Alongside another bout of retrospective but refreshing Prolapse activity, co-vocalist Mick Derrick lifts the lid on the band’s rich history
Almost anyone who passed through or encountered the Leicester music scene during the 1990s should at least have had a peripheral awareness of Prolapse. Creatively and operationally capitalising on the city’s status as an affordable ‘in-between’ mecca, the quintet that became a sextet and eventually a septet, were localised lynchpins who played their part in the creative community but also stood apart.
In Leicester at a time not dominated by any particular artists or genres but blessed with access to an eclectic mix of live venues, lots of record shops and DIY enterprises as well as being in easy touring reach of Nottingham, Sheffield, Birmingham and London, Prolapse became their own anti-institution between 1992 and 2000 (before reforming – predominantly as an occasional live entity – in 2015).
Across their existence, Prolapse have fused the duelling vocals of ‘Scottish’ Mick Derrick and Linda Steelyard with the sonic stews of bassist Mick Harrison, guitarists David Jeffreys and Pat Marsden, drummer Tim Pattison and keyboard player Donald Ross Skinner, with a borderline-unique alchemy that arguably makes more sense now than it did in the ensemble’s original run.
Sometimes behaving like several different bands playing at all once, Prolapse have channelled macabre storytelling, spleen-venting agit-punk, the agile jaggedness of post-punk, gothic industrial grisliness, various shades of shoegaze, multiple mixtures of all things kosmische, the darkest strains of psych-folk, transatlantic post-rock, murky hardcore noise, melodic indie pop and plenty else besides, that has so far bequeathed four diverse albums and a slew of singles/EPs that sound more bracing, innovative and enjoyable with age.
With renewed interest in the – now globally-dispersed – group, generated by recent well-received vintage Peel Sessions excavations from Precious Recordings, a just arrived expanded reissue of 1994’s Pointless Walks to Dismal Places debut LP on Optic Nerve Recordings and an imminent short UK tour, Prolapse’s artistic stock has risen once again.
Hence, the moment seemed opportune to look back in detail with Mick Derrick on the Prolapse canon to date and more. A process that he generously engaged with on email all the way from Norway…
How did Prolapse come together initially? Were many of you in bands beforehand?
We began as a four-piece – me, Tim, Pat and Mick. Tim and Mick were in a band called Smile, and me and Pat played made-up folk stuff together. We all hung around the Princess Charlotte in Leicester and eventually after a drunken night at Leicester Poly we ended up back in someone’s bedroom banging on stuff and using a bin as a mic.
Linda came later – she was originally our Bez but instead of dancing she peeled oranges. After a few gigs with me shouting, incessant full-on strobe, balaclavas and delay pedal noise we decided we needed something to soften the general havoc and that’s why Linda ended up where she ended up. After Smile broke up, we stole Dave who was very arty and less noisy. Before Prolapse, I’d had various roles in other bands with member of Lung Leg, Ganger and Test Department but that’s another story.
How important was the Leicester music scene in the birth and lifespan as a group? Do you think that it is historically undervalued, given that in the 1990s – when I was there as a student – it had several fecund independent labels such as Sorted, Fortuna Pop! and Pickled Egg, lots of independent record shops like Rock-a-boom and Timebox and a healthy live scene around the likes the Princess Charlotte, The Physio & Firkin and the two universities?
Very, but both fed off each other. The Princess Charlotte was an incredible venue. An old-style pub with a stage at the back where you could see great gigs every night. I looked at one of my old diaries and I was at gigs every second night – every night when I eventually started working there. The clientele was the usual early-90s mix of goths, Midlands grebos, the ubiquitous Crazyhead and Gaye Bykers [on Acid] crowd, indie kids and legendary punks from the olden days which wasn’t that olden back then. It was all very friendly unless there was a psychobilly night. Then you just moved up the road to The Magazine for some local bands or poetry night which was a bit quiet and awkward.
