Photograph by Joseph Leeder Photography
An interview with Alec Chapman, main man of 0 Hi Mark
Q: What is Bitter Politics about?
Mainly lies and the people that tell them. Also, what I call "binary thinking", meaning basically people who live in a world of black and white.
But then again I've put a lot of work into coming up with a set of songs that each tell several stories. The packaging is part of that story - the binary and the starkness. The simplicity of it. It is, therefore, pretty tough to say exactly what the album is about without denying people the right to reach their own conclusions. I know what every single line on it means - but like a magic trick I doubt these boring explanations would be satisfactory.
Q. But it IS a concept album?
Yes. Think Dark Side Of The Moon though, rather than Tales From Topographic Oceans! There's no eastern mysticism here, for example. Don't get me wrong - I love prog and nobody should ever dismiss those guys out of hand, but I don't have the patience to write a twenty minute piece - let alone to do all the overdubs! The very idea makes me edgy. What I've tried to do is take a song that says something and then arrange it in the way that best suits that song, rather than some meta-aesthetic that may not fit. I have no agenda about being fashionable or out-there. I just wanted to get it right.
Q. Why record a whole concept album, though?
The concept was born out of both necessity and artistry, because at a certain point I was having so much trouble writing songs I could accept I was happy with, that I had to find a thread to tie everything together. It may well be that only I understand that thread and people won't get why I did it. That's OK, too.
I guess I was inspired by Frank Zappa's conceptual continuity thing as well - he would keep coming back to subjects and in-jokes and it doesn't really matter if you follow him down those roads - it was important to his creative process!
Q. Has it been difficult to write a whole album on your own - particularly as your first release?
That's really two questions. I'll start with the second - I didn't want to start with an EP because I don't particularly like the format. Most bands start off with a six or so song EP and that is kind of their calling card - I'm not into that at all. My love has always been the classic vinyl format. Two sides give you a chance for a natural break (between 15 Questions and Trouble In Paradise on Bitter Politics, incidentally) and the forty minutes or so you were restricted to meant you had to be comprehensive but selective. I've just about reconciled myself to the fact that my album will never be released on Vinyl. Just about. We almost decided to avoid a CD release, but I'm still old fashioned enough to need that tangible thing. I'll probably sign every copy we sell out of joy!
Q. And writing on your own?
Oh yes, well, even given that I have always written on my own, the fact of the matter is I am far too unreliable to be in a band. I am... (pause) a little emotionally unreliable. Let's say that. I wouldn't want to be in a band with me!
I feel so sorry for Dave (Bland, Alec's co producer on the album) because he's been the person who has really had to go through the frustration of the months of waiting while I rewrote something, or decided that everything I had ever done was terrible. I'm surprised he's still speaking to me, actually!
It does get a little lonely being the dictator of the world's smallest empire, but I've been lucky in my collaborators on this one. They've been the thing that got me to the end.
Q. One of the songs on the album is something you didn't write, though...
That's correct. I've always been a huge admirer of my brother Keith's writing. This one in particular is a proper pocket symphony. I'm really glad we did it justice and hope people lobby him for more! The hardest thing about doing that song was living up to his guitar playing on the original. It took me eight guitar tracks but we got there in the end!
Q. Why doesn't that song have a title?
It does. It's just the 4'33'' of song titles (laughs). It's simultaneously a denial of clues as to what the song is about and an invitation to decide for yourself. I am not sure how we are going to mark it on the electronic copies, but it is represented by blank space, conceptually. As a little bonus bit of trivia, it's a sort of tribute to one of my heroes, Scott Walker, who has several songs named after their track number on his Climate Of Hunter album. Incidentally, The albums I'm writing for my POL-R project later in the year will have no track titles at all, just blank spaces where the track titles would go and a request for the listener to come up with their own and write them in.
