C86 Legends Close Lobsters Are Back in Action, But They Never Exactly Broke Up

Photo by Alastair Indge

Canon is an inscrutable and terrible thing. Who gets left behind and who is used as a cudgel of comparison for all the bands that come after? If history is written by the victors, what do we do with the history of genres specifically tailored to the self-styled losers. It’s a frustrating gambit and, either way, canon is usually some bullshit. So forgive yourself for maybe never having heard of Paisley, Scotland’s Close Lobsters. They were (indie) biggish in the UK, less (indie) biggish in the USA and, while always a very good band, they were on hiatus for a decade. First heard on the famous NME C86 compilation that etched nebbish rock into stone and gave us Wedding Present, Primal Scream, and the Shop Assistants (yay!), the Pastels and Soup Dragons (OK!), and…Age of Chance (yay! by me but I’m not going to try to convince you…), among others.

Ever since then, despite two great albums (1987’s Foxheads Stalk This Land and 1989’s Headache Rhetoric) of jangly and bitter pop-rock, and even an excellent new EP (Kunstwerk In Spacetime) that came out last year, Close Lobsters have remained in the public eye, as it where, as…one of the other bands on C86. This is dumb. And a new box set out on Fire Records, Firestation Towers 1986-1989, intends to set the record straight. Close Lobsters singer Andrew Burnett was kind enough to answer my borderline impertinent questions with the wry humor and grace that he shares with his band. I appreciate him taking the time.

Continued below

NOISEY: I’ve previously interviewed Drew McDowall, who grew up in Glasgow, and his descriptions of growing up in Scotland in the 70s are frankly a bit harrowing. You came of age in Paisley a bit later so, and please forgive my ignorance of Paisley, what was that like? If it’s not too broad a question, how did your upbringing affect early Close Lobsters?
Andrew Burnett: No more harrowing than anywhere else, more or less. Paisley is, in fact, the micro-Detroit of Scotland with a good smattering of the underground rejuvenating forces unleashed in Detroit through house and techno, and in a similar way a post-industrial Wasteland. In some other sense we are really Glaswegian overspill extended from the great post war social experiments that sought to cleanse urban degeneration by sending the huddled masses to the newly built healthy idyllic country suburb environs. That was the plan. Socialist realism in the West of Scotland. Johnstone, Paisley, Glasgow are the three geographical origins of the group. Growing up in Johnstone was great because it was surrounded by woodlands, which facilitated the building of campfires, the chopping down of trees, and trails through waste dumps with sticks searching for rats. All wholesome Huck Finn type activities.

We believed that we were simply a suburb of Glasgow, which I guess it was because the real locals, the people who lived in the old town of Johnstone, considered we interlopers Glaswegian overspill barbarians. Which we were. There used to be a song sung as kids growing up alienated and detached from our Heimlich city slums: “I’m a cunt, I’m a cunt, I’m a country boy…” Some aspects of Paisley as a town are fiercely independent of Glasgow and we are very proud of the punk rock inheritance that to this day exists in Paisley. The punk rock scene in Paisley developed by the likes of Groucho-Marxist Records and It Ticked and Exploded fanzine had a major influence on the group.

Bet you wished you hadn’t asked now? What was the question again?

In the same way that punk was a reaction to the perceived anodyne and/or bloated nature of 70s rock, was Close Lobsters and your contemporaries a reaction to maybe the forced aggression of punk? Or the gloss of new wave? Or, not reading too much into anything, was it simply a result of the records that you all loved? There’s clearly a connection to bands like Television but did you also feel some sort of kinship to the poppier Scottish acts like Aztec Camera and the Postcard Records scene?
All of what you say has resonance. We put it down to a subtle mix of Orange Juice and Crass. NY punk rock/new wave was hugely influential for us. Some people still think it weird that we cover a track from an anarcho-punk group the Mob. This kind of narrow compartmentalization completely misunderstands the ethos of punk rock. It’s a state of mind that rejects the mainstream and its tribalistic conformity. A floppy fringe in the 80s was punk rock.

There’s the common complaint of C86 that it was inherently conservative, and God knows twee (which, rest assured, I’m not accusing you of being) is the counter-revolution in black rim glasses. So much of your fame both early on and later (with Popfest) comes with those associations so I’m not asking you to be an ingrate but is there any misgivings to forever being associated with that even though it was one damn song on one damn comp and you made two very fine albums afterwards? This is obviously an obnoxiously loaded question so you should feel free to disagree with even the basic premise. Short version: how do you feel, in 2015, after all the music you’ve made since, about the Very Sanctified C86 Compilation?
Ambivalent. It raised our profile and simultaneously enchained us. One might conjecture that it was analogous to being raised on the scaffold to be hanged - or guillotined like Mersault. If you like, if he was. Another way to put it is that we have an innate human predisposition to seek "the origin" resulting very often in the reproduction of fairy tales. Lumping groups together because they once shared a cassette tape is like irrevocably connecting people heading to work travelling on subway train. They once shared space.

Taking a break from irritating culture questions, how did the box set come about? Was there discussion of the song order was it just assumed from the get go that it would be in chronological order? Why was the most recent EP left off?
Culture is good. The box set was the brainchild of Fire Records. I spoke a little with John about it in terms of the track listings etc but it’s really their thing. Our focus is very much and very much literally on "Now-Time," which is of course a little play on the title of one of the tracks on our latest EP on US record label Shelflife Records Kunstwerk in Spacetime. We are actually currently recording a new EP entitled Desire Desires Desire, Form Forms Formations for Shelflife Records featuring the tracks “EPIC WANDER” and “1986 Under London Skies” for release in late spring 2016. The box set tells a worthy tale of the past, our new music seeks to restore the epic and mythological dimensions to our lives.

Speaking of the EP, which is great, how do you feel it compares to the music on the box set? Do you listen to any of the earlier stuff and think “man, if we knew then what we know now…”? What is it like listening to the box set? Does it still have emotional resonance, either musically or lyrically?
I must confess that I haven’t opened the box set. It sits on the shelf, or if you would excuse, it continues to take up Shelflife. Its good that it exists but I’ve got all the stuff on it already. I would say that there is certainly an inheritance, a connection despite the years, a solid narrative, between the music. Lyrically I remain very proud of "A Prophecy" in particular for example. And "Got Apprehension." And "Flower." Lyric poems of the songs.

Photo by Steve Double

I heard being on Enigma, for a lot of bands, was a nightmare. Was being on Enigma a nightmare?
We don’t really know, they went bust very shortly after our abstract relationship was fomented and have a deep psychological fear that it was our fault. (I jest. Ha!) They did get our stuff out across these United States, which was a very good thing and was decisive in creating what the NME termed a few years back as a “cult following in the US.” Just wished they hadn’t gone bust! Very poor etiquette on their behalf. We had just got off the boat goddamit. “Never get out the boat, absolutely god damn right –unless you were going all the way”.

There’s no official break up of the band, only an “extended break,” so you get to avoid all the reunion questions, even if it’s only loophole. How does it feel to be active again? It doesn’t seem like anyone has missed a beat, which must be a relief both to your fans and, really, to each other. Are there plans to record a new album? Are you going to tour on the box set? And if /when you do, what’s the policy going to be on new songs versus old?
We play London in May 2016 as part of the series of momentous annual ‘’shows across great cities of the north’ who will have us. Returning to London for the first time since 1991 is tremendously exciting. This show will feature the new tracks and some of the old stuff reworked redrawn and quartered. We would love to come play NYC again also. We would love to come play NYC again also. See what I did there?

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