” I have reached a stage in my life where I write music purely for the love of it without thinking commercially in any way, just experimenting with texture and narrative to achieve impactful songs with deep layers of atmosphere and meaning.”
GEAR: Vox AC30CC2X (live)
AC15CR1-BRG2 (home studio)
Fender Twin Reverb (Procession & demon summer)
Guitars & Bass Guitars:
1. Gibson SG Firebrand
2. Fender Jaguar (Cream)
3. Fender DG-17M Acoustic
4. Burns Marquee (Greenburst) – retrofitted with Jim Cairnes single coil pickups, new electric wiring and hardened steel tremelo hardware, plus one tone pot changed to a filter sweep, all done by Jim himself.
5. Cairnes Globemaster II – (original Jim Cairnes guitar fair demo guitar)
6. Freshman Acoustic
7. Reverend BC1 Silverburst (Billy Corgan Signature Guitar)
8. Revelation RJT60M TL Greenburst
9. Reverend Charger HB
10. Revelation RJT60/12 (Sonic Blue)
11. Revelation RJT60-B (Black) Six String Bass
12. Revelation Rusty Steel Bass
13. Shergold Masquerader SM01-SD-CH
14. Jansen Invader (Daphne Blue)
15. Shergold Masquerader Custom 1973 (White)
16. Jansen Jazzman 6 (Greenburst)
17. Burns King Cobra Blue (Flame Maple)
18. Rapier 33 Sunburst
19. Hofner Galaxie Reissue (Red)
20. Hagstrom Retroscape H-III (Sunburst)
21. Futurama 2 De Luxe (Hagstrom) 1963 Blue
22. Eastwood Sidejack DLX (Greenburst)
23. Jansen Jazzman 6 (Sunburst)
24. Alden Galactica (Paisley)
25. Silvertone 319 14409 circa1968 (Sunburst)
26. Rapier Saffire (Sunburst)
27. Alden Quadrastar (Blue)
28. Alden Chicago (Honeyburst)
Keyboards/Synths:
Yamaha SK50D Symphonic Ensemble
Waldorf Blofeld
KORG Poly 800 Mark 2
MicroKORG
Drum Machines:
Roland SPD-SX
Nord Drum 2 / Nord Pad
Roland SPD30 Octopad
All band photography courtesy of Francis Fitzgerald
‘Alan Entwistle Pickups’ Artist
Paul McCarte
“My first love musically was Led Zeppelin…they opened a door in my head that has only ever gotten wider.”
GENRE(S): Electro Indie, Darkwave, Post Rock, Shoegaze, Dream Pop, Industrial, Synthwave, Indie Rock.
INFLUENCES: Joy Division, Talk Talk, Depeche Mode, Killing Joke, Led Zeppelin, The Smashing Pumpkins, Kate Bush, My Bloody Valentine, The God Machine, Kraftwerk, Ultravox (John Foxx & Midge Ure periods), Simple Minds (early period, up to New Gold Dream), Nine Inch Nails, New Order, The Cure, The Cocteau Twins.
FAVOURITE ARTISTS: (all of the above plus) These New Puritans, Wye Oak, Mogwai, Thomas Feiner, Hood, Orbital, Efterklang, Bon Iver, Radiohead, The Boxer Rebellion, Jeniferever, David Sylvian, Ride, The National, Puressence, Everything Everything, Disco Inferno, epic45, Foals, Mew, Bark Psychosis…but the list is huge really.
BANDS – ACTIVE: machiner
BANDS – PREVIOUS: Procession, demon summer.
PREFERRED PICKUPS, AND WHY: The JESC (DeArmond style) single coils on my Jansen Jazzman are very special, and the EWR64 Mini Humbuckers on my Rapier 33 are also lovely…they are both very suited to my style being both chimey and punchy at the same time, with lots of sustain.
BIOGRAPHY:
At 15 years old, Paul sang in a band with friends and only starting playing guitar after the band dissolved, on a Westone Spectrum SX bought from a catalogue. During early lessons, his teacher noticed his odd playing style…..he is left-handed but after starting to play right-handed, that became the norm for him.
Paul actually cites two bass players, Peter Hook and Derek Forbes, as some of his main guitar influences, after playing to Joy Division and early Simple Minds tracks and learning the bass lines, in those early days. As a poet, Paul took to writing his own songs straight away. Something which has stayed with him throughout his adult life.
His first proper band, ‘Procession’, gigged around Hartlepool from 1986, and then the North East in the early 90s at such venues as Newcastle Riverside and The Havanna (Middlesbrough) while touring and also running their own clubs, ‘The Crossover’ and ‘Weaveworld’. From ’93 onwards, Paul cites this as the period he really developed a style as a guitar player, crafting longer, more textured and ambient songs using his Gibson SG Firebrand and Fender Jaguar through a 1978 Fender Twin Reverb.
After ‘Procession’ disbanded in 1995, Paul went acoustic and set about writing songs for what would eventually be a new project called ‘demon summer’ featuring some new and previous collaborators and going in a more guitar-oriented direction, with ‘big, poppy and anthemic songs’. This earned them two independent record deals (Waterside Records), distribution and management deals, an EP, two singles (‘Burn’ getting national airplay, inc. BBC Radio 1& 2) and their album ‘Sideshow’ (all recorded at PulseArt Studio) whilst touring 2001 to 2005. An as-of-yet unreleased second album was also recorded in this period.
The evolution over several years from 2016 saw Paul take more creative control over writing and arranging, culminating in current outfit, ‘machiner’ where he programs drums and synths, plus vocal and guitar duties (recorded at Tower Street Studio), blending his love of electronic and guitar music together into ‘sonic ambience’. July 2022 saw the band launch with their debut gig, followed by first single, ‘the between’.
This latest creative period has seen Paul explore his love of guitars more widely and also is when he discovered Alan Entwistle; initially by purchasing a Revelation RJT60/TL Greenburst guitar and then opening the Pandora’s Box of Alan’s history in guitar and pickup design which has led to him collecting Revelation, Jansen, Alden & Rapier guitars, which now form his main live-set choices.
