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the official distractions website

Welcome to the official Distractions website. We will be aiming to record the history of one of the greatest, but least heralded, of all Manchester beat groups.

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Friday, March 29, 2013

The passing of time

Here's another lovely translated review of the new album from the continent.  This time Gianfranco Marmoro at Italy's Onda Rock gives The End Of The Pier 8 out of 10:




THE DISTRACTIONS

The End Of The Pier

2012 (Occultation) | alt-pop



I know. You were all distracted. After all, nobody’s perfect.

The harmonic power of the work of Mike Finney and company had passed you by, while Manchester was changing musical direction and their single “Time Goes By So Slow” was joining the pantheon of great songs of the post-punk era. From the Buzzcocks to The June Brides, by way of the Cars and Elvis Costello, The Distractions’ sound had that verve which had taken the Undertones and Housemartins into the charts, lovely pop-punk from the heart with the odd hint of funk and electronics. A series of mishaps saw success slip away from them. Steve Perrin was the first to jump ship, before critical revisionism turned them into the Chameleons’ unlucky brothers; thirty-two years on, the story is picking up again but there’s no hint of any nostalgia for days gone by.

“The End Of The Pier” is a pure emotional vintage: although looking to the past, The Distractions are moving away from any hint of post-modernism creating a clear, crystalline sound, in a series of ballads brimming with emotion. Mike Finney’s voice is even deeper and more nuanced, with a soul flair which was found among many of the bands of the post-punk period, and it’s no coincidence that Arash Torabi of the June Brides and Mike Kellie of The Only Ones are on board.


The very languor which stopped the group riding the wave of initial success is now their strength. That gloom of theirs which makes you feel strangely happy has now taken on tinges maturity and awareness: Finney and Perrin still have a lot to say and this is one of the most precious records of 2012. Their music contains all their passion for the jazz of Miles Davis (I wouldn’t mind imagining him doing a version of “The Last Song”) and for Serge Gainsbourg (the splendid poetry of “When It Was Mine”), but there are also traces of the neo-romanticism of John Grant and Stephin Merritt (“Man Of The Moment”).

“The End Of The Pier” is a rough-sounding album, in spite of the bittersweet tones and the wealth of delicate pathos. The passing of time is the thread running through all ten tracks, from the urgency of “I Don’t Have Time” to the resignation of “The Last Song” the emotions flow smoothly like a cyclical narrative whose ending can always be rewritten. The youthful candour of “Wise” contrasts with the confidential tenderness of “100 Times”, but the nostalgic tones of “Girl Of the Year” and the rock flash of “Boots” reflect a desire for a fresh start without merely taking refuge in memories (“Too Late To Change”) summing up a whole life story in just ten songs.

In a year which has seen the rebirth of Dexys, there’s a risk that a record like “The End Of The Pier” might be undervalued. As with Kevin Rowland’s band, we’re not just talking about a pleasant sense of déjà vu packed with old sound sensations, but a declaration of authentic creativity which can’t be overlooked.

The Distractions aren’t yelling to make themselves heard, but their whisper reaches to the bottom of your heart.

(c) Onda Rock.

Saturday, March 23, 2013

The great and the good

Courtesy of The Hidden History of Manchester's Punk Fanzines at the City Fun exhibition curated by the Manchester District Music Archive.  We go back to 22 September 1979 and The Distractions are supporting Joy Division, as reported in the 6th November 1979 Vol 1 Issue 11 of City Fun...


(c) Steve Benham at Joy Div.


THE DISTRACTIONS, The Nashville, their first London gig.  On before Joy Division, the place is packed.  I’m here to enjoy myself, not to think of things to write about and consequentially am totally pissed.  The Distractions don’t play their best but neither is it their worst.  The organ fails to work when called upon so consequentially Adrian has to remember the second guitar part.  I try to dance but there are tables in the way.  The band seem a bit less relaxed than usual, Mike and Steve are a bit less sure of their ground than usual and are not as confident in their between song asides.  So what, they sound good.  The audience don’t quite know that to make, about a third of them are getting into it but a few throw bottles (dodged most stylishly by the band) in the second encore.




JOY DIVISION at the Nashville are great.  The Nashville was firebombed by the National Front not so long ago and looks similar to the black hole of Calcutta – not that I’ve been there to check the truth of that.  Who thought The Factory was tatty you middle class posers.  Joy Division, well I’m stood on a chair talking to a friend I’ve not seen for a long time and watching the band about two thirds of the way into their set I have to leap off the chair and start dancing.  This is what it’s all about, involuntary excitement that compels participation and it’s just good, if you know what I mean.



