SoundFreak

The UTR collective first came to Sissy’s attention a year or so ago when we found ourselves at one of their events by accident; a friend from the states was in the UK to do a gig and Sissy turned up to see him to find a whole new underground scene that seemed to have evolved organically and was thriving without any corporate involvement. Months later, Sissy managed to get an interview with the collective’s founder, Chris Tipton, backstage at the Luminaire in Kilburn as he prepared for the evening’s gig.

SISSY: How long have you been promoting gigs?

CHRIS: It was about 3 years from last December.

SISSY: How many of you are involved in the collective?

CHRIS: There are about 11 people I suppose. I came back from holiday in San Francisco and Los Angeles; I’d seen a lot of shows over there and saw how differently things worked, how it’s a lot more community based. I came back to London with the idea of setting up some different shows for bands that I really loved. So it was really those two main reasons that got us started; seeing how things were done in the States and going to too many bad shows in London of bands that we liked.

SISSY: So you were the founding member of the collective and the one with the vision?

CHRIS: Initially, yes. But I got lots of friends involved and now it’s a really great community type thing. There’s a main core of about 4 people who book the bands and tours, run the website and mail outs etc… myself and then a whole group who help with the shows, the sound, putting up the bands, promoting the shows etc. We book tours for certain artists because it’s so expensive to come to the UK so if there’s a band that we want to do a show for in London, we usually have to organise a week of dates elsewhere to justify the expense. There’s loads of hidden costs in touring that people don’t see, like work permits and things.

SISSY: How did you all get together?

CHRIS: We’re all of a similar age, and basically we all met through contacts when we moved to London; none of us were from London, we all moved here after university.

SISSY: Are you also a musician?

CHRIS: I think everyone in the collective is also in bands. I think that’s a key thing. I play a bit of drums and some guitar and keyboards.

SISSY: Do you play at the Upset the Rhythm gigs?

CHRIS: We try not to because it’s a bit nepotistic. We try and find shows off our own back through other promoters. We usually end up playing shows that our friends put on in spaces or at clubs and stuff.

SISSY: One-off events rather than established venues like the barfly?

CHRIS: Definitely, we don’t believe in that type of stuff anyway… it’s all kind of corporate and horrible and a bit of a ‘closed shop’ scenario.

SISSY: So would you say that the collective has a political ethic behind it?

CHRIS: Very much so. If anything it started with finding fault with shows that we’d been to in the UK; Gigs with bad line-ups, expensive tickets, inappropriate venues and using soundmen who didn’t know anything about the music. We’re into getting people to come who really want to see the bands, and in the most ideal place possible.

SISSY: With the bands that you book, is there a policy to keep the billing as left field as possible or will you book anything as long as it has an anti-establishment vibe?

CHRIS: I guess the only overriding factor is whether we like it or not. I think we all have pretty left field tastes. We tend to do shows in 3 or 4 veins; we do a lot of noise shows, a lot of free folk stuff and lots of U.S. indie guitar bands, for example tonight we have the Microphones and Casiotone, which are two of the most premier singer-songwriters from the U.S. indie scene.

SISSY: The U.S. indie scene seems to have become a lot artier and less concerned with technicality than it used to be.

CHRIS: I think in the last few years a lot of bands have formed just to have fun playing lots of shows with their friends, not necessarily to be experimental or groundbreaking but just to have some fun.

SISSY: Can you tell me any of your musical influences; what inspired you to get into music in the first place?

CHRIS: My mum and dad got me into music; my dad was into glam rock and my mum was a punk. When I was growing up I thought they were really normal and I didn’t realise, but then I discovered their record collection and it was really good. I suppose I got into music because I wanted to have something in common with other people that pushed back the boundaries. I think everyone involved in the collective is really obsessed with music and with searching out new and different types of stuff. The bands I got into that we first put on shows for in the early days were Deerhoof and XBXRX; I would say they are one of my favourite bands and I saw them play in L.A. just before I came back to the UK

We’re not a profit-making organisation so we don’t take any personal gain from the shows but we try and make the shows pay for themselves so we can attempt riskier ventures. We can afford to bring XBXRX over to the UK and front all the airfare for the shows. It’s a bit of a dream come true because they’re seriously one of my favourite bands. If you haven’t seen them, what they do live is like a dance party kind of thing; it’s guitar, vocals and drums played really free but very rhythmically as well. It’s a bit similar to Magik Markers, but loads more spontaneous and fun because they have balloon cascades, silly string and water bombs. They were hugely influential on why I wanted to put on shows. When I came back to London from the States and went to gigs, everyone was standing 3 metres away from the stage, not clapping and just being too self-conscious. We wanted to try and break down the distance between audience and band. I think it’s all about the space where you do the show more than anything… if it’s somewhere inappropriate it makes you behave differently, though obviously London creates lots of problems in trying to find exciting, unusual places to put on shows.

