Formation (1991) David Callahan (vocals, guitars, samplers) had been in
indie rock band
The Wolfhounds, who were active for much of the second half of the 1980s. Often associated with the
C86 indie scene of the time, the band released several acclaimed albums of abrasive guitar pop and a dozen or so singles on a variety of labels. Following the band's split in early 1990, Callaghan decided that "when The Wolfhounds finished, I just felt that I hadn't really done what I wanted to do... It was always a bit of a compromise with the other members of the band, most of whom were a bit more rock-oriented. I like rock music, but there were so many other things I wanted to do. In the back of my head I just thought, 'Well, I'm going to do everything now, I might never get the chance to do it again'... I went in to see
Alan McGee because
Creation had offered us a deal by then, and I said 'I'm not gonna do The Wolfhounds, I'm gonna do this new thing'." Some of the ideas which would inform Moonshake had, however, begun in the last stages of The Wolfhounds. Callahan: "We'd used the sampler in the later days... I really loved the potential of that, and it just seemed to me that no one was fulfilling that potential. I wanted to compose things with it rather than just have loops or beats. I knew that I wasn't going to be able to do that in the Wolfhounds... We had already started discussions... that we were too mannish, too alpha male. It’s too laddish. We need some female input in this. We put an advert for a female guitarist. I didn't like and still don't like the way I sing now, so we wanted someone to kind of soften my voice and make it more interesting, perhaps even do harmonies. So I put an advert in the
Melody Maker, and the only person to answer was
Margaret Fiedler." Regardless of the divergence in approaches, all Moonshake songs made a strong use of textures, noise and sampler technology. Although Callahan originally favoured
Skyscraper as a project name, the band ultimately settled on the name
Moonshake (taken from a
Can single on the seminal
Krautrockers'
Future Days album).
First lineup - early EPs and Eva Luna (1991–1992) Moonshake signed to
Alan McGee's
Creation Records for their debut EP,
First, released in spring 1991. At this point, the band was continuing to follow the harsh-effected guitar-heavy sound which had characterised a lot of the last Wolfhounds recordings. The results drew comparisons with
Sonic Youth and
My Bloody Valentine, and lacked the dub element featured in later recordings. Callahan soon considered this a misstep. "We got really bad reviews in the music press. The record sold rather well because a lot of people liked weird head-fucky shoegaze stuff... I'm told lots of people really enjoyed tripping and listening to it. There's lots of stuff going on in the stereo and the speakers with different pans and stuff. People were getting quite freaked out with it. But it was too close to what a lot of other bands were doing, as far as I was concerned. We were supposed to be heading out on our own, and we kind of made a faltering step." "big, weird and unnerving" and "one hell of a ground-breaking record (which) stands resolutely alone among all of the albums released in 1992 as no other band has managed to create anything remotely similar before or since... a unique album with few equals",
Big Good Angel and split of original lineup (1993) For 1993's mini-album
Big Good Angel, both Callahan and Fiedler contributed three songs each. In 2024, Callahan recalled that
Big Good Angel "has some of our best stuff on it. It's fantastic. But that was largely recorded separately. I recorded with Mig and John, for the most part, in a studio, and Margaret did a lot of her stuff at home with Guy, and just brought it into a studio to mix. She scrapped one of her songs as well, and we had to come back in again so she could do "Two Trains", which I think was pretty much entirely written and recorded at home." Recalling the disagreement 30 years later, Callahan admitted "I felt like I lost my creative partner. Stupidly, I kind of rashly just rang her up once and said, "I don't want you to be in the band anymore," and she was really fucking upset. I felt quite bad about it. It was my fault for not being a very good communicator at that age." In addition,
PJ Harvey,
Stereolab keyboard player Katharine Gifford and
Sidi Bou Said members Lee Howton and Claire Lemmon all contributed vocals, ensuring that Moonshake on record would retain a strong female component in spite of Fiedler's departure. Harvey, in particular, made a striking guest contribution on "Just a Working Girl". Callahan: "It was my chance — and I don't think I succeeded in this — to go partly back to my original idea for the band, which was to have harmonies. Unfortunately, at the time, my voice wasn’t the kind of voice you could harmonize with
(laughter). Certainly, it wasn’t the other vocalists' fault; I thought they were great. It seems like every day we were just ushering people through the door, getting them to do a couple of hours, and ushering them out again. But I know we had fun." Callahan remembers "(It) came out nothing like I wanted it to
(laughter). I definitely had plans. We were using this big room at a studio called Blackwing that the
Cocteau Twins,
The Family Cat, and others had used before us. I had hundreds of sheets of paper over the wall with — because I can't read music — mixing and arranging diagrams of horns and samples and whose vocals went where... I had all this stuff written out on scraps of paper and stuck to the wall. It looked like a hoarder’s front room. In the studio I'd say, "I want a double bass on this." And I'd try to find a double bass player on the phone in the studio, and they'd come in the next day. It was all quite chaotic, and it sounds chaotic because of that. I could have carried on recording that for months. In a way I wish I'd got an actual producer in to make a bit more sense of it, but a lot of people like the chaos, so who am I to say?" Morland was replaced on drums by Kevin Bass, and although Gates did not continue with the band, Katherine Gifford continued to guest as female harmony singer on live Moonshake dates. One song from this period, "Heart Keeps Beating" was entirely sung by Gifford: although it was never recorded and placed on one of the band's albums, the band did record a live version at the Disobey Club in London, featuring Terry Edwards on saxophone plus several guest musicians from London skronk-improv band Skree (as "Skree Timelord Arkestra"). This was released on the Blast First compilation
3 Fingers and a Fumb in May 1994.
The Sound Your Eyes Can Follow received good reviews which were not matched by sales, and some time after the release of the album Moonshake parted company with Too Pure. The band's line-up continued to fluctuate over the next few years, with Callahan later remembering "it really ended up being like
The Fall or Stereolab, where there were constantly people coming in and out of the band all the time, which is not how I wanted it. I wanted a core that we could work with all the time. I had to audition people all the time, and then we had to do more rehearsals. Every time someone new came in the band, we'd have to rehearse. Often, we were playing to clicks and samples that were rigidly looped. And that meant that we had to be rigidly rehearsed, and the drummers had to wear headphones and really be locked in with the samples, which takes quite a lot of work." In 2004, Callahan reformed
The Wolfhounds, initially for live performances in 2004 and 2006, but with a full and ongoing reunion following in 2010. He began a full solo career in 2021 as
David Lance Callahan, describing himself as a "dissonant electric folk singer" and performing songs informed by folk, blues and experimental sound. In recent years, he has also worked with
Swell Maps C21 and Manyfingers. Raymond Dickaty went on to join
Spiritualized and stayed with them until 2002, following which he studied free improvisation. He later worked with
The Duke Spirit, AMP,
Zukanican and his own free-jazz/rock fusion band, Solar Fire Trio. In 2022, Callahan and Fiedler collaborated on a remastering of the debut Moonshake album
Eva Luna for a deluxe edition, which was released on vinyl and as a download by Beggars Arkive. ==Connections==