Sunday, March 17, 2013

Luxuriously upholstered

The last part of the interview by Dave Cantrell at Caught In The Carousel where the band further discuss the album and touch on future plans.




An Interview With The Distractions 

By Dave Cantrell

INTERVIEW with Steve Perrin, Mike Finney & Nick Halliwell


CITC: Mike, your voice, obviously, is the central instrument of the ‘Distractions sound,’ if we may call it that. It sounds natural and unforced to me, intuitive. Was there every any training, and if not, have you had to work much at it? At what age did you realize you had a bit of a gift of a singing voice?

MIKE: I never had training and I think that usually spoils the feeling, if you know what I mean.I can’t say as I worked on it, just practising seems to improve a voice. I listened to Sam Cooke, Otis Redding and all the Motown stuff growing up and tried to sing a bit like them. Then I realised that to have that kind of feeling was more a matter of believing what you sing rather than a technique (this was because Otis and Sam did some bad stuff in the name of trends! Listen to Sam Cooke’s Gospel recordings or Otis’s early love songs if you’re looking for an explanation of soul music). Not forgetting another two of my favourite voices, Al Bowley and especially Bing Crosby. Mix it in with a bit of Elvis and a touch of Janis Joplin and that’s what I always tried to aim for. Failed of course, but you shouldn’t stop trying because that’s what makes a unique sound.

I still don’t think I have a great singing voice, possibly because I can’t sing Sam’s “Hem of His Garment” or Jackie Wilson’s “Your Love is Lifting Me Higher” the way I would like to sing it. But, neither can anybody else, I guess! However,I always loved to sing pop songs, hymns, anything that made you feel better. I was also a shy kid, so it was a way of expressing myself without people asking me to leave the room. That came a bit later when I’d stopped singing.

I was chatting with Nicky Tesco (of the Members) many years ago and we decided that however bad a voice was, it was talent and not just holding down wires or hitting things. Nobody in either band agreed…!

CITC: Steve, your lyrics have a precision to them, a knack for nailing the emotional resonance of the song with both flow and economy, often succeeding at that cherished quality of a three-and-a-half pop song: resembling a short story (“Girl Of The Year,” for example). Do you have to wrestle them into shape or do they emerge without too much struggle? Plus, if you wouldn’t mind tackling the standard process question: Which comes first, generally, lyrics, melody or an image/character?

STEVE: During the early days of the band I, like many young men, believed that my own angst was interesting, so the lyrics tended to come first followed by the tune. The End Of The Pier was written after a period of almost 20 years, during which I had not written any songs and, initially, I had no idea what I was going to write about so with most of the stuff I started off with a musical idea, often adding lyrics which I knew to be rubbish just so I’d have a song structure to work with. I would then ditch the initial lyrics and start working on something which made more sense. Sometimes the second set of lyrics worked and sometimes they also had to be rejected and more work done.

“Girl Of The Year” was an exception, however. First I had the title (partially ‘borrowed’ from Tom Wolfe’s essay on Baby Jane Holzer) and, in the initial stage of wondering what I was going to write about, I thought I might use the landscape around me. I don’t know if you’ve even been to Wellington, New Zealand, but it looks a bit like a smaller San Francisco – hills, white wooden houses, pickup trucks – and I had the beach at the end of my road so decided to try and write something like the Beach Boys. That’s why it has “endless summer” in the first line but by the end of the line it’s gone cold and in the second line a pier has appeared and my girl’s considering jumping off it. It was then I realized that, wherever I am physically, my mental landscape is that of the North West of England and it’s pretty much inescapable for me so that’s where the writing comes from.

CITC: Nick, I’m still amazed by the sound of this record (even if I do say that about every Occultation release), given the short preparation time as a band and how relatively brief the studio time was (four, five days, I think you told me?). Factory Star’s Enter Castle Perilous was recorded with similar speed but the goal there was maintaining a rawness of sound appropriate to the spirit of that record – a resounding success by any measure – and the short recording time was part of the design to capture that. Yet here, under almost the exact time limitations, the sound is rather luxuriously upholstered, round and full, which, as it happens, is exactly what this record requires. Is it simply down to the different character of the two bands or have you some magic elixir brewing behind the mixing desk?

