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Known
to many as the extremely talented guitarist with rock legends
Ten, Chris Francis is rapidly becoming a legend in his own right
as a successful a solo artist. After hearing his most
recent release 'Studs n' Sisters' (the review of which you can
find elsewhere on this site), we just had to find out more from
the man himself ...
MM - Hi Chris,
thanks for taking the time out to do this interview with us
today, we really appreciate it.
Chris - No problem. Thanks for
having me and I’d also like to thank you guys for the album
review, which I enjoyed reading.
MM - What part of your life do
you think your music reflects most?
Chris - I don’t know. I
can’t really choose what gets reflected because I never want
to censor myself like that. I’m pretty sure it all gets
through in one way or another.
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MM -
What bands/artists did you grow up listening to and how have they
influenced the way you approach your music today?
Chris - I grew up listening to pop from
the 80’s – Michael Jackson, Madonna, etc. but it wasn’t until I
was in my teens that I really got into music and it was definitely rock
and hard rock all the way for me. I was really into Bon Jovi from
about the age of 12 and when I was about 14 or 15 I was getting into
Guns N’ Roses, who were about the biggest thing going at the time, but
it was really hearing some Van Halen (‘Hot For Teacher’ and
‘Poundcake’ as I remember - It was a Wayne’s World special on
MTV).
At around this time I met my good friend Rich Barnard and he was really
clued up when it came to the good shit and introduced me to a lot of
great rock bands. It was stuff like Poison, Cinderella, Tesla,
Winger, Aerosmith, Slaughter, Ratt, Warrant, Extreme, The Quireboys,
Danger Danger – all this stuff I never would’ve been exposed to.
1992 was a VERY strange time to be getting into this stuff. It was
like arriving at a party and being far more interested by the people
leaving than those who were there for the night.
I hated the grunge thing and the alternative scene that was going on at
the time. It was obviously a reaction against something but I
hadn’t had a chance to enjoy what it was a reaction against. So
in the early nineties my taste was sort of underground. A little
later as I reached my twenties I started to really get into stuff like
The Rembrandts, Del Amitri, Jellyfish and more singer/songwriter type of
stuff, but as a musician, guitarist and fan I was always a hard rock
nut.
My favourite guitarists are Eddie Van Halen, Nuno Bettencourt, Blues
Saraceno, Warren DeMartini, Andy Timmons, Steve Vai, Steve Stevens and
Brian May. Influential albums are Van Halen ‘1984’, Extreme
‘Pornograffitti’, Blues Saraceno ‘Hairpick’, Aerosmith
‘Pump’ and Jellyfish ‘Spilt Milk’. I’m really moved by
inventive guitar playing and melodic composition. As far as how I
think any of it has influenced my music, I don’t think it’s for me
to say.
MM - You are working with TEN and you
are also working as a solo artist. What kind of work do you personally
prefer? Solo or with a band?
Chris - My solo
career is all about my own material and I have 100% control over it so
it’s going to be special to me for those reasons.
MM - What’s new on the TEN front?
Chris - There’ll most likely be a new
album next year.
MM - What part of writing, producing or
playing do you think brings out the best in you as a musician?
Chris - Probably writing and producing,
which I love.
MM - You also do some lecturing at
Thames Valley University, how do you find time to fit everything thing
in?
Chris - I really enjoy doing that.
It’s something different and it’s rewarding to get a positive
reaction from the students.
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MM - How do you like to relax when not
out on the road or recording?
Chris - I love comedy, so I
enjoy watching DVD’s of shows and programmes as well as going
to live gigs. Going to the pub is always a good use of
time, I find, as well.
MM - You’ve
travelled all over the world with both TEN and your own Chris
Francis band, what have been the most memorable moments, both
good and bad, of your travels to date?
Chris -
Probably walking onto the stage for the first show I ever played
in Japan. I’ll never forget that moment, that’s for
sure.
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MM - Do
you get much chance to see the sights when you’re out on tour in these
far away lands or is it all work and no play?
Chris - Oh, there’s time for it all.
MM -
What made you go for a solo career as well as playing in TEN?
Chris - The solo career actually came
first. I always loved writing music as well as appreciating and
playing it so a band, solo career or both was always going to be
important to me.
MM - I found your ‘Studs n’
Sisters’ album very assessable as a non playing music lover, was this
your intention from the off or did it just evolve that way?
Chris - It was definitely my intention.
I don’t really think of it as an instrumental album as much as I do a
melodic rock album. It is in no way aimed specifically at
guitarists/ musicians, just rock fans.
MM - The album boasts a very unlikely
cover of Madonna’s ‘Material Girl’, why did you choose this
particular song for the album?
Chris - I am a child of the 80’s and
it’s a great pop song. It was a lot of fun to do. I had to
use a talk box to emulate the effect of the male backing vocals and
recreating the strange little vocal yappy dog-like sounds and stuff that
she does in the original was a good challenge.
