MISSION OF BURMA // Interview

(June 2013)

By all accounts Boston’s Mission of Burma should have had their day. Indeed Roger Miller, Peter Prescott and Clint Conley are all in their late fifties or early sixties.

In the early 1980s their first couple of records laid the groundwork for the majority of post punk that followed in their wake. After the release of the ‘Signals, Calls and Marches’ EP (1981) and ‘Vs’ album (1982), Miller’s on-going problem with tinnitus prematurely halted the band in 1983 who were by all accounts on the brink of a breakthrough of sorts, be it in an underground and independent way.

Some two decades later the band reformed, not for financial gain but simply because they could. There was unfinished musical business to attend to, and after the release of their comeback album ‘ONoffON’, released on Matador records in 2004, the band once again found themselves with a fan base that wanted to not only be challenged but wanted to be challenged in the loudest way possible.

I spoke to Roger Miller about Mission Of Burma’s latest record, last year’s ‘Unsound’. It has been greeted with universal acclaim by the press and the fans that have heard it. Now the record has been out a while we wondered what it felt like now that the band has finally been accepted?

RM: Well, we didn’t know what would happen. It was one of those records where we said damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead! We said we would do it the way we want, and make it a little bit more crazy and out of control than the last one. We were just happy that people liked it so much. We have no idea how people are going to respond, so we are just happy and grateful if you want to know the truth, and with Fire Records behind us we are now touring over in Europe. We were never successful before, so now we can go over and play and get paid and people like it.

LIR: Since the dissolution of the band in the 1980s, it wasn’t an easy journey for you guys to get everything back together, but now that you have you have found yourself in a great position with the band. There is massive interest out there.

RM: Yeah, people know us. We are now established as being some kind of important thing. I am not saying that we agree or necessarily disagree with that, but that is how we are perceived so people pay attention to us, not all the time or anything but enough that we can play.

On the last Mission Of Burma tour we did in December most people knew who we were. We did play in places like Zurich. Now most people in Zurich had not heard of us, so we thought this is going to be the show that bombs. Everything had gone really well and now finally we were going have a bomb, but no… They really, really liked it, and I was selling merch afterwards and this girl came up to me and said, “Where have you guys been all my life?” And she had never heard of us before; how the fuck did that happen? We are just so happy that things like that are happening.

LIR: ‘Unsound’ to my ears is abrasive and caustic sounding, and full of exciting twists and turns. It’s eclectic and yet somehow feels like a single piece of work, a cohesive whole. Do you feel it’s your most complete record?

RM: I think we have made three really good records: ‘Vs’, ‘The Obliterati’ and ‘Unsound’. They are the ones that I really like, but I think ‘Unsound’ to me rivals ‘Vs’ in the amount of variety. I remember when ‘Vs’ came out that some reviewers said that, “It sounds like they are shopping for a style. The first one is like this and the next song is like that”. The thing is we were not looking for an identity. We are just diverse, and I think a lot of that is apparent also on ‘Unsound’.

We have three writers and that helps, but even from the same writer and this is just from my side of the mountain you have got ‘Fell Into The Water’ [‘FellàH20’] which is just a murky but streamlined groove, and then you’ve got ‘ADD In Unison’ which has got psychedelic left turns constantly happening. I think throughout the record there is so much diversity and I personally like diversity. Some people may like something that just has a groove and they can sit through it and it stays the same, but that’s not how my brain works.

LIR: The songs on the new record do not at any time seem forced.

RM: I feel that we were more excited about doing this one than our last album, ‘The Sound The Speed The Light’. We were just out of control. We were having a blast and maybe sometimes we made it to the end of the song by the skin of our teeth, but you can feel that excitement and enthusiasm in it. Everything on there is very honest. Someone may say that we are doing too much of this or too much of that and that’s fine. If we are for you, well, we are not doing it on purpose to provoke you. We are doing it because it’s what we like to do.

LIR: What about the final song, ‘Opener’? The “Forget what you know” mantra at the end of the song could mean just about anything, but I like to think you mean that the audience can forget what they know about Mission Of Burma, and the next release could jettison you into some unknown territory. Sound about right or am I way off base?

RM: Well(Laughs)… There is a couple of reasons that it is last on the record.

Primarily because it’s called ‘Opener’. That’s just our bad attitude, but by saying “Forget what you know” that came about from when we did ‘The Sound The Speed The Light’ and we all agreed that we were not at the top of our game.

So when we started to make this one I brought in a song and Pete [Prescott, drums -Ed] brought in a song, and they were kind of similar to what we had done before. Then Pete said, “If we are going to do a new record, we have to do something different,” so I threw away my song and he threw away his song. The next one I brought in was ‘FellàH20’ and then ‘This is Hi-Fi’ which is pretty different, and then the whole band did that to some degree,It wasn’t hyper radical, but we tried to get out of our comfort zone and to me that’s where the phrase “Forget what you know” comes from.

We had already done that, so we tried to be innocent again and throw ourselves off a cliff. You never know where you’re going to land. If you are going to try and make sure that you land on a soft pillow, then why the fuck are you making rock music?

LIR: And what about writing new material? How do you follow up a record like ‘Unsound’?

RM: Well, I have written two songs so far, and they continue to push the boundaries according to the guys in the band and the people that have seen us play them which is good. Pete has started to bring in one too. Usually we don’t think about making the next record. We just start to bring in songs. and when there is six or seven then we go, “Oh-oh, I think it’s time to make another record.”

At this first phase where we are at right now I tend to write the most as anybody who looks through our writing credits sees, not that those songs are the most important or anything but I’m just always writing. At the moment there are no plans to write another record. I believe that we have another really good record in us yet though.

LIR: Does Bob Weston ever bring fully formed ideas to the table for the band to work on, or does it always work in the reverse where he is presented the song ideas and adds his parts from there?

RM: So far he hasn’t, you know. He plays in Shellac and he’s got plenty of a life of his own, so, no, he hasn’t brought stuff in. But when we have a song he will add some parts and they will always be things that we wouldn’t necessarily expect, so he alters the material but he doesn’t bring in the core songs, but in the future maybe he will. I don’t know.

LIR: He’s been in the band now longer than your original song manipulator Martin Swope ever was. Do you still see him as the new guy?

RM: No (Laughs). Besides he was in the Volcano Suns with Peter years ago and he produced Clint Colney’s band Consonant and he played trumpet on my avant-garde chamber ensembles in the early 90s, so we have all known him for years and so, yeah, he is not the new guy.

LIR: Have you kept in touch with Martin at all?

RM: He’s not very communicative. He lives in Hawaii with his family, and he kind of dropped out of the music scene, I think the last time I emailed with him was five or six years ago. I’d be happy to talk to him again, but you know he has his own life and I totally respect that. So I have no idea if he has heard the new record. But if he asked for it I would send it to him. Maybe he’ll see this interview and say, “Wow, Roger said he’ll send me a record”.

LIR: There is a lot of footage online from both eras of the band playing live, and it would appear that with the most recent shows you guys are more fired up onstage than you ever were. What drives you?

RM: Who knows? It flies in the face of logic completely. Why when we are in our late fifties and me at 61 does this band push itself so hard? We just played in New York. and my brother Ben who played saxophone in Destroy All Monsters with Ron Asheton, well, he sat in with us, and a friend of ours that watched us, she described it as “Burma has gone completely feral.” It’s as if we are a bunch of wild and dangerous animals on stage (Laughs). Why is that? I don’t know, but it feels really, really good. It’s one of the most satisfying things that I can do with my life is to play a Mission Of Burma show. It’s so cathartic.

LIR: Well, I think you wouldn’t do it otherwise.

RM: Yeah, right.

LIR: It’s that cathartic release that gets most people into punk rock and hardcore in the first place. Was it the same for you?

RM: Well, I can only speak for myself as the other members will all have something different to say on the subject, but I had a band in 1969 and 1970 which is in fact now reforming called Sproton Layer. We were a very psychedelic band and described as Syd Barrett fronting Cream. It’s with my two brothers, and we are playing gigs this summer and we haven’t played a show for 43 years but…

In 1969 I started my first band. I wrote all the songs with some help from my brothers too, but it was there that I really found my voice and a couple of the songs sound a little like Mission Of Burma actually. Then during 1970 and 1971 rock music had gotten so conservative that by 1973 I had given up on rock. I had no interest in it anymore.

I went to music school, and then when I came back to Michigan after that as if from out of nowhere the first Devo single showed up and Pere Ubu too. Patti Smith’s first record came out and I was like, “What the hell is this?” Then when the Ramones showed up all of a sudden you could do stuff again. It felt like the world allowed for creativity in rock music, and even though by then I was a very skilled musician having been a composition major at music school I loved the Ramones. The Ramones were gods. That’s my opinion, but in some certain respects that should not have happened. They could barely play their instruments, but I found that so much more refreshing than just about anything else.

Because of that I was allowed to become interested in rock music again, and complete what I hadn’t completed at the end of the psychedelic era which is form a band that can actually do something, and that became Mission Of Burma and post-punk and bands like Wire and Television. That was just incredible. ‘No New York’ for instance was just amazing.

LIR: If you can remember as far back as 1981, there was that track ‘Outlaw’ on your ‘Signals, Calls and Marches’ EP that I loved so much. Can you tell us a bit about it?

RM: I have a really good memory for this stuff.

Even though ‘Outlaw’ sounds like Gang of Four, for us Gang of Four did not exist at that point in time. It was very much influenced by that ‘No New York’ stuff like the Contortions, but it was also me going back and rediscovering my interest in Sproton Layer with the disjointed and incorrect chord progressions, but it was that twisted funk from that ‘No New York’ stuff that was the inspiration for the groove. That guitar solo to me, however, sounds like Sproton Layer. There is that psychedelic compression and harmonic intervals, and those lyrics are very, very dreamlike.

LIR: Yeah, if you take those lyrics out of the context of the song and read them on paper they are pretty trippy.

RM: Yeah, super trippy. As we progressed my lyrics got less trippy. I think I wrote that one before we even got Peter in the band. Me and Clinton had just stared to write stuff and we didn’t really have a band yet, but we thought it was good and thought, “Let’s do this”.

LIR: With ‘Vs’, the track ‘Secrets’ really nails down what the band’s core sound is for me? How did that come together?

RM: That was the third or fourth song I wrote for the band, I was very interested in Steve Reich at the time, and he was into gamelan so there was no need for harmonic change. With gamelan music, it is not the harmony. It’s other patterns and things that make the music more interesting. So that is basically a one chord rock song, but it was an ambiguous chord. So that was the idea behind it, I was thinking how can I make something so simple as one chord into complex music and interesting to the ears, and that’s why there is a drum solo instead of a guitar solo. Then I put in all these little variations, so there is kind of a chorus and kind of a bridge, but basically it’s all one chord.

Putting the vocals at the end also appealed to me, and those vocals were totally derived from when Clint used to work as a bartender at a pub called Jacks in the Cambridge, Boston area, and I would sit there drinking for free which was a pretty good deal (Laughs) and watching these people standing around and looking at each other but not knowing what to say to each other, so they were just fidgeting. That’s what that whole song was about – The whole thing of not really communicating, but there is some tension there.

LIR: What about ‘New Nails’? It’s so weird but it really stands out for me., It’s my favourite Mission Of Burma song.

RM: The riff itself (sings the riff) was from a description from my brother Darren. He came up with the phrase ‘hand chords’, where you just put your hands on the guitar and try and figure out what’s there. Instead of saying, “Now I am going to play an A chord,” you just place your hand down. So I picked up a guitar and my hand was in that exact position, and I just played it to see what it sounded like, and it sounded really cool, and that’s the main riff.

It’s basically just a tirade against organised religion, and in this case Christianity and how perverse it has become. I am very much against organised religion, even though there is a lot of things about Christianity that I believe are good. I would say there are a lot of things that are good about all religions, but once they become organised you lose the spirit completely, and when you lose the spirit of the spirit then you’re totally fucked.

