Rock star fantasies, alien abductions in the Cheshire town of Runcorn, Katy Perry in space, British ’60s new wave film Billy Liar, and the dangers of an AI girlfriend are just some of the weird and wonderful subjects covered on The Curse of You Know Who – the brilliant new album by UK singer-songwriter, Vinny Peculiar, who Uncut magazine once described as ‘the Tony Hancock of pop’, and the Irish Times said was ‘the missing link between Jarvis Cocker and Roger McGough’.
Thematically, the record – Peculiar’s sixteenth studio album – deals with conspiracy theories, half-truths, misinformation and fuzzy memories, and musically it embraces power rock, post-punk and jangly psych-pop; he cites influences including The Who, Magazine and XTC.
There are also some of his lyrical trademarks, such as cultural references from the ‘70s and namechecks for rock stars; this time around, Robert Plant gets a mention.
In an exclusive interview, Peculiar talks to Say It With Garage Flowers about conspiracy theories and writing and recording The Curse of You Know Who, which, coincidentally, is released on September 11. Make of that what you will…
Q&A
The new record isn’t a concept album as such, but there are recurring themes in some of the songs – conspiracy theories, half-truths, fuzzy memories and misinformation…
Vinny Peculiar: Yeah. I think misinformation is so prevalent today in every aspect of our lives.
How did you approach this record?
What I tend to do is finish an album, do a load of gigs, and then as the writing gene kicks back in, I try to do something a bit different. So, when I thought about writing this new album, I tried not to be quite as factually accurate and to be a bit more expansive.
I was going through a mini-prog-rock phase, which I’m out of now, you’ll be relieved to hear, but every now and again, I revert to Close to the Edge by Yes, or Trespass by Genesis, or early Jethro Tull. I think lyrically, particularly, Yes, are very expansive and slightly nonsensical, so I tried to be a bit more like that, but, in the end, most of the songs are kind of narrative songs.
The first song, ‘The Curse’, has a lyric that’s a stream of consciousness – it mentions Charles Bukowski, mansions of Belgravia, yachts in St Tropez and a prog-rock lyricist, and it’s also where the album gets its name from…
That song, and the title of the album, The Curse of You Know Who – and I only realised this not so long ago – were inspired by when Mike Joyce, Andy Rourke and Craig Gannon were in my band.
Things were going wrong, as they inevitably do when you’re in a band – the van broke down, or records wouldn’t make it to a radio station in time to get played, and Mike would say, ‘That’s the curse of Vinny Peculiar’. I used to nod along, but I thought, ‘Oh great, that’s all we need – to be cursed…’
That was 20 years ago, but I think the actual essence of that first song is taken from that. There’s always a certain self-delusion in setting up any project. It’s about belief and drive and ambition and hope, and then reality can kick in and throw a lot of curveballs, and I think that’s what that song’s about.
‘I was going through a mini-prog-rock phase, which I’m out of now, you’ll be relieved to hear, but every now and again, I revert to Close to the Edge by Yes, Trespass by Genesis, or early Jethro Tull’
Part of ‘The Curse’ deals with rock star fantasies, and there’s a line in the song that says, ‘We’ll be in Japan next year…’ It’s the ‘big in Japan’ rock ‘n’ roll cliché. You were in the band Parlour Flames with Bonehead from Oasis, and he experienced the whole ‘big in Japan’ thing…
That’s where that line comes from – you’ve detected that one pretty well. Bonehead would say, ‘What are you worried about? You’ll be in Japan this time next year…’
All those kinds of ambitions and doubts revolve in your mind and create a sense of a world where truth is so kind of unpredictable and fluid, and even when you find out what the truth is, you don’t even know whether it’s the truth anymore, so that fed into the song as well.
‘The Curse’ has a Who-like power-rock feel…
It’s funny, we were at a rehearsal the other day, and the band were taking the proverbial out of me and saying, ‘When are you going to do a windmill?’
