Features Gem Club: ‘It’s The Most Heartwarming, Incredible Thing’

Christopher Barnes is speaking days ahead of the release of his new Gem Club album, ‘In Roses’. Sharing an apartment with his boyfriend that they’re both renting, he’s weighing up the usual anxiety that strikes musicians when they know that what they do isn’t always a profitable exercise. “Every artist goes through that question of self-sufficiency,” he says. He’s had stints teaching music, but that was before “the record swallowed that time up.” 

Money isn’t on the mind, most of the time. Barnes is mostly concerned with the connection his music makes on those listening in. And if any record’s going to have a dramatic emotional response, it’s ‘In Roses’. Although not a one-dimensionally sad record in capital letters, it’s pretty much scientifically proven to provoke open sobbing. “It’s incredibly rewarding personally to be able to connect with people and have them respond to art,” he says, and that’s what keeps him going.

Listening to both debut ‘Breakers’ and this latest record, Barnes is putting himself at the very forefront. Listening in is almost like listening in and sharing his very thoughts. So it’s no surprise to hear he gets a lot of responses, both online and in person. But it’s something he thrives off. “Technology now is crazy. If I had the chance to write to a band and say ‘hi’ and they write me back… I mean, I couldn’t go on PJ Harvey’s Facebook page and have that happen. I want to be able to give that to people. It means a lot to me when people write. When we answer back, I want it to mean something to them too.”

When you started writing songs did you even imagine people buying anything?
If I start writing with other people in mind, it’s not serving the purpose of why I write. It’s just for me. You get into really dangerous territory when you consider ‘Who’s going to buy this?’ Fuck that. It’s crippling. I can’t think about that. I spend enough time suppressing that thought when I’m writing. If I start thinking about other things, nothing gets done. 

Do you ever feel like you could feasibly write a song that could take off and be written for a pop artist?
If it’s a case of me disassociating myself from it, it’s interesting. A lot of artists do that and I think it’s really freeing. You’re taking away your own identity. I’m not writing a song as Christopher Barnes - the performance wouldn’t be me, it wouldn’t go under my name apart from the liner notes. There’s that separation between writer and performer. You don’t have to think about the performance of it.

I’m intrigued by the instrumental tracks. Is there a reason why the opener is called ‘Nowhere’?
Have you seen the movie with the same name? It’s this very American hyper-stylised 1990s flick. It’s part of a trio of movies. The first one is ‘Totally Fucked Up’, the second is ‘Nowhere’ and the third is ‘Doom Generation’. It’s a trilogy of young, sexualised movies about kids in America, with aliens… It’s just all over the place. 

It’s described on iMDB as “90210” on acid…
Yeah! Well, in ‘Nowhere’ there’s this opening scene; a bunch of shower scenes and they’re playing this Slowdive song. It’s a very sexual scene, in the way that a naked lady is supposed to be with a shower scene. It’s one of my favourite opening scenes in a movie. Gregg Araki has a fantastic array of songs in his movies, and I wanted to write my own take on the music for the opening scene. Instead of the scene coming out sexual, I think it came out really funearial. And that was the jumping off point for the other songs - it was trying to set his visual to music.

How do you separate the album between the two instrumentals, ‘Nowhere’ and ‘QY2’. 
I think they define the record in half. From ‘Nowhere’ to ‘QY2’, that’s the lighter side. From ‘QY2’ to ‘Polly’, it’s the heavier material. We really tend to work with all the synths; a lot of what we do isn’t to dissonant. ‘QY2’’s opening section is a very stark thing. Before we knew we were gonna do a double LP, I liked the idea of people going to a turntable to flip the record. The first thing they’d put on would be the second side of ‘QY2’. I like the band of that. It links into the idea of changing the attitude. 

If half of the record is more optimistic, are people mistaking emotions? Like taking sadness when it’s really anxiety?
Generally no-one wants to feel uneasy, but there’s a lot that you learn from that. It’s not like I’m constantly going back to these horrible memories. You have these experiences, and the further you move away from those experiences, the stronger the perception is of who you are in relation to that experience. If that makes sense. The delivery is sad, I suppose. Each record we admit to saying that yeah, it’s sad, compared to other music. That’s not the intention. The intention isn’t to bum people out.

Is a lot of the music intentionally about you? Are ‘Michael’ and ‘Polly’ real people.
‘Polly’ was my Aunt. I’m writing about specific people. In a larger sense, ‘Polly’ is about who she was before she was sick, and who she was after she was sick. The idea is about how our bodies betray us, and how sickness can rob us of who we are. I mean, alzheimer’s is literally stealing people’s personas, their identities. It’s taking everything. It’s horrible. She was a professor at a university here and she retired. When she got sick, everything changed. We had to spend all this money on bills to take care of her. But ‘Michael’, the way I understand that song; it’s about a time in my life when I was such a horrible person that I would look to see if I could turn other people into a horrible person. In a romantic way. You knew you were such a piece of shit that you could see it in other people. You could turn them into the person you wanted them to be. ‘Michael’ is about any man I wanted to have that relationship with. If you take a song like ‘Marathon’, that takes Michael and flips it around. I used to work as a barback in a gay bar. I became friends with this man and it was very obvious he was in an abusive relationship. ‘Marathon’ is about how someone settles and accepts a negativity in the name of loving and in the name of a relationship. So it’s really all across the board.

It’s seems to cover a lot of time. You’ve already released a record - how do you think back to these things? It must be tempting to write in the present.
Sometimes I just think back - it sort of happens. Where I am; I’m in a happy, stable relationship with a person I love very much. I feel very lucky. But there was a long time when I wasn’t in that sort of safe place. You can’t help but think about that time of your life. It happens. And then you think about the ‘what if’ scenarios, the ‘where would I be’’s. It’s not be constantly going back to trauma and then feeling the need to have it out with whatever - it’s more a reflection of times past and who I am today. 

Do you often get responses to your songs from listeners?
I have favourite songs that are more fun for me to perform. I’m figuring out way to bring songs to the stage, to figure out arrangements. It’s really nice to get messages from people. Someone sent me a video of this old song on ‘Breakers’, and they’d set it to a Lamb of God circle pit. It’s this very hyper-masculine, shirtless guys moshing, set against this non-aggressive music. I was just blown away. It was so sweet and so thoughtful. I can’t bring up the words for what stuff like that means to me. 

When you perform do you notice emotional reactions in the crowd?
Sometimes it’s hard because there’s a light in your face! You know people are out there - you can hear them. People tend to be a bit more honest online, actually. It’s where they can take a backseat. But we have had shows where people have come up afterwards. And it’s crazy. If you had asked me five years ago if I could predict that any of this would happen I’d have said no. It’s the most heartwarming, incredible thing.