Mark Pritchard interview: “If you’ve been singing for as long as Thom has, you have to find ways of keeping it interesting”
Tall Tale-telling
Mark Pritchard is no stranger to collaboration. While he’s effectively been flying solo for much of the last two decades (his work alongside Steve Spacek as Africa Hi Tech excluded), the Sydney-based son of Somerset spent most of the first decade of his career conjuring up all manner of sonic treats alongside friend (and fellow West Country electronic music legend) Tom Middleton – most notably as Jedi Knights and Global Communication, but also Chameleon, Secret Ingredients and (from time to time) Reload.
Now he’s embarked on another collaborative project, one that is by far and away his most high-profile yet: a joint album with long-serving Radiohead frontman (and enthusiastic collaborator) Thom Yorke. Entitled Tall Tales and accompanied by an animated film created by one of his most trusted artistic accomplices, illustrator, designer and animator Jonathan Zawada, it’s a breathlessly ambitious project that naturally took years to develop and perfect.
There’s a lot to unpack, that’s for sure. For now, Pritchard is more concerned about the climatic conditions in his adopted country. “It’s unbelievably hot tonight,” he explains down a Zoom call from his home studio. “Really humid, too. I just vacuumed the place and the sweat was dripping off me. That’s Australia.”
Pritchard is getting used to late night and early morning Zoom calls. As you’d expect, interest in Tall Tales is sky-high, and with the accompanying film to promote too (it will be screened in select cinemas worldwide this month), he’s on a seemingly never-ending merry-go-round of interviews. Still, at least he Hoovered for us.
“Getting the film into cinemas was another big mission that we had to work out how to do,” he admits with a smile. “I guess Warp has some experience, as they have the Warp Films division, but it’s not normal to launch a film on the back of a record. Luckily, we got some help from my partner’s brother, who works in film. He suggested a couple of independent distributors and that’s great because I think we would have struggled if we were trying to distribute it ourselves. I can’t remember the exact number of screens it will be in, but it’s between 100 and 200 around the world.”
Zawanda has been working with Pritchard for a long time and it was his idea to create a visual version of the album – itself an idea that has not been explored that much previously. “When Jonathan listened to the music and how varied it is, he asked to create something for each song – though not narrative style music videos, more kind of worlds,” Pritchard explains. “He was doing that in the background for a couple of years, and we weren’t thinking about it being one film, but then when we saw them, everyone thought it worked better that way. Each clip has got something different going on, but I was able to shuffle them round to make a nice flow and then Jonathan developed an idea – a device – to link them together and make more of a sort of arc.”
While the film is certainly notable and visually impressive, with Zawanda exploring a wide range of visual and artistic influences, our concern here is primarily Tall Tales itself – an effortlessly immersive, atmospheric and slowly shifting affair that pairs Pritchard’s love of different rhythms, textures and odd electronic instruments with Yorke’s lyrical dexterity, experimental instincts and desire to use his distinctive and instantly recognisable voice in a dizzying array of different ways. It’s undoubtedly an electronic classic in the making – a set that effectively creates its own unique sound world and ambient-leaning sonic universe.
Pritchard and Yorke have worked together before, of course, with the latter guesting on the gorgeous ‘Beautiful People’ for 2016 album Under The Sun. Time passed and then, one day during the global Coronavirus pandemic, Pritchard received an email from Yorke.
“It was March or April [2020] I think, and Thom sent this email basically saying, ‘it’s a bit of a mad lockdown at home [in the UK], if you have any music that I might be into send it over’. I’d been thinking about my next album and maybe working with different vocalists rather than one, and I thought about maybe making some new tracks just for him. But in the end I sent him lots of different stuff – some almost finished instrumentals, some rough sketches and ideas. I thought he’d probably me more interested in unusual stuff.”
