The Obelisk Questionnaire: Caroline Cawley of Dystopian Future Movies & Church of the Cosmic Skull
Posted in Questionnaire on March 1st, 2023 by JJ Koczan
The Obelisk Questionnaire is a series of open questions intended to give the answerer an opportunity to explore these ideas and stories from their life as deeply as they choose. Answers can be short or long, and that reveals something in itself, but the most important factor is honesty.
Based on the Proust Questionnaire, the goal over time is to show a diverse range of perspectives as those who take part bring their own points of view to answering the same questions. To see all The Obelisk Questionnaire posts, click here.
Thank you for reading and thanks to all who participate.
The Obelisk Questionnaire: Caroline Cawley of Dystopian Future Movies & Church of the Cosmic Skull
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How do you define what you do and how did you come to do it?
Musician: After decades as an avid music obsessive, and stints DJing and as a concert promoter in my native Ireland in my 20s – It took me til the age of 31 to truly begin to write music. I was a bit lost, working in a bar, disillusioned with the education system in my newly adopted country (UK) when, after writing a few songs I was vaguely proud of, I met Bill. He was playing in a blues band with his brother Marty and, as a massive Jellyfish fan – early ’90s San Fran beat-combo led by singing drummer Andy Sturmer – Bill’s combined singing and drumming skills caught my eye.
I’m looking for a drummer to jam with, I said, passing him his free bottle of beer after their set. We exchanged details. It was a few months later, after bumping into him again outside a favoured late night establishment that we’d more often stand outside than within, that I noted his Taint T-shirt and how his beard was so long that it looked like part of the design. We began to jam a few weeks later and those early songs ended up on our first DFM self-titled EP. COTCS came a few years later and we’ve been a couple for almost ten years.
My day job is as a Primary School Music Specialist teaching 5 to 11 year olds. I’ve always wanted to be a teacher since I taught my little brother and a row of teddy bears in the front room at the age of 5. After almost 20 years as a regular class teacher, I recently began retraining as a music specialist. I’m now a year and a half in and beginning to see some positive changes. Namely marginalised kids who struggle with school writing Bessie Smith inspired 12 bar blues songs about their own lives. Incredibly rewarding stuff.
Describe your first musical memory.
My Dad is arguably more of a music anorak than myself and we had a constant and varied soundtrack growing up. My parents have told stories of me sleeping between two speakers as an infant, Led Zeppelin blaring, or dancing around the kitchen to Nik Kershaw classic ‘Wouldn’t It Be Good’ circa ‘84. But I guess one of my first musical memories is at the age of 5 or 6 listening to my then favourite album, Heart’s self-titled 1985 offering in the car parked outside our childminder’s house and wondering what ‘if looks could kill’ meant.
Describe your best musical memory to date.
Writing songs and beginning to record them with Bill in the early days of DFM was a revelation. Something that seemed so outside of the realms of possibility was within reach and almost a bit bizarre – hearing your own ideas played back to you. But our first gig was something else entirely. We booked it in a nearby city – almost everyone I knew was a seasoned musician in a great band so it was entirely too intimidating to think I could perform in front of any of them. This was the first time I would attempt to lead a performance in front of anyone since a frozen brain malfunction meant a humiliated walk off stage at a piano competition 20 years earlier.
Performing those songs and managing a pedal board in front of a very kind and accommodating crowd of 15 in Sheffield enabled my first experience of that ball of emotion rising in the chest, a release like no other as it rose and rose and tumbled out over those 4 or 5 songs. I burst into tears in the kebab shop afterwards. It was adrenalin, of course, but it was also something more. Some chemical composition changed within me and that was that. I’m a pretty heart-on-sleeve sort of person but there was an honesty and laid-bare quality to performance that I hadn’t expected.
The first airing of ‘She From Up The Drombán Hill’ – the spoken word track from our latest album ‘War of the Ether’ on a Leeds stage recently threw me right back to that feeling.
Telling that story in a crowded, silent room – an exposure like no other – voicing a story lived and endured by so many over decades back in Ireland. Those chorus breaks, those wide screen stabs have never sounded so enormous or so visceral. It’s a dream to be part of something like that.
When was a time when a firmly held belief was tested?
Dystopian Future Movies’ third album ‘War of the Ether’ is written about one recently uncovered instance of large scale abuse in Ireland centred around the Mother and Baby Homes – where pregnant, unwed women and teens were deposited by family or local clergy to hide what was deemed sinful. Growing up in a Catholic country, where church and state were firmly intertwined it was only later as abuses made the national press – abuses of power, child-sex abuse, cover ups – that what was often hiding in plain sight, behind a thin vale, was foisted into the public domain. And many simply did not want to believe it.
I’m not sure I ever had a firmly held religious belief, perhaps as a child where a romantised idea of unconditional love, forgiveness and the church as safe space permeated our classrooms and religion books in the form of bible stories. But when the idea of priest as counsellor, as listener, as pillar of community broke down, Catholic Ireland never recovered and is ironically a more accepting place now than it arguably ever was before with the recent passing of progressive legislation around abortion and same sex marriage.
Where do you feel artistic progression leads?
Progression is an interesting one. In education we are constantly being asked if our curricula or teaching approach can demonstrate progression of knowledge and skills across a child’s time at school. So we make sure that our kids are embedding and deepening their knowledge and understanding of concepts over time – so that some aspects become second nature to reduce cognitive load. Like playing guitar for example, if you are spending all of your time considering the fretting of a chord, it will take over all of your cognitive space leaving little for creativity. So, get better at the little things so you then have more head space for innovation.
Where does it lead? Well progressing within a band with a group of collaborators can only lead to more of those magic moments – the beauty of a super tight performance, moving like a ballet troupe between sections seamlessly. Anticipating or feeling changes in a jam, innately knowing or feeling what needs to happen next during the construction of a piece of music. To my mind, there’s nothing like the joy of a group of musicians inhabiting a piece of music.
How do you define success?
Humans are never content and always striving, as a general rule. So what accounts for success, even personally, seems to be always shifting. That can be good – being ambitious for yourself etc. But real success, I’ve come to learn more recently, is in the enjoyment of each step of the way. No matter what we achieve, we’ll be looking to the next thing, and that can be exhausting and mean that you aren’t really that focussed or present for what’s happening right now. It’s hard to enjoy or recognise the stressful parts of the journey but they are just as valid and necessary to an extent.
What is something you have seen that you wish you hadn’t?
That’s a really difficult one – I actually can’t think of anything. I guess even very difficult things go on to teach us something or change us for the better in the end.
Describe something you haven’t created yet that you’d like to create.
I’d like to complete a collection of short stories. Making a short film and or working on a soundtrack/ audio accompaniment would be a really interesting project. In many ways, DFM feels like it would lead there some day.
What do you believe is the most essential function of art?
To evoke emotion and thus bring humanity closer through shared experience with a greater understanding of our similarities and differences.
Something non-musical that you’re looking forward to?
Having some sort of non-band related holiday with Bill at some point. They are few and far between!
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