Abstract Concrete – an interview with Charles Hayward – The Canterbury scene(zine) continued….

In advance of his imminent European tour AND a 3 day residency at Cafe Oto, here is an interview with Charles Hayward talking about his roots, Quiet Sun and his latest project, the superb Abstract Concrete, who conclude his Oto residency on 24th February 2024.

One of my earliest correspondents for the Hugh Hopper biography had tipped me off that an interview with Charles would be extremely good value. He collaborated with Hugh on the Numero D’Vol, Clear Frame and Oh Moscow! projects as well as a number of tracks with Lisa Klossner which have only recently come to light. He’s best known to me musically as one of the extraordinary quartet that started out in the late Sixties as Quiet Sun, and who recorded the peerless album ‘Mainstream’, a number of years later – a classic of the genre. Seventies and Eighties projects included This Heat and Camberwell Now and he has continued as a fearless innovator until the present day.

Interviewed via Zoom back in September 2022, Charles proved to be energetic, erudite and slightly off the wall – as indeed is his persona as a musician, and one might suggest that the two facets intertwine fairly seamlessly.

Our conversation started, as, interviews often do, with a chat about current projects, and Charles took me, with some enthusiasm, through his then freshly completely recordings with an outfit he calls Abstract Concrete, whose story he set out below. It is only a year later, with their stunning first album released, that much of what he related starts to acquire its relevant context.

CH: the big thing for me is I’ve got this new group called Abstract Concrete. And we’ve just finished the album. We’ve played only three gigs so far, but the response has been amazing.

(The band are) all pretty much half my age, which is good. And none of them have got British passports, which is also good. And most of them are playing instruments for which they’re not known for playing. So all of it’s sort of up in the air and fantastic.

There’s a guy called Otto Willberg who plays double bass and improvised music, but he’s playing electric bass with us. And Yoni Silver who plays bass clarinet but he’s playing keyboards with us. And a woman called Agathe Max, who’s on the DIY scene and she plays violin usually, but she plays viola with us. And Roberto Sassi, who’s a guitar player – and he’s playing guitar with us. And I’m playing drums and singing.

If fans of Charles’ work are familiar with improvised, uncompromising soundscapes of varying accessibility, they might be surprised to hear a somewhat melodic, upbeat selection of songs, with Charles as lead vocalist, which only veers into the obtusely dissonant as an secondary tactic. Those songs, and Charles’ catchy lead lines, (delivered in the unmistakable South London drawl Quiet Sun fans will recognise from ‘Wrongrong’), are sure to stay in your head well beyond the album’s conclusion… Pinpoint driving drumming, warm bass and simple but memorable guitar rhythms and keyboard motifs undercut each track, but it’s the soaring viola accompaniments and Charles’ vocals that will resonate for the longest.

There’s a jaunty ska-like feel to the album’s outstanding concluding track ‘Tomorrow’s World’ where Hayward plaintively demands ‘are we there yet?’, and a boss nova vibe to the unfathomably titled but rather lush ‘Sad Bogbrush’. The extended hymn-like ‘The Day The Earth Stood Still’ is almost a paean to former musics, Daevid Allen ‘Death of Rock’ style’; whilst ‘Ventriloquist/ Dummy’ takes a bonkers diversion as a Hayward tackles both vocal parts, the latter a somewhat deranged falsetto. But nothing tops the beautifully constructed opener ‘Almost Touch’ whose state of grace is punctured by a frequent picking up of pace. A word on how the material originated:

We’ve got a set – we (first) played the set unselfconsciously, and then we played the set again, unselfconsciously. And then we recorded the album and all of them come in at about 55 minutes. That’s pretty much exactly what we’re doing. And there’s hardly any improvisation at all, but a lot of it’s generated from improvisation

PH: So you performed it once and then revisited it and it built from that?