Initially, Pritchard provided Yorke with 20 tracks in various stages of development; within a day, the latter had emailed back asking to work on one of them. “A few days later, Thom emailed me again saying, ‘can I try working on these 14?’ He was obviously excited by the music, I just wanted to know if it was feasible for him to do it as he was working on another album at the time. It took a few months, but he then started sending things back – some had full lyrics, some none, and others just ideas that needed developing. Then stems were exchanged so that he could work on the music as well – take stuff out, add things himself and so on.”
It took a period of years for the album to fully develop, with both men pitching in ideas, swapping things around and trying different approaches. It was, though, a fruitful and enjoyable collaboration – and notably different from many of the ways in which Pritchard had worked in the past.
“It was an interesting process for me,” Pritchard muses. “In the past when I’d worked with vocalists, I’d just do the track and then get them to sing on it – I hadn’t got into pulling things apart to make the song work. It was an amazing challenge to get involved in. To begin with when we were just emailing each other it was harder, but when we switched to Zoom it was much easier to communicate and talk about what we thought a song needed.”
Much credit should go to Yorke, who Pritchard describes as a “very good” collaborator. “There was no bullshit,” he says. “He’s very good at collaborating. I’ve done things with people in the past where it is a bit of a battle of egos, that whole ‘I’m right and you’re wrong’ kind of situation. He was straight up and honest – it was all about finding the best way to get the songs where they needed to be. That was really cool. I’m lucky that I’ve worked with a lot of people like that over the years.”
Given that the pair worked remotely throughout the process, never collaborating in the same room or studio space, how did it compare to his previous joint projects? Pritchard takes a little time to think before answering.
“In the past I’ve been in the studio vibing with people so I did wonder whether it would work,” he says. “But in the end, it wasn’t difficult at all. Maybe it was weird for me because I’d done a lot of the work on the instrumental tracks before we started – it was all music made at different points over the last 10 years that I’d not worked out what to do with or develop. So, I kind of became a producer, engineer and mixer. I still had to write some new parts or change things. I have no idea whether it would have been better or worse if we’d been in the same room – it’s an interesting thing to think about.”
Curiously, while at times the music feels claustrophobic and unsettling, a sonic sensibility reflective of the truly weird times we were living in during the COVID-19 pandemic, most of the instrumentals were written long before the virus began spreading around the world. While technically it is a lockdown album of sorts, it was not created to be one – and Yorke’s lyrics barely make any reference to that particular period of time. Basically, it should not be considered Pritchard and Yorke’s ‘COVID album’.
“You can imagine he was reacting lyrically to the lockdowns, but I don’t think he was a lot of the time,” Pritchard insists. “There was a whole heap of shit happening in 2020 and in the years before – Trump, Boris [Johnson], the Tories, Brexit, Farage, the pandemic, online craziness and the culture wars. We were quite wary when the music and videos started to appear this year, as we didn’t want people to think of it as a lockdown record, or a Trump record or whatever. We don’t want that idiot becoming part of the project – we’re all sick of him!”
All fair points. Consider the album on its own merits, having listened intently, and you’ll struggle to think of it as a lockdown record. It has a certain aesthetic, of course – layered, sonically detailed, frequently out-there and other-worldly – but there’s much variety within the twelve perfectly realised songs on show. Compare and contrast, for example, the elongated chords, skittish lo-fi drum machine beats, squelchy bass and edge-of-the-galaxy immersion of opener ‘A Faker In A Faker’s World’, the tipsy ambient beauty of ‘Ice Shelf’, the woozy throb of recent single ‘Back In The Game’ and the 16-but bustle of ‘Gangsters’.
Then there’s the lightly kosmiche-influenced brightness of ‘The Spirit’, the slow-motion shuffle and star-fall synths of ‘The Spirit’, the upbeat, triple-time pulse of ‘This Conversation is Missing Your Voice’, and the slowly evolving, reach-for-the-light warmth of ‘The Men Who Dance In Stags Heads’, which sounds like the kind of loved-up downtempo psychedelia that would not have sounded out of place on Primal Scream’s Screamadelica.
