Stats

Photo by Bob Foster

Name, where are you from?
Ed Seed, from Llanfyllin, a little town in Powys, Mid Wales.

Describe your style in three words?
Gene Kelly outdoorswear.

What’s the best gig you’ve ever been to?
St Vincent and David Byrne, End Of The Road 2013 - it was an exquisitely-engineered joy machine! The record they made together was super cool but the live show was something else, they’re both such total performers.

If you could be on the line up with any two artists in history?
We could open for 1978 Scott Walker and then James Brown & the Famous Flames, we’d get absolutely destroyed but it would be worth it just to watch them.

Which subcultures have influenced you?
In Powys when I grew up there were lots of ravers and people who were part of the free festival scene, post-hippie communities who got called new age travellers. I was too young to have taken part in acid house or any of those scenes, but it was something people’s older brothers and sisters were into and it sorted of trickled down to us as kids. There was lots of trance and techno around and because there weren’t really gigs in our area, it was dance music and free parties that defined how we thought of music as a collective thing. I wasn’t that into dance music at the time, I liked guitars too much, but later realised how much of it I’d taken in, even just the architecture of dance music: building something up continuously that’s quite long, carrying people with you as you explore and develop it. My dad is from Manchester and was distantly connected to some people involved in the Hacienda, and baggy was very present when I was growing up, even long after the rest of the country had probably moved on, so that was a big influence too. Later on, I was schooled in Northern Soul by a friend from Bolton, her whole family were into it big time. I guess that must have been one of the first cultures in the UK based around DJing rather than performing.

If you could spend an hour with anyone from history?
That’s the hardest question on here, I have no idea! It would be fascinating to meet literally anyone from distant history, like hundreds of years ago, just to see if you could even understand each other, let alone the realities and conventions of the worlds you came from.

Of all the venues you’ve been to or played, which is your favourite?
Last year we played at Transmusicales, a festival of new music in Rennes in north-west France. It’s in a huge exhibition centre on the edge of the town, just a big metal shed, but it was such a buzz to play to a massive crowd of people who were there specifically because they wanted to see acts they hadn’t seen before, whose music most of them barely knew - there was so much anticipation and energy in the place. We had a ball.

Your greatest unsung hero or heroine in music?
Nigel Blackwell of Half Man Half Biscuit - he gets written off as just being funny, like the band are a joke, but his songs are dense and deep. They feel truer to whatever folk music is supposed to be (music that describes people and their lives and times? idk) than the many boilerplate winsome fingerpickers out there. He’s also a regional hero for me because he’s one of the few people who writes songs featuring Mid and North Wales, and the border region I come from - this track 'Descent Of The Stiperstones' is a good example. The Stiperstones are a range of hills in South Shropshire, about 10-15 miles from where I grew up. They’re pitted with old lead mines in villages with names like Crowsnest and Snailbeach (where the song starts) and craggy outcrops like the Devil’s Chair. We used to go walking up there because my Auntie Pam lived just back over the Welsh side of the border in Montgomery. This song also then moves on to Montgomery, where the narrator goes to the famous hardware shop Bunners and gets involved in an altercation with former Crossroads soap actor Lynette McMorrow, who in the story has descended into madness after the waning of her stardom. It’s nothing so simple as a musing on the weird things that fame does to people - that’s just one of many threads Blackwell weaves together in his disarming way. The Stiperstones country was also the setting for the 1950 Powell & Pressburger film 'Gone To Earth', based on a book by local author Mary Webb, and the beautiful location photography by Christopher Challis inspired Kate Bush’s video to 'Hounds Of Love'. The cover photo of our new album was inspired by a promo still of lead actor Jennifer Jones, where she’s set not on location but on an elaborately-fake hyperreal technicolor soundstage. This seemed to bring out the constructed-ness and un-naturalness of the “natural” landscape, which is something I was thinking about a lot when making Powys 1999, reflecting on how unnatural I felt as a kid in a country environment like that. This is the kind of sh*t Nigel Blackwell knows and manages to tease into songs in ways I can only dream of!

Stats recently released their second LP 'Powys 1999'. Listen, purchase or stream it via smarturl.it/powys1999.