Clash catches Working Men’s Club frontman and visionary Syd Minsky-Sergeant traipsing the streets of Calder Valley on his way to a meeting, a few days before the band’s visceral sophomore record ‘Fear Fear’ is to be released.
With the album’s foundations stemming from the launch of their debut, developed with producer Ross Orton during on-and-off one week sessions for almost a year, its release promises a great deal for the Yorkshire troupe.
Syd checks in with us to discuss the origins of the album’s expansive sonic palette, the transition towards a largely synth based arrangement and the importance of progressing with their sound, alongside the contexts of lockdown and renewed perspective.
—
—
The album takes reference from various influences across different eras of music, is there an overarching sonic concept?
In terms of the big style production it kind of started with ‘Widow’ and ‘Ploys’ really, I think they represent two different halves of the record respectively, and they were the first two tunes that I worked with Ross on the record. ‘Ploys’ was a lot easier to process productionwise, there were parts that we kept – I think the bassline I made on a Wasp synth, and we literally just got my Wasp, brought it into the studio and recreated the exact same sound. We put some echo on the Prophet 600 bit that I’d written on my own in my bedroom, and we just took that sound.
Whereas in ‘Widow’ it’s going for a really big, wide, grandiose sonic thing. I think the recording process spanned over nine months. Widow went on for the whole time, and that was probably one of the hardest songs to finish in the studio – Ross was getting annoyed a bit, he wasn’t getting what he wanted from it, but he loves that song. I think it’s because he really cared about doing it justice.
By the time it got to the end, I did a writing session in the Yorkshire Dales, and Liam came with me. The last day we were there we started this scratch instrumental which ended up being ‘The Last One’. And those scratchy guitar-sounding samples was just him fucking around on a bass, and I just put it in the sampler and just cut it up to make those stabs.
By the time it got to writing ‘The Last One’, the production that we’d done on ‘Widow’ had influenced my writing process. Stylistically, what I was doing on my own I was trying to fit in with what we’d been doing in the studio for the rest of the record. We got so engrossed in making the second record that everything around that point of time with my writing process started to gel with it… ‘Ploys’ and ‘Widow’, in terms of sonic palette were the two fundamental tunes cause that’s what we started with, and in the end it was kind of making half the album go one side of it, half the album go the other, and then a hybrid of the two on tunes like ‘Cut’.
There was such a wide range of influences and sounds and that’s why there were a lot of demos for this record, making everything gel was the hard part. By the time we finished ‘The Last One’ I was like ‘this record’s done now’ it felt very much like a finished piece of work.
—
—
This record features a real emphasis on electronic instruments and textures, a shift from your earlier work. What would you say has been the main driving force behind this shift?
I think for the first record I was just starting to approach listening to a lot of underground electronic music, and I guess by the time it came round to finishing the second record I was immersed in really quite underground stuff, kind of like crate digging the stuff that people probably don’t know and isn’t mainstream in any way. A lot of influence from sifting through the internet really, and just spiralling. Once you get into one thing there’s a network around it, a lot of the time in the underground music world.
The other thing is that I was really getting into understanding synthesisers, and really building up a different understanding of that to what I had before, starting to get into modular synthesis and learning why things function in a certain way; thinking of a sound before I’d actually approach an instrument, then going into an instrument and being able to create that sound, because I knew why certain things reacted in a certain way. I know it sounds really nerdy but to me it was interesting going more into that world now.
I think something needs to change with each record we make and you have to approach things differently to explore a different side of your personality and understanding of music, so that there’s a shift each time. Otherwise for me it gets repetitive and that’s boring. I think when I listen to music, especially electronic music, I’m trying to analyse in my head and imagine how they’ve done something.
My imagination of their process might be completely wrong but in turn it’s still inspiring me to try that out in my own way and apply that to my own music. There’s a nice kind of creativity I think within electronic music because the span of instrumentation is colossal, with sampling and any form of synthesis really. It just felt like I had a wider birth of being able to expand on what I actually envisaged in my head on this record, and I felt like I wasn’t under anyone’s control. I didn’t feel as shy I think making this album really.
—
—
And there’s meticulous attention to detail across the board. How long was the writing process versus the studio process?
