History is filled with creative artists whose cultural influence far outstrips the number of records they’ve sold, and when it comes to the last thirty years of popular electronic music, Sydney-based band Severed Heads certainly make that list.
While the arena-straddling likes of Trent Reznor and Orbital have praised the band as a pivotal influence over the years, apart from perennially remixed dance favourite ‘Dead Eyes Opened’, Severed Heads haven’t really had a ‘hit’, remaining a cult/underground act in the eyes of many listeners. That said, the above factor is perhaps at least partially due to Severed Heads’ refusal to remain stylistically in the one place or repeat covering the same predictable ground. Over their lifespan they’ve been linked with a multitude of divergent scenes ranging from industrial through to noise, post-punk, synth-pop and ambient. It’s telling also that Severed Heads fans are humorously termed ‘Cliffords’ – a reference to the band’s retrospective collection Clifford Darling Please Don’t Live In The Past – a statement that could perhaps describe the band’s ever-shifting nature alone.
Throughout the last thirty years a number of different collaborators including Garry Bradbury, Loop Orchestra founder Richard Fielding and late dance producer Robert Racic have passed through Severed Heads’ shifting lineup, with founder Tom Ellard remaining the sole constant member. In many senses, it’s also Ellard’s early integration of computer generated visuals that set the standard for other artists to follow, with the animations just as crucial to any Severed Heads performance as the musical elements. Given the band’s cultural and artistic significance, it certainly seems appropriate that this year’s ‘Circa 1979′ post-punk retrospective as part of the Sydney Festival saw Ellard presenting a talk at the Seymour Centre, as well as a recent well-attended farewell Severed Heads show at the Hyde Park barracks that marked the official end of the band as an entity after three decades of creative activity.
With Severed Heads’ farewell live set at the Hyde Park Barracks just a few weeks in the past at the time of this interview session, one of the first things I’m curious to ask Ellard about concerns the challenges faced by a band with such an extensive and stylistically diverse back-catalogue when selecting material for a one-off farewell set. Given the strict limitations of a one hour live performance, were there tracks that he would’ve liked to include or emphasise that he was forced to leave out, and vice versa? As it turns out, Ellard’s response is firmly in keeping with the opinions expressed recently during his talk for the Circa 1979 series regarding artificially manufactured ideas of nostalgia for ‘classic eras.’
“What was important was that old and new are not different,” he argues. “Whether 1982 or 2002 should not matter, the date a track was written has no bearing on the quality of the music, but that’s how it gets described far too often by rock historians and I despise that kind of thinking which makes no sense in the confused culture of 2010. So we put tracks next to each other that were written 20 years apart and said – look it’s all one. A demonstration of timelessness, which I think is exactly the current issue in music.”
I suggest that this issue of ‘classic eras’ must be something that comes up quite often for an act that’s moved through such distinct stylistic phases over its thirty year long existence, shifting from the early tape-based noise experimentation of albums like Since The Accident through to the more pop/dance-based tracks of the early nineties like ‘Greater Reward’ and ‘All Saints Day’. Indeed, over the years, I’ve heard a multitude of descriptions applied to Severed Heads ranging from industrial through to pop, noise and post-punk, all of which seem to only describe very limited aspects of the band’s work. Does he find these genre tags restrictive or frustrating?
“Genre tags are disgusting filth,” Ellard replies. “Why in God’ name are they attached to everything except as some aid to the terminally dull? It’s something that now is institutionalised via MP3. I’ve said this before, but the moment somebody decides you’re a “dance’ band they criticise you for being insufficiently “dance’. Replace “dance’ with any term you like – same backwards need to conform and compartmentalise music into little boxes. We refused to stay put and people put us down because we were never “dance enough’, “industrial enough’, “experimental enough’ or whatever term they wanted to use as their straightjacket. Just plain wrong.
“And history is bunk. There was no “sixties’ or “eighties’. There’ no such thing as “classical music’. It’s all manufactured by people that need to box things in retrospect. Beethoven’ music is as fun now as it was when first played.”
As a longtime Severed Heads listener, I’d had the initial impression from statements made by Ellard on his website and blog that the band had quietly ceased to exist as an entity sometime in 2008/early 2009 (a perception reinforced further by the ‘Severed Heads 1979-2009′ inscription displayed at the end of the Barracks set). The very concept of a farewell show also doesn’t immediately seem in keeping with an artist so critical of dwelling on the past. Was a farewell set something that he’d always intended to do prior to the Sydney Festival, or was it a case of the surrounding Circa 1979 event making it a more interesting proposition?
“The only reason we came back for that show was that it was a genuine enquiry from some young people that had missed out on the era and wanted to see if it was important for their own ideas,” Ellard explains. “Signal to Noise was not old people celebrating their lost youth, whining about the present – those were the sort of people that made me shut it all down in 2008. I really hated Severed Heads at that time, I still find it tedious, but when asked politely and with mutual respect, we were happy to do it one more time. Now of course the backbiting, cynical old BS is raining down again, but they can’ touch it. Severed Heads is dead,†he emphasises. “Maybe we put that on display like Chairman Mao – but it’s not going to get up.”