NICK: If you’ve got strong material and the right people the best method is to book a good studio and play the songs. Factory Star were a tightly-drilled unit so Perilous was recorded in three days then mixed the following weekend, with hardly any overdubs, even the lead vocals were live. For Pier we had four days in June 2011, no rehearsals, in fact we’d never all met before. After that I set it aside for a few months, what with the Wild Swans album, financial considerations, etc. When I came back to it I felt we already had all the musical ideas we needed, so the rule was that overdubs should only bolster what was there, and I only broke it a couple of times. Lead vocals are crucial and astonishingly Mike’d done the whole album +1 outtake +3 acoustic versions in 6-7 hours at the original sessions. He came down to my place and we spent an afternoon redoing just 3-4 songs.

At that point Steve and I agreed the album didn’t need conventional mixing, where the producer zeroes the faders and spends a week listening to the kick drum. I mix as I go along anyway, so it was just a matter of getting the vocals to sit properly and everything else to gel around them. John Dent and I mastered the whole album in an afternoon. It was written, recorded, sequenced, mixed and mastered as a two-sided LP, so we didn’t front-load it with the poppier songs at the start, and we also didn’t use much compression on anything, so it does sound rather different to a lot of modern records, which are mixed so that everything leaps out at you the first time you hear it. The trouble with that is that it can get pretty tiring for the ears so you’re into diminishing returns. I’d hope this is an LP that repays repeated listening.

All in all, I’d estimate a couple of weeks or so’s actual work went into making Pier, though it was spread over 9 months. Even so, only four days of actual studio time, and that’s where the vast bulk of what you hear on the record was done. On average each song you hear is approximately the fourth time we’d ever played it. A couple of them maybe the third, and there are two where we used take 6. I don’t think we recorded more than six takes of anything.





CITC:  As mentioned in my review, and mentioned by many others as well, The Distractions, even during a 30+ year absence, remained warmly embedded in listeners’ hearts and minds. A number of bands back then made the one album and a handful of singles then disappeared, but very few retained the interest The Distractions did. We all have our theories as to why this is the case, what’s yours?

NICK: I’m least well-placed to answer this as a member of The Distractions but can perhaps speak as a fan and with my label hat on.

It’d be overstating the case to say there’s a huge number of people who remember the band but what’s definitely true is that those who care do so very deeply. My theory would be that the band sprang from their audience and never forgot that. In fact they wrote about and for their audience, so people identify those Distractions Mk I songs with their own lives. Steve’ll correct me if I’m wrong but the way I see it, with Pier we set out to do that again, i.e. to write about life in middle age. The other thing is that when Mike sings a lyric you believe him. Take that combination, songs about real life delivered with utter believability and that maybe goes some way towards explaining it.

STEVE: Although there are undoubtedly some women who enjoy our music the vast majority of the people you are referring to who”kept the faith” are men.  The End of the Pier strikes me as quite a “male” album. There’s obviously stuff about male friendship and male-female relations but if you dig under the surface there’s quite a lot of father-son stuff (from both points of view).

If you add to that the fact that while Mike undoubtedly has a strong voice there’s an underlying vulnerability to it, perhaps what we’re doing is saying something about the male condition, or one version of it anyway, at this age and this point in history, which chimes with a certain type of man. Others, however, would be better qualified to answer this question than me.

NICK: Steve’s right, it’s a very male album but perhaps an unusual masculinity in that it looks inward and… I can’t actually think of much music, or art in general, that deals with the subject of male friendship in any real depth. As I’m sure I’ve said to you before, when I got Steve’s first batch of around 5 songs, this was the first thing that leapt out at me and so I wrote Wise in response, as I was able to kind of look in from the outside in a strange kind of way. My other song on the album, Man of the Moment was a deliberate attempt to bring Girl Of The Year into the overall pattern of the thing. As we stood, it was the only third-person narrative song and didn’t obviously tie in with the rest, but it was a very strong song which had to be used. So I tried to write something that’d set it in context and link it in with the rest. How well that succeeded isn’t up to me to say. The other lyric that’s mostly mine is Boots, although Steve wrote what we might consider the first draft of it.

The whole thing was a fascinating process and one I’m very keen to repeat. I think Steve and I are just getting into our stride now.

CITC: Mike dropped a hint about one more album and ‘oh boy!’ to that. I heard Nobody’s Perfect when I was 24 years old, End Of The Pier shows up when I’m 56, so I have to ask, am I gonna have to wait until I’m 88 to hear the next one?

