The death of Cardiacs leader Tim Smith in 2020 came after he’d been forced out of action for health reasons 12 years earlier. In 2014, while fans still harboured hopes of some kind of return, Prog writer Dom Lawson indulged his passion for the band with former guitarist Kavus Torabi (now of Gong and Knifeworld).
As far as I’m concerned, Cardiacs were the greatest band that ever walked the Earth. The perfect combination of prog indulgence and complexity, punk energy and subversion and sublime pop melodies, the band completely changed the way I thought about music. And, like virtually Cardiacs fans, I cherish them more than any other band I’ve ever heard.
The obscenely talented Kavus Torabi joined Cardiacs on guitar in 2003 and remained a member until bandleader Tim Smith suffered a heart attack and stroke in June 2008 and the band’s activities fizzled to a distinctly tragic halt. I spoke to Torabi about five of my favourite songs and asked him whether they conjured up any specific memories.
Is This The Life
The best-known Cardiacs song of them all, Is This The Life was a permanent fixture in the band’s set lists for over two decades. It was famously played on Radio 1 by an only slightly bewildered Steve Wright and was as close to a hit single as the band ever got. You can find it on both 1984’s cassette-only release The Seaside (since released on CD but fairly hard to track down) and the classic 1988 album A Little Man And A House And The Whole World Window.
Torabi: The first time I heard it was as part of A Little Man And A House. It had just come out; I’d never heard of the band before and a friend of mine lent it to me and said, ‘You’ve got to hear this!’ At the time it didn’t strike me as being particularly different to the other tunes on the album. It was just part of the whole thing.
When the guitar solo in R.E.S. came in, they’d become my favourite band – before I’d got to the end of side two
Obviously it’s the one that really gets to you, because it’s so catchy and amazing. Later, speaking to friends and trying to get them into Cardiacs, there’d be people who only liked that one. So I realised that this one that the straights can get! I used to love playing it live. It had one of the few bits where we’d get to improvise. Some nights it would just be magical.
You’d think that someone would’ve come up with that chord progression before, wouldn’t you? It dates as far back as 1979, but I’m surprised that no one had thought of it before that. No one could ever have come up with most of the Cardiacs songs – Tim was the only person who could’ve written them. Is This The Life is just beautiful.
R.E.S.
Another track from A Little Man And A House, R.E.S. is a glorious example of Tim Smith’s ability to combine razor-sharp pop melodies with sinister, nursery rhyme insanity and mind-bending, prog-fuelled intricacy. Madder than a lorry full of boxes of frogs but still oddly beautiful, it almost certainly – as Kavus explains – feature the greatest guitar solo of all time.
Torabi: When I had to learn how to play that song, it helped that I’d known it since 1988 and it was just wired into my DNA. It was a case of having to remember where to put my fingers. I just knew all the funny timings without having to think about it.
I once said to Tim that I thought it was the greatest guitar solo of all time and he said ‘Oh, it’s a bit too Canterbury-ish for me…!’ It’s an incredible solo. It sounds corny, but I remember getting that record home in 1988 and playing it. My friend had already told me that he was sure I’d like it, and I loved the funny photocopied album cover with the big flower on it.
I remember getting through side one and thinking ‘This is really, really good!’ but when the guitar solo in R.E.S. came in, they’d become my favourite band – before I’d got to the end of side two.
Jibber And Twitch
First released on The Seaside in 1984, this early Cardiacs classic is another dizzying eruption of crazed musical ideas, insidious hooks and twinkly-eyed macabre. Shortly after joining the band in 2003, Kavus had to learn Jibber And Twitch, along with a ludicrous number of other songs from the band’s early years, for three shows in London – captured on The Special Garage Concerts Volumes I and II albums.
Torabi: Learning those songs was a really interesting experience! I found out a lot about myself during those couple of months. I knew two thirds of the songs because they were on The Seaside and Archive Cardiacs, but there were bits I’d never heard before. There was so much to learn – about 35 songs including the encores – but Tim’s attitude was, ‘You know what to do, just get on with it!’