At the end there is like this jaunty little ditty where you have Jesus walking round the desert saying, “Please don’t make an idol of me,” and we have Martin doing those loops and it sounds almost demonic. To me that is one of Martin’s greatest tape loop manipulations. Also I played cornet on that one, and Clint always refers to it as Roman trumpets because it’s all set in this Christian environment. It’s like a call to the gladiators or some shit.

LIR: When Clint brought in ‘That’s How I Escaped My Certain Fate’, what ran through your mind? Did you know straight away that that song would be on the record?

RM: There was no record to plan for. We didn’t have a record deal at all at that point. We were just making music. The first thing you do is make music and by the time Mission of Burma recorded ‘Vs’ we had 2 or 3 albums worth of material, so it was just a case of whatever songs came out good made it.

I will say that the first ever song Clint wrote in his life was ‘Peking Spring’. He’d never written a song and then he brought it in fully formed, and I’m not a guy without an ego or anything, and I thought, “They’re my songs and it’s my band,” and I had this long tradition of song writing, and then suddenly Clint shows up out of nowhere like Zeus pulling Athena from his eye. This fucking song, honestly, it was devastating for me.

It became a huge radio hit and I thought I was going to be the big hit writer, but very quickly I got over that, and I realised that Clint doing that sort of thing and me doing this sort of thing, and then when Pete starting writing later, that is what makes the band so interesting. Without Clint’s epic rock songs and my avant-garde doodlings and Pete’s rantings, it wouldn’t be nearly as interesting. It’s how they interact, and we perform with each other that makes this band.

I will say though that when Clint brought in ‘That’s When I Reach for My Revolver’ Pete and I stopped and said, “That’s a hit”. This was before we had even gone through the song once. We knew that that was our biggest hit right there.

LIR: On a commercial level do you think that any of your other songs deserved equal or higher status than that one?

RM: No not really, it depends on what way you look at it, but ‘Academy Fight Song’ and ‘Reach for My Revolver’ are the two biggest. There is a reason that they’re big. They each have a real hooky chorus and they are easy to sing along to. Clint has a stronger pop sensibility than Pete or I. ‘…Certain Fate’ is good too, but it’s just not quite as gigantic.

LIR: Where you surprised at how well Mission Of Burma was represented in the book ‘Our Band Could Be Your Life’?

RM: It’s quite possible that it was one of those moments where I broke down into tears if you want to know the truth. Of all the bands that are in that, book we are the least known. I mean, we are nobody. The Minutemen put out a lot of records and they toured a lot. We didn’t hardly do anything. We put out one record and an EP, and then we disappeared. I mean Black Flag, Sonic Youth, Butthole Surfers and the Replacements, these groups were all big. We sold less records than any other band in that book, and we considered all these people to be our peers. We never, however, expected anyone else to think of them as our peers, so literally when I read that I cried. There was a release that somebody had finally put us where I always thought we belonged, but dared not think that I should be there.

If you have seen the documentary that’s out there, then you already know this, but what was really weird was that when that book came out we reformed about half a year later and we didn’t intend to. Somebody asked us to play some shows. We were so stunned to be in a place that we thought we actually should be and never expected to be that to us it was unbelievable that after all these years somebody else actually thought that too. People started paying more attention, and somebody said you should play this show, this benefit and I said, “No, we are not going to.” Instead we did something else, and now here we are still playing. It’s really weird how things work out.

LIR: Along with the book, the advent of the internet and downloading, both legal and illegal would have brought your music to an entire new audience. How does that make you feel?

RM: Personally, I would rather there was no illegal downloading. When we released ‘The Obliterati’ compared to ‘ONoffON’ two years earlier, it sold half as many records, but it was the equivalent of selling just as many because sales are down everywhere. It makes it more difficult for the artist to survive, but I’m not going to wail against it because it’s what people do. It’s the new norm. It’s unfortunate for Mission Of Burma because if we made more royalties we would be able to record a new record sooner. Soon enough it will settle out. and I think there will be a new paradigm in its place.

LIR: Getting the band back together and being such a noisy act, you must have had concerns about your on-going problems with tinnitus.

RM: In all honesty. we thought we were only going to play two shows, one show in New York and one show in Boston, and that was going to be it. Then it turned into three shows in Boston and two shows in New York, all sold out. Shellac wanted us to go to England to play ATP and we had never played in England, so we thought, “We’ll just do that,” which of course turned into “And then we’ll do that and that.” We don’t play so much though that it is a massive concern for me. Back in the day Burma rehearsed two or three times a week and played twelve shows a month. It’s a very different world that I am living in now with Burma. We rehearse much less and play fewer shows.

Still, it is a concern and we have a Plexiglas thing round the drum kit, and I don’t use any monitors, and my amp is at the side of me instead of blasting in my ears. I don’t use those headphones anymore, but I have these really, really strong walls of rubber that I put into my ears. They go in really well, and they don’t come out when I am running around and yelling and screaming and shit.

LIR: If ever there was an iconic silhouette in punk rock, then it would be you playing live holding your guitar with those huge ear mufflers on.

RM: That’s a good one (Laughs). The reason I don’t wear them anymore is because they finally figured out a material that feels a bit like silly putty, and when you put it in your ear it doesn’t work its way out. Plus also it sure would be nice to see a picture of me playing a guitar without those things on, and now I can afford to do it.

LIR: What about the artwork on your albums? The recent ones have seemed a little thrown together whereas ‘Vs’ for instance is a beautiful piece of artwork that wouldn’t look out of place on a wall.

RM: A time when we were really involved with it would have been with ‘Vs’ and ‘Signals, Calls and Marches’. We had an artist called Holly Anderson who helped write lyrics to some of Clint’s songs. Well, we were working with her, and we spent a lot of time on those covers. Those are pretty iconic.

The ones since then…

LIR: Until ‘Unsound’, they have been a little bland.

RM: I thought so, yes. ‘The Obliterati’ cover for instance is just a picture I took on an aeroplane of clouds; it’s completely bland and kind of smooth, completely contrary to what the music is. We just couldn’t decide, and we rehearse so rarely we just think, “Yeah, that’s good enough.” But in the case of ‘Unsound’ John Foster, a graphic designer who works at Fire Records, he said, “Well, I’ll do it.” So it was the first time that it was out of our hands, and I believe that is partly as to why it came out better. He was sending us stuff and it went back and forth a lot, so we steered him. I think, however, that is one of the best record covers that we have had since we reformed.

LIR: Finally, back in 2008 Peter said in an interview that due to the ferocity in the way that Mission of Burma plays live that he gave the band a two year life span from that date. What happened?

RM: Well I jump around all over the place. We did a Volcano Suns song in our set last week, and after we listened to the original Pete goes, “Wow man, that’s really fast”. He can’t really play as fast as he used to. It used to be just sheer madness. But I actually think that’s good for Mission Of Burma because some of those early recordings of us playing sets in, say, 1981 have us playing the songs so fast when some of those songs are so complex that it was no wonder that people didn’t know what the fuck we were doing, and now we are forced to play them a little slower it’s just that little bit easier to hear what those songs are about.

But some of the shows this year have been the best we have ever had. It was 2008 that he said that, and now it is 2013 and we are still rocking. Perhaps our age is working to our advantage.

LIR: Thank you.

This iderview was conducted by myself and original appeared in pennyblackmusic magazine. click the link and sit back and read.

QUEENSRYCHE // interview

(July 2013)

In the vast world of classic rock Queensryche are legends.

Both their ‘Operation: Mindrime’ and ‘Empire’ albums are regarded as genre defining works and it should be no surprise to learn that with a career which has rarely let up since their formation in 1982 the band have sold over 20 million records. 

Before those two highly regarded albums, the band recorded an EP and 2 full length records that contained youthful vigour and grand ideas; they laid the groundwork for what was to come. Afterwards though the band struggled to keep up the momentum, eight albums followed ‘Empire’ with varying results. By 2007 the band seemed to have stalled and they released a covers album as bands tend to do when they begin to run out of ideas. A few years later 2011’s ‘Dedicated to Chaos’ found the band branching out sonically but by doing so they alienated a lot of their core fan base. 

Things had to change.

That change has now turned into an on-going soap opera of events that has burst into the public arena via YouTube clips and dozens of message boards around the globe. The information is out there for those that want to know the nitty gritty but the short version is that Geoff Tate’s behaviour on and off the stage gave the band caused enough to fire him. The result of this through court orders is that both parties are now allowed to continue to perform and release records under the moniker of Queensryche until a final decision is made about the rights to the name later this year.

So far Geoff Tate’s Queensryche have rush released a quite poorly received album entitled ‘Frequency Unknown’, the front cover of which displays a fist with rings on the fingers. Those rings are emblazoned with the letters ‘FU’. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to understand the subtext emanating from within the artwork’s design.

The remaining Queensryche members including founders Michael Wilton on guitars, Eddie Jackson on Bass and Scott Rockenfield on drums have replaced Geoff who seemed like such an essential cog within the band’s sound, with a new vocalist named Todd La Torre who had recently spent time fronting heavy rockers Crimson Glory to immense positive acclaim. Together with Parker Lundgren who plays 2^nd guitar and joined the group in 2009 they have released their latest record simply entitled ‘Queensryche’ via the fantastic Century Media label. Unlike Tate’s record the production is fully flavoured and the songs appear to be completely fleshed out compositions. The only telling difference that the band maybe wanted to release the record before the upcoming court date is that it runs for just 35 minutes rather than the hour mark that fans are a little more used to.

Maybe it’s down to this that the album adopts an all killer and no filler policy, the guitars sound bright and alive once more, the song writing is no longer bloated and in many places you would think that this self-titled effort could have been released the year following ‘Empire’. As for Todd’s vocals, they are outstanding, they keep the feel of Tate’s original blueprint whilst injecting a fresh energy and Todd’s own style creeps in here and there to intrigue fans with a slice of what may come next.

I feel Queensryche are back on track, the new record is hardly off my iPod and we are genuinely excited about the future of the band so needless to say I tracked La Torre down and got him on the phone direct from the United States to talk about the new record and what he feels he is bringing to the band.

Lost In Rock: Queensryche’s first piece of recorded music was an EP named ‘Queensryche’, and this new album is the first to feature you on vocals, it’s also called ‘Queensryche’, why recycle the title?

TLT: Well when we were first talking about what to call the album we had some tentative ideas and names and then finally when we had talked amongst the band we said what if we just called it ‘Queensryche’ and make a very simple but bold statement, no gimmicky artwork, no slogans, let’s just call it ‘Queensryche’ with a big ass Tri-Ryche right on the front. It’s who we are and it makes the statement of THIS IS IT!

So that’s we did and so far I think it’s been received in the way that we intended it to be. I’m not hearing any complaints from anyone. You know, these guys feel like it’s a rebirth for them and that self-titled EP was their beginning and they feel like it’s a new beginning for them so that’s why we called it Queensryche, it’s very simple and to the point.

LIR: I stopped listening to Queensryche when ‘Empire’ was released way back in 1990; personally I just couldn’t get on with Geoff’s over the top and theatrical vocals. I know that the majority of Queensryche fans would say those words are sacrilege but I much more enjoyed the metal flavour running through the bands earlier work also. With the new record I have just that, whichever side of the vocalist fence you sit on, musically this return to form is an utter relief for fans.

TLT: I actually stopped following the band after ‘Empire’ but I think ‘Promised Land’ is a really great record though.  I lost interest due to the musical direction that the band was going in; it was not something that was very appealing to me so I understand why a lot of people began to drop off the radar for them. Now with this album it’s completely different from what the band has put out in the last ten years if not more and the people that have a copy of the record tend to be saying “Wow, this could have come out straight after ‘Empire’”.

The style is more like the first five or six albums. This album seems to encompass the feel from the first EP through to ‘Promised Land’. Songs like ‘Spore’ are a little more progressive and vocally it could have gone on one of those earlier records. Then you have songs like ‘A World Without’ or ‘Open Road’ which are sort of ‘Promised Land’ or ‘Empire’-ish type songs. I’m really proud of this record but are we trying to compare it to ‘…Mindcrime’ or ‘Empire’? No. Those records and ‘Rage for Order’ were phenomenal, they are masterpiece records that deserve every bit of credit they have ever gotten and more and they were able to capture magic back then. What we are trying to do now is create our own new magic in 2013.

