Billy MacKenzie: Satellite Life

Dave Amitri on Satellite Life

2022 marks 25 years since Billy MacKenzie died and is also the year in which he would have been 65 had he lived. To commemorate these landmarks Cherry Red are releasing a
three CD box set, Satellite Life. It’s a collection of his solo work with curator, collaborator and friend Steve Aungle.

MacKenzie’s career can be broken down into three parts. The Associates with Alan Rankine. Youthful exuberance, experimentation and creativity fizzing from every release.
Pushing the boundaries of what was possible musically and artistically. Then the post Alan Rankine Associates trying to be more mainstream to please the record companies working with the likes of Martyn Ware looking for the big hit and missing time and again despite some brilliant pop singles. Then his solo
work collaborating with the likes of BEF, Paul Haig, Yello and Aungle. Again producing some absolute masterpieces but apparently commercially not viable. These three CDs cover the last part of that solo career during a particularly productive and creative period when Billy was working almost exclusively with Aungle. It also includes some collaborations with Dennis Wheatley and Laurence Jay Cedar.

Most of these songs can be found on the posthumously released Beyond The Sun, Transmission Impossible, Eurocentric and Auchtermatic. Billy took his own life before these
songs could be released or even finished in some cases. This collection lovingly curated by Aungle, brings them new life alongside some previously
unreleased songs and demos. There’s something for everyone whether it’s the Scott walker Style ballads, the covers of Sparks’ Mother Earth and Bowie’s Wild Is The Wind that are so special. Electronic dance tracks including a fantastic version of The Eurythmics Here Comes The Rain Again and some gorgeous soul and Motown style songs.

Thanks to the power of social media connecting me with him, I was able to speak to Steve Aungle, the man who worked with, lived with and knew Billy better than almost anyone in the last years of his life. I spoke with Steve for an hour on the phone from his home in Berlin. He was open, honest, enthusiastic and allowed a novice like me to learn as I went.

So this becomes part review, part interview. It will be no surprise to anyone who knows me that a new Billy MacKenzie collection will take some beating. I suspect that’s the case for most if not all of his die hard fans. I would like this piece to have something for those fans. Something new to go along with the new songs. For non fans it would be great to encourage those who think The Associates were maybe too much, maybe too dramatic, to hear what we hear when Billy sings. This collection could be an introduction to those people especially those songs with Steve’s wonderful accompaniment.

We talk about life with Billy and his death. Song writing, songs, singers and touring. What Billy thought of Britpop and you’ll even find out which 90’s song Billy loved and had his own special dance for. We even manage to talk about Satellite Life….

I started my interview with Steve simply by asking how he was.

S – I’m fine, it’s been a weird couple of years. I’ve done a lot of writing, especially in the
early stages of lockdown as I couldn’t really do anything else. I’ve got a studio here (in Berlin) I can get busy and do a lot of stuff

D – What do you listen to these days Steve? What’s on your radar?

S – Well this is gonna sound weird but I’m listening to a lot of J S Bach at the moment. J S Bach and Miles Davis. I never liked classical music when I was younger now I find myself listening to Bach. It’s genius, just so well
constructed.

D – I assume when you were learning piano it was classical was it?

S – I was classically trained up to school leaving age up to grade 8 and I played all the usual stuff Bach, Chopin, Schubert. When I left school that’s when I went in a different direction and started to play jazz and stuff. That
taught me a lot about structures and chord theory as regards songs. That’s where I learned about song writing. I played a lot of jazz and it taught me how songs were put together.

It was important to me that it wasn’t all about Billy. Finding music that worked with that voice needed someone who could understand how to build a song and what made Billy tick. You can hear the synchronicity between Steve and Billy throughout. With that bit of background in place I asked Steve if he was happy with Satellite Life.

