(…breathes out a contented and somewhat smug sigh…)
The covers album! Oh, I love a covers album.
Whether we are talking about a group tackling another’s album in its entirety, Pussy Galore’s ‘Exile on Main Street’, or a few artists re-visiting a classic; Decaer Pinga and Glands of External Secretion tearing a new hole for ‘Tubular Bells’, the covers album rules.
Like many things, I can trace this back to my teenage skintness. The covers album, like the compilation album was a safe bet when you were broke. You knew the songs, or could have a decent guess at the style. There was often a bunch of bands on them, I’m thinking of ‘The Bridge: a tribute to Neil Young’ in particular so even if a few of them sucked you could always goof-off to some new found weirdness. It made the expensive hobby of buying records and discovering music just a little bit more economical.
So I’m delighted and excited to see this album of ‘classic’ covers from Neil Campbell. What have we got here? Led Zepplin, The Beatles, Bob Dylan! My gosh, my mind is in clanking rotation to hear Neil’s gummy thumbprints on the songs that made my childhood.
But wait a minute. Before I dive in I think it’s wise we turn our attention to the man himself. Here’s another extract from my long-ass, boozy chat with Neil back in 2023….
While I’ve got you here Neil I’d like to ask you more about your ‘is not here’ tape
It’s not me. (Laughs uproariously) It’s obviously not me.
Err…who is it? (confused)
I don’t know. I mean it’s called ‘Neil Campbell is not here’ right? A great title.
I thought you were being all conceptual about it. So it’s not you singing? Damn…I didn’t twig at all.
(Laughs) It goes back to the late 80’s and we were round a friend’s house and someone produced this tape from a mysterious friend-of-a-friend called Sid and said, “you’ve got to listen to this it’s fucking rubbish.”
He put it on and I figure the guy on the tape is really trying, fingering the guitar chords, but it’s all so massively out of tune. It’s both great and hilarious. We got them to run us off a copy and then we’d make copies to send to other friends and play at soirees as background music as it was so funny. We must have played it when Jeff (Editors note: Jeff Fuccillo – the Union Pole boss) was over, having a drink, and Jeff loved it and said ‘we should put this out and say it’s you’ (huge laughs). And it’s kind of believable as I have a terrible singing voice.
One-eyed Neil (photo cribbed from internet)
What’s happening on the cover art? What have you been up to?
I was up in Edinburgh staying with Sticky Foster and we’d planned to record with Dylan and Lisa (Prick Decay) in this rehearsal studio. So we went in and played and recorded and, for some reason the session was booked under my name, but when we came out there was no one there to pay, no one to give any money to, so we just left. Then I realised they had Sticky’s phone number so he wrote the note to tell his flatmates to deny all knowledge of any Neil Campbell staying here. When I was going back home I grabbed the note because it was so funny and things all came together when Jeff was staying with me. I gave him the note as artwork for the ‘is not here’ tape like it was a found object.
Aesthetically I like the idea of the found object; both the tape and cover are found objects. In the same way Astral Social Club and Vibracathedral Orchestra are found names, found objects. They are all stolen or appropriated.
Neil’s ‘These Premises Are No Longer Bugged’ album (Fusetron)
My first solo album, ‘These Premises Are No Longer Bugged’, came from a big sign that I used to pass every day on my bus to work, on an abandoned washing machine factory. What did it mean? Why were the premises bugged in the first place? There was something gnarly and British about it which I really liked.
There was lots of that gritty British psychedelia about at the time, I’m thinking of the Midlands and Stoke scene in particular.
Yeah – just think of the name ‘Ashtray Navigations.’ Phil Todd had that gritty grime in spades!
As more drinks arrive we dive down a little rabbit hole talking about Goth music as I know Neil’s loves The Virgin Prunes and the March Violets.
Was Goth another gateway to you?
(long pause) Not really, as soon as ‘Goth’ became a thing and had a name I was out. And it certainly wasn’t important to me musically. I loved the disparateness of post-punk. Those early Rough Trade records included things like James Blood Ulmer and Sun Ra. It wasn’t just four white guys with guitars. I think the cut-off for me was The Sisters of Mercy’s first album. I never liked it. The early singles were fine but the album wasn’t right. It felt like they let all the squares in, all the Led Zepplin fans, it wasn’t just us wierdos any more (laughs).
How do you feel about looking back at the work you’ve made in the past?
I’m not opposed to it. It’s not like I was in a Top Ten band and now I’m ‘just’ doing this. In fact I think I’m still in the same place (much laughter).
And what a glorious place that is!
It’s not bad (laughs). It’s alright. I feel what I am doing now still keeps me engaged and the upside is you don’t think your glory days are behind you!
You are a pretty prolific artist, how important is being prolific to you?
Being prolific comes with the territory. My music doesn’t take that long to make and I like to work quickly. It’s not like I’m the Beach Boys making ‘Smile’. I play and improvise live to 2-track so amass quite a lot of material. Then cutting it down becomes the problem. I guess I could be more prolific! (laughs) I’m recording all the time and sometimes it’ll occur to me, ‘this all sounds like a thing, maybe someone else would like to hear it’ so I’ll turn that into a release. My set-up changes all the time and I’m often thinking of different ways to make sound or use a piece of equipment and that’s the puzzle, that’s what keeps things interesting.
Where is Neil I wonder? (photo – writers own stash)
Now, knowing what I know, I creep carefully into my listening pod with this tape.
It is, as Neil says, pretty terrible. The fact that this mystery guy is so ‘almost’ there makes things even more awkward and uncomfortable. I mean, he gets the words right. And he’s an OK singer. A bit middle-England and flat but that’s no crime.
But the guitar isn’t even playing an approximation of the tune. It slices at approximate slack strings, buzzing and strumming in any direction at once, all the time. The rhythm is a lead weight, so far from any notion of swing Duke Ellington is spiralling in his ermine-lined grave.
The Beatles’ songs seem to bring out desperation in our mystery guy. It’s as if the magical optimism of ‘Penny Lane’ is such an affront he drains the childhood dream and fills the memory with rancid shit. ‘Eleanor Rigby’ is pretty maudlin in the first place but bloody hell, this chap takes the cake, squeezing out any poetry like its so much dirty dishwater. It’s almost unspeakably awful.
In many ways I should love this. At points it could be the unhinged spluttering of someone like Jandek? It’s free, wild and naive and without a shadow of pretention. But…there is something about the relentless earnestness that gives me the creeps.
You have been warned!
Behold the lies! Neil (not Neil) is available to download for $1 (not $1)…https://unionpoletapes.bandcamp.com/album/is-not-here-up53
OR…you can download the whole damn Union Pole discography of 76 tapes for $5 here. Don’t be cheap!
It won’t surprise you to learn that I often make mistakes! Please leave a comment below if you spot a mistake in the blog or have a tale to tell to drive this Union Pole story forward. Everyone is invited on this ride.
One response to “Neil Campbell – Is Not Here (UP53)”
-
[…] This was all recorded at the Digital Music Lab at Lewis and Clark University in Portland, Oregon where Ryan was a student. This was when digital was a new thing (laughs)! I think I had just moved to Portland at this point, or it may have been in my last few weeks in Olympia. It was after I came back from the UK because the Neil Campbell ‘…is Not Here’ tape came out before this did. (Editor’s note: read all about Neil’s tape in the last post UP53). […]
LikeLike
All my ideas are stolen 
Leave a comment