STEVE: I suspect that there will be one last Distractions album and while I like the idea of a deathbed confession record written when I am in my late eighties I suspect that it will happen in the next couple of years. I have a cutoff date of 2016 as Mike will be sixty then and Kellie seventy. That will probably be time to say “goodbye”.

NICK: While there’d be something symmetrically pleasing about three albums, one youthful, one middle-aged and one elderly, there are certain logistical concerns – though by the early 2040s it may well be that most recording studios cater primarily for geriatrics with walk-in drumkits, amps built into comfy armchairs, monitoring via hearing aid loops, etc. Mike, Steve and I have talked about doing another one as I hope I’m right in saying that everyone enjoyed Pier and felt a sense of achievement – I know I did. If we’re going to do it then, realistically, we probably need to get on with it.

Further reading:



(c) Dave Cantrell. Caught in the Carousel

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Another (and final) album

The penultimate part of the terrific piece over at Caught In The Carousel by Dave Cantrell. This is the first half the interview with key Distractions where they discuss the old days, touching on the sounds of the new album.


An Interview With The Distractions 

By Dave Cantrell

INTERVIEW with Steve Perrin, Mike Finney & Nick Halliwell



CITC: Steve and Mike, I know the barebones, Wiki version of the Distractions origin story – formed in ’75 at college, swept up into the energy of punk – but could you flesh it out a little, including why the short-lived stab at reuning in the late '90s didn’t take and how you were able to come together this time?
Steve: To call what was happening in 1975 a band is pushing things a little. Basically Mike and I and a revolving cast of other people were making a noise in a primary school at the weekends. None of the other people stayed very long as there was no chance of getting any gigs, making any money or meeting any girls, which seem to be the main motivations of a lot of people to get involved in bands. Mike and I would not have objected to doing any of those things but were also compelled to carry on making this noise as ‘normal’ life seemed to only have the potential to drive us crazy. The good thing about punk was that it led to a number of small venues opening where untried bands could get a chance to play. Also you didn’t have to be musically competent if you were in some way ‘interesting’.

Our first gigs were played with Pip Nicholls on bass (who we met through Pete Shelley of Buzzcocks) and Tony Trappe on drums. Tony left soon after and Adrian Wright came in on guitar and brought Alex Sidebottom with him to play drums. That’s the lineup that made most of the records.

The mid 1990s thing was interesting but it was hard to get people interested. It was before the internet had become ubiquitous so it was difficult to let people know what we were doing. Then personal stuff started to get in the way. Our then bass player, Nick Garside, went to California to do some work, met a woman and never came back. Our drummer, Bernard Van Den Berg, went to South Africa to do some work, met a woman and did come back briefly but eventually decided to move to South Africa permanently. Then I moved to New Zealand (I had already met a woman so she came too).

Mike: It’s correct that Steve and I met at college, but the original drummer was the son of one of Steve’s colleagues and the other guitar was a colleague of mine. We practised in a church school hall for a while until we decided that my mate’s love of the Stones was too much for Steve and me (nor conducive to writing our own songs!) so Lawrence left and we finally got hold of a bass player through Pete Shelley, with whom we shared many a glass of bitter ale. Pete gave us Pip’s number and we practised with Steve, me, Pip and Tony, the drummer. We played our first four gigs at the Ranch Bar in Manchester, the haunt of most of that city’s ‘New Wave’ and ‘Punk’ artists and a few clubs in Liverpool as well. It soon became clear that to improve and play the kind of stuff Steve and I were writing (“Still it Doesn’t Ring” and “Valerie” were the two that stayed with us), we needed a better drummer and another guitar or keyboards. Most of our songs at that point were written walking to the beer shop, bottles or cans then taken back to Steve’s mum’s for further inspiration.  We advertised in NME and Sounds ‘Free pages’ (Steve always said you get what you pay for…) and got Alec for drums and an old mate of his Adrian, who could play guitar well and some rudimentary keyboards.  The practice room in the church in Wythenshawe (a large council estate in Manchester) was a bit too distant for Alec and Ade, so we started practising in a pub, first in Mossley, a town just outside Manchester, then in a pub in the centre of Manchester.

In late 1978, we got a practice room in Tony Davidson’s place (TJM), along with Joy Division, Buzzcocks and an assortment of other Manchester bands.  It was there we met Brandon Leon, who supplied us with recording time for both You’re Not Going Out Dressed Like That and “Time Goes By So Slow”.

