What better way to spend a cold and grey Friday afternoon than probing that brilliant human Stephen Gilchrist, aka Stephen EvEns, for facts.
You may have seen him tubthumping for Tim Smith’s Spratleys, Graham Coxon and The Scaramanga Six or them there Cardiacs but you may not know he is a jolly good musician in his own right.
As he has a new album on the way and live dates, Frank Wilkes settled down with a Curly Wurly to find out more…..
Frank: What is your background? How do you get into music, all of that kind of thing?
Stephen: I was born into a family of musicians.
I grew up in an odd little village in Surrey. If you walked across Ashtead Park, you would end up in Chessington where Cardiacs come from. I can’t help thinking that my connection to that is due to the fact that I think it might be my local folk music.
But yeah, a family full of classical musicians. My mother was a professional percussionist and still is. My father was an engineer, but was a very talented bassoon player who played professionally on occasion. My grandmother was a piano teacher.
My other grandmother was a cellist & a well-respected conductor and her husband, my grandfather, a viola player. And as a result, my sister and I, my sister became a cellist, and I became a viola player respectively.
Frank: And so how did you get from viola to be playing guitars and drums and all that kind of thing?
Stephen: My mum had to start teaching drum kit. She didn’t relish teaching it, but she said she needed to get enough of these to get kids she taught interested in percussion.
So she had a snare drum, bought a pair of hi hats and a bass drum. And then obviously me and my sister, were like “wow” – it was like rock and roll had come through the front door. So thus started a bit of a rivalry. One particular time, I was about 10, my sister would have been 14, and she’s going, “I’m better than you”. And I’m saying “I’m better than you”, and my mum said, “well, actually, your sister’s timing is slightly better”, and I thought right, we’ll see about that….
I started getting really into it (drumming) and my sister lost interest and by the time I got kind of better than her, she was like “whatever, I don’t care”
I mean she’s a fantastic cellist, she doesn’t need to play drums, she doesn’t need to prove herself with rock and roll music, she’s, you know, like most of my family, a very wonderful and subtle musician, they don’t have to make a load of attention seeking noise like I do.
But obviously I really got into the drums, started noticing drummers, I would watch Stuart Copeland and study him and want to build a huge drum kit like he had with all the splash cymbals in the world on it.
Now I’ve gone completely the other direction, very minimal setup. There was always the belief that I was going to become a viola player and then I had to come out to the family as a drummer, you know, they knew I had drumming tendencies but perhaps it was just a phase?
Both my parents have been incredibly supportive, but my mum did say one drummer in the family is enough.
But now she’s thinks, good, I’ve got someone to leave all my percussion instruments too. Now I’ve got a whole load of percussion potentially and it will need somewhere live somewhere one day, but hopefully not any day soon.
Frank: How did you end up playing with Graham Coxon?
Stephen: I’d been playing professionally a while. Well, I say professional. I’d been playing from the age of 16, picking up little gigs and stuff for money and by the time I left college I decided that I really wanted to be a professional drummer and I was taught by this guy, Nigel Bromley, who I’m still in touch with, who really encouraged me and supported me on those first few steps.
It took a while. I got a teaching job. I’ve taught for years, but that was my bread and butter while I slowly built up the gigs with odd bits of studio work.
Of course I did a lot of things wrong, lost a few gigs, you know, did the usual thing, made mistakes. It was a baptism by fire learning how to be someone that a bunch of people wanted to be a tour bus wit and then, you know, it doesn’t really matter how good a musician you are if you don’t have luck and I got lucky.
I had a friend. He was picked up by CMO Management and eventually he became Graham’s day-to-day manager and he needed a drummer for a band. I went to audition, and I think the fact that I could get to the end of the song without falling over or speeding up too much meant I was in.
I’m not great at networking to be honest, so it really does take people meeting me, getting on with me and then suggesting me for stuff.
Frank: So how did you end up playing with Cardiacs?
Stephen: Cardiacs started when I was a kid. I wrote to Dominic Luckman to ask for lessons and I had a good few years of having lessons with Dominic (taught me a hell of a lot which still resonates today).
