Larval Stage: Piano Magic’s Low Birth Weight Revisited

Glen Johnson recalls the gestation of Piano Magic’s inventive and sublime second album, upon its twentieth-anniversary vinyl reissue

The late-90s are perhaps an undervalued and under-remembered time in British musical history. With the engulfing successive baggy, shoegaze, grunge and Britpop waves having swept in and out during the earlier part of the same decade, the closing years of the last millennium gave more space for a broader and less NME/Melody Maker-framed spectrum of scenes in the UK, before the internet fragmented things even more fundamentally. In this era, more room became available for experimental sonic avenues, intermingling artist operations and micro-labels spread between Glasgow, Nottingham, London and elsewhere. Emerging from this healthier spread of cultural ecosystems were Piano Magic.

Led self-consciously from the back by Glen Johnson, for an existence that lasted in many chameleonic forms until 2016, Piano Magic stood amongst but also apart from the cultural environment that birthed the band. Whilst as primary songwriter, Johnson successfully steered band manoeuvres through a maze of line-ups, outlets and approaches, it is still the primordial Piano Magic epoch that holds the most sonic intrigue in need of rediscovery. Which is why a newly-repackaged vinyl reissue of 1999’s seminal Low Birth Weight album, via its original home at Rocket Girl, is worthy of an in-depth exploration.

Constructed with a slew of borrowed-from-elsewhere guests like Simon Rivers (The Bitter Springs), Pete Astor (The Wisdom of Harry, Ellis Island Sound, et al.), Rachael Leigh (Baby Birkin), David Sheppard (Ellis Island Sound, State River Widening, Phelan Sheppard, Snow Palms, ad infinitum), Antony Ryan (ISAN) and Robin Saville (ISAN) as well as a host of virtually unknown yet no less valuable accomplices, Low Birth Weight nimbly surrounds distinctive romantically-soaked and occasionally bleak songcraft with mesmeric minimalist electronics, treated guitars and studio trickery. Remarkably fresh yet retaining its mysteries two decades on, this second Piano Magic LP skillfully joins the dots between Kraftwerk, The Durutti Column, This Mortal Coil and Disco Inferno to fit the Concrete Islands world like a glove.

With all this in mind, Glen Johnson – who remains active with solo works, collaborative projects and running Second Language Records – was pinned-down via e-mail for an unapologetically-detailed look back at all things Low Birth Weight.

Aside from it being a twentieth anniversary, what else made you decide that time was ripe to reissue Low Birth Weight?

When the band dissolved at the end of 2016, I think it was inevitable for me to look back at the catalogue and consider a) whether it was all still fully available and b) what kind of life it could have beyond the band. I didn’t want all this hard work to just gather dust.  

Originally, there was some discussion about whether to reissue all four of the first Rocket Girl albums (Popular Mechanics, Low Birth Weight, Artists’ Rifles and the Seasonally Affective compilation) as some sort of deluxe boxset but when I went back to listen to these albums, as much as I still liked individual tracks, I wasn’t particularly fond of the complete albums. I think it’s a common dilemma faced by artists – whether to reissue early work they’re not so proud or fond of, even though the fans may want to buy it. Low Birth Weight is the only one of the first records that I think stands up because there’s a bare minimum of filler. It’s also been unavailable for quite some time now.

In some ways it feels like the quintessential Piano Magic LP (philosophically and collaboratively-speaking) but it also feels like somewhat of an outlier (with less ensemble-playing and no vocal role for yourself). How do you feel that it sits within the wider body of the Piano Magic catalogue? Is it your personal favourite?

It’s definitely one of my favourites and always has been. It is what I originally thought the project (for want of a better word) should be about – a sort of ‘revolving door’ of not just personnel but musical styles.  Obviously, by the next album (Artists’ Rifles), we’d become more of a band, mainly because we got the touring bug, so the revolving door temporarily got stuck. In the context of the whole catalogue, I think it was our larval stage. But an interesting one. 

Was it a deliberate choice to integrate guitars and more vocals into the construction of Low Birth Weight after the almost entirely electronic and more instrumental predecessor Popular Mechanics? 

My frustration with Popular Mechanics was mainly that there weren’t any proper songs and the only way I really know how to write proper songs is with a guitar. I love electronic and guitar music equally but I just didn’t feel satisfied sitting down at a computer or 8-track to make music. I needed something more physical. Prior to Popular Mechanics, I’d mainly played guitar in bands – big, loud guitar with lots of FX – so it was hard for me to just sit down at a table and click on a mouse. 

