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Bido Lito! February 2015
Sci-Fi Torch Songs
With ESA SHIELDS
Words: Richard Lewis
Photography: Keith Ainsworth / arkimages.co.uk
Devonshire Road, Toxteth, L8, is one of Liverpool’s lesserknown thoroughfares when it comes to musical connections,
rather unfairly as it turns out. The road’s capacious Victorian
mansions provided lodgings for some of the city’s most famed
mavericks in the early 1980s, with Number 20 serving as the
de facto Echo & The Bunnymen HQ through drummer Pete de
Freitas’ presence alongside Teardrop Explodes leader Julian
Cope, and Wild Swans main man Paul Simpson. Legend would
have it that the building’s living conditions surpassed even those
depicted in iconic 1980s vom-com The Young Ones for squalor,
Thatcher-era desperation and all-round craziness. The house
was also home to an American import described only as “The
Adolescent (Crazy Guest)” by Cope in his classic autobiography
Head On. Now we know her as Courtney Love.
Fast-forward to the present day and Devonshire Road is
still providing a home for oddball musical types, as it is the
current residence of one-man underground pop consortium ESA
SHIELDS. “I’m going to Berlin tomorrow and I found out three
days ago that they’re putting me on in Hamburg too, supporting
[cult electro doyen] Felix Kubin,” Shields explains as we meet up
in his front room-cum-studio, surrounded by a record collection
that looks to be the entire stock of Rough Trade East, West and
all points in-between. “A mate of mine is lending me another
one of these tonight cos I can’t delete anything off here,” the
singer states, nodding at the behemoth of an Akai 12-track digital
recorder that nestles in the corner of the room. “I wanna have
a seamless backing track so I don’t have gaps looking through
other discs as I’m playing.”
Ovum Caper, Esa Shields’ sparkling debut LP issued in
Caper
September 2014 by vinyl-only German label Gagarin Records
(hence the trip over), assimilates a bewildering array of genres,
and finds its resultant off-kilter pop songs successfully bridging
the gap between skewed and melodic. “I’m very glad it’s been
released; it’s a relief, really,” Shields says of the seven-years-inthe-making LP, as he lights the first in an endless succession
of Marlboros. “It’s nice to hear people talking about it, which I
thought would never happen. There were gigs where there was
literally no audience for years.”
Performed almost in its entirety by Shields, the album’s
wayward keyboard textures, obscure guitar tunings and
androgynous vocals lodge in the brain deliciously over repeated
listens. The backlit Lost Time evokes an obscure sixties girl
group, while the doomy synth lines and folk-inspired vocal
melody of Woods And Gullies suggest a mash up of a John
Carpenter soundtrack and Fairport Convention. The whimsical
acid folk of Shelley Duvall and the gorgeous Casio keyboardled pop bijou of Monde Capricorn meanwhile, provide the
Capricorn,
album’s considerable highlights, on an LP where, no matter
bidolito.co.uk
how discordant proceedings get across the eleven tracks, a pop
sensibility always shines through.
Formerly a member of superlative alt. rock unit SeaWitches,
and featured on a Super Numeri-curated compilation in 2005,
Esa Shields has long been a part of the city’s rich and varied
underground scene. A memorable appearance at Korova
supporting Ladytron in 2006 saw him eating an apple onstage,
a move some interpreted by ͽ