Switched on Pop - CHVRCHES and the sound of 80s horror

Episode Date: September 14, 2021

CHVRCHES is well-known for their comprehensive use of synthesizers and their updated take on “synthpop”, a subgenre of pop we most closely associated with the 1980s. While gearing up to make their second album in 2015, CHVRCHES members Iain Cook and Martin Doherty spent much of the recording budget buying up many of the original synthesizers used to make those iconic 80s dance tracks. Contemporary replicas of those synth sounds are now commonplace with pop acts like Dua Lipa and The Weeknd. But CHVRCHES has been wielding these sounds for more than a decade, and their newest project is a great reminder of how closely we link that synth sound with not just to a bygone era, but specifically to the eerie sound of horror film.  Screen Violence is their new album. It draws inspiration from classic horror films like John Carpenter's Halloween. With its horror frame, the lyrics explore dark themes, like the violent online abuse CHVRCHES lead singer Lauren Mayberry has endured for much of the band’s existence, a hyper consciousness of her own mortality brought on by that abuse, and fears of losing her grip on reality. Switched On Pop’s co-host Charlie Harding spoke with Lauren, Ian, Martin from CHVRCHES about the making and meaning of Screen Violence. MORE Chvrches' Lauren Mayberry: 'I will not accept online misogyny' SONGS DISCUSSED CHVRCHES - Never Ending Circles Dua Lipa - Physical The Weeknd - Blinding Lights CHVRCHES - California CHVRCHES - Lullabies CHVRCHES - Final Girl CHVRCHES - Violent Delights CHVRCHES - He Said She Said CHVRCHES - Asking For A Friend  John Carpenter - Halloween Theme Suspiria - Markos John Carpenter - Christine John Carpenter - Turning The Bones (CHVRCHES Remix) CHVRCHES - Good Girls (John Carpenter remix) CHVRHCES - How Not To Down (with Robert Smith) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. The band Churches, spelled with a stylized V, is well known for their comprehensive use of one of my favorite instruments, the synthesizer. And they have this updated take on synth pop, a subgenre of pop we most closely associate with the 1980s. While they were gearing up to make their second album in 2015, Churches members Martin and Ian spent much of the recording. budget buying up many of the original synths used to make those iconic 80s dance tracks. You can hear the full power of these synths on a track like Never Ending Circle off that second album.

And of course, nostalgic replicas of those synth sounds are now being spun up into hits for elite pop acts like Duolipa and The Weekend. But Churches has been wielding these sounds for more than a decade, and their newest project is a great reminder of how closely we link that 80s synth sound with something maybe a bit surprising, the sound of horror. Their new album is Screen Violence. It draws inspiration from classic horror films

like John Carpenter's Halloween and gets into some dark themes like the violent online abuse church's lead singer, Lorne Mayberry has endured for much of the band's existence, a hyper-consciousness of her own mortality brought on by, that abuse and fears of losing her grip on reality. It's a powerful record. I was so pleased to get a chance to talk to Lauren, Martin, and Ian from Churches about this album and am thrilled to bring that conversation to you today. Since you're going to be hearing all three of their voices,

I asked them to start out by introducing themselves. Hi, I'm Ian. This is the voice of Martin set next to... Lauren, the final member of churches. Thanks for joining me today. We're going to get into some music shortly, but I want to start with the idea of screen violence. It's such a provocative and contemporary title. What's the concept behind screen violence? How did it originate? I think we're always shying away from the notion of concept because it has such baggage when it comes to music, you know, the concept album. That said, though, I think the best way I've heard it described by Lauren, I think, was it's kind of a lens through which we've kind of filtered the,

the world it's like well you know here's a different way of looking at it that kind of focuses things a little more it was a band name that we had kicking about in a big list of about 40 or 50 potential band names in 2011 I think and Lauren had come across the spreadsheet recently and it seemed like a good idea to revisit that concept um ah fuck I said it damn it um idea Let's say idea. And I think... Primus. Like, lyrically, but before we started,

