Getting Super Weird with Greg Wilson

All lives are separated into chapters and for an artist, their musical journey alone reaches easy to spot milestones. For Merseyside native Greg Wilson, the most recent turning point in his career was the launch of the multi-media Super Weird Substance label.

The creative platform is wholly reflective of Greg's taste and ethos. Everything from the box set in which the first set of vinyls were delivered to the vibrant artwork prints, the mesmerising attention to detail and the nods to the past, present and future. 

The project was born when Greg Wilson and Blind Arcade's Kermit Leveridge came together and the first four releases saw collaborations with the two like-minded music heads plus remixes from Luxxury and Walter Ego. Not limited to the music released, the Super Weird experience branches out to include talks, art and bands.

We sat down with Greg in Croatia to discuss the label and how it all began, the influences, the music scene and Super Weird's arrival to Festival Number 6. 

Why did you think that now was the right time to launch the label?

For a number of years I had seen myself saying in interviews, “next year I'm going to start a label “and it got to next year and things were so busy that I just didn't have the option of getting round to it. In a sense I suppose the time has chosen itself. I think it's a really good time with what we're doing. 

And why’s that?

I’ve got a theory about how the music is at the moment, I think we're entering an emotional period. We're coming out of a cerebral time of genres and sub genres and a lot it is technical. Which is fine in its own context but now we're entering an emotional stage which may have something to do with austerity and the struggle in the world.

People aren't too sure of things and they need an escape in order to let go. So I think the positioning in terms of timing now is right, it's a good time to come in with different ideas. I think people are more open than they would have been five years ago or so. 

So did you look at the music scene and think that something was missing from it, something you could fill with Super Weird? 

I think it was just an extension of what I do as a DJ and I think from being part of the scene for past ten or so years, I've come to realise my role within this. Somebody once said to me that I’m a bridge builder - somebody who can connect the past to the present. So I can enable someone to go off down an avenue and then find their own way from there and develop their own interests. I've somehow managed to fall into that role, not just by DJing but by writing blog posts or whatever it might be. 

I can introduce someone to an area that they might not have been fully aware of and it becomes a place of discovery for them. So that's the same with the label. With the first four releases, two of those are cover versions and two of them are original tracks and I suppose that's the balance - we're still drawing from the past but we're doing it in a contemporary way. 

A lot of people get to my age and they might still play music but only to people of their own age. To me that's the biggest nightmare because it'd freak me out; it's nostalgic, it's like waiting for death. It’s like saying, “we're going to relive our good old days” as if there are no more good days to come. It's so important to retain that connection with youthful energy, and it's a reciprocal thing. I can bring experience to the table and knowledge that I've picked up along the way but a younger person has an energy that can spread that in a vibrant way. 

The Reynolds feature as vocalists on the first Super Weird release (listen above), could you tell us a bit more about how you began working with the girls?  

Katherine and Carmen Reynolds are two girls who live pretty much about a mile away from where I live and I'm so fortunate that we found them. They came into my life via my wife who was running singing groups for young people and she started a jazz group and said to me, “wow these two twins have turned up and they're the real deal”. When I heard them myself I completely agreed. 

They're fearless vocalists. Their musical intelligence is off the scale and they pick ideas up straight away. I think because since they were little babies they've been singing to each other, they have this understanding. 

What sort of understanding?

It's a little bit supernatural. You'll see them hit the same notes at exactly the same time and as they evolve, they'll gain more control over the gift they have. I want to be there to channel that and to help them express themselves. I don't take it lightly, I think they're special. 

So the Super Weird parties took place last year, was that before you decided you wanted to go ahead with a label?

The whole thing started on April Fool’s day in 2014 and we announced the label on April Fool’s 2015. It was this whole idea of a fool's leap and taking a leap of faith. The initial thing we did was the Blind Arcade Meets Super Weird Substance In The Morphogenetic Field mixtape (below), that was to really put the concept out there last summer. 

On the surface I wanted it to be accessible music that gives you a good feeling but underneath it has various layers. The cultural aspect is really important to us. For example, on the 12" singles, there are all these characters on the sleeve and they're all characters from the mixtape and from the happenings that took place - so everything has a reason.

The first four tracks from the release are dance based, but you've got your Balearic, you've got your boogie, you've got a rock thing going on with ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’, and a hip hop, funk sort of thing as well. 

Who would you cite as the main influence when you developed the Super Weird concept?

