The 'Alternating Currents' Legacy Interview: Stephen Patman of Chapterhouse
A swirling, dreamy soundscape. A sonic experience. Lyrics... that can wait.
Prologue
Chapterhouse's music wasn't so much heard as felt. It seeped into your ears like warm fog, laden with the scent of distant feedback and the hazy shimmer of distorted guitars. Vocals drifted in and out, whispers lost in a swirling vortex of sound that built and crashed like dreams on the verge of waking. Layers of melody intertwined, creating a kaleidoscope of emotions – melancholic beauty, introspective yearning, and the exhilarating rush of pure sonic bliss. It was music to get lost in, a soundscape that painted vivid emotions with a single, fuzzy brushstroke.
"Playground."
A faraway voice in London answered the phone and just as quickly was off, gone to search for Chapterhouse vocalist-guitarist Stephen Patman. It's not in the purest pop sense you could talk about Chapterhouse: their music emanates like blue sparks from a melted torch flame, scattered in the wind across a scorched landscape of innocent childhood dreams.
This winsome-looking, incandescent quintet from Reading, England has stirred the British music press into a frenzy. Even as Patman got on the line and we joked about the bizarre name bestowed on the rehearsal studio he's ensconced in, a burden must weigh heavy on his twentysomething shoulders.
"We've never really had great pressure on us," he replied. Granted, the band’s debut Whirlpool captures their sound, however, Patman lets me know that right now “We're two steps ahead of it."
Whirlpool in of itself is a rotating mass of layered guitars, pounding rhythms, and a misty lyrical haze mixed in, as evidenced by their single “Pearl.” It's not an unexplored realm – bands such as Lush and My Bloody Valentine have paved the way – but it's a sound that might be new when Chapterhouse skips over to our shores in the fall.
"You've got a certain duty to do it, Patman said, regarding their live performance song choices. "You can't be completely selfish. We're selfish on a musical level in that we're only ever going to do things for ourselves musically.”
Speaking musically, they have been compared to the Charlatans and all other so-called 'Madchester’-sounding groups. Patman found it flattering, but irrelevant ("The whole groove dance thing got blown out of proportion") since Chapterhouse is younger in age and essentially grew up where, in Patman's words, "We haven't got any kind of scene."
"The fact is we all come from middle-class houses in the south of England and there's no musical influence on us at all, except for what we had to go out and discover ourselves." He's also philosophical about Chapterhouse's sense of purpose. "We've got no desire for any kind of rebelliousness. The only thing we're trying to rebel against is moronic, thoughtless behavior. The basic principle behind us is writing good songs that move people and create an emotion in them."
Spurned on by swooped sounds of lithe guitars and crashing waves of crystal froth, Chapterhouse, to quote Aldous Huxley's Heaven and Hell, is something "which is about all the things that can take you to a higher level of consciousness, naturally, without drugs."
Epilogue
Chapterhouse – Patman, Russell Barrett, Ashley Bates, Simon Rowe and Andrew Sherriff – did make it over to U.S. shores to play their first gig in Boston for alternative radio station WFNX’s 8th Birthday Celebration on September 23, 1991. But, another band was about to detonate a hole through the entire music industry with their second album and the genre known as ‘grunge.’
