WITNESS
U.K.
Ray
Chan – guitar
Dylan Keeton – bass
John
Langley – drums
Julian
“Jazz” Pranskey – guitar, keyboards
Gerard
Starkie – vocals, lyrics
Ironic,
isn’t it? Along comes Witness
U.K. with Before The Calm, a debut
album “stripped of all affection, and daring to
be understated” (so declared New Musical Express), and the entire
British Music scene promptly goes nuts. Despite
the album’s title – and the band’s decidedly reflective style – the
storm of excitement over Witness U.K. has only increased over time.
Now, with MCA’s impending release of the album in America, Witness U.K.
is set to take its subtle power to it’s widest audience yet.
Since
last summer’s U.K. release of Before The
Calm on Island Records, a feeding frenzy on the part of the British music
press has ensued. Comparisons to
bands like Joy Division, Whiskeytown, R.E.M. and Counting Crows abound.
Melody Maker praised “the baroque fragility of Gerard Starkie’s
vocals and the effortless, atmospheric swell of Ray Chan’s guitars,” while
the London Times/Metro called Witness U.K. “a band to cherish.”
The album appeared in a host of British media reports of 1999’s best
releases.
The
brainchild of guitarist Ray Chan and singer/songwriter Gerard Starkie, Witness
U.K. first formed in 1997 in Wigan, a small northern English town sandwiched
between Liverpool and Manchester. Best
known to music fans as the hometown of Kajagoogoo and the Verve, Wigan provided
a sufficiently gray backdrop to Gerard and Ray’s technicolor imaginations.
Produced
by Phil Vinall (Placebo, Auteurs, Elastica), Before The Calm is petulantly defiant in its avoidance of anything
“au courant.” Says Dylan
Keeton, “It wasn’t about doing whatever Oasis was up to right now.
It was about promising ourselves to do something worthwhile.”
From the tempered guitar and glockenspiel in the opening bars of
“Second Life,” it’s clear Witness U.K. kept that promise.
Though Gerard Disdains analyzing his songs (“Listeners shouldn’t need
us to to hold their hands and tell them how to react,” he once told a
journalist), tracks like the elegiac “Freezing Over Morning” and the other-wordly
“So Far Gone” typify Witness’s muted euphoria.
Other tracks, like the upbeat acoustic-flavoured “Hijacker” and the
mad minimalist waltz “My Own Old Song” reveal the band’s genius for the
fine brush stroke.
One
writer once noted how “the smallest detail takes on a world of significance”
in Before The Calm, and this is never
more true than in the droning organ tones of “Heirloom,” the ominous tremolo
in “Cause And Effect,” or the ticking guitar arpeggio of “My Friend Will
See Me Through.” Noted Gerard,
“A lot of these songs could have lent themselves to big orchestrations, but
that was the last thing we wanted to do. We
just wanted to use our own humble talents to make things sound right.”
Adds drummer John Langley, “It took us a while to figure out how to
shape this music, but once we started, we found we could easily communicate with
each other.”
Both
Ray and Gerard grew up in and around Wigan, and both selected music as a sole
career goal from an early age. Ray
describes himself as “BBC” or British-born Chinese, but his bandmates affirm
he has the thickest Wigan accent of all time.
He took up guitar as a teen, and later breifly attended art college,
where he me Gerard Starkie, who remembers as a kid watching bands on “Top Of
The Pops” and wanting to do what they did.
“I began writing songs around the age of fifteen on a little Casio,”
he recalls. “Then I started
forming bands, and playing in locals pubs.”
He
became friends with Ray, but not for musical reasons… at least not at first.
“He came to school every day with a different brand of cigarettes,”
says Gerard. “I used to poach smokes off him.
Then we got into conversation, and we’ve been best friends ever
since.” Ray played with various
bands, some with Gerard, most not; but the two always stayed in touch and kept
tabs on each other’s musical growth. “We
finally decided that the two of us should do exactly the kind of music we both
wanted to do,” remembers Gerard. “So
we got a 4-track and started writing songs.
It took a year to get them as good as we wanted.”
Next
task: enlist fellow band members. Enter
Dylan Keeton. Born in Nottingham
and raised in the outer reaches of western Australia (“All I remember are the
trees, the rats, and the spiders,” he says), he moved back to Liverpool at the
age of 8, spending the next several years “desperately trying not to get
beaten up every day.” By age
twelve he’d taken up the guitar, joining his first band within a year, and
turning pro before leaving school. Dylan
was a featured player in several Manchester/Liverpool area bands, and had a run
as a solo artist before meeting up with Ray and Gerard after answering their ad
in a local music paper. “W gelled
immediately,” he says. “There
weren’t many musicians in England combining all of our respective influences,
everything from Joy Division to Tom Waits and Neil Young.”
Dylan switched from guitar to bass, openening new possibilities for
Witness U.K.’s overall sound.
The
band found the right drummer in John Langley.
A native of Bristol, he’d made a name for himself as a member of
Strangelove. John was particularly
taken with the songs of Gerard Starkie. “He
lives in his own world a bit,” he says. “Gerard’s very individualistic, very sensitive.
But he’s also a very funny, very normal guy.”
The band landed a record deal on the strength of one demo, and in late
1998, they made their recording debut with the single “Quarantine.”
The
band got their live act together, touring with
such bands as Sun Volt, Whiskeytown, Grand Drive and Gene.
They also released a second single, “Scars,” in early 1999 – a song
that would wind up on Before The Calm – and by last summer, with the release of the
single “Audition,” Witness U.K. had made their first national TV appearance
on BBC-2’s “Later With Jools Holland.”
Around that time Julian “Jazz” Pransky was brought in to round out
the band’s line-up. Also a
Bristol native, Jazz gained fame as a member of Jazz Butcher, having toured the
USA and lived in L.A. for a number of years.
Equally skilled as a web designer, Jazz not only beefed up Witness’s
musical profile (he plays guitar, piano, banjo and harmonica), he also put
together the band’s website (www.witness.uk.com.
Jazz
joined the band up in Wigan, but soon wearied of small town life.
“John and I were staying at this weird motel,” he says.
“I’d end up at the petrol station staring at the motor oil cans just
to have something to do.” That
didn’t last long. In the fall of
1999, the entire band relocated to Bristol near England’s south east coast,
which has made a real difference to the band’s esprit de corps.
“Now we’re one big brotherly unit,” exults Gerard.
“We all live in the same town, see each other every day: it’s one big
communal vibe.”
That
should help them when they come to America which is one of the band’s ultimate
dreams. “We really feel our main
influences come from the States,” says Dylan, “and we always felt we would
go down well there.” Adds John,
“American audiences are a bit more genuine than those in the U.K., who are too
swayed by press and image.” The
prospect of traversing the vast American landscape has Gerard most excited.
“Getting in a van, driving around for a few months playing the
shitholes with chicken wire in front of the stage: that’s the real way to see
America.”
Once
Before The Calm hits American shores,
the response here ay well be as enthusiastic as it has been in England.
Not bad for a band that less than two years ago could be found rehearsing
in the basement of a Wigan fish and chips eatery owned by Ray’s parents.
The transition from basement to world concert stages is in full-swing, as
WitnessU.K. brings to music a depth and pulse best served by sharing it with the
largest audience possible. On Before The Calm, Witness U.K. provides it’s own best testimony.
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