Downloaded from YTS.MX
(upbeat music)
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
- Renaldo & The Loaf's music
is for people that have ears.
- When I discovered Renaldo & The Loaf
it was a real different thing for me.
It kind of broadened my opinion of what could exist
or what was possible.
- When I wanna tell somebody what's it like
listening to Renaldo & The Loaf...
It's like being a baby
and hearing things for the very first time as an adult.
- There's a lot of humor there.
I've always found that there's things that they do
that make me chuckle.
- They're just so clever.
- You know, if you're a Streisand fan,
you might not like Renaldo & The Loaf, but who knows?
I mean, I don't know.
It's different.
(music composed of high-pitched voices)
- I have no problem with "weird" as a description,
but a lot of times weird is a way of dismissing something.
- I think the word "eccentric" sort of describes it best.
I couldn't label it with a musical genre.
I don't think it sounds like anything else.
- There was no limit to anything
it's like whatever they want to do, they did it
and it was like, as far as the creativity,
it was just like everything and anything goes.
- I don't wanna put it in a category that,
oh, it's this kind of music.
To me it's music.
(upbeat music)
- The media is so inundated with so much at this point,
they want things to be pre-digested for them
and the way you pre-digest it is you put it in a category.
The more original something is,
the less you can compare it to.
The less you can compare it to,
the less people are gonna take the time
to figure out what it is
and think about it and process it on their own.
- Once you get to listening to them a lot,
it just becomes like, this is the catchiest song.
Why doesn't everybody love this?
♪ We're in a bar ♪
♪ Playing guitar ♪
♪ Playing to the clientele ♪
♪ If that's what you are ♪
- I knew nothing about them
and I didn't know who made the music
or anything about their personalities
and I'll be honest
I wondered how people could make such strange music.
- I thought, boy these guys are great
and they're weird and they're embracing it
and they know it and that's great.
- The people that would make that kind of music
and the people that would have to be genius enough, I guess,
to make that kind of music
are probably not people that are out socializing
and partying, they're in their rooms doing that stuff.
That's why that stuff is so great.
- It was really extraordinary what they were doing
and then just flabbergasted
that it was coming from Portsmouth.
- They were just this enigma in the city.
(upbeat music)
- No one in my family was musical.
I think when I was about 10 or 11 years old, one Christmas,
I was given the plastic guitar.
(upbeat music)
That kicked it off really.
(upbeat music)
- My dad used to work in Portsmouth Dockyard
and one day he came back with two LPs.
first Tyrannosaurus Rex, "My people were fair."
The other was "Lumpy Gravy" by the Mothers Of Invention.
I preferred the Tyrannosaurus Rex album.
- Tyrannosaurus Rex's music
was like nothing I'd heard before.
The singing was very unusual.
In fact, you needed a lyric sheet
to understand what Marc Bolan was singing.
He had a very distinctive style.
(upbeat music)
- I've known Dave since 1969 or 1970.
So that would be well, do the math.
Can you do the math for me? (Brian laughing)
- I've known Brian for almost 50 years now.
We met at school in the sixth form in the art room.
- I was doing a drawing based on a Tyrannosaurus Rex song
and I think Dave was doing a drawing
based on a Tyrannosaurus Rex album cover or something
and so obviously we spotted this and got chatting.
- [David] Almost immediately
we started playing things together.
- [Brian] We asked our music teacher at school,
"Oh, could you give us some classes to play the guitar?"
- [David] We were both interested in folk music at the time.
- I bought a book of folk blues songs
and gave it to the music teacher.
Now he knew how to play all the chords
but he had absolutely no idea what the song sounded like.
So he was playing the blues
as though it was an old English folk song,
which didn't really help us much
and so we decided to,
just to sort of forget that,
we said we'd go off on our own path, which is what we did.
(early lo-fi recording)
- My mom had actually won in a competition,
one of the first cassette recorders
and she gave it to me and we'd set that up with the mic
and record our songs.
We always had the habit of recording,
pretty much everything we did.
So there are cassettes that exist going back to 1970,
going twang in an extremely naive way and singing.
(early lo-fi recording, unintelligible)
We got more dextrous at what we were doing.
- I suppose we've been playing together maybe a year
and the opportunity came to perform at a local youth club.
(experimental music)
We did three performances at this youth club,
which gradually got stranger.
- Each time we were getting more excited
about what we were doing and experimenting
the less the people liked it. (laughing)
- I think my parents were just kind of bemused really.
- My parents never really listened, never really heard it
apart from through the wall or the door
when I was recording.
- Other friends?
I don't think it was their kind of thing really.
- Oh, well, that's what you do.
Yes oh, you're our friend.
Yeah it's interesting.
Interesting is a really good word too actually
'cause it means nothing.
(ambient guitar music)
- Well, I mean,
there was a period when we didn't play an awful lot.
When Brian was studying architecture,
I was still studying zoology.
- In the intervening period,
we'd been listening to different musics.
I'd been listening to folk and world musics.
- Around that time I discovered Henry Cow.
That was a bit of a revelation for me
that rock music could encompass such a wide spectrum,
from completely free to completely structured.
- And when we got back together afterwards,
so we just got interested just making sounds.
- That's when things started
to kind of morph into a much stranger stuff.
♪ Here it is ♪
♪ Construction of dubious benevolence ♪
♪ Moving sloth of Lanton proportion ♪
♪ Just what you needed ♪
- I know it's organic, but I don't understand how they,
I know they used tape loops,
but I still don't really understand
how they got their sound.
♪ A different theater ♪
- I wouldn't say that I played any instrument well really.
- [Brian] Basically we just started preparing guitar
and playing guitars in different ways.
- I saw the guitar then as a device for making sound with
rather than as an instrument as such.
(prepared guitar music)
- We would grab whatever
and I don't know if I'd use the word abuse the instruments
but... think laterally with them.
(upbeat music)
- We liked the sound of synthesizer.
We couldn't afford one.
So we tried to make the sounds like synthesizers
using guitars, tape effects and so on, speeding things up,
slowing them down, that kind of thing,
running them backwards.
(experimental music)
- If you went in there,
there'd be all these various instruments,
but not state of the art instruments.
