Mark Burgess
Great American Music Hall
San Francisco

Our conversation with Mark Burgess of The Chameleons began a handful of minutes after he'd completed a triumphant performance to a sold-out crowd at San Francisco's Great American Music Hall back in August. It was his first solo performance in the states in almost five years, hearkening ahead to the first Stateside visit by the Chameleons 12 years after their demise.

Great hat.

Thank you! I can’t take it off because if I do I’ll forget it and I’ll lose it.  (Grins)  I’ve got a terrible memory for things.  So I thought, if I put it on now…

If you keep the hat on, maybe your memory will improve.

Hah!  Exactly.

That was a wonderful show – really incredible.

Thank you!  I messed up on some things but I hope you didn’t notice.  (Laughs)

To start off with the most obvious question: when are the Chameleons coming back to the States?

We are working on it.  It’s a question of just prioritizing at the moment.  First a couple of warm-ups in Scotland, then Europe in October.  We’re writing at the moment, and we want to record a new record.

Before the touring?

Well, sort of in tandem with it really, because in the past we’ve done it in the traditional way, where you get your songs together, you book a studio for five weeks, you go in and you finish it.  But we’ve done that three times, and we really wanted to do something different this time.

So what we decided to is to take the songs three or four at a time and - while we keep writing - record three or four here and three or four there.  Do it in different places and see what that’s like, because we’ve never done it that way before.  We’ve got about eight tunes [as of] last week, and some of them will make it on, some will be additional tracks and things like that.

We’ve got various people coming to us – really nice people – going, “We’ve got a studio and we’d love to have you here!”  So we’re kind of looking at that.  We did look at a [U.S.] gig in September.  We looked at it, we booked it, and as the bill progressively evolved, it became like…

That was the Done and Dusted UK Music festival in New York, right?

That’s right.  As it came together, it started to get really, seriously mainstream, and it wasn’t really our bag, you know.  At first, we heard, “Ah, well, Robbie’s [Williams] is gonna do it,” and we quite like Robbie even though he’s pop, you know what I mean?  And then Beck was supposed to be doing it and stuff, and we thought, “Oh, that’s cool,” you know, because we quite like him as well.  But then as it evolved it became, “Oh, my god…”  (Laughs)  It was just too much.  So we passed on that one.  But [our management] have told me that we will get out here before the end of the year for at least one show.  And we will do a tour, but the tour will probably come when we get the new record finished.

So, when you say “One U.S. show,” how are you going to pick where that one show is going to be?

Well, one show is rarely one show, is it?  One show becomes like three.  The feasibility of touring in America or playing in America – for the [Chameleons] – depends on the back-up we can get.  We’re working through a label in London actually that has very good connections here and everywhere else, and we’re going to sit down and talk with them in the next couple of weeks.  They want to nail it down because they want the record.  So we’re going to talk to them about who their affiliates are, and once we get the financial back-up, then…because it’s so expensive to take a band out, you know.

You had a lot of related problems when you tried to tour with Invincible.

Yeah.  You’ve got to have that backing.  I mean, just the work permits!  The way it is in the United States is if you don’t have American sponsorship of some kind, you will not get a work permit.  You’ve got to have some American backing.  Artful [Records], who we’re working with – they have Clint Boon and a few other people – have got that kind of network established, so we’re going to sit down with them and talk about it.  But we are really mad, mad keen to get over here and play.

About doing the new album in tandem with going on tour, are you going to be working through the new songs during these live performances?

Yeah, that’s what we want to do.  We have done it before, where we’ve half written songs and just played them.  You get to the bridge and you don’t know what’s going to happen.  (Grins)  You’re in it for the people, so you’ve got to do something!  I remember “One Flesh” was like that, along with a couple of other songs.  We were playing them and looking at each other going, “What the fuck are we gonna do when we get there, ‘cause it’s coming!” It gets nearer and nearer and you don’t know what’s gonna happen.  But it’s a really great way of getting arrangements nailed. 

