Moonshake


Moonshake were a British-based experimental rock band, existing between 1991 and 1997. The only consistent member was singer, sampler player and occasional guitarist David Callahan, who initially co-led the project with Margaret Fiedler. Fiedler and bass player John Frenett left Moonshake in 1993 to form the more commercially successful Laika.
The band was notable for its extensive use of textures and sampler technology in a rock context. In his 1996 article on Krautrock and its influences, Simon Reynolds described Moonshake as being among the "post-rock groove collectives".

History

Formation (1991)

David Callahan had been in indie rock band The Wolfhounds, who were active for much of the second half of the 1980s. Often associated with the C86 indie scene of the time, the band released several acclaimed albums of abrasive guitar pop and a dozen or so singles on a variety of labels. Following the band's split in early 1990, Callaghan decided that "when The Wolfhounds finished, I just felt that I hadn't really done what I wanted to do... It was always a bit of a compromise with the other members of the band, most of whom were a bit more rock-oriented. I like rock music, but there were so many other things I wanted to do. In the back of my head I just thought, 'Well, I'm going to do everything now, I might never get the chance to do it again'... I went in to see Alan McGee because Creation had offered us a deal by then, and I said 'I'm not gonna do The Wolfhounds, I'm gonna do this new thing'."
Some of the ideas which would inform Moonshake had, however, begun in the last stages of The Wolfhounds. Callahan: "We'd used the sampler in the later days... I really loved the potential of that, and it just seemed to me that no one was fulfilling that potential. I wanted to compose things with it rather than just have loops or beats. I knew that I wasn't going to be able to do that in the Wolfhounds... We had already started discussions... that we were too mannish, too alpha male. It’s too laddish. We need some female input in this. We put an advert for a female guitarist. I didn't like and still don't like the way I sing now, so we wanted someone to kind of soften my voice and make it more interesting, perhaps even do harmonies. So I put an advert in the Melody Maker, and the only person to answer was Margaret Fiedler."
Callahan and Fiedler began sounding each other out, with Callahan recalling "we'd go to each other's houses and play each other's songs and would get impressed with what each other was doing. My initial idea for Moonshake was to have PiL's Metal Box with samples, and the harmonies of The Byrds over the top... When I saw what she was doing on her own, I knew it wasn't going to be like that. Because she was kind of writing really good, almost folk songs." As well as singing and playing guitar, Fiedler shared Callahan's interest in samplers. The pair recruited bass guitarist John Frenett and finally drummer Miguel "Mig" Morland.
Callahan and Fiedler alternated the lead vocal and songwriting duties for the band, both favouring very different approaches: Fiedler created surreal, ethereal and atmospheric material, while Callahan favoured harsher-sounding urban narratives. Due to this factor, the performance style of the band alternated considerably depending on which songwriter's songs were being played. Initially, the band's diversity added to its strength - in 2009, Fiedler recalled "I really liked Dave Callahan's songs and his voice - obviously! That's why I wanted to be in a band with him... We were different people and wrote differently, but came from the same influences - Can, PIL, Kraftwerk, Eric B & Rakim, and MBV to name a few bands. Moonshake was a collision - it was supposed to be a collision." Regardless of the divergence in approaches, all Moonshake songs made a strong use of textures, noise and sampler technology.
Although Callahan originally favoured Skyscraper as a project name, the band ultimately settled on the name Moonshake.

First lineup - early EPs and ''Eva Luna'' (1991–1992)

