Features


EATERS - LOOKING FOR THE NEXT EVOLUTION

Edinburgh’s Eaters are a four-piece dedicated to music for the sheer fuck of it. With their feet firmly planted in a solid bedrock of hip-hop, Eaters have morphed and changed with each release, from the block-rocking ‘Digest,’ via the sci-fi electro weirdness of ‘Optimum’ to the creepy spoken word / trip-hop of the ‘Five Knives’ EP.

An amazingly prolific group, Eaters are part of the Incorporeal collective, along with the critically acclaimed Penpushers. Their new LP ‘Wives’ is due for release this year, with the band promising a return to the straight-up hip-hop of their debut. Rest assured, when Eaters say ‘straight-up hip-hop,’ they are unlikely to be talking about blunts, big-screen TVs and bitches. Theirs is a particularly Edinburgh kind of hip-hop – consistently inventive, genre-bending and sonically challenging.

They have produced beats for underground US hip-hop legend Sage Francis - an Eaters beat was used in the first version of his track 'High Step,' and they have more recently remixed 'Heart Failure.' But first and foremost come their own productions.

Impossible to pigeonhole, they are not a band who do ‘weird’ for the sake of it – MCs Laughing Gear, Tuck Pendleton and Quietman know how to rock a mic like the best old-school rappers, laying out bars about everything from space aliens to serial killers and beyond. For those that haven’t had the pleasure – meet the Eaters. Your ears will thank you later.

So, Laughing Gear - tell us what you’re up to. I just downloaded the ‘Five Knives’ EP, what else is going on?

That was a while ago… We just put out [‘Five Knives’] on the website, but before that there were a few physical copies floating around.

So there’s more in the works?

Several. We’ve got a few bits and pieces. There’s an album called ‘Wives,’ which is the first proper hip-hop album we have done since ‘Digest.’ We’ve also got another project which I’m doing the vocals for at the moment, and that’s called ‘Shouting At The Wind.’ That’s kind of a personal project. I decided I would write something which was entirely true. There’s also a third album which is just having the finishing touches put to it, that’s called ‘Tuck Pendleton’s Love Party.’ We’re looking at getting all three of those out this year: we’re just finishing off the vocals.

I get the impression that Eaters is as much a collective of musicians as a band. Is that the case? Do you write separately, or do you spend a lot of time rehearsing together? What’s your working method?

I know what you mean by saying we’re like a collective, but we are in fact a straight-up band, with four members. The members are: myself, Laughing Gear; Quietman, also known as The Watchmaker; Tuck Pendleton; and Dopeamean Jim, who’s our DJ. Pretty much the way we wanted to run it from the word go, was: we all had a little bit of production experience, and Tuck Pendleton and I did vocals. Quietman also did regular bits and pieces – less like lyrics and more like essays.

We wanted to have complete creative freedom: the way we run it is that nobody says ‘No’ to anything. We get together every week and work on stuff as a whole unit. We try and achieve different balances – Quietman has one production style, I’ve got my own style, Tuck Pendleton has his own style… so we change the balance regularly, and what happens is we get a different feel to each project we work on. We can push ourselves in different directions.

With ‘Digest,’ it was straight hip-hop – well I say straight hip-hop, but it’s pretty unique for what it is. ‘Wives’ is pretty much a follow-up to ‘Digest,’ but it has taken us through ‘Optimum,’ which was straight-up electro; and also ‘Watchmaker – Co-Axial Escapement’ which was Quietman’s solo effort, which allowed him to really polish his productions. So we’ve gone through all these different styles and methods, only to come back to what we set up to do primarily, which is hip-hop.

We’ve taken everything we’ve learned along the way and pushed it into [‘Wives’]. The whole of the new album was produced using a mix of us and our different styles. ‘Tuck Pendleton’s Love Party’ is Tuck’s solo thing, whereas ‘Shouting At The Wind’ is all Quietman instrumentals, with vocals by me and cuts by Jim. Quietman’s doing a remix of it, and adding a few vocals. All three projects have different sounds. So I can see what you mean about us appearing to be a collective: we do get the odd guest on, like on ‘Digest’ we had Kimo and Longface from Penpushers as guests.

I really enjoyed ‘Optimun’ when you went for a full-on electro sound, real ‘Planet Rock’ kind of beats. Have you moved away from that, or is it something you’ll return to?

Yes, the return of Captain Moonshooter! It’s about time actually… the problem is, we produce too much stuff. Although I’ve just mentioned three projects, we’ve got at least another four albums in the works as well. There’s an album of instrumentals for release next year… But I don’t want to go into those other projects in too much detail, because if you talk about things too early on, people get bored of hearing about it. But once all those are done, we will probably do The Return of Captain Moonshooter, with Death Scorpion [another Quietman alias]. The idea is it would be a narrative: the early adventures of Captain Moonshooter and Death Scorpion.