MM -
Can you tell us a little about each of the tracks from the new
album ‘Studs n’ Sisters’. The meanings behind the
lyrics, any stories about the songs …
Chris - In contrast to my first
album, I wanted 'Studs n’ Sisters' to be a concept work.
I’ve always had a real appreciation for album artwork and
design and the further insight into the artist’s
idiosyncrasies that it affords, and as a result the whole
package is full of references to movies and pop culture (bit
nerdy perhaps, but it was a laugh). |
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Instrumentals
are notoriously difficult to name so when logging ideas I would just
give them working titles to identify them by. So the system I used
was that each one was a ‘bitch’. ‘Light It Up’ was
originally called ‘Disco Bitch’, ‘Used-To-Be’ was ‘Ballad
Bitch’, ‘You can Dance Better Than That’ was ‘Shuffle Bitch’
and so on. The heavy metal spoof was filed as ‘Death Bitch’
and that title just stuck because I thought it was funny (particularly
because it doesn’t actually mean anything).
When I’m recording/producing I’m just constantly reacting to what I
hear in my head, so while I was listening back to the rhythm guitar
parts for ‘Death Bitch’ I could hear that it needed some dialogue
like clips from a movie over this certain section. This lead to
the idea that the song was from the soundtrack of a fictional film of
the same title, which I imagined would be an eighties slasher movie type
of thing.
My cousin Jon is a big film buff and he’s very much into his creative
writing so I asked him to write some scenes that we could record, add
atmospherics and sound fx to, and then insert excerpts into the track
and make it sound authentic. So he wrote this great stuff and we
hired some actors and created the scenes. I then kind of caught
the bug of this concept and decided that each track would have a movie
theme attached to it (though most of them without excerpts).
My brother Sam works in television and he’s really into writing and
showed me a sketch he’d been working on. I loved it and thought
it was hilarious so we worked it into the concept and that became
‘Pickle and Baby Bear’. By the way, most of the songs were not
supposed to be from the soundtracks of these fictional movies; just
abstract representations of the films, so it’s all a little strange.
Anyway, my friend, Rich, had given me a dictionary of hipster slang for
Christmas and I started using this as a source of song/film titles,
thinking the project could take on a 1920’s/1930’s vibe but within a
heavy metal context.
Anyway, so here’s the weird part: I’d read the entry for “studs
and sisters” in the book and felt that it expressed the duality of my
style; the timbre of power chords and punchy drums married to emotive
melody and harmony. Turns out, it’s not in the 30’s slang
book, so who knows where it came from - must have been hitting the
sauce. Originally it was just a song title, but I decided to make
it also the album title because I like the sound of things like ‘Sex
and Religion’ and ‘Guns n’ Roses’. There was a lot of
great dialogue stuff that didn’t make it onto the final versions too
so perhaps that’ll come out at a later time.
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Anyway,
here’s a ‘Track-by-track’:
‘Pickle And Baby Bear’ – One not so keen reviewer
described this track as being “inexplicably titled Pickle and
Baby Bear”. Well, Michael, allow me to elucidate: The
track features dialogue between two characters. One of
them is named Pickle and the other... let me just check… yes,
the other is named Baby Bear. If anyone’s a film buff
they may note the reference to ‘Pumpkin and Honey Bunny’
from Pulp Fiction. It’s just supposed to be a little bit
of fun, and in this day and age of iPods people can always leave
it off if they only
want the music. The script was written by my brother, Sam
Francis and I think it’s bloody funny.
‘Studs N’
Sisters’ – A cool, fun, melodic, bluesy track.
Feel-good rock n’ roll was the plan here.
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‘Sometime
Lady Crazy’ – Maybe if Danger Danger wrote instrumental rock it
might sound a little bit like this. Kind of commercial melodic
hard rock, featuring a reverse-reverbed tom hit break-down à la
‘Nothin’ But a Good Time’ by Poison … you’re welcome.
‘Light It Up’ – funky hard, hard funky, funky hard rock.
I had a lot of fun with this track and it’s lifted by some great horn
parts giving it the kind of effect heard in a lot of Aerosmith or
Extreme, or I’m thinking of 90’s British blues hard rock like The
Little Angels. I was absolutely honoured to have possibly my
all-time favourite guitarist Blues Saraceno guest on this one with his
always outrageous tone and phrasing. ‘Light It Up’ gets pretty
rowdy.
‘Used-To-Be’ – This is a very melodic, soulful and emotive
ballad that takes the listener on quite a journey whilst essentially
resting on a simple, fragile, naked melody.
‘Lift The Dogs’ – A major-key, Van Halen influenced, windows
down, driving hard rock tune. It features my friend and Ten
band-mate Steve McKenna on bass.