They had a couple of tape recorders I seem to remember.
Some guitars and some... combs
and some remember rulers that used to go "boing"?
things like that
and they'd record them and play them backwards
and all this sort of stuff.
(ambient experimental music)
- We developed our sort of sound vocabulary in that period,
just by improvising.
- We were always trying to push
what the equipment was supposed to do.
We'd think of, well, what if you did this?
It's not really designed to do that,
but if we took the output of this and put it into there
and then fed it back round, what would that do?
- I don't actually ever feel
that we ever deliberately wanted
to be weird or do weird.
What people called weird
is the stuff that actually gave us the excitement
to do what we do.
We just didn't want to do the boring stuff.
I think we would see ourselves more as Surrealists
and Dadaists, if you like, than anything
and so we weren't scared by these odd things
that we were coming up with.
We're very open to whatever happened.
(experimental music, "Duo Dance")
- Well all their music was produced out of Dave's bedroom.
- I used to live just around the corner from Dave.
I'd come round with guitar and whatever
and trundling actually a tape recorder.
Dave was getting a lot more into the idea
of making tape loops.
- Just record some sounds onto length of tape.
- Certainly for making the loops,
you would have to be extremely dextrous, like a surgeon,
cutting tape up with a scalpel.
- Finding where the sound started,
cut them out and then splice them all together.
(looped piano music)
- Literally, we wouldn't say anything.
We just sit down with instruments
and just start playing along to it, improvising.
(looped music with instrumental improvisations)
- We worked Saturday afternoon have a break for tea
and then we work on into the evening till maybe nine o'clock
at the latest, then we'd adjourn to the pub.
- It's like you were playing in a football team,
you're sort of like, oh yeah,
well we do training on a Tuesday
and you're gonna play on Saturday.
It became a habit and we just kept to it.
(upbeat music)
Eventually there was one particular Thursday afternoon
where these improvisations almost created a structure
a bit like a song.
(experimental music)
- So we recorded it and then we did some overdubs.
- We then sent a tape off to an independent record label
called Raw Records in Cambridge
and we got a very positive response.
(upbeat music)
- That record deal fell through
but someone who had found the music interesting enough
to consider that it was worth putting out as a record.
(looped triangle music)
- It wasn't like, "Oh, hey, we wanna make this our career."
It was just like, "Oh, well we've got this record."
It would be pretty neat if we could get it released somehow
and so we went to meet a couple of A&R people.
We went to Virgin and Rough Trade.
"Well, you know,
"you've got some really interesting ideas and sounds
"going on here."
- "But you need to kind of condense them more.
"You need to make each piece more interesting."
- [Brian] "Collide them together
"and go and buy yourself a decent tape recorder."
- This is when the idea of producing
a do-it-yourself cassette came about.
- And so we went and got the four track tape recorder
and then started recording the songs
which became "Struvé & Sneff"
and decided to call ourselves Renaldo & The Loaf.
(music fading in)
(dice rolling)
- We used to go out on a Friday night
for what we called Dice Nights,
which were based on a book called
"The Dice Man" in which the main character
made all his decisions on the roll of the dice.
We would decide where we went,
what we wore and what we would do
and we got wherever we were going.
We'd do it all on the roll of the dice.
- Each of the people that went on the dice evenings
had to have a dice name.
- [David] Someone had christened Brian "Renaldo."
- Neither of us actually know why I got that name at all.
- And I'd been christened Ted The Loaf.
- Ted, because at the time he had a big bushy beard,
which made him look a little bit like a Teddy bear
apparently.
- The Loaf bit is Cockney rhyming slang,
the Cockney rhyming slang, loaf of bread, head.
So someone who can use their loaf
is considered to be intelligent, brainy, whatever.
While we were kicking around ideas for a name
one of us said why not Renaldo & The Loaf?
And we decided, yeah, well, why not?
And that kind of stuck.
(guitar music)
- We were under no illusions about what we were doing.
I mean, we weren't trying to be a commercial
or successful band or anything.
- The idea of making a career out of music
never entered our heads at the time.
- And we were two like-minded people
who were almost indulging ourselves
in this creation as a form of art if you like.
(upbeat music)
It's quite strange
we did the vast majority of our most creative work
in a complete bubble.
We were in a bubble of just us and very few select friends,
the dice friends, of course,
as more people got to hear this stuff, we realized that,
oh, well actually,
you know what we have been making
and are making now does have some appeal
outside of our own bubble.
(upbeat music)
- Ralph Records was the coolest label ever period.
- Ralph originally was started by The Residents.
- It was an in-house record label
that The Residents set up
in order to put out their own records
'cause no one else wanted to.
- The Residents had started making these records
and they didn't really have a concept of selling.
They're not really the business people.
They just want to do the art
and then like move to the next project.
(upbeat music)
- I first heard of The Residents.
I think probably Dave introduced me to them.
- From what we could tell
from the albums we were listening to,
they weren't super competent musicians,
but they didn't let that stand in their way
of producing interesting music.
(upbeat music)
- The Residents couldn't play,
they couldn't play worth a shit
but they always felt like they could layer things
on top of each other, one track after another,
after another and create something that then had value
and interest.
- Pretty much music was dominated by people who could play
and that makes logical sense
but it also leaves an area of unexplored sound possibilities
for people who can't play.
- What The Residents did for us
was give us the confidence to know that in the world,
there was a band making proper albums
that were odd sounding, interesting sounding,
exciting to us
and that gave us the fuel, if you like,
to really move us forward.
- You know, The Residents were actually doing fairly well
in terms of finances, record sales at that point.
When "Eskimo", for instance, came out,
we drop shipped from the factory 10,000 records
like that
and then another 10,000 went fairly quickly.
We thought, okay, we will sign more "commercial" groups
and then ultimately that will then become
the financial backing
that allows The Residents to maintain their position
as The Residents.
- Now, Ralph was not just any record label,
certainly not like the big ones at all.
They're just like a bunch of really hugely creative people.
- I don't know, five, six people.-
- Who just happened to make records
and do the mail-order.
- Helping with the mail order,
doing whatever needed to be done there.
- Cleaning the cat box. (laughs)
- Everybody in the building was just so sharp
and so funny.
