Interview: Chapterhouse

Amongst all the British acts tagged under the shoegaze label in the early ‘90s, Chapterhouse have to be one of the most fondly remembered and unique, thanks to their blend of baggy dance beats with psychedelic touches. With the band reuniting for the first time since 2010 to tour their debut album Whirlpool in full, I took the chance to catch up with guitarist-vocalist Stephen Patman before their show in Leeds. Read below to find out why the band have chosen to reunite now, their thoughts on the ‘shoegaze revival’ movement, and the prospect of new Chapterhouse material. The Mic’s Josh Holmes reports.

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Josh: You guys haven’t toured as a unit in the UK in about sixteen years or so. Why choose now to reunite? Did something prompt that, or was it just a ‘spur of the moment’ kind of thing?

Stephen: When we reformed last time, it was a case of ‘this is gonna be it, we’re never gonna do this again’, but our situations have all changed since then. Andy, Ashley and I went freelance about four or five years ago, whereas before we were working together as composers in a company. We couldn’t really commit to much touring, because it meant the company would shut down, with its composers all missing. Since we’re freelance now, it means we’ve got a lot more freedom.

Really, what triggered it was compiling the boxset, Chronology, for Cherry Red. We started thinking, ‘maybe we should tour this, now we’ve released all these unknown songs’. Then, last November we were asked to play a festival in L.A. It got the guys interested, and we all thought to ourselves, ‘hm, maybe we could do that’, but we realised it was probably gonna be too soon for us to be ready in time. 

Alongside that, we got offered the Slide Away festival shows. We’d been offered them the year before, but we had to say no because we hadn’t really decided on anything, so they booked Swervedriver for that year. I spoke to Adam from Swervedriver to ask how it went, and he said it was great, particularly in how it covered their U.S visa costs and let them book some extra shows around it. So we did the same thing! We agreed to do it, with the six guaranteed shows across New York, Chicago and L.A giving us a viable tour already. Then, we got a U.S agent and started booking headline shows around that. 

Then, Nat from Sonic Cathedral said that he’d love to put on a show for us, just as we realised it was Whirlpool’s 35th anniversary in April. We thought we’d book a London show with him on the exact date, the 29th, then [we] booked a warmup show in Hebden Bridge after Ashley’s other band played there. We had about five days between the two shows, so we booked this tour. As we’ve been announcing shows, we’ve been offered more and more, like South America and some other places. 

Josh: So it’s just evolved from a one shot deal to this world-spanning tour?

Stephen: Yeah, exactly. It’s just snowballed!

Josh: It’s worked out in a way, with shoegaze exploding in popularity over the last five or six years. How have you been taking that? Has it been cool seeing new generations coming across the band’s stuff, now it’s a bit less niche than it was back in 2010?

Stephen: Absolutely. My daughter’s friends are all into that stuff, she loves the Cocteau Twins. I’ve not been pushing her to do that, it’s just her peers being into it. Slowdive, old mates of ours, kinda went viral on TikTok and they’ve been doing some amazing gigs. Ride and Swervedriver are touring their new albums. We’ve been discussing, even if we didn’t end up doing it, whether we’d tour again.

Simon’s been writing some stuff, kind of intended for Chapterhouse, and we just thought we’d start writing some stuff together again. I don’t hear that many new shoegaze bands, there’s some that I like and some that I find a bit dull, a bit generic and trying to sound like Slowdive, basically. But the band tonight, Night Swimming, they’re really nice. And there’s a few great bands in the U.S, like she’s green who are supporting us. We like to have great bands supporting us, and probably about one in twenty are the ones we really like. 

Josh: It reminds me of when I was interviewing the guys from Whitelands, who’re also on Sonic Cathedral, and they were talking about the songwriting being a key part of shoegaze as opposed to just focusing on the effects, whether it be writing a good pop song or whatever else you want to achieve. Is that something that you guys adhere to as well?

Stephen: Well, it definitely has to be a great song, but my preference has always personally been the tracks that are experimental and challenging. I prefer that over necessarily aiming to be successful. But some of the tracks we’ve done are obviously much more down the pop route, and they’re the ones that are, on paper, the reason for our success - like “Pearl” and “Mesmerise”, they’re what most people like. It gets them to listen to the other stuff as well.

Josh: With the shows that you’ve played so far across this tour, do you think you’ve been seeing more of the younger crowd, or is it mostly people who were picking the genre up in the first wave, the ones that might’ve seen you before?

