Quixote is not the type of band that hangs out in trendy bars wearing skinny jeans. They are a group of individuals that strongly believe in what they do. The last thing they would probably want is to give birth to the kind of music that would seriously compromise what they believe to be good quality music. Art first, popularity second. I appreciate that a lot in a world populated with mediocre talents supported by big budget record companies thinking only of the profit margin.

Cameron Laing is behind the wheel in this group, formed in the UK initially, under the name Rebel Jane. With some minor success under their belt and a name change to boot, the time came to move to Berlin and start from scratch. Their sound changed and maneuvered into darker, gloomier, more bluesy territory and with Berlin’s generous offering of musicians to choose from, they now have a chance to experiment more than ever. Currently working on a new album, the world is beginning to open up for Quixote.



I met up with Cameron, Phil and Guillaume at Place Clichy one fine evening to talk about their current status.  

You used to be called Rebel Jane. Tell me the story.

Cameron: I started Rebel Jane with Danny who’s in England at the moment. He’s the piano player and a person that I’ve written a lot of songs with. We lived together in London in a little disease pit of a flat and started a band, just the two of us. We had our first concert but we still didn’t have a name. We had been looking at posters all day, looking at different band names, trying to get inspiration and we had nothing. The idea for the name came to me during sleep, someone woke me up and I had that name so we thought “Fuck it. Let’s take it.” and we kept it for a while. Rebel Jane is quite a terrible name, and after couple of years of using it while still in London, our new management said it was shit. [laughs]

Phil: (Sounded) like a bald lesbian.

Cameron: Yeah. It sounded like a bald lesbian. He (manager) expected like a fat bald lesbian to come onstage instead of me. I guess that it wasn’t really representative of our kind of music and we never really liked the name anyway, we just had to have something. We ended up using Quixote because of the idea behind the story that it’s sort of “better mad and happy than sane and miserable”. I thought it was quite nice, and it looks nice, and it was our name ever since.

What would you say was the biggest change in your musical style when you compare Rebel Jane to Quixote?

Cameron: I don’t know. What do you (Phil) think? I think it’s just matured a lot.

Phil: When I first joined. It was just you and Danny so there was a lot of quite songs, a lot of acoustics songs, and then a few months after I joined a bit of louder songs started coming out, more bluesy sounding…

Cameron: … cos we had the bass sound.

Phil: Yeah. And more blues based songs rather than just kind of classic rock songs.

Cameron: Much more blues influence came through that’s for sure. I think it’s just matured a little bit. Cos some of the first songs when we first started were old songs, that we’ve written together before, when obviously we were a bit younger. I think we just started to develop and we’ve just got better taste, basically.

You’re a five piece band at the moment?

Cameron: More or less [laughs] Danny went back to London because he ran out of money so he went back to London for a while but we now have two new drummers Carlos and Mr. Alex so we have two drums onstage, so it’s still a kind of five piece band. We often use guests, like, next month we’ll have a brass section and an electric violin. We’ve already done concerts with a choir and saxophone and this kind of stuff…

Guillaume: …harmonica.

The move towards brass and violin is that something new that you’ve been experimenting with?

Cameron: It’s something in Berlin. We always wanted to do that in London. When you turn up at a venue in London there’s four bands and you play for half and hour, and it’s such a panic job for the technicians that the idea of trying to cram three choir singers and a brass section on this is impossible, so you just have to arrange songs realistically.
I’d been traveling with Danny and then I came here (to Berlin) on my own, and it was a kind of fresh start, so when I was advertising for musicians I figured I’d just advertise for anything and see what’ll turn up. We ended up getting lot’s of applications from weird, wonderful people, well, certainly weird people. That was the beginning of it all.

What was the reason behind your decision to move to Berlin?

Cameron: Well the short answer is that I was traveling with Danny in Spain and France, and we spent our money very quickly and then I accidentally stole lot’s of money from a record label and ended up going to Paris trying to spend as much as I could. Paris was strange and expensive and I’d heard so many good things about Berlin, and it’s creative scene, that I decided to come here

So you’ve never actually been here before?

Cameron: No. I didn’t know anyone or know anything and just took a bus out of Paris, came to Berlin and just a strange series of incredibly good luck landed at my feet and so it just seemed like a sensible place to stay.

And when was this?

Cameron: This was August 2010, a year and a half pretty much. It’s a great city, and I’ve met lots of good people in terms of music here. Like I said there were just lots of lucky breaks for us. Everything just kind of fell into place. It made sense for me to call Danny and call Phil and say “Do you want to come over to Berlin?”. I had some new people here (Guillaume, Carlos) and we brought some people from England over and started again.

