Sammy Davis Jr. knew what he was singing about: the rhythm of life is a powerful beat. For twenty-five years, Rhythm Of Life’s been an imprint for numerous Paul Haig projects since his first solo ventures after the break-up of the gloriously edgy Josef K.
Haig’s independent label Rhythm Of Life Inc has just released Electronik Audience, an album that finds him inspired by Kraftwerk/Yello-style electropop, and seminal Iggy Pop l.p. The Idiot. “When I first heard Iggy it was just my cup of tea – a deep monotone voice …instantly appealing”, recounts Haig with a wry smile: there’s a decidedly Iggy/Lou Reed timbre to his baritone and The Idiot’s well-turned lyrical economy continues to exert its influence. “Words that are quite choice and direct can really portray a whole feeling. So I was purposely trying to hold back on the lyrics as well”.
Electronik Audience started taking shape when, one Sunday afternoon, Haig sat down at the computer in his home studio, close to the sun-drenched Edinburgh park where we’re speaking. Embarking on what he terms a “voyage of discovery” through do-it-yourself technology where the tap of a synth key can inspire a whole song, he quickly created the sinister Traumatik. Its contagious electro-groove spurred Haig to fashion a whole album in a similar vein. “I wanted to stay in one specific genre”, he tells me. “Electronik Audience does what it says on the tin. I stuck to it quite stoically. I hardly went out for two or three months. I’m amazed how disciplined I was. I could have gone haywire with all the sounds I was hearing. Nowadays you can get all the sounds you want in one computer bank which is fantastic. It makes me want to write all the time”. This creative buzz is tangible, from the vocoder-laced title track to the darkly uplifting new single Thieves and former Radio 2 Single Of The Week Reason. The succinctly-titled Disco Gem is aptly described by its creator as “simplistic but infectious and minimal”. Discussing the Greek airport-sampling, teleport-evoking Departure 60, he adds : “I was thinking about a robotic character in a futuristic airport, not wanting anyone to touch him or bump into him…It’s like a filmic soundtrack hopefully the listener can make up their own imagery to.”
Having established his credentials as a composer via the Cinemathique series of soundtracks for imaginary films, Haig’s confident he’d revel in scoring movies: “I think I’d be able to come up with music very quickly, having been doing it the other way around for so long”.
Haig’s track record is lengthy and impressive. At 21, he found himself in a New York recording studio with Thompson Twins/Grace Jones producer Alex Sadkin. Like many renegades from what Dutch critics termed “depressy-wave” bands, Haig was consciously moving towards pop accessibility, signing to Island on the strength of portastudio demos.” I don’t think they’d heard any Josef K”, he says. “Coming out of Josef K into this shiny pop world was quite bizarre, a complete culture shock, especially from the dark indie past”.
Sorry For Laughing, a shining highlight from that past, has led an impressive pop life of its own – covered by Propaganda, and, most recently, by the 1990s. Nouvelle Vague titled their 2005 debut album after their own cover. Haig sang it with them at their recent Dunfermline show while in London, in March, he performed another Josef K classic, It’s Kinda Funny, at a Billy Mackenzie tribute concert. He describes the occasion as “a very strange night, a real mixture of emotions. I was really terribly nervous. But I was speaking to Billy inside my head and that got me through it”.
A favourite of Mackenzie’s, the Josef K original features incongruously hypnotic syndrums from sticksman Ron Torrance: ” It was his idea”, reveals Haig. “He paid for them, so he was going to use them. You heard them on disco records and then to have them on Joy Divisionesque indie rock is quite creepy”. They crop up, too, “like dark white noise, quite industrial” on Variation Of Scene from Josef K’s postponed debut l.p, Sorry For Laughing. Expanding the band’s post-punk guitar-based sound with synthesizer on these sessions, Haig was keenly “experimenting with anything I could find that made a noise before and during Josef K.”
This fascination with creating instrumental soundscapes is evident on Haig’s 1981 lo-fi curio, Drama. “I did about 500 cassette tapes, just cassette to cassette recorder”, he remembers, recalling 80s home-recording and mixtape culture as “the MySpace of its time- not the internet but people talking and posting each other cassettes”.
The spirit of experimentation extended to the singer’s award-winning tonsorial style, initially sculpted by Ron Torrance and inspired by another Sadkin client: “I was so young that I thought I’d have a haircut like Grace Jones: Straight up. Pillbox. I was Haircut Of The Year in Melody Maker. What a ridiculous accolade”.
The self-explanatory Swing In ’82 (shelved till ‘85) saw the sharply coiffured Haig move further from the scratchy sonics of Josef K: “I was living in Brussels and listening a lot to things like Frank Sinatra and Fred Astaire and I attempted to do a swing e.p. It’s ridiculous. I was far too young to sing these songs. You can hear it in the voice. I was just not mature enough. That was a huge mistake but it’s quite cute and silly in a way”.
A more assured venture was Haig’s 1984 collaboration with Cabaret Voltaire, recorded at the techno-industrialist dance outfit’s Sheffield base: “ I came back on a really old train. I was in this compartment when this woman and her daughter came in and all the way up the daughter was staring at me”. The pre-teenybopper tried figuring which current popstar the stylish Haig must be. Eventually she decided: “She thought I was Nik Kershaw”.
By the mid-80s, Haig was building a ripe-for re-exploration catalogue of dance-pop, galaxies beyond the scope of contemporary Kershaws and Joneses. He looked every inch the intergalactic pop-icon when teamed with Billy Mackenzie for STV’s 1986 Hogmanay show. Performing right after the bells,” We took Amazing Grace and did a weird guitar futuristic thing to it which had nothing to do with the song”. Bemusing both studio audience and fellow guests Big Country, this performance – YouTube it – followed two radiant shows by the duo in Edinburgh and Glasgow: “We weren’t competing – just chums having fun and I think that came across. Around that time we were offered a big deal from London Records and that would have been great but Billy was still contracted to Warner Brothers and couldn’t get out of that”. The Haig/Mackenzie collaboration Memory Palace, recorded at the Edinburgh musician’s flat over a four year period prior to Mackenzie’s death, was eventually released by Rhythm Of Life in 1999.
Co-produced with Mackenzie’s fellow Associate Alan Rankine, Haig’s 1989 album Chain is reissued by Cherry Red in November. His most recent collaboration, The Cathode Ray, started “as a bit of fun with my friend Jeremy Thoms and we ended up with an album”. Their glam-inflected 2006 single on Pronoia and forthcoming Marina album see Haig returning to catchy guitar-based pop. Though he views his two latest projects as ”chalk and cheese”, they’re united in homage to favourite influences. While Electronik Audience deploys a Kraftwerk aesthetic, the formative guitar inspirations Haig cites – Wire, Television, Pere Ubu and early Talking Heads – inform Haig and Thoms’ guitars and vocals, vibrantly underpinned by Neal Baldwin and David Mack’s recorded-as-live bass and drums.
Currently recording a follow-up to Electronik Audience which he predicts will be “more organic, a bit warmer with real bass guitars and more lyrics,” and with his work proclaimed an influence by artists from Franz Ferdinand to Bloc Party, the rhythms of Paul Haig’s musical life reverberate through past, present and future. A powerful beat, indeed.
Roy Moller
Rhythm Of Life releases a double a side digital single by Paul Haig – Thieves/Ready To Go (ROL016) on September 3rd.
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