Colin H on The Presleys
‘Embrace’ is the first album by the Presleys. It’s a 35-minute barnstorming, blistering urban garage blues-rock behemoth – and it benefits homeless people. It’s an album that requires no previous knowledge of those involved: Ned Alexander (drums, backing vocals) and Brian Houston (guitars, vocals, piano, banjo). The tracking engineer, Ben Loughran, adds bass and Moog on some tracks. It was recorded and mixed at Brian’s studio in Belfast.
It’s tempting to leave it there as an intro – because I’ve just said that one needs no other information to crank up this album and enjoy it. But… okay, let me tell you just a little about Brian Houston before we hear what he has to say…
Thirty years ago, around 1990, Brian’s band the Mighty Fall caused a sensation on the Belfast bar scene. Not least, they opened up a major covers-only venue to original music with a weekly residency at the Empire Bar. The Empire became one of Belfast’s key handful of original music venues in the mid-90s, along with the Warehouse (1994–96), the Front Page, the Duke of York and a couple of others. The Empire is still a key venue to this day – covers and originals – and Ken Haddock, the sax player in the Mighty Fall (based loosely on Springsteen’s E-Street Band), but also a fabulous singer, guitarist, songwriter and song interpreter himself, has held court there with a Sunday night supper club residency for the past 20 years. The ripples from Houston’s Mighty Fall have also been felt in the international careers of Johnny Quinn (Mighty Fall drummer, then Snow Patrol drummer/publisher) and Iain Archer (award-winning co-writer of hits for Snow Patrol, Liam Gallagher, Jake Bugg, James Bay et al.).
Closer to home, the Mighty Fall can now be seen in a way as the end of one era (their sole single ‘Kick it in the Head’ being one of the last releases on Terri Hooley’s legendary Good Vibrations label, on vinyl) and the foreshadowing of another, the mid-90s boom in Belfast’s bar music scene with a host of now fondly-remembered artists releasing one or more self-funded CD albums and EPs in a glorious golden age that lasted maybe three years.
Brian himself went back to carpentry for a living after the fall of the Mighty Fall for a couple of years, but emerged by stealth in 1994 with a mini-album on new-fangled CD called ‘Crush’, recorded with a £100 loan from his new pianist/collaborator Jules Maxwell (himself still in music, co-writer of songs on the recent ‘Mystere de Voix Bulgares’ album no less) and a song called ‘Daddy’s Getting into Jesus Again’, drawn from the experience of a difficult working-class upbringing.
What happened with ‘Jesus Again’ is the stuff of film scripts. A local radio presenter played it at 4am one night and the phones started ringing. It wasn’t a million miles away from what had happened to Elvis – Brian’s hero, then and now – when his first single was played in Memphis. Brian became known as ‘the Belfast Elvis’ not because he did Elvis covers (well, okay, sometimes he did ‘That’s Alright’ onstage in the early days… and when he headlined the Waterfront Hall in 1999 he encored with a seemingly endless version of ‘Suspicious Minds’; we were caught in a trap, we couldn’t get out…) but because of his huge charisma as a performer. He was a big personality on the scene and was often talked about. It seemed only a matter of time before he made it ‘out of Belfast’.
Strangely, despite this or that opportunity in Dublin and with English producers during the 90s, that breakthrough never happened. By the end of the decade, I had moved on from chronicling the local scene for the ‘Irish News’ (aside from writing for national journals on non-local music) and was working on my first book, ‘Dazzling Stranger: Bert Jansch and the British folk and blues revival’ (Bloomsbury, 2000), before moving into a public sector job for 10 years. That last decision was a mistake on my part, but the upshot of all this was that, having watched his remarkable progress from bar sensation to Waterfront headliner over five-odd years of intense activity and adventure, I only periodically kept in touch with what Brian was up to in the 2000s and 2010s.
Each of his first three albums was a big deal at the time, but as far as I could see they tumbled out very regularly with less local fanfare thereafter – although I’ve no doubt that each one was a big deal for Brian and his immediate circle. I think he’s released around 25 albums now, although recent years have been a bit blurry with digital-only comps and special-edition versions of albums with bonus discs etc. One album, ‘Sugar Queen’ (2006), seemed to rise from the routine and get coverage in Britain (I was aware that America had been his major focus in the early 2000s). It was a period when he was getting a lot of airplay from Bob Harris on Radio 2. More recently, his 2016 album ‘Songs From My Father’ – an exploration of Irish folk songs and a reappraisal of that difficult upbringing – caught my attention. (I see there’s now a 5CD deluxe edition on his website!) 2018’s ‘Hank’ was a fabulous homage to Hank Williams, with Brian bringing exciting new life and fresh arrangements to familiar songs, with the authenticity of 1950s valve amps and guitars and pristine ‘vocal group’ harmonies featuring only himself with the wonders of being, by now, a studio owner at a premises in the centre of Belfast. To my mind, that one is a great standalone release. If you like the Presleys ‘Embrace’, maybe try that one next.
I see from Googling that in between ‘Hank’ (which seems like something I received hot off the press only a couple of months ago) and this new band project as the Presleys, Brian somehow managed to fit in another album, ‘Reckless Love’ (2019). That’s the trouble with Brian, he’s insanely prolific – you blink and you miss whole albums. Indeed, that’s largely what prompted me to seek him out for this interview.
