There’s something undoubtedly special about when a body of work catches your attention out of nowhere and blows you away. Sure, there’s still plenty of excitement to be found when a release you’ve been eagerly anticipating lives up to expectations, but when a true masterpiece slides across the proverbial desk from a less likely source, well – that’s when the serotonin really starts working overtime.
It must be said that throwing around the ‘masterpiece’ label is something that should be done with immense caution. Such weighty proclamations often don’t have the substance to support themselves, and there’s a fair chance that when you’re using it, others might think you’re coming across as glib. In the case of Virgins, the debut record from Glasgow-based songwriter and composer Stanley Welch, it’s fully justified.
With only one single in ‘Croptor’ to his name prior to the album rollout; a track which featured on the 2021 edition of the cult compilation series from Slow Dance Records, Welch could appropriately be described as something of a virgin when it comes to releasing music, but this isn’t something that comes across from the talent on display.
Welch attests that the album was part of a process of him rediscovering a love of music he’d forgotten about, and the richness and diversity of the sound reflects the hyperactive rush you might feel when embarking on an odyssey of musical exploration. While he states that traditional folk, musicals and art rock make up a considerable amount of the influences he was digesting during the recording process, there’s plenty more that comes to mind when the songs dart between genres and touchstones.
For starters, songs such as the two pre-release singles in ‘Dressed in Black’ and ‘Houses, Dogs and Food’ approach things in an almost modern prog/post-rock fashion, bringing the likes of caroline to mind when more restrained and gentle, or Sufjan Stevens when at his most ostentatious.
Then come the classical flourishes, which exude the same sort of playfulness of Soviet-era composers like Dmitri Shostakovich or Aram Khatchaturian – that is until songs like ‘Boring Spirit 2’ and ‘The God of London’ suddenly pivot into adding cartoonish electronics, bringing to mind more contemporary artists like Anna Meredith.
Finally, there’s moments where Virgins dips its toes into all-out chaos, invoking the orgiastic jazz of Charles Mingus in the way that it becomes impossible to tell whether the members of Welch’s ensemble are actively enjoying playing together or hold a deep-rooted sense of resent towards one another – constantly trying to one-up each other with frenzied horn blasts or string stabs.
When described like this, Virgins all sounds a little bit much, and gives the impression that its creator might be the philosophical sort who is a little closed-off and pretentious. Welch, however, couldn’t be further from this archetype. He arrived in frame of our video call in a way that instantly conveyed warmth and groundedness – munching on breakfast, hair still damp, and sporting the same off-grey knitted pullover he wears in most of his press shots. As lavish and extraordinary as his music may be, he’s just like you or I.
Once the Marmite on toast had had just enough time to be digested, we settled into our conversation, and while looking for answers on how his debut album came to be the wonder that it is, we also allowed ourselves plenty of time to discuss his formative musical experiences, his life as a working artist, and discussing possible first dances at our hypothetical weddings.
Thank you so much for taking the time to have a chat. I’m really excited to discuss things a bit more and learn all about your craft. Could you start off by giving me a little bit of an elevator pitch for Virgins?
Oh, God. That’s something I’ve been trying to come up with for quite some time. I guess it’s an album that’s about theatricality, but it’s maybe giving too much. It’s a lot like when you are a virgin, so there’s a lot of fantasising or projecting onto things that haven’t happened yet. I guess an elevator pitch could be that it’s a young album, and it’s an album that’s trying too hard. I haven’t got a very good line for that. I need to think of something more niche.
How did the songs begin to materialise and when did you realise it was going to be an actual full body of work?
A lot of the melodies in the songs are things I wrote when I was really young; it’s like a collection of things from 2014 onwards. Then I moved to Glasgow on a whim during lockdown because my ex-girlfriend is from here. I’d just graduated from art school, but nothing was happening. I think I just needed something to do, and I’d been making music throughout art school, but it wasn’t really ever able to be properly developed or become a full thing because it was in the wrong context. I sort of fell back in love with a lot of things I’d been listening to before I went to uni, so I gave myself a project to make an album, and that was that.
