Hello everyone, this is W, host of the High Art on the Edge page, host of this podcast feature known as SurpriseCast, back for seconds, back for desserts.

Andrew Rose is here in the podcast studio to discuss a brand new album coming out called Solar and a whole lot more.

Welcome Andrew, nice to see you again.

How are you?

I'm very well, nice to see you too.

Happy holidays, what you been up to?

Well, I've been busy working, you know, I've been busy finishing this album, I've been trying to sort out the various difficulties of getting it distributed in the post Brexit and Trump world.

So sorting out deals with labels in the UK and the US, getting everything printed, getting everything sorted out and trying to make a living at the same time and going to see bands and traveling around the place.

It's been a bit of a whirlwind year.

Love how you have your hands always busy, you're always working, you're always coming up with new ideas, working on old stuff, working on new stuff.

And we're going to get into some of that stuff in a little bit.

I want to throw you an icebreaker question.

It's actually based on a post that you released a couple of days ago and I'm going to read it to you and I'd love your response.

This is what you said.

On Saturday, I'll be in Paris seeing the Chameleons and my friend Vox again for the first time since my 50th birthday in 2018.

And we welcomed him and Stephen Rice to our house in France and enjoyed a fabulous concert of the Chameleons classics in our village hall.

All righty.

And then you share a little bit more.

So here's my question for you.

Tell the listeners and me this connection to the Chameleons, Vox, and what is it about their music that has truly resonated with you over time?

Blimey, this goes back a very, very long way.

I first heard Chameleons on a John Peel radio show doing a session for their second album, What Does Anything Mean, basically.

And those were the days when I had a finger on a pause button on a tape recorder and I was taping all the songs and making a note of what was being played and then listen back to the tape for days and days.

And there was a song of theirs called Warm Flesh that stuck.

And I didn't like it at first, to be honest.

I didn't think much of it.

But it kept coming back to me.

And I found a copy of that album in a local store on vinyl, obviously, and started listening to that.

And a year later, I found a picture disc version of their first album, which is actually up on my wall there now that's been signed, A Script to the Bridge.

And it just kind of, I think it made a connection.

I love the sound, the pictures that the sound creates, the space echo guitars and the dual guitars and that whole kind of, it's to my ears, it's one of the essential building blocks that ultimately comes to make what we know as shoegaze, but which at the time was another development of what I heard of as indie rock here in Britain growing up.

So after the Chameleon split, I followed what happened after that, the Sun and the Moon and then the various solo and projects that Mark had with various people over the years.

I went to see them, I reformed it, I think 99, I saw them a couple of times then.

And I had been in touch with Mark as he then called himself now Vox via email.

He like I was a very early adopter of the internet and we kind of exchanged a couple of emails.

I have no recollection what we talked about, but it was amazing to actually speak to this guy virtually in those early heady days in the end of 2000.

And then I went to see him, they played a gig a couple of hours from here in a city called Toulouse.

And I went early, I turned up with a box of wine to the soundcheck and immediately was welcomed with open arms when they saw how much wine I brought.

And I said to him, you know, we had a bit of time and we went out for a drink before the gig and we got to know each other and we kind of went on chatting.

And ultimately that led to Mark coming over with Steven to my 50th birthday party weekend to perform as a paid artist, but also as a guest for a long weekend.

And we had a really good time.

And then I went back to see the band they played in London about a week later and I've not seen them since.

I'm really looking forward to it.

We're going to hook up during the soundcheck again and look forward to seeing them.

Sounds lovely.

And can you describe if possible, what is it like to be at a chameleon show for people that have never seen them perform in concert?

Oh, that depends on where.

Well, the first, the reunion gig, when they first reunited at the end of the 90s, and I went to their first, they did a gig in London and they came down to do a gig in Manchester.

Then they came down to London.

I went to see that one and it was an eye opener because there were all these punks and all of these people with spiky hair and they all dressed up for it.

And it was a real mosh pit and I got in there with everybody else and we jumped up and down and had a wild time.

My wife sat on the sidelines, but it was absolutely ecstatic.

That was brilliant.

The concerts are, yeah, there's a lot of energy there and rapturous response, you know, it's a band you've got to go and see.

They are full of energy.

I mean, they've been together for nearly 45 years and they are absolutely electric.

And I would definitely echo those sentiments and highly recommend for people that are listening to this podcast that are looking for a great show, definitely check out Chameleon's Blasted Cat and they have a brand new album out, Arctic Moon.

Have you listened to it yet?

I have.

I've played a couple of the songs on my radio show.

I think it's really good.

It took me a little time to get into.

It's obviously a different direction to the original albums and the re-album they did when they reformed.

But it's great.

It really is good.

There's another gentleman by the name of Patrick Fitzgerald.

Are you familiar with this gentleman?

I am indeed.

We're talking now of the Kitchens of Distinction, I believe.

We are talking about Kitchens of Distinction and his other project, Stephen Hero.

I know he's been doing some wonderful, intimate tours with this new album, Convalescence.

We did speak briefly last time you were on the podcast about Kitchens of Distinction and that dreamy sound, if you don't mind to call it that.

But I'd like to go a little bit deeper inside the weeds of either Kitchens of Distinction or other bands of that ilk that really speak to you as a musician.

That you know somehow, some way, they have influenced you and inspired you.

I wouldn't say Kitchens influenced me.

I mean, there's a whole broad gamut of bands who have inspired or whose music I love.

I wouldn't specifically hear the Kitchens in what I do.

I certainly, particularly since I acquired Pearl String Guitar last year, I'm more chameleons-esque tones in some of the songs that I've written lately.

