POLAROID SUITCASE
POLAROID SUITCASE: AN INTRODUCTION
Notes for the album’s 10th anniversary
digital release, written November 2012
I always wanted to be a pop star. Ever since 1981
when the likes of Gary Numan, Adam Ant and The
Human League inspired the nine-year-old me to
write a bunch of songs about cowboys, robots,
warriors and spacemen. As a child, I made pretend
records out of paper and span them round on a
pencil while singing my latest pretend hit single. As
a lonely spotty teenager, I wrote heart-rending love
songs about girls who wouldn't look at me twice.
There was nothing I liked more than music, and my
instinctive desire to emulate everything I liked
meant that, while ever I bought records, I would
always want to make them myself. After 'famous TV
actor' and 'hilarious comedian', 'pop star' was the
Number One career choice for me.
But I wasn't very good at it. I tried to learn guitar
but found it way too time-consuming and I didn't
like the way it hurt my fingers. I had slightly more
success with the piano, but ours got sold in the
wake of my parents' divorce and my single-octave
electronic organ just wasn't in the same league. I
wrote comedy songs and recorded them on a tape
recorder on my bedroom carpet, but they were
usually just new lyrics sung over the top of other
people's records and, after years of listening to
myself, I realised that I couldn't actually sing.
Though I continued to write pop songs till I was 21
years old, my inability to either play or sing them
meant they remained permanently locked inside my
head. By this time, it was obviously too late to start
a pop career, and, as I spiralled wearily into
adulthood, I thought it best to forget all about being
a pop star and try to be a comedian instead.
But I wasn't very good at that either. OK, I had my
moments, but I wasn't very proactive when it came
to getting gigs, and when I did get them, I wasn't
exactly a crowd-pleaser. Of the various acts I tried
over that first five or ten years, the most popular
involved me shouting about Ronnie Barker in a loud
thespy voice while stripping down to a PVC thong.
Everything else I did was just too damn weird. As a
consequence I rarely ever got paid to do it and
spent far more time in stuffy London offices honing
my skills as a data entry clerk and telemarketing rep
than I did in my No 1 career of choice. This, quite
naturally, made me very unhappy indeed.
And the music in my head wouldn't go away. Every
time I listened to music, new ideas emerged,
reshaping themselves into new forms in my mind.
The songs became more complex, the hooks
catchier, the tunes more melodic. I started to dream
new music, would wake up with new songs in my
head and hurriedly write down nonsensical lyrics in
a frenzied attempt to remember the tune. It hadn't
occurred to me how strange and uncommon this
was, that most composers write songs on an
instrument rather than in their heads. But I had a
silent jukebox of new, original music continually
playing inside my brain, and no way of telling
anyone what it sounded like.
I was 27 years old before I realised I could make
music on computers. A PlayStation game called
Music, which allowed the player to rearrange
various pre-programmed loops into different
structures and thus make their own banging club
anthems. It soon became apparent to me that, if I
looked beneath the surface, I could dispense with
the loops entirely and use just the basic sounds - all
sampled from real instruments - to make more
complex tracks, note by note. From there, it didn't
take me long to realise that, for the first time ever, I
could bring life to the music I heard in my head. One
sleepless month later, I had two albums' worth of
material and a burning desire to succeed.
But it all sounded awful. Amazing as the Music
program was, the stuff it churned out didn't sound
like the output of a professional recording studio.
And, by getting rid of the pre-programmed dance
loops and making my own beats note by note, I'd
removed any semblance of modernity from my
work. This was the late 1990s and, though I liked a
lot of dance music, all my musical references came
from an earlier time, before breakbeat and techno,
before acid house and drum 'n' bass. Basically
everything I did sounded like it was made in the
1980s, and everybody hated the 1980s. I sent a
demo cassette - yes, an actual cassette - to a music
magazine which praised the music's ambition but
pointed out I really needed to get myself some
better gear if I wanted it to sound good. A brief bit
of research suggested this meant buying a PC, a
software sequencing program and an entire library
of expensive virtual instruments before I could even
get close to reproducing what I could already do on
the PlayStation. Something a humble data entry
clerk couldn't readily afford.