What sort of obstacles were you putting in front of yourself that stopped you from making music? I know you said you pursued art for a while and that the early songs didn’t feel right enough to be put out, so what was it that changed things?
I don’t know. Art school can be quite a funny experience in general – especially when you’re making something that is nearly art, or that you can nearly think about in those terms. Maybe you need to be a little less critical, or critical in a very different way. For one thing, I didn’t have a studio then. I got this crazy little room in an attic that I shared with the Glasgow African Balafon Orchestra; they had this room and they were looking for people to make the rent cheaper. I got a little space in there, I had a drum kit and all this stuff, and that really helped. That maybe made it more official – I thought, “I’m paying for this, I’ve got to make it sound alright”.
I think it was mostly a case of not quite being able to connect to it and not being in the world enough to know what I wanted with it. I didn’t realise that you actually had to put your whole life into it in order to make it. Then I sort of found out I was the obstacle, and stress was the obstacle. Time and space became the way through, I guess.
A couple of years ago, you released ‘Croptor’ as part of the Slow Dance ‘21 compilation. How did that come about?
I studied for my art foundation with Marco [Pini, Slow Dance label co-founder] in Kingston, and we talked about music a bit and crossed paths at a couple of events in London. ‘Croptor’ was the first song I’d made that I thought could have been fun for other people to listen to, so I was excited about it. I sent it to Marco asking what he thought, and he was like, “oh, cool”, so then it went on the compilation. It was a little message.
I don’t know what feedback you received personally from other people who’d heard it, but do you think that was something that kind of spurred you on to continue?
Yeah, it was a nice little official thing that made it easier to believe that maybe someone would like it. It was like a nice kick, followed by a long break.
Obviously, the difference between that track and what you’re about to put out is the fact that there was no vocals on that. As this is the first time you’ve ever really sung or written lyrics, how did you go about finding your voice and knowing what you wanted to explore lyrically?
That was really hard. I didn’t think I couldn’t sing, I guess it took a while to pluck up the courage to actually try. I think having a space was really important, because I could shout and do bad singing for quite a while. Writing lyrics took ages to come. I started writing while lockdown was still in effect, and it just took so long to get into gear. I’d not realised that lyrics were this really specific thing that I was trying to write, and it was just awful, overcomplicated, drivelly, pointless rubbish. It took ages and ages to get it to a point where it wasn’t awful. I started listening to a lot of musicals, and that made it easier, and I also started listening to a lot of the things that got me excited about lyrics when I was younger.
What sort of things were those?
Oh, you know, The Smiths [laughs]. I think in a way, my relationship to music in art school was quite bad, and I stopped sort of really enjoying it, so after it was like a big decompression and I started listening to things I loved again, or things that I used to be into but sort of had forgotten. I realised that writing lyrics can be a nice way to express your feelings, or make certain feelings that you don’t like within yourself into a character. Then, that character can be as loud and hideous as it wants, and you can look at it from a removed perspective, I guess.
Do you prefer writing from that perspective, rather than as you?
Well, it is sort of me, but it’s taking me to an extreme, I guess. I’d quite like to be able to write in a very straightforward way, but I think all the things I was feeling weren’t very straightforward feelings. They were very twisted feelings, so I guess they had to come out in not quite a first person sort of way.
Moving onto your background – do you consider the music you make to have any close relationship to the art you make in other mediums?
I do. It’s been nice making music videos for this, because that’s been a nice bridge where you can maybe bring that together. I don’t hate art, but the world of art doesn’t give you a lot of energy a lot of the time. When it goes well, I do get a feeling, but it’s a different feeling. A funny thing was learning to value the different feeling that music gives me, and I guess because it can be more narrative and more emotional, it has slightly different rules. I do sometimes get a nice feeling that this is doing what art did at points, but I don’t really know yet which one I like for what purpose.
I noticed that the album cover is a piece that you made a long time ago. What’s the significance of the ‘Bread Shield’ and how does it connect to Virgins?
