Interview: Sean McGhee of Artmagic (2018)

Music producer-programmer / lyricist / songwriter and vocalist for the band Artmagic, Sean McGhee, thank you very much for agreeing to this interview.

For some time, you have been an in-demand music programmer/mixer for some major stars, including: Britney Spears; The Sugarbabes; Imogen Heap; Robyn; Alanis Morissette; Josh Groban; Mike and the Mechanics etc, and you have written for, and performed with many others, including Alison Moyet. How do you balance this with Artmagic and the demands of the band?

With great ease, to be honest! Both Richard and I have busy careers – he’s been a full-time member of Suede again since they reformed in 2010, and I’ve had plenty to keep me busy. Both of us spend a lot of our time on tour these days.  But we allowed our schedules to inform how we wrote our current album.  Instead of Richard putting together musical ideas at home and bringing them to me to write a melody, we would start with nothing. He’d come to my studio for a six-hour session whenever we both had a free day and we’d write, with him on guitar and me at the piano, working together from scratch – a fully collaborative process.

We also tried to work very fast, and instinctively, on the production, again making a feature out of our limited availability. I didn’t want to make another album full of sonic washes; all watercolours and fine detail.  I wanted to produce something that was more upfront and direct. Having limited time was great because we couldn’t spend forever agonising – it was just, ‘get it right, put it down, move on.’ So, I actually think it was really good for us.

 

How did you and Richard Oakes meet? Had you been a fan of Suede?

I was, but not in a ‘down the front at every show’ sort of way. I was a fan, but I’d lost them around the time of Head Music – I didn’t buy their transition into cold electronca and I felt Brett had lost his way, lyrically. But sometime in the mid-2000s, a friend lent me a copy of Sci-Fi Lullabies, the Suede b-sides compilation, and I was struck by just how great they were, and by Richard’s guitar playing and musical choices. Around this time, I got talking to another friend about Richard’s seeming disappearance from music. He encouraged me to try and make contact with a view to writing with him. And, as it turned out, he knew Richard’s brother a bit, so he found out who was managing Richard and put us in touch.

I think what swung it for us was that we wrote ‘Forever In Negative’ together the very first time we got in to the studio. We’re very proud of that song, and if you get something that good on day one, it has to be worth taking it further.

Artmagic’s acclaimed début album, Become the One You Love (2012), contains some of the most beautiful melodies and achingly-poignant lyrics in recent UK pop. How is the songwriting spread between you and Richard?

That’s kind of you to say – thanks.

On album one, it was ‘music by Richard, melodies and lyrics by Sean’. That said, if Richard has a melodic thought I’ll always take it seriously – so much of ‘Half-Life’ was him pushing me somewhere I never would have thought to go.

On the new album, it’s more collaborative.  One thing I was keen to do was to ‘bake in’ some concepts, right from the writing stage; in particular - sing less. I find ‘Become the One You Love’ a bit exhausting because I start singing four bars in and I don’t shut up until the very end of the record. I wanted more space. I also wanted more synth melodies, and less synth washes. So, when we started writing new material, we’d work together on chord change ideas, and I’d get into a vocal melody, but after a while I was always saying, ‘let’s write a part here, not a vocal melody’, and Richard was very much up for it, so I’d get on the synth and get into it. And he has plenty of input into the melodic stuff, too. We were both very much in agreement with the direction we were taking.

Similarly, one of Richard’s pet hates is endless beds of guitars blandly strumming out the harmonic information like some sort of indie robot, so when we got past the initial writing stage we binned all the stuff that did that and he came up with new parts that actually do something beyond just saying ‘here’s the chords’.

 

The title of the last album, Become the One You Love, conveys an uplifting message of personal, emotional growth. The song, ‘Down in the River’, seems to convey a plea for ‘coming out’ to whatever variety of sexuality is necessary for the individual. Many of the songs contained within the album evince a sense of elevation via a painful emotional transition. To what degree do the songs represent a personal narrative?

