Strange House In The Snow EXTRA

When I published my post on Strange House In The Snow last week, Dave Balfe got in touch to say it was one of his favourite Teardrop Explodes songs and a few days later wrote a message to me detailing the genesis and creation of the song, alongside other thoughts on the Teardrop Explodes. With his permission I am publishing that message here - it's a fascinating insight into the creative tensions in the band which produced such remarkable and imaginative music. 

STRANGE HOUSE IN THE SNOW

Dave Balfe memories October 2022 

Somewhere in the latter half of 1980, having already recorded Reward we (The Teardrop Explodes) went down to Rockfield Studios, near Monmouth in S.Wales to record its B-side in a single day. A slight indulgence as it could have been recorded more cheaply and simply in Liverpool. Though I'm sure the band would have been in full agreement, we always loved recording in Rockfield. I was 23, or maybe 24

With our previous b-side, Kilimanjaro, we'd set a precedent for creating a song in the studio. Alan Gill had written the music for Reward and I was keen to get a writing credit for the other side of the single. I had an unusual piano piece I'd been developing on my grandfather's upright piano in my fist in Grove Park, Toxteth. I knew it was too eccentric to be used in a conventional Teardrop song, It used a continual fixed '5th' harmony spacing on the white notes, that ignored the conventional changes to occasional sharps and flats it should have made as it moved across the keys. This pushed it into a curious musical 'mode' that sounded to me non-western, like something from an ancient civilisation (if they'd had pianos!), haunting and with a hint of some occult horror (to be a bit pretentious). 

I proposed the day's plan. Hugh Jones, by then our regular engineer, and I would get into the studio early and spend a couple of hours laying down the basics of a song, then the others would come down and put their contributions on top. I'm pretty sure none of them had heard my piece beforehand, though maybe Julian had. But certainly nobody had prepared anything. Hugh had created a tape loop of some kind to play along to maybe that tambourine you can hear at the beginning then I mapped out some kind of structure for the song. and recorded the pianos. After that I added the low drone and high warble synths that you can hear in the 'chorus' sections, Finishing with a few little strange moments, like the big atonal piano chord hanging in the empty section after the first chorus before verse two picks back up. I had always been a great fan of cinematic soundtrack music and I was thinking of the piece very much in those terms of atmosphere and drama - as opposed to a more typical, more conventional rock or pop song approach. 

I cannot recall in which order the other three recorded their contributions, not only because this was forty-two years ago, but also because as soon as I had finished doing my parts I then ate a large bag of magic mushrooms. determined to have an especially excellent time watching the rest record. It's quite possible that my outlandishly demented state sitting at the back of the control room contributed to the anything goes approach that followed. I'd guess Gary's drums were put down next. They weren't particularly unusual or funky. i suspect the slow and peculiar backing track was not something that gave him much opportunity to get a beat going. Alan's guitar was wild, raw, expressionistic and added to the crazed spooky atmosphere of the track, evoking something like the climax of a horror movie, Then Julian added the violin. Did he bring it with him or did he find it somewhere in Rockfield? I've no idea, I was completely off with the pixies by then. But I remember he and Hugh fiddling around with microphones and then that ear-splitting repetitive screech cranking the grand guignol up to a whole new lurid level. I'm pretty sure this was inspired by John Cale's similar use of violin in Venus in Furs and other Velvets numbers. I was having the time of my life, possibly the most wild and enjoyable trip I'd ever left the planet upon. But to the others. I've no doubt was just some maniac babbling unhinged suggestions with no care whether they were adopted or not, or indeed made any sense. 

Julian then did his vocal. Now Julian and I share a lot in common, and maybe diverge a whole lot more. Our sensibilities and philosophies, though overlapping a great deal. were quite different then and have distanced themselves more in the years since. But i have never doubted, nor stopped envying, his enormous talent. And this vocal performance for me epitomises what he could achieve in a certain domain when he was really let loose. I can't go into a full analysis and appreciation of the whole of that vocal. it would take too long, and require more of me than I feel ready to put down in words. But I find it genuinely awesome. I'm not sure if this is a true memory or a connection made later that somehow transformed into a false-memory, but I think we'd watched The Shining shortly before, So in my imagination Strange House's dreamlike violent scenarios take place in the haunted Overlook Hotel isolated over a snowy winter up in the mountains. For one verse he addresses me directly, 'Davey, don't let me lose my reason..." Something I don't think he'd have done if I hadn't been in such an open and unthreatening state at that moment. He seems to be pleading for me to help keep him sane. or protect him should he lose that battle. I had no idea at the time, not in the years following. how seriously to take this request. I thought about it often, and many times led to honour the obligation I felt it put upon me. But more often I didn't, and as our lives diverged any possibility of doing so became irrelevant. Such is life.. Such is me. 

For reasons I can't rationally explain this song has always occupied an especially hallowed place in my own personal list of peak musical experiences throughout the decades since. Does it live up to that, or are my emotions just an ineradicable product of the extraordinary drug experience I went through during the recording? Every few years I give it another play. Mostly, my opinion of its exceptional qualities remains high, as I disappear once again into its wildly frothing soundscape, frightening drama, sheer unsuppressed creativity and uniqueness. Though occasionally my critical faculties click in and it seems just an untidy mess of disjointed noise with someone yelling on top, and I wonder why I was fooling myself all these years. But that disillusionment never lasts beyond a few hours.

I've often gone over in my mind how the Teardrops went wrong. Most often blaming myself, or at least the mismatched chemistry of Julian and I. One of the mental exercises I often find myself doing, is imagining the alternative paths, the different turnings we might have taken at various junctures. Strange House,, for me, is one of those paths not taken. imagine that the small part of my musical make up that shared with Julian the love for such anarchic expressionistic untidy unpolished unstructured music might have somehow given up our more commercial direction and gone down this road. To create something a bit prog, a bit Beefheart. a bit Residents, a bit something beyond any of those. Maybe we would have ended up something like late Radiohead, ten years before them. I'm not saying we would, or should, have made an album that sounded like this, or that it wouldn't have crashed and burned commercially, but I do like to play with alternative histories. And none of us really knows what might have happened if we had. We later recorded another similarly recorded B-side (for Tiny Children, I think), Rachel Built A Steamboat. Without any mushrooms this time, and with a much sweeter charming vibe than the Lovecraftian horror of Strange House. If you haven't heard that, do please check it out. I love that too.

Endless thanks to Dave Balfe for taking the time to write these words and for allowing me to publish them on the blog. I hope you enjoy these insights as much as I have.