Released on Newcastle-based label, Ex Libris Records, Yonder! Calliope?, McMullan’s debut album proper, should, if there’s any justice, see him catapulted into the limelight. Packed with wistful ballads, foot-tappingly infectious upbeat pop and at least one near-classic country-gospel fever-dream (the stunning album closer, Don’t Think I’ll Sleep Tonight), Yonder! Calliope? easily marks McMullan out as a different beast altogether from his earnest countrymen being both lyrically sharper and deeper. “The album’s definitely skewed towards the melancholy,” McMullan agrees, down the line from his home in Ballymoney, Northern Ireland, “but the punkier side comes out in the live setting. The songs obviously sound different - it’s only me on guitar with Ryan H Fleming on banjo - but they sound a lot more aggressive. I enjoy it because there’s a punk rock attitude to it - I’ve tried to avoid the acoustic folk scene because it’s terribly safe and bland.”

I first encountered Aaron McMullan after stumbling onto his brilliantly deranged and rambling pop culture screeds on internet magazine Blogcritics and was immediately blown away by how he effortlessly channelled the raw spirit of William Burroughs, James Joyce and the gonzoid tendencies of Hunter Thompson. Regardless of whether he was ostensibly casting a critical eye over the likes of Eli Roth’s Hostel or the many travails of Pete Doherty, the real story was often in McMullan’s skewed take on the subject or the real-life tangents that wove in and out of each piece like an ongoing soap opera filled with lust, alcoholism and religious imagery. It wasn’t long until he turned that eye for the eccentric contained in the everyday to music, leading to an increasingly accessible set of internet-only bedroom demos, the highlights of which, now fleshed out, polished up and rerecorded, form the backbone of Yonder! Calliope?.

“The internet demos gave me confidence,” McMullan explains. “I never thought many people would listen to them, and probably not very many did. Obviously you think there’s something there, otherwise you wouldn’t put it out in the first place, but the net-albums helped me see that people would feasibly listen to my stuff without pressure being put on them!”

Still, at this early stage, McMullan’s new-found confidence couldn’t quite extend to the live setting. “Before we did the record I’d never really played live anywhere, I was terrified about taking the songs out to gigs,” he continues. “I could sit in my room and hide away on a corner of the internet. So, while the music was out there, I didn’t have to deal with it physically. When you’re live there’s no chance of saying ‘sorry, can I do that one again’.”

Having harnessed the power of the internet for something other than pornography, it was around this time that McMullan came into contact with Andrew Gardiner at Ex Libris. “I knew Andrew back in the day when we were both playing in punk bands in and around Ballymoney. He’d always scared me a bit, but there was something intriguing about him. Ryan H Fleming [who plays on Yonder! Calliope?] heard the net records and contacted me through Myspace. It turned out he and Andrew had God-knows how many bands going on together and Andrew was putting Ex Libris together. I just stepped into the middle of it all.”

So now that the debut album’s out of the way, how does he feel being so exposed after all this time? “I don’t think it’s sunk in yet but I can imagine hearing it on the radio now and not feeling like there’s some massive gulf between my record and whatever was played before. For a long time I got so drawn into how everything sounded to the point where I forgot about the songs themselves. So it’s weird listening to the finished album and being hit with the full force of the songs again.”

Finally, where does his inspiration come from? “Bright Eyes, The Pogues, Lonnie Donegan or The Libertines - people who are playing with traditional folk-ish ideas but doing something modern with it. But the music that inspires me wouldn’t necessarily sound like my stuff. When I listen to Bjork she’ll do something incredible and it’ll make me want to approach things - a lyric or something - in a different way.”

Yonder! Calliope? is out now on Ex Libris Records and available to buy or download from their website (exlibrisrecords.co.uk). Aaron McMullan can be found at myspace.com/aaronmcmullan.

The comic writer turned novelist seeks out America’s secret new constitution from among the country’s squalid underbelly

From the widely acclaimed political sci-fi of Transmetropolitan to the current Bond on crack espionage of Desolation Jones, Warren Ellis has been an imposing figure on the more respectable fringes of comic book culture since the early Nineties. His first novel, Crooked Little Vein, takes the reader on a rollicking detective road-trip across a modern America in search of an alternative Constitution.

Dazed & Confused: You’re best known for your graphic novels, how different was it writing prose?

Warren Ellis: Hugely. The secret to creating an image in prose is in what you leave out - you need to just suggest enough that the reader can create a convincing themselves. As opposed to comics, where, in writing the script, I need to describe images pretty specifically to be able to communicate what I need to an artist. Re-learning what notes to not play was tough.

D&C: The book’s protagonist experiences liberal big city America juxtaposed with the religious Midwest first hand. Are you interested in how these different sides coexist?

WE: I think America is one of the great ideas in human history. A revolutionary society, really, and an experimental one. While not losing sight of my admiration for the idea of America, the experiment has rotted in the Petri dish just a little. America is much more alien than it’s given credit for, especially to Europeans. And those sides they don’t co-exist, not really. That implies there’s some kind of accord between them. I still hear people in New York or LA characterise the land between those two cities as ‘flyover country,’ and the inexorable implication that all the people they see out of the jet window are just weird little ants who fill up space, talk about God, see UFOs and fuck horses.

Published by William Morrow/HarperCollins.

Dazed & Confused, Aug 2007

The Warren Ellis piece finally saw the light of day in the new issue of Dazed and Confused, albeit bumped, cut, a little mangled and subbed to wrongly imply that Ellis was an artist too. Hope it doesn’t piss him off too much. Anyway, I’ll post the text (corrected for the error) in a minute and the clipping when I can misappropriate a scanner.

If you’ve been trying to contact me recently, I’ve been terribly busy so apologies if I’ve not got back to you. Off to Germany for the dayjob tomorrow for a couple of days so I’ll attempt to catch up with everyone late next week.

In other news, I’ll be covering various bits and bobs of Newcastle’s Evolution Festival and its associated gigs for NME and Gigwise. There’s also a trip to Sunderland for NME on the horizon. I’m starting to ramp things up again after a period of stagnation and dayjob pressures (although those aren’t entirely over just yet, they should be more manageable).

And the sun’s out! Goodbye S.A.D!

Anyway, we’ve also lit a fire under the old Hot Topic thread and hopefully these will be coming out regularly (and I’ll be endeavouring to contribute to those at the very least on TMP). The second one of the new batch was posted the other week in answer to the very pertinent question, Is The Sitcom Dead? Go here.

The next one’s on The Libertines reunion gig and undoubtedly will flit into more collective musings on the Cult of Pete. It should be up later in the week and I’ll link to it as and when.