“Honestly it was due to Sarah and a few helpers at Modular who looked at the whole thing fresh and made it happen just right. They weren’ doing it for the business – this was nothing to do with Modular, but the company kicked in here and there to make it happen. I just advised, but when it came down to it, it was just mutual respect at work.”
Throughout the Barracks set, one of the things that was immediately apparent was the updated nature of many of the older tracks such as ‘Harold & Cindy Hospital’ and ‘Greater Reward’, with the reworked sonic elements being matched with retooled versions of the accompanying visuals, the latter track’s digitally rendered dancing bats being a key example. Was much of this material prepared especially for the farewell show?
“We were asked to perform in Belgium a few years ago (2005’s Bimfest) and the promoter contracted for there to be a lot of old tracks in there, which is common in Europe,” Ellard explains. “I was prepared to do this so long as they could be expressed in a recent voice and that was OK with Antwerp. What you got in 2010 was a continuation of that show concept. Old track, up to the minute version. At the front of the show the audience were given the lock off date – December 2009. Same as when you buy a tin of dog food, you want it fresh and you look at the use by date.
“Most of the ideas in those clips are now traditional to us. ‘Greater Reward’ has used the same dancing bats for 22 years, just remade. The robot people in ‘Firefly Overlocker’ are nine years old. The biggest thing technically was making all the clips high definition widescreen. Many of the assets were made for old TV and some of the clips took months to rebuild from the basic parts. But if you are truly alive, you grow. And having critiqued Kraftwerk for being a travelling decaying museum built in 1991, it was up to me to prove that there’ a better way.”
On that particular note, I’m curious to find out more about Ellard’s reasons for drawing Severed Heads to a close after thirty years of steady activity. Does this mean that all of the music he releases from this point onwards will be under his own name, rather than a ‘band’ entity or alias?
“By using my name I declare that I am a person,” he affirms. “The day I quit was when I realised that people treated me like a utility company – something to ring up and abuse and say whatever nasty thing that came into their mind because hey, it’s not a person, it doesn’ have feelings. Seeing as one of the reasons the band continued was to gather like-minded souls, it was a failure. It found some, but these good people didn’ need to go through all that band/fan garbage and it was better to drop that and just relax.”
“Also, despite the nice big farewell, the previous decade was pretty bad. We struggled and we struggled, but very few people cared. When people say that the gig was great and we should do it again – maybe they don’ realise we did lots of great gigs that were not noticed. Tom Ellard is just getting old and wants to say goodbye to the 16-year-old that started all that band stuff.”
“The back catalogue will continue to be available (on Ellard’s www.sevcom.com website) and as inexpensive as I can make it,” he continues. “More of the albums are coming out in the UK. Sevcom will continue to offer a view of the past, and my own site will offer a view of what is coming, and always try to be not too sensible.”
When I interviewed Ellard a few years ago around the time of the Illustrated Family Doctor soundtrack/DVD, he’d mentioned that he thought CD albums were over and that he was far more interested in exploring DVD albums in the future. I ask whether this still an avenue that he’s interested in exploring with reference to projects such as his upcoming Aerodrom audio photo novel.
“CD albums are over, and I struggle to find the replacement,” Ellard replies. “I love wheels – Blu-ray is the latest – because I am old. But maybe wheels aren’ it either, given that most culture is being sent over torrents. So many people claim to do good by providing other people’ music for free online, including mine. It’s kind of uninspiring to go to a blog and see praise heaped on some guy for offering something for which I dared ask five dollars at my site – I guess they are the real artists now.”
“Right now Aerodrom is stuck because there’ just so much other work to do. But for my work (teaching game design) I am playing a lot of adventure games released over the last 35 years and trying to accumulate the wisdom of it all. When I can get to it I hope to be a complete guru.”
I’m also keen to find out more about an upcoming video project he’s mentioned online called Umami that would select the highlights of an entire day’s TV programming and then compile it into a mix based on various pre-set parameters – and from the sounds of things, it’s something that’s exactly as conceptually complicated as it first sounds.
“Oh, that’s horribly complex,” Ellard confirms. “It’s turned into a doctorate and the hard part is this – what makes a “highlight’? What makes something “interesting’? If you had a machine that watched TV all day and then compressed and recalled the highlights into a vision mix all night – wouldn’ that machine be something that dreams? I have had to back away from Umami which is really John Jacob’ idea. I am trying to start with something that orders video according to a simplistic model of depth psychology. Then perhaps it can recall these according to a “train of thought’s – really a vector drawn though a multidimensional space. I have to start with very simple models of the idea.”
Given Ellard’s earlier comments regarding balancing his creative audiovisual activities with television and soundtrack work and a day job as a university lecturer, he’s certainly got his hands full. In closing, I ask whether he could ever see himself being in a band again in the future. In many senses, the answer is pretty much exactly the one I was expecting.
“No one is in a band anymore – everyone is a label,” Ellard explains in parting. “I just want to enjoy music the way I did before it all became so scrutinised by uptight critics. Maybe that means just recording for myself and never releasing any music again, but that somehow seems like I’m trying to be snobby. So perhaps, recording music and then dumping it on a torrent, saying that it’s really somebody else I’m pirating. That might be fun.”
Severed Heads’ five CD retrospective collection Adenoids and the rest of the band’s backcatalogue is available through www.sevcom.com