I think I thought maybe that lyrically it would be a lot more concepty, because at that point, in the touring and in the writing, I think now I look back on it with the benefit of hindsight. I think I did really want to, like, not write as myself and disappear from that because it felt like that was quite an exhausting experience almost. So I think I like the idea of being like, I can write about completely different things

and there'll be nothing to do with me, but now I can see I'm like I think that was almost a lens to process things through if that makes sense which is why songwriting is so amazing and so weird because now I look at it and I'm like well you were writing about things that were horrific you weren't writing about horror if you know what I mean the image on the front of the album is a TV screen that makes me think of poltergeist and like other 80s horror the idea of violent relationships to screens it's kind of throughout the music on the record. I think in the lyrics for sure,

I wanted to make sure there was very vivid imagery in it. So even though the songs themselves aren't about horror films, I definitely wanted those references to be a thread throughout the record. So a song like California, like the lyric in it is,

no one never warns you, you'll die in California. And you even say, pull me into the screen at the end. Yeah, it was just after I'd watch the Lost Boys, I'd rewatch that, and also I love the idea of people thinking this song is about an idyllic seaside town in California that's infested

with vampires. I think it was freeing in a way because I don't think we would have used that kind of imagery on previous records if there hadn't been it was like the album title says it's allowed so you can take these constraints off and you can write different things and I think it really

pushed the stories we were building into more vivid space I suppose. Yeah, I feel like I hear it also on lullabies and we hear it on final girl were you saying in the final cut in the final scene there's a final girl and you know that she should be screaming that's a pretty horrific moment yeah yay i mean not yay but yes that it went well it did what we wanted it to do but yeah i feel like the guys and i've talked about this a lot

like i don't know why i am so obsessed with horror films because i cannot handle them at all i can't i'm just like terrified like i can't do it but i keep watching them and there's something in your I don't think I'm drawn to like the sadism of it. I think there's something in your subconscious that you're trying to figure out that you're trying to process. It's cathartic, yeah. And I liked the idea of kind of writing about your own experiences through that kind of lens. Like when you're running and running to a horizon that keeps moving and you don't, you know, everybody, but especially women, know the sensation of feeling watched and feeling hunted and feeling unsafe in your own life.

And I think now I look back and I'm like, oh, I think that was some mental health processing that was going on there. Now, speaking of violence that happens to screens, you've spoken extensively about online bullying. In fact, you wrote a wildly shared piece, I will not accept online misogyny for The Guardian in 2013, where you revealed the full extent of the online abuse you've received as a member of the band. Is there a song on screen violence that particularly resonates with that experience? I think the song Violent Delights to me sums up to most. I don't know, it's the best I could sum up what that experience felt like. And that song's written about recurring nightmares and panic attacks. That's a tough subject.

So I was like, I want to make it like vivid and visual and feel like a story. Because it's something that's followed the band around since the very beginning. And this is probably the first record we've properly written about it. But so much has changed during the time we were in the band. Because somebody, a fan on the internet, sent me a clip of this Google talk that we did in 2014. And then I looked at it. I haven't watched that since we'd done it. And I saw this clip.

And I was conscious that I'm like, wow, that's like a 24, 25-year-old girl. And you're kind of getting the piss taken out of you by these questioners, which I didn't pick up on at the time. But there's a guy who works for Google who asks a question in the Q&A bit where he's like, essentially what you mean is that you need an emotional bodyguard. Do you think an emotional bodyguard for you on the internet is a reasonable response? I think if it existed that would be nice

but it's pretty abstract I suppose it's more difficult to deal with because it's not like a tangible physical thing there's no way of kind of just putting somebody bigger in the middle because there really isn't that okay thank you that's a hard question I wasn't prepared for that

I didn't remember that I don't remember that at all but it's definitely there and I'm like as a 33 year old I would be like fucking excuse me And I would like, definitely. But you know that's life experience. As a 25-year-old, completely overwhelmed by what was happening with the band.

