Pseudo Echo Love An Adventure…

Multi-award winning band Pseudo Echo have always loved an adventure and they’re set to traverse the country across February and March in honour of their biggest album’s fortieth anniversary. The record Love An Adventure saw the band gain world-wide success and a global fan base spanning Australia, USA, Canada, Europe and Asia. It spent more than six months on the US Billboard charts and was packed with hits including Don’t Go, Love An Adventure, Living In A Dream and the blockbuster Funky Town which spent seven weeks at #1 in Australia, six weeks at #1 in New Zealand, topped the charts in Canada, and hit the Top 10 in the US, UK, Sweden and South Africa. Front man Brian Canham talks to Hi Fi Way about this milestone.

Are you feeling excited with the level of interest in this tour which seems to be getting bigger and bigger?
Yeah, it is incredible really. Each tour’s grown and we can see, as you said, it’s been a bigger audience, bigger sales and the response is changing too. It’s broadening and the audience is broadening. It’s great, we work at it, we work at the show and we work at everything being better each time.

Do you put that down to a generational shift in your fan base?
I haven’t really given it that much thought. I’ve always just taken it as it comes. It is weird that you don’t expect that it’s going to get bigger. There was a point there where it was slightly diminishing, maybe fifteen to twenty years ago. We swapped management and that was a massive change. My wife Raquel took over management, and from there things increased tenfold. All of a sudden, the show was a proper show. We were getting great exposure and it just changed. It just built up and we sorted out any weak links in the band. Everything that needed addressing all of a sudden was addressed and improved. Just recently we’ve taken on more new management, so we’ve got two managers now, and that’s made a massive difference. Again, it’s taken us up another level again. I guess two heads are better than one!

The fortieth anniversary of Love An Adventure is an incredible milestone. How do you feel about that number?
Quite amazing, it’s hard to believe, I’ve pretty much done this all my life, you know, so it’s just, it’s my thing. It’s my way of life. To think that it’s forty years is incredible. We still perform those songs. They are still are so well received and essentially they are performed the way they were written forty years ago. There’s a few things added, a little bit more energy and a bit more of this and that, but generally it’s the same production and songs that we did back then.

Is there anything about that album or particular events that most people would not know about?
Yeah, I guess the big thing with that album is it’s the approach and the technology that was available that influenced the production. The first album Autumnal Park was probably unbeknownst to many people it was all performed live. There was very little sequencing or programming. It was just us in the studio, even though we were playing electronic instruments predominantly. We were just playing them live and we put it down in a couple of takes. Then there were a few overdubs for embellishment, and that was it. Whereas Love An Adventure album was very, very different. James Leigh and I predominantly wrote it and produced it in a home studio and it was really close to a finished product. Then we took it into the studio.

We brought in an American producer this time as opposed to the English producer on the first album. That gave it a different flavour as well. His influencers were different and he would encourage us to push things a certain way. It was predominantly sequenced and used a lot of session musos. Ironically it’s pretty much James Leigh and myself on that album, on the recorded side. The songs were a different formula that was James and I as opposed to Tony Lugton and Pierre Pierre. So, that changed a bit. But yeah, technology more than anything, you know, the advent of the sampling device that you could just find any exposed sound recorded into a computer keyboard, chop it up and then press a key and play that sound in various pitches was really the state of the art technology then, you know, the drum sounds, we couldn’t achieve drum sounds like that. So, everything was sampled, regurgitated and processed. It was very creative but a different approach.

The machine remix is really, really cool. What was the background behind that? Was that your idea?
Yeah, it was, I’m very precious about remixes, I’m pretty touchy about people touching my stuff, my creative stuff. When a remix is done well, it’s great. But then again, sometimes I feel like it’s not really me. It seems an unusual thing that artists do remixes. I understand it’s got a market and how it works. For me, I want the fans that love Pseudo Echo, I want them to love the remixes too. I don’t want to exclude them. I try to remain as much as I can, faithful to the flavour, the style of the music that I’m going to change. Even though I’m changing, I want it to be in the same flavour as the original writer. So probably not many remixes are done by the original artist or writer or producer.

So it, it keeps it close in the camp. I just took the approach that, okay, we’re going to give it a four on the floor beat. It’s going to be more clubby, a bit more pulsating. I’ll adopt a few techniques and things that they use in dance music, but also I wanted to keep it in the same musical chord set. I like changing everything in the chords when I do a remix, I don’t like to stay on the same progressions. I stick with the melody, and I just try and find all the chords that are different, that are still complimentary and take it in the right place. It was a real challenge musically that way. I really pushed the envelope in that way. The original track doesn’t have any guitar in it, so this one is going to be quite juxtaposed and have lots of guitar in it and is quite heavy at that.

Beyond the tour what’s on the cards for Pseudo Echo?
I’ve personally had a book on the cards for, God, it must be ten years. It’s incredibly hard to, my book has a certain flavour, but many things have changed in my life, so every time something changes, I’ve got to readjust the trajectory of where the book’s going. That’s still in the works. We are looking at doing some touring overseas. We’re just doing logistics on that. So, that’s pretty much a nightmare and extremely expensive. Our governments don’t help us a whole lot with that stuff, there’s another tour already planned for 2026. It’s mainly about lifting the show, inject more into production and each bit gets fine-tuned and the goal is to get it up back into a real high concert standard.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch Pseudo Echo on the following dates, tickets HERE…