There is a mystery about the way that certain countries embrace certain bands. Often, they go unrecognised in their native land, yet are feted elsewhere. That is certainly the case with Bristol's Mesh, who are huge in Germany and Scandanavia, yet are still only regarded as a minor act here in the UK. Their 1999 breakthrough second album, 'The Point At Which It Falls Apart', recently remixed and reissued on CD with a deluxe booklet, deserved to launch them into the big league, yet inexplicably failed to do so. That must have hurt, but they remain admirably philosophical about that now. Outsideleft caught up with Mark Hockings and Richard Silverthorn in their keyboard lined studio in Bristol to re-open those old wounds.
Outsideleft: Thanks for taking the time out to talk to Outsideleft. I was actually watching the interview your
live keyboard player Vaughn George did with you on his Youtube channel a little while ago, and I have to say I am a bit annoyed with Vaughn, because he's gone and asked all of the questions I was planning to ask, so what the hell am I going to do now? I might have to sit here asking the same questions, and you giving all the same answers.
Mark: Well, we had better try and give you some very slightly
different answers then!
Outsideleft: Haha. His interview was also called ‘Mesh - Deep Inside’, which I thought sounded more like a porn video and you’d get some interesting people searching for that on YouTube! Moving swiftly on, lets talk about the reissue of ‘The Point at Which It Falls Apart’, the new Special Edition, with the extra book, and remixed album. I've got the original one here, which I bought at the time when it came out, and also the fragile EP as well, which your old third member Neil sent me. I know it's 25 years since it first came out, which is kind of an anniversary, but is there any particular reason for reissuing it now, apart from that?
Rich: When we signed a deal with our label, Dependent, part of the deal was that they were interested in issuing the back catalogue again, because some of this stuff is not available. That then expanded into oh, let's do a different version of it, and a nice booklet. We were on board with that, and because it hit the 25 year period it seemed the right time to do it. it was recorded in almost pre internet days, and all the reviews and things and people have said on Facebook and social media have been amazing, people saying, “Oh, this album is the best album. It got me through such a period in my life” and all those things we just didn't know at the time. We should have done the ‘Fragile’ EP as well though, because that's 30 years old this year, but we didn't get around to doing that, which is a shame. There is talk of re-releasing most of the albums in this kind of box set/booklet format.
Outsideleft: Isn’t there a risk that would define you by your past rather than by your future, as it is looking backwards rather than forwards?
Mark: I don't really worry about that. For us, it's writing new stuff and getting out and doing new stuff. Most of our shows feature the stuff we've written in the last few years. Those are the things that we think sound the best. The next thing is going to be the best thing. That's just the way we write, that's the way we want to produce. That's why it takes us so long to do it.
Outsideleft: It’s been, what, seven years since the last album? Do you think it gets harder to do a new album the longer you leave it?
Mark: Oh yes. Absolutely. It's just very difficult to
find that sweet spot where you feel that you you're moving forward and not just
repeating what you've done before. I think we may be a little bit
unusual in that.
Outsideleft: As you were both
saying earlier, there is definitely a Mesh signature sound, but is that now a barrier to doing something that
sounds different, as you can’t depart too far from the Mesh template and risk
alienating your long term fans?
Rich: I think for me, and I'm not speaking for Mark
here, my lack of musical ability holds me back. I'm not the best musician, I'm
not the best keyboard player, I'm certainly not the best guitarist. I just bash
around and find things that sound great. And you do think “this sounds good”,
but sometimes that can really hold you back, because I haven't got the
knowledge to try something different. I stumble across things, but it is more
like happy accidents. It's not because I know what I'm actually doing! You know
what sounds good, and then you put it together. But sometimes, as I said, I
feel I get to a point where I've reached my limit on what I can actually do. Maybe that’s not true, but that's how it
feels to me, and I think that's what holds me back. Sometimes I will have
worked on something all evening, and then I'll listen to it the next day, and I
think, oh, hang on a minute, these are the same I used three albums ago, and
that's why it worked, but now I can't do that again. So you end up binning it
and starting something else. We both probably struggled with formal musical education a little
bit, so we are very much just trying things and see what happens, and that's a
very good way of working, because you never really know what's going to happen.