I find the songs a lot easier to arrange when there’s lyrics, so as soon as the lyrics are there, it tends to be that all the instrumental parts are there and it’s kind of muddled up. I find it really boring arranging an instrumental piece if it isn’t supposed to be instrumental music if that makes sense? I kind of know if something needs lyrics and once I’ve got them it’s a lot easier.
The biggest process is just getting stuff to a finishing line, if something’s half finished and it’s left half finished I find it really hard to come back to. It’s kind of a rarity that songs like ‘Cut’ and ‘The Last One’ did actually get completed. But it depends what frame of mind I’m in. If I just can’t be arsed I just can’t be arsed so I’ll just start something else and go from there.
Most of the material was written under lockdown, during which you were back home in Todmorden. How much has that environment fed into the record?
In terms of actually writing in response to being inspired by the environment, I think that was only prominent on one tune, which is ’19’. I just thought ‘ah this is really beautiful where I live and everything feels fairly untouched by humanity’ in parallel to what was going on in the rest of the world, in the cities, where COVID was running rife and it felt very different, like ‘oh we’ve just terrorised this planet and now we’re paying the price’. And there’s a line in that ‘the sea reclaims the tide’ which is basically the planet’s taking back what was it’s anyway, as a way to control earth. So that was in conjunction with where I was living and where I was going on walks at the time I was writing, kind of the first week we went into lockdown. That song wasn’t even for this record, it was for a body of work I was working on at the time.
—
—
That’s surprising considering the album is bookended so well, ‘19’ seems the perfect cinematic opener…
Yeah I think that was a hybrid of what the album eventually became. I wanted to make it quite dramatic in places so that’s kind of how I envisaged it… It’s weird because in cities people were looking more inwardly at their lives and thinking things weren’t adding up for them now that everything had been swept away. The city’s kind of redundant isn’t it? When you can’t go out.
Whereas where I was living it felt like everything was thriving, because humans are living in conjunction with the planet rather than just taking it over. Because of that I stopped looking so inwardly at my own life, and because of the internet there was a lot more of an open conversation about lots of things which normally would be shut down or pushed aside. I became a lot more focussed, and it felt like I could focus my attention on that a bit more and have a bit more perspective, and put it into words in a way that wasn’t necessarily forced.
—
—
Would you say Working Men’s Club lyrics tend to refer more to an inner perspective or a wider social commentary?
I think putting bits of social commentary in your lyrics can sometimes come across as forced, and then retrospectively you’ll look back and go ‘well I’ve timestamped that now, it’s not really relevant anymore’. I don’t wish to do that. That’s why I try to mask what I say sometimes a little bit because I don’t want to timestamp anything. The way I try to look at something is in terms of human history; it’s cyclical, we’re evolving, and technology changes, and the clothes change, and everything looks more futuristic but it’s basically fabricated around the same things. We’re still reusing and recycling the same materials, but with slight shifts. Maybe it sounds really pretentious but it’s the same thing with the music. At the end of the day popular music’s only been around less than a hundred years, so everything’s about recycling bits and looking at things from a different angle.
Recently I’ve been thinking ‘in ten years time I might not think the same way’, I might be wiser and I might think in a slightly different way. With the first album there’s things I’d change about that, maybe it was naive at points and a bit fucking all over the place, but it’s just a moment in time, and I think it’s fine to change your perspective or your angle. But I never want to pigeonhole something in the moment, then suddenly everything changes around it and it’s kind of redundant.
How has the return to live shows been for Working Men’s Club? And are there any upcoming shows you’re particularly looking forward to after the album drops?
Live shows will be good man. I don’t feel like we’ve properly got back into it yet this year, cause we’ve not done too much and been kind of on and off. I’m looking forward to this week actually getting back into the swing of things.
It’ll be exciting to see how the album’s material translates live.
I’m trying to make it more and more seamless really, but we’ll see. It’s nice to break stuff up otherwise it’s just one intense, barbaric onslaught. I’m up for changing things on each show but it never seems to turn out exactly; I become laze… we’ll see. I want to make it much more of a show by the time it comes to our tour at the end of the year.
—
—
‘Fear Fear’ is out now.
Words: Kieran Macdonald-Brown
Photography: Rachel Lipsitz