There's always something of Cocteau Twins lurking somewhere in the background.

Sometimes completely unexpectedly.

Slow Dive are always a huge influence.

There's a song on the new album which I went to see them in the springtime and they played up in Nantes and the sheer power of the ending of When the Sun Hits just blew me.

I thought, I need to try and use that whole feeling that I had when they kind of whack you with that sound.

If I can capture some of the essence of that in one or two of my songs, that would be amazing.

I seem to find my bass lines are often similar to something that you might expect to hear from Ride.

Steve Kroll.

That's the one.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

There are bits of that, and it's not conscious, you know.

There's bits of Mary Chain in there as well.

I don't go out to copy anybody, but I can hear, when I listen back to it, when I hear it, I think, oh, yeah, that sounds a bit like them.

Do you ever catch yourself going, ooh, this sounds too much of Ride, this sounds too much of Slow Dive, this sounds a little too much of Cocteau Twins?

Does that happen?

Actually, the opening song on the new album, which is largely instrumental, originally had a verse, or a couple of verses, and when I listened to them, I thought, now this just sounds like third-rate, late Ride.

You know, the kind of song that might have been an outtake to one of their recent albums.

It sounded, just didn't really, I thought, what am I doing here?

I'm not really capturing myself, and it's just sounding a bit dreary, and so I took it out, and reworked the song slightly, left the choruses in that were very much not like that, and I think it's a better song as a result, as a sort of almost instrumental.

So in that case, yeah.

But, I think, apart from that, if it kind of sounds a bit like somebody else, well, I think it's kind of, it's in the pattern.

The songs that I write, I don't think, are songs that sound like other people's songs.

I think there might be elements of the sound that are familiar to people who like other bands.

But, I like to think my songwriting is just...

Yes, absolutely.

So before we really launch and take a deeper dive into this brand new album, Solar, I want to base it around this book called Rules for a Night, written by the great actor Ethan Hawke, and think of this as like a compass, a journey, a sojourn, if you will, that this night goes on, and he acquires all this great wisdom.

So I'm going to read you some life skills, if you will, and then I want you to pick one.

I'll read you a passage, and I'd love for you to respond however you like that's connected to this new album, or maybe the past.

And we're going to do three today.

So here's the list.

We have solitude, pride, gratitude, courage, honesty, and friendship.

Which one would you like to pick first?

Let's go with gratitude.

Great.

Gratitude.

Here we go.

In the first year of my training, I had a horrible toothache.

Grandfather and I spent a long autumn afternoon in a field constructing a fence for some horses.

I groaned constantly about how difficult it was to dig a hole when my tooth hurt so badly.

I complained every time I swung the sledge, hammering the post into the stiff earth, and that my mouth felt as if it would explode.

If only my tooth didn't throb so much, I said to grandfather, everything would be perfect.

Months passed.

It was winter.

Grandfather and I were engaged in more carpentry.

I spent most of that morning cursing the bitter cold and complaining how I could barely feel my fingers.

And then grandfather said this, but how's your tooth?

It's fine, I said.

Well then, what a remarkable day this must be.

Gratitude.

How does it manifest itself in the work that you've been doing since early 80s, maybe this new album?

How does it rear itself?

Well, the last time I spoke to you, I'd just finished an album, which was kind of a very difficult album because I was under the misapprehension that something was very wrong with me medically.

Coming out of that, I had what I would call a burst of gratitude, which resulted in an immediate EP and album of music that was almost celebratory of being alive, certainly in my mind.

Is this Lisbon?

This is Lisbon and then Float.

So the Lisbon EP.

I just wanted to go out and make some really kind of bright up-tempo stuff and, you know, happier songs.

And then Float kind of came along and that kind of ends on a really kind of big, upbeat, joyful song.

And then we come to the new album and the last real song on the album is a song called Mountains.

And the lyrics of that, I cross rivers for you, I climb mountains for you, when the rain falls down, I'll never turn around, into this joyous chorus.

And that is, I mean, it's such a, I feel so overwhelmingly grateful to have been able to do and to be able to go back and do more of this amazing experience of walking hundreds of miles through Spain and meeting dozens and dozens of people and going to just this gradual place, climbing mountains, crossing rivers, going through difficulties and coming out a new and slightly changed person at the end of it.

To the extent that actually, when I had difficulties singing this song, because I always had a lump in my throat when I got to the chorus, because I was, you know, almost tears of joy.

It is such an uplifting thing.

And I was, you know, really grateful to have this chance to do this amazing thing and this chance to meet, which is where I'm going to go to next, meet so many amazing and wonderful people along the way.

On Mountains, you were able to gather people to help you sing?

Sure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This is the Camino Choir.

The Camino Choir.

Yeah, you hear them actually, to be fair, you hear them in the fade out because I would have liked to have used them a little bit more in the song, but it's all a bit ragged and I didn't actually manage to group everybody together.

It's amazing when you send, I did a thing to, which I sent to several people that I met while we were walking on the Camino in Spain and they're around the world.

So a friend of mine in Brisbane, for example, she did it, another friend in London, he did it and various others and a group of us here that are walkers, we managed to get around a table to do this.

It's amazing how people struggle to sing in time, struggle to sing in tune, you know, and there's only so much of that that you really want to play during the actual song, but with lovely, if you listen on headphones, you kind of get to the end of the song and the chorus repeats and everything drops out except the bass and the sound kind of expands as you hear the other voices suddenly singing along in this chorus, which, and you kind of sense them wandering, walking off into the distance almost as a gentle fade out.

