by Jani Hellén

I'm John Cavanagh, I come from Glasgow, Scotland, where I make music as Phosphene, I make radio programmes for the BBC and Radio Six International and sometimes I read the news for the BBC, I record music made by friends, I write too - and I've never had any clear-cut concept of what my future will be... all of the above are wonderful things which have happened in my life and I only hope such things continue to happen.

There are signposts in my life that suggest I haven't changed much since I was about 3! There's a photo of me wearing headphones at that age and about the same time I became fascinated by orchestral conductors, thanks to a TV show we had each week then called Leonard Bernstein's Music Night. As far as broadcasting is concerned, I have a tape I made when I was 11, linking records in the style of Alan Freeman (a great radio hero in the U.K. who later became a friend), but if you'd asked me what I wanted to be then, I would've told you that I'd like to work with audio equipment, repairing things. I always liked valves and messing about with radios and the like.

I was introduced to someone who had just started working at the BBC in 1989. He was looking for a voice to use on an idea he was piloting for a radio series. He didn't get the series off the ground until a while after that, but he was the person who got me into making short features for the BBC. At that time, the fact that I could already edit reel to reel tape was a very helpful calling card. The first person I ever interviewed for the BBC was Roy Harper and that's something that I'm still rather proud of! I left the BBC to work for Glasgow's main commercial station in 1990 and had lots of fun playing things like Captain Beefheart and the Colorblind James Experience in an environment more accustomed to Cher and Elton John, then the BBC launched a new U.K. radio network and I was invited back.

Delia Derbyshire, Link Wray and Dick Dale leap instantly to mind... well, how could they fail? One of the first things I was told by Alan Freeman was not to feel overawed, even if you'd always been a fan of the person or people you were talking to. However, if the people happen to be the original line up of the Crickets, well I think it's alright to behave like a fan! After all, along with Buddy Holly, these guys wrote so many chapters in the story of rock'n'roll. I've made some hugely enjoyable one-hour Soundwave specials recently for www.radiosix.com - a show in March 2006 with Nalle being specially memorable. They are three of my favourite people and doing a sort of free-form radio programme, where they played live and brought a bunch of favourite records was just magical.

Ha! I like your notion that I had one! I started taking music lessons when I was 11, playing clarinet. Next year I had a really unpleasant illness and for a long time whenever I blew the clarinet, I would start to cough really badly... or worse. Once the clarinet was boxed away, I really thought that was it. When I was 16 I was given a little Casio VL tone and I remember plugging that into my old valve Revox, speeding up and slowing down the sounds and bouncing echoes across the two tracks, but I never played that to anybody else as, frankly, I didn't know anyone then who shared that sort of interest.

Electroscope started when Gayle Brogan and I were running Boa Records. We were going to record a band on an old Ferrograph tape machine and she suggested we should test the machine first by playing together. That was a moment of discovery and so Electroscope started there and then. It really was, simultaneously, a revival of something latent and a complete beginning.

I met Gayle the day Kurt Cobain died. I knew someone who used to tell me about this friend of hers who liked "weird music" and that I would almost certainly get along with this person, because I was also judged to like "weird music". Anyway, I was involved in one of those rather annoying panel discussions which happen as an adjunct to music festivals. I had to chair this thing and, in the interval, I was introduced to Gayle. The reason I remember the Kurt connection so vividly is that later that day I was introducing bands like the Pastels and Lungleg on stage for BBC recordings and that was when we learned Cobain had died. One person arrived in the venue with the news and it really did sweep through the place. Anyway, while that was going on Gayle and I discovered what she once summed up as a mutual fondness for southern comfort and the Chris Bell solo album. Some dozen years on, she is still one of my closest friends.

Electroscope put out so many records, but if you listen to the two full-length lps, you can hear why it came to an end. On the first one (Homemade Electroscope), you hear lots of collaboration. By the time you get to the second (Journey to the Centre of Electroscope) you hear two people who have become better at expressing themselves, so it wasn't really a band anymore: it was two people making solo records under one heading.

