SHACK BIOGRAPHY
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You can call Shack many things – romantics, outsiders, survivors – but you could never call them swaggering trumpeteers of their own acknowledged brilliance. Britain’s greatest melodic folk-art guitar group throughout the last two decades, Shack remain the sound, as Mick Head has always said, of “truth and beauty”.
Since their formation in ‘88 this less-celebrated mystical Scouse quartet not only inspired Oasis but the Oasis generation, the guitar-besotted kids who would become the likes of The Coral and The Zutons today. Last year, Noel Gallagher, Britain’s most consistently impeccable A&R scout, saw Shack once again without a record deal and stepped in with a nifty solution: record their next album for his very own Sour Mash label. The result, ‘… The Corner Of Miles And Gil’ is a deep guitar-soul classic – all kaleidoscopic melody and jazzy, dreamscape trumpets - Shack’s fourth studio album recorded over two months in Liverpool during 2005 and the one which will take them, at last, to the heart of the guitar-led mainstream. In 2006, they’re also back with their original line-up: Mick Head (singer/song-writer/guitarist), younger brother John (singer/song-writer/guitarist), Iain Templeton (drummer, the sort of man who has taken his own teeth out, “with whiskey and pliers”) and Pete Wilkinson (bassist, who left Shack in the early 90’s ).
“We wanted Pete back in because this was always the best line-up,” says Mick. “So we kidnapped him, now he’s back it’s really good. Just because we love playing with each other.” John: “We tried loads of different bass players, different moods and no disrespect to the other bass players but getting Pete back in is just really enjoyable, good fun, we’re doing what we were doing when he joined the band in the first place.”
Noel, as a label boss, says Ian, “pretty much left us to it”, busy on tour with Oasis through the recording of ‘…The Corner of Miles And Gill’. John: “He’s a musician, so he respects your ideas and he probably doesn’t like his toes stepped on either. He’d just be ‘sounds great!’” Ian: “And he understands why things can sometimes….go awry! So there’s a really good understanding of us as a band. The one thing Noel is, is enthusiastic, he loves to see us get it together and see the possibilities. He came up with some great suggestions for edits and stuff like that. When he sticks his oar in, there’s a good reason why.”
‘… The Corner of Miles And Gil’ is a title which arrived, fully-formed, in Mick’s psychedelic conscience, a homage to their life-long musical heroes Miles Davis and (Davis’ arranger), Gil Evans.
“I had a bit of a bender,” says Mick, as he does, “and woke up in the morning and had this recurring thing in a dream, ‘meet me on the corner of Miles and Gil’. A fictitious street. I always respected Miles and Gil and it just seemed like a beautiful title. I think it says quite a lot. Beats 53rd and 30th! Better than meet me on the corner of…. Simon and Garfunkel!”
The lyrics, as ever, are plaintive, descriptive, funny and forlorn, tales of love, friendship and the spectrum of human experience, Mick a life-long natural storyteller who grew up, as did John, on the hard-knock housing estate of Kensington (‘Kenny’) in Liverpool, with his head both lost in the clouds and buried among the pages of Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey and Wordsworth. “Songs are just like writing stories,” says Mick, “fact and fiction, some more fact than fiction and vice versa but that’s what I like doing, writing stories, cramming ideas in, it’s massively enjoyable.”
‘…The Corner of Miles and Gil’ begins with the whimsical reverie ‘Tie Me Down’, surely the sweetest song ever written about restraint techniques in a sexual relationship. “They’re not pervy lyrics,” grins Mick, “it’s about love, isn’t it? And trust.” Pete: “It’s about being trussed up!” Mick: “No, it’s about trust, love and respect! And there’s a little bit of eroticism going on, ‘I trust you to tie me down’, it’s a beautiful song.” ‘Cup Of Tea’ is another intriguing, romanticised wheeze. “I wrote it post-trip,” says Mick in his matter-of-fact way. “A fella, his girl’s just left him, he gets a female lodger and she starts spiking his tea with acid.”
Elsewhere, there are name-checks for four early characters in ‘Home And Away’ in the ghostly ‘Finn, Sophie, Bobby & Lance’ “about people who go missing - and the girls in Home And Away were very tasty”. Three songs come from the increasingly colourful mind of the complex John Head: the epic, soaring ‘Butterfly’, the Sgt. Pepper eulogy ‘New Day’ and the arrestingly stark ‘Find A Place’, as atmospherically dense as Joy Division at their melancholic finest. “There’s been certain words used about that song,” smiles John, “and they’re ‘disturbing’, ‘strange’, ‘weird’. It’s about being cast aside and feeling a bit sorry for yourself (laughs) The drugs really kicked in.” “The bottom line,” says Ian, “is that it’s us. All artists develop, we’ve evolved and I think the stuff we’re doing now is the best we’ve ever done. It’s more interesting and more colourful because you just get better at it.”
In 18 years, The Story of Shack has become a mythological saga of near-biblical proportions. Born from promising 80s under-achievers the Pale Fountains, Mick and John formed Shack through love of the previous two decades, their melodic, pastoral, mystical harmonies beamed through the infinite rainbow prism of their life-long musical heroes: Love, Nick Drake, Tim Buckley, Sly & The Family Stone, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Harry Nilsson, The Beatles. They created the gorgeous, guitar-pop landmark ‘Waterpistol’ in 1991, never an embarrassingly prolific troupe, a deviation then followed in ‘97 as The Strands, Mick and John creating the gossamer, dream-folk masterpiece ‘The Magical World Of The Strands’. There followed, perversely, their most accessible album to date, the sublime ‘HMS Fable’ in ’99. Mick appeared on the cover of the NME as “our greatest song-writer: do you recognize him?” before the orchestral shimmer of ‘Here’s Tom With The Weather’ in 2003. Through their musical lifetime, there’s been studios burnt down, master-tapes missing, record labels folding, busking in Liverpool, playing in Arthur Lee’s post-Love band in the mid-90s, the brothers’ loss of their beloved mum mid-way through the making of ‘HMS Fable’, Mick losing his best mate and fellow “Paley”, Biffa back in the 80s, euphoric live shows, shambolic live shows, falling out, falling in and falling over through journeys around the narcotic fringes of what Mick calls “states of consciousness”. And all the while, making some of the most beautiful music ever created by soul men gifted in melody. Almost 20 years on, Shack are still here, still intact and still in love with truth and beauty.
“The bottom line is,” muses Mick, “we’re back together because we don’t fuck around, we love each other. Fundamentally, we all get on and we’ve got a steady, stable understanding. We can fall out… sometimes… but it must be as exciting for them to play with me as it is for me to play with them. John is the best guitarist I’ve ever met, Pete is the best bass player and Ian is the best drummer. So we just go forward.”
“The albums we’ve made the last few years,” decides John, “we don’t think any less of them, but making this album was really like putting on a comfy pair of shoes that you haven’t put on for years. Things just fitted into place. For me personally, it’s just so easy playing now. It’s like therapy.” The curly-haired man from Liverpool looks incredulous, “we look forward,” he grins, “to coming into work!”
by Sylvia Patterson
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