Pete Gustard

Interview With Pete Gustard

SBS:  Welcome to our pages!  Whether you’ve been here with us in some way before, or you’re brand-new to the site, it’s probably best to get an introduction from you so that we get everyone on the same page to start.  Tell us a little bit about the history of your music, and what’s happening with it lately!?!

Pete Gustard:  Hey Jer, I’m Pete.  I’ve been writing and releasing music for longer than I really want to remember!  I guess I’m a graduate of the brief (but bright!) Manchester music scene in the UK many years ago playing in lots of different bands, which at the time we were trying our best to build the biggest and best independent music scene…some of which nearly happened…and some bands even became kinda famous for a very short time.  ☺ I toured with Manchester legends The Fall, used the same rehearsal space with Oasis, was managed by Derek Ryder (Shaun’s dad from Happy Mondays) and enjoyed myself enough to not remember most of the details. ☺

More recently I formed a two-piece band with singer-songwriter Alison Riley (Seashaped) releasing 3 albums, then started work as a solo artist, releasing 3 albums and a couple of EPs, then started a collaborative project with vocalist and songwriter Chris Smith (Giant Silent World) releasing 1 album and 1 EP.

I’m currently working concurrently on my next solo album and Giant Silent World‘s next album…who knows which will set free into the world first!

Someone once described my music as ‘complex but catchy, thought provoking but accessible,’ but I’d like to think anyone who listens to any of my stuff could make their own mind up as to what I’m all about….

SBS:  Let’s talk about the before and after of where you’re currently at.  What’s something about the music that you’re making now that you don’t think you could have done five years ago, and what’s something you think you’ll be able to do with your music five years from now that you can’t do today?  How have you grown as an artist/band, and what steps do you take to continue your artistic evolution?

Pete:  I’m better at recording and producing my own music now than I used to be…I think!  Over the years I’ve always had great people help engineer my recordings or help with productions I’m struggling with.  But, over the last few albums I’ve grown in confidence on how I want to sound, how to simplify productions and to just not care too much whether anyone gets me.  Yeah sure, I want people to access my art, but do I want to purposely make myself more accessible?  No, not really!  I’m happy being me and doing my thing, and if that thing you can find anything interesting in, I’m over the moon!  Really!  But, if I need to change to make that easier for ya, I’m good as I am thank you. ☺

I make a lot of (sometime obvious, sometimes not so obvious) links between songs, find paths between albums that make sense to me, tell stories I want to tell that mean a lot to me…and that over the recent years I’ve felt much more comfortable doing…and that feeling I hope will continue to grow over the coming years!!

SBS:  If you were to assess the overall health of the independent music scene right now, what would you say?  What are the positives and the negatives about the current state of independent music, and what do you feel like artists & bands can do to contribute to the community & help it grow beyond the music being made?  If you’re not actively looking to listen to the music of other independent artists/bands, is it really all that fair to expect anyone would listen to yours?  How do you help the scene around you grow?

Pete:  Honestly, I think the independent music scene registers barely a heartbeat in the commercial cataclysm of social media…bands and artists have no solid ground to lay the foundations of their art.  The world yells ‘go viral by doing this…,’ ‘pay for clicks, guarantee success…,’ ‘write a guaranteed hit like this…,’ while lining the pockets of big tech companies and the viral marketers that pedal their success stories, that have no basis to support independent art any more than they chase the clicks they guarantee themselves by following ‘become viral by making content about becoming viral…’

It’s heartbreaking in lots of ways and is missing the one key bit of advice that should be at the heart of art ‘BE YOURSELF’…it’s your superpower!  It’s the only unique thing you can offer the world!

I grew up playing local gigs in front of eager local faces loving and hating everything they saw in equal measure, but they were not short of passion.  Ever.  They believed they owned that scene as much as the kids that were up on the stage trying to define that scene musically.

