Apr

3

2007
http://www.windmillmusic.co.uk/
Album Reviews : Puddle City Racing Lights, Racing/Tokyo Moon


LP6 : : Hey is this Mathew Thomas Dillon?

Matthew : Hello, yes…is this the Lunapark6 people?

LP6 : : Yes it is…

Matthew : How are you?

LP6 : : Fine…did I catch you at a good time?

Matthew : No..no…no..I’ve been expecting your call. Where abouts in America are you?

LP6 : : New Orleans

Matthew : Oh are you? Its a great part, I’ve been there actually.

LP6 : : When did you come to New Orleans?

Matthew : Oh when I was like 17 years old actually. I was hanging on..you know… Bourbon Street.

LP6 : : (laughs) What were your impressions of it?

Matthew : It was great. It was really good. Its got a really great atmosphere about it. A great place to hang out.

LP6 : : I would agree. I heard you made a music video last week?

Matthew : Yeah we did actually. We shot a video for “Fit.” I was just speaking to the director actually. But they’re having trouble with the edit. Having trouble making me look handsome you know.

LP6 : : (laughs)

Matthew : No that’s not true. But they’ve cut different versions of it and they want me to look at it. I think simple is better. But we shall see.

LP6 : : Was that the first music video you made?

Matthew : Yeah..it’s completely the first one. Fit is going to be the first single and then they’ll be another single in the middle of the year. And then there will be another one just before Christmas. So we’ll be doing three videos. It was really hard work actually this first video. I thought it was going to be really easy and fun. I thought I would spend the whole time laughing and doing cartwheels, but it turned out to be really difficult, so maybe in the next one I’ll get someone else to pretend to be me or something like that.

LP6 : : Thematically what is the video is about?

Matthew : We were doing a bit of an homage to Rocky. You know when Rocky goes on his run through Philadelphia in his old gray track suit? We were doing that around London, so you’ll get to see like all the good sites in London. Its actually quite funny. It kind of looked like Rocky was on holiday and he still went for his run. Like he couldn’t chill out in London and he still had to go out for his run. It should look good hopefully.

LP6 : : I can’t wait to see that.

Matthew : It’ll be out shortly. Its nearly finished now. You’ll get to see it soon, I hope.

LP6 : : Is Windmill a one man band or do you have other members now?

Matthew : It’s quite nice now actually. For the first time we kind of got permanent band members for the live side. Like were doing some shows with just a cellist. We’re doing some shows with a drummer and bass player. It’s always going to be a little bit different. But now we kind of have this group of people that are really committed to touring with us and being part of it. So, I mean Windmill will always be just me, but I’m lucky to have this great group of people I met during recording that all are going to be playing live.

LP6 : : When did you start recording “Puddle City Racing Lights?”

Matthew : It was last summer. I went to Manchester where Airtight Studios is and where we made the record. I think I first went over there in June or July? It kept getting pushed back and back because I still hadn’t signed the contract. It was with lawyers and we were just really keen to get going. So yeah, last summer. We did it over about 13 days in total, including mixing. But, I kept going back to remix’ing it because I wasn’t happy with it and it kept costing Melodic more and more money. It got to the point where David at Melodic said, “Ok this is the last time we have to mix it.” But we nailed at it at the end, I hope anyway.

LP6 : : Yeah its an amazing record. I love the record.

Matthew : Ah its so nice of you to say. I really love Lunapark6 actually. It’s really cool. Someone sent me the review you did of the 7” on Static Caravan and I’ve known about it since then. So I’ve visited occasionally ever since then. Yeah it’s really good and I really hoped I would get a good review on there as well, because you really liked the 7” and I really feel conscious of letting people down that liked the demos and stuff like that.

LP6 : : Awesome, thank you very much. Where did you get the title “Puddle City Racing Lights” from?

