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 /Pitchshifter/Facebook /Pitchshifter/Bandcamp
/Details /Length/10:00 read (approx) /Interview conducted/Oct 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.
The third entry in this series is a song I’ve loved for over twenty-five years, and from the band I’ve seen live more than any other: Pitchshifter. This band originated from Nottingham, initially as a grinding, industrial-metal machine in the Godflesh mould, but swiftly evolved into industrial-drum’n’bass-punk, signed to a major label and had a brief moment in the spotlight before dropping back a bit, and over the past couple of decades, reuniting for occasional tours.
Genius was an obvious standout from the first time I heard it (live, a good year before it was released), and it’s been a reliable alternative/metal dancefloor filler ever since. And with the first Pitchshifter UK tour in six years coming next month – alongside new version of Genius being released – it seemed a good time to talk to JS Clayden about the song.
The picture of JS Clayden and Goldie, and the lyric sheet highlight, come courtesy of JS Clayden. The other photo of Pitchshifter is my own.
Hello! We’re back around to a new Pitchshifter UK tour next month – the first since we spoke six years ago on /Talk Show Host /050. But as well as the live dates, you’re digging into the archives with what might be called a “corrected” version of probably your best-known song, Genius (which we’ll come to in a moment). Going back a bit before Genius, though, Infotainment? had already heralded a change in your sound, from the grinding nastiness of Desensitized to drum’n’bass and sheer power (and notably better production). Were you going to drum’n’bass clubs and suchlike around that time, or did the influence come from just what you heard at the time?
The Infotainment? album was a turning point in the band because it marked a point where I’d been given more control, ostensibly. Pitch Shifter (two words) was the band’s heavy beginning from the minds of Johnny Carter & Mark Clayden. Although Mark handed off main vocals to me early on (he hated singing back then), I’d realized that the shouting vocal style and super-heavy music was very limiting in terms of musical creativity. I was the one pushing for more groove and melody. There was initial resistance to that; but I was ultimately able to convince the guys that allowing more of the music that influenced us into our music would be a good thing, and not all of those influences had to be heavy.
The mainstream airways were dominated by bands like Blur, Oasis, Supergrass, etc.; but the underground was jumping with Goldie, Photek, Moving Shadow, Metalheadz, LTJ Bukem, No U-Turn, etc.
I liked the fact that I could take a beat and mangle it to my will, on my own, on a computer (let’s not get excited, it was an Atari 520-ST; your cell phone has more RAM) in a basement, add some heavy guitars and have something banging. That’s what excited me about the D&B movement (and rave, and trip-hop), how I could take elements of that and fuse it with what I liked — Heavy guitars — to make something new. I don’t think that we perfected that until the .com album (maybe “perfected” is too ostentatious, how about “matured”); but you can hear its naissance on the Infotainment? album.
For those of us that were already fans, www.pitchshifter.com wasn’t that much of a shock (certainly not in the way the music press seemed to think it was), but Genius hit like a bullet when it first dropped. You weren’t short of standout songs on the album – but was there a feeling that Genius was the one that had a so-called X-factor?
Thanks for the kind words. I personally think that the .com album has some of the best tunes that I’ve ever written: Genius, Please Sir, Microwaved, and WYSIWYG. This was a time when I’d managed to convince Johnny to let go of the reins more on the samplers and I was, thus, effectively let loose to continue the work form the Infotainment? album and mangle yet more disparate genres together. As a reminder, this was a time of progression in the music tech realm, and so we were still using Cubase on an Atari 520-ST with 2x Akai s100 samplers (for the memory — Cubase didn’t store the audio, only play it) and a Korg Prophecy keyboard.
One of the band’s goals at that time was to be heavy, but groovy. Genius just seemed to fit the bill the best and eventually started to become favoured as the “lead” track of the album but all involved. It’s actually an embarrassingly simple tune with only a few parts; but producer Machine did it justice, and after it got selected to be the lead track and video on the Test Drive 5 video game, it took off from there.
