I’ll admit Gene were a band that passed me by somewhat; I saw them a few times in Cardiff in the ’90s and admired their energy but bar a few singles wasn’t familiar with their back catalogue. I was at the time going through an obsession with the Manic Street Preachers, Super Furry Animals and Suede…..of course there were those that wrote them off as simply a Smiths’ copycat band and maybe their debut and videos lent credence to this notion; the wordy titles, the rich melancholic vocals and perky jangle pop of songs like ‘As Good as It gets’ and ‘Fighting Fit‘ that mingled with more slow burning torch songs like ‘Olympian‘, ‘Haunted By You‘ and ‘Speak To Me Someone’ ….
But that would be to disregard the muscularity of songs that probably owed as much musically to The Jam and the Small Faces as much as to those erstwhile Manchester icons. They were led by Martin Rossiter whose bookish, sensitive, slightly camp, earnest manner didn’t fit in with the laddish era of Oasis written off as just another Britpop band perhaps they were too late for the slightly more intelligent pre-Britpop era of Suede, The Auteurs, Pulp and Denim. Like ’90s bands of the time such as The Longpigs, Strangelove, Elastica, Geneva, Shed Seven, The Bluetones, and others, Gene inspired a devoted following but in their case they tended to be mocked and derided more than they were praised. Nevertheless over four albums Gene sold one million records (yes one million! ), a figure many current guitar bands would kill for, but by 2001 and and after their self released album ‘Libertine’ and following a fall out with label Polydor, the band was over.
I was given an hour of Martin’s time on the eve of the release of his fine solo album ‘The Defenestration of St Martin’‘ which comes over ten years since his last release. It’s a naked piano and voice album that’s confessional, reflective, at times brutal but mostly tender and sad, but most of all it is in my estimation Martin Rossiter’s finest record to date. Tackling grown up subjects in a sombre yet compassionate way, it is unfettered by much of the melodic affectations of early Gene. It is startlingly honest at times, brutal and thus a quite affecting and moving record and one suspects there are people in bedsits across the country who will instantly empathise with the emotions expressed in these compositions.
From the startling ten minute opener ‘Three Points On A Compass” the aching disowning of an absent father (‘All I got from you was my name, this stupid name”) over an almost classical motif, to the powerful plea for monogamy ‘Drop Anchor’, and the genuinely poignant ‘Sing It Loud’ this is an album replete with highlights. There’s the hymn to numbness of ‘My Heart’s Designed for Pumping Blood’ and the soulful search for comfort in modern technology ‘Where there are Pixels’, plus the gorgeous undulating closer ‘Let the Waves Carry you’ where Martin Rossiter switches gracefully into falsetto and back again. These ten tracks are free of unnecessary production or fat; it’s just that warm yet piercing voice and the punctuating piano notes that speak very loud and clear. This is a record he didn’t have to make to fulfil some contract and it shows; it’s a stirring record he made for himself.
Catching up with Martin on the eve of his debut solo album’s release I find him to be warm, witty and ever so slightly brutal with some things to get off his chest. In short, he is an entertaining and engaging interviewee.
Hi Martin, How are you today?
I’m a little tired actually, anticipatory is the word. The album comes out on Monday and there’s always that wonder whether all the nice things people have said will come to fruition, I want people to have it in their homes, and I want people to sing to it and cry to it. Here’s hoping that it happens. It’s been a long time since I’ve last released a record and nobody buys them anymore so…
I can imagine. When was the last time you released a record?
I ended Gene in 2004. I think the last Gene album was 2001 or 2002 so it has been a remarkably long time, everyone else has aged but I’m still young and gorgeous of course (laughs)…. if only that were true.
How’s the tour been going so far?
It’s six shows. They’ve been going well. Someone described the show at Norwich as more like being at a church than being at a gig, people stood crying. That’s my role in pop music, there are other people that make people dance I’m there to make things harder…..
