In Conversation: Creep Show
“We work together in a really weird, disjointed, fragmented and almost dysfunctional way,” laughs Stephen ‘Mal’ Mallinder.
Mal is one quarter of Creep Show, one third of Wrangler and, a long time ago, was one half of seminal Sheffield post-punk unit Cabaret Voltaire. To his left is Ben ‘Benge’ Edwards, another quarter and third of Creep Show and Wrangler respectively, and whose deep synth experience has made him a go-to collaborator for John Foxx, Blancmange, Hannah Peel, Gazelle Twin and countless others.
They are as alike as they are different. Mal is direct, expressive and chatty, whereas Benge is quietly authoritative, reflective and thoughtful. Watching their body language as they sit together in a Manchester hotel room, there is an obvious respect for one another – they listen raptly to each other, nod in agreement, or fall about laughing together. From the vantage point of a Zoom call, it’s a perfect window into the underlying chemistry that makes Creep Show so compelling.
“The reason it works is because we all know each other really well,” continues Mal. “We’re massively compatible. We have so many crossovers, not just in music but culturally as well – films, TV, design, architecture. Whatever it might be, we are very similar. Time and circumstances have thrown us all together but if we’d grown up in the same town, we would have been in the same band. We’re naturally comfortable in each others’ company. And the reason it works is because we have such a laugh, and we enjoy it so much. It’s an absolute joy working with them.”
The other half of Creep Show are Phil Winter of Tunng and electronic singer-songwriter John Grant. They have just released their second album, ‘Yawning Abyss’, which characterises their distinctive sound: smart electronics, bold rhythms and songs that flip between political reportage and social observation to madcap artistic levity. It is a complete collection of direct and incisive tracks, poured forth from the minds of four very different individuals.
“The reason it works is because we are just really good friends,” adds Mal. “Our sense of humour is the same. We are massively fortunate that we’re people who get along. It’s inevitable that we would make this music because we’ve each got a respect and admiration for the other person. But also, because we’re so familiar with each other, we can also just take the piss massively.”
Roll up, roll up: welcome to the Creep Show.
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First there was Wrangler, then there was also Creep Show.
Wrangler is a trio of Mal, Benge and Winter. Mal and Winter had known each other for years, while Benge and Winter crossed paths frequently while on tour. It was an obvious suggestion by Winter that the three of them should work together when Mal returned from an extended period living in Australia. They released their first album, ‘LA Spark’, on Benge’s MemeTune imprint (named after his studio) in 2014.
The same year, the group bumped into John Grant backstage at the Sensoria Festival. There was an immediate connection, but it would be four years before they recorded together. The catalyst for bunkering down in Benge’s studio was a show that Wrangler and Grant did together for Rough Trade’s 40th birthday in 2016. It didn’t seem right to call themselves ‘Wrangler and John Grant’ as they were a completely different group because of that additional personality, so Creep Show was born. They released their debut album together, ‘Mr Dynamite’, in 2018.
The starting point for what materialises as a Wrangler album and what becomes a Creep Show album is basically the same. Maybe that’s not surprising with so much shared DNA, but given the lack of overlap between the sound of the two groups, it might seem odd that they aren’t written in two completely different ways. The reality is that very often any one of the ideas that are being worked on could be for Wrangler, one of the band members’ solo projects, or they could end up as the basis for a Creep Show track.
“I just tend to get myself in the studio and make music, explains Benge. “A lot of the other stuff I do hasn’t got drums or beats. My own style tends to be ambient, or experimental, or just noisy. So, when I work on something and I feel it’s falling into the area of beats and structures, I’ll put it aside for Wrangler or for Creep Show.”
The catalyst for a Creep Show track, invariably, is the intervention of Grant, which then sends them off in a completely new direction.
“It’s this weird hybrid thing where we’ll select certain things from what we’ve done individually, or collectively, or which Benge started,” reflects Mal. “There’s no real process, but when we work with John as Creep Show, he’ll new try things. We basically start everything we’ve done all over again.”
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And so it was that what became ‘Yawning Abyss’ began with Benge working on sonic sketches. MemeTune, his studio, is sequestered away at a hidden location somewhere in deepest, wildest Cornwall on the UK’s most south-westerly frontier.
“I did some tracks that weren’t specifically for Creep Show,” he says. “They were maybe for Wrangler, or maybe for me. Some of the things were sounding more upbeat and more percussion-driven, and so I thought I’d send these out to everyone, and if anyone was interested, we could talk about using them and building them up. Some of them ended up on ‘Yawning Abyss’ and some might be used for a new Wrangler album. A little while after that, me and Phil did another session where it was just me and him working on the tracks, developing some of them further.”