Sorted, Fortuna Pop! and Pickled Egg arrived after Prolapse were up and running. None of these labels would have happened without the Durham Ox which was our regular drinking den. It became a magnet for not just the indie scene in Leicester but anyone into music. The owner Dave Dixey had released a single by a local punk band The Intestines in the early-80s and decided to go again with Sorted when we arrived in his pub.
So, the Leicester music scene was incredibly important to us and was very supportive.
Aside from often seeing you – and I think Michael Larkin of Lazarus Clamp – near the paternoster lift in Leicester Uni’s Attenborough Tower, if my memory serves me correctly members of Prolapse were quite regularly seen at live venues in the audience. Were you all big music fans as much as creators at the time?
Yes, from memory here’s what we were into at the time –
Linda: indie-pop, Sarah Records, 60s-West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band
Mick Bass: shoegaze and The Who
Dave Guitar: Steve Reich
Pat: Fairport Convention
Tim: The Fall and Levellers 5
Me: Early Rough Trade singles 1-30
We were regular attenders at gigs and danced floppy-head-down-windmill-dancing to The Field Mice.
Crate EP (Cherry Red, 1994)
This was the first of two early EPs released before your debut album, both produced by John Robb of The Membranes and Gold Blade. How much do you recall about making the recordings and were the tracks for the subsequent Pull Thru’ Barker EP put down at the same sessions?
Suite 16 in Rochdale was our first ever trip into a ‘real’ studio. It was owned by Peter Hook and was the place where The Fall, Durutti Column and Bogshed had recorded. It was quite wee but had a great atmosphere because of it. Me and Linda stuck to our usual routine which was troll the local charity shops and pubs while the musicians did their thing. After that we’d do some one-take vocals and then done. I always remember that John Robb seemed like a big man and we felt like wee weans but he was cracking and came up with many ingenious ways to make my voice sound louder which I liked. I think Pull Thru’ Barker was recorded at the same time. I’ll ask our drummer [as] he has an Excel list… he says it was a few months later.
Listening to the EP tracks now on the Pointless Walks to Dismal Places reissue bonus disc, it seems like the core alchemy between you and Linda was there pretty much from the start but musically things were a bit more straight-ahead noise-rock compared to what came soon after. Is that a fair assessment?
Yes, it is. We were all finding our feet. We only started the band for a laugh but got signed very quickly to Cherry Red so, in the spirit of making it up as we went along, we instinctively played what we knew. It worked for me, I liked Crass, shouting and showing off. Me and Linda are a one trick pony. We found a friend in argument; it should annoy the listener more but strangely it drew more people in. That’s why we stuck with our thing.
Pointless Walks to Dismal Places (Cherry Red, 1994)
It feels that your inaugural album benefits from both clearer – though not necessarily cleaner – production and sonically it’s more expansive whilst being more angular. How you would explain the shift? Were you becoming more under the spell of American post-rock and British post-punk bands?
No, we were always influenced by bands like Wire so nothing really changed there. The most obvious reason for the change in clarity and sound was the producer, Steve Mack. He was very easy-going but had a very definite vision of how things should be. So yes, it’s Steve Mack’s fault that we don’t sound like scratchy Membranes with a lassie. From the band’s side there was a bit of an obsession with shoegazing so there were more pedals and spaces I suppose.
For all its intentional grimness and grit, why do think that the album retains a certain remarkable freshness?
Well, the album is very fresh to me. I listened to it for the first time in 2015. I still haven’t heard The Italian Flag or Ghosts of Dead Aeroplanes. Once the albums were recorded, I left them alone. It’s the reason I make up the lyrics on stage, I haven’t heard the real ones. When I listened to the LP, I realised lots of bits that I had sung on had been cut out but as twenty-odd years had passed I didn’t really think that I could complain.
To answer the question, yes, I think the album sounds really fresh. I still don’t think there’s many – if any – bands that have made soundtrack music for arguments. Anyone who does the boy girl vocal thing usually leaves room for the other to sing, even Crass. We never felt the need to do that both vocally or musically.