And that was really special, that for me kind of encapsulates all the people that we met.

I was very particular that I wanted a guest vocal on that song, which is Mary Wyre from Eden As We Speak.

We've worked together on a couple of songs before now.

We met so many Australians on that walk and I really wanted to have an Australian voice on the album and Mary is that Australian voice and there are other Australians in the Camino Choir at the end.

Let us not be ashamed, and let us not be afraid, let us not be afraid, and let us not be afraid.

Through mountains and valleys, through heights and through valleys, the sun will start shining and we shall be able to see heaven above.

People that are listening to this podcast, Andrew, tell the listeners and me specifically this journey, this sojourn along the Camino.

Give us a little bit more geographical location.

Okay, so the main route that most people take, and there are many, many ancient pilgrim routes across Europe that all end in the northwest corner of Spain in a city called Santiago de Compostela, which is where the remains of St.

James are said to be held.

And there are caminos that run through Portugal, through Spain, through France, northern Europe.

The main route begins in a small town in the French Pyrenees, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, called Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port.

And you begin what is a 500-mile or 800-kilometer walk, which takes you initially the first day over the Pyrenees Mountains.

So you're up at about three, three and a half thousand feet.

You climb over the mountains.

On day one, you climb up 1,400 meters.

I convert that to feet multiplied by three.

It's high, and it's a big day, and you cross the border into Spain while you're on the mountains, and you slowly descend down into the Basque region of Spain and the city of Pamplona.

It's a three-day walk to get there, staying the first night in a monastery and then in inns and hostels.

And that route has existed for over 1,200 years.

People have been walking that route for centuries, and a whole history is built up around that route, which ultimately leads to the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela.

Now, I was able to take two weeks.

This is a six-week endeavor.

So I managed to walk 300 kilometers to the old city of Burgos, which has an incredible history there.

We walked through the whole of the Rioja wine region from start to finish.

We walked through.

The scenery is stunning.

There's any number of churches and little villages and wineries.

And you walk in and out of cities, and you get a bit of city nightlife, and you go to pubs, and you go to bars.

But every morning, you get up first thing in the morning, pull your boots on, pull your rucksack on, and get out on the road and see who you're going to walk by and who you're going to talk to and what you're going to experience that day, knowing that you're going to be another 15, 20 miles further down the road by the time you take your boots off at the end of that day.

And all of that time, you may be solitary.

You mentioned solitude.

You may be making friends.

You mentioned friendship.

Some of it does require courage because you are going on bits of steep and rocky terrain where you've got to get up and over nasty, tricky bits, bits where you fall over and graze your knee or you fall on your ass or whatever.

You end up a little bit cut and bruised sometimes.

It's not supposed to be easy, but it's manageable.

And it's manageable for everybody.

And you do meet people of all ages doing it.

It's a tremendous experience.

Also, one way you can zone out and just think.

Yeah, absolutely.

No, it sounds wonderful.

And it sounds like my girlfriend would absolutely love to partake in something like this.

Okay, let's do another one.

We have solitude, pride, friendship, honesty, courage.

Let's go with friendship.

Again, this comes from a book called Rules for a Night written by Ethan Hawke.

This is what the night says about friendship.

When I was first knighted, the Landrock Order totaled more than 50 in number.

The following year, however, only 17 of us survived the horrible six days that came to be known as the Battle of Lostrethiel.

In the months following that short, hellish week, we went about the business of victory by burying the dead, nursing the wounded, putting out fires, rebuilding houses.

One day, beside the Tower of St.

Bravita, a crowd had gathered around a child, eight or nine years of age, who was deathly ill, practically blind with a fever.

This is where I first came to know Sir Richard Hughes, a new knight of my order with a round belly and rich brown eyes.

He was called upon to try to heal that small child.

A skeptic in the crowd, who was still loyal to the Earl of Warwick, watched as Sir Richard laid hands on the young boy and whispered peacefully, calming words of prayer into his ear.

The skeptic shouted out, mocking the knight for believing that his ancient whispers and primitive style of healing could have any power.

And at that moment, Richard answered, You are an ignorant fool.

The skeptic's derision became angry, his face reddened.

Before the skeptic could gather himself to shout back or raise his fist in violence, Richard spoke again.

When a few words have the power to make you so angry, why would others not have the power to heal?

So, talk to us about friendship and how that has played a role in your life as a musician and possibly collaborations along the way, particularly on this new album, Solar.

Okay, I'm going to start with this new album, Solar, and I'm going to tie it in with this walk.

The walk I've been doing, I've done with a very old friend of mine, a guy called John, who has a song named after him on the album, John, and we've known each other since the early 90s.

We go to lots of gigs together.

He's going to be joining me in Paris for the Chameleons on Saturday.

He's catching the train over from London.

We are very good friends, and I think you need a very good friend if you're going to undertake something as potentially grueling as this.

But he's one of two people who gets a special mention on this album.

And the other one is a new friend, a friend I made on the wall.

While you're walking along, you chat to people, and usually maybe you talk for 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, and then you separate.

One starts walking a little faster than the other, or somebody sits down for a rest or something.

I started talking to a young Italian woman one morning, and we didn't stop talking for seven hours.

At that point, it was my longest day and her longest day of the walk.

It was just one of those really bizarre meetings of mine.

We have nothing in common really whatsoever.

She's 20-something, nearly 30 years younger than me.

Trying to explain what shoegaze is to somebody who's never heard it whilst walking through a plain surrounded by wheat fields in the middle of Spain is interesting.

But you know what?

Something happened that day, and a really deep friendship emerged.