We are already writing songs for the next record, I was just recording tracks for a new guitar part for a new song that I have just last night and I’ll be doing that again tonight.

LIR: So you have already begun to plan the next album?

TLT: Yeah, there are already four or five songs that are in the works for the next record. Personally what I would like to see on the next record would be to have a few songs that are even heavier than anything that made it onto this record. I would personally like to have at least one song in the six to eight minute mark, something that is like a ‘Roads to Madness’ length, that’s an intense 10 minute song, it’s something that can really morph into another animal and does it seamlessly under the one song title.

Also I’d like to be able to experiment with some of my higher screams that are a little more edgy and grittier. I think with this album there was some quantity of playing safe; I didn’t get real scratchy on it, I tried to sing it cleaner. It’s a very delicate balance you have between introducing a singer when all these people want to compare me to the great days of Geoff and I get that so I can’t be too different but I can still sing my way but there were some songs where I really wanted to get it super dirty and do some Rob Halford type of high gritty screams but the song content wasn’t terribly heavy so I guess the songs didn’t dictate for me to do that yet. So if we get into something that is a little heavier perhaps I can introduce a cool growl that goes into a solo or get into some really evil sick shit like something off of Fight or Halford and just make it pure evil, that’s the kind of stuff that I like to do.

This record is a really good starting point for the band and for me, I’m really happy about it and overall I have no complaints.

LIR: Over the years I have found myself drifting away from listening to Queensryche, the songs were not holding my interest as much as each album was released. As a fan listening to this new self-titled album for the first time I have to tell you, it was pretty exciting. It sounds so fresh. I also noticed that you have song writing credits on there, how accepting were the band of you contributing to the Queensryche model.

TLT: Well ‘Don’t Look Back’ was the first song that I ever wrote with Michael and he loves it. Out of the nine songs that have lyrics on the album I wrote the lyrics for six of them. Parker wrote ‘Where Dreams Go to Die’ and Eddie wrote the lyrics to ‘Fallout’ and ‘In This Light’. A lot of the drumming that you hear on ‘Where Dreams Go to Die’ was mine that I wrote as well and the outro for ‘Open Road’ was taken from a guitar solo that I wrote for that song. I had an idea for this solo and I just though fuck it, I’m just gonna track it. So I recorded it and gave it to the guys. I said “Hey Michael, I hope you’re not going to be upset but I put a guitar solo in the song and if there is any melody or inspiration that you can take from it and then do your own thing with it then great and if not then you can throw the whole thing away”. I have a heavier style of bending so he ended up taking the notes and he kept the overall vibe and melody for part of the solo and used it and looped it for the outro of that song.

So yes they were all very gracious and everyone was integral to the song writing from letting me come up with drum ideas to guitars. Scott wrote guitar parts, if fact when ‘Fallout’, ‘Spore’, ‘Open Road’ and ‘A World Without’ were written, well, Scott wrote those, he did all of those parts, all of the guitars and all of the drums and once we said yeah, that’s cool Michael then laid down his guitars with Parker and then he made it his way, he was making it how Queensryche would play this on guitar, he would then make some changes to arrangements and that’s how it would evolve, it was honestly a true band collaboration.

The beauty of a band like Queensryche is that they have songs that can just kick you in the balls and then have a beautiful song like ‘I Will Remember’. To have that flexibility today makes the creative process a lot more fun because you’re not boxed in.

LIR: Being in the recording booth and laying down those vocals must have been an exciting time for you?

TLT: It was exciting but there were times when my voice just sounded like shit and I would have to just say well, not today guys, I’m burned out. I would have to go back to it the next day because I was really horse and there was no way that I could sing the chorus’ clean, we would have to go onto something else. So there were stressful moments for me but when it was all finally done there were moments where I was like “Holy shit, I’m in a vocal booth and I am singing songs that are going to be on a new Queensryche album and I am the new vocalist”. There were moments where it was very surreal and it’s very gratifying. It’s hard to put it into words just what that feels like but it’s definitely a wonderful experience and I’m beyond thankful. If I never got to do this again for the rest of my life, well, I could actually say that I made it, I’ve done it and I did something historical in a legendary band’s career. To be the new singer of this band is monumental.

LIR: Having record labels vying for your signatures in this day and age must have just been icing on the cake for you. It so rare that happens these days.

TLT: It really does; now, I don’t know what kind of offers they were getting during the last couple of years but from what I understand a lot of new doors have opened that were closed for several years. We have an awesome new management company who are one of the best artist management companies in the world and Century Media as our record label which is great and they are really pushing this album well. All of the people’s resources that are connected to our team are awesome so it definitely feels like things are reinvigorated and there is a new enthusiasm amongst the band members that just didn’t exist before.

LIR: You can hear that in the songs.

TLT: That’s what we wanted.

LIR: Now at the moment you guys are in the midst of a court case with the original singer Geoff Tate primarily to gain control of the name Queensryche. Now I imagine the worst case scenario for you is that Geoff wins and gets to keep the name, you must have discussed it as a band so if this was to happen what would your plans be?

TLT: Well, that’s a very fair question… I have two answers for that.

Number one would be that we haven’t entertained plan B that much. These guys really feel confident enough in their corporate contracts that they are the majority and they had every right to fire a member of the band and there will have to likely be some sort of financial compensation for that person’s percentage of the corporation or the band name or whatever it is.

The second part of my answer would be that if infact these guys are not awarded the name then I assume we will still 100% continue to keep playing and make records. We would probably have to go out under another band name and then it would really be up to the masses to determine how they are going to support us. Certainly there is a lot of value in the name Queensryche from a business perspective, however there is also a lot to be said for the guys that are playing and it has to be said that there is also a tremendous value in that as well.

Because there is two versions right now, that’s kind of a testament to the value of who you are going to see, two bands using the same band name. So our album has been released just now and we know what those sales figures were for the other sides’ album and we are hopeful and quite confident that our sales for the first week will certainly exceed that and that in itself is a testament to the fans and what they want to go and buy.

I am not telling them to not go and see Geoff; I think that if they loved Geoff in the band then they should go see him. I would never tell people not to support him and that band, it would be completely unethical and very wrong; these are not good qualities to have. I have my own personal views about what I think but I if they can find music from him that they love then I want them to support him, if they can find it in us then obviously I want our support. If someone likes it all then that’s great, that’s what it’s all really about, it’s about the music.

You know, Michael and Eddie have also worked their entire life and are the song writers of these songs and they have every right to carry on with this name as a majority and Scott has always said in interviews that Queensryche has always been about the collective group and not about any one person.

My personal view and this is not just with Geoff but it goes out to any other band and it will probably be condemned due to me saying it out loud, but for one person to call themselves the band’s name is not really fair… Look, these are the guys that not only wrote the songs but these are the guys that performed the songs, nobody is going to play these songs better than the guy that wrote it, nobody is going to sing Johnny Cash better than Johnny Cash. I can’t sing Geoff, I am not Geoff Tates’s voice, I am just trying to do the best I can at representing the old stuff and that’s why it’s so important for me to create new music with the band. Nobody is going to play Eddie Van Halen’s parts quite like Eddie Van Halen, they might do a hell of a good job but people want to see what is authentic to them.

Geoff has a lot of great musicians that are playing with him but I don’t think the music is being played accurately and he’s even been quoted as saying that he enjoys their interpretation of the music so they are not playing it perfectly like the records and the guys I play with are because it’s their music. These fans are very critical and I think that that matters, I really do.

LIR: Have you ever met Geoff?

TLT: I have met him two times. I met him once when I was eighteen years old. I drove to a music store and had the band sign my ‘Warning’ CD cover and I have a photograph with Geoff and Chris DeGarmo. I also met Geoff about two years ago when Queensryche played their thirtieth anniversary show in Clearwater, Florida and it was the last show of that tour. I was the last one in the line and I went through and met Parker and Michael and Geoff and Scott and I talked with Geoff for about a minute and I said “My name’s Todd Le Torre and I sing for a band called Crimson Glory, I just wanted to say that you are a huge vocal inspiration to me and largely responsible for the reason that I sing in this style. I think you sounded great tonight, it’s really a pleasure to meet you and thank you for all that you have done vocally throughout your career”.

That was pretty much it, he looked at me and smiled and said thank you and he didn’t say another word to me. He looked around as if to say is there anyone else to talk to and then I had my picture taken with him and I still have it. That was my only verbal interaction with him, it wasn’t a conversation it was just me complimenting him and him saying thank you, that was it.

LIR: What a great story.

TLT: I’ve never told that in an interview by the way, until now.

LIR: That answers my next question which was going to be were you ever a Queensryche fan in your youth? Obviously you were.

TLT: Yeah, my sister used to date this guy in high school and he was a really good drummer and he gave me a tape of ‘Operation: Mindcrime’. I remember putting it into my tape player, I was fourteen I think. I played the first song which was an introduction so I just thought okay and then I pushed fast forward and I didn’t have that little selector where it would smart select the next song so it went to the end of the tape and I thought “Okay, let’s flip it over and try it again” and then it did it again, so I realised I would have to listen to it properly from the first song. So when I did I sort of liked it but I was fast forwarding again and I got frustrated and said “Nah, forget it”.

A few nights later I was lying in bed and I thought that I really wanted to know what was so great about this band so I put my headphones on, turned the lights off and just hit play. That was my first real listen to Queensryche and I loved the vibrato as I was a huge Iron Maiden fan.

Then I went to the record store and that when I found ‘The Warning’ record, this was an older one but I had to see what it was like and that became my favourite album. Because I was a drummer and learning I loved it, Scott wasn’t doing these drum fills that were (fast drum roll) ‘bdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbd’, I loved his placement of the drum fills and the time signatures they were doing on songs like ‘Before the Storm’. It was really captivating to me and that’s when I became a fan of the band.

LIR: I thought ‘Roads to Madness’ was the game changer on that record.

TLT: Oh, totally. It’s such a great song and we have so much fun playing it. If you go onto YouTube it’s there. I think my best performance of that was in Regina, Canada. If you type in “Queensryche Roads to Madness” there is one where I played in a casino and that is probably my best vocal performance of that song. We play it in its entirety, beginning to end in our set, even that fast, heavy part at the end; it’s really such a great song.

WNW: So you were a full time rocker in your youth then?

TLT: That vocal, the “ohohohohoh”, that real heavy vibrato always captivated me and then when you get into the overall song writing of Queensryche they were very much ahead of their time but Maiden were my first and then Queensryche, then I got really into Stryper. Even though I am an atheist I just loved Michael Sweet’s singing and his scream, not forgetting the guitar harmonies. They were just a really great band with great songs. After that it was Helloween, Testament and Dokken I was also a big fan of, also Fates Warning were great and these are the bands that I still listen to today that I very much love.

LIR: Queensryche were always a bit different, even with their artwork, gone was your typical metal “leather look” and devil imagery and in was that ‘Operation: Mindcrime’ cover which looked like an art movie poster or something.

TLT: Completely, even ‘Rage for Order’ was so ahead of its time, they were talking about computers even back then. Some of their stuff was way out there with those lyrics too. The lyrics to ‘Roads to Madness’ for example are completely crazy. I remember asking the guys in the band if they even knew the words to the song and they were like, “No?” So I told them. “Stay on the course to pass. You’ll never find the answer to a place where darkened angels seemed lost and never found” and “Scream to see the light of forming figures fast behind you. Lay the past in the wind to spin and your fate will sail beyond the open plains” Wow, it’s like that is pretty deep shit.

LIR: Finally Todd, before you were in Queensryche you were the vocalist for Crimson Glory…

TLT: I joined them in 2010, yeah.

LIR: Now were you a fan of theirs before you joined, the ‘Transcendence’ album from 1988 was one of those that I just loved. I would have thought that Midnight’s vocals and vocal range would really appeal to you before he passed away a few years back.

TLT: You know what, I’d never heard of Crimson Glory until two weeks before I met the band in 2009.