- It was kind of a playpen for adults.
- Ralph Records was a family.
Everybody in it was part of this family.
- We all did very much care for one another as humans
and I think that's what really made it work too.
(upbeat music)
- We made "Struvé & Sneff" the tape in September 1979.
It so happened that I was due to go
on a fly-drive holiday with some friends
to the West coast of America
at the end of September.
(upbeat music)
- He always said this, "Well, if I get chance,
"I want to go to 444 Grove street,"
which was where The Residents were based at the time.
- So I rang them up and they said, "Yeah, sure, come along."
Apparently I was allowed to get in
because I had a British accent
and I'd actually come all the way over to San Francisco,
et cetera
and I said, "This is our tape.
"We just done.
"I would like to give a copy to Ralph Records."
And the guy said, "Oh, well, yeah,
"I'll listen to a little bit now."
So he went off into a glass fronted booth
at the back of the space and sat there
and I think he must've probably listened
to, say, three tracks, something like that.
- Literally Ralph Records would receive
hundreds of demo cassettes.
You know they came in on a daily basis
and the reality was that there were too many of them
to ever listen to,
but for whatever reason, and at this point,
I really don't know what that reason was.
Somehow I was attracted to Renaldo & The Loaf's cassette.
- And he said, "Oh," he said, "this is excellent."
I know, thank you. (Brian laughs)
He said, "Have you got any more material?"
and I say, "Well oh I'll send you some more stuff, sure."
- It was called to my attention
by the A&R guy at Ralph, Hardy Fox
and he said, "Hey man, come listen to this."
And I did, and it hit me right away.
- I was very taken by it.
- He put it on for a minute and I'm like,
"that's very interesting."
- They were extremely original,
did not play by the rules, and did very interesting
and entertaining stuff.
(upbeat music)
- I think it was in June 1980,
that letter just arrived completely out of the blue
and said, look, you know,
we've really been enjoying your music.
It's not that commercial,
but we'd really like to put an album out by you
and that floated us completely.
(upbeat music)
- It was weird because we used to have these fantasies
about things that might happen.
One of the fantasies was taking the tape to Ralph Records
they'd liked it and we got signed to the label.
That's something we ever thought would happen.
- It was the label in the world
that perhaps we would ever dream of recording for.
- For it to actually happen was just a bit stunning really.
It was a huge stroke of luck.
(upbeat music)
- It must've been a great leap of faith
as making any decision
in a tiny little record company is,
but that just spoke to the artistry
and the people who Brian and Dave were.
- When they signed us
they were starting to sign other acts.
They were kind of expanding as a label then.
- Because we were starting
to sell The Residents successfully.
It only made sense that we could sell other people,
which was completely wrong, but that was the idea.
- They were maybe 10 or 12 different artists.
- You know including like Art Bears, Fred Frith,
Yello, Snakefinger, MX-80, Tuxedomoon,
Renaldo & The Loaf.
- The hope was that these people would sell in numbers
exceeding The Residents and consequently bring in enough
money to keep the label going and keep The Residents
doing their own eccentric weird stuff.
There was greater hope
or expectation towards other groups
like MX-80 or Tuxedomoon or Snakefinger
who were, you know, ostensibly more commercial.
- They did however have commercial appeal
with respect to the Ralph Record's target audience.
Which was one of very esoteric taste.
- We sat with Jay Clem when we were actually on the,
you know, signing the contracts and things like that.
and the question came up about, you know,
"are you gonna want us
"to make certain kinds of music for you?"
And he said, "well, no, you do what you feel."
- The expectation of our artists were to keep doing the same
creative things that caught them to our attention
in the first place.
- Do what you do
and we'll try to exploit it the best we can.
- We had a complete free hand
to record whatever we wanted,
as long as it wasn't 40 minutes of dog farts.
- 40 minutes of what?
- Did I say something about dog farts?
(Sheenah laughing)
- The phrase he used was like,
"as long as it wasn't 40 minutes of dog farts on a record
"we'll be quite happy."
- Okay well.
- Okay, that would exactly be a parameter
that Jay Clem would set.
- If Brian and Dave would have submitted
40 minutes of dog farts.
I assume it would have been done in a creative
and humorous manner
and therefore would have been acceptable.
(Tom laughs)
- So there was no pressure. (Brian laughing)
(upbeat music)
The stuff that obviously we'd been sending them
became with the tracks for "Larvae"
and the thing was put together over the next few months.
(upbeat music)
- I think when "Songs For Swinging Larvae" came out
we were very excited about it.
The fact that there was a proper release
as opposed to a home grown, do it yourself cassette.
- What Ralph did they sent us updates of what was going on.
Like they caught a lot of college play lists
where they highlighted,
Oh, "Larvae" was on the playlist here
and we'd get really excited.
Like, "Ooh, wow."
(upbeat music)
- The reviews were quiet mixed.
Well, some of them were bad.
(upbeat music)
I'll say on the whole, the music press, it was kind of,
they didn't go overboard about it
but on the other hand,
they weren't totally disparaging either.
- I think the UK press couldn't get over
that we weren't Residents' imitators.
- You know if you take most of pop music,
you can put it in a lump like this, you know?
And then you have The Residents over here
and you have Renaldo & The Loaf over here.
They're both kind of equidistant from, you know,
the mass of pop music as a whole.
♪ Boom boom crash crash ♪
- I first heard Renaldo & The Loaf
'cause I was looking through a record bin
and there was just a section of Ralph Records.
- I decided to check out all the other groups
on Ralph records
'cause The Residents were great
and I wanted to find out some more interesting music.
- The sleeves of their records
had the other bands on the label.
So I just figured if they're on Ralph, I'll check it out.
- You discovered music in such, you know,
prehistoric ways back then.
Sometimes somebody handing you something.
- You know, back then you didn't have the internet.
You weren't connected to things
and I was in a small town in central New York.
- Me and my brother
would like religiously watch a show called "Night Flight".
It was like a video musical program,
like a half-hour long or whatever.
- It was not a mainstream show.
There was no announcer.
- There was no genre.
It was like, anything goes.
- And you didn't know what they'd be playing.
So there is that excitement involved.