I saw her briefly a couple of days later.

You don't expect to see people all the time because there's thousands and thousands of people doing this walk at any one point in time.

She caught up with me, and a couple of days later, we were walking through a village.

She called my name.

Andrew, Andrew, came running up to me.

She said, I've got a really bad back.

I'm not going to go any further today, but I just wanted to say hello.

We exchanged contact details, which somehow we'd failed to do after seven hours of talking and exhaustion.

I then got back in touch with her to ask her if she was interested.

Months later, after I got home, back in September, to see if she was interested in this Camino choir thing.

And she told me she sang like a screaming goat and therefore would not.

But she was interested in that whole project.

And she's been really useful because her and John, I've been making recordings and batting them backwards and forwards and taking ideas and using these friends who both were there on the Camino to really give me feedback as the albums come together.

There was a song, there's a song called Cephalophor on the album, which is largely instrumental, and it's got monks singing on it.

And I sent this one to this friend, Victoria in Rome.

And I said, what do you think of this?

This is just kind of work in progress.

I'm thinking I've got to write some lyrics for it.

She said, don't touch it.

It's perfect as it is.

Leave it.

It's fine.

It's fine.

And you know what?

She was absolutely right.

And I think I would have ruined that song had my friend from the Camino who had seen the headless monk in the church in Ballarado, a village in Spain, not said stop right there.

The collaborations is a lovely song called Calling Claire from Claire.

Somebody, another friend.

She's Irish.

She's called Claire from County Claire.

I did have to ask her because the lyrics of that song are a bit suggestive of something that didn't happen, but it's a fun piece of music.

And we've been, you know, we've kept in touch.

And so she's, I was able to bounce that off her.

She's a good friend of mine to sing it, which actually, I think, helps to kind of make people aware that it's not something that really happened.

Yeah, the singer is Matthew Jones from the Hepburn, so Welsh indie band who I've done some mastering with and I met him a couple of years ago in Amsterdam.

So friends are coming in to sing.

Friends are coming in to bounce ideas off, which is very important when you, I think, when you're working on your own to have those friendships, both musical, but also in the instance of an album that is kind of influenced by an experience to have others who had that experience with you.

The moon is from time in the air A ray of sunlight on your hair The sound of a bottle filled with rum and beer Seems to me she's everywhere And now I'm all in red This is why I love speaking with you.

You have, like this night, you are so full of wisdom, so full of gratitude, and you have these wonderful narratives that compliment and go along with your music.

And when you went on this journey, you probably knew you were going to meet new people, but you didn't know how all that was going to unfold.

And from what you just shared, Andrew, what a bonus to have that experience and have now these people part of your life and your work.

I think so.

And funnily enough, there are also the ones that got away on this journey, the ones that you started to talk about just as you were saying goodbye and you started to talk to them about music or something.

There's a guy I've managed to kind of get back in touch with vaguely, an Australian guy who I was saying goodbye to just as we were leaving the pub on the last night.

And I'd spoken to his mother, but he's quite a quiet chap.

I said, you know, you do look a little bit like Neil Halstead from a band called Slow Dive.

He said, yeah, yeah, I love them.

I can't believe we missed the opportunity.

I've met you so many times, and all I've talked about is walking and stuff.

And there was another day, and you're at the very end of the walk, and I fell into step with this young redheaded English girl.

I think she was called Rosa.

And we chatted about stuff, and then we got on to music, and she turned out to be another bloody Slow Dive fan, and she was 20.

And I'm thinking, why did we not start this conversation about 10 miles earlier?

Obviously, we were just approaching the village at the end of the day.

So there's the ones that got away, but yeah.

Before we left, I mean, I'm not normally one for small talk conversation.

I kind of tend to be a bit uneasy in social situations.

I'm not that person who can walk into a crowded room and immediately start talking to people.

But something about this experience was different.

Something about you've got all day, you're all doing the same thing, going the same way, and you have all the time in the world.

And you have the freedom to pursue a conversation or to leave it at any time.

But you've got commonality before you even start.

I find a similar thing.

If I go to a gig and start chatting to the musicians there, as a musician, you find that commonality very, very quickly, and you find stuff to talk about and people in common and music in common.

And I found a similar kind of experience of the ease of making temporary friendships whilst on the water.

Yeah, and like the gentleman in Rules for a Night, Richard, who has this way of using words, you do have this way of communicating through your music, your lyrics, and just in conversation.

You have a great sense of the application of verbiage, the way that you can converse with people through conversation and listen.

You're a great listener.

Where does that all come from?

Is that something that's passed down from mom and her dad?

I don't know, and this is something I've been exploring recently because I discovered not that long ago that there's a condition called aphantasia, which maybe 5% of the population have, which is the lack of a mind's eye.

So I have no visual memories.

I can't visualize a scene.

I can't visualize a person, useless faces.

So I listen.

When I was very little, I was very, very short-sighted.

The first five years of my life were probably a blur.

So my brain kind of wired itself.

Maybe that's why I'm a musician.

I don't know.

My brain kind of wired itself to concentrate on listening rather than taking visual cues for things.

I don't know whether that's genuine or not, but that appears to be something in my makeup, which makes me more of a listener than a visual person.

And somebody who's more suited to radio than TV.

Do you find that society, maybe where you live, the art of listening has eroded a bit in terms of conversation?

Maybe social media?

That's a good question.

I live in a country where the main language is a second language to me.

So I have to listen extra hard when I'm talking to people.

And likewise, they have to listen extra hard when they're trying to understand my French, which is a lot better than it used to be.

But that makes that a difficult question to answer, I think, in the context of my usual social life.

