Canterbury 2.1 – Tom Penaguin (part 1)

Update: part 2 of this interview is here

The first interview for the Canterbury 2.0 series is, oddly enough, with the one musician on the list with whose work I was blissfully unaware of only 6 months ago. Just before Christmas last year, Ryan Stevenson of Zopp, who will be interviewed later in this series, mentioned the following in a Messenger exchange: “There’s a young French guy called Tom Penaguin who sent me his album asking for record deal advice. It’s AMAZING!”

He wasn’t joking. Tom was kind enough send on some samples of what would eventually end up as the album Tom Penaguin, an instantly recognisable blend of Canterburyesque elements, but just as instructive was dipping into an extraordinary array of Youtube videos chronicling Tom’s development from being a fresh-faced 16 year old all the way through to the present day.

Click here to watch the album being mastered

Tom’s calling card is his multi-screened performances where he takes ALL instruments: a dexterous, almost manic drummer; a fluid Hillagesque guitarist; an equally malleable manipulator of the bass: but also not afraid to use keyboards in a variety of roles; innovatively using tape machines to create looped backgrounds; and even on occasion turning his hand to vocals.

All are done with seemingly effortless command, culminating in the album on Amarxe Records that you really should now have before you, a Canterburyesque masterpiece of sorts which dons particular hats to the Dave Stewartesque lineage of Egg, Khan, Hatfield and the North and National Health.

So, before diving into the specifics of that album, let’s examine the long route towards it. Tom, who lives in Western France, is still only 28, and pays the bills through a job working on lathes for farming machinery rather than the  prolific musicianship on display here. So how did one so young get to this level of virtuosity and insight so quickly across such a range of instruments and styles?

(My parents) both played a little bit of guitar when they were young, but I never saw them play regularly. But the acoustic guitars were there so I had the chance to try an adult-sized instrument when I was very young!

As far as I can remember, I’ve always been playing music in a way or another. When I was very young I used to sing “false English” while banging things with sticks or playing with a toy guitar. One day my father even built me a small drum kit with some empty paint buckets and a jerrycan. I began taking guitar and music theory lessons when I was 5 or 6, in a rural music school. I quit the music theory lessons 4 years later as I was not very interested, but I continued guitar lessons for a few years before switching to a country/bluegrass guitar teacher for another 2 or 3 years. When I was in middle school, I used to come back from school and put on either the Who or Led Zeppelin on my bedroom’s hifi for me to spend hours trying to play over it. When I (finally) discovered Zappa, I spent 2 years only listening to his music and trying to play over it. That was the period where I learnt the most.

When I was 6 years old, my parents bought me a vintage organ, an Eko Super Junior A from the seventies. I kept it for a few years before giving it to one of my cousins. Years later, when I was 14 and had suddenly gained an interest into vintage keyboards, I took it back and repaired it since it had sustained a bit of damage (a few broken keys and a chewed up power cord). Then I bought a Hohner Pianet T and I learned how to play on the spot, by trying to imitate what I liked to hear at the time.

I always wanted to play drums, but my parents were reluctant to the idea of having a loud drum kit in the house, so I had to wait around my 15 or 16 birthday to be able to buy a very cheap drum kit that was immediately placed in the garage, far from the house. Same thing, I learned on the spot, by playing over The Who, Henry Cow, Soft Machine, Zappa.

I never tried to actively learn how to play bass, I came to it with the approach of a guitarist. I also never bought one, the 2 basses I own are from a good friend of mine that forgot them in my room (and he was left handed too).

I’ve been writing and recording solo music for quite a while. When I was around 12 years old, my uncle gave me a 4 track cassette tape recorder, and I was immediately hooked. I moved to computers and big reel to reel tape recorders since, but I always had solo projects in a corner of my mind.

I asked Tom what sort of music he was exposed to growing up and how it influenced his own compositional work?

I was exposed to The Doors, Santana, Dire Strait, Eric Clapton, Satriani, Rita Mitsouko… none of it had a real influence on my compositional work. The only thing that had a real influence was that my mother sometime played Zappa’s Yo Mama in the car while going to middle school, that’s what got me into wanting to hear what else was available from that man, and all that I learnt from him.

So what about his own personal connection to Canterbury scene music, and how did it manifest itself?

I think I became aware of the Canterbury scene through the gear they used. I’ve always been fascinated by two things, music and mechanical things, so you can imagine my excitement when I discovered that some keyboards blended both of those aspects! I quickly began to look for bands that used them, because I loved the sound of those instruments, and as I was looking for bands that used Hohner Pianets, I found out about Soft Machine and Egg, but in general this search made me aware and passionate about most of the prog acts of the 70s.

It came a little bit later than the rest of the prog scene. I was around 14 years old when I found out about Genesis, King Crimson yes etc, then Zappa, then the RIO/Canterbury scene around 16 or 17. Very often, the line between jazz fusion and prog is a bit blurred, like with the later albums from Gong, Soft Machine, or focus in general, so I got into that at the same time (I’m currently digging into the MPS repertoire with people like Volker Kriegel, Jasper Van’t Hof, Joachim Kühn etc.. amazing German jazz rock).

I don’t know where this comes from, but I’ve always been very curious about the individuals inside a band. If I really enjoy something, I’ll try to find what bands also included those same musicians, to see which one of them carried the vibe I really liked at the beginning. This went extremely fast with the Canterbury scene, as every musician of the scene played in almost every band. Then I found out that there was a “Canterbury” label glued to almost all my favourite bands, so I dug even further.

So what does Tom regard as the essential components of the Canterbury sound?

The first thing that pops up to me is the fuzzy organ and fuzzy bass sound. I think that originates from Soft Machine touring with Jimi Hendrix. What’s funny to me is that I’m pretty sure Dave Stewart, Hugh Hopper and Mike Ratledge all used a Shaftesbury Duo Fuzz, which happens to be a rebranded Shin-Ei Duo Fuzz, inspired by the Univox Super Fuzz. Those fuzzes are very harsh sounding but work very well with the mellow tone of a Hammond or Lowrey organ. Tim Hodgkinson used a Marshall Supa Fuzz (I asked him directly a while ago), and I’m pretty sure it was placed after the reverb tank of his Farfisa Compact, allowing the tail of the reverb to be distorted as well. I don’t know where the wah pedal comes from, maybe from Hendrix or from an attempt to tame the bright fuzz, but it was also used extensively on organ sounds. It also allows a bit of evolving texture during slow progressing chord parts, since Leslie cabinets were rarely used.

Regarding the compositions, it ranges from psychedelic influences to classical and jazz. What I think is the most interesting thing is that the classical influences are digested in a very different way than “mainstream” progressive music and Italian prog in particular. Here the influences come from modern composers ranging from Stravinsky to Holst, where most of the other prog bands used baroque, classical or romantic influences. Mont Campbell in particular seemed to be very fond of the first two Messian modes (mainly the whole-tone and octatonic modes) which were also used by Stravinsky, Debussy, Ravel… This use of particular modes combined with asymmetrical metrics gives a very mathematical feeling to the music, in a good way.

The lyrics remain very joyful, at times even funny or pataphysical. It feels to me like those lyrics are an excuse to sing, that the song was not built around it. They are always wonderfully written and sung with ease around a very difficult and ever-changing melody line. Henry Cow lyrics were different though, but I think this comes from the RIO side of the music.

More tomorrow as Tom talks extensively about his album, and we also delve into some of his extraordinary Youtube videos.

Tom Penaguin is available on AMarxe records here: