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Sony Music News Release
Sunscreem Biography
by Sony Music / © 1993 Sony Music Entertainment (UK) Ltd
“In England it’s definitely singles, singles, singles, singles,” says Lucia Holm, the beautifully blonde, half-Finnish vocalist of pop techno hitmakers Sunscreem. This musically skilled quintet has applied a love for modern electronics and the hip dance music scene to serious songwriting and experimentation.
“There’s a lot of snobbery there that can be hard to cope with,” says Lucia. “If you have songs and you’re identified as a dance band, some people find it odd and they think we’ve jumped on some bandwagon. But we’ve been doing this far longer than most people that put out dance records. And they’re so surprised that there are lyrics that have more to them than ‘Ooh baby, I love you’.” Coupled with this is the confidence of a band as equally at home playing live onstage as they are inside the recording studio.
Sunscreem has won attention for their lead singer’s ragga locks and the fact that they’re a 5-piece live band – Holm, keyboard/synth player Paul Carnell, guitarist Darren Woodford, bassist Rob Fricker, drummer Sean Wright (and sometimes a DJ and two male dancers) – but they also craft great songs with full melodies and lyrics.
England’s latest techno dance crossover success may seem to have come out of nowhere, with their singles riding high on the British dance charts, but Sunscreem has been at it for years. Their string of UK hits, including the chart-topping Love U More, Pressure, Broken English, and Perfect Motion are among the baker’s dozen cuts to be found on O3, Sunscreem’s debut album.
Though on techno’s cutting edge, the Sunscreem sound has evolved from an intimate association with their machines – without worrying about current trends. “The band’s name comes from a sound on the synthesizer,” says Carnell, Holm’s primary partner-in-crime. “The sound’s on our track Psycho. It’s one of Lucia’s favorite sounds. Depending on how hard you hit the key, it either explodes or it gives a very mellow sound.”
His statement sums up the album’s range as well. Self-produced, Sunscreem’s debut features tracks that traverse the boundaries between hardcore techno, classic house, electronic pop, and driving atmospherics. The music on O3 reflects the band’s experience in song construction. This experience carried over to their innovative cover of Marianne Faithfull’s groundbreaking Broken English. Its inclusion shows Sunscreem’s sense of progressive electro pop history as well as an appreciation of a song with real feel.
Sunscreem’s musical depth made the creation of their biggest record yet, the pulsing, synth-rich Love U More, a simple process. “Lucia wrote the lyrics in one go,” says Paul. “It varies of course; on some songs we’ll spend days and days, the other 90% is written in a few minutes. Love U More is a very ambiguous song – in one sense it’s a love song, on the other hand it’s an ‘I can’t love you’ song. There’s also quite a lot of nature references, so it’s an environmental song, too.”
At Sunscreem’s core lie Carnell and Holm and their particular histories. For a band so technologically wise, both incorporate an ironic love and devotion of the organic. Paul’s recording studio is in the near-rural suburb of Essex and is built in an old barn. “I grew up literally 800 yards from the studio, so I’ve lived in this part of the country all my life in the middle of nowhere.”
Nonetheless, at 31, he has learned a lot about music and recording. When he first started taking piano lessons at age of six, he also got a special education. “I had quite an unusual piano teacher who didn’t really believe in teaching people to read music,” Paul says. “She used to write a lot of music herself and taught her pupils how to read by ear.”
Electronic music entered Paul’s life early on. “When I got to secondary school, I just taught myself and played by ear,” he recalls. “Even with the first group I had at school, I had an old Revox tape recorder and a set of oscillators which was basically circuits from a synthesizer. But we didn’t have any keyboards, so we generated it all by twiddling knobs.”
Depeche Mode, one of the first electronic pop bands to reach mega-stardom, came from Paul’s town. “They just found the right combination of people,” he comments. “My first group was RLD – I can’t remember what it stood for – and the next was called the Abraham Darby III. We just weren’t ready yet. After I left school, it was just a bassist, a drummer, and myself on keyboards. Very technologically orientated, it was called Newspeak. We actually had a small independent label deal and had one single released on a label called Storkbeat. But it died a death. This was in 1979 or ’80.”
During this time, Paul taught music and worked odd jobs, but making it musically was his obsession. “I was forming a new band,” he continues, “and we had a drummer, myself, and a singer. We were looking for a bass player, and Lucia put an advertisement in the local music shop saying she was a cello player looking for a band. Our drummer – not being entirely sure what a cello was but thinking it might be a round the bass spectrum – rang up Lucia and asked, ‘This cello thing, is it a bass or what?’ Well, she claimed she could play a bit of bass as well, so she came along originally as a bass player. We did some good tracks as Shot The Rapids and played live with sequencers just as the acid house thing was exploding in ’89. Suddenly we were going out to clubs, hearing totally synthesized music that had a bit of Philip Glass, rap, house piano, and sometimes a soaring melody. So we thought ‘Right, let’s get on with it!’”