I was thinking of opening the set with that song – it’s just classic Who power chords from ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’, but dressed up in a different melody, and obviously they’re not played by Pete Townshend…
You worked with producer Dave Draper on the new album – he’s great at getting that classic power-rock or power-pop sound – he’s produced Marc Valentine, who I like…
Dave does have his own sound and his own way of doing things, and one of the things we do is that we work very fast. I record everything here [at home] and then I take it to Dave to tweak some of the sounds. I need someone to say, ‘you’ve got 16 guitar parts here – you’re going have to get rid of that one, that one, that one, and that one…’ Then I can get a bit more balance.
Music and technology have given me the opportunity to make a rock album at home, but to give it the drama and the sound [I want], I have to fully think it through with someone else, so I like to work with a producer.
Let’s talk about the song ‘Billy Liar’, from the new album – you’ve had a love of the book and the film for a long time, haven’t you?
Yes – I can’t remember whether I saw the film before I read the book… It was possibly the film, but it’s one of those films and books that have merged into one. So, when I reread the book, I can hear the film – all the voices…. It kind of merges…
I’ve heard a few people talking about it as a comedy, but it’s way more than that – it’s like a tragicomedy of aspiration, really. Keith Waterhouse wrote the book – and, at the time, it was the weirdest thing in the world to have aspirations to do anything creative outside of a smallish, mill-based industrial city in the north.
‘My dad didn’t like electric guitars – he liked musicals and hymns and nothing else – he didn’t even like The Beatles. We had quite a religious upbringing. I wasn’t very popular when I was on the dole, trying to form a punk-rock band’
It’s that idea of the parental overview as well, and the way that’s portrayed with the gran and the dad’s old-school vision. So, it’s a youth culture film from 1963, when, suddenly, it was possible for working class kids to do something other than automatically follow the same route of their fathers, and they could also dress differently.
It was the dawn of the 1960s. It had a big effect on me, partly because my parents were a bit like that as well, in a funny kind of way. My dad didn’t like electric guitars – he liked musicals and hymns and nothing else – he didn’t even like The Beatles. We had quite a religious upbringing. I wasn’t very popular when I was on the dole, trying to form a punk-rock band, and in the end, I had to get a proper job, like so many people.
In the song ‘Billy Liar’ you mention meeting Julie Christie and Tom Courtenay, who both starred in the film. Did you meet them in real-life?
Yes – that’s true. I met Julie Christie in a place called Redditch. I had a little band, and she tapped me on the shoulder after we’d played and said, ‘I really like your band’.
I started to melt – even then I was obsessed by Billy Liar. I felt that internal collapse of speechlessness. If it was now, I’d have got a selfie or something – if I’ve had the physical energy to – but not back in the day.
I met Tom Courtenay when he was appearing at the Royal Exchange in Manchester. A friend of mine was interviewing him and she said, ‘Come along.’ I said, ‘I can’t come in, but I’ll just meet you after you’ve finished the interview’, so I said hello to him, and told him that I loved the film and that it meant a lot to me, and he said, ‘Oh, thanks very much’. That was it – it was nice. They say don’t meet your heroes, but those two people just seemed lovely.
‘I met Julie Christie in Redditch. I had a little band, and she tapped me on the shoulder after we’d played and said, ‘I really like your band’. I started to melt’
It must’ve been nice to write a song about Billy Liar after all this time…
Yes – it fitted with the narrative [of the album] because the whole thing is about mistruths and fantasies. Billy Liar is creating a world where there isn’t really a world – it’s a world of imagination and possibility, but we all need that world of imagination and possibility to give us some kind of kudos to do anything. Before you get the reality, you have to imagine it. So, he does – he has a good go of it, but he gets well beaten down by his circumstances.
Were all the songs on the new album written especially for it, or are some of them older?
They were all written in the last 18 months, but they’re not all about conspiracies and weirdness. ‘The Velvets’ is a typical Vinny Peculiar retrospective song – meeting hippies, when you’re only 13 years old… You’re suddenly in the grown-up world and it’s simultaneously the most frightening thing in the world, but also the most exciting…
‘The Velvets’ is one of my favourite songs on the record – I love the cinematic guitar sound…
That’s a 12-string.
