Music Makers: Unlikely Band With Unlikely Single

By LARRY McSHANE

Perhaps the only thing more unlikely than the line-up of The Dream Academy, a rock'n'roll guitarist paired with two classically trained musicians, is the success of the British band's decidedly different first effort.

"Life in a Northern Town," a Top 10 single in both England and the United States, is a song first written as an African chant during a full moon. It features no bass, no drums and has an oboe solo. Says lead singer Nick Laird-Clowes, that's just the way the band wanted it.

"The record companies just said, 'Well, this doesn't have a drum part, just two big boom-booms on the chorus. You want to try to put bass and drums on it.' And that's the very thing we didn't want to do," he said.

Laird-Clowes laughs now, recalling the days before he met keyboardist Gilbert Gabriel through a newspaper advertisement and instrumentalist Kate St. John at a party. However, Laird-Clowes and Gabriel, who share the band's songwriting chores, remember their futile attempts to get a recording contract for their'60s-rneet-synths sound.

"We went around for two years," Gabriel said. "It was that old malaise of the fashion of punk music, and then the backlash against punk - producers coming in and sort of just taking over because a lot of people couldn't play." "It was incredibly rough," recalled Laird-Clowes, who wears paisley shirts and shoulder-length hair. "We were turned down by every major record company and, every independent record company."

Laird-Clowes was heading a band called The Act "a post-punk, Elvis Costello kind of band with two guitars, bass and drums," when he hooked up with Gabriel in 1979. St. John joined up shortly thereafter.

"We talked, and you can only get a certain amount of textures out of the two guitars-bass-drum lineup, and we wanted to try experimenting with different sound," Laird-Clowes said in an interview with the trio. "We're all in our late 20s, and we all wanted to have something that would take us into our 30s that would be more of a craft. We wanted something artistically fulfilling."

Much has been made of the band sounding like a throwback to the 1960s, and their appearance and lyrics invoked further comparisons. Laird-Clowes alludes to President Kennedy and the Beatles in "Northern Town," while Gabriel favors the frameless sunglasses once worn by the late John Lennon.

"The fact is, we all grew up in the 60's and absorbed that information," said Gabriel. "It comes out in our music, but also, this is 1986. ..."

"And we're making 1986 music for now," interrupts Laird-Clowes. "We're not a 60's pastiche band, and we're not trying to be that. If we dig the hair and the look, it's just a reaction to the (British pop star) Howard Jones' spiky top, which is 10 years old anyway. This is very innovative as far as I can see."

St. John, a quiet blonde who plays saxophone and oboe on the band's self-titled record, added: "The '60s were very innovative, and people would use all different things, go to all different styles to pick music. It was much more experimental."

The band couldn't have picked a more qualified producer for an experimental album: ex-Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour, whose former band did concept albums such as "The Wall" and "Animals" before it split up.

However, Gilmour, affectionately called "big daddy" by Gabriel, initially balked at working with the group.

"He said, 'I don't want to produce other people. It's boring. I've got my own career. So you go in and make the album yourself and I'll mix it,"' recalled Laird-Clowes. "So when we brought the album to him, he said, 'All this. You could do it so much better.' And he ended up spending three or four months on his own redoing it. He's our favorite person to work with."

The band, with an extra five musicians gleaned from friends of St. John or Gabriel, recently played a limited number of live dates, but they won't get involved in extensive touring until after a second album is completed.

"We've decided that we're not going to go out now and work nine months, playing every territory that wants us, and then be asked: 'Where's the next album?"' said Laird-Clowes. "We'd rather try to get back to making musical and lyrical observations because that's how we made this record and that's what we're about."

 
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