Words and photos by Anna Battista
Memory. Memories. Each of us has got happy and sad memories, good and bad memories, nice and not so nice memories. The Trashcans’ memories from the ‘90s must have been of the former kind: the band released their debut album Cake in 1990, three years after their second album I've Seen Everything came out. But, after A Happy Pocket (1996), they parted company with Go!Discs, and were later forced to sell their recording studio as well. The band’s 1999 Snow EP marked a return to full form, while the rare demo collection double CD album Zebra of the Family (2003) helped the band to raise money to record Weightlifting. “Our fans kept us afloat,” Reader claims, calling the support the band got through the web “the initial spark” that helped the band believing again in what they were doing and regaining their self-confidence. The new acquired freedom from major record labels is also allowing Trashcan Sinatras to be more independent, “It seems that we have a lot more potential now that we don’t have a major record label,“ Reader states. “We own the record every time, so we only have to phone somebody anywhere and arrange a gig, whereas with a major label, we wouldn’t be able to do it. We want to afford to tour and play decent venues where we can represent ourselves well enough: it’s all very well to say let’s play anywhere, but if we were to travel down to Birmingham and get any gig, we could end up in a pub where nobody would listen to us and that would affect us and dishearten us. Another thing that it is different about releasing the record ourselves is that now it seems the record also has a longer life. Before on Go!Discs we would have two or three months and if we hadn’t made any impact at all by then, the attention would concentrate on another artist. Nowadays, in general, artists push a record for a year or maybe even more, for example by having a song played in a film, a thing that can regenerate an entire album. I think this is a good thing, I don’t think there should be any limit to your music, you should be able to do what you like with it. Major labels have commercialised marketing strategies that most artists follow, but that’s stupid, because they don’t work with everybody.” I ask Reader if the new independence also means that they will develop Picnic Records, the band’s label, and use it for other bands’ releases “Well, let’s put it this way, I wouldn’t like to be in a band signed to our label,” he states, “first of all there’s no money, secondly we’re not very organised. At the moment it’s just for us and it’s just an imprint. We just wanted a label for the record so that we could licence it in different countries.” Since we are talking about labels and recording, I ask Reader if the band ever misses Shabby Road, “I sometimes do,” he admits, “but I just miss certain machines, that’s all, I was very fond of a couple of reverb units and I really liked the tape machine, but everything is gone and we don’t regret it. We’re really glad to be away from the building itself. The situation was very stressful. The building would have been fantastic if we had had the money to keep it up. It was very old, so every time it rained, it would get flooded. The Chinese restaurant down the stairs would always been arguing with us. It was really hard to have a big building, that is why I respect a lot of people like the Delgados who run Chemikal Underground and seem to be very organised people. I’m just not like that at all, I can’t keep more than two or three thoughts in my head, but I suppose it is fine if you just want to be very disorganised and shambolic, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it…it’s actually what works for Trashcan Sinatras!” The Delgados are not the only contemporary band Reader admires, among his fave artists there are also Franz Ferdinand, Super Furry Animals, Nick Cave and Rufus Wainwright. According to Reader, music has fundamentally changed, together with its audience, “People are more open and they accept things more openly now,” he claims, “maybe a few years ago, what the U2 did with iPod would have been frowned upon, but nowadays many people simply don’t care. Maybe ten years ago somebody would have said it would have been a bit crass to have your song on a Playstation. Well, I don’t know if it’s crass or no, but nowadays nobody cares, you don’t hear many complaints about it. People don’t really care as much as they used to, it doesn’t seem to apply anymore. Everything is so commercialised now in the world and we’re so used to it that we have become inured to it.”