your music production is a bit trans-Atlantic sending ideas back and forth. What do you find are the benefits and disadvantages of remote collaboration?
Stafford: I suppose we have dispensed with the idea of jamming in a practice room for ten hours in the hope of coming up with an amazing song. Marco comes up with the backing track which I am given permission to cut up into an arrangement that I can insert my lyrics to. Marco and I start with a base of drums and guitars, everything after that is primaeval orchestration that relies on instinct serendipity and our worldly talent.
There is a definite easy pace about the collaboration. Ideas having been fired down the line often can sit about and be allowed to breathe for a while. There is no immediate pressure to come up with an artistic solution or indeed a killer finished lick. Sometimes as a song sits in the ‘in-progress folder’ the perfect accompaniment/lyric/instrumental comes along that would have been too late had we been eager to box it up and ship it out.
The downside is that Marco sends me a lot of stuff that all sounds fantastic, and I simply cannot come up with enough great ideas to do them all justice.
OSR: What do you hope people take from your new music output?
Stafford: It’s the kind of music that has less in common with the current rock acts these days, and perhaps we are using our inspirations from previous decades, but at the same time I listen to a lot of new music that you can’t help but be energised by. Acts like Viagra Boys, Bob Vylan, The Vacant Lots, Fat White Family, and Baxter Dury. I hear a lot of resourcefulness from these bands, and I believe they are learning their magic from what has gone before, so I guess you never lose what you were brought up on. I hope that people hear the new album and can hear reoccurring but fresh themes and ideas.
OSR: You filmed a music video for ‘The Rules of the House’. What can you tell us about that?
Stafford: I came up with the lyrics from the way Marco’s music invites you to explain something to the audience because of its cliff-edge chords. The inspiration came from a time when I remembered a sign, I once saw in a pub in the Welsh countryside which stated a set of rules for the pub’s drinkers. Most of them were quite light-hearted but I could detect a little suggestion of malevolence in there, so I made a mental note of them. I think I put about five of them into the song and the others I made up from the spirit of the landlord’s original list. Certainly ‘campsite rules’ and ‘Get a round in’ were two of them. And my favourite, ‘I don’t argue with idiots, the landlord is always right’. The video was to express an irate landlord which I think we came close to achieving.
OSR: AI is becoming more popular when it comes to music video creation. What do you think are the pros and cons of AI?
Stafford: I have investigated this area, and I can say there are two areas of AI that will ultimately affect video production. The first is content creation whereby the lazy writer who has no ideas of his own and wants to get tech to provide him or her with a script, a screenplay or story or indeed a solution to their vacuity. These people are invariably found out and their work is often cast aside as horribly mediocre.
Thankfully the true visionaries of the genre who can provide an original concept which by its unique quality discover unchartered areas of the human soul where a programme or ‘bot’ cannot venture, will hopefully triumph. Chat GTP is a very clever programme but ultimately it merely borrows second-hand notions from the internet and if you want mediocre it will provide you with it.
The second area of AI which we should use is to help us do the basic leg work. Editors working in filmmaking for a long time have been working in very inefficient ways. If you are an editor a programme to help you position files into an order with relevant grading and sound levels can set you up for the final creative ‘human’ edit and save you a lot of time.
Likewise, there are programmes that will help you create storyboards which look a lot better than our hand-drawn attempts and can get information across much more effectively. AI can plan schedules and rotas and can plan whole campaigns of publicity and promotion; I can think of no producer and their team who would not welcome this kind of time-saving device.
Interestingly in music, Spotify, the largest audio streaming business, recently took down about 7 per cent of the tracks that had been uploaded by ‘Boomy’, the equivalent of “tens of thousands” of songs. These songs were not only AI-generated ‘songs’ but were massively streamed by artificial means in fake streaming farms. A double river of shit to further drown the music industry, and make the independent musician’s life a little harder.
OSR: What advice do you have for new musicians?
Stafford: Find your audience, be niche, explore the less-trodden path and make it your own. Don’t be a pop star, be a musician, be a creator, be an audio-visual experimenter, be a sonic mechanic, a noise merchant, anything but a pop star. Don’t play music, exploit silence, turn everything on its head and start again. Never be satisfied with anything that a lot of people like, remember only dead fish go with the flow.
Do not try and please everyone, you will please no one and be ignored. I remember once reading an interview with Embrace – a band who are desperate to be loved – where they said that every time they wrote a song they tried to make it the best song in the world. And on reflection, that is exactly the problem.
Artists who have the biggest audience and are the most popular don’t make the best music as they have to create a one-size-fits-all product. Many great stars rue this stifling constraint and are hugely jealous of the lesser-known and untamed artists who have the freedom and anarchy of a ragged soul on fire.
OSR: If you had to categorize your music by genre, what would it/they be?
Stafford: We are a couple of punks who have not kept in our lane and have experimented wildly. While we were brought up in the world of death rock. Trash blues and post-punk, I think the fact that we have two albums out that we are both really pleased with, and where we have stretched our musical interests to the limit in trying out various styles, instruments, and technology. In this way, it’s been a fresh approach to our way of songwriting, whereby we have created a sound that goes beyond our ‘house style’ love of post-punk, trash blues!
We have toyed with wah-wah guitar, jazz flute, Hammond organs, trumpets and oboes, sequencers and drum machines, strings, and brass synthesizer sounds, which are areas of music that we would have normally found at odds with our punk rock sensibilities.
OSR: What are your thoughts on the constantly growing number of sub-genres?
Stafford: After a while, it can be trying to be able to differentiate between some genres, I’ve always been puzzled as to what darkwave is when it’s somewhere between goth and post-punk, but too vague for anyone to admit being part of the genre. Soft-goth is a thing I believe, which sounds hideous. I remember when power-pop was a genre, which meant pop bands tried to get in with the rock band but ended up just appealing to adolescent boys. Don’t forget these genres are not created by musicians, they are fostered upon them so they can be placed in bland playlists for Spotify.
The worst culprit for multiple genres is in the field of electronic music which can’t decide what it is and has managed to subdivide it’s oeuvre into 300 different genres. From ambient to video game chiptune. But for more experimental musicians it means that there is always an excuse to make something utterly impenetrable and blame it on an audience that doesn’t understand you because they didn’t get the genre.
OSR: What can we expect from Harry Stafford and Marco Butcher in the future?
Stafford: We have enough songs for another album but will probably write even more to fulfil a new direction we are going for which is yet more cinematic and experimental. Marco has been trying out sequencers and drum loops; I have been trying out brass and orchestration. It’s not as bad as it sounds believe me. We hope to play some gigs as soon as we can get together in the same place. We live 3,798 miles apart and have never actually met in the flesh.
Many thanks to Harry Stafford for speaking with us. Find out more about Harry Stafford on his Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Spotify.
This artist was discovered via Musosoup #sustainablecurator
