Harrison's Harrisonics

Review :: Blonde Redhead 'Fake Can Be Just As Good'

2011-02-11T03:46:00.000-08:00

This old review first appeared in BigO Magazine, Singapore - back in the day.

BLONDE REDHEAD

Fake Can Be Just As Good

(Touch and Go)

Whenever anything is written about the wondrous trio of Blonde Redhead, it seems that another New York band is bound to get mentioned; and it ain't DNA - the seminal outfit who recorded the song from which Blonde Redhead took their name (not to be confused with Singapore's own DNA).

No, Blonde Redhead complain of a condition called Inevitable-Sonic-Youth-Namecheck-Syndrome... and this review looks like it just failed to be an exception. Apologies to Blonde Redhead.

When a band gets wacky with its guitar tunings and has a sound that doesn't exactly fit the "standard" guitar formulas we're too used to hearing, the words "Sonic" and "Youth" are never too far from the lips of certain

lazy-eared folks. It's a knee-jerk reaction Blonde Redhead must have become sick of years ago.

Admittedly, the Blonde Redhead's compelling guitar interplay and references to New York's No-Wave scene means there are times when their music is reminiscent of something you might have heard in Sonic Youth's '80s repertoire, but even if they are the best candidates for succession to the Sonic throne, Blonde Redhead don't deserve to be thoughtlessly typecast as Sonic-wannabes. Like their previous records, Fake Can Be Just As Good shows that Blonde Redhead have a romantic sensuousness and mystique that's all

their own.

The emotional intensity is there from the beginning with the urgent dash and chaotic guitar shards of Kazuality. For a start, with a title like that, is it wrong to assume that Amedeo Pace's anguished lines like

"I-want-you" are addressed to fellow Blonde Redhead singer-guitarist, Kazu Makino?

Exciting as it is, Kazuality merely touches on what's to follow - the rich, winding melodies and rhythms that emerge, interlock and explode in the songs like the euphoric Symphony of Treble, the ominous Pier Paolo, and the bittersweet beauty of Ego Maniac Kid.

The aptly-titled Bipolar is a demonstration of how effective Makino and Pace's dual vocals can be as they earnestly trade lines over hypnotic harmonics and the Can-like drum patterns of Amedeo's twin brother, Simone Pace. Guest bassist Vern (on loan from Unwound) miraculously anchors the dramatic tension Blonde Redhead repeatedly create - something that's undeniably there in the interconnecting elements of Water. It starts with taut, staccato blasts which then unravel into more chiming, flowing music as Pace laments "Wasted wounded silent love." In this context, the extended drum roll that pulls the song out of the hum of its breakdown into a more violent passage is virtually orgasmic. However, despite the intensity, the band never resorts to artless bombast.

Even with the comparatively standard, upbeat riffage of Oh James (whose spy-theme guitar part resembles Pink Floyd's Lucifer Sam), you can't escape the sense of longing that's embedded in Blonde Redhead's music.

Despite the album title's claim that Fake Can Be Just As Good, understand that this is no cheap imitation. This is real, beguiling and beautiful music.

(8) - Ben Harrison (whose band gets compared to Sonic Youth)

Review :: Richard Ashcroft "Alone With Everybody"

2010-12-01T02:00:00.000-08:00

Can one be too harsh on the Verve's Dick limp offering (that I -for one- don't remember)? In retrospect, comparing it to Bon Jovi's 'emotional depth' and 'the raw power of Barry Manilow on downers' was probably too kind. Jon and Bazza have tunes I remember for a start.

Blonde Redhead Anecdote + Review :: Blonde Redhead 'Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons'

2010-11-22T01:42:00.000-08:00

I've written more than one Blonde Redhead review in my time. I know this because one of the reviews (not this one) is integral to a favourite true tale (that might sound like a-shaggy dog story) of my secret rock n' roll glory...

I was in NY. Blonde Redhead, The Make-Up and Modest Mouse were on the bill for a gig at a New York university. I wanted to go. It was sold out. Early afternoon on gig-day: I was checking the venue on the off-chance, or I happened to be passing, or something... Either way, I saw the Blonde Redhead trio (no crew) on the chilly (or was it freezing?) pavement sidewalk clutching their instruments (in soft cases).

I said hello and gave them a present I'd brought along with me (just in case): a copy of BigO Magazine containing my review of their 'Fake Can Be Just As Good' album.

Turns out they were unable to get into the venue, or were stuck waiting to meet their appointed liaison. A large uniformed chap was being difficult about letting them into the building. I suggested it'd be easier to plead their case now they could show the bloke a Singaporean magazine with them, and point out that the name in the magazine corresponded with the gig poster.

How about I try? I thought it was worth a shot because I'd seen that an English accent could sometimes have a handy effect in this USA place...

Sure enough... within minutes we were in a tiny school dressing room backstage. And stranded there too (something to do with no passes). Hey, but there are worse places to be than stuck with smart and polite musicians tuning up their unusual-looking guitars (to a pitch pipe too - not an electronic tuner)...

And then -never mind my review helping them to get in the building- came the bit where maybe I really did help save the day...

TO BE CONTINUED

Review :: The Jesus Lizard 'Blue'

2010-11-02T02:36:00.000-07:00

This Jesus Lizard record is, according to the Wikipedia entry 'something of a departure for The Jesus Lizard, exploring some of the more experimental instincts hinted at on earlier songs like "Happy Bunny Goes Fluff-Fluff Along",' but I don't know if I knew this at the time. Sure enjoyed playing the track 'Needles for Teeth' at discos though.

Review :: ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead 'Madonna'

2010-11-02T02:16:00.000-07:00

...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead made an album called 'Madonna'. Which is now also the name of a band. And an iconic singer.

Not sure if I used the phrase 'suss the fuss' in other reviews. Wouldn't be surprised. I do like it.

Someone once told me they reckoned I'd been the first to put two words together to get 'genre-defying', and that it had then caught on. Not sure about that. Didn't get me paid did it? Haha. Kiss my art!

Review :: Cocteau Twins 'Stars And Topsoil - A Collection (1982-1990)

2010-11-02T01:53:00.000-07:00

Cocteau Twins

Stars and Topsoil – A Collection (1982-1990)

(4AD)

Convention suggests that a Cocteau Twins review demands sentences that evoke the enigmatic trio’s songtitles - something like: "Shimmering sugar spangle shards cascade as spindling spirals of opaque yarn spin pearly dewdrop drops o’er the tremulous, rippling opaque." And with that formality dealt with we’re free to re-evaluate the proto-dreampop namedrop whose tinpot beatbox and early Banshee gloom soon blossomed into a unique entity – an integral part of the Gothy / Indie fabric of the ‘80s, and a companion to swooning Pandoras whose dreamboxes ached for glaciers melting.

They may have been a one-trick pony, but what a glorious trick it was: Liz Fraser’s indecipherable, angelic warblings cast over a glimmering sheen of chiming, chorus-pedalled guitars; delivered with a grace that was enough to make Annie Lennox wet herself.

And who’d have thought that a kooky-cool Chinese star would one-day opt to cop a lot of the sound to great effect? So, not only an 18-track reminder for some, but also a potential revelation to many Faye Wong fans.

Review :: Gorky's Zygotic Mynci 'Spanish Dance Troupe' single

2010-11-02T01:39:00.000-07:00

How charmed I was by this 7" single scored in a tiny-town shop – despite not having a record player? Charmed enough to send this review on a postcard mailed to BigO Magazine in Singapore (no, come to think of it: more likely sent via aerogramme, or maybe even email - but a postcard makes it a nicer story innit). Probably cost 99p or something like that. Never got to hear the album. Not even sure if I ever even saw the album (of the same name) in a shop for that matter. Worthy of investigation?

Item :: Stellarium - Stargazey Pie

2010-10-29T03:00:00.000-07:00

You heard the Wilde line about how we're all born in the gutter, but some of us look up and see the stars?Either way it rolls, a stellarium trip is one way to enhance your view wherever you are -- be it with a stellarium star-map, or with the debut album from the band called Stellarium, out today (Sept 15, 2010).

Singapore-based Stellarium is already a regional gig favourite for those who like their candy to come with psycho swirls. Gloriously loud, they're a powerful live act who are sonically hypnotic and hang with the twang while armed with honey-dripping hummable hooks. It's the kind of thing that can be conveniently tagged as "shoegaze" -- except this quartet seem too Rock n' Roll to limit themselves to the limits of a genre-lock. Heck, they could be true to their spacious name and call themselves sky-gazers if they wanted to... But never mind the name-games, know this: Stellarium's self-titled album is now available in Singapore at Straits Records(Haji Lane), Roxy (Peninsula) and Books Actually(Club Street).

And it's yours for a mere $12.00 (SDG).

Alternatively, you can get the album via mail-order (complete with a download of the album while you await your CD in the post) or a digital version and more at the Stellarium Bandcamp site. See here for more Stellarium sights and sounds.

May the fuzz be with you.

Review :: Pavement 'Terror Twilight'

2010-10-26T03:02:00.000-07:00

"If Pere Ubu were crossed with a boy band made up of polite-but-peppy (not preppy) JD Salinger characters it might sound like this..." Pavement. Not Vampire Weekend. What you reckon?

Spot how I used previous Pavement titles to do the work for me: Slanted and Enchanted; Brighten the Corners; Crooked Rain... Another medal for this one please.

This review was another overnight turnaround number. Most of the listening done on a walkman while en route to East Coast Rd on a number 10 bus.

Had I more time... I could have written an even shorter one! Haha. Viva brevity in reviews. I always preferred writing the short ones, amused that crafting them took up more time than epics that the editors would push me to write (so they had a cover story). Ugh. Like when I was coerced into being kind to Stone Roses' 'Second Coming' to please the advertisers. Never let that happen again.

Review :: Joe Henry 'Fuse'

2010-10-26T02:17:00.000-07:00

A review of Joe Henry's wonderful album, Fuse - a record I know I've described as being my favourite hangover soundtrack. This review appeared in BigO - a sober Singaporean monthly magazine.

I met Joe briefly in a corridor in New York once. Immaculately dressed. Immaculate manners. Shook hands, and he politely said it was a pleasure to meet - which is precisely what I was going to say. He wasn't to know I was quite the fan and had already been overdosing on my advance copy of Fuse. Knowing the album also enhanced the experience of the unfussed launch gig I got to see later. Lovely.

Incidentally, it says here that Joe Henry loves you madly. How nice.

Review :: Smart Went Crazy 'Con Art'

2010-10-26T01:53:00.000-07:00

A review of Con Art by Smart Went Crazy that appeared in BigO - a monthly magazine that used to be published in Singapore. Review by Ben Harrison. Find out more about Smart Went Crazy here.

