Inspirations for new collections of posts come from disparate places. This one comes from two places: one, a desire to try and record some of the stories of the past in our scene, by way of beloved songs, and two, from The Guardian’s long-running How We Made series.
/The Last Song I’ll Ever Sing/Links /Bandcamp
/Details /Length/05:00 read (approx.) /Interview conducted/Sep 2024
So what’s the point here? The scene is getting older. A great many bands no longer exist, a worrying number of people from within the scene are no longer with us. So let’s see what stories we can tell in the meantime, and I’m going to attempt to do that by talking to some of the people behind some beloved, long-lasting songs familiar to many readers in our scene.
It’s an entirely personal selection, at least to start with: the first few are songs I’ve known a long, long time, and had some curiosity around. The title of this new series comes from one of the closing tracks on Gavin Friday‘s sublime 1995 album Shag Tobacco.
A note about the interviews on amodelofcontrol.com. This is now a long-running, occasional series, occasional because of the fact that I only interview artists when I have something to ask, and when artists have something to say. I don’t use question templates, so each is unique, too. Finally, I only edit for grammar and add in links, so what you’re reading is the response of the artist directly.
I’m starting with Dream Disciples, a Scottish goth band that formed in 1990, and came to an end at Whitby Goth Weekend in April 2004, playing their final show at the festival. They toured incessantly, released five albums, and sold a reasonable number of records for the time (and the scene), and to casual dancefloor fans, will seemingly eternally be remembered for late single Room 57, a soaring, anthemic track that was on final studio album Asphyxia.
It was the first song I thought about covering for this series, and one-time Dreamies member Gordon Young (and one of the writers of Room 57) kindly gave up some time to respond to my questions. The photo Gordon supplied is understood to have been taken by Taya Uddin.
Asphyxia turned out to be the last album from the Dream Disciples, with the changed lineup that involved you and Karl North from Rosetta Stone.
After Asphyxia we did do one more live album – Gestalt – that was released in 2002 after we’d recorded a bunch of shows including two memorable evenings at Camden Underworld and the old NMB (Dissolution/Epitaph) in Sheffield. I remember having to edit out hours of some particularly choice heckling – and it wasn’t all from the audience either…
What do you remember from being part of the creation of the album, and particularly Room 57: did you know that this song was the “hit” from early on, and was it one of those songs that came together relatively easily?
Asphyxia was made just on the cusp of home computers being able to record and process audio. Back in those halcyon days the machines and sound cards would crash if you so much as looked at them, we even melted a Pentium 2 CPU at one point!, and the whole exercise could one minute be incredibly liberating and the next reduce you to screams of frustration and kicking some unfortunate piece of equipment across the room. All in all though it was a huge learning experience, as I’d originally started in analogue studios, but even today I’m still making use of the skills I picked up then. Most people are maybe doing one, or a couple, of records a year – whereas I’m typically working on over a dozen albums / projects annually.
When it came to Room 57 the remarkable thing was that it was pretty much written in an afternoon! I’ve still got most of the equipment that was used on it – from the big chunky bass ARP, which came from a Yamaha AN1x, to the legato strings off a Korg TR rack with its infernal menu systems. Even on the very original demo you can hear all the parts were already there and it just needed the fat trimmed and the fairy dust / polish added. Some of the other songs on the album equally just ‘fell out’ and came together quite quickly – whereas the likes of Velvethead took 3 years and umpteen different versions before we finally nailed it. Bizarrely, after so many iterations, both of the guitar solos on that track were improvised on the same session with myself and Sid both egging one another on to see whose solo could outdo the other’s – helpful competition as it were.
I’ve never found you can typically predict that something will be a ‘hit’, if such a term can ever be applied in Goth, but a good hook is a good hook regardless of genre. It’s the magic element that people remember and, once it’s in your ear, it stays there forever.
The song has had a remarkable staying power: I’m reminded of it being the final song the band played at their final show (Whitby April 2004, of course), the fact that it will fill any goth dancefloor in the UK, anytime, anywhere – I fondly remember Kynon playing the Escape Room at the last Infest at Bradford Uni on the Sunday night, where he was struggling to get much of a dancefloor…until he put on Room 57 and boom! There’s a packed dancefloor of goths who knew every word. Are you still proud of it when you hear it out and about?
For me it’s quite bittersweet. On one hand it’s a reminder of the fact that as the band finally started to get some reward after a decade’s worth of hard graft – bearing in mind we did, by today’s meagre standards, a crazy amount of gigs and tours – that it all came to an end. On the other it’s hugely gratifying to see and hear that a piece of music I once wrote in an afternoon has brought a moment of joy to people, in many cases to those who then later became lifelong friends, and that it still stands up as a document / artefact of the time. Back then social networking was mainly analogue with the digital version still in its infancy (shout out to the UKPG / Alt.Gothic types) and the world seemed a much bigger, more mysterious place. Goth now, thanks to the Internet, has not only survived – but thrived and grown well beyond the shores that originally spawned it.
Finally, do you have any idea what Colin Lowing is on about in the lyrics? Is it just another rock’n’roll cliche?
The public meaning of the song is subjective, though it wasn’t written to cynically or intentionally exploit people’s feelings, but reflects scenarios and emotions that almost anyone can relate to. A sense of belonging to something greater than yourself, the failure / entropy of everything, the passage of time and the end of youth – all and more are applicable and I’d rather people chose for themselves what they want it to mean.
Privately? I know exactly where and what Room 57 is but you’ll need to ply me with several glasses of good single malt to get that particular tale out of me…