This album as the Presleys is the first time since the Mighty Fall that Brian has released work as part of a band (not counting the Hudson Taylors, a gospel music trio he worked with on US tours in the early 2000s). It deserves a bit of a spotlight – for people to notice it. And it helps that it is a wholly distinct product, a wholly distinct identity, and a ‘sound’ that Brian hasn’t captured on record before – though I’ve long been aware that he can play barnstorming electric guitar onstage. As Brian says in the interview, the new name is a real blessing on platforms like Spotify – the casual browser will have no need to wade through hundreds of ‘Brian Houston’ recordings (including recording by ‘the other Brian Houston’, see below), in often diverse styles. The Presleys rock. There’s no folk, no gospel, no county, no finely crafted lyrics – just blues-drenched rock, high-volume field hollers about the lives of the poor in America.
There’s a bit of nostalgia in this too, in that Brian will very kindly be playing a charity concert I’m putting on in Belfast in March: ‘Warehouse Remembered #2’. We did it with reunions of five acts associated with that golden age mid-90s scene in Belfast last September, raising £900+ for Fauna & Flora International. This time, it’s four other great acts and artists from that era in reunions and one-off new groupings, with funds going to a Foetal Alcohol Syndrome support group, with Brian headlining in a one-off trio with punk legend Petesy Burns (The Outcasts) and burbling bass maestro Ali MacKenzie (Bush Turkeys) – where he’ll certainly be debuting some of this Presleys album. The Belfast Elvis is returning as the Presleys. I’m sure there must be a moral there somewhere. Elvis is back in the building.
We met at a diner outside Belfast where the food was cheap, the coffee was great and the background music volume tolerable. Here is 70 minutes of digitally taped wisdom and biography from the man behind the Presleys. It may even have been the first time I’d interviewed him 20 years. Time flies.
(Interview in the comments below)
INTERVIEW PART 1:
CH: Imagine someone reading this has no idea who you are. What is the brief history of Brian Houston? Help the casual reader understand your journey.
BRIAN: In a nutshell… Well, I was in a band [the Mighty Fall) that didn’t get a record deal, with Johnny Quinn, Iain Archer, Ken Haddock, Big Chuckie. That flopped in the early 90s. I went off music for a while then I made a demo with Jules Maxwell [a song called ‘Daddy’s Getting into Jesus Again’], which Stephen Woods played on the radio and next thing we had a [local] hit record. And some people say…
CH: That it’s been all downhill since then? (laughs all round)
BRIAN: The public has never recovered. Some people say that was the first independent CD release in Northern Ireland. I’m not sure that’s true – but I’m claiming it anyway! Next thing I knew, a certain Mr [Kyle] Leitch introduced me to the retail outlets in Belfast and I went down there with my little copy book, which I still have, and boxes of CDs [the album was ‘Crush’ (1994)]. We sold maybe 3,000 of those, which was amazing.
CH: Was Mr Leitch the subject of your oft-speculated-about later song ‘Backseat Driver’?
BRIAN: No comment! So I just followed that model, really, for a few years, did some work with a guy from Mike & the Mechanics, Adrian Lee, and that was all trundling along until in 1998 I made a record [‘In the Words of Dr Luke’] on a hard drive, myself – and that was the first time I’d made a record by myself. That sold a few thousand copies and it changed my life because I made a second record off the back of that [‘Big Smile’ (2000)], which I licensed to an English label, who gave me thousands and thousands of pounds and lots of gigs – primarily in the Christian market, which had me then play my first shows in America, touring there for seven weeks. That would have been 2001. I got a big advance and we lived high on the hog for about three years until I got really cheesed off with that world – struggled to bring my ‘Belfast barroom braggadocio’ to the church-centric cosmos of American Christianity. I just couldn’t get my head around it, and I decided I wouldn’t do it anymore. I went back to doing bars and clubs. I was about three years in that [Christian] scene, but I’ve always been labelled as a Christian artist, strangely enough – even though the vast majority of my stuff has been in the mainstream.
I then made ‘Mea Culpa’ (2001), ‘Thirteen Days in August’ (2004), ‘The Valley’ (2006), ‘Sugar Queen’ (2006), ‘Three Feet from Gold’ (2008) – and each one of those albums was more and more successful than the others, until we got to ‘Three Feet From Gold’. I got a really bad review for and that really disheartened me. At that point I thought I would quit. That was 2009. I told a few people I was going to quit. I had a very bad experience in Austin, Texas at the SXSW thing. Some of the people on the trip were kind of hogging the limelight and for some reason I took this as a personal rejection. Between that and the bad review, I thought I’d quit. But I had a studio, owned in partnership with a friend in Hillsborough, and my wife said, ‘Why don’t you go to the studio and instead of making an album, make a song for yourself and have fun doing it?’
So I did that, and that process eventually became ‘Gospel Road’ (2009), which was an old-timey ‘Oh, Brother Where Art Thou?’ type record. Next thing, it was all over the radio in Northern Ireland, next thing I’d sold out the Grand Opera House three years running… and at that point, I didn’t really know where to go in terms of Ireland, so I decided to go and live in America. I got a visa and away I went, and I stayed there till 2015. Because I’d been in America, I’d kind of realised my Irishness – sometimes, when you’re away you become more aware of where you’re from. And that’s when I got into following Irish trad music. I’d also met some Native Americans and was very impacted by the fact that they’d lost their culture to the white man, and realised that had happened in Ireland – [the fault of] ‘my people’, my ‘Ulster-Scots’ or whoever we were back in the day.