The imagery in the song is great – a bunch of kids in the ‘70s, sat outside, listening to music, like The Velvet Underground and Pink Floyd, on a portable cassette player, and getting stoned, with hippies… Robert Plant gets a namecheck too…
Yeah – I must admit, I don’t think I’ve done an album in a while where someone hasn’t been namechecked. Sometimes I don’t even realise it because songwriting is quite an intuitive and spontaneous process, and you don’t even know whether it’s any good, even when it’s done. I’m a namechecker.
Well, Katy Perry certainly gets a namecheck on the new record. From ‘Billy Liar’ to ‘Katy Perry in Space…’ That’s why I love your records – you never know what you’re going to get next…
That’s nice of you. I suppose the subject matter is fairly diverse, and the strand of conspiracy is thin, but it’s probably there, even during ‘Katy Perry in Space’, which appears to have happened, but you can still read about a lot of people who believe it didn’t…
‘I don’t think I’ve done an album in a while where someone hasn’t been namechecked. Sometimes I don’t even realise it because songwriting is quite an intuitive and spontaneous process’
So, this was when Katy Perry travelled into space last year, as part of an all-female crew on Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin New Shepard flight…
Yeah – I suppose she wanted to get in the record books as the first pop star in the race, which is the first line of the song. In the video, I tried to juxtapose some of the atrocities on Earth versus the dicking around in a tin can.
So, you haven’t got any ambitions to go into space?
Not really – it’s not something I’ve ever thought about. I wouldn’t say I was risk-averse, but I don’t have any hobbies that involve risk, unlike my grandson, who rides a mountain bike.
Did ‘Katy Perry in Space’ start off as a country song, but end up being a bit rockier?
Yeah – my mate rang me up and I said, ‘Have you seen the news? And he said, ‘Oh yeah, you should write a song about Katy Perry in space…’ I’m always up for a challenge, so I wrote something immediately for a laugh, and then I came back to it the next day and slightly refined it. It was a country song, but it became a little bit noisier.
‘AI Girlfriend’ is another of my favourite songs on the record. Was that inspired by Spike Jonze’s film, Her?
Yeah – it’s such a great film. There are a few jaw-dropping moments in it when the man, who loses himself in a relationship, suddenly realises the fact that he’s fallen in a love with a computer… When I wrote the song 18 months ago, it had a minor edge to it, but now I don’t think it has hardly any edge at all, because of the speed at which people are engaging with AI and how AI is becoming more and more normalised.
The music has an edge to it – it’s heavy post-punk…
Yeah – I was thinking Magazine when I did it. I haven’t quite nailed the John McGeoch sound, but it happens just once in the bridge, when I pull out the weird flange chorus stuff that he used to use with The Banshees. Mostly, it’s just that driving, post-punk sound.
‘I liked the idea of Brian Cox and Tim Peake on a space station, getting befuddled and wittering on… I imagine them looking down and seeing that the Earth is flat…’
On the track ‘Flat Earth’, you use a guitar riff from a song you wrote in the ‘80s…
Oh, yeah – that kind of XTC motif that’s intermittent in the song and acts as an intro. It’s funny with songwriting… I’m not wishing to namecheck Noel Gallagher, but there was something I saw on social media the other day, where he said that he’d had a chorus for a song for 20 years, but no verse – he tried to write it so many different times, and, all of a sudden, he got one and it fitted. I was a bit like that with that riff, but I don’t think it’s going to do for me what ‘Wonderwall’ did for Noel.