Guillaume: So that was the short answer? [laughs]


How would you compare the music scenes both in London and Berlin in terms of how you have to survive as a band?

Cameron: It’s much easier here, for sure.

It is easier?

Cameron: You have to have a job in London or else there’s no way you can live in London without a proper job you can’t just be busking like here.

Phil: To busk in London you have to apply for an audition, don’t you or something? You can’t just go on the street and do it. You basically have to have a job to live.

Cameron: It’s just incredibly expensive. We rented a house boat in central London and it was basically sinking, and it was a disaster but comparatively very cheap. It was big so we had a rehearsal room and a recording studio there and we all lived on the boat together. When that boat was sold it would have meant that we would have to go into our own individual real London life, get an apartment bla, bla, bla but it’s crazy, crazy money. You can’t survive from the money you make in music (in London) where as here you can survive from the money you make in music.

Let’s talk about your influences. You say Nick Cave and Tom Waits are some of your main influences. What is it about them that really attracts you or makes you want to go in that direction?

Cameron: They pay us. It’s their new marketing campaign.
I think the main thing is the lyrics and writing. I don’t think we sound particularly like Tom Waits and Nick Cave, I mean even my voice is completely different. We’re similar but more from a lyric writing point of view, and the atmosphere it creates. There’s no excuse to be writing “la, la, la, baby I miss you” kind of crap over and over again. For me obviously, language is a pretty big thing and you can do quite a lot with it, so it’s nice to make the most of it. I think they, same as Leonard Cohen, write just amazing poetry, and that is the biggest influence from them from my point of view at least and I guess maybe from musical side of things it’s just that slightly blues influence that affects the rest of the music.

I know this is a difficult question but would you be able to tell me what is it about music that makes you want to be a musician.

Cameron: I don’t think it’s something that you even choose to do. You kinda have to do it. If I look at it from like a logical point of view, it’s terrible isn’t it, you’re just living in poverty for months, months on end when you’re playing. Sometimes you just wonder what you’re doing. It’s one of those things where your constant strive for excellence changes your outlook on everything. Every single thing you see or read, you’re thinking about how that word could be interesting in a song or in a line. It completely skews your perception of life, and I don’t it’s necessarily that healthy a thing. I think it’s just something that you just have to do.

Phil: We had some bad, bad experiences on stage but something keeps on driving you. You just keep on wanting it to get better. You’re trying to reach something you never get to. You strive to play this really good show that you’ve got in your head. I think sometimes you get there and it feels really, really good but then you just keep on driving to make it better and better and better. If it wasn’t for that drive, like Cam said, it could get a bit depressing sometimes.

Cameron: It’s insatiable isn’t it, it’s like nothing is ever enough. I mean you finish a record and stuff and you spend ages on it. You get to a point where you finally think “Ah, this is good” and a month later you don’t want to listen to it anymore and you’re just thinking to move on, but you want to just try and realize the potential. I think with this band, when you look around, and I listen to the songs I think there’s something here that excites us at least. You wanna try and get to the point where it’s fulfilled it’s potential and it will never fulfill that potential because every step you take you get better. It’s not something you can quit.

It’s like a drug.

Cameron: Yeah. It makes you poor and it makes you unhealthy. [laughs]
Tell me about the new album “Devil in a Bunny Suit, Angel in a Cocktail Dress”. 

Cameron: We’re hoping to release it as limited edition CD on the 26th Jan at SO36, and online next month in February. That’s the plan.

When did you record it?

Cameron: It’s been going on for a while. The issue is that we worked with our old manager Tom and the mixing engineer from the Beatsteaks and did this demo CD and stuff. He’s a great guy and does a good job, but it wasn’t the sound we wanted, in the end. It became very clean and polished. It’s a common theme. It happens every time you work with producers, and they try to make you sound super professional. Sometimes it loses it’s character, and so we’re doing it ourselves at the moment.

Recording live?

Cameron: Some things have been recorded live. Some versions of the songs we might use from different situations. We started it at the end of the summer but had to start completely again because my computer broke and then the next one got stolen and the next one kind of broke again. Just last month I got a new computer and managed to get hold of all the equipment we need to be doing a good job, so we’re now in a kind of an intensive working phase to try and get it ready, and it’s really only like half way done.

Are you the only writer?

