8 Tracks – Ewan Pearson

I grew up with music-mad parents and my earliest musical memories are records of theirs – lots of stuff from the English folk revival, Richard Thompson, Irish blues-rocker Rory Gallagher and people like that. This on the other hand – taped off Radio 1 on a family cassette player we had – is one of the first things I can remember choosing to like myself. Ridiculously cheesy 70s pop that only a four-year old could really love but at the time I thought it was totally amazing.

This is the one of the first records that I can remember buying because I liked a sound in it – in this case the ridiculously huge gated reverb sound of Tony Thompson’s drums – rather than a song or the band or whatever. So in a weird way it feels like the start of my interest in production – I remember thinking ‘how on earth did they get it to sound like that?’ I’m not sure I would really want to listen to it today – there are lots of much, much better records that you can obsess over the production of: Hounds of Love, Talking Book, Rumours, Hats, Voodoo, A Secret Wish. I should be linking to all of these – they’ve all been hugely important to me – but I’d be here all day.

I didn’t really like house music at first – I thought Jack Your Body was a gimmick! The first club music that I liked I didn’t even realise was club music at the time because I was only 10 or so – I thought it was was pop music because it was. There were a series of hi-nrg disco records which crossed over to the British charts in the early 1980s – things like ‘Male Stripper’ and Dead or Alive’s ‘You Spin Me Round’ and Hazel Dean and so forth. Eventually that Linn Drum clap sound and double-octave bass-lines would filter their way into things like my Freeform 5 and Goldfrapp remixes. But it took a good twenty years.

‘Sign of the Times’ came out the day before I turned 15 and I got it as a present on my birthday. Hearing a pop record that was all over the place and yet that incredible at that age… It was the first brand new record that made me think “holy fuck this a thing which people are going to look back in awe on in a hundred years time”. You are told what comprises the canon of ‘classic’ records and that these only exist after a certain amount of time has elapsed and enough worthy people have pronounced upon a particular record’s value. But this record blew my head off from the first listen – and I knew that whatever other people thought didn’t really matter. It taught me that drum machines – in the right hands – could be as funky as any drummer could ever be. And it had such individual moments of total genius – ‘…Girlfriend’ and ‘Sign of the Times’ particularly – where the combination of production and music are as sublime as pop has ever been.

Aside from ‘Blue Monday’ I didn’t really know much New Order until the ‘Substance’ compilation. After that I became pretty much obsessed with ‘Touched By The Hand of God’ and then ‘Technique’ which was the first proper artist album of theirs I got. I listened to this song repeatedly wondering how they could make such effortlessly beautiful melodies? Now it’s my job I’m aware that it hardly ever is effortless – the trick (with pop at least) is that now matter how much you agonize or how long it takes it stays effortless for the listener. New Order were a massive inspiration in my becoming a musician – I wondered if it was possible to even begin to make something so transcendently beautiful? If something I made could produce a tiny portion of that emotion in someone else then it was worth a go.

Having dismissed house at first it took the collision of dance music and indie pop in the UK and the nascent production careers of DJs like Andrew Weatherall to put me straight and push me in the direction I’ve since taken. ‘Raise’ is less well-known than lots of the things Andrew did early on but I love it – a cheeky piano lift from a dodgy balearic pop record (Thrashing Doves’ Jesus on the Payroll), Siouxie-ish vocal, and a whip-smart lyric. Lots of the pop-dance crossovers that weren’t the famous chart hits of this time are really great – the first Saint Etienne records, One Dove, Fluke. I love them all.

Eno is far too obvious a figure to cite as an influence – in the sense that if you’re a producer from the last 30 years and you’re not influenced by him, then what exactly are you doing? But it’s not so much musical for me (although I love many of his records – Before and After Science from which this comes in particular). It’s more the way he combines the activity of successfully making things with being interested ‘at large’ in that activity and its wider context. His Faber-published diary from the early 90s is an amazing book. The world – especially in the Internet age of hucksters trying to peddle stuff about ‘creativity’ and ‘process’ to kids who will be really lucky if they can ever earn a penny from it – has made me very cynical of those who talk too much about how they do stuff as opposed to actually doing stuff, but taking a step back and thinking about how and why you do what you do is still really important.

I realise there’s not much dance music here and it’s not really for any reason other than I guess a lot of it, especially these days, is ruthlessly functional and I’ve never been very interested in just groove or function. I always want to have song or melody or something else in there too and my favourite things I’ve been involved with – whether it’s some of the song-based remixes or tracks like the ones Al Usher and I do as Partial Arts – always try and have their cake and eat it. To have some dance element but use that to actually do something else instead. And I’ve realised that lots of my favourite pop and dance records are not quite one or the other – records like ‘The Visitors’, or Womack and Womack’s ‘Teardrops’ or Pet Shop Boys’ ‘Being Boring’ or Charles B’s ‘Lack of Love’ or Mood II Swing’s ‘All Night Long’ use supposedly dance tropes to deliver a heartbreaking payload, to sweeten what would be far too bitter a pill to swallow otherwise. It seems to me to be about a brilliant trick to pull off as dance or pop music can do and as good an inspiration as anyone could have.