The Noise Who Runs | Ian Pickering | Interview | New Album, ‘Preteretrospective’
UK-France electronic rock duo The Noise Who Runs will release ‘Preteretrospective,’ out April 21st, 2023.
The Noise Who Runs is the project of songwriter and performer Ian Pickering, best known as a member of and songwriter for 90s British trip hop outfit Sneaker Pimps. Over the past two years, he has churned out this new album while also working on the new Sneaker Pimps album. Hailing from Hartlepool in the north-east of England, Pickering launched this project in 2019, three years after relocating to Lille, France. Today, The Noise Who Runs is a duo of Pickering with Brazilian-born French guitarist Felipe Goes. The Noise Who Runs is a direct, literal translation of “O bruit qui cour,” a French phrase meaning “gossip”. It was also the name of Pickering’s favourite restaurant, where the ideas for this project fell into place.
It’s great to have you. How have you been in the last three years?
Ian Pickering: To be honest, I’ve been great. Any complaints are for the general bigger picture of things. The crunch for me started way back in 2008, I ended up leaving the UK in 2016, so lockdowns and furloughs and lack of work and catastrophic, nonsensical government decisions across the globe, I can walk that room with ease at this point; there’s nothing much left to throw I couldn’t manage to vaguely juggle and get by somehow. It was tough, 2020, but things have gotten better from the end of 2021.
And from the music perspective, it’s been a weird kind of blessing, all positives, albeit extremely well-camouflaged at times. The Noise Who Runs is always playing catch up on the amount of material that’s been written and keeps getting written. The whole project is a slave to that, so, although 2020, in terms of releasing stuff, turned out to be something of a false start, now everything’s on track and, hopefully, managing to be kept on top of.
What initiated the project The Noise Who Runs?
The project was always “the project,” always the same, part of the same evolution and journey, it just didn’t have a name. And a band by any other name would sound as sweet, but the name elevated the whole thing, an aspiration; that gave it an instant extra driving force perhaps; it encapsulates what these days would pass as a mission statement, in corporate business-speak, that awful jargon of acronyms and cut-and-shut management gobbledegook, downsizing, for example, or fucking CFO. But I’m not sure there was anything to initiate, not in terms of the writing and recording, which has been evolving in various incarnations since what eventually became “transporter” and beyond, since around 1995, 1996. It was more moving to France, getting sober at long last, meeting new people, feeling in a good place that led to a revitalising of inspiration and desire to get the vehicle moving again and then the name appeared out of nowhere – the translation of a restaurant we went to, O Bruit Qui Cour. And that in itself felt like a conceptual epiphany, four words, a name that sums up the intention and the feeling that runs through the songs and the sound. Since the name fell into my lap, most of what’s occurred has been a careful paying attention to coincidence that keeps things heading in the right direction, even the setbacks. The main reason for The Noise Who Runs is that things need to be said and nobody seems to be saying anything and certainly not saying it particularly well.
Tell us how busy were you working on The Noise Who Runs and at the same time the new Sneaker Pimps album?
I’m not sure I even notice being busy when it comes to working on music or writing lyrics. It’s my pleasure and my passion. What I probably notice, which only fuels the fire, is how much the majority of my time is seemingly taken up with stupid little needless things, how constrained I am by both time and money. Certainly when I was working three jobs in 2019, it was easy to do the Sneakers stuff but I got increasingly disaffected with the slavery of the workplace in the big scheme of things, tried doing just one job from September 2019 and then struggled to survive through 2020. But nothing stops the lyrics or the songs and I’ve never felt busy or pressured to be honest. What did Bob Marley say? “One good thing about music, when it hits you you feel no pain.”
Would you like to share how you approach working on ‘Preteretrospective’?