As for the '94/'95 reunion stuff, it started because we had studio time in Nick Garside’s ‘Out of the Blue’ studio in central Manchester. He was a fairly well known producer from the ‘Madchester’ scene and asked if we would record some tunes with him playing bass. This became 6 songs, three of which became the Black Velvet EP that Nick Halliwell released, one was used by Factory magazine [Scream City by Cerysmatic] and the other two are awaiting extra further treatment some time in the future. In 1995 we booked a session in Joe Meek’s studio in London and recorded one track on all-valve equipment (the same as used for Telstar and My Generation!). The drummer was Bernard Van Den Berg who was originally in the Secret Seven with me, but also in the 1994 Distractions. The bass player this time was Kevin Durkin, who was in the Escape Committee with Steve and originally in the Direct Hits, another TJM band.  We didn’t fold, we just sort of ‘fizzled-out’.

In 2009, I saw a mention of The Distractions on the website for Granite Shore, Nick Halliwell’s band, which was very complimentary of us and I sent a ‘Thank You’ note to Nick. A few weeks later, I noticed on the same website a note from Nick asking me to get in touch. I did and Nick asked if I would like to record some more tunes. I was happy to do so, but only if Steve was involved – now in New Zealand. Nick somehow got the whole thing together and we recorded the Come Home EP in Liverpool. We all enjoyed it so much, and Nick being a really Top Guy, we started talk of an album.  That was recorded in 2011 in Exeter.  It seems to be doing very well and now there’s talk of another (and final) album…Love it!


CITC: Steve, Nick, you’re both playing guitar throughout the record but instead of the standard roles such a set-up suggests – one’s primarily lead, one’s rhythm, maybe some switching up – the two of you seem to intertwine, overlap, etc, to the extent it sometimes seems a single guitarist overdubbed. Was that the intention or is it just a naturally occurring dynamic between the two of you?

Steve: I think it’s because we’re both songwriters who play the guitar rather than guitarists who write songs so the main thing that’s going through our heads is “what does the song need?”. The only bit of conventional lead guitar on the record is on “I Don’t Have Time” but that’s only there to reflect the lyric and what Mike’s doing with the vocal.

Nick: I don’t think either of us has ever had any interest in becoming a guitar hero, although Steve’s lead break on I Don’t Have Time suggests he’s the better qualified of the two of us. As he says, we’re both thinking about what the song needs, so on any given song you’ve generally got one of us underpinning the rhythm and the other the melody of the song rather than attempting to embellish and there’s a certain amount of switching back and forth, sometimes during the same song - 100 Times on the new album is a good example, initially I’m playing the rhythm and Steve the melody, then we swap – I didn’t even realise we’d done this until I came to try and work out what I’d done so I could play it live! Essentially, when you’ve got a vocalist as good as Mike Finney you’ve got to leave him enough room to do his stuff. Essentially The Distractions' recipe is that if the material’s strong enough you’ve just got to let Mike put it across and anything that detracts from that is an – if you’ll excuse the pun – unwanted distraction.

Steve: The relationship does seem to have evolved naturally and, organically, our sense of timing is very close but I remember liking the fact that on early Rolling Stones records you couldn’t tell which guitarist was doing what: it just sounded like one big guitar. Maybe that’s an unconscious influence, I don’t know. Certainly, when it was time to prepare for the live shows and I was listening back to the recordings I quite often couldn’t work out which part was Nick and which was me.

Nick: Not just naturally but almost tacitly – Steve and I have only ever met in recording studios and on stage. The first time, on the first morning of the Come Home EP sessions, the only discussion was about which of us would plug into which amp and having resolved that I don’t remember us ever talking about anything guitar-related again. Steve sends me demos of his songs, with him playing the guitar, so if he’s carrying the rhythm I’ll usually go for the melody and vice versa. I can’t remember us ever actually talking about any of this though… When Steve and I said goodbye, in the bar of The King’s Arms in Salford on the evening of Saturday 1st September, his parting words were “one day we must actually sit down and have a conversation…”. I rather imagine this with the two of us as gnarled old men. It’ll be fairly soon then.

When I came to mix the record, I was struck by how tight the guitars were, even though Steve and I had only played together once before when we recorded the album, and the obvious thing seemed to be to use that. So neither guitar is mixed as “lead”, they’re each placed consistently in one speaker throughout the album at pretty much identical levels, I think mine’s on the left and Steve’s on the right but it might be the other way around. I did use one or two little production tricks to reinforce this but it was merely a matter of capitalising on something naturally occurring.

[to be continued - final part to come]


(c) Dave Cantrell. Caught in the Carousel

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