In The Garage

Of all the rock'n'roll-affiliated genres, garage rock is perhaps the most insular. That's why someone like Montreal-bred, Berlin-based one-man band Mark Sultan can be such a behemoth of the field without being even vaguely a household name in more traditional circles. For well over two decades now Sultan has been at the forefront of the garage scene, playing in a slew of bands such as The Spaceshits, Les Sexareenos and more recently The King Kahn & BBQ Show (BBQ being just one of Sultan's many musical sobriquets), but it's only in the last few years that he's been travelling as a one-man band (in between other pursuits) and releasing music under his own name.

And boy is he suited to playing solo. While (usually esteemed) guests help him flesh out his songs in the studio, in the live realm it's just the man, his drums and guitar and that wonderfully expressive voice, allowing his considerable songwriting chops to come to the fore. His sound manages to be surprisingly diverse within the inherently limited palette of garage rock – touching at times on soul, doo-wop, country, psych and rockabilly – but at its core it's all basic, primal rock'n'roll, music which isn't always immediately accessible, but which is always highly rewarding if you give the myriad of hooks hidden beneath the scuzz and distortion the chance to seep into your consciousness.

“It was weird, I just ran out of choices,” he ponders on how he came to be playing on his lonesome. “The Spaceshits turned into Les Sexareenos, and then that band kind of ended in a really weird way. I had a stockpile of songs and didn't want to wait around, I really wanted to keep going and maintain the momentum. I'd decided, 'Okay, I'm going to live like this. I don't care, I'll live in a ditch as long as I can make music', so if I'd taken time off and tried to find a band and stuff I think my momentum would have been halted. I would have had to get a straight job, which was contrary to everything that I was into at the time, so I just thought, 'I think I can do this by myself', and started writing songs tailored to playing solo. It's like a musical prism, and you have to think in those terms and make music that's only feasible done the way it is by one person. I started doing that and I could do it and it was comfortable, and people reacted well to it, so that was that.”

While you'd imagine that playing multiple instruments onstage simultaneously would make for a cumbersome occupation, Sultan makes it all look so easy, although he attests that there's an element of smoke and mirrors at play.

“I'm a drummer first and foremost so I've got the coordination part sorted – I think that's the hardest part when you're doing this kind of thing,” he continues. “I can't play guitar for shit, for example, but I can play drums so I can do four things at once because I know how to turn my brain off onstage, so I can kind of do everything. Once you get over the coordination aspect it's not difficult. I can get away with not playing guitar because I can sing fairly well, but I guess if you can't sing and you can't play guitar and have no coordination and can't play drums then it's probably not the best thing to take up.”

Fortunately the power in Sultan's music is derived from passion and energy rather than virtuoso performance, a trait that he seems more than happy with.

“Oh, definitely!” he concurs. “I know with every band I've ever done the idea of practice is just not something on our radar. I don't believe in practice for this kind of music, because I just think the better you get the finer you can play your instruments, and do this and that, and I think that actually affects the music negatively. Whereas if you don't practice there's that element of danger – I like when things go wrong, and I like when the music changes every night. I just want to play whatever comes into my head – I want limitations, I want mistakes, I want kind of a raw sound. Someone said to me once, 'Why don't you practice guitar, you could do some solos?', but I don't give a fuck about solos, I just play chords. If I wanted to be a virtuoso I'd join a camp for retarded children. You know what I'm saying?”

Sultan fell in love with garage from a young age, abetted (albeit indirectly) by his very own parents.

“I was into rock'n'roll stuff from early on,” he recalls. “I guess my parents got married and gave up their lives, one of those marriages where it's like, 'Okay, we're married, dump everything in a box'. When I was young I used to skip school all the time – because apparently I was intelligent and didn't have to go to school – and I found a box that they'd never mentioned, full of records. I had one of those cheap Fisher Price turntables and those kids records – like, 'Turn the page now', those ones with a goose wearing a fucking woman's dress – but then I found this box with this old rock'n'roll stuff in it, like the Stones and The Beatles and these weird compilations of good, decent enough rock'n'roll stuff like ? And The Mysterions and stuff. I was like, 'That's weird, I can't believe they've never played me all this', and I'd stay home from school and just listen to that stuff ad nauseum. It got to a point where that music and listening to that stuff was way more interesting than anything else – I'd read a lot, but I wouldn't watch TV, I'd just skip school and sit in my room all day and do that and think there were ghosts in the house.'

And while he's happy plying his inimitable brand of garage rock all over the planet, Sultan's not convinced that everybody he comes across at shows shares his unabashed love of the form.

“For the last few years it's been like such a fad that I try not to pay attention to who likes us and who doesn't like us – half the time I don't think anybody really likes anything, people are looking over their shoulder to see if it's cool or whatever,” he smiles. “I can't tell who genuinely likes this kind of music and quite honestly I don't really care, I just do my thing and at the end of the night there's going to be at least one person who says, 'Thank you' or 'That meant a lot', and that means infinitely more to me than some guy with seven handlebar moustaches and a pair of white sunglasses telling me I'm fucking cool or something.”