Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
‘Me“It’s mind-boggling,” says 69-year-old Steven Hall. For the past three years, the Scottish singer has lived with her lawyer husband a few hours south of Chicago, driving Uber to make extra money. looks through disco, folk and synth-pop with twists in Chinese opera and Pitchfork church he called it “an archival triumph and one of the most exciting new releases of the year”.
It all happened when the label head, who was impressed by Nirosta Steel’s 2014 album Cool Fire, asked Hall if he had any other songs. “They didn’t know what they had,” says Hall. The twelve unreleased songs he shared spanned four decades of soulful singing, and revealed a global life and career that intersected with experimental icons such as Arthur Russell and Allen Ginsberg. Now My Skyscraper appears to be on the verge of admitting Hall into the legendary ranks of rescued artists whose time has come too late.
“I feel like Rip Van Winkle! Like I suddenly came out of a cave and I’m blinking and all this light is shining on me,” says Hall. “Two weeks ago the brand was maybe $2,000 in debt because we made 200 copies. Now we have an order for 1,000 and we want to print 2,000.”
Born in the Glasgow suburb of Milngavie to a middle-aged father and a “tough as nails” mother from a family of 18, Hall grew up singing in the church choir and local theater company. His parents sent him to a teacher to get rid of his accent, which took on an obscure accent (“some people think I’m Swedish”), but they were very gentle as his sexuality developed, and the young Hall liked boys and girls freely at school. “I never thought about getting out of it,” he says, “because I came from a very liberal family where my parents’ mentality was, ‘Whatever you want to do, that’s fine.'”
After his father’s death, Hall’s mother placed her ad in the International Herald Tribune and discussed with her three children (Hall has twins and a brother) what to do next. A man in Delaware won and the family moved to the US, which surprised Hall for a long time because of his interest in American music (“especially real fantasy, Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney, ‘let’s show’ show”) and the Chrysler Building, which was built from stainless steel called … Nirosta steel.
Poets – including Ginsberg – attend his high school in Delaware, and Hall joins them on their trips back to New York City, which is how he found himself in a place called the Poets House in the middle of the East Village art scene at the time. “I thought it was natural, because that’s what I knew,” says Hall. ‘Oh, Bob Dylan is coming, his car is parked. Richard Hell from the television station he has a show tonight.’ I thought I would do the same.”
He briefly followed Ginsberg to Naropa University, where he studied dance and poetry under Douglas Dunn and William S Burroughs. But it was while visiting Ginsberg in the Poets’ House that Hall met Arthur Russell, and the two formed a deep friendship and collaboration while playing a collection of Ginsberg’s poems. Russell, he says, was one of the few people who “couldn’t stop creating all the time, and it wasn’t a conscious thing.” His intelligence was completely natural and came from his Buddhist upbringing.” People say Ginsberg brought Buddhism to the West, but Arthur was, in a way, teaching Allen.
Hall and Russell collaborated on a number of projects, including disco outfit Loose Joints and DJ Steve D’Acquisto. One of the only two songs they wrote together, Go for the Night sweltering, appears on My Skyscraper, produced by the members of Arthur’s Landing, a tribute group assembled by the members of their band after Russell’s death from Aids in 1992. Another co-written, lo-fi elegy called Lost in Thought, which was known as “Lost in Thought”, wanted to be featured on album 2 but wanted to be included in the album. diptych New Sensation and Special Weakness – just two of three paintings of Russell, a multi-instrumentalist, playing the drums.
Those last-minute additions miraculously survived, since Hall “had just transferred them last year, having been on tapes of two songs for all those years. More than that, the tracks were changed in one direction: “Once we left, the idea was that we wouldn’t stop, and we wouldn’t go back and do it again.” Everything I did, Arthur was on top of it.
Continuing in their partnership, the pair have found inspiration in joint trips to popular nightclubs such as Danceteria and The Saint. One of his favorite pastimes, Hall says, was going up and looking at the guys in the East Village, I like his Ukrainian athletes and Puerto Ricans “who didn’t like to wear underwear when they were wearing pants”. With a wry laugh, he recounts that, when a gentleman approached, “we would hold hands and say, ‘get into the binocular view.'”
Hall admitted that his relationship with Russell sometimes suffered because of their rivalry, and what he saw as his friend’s jealous attitude. In a book Walking WideHall reveals that he was on the verge of signing to Russell’s label Sleeping Bag Records when Russell grabbed a pen in his hand, saying that he would become more famous and advance. “Arthur had a saying, ‘Sometimes it’s good to have a bad attitude,'” explains Hall. “At that point, he thought that some of the people at Sire Records, some of the lazy people he was hanging out with and playing demos with, took his ideas, which is possible.” Hall says Russell believed that the Rolling Stones’ song Miss You, for example, was based on one of his songs – although “there wasn’t any evidence of it, but it was the same thing”.
after advertising
In her 20s, Hall began spending a lot of time in East Asia, having a wealthy girlfriend in Hong Kong. He began scoring performances and hosting workshops for Zuni Icosahedron, an experimental theater company there, and later “made a great living” filming for film and TV studios in Taiwan. Naturally, he took inspiration every step of the way. My Skyscraper Lost in Music ends with a quote from a Cantonese funeral, and Boss Trix (Benny’s Song) was inspired by a Taiwanese lover with the ability to sleep well.
“I’ve been collecting all these songs forever, really, not just collecting,” he says. “A song that was written 30 years ago, or what I did with Arthur 40 years ago, I still do it in different ways so that I don’t get tired, or with different songs that I sang with people of other languages.”
With the success of the album, and with big events about to happen, including his first performance at the old Pyramid Club in New York (now Nightclub 101) since he played there with Russell, Hall hopes to resume his records with new friends, and says he wants to do a cover album that includes his recording of Sade’s No Ordinary Love, first.
He said: “It’s like riding a wave and seeing where it goes. There was no plan or marketing budget, it was just the music we wanted to put out.”
As for finding new success at the end of his career, Hall was undaunted. “I really admire older singers, like Madonna, who is two years younger than me, or Mick Jagger, who is much older,” he says. “Some musicians just find ways to connect with it. There’s a truth to the process, because everyone does it because they want to. And that’s the way my music is, too.”
