Christopher D Ashley interview for FACT

CDR for Fact, Spring 2008

Unlike many music teachers, Christopher D Ashley has spent the last year putting out crafted electro pop on Sunday Best rather than banging on about Moody Blues and awkwardly smoking a joint with the kids after band practice. Growing up in a 70s household, Chris, the youngest son of an English father and a Belizean mother, started learning music before most of us stopped eating crayons, picking up classical piano at the age of five.
“I was seriously, like, 11 when I realised that other kids weren’t musically trained! That was how old I was when I realised that it wasn’t normal to go home and practice for two hours a night,” he laughs. “I mean having a ‘diverse household’ was great because I got to hear different music, but what was far more important was the fact that the house was full of music. I’d be hearing my dad’s classical records in one room and my mum’s Caribbean music in another.” Like any teenager in the late eighties, he soon discovered that fourth horseman of thrash Megadeth and Street Sounds-style electro hip-hop. Still, he couldn’t just persuade his folks to pony up for a second hand guitar and discard it guiltily after a week because it didn’t transform him into Dave Mustaine over night like the rest of us: “My dad didn’t let me have an electric till I taught myself acoustic guitar. So I did… and formed some bands with terrible names!”
After a few years building his rep on the Reading electronica scene, along side folk like Nathan Fake and Dan Le Sac, Ashley’s lucky break came when le Sac himself passed a tape to Rob at Sunday Best. “We negotiated during the summer, and I was recording the album around people’s front rooms during at nights. I ended up recording much at the house of a friend that we met looking for a party. They’d get up for work and I’d be sleeping on their couch. Much tea was drunk!” He also took the show on the road, playing with heroes like Luke Vibert and Keith Tenniswood – who was so blown away by young Chris that he asked to come on, and now forms his live band. Something of the sofa-surfer has stuck on the album – though influences from Reich to Cage are kicking around in the dynamics of songs like “When We Shining”, there is also much in the way of fuzzy-headed funk and bleary-eyed elegant electro on “Sugar Coated Lies”. His Album Cruel Romantics is an omnivorous treat that ranges from acid house tremors to Prince-like white soul to soca to tweecore indie, “When I work with people like Keith, it’s great because they don’t see a boundary between styles. It’s all exciting. It’s a reason to get passionate, isn’t it?”