Dead Certs
Sounds Magazine August 11th 1984 by Jack Barron
Submitted by Adrian Howarth
Play at your own risk!!
"We're about as gothic as goldfishes," pin-points bassist Pete, pulling
on his can of Special Brew, deep within the bowels of Blackwing Studios.
Well that takes care of that for it's correct that this group of four aren't
bats in the belfry of modern music. Schlock and trash terror doesn't run through
their arteries. Also...
Even a stiff would recognize Play Dead aren't heavily scaled, at least not in fish terms. It's true however that since I last saw them they have put on a bit of beer weight, all except for rake-drummer Wiff who is busy computing a beat at the moment.
This is a band who've reached maturity, as a listen to their brooding 'From the Promised Land' album proves. I mean, I was shocked…I like the record a great deal and I haven't been an admirer of Play Dead since I wrote a nasty live review of the outfit for a local newspaper, ooh, a number of years ago.
That's one of the coffins that singer Rob, guitarist Steve, and the other pair have been attempting to break out of. Not my hitherto dismissive attitude of course, but the perceptions of you out there of which I am one.
For example it's interesting the way this feature came about…A hot, lethargic day in Long Acre and the weekly editorial conference is in progress. Names are being mulled over for coverage.
"How about Play Dead?" inquires Chief Fuller. "Their album has been hanging in the independent charts for a couple of months."
Nobody wets their pants with excitement at the prospect.
"Actually, I just got around to listening to 'From the Promised Land' last night," admits Dave Henderson, "it's actually…pretty bloody good."
He looks surprised, as if he expected to taste shit and found a curry.
"Well, they live near me so I guess I could do the interview," I offer…It's that random.
I tell this story to Play Dead when we meet and they understand immediately.
"We suffer a little bit from people not really listening to the music we're making," explains Rob.
The vocalist's pony tail has been shed for a cross between a very short mohican and a Hare Krishna crop. His voice is matter-of-fact, not whingeing. [sic]
"As soon as they know who it is they straight away put us in that vague bracket," elaborates Rob, um vaguely.
I know what you mean.
"Like people have drawn up this idea of what we're about, what we stand for and what we do," he continues. "If you looked at all the reviews of the singles that's all they do without actually talking about the music."
"People heard us when 'Propaganda' came out and they judge everything in terms of that," chips in Steve.
Ah, that single, the one which clinched them a full Sounds feature some two
years ago, a 45 that in retrospect seems a naïve slice of dark-metal-meets-disco-rhetoric.
There's nothing akin to the song on 'From the Promised Land' either in sonic
or lyrical terms. Yet…
A lack of critical enthusiasm due to misconceptions is the cancer responsible
partly for mutating the group's music. Play Dead like to shift their direction
while the public prefer them fixed in one sphere. It got to the point where
they considered changing their name…but they've come up with another solution,
which is why they're in Blackwing today.
Together with Mich of Look Back in Anger they are ensconced in Vince Clarke's church hall studio to record for a separate project. The name of the venture will remain veiled until September when the resulting single will be released. One thing is certain, you won't recognize the music as coming from Play Dead.
'Propaganda' may have been responsible for shoving the band into the spotlight, but of course they formed quite a while prior to it. Cataloguing is tedious, but it's informative that although most of the group's contemporaries - from Bauhaus to the Birthday Party to UK Decay - have fragmented. Play Dead still keep moving on together.
"Usually you find the reason bands split up, is that the people involved are into different things and they find the band restricts them," reckons Rob. "With us we all get to do what we want. Nobody says 'do this or that', it's still really democratic."
Paradoxically, it's this lack of leadership which has led them to stumbling on the matrix of dank textures 'From the Promised Land' swirls with. Producer John Fryer of Cocteau's and X-Mal fame has stripped the guitars of their previous ram-it-down-your-throat quality. Wiff has learned the art of the Linn and Rob's vocals are more assured. Above all though the record contains songs which knot the nerve-ends more securely than before.
For all their love of the usual lifestyle excesses, Play Dead are not a stereotype but complicated in their way. Disentangling the vortex of fucked up emotions on "From the Promised Land" takes concentration, which can't be bad. But where to begin unraveling the strands for hints?
Here will do…
"'Return to the East'? Well you know the Hesse (clue!) book Journey to the East?" asks Rob. "That's about a bloke who goes on a holiday but it's all in his head, a written dream I suppose. Anyway, incidents happen on this holiday, he's thrown into places he never imagined he'd be and has to cope within this small journey in central Europe."
"Likewise I wrote 'Return to the East' from thinking about my life. I thought about when I was younger when I read books about people experimenting, and how I grew up and began to question the things I do. It's really like a big puzzle, there are really big bits which fit if you're willing to open up to them."
"And 'Return to the East' is about how when you're young you see tings as one dimensional, that there are goodies and baddies in the world. But as you get older you realize we're all good and bad. It's just that you happened to meet people when they were in a good or bad mood. It's a combination of getting wiser - and drugs, I suppose."
The latter is what I was referring to earlier in terms of the group's rock lifestyle excesses. Play dead are concerned with the expansion of perceptions, multiple realities and the like in one sense. Hesse and Casteneda are part of the conceptual baggage, tools for self-awareness, initial doors to different thoughts.
Pot-boiler philosophies are easily vilified of course. But if Rob and the others get inspiration from these sources, among others, to create searching music that's fine by me. They would be the first to tell you they aren't MENSA members.
Indeed, there is a caveat, an escape clause, built into the logic which fuels the songs. Like all good subjectivists, Rob doesn't pretend to have any answers.
"The thing is you see, I can't say for certain there's anything there, because if I knew for certain I'd be a Messiah."
This simply isn't the effects of too many drugs is it?
"No!" Denies Rob adamantly. "I can see loads of relevance in lots of things. Take religion - by reading books about religion and watching things about it and generally taking religion in you can see how it's like a fucking bike wheel."
"Religions nearly all say the same things, they're all at the ends of the spokes pointing at the same idea. Some call it God and some call it The Force, but there is A Power no matter how factual you are. That's why all the religious wars are so petty. It's like kids saying 'My God is better than yours'."
And so we talk on about how the band, through their longevity have meshed at an intuitive level.
"We're all such isolated souls (people in general) and that feeds into the music. That's why Play Dead's music is thought of as gloomy but it isn't, it's just personal. Some people find it painful to listen to other people's emotions," concludes the vocalist.
The trap of seeking enlightenment, or spirituality etc, is that it can atrophy into morbidity. And 'No Motive' arguably the most jarring excursion on 'From the Promised Land', captures this slide into the pit of disturbance perfectly.
"I wrote that when I was going through a month when it was all just too much," says Rob. "I'd lost the thread of life a bit. You know you have those phases in your life when it doesn't seem fucking right? You just see all the shit and none of the magic."
"Well, I had a period when it got to the point where I was so pissed off for taking myself so seriously that I either killed myself or forgot it."
An overdose being "too hit and miss", he decided the surest way of topping himself would be to jump off a tall building.
"There's no possibility of pleading for attention with that method."
When the crunch came, however, he obviously didn't go through with his plan, for whatever reason.
And so Play Dead continue carving an existence at the margins of modern music. The band might have once used a bat for a logo, but they've always been outside of the major post punk trends, let alone Goth.
It's a chilly corner they inhabit where anxieties and fears they share through their songs provide scant warmth for all those "isolated souls".
Play Dead are struggling for their survival as a unit in a commercial world. They have a tension which short-circuits the goldfish swimming in the bowl of the Biz. They are surprising.