CH: But tragically, given that you were speaking in ‘Ulster-Scots’, they couldn’t understand your apology… (laughs all round)
BRIAN: Yes, ‘At least speak in a real language instead of a made-up one to get funding!’ they said! So that’s when I started to get into Irish music as well as the blues… For me there’s always been rock music, in the background, blues, which has rolled along, the gospel music thing, which I mostly got from Elvis, and then I added Irish music to that. So, I’ve now got a palette that stretches across all those genres, and currently I’ve started several projects – a blues project, an electronic project, another gospel project, and a band project called The Presleys, in the blues-rock field.
CH: Has your musical variety and prolificity as a recording artist been a blessing or a curse?
BRIAN: A curse.
CH: You live and breath the world of Brian Houston, but for people out there who have lots of distractions and consume lots of culture…
BRIAN: Who have lives! (laughs)
CH: …you have a mind-boggling amount of styles and creativity. You must have heard it before from people that it’s increasingly difficult to land your product on the ears of the public, and even more difficult if your product is radically different every time. Last week, you gave me The Presleys’ album ‘Embrace’ (2020), which is hard blues-rock, today you’ve given me ‘Anam Cara’, which you’ll release at some point this year credited to King Boru, which is a ‘Celtic worship’ Christian album. It’s all one music to you, but it must be incredibly difficult to land those blows on the public. Do you just follow the muse or do you follow the market?
BRIAN: I’ve never been able to find the market so I can’t follow it! That’s probably always been my problem.
CH: Well, for somebody who hasn’t managed to find the market, you’ve managed to have a 30-year career. You’ve always found just enough of the market enough of the time…
BRIAN: Well, even a stopped watch is right twice a day. The fact that I’m around, making music – occasionally, that music seems to blend with the zeitgeist and I can benefit, briefly, in that window. I mean, I had no idea whenever I made the ‘Gospel Road’ record – I made it for fun, I made it like an Elvis record, with doo-wop things going on… I’d never had the bravery before to connect [on record] with that 50s style of music that I loved as a child.
Out of the three national reviews we got for ‘Three Feet from Gold’, two were glowing and one was paint-strippingly blisteringly critical, saying the record was a desperate attempt to get fame. I was very hurt by that; I took it very personally. But out of that I felt free. I thought, ‘I can’t please these people, I might as well just please myself’. And that’s when I made ‘Gospel Road’ (2009). But my PR person at the time, James Rollins, said, ‘Do not release this record, it will kill your career’. I said, ‘Well, I have to release the record. I’ve made it. I can’t just pretend it doesn’t exist.’ So I gave him 25 copies instead of the usual 800 giveaways – we’d given away 800 copies of ‘Three Feet from Gold’ (2008) as promos. They’re still showing up on eBay! But from 25 copies it became the most played record on local radio in 2010. It goes to show you… As an artist, I do something I feel like doing and people like it. I’ve tried to do things that I thought would be commercial only to find out that, no, it wasn’t. So I haven’t got a clue.
CH: The two albums you’ve given me this month are under band names/pseudonyms [The Presleys and King Boru]. Is the ‘Brian Houston’ brand played out? Is there too much baggage associated with it? Do you want these albums to be heard as the first releases by a new entity?
BRIAN: Erm… I have a difficulty in terms of Spotify because there’s a person with exactly the same name as me, who is much better known than me, and he’s a Christian preacher from Australia. He releases talks. So, anyone looking for me comes across this other guy – ‘Why is this Belfast guy talking with an Australian accent?’ So part of the problem is that. Part of it is a deep-seated insecurity, a fear, that people in Belfast – in my imagination – if my name comes up [in connection with a new release], at radio stations, I can imagine them saying, ‘Houston? Is he *still* going? Why doesn’t he just curl up and go away?’ I can imagine them thinking, ‘Why is he still going?’ And the truth is, I’m going for exactly the same reason as Bruce Springsteen or Bob Dylan or the Rolling Stones or Paul McCartney – it’s what I do. Paul McCartney’s not doing it for the money; he’s doing it because he’s a musician. Likewise, Bruce Springsteen. Unlike them, I *do* need the money. I can’t let go of that tiger by the tail because… I mean, what else can I do? This is who I am.
CH: If you were a carpenter…
BRIAN: …and you were a lady! I mean, I have considered giving this up and going back to carpentry work or, you know, try and get a job related to the music industry, but those doors have never opened. I’ve worked as a consultant on some projects [recently], because I’ve built up a lot of experience in terms of recording studios and how to survive in the music industry, so I find myself trying to help others.
CH: Getting back to the Presleys album, it must be helpful that that album – and later this year the King Boru album – is coming out under the radar and that no one in the world bar the millions reading this online will realise ‘It’s Brian Houston!’
BRIAN: Well, if they read the back of the CD, they’ll find out it’s Brian Houston. What’s good about the Presleys is that there’s absolutely zero ambiguity as to what it is. It’s an unashamedly blues-driven rock album. You’ve no idea how much that simplifies my life. Because I can create a Facebook page for that brand and then get that brand to join all these groups on Facebook, like rock music groups – and I don’t have people saying, ‘Hang on, you’re not a rock guy, you play folk music or Christian music…’ There’s none of that ambiguity. It just is what it is.
CH: Houston rocks.
