One of my favourite albums of last year was by a band Id never heard of before, Hepcat Dilemma. Not only was it unexpected it was also chock full of the sort of music I don’t often find myself listening to: anarchic, challenging, quirky and all in all simply wonderful. I exchanged a few emails with Chris over the weeks after the review and knew I had to speak to him, but it wasn’t until I saw him kitted out with friends in Star Wars attire that I picked up the phone! Both of us it transpires have been fans since we were kids. This was in February before the whole coronavirus thing that besets us now. I’m still catching up with interviews but this is the oldest I had left, sorry Chris, I hope you’re OK mate…
Mark: Hi, Chris, its Mark from The Rockpit, how are you?
Chris: Hi, Mark, I’m great thanks.
Mark: Was that you in Jedi robes I saw?!!
Chris: That is me in the photo; but I’m actually the giant Ewok on the left!!
Mark: I had to ask as I’m a big classic Star Wars fan!! What better way to start an interview!
Chris: Oh, yeah, I saw the first one on my birthday in 1977 and that was life changing for me.
Mark: Yes it was, I’m a fan for life, so let’s talk a bit of controversy before we start talking music! What do you think to the previous three films?
Chris: I thought episodes 7 and 8 were OK, but I thought 9 was one of the best in the series. It was magnificent; it just felt like a love letter to the franchise, it was perfectly satisfying, I adored it, and it was almost as good as Rogue 1 which is my favourite.
Mark: Favourite of all of them?
Chris: Rogue 1 followed by Episode IV, Empire Strikes Back followed by Episode 9.
Mark: Wow! I could talk for hours just about that selection!! But, let’s talk some music! One of the most unexpected albums I heard last year, and it’s not often people send me vinyl, was yours and it was great! I got to review it because I was the only person who still had a record player!
Chris: Vinyl’s coming back, thank goodness, because we didn’t do any digital with this one, just vinyl or nothing.
Mark: I’m so glad I did, when you listen to the same sort of music most of the time as a reviewer, it’s great when you come across an album like this, it takes you back to a place you used to inhabit when you were a bit younger. Back in the day, I wouldn’t say I was a massive fan of progressive rock, but I loved bands from that post punk era like Husker Du and stuff like that, so when I heard your album “Art Imitates Life” it brought back some strange feelings for me, which is a very good thing!
Chris: Strange feelings are what we’re going for!!
Mark: Haha, that’s what I imagined! So, the band’s got a long history, I know you’ve been there for part of that history, but this is your first album with the band, isn’t it?
Chris: With them, yes, I’ve been in the band for about eight years now, but they told me it was their 26th year anniversary not too long ago, so the band has been together for quite a while, I’m a newcomer!
Mark: Yeah, I managed to track down “Overend” which was the band’s previous album, which was 18 years ago!
Chris: Yes, that was 2002.
Mark: It was very “King Crimson”, so even though there are shades of that progressive rock on the new album, there’s also all kinds of stuff going on, I guess with a gap of so long there’s plenty of time for things to happen and gestate in that period. To me, listening to those two albums it almost doesn’t, and I guess it isn’t the same band? Although the name has remained, what’s the emotional connection there with the name Hepcat Dilemma?
Chris: I wasn’t there for the inception, but I know Bob was watching a cartoon, I don’t know exactly what it was called, but it was something similar to Tom and Jerry, a cat and a mouse, and they had a bit on the show called Hep Cat Symphony, and Bob wanted to call the band this, and I guess some of the other guys in the band didn’t like that name, and apparently that became the dilemma, and it turned in to Hepcat Dilemma! But, ironically, the thing that blew my mind was when I bought my first bass, long before I met these guys, back in 1987 I bought my first bass and I was driving home thinking of band names, as 17 year olds do, and the name that sprung into my mind was Hepcat, then I wanted to be in a band called Hepcat and then I forgot about it relatively quickly! Then decades later Bob said to me hey would you like to be in Hepcat Dilemma for one show? And I thought I’ve been waiting for quarter of a century for someone to ask me that question!
Mark: I’m not sure where I first heard the word Hepcat, but I remember The Cult in their early days used that phrase on one of their early albums; it’s a name that’s familiar, and to me evokes thoughts of the 50’s or earlier times.
Chris: Yeah, that Beatnik/ Jazz kind of era, that’s what I was thinking of in 1987 for sure.
Mark: So, you’re a bassist? I’m a failed bassist!
Chris: I’m more of a failed guitarist!! The guitar was my initial instrument, and then eventually I realised that there were so many more guitars that I decided to branch out and play drums and bass and as many other things as I could get my hands on, and bass seemed to be the only one that I clicked with!
Mark: Talking about the album, I read somewhere that you’d been playing around with some new tracks as well, so there’s new material on the way?
Chris: Oh, yeah, we’ve already started recording the new record, we’ve got two new songs down, and we’re recording two records at the same time, we’re doing the new release, and we’re working on old Hepcat Dilemma songs for an old songs release, so each session we do two new songs and one old song. The two new songs sound really great, and we’re already booked in to do the next session to do the next three songs, and we’re pretty excited about that.
Mark: We’ll be looking forward to that, definitely. One of the questions I always love to ask musicians is about music, and there are sort of two sides to the coin to this, some musicians tell me they don’t really listen to anything, and some will say they listen to everything! Which side are you on?
