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Home Biography Comments Contact Discography Interviews Links Lyrics Quotes Reviews Videos		Interviews Robots and Electronic Brains - Zine (October 2000) Robots It was in May that I sent Adrian the questions. It was in October that he returned them. There's a few things I'd like to pursue but, frankly, I'm worried that if I was to send any more questions this interview would never see the light of day. Adrian is Adrian Shaw, leader of The Teenbeat, lyrical visionary and sometime doodler. The Teenbeat are a scratchy outfit who make rough-edged improvisational music that somehow manages to be not remotely self-indulgent and really rather listenable. Think Half Man Half Biscuit with extreme gallows humour and an autobiographical bent. I first reviewed The Teenbeat last year when, having sent off for their tape after picking up a flyer at the Bull & Gate, I was astonished with the 90-minute assault that came by return. A series of pasted songs, Jim Reeves worship and skits in the vein of John Shuttleworth were crowned by the line "bulimia queen, I bought you pop and crisps from the vending machine" from an ode to a sixteen-year-old whose name appears to be Urina. Not a common name, admittedly, but it does help the rhyming scheme later on when, in a sad climax, she drinks... toilet cleaner. a further cd-r followed, and I described it thus: "The Teenbeat deal with the details in life, the tiny facets of the everyday that pass most of us by. Theirs is a childlike perception of often adult concerns, but also of a childhood past with layers of grown-up reflection. I'll stick by that. Even more so now. Adrian did this interview on the train to Liverpool for a gig with Ricky Spontane and again on the train home afterwards. Robots Tell us about the band. Ade We are from all over Britain: Finsbury Park, Birkenhead, South Shields and Barnsley. I'm from Barnsley. me and Kevin (lead) are old friends. We met the others a couple of years ago and we all thought we could get big and play Birkenhead's premier rock club, Stairways. We haven't yet, but we will. we all met in Birkenhead. This is my Mecca. Small town is my town and my town is me! Robots You live in London while the rest of the band are in birkenhead? Ade yes. Robots That must make practising hard? Ade It's not too bad. Every three weeks I go up and we have a big jam and record it and it is mainly improvised stuff. Our songs are usually just reworked jams. Maybe I'll add an extra line here and there. That's why so many different versions exist. They seem to stabilise after a while. Robots Yes, a lot of the stuff on the tape is obviously improvised. There's one line that sticks in my head, you just keep on spiralling around it: 'got 17 hours to work today, I don't think I'm going in...' - Here Comes Neil Ade That's an extra line I added after Neil (bass player) got sacked from a night watch security job at a dockyard. On a 12-hour shift he turned up 8 hours late and left 4 hours early. The boss found out and booted him. The song was inspired by my first meeting with Neil when he handed me a plastic bag and asked me to guess what was in it. Robots And? Ade It was a bag of his dreads of course. Robots How much of the songs do you have ready when you practice? Ade Most of our songs have started off as improvisations. Eventually they get knocked into shape. Songs are useful for gigs. We'd be just as happy jamming on stage for two hours. I love songs and jams. Most of the stuff on CD-R that we put out is one-take stuff that we could never do again as good. So we don't normally bother. Like Hercules. But if we had time we could probably knock that into a song. I write a lot of songs that we don't play. I normally do these at solo gigs which I do quite a lot of down in London. These sometimes feed into the jams but I prefer the words to come with the moment and the night. This seems to have meaning. I don't sing stuff I don't mean. I like to do one take, get things down and then move on. I can still plug into the source (I like a bit of source) of the songs. That's what makes a song live and this comes across, I hope. If it didn't, I would give up and do the garden instead or build a dog kennel or pull my pud. At this moment in my life all these songs are about real things and real feelings that I have. Just passing Rugby. But I know things will change. Robots You seem to focus in on the minutiae of life. Is that what fascinates you rather than the big picture? Ade 'Minutiae' is a nice word. I think it's true that the more specific you get the more universal you get. Nuneaton. I'm now on my way back and I'm completely wasted. The gig was good. Spontane were great. We were wasted on stage so we ended up going into sikadelic rockouts. Some people prefer to write about what they know. This kitchen sink realist stuff is nothing new but it's what I'm into. I love all that Max Miller and George Formby. This is what I know about: council houses and pit towns. I only sing what I believe in, what's real to me. I love people singing about real things even if it's collecting stamps. Empty songs are pointless for me. The human condition and all