PLAGUE SONGS | INTERVIEW

 

Guardian cartoonist Martin Rowson’s words and images, Welsh playwright Jon Tregenna’s music and production and two volumes of songs performed by various actors and musicians. Having listened to both, Carl Marsh was prepared to find out more… 

 

Plague Songs’ new album, The Second Wave, is the followup to Plague Songs Vol.1, released a few months ago, and again the core duo behind it offer broadsides against hot topics of modern Britain, COVID-19 and Brexit unsurprisingly at the forefront. Hailed as “angry and disturbing as these present times” by Ken Loach, Martin Rowson doesn’t hold back with his verse, and though both he and Jon Tregenna are acclaimed in their field, it’s doubtful you’ll hear this music on the radio or see the videos on TV.

 

As we know, the content and the words of your music is not for all ears. Does it bother you, knowing that a bigger audience can’t hear it?

Martin: No, what bothers me is the fact that the people in this country who define the cultural mores under which we operate think that it’s apocalyptic to hear somebody say “fuck” on national TV than it is to be surrounded by 60,000 people who’ve died through government incompetence and neglect. That’s quite extraordinary. I heard Hugh Laurie say “fuck” on BBC One last night, just before 10pm. So why can’t we have my lyrics effing and blinding with Jon’s fantastic music, which doesn’t use the word “fuck” once!

Jon: I tried to make a guitar swear, but it was quite hard. [laughter]

Martin: I’m using language which I think is appropriate for these times.

 

And what about you, Jon – does it make you a little bit disheartened that it’s not going to be heard, you know, on the radio?

Jon: I don’t worry at all about that, because it’s a form of art that’s almost deliberately putting itself outside of the box. It’s there to be discovered, but it’s not there as part of the general morass of everything that’s being released. So in a funny kind of way, I think if we’ve targeted it, it can’t be commercially successful.

But in another way, it then has an intrinsic value that it’s horrible, it’s outside, and it’s underground. And it’s disarming, and violent. I think those are the qualities that make this such an interesting project for me. I mean, if Martin wrote all of the lyrics without swear words, what would it be? It has to be; it has to be offensive; it has to be horrible.

 

Is there any topic that you wouldn’t want to touch upon?

Martin: I have a sort of personal code of honour, if you want to call it that, which is taken from the great American journalist, H.L. Mencken: his definition of journalism was to “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted”. So I don’t attack people less powerful than me.

 

What were the origins of Plague Songs – do the words or the music come first?

Martin: I started writing a poem every day; I’ve already had a couple of volumes of poetry published, but I started writing a daily one on the 11th of May, to buck up my friend, the poet Luke Wright, who was doing a Twitter feed every night and was looking a bit gloomy. I rang him up and said, “Why don’t we write a poem – if it’s rubbish, it doesn’t matter, but you’re not writing at the moment, you’re locked down there…”

Of course he, being a professional poet, buggered off and didn’t do anything about it at all [laughs], but I found it quite fulfilling – a kind of mental throat-clearing in the morning. Unless there were pressing deadlines somewhere else, I’d try and sit down for an hour. I didn’t do one this morning, because I had to do this [shows me the artwork for the following day’s Guardian cartoon].

And then Jon phoned me up, asked me what I was getting up to in lockdown and said, did I have any stuff that I’ve written? I said, “strange you should mention that,” sent it all over to him, and now every day I send whatever I’ve written to him and Luke, my poetry publisher, my agents, and a couple of other people.

It’s not like I’m saying, “here’s this, put it to music” – it’s like I’m throwing breadcrumbs out of my bag as I wander through the forest, and Jon is walking behind me picking up the ones he fancies and putting them to music, which I like because it makes it more random. It gets to the point where it’s a three-part collaboration: I do something, Jon finds it, he adds something to it. He then gives it to the singers or performers, and they add something else. And so nobody has overall possession of these things – I like the collective ownership of it.

 

Did you have early ideas who you’d planned to sing them?

Jon: I started off with a couple, but then a guy called David Charles, who was originally from Cardiff, got me in touch with Jack Klaff who was in Star Wars and is a famous theatre actor. It kind of spread from there. For this second one, we brought a couple of new people in, but generally we’ve got a sort of core cast.

The fantasy would be that one day it goes onstage – so you don’t have 40 people doing it, you’d have a core cast of people who have contributed to each of the, potentially, three albums – we’re looking at a third even though we’ve only just launched the second. We’ve done about 37 of Martin’s poems now.  [to Martin] How many have you written since then?

Martin: Maybe over 100. Some of which can’t be put to music, some which can’t be put to words. [laughter]

Plague Songs’ The Second Wave can be viewed in full here.

words CARL MARSH