Big Block 454 (June 2010)

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This band from UK is without doubts one of the wackiest bands in ProgArchives. Their music is pretty hilarious, but still very good at the same time. Their approach is  very much a disregard for any musical conventions. This is a mix of Monty Python and RIO. I therefore got in touch with them for the full story. The whole band answered this interview.
Health warning: This interview may give you some sore muscles. 
------------------------------

 Your
biography is included in PA. But why did you choose that name ?

As
you may know, 454 grams equals 16 ounces, and 16 ounces make one
pound in British Weights & Measures – the Avoirdupois
system. Avoirdupois meant "goods of weight", things that
were sold in bulk and were weighed on large steelyards or balances.
The Big Block (“gros bloc”) was the balance weight on the
steelyard.

Our music
signifies the balance between order and chaos, light and dark, good
and evil, sweet and sour, cheese and onion…

To
start with; please give me your (long or brief) thoughts and lowdowns
on.......

I
Changed My Dentist... I Changed Him Into a Horse from 1998

The
first full-length album by Big Block 454 – this defines our music
and sets the standard for our career. “It takes a vigorous baboon
to stir an enormous pond” – never has a truer word been spoken.

The
songs are merged together into one long stream of unconsciousness. A
spit in the snow. We want your minds. This is the new typography.
The importance of trivia. It’s all there.

Much
of what we do is made by a collage-type process. We are working on a
new kind of glue for sticking sounds and words together: we used to
use Cow Gum, but after the BSE crisis we had to abandon that method.

“Strange
travelling companions / an accumulation of dirt / two weeks without a
toothbrush / a 17-day shirt”. I think that just about sums it up.

A
brief breakdown:

Throb
– Pete
Scullion on vocals. “A spit in the snow”. He didn’t actually
say that.

Vector
Analysis Can Be Fun –
slide guitar in the style of Snakefinger, accompanied by Guy Fawkes
fireworks – recorded out of the studio window on the night of
November the 5^th.

Ale
& Cakes
– Boiling Water… A song about tin mines in Cornwall.

 17-day
shirt
– a true story.

Jacob’s
Dream –
a Biblical story recited in a Cumbrian dialect.

Pump
House
– a piece of music commissioned by a left-wing theatre company, for
their production “Out of the Red” at the Pump House in the centre
of Manchester.

Thing
#1 – featuring
the home-made monochord instrument known as The Thing.

Fistula!
from 1999

Music
from the legendary unfinished film of the same name, by Oldham’s
greatest living expressionist film director Les Howarth.

A
cross between “Metropolis” set in a New Manchester and
H.P.Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, the film plots the course of 3
inquisitive tabloid reporters from Wigan who set off in 1929 to
investigate the hitherto-uncharted mountains of Antarctica in a
Dornier
Do X flying boat. Imagine George Formby starting in a remake of John
Carpenter’s “The Thing” and you won’t be far from the truth.

Colin: 
We used the banjolele extensively for the film music. And The Thing
(our monochord musical instrument made from parts of a mainframe line
printer power supply and a Tri-ang church kit, which has been on all
our albums from “Dentist” to “Bratislava”). I’m not making
this up!

Last
time we heard, Les Howarth was still trying to finish the film.

Alex:
It was the film project that first attracted me to the band. Ten
years later, and I still haven’t seen it.

Bratislava
from 2008

I
rue the day I went to Bratislava. An album of capital cities
(Bratislava, Tirana, Ulan Bator) and more obscure places –
Anglezarke / Machpelah / Ouspensky’s Cellar.

I
took to the road with a German netball team. Foreign Aeroplanes
Upset Sleeping Tirana. We’re wearing our influences on our sleeves
here.

This
album is a logical extension of what we’ve always tried to do.
We’ve always been interested in making pop music, but in the past
our dogged insistence on being experimental has led to music that
might have a minority appeal. Bratislava is our attempt to graft
experimental processes onto pop music to produce a hideous chimera
that will have huge appeal to the pop-buying millions. We think we’ve
succeeded. We’re not sure if the millions agree, the blind fools.

Some
hints: ‘Lush Ulan Bator’ is Chas & Dave going on holiday with
Brian Eno. It goes horribly wrong. ‘Packing Away’ is a very
straightforward song about loss, in which a bereaved person is
assaulted by a very large manatee. ‘Upside-down & Dirty’ is
an attempt to get girls. ‘Ouspensky’s Cellar’ is about what the
little known cell of Theopsophists operating in the Lancashire
countryside did on their days off.