Because we are stumbling around to try and find ideas, we do come up with stuff
that fits into what people expect, but also is different to what we did last
time, or is going in a different direction. You know, everyone complains when
an album is not the same as the last one, but give it six months, and then
everyone can’t imagine it being any different. Sometimes I'll drop in what I
think's a good sound. It might be a sample, but does it even hit a note? But
you make it work, and you make it fit in with what you're doing. It is a like a
kind of patchwork quilt, really, putting it all together and hoping it sounds
good when it comes out the other end. Sometimes, there is a bit on the end of a
recording that is not used, but one of us will think “that's quite good. I'll
pick that up and put it in somewhere”.
Outsideleft: There's no
mistakes, they are all just sounds.
Rich: There's no wrong ideas. Sometimes you have to
crowbar it in there a little bit, but we've got our own musical language now and
you get used to it, and then you wonder why you didn't come up with that in the
first place.
Outsideleft: A lot of bands,
when they get to a certain point, and not just electronic bands, but other
bands as well, start to do collaborations with other artists, who are sometimes
quite different to them. They'll take an ethnic musician or violinist or
someone like that, and they'll start working with them because the difference
in style actually gives them inspiration. Haven’t you ever considered saying “Okay,
I'm going to get a Sitar player in. We're going to find one, and we're going to
use that as inspiration for creating new music?
Mark: One of the problems with something like that is, although it's a great idea, and I think it would work really well, you have to organise a scheduled writing session, and we haven't done that for quite a long time. With the technology we use, it's very difficult to run a session like that to do it. Sometimes during the mixing process, we get other people involved in it. It's good to be challenged and have someone else to say I don't think that's working, or, you might think it sounds great, but I don't, I just don't think it works in the context of the album or the song. To be brutally honest with you, and actually challenge you and push you and make you argue with them and stuff like that, to get a bit of a rise out of you, but also to make you defend every track and think through what you are doing. That’s one of the benefits of being on a label as, particularly in Germany, you have to get used to taking fairly harsh, brutal, criticism. And you just have to take it. If you want to get insulted about any kind of musical output, just give it to a German record label, and they'll find something to say about it that will cut you to the core!
I use a guitar quite a lot to write, as you end up with something
very different when you do that. You almost can’t avoid writing a song if you
use a guitar, it's very difficult to mess it up, really. If I start with a
synth, I'll usually struggle. If I start with something electronic, I usually
struggle when it comes to writing a song with it.
Outsideleft: The biog that came with the original promo copy
I have from 1994 opens with a bit of a moan, going on about labels who said
they'd sign you and didn't, and their A&R man left, and nobody knew where
they were, and so on. Has that been a
bit of a theme over the years, with the music industry ignoring or bypassing or
underrating you? Doesn’t that make you bitter after all this time?
Rich: Honest answer – yes! We always tried our best
to kind of get noticed. That's part of the job, isn't it? I mean, you write
music because you like writing music, but at the end and end of the day, you
want it out there, and you want people to recognise it and like it, and
certainly want record companies behind you. So yes, there is resentment that
we've had to do it the hard way, but maybe that's made us who we are.
Mark: It’s been a good thing in in some respects, because
we're self-reliant now, although we need the record company to put the records
out, and that's great. As Rich said, we've had to do it the tough way. We might
have got a bit more support if things have gone slightly differently, we're
feeling we're quite in quite a good position, I think, to keep making music.
We're not, we're not relying on anyone really to do it.
Outsideleft: I think that helps you to remain friends as
well, because some bands get a lot of success and money early on, and they all
seem to drift apart, don't they?
