We chat to the Speedy Wunderground artist about his live show and forthcoming EP ‘Graceful Degredation’.

This Saturday, we host Joyeria at The Old Blue Last for a free gig as part of the venue’s 20^th Birthday celebrations, plus support from Domina and Potato. Ahead of the gig, we had a chat to the Speedy Wunderground artist about his new EP ‘Graceful Degredation’, which comes out on 31^st October, looking ahead to the concert and discussing the ambitious new collection.

How would you describe your live set to someone who has not seen it before?

I don’t describe my set to others.  I’m not a salesperson nor do I have the insight into my output, performative or otherwise, to frame it correctly for anyone.  I’m sure somebody has reviewed my show at some point for some magazine… if you want to know what a show is like, look there. That’s part of the job of a critic, to place things in cultural history for those things deemed worthy of the people’s precious time. Well, that, and selling advertising.

What is your favourite moment of the live show?

A lot of people don’t know the songs… they’re coming to see the show for the first time or a friend has brought them… this is what underground music is like, dark rooms with friends.  So after the first song or two, there’s this polite clap as the audience try to go through the motions of figuring out what it is.  What type of shoe are they putting on?  Is this punk?  Is this rock?  Is this country?  Ultimately, Is this any good? The best moment is when the polite clap of speculation turns into the hoots and yells of celebration.  Then as a room, together, we can acknowledge that we got something cooking, something special, it’s the best.  On stage or in the audience, that’s the moment!  

What would you say is the unifying thread of ‘Graceful Degradation’? Something conceptual? A sound? Something else?

Graceful Degradation is the thread.  It’s the concept that holds all of the pieces together.  The music, the writing, the photography, the paintings, the sculpture, the film. They all pull from the pool of Graceful Degradation.  The lexical meaning of Graceful Degradation is the ability of a computer, machine, electronic system to maintain limited functionality even when a large portion of it has been destroyed or rendered inoperative. It was first introduced by the English psychologist David Courtenay Marr in the context of cognitive systems, suggesting that an efficient information processing system (like the human brain) should be able to handle minor errors without generating completely incorrect output.  I always make the simplest example of this being when an escalator breaks, it becomes stairs. I believe humans are in a constant state of Graceful Degradation attempting to prevent catastrophic failure. Stuck between the escalator and the staircase never being one or the other.  The body of work, from multiple angles, illustrates the struggle of identity. A distorted truth we can never fully see ourselves. This psychological fracturing of the “real” self is elusive and unknowable, each song scratching the surface, only to break a fingernail. 

What part of the EP are you most excited to share with the outside world?

There’s a track on the new EP, ‘Starving Ghosts’, a song with a kind of a sad-clown-at-the-edge-of-town feel to it. Like one of those old, dusty photographs you find in a shoebox, half-remembered and full of a beauty that hurts a little. God, it’s a terrifying thing to admit but I’m genuinely proud of it. This whole, deeply silly, maybe even tragically human project is anchored by that song. There is also a sneaky Bukowski reference in there.

I’ve also finished this short film, ‘The Bat’. It’s another attempt to circle back to the whole Graceful Degradation thing, but this time from a new, unsettling angle. I poured a lot into it—not just in terms of the usual sweat and stress, but in a more literal… blood. I also play guitar on the soundtrack, a skill I’m both grateful for and perpetually suspicious of. The hope—the faint, hopeful, and probably ridiculous hope—is that I can show the film right before a live performance. Just to have that shared moment of something… else. That would be something.

What appealed to you about ‘The Swimmer’ as a starting point for a song of your own?

The order of the question is wrong.  I was writing and then through some conversations it turned out what I was writing echoed a lot of the John Cheever’s short story and the short story is Graceful Degradation a way I’d not been approaching it. This accidental lantern, illuminating a back alley of my own work. So it was a perfect place to grab from, to borrow some perspective. To finally understand what in the world I was even doing, to take the raw clay of my own ideas and, with this new knowledge, press it against something true and solid to see if it would hold.

What makes a story set in 1960s suburban America relevant to your own experience?

Absolutely nothing. What applies here, I think, is Ned, the character, who just happens to be based in a certain place, much as I—the person writing this—happen to be located right here, in London, in this particularly exhausting century. The great, and perhaps terrifying, truth that has remained utterly unchanged since the 1960s (and maybe since the very dawn of humanity) is the profoundly multifaceted nature of human perception. It is a kind of small, sad joke that there are literally hundreds of versions of you walking around, each one a wholly unique entity cobbled together from the small, broken pieces of a few brief interactions. There’s me the hero, me the asshole, the drunk, the father, the brother, the lazy, the poor, the rich… all of these opinions are those of a dilettante, a kind of amateur archaeology, but they are also, for the people who hold them, entirely real. And then, of course, there are the hundreds of other versions rattling around inside yourself, the ones you can choose to discover or leave in the dark. Sometimes, in a strange act of cosmic grace, the two meet. But mostly, they just don’t.

If you were a tribute act to one artist, who would it be and why?

Leonard Cohen, because he is better than me.