Jane Weaver's Personal Best

JANE WEAVER: Five years before Cherlokalate came out, when I was in Misty Dixon, our bandmate Dave [Tyack] went on a solo walking holiday to Corsica and never came back. We were supposed to put the finishing touches to our album straight after, but he just never turned up to the studio. We found out that he had gone missing after just a couple of days of being out there, but nobody knew where he could have gone. It turned out that he had died – he’d probably slipped and fell – but it took two years for his body to be found. It was horrific for us and horrific for his family.

When somebody goes missing like that, you find yourself this bizarre situation of being stuck in some kind of limbo of grief. I remember thinking ridiculous things that could mean he was still alive. Like maybe he’d joined the Foreign Legion, who are based in Corsica, or maybe he’d been kidnapped, as if was it was some kind of Famous Five mystery story. When he was eventually found, I was heavily pregnant with my daughter, and it was pretty horrendous. Even though we’d wanted some closure, some kind of conclusion, the whole thing was pure trauma. It’s something I’d never experienced before and never want to experience again.

We did eventually finish the Misty Dixon record and put it out, but it was very hard to go on after that. Dave was someone I used to work with quite a lot, so I was bereft to not have him around. He was an amazingly musical drummer, a jazz drummer, who recorded and released his own music as Dakota Oak, and in the Dakota Oak Trio. He’d grown up in the Germany countryside, close to a forest, and some of his music had this kind of fairytale quality.

“Shoulder Seasons” is about when we went to Corsica to try and find him after he'd gone missing. I remembered him saying that the reason he wanted to go there was because in Corsica you could experience all the seasons in one day, and we had that experience while we were out there looking for him. We had a hire car and drove from the hot beaches up to the snow-covered mountains, just like he’d said.

BEST FIT: What else was going on in your life at the time?

Well, in 2003 I’d got married to Andy and in 2004 I became a mum, so I think my output and the way I made music had changed. It’s weird in a way, because it gave me more of a gritty determination to prove myself. You know, I was one of those people who are like, ‘Yeah, it’s fine, the baby will just fit in with our lifestyle’, as if I could just walk around with a papoose and play guitar.

Of course, being a mother wasn’t like that at all in the end, and it kind of changed the way that I write. So, yeah, Cherlokalate was a compilation of stuff old and new. It got me back into the studio and recording with a band. It was good to record a song like “The Pain”, which is quite heavy and another of my favourites from that album.

I might have chosen that one, but I think “Shoulder Seasons” is perhaps a deeper story and people who came to my music later might not know it or know that whole part of my history.

If you’d had to choose a Misty Dixon song for this list, which one would it have been?

Probably “Headlights” because it was one of the first ones we made. Thinking about the beginnings of Misty Dixon just feels me with such a warm feeling, because it was such a fun band to be in. We were all just really great friends. The others would often call me the mum or the grandma of the band, because I guess I was the driving force. I always end up being the organiser, but there was so much laughter. Which is hilarious, because all these downbeat songs came out from it.

Otherwise I might choose “Are You Lost”, because that was one we’d finished before Dave went missing. It was also the first single we released from the album, and it was very poignant. When it came to releasing the record, we couldn’t really hold it back. We just had to get it out, and at that point we were still hopeful that Dave would come back and everything would be fine.

BEST FIT: This song from The Silver Globe is a collaboration with the producer David Holmes. What’s the story there?

JANE WEAVER: I’ve known David for a long time because he’s a friend of my husband. At some point he’d moved over to LA with his family to do some film scoring and was working in this incredible studio called Electro Vox, which is in Hollywood and was where a lot of the big film studios did their sound recording, especially Paramount Studios. A lot of cool, history-making music was recorded there too.

David invited me out there to work in the studio with him, which I couldn’t really afford to do but I went anyway, just for the experience. We had such a creative session there, working with a guy called Woody who ran the studio and who is also an amazing musician.

I’m a massive studio geek. I’m not that technical with stuff, but when somebody presents me with a really weird old synth or loads of strange outboard gear, I instantly want to know how it works and what I can do with it. And David’s like that as well. He’s quite experimental. We went into the studio with some demos and just had a great time working with loads of equipment I’d never used before. It was so inspiring, to have all those creative possibilities.