Where does the ability to tell stories and construct narratives come from? It’s always been a part of hip-hop but Eaters seem to be particularly good at it. What do you draw on for inspiration when you’re writing these lyrical stories?

Personally, I grew up reading too many comics and watching too many David Lynch films, and sci-fi… The thing about hip-hop is that when I grew up listening to it, it was very much American: it was all about the New York lifestyle and whatnot. The impression I got was that you had to bring your own experience to the party, and I totally agree with that, but you don’t really want to hear about someone that works in an office. So in order to find subjects that I wanted to write about, subjects that were interesting, I had to go for fictional stuff. Sometimes I go for stuff which is a straight-up rant about how I’m feeling, but disguised in verbal nonsense; and sometimes it’s just down to the bog-standard: ‘We are dope, you are not,’ which hip-hop people do. But it’s all good fun!

Do you think that comics and sci-fi are a particularly big inspiration for Scottish hip-hop emcees who are trying to create their own style? Mikey Krumins [of Abdominal Showmen] has some Alan Moore-esque lyrics, and Penpushers’ classic first album ‘Last Vestige of Holism’ is packed with sci-fi references…

It’s hard to say. In terms of Penpushers, I know Longface grew up reading and watching a lot of the same stuff that I did. I know that the other Penpushers also got into that stuff around the same time too, off the back of me and Longface. I’d say that for people who are more imaginative and more willing to push the boundaries, there’s a good chance that this is what inspires them. I mean, you don’t write that kind of stuff without having an admiration for people who do similar work, whether it’s in the same medium or not – books, comics, films… I myself dabble in pretty much everything that there is to do: everything’s entertainment, it’s all good.

You were actually in a band with Longface prior to Eaters forming – can you tell us a bit about The Pesky Varmints?

Myself, Quietman and another gentleman called Paul started the Pesky Varmints, and then Longface and A1 joined after a wee while. But it all goes back to well before that – before I started writing even, Longface was in a band with Reachout, and they used to knock about the area I lived in. We’d all grown up together, so The Pesky Varmints were a natural progression.

How have things changed for you since the Pesky Varmints days? Is it easier or more difficult to get your music out there and get it heard?

Back then in the Pesky Varmints days it was always good in terms of getting gigs – A1 was already an established DJ on the scene, and Longface had a lot of contacts, whereas Quietman and myself were never quite as interested in the whole ‘getting contacts’ part of things. We just kind of went along with what was happening – it was good to have everyone on board, because that was what made it work. But from the point of view of getting stuff out nowadays, the internet is a godsend. It kind of goes without saying.

We’re still crap at business; we’re still crap at networking: it interests us less than watching paint dry. The fact that we can use stuff like CD Baby, which allows you to get on to digital distribution sites and do direct sales… stuff like MySpace, and our own website just make it so much easier. We’ve probably got, bizarrely enough, more people in Japan and America who like our stuff than here in Scotland.

What do you think it is about your typical Scottish music-buyer which makes him seek elsewhere for his beats first? Why is Scottish hip-hop not more popular with Scots?

First off, Edinburgh in particular is… not snobbish, but… very particular in its music taste. Bands go to Edinburgh, and if they aren’t good, people just won’t cheer. But if you go to Glasgow, there’s usually a great crowd there. So that’s Edinburgh… but Glasgow on the otherhand, the hip-hop bands there have a very tight community – people like Eastborn and Loki [of Dropzone Records]. I don’t know those guys, but I’ve met them on a couple of occasions and they do seem to support local stuff, which is really good. But that’s not something that happens regularly [on the East Coast] except in small groups – Underling are doing very well, as are Harlequinade’s band Sileni. They’re doing well supporting themselves in Edinburgh, where historically there hasn’t been much community. It’s always been everyone out for their own ends.

The Glasgow guys band together, but they also seem very prepared to say: ‘This is Scottish hip-hop.’ Edinburgh bands on the other hand often seem to shy away from the term. Why do you think that is? Are a lot of Edinburgh bands, because they’re experimental (like Penpushers and Sileni), less inclined to group together into a ‘scene’?

It’s an interesting question, but I don’t know how much of a bearing that has on things… I think if there was a Glasgow band who were as experimental as some of the Edinburgh bands are, they would be supported [by their Glasweigan peers] just as much. This is a complete generalisation, but a lot of the key players in the Glasgow scene do use quite a standard hip-hop ‘template,’ if you like. They have broad, very distinctive Glasweigan accents, and the topics they address stick quite closely to the time-honoured hip-hop concept of ‘keeping it real.’ They want to do it from the point of view of: ‘It’s rough out here.’ Whereas in Edinburgh, that’s just not something that anybody does, at all.

Do you think Edinburgh just wouldn’t be convinced by a ‘keeping it real’ type of band? Do you think that type of band would just be laughed out of the room?

