Interview: Parsley Sound detail their career on the eve of their latest release
Parsley Sound are the duo Preston Mead and Dan Sargassa who released an early single on Warp Records as Slum, before signing to Mo’ Wax and releasing their debut album Parsley Sounds. Their album became one of the label’s final releases before it closed in 2003.
British magazines like i-D, Dazed & Confused, NME, and Muzik were all admirers of the group’s output, as were the many fans that pushed their single Platonic Rate to #151 in the UK Singles Chart. 2013 saw their follow up Picnic On Mars released independently before the group seemed to disappear again. Now, in 2022 they have returned with a new album The Lockdown Locomotive by Shelton Street Orchestra, recorded through the 2020 lockdown.
Note: Answers were sent via email and answered individually and as a group. PS=Parsley Sound, DS=Dan Sargassa, and PM= Preston Mead.
I’d like to hear a bit about your careers before you met. I understand you both played saxophones. What attracted you to this instrument, and who did you play with?
DS. Inspired by Francis Monkman’s theme tune to the film The Long Good Friday, I took up the saxophone at secondary school. Aged 12 I joined a local (Wembley) Reggae band called Crucial Recruit, and we rehearsed every Sunday hoping to become the next Musical Youth! We played at all the local schools, the Brent Festival and cut a dub plate at Easy Street studios in Willesden Green. Keith Drummond from Black Slate was the guitarists’ uncle and he’d help us with the arrangements. By my late teens I was beginning to pick up recording session work and gigs in the house bands of London clubs such as Singers and Voices.
PM. I began on drums but interest soon shifted to guitar. When I was fourteen, I joined a band with some schoolmates who were a bit older and more advanced in their playing. We lacked a bass player so the role fell to me. From the late 80’s I was playing bass several times a week for various bands across multiple genres trying to get as much experience as possible. Then, in 1989 I got my first 4 track and spent more and more time writing and recording my own material and gradually began collaborating in the early 1990’s on diverse projects, for example, with the reggae producer Steve M of Jah Warrior, on his first album for Mr Modos records. I co-wrote and co-produced the first two FM Inc twelve inches Sweet Giving and Call Me Anytime and spent a couple of months in pre-production with the 4AD artist Heidi Berry for her self-titled album. I gained a lot from those projects.
So you met around 1991, did you begin working together at that time?
PS. We knew each other in 1991 from a squat party jam in Marsden Street, Camden Town. After that we’d come across each other booked in at various sessions and jams, but we didn’t join forces until 1995.
DS. After a period of touring, I was buying recording equipment looking for a production / writing project to get stuck into, beginning with the Yamaha QY20 a great little MIDI music production box. I played Preston my ideas, and he played me some stuff which I really liked so we decided to start working together.
PM. I thought Dan had some very good tracks too, but our intention was to set up a studio space and start recording other people, and our personal music was to the side of that. Our first paid commission was a remix of Garbage’s Milk. It did not pass muster!
Your first release together was on Warp Records under the name Slum. How did this come about?
PS. Our friend Leila Arab was enthusiastic about our music and by chance played our demos to Warp who then offered to release Twilight Mushrooms as a white label with the possibility of an album deal further down the line.
Could you talk a bit about your memories of the music scene back then? Were you playing live, DJing, playing with other bands etc?
PS. There was a great music scene, almost every day of the week there was a jam or a gig somewhere in London, lots of projects/collaborations across multiple genres if that was an experience you were looking for it was quite easy to find. Some of these improvisational nights would go on till the early hours and it was not unusual to be playing for several hours at a time therefore you had to keep things fresh which presented quite a challenge! There would often be a DJ or two and often they would spin beats and tracks in sync with the band. We soon became aware that some of the most imaginative and exciting music of the time was being made by DJs rather than what might be termed as conventional musicians.
PM. For example, I have an abiding memory of a night at Subterreania where the DJ mixed in Strawberry Fields over a fast house track — in and out for about twenty minutes the audience went bonkers. I loved that merging of disparate material creating odd strange juxtapositions, the old and the new, often out of key with tempos slowed or sped up — set the imagination racing.