Rich: I think if you get mega famous, there's probably a whole new set of pressures that come with that. Money probably is one of them. It's quite intense, I guess. We've had to make our own way through it a little bit. That's not to say we haven't had any help, because we have, and we've done very well. We're in that sort of middle ground where, you know, we're not unknown, and we're not mega famous. We're kind of sitting in the middle there somewhere, which is actually quite nice in many respects, and maybe it does us a favour that they have never moulded us. Too many record companies want to push you in in a certain direction and they start changing things and moulding you to fit into categories and all that kind of shit. I think we remained true to ourselves, and we do what we want to
Outsideleft: The music industry
doesn’t seem to values musicians and they do seem to treat them really badly.
Most of the time, a lot of people I speak to are fighting against their record
company as much as working with them. You're
self-reliant and have a DIY attitude towards things but that must mean a lot of
work for you to do live as well, without that industry back up behind you.
Rich: Yeah, both of us work very hard for the live
stuff. It all has to be reprogrammed for
live. All the video stuff, even the software that runs the stage, is written in
house. We do all that, so we don't really rely on anyone. We have a lighting
guy, sound engineers, on the day, but essentially, what is coming out the
speakers, and what you see is, is what we've done. I think we've made a rod for our own back to
be honest, because even in the early days, we were always trying to do things
with back projections and that now has moved on to video. So we have to do it. It
would be not a Mesh show without that, as it has become part of what people
expect.
Outsideleft: Mark, Previously, you’ve said you are reluctant
as a vocalist. It’s not something that
you're particularly comfortable with.
Mark: That's true. It's always been the case. I never
wanted to do it in the first place. It was only supposed to be a stop gap,
really, ‘till we found someone else. I mean, I like singing, and I like doing
the records, but being the front man and having that responsibility, I’m always
slightly on the edge of stress with it. It isn’t my natural habitat, put it
that way, but it's just one of those things that's happened. it kind of works. I
think people sense I'm not 100% comfortable with it, but maybe that gives it a
bit of bit of extra tension when you're watching it
Outsideleft: You both still live and work in Bristol. Do you
think yourself as a Bristol band, a local band made good?
Mark: I'm a very proud Bristolian, but there's part of me that thinks we were kind of ignored by the whole Bristol scene at the time. All anybody ever wanted to talk about at the time was bloody Massive Attack and Portishead and the bands that made it. Then there was Ronnie Size, and the whole drum & bass and jungle thing, and everybody else was kind of brushed aside. Because we were doing electronic music, and that wasn't what all those bands were doing, it got brushed aside a bit by the press. That is why we escaped to go other places.
Outsideleft: Your biggest audience is in Germany, isn't it, and on continental Europe, rather than in the UK?
Rich: Scandinavia and Germany, and we've been to America. We did a tour across America, and it was quite good. I wouldn't say we are massive over there by any stretch, but I think we have our global audience. Certainly, Europe has been really, really good to us. We just followed where our labels have been. We were signed by a Swedish label, and then by a German label, it just makes it easier to get known in those countries. There seems to be a different attitude to us over there. When we started, it was quite difficult to get a small club to go and play in the UK that that had any decent facilities. It was all very different in in Scandinavia, all very different in Germany. There were small clubs who didn't treat you like you shouldn't be there. It just all seemed to make a lot more sense. You know, we could do a little tour, and as we got slightly bigger in Germany, there's loads of clubs of about 500 people to 1000 who had showers, and they gave us breakfast. We used to always tag a couple of UK dates on the end of a tour, so we’d had three weeks in in Europe being treated like Gods, then we go back to the UK and we get “Dave, the sound engineer has got the keys, and he's not turning up till four o'clock. Then when you get in there's nothing, no drinks even, and it's really shit in comparison, and this is why we gravitated towards Europe. It was out of necessity, really. People were offering us tours and we just went and did it, whereas over here, it was just a struggle to get anything organized. It seems weird that it was easier to do it a couple of 1000 miles away than it was to do it on our own front doorstep.