BRIAN: Well, the Presleys rock.
CH: Tell me about that project. Why should people check it out?
BRIAN: Well, it happened by accident. A friend invited me to America and asked me if I’d be interested in helping a not-for-profit homelessness project try and raise awareness. So we brainstormed and came up with this idea to set up in his garage, play on the internet [in video posts] and get people to donate. But he had two babies and us playing in his garage wasn’t going to work. But the charity had a house donated to them, to house and rehabilitate people who were stuck. So we drove to this house every day, set up a little PA and even in the car on the way up we didn’t know what we were going to play – were we going to other people’s tunes, my songs, write something, worship songs…? So we just plugged in, me with an old Fender amp, him with his drums and as soon as I hit the first chord, I had an idea for a song, he jumped in on the drums and an hour and a half later we had broadcast that first song on Facebook live. And we thought, ‘Wow! Well, that was inspiring.’
We did a couple of songs in one room, then moved to different rooms of the house. We did one in the bathroom called ‘These Walls are Closing in on Me’. Having fun. It was an old house and we could hear the rain, so we wrote one called ‘I Can Hear the Rain’. There were difficulties in a relationship close to us, we were hearing some stories about that, so we wrote a couple of songs about relationships breaking up. And we were hearing stories about poor people, so we wrote ‘Poor in America’ and ‘Rocking Ricky’. We were there for ten days then we had some gigs up in Richmond, so we had to get it done and get out of there. We raised a few hundred dollars for charity and we thought, ‘That’s it’. But then we thought, we have more than ten songs, why don’t we put a record together? We can get copies to the charity, they can get awareness and money, and we’ve got a record – and the whole thing hasn’t been for nothing, as in written, broadcast and over: it can be written, broadcast and recorded. There’s a record of what happened.
CH: Am I right in thinking that Ned, your collaborator, used to be homeless?
BRIAN: No… well, there are different levels of homelessness. There were times he was without his own abode, but that was a while ago. The people we’ve written about, like ‘Rocking Ricky’, he’s a janitor in a motel. In America, if you have a felony against you then you can’t get a place to live. You can’t rent an apartment.
CH: It’s interesting that you did this up-to-the-minute internet broadcasting and then felt that you wanted to lock it down in an ‘old school’ album. I’d be the same. As an artist, one tends to think in terms of a body of work representing a particular time or project, but there are people out there, in a younger generation, with no concept of that – just streaming this or that track.
BRIAN: Some friends’ cousins turned up at a party we were at, rebellious looking, long hair, army jackets…
CH: That’s you! (laughs all round)
BRIAN: I asked, ‘Who are you into?’ They said, ‘Led Zeppelin’. I said, ‘What’s your favourite album?’ They guy looked at me. He’d no idea that they had ‘albums’, all he knows is he streams their music for free on Apple Music or Spotify, and the fact that those songs were once collected together on albums, as statements, was brand new information to that person.
[More talk about the nature of ‘the album’, the history of recordings, 78s, vinyl, Frank Sinatra, ‘Sgt Pepper’, etc.]
BRIAN: This whole concept of an album is very much of our generation. People are trying to sell us the idea that the album is over and it’s all about singles but the problem is, that’s like trying to tell an author to release chapters rather than a book.
[Talk of Dickens, Conan Doyle, James Joyce, books published in sections/periodicals before appearing as whole works]
BRIAN: Here’s the thing, we did that album, it was very pure, there was no agenda when we started other than to help a charity out. We were as surprised as anyone else that it birthed the creativity that it did. ‘Poor in America’ – I dreamed that song. I woke up with the entire song. It’s as close to [Paul McCartney with] ‘Yesterday’ as I’ve come.
CH: So you’re a ‘Yesterday’ man? (laughs all round)
BRIAN: It was because we were in a creative environment, and I was detached from all other distractions or domestic concerns. To me, it would have been a shame, and a loss, to leave that music and say, ‘Well, that was nice…’ Especially since, to be honest, when we were doing it, it felt really good.
CH: It’s quite a departure for you in that, song-writing wise, it’s simple. You’ve boiled it down to the bare minimum. I know you’ve done the whole Nashville co-writing thing, where it’s all about the structure and formula – bridges, pre-choruses, key changes et al. With this, it feels like two guys in a room, amps at 11, playing modal blues on three chords. It is, of course, more sophisticated than that because you’ve built in movement and dynamics to most of the songs with layers of harmonies and so on, but basically, it’s not that far away from Link Wray in 1955, is it?
BRIAN: No, it’s not, and in fact that’s a huge compliment, to be compared with that sound, because that’s exactly the music that inspires me at the minute. I have to give a mention, at least, to the fact that there’s a tremendous similarity between Irish music and the blues: the root note stays constant and the melody moves up and down…
CH: Did you use a dropped D tuning on any of these songs?
BRIAN: No, nearly every song was written in A – just because I kept finding riffs in A. So the A is the root. There’s a couple in E, where I found similar riffs. But in Irish music, by holding that one note, it gives the melody tremendous freedom to soar and drop, soar and drop. You would think that that would be a restriction but in fact it’s a freedom. Before we would broadcast a song, we’d record various versions on my phone…
CH: So you were phoning it in? (laughs)
BRIAN: …and by the time we came to record them properly it was seven months later and we hadn’t listened to that music since the day and hour we wrote it. So now we’re sitting in a studio, playing these demos on our phones, playing the videos, going, ‘Oh, that’s what we did…’ Then, we’d set up a click track in the studio a bit faster than we’d played on the video, because the temptation in the studio is always to play things a little slow, but you’re better to play them a little fast. So, from writing to recording there was no touring the music, no performing it to your wife, no adjusting the lyrics – it was, ‘That’s what we did, now we’re recording it’. It was as if the recording had happened the week after we’d written the songs. I think that’s why it’s fresh.
