'The Independent' Review Of Rogues Gallery - Fri 4th Aug
Songs of the Depp blue sea Captain Jack Sparrow has inspired everyone from Sting to Nick Cave to contribute to a nautical album. By Phil Meadley 'The Independent' He's the producer every musician wants to work with, such is his unerring ability to conjure up unlikely and interesting concept albums. But when Pirates Of The Caribbean producer Gore Verbinski and Jack Sparrow himself (aka Johnny Depp) hired Hal Willner to compile an album's worth of sea shanties and pirate ballads, Rogue's Gallery, he was set a formidable task. For many people it would have been a bridge too far but, as Bono says: "Hal Willner would make a great Captain Bligh." Affiliated to a Disney blockbuster, the men in charge could have been forgiven for enlisting a host of sickly sweet A-list celebrities to fluff out the salty sea tales, but with a keen sense of authenticity embedded into their collective psyches, they decided to sail off into uncharted waters and press-gang artists as diverse as Bono, Bryan Ferry, Antony, Lou Reed, Eliza Carthy, Jarvis Cocker, Nick Cave, Baby Gramps and Pere Ubu's David Thomas. That's not to mention Ralph Steadman doing a worthy impression of Spike Milligan, and Sting going right back to his Geordie roots in credible fashion. "I think the idea boiled in the mind of Gore," Willner says when discussing the origins of the project. "He was working on the Pirates of the Caribbean films with Depp and it consumed their lives, so they fell into researching pirate culture. I guess in movies you sit around a lot, so they started talking seriously about putting an album's worth of songs together." Willner was brought into the mix through the Epitaph record label's boss, Andy Culkin, who had been a fan of such projects as Weird Nightmare - Meditations On Mingus and Stay Awake, an album of vintage Disney songs covered by the likes of Tom Waits, Sinead O'Connor and jazz avant-gardist Sun Ra. Quickly discovering that simply a collection of revitalised sea shanties wouldn't work, he decided to mix them with sea songs and ballads. "I started doing intense research," he says. "I found these amazing books on eBay of pirate and sailor poetry. I didn't even know what the melodies were. That was where someone like Mary Margaret O'Hara comes in, because she has the ability to invent a melody while singing straight out of a poetry book. Her track ('The Cry Of Man') is hands down my favourite thing on the record." Although busy on other projects, he'd spend at least an hour or two every day gathering information, making a field trip to a record store, surfing the net, rummaging through antique book stores, or trawling through the late, great musicologist Alan Lomax's archives. At the end of 2005 he'd assembled a few hundred recordings plus a collection of songbooks, sheet music and poetry. A likely list of 400 songs was edited down to 70, and eventually to a definitive top 40, which he started sending to potential collaborators. After that, it was a case of getting everyone in a studio. "I guess we started in the middle of March with the first session and it was finished by late May. We had a very intense three or four days in London, and the same in Seattle, and a week in New York, and two sessions in LA." Regular contributor and noted musician Kate St John was invited to help put together the London sessions with Dirty Three member Warren Ellis. She had under a week to arrange recording session with the likes of Norma Waterson, Martin and Eliza Carthy, Ed Harcourt, David Thomas, Robyn Hitchcock and Nick Cave. "In each session (LA, New York, Dublin, Seattle, Paris and London) there would be a different house band," explains St John. "Hal likes to work in a really spontaneous way. He's a wonderful producer because he trusts the musicians and lets you get on with it." She believes that sea shanties were ideal because of their simple arrangements, giving the musicians a largely blank canvas to work with. "It was fascinating watching Nick Cave at work," she says. "He just sat at the piano for 40 minutes and worked the song over and over again until he found his voice and delivery. One of his tracks ('Pinery Boy') is all about a sea captain's apprentice who gets hanged. Some of the material was so dark." On the dark side is "The Cruel Ship's Captain" performed by Bryan Ferry. "Piano is my instrument