How were you writing material together as a band at this fairly early stage and did it substantially change afterwards? Were you and Linda writing lyrics in reaction to the music or were Mick, David, Pat and Tim – with Donald subsequently – responding to your vocal duels?
Always music first and vocals last. I sung mine as they came out and Linda would often scribble hers down while the music was playing. This happened in the studio or ten minutes before a live BBC session. No compromise. The band would sometimes get together and do the usual jamming thing until something happened but more often than not there was a lot of made up on the spot stuff which was recorded and stuck.
“Headless in a Beat Motel” and “Surreal Madrid” unfold like your own takes on The Gun Club and The Birthday Party, respectively. Were either an influence?
I love The Birthday Party. I was hybrid indie kid/goth in the 80s and I worked my way through The Cure and Siouxsie before discovering The Birthday Party. Their energy and madness really appealed to me, so aye, they are a part of these songs. If I’m honest though “Headless…” is Steve Ignorant of Crass. I never really heard much of The Gun Club before I moved to Oslo, where it seems everyone loves them.
What went into the sonic mix for “Doorstep Rhythmic Bloc”? And what is that plucking-like hook throughout the whole piece?
Tim answers this one: “Dave played the plinky thing with a drumstick on the guitar strings. The sonic mix was guitar, bass and drums with Pat using loads of delay like The Edge”.
In the context of the whole LP and despite its title, “Burgundy Spine” is noticeably quite dreamy. With hindsight was this your quasi-shoegaze moment?
A very definitive ‘yes’ from Tim.
The finale of “Tina This Is Matthew Stone” is a pretty violent couple’s argument turned into song, that according to the sleeve notes of the reissue became quite notorious in live settings, with your dramatized physical interactions with Linda, to the point where are audience member even tried to intervene. How do you feel latterly about the song and how it evolved at live shows?
This fight started at the recording studio and was basically continued in front of the audience. There’s been many times when I’ve thought that it could be looked on as a gimmick and have said to Linda that we should shelve it but every time we’ve decided to do it. The reason we continue is that, like the music it is different every time. The cuts and bruises are real, and some things are broken in the process. It’s our contribution to performance art without the choreographed moves. The other reason I think it’s still relevant is that it looks even more disturbing and real as we get older. A middle-aged man battering a smaller – only in stature – woman of the same age is disturbing and basically reminds people that these problems never go away.
Backsaturday (Lissy’s / Jetset Records, 1995)
Your second album seems a fairly radical shift sideways, especially with 15-minute opener “Flex”. What do you think had changed? Had you more fully embraced kosmische influences at this stage and was it consciously less focused around yours and Linda’s frontline, given that it’s a lot more instrumental?
Yes and no. The LP was recorded in a weekend for three hundred pounds, so there was no money. This suited us as we got to really experiment. The recording process was the same but with further to walk to the pub – we were in Cheshire somewhere – it meant the musicians minus me and Linda had more time to experiment among themselves. Early connections with the 1991-92 version of Stereolab, Pat’s Krautrock obsession and the access to records at the legendary Leicester record shop Ultima Thule meant Krautrock and kosmische was always knocking on the door. This album drew it out and laid the foundations for the later stuff.
Do you think that actually makes a lot more sense now and since you had it reissued a couple of years back?
Aye maybe, I now live in the future and can see what came after.
T.C.R. (single on Love Train, 1995)
This one-off single feels like the motorik-indie-pop hit that got away or just arrived too early, although it did get integrated into the US Jetset Record CD edition of Backsaturday. Could it also be the most Brix Smith-featuring-Fall-like number you released?
The song has grown on me. I never quite understood why people liked it but that has something to do with my aversion to melody within Prolapse. The same can be said for “Autocade” of which I’m not a fan. “T.C.R.” was us nearly being a pop band. I don’t like that.
Did The Fall comparisons ever become tiresome in the band’s original existence?
Not really, many in the band love The Fall but of course it was lazy journalism. I just don’t think anyone knew how to describe us including ourselves, which didn’t help.