I just thought it was a strong image. It’s covered in shiny shit that I found on the street, and it sort of became a little collection or habit where I’d see a shiny thing, pick it up and keep it. I’ve still got tons of it; it’s kept going. I guess the way the album came about, where lots of little bits were collected together and arranged, that seemed to create a thing where they stood out – that was maybe a nice little parallel. It just felt right, and it came naturally.
When you talk about collecting lots of little things together, a few of the tracks on the album come in very distinctly separate parts – were they written completely separately and did you only later realise how they follow on really well from each other?
That’s exactly what happened. Sometimes it was years apart, and it would be a different project. I think most of the work making the album was finding ways for these bits to feel at least slightly natural – really wrenching them together. That’s maybe a stupid way of making songs, and I think I like the result, but it’s maybe too tiring to be sustainable.
Switching to your musical background – you started learning the drums first?
Oh, yeah, I am a drummer. I learned the drums when I was five or something. That’s another thing – when you go to uni, you won’t necessarily have access to a drum kit, so that sort of fell off. After that, I learned other things very gradually.
How many instruments were completely new to you in the process of making the album?
I bought a saxophone in about 2018, and I’ve been learning to play the clarinet but that’s pretty much the same as a saxophone, really. Then cello and violin. I bought a cello in order to make ‘Croptor’ because I needed some long notes or something, and then I started playing that more. My mum then gave me a nicer one, because she stopped playing it. Violin came on the back of that, which is also, you know – the same as a cello. I used the album as a way to learn things because I needed a part, and then a fun thing to do for a week was maybe learn how to play that part. I can’t read music though, so I didn’t have to do any of that stuff.
How did you find the difference between the stuff that you did completely alone and the stuff that you did alongside your band, Texts?
It changes day to day, I guess. It’s much less tiring doing it with a band, and working alongside a band is more fun. When you’re putting things together very slowly on a Logic project it feels much more like just editing, but when you’re playing as a band, you’re self-editing all the time, so that’s really natural. When you’re doing it on the screen, it feels more like doing a painting or something, because there’s so much taking away and putting down little things, and working out what else is needed from that painting. I like both actually, but I sort of want to do both to a bigger extent and maybe separate them.
You recorded the tracks with the ensemble as live takes, right?
Those two, ‘Dressed in Black’ and ‘Houses, Dogs and Food’, were sort of live takes at the core, and then I covered them in cello, saxophone and accordion after the fact. We just put them in a studio in the middle of the day. Obviously they’re much better recorded, but for those tracks, there was very little heavy lifting to do in the mixing. I mixed the album with my friend Gaspard, but it was the tracks that I recorded myself that were a bit of a nightmare. There were lots of things that shouldn’t have been there – big errors that mixing engineers might pick up on.
How did you put the group together? What was it about those people that drew you to them as collaborators?
I don’t know if I really have a hold on the music scene in Glasgow, although I feel like I know some people now, but at that point it was just like “I know that you play this instrument and you’re my friend, so you’re going to come in”. I think it started off with Otis [Jordan, guitar, banjo and clarinet] and Anna [Vlassova, viola], because I studied with Anna and then Otis knew Anna from Manchester. We all lived in the same little area. Then Libby [Hsieh, aka Alvidrez] came along and it turned out they played bass, and it just accrued people very gradually. Now through Simon [Heberholz], who is a saxophonist, it’s become a lot of conservatoire people, which is great because they are very good at learning things. There was no plan, they just happened to all be very good.
Do you think having people with formal musical training elevated how easily you gelled together?
Yeah, for sure. I think I need to be looser with the next one, because at least when we perform live, I’ve not left a lot of room for improvising, and I think it would be nice to do some actual band work where you jam something out. Everyone in the band is an amazing musician, and the fact that we’ve got these conservatoire-trained people now it’s not better or worse, but it’s very cool that they’re jazz people who can just sort of do all these crazy things. They can do fireworks. It’s a privilege.
The two videos that you put out for ‘Dressed in Black’ and ‘Houses, Dogs and Food’, were they concepts that you worked on alongside the directors?
