Last Monday, I was chatting to Mark Waters about his musical beginnings. Today, in the second part of our interview, he tells me about his experience of working with Pete Brown (co-writer with Jack Bruce for a number of Cream songs) and his current band Sangria Furlo.

Tell me a bit about working with Pete Brown and making The Cream Acoustic Sessions

Working with Pete over many years was a journey that allowed me to have a deeper understanding of what the new renaissance of the 1960s and 70s was all about. Pete was in the centre of that having spearheaded the Beat Poetry Movement in the late 50s and early 60s mostly in London. Initially Pete acted in my first short experimental film playing the part of God With No Face.

When we screened the film he saw the Buñuel influence and so we started writing short films together. The thing about working with someone who was part of the arts revolution of the 60s is that you realise how totally free you can be in creativity. That generation had basically shed all inhibitions, something society tried to beat back into subsequent generations.

So then I came up with the idea of making a documentary about Pete. A ‘warts and all’ film. I titled the film ‘White Rooms And Imaginary Westerns’ after his auto-biography. The yet to be released film features the cast of Pete’s life; Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, Jack Bruce, Martin Scorsese, Arthur Brown and many more.

READ MORE: MacD on Music

On the back of this we ended up making ‘The Cream Acoustic Sessions’, the brain child of Mike Carden, Pete Brown, Charles McCutcheon (From Ulster) and I. The film was backed by Quarto Valley Records headed up by Bruce Quarto.

One of the funniest experiences on location was in Abbey Road Studio 2. We were recording Sweet Wine with Ginger Baker on drums. Ginger was pretending to be more decrepit than he really was and the first two or three takes were complete disasters. Everyone was super nervous. People were thinking that the whole session was going to be a write off. But it was Ginger.

He was messing with them. He had made a career out of f***ing with other musicians psychologically and rhythmically. Sort of a tradition he had brought from jazz to rock. When he came back to his drum seat after a cup of tea he played a storm with drum solo summoning the soul of Fela Kuti. 

The project was a fabulous experience to work on. The album, ‘Heavenly Cream’, which accompanied the film made it to number 10 in the UK Breakthrough Chart and number 15 in the UK Americana chart.

How did Sangria Furlo first come into being?

I was playing guitar at a friends barbecue in Mijas the summer of 2022. Mark Cornthwaite was there, we jammed a bit. A few months later I got a call asking me if I wanted to jam with his band. So I got a ride from Roly. He drove me through a river ford which leads to this favela of illegal dwellings made from breeze block which sits on a flood plain. At the end of one of the streets is an old farmhouse that was cut off from its land when they built the new Costa Del Sol motorway. 

I spent the next few hours improvising different styles of shouting and screaming down a microphone. I was suffering a bereavement at the time. The experience was cathartic. At the end of it Roly stood up and said will you join our band? I said, I’m not sure it’s a band. More of an art project. I sometimes still think that of Sangria Furlo.

A few months later Mark died suddenly. So our first gig as a band was Mark’s wake. Our second gig was supporting the legendary London Punk band The Wasps, and that’s the night Sangria Furlo got its name.

Tell me about ‘Trans European Metal Disco’

‘Trans European Metal Disco’ is our first album. Some of the songs were co-written by Mark Cornthwaite before he died and the rest were written by Klas (a sometimes member of Sangria Furlo), Denys, Roly and I. The title of the album came from an exercise where we were trying to be reductive by trying to describe our music in general genres.

Klas had the title which he had decided not to use in another project and I thought it was perfect because here we were, four different nationalities from across Europe living  and creating work in another European country. We are trans-generational, trans-national and trans-cultural. And the audio landscape of the varied tracks is representative of this. 

And that’s it from Mark Waters. Thanks to Jane Savidge for making this happen. Sangria Furlo’s debut album ‘Trans European Metal Disco’ is out now and they can be found on Instagram @sangriafurlo.

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