Interestingly, while the material of Golden Syrup contrasts quite starkly with its predecessor, it is in fact far closer to the sound of Patrick Kelleher and His Cold Dead Hands as a live experience. This is emphasised with the band’s name on the album artwork. What prompted this small but significant change?
“I called it Patrick Kelleher and His Cold Dead Hands this time because I wanted to establish the band as a band name, so that people would try to book us as a band. Last year a lot of people would ring me up or email me expecting me to play a gig solo and it was getting a bit confusing doing the solo gigs and the band gigs and I’d rather just stick to one if I can.
“While I was writing the parts I was conscious of this being something that we could work out live. I knew there would be a bass player, a drummer and a keyboard player, I knew who’d be playing what basically. That made a difference to the album, all the songs have bass, one song doesn’t have drums. It made me think about trying to narrow my options a little bit instead of using everything around me and changing things from one song to another, I didn’t do that so much this time. I behaved myself a little better.”
The full-band approach to the new material may pose some limitations in terms of playing live as previous shows on the back of You Look Colder seemed to adapt well to the full band or simple solo sets. Solo gigs may be unavoidable in some situations as most of the Cold Dead Hands members have dedicated musical projects of their own like Catscars, Hunter-Gatherer and School Tour.
“Well gigs will be with the full band where possible. For instance, this morning we were offered a gig in London for the Yes Way festival. Ger (Duffy) played it last year as School Tour. They can only pay a hundred quid so I was looking frantically at ferries and planes this morning to see would it be possible to bring a band over for not too much more than that, like a couple of hundred quid or so, but it’s fairly difficult. So if I get offered gigs abroad and they can’t afford to bring the whole band over then I’ll have to do it solo. I did that in Gdansk in Poland a couple of months ago and in Copenhagen. I wanted to bring the band but they couldn’t afford it so I just put backing tracks on my sampler and hooked the drum machine up to the sampler via MIDI and just sang on top of that. You have to be a little adaptive if you write weirdo music!”
Despite a fairly minimal stage set up with synths, drum machine, bass and guitar, there always seems to be quite a varied array of instrumental sounds on offer in Patrick Kelleher’s music. Although he seems to switch easily from one to another, he’s not keen on being considered a skilled multi-instrumentalist, instead preferring to take a loose approach of making things work for him.
“Exactly, whatever works,” he says. “People often ask me, ‘you play a lot of instruments don’t you?’ But I don’t play guitar better than your average 14-year old kid. I can play what I need to play on a keyboard to record or when I’m playing with Catscars I can learn a part that’s quite simple and just play it. I don’t have any intimate knowledge of any instrument because I never took the time to. I guess I’ve chosen not to make that my art, I’ve chosen to make my art more kind of collaging, putting layers of instruments together, this artificial musical production that we have now. Brian Eno used to talk about how the job of the musician now has become visual. You can look at a screen and you can layer tracks on top of one another like a collage. You can listen to something over and over again, and manipulate that, chop it up whereas before any recording technology existed all you had was your ear and the sound.
“I do feel more comfortable with a guitar, it feels more natural with my hands. Drums as well. I always felt comfortable making drum beats, simple drum beats now because I can’t play anything complicated, I need more practice. Guitar feels more natural to me than a keyboard. I never feel comfortable where I am, I always want to be somewhere else, so if I play one solo gig and I play the drum machine, afterward I’ll be like ‘oh that didn’t work’. Rather than try again and make it perfect, I’ll change my idea and do something else instead, which can have interesting results.”