You never knew what was gonna be on there
when you turned it on.
- So this particular night we tuned in
and they put in the Renaldo & The Loaf
"Songs For Swinging Larvae" video
and we were just like, just completely blown away.
It was like nothing we've ever heard or seen before.
It was so outrageous.
- I was working at Ralph records, pumping out rock videos,
which we didn't know where they were rock videos
at the time
'cause we didn't know what rock videos were.
They were just short music films.
- That's the kind of record company it was.
Have to have an in-house filmmaker.
- I suppose it sort of shocked us in a way.
It was a sort of shock tempered by the fact
that it was also pretty cool.
The whole film was brilliantly put together
and visually it was great.
- Just stolen my favorite videos for anyone.
- It's just brilliant.
- Modestly speaking,
I think it's the best music video ever made, but you know,
I'm prejudiced.
- All that red, red, red, red, red.
- It's just red liquid.
It's not blood. (laughing)
It's just red liquid.
- When I'm washing dishes in the sink.
I always think of the woman pouring the colored liquid
back and forth into the cups
that occurs to me almost every single time
for I don't know how many years.
♪ Oooh, look at the Earth! ♪
- So we have this little kid abducted
brought away and stuff
and then all these images of fish heads being blended up
and things like that and you know,
it's just Graeme's vision.
Graeme sort of like,
he looks a little outside the box.
♪ Lucky for you, lucky for you ♪
- We had not a great deal to do with it really.
- We had a few ideas,
like things like having somethings running backwards
but apart from that was Graeme Whifler.
- First of all, I had the Ken Parnell story.
That was the backbone to the whole thing.
- The kidnap thing,
which I think we would have ever thought about.
- Well, it was based on a true story yeah.
- There was this crime splattered across the front page
of the Chronicle
and it was about this guy named Ken Parnell
who would kidnap a little boy and taking them home.
That was my story.
I walked into the business affairs office
at Ralph Records
I slapped a newspaper down and go,
this is the video
and then the rest of it is just imagery.
It's kind of like dream imagery that I just made up
as I went along.
This is the cat from the Renaldo & The Loaf video.
It was originally abandoned fur coat
in my neighbor's backyard
and I saw the coat back there and I thought,
"oh, I can make a cat with that."
I got another one for you though.
It's just some thrift store find,
but I go all around the world and people come up to me
and they tell me I gave them nightmares as a kid.
- When I first saw that video,
I wanna say I was about 14 and I was very disturbed.
- Watching those Ralph videos
had a real psychological impact
on a lot of young minds.
- You know, it was very shocking for people,
but a lot of people loved it
and once again,
another thing ahead of itself.
- We would show them at nightclubs,
we'd show them on college campuses,
we would show them anywhere we could.
I mean, we were desperate, we'd show them at film festivals.
- It got shown at a couple of festivals before
people thought, "oh, hold on.
"This is really not the kind thing you can show
"on mainstream telly or anything."
And then it sort of became a cult thing.
- And then when MTV came along, we were one of the,
I know a small stupid record label,
but we had a can of films sitting there
and it was this like,
well maybe some of this stuff
could get put on this new TV thing.
I don't know how many times it was shown,
but I know I seen it at least once on MTV.
- A lot of people have seen it.
- That video was one of the things that really,
really drove home the idea that, yeah,
this band was definitely like a Ralph Band.
(upbeat music)
- After I did Renaldo,
I think that was the last one I did for Ralph Records,
their economic situation was rapidly changing
and they just didn't have the money for videos.
(upbeat music)
- At that time that was kind of a low point
for Ralph records.
The Residents did their "Mole Show" tour,
which was a complete and total disaster.
♪ Lights out, Ted's asleep ♪
♪ Indulging in R.E.M. ♪
- It was a very hard time financially.
I mean, it came very close to just disappearing
at that point.
- Not only did it mean that we were going to have
to completely restructure.
- There was a big change in turn over.
- It was very hard to get paid by people
and start collecting money.
- But it also meant we had to move from 444 Grove street,
which was just awful.
- You know, Residents were self-recording, self-produced
for all practical purposes.
My partner Hardy was the engineer and kind of co-producer
with The Residents, but for anybody else,
we would have to hire our studio
for them to go into and make an album.
Whatever the cost of that was,
it would start out that much in the hole
for Renaldo & The Loaf were not in the same category.
They were more like The Residents.
You know, they were self-produced.
I was just trying to figure out
how to do the least inexpensive cover I could.
So it was basically a black and white drawing that I did
and then a two color print job, because that was cheap.
(upbeat music)
- "Arabic Yodeling" was a difficult birth.
- What people would refer to as the difficult second album.
- Well usually it's the difficult second album,
because that will it sell as many as the first one
and will the band succeed in the future?
It wasn't like that.
It was the difficult creative aspect
of the second album for us.
- Although it was kind of the third release we'd done
because there's "Struvé & Sneff,"
the first two were recorded without
we didn't know that they were gonna be made public.
- For the first time
we had the knowledge that whatever we were coming out with
would likely be released
and that was something we'd never had
to deal with before ever.
- So I think we became a bit more self critical I guess,
about everything we did.
Was it good enough?
- We were seeking perfection to supersede what "Larvae" did
and basically we just wouldn't be satisfied with anything.
- The whole process was becoming much more protracted.
- It did change our working relationship
in that we felt that we had to separate
and explore musical ideas individually
and then bring them together and surprise each other.
(upbeat music)
Late February in 1981,
Dave and I went to San Francisco to visit.
- They were here in San Francisco
for a good two to three weeks.
- And during that time,
The Residents expressed an interest
in seeing what would happen
if they and Renaldo & The Loaf
actually were in the studio at the same time.
- Somebody,
once again, I don't know who at this point
made that suggestion,
you know, threw it out into the ozone
to see if it would float or fly or whatever
and it just kind of took on its own life.
- It was just another one of those things
that was just a natural progression.
- I think that The Residents really, well,
I know they loved Brian and David's music, you know,
it was just like, I mean, we played it all the time,
you know, I mean, there would be Led Zeppelin playing too,
but we would hear Renaldo & The Loaf,
we would play that tape to death.
