The guy behind me in the ticket line pegged me for a journalist at first glance. “What outfit are you with?” he asked, and I, without hesitation, responded, “The Georgetown Voice.” This seemed to impress him, as he tagged along for a good part of the night, inquiring about what angle I was planning to take with the story and what Neil Halsted was really like in person.
A setting of the scene is in order, I suppose. On Feb. 12, the Brit shoegazers Mojave 3 had come through the 9:30 Club on tour in support of their third studio release, Excuses for Travellers. But more on that later. Halsted, the subject of my stalker’s inquiry above, is the chief songwriter and frontman of the band. I had sat down with him earlier that evening for an interview, to discuss the band, the record and his future in advertising.
For those unfamiliar with the style or the term, “shoegazer” is one of the few words that means exactly what it sounds like. Take a second and “gaze” down at your shoes. Now imagine the kind of emotions that would normally be associated with what you are doing right now and put them to music.
That, in two sentences, is “shoegazing,” a style of music that traces its roots back to the late 1960s and early 1970s in Britain. It saw a new surge in popularity in the U.K. during the early 1990s, and in recent years the sound (also known now as sadcore) has reached an increasingly large number of ears in the States, as well. Led by Scottish ensemble Belle and Sebastian and Portland, Oregon-based Elliott Smith, the more subdued, sadder side of rock has grown in popularity and has slipped, unnoticed, into the mainstream via U.S. commercials. Yes, commercials. U.K.-based Badly Drawn Boy was featured in a Gap Christmas ad this year, as were the Red House Painters. And the godfather of all shoegazer bands, the tragically hip Nick Drake, has seen a rebirth in the last few years courtesy of the Volkswagen ad that his most famous song, “Pink Moon,” was featured in.
Drake, often cited as one of the first shoegazers, recorded three albums in the early 1970s before meeting with a tragic death. Soon after, the sound that he had pioneered was put into mothballs and not taken out again until the early 1990s.
During that time, Slowdive was on the scene. A shoegazer band that also incorporated a more ambient sound on their later work, Slowdive became fairly well-known before splitting up in the mid-1990s. Mojave 3 rose from the ashes of that breakup, with Slowdive ex-members Halsted, bassist Rachel Goswell and drummer Ian McCutcheon joining guitarist Simon Rowe and Alan Forrester to create the new band. Their debut album, 1996’s Ask Me Tomorrow, showcased a new, more song-based direction for the Halsted/Goswell songwriting duo. In 1998, Out of Tune followed, and last year’s Excuses for Travellers confirmed that Mojave 3 had “made it”: the record met with great support at college radio and had widespread critical acclaim.
Still, support at college radio and critical acclaim will only bring so many people to a nightclub on a cold Monday night in February. The 9:30 Club was scarcely half-full by the time Mojave 3 came on, meaning that the aforementioned stalker had no problem finding me whenever he wanted to ask a question about the band.
“You know,” he told me, “I think this is a great night-time record. Really, I can only listen to it at night. Did you ask Neil about that?”
I couldn’t bear to break it to him that I didn’t ask “Neil” about a great many things. Halsted played the role of reticent indie-rocker superbly, offering hesitant, parsed answers to any question I could think up.
“I actually think this is quite an optimistic record, personally, more optimistic than the other two,” he confided hours before the show began. Sitting in the dressing room of 9:30, he looked at ease as he comfortably smoked a cigarette and fielded questions. But the feeling was left in the air that the answers I was looking for weren’t to be found in an interview with him but on the album itself. He seemed to be ill-equipped to deal with the publicity and increased fanbase that Mojave 3 has brought him.
“I think we’ve probably brought a lot of people with us from Slowdive. Definitely some people come to see us being fans of Slowdive,” he said. “I think with this record we’re probably picking up some new people who weren’t aware of Slowdive.”
We talked about his musical roots (Gram Parsons, Johnny Cash, Nick Drake) and the music he was listening to now (Neil Young), but leaving the room 20 minutes later, I had the sinking feeling that I had learned absolutely nothing about him during our interview. The only moment of connection came when asked about the possibility of the band ending up in a Volkswagen ad one day like their icon Drake has. After some laughter, he replied “Heh?I don’t know, the Volkswagen people haven’t called us up yet, but that’s probably an oversight on their part. I’m sure it’s going to happen.”
But the window to Halsted’s soul came not through the interview but his music. After a strong opening set from the Sid Hillman Quartet, Mojave 3 found their way to the stage around 10:00 p.m. Beginning with “My Life in Art,” a slow-moving tale of broken hearts, the band spent just over an hour wandering through what could best be termed “the infinite sadness.” The roots-rock of Excuses for Travellers, a quiet pedal steel and acoustic guitar sound that betrays Halsted’s country influences, gave way to a more straightforward shoegazer sound, with the crowd never moving beyond a slow head nod the entire night.
Halsted captured the sentiment exactly with the first line of the show’s highlight, “In Love With a View: I had a plan that was built on thinking too long.” The songs on Excuses that move beyond the introspective melancholia of the rest of the record were omitted. The performance itself was subtle and subdued, with Halsted’s occasional pacing marking the only movement on stage the entire night. The listener is left with the feeling that the sky is always gray in his dreamworld.
A lot of the show felt like a star vehicle picture produced for Halsted. He was clearly the focal point of the band, anchoring the center of the stage, and the attention of the crowd was drawn to him at almost every moment along the way. Nevertheless, the five people standing around Halsted defined Mojave 3, with Forrester’s pedal steel creating the unique sound that has come to be so closely associated with the band. On an earlier tour opening for fellow U.K. outfit Gomez, and then on a solo acoustic tour last fall, Halsted failed at capturing the sentiment of his music exactly. Live, the rest of Mojave 3 added greatly to the songs that he had written, creating together a tempered, experienced meditation on love and sadness.
On the way out, I was once more hunted down by the man from outside, who asked/said, “Great, huh?” I mentioned something about not being really able to be excited about the performance. Sadcore, done poorly, sounds pretentious and almost laughable. Done well, it sucks the soul out of the body, leaving you exposed and in awe of the range of human emotions. Mojave 3 landed somewhere in between Monday night, offering little of the “optimism” that Halsted had spoken of earlier but not quite vanquishing happiness from the building. And if that is great, well then I suppose I agree.
