Jack Cooper

(This first appeared in issue #71 of Shindig! magazine.)

Blackpool Tower of song. Ultimate Painting's Jack Cooper explores the emotional pull and push of home on his debut solo album. Duncan Fletcher listens in.


Jack Cooper's debut solo album Sandgrown is named in reference to a “Sand Grown 'Un”, the local term for someone from Blackpool. It explores the emotional pull and push of a place that ties and binds but that can also feel small and stifling. The album also has wistful, elegiac affection for a North that's been in managed decline since the 1980's, and a speaking up for marginalised and maligned communities. Key track 'Gynn Square', captures this perfectly.

“As a teenager I worked the deckchairs on Blackpool front,” says a jet-lagged Cooper, home after a short US tour with Ultimate Painting. “There were about 30 of us, all kids. We'd get taken out in a van each morning. Gynn Square was the furthest away and you'd have to get there on your own... It was kind of below the sea wall, a weird place... Sometimes people think of the north of England as backward but Blackpool was an incredibly liberal place – a lot of gay people, immigrants because it's a port town. I went to school with black people, Muslims, Hindus, it was a really multicultural place. I remember some drag queens from Funny Girls coming down, one just sat with me all day chatting, giving an insight into their world. But Blackpool also had a high proportion of heroin addicts. There'd be needles lying around and people shooting up behind the deckchair stack. You'd meet strange people and see things you didn't want to see. Scary people would talk to you and you'd feel out of your depth. Some places just have a sense of dread about them.”

The narrative is broken up by two instrumentals, 'Sandgrown Part One' and 'Part.Two', showcasing Cooper's sparse, but layered guitar work, something like Curtis Mayfield meets The Grateful Dead's Bob Weir. “That's exactly what I was going for along with the tremolo sound! I wanted it to be quite simple... I'm not fast enough to be a really good lead guitarist so I've tried to figure out my own style, kind of rhythm guitar with bits in.” The album was recorded on a Tascam 144, famously used by Bruce Springsteen on his Nebraska LP. “I'm no Springsteen fan but I've always liked the way Nebraska sounds. Wu-Tang Clan used a Tascam for 36 Chambers. That album sounds amazing! It has a kind of hazy fuzz to it. That's actually more of an inspiration sonically than Nebraska.”

For someone who has always worked collaboratively in bands, the question is why a solo record now? “I've always wanted to do, not like a song-cycle but a cohesive thing and I've always written about Blackpool, from that point of view. It would be odd to have done it within the band context just because it's so personal to me. With bands and collaborations sometimes things improve and sometimes things get diluted. This I wanted to be more of a singular vision... It's a solo album but because it has this overarching theme it's like one foot in the water of being a solo artist. It's not like 'these are my songs and these are my feelings on life'. This is just my feelings on one particular thing.”

Sandgrown is out now on Trouble In Mind.

Maston - Opal Collection

The one man music machine known as Frank rounds up his early releases for your listening pleasure. John Barry meets Brian Wilson on splattered black vinyl.

Last year musical polymath Maston released Shadows, his triumphant debut LP on Trouble In Mind Records (read review here). It was was one of the year's most pleasing surprises, a mix of soft psychedlic and dream pop, full of Brian Wilson-esque studio exploration and melodic inventiveness.

Since then he's busied himself touring as part of fellow psych-adventurer Jacco Gardner's backing band, though it's been pretty quiet on the solo front. That's about to change thanks to Stroll On Records, who have rounded up the music from Voyages and Opal, Maston's first two cassette only EPs, along with some unreleased tracks from the Shadows sessions. The result is a ten track compilation entitled Opal Collection.

While lacking the cohesiveness and flow of his Shadows album the music on this collection is in a much similar vein and will be a well received stocking filler for fans of his Shadows LP. Along with echoes of prime-era Beach Boys, and wrecking crew studio layering there's an impressive dose of John Barry and cold war spy movie soundtracks.

With most tracks vocal-less and and short in length, it has the air of a recently rediscovered film score, one that has inventive use of percussion and an knack of mixing spooked tension with poppy melodies. Nobody does this quite like Frank. While we wait for the next album, this collection of his earlier work will do nicely.

Look out for this release on a limited (300 copies) splatter/black vinyl edition.

Click here for more on Maston.

Click here for more on Stroll On Records.

Maston - Shadows

Frank Maston's the man with the studio tan! LA-based baroque-pop classicist releases his debut album.

Studio auteurs, you gotta love 'em! Not least the California based producers who made their mark in the 1960s. They remain a truly fascinating bunch. As the world gets ready to see Al Pacino play Phil Spector in the upcoming TV biopic, and Brian Wilson announces that the recent Beach Boys live outings are unlikely to be repeated, (perhaps indicating that once more he'll retreat into the safe space and sonic possibilities of the studio), the time is right for a new maverick to highlight just what is achievable when sat in the producer's chair.

Enter Frank Maston. His debut album Shadows, on the increasingly excellent Trouble In Mind Records has echoes of the big names mentioned above, along with touches of those other west coast wizards Burt Bacharach, David Axelrod, Arthur Lee and Van Dyke Parks. Though rather than directing a studio full of musicians, Maston plays all the instruments on Shadows, with the exception of the harp on one track. He's effectively a one man Wrecking Crew, Hal Blaine, Glen Campbell and Carol Kaye rolled into one. Seemingly masterful with any instrument, be it brass, woodwind, string, organ or percussion. It's such skill and ability coupled with his taste for inventive melodies that makes this album one of the most arresting so far this year.

Though the album does owe a great deal to the classicist, intellectual studio work of the '60s, in particular the arrangements and instrumentation of Pet Sounds, there are other sounds to be heard. Several instrumentals have a cinematic feel and there are shades of both mariachi and muzak (in a good way), along with an indie sensibility not a million miles away from such bands as Real Estate. The album walks a tightrope between warm comforting jangle and a more edgy, unsettling eeriness.

Maybe it's the air-conditioned retreat from LA's climate that makes the studio such an attractive place out there on the west coast. If that's the case maybe global warming does have some positive side effects. Out of the sun and into the shadows indeed.

Click here for Maston's Bandcamp page.

Click here for the Trouble In Mind website.

Jacco Gardner - Cabinet Of Curiosities

Get on your (white) bicycle and ride! Introspective psychedelia at its finest!

Anyone who's ever searched for original psychedelic-era vinyl on Ebay will know that to acquire such artefacts you need a bank loan or a lottery win. There's a good reason for this - a lot of the records were bloody great, and continue to fascinate and garner new generations of fans to this day. A lot cheaper, yet no less psychedelic or impressive, is this debut album from Dutch psych-wonderkid Jacco Gardner.

Gardner's previous two singles, 'Clear The Air' and 'Where Will You Go' (both included here) raised eyebrows and expectations last year, and this hotly anticipated long-player does not disappoint. Gardner plays all the instruments on the album, except drums which are expertly played by Jos van Tol. With baroque arrangements of harpsichord, flutes, analogue keyboards and strings, the effect is authentically reverential to the music of the late '60s, yet somehow feels right for now, like a great lost record who's time has finally come.

Click over the jump for more on Cabinet Of Curiosities.