Lansdowne Church Hall, Great Western Road, Glasgow
Saturday August 9th 2008, 8pm
When Calvin Johnson plays a booze-free all-ages show in a church hall in Glasgow’s west end next week, he won’t be attempting to be cute. Rather, it’s just one more wilfully skewed strategy in this most single-minded of maverick’s ongoing mission of DIY self-determination, ever since he landed up as a volunteer on a community radio station in his native Olympia, Washington while still a teenager.
In the thirty years since, Johnson has been a key figure in the lo-fi pop underground, both through his own bands Beat Happening, The Halo Benders and Dub Narcotic Sound System, and through K Records, the label that has been home to Beck, Modest Mouse and a host of other fellow-travellers, and which Johnson still runs on cottage-industry aesthetics today.
More recently, Johnson has returned to his solo troubadour days via the 2007 release of his third album, ‘Calvin Johnson and the Sons of Toil.’ All of which, as one might expect, is delivered on his own very special terms.
“I like to play all-age shows,” Johnson says in his trademark slow baritone. “But aside from that, I’m really not excited about playing rock clubs. Church halls are more social. The atmosphere’s just so much better.”
Such an approach is also in keeping with the ethos of Edinburgh’s Tracer Trails organisation, who’ve ploughed a similarly low-key furrow over the last eighteen months, and who for this latest exercise in kindred spirit-hood are venturing out-with the capital for the first time. It’s half a decade since Johnson last played Glasgow, where he forged links with The Vaselines more than twenty years ago, and with The Pastels, who themselves fly an independent flag pioneered by Johnson and K.
Trading under a slogan of ‘Exploding the teenage underground into passionate revolt against the corporate ogre since 1982,’ as states of independence go, K Records has kept the faith more than most. Not for nothing did Johnson host the International Pop Underground Convention in 1991, featuring fifty like-minded bands who had no truck with the wall-to-wall barrage of conveyor-belt pop careerists buffed into homogenised submission who litter today’s mainstream. Fledgling Vaselines fan Kurt Cobain even got himself a tattoo of the distinctive K shield that acts as the label’s logo, repelling all boarders in its hand-drawn but still protective way.
“There’s an implied meaning in what you say,” ripostes a somewhat defensive Johnson when asked about operating the K way, “that suggests I’m somehow losing out on something. I’m not. If I went with a major label, I’d be losing money and going into debt. I’m not. I can eat a whole lot better than people on major labels because I don’t owe them any money. They’re not exactly rushing out to meet me, but the feeling’s mutual.”
The day we talk, Johnson is holed-up in his self-built laboratory that is the Dub Narcotic studio recording an album with Make Up vocalist Ian Svenonius. There’s also recordings pending from a host of K acts, and a new Halo Benders album mooted. As ever, there’s no master-plan at play here.
“It’s very vague,” deadpans Johnson. “Things will come out when they’re ready, and we’re not going to rush them. I’m only going to be here for another thirty or forty years, so why waste time doing things I don’t want to do?”
The List, August 2008
ends
Saturday August 9th 2008, 8pm
When Calvin Johnson plays a booze-free all-ages show in a church hall in Glasgow’s west end next week, he won’t be attempting to be cute. Rather, it’s just one more wilfully skewed strategy in this most single-minded of maverick’s ongoing mission of DIY self-determination, ever since he landed up as a volunteer on a community radio station in his native Olympia, Washington while still a teenager.
In the thirty years since, Johnson has been a key figure in the lo-fi pop underground, both through his own bands Beat Happening, The Halo Benders and Dub Narcotic Sound System, and through K Records, the label that has been home to Beck, Modest Mouse and a host of other fellow-travellers, and which Johnson still runs on cottage-industry aesthetics today.
More recently, Johnson has returned to his solo troubadour days via the 2007 release of his third album, ‘Calvin Johnson and the Sons of Toil.’ All of which, as one might expect, is delivered on his own very special terms.
“I like to play all-age shows,” Johnson says in his trademark slow baritone. “But aside from that, I’m really not excited about playing rock clubs. Church halls are more social. The atmosphere’s just so much better.”
Such an approach is also in keeping with the ethos of Edinburgh’s Tracer Trails organisation, who’ve ploughed a similarly low-key furrow over the last eighteen months, and who for this latest exercise in kindred spirit-hood are venturing out-with the capital for the first time. It’s half a decade since Johnson last played Glasgow, where he forged links with The Vaselines more than twenty years ago, and with The Pastels, who themselves fly an independent flag pioneered by Johnson and K.
Trading under a slogan of ‘Exploding the teenage underground into passionate revolt against the corporate ogre since 1982,’ as states of independence go, K Records has kept the faith more than most. Not for nothing did Johnson host the International Pop Underground Convention in 1991, featuring fifty like-minded bands who had no truck with the wall-to-wall barrage of conveyor-belt pop careerists buffed into homogenised submission who litter today’s mainstream. Fledgling Vaselines fan Kurt Cobain even got himself a tattoo of the distinctive K shield that acts as the label’s logo, repelling all boarders in its hand-drawn but still protective way.
“There’s an implied meaning in what you say,” ripostes a somewhat defensive Johnson when asked about operating the K way, “that suggests I’m somehow losing out on something. I’m not. If I went with a major label, I’d be losing money and going into debt. I’m not. I can eat a whole lot better than people on major labels because I don’t owe them any money. They’re not exactly rushing out to meet me, but the feeling’s mutual.”
The day we talk, Johnson is holed-up in his self-built laboratory that is the Dub Narcotic studio recording an album with Make Up vocalist Ian Svenonius. There’s also recordings pending from a host of K acts, and a new Halo Benders album mooted. As ever, there’s no master-plan at play here.
“It’s very vague,” deadpans Johnson. “Things will come out when they’re ready, and we’re not going to rush them. I’m only going to be here for another thirty or forty years, so why waste time doing things I don’t want to do?”
The List, August 2008
ends
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