Increasingly Good Shape: Keiron Phelan Interview

The reblooming Keiron Phelan accounts for the emotional and melodic synthesis behind the third album in his scholarly pop craftsman guise

South Londoner Keiron Phelan has donned a variety of musical outfits over the last few decades.

To many he is still best known as the co-leader of much-missed post-pastoral explorers State River Widening and the amorphous experimentalist Phelan Sheppard, enterprises he shared with fellow multi-instrumentalist and now Snow Palms mainstay David Sheppard. To others, he is recognised as one-half of the capital letter-averse littlebow (with fellow flautist voyager Katie English of Isnaj Dui and Busy Microbes) and as part of the remotely assembled Anglo-Japanese avant-pop operations of Smile Down Upon Us.

For those who have been in need of a gifted multi-skilled session player and/or co-arranger, he’s additionally been relied upon by – big inhale – The Bitter Springs, Silver Servants, Brona McVittie, Darren Hayman & The Secondary Modern, Allo, Darlin’, Pete Astor, Glen Johnson, Orla Wren, Klima, Robin Saville and Michael Warren (AKA Ziggy Heroe).

However, over the last four or so years Phelan has donned fresh attire – both sartorially and stylistically speaking – as a colourfully tailored and intelligently playful singer-songwriter.

Thus, with 2018’s lush and infectious solo debut long-player, Peace Signs, Phelan ostensibly reinvented himself by refracting a pent-up penchant for 70s art-pop through his kaleidoscopic extant skill-set, with an expansive ensemble under his benevolent direction. 2020’s similarly magnetic sequel, Hobby Jingo, made some space for more 80s-to-90s hued influences and extra character studies by paring-back some of its predecessor’s ornateness, with his backing band slightly slimmed down but properly anointed after the title of the preceding album.

This year’s newly-released – and also Peace Signs-bolstered – Bubblegum Boogie on Gare du Nord Records takes things into deeper emotional terrain, with some life experiences directly and indirectly transposed into some weightier and more melancholic material. Yet, Phelan’s melodic magpie musicality is sustained and expanded upon throughout, whilst plenty of lighter moments are deftly deployed in strategic places to offset the heavier lifting elsewhere.

Accompanied by a collection of amusing and touching tie-in videos, along with a selection of live dates, Bubblegum Boogie is set to be a welcome micro-label-level multimedia exposé of sorts from this big hearted and agile artisan.

Drafted in for some questioning, without any need for persuasion, Keiron Phelan proved to be as loquacious and obliging as his latter-day lyric writing and tune sculpting would suggest…

Last time I interviewed you – for the departed Delusions of Adequacy – it was around the release of your first songs-based album in 2018, Peace Signs. How has sticking primarily in your singer-songwriter and band leader mode suited you since then?

Wonderfully. I think my voice is in increasingly good shape, both technically and expressively, and my band create half the song arrangements simply by dint of being superb musicians. I feel I’m writing inventive lyrics and to real emotional purpose. I’m most fortunate. That’s me bigging us up!

I understand that your new third album – Bubblegum Boogie – was composed whilst living back at your childhood home to look after your late mother in the last year of her life, which also overlapped with the first most intense part of the pandemic. On a purely practical level, how did that all work out? Were you working quietly at odd times of the day?

Yes and no, to the last part of the question. Looking after someone with dementia is a 24-hour business. You’re not ‘on’ every single moment but you never know when you will next be called upon, or how soon after you were previously needed, and it can be any time, day or night. So, you just have to compartmentalise. You can’t set blocks of time aside; you just play when you can. It’s a little brutal but it is an incredible exercise in self-discipline. Any “I have to be in the right mood” or “I need my environment to be just so before writing” goes out of the window. In some ways I don’t think I’ve ever worked so much to purpose.

Was it helpful in coping, with what must have been personally taxing times, to be songwriting in the background as it were?

I’d say it was more reflective of the situation – as I think the album demonstrates – than helpful. One shouldn’t ask too much of music. It won’t save your world. But I think it’s important for me to say that looking after a close relative who has such a disease is probably one of the most important and best things that one can ever do. What it demands of you and takes out of you is not to be taken lightly but, if you can swing it, you’ll feel a better person for it. That’s its own reward.

How did the writing process impact on how you translated the songs into band arrangements this time around, when you finally got the chance to record them in a studio?

Not so much. The band are really good at just clicking into place, in the studio. I probably had the arrangements even more thought out than usual, simply as I’d had more time to do that. Which was paradoxical as it’s deliberately more stripped down, arrangement-wise, than the previous album, Hobby Jingo. The real pain was staying patient enough until we could finally get back together. But that stricture applied to everyone.

To what extent did returning to stay somewhere stacked with so many early-life memories sway you on devising more personalised and less character-driven material?