Review :: 13th Floor Elevators 'All Time High'

2010-10-25T22:46:00.000-07:00

These chemical brothers make anyone else look like mere day trippers wrote Ben Harrison of the 13th Floor Elevators in another unpaid review published in BigO - a monthly magazine once published in Singapore (BigO could be an acronym for "Before I Get Old" like in The Who song, dig?).

Review :: The Lemonheads 'The Best Of The Lemonheads'

2010-10-25T22:39:00.000-07:00

Bubblegrunge! And Alternapop! Give your scribe -Ben Harrison- a medal!

Another unpaid review that appeared in BigO - a monthly magazine once published in Singapore. (BigO could be an acronym for "Before I Get Old" like in The Who song, dig?).

Review :: You Am I 'You Am I's #4 Record'

2010-10-25T22:23:00.000-07:00

You Am I described as graduates of the Replacements' school of damaged, raggedy-ass poetics and a cool Antipodean pick-you-up if Soul Asylum's exile on lame street has got you down no less. Written by Ben Harrison. Appeared in BigO - a monthly magazine once published in Singapore. (BigO stood for "Before I Get Old" like in The Who song, dig?).

Review :: Jesus and Mary Chain 'Munki'

2010-10-25T22:11:00.000-07:00

A wee review of the Mary Chain's last album (to date) - a review that might have been much longer if had I been able to give it more than one listen at the time. Appeared in the published-in-Singapore monthly music mag called BigO ("Before I Get Old"). Munki became my most listened-to Mary Chain album. Messy? Maybe. The sound of a band falling apart? In places. But fabulous Rock n' Roll? Absolutely.

I remember the opening line of another JAMC review I did for BigO. For Stoned & Dethroned. It began with something along the lines of 'I love the Jesus And Mary Chain more than you do. I still mourn the loss of my collection of Mary Chain clippings, lyrics and posters from Smash Hits...' Something like that anyway.

John, But Not Forgotten :: Keeping It Peel in 2009

2009-10-07T02:27:00.000-07:00

For over twenty years of my life there was at least one constant I could count on, no matter where I went or what I did. It was John Peel.

I might have gone long periods without hearing the voices of my parents or brothers, but there weren't many weeks when I didn't manage to somehow hear the deadpan tones of John Peel, the pioneering British DJ who died suddenly in October 2004 – leaving an irreparable gap in the lives of his loyal listeners and fans across the world.

Peelie –as he's affectionately known– was already an institution when I discovered his show. At first I tuned-in hungry to hear the reggae, dub and seemingly unintelligible rap of Jamaican "Toasters" he would feature; but before long almost everything he played suited me – especially since we shared an appreciation for twangy guitars, whether they were playing the blues, surf, rockabilly rumble, Zimbabwean jit-jive, Congolese soukous, or adding to the drama of The Smiths or the Bad Seeds, overwhelming the songs of Sonic Youth and Jesus & Mary Chain, or calling the girls to get up and dance with Franz Ferdinand.

And then there was rap. And techno. And garage, gabba, grime, grunge and grindcore. Plus dancehall, speedcore and happy hardcore. Drum & bass, dubstep, ambient, country, folk and –oh– those heartbreakingly yearning 70s soul ballads. Not to forget the impassioned hollering of the Riot Grrl movement; or those cowgirls recorded yodeling all high & lonesome, long before your parents were born.

And what of artists like Ivor Cutler? To put this Scottish songwriter, poet and humourist in a category like "spoken word" doesn't do him justice… But whatever it was, it was all good to me.

Ask "What kind of music did John Peel play?" and you could reply: he played good music. Or at least, he played what he thought was good. And I still naively think that's the whole point. It sounds like a blazing simple concept to me, and it's what I assume a DJ should do: Play music that they like. Except... I don't know how many working DJs actually do this. I certainly can't tell if those I've heard on Singapore radio even have any passion for music. Maybe they do. But the sound of their own voices seems to be their primary love.

And when evidence suggests that to be a radio DJ today requires a fake accent that no ordinary person in any country would ever normally speak with, we can assume that the likes of Peelie would now have difficulty getting a job on radio. Maybe he also contrived radio persona for when he was on air; but if he did, it was a good one. It was good enough to make us feel like we'd lost a member of our family when John Peel died.

When the news broke I knew I wasn't alone in feeling like I'd lost a slightly befuddled but incredibly wonderful uncle. And I knew immediately that I'd miss him. He was an incomparable and sincere enthusiast – a man who didn't have eclectic taste simply for the sake of it, but because great music isn't limited to specific genres or countries. He didn't seem concerned with the tedious pursuit of attaining hipness. His shows really WERE about the music.

I'm never quite sure what people mean when they tell others to "keep it real" – especially if they're vulgar, gold-drenched showbiz sensations whose sense of reality appears to have long since split. But if you're going to tell me to "Keep it Peel": please know that I already did. And I don't intend to stop any time soon.

John Peel Day is commemorated on every 2nd Thursday of October. This year it's being done in Singapore like this (click here for the Facebook event page)

GUEST REVIEW BY KURT COBAIN :: MUDHONEY OP-ED

2009-09-02T20:36:00.000-07:00

Voice of Generation (cough) tells us something that we already knew. But it's an excellent summary and something that bears repeating, so: thank you Kurt, and sorry for the delay with getting this online:

Succinct. And I think Mudhoney would approve too. My abiding memory is that I didn't have a heater, let alone a computer, when this was submitted in 1991 and provided a different kind of warmth & light against the cold & dark I was in.

I'd include the accompanying note, but it's personal and/or libelous (about drooling DJs). Brilliant. Dear Kurt, thanks again for everything. x

PS:. And how's this for another example of a piece of music-writing by a musician? It's a pet topic of mine after I noticed that my heart responds best to music writing when it's been written by musicians. Yesterday I read a few great paras about The Replacements written by Joe Henry.

I reckon this is because musicians write about music from their front-line; or, as veterans, they know what they're talking about. Whatever the case, somehow writing about music written by musicians seems to stand out more to me than journalists' bits. And it seems more trustworthy too. Even when they're fibbing.

SHIRKING THE QUIRK :: BECK INTERVIEW

2009-08-06T01:53:00.000-07:00

Ever wary of hype, Ben Harrison was not going to be taken in by Beck’s 'Loser' based on the hype and enthusiastic recommendations of BigO's editors. He then groaned unappreciatively when he was namechecked and compared to the Gen-X poster boy in a BigO review of Beck’s Geffen album, Mellow Gold. But when he actually got to hear more Beck, Harrison recognised a kindred spirit and an imaginative music-maker, so that by the time 1996 came around, Ben was beginning to itch with anticipation for Beck’s new album, tentatively titled Robot Jazz. When the eagerly-awaited album arrived (now called Odelay) it didn’t disappoint. With this in mind BigO figured Ben Harrison had the mindset best suited for shooting the breeze with Beck Hansen. This article was first published in BigO #128 (August 1996). They called it 'Don't Call Me Quirky'. Beck then.

On the vast mountain of music there’s a backwater where the gold diggers have set up shop to get rich on whatever nuggets of sound that come along. Mostly, they prospect down by the old mainstream, but every now and then, there’s a flash in the panhandlers’ pot that is something more than the wall-to-wall mediocrity marketed as pop.

When a young Californian troubadour called Beck seemingly came out of nowhere back in ‘94, you could have been forgiven for thinking that he was destined to be a one-hit wonder with his song, Loser. But for those paying attention, it soon became evident that Beck was no mere gimmicky wagman.

Mellow Gold, Beck’s consistently brilliant debut album, and Stereopathetic Soulmanure, a scatologically-compiled independent release of recordings dating back to ‘88, showed his musical breadth, wit and versatility; while One Foot In The Grave, his low-key “folk” record on the K label, demonstrated his ability to be as engaging as ever even without the myriad of sounds his other releases presented.

On his new album, Odelay, the sonic palette is Beck’s richest yet - but it’s best heard rather than talked about, especially since right now, you’d be hard pressed to find more inventive and exciting pop music on this side of the cosmos. Even if it were to only sell one copy, Odelay is still a hit record as it can hit you on every level being simultaneously groovy, intelligent, witty, poignant, bad-ass, plaintive, simple, complex, plain fun pop music.

In 1995, Mellow Gold was a glaring omission from Big0’s list of the best albums made between 1975 and 1995, but now it’s not inconceivable that Odelay might sit in an equivalent list come 2020AD. Not that you get the impression Beck is obsessively out to make fiercely fantastic records. They just happen to come out that way.

Chilling out at home on a summer evening, Beck was relaxed; so relaxed in fact that a more accurate transcript of our phone interview would have exhausted my keyboard’s fullstop button if I marked every pregnant gap between words when I didn’t know if he’d finished speaking, or if we were still in the middle of one of his long, cool-in-talk sentences (which were peppered with plenty of “you know”s).

Beck also proved amiable rather than the nonsense-spewing maestro I was prepared for. I’d previously been delighted in reading his elliptical replies to other journalists - a defence mechanism against people sniffing round his patch. Statements like “I think I’m the Bon Jovi of the ’60s… or Kip Winger with a protein shake” seemed to be more than surrealistic fooling around (wasted on bemused journalists trying to tag him as spokesmodel for a slacker generation). It was instead a way of throwing skeptics off his trail.

Although a native of Los Angeles, his voice still carries the mid-Western drawl he probably picked up while growing up outside Kansas City with his grandfather (a preacher). When we spoke, he’d just returned from a productive trip out of Los Angeles, up the east coast to record in Olympia, Washington, and to play at the Tibetan Freedom Concert (organised by Beastie Boy Adam Yauch) in San Francisco.

“It was great,” Beck enthused about the event that took place just two days before. “It went on over two days and 60,000 people showed up each day. The audience was really receptive. I played by myself, solo. Did a lot of stuff off the ‘K’ record and I did a couple of new unreleased songs. Had a drum machine that I turned on for a while.

“There’re two kinds of show I do. One where I just play by myself, play acoustic and it’s a pretty loose affair. It’s definitely more low-key and kind of open-ended and experimental, and I don’t play with a set-list. I let the audience call out the songs. Those are real fun shows… it’s like you’re just playing for a roomful of friends.

“And then, there’re the shows with the bands and they’re more electric, playing with a louder volume and it’s, of course, more rhythmic, energy-oriented.”

The Tibetan Freedom gig was a more positive experience than being on last year’s Lollapalooza bill, which he describes as being “more bummer than summer.”

“Oh, it was totally different, completely. This just had such a great feeling to it. Everybody was very relaxed and having a good time and everybody played great shows. It was non-stop music all day… just a blast.”

BEN: It had quite a diverse line-up of acts, some of whom you’ve played quite a lot with recently. Do you see them as friends or musical peers?

