Interview: St Jude's Infirmary - Close brush with noir

Published on Friday 14 August 2009 14:12

WHEN BANDS TALK ABOUT "DIFFI-cult second album syndrome" they're usually referring to the tricky task of following up a well-received breakthrough record with something even better. For St Jude's Infirmary, however, the term has more serious connotations. It's no coincidence that their sophomore effort, released on 22 August, is entitled This Has Been The Death of Us.

The Edinburgh five-piece made their recording debut in 2006, with the excellent Happy Healthy Lucky Month – a mixture of sad, sweeping epics and rollicking bar-room romps which saw them hailed as Scotland's answer to The Velvet Underground. Riding high after this initial success, the band wasted no time in heading back to the studio to record their next long-player. Even with cameo appearances from celebrity fans Jack Vettriano and Ian Rankin pencilled in, the whole process was supposed to take two weeks. It took more than two years.

"It's been fraught," says singer and guitarist Mark Francis.

"It's been hellish," says bassist, singer and chief songwriter Grant Campbell.

There's a pause, as if the band are trying to decide on a designated speaker – someone to trigger their avalanche of bad news that will inevitably follow. In the end, it's Francis who sets the ball rolling.

"We've had marriage break-ups, six different house moves, two different drummers..."

He trails off and Grant picks up the thread. "It all started off on the first day of recording, when the drumskins were wrong – different sizes that you could only get in America. We spent ages chasing up those drumskins. Then our drummer got chickenpox."

"Then our producer got sick as well," chips in singer and cellist Ashley Campbell.

"Then my wife left me," says Francis, "then we got back together and then she got deported."

"And then," says Grant, "just when we thought things couldn't possibly get any worse, I got cancer. Testicular. I'm fine now though."

"It was a bit like the building of the Scottish Parliament," says Francis. "There were such good intentions, we were all really up for it at the start, but then the whole thing turned into such a soul-destroying venture.

"Now the album's done, though, and it's away getting pressed, you start to remember why you wanted to do it in the first place."

Fans of Happy Healthy Lucky Month won't be disappointed with This Has Been The Death of Us, recorded and produced by Andy Miller (Mogwai, Sons and Daughters). Like their debut, it has the same intoxicating mix of gritty, grinding guitars and swooping, swooning harmonies. It's literate like its predecessor too – Sylvia Plath and Ian Hamilton Finlay are namechecked – yet there are enough hummable hooks that you don't need to try to puzzle out the lyrics. The most surprising thing, given all the trauma, is that many of the songs sound so upbeat. "I don't think it's a gloomy album," says Grant. "We finally had a chance to go into a proper studio so we wanted to make an album where every song was a silver bullet that we'd just shoot from the hip – BANG there's a song, BANG there's a song. When we came in a lot of the songs were really flabby so we cut a lot out of them, just to get to the crux of it. And we were excited, you know, we were given the chance to do this finally and, in spite of the grief and the misery, it all came together."

The other striking aspect of the album is the appearance of Rankin and Vettriano, who lend their voices to Grant's poetry, occasionally to spine-tingling effect. Rankin's voice may be familiar to many, but Vettriano's honey-toned growl is a revelation. "Their sonar's making corpses out of whales," he intones on stand-out track Tacoma Radar, "so the brave, the few, the submariners can prevail".

"Originally Jack was just going to read the poem on Tacoma Radar," says Grant, "but as soon as he'd started on that we were like 'woooooah, that sounds amazing.'"

"Both Jack and Ian were in the studio on the same day," says Francis. "Jack realised that Ian's part was quite a bit longer then his, so I think there was a wee bit of competition. Jack has got a great voice. It's amazing enough in person, but through the speakers in the studio with loads of reverb it sounds like the voice of God. Well, a very Fife God."

Although now based in Edinburgh, St Jude's Infirmary was formed in Kirkcaldy by twins Ashley and Grant Campbell and their cousin Emma-Jane. Francis and drummer Alun Thomas joined later. The group first caught Vettriano's attention in 2006, when they sent him a recording of their song Goodbye Jack Vettriano, written when Grant was feeling homesick in a bar in Rotterdam and saw a Vettriano print on the wall.

The band asked Vettriano if he would appear in a video they were making for BBC Scotland's The Music Show.

Vettriano didn't just agree to appear in their video – a riff on one of his famous beach scenes, played out one rainy day on Edinburgh's Portobello seafront – he also declared his intention to do a painting to go with the song, and the resulting self-portrait will form the cover to the new album.

"The thing with Jack and Ian," says Grant, "is that it's easy to be sniffy and say what they do is populist. But there's a lot more to Jack that the beach stuff. Don't get me wrong, those paintings mean a lot to an awful lot of people – but he's done much better work."

"Him and Ian are both really down to earth," says Emma Jane, "changing their diaries to come and spend a whole day in the studio with us and get driven around in a small bashed-up car with a flat tyre."

St Jude's Infirmary launch their album at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, on 22 August as part of the ongoing Rough Cut Nation exhibit. Visit www.saintjudesinfirmary.com