SoundFreak

Dave… articulate and connected

Dave Randall is perhaps best known for playing guitar in Faithless, but he’s also got his own band Slovo and has played for many other artists including Emiliana Torrini, Pauline Taylor, Dido and 1 Giant Leap. He has a distinctive style, bringing lush atmospheres and ambient soundscapes to anything he plays on, as well as being a soulful and articulate acoustic guitar player, and he’s also able to rock and funk with the best on electric guitar when required. Sissy has managed to persuade Dave to take a couple of hours off from working on his new album to meet up for a cup of peppermint tea and a chat:

SISSY: How long have you been playing guitar?

DAVE: I started playing the guitar when I was about 10 years old. And by the time I was 13, which is when I got my first electric guitar for £25 out of the local paper, I knew I wanted to do it professionally. But it wasn’t until 10 years later, when I was 23 that I was able to give up my day job and start working as a guitar player.

SISSY: Did you have your own bands in the interim?

DAVE: Yes… my philosophy as a young musician, which I would endorse and encourage others to adopt, was to say no to nothing… musically speaking; to play with as many people and in as many different genres as possible. Also, I tried to keep an open mind and absorb as much information as I could. So I had a lot of bands during that 10 years, and to this day I work with as many people as I have time for.

SISSY: What were your main influences and inspirations?

DAVE: My earliest significant influence was my best friend’s older brother. I was very lucky because he was a good guy; he took the time to show me a few chords and to play me some of his albums. Looking at him playing his guitar, I thought it was the coolest thing that anyone could do. Then I started to listen to a lot of the bands that were around at the time… this would have been the early 80’s. I listened to the Police a lot; Andy Summers was a big influence on me. Then a little bit later on I heard Hendrix for the first time, then I got into rockier stuff like Living Colour so their guitarist Vernon Reed became an influence.

Another crucial thing was that I was encouraged by a lot of my musician friends from my hometown of Southend-on-Sea, who were around 15 years older than me, to listen to a lot of blues music. To this day, I have a love of acoustic and early electric blues.

SISSY: It seems that all good guitarists have at some point immersed themselves in the blues when learning their craft.

DAVE: It’s pretty important… there are some people who try to break away from that tradition like Richard Thompson, who I also love; he’s gone for a much more English rooted folk tradition. But for me, blues and everything associated with it like soul; just great black American music, right through to hip-hop… things like A Tribe Called Quest and Slow in Theory who were all part of the same trajectory; really emotional, exciting, soulful music which moved me and which I tried to learn from and emulate in some sort of way.

SISSY: You mentioned buying your first guitar; what was it?

DAVE: It didn’t have a name, it was very basic. I remember my mum being quite irritated at having to spend the £25. It was a birthday present and I remember her saying ‘you’ll probably give up in 6 weeks!’ So it’s quite nice to be able to prove her wrong all these years later.

SISSY: Did you have any formal music education at music college or anything?

DAVE: No. I don’t have grades on any instruments but I did take studying very seriously… when I could afford it I would have a few guitar lessons from a guy that lived locally; then I did a couple of part-time courses in London and played with as many other guitarists as possible. So I did take learning very seriously but never did it in a formal way.

SISSY: Do you think some college courses can be too set and structured and give an unrealistic idea of what it’s really all about?

DAVE: I think that’s true because although playing guitar is a craft and therefore you need a set of tools available to you and to be fluent and have a vocabulary, at the same time it’s an art so you have to bring your own personality, feel and perspective to the instrument. Colleges which hot-house players on a 2-year intensive course sometimes focus exclusively on the craft side of things and you emerge at the other end able to copy any number of great players but the real question is, can you create something original which is your own?

SISSY: You mentioned having a day-job before you became a professional musician; what did you do?

DAVE: I had a part-time job in a record shop for a while; I did all sorts of jobs before that including working in a pork-pie factory!

SISSY: Aren’t you a vegetarian?

