Fila Brazillia's Twists and Turns of Luck
Q&A: The maestros discuss their classic album 'Luck Be A Weirdo Tonight'
Fila Brazillia remain one of the great shining lights of post-rock music, period. Their musicianship, studio mastery, and compositional brilliance continues to amaze fellow artists and tastemakers. Contemporaries from Radiohead to Black Uhuru have asked for their magical touch. Not only in remixes, but in their bold album statements, they cracked open the airstreams of cross-pollination between all musical forms.
Releasing on average an album a year in the 1990s, Fila became synonymous with the British chill-out sound, their fusion style pioneering today’s seamless blend of genres — a freedom of expression that younger artists enjoy now as a given. In those heady days, Fila completely ignored the boundaries set up by the music industry, catching the tail of the indie electronic scene and then quickly moving to the forefront of the acid house generation. Their name was often dropped into the same sentences as Kruder & Dorfmeister, Ninja Tune, Fatboy Slim or Goldie. The lead artist on the infamous Pork Recordings label, they graced the halls and redoubts of cool.
Still recording on and off together in recent years, Fila’s Steve Cobby and Dave “Man” McSherry just finished a successful Bandcamp vinyl campaign for arguably their best album, Luck Be A Weirdo Tonight.* We chose it as one of our top-top albums of the 1990s. While the ‘90s electronica revolution was head-spinning in its output, Fila’s Luck — or Weirdo as they call it in shorthand — stands out in part because of its melodic quietude mixed with sharp rambunctious angles. It’s both calming and thrilling. At all times it floats and stings like a bee.
And yet while Cobby and McSherry’s sonic games always keep the mind guessing, there was never any doubt about their emotional center. Yes, there is humor and a determined ethos to never take themselves too seriously. There is indeed weirdness and luck throughout their work, made literal in Luck’s title and its cover. It’s curious in an Alice in Wonderland kind of way. But it’s also blue in a Miles Davis kind of way. And until I talked to them for this interview, I didn’t realize just how so. While I could always hear a poignant beauty in songs like ‘Heat Death of the Universe’ or ‘Weasel Out The Muck,’ learning what was going on in their lives at the time reaffirmed the uplifting power of their chimera music and the healing balm of its wandering soul.
Connecting over the web, I asked them a series of questions about the mysteries behind Luck. From cameos by other electronic music legends to secrets revealed about iconic moments on the album, this article is for every Fila fan that ever grooved, kicked back or dreamed to their mad tunes. For those new to the Fila fold, I can only say I envy you: for the fresh discoveries ahead for your mind and your own truth — around every corner is a revelation, a shooting star, a rabbit leaping in the wild.
For those who don’t know and for context, Fila’s home base is in the port city of Kingston upon Hull in Yorkshire, on the middle eastern coast of England, and their studio is called Stunk Dusty (what a name!). I would like to thank the gents for their time and gracious sharing. In the future, I hope to bring you more on their incredible story and sound. OK fans and music nerds, here we go…
Ghost Deep: On making Luck Be A Weirdo Tonight…it’s such a distinctive, dense and heady record. Were there particular influences or inspirations for Luck, and why its strange title?
Dave “Man” McSherry: I half remember singing that tune to Steve — maybe I did, maybe I didn’t! There was always a lot of word-play tennis going on where words were misheard and bent.
Steve Cobby: No particular influences as such, outside of our usual remit of trying to do things that interested us. We never really wanted to repeat ourselves at any point. So lots of experimentation being the name of the game — the order of the day, I should say.
And the title was just something, a scat line that Man had come out with as he, well, we both did, there was lots of twisting of titles and words, punnery, and the like, and it was the melody line from ‘Luck be a Lady’ from the film Guys and Dolls but he sang, “Luck be a weirdo tonight!” instead — that type of thing. So it went up onto the titles board, and we used it as the title of the LP.
Can you describe the writing and recording process for ‘Luck’? What was it like working with Bernard Moss and Gary Burroughs on this record in particular?