This is where the unique history comes into play surrounding the album version. The original version of the song featured a dubby pre-chorus section. During the very last minute of the album mixing process, the idea was floated that the song would maintain a crisper pace if that section was chopped out. In doing so, some of the original lyrics were erroneously chopped out with it. This meant that the album version of the song just repeated the first line of each verse (A-A) instead of resolving to the intended second lyric (A-B). This change was even too late to be adjusted in the album artwork (as you can see from the image of the published album booklet).
The only problem is that the album version doesn’t actually make sense with that edit, something has irked me for decades (imagine singing a song that you know to be technically “wrong” a million times…). The good news is that the release of [NOS] Genius (originally a Kickstarter but also available in very limited-edition hand-numbered vinyl on the upcoming tour dates):
Nov 26 @ Bristol Thekla w/ BLACKGOLD & Mallavora
Nov 27 @ Manchester Gorilla w/ BLACKGOLD & Dekaytah
Nov 28 @ Portsmouth Wedgewood Rooms w/ BLACKGOLD & Sabres
Nov 29 @ London Garage w/ BLACKGOLD & The Sad Season (feat. Mikee Goodman of SikTh)
Nov 30 @ Nottingham Rock City w/ BLACKGOLD & Swear Blind
[NOS] Genius finally unites the album music with the correct verse lyrics: If dysfunction is our function, and if we learn by our mistakes, then I must be some kind of Genius. This combination maintains the aforementioned “pace” of the song (without the dubby pre-chorus backing of the original demo); however, by not hacking out the original lyrics, it also finally makes the self-deprecating dark humour of the song whole again — bringing the song more in line with the band’s whole vibe and album counterparts like Please Sir and Microwaved. In short, [NOS] Genius is technically how Genius should have always sounded: it’s less lyrically repetitive, the words make sense, and the concept that the lyrics were designed to convey remains intact.
There’s also the issue of speed. The “.com” demo was recorded and mixed “in the box” chez Pitchshifter and then transferred into Pro Tools at Machine’s studio in the USA. However, there’s a 0.4 bpm delta that crept into the released version of the song at some point (perhaps due to pre-master 1/4″ analog tapes of the era). What does this mean? It means that you’ve technically never actually heard Genius at its correct speed of 136bpm. The [NOS] Genius release also fixes that issue.
And, we should talk about the mastering. There is nothing “wrong” with the mastering of the released album version of Genius (mastering is a subjective artform); however, the .com album was mastered in the early days of the “loudness war”. With modern advances leading to a more democratized accessibility to mastering (mastering was crazy expensive in ’97), and the hindsight understanding of the ways in which the brick-wall limiting of that era can impact the sound, [NOS] Genius has been mastered in a way that makes sense for 2024 with the tools available in this era. This means that it might not seem as “loud” (in terms of LUFS, if you’re nerdy enough to know what that is); but it should have more dynamic range, allowing more of the transients in the music to shine through, keeping the music more how we wrote it before your heard it.
Lastly, what about that bass? Trade secret: to add “weight” to choruses when performing live, Pitchshifter uses a sub-bass synth line that follows the notes of the bass guitar riffs (this is why you may have noticed your face melting off at one of our live shows when the chorus of Genius kicks in if you’re standing near the front). Although absent from the .com version of Genius, this has been added to the [NOS] Genius version. And so, on a system with a sub, or a decent set of headphones (that can actually playback audio in the 35-75Hz frequency range, and not just say that they can on paper), the listener should notice that the chorus of [NOS] Genius feels a bit more in keeping with the live version (hopefully the best of both worlds).
The video for Genius is the band against authority (very much a theme of the band’s sound and lyrics generally). Where was the video filmed, and do you remember much about the process?