Moonshake signed to Alan McGee's Creation Records for their debut EP, First, released in spring 1991. At this point, the band was continuing to follow the harsh-effected guitar-heavy sound which had characterised a lot of the last Wolfhounds recordings. The results drew comparisons with Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine, and lacked the dub element featured in later recordings. Callahan soon considered this a misstep. "We got really bad reviews in the music press. The record sold rather well because a lot of people liked weird head-fucky shoegaze stuff... I'm told lots of people really enjoyed tripping and listening to it. There's lots of stuff going on in the stereo and the speakers with different pans and stuff. People were getting quite freaked out with it. But it was too close to what a lot of other bands were doing, as far as I was concerned. We were supposed to be heading out on our own, and we kind of made a faltering step." 
After the release of First, Moonshake signed to the emerging independent label Too Pure. Their first single for the new label was "Secondhand Clothes", which showed a leaning towards the dub-bass-heavy post-punk sound of bands such as Public Image Limited and The Pop Group. According to Callahan, the band was "determined...because we'd made such a false step with the Creation EP. The next one should really be a leap. And it was... We spent a long time in the studio kind of dismantling that song and putting it back together. Margaret spent most of the session with headphones, on a sampler, just trying to match things to the music. She turned a song I wrote into something a bit more forward-looking... And then when we got to the studio, we took it apart more. It was all about deconstruction and putting it back together in different ways. And it worked really well."
"Secondhand Clothes" was followed, in 1992, by the Beautiful Pigeon EP. The band began to earn many positive reviews for its unusual sample-driven and rhythmically propulsive sound, which drew on indie rock, noise-rock, breakbeats, electronica, psychedelia, dub, art-rock, Krautrock and punk. Callahan: "I really didn't like acid house and baggy and all that stuff that was going on in the UK... But hip hop really had it going on, and so did some of the American bands particularly in the late '80s... it was more the music, the investigation that a lot of hip hop producers did—slowing things down, playing the stereo one bit slower then the one bit faster, running things backwards, playing the samples like an instrument. All that stuff that started with Gang Starr and those kinds of people, we really loved that. We thought, "Well, we can do the same and perhaps we can write songs with this stuff.""
Moonshake's debut album, Eva Luna, followed in October 1992. It continued the alternation between the different song-stylings of Callahan and Fiedler. Callahan said that "if you listen to the line-up with her and me, it's a schizophrenic band... It’s got a dual personality. We did occasionally write songs together, but we were mostly flipsides to each other... But we'd also play with it more and have really noisy bits in her quiet songs and occasional really quiet bits in my noisy songs. The whole thing was meant to blend. There were definitely a lot of contradictions there, but that’s interesting in a band, isn't it?"
Callahan said that the band was "well prepared" for the recording sessions following extensive rehearsing, but that they'd also embraced opportunities to improve the material further while in studio. "I remember struggling with "Seen & Not Heard"... trying to get all those different noisy guitars to sound separate from each other, but somehow still the same, was a challenge. It was a lot of fun. I remember sending some demos to Terry Edwards — he played the horns on it — and he came in and I just said to him, "Can you do some kind of free jazz on bits of it? And can you do an Ennio Morricone trumpet thing on the third verse?" I just thought he'd do something kind of token, but he came and did these amazing horn parts, and it just really lifts the whole song... a noisy, Stooges-inspired song... but it just takes it so much further, almost into jazz. I’m just really happy with the way that came out. It was such fun to hear someone doing such good parts on your songs. I couldn't recommend it more, to farm it out to people like Terry."
Variously described as "bursting with ideas and tension... a richly inventive, endlessly fascinating listen", "big, weird and unnerving" and
"one hell of a ground-breaking record stands resolutely alone among all of the albums released in 1992 as no other band has managed to create anything remotely similar before or since... a unique album with few equals",
Eva Luna ultimately satisfied both Fiedler and Callahan. Callahan: "We knew we'd done something really good... We thought the "Secondhand Clothes" EP and had everything the band should be about on it. It had everything. We certainly thought we'd done something that was true to us that would either be ignored for being too out there or would make an impression. And, fortunately, it made an impression. We wanted it to be both weird and have songs. We wanted it to have an upside-down kind of layering. It needed to have big bass and drums, like some dub or funk records, but we also wanted to find ways to incorporate the samples in a way that didn’t sound like they were sellotaped on, like so many other bands. We wanted it to be completely enmeshed in the songs and the music. And I think we succeeded with that."
In between studio and writing sessions, the band spent 1992 touring Britain with The Wedding Present, Th' Faith Healers and PJ Harvey, as well as supporting Pulp in Paris.

''Big Good Angel'' and split of original lineup (1993)

For 1993's mini-album Big Good Angel, both Callahan and Fiedler contributed three songs each. In 2024, Callahan recalled that Big Good Angel "has some of our best stuff on it. It's fantastic. But that was largely recorded separately. I recorded with Mig and John, for the most part, in a studio, and Margaret did a lot of her stuff at home with Guy, and just brought it into a studio to mix. She scrapped one of her songs as well, and we had to come back in again so she could do "Two Trains", which I think was pretty much entirely written and recorded at home."
During the summer of 1993, Moonshake played the Big Top Frenzy festival in Portsmouth, and then embarked on a brief American tour, playing variously with Radiohead, PJ Harvey, Pavement, Yo La Tengo, Liz Phair, Bailter Space and Nothing Painted Blue. By now the divergent styles of the two songwriters was producing too much creative tension for the band to survive for much longer. Callahan: "Margaret probably had slightly more songs than me on the first LP, and was feeling that she really needed to record with just her and Guy on her own, and she said as much to me in a meeting. I started to feel like maybe I was getting edged out of my own band... She wanted to record with Guy, who by that time was not just the producer, but her partner. So it was very much a sewn-together kind of thing. Whereas I was still out on my own." In 2009, Fiedler recalled that "maybe after a while, the tension that was there in our writing and singing styles spilled over into real life. Things did get extremely tense on the last tour we did together in 1993 in North America."
Following this tour, Moonshake split in half, with Margaret Fiedler and John Frenett departing to form a new band, Laika, with Fixsen. In 2009 Fiedler, recalling of the split, stated "it wasn't amicable. In fact it took me years to get over it, which is kinda sad to admit. I haven't spoken to Dave in years..." Earlier, she had commented "Laika is a close working collective; in Moonshake that was never possible. David and I always did what we liked. I have never compromised myself and that's the main reason why I was forced to leave the band. After the American tour David no longer wanted to work with me."
Recalling the disagreement 30 years later, Callahan admitted "I felt like I lost my creative partner. Stupidly, I kind of rashly just rang her up once and said, "I don't want you to be in the band anymore," and she was really fucking upset. I felt quite bad about it. It was my fault for not being a very good communicator at that age." Callahan and Fiedler repaired their personal relationship in later years.
Casting a critical eye over the original Moonshake's work, in 2024, Callahan commented "to some extent, it was a failed experiment but I think a lot of it worked. And I think it sounds contemporary now, which shows we were doing something right."