© www.totalmusicmagazine.com http://www.totalmusicmagazine.com/- making–playing-listening-loving

www.totalmusicmagazine.com Interview with Merv Pepler

Total Music: Was there much music around when you were growing up (family/friends etc.)?

Merv Pepler: "Funny you should ask that. It's a resounding yes of course. My parents are not musicians or even that musical but they had a very diverse and pretty large record collection. My mother grew up in a pub so she got all the 45's that came out the jukebox when they were finished with and when I was about six years old my grandmother gave me a radiogram (for the younger people amongst you that's a big old wooden cabinet thingy that had a radio built in and also a record player) You used to be able to load a whole bunch of 45s on the long spindle and they would drop one at a time. I remember being fascinated with the diversity of the stuff I was hearing and the other funny thing was that I always seemed to prefer the more experimental B sides. I also used to hear weird late night radio shows that it picked up, like Radio Luxembourg and probably some early pirate stations. We also used to have huge family gatherings on every Boxing day at my Nan's house and music was always blaring out on those occasions."

Total Music: How did you first hook up with the ?

Merv Pepler: "I was friends with a guy who ran Better Days distribution, which was basically a load of weird 'n' wonderful psychedelic bands releasing stuff on cassettes in the mid to late 80s. I was buying a lot of this music and had fallen in love with the Ozric sound, then one day he told me that they were looking for a new drummer so I went to London and auditioned, I wasn't the best drummer of that day but I fitted together with them personality wise (er, I was the only MAD one I think!) literally 10 days later I was doing my debut gig with them at the George Robey in Finsbury Park as part of a Club Dog night, coming from a small town in Somerset all this new hedonism was pretty eye opening!"

Total Music: The period you were with the band was without doubt their most successful/popular era, you must have some great memoires of those days?

Merv Pepler: "Loads of great memories for sure... I guess being that young I never stopped to think about what was actually going on, we were very anti-social and didn't enjoy trying to be the 'commercial' proper rock band type thing so stuff like gigging in HMV in Oxford St was pretty traumatic! I did enjoy the gigs though and we were legendary for going off on 5 to 6 hour gigs of jamming. I remember bands like the Levellers hating it when they had to wait for the stage while we were on. Also the recording of those early like hold very special memories for me, especially as the bass player died not long after I had left the band so yeah, good good times that taught me a lot about music and also a lot about myself." © www.totalmusicmagazine.com http://www.totalmusicmagazine.com/- making–playing-listening-loving

Total Music: Tell us about the Wooden Baby project, are there any recordings?

Merv Pepler: "Hah, yes there are recordings. Wooden Baby was the project I was doing before I actually met the Ozrics. I did many gigs including some Club Dog ones and the infamous Crypt Club in Deptford. It was myself and a guy called Charlie Daniels, kind of '60s garage psychedelia meets '80s goth with some punk chucked in."

Total Music: What prompted you and Joie to start ?

Merv Pepler: "Well we had met this guy, Steve Everitt, and had an immediate connection with him, he came down to Somerset for a new year around 1987 and brought with him an Akai sampler and some floppy discs containing some kick drums and some Kraftwerk samples. We were actually planning to do Ethnic inspired , dance music with sitars and shehnais as we all had a deep passion for , the ethnic sounds quickly degenerated into wibbly wobbly squelches and then Steve started to play a 4/4 kick on top... That was that really."

Total Music: When/Why did you decide to leave the Ozrics and make Eat Static a full time thing?

Merv Pepler: "The touring and gigging became too much, even for me, away for months at a time, having to lose out on some interesting stuff 'cos of clashes etc.. We were at the stage where a five week tour of the states was becoming a regular thing and it pained me that Eat Static had to keep going onto the back burner 'cos of Ozric commitments. That plus the age old problem of greed and corruption was settling into some areas as lots of money started to be generated, this was in 1994, so we struck out on our own. It was quite weird having two albums simultaneously in the main chart one week. Implant was no.11 and was no.9."

Total Music: Any possibility of any more Nodens Ictus music?