- Wow, okay. (David laughs lightly)
But anyway,
we eventually devised this idea of doing an album
in four days.
Day one being just like this huge jam session,
day two, doing overdubs, you know,
day three, some vocals,
then all that sort of thing.
Of course, it was completely unfeasible.
We did do the long jam session
and we did do quality control sifting of that jam session
and then that was it.
It was just shelved and forgotten.
♪ What, you say? ♪
- In '83, Dave and I went to see "The Mole" show
and afterwards we met backstage with The Residents
and we were chatting and they floated the idea of just,
hey, do you think we could actually
perhaps finish that project?
I said to them, "okay."
When they wanted to do it, Dave wasn't available
to be able to do that
and so I went to San Francisco,
Dave sent a box full of really cool loop tapes.
The jam session had been transferred to a 16 track
and we used those as templates for potential songs
and so the songs happened in the studio.
For me, is it a dream?
I don't know.
I can remember significant parts of it
and there is photographic evidence of that time
of the recording,
but it was like to spend time in the studio
with The Residents for like three weeks,
it was just amazing.
- But they did learn things from The Residents too
and I think The Residents learned things from them.
- I think the response was quite positive.
- Certainly for us it had the impact of the largest royalty
we ever got.
- And that gave us enough money to be able to afford,
to buy an eight-track tape recorder
and a proper mixing desk.
- Some outboard equipment, one of the first digital reverbs.
- What we didn't realize was how good a job
The Residents and us were doing
at creating an intriguing image
and a lot of times I think it was people
that were so drawn into the world of The Residents
by that image that was responsible for the sales.
- The anonymity, the way they present themselves in public.
That kind of generates more interest
than two part-time British guys.
(upbeat music)
- I trained as an architect,
went into practice straight from college
and stayed in self-employed in practice
in a partnership for many years,
something like 40 years.
- For most of my working life,
I worked in the National Health Service
as a biomedical scientist in pathology.
We get all the tissue specimens from operations,
postmortems, biopsies, from clinics and so on
and we make the slides that the consultant pathologist
then uses to make their diagnosis.
- In that latter period.
Both our personal lives were changing.
- I think probably Brian and I viewed our day jobs
in slightly different ways.
I mean, Brian being... his career as an architect.
I think he saw it very much as a career.
I was certainly committed to the job.
I felt that it was a worthy thing to do
but it was also something that when I went home
at the end of the day, I could forget about it.
I always saw working as a means to an end really.
It was a means that provided money for living
and I also had the free time to pursue the music.
- There were stresses, post-"Arabic Yodelling."
We did a compilation album, "Olleh, Olleh Rotcod",
which was I think instigated from the
"Title in Limbo" recognition, if you like.
We got taken a bit more seriously.
Since we were very much a hands-on people with our projects,
we didn't just say,
"Oh, here's the music you go off and you just do the cover
"and you just do whatever."
We just didn't think like that
and so we spent time working on the cover
with some artistic friends and that
and it just took time
but when you're doing that, you're not doing music
and so there was a gap.
(upbeat music)
It's a certain amount of energy that you have
and when you're trying to juggle that with whatever it is
you're doing for your job
and you haven't always got the energy
to feel perky on a Saturday and hey, let's do this.
- The fact that we were recording on the eight-track
there was a lot more tracks to fill up.
- And about the time we'd actually got the audio done,
which was probably '86, then it came to the cover
and a lot of time was spent on the cover.
You know, while all this was going on
and "Elbow" wasn't finished,
we weren't really thinking or doing any other music
and I know it exhausted us.
The whole thing just exhausted us
and that is the point, I think, where we thought,
(sighing)
this is like hard work isn't it?
- We just ran out of steam, I think.
- It's not like something I really recognized at the time,
but maybe it was happening a little earlier.
I don't know.
- It just it didn't seem like quite so much fun.
- Our friendship was very much born out
in the music of course
and that was what glued us together.
Although we were like friends
and Dave was the best man at my wedding
and things like that
but you know apart from meeting up and doing our music,
we didn't use to meet and do other things.
(upbeat music)
- You know I worked with a million bands through my life
and it's just, everything is chemistry, you know
and it's the chemistry of this and this that makes this.
- It's not uncommon for bands to break up,
keeping those egos and the personalities,
copacetic is not an easy thing to do.
- As I saw it,
they had a bond through their Crusty Bachelorness.
Whatever balance existed in their relationship,
and I felt like there was a very strong creative balance
that existed early on,
but that balance then got upset with Brian having in a way,
having things more important in his life
that he had to deal with.
- I raised two daughters,
continued the practice, working, plate spinning,
keeping things going.
- I mean, Brian will have his own take on it
but from my point of view,
it was focusing on other things.
A lot of which was discovering who I am,
getting married, moving to a whole new location.
It's just life happening really
that's... I mean, that's all,
any of it is, really, it's just life happening.
- We just decided to take these two different roads
and those roads were such that they were somewhat far apart
and then we lost sight of each other.
- Probably by the time we stopped playing
we'd been working together for about 17 years.
- I don't know if I was surprised
as much as I was disappointed.
- They were just silent.
You know I mean, you didn't really know why things happened
because there was no Internet
and there was no magazines that covered artists like them
that just happened to stop making music
and at the time you just accepted it.
(gentle melancholy music)
- I had heard some painful rumor
that David was not only disavowing Renaldo & The Loaf,
but sort of disavowing music.
So I thought, well, there goes that.
- Brian carried on making music.
I didn't, I mean there was other stuff going on in my life
and at that time,
which I'm not gonna go into.
Yeah I just didn't,
that urge to create just kind of gone really.
- Musically, I floundered when Dave wasn't around
because I've been so used
to us bouncing things off each other,
I needed a sounding board.
- He would tell me, you know, he's working in this and that
and he hasn't had a lot of time for music,
but he does have his studio upstairs.
- I did find that there was a possible release
in that by getting into using a computer
and so in the very early days, wait, 1990, 1991 or whatever,
I'd started creating stuff in MIDI on a computer.
Although the amount of work I did was minimal
compared to before
and I found it virtually impossible to make decisions
and so things hardly ever got completed.