CH: It’s quite visceral as well. The lyrics almost feel like they’ve come out fully formed – they’re like urban field hollers, mantras…
BRIAN: Yes, I didn’t notice that till we’d made the record. There’s no second-guessing, and that’s what’s beautiful about it. As a singer-songwriter, one of the things I fall into is constantly refining and refining and refining to the point that…
CH: There’s no song left?
BRIAN: …or that it’s a far inferior product to that which you started with. I wonder does that happen to people like U2…
CH: Actually, ‘Poor in America’ reminds me of U2 at their most visceral, around the time of ‘Rattle & Hum’ and ‘The Fly’ – before they started laying things in the studio to the point where it’s just a big blancmange of sound.
BRIAN: That’s an amazing compliment. When U2 met technology it was almost like they began to become songwriters, and as soon as they did that, that idea of four guys in a space jamming with a fresh idea went out the window and it became four millionaires with ProTools comparing notes and making a record. I think you can hear that in the music. And that’s what happens to me sometimes. When you ask me ‘Is the Brian Houston brand dead and gone?’ I’ve actually got another album…. Well, there’s three other albums in the can: one will probably never see the light of day, because it was written for children and people keep saying ‘Don’t release that album’; there’s another gospel album, which I didn’t put out because I’d done three [in a row] and I didn’t want to do another one; and the other one is pure singer-songwriter…
CH: That one probably *should* come out as ‘Brian Houston’…
BRIAN: That’s the one that’s probably going to be a ‘Brian Houston’ record. But interestingly, I’ve been playing stuff to a guy called John Dines and he’s saying to me, after I’ve spent a couple of years writing these songs, demoing them and then recording ‘releasable’ versions, ‘Actually, I prefer the demos’.
CH: The Springsteen ‘Nebraska’ experience…
BRIAN: Yeah. There’s a song called ‘Angel on the Corner’, which I wrote about Ken Haddock, and I recorded several versions as demos and then reached the point where there was a finished record, could have been put out as a polished thing. And John says, ‘No, I prefer the demo’. And the [first] demo is literally me sitting down for the very first time ever playing the song. And that’s what’s similar to the Presleys in that it hasn’t been filtered. And yes, the beauty of ProTools is, as I’ve now learned, if I’m recording and I mess up, don’t stop – just keep going and fix it later, and there’ll be a viable recording.
CH: We’re back to your detractors: ‘Brian Houston – he just doesn’t stop!’ (laughs all round) Am I right in thinking this Presleys album is the first time you’ve put an instrumental out?
BRIAN: Yeah.
CH: I think it’s great…
BRIAN: That’s my favourite track on the album [‘Bling Blues Jam’ – just guitar and drums]. The reason I love it is cos it’s so balls-to-the-wall raw. It just happened.
CH: It has an early Fleetwood Mac feel to it – it’s like you’re in the room…
BRIAN: You’ve hit the nail on the head. Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac – what an incredible band! Fort an 18-month period he outsold the Beatles and the Stones put together. And no disrespect to the later Fleetwood Mac, who made gazillions…
CH: …and ‘Don’t Stop’… (laughs)
BRIAN: …that early Fleetwood Mac, the stuff is so fresh and song-writing is so good. To tie it all back to where we started, when I was 16, a guy lent me a record and ‘Crush’ (1994), my first album, the whole way we recorded it was inspired by that record – although it doesn’t sound at all like it. But if you look at that album booklet you can see that I’m trying to mimic this other album, which had a gatefold sleeve – ‘Blues Jam in Chicago’ (1969) – which I’ve managed to re-buy on vinyl.
CH: Nobody listening to your music in the 90s would have thought, ‘There’s a guy influenced by Peter Green’. Your obvious influences back then were Bruce Springsteen, Elvis, contemporary US country artists and a bit of Van Morrison as the decade went on.
BRIAN: Yeah. But there’s even a song on my first album inspired by Nirvana, called ‘By Your Side’, which had a huge build up and drop…
CH: …which sort of mirrors your career (laughs)
BRIAN: Not so much in the build-up, but definitely the drop! But because it’s done on acoustic guitar, you wouldn’t see the Nirvana connection.
CH: You began your career at the end of the vinyl era, on Good Vibrations, and you’ve now outlasted the heyday of the music industry. What are the differences, in your experience, of making music professionally now and in the 90s?
BRIAN: There’s some similarities, some differences. The differences are that things weren’t as corporate. You could literally walk into Virgin Records with a box of CDs under your arm and a block copy book and give them 25 sale-or-return. You can’t do that now. I could go to Virgin, Our Price, Graham’s, Hector’s House – give a box of CDS, call back a week later, give them another box. That access was because I lived in Belfast and knew Kyle Leitch, who was a record distributor guy. And you could go to the radio station and they would play your record. Now, you do have access these days via Spotify, YouTube, CDBaby, Apple Music – you have access to a global audience. But back then local radio would play your music.
