TLOBF Interview // Hige Club

When he first heard there was going to be a film the life of Serge Gainsbourg released this summer, Philip Ilson from the London Short Film Festival – a massive Gainsbourg fan – wanted to do something to celebrate its arrival. So he commissioned Markus (formerly Their Hearts Were Full of Spring’s frontman, currently on guitar duties with David Shah’s The Melting Ice Caps), to record a new version of Gainsbourg’s forgotten classic album Charlotte For Ever. Here’s how Markus explains the brief:

“Charlotte For Ever is an album Serge wrote for Charlotte in 1986 (she was only 12 at the time, I think) and she sings most of the tracks, although there are a few that Serge also sings on. The record is swathed in the worst kind of 80s production stylings you can imagine: session muso slap-bass, extended synthesizer solos, show-off guitar licks at every turn, wailing saxophones everywhere … Despite this, Phil is convinced the record is a lost classic of genius songwriting, and my brief was to strip it of the badly dated 1980s production and re-record the whole album to reveal the hidden pop gems at the heart of it all.”

Thus Hige Club was born.

All of the music (except the cello on Lemon Incest, which was played by sound designer Assaf Gidron) and the male vocals on the album were performed and recorded by Markus himself, the record was also self-produced. Newcomer Charlotte McEwan (currently a film student at University of the Arts, London) takes on the daunting challenge of singing Charlotte Gainsbourg’s 15-year-old-girl vocal parts, and does so beautifully.

But although there are only two people on the record, the Hige Club live band is a bigger beast, featuring some of South-East London’s finest alt-poppers: Markus and Charlotte will be accompanied by Gavin and Mark from the band William (on guitar and bass), and Gemma from Hindley / John & Jehn (also on guitar).

Judging by the record I’d say this project was a great creative success, would you/are you considering more projects of this nature?

Thanks, I’m glad you liked it. I think it turned out pretty well too, but there are a few things I’d change if I could do it again with more time. I tried out a lot of stuff that’s not part of the usual process I go through when I’m writing and recording my own songs, and it didn’t all work out exactly as planned, but it was definitely a good experience.
I’ve no plans to do anything else like this in the immediate future, but given the right circumstances and material I’d definitely take on something similar again.

What were the major challenges of putting the album together? It sounds like you had to go through a process of separating the beautiful songs from the ghastly mid 80s production treatments/instrumentations… Could you talk about that process?

Yeah, I imagined the process being a bit like super-modifying an old car or something – you strip down the engine, have a look at which bits work and which don’t, clean up the essential parts you want to keep, replace the parts you don’t want with different parts, then build it all back up again and give the bodywork a nice new paint job … in the end it’s still the same car, but a very different version of the same car.

The original Charlotte For Ever is a pretty cluttered, complicated sounding record most of the time – so many instruments (or session musos, more like) competing for your attention all at once. But that disguises some pretty simple, elegant songwriting, which quickly became clear once I’d worked out the basics, and I wanted to make that really apparent in my versions of the songs – I didn’t want anything in my arrangements to get in the way of the songs themselves. So I made some quick demos just strumming the chords or playing out the main vocal melodies on an acoustic guitar, and from these absolute basics the ideas for my arrangements suggested themselves without too much effort.

But the biggest challenge of all was the language – neither Chuckie (Charlotte) or I are French speakers (apart from whatever veiled memories remain of our GCSE vocabulary), so it was really painstaking work to try and get that right. My friend Stuart (the drummer from Grace Cathedral Park) came to the rescue – he studied French at uni and he typed up all the lyrics and translated them for us. From there Chuckie and I would listen through to the original record, line by line, to make sure we got the rhythm of the language and the pronunciation right, and also to get a feel for the meaning behind the words. A big part of what’s interesting about the album is in the delivery, you miss so much of that just from a dry read-through on paper.

All things considered I think we did a good job with quality control on the language issue, although there were a few howlers that almost slipped through … “des orages dans l’air” (storms in the air) almost became “des oranges dans l’air” (oranges in the air), and “le plus enivrant” (the most exhilarating) almost became “le plus environs” (the most surroundings). Still, there are probably one or two we missed that made it onto the record!

How did you go about getting such a natural, warm sound on the record?

Are you asking me to give away my secrets?! Actually there’s no secret to it really – a few decent microphones (Rode NT1000, Oktava MK102, Sennheiser MD421), a decent pre-amp (FMR Audio’s RNP for most things), and decent instruments. You can’t really go wrong with that combination. Add a little reverb and compression to bring it all together in the mix and you’ve got yourself a nice sounding record.