BECK: Probably both you know, whatever peers are. We’re all playing music and we tend to play shows together. I tend to play shows with Sonic Youth, Pavement and those bands. A lot of the bands playing were the ones that get lumped into the alternative category, but there was a lot of hip-hop: De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, Biz Markie. And Buddy Guy, John Lee Hooker were there. It was pretty diverse. Yoko Ono was incredible. She was like a mountain.

I don’t really compare musicians. It’s not a competitive thing for me at all. We’re all contributing, all tapping into the same musical force. We’re really just transmitters to other people because everybody has that need to hear music and hear rhythm.”

Is there any musician, specifically, whom you feel close to? Do you feel you have musical contemporaries?

Er… I don’t put myself above or below anyone really. I look up to someone like Willie Nelson. I’m not into flash-in-the-pan kind of bands, faddish kind of things.

So do you see yourself as part of any particular lineage?

Yeah, it’s been a little bastardised along the way. When I was playing more straight folk music, I was trying to work in-between Woody Guthrie and the blues, but also having it informed by punk and that kind of energy.

Woody would have been a punk. More than his son is…

Oh yeah, he was a punk definitely. He was always following his own instinct. He never played the game and that’s why he never achieved success in his own time. He didn’t become the Will Rogers of the day. He’d get a big radio gig and he’d bring all his communist friends on, or he’d start talking about labour unions. He’d get some money to buy that fancy new car and then he’d give it away to somebody - a labour organiser or something.

So you’re not into Arlo Guthrie, his son?

I always look to Woody because I relate to him more, coming from a pretty working class, and a very… somewhat limited, background. I didn’t have money when I was growing up and I was thinking of Arlo as more kinda goofy ’60s child with this idyllic life. He had it good, was always taking drugs and being this loopy character, and I couldn’t really relate to that. I’ve always been scraping to get by…

Woody Guthrie cuts a very romantic figure, taking to the road at an early age, a hobo from the dustbowl. Did you ever do the equivalent ‘hobo-ing’ thing?

Well, I don’t think it’s possible to hobo anymore. You’re just basically a homeless person now. The quality of life of a hobo has plummeted and now you’re just plain old homeless. But I’ve done that sort of travelling when I was younger - just ridin’ on buses. It wasn’t any kind of romantic thing. I was just trying to find a place to live where I could get a job. It wasn’t like “Mom’s footin’ the bill and I’m just riding the bus.” When I was 17, I was out on my own having to make my own way.

Beck says his life is more settled now, and he's living in his own place. I wondered if that was the case when Mellow Gold came out.

“No, I was just livin’ on the road,” he says. “I wasn’t too focused at the time. I’m all for getting to a point where I can get a little more relaxed with things ‘cos it gets a little hectic y’know. At first, it was very disconcerting and throwin’ me off…”

I don’t ask Beck what he makes of being described somewhere as part-Woody Allen, part-Woody Guthrie, though Guthrie has been the most consistently referred-to singer when it comes to Beck, something he doesn’t seem to mind as Guthrie continues to be a major influence.

“I learnt to play guitar from listening to Woody Guthrie and Mississippi John Hurt. I’ve really embraced a lot of different things since I started playing music but I try to maintain some of the spirit and that looseness that so much of their music stands for. But y’know, I don’t want to be playing songs that are antiques. I wanna keep the intent - the musical intent - that’s in Woody’s music and all the other folk musicians, and keep it alive even if it has to transform into something else that uses drum machines or whatever."

Perplexed that anyone would think the new album title has anything to do with rock guitarist Jeff Beck’s Beck-Ola album (anyone including The Straits Times editors who credited Odelay to the ex-Yardbird in their paper's feature review of Beck's record); or that a line about “the rotten oasis” in the opening track, Devil’s Haircut, refers to THAT Manchester band, Beck has to laugh off the more ridiculous comparisons - except he says he gets them “all the time.”

He says: “Like someone was saying Loser is from a Lynyrd Skynyrd song or something and, like, I never even heard Lynyrd Skynyrd. I’m totally ignorant of ’70s southern rock. People say ‘oh, this song sounds like that’ and I’ve never heard that song. There’re only so many songs and so many ideas out there but a lot of what I do comes out of improvisation. And I don’t sit around and listen to something to copy. It’s got to come from a place where it’s unconscious…”

And whenever it comes to improvised stuff like yours, people are always quick to tag it as being “quirky ” or “ironic. ” Does that piss you off at all?

I really think those words are somewhat vulgar because they cheapen any sense of trying to do something like expand the scope of the way we look at something.

With something that is offbeat, where you’re trying to use surrealism, or expand the way things are perceived; where you disengage yourself from traditional logic, and try and create a more unconscious side, and try to get closer to something that’s truer and closer to how we really think and our whole internal life… what they tend to do in the media is go ‘Isn’t that quirky?’ or ‘Isn’t that wacky?’

And that’s something I’ve battled since day one. It’s a hard line to go, between trying to do something different without that degenerating into something pretentious and over-wrought. Keep it live and natural and flowing and try to get to the root of it.

So you care how you’re perceived?

Um… no, I can’t care. At first maybe I did a little bit, but after a while I decided to let it go ‘cos everyone’s gonna have their own idea. It’s almost impossible to be represented correctly. The essence of what’s going on is communicated through the music so I think at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter what the perception is. When you’re gone, the music will still be there and time will be the equaliser.

So, in the words of your own song, you “pay no mind?”

Yeah, I wrote that when I was about 19. It was about growing up in the ’80s and having this whole materialistic Top Gun-Tom Cruise, Michael J Fox, you’re white, you’re male, you’re winning, you’re collegiate, you’re good at sports… all this.

That whole winning mentality really left a lot of people on the outside and I think that’s a lot of what the whole “grunge” thing was about, why that hit a nerve, because a lot of people were left out of the picture in the ’80s. Here was all this stuff being thrown at you and to just actually get through that and just get to the kernel, the root, of what’s important and what’s real.

The perception of Beck as a “quirky” artist actually belittles his music. Sure, taken superficially there’s a lot of humour and apparently absurdist elements to some of his work, but alongside this there’s a whole canon of beautifully plaintive songs, added to ones where the sense of furthering that country/folk tradition is obvious.

“I’m interested in taking old folk songs and writing new lyrics about more contemporary situations,” he says, citing Mexico as one such example, a tale about Beck losing his job at McDonald’s, holding up a 7-11, getting revenge on his old boss and fleeing south of the border. Purists might disagree, but this is as much an extension of the Guthrie ethos as much as Bob Dylan (once seen as Guthrie’s successor) ever was.

Have you ever been accused of being irreverent with that tradition?

I’m way past that. In the ’60s, they incorporated folk music into everything. Country Joe McDonald and every psychedelic jug-band from ‘Frisco to Cleveland pretty much bastardised all the (laughs) “original” folk songs. At this point, they’re all so obscure that people hearing them now just think they’re new. These melodies have been in the air for who knows how many hundreds of years.

That Beck can casually tell me (in all modesty, and only when I asked) that his songs have been recorded by the likes of Tom Petty (Loser) and the legendary Johnny Cash (the gorgeous Rowboat) is testament to his talent.

But Beck seems equally impressed by, and more eager to talk about, a cover of Asshole he heard in Paris a few months back. “These little 16-year-old girls did a version that was pretty incredible,” he says, “They’d changed the chords and melody all around and it had a much spookier feeling - more foreboding. It was really great to hear that.

“I think I mourn the loss of that spirit where a song is just a song and anyone can sing it. People own songs now. The song you sing is the song you own. That’s why I was attracted to folk music - these songs belong to everybody. Anybody could use them, reinterpret, add something and change them, adding to that tradition or that craft, that’s a goldmine.”

These older songs like Asshole and Rowboat are perfect examples of Beck’s more obviously plaintive tunes - fairly plain recordings, compared to the dizzying brilliance of Odelay, with soul-baring lyrics. The Spirit Moves Me and Modesto also have this spirit and were recorded at the same time.

Beck: This was ’bout four years ago up in North Hollywood. I was going into the studio and I’d played in this country and western bar and there was this pedal steel player there, Leo LeBlanc, and I asked him if he’d come down and record something for me ‘cos I was doing this record. And then I realised I didn’t have any songs for him to play pedal steel on so I just wrote them real quick… just before I went to the studio.

But they seem such personal songs. Maybe you were caught off guard, and you didn’t have time to “filter” the lyrics like some of your other songs…

I think so. They’re not overwrought at all. It’s just straight, coming out.

Is Modesto named after the place?

Yeah, it’s a place, it’s a state of mind. It’s just a bleak California farm town…

I was unaware it was a real place till I saw it in Lowlife, a movie by George Hickenlooper (famed for his documentary on Apocalypse Now). Though Lowlife’s down-and-out-in-LA scenario might sound like another Generation-X fest, it was mercifully free of such cliches...

Yeah, it’s really time to transcend that whole Generation-X thing. It’s really like marketing a whole generation as a soda-pop can or something. It really reduces it.

Which is a tag you get associated with, and people still harp on it as if that’s the only thing you’re about. Does having to talk to the media (like this) feel like work?

Well, sometimes it’s work. But this is pleasant, I’m enjoying this… The way you ask; are you a musician too? Most of the time though it’s a drag. You’re talking to someone who’s coming from a totally different side of things and you don’t connect at all. It’s work when you’re trying to connect with the person you’re trying to talk to. And I get asked a lot of stupid stuff all the time, always like “this is the Loser.” It totally misses the point of that song.

After the hoopla of Mellow Gold, the follow-up album could contain songs reflecting the unwanted media glare... it seems to be a subject common to artists when they write in the wake of “success.” But Odelay seems free of such blatant swipes. Yet you get nicely scathing in songs peopled by the likes of the Whimsical Actress, the Truckdrivin Neighbours Downstairs or Nightmare Hippy Girl. Were they about anyone in particular?

Yeah, Nightmare Hippy Girl was definitely one person and the Truckdrivers were actual neighbours I had downstairs. These songs were actual reflections of these people, or this whole reaction to their existence. I think I’m moving away from songs that are portraits of a specific thing and moving towards songs that are portraits of a mood or a lifestyle or an atmosphere that includes everybody.

Like Sissyneck on the new album with it’s “good ol’ boys”?

Yeah, Sissyneck is more of a way of life. And Jackass was just the general mood of that week in the midst of summer, where the only goal is movement. It was one of those taking-stock things.

The sample of Them’s It’s All Over Now Baby Blue is beautiful…

Yeah, that’s a nice little sample.

…and the lyrics seem to have echoes of that song with the “Loose ends tying the noose in the back of my mind,” and the lines “I remember the way that you smiled/When the gravity shackles were wild/And something is vacant when I think it’s all beginning.” Do you consider yourself romantic?

Somewhat… yeah… but I would say begrudgingly. There’s not much room for it these days. I’m not one to romanticise the past or anything. I try to be aware of reality and yesterday can be just as cool and mundane as today.

