The Stool Pigeon

Nick Talbot is standing outside a fast food joint on London’s Oxford Street chowing down on a burger and talking. Mid-sentence a drunk guy lurches into view asking for, or rather demanding, money. Nick says he hasn’t got any and tries to pick up his thread again. “But you’ve got a phone,” says the guy, his voice heavy with implication. Until now, Nick has been the model of politeness and wit, but suddenly, for a moment, he explodes. “Look, just FUCK OFF!” he yells and the guy stumbles off shocked. “That was so rude,” he adds, unconcerned about the subtle threat of violence that was made, just the lack of manners. After the briefest of pauses, he continues like nothing has happened: “Yeah, that’s right, I play pretty much all of the instruments on the album, bar drums, but there’s a heavy amount of computer processing going on as well. There is a certain haunted look that you can see in the face of electronica musicians as they stare into what is just a never ending string of ones and zeroes.”

Gravenhurst are not your run of the mill band.

Formed in 1999 after his friend and musical partner in Assembly, Luke Gale, was killed by a reckless driver, Gravenhurst are named after a Dave Pajo song and also, coincidentally, a small English village. Drummer Dave Collinghurst is the only other full-time member and they’ve just released their new album, The Western Lands, through venerated indie, Warp. There’s a tangible feel of sumptuous quality and classicism to this album, from its gothic (that’s Joy Division and Northanger Abbey, not Cradle of Filth and Buffy the Vampire Slayer) lyricism and sublimely melancholy grain to its unashamed literacy (The Western Lands is a fairly impenetrable novel by the fairly impenetrable author William Burroughs). Gravenhurst are built from contradiction; they use ultra-modern technology to make ancient-sounding noise, yet Talbot pens pastoral sounding odes to modern urban alienation. Their combination of expansive rock, My Bloody Valentine shimmer and electronica caused one friend to quip: “They’re not so much shoe-gazers as screen-gazers.”

Although he is careful not to describe what he does as psycho-geography, Talbot talks keenly about the writing of Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair and how a peculiarly English sense of time and place has informed the album. Talking about the track ‘Grand Union Canal’, he says he’s fascinated by this once mighty transport network that connected all of the major cities that “almost immediately became redundant”. He pauses and adds: “They’re like collapsed veins joining up all these cities. They’re only used by people to go on boating holidays but they’re also fetid. Just full of dead bodies and shopping trolleys.”
Warming to his theme he adds: “I go on about the Northern Line in that song ‘Hour Glass’ and it typifies what can be so lonely about London. You get on it and you’ve pretty much got no idea where you’re going to end up because the whole thing makes no fucking sense. It always stinks, it’s always breaking down, it’s always full of people, and it’s always really hot. It passes through Hades at some point. It’s right down the middle and black, like a diseased spine on the Underground map.

‘Song Among The Pine’ was written for use in a German film Ein Freund Von Mir and, despite the track’s name and bucolic ambience, it is used to soundtrack urban cityscapes at night. The song, which revolves around the theme of pursuit, makes Talbot muse that “it might have been better for humanity if there had been no industrial revolution - everything would be better if we lived in this Arcadian, agrarian society”.

When asked if he agrees with John Gray’s Straw Dogs thesis that mankind has to back away from all of its grand political, religious and social schemes of the last 3000 years; to stop trying to save ourselves so that we can save ourselves, he says: “It’s fascinating. He’s been calling for a coalition of greens and conservatives for years. John Gray is right, but he doesn’t believe in free will; he doesn’t believe in autonomy. He mentions the half-second delay [in Straw Dogs, his 2003 book], which is an experimental finding that makes you think: this just can’t be true. These scientists found that if they flashed up various different disturbing images at your retina very fast, they can measure the galvanic skin response, a stress reaction. They found at a very minute level, your stress reaction would jolt upwards before the brain has chance to recognise the image. The only way you can make sense of this is if causation is happening backwards. He uses this to say that there is no free will, that humanism is just another twisted form of Christianity. He really believes in what he is saying, but you have to go back to David Hume, who also didn’t believe in free will, but said we simply cannot live like that. He would say that he was putting down his pen to go and play backgammon with his friends, rather than sustaining this thought any longer.”

Even in a world with no hope of achievement or progress, there is respite if you choose to take it.

You get the impression that Talbot would sooner talk all day and night about philosophy and literature than discuss anything personal or about his lyrics. (When pushed about why he feels “sick and sad” when he sees Bethnal Green tube station - a reference to the song ‘Hourglass’ - he just says, “It’s a very sad place”.) Perhaps it’s better not to have these things quantified; that the second you observe them, they cease to exist or cease to function properly. But for me, Gravenhurst sound like the final bitter-sweet stage of heartbreak and almost transcendent sense of melancholy that says you’re getting better and will be whole again soon, making you almost crave for the pain again.

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