The Velvet Underground

(First published in Issue 120 of Electronic Sound magazine, December 2024)

SPRUCED UP

Between them, Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips have brought us the gifts of Galaxie 500, Luna and Dean & Britta. Pete “Sonic Boom” Kember, meanwhile, has been the proud bearer of Spacemen 3 and Spectrum. This festive period, they have clubbed together for a joint present – an enchanting collection of Christmas covers

Words: Bob Fischer

“A Christmas album is something we’ve talked about every year,” says Dean Wareham. “We started with one single about ten years ago.”

“Twenty years ago!” corrects Britta Phillips, his wife and long-term musical partner. It’s a sunny morning in their adopted home city of Los Angeles, and they’re together in the kitchen. She’s closer, by the way – it was 2007.

“We covered ‘He’s Coming Home’ by The Wailers,” continues Dean. “And ‘Old Toy Trains’ a song that Roger Miller wrote for his son. Who was also called Dean, so I thought that was funny. Then later, we did ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)’. That was Pete’s idea.”

“And ‘Little Altar Boy’,” says Britta. “That was Pete too, I think?”

Pete Kember is sitting with a wry smile in an adjacent Zoom window. He’s not in LA, though. He lives in Portugal.

“Pete’s the A&R man here,” says Dean. “He’s responsible for the repertoire. Finally this year we said to him ‘I think we’ve got enough Christmas songs to make a record’. So he invited us – or rather we invited ourselves – to Portugal to finish it.”

You surely don’t need the full backstory here, but hey – Christmas is a time for giving. Dean spent the late 1980s as a mainstay of US indie behemoths Galaxie 500 before leaving in 1991 to form widescreen dreampop outfit Luna. Britta joined in 2000 and the couple were married in 2007. For the last twenty years, they have recorded simply as Dean & Britta, morphing into a charming and deceptively dark-hearted Lee and Nancy for these troubled times.

Pete, meanwhile, cut his psychedelic teeth with Spacemen 3 and Spectrum before forging ahead with his Sonic Boom persona, becoming producer of choice for MGMT and Panda Bear and even – bestill our collective beating hearts – forging an early noughties musical partnership with the great Delia Derbyshire.

The trio have been friends and occasional musical accomplices for decades, but it’s the festive spirit that has drawn them together for a full-on collaboration. ‘A Peace Of Us’ is a genuinely lovely collection of Christmas covers, including buffed-up versions of all the aforementioned singles. Britta sings Merle Haggard’s ‘If We Make It Through December’ with a delicious country twang, and there’s a thrilling synth-pop take on Willie Nelson’s ‘Pretty Paper’. We even get a sumptuous version of ‘Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown?’ from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Quite demonstrably – and I’m taking no further questions on this – the finest James Bond film ever made.

“I agree!” laughs Pete, uproariously. “But Dean doesn’t.”

“We had this argument when we were mixing the album,” sighs Dean, still clearly unconvinced about the cinematic merits of George Lazenby. “‘G’day mate, I’m 007…’”

Hopefully, I suggest, the selection process for the album was a more harmonious debate.

“We just tried to figure out which songs we liked, and which ones we could cover well,” explains Britta. “I like ‘If We Make It Through December’ because lyrically it’s a bit dark. I didn’t want us just to do the Christmas songs you hear all the time.”

“The one I really can’t stand is ‘Chestnuts Roasting On An Open Fire’,” grimaces Dean. “They start playing that just after Halloween. You walk into a shop and go ‘Noooo!’”

It’s an uplifting album, I tell them, but it doesn’t shy away from the midwinter melancholy alluded to by Britta. A stark reminder that the festive season can also be a time of fractiousness and regret.

“It’s not always the perfect time for everyone,” nods Pete. “Some families collapse at Christmas and get into massive arguments with each other.”

“Absolutely,” nods Dean. “With my family it’s ended with people walking out the door.”

“I like the magical childhood memories Christmas brings back,” says Britta. “But what I don’t like is how commercial it’s become. I feel like Christmas is for kids, really. Adults shouldn’t have to give each other presents unless they really want to.”

“It’s nice to have a festival of light, though,” continues Pete, thoughtfully. “That ‘Peace on Earth’ vibe is something we should all have in our armoury every day of the year. But somehow it only comes out at Christmas, when people are more forgiving of each other. I think there’s been a winter ceremony since time immemorial – it’s something to look forward to at the darkest time of the year.”

Perhaps the most poignant song on the album comes at the very beginning. ‘Snow Is Falling In Manhattan’ was written by David Berman and included on Purple Mountains, the only studio album from his acclaimed Silver Jews project. Less than a month after the album’s release in July 2019, Berman took his own life at the age of 52.

“That’s such a great album,” says Dean. “We ran into David about a year earlier when he was recording up in Portland. He said ‘I’m fifty years old and nobody ever makes a great record after they’re fifty. It can’t be done’. So when Purple Mountains came out, I sent him a note to say ‘You’re fifty and you’ve done it’! But he was already in a dark place, and a couple of weeks later he’d killed himself. That whole record, when you listen to it, sounds like a long suicide note. There’s a great line in ‘Snow Is Falling In Manhattan’: “Housed within the song’s design / Is the ghost the host has left behind”.

“We didn’t know him that well, but we’d check in with him every couple of years. The last time, we were driving through Nashville after we’d moved to LA, and we said ‘Do you want to get together for coffee?’ He said ‘I wake up at 5pm every day, so we can have ice cream if you want’.”

The close friendship between Dean, Britta and Pete was forged in 1989, when the UK touring schedules of Galaxie 500 and Spacemen 3 collided. Since then, they have happily cultivated what Pete calls a “mutual admiration society”. And when asked about the musical inspirations that provided early touchstones, they don’t hesitate – in almost uncanny unison – to nominate The Velvet Underground. You can still hear the influence on ‘A Peace Of Us’, where alluringly deadpan vocals are frequently woven around minimalist guitar lines.