and that led me into how to do the song," Ferry says of his blues-tinged rendition. "I thought bleak was the way, as the song itself had such a strong resonance." His version of "Lowlands Low", featuring Antony, hangs together remarkably well, even though the latter's voice was overdubbed after. A particularly rousing London session included the Carthys, Ed Harcourt, David Thomas and Ralph Steadman. "I haven't seen my parents holed up in a studio for so long," says Eliza Carthy. "They arrived there in the morning and were still drinking red wine at 2am the next day. Mum (Norma Waterson) was doing all these backing vocals. I've never seen anything like it; she had her headphones on and was doing this little goblin dance to "Bony" (a particularly raucous track about Napoleon Bonaparte performed by Jack Shit) going: 'Arrghh, arrghh.' It was mental. She was like you'd imagine Karen O from Yeah Yeah Yeahs in 40 years' time." Harcourt, who performs a beautifully pared-down version of "Farewell Nancy", remembers playing piano on Ralph Steadman's track, "Little Boy Billy", before getting him to sign a bottle of Wild Turkey in honour of Steadman's old friend Hunter S Thompson. "I found myself at two in the morning with Martin, Eliza, Norma and Warren slapping our knees and singing these old drinking sea songs. I also EBowed my banjo on Dave Thomas's 'Dan Dan'. He was half-naked in the studio with braces on. It was a pretty awesome sight. "I knew that because Hal had asked all these interesting people that it would be a very different experience," he says. "If he'd asked all folk musicians, I don't know if it would've been such a great album. The fact that he got David to come in and do a completely mad interpretation of 'Drunken Sailor' ... it sounds like music from Mars or something." David Thomas believes that when you want a metaphor for the condition of humanity you can't do better than reference drunken sailors and mad ship captains. "I didn't set out to do a radical version of 'Drunken Sailor'," he insists. "I wanted to properly interpret the song, not as a museum piece, but as contemporary folk music. And, uh, drunkards don't sing, that I've ever noticed, in neat musical syntax. Not down at my local anyway... Back in LA, Loudon Wainwright was working on one of the most debauched songs,"Good Ship Venus", alongside the far more sedate "Turkish Revelry". "I supposed that I liked the fact that one was sweet and sad, and the other was disgustingly filthy," he says. "The version of 'Turkish Revelry' that Hal sent me was by an amazing singer called Paul Clayton, who was an early supporter and friend of, and influence on, Bob Dylan. The version of 'Good Ship Venus' was by American folk humourist Oscar Brand, who oddly enough couldn't bring himself to sing the line 'the mast was the captain's penis', opting instead for the tame, almost prissy alternative: 'a mast of a phallic genus'." Richard Thompson, who contributes "Mingulay Boat Song", is a fan of Willner. "I'd worked with him in the past, so I knew he had great vision, and that this project would be left of centre enough to be interesting," he says. His son Teddy performs an exquisitely pared-down version of "Sally Brown". He didn't realise that a childhood favourite would have racist connotations: "I had to look up the real words online and found out that there were these very dodgy verses that I'd never known about. I hadn't even realised that it was West Indian, as I'd always assumed that all good folk songs come from England." Ralph Steadman's interpretation of "Little Boy Billy" was just one of many collaborations that he's done with Willner over a 25-year period. "It's actually a sad song about cannibalism at sea, with guzzling Jimmy wanting to eat gorging Jack, but deciding on little boy Billy instead," he says. "I don't know why he thought of me except that perhaps he thinks I'm a sick bastard." It seems that very few people turn Hal Willner down, and normally scheduling is the only thing that gets in the way. "Usually we get who we're looking for," he says without a trace of smugness. In anyone else's hands, Rogue's Gallery could have been a messy compromise, but Hal Willner has pulled off the nigh on impossible yet again. This is certainly one of the most surprising and welcome packages of the year, and the good news is that there's a second volume due out next year to coincide with the third Pirates of the Caribbean film. 