DAVE: I was and still am, but you have to pay the rent! I’d say to any young musician, there’s no shame in paying the rent by whatever means you can. It’s better to have the basics of life together than to try and do the romantic struggling musician thing and not even be able to afford new strings.

SISSY: What led to you becoming professional?

DAVE: At 23 I got a lucky break; an old drummer friend who I’d been playing with since I was 16 introduced me to the people who formed the first incarnation of Faithless. I was already earning some money from music by working with singer/songwriters like Pauline Taylor (who sung on the first Faithless album) and a guy called Jay Fisher. I also had my own 3-piece rap-rock band called Bombastic. We didn’t get signed but it taught me a lot about performance and writing. It wasn’t until I joined Faithless that I was able to leave the day job and register myself as a self-employed musician, which was a lovely feeling.

SISSY: How long did you play in Faithless for?

DAVE: I toured with them between 1996 and 2000 at which point I left because I wanted to make the first Slovo record, which was my own project. That was released in 2002 and we toured to promote it for 2 years. Then, in 2005, Faithless called me up and asked me if I’d consider coming back. They’d been using a guitarist called Nemo Jones who’s a lovely guy and a very good player but they’d gone their separate ways.

SISSY: It seems that you have an affinity with Faithless in terms of ideology.

DAVE: I think that’s true; we were quite a diverse bunch of people with very different perspectives in lots of ways but we do coalesce around certain important ideas. Max and I performed together at the last-but-one Stop The War Coalition Demonstration in Trafalgar Square. So we do have some ideas in common, but I think what’s more significant than that is that we’re all old friends. We’ve got 10 years of shared memories between us and it’s been great fun working with them again. I’ve been working with them this time since the beginning of last year; this year we’ll be playing some dates in Ireland and then the V festivals.

SISSY: How do you find sessioning and playing other people’s material compared to doing your own projects?

DAVE: The term ‘sessioning’ can have negative connotations for a lot of people so let’s call it ‘playing guitar for someone else’ because with Faithless, I do feel like I’m part of the family and I get to write a little bit occasionally… I contributed ideas to two songs in the past. But I love both things; I love playing for someone else because I can really focus on being a guitar player and performer and enjoy the whole experience. Whereas when you’re doing your own thing, although ultimately the long-term picture is potentially far more satisfying, because you get to document your musical ideas, work with the people you choose to work with and flex your creative energy in a completely holistic way, even though that’s all great, it’s also really challenging. It means that in my case, I spend long solitary hours chiselling away at ideas in my little studio in Brixton. I think of songwriting as being similar to sculpture, in the sense that you have a vision of the finished statue but to get there, you have to chip away at a hard piece of rock for days on end. Therefore it can be a bit gruelling; that saying about it being 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration, is in my experience entirely true!

SISSY: You seem to be quite adaptable and able to easily interpret other people’s ideas, whereas some musicians get frustrated when they aren’t doing their own music. Do you think you would get frustrated if you didn’t do your own projects as well?

DAVE: I might have felt that way; I know a couple of musicians who have resented doing gigs for other people when they should have been enjoying the opportunity. They’ve been so pre-occupied with the fact that they’re not getting on with their own stuff that they’ve been hard to work with when what they’ve been offered is actually a gig that other musicians would consider a dream come true. I think you’ve got to keep some perspective and humility.

SISSY: On your website, I noticed that as well as your band Slovo, there’s another project called Randall. What’s the thinking behind differentiating between the two projects?

DAVE: After I made the first Slovo album, I made a mostly acoustic, instrumental record and just released it on the internet under the name Randall. It’s a strange little album that I’m actually very proud of; it’s quite stark and haunting, and hopefully quite beautiful. I didn’t incorporate the material into Slovo because I felt that it had its own integrity and its own remit, in a way. Slovo is about having a narrative running through the albums, which is in part social commentary, and partly reflects the fact that I see the world through a political lens, and I like to work on the album with people who can help to develop that narrative.

