SPILL FEATURE: SCULPTING SOMETHING THAT WILL LAST – A CONVERSATION WITH JOHN DOUGLAS (TRASHCAN SINATRAS)

SCULPTING SOMETHING THAT WILL LAST

A CONVERSATION WITH JOHN DOUGLAS (TRASHCAN SINATRAS)

Trashcan Sinatras, based in Irvine, Scotland, released their debut album, Cake in 1990. The band built up a solid and loyal following and achieved great success, especially in the U.K. Their most recent studio album, Wild Pendulum, was released in 2018. In 2023, lead singer John Douglas released his self-titled debut album. John Douglas was a very different sound from Trashcan Sinatras and it showed a different side to Douglas.

“I just decided to do some shows,” John Douglas told me during our recent conversation via Zoom. “I have a lot of friends who can go out with just an acoustic guitar and play a show. I kind of envied the skills to be honest. I had been playing with a friend of mine, Alan Kelly, he is an Irish traditional musician, and I would play some shows with him, and I would do a few songs and chat. Set the scene for the song. I quite enjoyed that, and that was a bit of a learning curve. Once I started doing it and enjoying it, I thought, ‘I quite like the sound of the acoustic guitar and voice, so I should record it while I am up and running with it.’ I also wanted something that people could buy at the gig. They could buy the CD, and it would represent what they saw.”

Doing the shows also helped Douglas with his writing and getting over some hurdles. “It was interesting to see how songs survive while performing. I had a bit of writer’s block for a short time, and once my mind shifted to a notion of songs being expressed just me and a guitar, songs started to come back. The record was to capture what I was doing.”

Douglas, as a member of Trashcan Sinatras, was also one of the members who wrote for the band. Were the songs from that era difficult to transform into acoustic songs? “The songs were written on an acoustic guitar, but with the help of a multi track, a four-track recorder. Once I discovered that, it became a big part of writing, because I could write the basic track and stretch it but generally most of the songs were written on the acoustic. I wrote a few songs on piano, but mostly guitar. But it wasn’t difficult turning the songs into acoustic numbers. When I decide to do some shows, I will look at the catalogue of stuff and I chose the ones that were mostly written by me. I had been used to playing them on my own in the house, and they actually suited the approach. There were a bunch of songs I tried that didn’t suit the approach. I didn’t want to be the guy strumming a guitar on stage and imagining a band in my head. I wanted to stretch the acoustic guitar and the vocal would make the dynamics of the song work within those limitations. I am a big fan of limitations, they sort of stretch you when you are in there and there isn’t a whole world to choose from, just two or three, and that is pretty inspirational.”

JOHN DOUGLAS ALBUM REVIEW

“I’m a big fan of the stripped-back approach, like the early Dylan records. There’s not many around. When I watch acoustic acts, or see somebody, there are a lot of people just bashing away. That was something that I wanted to avoid. I am going to avoid just bashing away. I want the guitar to be doing a thing, and me doing my thing, and majorly capturing the emotion of the song. Song choice has a lot to do with it. There has to be something going on that needs to be captured. The golden rule was, if I could sing the songs and inhibit them, then they are in the frame for me to put on the record and be part of the show. I just play them, and they work out,” he laughed.

On the album is a cover of Prefab Sprouts “We Let The Stars Go”. I am a big fan of the band, even before we toured with them. I used to go busking in London, I was living down there for a while. It was a skill I saw people do, and I thought, I can do that. There were some nice spots, near Hyde Park, there were little tunnels with nice reverb, and I would just play. There were a lot of songs I learned that people would stop to hear, and this was one of them, especially guys my age. They would stop and say “I love that song, and I don’t hear it very often. Thanks for playing it.” It has a connection with people. And I just love the story. A lot of the Prefab Sprout songs, lyrically, tell stories. That one is just a universal feeling, where you are dwelling on an old flame and when you dwell on an old flame, it can eliminate what you were like back then. And I don’t think the guy in the songs comes off too well. You can leave people behind when you are young and you don’t know the damage you are doing. But it also reminisces about a gorgeous time. So, when I did the acoustic thing, I thought I should do it, because I love it.”

Douglas also recorded some new songs for John Douglas, which he will be performing when he tours in North America in October. ““I Just Want To Go Home” is a song I wrote a while back. A couple of the songs are songs I put out for the Trashcans pool, and they never made it on to any of the recordings. That song captured the feeling, it is quite an anti-social song in its own way. I just want to get some peace and quiet and recharge the batteries. I am very familiar with that feeling. I embrace family life, but I have to make space for myself. The song stuck with me, and when songs stick with me, I just have to put them out in some sort of way. It really suited the acoustic format as well.”