I have a Mister Bump approach to songwriting, you know, the accident-prone, blue Mister Man with the bandages, who finally gets the job he was made for, walking nonchalantly around an apple orchard, bumping into trees and catching the apples when they fall. If someone sends me music to write lyrics for, I sit down and do it, usually within a week from starting. But with The Noise Who Runs, I wait, try to recognise when to push and when to leave things for a while. And that seems to work; since I adopted that approach, I’ve been a lot more productive, a lot more consistent and things just seem to fall into place and come together. ‘Preteretrospective’ was born out of a writing surge for EP4, ‘These Will Be Your Gods’. The original plan was something else entirely, I decided on two different songs to the original four midway through that EP, and in trying to find something to balance ‘These Will Be Your Gods’ and ‘Cows Come Home,’ inadvertently came up with six songs that I then accidentally added to a playlist of the original two EPs from 2020 and got weirdly put on shuffle. And that all kicked me off thinking that those eight songs from 2020 hadn’t really seen much light as well as the fear that they might be forever held up as songs about the COVID-19 year, which they really weren’t, and this plan to recontextualise them by curating them on an album with the six new songs made perfect sense and felt right. It’s also a nice chance, now things are less financially traumatic and we’re ahead with the plans and recordings for a lot more material, to relaunch the project properly, hence the name ‘Preteretrospective,’ which I believe I made up. I also have anthropobscence and juvenihilation in my inventive lexicon.
How did you originally meet Felipe Goes?
Felipe started working at the same language school where I was working; he was young, had long hair and I took an educated guess that he played guitar and told him I had a project I needed a guitarist for. It was that simple. At that time, I’d finished writing the songs for what was meant to be a debut The Noise Who Runs album (and the songs kept on coming) and I’d met a guy who is an amazing bass player and had agreed to give it a go if I found someone guitar. So we began meeting up, going through songs, choosing a set. And because Felipe and I worked together and I lived close, me and him started recording stuff at mine and working on the tracks. Then we had maybe one rehearsal with a drummer, Julien, who did some of the drums on ‘Preteretrospective’ and worked a lot on the two EPs we made during the pandemic lockdowns. But the rehearsals and thoughts about playing live were indefinitely put on hold with the confinement and then the restrictions on rehearsing and the studio closing and then relocating – endless nonsense. But now it’s time we headed for the stage for a while, probably next year, I would say.
And how would you describe the energy and the creative ideas when you two work together?
In a terribly unrock ’n’ roll way, it’s mostly calm, self-effacing, silly and comfortable, in that, I find it very hard to be myself when I don’t feel comfortable, so it’s just one of those easy relationships where we do and say exactly as we find and no one ever gets their nose out of joint. We’ll see what happens when we start playing live, that should bring new experiments and something unique and that’ll give feedback into the recordings and the approach. We’ll see. It almost sounds exciting.
I would love it if you can share some further words about Sneaker Pimps upcoming album as well? What can we expect?
Why? What have you heard? Totally seriously, I don’t know anything about an upcoming Sneaker Pimps album, but then I don’t pay much attention once I’ve done my bit to be fair. It’s not my day job, neither is The Noise Who Runs. I have to work to make ends meet, but, for me, that works out better for the writing; genuine, uncut input is out there everyday, everywhere. What I do know is there was a lot of material in excess of what we released on ‘Squaring the Circle’ – a lot of songs, a lot of new stuff and some reworked older stuff, unreleased or never really worked on in any seriousness before. I started working on ‘Squaring the Circle’ in January 2019, with Fighter and SOS, and the tracks kept coming and the last four I worked on, one of which was the wonderful Ma Fille Concrete, which we used to play live on the last tour back in 2003 with a big screaming sound on the Juno, was January 2021. So there’s certainly something afoot – it would be a shame to let them go unheard in some shape or form. All that seems very non-committal and evasive, but I genuinely have no information on that.
How did you originally get interested in music and what led to the formation of Sneaker Pimps?
I was always interested in lyrics more than anything, lyrics and melody, and really got dragged along with Liam Howe’s interest in music and fascination for recording and production from a very early age. It started out as him and his brother with a reel-to-reel tape machine and a Casio VL Tone, a Roland SH101 got added, then a Yamaha Music Computer, which I still have in the attic at my mum’s, I’ve just not brought it across to France yet, since I only use it for two sounds now. I bought that off Liam when he upgraded and that went on through our teenage years and still carried on in Sneakers, only then it was free. From about the age of 11 or 12, we can just name the incarnations of the songwriting and recordings – it’s Turkey Bones and the Chicken Dancers, one home cassette with a lot of cover versions on it, but I can still remember the one original song, then Castro to Deodar, two albums released on cassette at school, SleepFuse, which is were Chris Corner joined in, which was brushed away by the labels for sounding too much like a third album, which in essence it was, and then, like an overhaul, came all the stuff those two did as Frisk and then ultimately the FRISK stuff led to Clean-Up Records, to Kelli and Sneaker Pimps in 1995. Do I sound like an encyclopaedia? Or like it’s my specialist subject on Mastermind?