LIR: Wow!

TLT: No shit, but yes, ‘Transcendence’ is a masterpiece, in fact their first two records of which ‘Transcendence’ was the second are without question two of the best metal records ever written. Midnight’s range was ridiculous, I wish I had his range, it was so amazing but his emotional delivery was just phenomenal. Songs like ‘Painted Skies’, ‘Burning Bridges’ or ‘Lost Reflections’ were amazing and of course Jon Drenning’s writing and Jeff Lords’ bass playing, that whole band and those two albums in particular are truly amazing.

It’s funny you should mention this because I haven’t listened to Crimson Glory’s music in eight months and now I am tempted to just put it on, I really would enjoy it again.

It’s a bitter-sweet thing for me actually; I didn’t want to leave the band but the fact is that they just weren’t doing anything.

LIR: Yeah, they are so slow.

TLT: Dude, you don’t even know! I tried so hard to get song writing going and Jon would blow me off and I would go for months without hearing a word and I just thought that we were supposed to be making a record here. The fans of that band were just so amazing so I really wanted Crimson Glory to put out a record for those fans way more than for me because those were the people that had been with that band for so long and they deserved a really great album and when I decided to resign from the band it really bummed me out.

I have some nicely framed tour posters in my house from some of those shows but the whole thing still makes me angry. It pisses me off to be honest with you Paul because we had so much potential to come back and do some really great things and all of those fans accepted me which is unheard of. I never expected the fans to accept me in the way that they did and that felt so special for me. I even got to wear the iconic mask during ‘Lost Reflections’, in fact I am looking at it as we speak, it is sitting right here in my studio. You know what, it was all part of a bigger plan, not a plan that I had but part of the evolution of my life. It was a wonderful experience and an amazing opportunity and I have no regrets about it to this day. I am very thankful to Jon Drenning and Ben Jackson and all the guys in the band but it’s led me to where I am now.

I wake up every day, I make my cup of coffee, I check the email and then I fire up my studio and then I work on music and I am the singer of Queensryche. For the first time in my life at the age of 39 years old I am able to earn a living as a musician doing what I love. I don’t have to be a millionaire, I just need to be happy and personally for the first time I feel 100% gratified.

LIR: Todd, thank you.

thanks to John @ Pennyblackmusic for setting me up with this interview.

Jello Biafro and the Guantanamo School of Medicine // White People and the Damage Done (Alternative Tentacles)

This is the second full length that Jello Biafra has crafted since the formation of his Guantanamo School Of Medicine project, and it has to be said that when Jello clocks in it tends to be business as usual. The Dead Kennedys legend hasn’t made a classic album since he made ‘The Last Temptation Of Reid’ with Al Jorgensen from Ministry under the LARD banner, and that was way back in 1990. Since then the lyrics have stayed masterful, and the voice is just as shockingly skewed as ever but the music itself has never been up to much.

So from a purely musical standpoint then ‘White People And The Damage Done’ is pretty much hit and on more than one occasion miss. Opening with the mid tempo ‘The Brown Lipstick Parade’ was a pretty grave mistake. The opening riff has been recycled by more rock and metal acts than it deserves, and until the half-way point where the band breaks the song down into its component parts it sounds like Jello just phoned the song in.

On the other hand album closer ‘Shock-U-Py’ has the greatest riff that AC/DC have never recorded. It seems incredible that after so many years preaching to the converted Jello has yet to become jaded with his cause. He can still create an anthem of hope and stand up for the little guy. It may not have the instant shock appeal of ‘Nazi Punks Fuck Off’, but the outrage and power of the chorus hooks you in as much as any of the 80′s Dead Kennedys stuff he does.

The general rule of thumb here is that faster is better. ‘Hollywood Goof Disease’, ‘Mid-East Peace Process’ and ‘Road Rage’ are perfect slabs of poisoned punk vitriol, and I wonder if the rest of the album had kept up that kind of pace with the stomp of ‘Shock-U-Py’ included for a little relief from the frantic pace then Biafra may have once more had a classic record on his hands.

I originally reviewed this for Pennyblackmusic.

FISH // INTERVIEW

(April 2013)

Born Derek William Dick, Fish has since the very early 1980s brought his unique lyrics and vocals to many a progressive rock classic. His career has flourished both in the years he spent with Marillion and since 1989 when he embarked on his adventurous and vast solo career. This momentum halted in 2007 during the release of his fine ‘13th Star’ album when his life dismantled after a series of disastrous relationships and career-threatening throat operations.

This month I join Fish on the phone from Scotland. We talk to him about the years in between his last release, and what is happening with the yet-to-be-released new album ‘Feast of Consequences’. We also focus on the Marillion years, and just how the man prepares and executes his live show.

LIR: My discovery of your music was quite different than many others I expect. Although I was aware of Marillion and the huge hit single ‘Kayleigh’, I didn’t listen to your music until I received the ‘Bouillabaisse’ compilation double CD as a Christmas present from a friend in 2005. He was annoyed at me for never giving you a chance. After hearing it I was hooked and started to pick up your back catalogue.

F: Well, that’s nice to know. It’s the one thing I kind of hold faith in, and in these days especially I like to think the whole word of mouth thing still exists and it can it still move people.

LIR: How difficult is it to compile those things? You have to keep in mind lifelong fans and then people like myself who don’t know your stuff. It has to be tricky.

F: I think that is why you put the best ofs together. When I go to a new label I tend to launch with a new best of because it seems to make the most sense and yes, the whole idea is to capture those people that might think, “I know ‘Kayleigh’ and it’s the right price. It’s got nice packaging.” Then they go away and think, “Right, I want to try this album and then that album.” That is what it’s all about.

But it is hard putting them together. The ‘Bouillabaisse’ thing was a little bit easier because I nominated the ‘Balladeer’ and ‘Rocketeer’ thing where one album was just the ballads and the other was just the rock and heavy duty songs. It did bring some people into the fold, but again it never did as much as we hoped it would.

Things have changed so much. The whole idea of selling albums, moving albums and promoting albums has just completely changed. There’s a whole different process now.

LIR: I think it’s strange that in this day and age with YouTube, Spotify and iTunes just a click away that a compilation album could still affect anyone, let alone myself.

F: I think as well, in all honesty that if you look at ‘Misplaced Childhood’, which sold 3,000,000 albums or something and what I am selling now which is around 50,000 units, that is a big gap of people that are happy with the old albums but they just won’t get into the new stuff. So compilations are important in that regard because those kinds of fans are not necessarily part of the download generation. They are used to having physical products, and it is getting harder and harder to put the physical products in their hands what with the demise of HMV etc., and the whole of the independent retail scenario going out of the window. It’s harder to catch browsers, you know? But you just adopt it and I don’t get bitter about it. That’s just the way it is but then again I run my own independent label which has just me on it, so it’s very much a cottage industry now.

With Marillion we would get something like fourteen pence per CD on a full priced CD, and when you put that into context you find that you are shifting a lot of albums, but you are not making very much whereas now you can make a lot more depending on how much effort you want to put into promotion. But then again with promotion what do you do? Buy a page in ‘Classic Rock’, get a page in ‘Prog Rock’ or whatever and aim it at your demographic? What else can you do? Most people skim through adverts. They are blind to them.

LIR: Do you see a lot of young kids in the shows?

F: There are some, I’m not going to lie to you and say a large proportion of my audience is under 20 because no. It’s not. If I look at my Facebook demographics, it’s all the 35-50 age group. But then again when I got a bit older I picked up on artists like Marvin Gaye and Otis Redding that I was never exposed to when I was a kid, but then there maybe the argument that because I am a musician in a world of musicians that I would have a duty to examine what they did because of the legends that they were.

I know about my daughter’s generation and my daughter is 22. Her favourite bands are Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac, Pink Floyd and Free, and a lot of her friends have discovered what I’m doing. They are aware of tracks like ‘Kayleigh’ of course, but they have also been switched on to some of the other stuff. So that’s all very well. It’s nice to have people into your music, but you still need to sell that music to make it work and to keep your mortgage paid. Selling this music is becoming harder and harder, and again I am lucky that the people that make up a huge part of my fan base are people that like tactile items. That has been the spine of my entire existence.

LIR: Well, you have adapted incredibly well with technology. Your fan base is always kept up to date with goings on, often with daily updates in fact. It keeps people incredibly loyal, but do you think because of this you have lost a little mystique, a little mystery about yourself that fans often love about their heroes?

F: Yeah, but I don’t think there was much of a mystery about myself in the first place; I was never a Bowie of a Ferry or anything like that. I’m the sort of guy that goes to see Hibs [Hibernian football club-Ed] play on a Saturday, and I am far more comfortable in a pub than I am in a nightclub.

My character has been one that is always open. My lyrics have always contained an openness about my life. Sometimes I am a bit too open for my own good perhaps, so I wouldn’t say that I am particularly a man of mystery.

So when the internet really hit I enjoyed the communication between fans. In fact that was one of the problems I had when I was in Marillion in those latter days. We were becoming more and more distant from the people. When you play a 3000/4000 capacity hall you can still have a tangible contact with the audience. So if somebody shouts something from half way up the hall, people can hear it and they can hear my answer, but when you go up to a 15,000 and somebody shouts out and they are 20 yards away from me then the guy at the back can’t hear a damn thing he said, so he can only hear the response.

So suddenly a certain dislocation went on, which wasn’t helped by the fact that the light show and the production was such that I would walk onto the stage and spend around 70% of the gig blinded by a super-trouper. I couldn’t actually see and get an awareness of the depth of the crowd, to feel the back of the hall. Adding to that I was in a band that with all due respect, well, they were quite happy to run straight through the sets, run through the same solos and the same songs every show. For me it became monotonous, and added to that I was coming offstage into a backstage area that was populated by people that I really didn’t want to know. We were the ones that were buying the champagne and the beer. We were the ones paying for it. A lot of the people there three years before hated our guts but because we were selling papers and magazines we were in favour ,and we had to press the flesh of people who owned huge record store chains, and at the end of the day they were making more money off the albums than we were.

Add to even that, we had gone up to that division, that level where we had managers, tour managers, assistant tour managers, tour accountants, assistant tour accountants etc. etc., that there was an entire tribe moving with us. By the end we only managed to get the manager down to 20%! Towards the last days for me in the band I just thought, “Why am I doing this? It’s just crazy.” The phrase I always use to describe it is that fame is great as it will get you the best table in the restaurant, but the waiters will always expect more tips. I got so sick of it.

When I went on to ‘Vigil in a Wilderness of Mirrors’ (Fish’s 1990 debut solo record-Ed], there were certain pangs to get the record up to that level and it was for a while, but then I had the big legal wrangle with EMI after my first solo album when I went to Polydor. It was then that a huge undermining of the foundations went on, so I had to change and it took me a long time to adjust to where I am now and I am quite happy with my lot. I never wanted a Maserati, or have been somebody who would drool over having a villa in the south of France or something like that. I have my organic vegetable garden and I am quite happy pottering about in that, going to football and going for wanders down the beach, I am happy with that. I am sitting here in a house right now, and if I look out the window I can see snow-capped hills that are just three miles away that I can wonder around in the summer. To me that is cool.

I find celebrity a bit uncomfortable; I’ve been through the heavy intrusions of privacy like when just after my very short second marriage I was subjected to a 4/5 page article in ‘The News of the World in Scotland’. I was very uncomfortable with that.

LIR: What about today when you speak to the press?

F: I have got absolutely nothing to hide. Obviously I do have a private life and I don’t talk about my family that much… Saying that, my daughter, she’s a model now and goes under the name Tara Nowy. She is getting quite successful now and is currently auditioning for a big Sky TV ‘X- Factor’ type thing to do with models and she is no stranger to celebrity. She has been brought up on it. She’s very cool. I remember one time we went out to see Queen in Holland, and we were sitting in the hotel after. There was Brian May, Roger Taylor and I chatting away with some of the other Queen guys, and my daughter was holding court, and at the time she was only about 14 years old, so she’s not daunted by celebrity or phased by famous people.

