About six weeks ago, I met up with David Cross Band co-founder and keyboard player Sheila Maloney in a well-known meeting place/pub at the back of Kings Cross station for a good old natter. Read on…
Roger Trenwith: Tell us about your musical background. Is your family musical at all?
Sheila Maloney: Well, I started off learning piano when I was five. I did all the usual classical stuff, grades and everything. My mum and my uncle on my dad’s side were both amateur musicians, and my sister is a good jazz trumpeter. All of us had piano lessons.
My late brother was getting his act together to do piano in pubs and stuff. So yeah, we’re all musical really.
Roger: What about your musical education?
Sheila: I did all the classical stuff, but even at the time I’d sit down at the piano at the weekend, making stuff up…atmospheres and imaginary film scores, things like that.
Roger: There’s a track called Autumn on your Bandcamp page that is certainly very filmic.
Sheila: Yes, it is. It does mostly start from playing on the keyboard or piano and just improvising, trying out ideas and then working it up from there. I don’t sit down with a sheet of music paper.
At some point I am going to put an album out. It’s mostly written from way back, a long time ago, and I just want to get it done really. But I did write something about two years ago that’s going on there as well. I saw that expression, the pale blue dot, about the Earth being seen as that from Voyager, and so the album is going to be called A Pale Blue Dot because I’ve just got that image of being so small in comparison to the Universe.
I need to master it properly, as some of it was on really old DAT tapes, which I couldn’t actually use. It’s now been converted into audio files on my computer, so it is now almost ready to finish off.
Roger: I look forward to that!
Do you get commissions for commercials or films?
Sheila: Not much, but I did a thing on football violence once! A documentary called Trouble On The Terraces, with Sean Bean narrating. So that was quite fun.
Roger: Did Sean Bean die by the end of the first chapter? 😉
Sheila: Well, it was interesting!
The first commercial thing I got asked to do was an educational documentary on astronomy. I wrote four long synth-based tracks that are the basis of the album that I will soon finish, and then I’ve written some new stuff as well.
Roger: Give us some highlights of who you’ve worked with before David Cross Band.
Sheila: Funnily enough, I met up with David Cross some 30 years ago, I started the band, you see! 🙂
Roger: Oh, did you? I didn’t know!
Sheila: Back in the day. I was working as keyboard player. I was doing lots of pop stuff, and playing all the clubs in London. I nearly got signed to EMI. I met up with David through an evening class where he was teaching jazz. And so obviously I was one of the best people in the class (heheh), and we started improvising stuff. It wasn’t really jazz, but he thought we could work together, and I had lots of ideas and suddenly it’s “let’s start a band”. So we did! We went through a few names… I can never come up with names. We were “They Came From Plymouth” at one point!
Roger: Ha ha… that’s not very good is it?
Sheila: It’s rubbish! 🙂
So yeah, we started that and then came lots of touring. We put three albums out: Memos From Purgatory, The Big Picture, and Testing To Destruction.
Roger: You’re not on the last DCB album – Ice Blue, Silver Sky ?
Sheila: I didn’t join again until about two years ago. I don’t know why David decided he wanted keyboards back. It was probably because I did a gig with them at Butlins in 2016, because David Jackson broke his toe and couldn’t make it so they needed me to come along. He asked the day before “Can you come and do this?” and I didn’t know most of the new stuff, but hey, I’ll give it a go. So I learned several songs overnight just about in time for the gig, and while standing on stage!
Roger: Did it work out?
Sheila: Yeah, it was brilliant, and such a great feeling having not played live for such a long time! It was televised too, but unfortunately, it’s not available. It was something called Electric Dreams. It was set out like a club, with the 80s stuff upstairs with Howard Jones and people like that, and us downstairs.
Ed’s note… If anyone out there in Reader Land has heard of this and has got it on DVD or whatever, please let us know!
Roger: Bring us up to date with your musical exploits…
Sheila: Well Roger, there’s my interim career writing music, teaching and being in charge of music and music tech for a major exam board. On the band front, we’ve been doing a mix of DCB tracks and also performing the whole of Larks Tongues in Aspic @50 which started last year and continues at the moment, plus tracks from Starless and Bible Black, and Red.
It’s quite an interesting concept to add keyboards to tracks that for the most part only had mellotrons on them (plus the odd electric piano) while trying to keep some feel for the original tracks.
Just before I joined the band again I was working with Mick Paul on his album Parallel Lives. He had an album of material with vocals with Jinian Wilde or his own vocals, drums (including Craig Blundell), and bass, and some basic keys on them. It was all written by him but had very basic midi keyboard parts. I spent a lot of time building up the tracks and I hope adding a more in-depth texture and harmonic interest alongside lots of keyboard solos and integrating solo piano, something that I am always keen to include.
