Andy Darlington talks to UV PoP

ATTACK: DECAY: SUSTAIN: RELEASE.

John lunges irritably across the console, flicks brittle bursts of Yamaha guitar across channels, thumbs the echo into receding mirror-corridors of jaggedy reverberations, then fine-adjusts down through gradations to stark clarity. The drum-track fades in beneath it, building in sharp mechanical punctuations of accumulating momentum, and as it balances out to something approaching the images in his head, the irritation dissolves into a grudging smile.

John White IS UV PoP.

Could be he's the world's smallest big-band. Certainly he's more extreme than Howard Jones and provides more byte-high fun than Thomas Dolby. He proves that sometimes it's possible to dance to a drum-machine and retain that human touch. Live, UV PoP is a one-man kaleidoscope of fast-forward slides, tight tense tapes, and clean erupting guitar runs. A slight White boy in black hand-me-downs and a precariously balanced infrastructure of guitar, saxophone and Revox; and the gift of sound and vision. On stage, last year's Indie-chart single 'Just a Game' gets its anti-war message rammed home through shimmering contrails of craftily contrived visuals, while 'Sleep Don't Talk' from his current album goes stumbling into light tripped out with effective strobe while John strips the nerve with lacerations of bottle-neck effect by rasping the fret up and down against the mike-stand. No junk funk and get on down. No heavy-duty posing either. Just single-minded commitment to his music.

He prefers a setting in which he has absolute control, "that's why I'm on my own. I've been in something like seven or eight line-ups of different bands. That's not many by some people's standards. But for me it's seven wasted efforts."

John White gives the impression of height and sparseness, dark hair and studio tan. His seriousness is broken only by shyly reserved slanting grins accompanying an often self-deprecating humour. His album is called 'No Songs Tomorrow'. It's available now through the Leeds based Flowmotion independent label (from Red Rhino & Cartel). It forms a stunning vindication of the sophistication of cottage-industry electronic soundmaking in '84.

We are talking in the front room of his terraced house in a grimy post-industrial out-growth of Doncaster. A room meticulously jury-rigged into the home recording studio that's largely responsible for the album. He provides a guided tour of the equipment: a Teac Reel-to-Reel 4-track, a Revox Mastering machine, and an Allen & Heath 7-into-2 Mixing Desk (quite old and in need of repair). Then the outboards: a chorus and distortion pedal (fuzz box and chorus), and an Analog Echo unit. Also a string machine, a Pro-1 synthesizer, a trusty old drum machine (a programmable Soundmaster Stix), six guitars and a saxophone.

"All my drum tracks on the album — with the exception of one — are done on this cheap Soundmaster," he explains. "I've heard umpteen albums with Linndrums on that don't sound as good — and if you don't believe me just buy the album!" He dissolves into laughter that hacks around patterns of curly leads and cables, before surfacing. Then, "I mean that, seriously. Take a listen to some on the rhythm sounds I'm using. Seventy-five per cent of the stuff you hear on daytime radio is done with either Linndrums or a Simmons kit — and some of those things are atrocious. The Linndrum is not a magical thing by itself, it's down to the producer and the engineer, it's what you do with it. Listen to 'Hiroshima mon Amour' by Ultravox! (off the 'Ha Ha Ha' album). They use a drum machine on that, I think it's one of the CR78's, and there's nothing to it — it's more of a click track. But it's absolutely brilliant, it's just dead right." A pause. "So I 'treated' a cheap drum machine sound, and I recorded the album here, at home. Four-track really makes you work hard, especially if you're not using it as a four-track, if you're using it more as an eight-track by doing a lot of 'bouncing'. You've got to do a lot of anticipation. When you do a first mix of the first four tracks you've got to anticipate. You've got to fit another three tracks around the thing, and once it's been mixed and put back on you've got to leave imaginary gaps for everything else to slot in. It's difficult. Sometimes it works. But I'm quite proud of the way it's turned out. I don't think people are going to look at it as a four-track album, they're going to look at it as 'an album' along with all the rest of them..."