What about Derelict? It feels like immigrants having a hard time…

Yeah. Coming into town on a ghost ship and the stowaways are finding themselves naked in the back of a police car, smelling of herring and birdshit.

There’s an ethnic feel to the music. It sounds like a gamelan which you also had on Beercan.

It’s actually this thumb piano thing. A giant thumb piano.

The scope of sound on Odelay is your most ambitious yet, and you share production duties with the Dust Brothers. How did you hook up with them?

We had mutual friends and they were in the neighbourhood. We got together and got along really well and it just worked out. At first I was a little concerned because, of course, they’re known for their thing. They’re really well-known remixers and I was really concerned with… I still am too… with working with someone that’s going to change what I do. But it worked out really good actually. They really got what I was going for… (huge pause)… there.

Hip-hop beats have featured in your work from your first release. Were you into it when you were younger?

That was inescapable, pretty much everywhere, in the neighbourhood I grew up in. All the bad-ass kids would be breakdancing in these congregations down on the comer, and you’d go up to Hollywood Boulevard on weekend nights and they’d have breakdance competitions going.

I like the story of how you first heard the New York band, Pussy Galore (the young Beck was a fan of James Bond movies and was curious when he heard of a band named after this classic Bond girl) - a band that featured Jon Spencer, who has since been in the Beck touring band and has had his work remixed by you. What do you remember of the New York scene as you discover it?

I remember when I was a kid, I’d go to Sonic Youth shows in ‘85 and it wasn’t punk. We didn’t know what it was. It had a danger to it. It was a little bit ominous I remember. In retrospect it’s been incorporated to popular music so much, these guitar sounds and all…

Your mom, Bibbe Hansen, owned the Troy Cafe (an LA venue) and I heard she’d let the late Darby Crash from the Germs crash at your place when you were younger. It must be interesting hanging out with your friend Pat Smear (then also of the Germs) all those years on.

I grew up in LA as a little kid when the punk thing was happening. I was aware of all this but I was definitely in my kid- . world. When I was 12 years old, I wasn’t playing in a band like Redd Kross, who started really young. But getting back to that Sonic Youth thing, it was an interesting time. There wasn’t really a name for that music. They didn’t come up with “alternative;” it wasn’t really college rock (that was something else). I enjoyed that. It’s kind of sad when something gets usurped, labelled and filed.

When you left LA and went to New York did you experience that scene?

I went there in the mid-’80s and there was definitely something happening. All the musicians, everybody I met, it was a different attitude. If we were playing music, it wasn’t what our parents were into. It wasn’t a James Taylor thing. It was more of that Woody Guthrie thing, or more kind of raw, primitive, crude… We were trying to put more life into the music because it seemed like everything that was popular… everything that was on the radio at the time was sort of a wax-mannequin- version of real music. It was a cardboard cutout.

And that’s when you started writing songs. You’ve put out a lot of good material in the last few years. Do you consider yourself prolific or are other people just slow?

I can be but… I’ll just sit down and stuff will come out. I used to work every day. Get up, have breakfast and then work on songs for all afternoon and then work on songs again at night… just everyday, just working on things, recording. That was the period I was working on Mellow Gold. I got laid off my job and I had about a year there. This was about ‘92 where I was just writing all the time and it’s really a luxury. I wish I could do that more. Now I’ve got to squeeze stuff in here and there.

So is there another “K” record in the works?

There is. It’s pretty much recorded. I went up there about two summers ago and recorded almost a whole new record, and then I went up again last week and did another record. So between the stuff from two years ago, and the stuff from last week, there’ll be something out of it. I think it’s interesting - that span of time and having all that exist on one record. That’s kind of what all the records I do, do. It’s about that fracturing of time when something’s recorded.

Is Going Nowhere Fast on it?

No, I haven’t released that ever. That’s a very old song, one of the first ones I ever wrote.

I read your mom loves it. She said it’s one of your best…

Yeah? I don’t know about that, I’ll have to ask her. My mom gets very involved with kids calling her up all the time. She’s very open and we have the same initials so people are always calling her up.

And she has her own band, Black Fag, fronted by a six-foot-eight transvestite called Vaginal Cream Davis. They sound like just the kind of band that should come and play in Singapore!

Yeah, I think so. They’ll be right in there! I can’t imagine it there. Is it weird? Maybe kind of like a JG Ballard apocalyptic city? Of course, I’ve heard the superficial things that you can’t chew gum and all that but (laughs)… but I’m interested to go there. I spent some time in Hong Kong on our last Asian tour (with Jon Spencer).

I really wanted to get over to Singapore but the show got cancelled for some reason. I’m totally into that end of the world and I really want to explore it. We’re supposed to come out to Japan and Asia in October so maybe we’ll hook up.

DOCTORIN THE HOUSE :: WHERE ALBARN MADE HIS MILLIONS

2009-07-30T01:59:00.000-07:00

One thing not mentioned in Harrisonic's last two Blur-related posts: the brilliant theory that Damon Albarn was behind 1992's international mega-hit, "It's My Life". Harrisonic assumed it was common knowledge that "Dr Alban" was the first of Damon's anagramic alter-egos. And the success of the "Doctor" financed the second Blur album. Orchestra and all.

The reported recent activity of the "Doctor" only compounds Albarn's genius. See Wikipedia:

"In 2007 Dr. Alban has released new album Back to basics. It is sold only on the Internet through official website, with exception for Russia where CDs and cassettes were issued.

"In 2008, he released a single with Haddaway, entitled "I Love The 90's". Alban proved that he did not forget his fellow artists of the last decade and he mentions in the lyrics some of the best hits of the Euro years: "Rhythm Is a Dancer", "What Is Love", "Scatman", "All That She Wants" and his own "It's My Life"."

The secret King of Pop?

You can't make this stuff up can you?

GOING BLUR AGAIN :: BLUR 2009

2009-07-30T01:53:00.000-07:00

There's an old English band called Blur who recently regrouped to play some concerts. And I get the impression we're meant to be jolly delighted about their return. But is this a surprise? Not if the UK music writers who hail this second coming are anything like I imagine them: clean white folk who've had some sort of relationship with Blur in the past - whether this meant rubbing shoulders and/or noses with the band in the scenery of '90s London (for the older hacks); or -for the younger ones- having Blur as a soundtrack to adolescence and young adulthood - the times when music has its best chance of reaching you, and then never quite leaving.

The music you did your homework to (with or without Smash Hits pin-ups of Damon on your bedroom wall), and the tunes that were there during your first experiences with heartache, booze or sex: this is Special Music. So Blur probably couldn't have chosen a better time to launch a surgical strike on the heartstrings of their old target market - a polite bunch who are now all grown-up and with the means to do some spending as a receptive audience for a band they remember fondly.

Just in time for summer (and in the wake of a practically tuneless Oasis album), a great escape into nostalgia is exactly what Dr Albarn ordered for this sector modern life of Albion. And I've always had the impression Albarn likes to think he knows best. How can I forget him telling me all about what it was like to live in Singapore? Not sure if he'd been here before, but somehow he knew. And don't get me started on when he whips out his melodica to parp some meaningless notes to his recordings of matchless Malian musicians like Afel Bocoum and Toumani Diabaté. He might have footed the bill, but even so...

And by now you might have guessed that the prospect of the Blur reunion didn't set my heart a-racing. For me it's soiled by a caricature Damon wondering what to do next after the hits of his very successful Gorillaz project, his all-star supergroup ('But Mummy, I WANT Tony Allen AND the bassist from the Clash in my gwoop'), the aforementioned Malian stuff -oh- and don't forget the frickin' opera he did. IN CHINESE! Whatever next? Call his spiffing old chums perhaps?

In fact the only upshot of the reunion that occurred to selfish me was that BigO Magazine might mark the occasion by republishing an old Blur interview I once did. And this would spare me having to retype it.

But they did no such thing on the occasion... instead it turns out they already ran the story a few months back! Naturally they didn't tell me about this. Nor did a recent phonecall from a meek member of their politburo explain why they refuse to acknowledge the existence of anyone making music in Singapore at the moment. Odd, secretive folk. And so I don't feel compelled to tell them that I just posted my old Blur interview on this very blog (in the preceding entry). These is rotten days. Those were different times.

A MATTER OF FOCUS :: BLUR INTERVIEW

2009-07-29T05:46:00.000-07:00

(first appeared in BigO #145 - January 1998)

As Blur come to the end of their world tour, Ben Harrison finds himself welcomed into the insular world of one of the most important British bands of the Nineties, and then makes a few great escapes with guitarist Graham Coxon and a whole lot of alcohol. He lives to tell the tale and gets Blur into focus. Pictures by Little

There was a time when Blur seemed to be anything but. That is to say -for the benefit of readers that don't speak Singlish- you couldn't describe the British group called Blur with the Singaporean adjective, 'blur'. It wasn’t applicable because here was a band that appeared so self-assured and focused that the members often came off as being downright arrogant.

At first their cockiness was only partly justifiable because -despite showing they had a knack for vibrant pop tunes like There’s No Other Way- Blur’s 1991 debut album, Leisure, didn’t really fulfill the band’s potential.

The following year, Blur then appeared to be floundering when it came to maintaining their initial impact on the British music scene - especially when compared to the much-hyped arrival of Suede. Not that any of their lippy-ness abated as they went into a boozy slump because singer Damon Albarn could always be counted on to provide a scathing soundbite, even when he and cohorts Graham Coxon (guitar), Alex James (bass) and Dave Rowntree (drums) were supposedly at their lowest ebb.

But then the band began to live up to its own acclaim with a trilogy of pristine albums, Modern Life Is Rubbish, Parklife and The Great Escape. Each was more successful, both critically and commercially, than its predecessor and confirmed Blur as bona fide pop stars. Blur were unashamedly at the vanguard of the “Britpop” phenomenon, and you’ve probably heard enough about the time they went head-to-head with arch-rivals Oasis in ‘95 and bookies took bets on which one of the two would be the first to top the chart.

It wasn’t until early ‘97 that the public got to see the “blur” being put back into Blur. Their moniker became appropriate when they released a self-titled album that boasted a fuzzy logic not normally associated with the group. The band had never sounded so unrestrained, or, as Alex James now puts it, raising a bottle of red: “unshaven.”

For guitar wunderkind Graham Coxon, an appropriate gesture that marks this transition could be how he adapted the logo painted on the head of his Marshall amplifier. It used to read “Mod”. Now it says “Moo.”

++++++++++

Notions of blurriness also seem to be part-and-parcel of almost any band’s touring experience, and Blur were no exception on their world tour last year. When we hooked up last October (1997), Coxon really did sound as if he was talking from the other end of the world. Granted, I was in Singapore and he was in a hotel room in Houston, Texas at the time, but the sense of distance had nothing to do with the quality of Telecoms. Across a crystal clear phone line, Coxon’s staggered -at times virtually whispered- delivery, measured up to his reputation for being the quiet one of the band.