A
brief breakdown:

Motorcycle
Au Pair Boy
– a phrase from Kenneth Williams; a lyric that ties in early
British computer and code-breaking innovators with Biggles. And the
Fibonacci Series, which crops up quite often in our music.

Anglezarke
– an expanse of moorland in Lancashire with many Bronze Age
remains. The song features Mark playing the tumbi, a Punjabi
one-stringed instrument.

I
rue the day I went to Bratislava
– self-explanatory, really. Have you caught any fish yet?

Hi,
Lax Old Medic –
Ebenezer, Machpelah, Canaan, Abraham. All mills and chapels in the
Hebden Bridge area of West Yorkshire. A song exploring the close
relationship between industry and religion. Ina rub-a-dub stylee.

I
was Arthur Brown’s Health & Safety Advisor
– where Alex plays a Morris Dancing melody on the accordion,
accompanied by autoharp and crumbly electronics.

Lush
Ulan Bator – featuring
Wasp synthesiser, which appears on several songs on this album.

Foreign
Aeroplanes Upset Sleeping Tirana
– Mark on lead vocals and acoustic piano.

Three
Sevens Clash
– written and recorded on the 7^th
of July 2007.

Melamine
- Melamine
is combined with formaldehyde to produce melamine resin, a very
durable thermosetting plastic used in Formica. The end products
include guitar saddles and nuts.

Upside-down
& Dirty
– to record Alex’s vocals on this piece, his microphone was
plugged into a tiny Yamaha portable guitar amp, set to overload.
This amp was then concealed in a metal desk drawer (to prevent
feedback and to capture that tinny ambience) and another microphone
was played inside the drawer to pick up the sound. The drawer was
then closed.

Ouspensky’s
Cellar
– featuring some backwards/forwards voices, also found on “Foreign
Aeroplanes…”

Packing
Away
– Alex performs this, accompanied in the distance by Colin’s
Thing and slowed-down saxophones.

and
the compilation album Rough as Sausages from 1999

A
compilation of material from the earlier albums, with two songs never
released anywhere else – “My watchstrap smells great” and
“Marzipan Pig”. The latter was our riposte to the record company
who had branched out into selling confectionary as well as CDs.

Interesting
cover photo of a “Holly Johnson from Frankie Goes To Hollywood”
look-alike driving a Standard Jungle Bug off-road whilst smoking a
cigarette with wild abandon.

Even
seasoned followers of the RIO/Avant Garde scene has told me that your
music is very weird........ and that says a lot. I had a look at the
train video you have released and I agree with them. But how would you
describe your music and which bands or scene would you compare your
music with ?

Colin:
I don’t think our music is very weird at all. Take the short film
you mentioned, “Garratts to Rhyd Ddu”, which features a South
African articulated steam locomotive (built in Manchester) thundering
through the foothills of Snowdonia – accompanied by cheerful
whistling, Russian short-wave radio transmissions and someone
reciting the Fibonacci Series. An ordinary tale of everyday Welsh
folk. Tell me what’s weird about that?

Alex:
On the other hand, it could be a video of a train with some music
that sounds a bit train-like. Isn’t all art like that?

In
the early 1970s, Richard Branson attempted to hoodwink the dying
embers of the gentle hippy scene by pretending to be a nice guy. He
did this by wearing hand-knitted cardigans, sporting an unruly beard
and opening shops which on the face of it appeared to be your
standard head shop that happens to sell a few discs – but were
actually a chain of music proto-superstores. He then pushed his line
of left-field music by selling vinyl LPs for the price of a single –
we picked up Faust, Amon Düül II, Can, Gong and so on. Most of my
friends at school bought “The Faust Tapes” for 49p, listened to
it once, decided they’d been well and truly conned and promptly
used it to behead the headmaster’s petunias – but I continue to
listen to it to this day.

Alex:
I read that as ‘behind the headmaster’s penis’. 

As
a Scandinavian living in the UK and having to put up with five
minutes of cricket scores in every news report on BBC, it seems to me
that your band is based on the one thousand years old British
eccentric traditions which makes the rest of us wonder if UK is a
mental asylum somewhere in the ocean west of Europe. All this has
been described brilliantly by PG Wodehouse and Monty Python. Is your
band based on the impenetrable British eccentricity or is your band
an expression of a wider cultural identity ?

Colin:
Cricket scores, indeed all sports scores, are an essential part of
British culture. On the beaches of Dunkirk, whilst waiting for the
flotilla of tiny boats that would transport them to safety, British
soldiers would dodge the Nazi machine-gun bullets to crouch round
their wireless sets and hear the latest score from Trent Bridge.

