“In a nutshell, we were listening to new things and reading new things and seeing new exhibitions and all those things that go into the big Bronson melting pot of the way we write songs,� says Archie Bronson Outfit drummer/lyricist Arp Cleveland of the influences that made an impact on the band’s sophomore album, Derdang Derdang. Once that influence was absorbed, the bluesy/post-punk trio (named for a ’70s comic book hero and featuring Cleveland, guitarist/bassist Dorian Hobday, vocalist/guitarist Sam Windett, along with utility member Duke Garwood on clarinet and Moroccan rhaita) sequestered themselves in their London flat and concentrated on writing the songs that would eventually comprise Derdang Derdang. It wound up being a very different process than the one that yielded ABO’s 2004 debut, Fur.
“We holed ourselves up at home,� says Cleveland. “We kind of cut ourselves off from everything, really, except each other. For months on end, we’d get up and we’d be writing in Dorian’s bedroom and we got pretty anal with it. We had wall charts up and spent all day playing music and then we’d get drunk in the evening and argue about what we’d done, about what was rubbish and what was great.�
Without really planning to do so, Cleveland notes the Outfit worked on Derdang in an almost opposite fashion as Fur, in terms of writing and recording. “With Fur, it was written in a different way, not as intensively, as when we recorded it, we had much less time and we recorded it in the middle of nowhere, so it was actually quite a claustrophobic recording experience,� says Cleveland. “With Derdang, I think we made a really claustrophobic writing atmosphere and then flew off to sunny Nashville, which was a totally alien and exotic place for us.�
So exactly how did a Stooges-flecked trio from old Londontown wind up recording their sophomore album in Music City, USA? One of the producers suggested by the band’s label, Domino Records, was Nashville resident Jacquire King, whose work with Tom Waits and Kings of Leon had made an impression on the Outfit. The pairing turned out to be a perfect fit.
“We sent off demos to various people we were impressed with from work they’d done before and Jacquire was one,� says Cleveland. “And we just loved what he had to say about the songs we sent him. He really seemed to get where we were coming from or where we wanted to go with it, if you like. The fact that he lived in Nashville was a bloody great bonus.�
For Cleveland, one of King’s most welcomed attributes was his patience with the young band. “We like to record live, and we have a lot of set ideas about things as a band, which are often quite wrong but we’ll be quite passionate about,� says Cleveland with a laugh. “We don’t know they’re wrong obviously until we’ve been proved otherwise by someone being patient and allowing us to discover our wrongness. He was really good for that.�
ABO’s intense writing workshop wound up resulting in an amazing amount of material, nearly 50 mini-discs filled with prospective songs. The selection process was almost as arduous as the writing had been. “A lot of the process involved the wall charts and argument,� says Cleveland. “We had so much material - obviously not all of it was particularly good - but in the end, it came down to having the title, Derdang Derdang, and having songs that seemed to fit together. We felt like we were creating that title, if you like. We wanted to write something that felt like a whole thing; lyrically I wanted things to intertwine a little bit and musically we wanted that too, as well as to slightly take you on a journey. The overriding thing was it had to be Derdang enough, which sounds kind of rubbish but it was true.�
The title is a bit of a puzzler. Americans might think it’s obscure British slang, but it is, in fact, nothing at all. “It’s not at all British,� says Cleveland with a laugh. “A few people thought it was a Germanic word, and I thought they might and I quite like that. I like fucking with people a bit. The loose idea I had from the lyrics was dada, and I felt that was quite a Dadaist phrase, not totally nonsense. But because we had that really early on and we all agreed it was the title we were all happy with and were writing songs toward, it started growing in meaning. It has an almost onomatopoeic element; it almost sounds like a guitar twang, which I like. If you split up the word, der means derivative and dang, in the dictionary, means ‘derived from damnation,� and I liked that. Then you can take the ‘d’ from the middle and put it at the end, it almost spells ‘deranged.’ It’s quite fitting to where we were going.�
Brian Baker
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http://www.archiebronsonoutfit.co.uk
http://www.dominorecordco.com
Archie Bronson Outfit's Derdang Derdang is released July 25, 2006 on Domino Records.
