ES7125 seven-inch features Mark Pritchard & Thom Yorke
‘THE MEN WHO DANCE IN STAG’S HEADS’
‘THE MEN WHO DANCE IN STAG’S HEADS (INSTRUMENTAL)’
Our latest exclusive Reader Offer brings together the vastly disparate talents of Global Communication producer Mark Pritchard and Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke
This month’s seven-inch is a terrific collaboration between Mark Pritchard from Global Communication and Thom Yorke from Radiohead. ‘The Men Who Dance In Stag’s Heads’, which is backed by an instrumental version of the song, is one of the most striking tracks on ‘Tall Tales’, a new album by this seemingly unlikely partnership.
‘The Men Who Dance In Stag’s Heads’ is quite different to the dystopian electronics elsewhere on ‘Tall Tales’. At times, the track brings to mind The Velvet Underground or perhaps Spacemen 3. Yorke sings in a low voice, light years away from his distinctive falsetto, and his delivery is almost spoken word. One of the principal inspirations for his lyrics is Benjamin Myers’ 2017 novel ‘The Gallows Pole’, which Shane Meadows made into a BBC television miniseries a couple of years ago, while Pritchard’s music is characterised by bassoons and the drone of a harmonium, together with a slow and hypnotic Moe Tucker-ish drumbeat.
“I started working on the track with Steve Christie at Vintage Keys Studio in Hampshire,” explains Pritchard. “A friend of mine, Kirsty Hawkshaw from Opus III, had said to me, ‘You need to meet this guy, you’re going to love him, he’s into old synths’. She mentioned he had a lot of 1950s and 1960s valve synths. She also told me he was able to fix them. And then when I chatted to him, I found out he had two harmoniums.”
Pritchard says he has always loved the sound of the harmonium, adding that this stems from being a big fan of the cult Scottish poet and musician Ivor Cutler, who used the instrument on many of his recordings.
“I’ve often thought about doing something with the harmonium,” continues Pritchard. “I wanted to see what I could do with it. So I asked Steve to record every note of the instrument, first with the closest room mics and then with distant room mics. I was able to use that to write, thinking I could eventually just replay it live. I tweaked it and put a bit of distortion on it, which for some reason felt right to me, and that pushed the track a little further towards The Velvet Underground.”
‘Tall Tales’ is accompanied by a feature film created by multidisciplinary artist Jonathan Zawada, with each of the 12 tracks having its own visual narrative. For ‘The Men Who Dance In Stag’s Heads’, Zawada came up with an enthralling segment involving a rolling silver coin and a goat skull with a Greek tragedy mask in its eye socket, alongside other surreal imagery.
Like the track itself, the visuals were inspired by Benjamin Myers’ ‘The Gallows Pole’ and also by the story of Alexander Selkirk, the 16th century castaway who gave Daniel Defoe the original idea for ‘Robinson Crusoe’.
“Thom suggested early on that he’d been influenced by ‘The Gallows Pole’, so I read the book myself along with some more of Benjamin’s titles,” notes Zawada. “Some of the imagery came from that, but I was also reading about Alexander Selkirk during this period. It’s an amazing true story. There are incredible diary accounts from the time, written by people he spoke to about his life on this isolated island and the decisions that had led him there. The goat imagery is a reference to that and there are a bunch of other aspects of his story that I layered over the top as well.”
