‘In Spite Of Everything, The Stars’ align for LEIN SANGSTER’s astonishing new album

EXCLUSIVE LEIN SANGSTER INTERVIEW

‘In Spite Of Everything, The Stars‘ the new album from Liverpool-raised, East London resident, LEIN SANGSTER, is an astoundingly brave, personal body of work, brutally honest, painful and open, at times the grief crushing and enveloping, yet side by side, the listener is rewarded with moments of silken purity, and unbridled joy.

Audible influences are many, and varied. Sangster’s home town provides several points of reference including The Pale Fountains, but there’s a clear, underlying homage to the golden era of America’s West Coast, and perhaps the merest hint of Scotland’s, Trashcan Sinatras.

“The Trashcan Sinatras later stuff I hadn’t heard, I can see what you hear in the similarities, but ‘Pale Fountains,’ that’s a compliment,” said Sangster. “But probably me and Mick [Head] were coming from the same background really and the same sort of song books and a love of Bert Bacharach and those kind of songwriters, and Mick’s stayed with me, he’s a very good friend, we go back a long time. I mean we both came from like a post-punk background and all the bands I saw when I was a teenager were all post punk.

“I think The Pale Fountains to me, that was so precocious like for Mick, he was definitely ahead of in terms of what I wanted to write when I was in ‘Send No Flowers’ which was my first band. We were just teenagers, but we got really good because the manager had a rehearsal room so we used to rehearse like nearly every day, and then I was in a band called ‘Kit’ which again was more about the song, so we just got better at kind of thinking, ‘oh what’s interesting about a song?’ And yeah, a good beginning, a nice outro, a middle-eight, something interesting.

“But we all got into all those harmonies Crosby Stills and Nash, and Love. I always say that Love’s ‘Forever Changes’ is basically a bible for musicians in Liverpool.  You know, the best drummer Hal Baine by far, that’s like the measure, and so when I learnt to play, I’m from a music family but none of us are readers, we’re all just like my grandad Michael Campbell, he was an accordion player, a folk singer in the ‘50s. He used to do all the clubs and that’s on me mum’s side that’s why I’ve got Campbell in my name, it was my mum’s name, it’s my middle name. I was going under Campbell L Sangster for a while, but then people were getting confused because it was like, ‘what are you called now?!’ anyway, so me and Mick, it’s that kind of like Liverpool thing – Irish families singing shanties together at Christmas.

“But with this new album, it has taken such a long time to get the songs into shape and that was interesting to me. I did work really long and hard on a lot of them, and some of them came easier. The influences are like, I think Liverpool is a musical city, and people like to do things different as well, so I think when you started out as a band one of the main things was not to sound like anybody else, and then the other one would be to kind of like to have something that’s tuneful and catchy but weird or whatever. If you think of The Coral, all the Coral stuff is catchy isn’t it, it’s very, very melodic, but if you think of their first album there’s quite a few weird tracks on it, it’s pieced together with something really poppy, but then you can afford a few weird songs.”

“And I took an age to find a good title for the album, and I love poetry as well. In 2013 I did a year at The Poetry School in London and that just changed everything. I mean I went in a bit arrogant really thinking, ‘oh I’ve written all these songs, I’m going to find it easy to write poems,’ and then I was like, ‘fucking hell, this is really hard’ as time went by!

“We had a tutor called Tamar Yoseloff, she’s a poet from New Jersey, she’s really good, and she said to us the first week, “You do your homework, or you don’t bother coming back. You’re going to write a poem every week regardless of what’s going on in your life, I don’t want any excuses,” and so it got me into reading a lot of poems and there was a poet called Edward Hirsch, and he had a poem and one of the lines in it was, ‘In spite of everything, the stars.’

The album opens with ‘Why Didn’t I Say,’ perfectly setting the tone for the following forty-five minutes – a deep, emotional song, of fitting in, finding out, and forging your own path.

“There’s a lot going on, and it’s a true story. My teenage years I grew up in North Liverpool, it was a funny area. It was really rough, and it was also quite posh as well, it had a real mix of kids. But being different, being queer, and our family was different, my mum and dad were quite different as people – like rebels – and we didn’t really fit in.

“As a family I think we were just the odd bods, and I was a queer child and you can aways spot queer children. We moved into this area where it was quite tough, and you had to kind of fight your way out of situations. But that was like a coming-of-age story where it was like I’d met someone who was like me, but it was like one minute I was hanging out with them, and the next minute they were moving.