(upbeat MIDI music)
♪ In the things I say in the things I do ♪
- He sort of fell off the scene.
There were no releases coming out
saying right to Renaldo at this address.
He was just a non-entity.
The only thing that existed was Ralph Records
and at that point,
Ralph Records didn't exist anymore.
- We really were no longer,
we were interested in putting our energy
and impetus behind The Residents, not behind other artists,
but Tom and Sheenah maintained that interest.
- Tom Timony started
sort of a splinter kind of a company.
- About 1988, we sorta created T.E.C. Tones.
- [Sheenah] We were kind of expanding in different musics.
- We tried to do things that were really not oriented
to, let's say, the Ralph clientele.
- I actually did correspondence with T.E.C. Tones
and then I didn't get any like letter back
or anything like that.
I just got a catalog.
- I heard had this band Renaldo I want their CDs.
Do you have them?
And of course we had them, we had the albums, we had CDs,
we had everything.
- It was like a nuclear bomb went over my head,
because it had all these things
that I didn't even know about.
Like I knew that Renaldo video,
but I didn't know their albums.
I didn't know anything about them.
- I wound up getting the gig to repackage
some of the Renaldo & The Loaf stuff for CD
and I asked if I could do a piece of art
for like a two page spread
of just trying to insinuate myself in there somewhere
into a record that already been established.
Because I remember the way I pitched,
you know, "it's just two more panels.
"It won't cost too much."
And I just dug through the lyrics,
word like camel or whatever and I was like,
oh, I can draw that.
So I tried to make everything in it,
part of the world that they were trying to create
I was trying to illustrate their world
by putting their elements in there.
(upbeat music)
- The albums had been reissued on CD
by T.E.C. Tones in the early '90s
but there was no sort of retail presence, shall we say
of Renaldo & The Loaf.
Our stuff was very difficult to get hold of.
- Nobody knew who they were.
I had friends and I said,
"Have you ever heard of Renaldo & The Loaf?"
And they said,
"You're making that up."
- In those days in the late '80s
it's very difficult to find out about bands
that weren't current, if you like,
or bands that weren't on TV
or played on the radio.
- I first heard about Renaldo & The Loaf
as this kind of like almost cultish thing
back in the mid-1990s.
- It was really hard to get their albums back then.
- Anything that was at the record store
was major label stuff.
- And it wasn't until some years later almost, you know,
sort of in the last 10, 15 years when I met Brian,
he was able to furnish me with all of the material
that you can get hold of for all those years ago.
- I was always never lost my pride in Renaldo & The Loaf.
I always had a love for that music and what we did.
- I reached out to Brian and I just said, "Hi, I'm a fan"
and I told him how much the music meant to me
and I couldn't believe he responded.
- If people were interested, I would talk to them about it.
If people, you know,
I would deal with people
who were trying to find something out
about Renaldo & The Loaf,
the website that was originally set up by, Ian McGrath.
- I realized that there was no Renaldo & The Loaf website
that I could find.
Then I said, well, why don't I make one?
(gentle upbeat music)
- When I first got a computer and first got internet access,
just out of interest,
I put "Renaldo & The Loaf" in the search engine
and I was surprised to find
that there were actually a couple of websites
devoted to Renaldo & The Loaf.
I was surprised
that there wasn't any interest at all really.
(gentle upbeat music)
Something I find is quite helpful
when you're looking back on a situation
or an experience in your life
to kind of write it down
and it's surprising things that come out,
things that you remember,
insights you get about the whole process
that can be instructive.
I was gonna say cathartic,
but cathartic's perhaps too dramatic a word for it.
- I had no means of actually contacting Dave at all.
I didn't know where he was.
I had no idea.
- Dave emailed me and he didn't say "I'm Dave Jansen."
He didn't say "I'm Ted the Loaf."
It was like, he was a Dave Jansen fan
who was wondering why this website was so,
which purported to be for Renaldo & The Loaf
seemed to be so Renaldo-centric.
- I just contacted the guy and said,
"Yeah, do you want a different take on this?"
- And then he emailed me again
and I was just like, this is really weird
and I just forwarded it to Brian and said,
"Do you know who this is?
"I have a feeling you know this person."
(gentle upbeat music)
- I find it very interesting
because it's a perspective of Renaldo & The Loaf music
that had never occurred to me.
- I think at the time when I wrote that
I was feeling somewhat negative towards the music.
I think that was just part of the process of writing
that was kind of,
yeah maybe cathartic is a good word after all,
but then it got Brian and I talking again.
I mean, that was the important outcome of it.
- I emailed Dave tentatively and got a very warm response,
which made me exceedingly happy
and then we just started an email correspondence.
- Coincidentally, around that time,
I'd arranged to come to Port
as I was staying with another friend
and I just said to Brian,
I said, "Well actually, I'm in Portsmouth.
"in a couple of weeks.
"Do you fancy meeting up?"
(dice roll, upbeat music)
- [Brian] We went met up for a drink
at The Tangier pub where we'd actually done
some of our lyric writing.
- Well, it would be 20 years, wouldn't it?
For '86, well it wasn't maybe '87 to 2006,
19, 20 years.
- I could admit I was a bit nervous,
but literally within seconds that disappeared.
- The extraordinary thing about our meeting up again.-
- It's just like the intervening period it never happened
and we were chatting away and reminiscing on this, that
and the other.
- It seemed like we picked up the conversation
as if we hadn't seen each other for a week
and basically everything
just sort of slotted back into place again.
(indistinct chattering)
- Our friendship was rekindled
I would say almost instantaneously.
- We were both older, wiser now, hopefully
than we were and we were both big enough
to pick things up without any difficulty.
- I had a whole wadge of CD-Rs to give Dave of music.
That's both the actual albums and outtakes.
- I mean, I had not listened to the stuff
for 20 years really.
- He said the memory I had,
it got so clouded perhaps by time
that he was pleasantly surprised that actually
our music was, he quite liked it.
He then started messing around using a computer
to play with them.
which I thought was wonderful.
- A friend of mine had given me
some music software programs.
He heard that I was kind of vaguely interested
in trying something like that out.
- Dave went nuts.
I mean, he was recording stuff all the time
and making "The Darkening Scale" projects.
