By Keith Walsh
Out of bitterness sweetness comes. The latest single by Julian Shah-Tayler demonstrates that sweet music can be made from difficult circumstances. His new song and video “Fisk” comes out of something terrible that happened to he and his bandmates while touring with the band Magic House.

The tune itself is a mid tempo single featuring production from Robert Margouleff, strings by David James Neilsen, and Shah-Tayler’s exemplary studio wizardry and production. But despite the beauty of the song, its origins are rather sordid.

As Shah-Tayler, an expatriate from England who has now established himself in Los Angeles as a composer for TV and film as well as the mainstay in Depeche Mode tribute ‘Strangelove’ and Bowie tribute ‘The Band Who Fell To Earth,’ told me in a phone conversation:

“Yeah, I mean the story of it is, I had a Danish guitar player, I joined a band in London and we were doing very well, and touring, actually we were touring in the footsteps of Muse…It’s called Magic House. Terrible name, not my choice of names. Great band. And the guitar player was Danish, and we played a show at Dracfest, supporting The Stranglers, and basically we played that show, he smoked some weed, I think it was, around the campfire after the show, because the show went very well, and he had a psychotic episode and left the band. Which was right before we were demoing some demos for Mother Records, which was U2’s label. And that’s what the song was about.”

This particular time was critical for the band, and after this episode things were never the same, though it was not the end of Magic House.  As Shah-Tayler explains: “We got new guitar player, and we went on to release records and we did okay, but I feel like that was a crucible time and that would have caught fire at that particular time. And because we had that particular setback it really fell apart, and I wrote that song then. That was a long time ago, when I lived in London.”

I asked Shah-Tayler if the song was from the Dane’s point of view. “No, it’s from my point of view,” he told me. ” I was absolutely devastated and hurt and surprised, and all sorts of things. I guess there’s a degree of his point of view too. And certainly ‘of all the fish in the sea, the biggest is me’ is probably from his perspective, and Fisk means Fish in Danish, that’s why it’s Fisk.”

“Literally it’s the Danish translation. He felt he was too big for the whole thing, it was very strange. He was smoking roll ups in the back of the van all the way down and muttering how we were going to kill him and dump him in the ocean. That we were going to steal all his songs, kill him, and dump him in the sea.”

Traumatic times for all, especially for the guitar player.

The video for “Fisk,” was created by Shah-Tayler, and features footage from his London years presented in a psychedelic new fashion.

“Fisk” has gone through several versions. “I recorded Fisk multiple times, over the years,” Shah-Tayler told me. “I’ve recorded it as a kind of Oasis-y type song, a Verve type song, I’ve recorded it multiple times. Because it’s not a traditional single in the sense that it’s like mid tempo,…I worked very hard to get it where it was, and I’ve had four or five different versions and then I worked on the one that you hear now, and presented that to Robert and then he sort of kind of made me rerecord some of the guitars. I mean the process with Robert is that I kind of produce the track and then he comes in and sort of oversees and co-produces with me he mixes it with his guy and it always sounds magnificent.”

Indeed it does. I asked Shah-Tayler about the synths used, and he told me what I suspected  — that he uses analog hardware synths, avoiding software synths, partly due to an aesthetic approach and partly because he relies on a Mac computer running ProTools that he hasn’t upgraded. He said that the brilliant string arrangements by David James Neilsen are virtual strings, and that the bassline is a vintage Roland SH-09 synth.

“Traditionally I use an SH-09 for bass, it’s just a really solid, strong straightforward bass sound. It’s only one oscillator. It’s  present, and there. It’s analog, and you can’t avoid it. In mixing it’s really good. You need to do a bit of drive on it.”

https://www.synthmuseum.com/roland/rolsh901.html

For this new version of ‘Fisk,” Shah-Tayler told me he was inspired by the work of one of the new generation of electronic music artists. “After going through several iterations of the song , now actually I hear Billie Eilish to be honest. But it was inspired by the Billie Eilish stuff, when I kind of got my head around what she was doing, I was quite inspired by it. Because I was like, there’s nothing in here. It’s really simple.”

I mentioned that I’ve heard a couple of her songs on KIIS FM and liked them. “Oh she’s great,” Shah-Tayler says, “and if you’re a fan of electronic minimal, her brother who does production, Finn, he’s a proper genius, it’s great.”

The wah sound on the guitar in “Fisk” is more than pleasant, and though I had learned in previous interviews that Shah-Tayler records directly into ProTools, I asked him how he got that particular guitar sound.

“For this one? For this one I used an HD500 X with the wah, it’s a Line 6. Top of the line floor pod basically. It was basically a very straightforward sound with the wah. That was a Margouleff addition, because it wasn’t there before. I actually recorded a majority of the guitars prior to that particular wah part, with a Variax, on the banjo setting. “(The Variax guitar is also made by Line 6).

I suggested that the guitar part in question was a sitar sound. Shah-Tayler replied: “It’s not a sitar, it’s actually a banjo and I wanted a sitar, it’s a banjo. It’s a Variax, and the Variax I have is f-ing terrible. But it sounded right, and yeah, I mean I like the Variaxes, I just have a very bad one. I have the first ever Variax because it was something like $70 in a pawn shop. And I plugged it in, and in the guitar you have the battery pack, so you can use the guitar, and the tunings, and all the settings, directly from the guitar, you don’t actually need a Variax thing (a module?)  So it’s basically a kind of weird synth vibe.”

Despite all the drama of the Danish guitar player whose episode inspired the song, Shah-Tayler says “he’s fine now.”

All’s well that ends well. Check out this lovely and fascinating new song and video on YouTube and Spotify.

Also, check out Julian Shah-Tayler every Wednesday on Facebook Live as he presents a live show of his originals and Bowie covers.

Julian Shah-Tayler on Facebook
Julian Shah-Tayler on YouTube

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