Matthew : I mean, the basic idea was, just like this feeling I’ve always had while growing up whenever I was in a big city like London and it was raining and you know…the summer setting and there were bright lights just kicking around everywhere. And it was trying to take, like we do with the songs, an image like that and try to word it in a different way. In a way that sort of only I could think of, that is personal to me. So it was just expressing that feeling in a title.

LP6 : : Gotcha. During that 13 day recording period, what was the general vibe like? Were you kind of nervous since this was your first album?

Mathew : Oh God..I was really terrified. I think the first morning I was really really terrified. Especially since the way Windmill has progressed, because it was just me recording stuff on my own for like 10 years. Then to get signed and all that was so great, and it’s such a great idea in your head and when you come to do it, you kind of get freaked out by the whole thing. And its not like I had band members that I had known for years and years that were gonna help me get through it. I remember the first morning waiting outside the studio just thinking “You know this is like 18 months work that we’ve got to do?” 10 days was the initial schedule. I just thought there’s no way we’re gonna do it. So yeah it was really scary, but Tom Knott who produced the record with me, he’s just an absolute legend. He’s so open minded, I mean he has years more experience than I do, but he was still open minded to all my suggestions. He knew it was my record and he just did everything he could to get it to sound like how I wanted it to sound.

LP6 : : You said Windmill has been making music for 10 years?

Matthew : I have like thousands of tapes and cd’s and thousands of songs. Like that song “Asthmatic” was done when I was like 16 years old. There’s like an old versions of it as well. In fact you take the demo’s from 10 years ago, it sounds exactly the same to me. I don’t know what I was waiting for but its good to finally get going with it.

LP6 : : Are you self taught or classically trained?

Matthew : I am self taught. I got bored of keybaording and just started to hammer things out. Then I went to this girl that I was really attracted to and I made her give me piano lessons. But it was mostly because I was attracted to her. She used to give me piano lessons in her pajama’s which was really really cool (laughs). Connie Smith her name was. What ever happened to Connie Smith? We don’t know.

LP6 : : (laughs)….Do you also play the guitar?

Matthew : I play a little bit of the acoustic guitar. “Boarding Lounges” was written on an acoustic guitar. There’s like an original version which was acoustic guitar. I know like a few chords but you know you can write a billion songs with a few chords. But, it’s always been piano for me. Its my first love all the time.

LP6 : : So you will like hammer out stuff on the piano first then build lyrics around it?

Matthew : I have a digital 8 track recorder that I did all the demo’s on. It cost like, you know, it would be like $400 or whatever, not to expensive. I improvise some piano and then I just start recording some vocals and then keep improvising until it’s kind of there. It will always have to be spontaneous. Like if I keep driving it, you know it will lose its magic I think. Everything has to be improvised and spontaneous. It’s always better that way I think.

LP6 : : There seems to be a theme on your record about transportation and airports. What inspired you to write about that theme?

Matthew : I just think like new opportunities are really exciting. I mean, it’s just a great way of expressing it, just run with the theme about airports. You know you go to an airport and like people get really blasé about it. Whenever I go I’m like, “Wow where is everyone going?” It’s incredible.

LP6 : : Fluorescent Lights – how did that song came about?

Matthew : A lot of the songs that I do just come from images I have in my head. They’re kind of like dreams or they feel like I’ve been there or I have done it, when I probably haven’t. I wrote that song in an old church hall out in the country in England. It was a basic song that I tried to get together for a live show. I just really felt conscious of that fact of wanting something so slow and subtle and simple and that could just erupt on a chorus. Thats how it kind of evolved. Again it was kind of expressing that feeling of going somewhere and bright lights, just wanting opportunities when perhaps you didn’t have them.

LP6 : : What about Tokyo Moon?

