Mojo - The Music Magazine

TUNE INTO LATE JUNCTION, the home of art-rock on BBC Radio 3, at 11.15pm this Thursday, October 15, and strap yourselves in, as Chicago post-rock groovescapers, Tortoise, featuring drummer-to-the-stars John McEntire, take on Wire singer and Githead mainman Colin Newman, over several rounds of tag-team action, decided by three falls or a submission.

Their instrumentals, which MOJO has heard in advance, constitute a fascinating encounter between Newman's anxious, insectoid probing and Tortoise's morphing polyrhythmic cross-stitch. It's just the latest in a string of collaborations urged by the R3 music show, previously responsible for bringing together Tunng and Tinariwen, and Adem with Mercury Prize nominees Sweet Billy Pilgrim.

Colin Newman fired up the email to tell MOJO how the liaison came about...

"Liaison hahaha! You make it sound like a dirty weekend! I've known Tortoise's music since the mid '90s and Djed is one of my all time favourite tracks. I also view them as being one of the most influential bands of that period - even if that can't really be seen much right now (maybe not until the '90s revival gets properly underway in about 5 years time!). I had an amusing conversation with John McEntire on the phone then Malka [Spigel, Githead member and Mrs Newman] and I went to see them at The Garage the night before the BBC session. Like pretty much anyone else I was intrigued to find out what it might sound like."

What surprised/delighted/frustrated/angered you about the way your methodologies interacted?

"Well when we chatted after their show I kind of made the point that as much as I love their multi-instrumental virtuosity we'd better keep it simple in order to have a snowball's chance in hell of coming out with anything that would actually be a collaboration rather than me struggling to keep up with them. We also agreed between us that the best idea would be to expect nothing then there would be little chance to be disappointed. What was great about how it turned out was that it was all actually pretty quick. I started playing some of my usual moronic guitar and they all joined in! Within a very short time we had 5 pieces. My only real problem was that I would have done some of the mixes differently."

Can you describe the results?

"I played guitar on the first two, keyboards on the third, bass on the fourth and guitar on the fifth. I pretty much started all the pieces and they pretty much arranged themselves around my simple 'spines'. I think the result is a kind of hybrid that really doesn't sound like them or me. If you think that we basically did it all in three hours from a standing start and only stopped because I felt we'd given the BBC enough free music then the results are quite remarkable. They can all play really well. I tend to be pretty quick about deciding about structure and stuff. With Githead I'm used to going from a standing start to a finished piece pretty quick. I think Tortoise tend to take longer over their arrangements so it was a lot of fun for them to get somewhere quite far in a very short time! As a band they are considerably less precious about what they play than their image might tell. They are definitely up for a good laugh. At the end we all felt it would be nice to find another opportunity to do this, perhaps on stage, even."

The show is available for up to seven days after broadcast via the website at www.bbc.co.uk/radio3. Tortoise play London Jazz Festival and All Tomorrow's Parties in November; Githead's latest album, Landing, is released in November.

By Danny Eccleston

Pictures by Lucy Johnston