I think that’s a fairly good point, yeah…

I can think of one exception – Northern Exposure very much rep their working-class roots and their own life experiences; they use that as a jumping off point for some of their lyrics and themes. My own personal tastes run more to yourselves and Penpushers – the more experimental side of things…

It’s all about influence, isn’t it? If you look at the music forums – which I occasionally do, because I like to see what’s going on, and get a feel for the scene, who likes what and so on. If you look at the forums it does seem that the Glasgow bands are more influenced by artists like Nas or Mobb Deep – mainstream hip-hop, I suppose you could call it, although it’s not particularly mainstream… just the more popular hip-hop.

The Queensbridge School…

Yeah. Whereas ourselves and the Penpushers, we always looked for the next evolution, be that cLOUDDEAD, anticon, El-P, whoever. It’s pushing it. The problem is that you end up with tastes so bloody narrow, you never end up buying anything.

Let’s talk about your live set-up – do you enjoy playing live, or do you see Eaters as more of a studio band?

[Laughs heartily] We’re much more a studio band. We do enjoy playing live, but basically with The Pesky Varmints it got to a point where we had played so many gigs that we got bored after a while. We were doing gigs every Tuesday night at Henry’s Cellar Bar, playing the same sets to the same punters, who quite often didn’t even want us there. It became a chore, plus going in to work hungover on a Wednesday because you’ve been drinking till three in the morning is never good.

When we started Eaters, Quietman and I never really wanted to do that many live gigs. We will do some more live sets when the next album drops, and we intend to make it quite different to what we usually have. We’re not doing just the standard hip-hop set, we’ll try and make it different by kind of blending the tracks together, and we’re looking at doing some visual stuff; create some sort of video for the instrumental Watchmaker tunes… We want to spice it up, because ultimately, all music is entertainment. No matter how much artists try to and press it up as something different, its entertainment. It can carry a message, it can be a vehicle for other things, but ultimately it has to be entertaining, gigs especially. Otherwise what’s the point?

If someone came along and offered you a bunch of money, and tried to take Eaters to a wider audience, I take it you guys would jump at that?

Not necessarily! [Laughs] This is the other thing about the crew. We’re all married, three or four of us have kids, and we all hold down jobs. It’s a very stable setup. What we do, we do for love of music. We do it because it’s something we wanted to do since we were teenagers; since we were twelve years old and bought our first copies of ‘Raising Hell’ [by Run DMC].

If someone was prepared to put money behind us and take over the distribution, that would be fine; but if it turned out that we were expected to travel and play more gigs, that would become more difficult. Ultimately, doing the music and getting acknowledgement from people for doing that is what it’s all about. If we could get enough people to buy say, 500 physical copies of a CD, and we could break even on that run, we’d be perfectly happy. It’s not about exposure and numbers of fans: it is just about doing the music, primarily. The second point is getting acknowledgement, especially from our peer group.

Given that you guys have all settled down and started families, do you find it harder to come up with lyrics and ideas?

Not at all. I never stopped watching dodgy sci-fi movies. Maybe I stopped reading comics quite as much… Although I did recently read all of The Invisibles again. I think if anything, the more you learn about the world, the more you are inspired and annoyed by things… If anything, we’ve become more socially conscious, we’ve begun to write more personal lyrics, like I’ve been doing on ‘Shouting At The Wind.’ But we’re also still coming up with daft ideas and bizarre names, and bouncing stuff off each other. It’s all part of the fun, isn’t it?

Did you find ‘Shouting At The Wind’ more difficult to make because the themes you were dealing with were more personal?

‘Shouting At The Wind’ was done in the same way that ‘Five Knives’ was done. ‘Five Knives’ was another personal project for me – I did everything for that album, the production and the vocals. I planned it from the word go, so it was very much a concept album. With ‘Shouting At The Wind,’ I knew exactly what the concept was – it had to be personal, and it had to be true. It had to have areas of internal reference and areas of external reference – that allowed me to cover enough subject matter that I could talk about my opinion of the world. So it was easy in some respects, but when you’re trying to write something that’s so coherent in terms of content, you can’t really start arsing about with the language as much, and using all the funny bits of wordplay that you can use when you have more freedom.

I was constrained by having to write coherent sentences. I tried to push myself – this is something we always try and do in Eaters; to push ourselves and get better. So I pushed myself by getting instrumentals from Tuck Pendleton which were never meant to have lyrics in the first place – one of them has got a three-bar beat, for example. A lot of them were at a much slower tempo than I was used to. So as a result, it has pushed me in different directions – and it took quite a lot of re-writing before I was happy with it.

Eaters new LP 'Wives' will be released in 2008 - keep your eyes on the Weaponizer blog for more news on the release date. We'll also keep you informed of all the Eaters solo projects.

Links:

Eatersmusic.co.uk
Eaters on MySpace
Buy 'Digest' and other Eaters albums at CDBaby





Features