Quietly burrowing away at the fringes of the Scottish indie scene for a year or so, Mitchell Museum’s ascendancy to all-over-the-place underground stars seems to have been remarkably fast.
With a hard-to-define sound, all 60s psychedelia and 90s college rock and a certain something – that ‘X factor’ if you like – this is a band on the up.
So, always first on the case, itm? spoke to frontman Cammy MacFarlane
itm?: Ok, we know about how the band name came about (a misheard reference to the Mitchell Library), how about the album title?
C: Peters Port is a little frankly beautiful place in the Isle of Uist. I used to live in Uist with my parents. I don’t live there anymore and I won’t be going back again (for personal reasons I don’t want to get into). I’ve read that I was sent to Peters Port by my parents after losing my mind. This isn’t the case. I did have a brief problem with holding onto my sanity (A manic episode), but this isn’t related to Peters Port. Some of the songs on the album are about that “mad” period of my life though.
itm?: Who does the songwriting – what’s the process? And from that who does the (at times odd) lyrics? And what’s behind them – would you put them in print for public dissection?
C: As far as the song writing goes I normally make up a demo song on my eight-track and then play it to the rest of the guys. From there they go off and work with the bass/drum/guitar part that I wrote and make it into something better.
I write the lyrics… and yeah… I suppose they do seem odd at times. The lyrics are very personal… and there normally about… well not particularly cheery things. I’m not a big fan of heart on the plate lyrics:
“Am standing in the rain and am feelin’ really bad, and we both know it was you that made me sad.”
It doesn’t really…excite me. However I can accept that my lyrics could seem obtuse and odd for the sake of it to some people… I don’t personally feel that’s the case. Sometimes when a person sings “spinning like a rabbit going out of control” they’re singing that because they didn’t eat for a week, and they went mad enough to start hallucinating dancing rabbits.
The lyrics are printed in the inside of our vinyl cover… but they’ve been all cut up and smudged… Kris (bassist) does the artwork for our stuff… maybe he hates my lyrics and that’s why he chose to do that… hmmmmm…
itm?: What have you been listening to? You’re getting compared to the Flaming Lips, Animal Collective etc, are any of these flattering or a bit irritating? (Pink Floyd???)
C: We have been drawing a lot of Flaming Lips comparisons… and I’m quite happy with that. The Flaming Lips have been a favourite band of mine for a long time. Although I actually haven’t listened to any of their stuff for quite a long time… I’ve found it interesting that people are picking up on their influence when I really hadn’t been thinking about them during the song writing process. As for Animal Collective – I like them too… and they were the band that got me into the idea of sampling stuff… like dinosaurs and owls… little layers of peculiar sounds that are hidden beneath other conventional instruments that fit together to make a wall of sound that you don’t initially notice as being strange at first. I’ve been listening to Dan Deacon quite a lot… I like the way he carries that sort of thing off.
I am happy to say that both me and Raindeer LOVE Pink Floyd and wont hear a word said against them! I love the way that they put their albums together that worked as one whole piece of work… that’s something we tried to do with the Peters Port Memorial Service… Hopefully it worked.
itm?: I get the impression the album’s getting into the right places, from the reviews it’s picking up – I know you’re putting this it out yourselves, but are you getting help or whatever elsewhere?
C: We made (the band’s guitarist) Dougie’s clothing business into a record label to see if we could do it ourselves. We have had some label interest but nobody seemed to be coming up with a million dollar deal anytime soon… so we thought that we should try and take things into our own hands. It’s been a fairly exhausting yet extremely rewarding process… that’s made us all a bit skint. The four of us have each got our own skills that we can bring to the Electra French table – Kris is really good with all the art/video and communication side of things. Raindeer is an extremely good negotiator (I know he doesn’t know this but he is!), and Dougie’s good at coming into your bedroom to put a wet finger in your ear just as you’re about to fall asleep. Actually that’s not fair Dougie’s got an amazing business brain. We’ve all got our skills but in all honesty and don’t think that we’d be able to pull our abilities together so well without the help of our manger “Coach Chris-x-DeRosa-Connick”. He’s the guy that really makes sure that we get our act together!!
itm?: So do you live together in the same place like the Monkees?
C: The 4 of us all live together in a flat that is above and slightly to the right of Sleazys.
I love sitting on a bed on the beach with Kris, Raindeer, and Dougie… isn’t that what the Monkees did?… or was that Supergrass?… I get them confused.
itm?: I see you’ve gone vinyl, as well as download – are you big fans of physical formats, or is it the art work or what? Are you doing a CD release?
C: Yeah…We were originally going to just release the album as a download…but we all love vinyl. We love the sound and we love the way that it works as a showcase for the artwork. We’re planning to release the album on CD in September/October.
itm?: Finally, what’s next? World domination, or just doing it for yourselves / if anyone likes it it’s a bonus?
C: We’re working on a 5 track EP just now….We’ll hopefully have that ready for Christmas. We do this for ourselves and for other people. Making music is a very therapeutic thing for me personally, but I would love to think that I’m helping someone get through the nightshift whilst listening to our music. With the risk of sounding like a hippie, music’s helped me get through some fairly rubbish times. Hopefully our music will do the same for somebody else… maybe…
The Peters Port Memorial Service is out now. Mitchell Museum play Edinburgh’s Electric Circus on August 11th.
More at www.mitchellmuseum.co.uk