I just look at that person. I'm like, wow, you look so sad. You look so worried and so sad and so small, kind of. And I'm just kind of like looking at the floor, being like, I don't really know. I don't really know why you're asking me. I don't, you fix it. You're in charge of the internet.

Good question. So I just like that the conversation around those things has changed so much during the time we've been in the band. And I feel differently about it. But it's definitely bizarre to look at those things. He'd be like, wow, nobody knew what was going on. Nobody knew it was going to get like this. It's the Wild West, man. I want to talk about the song, He Said, She Said,

where you sing about verbal violence, gaslighting, the impossible expectations of just being a woman. Maybe it's age, maturity. Turns out at 32, 33, you really hit your fuck-that factor on things like that. I think when I was 23, I knew that there were double standards and things that were applied to me that felt confusing or frustrating, but I hadn't had enough life experience to fully be exhausted by that. And I think that if you're going to scream it anywhere, might as well do it in a pop song rather than in the house by yourself, I guess. There's a way that the frustrations that you're expressing in the song feel echoed in the way that you sing the chorus. It sounds almost disembodied.

Well, I feel like that was definitely a production choice in terms of why we used the auto tune so it would feel like a call-in response and it would feel like it was becoming increasingly like a cycle or increasingly unhinged. From the production standpoint, it was a deliberate move to make that sound like an internal argument or like the sound of somebody literally losing their mind is like, am I hearing voices? You know, when Lauren sings, I feel like I'm losing my mind. There's like a disembodied voice that sings it back. And that speaks to what the lyrics are about. It's that you are having this experience.

And if you verbalize that to somebody, they're going to say that you're insane. Or they're going to say you're overreacting. So in your mind, you're like, am I, am I, am I, am I all the time? Do you feel there's any sort of resolution in the song, whether musically or sort of from a place of personal catharsis? I feel like it's quite telling that the song ends on the line I try. Because I feel like that's all we can be doing is like trying and trying, not necessarily even to change the way that. that people are, but just trying to find some kind of better way to love with it, if that makes sense. The most positive thing that's come out of this is that people have gotten in touch

with us saying that the song connects with them. And I think that's always my last minute, like two minutes to midnight fear before a song comes out is what if, what if? And then with this song specifically, I was like, what if that's just going to push some people's buttons? And I don't want to do that. That's nothing wrong with pushing people's buttons. Fuck it. Yeah, I think I just I feel like, you know, I guess it's just about how much energy, emotional energy you have for that

sometimes and I think I've spent a lot of emotional energy on things over the years which, you know, it chips away at the soul that stuff. So, but hey, then we write a song about it so it can't be mad about it because it's all paying forward into the next thing. I mean, throughout the entire album there's themes of violence. You move beyond just the idea

sort of screen violence and talk about violence more broadly. There's some very dark and personal moments. Like, I think about, on asking for a friend, it opens singing about the fear of death. I'm afraid to die. Oh, good I could buys. I can't apologize. How Not to Drown feels like a murder fantasy. Why did you want to play with violence as a musical theme?

I feel like because of the album title and the themes we were talking about, I did want the lyrics to be very vulnerable, but to have those moments that are like a gut punch and there should be violence in the imagery because that's what we're talking about. There was definitely time after certain rounds of touring when things had gotten really bad, back on my brain here. What do you mean?

Just because even the consensus is, if it's on the internet, it's not real. So if you wake up to hundreds of death threats in an inbox, it's not real. And the human brain does not make that distinction like emotionally you're not like oh well it's probably not going to happen when this person says they're going to come down to the show

it's probably not going to happen like you can't make that distinction and if it happens enough times I think I've definitely developed a hyper-consciousness of mortality and I was talking to somebody about it once being like can you quickly help me put my brain back in my head because I have to go back

on tour and I need to know how to do this and they were like you have a fixation on the concept of mortality because you're reminded of your own mortality constantly when you're working and that's weird to be in a pop band and be going to play a show and be like, I wonder, today's the day. That's not very normal.