Chris: I listen to, I don’t think everything, but I listen to a lot, but I focus on a couple of things. I’m a huge fan of Captain Beefheart; he’s the most important thing I can think of, and I listen to weird stuff like the Dog Faced Hermans and Camper Van Beethoven. I prefer bands that are a little bit off kilter, stuff that never really made a cult following. I think the one thing that the band can all agree on, is that we’re all huge fans of King Crimson, that’s the unifying presence that never leaves. We’ve started to the point now where we at every practice, we pull out the Bill Bruford autobiography, and I’ve been chosen to read a few sentences from the book, just to piss off our drummer for some reason!!
Mark: That’s great!! There’s some great songs on the album, and I love the diversity, and also the way that you’ve put some songs up against others, but I’ve got to ask you about a few of the songs, I’d love to know where they came from. “Night of the Spiders” is one of those songs.
Chris: Oh, that one for me was really the shining moment of the album when we recorded it. Honestly, most of the tracks come from Bob’s (Loiselle) brain, he creates this stuff, he writes the songs, brings them to us, and we help him arrange them and flesh them out. That one, as we recorded it, we had it all down and we were listening to it mixed, and more just happened to it in my head, I just found more and more as we were recording it, stuff that we weren’t expecting and a lot of improvisation happened, that one really spoke to me probably more than any other song on the record.
Mark: The other song, for some reason and I don’t know why, that really stuck in my head is “What Will Her Kiss Mean Tomorrow?”
Chris: Yeah, again, I don’t know where Bob gets the inspiration!! It really blows my mind, we are so in tune with each other, we’ve become such a unit that we end up thinking alike, but when he throws this stuff at us it’s always a surprise! Every time we sit down and he says ok I’ve got a new song, it is never, never what we expect, and when this one hit us we thought this doesn’t fit in our catalogue at all, and the next thing I knew it was one that really really spoke to me as well.
Mark: It is amazing how it does that, there’s definitely contrasts on there, it’s a great record. I guess a lot of progressive music, if you like, is meant to be enjoyed as a whole, but one of the things I loved about the album is that you can dip in here and there and wherever you like, there’s no you have to play side one followed by side two to get the point, there’s just some magical moments on there that really stand out.
Ok, we ask everyone these three questions. Taking it all the way back, when did you know that music was going to be part of your life? Was there a defining moment?
Chris: I was really young when that came to me, I remember being a little kid walking barefoot in the grass and just pretending that I was on stage. I must have been about six or seven years old, and I just knew that was going to happen, my mum was a singer, and for a long time she sang in Barbershop choruses and Barbershop quartets, and I would listen to harmonies from her as they would practice in the house, and I knew that harmony was important. My brothers were huge Beatles fans, and so I was immersed in the Beatles from as early as I can remember, my eldest brother was eleven years older than me and when he was moving out, I must have been five or six years old, he was packing the car and I remember very clearly that I had a plan to steal his Beatles records! As he was packing the car, I remember I waited until he was in the driveway, I ran in to his room and I opened the box, and I pulled out the ten records that he had, I stole them! They were not going to leave the house, it was not an option!!
Mark: That’s a great story. It’s incredible, with some people it’s a song they hear, and with others it’s seeing a band in concert.
Chris: Then, it wasn’t until I was a teenager; it was The Smiths record “Meat is Murder”, I listened to that record and there was something about it, I know Johnny Marr gets all the credit for that band, but for me it was the bass and the drums, when I heard the bass on that record in about 1986/87 I knew I had to be a bass player, that was the album that made me pick up the bass. Probably “Barbarism Begins at Home” might have been the song that made me realise the bass was going to be my life.
Mark: The Smiths were one of those bands that were huge in the UK and some parts of Europe, and Johnny still continues to put out some interesting music.
Chris: I just think it’s great, I think that rhythm section is one of the most under rated of all time!
Mark: If you could’ve been a fly on the wall for the creation of any great album, at any time in the history of rock music, what would it have been for you?
Chris: Oh that’s easy; it would be Captain Beefheart, “Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller)”. That record is the pinnacle of music for me, it’s the greatest thing I’ve ever heard!
Mark: That’s interesting because it’s not one of theirs that I would normally go back to! You’ve prompted me to go back and revisit a few albums, which is always good!
Chris: I would never have even heard of that record, at least not in the right time of my life. But when I was in college I worked in the library, just shelving books, and Kurt Loder was one of the original MTV news guys, and he wrote a book called Bat Chain Puller, and I’d never even read the book, and I’d just had it in my hand about three dozen times as people kept taking it out because he had written a book, and so that name was stuck in my head. Then I was in a used record store and I came upon “Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller)”, and I picked it up and I went, Oh, It’s a Kurt Loder book and I bought the record and it changed my life, so I have him to thank for handing me that record!
Mark: Ok, I’ll put that on my playlist for this evening!! We always close with an easy question to finish. What is the meaning of life?
Chris: Oh, Man!! I wish I could figure that out, but at the same time I’m afraid if I do figure it out that it might be over!!
Mark: Yeah, that’s a good answer! The best answer I’ve had to date and I’ve been asking this for ten years was somebody last week said “the meaning of life is Rock and Roll, I just don’t know what the meaning of Rock and Roll is!”
Chris: (laughs) Beautiful!! I’m never going to have kids, that’s not my thing, but I’m going to keep making art and music because I have to live on somehow, and so that’s the meaning of my life.
Mark: I think to make a positive difference, and you’ve certainly done that with Hepcat Dilemma and long may you continue to make great music. It’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you, Chris, and one day I’d like to do it again. Thank you for your time, take care mate.
Chris: Thank you, Mark, you too.