Spindle Radar: Gunship On Their Diverse New Era, Pop Culture Influences And Championing The Dreamer

Inspired by retro soundscapes and the audio-visual, Gunship are comprised of musicians Dan Haigh, Alex Westaway and Alex Gingell (the former two of previous fame with band Fightstar). The band’s forthcoming new album Unicorn – aptly taglined with ‘Imagination Is A Weapon’ – is expected to include more rock, industrial and EDM influences alongside their trademark synthwave style. Set to feature an impressive roster of collaborators and build on their love for the contemporary nostalgic, Unicorn was announced with the release of first single ‘Monster In Paradise’, a cyberpunk anthem featuring saxman Tim Cappello, Wargasm’s Milkie Way, film composer Tyler Bates and Dave Lombardo of Slayer fame. Released alongside a cinematic music video of a Blade Runner x The Terminator dystopian metropolis, it’s an exciting glimpse of what’s to come. We got the chance to chat with Gunship, read our interview below!

Hey Gunship – for first-time listeners, describe your sound in three words.

AG: Cinematic reverie fuel
AW: It’s just noise!

Congratulations on the release of ‘Monster In Paradise’, it’s a cyberpunk masterpiece and the accompanying visual is a real spectacle. What’s the story around the track/music video?

AW: We write music using a very visual palette, creating an idea of a world/scene/scenario from the very top. The ambition with the video was to essentially show what a rock show would look like in the world of Blade Runner twisted with Terminator. With budget and ambition being incongruous as is usually the case with Gunship, I think it turned out pretty cool. One aspect missing from the video which is apparent in the song is a thread of love/romance. We were very close to having a dog (German Shepherd) in Milkies Jeep with her which I think would have gone a little way towards scratching that itch, but couldn’t quite piece it together in time.

Collaborators on the new track include the incredible Milkie Way from Wargasm, Dave Lombardo of Slayer, Tyler Bates of Marilyn Manson’s band (and many iconic film scores!) as well as the late Tina Turner’s saxophonist, Timmy Cappello. Why did you decide to recruit such a broad range of musical talent and how did these relationships come about?

D: Ultimately I think we all just really enjoy creating things, and the act of creation – that “creating something from nothing”…that’s the real reward for the effort we put into our songs and videos etc. We love to collaborate with a wide range of artists in GUNSHIP – because in the act of connecting with other artists, you get to share that feeling of creating something with someone else who has chosen to centre their lives around being creative. Plugging into another artist’s creative world, process and approach is always deeply interesting, and also an amazing learning opportunity. The magic is that everyone does things differently and you ultimately you get to build something unique that wouldn’t be possible without that particular combination of personalities, dispositions and merging tastes etc In terms of who we approach – it’s literally people we either see, or have seen, who create work that we absolutely adore. Essentially I guess that’s a long way of saying: making stuff is cool, but making stuff with people who you hold in high esteem is one of the very best things.

How do you feel the post-pandemic world has affected music production and songwriting? Is it easier or harder to collaborate?

AG: In many ways it hasn’t changed a whole lot for us. Due to family commitments we naturally transitioned to working remotely most of the time before the pandemic was a thing. Everyone in the band has some kind of home studio setup. Our songs tend to be born in one of them and then get passed around and around with each member putting their shoulder to the wheel in turn. Eventually, when they’re in good enough shape we might get together in person and do some collective work on really pushing them over the finish line and adding ‘sprinkles’ as we call it. We also like to collaborate with artists worldwide, and most of the time the only feasible way to do that is remotely at the convenience of the artist involved. I think that doing the early work remotely is great because it gives each of us space and time to search for our own quality contribution, and then we live close enough to each other that it’s convenient for the three of us to finalise tracks in person, where it’s so much quicker and easier to communicate and iterate on the final pieces.

Milkie Way and Timmy Cappello also feature in the music video, Milkie Way giving a fantastic Terminator-inspired performance. How long did it take to create the video, there’s so much detail!

