Tenement Steps To Glory: The MOTORS Tune Up

Tenement Steps To Glory: The MOTORS Tune Up

Rob Patterson

The sky cracks open and fat raindrops cascade noisily onto city, pavement. Suddenly awake, alone, in a crowded New York City apartment, he hears the soundtrack to his day (rock ’n’) roll into his ears. It’s a matter of flicking on his stereo. The disc—Tenement Steps by the Motors.

It’s the perfect day to talk with Nick Garvey and Andy McMaster about their latest LP. Rain heaves into a city in the throes of a transit strike, and the locked-up traffic is noisy and fraught with intensity. Likewise Tenement Steps simmers with that same urban energy, and I imagine if they could have gotten this rainstorm onto the disc, it’d be there.

I’m almost tempted to ask them why they didn’t press it in gray vinyl, especially after a 45-block, 45-minute cab ride through cramped and cranky city streets to get to Virgin’s downtown offices in New York. But Nick Garvey, a stout and merrily sarcastic sort, beats me to the punch.

; “Aren’t you going to ask us if it’s a concept album?” he queries. After all, we’ve been talking about just how different each Motors record has been, with the only seeming correlation between all three being great songs and sounds filled with immense, surging power. This time they’ve locked that into an appropriate subject, and have fashioned a set of eight songs that thunder with the frayed-nerve essence of city life.

But no, I tell them, I don’t hear it as a concept album, though I do hear a lot of concepts. But right now the concepts are too close to talk about.

With the help of New York engineerproducer Jimmy Iovine (Springsteen, Patti Smith, Tom Petty) they’ve fashioned a moving sort of urban suite that pulses with the anger, bitterness* and anomie that a day like the one we’re in reinforces. The album has a sound like crumbling skyscrapers— huge and thunderous, filled with tense strings, fast honking horn, wailing girls in chorus, and the chunky but melodious power rock that is the Motors.

Garvey pops in and out of the room

" The pub rock scene was dead by the time we started. -Nick Garvey "

between phone interviews grinding out a joke or two for his own pleasure, but it’s McMaster—the reticent but very deepthinking Scottish keyboards whiz of the band who hits nails without even knowing it. Suddenly Tenement Steps comes into focus as he explains what he’s been doing in the nearly two years since Approved By The Motors, an album that yielded them two British chart singles.

“It’s sort of boring really,” he insists, “but I didn’t have a house to live in. Two hit records in England and no place to live. So I was squatting, y’know, in a fuckin’ derelict building. And it began to get embarrassing, because people’d find out that this pop star was living down in this old shelter.

“For me, I have to have a place with a bit o’ peace—nobody above me or below me or around yellin’ up at me to shut up, and it took me about eight months to find a place that was detached that I could afford.”

But the Motors’ history and music has been rife with struggle. McMaster was also slumming because they’d gone into debt gettting the live version of the Motors (Andy, Nick, Bram Tchaikovsky and Richard “Slaughter” Wernham) onto the road.

“The reason that band broke up is because Bram and Richard felt that we weren’t giving them an equal share*..they felt like paid musicians, which is what they were,” explains Andy.

“But we couldn’t make them a part of the

band, because if we did they’d be taking on a share of our debts.”

The parting left relations a bit strained, even though Garvey went on to produce the first Bram album. Bram tells it as not enough room for his songs and musical ideas. The Motors seemed intent on protecting their investment by keeping it their own.

But Bram’s situation was not all that dissimilar from Andy and Mick’s when they met in Ducks Deluxe. Garvey was currently employed as lorry driver for the Flamin’ Groovies when he was asked to join Ducks on guitar. McMaster had been a “nine-tofive-man,” working as a silversmith. “But he’d worked for so many of the companies in London and gotten the sack that he couldn’t get a job anymore,” says Nick.

“I’d get a job at a place and then after a few days I’d just stop showing up,” explains Andy. “It finally got to the point that I’d worked so many places that I’d call up one for a job, thinking it didn’t sound familiar. They’d hear who I was and ‘click!’ ”

Their time in Ducks seems to have been time playing music they didn’t like in a band they didn’t like. Though Garvey won’t say when the alliance was formed between the

two, he sarcastically observes “that^the only way we were a duo in that band was because we both didn’t like it!”

For them the Motors was their chance to write, play, and record pop music the way they saw it. They fiercely'set themselves apart from any camp (“We weren’t part of TURN TO PAGE 61 the pub rock scene, whatever that was,” insists Garvey. “That was dead by the time we started.” He also makes clear later that “we certainly aren’t new wave, and I don’t see how anyone could say we were.”)

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“People find it hard to categorize us,” says Andy. “Honestly, 1 couldn’t put us in any category, new wave or old wave. We don’t believe in any of that. We just want to write great songs.”

They are justly proud of Tenement Steps, feeling it’s the most powerful statement yet by the band, even though it is not really a band at this time (Rockpile drummer Terry Williams sits in with his unflappable beat, and bassist Martin Ace rounds out the group for the album).

“At this point it would just cost too much for us to do it,” says Nick, “and do it the way we would like to. I’d love to put the big sound on this album onstage. Putting a big old cathedral bell on tape is okay, but getting that fucker on a stage and banging it until it blasts the audience’s ears is really the thrill of music.”

“We’ve been itching lately to get out and play,” Andy explains, “but we have to find the right people. Which is not easy. Musicians aren’t the easiest people to hire.”

Considering the way the last Motors line-up blasted out buzzsaw rock, if they do get it back on stage it’ll be an ear blaster.

But any idea that the Motors may be dead as a band (rumors of their “break-up” circulated a year ago) is quickly dispelled by Garvey: “We’ve got a contract that calls for a lot more albums, so they’ll pretty surely be a Motors in one form or another for quite some time.”

And if their albums keep getting better, the Motors may have that band and new flat sooner than they expect.