So I think I was like, okay, I'm not actually a maniac. That's a normal psychological response to that. And obviously I don't feel like that now necessarily. But I feel like hopefully it's, well, it's something I think people will relate to when they hear the record because everybody in this moment in time is so hyper-conscious of life and death because of what's been happening in the world. on screen violence we're dealing with these themes of horror and the thing about horror is that it fixates on the trauma it so rarely focuses on the fallout and potential for healing that happens afterward do you feel that we're hearing any of that aftermath of violence on this record? I think so for sure literally. I'm very conscious that I really don't want people to talk about this record like she's writing about internet trolls because to me I'm like that's not what's happening.

It's writing about your experience slightly during but mostly afterwards and what that has done to hear of psychology and how you think about people and how you relate to people. And yeah, that to me is the part, especially for female characters and horror that we don't see a lot of. Like True Detective, a show that I love is about a dead girl that they find at the start of the season. And then the rest of the show is about the relationship of Woody Harleson and Matthew Conaghey. She's a plot device. She doesn't, her experience and how doesn't matter. It's all about how these men have experienced her loss. And even the way that the media talk about some of the stuff that's happened,

that happens to women in real life, online, wherever, and the way people report things that I have technically said to them in interviews, it is like a strange secondary layer to it where people fixate on the macabre and the violence, and they don't actually, they talk about, they're almost talking more about the men that are perpetrating it than they are, the women that's receiving it It's kind of fetishistic, isn't it? Yeah, it's a different kind of violence fetish. You're not

perpetuating the first wave of it, but you're perpetuating the discussion around it. And I guess, yeah, there's just not a lot of space for those kind of stories. Euphoria of Calvin Klein, the new collection elixir. Three new elixires perfume intense. Solar, Magnetic, Ball.

Pulsa in the banner, do the quiz, and discover your fragrance euphoria. In addition to the themes of lyrical violence, I also hear the sounds of violence embedded within that production. Obviously, you all are known for your heavy use of synthesizers. We often associate synthesizers with 80s synth pop, but there's also a lineage of synthesizers through horror. Very much so. I actually started doing a master's on it when I was at uni.

The connection between those sort of synthetic scores and horror films. of that time is almost by necessity because they were low-budget films, all of them. They weren't big studio films and they couldn't afford a composer and an orchestra and a big budget score. So they had to use whatever was at hand. And that just, I think, happened to sort of coincide with the availability of affordable electronic instruments. All of a sudden you had these keyboards that you could buy and you could make the scores as Carpenter did, you know, him and one other guy, complete control over every aspect of the music. If it had been 20 years earlier,

that wouldn't have been the case because the synths would fill a room and would cost tens of thousands of dollars. It's kind of two things that coincidentally happened in time that formed an aesthetic that now we're sort of looking back on 40 years later and co-opting in a sense. When you have X amount to make an entire movie, you're John Carpenter and you can't afford John Williams

to come in and score your whole movie. What do you do? Right. Okay, you buy a drum machine and you buy a synthesizer and let's go and see what I can do yourself. And that to us will always be truly inspirational. We've worked with producers in the past sometimes, but this is a band that started in the first five years

were just two producers in a basement studio in Glasgow, like doing all the beds and all the tracks. So that ethos of the DIY aspect speaks to us very directly and is very much built into our DNA. Are there certain synthesized sounds that you feel particularly evoke that period of horror films? Yeah, not even just sounds, but entire synthesizers, keyboards that to me are very much synonymous with that sort of thing. I went about tracking down a seal orchestra.