You’d hear people talking about how Stairway To Heaven was the best song ever written… Dirty Boy sounded like what I imagined Stairway To Heaven would be like
He gave me and Bob Leith, who also wasn’t around in the early days, a free rein to do what we wanted with the songs. The weird thing about that is that I’ve never been one of those people who works out other people’s songs. It was the first time I’d ever really sat down and committed to learning such a big body of stuff. I really liked it! It became my life. I’d go to work each day and then come home and spend two or three hours learning it all. I’d learn maybe one new tune each night and then run through the rest of what I’d learned previously, until three or four weeks before the gigs I was just coming in and running through both sets.
It takes up so much of your brain – it was like revising for an exam. Even two weeks after those gigs I’d forgotten how to play half those tunes. We had a party afterwards and it felt like my mind was slowly coming back to me.
Dirty Boy
In 1996, Cardiacs released a double album entitled Sing To God. An audacious and ambitious 90 minutes of pure Tim Smith genius, it’s an album that encapsulates the overwhelming magic and majesty of the band’s sound, with a wonderfully vivid and powerful production they never quite equalled on their other recordings. The greatest song on an album full of great songs, Dirty Boy is nine minutes of dark, monumental and lavish psychedelia. There’s nothing else quite like it.
Torabi: “The funny thing with Dirty Boy was… I remember when I was a kid, maybe 10 or 11, and into rock music, and you’d always hear older people talking about how Stairway To Heaven was the best song ever written. It had an alluring title, but I wasn’t really into Led Zeppelin at the time; I was into Maiden and stuff.
I started to imagine what this song must be like, but when I heard it a couple of years later – and I do really like Zeppelin now – I was so disappointed! I thought, ‘Is that all it is? Is this supposed to be the greatest song ever?’ Let’s face it, it’s not even the best Led Zeppelin song!
So when I heard Dirty Boy it sounded like what I imagined Stairway To Heaven would be like. Surely it’s the greatest psychedelic rock song ever recorded, by a long way! It was great to do live, but one of the hardest to play because of the amount of chords.
Tim’s attitude to some of the punky songs was that if you fucked them up it didn’t matter, because ‘It’s fuckin’ punk, isn’t it?’ But with Dirty Boy you were not allowed to play even one chord wrong; and there are so many, going from major to minor and then back.
It was so hard to learn, but you really owe it to that song to play it properly because it’s so amazing. It makes you want to believe in God! It makes the whole God thing seem plausible!
Ditzy Scene
Recorded shortly before the last Cardiacs tour before Tim became ill, Ditzy Scene was the first song to be committed to tape by the Kavus-era line-up. It was released as a limited-edition single by Org Records and offers a tantalising glimpse of what the band’s proposed next album, tentatively known as LSD, might have had in store. Vocals aside, Smith had recorded most of the album when he fell foul of ill health but, as yet, the songs remain hidden in some magical dusty vault somewhere.
Torabi: I wrote the words for that song! It was weird one to record, because we felt a bit pressured to get it recorded before the tour. I’m not mad on the mix of it, so the plan would’ve been to remix it for the LSD album that never happened.
That intro was so hard to play – we’d have to completely concentrate for it. Once you got lost it was all over
I love the tune. It was the first thing we did with that new line-up and it was a new thing. When we started recording it was like, ‘Fucking hell… here we go!’ When those girl vocals came in at the start, going ‘Aaah aaah,’ it was a real goosebump moment and I thought, ‘Okay, we’ve really got something here…’ It’s just brilliant.
We only played it right maybe once or twice on that tour. It was so frustrating! It became one of things when so much pressure is put on and it just makes matters worse. That intro was so hard to play – we’d have to completely concentrate for it. Once you got lost it was all over, particularly doing stuff with tapes. You had to be in with the tape, so the minute you dropped a beat we had to stop.
We did it right in Leeds – I remember that, because when we did it Mel Woods threw a tambourine into the audience! After the gig I remember Tim saying, ‘I hope that wasn’t one of the good tambourines…!’