Q. Are song titles important to you?
The fact is, because of the way I write lyrics, the titles tend to be the key to the song's meaning. Even if the title is in the chorus I guarantee you the title came first every time. The complete removal of the titles frees the listener from my version of the song's reality. From the tyranny of the truth, if you will.
Q. Is that part of the concept for that project, or just a gimmick?
Both. It's deliberately both.
Q. How did you meet the people who worked with you on Bitter Politics?
-Simon I know from (covers band) Plan C. He's the best keyboard player I know, so I had to get him to replace my gorilla style playing on the piano. You can really tell the difference! Compare his playing on Last Waltz with my remedial Vangelis on valium style piano on Postmortem. Worlds apart! (laughs)
-Dave I knew from the covers bands as well. He just turned up one day to help do our live sound. We've become really great friends and collaborators despite having massive differences in tastes in many ways. He's now a fully qualified and highly in demand live sound engineer and i just hope I can work quickly enough on the second album to prevent him running off to America with his fiancee before I need him!
-Nathan and Sarah at Long Track I met when recording with my family. We do occasionally all get together and record some covers - it's pretty fun to see how we all work so very differently. My two brothers do all the hard guitar work and I get to just play the bass for a change, which I rarely get to do these days. Knowing the quality of the equipment there and how great Nathan and Sarah are, it is safe to say I'd be very reticent about ever working anywhere else in future.
-Cindi I met at work. Like many independent musicians I sadly have to work, in this case it was a lucky coincidence because just when I needed that style of vocals you hear on Cindi's tracks (15 Questions and lies) I remembered I knew someone who could sing like that. You could say it was foolish to write duets without anyone in place in advance - if you would say that then you don't know me very well!
-And finally, well, the drummer is easy. It's my dad. I shied away from using family members in the beginning because it's a minefield when you have to do things like edit their parts or replace them - which we did on A Leg Up for stylistic reasons (we pretty much rerecorded the entire track in one afternoon) - but one day it just turned out that he had gone and recorded them all as a present to help me get things moving. You can't buy love like that! God knows how long it would have taken otherwise.
Q. Do you have a favourite song on the album?
It sounds irritatingly vague, but at this point it's all pretty much equal to me. Perhaps people don't know the process but by the time an album is released the people working on it have heard every song a few hundred times - and bear in mind I played almost every instrument so I never got to go sit down and rest my ears while in the recording studios. My instinct is to favour the songs written later as a result - and not really because of their quality. I've just heard them fewer times.
Q. Which songs were they?
Oh, the very last song written was (lies). It was originally written for the second album, which I'm composing at the moment, but we dropped a song and that left a gap in the conceptual flow of this one. I changed a few words on this one and recorded it the same day. Before that we'd recorded Postmortem in one hour. It had never even been sung before and the words only got their final draft done at the piano. It was pretty intense, but I walked into the booth afterwards and the looks on Dave and Nathan's faces were priceless. I knew we had a good final song at that point. I didn't really want to end the album on Suicidal Greed since it's such a negative and backhanded sentiment. People might get the wrong idea about my outlook.
Q. You seem to work pretty quickly, recording (lies) in a day, Postmortem in an hour...
Yeah, but only when I'm in the mood. We're leaving out the months of downtime throughout the project! I pretty much have to force myself at gunpoint to get stuff done. In the studio the fact that you're spending money helps keep you focused. Left to my own devices I write about twenty hooks a day in my head, then I forget twenty one of them. It's my cross to bear, I suppose, and a lot less awful than most people's. The fact that we did Postmortem in an hour shows you the thing I mean. That song had been written in my head over the proceeding fortnight and it was simply a case of getting it down. I had to do it then or it would have been gone forever. Or at least my confidence in it would be dead.
(lies) was different. I started with the structure and the word "lies" and wrote the bass line first. I don't normally do that but in this case the bass line led the rhythm guitar part which suggested the lead part and so on. The melody in the second, faster part has been rumbling around my head for years and I wouldn't be surprised if it turns up again on the next record. Hint hint.
