Leng Pleng

As their Facebook page notes, Soselo Summer have been “failing to meet their full potential in Phnom Penh, Cambodia for some time now.”  They’ve got a bunch of gigs coming up this weekend and next, and LengPleng decided it was time to hear what they have to say for themselves – Ned, Ronan, John, Neil and Felix (Hansley was unavailable) gathered for a post-rehearsal chat in the garden at  Cloud.

LengPleng:
What is the creation myth of Soselo Summer?

Ned:
When Blood Bricks broke up I wanted to start another band, and I wanted to work with Ronan because he sings like an angel in a heavenly choir.  I wanted him to not play guitar but just sing, doing songs like David Bowie’s Modern Love – sailor suits, the whole thing – which was not the direction we eventually went in. Ronan recruited John and I recruited Kuzey – he’s no longer playing with us – and then we kind of kept adding people.

Ronan:
Soselo was Stalin’s pseudonym when writing poetry as a young man, before he killed 50 million people.

LengPleng:
The first time LengPleng was aware of a band called Soselo Summer you were playing at Meraki in Kampot.

Ronan:
That was the first gig and it was a shocker.  John was hungover and nervous, Kuzey was nervous.

John:
There was a dogfight in front of the stage.

Ronan:
The fight went on for a while.  The one person that was listening to us then spent the rest of our time trying to separate these two dogs.  Inauspicious beginnings.

John:
Remember there was no water in the place.

Neil:
It was in the middle of COVID as well.

LengPleng:
And so Meraki, then what?

Ronan:
Everyone left.  We got Felix in on drums.  Hansley left and we got Neil in to do lead guitar, then Hansley came back – all of a sudden we’re a six-piece.  It’s gone from strength to strength from there to be honest.

Neil:
Still the bulk of the material actually stems from that early period.  Most of it was there before I came along.

John:
About half and half.

LengPleng:
How many gigs have you done now?

John:
Seven, eight gigs maybe.

LengPleng:
And who is doing the writing?

Ned:
It’s mostly John, and I add something every once in a while.

Ronan:
I do vocals and melody.

John:
We’ll bring something on, whoever brings in a song, and then Ronan puts a melody for the words.  In the early days it was easier to workshop a song – when it was four people rather than six.  When everyone has an idea it becomes pretty impossible.  For that reason the later songs that we’ve worked on have taken a bit longer.

Ronan:
There’s 12 songs now.

John:
12 decent recordable songs in a year and a half is not bad.  All things considered.

Ronan:
There’s still a lot up in the air in terms of what parts go here, what parts go there.

LengPleng:
Is the band a dictatorship or a democracy?

Ned:
Everybody can play whatever part they want.  John writes a lot of the material, and then how Ronan sings over it or how Neil plays the guitar, that’s all up in the air, you can do what you want with it, within reason.

John:
It slips in between both.  It starts as a democratic process and then to get it right a bit of dictatorship is required to finish a song.  With democracy it goes around and around and around.

Neil:
There are some red lines.  One is I’m not allowed play any blues.  As I’ve learned.  And I’ve made my peace with that.

Felix:
Disco is okay.

Neil:
And covers, we don’t do covers.  Which is a delight, absolutely.

Ronan:
John does most of the rehearsal bookings, and for gigs it’s all of us.  A six-piece isn’t easy to transport around town.  A lot of places don’t want to do such a big band, they think it’ll be too loud.  There’s very few places – Oscar’s on the Corner, Cloud, The Deck is coming up, Birdcage is trying.

LengPleng:
Is there a sound that you are trying to emulate, or are you putting six people in a room and seeing what happens?

Ronan:
Well, there was the early David Bowie idea, and then it shifted more to 90s alternative.  The later stuff has taken another shift, we’ve decided to get a bit weirder, a bit more expansive.  Colouring outside the lines.  I think we’ve found a happy medium in there.

John:
The original brief was guitar-driven with synths, essentially.  And it oscillates around that idea.

Ned:
John plays kind of shoegaze guitar, and then Neil has a lot of texture in the leads, I just play really loud bass and refuse to turn down.  Ronan’s vocals are actually louder than my bass even without a mic.

LengPleng:
What about you Felix?

Felix:
This is my first time playing drums in a rock band – my childhood fantasy right here.   I’m playing a lot of keyboards around town now, but this is more fun, it’s original and it’s rock, and it’s a good release for me.

John:
Felix is a highly trained musician, he’s been to music school, he’s got his degree, but what he’s playing is very unconventional in many ways.  So he’s outside his comfort zone in that respect.

Felix:
The first two times I played with them I didn’t know what I was doing.  Just finding my way.

John:
You can be working on a riff or something, then Felix from behind the drums will say “You know that A flat you just played?  Can you just move that half a step?”  He stands up behind the drums and says “No, not that note, that note!”

Ronan:
Just hit the #$%^# snare!  My favourite was when he took the guitar off you and tried to show you something but he can’t play the guitar.

Felix:
I know what I want but I can’t do it.

Neil:
The band is super refreshing for me, because I can get jaded, in a bit of a rut, and I felt that way with the more cabaret-type bands.  This is a breath of fresh air.  Different personalities, different stuff going into it.

John:
Being in a reasonably eclectic group can be quite gratifying –You get these different ideas, influences, and the net result is more interesting.  I can sit at home and write a song and it will sound like a song that I’ve written,  but I bring it to this group and it will be pulled in different directions.

Soselo Summer play tonight at The Deck with The Argies (Argentina), We are Ewe and Radioactive Deathmonkey, then on Friday with We are Ewe and Gaby Courroux at Birdcage.