Well, yeah, I’d come in with an idea that’s so loose that the only way to get moving from that very loose idea is out into some sort of improvisation and then go back and stop and go – that needs to shift up a tone now. So let’s carry what we’ve just done. And meanwhile I was adding words at the same time. So a lot of time the words come out of the sound, as opposed to being a thing that you impose on the sound later. It’s just like the words have come out from the process of rehearsing.

PH: And are these people you’ve played with before?

I played a little bit with Yoni and Roberto before. I’ve known the other two’s playing for a while, but I’ve never played with them until we started (Abstract Concrete). But because of lockdown, everything got stretched right out. So in fact, even though we’re on our 4th gig, we’ve been working on it for two and a half years or something like that. So the effect of that is we go in and play live and we’re super rehearsed, but we’ve also a huge amount of bottled up energy. So this is the best of both worlds., I love improvising music where you don’t know what it is you’re gonna do, but if you do know what it is you want to do then you might as well REALLY know what it is you’re gonna do.

For all its origins, these appear, to an outsider at least, to be highly structured pieces: generally clocking in at 6 or 7 minutes, introduced with bass and drums and maybe a lick of guitar or keyboards, and adding extra layers of instrumentation before Charles’ voice eventually cuts through with soundbite lyric. Aided by super clean production, the effect is often stunning…

PH: You say it evolved through lockdown? Did this evolve remotely then?

no, we’re talking about huge hunks of not getting a chance to rehearse. And only rehearsing, very distanced. And when we did rehearse and all that stuff, we went through the formalities of whatever was being imposed at the time. But that’s why it’s taken so long. But it’s also meant that I could go away and write the words, in relation to the rehearsal tapes and stuff like that.

Abstract Concrete released their first album (eponymously titled) in November 2023. Included amongst the usual amalgam of artefacts one finds on bandcamp are no less than 51 copies of a rather special vinyl edition. As the publicity says:

“Encased in concrete, must be broken to be heard/ Includes lyrics booklet and CD/ Designed and made in the award-winning state51 Atelier/ [NB: Each special edition will be made to order so shipping will take longer]”

Charles also recently popped up last year supporting Godspeed! You Black Emperor on some dates on their UK tour. I saw Godspeed! up in Manchester, a decidedly un-intimate experience dogged by poor sound quality in the cavernous Academy barn. More positive reports came back from London, where Charles was the accompanying act – when I asked a friend who’d attended to describe Charles’ act, he rather succinctly summarised it thus: “enthusiastic extemporised drum routines against a dark electronic score with vocal utterances and chanting”. At the time of the interview Charles was just gearing up for it:

PH: It would be really interesting to hear this . So is (Abstract Contract) what you are doing in supporting Godspeed?

No, unfortunately. I mean, we wouldn’t have got any money for ourselves at all if the fee that they’re giving me for my solo had been spread among the five of us. But we WOULD have done that because it would have been really advantageous to the group to play two nights supporting Godspeed.

But instead I’ve got this weird system which incidentally relates back to Hugh. Insofar as I was, hugely inspired and sort of shaken up, by especially ‘Minitrue’ and ‘Miniplenty’ (from Hugh’s first solo album ‘1984’) and I read an interview where he laid out the ideas inside it, and so some of those ideas I sort of let bed down inside my own thinking. So even though the record came out in whenever it was – ‘73, I sort of manifested my version of it sometime around ’95, although I’d been using tapes and this weird overlapping – so I was in rhythm when I did those tapes. Now I’m in a different rhythm, but I’m gonna let these two things coexist and see what happens.

So anyway, I’ve developed this system of three electronic streams. None of which have any coordinated relationship with the other two. And which have no common pulse. And I provide the common pulse with the drums, and I provide a sense of structure with the vocals. And I bring these rhythmically randomised things in with foot pedals at the drum kit in blocks. So I, you know, I spend a lot of time working out what notes I can play to go with this bit of the song that won’t clash with the melody that I’m singing. So it’s a very, very weird, ambiguous thought I have to go in to get this result to come out the other end. That’s what I’m doing with Godspeed! You Black Emperor.

