The Connells: Steadman’s Wake  | Black Park/Missing Piece Records; Sep. 24

Luckily, there are legions of fans who like The Connells much better than Mike Connell does.

The founding songwriter and guitarist of the immortal Raleigh indie rock band is disarmingly self-deprecating, to a degree that would be suspect, were it not for his apparent total lack of bitterness. His line of patter is as distinctly Southern as his music, though it also conveys the genuine humility of an un-entitled artist who, despite having scaled enviable commercial heights, is still just so happy to be here.

The Connells, which now consists of brothers Mike and David Connell, Doug MacMillan, Mike Ayers, Steve Potak, and Rob Ladd, met and formed at UNC-Chapel Hill but played their first show in Raleigh, their hometown, to which they promptly returned after graduating.

“For some reason, people took note and liked some of what we were doing,” Connell says, with typical understatement. In the mid-eighties, so-called “jangle-pop” bands from Southern college towns were in vogue.

The Connells swiftly broke out of North Carolina, riding the patchwork airwaves of college radio to a contract with TVT Records, a release on Elvis Costello’s label, MTV and commercial radio play, the U.S. charts, and, by the early nineties, international hits.

Though The Connells never stopped playing, Steadman’s Wake, which comes out September 24, is their first new album in 20 years. The fresh, open, undistorted sound framing their signature guitar leads, so near to and yet so unlike the Merge generation that came along five years later, hasn’t aged a day.

Recently, Mike Connell gregariously indulged our obsession with local music history from The Connells unique vantage as underdogs on top of the world.

INDY WEEK: When The Connells got started, who were you inspired by?

MIKE CONNELL: I was absorbed mostly with what was coming out of England. Echo and the Bunnymen, The Smiths, The Cure, and above all The Clash. Closer to home, obviously, R.E.M. was casting a huge shadow and showing that garage-caliber bands from the South, like The dB’s and Let’s Active and Pylon, could do it.

You get lumped in with those jangle-pop bands, but your early stuff sounds more like a goth-rock Byrds.

That’s really perceptive, because early on, [former guitarist] George Huntley and I were both playing Rickenbacker 12-strings. It’s absurd for a band to have one 12-string, so having two was doubly absurd. Some critic—not intending this as a compliment in any way—said that we sounded like we were trying to be R.E.M. with Morrissey singing. Fair, probably. [Laughs]

To a lot of people, the story of local indie-rock starts in 1989 with Superchunk and Merge, but you were around a good five years before that. What were the key venues and bands in your world then?

In Raleigh, it was The Brewery. As for bands, UV Prom was a huge favorite. By the time Superchunk and those guys came along, we were fortunate enough to have sort of spread our wings and ventured out through the country. We would come home, and it became evident what was happening in Chapel Hill, and it was amazing.

   But we also understood—being us, being from Raleigh, not having that hip quotient—we were never going to be included in that scene. So I just admired from afar and marveled at Polvo and a lot of those bands. I guess they were aware of us, and maybe the thinking was, “let’s do everything in our flippin’ power to avoid that,” whatever that is coming out of Raleigh. [Laughs]

So who were the bands you played with?

We played a lot of shows with [fellow UNC band] Dillon Fence. A little later, we played a lot with The Mayflies USA. And Queen Sarah Saturday out of Durham, with Johnny Irion—they were great. Johnny ended up marrying Arlo Guthrie’s daughter and moving to the Berkshires. But really, while we would come back to play a couple of shows a year, we were mostly out and about. We befriended a lot of bands from Boston.

You were on that More Mondo compilation with The Pressure Boys and The Bad Checks and Southern Culture on the Skids in 1985.

We were over the moon to be included on a record with so many really cool bands. Just to be on a record had once been unimaginable. You’re holding a piece of vinyl with your shitty song on there, along with a bunch of great songs. It was a kick in the pants, getting on that More Mondo.

Your debut record, Darker Days, was produced by Don Dixon, right?

Don Dixon and Rod Abernethy, who had been in Arrogance. They obviously made a huge impact on the music scene in North Carolina starting in the seventies. Don was friends with Godfrey Cheshire, who was writing for The Spectator, so I think Godfrey might have had something to do with that connection. Don came to watch us at the Cradle, and even after that, he still agreed to work on the record with us. Given that he had worked with R.E.M. on Chronic Town and Murmur, with Mitch Easter, we were pretty floored that he would deign to work with us.