How did you end up with such an expensive-looking video, that seems like some of it was filmed in an American city?
It was filmed in Wall Street in New York. They closed off the whole of Wall Street and I had my own make-up artist. Our [US] label Jetset got a big pile of money to do some MTV thing on us but it fell through so they gave us 35,000 dollars which we never seen. Instead, we got a flash video and a New York loft party with Foetus and other local Z-list celebs. The video was great but the parties were cringey and we passed on the coke and instead sat around a coffee table drinking crates of champagne. I loved every minute of it but was glad to get back to Leicester.
The Italian Flag (Radar / Jetset Records, 1997)
This almost double-album – often cited as Prolapse’s best all-round collection – represented your full range brilliantly and came close to some commercial crossover when its three singles received attention from Radio 1. Was it odd to be pushed more in the spotlight?
Not really. We were never on TV and while we were in all the music press and on radio we never really got sucked in that much. Everyone except Linda lived in Leicester, we never really felt we were thrust into anything. We flew a bit more to America but basically still got drunk in Leicester.
Was there much pressure applied to you at the time from the major label-backed Radar imprint that released it? They appeared to spend a fair bit on videos and other forms promotion to push the album…
Hahaha, yes. When we signed with Radar the first thing I said to them was “you do know we’re never going to be famous?” The guy’s face dropped. I think they had big plans and I’d imagine they hoped they could push Linda more towards the front and make us into The Sugarcubes or one of the countless awful Britpop bands that were around. Luckily, Linda was more anti-pop than me.
How do you rate the record as a whole now?
As I say I listened to it for the first time in 2015 and was really impressed. I’ve always thought everything would sound really weak and there would be lots of shouty nonsense but it’s an album that I’m proud of. I hope that’s not because I’m getting old and that it’s my more mature ears that are listening to it. That would just be boring.
“Deanshanger” has fixated me for years, sounding like the pinnacle of the recurrent ‘two-songs-in-one’ approach resulting from Linda’s and yours almost completely parallel lyrical and vocal parts. Can you remember what inspired both your components? Yours comes across an anti-80s nostalgia diatribe and Linda’s feels like a strange short story…
You’ve more or less got it in one. I can only speak for myself but at the time I was living in a motel in Deanshanger near Milton Keynes as I was excavating in some fields near there. The place was depressing as fuck and hadn’t been done up since the 80s and the clientele were businessmen just passing through. I was there for six weeks and went through the whole menu every week. It was hellish. Anyway, the surroundings helped inspire the anti-80s stuff. I love the bit of the 80s I grew up in but it really was a depressing time particularly for music and the poor in Britain.
The somewhat atypical ten-minute closer “Three Wooden Heads” – along with contemporary B-side “Snappy Horse” and “Place Called Clock” from your 1997 Peel Session – pre-empted the acid-folk revival by a few years. What infused into its gestation?
I played the bagpipes and Pat played the mandolin and had tried some folk stuff before. I’d say Pat was the main driving force. The track “Three Wooden Heads” and “Snappy Horse” are a reference to The Wicker Man which was also a favourite. Three wooden heads: Edwoo(ar)d wood woo(ar)d.
You produced a lot of strong and interesting B-sides for the multi-format singles from the album, was this due to you being super-prolific at the time or more from record label demands to fill physical editions to help nudge you into the charts?
Probably a bit of both. We always had enough songs lying around and we could always magic some up in minutes. The quality was not always brilliant. It being Radar I think nudging things into the chart was a big priority. By this time though Linda had already said she’d refuse to go on TOTP which luckily was never going to happen.
Is there any chance that The Italian Flag might get reissued with both its mixes and/or all the B-sides one day or is it all tied-up in label ownership legalities?
It’s tied up. My dream is to get everything in a box set. We have talked about looking into the ins and outs but maybe next year.
Sometime around the release of the album, one of my biggest regrets during my own time in Leicester was missing you perform at The Physio & Firkin, with support from Novak. To understand Prolapse properly is seeing you live an essential experience?