I ingratiated myself a bit with Cardiacs. I’d get to a gig and if Tim would be there on his own we’d hang out a bit, because usually there was a huge circle of people around.
I just remember one night spending a whole night with him in the borderline with my friend Sally Young (Ut/Quint)
We just sat there drinking and talking all night, and he’s kind of like a little boy sometimes. When it got to the point where we really had to go, he just had this little look like Christmas was over. So we had obviously struck some kind of rapport.
Then Scaramanga Six, who are really good pals of mine, their drummer James moved to Australia so I joined the band for a bit.
They were talking about doing an album and they always fiercely DIY, not like everyone else waiting for a record label to pick them up.
Their attitude has always been, no, we’re going to do this. life’s for the living, let’s do this, let’s invest in our art.
They were talking about recording a new album and would really love to record with Tim and I just went, well, I’ll give him a call. Tim had just moved his studio to Salisbury a couple of years before. Called, we set it up and we went.
One of the most hilarious things about Tim is you never knew whether he was kind of really aware or not of what people thought of him or knew of him. The Scaras were fans, and they loved him, and they loved the way that Tim recorded. After a few days of recording we ended up driving down to the local pub from where he lived outside Salisbury, and he was asking about the band’s plans.
They said “we’re going to do this tour when we get the album out”, and he goes, “oh, actually, me and my brother have a band”, and it’s just like, “yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we’ve got this band and we do a bit of that mischief”, and I said, “Tim, they know who you are it’s why they’re here”. But I don’t know if he just thought I’d bought a bunch of mates down to pass on some work or if he thought I’m going to pretend that they don’t know who I am.
The best thing about Tim is that he was very neutral about what people thought of his music. He’d say stuff like “do you know what? I could really imagine if you didn’t like our stuff, it would really get on your wick”.
He knew there were people that thought he was a rock god and I’m sure he loved that, but I think in the grand scheme of things he just saw himself as funny little Tim from Chessington, you know? Even if he is, at the very least he’s the reason I find myself where I am…. wherever that is.
I had a conversation with my mum recently about my wide and quite greedy attitude to music consumption. I am big fan of everything that I like, be it, you know, hard stuff, pop music, classical, jazz, or experimental stuff. Mum asked, me “so come on, what’s your favourite music?” And the answer was “anything Tim’s written”.
It’s true. It’s my folk music, it feels like home.
Frank: Have you always been drumming then or do you do guitar with anybody or anything like that?
Stephen: God no, I don’t play guitar for anyone but me.
I’ve had lessons. Andy Hackett from The Rockingbirds gave me a few lessons last year and actually I’ve found it a lot easier to play since he showed me some stuff but then he started teaching me scales and then I start playing scales instead of finding tunes and it’s taking the magic out of it.
Frank: Tell us about your new album, Weekend at Bernies 2. I’ve seen the walkthrough that’s on Instagram, which I think is really, really great, but obviously there’s one track that you won’t tell anybody about.
Stephen: It was at Kimiya. I just wanted people to hear that without any spoilers because I was so proud with how it turned out. Nick Bourne and I think we’re going to do a listening party in the next couple of weeks. So keep an eye out and you can hear it there.
Frank: Firstly, why choose that title?
Stephen: Because it’s iconic? It’s iconic because they managed to make a sequel of an unsequel-able film. How can you do a sequel of a film about a man who’s dead? It is such a cash grab and so watchable because it is just ridiculously bad.
Awful.
The project was to write an album in a weekend and I decided to call it Weekend at Bernies 2, so it does not have any expectation, you got to take it as is because I didn’t know how it was going to turn out. It ended up taking me 8 years to finish it but I think I have spent a total of 4 days on it, time wise.
I literally wrote Little Birdies Leaning to Fly and Tin Shack between 11 o’clock and midnight on the Sunday. It’s a bit like the Rutles. The first album took 20 minutes to record, the second took even longer.
Frank: How does it differ in your opinion from Employee of the Month?