“And the mum never let me in the house, I don’t think she ever liked me because of the way I looked, I looked really masculine as a child and my mum and dad used to say, ‘why don’t you start dressing more like a girl’ and I’d be like ‘Oh, OK!’ but when punk came along that blew all the rules out of the window anyway, and that was like fuck that, you can wear what you want! It was really liberating.

“So that was like the period just before that, and also like that fragility in a teenage life that carries with you, it’s that bullying in that kind of way, it can colour your life. I’ve got friends and it devasted them like when they were bullied at school for being queer. You can see it and that was like the line in the song, “There was something in your eyes, Too fragile to hold a gaze.’’ It’s like I’ve known quite a lot of people like that really, I still do, but somehow I came out and survived. I don’t know how or why but I did, and you have to tell the tale, but it’s pretty tough.”

‘Me And This Ghost‘ wouldn’t be out of place on Paul Malloy’s 2024 ‘The Madmen of Apocalypso,’ its jauntiness in contrast to a story of how we all, occasionally, struggle to deal with any number of issues, issues unseen by others.

“It is, and I wrote that when I was really skint. It was when I was thinking of going back to Liverpool because I was fed up of London because it felt like everything was shutting down and getting gentrified, and I was spending a lot of time on my own because I didn’t have any money and I wasn’t seeing a lot of people and I felt like I was really isolated – well I was – and then that song came from that really, and also going around London and thinking ‘oh that used to be there, and that used to be there’ like a ghost and the idea of a ghost.

“It was also something I’d remembered from a film called ‘Wings of Desire’ by Wim Wenders which I always really loved as a kid, a young teenager when I first saw it. There’s a bit in the film where there’s an older guy and he’s going round Berlin and he’s talking to the person and saying ‘oh that used to be that, and that used to be that,’ and when I was younger I was like, that must be mad when you go round the city looking at what used to be there and then I realised that I’d got older and I was going round the city where I lived, and I knew what was there before, so it’s almost like that ghostly thing where it was like a few ideas rolled into one, but it had an optimism because that’s why it’s got that ‘beyond all horizons’ line, because it just keeps going – and it’s nice to play live if I get the tempo right, otherwise I play it too fast and it’s a bit crazy.

“With ‘Beautiful Stars,’ again, this took such a long time to write. It had a different tune and I demo’d it a few years ago and there was something missing, and even the guitarist and bass player Daniel Fell I was working with – I did two albums under the name ‘Bad Anorak 404,’ it was pretty much a solo endeavour and then getting together with friends and family I did the demo – and Daniel was like ‘Oh I really love this Beautiful Stars,’ and when I did it the new version, the beginnings of it, he was like ‘Oh this is not as good,’ and I’m like ‘What?!’

“But you got to persevere with it because I could already hear the military kind of vibe with the drum beat and I already knew it should be quite expansive, and I just wanted it to be like it sounded it was in an open plain because this person’s lying on the floor looking at the stars in this open plain, and I wanted the music to sound like that, and the other tune didn’t, it was an OK tune but it wasn’t a tune that was going to be the vehicle for ‘Beautiful Stars.’

“So, it took a long time and also getting that military beat when I was rehearsing the album with my brother Jim, and my friend Tony Smith. He tried quite a few different military beats, I drove him mad actually, I think he was glad to see the back of me! But no, we’re really good friends, but it was like ‘hold on, it’s not quite right,’ and then we’d go through different snares that he had because he’s got loads of drum kits, and one day I just went round to his to listen to snares, and snare after snare, and then it was like ‘that’s the snare, we’ll use that one!

“I like playing that song live, actually we did it at the Union Chapel [supporting Shack] it’s the right pace. Sometimes I count it in too fast and it’s a pain in the arse then, too fast, but I got it the right tempo that night so that was good, It’s cinematic.

“I studied sound design and composing for film at the beginning of 2000 at the London College of Printing because always in ‘Kit’ and in the ‘90s, I aways wanted to produce my own music but it never seemed possible because I didn’t have a studio, and people I’d work with I’d be like ‘can we do that,’ or I always wanted to be more experimental, and they’d be like ‘what do you mean,’ and I’d be like ‘Oh God, I don’t know WHAT I mean!’

“But when music software came out, Cubase, I got into it and I did a music technology course at Wandsworth Thames Valley Uni and I met this guy from Germany, Matthias Kobble, he really got me into it, software and everything, and then I applied to the London College of Printing. I never even thought of doing a degree, but I was like I really want to do that now and I’m going to do it alongside my music. So when I record, now I know what’s possible because I know I can achieve something sound wise, so it’s helped, but I’ve still got a long way to go with it.” 

And that theme of tough, perhaps even troubled, love features again in previous single, ‘History Repeating.’