that. Love, hate, deaths, pain, pizzas, chips and beans etc. We're all connected aren't we? Like one big pylon, all wires and metal like the Eiffel Tower, underground invisible wires. none of this is new, but it's what I'm into. I love the epic in the everyday. You only need to talk to somebody on the bus. Pain and death and love is everywhere, you don't need to go to amsterdam with a rucksack or new york for life. Life is everywhere. Trauma is everywhere. We can only hope to save humanity by loving the man on the bus. We can save the world though love. I believe this. I believe in universal power. Basic socialism: you hurt one, you hurt everybody. The Teenbeat sing about sick things when life is sick. Like everybody I want to kill people sometimes. Remember the love. All of our songs are love songs of some description. This is a moral debate, is it not? When we generalise with the 'big picture' we conveniently overlook the fact that we're a person in a place in a real world and assume life is happening outside somewhere far away on television. At the same time, of course we should be very concerned about the global effects of these capitalist who are screwing over our brothers and sisters in far away places. We are all implicated in the west. Unless you live in a cupboard and eat your own shit. Right, off to Macdonalds... oh oh oh. Robots The world in your songs is quite cruddy. Is that how you see it? Ade Like most people when life is good you don't notice it. It's just going by and you're happy. It's invisible. When it's shit, that's when you notice it and start thinking. unfortunately, our material is 90% songs about how shit life it. I've been contemplating suicide for the last two years and this has warped my lyrics but I think that on the whole The Teenbeat is life-affirming. The bottom line is that life's a joke. Which it is. Sometimes I get into a bit of a nihilist thing and want to wipe the slate clean and maybe let the amoebas and cockroaches take over. 'Give me the button to press.' God, bring on the flood. that's cos i'm a bit of a self-loather which I'm not happy about sometimes. (a lot of the time.) I hate myself and what i am. I was in a state of mental anguish when I recorded a lot of the stuff over the last two years. I had a bit of a mental breakdown in March '99 (the Flapjack Sessions) I broke down in the middle of recording. I thought people were trying to poison me. Robots There's obviously a lot of bottled-up emotion in the songs. But also seaside towns. And nonsense. Ade I love the sea. It's big. The noise, the smell, it's the only time I feel safe: when I'm on the beach up by Whitby or Scarborough. I have happy, melancholic memories of that freaking mass of water. The North Sea. I love nonsense. Life is nonsense. Robots Did you invent the name Urina to rhyme with toilet cleaner as I suggested in the review? Ade Urina is the real name of a foreign girl in a photograph I saw. I mixed that with a story of a woman in the Daily Mirror who knew she was going to die through bulimia but kept doing it like a slow suicide. This upset me. Eating disorders, in my opinion, are a symbol of the sicker sides of consumer capitalism offering us what we can't ever have. (Britain on the couch.) that's what I was on about before about having a real life and doing things that can have real, immediate effects like saying "hello" to the man next door. (getting friendly with him, finding out where he keeps his life savings, then breaking in when he's down the boozer.) You know what I mean. Robots The story in Tonka Toy ("I can touch you in those places I don't even know the name of') seems very real as well. Did it happen? Ade Tonka Toy is real. It's about me growing up in a pit village with slag heaps, coking plants, maggot farms and sexual awakening. Robots With the dark humour side to your lyrics are you worried about being seen as a comedy band? Ade I distrust people who can't laugh at themselves. Life is a tragicomedy. Piety and seriousness aren't my scene, art has to have humour in it. I've never taken myself seriously even when I've been ready to end it all. Yet I am very serious. That's why our next single will have as the b-side i'm a very serious man. The comedy band thing is a line I'm happy to hang around now and again. People have laughed at me all my life whether I'm trying to be funny or not. If we can make people laugh that's not a band thing. people also cry to our songs and get depressed to them. This is a major achievement for me. I use music to get off on a downer, to feel the low, and if people can get all this from our music, and make toast to it or have a then great. Robots I'm thinking of Half Man Half Biscuit, particularly. A band who never seemed to get the recognition they deserved for their music because they were also funny. Ade Half Man Half Biscuit haven't influenced us at all. I'd never heard of any of their songs until last year. When I did, I loved 'em and was surprised at the crossover because they're from Birkenhead and they love Jim Reeves. So how surprised were we to find that we now practise in the same room in Birkenhead. As yet we haven't met but we're hoping to do a gig with them soon. Robots Who would you say has