That separate session between Benge and Winter was unusual, but, hey, Mal said there isn’t really a process. Someone suggested convening at MemeTune for a couple of weeks to work on tracks together. And that is indeed what happened. Well, sort of.
“We’re all really busy, so getting us together for a full two weeks is quite hard,” says Mal. “But we managed it, and we all did convene at Benge’s… and then John and I both got COVID right at the beginning of the two weeks. Benge didn’t get it and Phil went home.”
“We were all in different bedrooms,” laughs Benge. “We were confined to our quarters.”
“Benge was in the main building where the studio is, and John and I were in the cabin, which we called the plague house,” adds Mal.
“We didn’t see you for over a week! We were leaving food outside the room for you.”
“It was hilarious,” says Mal. “Friday night was pizza night. That was the best bit. Benge and his wife would bring pizza over for me and John, leave them outside the door and then go back to the main house.”
The upshot of this was that instead of two weeks all working together in the studio, for the most part they ended up recording in pairs. With the Cornwall sessions a creative write-off for Mal and Grant, they headed off to Grant’s adopted Iceland to work together on lyrics and vocals in his studio.
“I think that was important as well, especially in the context of how the first Creep Show album was constructed,” reflects Mal. ‘’Mr Dynamite’ was made from building blocks, whereas this one worked slightly differently. With ‘Yawning Abyss’, John and I were sat in the same room, so we could bounce lyrics and vocals off each other. John would have an idea of something, and I would respond to that. We did enjoy that.
“We weren’t sure how that would work, initially,” he continues. “Previously, we’d worked separately. We’d do bits and build it up that way. But this time, we were sitting on the couch in his studio, writing. It was organic. It was great. We had a great time. I’ll forever remember and be thankful for that. We know each other really well, but we’ve never actually sat down and written songs together.”
“John said that he was quite nervous about that process, because he’d never done that before either,” adds Benge.
“We were under a lot of pressure, as we only had a week to get it all done,” says Mal. “Spending seven days in the studio in Iceland together meant we were able to talk and engage and relate and connect with each other. We didn’t fuck around. We had a routine. We’d be in the studio for 10 o’clock and then we’d work pretty solidly until about six o’clock. There were no distractions. We’ve got massive respect for John, as a person and as an artist, and he knows our history. I’m not saying that this is one big love-in, and there was no cynicism about it. We respect each other. It’s as simple as that.”
It’s hard to consider a title more suited to Creep Show than ‘Yawning Abyss’. Loaded with meaning, it manages to straddle the serious and humorous simultaneously. On the one hand, it evokes the idea of humankind teetering on the edge of oblivion; on the other, it suggests people-watching a sleepy passer-by, their mouth contorted with bored tedium. Politics, social observation and absurdism, all in two words.
Falling into the first category are ‘The Bellows’, ‘Moneyback’ and ‘Yahtzee!’. The former is arranged like an unheard Kraftwerk track from ‘Computer World’, only instead of wide-eyed wonder at the marvels of modern technology, it is a cynical swipe at a world population more concerned with the number of follows on social media than a salvo of nuclear-enabled missiles spelling imminent destruction. ‘Moneyback’ is a deft look at destructive financial innovation, from cryptocurrency to complex and shady derivatives. The rambunctious ‘Yahtzee!’, with its extreme vocal processing, manages to rhyme the dice-based game with Nazis, and imagines a situation where the adults are downstairs happily playing while the kids are upstairs watching porn.
“I don’t see much of a break from the stuff that we were doing with the Cabs,” offers Mal by way of explanation. “It’s the same subject matter. We all are political. We all have strong opinions. John grew up in America as a gay man, and so he sees the inconsistencies in the world. We don’t deny our political nature, so we make it part of what we do. It’s a kind of commentary, but it’s not a polemic. It’s just observational. All of us are highly aware that the world in which we live is very fucked up in terms of information and AI, and the political shift to the right. We just see it all from our different perspectives, but there’s also a collective perception of it. We’re all mirrors of the world. We reflect it, musically and artistically.”
But what about that absurdist side of Creep Show? For that you need only take a listen to ‘Steak Diane’, a dish that was once a staple of so-called ‘Continental cuisine’ in your mum’s 1960s cookbook. Its lyrics? Nothing but the words ‘Steak’ and ‘Diane’.