Lucia, whose father was a gardener, was torn between music and a love of nature. She had even worked on a farm for over a year after leaving college. Maybe because of Lucia’s love of the modern and the traditional, her combination of throbbing dance pulses and old-fashioned songwriting is musically effective.
“I was born in Kent,” she begins, “and always tried to make instruments from my Mum’s wine glasses or string guitars. At 8, I had the choice in school to play an instrument, either violin or cello. I chose cello. It’s a nice, sexy instrument that makes nice, sexy sounds and is in the shape of another human.
After I finished high school I went to Dartington College of Arts deep in southwest England. They had drama, music and art there, but I only did music and a bit of dance. The most interesting course I took was 20th century music, which ranged from English folk and electronic music to Japanese, African, and Balinese music. I got into all that systems music too, the modern stuff as well, like Philip Glass.”
In the learn years before they signed with a major label, Lucia supported herself through a private list of clients who either solicited her skills in gardening or as a music teacher. From such sensibilities, she adds a warmth musically and lyrically. “I played some cello here – double-tracked on the opening of Pressure – but we mixed it down a bit,” she explains. “On the next album, we’ll have lots more cello and maybe some of the African music that I’ve gotten interested in.”
The rest of the band members bring in other key elements. “As well as being a guitarist, Darren brought a studio engineer’s expertise to the whole equation,” says Paul. “Since the age of 14, he had worked in a local studio close to here. So Lucia, myself, and Darren had been working on demos in the evenings trying things out in our studio, and as we became more involved in the dance thing, the three of us started moving more in that direction.”
Finally they sought a drummer and bassist. “The three of us advertised in the music papers,” Paul tells, “yet funnily enough, both Rob and Sean were met through word of mouth. We rang up all the music shops and asked if they knew any bass players. That’s how we met Rob. We wanted someone who was into the club and dance scene, which Rob had been involved with – he had even put out some raves. And he was a gregarious stage personality. Once he finally joined in February ’90, we formed this band.”
The intent was always to be a live performing unit, not just a studio concept. “Once there were five of us,” says Paul, “we started playing gigs but in a fairly unconventional way – at raves or parties. Sometimes we would take over a more conventional venue and put on an evening that was like a warehouse party. Gigs such as these drew the attention of major labels. At that point, we didn’t have a record out and we’d only played a half-dozen live dates. The an A&R man from another label saw one of our live performances and got very excited. He spread the word and, within a couple of months, we had most of the major record companies interested in doing something with us. It all happened very, very quickly. By the time we got round to Christmas ’90, we had offers from other labels and Sony.”
Sunscreem was signed to the company in February ’91, through SoHo Square, a label started by Muff Winwood, the famed rock producer. “He approached us and said, ‘Effectively, you’ll be on a small label within a bigger label’,” explains Paul. “If we’d gone for a strictly dance music label, that might have been wrong for us because our music takes its inspiration from the underground rave thing, it’s of so many different styles.”
Sunscreem is launching their American debut on Columbia following a year of climbing both the British dance charts and pop charts. While attention is sure to follow them in the US as it did in England, hopefully it will not be as some fashion-conscious bopper band. Otherwise, they may have to endure having tales told about them like those in the British press of Mervyn the tortoise.
“There’s this chart show in England where they play the video, and snippets of useless info about the band go up on screen,” Lucia says. “Our A&R lady was feeling a bit mischievous and decided that I had a pet tortoise named Mervyn, which is Muff Winwood’s real name, and that I took the tortoise on tour with us.”
“We were touring Scotland,” Paul continues, “and people asked, ‘Where is your tortoise?’ We had no idea what they were talking about. We hadn’t seen the mentions in the papers. Another time a headline said Lucia was knocked out by sprouts. She’s allergic to sprouts, but they claimed she ate a plate of them and was laid up in the hospital and almost couldn’t do the tour.”
Sunscreem isn’t a teeny bop pop band where members are youthful entrepreneurs jumping on the techno rave bandwagon that swept through the clubs and then spread to huge outdoor events and Britain’s pop charts. Nor are they a crew of studio-wise but instrumentally unskilled deejays who have sampled and remixed their way into popdom. This band’s future lies less in press clips and more in the three S’s – synthesizers, sequencers, and samplers.
“Our musical taste is evolving all the time,” Lucia sums up. “We’re always changing things, hence all the remixes. We’ve got the studio, so we can do it quite easily ourselves, which allows us to evolve really slowly and do our own thing. It’s no good following fashion.”