It's good to hear that people liked what we did enough to suggest reforming Electroscope, but I don't think either of us is really into looking back in that way. However, the good news is that instead of one entity, you now have two: Pefkin and Phosphene. I've played on Pefkin material and Gayle plays on the forthcoming Phosphene release on Rusted Rail Records. I really enjoy recording stuff with Gayle these days and I think because we know one another so well, explaining what sound you're trying for and communicating ideas comes really easily to us. It's also a good meeting point for the quaffing of the odd glass (or two) of Islay malt whisky!!

Well, even though I was working on a lot of ideas with Electroscope which were mainly mine, once it was Phosphene I really had a bit of a confidence problem. I was recording these tracks, but a bit like the tapes when I was 16, I wasn't letting people listen to what I was doing. One day Drew Mulholland, of Mount Vernon Arts Lab, was round and he said "right, let's hear them" and so, slightly backed into a corner, I put the 7 tracks I had on to play. I then left the room on the context of getting him a biscuit or something so that I didn't have to sit there while he listened! When I came back, he was really enjoying the music, he told me these tracks were complete and that it was time to get some cassettes made up and start looking for a label to issue them. I thanked him then and I thank him again now, because very quickly Daf from Oggum Records in Wales responded and said he wanted to put out a Phosphene album. Of course, as soon as somebody showed this interest, I had a sudden surge of enthusiasm and, in no time, I had three new tracks and that made enough material for "Long Meadow Felt Company," the first album. Since then there've been two more albums, both for Secret Eye in Providence, Rhode Island, and other releases which have broadened the range in rather attractive ways. One, for Evelyn Records, has a half hour thing called "The Singing Woodstove" (and the title says it all really, as it featured... a singing woodstove!) and another, for Nidnod Records, was an old story about a king who got what he asked for, but he'd asked for too much! I set that within a music background and it also formed the first Phosphene live show, which happened in the Victorian music hall where Stan Laurel, Jack Buchanan and Cary Grant made their stage debuts, so it was quite a place to hold your first live show.

I don't tend to consider that too much. I like to think I'm very open to new ideas and that I can learn many different things from people who cross my path, but music is such a constant in my life - and always has been - that (and I know this might sound a line of pretentious nonsense) I don't consider it much less important to living than breathing.

Another thing about working on my own with Phosphene was that I felt it would be much more interesting if other ideas and voices appeared to take things in new directions. The first album was all me and it was good to know I could do that. The next one had some guests and I especially enjoyed recording with John McKeown, now of the 1990s, who brought noisy guitars into Phosphene. I loved that and I think that anyone who felt they'd pinned down what sort of sound my records would have would've been surprised by a very direct homage to Chuck Berry creeping in!

By the time I got to the third album, "The Plum, The Orange and the Matchbox," it was collaboration all the way with a whole bunch of friends and mainly with Lol Coxhill and Raymond MacDonald. Lol had been a hero from when I first got into free music, so it was a great thrill to find that (a) he liked the first album, (b) that he was interested in playing on something of mine and - best of all - (c) when he turned up at my house with Raymond, he wanted to work on 6 tracks in one morning!

...and so it continues. I have a Pickled Egg records single on the way (it may be around by the time the reader is perusing this) featuring Bridget St. John, Isobel Campbell and Bill Wells on one side with one of
my songs and Hanna, Chris and Aby (Nalle) and me singing one of Bridget St. John's songs on the flipside. It's easy to say how much I enjoyed making this record, but I really can't express here just what working with Bridget in New York and singing with Nalle at my home has meant to me.

That's the first time I've come across the phrase "gear geek", but I fear you've absolutely nailed it to the mast! I've always been someone who could accrue any amount of beautiful junk. I don't drive, which is just as well, because I know that if I did I would end up with a collection of rusting hulks on the street outside my front door. I mean, why have a modern car when a '65 Humber Scepter could be there instead... even if it never ran properly? Yes, it really is for the best that I travel by bus, train and thanks to lifts from friends! I've never been any kind of obsessive collector or completist, in the way that some people are, especially with with records: that kind of thing doesn't appeal to me at all. However, I do love things that have a handmade quality to them, things that give off something that suggests people designed and made them and cantankerous old bits of sound equipment - instruments, tape recorders, oscillators - all possess that quality.

