Behind enigmatic, chameleonic outfit UKofA is none other than John Cormack (Hawk Eyes, Godzilla Black, etc.). We had a chat about his new left-field rock album ‘All This For a Little Peace’ and how he manages to keep the creative tap on.
Drowning Sea God Records: You’ve gone full rock after two solo albums that were more electronica-based. What was behind this return?
UKofA: This album was actually made before the last one I released [‘Punishment Park’]. I haven’t really had a plan with any of these solo releases.
Punishment Park was a mix of different things that came over a number of years. The same is the case with this new one. A lot of it came out of playing with Hawk Eyes. It was taking a long time to make the last album with them. In the meantime, I was still in writing mode for that style of music – heavy, distorted guitars left and right. I got to the point where I wanted to prove to myself that I could record a whole album on my own, Dave Grohl-style.
I do remember thinking: Sometimes, you think that your influences are too obvious, but with this one, I was just going to do whatever came out of me and lean into the stuff I really like and grew up with, which was rock and metal, Radiohead, Tears for Fears and that layered 80s production, but all in a rock domain, which mainly came from the live drums.
DSGR: How did you produce the album?
UKofA: It’s a while since I wrote those songs. I did all the demos for that album five years ago, which is crazy.
The drums were done at The Nave in Leeds, which is an old church and is co-owned by the guy who plays keys in the Kaiser Chiefs. He was there sometimes, very briefly.
I just rolled over some of the stuff I played on the demos. At that point, I didn’t have the capacity to re-amp the guitars like I do now, so I recorded the guitar performances directly; same with the synths, which were also played and recorded through an amp. There’s a lot to be said for that approach which makes you commit to a sound. I’ve got a small studio space down by the M25. I’d go down there and say ‘I’m going to do these songs today’ which meant I was more focussed and had less time to mess around. I did the vocals in my garden shed and that was it!
The album was mastered by Dave Draper. He was recommended to me by Andy Hawkins, who recorded Hawk Eyes and engineered the drums on my album. It turned out I knew Dave because Hawk Eyes had done a tour with his band called Hey You Guys! about ten years ago.
My friend Suki does vocals on one song, ‘Strength and Power’, which she did in Berlin. The vocals that are on the track are actually demos that she recorded into her phone, because it became apparent that she wasn’t going to be able to come here, and I couldn’t go there. She does have someone there who can help her sometimes, but I wanted to get it finished, which is ironic, as it’s taken me so long to get it out. So, because she’s such a good singer, I said: ‘Just do it on your phone’. She double-tracked it and then I just edited and comped it and did a lot of EQing. When someone’s that good a vocalist, it just sounds good and you can easily make it bed in. It has a little bit of a hushed vibe to it. Most people won’t realise that it’s recorded that way unless I tell them. She’s amazing. I hope to do more with her in the future.
DSGR: You once talked about approaching writing like project management.
UKofA: I wish I did approach it like that! Where I’ve done bits of project management at work, I can increasingly see how you could apply the approach to songwriting. It’s all about finishing. Everyone has that problem, setting yourself time, hard deadlines and getting things done.
I spent a lot of time with the sonics on this album. It’s the most professional-sounding record I’ve done. I did spend a lot of time trying stuff out, stripping things back. But when it came to it, particularly the vocals, I was like, right, I need to just finish this now and put it to bed. It was still quite a while, though. I recorded all the drums in April-May 2018 and finished the album in December 2019. I wasn’t working on it full-tilt; during that period, we bought a house and moved and I had to put my little studio together.
There are advantages to being a completely independent artist. It’s great that I have my own little studio space. I can come in here and tinker on stuff. But if you or someone else is paying for the studio, you have to make that time as productive as possible. There’s a lot to be said for that. Things might not come out the way you like, but for an audience, it is what it is, so it just goes out into the world. Then you move on to the next thing. I’d love to have the experience of working with a producer and not having the luxury to take as long as I want. Working on my own with no deadline makes it far too easy to procrastinate, especially with the mixing.
DSGR: You’ve released lots of albums with different bands. How do you keep the creative tap on?
UKofA: I don’t know, haha. I’ve never really had a problem musically, because there’s so much stuff to get inspiration from. There are some musicians that have their specific furrow that they plough. And if it’s not coming out, it’s not coming out. But for me, there’s a whole world of things I like and wonder if I could do something that sounds like that. Obviously, the hope is that if you put it through your own artistic prism, it ends up sounding like you.
I just have ideas all the time but I have to be relaxed. I have been in situations where I have to come up with stuff on the spot and I don’t really like doing that. I’ve never really enjoyed jamming. I have done some free improv and that can be fun, because it doesn’t really matter what you do!
I don’t miss band practice where you try to write in a room, where it’s a kind of democratic process. That was something I learned with previous bands. When I started with Godzilla Black, there were just two of us and we were trying to come up with the craziest ideas we could and then build songs out of that. It was really rewarding and productive, but it took a very long time, because we were starting from seconds’ worth of ideas and trying to make it into something that worked. By the end of Godzilla Black, I thought ‘OK, I can write songs now’, and I’m still on that trajectory, although there’s a part of me that thinks it would be cool to go back to that initial Godzilla Black approach. We spent a lot of time at our rehearsal space, sometimes sleeping there. We’d come up with random stuff and record it all!
DSGR: Is it the camaraderie or the process that you miss?
UKofA: For a long time, it was just the two of us. We were both drummers and interested in the same sorts of things. What I really liked about early Godzilla Black is that we were never planning to play live, so when we were making the record, we were layering stuff up and it was all about the sonics of it. It was never about the performance in the sense of having to go on stage and reproduce it, whereas now, I feel much more like I want to play live or I want it to be heard live.
I do miss working with other people, but they have to be the right people. That’s so difficult to find. And even if you do find the right people, there are so many other things that need to line up, like availability and what people want to get out of a situation. It’s a lot easier to manage when it’s just me!
‘All This For A Little Peace’ is out on 5 May 2023 through Pony Down Records. Get it from the UKofA Bandcamp.
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