“Kramer had this massive pad with this huge studio in New Jersey and we just spent two weeks there. We slept under the mixing desk on the most plush carpet you can imagine. He had the most crazy film collection ever. We played table tennis and we recorded the album. Then there was the morning Kramer came in and said ‘Kurt Cobain’s killed himself.’” – Andrew Craig
Back in 1994, Andrew and Jane Craig were in a five-piece indie-pop band called Luminous. They made a demo, sent it out and soon after, to their astonishment, they were recording an album in America with one of their musical heroes… Kramer.
Andrew: “He loved the demo but wasn’t sure how we could get together because we were opposite sides of the Atlantic. So we scrimped and saved and bought our tickets and flew over. We all went over. I remember it was £189 each.”
Jane: “For a load of people who were on the dole, that was a lot of money.”
If you don’t know Kramer by name, you probably know a whole heap of his creative output. He famously produced Galaxie 500, as well as Low, Half Japanese, Gwar and Daniel Johnston. He released those artists and more on the label he founded, Shimmy-Disc. He toured with Butthole Surfers and Ween, and contributed to the Pulp Fiction soundtrack. He was the chief protagonist in the freakish cult-psych band Bongwater. Kramer has pioneered a lot of landmark alternative music. Luminous were thrilled to be under his wing.
During the two weeks they were in the States, the band hooked up with an engineer and laid down the 11 tracks that would make up the album Concentrate – and then Kramer took over.
Andrew: “He had the biggest joint you can imagine and locked himself in the studio with all our tapes. A couple of days later we were allowed in. It sounded great. He’d done a few tricks with it, sending tape backwards and there’s some backwards Beatles on it. He’d added that production layer, which was really cool.”
Luminous were a permanent fixture on the Brighton music scene in the mid-Nineties. They played every venue, some of them numerous times over. They played the festivals. They were known. But their pinnacle remained the Kramer-produced Concentrate, released on his Kokopop label in 1994, and the band eventually drifted apart into different projects, different walks of life.
Nearly 20 years passed before Andrew and Jane, in 2018, rekindled their passion for making music. A year later, and following a clutch of singles, they released an album – Nothing’s Ever Finished – on their own Duck Race Recording Company label. That was under the band name Dreams Of Empire. A second album came soon after, Encapsulation, mixed by Steve Whitfield (The Cure, Pale Saints), after which they changed their moniker to Dreamcoaster. But it’s their latest album, Imaginary Reflections, that has given them the greatest sense of pride.
Andrew: “We kind of rushed our first two albums because we weren’t sure how long the project would last. And we did a few EPs and did some stuff with labels, but it was getting overdue to do something proper. I actually quit my job so that gave me the perfect excuse to bury my head into songwriting. I spent a couple of months at the beginning of last year, in those dark, wintery days, writing, recording. Dragging Jane in and getting great feedback and getting the vocals right. And emerging with what we felt was a good balance of songs. Something that kind of shows all sides of us”.
Across the eight songs that make up Imaginary Reflections, they do indeed create in shades and varying textures. The opener Catch Me When I Fall, is a light, jangly C86 affair. Much of the album, with its pop breeziness, feels like primetime Sarah Records. But tracks like Promise You’ll Be There come with a darker edge and a more propulsive dynamic.
Lyrically, Andrew deals extensively in literary metaphor and allusion. The album’s title points to the fact that a number of the narratives on the album are fictional.
Andrew: “I haven’t had a life full of break-ups but I still love writing a break-up song. I love writing songs about death. But I wrap them up in a metaphor. So the metaphor for Promise You’ll Be There is that it’s about running, but the true meaning is a bit more black and white. Jane’s got to sing my lyrics, so that’s always quite interesting too.”
Jane: “Once I properly understood the lyrics to Promise You’ll Be There, I had to stop myself welling up every time I sang it, because Andrew is imagining what might happen upon death, when you’re parted from your loved one. It’s all about someone waiting for you. That tugs at the heartstrings.”
The album is rooted in late Eighties and early Nineties influences, though it feels fresh and contemporary. That’s in part down to its very crisp, assured production. And, in part, because there’s been a real resurgence in such sounds. New bands like Autocamper from Manchester and The Cords from Glasgow are re-energising the ‘jangly guitar’ genre, as are a slew of San Francisco bands such as The Umbrellas and Chime School, and the likes of Jeanines from New York.
Jane: “There’s bands both young and old. Heavenly have just announced a new tour and a new album. There’s been some really great stuff coming out in that kind of shoegaze space. I’ve been really interested in what Slowdive have managed to do over the last few years. I think they’re far more successful now than they were back in the day. We saw Pale Blue Eyes at the Great Escape last year and I saw them at Rockaway Beach the year before that. They’re doing some great stuff. Bdrmm too. There’s loads.”
One thing that has changed for Dreamcoaster over time is their live set-up. Having toyed with various configurations, Andrew and Jane have settled on playing as a duo with, as they say, “the bass and drums in a box”.
Andrew: “We’ve had a lot of line-ups. I became the Mark E Smith of indie at one point from the number of people I was firing.”
Jane: “You can’t fire me.”
Andrew: “Yes, there’s one constant. Two, if you include me. We did have five of us at one point and it’s incredibly difficult to manage five busy adults. A lot more difficult than when we were all just lying around on the dole. We took about 18 months out of playing live and thought we can’t face it trying to get them together again. It’s too stressful. Then we were inspired by bands like The KVB. It’s definitely a compromise, nothing really beats a live drum kit, although they’re a pain in the neck at soundchecks. But we’ve made it work. We played a lot of big gigs last year, we went to Germany, we played a massive festival down in Dorset.”
Jane: “I have to multi-task a lot. I’ve got a lot of buttons to press, while singing. It’s a bit of added pressure. “
Andrew: “It’s like you’re in the cockpit of a 737. But we haven’t crashed yet.”
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Dreamcoaster play The Grayston Unity on Saturday 21st February with support from Eve Joné. An Ox & Hope Music event. Buy Tickets>
Follow Dreamcoaster on Instagram for news of gigs and future releases.
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