interview: The Sleeping Years

I'm going to attempt to do some interviews with some of the artists who have made the best albums of the year so far. First up is Dale Grundle from The Sleeping Years. 'We're Becoming Islands One By One' is a TracksandGigs favourite (I'm also really enjoying the EPs, especially a beautiful song called 'Untroubled'), I asked Dale some questions and he gave some really interesting answers so they are reproduced here in full....

T&G- - Catchers were one of TracksandGigs' favourite bands of the 90s. In the days pre-internet, I discovered them by hearing 'Cotton Dress'playing in an indie record shop and asking the staff who it was. Would never happen these days. What are your best memories of Catchers and why did the split happen?

DG- Well, I started Catchers while I was at school so we managed to go from sending crudely recorded demos out to record companies to moving to London, to recording our first singles, right up to touring with well-known bands. We were very young - Alice was about 17 or 18! So at the beginning even just being able to play in London was such a huge thing for us.
One of the moments that stand out for me is the 2nd La Route du Rock Festival that we played in St Malo (in '98). We had played there about 3 or 4 years before just after recording our debut album 'Mute'.In 1998 we had been playing at the Water Rats in London and got a call from our agents in France asking if we would be available to appear at the La Route du Rock as Cornershop had pulled out at the last moment. The line up that year was incredible - Portishead, PJ Harvey, Spiritualized, Yann Tiersen, etc. The only problem for us was that our drummer Peter could not come with us. We decided in the end to gamble and phoned a drummer that our guitarist knew and got him to drive down from Derby to London that night. He had never heard our music before so he spent the journey to France sitting listening to both our albums on a walkman. We ended up being able to sound check just three songs with him and went on to play 9 songs for the very first time with him live to about 7 or 8,000 people. I'm not sure if I would be brave enough to try that now but we did ok!

Catchers had a lot of amazing experiences - we moved to New York and toured from coast to coast, played with people like Dr John, recorded with Robert Kirby. In the end however, as with a lot of bands, priorities began to change for people. We had problems with our label and didn't feel the support was there as much as it had been. Also I had been in a relationship with Alice for a few years which had broken down. Everyone seemed a little exhausted by Catchers and as future plans were being made I looked around and felt it was not right to continue like that.

T&G- - Pretty much everyone I played Catchers songs to liked them but hadnever heard of them until then. 'Beauty Number 3' used to go on all of my 1990s mix-tapes! You seemed to get great press in the UK but never got all that well known. Was that frustrating?

DG- I think it's more frustrating now than it was to us at the time. We had people like Mark Radcliffe playing us on BBC Radio 1 and the music magazines seemed to be behind the records but there were lots of other elements not in place for us. We never had management and we did not have a booking agent for the UK until the 2nd album. So even though we would get good press and radio it was hard to follow it up in the UK. They are good records that I am very proud of. I love the fact that they have have a bit of a cult following but of course it would have been better to sell more copies. The thing I love about Catchers is that we managed to exist within the Brit-pop era but made music that was very out of line with what was happening around us. We came from somewhere very small and quite removed and I think that had a very important influence as to how we saw what we were doing. I am sure our label would have been happier if we had hung out with NME-adored bands but it was never what we were about.

T&G- - I had pretty much given up on hearing music from you again with such a long gap after 'Stooping To Fit'. What did you do post-Catchers and what made you return to music with Sleeping Years?

DG- I kept on writing music but just never released anything or tried to look for another deal. I think I needed time to reassess everything as I had been working as Catchers for about 6 years and didn't really know what else to do. 'Stooping to Fit' was a very difficult album for us to record - the band were not in a very good place at that point. So we all needed a little time to heal. I got a job, read a lot of books and kept my head low. I had some health problems as well which delayed things but really I just needed to step back and figure out what I wanted to do. Eventually my fingers itched to the point where I needed to be playing and everything slowly made sense again.

T&G- - The songs on the EPs and 'We're Becoming Islands...' seem to focus a lot on home and family. Was that a major theme when you wrote the songs?

DG- When I started writing the songs for The Sleeping Years I kept thinking of the line in 'Clocks and clones' - 'old souls all rapt in wonder for the arc of them'. I liked that idea of looking back at a life's journey - about how random the starting point could be. I looked at where I had been born and what my homeland was like and my language and culture.

I am originally from a small village in the country so nature has always featured in some way in my work. I wrote 'Broken Homes' and tried to tie in a sense of the physical to the geographical - 'brittle maps of my ribs bowing...'. I also sent a dictaphone back to my parents and asked them to record themselves talking about their lives and wrote 'Dressed for rain' and 'The lockkeeper's cottage' based on their stories. I felt like I was starting again from the beginning and because of that I needed to try and understand where I came from. 'Macosquin, Coleraine', 'Strays', 'Human Blues', etc all contain elements of the language that I grew up with. Up until this point I had tried to stay away from writing too directly about Northern Ireland. Unlike some of my friends I never read Irish writers as I grew up because I didn't want to be influenced by them. I needed to find my own voice first before I could talk about my home.

T&G- - The two Catchers albums ('Mute' and 'Stooping To Fit') sound quite different to each other and 'We're Becoming Islands...' has more of a folk feel to it. What music are you listening to these days and who are your influences?

DG- I think the Catchers' albums sound differently also because of how the songs were written. I started teaching myself piano around the 2nd album so the songs grew in new ways. The TSY songs were demoed at home on my studio so for the first time I was able to arrange everything myself. The Catchers records could have sounded a lot different though. We had Dave Fridmann lined up to record 'Stooping to fit'. This was before 'Deserters Songs' as I really liked 'See you on the other side' at the time. I was even speaking to him on the phone but then the label ran out of money and could not afford to send us to the states to record with him. Mike Hedges was suggested by Setanta for 'Mute'. I had wanted to go a little more left-field withg our choice of producer.

The last bands that have genuinely excited me have been Grizzly Bear and Animal Collective. I also discovered the Alan Lomax Southern Journey series and Harry Smith's American Folk Anthology while I started writing The Sleeping Years' songs. I listen to a lot of different genres though - I grew up listening to soul music on my mother's side and folk/country on my father's. Vocally I am influenced by people like Mark Hollis - the last two Talk Talk records and his solo album are all stunning. I love Moondog, Ivor Cutler, Can, Captain Beefheart, Low, some of the Anticon artists, Davy Graham, etc.

T&G- - So far, TSY live dates have been mainly one-off gigs. Are there any plans for a tour? I am absolutely devastated that I missed you playingThe Union Chapel, which is my favourite venue. Did you enjoy playing there....and any plans to return?

DG- Yes, I have actually played the Union Chapel three times so far. Once with Catchers (supporting Edwyn Collins), once on my own and once with Michelle. I love playing there - it's such a beautiful venue. I have had a connection with that venue since I came to London. I will be appearing there again this year but it will be for the Arctic Circle Xmas show which will feature me singing to music written by Ted Barnes. It's going to be included on a forthcoming Arctic Circle Xmas EP which will be arranged by Harry Escott and feature a choir and some other artists. Pika Pika (who have created all the TSY artwork) will be involved as well.

T&G- Whats next for TSY? Are you working on new songs at the moment?

DG- We have a lot of shows coming up right until the end of the year (all listed on our myspace page). We will be travelling to Austria and Italy for the very first time and we have a rescheduled trip to Beirut in November.Aside from that I have been recording demos at home for the next album which will hopefully be out some time next year.

Thanks to Dale for taking the time to answer the questions. Sleeping Years play The Social in London on 5th November and TracksandGigs will be in attendance!