D: The idea to play a club gig in a cyberpunk future had been knocking around for a while and ‘Monster In Paradise’ just felt like the right track for the idea. The voice over on the song intro was born from contemplating the various monologues from the Terminator franchise – but when it came time to consider the video more deeply, I was into the idea of Milkie paying homage to the famous conclusion to Terminator 1 with Sarah, the Jeep, the polaroid and her recording her voice into the dictaphone etc. This led to us wanting to incorporate our own elements of expanded Terminator lore in other areas of the video too. We had some fun contemplating how a future Skynet might seek to develop technology which could turn regular human folk into biological drones, and the transformations you see in the video are examples of this. Elliott Gonzo directed and an excellent team assembled by KODE brought their skills to the shoot day, which all went extremely smoothly considering the quantity of what we had to capture. Many Gunship fans also turned up in their own hand assembled outfits which absolutely blew us away. I then edited this video over the course of around 3 weeks while we all simultaneously handled the eye special effects work (we all have backgrounds in VFX). Typically we do personally put in a huge amount of work into our music videos, which it seems is something that’s largely gone out of style in much of the industry… but we love the process and I guess we are all still aspiring filmmakers at some level… lol 😉

You’ve also announced your third record – Unicorn. Why this title and what does it tell us about the track-list and project as a whole?

D: The album is titled ‘UNICORN’ after the international icon of fantasy and imagination. The album is sonically diverse, but the theme linking everything together is celebrating the power of imagination. The album’s tagline is ‘Imagination Is A Weapon’ – there’s plenty of trouble in the world at the moment, and it certainly felt that way during the period we were writing these songs in , but ultimately it’s people’s ideas that solve problems. Imagination is what moves us forward and it’s what can solve our problems big or small – imagination is probably the most important resource we have. “UNICORN” is our way of championing the dreamers in this world.

How does Unicorn differ from your previous two albums, are there varying influences, genres or themes involved?

D: While writing for UNICORN I very consciously widened the set of my own influences that I would allow to affect the music that I was creating. ‘Monster In Paradise’ was the first track where I allowed myself to tap into textures and sounds that I adore but had previously deliberately withheld from GUNSHIP material. I still set off to make music that I wanted to hear but couldn’t find, but also not get stuck within any genre formula – and maybe these restrictions were never really there, but in practice the ‘just do what the fuck you want without restriction’ approach felt natural and meant I wrote some stuff I was excited about. I feel that a little more Industrial, rock, punk and goth shades made it into the big mixing bowl, but also a much more deliberate focus on rhythm and groove in the bass and drums – you can actually dance pretty hard to some of the new stuff. In terms of texture, I dug deeper into the 1980s production thing, continuing to use genuine 80s hardware and analog synths – but also built a large eurorack modular system which definitely contributed heavily to the dirtier, grimier and more distorted elements on the record.

AG: I think that Unicorn expands what GUNSHIP is about, rather than changes it. I feel like there’s a core element to the GUNSHIP sound and songwriting that’s consistent across all three records, and we would not want to lose that moving forward. But at the same time we don’t want to get stuck repeating ourselves and there are so many different directions and ideas we still want to explore – more than anyone could fit on a single album. So Unicorn is pretty diverse. We wanted to keep delivering on the things that made the first two records special to us – the 80s cinematic and pop culture influences, the lush synths, the attention to detail and the emotive lyrics/vocals – but we also wanted to mix in some other elements here and there and keep challenging ourselves and our listeners. So there are a few other elements mixed in here and there such as a little bit of a 90s influence, even a touch of EDM in places. That said, just as we pushed in new directions in places, we also mined even deeper into the 80s as in our collaboration with Britta Phillips (the original JEM) and doubled down on tried and tested touchstones like live saxophone. We loved working with Tim Cappello so much on Dark All Day that he graciously ended up playing on five songs this time around – I truly believe that people are going to love his work on Unicorn, he really elevates anything he plays on to the next level, he’s unbelievable!

Will there be any appearances from Fightstar bandmates on the new record..?

D: Yes there will! I’m very pleased to say that Charlie Simpson is back for “Tech Noir 2” along with the horror master himself Mr John Carpenter as well as Tim Cappello on sax too. Writing a ‘sequel’ to an existing song was an interesting challenge and a great deal of fun. Trying to transport yourself back to the creative place where the first “Tech Noir” originated, and produce something that shares enough of the first song’s DNA without making it a clone was an immersive and kind of weird experience. Also attempting to identify the original song’s signature elements and allowing ‘children’ of those themes to come to life was rewarding and also a bit like stepping into a time machine… like visiting an earlier version of yourself. It looks like Lee Hardcastle is also coming back for this sequel – so we’re hoping for another masterclass in claymation there… The whole team is back!

Make sure to check out Gunship’s new single ‘Monster In Paradise’ and its accompanying music video here or below. You can also pre-order their new album here.