Of course, for all this subtle variety, Tall Tales is still a coherent single sonic statement – something that can arguably be credited to two key aspects. The first is the choice of electronic instruments. Pritchard has long been a collector of unusual and often cheap synths, keyboards, drum machines and other electronic noise making implements, and it’s the sound of these eccentric instruments that initially shaped the sound of the album.
“I’m always interested in using different things I’ve not used before,” Pritchard insists. “I’ve got quite a lot of unusual things, but there are also studios you can go to where they have really amazing collections of rare and strange synths. I dropped everything to go to this place in Melbourne that had a few early synthesisers. I just spent 20 minutes making and recording sequences and noises. You have to have the time to be able to do that though and knowing what you want helps – otherwise it can be hours of just listening to weird noises until you stumble on something you want.”
Pritchard also looks elsewhere for inspiration, even going as far as recording various pipe organ sounds for later use. That dedication to his craft – and creating unique sound worlds – came in handy when working on ‘The White Cliffs’.
“That originally had these long basses, which came out of the [Suzuki] Omnichord, but it was really dominating the track,” Pritchard explains. “The bassline was almost like a doo-wop one – it was a little bit kitsch but kind of worked. Then Thom said, ‘I need to get the bass out because it’s stopping me from finding the melody’. I wasn’t sure but when he sent the vocal back, and the song without the bass, it sounded amazing. It was cool, but I felt I needed to find a way of getting bass in there.”
Nothing worked, he says, but eventually he found a way: “The vocal was quite low in parts, so I generated white noise in that key and used that instead of a bassline. The pipe organ used in the track has massive sub-bass too, like 40 or 50 hertz. That’s not a bassline, but it’s a deep bass sound. You can only really hear it on headphones or speakers. Crank it up and dogs in a wide area will be going crazy!”
The other unifying element across Tall Tales is Yorke’s voice, which he almost used as an instrument. He sings a lot across the album, of course, but not always in his usual range. There are spoken word sections, too, as well as densely layered harmonisations and vocalisations that effectively act as a track’s lead melody. This, coupled with Pritchard’s inventive instrumental choices, lies at the heart of its unique sound.
“I guess if you’ve been singing for as long as Thom has, you have to find ways of keeping it interesting for yourself,” Pritchard muses. “He has other projects where he sings straight songs with a band, so he didn’t have to do that, but I was wary of doing a record with him where he didn’t sing. So, sometimes he sang straight. Sometimes we put weird effects on his vocal. Sometimes he messed up his own vocals and sent them to me.”
Yorke’s approach resulted in a wide range of interesting vocals and vocal-based textures, which brought its own issues for Pritchard: “The whole thing was a challenge because he does a lot of layers and a lot of interesting things with his modular system. That’s why it took so long – there’s a lot going on and we wanted people to be able to hear every musical and electronic element as well as the vocals. I found a way of doing it though and balancing his vocal ranges with the odd harmonic ranges of some of the synths.”
Now the album and film are done, dusted and on the brink of release, Pritchard looks back fondly on the extended production process. Typically, he’s already focused on his next solo album.
“After we finished Tall Tales I took some time out and did a lot of maintenance on my gear,” he explains. “There was some stuff that had stopped working, but I found someone great over here who helped me get them going again. That made me think I have to start using them more, as I haven’t for a while. One thing I have learned is that if you limit yourself to one piece of gear [when starting a track], sometimes you end up with something you’ve never done before. From what I learned from doing this record, I decided I’m going to go even harder using certain bits of kit and no plugins. I just want to keep the old drum machines, because they’re imperfect, and every time the snare hits, it’s not the same.”
Mark Pritchard and Thom Yorke: crafting unearthly musical perfection out of imperfect instruments. It’s certainly a unique selling point.
Matt Anniss
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pics: Pierre Toussaint