It's from the late 70s, and it was used a lot in Italian horror movies, and I believe it's all over the Suspidia score. It has really particular personality. It's bad in just the perfectly amazing way that it is. It has like four sounds, a percussion sound, a string sound, and like a wind sound. And this was high tech at the time. You know, this wasn't designed to be in the so bad it's good category. Sounds nothing like the instruments that was trying to emulate like 50 years later,

but it sounds so special and so unique. There was something in that architecture. It cannot be matched. I can't pan all the way around the studio right now. You wouldn't see this on the podcast anyway, but there's synthesizers literally everywhere in this room, and most of them are 30 years old at a minimum, for that exact reason.

These sounds are truly unique and unrivaled still. Synthesers can have such broad voices. They're in all kinds of music, there are a certain way in which their process that makes it feel like it's coming from the world of horror? Yeah, I mean, if you're looking to do something, you know, Anxie and Eerie, there's a number of go-toes. I guess there's types of sounds. There's types of, there's a lot of, I think, for me, there's a lot of effects involved when I'm going for a particular mood like that. If I want to date it specifically to that, what you might be getting at, the kind of the 80s type horror,

my go-to synths will be like the usual suspects like at Oberheim or Jupiter or Juno. But then because you're used to hearing those things in a particular way through a particular medium, like VHS or through like an old score where all the high ends dialed out or like things are, it wasn't necessarily the most hi-fi recording process. so if I was to just take the sound of like an eerie high Juneau 60 or whatever and then present it laid bare it would not evoke those feelings in my opinion that's where the process of starting to shape it into that world will begin

there's a thousand plug-ins out there that tried to emulate the wow and flutter and the tape warble and all those things those can be an interesting place to start. And then there's the reverbs of the day, like the AMS and like the kind of the lexicon style reverbs that are all very synonymous with those types of 80s sounds.

And then at the end of the day, the content of what you're playing on those things is the difference between Beverly Hills Cop and like... The well-known horror film. And like Halloween. Yeah, the same instruments. You know, but what I'm trying to say is those same tools were used for vastly, vastly different jobs.

And so much of why they sound the way that you're talking to me about and what I think you're getting at is in the arrangements and in the processing. There are just so many eerie sounds here. And I was going through, as I was listening to this record, all of these John Carpenter references kept coming to me. mind. And of course, John Carpenter, the composer, actor, director, filmmaker. Legend. Yeah, legend of horror film. Like, when I heard the opening of your song asking for a friend, to me, these synth pads are really reminiscent of Carpenter's 1983 film, Christine. Kind of like this opening of a horror film where things are still copacetic. You think things might be okay before the first jump scare comes out? And then on

lullabies, there's this cano line that reminds me of Carpenter's theme for Halloween even a little bit, just the minimalist cano. Like in a major mode, yeah. This is the part where you get legal action taken against us. That's why we collaborated with John Carpenter

so we wouldn't get Sid. As part of this album rollout, you've collaborated. Why did you want to work together? When we were discussing the idea of screen violence, somebody was suggested that we have composers, reimagined some of the songs, and our first instinct was, oh well, we should ask John Carpenter. It was shortly after we had decided to just ask Robert Smith if he wanted to feature on a song.

And so we were in this kind of headspace where, well, if you want to work with your heroes and legends, you just ask. And I guess maybe they say yes. And an actual fact, that's what happened. We were lucky enough that he said, sure. I really like that song, Good Girls. can you send me the stems? He said, if you would rather not pay me for the remix, do you fancy remix in one of mine?

