RECORD COLLECTION

Steve Sullivan’s the man behind the new Frank Sidebottom documentary Being Frank. But his record collection’s a lot proggier than that.

Although I was born in one of the proggiest years, 1974, the first music I was aware of was Madness and 2-Tone. But I’d grown up with The Goons and some quite strange music, such as The Crossbeats, which was a band that played religious songs in the style of Merseybeat. I was also fixated by things such as ITV show Animal Kwackers, a garish take-off of the Banana Splits. Anything unusual and nightmarish I was usually drawn to! [Laughs] That, and soundtracks for obscure children’s TV shows – such as this Japanese one for Ultraman – light up a massive serotonin part of my brain and I have to have it. The first really proggy thing that caught my attention was when I was on a day trip to Grimsby with a housemate from uni. He said ‘This is a good record shop,’ and we went in and heard Frank Zappa and The Mothers Of Invention. They were playing We’re Only In It For The Money’s Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance. It really chimed with me, I don’t know why. I don’t remember ever going in another shop since that played Zappa, but I did once go to Berlin and in one flea market there was a stall that was all Frank Zappa. And around it were all these men with moustaches that looked like Zappa, stocking up on him. After Grimsby I started to explore his catalogue, who was he and what was he about. He was so interesting; anti-drugs and yet he made this music that would most be enjoyed by people on acid or smoking dope. My favourite Zappa song is Go Cry On Somebody Else’s Shoulder. This is one of the bitterest love songs; lyrically it’s totally of the counterculture and musically it’s totally of the 1950s. This is decades before postmodernism. He was a phenomenal innovator and recreator of all his influences.

All my life I’ve been fascinated by barrel-organ music. I saw one in Preston Flag Market when I was a kid and there was something about it that I loved. It struck me as a peep into the past, it’s ancient, mechanical, fascinating. I have about 30 albums of it now. I was yet to hear The Beatles and the barrel-organ on Sgt Pepper – that was when I was about 14 and the documentary The Compleat Beatles was on TV, opening a world of play and

imagination. A sideways look at the real world, they obviously had that fascination with music and instruments of the past too.

I came to McDonald and Giles relatively late. I was working in a cinema in Cardiff in the mid-90s. One of our projectionists, Mark Roberts, had put on some music before a screening, which was always something conventional. This night he put on McDonald and Giles’ Suite In C and oh my god, what a musical odyssey I went on. I’m not sure the audience liked it, but deep into that song there is a moment where three saxes take over and they’re playing this groove that’s unbelievable. It melted my brain. I had to bang on the projectionist’s door to ask what it was. Now I listen to it all the time.

I started raving about McDonald and Giles and people said, ‘You need to get into King Crimson, then.’ So all of a sudden I heard In The Court Of The Crimson King and what an album that is.

Around that time I discovered Frank Sidebottom. I went to a friend’s house and he was the kind of person who organised their CD collection according to the colour of the spine, like a piece of art. Then I noticed he had a Frank Sidebottom CD. There was a whole album? It was shocking to me, as this was a guy that I remembered from kids’ telly in the 80s. He told me to take it home, saying, ‘It’s not what you think it is.’ So I did, and heard this world that Chris Sievey [the man inside Frank] created spilling out of this CD. Some of it sounded like George Formby played badly. That was the tip of the iceberg, though. He was an avid Beatles fan, too. The more I dug, the more I loved it. Sievey fitted in with my love of outsider music.

Outsider music is made by people who’ve not had any musical training and aren’t necessarily aware of what they’re doing. Take Wesley Willis, a 300-pound, schizophrenic keyboard player from the Chicago ghettos. All his songs sound the same but he would do songs like I’m Sorry That I Got Fat or a concept album about how he beat up a load of superheroes. It was him processing the pop culture around him and what it meant to him. I also love Daniel Johnston; when he made an album there would be one copy that he’d hand to someone, then he’d go home and record another copy. That’s not how you do it, but their brains don’t work in a commercial way.

Which leads to my favourite record of all time. There’s a website called The 365 Days Project, a spin-off from a radio station called WFMU, by a guy who collected outsider music and thrift store finds. He said, ‘I’ve got all this crazy music, I’m going to put one thing a day online.’ I was blown away. One of the best things on there was Hooray For Hollywood by The George Garabedian Players And The Awful Trumpet Of Harry Arms. It’s classic Tijuana brass, with two trumpets playing the lead off-key. There’s something about that that I totally respond to, like the clash you can get in Frank Zappa’s music. It’s atonal, in the way that someone like Captain Beefheart can be, the rhythms are wrong, but so right.

I knew a little about Beefheart, but the more I worked with Martin Sievey, Chris Sievey’s brother, on the Frank Sidebottom film, the more I learned about Beefheart. The two of them were huge fans and had seen him at the legendary Bickershaw festival in 1972. I love Safe As Milk, every track is awesome. I love the musicality, the voice, his attitude. Any artist who is putting out records of their world view, and not deliberately trying to make money, just expressing what they’re thinking – Zappa, Beefheart and Frank Sidebottom all share that – is good with me.

I found Neu! totally accidentally. It was when eBay had just started and I was buying CDs from a discount label and I needed one more thing to get free postage, or something. I bought the first Neu! album, and when I put it on, there’s something about that rhythm that spoke to me. It’s also the most brilliant driving music.

For new prog, I love Bo Ningen. The last time I saw The Fall play, they were supporting. My wife was coming out of the toilet and I grabbed her and said, ‘Come and watch these.’ They were four Japanese lads dressed like schoolgirls, belting out the loudest noise that was so deafening you could just make out a tiny bit of texture at the top end of what they were playing. It was a hypnotic drone that gripped me. To know there are people out there still making sounds like this – and young people bringing their influences from here back to us – is so refreshing to me, it’s exciting.”

“I HEARD MCDONALD AND GILES, AND WHAT A MUSICAL ODYSSEY

I WENT ON.”