McSherry: Both great musicians. Bernard recorded at Stunk Dusty many times and was also part of the sextet. He’s a great improviser. We recorded Garry at another studio - he just played various beats to a click and we left with a DAT’s worth of him. We’d often dip into that for loops and breaks. And we paid both of them! As we always did when using session players.
We’d borrowed a Roland MC-202 from Muzz of Bullitnuts — that’s the bass line on ‘Heat Death of the Universe’ and ‘Do The Hale-Bopp.’ We also sampled my Ventolin inhaler, snapping a biro and jacket zips to make the rhythm track. Steve’s classic Fila drumming of that period as per the Lamb ‘Cottonwool’ remix also features.
Cobby: I forgot it was our first “played” LP really. Just listening again and remembered how paranoid I was about folk hearing my drumming on ‘Billy Goat Groupies’ for first time as it was so much more than the one and two bar samples I’d been making on the kit up until then.
I can't remember one album from another, to be honest. It's just one big kind of mass of kind of work in Albion Street studio. That's the main memory. It's just you know, there's a lot of work came out in that period. So I remember working with lots of different musicians and enjoying it. We had a lot of guest musicians come in. Bernard obviously was a frequent visitor because I had worked with Bernard before in a previous band, Ashley & Jackson. And so he was an old friend and constant collaborator throughout.
Gary Burroughs, rest in peace, another excellent local drummer. We went to his studio, we did, to record his drums — animal tracks — and then we brought those tapes back to our place and chopped them up.
While Fila Brazillia has a very distinctive sound, every album is very different. Luck Be A Weirdo Tonight was in general a more thick and dense record, as well as more laidback. There are no 4/4 house tracks on it, for example, or frenetic drum ’n’ bass rhythms, both modes that appeared in some fashion on your other records from the time. Was it a conscious decision to pace Luck in a slower jazz mode?
Cobby: It wasn't a conscious decision to omit house and not do any drum ‘n’ bass. It really was just instinctive. Everything about what we did was instinctive. We never really planned anything. We just did what we felt and we didn't feel that we had to kind of repeat anything that we'd done before, regardless of how successful it was. So certainly weren't conscious of omitting anything or adding anything. It was just a case of us exploring.
McSherry: I don’t think it was a conscious decision but I remember being a bit sick of four-on-the-floor after Old Codes was done. We were doing a lot of remixes in 96/97 so any urges we may have had to make a drum ‘n’ bass type of rhythm could have ended up there. We’d often do two versions - a down-tempo and a double speed: Busta Rhymes, for example.
There’s a lot more of us playing on this record (guitars, drums, keys, voice) and less sampling. We’d gradually been adding ways to do that to the studio since Old Codes. More sampler memory, 8-track hard disk recorder and then Logic audio recording on the Mac, which we bought with the money from the Radiohead ‘Climbing Up The Walls’ remix. Mixmaster Morris was in Stunk Dusty with us when we’d only had it a few days. He restarted the Mac about a thousand times saying it was like changing gear driving a car.
Along with Old Codes / New Chaos and Power Clown, Luck is a seamless record, so it has that immersive Dark Side of the Moon quality and flow. I love both of those albums too. When was that decision made to make it a continuously flowing album and how was that different from your other works where the songs are separated out?
Cobby: Dark Side of the Moon was a big influence on me as a child. So it's a good shout out. I think we must probably thought it was time to do another one I think. We couldn't constantly do them seamless. And you know, horses for courses, I suppose. Some material blends better than others. But again not a conscious decision that I can recall. We didn't sit down and think, “It's definitely time to do a contiguous mix again.” It just felt right, so we went with it.
McSherry: We’ve alway’s liked the idea of an LP being a sonic journey that you can lose yourself in — blending the tracks together keeps you on that path. I think that was the intention for most of the LPs apart from Maim That Tune which was originally going to be called “Shuffle This Puppy,” meaning the CD should be played in shuffle mode and you’d get a surprise when the next track played.
