"MACBETH", Volume 5, 1992
Robin Gibson

Gordon Sharp doesn't want to make things difficult for himself but he does it anyway. He sets up blank pages and fills them and this Volume track is for MacBeth the first ink on a new sheet.

We could go right back to punk rock but let's be concise and say that the Scots singer moved to London over ten years ago, has since pursued a staggered but determined odyssey as the pivot for Cindytalk -- an outfit to which for want of better casual expression, he will nowadays refer as "experimental" -- and experienced in 1984 a period of unsolicited acclaim as an outstanding contributor to This Mortal Coil's 'It'll End In Tears'.

Now, with Cindytalk's progress temporarily stalled -- a long and other story, of which more in a later Volume -- while their new album awaits release, he has set up another blank to blot.

"I would've used Lulu, but it's been done before," he laughs. "I like the power that MacBeth has. Cindytalk was always a bit of a deliberate false impression and I think MacBeth can be the same thing.

"MacBeth the real person was a very benevolent and kind king. During his reign (1040-1057, fact fans) Scotland didn't have any expansionist ideas. He was concerned with what happened within the country. It's interesting how a very clever playwright can come along and destroy your reputation entirely for possibly propagandist reasons. At the time the play was written it was important for the English to believe that Scots kings were bad people -- heathens and primitives. It was a good way of darkening the soul of a powerful character from Scottish history.

"I looked into it and I got really pissed off that that had happened. I like the darkness of the name MacBeth but, knowing the historical truth, I thought that I'd like to use the name for both purposes. It has a power, but also in the context of dissemination of information -- if I can sort of lighten the name of the true MacBeth then I'd be quite chuffed about that."

The simple and obvious path which could have been mapped for MacBeth would have been that of using the hard done by monarch's name as a vehicle for Sharp's growing fascination with Scots history, folklore and folk music. But the obvious path is never the Sharp one.

Instead the first fruit is languishing on the shelf as part of the new Cindytalk album, 'Wappinschaw' (commences with a solo vocal version of the Ewan MacColl song, 'The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face', normally associated with Roberta Flack, and closes with several minutes of pipe music) while the debut from MacBeth is a song from the classic '88 album 'Miss America', by the disarming and brilliant Canadian singer Mary Margaret O'Hara.

'Help Me Lift You Up''s Sharp connection, ironically enough, goes back to This Mortal Coil, although the version that ended up on TMC's 'Blood' in 1990 was not his.

"In the first instance it was Ivo (4AD supremo)'s idea to record 'Help Me Lift You Up'. It was heading towards 'Blood' and I had been saying for ages that I didn't want to be involved in This Mortal Coil. Not because of any great feeling but just because I did the first one and it felt right not to do another one. Then he sent me a tape of a few songs that he was thinking of covering and that was the first track.

"I'd never heard of Mary Margaret O'Hara but I just fell in love with the song immediately. I didn't really want to be that closely involved with This Mortal Coil, but I loved the song and thought, Fuck, this is a song I would love to sing. So I said I'll do it.

"So I went into the studio and during the day of recording we fell out. We squabbled over how it should be done. I wasn't too chuffed about the musical content -- he wasn't too chuffed with the way I was singing it. So we stopped, and he went off and did it with somebody else. But I retained the feel for the song."

Splaying out is something Sharp is very good at. Cindytalk have always streched, beautifully, and MacBeth doesn't necessarily not entail members of Cindytalk (indeed David Ros is one) and it certainly doesn't necessarily entail them. It doesn't mean Scots folk music (obviously) or even folk music but it doesn't rule out rock music. Or anything for that matter.

"Exactly. That was another thing which made me think it would be good to use the name in this context, because that would be clear. There are many other covers and Scottish things I want to do -- songs by people like the poet and writer Hamish Henderson. But it would have been too obvious to approach it from that point.

"And the last thing I want to do is to suddenly become a born-again Scot. I'm just becoming more aware of that cultural thing. I think it's actually very important. I don't see that people that make music under the broad heading of rock, or whatever, have to adopt American culture for their frame of reference. That's important, because rock culture's tied up with American culture, and we're not gonna deny that we like Iggy Pop and The Stooges -- but at the same time we have influences which go back to our own roots."

There is one area where MacBeth-as-concept might begin to gel. People have been howling at Sharp for years (ever since they heard him sing 'Kangaroo' in 1984) to sing 'songs', while he has persevered with the Cindytalk adventure, making albums which, while capturing both the raw power and the subtleties of his voice, have often done so amid crawling, lurching cacophonies which would give The Stooges of 'Dirt' a good run for their money and then perform a triple-jump over them just to rub it in. Now he sees an option of parallel routes.

"I think I'm interested, increasingly in the last couple of years or so, in singing other peoples' songs. Cindytalk haven't really developed a way of doing that. We write pretend songs, and moods, and things like that, but I wanted for some time to create an alter-ego for something else that would exist beside, so that things could move back and forth."

So don't you just make things difficult for yourself?

"Inevitably," he groans. "I probably couldn't do it any other way."

It's never easy explaining what is going on.

"Oh fuck, no. It's not."

Do you tend to take the same approach in day-to-day life?

"All the time. Unfortunately. Life would be much easier if we all did things in a dead straightforward way and followed one path which went quite straight. But it would also be pretty tedious. And I would just give up from lack of interest."

Reprinted without permission.