"[Mark has] always been a gentleman to me. I know he has that [dark] side to him, but he can be very charming when he wants to be. I can vouch for that!"
Digesting Coke and chocolate simultaneously. Drinking orange juice straight after you've brushed your teeth. Wearing a fluoro shirt to a metal show. All things that don't go well with one another, no? Well, on first observation, that's how one might categorise the pairing of ISOBEL CAMPBELL & MARK LANEGAN. Before hearing the duo sing in sweet harmony together on their new album, Sunday At Devil Dirt, I would have agreed. On paper, Campbell's winsome, soothing higher tones seem like they would be an awful match for the low, gravely edge of Lanegan's world-weary voice. Yet somehow it works.
When prompted, Campbell herself is at a loss to explain the strange combination. "It's really weird, our voices blend really well. I didn't really realise how much until I was mixing the record and I just realised we have this really good blend when we're singing."
Campbell, a former member of indie twee-pop group Belle & Sebastian, explains how exactly she and former Screaming Trees/occasional Queens of the Stone Age frontman Lanegan came together in the first place.
"To be honest, looking back, it was really quite random," she laughs. "I've always been such a fan of Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra and I knew that I had a light voice. In the back of my mind I was always on the lookout for someone with a low, dark voice and in about 2002-03 I said to my boyfriend at the time "I need a low voice" and he said "check out this guy." He played me something and I was all "oooh, yeahhh..." so I just completely blindly sent Mark a half-written song and then two months later he called me up and he's like "I've written the melody" and he'd written lyrics as well. I spoke to him on the phone and he'd finished this song and sang it down the phone to me. Then a couple of months later he was in town with Queens of the Stone Age and I went along to meet him then." The rest is history.
Lanegan is not the nicest bloke in rock, so the story goes. He has a reputation for being the dark, brooding, formidable type that you don't want to mess with. Campbell assures me that that portrayal is not always one hundred percent accurate. "He's always been a gentleman to me," she confirms. "I know he has that side to him, but he can be very charming when he wants to be. I can vouch for that!" she enthuses. She adds that the pair are on the same page musically and that "I'm quite honest, you know, and I think he's a bit like that too. So if something we write sounds pretentious and shit we'll just go 'oh my god, that's shit.'"
Sunday At Devil Dirt is not the first time Campbell and Lanegan have met to make beautiful music together. (Oi! Mind out of the gutter, thank you.) This new release follows on the back of the success of their first collaborative effort, Ballad of the Broken Seas, which contained a pleasant mix of acoustic indie folk duets and was released in 2006. The album received critical acclaim and earned the pair a controversial Mercury prize nomination (controversial because Lanegan is American and the award is for British artists only). Not that it should have been that big a deal, considering Campbell is without a doubt the dominant force behind the music.
"It's totally my baby," asserts Campbell. "On the last record, Mark wrote one song and I wrote the rest of them on my own. And then with this record I wrote most of them on my own as well."
Campbell is no stranger to making music on her lonesome. Since her departure from Belle & Sebastian, she has released two full length solo albums and a number of EPs. She decides to sit on the fence over the issue of which setup she likes best – being in a band or being by herself. "At first, [after leaving Belle & Sebastian], it was like 'oh, will I ever work again?' But it was really liberating," she confesses. "With the liberation comes a lot of pros and cons, you know. It is really liberating, especially making the records with Mark. The new one was really hard work for me but to be able to realise a creative vision is just wonderful. I couldn't hope for any more really. But it's not always easy. It can be quite tough and sometimes when it's tough – when there's no money, when Mark can't tour for a long time – sometimes when it's tough I think 'oh I wish I was in a band' but it does have good points too."
It's interesting to note that despite the fact that Campbell is the one who wears the pants in their musical relationship, so to speak, it is Lanegan who handles most of the lead vocal duties. "I like writing," she muses. "It's one of my favourite parts of the process because I get to go off into my imagination and just explore stories and sculpt away at things. It's complete escapism. It seems really magical to me, I really like that."
The creative side of the process, as opposed to the technical side, seems to be Campbell's forte. "When I'm writing, I'm in my own house and I'm comfortable, it's private... if you're in the studio, you're in the studio with some sweaty engineer who wants to talk about rock bands or you know, the latest... who's number one. I mean, what do I give a shit about that?" Indeed!
Spending weeks on end cooped up inside a recording studio with chart-obsessed sound engineers isn't exactly Campbell's idea of fun. "I've figured out that engineers that work in studios are all pretty mad. They're all just locked away all the time, so... it's quite tough, you know." Thankfully the album is now complete and a number of tour dates, sadly so far not including Australia, await Campbell. "I'm so glad my record's finished and I don't need to be in the studio for a very long time," she laughs.
After chatting with Campbell for a good fifteen minutes, it becomes clear that she is an extremely sweet and charming woman. It comes as no surprise that someone like Lanegan would be keen to work with her once again. After all, though they may come from two seemingly very different backgrounds, the formula works. Perhaps next time Slipknot are in town I'll bust out my bright pink polo shirt... With the collar up, of course.
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