Hang Ten with Surfquake

My exclusive interview with New Model Army and Surfquake's Nelson. First published in the January 2012 issue of Colchester 101 magazine.

Barring a few years spent living in the North when he joined New Model Army, Nelson has been a familiar figure on the town’s music scene for many years, usually playing in four or five bands at once. I caught up with him for a chat at the 8 Ball Diner on the A12 to talk about all matters surf guitar.

 

Beyond the streets of sunny Colchester he’s known by The Family, the fiercely loyal global following of New Model Army, as the post-punk/alternative rockers’ bass guitarist. Back here in his hometown though Nelson is a highly popular and respected figure in the town’s music scene who has played in more local bands over the years than you could shake a stick at. In the run up to this past Christmas alone he played eleven gigs for seven different bands, having to remember how to play too many songs to mention, putting in many hours of rehearsal time, let alone the actual gigs themselves “It gets stressful sometimes but you’ve got the make ends meet and it’s the only way I know” Nelson  tells me, having made his living from music since leaving the job he did working in the drawing office of a local factory for a couple of years after leaving school.

An accomplished musician, Nelson plays many instruments, in fact the great Martin Newell once told me “If you’ve got Nelson in the band then basically you’ve got the band.” Amongst his many talents he also plays double bass with local favourite Ady Johnson, and is featured on Ady’s critically acclaimed album Tell the Worry Dolls. Being so much in demand it’s a wonder he finds time for projects of his own, but these days when he’s not touring Europe and America with New Model Army Nelson’s main passion is his surf guitar band Surfquake in which he plays lead guitar alongside Ophelia Mills (keyboards) Nick Sadler (bass guitar) and Danny Sceats (drums). “We’re musicians and we just want to play, and nobody else around here was doing this” he tells me, explaining how the band love the Surf Guitar sounds that he and his fellow New Model Army bandmates often play in their tour bus on their long road trips across the USA when, surprisingly,  it’s the only style of music they can all agree on listening to.

“We decided that there is no point competing with all the younger bands playing modern music. And there’s so many bands doing the older stuff from the 60s and 70s, and again so many doing Blues, that we just decided to play surf rock instead.  Also, I see quite a few bands out there and I think ‘They’d be really good if they had a great singer’ and I just didn’t want us to fall into that bracket! None of us are great singers so playing instrumentals was the perfect way forward for us.”

It’s a sound that has made them one of the most popular bands in town, in demand with both venues and promoters alike for their ability to pull in good crowds and quickly win over even the most nonpartisan members of the crowd.  This in turn has also lead to appearances at summer festivals, in fact one of several times I caught them last year was at the Kelvedon Free Festival where they went down a storm. “That was one of the highlights of last year, along with a festival on the beach at Dunkirk in France. We also played a festival in Germany which was great fun. We clocked up over 20 gigs last year and hopefully we’ll get booked for over 30 this year.

 I ask Nelson about their new album “We’ve had so many people ask us if we have a CD they can buy that we finally thought we’d better record one, which took us the best part of a year to get together. Even though we’ve been managing to get loads of gigs here, and in Germany and France, we thought it would be great to have something better than just a demo to give out to get the gigs. So hopefully this will help us to progress a bit. We’re not looking to become famous, or get in the charts or anything like that. Surfquake has always just been lots of fun for us. That’s the most important thing.”

The resulting album, Surf and Destroy, is a 50/50 split between Surfquake’s own compositions and classic surf guitar songs which include well-known TV and movie themes “On this album there are two 60s TV themes, the Munsters and Joe 90. People don’t realise they know some of these tracks but if you switch on your TV you are guaranteed to hear Misirlou by Dick Dale and His Del-Tones in an advert or programme at least once a week. We’ve got Toby Bull from Fuzzface playing trumpet on that one and we are very pleased with how it’s turned out.”

The album also features covers of recent Rock and Roll Hall of Fame entrants The Ventures’ War of the Satellites, and Pipeline and Penetration, but their own songs are so strong that they blend seamlessly with the covers, a testament indeed to the band’s song writing and musical abilities: “A lot of people come up to us at gigs and ask ’Who was that track by? Where can I get it?’ When I tell them it’s one of ours they are always surprised. We’re very proud of that.”

And so they should be.

The album’s cover was painted by the famous comic book artist Kevin O’Neill who produced the image of Tharg on the front cover of the very first issue of 2000AD, and who has worked with some of the great comic book writers such as Alan Moore, collaborating together on titles such as Marshal Law, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen which was made into the 2003 movie starring Sean Connery. So how did this come about? It seems that O’Neill was in town for a signing and wandered down to The Bull where Surfquake were playing. Nelson laughs and tells me “I got chatting to him and thought ‘Well, I might as well ask him’ and he said “Yeah, I love the band. I’ll do it.’”

Kevin O’Neill is not the only one who loves Surfquake. Here at 101 we are huge fans and wish them the very best of luck with the album.

Surf and Destroy is available for download on iTunes and Amazon.

Purchase the album here: www.surfquake.co.uk'

Like' Surfquake on Facebook here: www.facebook.com/Surfquake

Photography by Andy Roshay. www.roshayphotography.co.uk

I run Media48, a Colchester based graphic and website design and marketing agency where we know a thing or two about how to market a business. If you would like to find out more about what we can do for your business then give us a call on 0800 756 1470 (we even pay for the call) or email me simon@media48.co.uk