Over the Rainbow: KAPUTT on Carnage Hall

In 1961, film icon Judy Garland walks on stage to an overture medley of her best-loved show tunes and the roaring cheers of a packed Carnegie Hall. She gasps, overwhelmed by the response, composing herself before breaking into When You’re Smiling. Scrutinised in the preceding years by the popular media for drug problems and a yo-yoing body weight, this no frills-all thrills performance would later help secure Garland’s stature as "the world’s greatest entertainer". Yet the subsequent years leading up to her death by accidental overdose in 1969 would prove difficult, dogged by divorce and financial ruin.

It’s a heartbreaking bungee from rise to fall and back again, and one that holds significance to Glasgow sextet KAPUTT’s singer-guitarist Cal Donnelly, who first heard recordings from the pivotal Judy at Carnegie Hall in a tour van, on a taped radio show presented by Melvins frontman Buzz Osborne. "I honestly can’t remember the song," he says, "but I went back and I listened to the record and thought it was just…" – his eyes brighten – "amazing!" Garland’s career-defining moment is at the core of the group’s debut album, named Carnage Hall in interpolation of her seminal comeback release. Its cover, designed by Donnelly ("I really wanted to do graphic design when I was at school"), references Garland’s poster-style in vivid orange.

But the album’s title track takes a branching path: "What if her performance was a complete failure? No one comes, she loses her voice. It’s game over, the end of her career. Maybe she would’ve lived on, who knows." Following a knotted guitar break by Donnelly and singer-guitarist Simone Wilson, noodling in the vein of Television’s Tom Verlaine and Jimmy Rip, seasoned with Chrissy Barnacle’s scattershot sax and the combined erratic rhythms of drummer Rikki Will and percussionist Emma Smith, Carnage Hall breaks down midway like a crashing economy, as a desolate landscape takes precedence – one that, if you squint hard enough, reads as an ill omen of the UK’s socio-political uncertainty, as Brexit looms and the far-right takes hold over Europe.

The lyrical imagery reflects a worst-case-scenario: 'Builders are not working / Ticket sales are slow / Revolving doors broken / The dancefloor must go'. Although, the image is tinged with its own uncertainty; linking social upheaval to a focal point we’d likely revisit for a do-over is a comforting fiction, but a fiction nonetheless. "You can sell the idea of an event," Donnelly says, "but things happen slowly. You can pinpoint event A, B or C but it’s all a slow burn, no one ever warns you, then you get here and you’re like 'fuck, this is how it happens!'

"[Carnage Hall] is like this alternative hellscape we’re in. That’s why we named the album after it." The very first line of album opener Rats betrays post-punk sprightliness with the same lyrical spirit: 'It’s so much darker now'.

Donnelly isn’t sure that any other members will be passing through for our interview at Glasgow’s Old Hairdressers this evening. While rallying six band members is a monumental task by itself, it’s surely harder still when they also appear in countless other band configurations (Breakfast Muff, Hairband, OVERWHELMED, and many more) and need to work day jobs (cafes, pubs, nursing homes, dentistry). "We definitely manage," he says, sipping his soda water. "People just have to push themselves, I guess – we’re having to be like, 'fuck it, these are the three hours for rehearsal, we just have to get it as best we can'."

Before recording the album with Luigi Pasquini in Glasgow’s Anchor Lane Studios, the project’s beginnings were shaped by practical limitations, with Donnelly and singer-saxophonist Chrissy Barnacle both working at the same cafe, convening over a drum machine to record demos. "I wanted to do a band with a sax. From being a teenager to my early 20s, I’d been fucking screaming and hammering out three chords," he says. "I wanted to do something with a different textural quality."

This mentality bled into the creative process, long before their co-barista Tobias Carmichael joined on bass, with members intermittently jumping on different instruments for a fresh perspective. "It’s like, you’ve written this song and you spend all this time building it up, then you play it for a-year-and-a-half, then deconstruct it," he says. With percussionist Emma Smith yet to join, the group took to using an empty bottle of Buckfast as a makeshift cowbell, still in use to this day in performances and on record. Was he worried that music writers might indulge in stereotyping? "We started using it because Chrissy had it in her saxophone case," Donnelly explains. "People drink it up and down the country. The first line of slowthai’s album [Nothing Great About Britain] is 'Bottle of Buckie', and no one asks him about it."

Each amorphous track on Carnage Hall houses divergent micro suites, musical twists and turns that give the album a frustrated flow, muddied and moss-laden in parts, with pools of crystal clarity elsewhere. "Pastoral" is the word Donnelly uses. On the subject of his own wiry guitar playing, he says: "I’m not particularly good – I’m self-taught on guitar. It’s more interesting to write that way than to write some kind of Todd Rundgren ballad – it's easier to sound like a slinky falling down the stairs than consistently hitting the high notes and telling girls that you love them." Your move, Rundgren.

This pretty-ugly sleight of hand extends to KAPUTT’s lyrical content; deeply personal yet cloaked by the surreal and the mythological, personal histories retold through characters and scenarios ("it’s a way of protecting yourself"). Suspectette concerns itself with societal mistrust of women via an oft-told story about Mary Weiss of The Shangri-La’s, who once gained attention from the FBI for allegedly carrying a gun across state lines. Buried With My Nose refers to Cal’s family history via a dominant genetic feature – "the Niven nose" – and the fraught link to his estranged grandfather ("he owns something that I have on my face. I couldn’t settle that, so I wrote a stupid song about it").

Drinking Problems Continue Pt II was written in part to eulogise his other grandad, a shipyard worker who died from asbestos-related illnesses. "All the workers were exposed to all these chemicals that the higher-ups knew were dangerous," Donnelly tells us. "In the end, it’s what killed him." His memory is also refracted through lyrical retellings of childhood trips to Ullapool: "A postcard view of Scotland. But there’s still a guy pissing on the street, guys fighting on the beach. It’s where my parents got engaged."

Among the curses of fame, systemic violence, familial strife and the tainted nature of memory, it seems the central thesis of Carnage Hall is this: what if things had been different? Is the place over the rainbow, where, as Garland once sang, 'the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true', a place of alternative history? If so, what good would it hold – and what fresh hells? KAPUTT don’t claim to have the answer, but they offer a balm. "Something about dancey, janky music, shared with minor traumas is," Donnelly pauses, then laughs, "good for the soul."

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Carnage Hall is released on 27 Sep via Upset the Rhythm
KAPUTT play Freakender, The Old Hairdressers, Glasgow, 13 Sep

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