What artists/groups inspired your work on the record?

A couple of old Luke Haines records – Baader Meinhoff and the first Black Box Recorder album – were reference points for some of the arrangements. They’re both full of really cleverly constructed songs, simple but really unique and atmospheric.

I was also listening to Waiting by Fun Boy Three a lot, which I think had its effect on the rhythmic side of things.

The guitars ended up being some kind of Smiths/Wilco hybrid – lots of up-front clean, chorus-y tones like Johnny Marr in the good old days, and the bigger, more distant guitar sounds were an attempt to get somewhere close to the kind of noise Jeff Tweedy gets going during Wilco’s big old instrumental crescendos.

For some of the Charlotte vocals I was aiming for something similar in atmosphere to the songs Julee Cruise sang for Angelo Badalamenti on the Twin Peaks soundtrack, but without getting too “ethereal” and distant. The Besnard Lakes do a pretty good job of getting that kind of vocal sound, and I’ve been listening to their album a lot this year.
I wanted there to be a real contrast between the Charlotte vocals and the Serge vocals, which I wanted to keep much more dry and warm and up-close, like Kurt Wagner from Lambchop when he’s not doing his falsetto thing. And a bit of Jarvis’ influence also managed to sneak in on my spoken lines too.

What are your favourite film soundtracks/composers?

I mentioned one already – Angelo Badalamenti, especially his work for David Lynch. His music is really atmospheric and strangely contradictory – at the same time it can feel really warm and quite icy, very intimate but also distant and detached. And Falling is a stone-cold classic theme tune.

Let’s get Ennio Morricone out of the way early on too – try and imagine those Sergio Leone films without the soundtracks: impossible.

I love the cheesy gothic-synth-prog stuff that Goblin did for Dario Argento’s horror films: Suspiria, Phenomenon, Profundo Rosso … and I think they did the music for George Romero’s original Dawn of the Dead too.

And I have to confess to being a bit of a geek for some of the classic old musicals. West Side Story is the one it’s OK to like because it’s Leonard Bernstein and it’s jazz and it’s cool, and that’s all true. But Rogers and Hammerstein are genius too – there is no film soundtrack ever made that beats The Sound of Music.

What are your favourite films? Did you seek cinematic inspiration?

Nah, this was fully a musical project for me. I could list a bunch of films I love of course, but it wouldn’t really be relevant so I’ll move right along …

How was it working with a newcomer (Charlotte McEwan)? Did it help in getting a feeling of naivety? Will you work with her again?

Chuckie has a great tone to her voice, and I knew it would work well for these songs. I wasn’t too concerned with trying to re-create the same sense of naivety of the original record. There’s no way you could out-do it or even really come close to emulating it, for all the obvious reasons, so we didn’t really set out to try – it would have been weird and a bit too much of an affectation to have an adult imitating a child singing to her dad. I just wanted Chuckie to get comfortable singing the songs in whatever way was most natural for her, and get that on tape.

That wasn’t as easy as it might sound though. It’s a pretty tricky prospect to take on for your first record: here are a bunch of songs you don’t know, written for a child to sing (with all those un-naturally high top notes), and in a foreign language … It took her a while to get confident and comfortable, but she did a good job.

We’ll probably work together again in some context or other – I did some music for a short film she made for her degree course earlier this year too, so I’m sure one of us will come up with a project that we can both work on again.

Were the live shows fun? Could you ever be tempted to do any more?

We just found out that Branchage Film festival had to cancel us, along with a whole raft of other acts and events they had lined up – they couldn’t afford to get us over to Jersey for the show because a lot of the funding they rely on has dried up. First hand evidence of how government cuts are affecting the arts already! For shame ConDems, for shame.

Anyway that means there was only one show, at The Curzon (Soho) cinema in London. It was weird in all kinds of ways – the shape of the stage, the layout of the room, everyone being seated and so far away from us, the sound coming in at us from the surround speakers instead of stage monitors … but it was kinda cool. Most of the time when I wasn’t singing I was watching the projections of all the old Gainsbourg movies and music videos on the massive screen behind us, which looked great. Also we were introduced by Joan Sfarr, the guy who directed the new Gainsbourg biopic, and we took him off into Soho for a few drinks after the show too. Lovely guy.

I don’t think there’ll be any more shows now – I liked the idea of it being a really short term project with a definite end. When it’s done it’s done, and then on to the next thing. I think it’s pretty much done now.