Despite his initial diplomatic claim that “usually we mostly have a good time touring America,” the disorientation of the whole experience was definitely in full effect. Although he was excited by the promise of “some decent veggie food there,” his upcoming date in Singapore seemed a long way down the road for Coxon.

By the time we’d fixed a date for “a bit of a natter and a few beers,” he’d also made disconsolate confessions about “not feeling hugely happy with myself" and how "It’s hard to get motivated.” Although he still had his habit of rounding off with a self-effacing laugh and the typically English pronouncement of “Mustn’t grumble,” his sentences were become punctuated by huge gaps of uncomfortable silence. Obviously his claim of having “a good time” in America wasn’t ringing true. But it wasn't as bad as Blur’s earlier American tours.

Coxon: “We were quite angry at the time (on those earlier tours). Our impressions of the States had been coloured pretty nastily by bad experiences which were mainly due to bad touring and being on a record label that had no understanding of anything except Vanilla Ice. It was very difficult. We did a two-month tour when Smells Like Teen Spirit was huge, so it was a waste of time. No one was going to listen to us, so we got pretty screwed-up about it for a while.”

You have a whole continent’s-worth of dates ahead of you - something other bands would dream about. Where would rather be?

“Oh God, I’d rather the studio right now - but that’s the old cliché as I’m on the road right now, so the studio seems more attractive... Actually, I’d like nothing at the moment. I’d like to earn my crust by doing nothing. I don’t want to go into a studio. I don’t want to be on the road. I just want a year off or something - just see what my life’s doing. I’ve just been touring quite a lot this year.

“Mostly on our last American tour I didn’t even want to go home. It was really weird but I was quite frightened of going home. And now I don’t know whether I miss England anymore. This time I’m not really going home anyway. I’m going to be staying in California until we go out to Korea and Singapore, so that’s strange.”

A few weeks later the British music press seemed to be reacting to similar statements from the Blur camp which meant -when coupled with the band’s announcement that they won’t be playing any more live dates in the “foreseeable future”- that they had enough material to begin colourful speculation about “tension” within Blur.

And then there was the bit about how Coxon was no longer refusing alcohol after a valiant attempt to stay on the wagon. At least, I thought, this meant we might get to catch up in style when he got to Singapore. And we did.

+ + + + +

“Every band hates each other to some degree at the end of a world tour,” Damon Albarn says with a glint in his eye as he holds court in the band's Singapore hotel. But even when they’re quibbling over the punk-rock merits of Coxon’s beloved Minutemen versus Albarn’s preferred Wire, the scene is now the antithesis of anything remotely connected to “hate”.

It’s several weeks since we last spoke, and whether we're sprawled in Coxon's hotel room floor listening to the latest BigO Singles Club CD (Etc's Adolesce is his "cheers" pick); having a marathon session of listening to Coxon's demos and Red House Painters, Nick Drake, Yo La Tengo and Happy Go Licky CDs, or chowing down aloo gobi before grooving to live Bhangra in Little India, he’s in considerably better spirits than he was in Texas. This is understandable as all of Blur are probably buoyed by the knowledge they’ve got to the end of the world tour.

Coxon: “I was expecting Singapore to be quite exciting, quite crazy and quite hefty on the sensory department. I heard about some crazy fires and some bad, bad air (ie. the 1997 Haze); so I was wondering what’s going on: ‘Why isn’t anybody stopping the fires? Is it just going to burn until the planet’s burnt out?’ I was just hoping that we’d be equipped for everything mentally because we’ve been going through all sorts of weird stuff, so we’re all pretty knackered. It’s just been… mentally… weird.”

And this comes after one of the unexpected events of the American leg: the sudden departure of the tour manager. When we first spoke, you were unnervingly deadpan while sitting at the eye of an on-the-road storm.

“Yeah, the tour manager just left the tour when we were playing. He just kind of… quit! (short, unhinged chuckle) Disappeared! So we felt like the cat’s away...”

How do you deal with something like that?

“I usually spend a lot of time on the phone and listening to music in my room, stuff like that. And now I’m writing a lot of stuff myself… something just to record on my own; my own songs that I’ve been writing. But I don’t know if anyone gives a **** about that.”

Coxon’s song, You’re So Great, is one of the highlights of the last Blur album, and many of the audience had hoped to hear it as part of the set at Blur’s Singapore show. However, Coxon sighs they’ve only performed the song live in Japan “because there are so many ‘Graham obsessives’ over there.”

Not only is You’re So Great the first song totally written and performed by just one member of the band (he recorded the vocals hiding under a table in the studio), it’s interesting because it presents something more far personal than the Damon Albarn songs which make up the vast majority of their catalogue.

Coxon: “Damon usually writes the lyrics to his songs, and when there’s a tune that I want to do something with, he has said: ‘If you like this tune so much, you write the bloody lyrics to it, because I can’t’. So I am writing lyrics. I’m writing them every day. But they’re for my own things - not for Blur things.”

So, honestly, what do you make of Damon’s lyrics?

“I like his nonsense lyrics the best. I like it when he’s sad. I like his melancholy stuff more. When he likes to get clever it gets a bit weird. He gets to be bit of a smarty-pants about it.”

Don’t you find a lot of those “smarty-pants” songs patronising?

“A little bit maybe. That’s why I like his personal stuff better… like the Blue Jeans (from Modern Life Is Rubbish) kind of things. It’s more interesting to me hearing what’s on people’s minds rather than hearing smart-arsed comments about where they live.”

Having been in the company of your bandmates for an extended period, it’s inevitable that cabin fever should set in...

“With these shows, I’m really just a bit tired of the songs at the moment… Even the new stuff that we’ve been playing. I really just want to improvise for an hour.”

So Blur don’t “road-test” new songs that might get written as you tour?

“Damon is writing new songs, but no, we don’t; except we’re playing this song called Swallows In The Heatwave, which is one we wrote recently. But that’s just a kind of slow spaz rock song. I’d like to change the set quite radically, but there’re bass-players to please. And our bass-player just likes playing crappy pop music.”

One thing that Coxon will enthuse about is playing at last year’s benefit concert for a Free Tibet, an experience he describes as being “great…,” and not just because it meant he got to hang (albeit nervously) with heroes like Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth.

Coxon: “It was very spiritual. It seemed very special to be there and to be involved. I enjoyed it and it gave Damon a chance to say he likes Tibet. There was a lot of good feelings happening and a lot of different music (being played) with a really good cross-section of everything. But it was also quite a freaky concert though as there were a lot of people I quite admire around, watching the show. So it was very scary for a while.”

So despite being a recognisable “pop star” yourself, you still feel daunted by people you’re into and admire?

“Yeah. These people are so nice, I shouldn’t be like that. But I always feel like a dork. That’s just the way it is.”

Coxon reaffirms this when we talk about how audiences differ in different parts of America. For the most part he reckons he has no understanding of the audience there, while Washington DC stands out for being “dangerous… very dangerous. There’s a lot more crazy punk kids there that don’t know if they’re going to survive another week.”

Talkin’ DC then leads us to raving about Fugazi and he shudders to think of the prospect of actually being in the same place as them.

Coxon: “I imagine it’d be really stressful for me meeting them. I mean Guy (Picciotto)… He’s fantastic. As a guitarist and as a performer, he blows my mind, he does. I’ve seen them quite a lot. And super records they make, by golly.”

Are you in a position where you’d consider any other musicians to be your peers?

“I don’t feel part of any gang. I’d quite like to have a few friends but not really have a ’scene.’ There’s a severe lack of friends and too much ’scene’ going on in this crappy business. I suppose some friends would be quite good. A lot of people I feel closer to musically maybe are American, but I can never really be part of that. Maybe people like Radiohead, I guess I’ve got empathy, sympathy, or some kind of ‘…thy’ with.”

Two other bands that Blur have been spuriously connected to are Oasis and, more recently, Pavement. All three of you have released albums this year. Which would you rate as the best?

“Um… ours because I can just about listen to it all. I think Pavement’s and ours are pretty good. I don’t think it’s Pavement’s best and the Oasis one is CRUD (loudly)… But that’s just a matter of opinion.”

The Oasis one is shite. And it’s made worse by the fact that I’ve not seen a bad word against it, anywhere. What’s going on? Do you think journalists are scared, intimidated by Oasis?

“I think people are just waiting for someone else to say, ‘Look, this is crap. What are we talking about?’ Then everyone’ll do it. I was really ****ed-off in England ‘cos it went on sale and it was all about how many people bought it. It’s just like: ‘What’s this country coming to?’ It’s just a ****ing great, big lie - egocentricity on a huge, vast, scale. I don’t understand it. I just can never understand it - their attitude towards themselves; their attitude towards their music and their audiences. They’re complete… I dunno. It’s supposed to be rock and roll, but it’s just styleless and… ”

It’s like the Emperor’s New Clothes.

“Of course it is. I reckon any minute everyone is going to start laughing their heads off.”

Another thing the press cooked up is that the latest Blur album is a big departure for the band. But was it really? Weren’t a lot of the things that people have picked up on this time round already there in the first place?

“Yeah. I don’t think it is much of a departure. I just think it’s all rubbish to say it’s a huge departure and that it’s all influenced by American music or whatever. Anyone who knew our stuff wouldn’t be so freaked out by it… if people knew the group. I know not everyone can be obsessed with Blur and our b-sides and everything and shite like that, but this new record seems to have confused people even more.”

But when you came to release something like For Tomorrow in 1993, the first single off your trilogy, did that feel like a departure?

“Yeah, it was the first time we were using strings and stuff like that; expanding the sound in that way; and getting influenced by other more grander things like Scott Walker, Jaques Brel, Francoise Hardy and people like that. We mellowed out a lot more too. I think we’re super mellow now. We have crazy, spazzy half hours, but we’re much more quiet these days.”

When each new Blur album comes out, are you able to predict what people are going to pick up on about it?

“Not really. I don’t think we even have a clear idea what it is so I don’t think we can really know. Like after we played MOR on the road, it turned into something a bit different to how we recorded it for the album. So we re-recorded it for a single. It’s just natural. We recorded it off-the-cuff in the studio - it wasn’t really ‘written.’

“That’s what changed for this record - we improvised a lot more and jammed. Essex Dogs was like a jam which I started up and Dave joined in. I was messing round with delays, echoes and stuff on pedals, and we cut it all up and put it together. I think Theme From Retro was the same.

“For me that’s some of the most interesting stuff on there, like the end section of -what’s that song?- Strange News From Another Star. I had a weird idea we should have two drummers, so me and Dave played drums on two different kits and I had this little tune which I played over it. I think we had more confidence to just go with ideas like that, see if they worked, and go with them until they worked. That’s the difference with this record.”

Do you think you’ll maintain that direction now, for your next album?

