SoundFreak

Sandy… getting in the mood for Christmas!

Sissy first heard the music of Sandy Dillon a few years ago, and couldn’t believe that this woman remains an underground artist despite her highly original talent. She plays piano and keyboards and sings her own hauntingly twisted swampy bluesesque songs; her voice somehow combines the vibes of Louis Armstrong, Tom Waits and Captain Beefheart, but channelled through the vocal chords of a diminutive girl. The musical backdrop to her voice is often minimal and evocative but also conveys that there is a kind of warped humorous undercurrent to some of the songs. Sandy has released four albums to date; Skating (1996), Electric Chair (1999), East Overshoe (2001), and Pull the Strings (2006). She continues to tour sporadically, mostly in Europe where there seems to be a greater understanding of her uncompromising material. One of Sandy’s long standing band members is Ray Majors (on dobro, banjo and guitar) who used to play in 70’s legend Mott the Hoople and recent incarnations of the Yardbirds. Previous live line-ups have included Ed Harcourt (on bass), members of labelmates Alabama 3 and Katie Tunstall’s drummer Luke Bullen. Another sorely missed long standing collaborator was Fripp-esque guitarist Steve Bywater, Sandy’s husband who tragically died in 2000.

SISSY: Where are you from and how did you get started playing music?

SANDY: Boston, USA. I played classical music as a child… I was quite a good pianist, although there are hundreds of very gifted 13 year old pianists in the States and lots of competition. I was one of those kids who got straight A’s at school, not because I was so smart but because I understood what I had to do… I came across as a responsible student but really I was just trying to get all the work out of the way. I was like that in the day, and then in the night time I was seriously delinquent and would be out clubbing. I looked older than I was and had a fake ID so I could get into gigs and things. Aerosmith were a local band I’d go and see… they’re a great blues band. I was also listening to Hendrix and things like that and I suddenly thought to myself, if I was sitting at a table with Mozart and Beethoven, they’d be going ‘Hey, what’s your latest thing?’ and they’d all be talking about their latest compositions and I’d have to say ‘Well, all I’m doing is copying you’. I didn’t know how to write music, I was just good at reading, but if you took the sheet music away I was stuck!

SISSY: Did you study music at college?

SANDY: Yes, I went to Berkeley University in Boston to study music. I was playing jazz piano and I did orchestral scoring; that’s what I really wanted to do, I wasn’t into rock or anything. The big heroes at the time were jazz players like Pat Metheny, Thelonious Monk, Chick Corea, John McGlaughlin; fusion stuff where you had to play 20 zillion notes a second. At the same time, punk was starting so in my split personality I was into jazz by day and started going to punk gigs by night! So I didn’t fit well into the school… punk music was absolutely laughed at because it was made by people who supposedly couldn’t play. They didn’t understand the whole ethos of punk music… the DIY ethic and so on. So I used to write little songs when I was at Berkley but I didn’t play them to anybody because they had a snobbish attitude and I could only write songs to a certain level.

SISSY: What did you do when you left college?

SANDY: When I moved to New York after I graduated from Berkley, the only jobs I could get were playing in piano bars. That was really tough because you had to play six 45 minute sets with no repeats! In the States, because there are so many people doing it you can’t afford to specialize… you might have to go and play jazz gigs so you have to know your standards. Then some of the bars I played in wanted singing as well as piano and if I’d hired a proper singer I would have had to split the money. So I decided to fake it! I’d choose songs that had very small vocal parts because I don’t have a big range. Then I started sneaking in my own lyrics over a basic 12 bar blues form, mainly because I couldn’t remember all the words to a song! It was like writing on the spot to fill my 45 minutes. People started asking for those songs again but I couldn’t always remember them because I never wrote them down, so I tried to remember each song by one word! It took me all that time since college to learn to write properly.