So I'm going to kind of pass on that question.

Fair enough.

Can I pick the last one?

Yeah.

Go for it.

It's courage.

Courage.

Here we go.

Okay.

And then I want to see if you can apply it also to this song called Hand With an E.

I'll get to that.

I love that version.

Courage is our ability and willingness to overcome our fear.

Fear is nothing to be ashamed of.

It is a powerful resource reminding us to be wary, alert, and mindful.

Fear is the dark.

Courage is the light.

Fear is the call.

Courage is the answer.

With regards to this new album, how do you think you possessed courage in terms of its arrangements, compositions, lyrically?

Where did you feel like you were kind of stepping out of your comfort zone, no pun intended, and move the needle in terms of your skills a bit?

Courage.

Well, I think musically, I did a cover version of Hand With an E by The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, and I recorded it.

It was the day after Christmas last year I started recording it.

I had arranged to interview Kip Berman from the band in March at a gig they were doing in Spain that I drove down to.

And I kind of just for fun, really, decided that I'd have a go at this cover version as a learning experience.

And then I kind of plucked up the courage to ask him whether it was okay to release it as a single.

I was kind of thinking, you know what, if they do this live and they need a tambourine player, a guest tambourine player, maybe I could volunteer.

As it was, they were doing the first album, so that didn't arise.

So I initially tried to replicate as closely as possible the original, and then apply on to that as the song evolves.

So more and more of my own style and my own sort of work.

I wanted to make it a bit of a bigger, more, if not cinematic, then kind of Phil Spector-esque, not Wall of Sound-y sort of approach to it.

And it took a little bit of courage to ask him if that was okay.

And he said, hey man, you know, it feels only right.

And if I'm going to see you and talk to you, I hope you're going to approve what I've done with your song.

And they were really good.

And he's been so nice.

He gave me permission to reproduce the lyrics in the CD and the LP of the new album, which is really kind of them.

But that also, my writing style when I'm writing a song, is to start with nothing in the studio.

It's the Cocktail Twins, Robin Guthrie approach, it turns out, where you just go in not knowing what's going to come out.

You start off with a drum beat.

You kind of start layering guitars, bass, whatever, over that.

And you start thinking about melodies and humming tunes, and figuring out some lyrics that are going to fit melodically and rhythmically to that tune.

Doing a cover version allows you the freedom to work on everything in the studio, and your guitar sounds, and your arrangement.

The arrangement's already there in the way that I approached it, because my initial approach was to work on using their arrangement with me doing that.

So I had the template ready.

I'm not kind of fishing around in the dark of a song that doesn't exist yet.

I'm working with a song.

And that kind of, I think, helped me to take a step forward in terms of production.

And the production, I think, on this album is a good step forward compared to the previous work that I've done.

There are other things that I picked up on from other friends that also contributed to that.

But I think that kind of gave me the courage to believe in my own abilities.

Yes.

When it came to writing newer, shorter, more focused songs that I think hold together, I hope hold together better than some of the previous work.

If you don't mind me saying, I would concur with you regarding the production work.

I think it sounds absolutely fabulous in terms of listening to the songs I had the headphones on.

And really, everything just seems so crystallized.

It seemed like there was a strong conscious effort to make a more, I hate this word, but polished sound without sounding too formulaic in that sense.

Would you say that's true?

Absolutely.

And I will have to thank two people, particularly for that.

What are three people to be honest?

Back in January of this year, I went to Switzerland and met up with Andy Jossi of Churchill Garden and various other projects, Blue Herons and Neil Bergdahl, who's whimsical and many other bands as well.

We had a little three man shoegaze summit in Lucerne where Andy lives.

And he gave me some really good points.

We're able to sit around and look at the stuff that he was working on.

And there's a technical stuff, production stuff that he picked up on from his collaborations and his work.

And that was really, really vital in terms of helping my production skills.

So that was one bread that comes into the better sound quality here.

I also bought a great big fuck off new computer, which allows me to, instead of having 15 or 20 tracks, I've got the 72 tracks on the last song on that album.

You know, Will, it doesn't follow.

I can't make it fall over.

So that's another aspect of the production.

The other person I would say, since I first met Robin Guthrie, we chatted quite often on the phone and we had this conversation.

I went to his place earlier this year and there was one little, he dishes out little nuggets of wisdom, which I cling to.

And one of his nuggets of wisdom was when he's producing, to tell bands to make the song shorter, say it in a shorter space of time.

You don't need so many verses.

You don't need your songs to be, you know, let's try and compact this down a bit and try and say a little bit more in a bit less time.

Um, unless of the self indulgence.

I don't think he put it quite like that, but what he often finds is a song will be five minutes long on it.

And what's in there is a really good three minute or three and a half minute song trying to come out.

And there's a, if you get what I mean, um, and I went, I went back and looked at my last album and I thought, you know what?

I listened to that and I think, God, if there's a lot of trimming could have gone on there, I could have had a lot more songs on that album.

If I trimmed back a bit and, and been a bit more focused and a bit of editing, you know, to counter that.

And I would agree, but I'm not a musician, but some of those songs from the last album in service of the tune, you're honoring it.

And if that's what you felt at that time, why go back and, and, and, and the rear view mirror and go, yeah, I could have trimmed that.

I, I listened to them and I think, and there's only, you know, on the, the floats album, there's probably two or three songs I think would be improved.

Okay.

Um, with maybe one verse less.

Yeah.

Maybe it's the, it's the habit of writing a certain number of verses.