SISSY: Did you write music first and then find the political theme or was it your politics that inspired the music?

DAVE: I don’t think I can separate the two because to be an artist, you have to communicate something honest from within and I honestly ask questions about the world, not only in my music but with friends down the pub and so on. I am actually interested in the questions that I then write about on the Slovo records, from feeling lonely in a big city and alienation to what’s going on in the Middle East. That’s not to say that I always want to be overtly political; I don’t… the Randall album didn’t have a single lyric on it, political or otherwise but with Slovo I have continued to explore political questions. On the second album, I’ve worked with a very interesting and politicised East London-based quite grime-sounding MC called Bobby Whiskers and I’ve also got a guest called MC Boikutt on one of the tracks from the west bank town of Ramallah in Palestine rapping in Arabic about life under occupation.

SISSY: Is it true that you travelled to Palestine to research and record bits for the first album?

DAVE: The first album began with the voice of a 70 year old Palestinian woman saying how hard life was and it kind of set up the whole album, putting what I saw as the voice of the usually voiceless multitudes at the start of the album to set the scene. On this album I wanted to return to Palestine, at least metaphorically, but present it not from the perspective of a sad and desperate victim of oppression but a more positive side; a young, articulate MC who wanted to represent everything that is positive and fighting back against the illegal occupation, everything that is anti-racist about Palestine to a young audience.

SISSY: Do you think the situation in Palestine has improved in recent years?

DAVE: No, it’s as bad as it ever was.

SISSY: Are you attracted to supporting causes that fight injustice in some way? What draws you to deal with those issues?

DAVE: Firstly, I think that all things are connected; the fact that people feel that resources might be scarce because a school is threatened with closure or a hospital is being privatized or a playing field sold off, I think there is a connection through economics between that and war in the Middle East, the desire for oil and imperialism. And in turn, between imperialism and what is going on in Palestine and Israel. Economics has a big part to play in the west’s agendas; for example the British and American governments shook hands and did deals with Saddam Hussein long after he’d gassed the Kurds. The hypocrisy of the leaders of Britain and America is mind-boggling. So in my view, things are pretty grim. However, I don’t think that the state of the world we see today is inevitable… we are all agents for change. We can’t sit around and wait for divine intervention, nor can we defer our power to elected politicians. People have to talk about ways that they themselves can take the power back and create a different world. So those are the sorts of ideas that underlie the political dimension of the Slovo records.

SISSY: It seems quite rare for a musician to put their neck on the line and take a political stance nowadays; mainstream music almost seems to be politically castrated compared to the 60’s and 70’s when people felt that music could change the world.

DAVE: I’m not sure I agree… I think the war in Iraq has opened a lot of people’s eyes to just how cynical and rotten the American administration in particular is. Therefore there are a few more mainstream American acts that are finally making political statements; some of them always have, even huge people like Bruce Springsteen down to smaller acts like Arni Defranco and unexpected acts like the Dixie Chicks. It’s a good thing that there are growing levels of politicization in music. Music tends to reflect the mood of society in that while some people are confused or apathetic, there are others who have no faith in mainstream politics but who are nonetheless politically minded; organising benefit gigs, going on anti-war demonstrations etc.

SISSY: I heard a good quote from Tony Benn the other day; he said ‘We are no longer being represented by our politicians, we are being managed.’

DAVE: But we can represent ourselves. New attitudes are already affecting party politics. The important thing is to reject this idea that privatization is inevitable; new labour tells you that you have to accept the introduction of the private sector into schools, hospitals and the tube and the implicit message on international issues is that you can’t really challenge American power. I think that at every level, we have to say ‘No, we don’t accept that.’ We shouldn’t accept that our council homes are being sold off to the highest bidder, we should invest in council housing. Are we going to pretend that these things aren’t to blame for tension in local communities, when they have been run down by corrupt local councils? You have to take on each of their lies one by one and organise with others to present an alternative, and I think that people are starting to do that. It’s already beginning to have an effect; recently the Financial Times said that there are 2 superpowers in the world; one is the US ruling class and the other is world public opinion. There are more of us than there are of them, and most ordinary people agree on many things. We’ve already made it difficult in this country for the government to get away with backing America on further imperialistic adventures like a war in Iran.