Stephen: Employee of the Month is my least favourite record I’ve made. Well, its got three of my favourite Steven Evens’ songs on, but it doesn’t feel to me like a Steven Evens record.
Dustbin Man is the only song I feel that I will enjoy playing for the rest of my days. I love it and I wrote that in about two minutes. I bought a looper pedal and that was me demonstrating it in the shop to myself. And Jon Snow might be the most technically impressive song I’ve written. The Crystal Palace is just my favourite song ever.
But as an album, I remember finishing it and going, this sounds like an indie rock band album. It didn’t feel like a Steven Evens record.
I’m not saying I don’t like it, but it’s my least favourite. I really like the first one, which was universally ignored.
I still don’t know how many records we sold of that one. But I got two reviews, both of them scathing. Yet I was so proud of it and still am. I still think maybe I like Here Come the Lights better but I still really love it.
I’m fiercely protective of it, it’s just like the weak sickly child that nobody really wants, It’s still my baby.
Frank: So, well, how’s the new album going to be put out? Will it be a physical release?
Stephen: Yeah, it’s being, I’m waiting to hear from Nick [Bourne of Onomatopoeia Records], I’ve done the artwork for it. Nick is set up to do the orders for it, but we’re not doing a proper release. It was an idea of basically to help fund this tour. I don’t know how we’re going to release it next year, but I think we’re only going to do 100 copies of it.
I think it will be based on the pre-orders. Once enough are in we will cap it there.
That might be it, because we did a mini album in between Employee of the Month and Here Come the Lights, called Smoking is Cool which was just an EP that me, Jenny and Jimmy went to France and did with Steve Albini.
That came out as just a six track mini album. And we cut 40 copies which sold out almost immediately in the first hour and the last three copies went the following Friday.
And then people were like, oh, can I get a copy of it? No. Oh, is it coming out digitally? No. So you can’t. Everyone who bought the physical got digital if they asked politely.
But it was just like, no, no. If you don’t think music’s sacred, I’m going to keep a limited number of people allowed to access it.
I mean, it’s not the greatest record in the world, but I think it’s good to make some things a holy grail. We are all used to have everything on tap, here’s something that you’re going to have to either barter with someone for their copy or search the world for 1 of 40. I thought if there was so much demand, say, if I thought 50 really want a copy after they sold out, I’d say, come to this address at 2.30pm on the 14th, and I will play it to you twice, and then you can go home.
I like that, if you can’t have a bit of control over your art, what power do you have? Otherwise you are just some streaming whore, that’s who you are.
Frank: Was that the only time you worked with Albini?
Stephen: No, I’ve done four records with Steve. So that was the last one I did.
Before that my wife’s band, which I played bass in, Hot Sauce Pony, did a record with Steve. When Scarras went out to Chicago in 2012, with me and Gareth Champion doing double drums. The first time was in 2005, my old band stuffy/the fuses second album Angels Are Ace.
I put that on occasionally and I’m always surprised at how much better it is than I remember it. But that was definitely, I think that was my favourite recording experience. We made this record in five days. I don’t think any of us had done such a record so quick and that included getting a string quartet in and a small brass band.
Frank: I have some quick-fire questions. This one’s sent in by Nick Beddow.
What’s your hair regime?
Stephen: I wash it with cold water with soap and conditioner, and then I spray it with anti-frizz, and then for 30 minutes my hair looks normal before it becomes this.
Frank: The next question was sent in by Hugh Janus. Does Donald Trump?
Stephen: I don’t know who that is?
Frank: That’s a good way to be. Do you like milk?
Stephen: Um, which kind?
Frank: It’s not specified
Find out more about Stephen EvEns:
https://stephenevens.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/stephenevensmusic
https://x.com/stephenevens
https://www.instagram.com/thestephenevens/
Meet Stephen EvEns (our interview from 2019!)
Stephen EvEns will be performing for Buds & Spawn on Friday 6th December 2024 at The Dorothy Pax, alongside a DJ set from Marina Organ (The Other Rock Show / The Organ)
This gig is FREE ENTRY, but please come prepared to put your hands in your pockets to show your appreciation at the end.