Name: Max Décharné
Occupation: Musician, author
Nationality: British
Recent release: Max Décharné's new album Veronica’s Lake is out November 15th 2025 via Dangerhouse Skylab. Order the vinyl LP via the label's Discogs store.

If you enjoyed this Max Décharné interview and would like to know more about his music and current live dates, follow him on Facebook, and bandcamp.



When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects, and colours. What happens to you physically when you're listening? Do you listen with your eyes open or closed?

Eyes open, looking at some random thing across the room but not paying much attention to it or anything else except the music. For me, the important thing is listening, rather than seeing.

Although I make videos for some of my songs, I try just use the images to complement the recording in a general way, not to act out the lyrics. There’s got to be room for people’s imaginations and their own individual interpretations.

Do you experience strong emotional responses towards certain sounds? If so, what kind of sounds are these and do you have an explanation about the reasons for these responses?

I’ve always been partial to instruments like the vibraphone or the harpsichord. Not sure If I’d call it a strong emotional response, but they’re generally sounds I enjoy hearing, which is why I tend to use them on my recordings, alongside other more commonly-employed instruments.

As for why they appeal to me, I really have no idea, but it may well have something to do with hearing “Sunday Morning” by the Velvet Underground at an early age.



It doesn’t get much better than that.

When did you start writing and producing music - and what or who were your early passions and influences?

I’ve been a piano player since I was four, a drummer since I was eleven or twelve, and done time in bands since I was sixteen.

Then, around 1985, I bought a 4-track machine and started writing my own songs and recording them, some of which I then had a chance to use when we formed The Flaming Stars in 1994.



Early influences? Glam rock, 60s girl groups & garage rock, 50s rockabilly, 1930s boogie-woogie, 70s punk rock

What are the most important tools and instruments you're currently using?

I don’t use tools, and don’t record music using computers. Just instruments, microphones, an amp, a reverb unit, a delay unit, a distortion pedal, and a multitrack recorder. That’s it.

I like to record the sound in the room, playing things in real time – it’s all about capturing a performance, including the mistakes. If I don’t get what I want, I just do another take.

On my new album, Veronica’s Lake, I’m singing, and at various times I’m playing electric guitar, acoustic bass guitar, ostrich guitar, piano, organ, vibraphone, harpsichord, snare drum, hand drum, maracas, synth strings and a mattress. Having said that, if a song just needs one instrument, then that’ll do.

I like big spaces in the sound, and songs with room to breathe. Above all, I want something human, not machine-generated, not auto-tuned, sampled, looped or edited. Airbrushed perfection is absolutely the last thing I’m looking for. It doesn’t interest me – not in my music, or in other people’s.

Many songwriters have claimed that as soon as they enter into the process, certain aspects of the narrative are out of their hands. Do you like to keep strict control or is there a sense of following things where they lead you?

I never know exactly where a song is headed, and sometimes even where it’s got to after it’s finished. They should have a bit of mystery about them, and there’s no point trying to explain what they mean.

Everything has a starting point, a trigger or an inspiration, but the good ones go their own way and don’t come with a guide book.

Which albums or artists do you love specifically for their sound?

Charlie Feathers, Lou Reed, Jackie DeShannon, Tyrannosaurus Rex, The Ronettes, Richard Hell & The Voidoids, Gene Vincent & the Blue Caps 1956 line-up, Francoise Hardy, Hank Williams, early Jacobites, early Ramones, Sinatra at the Sands, Gravest Hits by The Cramps, to name just a few.



There can be sounds that feel highly irritating to us, and then there are others we could gladly listen to for hours. Do you have examples for either one or both of these?

Highly irritating? Car alarms, police and other emergency services sirens, traffic noise, dogs barking, people barking, politicians making speeches, announcements on public transport, other people’s phonecalls.

Gladly listen to for hours? Not much. For a while, maybe, but you need regular doses of silence to counterbalance things.

Are there everyday places, spaces, or devices which intrigue you by the way they sound? Which are these?

Old buildings with a good natural acoustic will always sound better to me for recording music than most padded and sterile studio environments. The sound needs to rattle around a little.

In 1991, when I was the drummer in Gallon Drunk, we recorded our single “Some Fool’s Mess” in a small room in an arch under Waterloo Station that had large sheets of corrugated iron propped up around the walls.



So what you’re hearing on the track is a very live, brash metallic sound on all the instruments, and that really suits the song.

What are among your favourite spaces in which to record and perform your music?

See the previous answer for recording.

As for playing – anywhere that’s got a roof and isn’t large. I’ve played at a lot of stadiums, sports arenas and outdoor festivals – and they uniformly sound like shit. Those kinds of places are all about cramming as many people as possible into the largest space in order to extract their money.

The music is a long way down on the organisers’ list of priorities, and it shows. I prefer small clubs.

Do music and sound feel “material” to you? Does working with sound feel like you're sculpting or shaping something?

No, not really, but yes, there’s a sense of shaping something and seeing how it might turn out.

How important is sound for our overall well-being, and to what extent do you feel the "acoustic health" of a society or environment reflects its overall health?

I think it’s important to spend as little time as possible listening to the kind of mass-produced, over-produced, computer-generated slop that the music industry and the streaming services want to throw at you these days.

Other than that, delete your Spotify account, pick something you actually enjoy and put it on the turntable.

Tinnitus and developing hyperacusis are very real risks for anyone working with sound. Do you take precautions in this regard, and if you suffer from these or similar issues, how do you cope with them?

I do now, but I didn’t back then, and I’ve been in some extremely loud bands over the years.

Tinnitus is a fact of life for most musicians of my generation, everyone I know has it.

We can surround ourselves with sound every second of the day. The pianist Glenn Gould even considered this the ultimate delight. How do you see that yourself, and what importance does silence hold?

Mostly, I’d rather have silence.

The shift from analogue to digital recording technology has given recording artists and composers a great deal of freedom and autonomy. Having worked for some of your career in analogue, is there anything from that era you miss or that you feel digital lacks?

I much prefer analogue to digital. I like recording music in real time, and the recording equipment for me is simply there to preserve a performance.

Digital technology has been used by a lot of people to make themselves sound capable of things they are not – like singing in tune, for example. Smoothing out the rough edges.

If that’s what they want, fine, but it’s not for me. I can’t see the point, and I like the rough edges. That’s what makes it human. Like John Peel said about vinyl, life itself has surface noise.

With more and more musicians creating than ever and more of these creations being released, what does this mean for you as an artist in terms of originality? Who are some of the artists and communities that you find inspiring in this regard?

It doesn’t really affect me at all. Whatever anyone else wants to do is fine, but I don’t take much notice. I’m making music for myself, because these are the sounds I want to hear, and my way of achieving that is to write all the songs and play all the instruments.

I’m also the recording engineer and the producer, so the end result is down to me – it’s a series of personal choices. Being in a five-piece band is a much more collaborative process, whereas my solo records are just me with no outside help, for better or worse.

After more than four decades in what’s laughingly referred to as the music business – which always seems keen to put the emphasis on the last word of the two rather than the first one – I’m a lot happier now working this way.