Stephen: It’s been a mix, actually. I think the majority of the crowd are the ones from ‘back in the day’, and it’s great talking to people who are like ‘oh, I’ve been into you since the 90s’, but I’ve actually been seeing quite a mix of younger faces. Some in the middle, too, not just teenagers but people in their 30s. I think the thing about streaming is that it allows people to get into music however they want. It just pops up in their recommended, and then they might like it. It was a real mix of ages last night in Manchester especially.

Josh: With the streaming recommendations being so based on algorithms, and that playing a big part in why shoegaze has popped back up, do you think there’s anything worrying with people discovering music that way, that it’s people just listening to what’s fed to them? Or do you think it’s cool that it gives them an avenue to find things they wouldn’t necessarily have had?

Stephen: I think the fact you can find pretty much any song that’s ever been written is always a healthy thing for music, because previously you’d always have to hunt stuff down and hear about it from elsewhere. I think it’s actually great that if you like a certain type of music you get suggested stuff in a similar vein. The only unhealthy thing about it is that the bands don’t get paid anything! 

Josh: With the tour, how easy was it to pick the songs back up and start practicing them again? Did it come fairly naturally, or take a bit of getting used to?

Stephen: It did come pretty quickly, actually. The only difficulty was Simon, who, although he’s not left the band, didn’t really want to play live anymore. So we had to get someone in instead, a friend of ours called Joe - who’s filled in for Simon in the past, actually. When Simon was in Mojave 3, he couldn’t play a tour, so Joe stepped in for him then. He also used to play in Ashley’s trip-hop band, Cuba. The only thing that made it more tricky was him having to learn things from scratch, and it’s a lot of songs. Quite a lot of them are a little different from what they are on the record as a result, whereas Simon would’ve just clicked back in straightaway.

But we were sounding good after the first set of rehearsals, it was just a matter of fine tuning. We booked a residential studio down in Somerset where we could stay from Friday to Sunday and we did four weekends from January to March, and by the end of it we felt ready. It’s not just learning the songs, you’ve got to really know how to get the set to flow and the changes between everything working. We’ve just tried out in-ear monitors for the first time as well, it’s been a revelation. 

Josh: Not sure if this is something you’ve even thought of planning out yet, but a lot of people also hold some love for Blood Music, your second LP. Have you thought about doing anything to commemorate that record, or are you just taking things as they go?

Stephen: Yeah, we’ve not really thought about that. It’s an album we’ve got mixed feelings about, in the respect that we like the songs that are on it but we don’t like the way they were executed as much. We felt a bit compromised when we made it. We’re playing a couple of tracks from it in our set, but others that don’t translate so well or fit into what we want to do we’ve had to leave out. A lot of stuff on Blood Music is sequenced beats, some of which Ashley wasn’t involved with either, since he’d left the band that time and he’s never played it live. So I’m not sure whether we’ll conjure up the enthusiasm to do anything for that record! [laughs]

Josh: Last question for this interview. You’ve been alluding to writing [and] working on some new material. Do you have plans to do a new EP or album? Is that something you’re looking at down the line after this tour?

Stephen: Yes, absolutely. We were hoping to get a few more festivals in after the American tour, before we go to South America, but we kind of announced it a bit too late to get onto the bills. That’s all likely to happen next summer. So, we’re gonna have a bit more time available for us during these summer months to look at that and work on things a bit. 

Being freelance composers has meant we’ve had to spend a lot of our time getting work in to pay the mortgage! [laughs] It’s meant putting time aside for writing stuff for Chapterhouse has been a bit lower on the priority list, but after these tours we should be in a good spot where we won’t have to be so concerned about bringing work in, and it’ll give us a bit more freedom to write some stuff. 

I’ve got a couple of tracks I’m planning to develop into Chapterhouse songs, and Andy says he’s got some stuff coming. Simon is only really interested in writing new material, so he’s already working on quite a few things. We just need to find out how it all fits together as being ‘Chapterhouse’. It’s been one of the things we’ve had to think through - ‘what would Chapterhouse sound like now?’ - because we’re not exactly shoegaze aficionados. We don’t really listen to shoegaze music, but we know that when we’re making a new Chapterhouse album it’ll have to fit within the realm of what Chapterhouse were, but it wouldn’t necessarily be ‘shoegaze’. It’s hard to say right now.

Josh: It’s just ‘you’, really?

Stephen: That’s it.

Chapterhouse finished the UK leg of their Whirlpool 35 tour with a show at the Islington Assembly Hall in London on April 29th. The band will next play a string of U.S dates, starting with Slide Away festival’s New York dates on May 15th. Their comprehensive CD box set, Chronology, is also available through Cherry Red Records.

Josh Holmes

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Edited by Isabelle Tu

Photos courtesy of Josh Holmes