The Genius video was filmed in Lovell’s Wharf in South-East London (SE10). It was basically a disused warehouse that was prepared to let us spray water in it (the video features a jet hose) and generally mess it up for the day.
Back then, the process for recording a music video was to get different producers to send their idea for a video, called “treatments”. Fax was the mode of communication for paginated documents in 1997, and so we’d get all of these treatments faxed to us. Most of them were fucking awful. I remember one that said that I’d be in a chef’s hat frying burgers on a prison electric chair. Ridiculous. I drew a massive cock and balls on that treatment and faxed it back to the number that sent it; the internal schadenfreude of imagining the face of the recipient as they realized they didn’t get the job without a single word being exchanged.
The Dempsey twins won the contract as their treatment fit the Pitchshifter vibe, and so off we went to a warehouse to create havoc. There were a ton of extras hired to dress up as riot cops, to whom we could rail against (ah, the heady enthusiasm of youth), and a stack of non-functioning old PA stacks to make it look like we were playing through a giant rig.
I remember finding it hard not to laugh in the slo-mo sections. You have to sing at double speed so that it’s at normal speed when played back in the right tempo. You’re basically rapidly miming to a playback of yourself where you sound like pinky and perky whilst moving your body like a speed freak.
Lastly, I remember the power of the police water cannon that we rented to soak me. It was insanely powerful and kept pushing me backwards as we filmed. The operator told me that he’d gone easy on me: “I put it on a 2 for you, it goes up to 10, anything past 4 would bruise your flesh.”
In keeping with the technological futurism of the album for the time, every track in the liner notes had a version number (notably “Please Sir” was v3.2). Were you tinkering a lot with these songs in the recording process, both in Nottingham and in Hoboken, NJ with producer Machine? (And is it really the case that .com was Machine’s first production job?)
The goal was to make the .com record sound like it had be remixed (i.e. by mangling multiple genres together), but starting out that way, and so, I guess, “pre-mixed”, if you will. That meant a lot of versions and tinkering. I don’t think that creative people ever really feel that any creative work is “done”, per se. Moreover, they just let go of the project once the timeline/money ends. I hear stuff on the .com record to this day that I would have changed (I actually added a guitar lick on the remix of [NOS] Genius that leads into the bridge that I realize in hindsight that I should’ve had on the original).
As for Machine, I’m not sure that the .com records was his first full production job, but it’s possible. Working with him was great and the best time that I ever had in the studio. He totally understood our goals and vibe and never hampered our crazy experiments and creativity (reminder that mixing drum and bass, trip-hop, punk, metal and dance together was so new in 1997 that people thought that we were off our rockers).
Was this new version your original intention for Genius, and why did it change so late on – was it a band or label decision?
To be honest, it’s kind of hazy as to who was ultimately responsible for the last-minute change. It may have been one of us, or Machine. We all went along with it though, I guess (because I don’t remember being tied to a chair with gaffer tape and made to sign a release with a gun to my head). There are a lot of fast-moving parts on a record and sometimes you’re just trying to keep it all together and stay on schedule.
Finally, how do you see Genius with the benefit of hindsight?
I still think that it’s a banger. I think it’s a better song with the original lyrics back in it (less repetitive; more dark humor), and any artist will always hear things they’d go back and tweak; but the album version still bangs. The [NOS] version is exciting for me to finally bring to light after all these years. I’ve always stayed away from remixing the song (perhaps because I feared that messing with out “crown jewels” might go awry?); but I really enjoyed doing the “[NOS] Genius” remix. I got to play guitar again (which, of course, meant buying some new pedals), add my kids on some vocals in the bridge, do some glitch work, experiment with new plugins and AI, and have fun creating a remix that keeps the heritage of the song intact but adds a lot of new elements (I put some DJ scratching and breakbeats in the bridge for the faithful).
Pitchshifter are on tour at the end of November in the UK, although the London show has now sold out. [NOS] Genius can be ordered now, or purchased in “limited quantities” at the live shows.