A.R. Kane might just be the greatest indie rock group you’ve never heard. But back in their late ’80s prime, the band didn’t lack for attention and acclaim. Centered around the core of Alex Ayuli and Rudy Tambala, with help from producer-mentor Ray Shulman, singing sister Maggie Tambala, and various musician friends, A.R. Kane recorded for the mighty independent labels 4AD and Rough Trade, garnered rave reviews and cover stories from the British music press, and topped the UK indie chart with their debut album, 69. As half of the alternative supergroup M/A/R/R/S, they even scored a No. 1 UK pop hit with the pioneering sample-based dance monster “Pump Up the Volume.†Alongside their peers My Bloody Valentine and their personal idols Cocteau Twins, A.R. Kane supplied crucial DNA for the shoegaze genre, while their experimental approach to guitar soundscapes influenced early post-rock.
So why has A.R. Kane’s profile faded when it comes to subsequent accounts of what went down between post-punk and Britpop? Partly it’s because they never toured extensively, like My Bloody Valentine did, nor did they reform to cement the legend and the legacy (like MBV and others have done). It’s also because their records have only been sporadically available in recent decades. That changed earlier this month, with the release of A.R. Kive: a remastered box set of their core work from 1988-89, with essays by the late Greg Tate and Neil Kulkarni, plus a fan feast of information about the group. And 69 and its poppier follow-up “i†are also available on streamers like Spotify and Tidal for the first time.
As someone who wrote about A.R. Kane in their heyday, I jumped at the chance to speak with Rudy Tambala for the first time in three decades. After he and Ayuli went their separate ways in the mid-’90s, it’s Tambala who remained most active in music with groups like Sufi and Jübl, and he’s been the driving force behind the A.R.Kive project. “Some of the earliest releases aren’t on this box, but Up Home!, 69 and “i†—to me, that’s the body of work, the creative sorcery,†says Tambala by Zoom from his home in Cambridge, England. “I view it as a cultural legacy that hasn’t been appreciated. We don’t get the credit—and I would like it! The impact that we had—and could still have—is enormous.â€
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Rudy Tambala: Right at the start, we got stung—one of the first interviews, the journalist described us as “the Black Jesus and Mary Chain.†We grew up in Stratford, East London… we’re an English band! And it wasn’t like we were doing hip-hop or playing reggae. We were playing the music we fucking loved—on guitars, noisily. Equally, when Greg Tate and Vernon Reid [of Living Colour] sent us a letter inviting us to join the Black Rock Coalition, we were like, “No, we’re not going to ghettoize ourselves.†We refused to be categorized in any way, shape, or form. And one of the categories was race. But, over time, you mellow. And there’s no point in denying it—it’s not going to go away.
Nigerians are more different from Malawi than Germans are from Irish! So there’s no connection, except that we both had parents from Africa. Everyone in Malawi looks exactly like me–small, skinny. We’ve got a certain approach to life. But my mum, she’s a third-generation immigrant from Holland. Her ancestors fled Holland because of Jewish persecution. So I’ve got Dutch, Jewish, German, and some Irish on my mum’s side.
That feeds into my music lineage, because I grew up hearing waltzes—my mum loved Strauss and Austro-Germanic culture. Blasting the Blue Danube every Saturday afternoon! Which is why there’s 3/4 time in some A.R. Kane songs. Meanwhile, my oldest brother would be playing ska and reggae. There was a period of my brothers and me going out on the soul scene, dancing to jazz-funk. Whereas Alex’s brother worked on the reggae sound system Lord Creation Hi-Fi, so Alex had a deep background in dub and going to blues parties. We were both into post-punk and Public Image Ltd, but also synth stuff like Japan. At university, through my best mates Dan and Julian, who later formed the shoegaze group Kitchens of Distinction, I heard prog rock. I’m discovering cannabis, sitting in my room smoking and listening to Pink Floyd and Genesis. After a year of studying biochemistry, I quit college and became a complete dropout - doing Zen Buddhism, taking LSD, and listening to Hendrix and Velvet Underground.