I also used to play in Japanese Enka bars; before there was Karaoke there were these bars where people could go up to the piano player and give them 50 bucks to play ‘I left my heart in San Francisco’ or something and they would sing… it’s that whole Japanese thing of humiliating yourself in front of your business colleagues to put things on an even level. I was earning lots of money because these guys got to know ‘the funny little girl piano player’. I wasn’t really suitable for the normal hotel bars because I didn’t sound like Leann Rimes or someone and I had weird short hair so I also used to play in a famous gay bar on 53rd and 2nd which was know as Boy’s Town where all the rich upper-east men went cruising for young waiters. One night I looked up and saw Tennessee Williams; he lived around the corner and he was always out cruising for rent boys. At the time I was living in the Chelsea hotel… I had a flat there. I know it sounds like a bit of a cliché! But really it was because they had a phone there I could use and I didn’t need a deposit because I moved in as a hotel guest then changed it to a lease. When you’re 20 years old and out representing yourself in New York on your own it’s scary but the Chelsea had security guards so if I came back late at night it was safe and they’d be checking out your visitors to make sure no weirdos came in. I needed that because I was a bit wild and got myself into the most ridiculous situations!

SISSY: How did your first record deal happen?

SANDY: It came about as a result of Tony Defries of MainMan (David Bowie’s old manager) seeing me play the role of Janis Joplin on Broadway at the St. James Theatre in..um…1982. The show was called ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll – the First 5000 Years’. It was great, in Act 2 I got to pretend to be Wendy O’Williams from the Plasmatics with a chainsaw and plastic tits with gaffer tape on the nipples! Funnily enough, that was the biggest money I have ever earned, per hourly rate! Anyhow, Tony liked my performance, I played him some of my songs on a piano, signed up with MainMan and got a deal with Electra in New York. I was thrilled!

SISSY: What made you move to the UK?

SANDY: After Electra declined to release either of the 2 records I made for them, MainMan moved me over to London with my then producer, Mick Ronson to try out some studios etc. We only had one release, on EMI Priority Records in 1985, a single with a double A side called ‘Flowers and Heavy Boys’. ‘Flowers’ was produced by Dieter Meyer (the guy from Yello), and ‘Heavy Boys’ was produced by Ronno. (Mick Ronson) I adored both those men. They both seemed to get what I was about, although in very different ways.

SISSY: You eventually signed to One Little Indian Records; how did that come about?

SANDY: I’d done some recordings and a guy called Tom Astor who ran Orinoco Studios (who has been my manager ever since) heard the stuff and played it to Derek Birkett who runs One Little Indian. He really loved it and said he’d like to put it out and wanted to meet me. He promised not to mess with it and to put it out just as it stood which was fantastic… I’d never had that because all my life until then, record companies would sign me because I was unique, then they’d try to push all the uniqueness out of me. Because it was the early 80’s when I was first doing stuff, women in the music industry were viewed very differently to how they are now. Basically if you wanted to play ball, you had to listen to what you were being told to do, to a certain extent, otherwise you’d have the door shut in your face. So I would compromise and try to make my sound more commercial, and then the record company would turn around and say that the very thing they had liked about me had gone. I always compare it to being a 13 year old girl when your boyfriend wants to have sex with you; you hold out and hold out, then you shag him and he never calls you again!

SISSY: So would you say it’s harder to be taken seriously in the music industry if you’re female.

SANDY: Definitely; but you have to just get on with it, although it does depend what kind of artist you are. The famous story is that Madonna never compromised, but then the sort of act she was meant that she didn’t have to because she wanted to be commercial. But if you’re trying to present something different it’s hard. For example, when I was first signed to Electra they wanted me to be more like Cindy Lauper and they put me in with a hip hop producer so there was my bluesy singing over hip hop beats… some of it sounded good but I wanted to sound like Robert Johnson or something.

SISSY: Who would you say were your main influences as a writer and also what stuff do you love?

SANDY: My main influence is the 5 senses; anything I hear forms the visual, and anything I see or visualize suggests a score to me, then with taste, touch, and even smell the music arrives, usually nearly complete. Improvisation and simultaneous composition/performance is to me the ultimate goal of an artist, so that as you experience anything, you communicate it to others. Everyone is your audience, meaning all communication is performance, and all performance is real. Nothing is really pretend. Even actors who say they are pretending are only pretending to themselves they are. This includes every emotion, and every connection we make with each other, our surroundings and our consciences. The fake is real, and vice versa, it’s all just different versions of a score that keeps changing. From music to film to literature… crap magazines and the Bible, we constantly process this stuff into creative outpourings of what is called artistic. I believe everyone is an artist and that some of us do it publicly by painting or storytelling or songwriting, perhaps individually more desperate to connect to others through the ritual of performance. I also now like to listen to nothing at all but the air of whatever place you find yourself in… if you stop and listen to it, it’s full of surprises. You have to shut up and just chill.