Is that what this record is concerned with? I’ve been really enjoying it, listening to it often in the middle of the night. You must be proud of it?
Yeah it’s undeniably not an easy listen, I’d be surprised if people can sit down and listen to it all the way through. I think it’s rare, I can’t think of an album that is that lyrically challenging not of the last five years anyway, which I’m very happy about actually. It’s important nobody is doing this anymore, nobody is writing songs to reflect the darker and sort of more vulnerable side of life. And that’s a great shame, it seems the gate keepers of the music industry aren’t letting people like me through. So I’ve snuck through the hitch…
Did you feel less pressure to produce music than when you were on the tour-record-tour treadmill of being on a major?
The timescale has been mine obviously. What I’ve chosen to do in some ways is business suicide. If we jump back ten years or even fifteen years there would be a lot of people who would be keen to hear my record. Time it’s a memory, so it’s clearly not a tactical record in that sense. It took a long time for me to start writing again to be honest, I felt winded by the music industry. At my age it takes a long time to stand up again when something that large has clenched its fist and chucked it into your stomach.
And I guess the music industry has changed even in the period since you’ve been away?
It’s remarkable, I was speaking to the manager of a Mercury award nominee band recently who was saying that their album had sold twenty five thousand albums around the world, fifteen years ago you could have certainly stuck a naught on it and made a living, it certainly would have been enough to pay the bills…..
Rather than the traditional record label route you’ve used pledge music to fund this record. How did you find that as an experience?
With Pledge it wasn’t our first choice I would have liked a record company to sit me down and to say lovely things about how they believe in my record and want to put it out, but I mean a 42 year old greying Welsh man isn’t exactly in pop music marketing 101 is it? But I was determined to get the record out, I didn’t want it just to be sitting around in my front room. But I found it not to be an unpleasant experienced and I find a lot of things unpleasant so I’ve been astonished at the goodwill and affection from fans, I mean I haven’t released a lot of record in ten years it shows a great deal of faith…Most people haven’t heard of crowd sourcing or pledge or kickstarter. It’s a very new idea that you put your credit card number in and two and half months later a record pops through your letter box… I would treat that with great suspicion but I don’t blame people for thinking that. But we’ve had a sizeable number who were prepared to take that leap of faith and jump they did and it’s arriving through people’s doors this morning, I gather. The record companies are very slow to react, it’s just taken them years to realise there’s a thing called the internet and it will take another three or four years to realise that there are people like me releasing records themselves….
I doubt Lucien Grange at Universal is losing any sleep over the fact that I’m releasing an album. It does put control back into my hands .There are times looking back at my career where I’d wish I was in more control. If you look at Gene, if any one of the four of us had been in charge of the band then it may have been different, If I’d been in charge for example certain songs would have been treated in a very different way and we would have sold more than we did. It was one of the things that made us very listenable but I mean you couldn’t sum us up in five words. Anyone with ears could see that the only albums that sell now can only be summed up in five words like some dreadful Amazon algorithm where you put five words in and out pops Adele.
Was there a commercial pressure at work on Gene?
It’s just the fact that we were a democracy, four of us had equal impact. There were battles some of which I won or Steve won and some of which we all lost that was the lovely thing about the band but that’s one of the things that made it harder to square off, we were a square peg and there wasn’t even a hole to push us through…
I read an interview with Brian May who said that Queen used to argue in the studio and the records were a compromise between different opinions….
Sometimes those compromises work very well, I’m not here to defecate on people’s memories there are Gene songs I’m still immensely proud of and songs I no longer listen too but I won’t say which as those songs are no longer mine and exist in a wider space than that. I don’t want to say which songs or that I don’t like them. It would be like Paul Simon coming out with ‘Oh Bridge over troubled Waters is a bit shit’ which would be like a dagger to my heart’….
Which was your favourite Gene album?