Matthew : That was a big improvisation session. Sometimes I kind of come up with lyrics that are coming from the subconscious rather than conscious. I mean what does that mean? I don’t know. I was messing around with the piano and there was a girl there. She’d given me a magazine and it had a problem page in it. I was like doing the letters that people had written in with their problems, I was doing them as songs and sort of in between doing that and the replies I was doing “The results are pending…” It just came from that and she went “Oh I love that! You got to make that into a song.” One of those strange things that just evolved and you couldn’t do it again. It just happened.

LP6 : : Amazing.

Matthew : Yeah its bonkers. The whole thing is crazy!

LP6 : : My friend Mike that wrote the review for Puddle City Racing Lights, he wanted me to ask you what exactly is a “Plastic Pre-Flight Seat” ?

Matthew : I’m always conscious of the fact that no matter what I write about, however it’s been written about before, wherever it has been written about before, it has to be said in a way I think is really fresh. I was thinking of sitting in one of those plastic seats in a departure lounge to fly. To think of a new way of saying what that was and it was “a plastic pre-flight seat.” And that was kind of about if you have a fear of flying, but also a fear of anything. How exciting that feels, but sometimes it feels too exciting to the point where people don’t do anything about what they actually want to be doing. When really you should move past that.

LP6 : : Speaking of transportations and airports, whats the most memorable place you’ve been to?

Matthew : (Thinking) I think it was sitting in a donut shop in London when it was raining …was really amazing. Like anything can be amazing. I don’t think you have to go too far to always appreciate things. I’ve been to some amazing cities. I mean New York is amazing, New Orleans is amazing. Rome is incredible. I’m really looking forwards to getting out and visiting these places. You know going there and playing there. Traveling while doing the thing you really care about is the ultimate way to live I think.

LP6 : : Definitely. The thing about the donut shop in London I can totally relate to. Some places around here, I’ll just sit around here and snap some pictures. Those would be the best pictures that would ever come out rather than some landmark or something that you would think would be the best place.

Matthew : Thats so true. I think it’s so easy to get blasé about it. When there’s people from all over the world that would die to see what you’re seeing everyday.

LP6 : : Speaking of which, the album cover for Puddle City Racing Lights looks amazing, how did that come about?

Matthew : I have this stack of old notebooks that I do lyrics in. For every lyric there is kind of like a strange doodle. Theres this guy in this raincoat that I have done from when I was 17 or 18 years old in one of the old songbooks. For some reason it has always stuck with me and it has always seemed really representative of the music I was making. So it just seemed really fitting to put him on the cover. A great designer friend of mine called Jonah Buckley…I sat with him and I came up with the concept and he did all this amazing artwork for it. Which just couldn’t have gone better.

LP6 : : Definitely awesome cover.

Matthew : That was one of the things I was really nervous about. because you have this body of work and then it has to be represented by something else, which isn’t your music. It’s a big responsibility to get it right. We sat for hours and hours and we pained over it, but I think was worth it by the end.

LP6 : : Musically. what influenced you when you were younger?

Matthew : A lot of things I was listening to were quite sort of the alternative acts but I mean they were pretty big. I was listening to REM and Counting Crows and the Eels,.. they were all the Americana stuff but It wasn’t really that left field. I think it was my idea just locked away in a bedroom without having been exposed to any left field music to take these great like alternative pop songs and twist them a little more and make it further left field. That was always my vision for it I think. Just something outrageously distinctive but still you know..really different and felt a little bit fresh.

LP6 : : After the album release are you planning to tour?

Matthew : We’re doing a few shows here and there. We sort of got a lot of interest over in France, Spain, and Sweden. We’re doing all that over the summer. We’re not playing every night, its like 3 shows a month at the moment. I mean there filling up all the time. I would just play constantly. I love playing the songs, especially to the people that know the songs. That just amazes me.

LP6 : : You like the live performance part hunh? Don’t get nervous?