S – Yes I am. I bowed to this whole principle of putting a few demos on there just because the songs are good even though they sound really rough. So I wasn’t too sure about putting some of the demos on there but overall I’m really pleased with it. Especially the first album The Winter Academy I think that could actually be released as a vinyl album. I think it’s really, really good.
I spent quite a lot of time trying to work out a good running order. It’s quite long, each album is about an hour long. Really pleased with The Winter Academy and most of the rest. So overall I’m really pleased with it. It’s never perfect.

D – Do you think Billy would have been?

S – I think so. We had plans to re do it a certain way and we never got the chance so the demos are on there. He might have been a bit iffy about including those. There’s a song called Velvet on there, on the third CD and
that was just the demo. We had plans to do it in a completely different arrangement. I didn’t even really want to include that track but I relented to
pressure from a few fans. I do have to give credit to Craig Burton. This collection wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for him. He contacted me April / May last year. I hadn’t heard from him for long time but we go way back. It was him that had the idea to re-release the two albums Beyond The Sun and Eurocentric and all these new tracks. I wouldn’t have thought of doing it if it hadn’t been for him. It was his idea and his whole motivation and when I looked at it I thought it was worth doing. Just because there’d been a couple of reissues, you know Transmission Impossible, Beyond The Sun. I had nothing to do with them I didn’t even know about the. They were done without my knowledge. The way the tracks were compiled wasn’t right, there was so much about them that needed to be put right in terms of Billy’s legacy. The Associates stuff had all been reissued and it was all sort of there. Craig’s point was that this latter part of Billy’s career, the last four or five years was in a bit of a mess at that point. So recompiling this stuff, putting all the electronic stuff on one album, putting all the ballady stuff on an album and then putting all the band stuff on another. Just get it so it’s not a mish mash of styles. Which those two albums Beyond The Sun and Eurocentric, you know they were like a pastiche

I’d never really considered this before. I was so happy to find Billy’s solo work and those incredible songs on those albums that I’d listened without considering the bigger picture. This whole project was obviously important and now I’ve heard it it all makes perfect sense.
Before we discussed the music I wanted to talk about the sleeve notes by Aungle, Wheatley and Cedar which are worth the purchase price alone. As an insight into what made Billy the force of nature he was, his eccentricity, loyalty, generosity, sheer unadulterated talent and occasional ability to be a complete pain in the arse. They’re perfect. They also contains the most profound statement I’ve read on Billy’s untimely death from his Aunt. A perfect accompaniment it sets up the music for fans and newcomers alike touching as it does on Billy’s frame of mind at the time. Our conversation continued.

D – I’m going to go on to each disc individually if you don’t mind. I’ve got some questions regarding a couple of songs but I do want to go back to the sleeve notes first, they are extraordinary. I think that period of time in Billy’s life would stand it’s own book? I think it would actually make a brilliant film. There’s so much going on, so much around the final tragic ending. It feels like there’s something else that could be done.

S – It could be, did you see the Glamour Chase documentary? I thought it was alright. I thought there could have been a lot more in it. I felt it was a bit short, 25 minutes long. It was good that some kind of documentary got done but it could have been a lot more in depth. But you’re right. In the end it’s a story that lends it self to..

D – It’s definitely got a beginning, a middle and an end…

S That’s right. It’s got a tragic, tragic end to it. In the end I’ve sort of coped with Billy’s suicide and his death in a certain way in that I kind of
accept that he’d packed a lot in to his 39 years. It’s impossible not to be negative and cut up about it at the time it happened of course. As the years go on and you start looking at it in a different way.

D – I don’t want any spoilers for people that haven’t seen it yet but his Aunt’s comment in the sleeve notes is the most profound comment I’ve read yet on Billy’s death. The way she described it. I thought yep there you go, she’s nailed it. Clearly I didn’t know Billy but that feels like maybe it’s anexplanation, if we’re looking for one.