Of the Gene records? Probably ‘Libertine;’ the last one, it’s the last one that sounds like an album, it’s coherent there are songs on there where I thought I was starting to sound like a good lyricist, I mean at times I’d been a good lyricist but I was young and inconsistent. Song like ‘Is it over’ and ‘Somewhere in the world’ that have a link with what I’m writing now. ‘With Somewhere in the World’ it was the first song I wrote where I thought Elvis could have sung it, which is frankly all I’m ever trying to do….
Live-wise in Gene, what were your highlights?
The one thing I miss actually now is the fact that when I do a show now I don’t have that gang to jump around with and say how wonderful it was and not feel egotistical, and share things. I have a piano player who comes away with me but he’s a hired session player but it’s not really his job to say ‘wasn’t that fantastic?’ I completely understand why some people have entourages mine would be slightly less glamorous, I can hardly afford to have someone with a brolly to hold over me. It would be lovely to have a couple of people who are as invested in it as I am, it’s a small complaint but only a small one….
It’s fair to say Gene aren’t the best known band of that era….
Gene once jointly held a record for the top twenty single that spent the least time in the top twenty we had this fanbase who adored what we did and then people who loathed us. We were loathed by 98% of the planet but there was 2% who saw the gleaming diamond in a big steaming mound of shit. I think it was ‘We could be kings off’ the second album. We were a buzz band for eleven hours, and very exciting it was at the time….
I keep reading that Gene were a Britpop band but I find that description a little ill-fitting, how do you feel about it?
Our first record came out a week before or a week after Oasis’ first record and in terms of the zeitgeist that Oasis single marked a cultural shift in the UK towards a more unpleasant world. To which we certainly didn’t fit in, it was very easy to mock us, we mocked ourselves. I mean I unashamedly liked books which was like a shooting offence at the time…If we’d been around a few years before it would have been OK, suddenly it became patriarchal. In a way I wish we’d been Finnish or Latvian I mean we were four white men from the United kingdom it was unavoidable we could have made a dubstep record and we would have been called Britpop.
What are your inspirations now as compared to then?
Two things really one not an inspiration but I’m desperate to be brilliant, now. The whole process of writing songs that you have to stand on stage and you have one piano, instantly it points people’s ears at the words. I had to become much better at that art-form of writing I wanted to have a narrative that nobody else is talking about. That’s actually not a difficult challenge in popular music at the moment. I would argue that pop music and I’m talking One Direction is more likely to challenge people than that broad term indie these days. I don’t hear many bands who write songs that will impact on people’s lives apart from maybe Villagers. I want to write songs that will stand the test of time and punctuate people’s lives. I want to make people cry there’s one song on the album called ‘Broken Sorrow’ inspired by an early Villagers song I’d heard that was never released about two statues in Spain that had this lovely story that came back on itself. If people can’t listen to them and understand then I don’t feel like I’m doing my job. I don’t like the idea that you need an accompanying booklet to explain it to you, I would like seven year olds to be able to understand them.
I liked the bit in the final track ‘Let The Waves Carry You’ when guitars suddenly emerged it was a surprising flourish, given the rest of the record is just piano and voice….
It was a musical boo it was sort of popping your head around the corner and hiding in a cupboard waiting for your partner to get home….I’m in a band as well as doing this in which I play bass called Call me Jolene, I don’t want to make another piano and voice record so maybe that’s the hint of the future…
So do the words and music just come to you sitting at the piano or do you carefully piece them together?
I work very hard there’s another great rock music myth you hear some hoary old blues based guitar player saying ‘yeah man I’m just a conduit I’m a satellite dish of music. Frankly I just want to implant my fist down their throat it’s a guarantee it will be meaningless. Every syllable is considered and poured over. I spent months on some of those songs….
I guess there’s that classic second album syndrome when a band is on the road and touring and have less and less time to spend on their next record….