CH: Yes, it’s one guy now: Ralph McLean [Radio Ulster presenter with one show per week featuring local music].
BRIAN: One guy. And Ralph only has two hours on a Wednesday night to try and play all that local music, which used to appear on the Johnny Hero Show [on Downtown Radio] every night – he used to be the John Peel of Ireland. Well, him and Dave Fanning [on RTE]. There used to be that route to market, to the listener, as long as you got through the door.
CH: Nowadays, one can’t really find the door.
BRIAN: In the great conspiracy, the powers that be have found another way to shut out the independents. It’s 30 people in a hotel in Norwich being played Mariah Carey’s latest release and if they went for her last one, they won’t play her latest one. There’s that kind of madness going on, which means that people like Van Morrison – who should be all over our local radio and BBC and everything else – they’re still playing ‘Brown-Eyed Girl’ and ‘Here Comes the Night’. And he’s frustrated because he doesn’t own the copyright on those songs plus when he releases a new record, they don’t play it. It’s become mad now – it’s so sample-driven and fear-based and low-risk. There is an opportunity for the right person with the right mind to ‘learn’ the system and hack it, basically. There must be a way for artists who are individuals to grow their YouTube channel, grow their Spotify channel, grow an audience.
CH: You have to do it yourself in that Ed Sheeran way…
BRIAN: Which is exactly where I was at when I started. I had to do that myself.
CH: And you’re kind of there again…
BRIAN: I’ve never left that place – everyone else has just landed down where I’m at! All us bottom-feeders are at home together on the sea bed.
CH: Yet one or two of your fellow-travellers on the Belfast bar scene in the 90s have found a niche in the bigger ocean, if you like: Iain Archer as a backroom writer for big names; Foy Vance as an Ed Sheeran co-writer and recording artist; Cara Dillon… There are a few names, at least.
BRIAN: Yes, but they live in England.
‘Poor in America’ from the Presleys’ album ‘Embrace’:
INTERVIEW PART 2:
CH: Here’s another question: 25 years on, you’re still living in Belfast but most of your live work is on another continent. Do either of those points surprise you?
BRIAN: Em… I live in Ireland because my family’s in Ireland, specifically Belfast. Until you live away you don’t realise this, but Belfast is actually a very inspiring place to live…
CH: It is?
BRIAN: Yes. It’s very bohemian and it’s very ‘free’ to be creative and who you are. There’s still a spirit of punk in Belfast. Now, if you live in Raleigh, North Carolina, you will find that’s not the case. And that’s communicated to you when you walk into a place and someone gives you a look up and down, because you’re a ‘weirdo’. You don’t get that in Belfast. Now, I can walk up the street with a Davy Crockett hat on and people might look at me, but you don’t get jocks coming along and punching you in the mouth.
CH: Even in Texas, with a Davy Crockett hat, would they have that problem?
BRIAN: In the summer, I’m sure they would.
CH: In Houston, do they have a problem? (laughs all round)
BRIAN: The only problem I have with Houston is that’s it’s 45 degrees all year round, it’s a killer. But yeah, there’s a lot of cultural freedom in Belfast and it wasn’t till I lived away and then came back and walked the cobbled stones of the Cathedral Quarter that I realised there’s a big ‘Yes – be yourself’.
CH: Ulster says yes?
BRIAN: Yes! But the corporatisation of radio is the opposite spirit.
CH: It’s ironic, because as I recall, in the 90s your whole drive was to get into the game; now, in a way, your whole drive is to do your thing entirely independent of the game – because the game has become something weird and intangible. Are you embracing that?
BRIAN: Well, what you’re alluding to is the psychodynamic of rejection…
CH: Was that not one of your biggest albums?
BRIAN: ‘The Psychodynamic of Rejection’! When a person’s rejected, the first thing they do is they can’t accept that, they go back and say, ‘No, you don’t understand…’ You keep coming back. But eventually you reach a point where you realise you won’t be accepted. And what you have to do is accept that fact. In the late 90s I accepted the fact that I was outside all the marketing, I was outside all the age brackets, all the stylistic brackets and I was…
CH: But you were very *close* to some of those things…
BRIAN: Close but no cigar. Yeah, I was close – close enough to see that I wasn’t in. I went to Nashville when I made ’35 Summers’ (1999), which was a folky/country record and friend said, ‘You should take this to Nashville…’ Off I went to Nashville, I walked Broadway, went into those stores and I realised ‘I’m not a country artist…’ I’m a John Prine or Kris Kristofferson type, not a ‘country singer’. And when I realised that, I realised I had to follow that muse. It’s the muse of articulating your life. The biggest mistakes I’ve made in my career have been when I’ve tried to write songs that didn’t come from the heart. There’s a place you get to – I don’t know if you’ve experienced this as an author or as a songwriter – where you’re outside of yourself, you’re floating on a wave of inspiration. You’re not thinking, you’re just experiencing. It’s not you any more, it’s like you’re in this cosmic stream…
CH: Was that not you’re ill-judged progressive-rock phase: Brian Houston’s Cosmic Stream? (laughs all round)
BRIAN: When you’re in that place, it’s like the song’s writing itself. And again, back to the Presleys, back to those demos that John likes. You’re in that place where you’re not filtering, you’re just writing. And that’s the purest place for a writer. I’ve been to Nashville, and friends have set up multiple writer’s appointments where I’ve written 20 songs in a week. I’ve been part of the machine. Four songs a day. And at the end you can’t remember the first day’s songs – I can’t even remember the songs I wrote that morning. And I’m sitting thinking, ‘How does anybody keep track of this?’ And if you’re doing this week in, week out, how is your head not pickled? I realised that there’s a way to make a living as a songwriter that involves becoming part of the machinery, the manufacturing machinery.
