The Beat Surrender

So, we’re upstairs (with a soundcheck in the background) at The Macbeth in Shoreditch, London, a dingy little venue that’s seeing the future legends of music gracing its stages on a regular basis these days. Thomas asks about The Beat Surrender before we then get down to business.

Has today been a good or a bad day?

Today’s been a mixed day. Most of them are mixed. Yeah, I woke up feeling really good, and turned on the internet, and then it went down a few grades but then yeah I had a friend help me carry my stuff down here and we started getting all ready for soundcheck but there was no soundman and had to wait 2 hours.

So you live in London, but are from New York originally – what brings you here?

Um, well I lived in New York for most of my life, over 20 years, so I think I loved it for a long time but I just got tired of it. I started to find things about it like so many different things in life, things started to eat away at me that never used to bother me, and part of was just for a long time feeling ‘this is the best place to be do your art’ as a lot of people believe because it’s the school of hard knocks and they won’t accept anything that’s not ‘excellent’ and you really have to work to get inspiration from the people around you.

And all that happened for me but I started realising that there’s something to be said for a culture that comforts you even when you’re not doing something 100%, it brings you up, it’s not always about fighting your way to be cream of the crop, sometimes even if you’re not doing something that’s absolutely excellent there’s a reason for it to exist still.

That’s really interesting that you find that about my culture, because that may be the way I feel about your culture.

Ah, I was mainly just talking about New York there, but I did find when I came over here that people were a bit more receptive to a mad scientist.

What was your inspiration for a covers album that was more guitar-based, because I understand that you were working on a fourth album and thought ‘hang on, I’m going to do this instead’?

That’s absolutely right. I had met David Lynch through a photographer friend of mine and I had given him some music, some of my records, and it was later in a pub conversation with some friends that said ‘wouldn’t it be great if Lynch took one of your tracks and used it in a film?’, and then I thought we were just talking about how great a lot of the music in his films is, and then it suddenly came to me that maybe doing the opposite was a good idea – to take some of those songs and do interpretations of them. But, that’s the short answer or the long answer – I don’t know!

Are you pleased with the result?

I am. My goal with this was to not outdo those songs, for better or worse, I wasn’t choosing songs where I thought ‘that was a good song but a bad version’ or anything like that, it was just that I really like this song, I wonder what makes it tick, I wonder what makes this song work, and I wonder if I can play it and make it my own.

Also, I feel like a really good song, if someone’s done a great version of it, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the only version of that song that could be out there, in fact maybe you get bored of a version of a song but then somebody does another and suddenly it becomes interesting in a new way, maybe you’ll hear things in a song that maybe you didn’t hear in the original.

Do you have anything special planned for the show tonight, that you would – rather than your ‘normal’ album shows where you’d play out your new tracks – do you have anything a bit Lynchesque or anything particular that’s a bit different?

Well, yeah. I’ve got a lightbulb hanging from a briefcase, which you might have seen at soundcheck

I understand that as part of your instrument ideas (Thomas makes his own), you go through garbage. Have you ever made anything for your home?

Oh, I often do things, I often attach lights to the end of things, I often screw lights to the bottom of shelves and have unorthodox ways of approaching one’s domestic situation. There’s one that I did not actually at home but when I worked in animation, I started getting carpal tunnel syndrome from hitting a computer’s spacebar over and over and over…I thought, ‘there’s gotta be some way I can do this with my foot’...so I actually put a string over some pulleys and attached it to a mallet.

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