And we were like, sure. Hell yes. Next thing you know, there's a split seven inch on Sacred Bones and we've collaborated with one of the most important filmmakers and composers ever, in my opinion, based on what I love and what the cinema that means something to me, you know? And I do think, like, based on the lyrical content and like

John Carpenter has written some of the most important female horror roles ever. So I feel like if anybody is going to be entrusted with how to extrapolate those lyrics further, it should be him. You said you also got to collaborate with Robert Smith of The Cure on the song How Not to Drown. How Did this come together and what does his contribution do for the song? We'd need another podcast. I know, I know. He could talk about this all day. Yeah, no, it was something that, I mean, everybody knows that The Cure have been working on new material and the prospect of them touring again next year or whenever kind of peaked our interest

and we thought that maybe we could give them a shout and see if we could sort of throw our hat in the ring for potential support slot. But it turns out that he doesn't actually, Robert Smith doesn't actually have a manager, so he got back personally to our manager and said, hi, Campbell, what do you want? Really to the point. And we were. we're just like, God, I don't know. Maybe we could send him some songs and see what he says. And he got back and zeroed in on how not to drown as being one of his favourites. And we were just like, you know, go for it.

If you want to chime in with some thoughts and ideas, then we would be more than grateful. So some time passed and we hadn't really heard anything, but we'd kind of, I guess, accepted that maybe it had gone away. and on Halloween night, it was 2020, we were all together, we were mixing the album, and we were about to go and watch a horror movie with some nice red wine, and we got the email through from Robert with his demo, his parts on it, and we just freaked out. As total Kure, Lifetime Kure fans, we absolutely, it blew our minds. And Lauren, I'm curious, what does sharing vocal space with Robert Smith do on this song for you? I just think the way that the whole experience went down speaks to the generosity that he has for other artists and other creators,

because he was always conscious of making sure that he didn't seem like he was taking up too much space in the process. I assumed he would want to rewrite the lyrics, so we were very much like, whatever you want to do, please change whatever you want. And all that switched was originally when the second verse was sung by me, it was like out for blood and they will have my guts. And the only thing we really changed was so that he says, have your guts. So it's like he's another narrator of this weird murder ballad, non-ballad kind of thing. And I mean, I could probably retire tomorrow and be like, Robert Smith thought our lyrics

were good enough to stay as they were. In the song, I can't tell if his character is a lover, is a spectator, or is even the murderer. There's something kind of spooky about that unknowing. Yeah. I always kind of like to imagine it is the idea that he's kind of a macab narrator that's standing beside the grave or narrating the scene as we see it. So I am the protagonist in the thing. And then he is, I don't know, like, and like the ghost of Christmas yet to come.

Like that kind of thing. You know what I mean? The ghost of 80's past. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We were all such insane fancies of cure. for many reasons, but I feel like

they've always managed to have that balance of darkness and light, and we've spoken to him about it, and he's like, when I want to write a really up pop song, I write a really up pop song, and when I want to write something filled with melancholy, that's how I feel, and then I'll write that. I can't write what I don't feel, and he was like, why should I stop myself doing either of these things? And I feel like there are so few people that can have that duality and do it in such a perfect way.

I mean, I get the sense, even though there's dark themes on this record, the joy of creativity can be heard. As much as we might be trying to escape the idea of concept, there are so many interwoven themes that it feels like this is one body of work. Well, yeah, I feel like as much as the record is quite heavy in some ways, for me, it's kind of about what that looks like when you get to the other side, you know, like trying to get to the horizon. And in my mind, when I see a little movie scene,

I'm like, you're getting to the horizon, the sun's coming up. And like, you made it out, if that makes sense. Totally. Lauren, Ian Martin, thank you so much for sharing screen violence with us. It's been a pleasure of speaking with you. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, thanks, Charlie. It was great fun.

Switched-on Pop is produced by Nate Sloan, Megan Lubin, and me, Charlie Harding. We're edited by Joey Myers, engineered by Brandon McFarlin, social media by Abby Barr, illustrations by Aaron Scott Lebe, executive producers, Nashak Kerwa and Hannah Rosen, or a member of the Vox Media Podcast Network and a production of Vulture. You can find us at Switchedonpop.com on social media at Switchedon Pop, and we'll be back again next Tuesday, with another episode. And until then, thanks for listening.