Yeah I guess there’s some truth in that. But this is unquestionably a first album. It’s taken years of sweat and ink. I have a piano at home and it’s one of my great joys in life to just sit and play, one develops an instinct for what is going to work. There are no songs half written or that haven’t been released it’s just those ten songs . Of course there’s been many a note or half idea that’s sat on a 1980’s Dictaphone somewhere I sit at home I have notebook and biros and I record……
I was particularly taken with ‘Where there are pixels there is life’ it gives emotion to something which some people might see as cold like technology and how people can find comfort in it….
It’s a song that understands why people do that. I completely appreciate that, the world is a dark place why wouldn’t you retreat into a world that would hold many more options for you. I’m not suggesting it’s necessarily healthy it’s too easy to criticize someone for living remotely. It’s the modern day equivalent of disappearing off to a cave. I utterly utterly understand….I’m a reasonably modern human being it’s what I do I write I comment on what I see on my own behaviour and other people’s behaviour: I feel a great deal of empathy for people who try and disappear. There’s contact to be made and also that ability to reinvent oneself, I don’t think there’s a person on the planet who doesn’t want to be someone else and the internet allows them to do that….
At the end of the 90s you wrote some politically charged songs, how do you feel about the current political climate…
I see David Cameron walks around with the shadow of Margaret Thatcher ever since the war and ever since that wonderful Attlee led Labour government when they introduced the NHS and they built some of the loveliest housing. Ever since then there’s been a relentless drive too the free-market economy and everybody knows the free market hates the vulnerable and everybody knows the vulnerable would suffer…I loath them deeply, the Tories hate the disabled they hate the old they hate the young they despise those in need and I only wish them ill. Tony Blair and his government clearly have blood on their hands, I was very excited in 1997 when they got voted in we’d had Tories in power for eighteen years and they had a mandate to do even more, it would be churlish to say they did nothing, when they did introduce things like the minimum wage. But they became too obsessed with continuity they were working with the language of what had gone on in the last eighteen years.We now hear people in hushed corners whispering words like nationalization, whereas is 1997 you were clearly some kind of lunatic if you said that. Labour had been a process since the 80s of that process ignored the main constituency of people. People who were Labour voters now just vote and in constituencies that you need to be won to win an election they’re just not turning out. The Labour party missed an opportunity to affect real change in this country, sadly they slowed down the march to free market but didn’t reverse it…
Do you prefer Reginald Perrin or Rising Damp?
I like both. But the reason for the questions are obvious but no the rumours aren’t true much as it would make a more interesting back story to my life that I spent weekends at Uncle Leonard’s but it’s just not true….
Do you still support Cardiff City?
I don’t, I live in Brighton and I have children and it would be about a hundred and forty round trip but I don’t have the time. I am still following them very closely of course. One of my huge regrets I sometimes don’t feel Welsh enough for some people. I grew up around Cardiff but when I was 9 we moved to England. Inevitably there are people who claim I’m not Welsh enough for them I’d just like to plead that it’s not my fault. I’m by no means a nationalist I have more important things to do with my time….
I remember seeing you at the Big Noise gig in the 1990s in Cardiff Bay….
Yeah with Catatonia and Paul Weller that was a very strange bill which was compared by Danni Minogue because for some reason the trough of her career was how low she had to sink introducing me, the poor thing. Sadly that’s how the industry treats women they assume that they don’t have an idea for themselves and don’t like it when they do. Lets be honest it’s a remarkably sexist industry to find someone who is prepared to be a puppet when there are thousands of talented female musicians who must be banging their heads against the walls asking why they are not allowed in…
Why is there no Cardiff gig on your current tour?
That was logistics we tried and we tried and to be honest all I wanted was not to lose money. We just couldn’t find a show to do at the right time. I’m sorry to the whole of the west of the United Kingdom…..
I read a quote from your DIS interview about labels being run by ‘moral vacuums in mid priced suits’; was there any particular reason for this? You were on Polydor with Gene weren’t you?