Gallery
DJ Magazine
I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream err... Sunscreem?
by Ronnie Randall / DJ Magazine No. 73 1-5 Oct 1992 / © 1992 DJ Magazine
Sunscreem. Perfect pop dance – but is it live, and does anybody care anyway? Ronnie Randall is asked to put any prejudices aside on your behalf.
Yes! The singer IS a blonde female from Essex. Yes! They HAVE got two guitarists and a ‘proper’ drummer. Bloody hell, even the dancers are MALE. Sunscreem seem to have got all the ingredients wrong for an act that want to appear in clubs and at raves. Yet since (or perhaps despite?) their jolly poppy mainstream singles chart entry earlier this year with ‘Love U More’ they’ve been doing just that, and what’s more are proving rather successful at it if sheer volume of bookings are an indication.
Funny thing though, I thought they were children of the revolution, circa 88/89, so why do they keep stressing this term ‘live band’ all the time? Almost as if they’ve got a guilt complex about faking it occasionally or something, like it’s a sin.
“We ARE live…” Whatever you say.
“But it’s true.” I’m here to believe you.
“Basically the sound is keyboard generated, but on stage we blend the guitars and the drums with all the electronic stuff, and actual ‘live’ vocals, none of that lip-synching through the PA to a DAT backing track. We just use a sequences, otherwise it’s the real thing… I suppose we’re a bit of a hybrid, quite bloomin amazin really.”
Does anyone care if you’re genuinely ‘live’ at a big dance event? Who REALLY notices an ‘act’ at a rave? The whole night is generally cranked up by the volume and the beat, they flow uninterrupted and nobody really looks up.
“They do, people appreciate that we’re setting up substantial gear (err.. as in equipment) for them, they can see that we’re not just turning up, plugging into the PA for ten minutes and them buggering off to the next rave along the motorway. There’s a genuine appreciation of that fact. Besides, a live band is a statement, we’re here, look at us, we’re happening now.”
Sunscreem have been sussed, some would say cynical, enough to realize that major labels like Sony are primarily interested in acts with long term potential. Corporate wisdom preaches that pure dance music doesn’t sell volume outside of the dance arena. In their view yer typical Urban Hype types are unlikely to be the next Elton John, and neither will there be too many publishing royalties from the future cover versions of ‘A Trip To Trumpton.’
“We consciously sold ourselves on the basis of our songs foremost, and then slipped in the instrumental dance tracks after getting the deal… The ‘proper’ album is done by THEY (Sony) say dance albums don’t sell, they want it released on the back of a top ten hit, so it’s been put back to January now, after the ‘Perfect Motion’ single. Don’t sell? What about 808 State, Orbital, The Orb… This is the future.”
So it’s back to the old gigging trade routes for Sunscreem, EARNING their future chart position on the tried and tested autumn college circuit.
“Right now we’re into a two month solid college tour… It’s tough, the label wants us to sleep on the bus, images, ten people and no showers. We usually perform for around 15-20 minutes in clubs, but colleges require 45-50 minutes, so it’s a different challenge, much more about the songs. We take our own DJ, like Dave Valentine, to warm up, and he performs with us. There are 8 on stage, the DJ, five band members and two dancers.”
A college crowd are potentially more receptive to axe-wielding and drums.
“Sure, but it’s important to point that our guitars don’t play rock riffs, we try to create new sounds by using them to trigger samples sounds. There’s a lot of content in the songs too, we’re into words, very fussy, there’s got to be more to lyrics than just ‘Take Me Higher.’ We go down well in any situation; really hardcore places like The Eclipse in Coventry and Rage at Haven have asked us back so we be doing something right.”
Strangely I was at the second Rage, (which incidentally isn’t that hardcore on the main dancefloor anymore) and was surprised, in view of what I’d heard, to see Sunscreem mix lip-synching with a smattering of live vocal, meanwhile failing totally to convince that those famous loneliest guitars in clubland are either being played, or triggering anything beyond audience mirth and occasional hostility. The one surprising and exciting truth of that particular night was the sight and sound of a real drum kit being thrashed about. Call me an old fart reactionary if you like, but I was just DYING to hear the authentic screech of one of those guitars, they CAN work in a club context, and soon someone is going to realize it.
Sunscreem? Visually it’s a great package, action packed, fun, yet earnest all at the same time. But inevitably by trying to be all things to all people, and all sounds for all ears, credibility problems are a concern. After all look what happened when science bods mixed pop with hardcore… Smarte’s.
Gallery
Soul
Title:
Soul (Extended Version)
Artist:
Sunscreem
Album:
Sweet Life
Notes:
⮾ Unreleased
Links:
Written by Holm / Carnell / Woodford. Produced by Sunscreem. Mixed by Sunscreem (2011).
℗ 2011 Annalogic Ltd.