Given that was it recorded in four different locations with multiple configurations of people and instrumentation, are you surprised about how cohesive it still sounds or is that harder for you to recognise, given how much you know where all the joins are in its build?

I think I’m probably the only thread that goes through all the album so any cohesion is perhaps just that – me. It was all very hurried with no real game plan as to how to make a cohesive whole. Some of the tracks were recorded solo, at home by me, one in a garden shed in Mornington Crescent with three American music students, four recorded in a basement in Nottingham, others in a basement in Gospel Oak, London and yet there’s certainly a Piano Magic vibe throughout. Romantic, ghostly, lovelorn…

In assembling this reissue, did you happily rediscover details that you’d forgotten about? Even though I’ve listened to the album countless times over the last two decades, I somehow missed the Throbbing Gristle-like coda to “Snow Drums” and the bleaker-than-bleak ending to “Dark Secrets Look for Light” until listening to it again in preparation for this interview…

Yes, until I received the new test pressings, I hadn’t sat down and listened to the album properly in many years. I can, with hindsight, pinpoint almost exact influences – Disco Inferno, obviously but also Kitchens of Distinction, AR Kane, Warp Records… In 98/99, I would’ve also been listening to a lot of American groups like Pan American, Tortoise, Rachel’s and all the space-rock on Rocket Girl – I particularly liked Füxa.  Their 3 Field Rotation and Very Well Organized albums greatly influenced A Trick of the Sea, the EP which came out between Popular Mechanics and Low Birth Weight. 

In terms of sonic invention, it’s arguable that Low Birth Weight is the one where you packed in the most subtle aural surprises, like the vocal-sighs-as-rhythm tracks on “I Am the Sub-Librarian” and the still unawares-catching lurch in the middle of “Snowfall Soon”. Was there a lot of time and thought put into making it so intricately-assembled yet never cluttered?

No, it was all very impulsive. I tend to work very, very quickly – first take if possible. Martin Cooper and Matt Simpson, the main producers behind the album were, thankfully, the same. I’d really like to say there was a plan but literally everything was thrown at the wall to see what stuck. I was greatly influenced by Disco Inferno who, I was convinced, were signposting the future of music with the way they incorporated sampling into their songs. I wanted to do the same – ‘narrative sampling’ if you like. So, all those little frills and sonic oddities you hear throughout are very much inspired by them. Again, by the following album, that level of experimentation had evaporated. 

Aside from yourself, who were the most significant contributors into the shaping the sound and production of the album?

Martin Cooper and Matt Simpson. Martin was probably the closest Nottingham had to Martin Hannett in terms of sound experimentation at the time. He had a home studio near Attenborough Nature Reserve, which was a couple of miles from Nottingham city centre. I loved going out there and was always really excited to record with him. I’d say, “How do we make the drums sound like they’re in a cardboard box?” and he’d literally put the drum-kit output through an amp with a cardboard box around it. At one point, we put a microphone in a plastic bag underwater in a bath because we were looking for that submarine reverb. Not sure how we managed not to electrocute ourselves. 

Other times, I’d lay down a guitar and a guide vocal and leave him alone for a couple of days to play around with it and I’d come back to what I (then) considered to be a masterpiece. He was a musical and electronical polymath and so played drums, bass, keyboards, whatever was needed. He also built his own pedals and noise machines, so it was never boring, working with him.

Likewise, Matt Simpson was always fun to work with. We recorded in a stuffy Gospel Oak basement bedroom with no windows but because there were no distractions, we got a lot of stuff down in a short amount of time. Both of us had that Kraftwerkian approach of working in breezeblocks of sound until you had a house with a roof. No improv for us; it was all very linear. There were parties pretty much every weekend in that flat so we also got to let our hair down after days of making what could be described as very melancholy music. 

The album features a series of guest vocal-led songs and couple of instrumentals. Had putting yourself in front of a microphone even occurred to you at this point? Were you primarily thinking of a This Mortal Coil modus operandi?

I really didn’t want to sing in Piano Magic. I wanted to be in the producer chair, like Ivo [Watts-Russell] or John Fryer. I loved the TMC idea of just inviting in guest singers and musicians to do the bits you couldn’t manage yourself. I was only really forced into being the main singer on Artists’ Rifles because if I didn’t do it, the band would’ve been mainly instrumental and have had fewer opportunities to play festivals, etc.  Piano Magic literally jumped from playing the Hope & Anchor in Islington to doing Benicassim Festival in Spain between 1999 and 2000 mainly, I think, because we became a proper band with a proper singer. 