“Maybe. I suppose the next record will be even weirder. Once we recorded it, the last one didn’t seem very weird at all. But I think we’re going to make a weird record next because - if what we’re listening to is anything to go on - it’s going to be really strange… But it’ll probably end up being pretty Blurry.”

So what music are you listening to?

“Well, Damon’s listening to Lee Perry - a lot of dub stuff. And I’m listening to a lot of free jazz - Eric Dolphy and Ornette Coleman. I like a lot of old blues stuff. Music that makes me feel good. I like Yo La Tengo a lot - I kind of wiggle around my room to that, don't I? I’m actually enjoying listening to music a lot more these days.”

(With dubbier and freer influences creeping into Blur’s music, it should come as no surprise a remix album is to be released -although only in Japan- including recent mixes by Adrian Sherwood, William Orbit, Moby, even Tortoise’s John McEntire and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore.)

You’ve referred to this “white-coatey” approach you have when it comes to recording. It makes sense with earlier albums because they do have such high production values. But did that approach really go out the window this time round, as it’s been made out?

“I’m into it as far as doing things so I’m not staying up all night. I like getting in at a reasonable time, having lunch at lunchtime, having cups of tea and being quite civilised; and not getting stupidly off your head and thinking you’re going to create genius because you’re stoned, because that’s a load of crap. Thinking, using your brains and experimentation - I suppose we think more in that way in terms of our music now.”

Before this some of Blur’s priorities were obviously different, and not all of them were musical. When you first started making records did you feel an opposition to everything else at the time? I remember Jonathan Ross (British TV presenter) being sarcastic about how you looked in your debut video, She’s So High. Did that rile you up?

“Well, we were being the Stone Roses. Every time I see Jonathan Ross now I bait him about it. It’s been about three or four times, and every time he creases, crumples up, apologises, and is very embarrassed. But it’s just fun, isn’t it? He was probably off his head on what he suspected we were off our heads on anyway. Who knows?”

Then, a few years later, the Anglocentric side of Blur was played up, which is when Parklife was a triumph at the Brit Awards. How important was that kind of public recognition?

“No one liked English music you see. So we were determined we’d make people -in England, in America, wherever- like English music for a while.

"And we made people like English music.

"And English music has now turned into crap so we’re doing something else.

"We’re not exactly a loyal bunch of people with any kind of music. If I was that, I’d still be listening to my Smiths records.”

Nam-Nam + Cham-Cham #1

2009-07-01T03:16:00.000-07:00

drawed by harrisonic

HOPE FLAMES ETERNAL :: FLAMING LIPS INTERVIEW

2009-06-11T05:06:00.000-07:00

The Flaming Lips were always hot stuff. Ex-BigO Magazine astroboy Ben Harrison probably first read about them in an old photocopied issue of a BigO magazine from the 80s. Over a decade later, the Lips hit a new level of success with the release of their brilliant 1999 album, The Soft Bulletin, making them an even hotter commodity… and even harder to reach on the phone. But Ben persevered, battled the robots, and eventually got Lip-synching with the bands’ main spaceman, Wayne Coyne, when he called the Witchita line, man.

(This article was first published in BigO #168 (December 1999). The Soft Bulletin was BigO’s Album of 1999).

Wayne Coyne, a traveller of outer and inner space, is getting closer to his home ground. He’s on the road - quite literally - with his band, The Flaming Lips, as they drive towards a gig in Witchita, Kansas, before heading for their hometown of Oklahoma City.

And Coyne’s doing something the un-jaded 38-year-old has done on every Lips Inc release since 1985’s self-titled debut. He’s expressing wonder. “It’s crazy,” he guffaws. “Don’t you think it’s amazing that I’m here driving down the road and talking to you in $ingapore… and that it works?!”

When he then discovers that it’s early morning on my side of the planet, and I’ve yet to have my breakfast, it’s cool to hear him re-phrasing lines from one of his biggest hits to date, Bad Days: “Who wants to wake up early if you don’t have to? Sleep late when you can!”

Coyne seems so affable it’s as if he’s about to suggest we postpone the interview till I’ve “at least had some coffee and all that,” but this idea is lost in his next animated volley of super-elongated sentences which come as rich as his band’s music, and where my chuckles are reciprocated with a louder laugh from him. When he’s told of $ingapore bands like Rocket Scientist covering The Flaming Lips, he peaks with an exclamation of “Wow! Woah! Alright!!” before the rapid-fire speech suddenly stops dead.

I fear the line’s been cut.

Hello?

“I’m here,” Coyne says eventually, breaking his uncharacteristic silence. “I’m just amazed.”

Way back when (from left): Wayne Coyne, Richard English and Mike Ivins… when they were with Pink Dust Records.

I would have first heard about The Flaming Lips when they were profiled in BigO in the ’80s. Would you have been able to envisage people in $ingapore listening to your band at the time?

Without thinking about it much, I guess I always think of how universal music is because I travel all around the world and I see how everybody likes music and, to some extent, I always hope we can be accepted in an universal way. But actually… no. The probability of people in $ingapore hearing thoughts that were in my head did seem like a long shot. I can’t even picture what $ingapore must be like. And it does seem surreal to think that there’s people down in $ingapore, not just listening to our music, but doing cover versions of our songs.

What got you into music when you were growing up?

I have three older brothers who were listening to music all the time and I was exposed to it all… so, it was probably through that. It’s a great way to get exposed to music. They seemed to have good taste. It never occurred to me that the music they were listening to was good or bad, but through their record collections I heard all kinds of great music that otherwise an eight-year-old would never hear on his own. And the culmination of the trends of the time, the music, drugs and all that - I think it’s hard not to be attracted to that.

So what sparked you off and made you want to play your own music?

I simply started doing it because I liked it. I really didn’t have any skill at all. I think I didn’t realise how much skill and talent people really have in music. I figured you must need to have some sort of skill and some sort of desire to do it, but I just started to make records and stuff simply because I just always liked music. It wasn’t really till much later on - probably as much as 10 years after we started to make records - that I realised just how hard it is and how much skill, talent, drive and all that, it really took.

You suggest this in your sleevenote for the compilation covering The Lips’ indie years. I find what you wrote ridiculously self-effacing. I know people, myself included, who were blown away by a lot of that stuff. Just as an example, Telepathic Surgery was - and still is - unlike anything around.

I hope I don’t paint it so we look like idiots, but I realise that at the time, what we thought we were doing and what we really were doing were worlds apart. But what we always did have, and still do have, is a bunch of energy and enthusiasm for exploring - if not new ideas - at least, our own ideas. I think the compilation’s title - A Collection Of Songs Representing An Enthusiasm For Recording By Amateurs… The Accidental Career - says that.

Amateurs don’t have the same pressures to conform that “professionals” might have. As a result they’re more open to having fun…

And you can probably tell this by talkin’ to me. Sometimes it feels like if you have enough desire to do something, you’ll end up doing it. I think because we were so talentless and so skill-less, in some ways it comes across as being very original because we don’t sound like anybody else as most other bands can play better than we could.

I still think you’re being modest. I guess there was a lot of hardcore going on when you first started out. Did you feel as if you had any peers at the time?

Oh totally… Everybody. The Minutemen stayed at my house. We were fans of all styles of music. We could be fans of the Minutemen, Black Flag and the Meat Puppets at the same time as being fans of The Beatles, Echo And The Bunnymen. We never had any boundaries of what we liked.

Echo And The Bunnymen? I was wondering if your song, Bagful Of Thoughts (recorded in 1984), was intentionally Bunnymen-esque?

I think the band we thought we were sounding like was The Chameleons to tell you the truth.

Like thinking of The Flaming Lips being heard in $ingapore in the ’80s, it’s strange to picture how such a relatively obscure British band like the Chameleons could have reached you in the American mid-west.

The first record has five amazing songs on it, but if you don’t get the right record you’ll be sorely disappointed… But that’s what we would do: We’d hear these bands and go “Oh, we want to make a song like that.” And since we had no abilities whatsoever…

But you can’t really be embarrassed by those early records? You actually called your album, Oh My Gawd…, “unpleasant.”

I think it’s just mixed very badly. It has no low end. I have to turn the low end up as far as it will go on every stereo I played it on. That’s mostly what I mean by unpleasant - not unpleasant as a creation, but unpleasant aesthetically as the sound coming out of the speakers is in the wrong phase sometimes. I don’t really feel embarrassed by them. Actually, I feel I can hardly relate to them. I can hardly think of how we did the records - mostly because it (was) a long time ago, and mostly because they were done in such a freakish kind of environment.

We’d literally spend days and days - up all day, up all night… sleeping on the studio floor for an hour and then waking up for the next day. They’d be these blurs of us trying to cram all these ideas into these sessions that we called “albums” at the time. And when we got done, that’s what the album would be; we really had no luxury of remixing or rethinking it or anything. I am quite proud of them really. I don’t know if I’m proud of them for what we intended to do. I see them as unique, but sometimes what we intended to do and what we ended up doing was completely different.

Were you making the music mostly for yourselves or did you consider an audience when you were making it?

At the time we’d hoped to gain an audience, but I really think the only way that people can really pursue music without having a bunch of rewards is because you like it. What I mean by “rewards” is things like fame, money and acclaim. You have to do it because you like it if don’t get those things. And I truly do think I’d do this even if no one cared. I wouldn’t be given as much money and I wouldn’t talk to as many journalists, but I’m sure - well, I know - I would really do it anyway.

I’m in one of those lucky positions where I do what I must do; and I do what I love to do; and I do get money, and all that stuff, for it. So at the moment it’s a good spot to be in.

When were you able to quit your day jobs?

I think it was around 1992 or 1993.

Really? So that would mean you were still working when you made records like In A Priest Driven Ambulance?

Well, we were touring then so we didn’t necessarily have full-time jobs. We toured all the time but we only made just enough to make our records and to live very badly. We all lived in the same side of a duplex which would be like a living room and a bedroom that would sometimes have as many as five grown men living in evil conditions. We were in our 20s, I was 28 or something, and we would probably have preferred to have day jobs to be able to live a little better, but our schedules didn’t permit.

Then luckily, after we did In A Priest Driven Ambulance, we got signed to Warner Brothers in, what still seems to me to be, some sort of bizarre accident. They gave us an insane amount of money for the way we were living at the time. So it was around the beginning of 1990 that we began this other side of our lives with Warner Brothers.

I have worked jobs here and there since then - I think in the summer of ‘92 I spent mowing lawns - but I think it’s been about six years since I’ve had to do anything other than just be in the band because since about ‘93 we’ve sold lots of records and made a lot of money playing shows. So it’s been quite easy to just be in a band and pursue music.

Was having all of you living together in the same place fractious? Some people couldn’t deal with it.

