Issue 19a / 24 May 2024
In part one of this week's runaway train of DIY electronic goodness... Album Of The Week: Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan's 'Your Community Hub' + bumper Gordon Chapman-Fox interview
Settle down at the back. You can feel the buzz of excitement in the air when there’s a new release from Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan can’t you? And today is that day. All four of the previous albums have sold out in the blink of gnat’s chuff. The last one was the largest pressing Castles In Space have ever done and it was gone in a weekend. For this one they’ve doubled that run.
It’s a phenomenal success story that’s for sure. The album, ‘Your Community Hub’, was released at 8am so *looks at watch* you should be in luck if you’re reading this while the email is still wet. You can find my thoughts on the new record below along with an insightful interview with Mr WRNTDP himself, Gordon Chapman-Fox.
See you back here at 3.30pm for part two for today’s mailout, which will feature a round-up of the brave souls also releasing music today. Balls of steel, the lot of them.
Happy WRNTDP album release day everyone.
Neil Mason, editor
moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
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WARRINGTON-RUNCORN NEW TOWN DEVELOPMENT PLAN ‘Your Community Hub’ (Castles In Space)
‘A Shared Sense Of Purpose’, the first single from Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan’s ‘Your Community Hub’, comes with a remix from synthpop behemoth Vince Clarke who is referred to in the press materials as the “Godfather Of New Town Synthology”. I had to pause when I first read that. The Godfather of New Town Synthology. It’s an idea I’d never considered before, but Basildon was one of 22 post-war new towns and one of eight built within 30 miles of London to soak up the capital’s housing problems. There’s a great 2018 documentary called ‘New Town Utopia’ that focuses on Basildon. The best pop star they could rustle up was “Hippy” Joe Hymas of Hayseed Dixie. A trick missed there, no doubt.
What’s really mind-blowing is that WRNTDP’s Gordon Chapman-Fox grew up on the 80s synthpop made by Vince Clarke and that influence is there to be heard in his music, and then you take on board that Vince Clarke must’ve made music that was influenced by his surroundings. Well, it fair makes the head spin.
‘Your Community Hub’, WRNTDP’s fifth long-player, deals with the concept of community in the new towns of Warrington and Runcorn where the planners were working with ideas like the five-minute city, where everything you need – from doctors and dentists to schools, shops, libraries, recreation and community centres and transport links – were a five-minute walk from your front door.
Gordon’s point is that we’ve seen a long, slow slide into decline as successive governments have undermined and eroded those basic services leaving us where we are now. The knock-on effect of all this is firmly on the population's health and well-being. And it all starts with community, spaces for people to meet and communicate, which the forward-thinking planners of new towns knew only too well.
Musically, the influence of synthpop is here for sure, perhaps not as overt as it has been (see ‘Built By Robots’ from ‘People & Industry’, which is a straight synthpop crowdpleaser), but it’s here in the fairy-light twinkles of ‘Cul-de-Sac’, it’s here in the epic synth shimmers of ‘Summer All Year Round’ and it’s here in the melody of ‘Facilities For All Ages’.
Also here, like on ‘The Nation’s Most Central Location’, are those huge industrial Vangelis-y CS-80-like sweeps and on top of that this time we get the repeating motifs of the minimalists. Listen to the way ‘Facilities For All Ages’ ebbs and flows as it builds towards its crescendo and tell me Riley and Glass wouldn’t be nodding in approval.
And yes, while the subject matter requires looking backwards little else does. This is music made by an artist looking forwards. “I think it’s always been contemporary,” Gordon says. “There’s definitely echoes of different acts in there, but it’s never intentionally created as a vintage homage. There’s as much inspiration coming from contemporary artists like Craven Faults, Sulk Rooms or Arushi Jain as there is being influenced by Jarre, Harmonia or OMD.” Which is great to hear. There are some who insist on tagging WRNTDP as some retro 70s throwback. It is nothing of the sort.
The production here also seems to have cranked up a notch. I don’t know why I haven’t noticed this before, but WRNTDP benefits from being turned up loud. ‘Pedestrian Shopping Deck’ has a deep bass growl, like a heartbeat, or a clock counting down, worth writing home about, while the room-shaking rumble of ‘Summer All Year Round’, is just epic. It grows with the track, as if it’s alive, and joyously it is allowed space all of its own for the closing 30 seconds, which is one of those moments that makes you want to stand up and cheer.
For those who welcomed the fire and fury of the last album, well, ‘Your Community Hub’ still holds the rage of a man who has lived under a Tory government for too long. And yet this isn’t an angry record. That anger is working its way out as something else. Gordon says the album feels optimistic. Maybe it’s the election on the horizon.
Gordon talks about how Thatcher’s “there is no such thing as society” has been taken as a mission statement by successive Conservative governments “who have aimed to remove as much support and communality from the citizens as possible”. In their wisdom, the planners in Warrington and Runcorn believed in community. Here is a record that does too. Don’t hang around, it’s going to sell very fast indeed. Will you get hold of a copy? Chop chop.