Merv Pepler: "One thing I do miss is working with Ed Ozric, we had a very special bond in the studio. In fact many an Ozric track was started by just me and him, a sequencer/a click track and hours of jamming all night. We used to live near each other here in Somerset so it was easy to hook up regularly but now he's living in Colorado so it's very difficult to see each other now... Never say never!"

Total Music: Obviously extraterrestrial theme's are a major part of the Eat Static set-up, why is this such an all-prevailing subject?

Merv Pepler: "Ahh, you noticed? Hehehe, well I grew up in Somerset and Wiltshire right bang centre in the middle of all the ancient sites and UFO hotspots. I also grew up in the early 70s so my school days consisted of me watching bloody strange school programmes that were littered with bleeps and bloops and all kinds of weird synth noises. I also had a massive love for sci-fi movies as a kid, and that was the golden age of sci-fi, so I guess all this went inside and genetically warped my mind. I must admit I never did feel like I belonged on this planet, almost as if I had realised how deep the human consciousness was at an early age and this had always had me deep in thought. I still do it now, I can be in a room full of people chatting and I'll be in the corner lost in thought."

Total Music: It must have been sad when Joie decided to leave, did you ever think it was time to call it a day as well? Has Joie heard the new album? © www.totalmusicmagazine.com http://www.totalmusicmagazine.com/- making–playing-listening-loving

Merv Pepler: "It was very sad for me, like losing a brother in a way, he dropped right out of everything, got a new girl and disappeared. I ain't seen him since 2008. I felt like chucking the towel in several times believe me! It's been a really tough rocky road to do this full time and scrape a living together. Funny you ask about Joie hearing the new album as I spoke to his ex yesterday who had taken him to a funeral this week and she had played him some on their way there, I heard he was very impressed!"

Total Music: It's been a long time since Back To Earth, why was it on a different label and why the long wait before this album?

Merv Pepler: "Back to Earth was recorded for Interchill records - I have been involved with them since their very first album release - Andrew, who runs the label, is a sweet lovely guy and I love his whole ethos with the label and it was a golden opportunity for me to do a whole album in one kinda vein, something I don't get to do that often (in fact my next album project will be a follow up to that album for that label).

The reason for the long delay is that I have been really busy gigging constantly and had also gone through a major shit storm. What many people don't know is that Dead Planet was actually the Mk 2 version of the new album, yes there was a Mk 1... I actually deleted the WHOLE Mk 1, so it no longer exists, and that was nigh on 35 tracks! To cut a very long depressing story short I kinda got re- born, started the album again but this time I was on fire! Things had turned around and I actually felt like I could write the best stuff I could after surviving the crap I had gone through. I spent just under two years making Dead Planet and it was the first time I ever finished an album and felt dead proud, like I had gone full circle and Static had finally found its real established niche."

Total Music: Steve Everitt is obviously still a big part of Eat Static...

Merv Pepler: "Haha Steve is an enigma! A dark elf that always seems to pop up at the right moment. He left in 94 to raise his son and to concentrate on his career in library music, but with Static you can never leave. It's in his DNA, he IS and always will be part of 'the Static!' This is spooky but I hadn't seen or spoken to him since we collaborated on stuff for Back to Earth, then very early last year I had a message come through from my Eat Static website saying 'Merv, I have lost all your numbers/emails etc.. it's Steve.. do you fancy some analogue mayhem?' I was literally at the point of collapsing with all my workload for Dead Planet so he was like the Cavalry riding in and we just gelled and made some magic happen! The other weird thing was I was just at the point of buying and getting into modular synthesis and lo and behold he told me he had just bought an Emu modular! So we were on the same path as each other and this was the point where our paths, once again, converged. We both now have gone mental the past two years and both our studios feature a lot of modular stuff."

Total Music: Tell us about working with Steve and Miquette?

Merv Pepler: "Two of my absolute heroes and amazing friends. My whole life in psyche music started with Gong's 'Master Builder', so I had to have Steve on Dead Planet as this new album is kind of a representation of my last quarter of a century in music, that's why all the diversity is there... this was not deliberate but just flowed from within, the whole album was like that, I was doing stuff that I © www.totalmusicmagazine.com http://www.totalmusicmagazine.com/- making–playing-listening-loving knew had to be done but didn't quite know why, and when Steve starts that Glissando guitar sound I automatically melt down. Legends!"