Q. The other songs are older?
Yeah. The oldest one is Joint Of No Return which is eight years old. I can remember writing it very well - I was suffering horrible writer's block so wrote it by dealing four cards from a deck of chord shapes. That's a true story. What is now the third verse is the very first thing that came out of my mouth when I sang along with those chords. So the song had to be on the album because of the focus on questions and answers - one of those binary relationships it is all about. That sort of thing. Many people hear it and make assumptions about what it all means - maybe they will on lots of the album, I don't know. Joint... is definitely one where the truth is far more boring than whatever you can imagine - so stick with your imagination!
Q. Has your songwriting evolved over time or do you still write in the same way you always have?
Well, the process is different for each song in musical terms. Even in something as basic as the instrument it was written on. Canned Laughter, for example, was based on me sitting at the piano and recording the first verse, bridge and chorus that came to me. That was was like bottling lightning - I knew I had something in my head but I couldn't explain it. I had to play it. It was just lucky the computer was there to record into or it could have been lost. Everything else led from that piano part.
Now something very different is Trouble In Paradise. I'm a huge Warren Zevon fan and in that song I consciously tried to write something I could imagine him singing. I doubt I have reached his dizzying heights but for this one I started with the words and worked the other way - exactly the opposite of Canned Laughter.
Q. Trouble In Paradise is about celebrities, right?
Yes and no. I mean, it's not one of my subtler lyrics, but there's a reason I sang it myself when its subjects are both female. I think we all crave fame at some level for at least some of our lives. What is fame if not the appreciation of others? I'd be lying if I said that I'd be happy if I never sell any records. Well, even if I sold just fifty CDs, I'd want to know people enjoy my art, maybe if they emailed me or something just to say "great job". It's a simple pleasure but any artist needs encouragement in order to go on creating. Nobody wants to spend their time throwing their work into a black hole - anyone who says they're happy just to create in a vacuum is probably lying. That's my thinking on it. Releasing a thirteen track concept album about politics is not quite the same as releasing a sex tape and tipping off MTV, I know...
Q. That's a horrible image
Isn't it? In fact, that's another thing. I made a conscious decision to distance my identity from this work, didn't i?
Q. Why do you think that is? In fact, why have a "band" name at all?
First of all, to the general public I am not a selling point. I am a nobody. There are many meanings to that zero on the front of the album and that is definitely one of them. I am no one anyone has heard of. I think once I'd accepted that I just saw an image of my name on the front of a record and it just screamed the wrong message. I'm not a heartfelt singer songwriter releasing an album of songs about my ex girlfriend.
If you'll forgive the third person, the identity of Alec Chapman is not important to the music - 0 Hi Mark is a way of ordering things and is after all not my only musical outlet. You have to find some way to categorise your work or you'll get swamped.
Also, things change and I have no fundamental objection to being in or this identity becoming an actual band, though I'd probably end up the Lindsey Buckingham of that group and try to take over. Sadly it's in my nature to want control of things. Being known as a third party identity leaves that open.
Q. What does 0 Hi Mark mean?
OK, bear with me. I love movies, but I really love terrible movies. There is a movie, which may be the worst one ever made - a sort of relationship drama written by someone with no understanding of relationships - called The Room. Its star is also its director, writer and producer, which I found apt for my work if perhaps a little insulting to my skill level. Anyway, in that movie his best friend is called Mark and this is the first line said to him.
Q. Who is the Mark thanked in the album sleeve then?
That one. I thank all the characters from the film. It changed my life, seriously. No matter how badly I feel my work is going at any stage I now know I can step back and think "well, at least I didn't write, star in, produce and direct The Room". It's enormously liberating. The movie transcends bad, and at a certain point (fans will know what I mean when I say it is the tuxedo scene) you come to a glorious place of zen like calm where all things are possible. In a couple of decades it will be prescribed as depression medication.