DS. 1992 I started to get full time work touring, I was in the live band playing sax and flute for Bjork’s Debut album tour and then with Bryan Ferry on the Mamouna tour. I was also session recording for various artists such as Goldie, 808 State and Clyde Stubblefield. I was trying to get my head around the paradox of musicianship versus muso’ness and what is valid self-expression. It was coming up a lot for me around that time.
How did you move to Mo’ Wax? Had you met James Lavelle before?
PS. Neither of us had met James but both of us had heard him DJ many times. Ruth Rothwell who’d signed us to Universal publishing set up a meeting with him.
Where did the name Parsley Sound come from?
PS. In 1997 we started a recording studio at what had previously been a rehearsal room in a Camden basement, and there was a resident tabby cat called Parsley who wasn’t fazed by the loud amps. Parsley was a bit of a local legend so the studio was named Parsley Sound and then eventually we gave our own recording project that appellation.
What were your influences at the time?
PM. Well by that stage the list was very long. I was just as likely to check out John Peel’s show as someone like Greg Edwards Soul Spectrum or David Rodigan’s Roots Rockers broadcasts. I hated house music to begin with but had some friends who put on some early raves in Alperton which I ended up helping out, so I was exposed to some really cutting-edge DJs mashing up all sorts of tracks in the mix. The exhilarating emergence of drum and bass too. Through, initially, my aspiration to be a bass player I’d become interested in the world of jazz and its development through the twentieth century — I was still buying records by people like Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley, and Keith Jarret. I had a large selection of ECM records too, Eberhard Weber, Shankar, etc. I was becoming increasingly interested in lyric writing- what artists chose to write about, and their style of expression. I began reappraising artists like Lou Reed, Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Morrisey and loads of others to that end. Off the top of my head, I can list a bunch of albums made around the early to mid-nineties as having a strong and direct influence, Spiderland, Screamadelica, Fox Base Alpha, Loveless, and Endtroducing would all be towards the top of that list.
DS. In my late teens and early 20’s I was into funk and bringing tracks from The Meters, Sly and the Family Stone and early Kool and the Gang to band practices. By the mid-nineties I was ditching preconceptions and looking for new sounds. Working with Bjork opened me up to whole new ranges of music. I’d always had a very diverse taste growing up in a family full of music lovers, so for me anything from Beatles to film soundtracks. But being a sax player, I was inevitably influenced by jazz, particularly Charlie Parker to begin with but then I started to get turned on to the modal stuff, Pharoah Sanders, Ornette Coleman, Roland Kirk, less chord changes and an emphasis on drone, layers of sound and crescendos. For me this connected that desire for new sound to electronica so it was a natural shift towards labels such as Warp and XL and albums such as Bytes by The Black Dog, LFO’s Frequencies and Music for the Jilted Generation.
PS. The machines we bought or borrowed inevitably held an influence. They all had different capabilities. Early on Dan bought a Tascam 388 8 track on which we made Twilight Mushrooms, Stevie, and other tracks. A mixer and quarter inch reel to reel all in one — a fantastic machine! No effects were used until we got a computer running Logic Audio and set about combining tape with digital, vari-speeding, overlaying whole mixes, resampling parts, endlessly exploring sonic possibilities that the new tech offered. Sometimes just a particular sound could be the departure point when starting off a new track and we tended to effect parts while writing rather than in the final mix. Machines we loved included the Roland s760 sampler, Boss SE70 effects unit and Roland Jupiter 8 and SH101.
What was it like to get all of the positive feedback you received from the press? Was this part of being on Mo’ Wax, that you would get instant recognition by culture mags like Dazed, I-D, or NME etc.
PS. Great! Being on a label like Mo’Wax would automatically raise an act’s profile and Beggars Banquet distribution meant the record got about too. We went to Brussels to do a press day, twelve interviews in one day with mags from around Europe, so at that point there was a sort of inkling that the album was liked. There’d been a good run with the preceding singles and one even got NME single of the week. Soon after there was an offer to play a festival in Paris for what in our thinking was a DJ gig. We turned up with records and CDs and the organiser welcomed us in and asked where the band was? Our response was we ‘d be DJing, he replied, pointing to poster, ‘But you’re the headline act!’… that was a mental moment. There were three other bands on and they were all really good. We did a long set and things turned out quite well. There may have been a miscommunication with our management, but it was a happy time.
What was it like at Mo’ Wax then?