Also, Old Codes / New Chaos was mixed live using two playback DATs and a recording DAT — it’s a performed DJ mix really. If we made a mistake we’d have to start the whole thing again which was a bit of a faff, hence us not doing it again until we had multichannel audio on a computer — the Logic / Mac set-up we bought in ‘97. Every LP since — apart from Jump Leads — is seamless.
On Luck’s milieu…Luck was very innovative in how it blended organic with more technological sounds and textures. It has a universal mesmerizing headspace to it. When you listen to it now, are there certain memories that come back to you about where electronic music was going at the time?
McSherry: We came back to Stunk Dusty one night with Ashley Beedle and his driver — I think he had played at “Room” in Hull. We had just finished Weirdo and we self-indulgently played it in its entirety really loudly to our captive audience. It sounded great but not much like anything else going on at the time — I guess that’s why it still sounds good now.
Cobby: I can’t remember what anybody else was doing at the time. I'm not overly conscious of the zeitgeist. Not obsessively so, anyway. So I’m thinking 1997 — no, I can't think of what was going on at the time. There was certainly, you know the thing about blending organic — “analog and digital” we used to say — it was synthesizers and guitars. We would pull from the electronic as well as the organic. We were brought up as playing musicians but couldn't eat up technology quick enough. You know it was a revelation to us, we loved it and engaged with it immediately. But we didn't ditch our playing heritage to embrace electronics.
So it was just for us more colors to the palette. It was more colors. And we were still using the original colors but we had new colors to use. And so it just seemed like a bigger palette was available for musicians if you could allow yourself to use anything regardless. A lot of people got caught up in genres, feeling that they could only use organic instruments because electronics was for electronic acts, and vice versa, and we never considered any of that. We always thought everything was — everything's up for grabs. All tools are valid.
Luck is a real journey. It certainly also has a pastoral vibe to me, perhaps in part because of the artwork, that it’s the impressionistic mindset it puts me in. Many of the song titles have allusions to flora and fauna, like ‘Billy Goat Groupies,’ ‘Pollo De Palo’ and ‘Weasel Out The Muck.’ Did you write the album with this in mind? Was this a reflection at all of Hull or the part of England that you live?
Cobby: Again, just wordplay. I'm just trying to think, ‘Billy Goat Groupies,’ which is just a play on Billy Goat Gruff. ‘Billy Goat Groupies’ I guess — anything that made us laugh tended to go up on the titles board. Any word play, and then when we came to like naming the tracks, whichever one suited which tune, would be attached to it. So it is quite a random dice-throwing way of looking at it. A lot of it is happenstance and serendipity.
‘Pollo De Palo’ — I do actually remember where that one came from. I was reading that in an airline in-flight magazine that somebody had mentioned iguana as a future food. And I can't remember which culture it was, but a South American culture that call it “chicken of the trees,” which is pollo de palo. ‘Chicken of the tree,’ so yeah, that one went on the board. And ‘Weasel Out The Muck,’ that’s definitely one of McSherry’s. A lot of it was just random.
McSherry: Hull is definitely not somewhere you’d associate with pastoral vibes but the appearance of more acoustic instruments on this LP conjures that up, I guess. Various animals and lavatorial habits — ‘Weasel Out The Muck’ — often made it onto the titles white-board in Stunk Dusty. A recurring theme.
Where did you guys hang out at the time? What other personalities, places or events maybe helped shape the record, directly or indirectly?
Cobby: I would have still been DJing every weekend in ‘97. I don't think it would have been at the “Room” anymore. I was traveling a lot in ‘97. If it weren’t Fila, it was DJ gigs, international ones. So that was certainly kind of in the zeitgeist at the time — international travel, for me.
And in ‘97, I mean, it was like peak Pork really. It was absolutely at its zenith in ‘97. So we were just enjoying the success of the label, which we had kind of waited 10 years for — seven, eight years in ‘97 — seven years for me personally, trying to make a successful living out of music. I had been waiting all of my adult life.
