Kevin Shields and Brendan Lynch in the Primal Scream studio. All images courtesy Maria Bartolo

Subway Sect is a new radio series, produced by Maria Bartolo and CR's Eliza Williams, which is airing on Resonance FM, London’s art/experimental radio station, over the next six weeks. The shows aim to explore the complex relationship between art and music and take the form of a series of conversations between artists, musicians, writers, designers, djs and music video directors.

The shows go out each Wednesday at 1pm on Resonance (104.4 FM or online at www.resonancefm.com) and we’ll also be bringing you transcripts of highlights from the shows each week on the CR blog.

First up on Subway Sect is musician Kevin Shields, who has been a member of My Bloody Valentine and collaborated with Primal Scream and has also produced a number of solo projects including the soundtrack for Lost in Translation and acting as 'noise consultant' on Douglas Gordon and Phillippe Parreno’s movie Zidane (A 21st Century Portrait). Shields is in conversation with record producer Brendan Lynch, who has worked with Paul Weller, Primal Scream and The Rakes amongst many others. The show was recorded at Primal Scream’s recording studio in north London early this year.

Inside the studio

On early memories

Kevin Shields: When I was eight I formed a group with my brothers and sisters called The Cushions. We had these round cushions, typical 60s/70s cushions and made drums out of them… And I do remember being obsessed with this rock band four doors down; I loved them until our dog bit them and they threatened to shoot our dog with a BB gun.
Maria Bartolo: And you, Brendan, I believe formed a band with your family?
Brendan Lynch: Yeah, we all went to Irish music lessons. When I got my first drum kit we thought we'd form a band – myself and my two sisters. We thought, 'what are we going to call it?' My mum said, ‘Why don’t you call it The Lynch Family Pop Band?’ It was at that point that I knew she just didn’t get it.
MB: Can you remember any musical equipment from when you were young, that might have been around the home?
KS: Yeah I do. In those days, what people did back then – my parents were Irish – was send reel–to-reel tapes of the family talking, like audio letters. That was quite common in those days. The top part of the box was a speaker and the bottom part was the reel-to-reel.
BL: Same for me – Grundig reel-to-reel. Absolutely great bit of equipment! You could feel the heat off it. It was my dad's pride and joy… they were really hissy, weren’t they?
KS: It was also my first guitar amp. You could plug things into it. It also made a really strong smell when it heated up. It had a great distortion sound but it was like plugging it into a hi-fi distortion sound – really upfront.
BL: But you were talking then about superb technology of the time. This was like THE ultimate! This was like space equipment, to us when we were kids.
KS: The first present I got was a guitar for Christmas.
BL: Was it acoustic or electric?
KS: Electric.
BL: Did you have an amp?
KS: No, reel-to-reel.
BL: Even better! Have you still got it?
KS: My parents have it.
BL: You should try and find it.
KS: For years I’ve been like, ‘can I have it?’, because that’s my first guitar.

On punk

KS: That 1976 period was ******* rubbish!
BL: Yeah, just before punk.
KS: I remember giving up on music, I remember thinking I don’t like music – it's kind of crap – and I remember thinking, 'I’m going to do karate, yeah karate’s way better!’ When I first heard punk it was The Sex Pistols and I heard all the stuff about it and I was a bit against it… it was like ‘kill your grandmother’ and all that media stuff. I heard a Sex Pistols record and I remember thinking it's not THAT different, it's not that radical, but then at the time bands like The Buzzcocks were getting on Top of the Pops and that was like ‘Wow… that’s really cool’.
BL: I really loved Malcolm Garrett and the stuff he did with The Buzzcocks. I was a massive fan of The Buzzcocks – that was one of my first art memories – he did their covers.
KS: And so futuristic.
BL: Yeah, very Pop Art. I had a Saturday job so I could go out and buy a single every couple of weeks, but there was nothing I wanted to buy, because nothing sounded any good anymore. But then the punk thing happened, like Kevin said, and when I actually heard the records it was like a life-changing experience. You can talk to anyone of our age that we know and they will tell you the same thing, I think.
KS: I saw this TV programme and The Ramones were on it, they played two songs off the second Ramones album and I was completely shocked… It was like. 'Oh my God, this is incredible!’ I couldn’t believe it and literally went to my friend's house and said, ’did you see that show?' and he was like, ‘no I didn’t…’ and I was ranting ‘The Ramones The Ramones!’ Then after six months I realised noone I knew was into it and I was on my own – and that was the beginning of that journey, I had to find new people.
BL: Yeah, it was just me and my friends into it and that bought the records. Nearly everyone else was into disco at that time.
KS: At school the so-called ‘cool’ kids don’t even know about this stuff and you’re like, ‘Hold on!’ And then a few people that we kind of knew – that weirdo, and that weirdo, and your friend that’s not even into music – discover it. Our school used to have this thing when at 11.45am there would be a thing called ‘recess’, when the whole of our school would be all out of class and you’d go to a big room where you can get coffee and tea, and have a snack, and the whole school would be around. We’d have a cassette and a little ghettoblaster and play The Ramones and try and convert people the whole time to The Ramones. When you first start becoming a real fan you realise that you are in a really rarefied world. You thought loads of people were going to be into this and you realise most people that you knew just didn’t get it… they weren’t interested.
BL: They just wanted to listen to disco.
KS: Yeah… and back then Grease was big, [they were] all doing that Grease dancing.
BL: Yeah, and they would play the one punk tune at the end of the night. We’d have a little pogo, then go home. Without any girls!
KS: Yeah, it was definitely the beginning of an outsider existence.
BL: It’s kind of changed now. I see these Foxtons Mini’s being driven around with The Clash and The Sex Pistols and ‘Anarchy in the UK’ written on the side of them. It's quite shocking – I find that more shocking than the groups.