Cameron: For this album it’s been me and Danny. We’ve been together since 2005 writing. Some songs are just mine. I mean I wrote the text, some songs I wrote the music to as well, some songs Danny’s written music to and I’ve done text and some songs we’ve written the music together. Back in London we used to have a small 8-track recorder on which we would record our ideas. You’d kind of come home and you’d be listening to what’s happening and Danny’s recorded like four chords just going round and I’d add a bass part to it before he’d come home. Always without really saying anything. It became almost like a weird game to kind of come back to it “Done a few things to the song today” and then it eventually gets to a point where you’ve got a finished track, and someone has to finish it before it just disappears. It is a collaborative writing process between me and Danny really.

How do you feel about Facebook as a way of connecting to your audience or promoting yourselves?

Phil: It’s really good but I don’t really like it. I hate it, self-promotion like that. It’s nice cos it’s kind of faceless but at the same time it’s odd. I’d never do it from my own page, I should probably cos all my friends are there but I don’t really want to poke people and say ìHey, I’ve got this song out, download it, listen to it.î
Guillaume: I think we have to, we feel like we have to have it. It’s not something we do. We’re not self-promoting. It’s not the aim of the project to sell itself. We want it to work. The key nowadays to do that (make it work) is that kind of thing.

Cameron: It’s a disaster for music. Full stop. Not so much using Facebook in itself, but the whole point is you have to be a business enterprise, you can’t just like music and play songs and get it to the people and hope it takes off. There’s no money in music cos nobody pays for music and because there’s no money none of the companies are willing to take any kind of risk whatsoever. The radio is becoming increasingly populated with quite safe generic bands. Like the rock band scene is basically the pop band scene it’s just what goes and plays on the dance floors to 18 year old kids who dance to Michael Jackson or Kylie Minogue or something. It means that if you want to be a slightly more off the wall musician you have to market yourself very well and find your own type of audience, build your own thing so that the company can say “Oh, these guys are already quite successful” and we can just like invest in them and that’s it.
 To give an example, we had an email from Universal saying that they really like our songs and they consider us a high-quality band that could have a lot of success, maybe with major independent companies, but that at Universal, and I quote “We’re sometimes looking more for quantity than quality”. We all know that’s how it works, but when you have the A&R person from Universal actually specifically writing and saying they’re not looking to develop artists or whatever, then that’s a big problem. The thing they are looking for is to have people that write a large quantity of very disposable music that they can drop in an advert because that’s the only way they can make money by getting it into major corporate advertising. What kind of genuine artist or musician would want to essentially be writing a soundtrack for a Pepsi advert? It’s other things that we got into it for, and I don’t think that’s what any of our favourite artists, musicians, poets, authors or filmmakers got into it for.

Guillaume: I think of it from the other side too, because nothing is all black or white. People can promote stage shows or do other promotional stuff. It’s great for communication too. People can write to us and interact with us, and of course Facebook helps us to promote our concerts and record releases. But the problem is that, with the industry the way it is now, we are obliged to operate as a social networking business, that is where we feel something is wrong.

Cameron: All of the online social networks and computer programs are great tools, but when everyone can use these tools, to download recording software, make music, then promote it to everyone in the world if they have the time to sit on the computer all day. Bearing in mind not everyone is necessarily going to be making good music. When you have so many people doing it, these tools, Facebook etc, become completely saturated like Myspace was. Originally people were having great success making underground music and using Myspace to connect to people and communicate…it’s how we did our tour of the UK. It’s a very useful thing but once you’ve got ten billion people, you know, recording their dog barking along to the “EastEnders” theme tune and trying to send it to record companies and putting it up on Myspace it obviously gets to a point when any person with an account would block bands. You couldn’t go on to, like, a little meeting forum and be posting things or contacting people because people think, like, “I’m sick of getting messages from bands”. That’s what happens.
They are wonderful tools regardless, and Facebook is so useful to us of course. It’s useful for everyone but the kind of split problem is that firstly, everything will become saturated eventually because any good thing will become saturated by people who will want to use it, and there’s absolutely no divider between what’s going on and secondly the fact that you have to do it. You have to spend so much of your time marketing, creating new ways to contact the press or to contact the radios or to contact labels to reach new fans. A lot of musicians spend more time marketing than writing. There’s a lot of people that haven’t written a song for a year but they’ve got ninety thousand YouTube.

Quixote is Cameron (main vocals, lyrics, piano), Guillaume (bass), Phil (guitar) and Carlos (drums).

You can catch Quixote at WABE on 14th of January and at the Berlin Unhinged Festival at SO36 on 26th January. 

Interview and Photo: Olga Baczynska

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