Of 22 acts on the NME’s celebrated C86 indie cassette compilation, The Wolfhounds, while uncompromising from day one, proved to be real slow-burners, given the benefit of 35 years’ hindsight.

While Primal Scream and The Wedding Present found commercial success (the latter still going strong), Half Man Half Biscuit managed both cult status and consistent output, and The Mighty Lemon Drops and The Soup Dragons enjoyed relatively brief flirtations with crossover fame, this innovative Essex outfit shone bright then split, then regrouped and went at it again, all the time retaining that initial passion for the cause.

And David Lance Callahan, frontman of The Wolfhounds as well as a prime mover behind ‘90s trailblazers Moonshake, continues his creative odyssey judging by long-awaited solo debut LP, English Primitive I, the first of two forays into ‘a concoction of apocalyptic British folk, Eastern psychedelia and stunning lyricism’.

The singer-songwriter/guitarist made use of the lockdowns to deliver a mélange of ‘mutant Eastern, West African, folk, blues and post-punk influences’. What’s more, his publicists have good reason to suggest he’s now taken his place ‘alongside cult heroes Robert Wyatt, Scott Walker and Cathal Coughlan as a prime example of seemingly limitless artistic expression’. 

His impressive full-length, seven-track LP – with English Primitive II, from the same sessions, next – arrives 40 years after David, whose CV also includes collaborations with members of Stereolab and PJ Harvey among others, set out on the (garage) rocky path from his band’s Romford roots.

I covered a fair bit of that ground in my last feature/interview with David five years ago (linked here), but I’ve since learned more via Neil Taylor’s excellent C86 & All That (Ink Monkey Editions, 2020), the Red Sleeping Beauties chapter great for background on The Wolfhounds and labelmates, friends and allies McCarthy.

In short(-ish), Dave Callahan and Paul Clark (guitar) were at school together, starting out in 1980, soon joining Purples Hearts’ singer Bob Manton and drummer Simon Stebbing – moving away from the Mod revival scene – to express a love of ‘60s garage rock, the four-piece initially playing 13^th Floor Elevators, Seeds and Love covers. The Changelings – as they were – became regulars at The Garage, Mike Spenser’s Hammersmith’s Clarendon Hotel-based outlet. When Bob and Simon moved on, they became The Wolfhounds, moving up a gear in ’85 with the addition of Andy Golding on second guitar, Andy Bolton on bass and Simon’s 15-year-old brother Frank Stebbing on drums, dates following at the Rezz, Romford, its promoter Chris French soon helping them find gigs further afield in the capital, including The Marquee and lots of ‘squats, dingy bars, basements, colleges, and anywhere that would have them’, according to Neil Taylor. The influences were already diverse, from Rough Trade and Postcard post-punk to Julian Cope-touted garage obscurities, ‘50s and ‘60s jazz and pastoral singer-songwriters such as Nick Drake.

Slowly, support slots led to influential NME and Sounds reviews, the band finding kinship in The June Brides’ ‘off-key beat music’, a demo handed to The Pink Label’s Simon Down during one of their gigs ultimately leading to debut single, ‘Cut the Cake’, recorded in November ’85 in Bow along with no-holds-barred ‘LA Juice’, Birthday Party homage ‘Deadthink’ and the more languid ‘Another Hazy Day on the Lazy ‘A’’, the first Wolfhounds track that grabbed me (I’d clearly not heard ‘LA Juice’ then!).

Perceptively, Richard Boon wrote in The Catalogue that they were ‘full of big, reverbed, trebly guitars, swamp-blues vocals, repetitive riffs and heartfelt yearning’, but ‘a little too determined to put the rage into garage’. As it was, Sounds single of the week status followed, The Legend, Ron Rom, John Robb and Mick Mercer among their champions, the band on their way, second 45 ‘Anti Midas Touch’ raising the profile, that among the songs on the first of three John Peel sessions.