Mark: We both still have jobs here. I mean, we're just normal
people doing normal things, apart from being rock stars on the weekend. When we got signed by Sony, they offered us a
shitload of money, and we went, right, okay, this, this is it. This is how you
become a pop star. But the harsh reality of that is it starts running out. So
we got to a point where we said, well, we can either just run it down until
we've got no money left, or we keep what we've got and go back to work part
time and run the two together. And we're still doing that now. We have day jobs
and we do the Mesh thing at the same time, so there isn't a lot of time to do
other things. Much as I'd like to have a go at doing a remix for someone else every
so often, generally it's just working on our own things.
Outsideleft: Music technology has moved on
enormously since you started. Its developed to the stage where non musicians
can produce very professional sounding recordings just by stitching samples
together and putting it out on Bandcamp, or through a streaming platform. Does
that make you think what's the point? If it's so easy for everybody to do this,
what are we doing here, trying to do this the hard way?
Rich: There's some incredible programs now that clean
up noise from recordings. They're intelligently pulling out the noise from
recording and leaving everything else untouched. AI is finding those
frequencies in there and reconstructing it. It's quite incredible. I've got a
synth that you can put a sample into it, and it analyses it, and it spits out an
oscillator model of that sample. So you've got a synth that plays the sample,
but it's modelled that sample using oscillators so you can easily change how it
sounds. That’s incredible, absolutely amazing.
Outsideleft: But are they
your ideas, or AI’s ideas?
Mark: I could get AI to
write me 50 verses that all rhyme and all are all syncopated together, but
there won't be a single line there that's usable, not when it comes down to it.
It all looks very impressive and sounds very impressive, but when you actually
try and use any of this stuff, it really doesn't work very well, but it is
giving you a good big list of ideas that you can that you can work on. So, it’s
a tool you can use. It's giving you lots of different ideas, but that's
probably no different from having a big sample library and going through them.
Outsideleft: I'd agree. One
of the things about AI is although I could say “write me a song in the style of
Mesh”, and it would probably do a decent job of it, it couldn't go out and do a
gig or a performance and things like
that. Do you think that the live side of it is now becoming really key to bands
being able to make a living out of doing these things, or make some money, themselves, because Spotify are taking most of the money out of everyone’s releases?
Mark: I think that's still where the money is. I think we've also been quite lucky in as much as it's a generational thing in the age group that we're playing to that we've always sold a lot of physical albums. So even now, the re-issue of the second album sold out almost immediately. I think we're quite lucky in that. But, yeah, certainly the live thing is where the money is nowadays. I mean, you don't get any money out of the bloody streaming platforms do you really?
Outsideleft: My final question is about something
that's always dogged you; the comparison with Depeche Mode. Does that annoy you,
the fact that people are still saying that?
Rich: It does me! It's just that lazy journalism, and it
really just pisses me off. Everyone does it just because we're using synthesizers
and samplers. If people said we sound like Depeche Mode because we have really
good songs, well written and well recorded, then I'm fine with that. If they're
saying we sound like Depeche Mode, because we're trying our best to sound like
them, then that’s really irritating. Why would we spend our energy trying to
sound like another band? It makes no sense to me.
Mark: A lot of it depends on your experience with
the electronic music genre as well. There's hundreds of bands that we know of
in what we would call that genre, yet in most people's experience, there's
Yazoo, and there's Depeche Mode, and maybe Human League. And that's really it. They
make that lazy Depeche Mode comparison because they've only got that one frame
of reference.
Outsideleft: Thanks for talking to us today and best of luck with the upcoming German festival dates and recording the new album.
Essential Information: 'The Point At Which It Falls Apart' is available now on CD from Dependent Records
Main image: Mesh at Black Lower Castle Festival 2022. Image by HR Pictures