influenced you, then? Ade This is always difficult. Life is the obvious influence, but musically? I love all kinds of music from the 20s onwards. I love listening to the sounds of the sixties and Radio 2 on Sunday. Nothing much from the 90s turned me on. Oh, I was obsessed with Paul Simon for a year. The templates I use for songs come a lot from the 50s. '3 chords, a red guitar and the truth' is what Dylan said. I love Dylan and Hank Williams is up near the top, and Elvis, of course, is someone who provides never-ending love. Robots Are you a country music fan, or is your Jim Reeves fascination for some other reason? Ade What's this fascination with Gentleman Jim? Is it a kitsch thing? With me, no. His voice touches me. Pure melancholy. It now has personal overtones. I grew up listening to country music. My dad was a big fan. I've always loved it and I'll carry on playing it and loving it for ever. I love folk music: just an acoustic and a song. The Barnsley Bard they called me. Robots "There's a story-telling tradition in country that you're very much part of. Ade I just want to be a song-and-dance man. I love story-telling. I do tend to construct my songs in that way but I've never really thought of it before. Robots There's some great one-liners in your songs too... Ade One-liners? I've written so many songs and words. I don't tend to analyse anything too much, just do it and move on. The words just come into my head and I sing 'em out. Very few are written down so it's strange to see people dragging out a line and typing it up. I did my first one-man play in Liverpool recently, written by my good self and including a few songs. Tonka Toy's about growing up in a pit village and that's interesting cos people listen to the words in a different way and context. I liked it and I'm gonna do more. It's gonna have some early Wedding Present songs in it off George Best. I met Mr Gedge the other day. He's not entirely convinced by my George Best rock opera.
		The Exclusive - Zine (1999) Exclusive I discovered Teenbeat entirely by accident, which is what makes it all the more special. I write to Graham Shaw from Sick Happy Idle fanzine and he mentioned that I may like his brother's band and passed my address to him. Before long I received a package from Ade, singer with said band, including one of his infamous letters (gloriously decorated with his drawings...) and a tape of some of his band's songs. I put the tape in the player, expecting something good as he had name checked K Records stars Beat Happening, but I was not expecting the fantastic sound that came out. The closest I could possibly describe it would be John Shuttleworth singing songs written by Jerry Sadowitz in the style of Half Man Half Biscuit, released on K Records. Yes, that good. I decided I needed to hear more and more so I got more tapes and more tapes and still the same genius sound was there, it wasn't a one off. This band were special and their lo-fi, beautiful songs put a smile on my face, even when they were singing about women who work in Aldi or walking disasters or going to Scarborough in Ade's dulcet Yorkshire tones. I really think that everyone should hear the music made by Teenbeat and I'm going to do my best to make sure I can help. I was going to give you a potted history of the band in this introduction but why not let Ade (vocals, guitar) do it himself. Ade Me and Kev met as students in a big house on Silverdale Road, Birkenhead, where we wrote some songs and then looked very hard for a "Nico" (I never intended to sing) but instead we found Lee at a club where I used to compere and it was love at first sight. We've had loads of members drifting in and out (probably over 30); they turn up now and again. Neil stepped in to play guitar and now our line up is complete with Ned on keyboards and Phil on harmonica. Exclusive What were your original intentions for Teenbeat? How have you changed musically or otherwise since you started? Ade Like all youth bands we had world domination first and foremost in our minds but a few years down the well trodden path towards fame and fortune our feet got snared in the thousands of snapped guitar strings and I've realised it's never going to happen. Brancusi, the sculptor, travelling as a youth thought he had stunned a cow into rapture with his beautiful pipe music, only to realise that the cow was just urinating. "What is fame?" he asked, "As you can see, cow piss, that's all." These days I'm suicidal most of the time so I don't think too much about the future. It's always going to be a minority audience; we've accepted that. We're hoping to get a mail order thing going to generate some income. The Teenbeat dream is to have a house in Birkenhead converted to a studio and flats so we can carry on playing and recording songs forever. Exclusive With most bands I find that I can put some sort of reference point to them to describe what they sound like but with Teenbeat I found it extremely difficult. People have asked me what Teenbeat sound like and I just give them the description in the intro and they're none the wiser so I asked Ade how he would describe their music. Ade Someone once said our music was "uncannily familiar yet like