Back to the comedy then. My wife - thankfully a fan
of both my comedy and my music - said maybe I
should try to blend the two, write some lyrics to the
tunes and try to incorporate them into my act. But
in my dark-hearted misery I didn't listen, preferring
instead to mope about how the modern world was
rubbish and how they didn't even have proper pop
stars any more, not like in my day. The pop stars of
my day were heroes who wore too much make-up
and ridiculous outfits and dared to make themselves
look silly in pursuit of a chart hit. Not like these
stupid shoe-gazing guitar bands and pathetic
faceless dance acts who spend way too much time
trying to look cool when in fact they're just boring
dullards in jeans and t-shirts who all look exactly the
same. No wonder our country's going down the pan.
I suppose that's when it dawned on me. That
instead of moaning about why modern music was
rubbish, I should make my own antidote to it. That
instead of rejecting the way my gear sounded, I
should embrace it. And that instead of worrying
about being completely out of step with the times, I
should deliberately go out of my way to capitalize
on that fact. From that moment on, I decided I
should model my act on the New Romantics of the
early 1980s. I would wear outrageous fetish clothing
and smother myself in make-up. I quickly thought
up a suitably pretentious name, taking the 'Gary'
from Gary Numan, the 'Strange' from Steve Strange
and the 'Le' from Simon Le Bon, and before I knew
it, I was no longer plain old Waen Shepherd. I was
the New Romantic pop star Gary Le Strange.
I then spent the next two years avoiding it. Despite
the continual protestations of my wife, who thought
it was the best idea anyone had ever had in the
entire history of humanity, I wasn't convinced it
would work. I'd never played my music live for a
start, so had no idea whether anyone would like it. I
was also a bit concerned about how commercial it
all seemed. Nostalgia was big business and, even
though everybody thought the 1980s were an
embarrassing pile of big hair and shoulder pads that
was best swept under our collective cultural carpet
and forgotten about, the kids who grew up in those
years were now moving into their prime and
dictating the cultural terms of the nation. Around
the turn of the Millennium, the tide of public
opinion started to turn away from the 70s-inspired
sounds of the 90s and the forgotten "Me decade"
started coming back into fashion.
While I was procrastinating about Gary Le Strange,
the charts slowly filled up with dance tracks based
on Gary Numan riffs - like Armand van Helden's
Koochy, Where's Your Head At? by Basement Jaxx
and The Sugababes' version of Freak Like Me. Steve
Strange wrote an autobiography called Blitzed
which joined the life stories of Boy George and Marc
Almond on my "must read" list. Bands reformed for
TV shows like VH1's Bands Reunited and lucrative
Here and Now nostalgia tours. And then, crucially,
Adam Ant got sectioned after throwing a car
alternator through a pub window and threatening a
bunch of onlookers with an antique revolver, starkly
proving to everyone who hadn't already noticed
that he wasn't just some has-been teen idol in
lipstick but in fact a deeply eccentric individual
whose life and work were worthy of much greater
scrutiny than they'd already been given. All of which
threw early 80s pop very much back into the
cultural limelight.
In fact, it was such an auspicious time to create a
comedy character based on the New Romantics -
and such an obvious target to pick if you wanted to
parody anything at all - that I worried it would look
too cynical, too commercially driven, and that
somehow this would harm me. I was a creative
artist, or so I thought. I didn't want to spend the rest
of my life being referred to as "that 80s guy." The
idea that people would think of me as some kind of
vapid nostalgia merchant made me feel physically
sick.
Then again, I reasoned, the New Romantics weren't
that commercial. Their best stuff was weird and
depressing and angular and arty. They were more
likely to sing about grotty bedsits and futuristic rape
machines and giant records that grow to the size of
the solar system than they were about boys
meeting girls and happily dancing in the moonlight.
It struck me that if I was ever going to be a pop star,
that's the kind of pop star I would be. I also worried
that if someone else did it - and if I didn't hurry up,
there was a greater possibility that they might -
they'd emphasise the big hair and the shoulder
pads, confound it all with yuppies and Thatcherism
and totally ignore the weird, dark side. Worse still
was the idea that they might actually make a
success of it, and I'd spend the rest of my life hating
myself for not having had the balls to run with it
when I had the chance.
I was terrified though. Largely of failure. This was a
massive job - character creation on a scale I'd never
really considered before. I wasn't sure I could pull it
off. But that was nothing compared with my fear of
success. Because if I did pull it off, it had the
potential to be massive. Good comedy songs were
hard to come by, convincing comedy pop stars even
rarer. With the right idea at the right time, Gary Le
Strange could be stratospherically huge. I'd spent so
long hiding behind a nicotine-soaked cloud of
obscurity that the thought of success seemed so
alien, so desperately remote, that it almost seemed
threatening. Did I have the courage to give up my
comfortable penniless anonymity and reach for a
successful future, where I might not only be loved
and praised but also hated, mocked and judged?