Three Into One

Despite the intensity of his music John is not a pushy bloke. He got into self-sufficiency not through megalomania but largely through default. He admits to being "difficult to work with. I've got a lot of nervous energy. I get wound up really easily." But part of that, I'd guess, is down to his severe unwillingness to compromise. Yet he served time with those seven or eight different band line-ups leaving an increasingly sophisticating trail of vinyl in his wake. He toured Italy with Red Flame band Artery, worked in Shy Tots with former Fall-girl Yvonne Pawlett, and did the odd session work here and there, but it was the I Scream Brothers that provided the blueprint, "the stepping stone into" UV PoP. There were two vocalists/lyricists, with John providing the entire instrumentation. The Brothers built up a strong Northern following and cut a highly-rated 12" EP for Pax at Sheffield's Western Works. But when the bands other two-thirds lost interest in the project John was left with custody of the Revox, and the ideological nucleus for UV PoP.

"Before that I'd always worked as part of a conventional band, as a guitarist. But now I was given the opportunity to compose, and that appealed to me. The idea of the album is to sum up those last two years," he explains. "It's two years material."

It was Cabaret Voltaire who ignited the 'to each man his own recording studio' ethos in the mid-'70s, and sure, John's probably fleeced the Cab's for what he could get away with. The scrupulous critic might draw some parallels between the UV PoP track 'Commitment' with its thefted American-accent sales-promotion spiel, and the found-sound tape ingested by the Cab's to provide the continuity motif to their 'Sluggin Fer Jesus'. But there again, such comparisons don't bear closer examination...

John White IS UV PoP.

He sits cross-legged on the floor between speakers and record racks (containing everything from Charlie Parker, through In The Nursery, to early Spandau Ballet). "I think there are seven directions on the album," he asserts, "and I could go any way! Or any two! There's just so many options open to me now. It's a really good position to be in. There's the electronic side, there's the straight sort of song/ballad side, then there's the experimental side which takes a couple of forms as well. I'd done the Pax single, and I don't think I could have done myself justice with another 7". If anything I had to get the whole set out on an album. The whole thing out as one package, cos to get the full idea of UV PoP two songs are just not enough — as you'll gather when you hear it!"

Listening to the album you're forced to concede his point. The single 'No Songs Tomorrow', originally recorded under the watchful production eye of Richard Kirk and Stephen Mallinder of the Cabs, and issued on Pax, is entirely reconstituted, and opens up the more melodic song-structured first side. Commercial applications are difficult to assess, and are probably irrelevant to John anyway, but they more than likely lie in this direction. While 'Sleep don't Talk', a stage stand-out, inaugurates the more experimental second side, taking the intelligent manipulation of pure sound to the limits. It's White light, White heat all the way. There's a kind of psyched-out rawness, a nervy urgency about UV PoP that can destabilize an audience, a sheer intensity of concentrated images like he's burning to play and is loathe to let a moment slip by without fleshing it out every-which-way. Something of that quality comes through on vinyl, an explosive compression of ideas that he's artfully built for maximum effect, sometimes almost too dense a force-feeding of sound for listeners of a nervous disposition. There's precious little space for relaxation or the collection of shattered sensibilities. But that's not what UV PoP is about. If you want sweetness and sterile perfection buy Duran Duran. With John White you get solid sonic assault from start to finish, from track one, through 'Arcade Fun' and the instrumental 'Hafun Kiddies' to culminate in the chilling 'Four Minute Warning'. It's a stunning debut spiky with ideas.

A Self-Made Man

"It's good to have the equipment at home and do-it-yourself. You think 'Well, I'm not paying for this time.' So you're not looking at the clock all the time. If I'd been paying for time in the studio I'd have run up a bill I couldn't pay off in four or five years!"

The technology that makes the 'home studio' ethic stand up is now more accessible than it's ever been and John White, through his UV PoP vehicle, provides other aspects to the 'portable intelligent unit' concept of the solo artist. He's part of the decentralization of the record industry. A democratisation of the means of production, reproduction, and audience seduction.

John White is UV PoP. A self-contained attache-case band. Could be he's the world's smallest big-band.