LEE HARVEY

Rip It Up, Issue 167, 1 June 1991, Page 14

LEE HARVEY

LEE HARVEY

Three years ago Lee Harvey would head up to the Gluepot with his guitar in one hand and a hipflask of bourbon in the other and ask Chris Knox or Otis Mace or whoever the hell was playing up there if he could take a turn first.

“| went up there and made up all this stuff. | had a riff that lasted 30 seconds and added on to it and

played it how | felt that night and it snowballed from there.”

He'd play between bands, make - up lyrics on the spot and just “bash away really wildly on my acoustic guitar and scream and pldy and that would be it.” '

Sometimes it'd be really good and sometimes it didn't work because he wasn'tin the mood but at least Lee Harvey never felt stale. Nowdays he feels he's lost some of that spirit of spontenaeity because he’s better known to the Gluepot crowd and “you know what they're thinking and

you're having to impress them instead of impressing yourself.” Meanwhile, Lee Harvey bought himself some four track equipment and holed up in a security building in Queen Street where the strange

acoustics and untoward atmoshpere enabled him to start recording his uniquely haunting songs, some of which are about fo be released on a Flying Nun EP. But the bedroom-recording stalwart has reservations about high-tech production, fearing that much of the spooky, spectral quality of his four-track style has gotten swallowed up by the studio. ; “It's just a bit too straight for me,” he says of the production process, “a couple of the songs | didn't play properly because | just lost focus. | was producing it and recording it all myself and | got saturated, | didn’t know what sounded good and what sounded bad after a while. Ideally | would like to have known how it all worked, it took me hours to explain to the engineer what | wanted. The communication thing was a slow boat to China but it's not too bad, it's

astrong EP.” Flying Nun are also keen to release an album of his “dirty four track stuff”, but Lee wants to leave off a while, otherwise people won't know where he’s coming from. Still, the four track songs are special, their weird atmoshpere intact and unvarnished. Two of the tracks on his demo tape were recorded with occasional backing band The Bagmen (the guitarist and drummer from the Hallelujah Picassos with whom he enjoys a “really cool chemistry” on stage) and demonstrate the reggae sensibilities of that outfit. Other songs — ‘Girl In Yellow’, ‘Harry’, 'Honey Jar' — Lee Harvey seems to write from some distant, cloud shrouded shore of the imagination. On ‘Don’t Wanna Feel Ya Gold’ he introduces a distinct

American twang, guitar flanges dumbly, he sounds like an old man from the bayou. The tracks on the demo are ghosted with cheap echoes and scraps of voicesand

animal sounds. He uses whatever is at hand at the time: “Little casio

tones, toys and things, my drum machine’s just this shitty little casio tape. | just play around with it and get a good sound and go ‘okay”.” Just recently Lee Harvey has joined another band with Buzz from BFM's Buzz’s Kiddies Show and the drummer from Jean Paul Satre

Experience. He's not sure what

direction to take next, wanting to put all his energies into one thing but remaining true to the spirit of his first love, four track home recording. As for inspiration, last year Lee Harvey discovered the White Album. He says he doesn't buy many records (can't afford to) but he is a big fan of Texan songwriter Daniel Johnston.

“He is one soloist | really admire. Sure, he’s a little bit crazy but his lyrics are just so good because when you listen to him you're hearing no other kind of influence, you can imagine him not even having a record collection, not even hearing other bands. This is coming straight from him and to me that's the most important thing.”

DONNA YUZWALK