Q. You suffer from depression yourself - how does that affect the writing and recording process?
It's the main enemy for me. More than anything else, it is like a dead weight pulling you down and you have to fight it. First thing you have do is admit it's there and accept it will be a lifelong struggle. You can't just "snap out of it" any more than you can spontaneously fly!
There's still a serious taboo about mental illness even in these times. I find that people get disarmed when I talk openly about my depression - basically variations of "but your life is perfect" or "but you always seem so happy" - these people don't see you at the bad times so they simply don't get the problem. Others suffer as well but can't bring themselves to admit it. I must say to anyone suffering - go get help. It makes a huge difference and certainly saved my life.
As for its effect on the music, depression has not really flavoured the music on the album - many songs that have been cut were affected, but they would never have made it really. The main effect has been to slow the process down. I'd say this album would be released two years earlier if not for delays caused by extreme crises of self confidence and ennui.
I stop writing altogether at those times. I don't find sadness helps me write songs like, say, Morrissey seems to! Because it affects everything in your life it's easy for your songs to become incredibly miserable and misanthropic very quickly. It never feels like a creatively stimulating force for me.
Whilst I don't particularly like the characters in my story, I do like humanity. I hope I avoid stepping too far the wrong way.
Q. What are your plans for the future?
Well, Bitter Politics is the first part of a conceptual trilogy and I am already working on the first sequel. I hope this won't take another five years. I'm aiming to release it some time in 2014. As a preview I can say that while the first album's theme is lies, the second's will be delusions and the third will be about regret. And you can dance to them! On top of that I have a project bubbling away with one of my brothers and another one called POL-R which will be very different again.
Q. Will you do any live shows?
I certainly want to. The problem is putting together a band, since the music is hard to translate to a solo performer gig. I am so independent I am actually completely outside the music scene! The other problem of course is recreating all five Moog parts on A Leg Up, live!
Q. Five Moog parts?
I got carried away.
Alec Chapman was speaking to Ross Worthy, December 2012
Mainly lies and the people that tell them. Also, what I call "binary thinking", meaning basically people who live in a world of black and white.
But then again I've put a lot of work into coming up with a set of songs that each tell several stories. The packaging is part of that story - the binary and the starkness. The simplicity of it. It is, therefore, pretty tough to say exactly what the album is about without denying people the right to reach their own conclusions. I know what every single line on it means - but like a magic trick I doubt these boring explanations would be satisfactory.
Q. But it IS a concept album?
Yes. Think Dark Side Of The Moon though, rather than Tales From Topographic Oceans! There's no eastern mysticism here, for example. Don't get me wrong - I love prog and nobody should ever dismiss those guys out of hand, but I don't have the patience to write a twenty minute piece - let alone to do all the overdubs! The very idea makes me edgy. What I've tried to do is take a song that says something and then arrange it in the way that best suits that song, rather than some meta-aesthetic that may not fit. I have no agenda about being fashionable or out-there. I just wanted to get it right.
Q. Why record a whole concept album, though?
The concept was born out of both necessity and artistry, because at a certain point I was having so much trouble writing songs I could accept I was happy with, that I had to find a thread to tie everything together. It may well be that only I understand that thread and people won't get why I did it. That's OK, too.
I guess I was inspired by Frank Zappa's conceptual continuity thing as well - he would keep coming back to subjects and in-jokes and it doesn't really matter if you follow him down those roads - it was important to his creative process!
Q. Has it been difficult to write a whole album on your own - particularly as your first release?
That's really two questions. I'll start with the second - I didn't want to start with an EP because I don't particularly like the format. Most bands start off with a six or so song EP and that is kind of their calling card - I'm not into that at all. My love has always been the classic vinyl format. Two sides give you a chance for a natural break (between 15 Questions and Trouble In Paradise on Bitter Politics, incidentally) and the forty minutes or so you were restricted to meant you had to be comprehensive but selective. I've just about reconciled myself to the fact that my album will never be released on Vinyl. Just about. We almost decided to avoid a CD release, but I'm still old fashioned enough to need that tangible thing. I'll probably sign every copy we sell out of joy!