So it was a super positive time. We were living in town at a flat in a Georgian townhouse on Albion Street, which is where the old studio was. And, you know, all and sundry was coming by. It was very much an open house, but was on the third floor, so you actually had to use a code ring to get an answer, and the key would be lowered down on a piece of string.
McSherry: ‘96 / ’97 was a weird time for me. My brother committed suicide in May 96. We were working on the Sirenes’ ‘Deep End’ remix around that time and I remember coming into the studio and Steve asking me if I wanted to stay and work or go home. I think by this time we were putting in pretty long shifts in the studio — just treating it like a job really — coming into the studio four days a week, 10am-10pm. I don’t think we talked about it much but Steve was a massive help and I’m very grateful for him being there for me during that time.
We lost ourselves in our creative world — I guess it was therapy, really. Steve would encourage me to get on the mic and I’d come out with stream of consciousness type stuff and we’d piss ourselves laughing. Everything seemed a bit hysterical and surreal to me but I think letting lash in the studio really helped! ‘Lieut. Gingivitis Shit’ and particularly ‘Van Allens Belt’ has some of that going on.
The title to the opening song ‘Lieut. Gingivitis Shit’ has always struck me as truly out there, setting a great tone, while married with a beautiful melody. Can you tell us where that song title came from or more about that song, such as the laughing or that perfect beat that opens the album? And perhaps relatedly, what was it like in your studio, slamming out about an album a year at the time?
Cobby: Well you haven’t met Man. The opening, that there, like Man just singing kind of “gingivitis” and then both of us just pissing ourselves laughing, it was kind of like, I wanted to archive that because that was like a kind of slice of what was going on in the studio, a lot of the time. Which was just a lot of laughter, a lot of scatological wordplay, both sung and spoken, and a lot of laughter off the back of it.
So, I think he was in there, he was going to maybe do some backing vocals or some harmonies, was what he was supposed to be doing. But he's a kind of Salvador Dali [laughing], a Salvador Dali-esque character sometimes in the studio. So, surrealism was his forte — so it was surrealism and wordplay, and a little bit of operatic singing.
Yeah, and hysterical laughter. But we threw it in there just because we always liked the idea of objet trouvé — and so it was a little bit like behind the scenes, seeing a little bit of the workings or something, seeing the body of the engine. Right, if that isn’t too pretentious.
McSherry: The laughing is another example of the hysterical, manic headspace that I or we seemed to inhabit at the time — fuck knows why I decided to sing the word “lieutenant” in a cod operatic voice, but it cracked us up.
“Gingivitis” is in reference to Lee Armstrong’s dental problems [more on him later].
On the best kind of weird…Are there any particular songs on the album that are favorites or that have special meaning to you?
McSherry: ‘Her Majesties Hokey-Cokey’ is pretty fucked. It always reminded me of a sort of alien Glenn Miller swing band. I think we always liked to see what we could get away with in terms of conventions of genre. Weirdo is tagged as Electronic Dance on Apple Music — it’s neither of those really.
Somebody on Twitter was waxing about the “30 seconds or so at 4 min 30” in ‘Weasel Out The Muck,’ so I had a listen to remind myself and was surprised to hear it’s the guitar ’solo’ bit where I was doing my best Hugh Cornwell impression. I think this is another good example of the dynamic between us in the studio — Steve is great at setting a scene in which you can lose (and surprise) yourself when you’re playing — ‘Blowhole’ on Phoebus is another example. It’s impossible to do that on your own — you need the other person to pull that out of you.
The end of ‘Billy Goat Groupies’ soundtracks Reeves and Mortimer burying a car in the BBC Omnibus programme in ‘97. I love Vic and Bob, so was chuffed about that.
There’s this great moment in the album where a voice talks about self-fulfilling prophecies in the context of the year 2000. Looking back, things did indeed start to go screwy. Can you tell us where the voice sample comes from about “packing up the bags” in a “millennial fever”?