A shorter version of this song is featured on the 2015 album
.Mixmag
Crazy Love
by Miranda Sawyer / Mixmag Vol. 2 Issue No. 16, September 1992 / © 1992 Mixmag
They smile, they shine, they play guitars – Christ, they even play live while singing stuff like ‘have sex hung drawn and quartered’.
Miranda Sawyer visits the Sunscreem studio in sunny Chelmsford and finds out you can get away with a lot more when you’re grinning.
Take a right turn off A12 at bustling Chelmsford, trundle leafily through Little Baddow (one shop, two pubs, high shrubbery content) and it’s the first right after The Rodney. Turn left at the sign for Retreat Farm, bump past the teeny camp site, slalom round the ducks and there it is. A 400-year old cow shed with al fresco facilities. Sunscreem studios.
Inside, four of the five ‘Screemers (bassist Rob is still in bed) are having elevenses. Filter coffee, with dodgy milk and no biscuits. “There’s no shops near here,” apologizes Lucia, she of the white dreads and infamous tartan trews (sadly not in evidence today). Not to worry. The sun’s out, the ducks are looking cheerful – and there’s a huge bottle of Vladivar vodka in the studio fridge. A nice day out.
Sunscreem are poised for dance domination. After a year and a half of touring their eye-openingly energetic live set round British raves, their third new single, the soaring Love U More crashed the Top 40. And quite right too. A fine slab of sunny house with intense, intelligent lyrics and a pop chorus that put Kylie to shame, it followed the excellent Pressure single and launched Sunscreem into chartland. And it doesn’t look like they’ll be going home from there. The next single, Perfect Motion, comes complete with Leftfield remixes. And their fabulously upfront LP, O3, out next month on Sony offshoot, Soho Square, offers a blistering combination of good time house and sophisticated melodies – and at least two more top singles.
And then there’s the live act. Described by the band themselves as “energetic, raucous, chaotic, and er, uncoordinated,” its enthusiasm, its attack and, yup, its guitars put Sunscreem in a completely different category from the usual anonymous ‘three songs and off’ club PA.
“Sometimes we think it could be so much easier,” sighs Lucia. “We could just arrive, plug in the DAT and do it. This way it’s a lot harder.” But it definitely plays off in atmosphere. No miming matches Sunscreem live. Back in the studio, perched on variously sized seats between a humdinger of a mixing deck and a notice telling you how to use the sampler (“Switch on the generator and away it goes”), sit our four interviewees.
Meat Sean Wright, 24, drummer, crap joke teller and dead ringer for Madness’s Woody. Singer Lucia Horn [sic: Holm, not Horn], 26, prone to wild giggles and off the wall comments, small, pretty, less crusty looking than in photos. 25 year old Darren Woodford, flared hair guitarist with bovver boots and ‘Trust me, I’m mad’ eyes. Paul Carnell, 26, lanky, over bleached keyboardist with a grin that could swallow Australia. Relaxed, honest, enthusiastic, double friendly, they’re all lovely, lovely people. Every home should have one.
The Sunscreem story begins when Lucia moved to Chelmsford from Maidstone in 1988. She put an advert in the local music shop, extolling her self-taught talents on bass and cello, and Paul phoned her up. “She couldn’t play bass, but she was a nice person,” he says now. “So we took her on.” Paul, Lucia and a bloke who’s since left, took to rehearsing their “keyboard-orientated – okay, Depeche Mode-ish” stuff in a local school hall. They recruited Darren in ’89 after he returned to Essex after a stint playing dubious rock covers to US marines round Europe. “Not quite cabaret, but everything I despised in music. And I was doing it four hours a night.”
The three of them started going regularly to clubs, particularly The Chicken Shed, so called because it was held – surprise – in a chicken shed, and The Barn in Braintree where fellow Essex man Liam ‘The Prodigy’ Howlett could be found lurking and where The Shamen’s Mr C regularly DJed. The band talk somewhat wistfully now of a real cross-section of people dancing to a great variety of music. They were anyway thus inspired to make dibbly noises themselves. They named themselves after their favourite synth sound and then they decided they needed a bassist.
“We said to ourselves,” recalls Paul, “ideally the kind of bloke we want would have a van, come from somewhere really lairy, like Canvey Island, definitely have tattoos and a massive grin. We’d had a couple of people down and they was good bass players, but a bit straight. Then this van came hairing round the corner, screeched to a halt outside the studio. The window winds down and this bloke looks out and gives this huge grin…”
Rob had got the job before he’d even found the studio door, Sean completed the lineup, and in 1990 Sunscreem decided to launch their first gig by putting on their own rave. 200 people turned up to the warehouse in Hackney, “but no one realised we were on,” says Lucia. “There was so much smoke.” Perhaps not such a bad thing, as not all the band made it on stage. “Rob was in his van, interfering with a young lady,” reveals Darren, delicately. Fair enough.