SISSY: What are the main venues that you put shows on at?

CHRIS: Loads of different spaces; one is Barden’s Boudoir in Stoke Newington. We have a long history with that place. It all came about because we were looking for a space to do a show for a band that are friends of ours, Lightning Bolt, who were over here to do a show at the Electric Ballroom but they wanted a place to do a fun party show. We couldn’t find an appropriate space… no one was into the idea of having a band play randomly on the floor somewhere, and we wanted to keep costs down and make the tickets as cheap as possible, like around £3. One of the collective was talking to this Turkish guy who owns the whole block in the street and he showed us Barden’s Boudoir, which was just an empty basement at the time. We did the Lightning Bolt show there, which worked out really well. A few months later they decided to turn it into a proper venue. We did quite a few shows there and the best thing about the place is that we’ve got to know the guys that run it and they are really cool and let us use it cheaply, which means we can afford to pay the bands more money and perhaps book riskier acts as a result.

SISSY: It just goes to show that if you go into something with the right spirit, others will be happy to get on board and help out.

CHRIS: It’s true; enthusiasm can go a long way to making things happen. We started out with nothing and now we have enough contacts, experience and resources to put bands on tour and pay for backline.

SISSY: Do you still put on shows at Barden’s? And what other venues do you use?

CHRIS: We still do the occasional show at Barden’s Boudoir. We also use this place (the Luminaire in Kilburn) because it’s got incredible sound; the guy who runs the venue called Andy is one of the sweetest people you could meet. He really cares about the bands that play here and hurries around looking after everyone. We don’t do regular nights anywhere, we just put on shows as and when there are bands we want to put on. Barden’s is good for things that are a bit risky and the Luminaire is good for things that are a bit more established because it costs a bit more to hire, it is also good for stuff that requires difficult sound set-ups. We’ve also used a lot of found spaces, like people’s basements. We started off by doing shows in a wine bar on Great Portland Street called Needles. The best show we did there was Deerhoof, which was our first show. They were doing a support tour but need their own headline show, so we put them on and it turned out really hectic! We did six shows in a row there and then it became impossible because the guy who owned it didn’t really understand what being a venue owner was all about and couldn’t see the potential benefits… he preferred two people drinking wine to a packed venue. We were a bit naive about the amount of people that would come to our shows to begin with; for Deerhoof we were really worried, thinking we would only be able to pull about 50 people but then 300 people turned up to this 100 capacity venue!

We’ve also used a Salvation Army hall on Oxford Street… we put on a gig there a few months ago for The Evens which is Ian MacKaye from Fugazi’s band. We’ve also used a few churches for different things as well; one we did was this very reclusive guy from Texas, Jandek, who plays outsider folk music. I find churches are great for certain shows, they don’t really work for loud music because of the natural acoustics but anything vaguely atmospheric works brilliantly. And churches tend to be readily available and staffed by surprisingly enthusiastic individuals. We started off by checking out all the venues in the back of Time Out but soon discovered that most of them are fully booked with club nights or are pay-to-play. Politically we didn’t want to get involved with that, so we were left with 5 or 6 possible venues, which always seemed to be booked up weeks in advance.

SISSY: Would you say your politics extend to other areas of your life as well? Are you anarchists or socialists?

CHRIS: Our politics are part of who we are and what we do. Some of us are politically active but it’s hard to define what we are… we believe in everyone having a really good time so maybe we’re hedonists rather than anarchists! We’re very anti-corporate so all the promoters and artists tend to be doing a similar thing. We’re not motivated by money and we distance ourselves with those who see promoting as a kind of vanity project to make them feel cool because they put on bands. I also feel strongly about elitism in the underground scene – we have a really wide range of people that come to our shows because we work hard to promote our shows to people that might not necessarily come to see certain artists or types of music.