I was able to postpone a decision even longer
thanks to a stroke of bizarre good fortune, when a
sideline in animation got seen by someone at
Channel 4 and I ended up being asked to direct a 12-
minute cartoon for the Comedy Lab series. This
dovetailed with me finally finding an agent and
allowed me to spend nine paid months sitting in
front of a computer screen looking at CGI pictures
rather than worrying about whether or not I should
be making New Wave pop music. Fortunately, these
months only served to teach me that I never wanted
to make another animation as long as I lived, and
before long I was itching to get back on stage. I
quickly formed a double act with my friend Simon
Farnaby. It was only a matter of time before Gary Le
Strange became an integral part of our stage show.
Gary made his first public appearance at a gay club
called Barcode on Archer Street in Soho, where we
did regular sketch comedy nights for a largely
clueless audience. Gary at this stage was a
psychotic, drug-addled has-been trying to make a
comeback. I sang a song called Sex Dummy, about a
man who falls in love with a shop-window
mannequin, before raping it, discarding it in a skip
and finally becoming it. I didn't realise it at the time
but I suppose it was an allegory for what I was doing
to the New Romantics. It went down well enough to
warrant another go, so I added another song called
Geometry which emphasised the character's lonely
weirdness and placed him in a more down-to-earth
context. All my mates loved it but the public at large
weren't that impressed. I entered a few stand-up
competitions in the summer of 2002 but no one
really saw any potential in my act. I made a few
recordings which were frankly rather terrible and,
by the end of the year, I was ready to give up on it
and move onto something else.
But my wife wouldn't let it go. And, when Simon got
too busy and our double act bit the dust, Gary Le
Strange was the only option left. So at the beginning
of 2003, I redoubled the effort. The songs got better
- Ballerina and Grey were more sophisticated and,
crucially, funnier than the first two. I worked harder
on the character, intensely studying biographies and
interviews to find the right manner, the right stance,
the right tone of voice. It struck me he'd be much
more fun to write if I ditched the idea that he was
making a comeback and pitched him more as a guy
who had never even been there in the first place - a
sad, deluded anachronism who believed
wholeheartedly in a pure synthpop vision, a man
out of time who was riding the crest of a new wave
into what he hoped was a glorious electronic future.
Just like the New Romantics, he hated being called a
New Romantic (he preferred 'Neo-Regency Face
Warrior') and would do anything to avoid being
associated with the term. But just like the New
Romantics, he was destined to be a flash in the pan,
a glorious moment of hopeful creativity where
everything coalesces into one beautiful freeze-
frame of infinite potential, then evolves into
something slightly less appealing and eventually
disappears.
It was quite late in the day - February 2003 - when it
became clear it was now or never. The act would
never progress unless I did what all comedians are
supposed to do and take an hour-long show to the
Edinburgh Fringe. It was a conversation with Danny
Robins that did the trick - he basically said the
timing was right and that, if I didn't do it now, the
moment would be lost forever. And for some reason
I believed him. He introduced me to a company
called It's Alright for Some who were only too happy
to produce the show and within a couple of weeks I
was in a studio having the photos done for the
poster.
From then on, everything moved at a lightning pace.
I had four months to write four more songs and an
hour-long character monologue, while still trying to
hold down a day job as a media analyst and
somehow continue to pay my share of the rent. To
aid my speed, I started to devour all the inspiration I
could find - CDs, vinyl, books, documentaries -
anything I could get my hands on. The result was
Polaroid Suitcase, an hour-long show about a 31-
year-old wannabe New Romantic pop singer who'd
been doing it forever but never achieved a thing.
Yet still he carried the vague hope that he might one
day be a star, "like the Gods I saw dancing on Top of
the Pops." The character blossomed from a one-
dimensional nutcase into a multi-layered loner,
painfully sincere but sadly deluded, with a detailed
back story about his fractured relationships and his
total failure to make a mark, ending with a rallying
cry to join him in his doomed but weirdly plausible
mission to reshape the world in his own image. In
many ways, it was far more autobiographical than
anyone realised.
You'd have thought with all this I'd have enough on
my plate, but no. Never having been one to give
myself an easy ride, I decided to give him his own
website. Ostensibly run by a fictional pair of crazed
fans called Tracy and Michelle, who adored
everything Gary did with a psychotic intensity, it
served as a surprisingly effective promotional tool.