Brendan Lynch

On making music

MB: Can you describe the process you go through to make a piece of music?
BL: Well, I’m a producer so I’m working with artists, so it’s kind of different for me, because Kevin is an artist, but I suppose it depends on what sort of artist I’m working with. If I’m working with a band that have never made a record before it's very different… they don’t really perceive what a good performance is, it takes time and experience, so they kind of need a little help.
KS: Yeah, totally. I’ve only produced one band in my life – it was a band called The Beatings when we made the record and then they changed their name to Beat It when we finished, then they broke up six months later! That was a real eye opener for me; on how hard it was to be a producer and, like all things in life, it takes all your energy.
BL: But you produce all your own records.
KS: I do… but it's easier to produce yourself, it’s a lot harder to produce somebody else, it takes a lot more attention. Because when you are doing it yourself it's intuitive, you know, 'I've got to do this or I've got to do that', but when you’re dealing with other people, you say 'You've got to do this', and they say ‘Why? Why have I got to play that again or why is it wrong?' And you’ve got to explain… and at the same time not subjugate their spirit basically and that’s a hard thing to do - to lead people to the right direction yet not **** with their sense of self or their confidence basically.
MB: (To Brendan) How would you encourage a band to be experimental?
BL: I’d give them a piece of equipment maybe and just say, ‘Here, listen to this…’, you know, ‘plug your guitar into this and see what you can do with it.’ People take that on board and try things and usually come up with something really special. I’ve done a lot of stuff where I put these little practice amps into filing cabinets and mike them up – and the guitarist will play through it. So instead of using a massive amplifier in a great big room we will use this thing on the record as a major part of the guitar sound.
KS: Yeah, one of the best guitar sounds I ever got was based around this little amp that looked like a tiny radio and it appears to go against what you think – like big sound means big equipment. But microphones are small – only two inches wide and the little amp picks it up better, it sounds bigger.
BL: I realised that making records is all a lie. In real life the vocal isn’t louder than the bass drum, so what you are hearing out of those speakers isn’t quite what it really is.
KS: You introduced into the concept of production that the bass drum doesn’t have to be really clicky like that really 80s production value. What you did with those Paul Weller records and Ocean Colour Scene was [to develop] an attitude that was that, because in the 80s people went really overboard with what you can do in a studio and it was a lie… the only way a band would sound like a band was if the singer was up close. And the only way to make the drums sound the way they should is if they were far away – and you won't hear the click that loud. It’s a less toppy, less treble-y, less hyped-up sound.
KS: (Referring to My Bloody Valentine) Our philosophy was very much going against that 80s production value, we were influenced by Sonic Youth and lots of American bands and it was the beginning of what they called low-fi. What we avoided doing in the studio was adding loads of top to everything to make it sound produced… and not putting lots of EQ on things when we mixed it. The sound that we had they were calling ‘the fluff on the needle’ sound. Compared to the records of the time it sounded quite muted.
MB: (To Brendan) It was interesting hearing Kevin talk about what he observed about you in the studio and the processes that you use, can you talk a little bit about what you noticed about working with Kevin?
BL: I think Kevin’s very special, he’s…
KS: ‘Special Needs’ special!
BL: He’s obsessed with sound, it's hard for me to describe it because it’s so different to any other artist I've worked with, but he’s got a perception of sound that is quite intricate. When I was working with you, you’d set up the sound, listen to the song, get something together, but a lot of it was chance and suddenly something great happens, but it's kind of an accident – but if you hadn’t set it all up…
KS: Brendan’s made a good point because some people might call me a perfectionist. But it's not about perfection – but I will make a big effort to get to a place where that can happen – and when you are in that place anything goes. But you have to work to get to that place and that’s the difference between the common perception of perfectionism… people imagine it's someone slowly working towards something but it's not like that at all, it’s a seemingly haphazard process of creating the environment and then going 'OK, now we are in it we can do what we want'. It's like a party, you go to all that effort to create it – then when you are doing it it's like madness.