For me, when I was at the Prog Awards last year I found myself talking to some people that were heroes of mine like Peter Hamill, and I was even sitting on a table with Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford. I would never have believed as a teenager that a) I would be at such a thing as an award ceremony that celebrated progressive rock and b) that we would all be sitting there together at a table. It was quite surreal, I expected somebody to wake me up and tell me that I had my O Levels to do tomorrow.

When people ask me if I miss it [the celebrity status], I say not really. I still play big gigs. We have a gig that we are organising at the moment that I have found really exciting, and that is at Mogadishu Airport. I have friends of mine that were in the army and are working with the UN training people, and one of them phoned me up and asked if I fancy a gig there as there is a bar that can take 500 people, and that that the flights will be taken care of and I said, “Yeah. Why not?” We’re not going to make any money from it, but I want to do it and be able to put it on a T-shirt and say we played Mogadishu. How else would I ever get a chance to do that? That’s the sort of thing we never did with Marillion, I’ve been to Bosnia and Kosovo with the army doing gigs, and they were the most enjoyable gigs on the most exhilarating tour I ever remember doing. I don’t think of playing the Ahoy in Rotterdam in front of 18,000 people as anywhere near that category.

LIR: It’s odd you should say that as I think you are one of those rare frontmen that can connect with an audience whether you are playing a small hall or a big stadium. The way you communicate with the audience it’s as if they are in your front room.

F: That’s just the way that I was brought up, that’s one of the things I abhor about these ‘X- Factor’ or ‘The Voice’ types of reality stars. You can take a monkey into a studio and make a recording if you teach it enough tricks, but that doesn’t mean they are going to be able to hold the centre of a stage.

It’s really strange, I think I was born a decade too late. A lot of my peers have told me that if I had been around in the 70s… well, you know. The Marillion I joined in January 1981 went out and played pubs and clubs. We played in front of 30 or 60 people some nights. That’s how you learn your trade. You play in front of people that are not interested in what you’re doing. It was a struggle, but we had to try and pull people in to examine what we were doing. So I learned through technical failures with the band when things went wrong on stage. Being young we didn’t have that back up so when things went wrong I had to deal with it, and I think having that apprenticeship has stood me well over time. I feel comfortable on most stages. It’s all to do with projection, my self-confidence and my ability to wield some kind of control, but it’s like working with tigers sometimes. If you are not careful, they will rip your arse off (Laughs).

I have seen some guys on stage that are big names and the way they are with the audience makes me think, “Why are you doing this? Don’t even bother talking!”

LIR: Keeping on the subject of communication with fans, it was no secret that you had problems with your voice recently.

F: I had two vocal operations, one in 2008 and the other in 2009. With the first one there was a lot of dark shadows and questions hanging over me pre-op and I didn’t even know if I was going to have a voice when I came out of it, and the second came really quick on the heels of the last one. It was like taking two hard Muhammed Ali punches straight to the face.

LIR: I take it this was the main reason behind the six year gap between the new album coming out and ‘13th Star’ back in 2007?

F: Yeah, in 2007 we did ‘13th Star’, and it was a great album, and we worked real hard on it but at the time that we were recording the album I was going through the blender. I was about to get married, and then the woman basically walked out on me just before the wedding. This was just before that album, so then I went on that tour, and by 2008 for every five gigs I was doing there was one great gig and two average gigs and two dreadful ones; it was all to do with the voice. It got to the point where at 9 ‘o clock at night I was dreading having to go on stage because I didn’t know what would happen. I could never tell.

I had a cyst in my throat so some days it wouldn’t be as rampant as others; it would deflate in a way but I didn’t know that. It got mentioned in the press and I would get stressed out. I came very close to walking away from everything at the end of that tour. Then I had the op and went out in 2009, and then I got married. That lasted all of six months. Three days after my second operation she disappeared as well, so I had really taken a serious kicking. I couldn’t sing during 2009. I only did five shows, and there was no way I was going to get anything written at that time because of all of my problems. For me the first six months of 2010 every morning was full of I Love You’s and every night was like a mortar attack. I’ve never known a more emotionally confusing time in my life.

At that point I decided to go out on an acoustic tour, trying to re-find my voice, to find out how to deal with a crowd again and get my confidence back. I had to re-examine exactly what I do and it started to work. I really enjoyed going out with the acoustic format. We were playing to everything from 200 people a night to doing 500/600 a night in parts of Poland and Germany, and everything seemed to balance out for me. We managed to get to play in places that we would never have been able to play in with the electrical band format. We ran it like a guerrilla style operation and slimmed it right down, so we could get into areas that we could never had done with the “This is what we must have” kind of attitude.

That finished in 2011 and I wanted to distance myself from that darkness that I was in. I didn’t want to write about a shitty marriage or writing about the “WOMAN”.

LIR: So no classic break up album?

F: Exactly. So I wanted to put some space between me and that time. So then we got to 2012 and Foss Patterson [pianos and keyboards-Ed] and Frank Usher [guitars-Ed], who had been on the acoustic tour with me began to talk about writing this album. We did some festivals and stuff but just had no new material coming through. So I just thought I had to bring a writer in. Before that I was really getting down about it and questioning whether I could even make another album.

Now, I had a major fall out with Steve Vantsis [Fish’s long-time collaborator-Ed] in 2008. It was over a lot of little things though, just business crap, and we had been friends for such a long time that when he came along to a couple of gigs on the acoustic tour it felt right to shake hands and make up. It was obvious that we had both changed over the years, I had got rid of the demons that were with me in 2008 and so had he, you know?

So when Steve came up last year in the first couple of weeks he was there we had managed to get the skeletons of six songs together, so that spurred it on for us and he was getting involved in the writing. But it just wasn’t coming together quickly enough for me.

LIR: Yeah, the last I heard was that the new album was going to be called ‘Feast of Consequences’, and it would be released either late 2012 or early 2013.

F: I just wasn’t ready; there was no point in just rushing in and doing this, I would never want to put anything out half cocked. If I am going to put out an album that would be my first in five years than another six months isn’t going to matter. Financially I am aware I have to get something together and put it out as the log pile is beginning to get thin and is bark now, but at the same time I am not going to put out shit. I’ve never done that. I’ve never put out an album just to make money; it has to be a statement, a piece of creativity that I am proud of and I think that ‘Feast of Consequences’ falls into that. I am really pleased with the lyrics.

LIR: Lyrics are so important to fans of yours and one of your simplest and most effective lyrics was in my mind ‘Sugar Mice’ from the ‘Clutching At Straws’ LP you did with Marillion in 1987.

F: That was the single that went missing; it’s a fucking great song even if I say so myself. To me it’s like country and western. In 1987 when we started to put ‘Clutching At Straws’ together that was when creatively the band started to fall apart in as far as if you listen to the album it’s made up of lots of bits that we joined together. Some stuff like ‘Incommunicado’, ‘White Russian’ and ‘The Last Straw’, they are songs that have recognisable song constructions. We got ourselves a little bit of swagger and became a lot rockier, and that was the direction that I wanted to go in. So if you look at a song like ‘Sugar Mice’ or a song like ‘Incommunicado’ or even ‘The Last Straw’, you can easily see the link through to the ‘Vigil’ solo album. The best version we ever had of that was actually a demo that we made in Maidenhead and the tapes got lost or damaged. It was one of those moments where we were just playing together and everything fell in to place.

I love playing it because we can play about with it on the stage, that middle section… you can jam and put that Van Morrison jazz scat vocal on top of it. You can play about with it and bend the dynamic of it which is a wonderful thing; it’s a really great song.

Lyrically it was inspired by going to Milwaukee, and I think we were supporting Rush, and we ended up in this shitty Holiday Inn in the middle of the projects there, and there were some skag dealers outside in the car park, and it was snowing and cold. My Samsonite suitcase just exploded in the elevator, and I got up to my room, and it had an aertex ceiling that had scrawled on it stuff like “Kenny Loves Linda”, and all there was to do was to watch wrestling on the TV. It was terrible. So I went to the bar and there were these sad bastards there, and a Trivial Pursuit machine that had just sex questions on it, and an old jukebox that contained nothing but ballads, I also spent around $70 on the phone having an argument with my girlfriend at the time so I was gutted. This was meant to be Milwaukee, and that was the vision that kind of inspired that song. That vision of someone leaving Edinburgh for the promise of somewhere like Milwaukee and why is he running away? Is it from his family or has he really gone over there to find a better life and bring them over? There is a very melancholic Scottishness to it.

LIR: You have just posted new lyrics to a song called ‘All Loved Up’ on Facebook. Is this track going to be included on the record?

F: Yeah, it is. Now we have eleven songs. I have eight completed lyrics. There is only one though that I have no lyrics for, and that’s called ‘The Layman’. There is a song called ‘Perfume River’, and I finished that two weeks ago. For some reason I just wasn’t happy with it. It didn’t feel good and I wasn’t comfortable with it. The lyric fitted well and it worked with the melody, but something just felt like it was just not right. So I texted Steve a few days ago, and I said, “I think it needs another verse because the story isn’t complete. It’s not rounded out properly. There is no act three in it”. And so I just sat down with it and basically it was just four lines, four lines that didn’t sound right, so I deconstructed it by taking all the words out and putting them back together in a different way and then low and behold… Bang! It all made sense.

“The fetid smell of stale revolutions” was the line that did it. That was the one line in the verse that just made complete sense of the chorus. That is how I work. I self-edit so much and I love working with words. Years ago with ‘Perfume River’ I may have just let that go, and allowed it there or written another verse, and it would have been flabby over three verses. So in the last month or so now that I am coming to the end game with all these new lyrics. I’m loving doing the final bits of polishing and tidying up before I put them out there on the exhibition floor.

I do love writing and that book that has been held up over the last three years [Fish’s long overdue autobiography-Ed] just has to be managed next year. People always come up to me ,and say you have to write this book, and explain all the lyrics or write a biography or compile all your blog entries together into one big volume. I’m just like, “For fuck sake” (Laughs). I mean I am under no real pressure. One of the problems with living where I do on a farm in East Lothian, two miles out of the town and on my own is that sometimes getting the discipline together is hard. It’s all too easy to switch YouTube on, and spend two or three hours just watching drivel or kidding yourself into thinking you are doing research (Laughs).

LIR: Finally you are going to be doing a tour in May. Are you excited to be getting back out on the road?

F: I am very daunted by the tour, We are going back to the old formula. It’s just like in the old days when you wrote the songs, and you put them into production rehearsals. Back in ‘83, ’84, and even ’85, we took new songs out on the road and played them live, and this is what I’m doing on this May tour. I am in the situation where the album is pretty much finished, and the band starts production rehearsals next week with all the new material. Then after a week off we go into full on rehearsals, and then go and play twelve shows where we are planning on playing roughly six new songs a night. I’d never be arrogant enough to think that we should play the full brand new album, and you should have to sit there and listen to it, that’d feel like you’re in a study group. The fans are paying ticket money to be entertained; you have to provide old material as well, especially now that ‘Script for a Jester’s Tear’ (Marillion’s 1983 debut album-Ed) has its thirtieth anniversary. We have a good balance of well-known songs and up songs and songs the punters love, so this upcoming tour experience should be fulfilling for both parties.

LIR: Thank you.

PISSED JEANS // Honeys (Sub Pop)

Philadelphia’s Pissed Jeans have been making quite the name for themselves over the past few years. They appeal to the punks, the rockers and the indie kids in equal measures, quite a feat in current day music’s tribally split scenes. The group’s previous album, ‘King Of Jeans’, brought them to my attention, and I was blown away by the ferocity of the songs on that platter, I couldn’t wait to see what their new one had in store. A friend who had heard an advance copy of it told me I would love a track called ‘Gaze’ and he wasn’t wrong.

From the off ‘Gaze’ is a blinder. Taking Rollins Band’s ‘Blues Jam’ from the quite incredible ‘The End of Silence’ LP as its blueprint, it drags Henry Rollins from his powerhouse latter-day period and reimagines the song as if it was recorded whilst he fronted Black Flag. I didn’t know that I wanted to hear this until I did, but it’s incredibly clever and something Pissed Jeans must have been aware of when they recorded it. Some of the hooks and accents from vocalist Matt Korvette are spot on in their delivery. His “I’m not innocent, I’m guilty” refrain could easily be a studio offcut from Henry Rollins’ masterpiece.