Matthew : You know I definitely do get nervous, but you know I earned my stripes. I mean like the year before, prior to getting signed with Melodic, I was playing some places where they just didn’t like that kind of music at all. In retrospect, you look back at it, and it’s quite funny. you know? We played to a goth audience that shouted “you’re worse than the Milkmen!” and I didn’t even know what that meant, but apparently I’m worse than the Milkmen. And then some went “Its OVER!” at the end. You know, its heart breaking, but to look back at it, its good to sort of gone through that kind of thing.

LP6 : : Thinking about your music and the anthem punch it has, I would guess it would translate really well to a live audience. I’m surprised you couldn’t win over the Goths.

Matthew : (laughs) I think the Goths were having their hearts melted down deep and that’s what they were protesting against. I was making them feel and they didn’t like that, so they had to lash out, which I can understand. So you know its like two years later and hopefully we’ve converted them and they can feel.

LP6 : : Any plans to have the record released in the U.S. yet?

Matthew : We’re doing good licenses everywhere actually. We’re licensed in Spain, Japan, Germany. I think the U.S. will come a bit later. In fact the majority of the people that I’ve talked to were more from the U.S. I would think it would get a release there eventually.

LP6 : : I would expect you would do really well over here. Everybody I played it to loved it. What inspired you to do the cover of Love Will Tear Us Apart?

Matthew : That was never supposed to come out. I was just bored. I was just playing around the piano and just came up with a ultra simple new riff for that song and just for a bit of fun made it. I came to that song really really late and I didn’t realize that everybody knew about that song and that everybody covered that song and no way would I have done that. But then at the same time its nice to take a song thats been covered so many times and make it really Windmill.

LP6 : : Do you still have a day job and how does your friends respond to the fact that you will be releasing an album and touring Europe?

Matthew : It’s kind of mad actually. I’m sort of like the first person we know doing it. Especially where I grew up, its not what you really do. you know? I was working as an animator last year. This year has been filled with a lot of Windmill, we’ll just have to see where it goes I think.

LP6 : : This is the last question and it’s quite off topic. Let me know if you agree or disagree.

Matthew : Ok.

LP6 : : I’ve learned that you can’t make someone love you. All you can do is stalk them and hope they panic and give in.

Matthew : (pause..then laughs) You know it’s probably true. Yeah, I’ve done my fair share of stalking (laughs). That sounds really bad. Don’t print that. That’s terrible. No I don’t stalk (laughs). You know that’s probably a very good saying.

LP6 : : I actually read that on a beer glass in a bar somewhere and it made me crack up so much. So I thought I would have to ask that next time I do an interview. Hey good luck on the tour and I hope you get to come out here.

Matthew : You know I really hope we get to come out there and play. My band is just amazing, made up of some of the Earlies. Have you heard of them?

LP6 : : Um no, I don’t think I am familiar with them.

Matthew : Check them out, they’re good. Just some great musicians in it.

LP6 : : When you play live do you play the songs straight like the recorded versions or change it up?

Matthew : A little bit of both I think. I mean to be fair we have had only a few rehearsals in Manchester and we have yet to do a show as a full band. So it will be very trial and error and we’ll see. When I play solo shows with a piano, which is fun as well, I just wing it and it just changes constantly. That’s something the Eels do amazingly. They can do the same song and do it a billion ways. Just like amazing and the song is always there no matter how the song is presented. That is something I really want to do with Windmill. Just surprise people all the time.

LP6 : : Well thank you for doing the interview….

Matthew : Thank you for calling…

LP6 : : Cheers…



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3 Comments so far

  1. 3 mwnf Says: April 7, 2007

    i like how he learned piano..
    lovely, lovely, strong music with a personal, unique approach.

  2. 2 okies Says: April 6, 2007

    lovely tunes and lovely interview!

  3. 1 Sam Says: April 3, 2007

    great interview, I remember meeting Matt back when it was still really in the really early stages, he’s a legend, really down to earth!!

    Seeing his music grow into an unstoppable machine is great, can’t wait for the albums release!!

    Loved it then, loving it now!!