So, yeah, we want to play the stuff before we put tracks down, have a loose idea of what we’re going to do and just improvise a little bit and experiment in front of an audience.  We want to get out and play some of this stuff before we actually lay it down for an album.  The idea is if we come over here for ten, twelve or fifteen dates or whatever, we might be able to say, “Right, well let’s take a week out and record here, get the vibe of the place.”  I like it here [in San Francisco] – I’ve been looking at studios and thinking about ways we could record here.

How common is this for the Chameleons?  You mentioned once before that Script of the Bridge was recorded by just going into the studio with shells of ideas.

There’s no sort of set rule.  We always, when we get an idea, play it before we lose it.  We’ve done that quite a lot – “A Person Isn’t Safe” is one of those where we just had a rough idea of what we were going to do. 

Any plans to incorporate new digital technology in your recording?

I like analog machines.  I prefer them – we did Strip on one.  It’s warmer.  We write on digital equipment, though, just because it’s great not having to use more tapes and rewind tapes and things like that.  It helps to get ideas down very quickly.  And I have recorded digitally – the Invincible album was done digitally. 

I tend to like the sound of analog, I just do, but it’s getting few and far between.  A lot of people are ditching it in favor of digital.  If you’re with somebody who really knows how to use it, then you’re all right, but a lot of engineers and studios are putting it in and they only half know what they’re doing.  For guitar music, it’s so important that people know how to use the medium.

What’s the name of the new song that you performed tonight?

It doesn’t have a title – we’re calling it “Within Without” at the moment, just a working title.  Reg and John have yet to come in on it – it’s just something me and Dave did last week.

Do you guys usually write as a unit, the four of you together?

Sometimes we do, yes.  But “Within Without” was half Dave and half me.  He was playing the chorus chords and I said, “I’ve got something to go with that,” and we did it.  We’ll give it to Reg, he’ll take it away and listen to it for a bit; other times, Reg’ll be smoking in the corner, he’s got his headphones on, and we go, “What’s he doing?”  and then he’ll say, “I’ve done something,” and play a riff or an arrangement and we’ll go, “Ooh!  That’s original!”

So it can vary – there’s no real set way.  But sometimes it’s the four of us sitting down.  We’ll get the ball rolling with three of us, really, ‘cause I like to hear exactly what Reg and Dave are doing and know exactly what I’m doing. When you’ve got a kit going, it’s not always easy to do that.  So first we’ll get the skeleton, then go, “Right, well, that’s one for John,” and we’ll not touch it again until John comes in.

On Strip you used the digeridoo and something else that sounded like a whirling tube.  Where does that kind of stuff come in and will it be utilized in the Chameleons’ new songs?

Dave plays digeridoo, and yeah, we wanna [use it].  It more comes from Dave, really, because he’s been hanging with a lot of acoustic players at festivals and green gatherings and things like that.  He’s getting all sorts of cool ideas of what to use.

Will rough tracks like “Indian” (from the acoustic album Strip) be reworked for the new album?

It’s already changed quite a lot because as soon as John got in it, it gave the whole thing a great dynamic and really took it up a notch.  So it’s going to depend on whether or not it’s still fresh, if we can freshen it up – because we’ve been playing it a lot now.  It’s enjoyable because we get such a great dynamic.  But that’ll be on the live record that’s coming out, and the video as well.

How did the Chameleons reunion come about? Had it been evolving over a long period of time?

Yeah.  It started with me and Dave going for a drink.

These things always start up that way.

(Laughing) Yeah, they do!

And when was that?

Last year, in August, I think.  I was working with Adrian Borland – from the Sound – at the time.  He had a side project called White Rose Transmission based in Germany, in Bremen.  Adrian had written a song that he wanted me to sing and play bass on, which I did. 

Afterwards, Adrian was talking about going out and playing live, and I said I’d love to do that because I was a big fan of the project.  It was at that time that I spoke to Dave about getting together. Then Adrian killed himself and his tour just all kind of went...