They released two a best of and a greatest hits, one expect that the thing that I found most upsetting was they almost felt like they’d come along and removed their penis’ from their trousers and pissed on their grave. I saw one of these crappy compilations and saw that they had neglected to spell Rossiter properly. Its just an indication of how much the music industry cares about music. Which was quite rude. It was ridiculous. We had one of the John Peel session albums coming out and they deliberately timed the release to coincide with the release of the John Peel compilation album. And one of those albums they tried to release. It’s disrespectful to a band who made them a sizeable amount of money and probably paid for their spray tans….We shouldn’t be surprised it’s just the lack of care and a indicator of people not caring about the thing that they profess to care about most which is music. That they are dreadful dreadful people…..
I guess a lot of major record labels have become rumps now selling back catalogue records….
Making their money out of repackaging nostalgia….
Have you read that book Retromania? The author Simon Reynolds talks about the lack of quality in modern music so people are still obsessed with the past that they can’t see the future….
What happens is the industry creates an illusion of choice for people where think they have a choice but actually the choice they have is phenomenally limited in the actual range and invention of people out there which is heartbreaking and I really can’t see how it will change until the industry genuinely collapses. There’s no shame in wanting to be able to earn a living out of music. There needs to be some way of doing it, a way that allows the public to have real choice….
It’s funny that we’re almost getting nostalgic for the old way of doing things…
It’s got so bad now that people are nostalgic for a time when it was only terrible. The album will die for which I don’t feel romantically attached to the album in fact most albums are appalling they’re three singles with thirty two minutes of noise. I think cloud storage actually holds the key to the future of the industry. The measure of the quality of an album up until now has been on how many copies are sold if there was a way of rewarding people for the impact it has which can only measured by how many times people play the music. I would like to think that people will play my album till it melts in your record player, you know those records everyone owns that you played and played to death until the needle broke on your record player or your stereo blew up. Actually I think cloud storage of music will potentially allow how many times that things are played count for something again if that was rewarded then nobody would play filler….
I still like records though…
We’re old we like to hold things young people don’t care about holding things. It doesn’t mean they don’t love the music I would happily sacrifice the idea of product for the idea that listens actually count for something….
Some people tend to listen to Spotify on tinny laptop speakers, I guess with improving technology the hope is the way we consume digital music will improve too…?
Oh well people who listen to music on laptop speakers should be rounded up and marched off the edge of Anglesey….
I read that the last time you and all the members of Gene took to the stage was in 2008 …?
Yeah that was a present for our manager, I’m not sure he wanted it but he got it anyway…
Why do you say that was it under rehearsed?
It was fine actually, most of them are fully committed to muscle memory it didn’t require much rehearsal…
There’s no point me asking the stereotypical about whether you would ever get back together question then?
There’s absolutely no point I just have no desire to turn around and look backwards I would genuinely rather fail. And I don’t get the argument that some bands try to put forward about ‘just trying to make a living’ I say just go and get a job that’s what I did don’t trade on nostalgia, don’t insult the art form I love, pop music deserves better…
So what do you think about the Stone Roses getting back together then?
I’m just disappointed. I’m just saddened that greed seems to have dominated people’s decisions. I’ve turned down money to reform Gene before I just wouldn’t do it and I’ve been on the dole on and off over the years. I’d have to be at the point where my kids where getting rickets through starvation to do it. There are more important things in life than greed. I was also immensely disappointed to see the Stone Roses are playing in Dubai that imprisons people for being gay and has terrible women’s rights and they’ve obviously decided it doesn’t matter and closed their eyes to it. It’s tacky there’s lots of these bands. It’s not just Status Quo either I don’t know why they don’t just go to a flea market and buy Status Quo t-shirts, and it’s just about money, it’s pure greed. Go and get a job! Stop shitting on people’s memories…
Very interesting to talk to you thank you for your time…
Thanks give my love to Cardiff will you?
Martin Rossiter’s album ‘The Defenestration of St Martin’ is out now.
