Pale Blue Eyes’ excelsior modernist pop music comes from Devon and Sheffield – via stop-overs in Iceland, KLF-land and the Steel City home of British electronic music.
Pale Blue Eyes’ own Penquit Mill studio has been crucial here. The PBE studio sits in the Devon greenery, with buzzards wheeling overhead, just south of Dartmoor. To create the studio, the band members took out a bank loan and worked pretty much anywhere that would provide a wage – at a soup factory, at music festivals, in greenhouses and cinemas, running bars at disturbing corporate events, as a tree surgeon’s assistant. The core of PBE debut album Souvenirs was written and recorded by Sheffield’s Lucy Board and South Devon’s Matt Board. Matt and Lucy were married in 2018, years after meeting at art college.
“When we were younger,” says Lucy, “we recorded at various studios – from makeshift DIY places in Sheffield and Plymouth to residential studios like Rockfield in Wales. Rockfield was like heaven to us, but it was somewhere we could only afford for a couple of days. Our dream was to have more studio time, to develop songs without being ‘on the clock’, and to learn how to produce ourselves.”
In time and with hard work, the PBE studio took shape. All the goods arrived. The Moog Little Phatty, the Prophet 12, the Roland Space Echo. The Moon Funeral Fuzz, the Big Sky reverb. Alongside all the gear in the studio, there was a crucial resource outwith. As she’d left her teens, Lucy played in various bands in Sheffield – including several projects overseen by Adrian Flanagan, later of Moonlandingz and the Eccentronic Research Council. Lucy also, subsequently, got to know Flanagan’s Moonlandingz co-founder, Dean Honer. With his studio experience with artists including Róisín Murphy, I Monster, the Human League and Add N To (X), Honer became an important part of the PBE story. He mixed and mastered the Souvenirs album and also acted as adviser during the record’s creation. The title of Lucy’s college dissertation makes clear her own interest in South Yorkshire synth innovation: “An Investigation into Sheffield's Alternative Music Scene Between 1973 and 1978, with Particular Reference to Cabaret Voltaire.”
While Lucy examined her home city’s hifi heritage, Matt’s musical exploration saw him travel further afield. As he entered his twenties, he’d become enamoured of the sounds Sigur Rós had been making in Iceland. Matt had met a couple of Icelanders while studying for his music MA. With money he’d saved from working at the soup factory, he decided to go and spend some time in Iceland. Speculatively, he turned up at Sigur Rós’s Sundlaugin studio, outside Reykjavik. There he ended up doing some formative recordings with Sigur Rós studio engineer Birgir Jón Birgisson.