Debut LP Unseen Ripples from a Pebble then ensured cult status before they ploughed on in a more rampant style with 1989’s mini-LP Blown Away and the full-length Bright and Guilty, the latter being reissued as a deluxe edition double-LP by Preston label Optic Nerve next year. After one more record, 1990’s Attitude, they were gone, barely five years down the line, but reconvened for a 20th anniversary gig, and since 2014’s Middle Aged Freaks collected their comeback singles, they’ve delivered two more lauded LPs, 2016’s Untied Kingdom and 2020’s Electric Music.

I’ve been lucky enough to catch the bands at various key stages down the years, five times between February ’86 (supporting That Petrol Emotion and The Mighty Lemon Drops at the afore-mentioned Hammersmith Clarendon) and late January ’89 (at Euston Drummonds, with Lush third on the bill), then twice more at The Continental, Preston, in more recent times.   

As it turns out, they were back in live action last weekend at 229, Great Portland Street, in London’s West End. Not a venue I recall from my days out and about around the capital, I told him.

“Yeah, most of the ones I used to go to are closed now. They’ve got flats or shops on them.”

Sad, really. We’ve spoken before about venues like the Sir George Robey, Finsbury Park, long since gone, although in that case people’s memories of times and happening bands caught there seem to have made it far more attractive in the memory than the reality was.

“It was insalubrious! It had plenty of good times within its walls though, even if the scenario wasn’t so attractive.”

Last time I saw The Wolfhounds was at August’s Preston Pop Fest three-dayer, a Lancashire visit which unfortunately ended with double-jabbed David, despite daily tests, succumbing to the dreaded virus.

“Ah, yeah, me and the missus got stuck in Preston for a few days with Covid.”

It clearly hasn’t curtailed his love for the venue, though, with both band and solo engagements lined up at The Continental next weekend and in April 2022 (details of both events to follow further in). And so to the cracking new debut solo album – was English Primitive I your lockdown project?

“Partly, there were a few things already recorded, but yeah, once we weren’t allowed to leave the house I basically finished off more than a double-LP’s worth of material and got Tiny Global to agree to put them out, which is nice, so there’s more stuff from the same sessions in the process of being mixed now. So it all came together during lockdown, when there wasn’t a lot else to do other than catch up on my books, film and write songs really.”

Also a freelance nature writer, a permit from Natural England allowed him ‘some fresh air’, carrying out ecological surveys around East and North London. But the solo LP clearly kept him focused too, and opening track ‘Born of the Welfare State Was I’, seems rather apt after all that clapping on doorsteps and raging debates about the future of the NHS and related state provision in this ‘untied kingdom’ of ours. Fellow Essex lad Billy Bragg always talked about things with such passion, acknowledging it was the NHS and the Welfare State that gave so many of us who perhaps would have struggled otherwise to make an impact through education, good health, a benefits system, and so on. Was this your way of expressing similar sentiments?

“Yeah, there’s a lot of that, and about how I literally do think – like it says in the first line of the song – it’s the very peak of civilisation, the Welfare State, we’re one of the richest countries in the Western world there’s ever been, and can afford to support the people who are falling behind or who aren’t as able as others. The danger is, as heard in the song and the accompanying video, that under the surface we’re taking it too much for granted, and gradually – ever since Tony Blair got in – the Governments have been chipping away at the NHS and other parts of the Welfare State, farming them out to private companies, who certainly won’t be considering their clients with too much empathy.

“But as I discovered this morning, because I’ve got a friend who’s a doctor, it says in the song about – half-jokingly – how we don’t have scurvy and rickets anymore. But we do! They’re back. So we need it more than ever, at a time when the whole thing is being eroded by vested interests.”

That opening song includes lines from Bo Diddley’s ‘Pills’, that ‘rock’n’roll nurse going to his head’, and I confess that while maybe I should pretend I first knew that song from the New York Dolls’ 1973 version, going back from there to the original, in fact, that was a song I first got to enjoy via boozy Saturday afternoon affairs watching Wolfie Witcher and His Brew at The Clash’s old local, the Caernarvon Castle in Camden, in the mid-’80s.

“Well, at least it wasn’t the Lurkers’ version!”

Which version did you hear first?