I would say yes. Most people are usually hooked at our gigs and get an underwhelming reaction when they play their stuff to their pals. So, aye unless you like us instantly you probably won’t like us unless you see us.
Ghosts of Dead Aeroplanes (Cooking Vinyl, 1999)
After the relative success of The Italian Flag, this seems to have been overlooked a lot. Was that a mild relief or a burning disappointment?
I personally thought it was fine but I know that within the band there was a bit of disappointment among the musicians, particularly Pat and Tim who’d hoped it would have taken off a bit more.
Like your other albums it seems to have aged very well and at times feels like it might have been better received in the 2020s, with its quite sleek Neu!-infused grooves, spacey atmospherics and psych-rock passages. Would you concur?
Yes, I suppose it might be although I think that our music would still be a bit too difficult for 2020 ears.
How and why did things fizzle-out for the band after the release of Ghosts of Dead Aeroplanes? Was it just a natural, amicable winding down?
Part fizzle part discontent. Half the band wanted to continue and the other half including me and Pat wanted to jack it in. There was no real reason. About a year after I kinda regretted it but by then it was too late.
John Peel Sessions 20.08.94 / 08.04.97 (Precious Recordings of London, 2022)
The two recently issued Peel Sessions EPs on the trusty Precious Recordings really feel like they plug some key missing pieces in the band’s history. Were you pleased how well they turned out?
Yes, very. Another long line in tracks I’d never heard before. I couldn’t remember the ‘1700s version’ of “Deanshanger”. Totally cracking and the band sounded great. It’s so brilliant to have a document of these rough versions of the songs and also a vinyl copy of the songs made up specifically for the sessions.
Was it fun to rediscover the version of “Deanshanger” with your very different set of lyrics for the session?
Yes. I remember reading about the Enlightenment and that must have been what sparked it off. I can hear that my 25-year-old brain was much more sharp and witty than it is now.
You’ve reformed Prolapse in recent years to play live, how have you enjoyed the process and how different has it been compared the group’s original existence?
We’re all more tired and everyone except Linda had glasses. However, within about ten minutes of getting in the practice rooms we were back to where we’d left off. You won’t hear any new warbles in our songs or dad rock. It’s all very much the same.
Do you have any plans to record new material and put out some more archival releases?
Yes. We’ll do new stuff probably very slowly over the next ten years. We had booked a studio in 2019 but covid came. We all survived, so we’ll try again.
Aside from Linda working as newspaper reporter in Leicester, where are you all currently scattered geographically and doing as day jobs?
Linda is the assistant editor at The Leicester Mercury. I’m based in Oslo and I’m now a researcher looking into the topography of the medieval town. Pat is an archaeologist and translates articles from Danish to English in Copenhagen. Mick works in care in London and lives near the location of every British sitcom from the 70s. Tim tells me he’s a programme manager in geoinformation in Leicestershire – whatever that is – and Dave is an art teacher in Colchester.
Bringing things into our orbit, you’ve expressed a lot of love and support for electronic artists on labels such Castles in Space and Werra Foxma, that we’ve covered a lot on Concrete Islands. Are you still very much a music lover above all else? What are your current listening recommendations?
Oh yes, I love music. You mentioned the Castles in Space label. We actually have the electronic artist Everyday Dust supporting us in Glasgow. He’s fantastic, come along and see. I also love the releases on Clay Pipe Music with beautiful artwork by the label’s creator Frances Castle. Werra Foxma Records do crackin’ electronica coming out of Scotland and beyond. My favourite electronic artist from the last few years though has to be Craven Faults who create ambient soundtrack music for rundown mills on the moors and abandoned rural industry.
Right now, my favourite guitar-based stuff is probably the San Francisco and West Coast scene with the likes of The Reds, The Pinks and The Purples, Sad Eyed Beatniks, but especially April Magazine whose only album sounds like a 1975 demo by Galaxie 500. Also, more locally the latest album Flora by Frøkedal is crackin’.
Main feature photo credit: Joe Dilworth
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