What runs through your mind if we would play some of the older material you did with Sneaker Pimps?
On one tiny level, I feel glad to have had some level of impact with my lyrics, and have been part of those songs and Sneakers, but I’m still talking – mostly saying the same things because the message isn’t hitting home yet. But mostly it’s always like travelling back in time for a few minutes, and it’s very pleasant, a tiny holiday in spacetime. I go back to where we were when we were writing it, what happened around that time, where it led, dominos, snakes and ladders of memory territory. I like it, unashamedly. The other thing that always strikes me is just how good it is, and how always slightly ahead of it Liam and Chris were. ‘Bloodsport’ pre-empted the 80s revival by a long way, and it was a much more decent reflection on that influence than most of what then followed and now seems relentless and never-ending carbon copies of just the surface of what the 80s had to offer.
The craziest gig you ever had would be?
A past gig? The prize for me, with Sneakers, would be Moscow at the 16 Tonnes club, in 2003, after the European Tour but before the Nuke Festival. I have no idea what the capacity was, but it was so far over by a big few hundred and it wasn’t a massive place to play. The people were wild, so on it, so happy – and Liam made the trip, after missing the European Tour and that was the first time I played onstage live with Liam since we were children and I got stage-fright during a Christmas concert as five- or six-year-olds, rendition of ‘When Santa Got Stuck Up The Chimney,’ a recorder duet which only Liam played in the end. That was pretty crazy too.
There is of course one other, or two others, which are the last two nights of that European tour, Luxembourg and Bruges, where I first met Emilie, my fiancée. I’m a slow worker, it took us another 13 years to start our life together.
Are you involved in any other bands or do you have any active side-projects going on at this point?
Not at all. I write some lyrics – or have – for Colin C, the guy who sorts out my songs at the final stage with some production tweaks and then makes them glorious with his mixing and mastering and I did some stuff for Front Line Assembly on a couple of albums, as well as a really cool French artist Valerie Renay. I just put a Spotify Playlist called The Collaborator up recently with those ten songs on them. You can check it out…
But people don’t really look for lyricists like me to write for them very often and, realistically, I have so many songs and so much material now that my focus is on that. I’m always open though and I always find the time. I just put The Noise Who Runs first now. But send me the details of the next Bond Movie. I would seriously make an amazing job of that.
Let’s end this interview with some of your favourite albums. Have you found something new lately you would like to recommend to our readers?
Not so much new maybe. I’m excited to hear the new Depeche Mode album, intrigued to hear Roger Waters’ reworking of ‘Dark Side of the Moon’. It’s the first anniversary of Sugar for the Pills’ ‘Wanderlust’ album, which I like very much. Most recently, I was listening to Mystic Underground on Bandcamp, a New York-based band that has something of the electronic 1970s Sheffield about it. Someone else I really like is Miaow McDonald, a Scottish artist who sang on High Time in Lo-Fi, our third EP. And Claudio, the guy who produced the precursor album to The Noise Who Runs, Left Handed Tendencies, he’s got some very good work under the name Spural, well worth a listen, he’s a super talented one-off.
Thank you. Last word is yours.
Dance. Seriously – go out dancing, somewhere, anywhere. Go and watch a music night in a pub, a bar, go to a club, hit the dancefloor, dance to the band, dance to whatever the DJ’s serving up. Stay at home but invite your friends and jump around some. Clubs are closing and dancing in a communal space, without any care for posing, posturing but simply responding and being driven by music, by the beat, by the people around you in the best way is something vital. I’ll be standing with my back to the bar, tapping my foot because I’m a pretty appalling mover. But don’t do as I do, do as I say. Trust me, you don’t wanna see me dancing. But please – get yourself out and your ass on the dancefloor.
Klemen Breznikar
Headline photo: Théo Valenduc
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