“I can’t remember which, but it was around the same time in the ‘80s. I was a garage rock aficionado, so liked Bo Diddley and the New York Dolls. But the whole point of it is a folk music thing where the odd line is passed on down the generations, and it seemed amusingly, ironically appropriate to the song and popped into my head when I was writing it. I can’t even say why it’s there. It just happens sometimes. You have to justify them afterwards. You write lines that sound good, then sometimes, subconsciously, they fit, or you have to rip them out, write something else.”

Going briefly back to Preston Pop Fest, I pondered over how The Bluebells’ ‘Young at Heart’ should have been the anthem of the weekend, but maybe it was The Wolfhounds’ ‘Middle-Aged Freak’. And I mean that in a celebratory sense. Some of us aren’t quite as young as we think we are now, but still retain some of that old punk spirit. And I don’t see you among the contented pipe and slippers brigade.

“I’m enjoying that. We’ve started to get that. Sleaford Mods supported us early on, when they started, and when I went to see them after they got big, I was jealous of their audience, because there were people of all ages just letting rip, not giving a shit how they looked. And then we started to get that – mosh-pits of middle-aged people! I’m quite pleased that in some way our music sort of lowers people’s inhibitions like that … ignoring that it’s all bulky middle-aged men, which is a bit off-putting for everyone else – you don’t want to get crushed by this greying juggernaut!”

True. In fact, there was almost an invisible barrier between the uninhibited dancers and the next wave of fans at The Continental, if I remember right. Meanwhile, the other song that really grabbed me on this occasion – even more so than the previous time I saw you perform it – was the epic ‘Across the River of Death’. And in a sense, isn’t that almost your homage to ‘Caroline’ by Status Quo’, with that monster riff that builds and builds?

“Ha ha! Yeah, there’s possibly a subconscious element of that tune. I mean, the actual … it’s on a drone, so there’s only a certain amount of tunes you can do over a drone, really, but yeah, I mean, when I was nine or 10 years old, I liked ‘Caroline’, ‘Down Down’ and all that stuff. In a way it was kind of priming people for punk rock a couple of years later. But really, the big influence in the song is Jacques Brel and things like that. I don’t want to get all highfalutin, but it’s like Rabelais and things like that. It’s a broad sweep of like … everything in society and how it’s all going to die, you know. Ha!”

Well, I realised it was a bit deeper than ‘Caroline’, but …

“Is it really, though? Is that deeper than an attraction between a man and a woman?”

Good point. We’ll draw a skew-whiff line under that. And getting back to the album, who joins you on that opening track?

“That’s got Daren Garratt, who drummed in The Fall and The Nightingales. I’ve known him since he was in Pram. We were label-mates with them in Moonshake and loved the band. He’s always been a great drummer and this was an ideal opportunity. I couldn’t get all the guys in The Wolfhounds to play, otherwise it would have been a Wolfhounds record and would have spoiled the idea, and he’s a someone I always wanted to work with. And he said yes immediately.

And I got an old mate of mine, Terry Edwards, to play flute and trumpet, and he always changes things for the better. And I had a regular female voice in Katherine (Mountain) Whitaker, who I’ve known five or six years. I always thought she was an underrated singer, possibly because she was in a very obscure indie band – Evans the Death, a good band but I guess they never really got far. I think she’s got a very distinctive voice. I always thought it was a shame people couldn’t hear her a bit more. And she was ideal, because our voices blend very well.”

How far back does your link with Terry Edwards go?

“I’ve known him since I was 15 and he was 19.”

I always associate his arrival as the Norwich years, with The Higsons and so on. But you’ve clearly known him longer.

“I remember him going off to university. Basically, when I was 15, I was a little punk mascot around all the older punks. I had lots of older friends then.”

I’m seeing you as a bit of a Mick Jones character now, the young kid on the scene, in his case following the likes of Mott the Hoople up and down the country or hanging out at London venues, again something of a mascot to established faces on the scene.

“It wasn’t quite Mott the Hoople for me, but these were the days when well-known bands would turn up to play your youth club on 50/60-day tours, so you’d get to see Alternative TV and people like that down the road. I’d see (Terry) there in the crowd, and there were probably only 100 people at those gigs, so you’d end up knowing most of them. Some went on to be quite well known, like Mick Herbage, the guitarist in Department S, he was in the same crowd and playing in some of the bands. Purple Hearts were called The Sockets then, before they turned into a leading Mod revival band. And I would say the best one, along with The Chords.”