To a large extent but in a very odd way. As my mother became increasingly unable to recognise her home it began to lose its nostalgic purchase on me. I assume this was part of me comprehending her process of memory loss, as in looking after a dementia sufferer that’s part of the job; accepting what’s gone and working with what’s left. There’s no one now living that remembers my early life apart from myself and I could very much feel that coming in that final year, so I was recycling childhood memories as fast as I could. I became increasingly aware of how much we are simply stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves. It’s unsettling but an interesting place for a writer. So, there’s a lot of ‘me’ in the album. But not a verifiable me.

Despite the more challenging circumstances and quite a few more reflective songs this time around, were you also determined to still bring in some lighter shades into proceedings?

Unquestionably. That’s why I chose to cover “Sugar Me”, for one thing. I can ‘do sad’ when events turn that way, but it’s something of a foreign mindset for me. I’m far too old to be gloomy. That would be a really silly waste of time.

Delving into a few specific tracks, what went into the mix for the opener “Trojan Pony”? It’s another of your big earworms…

Remarkably little, but I think that’s the genius of pop music. You can create something strangely gripping almost by sleight of hand. Train of thought? It’s a play on ‘Trojan Horse’. Pony makes it small, weird and fun. One rides a pony. That can be metaphorical. Has to be as we’re all stuck indoors with nothing to do. Pony rhymes with lonely. Which we currently are. I like chant-songs, so there are three lines to the whole song and some ‘da-da-dahs’. It also shaped up a little like Mungo Jerry, who I like… and is a distant cousin of mine. Tah dah!

The song also has a really funny video featuring you and your partner’s daughter… How did that come together? Did you have a lot of fun planting visual Easter eggs in it?

Yes, Imogen – my partner’s daughter – does great deadpan, the camera likes her and she was patient with us. If “Trojan Pony” is about anything it’s having to wait to do the things you want to do. So, a ‘bored father-daughter’ domestic vibe seemed to work and makes it a real home movie. The Easter eggs certainly were fun. Me reading a copy of The Iliad was a no brainer, as was the copy of the Racing Post – saw a great horse in the 3.30 at Chepstow that I never got chance to bet on. The Mott the Hopple [book] and Dr. Alimantado [album] looked good and the rabbit dolls are my friends. Relatedly, the bunny hop that we perform is ripped off from Bowie’s video for “Fashion”. I do that in nightclubs occasionally but no one ever gets it. Quite the opposite, in fact. The water pistol has to be there for bored-beyond-belief Imogen to shoot me with at the end of the film. It’s her only way out…

Contrastingly, “You’ve Got Your Mother’s Love” and “I Don’t Know How We’re Getting Home from Here” feel like the saddest songs on the album. What are they about? Judging by the video, the former seems like it’s tribute to your own mother…

“Mother’s Love” is a tribute of sorts. But it’s mostly about my mother’s relationship with her own mother – I was raised by the two of them – which was very emotionally restricted. Some of my family had harsh lives and that can make for hard people. And my mother never quite got to escape from that backdrop, as much as she tried. It was the first song I wrote after she died and while I won’t pretend I specifically sat down to write what I did, it’s an easy guess as to where it’s coming from.

“Getting Home” is a metaphorical dementia song. I frame it as a parent-to-errant-child narrative but, in the real, I’d become the parent and my mother the child. People with dementia often cease to recognise their environment, even if it should be a very familiar one and repeatedly ask to be taken back to that familiar place, even though they’re still actually in it. So, I ended up with a moving song due to an insoluble problem. 

“My Last Great Love” seems to bridge the gap between the more melancholic and more upbeat moments, what do you think infused that one?

That was just me wanting to be Marc Bolan for a day. Pure, much needed, escapism. I’m a big F Scott Fitzgerald fan and I was reading through his short stories at the time. I recall thinking that was a very Fitzgerald-style title.

“Ziggy on the Landline” brings back a character from Peace Signs – who isn’t from Grange Hill or a Bowie persona. Did it feel natural to bring back some of the same cast members?

I genuinely have a friend called Ziggy who I did used to speak to using our landlines, at the time. So, as a title this was an absolute gimme. And it references Hobby Jingo, although that’s more of an activity than a character, I would say. The Blamblam is a now defunct club in Brighton. Baby Driver refers to the film, and so on. But, yes, it’s nice to assemble a returning cast of characters. I’m not sure Kaiser – from “What Kaiser Did” – has finished with me yet and I’d like to give Satellite Hitori a new adventure sometime.

In turn, “Guessing Game” feels like both a cousin of “Hippy Priest” from the same album…

Perhaps so! I hadn’t noticed until you mentioned it. They are both gently satirical studies of emotional shallowness, I guess, and they both go clarinet crazy.

“Apple Pie” makes me think of Prefab Sprout with a sprinkle of The Divine Comedy. It also sustains the run of food-based allegory songs, following on from “Candy Floss Hair” and “Cinnamon Synthesis” on your second album, Hobby Jingo…

I like to squeeze a touch of The Divine in, if I can. Hannon is a force for good, in my world. The food thing is just a coincidence. But, hey, we’re Peace Signs and we want sugar and spice and all things nice! Like to buy some oranges?

