Pinning his discovery of Bob Dylan as the ‘most significant moment’ in his life, Birmingham folk upstart, Andrew Cache, has been playing in and out off the steel cities back streets for the most part of his late teen years, moulding his mature sound, and that discovery of Bob Dylan certainly shines through on the singers debut EP, Drifters, Gamblers and Low Life Ramblers.
HTF decided to catch up with Cache to get to know the singer a little more and to find out more about his music.
HTF: How are you today and what was the first thing you did when you woke up this morning?
Andrew Cache: Sorry if I’m not at my most vibrant and witty and friendly today, I spent all day yesterday on the hottest train ride of my life after an hour in Bournemouth where everything is sickeningly sunny and carefree and all the people are ridiculously beautiful (I was, it seems, the only pale lank haired northerner in the whole damn place, and before you say anything yes, Birmingham is just about in the north). I hadn’t realised how much like a Californian stereotype certain English seaside towns got. That, and the lack of either good scotch or company awaiting my return have put me in a bad mood.
The first thing I did this morning? Read a page of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, cursed the morning and went back to sleep. Hey, I’m a 20 year old unemployed guitarist what do you expect?
HTF: What do you hope people have taken from listening to your debut EP, Drifters, Gamblers and Low Life Ramblers?
AC: Damn that’s actually a pretty hard question to answer. The reason I write songs and sing them and record and such is because I don’t really know how to do anything else. It’s as natural to me as breathing and going to the toilet and I think if I stopped I’d probably just die or something you know, so I don’t really think about an audience’s response to something. I do it more as a necessary catharsis, the only way I know of exercising all my pain and joy and frustration and love and rage. It’s like labour pains – you know they have to come out.
I suppose I’d want people to at least realise that it’s something real and important I’m expressing, so even if they don’t like it they appreciate it’s not something negligible and it means more than just cheap entertainment. I put everything I am in these songs and art is always a bit like standing naked under unknowing eyes as Bob Dylan put it. At the very best I’d like them to care about the characters and their journeys; to feel like what they’re hearing expressed something they’ve always felt about the way we live and don’t live in this screwed up, sprawling dark world. And it sounds horribly corny but to maybe get some hope and comfort and strength from the music. I genuinely believe that all the secrets of the universe can be contained in a great song and they can save you. But I don’t really pretend to be that great a songwriter. I just do my best.
HTF: What sort of sound where you going for in particular? Was there any artist who had a prominent influence on the sound?
AC: I didn’t want it to sound too produced, I think that with certain types of songs that can take away from the purity of them. The idea was to make it sound like you were sat alone with me late at night while I played, you know, that very intimate feel. I was listening a lot to Johnny Cash’s American Recordings, which was recorded alone in Rick Rubin’s living room with just one acoustic guitar, and Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, which he recorded alone in his bedroom, at the time. I loved the raw, honest, immediacy of those records. One of my favourite blues albums is an album called The Sun of Our Life by The Rev. Gary Davis and it’s just Gary on his own playing all these stunning ragtime blues pieces completely live, imperfections and all, and then halfway through there’s a track called ‘cigarette break’ and it’s literally Gary Davis saying “ah man I need a cigarette” and lighting up! And they left it on the album! And it made the whole thing seem so real and human which is why we left the false start in on Another Man Gone. I didn’t want the EP to sound sanitised though at the same time you’re spending all this money on professional studio time and you don’t want to waste it so I think that, and my nervousness and self-consciousness because it was my very first professional recording in a proper studio, meant we ended up with a slightly slicker sound. But I’m still very proud of it as a first recording.
HTF: Lyrically, what topics do you cover on the release?
AC: I like to think there’s a unifying concept behind all the songs and that’s the price of freedom. I think Kris Kristofferson had a point when he sang ‘freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.’ You have to go right to the edge and lose a lot of all the meaningless comforts about society we get so hung up on to find freedom but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth chasing (it’s probably the only thing worth chasing along with love). So it’s about people that go to the absolute edge and lose nearly everything in their pursuit of freedom and so it’s got a kind of bittersweet feeling. There’s a big Thelma and Louise vibe in it for that very reason and a lot of imagery of the American road which I’m totally in love with, having grown up on a diet of Jack Kerouac and country music. So the whole thing’s a doomed Kerouacian road trip populated with losers and dead beats living on the fringes of society because in my experience they’re the only people that are totally and beautifully alive. But it’s a sad kind of alive. I wanted to capture that feeling.
HTF: Are there any humorous tails from the studio that you would like to share with our readers?
AC: No. Seriously, I’m racking my brains but nothing funny happened at all. I remember laughing a lot with Simon Hopkinson who produced the thing and is an all round great guy but I’ve no clue what the hell we were laughing about because there was absolutely nothing funny about that day. The journey took four hours through flooded Nottingham on a rail replacement bus service at an ungodly hour of the morning (I’m a guitarist and guitarists don’t like getting up before 1 in the afternoon). We had only a few hours to record the thing and I remember doing endless retakes because all the songs were so damn long. There was only powdered milk for the tea which tastes like something you can’t publish and the whole thing just felt like a lot of hard work. Sorry, that’s not very funny.