S – Well it made sense to me. I then started to think about the last few months I saw him because of course he went back up to Scotland in November 96. I only saw him one more time when he came down to London to sign the publishing deal in January a week before he died. Those last few months that we were living together. This thing of his mind just crashing. He’d be sometimes waking me up in the middle of the night and just sit on my bed talking. I’d fall asleep and wake up and he’d still be talking it was like a fuse had blown in his head. So when Betty said that it made a lot of sense to me because it made me think of the way he was in the last two or three months. I never really bought that explanation that he couldn’t cope with his mum dying.

D – It really leapt out at me and I thought that makes perfect sense.

S – It’s nice and simple, Betty was very down to earth, typical working class, Dundee, in her fifties always very pragmatic and straightforward. It’s very refreshing when you get a take on something from somebody like that as
they will come up with something that nails it.

D – As I’ve said the sleeve notes are great and will be a fantastic addition to the music for those who know Billy and those that don’t know Billy’s story it will be a real bonus and insight.

S – I hope so. I suppose at the end what you’re hoping for is trying to find some new fans along the way as well.

After that I thought we’d better get on to the music. The three discs are broken down into distinct groups. Disc 1 – Winter Academy are mostly piano torch ballads, unplugged and letting MacKenzie’s voice soar. Disc 2 – Consenting Holograms is all electronica, dance and high energy. Thrilling stuff. Disc 3 – Liberty Lounge is
full of songs with MacKenzie and a band. A great mix of soul, glam and pop. Once we began talking about the music Steve’s enthusiasm for the songs, working with Billy, his clear love for Billy and emotion for the period shone through.

The next section is just us talking and I hope it gives you a real insight into these three remarkable discs and what went in to creating these songs. I’ll see you on the other side…..

D – I really like the way you’ve separated the styles out. It works for me

S – Yeah, it makes it more cohesive.

D – Disc one Winter Academy is my favourite side, it’s just beautiful. When I first got into Transmission Impossible and Beyond The Sun and picked up on these songs. I was a bit late to them to be honest, I didn’t discover them in the 90’s. Life meant I wasn’t listening to very much at the time. When I did discover them suddenly Billy’s voice with the piano and having also seen the Ronnie Scott’s gig that he did. It was like, this is where Billy probably should have been. Straightforward productions with that voice. Just really work for me. I love all of the songs that were done in that style. How did the writing process work with you and Billy?.

S – It sort of changed from song to song. There would have been a couple of times where I would actually basically write, not a piano piece but just sort of a song without words and Billy would go “I really like that”. That only happened a handful of times. Most of the time Billy would come to me with an idea and he’d usually have the lyric pretty much written. I wouldn’t have
anything to do with the lyrics, he was such a brilliant lyricist I was quite happy to let him take care of that side of things. In terms of those song, it was different with some of the electronic stuff but in terms of The Winter Academy songs what would happen is we would go to the piano. I would start coming up with some chords and he might sing a certain note and I’d go “what if I go here?” and I’d basically bend, get him to change the melody to suit my chord change. So by the time we were finished with it his idea had been moulded into something else. So it was melded between us. Other aspects of it we kinda.., if there was a string arrangement or something like that I sometimes did them, sometimes Billy did them. The thing about Billy is he always had ideas for everything. People assumed he just wrote lyrics and someone else wrote the music but the thing is whether it was with me or with Alan Rankine, Howard Hughes or anyone else there’s no way you could stop Billy from coming up with ideas for other instruments. Sometimes he’d just come at you with a bass line or something else. So whenever we went into a recording or writing session he’d
already done a load of preparation. He came in teeming with ideas and so you hold him off. To a certain extent I got most of my writing done when he wasn’t in the room so I had some sort of thought space to get my own stuff. He was quite intense and he’d be throwing stuff at you constantly. So that’s the way it would generally work. Sometimes I came up with something and he’d put words to it but that only happened on a handful of occasions. Most of the time he would come to me with a vocal melody and some words and then we’d start working on it. It got quicker and quicker as time went on. By the last year in 96 we were writing stuff really fast

D – You can see it was a really fertile time for you both. There were so many songs over
such a short period of time.

S – There were tons honestly Dave. There’s actually a fair amount of stuff that got lost as well. When we’d recorded something we’d get the master and he’d borrow it to let someone hear it and then he’d lose it. Then he’d borrow the safety copy and I’d say “you mustn’t lose this” and he’d lose that. There is a chance that there is some material in his sister’s house because his sister Helen has got a whole trunkful of old tapes, like cassettes. So at some stage we’re gonna go through that and see what’s there.

D – That’s great. Back to side 1 the one song I picked up on as I knew most of them from the previous recordings was Tallahatchie Pass? There’s a country feel to it and Billy sings it with a twang to his voice which I absolutely love. What’s the story with that one?

S – The original demo was country. When you isolate the vocal melody you just think, right this is country and we’ve got to give it the Glen Campbell treatment which is essentially what we did. We were thinking let’s try and make it sound like Wichita Lineman. When we originally did it, it was more electronic it sounded completely different. But I’d always thought it should be done like a country song. Which is kinda weird as Billy never came up with anything remotely country and I’ve never really been into country music myself. In the end the treatment it got I think works really well.

D – I agree. Coincidentally I’ve recently done a piece on the album Wichita Lineman after hearing the song on the radio. It was exactly what I thought of when I first heard Tallahatchie Pass. I loved it. It just leapt out because it’s so
different and brilliantly done. That’s it for Winter Academy. I could talk to you for the next hours and hours on it but I don’t want to take up too much of your time but you should be very proud of it Steve.

S – The record label Cherry Red have mentioned a possibility of it being some vinyl spin offs. If the was the case the first suggestion I would make would be to release that first album on vinyl.

D – That would be fantastic and I think it would be incredibly well received as well. Disc two Consenting Holograms is much more up-tempo and the music more dance orientated. I can imagine Billy’s energy on this was amazing to witness?

S – Actually I think Billy was more interested in electronic music than anything. We talked earlier how the stripped down format really suited his
voice and it does but I suppose at the end he felt that all that torch, Scott Walker type stuff he could do that in his sleep. He didn’t really find it much of a challenge. He saw electronic music as I did and I still do as an area where you can really explore what you can do with sound. It’s much more open. This is one of the problems with his career is that he always wanted to do different styles at different times. He was never a one style type artist, he was always changing up. When we were shopping the material around to try and get us signed in 1995 one of the problems was that the stuff we were presenting was a mixture of this electronic stuff, the Scott Walker ballads, 60’s soul, glam rock. It was all jumbled up and a bit of a nightmare for any label to deal with, they want to market it as one thing. The electronic stuff, I think that was where he wanted to go because he saw it as more of a chance to innovate and break new ground. I think also it gave him the chance to sometimes not sing. He did a few electronic instrumentals. There’s two instrumentals on that album. It was nice for him not to have to sing just mess with electronics, it gave him a break. Emotionally as well with the torch stuff it’s quite draining as your doing all this really personal material and you’re exposing yourself and he found that quite draining. So I think the electronic thing was essential that he was able to do that and I was up for it as well I love the electronic stuff.

D – It’s certainly different. With the way the 3 discs have been laid out if you’re in the mood and that’s the sort of stuff you want to hear, bang there it is. It’s interesting you say that’s what he was in to, that’s where his heart laid almost. Was there any discussion about whether the Consenting Holograms stuff was commercially viable or was it just not considered?

S – I think on that album there’s a couple of tracks that are quite commercial. I think Falling Out With the Future could have been a hit. There
were some DJ’s that played that and it went down really well on the club scene. It sounds great when you hear that through a big sound system.

D – I was never one for Ibiza, it wasn’t my thing but you can imagine these songs in that environment. Was there any interest from that market?

S – Not really, at one point there was interest from German label Logic. Sparks were signed to them at the time. Mid 90s and they were interested and paid for us to do some demos but it never went anywhere. If they had signed that they wouldn’t have been interested in the other material. The problem with Nude who Billy signed to in 96 was that they only wanted to do the Winter Academy stuff. So if Billy hadn’t died and we’d continued as we intended to do in 97 we would have been going ahead with the whole Nude project there would have been all kinds of problems. They did not want to do anything electronic at all.