When I was in This Heat, what we always looked for as a support act was one person who didn’t use too many mic lines. And basically that’s what I am – I think I’m being employed partly on that level, although I can hear a certain mood equivalent between Godspeed! you Black Emperor and (This Heat’s) ‘Deceit’. Even though our thinking was very lyric based and their (Godspeed’s) thing is mostly instrumental as far as I understand. I can feel the mood in what they do. And they seem, they seem to be very enthusiastic about me being the support.

We went back to Charles’ roots and I asked him whether his path had crossed with the early Soft Machine band, as schoolmate Bill MacCormick has gone on record as being a frequent visitor to the Dulwich household of Honor Wyatt which, at the time, housed the Soft Machine. I asked him whether early Soft Machine and its ilk was ‘his bag’ (of tastes).

My ‘bag’ had been severely, severely ruptured very, very early on in my life. I was very, very, lucky. My father had been a prisoner of war and he joined the army and gone to war, (and was) obliged to listen to British dance music, because that’s all there was, Victor Silvester and stuff like that. And then he had the misfortune to become a prisoner of war. And other people who were also prisoners of war were American GIs.

He gave me a resume. The white guys were arseholes. The black guys were fucking fantastic. ‘So what do you mean, Dad?’ ‘The white guys – all they ever did was boast about how their Red Cross was superior to our one.’ (adopts American accent) ‘ You guys ain’t got chewing gum. What, you only got one roll of lavatory paper’, you know, all that sort of stuff. Whereas the black guys were like, hey, ‘do you want to hear this?’ and calling my dad over and saying look, ‘listen to Count Basie’.

So my dad got turned on to good jazz before I was born, so I was born into a house where Teddy Wilson, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke, Count Basie were just like normal figures. And not only were they normal figures, they were very high cultural artists. They were given a lot of respect from my dad. And so my ears had been opened up quite young and then I heard The Who doing ‘Anyway, anyhow, anywhere’. And that was like, OK, Dad, I’m going off down this road now. You do your very deep, beautiful extended bebop improvisation stuff. I’m gonna listen to this stuff that’s like noise from aeroplanes landing. There’s something else happening and it’s electric.

But when I was eight, I played a duet with a thunderstorm. On the piano, and the whole atmosphere was – it didn’t stop me from doing what I wanted to try doing.

PH: Were you formally taught then?

I was formally taught piano from the age of about 4 to the age of about 10. And I had two very small bouts of drum lessons. One when I was about 11 for about a year. And then another one when I was 16. Which was only for 9 hours, 3/3 hour sessions with this maniac called Max Abrams, who was one of the nastiest people … really a nasty guy, but I said to my dad, look, I don’t want to do this anymore. This guy’s an arsehole.

But later on when I wanted to play and learn to … I needed to play a very clean drum roll. And it was like years after I’d seen Max Abrams and I’d been doing all this sort of Dutch European Free Jazz tiddly bomp stuff. You know, anti technique stuff. And then I got into a thing where I needed to play a very clean roll and I just vibed on this teacher. And there it was. There was this whole thing. This guy was a really good teacher.

And then there was the Camberwell Music Library just down the road from where I lived. And somebody in there was super super hip – it was amazing. Somebody there was just fantastic. And so there were little files where you could get your Monteverdi and your Beethoven, which I loved listening to. But there was a series of shelves. With record racks – and you could go through the record rack and it had, rubbing shoulders with each other. Stockhausen and Ornette Coleman, for instance. And Bartok. So it was basically 20th century, but real 20th century, all of the 20th century, you know.

