Dan Morelle

Following on in the series of re-publishing interviews I did a while ago, here is an interview with The Aloof. I honestly have no recollection of doing the interview and was surprised when I stumbled upon it in a dusty back issue of G-echo December ‘99! Alas, The Aloof do not appear to have done much since this outing although band members are also elements of the gestalt entities that are Sabres of Paradise and Red Snapper. This is the interview:

The Aloof are Ricky Barrow, Dean Thatcher and Gary Burns. They have released three albums over the last four years and after parting company with East West, have taken the initiative and started up their own label - Screaming Target Recordings. Their new album, ‘This Constant Chase For Thrills‘ was recorded in the resurrected Sabersonic Studios in London. Ex-Sabres of Paradise Gary Burns (admittedly feeling a bit shady) took time from his constant chase and answered a few questions posed by Dan Morelle.

The name? It’s actually a dance from an old film called Sweet Charity. “It’s like this mad 60’s dance. Shirley Maclaine does in the film, y’know like the Gap advert, that’s almost identical to the dance in this film and it’s called The Aloof. In 1998 three days after the release of ‘Seeking Pleasure’ The Aloofs last album, their record label East West dropped them.
“You didn’t miss a lot to be honest”,
“That was a bit of a weird album it sort got taken out of our hands really, it was the first time we’d been asked forcefully to get a producer. They were asking us to write f**king pop songs, that’s the bottom line, it’s not what we do.”

So if The Aloof wanted their creativity taken seriously why did they sign to a major like East West?
“We wanted to take our sound live and you need tour support to do things like that because it costs a fortune. There’s 16 people on the tour bus … wages every day, it costs us two and half grand to do a gig”.

‘Doing it for money’, the strongest track on the album, is that song about the band?
“No, not at all the lyrics are about Ricky. When we got dropped by the label he had to get a job, he’s got a family. We never were in it for the money to start with, at the moment we’re skint as f**k.”
How do the band generate ideas?
“I just try loads of different chords, I’ve always got mad little ideas about different chord changes then when something hits that we all like we all go ‘yep, that’s the one’, it’s not really scientific we tend to just have a smoke and see what happens.”

Any suggestions for up and coming bands: “if you’ve got the right ideas and you’ve got the right heart for it that’s gonna shine through no matter what you do, if you’re talented and you’ve got ideas people are gonna see that and you only get better the more you do it.”
“People don’t know how to take us really, we’re always trying to sound like us and no one else.”