1996 / The Daily of the University of Washington / Crayons for grown-ups by Marc Hawthorne, Daily Staff

. The members of The Pastels, Scotland's finest pop export, take their work seriously - more seriously than most people seem to give them credit for.
That's why their most recent LP, Mobile Safari, has only just recently been put out in the U.S. after having been released in the U.K. a year ago. They hadn't been very happy in the past with several of the labels they had worked with in the States (including Homestead Records and Seed Records), and they wanted to make sure they got it right this time. "K and Matador aside," admitted singer/guitarist Stephen Pastel (real name McRobbie) during a recent phone interview from Glasgow, "we haven't had really good experiences." Seattle's Up Records ended up with the best bid, and last month they finally released Mobile Safari in the U.S., more than a year and a half after it was recorded.
The record is an endearing and blissful piece of art, once again showing off the band's ability to write beautiful pop songs that make you want to hug them with all your might. The instrumentation is delightful, especially on particularly jumpy tunes like "Yoga" and "Classic Line-up," but it's always the voice that draws the listener in. All three of the core Pastels - Pastel, bassist Aggi (real name Annabel Wright), and drummer Katrina Mitchell - take turns lending their voices to 11 of Mobile Safari's 12 tracks ("Mobile Deli" is an instrumental). Whether it's Pastel's passionate crooning, Mitchell's childlike charm or Aggi's breathy emotion, you always get the sense that what you're hearing is coming straight from the heart.
"I think the songs are more personal to us in a way, and I feel we've become better at expressing ourselves as we've gone on," Pastel said. "For me, Mobile Safari has a lot more depth and soul to it than the other records. I think it's the first record where we've really started to kind of make use of space - it's the first record that we really thought of in terms of having different rhythms on the tracks. The Pastels in the eighties - we just weren't proficient rhythmically."
Ah, yes, The Pastels in the eighties. This still-young group ("We're all around 30, but Katrina's younger," Pastel said) has been around for almost 15 years, beginning in 1982 when Pastel met the notorious Brian Superstar in Glasgow.
"Brian worked in a record store in Glasgow, and I used to sometimes shop there and got to know him through that," said Pastel. "He had a reputation for being quite an obnoxious person. He used to insult all the customers of the store, but he didn't insult me. So we got talking.
"I met Brian and Aggi roughly at the same time, and that certainly gave me the impetus to kind of do stuff. There was a U.K. band called the Swell Maps, and both Aggi and I were really huge fans of them, and we both wrote to them, and they put us in touch with each other."
After recording a bunch of singles for such renowned British labels as Creation and Rough Trade, The Pastels finally solidified a five-piece lineup and released their debut LP in 1986, Up for a Bit with The Pastels. Little did they know how much of an influence they were having on their fellow Scots.
"I played the first Jesus and Mary Chain record the other night," Pastel said, "and I thought it was fantastic and I was really proud that in some ways they'd been influenced by our attitudes. And just the fact that I know they came to our shows and were impressed that someone else was kind of trying some of the same ideas that they were - even though I think their debut LP was really a lot better than what we were like at the time. And Teenage Fanclub - I'm really proud of the records they made, and kind of proud to know them. And I like The Vaselines' records. I mean, yeah, I feel really proud that people have picked up on certain things of our band and I'm happy that people think a lot of those records are really good."
The singles kept coming (as well as a singles compilation entitled Suck On The Pastels) and then LP number two proper, Sittin' Pretty, was released in 1989. The band toured for a bit, but then they realized that something was terribly wrong.
"After Sittin' Pretty we were completely frustrated with it. We didn't like the record, and I had started working full-time as a librarian, and I was just really burnt out all the time," Pastel said. "I felt that we had come quite far, and then some of the people that we had played with kept referring to the band as a hobby, and I was just completely frustrated. Aggi said that she wasn't happy with it anymore and she just wanted to leave the band."
After disappearing for about two years, the band re-emerged near the end of 1991 with two new singles and a new attitude in their music. What turned things around?
"It was having the courage to break up with the initial lineup, or the lineup that we'd had for the previous four or five years," said Aggi in a separate interview from Glasgow. "It was very difficult after Sittin' Pretty for us to do anything, and everything we did was quite hard. So that's why it took a long time even to do those two singles. We were encouraged when we did those singles because we felt we were really heading in a positive direction."
"I felt that the group had rediscovered its innocence," Pastel said. "Sittin' Pretty is a very jaded record. It has a couple of good tracks, but to me, our band sounds really burnt on that record."
The band's lineup has always been changing (and has included members of Teenage Fanclub and Eugenius), but with the release of those two singles, Pastel, Aggi, and new addition Katrina Mitchell became the heart of the group.
Another singles compilation, Truckload of Trouble, was released in 1992, but then The Pastels machine began to slow down once again.