I don’t think we had a choice. And we were really immersed in exploring new ideas. If we thought that was the way we’d live from then on, we probably would have not have done it. (But) somewhere in the deeper recesses of our rational minds we felt we could probably make some money doing it, eventually.

I think we thought of it as just a temporary phase of poverty, and we would soon be out of that. We never thought we’d be rich. We thought we’d be a little bit above poverty or something. Luckily we jumped out of something I’d consider a stifling-poverty-sort-of-life to something that’s actually pretty comfortable.

Mercury Rev’s Jonathan Donahue was your guitarist around this time…

Yeah. Me, him and Michael (Ivins - Lips’ bassist)… and even (producer) Dave Fridmann, would all play guitars on our records per se… But Jonathan definitely would be considered the fourth member of the band for Priest Driven Ambulance and Hit To Death In The Future Head.

Were The Rev already going when he left Flaming Lips?

I believe his band was going as early as 1986 or ‘87. I remember staying with them in Buffalo where Jonathan and all of them went to school at. Jonathan was a kind-of promoter that’d bring rock bands to play at his college. So if you went up there to play it was kind of obligatory that you’d stay with him at his place. That’s how we got to know him, Sean (Rev guitarist, aka “Grasshopper”) - even Dave Baker (original Rev vocalist). They were all making music even together back then.

How did you hook up with Dave Fridmann? As well as playing for Mercury Rev he must have been a particularly valuable friend to the Lips - producing nearly all your records for the last decade.

He was a mutual friend of Jonathan and Sean, who had done some recording with him. I think it was the summer of 1988 that we finally thought we should get a soundman to travel with us and he volunteered his services. And we’ve been joined at the hip ever since.

Is there much interaction between Mercury Rev and Flaming Lips now?

Not really any interaction, but not because we don’t like each other. I’ve seen Jonathan quite a bit this year because we played a bunch of shows with them and hung out quite a bit. I think that even when we were working together within the Flaming Lips framework, I knew he had his own ideas of what he wanted to do and I had mine.

One of the initial reactions to your Soft Bulletin seems to be to relate it to Mercury Rev’s Deserter’s Songs. Isn’t that irritating for you?

Oh no, not at all. In some ways it’s good to have a comparison because sometimes I think we live in a nothing where there’s no other band that does anything remotely close to what we do. Sometimes that’s more frustrating than having a comparison. There are so many bands out there that I don’t think of as peers, but I love what they do.

I definitely respect and like what Jonathan does. He really pursues his own thing. I actually don’t think he listens to Flaming Lips music at all. I know for a fact that I listen to Mercury Rev stuff, but I would preface that by saying I listen to everything, so it wouldn’t surprise anyone to say I listen to Mercury Rev and I listen to other records at the same time.

To say that we influenced each other isn’t true but you can see where people would think that one record was made because of the other. I think we both actually think we’re doing something totally unique, but sometimes it ends up being something that’s quite similar.

And you share the same producer…

Yeah, working with Dave Fridmann ends up being we’re both pursuing things both through him. Discoveries I make get funnelled though Dave Fridmann… discoveries that Jonathan makes get funnelled though Dave Fridmann - so it doesn’t surprise me that there are some similarities.

Do you bother anticipating how people will regard your records? Do you guess what the reactions will be?

Not with “music people” like you yourself. Music people are interested in what we do because we do try very hard to be inventive. I worry about trying to sell records… fooling the public out there so we can keep getting enormous amounts of money.

I don’t know how comfortable you are with the idea of the “concept album,” but The Soft Bulletin could be seen as being one.

I would agree. It certainly isn’t by design. I say that because there were five or six other songs that we made but we didn’t put on there - not for any particular reason, it’s just that we weren’t happy with the mixes and we thought, “Well, we’ll finish those later on.” So we threw this batch together not thinking there was a particular concept.

But when I step back and listen to it now I hear these dramatic themes of love and death; and hopefulness; isolation; a borderline insanity idea… without it purposely being an identity we put into it. I hear it now and I think (the songs) definitely help each other out. I can see themes running through them definitely.

About the theme of love, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys said that with his Pet Sounds album, he experimented with “sounds that made the listener feel loved.” Were you aware of that with your song, Spoonful Weighs A Ton? It could be taken as a tribute to the Beach Boys, especially with the last line, “the sound they made was love.”

Oh boy, when you say it that way it sounds better than I could do myself. The whole song sounds like an analogy about what he was going for.

You met him, right?

I did meet him. I did actually do a pretty long interview with him to tell you the truth.

Was it good for you? He has something of a reputation…

Well, I was warned that he does not do interviews very good. You can see the way me and you say something and we bounce ideas back and forth and it becomes a conversation… this doesn’t happen with Brian Wilson. I thought I asked him some good questions that I wanted to know some answers to. He couldn’t say anything.

I asked him why he never used distorted guitars because he’s such a big Beatles fan and all that. I thought, “Well hell, you know, when they started using feedback and stuff like that, why didn’t you start doing that?” And his answer was: “Oh, because it had already been done, why should I bother?” My unspoken reply to that - I didn’t say it, but I should have - was: “Well, harmony vocals have been done and people have played pianos and vibraphones for 30 years now, but you do that.”

I found it to be kind of frustrating even though I was very pleasant with him. I didn’t walk away knowing anything about him that I didn’t know before. I guess the one thing I walked away knowing was that he’s genuinely very apprehensive and shy about his own music.

He should dig the positive vibes of The Flaming Lips. The aura is so strong on The Soft Bulletin. It seems to have a sense of intent - transmitting a manifesto of a Flaming Lips psyche.

I agree. I think it’s the most clearly-realised idea that I think I’ve ever had - even if it’s by accident. I hear it now and we even superseded our expectations and intentions with some of it and the things we intended to do. I do agree that some of it is like a glowing light of optimism sometimes. I think it’s based in a kind of realism, but a realism that’s lit up with optimism.

There never seemed to be much room for cynicism in The Flaming Lips…

Well, I think we tried! One example of that is when we were recording Wonderful World - which is a beautiful, beautiful, optimistic song… we were trying… and I don’t know why - we were trying to make it a cynical, sarcastic song. And whenever people hear it, even immediately after we did it, people would just glow they’d go, “Oh, it’s such a great song. It makes me happy…” And secretly we were going, “It’s not supposed to make you happy. It’s supposed to make you pissed off… supposed to make you mad.”

So we knew even back then. Even when we’re trying to be sinister we don’t pull if off very well, no matter how hard we try. I think that when we work on something to the extent we do, we inject our personality into it and get this thing across that is more optimistic and happy. So I have more or less surrendered to that.

When I do songs I do see that in the end I always manage to twist it so that even if it is tragic, at least there is some hope in it. Sometimes it’s just plain silly and you don’t need to inject any of that; but even when they’re serious, they feel positive.

But it’s not infantile or stupidly optimistic. You don’t shy away from reality. The lyrics of The Spark That Bled (from The Soft Bulletin) actually came as a shock. There’s a very Lips-style scene building up as you describe this positive “chain reaction,” but suddenly reality bursts in when you sing: “Too bad… in reality there was no reaction.”

I think that’s kind of what happens when you get engulfed in your imagination and your imagination has built everything up around you in such a good way. It is a shock when you have to realise this is the way the world is and we’re floating in outer space, and life is short, and death is sad. I agree that when you’re thrown back into reality it is a shock - but a good shock in a way.

I think the best way you can be is to be happy in a realistic way. I run into a lot of people who want to live in an un-livable bliss where they just want be happy all the time. This isn’t good. You have to have a wide range of emotions and reactions. You don’t want to walk around saying everything is groovy… especially when everything isn’t groovy.

I think with our songs you can tell we experience all that. Sometimes we’re very happy; sometimes we’re even depressed. But hopefully it’s based on realistic things that are happening in our life - and it’s our real life that’s making us happy, or sad, or bored, or any of those things.

Maybe that’s what makes The Soft Bulletin feel mature. I’m encouraged that a sense of mortality you develop as you get older doesn’t have to mess with the morality you construct when you’re younger. Songs like The Gash don’t pretend it’s not a struggle, but somehow the album is still like a rallying call that says it’s worth fighting the good fight.

I think I’ve always had some of that morality, it’s just I’d never been able to clearly communicate it. On some of our earlier records I was trying to be poignant and serious about things like love, and even the relationship with the universe and how confusing that can be, and I simply wouldn’t say it very well. But I am curious about those sort of things.

Sometimes I’m glad when I can communicate that to people as it lets them know what I’m thinking as opposed to them thinking I’m some nut who takes drugs and doesn’t know what he’s sayin’. I try to be as clear as I can. I think I just got lucky on The Soft Bulletin. With the sounds that we used, and the words that I used, sometimes they go together and it makes such a grand, cinematic almost, statement.

How do you pull it off live? You’ve said that you’re a recording artist rather than a performer now.

Well, we take our recordings with us. We bring some of the string sections, some of the drum sections and some of the stranger, un-reproducible elements with us on a backing tape and we play on top of them.

I hate to say it, but I think some of the songs actually come across as even more powerful when you see us play. They don’t lose any of their impact, they seem to gain this thing you can communicate when an audience is right in front of you. Sometimes I think records take longer to give you the impact. I think the way we’re doing it really complements the record.

How do audiences react?

So far I am utterly amazed that they seem to love it. We have people who’ve seen us for 10 years and they come and… I’ve actually seen grown men in the audience crying.

Well, it’s beautiful music.

But you don’t expect that at rock concerts. Especially with people who’ve seen thousands of concerts.

Ah, you’re being modest again…

Well, I expect them to be cynical and not react to these things… But I’ve seen it happen. So I’m encouraged that music really can touch people if it’s presented in the right way. I’ve seen it happen.

Note: Blast From The Past Message From Wayne Coyne (1999): Wayne Coyne would like to say thanks to all the people who say they like The Flaming Lips: “I’m glad if it’s moving them in any way at all.”

2009 UPDATE: Ben and Wayne later met in Paris where Ben gave Wayne the good news that Soft Bulletin was BigO’s album of the year and Wayne gave Ben passes for the Lips’ sold-out show with Pavement, also featuring Radar Brothers and an up-and-coming British act called Muse. When talking about the possibility of a gig in Singapore, one thing Wayne said was: 'Yeah, it's a long road to Singapore, but we'll get there eventually'.

The Flaming Lips went on to even more acclaim and success, winning Grammy’s and finally releasing Wayne’s long-awaited - and literally home-made - movie, Christmas on Mars, in 2008. Ben Harrison continues to keep it real, off-the-cuff and straight-from-the-heart with the psychopop and bop band called Etc. Visit their soundcloud page here or their myspace page here (free downloads galore).

VELVET GOLDMINE :: MOE TUCKER INTERVIEW

2009-06-02T23:50:00.000-07:00

Moe Tucker's drumming might have saved my life. There are certainly times when her super-simple but super-steady beats make everything seem a whole lot better - times where what she does is give us an answer to some vast cosmic question. And then there was that time when Moe answered my questions and it got published a Singapore-based magazine called BigO (June '98).