Those opportunities just don’t exist anymore.  Live music has become over-bloated arena autotune productions at one end, with small niche established genre scenes at the other.  The opportunity to innovate, shock and really define new scenes has largely disappeared…well, unless that scene has been thrown in by a corporate marketeer at one of the huge influence marketing houses…

There are some exceptions though… Jer, take a bow!!!  Sites like sleepingbagstudios still know that the heart, soul, body and mind of music is still largely alive and well in the bedrooms of the hopeful out there…people are still making AMAZING music, not many people are listening to it while the big artists stream in their billions as part of carefully curated playlists, but it doesn’t make it any less amazing remember that!!

How to make things better?  It’s gonna take a lot to unpick the crazy social media platforms lack of airplay and exposure for independent artists…pay them, sure they’ll send you a few clicks and likes …don’t pay them and only your mum will probably read your well thought out updates on there…or click on a link to your latest masterpiece…that is, if you’re lucky and she’s not checking out a photo of a cat.

SBS:  What do you consider to be the biggest accomplishment or achievement you’ve had with your music to-date?  How do you personally measure your own success – is that something that even can be measured?  Is it awards, accolades, chart position…or is your definition of success based on something entirely different?  Should success, however you define it, be something that artists are continually focused on – or is success something that naturally occurs in the course of doing what you love to do?

Pete:  My biggest success, I think, is listening back to one of my albums and still thinking the decisions I made in what I wanted to say and how I chose to say it still make sense to me and don’t feel reactionary or shallow.  It’s really easy to write a song that says ‘Fuck <insert name of dictator/megalomanic here>’ but, for me, the theme of political change and the people who fight to make right the imbalances in society are the stories that I want to tell.  Loads of my material comes from peoples’ selfless acts, and I always think if I could be 1% of some of those people I’m literally heading in 100% of the right direction.

So, success isn’t the clicks, likes, views or virtual pats on the back, it’s the opportunity to tell the stories I want and as a result, literally anyone listening to that!

SBS:  When you’re working on something brand-new, and something about it just doesn’t feel like it’s coming together the way that you think it should, how do you know when it’s time to give up on it, or how do you know that it’s time to dig in even harder and find a way to make it work?  Are there distinct red flags you can hear when something’s not working?  What are the signs you look for that tell you to stop forcing the material?  What would actually encourage you to keep going with the process instead?

Pete:  Honestly, I just give up on a song when I feel that first hint of boredom or uncertainty with its identity.  Love that lyric I did, yeah carry on, I hit a groove with a bass line in there, yeah keep it going, not sure what this song needs, bin it!

I work pretty quickly, and things have to come together for me quickly for me to finish it.  Anything drags and its goodbye!!  There’ll be another song along shortly. ☺

SBS:  One of the points of general consensus in the art of making music, is that we all get our sound from somewhere…we hear what we like, then more often than not, we take tiny pieces of what we love to find our own voice & approach to go on and make music in our own way.  Essentially, what I’m saying is that it’s absolutely natural to be inspired by other artists/bands, and almost every artist/band ends up having that inspiration show up in their own work in some way, shape, or form.  What the real key is though, is retaining your own organic perspective – you still wanna be original too, right?  So how do you go about doing that?  Are there artists or bands that you know have been an influence on your style & sound?  How were you able to incorporate that influence without becoming too noticeably derivative and still be yourself?  Should we embrace and celebrate our influences more than we do?  It’s almost like we try not to admit influences exist in the pursuit of being original, but it’s like, bruh…if it’s there, we can hear it.  We all borrow something from those that came before us to some extent, don’t we?

Pete:  I’d like to think I’m me.  I’m 100% of every note, word and feeling in the songs I write.

I’m not.

I’m an Indy kid from Manchester, who grew up in a post punk world listening to much more 70s Funk than was agreeable to the majority of people I went to school with.  I never had a music lesson, was horrified at cover bands (or the thought of ever being in one) and bought a wah wah instead of a tuner as my first guitar accessory.  I always loved a diverse array of music and always dreamt I would one day understand how all those amazing bands made all them sounds so appealing to me.