PS. James was encouraging and supportive. There were about half a dozen meetings with him in all and the last time was when he came to the studio in April 2002 to OK the Platonic Rate single. His attention to product design always impressed us. He enabled the collaboration between Preston, who came up with the artwork concepts, and their main designer Ben Drury.
Was James Lavelle hands off in terms of letting you develop your sound, and did you work with other people at the label?
PS. Yes, he was. We did start a couple of tracks with Pablo Clements from The Psychonauts and UNKLE. Joel Cadbury sang backing vocals on Ocean House and it was our good fortune to share South’s studio premises for a year or so. The guys were mostly on tour, it was a great space.
Mo’ Wax closed in 2003 right when your album was released. What was your response to the news at the time?
PS. Sad. There had been some indications that all was not well for a while but we’d received half our advance and just got on with things. At the beginning of 2003 our manager advised that the album needed to be submitted by the end of March or there could be no guarantee of it being released at all! Our rent for the premises was paid up until July, knowing there was a lot to get on with until then. That was the only time things went a bit wonky. Our intention was to release a fifteen-track album but quickly cut it down to twelve. We managed to submit by the date set but felt that certain things were rushed to the detriment of the album, we messed up a couple of tracks at the mastering stage, lost the sub-bass on Temple Church Mansions, let Twilight Mushrooms run on thirty seconds too long. Candlemice could have done with another week’s attention. The artwork turned up in muddy colours — very different to the garish citrus brightness intended. At that time, we thought that the album was not the full ticket. An anti-climax.
Were there plans for more music on Mo’ Wax, or did you already know they were closing as you finished the album?
PS. Nick Hugget came down to our studio in Kentish Town and listened to the album, thought it was great and said he was hopeful for plans for another one but that was our last contact with him.
Your next album didn’t arrive until 2013, can you talk me through the intervening years? You released some songs during this period, but was the long time between albums intentional?
PS. After wrapping up the album sessions, we worked intensely on a remix for John Cale. By that point we’d been in each other’s pockets for quite some time and were ready to go our separate ways. Although there was a subsequent release of a couple of singles on Destructible Records, we never again really worked with the same intensity or commitment as on the first singles and album. Then in 2008 Gabriel Prokofiev approached us to do a remix for his project Concerto for Turntables and Orchestra. The remix went on to become part of the score for the ballet Mechanics of the Dance Machine by Karole Armitage. We had a great time working on that. Gabriel offered to release a single on his label Stop Start and very kindly made his studio available to us in downtime. Here we began forming tracks for another album but more as a part-time project.
You self-released your second album Picnic on Mars. Can you talk me through what that was like at the time? Sites like Bandcamp, and streaming services like Spotify hadn’t started yet, so was it difficult to do it yourself?
PS. Looking back, it would have been much easier to do it with a recording advance and a supportive label but the thought was just to go for it ourselves. As said, it was pretty part time and the end result was a record perhaps less than the sum of its parts, probably more effective as a five track EP. There was quite a lot of other material and we’ve recently been sifting through it, perhaps some might get resurrected.
It’s almost been ten years since your last album, have you been working on any new Parsley Sound music, and can we expect a third album in the future?
PS. No more plans for Parsley Sound. Our working process was very slow and the thought of sitting in a studio for such long periods of time does not appeal! It could take up to two months working on a remix, like fulltime God Damit! How many days can any one life hold?
What are you both up to now?
PS. There were lots of half-finished ideas sitting around in our archive so at the beginning of the lockdown, finding ourselves with spare time on our hands, we began working remotely. Over an eighteen-month period twelve instrumental tracks materialised creating an album called The Lockdown Locomotive by The Shelton Street Orchestra. It might be a one off, but if not, it will be based around live recording and gigs — in that regard very different from PS.
DS. I do the occasional session gig and recording, alongside freelance production work and instrumental teaching.
PM. I’m finishing a degree in History of Art and hope to graduate this summer. I’m getting about again on the bass too. A couple of years ago I went on a European tour with Sixto Rodriguez, that was a really great experience.•
The new album The Lockdown Locomotive by The Shelton Street Orchestra is available on Bandcamp. Keep up to date with Parsley Sound on Facebook.
This article was originally published in The Shadow Knows Issue #3, July 2022. Buy the fanzine here or read more at our website.