It’s a music community ethos that still survives, and you’ll find David among those taking part in a live tribute to Pat Fish, aka The Jazz Butcher, following his recent death, at an event at Camden’s Dublin Castle on November 27^th. And Pat was among the artists who played Preston Pop Fest in late August. Did David get to know him well?

“We weren’t best mates, but one of our mates from Romford, Paul Mulreany, ended up drumming in The Jazz Butcher, and Martin Stebbing, who played bass on our second album, ended up driving and being their sound engineer in the States. Whenever they were on tour and did a London show, they’d sleep on our floors and sofas out in Forest Gate. So I knew that from that, then over the years we’d bump into each other. He was always a nice chap, and wrote very witty, catchy songs.”

Is there a clear demarcation in your mind as to what’s a David Lance Callahan song and what’s a Wolfhounds song, or is it just purely what you’ve done with them?

“There are grey areas and there are occasional solo songs by me and by Andy on Wolfhounds LPs, but I think it’s meant to be a band. It’s not like The Beatles (White Album) where everyone’s doing their own solo project. There are often songs I write that don’t seem to be appropriate, and either I want musicians on them but don’t think they would suit the band’s playing style or would stretch it to breaking point. Or they’re just things I want to perform on my own. I very rarely write personally, but the sound of them can be more intimate.”

Mention of Daren Garratt took us on to The Fall, but you’ll have to wait for that book project for all that. Needless to say, there was a band among many more than inspired his own path, although he was careful to share the love on that front.

“It was the whole scene at that time. It was amazing. There were hundreds of amazing punk and post-punk bands, and all these people contributed in some way, all blowing your mind every time a new record came out. Everyone from the Sex Pistols to The Slits to even tiny little bands like …And the Native Hipsters. Listening to the John Peel show between 1976 and 1982 was just a mind-blowing experience. It continued to be, but it was this one scene just producing all these …

“The first time I listened to Peel was probably February 1977, and he had sessions by The Damned and This Heat. And I still say to this day that I thought both bands were punk. I had no idea who wasn’t. To me, punk could be loud rock’n’roll and it could be just weird noise that sounded like nothing you’ve ever heard before. And I think that’s a good summary of what punk should really be.”

Rather than the established retrospective view today. It was about attitude and much more than safety pins, spiky hair and all that, yeah?

“Yeah, not what they seem to call punk nowadays, which appears to be trainee lawyers and publishers revelling in their ineptitude and lack of ambition really.”

So, there’s not going to be a booking for you down at Rebellion at some point?

“There’s nothing wrong with that. I mean, Rebellion is largely old farts in punk bands, but a lot of them are good. I was sad I didn’t go a few years ago and see The Weirdos and people like that who’d never played here before. The kind of punk band I’m talking about is I guess those playing on the indie pop scene that just sound really unimaginative to me. They treat it like a hobby, and I don’t want to hear people doing it as a hobby. I want it to sound like it’s their whole life.

“I don’t have any problem with bands like The Undertones and The Specials playing their big hits. When I’ve seen those bands, they’re still putting everything they’ve got into it. And we still play some of our old stuff from time to time. I don’t really have a problem with that. I just have a problem with laziness and lack of attitude, really.”

Will English Primitive II follow pretty soon? You say you’re at the engineering/mixing stage at present.

“Well, you probably know there’s a big backlog in vinyl pressing. Ideally it would be out in the Spring, but quite possibly it’ll wait until October. I hope not, but the likelihood is that the backlog of pressing plants will mean there’s delays, but essentially by the end of December it will be ready.”

And in the same way I asked about a demarcation between this album and Wolfhounds products, is there a demarcation between parts one and two of the solo project?

“They’ll sound different just because the songs on them are different, but they’re all from the same sessions, so I have to say yes and no because, again, there’s going to be some more long-form things. It will sound less Eastern influenced, perhaps a bit more psychedelic, but only because of the songs that have made it onto each one. There are three or four that were left off the current LP because I didn’t think they would go as well as some of the others, and after discussions with the record label we said we’d use that as the basis for volume two, then I recorded a whole bunch of new stuff earlier this year.” 