- I'd started working on what became known
as "The Darkening Scale"
which was kind of my side project.
(upbeat music)
- We didn't actually make a conscious decision
to sort of like start recording together again
but I think it's fair to say
that some of the sort of like ideas and sketches
that Dave was coming up with like fired me up.
- And I was finding that sometimes
I was coming up with bits that I thought,
well, I like that,
but it's not really in the style of 'The Darkening Scale."
I started wondering whether it would,
maybe it could be a Renaldo & The Loaf piece.
- I've got to say I had to get my confidence back a bit
because I hadn't recorded with anyone for so long.
I had to sort of like get my confidence back
about "this is what I can do."
I would use my programs to send some computer audio
over to him.
It's almost like a replay of when we started again in '77,
just with abstract sound
and those abstract sounds became songs.
These experiments then became songs.
- When we met again, Brian was talking about
reissuing the albums on CD.
- I've always said that I wouldn't limit myself
and that whatever I like,
I was happy to release.
From a very early stage
I saw that they were somehow in contact again.
I said, well, how about reissuing the old material?
- And we said, "Why not?"
(upbeat music)
- When they announced
that they were gonna start a reissue campaign,
but with all this extra bonus stuff,
I was like through the roof.
I was so excited.
- So we've done the whole catalog by now.
(upbeat music)
- When Klanggalerie started reissuing
these wonderful double CDs,
I got a real insight into the making of the music,
the preparation for the music.
(upbeat music)
- Obviously there was a full unreleased album
and as they both agreed that it was worth releasing,
it just happened.
- Pretty much everything
that we would possibly want to release
has now been revealed.
(gentle upbeat music)
- I thought maybe once they did all the re-releases,
they would do a new album
and I was very hopeful for that.
- We'd recorded a few songs when Brian was visiting me
one time, he said, "well, actually,
"we've got about nearly 30 minutes worth of music.
"What do you say that we go for it and make another album?"
- We played some stuff to Walter at Klanggalerie.
- We have no idea whether anybody would like it or not.
I mean, we felt they were strong pieces.
- You know, if I tried to describe
how Renaldo & The Loaf album should sound
like for 35, 40 years on
this would have been it.
You know what I mean, it's so Renaldo.
Of course the technology is different and you can hear it.
(upbeat music)
In some way it's also like they picked up
where they just stopped.
- Eventually compiled it up and "Gurdy Hurding" happened
which was a complete surprise to everybody.
It was a surprise to us
about six months before it actually it was released
because we hadn't actually brought it together before.
- When we made "The Elbow is Taboo"
we were already exploring the idea of a medieval music.
Something that fascinated both of us,
but we didn't have the resources to do it.
Sampling was still in its infancy.-
- And we couldn't learn to play crumb horns that quickly.
(both laughing)
- I was kind of nervous
because I didn't know whether
they had to recapture what they had,
but when "Gurdy Hurding" came out,
I just felt not only was it as good as everything else,
it was actually a step forward.
- The new stuff is awesome.
I absolutely love it.
- My first reaction was, "Ah, they're back!"
- I was absolutely over the moon.
I thought it was brilliant.
- I'm very happy because I'm a fan.
- It sounds like Renaldo & The Loaf.
It sounds exactly, it's the natural progression.
- It's beautiful to me to see that the inspiration
is seems to be the same
and the direction seems to be the same.
It's them sitting down again, being pure and going,
what do you want to do?
Let's do what we want.
And they sit down and they do what they want
and they go forward, you know, that's inspiration.
- My wife didn't like the music at all,
but she was always very supportive of everything I did
and I would have loved her to have seen "Gurdy Hurding"
come to fruition because I think the music on that,
there's some there that she might have actually liked.
- Renaldo & The Loaf, as I see it,
a modal way of playing.
There aren't many chords in their music.
So actually to get something that looks like
Medieval woodcut or manuscript illumination,
like that kind of work on the album design
worked really well,
but I didn't see it coming at all.
- I've always hung out on Residents Chat
and Brian is a Residents collector
and he'd come on every once in a while
and I was always too scared to talk to him.
- That one's my favorite.
They're just two regular guys in silly hats.
- One day I got an email through my contact form
on my website from Renaldo
and I was like, "Holy crap."
- Poxodd's interpretation of the world of "Gurdy Hurding"
if you like, visually, is spot on.
- I was really anxious to see who got the cover
because I really wanted the cover.
So when I heard it was her, I was really happy and relieved
that it was sort of the guy that I really was.
- So I came up with a sketch
where they had these basket hats with branches,
for antlers kinda with bells on them
and I made that sketch and I got to thinking about it
and I was like, I think I can make those hats
and I was thinking maybe they should have some eyewear
and I believe it was David
who suggested bread slices for glasses
and it kind of went from there.
- After I did the album cover,
I was so excited to work with them.
I decided I would make some merchandise
and they were all up for that.
So I made some posters and art cards and stickers.
It was just for no reason because I wanted it.
I just wanted some art so I made it.
- It's amazing working with them.
They have a lot of ideas
and I try to incorporate all of their ideas
as much as I can.
It's usually kind of a pretty equal three way collaboration.
- Well, we just find her work so exciting.
(Brian laughs lightly)
- Dave and Brian said, "We wanna do a video single,
"if you like, we wanna promote it on YouTube."
Nobody knew about the album.
It was super secret.
I'd seen the hats.
I think I haven't seen drawings or photographs of the hats,
which Poxxod had taken,
which tied in with folk
and just generally Medieval weirdness really
and in fact when I show people
who don't know Renaldo & The Loaf's music
and I showed them the video and they go,
they asked me what am I looking at?
And I have to explain to them what an 'obby 'oss is
and it's apostrophe O-B-B-Y apostrophe O-S-S.
It's a Cornish way or writing of "hobby horse,"
which is somebody who's dressed up like a horse,
which is a medieval kind of pantomime thing.
Brian is the 'obby 'oss to start off with,
but at the end they change round
and Dave becomes the 'obby 'oss.
It's really how I see them as a duo.
It's a biography really
and a Medieval send up. (laughs lightly)
- They've refused to play live for a very long time.