So I came back to England and said to Dave, “Well, if we’re gonna do it, now is the time, really.”  We talked to Reg and John and everyone was up for it.  And then three days at the Witchwood became five days at the Witchwood, and then it became the Witchwood and the Academy and Shepherd’s Bush and it all just fucking – excuse me – took on a life of its own.  We were having such a great time and getting on so well, and we were writing more or less right away – “Indian” was done in like two minutes, so….

Did you ever feel any anxiety over it – like “What if nobody cares” or “What if nobody comes to see us?”

Not for me, because I’ve had a lot of direct feedback.  Reg was worried about it, and Dave.  I think my reassurance came mainly through Internet and the computer – since I got the Internet like about six years ago, when the Web was unrecognizable from what it is now, and actually I found resources like John Caruso’s FTP site, which stunned me.  Then I used [the Internet] to promote the Suns when the Suns came over here – I posted the gigs on newsgroups.  I got lots of feedback and I was amazed. 

But the others weren’t really plugged into that, so they didn’t really have any idea and were a little bit worried about it.  Reg was saying, “Can we fill three nights at the Witchwood?” which is like two hundred people a night, you know.  (Laughs)  I said, “Well, yeah, I think it’ll be all right.”

Do a lot of people email you?

Yeah.  The Web site took some of the strain off it a little bit, because I move around a lot, so I can’t always keep up. I have a computer that I keep at my parent’s house because I’m moving around so much now.  It’s difficult, but I try to reply to as much as I can.

What’s the feedback so far?

It’s just been tremendous – I’ve not heard anything negative yet.

A lot of long-time fans or are you hearing from new fans who’ve just discovered you?

Most of the people I hear from have never seen us live.  I would say eighty-five percent of the people coming to the shows haven’t seen us before but have been buying the records and listening to the records for a long time, and age from like fifteen to fifty.

There were quite a few younger fans right up front tonight, singing along to all of your songs.

Yeah!  I get a real kick, a real buzz out of that.

It’s a great testament to your staying power that people who never got to experience you live are still really strong fans.

It is!  And then there’s the sort of “genres of lifestyle” that we encounter, because you know, everyone’s got their own thing – some go out to these clubs and others will go out to those clubs…. Then suddenly we played – especially like at the Academy in Manchester – and you’ve got all these different sort of freaks all together, all into one thing, and it’s completely amazing!  (Laughs)

You’re bridging social gaps.

It just seems to have gone that way, you know?  We appeal to all locations and all walks of life.  They all get something from it.  We’re playing to more people than we ever played to.

So many bands have cited you as an influence –

That’s very flattering.

But in terms of writing your new stuff, who have you been listening to that has influenced or made a big impression on you?

I’m into a lot of different kinds of music.  We were always – and it’s still the same now – very adamant that we wanted to have our own identity, so we kind of shunned those kind of influences.  I’ve known these guys since I was eight or nine years old and we always celebrated finding such common ground.

But…for me, the best singer-songwriter ever – and I’ve been listening to records since I was five – the best ever was Jeff Buckley, without any doubt.  Dave wasn’t that familiar with him until I played him some stuff from Grace and he was like, “Wow…”  I think that’s probably the most single, biggest impact, Grace and Jeff – who played here, actually, so I’m very proud to have stood on the same stage.

Might you ever tackle one of his songs?

No, I couldn’t.

Not trying to imitate him, but doing your own interpretation of his songs.

Actually, there’s a track called “Music Box” on My Sweetheart the Drunk, which Adrian wanted me to do.  He was so pushy about it!  He kept saying to me, “You gotta do that song.  You have got to do that song.  It’s perfect for you!”  (Laughs)  So, I might do it, actually.

The Chameleons ended up performing four historic sold-out U.S. shows (two in Los Angeles, two in San Francisco) at the end of November. We hope to speak to Mark and his fellow Chameleons when more new material is completed and the band's future plans have evolved.