Elsewhere on this, the band’s fourth album their Sub Pop pedigree shines through. ‘Health Plan’ uses an identikit rip from Nirvana’s ‘Tourettes’ as its intro, and the slower numbers like the Mudhoney-flavoured ‘Loubs’ and ‘Teenage Adult’ expose a real flabby grunge sound emanating from their guitar cabs. Music this dirty hasn’t surfaced since Tad gave up the ghost in 1998. That is a long time to wait for a band to capture the original essence of the grunge movement. It’s in Pissed Jeans’ blood. None of these songs are in-jokes or recorded with a knowing wink. They play it perfectly straight and obviously love the punk and grunge scene they ape so perfectly.

You could play a game of spot the influence when listening to ‘Honeys’, but as their previous records have shown this band is much more than the sum of its parts. Each album shows genuine development from the last. and it doesn’t detract from the quality of any of their older recorded output. Along with Ceremony and the UK’s Flats, Pissed Jeans are proving that off kilter punk-rock is in very rude health at the moment. ‘Honeys’ is an absolute monster of a record in its own right and an early contender for record of 2013.

I originally wrote this for pennyblackmusic.

MARNIE STERN // The Chronicles Of Marnia (Kill Rock Stars)

One of the most interesting and innovative guitar players to come out of the US recently is Marnie Stern. Along with fellow six string virtuoso Kaki King, these two ladies are not only showing that ridiculously technical playing can sound cool in the setting of a pop song, but that incredible full length records can be created time after time as long as the songs themselves doesn’t suffer at the hands of this gifted expertise.

Oddly, if I had received this new Marnie Stern album and was told that it was the latest Yeah Yeah Yeah’s record I would have totally believed it. Putting on the first track ‘Year of the Glad’ seals it but even if I found cause to doubt due to the fact that the guitar playing is far more intricate, clever, technical and experimental than YYY’s had ever committed to wax previously, as soon as Marnie makes quirky monkey noises at the 1.20 minute mark I would have no reason to doubt that Karen O was on the microphone. Put this down to Marnie’s continuing mission to deliver eclectic guitar work within the confines of a catchy pop tune if you willm but once you recognise it the similarities to YYY’s is undeniable.

Saying this it is not a negative thing. ‘The Chronicles of Marnia’ is a far better album than either ‘Show Your Bones’ or ‘It’s Blitz’ ever were. She delivers her best guitar work to date on ‘You Don’t Turn Down’, which combines an enigmatic demonstration of mathematical finger tapping and the thickest crunchy riffs this side of mid-era Led Zeppelin.

If you prefer to be awed by a great tune with massive hooks, then ‘East Side Glory’ takes the floaty melodies from the likes of Juliana Hatfield and the Breeders, yet keeps that incredible guitar playing intact.

The only negative this reviewer can find is that there is nothing on here as whacked out as say ‘Logical Volume’ from her 2007 debut album, a LP I still listen to regularly today. I loved the multi-layered guitars and jarring sonics that ebbed and flowed from the discordant production. Alternatively, this record is a lot cleaner sounding, yet the distorted guitar is enough to avoid accusations of sell out. It will be interesting to see where she goes next, but more to the point it’ll be interesting to see if YYY’s can match this stellar effort later this year. The bar has been raised.

I originally wrote this for pennyblackmusic.

THALIA ZEDEK from COME / UZI / LIVE SKULL // Interview

(July 2013)

Thalia Zedek has been active in bands since the mid 80s. Her ground breaking and criminally underrated works with looped noise in Uzi, New York No Wave with Live Skull and distorted guitar fuelled blues with Come have left indelible marks on all those that have heard them.

Today, Thalia has just released her fourth studio based solo album entitled ‘Via’ on the Thrill Jockey label. Her distinctive smoky vocal rattles throughout the vibrant collection of songs and as always whilst the sales may not have been stellar the song writing and musicianship definitely is. It would appear that Zedek was born to stay underground and her creativity thrives on it.

The day before her recent one off show at The Buffalo Bar in London I caught up with her to discuss the new album and gain some knowledge about her vast history in the underground rock scene.

Lost In Rock: As a youngster I loved the Come album ‘Eleven:Eleven’ enough to follow you through your solo career, up until the current day. What I didn’t know was that before Come you were part of this incredible and intense No Wave New York band called Live Skull, at the moment very little else makes it onto my stereo.

THALIA ZEDEK: You probably know this but I’m not on all the Live Skull releases, I kinda joined half way through.

LIR: Yeah, I was aware of that. Right now I think the ‘Snuffer’ EP is the one for me, I’m sure you are on that one.

TZ: Oh great, I think ‘Bringing Home the Bait’ [debut album released 2 years before Thalia joined] is probably my favourite. I was really into James Lo’s [Live Skull drummer] style. I met them as I went to all their shows in Boston and I was somewhat dismayed when they told me that they were looking for a new singer and asked if I would do it. I was a huge fan so against my better judgement I joined. I think the band changed a bit after Marnie [Greenholz, bass] and James Lo left but that first record I did, the ‘Dusted’ record, it was half James Lo and then half Rich Hutchins on drums but at that point Marnie was so on it.

I joined after they made two records, they did ‘Bringing Home the Bait’ and ‘Cloud One’ and also they did the ‘Pusherman’ EP, which was really good. In fact I found out everything is being re issued on this French label pretty soon [it turns out that record label is called Desire Records and they are just about to release the ‘Bringing Home the Bait’ album, the rest of Live Skull’s catalogue will follow].

I was never the driving force behind them; it was always Mark C and Tom Paine. As I said I sort of came to them at the halfway point and did 2 full lengths and an EP with them before they broke up.

LIR: Do you actually recall recording the Snuffer EP?

TZ: Definitely, yeah, we recorded everything with Martin Bisi who recorded the original Sonic Youth stuff and I think he is still recording now, stuff like The Dresden Dolls, but he’s been in Brooklyn forever and I still see him around once in a while. But, can I remember recording that session? Now I think of it, probably not, it was a while ago. I do remember doing ‘Dusted’ and a bunch of other stuff but I think it was an EP that was maybe recorded at the same time as something else but I don’t think they were left over tracks… I don’t know, they were kind of foggy years for me.

LIR: I read an old interview with yourself from your days in Come and you were talking about your time in Live Skull and you said that you never really felt like a New Yorker.

TZ: I said that?

LIR: You said that, yeah.

TZ: Well people always think I am from New York for some reason but I am definitely not, I know a lot of New Yorkers and New Yorkers are like New Yorkers. You can be a first generation New Yorker or a second generation New Yorker but I didn’t really have any New York in my blood or my history so yeah maybe that was it but what I can say is that I love New York now and I love living there too. It’s one of those cities where I can say that I love living there way more than I can say that I love visiting there. That saying of it’s a nice place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there, well, with New York it’s the opposite. When I would visit the city and play shows there before it was always a little too crazy and it wasn’t until I got to live there that I got to really appreciate what a warm, interesting and cool city it was.

LIR: Compared to New York Boston must feel pretty laid back, almost a lazy, sleepy city.

TZ: I wouldn’t describe Boston as lazy, but it definitely doesn’t have the hustle that New York does. It’s a much, much smaller city and there are a lot of universities there which means there is always an influx of students and that keeps the economy on a more even keel. So I couldn’t say it’s lazy but it is much less urban city.

LIR: Your new solo record, ‘Via’, has been a long time coming it’s been some five years since the release of your last full length, ‘Liars and Prayers’. Why the long gap?

TZ: Some of that is me writing in spurts and there can be a couple of years in between them sometimes, I am not the most prolific writer. It comes in waves for sure and for a while now it’s been two or three years between records minimum. So we pressed the last record and did a bunch of touring on it, we toured in Spain and by then I already had half the songs for the new record and when we got back my drummer quit. I found a new drummer fairly quickly but I was in a little bit of a discouraged mood and I had a bunch of family stuff as well that I was dealing with so that took priority. I did continue to play music but I wasn’t feeling very inspired and I definitely wasn’t thinking I had better put out another record and go out on tour again.

LIR: Plus of course you would feel awful now if you had simply released a half-baked record.

TZ: Yeah but you know I don’t really fall into that category where I put out a record every two years and tour in between them, I’ve always had other jobs to do at home. I’m not the sort of person who wants to be on the road and tour one hundred and fifty days out of the year, I just can’t do it. My relationships are just too important to me and it’s not uncommon for me to get caught up in stuff.

So I had this new drummer and I moved, and my parents moved into town and my father got really ill and passed away, there was a lot of stuff going on. I was playing music that whole time but I was not really doing a lot of shows or thinking about recording. I wanted to but I had enough on my plate to worry about when it was going to happen.

My drummer and me had been playing around a year and a half, maybe two years at that point and writing tons of stuff, just playing and not really recording and then he got offered this amazing job in Buenos Aires and told me that I might wanting to start looking for another drummer and I was just saying “No, I wanna record with you before you leave”. It was just one of those things that kicked me in the ass; I had all these things I’d been jamming on so we got to do them.

LIR: I video you have made for the track ‘Winning Hand’ is such an engrossing watch. It’s a creepy film though with you just staring at the camera and smoking.

TZ: We made that with a pretty well-known artist called Suara Welitoff, she does shows all over the place and I’ve been a model for her for many years. She does a lot of stuff with video and is a photographer and that was actually some footage that she had taken of me that had previously appeared in some of her art shows and we have collaborated in the past when I have done live stuff, she will project stuff while I play my songs. So we asked if we could use one of these videos for one of my songs and that’s the one she chose which uses part of a piece that she’s already made. Funny thing is I quit smoking like four years ago and there I am smoking these cigarettes. In fact if you have a physical copy of the album there is a photo of me on the back taken by Suara, the one with the hands, well that’s a really old photo too. It’s weird to have it all, it’s like “Well you used me so now I can use you.” It’s a symbiotic relationship.

I don’t tell her what to do so that is what she came up with and yeah, it’s very eerie and really not too much of a music video thing but even though it’s me it is kind of engrossing because it’s odd to have someone just looking at you for that long, it’s kinda weird, right? Suara is a pretty interesting person and I would encourage you to check out her stuff if you like that video, all her stuff is really, really cool.

LIR: The lyric “Where I wanted to be by now, Is not this place though I have come far” from ‘Winning Hand’ could mean a lot of different things to different people. Are you talking about your career in music, or does it deal with more personal issues?

TZ: Yeah, it’s fair to say I was thinking of that, I would say that the rest of the song is not about that. It’s a little bit of a struggle for me in terms of the fact I feel unbelievably lucky to do the things that I have done and to be doing what I am doing like even having people interviewing me. I’ve worked in music all of my life with musicians that are so talented and I’ll never ever have that so I don’t take it for granted. I have been so absolutely lucky although other people may look at me and think well, she never really made it. There are always different levels, how do you compare yourself?

I know that I am very, very lucky and I have done way more than I ever thought I would. When you get older you go through that thought of “Should I stop doing this?” Because I am doing it for myself then maybe I shouldn’t be inflicting it on other people, it gets confusing. Touring especially brings a lot of ups and downs and it takes a pretty tough person to do it and I don’t think I always handle it in the best way. There are the extremes, sometimes you can play to a packed theatre for one night in Barcelona and then play to 13 people the next night, it’s really an extreme situation to be in and you have to be a really even keeled and tough skinned person to deal with it.

LIR: Well you have a great bunch of people travelling with you though, which must help?

TZ: I do yeah, the guys that I have been playing with are called the Thalia Zedek Band but I used to go out under my own name. I never thought that I would be playing with them for so long because they are all really great and all have other projects so I thought I would just do it under my own name because of the way as people come and go or would be busy.

LIR: David Curry’s viola playing is exquisite on the new record.