Well, they do and they don’t. I’d be prepared to admit that the first album is more autobiographical than the second will be, but it’s not as simple as my diary, laid bare. You have to do more than that, because you should aspire to more than having an albums with titles like ‘I Loved You But You Left Me’ or ‘Lonely ‘Cos You Left Me’ or ‘Love is Nice’. Which doesn’t stop a lot of people doing it anyway, of course, because the concept that there is anything worth saying that isn’t completely self-obsessed has vanished from current pop music.

‘Down in the River’ was me paying it forward as a gay man, really, although it’s comical to think I might connect via a song with a teenager. Richard and I are both in our 40s now, after all, and I don’t think anyone who’s not our contemporary listens to our music. Which is fine, by the way, and perfectly natural.

‘Down’ is definitely a message of ‘come out, be who you are, dive in, the water’s fine’. And I did agonise, actually, because I thought it might be a tired sentiment - and then Gaga put ‘Born This Way’ out after we’d written the song, but before we released it, and I thought, oh, not so tired after all! I think ours is a bit more subtle, lyrically, but good on Gaga – I bet there’s a sizeable number of young queers who literally owe their lives to her music, so good for her.

The thing was, when I was still in the closet as a teenager, I had Erasure’s live video from the Wild! tour, and Andy Bell sang a barnstorming version of their song ‘Hideaway’, which is all about coming out, and it really meant something to me back then. I think I was trying to end up in the same territory. And it’s an unashamedly big pop song – from the moment we wrote it, I was calling it the Girls Aloud song.

 

Speaking as a gay man of a certain vintage, I find a number of Artmagic songs connect directly with my own life experience, in a way that I think is still very unusual in contemporary music. Certain lyrics seem to directly address the shifting sociosexual parameters of contemporary relationships. ‘The Sleeper’, for instance, must ring true to an enormous number of people. And your cover of Robyn’s ‘Call Your Girlfriend’, when sung by a man, is a wonderful antidote to the routine, customary, heterosexual direction. Is this a conscious ingredient in some of the songs?

It can be conscious. I mean, I’m a gay man, and that’s my romantic reality, so I want to be true to it. It’s not a strict policy but I do have it in mind.

It’s nice of you to mention ‘The Sleeper’ because no-one ever mentions it. I don’t think anyone likes it. I certainly don’t think it’s our best song, but it got written because of ‘I Keep On Walking’, which is really a song about surviving bereavement, but it starts out with two men forming a relationship after one encounters the other with his then-girlfriend on a hiking trip. And she leaves the narrative almost immediately. I kept thinking I was doing her a disservice, and that she deserved a say as well, so we wrote ‘The Sleeper’ so we could get her side of the story. Once we’d done that, Richard said, ‘why don’t we write a song from the perspective of the other guy?’, which was a brilliant idea, so we wrote ‘The Scruff of the Neck’ and ended up with this little triptych. So, it wasn’t really intentional – we were just following the narrative paths of these three people.

I do think hard about the people I write about, even if they’re fictional. I feel for all three of the people in that little song cycle – one ends up having her boyfriend leaving for another man, one ends up dead, and one ends up trying to cope in the wake of his loss.

As for ‘Call Your Girlfriend’, we were asked (i.e. coerced) by our press people on the last album to do a couple of covers for the blogs. We had about 5 minutes to do them because Richard was already working on Suede’s album Bloodsports, so we had to pull them together really quickly. And it’s not something we’d do again – Richard really isn’t keen on them. But I must be honest – I love our version of ‘Call Your Girlfriend’. The pressure was on, though - the original ‘Call Your Girlfriend’ is one of the great pop songs – it’s fucking amazing. And I can’t resist a bit of heartbreak on the dancefloor. So I thought, knowing I was going to be a gay man singing a song written by a woman to a man, if we’re going to do this at all, and I’m singing it, it can’t just be as simple as that. So we wrote a brief extra section which makes it clear that guy singing it knows the man he’s seeing is never going to leave his girlfriend for him, and so he’s forcing the situation to stop himself from being caught there forever as the secret lover. I like that we did that.