Then began the long slog of touring. Determined to offer more than just a PA, Sunscreem would hire small clubs or rooms above puts and turn them into complete audio visual experiences. As well as the band members themselves the ‘Screem brought DJ Dave Valentine, mad dancers Tony and Baz, and their own lighting people, equipped with mirror ball and laser “held together with sticky tape.”
Having signed to Sony Square [sic: Sony Soho Square] in February 1991 (“we bought a huge bottle of champagne but ended up drinking all theirs instead”), the never-ending Sunscreem tour continues, trekking up and down the country in their van, playing Sonic The Hedgehog (natch) and listening to Bird FM, the chirping, tweeting test transmission for the new classical station – “so much more relaxing than real music.”
Aren’t you sick of touring yet? Paul: “Sometimes all the effort does get to you like when you’re playing with another PA, and they say things like ‘How many gigs you done tonight?’ And you say ‘One’, and they’ve done three or four in one evening because all they have to do is plug in the DAT and go.”
Lucia: “But we were always determined to do it live. You can get so much more energy coming across to the audience that way.” Paul: “There’s so many of us that if one of us is having an off day you’re guaranteed that someone else is really going for it. Anyway, our band before just used tapes, and the worst thing about it wasn’t like the great moral principle of playing live, but just that the tapes became such a drag. Once you’ve recorded your backing you can’t change it. You can’t get excited about a piece of the tape, whereas if you’re actually doing it, you can change it an hour before and actually get excited about playing.”
Sean: “We did that the other night.”
Lucia: “Yeah, it was terrifying, everyone was going, ‘We’ve gotta do that acapella bit at the beginning of the Slam mix of Love U More,’ so we programmed it in just before we went on…” Paul: “And then you sang all the wrong words.”
This will-they-won’t-they-pull-it-off spontaneous disorder is a large part of what makes Sunscreem so explosive on stage. “It is a bit chaotic. Even our dancers can’t clap in time.” Still, with influences ranging from “noisy noise” through The Jam to Polynesian rhythm music, taking in all houses along the way, it’s little wonder that occasionally it’s hard to keep things under control. Mostly it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but the band agree that trying out and developing songs by playing them live is the best way to find out if they’re any good. It’s also led to a confidently emotional style, both musically and lyrically. Lucia’s frustration scorches out of The Pressure [sic: The correct title is Pressure] like she’s swopped her dentures for a blow torch, and if you listen carefully to Love U More, you’ll find a lot more than the starry-eyed love-pup dribblings of, say, Opus III.
“Yes, I do say ‘Have sex hung, drawn, and quartered’,” admits Lucia gamely. “It’s about being crucified. I also say fathers rape their daughters as well, ha ha. It’s a love hate song. People think it’s a sweet, nice tune, but I’m really saying I can’t love you anymore.” Sunscreem don’t have a manifesto, but they do have an attitude. Typically, they find it hard to define.
“It’s sort of…” struggles Paul, “we were inspired by the whole scene two and a half years ago – the idea of a club as a melting pot. Different styles, different people and it didn’t really matter. That may sound a bit daft but clubbing sure as hell wasn’t like that before, and whatever that represents it was incredibly powerful. I mean, it’s the only popular movement that’s inspired a Private Members Bill.”
“And it’s lasted, despite the media right across the board slagging it. I mean, the NME has a constant anti-danceness about it. That’s really interesting – I mean, the media embraced punk. They say that there’s no personalities on the dance scene, well, the idea of a pop personality is purely a media thing anyway. If they went out and met everyone who has a good record out they could easily find the personalities.”
He pauses for breath, “But in the end people vote with their pockets don’t they? And dance music is the only thing that sells. There’s a quiet revolution going on.” And what will the results of this revolution be?
Sean: “Darren for President.”
Darren: “I shall run an extremely tight ship…”
Sean: “Free Jack Daniels in every household. Compulsory nudism.”
Time for a tour of the studio. Although there’s three large-ish rooms, only one is used fully. The other two are littered with equipment, drills, wires, screws, a drinking trough and an unused workout machine. The band are convinced that the middle room is haunted, and tell of two horrible people that moved into the nearby farmhouse who were eventually frightened off by all the strange knockings. “They thought it was us, but it wasn’t.”
In the main recording room, the walls are decorated with a wide range of “art.” There are a lot of club flyers, a huge picture of an impossibly curvy Marilyn and a still of Malcolm McDowell from Clockwork Orange because Darren used to wear a bowler hat and his eyes are the same. Round the corner, and there’s the script for a Sunscreem spaghetti western video – “we see a lone rider approaching through the heat haze, the figures abstracted” – Paul says he wasn’t comfortable about being abstracted.