And then, on top of all that, I decided to record an
album.
My experience as a record producer and sound
engineer was minimal to say the least, and the
equipment at my disposal was primitive even by the
standards of the time. But I did have a fair inkling of
how to go about recording something vaguely
listenable and, though my attempts thus far to
record Gary Le Strange had all been abysmal, I was
determined to get it right. Initially I wanted ten
tracks on the disc, but I just didn't have time, so I
opted to record only eight, hoping a smaller
workload might give me a greater chance of
success. The new songs - an Adam Ant-inspired
piece called Prince Charles, a Japan-influenced song
called I'm Japanese, a John Foxx/Human League
hybrid called Individuals and the Gary Numan
tribute Is My Toaster Sentient? - all had to be top-
notch if I was to make this project work.
The music was, with one exception, all created in a
two-bedroom flat in Walthamstow, East London, on
a program called MTV Music Generator for the
PlayStation2, the tracks loaded one by one (via a
MiniDisc recorder) onto a PC, before being
processed in a program called Sound Forge (which
allowed me to add effects like reverb and distortion)
and reassembled in a film editing program called
Adobe Premiere. The only exception (apart from a
few sound effects here and there) was Prince
Charles, which still utilised sounds from the
PlayStation but added a few instruments from
another program called Fruity Loops (an experiment
I quickly abandoned, mainly for reasons of time and
money). The vocals were recorded on a Shure SM58
- the cheapest microphone I could get, and not one
particularly suited for studio recording - before
being loaded into Premiere alongside the backing
track and finally mixed down to a master file.
Looking back, it was an insanely complicated
system, but I didn't have the time or the money to
upgrade to anything better.
The result was as good as I could possibly make it.
I'd never strived so hard for perfection in anything
I'd previously done and, though I'll always be too
close to it to be able to view it objectively (I hate
watching or listening to anything I've ever made or
been in - I only ever see the mistakes), if I listen to
what others tell me, I appear to have pulled it off.
It's clear it hasn't been made at a top professional
studio, but it sounds much better than a typical
amateur bedroom recording. It's still raw in places -
listening to it now I hear various pops and clicks
where the sound distorts as the volume gets too
high - but those moments are relatively few and,
nine years on, I'm surprised by how clear and
punchy everything is, how detailed the
arrangements are. I became a better singer later on
but the voice here isn't too flat. As for the mastering
- I always thought I could probably do a better job,
but revisiting it now, with more experience and
more professional audio mastering tools at my
disposal, I've discovered that no matter what I try to
do to make the master tapes sound better, I always
end up making them sound worse. Having lost the
original multi-track files long ago, these master files
are all that exists, and there's nothing I can do to
make them sound any better. What you'll hear if
you download these tracks now are the same,
unaltered files I made in that suburban bedroom in
Walthamstow in the spring of 2003.
It could all have been a massive, expensive, time-
consuming mistake. Fortunately for me, the live
show was an enormous critical success. An early
slew of four and five star reviews meshed with a
generous word-of-mouth buzz to guarantee me a
sell-out audience for the second half of the run and
a fair appraisal by the Perrier panel, somehow
unexpectedly and brilliantly resulting in me winning
the Perrier Award for Best Newcomer. After a brief
bidding war, I won a TV script development deal
with the BBC, a regular slot on the BBC radio series
The Day the Music Died and, at the ripe old age of
31, finally embarked on a solid, tangible career as an
actor, comedian and comedy songwriter. Gary Le
Strange spent a few hectic months as the next big
thing before everyone moved onto the next next big
thing and, after two more live shows and two more
albums, he nosedived into obscurity. By the end of
2007, I resolved to stop being him and got on with
something else.
As for the album, I only ever pressed a limited run,
which I sold at gigs and on my website until I ran out
many years ago. I always meant to re-release it as a
download but for various reasons never got around
to it. But it feels long enough ago now to be able to
look at it with fondness rather than embarrassment.
I no longer fear being "that 80s guy" so this feels like
a good time to give Gary's music a wider release at
last. I just want to finish by extending my eternal
gratitude to all the many, many wonderful and
talented people who believed in Gary Le Strange
and helped me through that difficult but thrilling
summer in 2003 - not least my beautiful wife Katy.
It's thanks to you that I've never had to go back to
being a data entry clerk, and that, for one brief,
fantastical moment, I finally became a pop star.
Waen Shepherd, November 2012