‘Your Community Hub’ is out now on Castles In Space
WARRINGTON-RUNCORN NEW TOWN DEVELOPMENT PLAN
We caught up with Gordon Chapman-Fox for a chat about album number five, ‘Your Community Hub’, and found ourselves covering off everything from Pentangle to the upcoming general election and so much more besides. Buckle up…
Photo: Meg Kerr
Interview: Neil Mason
Hello Gordon, how’s things? What are you up to today?
”I’m beginning to assemble my live set for Levitation in October. It may seem a while off, but I like to plan these things in advance, and I’m hoping to do something a bit special for that one. That and admin. So much admin.”
WRNTDP hasn’t become any less popular in the last 12 months has it?
”It keeps getting bigger and bigger! For the fourth album we had 2,000 records pressed, the biggest run ever for Castles In Space, and they more or less sold out in a weekend. That absolutely blew my mind. This year we’ve gone for twice that in the hope that people can actually find it more than a week after release.”
Any particular highlights from the last year? Any proper pinch me moments?
”The gigs in London seem to be getting bigger and more intense. It’s incredible to be part of this ever expanding thing. The Iklectik day in May last year was one of my favourites, meeting so many great people and such a wonderful venue that’s sadly been lost to developers. Playing at the Just Dropped In record store in Coventry is always such fun too, with the vibe that Alun and Joe have built there, that’s an amazing venue.”
Talking of pinch me moments… Vince Clarke remixed your current single, ‘A Shared Sense Of Purpose’ didn’t he?
”Synth heroes don’t come much bigger and legendary than Vince Clarke, do they? It’s been absolutely mind-blowing. I can’t say we’ve been hanging out in a studio or anything, I’ve emailed him maybe four times, and each time with trembling fingers. He’s been lovely. But considering what he and his family were going through at the time, and in the middle of the hype for his solo album, I am astonishingly grateful that he took time out to work on a silly remix for some unknown schmuck like me.”
It’s the first WRNTDP remix isn’t it? Why have you not had a remix before?
”I’ve always been too busy moving forwards. I do have a couple of remixes of early tracks somewhere that I had meant to do something with at some point. They might see the light of day some time.”
Your people describe Vince as the “Godfather Of New Town Synthology”, which hadn’t occurred to me before, but Basildon is a new town… when did you first make the connection?
”Pretty much the nano-second Colin at CiS said, ‘I think we can get Vince Clarke’. It hadn’t occurred to me to ask Vince as I thought he’d be so far out of our league. But as soon as he said it, that connection just clicked, and it made perfect sense. He was the New Town Boy of 1979, maybe the project just struck a chord with him.”
So if you’re influenced by Vince’s work and he was influenced by his new town surroundings is he the original WRNTDP? Or are you the new Depeche Mode?
”Oh, Vince is just in a different league! There’s no comparison.”
There’s also a 1973 version of the single… why 1973?
”Because the whole Warrington-Runcorn thing is such a niche project I wanted to expand the scope of it musically, and I didn’t want to go too far into the 1980s because that’s the end of new towns as a thing. So extending the scope of the project further back in time made sense. 1973 seemed the perfect time for my acoustic tracks. It’s the tail end of the post-hippy back-to-nature boom of the late 60s and early 70s, meets the emergent era of electronica. It’s ‘Tubular Bells’ meets Tangerine Dream.”
It sounds quite Pentangle! Is that you playing guitar? A guitar! Whatever next?
”Pentangle is definitely a reference point. And it is me playing guitar… a bit. The acoustic guitar is a sampled, because I’m just not that good at finger picking. But the big fuzzy guitar solo is me. And yes, it feels really odd to be doing a guitar solo in the synth project.”
Guitars aside, your sound palette was deliberately pre-1979 on ‘Interim Report’, how much has it changed throughout the five albums?
”It hasn’t really changed that much. I do intentionally try to use sounds achievable in 1979, but it isn’t a rigorously enforced rule. Musically though, rather than technically, I think it’s always been contemporary. I don’t aim to be a pastiche of any particular sound or era. There’s definitely echoes of different acts in there, but its never intentionally created as a vintage homage. There’s as much inspiration coming from contemporary artists like Craven Faults, Sulk Rooms or Arushi Jain as there is being influenced by Jarre, Harmonia or OMD.”
As the title of the new album suggests, ‘Your Community Hub’ deals with the idea of community in the new towns of the north-west doesn’t it?
”I think a lot of the reaction to new towns has been very much focused on how people felt dehumanised within them. But incorporating facilities and communities together was completely at the forefront of the planners minds. Many new towns were designed as collections of smaller communities, almost villages, with a town centre as its focus. On a larger scale, the album is also about our own sense of community, and how it's been eroded into a selfish, anarchic survival of the fittest competition, because it makes it easier for corporations to sell us crap.”
Some of the ideas at the planning stages, like the five-minute city, were pretty radical, weren’t they?