TZ: He is amazing and Mel [Lederman] is a great piano player too, Mel plays on all of my albums from the very beginning and so does Dave [Bryson, Drums], I have a really solid group of guys.

I don’t have a booking agent in Europe right now but I’ve met a lot of cool people on this current tour and I am pretty confident that that we will be able to come over and do a proper tour. I know it would be easier to come over and tour solo but my band is amazing and are a huge part of the sound, they beat playing the songs just on guitar. I really am a band type of person.

LIR: Do any of them bring music to you or is it pretty exclusively your songs that other musicians play on?

TZ: Well as I say they pretty much all have their other projects so they don’t and maybe sometimes I feel like “Do I have to write everything?” But it’s probably better that way. It’s not really like a democracy but I don’t write anyone’s part, I just play with people who understand me and they add stuff to what I am doing but I do have the last word, they know it’s my thing and they like it that I do all of that work.

LIR: Changing the subject now your old band Come has just had a re-release of the some would say classic 1993 album ‘Eleven: Eleven’.  How involved where you in that?

TZ: I was really involved in it, the way it worked out was that Chris Brokaw [guitar] got stuff rolling because he was playing in this pretty great band called Dirt Music with Hugo Race who was in The Birthday Party and their records were being put out by Glitterhouse which was the German label that actually put out the first Come single. So in the course of dealing with Glitterhouse a lot again they got talking and Rembert [Stiewe, founder of Glitterhouse Records] brought it up that he would love to re issue ‘Eleven: Eleven’ as it was one of his favourite records of all time. So we were all a little bummed that we had fallen out as friends so Chris asked us what we thought about re-releasing it and we all agreed that we would love to have it available again.

That was in 2010 and it took years to get it cleared from Beggars Banquet. We were hoping that we could put it out in 2011, I mean wouldn’t that have been cool for ‘Eleven: Eleven’ to come out on 11/11/11?

LIR: Yeah right.

TZ: it was just really stupid contractual stuff and I am just gonna go ahead and say it as I don’t give a shit but Beggars Banquet were saying that “We own this record for ever”. No one could find the contracts and they were insisting that they owned it so we thought “We are just gonna go ahead and do this, we are not waiting anymore”. It’s just stupid record company stuff which is kind of ironic now because it’s out on Matador in the States which is owned by Beggars Banquet so in a way they got it back (laughs). Whatever, you know, we didn’t care really, we just wanted it to come out.

In the meantime from it coming out on Glitterhouse, Matador wanted to do this 25^th anniversary thing and wanted to put together a box CD for it so they contacted us about using one of the songs because they didn’t own them any longer and then they said “Hey, do you want to play a Vegas show and that just seemed like it would be so much fun. Vegas is cool, getting back together 20 years later and playing Vegas? It just seemed like a blast. Sean, Arthur, Me and Chris were really into doing it. So we did that and a warm up show in Boston and we really enjoyed it so we thought we might play a New York show too and we based a few more shows around that.

Now we have the reissue too, I’m not really an archivist but I would say that about 99% of the stuff from the cover that is on there was from stuff that I kept in my basement so yeah I was pretty involved in it. I didn’t put it together or design it but I sent in a lot of the raw materials and tapes.

LIR: ‘Eleven: Eleven’ is generally regarded as your best work, I personally prefer your first solo record ‘Been Here & Gone’ but I understand its appeal. Is it your favourite?

TZ: I recognise that it is due to people’s reaction to it but I didn’t understand why people thought it was so much better than the other stuff, I really liked a lot of what we did afterwards. I never quite grasped why it had the effect on people that it did. I know that a lot of people who had ‘Eleven: Eleven’ didn’t have a lot of the other stuff and when they did that seemed to have a different effect on people.

It wasn’t recorded any differently and the whole process wasn’t different from our other records. I don’t know. Sometimes I will write a song and I think that it’s great and then when you play it live people just don’t get it. It’s hard to tell so I would say no, when we recorded ‘Eleven: Eleven’ at no point did we think that it was going to be an important record, they were just the songs we had at the time like all of our other records. It’s just for whatever reason this one ended up touching people in a certain way.

LIR: Are there any plans to write new material with Come?

TZ: I don’t think that anybody has any interest in it, I was offered it a couple of times and I had a couple of songs kicking around that maybe we could have done something new with on this tour but I just don’t think so. For one thing logistically it would be really difficult but for another thing I think people have different lives now that maybe wouldn’t allow for it. We don’t really talk about it but the couple of times that it has come up nobody has been really into it.

LIR: And finally Thalia, what do you feel is your greatest musical achievement so far?

TZ: Um… I really liked this record I did with a band called Uzi, it was before Live Skull and I listen to that record sometimes now that Matador have reissued it and I just think, man, we were really ahead of our time and now it does not sound dated at all. We did some really cool stuff with tape loops and things like that.

I really like ‘Been Here & Gone’ too. I hadn’t listened to that record in ages and this winter it was on my iPod on the way to work and I thought it was just an amazing record. I literally hadn’t listened to it in years and it really gave me the idea of what I did this past March with a residency type of thing where I did all of my records in a row. That whole idea came from that listen of ‘Been Here & Gone’.

The record I still play most off of though would be the first one I did for Thrill Jockey, ‘Trust Not Those in Whom Without Some Touch of Madness’. Some of those have become staples but I really loved revisiting those songs from ‘Been Here & Gone’, man, Chris Brokaw plays such beautiful slide guitar on it. That record went out of print and I put it back in print myself so I could have it with me on the tour. I found out when I was doing this residency by asking Matador for some copies and they told me it was out of print. I had no idea and they told me that [the copywrite] had reverted back to me. I was like Jeez, thanks for telling me, so then I said what about iTunes and they said “no, we took it off iTunes too” so it was literally not out there anymore so I asked them to send me everything they had straight away and I re did it myself so now it’s out at least.

LIR: Thalia, thank you.

MUDHONEY // Interview

(March 2013)

If you were to order a package of albums from Sub Pop, the chance is that the manager at the relatively small warehouse at S.P.H.Q. would pack your records and send them on their way. Imagine if you will that that manager was none other than Mark Arm himself. The very Mark Arm who sings on that Green River LP you just ordered and plays his raw guitar on that latest Mudhoney CD that you just purchased. That’s like going to watch England play football and have Wayne Rooney polish the seat for you before you sit down. Well, it is a close enough analogy. It seems like madness and yet it actually does happen. If ever there was a humble man, content with his lot, then that man is Mark Arm right now.

He has every reason to be of course. His obsession with music which began during high school has blossomed into many projects over the years. From seminal Seattle rockers Monkeywrench to his raggedy punk folk solo career which tragically lasted for only one single, Mark Arm has played and sung on some of the greatest guitar music from the last thirty years in our eyes. He is most well-known, of course, for his work with Mudhoney who, along with Nirvana and the Melvins ushered in the grunge era in the late 80s and early 90s. What’s more the band is still active and vital today.

Not only has he achieved all this but he also has that aformentioned pretty cool job to boot damn him, with the label that he has spent most of his adult life on, which is where I take their chance to call him whilst he is on a well-earned break.

LIR: Having now spent half your life in Mudhoney, does it seem like twenty-five years to you?

MA: Hmmm, I suppose if I think about it (Laughs). There are times when I look back on Green River, and that seems like a real long time ago, and I was only in them for three years (Laughs). Hmmm, I guess it has been half my life. Yeah, weird.

LIR: You started your first band, Mr. Epp And The Calculations when you were at school. Did the young Mark Arm ever envision he would still be making music at fifty?

MA: No, absolutely not. There is kind of a funny story with that band, Mr. Epp. It started off as this imaginary thing with my friends at high school but then we actually started buying guitars and talking about maybe starting to write songs, which should be “songs” in quotes and we knew some people that had a band so we thought maybe we could play a show with them. One of the guys dropped out and he said, “I don’t want to make music my life,” which I thought was the most ridiculous thing to say at that point. I thought how could this ever end up being more than this stupid little thing that we are doing right now? And here I am thirty years later still playing music. So I guess Peter Wick (the splitter in question) was right.

I remember how exciting it was when Mr Epp had their very first single put out. The first thing that I had been a part of was in my hands. I was dancing around my bedroom with the thing in my hand, you know, like “Look at this!” And it’s really not that great when I listen to it know but at the time I was just amazed. It makes things seem more real. I often wonder if kids today that only post things on the internet and don’t get to produce anything tangible get that same feeling as I did then.

LIR: You’ve been quoted in the past as saying that you are not one for nostalgia and you live in the now, yet already this year there are plans for a live DVD of Mudhoney’s first European show and a documentary movie which charts the whole history of the band?

MA: Well Ryan Short, the film maker, came up to us. He did the Tad documentary, and I was interviewed in that, and later on he approached us you know, like “I’ve got an idea for another movie, it’s you!” You know with that Tad documentary there was conflict with the band getting totally fucked over by record labels and circumstance, and I was like “But what’s the story with us? We are still together and all friends, and there is no big conflict or anything like that, so what’s the story going to be (Laughs)?” That didn’t stop him.

LIR: With all the musical history that you have been part of, whether a willing participant or not, I would have thought you have an excellent autobiography in you. Although saying that, you are incredibly busy on the promo treadmill too. Have you ever thought about writing it all down?

MA: Ha. No, this is plenty right now. You know of Keith Cameron?

LIR: Yeah, of course, he did Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins interviews for ‘NME’ back in the day.

MA: He is working on a book on us and that will more in-depth than the movie, obviously. There are all sorts of weird things going on. You know we played with Motorhead a couple of years ago, and Lemmy said to me that if you keep hanging around long enough people will call you a legend (Laughs).

LIR: You are about to release a new album and you have a tour to back it up. Is it somewhat of a relief to get off the nostalgia train and look forward again.

MA: Yeah, well it all comes together at the same time. It’s not like I’ll say, “Hey, we can’t talk about the past because we have this new record.” I’m always happy to talk about both; the past is part of us you know?

LIR: Well, there has been a five year gap between ‘The Lucky Ones’ which was your last album and the new one. I understand that you all have family and other work commitments, but was that whole period spend crafting the new record?

MA: No, we started compiling riffs in 2011. The trouble is that we can’t always get together all that often. So if we have a tour that comes up we have to rehearse current material and older material, and get that ready for the tour instead of working on newer songs. It’s an either/or situation because Steve (Turner, guitars-PW) lives in Portland in Oregon, so he can only come up once every week or every two weeks so it didn’t seem like we had got momentum going with the new record until last year.

LIR: So it came together in actual fact pretty quickly?

MA: Well, yeah, we stockpiled thirty plus song ideas ,and then it was just a matter of me coming up with lyrics that might fit them.

LIR: And why call it ‘Vanishing Point’?

MA: Well… It’s a reference to the cover art, how with that picture things just go off into the distance, and it also refers to a movie that we all like (hopefully the 1971 turbo charged Dodge Challenger flick and not Viggo Mortensen’s turgid remake – PW). ‘Two Lane Blacktop’ (An even better car movie from 1971 – PW) doesn’t really work in context to the cover art (Laughs).

LIR: That’s a relief that the album title doesn’t refer in any way to the band splitting up.

MA: No, no, no. I hope people don’t read that into it.

LIR: The teaser for the new album that you have pre-released is the fantastic track ‘The Only Son of the Widow from Nain’. That’s referencing I presume the part of the Bible where Jesus demonstrates his power by raising the dead back to life. I see a correlation with your band. Every few years some divine power jolts the band back into being.

MA: (Laughs) That’s a funny one. It’s appropriate and it works but it wasn’t in my mind. More than anything, it’s a very, very belated response to ‘Dig Lazarus Dig’ (Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ 2008 master work). I was just trying to work out who else was supposedly reanimated by the Lord Jesus, and I found out there was this poor unknown person who only goes by the title of the only son of the widow from Nain, and I wanted to do a song from his perspective.

LIR: Another song from the new album that I instantly loved was ‘I Like It Small’. What’s that idea behind that one?

MA: It’s a kind of odd thing. We just had the music down and recorded in my digital recorder at home, the riff and the way that the thing was played.

LIR: It’s very raw pop.