On sound art

MB: I'm interested to see what you guys think about sound art and how it relates to what you do?
BL: I think Kevin is a sound artist – you take a noise and make it into something else and then it’s not a noise anymore, it's music.
KS: I remember what I thought when I first heard it – I remember being really cynical because artists working with sound were doing things that I literally did when I was ten years old, I was going ‘that’s what I did when I was ten and these people are doing things for exhibitions that I was doing for fun!’ There’s a theory I’ve got, or read, I don’t know where I got it from, but it's in my head anyway – it's that often people who do things with the most passion in life are in a way the people who ‘need’ to do them because they don’t get it – and that creates a newness. The people who are doing sound art are from my perspective so clueless about the nature of sound and its relationship to things, that they come up with these conceptual art concepts… I’ll give you an example; I saw a sound art thing on BBC2 on one of those Later type programmes and somebody was putting odd statements over a tannoy system in a supermarket. So instead of saying, ‘Will so and so come to checkout two', [they were] saying something like, ‘Will so and so come to banana two to checkout four’, to subvert the process. So in a public domain you’ve got this thing where people just naturally walk around accepting ambient constant messages in a supermarket without really thinking and so you could say the artistic endeavour was to subvert that… but that was what I was doing when I was at school – for fun!
I can remember at school a really funny thing. We had these weird desks and we had a big library in our school and I found that if you rubbed your feet in the library it made a really similar sound to when a tannoy wasn’t working properly [demonstrates sound] – but it was my foot doing it.
BL: Can you do that again?
KS: [Makes sound]
BL: I like that, baby!
KS: This is the funny part; we had this librarian woman who was always in the library and she’d be like ‘Shhh!’ At any point there was always between 50-200 people in the library and everyone would be straining their hearing while I was going [makes sound] and desperately trying to listen! But that’s something an artist would say – ‘Let's do that! Let's project sound that’s so muffled and so hard to hear that isn’t it interesting that people are still trying to listen to it when it's actually nothing!’ Do you know what I mean? That’s what I mean about sound art.

Shields and Lynch with Elvis

On the Lost in Translation soundtrack

MB: Did you work with the film visuals? Were they present as you were making the music?
KS: I was in a unique situation where the music supervisor, Brian Reitzell, was a very good friend of Sofia Coppola’s – at the time it was very family, very small, there was nobody looking over anyone’s shoulder saying ‘What are you doing? How long’s it taking?’ So because of that there was no preciousness. The film was done very quickly; the shooting took 10-11 days and as they were editing, we were just getting everything. The initial brief was just to do stuff for the cityscape. Did that, and failed basically – it was too weird. My essence and cityscape together make weirdness! Sofia Coppola sat down and listened to it and said ‘...it's too weird – it sounds a bit scary’. We loved it but said 'OK that’s the first hurdle – this is her movie', do you know what I mean? Brian loved it, I loved it, but the director – it's her movie, she’s got the vision, she knows what she’s aiming for, so it was like, OK, start again.
In film they put ‘temp’ [temporary] music in. For example, in Apocalypse Now that classic bit of music with the helicopters – that was ‘temp’ music. But when they tried to replace it they were like ‘We can’t do it – this is actually perfect'. But all films are done that way, the director goes ‘…something like that would be really good’. But the trouble with ‘temp’ music is that the people doing the music have got to do something like it - and I had to deal with that in Lost in Translation. So it's nothing like creating music from an artistic perspective where you are coming from inside your heart and soul. But the catch is if you don’t put your heart and soul into it, you don’t make anything of any worth anyway. So you’ve got to find a way of putting yourself into it but not getting precious. The analogy would be drawing pictures in sand where you know they’ve got to be washed away soon and you are not drawing them to keep them or own them. Or [like] making sandcastles, you can just love doing it and put everything into that moment of doing it… and it’s all about what you are doing ‘now’.
BL: But you’re making sandcastles for someone else.
KS: Yeah, and it's going to get washed away, but if it gets kept that’s just a brilliant bonus.

Tracks included in the show: Link Ray – I'm Branded (theme tune), Primal Scream – Vanishing Point, Primal Scream – Burning Wheel, Primal Scream – Exterminator, My Bloody Valentine – Sometimes, The Buzzcocks – Orgasm Addict, The Ramones – Judy is a Punkrocker, My Bloody Valentine – Lose my Breath, Paul Weller/Brendan Lynch Remix – Cosmos, My Bloody Valentine – Only Shallow, Primal Scream – Kill All Hippies, Public Enemy – Terminator X Speaks With His Hands, Primal Scream/Brendan Lynch Remix – Struttin', Primal Scream – Accelerator, Oasis/Brendan Lynch Remix – Champagne Supernova, The Jesus and Mary Chain – Just Like Honey, Kevin Shields – Ikebana