D – I read somewhere that Billy wanted to push on with the electronic stuff regardless?

S – Yeah, I think there would have been all kinds of problems. Billy had problems with labels before that. He had terrible problems with Warner, terrible problems with any label he was on as they couldn’t really control him and get him to do one thing. Meanwhile he’s running up these huge bills.

D – Of course. He must have been an intense and fascinating character to be around. I understand Billy was a huge fan of Firestarter. Is that right? I love the idea of that.

S – He was, oh he loved Firestarter. He had this weird jerky dance he did to it when it came on and he’d turn it right up. This weird twitchy kind of dance. He loved that. It was the only track of theirs he loved actually. I remember we got the album and he went “the rest of the album’s shit”.

D – We’ve all done that. Bought an album on the back of one song. So that was clearly where Billy’s heart was and it’s a real shame he didn’t get the opportunity to really push that. I enjoyed that disc. Consenting Holograms is great it shows you a side of Billy that’s a bit different again but I must admit I’m a sucker for Disc 3 – Liberty Lounge. The three opening tracks, my God when I first heard those. The Mountains That You Climb, I had to pull the car over.

S- I think those three songs are three really great soul songs. I think Tomorrow People if they’re going to do a single from Satellite Life they’ve got to do that song. That’s an absolute stand out single I think. It was so weird the way I found that. This was last year, I’m going through old tapes to see if I could find anything else that we could remix or put back together again for some extra material that hadn’t been heard before. I vaguely remembered the song but suddenly I came across him just singing the vocal on his own. It was a really good vocal and I though we could just take that vocal and rebuild the track around it. We’d make it into a sort of Motown song. So I got together with the two guys from White Label, those three songs are all White Label as is Tallahatchie Pass. White Label is myself and these two musicians and we’ve been doing remixes since about 2011 and we were used to rebuilding tracks from zero. We just had a vocal to work with on Tomorrow People. I’m particularly pleased with that track as I didn’t expect that to appear, it just appeared out of nowhere. I think those first three songs work really well together.

D – Tell me about MacArthurs Son

S – We originally wrote that song for David McAlmont. He came round and we played it to him, just on the piano and Billy sang it. He was really up for it so we said we’d demo it with the band and we’ll take it from there. So went to the studio, demo’d it and we thought “now, we’ll keep this for ourselves. So Billy phoned him up and said “sorry David we’re gonna keep it” and that was the end of that. That was a very important song as that was the song that got Billy signed to Nude. That then lead on to the publishing deal as well so it was a pivotal song.

D – It was a real treat for me to hear those three new songs. As I’m sure it will be for many so thanks for that.

S – I thought It was really important that there had to be a generous offering of new material. I knew that most of the people would have heard all the other tracks.

D – Something I wondered me while I was listening that may be a bit trite but I’ll ask it anyway. 1995-97 was peak Britpop era. Was there any thought to knocking out a Beatlesque, guitar heavy version of Sour Jewell or something to jump on that band wagon?

S – No. Sour Jewell was supposed to be a tribute to Roxy Music. I wrote the backing track without him there. He was away somewhere and he came back and I just had it playing in my room really loud. I knew he was in the house and he came through and said “what’s that?” I said it was just a new track and he asked if he could put a vocal on it. I said “well yeah, that’s the idea”. I deliberately made it sound as near to early Roxy Music as I could. We had listened to that first Roxy Music album a lot.

D – I can’t really imagine Billy getting into the whole Blur and Oasis thing. I suspect he preferred Pulp or Suede?

S – Well, we never really talked about Britpop. I think he made a few disparaging remarks about Suede because they were on Nude Records as well. In fact that was Nude Records one big success, Suede. I remember we were listening to some Suede and Brett Anderson was doing this high falsetto singing and Billy was shaking his head and saying “nah, that’s my territory”. I think he was a bit disparaging about Britpop in general.

