On Helen McCookerybook's Pea Soup and the 7" album as a format

 

Back in January, as the world was just starting to go a bit mad, musician, artist, writer and lecturer Helen McCookerybook wrote on her blog about her decision to create a mini album of short songs on 7".

It's an interesting read, expounding as it does on ideas of 'smallness' and 'bigness' as well as 'loudness' and 'quietness'. 

Her decision to do a 7" album intrigued me in another way: The timing of it. 

Helen began her career back in 1976 as the bass player in Brighton punk band Joby and the Hooligans, before moving onto bass duties in post punk band The Chefs and (later) guitar in Helen and The Horns. She had a long sabbatical from music before returning in the 2000's as a solo performer. 

Previously, when I've heard 7" albums, they've tended to be by very new bands just starting out. Bands who tend to have a lot to say, but who also have very little in the way of resources. Songs tend to be shorter when you first start out, and back in the mid 1990s, pre download, 7" EP's (as they tended to be called at that time) were the DIY format of choice if you were a punk band. 

I have two in my collection, both from 1995: Kenickie's debut, Catsuit City (8 songs), and the Yummy Fur's second or third release, Kodak Nancy Europe (10 songs). Both bands were still teenagers at the time, and the songs on each record are raw, very under produced, and - by and large - very, very short. 'Male Slut', a classic from Kodak Nancy Europe, is probably under a minute long, and the lyrics consist in their entirety of:

A male slut can
Get a drink in the Victoria pub
Unless he
Serves the customers with X Ray Spex
Male slut
Male slut
Male slut
Male slut 
Male slut 
Male slut

Similarly, Kenickie's high speed punk take on the soundtrack to Grease ('Rammalammalamma') also only takes about thirty seconds.

In the case of Helen McCookerybook's Pea Soup, the songs are short, well polished, well produced little masterpieces of songwriting skill and experience. A lot of love has gone into these ten songs, one of which is only five seconds long. 

There's something about the understated nature of McCookerybook's songwriting that lends itself to this format, and I think that's also why it's a format that works so well for punk bands: Simplicity. 

When Kenickie recorded Catsuit City, they could just about play three chords and, arguably, their skills set musically was behind what they were trying to do as songwriters. Listening to that struggle in songs that last between 30 seconds and two minutes is fascinating, even now. The Yummy Fur, having formed their band slightly earlier, were ahead of Kenickie in terms of musical prowess, but not by much: There is a jerky, handmade quality to their songs too, but they feel slightly less frustrated with their capabilities. 

The 7" album is a forgiving format then. In the mid 1990's it was a good way for young bands to flex their songwriting muscles and get a relatively large number of their songs down for posterity without them feeling overawed by the recording process. Nowadays, young musicians are messing around with GarageBand on their laptops long before they play live so, in some ways, the process is slightly reversed. Whether this leads to a greater confidence for young female singer/songwriters when faced with a formal recording situation in a studio remains to be seen. 

For McCookerybook, the process has been cathartic, a labour of love. A seemingly 'small' DIY project over which she has maintained control of every part of the process (even the sleeves are hand crafted and numbered.) Given the highly DIY nature of both Catsuit City and Kodak Nancy Europe, this feels very appropriate.