Issue 32 / April 2013

8
Bido Lito! April 2013
Clang Boom Steam
Words: Richard Lewis
Words: Richard Lewis
Photography: Robin Clewley / @robinscamera
Announcing their arrival with the superb angularity of debut
cut Worms and the death-rattle sermon of accompanying double
A-side Clan late last year, blues/punk quartet CLANG BOOM STEAM
are one of the most promising prospects to emerge from the
Mersey Delta for 2013.
Aside from flagging up one of the band’s primary influences,
their moniker - taken from a Tom Waits track – also extends to the
group’s sound. “When the name popped up we were making a lot
of noise with the music we were doing in practice and it seemed
onomatopoeic as well,” Garvan Cosgrove (Singer/Guitarist)
explains, sipping coffee in a bustling MelloMello.
The Northern Ireland via Merseyside four-piece were founded by
Garvan and guitarist Charlie Mullan, veterans of several Liverpool
groups, and are completed by bassist Conor Simpson and drummer
Giulio Vaccaro. “Me and Charlie have been playing music for years;
we’ve been in Liverpool for ten years; we’ve gone through a couple
of different bands trying to work out what we were doing. We
played up and down the country,” Garvan explains.
Whereas Garvan and Charlie’s previous groups had boasted folky,
acoustic arrangements, Clang Boom Steam are a more hard-hitting
affair, in thrall to the power and volume of electric guitar, bass
and drums. Soaking up the raw energy of Californian psychobilly
renegades The Gun Club (in particular their groundbreaking 1981
debut Fire of Love) along with an infatuation with Nick Cave and
the aforementioned Waits, the pair set out on a new path.
“We were playing a lot of acoustics and mandolins; it was
almost a kind of punk Irish Pogues-y band on one level,” Garvan
says of the pair’s earlier work. “I went back to my roots. I started
when I was younger listening to Nirvana, so I was just getting fed
up within the confines of an acoustic folk thing. It’s like that film
you saw when you were five: it comes back round and every bit of
it you know inside out ‘cos it’s sort of ingrained.”
In tandem with Garvan’s switch from hollow to solid-bodied
guitars and something edgier and more immediate, the move
opened up a completely new musical avenue for the songwriter.
“I’d never been in a four-piece rock band of any sort,” he explains.
“In other things I’ve done there’s been a lot of chords and melodies
going around, but with this band I didn’t really wanna do that. I
wanted to create something that was built on bass and drums.”
While CBS operate in a two-guitars-bass-drums set-up, the
band aimed for a specific sound, partially drawn from the
saturated guitar tones of QOTSA. “One of the things was going
heavier; we didn’t want to put any kind of classic rock sound
through our amplifiers,” Garvan emphasises. “We wanted to
make it dark and dirty, gritty rather than smooth. We wanted to
bring a visceral element to it.”
Once established, the fledgling group went through a
baptism of fire, having to book a recording studio at the earliest
opportunity. Precipitated by an amicable split with four-string
axeman Malcolm Lunan due to his long-standing commitments
in Eugene McGuiness’s band, the recording of CBS’s debut LP had
to be undertaken as fast as humanly possible. “We kind of threw
the band together to begin with and managed to get a load of
songs down,” Garvan says. “To be honest, it was out of necessity
more than anything we got the album recorded, as Malcolm was
leaving. It wasn’t supposed to be an album; it was supposed to be
a snapshot of where we were before we lost our bass player.”
Pencilled in for a May release and wrapped in a cover by
Alan Moore-approved artist Michael Lacey, the disc was almost
unbelievably nailed in a single day’s work at Whitewood Studios.
“We didn’t have any money, we did it live in the studio,” Garvan
says of the session. “We just set up and recorded all the tracks. I
think the most we played a track was four or five times. We only
overdubbed the vocals afterwards; everything else was played as
it was in the studio.”
Set to feature Worms and Clan alongside the crystalline guitar
lines of Digging Up the Dead and the staccato bursts of Good
Ship, the album’s highpoint is reached on the stunning Fort St.
Gabriel. The pinnacle of their songwriting achievements thus far,
the five-minute opus reads like a modern day blues, summoning
up the image of a mirage-like desert outpost, a veritable mininovella
set to music. Like mid-sixties Dylan or Nebraska-era
Springsteen, the track demands the listener’s close attention as
the winding narrative unfolds. Amazingly, considering the song’s
skilfully constructed stanzas and tumbling rhyming schemes, the
entire lyric was written in a single sitting.
“There’s only about five, six verses in there,” Garvan explains.
“Charlie had the chorus to it and he couldn’t do anything with
the rest of it, so I took the verse and wrote it in half an hour. The
words came out pretty much as is. Sometimes it’s good to write
songs fast, a certain feeling comes with it.”
Aside from the influence of acclaimed musical wordsmiths
Nick Cave and Tom Waits, Garvan draws inspiration from literary
sources including Anglo-American poet W.H. Auden and gothic
horror icon Edgar Allan Poe. “I like to mash it all together, take
all the things that I’m buzzing off,” the singer enthuses. “I really
like stories and imagery. You get so much more from a big verse.
I write stuff constantly, anything I hear or think of I’ll write down.
I’ve got a notepad full of stuff I keep an eye on I can use.”
With the LP in the can and out-of-town gigs being lined up
around its release, the band are relaxed about the response the
album receives. “You kick it out of the aeroplane door, let [it] drop
to ground and hope the parachute opens on the way down,”
Garvan says of the disc’s upcoming release, laughing. The band
needn’t worry about the album’s ripcord working, however, as
after only a cursory listen it’s manifestly clear Clang Boom Steam
are guaranteed the happiest of landings.
soundcloud.com/clangboommusic