CH: It sounds ghastly.
BRIAN: It’s taking a creative medium and making it a cookie cutter. If that’s what you want to do, fill your boots. But I’m wary of it because I don’t want to become that kind of songwriter.
CH: Would your ideal be if some big country artist covered one of your songs and made you a million quid, leaving you free to be a completely free artist, able to follow the muse without the pressure of paying a mortgage. Or would you think, ‘Ah, I must follow that up and write another one just like that’?
BRIAN: I think it would be a massive mistake to try and follow it up. I can certainly imagine a younger, more naïve Brian saying, ‘Oh, my goodness, I wish I’d three of those!’ I remember getting that panic once. I opened for Hal Ketchum back in the 90s and I walked out of the Elmwood Hall with his manager, Mark Hartley, who put a big arm around me and said, ‘This could work, son, this could work!’ And for a brief moment I saw the future – California, suntans… I thought, ‘Here I go, first foot on the ladder’. So, via [Dublin impresario] Pat Egan, whom you’d put me in touch with, I sent him off ‘Crush’ – on cassette – and he came back and said, ‘There’s only one good song here’, which was ‘Jesus Again’.
CH: And you were crushed? (laughs)
BRIAN: I was absolutely crushed! I wished I had three ‘Jesus Agains’, but I didn’t. A few painful things were said to me back then. A ‘Belfast Telegraph’ article said I had ‘cringingly embarrassing lyrics’ in one song. That was a wake-up call. And Pat Egan told me there needed to be some serious quality control over my song-writing, and that’s still true today. I’m working with John Dines as a sounding board for quality control…
CH: You’ve always needed somebody in that role, haven’t you?
BRIAN: Yeah. I would still trust Kyle Leitch’s taste, or your taste, or Johnny Quinn’s taste – Johnny’s always had exceptional taste. I’m the worst person at filtering me. I still need that third-party input. I’m very aware of that, more than ever now. But instead of me thinking, ‘I’ll write another ‘Jesus Again’’, it made me think ‘I’m going to become a better songwriter’. But when Pat would say to me, ‘This is a good song… that’s a good song…’ I’d scratch my head and think, ‘Why? What makes that good and that not good?’ Because they felt the same to me.
CH: Well, there’s a certain subjectivity to this, I’d suggest. Take the Presleys album – ‘Poor in America’ is a ‘song’, if you like, but there are other tracks on the album that, structurally and lyrically, are ‘thin’ but yet the impact is big, because of the whole aural experience. They are great ‘records’ rather than great songs, in a way. I’m very wary of people who say there’s an objective way to say what a good song is. Very quickly, you end up in Nashville where it’s set template or nothing. It’s the music equivalent of the Aryan ‘master race’ idea – it’s just one variant being touted as the norm. ‘Hey Jude’ by the Beatles would never have been made in Nashville and it’s a triumph.
BRIAN: And yet Bob Dylan found something there that made him produce one of his best albums.
CH: I think you can draw from lots of different types of music, and mainstream Nashville is simply one ‘type’ of music. Great songs can be written by people with no understanding of any so-called rules…
BRIAN: Well, look at Willie Nelson – failing to score a goal in Nashville, even with his song ‘Crazy’ – a successful songwriter but not a successful artist. And then he goes off to Austin and makes ‘Red Headed Stranger’ (1975), which is a concept album, and the most commercial song on the album is ‘Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain’, which he didn’t write, and yet ‘Red Headed Stranger’ is probably the better song, but nowhere near as commercial. That album was a massive success for Willie, Now, I have to say, I’ve played that record and I don’t understand why it was such a success. His label thought it was a bad demo: ‘Let’s release it and when Willie sees it’s a flop, he’ll be a good boy and do what he’s told’. So it’s a huge shock when it becomes massive. It goes to show that there’ll always be a Chris Stapleton to confound the industry, there’ll always be a Seasick Steve, always be someone… The Beatles were that: ‘What do you mean ‘The Beatles’ – it has to be ‘Something & the Somethings’’; ‘What do you mean there’s no frontman? What do you mean there’s three singers and even the drummer sings? Nobody does that!’ And then they shift the whole thing. There’ll always be someone who’s different from the pack, and whenever they succeed, the industry will slavishly follow them and produce a bunch of other things, which may be great but not ‘the thing’ that the original is, like Ed Sheeran.
CH: I struggle to see the appeal of Ed Sheeran, myself, though hats off to him – a ginger fat boy on his own with a guitar filling stadiums…
BRIAN: My reading of the Ed Sheeran thing is that in an age of perfect Instagram lifestyles along comes the boy next door singing songs about girls in the A Team. Some of the songs on his first album are incredibly visceral. He’s authentic – that’s what he is: authentic.
CH: He was a Red Headed Stranger… Was ‘Sugar Queen’ (2006) your most commercial record or just the one that got you the most visibility in Britain?
BRIAN: Well, it sold about 7,000. It was the most visible record in terms of Great Britain but in terms of longevity, if you go on Spotify the biggest song I have is ‘Glory, Glory’ off ‘Gospel Road’ (2009), the record I made for fun.