“Steak Diane’ came from the most ridiculous thing,” chuckles Mal. “John went, ‘I want to make a track where the only lyrics are steak and Diane.’ And we went, ‘Oh, okay’. We just decided to do it. John and I both just kept saying ‘Steak Diane’. The common denominator for me is Dada. That’s the Dada track. You can’t work it out what it is. It’s comical. It’s self-effacing. But, at the same time, it’s also really subversive, because no one else will make a track called ‘Steak Diane’.”
To underline Mal’s Dadaist tendencies, one should not overlook the fact that his 2019 solo album (co-produced by Benge, obviously) was called ‘Um Dada’. Oh, and Cabaret Voltaire was the Zurich nightclub established in 1916 by Hugo Ball, the founder of the Dada movement. “It’s a question of connections, and loosening them up a bit,” said Ball in his Dadaist manifesto. If that doesn’t sum up Creep Show and their non-process perfectly, I don’t know what else might.
Talking of looseness, one characteristic of the Creep Show Sound, best exemplified by the song ‘Matinee’ from ‘Yawning Abyss’, is a noticeable funkiness. An awkward funk was omnipresent in a lot of Cabaret Voltaire’s music, and it’s undoubtedly here also. But how do you achieve a naturalness with synths, equipment that seems inextricably linked with the idea of music made on a grid?
“Phil and I just had this conversation literally half an hour ago,” says Mal. “I said to Phil, ‘I like my rhythms machine-like, and my percussion loose.’ I think there’s something in that. I like machine rhythms. I love that kind of regularity, that kind of clockwork thing. But also, I love the fact that you can have fluid things that flow on top of it.”
Benge nods and offers a technical explanation. “One of the ways we work with Wrangler and with Creep Show is that we’ll sequence up basslines and drum patterns,” he says. “They’ll be our framework or skeleton and then Phil will come in and play on top of it, with a human bass or synth part. That will be a rhythmic thing, but it will be played by him, by hand. That’s what gives it a funkiness. It’s actual hands working on an actual keyboard or tweaking a knob filter. It means it’s constantly changing through the track. Whereas if it’s just a machine, you can program things to change, but it won’t have that human feel to it. So it’s basically the combination of the human and the machine that makes it funky.”
They both describe Winter as having a delicate understatement to his approach to playing. Mal recounts a story from the sessions where they were struggling to write a bassline for one track. Winter asked to have some time alone to figure it out. The others came back in a while later and found him asleep. When he woke up, he told them he’d written it. It turned out to be just one note, and it was perfect for the track.
The synths arranged in Benge’s studio are another reason that Creep Show music sounds like it does. A glance at his social media reveals an array of equipment that would have the most ardent synth collector salivating. Like Winter, Benge is a master of restraint – instead of loading up each track with copious amounts of vintage synth sequences, his approach is to be very deliberate and thoughtful about what each song requires, driven by a natural ability to know what might fit best where. In this way, each synth is like another member of the Creep Show line-up, with its own personality and own character.
“I love that we work with machines that are intrinsically human,” says Mal. “They’re sentient in their own way. There’s a humanness about them.”
“For the sounds on this album, we went to a slightly different place to where we’d normally go,” says Benge. “We deliberately chose synths from the early 1990s because they’re outside our normal comfort zone.”
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I mention to Mal and Benge that ‘Yawning Abyss’ is a brilliant, brilliant album. It’s not a flippant, throwaway comment because, you know, it is. They seem genuinely humbled by this – remarkable, given how many amazing albums both artists have been involved with. However, I suggest that my opinion doesn’t matter. The only opinion that matters is Taylor Swift’s. Mal issues a huge laugh.
It’s not the sharing of an in-joke, but one of the most unusual moments ever to grace social media: a confused SwiftieTM wondering why her copy of the re-recorded ‘Speak Now’ sounded so weird. The reason? Because, instead of being ‘Speak Now’, the vinyl inside the sleeve was a 90s electronica release – ‘Happy Land (A Compendium Of Electronic Music From The British Isles 1992 – 1996)’ featuring Cabaret Voltaire’s impeccable ‘Soul Vine’ from 1992’s ‘Plasticity’.
“I just thought the whole thing was quite really cool in the sense that all of a sudden there was this clash of cultures,” says Mal, when he stops laughing. “People should swap their cultures around more often, because we live so much in our own little ghettos and echo chambers. It’s great if people are exposed to someone else’s culture all of a sudden. It was nice for one world to be briefly exposed to another world.
“It’s also quite subversive,” he concludes. “I like subversive.”
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‘Yawning Abyss’ by Creep Show is out now on Bella Union.
Words: Mat Smith
Photo Credit: Chris Bethell
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