Darren’s community charge liability order for £343.32 is penned up with the single word ‘Bollocks’ scrawled across the bottom. In the fridge resides the huge vodka bottle, half full, plus three Pils and some nearly-melted Dutch chocolate ice cream. There’s one of these violently large, fluorescent pump-action water pistols hanging up by the door. And on the opposite wall there’s a handwritten note awarding Sean “Mister Flakey 1992” – signed by all the others. Plus the record company direction for Top Of The Pops. “Lucia – go to bed early. Darren, Paul, Rob, Sean – don’t. So Lucia looks radiant.”
Despite their obvious talent and patent pleasantness, there are a few things that nag about Sunscreem. Their utterly vile Heavy Metal logo for instance.
“There’s a lot of people that really like it,” says Darren defensively. “Yeah,” jests Sean, “[Iron Maiden’s] Bruce Dickinson was saying to me just the other day…”
“It’s like the name,” says Paul, “some like it, some don’t. If we’re really successful, maybe all heavy metallers will have to change their logos.” And what of Lucia’s retro tartan trolleys, as featured in the Love U More video? What brought them on?
“Um, I thought they looked lairy, loud,” she says. “Anyway, didn’t you see his trousers?”
“Mine were really disgusting, true,” admits Paul.
“They weren’t a taste statement,” insists Lucia, “they were just the loudest thing I had. They’ve retired to the wardrobe now.”
And finally, what on earth makes you so enthusiastic? You’re always bloody smiling. “That’s the one thing that really unites us,” claims Paul, “our hatred of people looking grumpy in an effort to look cool.”
“You’re only on the planet so long,” notes Sean, “you might as well have a good time.”
“Plus,” adds Paul, “you can get away with a hell of a lot more if you’re grinning. You can get away with lines about fathers raping their daughters on Top Of The Pops without the BBC even noticing! If we were The Jesus And Mary Chain, we wouldn’t have stood a chance.”
Gallery
Sweet Life
Title:
Sweet Life (Album Version)
Artist:
Sunscreem
Album:
Sweet Life
Links:
Written by Holm / Carnell / Mortimer / Woodford. Produced by Sunscreem. Mixed by Sunscreem.
℗ 2015 Annalogic Ltd.
NME September 92
E Will, E Will Rock You!
by Roger Morton / NME 5 September 1992 / © 1992 NME
Attention, technophobes, guitar geeks and pop conservationists. Cast off your lumpen prejudice about ‘dance acts’ being culturally useless E-user-specific digital cheats and let ROGER MORTON take you into a world where technology goes over the edge of sanity, where SUNSCREEM, FINITRIBE, ESKIMOS & EGYPT and OPUS III are putting flesh and blood and sweat and charisma and politics and tunes into “that BPM stuff.”
If it was Bono and the elk, there would probably be a book in it. If it was Morrissey and the elk, it would be a matter of bizarre speculation in the next TV art show documentary. If it was Fruitbat and the elk, the gossip columns would have swallowed it whole. If it was Moose and the elk, opportunist T-shirt-manufacturers would have sprung into action.
But it was not a rock figurehead, or patented pop personality, or indie cartoon character who stood cleaning their teeth one day in a Finnish log cabin and felt the hot wet breath of a huge elk, antlers wrapped in seaweed, panting in their ear. It was not one of the strumming soap opera regulars who had to flee from an elk attack.
It was Lucia, the half-Finnish goldilocks singer and songwriter with Essex dance popsters Sunscreem, and if the channels of communication or the nation’s musical life were flowing normally, Lucia’s anecdote would have travelled about as far as an elk with its legs shot off.
On a Saturday night in the small town of Braintree, Essex, the converted Embassy cinema gradually fills up with waist-coated youth, and upstairs in the makeshift dressing room Sunscreem prepare for the night’s gig. It’s an average scene of pre-show chaos. The five Sunscreemers, a disparate hotch-potch of scruffy semi-fashionability, loll around the beer bottle-strewn room.
The promoter fusses in and out, wondering where the next DJ’s pissed off to. Lucia stands to one side, chatting about her former career as a gardener and elk fighter and wondering what to do with the giant cut-out of Mel Gibson she’s just found.
It’s a regular scene of babbling and boozing. It could be a rock band limbering up for the onslaught. But in one corner lies an innocent-looking stack of computer discs, as incriminating to some as steroids in a shot-putter’s shower bag.
Sunscreem are a band and they are popular – their recent single Love U More was a Top 20 hit – but, in the eyes of technophobes, pub rock reactionaries, bardic bores and guitar freak geeks, they could never be a proper pop band. They play at raves, they use computers, their musical reference points are mostly post-acid house, so they must be just a dance act.
And over a decade after New Order’s Blue Monday proved otherwise, the belief is still widespread that if it smells of dance then it must be short-life, short on ideas, culturally useless, un-musicianly, ecstasy-user-specific, incapable of humour or rage, and highly unlikely to be the product of personalities worthy of investigation. It’s just dance music, innit… and that means it’s as one-dimensional as a cardboard cutout of Mel Gibson.