You know, with the new album, I've tried to mix up the songwriting process a bit and that the, um, the structures of the songs I've tried to mix up a little bit more than I might've done earlier.

But at the songs on the previous album, I think, you know, if I, if I, if I'd got rid of that third verse, it would be a tighter and a better song.

And this, I mean, the very last song on that album floats is a very long song.

And there's actually, there's a second song trying to get out there, which starts about halfway through the first, the main song.

And you think, well, that, that would have been interesting to do as a, a short version.

How would that have worked?

Because it's a song that it's a long build to get to where it gets to.

And is that bill too long?

I don't know.

I love that song, but I would also be interested would have been interested to hear what a brutal producer might've done with it.

I've been told really, Andrew, really, you're going to stop there.

You don't want to stop here.

You know, I want to ask you a little bit more about this album, uh, solar that arrives in January.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah.

Um, did you master it yourself?

I did.

Yes.

Had you thought about pushing it out to someone else or did you just thought, okay, economically, this makes sense.

This is blah, blah, blah.

It's all, it feels almost like an intrinsic part of the recording process for me.

You know, there's a seamless transition the way I work through, through the whole process of mixing.

I'll get a mixed on and then I'll master it.

And I listened to the master for a bit.

Now I'll go back and do a new mix.

And that, and something you said earlier about that, that there's a production on this.

Yes.

I spent a long, long time on the production and, and remixing and remixing and remixing and reworking and redoing in a way that I've never, ever done before.

Uh, mountains, that colossal 72 track that, that took 45 mixes before I was happy with it.

Um, 30 of which were done before Mary was available to sing the lead vocal.

So I had sort of standing vocals for that.

And I thought I'd got it so that I would just stop her as, as her vocals in.

And that would be mixed 31.

But no, the, the simplest song in, in on the album, which is the second song, a song called first light, which will be the second single from the album.

Yes.

The simplest songs can sometimes be the hardest to get right.

Cause there's nowhere to hide.

There's so little going on.

There's a couple of guitar lines.

There's a bass, there's a kick drum and there's a tambourine as, as my vocals.

And that took a very, very long time.

I did ask somebody else if he might have a go at the vocals.

That didn't happen.

So I, I kept returning to it and trying different vocal styles, whatever.

And in all of this process, I'm mastering it because that, that gives me the finished sound.

And I'm, I then listened to it obsessively trying to pick out what isn't working or how it might work better.

And as a consequence, I've listened to almost nothing else for months than this.

It's been really nice.

Actually, the last couple of weeks to start listening to other people's music.

Again, I want to know from you, Andrew, when mastering other people's work, talk to us about that pressure.

Do you feel pressure?

I don't actually feel pressure.

No, I think I feel like excitement.

I mean, I, my, my day job involves producing and mastering an album of classical music every week, done probably a thousand albums on this, of that kind of stuff.

So I don't kind of, I don't get scared about doing it.

And I know instinctively when something sounds right.

And it's very, very rare these days.

When I first started massing for other bands.

Yeah, it kind of, there was a bit of a learning curve for me because I've done all the classical music and a lot less rock music mastering, but there's a point at where it just clicks and you just think that's, that is the sound that is exactly.

And hopefully that isn't too far from the mix that comes to me mastering.

It, it, it's a, a strange and unusual process because the quality of what you receive is so variable.

Yeah.

So you, you know, and you, you don't want to kind of alarm the person that you're working for, but sometimes you want to send them something that you think, this is how I hear it.

Does this work for you?

They come back and say, well, actually that's not what we really had in mind.

And you say, okay, well let's, let's, let's talk about what you, what you want and what you're not hearing.

Have you been able to pick up little tidbits of strategies, techniques from other people that master albums as well?

I haven't, no.

I mean, I, I, I've never really, it's, it's, it's hard to sit down and talk to someone other mastering engineers.

I know exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I have mastered stuff that Mark Gardner's mixed, but I've never talked to him about mastery and I've never talked to Simon about mastering.

That would be a fascinating conversation to have like a round table discussion with people who do that.

It's often thought of as a bit of a black art secrets.

Now, before we wrap up this conversation, I do want to get your thoughts on this topic that so many artists are talking about right now.

And of course I'm talking about AI.

Okay.

What are your thoughts?

Well, that's a very, very interesting conversation to have.

So the first I have, I will freely admit that I have used AI tools in the production of music.

I don't have AI tools to write songs for me and I wouldn't wish to do so.

But one of the, and I did want to actually talk about the Lisbon EP.

Let's wind the clock back to Lisbon.

I was going to Lisbon.

I thought, this is a great place.

We can shoot video here.

We can have some fun.

And I need to write a song about Lisbon.

So that when I get there, I've got something to sing about and I've never been to Lisbon.

How on earth do you write lyrics about a city that you've never visited?

And so I got chap GPT to write a set of lyrics, which I then pulled apart, edited and reworked into something that, that I could sing.

So I didn't entirely write the lyrics to that one song.

So that's confession.

Number one.

The interesting thing was it made it really, really hard to remember the words because when I've come to actually trying to sing them in front of a camera, I can't remember the words cause they're not been, they've not come out of my head.

They've come and there's something slightly, there's something very, not me about them, but you've got to sing something.

And I really didn't feel qualified to write a song about this city.

So I offloaded that on chap GPT.

And that's, that's a couple of years ago.

I could probably write a better song now than it could then, but I didn't ask you to write the tune or the chords or anything else.

Just some words that I could adapt to the music that I'd already got.

More recently, there are tools that I've been able to use on this album, which allow you to, to change your voice.

Now voice changing tools have been around a very long time.