Q. And writing on your own?
Oh yes, well, even given that I have always written on my own, the fact of the matter is I am far too unreliable to be in a band. I am... (pause) a little emotionally unreliable. Let's say that. I wouldn't want to be in a band with me!
I feel so sorry for Dave (Bland, Alec's co producer on the album) because he's been the person who has really had to go through the frustration of the months of waiting while I rewrote something, or decided that everything I had ever done was terrible. I'm surprised he's still speaking to me, actually!
It does get a little lonely being the dictator of the world's smallest empire, but I've been lucky in my collaborators on this one. They've been the thing that got me to the end.
Q. One of the songs on the album is something you didn't write, though...
That's correct. I've always been a huge admirer of my brother Keith's writing. This one in particular is a proper pocket symphony. I'm really glad we did it justice and hope people lobby him for more! The hardest thing about doing that song was living up to his guitar playing on the original. It took me eight guitar tracks but we got there in the end!
Q. Why doesn't that song have a title?
It does. It's just the 4'33'' of song titles (laughs). It's simultaneously a denial of clues as to what the song is about and an invitation to decide for yourself. I am not sure how we are going to mark it on the electronic copies, but it is represented by blank space, conceptually. As a little bonus bit of trivia, it's a sort of tribute to one of my heroes, Scott Walker, who has several songs named after their track number on his Climate Of Hunter album. Incidentally, The albums I'm writing for my POL-R project later in the year will have no track titles at all, just blank spaces where the track titles would go and a request for the listener to come up with their own and write them in.
Q. Are song titles important to you?
The fact is, because of the way I write lyrics, the titles tend to be the key to the song's meaning. Even if the title is in the chorus I guarantee you the title came first every time. The complete removal of the titles frees the listener from my version of the song's reality. From the tyranny of the truth, if you will.
Q. Is that part of the concept for that project, or just a gimmick?
Both. It's deliberately both.
Q. How did you meet the people who worked with you on Bitter Politics?
-Simon I know from (covers band) Plan C. He's the best keyboard player I know, so I had to get him to replace my gorilla style playing on the piano. You can really tell the difference! Compare his playing on Last Waltz with my remedial Vangelis on valium style piano on Postmortem. Worlds apart! (laughs)
-Dave I knew from the covers bands as well. He just turned up one day to help do our live sound. We've become really great friends and collaborators despite having massive differences in tastes in many ways. He's now a fully qualified and highly in demand live sound engineer and i just hope I can work quickly enough on the second album to prevent him running off to America with his fiancee before I need him!
-Nathan and Sarah at Long Track I met when recording with my family. We do occasionally all get together and record some covers - it's pretty fun to see how we all work so very differently. My two brothers do all the hard guitar work and I get to just play the bass for a change, which I rarely get to do these days. Knowing the quality of the equipment there and how great Nathan and Sarah are, it is safe to say I'd be very reticent about ever working anywhere else in future.
-Cindi I met at work. Like many independent musicians I sadly have to work, in this case it was a lucky coincidence because just when I needed that style of vocals you hear on Cindi's tracks (15 Questions and lies) I remembered I knew someone who could sing like that. You could say it was foolish to write duets without anyone in place in advance - if you would say that then you don't know me very well!
-And finally, well, the drummer is easy. It's my dad. I shied away from using family members in the beginning because it's a minefield when you have to do things like edit their parts or replace them - which we did on A Leg Up for stylistic reasons (we pretty much rerecorded the entire track in one afternoon) - but one day it just turned out that he had gone and recorded them all as a present to help me get things moving. You can't buy love like that! God knows how long it would have taken otherwise.
