Interview: Tom Dowse (Dry Cleaning)
When I first heard Dry Cleaning I was immediately struck by the interesting guitar sound sitting in a post-punk arrangement. So it was an absolute pleasure to meet with their guitarist Tom Dowse ahead of their Glasgow show at St. Luke’s earlier this month. We chatted about the band and his approach to guitar playing.
Tell me about the band and how you all got together.
I was playing in my own band at the time. I met Florence at college – we studied together. Through her, I met my girlfriend. She was best friends with Lewis, and her sister goes out with Nick. Over the course of about three years, we were always chatting about bands. They had a band that was winding down, and I had a band that was winding down.
We’d always chatted about doing different bands and stuff. Lewis and I always wanted to do a stoner band, or a doom band or something. We bonded over things like At the Drive-In and Deftones, all the stuff that was really important to us as kids. Converge was a big one…Then, eventually, we started getting together and jamming on a Sunday. Over the period of about seven months, we sort of coalesced, and then we were looking for a singer. I met with Flo and showed her some of the music we’d been working on, and she really dug it. And it just flashed in my mind to ask her to join! It wasn’t as simple as that, it took a few months to convince, but when she did, the rest was history.
You’ve had a busy couple of years, all things considered. Do you have any particular highlights so far?
There are a lot of highlights… I've had my last two birthdays on tour at festivals. I turned 40 at Green Man Festival and Flo got everyone to sing Happy Birthday to me. There were about 6000 people in that tent at that time, and it was pretty moving. And we got to stay the whole weekend and enjoy ourselves with friends, that was a bit of a highlight.
When I first heard you guys, your guitar sound really stuck out to me as textured and exciting. The way that you use distortion, chorus and delay. Tell me about your influences as a player.
That's very kind of you to say. My influences…I guess I sort of nick bits of everyone, really. People like Omar Rodriguez from At The Drive-In, just for how wild it was. There's a band called Le Savy Fav. They've just reformed, actually. I always liked how one of their guitarists did a lot with just like one note.
Then I’m a huge Smashing Pumpkins fan. I love the way that when they go into a chord, it's really loud and distorted but it's not aggressive. It’s more seductive than that. You could say a similar thing with Deftones, I suppose. [At this point we went on to nerd out about the production on Siamese Dream.] I like guitar sounds that have a bit of depth to them, and I like things that are a bit indistinct. I don’t like things that are too clear-cut. I like mess, and that's part of my playing style as well. I like to leave in drone notes and weird off notes. I like mistakes and things like that. That's why I like delays, actually, because they help you blur it all together and be like, ‘Ha ha, I meant it!’
Speaking of gear, talk me through your rig and what you’re loving at the moment. What’s on your pedalboard?
Rig-wise, I'm going through a bit of a change, and I can't necessarily say what I'm going to settle on for now. What I am enjoying is a little Fender Champ, which I get the feeling that's going to be the amp that I use in the studio a lot and at home. I’ve also got a [Roland] JC40 at home as well. They're the sort of things I use at home and in the studio.
Live, I'm coming around to just using something that's more basic. So I’ve got a ’59 Bassman and I’ve got a Vox AC30. I usually use 2 [Fender] Devilles but I’m going off those. I love driving the valves, and I just found they were a bit limiting. I'm on a bit of a journey to try and fatten out the sound a little bit more, and going forward try different options dynamically.
As the venues have gotten bigger and you have a bit more say about what you’re able to use, have you found that you're constantly trying new stuff out or do you still have a pretty set rig?
It's never enough. It’s never right, if you know what I mean? You get odd, I'd say 1 in 20 gigs, where you totally trip out, as if you're just inside the sound. But the more I do it, the more I realize a lot of that is down to the monitor engineer. At gigs, you have so little control over what you're doing. What people hear – that's all coming from the front of house, what he decides. So we work together on what's going to be right for the front of house. I take so much more now from the monitors, and nowadays, if I can hear what I'm doing, I'm happy. I don't give myself such a hard time about the sound of my guitar live anymore, because it's too variable.
On the recording front, do you approach your guitar sound and playing in a different way in the studio vs. playing live?
I quite like layering everything up, quite like the Smashing Pumpkins. If I could condense a 12-string electric, an acoustic, a distorted SG, a bit of a T. Rex/Bowie – that 70s hard rock/glam rock sound, into one thing, I would! It's almost like me trying to do that and getting it wrong is what has ended up as being my sound. We’ve got a second guitarist who plays keyboards joining us soon, and I would love for them to be doing some second guitar parts on the acoustic. Ideally, they’ll play basically the same thing that I am, except for the solos, to fatten it out a bit.
What was your first guitar pedal, and do you still have it?
It would probably be a Big Muff. Yeah, the Black Russian Big Muff, and no, I don’t have it anymore! I went through a period of listening to a lot of Mogwai, and at the time I wanted the hugeness, and I just didn't understand how you get that. I was expecting one pedal to do everything for you. It's all part of the fun! [at this point we went on to discuss the mistakes we all make getting our first pedals]
Finally, can I ask what’s next for the band?
Yeah, so we've got a few bits and pieces this summer, a few festivals, we're going to be writing a third album, we're going to Chicago to do some recording, but that's not necessarily directly for the album. It's just to get the wheels turning a little bit. It is nice to go away and do stuff like that because it focuses your attention, and we love Chicago as well. We’re doing some European dates with Nick Cave in October. So there will be some pretty big rooms on that! So that's it for the year, and after all that, all systems are on the third record!
