Issue 11 / May 2011

18
Bido Lito! May 2011
A POSTCARD FROM
MOTHER EARTH
Words: Nik Glover
Illustration: Graham Cheal
NB: The following was sent to Bido Lito! Second Class after weeks of
chasing Mother Earth around for info. We know at least 60% of it to be
untrue ...
Bido Lito!: Mother Earth?
Mother Earth: We started life on the Isle of Man. There’s little-to-nothing
going for the city of Douglas aside from a constant in-flow of warm winds
and an abundance of crayfish tails. The venues are operated by tax-avoiding
aristocratic motorcycle enthusiasts, and the Island’s other bands are stuck in
a curious courtship with the U.S. ExPat line-dancing movement. In a flash of
the seasons, the Mother Earth boys broke out of their Irish Sea time-loop and
drafted in a third-cousin to stand ‘pon the left-hand-side, ripping on a friend’s
Telecaster copy. And the rest, depending on which old myth you pay attention
to, is recent ancient history.
BL!: How’s work on your album?
ME: We think of our tracks like rocks. We’re squashing down layer upon
layer of ideas into each piece to create something solid and long-lasting.
The record, as it will be, is currently in the form of our expanding/contracting
‘live set’. Our brainwaves for tracks tend to appear in lumps of two or three
at a time, like shards of pumice-stone. It’s like this: a timeless fossil of a
musical idea will be compacted under heaps of impermeable dirt, but we’ll
sift through that and clean it up for presentation purposes. Once this process
has been completed several times, you have a set of things that you’d like to
‘show and tell’. The ‘show’ aspect is obviously the playing of this material in
a gig setting. The ‘tell’ part is documenting these things once you’re content
with them, and is a little more intricate and complex. Like that scene in
Jurassic Park - Mother Earth needs to be both the skeleton of the dinosaur in
the lobby AND the live T-Rex that stomps through and demolishes everything
in the way. It can be difficult, but with time & effort it becomes a song and
dance.
BL!: How’s the Croxteth lodge ‘scene’ developing?
ME: Scenes are inevitable aren’t they? The notion of a scene will prevail, at
the very least. They exist in and out of music because, out of convenience or
otherwise, people tend to pigeon-hole what they know and what they don’t
into genres, sub-genres, anti-genres, sub-quarks and the like. We are powerstep,
igneous-riff and conglomerate-rock, feel free to call us and what we do
whatever you want if it helps you. We want to do just that.
The thing is that we crash-landed here really - put our anklebones in &
intruded on a peat bog party. We put word out on a few web forums, months
back, and received an offer from a bird keeper with a basement space. When
we got in the gaff it was so tidy. People were coming & going, playing on
a spoken-word record here, laying down a dubplate there. Everyone kept
busy, and the ‘lights out at eleven’ rule really helped productivity. We’ve since
shacked up in a refurb’d (en suite) changing room and the tectonic plates are
really shifting along nicely. That said, the underlying theme of a Lodge being
a place where old pals have bundled together in aid of a shared distaste for
boredom can only be a handy environs to exist in. We wouldn’t like to give
ourselves a grand title, because it’s just that. Back at the ranch you’re just as
likely to hear Ce Ce Peniston as you are a bit of the Webber.
BL!: Where does Mother Earth come from?
ME: Many pillars of the Manx community are VAT-dodgers so there’s a
tendency on the Island to ‘Google-proof’ the name of your company or firm,
to throw off the Scotland Yard sniffers. So really we’re just taking the mickey
out of that tendency, following suit with a band name that Black Sabbath
traded under for a fortnight.
BL!: Is Liverpool better now than in the past? Was it any good then?
ME: When we arrived it was completely overwhelming, shocking and
arresting - and now it’s even more so. Evolution takes a long time, so not
too surprisingly we’re living in a time within which you can draw a lot of
comparisons, because really, not that much has changed. Liverpool has a
good scene and there’s a lot of variety but it’s been that way for a while, not
all too surprisingly.
Over on the Island, there’s a gated amount of musical knowledge that
gets shared. We were all pretty well versed on the tried-and-tested bunch
– Cream, Rush, all that lot aren’t a secret. It was only when we got to these
shores that we realised Mersey Beat had upped and left, the British Invasion
had become a two-way war of attrition, and the decades had been unkind
to yesteryear’s Power Trios. We had to ‘jack in’ to 30-odd years’ worth of
sonic cavorting. Like in the film The Fifth Element where Leeloo gets up-tospeed
with the history of human civilisation in a flash. And I can tell you, our
revision sessions were not pretty. One dawn Jacob sat bolt upright behind
the kit and memorably uttered, “I know kung fu.”
The tools for documenting musical goings-on (posh computers, retro-fit
digi-cams, the information superhighway), are all too prevalent, but they
didn’t used to be. Scenes are more extensive and looked at, as is the term.
Time will tell if they really existed.
motherearth.bandcamp.com
www.bidolito.co.uk