There are hints of psychedelia, psych-rock or whatever you want to call it on English Primitive I. There’s a Velvet Underground feel on ‘Fox Boy’ for me, as if it’s a lesser-known Velvets song.

“I’d rather it sounded more like a better-known Velvet Underground song! But I guess so, maybe that’s what you get with a bit of fuzz guitar and some reverb. That’s what you end up sounding like, whether you like it or not! Yeah, I bought this cheap digital tanpura-tabla online from India, plugged it in, found the right settings, then jammed along with it.”

Well, it works. And because you mentioned that crossover into folk, maybe that’s something people haven’t previously spotted among The Wolfhounds’ catalogue, but it’s there on songs like ‘Goat Man’, something I could hear Nick Drake sing. You’ve gone somewhere else with that.

“I do like Nick Drake, but the idea behind this, if you strip everything off Wolfhounds songs, they kind of sound quite folky anyway. When we went up to Preston previously {for the UnPeeled Xmas show in 2016, another corker} and only two of us made it, we {David and Andy} were playing the songs semi-acoustically, and lots of people said it sounded like a weird folk band. So it’s not too big a stretch to go to that from this, but I’m just as much influenced by people like John Lee Hooker. I’m not a big acoustic fan, but someone like John Lee Hooker could sit there with his cheap amp and cheap guitar and play this distorted kind of solo stuff – that’s kind of the way I feel most comfortable doing it.”

I was going to mention ‘She Passes Through the Night’ had a Howling Wolf meets Revolver-era Beatles, but maybe John Lee Hooker would have been more accurate.

“Well, the fact that you can’t quite put your finger on all these things is pleasing to me!”

And there’s a real epic feel to the eight minutes-plus of ‘One Rainy September’, also involving the Iskra Strings (John Smart, violin; Emma Owens, viola; Verity Simmons, cello; James Underwood, violin), arranged by Dan Fordham). Was that something you envisaged, or did it just become that epic?

“There were probably a couple more verses! It was kind of pared down to as short as it would go, which is true of a lot of these things. I quite like the breathing space – being able to do seven or eight minute songs. And most people who like it say it doesn’t feel like seven or eight minutes, which is what you’re trying to achieve. The trad rock ideal is something like ‘Stuck Inside of Mobile’ by Bob Dylan from Blonde on Blonde. And if you get a riff that’s good enough, you can just keep going round it for 10 minutes and no one cares, because it’s great. And that’s a brilliant example of that kind of thing. I don’t want to sound like that, but he kind of opened it up in pop music for having long songs and I don’t see why we should step back, as long as they’re good. And I felt these would be worth people’s time and effort in listening to them … and hopefully it wouldn’t be too much effort!”

As for ‘She’s the King of My Life’, I see that as an out-and-out love song, but with trademark Wolfhounds wonky guitars, yeah?

“Ha ha! It’s not really a love song. It’s kind of about the beginning of a relationship and feeling kind of insecure and unsure, but done in a kind of sado-masochistic kind of way!”

What came first – your solo project or bandmate Andy Golding’s Dragon Welding project?

“Both, because to varying degrees we weren’t in bands for a long time, particularly as we’re being parents, which doesn’t allow much time for that kind of thing. We were both writing in our spare time, wondering what the hell to do with it. We managed to use up a lot of stuff in The Wolfhounds, but a lot of the ideas weren’t appropriate for that. I had stuff perhaps more suited to Moonshake. So it was inevitable that we’d have to find outlets for stuff perhaps not so suited to the band.”

That’s something else I wanted to put to you. I know it was never properly a stable of artistes, but if you think of the C86 bands, there was always real diversity between you all, but when I think where you’ve gone with various projects, I’m struggling to think of others among that roster who covered so much ground, taking into consideration not just The Wolfhounds, but yours and Andy’s solo projects, Moonshake, involvement with Stereolab, and so on.