Total Music: How did get involved?

Merv Pepler: "That took 19 years to happen! I was on tour with the Ozrics in 93 or 94,somewhere on the East coast like Boston or somewhere - it was actually the day we heard about Lady Diana's death - I was in a soundcheck, patiently waiting for Ed to sort his guitars out, and was reading a music magazine that was at the venue, kinda like their equivalent of the old NME, in the centre pages was a double spread interview with the Cure. Being a massive fan, I was reading it through and then came a question to him asking 'are you listening to anything that's around now, any bands exciting you?' The reply was 'my favourite band at the moment is an electronic band on Planet Dog records called Eat Static...' As you can imagine, I pretty much fell off the chair in disbelief! had to get Joie to re-read it to me! (hah Joie actually hated the Cure!). Anyway, I did the whole following it up, chasing managements etc. It took years to come about but I think it happened at the perfect time!"

Total Music: What is it about /dance/ that still excites you?

Merv Pepler: "We are in a golden age of technology right now, with powerful computers that can replicate almost any instrument, old and new, yet I am not hearing enough diverse, experimental, challenging music, if anything, I think computers have had a bit of an adverse effect so what it makes up for in power it loses in people's imaginations. There's too much bland stuff out there, too many websites telling you 'this is what you need to do... Half the fun in the old days was not knowing and not having anywhere to go to get answers, so I really hope to hear a lot more refreshing original stuff in the future. Recently, I have been listening to a lot of the old school names like , Greg Hunter, Higher Intelligence Agency, some of these guys are still making music to this day and I have to be honest, most of it is more exciting that the new stuff I hear... Having said that, I still play many dance events and festivals and still love the energy they create and love the freaks and weirdo's ya meet there."

Total Music: The web is obviously a help but with the music industry obsessed with repackaging old material or promoting 'Pop Idol/The Voice' style nonsense it must be increasingly difficult to sell enough albums to make it self-supporting?

Merv Pepler: "Yes ,it's very tough now, only last night I was on a bootleg torrent site, and lo and behold, I was the number one download! FFS! I just hope that people realise that if they steal music for free then there's a good chance that the artists won't be able to record another one. I know many guys that have had to take on a proper job to financially support themselves and their families, and most of them that have done that end up making a lot less music. Personally, I would love to spend more time at home, in the studio instead of the relentless gig schedules I put myself through every year but gig money is pretty much my main income these days, I have had offers to do more library music work but I always felt that would be doing music for a job plus I wouldn't have the freedom to write music for myself...my own tastes. So yeah, PEOPLE! BUY THE MUSIC DIRECT FROM THE ARTISTS! SUPPORT THE UNDERGROUND!!" © www.totalmusicmagazine.com http://www.totalmusicmagazine.com/- making–playing-listening-loving

Total Music: There seems to be a hardcore nucleus of rave/electronic acts from the early '90s that are still very active (like System 7, etc.), do you keep in touch, help/support each other?

Merv Pepler: "We bump into each other quite often, usually in some weird place abroad, or a shuttle vehicle used to ferry people to and fro at the festivals. just guested on my new album, I did a remix of Banco de Gaia last year ('Wimbletoot'). I recently bumped into Paul from Orbital which was nice. I have also struck up a few friendships online/facebook with acts I really admired back in the day, like Robert Leiner, Jimi Tenor etc. etc."

Total Music: What's next for Eat Static?

Merv Pepler: "I wish it was a holiday and time off but alas no, I'm already in the studio again. I have started a new project called Strontium Dogs and we almost have our debut album finished, it's kinda old school acid meets modular synths and . I'm also just finishing off a couple of Eat Static remixes, one for Tsuyoshi and one for . My next Static album will be a follow up to Back to Earth for my good friends, Interchill records. it never stops!!" http://www.eatstatic.co.uk http://www.facebook.com/eatstatic http://eatstatic.bandcamp.com/ https://soundcloud.com/eat-static

© Copyright of the above text is owned by TotalMusic-Online and is intended only for personal use, it may not be republished without the express permission of TotalMusic-Online. Websites wishing to link to this copy may do so as long as they clearly credit and recognise the copyright of TotalMusic-Online.