Every year, we got an invitation from a guy
who runs a festival in Gateshead.
Every year he wrote and asked us whether we'd perform
and we always said, "No."
- It's not something we do.
That's right.
But it was something which I wanted to do
at least once in my lifetime
to stand on a stage as Renaldo & The Loaf
and do our songs.
♪ I bet you didn't know today ♪
- I think Walter had kind of mentioned the idea
of doing it.
- Of course, I tried to come up with arguments
why it would be a nice idea to do it.
- I think the fact it was for Walter
because Walter is a good friend
and he's been extremely supportive.
- I see it as a very big honor and a very lovely gesture.
♪ I bet you didn't know today ♪
♪ Was such a long time coming ♪
- From my point of view is
when I told friends about it,
they said, "You've got to do it."
(David laughs lightly)
And so, yeah it happened.
♪ I bet you didn't know today ♪
- Well, we went to Vienna last year
and I didn't know what to expect.
- When they went on stage.
It was-
- That they hated it.
- Yeah, I've never been booed before.
(David laughing)
(audience applauding wildly)
It was amazing. - Very supportive.
It's fair to say that Brian
is more of a performer than I am.
- When they performed in Vienna last year,
what an amazing venue and feat that was.
- I can only compare it
when people paid all that money
to go and see Led Zeppelin reform in London
and people literally came from around the world.
Well for Renaldo & The Loaf
people literally came from around the world.
- [Walter] The crowd went absolutely crazy.
The crowd really loved them.
(audience applauding)
- The audience were just, like, so receptive,
enthusiastic, that sort of spurs you on doesn't it?
(audience applauding)
Thank you so much for coming.
- People weren't just singing along to lyrics
they were, (sings "A Medical Man")
They were actually doing the music in the audience
and you can't hear that so much on the recording,
but in the audience, that's what people were doing.
They were singing emoting all of the little pieces
of the music.
It's like a real intimate knowledge.
Fantastic.
- I was at a hotel room on tour or someplace
and somebody said, "Oh, you should check this thing out
on YouTube"
and I laid there in bed
and watched Renaldo & The Loaf live in Austria.
So this is like, oh, this is great.
- This wasn't like a plush, velvet seated,
Vienna piano recital.
It was wild and that made it even more extraordinary
because I know for a fact
where they'd get offered to play in London
and they are very nice places
that added to the extraordinary nature
of what that show was.
(audience applauding)
(upbeat music)
- The reissue of all the old material,
I think it's given people an opportunity to reappraise
Renaldo & The Loaf.
(upbeat music)
The distance between now and then
has given people a different perspective on it.
- Well, listen to what people are listening to now.
They're listening to stuff
they would never have dream they would have liked.
Different electronic treatments and things like this
and subject matter.
- You can feel that Renaldo & The Loaf
with things that they were doing like 40 years ago,
that young kids are thinking that they're finding out,
but it's been, everything's been done,
it's just like Renaldo & The Loaf are Godfathers.
- The recognition that "Larvae" has got as an album,
in more recent years,
I think it's got more critical acclaim, if you like,
for what it did.
I think it was voted the,
was it the 13th or 14th Weirdest Album in the world?-
- 14th Weirdest Album of all time.
- Of all time in Mojo. Yay.
- They've become,
I hate to use "cult band," but you know what I mean,
an interesting "Internet band."
Their popularity has grown in a certain way
amongst the cognoscenti.
- Well it's rare thing for that kind of band
to exist anyway,
let alone be the kind of band that breaks up
and gets back together or whatever.
That's a typical band thing,
but they're not a typical band
and there'll never be another one like them
and you couldn't put a band like that together.
A band like that has to come together organically.
- They've been really solid, apart from a break.
You know, they've come back together
and they're still producing, eight albums is it now,
nine album?
Something like that, it's crazy.
- Well, I mean, the way things work.
What is time?
It's just a brief hiatus.
I mean, if you think of it in a bigger grander scale.
the fact that it was 20 years or something,
'cause the last time I spoke to you,
it was about 40 years ago.
- I always felt that things happen the way they happen.
They couldn't have happened any other way
than the way they happened.
The idea that something could have happened differently
is just that, just an idea.
- The two guys that came together in 2006, again,
were in many respects, just the same, but in other respects,
very different people.
We'd grown up basically.
- That 20 years in some way was necessary
for what happened next.
(upbeat music)
- Our friendship was because of who we were,
not what we were. And that's why it's,
to my mind so much richer now,
than I even was before.
- I really enjoy it when Brian comes just for a visit,
and we just go out,
we might go somewhere for a day and explore a town
or whatever.
Sometimes I say, oh, in a way,
it's great that we're not doing music on this visit,
we're just having a good time together.
- Yeah I mean, originally it was like,
music was the fuel for the friendship,
but now friendship is the fuel for the music.
- That's a good point. I like that.
- The fact that they were able to overcome a 20 year gap
in their creative relationship
well, that just sort of endears them to me that much more
and it's kind of like, "Yeah, go for it
"Renaldo & The Loaf."
- To come back after that many years
is a testament to a friendship I think,
I think that's awesome.
- If someone had never heard their music before
I would say don't be afraid.
Just go with it.
Just start listening to it.
Don't be put off,
just go with it.
- Expect something, a very unique journey,
a very unique audio experience.
- Put your prejudices aside about music,
listen to it with open ears
and try and see the originality in it
- The great thing is,
I wouldn't say start here or start there.
I'd say dive in and take your chance
because whichever album you chose to me that most fans,
they would be different.
So it's like, you know why?
I can't say start.
I know where I would start because that's where I started
but take your chance.
Like shake a dice, take your chance.
- In the 20th century,
they were not that popular, in the 21st century,
they might not be popular, but in the 22nd, 23rd century,
I think they'll be giants.
- So we tend to just wait and see don't we?
- Well, now that we're both dog owners,
the possibility of the 40 minutes a dog farts album
is possible. - It's certainly there.
- It almost sounds like something I would have said.
- Definitely. (Sheenah laughing)
(backwards recording)
(upbeat music)
(Brian speaking backwards gibberish)
(Brian laughing)
(Dave speaking backwards gibberish)
(Dave laughing)
(all laughing)