CLAYPOOL LENNON DELIRIUM
A state of delirium struck again as Les Claypool and Sean Lennon returned with their prog/psychedelic garage-rock album South Of Reality.
In 2015, Sean Lennon’s band the Ghost Of A Saber Tooth Tiger were the openers on a tour co-headlined by Primus and Dinosaur Jr. Which is how Lennon ended up having an impromptu jam with Primus bassist and lead vocalist Les Claypool one night before a show.
“We were playing on acoustics in the back of Les’s tour bus, ten or fifteen minutes before one of us was supposed to go on stage,” Lennon recalls. “And we came up with a bunch of things really fast. I remember Les being like: ‘Yeah, I noticed that you were kind of writing a song as we jammed, as opposed to just noodling.’ I think he liked that.”
“He was playing things that I wasn’t expecting, and that always intrigues me when I play with someone,” Claypool adds. “So I could tell right away that we had an interesting dynamic together. And I also liked the fact that Sean sometimes has odd approaches to what he does,” he says, laughing. “Because, as you may know from my work, I’m a little off-centre, too.”
‘Off-centre’, of course, doesn’t even begin to describe the supreme oddness of Claypool and Lennon’s individual artistic output. As the frontman and main songwriter for Primus, the former has spent the past three decades or so crafting some of the knottiest, most dizzyingly complex and bizarre bass lines in modern music.
As for Lennon, he’s a multi-instrumentalist who as well as his solo and band pursuits has collaborated with artists in pop, rock, metal, avant-garde, hip-hop, psychedelia, folk and other genres – and that’s in addition to his work scoring films, producing records, acting and more. (He is also, of course, the son of John Lennon and Yoko Ono.) Put these two off-centre individuals together in a room – or the back of a tour bus, as it were – and the result is, as Lennon says, “definite creative chemistry”.
The outcome of that chemistry is the Claypool Lennon Delirium, a project which serves as a conduit for the two artists to explore the outermost reaches of their shared musical sensibilities. The duo released their debut album Monolith Of Phobos in 2016, and followed it up in 2017 with the EP Lime And Limpid Green.
In 2019 they returned with a full-length followup, the similarly exploratory South Of Reality, on which they indulging their shared love of 60s and 70s prog, psych and garage rock and melding it to jam-band-esque instrumental excursions, sweetand-sour vocal harmonies and a lyric approach that is one part dark ruminations on the human condition and one part word-salad whimsy.
Claypool and Lennon recently sat down to talk about their artistic bond, their recording arrangement, and what it is they like about working with one another. Central to this last point, Lennon says, is the fact that “we have an easy flow together”. Which, Claypool adds, is an important, if not essential, aspect of the Delirium. “It has to be easy,” he says. “Because I don’t like pushing things. If things aren’t coming easy, then I’ll go do something else — like catch a fish or something.”
You pull from a lot of different sounds and styles in the Claypool Lennon Delirium, especially latesixties and early-seventies prog. What do you love about that music? Sean Lennon: I think we love prog because it’s open-ended, and you can kind of do anything with it. It’s expansive. So it suits us, because it doesn’t seem strange to write a song in three sections about a rocket scientist [the track Blood And Rockets, about American rocket engineer Jack Parsons]. It’s the theatrical version of rock’n’roll. [laughs] Les Claypool: I like it because it’s a rock that I haven’t really turned over on my own yet. And I tend to turn over a lot of rocks. I think Primus has always been pretty progressive, but in a different way. Primus is a heavier band. This to me is more reminiscent of Syd-era Floyd stuff and things that were going on around that time. And we come at it from different angles. As a kid I was a big fan of Rush and Yes and Utopia and Jethro Tull, whereas I think Sean was coming from a more psychedelic side of things. We like turning each other on to different things.
What was the collaborative process like for South Of Reality? Were you guys coming up with ideas independent of one another, or were you working on everything together? SL: Both. Les has a really good work ethic in a lot of ways. For example, he has this policy that everyone show up for rehearsal the first day knowing all the songs for a tour. Every part! He wants you to do your homework. It’s kind of like that for him when making a record, too. He does his homework before he gets there, and he shows up with a lot of ideas. But then there are other things that we came up with just by jamming together in the studio. Sometimes we would write a song a day for several days in a row.”