You go back to the seventies and you listen to the vocoders that you hear on all sorts of late seventies records.

Electric light orchestra were great for that.

Mr.

Blue sky.

Yes.

Yeah.

They're changing the voice.

And I was using something on the last album, which allowed me to repitch my voice, my voice singing an octave higher, which sometimes sounded a bit weird and sometimes sounded kind of natural.

What I've done with this album and had so much fun doing is creating backing vocal where I am singing the backing vocals and then I'm giving them two different voices.

And I'm using this new tool that we have where I've got maybe 40 or 50 different vocal vocalists to choose from, because I'm not in a position where I can just call in a choir of backing vocalists at the drop of a hat.

I've had my guest vocalists and they've done really well, but I've had great fun making backing vocals.

I first did this on the last.

I remember having this conversation, very conversation with Mr.

Guthrie as I was finishing float.

And the last song float, and I'm standing in the garden telling him, say, Hey man, you've got to try this.

This is really cool.

You know, I've got 16 layers of backing vocals.

I've built up this kind of backing vocal group on float, doing the harmonies that is my singing and it's being harmonized, but with a male and female kind of virtual choir.

And that kind of the very first song that I wrote on solar, which is a song called we can see for miles, which another really good friend of ours has sung.

It's the third song.

The very first bit of vocals on that is a bit of backing vocals, which came to me.

But at that at that, but at that at that, I don't know what, what I was thinking of, but it just sort of, there's a little bit of something I thought, let's give that to a couple of female vocalists.

And it's still there in a mix that was done a long time later, but there's that little kind of, there's this kind of rhythmically kind of backing vocals.

There's some, ooh, la, la, some bits and pieces like that that give extra texture and dimensions to the music that weren't previously there.

So in that respect, using AI as a compositional, no, not compositional, but a recording tool in the same way as you might use a synthesizer to generate string sounds.

I can now use an AI voice to generate the female vocal.

I don't think they're good enough to be honest, to use as lead vocal, but as backing vocals and harmonies, and as a way of strengthening my own voice so that there's a voice that I can pick on, which is very close to my voice.

And it just makes my voice sound a little bit richer.

It blends in slightly different frequencies to the voice that I have and helps me sound fuller.

So, yeah, I like that.

What I can't get my head around is why anybody, apart from making easy money, would flood the market with AI written, recorded, produced slop.

You know, these songs are to me, they are very, very personal songs.

They're songs that make me laugh.

They're songs that sometimes make me cry.

I'm able to express more of what I want to hear with these tools, but there's no way that any of them are going to get in the way of my creation and my songwriting and my expression of feelings and thoughts.

That is what I try and produce.

Okay.

Okay.

So it sounds like what you're saying to the listeners and me, Andrew, it's a tool.

Yes, that's the way I approach it.

Yes, indeed.

A tool that you want to experiment with, a tool that you want to become more adept at using in whatever fashion that may be.

But in the end, you know, you will always have your personal stamp on the music.

Sure.

And if I was, if I was in a big studio with a big budget and a group of backing vocalists to hand, then maybe they would be the ones singing those vocals as it is.

I'm singing those vocals and then giving my voice to a different voice.

You know, I'm not asking them to generate anything.

I'm just retuning my voice to a different style.

You see what I mean?

It's so interesting because you and I are just talking and people can't see your response, your facial expressions, but I can see them.

And talking about this AI thing, there was a little bit of uncomfortability.

Well, absolutely.

Because a lot of people become this dirty word.

Yeah, totally.

Totally.

I remember I interviewed Oliver Ackerman from place to very strangers last earlier this year.

Was it last year?

Whenever I spoke to him and I asked him about AI, just a general question.

And the hostility was immense.

And he's not the only one.

There's a lot of people who don't want to think about, well, they have thought about it.

They don't want to be involved with it, shall we say.

And I can absolutely see that in the context of his music and what he does and the potential threat to people who try and make a living from music.

I'm in a lucky position where the music that I produce myself, I'm not trying to make a living from that.

And I'm not out on the road performing it.

And, you know, I can, I have a studio and I can do this stuff.

And frankly, if nobody else wants to listen to it, it's a kind of as it was when I was a teenager.

And I look back, it's almost like a diary in sound of my life, where I am at a certain point in my life.

It's always quite personal.

And that's always, usually there's a very personal element in what I do.

And that's increasingly the case as time has gone on.

And I've kind of mastered various skills in terms of production and being able to play.

Yeah, better.

And if we ever have a conversation again, Andrew, recorded or not, a year or two or, you know, five, seven years down the line, it'll be interesting to see your viewpoint perspective and AI.

And maybe it will be the same as what you just shared.

Now, maybe you'll be even Gideon.

Who knows?

Right.

As I say, for me, as a production and compositional tool, I feel that it's made, given me the option options to make a better album, purely.

No shame in vocals.

No, no, that a lot of people will be uncomfortable with that idea.

And that's why I'm, I'm keen to sort of make it clear that the music is all real, that those vocals were sung by a real person.

Who's so think of it, maybe more as voice altering software.

It just has to use AI to get from my voice to a female voice, rather than what you think of as AI generating from nothing or from a text prompt or something.

Is there anything else you want to say about this new album?

Anything you want to share?

Just have a look.

Think it's probably it's had, I think it's more accessible album.

I think it's, I hope it's more accessible because when I go back to the Camino next May, I'll be taking a batch of postcards to give out to people along the way to say, Hey, I've got this album and it's all about what we're doing here.

And, you know, you might not have the faintest idea what you guys or dream pop is, but have a listen and see what you think.