'Rogue's Gallery' is out on 21 August on Anti-/Epitaph He's the producer every musician wants to work with, such is his unerring ability to conjure up unlikely and interesting concept albums. But when Pirates Of The Caribbean producer Gore Verbinski and Jack Sparrow himself (aka Johnny Depp) hired Hal Willner to compile an album's worth of sea shanties and pirate ballads, Rogue's Gallery, he was set a formidable task. For many people it would have been a bridge too far but, as Bono says: "Hal Willner would make a great Captain Bligh." Affiliated to a Disney blockbuster, the men in charge could have been forgiven for enlisting a host of sickly sweet A-list celebrities to fluff out the salty sea tales, but with a keen sense of authenticity embedded into their collective psyches, they decided to sail off into uncharted waters and press-gang artists as diverse as Bono, Bryan Ferry, Antony, Lou Reed, Eliza Carthy, Jarvis Cocker, Nick Cave, Baby Gramps and Pere Ubu's David Thomas. That's not to mention Ralph Steadman doing a worthy impression of Spike Milligan, and Sting going right back to his Geordie roots in credible fashion. "I think the idea boiled in the mind of Gore," Willner says when discussing the origins of the project. "He was working on the Pirates of the Caribbean films with Depp and it consumed their lives, so they fell into researching pirate culture. I guess in movies you sit around a lot, so they started talking seriously about putting an album's worth of songs together." Willner was brought into the mix through the Epitaph record label's boss, Andy Culkin, who had been a fan of such projects as Weird Nightmare - Meditations On Mingus and Stay Awake, an album of vintage Disney songs covered by the likes of Tom Waits, Sinead O'Connor and jazz avant-gardist Sun Ra. Quickly discovering that simply a collection of revitalised sea shanties wouldn't work, he decided to mix them with sea songs and ballads. "I started doing intense research," he says. "I found these amazing books on eBay of pirate and sailor poetry. I didn't even know what the melodies were. That was where someone like Mary Margaret O'Hara comes in, because she has the ability to invent a melody while singing straight out of a poetry book. Her track ('The Cry Of Man') is hands down my favourite thing on the record." Although busy on other projects, he'd spend at least an hour or two every day gathering information, making a field trip to a record store, surfing the net, rummaging through antique book stores, or trawling through the late, great musicologist Alan Lomax's archives. At the end of 2005 he'd assembled a few hundred recordings plus a collection of songbooks, sheet music and poetry. A likely list of 400 songs was edited down to 70, and eventually to a definitive top 40, which he started sending to potential collaborators. After that, it was a case of getting everyone in a studio. "I guess we started in the middle of March with the first session and it was finished by late May. We had a very intense three or four days in London, and the same in Seattle, and a week in New York, and two sessions in LA." Regular contributor and noted musician Kate St John was invited to help put together the London sessions with Dirty Three member Warren Ellis. She had under a week to arrange recording session with the likes of Norma Waterson, Martin and Eliza Carthy, Ed Harcourt, David Thomas, Robyn Hitchcock and Nick Cave. "In each session (LA, New York, Dublin, Seattle, Paris and London) there would be a different house band," explains St John. "Hal likes to work in a really spontaneous way. He's a wonderful producer because he trusts the musicians and lets you get on with it." She believes that sea shanties were ideal because of their simple arrangements, giving the musicians a largely blank canvas to work with. "It was fascinating watching Nick Cave at work," she says. "He just sat at the piano for 40 minutes and worked the song over and over again until he found his voice and delivery. One of his tracks ('Pinery Boy') is all about a sea captain's apprentice who gets hanged. Some of the material was so dark." On the dark side is "The Cruel Ship's Captain" performed by Bryan Ferry. "Piano is my instrument and that led me into how to do the song," Ferry says of his blues-tinged rendition. "I thought bleak was