SISSY: Now that you’re in your 40’s do you think it’s a good thing that the type of music you make doesn’t have an age limit?

SANDY: Definitely…in fact it was harder to do when I was younger because people don’t think you have credibility; that you haven’t suffered enough to play the blues. Now I’m going to start saying I’m 56 so people think I look good for my age!

SISSY: Which countries do you have a fanbase in?

SANDY: I have a strange career because I have large cult following in Germany, Austria, especially Belgium, a bit in the Netherlands and funnily enough, Poland, which I’ve never been to but I keep getting emails from. But it’s all people who’ve discovered me themselves; it’s certainly not because of any promotion that’s been done. What’s strange is that the lack of help that I’ve received in one way has been quite cool in that I’m never under pressure to do anything. That’s one of the advantages of being 46. The hardest part is when you’re in that mid-range, in your 30’s, you’re not a young cute thing and you’re not old, but when you get older it’s like you get young boys respecting you. I’m really looking forward to being 60!

SISSY: What effect (if any) do you think the internet has had on music?

SANDY: Huge!! The internet means that artists like myself no longer have to worry about mundane things that aren’t a part of what we are trying to do. Meetings that used to HAVE to happen can now be totally avoided. I owe a lot to the internet for getting my music around the world in a way that no record label would have done for me… the control of radio/tv. Popularity is all meaningless now, because people can find the sound that’s relevant to them via internet. Also, I have now been making records with various people via the internet, some I have met, some I have never met… except through music down the wire… its a good way to represent yourself as there’s no need for any social crap so you can get straight through to raw self expression. It’s interesting, as initially I thought… ‘Oh, I ain’t one of those computer types!!’ I ‘m still fairly acoustic in my approach to everything from getting out of bed to recording live, albeit most of it with judicious amounts of DISTORTION! I recommend distortion as usually the answer to everything; your song, your life… exaggerate anything to the point of destruct-deconstruction and clarity will be revealed. I like working with other artists who aren’t afraid to push the buttons. Sometimes, forward thinking business people can be like that too, and they help realize a lot of creativity.

SISSY: Do you like to use any particular music software?

SANDY: I can only list my hardware: drills, saws, the metal and formica bits from kitchen units, oil drums, and some gaffer tape. I remain slightly old fashioned.

SISSY: Do you have a website or myspace page you’d like to plug, also when was the most recent album released?

SANDY: I do have a myspace but only just remembered the password so I can update it now. I also now have a website: www.sandydillon.com and if you go there and see the Links page, there are some great ‘unofficial’ sites that are actually official. I never did get that… one done by a Belgian guy called Jerome Smeets and another guy called Irwin in Holland. My ‘official’ site is new, and I haven’t had much time to devote to it yet. I plan to release film and other works not available on One Little Indian, my UK record label; stuff that is too weird for them. Although I have to say they were the first and only label to fund and release my work commercially without asking me to ‘clean up my room’, so to speak. Soon I am hoping to work with a guy called Chris the Sparkleboy and his friend Eric…I met them while on tour with Robert Love, aka Larry Love from Alabama 3. He also sang/wrote with me on my latest release called Pull the Strings, produced by David Coulter and Ken Thomas. It was released at the end of April 2006, and I did the Ghost Flight tour (named after Rob’s new solo album) with Rob and another labelmate Jeff Klein prior to that. This fall I’ll be promoting Pull the Strings in Europe, which is mainly where I gig these days.

SISSY: You’ve done duets with people in the past… who would you like to duet with in the future?

SANDY: I love duets. On Pull the Strings there is a song I sing with Rob called ‘Why?’ its one of my favourites on the album; it’s just voices and harmonium. The artist I would like to duet with in the future is definitely Ed Harcourt… his album The Beautiful Lie (Heavenly) and his other work with The Wild Boars is fab!! I love Ed. I think a co-write/duet with him would be a musical dream come true

SISSY: Would you like to mention any other future plans?

SANDY: I have a vague sound plan for my next recording of a group of songs concerning women who are or have been shipwrecked………..distorted rigging will feature!!! give me enough rope to…..

Check out www.sandydillon.com or myspace.com/sandydillon for more information.