Severed Heads were making unusual experimental electronic music in Australia as early as 1979, Starting out as three piece, and by turns gaining and shedding members over time, Severed Heads eventually streamlined to become Tom Ellard as the singular creative force behind a seminal and unique part of Australia’s music history. Anaya Latter caught up with Ellard to discuss Severed Heads’ 32 year career as Australian electronic music pioneers and their upcoming tour with Gary Numan.
Severed Heads pioneered progressive industrial electronic music in Australia, although Tom Ellard admits it was not always well received when they started out in 1979. “To give you an idea the end result of most of the concerts we’d either be beaten up or thrown out of the venue – or both, and it is very interesting to look at how people accept just electronic music now, because at one point, you would not be able to perform that in public without there being a near riot.”
Severed Heads’ music is often accompanied by striking visuals, and the early work was often done with VHS synthesisers and analogue tape loops, which Ellard has no great nostalgia for.
“It’s very nostalgic and romantic if you didn’t actually have to do it. You know, editing stuff on VHS tape and carrying large television sets up and down the stairs of a nightclub all of that is wonderfully romantic in retrospect but there’s a really big difference between being the person who was there and being the person who fantasises about what it was like.” He adds “There is an aesthetic that comes from difficulty, of the materials being somehow inadequate, I think that’s something that’s definitely worth looking at.”
Ellard finds that working with new technology has it benefits but also can fall short of what he is striving for visually. “You can make something a bit faster but then you do tend to find that it’s got a kind of hard edge to it that is sometimes annoying. Anything done on a computer system obviously is made up of pixels, of dots. Dots tend to be visible somehow even with all the work you do. And sometimes you want to get away from the dots and you just want to get a piece of paper and a pencil and go that way, it is easier but then there’s an increasing difficulty in getting the kind of textures that you really want. So you get a faster result that might not be the result you kind of wanted.”
Because there is such a convergence between the visual and the sound quality of Ellard’s work and Severed Heads in particular, there is an inevitable sense of synaesthesia; which Ellard believes is more of an everyday occurrence than we might think. “The idea of trying to marry sound and image is something that people do all the time, and is perhaps something that doesn’t need to be overanalysed.
“If you watch a film it just happens anyway – what you have is a thing called synchresis where the images are up on the screen and the sound is coming through the speakers and yet it looks like the person’s mouth is speaking, their voice seems to be coming from the right place, and people have been doing cinema for 100 years.
I personally think that music is the same thing that you put on a record and then a film, and when people shoot a film – if it’s done musically you can tell, there’s a certain quality to it. So yeah I agree there’s such a thing but I don’t think we have to put it in a glass case.”
Ellard describes the duty of the artist as having a role of responsibility to season one’s offerings:
“ On one side you are the servant of the audience you are in some way giving something to the person who has been kind enough to look at or listen to what you’ve done there’s a certain amount of respect due on both sides. But I think in the same way as we make horror movies to give a little bit of a thrill and a little bit of a boost of interest to the audience, the musician should in some way throw a little bit of the harsh along with the smooth – it’s no more than maybe putting a bit of pepper in the soup… There’s a lot of deconstruction which reveals interesting things, but I think our duty is then to go on and make something from these things.”
Ellard sees playing live as a reciprocal experience at times, even for electronic music.
“There is a certain synergy even if you are doing music which is based around machines, you are still making the machines do things that are part of the vibe in the room. A lot of good music is written by people after they’ve done a tour and they’ve encountered some sort of reciprocal reality with the people they work with and the audience.”
Ellard, describes Severed Heads as ‘fungal disco’, adding that genres aren’t helpful for anybody.
“The moment you’re in a genre you’re being compared to the norm and you’re being found inadequate. We have always been criticised for not being a very good dance band, or not a very good industrial band, or not a very good post modern analytical unit or something there’s always somebody who’s telling us that we’re unsuccessful in conforming to a norm and so really to try to build a genre to my mind is like accepting the lack of freedom I think I’d rather just continue to prank people and not do what they want me to do, I think that’s a better idea.
Ellard reveals that he is keen to expand the consciousness of what music is and what it entails.
“Certainly there is a synchresis coming between the vision and the sound [with Severed Heads] and that’s pretty common these days, really – my angle on it is that it’s all music. I’m coming from it [all] being music, and I think that all visual material is music as well, and that might be the thing that’s different.”
“A hundred years ago a painter like Kandinsky would use music as a model for what he was painting, and in the same way that Paul Klee was a violinist and would do his painting based on musical forms. Somehow or other we’ve got to the time we’re in now where people talk about things like ‘sound art’ and sound art to me sounds like the biggest cop out of all time it’s like music with all the music taken out of it.
I don’t know why we’ve become so afraid of the word music and so I try to take it and rub it in people’s faces as much as possible to remind them that hey, music is actually the greater art form of antiquity and sculpture and painting and all of these things sit within these terms of music.”
Ellard has a broad bed of influences that he draws from, and sees that the 1970s as the time when really interesting things were happening musically.
“I don’t think anyone really innovates anything. [But} certainly there was stuff going on in the 1970s – so-called Kraut rock, bands like Neu!, Cluster that were doing really interesting stuff and what came out of that was Kraftwerk and early Kraftwerk were doing some really interesting things. In America you had this response to that , space rock bands like Chrome and The Residents, over in Europe the industrial movement, people like Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire. It was very poetic I thought, trying things out which weren’t immediately obvious, weren’t immediately satisfactory but were reaching towards a universal emotional contour, it’s very hard to sum up. All we kind of did was have an equal admiration for all of these things and to try to bring them into what we did.”
In terms of what to expect of Severed Heads today, Ellard admits the decision to play again was a reluctant one, as he is a full time academic, working on a number of solo projects, including a series of concerts for high school students in NSW where they deconstruct and dismantle an electronic piece that has just been played, Ellard says that Severed Heads is safely retired, but there was strong feedback from fans that wanted to see more of the old material.
“We had some people say that we played at the Sydney festival last year and that really wasn’t enough, and not enough people got to say goodbye so we felt we should go back and do a little bit more, a bit of a sequel to that, but really honestly we do want to actually stop playing live.”
For those lucky enough to see Severed Heads, the experience promises to be a coalescence of electronic sounds, loops and synthesisers set to visuals that are to be understood as an integral part of the music.
Severed Heads are supporting Gary Numan on his Australian tour.
GARY NUMAN
performing
The Pleasure Principle, May 2011
with extra special guests
Severed Heads (all dates excluding Perth and Auckland)
and
Motor (Sydney Only)
Thursday 12th. Brisbane. Tivoli. 18+.
Tickets from http://www.ticketek.com.au
Friday 13th. Sydney. Enmore Theatre. All ages.
Tickets from http://www.ticketek.com.au
Saturday 14th. Melbourne. Forum. 18+.
Proudly supported by Triple R
Tickets from http://www.ticketmaster.com.au
Monday 16th. Adelaide. HQ. 18+.
Tickets from http://www.ticketek.com.au
Tuesday 17th. Perth. Astor Theatre. 18+.
Tickets from http://www.bocsticketing.com.au/
Saturday 21st. Auckland. Auckland Town Hall.
Tickets from or www.the-edge.co.nz or 0800 BUY TICKETS