the way, as the song itself had such a strong resonance." His version of "Lowlands Low", featuring Antony, hangs together remarkably well, even though the latter's voice was overdubbed after. A particularly rousing London session included the Carthys, Ed Harcourt, David Thomas and Ralph Steadman. "I haven't seen my parents holed up in a studio for so long," says Eliza Carthy. "They arrived there in the morning and were still drinking red wine at 2am the next day. Mum (Norma Waterson) was doing all these backing vocals. I've never seen anything like it; she had her headphones on and was doing this little goblin dance to "Bony" (a particularly raucous track about Napoleon Bonaparte performed by Jack Shit) going: 'Arrghh, arrghh.' It was mental. She was like you'd imagine Karen O from Yeah Yeah Yeahs in 40 years' time." Harcourt, who performs a beautifully pared-down version of "Farewell Nancy", remembers playing piano on Ralph Steadman's track, "Little Boy Billy", before getting him to sign a bottle of Wild Turkey in honour of Steadman's old friend Hunter S Thompson. "I found myself at two in the morning with Martin, Eliza, Norma and Warren slapping our knees and singing these old drinking sea songs. I also EBowed my banjo on Dave Thomas's 'Dan Dan'. He was half-naked in the studio with braces on. It was a pretty awesome sight. "I knew that because Hal had asked all these interesting people that it would be a very different experience," he says. "If he'd asked all folk musicians, I don't know if it would've been such a great album. The fact that he got David to come in and do a completely mad interpretation of 'Drunken Sailor' ... it sounds like music from Mars or something." David Thomas believes that when you want a metaphor for the condition of humanity you can't do better than reference drunken sailors and mad ship captains. "I didn't set out to do a radical version of 'Drunken Sailor'," he insists. "I wanted to properly interpret the song, not as a museum piece, but as contemporary folk music. And, uh, drunkards don't sing, that I've ever noticed, in neat musical syntax. Not down at my local anyway... Back in LA, Loudon Wainwright was working on one of the most debauched songs,"Good Ship Venus", alongside the far more sedate "Turkish Revelry". "I supposed that I liked the fact that one was sweet and sad, and the other was disgustingly filthy," he says. "The version of 'Turkish Revelry' that Hal sent me was by an amazing singer called Paul Clayton, who was an early supporter and friend of, and influence on, Bob Dylan. The version of 'Good Ship Venus' was by American folk humourist Oscar Brand, who oddly enough couldn't bring himself to sing the line 'the mast was the captain's penis', opting instead for the tame, almost prissy alternative: 'a mast of a phallic genus'." Richard Thompson, who contributes "Mingulay Boat Song", is a fan of Willner. "I'd worked with him in the past, so I knew he had great vision, and that this project would be left of centre enough to be interesting," he says. His son Teddy performs an exquisitely pared-down version of "Sally Brown". He didn't realise that a childhood favourite would have racist connotations: "I had to look up the real words online and found out that there were these very dodgy verses that I'd never known about. I hadn't even realised that it was West Indian, as I'd always assumed that all good folk songs come from England." Ralph Steadman's interpretation of "Little Boy Billy" was just one of many collaborations that he's done with Willner over a 25-year period. "It's actually a sad song about cannibalism at sea, with guzzling Jimmy wanting to eat gorging Jack, but deciding on little boy Billy instead," he says. "I don't know why he thought of me except that perhaps he thinks I'm a sick bastard." It seems that very few people turn Hal Willner down, and normally scheduling is the only thing that gets in the way. "Usually we get who we're looking for," he says without a trace of smugness. In anyone else's hands, Rogue's Gallery could have been a messy compromise, but Hal Willner has pulled off the nigh on impossible yet again. This is certainly one of the most surprising and welcome packages of the year, and the good news is that there's a second volume due out next year to coincide with the third Pirates of the Caribbean film. 'Rogue's Gallery' is out on 21 August on Anti-/Epitaph