American Wrestlers. With a title like that, it’s hard to know what to expect. And for quite a while, when the songs were first released on the internet, there was no information as to how they came about or where they were from. Then the quality of the music began to attract attention, and eventually, the story emerged. American Wrestlers is the creation of Gary McClure, a musician originally from Glasgow, with a number of previous projects to his credit. The most well-known of these was a Manchester-based band called Working for a Nuclear Free City, described as “a flawless lucid-dream trip through a thousand fantastical influences”, who released a couple of critically acclaimed albums. After McClure put out a solo album, Wreaths, which didn’t find the kind of response he’d hoped for, fortune intervened when he met his future wife, and followed her to America. Waiting for the wheels of bureaucracy to turn so he could work here, McClure thought he’d while away the time writing a couple of songs. A local pawn shop sold him a bass and a Tascam 8 track recorder, and his front room became the studio. Result. The warm, emotion-infused mix of songs starred through with guitar hooks and wry pop influences triggered a wave of record company interest. Now, the self-titled album is due out at the beginning of April. Northern Transmissions was curious. Alice Severin spoke to Gary McClure about living in another country, songwriting, and what it’s like to record without being linked to the internet.
And I was getting the feeling as well that – I don’t think this era is any different from any other era, I think it’s always been that way. But a lot of songs and a lot of music is about – look at me, and here’s me, and the music is really a vehicle to promote the person as some kind of star or something, or a weird character. A lot of people do that kind of thing, but – you know songs are things that people sing. That’s what a song’s for. And it’s not about the person who writes it, or being famous or something, or making some weird artistic statement. It’s supposed to be something with a common idea, that everyone can understand, so everyone can sing it. That’s what a song is. And it seems such a simple, stupid thing to say but it’s almost like people have forgotten that.