So how come Sunscreem play that night with the sort of power, scope and charisma that every greedy young rock band aspires to, but which rarely comes to life away from the bedroom mirror? Lucia bounds around the stage like a zero-gravity antelope, wrapping breathy vocals around the computerised power surge, while keyboardist Paul, bassist Rob and drummer Duane bend the mood from euphoria to tranquility and beyond.
There are tunes, there’s a thoroughly absurd pare of male dancers, and there’s gonzo guitarist Darren whacking out exploderama chords and acting much like a man applying for a job in AC/DC. It is nothing like a PA. It is something like a vivid, exciting, multi-pronged ‘gig’, where you’re encouraged to dance instead of slump in a corner and neck as much lager as possible. But they’re probably digitally cheating aren’t they? And anyway, it’s a separate world, all that BPM stuff?
Bollocks.
Driving back into London after the Sunscreem show, yanking round the M25 orbital route along which, in summers past, the early rave traffic headed out for frazzled nights in the fields, we flip the radio dial in search of hot truckin’ music. Late Saturday night outside London, there is one golden oldies station playing Toto and Phil Collins, one phone-in show for suicidal insomniacs and four amphetamine-hardcore pirate dance stations blasting out utter nutter computer breakbeat blitz noise.
It’s the sound of technology going over the edge of sanity, mental rave tracks sped up by the DJ so that the vocals sound like Pinky & Perky. For all its extremity, however, that cyborg cranium-crush sound is being taken on board by legions of nutter youth. When the parameters of dance music have wigged out this much, it’s even more preposterous that the likes of Sunscreem or Finitribe or Eskimos & Egypt or Opus III and a hundred other club-spawned pop bands should be regarded as not pop, alien to the traditions of rock ‘n’ roll and insignificant compared to this week’s imported grunge band.
Finitribe and Eskimos & Egypt have no more in common with crap nosebleed techno or miming Belgian rave trios than Suede have with spandex metal, and they should not be tarred with the same brush.
While embattled pop conservationists dig their heels in viewing anything techno-tinged as foreign and irrelevant (like big band fans in the ’50s blocking their ears to rock ‘n’ roll), the high streets of the nation mutate into clubbing fashion catwalks, and queues for clubs gets longer. If part of what it is to be a good pop band is to capture the moment, to be plugged into the times, then the successful bands right now are the ones dealing in rota-pulses, states of euphoria, New Age dreams and nightmares and techno-metal collages, not the ones re-writing glam rock or punk rock or Hüsker Dü rock.
No-one anywhere would claim that all dance-nurtured music was worthy of the same attention that rock bands get, but after The Shamen, The Beloved, the KLF et al., it’s obvious that some of it is. And you don’t even have to take ‘sides’.
Sunscreem, who played at Reading this year, Finitribe, whose album toppled the indie charts recently, Opus III, who have hogged radio play across the boards, and Eskimos & Egypt, who head out on a college tour in September, are already in the process of proving themselves in anybody’s territory, on anybody’s terms.
“It has been a bit of a problem for the last year-and-a-half,” says Sunscreem’s lanky dungaree-hanger Paul, “because people are continually going, ‘Well what are you <em>like</em> then?’ I suppose what we’re doing is a bit odd, so you sort of expect it. There just isn’t a pigeon-hole way of doing things for us.”
Despite the incomprehension of sludge-brained chunks of the music business establishment (Gallup recently penalised the chart position of their Love U More 45 because they couldn’t understand why a major label act was selling so many records in independent shops), Sunscreem have slowly been proving the viability of rave associated music as long term pop.
One-time beaters of metal and guitar dabblers in the wilds of Essex, they found a unity of purpose in the summer of ’88/’89 dance scene at The Barn in Braintree, a club also frequented at the same time by The Prodigy and The Shamen.
They gigged endlessly at raves around the country, recorded in their own converted milk-shed studio on a farm in Essex, and their third single for Sony Soho Square, Love U More, broke into the mainstream. Sounds like the sort of thing pop groups do, really.
The clever bit with Sunscreem and their digitally aware cousins, however, is that they are as at home with a laser-guided dancefloor remix as they are with a radio digestible song (see the multiple remixes of new single Perfect Motion). The dance ghetto is too cramped for the likes of Sunscreem. Their forthcoming LP is not called Bangin’ Amnesiac Obliteration, it is called O3, the symbol of oxygen atoms in the ozone layer.
“I think there is a danger that, because of the dance element, whatever it is, people still think of it in the same terms as ’70s disco,” argues Paul. “And there’s no comparison whatsoever between the two. It’s a completely different set of people involved. It’s a different thing. I think that sometimes people assume that, if you’re a band playing dance, then you’re some kind of disco soul thing. Most of our songs have actually got quite serious lyrics.”