nothing you've ever heard" and somebody else said, "George Formby meets the Velvets" - I'm happy with that. Soussion vivant dans mes pantelons, zeut alors! A tout a l'heure, je vais trouver une femme (excuse my French). Exclusive When I was reading the free Teenbeat fanzine 'Doorstep' I kept reading about a happening at "Simon's Kitchen" every week, what was/is that? have you played many gigs? Ade We did a lot of gigs in early 1998 in Liverpool and London but then I moved to sunny Surbiton and things got a bit more complicated. I've done quite a few solo gigs down here, mainly at the Bull & Gate. We played the 12 bar in Soho and we're playing in a charity shop in Birkenhead (we turned down HMV at Piccadilly), strangely enough across from where Simon our keyboard player used to live. He left to live in an Irish commune. We practised in his kitchen for a while and we got a scene going in his house every Wednesday night. When it got too busy we moved it a pub backroom and then to the cellar of a club in Liverpool. It was just word of mouth, clandestine meetings really. Exclusive I was also reading about 'The Teenbeat shrine', can you explain it's relevance and how people can get to it to visit it? Ade The Teenbeat isn't just a band, it's a religion. It has its own intricate belief system. Lee Bailey is our spiritual guide. People have come in and out of home but once you've been with us, you are always part of us and will live on in the myth - like Marcel and his red pullover. One day when we were all out in the wood we found a tree and decided that this should be our shrine. The local copse is very important to us, it's a place of deep spiritual significance, a holy place. We love nature - we visit the shrine. This pilgrimage is an important post-practice ritual. People send us personal artefacts and we place them at the shrine - call the copse! If you go down to the woods today, you're gonna get a big surprise. You'll find the teenbeat - bring the Eiffel tower and a pigeon feather, Septemember member member weather, bring a Rubik's cube cause we're clever, bring two door handles and an Aldi bag. Exclusive How on earth do you write Teenbeat songs? Ade We all get pissed and boxed and then jam out for about 10 hours. I slip into a trance and mumble any old shit, then we listen back to our ropy 4-tracks and try and salvage something from the wreckage. Most of the stuff we churn out on CD is never gonna be repeated - some of the stuff that is more "songlike" becomes a "song" which we can repeat more than once. Songs are useful for doing gigs though live we sometimes jam and i make some new words up off the top of my head - if I've seen some jelly babies stuck on the tube train window, or if Neil's been sacked again, or if Tim's been punched in the chip shop. For example. Exclusive I was just going to mention that actually, what influences your lyrics? There seems to be a recurring them of the sea and northern seaside towns. Ade Birkenhead, chips, beer, pizzas, sour relationships, sour grapes, council houses, Scarborough, women's tits and vaginas (lovely - ed), loopholes in the law, spiders, Dennis Law, Robin Hood's Bay, Lee Bailey, Marcel, Barnsley, muckstacks, shop assistants (mainly in pizza parlours and Aldi shops), blonde hair, going home, leaving home, thinking of how happy I once was when I was up a tree looking at my friend's mother getting showered, how it all went wrong, 15 years of depression and misery, trying to find love, trying to make sense of a meaningless world, eating Neil's soup, buying second hand trousers, laughing at myself, loving Bromborough, anything northern, anything to do with the ocean, not being able to feel my arms, eating Ned's flapjack, listening to water dripping off a broken drain, Radio 4, Radio 2, wanting to feel wanted, crying a lot, drawing stylised sexual organs, playing the organ, singing, talking, holding hands with my special friends, listening to the sad sounds of aeroplanes way up on high, the early morning rain, my pockets full of sand, etc. etc. Exclusive What do you think of the current music "scene"? are there any other bands you're into? Ade Since I moved down here I've seen a lot of live bands. The ones that most impressed me were Ricky Spontane, Baxendale, Brain Of Morbius, Ben (Country Teasers/Male Nurse) and the top of the tree has to be Billy Childish and his Headcoats - it doesn't come much better than this. Seeing stuff live is my only contact with contemporary music. Have the Bootleg Beatles split up yet? But if somebody can make a few quid out of being in a band, it doesn't matter what it is, it saves them having to do some shitty job, then good luck to them I say. If you don't like it, you don't have to listen to it. It's like the difference between buying beans or spaghetti hoops, it's whatever your trip is. I mean major record business isn't very interesting at the moment but that's the way big business is - Coca Cola's not an interesting drink, it's just another product. Products have to be homogenised, this didn't happen so much in the early days in the 60s as the record business wasn't as sophisticated. It doesn't mean to say that interesting things still aren't going on, check out