You’re very open about your musical influences behind this album in the new sleevenotes – with the likes Disco Inferno, AR Kane and Kitchens of Distinction being namechecked – but far less so lyrically. Who or what do you think shaped your approach to the wordplay for this album, which is as striking and distinctive as the music on Low Birth Weight but less discussed? Some might say there’s an early-Smiths feel to “I Am the Sub-Librarian” and maybe a bit of Leonard Cohen on “Bad Patient”…

Yes, it’s perhaps odd that I was predominantly listening to instrumental music around this time – Tortoise, Rachel’s, Scanner, Warp Records, etc. But I suppose my big lyrical influences stayed with me – from my teens, Terry Hall, Marc Almond and later, Morrissey, The Go-Betweens. I love Leonard Cohen now but I wasn’t listening to him much in the nineties. Likewise, I’m as much inspired by authors as I am by songwriters so there’s probably a bit of Richard Brautigan in there.  He was never far away from me in the 90s.  Same for prose writers like Michael Ondaatje. 

At this stage in Piano Magic’s compositional processes, what came first, the words or the music?

The music. Until the last album, Closure, it was rare for me to write the words first. Ironically, everything I’m working on now is words first. The words have become, if anything, even more important to me recently. I’d rather be remembered as a good lyricist than a shit musician.

The album features three fairly unknown female vocalists – Rachael Leigh, Jen Adam and Caroline Potter – who all put in beautifully-restrained and largely semi-spoken performances. What was your approach to directing them and arranging things around their voices?

Well, Jen’s song, “The Fun of the Century” was written 100% by her and I had very little involvement in the playing. I thought it was such a great, intense song and it was just a matter of slotting it into the album (it’d already come out on a 12” on Piao! by this point). Rachael could sing but I really liked the sound of her voice in spoken word pieces. It had a chilling, automaton-like quality. There’s a beautiful intensity to Caroline’s performances I think. Again, she could sing – and played in a Nottingham shoegaze band, Halo – and knew implicitly what I was feeling on those songs, as we were living together as friends and hanging around with the same crowd.

“Fun of the Century” fits as well as expands the Piano Magic mould exquisitely. Do you think that it paved the way for the more baroque stylings on Artists’ Rifles?

Yes, I think it did but I probably didn’t recognise it at the time. I really, really loved Jen’s songs. Before I met her, I was given a demo tape which she recorded under the name The Hotel Bruce and she was doing that Beach House sound years before they existed, albeit more lo-fi. The baroque thing is something I keep coming back to. You can hear it again on Life Has Not Finished with Me Yet in particular and the new stuff I’m working on also has something of that vibe. 

The two tracks that first hooked me into the album were “Crown Estate” and “Dark Secrets Look for Light”, which feature the voice and words of Simon Rivers of The Bitter Springs, which have only become more mesmeric and striking with age. How did that collaboration come in being?

In 1997, I was working at Rough Trade Records, running a new singles club called the Trade 2 Singles Club (Geoff [Travis] had temporarily lost the Rough Trade Records name and found a new backer for Trade 2 in Island Records). We’d get demos almost every week from The Bitter Springs but I don’t think Geoff was much into them. I liked a handful of tracks though – particularly “Girl on a Mountain Bike” which ended up being the B-side to the single we eventually put out. I thought Simon was a fantastic lyricist and vocal presence but I never much liked the Springs’ music, so I plotted to get him away from them for a few tracks. He’s also brilliant on “England’s Always Better (As You’re Pulling Away)” on our Part-Monster album. I remember him recording another track with us, possibly for 4AD, which had the fantastic line, “Jesus was a gambler – he carried that cross for a bet….”

Simon’s pieces read as very dark novellas on paper, how much did you discuss his inspirations and intentions with them him at the time? Were you taken aback by both their desolation and imagination?

Yes, blown away. We had no idea what he’d sing until he was literally sitting with a mic in front of him on recording day. And it was all invariably one or two takes. Both songs have exceptionally worrying themes to them. “I’ll make a cup of tea and then you can show me what a woman looks like with her head turned inside out…” is terrifying; real American Psycho stuff. At first, I didn’t think we could have that sort of subject matter on the album because we were doing this brooding, lovelorn, melancholy thing but his words gave the album a menacing edge it wouldn’t otherwise have had. 

Pete Astor of The Loft, The Weather Prophets, The Wisdom of Harry, Ellis Island Sound et al. takes the lead on the closing cover of Disco Inferno’s “Waking Up”. What do you think he brought to the song given how fond you are of the band’s oeuvre?

