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‘Me he didn’t plan to do it Eurovision ever,” muses Sam Battle as he takes me around his museum, pushing the hair of the maddest scientists from his youth and coaxing drones out of metal boxes as we go. So, we emailed the BBC to ask, ‘Is there any way we can go forward?’ and they said, ‘Well this guy might be interesting…’
Known to his fans as See Mother No ComputerWar has built a cult following with his wild music and esoteric art. The persona started life as a side project when he was a lead singer with indie can-be-Zibra in the 00s. After the band broke up in 2016, War threw himself into the world of Look Mum No Computer, filling his YouTube with videos showing everyday technology into weird and wonderful forms, whether it’s turning Sega Megadrives into functional synths, or Henry vacuum cleaners into flamethrowers. In this world, nothing is wasted, and every bit of lead can be turned into musical gold.
Which brings us to his wealth of revitalizing technology, called This museum is (Not) Finishedhidden in a street in Ramsgate. Push open the front door, and you’re met with a heavy gate covered in Nintendo Game Boys. Open it and you enter a cave, somewhere between a museum and Adam West’s Batcave, under the ceiling are screens, flashing lights, mysterious dials, moving wires, mysterious toys and loud speakers. It’s a rich collection of long-forgotten analog technology, mocking the diminutive Tardis-like exterior. Everything is crying, crying, rising, rising or crying in a cacophony of production.
The battle is in the middle of it all, wearing his fire suit, pushing levers, checking levels, driving wires and keeping calm like a boatman. And now, after a few emails and an afternoon spent writing songs, he finds himself in the unlikely position of representing Britain at the 70th Eurovision Song Contest. “Sounds like a village war, but global!” waving loudly.
The war began to destroy electronic devices “since before I can remember – I took away every toy my parents bought me.” Now with over 700,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel, he has turned his passion into a career. His musical works range from toys – repurposed Furby toys, which sing atonal music from their lips – to his massive Megadrone creation. This modular synthesizer is such a beast, War had to find his own Ramsgate facility to complete it.
The battle was always with the desire to run a museum dedicated to restoring ancient technology. All his weapons are displayed, free from capture and interference by the people, and the War is in the middle of the chaos. He is not precious about these things. “Yeah,” he complains, “the kids can be heavy, often on purpose, but they almost never break anything.”
Today, the Megadrone takes up an entire part of the museum, a group of 1,000 oscillators linked together, their little red eyes blinking, that can be played simultaneously in one big blast. Battle activates the Megadrone, and hits a button on the connected keyboard. Nothing happens.
“Ah. Wait – what – what’s going on, this…” he shakes the wires, completing the arcane transformation. “Wait…I…” Nothing. He presses another key. Suddenly an ethereal drone sounds like an airplane taking off into the sky.
“That’s only a hundred of them,” he shouts. “It takes hours to sing a thousand songs!”
When – much to his surprise – the BBC responded to his Eurovision application and asked him to come and write a script, Battle was determined to stay true to the Look Mum No Computer ethos. Unable to carry the dreaded Megadrone, he instead appeared with the Kosmo synth, a “mini” version of the Megadrone that comes in just six cases. He recalls: “I came and said, ‘Okay, so who are we writing to?’ There were three people in the room, they turned and said, ‘We are writing to you! I was very scared.” Recovering from his mistaken belief that he should write the song for someone else instead of singing it himself, he began to lay down his parts.
“I put Kosmo’s song together and showed them how to play it and said, ‘If we’re going to make a song for me let’s write it on this. They were really confused!” The war is like that. “At first they weren’t sold there, but soon they started messing around. Then we spent 12 hours making the song. Halfway through we were all in agreement that it wasn’t going to be chosen, so we started to ignore it, and made a song that was fun. We got there in the middle of the night and we said, ‘Okay, it’s there, it’s done, wouldn’t it be nice to meet you! The next morning the guys at the BBC were like, ‘What have you done? This wasn’t what we were expecting, we had a plan and this is really messed up.’
Much to Battle’s surprise, his song – which he sang to the tune of three in German (“I just came back from Germany so it just popped into my head”) – was chosen as a UK single. Somewhere between angry sub-waves and 80s Europop, the lyrics contrast her crying with what’s knocking her down, and the joy she feels when she reads: “Eins, zwei, drei.”
“When writing, there was a feeling of, ‘What was I thinking when I sang the Eurovision song?’ A little German, a little extreme, and it doesn’t make bloody sense…” He laughs. “It’s a British thing. We like to complain about the things we like. It’s a kind of romance.” To add to the absurdity of the song, he spent the last month skillfully building the final stage in Vienna. He is tight-lipped about the details, except to describe the set as “very difficult … there are many things I have to jump on. If I fall I will look like a fool in front of thousands of people. My bruises are repeated.”
Make no mistake though – musically he’s very dangerous. “Kosmo has a certain rich sound,” he says. “I’ve spent six or seven years building a sound, it’s like Brian May with pedals or Lars Ulrich with his snare drum, with my band in a box. I’m going to Eurovision for the opening of everything. It would be nice to do everything well, to do well. We’re setting ourselves up to make a mark – whether that will have an impact on other people.”
But as he heads to Vienna to win, he is already thinking about his next job. With a twinkle in his eye, he points out a military-looking tube on the ground.
“It’s an aerial siren – if you have several at the same altitude you can write different notes and it works actually a lifting organ. One siren per note. So I’m taking eight or so and putting them together. I am making this plan now, I will finish it while I am in Vienna and hopefully when I come back, I will put it on the roof of the museum.
I’m saying that an air blast siren can be, naturally, insanely loud. “Okay…” he laughs, not as scared as before, “I’ll use it as much as I can before it falls.”