Q. Do you have a favourite song on the album?
It sounds irritatingly vague, but at this point it's all pretty much equal to me. Perhaps people don't know the process but by the time an album is released the people working on it have heard every song a few hundred times - and bear in mind I played almost every instrument so I never got to go sit down and rest my ears while in the recording studios. My instinct is to favour the songs written later as a result - and not really because of their quality. I've just heard them fewer times.
Q. Which songs were they?
Oh, the very last song written was (lies). It was originally written for the second album, which I'm composing at the moment, but we dropped a song and that left a gap in the conceptual flow of this one. I changed a few words on this one and recorded it the same day. Before that we'd recorded Postmortem in one hour. It had never even been sung before and the words only got their final draft done at the piano. It was pretty intense, but I walked into the booth afterwards and the looks on Dave and Nathan's faces were priceless. I knew we had a good final song at that point. I didn't really want to end the album on Suicidal Greed since it's such a negative and backhanded sentiment. People might get the wrong idea about my outlook.
Q. You seem to work pretty quickly, recording (lies) in a day, Postmortem in an hour...
Yeah, but only when I'm in the mood. We're leaving out the months of downtime throughout the project! I pretty much have to force myself at gunpoint to get stuff done. In the studio the fact that you're spending money helps keep you focused. Left to my own devices I write about twenty hooks a day in my head, then I forget twenty one of them. It's my cross to bear, I suppose, and a lot less awful than most people's. The fact that we did Postmortem in an hour shows you the thing I mean. That song had been written in my head over the proceeding fortnight and it was simply a case of getting it down. I had to do it then or it would have been gone forever. Or at least my confidence in it would be dead.
(lies) was different. I started with the structure and the word "lies" and wrote the bass line first. I don't normally do that but in this case the bass line led the rhythm guitar part which suggested the lead part and so on. The melody in the second, faster part has been rumbling around my head for years and I wouldn't be surprised if it turns up again on the next record. Hint hint.
Q. The other songs are older?
Yeah. The oldest one is Joint Of No Return which is eight years old. I can remember writing it very well - I was suffering horrible writer's block so wrote it by dealing four cards from a deck of chord shapes. That's a true story. What is now the third verse is the very first thing that came out of my mouth when I sang along with those chords. So the song had to be on the album because of the focus on questions and answers - one of those binary relationships it is all about. That sort of thing. Many people hear it and make assumptions about what it all means - maybe they will on lots of the album, I don't know. Joint... is definitely one where the truth is far more boring than whatever you can imagine - so stick with your imagination!
Q. Has your songwriting evolved over time or do you still write in the same way you always have?
Well, the process is different for each song in musical terms. Even in something as basic as the instrument it was written on. Canned Laughter, for example, was based on me sitting at the piano and recording the first verse, bridge and chorus that came to me. That was was like bottling lightning - I knew I had something in my head but I couldn't explain it. I had to play it. It was just lucky the computer was there to record into or it could have been lost. Everything else led from that piano part.
Now something very different is Trouble In Paradise. I'm a huge Warren Zevon fan and in that song I consciously tried to write something I could imagine him singing. I doubt I have reached his dizzying heights but for this one I started with the words and worked the other way - exactly the opposite of Canned Laughter.
Q. Trouble In Paradise is about celebrities, right?
Yes and no. I mean, it's not one of my subtler lyrics, but there's a reason I sang it myself when its subjects are both female. I think we all crave fame at some level for at least some of our lives. What is fame if not the appreciation of others? I'd be lying if I said that I'd be happy if I never sell any records. Well, even if I sold just fifty CDs, I'd want to know people enjoy my art, maybe if they emailed me or something just to say "great job". It's a simple pleasure but any artist needs encouragement in order to go on creating. Nobody wants to spend their time throwing their work into a black hole - anyone who says they're happy just to create in a vacuum is probably lying. That's my thinking on it. Releasing a thirteen track concept album about politics is not quite the same as releasing a sex tape and tipping off MTV, I know...