But, I’ve never worked it out and don’t really want to.

I just can’t approach music as a technical exercise.  I’ve worked with people who have asked me for keys, time signatures, tempos and a whole host of music stuff I have no idea or care for, it’s just NOT ME!!

I play by ear at the speed I fancy and I pick the next chord based on a funny feeling I get when I’m ready to change ☺ …and I know that might sound horrific to some musicians out there, who are brilliant, remarkably talented and absolutely aware of the rules that surround music but the thought that A doesn’t go with B, because of C in certain keys in music makes no sense to me because I can literally play them without being struck down by lightening from above.  Try it, you’ll see! ☺

So, anyway, where were we…ahh yes, influences!  Ok, I’m 100% a result of all that stuff I listened to as a kid and that I can never change, but I’m 100% myself in the way the results pop out in my songs. ☺

SBS:  Has there ever been a time where you wrote something inside one of your songs…maybe it’s a lyrical line, or maybe it’s a riff of some kind…something that you did, where you surprised yourself?  I like to think we all have a moment or two where we can stand back and be amazed by something we created, and appreciate the fact that maybe, just maybe, we exceeded our own expectations of what we thought we could accomplish – you know what I mean?  Get as specific as you can so the fans out there know what they should be paying attention to when they hear it – what’s your favorite thing that you’ve written on the inside of one of your songs, and why does this particular piece resonate so much to you?

Pete:  There’s lots of parts of songs I’m proud of for one reason or another, might be a lyric, a riff, or just a weird tempo change ☺ …but I think the intro to “DESPERATE DAYDREAMS” from WASH IT DOWN WITH SUGAR is one of the bleakest introductions to a song I’ve ever written, and as a result it made me reset where I thought I could go in lyric terms…

“In every empty classroom, where laughter used to ring,

Echoes of a tragedy, a song that never sings,

We know there’s no god to guide us, on this path that we tread,

Children were the future, but they chose not to LEGISLATE.”

It’s bleak and offers no ambiguity in what I think is a solution.  Yeah its anti-gun freedoms, and yeah I like my songs to balance world challenges against world solutions and focus on positive change and people who promote those positive changes for the greater good of society, but it also reminds me that I struggle with gaining a positive aspect with certain things!!

SBS:  I’ve been having a lot of great debates lately about whether or not everybody that’s making music has the right to be heard…and you’d probably be surprised by how different people seem to feel about this issue.  I know where I stand on it, and I think you can all probably get an idea of what my position would be from this free interview we’re doing here & the way we run things at sleepingbagstudios…but regardless, I’m putting this question out there to you, because I’m interested in YOUR perspective.  Just because you’ve made a song, does that mean people should listen?  If your answer is yes, do your best to explain why you feel that way & why we should make a sincere effort to listen to the music of others.  If your answer is no, explain why you feel that way, but also explain why people should still be listening to your music if that’s the case – what would make your music the exception, and not follow the rule?  Is there any value to an idea that’s not finished, or a song in its demo stages, or maybe something that’s not recorded in a top-shelf studio or with good equipment – somebody still took the time to make that song to the best of their ability with the means they had to create it – should that be listened to, or not?

Pete:  I think its two-fold, artists have 100% the right to have the opportunity to be heard, but the world has a 100% the right to not listen if they choose not to. ☺

We are all fed music (and people’s art) daily based on algorithms that change like the wind and marketing budgets that remain robust regardless…those terms are the ones that we should be absolutely aware of and try harder to find music that isn’t part of that dynamic.

Where to find that is another question and challenge entirely…of course sleepingbagstudios offers a cornucopia of independent music to feast your ears on, but do we use that resource to entertain ourselves enough?  Or find our next favourite artist?

I don’t think we do, and that is a fundamental failing of the scene to not recognise the very thing that tries to course correct the failings of the corporate machine!