So all I ever had to buy – the missing thing in there was rock music and I’d have to buy that for myself. I was astounded they didn’t have the United States of America in the rack and all this stuff, so I’d have to go and buy that. But everything else, I was going twice a week to this record library, getting 3 records out. Listening like a maniac. Going back on the Saturday and doing the same thing. Just going round and round. So when I heard the Soft Machine, it was …. I’d already seen Hendrix like five times and I was completely inside music by the time I heard the Soft Machine. It was a shock, but it wasn’t that much of a shock.

And drummers who sing. You know, we’re a very rare breed. There’s Clem Curtis out of the Searchers. There was Ringo. Back then, that was about it. Yeah. And then there was Robert (Wyatt). And I wanted to do that, so I was just interested in watching people who could do that.

PH: The Quiet Sun album – I don’t know how much of an accurate reflection the album is (of the band) because I know the album came later. It’s almost like a hard edged Soft Machine to me. It’s just astonishingly brilliant, ‘Mainstream’. Was it consciously taking Soft Machine as its main influence?

I think it’s consciously moving away from Soft Machine as its main influence. You talked about that hard edged thing. There’s a deluxe version of the Quiet Sun album which has got the demos. And the demos are much more watercolouring and for me and they’re very Soft Machine.

But by the time we got there was a four year period between the splitting up of the band and the recording of the album. And in that time Phil had gone into Roxy Music and played in a very sort of like technicolor, sort of big clear obvious way. A bit like an acrylic paint or something. And Bill had been with Matching Mole. And I was doing my weird sort of underground thing. And the music had moved on. In fact, there’s sections on the album that weren’t really ever played. They weren’t played live. They were sort of like new amendments to the material. And also you’re making a record and you think, ‘oh this bit here goes into that bit there, but then we find that part one isn’t working so well, so we’ll just keep to part one’, which is what happened to the last track on side one ‘RFD’, that originally had a much more rhythmic follow up piece.

Perhaps it would be nice at some point to delve in a bit further to Charles’ time with Quiet Sun, or his brief excursion with Gong, although Bill MacCormick’s forthcoming autobiography ‘Tales of a bass impostor’ will deal extensively with the former. You’ll also have to wait for the Hugh Hopper biography to hear what Charles had to say about working alongside Hugh in Oh Moscow! or various other projects including Clear Frame and Charles’ Out of Body Orchestra, which Hugh appeared with. There are also snippets relating to Acid Mothers Temple which it would be nice to publish somewhere. Watch this space!

3 day residency at Cafe Oto, London – 22-24 February

Cafe Oto host a 3 day Charles Hayward residency between Thursday 22 and Saturday 24 February.

More details available here: https://www.cafeoto.co.uk/events/charles-hayward-three-day-residency/

Charles had this to say about each day’s events:

Thursday 22 February – Zigzag + Swirl supported by Lello and daylight bulb

Zigzag+swirl is a solo set of drums, voice, zigzag and swirl, songs in quantum funk, never the same twice, no click, no fixed zero point; forget concepts, this music does not exist in its own orbit it is completed by ears, minds, bodies, the interplay between intent and perception. From This Heat to now: Forward Music!

Charles Hayward – At Times Like These

Friday 23 February – Albert Newton (Pat Thomas, John Edwards, Charles Hayward) supported by Evan Parker/Tomas Challenger. Charles will also perform Invisible Songs – “a sequence of songs and soundfields with extreme minimal attitude”

Albert Newton was initially a quartet comprising Harry Beckett trumpet, Pat Thomas keyboards, John Edwards double bass and Charles Hayward drums. This strong music continues and develop across a wide range of audiences and spaces including palatial cultural cathedrals, social dance events and scruffy South London pubs, a conscious strategy to break divisions put in place by an avante garde elite eager to maintain a cultural schism that confirms an avante garde elite. Since the death of Harry Beckett in 2010, the group remain a trio, leaving intriguing and mysterious gaps in the music, working its way slowly back from a ‘music of absence’ towards a place of resistance and communal joy live in the moment: verve, groove, conviction and strength