In 1993, Dean’s band Luna actually supported the reformed Velvets on their short-lived reunion trail. What on Earth was that like, I wonder? They weren’t a band noted for their harmonious relationships.

“They seemed to be getting along fine on that tour,” insists Dean. “The first date was in Edinburgh, and that was fun – I remember sitting in the dressing room downstairs and hearing them practising upstairs. They still sounded like nobody else. Those aren’t my favourite live recordings of the band, mainly down to Lou Reed’s singing, but it was still exciting to be on the tour.”

And did he get to spend much time in their company?

“I remember on that first night in Edinburgh, Lou invited me into their dressing room to talk, and I was sitting with him when he saw another couple of people walking in. He said ‘Are you music journalists?’ And they said ‘Yes’. He said ‘Get the fuck outta here! This is a private conversation!’”

“I went to one of their Wembley shows,” adds Pete. “It turned out I actually had a collapsed lung, but I left halfway through the Velvet Underground’s set in mild disgust. Lou Reed just seemed to be trying to fuck everything up. Any songs where he wasn’t singing, where it was John Cale or Moe Tucker, those were great. But whenever it was his turn to sing or play guitar it was…”

He tails off and visibly winces. As a longterm Velvets obsessive, it’s a confession that clearly pains him. I’m just impressed, I tell him, that it was the quality of the performance rather than the discomfort of a collapsed lung that forced his early exit.

“I wasn’t feeling good,” he admits.

While Dean and Pete’s twentysomething selves were immersed in spiky garage rock, Britta’s career path originally looked set to take a very different route. As an actor, she starred opposite Liam Neeson and Julia Roberts in 1988 musical comedy Satisfaction. In more recent years, she has provided character voices for the Cartoon Network. Does that acting experience, I wonder, go hand-in-hand with the techniques required for singing? Certain lyrical concerns, I assume, might even require the adoption of specific personas. Especially on a covers album like ‘A Peace Of Us’.

“Yeah, I think they’re related and they help each other,” she says. “I’ve done some session singing too, so I can change my voice around a bit. I’m always trying on other people, and you find yourself through them. It’s a meeting of yourself and someone else, but it’s just instinctive really.”

She has, she reveals, recently been embracing the devoted fanbase of one of her earliest incarnations. In 1985, she provided the lead vocals for Jem And The Holograms, a colourful animated series depicting the adventures of Jerrica Benton, a strait-laced music executive who uses a holographic computer to transform herself into what the title song gleefully describes as a “truly outrageous” rock star.

“I attended JemCon just a week ago!” she grins. “I don’t even know how to explain it. It’s non-stop and exhausting but it’s great. It’s a very niche convention with about a hundred people, but a lot of the same people come every year. From Rotterdam, Italy, all over the place. Including some young people – there were a couple of 21-year-olds there. A lot of them had hard times as a kid, and Jem And The Holograms was their happy place. Their escape. So it can be very moving. I like to sing and make people cry!”

Conventions are amazing, aren’t they? I’ve been to lots. They’re basically filled with people who can’t talk too deeply about their passions in day-to-day life, so when they all get together in a hotel for a weekend, that’s literally all they talk about.

“Yeah, it’s great,” she smiles. “They all find each other and flip out.”

“When you say you’ve been to conventions,” asks Pete with a knowing smile. “Are we talking Doctor Who?”

Bugger, is it that obvious? He laughs raucously.

“I once went to a Doctor Who convention with Delia Derbyshire,” he recalls. “She said ‘I’ve been asked to go, but it’s not really my thing’. But I told her she should, and I offered to go with her. She got quite drunk, just through nerves I think, but people queued for hours for her autograph. I had to sit around all day waiting for her to sign all these copies of the Doctor Who single! I think it was really good for her, though. She’d been unappreciated for decades, so it was really nice for her to see that she meant a lot to Doctor Who fans.”

Back to all things festive. Our time together is drawing to a close, and if we all close our eyes we can surely imagine the first snowflakes beginning to tumble past the bedroom window. So what’s everyone’s most memorable Christmas experience? The Christmas Day from years gone by that sums up the season more than any other? Dean, Britta and Pete all puff out their cheeks in thoughtful contemplation.

“I remember being six years old,” begins Dean. “We were living in Auckland, New Zealand – where of course it’s summertime at Christmas. I got a new bicycle, which I was very excited about, but we also went down to a little beach. The sea there was usually very placid, but on that particular Christmas Day there were huge waves rolling in. So that really sticks in my mind.”

“For me, it’s my earliest Christmases,” says Britta. “When I was about five. They were spent with my grandparents, and they felt like the cosiest, safest, most Christmassy Christmasses. I just remember my grandmother’s family and the food – the smells and the cookies! That was my favourite time.”

There is, meanwhile, an increasingly mischievous smile spreading across Pete Kember’s face.

“I was once driving home at 2am on Christmas morning when a police car came whizzing up behind me,” he begins. “I had an eighth of hashish on me, and I thought ‘I’m not going to spend Christmas Day in jail’. So I put it in my mouth and swallowed it. At which point the police car overtook me and whizzed off somewhere else! I got home and tried to regurgitate it but I couldn’t. So the next morning, when my mum came to wake me up, I couldn’t even open my eyes. Even by lunchtime I was still sitting there with my eyes glued shut, hardly eating anything. I was so stoned.

“So that was definitely a memorable one.”

A Peace Of Us is available here:
https://deanandbritta.bandcamp.com/album/a-peace-of-us

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