Direktlänk till inlägg 18 juli 2024

"In the Spotlight" with Mark Heffernan

Av Creative reader - 18 juli 2024 06:15

Hi and welcome to this weeks "In The Spotlight".

Today I have the huge pleasure to have a chat with solo artist Mark Heffernan

Hi Mark and Welcome.

Your profile on Insta names your Genre as "Nomad" which actually is something new for me.. What does "Nomad" mean?

Well, to me it means i don’t have to stay in one place. I am not limited or defined by the narrow confines of a scene or sound. I use it to allow me to roam free synthesising the parts of all of my eclectic taste. Taking a bit here, remaking a bit there. All filtered through my own personal noir lens. So to me a genre nomad is a musician not tethered or fettered by my own limitations. This is probably a reaction to a previous band and how we became prisoners in an ever-narrowing sound. The walls of our own limits began to strangle creativity. I am determined to avoid that fate twice.

Did you start out as a musician or was that something you grew into?

As long as i can remember i have played. I started piano lessons aged 4 and a half.

Interestingly, i used to define myself as a musician. Now i think of myself more as an artist whose medium is music.

As a teen i was a guitarist. I lived for playing the guitar, especially live. I practised for hours every day and was in bands whose prime role was to give me a space to play guitar in front of people.

In my twenties i was a guitarist, a songwriter and a backing singer in a band. This was as a result of an understanding that if I wanted to be successful, I needed to write songs. I was lucky that i had bandmates who helped me and by this time i had studied guitar for a year at the Guitar Instutute in London, which very much showed me what i didn’t want to be. I wanted to collaborate and make something new. Not retread old ground, play covers or other people’s music. Nothing against that but it wasn’t for me.

These days i view what i do as little art projects and i use whichever instruments i think will help me to realise that idea. I play guitar, piano, keyboards, synths, programme drum machines, sing. Whatever is needed to get an idea from my head to being a piece of music.

Growin up, which influenced your music style the most? Both as and artist and as a listener.

Well, my life changed when I heard Hendrix. I suddenly had a purpose: to learn how to do that!

I became an avid fan of 60s rock and some 70s stuff, basically anything where i liked the guitars. Then aged about 13/14 i discovered Indie music and that became my next big obsession. For me it was never really the lad rock side of things, it was always the more pop and angular side of britpop and then like an archaeologist I worked backwards through indie and post punk.

I was lucky to have a lot of people with good taste from whom i could take things, friends, family, family friends; I ended up with an eclectic mix to draw from.

Then aged 19 at guitar school i became so bored of hearing guitars i wanted something new. I had always loved dressing up and electro pop seemed to give me a perfect scene to explore with artists playing with their image and that drove me on. I started listening to Kraftwerk and a lot of the british early 80s electronic acts and at the same time in the UK clubs like Trash were appearing mixing indie with an electronic tinged feel and put on my eyeliner and glitter and dived straight in. And again simultaneously there was the French invasion with bands like Air releasing stuff. Then Electro-Clash appeared and I loved it.

At about 2001 Indie stopped being so tame, i hated the late 90s indie scene it was so whiney and safe and when bands like the strokes, the white stripes and the Cooper Temple Clause appeared and i was into that too.

I think i have always looked for music and still do. I want to hear things i don’t know, but i have a tendency to look back for new things rather than at the contemporary scene these days. I do listen to some current acts but would rather take my influences from melding together a wide assortment of different things from the past.

How would you describe your creative process?

It all starts with the concept. My work is incredibly concept driven. I have to have an idea and a project i want to create. That gives me space to start work. For example, my Gallery album was all about trying to turn works of visual art into songs. Either an attempt to create sounds that painted that a picture or to make songs inspired by the art. I then go as far as i can within those limits, but i think it is important to have ideas to start for me. Without that, there is an empty space and that wont encourage me to start strumming a guitar. Once the project is begun, each song will have direction but i also leave lots of space for things to be spontaneous and i try very hard not to edit or limit myself once working. If an idea ends up departing from the original intention as long as the result is good, then I allow it space to grow and breathe.

So it starts with the idea, then mutates in the process.

I also have a great fear of retreading old ground so often refresh the gear I am using for a new project to force myself to learn new things or to get reacquainted with some old equipment.

What are you currently working on and what are you planning for the future?

I am just finishing off my new album: The Jet Age.

This album is all about the style and look of the jet age. Taking cues from the interiors and films as well as the planes. It has seen a big return to guitars, which i didn’t expect. Since my 3rd EP i have written almost everything on piano and synths and this was a real pivot back.

My original notes for this album said latin beats and percussion sounds, played on 80s drum machines with stylish lyrics in the style of Cole Porter and Roxy Music plus Velvet Underground guitars. That is probably best realised on the first song recorded for it, Pin Up Queen. After that it has naturally drifted as i get bored of doing the same things.

Referring back to what I said earlier, I did though buy some old cheap 80s drum machines so that I could learn how to programme them and that has been amazing. As a guitarist, my interaction with drums was saying yes or no to beats the drummer played. Drums and percussion has been a real learning curve as a solo artist, and experimenting with these old machines has been inspiring. Learning something new often creates the best space for me to create as the messing around often takes me to unchartered waters, and that is where the magic is.

I am about to release my new single, Dictatorship of the Air on 5th August on spotify and other streaming services and the Jet Age will be out in September to stream and on limited edition cassette. I love working on the packaging as for me it is part of the whole project.

What is the one thing you would like to tell your fans?

Firstly, thank you and i would be flattered to think i had fans. Second, my god they are a discerning and beautiful bunch.

What is the one thing you would like the music industry to know?

Well, I don’t think the music industry in its large corporate form has anything to do with what I or many of my great peers do. But in general, i would like large companies to cease buying up nice things and sucking the love, independence and joy from them. The big companies create zero and profit to the maximum from other people’s ingenuity, sweat and toil. I appreciate that i have critiqued rapacious capitalism here and drifted from the question but the music industry is no different now from any other industry. Perhaps it never was and i am looking to halcyon days that never were.

I am happily able to make music on my own terms. Happy that some people listen and even happier that some like it.

And that was my chat with Mark Heffernan. I hope you found it as interesting as I did.

Take care and I hope to cya all soon.

And YOU can find more from Mark Heffernan here

https://x.com/pocketlintmusic

www.instagram.com/pocketlintmusician/

https://pocketlint17.bandcamp.com/

Don't forget to Comment, Like and Share with your friend

Cya next time!

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