“I’ve had a few disastrous relationships but I’m in a really happy one now and ‘History Repeating’ is kind of pieced together with people I’ve known, and relationships where I’ve gone back to a relationship and it hasn’t worked out. And also my mum was addicted to alcohol and it kind of destroyed the teenage years and the last bit of our family life really. I’ve had first-hand experience of people with addiction and I always say ‘your love can’t save these people,’ they’re addicts, they can’t help it and they’re going to betray you and it’s not because they don’t love you, they’re addicted, that’s their thing.

“And with the song there’s quite a few people I knew and I wanted the character to be someone who was weary of someone who had been addicted and then they had got clean because I’ve known people like that as well. It’s like the way it is, people fall off the horse, it’s the pressure. I’ve got friends who are clean for years and then they fall off the wagon – and it’s also love as well, sometimes we love the people that are the worst for us don’t we?

“As humans there’s something about someone isn’t there and equally as well another thing about that song, my partner I’m with now, we had a rocky start because she was going through a lot of stuff in her life and I was. It was not long after my mum had died and lots of stuff came up for me and it’s like I think when people are stressed in a relationship it can bring out the very, very, worst in people, so people behave quite badly. But that’s not really them and you take them individuals out of the relationship and they’re perfectly civilized people aren’t they. But you put them back into the relationship and they’re at each other’s throats.

“But we broke up and then got back together eighteen months later and ‘History Repeating’ was kind of like already written, but it was a little bit of that getting back together, it wasn’t the same story but it was just from previous stuff it’s like that taking a chance, because it’s your life isn’t it? Because who you choose as a partner can really take away decades of your life if you choose the wrong person.”

The album surprises even further when Sangster’s love of ’60s harmonies resurface and contribute a warm, hazy, Glen Campbell, ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’ vibe to the sublime, ‘End of an Era.’

“I love ‘Rhinestone Cowboy,’ and I love Glen Campbell as well, like I said it was like our name – my mum’s – and when you’re a kid you wonder if you’re somehow related even though he’s American! But it’s such a compliment ‘End of an Era’ and ‘Rhinestone Cowboy.’

“I love country music and when I was saying about Mick and all of us discovering Crosby Stills and Nash I meant I didn’t know that stuff when I was a kid, I knew it as like a young adult like twenty-odd because we were a pop household really. We were like soul, Motown all the ‘60s soul, Stevie Wonder and all the crooners like Nat King Cole, and obviously The Beatles. A lot of pop music, my dad was always obsessed with like what was a ‘classic’ he’d go, ‘oh that’s classic that, that’ll be around for a long time!’ and the early ‘70s a lot of stuff that was in the charts like Abba, so Rhinestone Cowboy, my Mum used to love that.”

‘Summer Rain‘ – an absorbing, hypnotic song – is accompanied by a blissfully relaxed video, an exercise in simplicity over gimmick, and perhaps even Sangster’s favourite song?

“I haven’t got a ‘favourite’ song. I like different songs in different times because they all mean so much to me, they are all different and they bring out different things. Even like ‘Minus One,’ that seems like it’s not as intense or it’s like a feelgood song, but musically my brother played a really great bass on that, it’s really quite melodic and different, but he’s an amazing bass player and an amazing musician, so that means a lot because it’s nice to play and everything, quite simple as well, quite short.

“But at the poetry school, I wasn’t afraid to keep chipping away at a song, and ‘Summer Rain,’ that was like draft after draft after draft, so it did help me kind of maybe really make me think of a song like a poem, where you start on one thing and you end up with something totally different. It’s almost like I went through a mad journey with that, and it sort of helped really with all kinds of writing.

“I mean I’d always written lyrics, I always felt like that was a strength whatever songwriting I was doing I find writing the music harder because I always try and write something that’s a bit different musically, or something that’s interesting and that’s hard. I might have an initial riff and think ‘oh that’s cool’ but actually piecing the song together musically I find that harder. With the lyrics it’s almost like I can kind of piece things together and use maybe a good lyric. I can try loads of different tunes but certainly with Summer Rain that kind of was the help of the poets, and I wanted it to be a good reminder that it was the poetry school that was the start of the journey, the beginning of it where it was like, OK, this can really open my mind and take it somewhere.“

“With the song ‘Library Fines,’ that took a while to transpire, but it was around that time of ‘Me And This Ghost.’ I did actually get quite a lot of library fines it’s true, it was before it went digital and you’d get a letter saying you’ve got £2 library fines. It was exactly like a frustration, because like one of these days it’s going to be different, it was an optimistic thing, but I don’t know where it came from, it came from nowhere because I just wrote it on a scrap of paper. It was like ‘gone and got all these library fines,’ and one of the books was a self help book ‘How To Let Go,’ and that’s real, and one of them was an Edgar Allan Poe, so that was such a chance that was out of date.