I think he probably sleepwalked the singing if I’m honest. I love Pete but he probably had little interest in Disco Inferno! But we did used to talk for ages on the phone back in the Rough Trade days (he was working for Momentum Music who published a lot of 4AD stuff), mainly about new bands we loved, like Electric Sound of Joy. We covered “Waking Up” mainly because it was easy to play – it’s not even from their glorious sampling/MIDI period. I also loved that opening line, “A sky without a god, is a clear, clear sky….”

The wordless “Birdymachine” – which like “Shepherds Are Needed” feels like a hangover from Popular Mechanics – prompts a more zoomed-out question I’ve meaning to ask likeminded artists for a while. Why do so many purveyors of less-beats driven electronica have such a thing for replicating ornithological sounds?

It’s a good question. I think a lot of electronic musicians have gone through that period of trying to replicate bird song or at least, feeding it into their music. I did quite a few experiments of converting birdsongs into MIDI notes and then attributing other instruments to those notes. But invariably it’d come out a jumbled jazz. You can’t beat the birds at their own game. 

The only other Piano Magic album that you made later with such similar intentions as Low Birth Weight to mix studio exploration with a raft of guests was 2002’s Writers Without Homes, your sole album for 4AD, which felt to me less successful in its execution. Would you agree and if so, what do you think made it being less effective?

I’d agree that the principle was the same – the ‘revolving door’ and that it was a lot less successful! That album was a fucking mess right from the start. We’d worked fairly well with John Rivers on Artists’ Rifles and the Son De Mar film soundtrack but I think he was bored of us by the time we started Writers. We just didn’t see eye to eye on the new songs and so we effectively fired him (via 4AD). There was a protracted length of time getting the tapes back from him and by then I think we’d lost our mojo. I never ever listen to it because I think it’d probably make me want to give up making music. “Music Won’t Save You” was one of our best songs live but we butchered it on the record. I feel like I should apologise to Vashti Bunyan and John Grant because although they put in sterling performances, we padded the album out with incoherent odds and sods that went nowhere. A French magazine editor once cornered me in a bar in Paris and said, “You could’ve been big but you really fucked everything up with that album.” I agree with the latter. I think we had some good reviews in, oh, Macedonia but it was nothing near good enough to justify 4AD keeping us. 

Low Birth Weight, its predecessor Popular Mechanics and contemporaneous singles/EPs were born were in amidst what seems like a somewhat uncelebrated era in the late-90s, where small and micro labels like Ché’s sibling capital-letter shy i imprint, Earworm, Wurlitzer Jukebox, Lissy’s, Bad Jazz, Liquefaction Empire and Rocket Girl where putting out lots of interesting experimental and collaborative stuff. Did it actually feel like a particularly creative and supportive artistic environment to be working on that periphery at the time?

Yes, very much so. We were very friendly with most of the people who ran those labels, we were excited by the artists they were working with and the music they were putting out and we played on a lot of mixed bills with those artists. It was a common thing to have say, us, Plone and Amp on the same bill. Or us, Mogwai and Pram even. Because of Vinita, I was right in the middle of the Rocket Girl thing, hanging out with the other bands like Füxa and Mazarin but I was also regularly talking to Joff at Bad Jazz, his brother Leon at Liquefaction, Jamie at Lissy’s, Keith at Wurlitzer and buying their records whenever I couldn’t blag them. Almost everyone I met inspired me and I did see it as a sort of nameless scene of sorts at the time. I loved Plone, ISAN and Broadcast in particular; envied them. I wore out that first Broadcast 7” for sure. This was a time when the 7” was king and there was never any shortage of labels approaching us to put something out. I do regret being so prolific because the quality of the music suffered but on the plus side, if our name wasn’t everywhere we’d never have had the gig and touring offers we had. 

Sidenote: I’ve recently been thinking about why we ended up with such a rubbish name and I’ve only come up with this: at the time, anything retro was cool – secondhand clothes, vintage furniture, analogue musical instruments and particularly junk shop records. Bands were called things like Metrotone, Flowchart, Electroscope, Amp, Pram, etc.  In my haste to name the band – we had to put something on a demo tape – I took the title of an old junkshop piano medley 10” record that was lying around in my flat. But once that retro-futurism chic faded away, we were left with a name that neither suited our music nor sounded cool. In Italy, Spain, France, etc, fans actually thought the name was good but once removed [of] the sexy Continental pronunciation, you have something rather silly. Like Disco Inferno. 