Also, even though we did the dreary thing of slowing a banger down into a ballad, I think we avoided the modern trap of making a beige acoustic version of a classic big song, sung by someone who sounds like they’ve never known the touch of another human being. There’s a long list of those and I fucking despise all of them.

 

Can you tell our readers a little about yourself? Where did you grow up, and who were your musical heroes and influences through your adolescence? Were you always destined for a life in music?

I was born in Birmingham in the UK, but my family moved to Ireland when I was 2, and I spent the next 11 years living right on the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, mostly on the NI side. When I was 13, we moved back to Birmingham, and I’ve lived in the UK ever since, although I do hold an Irish passport – something which, in the face of our ruinous and racist referendum to leave the EU, I’m relived to have. I’m also glad we moved so I didn’t have to suffer a closeted adolescence in UK’s equivalent of Alabama - although even Alabama has equal marriage now, which Northern Ireland doesn’t.

I can look back now and say I was always destined to be a musician, because I was always obsessed with music, but if you’d told me at 16 that’s what I’d end up doing for a living, I’d have laughed in your face. Being creative was something other people did, and that’s an attitude borne completely out of the community I grew up in, and it took time to get past it. Plus I was a fat, closeted queer, getting bullied by both teachers and pupils at school, and dealing with all that was quite enough to be getting along with.  But the seed planted itself in my mind at some point during my late teens, and I blindly pursued it, without a plan B. Best thing I ever did. No plan B makes you work harder.

The first band I ever loved was ABBA.  I always wanted their records for birthdays and Christmas. I remember getting ‘Super Trouper’ for my fifth birthday and feeling quite put out because it was on cassette and not vinyl. I was obsessed; I have a vivid memory of making a toy record player out of cardboard when I was about 4, and the records I made to go with it were all ABBA records.

The thing is, when you’re very young, you listen to people singing about love or loss and it feels very adult and fresh because it’s new to you, and you’re too young to really understand it. So something that might feel quite gauche or obvious as an adult has something in it that can really capture a child’s imagination, and there are a lot of ABBA songs that you could fit into that category. Not to put them down, though – Bob Dylan or John Lennon never wrote anything as lyrically coruscating as ‘The Winner Takes It All’ or ‘The Day Before You Came’. And, musically, of course, theirs is a rich and colourful world – amazing melodies, amazing chord changes, fantastic arrangements, beautiful production, and hooks absolutely everywhere.

All the way through my childhood I loved synthpop – Depeche Mode, Yazoo, Erasure, Nik Kershaw, Howard Jones, The Human League. That’s where I started. But I’ve never stopped with music. I go to more gigs than I ever have and I still buy a crazy amount of new music every year. I don’t do nostalgia.

Artmagic’s current album, The Songs of Other England, has very much a pastoral flavour to it. Images of agrarian England and the countryside are plentiful. I think I might also have detected a couple of musical nods to Steeleye Span in the mix.  The title song seems to have the cadence of certain Victorian poetry, such as by Alfred Lord Tennyson.

I’ve spent the last few years immersing myself in English folk music, both for the songs and the tunes. I’ve been to endless gigs and I’ve been learning to play the diatonic accordion. This doesn’t mean you’re getting 10 x ‘John Barleycorn’ on this record, but lyrically it’s definitely had an influence on me. The songs are, in the main, character sketches that examine different ideas or emotions from the perspective of different people — a lonely fisherman, a farmer ploughing the land, a Muslim woman birdwatcher or a child watching the snow fall down. There’s also a song of praise to folk song itself. It’s a more thoughtful album than the first, I’d say.

Musically, it’s more of what we do best – harmonically rich, melodically strong, guitar-driven, but with synths – but with a more direct approach, and a pared-back sound. It’s less poppy, too – the songs are often a bit longer and we didn’t want to agonise over getting ‘the single’ when we know that radio is almost certainly not going to play it anyway.  And we’re different people to who we were six-years ago, so it’s important that we went somewhere different on this one. I think it’s brilliant.