SISSY: Now that UTR has become successful, how will you progress in the future and continue the spirit of it without selling out as it gets bigger?

CHRIS: Next year we’re hoping to do some kind of festival in Central London, which will be a challenge; there’s not many interesting events like that in Central London.

SISSY: It’s true that London is lacking in scenes with the DIY ethic; most small towns have lots of bands all helping each other out and setting up events.

CHRIS: Absolutely… out of London, everyone’s writing fanzines and making mix tapes for each other, bunches of kids supporting each other. I think we’re one of the only organisations doing that stuff in London. There is Eat Your Own Ears and All Tomorrows Parties who are trying to have the same sort of ethic but their focus is more mainstream. When you deal with people from All Tomorrows Parties, you find there is a huge gulf between what we do and what they do even though it seems similar at first glance.

SISSY: Do you have a fanzine associated with UTR?

CHRIS: No we don’t have anything that’s like physically printed matter, just the website. The key things that we’re going to work on in the next few months are, we have videos and photos and written accounts of every single show we’ve done which must be between 60 and 70 by now. We’re going to upload this footage to the archive part of the website. At a lot of the early shows, no one could see the band properly because we didn’t use stages, so we realised we should film it all so people could see it. It’s taken forever to get round to it but we’ll get there soon.

SISSY: As interest in the website rises, will you be tempted to increase revenue by taking advertisements on the site?

CHRIS: It seems unlikely. Any money we make is generated by people’s goodwill and by people coming to shows and it can be annoying to go on a website and be inundated with ads. It doesn’t really fit with out ethic, though I’d have no problem with promoting artists, independent stores etc.

SISSY: What are your other future plans?

CHRIS: As well as the festival we plan to do, we’ll be working with the art magazine Frieze in October to curate the music programme for the Frieze Art Fair. It’s the biggest thing we’ve done by a long way and it is really exciting. But it is all a bit secret at the moment!

SISSY: Do you have a label associated with UTR?

CHRIS: We do; we’re on our 8th release now and it has been an honour to work with such fantastic artists.. Rough Trade always put our records on their shelves. We distribute in UK, Europe and the US through Southern Records Distribution. The label is now on an equal footing with the promotion in terms of our priorities.

SISSY: What do you think the effect of the development of the internet has been?

CHRIS: I think it’s been great; having a mailing list has been the most helpful thing ever. To start with we’d just email our friends about forthcoming gigs and that grew until it took 3 or 4 days to email everyone on the mailing list. Now we’ve had to bite the bullet and buy some software to do it automatically because we have several thousand names now. It’s been great to have a website so we can tell people about bands and they can click on links to the band’s websites and hear their music. It’s a good way of hearing stuff you wouldn’t usually listen to.

After the interview, Sissy stuck around to see some of the gig; first on was un-assuming French-Canadian Genevieve Castree who goes by the name of Woelv. Her set consisted of minimalistic, beautiful, haunting songs performed a cappella or on acoustic guitar. Genevieve tackles controversial subjects such as her objection to Canada’s high spending on the winter Olympics when there are areas of extreme poverty, neglect and deprivation close by, and her thoughts on the use of atomic weapons and why much of the world persists in developing more. She performs her songs in French but the spirit and sentiments seem to transcend the language barrier. Her voice has an ethereal quality and very individual style; an easy comparison would be a folksy Bjork but Genevieve’s material is far more uncompromising and leftfield.

Next on was Casiotone For The Painfully Alone, the brainchild of American film school dropout Owen Ashworth. Owen performs alone with a synthesiser, using a juxtaposition of cheesy retro and contemporary sounds as a lo-fi backing to his heartfelt and often amusing anecdotal lyrics. The effect is both hypnotic and hugely entertaining.
Warez had to leave at that point, missing headliner Phil Elvrum from US Psych-popsters the Microphones, but we’re sure that in the spirit of all things UTR, it was another uncompromising, unusual performance by an eclectic, leftfield act that would be lacking an arena and outlet in the uk if it wasn’t for UPSET THE RHYTHM.
See upsettherhythm.co.uk for details of forthcoming events and releases, and to join the mailing list.