The Dead Man's Waltz: "We’re blurring that line between audience and band"

No matter how successful a band might become, it doesn’t change the fact that most of them come from all too mundane an origin. Take Radiohead, for example. Arguably one of the most influential bands of the last twenty years, and they all met in the far from rock’n’roll confines of the elite Abingdon Boys School. Even The Melvins used to practice in Dale Crover’s parents’ house, and only with the greatest mental gymnastics could they ever be classified as ‘normal’. Perhaps this is why The Dead Man’s Waltz’s Athena-like birth from the minds of Isle of Skye’s genre-defying Injuns is all the more tantalising.

“Injuns were known for being very eclectic, especially on our first album,” explains accordionist Leighton Jones, “but we had always presented very strange ideas and concepts. So we wrote a musical, Scary Love, which essentially was a lament to Vaudevillian theatre and we had these ideas and songs in there which took on their own meaning. From that came this band called The Dead Man’s Waltz, which was the band in the musical, and we found ourselves writing more and more for this band and we realised it was just a natural progression. Injuns was a scrapbook for our ideas and from this scrapbook came this old, faded photograph that we’ve looked deeper and deeper into to find precisely what it is we wanted to write about in the first place.”

This flair for the dramatic makes the venue for our meeting even more apt. We’re in Glasgow’s oldest watering hole, Sloans; not only is a new opera set in the locale being practiced upstairs, but it is – according to Leighton – the site of at least two hauntings. While the remaining trio of Hector MacInnes, Magnus Hughes and David MacLeod are currently scattered across the country, Leighton takes care in explaining why the spectre of the past is no mere illusion in their music.

“I don’t think we’re the first band to explore the concept of folk-noir because you can hear it in a lot of places,” he reminds us. “From Nick Cave through to Tom Waits. I think that this genre is all about embracing the darker side of folk music, and that is the human psyche. It’s like an echo but when you bring it to the fore it retain its mysteriousness and stories. There is a treasure trove of stories and experiences to draw from.”

These tales are the bread and butter of the band, darkly romantic and haunting slices of life that stretch through time and space. “We’ve always written character-based pieces and The Dead Man’s Waltz gives us a platform to do that on,” he continues, “but it has become more and more that we are writing stories based in Eastern and Western Europe in the 20th century. We’re just more inspired by other people’s stories than our own and I think that by delving into other people’s lives you can explore your own experiences more easily in a musical way.”

Europe feeds the band’s world in more ways than their sense of romantic ideals. Germanic musical traditions are inextricably tied to what is now considered the archetypal folk setup or, as Leighton terms it, the ‘accordion and banjo’ approach to instrumentation. “It stretches all across Europe, doesn’t it? This stretches through all the Balkan states and I love that, that beer-hall oom-pah. There’s something quite harrowing and dark, but also celebratory there. You can hear this horrible celebration of the fact that man is kept alive by bestial acts and this is what attracts us.”

Then the theme for the band’s first promotional video – the beautifully dreamlike Cry On Me, which echoes the stark brilliance of film pioneers like F.W. Mernau and the trance-like meanderings of David Lynch – should come as no surprise

“It’s another existential murder ballad and its video is kind of a dream state which illustrates the rise to the surface of a man’s fears and anxieties when he’s caught in a deranged love triangle of sorts,” Leighton gives up somewhat cryptically. “It’s a state where your nightmares can become real, and there’s more of that to come.”

While it can be found on a cursory search of YouTube, a more in-depth excavation will also dig up another, darker short movie, depicting the band’s corpses strewn about the rooms of a ramshackle house. A lone figure chronicles these atrocities before setting to work reviving the corpses, thus setting the stage for the quartet’s debut under the guise.

While the premise for the short is understandably vague to anyone unfamiliar with the way they represented themselves as Injuns, to the band it was a bridging point between the old and new. “The doctor of shady intent discovered the band as it was at the end of the musical, all dead in a house. Unfortunately no-one saw the musical!” laughs Leighton. “The doctor was a character that we created to discover them and to give birth to these dead men in a converted ice cream factory in Partick, where we built the stage to look like a hospital from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.”

This train of narrative eventually culminated in the flesh during the band’s first show. “The doctor did a presentation before he unveiled the band and we got members of the audience to come up and read stories, each relating to how each member of the band met his maker. So, we improvised and created a soundtrack live. It doesn’t make much sense as a stand-alone video but it is connected to the first gig that The Dead Man’s Waltz ever did, and the doctor is still with us to this day.”

The doctor’s inclusion is only one of the numerous facets that are currently at work to mark this unconventional band as one of Scotland’s most intriguing new acts. But to them this is more than just a gimmick. “We’re performing with the continued theatrical idea and we’re blurring that line between audience and band,” says Leighton. “It’s based in a Brechtian theme. It’s not about escaping for the duration of the show, it’s about hacking that line down with a sword and forcing people to take note of what you’re doing, and they’re either loving it or being repulsed by it. There should be this sense of, ‘I really want to DO something about this!’ I don’t know what you want to do about it, but there’s got to be an answer, goddammit!”

If you’ve finishing reading this and you’re asking yourself the same question, then you already know what the answer is – seek out this waltz macabre for yourself, as soon as humanly possible.