Get ready to rock to the iconic sounds of the eighties with the legendary Pseudo Echo. Right off the back of their massive national theatre tour, the band will now bring their show, featuring epic lighting and visuals, to the clubs for the 2024 MACHINE Tour. Best known for their international #1 smash hit Funky Town, Pseudo Echo revolutionized the music landscape with their avante-garde style and hits like Listening, A Beat For You, Don’t Go, Living In A Dream and Love An Adventure.
The band exploded onto the charts, after their history-making performance on Countdown, becoming the first unsigned band to appear on the show. Soon after Pseudo Echo signed a major record deal with EMI, receiving fifteen Gold/ Platinum album/ singles, multiple awards including Australia’s Most Popular Band, Most Popular Male Performer (Brian Canham), twelve ARIA nominations including Best Producer (Brian Canham), and Grand Prize at the Tokyo World Popular Song Festival. The band have embarked on several world tours, appearing on television shows along the way including Top of the Pops, The Dick Clarke Show , The Joan Rivers Show, and MTV Live At The Ritz, to name a few.
Fast forward to 2024, Pseudo Echo celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Listening with a fresh new Remix from the forthcoming MACHINE album. Brian Canham talks to Hi Fi Way about the tour.
Congratulations on the fortieth anniversary of Listening. It’s hard to believe how fast the time’s gone.
I’ll say, Jesus, forty years where did that go. Yeah, it’s sort of surreal, isn’t it? The passage of time. When you look back, it’s just a blink, but if somebody had asked me when I was twenty one years old that I’d be doing an interview with Pseudo Echo when I’m nearly sixty two would be hard to fathom.
Does this milestone entitle you to some sort of gold watch or something to commemorate the anniversary?
Yeah, you would think so, wouldn’t you?
Do you celebrate these milestones personally or do you just take a moment to reflect and then keep moving on?
Yeah, pretty much take a moment, I think I was a few months into the year before I even realised, and it just occurred to me. I said, oh right, it’s like we released something in 1984 and I said, here we are in 2024. I said, well, we’ve got forty years here. It hadn’t really even occurred to me till it happened.
How do you feel about the Machine Remix compared to the original?
Well, it’s always a slippery slope when you tackle a remix. I’m sort of a bit anti-remix with people doing them because these days when the remix is done, it’s really just the vocal and then it’s somebody else’s production. I’m quite precious about the production and the sound that’s associated with the name. So, hence why I chose to do the first remix myself and just tackle it from a different perspective, but at the same time trying to be faithful to the original track and not sort of destroy anything.
We’ve had some done that are just horrible and some that have never seen the light of day. I’m not always a fan of it when they just sort of destroy it and there’s just fragments of the song. I like to hear the song, maybe a different production, a different arrangement, but I want to hear the song and the same sort of musicality. So, with the Listening one, I, strangely enough, I borrowed the progression from another Pseudo’s song, an early, sort of walkaway progression of, um, “Autumnal Park”. I just thought this is weird. I’ll put these two tracks together and see where that goes and then just worked on the production and built it from there. It was a nice feeling to give it a kind of a fresh sound without offending our loyal fan base.
Do you think you would do that with any other songs in the Pseudo Echo back catalogue?
I’m going to work on doing a whole album of them, of all the singles in that same sort of flavour, it’s been challenging because we’re touring. Once I get off the road I’ve got to wind down and then I’ve got to get back into that frame of mind into creative production sort of hat. That can be hard to do. It takes me a while to get into that mode, especially when I’m exhausted from the touring but we’re getting there.
Do you find that these remixes starts to resonate with a much younger crowd?
Yeah, absolutely. So far it’s been a great response from our more older traditional fans, but also really great with the newbies, so that is good.
Are you pinching yourself with the amount of touring that you have been able to do with the interest being as strong as ever? It must be a really exciting phase for Pseudo Echo?
It’s nice to evolve rather than just sit where you are and keep repeating the same thing. Since Raquel my wife came on board with management, things really changed. She really stepped it up and she was quite critical of how it was presented and what we needed to do to lift it up and make it more entertaining and more of a show. That’s been the most gratifying feeling that we’ve achieved.
The band is super tight and seems to run like a really well-oiled machine these days?
That is the vibe, I really pride myself on it being tight and being authentic, not drifting too far away from the starting point of the original tracks and keeping it fresh. Whenever there’s somebody who’s a bit reluctant or they’re just going through the motions, well then they’re probably not right and that’s their time. That’s when I recruit somebody who’s keen and fresh and Lula on Drums is a great example. She’s fresh and she’s twenty years old and she just brings so much energy to the band and to think she’s a fan of the band, she already knew the stuff and bought tickets to one of our shows and has ended up being the drummer in that same show.
Do you really relish playing bigger festivals but then being able to play more intimate venue such as The Gov?
Yeah, it is good because the theatre tour we did was something like forty five dates and it was pretty full on, it’s a high spec tour, but at the same time it was good to do a two hour show then, a lot of storytelling and then going off into this and that. Pseudos have always been known as a kind of a high energy dance groove, so it was good to be able to go, let’s see this whole show condense down a bit into a club where people can dance and party on and have a real blast. So kind of covering both bases.
Are there any different focuses with the set list for this particular tour, or more so the show in Adelaide at The Gov?
Yeah, there’s a few changes, it’s a snapshot of the first three albums. We always conclude with all the hits. We won’t ever drop those, but we just sort of mix up a few of the other tracks, the fillers and the ones that aren’t the hits that we move around a bit.
Last time we spoke you mentioned that there is the possibility of a reunion might be on the cards. Is there any progress with that?
It probably won’t now, we did explore it, it didn’t really get off the ground. I was looking forward to it, we went there, but it just didn’t get any further. So sometimes best left alone.
Beyond the tour what’s next? New music maybe?
I’ve started doing some co-writing with one of the former members and I thought we belted out some great tunes, but then there was a few issues there that sort of put that on hold. So, now I’ve got to go back and resurrect that. I’m confident I’ve got some good material. It’s just picking the right timing to get in and do it all. Now,
Sonically, is there much you can say about the direction that you might take these new songs?
I guess that the remixes kind of hint at the direction, I reckon. It’s a more modernised version. Strangely enough, I’ve been really absorbing a lot of the synthwave stuff that’s happening, that’s been happening over the last decade. I love it. I can hear the influences from the eighties stuff and to think this is made predominantly by young kids in itself is pretty exciting. I love that that flavour, what they’re doing with this early eighties influence and that’s probably the same place I’ll be going.
Are there any bands that influence that direction in sound?
There’s a band called Dance With the Dead that I absolutely love, they’re fantastic producers. They predominantly do instrumental, there’s a lot of them that I follow and I love their music and I’m probably going to reach out and perhaps do some co-production, co-writing with some of these teams that I’ve been listening to because as they don’t really do vocal stuff, they just do bed tracks and that’s kind of like what I love working with. I can sort of hear where their head’s at and we thought we’d approach a few of them and see if we can do a collaboration.
Do you think that might be a way to take Pseudo Echo International again, or is that not necessarily a priority now?
Absolutely, absolutely. It would probably be quite double-ended because a lot of these acts are relatively unknown considering how good they are and maybe it’s a thing where it can work for them and us.
Interview By Rob Lyon
Catch Pseudo Echo on the following dates, tickets HERE…