past the N.M.E. scene down to the local level and there's still some mad shit going on, like in Birkenhead there's plenty of mad shit going on. Don't worry about whether Oasis are any good or not, it's irrelevant. Today we can choose any particular genre of music from 60s garage to free form jazz, see it live or buy it from hmv. Today these are irrelevant questions, you can see whatever you want. Exclusive Whenever I mention you to people they always think that I'm referring to the label of the same name, is there any connection? Ade Since we've been "online" as they say, I've become aware of other Teenbeats that crop up when you do a search but no, we've never heard of the label - maybe we should send a demo. We named the band after an old 60s pop album I picked up in a Birkonian charity shop - it was full of bands from a time when bands were bands. Exclusive Someone I know described your sound as being similar to John Shuttleworth - do you take it as a compliment? Ade Definitely a compliment. Mr. Shuttleworth makes me laugh, I can understand the comparison - we do veer into self-parody now and again and what with my dulcet norethern tones. Ned recently bought a fancy Casio and I found myself singing along to elaborate backing music. As I caught my reflection in the window sitting there at the keyboard for a second, just a tiny second, I saw the future - the pigeons are in flight. Exclusive Okay, I think that Ade has said everything there. The Teenbeat write original, funny lo-fi tunes that deserve to be heard by everyone. I mean everyone. Their songs get into your head and stay there, you can't help but let them into your hearts. They are truly magnificent and they excite me greatly. Contact them and enter the land of Teenbeat where Scarborough is the only place to be and flapjacks are beautiful.
		Lowsley Sound - How The Caretaker Saw It Lowsley I first met Adrian R. Shaw on the last train back from Manchester. For one reason or more, the passengers had been heavily drinking and were in a boisterous mood. As the train pulled out of the station, my colleague and I had our attention drawn to some sort of commotion towards the very rear of the train. There was much jeering and some yelling, and this figure could be seen approaching. Some of our fellow passengers were throwing things at him whilst those who had nothing to throw cast their eyes away as he passed, only to stare at his retreating figure and shake their heads in wonder. His retort to all this was a warning that he was from Barnsley, and he seemed surprised that he was not receiving the respect that he felt due from this statement. He stopped to shout something at someone just in front of us, noticed the adjacent seat was empty and lay himself down before us. He was wearing a rather smart but terribly dated powder blue C&A suit, a mass of curly hair (the type that Leo Baxendale would illustrate with a bird feeding her young within it), and a pair of those silver specs that collect algae around the rims by the nose. At some point this expression appeared which I took to be one of insanity, but it was an attempt at registering recognition. He pointed at me and claimed we'd been at college together. I naturally denied this, but on comparing dates it did indeed appear that we had been there at the same time, although never met. Later I would recall a twit that I had noticed in the canteen with the most ludicrous Smiths quiff, NHS glasses, beads and no doubt some shrubbery crawling up from his rear - I had immediately made the wise decision to ignore him for the rest of my education. Having established (in his eyes at least) some common ground between us, he preceded to describe his night out. He'd been to an open mike night at a comedy club where he'd had a few drinks to calm his nerves until it was his turn, making sure he heckled everyone before him... finally he was in front of the mike but he only managed to deliver his first joke ("my wife's got a ten inch gash, it takes some licking") before a bouncer had his arm twisted up his back and was marching him out of the club ignoring Adrian's warning ("look pal, i'm from Barnsley") and depositing him in the street. He then suffered further abuse in the chip shop from a couple of girls he was only being friendly to before making it onto the last train and the unpleasantness within. We acknowledged his tale with neutral nods that he mistook for sympathy, and he told us about his job. He was a security guard at the Tate, and stood in front of paintings all day ("if I've got to have a job I want to have one where I don't have to do anything"). His salvation from this was a band he and his mate Kev were in, called The Teenbeat, and they needed a manager. He offered me this position and I gave him my address to send a tape to. About a week later, I received a letter in the post. In childish scrawl it asked me if I remembered the previous meeting and here was the requested tape. It was the most badly taped thing I had ever heard. Some sort of gig where a possible audience of about ten were enduring a clueless combination of guitars and bass with this amazing popping sound as percussion.

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