For example, we used something called an orchestron, which I think was one of the first proto-synths. It was massive. We also used a Binson Echorec, which is a tape delay from the ‘70s and is synonymous with Pink Floyd. We’d record some vocals, flip the tape over and record again, creating these amazing multilayered vocal effects, which you can hear on “Arrows” and on “Stealing Gold” from the same album.

As it turned out, The Silver Globe was kind of my indie breakthrough album. The limited amount of success I’ve had is probably because of that record, really.

What was the inspiration for “Arrows”, from a lyrical perspective?

It does sound as though I’m wallowing in loss and it’s quite melancholic, quite miserable, but I don’t really know where that came from, other than it just being something that I wanted to write. I knew I didn’t want the song to be very wordy. I wanted it to repeat one of the phrases like a mantra – “Still the same / nothing without you” – and melodically it’s quite downbeat, but there are some uplifting bits in it too.

JANE WEAVER: I didn’t want to do an album of remixes and reworkings for Modern Kosmology, so for some reason I decided to go back into the vaults of those recordings myself and create something new from it. Honestly, it was kind of a hideous task. I really got in over my head. It took ages and it was not a comfortable process.

To pass something I’ve done over to someone else for a remix or a rework is fine for me, but to take my own songs to pieces and try to create something new from that was really not an enjoyable experience. But these two tracks came out of that and I'm really, really happy with them. When I listen to them now, I actually feel quite proud of the fact that I had to undo a lot of stuff that I’d already done in order to get to these two songs, which I consider to be a single piece.

Loops in the Secret Society started out as an Arts Council project that would enable me to go out on a solo tour and play the songs from Modern Kosmology live. I just really overcomplicated the situation, quite a lot. Because I wasn’t just working from the stems, I was writing new parts and adding those on top, as well using outboard stuff. I thought I was going to go into the studio just for a short amount of time but I ended up digging into it a lot more than I wanted to.

When I’d finished the album, I then had to think, ‘How the hell am I gonna play this now?’. I didn’t want to have a backing track and just play on top of that. I wanted it to be a different kind of experience. When I did The Fallen By Watchbird, Andy had suggested I get some dubplates made, and that worked really well. So that’s what I decided to do here. Instead of doing everything purely digitally I had a deck that would play the backing and then I would play on top of that. It was a more earthy experience, I think. You actually get all the crackles and the surface noise.

BEST FIT: I saw you play this album at EartH in Hackney and it was fantastic. But quite stressful for you, I imagine.

Honestly, it was a bit manic. It’s never easy for anybody to loop stuff live, because if you get it wrong you can’t really get out of it. It’s a very nerve-wracking experience. I don’t know if I would ever do that again in the same way. Maybe I’d have some people on stage with me rather than doing it all myself. Not a drummer, more synthy stuff. So actually a bit like the way we perform as Fenella.

You mentioned in an email that Loops in the Secret Society was influenced in part by the soundtrack to the 1986 thriller movie Manhunter. Can you expand on that a little?

There’s certain synth stuff that I absolutely love, and the Manhunter soundtrack is definitely one of those. I wasn’t deliberately trying to replicate that sound, but certainly I was influenced by the music of Kitarō. He’s a Japanese composer and musician who makes this sort of new age music with a lot of spacey sounds. Quite ‘80s sounding, which I like.

At the time, I’d just bought a whole load of new synths – a Juno and various other things – and was playing around with those. It’s lucky I got them then actually, because the prices have gone through the roof since, for various reasons. They’re just not really affordable now.

The title “Ivana Vessel”, is that another nod to Paola Suhonen?

Yeah, it is, because I think some of the music I used in that track was pinched from the earlier sessions for the Ivana Helsinki stuff. I think I just dug into anything on my laptop that was a stem, and that was the part that I quite liked doing. Even though I hate the technical stuff and moan about it because it doesn’t come naturally to me, I do like looking through old files, playing them and thinking, ‘Wow, where did that come from?’. I like that you can create a collage of these old bits and pieces and give new life to them.

Are your laptop files super organised or are the stems and everything just scattered all over the place?

[Laughs] Oh god, I’m hideously disorganised! My brain is just not capable of being anything else. I wish I was organised and I do try, because I do think it can be overwhelming when you’re faced with chaos. But I don’t beat myself up about it. Who has the time for that?