ONE DAY ALL THIS COULD BE YOURS
Brexit. Pollution. Social injustice. The rise of the right. Modern life might be rubbish, but it doesn’t half inspire some great music. Just ask Mike Vennart, who’s back with a creative call to arms, and opinions on everything from drugs and drums to dark times and dream pigs.
Fear was a much simpler emotion during childhood. Monsters under the bed, fanged Doctor Who aliens and, in early adolescent years, the bloodthirsty creatures lurking in the darkest corners of Stephen King’s imagination offered a thrill of fantastical danger, offset by the warm comfort and safety of the family home, and parental assurances that there were no such thing as ghosts.
But in adulthood, the rising sense of uncontrollable terror so many of us feel on a daily basis comes not from fictional ghouls but from the chaos, violence and cruelty meted out on the News At Ten, or under the avuncular guidance of David Attenborough as he forces us to face up to the damage that we as a species have done to the planet we call home.
It’s the big issues that have been keeping Mike Vennart awake, and that have informed much of his new album To Cure A Blizzard Upon A Plastic Sea, a stunningly evocative follow-up to 2015’s solo debut The Demon Joke.
It’s crammed with the dense, heavy, progressive melodicism that has been his trademark ever since the earliest days of his previous band Oceansize.
“To Cure A Blizzard was what the album was called for a long time, and that came from the track Robots In Disguise,” he explains. “That is primarily about dehumanisation and how the Brexit mentality has enabled the general public to think it’s okay to look down your nose at people who are living in poverty, people who are downtrodden, or people who are fleeing a war zone. It’s okay to have no sympathy for them. The idea being that you can shield your kids from all these horrendous things and just keep them indoors and they don’t have to worry about these sorts of things. The flipside of that is that living in a cocoon sends you fucking crazy as well. Seclusion can protect, but it can also totally destroy.”
The second half of the album title is taken from the song Immortal Soldiers, inspired by watching his six-year-old son playing with his Star Wars action figures, and coming to the chilling realisation that, in their imaginary battles, they will die a thousand times, but in real life will outlive us all.
“I’m just fucking surrounded by plastic,” he notes. “And the older I get, I’m just incredibly phobic of plastic now. It’s weird, it’s just everywhere, and it’s going to outlive us all by thousands of fucking years.”
None of this will come as too much of a surprise to those who follow Vennart on social media, where, among excitable tweets about his love of Iron Maiden and whipping up interest in his new tour, he rages against social injustice, benefit cuts for those most in need, and the rise of the far right. Just recently he was appalled to witness a man at a Roger Waters gig in Manchester who insisted on doing the Nazi salute all the way through the show, wordlessly and aggressively daring those around him to confront his actions.
But even without too-close-for-comfort examples like this, the constant stream of 24-hour bad news, of a world circling the drain, had already become too much to handle. So high was the anxiety that he developed a nervous twitch, and found he was obsessing over things, replaying events in his head from 10, 20, 30 years ago, with more layers being added with every new bulletin.
“As I get older I try to be all-encompassing and I try to be accepting of everybody’s differences and opinions, but I can’t help being in the deepest, darkest despair at the absolute shit I see on my phone every day,” he says. “All day every day it’s fucking bad news and it’s lies, fucking he-said-she-said Chinese whispers. It’s fake news, but why can’t we get to the bottom of what is fucking real and what isn’t? Even when something is proven to be real or something is debunked, the lie is always there and it’s bigger than anything. It drives me fucking insane.
“It’s driven me to the point where I’ve had to start taking antidepressants, because however awful this shit is that’s happening, I’ve got shit to do, I’ve got relationships to maintain, I’ve got a kid to bring up and I’ve got a wife to adore. I can’t be letting this shit get in the way, but it was.”
Elsewhere, there’s a song written from the perspective of a suckling piglet destined for the dinner table. “One night me and Simon [Neil, Biffy Clyro frontman] went out in Germany and we were served
suckling piglet. To this day I have recurring nightmares that I’m being served this live piglet, and it’s looking me in the eye, saying, ‘Please don’t, please don’t…’”
Then there are ruminations on “getting old and not really wanting to take class A drugs any more, but your mates who are a bit older than you haven’t got the memo, so you’re having to hang around with people that are absolutely off their heads on coke”.
It’s not all darkness though: Vennart is a funny and engaging man. Who else, after all, would come up with a doomed-to-be-mispronounced song title like Diamond Ballgag?
His adopted hometown of Manchester is a subject of adoration on the album. After the bombing at the Ariana Grande concert in 2017, the nation couldn’t help but be floored by the wonderful resilience and compassion displayed by the city’s residents, but Vennart had long been planning to pay tribute to the place, particularly in the surprisingly baggy vibe of Spider Bones.
“I’ve just got a lot of pride for it,” he says. “I grew up in a suburb of Leeds. If you weren’t wearing a tracksuit or if you weren’t into football, you were just an outcast. I was the only kid in my school that had long hair and wore a leather jacket and was into heavy metal. I literally had no mates. I can remember the first time I heard [Nirvana’s] Smells Like Teen Spirit.
I was sat in the toilet cubicle, listening to the radio on my Walkman on my own because I didn’t have any friends. I couldn’t ever go around telling anyone I wanted to be a singer.
“So when I moved to Manchester when I was 18, I just found you could be absolutely anyone you wanted to be. And there are venues of every size – for every style of band, there’s somewhere to play. I just love it.
I can’t imagine living anywhere else. I’ve been all over the world and seriously, I don’t need anything else. It’s just got it all.”
As with The Demon Joke, To Cure A Blizzard… was written and recorded during downtime from his day job as live guitarist for Biffy Clyro, and once again features the talents of former Oceansize comrades Richard ‘Gambler’ Ingram (keyboards) and Steve Durose (guitar), with the latter also playing an invaluable role in producing the record.
“The drum sounds that Steve managed to conjure, they are things I didn’t even think were possible,” says Vennart. “In the past, we’ve gone for a big rock, almost metal drum sound. This time it was, ‘Let’s make it sound like Fleetwood Mac, or David Bowie. Let’s make it sound really, really 70s and then counteract that with some big rock action.’ I was just delighted with what Steve managed to pull out of the bag – it was really different.”
We do live in dark times. But as long as there are creative souls questioning the status quo, standing up against injustice and calling the powers that be to account, there’s hope, humour and a sense of solidarity to be found. To Cure A Blizzard Upon A Plastic Sea is a call to topple plastic armies both literal and figurative, and its importance to its creator can be summed up by his final word on the record: “I haven’t been that excited making an album since the second Oceansize album.”
The monsters under the bed are real. It’s time to chase them out.
To Cure A Blizzard Upon A Plastic Sea is out now via Medium Format. See www.vennart.com for more information.
“When I moved to Manchester when I was 18, I just found you could be absolutely anyone you wanted to be. I’ve been all over the world and seriously, I don’t need anything else. It’s just got it all.”