”Yeah, Runcorn was designed so that all the facilities you might need, or at least you might need in the 1970s, were within a five-minute walk of your front door. It was designed to allow people to leave their cars at home. Within five minutes you could walk to one of these community hubs, catch a bus to go to work, do your grocery shopping, banking, post a letter, drop the kids off at playgroup or school and see a doctor. It sounds, weather permitting, quite an idyllic arrangement to me.
But the ideal and the reality are suddenly two very different things once you put actual people in those situations aren’t they?
”I think the difference of the post-war planning period is that it was very much designed as a way of changing people’s lives for the better in a very paternalistic approach. But people, myself included, will always take the quickest, easiest route through something. And if that means cutting across your nicely landscaped bit of grass to get to the shops, or getting into the car instead of walking, people will do it.”
I can’t work out if I’d want to live in these places or not. Would you have done?
”I’ll happily admit that I didn’t grow up in a new town, but I think all of us Gen Xers grew up in the post-war consensus. We pretty much all went to a school with a flat roof, or popped into a post-war library or health centre. We all grew up surrounded by this architecture and this ethic of a shared, communal existence.”
The last track on the album kind of sums everything up doesn’t it? ‘A New Town With An Old Sense Of Community’. Was it all just a Utopian dream?
“I don’t think it was a dream. To the planners and architects, it was very much a cause. No matter how misguided some of their designs may have been, they tried to plan and design the ultimate in affordable, modern communities, using the latest knowledge in many disciplines including architecture, economics and sociology. And although they made mistakes, their intentions were grand. The one thing they didn’t plan for was neoliberalism killing off the entire ethos.”
Thatcher plays her part, as always. Her “no such thing as society” still permeates
”The Thatcher revolution and dawn of neoliberalism killed off the new towns movement and many of the jobs and industries around Warrington and Runcorn. Anything that’s happened since Cameron has been an acceleration of that. Austerity was sold as an economic necessity when it was a choice to kill off services that helped society. Brexit was the next con we were sold, and now we’re even at the stage where a prime minister is trying to convince the public that they don’t need basic human rights. It’s disgusting and grotesque.”
Does community exist or have we seen the last generation with any real sense of community? Our parents? Our grandparents?
”Not at all, I think it's a very human instinct. We saw it at the 2012 Olympics, and we saw it in the first stage of lockdown in COVID. I think the Tories and the media work very hard to squash it out of us though, encourage division and petty, shallow selfishness. That period of Boris Johnson being in charge just felt like the entire government said ‘Fuck you, you’re on your own’ and had their fat fingers in the till. Truss trashed the economy, and Sunak’s government is a void, but I think people like a sense of community, and I feel it’s still there just under the surface.”
With a general election coming up, do you think there’s cause of optimism?
”I can’t wait for a change of government. I think even having a government in charge that can be bothered governing will be a major relief. I don’t think there’ll be an immediate mood change, I think we’ve all grown too cynical and Starmer has been playing down any expectations at every stage. I do find it funny though that Labour have identified new towns as a project to get behind. I read that the UK would need 36 new towns of the size of Milton Keynes to solve its housing crises. I doubt that will happen, the scale is beyond anything we can conceive or afford at the moment.”
You go through the emotions on these records don’t you? Loneliness on ‘Districts, Roads, Open Space’, anger on ‘The Nation’s Most Central Location’. This one feels mournful, sad even…
”It’s funny you should say that. This one feels optimistic to me. That said, my music does seem to walk that tightrope. I’ve had different people react to the same live performance of the same song and told me it was joyous and uplifting on the one hand, and sad and heartbreaking on the other.”
How many more albums do you think there are exploring all this?
”An album for 2025 is already nearing completion! That album is based on my live sound and very much designed to be performed live. It’s my stadium rock album, though the theme will be less about new towns and more the privatised industries, and what an absolute con we were sold in the 1980s. Beyond that, who knows?”
There’s plenty of other new towns, could you have off-shoots? Basildon New Town Development Plan for example? A collaboration perhaps?
”I had considered doing an album based on the different new towns, and possibly looking at tying that in with a tour of them. But I think I’m happier exploring the themes of the new towns and post-war consensus, without changing the geography. That said, I must confess to bulking out the footage I use in my live shows with footage of Milton Keynes, Basildon, Stevenage and others. There just isn’t enough footage of Warrington and Runcorn to use!”
For more WRNTDP, visit warringtonruncorn.com
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The current issue of MOONBUILDING is full to the gills with the good stuff. On the cover, star-in-the-making Maria Uzor, we profile label-of-the-moment quiet details, there’s an incredible interview with Captain Star creator Steven Appleby, and Ghost Box’s Jim Jupp gets busy with our There’s A First Time For Everything questions.
We review a big pile of releases from labels including Castles In Space, Woodford Halse, Persistence Of Sound, Assai, Ahora, DiN, Werra Foxma, Ghost Box and many more. There’s a column from The Orb’s Alex Paterson and the world-famous Captain Star cartoon strip.
This issue’s CD is ‘The Moonbuilding Miscellany – Volume One’, which is put together by CiS supremo Colin Morrison. It’s a belter featuring tracks from the likes of Lo Five, Lone Bison, Twilight Sequence, Ojn, NCHX and more.
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