CORDRAZINE's Sam Holloway
Australian Musician Issue 14 Winter 98 Interview by Rob Walker

The new Cordrazine album is unlike anything produced in Australia in a long, long time. Power guitar chords, Rickenbacker jangles and hip hop influences are nowhere to be found. With 'From Here To Wherever' you'll find the unique voice of singer songwriter Hamish Cowan and his romantic views and notions of the world bought to life with some epic, haunting melodies executed by real instruments and musicians. Cordrazine are aesthetically decades away from the media hungry, all consuming entertainment world of today. Their hopes for the newly released album are modest. As long as it stands on it's own merits with no comparisons, boundaries or walls, and as long as their long standing fans who supported their debut EP can get it, then that seems to be all that matters. Australian Musician recently spoke to the band and in particular keyboard player Sam Holloway, who had a major part to play in creating the sound and feel of the album.

On some albums the keyboard parts are fairly straight forward whereas the with the Cordrazine there seemed to be an opportunity to be really creative...

I find that with Cordrazine and the music we make together, there is a lot of room in there for a lot of things. I think the most simple way of describing it would be ..with a normal thing you've got lead guitar and rhythm guitar and then the vocal melodies and the guitar intertwined with it. Then there might be a keyboard player comping the whole thing but with Cordrazine I get to do the whole lot. Hamish plays very simple strummed chords and I find myself comping what he is doing and there's also a bit of improvisation in there as well.

Did you experiment with many different sounds with the songs or did hamish have an idea of how his songs should sound?

We never went into a song with an idea of how it would sound. We never have a pre-production meeting. We just start with a bit of an idea and go from there. Most of the experimental stuff on the album were the Mellotron parts. I liked working with the Mellotron and we had different types of Hammonds, the C3, Leslies , an upright B3.

You seem to prefer the older keyboards?

I'd rather a B3 or a Leslie than a midi control studio. I just prefer analogue equipment. Everything today seems to be trying to imitate them anyway. You go and buy a keyboard and it's trying to imitate a Rhodes or a B3 or Moog. I've got my old Roland SH380 which I have 'Midied' up, it's a real old analogue keyboard but I prefer it because it's the real deal. It's a lot more costly and heavier to carry around but I like the sound and I think they go well with electric guitars and basses.

I see on the credits that you also use some newer equipment.

I just got a Roland JV880 Sound Module and I've been looking at their expansion cards they have been making of 60's and 70's keyboards. I think they are great. I think some of the sampling technology that is going around is good. Sony do some great stuff too, the onboard programs are really good. I've also got an 880 keyboard which is a Rhodes, Roland bought the Rhodes name recently. I was using a Yamaha CP70, the 1980's Cold Chisel age piano in a semi acoustic case but we just had to replace it, it was too big so we got a Fataar Studio Logic 76 note weighted controller.

And what about amplification Amplification?

I use a KB100, my first piece of equipment I ever bought and my favourite. It just never dies.

There are a lot of strings and other instruments on the album, how will you go about replicating those on stage?

We could sequence the whole thing, replicating it exactly and we have experimented with things like that but it's just not the point. The point is to get across the melodies. Like the string section in 'Memorial Drive' basically I just give it really high and low draw bar settings and play the string arrangements. So all the melodies are all there and all the lines are there but the sound is not. But I think it kind of makes up for it. The same with the choir at the end of 'I Never Cared Before'. On stage Hamish is now singing the choir's solo vocal part. I just play a bit more piano and a bit more organ with the other hand. I just kind of fill it in. I find that organ, especially with the Leslie I can replicate and replace a lot of instruments, particularly because it's got such a wide sound band...a lot of high and lows and a lot in between. It kind of fills out like a 12 string guitar or string section. So all the poignant musical lines or rhythms will be there but not necessarily the same instrument as on the album.

Do you find much use for the computer and music software with your music?

I use cakewalk and Pro Logic which is good to test out string arrangements or harmonies and just to stuff around and have a bit of fun. You can get a rhythm section going, so you can practice. I had a little MC300 that was cool, like a little cash register. It had 4 tracks but I tend to be playing more games at the moment, I'm trying to get through Red Alert.

Do you think we'll ever return to the days where keyboard players like Rick Wakeman and Gary Numan were at the forefront?

You never know. I've got the best video of Yes Live In Philidelphia in 1979. In their set at the time Rick Wakeman did his own solo spot of about half an hour. He did stuff from his albums like Six Wives Of Henry VIII and Journey To the Centre Of The Earth just before the band's second set and it was just fantastic. It's amazing but I just don't think people want that anymore. I don't think that sort of thing will return until people want music. I think back in the 60', 70's and early 80's what was at the top of the pops was generally real music. Whereas today just about everything in the charts is more about style, especially the American top 10 which has nothing to do with music, it's all style. Marilyn Manson is the biggest crock of shit I've seen to be actually called music. It's a disgrace. It's providing a message to kids that they shouldn't want to hear.."I want to kill people, I want to kill myself". It's just crap. So I don't think anyone like Rick Wakeman can be successful until people get back into buying music not buying CDs because they like what the band's wearing or what they are saying. Look at the Spice Girls. The most interesting thing I heard about them was that when they go to a different country they learn a verse in another language. They don't know what they are saying, they just learn how to say the words. It's like computer software or a product. It's not about music but T Shirts and Polaroid cameras and Chupa Chups. But...here I am in a record company office doing an interview, I'm part of the game now. But there'll always be a Yanni!