I think I sent the album to Louis [Scantlebury, director of ‘Dressed in Black’] and he was really nice about it. He makes crazy things, so I asked him if he wanted to do it. It turned out that that weekend, he was going to film the Battle of Hastings recreation anyway and said “okay, I’ve got an idea”. He went away and did it really quickly, but I didn’t really have any input apart from being enthusiastic.
Do you know how the performers reacted to having this singing sock interrupting them?
I think they were very enthusiastic, but I think they like it when people are interested. I think there was probably a lot of behind the scenes where he’d ask if it was alright to do this. I think they were fans, although he did the same for his uni degree show at a football match, it might have been an Arsenal match. Someone took a picture of him while he was filming it and tweeted it with the caption “what the fuck’s happened to my club?” It sort of blew up a little bit, everyone was like, “what the fuck, this guy’s some sort of creep”.
I wanted to ask you a series of quickfire questions in honour of the album being called Virgins – it’s going to be about musical firsts. What was the first album you remember being blown away by?
American Idiot by Green Day.
Why did that resonate with you?
Because I was eight [laughs]. No, also because there’s sick songwriting on it. It was just very good to jump on your bed with a tennis racket to. That was the main use it had for me at the time.
I suppose that’s, you know, a lot of people of our age’s first introduction to a rock opera, as well.
Yeah, that’s true. I remember the music video had some pretty hot scenes in it. That was maybe a bit of a reason – for the titillation.
What was the first thing you ever saw live?
I think I saw The Wailers when I was pretty small at a glamping festival. Other than that it would probably have been Gogol Bordello, maybe. We were visiting my family friends in London, and I think it was at the Brixton Academy. It was crazy. I mean, I stood at the back the whole time, but it was pretty good. They’re very energetic. They’ve got dancers, it was hard to say no to.
First song you ever wrote that you felt proud of?
Oh, shit – probably what became the chorus to ‘Hamlet’, which I wrote during my A-levels, maybe. I was like, “oh, hang on, I like this”. It wasn’t as long at that time, but then it morphed into what it is now.
Tell me about the first time you played to an audience.
The first time ever would have been in a covers band we had in Cornwall during secondary school called The Ducks. It would have been in a tent in a field, in a place called Ruan Minor – to a lot of mums. It was kind of fun. I was the drummer in a couple of wedding party covers bands. We would have played ‘Chelsea Dagger’, I think we did ‘New Shoes’, and I think we might have done ‘My Generation’ as well.
On the topic of weddings, what would be your first dance at your wedding?
Fuck, I’ve never thought about that. What do people have?
I mean it tends to be slow and ballady, but then you’ve also got to make sure that that slow ballad isn’t a breakup song, because then that’s just going to mar your marriage.
I guess it would have to be a song that both people like. I wouldn’t want to be like, “listen, do you want to marry me, but also, I have some conditions”.
Weirdly, I don’t think my parents ever thought about it, because I’ve heard that they just asked on the day and ended up doing their first dance to ‘Jump’ by Van Halen.
That’s sick. Something like that would be fun. What would yours be?
I feel like you can’t go wrong with Stevie Wonder.
Oh, ‘For Once in My Life’. It’s got to be that.
Generally speaking, what’s next for you? Do you intend to play up and down the country a little bit and have you got more stuff that you’re keen to put out?
Yeah, I’d love to play up and down the country a little bit. I guess that would need to be organised. We did a few gigs in London which were really nice because I put them on with Max who runs North <3 South Records with me, but it was too much stress to really get anyone here enjoying playing because you don’t know if you’re going to make enough money to pay everyone a bit. The fuel to drive down is crazy. But yeah, if someone pays us, I think it would be great to do gigs up and down the country. Music wise, I’ve been writing a lot recently – I don’t want to jinx it, but if I can find a good way to pay for it, then it would be nice to do a lot of collaborations. My vague idea for the next project would be lots of different things with lots of different people. I haven’t really thought about it yet but I’d like a brass band. That would be good.
Words: Reuben Cross // Photos: Anna Metzger
‘Virgins’ is out now via North <3 South Records. Stream and purchase the album via Bandcamp.