I never started out to collect memorabilia, but when an Ampex tape recorder that had been part of Joe Meek's studio set up came along, well, what could I do? Watch it pass by? I think not! Same with the Pink Floyd organ and the nice thing is that, rather than being mothballed or shown somewhere just as an object (a la those Hard Rock Cafe bars where, you know, Jeff Beck's guitar is in a glass case up on the wall), the Pink Floyd organ is played and recorded and it lives on in the here and now, not just as some relic (Pink Floyd album pun intended!).

The VCS 3 is a source of boundless adventure and it's fun to take that out live... instant stage presence guaranteed!

As for modern recording machines, they offer wonderful convenience and it's all down to what you do with them. I have Pro-Tools, but I just treat it like a tape recorder. I don't use any sort of midi or sequencing equipment. I think that something like Pro-Tools will give you in return very much what you put in. It doesn't add the attractive coloration you get from analogue equipment, so my method of working is to make sure the signals it records are already nice and hot and that's where the old equipment comes in: right at the start of the chain.

Another moment of glorious serendipity. I was approached by an American publisher who was planning a series of short books on classic albums. He had "Dark Side of the Moon" on his list of possibles, but I suggested that, if he swerved that in favour of Piper, I felt there was a much better story to be told, that the context of the emergent underground culture which lead to the album would be a lot more colourful than a lengthy examination of Dark Side. Luckily the publisher went along with this and I was off on an adventure! The book is now available in an Italian translation and plans are afoot for a Korean edition too.

As far as writing another book is concerned, yes, I'd be very interested in doing that, but I don't really have the time to go around trying to sell the notion to publishers, so if anyone reading this would like me to.......

I like food and drink, films (don't get to see as many as I'd like to), books (another advantage of public transport: you can't read if you're driving!), seeing new places and spending time with interesting people. Only yesterday I met with a friend of a friend who's visiting Glasgow for three days to take part in the Royal Institute Science Exhibition which is happening here. This person is from Belgrade and she is a research student in the field of astronomy. Today, thanks to that meeting, I ended up looking through an electron microscope at particles collected from the tail of a comet. Now, that was fascinating and completely unexpected.

An honest answer in one word is probably: fear. I like to have things going on and I guess I fear how much I'd miss all that if my life just dried up and nothing was happening. In some respects, maybe my natural curiosity is what keeps it all spinning, but if I think about it, that fear probably drives quite a lot.

I never lose sight of the fact that being paid to do work I enjoy is, in itself, a charmed life and also how lucky I am to have time to do the things I love that don't pay, but there is always an undercurrent to all of that.

One thing I haven't mentioned is that I'm re-issuing a rather forgotten album of library music Delia Derbyshire made in 1972. I got very excited when I was given an original copy of this, so much so that I ended up licensing the music for an LP release from KPM, the company who brought it out in the first place. Delia was an amazing person and this album must be heard again!

Also, I've recently discovered a wonderful bunch of people in Galway. While I was there I recorded something with Dave Colohon (Agitated Radio Pilot) and I'd certainly like to go back there soon and try Some more music with people there.

Well, I don't want this to sound unduly morbid, but here it is... I said I never really had a concept of my future. I'll maybe explain that a little. I've met people who in, say, their early '20s will go "this is what I'm planning to do until I'm 55". Alright, so some things need a certain amount of forward planning, but even when I hear of what someone will be doing in a couple of years, I think that you don't know what will happen and you could be dead by then. I was talking to someone recently who was very hung up because she'd just turned 25. I have plenty of things I'm hung up about, but thankfully such matters do not register with me at All (just as well... I passed 25 in 1990!!). I am primarily concerned with now, what is happening in the immediate future and the people I care about. The longer term? That'll unravel itself if/when I get there!

phtos by Vic Singh, Gayle Brogan, John Cavanagh, & Tony Currie