The album’s iconic sleeve is made-up of a distinctive diorama and you used more of them on other early releases. What did you like so much about them?

I think it was more about photography really. Dominic [Chennell], who started Piano Magic with me, was a photography student and shot the covers for Wrong French (a cage full of synthetic birds which we had in our flat), Wintersport (our bathroom heater) and For Engineers (a retro-clock from our flat). Simo Bogdanovic had been on the same course as Dom and took the shots for A Trick of the Sea, The Fun of the Century and Low Birth Weight. I vaguely recall a conversation where Simo told me about Walter Potter’s taxidermy (then) at Jamaica Inn in Devon and I thought it might be very us. So, he went off and did the shots and I loved pretty much everything from the session. We were spoilt for choice for the cover but it’s become somewhat iconic. The cats don’t look like real cats, do they? In fact, I originally questioned whether they were, in fact, taxidermy at all. But it turns out, Potter just wasn’t very good at stuffing. 

Where did the concept for the album title and corresponding original sleeve-credits listing of each contributor’s own birth weight come from?

I honestly don’t know where the album title came from or why the album is called that particularly.  The listing of each contributor’s birth weight seemed like a fun idea at the time (though it’s not on the new sleeve).  I was convinced I would’ve been the heaviest baby but I wasn’t. 

Do you think as a whole that Low Birth Weight locked-in an intrinsic dichotomy at the heart of Piano Magic’s canon; always moving forwards with progressive lateral approaches and shifts in personnel but still looking back to old musical, visual and lyrical obsessions?

Yes, undoubtedly and you would know that more than anyone! Part of me wishes we’d carried on with the revolving door, mainly because I think we’d have made more interesting records (see Silver Servants). But if we hadn’t become a band, which we did shortly afterwards, we wouldn’t have had the amazing opportunities we had to tour. Honing the project down to a band of four or five people meant that we could not only travel but help the band grow.

You’re planning to do special a live show to commemorate this reissue. Will it be a quite a challenge, given that you’ve barely played much of the material on stage previously? Will many of the key performers be involved?

We’re still debating how, where and when to do this but certainly seven or eight of the tracks are guitar-based so they can be played fairly easily. Paul Tornbohm will definitely be involved and I had tentative yeses from Simon and Pete. Just need to work out when and where. It won’t be under the Piano Magic name by the way. Paul and I are currently pulling together a new project under a new name that can feasibly incorporate some Piano Magic material. I’m excited about playing live again. Hopefully, we can get out to the Continent once this whole Brexit shit-show has settled. Or maybe we’ll be effectively fenced in on our sad little isle? 

With the fond remembrances that this reissue have delivered is there any chance of that the comparatively overlooked but also essential Artists’ Rifles will also get a vinyl reissue?

I don’t think so. Unless a label comes in that really, really wants to do it.  As an album, it doesn’t particularly excite me in the same way Low Birth Weight does. Although it’s a good document of us working out a way of being a band and not a bedroom-ridden home recording project. For the time, it was seen as quite an adventurous record within that post-rock genre and heralded in places like Spain, which enabled us to tour pretty much everywhere but in hindsight, personally, I find it a bit thin.    

Although, the Piano Magic line-ups solidified a bit in more after this early period, there is still a big enough list of passing-through contributors to come close to matching the numbers that went through The Fall. If someone was ever to interview all the past players with Piano Magic – as Dave Simpson’s did with those who served under Mark E. Smith in his book The Fallen – what might be the recurring thing people would say about the band and your directorial role?

There’d definitely be quite a few disdainers! They say you should never work with your friends but I always pushed that to one side in that hope that those closest to you would understand you and therefore your songs, more sympathetically. What I missed was that once you start putting other people in with your friends, they don’t always work well together and it becomes your responsibility to keep the peace. I have, often blindly, tried to propel Piano Magic forward and it’s been at the expense of many friendships and relationships. It was certainly never a happy ship for long. I’d say the golden period was around Disaffected, where we all got on, were all super-creative, were making some money, were free of label interference, were free of certain toxic presences, were touring regularly. 

And finally, bringing things back to 2019, what new or archival wares are you working on?

I’ve lost count of the number of unfinished records on my laptop but I am working on getting something out this year. I’m also thinking about releasing Piano Magic’s The Troubled Sleep of Piano Magic on vinyl at some point. It never came out on vinyl and would benefit from a redesign. There’s a new Future Conditional album in the works, a multi-artist project called Avenue with Trees and a new Textile Ranch album all queued-up, awaiting a final push. I’m not standing still.

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