That was 1985–they were doing “Pink Orange Red†and they looked like they were from another planet. I rang Alex—and Alex, it turned out, was ringing me. Because his phone was engaged, I went straight round to his house and said, “Did you see that? Let’s start a band.†All we had was Alex’s battered old acoustic guitar. He taught me how to play Sex Pistols’ “Pretty Vacant†and Joy Division’s “Atmosphereâ€â€”the two influences on our first single “When You’re Sad.â€
We’d been listening to 4AD groups for three years. I went to bed every night to the sound of Dead Can Dance’s “Flowers of the Sea.†So we were just in awe. 4AD was everything I’d expected. Vaughan Oliver of 23 Envelope, who did all the gorgeous 4AD artwork, had shaved the heads of everyone who worked at the label, men and women. Everyone wore all black. They looked like New Age beatniks. Cool as fuck. They even smelled cool. But, we discovered soon enough, underneath they were just the same as the rest of us—Lord of the Flies!
For me, songs have four components. The lyric element—take that to the limit and you’ve got Joni Mitchell. The rhythmic element—taken to the limit, could be any kind of dance music. Then there’s the melodic element and the sonic element. It’s almost like you’ve got sliders that go up and down and if you push one element, it has to be at the expense of others. A.R. Kane was primarily about the sonic thing—textures and guitar loveliness. The first track on Up Home!, “Baby Milk Snatcher†has the pushing-the-sonic-envelope thing and the rhythm thing, with the dub reggae groove. The lyrics sound pretty but mostly they’re in a made-up language.
That 12-string guitar you can see behind me is the main instrument on “The Sun Falls Into the Sea.†Fed through slight distortion, reverb and a phaser—not what you would normally do with a 12-string! We were using dub techniques to create this massive ambience, but without using obvious dub reggae effects.
We were really into dream mythology. I had a book about astral traveling. At the end there was a guide to lucid dreaming. So we both used to practice it—go into a semi-hypnotic trance just before falling asleep, focusing on an object. Then what happens is, in the dream you see that object. That keeps you awake inside your dream. What would happen was that we’d hear music in our dreams and wake ourselves up to write down melodies, lyrics or even just the atmosphere that we wanted to capture. Our music was literally dream pop.
We’d done the homespun lo-fi thing and didn’t want to repeat that. So we thought, let’s go high production value. We wanted to work in big studios, use an orchestra on some songs, bring in musicians and percussionists. “A Love from Outer Space†was massively expensive to make. We just went for it!
We wrote to Walt Disney. And we got this letter with a picture of Mickey Mouse at the top, just a couple of sentences saying, effectively: “No, you cannot use it—if you do we’ll sue your ass. Thanks, Mickey.†So we called it “i†but if you look at the cover, the word supercalifragilisticexpialidocious actually appears on the sleeve. “i†came from Gurdjieff, the philosopher/hypnotist. He had this thing about the many I’s that you are. In 10 minutes time, you’ll be a different I, and then a different I, and then…
I really liked the word “arcane,†partly because of Dead Can Dance’s [first EP] Garden of Arcane Delights. Alex wanted to spell it with a “k†because he loved Citizen Kane. Then we came up with the idea of A.R.—the initials standing for Alex and Rudy, but it also looks like the name of one person. So that’s the idea of two people becoming one. All this happened in the space of about 60 seconds, when we were chatting at a party. Later, in our private language, “kane†became a verb—like, “have we kaned it yet?†Meaning, “Have we gone far enough? Have we made this song sound like us and nobody else?â€
I don’t want to place blame because I was the one who said to Alex, “I don’t want to work with you anymore.†Because when we came round to do a fourth album, the chemistry was just gone. We were on completely different wavelengths. We’d had the same backgrounds, the same influences, the same knowledge, even the same tone of voice. All that changed really quickly. And the way we work together really had to be all or nothing.
But the whole archival thing has been an amazing experience. It brought up so many memories. I actually lost a lot of sleep and had nightmares thinking about it. Going through all these boxes, there’s photographs of the band, letters and faxes and legal documents and old tapes. I imagined my children going through this stuff when I’m dead!