SISSY: Do you think you have sacrificed greater commercial success by using your music as a platform for your beliefs?

DAVE: That might be true, but I’m not conscious of making any sacrifices, or of making a propagandistic record. It is one aspect of what I do, but it’s something which comes naturally. Both Slovo albums also have love songs on them, and moments of contemplation about completely different things. It’s certainly not about party politics; all the parties agree with each other about the very things I disagree with… the three major parties in this country are a bit of a waste of time, so my only interest in them is to encourage people to reject them.

The new Slovo album is called Todo Cambia which is Spanish for ‘everything changes’. I heard the phrase when I was in Venezuela at the beginning of the year; I went there for the world social forum. It was particulary significant that it was in Venezuela because they’ve got the world’s most left-wing elected government. They face a lot of challenges; the leader Hugo Chavez has already been the victim of an American-backed attempted coup. He’s trying to take some of the profits from the vast oil reserves of Venezuela and spend the money on helping the poor. He’s had some success but the richer Venezuelans and foreign investors don’t like it, and the Bush administration hates what he’s trying to do.

Todo Cambia works for me as an album title on two levels; firstly that on a political level, things will inevitably change for the better or for the worse but it also works on a more personal level; creativity is a response to changes in our lives, whether it’s the beginning of a relationship or the end of one, or responding to the world around you and articulating that in as honest a way as possible.

SISSY: In what way has Slovo developed over the course of the 2 albums?

DAVE: It was certainly my intention that the 2 albums have a sense of cohesion. The first album was more acoustic in flavour. It was called Nommo which is a west African word meaning ‘a problem shared is a problem halved’… it’s a tradition where things experienced as an individual are then discussed in a communal context, and that’s what I was doing on the first album; talking about the things that troubled me. Nommo had some west African influences musically as well. The second album is more urban in a London sense; it’s got a slightly tougher sound, partly because some of the vocals are by an east London MC. The production has a more urban feel, although there are still some acoustic moments.

SISSY: You’ve also started singing some of the vocals yourself; are you enjoying the experience?

DAVE: It’s probably been the same for me as it is for any songwriters who don’t consider themselves singers! I sing on about 3 tracks on the album. Initially I wrote a song called Spun Out and sang a guide vocal as I often do. Then I got the real singers in; Andrea Britton, who is in the band, sang it and I got another guy who’s on the album to try singing it, but then everyone agreed that my old guide vocal version had something which the other versions didn’t have; a certain emotive quality. So I thought I’d be brave and go with the thing that had the right feel and seemed to move people the most, even though I wasn’t confident about singing.

SISSY: Do you find it easy to sing and play guitar at the same time?

DAVE: It’s not something I’ve done much of. I’ll be sure to arrange the songs in such a way that it works, but it’s all new to me… Damien Rice I’m not! When we perform the songs it will be the first time I’ve sung live. But potential listeners will be pleased to hear that I will be joined on stage by some wonderful vocalists.

SISSY: What are your plans for Slovo this year?

DAVE: I’m finishing off Todo Cambia at the moment so it should be finished within the next few months, although we may not have an official release until the beginning of next year. I am guaranteeing to those people who have been in contact through my website that we will make a limited run of pre-release copies available through the website and we’re going to start doing some gigs in July.

SISSY: It seems that you are already using the internet to distribute your music and contact fans. How do you see this trend affecting the music industry?