‘Riding For A Fall’ – This is about as dark as my music gets,
but it has rays of light that pierce through in places; It’s a ballad
but very unlike ‘Used-To-Be’ and it features a lot of free,
expressive, bluesy, emotive lead playing that I’m very proud of.
‘You Can Dance Better Than That’ – A boogie really, that is
made all the more playful by the live brass section, arranged by Rich
Barnard; It’s a good-time snappy number. I also had a lot of fun
creating the percussion loop for the intro, which was built up from
sounds made by me flicking my cheek and sweeping a brush on the floor
among other things.
‘2nd Base’ – Something completely different;
This one is kind of like 80’s soul, which I don’t really listen to
so I don’t know exactly how this came through my creative unconscious,
but it did. Anyway, it became an opportunity to cop a smooth old
tone and throw some wrong notes into my melodic phrasing. My good
friend Jon Perry plays a killer guest solo after the first chorus too.
It’s ultimately a pop track – I don’t think that it’s jazz of
any kind.
‘Death Bitch’ – How has it taken this long for someone to
write a metal tune called ‘Death Bitch’?! This one’s a
short, sharp comic-book heavy metal track, with horror movie overtones.
Again the idea is fun. There’s a bit of actual shredding in this
one too. Also I lost a bid for a Theremin on EBay so I thought
“bollocks, I’ll try to get that sound on guitar”. I used a
Fernandes Sustainer system and whammy bar to get the effect I was after.
‘Sunday Nite @ The Sauceboat’ – This is again dialogue and is
the sequel to ‘Pickle And Baby Bear’.
‘Material Girl’ – The only song on the album that I didn’t
write. It’s just a master class in pop song-writing, and also I
just thought it was funny for a guy known for playing in a heavy metal
band to record a Madonna hit.
‘Deleted Scenes’ – Gratuitous and reprehensible! I
thought I’d put all of the mindless guitar jamming in one place so I
could keep an eye on it and make sure it behaved itself. The outro
guitar duel between Blues Saraceno and me from ‘Light-It-Up’ was
‘comped’ down from a full seven odd minutes of trading licks –
THIS IS THAT WHOLE JAM. One for the guitar-heads out there.
MM - I know the two earlier solo albums
are instrumentals but have you ever thought of putting words to any of
the songs?
Chris - Well, not those that I’ve
released – they’ll stay instrumentals, but I have a ton of material
in music and lyric form that I’ll be working on in the near future.
MM -
Every musician at some point in their life decides to pick up an
instrument and learn how to play. What was it that made
you decide to do so in the first place?
Chris - Seeing Van Halen on TV
for the first time and just becoming generally obsessed with
rock music – so it had to be guitar, though I did initially
flirt with the drums. Testosterone probably had a fair
amount to do with it too.
MM - What was your first guitar
and what song did you master on it first?
Chris - A
black Encore Strat copy and ‘Every Rose Has Its Thorn’ by
Poison. |
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MM -
How long have you as an individual been performing and can you remember
the first time you ever played in front of a live audience?
Chris - I’ve
been performing for about twelve years and I remember my first time was
with my school band Way Cool Junior in the school hall and all of our
peers were forced by the school to watch! Strange in hindsight –
I thought that rock n’ roll was supposed to be despised by the
authorities – we must have been doing something wrong.
MM - As a musician you probably listen
to a wide variety of music, but is there any genre(s) that you simply
refuse to listen to?
Chris - I generally hate dance and hip
hop music.
MM - What do you think about the current
trend where radio/music TV shows can make or break a band overnight?
Chris - I don’t
think it’s anything new. I’m sure radio in the fifties had the
power to make and break acts, and music-based reality TV shows are no
different from any other reality shite, it’s just about desperately
trying to keep viewer attention while getting them to phone in so they
believe that the whole thing matters and they matter and they can
be sold a cheap thrill, so I doubt that affects the music industry at
all. What is a problem is people not paying for music.
MM - What do you feel has been your proudest achievement to date?
Chris - Continuing to play melodic
rock.
MM - What does the future hold for Chris
Francis? Do you have any projects in the pipeline?
Chris - Yes, a lot. I just need
to prioritise and make the time for them, but continuing to put out new
music whenever I can is the plan for the future.
MM - What advice do you have for any
young up and coming guitarists?
Chris - Stop
reading this interview, get off the internet and play your guitar.
MM - Finally any words of wisdom or
messages you’d like to share with our readers and all your fans out
there?
Chris - I’m hopefully still too young
to have words of wisdom.
MM - Well there you have it folks, the truth, the whole truth, and
nothing but the truth from the great man himself Mr Chris Francis.
We'd like to thank Chris for taking the time out to chat with us today
and wish him every success with his music. If you haven't caught
his new album yet then check it out, it's major league impressive. |