"Katrina was starting to learn drums from scratch and we had some songs," Pastel explained, "but it took us a while to really put it all together. In retrospect, I can't understand why it took us so long to make Mobile Safari, and I feel frustrated by that. It's hard to understand what happens. Sometimes you can become almost too abstract for your own good."
The time and effort spent making Mobile Safari was put to good use. Every track on the record is a beautiful elaboration on the band's collective interest in creating uplifting and intoxicating music.
"Now we're much more interested in the rhythm of things, and I think we're moving away from more traditional Pastel's kind of songs into something a bit more abstract," Aggi said.
The band's trademark of missed notes both vocally and musically is responsible for occasional criticisms that the band is unprofessional. But on a song like "Exotic Arcade," when Pastel clearly misses the intended notes during the line "Everything I see is you," it only enhances the emotion he is trying to convey.
"We never willfully make mistakes," Pastel said, "but sometimes when we make mistakes we leave the mistakes on the tracks, just to keep the music very human-sounding."
"We could easily just spend a little bit longer and get everything perfectly in tune and in time," added Aggi, "but it would be really dull."
Aggi, who is also an illustrator (her work at the Glasgow Herald has been put on hold with The Pastel's recent surge of activity), once again created the sleeve art for Mobile Safari.
"I think completely the same approach lies behind my drawing and the music, in that I go for the feeling rather than getting a line perfect," she said. "I might do ten drawings of the same thing to try and get it right, but I might go back to the original one because it's got more feeling than by the time I've done it ten times.
"I think you need to have a broader life, really, to make music more interesting," Aggi explained as she discussed the band's choice to keep jobs outside of the band (Stephen is a librarian, though he is presently working in bookstore, and Katrina is gearing up to attend the University of Glasgow).
"I think when you're making a record, it's good to be completely focused on it," Pastel said. "But the rest of the time I'm not really sure. I think balance is a good thing."
Another way the band members have been balancing their lives is by participating in a project called Sandy Dirt. Comprised of the three Pastels plus Al Larsen from Olympia's Some Velvet Sidewalk, Sandy Dirt just released a five-song self-titled EP on K Records. Rooted in the lovely pop that The Pastels are so good at, the EP also clearly reflects Larsen's spontaneous and more rock-oriented work.
"Al doesn't really do multiple takes or anything, he just completely goes for it," Pastel said. "With this Sandy Dirt stuff, we really tried to do things in first and second take, and just leave it at that. It was good, and Al's really got a good energy. It was really nice for us to record with him."
Sandy Dirt came into being during the summer of 1994 when Pastel was able to hook Larsen up with an artist exchange program from the Glasgow Arts Development Council. Pastel and Larsen had been trading records through the mail for quite some time, and were both very impressed with each other's work.
"[The Arts Council] does this all the time," said Larsen during an interview from his Olympia home. "They don't ever do it with America because America doesn't reciprocate too well. They do it all the time with Germany or wherever. Their attitude is basically, find some creative people, bring them over, and they'll be motivated because they're motivated people anyway.
"My idea was that I wanted to come over and collaborate with them. I didn't know exactly what we would do or anything like that, but it was that we'd get together and make some recordings and it wouldn't necessarily be The Pastels with me, but just something that we did together."
Larsen finally made it to Glasgow in November 1994, and spent three months playing shows with The Pastels, playing shows on his own, and recording Sandy Dirt songs. He also spent some time in the hospital.
"Beck was playing in Glasgow, and Al was really keen to play in the show and Beck was really keen to have Al," Pastel said. "So we said we would play with him and do a mixture of Al's and Some Velvet Sidewalk's songs. During the soundcheck, Al was leaping around and he banged his head on the ceiling and collapsed. He had to go to the hospital and he completely missed the show. So Beck thought that was pretty punk rock - to knock yourself out during the soundcheck."
Because Mobile Safari was just about to be released in the U.K., The Pastels were very busy during that time, and so it wasn't until the end of the trip that Sandy Dirt actually got recorded. "I came there ready to get off the plane and go into the studio and hammer some things out," Larsen said. "But it didn't really happen that way."
"In the end, the recording we made was really, really spontaneous," said Pastel. "We only really worked on it for about half a day, and it was really frustrating because I feel we could have done much more. But I do like the record."
The most impressive track on the EP is the opener, "Klein International Blue," led by a catchy guitar line and grounded in a pleasing groove. "Ship To Shore" is so Pastelized that The Pastels have added it to their live set. The other three tracks, including a reworking of Van Morrison's "Slim Slow Slider," are more sporadic and raw.
All four members would like to do more Sandy Dirt recordings, but the Atlantic Ocean is keeping that from happening anytime in the near future. The Pastels were asked by Up if they wanted to tour the U.S. in May, but they declined because they are planning to make another record around that time. Hopefully this time we'll be able to hear it without such an extended delay.