D – So it’s 1996 and you’re making all this music. Was there any talk of touring at all?

S – Billy was up for touring, he was up for performing. He wasn’t shy. We didn’t talk a lot about touring but he said to me that he didn’t really want to get too involved in rehearsals until right near the end. You’re gonna have to
find the right musicians, rehearse them up and get the band ready and I’ll come in at the last couple of rehearsals and we’ll do it. I would have been totally up for that. We had the musicians that we would have needed. He would have been up for it, he wasn’t ever against the idea of touring at all.

D – That’s a real shame it never happened. What a thing that would have been to see Billy performing these songs live.

S – He was always up for performing for people. Whenever we had visitors
he’d always get me to go on the piano and say we’ve got these new songs. Whoever it was we’d perform for them. That used to happen a lot.

D – A pity there were no camera phones around in 1996.

S – I do often wonder how he would have dealt with technology, the internet, social media. I just wonder how he would have reacted to all of that.

D – You can only imagine. Staying with touring I recently heard Alan Rankine say David McAlmont is the only singer he’d consider touring Associates material with. If this release is a real success and there’s a real buzz around it does it have to be Billy singing these songs. Is there anyone you’d consider with the right band?

S – I agree with Alan on that. I think David McAlmont is probably one of the few male singers that could cope with Billy’s songs. I was working with a Canadian singer last year and we covered some of the piano songs. She was a really good singer and she really struggled with them. She said these songs are really hard to sing. It’s not just the range, you need a lot of lung power as well. They are quite exhausting to sing. Whoever would take that on would have to be
really top drawer.

So that was about it for the 3 Cd’s I hope you enjoyed that part of this as much as I did. The songs I know just sound better the way they are presented here and the new songs are
everything I hoped for and more. I wanted to ask Steve how this time was for Steve and how he felt about it all now. These songs and this collection wouldn’t have happened without him.

S – Those four years with Billy were the best four years of my life. They were verypressurised, a lot of stress and everything felt very intense. But I really had a great time. As a musician those four years were the best I had and that was down to working with someone like Billy. I was a really great learning curve in terms of writing and arranging and it’s also made me really resilient in terms of working with other people. If you can work with Billy you can work with anyone. He was so bloody demanding. So may people I know couldn’t cope with working with Billy MacKenzie he would stretch you, he would pull you and push you and drive you insane. You’d come out of it having learned a lot but also with a really good result. It was always so worth it. It was like doing four years at University. Whatever I’ve done since then I couldn’t have done without those four years, they wear absolutely vital. I’ve written three albums of material during lockdown and I’m hoping to get something released.

D – That’s great. This is clearly all about Billy but it’s good to finish with some insight into what this whole period meant for you. Thanks for your time and for sharing so much of this with me. Good luck with your current projects and this release.

For me to have spoken to someone who worked so closely with Billy and knew him so well was quite something. The fact that the collection is so perfect makes the whole experience of reviewing it and speaking with Steve a great experience for me.

This collection for a fan like me is like finding an old box of photographs and all the emotion that can bring. Steve Aungle has sorted them all out, put them in albums and now instead of a jumble of images they are laid out to enjoy and share. If you’re already a fan you’ll love Satellite Life as you will find something new among all the familiarity. Three discs, nearly three hours of music to wallow in.

If you’re new to Billy MacKenzie or just new to this period of his career I could risk boring you like an old Aunt by ploughing through each song one by one. So instead I’ll leave you with just one in the comments. This song from The Winter Academy CD is a familiar recording and contains what is perhaps my favourite MacKenzie vocal. It’s Billy MacKenzie at his absolute best for me during a period of his life where we can only guess at what he was going through. If it were a photo it would include waves, dark clouds, sunlight bursting through and a heavenly apparition singing the mesmeric ending that closes a haunting yet beautiful and heart-breaking song. Try and stay with it to the end…

Satellite Life is released on Cherry Red Records on April 22nd

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