Phil McMinn Feature for OMS

It seems that Phil McMinn was as disappointed as anyone else when his former band, local favourites The Winchell Riots, broke up in October last year. "After the band split I put down my guitar and stopped playing music for a year. I was so disgusted by the process surrounding the break up of the band that I couldn't have music as part of my life." But absence clearly makes the heart grow fonder – McMinn is now back with a solo EP, A Crystal / A Diamond / An End / A Start, released this month via Beard Museum. "In the last few years I had to work out whether I really wanted to play music again but ultimately I realised I don't have a choice in the matter."

Many people in Oxford will be glad to hear of McMinn's compulsion to create music, but I asked him whether he had noticed a void in the local music scene, perhaps an arena-sized hole that had been left by his former band. "I feel a more general absence in the local scene of a time that has passed when the Zodiac was the centre of the world; there was a community of people working towards a common goal, and everyone was friends with everyone else. That doesn't exist anymore, not that I can see. It's a lot more broken up now."

After being in two of Oxford's most hotly-tipped bands in the past decade (Fell City Girl and The Winchell Riots) one can imagine how easy it would be to become jaded with the music business in general. "There's only so many times you can see a band form, get signed, get hyped, get dropped and split up before you start to become a bit more serene about it all. And that cycle was getting me down so I stopped listening largely." But McMinn hasn't entirely given up on Oxford bands – he still has place in his heart for the likes of Family Machine, Gunning for Tamar and Oxford's elder statesmen Radiohead.

But it was his formative experiences of being in bands that informed McMinn's decision to go solo in 2012. "I've worked with bands for years and I just got tired of the process of having to 'consult' before I booked a gig, or check with girlfriends whether we could go on tour, or have my songs put in front of people for inspection before we could proceed and work on them. I trust myself just about these days, and I don't need other people to quantify that."

Along with former Winchell Riots bassist Rich Leicester, McMinn slowly brought together A Crystal / A Diamond / An End / A Start, a process which he describes as "me trying to break Pro Tools." But with one beast tamed, how has McMinn taken to being a solo artist, devoid of the bombast of a backing band? "I made a deliberate decision to engage with the fact that I can't be as loud or brash as either of my bands have been, and that was important. With an acoustic guitar and a vocal there's no hiding, so I had to relearn how to play and how to be on stage, which is something I'm still getting to grips with." But fans of Winchell Riots will no doubt find the transition a much smoother one because, as McMinn notes: "I was the songwriter in The Winchell Riots, so there's bound to be some continuation there musically."

I ask McMinn if there will be a solo album if all goes well with the EP: "It's always about money, which dictates how much an artist can achieve. I get so mad with bands who put some shit out in some shit artwork they did themselves - surely there is much more at stake than that? There has to be value to music and I don't want to flood the world with music unless it's totally worth it.” The earnest singer-songwriter leaves us with his philosophy on the importance of music: “People die to music, people break up to music, people get born to music. So that has to be respected. Charles Bukowski says it better: "unless it comes unasked out of your heart and your minds and your mouth and your gut, don't do it." 

[Originally published in Oxford Music Scene magazine, November 2012]

http://oxfordmusicblog.co.uk/Oxford%20Music%20Scene-21.pdf