Eleven years later -just a few days ago- I had a strange instinct to check the website of that now-defunct print magazine. And when I did: I discovered that they had put the interview online that very day. Weird. But viva synchronicity anyway!

Hoorah too for my mini-chagrin that they should do this without letting me know because their transgression led me to click the required buttons to create the very Harrisonic site you're reading now. "If they can post it, then so can I," was my response to what I took to be supremely ironic dirty trick. Why ironic? Because a few years ago BigO's editors seemingly cut ties with their loyal writers in a bizarre purge that smarts as we probably thought thought we were all good friends. Their moves made me feel that for all those years we were actually nothing more than unpaid employees. But that's another story.

As for Moe & Me: I wouldn't normally be interested in a straight Q&A. But I made an exception for Moe. And not just because she was a member of the legendary Velvet Underground, but because I'd also enjoyed her solo records and an lovely, intimate gig with a band that also included another Velvet cohort, Sterling Morrison. You wouldn't have needed to know any of the musician's back-story to enjoy that gig.

Because of the secretive way that BigO handled things, I didn't edit the interview myself. Nor did I get to proclaim my revolutionary theory that Moe Tucker's drumming is an enormous influence on modern electric guitar-playing as we know it; but since I've said it here, you can go away and think about it for yourself. And then maybe you'll understand why the biggest influence on my guitar-playing is Moe Tucker - the drummer.

VELVET GOLDMINE - MOE TUCKER IN HER OWN WORDS

Interview by BEN HARRISON

First published in BigO #150 (June 1998)

Ben Harrison: I was lucky enough to see your band with Sterling Morrison play in England in 1991 or ‘92. The show had a wonderful, intimate and celebratory feeling to it, firstly with how the band was interacting and then with the audience. Do you still go on the road and play such gigs?

Moe Tucker: First let me say that I like your feelings about the show you had seen. And yes, I still tour although I haven’t toured a lot in the past year or two. I’ve done a couple of tours with a group called Magnet. I play drums with them.

Do you have any preference - drumming or playing guitar and singing?

I prefer to play guitar! It’s fun playing with Magnet because I haven’t played drums in a band for such a long time, but I wouldn’t want to be a permanent drummer.

You played guitar before you joined the Velvets. How proficient were you at it?

I could only play a few chords.

How do you write? Is it a drawn-out process or is it spontaneous? What tends to come first - music or lyrics?

Actually all the songs I’ve written have been written in one sitting each. With some word or phrase changes here or there, of course. I’ve had songs where the music was first and songs where the lyrics were first.

Do you still have to have a day job?

No, thank god.

Are any of your children interested in music?

My 17-year-old son (the “baby”) plays guitar. He started about two years ago and has gotten quite good!

You’ll probably downplay it (and little is made of it in any material about the Velvets I’ve come across), but your position as a drummer strikes me as being very unusual for its time, regardless of the type of music the band was playing and the type of songs that were being written. In the first place there was your style of drumming. How did you come to drum like that and use that kind of set-up?

I always hated cymbals and wanted to stay away from using a cymbal for every accent. I also love African drumming and was trying to get a sort of African sound (deeper sounds).

Although it might not have been conscious, do you think of your drumming as being as “far-out” as the other elements of the Velvets music? It could be made out that your drumming was as much of a “statement” as what the rest of the band was doing in their playing, lyrics and approach?

I didn’t at the time, but now I do. And yes, I guess I was making my own little statement!!

The other thing I assume must have been unusual at the time was the fact that you’re a woman playing music. Was much made about this at the time?

Nothing was made of it at the time!! It’s only now that it’s made out to be so unusual. But then again, we weren’t exactly the centre of attention in those days.

What would you have done musically if you hadn’t been asked to play in the Velvets?

I’m sure I would not have done anything with music. I would’ve stuck to my job.

Do you think that other groups might have had difficulty accepting you as a drummer (or even just a musician, regardless) just by virtue of your sex?

No, not really. I think musicians, writers and artists are generally free of prejudices. I think that what’s most important to those people is what you offer rather than what you are: male, female, black, white, Christian, Muslim.

Would you think that much has changed for female musicians in this day and age?

Only that there seem to be more of them!

I’m struck by your patience when it came to many of the experiences you had in the Velvets. The characters you worked with and encountered would try anyone's patience. Druggy. Egotistical. Conceited. Have you found any similarities in this - especially in working with (strong-willed) male musicians and artists - when it came to bringing up children?

I never thought about that!

Doug Yule stated that his biggest regret was that the Loaded album was recorded without you. The reason it was recorded without you was because you were pregnant at the time and it sounded like the manager wanted the rest to go ahead rather than waited for you. Does it irk you that the rest didn’t draw the line and wait for you?

It doesn’t “irk” me, it disappoints me because there are songs on that album that needed ME!

Do you like the songs on that album? And what about its overall sound/production?

I love a lot of those songs! I never listen to the album because - and this sounds awfully egotistical - they just don’t sound right with a regular drummer!

The period after Lou Reed left the Velvets is a gray area in terms of what we know about how the group continued, yet you and Sterling and Doug Yule continued. Were you playing gigs? How do you remember that period?

Yes, we kept playing shows. When I think back on it I think Sterl and I just would rather play music than get a job and that’s why we stuck to it. The band was good, but it wasn’t anything special - just something to do instead of “growing up”!

The Velvets were ahead of their time, or times were behind the Velvets. Was there a point, years later, where you felt as if people or music had caught up?

I don’t think they’ve caught up YET!

It goes without saying that the Velvets inspired countless bands, but are there any that you feel have really captured and expanded what the Velvets were doing originally? If there was a spirit of the Velvets, which band is best keeping it alive, even if they’re unaware of it?

I really can’t think of any band that is anything like the Velvets.

In Singapore in the early ’80s, Zircon Lounge recorded and performed Velvets songs; in the early ’90s the Padres (who’ve since become one of Singapore’s big names) started out by playing Velvets numbers, and I’ve heard Livonia (who’re currently #1 on the charts here) play There She Goes Again too. Obviously you’re aware of The Velvets’ influence being international - but when did it first strike you this was the case?

Around 1981 when I was working on Playin’ Possum. I had decided I should start looking at some music magazines (Musician, Creem, etc.) just to see what was going on. I hadn’t listened to the radio in 10 years, and never bought records - except old ones. I noticed that in every magazine I picked up the Velvets were mentioned at least four times! This was a HUGE surprise to me. Up till then I had no idea that anyone gave a damn.

Do you think that people perceive the Velvets as being a group? When I listen to them it’s always yours and Sterling’s contributions that strike me these days, yet some people might have the misconception it was Lou Reed’s band.

I think Sterling and I have been much more “recognised” in the past 10 years or so. I think one reason for that is that John and Lou both continued doing music and were therefore in the public eye. And, two, most people don’t pay much attention to the drums or rhythm guitar!

Are you kept up to date on how the Velvet’s legacy continues to endure, like do you get to hear, or are you interested in hearing, the numerous Velvets cover versions out there? What kind of emotional response do you have to hearing these songs you were involved with… or is it something you can get used to?

I’ve heard a very small portion of the VU covers there are. I’d love to hear more! I’m always flattered, no matter how bad or good I think the rendition is.

Any fave readings of Velvets material by other people?

Sunday Morning by The Changelings and Pale Blue Eyes by Half Japanese.

Why do you choose to re-record certain Velvets songs? Is it for the pleasure of simply playing them, or is it to make it closer to the way you feel it should be played?

I choose all covers with two things in mind - a) I always cover songs that I really, really like and b) I cover only those that I think I MIGHT be able to sing half way decently!

In this regard, any comments on why I’m Sticking With You and After Hours are recorded and released as a single? Why these particular songs and any changes made to them?

I re-did After Hours and Sticking because they are HUGE favourites at live shows and I thought it would be fun to have another version of them.

There’s a trendy club called Velvet Underground here in Singapore, and another in London, though nothing about the places seem to reflect their namesake, your former band. Is it irritating that people go to these places with no idea of who the Velvet Underground are?

No, it’s irritating that they get away with using the name!

Does it strike you that these VU clubs might be like some kind of Warholian thing where something has been appropriated, in this case the name of your band, and become something else in the process?

Most likely!

Did you absorb much of the art aspect of the Warhol scene - or was it something that was going on while you played music?

I always wished I could be in the audience just once while we were playing and the whole show was going on so that I could see/hear it as a whole. It must’ve been incredible! Especially in those days!!

The updated UpTight book ends with something about how the Velvets had yet to be inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Do you think that that kind of recognition was important to Sterling who often mentions in the book the “crusade” aspect of the music?

It was very important to Sterling - not because of a crusade, but because Sterl wanted to be recognised and would have seen it as an accomplishment and as a way to ensure that his/our name will be there forever. Of the four of us, Sterl would have been the most thrilled by the induction and it infuriates me that those assholes waited so long!!!

I am particularly intrigued by the Grl-Grup EP. Why do a Phil Spector cover? And how did you (and the band) decide on which song to cover?

WHY DO A PHIL SPECTOR COVER????? Those songs are just so damn wonderful!! I defy anyone to listen to Da Doo Ron Ron without wanting to dance!!! They are SO MUCH FUN!!!!!!!!!! I decided which songs to sing by what I said earlier (although I must admit I was very nervous that I would just totally blow the vocals).

I really enjoyed your vocals on this CD and am wondering why you didn’t do more vocals in the Velvets. Is it because whoever wrote the song got to sing?

I never wanted to sing when I was with the VU. I was MUCH TOO nervous about singing to try that!!!

You might like to provide some background on the Changelings on your website - like how did you hook up with them and what it is that makes you want to record with them?

Good idea! I’ll tell you the story - a mutual friend sent me a CD of theirs on which they did Sunday Morning. I absolutely loved the whole CD and wrote to tell them that. They wrote back, etc. etc. When I was ready to record I thought they’d be great to have in the studio - keyboards, violin, Regeana’s wonderful voice. And I was real happy to find that they are very, very nice people. They were great in the studio!

Is Lakeshore Drive Records owned and run by you? If so, when was it started and what made you decide on such a venture?

Yes, Lakeshore Drive is mine. It’s not officially a company, but we needed a label name fast so we just used that. I’ve had my own label before - Trash Records - on which I put out Playin’ Possum and a single. I had no desire whatsoever to look for a “real” label for these two new CD’s. I’m sick to death of thieving labels!

Lastly, your forthcoming children’s songs project - how did that come about?

Clay Harper - who co-wrote the children’s thing- owns Casino Music, which owns the studio I record in. I had worked in the studio producing an album and Clay asked me if I’d sing a song or two on the kid’s album. Phew!