CH: Speaking of the 90s, as we were earlier, you’re playing the ‘Warehouse Remembered #2’ charity concert in March [a gathering of artists/reunions associated with a 1994–96 Belfast venue] – a solo set and then a power trio set with punk legend Petesy Burns on drums and Ali MacKenzie on bass. Will it be legendary?
BRIAN: Yes it will. It will be legendary after you write it up! (laughs) I’m looking forward to it. I’m excited about it.
CH: Are you going to be playing any songs from that era, like ‘Jesus Again’ or ‘Crush’?
BRIAN: Well, who knows? I don’t know till I get up there sometimes what I’m going to play. The artists I admire are people like Jack White, Bob Dylan, because they get up and try and find that thing we’ve been talking about – you’re floating, feeling, not thinking, not planning. I’m always looking for that golden moment when there’s something happening in the room. I think records need to be made like that – if they can. I think that’s why the Presleys record is good. I’m excited about that record because it’s just so unmitigated. It just happened. I’ve listened to it more than anybody, because I mixed it and recorded it.
CH: The ‘Anam Cara’ album you’ve just given me…
BRIAN: …is the opposite. Because it took over a year to write and record. The reason that one isn’t out is because of advice I’m getting from people I trust – that releasing too many records too soon devalues them.
CH: It risks confusing the market but then again, given they are credited to different entities – the Presleys and King Boru – and neither as ‘Brian Houston’, hopefully that’s no longer an issue.
BRIAN: If one of them is successful, great; if both are successful, that’s a problem – I can’t do both [at the same time]. ‘Anam Cara’ is very produced, with an ensemble of musicians – flutes, uilleann pipes – whereas with the Presleys, me and a drummer could take that at least 80% of that record on the road. The trouble for me, Colin, is that I’ve spent so long on ‘Anam Cara’ I’ve lost all perspective. Is it good or bad? I don’t know.
CH: Well, Kyle Leitch, your one-time cheerleader in the 90s, keeps telling me it’s your ‘legacy’. He’s been known to make wild exaggerations before. Then again, he might be right. Put it this way, if you were run over by a random bus – or Terri Hooley – tomorrow, what do you think your legacy would be? Would a man on Radio Ulster say ‘And here’s ‘Jesus Again’ by Brian Houston, who’s just been run over by Terri Hooley…? (laughs all round)
BRIAN: Here’s what I think my legacy is and it’s taken me a very, very long time to deal with the privilege it is and the loss it represents. My legacy is that if that first Brian Houston CD *was* the first independent CD release in Northern Ireland, it wasn’t the last. It said to other people ‘This is possible’. I know people like Duke Special have said in interviews, ‘Because I saw people like Brian Houston making a living in music, I felt it was possible’. Through my band [the Mighty Fall, c.1990], you had Johnny Quinn, Iain Archer and Ken Haddock – all in one band, all now still making a living in music.
Ken Haddock was in my studio a few weeks ago, and we both know Ken struggles with a bit of a mood disorder, and I played him that song ‘Angel on the Corner’, which is about him, and honouring him, and when he left my studio he was talking about renting a space where he could take photographs, make music and be creative. So something about him seeing me sitting in a room – with my guitars, my songs on a computer, my gear, my life; no I’m not famous, no I’m not wealthy, but I’m surviving and I’m *being* an artist… There’s something about the fact that I just don’t go away, that I keep being me, that keeps replicating that model. It keeps happening. It happened the other day – I was queuing up for something and someone said, ‘If it’s good enough for you, it’s good enough for me’.
So there’s something about me standing out here in the wilderness, no matter what taste-makers say, no matter what those 30 people in Norwich say, your man’s still there, writing songs, making records, going on the road. If your purpose in this life is to be an artist then the greatest crime you could commit is to not be that person, and the greatest way to honour that is to say ‘Yes’ to the muse and to follow your calling. Look at James Devlin [a 90s peer of Brian’s, also on the ‘Warehouse Remembered’ bill] – after all the day jobs, he’s back out there, wanting to express himself. My legacy is: ‘The answer’s Yes.’
A bit of history – Houston’s Mighty Fall, four-piece version, on Good Vibes in 1991:
Will you please slow down on this habit you have of introducing me to fantastic artists I’ve overlooked in the past, please Colin?
*sells kidney on eBay*
Here’s the Presleys FB page:
https://www.facebook.com/bookthepresleys/
And here’s a clip, taken by Mrs H, of Brian at the ‘Smash the System’ gig in December 2018, leading a totally spontaneous blues that morphs into ‘Johnny B. Goode’. It’s not a million miles away from the Presleys sound. Brian wasn’t on the ‘Smash the System’ recording (by Colin Harper’s Bourgeois Fury) but I invited him along to the gig. One of my better decisions… 🙂
Do you have your own website? If not, then I think you have enough content to make it worthwhile.
Well, I do, but it’s a sleepy shop window – I add bits of news every few months and periodically revamp the ‘set in stone’ content (pages on my books etc.). Sometimes, in a 6-monthly news thing I’ll include a link to an Afterword feature I’ve contributed. But I steal time to do these sort of features – having a more active content-generating approach to a website would ruin me…
Looks like The Presleys’ album will be released in April. Here’s a new video for my face track on the album, ‘Bling Blues Jam’ – just drums and guitar, live and spontaneous.