And Elvis Costello’s label put it out in England. As somebody who was so into British music, that must have been a big deal to you.

Yeah, it felt like a huge deal to me. Ed Morgan, our manager, was interning somewhere in London. He went around with our cassette demo to various labels, and somehow got the ear of someone at Demon Records, and they agreed to release the damn thing.

You mentioned Mitch Easter—you worked with him on Boylan Heights, a title that will resonate with Raleigh readers. That was your first album for TVT.

March of ’87, we went to Winston-Salem to record at the Drive-In with Mitch. We would stop, go play a show at some party, and make some more money to pay for the record. That summer, we were opening for a band from England at The 9:30 Club in D.C., and Steve Gottlieb came down from New York. He had just started TVT, and he came backstage and offered to sign us. Our thinking was, we’re lucky if we make another record, and someone’s offered us $20,000 for a record that’s already in the can. Never mind that he has right of first refusal to seven more; sign us up.

You spent a number of years trying to get out of that contract.

We did. But TVT sent us to Fort Apache in Boston to record Fun & Games with Gary Smith, who had worked with The Pixies. In the summer of 1990, they sent us to Wales to make One Simple Word with Hugh Jones, who had produced Echo and the Bunnymen. Again, we were just in disbelief that we would get to record with Hugh Jones in the Welsh countryside, so idyllic and picture-book. It was at Rockfield Studios. Queen recorded “Bohemian Rhapsody” there; Black Sabbath recorded there. There are two studios and living quarters, and The Pogues were recording Hell’s Ditch with Joe Strummer while we were there. So every day, we’re seeing Joe Strummer and Shane MacGowan. Unbelievable.

But yeah, after One Simple Word, maybe things weren’t going so great with the label. We tested the waters to see if it would be possible to get off of TVT, and Capricorn Records was ready to snap us up, but we couldn’t. We did renegotiate the deal with TVT for better terms, so when they sent us up to Woodstock to make Ring, things had gotten better. We understood that the contract was not great going in, so we had no one but ourselves to blame. There was no one from the label looking over our shoulders. They gave us enough rope to hang ourselves, which we did.

In 1993, you had an international hit with “‘74–’75.” How do you come by the Celtic influence there and in some of your other songs?

I guess you can come from either the British folk tradition or the blues tradition, and some bands, like The Yardbirds, are able to do both well. We knew it would be a joke if we attempted to play any sort of blues-influenced stuff. So we were strictly in that British folk tradition, with a lot of minor chords, so it wasn’t all sunshine. We were trying to get some darker elements in the songs, though no one would accuse us of being Killing Joke.

Were you surprised by how well that song did?

Floored. There was nothing to prepare us for how lucky we got with that tune. It did OK in the U.S. But a label in Stuttgart—Intercord, which is aligned in some way with EMI Records—had a sense that it would connect in Germany. They asked Steve Gottlieb if they could license the Ring album, and he said, sure, but unless and until The Connells do something in Britain, there’s no chance they’re going to do anything on the continent. I think they struck a deal with anticipated sales of a thousand copies.

But these guys from Intercord, their hunch was absolutely spot-on. Within three or four weeks, the song was in the top 100 in Germany, and it quickly got to top 10. Steve Gottlieb called me one day and said, congratulations, you got your first number one. From Germany, it spread throughout most of Western Europe, and up into Scandinavia, and then Britain and Ireland.

I’m afraid we’re going to have to leapfrog over the rest of the nineties

Good! [Laughs]

This is your first record in 20 years. Why now?

Things had died down enough between day jobs and families that we finally could get together and work out arrangements, not just a couple of guys sitting around with acoustic guitars. We had been playing, but all we did was go out and play old songs. At some point, we reached a critical mass of 11 or 12 tunes, which, in our mind, was the requisite number to justify going into the studio to make an album, which I realize is a dated concept—one that we might like better than the last couple of outings.

You took on a more prominent role as a vocalist on this record. Does it feel a lot different being The Connells in 2021 versus 1991?

Yeah, unfortunately, I did. Some of the songs are more personal. Two of them are about my kids, who are now 16 and 17. So I sang all of one of those and part of another. But I think the blueprint is pretty much the same. I come in with the idea for a song, and the other guys come up with their own parts. Back then, George Huntley was also contributing songs, and Doug’s contributed some really, really good songs—well, relative to what we do.

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