luke mcgarry

Download: A Certain Ratio “Shack Up”

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We caught Factory Records’ funk-punk-jazz originator band A Certain Ratio’s guitarist/trumpeter Martin Moscrop in the throes of decorating. A wet cold English day passed by his window, but he spent it inside painting walls. Their performance at the Part Time Punks’ fest will be their first U.S. show in over twenty years. This interview by Daiana Feuer.

Do you have a new home?
No, but I’m making it new again.
You seem to wear many hats—interior decorator, musician, producer, head of a label—and you teach?
Yes, I’m head of the music department at Manchester College. Being a professional musician for years, there are periods when you’re not making a living out of it. And there was one particular period where I wasn’t making a living out of the band—I just fell into the job basically and took to it very well, and the people I was working with took to me well and the offer just stuck.
How much of your time do you spend making music?
We recorded the new album last year. Because we all have full-time jobs, it was like doing it as a hobby, you know. One of the reasons we stopped making music and stopped touring was it gets to be a bit too much like a circus. Like a traveling circus where you’re just gigging all the time—making records, gigging, promoting the record. When you’ve got kids and stuff sometimes you want to be at home and be with your family. So it’s good now because it’s like a total hobby. There’s no pressure that way. If it’s a hobby, there’s no pressure on when you’re going to get your album ready, is it going to sell, that sort of thing. Because it doesn’t really matter if it sells, and it never has to for A Certain Ratio. We always made records for ourselves first and foremost. If the public like it then that’s an added bonus, but if they don’t, it doesn’t really matter.
But it seems like people appreciate it more now than when you originally conceived the band.
Yeah. When the albums got reissued on Soul Jazz, they all got fantastic reviews in the U.K., saying we were way ahead of our time—that sort of thing. Whereas when the albums originally came out, they got slated by the press because they didn’t really understand them. In particular, mixing jazz with funk and stuff like that with punk—they didn’t like the jazz bit of it. They didn’t mind the funk, but they didn’t like the jazzy aspects. Whereas when journalists reviewed them for the re-release, they said that was really innovative and a lot of people copied us with what we did. What goes around comes around. There’s an interview with David Byrne of Talking Heads and the journalist said to him, ‘A Certain Ratio were your support act on your second tour of the U.K. before you started playing funk music—when you were a rock band. Did they influence you at all?’ And David Byrne said, ‘Yeah, it’d be a lie to say they didn’t. They did influence us and after that tour that’s when we started getting into funk music and world music.’ Some people saw it then and others didn’t. It’s really good at the moment and it has been for the last few years. Since the advent of bands like the Rapture, and stuff from the DFA label, a lot of young people are getting into A Certain Ratio. We have quite an audience when we do gigs. We have a really weird mix actually. You have older people—middle aged, 40s, early 50s—and then you get 17- and 18-year-olds as well. So it’s a good mixture.
Do people nod or dance?
Our set’s quite difficult to dance to. There’s quite a few dance-y tunes in there, but then there’s quite a few moody tunes as well. So they might just get into a dance-y mood and then we throw them with a moody track. We’re not trying to build them up into a dancing frenzy. We like to try and confuse them a little bit.
Who are some of the bands you rolled with back in the day?
In the early days of Factory, all the Factory bands used to play together. And it was almost like a Factory package if you like. We toured the U.K. and Europe and sometimes it would be A Certain Ratio, Section 25 and Durutti Column—sometimes it would be A Certain Ratio, Joy Division, Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark, and it would be different Factory acts, but when Joy Division turned into New Order, New Order got pretty big. We toured with New Order in the States because it allowed us to get over to a bigger audience really. But we actually went to the States before New Order and before Joy Division. We recorded our first album in East Orange—in New Jersey.
And Madonna opened for you once?
That was at the Danceteria in New York. I think it was ‘81 or ‘82—it was our end-of-tour party and she needed a gig so some A&R men could come and see. So her manager got her to open for A Certain Ratio. And she was signed after that.
Three of the originals remain, but how many other people are in the band now?
There’s actually six people in the band at the moment. We’ve got Denise—she’s an additional member but we see her as a member. She sings together with Jez. On the moodier songs, Jez sings because the nature of his voice is very moody and his lyrics are moody. And on the more up funky things, Denise sings. So you’ve got that mixture—like in shades really, which is how we want to keep it. The set that we choose is the set that we think we’ll enjoy playing. Because we’ve got new material in the set we would play, we wouldn’t want to alienate the audience too much because they’re not on to the new tunes. But the proper A Certain Ratio fans, they’re going to want to hear new tunes as well as old ones. So we mix it up a bit. The set actually spans four decades. Nearly as much as the Rolling Stones! We’ve got one song on the new album—it’s called ‘Teri’ and that was the first song A Certain Ratio ever wrote and it’s never been released. It was written in 1978, so we put a modern slant on that. And obviously the most recent tunes we did last year so it’s been four decades, really.
How would you compare the music now to the old material?
To be honest, the album that we’ve just done is pretty much like the old stuff because the way we did the album was we decided to make a conscious effort to record it quickly. We wrote the songs one weekend in the rehearsal room, then went to the recording studio the following weekend and record the songs we’d just written. We’d only written them and played them about twice. Which gives it that raw edge. That’s how we recorded the new album, which went really, really well. So, the relationship we have with the new stuff is exactly the same as the old stuff because it’s got a similar vibe. We didn’t do that on purpose but the first couple of tunes we recorded like that was like—‘Wow, this is just like the old stuff.’ And we realized why it was like the old stuff and it was because of the speed at which we were working.
If you could stock your own shelf at a record store, what records would you want next to yours?
As far as old stuff that influenced us, anything by James Brown, anything by Miles Davis or John Coltrane, anything by Brian Eno, anything by the Velvet Underground, anything by Kraftwerk—so quite an eclectic mix of funk, jazz, electronica and weirdness because that’s what we were into. We were into quite the eclectic mix of stuff. That’s why we came out the other end like we did.

A CERTAIN RATIO WITH PYLON, LOVE IS ALL AND MANY MORE AT THE PART TIME PUNKS FEST ON SUN., NOV. 16, AT THE ECHO AND ECHOPLEX, 1822 SUNSET BLVD., ECHO PARK. 2 PM / $20 / 18+. ATTHEECHO.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/PARTTIMEPUNKS. VISIT A CERTAIN RATIO AT ACRMCR.COM.