Q. That's a horrible image
Isn't it? In fact, that's another thing. I made a conscious decision to distance my identity from this work, didn't i?
Q. Why do you think that is? In fact, why have a "band" name at all?
First of all, to the general public I am not a selling point. I am a nobody. There are many meanings to that zero on the front of the album and that is definitely one of them. I am no one anyone has heard of. I think once I'd accepted that I just saw an image of my name on the front of a record and it just screamed the wrong message. I'm not a heartfelt singer songwriter releasing an album of songs about my ex girlfriend.
If you'll forgive the third person, the identity of Alec Chapman is not important to the music - 0 Hi Mark is a way of ordering things and is after all not my only musical outlet. You have to find some way to categorise your work or you'll get swamped.
Also, things change and I have no fundamental objection to being in or this identity becoming an actual band, though I'd probably end up the Lindsey Buckingham of that group and try to take over. Sadly it's in my nature to want control of things. Being known as a third party identity leaves that open.
Q. What does 0 Hi Mark mean?
OK, bear with me. I love movies, but I really love terrible movies. There is a movie, which may be the worst one ever made - a sort of relationship drama written by someone with no understanding of relationships - called The Room. Its star is also its director, writer and producer, which I found apt for my work if perhaps a little insulting to my skill level. Anyway, in that movie his best friend is called Mark and this is the first line said to him.
Q. Who is the Mark thanked in the album sleeve then?
That one. I thank all the characters from the film. It changed my life, seriously. No matter how badly I feel my work is going at any stage I now know I can step back and think "well, at least I didn't write, star in, produce and direct The Room". It's enormously liberating. The movie transcends bad, and at a certain point (fans will know what I mean when I say it is the tuxedo scene) you come to a glorious place of zen like calm where all things are possible. In a couple of decades it will be prescribed as depression medication.
Q. You suffer from depression yourself - how does that affect the writing and recording process?
It's the main enemy for me. More than anything else, it is like a dead weight pulling you down and you have to fight it. First thing you have do is admit it's there and accept it will be a lifelong struggle. You can't just "snap out of it" any more than you can spontaneously fly!
There's still a serious taboo about mental illness even in these times. I find that people get disarmed when I talk openly about my depression - basically variations of "but your life is perfect" or "but you always seem so happy" - these people don't see you at the bad times so they simply don't get the problem. Others suffer as well but can't bring themselves to admit it. I must say to anyone suffering - go get help. It makes a huge difference and certainly saved my life.
As for its effect on the music, depression has not really flavoured the music on the album - many songs that have been cut were affected, but they would never have made it really. The main effect has been to slow the process down. I'd say this album would be released two years earlier if not for delays caused by extreme crises of self confidence and ennui.
I stop writing altogether at those times. I don't find sadness helps me write songs like, say, Morrissey seems to! Because it affects everything in your life it's easy for your songs to become incredibly miserable and misanthropic very quickly. It never feels like a creatively stimulating force for me.
Whilst I don't particularly like the characters in my story, I do like humanity. I hope I avoid stepping too far the wrong way.
Q. What are your plans for the future?
Well, Bitter Politics is the first part of a conceptual trilogy and I am already working on the first sequel. I hope this won't take another five years. I'm aiming to release it some time in 2014. As a preview I can say that while the first album's theme is lies, the second's will be delusions and the third will be about regret. And you can dance to them! On top of that I have a project bubbling away with one of my brothers and another one called POL-R which will be very different again.
Q. Will you do any live shows?
I certainly want to. The problem is putting together a band, since the music is hard to translate to a solo performer gig. I am so independent I am actually completely outside the music scene! The other problem of course is recreating all five Moog parts on A Leg Up, live!
Q. Five Moog parts?
I got carried away.
Alec Chapman was speaking to Ross Worthy, December 2012