Once this was all done, we booked a day in the studio and got Steve Roberts to complete all the tracks that didn’t have Craig on them.
At the same time as all of this Jinian contacted me and asked me to start a new band with him and Mick. We pooled together all our ideas that we had been working on over the years individually and somehow the combination of these became unique as a group. We spent a lot of time rehearsing and writing in studios and working at home to develop the music.
Then Covid came along. Jin moved to Sweden and I sat in my house adding keyboard parts to anything that moved. Eventually I worked with Mick to master and release his album which came out in 2021 as lockdown started to ease. We kept on with ideas for The Fae (as we decided to call the other band) and we were then invited by Monument Alley to do a gig in Norway with Mick’s stuff.
Then Covid went away (Woohoo!). This year we finally pinned down Steve Roberts and booked Sonic One studio in Wales and recorded all the drum parts for The Fae. I now need to update a few keyboard parts to blend more with the drums and then it will be ready to mix and master so will be hopefully out this year or early next. Probably, any gigs will have to be in Sweden!
Roger: My, you have been busy! I must hear The Fae album when it’s out, and Mick’s album!
Change of subject coming up… The David Cross Band are very busy touring, but somehow I keep missing them, as you know! 😊 You’ll soon be off to America. What’s it like being the only woman in the family?
Sheila: I don’t know if I get treated any better or different or worse, to be honest.
If you want to go into the whole thing about women in music, I don’t really know where to begin with that, really. Because we’re still quite rare as instrumentalists. I think you’ve got to look at how do people get started? Usually, musicians get started at school, and therefore, you’re at school and there’s loads of people playing guitar and drums and stuff, but they were mostly the boys. Girls don’t get that formative experience. That’s why there’s loads of female keyboard players because we all do our piano practice. 😉
Roger: DCB is touring all the time, it seems. Is it hard work, jetting about all over the place?
Sheila: Nah… It’s fun! I love touring. It’s great. The biggest tour I’ve done so far was Poland in January. We did six gigs in a row, night after night, and that was just brilliant! Each night the music would settle in and get better and better. Although we are very lucky to get a range of different gigs, when they are one-offs you don’t get the chance to kind of develop the live performance and respond to audiences organically, so at the end of the week everything just seemed to be on a different level musically.
Roger: Yes, it sounds fabulous! Then you have America coming up?
Sheila: Yeah, I’m really looking forward to that. It’s six weeks on the East Coast. We’re going to go up the coast all the way, and then go up into Canada, and maybe come back down a little bit. Leonardo (Pavkovic – Mr MoonJune and tour manager extraordinaire) has it all worked out. He’s brilliant! The most I think we’re driving at any one time is four hours, and they’re all kind of quite nice routes.
Roger: Who does the driving?
Sheila: Oh, we’ll hire somebody in America, although I think John Mitchell is quite keen on driving as well as being a stunningly talented guitarist. It will be brilliant!
Our intended South American tour has changed a bit, there’s just been a military coup in Bolivia, which is the best excuse I’ve heard recently! The one in August was cancelled and is now potentially happening in December. There are two gigs booked already in Chile.
Roger: Going back to the band again, and the songwriting process, presumably you contribute to the writing?
Sheila: In the original incarnation of the band I was a co-writer, but I haven’t been involved with anything recently. We would spend hours improvising or trying out ideas, or people would bring ideas in from home.
Roger: Was it all instrumental?
Sheila: The first album was, but then we thought we maybe want to do some songs. Maybe that would make us more successful or whatever.
Roger: Who wrote the lyrics?
Sheila: We had John Dillon at the time who was the bassist and singer, so he wrote all the lyrics. He kind of wrote the verses and choruses of the songs as well, but we did work on them as a group because everybody was putting their instrumental sections in.
Roger: You have got one lone UK gig coming up, which I’m really looking forward to!
Ed’s note…this interview took place before the Camden Club gig on 8th September. See link below…
Sheila: Yes! We have got one British gig coming up, which is (was!) on Sunday 8th of September at Camden Club in London, at one o’clock in the afternoon.
After Camden we are playing “Progress One” Festival in Sardinia and then the MoonJune “In the court of the harvest moon” festival in Toledo before we travel to the USA for the East Coast tour.
Roger: Thanks Sheila, that was all very interesting. Good luck for all your touring!
Now…whose round is it?
You can read Roger Trenwith’s review of the David Cross Band gig at London’s Camden Club HERE.
Sheila Maloney – Website (David Cross Band) | Bandcamp