“It was funny writing that, but when it came together again I really, really worked on it, and I really worked on the tune as well. It was slightly, slightly different, it was a bit jazzier and then I realised the rhythm had to move a bit more like a rhumba. And I played drums on that one and I love that kind of beat and it always makes me laugh doing that, and when I play it with my band I always laugh at the end when we finish it. At the ending – the ‘cha cha cha’ bit – it’s just like really camp isn’t it!”

‘In Spite of Everything, the Stars,’ draws to a close with ‘Sad Song,’ and ‘Funeral Song‘ which pull even further at a by now fragile and bruised heart, the string arrangements on ‘Funeral Song,’ tipping it into genuine, legendary status.

“Funeral Song, we can’t play that live, it’s too much really, but Simmy Singh who played the strings on the album had met a friend of mine on a music retreat in Banff in Canada, and my mate was saying that I wanted to work with a string arranger, and it was funny my friend had gone from London to Banff and met this woman and introduced us, and we just got on dead well. And it wasn’t an effort at all, she was like the perfect person and just seemed to kind of be in my head, we sent each other ideas and it wasn’t hard, but ‘Funeral Song’ especially, I love the strings that she put on that.

“I wanted that feeling like after my Mum died. That day was so spiritual because in the song it says, ‘You left us rainbow smiling…I Can See Clearly Now,’ but we were standing there, and we looked up at the sky and there was this strange phenomena, it’s called ‘a smile in a sky’ it’s like an upside-down rainbow, so there was this smile they call it. It was in the summer, the funeral was in July, and it was boiling hot, and it can be like this weird formation and then it turns upside down, it’s quite rare. And then someone shouted, ‘Oh Mary’ – that’s my Mum’s name – ‘she’s smiling in the sky,’ and one of her favourite songs was ‘I Can See Clearly Now,’ and we all sang that at the funeral.

“And after that there was a series of friends who died, and going back to The Coral, my friend Alan Wills died, it was his label, and he managed The Coral. He got knocked off his bike in Liverpool a couple of years after that, and another friend died and I just found myself at a lot of funerals and it was just like that feeling, I just thought I want to write a song and I’d written this poem about the way I was feeling – sort of like the beginning of the song, ‘Day like no other, hearts come together,’ that was like me trying to process everything and by the time the album’s out it’s another death and my father died a couple of years ago, and so that intensified the feeling of the song really.

“But I just hope it lets people grieve really because when you grieve, I’m still grieving for my dad and sometimes I forget I’m still grieving and sometimes, if you do cry, it can really help you. And that song, ‘Picture you running now a golden summer glow,’ that was genuine where I did feel that for my mum that she was going to meet her mother, because she lost her mum when she was six months old, she was a war baby, and it was like this ‘your mother is calling, it’s time to go home.’ It’s also like for everyone’s mum isn’t it? I remember saying to someone, it’s your mum, you’ve got that bond with your mum, it’s just so close.”

Nobody would begrudge Sangster a period of reflection following this album’s release, but despite the huge emotional toll involved throughout the production of ‘In Spite of Everything, the Stars,’ it would appear the songwriter has already began work on a follow up.

“Musically I’ve written a ton of songs so I’m going to get cracking with the band. I’ve been fortunate to find these people that are really good in the band, and Catherine Marshall, she’s a great violin player. She’s worked in orchestras and she was in one little indie band, but she’s retraining as a councillor and gone back to being a student, so she’s got some time on her hands. And the other two, Tom Dwyer is a really good bass player, and the drummer Richard Eldridge is great, he’s like a jazz, soul drummer, so I’m really chuffed to find them.

“It’s so hard to find good musicians who are available so I’m going to get cracking in July once we’ve got the launch on July 2^nd out of the way, and then I’ll get cracking on the new songs. I’ve got a little basement studio and just continue on from the album. Some of the new songs are sounding good, and that’s what I’ve been doing playing them and writing new stuff.”

Sangster names Love’s ‘Forever Changes’ as a bible for musicians – but surely ‘In Spite of Everything, the Stars,’ deserves to be ranked a close second as a body of reference for songwriters, aspiring or accomplished.

And if your emotions don’t get the better of you at least once during your listen to this extraordinary album, you clearly have no soul – and we can no longer be friends.

‘In Spite Of Everything, The Stars’ album launch, Wednesday, July 2nd, ‘Jamboree,’ Kings Cross, London.

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