IT WAS ALL FIELDS REINDEER WHEN I WAS A KID...
Having survived the death of the shoegazer 'movement', Moose have metamorphosed into melencholy guitar popsters propping up the bar with Gram Parsons and Lee Hazlewood--and America is calling.
Dele Fadele cries into his beer--with joy.
    Reeling around the top of King's Reach Tower: Steve Double

    Last year, a community of Thames Valley drinking buddies held such a stranglehold on British independent music that they ended up being reviled for their very existence.
    Because of a penchant for effect pedals and a tendency to prop up the bar at each others's gigs where the sonic menu favoured blurred, indistinct songs with lots of mumbling, Chapterhouse, Lush, Slowdive and Moose (among others) were lumped together under the tag 's***-******' by movement hungry journos.
    The fall-out from this was eventually a shift by indie-kid punters away from these etherealities towards flannel-wearing, long-haired, back-to-basics pretend heavy metal, also known as 'grunge', but what has gone mostly unnoticed now has been the determination of '91's culprits to blaze distinctly individual trails.
    Knowing that it you live by movements you die by movements, Moose have never been comfortable with fame-by-association, to the extent that they're now completely unrecognisable from what there were nine months ago. 'Little Bird', the current single, will have you wondering ig you ever really knew them as it orbits the universe of perfect guitar-pop with a dash of upbeat melancholy, having more in common with Gram Parsons and Lee Hazlewood than the Cocteau Twins or The Jesus and Mary Chain.
    You'll learn to say 'amazing' and Moose in the same sentence whenyou hear its little niggling hooks, off-hand vocals and absorb its foreboding atmosphere and, furthermore, you'll be stumped for words when you detect the rich seam of country music that threads through the debut LP, 'XYZ'.
    They say you've never really arrived in music industry terms until you craft an LP, and this is Moose cruising through the city at night in a long, black limousine, supping vast amounts of sake and puking out of the window on to fresh snow.
    'XYZ' is a surprise for being at once accessible, structured and decidedly experimental (not in a Throbbing Gristle sense, I hasten to add, but within the limits of gently sculpted 'songs') while showing that the only limit to your musical horizons are in your imagination.

    The beers are flowing and lubricating our tonsils as I settle for a chat with Russell Yates and Moose (the band's monicker comes from his nickname) in the general vicinity of London's Blackfriars Bridge. These long suffering characters have been the nucleus of the band and its main songwriters through many line-up changes, the most recent of which added Lincoln Fong (bass) and Russell Fong (guitar) to floating member Mick Conroy (keyboards).
    Still reeling from being put through camera paces at the top if IPC Magazines' 29 storey building, Moose is taking some time to get into gear. You get the feeling that conflicting emotions seethe beneath his calm exterior but he's pretty affable--gregarious even. More mature than most rock n' rollers and a father to boot, everything he says is guided by a fierce love of music that borders on the obsessive. Russell Yates also lives music, but his down-to-earth demeanour is in keeping with his trademark resigned shrug vocals on record. They both get agitated on stage, with Russell always fighting to overcome stage-shyness and Moose taking it out on his guitar, but when the show is over it's alway party and silly conversation time.
    We start with both ex-s***-****** enthusing deeply about their debut, but in terms that would bring blushes to the faces of all but the most committed musicians: "the warmth of the strings"; "the use of kidsı toys as instruments"; "classic song structures". Then I remember how someone revealed the fact that Moose never writes lyrics down in the studio, he just sings a guide vocal which Russell has to listen to and try to reproduce, often with hilarious results. This is important, because what the listener then gets is just a feeling; the listener brings his/her own baggage to bear on the words and, if misheard, they relate only to incidents in his/her life. Thus, Moose is spared everyone knowing the contents of his lyrical diary. He's forthcoming on the subject of 'Little Bird', however.
    "It's just about a guy I used to go to college with," he admits, "just the way he lives his life; he's almost a modern-day beatnik, for want of a better expression. He just gets up and goes wherever he wants......it sounds a bit more sarcastic in the lyrics than it actually is, it sounds really nasty in a way, but it just came out like that, I didn't mean it to be horrible."
    An intriguing interlude on the LP, hidden among Moose's sometimes shattering songs, comes with a light cover of Fred Neil's 'Everybodyıs Talkin', made popular by Harry Nilsson and quoted by Pete Wylie on 'The Death Of Wah!', which some people would consider a sacred song. What made Moose risk life and limb to tackle it?
    "We love it. It's a beautiful song," Russell offers, "It just pulls all the emotions that we probably try to do as well," Moose adds, "It pulls melancholic heartstrings and paints a lonely but beautiful picture at the same time. We asked the other guys if they'd like to play it live and they loved is as much as we did, so when it came to the LP, we just thought: 'Let's record the f----r'."
    Personally, I've always associated that song with death; not in a hamfisted, gothic way, but in a way people who've had near-death experiences report back. You're moving form one place to another. You're still there on the ground but nobody can see or hear you and yet you can see them acting as if you're not there. There's distance in those words: "Everybody's talking.....But I can't hear a word theyıre saying."
    Russell: "Well, the listener hears it their own way. To me, it's just about loneliness, about not being understood, being separate from the crowd. To someone else it could mean paranoia......there's a brilliant Four Tops version of it as well, that people sould search out. For three seconds or so, a harmonica leaps out of the mix and it's just like, wow! It leaves you cold."
    Moose: "When we were mixing our version me and Lincoln did the guitars so...you know when it's late at night and you're on a bus going somewhere? You've got cars coming at you, whooshing by, and headlamps in your face. Well, we tried to get that feel on the record."

    Moose have always been slightly misunderstood. By Russell's admission, when they started out, they were very matter-of-fact about the group, but now there are world-breaking ambitions in the roost. I've watched them metamorphose from an unlistenable, feedback-weilding troupe, through the jagged indie-pop of 'Suzanne' to the crying-in-your-beer strains of 'This River Never Will Run Dry' on their third EP, the only song so far to hint, albeit vaguely, at '92's new direction. Moose were eventually going to escape being compared to their peers. America is already calling and they've signed to a major over there, which just proves the old adage, "the grass is always greener......"
    For sure, while pundits in England trip out on every hopeful Amerindie group, there is a pocket of the US underground who have no time for local grungemeisters and would rather luxuriate in English soundbaths from contenders like Moose. To run a twist on this, Mitch Easter was hired to produce 'XYZ'--and he's best known for his work on the first two REM LPs and his membership of Let's Active. Was this a marriage made in hell?
    "He was a totally cool person," Russell says. I tend to be naive and think they're going to be right-on and just the same as me, and sometimes they're not and it's shocking. I took it for granted that Mitch was gonna be like that and he was. You come across a lot of people--and I know I sound like a wanker--who don't care about social issues like equality, but he wasn't like that."
    "Someone described him, before we met, as a Country version of Woody Allan and he lived up to that. Intelligent. Perceptive. Hilarious. He said he never loses his temper but once he was driving along in Winston-Salem where he lives, and the Ku Klux Klan were giving out leaflets on this corner. He was in a bad mood--and he say's he's a bit of a coward--but that was it. He got out of his car and he had to be dragged away by the police for having a go at tha Klan. He was really having a go, screaming and effing and blinding, but this Klan guy turned around and gave one of the best put-downs ever. He looked at Mitch (who has long hair) and he goes (adopts deep Southern drawl): "I bet you wear an earring."
    Watch out for that high-flying, multi-speckled bird. It'll take your breath away. It answers to the name Moose.