I remember the
interminable
Saturday afternoons of my youth, when father would check his
Pools coupon whilst listening intently to the long-drawn-out football
results… “Hamilton Academicals versus Airdrieonians…
… … Late Kick-Off.”

There
was silence.

The
lyrics on our next album may well be based purely on cricket scores
and the Shipping Forecast. I often switch on the BBC at 5 o’clock
in the morning to hear the Shipping Forecast – “Tyne, Dogger,
Fisher, German Bight” – there’s something reasurring to know
that those brave men are out there catching the haddock for my
fish’n’chips whilst I’m tucked up warm in bed. Keep it up
chaps !

Oh,
by the way. Remember that the “one
thousand years old British eccentric traditions”
were fuelled by the 5 Invasions of Britain. All of which came from
Continental Europe, and one of which was Scandinavian. So it’s
partially your fault. Your lot had our women and land, but you won’t
get our jokes.

Alex:
Imagine Colin as a retired Colonel dozing off in his armchair after a
particularly large breakfast. Say what you like to him, and he’ll
just go muttering off at a tangent. Imagine I’m his faithful, but
rather world-weary butler. I will attempt to answer your question.

There
is a peculiar strain of English culture that is half whimsy, and half
rather terrifying. Think Edward Lear, Vivian Stanshall, the Hobby
Horse, Arthur Rackham. We share a love of those things, and that
influences what we do. We insist on being English – we try to avoid
blues scales or American influences, or, if we fail to avoid them, we
try to force them to be British. We’ve done a dub reggae piece
concerning vanished English industries. We’ve forced Augustus Pablo
to join a morris dancing team. By the way, if our English
eccentricity is impenetrable, we like it that way. Anyway,
Scandinavia also produced the Moomins, so think on.

How is
your label situation and what is your experiences with the music
industry ?

Currently,
we are totally self-sufficient. We record in our own studio, produce
our own material, create our own artwork, make our own films, and
market our own music.

In the
1990s, we were marketed by a European record company and had rather a
bad experience with them. This is explained in greater detail in our
song “Marzipan Pig”.

Just to
wrap this interview up; do you have any regrets in your music career
?

Colin:

I regret
losing my British Road Services donkey jacket when I played a gig at
a pub in Salford. I regret not buying a Baldwin Double-6 electric
12-string (in green sunburst) for £50; it seemed too expensive at
the time. Likewise a Fender XII “hockey-stick” electric
12-string for £200 and a Hagstrom 8-string bass for £25… that was
in Huddersfield… why oh why didn’t I buy it?

I joined a
band in order to make a fool of myself on stage and to meet oodles of
lithe young women. I regret only completing 50% of this quest so
far.

I regret
the passing of trolley buses. I regret the fact that I will never
really know the purpose of ley lines and prehistoric stone circles.
I regret the fact that more and more people are frying fish’n’chips
in vegetable oil instead of beef dripping.

Alex: 

To quote a
friend of mine, no-one ever got laid through playing experimental
music.

Mark:

No.

What is
your five alltime favourite albums ?

Colin:

The
Clangers “Original Television Music”

White
Noise “An Electric Storm”

BBC
Radiophonics Workshop “Greatest Hits”

Vivian
Stanshall “Sir Henry at Rawlinson End”

The Soft
Machine “Volume 1”

Alex:

Robert
Wyatt: “Rock Bottom”

Basil
Kirchin: “Abstractions of the Industrial North”

Ashley
Hutchings “Morris On”

Television:
“Marquee Moon”

The Silver
Band of the Oswaldwhistle Pudding Works: “Plays Stockhausen.”

Mark:

Will
Glahe: “Will Glahe in Bavaria”

Pink Floyd
and Ron Geesin: “Atom Heart Mother”

The Thomas
Tallis Trio: “Vaughan Williams 5 – Jazz 0”

Sonic
Discovery: “Ooh! What do we have hear then?”

Not the
Nine O’Clock News: “Hedgehog Sandwich”

What
is the latest update on Big Block 454 ?

We
are starting to make our back catalogue available as downloads on CD
Baby, iTunes and Amazon. The first one is the 2004 album “Their
coats flapped like God’s chops”.

We
are working on a lot of new material, so should have a new album out
within the next few months. Five songs are already finished –
three of which have had radio plays.

Anything
you want to add to this interview ?

Bagpuss, dear
Bagpuss
Old Fat Furry Catpuss
Wake up and look at this thing
that I bring
Wake up, be bright, be golden and light
Bagpuss,
oh hear what I sing.

?... A big thank you to the band for taking time to answer my questions. 

Their PA profile is here and their homepage is here

Edited by toroddfuglesteg - June 12 2010 at 02:39