Interview: Cherry Ghost

Manchester's Cherry Ghost are back. Miz DeShannon catches up with the ghost himself, Simon Aldred, to talk about the new album, Bruce Springsteen, and how, after two years away, things are looking better than ever for the much loved band.

So, you’ve been a bit quiet for a while. How's the tour gone?

It was really good, we did quite a few supports prior to our own tour and festival slots, so we used those as a little bit of a precursor to our own dates. It’s nice to know that people still remember you, and you turn up to venues and there's a room full of people waiting to see you. It's been much more enjoyable than the first tour. I mean, I didn’t really enjoy playing the songs off the first tour after about two or three months as I felt we, or I, had outgrown them in terms of songwriting. So it was nice to play songs that are pretty much more challenging.

How are the songs more challenging?

Well the songs off the first album (Thirst For Romance, 2007), even when we first toured them they were three or four years old. There's this backlog of material that we just sieved through, and they were kind of all bodged together. There are some really good singles in there but the rest of them, well, there was no cohesion to it in terms of an album. So it was very much the idea now to have a cohesive sound that came from us as a collective as opposed to me as a songwriter.

Last time it was me writing the songs and just adding on the instrumentation, whereas this time we’ve worked much more together. It's more ambitious in every way. A lot of people take great delight in telling you “it's not as good as the first one" or whatever, and okay there aren’t as many immediate radio tracks on the album, but I think in general it's definitely a better album as a whole. Once you learn all the songs it can actually get quite dull touring, but if you're constantly improving and you do set yourself a bit of a challenge, it does keep you interested really for a lot longer.

Who’s Mr Chop, and why has he chosen ‘We Sleep On Stones’ to remix?

Mr Chop is a guy called Cozz who owned the studio we recorded our first album in. It's like a mock Motown studio with lots of old analogue and vintage equipment, and he records under the name Mr Chop for a very famous place in America called Stonesthrow. They have people like Mad Lib and things on their books. So we sent him some stuff and asked him whether he wanted to do a remix, and he did 'We Sleep On Stones'. He's very into his film soundtracks so there's a bit of a Steve McQueen/Bullit style to the remix which we really liked. He's very talented but he never leaves his house, it's only down the road but he never leaves, and it's murder trying to get him to even go to a gig, but he's lovely.

Are you quite a philosophical person? Some of your song titles seem quite deep and meaningful. ‘We Sleep On Stones’ for example – what does that mean?

Well, I actually pinched that from a nightclub in Berlin called Basic - 'cos I wrote some of the songs in Berlin. The motto was in German, and it was  ‘we sleep on stones, we drink gasoline’. I just liked the idea of it so I thought we should do it. But in the context of the song it means a kind of restlessness which doesn’t actually mean you’re sleeping outside, it just means that you can't get any rest or sleep. It's about people with bad dreams, people who are suffereing a little bit. It's related vaguely to war and lost loved ones, so it’s a bit of a metaphor. But I quite like stealing stuff, it saves me thinking! (Laughs). If you've got the title of a song it helps you write it... your experiences around where you found that phrase... I quite like picking things up in certain environments. I’m not into reading books and just pinching quotes that don’t mean anything to you, but if you're walking about and you see something and it means something to you, I think it's quite right to use it.

You've said before that you don't think you can sing very well. Why's that?

(Laughs) I really used to think that I couldn’t sing well. I think I sing alright actually, I’m aware of my weaknesses now. I think over a period of time you get used to the way you sing, you find you strengths. It took me a while to find my voice because you model your voice on other people. You want to sing like whoever, and you just find you copy them a little bit. Then you listen back to it twelve months later and you groan. We used to do demo after demo and you’d come out with a bag of tapes and give them to your mates and send them to record labels and they’d just end up in the bin, but they’re quite useful as you just listen to them back and most of the time you cringe. But you’ve got to do it, you’ve got to learn that you pronounce the things with an overt American twang or an overt Manchester twang, and either are equally wrong. You’ve got to find your own voice within what you do and all those influences. It's taken me a while, but over the last two years I’ve beome very comfortable with my voice. I feel it's very natural now, I sing and I can listen to it back now without shifting in my seat.

What things in life inspire you to write? 

Everything does. Quotes, things people say, overheard conversations, as well as books, films... I try and get some level of depth out of things. But they are all real experiences. I mean, there are some things on there from myself, but I’m never particualrly autobiographical, I try and use other peoples lives because I just think they’re more interesting and musicians can often get quite self obsessed. I don’t really want a whole album written about me, so I try and interpet them through a third person really, which is why a lot of the songs on the album are written from a female perspective as well as a male’s. Theres so much of this 'lads in bands' stuff around, and the lad rock thing is a bit dated really. That whole Oasis thing with lads and coats, it's so boring, so I just think it's more interesting to make an effort and mix it up a bit really.

So the whole experience of this second album has been about spreading your creative wings then?

Yes, instead of being a solitary song writer, I try and embrace other people's experiences as well as my own. There are always people who will criticise things that are written about something serious, because you always run a risk of looking a bit pompous and taking yourself too seriously, but that is me, that’s the way I am. I probably do take myself too seriously, although we have a lot of fun and stuff too! I don’t really have a problem with it, some people are put off by the fact that things are serious or ernest, but it's generally from real life. Not everything is a bed of roses, and I think it's valid to be able to give a voice to that in a song.

What is a Cherry Ghost?

Well it’s a boring story really. It's stolen again (laughs), from a Wilco (American band) lyric. I didn’t want to use my own name, as I didn’t want to be a singer songwriter as such, so I thought I'd invent a name that sounded more like a band. I was listening to an album called A Ghost Is Born at the time when I needed a lyric, and it's just one of the lyrics of that. I think it's supposed to be a positive memory, a sweet thing, that’s the kind of image that I get but really I just liked the sound of it. Band names cease to mean anything after a while, you just get so used to saying it that you don’t think about what it means anymore.

Have you ever seen a ghost?

No, I thought that we did though. Where we recorded this album, we were in an old barn. Apparently in the 1940s there was a German prisoner of war staying in the barn and working on the farm. He hung himself in one of the bedrooms, and his ghost was supposed to haunt the barn. There was lots of weird creaking, and you could hear someone walking up and down the stairs in the night while we were in bed. I’ve not had anything since, but there have been a couple of suspicious goings on in there, although we do have a Scouser in the band and he takes great delight in playing jokes!

So now you’re back, what’s next?

Well, we’ve got some dates with Mark Lanegan and Ray Lamontagne, and we’ve just found out that Bruce Springsteen’s a big fan, so we’ll be trying to blag some dates with him if we can! (Laughs). And just some more recording. I’ve been trying to set up a little studio, we’ve got some songs, and we’re going to try and have a bit of a different direction with things, make it a bit simpler, and more upbeat, a bit more cheerful, God forbid! (Laughs)

So yeah, writing and more gigs, and that’s about it really. We’ve not had time to do much planning after a busy Summer. The album's still really in its early stages, it's still being drip fed out, a lot of it's being spread by word of mouth. We’re on an independent label so there's not one of these massive budgets to do loads of advertising, and ram it down people’s throats, you’ve got to rely more on word of mouth and it’s a longer process.

But I mean the good thing is that people keep buying the album week after week which is good, and they buy it because they really want to, but you kind of have to be a bit more on your tip toes really, doing gigs, and picking up on offers of things. But writing is they key, and I think - although I could be wrong - that I’m getting better the more I do it. I’m feeling more positive, so we’ll see!

Interview by: Miz DeShannon

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