‘Flat Earth’ is one of the songs on the album that deals with misinformation, and it namechecks Professor Brian Cox and British astronaut, Tim Peake…
I liked the idea of Brian Cox and Tim Peake on a space station, getting befuddled and wittering on… I imagine them looking down and seeing that the Earth is flat after all, and although that’s ridiculous, there are always elements of any conspiracy that has some kind of genuine premise – even the ridiculous stuff. Quite often, years later, big conspiracy theorists don’t sound quite as weird…
I was going to ask you about your views on conspiracy theories…
Yeah. Well, I’m much more open to them now than I used to be. I wouldn’t say I’m a believer, but I’m not an absolute non-believer.
Where do you stand on alien abductions in Runcorn in the early ‘70s?
Somebody suggested that to me, but they didn’t know much about it, so I just used it as an idea for a song [‘Runcorn Abductions’ ] and expanded on it. If anyone’s going to get abducted and taken by aliens, then Runcorn’s a pretty good place to stop off. I used my own experience of Runcorn.
There used to be a great guitar store in Runcorn. It was called Frailers, and it was run by a guy called ‘Freewheeling Frank.’ I bought guitars there. I remember when I went in once, Ian Broudie [The Lightning Seeds] had been in the day before, bought two guitars and cleaned out the whole shop of percussion instruments.
Frank sat at the counter and just snarled at everyone – you had to do a deal with him to get a decent price. He was a ruthless dealer, but very entertaining and very droll.
He didn’t make it into the song, though?
No, he didn’t make it in, but now I’m regretting not mentioning him. It could’ve been Frank who was taken… No, two people went missing in Runcorn, and that’s the truth of it…. My friend told me the story about it and said, ‘Did you realise that there were alien abductions in Runcorn?’ I thought, ‘Oh, maybe I should write a song about it.’ I didn’t think to Google it and check it all out – I just created some ideas, as you do when you’re a songwriter. You’ve got some sort of licence to do that.
‘Rock and power are the two words of the interview, aren’t they? Anyone would think I was David Lee Roth’
The song also mentions The Osmonds, and Mr Rigsby from the ‘70s sitcom Rising Damp…
Yes – there’s more namechecking…. I hope I don’t get too massive because they’ll all want paying.
You could do a whole album of songs that namecheck people and not make any royalties from it… but I guess that’s just like normal…
(Laughs). Exactly – nothing would change.
On ‘New Dark Ages’, which deals with state surveillance, there are more power rock guitar chords…
Rock and power are the two words of the interview, aren’t they? Anyone would think I was David Lee Roth, but I’m not quite at that level.
The final song on the album, ‘Moon Landing’, is about the ultimate conspiracy theory – that the 1969 moon landing was faked…
I think the song plays with the idea that it’s more of a romantic idea than the truth. If I was to have a favourite song [on the album]…I quite like that one – I like the questions the song asks and I like the production.
The lyric references you watching the moon landing when you were at school…
Yeah – there was a big hoo-hah about it and we were all excited. We all wanted to be astronauts as soon as we’d seen it, and then we went back to wanting to be footballers pretty quickly afterwards. The song is from an outsider’s imagination, but with some sort of reality of experience from the classroom… It’s from the classroom to the chaos of conspiracy.
‘There was a big hoo-hah about the moon landing and we were all excited. We all wanted to be astronauts as soon as we’d seen it, and then we went back to wanting to be footballers pretty quickly afterwards’
Have you heard any good conspiracy theories lately?
No, but I’m hoping I will do, so I can do album number two of conspiracies… I’ll probably do something different next time… I’m thinking of doing an acoustic album. I just sold a couple of guitars and bought a good, new acoustic – a Gibson J-45.
So, The Curse of You Know Who is released this month…
Yes – on 9/11. There’s no dark, deep significance to that. You can go down a lot of rabbit holes with that one, and, with the context of the album, people may read something into it, and they’re welcome to.
The Curse of You Know Who is released on September 11 on Shadrack & Duxbury Records.
If you order the album on Bandcamp here, the digital release includes two additional bonus tracks, ‘A Ghost’ and ‘Old School.’
For Vinny Peculiar tour dates, visit www.vinnypeculiar.com.
Say It With Garage Flowers 