I meet Steve Gullick in the unlikely concourse of Liverpool street station outside a WHSmiths. He’s easy to spot amongst the suits and sightseers: dressed all in black, hair pulled back from his face as if worried into position, greying stubble and an expression on his face that looks like he’s about to either bolt or hit you. But the furtive fight or flight demeanour belies a charming and modest man who sleeps in his socks and managed to make even Jeff Buckley laugh.
With twenty years of experience behind a camera he’s documented some of the most honest and hard working musicians of our time with iconic portraits of Nirvana, Bjork, Frank Black and Lou Reed, to name just a few, and with his band Tenebrous Liar that candour and elbow grease is now his own…
BCR: So how have the gigs you’ve been doing recently gone?
Steve Gullick: We’ve enjoyed doing them. We’ve got another six gigs before the end of the year and I don’t think we’ll do anymore after that. We’ll do another record probably. But I used to think that people wouldn’t take me seriously as a musician because I was a photographer. It might just be my paranoia but I don’t think multi-taskers are taken seriously…
BCR: But you’ve been doing music for a while now. I know you were in …Bender…
Steve Gullick: Yeah, there’s …Bender, which hasn’t split up… the last gigs we did were with Will Oldham. We played Queens Elizabeth Hall with him. My all time favourite musician is Will Oldham, particularly during the Palace years... We haven’t played since because we fell out that night. I’d like to think we’ll make some more music, because I think it’s good. …Bender’s a lot more folk-y and I suppose a bit more avant garde. Tenebrous is an attempt at pop.
BCR: So …Bender is more like the first Tenebrous album, Tenebrous Mitchell?
Steve Gullick: No, it’s even more out there that. The last thing we recorded sounds like The Velvet Underground which pleases me greatly. There’s a …Bender album written but…
BCR: So how come you fell out?
Steve Gullick: I think I displayed a… lack of commitment. They were really keen to go for it and I wasn’t. I haven’t got time to be a pop star. Not that …Bender would achieve pop stardom but to make a decent attempt at it would have involved… trying. Trying to do a lot of shows.
BCR: Aren’t you doing that with Tenebrous Liar though?
Steve Gullick: We just did seven shows and we’re going to do another six. In an ideal world it’s what I’d love to do but my family circumstances don’t allow me to go off and be a full time musician. It’s essentially a hobby. And it’s a way of getting stuff out of my system. I feel better afterwards, it helps me to continue with my life. It’s like fishing. Some men go fishing on a Sunday and music’s my fishing.
BCR: But even weekend fishermen are all waiting for the Big Fish…
Steve Gullick: Well, you never know do you? Chances are I’m not going to… Thing is, if the music did become financially motivated then it would ruin it. The music I’m making is pure as far as I’m concerned. Because I want to do it. I don’t have to do it. You get a band that’s several years into their career and have had some success then they’re a career band. In a lot of cases it’ll still be the real thing but others they’re just doing it because that’s what they do.
BCR: You were saying about how it’s a way to get something out of you and a lot of bands seem to site catharsism as the driving force behind their writing. Do you have to be miserable to write?
Steve Gullick: I can’t write if I’m too miserable. But I can’t write about being happy. It doesn’t float. I’d rather write to somebody than talk to them because you have time to consider what you’re saying. Maybe the songs are a kind of … watch out for that, watch out for this.
BCR: Like warnings?
Steve Gullick: Yeah, it’s a diary of foe. Don’t do that again or… before I started writing songs I started getting tattoos for the same purpose. Marks on my body warning me not to do stuff.
BCR: So instead of getting I Love Tracy, it’s Stay Away From Tracy…
Steve Gullick: Yeah, simple things telling me to stay away from Tracy. I’ve got some that are really nice like this one [four red hearts, with their points facing inwards] represents my wife and kids but this one [blue diamond with a snake stretched into a question mark] just says why are you such a cunt? and it’s on my drinking arm. I’ve got a pissed tattoo that I got done with Ed [Harcourt]. We went to see Sleater Kinney at SXSW and their guitar player has a 27 tattoo on her arm and we were pissed. I was born in 1967 and he was born in ‘77 so we decided to go and get that tattoo. We made the tattooists race.
BCR: Who won?
Steve Gullick: Mine did. It’s that tens years extra experience…
