into these new songs. But Michael felt he wanted to do something
less minimalistic and so that was the end of that lineup.
Robert’s parents had a little Hammond organ in the extension.
It had a rhythm machine on it that played very simple beats. It had
bass pedals and a keyboard, so Robert used to record rudimentary
demos on it. We’d have a listen and say, “OK, maybe it shouldn’t be
a bossa nova beat...” We’d jam through a song for an hour, see
what came out of it.
I remember rehearsing “A Forest”. I had the title. I thought as a
name for a song, it was kind of different. Robert had some words
already, so we married those together. We just wanted something
that sounded a bit like early krautrock – which I was a great fan of
- with a very mechanical, motorik beat. “A Forest” has this very
hypnotic quality, where it sounds like it’s moving, but it also
sounds like it’s standing completely still, which
we really liked. More than that, it was about us
recognising our limitations. It was very simple,
and that simplicity became our great strength.
By the time we came to Seventeen Seconds, we
had a new band. There was me and Robert, and
then Simon Gallup on bass and Matthieu
Hartley on keyboards. We’d bump into Simon
around town, then in the pub, and we’d go and
see his punk band, the Magspies. Matthieu was
his friend. We all shared the same thoughts
about living in Crawley, so it seemed a natural
progression for them to join the band. Your
friends from the pub are the people you’d
prefer to work with, if you could.
We decided we were going to record
Seventeen Seconds all ourselves. We’d
made Three Imaginary Boys with [manager]
Chris Parry at the desk. It was OK, but it
wasn’t completely us, so Robert said,
“Chris, we’re gonna do it ourselves. You’re
welcome to come and listen every few
days, but you might leave with your ears
bleeding...” We were very enthusiastic about
doing the production. Meeting Mike Hedges
onthefirstalbumwas very fortuitous,
JULY 2019 • UNCUT• 79
because he was young for an engineer, only three years older
than us, and he understood what we were trying to do. I’d sit
there with Hedges, listening to Robert in the studio singing,
then we’d all listen back to the sessions, commenting and
exchanging ideas. Essentially, we were a whole production
team. We spent a lot of time making very elaborate tape loops
with pencils stuck on top of mic stands! It all worked.
Our songs were getting more escapist, more abstract. Funnily
enough, a little while ago I wrote to Robert. I told him I’d been
looking around on Google and walking down some of the
streets where we used to live, and it struck me very forcefully
that the actual physical place – the greenery of the trees, the rain,
those streets – inspired a lot of our songs. It was no surprise that we
made that kind of music, because we lived in a very muted, very
grey place. We just reflected back what we saw around us!
The darker element of the songs? We were partly drawn to a
certain type of literature [see panel]. But we were responding to
what was going on around us – the political and social unrest in
England at the end of the ’70s. Instead of thinking, ‘Oh, the world’s
all great and lovely, we’ll sing love songs,’ we realised, ‘No, it’s not
so great and lovely...’ GABOr SCOtt/redFernS; BOB KInG/redFernSIn Australia on
the band’s first
wo rl d to u r,
Au g u st 1980The Seventeen
Seconds lineup,
1980: (l–r) Lol
Tolhurst, Matthieu
Hartley, Robert
Smith, Simon Gallup“yO u r FrI e n dS
FrOM the PuB
Are the OneS
yO u ’ d Pr e Fe r
tO WOrK WIth”