The first interview I ever did with one of the big three English music weeklies (Sounds) was at a pub in Islington, London, in August, 1989 with one Roy Wilkinson. It was an eventful little trip. I was vacationing in London with my girlfriend, but with Galaxie 500’s Today and On Fire records just coming out, and the band signing to Rough Trade, a meeting was set up with Roy. Not having done many interviews, I was somewhat resistant to his questions; I think I found it slightly embarrassing that the English music papers would ask serious questions of young kids just starting out in bands, as if we knew anything about the world.

“Though he doesn’t refuse to explain what he’s doing,” Roy wrote, “there’s always the hint that he rather do it than talk about it.”

Years later Roy Wilkinson loans his copy of Today to his young brothers, Neil and Yan Wilkinson. They form a band, British Sea Power, they sign to Rough Trade, they travel the world, I meet them at Bowery Ballroom in the late ‘90s, where they perform their cover of “Tugboat”. In 2021 they drop the “British” (a word laden with connotations) and are henceforth known simply as Sea Power.

We keep in touch over the years, and in 2024 Roy writes a big piece on Galaxie 500 for Mojo magazine. A few months later he suggests we do something special for the Krankenhaus festival that his Sea Power brothers run at Muncaster Castle in Cumbria, the Lake District – how about I come to the festival, play one set with Britta, and another with Sea Power backing me on Galaxie 500 songs? This is an easy yes.

August arrives, we fly to London, spend four days with friends in Richmond, we walk along the Thames, we visit the Tate Britain and see the Turners (they have a lot of them). We rent a Nissan Qashqai and drive to the town of Hebden Bridge, about an hour north of Manchester. We play warm-up shows at the historic Hebden Bridge Trades Club, and visit Sylvia Plath’s grave, located in the cemetery just above the town.

We are joined in Hebden Bridge by Martin Aston, an old friend and English music writer who had also done an early interview with me, conducted over rice and beans at a Cuban diner near Kramer’s studio on West Broadway. I can’t remember if it was even published, but I do remember squirming as he probed me about the meanings of my lyrics. Again I resisted talking about the lyrics. I figured that there wasn’t much to say, that to try and explain them only cheapened them; lyrics are meant to be heard as sung, with an assist from a major-minor chord progression, not dissected on the page. But of course he was paid to do exactly that. And in the interim I’ve grown more willing to examine the lyrics and even be proud of a few.

Martin will travel with us for the next few days; he’s a tall man but we squeeze our bags and guitars into the Qashqai and away we go, three hours north to Muncaster Castle, Ravenglass. Martin and I reminisce about that uncomfortable interview all those years ago. I mention that the most popular Galaxie 500 song on Spotify is “Strange” and there has been some speculation from my former bandmate Damon that this success was driven by the Spotify algorithm: “Strange” was not a single back in the day and no video was made, so why would it get to the top of the our chart now?  I would counter that it should have been a single, and its popularity today is the proof. The song found its audience.

“It’s the lyric” Martin offers —  I stood in line and ate my twinkie — “that’s what people responded to.”

Britta and I are assigned a room in the coachman’s quarters at Muncaster Castle, which stands overlooking the river Esk, near the town of Ravenglass. The festival itself a short walk away, in a large barn. It’s a small festival, just two stages, and the backstage area is yet another barn. The odor of sheep manure is strong back there.

Friday night I do my Galaxie 500 set with Sea Power, and I let them dictate the arrangements. They are a big band: two guitars (three with me), bass, keyboards, trumpet, violin, drums — and the songs sound big too. It is a thrilling 45 minutes on stage; the emotions surge through me when we close with an extended jam on “Tugboat.”

On Sunday afternoon Britta and I perform our duo set. I feel a bit naked on stage with just the two of us, but it goes well. And then we’re in for a treat, the highlight of the festival for me — a shorty comedy set by Stewart Lee, my favorite comedian in the world. Calling him a comedian doesn’t really do justice to what he does. Yes there are jokes, but so much more, there is therapy and politics and surrealistic leaps in time.

Maybe part of the reason I like Stewart Lee so much is that he is a sometime rock critic himself, and wrote some beautiful liner notes for the Domino re-release of Today in 2009 where he went so far as to compare my early guitar playing — “the gap between his hopes and his abilities” — to John Coltrane. I know this is hyperbole; Coltrane was a genius, I am a guitarist who occasionally plays something good, even if by accident. But it is super fun chatting with Stewart backstage; not only had he seen several Galaxie 500 shows in London at the end of the eighties, he had also seen Britta’s London-based band: the Belltower.

We stay up late watching Sea Power and Throwing Muses, and that's it for the festival. Britta and I continue on to intimate gigs in Durham and North Shields, we have fish and chips with Andy Aldridge (and Hazel) in Whitley Bay, sitting on a beachside bench on the North Sea. And in the morning we board a plane, homeward bound. I pull out the latest London Review of Books and read an essay by Adam Phillips: On Resistance.

“In the psychoanalytic story,” he writes, “all resistance is originally or eventually resistance to speaking, resistance to language. And this of course is testament to the power of language, and to the power of resistance. . . A poet’s words and and rhythms are not his utterance so much as his resistance.”

And this: today (Bandcamp Friday) we are finally releasing the single-disc edition of 13 Most Beautiful: Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests at streaming services. This sequence of the album follows the live show we performed, without the extra remixes, and it flows better this way. We are not sure if it’s the algorithm, but one song from this album, “Herringbone Tweed,” has recently become our most streamed song on Apple Music.

x Dean

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