Another new song on the album and being performed is “Lost”. That was one of the ones that I mentioned earlier about writer’s block. When I changed my mindset and just played guitar and sang, that song arrived in literally minutes. It took me 10 minutes in total to write it. Actually, the version on the record is the writing demo. I have a little space I go to, and when something is arriving, I turn on the recorder. That is the freshest thing I have done that made it onto the record. It is a mood that is captured. There are a lot of times in this life where I feel I just don’t recognize anything. When life, from one moment to the next, is radically shifted, When I perform that song, I feel that folks feel they are lost in many ways.”

Because the show is acoustic, Douglas is not committed to a setlist that he plays every night on every tour. “It is ever evolving. I am adding new songs into it, and some old songs that I have looked at again. I have a bunch of songs, a couple I save for an encore, and the rest is just what feels right on the night. I don’t have a catalogue of every song the Trashcans played, and it is not me representing the Trashcans. It is not one guy trying to be the Trashcans. It is me doing this new thing and I am doing some songs that ended up on Trashcan records. It will be a slightly different show. I also tell a lot of stories and try to set the scene, and some of that is local knowledge, so I may have to adjust a little. But I feel I am still in an apprenticeship. Me with the guitar, I learned a lot in the initial year I have been doing it. I expect when I am touring the States, I will learn other things as well.”

Along with the tour, and his debut album, Trashcan Sinatras were also the subject of a radio documentary. “That was a brilliant experience. It was made by Ken Sweeney who makes radio documentaries. He spent about 10 or 15 years making this thing, interviewing us at various times over the years, trying to figure out an angle. He kind of knew there was an interesting story with the Trashcans because there is stuff that we don’t tend to dwell on, but it turned out that he wanted to make it about songs. It is about an hour long, but it covers a lot of ground. It paints a lovely picture. For us it is really pleasing because he is focusing on the songs, the lyrics and where the inspiration came from and we never really analyzed it all that much, and you discover you are writing about your local life, geography, and the issues you had growing up and using local phrases, but it is still universal.”

The radio documentary and the new songs have Douglas in somewhat of a reflective mood about the band and his own life. “It was a struggle early on, we weren’t confident people. We come from working class, well read, but working-class backgrounds. There isn’t a lot of self confidence inbred in general where we come from. My father’s generation was different, they were off to the big city. They were working class and proud of it and stood beside anyone. And I learned a lot from that in later years. But when you are young, you don’t have the confidence, especially making music, because it is such a precious thing.”

When you first discover music, you think it is made by these geniuses who conjure up this stuff. We made those things knowing they would be around forever, because you deal with eternity when you write music, and you are in the same room as those geniuses, same trade, same tools, that was always in the back of our minds. Whether they were successful or got anywhere near those people’s accolades is irrelevant.  When you are doing it, you try to sculpt something that will last, and we reflect on our own lives and try to be as poetic as possible.

“It is brilliant that people like the records we made 30 or 40 years ago and are still interested, it is pretty amazing”.

Tour Dates

October 1   LOS ANGELES – Hotel Cafe  *
(Special guest appearance by Trashcan Sinatras’ Frank Reader)
October 2   SAN FRANCISCO – The Lost Church  *
October 4   PORTLAND – Mission Theater  *
October 5   SEATTLE – Ballard Homestead, Fremont Abbey  *
(Special guest appearance by Trashcan Sinatras’ Frank Reader & Paul Livingston)
October 7   SALT LAKE CITY – The Beehive  *
October 8    DENVER – Mercury Cafe, Jungle Room  *
October 10  KANSAS CITY – Knuckleheads  *
October 11   MINNEAPOLIS – Icehouse MPLS  *
October 12   CHICAGO – GMan Tavern **
October 15   TORONTO – The Monarch  **
October 16   CLEVELAND – Beachland Tavern  **
October 17   COLUMBUS – Natalie’s Grandview  **
October 19   BOSTON – City Winery Boston  **
October 20   NEW YORK – Cafe Wha?  **
October 21   PHILADELPHIA – City Winery Loft  **

* with Lily Vakili of Vakili Band
** with Lauren Calve

Tickets Can Be Purchased HERE

Artist Links