Interview: The Phantom menace

Published on Friday 19 December 2008 15:05

GLASGOW-BASED SEXTET THE Phantom Band are a good advert for perseverance. Formed through a web of ties between university friends, old schoolmates and casual acquaintances, it's taken them until now to finally meet with any kind of recognition – the first month of 2009 will see their debut album released on Chemikal Underground, a full seven years after the band got together.

"It's weird to think about that," says singer and guitarist Rick Anthony. "Seven years is more than a lifetime for some bands. We weren't always the Phantom Band, though, and we weren't even gigging at first. It took us two years before we played low-key shows at places like the 13th Note and the Bon Accord bar, and then we never even had a settled name – we were called Son Of and Robert Redford, among other things."

Anthony, from Aberdeen, reports that the addition of synthesiser player Andy Wake to the line-up (that's Anthony, guitarists Duncan Marquis and Greg Sinclair, drummer Damian Toner and bassist Gerry Hart, all of whom are 30, give or take a year, and from Aberdeen, Dundee or Lanarkshire) and the decision to scrap most of their old material, saw the Phantom Band born around three and a half years ago.

"It's hard to describe what we sounded like," says Anthony. "I would say we were still a rock band, but we played a more earnest, traditional kind of rock when we started out. It was OK for what it was, but it was also, I don't know, boring. It just wasn't very inventive, and we got bored of playing all the same songs over and over. It came to a head at the Bon Accord one night, we had a freak out and Duncan said, let's just scrap all these songs and never play them again."

What happened next involved "improvising noise for half an hour to the bemused patrons of the Bon Accord bar on a Friday night". That isn't quite what they've ended up doing, but still the album Checkmate Savage thrives on a richly varied style that's a world away from dull heritage rock. It blends Krautrock, prog, psychedelic folk and a heavy dose of early analogue electronica. The band enjoys the music of "risk-takers" like Captain Beefheart, says Anthony, although his preference is for auteurs Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Tom Waits, Nick Cave and, incongruously, Prince.

"We've found a way of working which generates much more interesting music," he says. "Before we'd think, right, we have to write a song, to construct one which does this and that. Now we work organically, jamming in the studio, just feeling around for ideas and building in parts we've worked on before until we have a piece of music worth pursuing. Because there are six of us with very different influences all pulling in different directions, sometimes these jams fall apart and sometimes they work perfectly."

The jamming method, though, is often criticised as a hippyish relic and the absolute antithesis of sleek, modernist pop music. How do the Phantom Band find the middle ground, and then turn these rough pieces into an album full of songs?

"It's more about trying to play something which we find interesting, if that's not too much of a cop-out," says Anthony. "If something about what we're working on is interesting enough that we want to play it through a few times and then develop it further, that's enough for us. A lot of songs on the album are pieced together from different tracks we've been working on; I think if anyone had said to us that one day we'd manage to record an album's worth of songs this way, we'd have been surprised.

"We recorded with Paul Savage in Chem19 (ex-Delgado Savage is producer at Chemikal Underground's studio], and he watched this process, he saw us become more able to focus our ideas into coherent pieces of music. The guys at Chemikal came to see us play a few shows after this, then told us they'd like to make an album with us".

What Anthony calls "the puzzle" – the challenge of committing their sound to record – started there. He finds it strange to have written songs and recorded them for posterity shortly afterwards, instead of allowing them to change and mutate over the months. Will the band be able to stop experimenting now that they have supposedly "final" versions in the bag.

"I'm not sure people actually want to hear exactly what they've already heard on an album at a live show," says Anthony. "As far as we're concerned, the last version we've played of a song is the definitive one."

Anthony won't be drawn on the doubtless in-jokey nature of the album title, only muttering something vague about liking "to play chess". It could, in many ways, be seen as a metaphor for his band's tentative but deliberate progress.

&#149 The Phantom Band play the Hot Club at Nice'n'Sleazy, Glasgow, 31 December. Checkmate Savage is released on 26 January.