Lucia: “It’s not like we’re a political band, but every time I sit down and write it ends up being about global warming or something like that. It’s all quite catastrophic. Lots of catastrophe. Personal catastrophe, too.”
Sunscreem songs, the scattered phrases and peaking rhythms, are articulate, but they’re articulate in a way that the defenders of Fortress Rock refuse to acknowledge, as if the sound of the Pixies’ caterwaul guitars, which speak volumes to a generation trained to invest emotionally in distorted block chords, was somehow intrinsically more eloquent than layers of rhythm and damaged synthesiser loops.
It is, of course, what you’ve experienced that allows you to make sense of a type of music, and as Sunscreem and co are well aware, there is now a whole generation for whom straight guitar music means jack shit.
Paul: “Some dance music is maybe very simplistic to outside people, but it’s still firing up people to go and do it. Five or ten year ago everyone wanted to be a guitarist or a singer, now everyone wants to be a DJ. There’s loads of kids out there with a turntable and a sampler. And you’re can’t stop it because it’s technology-driven. It’s like the electric guitar coming along. You just can’t reverse it.”
Gallery
NME March 92
Sol Music
by Sherman / NME 21 March 1992 / © 1992 NME
There’s no bleeps ’til Chelmsford, as dance-friendly ravers SUNSCREEM elicit we-love-real-instruments-especially-guitars shock. And still in Essex, check out SUBURBAN RECORDS, putting Romford on the Techno map and challenging Branson for record moguls of the year awards.
Forget the recent image of LFO smashing guitars on the cover of NME; as much as certain people would love you to believe it, guitars are most definitely not redundant yaet.
Chelmsford-based SUNSCREEM are substantial proof of this, currently the only rave act (with the possible exception of The Shamen) to incorporate ‘live’ instruments into their Techno-friendly set.
Formed in 1990 around the nucleus of Paul Carnell, Lucia Holme [sic] and Darren Woodford, Sunscreem were fashioned as a reaction to the abundance of PA acts touting their fraudulent DAT wares on the circuit at the time. Two years on and they’re one of the country’s hardest working PAs.
It may be an odd sight to see a band enter the cauldron of a packed rave clutching drumsticks and guitars, but any indie-dance accusations should be withdrawn right now; as their third single Pressure demonstrates, this is hard dance with burning guitars and heaving chunks of bass-laden, piano-ed-up Techno. And being primary a live act, Sunscreem are attempting to break the rules that determine how dance acts should perform.
“I can’t see how any hand that goes off DAT can go forward and progress with their live act,” Paul says incredulously. “Essentially it’s very lazy and amazing that rave crowds continually put up with it. I think a lot of PA acts aren’t the slightest bit interested, they’re just doing it because their label wants them to. We’ve met acts at raves who just turned up because it was on their timetable, and the fact that we were a bunch of people who really looked forward to playing is bemusing to them. It doesn’t seem to bother them, but I think it’s a bit sad.”
Cracking the charts isn’t a priority, for Sunscreem it’s more important than they reach a wider audience through their gigs on the club circuit. And for once a positive view of what the rave scene has created emanates from this collective.
“Because everybody is totally into the music,” Paul says thoughtfully, “this whole scene has broken down radical and sexual barriers, these issues aren’t even entering people’s heads. It has changed people, they may not know who Oscar Wilde is but does that really matter? We’re getting back to what really matters, where people can get on well together and that’s no bad thing at all.”
Also apparent is their excitement at the continual progression of House music and the realisation that it’s still in its relative infancy.
“It excites us when something like The Aphex Twin’s Didgeridoo comes along,” says Paul quietly but enthusiastically, “and you think ‘I wish I’d done that’, but then you realise the possibilities that records like that open up, and as long as technology progresses, so will this music. It’s so open-ended, there is no rule book!”
“We’re just scratching the surface of what we want to do,” offers Darren. “We’ve moved on so much in the last six months and the stuff we’re working on for the album is widely different from what we’re doing at the moment.”
Coming from a studio background, they spend a lot of time getting a healthy sound and people are beginning to notice that. But certain industry ins(n)iders have had the gall to accuse Sunscreem of being nothing but hype, part of the machine. But when you consider the amount of tin-pot records and plastic PAs currently doing the rounds, and you balance it with Sunscreem’s total love for, and dedication to, their music, coupled with the fact that they’ve been devoted House music fans from the word go, then there really is no case against them. The only message to these people is go and check them out, recognise their enthusiasm and witness crowds’ responses.
Lucia has an answer to these critics. “You’ve got to remain true to yourself and do what you want to do, otherwise you’ll be so unhappy whether you’ve got the money or not.”
Screeeeeeeming Massive.