Sometimes a little less ‘my music is THIS!’ and ‘I deserve a platform’ and instead ‘wow that music is great’ and ‘they deserve a platform’ would not go amiss in our very precious independent world…

SBS:  There are ups and downs in the dynamics of almost every album we listen to, with very few exceptions.  Even those exceptions, probably still come down to more of a personal preference about what we enjoy about music and how we personally hear it, rather than anything being completely and totally “perfect” – you know what I mean?  Does an album actually need to have some kind of up/down dynamics in terms of what’s appealing to the masses in order for the best of the best songs in a lineup to be fully appreciated?  Wouldn’t every artist & band avoid the ‘down’ side (less accessible/less popular for example) if they could?  Does the ‘down’ side represent something else perhaps, like the story of an album or journey of an artist?  Is the ‘up’ side of a record as potent or noticeable if it doesn’t have a ‘down’ side to go with it?  Would a completely balanced album somehow be boring if it didn’t have the ups/downs that most have?  Do we HAVE to like every single song on a record for it to be considered complete?  Are the dynamics of an album something anyone can really steer in the direction they want to, or are all artists & bands simply going with the strongest material they have created at the time?

Pete:  Honestly, for me, every album should be a journey.  A place for laughter, tears, confusion and understanding.  And as artists, if we’re writing to establish ourselves in a genre through a formula for success, we’re definitely competing with much bigger budgets and marketing power that will better us every time…

I’ve said before and I’ll say it again; your superpower is YOU!  The uniqueness of your style and thoughts already place you in a position that no one can replicate.  But having the confidence to just let yourself rip and express that in a way that cares less about conventional success metrics can be a tough journey.

There are songs on some of my favourite albums I’m not a massive fan of (“Don’t Pass Me By” – The White Album – Ringo, I love you man, but I’m just not sure about this track ☺) and there are totally songs on my own albums that make me wonder what the hell I was thinking (“Goodbye Europe Goodbye” – The Open Vein – yay, let’s all hold a note on an electronic horn for 10 seconds to make a point! The song sentiment remains in fairness though just its implementation!)

I think when we write a collection of songs, we all think that at least some of those songs might have a better general reception than others, but if we let those thoughts guide us into basing our whole works of art on those notions, we won’t have an album journey, we would just have a pre-curated greatest hits that were never really hits in the first place…

SBS:  I wanna send out a shout-out to YOU from me personally – I appreciate everyone that has taken the time to talk tunes with me throughout the years, and I appreciate the time YOU have taken with this interview too.  Because this one’s a little different in the sense that it’s been sent out to multiple people and is a little more generic in that regard, I have no doubt whatsoever that we probably didn’t get to talk to you about something you wanted to talk about – so let’s fix that!  This final space is what we call the SBS Open Floor – a spot where you can say anything else you want to say to the people out there.  It can be anything at all…your main websites…something else you want them to know about you and/or your music…your favorite bands in the scene right now…the secret 11 herbs and spices to the Colonel’s secret recipe – you get the idea, and it’s probably best you choose something that suits you rather than take any of my suggestions, but feel free to take the SBS Open Floor for a ride.  Whatever it is you want the people to know, now is the prime time for you to tell’em!  Thanks again for everything – keep in touch!

Pete:  Jer, right back at ya man.  I LOVE what YOU do!  You’ve even literally made me pick up my guitar again and write and release more stuff because I craved your words as you dissect my art…

In closing though, honestly I care less if anyone ever listens to my music, but I do absolutely care that I write music honestly and it is about those things that mean something to ME.

I feel it’s an absolute privilege to be able to do this, and something I will never take for granted.

Be kind to yourself guys, write from the heart, never let anyone tell you you can’t or are incapable of doing something.  YOU ARE.  YOU WILL.

AND YOU WILL BE PROUD.

☺

Find out more about Pete Gustard from his official website at:  https://petegustard.co.uk

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