DAVE: There was a piece in Music Week recently, talking about the significance of various download sites; there’s been a lot of conjecture about this. I think the truth is that no-one knows for sure but I think the 2 obvious points are firstly that there is a huge opportunity for people like me who have a small network of people already interested in a record; I can reach them directly and build up a relationship with the people who listen to my records, which has never been possible before. That’s the positive stuff. The more underwhelming aspect of all this is that if you don’t have a fanbase and you want it to grow, then most of the time you still have to rely on conventional means like airplay, racking in the record shops or the online equivalent of banners encouraging people to listen to you and all that relies on big money. So the grip of major label financial backing isn’t completely broken, and I don’t suppose it will be for a long time. I’ve got mixed feelings about the whole thing; you have to embrace that which is good but like most technology, it depends who is using it and why, and to what end.

SISSY: I wonder whether things will become similar to how they were in the 1920’s when everyone had a piano and played music at home but the number of people making music their profession was a tiny fraction of what is has become since. Now everyone can have a band and share their music but the over-saturation could erode the mystique of the recording artist and stop us having those shared cultural memories like the record everyone had their first kiss to etc.

DAVE: I think you’ve got to have a balance because although it’s good to have a shared culture across the Britain and the world beyond, on the other hand, the homogeneity of national radio in this country is mind-numbing to say the least. It’s very hard for interesting, innovative artists to get played except by one or two maverick DJ’s after midnight. So the internet could help to redress the balance and help to give a platform to previously marginalised music. I must admit, it is quite weird that when I go to my studio now, to do the admin stuff, I used to just have to check my emails. Now I have to do that as well as check the forum on the Slovo site to see if there’s any pertinent questions that need responding to. Then I have to check myspace and other sites to see whether any messages have been left there, so if you’re not careful, you can get sucked into spending more time than is healthy on the internet. I think it just came out recently that young people are now spending more time on the internet than in front of the TV so maybe that’s ok, if it’s just TV that’s losing out. Last night my housemate was looking at an internet dating site and I thought about all these people who aren’t bothering to go to the pub because they’re dating on the internet… how ridiculous! I don’t subscribe to conspiracy theories but I do think this is part of a trend which does encourage us to spend more time in isolation. It’s a mad thought that all across London, on any given evening there’s people playing backgammon online, or chatting online or trading music or pornography online with people all over the world, and these same people don’t even know their neighbour’s name or pop round for a spliff and a chat!

SISSY: What software do you use for recording?

DAVE: I mainly recorded the album on Logic. I’m not an expert when it comes to computer software. I use it to achieve an end but I’m not really into it. Still, Logic has allowed me to a lot of the things I wanted to do. I run it on a battered old G4 laptop, which is very basic by today’s standards but it serves my purpose.

SISSY: What guitars and pedals do you use to get your distinctive soundscapes?

DAVE: The only general thing I can convey to others is to take time to open your ears; in other words don’t just dial up a preset on a Pod or something, and expect it to sound like your favourite guitarist. Find your own sound and pay a lot of attention to the tone. I use a handful of old Boss stomp boxes; 2 delays in line, a wah pedal, a Digitech Whammy-wah and I run those through a nice Mesa Boogie amplifier. I use mainly a Fender Stratocaster and occasionally a Telecaster and I use slides and E-bows or whatever I need to achieve a certain texture. So think about the texture you want to achieve and what emotions you want to evoke primarily in yourself and therefore in the listener.

SISSY: if you hadn’t become a musician, what do think you would have done instead? Do you think you’d have been a politician?

DAVE: No I don’t think so. I’m sure I’d still be asking questions about the same things and getting angry about the same things. I suppose I’m a people person… it would be nice to give some romantic answer about something outdoorsy but I think I’d most likely be working in a café, chit-chatting about nonsense!

Having exhausted ourselves discussing the state of the world and music, we leave Dave to go back to his bunker in Brixton and continue sculpting the new Slovo album. You can check out new tracks from the album, read about Dave’s music, buy the first album and contact Dave at www.slovo.co.uk