McSherry: It’s David Byrne — I think! — from one of Steve’s extensive archives of spoken word stuff.
Cobby: Thanks to Mr. M's reminder, the vocal samples are indeed David Byrne and taken from this excellent Channel 4 doc from 1984.
The artwork is iconic. Anonymous Design, who helped craft it, live in “your neck of the woods” so to speak. Can you explain the story behind it and what it’s about or from?
McSherry: I was knocking about a lot with a Hull head called Lee Armstrong — he was a graphic designer and he’d show me how to use Quark / Photoshop etc. He put the Old Codes / New Chaos sleeve design together using card, tape and lettering. Black Market Gardening’s flowers and fake wood idea came from an old biscuit tin Lee’s mum had.
For Weirdo, I’d found the Home for A Bunny kids’ book in a charity shop and really liked the idea of a cute innocent image for the cover of quite an “out there” record. I now feel bad that we didn’t credit the illustrator Garth Williams with the theft. Lee liked to drink and had developed gingivitis — hence that word popping into my head when Steve gave me a mic. ‘Pigs Blood and Chalk’ — on A Touch of Cloth — is also a reference to Lee’s recreational habits — Guinness and E’s. You can also blame Lee for the typos in the titles.
Luck is especially beloved by a certain group of fans, especially serious music heads. For example, the late great Dan Sicko, who wrote Techno Rebels: The Renegades of Electronic Funk, chose it as one of his favorite albums of 97 in Urb Magazine. Many of my music friends still talk about it lovingly, and to this day, I have friends who thank me for turning them onto the album when I first reviewed it myself for a West Coast rave zine.
Cobby: Right. It's interesting that you should say that because I wasn't sure that it was. Certainly it is not one of the albums that I've gotten feedback for — in great amounts of positive feedback for. In fact, only last week I read a review in comments on YouTube where somebody said that we had turned shit after having put out our third or fourth album. One man's meat is another man's poison. I love the fact that it might be beloved by fans. Certainly the vinyl campaign went really well. And so there's a lot of people that do like it.
Among your many accomplishments and other great works, what does this album in particular mean to you both? And does it relate to the masterful Power Clown, which came out the next year and also was reissued on vinyl, in any way?
Cobby: No, no connection really, as such, other than just the continuum of graft at that time. We were in the richest seam we could have possibly been in. You know, the planets had aligned. We owned the means of production and the light was finally shining on us, and we felt liberated.
So I suppose that went on to kind of inform what Power Clown was about as well — the way we were working or were going about things, and the things that we were interested in at the time, and getting engaged in. But yeah, you know, it was golden era — halcyon days as they say.
Can you tell us any more about your future plans. Might we see more new material following 2020’s MMXX?
Cobby: There’s things on the back burner waiting to be finished. Man is super busy with a young family and a super demanding job. I know from personal experience, it's very difficult to write good music unless you're relaxed. You don't want to force it.
So when the time comes we'll get cracking and get things finished. There’s some tunes not far off in the pipeline. But there's these legacy reissues that we're kind of getting involved with at the moment that we’re a little bit more focused on, which is getting the back catalogue reissued on vinyl, some of it for the first time.
McSherry: MMXX was an interesting experiment — a remote collaboration done over email — swapping files, notes. I think we made a good record there, but that approach isn’t sustainable in terms of enjoyment or vibe for me.
Being in the same room together is when the magic happens — when you encourage each other and set the scene for each other to go to places you wouldn’t, couldn’t on your own. There’s a few bits of work in progress that would be great to finish off in the real world in a room together. Fingers crossed!
*Luck Be A Weirdo Tonight was originally released on CD only. For the first time ever, it is now available on 180 gram vinyl via Bandcamp for music lovers. While the compact disc format provides the seamless experience, the warmth of the vinyl will be a welcome new dimension to explore. It is slated to ship later this summer.