Possibly the main influence if I boiled it down wasn't even a musician, it was a comic book writer called Alan Moore who created Watchmen and V for Vendetta. Kermit is a comic book person and he grew up on comics so he'd bring the original Watchmen ones in and I'd have a quick glance but I was more into reading. It looked interesting and I liked it but I had more important things to read. But about 5 years ago, the film did it for me. 

It's amazing, isn't it?

It is, I think they did a really good job. Alan Moore won't take any money from the film. His attitude towards it was because he made it in the comic medium, and that was the only way that he could tell the story and anything else was a lesser version. 

The Watchmen comic was basically to that medium what Sgt. Peppers was to pop music, it absolutely revolutionised things. Peppers was the first to put the lyrics on the sleeve and Watchmen was the first to do stuff like not have any adverts. It was also the first one to use written pieces alongside the drawings just to embellish it and to give depth and layers. It is stuff that he introduced as fantasy aspects and are now coming into the real world. That is what is interesting.

So what about the name itself? 

The name Super Weird Substance is something I heard Alan Moore say. He talked about information as a super weird substance. Information underpins everything and he talked about this theory of information doubling. 

In the first say 50,000 years of civilisation they could measure the amount of information by the inventions developed within that period of time, to double that information it took another say 5,000 years and so it went on. He said in a documentary in 2003 that in 2015 information will double every thousandth of a second. And he was right, that's Facebook, the cloud, stuff like that.

All bets are off, who knows what will happen now. It's very interesting where this is going, it's almost an evolutionary step. Someone like Alan Moore makes sense of the world through his writing. There's a lot of synchronicity and connection, that's what I'm about, the way things interrelate. I tried to get Alan Moore for the Super Weird Happening at Festival Number 6.

Image: DC

So does he know how much he's influenced you?

No I don't think so, Alan Moore is a legend. I mean, Time Magazine named Watchmen as one of the top 100 books of the 20th century, not comic books, actual books, with the likes of To Kill A Mocking Bird. This is the level he's at - he's an artist. 

It’s like the KLF, they not only burnt one million pound but they deleted their back catalogue, they were the most successful singles band in the early nineties but decided to almost write themselves out of history. I think in many ways they felt like they had been coerced by the industry, that they had gone to the dark side in a sense when they just wanted to have fun and prove that it was all bullshit. They became so big and they recognised that and it scared them.

I think looking deeper into it, it's about art and it's about legacy. In 100 years time they will look back at Alan Moore and say, "that guy was for real, he was proper, he wouldn't take the deal.” That's really something to be said in this modern age when everything is so corporate.

He revolutionised the comic book format and in Watchmen all the characters are archetypal human characters and he wanted to show the flaws. He wanted to say if there were superheroes that they would be flawed. 

He also shone a light on the world which we live in and gave it a twist. That's where it makes its mark for me. That whole term of the watchmen, it came from a rich roman who was going away to battle or something and he wanted his wife remained chaste while he was there so made sure there was someone there to watch her.

But who watches the watchmen? 

There you go, that's the thing, people start doing things with moral intentions but it can always do a 360 spin. 

Alan Moore is a huge influence on this project, but other influences would be people like Roger Eagle who was the DJ at Twisted Wheel in Manchester in the sixties along with a man called Guy Stevens who was at The Scene in London. Northern Soul comes from the Twisted Wheel. You could definitely say they were the first two DJs of the modern era in the North and the South, they were proper music heads.

Heroes can be people who are very famous but heroes might be people that never achieve it fully but were equally as influential when you boil it all down. It's about making those connections and just inspiring people to look beyond the surface of stuff. 

Like you mentioned earlier, you’re bringing a Super Weird Happening to Festival Number 6, what can people expect?

It'll start between 9 and 12 and we'll have stuff like juices, massages and yoga. A bit on that Morning Gloryville tip and then it'll go into talks. We’ve got Howard Marks (aka Mr Nice) coming, he was the biggest cannabis smuggler of his time and ended up getting jailed in the States, before coming back to the UK and writing a highly readable best-seller about his experiences. John Higgs who wrote the KLF book will also be speaking and Daisy Campbell who did a play called Cosmic Trigger in the Camp & Furnace. 

Then we'll have live performances from Blind Arcade and we'll have the Reynolds and Kermit obviously. I'll be DJing to finish off. So it's a day of multimedia things, different stuff going on. A happening is a sixties term and it was used in relation to artistic events. It's evoking the spirit of that, trying to be a bit experimental. 

Like this? Try A Super Weird Happening at Gorilla

Or Kermit Leveridge's Super Weird Playlist