I presume that “Song for John Howard” isn’t about the second longest-serving Australian Prime Minister?!

John is fantastic, the godfather of the glam ballad. A lovely man and should have been a huge star in the 70s. If you’ve never heard his music, check it out.  I wanted to write a song for my – then – new girlfriend, but doing that can feel a little… obvious? I’d also wanted to write a song for John. So, I took an early winter morning that she and I had spent together, described how it felt and made my feelings for her into a ‘present’ to John. Which sounds slightly promiscuous. Still, both she and he seemed happy enough about it. Phew.

What led you to cover Bill Fay’s “I Hear You Calling” and Lynsey de Paul’s “Sugar Me” for the album?

I love Fay’s work and I’d earmarked “I Hear You Calling” some time back. His own version is a strangely tense affair and for a devout Christian quite spiky around the “Some say Messiah coming, to give me back my time?” vibe. It’s very doubt-ridden. But I wanted to do a gentle version that would suit my lower voice and the band – mainly Ian [Button] and Jenny [Brand] – instinctively transformed it into a gently rolling country tune. Its themes of time lost and – probably – time wasted also chimed in with my mother’s situation but, for once, I wanted to look at that softly. This is as close to being sweetly fatalistic as I’m ever going to get.

“Sugar Me” I have loved since I was eleven. I heard a Papernut Cambridge version and for once – as I adore PC – thought “Nah, I can do that better”. Competitive Keiron! It’s a Spartan arrangement and the duelling pedal steel and clarinet between Jack [Hayter] and Jenny in the second half must be an instrumental one-off. The song needs a sweet but insistent vocal as it’s quite a contradictory emotional synthesis. The narrator begins by coyly pleading for monogamy but by the – potentially endless – looping outro choruses it ascends to a plateau of relentless romantic and sexual attention seeking. Very little breathing space when you’re singing that song, too, so you kinda feel it.

The album’s title track and the end piece “A Modern Day Dorothy” feel like they were conceived as an interconnected pair… is that an accurate assumption?

Fairly. “Bubblegum Boogie”, the song, was one of the first written for the album. It’s loosely about missing my clubbing friends – as lockdown hit – some of whom I only ever saw in clubs; the loud Saturday nights and the quiet Sundays, afterwards. Wondering if that would ever come back. It seemed to need a postscript, hence “Dorothy”, with the dancing/red shoes ‘worn out’ reference. The Wizard of Oz was also one of my mother’s favourite films, so that fitted in too. I love the boogie and shout end section. I don’t shout much but when I do…

Does it feel you’re in a more settled late-career phase rather than feeling the need keep switching as much between musical hats? Have you found it harder to get back into your more experimental instrumental work? Is there anything currently in the works from that vein?

Yes, this feels more settled. Also, previously, I’d always have one main co-author, the principals being David Sheppard or Katie English. Whereas this is just me ‘wearing my hat’. One of the reasons why I turned to songwriting was that I’d spent almost eighteen years creating largely instrumental music, which could be considered experimental – although I’d suggest that in some respects my songs can be stranger, if not in form then in content – and I didn’t intend to blow myself out. But I currently feel more commonality with Walt Disco than, say, Harold Budd and if I’ve got anything at all left in common with Eno then it’s the 1974 version. I don’t see why I wouldn’t return to the other side, though. There’s still much to be done.

Do you hope that your incredibly strong run of albums with David Sheppard – trading as State River Widening and Phelan Sheppard – will eventually be recognised for its importance in bridging the gaps between a British-born take on US post-rock and the neo-classical world?

That’s a very kind question. Who knows? But other than being given licence to roam by post-rock I’m not sure we had much in common with most of our contemporaries of the time. Certainly not the Chicago sound – which I found intriguing but a little bloodless – and we were nothing like Mogwai or Fridge. Nor did we resemble the following folktronica of Tunng. Our sound was very emotionally led and, at the risk of being pretentious, quite Apollonian. I’d say we drew on the gentler sides of West German kosmische [like] Cluster [and] Popul Vuh, a touch of English folk guitar style and fusing minimalism into interlocking acoustic guitar arpeggiation – which I think was our genuine innovation. So, perhaps more of an anomaly than a bridge?

Do you think you’ll ever reunite in a similarly collaborative way?

It’s not really on the cards at the moment. We’re both creating vibrant new music, as we judge it, and we did make a great deal of music together. Aside from the five official albums, there was enough other material released to form a sixth. We also did the first Smile Down Upon Us album together and co-arranged Pete Astor’s Songbox. That was certainly within a twelve-year period and we never intended to keep mining until the vein became low yield. Also, when bands reunite, how often does it actually turn out to be a good idea?

Is there anything else you have planned for the near-future… and beyond?

At the moment I mostly just want to be on stage more. I love the dressing up and the performing. But the main thing would be the fourth Peace Signs album. Most of it’s written and the provisional title is The Whole Band Just Turned Mellow. Which they will.

keironphelan.bandcamp.com

Main feature photo credit: Catherine Whiteoak