HTF: Do you have any rituals when it comes to writing songs, or is it all in the moment?
AC: I drink 2 bottles of Gordon’s Gin and 1 bottle of cough medicine, put on a dress, spray paint ‘liberty is not just about killing rabbits with AK47s’ on the bonnet of a car and drive round the block 28 times singing ‘Okie From Muskogee’ backwards. If I’m still not inspired I put Kris Kristofferson’s ‘ You Don’t Tell Me What To Do’ on the stereo full blast and drive at 110 miles an hour into the front of the nearest sales office (kind of a social/political statement).
Actually no, I don’t have any rituals for songwriting – you just have to let it happen. The song is in charge, not you, and it’ll only come out when it’s ready to.
HTF: How have your live performances been going of late?
AC: A lot of fun the vast majority of the time. I’ve always felt live performance is a much more real and honest way of communicating than recording and I think of myself much more as a live performer. The only times I ever really feel alive or at home are when I’m singing live and I’m totally connected with the song and nothing else in a way you can’t be in a studio.
What’s more I’m genuinely really excited to be playing the Lichfield Rocks Festival July the 26th at Litchfield Brewery, The Bowling Green. It’s only in its second year. The whole thing was organised by Kyle Perry who’s the front man of Stubblemelt to raise money for Whittington Barracks Regiment to build a new hospital for wounded soldiers which I’m sure we’ll all agree is a damn good cause so I kind of admire the fact that Kyle could just be getting drunk with groupies and such but he’s actually really helping his community. I think last year they raised something like £2500 for St. Giles hospice and they’ve managed to book some much bigger acts this year so I expect they’ll raise a lot more. Festivals give me a great chance to connect with live audiences so I’m really enthused about that.
HTF: What is it about being a solo artist that appeals to you?
AC: I don’t like people. Or is it that they don’t like me? Whatever the answer I’m definitely better when they’re not around me all the time. I dunno, I remember I spent sometime in bands during my misspent youth as a hard rock guitarist and all I really remember is that they’d always want to sound like Biffy Clyro or some such and I’d always want to sound like Bob Dylan and in the end we’d all get annoyed and things would get smashed and we’d decide I’d be better working alone. As a songwriter I’ve always been VERY precious about my music and I’ll never compromise when it comes to the music. Who’s buying the next round, who’s name gets listed first, that kind of thing I’m lenient on but the music always comes first and has to be done just right. So being a solo artist is really the only way I can have full control over my artistic vision. The downside is if it’s no good it’s only my fault. I can’t blame the drummer for screwing up
HTF: You’ve spoken about your next release following a concept. What is it that we can expect from this concept and is it something which you have wanted to do for a while now?
AC: It sounds really pretentious but it’s basically a concept album examining self-destruction (which I’ve done an awful lot of) and salvation (which I have slightly less experience of). It’s about a journey from self-destruction to salvation and the concept that you can’t really find salvation unless you take yourself to the edge. It’s a journey I actually went on literally myself when I was writing the songs for the album. I’d been drinking a lot, too much, and more importantly I was doing the wrong kind of drinking. It wasn’t social or enlightening, it was isolated and destructive and everything around me just kind of died and I wrote a song called A Bottle and a Bible which is to this day and to everyone’s agreement, the very best song I’ve ever written by far. I didn’t realise it at the time but it was also a perfect description of a journey of self-destruction ending in salvation (which I was headed to). A very good friend of mine called John Arthur who’s a poet and author (and had been witnessing my downwards spiral) wrote me the lyrics to a song depicting the same thing called Pipes and Dreams. Well anyway, Tom Waits once said that sometimes when you write an album you write 2 songs, get them a hotel room and they have children which is basically what happened with these 2 songs and before I knew it I’d written a damn good concept album.
I’ve already recorded it and I’m completely and utterly in love with the thing, it’s by far my greatest artistic achievement and the music is much more powerful and intense and well executed than my past work. Also I’m singing with a lot more passion and authority (what’s more my voice is about 100 bottles of whisky deeper than the slightly nasal whine on the EP). I don’t know how or when it’s going to be released yet but as you can probably tell I’m very excited about it and you can hear most of the songs in my live set. I don’t know if I’ve always wanted to do it, it’s just something that happened very naturally and spontaneously as if some higher force was in control.
HTF: To finish, if you were a type of culinary dish, what dish would it be and why?
AC: I don’t know but I imagine it would be something bitter, cheap and bad for your health.
While we wait for Cache to drop his debut album, have a listen to the beautiful ‘Ride’, which is taken from the record, below.