And the people that I've walked with who had nothing, no idea about it, I played sent them songs from it and had a great response to it.

Nice.

I think it's, it's a personal voyage and it's a very, I'm not a spiritual person.

I didn't, I know this is a, for some, it's a religious pilgrimage and that that's not me, but it's, it's, it's something that has kind of changed my life.

And I wanted to explore that in the music that I came out of it.

And I really wanted to make it the very, very, very best I could possibly do in tribute to all the people that I met and all the, all the hard work we all put into getting from the start to the finish of that incredible journey.

There's a musical journey to be had as well.

Would you call it a concept album?

Kinda.

Okay.

In, but then not, there's a theme running through it, which is that it was inspired by a journey, but it's also inspired by people.

It's also inspired by stuff that you see or just feelings.

So the fact that the inspiration came from.

Yeah.

The time in my life doesn't necessarily make it a concept album, but there are, you know, the artwork is all drawn from, from it.

It does.

It makes it quite clear to anybody who ever goes along this particular journey, where it's come from, but I'm not setting out to write a, an album about walking a trail.

It's just how that's affected me.

And I expressing that in music and those people.

Well, you did it beautifully.

What's coming up for you in 2026 and beyond?

Anything you want to share?

Well, I'm currently mastering a couple of albums, which I wish I could tell you about of somebody I know you're going to be very excited about for next year.

Yeah.

So that's all very exciting.

This album comes out on the 9th of January, solar album, which is coming out on three labels is my own label in Europe.

There is sure dive records in the UK and there's somewhere cold records in the States.

So we're all releasing it on the same day.

It's kind of, and that was, you know, I first tried to get a record deal in the mid eighties.

I used to have a really nice rejection letter from Ivo for AD stuck to my bedroom wall when I was 17 or 18.

And I've never made it.

And these I sent in this case, I sent these albums off and within hours of communicating and, and emailing links to this, those deals were done.

So that says I'm really, really, maybe I'll actually got something right for once.

I'm really pleased about that.

As for the rest of the year, it's a bit of an open.

Yeah.

This year has been so packed full of stuff.

Yeah.

I've tried to kind of keep next year open.

I'm going back to Spain in May and we'll spend another two weeks walking 260, 270 kilometers meeting people, having amazing experiences.

Will that result in the second album?

I don't know.

I really don't know, but I didn't know that this would come out of this.

I kind of felt at the end of the last album float.

Wow.

How can I top that?

And I'm kind of did nothing apart from that cover version.

Yeah.

And wasn't really thinking about it.

And I listened to it quite a lot while I was walking.

I listened to nothing while I was walking and I talked to people while I was walking and just let it come.

And who knows?

Will there be any more DKFM pristine masters?

The radio show will carry on.

I did that every month and, you know, I will find some more victims to interrogate.

You know, the moment the diary is kind of empty, so we will see what comes.

I think it's been such a, as I say, 2025 has been such a whirlwind from start to finish that I kind of need to breathe a bit.

Sure.

Come up for air and see what happens next.

How can people find your work?

Well, um, the obvious answers for me, I will go to band camp.

It's all there.

If you don't want to pay for it, go on Spotify.

It's all on, you know, and all of the other streaming services.

This album you will find through shore dive and you'll find through somewhere cold in the States.

If you would like to buy a copy, then, yeah, you'd be able to buy it on vinyl through shore dive.

You'd be able to buy a CD through shore dive in the States.

CDs be handled by somewhere cold.

This is the post Trump world where we can't send, I can't send a copy of this desk to you a less than 35 bucks because the whole postal system is totally screwed over by the new tariff system.

And you can no longer send a small packet.

You have to send a big box.

Heard that from other artists.

Yeah.

Um, so we're adapting and we're working together and we're working, you know, yeah.

Um, but that's, yeah.

And look at, you know, it'll be on, I'll be making some more videos.

I expect.

Nice.

So there'll be bits on YouTube.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'd love to do a worldwide tour.

Well, do you know what?

I have a rule on touring and that is that I will only go on tour when I can get slow dive as my backing band.

The beauty of this is it was never, ever going to happen.

Um, yeah, I had that conversation with Christian a couple of years ago.

Yeah.

We had a good laugh.

No, I don't think it's going to talk.

I would, I can't imagine the situation.

Where a band was together and I was fronting it, it would scare the life out of me.

I'm not, I'm not a performing musician.

I exist in the studio where I'm at home and I love that, but getting on stage scares the life out of me.

Never say never.

Okay.

Are you, this is like, this is like, um, the Smiths ever getting back together or just thing.

One thing you do have is discipline.

I'm going to wrap it up with a final quote, but this time we're not going to talk about it.

Here we go.

Again, from rules for a night written by Ethan Hawk discipline in the field of battle.

As in all things you will perform as you practice.

So practice hard with practice.

You build the road to accomplish your goals.

Excellence lives in attention to detail.

Give your all, all the time.

Don't save anything for the walk home.

The better a night prepares, the less willing he will be to surrender.

Andrew Rose.

Thank you so much for being my special guest on surprise cast.

Everyone check out this brand new album.

Solar put on headphones.

Share it with friends.

Go on your own walkabout.

And take in all the flavors, the sounds that he has offered up.

So kindly in his work.

My name is W.

Most of surprise cast.

And remember this, everyone.

Great music is all around us.

All you have to do is just keep your head up.

Keep your head up.

Keep your head up.

Keep your head up.

Keep your head up.

Keep your head up.

Keep your head up.

Keep your head up.

All you have to do is just keep your ears open.

Ciao.