“Well, we’re reissuing Bright and Guilty via Optic Nerve next year, a deluxe edition double-album with B-sides, outtakes and so on. And there’s stuff there where one song sounds like hip-hop and has (The) Pop Group influences, then there’s weird sort of psychedelic ballads, and I’d forgotten about it, to be honest, in any depth, and was quite pleased how good it sounded so many years on. So yeah, even when we started out and could barely play, and people fingered us as a kind of garage indie band, we were listening to John Coltrane and hip-hop as well as the Nuggets and Pebbles albums. It was never limited. We were just limited by our abilities rather than our tastes, and ever since it’s been a way of incorporating wide taste. I’ve got very eclectic listening habits.”

There were kinships though, with McCarthy one such band that weaved in and out of your world.

“Yeah, and I still think Malcolm Eden’s one of the best lyric writers of his generation, yet no one seems to know him. He’s incredibly intelligent and witty and it’s kind of sad he didn’t get to continue after McCarthy much, although Stereolab of course were an excellent band.”

Talking of Stereolab, it would have been Mary Hansen’s 55^th birthday recently, which really makes you think, seeing as we lost her so young (she died after being struck by a car while riding her bike in London in December 2002).

“Yeah, and I like all the Stereolab albums, but I think a little bit of their soul dropped out when she died. I think they’d probably say that themselves to a degree. But their recent reformation gigs have been triumphant.”

And because we were talking about that wide canvas of The Wolfhounds, could you have seen where Matt Deighton would head next after his spell in the band, with Mother Earth and beyond?  

“Matt was and remains to this day an excellent guitarist and played excellent stuff when he was in the band. He was only in the band for maybe six to nine months, but always really liked things like Humble Pie, stuff like that. He was always a bit of an early ‘70s hard rock and folk guy, so the fact that he joined a band that looked and sounded like that wasn’t too much of a surprise! And that was never really where we were heading.

“But listening back to Bright and Guilty, his playing on that is fantastic, and despite the relative straightforwardness of a lot of his stuff, he’s a big Beefheart fan and stuff like that as well, and you can hear that in his playing with us.”

And once English Primitive II is out, will you head back to The Wolfhounds and another band album?

“We haven’t really discussed that, and because it’s a group effort it was quite hard to do anything during the lockdown. But now we’re coming out of that, we’ll probably start writing new stuff, I suspect. I’ve probably got more band-oriented stuff lying around if I think about it. And I’m sure Andy has too.”

In the meantime, you return to Preston for Saturday, November 20th’s Garage Peel all-dayer, a ‘superlative edition featuring the cream of British garage rock acts championed by legendary DJ John Peel’, a ‘3.30pm until late’ event also involving Glasgow’s The Primevals and Inca Babies, among others, with The Wolfhounds playing a special set reflecting their own garage rock inspirations, I hear.

“Yeah, apparently so! We’re having the first rehearsal for that on Wednesday, so we’ll discuss what we’re going to do, but yeah, it might be a little more trashy. We shall see!”

David and bandmate Andy Golding – in his Dragon Welding guise – then return to The Continental the following afternoon, Sunday, November 21st, their sets to be drawn from their respective solo LPs (Andy’s 2019 Dragon Welding LP recently followed by Lights Behind the Eyes on the Dimple Discs label). And then there’s April 22/24’s Vernal Equinox, the pair again delivering solo spots and contributing to a full band performance.

“Yeah, and most excitingly, there’s also Martin Carthy, a career-long excellent artist, and Stick in the Wheel, probably one of my top-10 favourite current bands. We’re looking forward to that a great deal. And Alison Cotton, the viola player who performs on ‘She Passes Through the Night’ on my LP, is playing with her band, so that’ll be good too.”

You can catch up with all the latest news and releases from The Wolfhounds, David Lance Callahan and Dragon Welding via The Wolfhounds’ Bandcamp pages. And for full details of the above-mentioned November shows and April events at The Continental in Preston, Lancashire, seek out Tuff Life Boogie’s Facebook events pages. Regarding the November events, tickets for Garage Peel are £12.50 via Skiddle, The Ferret and Action Records, with two-for-one deals at the latter outlets, and £5 on the door or via Skiddle for Sunday’s solo sessions.