Return of the Black Sun: Robert Hampson on reprising Loop
After a twenty-four year hiatus, Loop shocked fans with a sudden announcement of a reformation in 2013. About to play these shores on a co-headline tour with Godflesh, frontman Robert Hampson speaks to us about his absence and his return
For a man so well versed in the art of creating tectonically heavy grooves, Robert Hampson is a remarkably charming and mild-mannered individual. Formed in the grim London of 1985, Loop began as a loud and scrappy psychedelic rock band, hiding behind curtains of hair and walls of sound. But by the time of 1989’s Fade Out, the band embraced sonic extremities and became so grinding and intense that they threatened to collapse in upon themselves.
Whereas their noise contemporaries looked to the skies for transcendence, Loop hammered through to the depths, with their thick, molten repetition, ripping holes in the earth’s surface. Of course, the only natural response to this was to disband, which they did in 1991; Hampson re-surfaced initially as a member of Godflesh and latterly as part of Main, which deconstructed the ‘rock’ guitar until it was no longer a viable option. In the interim years, Loop’s reputation soared in tandem with Hampson’s outright refusals to bow to the burgeoning revisionist trade. Until last year that is, when the band returned to play a short UK tour and headline ATP. And now the band are touring again, this time as a part of a mind-melting double bill with the aforementioned Godflesh. So, what happened?
“I refused to reform Loop for a very long time because I just wasn’t interested,” reflects Hampson. “I had been asked more times than I could count to do it but gradually, over the years, I guess I softened. It wasn't a case of reforming the group just because a certain number of people were saying things; it was a considerable amount of people that wanted this. And being asked by people like ATP to curate the festival and being asked by bands like Mogwai to play with them, it just became a little bit more interesting and I thought ‘Well, I can only give it a go and see what happens.’ If it was an abject failure, you walk away from something very quickly. At this moment, it hasn't been. We have a lot of commitments dating from when we originally announced the reformation so we'll finish those commitments and then I'm not sure what the future will hold.”
The era in which Loop formed was marked by ‘indie’ music adopting a shambling, amateur-ish and ultra lo-fi approach to music making. In retrospect, the emergence of bands like Loop seem like a bold two fingers to the C86 scene and their ilk; instead of fey love songs that sounded as if they were recorded inside a sock, Hampson and co. embraced overt aggression and were arguably more at home amid the studio setting rather than the live venue. Even their Can and Suicide covers were more obsessive-compulsive than the originals. “It was radically different to everything else in the ‘indie’ scene,” admits Hampson, “but it was sonically not a million miles away from what people like Head of David were doing. I don’t particularly like labels or being categorised but we weren’t the only people beginning to embrace a louder and aggressive sound. But I was always obsessive about music from a very early age and I always had some form of recording studio since I was thirteen years old; I saved up all my money as a teenager to buy a Portastudio way back when! I do miss the days of old school analogue but I love being able to use digital systems that are so portable and accessible. Back in the day, you had so little, you would have to make the best of it and that was exciting, it was the challenge. But now you can do such radically different things.”
"We had a reputation for being very loud, this time it's even more powerful" – Robert Hampson
To the untrained ear, the 2013/14 edition of Loop doesn’t incorporate Hampson’s more outré guitar experiments which characterised his work with Main yet both groups have their roots in the cranked-up, troubled guitar sounds of Bo Diddley, Sonny Boy Wiliamson and Buddy Guy. “My uncle Roger was very much part of the English blues scene in the early 1960s,” Hampson concurs. “When it began, it was a very small circle of people, he knew a lot of the people who later became stars: Eric Clapton, The Yardbirds, Howlin' Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson stayed with my grandmother. That's been really interesting; it's only really recently that I'm getting to the roots of what was going on within my family.”
But did the guitar ultimately become an unwanted cross for Hampson to bear? “It wasn't an albatross round my neck, If I had any issues at all, it was purely that when Main was beginning to progress a lot more and there was much less guitar, people were basically talking about me being a guitar player but it was very difficult at the time to convey that the guitar is pretty much gone now, it has evaporated. That was very evident even from the very first Main EP, that the guitar was used as a tool but there was a shift away from the very traditional sound, it was much more about sound design and creating a soundscape and the focal point on the guitar wasn't so important as Loop. As that progressed, that became the chain around my neck, the iconic nature of the guitar rather than the Loop aspect. After a while, when people got used to what Main was doing, there weren't any similarities to Loop anymore. People would mention Loop to me but I never had a problem with that.”
Loop’s return to the live stage has heralded audience sizes markedly larger than the group’s heyday which creates an unusual irony for Hampson; as a solo artist, or with Main, he can nary get a single gig in the UK let alone go out on tour. This turn of events has seen him reside in Paris for the last number of years, a city much more open and accepting of his more recent musical output. “Musically, I don't feel my home is in England anymore, it's very, very rare I even get offered the chance to play in my home country which I find slightly sad,” he says. “Now you have places like Café Oto in London but it's a very small audience, and that's kind of a shame. Really, as a solo artist, even with Main, I can't get arrested in my own country. I'd love to come home and do some shows but it's not an option, I get the occasional offer but it never comes to fruition.”
Did this have any bearing on his decision to reform Loop? “No, if people don't want to listen to my music then they don't have to – what can I do about it? I don't hold any grudges, I don't have an axe to grind. But it absolutely did not have any bearing on Loop reforming. I have mixed feelings about playing with Loop live. Being twenty four years older now, you have a very different perspective on things so there's a twinge of nostalgia but it's nice, I don't think it's a bad thing. I've enjoyed the fact that so many people have said to me that these songs seem as relevant now as they did back then, as if they have an almost timeless quality about them. I don't look at it in that way myself but a lot of feedback so far seems to have been 'Wow! it's quite relevant'. There's a different element to it now, modern sound systems are much, much better than before and we have the ability to do a lot more on stage than we used to. That's exciting, as we've embraced a little bit of technology here and there which we never had access to back in the day. Even though we had a reputation then for being very loud, this time around the volume is still there but it sounds even more powerful than it was then. That was definitely one of the reasons in doing Loop again; sonically it could be so much better than it used to be in a live situation.”
Finally, for these Loop and Godflesh co-headlining shows, will Hampson be double jobbing? “No,” he laughs. “When we decided to play together at Roadburn it was only seen as a one off but right at this moment in time, I'm concentrating on Loop. The Godflesh boys have a new album coming out and I don't wanna really play two shows in one evening! But you know, I’ve really surprised myself by reforming Loop and I’m beginning to fall back into old patterns of feeling certain things about the music again. And if I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t do it.”