MA: Yeah.

LIR: I have to say that when you brought the horns in for the ‘Under a Billion Suns’ LP (2006 album – PW) I was worried that you might lose that raw and distinctive sound that you have. As it turns out it simply added another dynamic to an already rocking record.

MA: Yeah, I guess it all depends on how you use something like a horn section. When the Rolling Stones used the horn section on ‘Exile On Main Street’, it didn’t make them sound any slicker or even the Saints using horns on ‘Eternally Yours’, that is still a raw record.

LIR: I love Swans recorded output dearly and I spoke to their main guy Michael Gira recently, and he said that what inspires him is death itself and the fear of living a pointless life. Now that is a heavy answer from an equally heavy guy but if I may ask you, outside of other bands what is it that keeps you inspired when working with Mudhoney?

MA: Oh yeah, I think their last two records have been amazing also. For me though, it’s just the enjoyment of it (Laughs). I think Michael is a heavier and far more ponderous person than I. For me it’s the kicks. I don’t expect that there will be a mark that will be made and carry on into the future beyond my demise. I couldn’t really give a shit about what happens after I’m dead, you know? I won’t be there to enjoy it.

LIR: Why that may be true you must be aware that a song such as ‘Touch Me I’m Sick’ which you wrote of course will live on past my or your death. It has become part of the rock music landscape now, like ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ or ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit ‘or ‘Anarchy in the UK’ or even ‘Please, Please Me’? It means that much to many, many people.

MA: Wow, er… I have never heard anyone say it quite like that.

LIR: C’mon…

MA: Well I know that people like the song a lot and I think it’s a great song but… I see it as more of a Sex Pistols ‘Bodies’ type thing.

LIR: After the demise of Green River did you ever consider at that point just jacking in the whole music thing?

MA: No, I was always in other bands. When I was in Green River after Steve quit, he joined the Thrown-Ups and a few months later I joined the Thrown-Ups as a drummer. It was never like I should start a band and try to make it. We were playing in bands to entertain ourselves and be friends. We might say “You know it would be awesome to visit Europe sometime or even just tour a place that isn’t in the Pacific North-West.”

With Green River, we did try to do a couple of tours in the States, but they weren’t very successful at all ,and with them ending with at least my mind-set I never thought, “Well, that’s it with that I might as well go and be an accountant now”. It wasn’t a career path for me. It was just a weird fluke that I was able to quit my job when Mudhoney went on their first tour. Of course when I came back off tour I had to live with my girlfriend and her mum and that was pretty horrible as you can imagine. “What’s this guy doing here? You get him out of our house.”

LIR: I bet you were loved.

MA: Oh, yeah.

LIR: At the beginning of Mudhoney’s rise in 1990 you did a solo single called ‘The Freewheelin’ Mark Arm’. Have you ever thought about putting out any more solo material at all?

MA: I really enjoy collaborating with people and I don’t feel the need to do it. It’s not like there has been anything that I really want to do that I haven’t already been able to do with Mudhoney, or any of the other bands that I have been in like Monkeywrench or Bloodloss or whatever. I am more inclined to play with other people and be able to bounce ideas around, rather than saying, “I am the captain of this ship and I want it this particular way.” I think that the whole is generally greater than the sum of its parts.

LIR: What was your mind set when you went to record the 7” then?

MA: Well, that was just before Gulf War 1, the first Iraq war, and you could feel that building up, and I was terrified at the notion and seeing people getting all gung-ho for the war. It was horrible. I think I asked Chris Eckman from the Walkabouts to show me the chords of (Bob Dylan’s) ‘Masters of War’, and then I went into the studio. Also I was driving down a street in Seattle called East Lake, which takes maybe 15 to 20 minutes to traverse, and on the course of that drive to downtown I had written all the words to the B- side ‘My Life with Rickets’. It was just a lark.

LIR: You are not afraid to tackle a subject which may end up biting you on the arse, songs like ‘Overblown’ about the grunge scene, or ‘Into Yer Shtik’ making comment on Courtney Love, or even more recently with ‘Hard On for War’ tackling the likes of the war in Afghanistan. With those songs do you think you could have said more or do you sometimes censor yourself to avoid too much backlash?

MA: I don’t think so, I can’t recall any time I’ve done that. I wouldn’t say it’s censoring; it’s more like trying to hone something and get it right.

LIR: With the more recent shows as the initial audience ages with you have you noticed any change to the Mudhoney crowd at shows?

MA: Oh, fuck I don’t know. Sure, people are individuals. Like a snowflake, no two are alike so no two audiences are alike. We are not the sort of band where you are meant to stand back and analyse what’s been going on.

LIR: So no chin strokers then?

MA: Hopefully not. We hope to give people more a visceral experience than an intellectual thought-provoking one.

LIR: Finally for any potential new Mudhoney fans out there do you think there is anything in the band’s back catalogue that they should avoid?

MA: Hmmm, far be it for me to tell people what they should like, I don’t think that’s my place. People will have to figure that out for themselves. They might not find anything they like (Laughs).

LIR: Thank you so very much Mr Mark Arm.

I got this interview thanks to the hard work of John Pennyblack. This interview originally appeared in pennyblackmusic.

BOB MOULD – HUSKER DU // Interview

(May 2013)

Bob Mould began his musical career in 1979 when as a 19 year old he formed the legendary Minneapolis punk rock group Hüsker Dü. Between then and their break up 9 years later the band developed their style from 30 second thrash workouts to producing some of the finest skewed rock music that the 80s bore witness too.

If being in one legendary band was not enough Mould then formed Sugar and found great success (especially in the UK) in the early 90s as well. The debut album ‘Copper Blue’ is still generally regarded as the greatest album to have been released in 1992, a year that also saw the release of REM’s ‘Automatic for the People’, Pavement’s ‘Slanted and Enchanted’, PJ Harvey’s ‘Dry’ and Sonic Youth’s ‘Dirty’. This was no small feat and thoroughly well deserved. It would seem that surely lightning wouldn’t strike 3 times for the guy. Would it?

Well, since Sugar’s untimely demise Mould has embarked on an incredible solo career, this has resulted in at least 2 albums that I would consider classics and many other fantastic collections to boot. Don’t believe us? Hit YouTube and you’ll see. The most recent of these classics would be last years fine effort ‘Silver Age’. The record’s tone matches that of the abrasive guitar ridden ‘Copper Blue’ and added in with his recent work with the Foo Fighters this has once again shot Bob into the spotlight.

Speaking via Skype all the way from the U.S. of A Mould gives us the lowdown on the new album, his autobiography and just what happened when he met up with Punk legend Pat Smear.

Lost In Rock: The ‘Silver Age’ album has been out for a while now; when you completed it did you have any idea how popular the album would be if you returned to that guitar saturated Sugar type of sound?

Bob Mould: Well I figured people would enjoy this record because I enjoyed making it immensely. I knew ‘The Decent’ was a pretty solid song and ‘Star Machine’ was a pretty cool song but this whole response to the album, well, I am very happy with it. It had been a while since I had honed in on that type of album I guess. I think everything that led up to the writing and the recording helped, it was all good stuff, the 20 year anniversary of ‘Copper Blue’ coming up and taking 3 years away from writing music and the build-up that that created in my head and having this goal of trying to write a short and loud guitar pop record. Plus all that stuff like hanging out with the Foo Fighters, all these things combined made it really easy for me to put the record together.

LIR: Watching the ‘Star Machine’ video was a joy from beginning to end. Your comedy timing was impeccable. How did that come about?

BM: Jon Wurster [Drums] is such a natural at that stuff but for me it was like pulling teeth. The guy who put together the film is called Jon Glaser and Jon is an American comic who has done a lot of TV, he had a show called Delocated and now he’s on a show on NBC (one of our national networks) called Parks and Recreation. We started with a couple of ideas but Glaser really dialled it in the treatment. We shot it all in one day in New York and we tweaked it a little bit as we went but it’s pretty much all Glaser’s idea and I knew that Jon Wurster would be great in front of the camera so I was like “Just make it about Jon”. He is the guy, so we went with our strong suit, it was pretty funny.

LIR: I’ve noticed from video interviews with you that you have a dry sense of humour and as I said your timing is great, have you ever thought about doing a spoken word show like Henry Rollins does?

BM: That’s funny you should say that, the closest I have gotten to that was in 2011 when the book was released [Bob and Michael Azerrad’s autobiography of Moulds life; ‘See a Little Light’] and I did a lot of touring to promote the book and the format that I was touring in was playing solo and electric for a couple of songs then I would read a passage from the book. For instance I would read the passage from the book from 1988 about being up on the farm in Northern Minnesota and writing ‘Notebook’ and then I might play 4 or 5 songs from ‘Notebook’, then maybe I would jump to another era and describe the process or the environment that I was in that allowed me to write these particular songs or albums. That is the closest I have ever gotten to spoken word.

People that know me know that I can be a pretty funny guy when I want to be but I just never let anybody see it (laughs).

LIR: If there was an offer to do full spoken word do you think you would take it seriously?

BM: I think I’d hold out, I’d rather hold out for my own sit com (laughs). No, what Henry Rollins or Jello Biafra does is incredible. Hats off to what they do, I could never do that. I can be funny in small doses. I don’t think a TV show or a spoken word performance would be good for me.

LIR: Going back to the new album now can you tell us a little bit about the track ‘Keep Believing’?

BM: Yeah, I can give you all the skinny on that one. I t was one of the last songs that I wrote the music for and the first part of the song remained pretty much as it is now. But I had this chorus that was sort of an awkward, clumsy chorus musically; I was trying to do too much with it. So when the 3 of us were doing the basic tracks for the album we looked at each other and said “What do we do with that part” So me and Jon were in the room and I started playing prototypical Bob Mould chord changes and the part where that solo comes in, that ascending riff, the part before all the back end comes in well I just sort of threw it out there as a riff and Jon was like “That sounds good”. It turned out to be a really cool musical bridge that gets you from the front to the back.

So I said just give me 30 seconds and I’ll just dial it in, so we dialled it in and got rid of the other part. When we dropped it in there it was like “A-ha!  That’s it!” It didn’t really need a chorus; it just needed that solo bridge to get it to the end of the song.

So we had the music recorded, then fast forward 2 months and I’m working with my engineer and we have the entire album mixed except for that song and we only have one day left so we have to mix that song and after write words for it. (Laughs) I really have no idea; I know what I sort of wanted it to be but…

So what happens with me, and I’m giving away a little secret here, is that I have these boxes of 45’s that I had when I was a kid and I used to listen to them when I was 5 or 6 years old. I listened to them every day and memorised every stich on them backwards and forwards and whenever I am stumped I go back to that box of singles and then I start playing music and something will happen. But we were in the studio and all my singles were at home so I went on YouTube and started pulling up videos and finding these songs and I pulled up this one song and I thought that’s it, it triggered everything. After that I spent half a day dialling in the words and then the engineer was getting everything ready for me to sing over. By 9 o’clock that night I had created this elaborate puzzle and tribute on the back end of the song about The Byrds and The Beatles, all those things that are the touchstones for me. I spent about an hour singing it and we started piling on the harmonies for another hour. By 10pm I had totally blown my voice and spent the last couple of hours mixing the song. It was pretty crazy but it’s such a beautiful song.

With those words I was floundering all day listening to old songs just to find a way into it and then finally this one song just opened the door.

LIR: And the song?

BM: (silence)

LIR: Okay, was it those singles that got you into music in the first place or did you really the pleasure of music when you left home?

BM: Oh no no, I was into music as a small child, my whole childhood was music. That was my escape from the life that I had. Those records that I am talking about, they kept me alive as a kid, I am looking at them right now as we talk, they are right there.

The beauty of the book for me was that I know these things because that’s who I am but I didn’t understand how woven together everything was and we never know it unless we do take the time to sift through all of it. We can have a general idea that this led to this and that led to that but in writing the book and this is where Azerrad was key was that he had that perspective from the outside of it all. He would say to me “So you knew you were gay when you were five, you grew up in this violent household but you had this music that pulled you through. Okay look at what you did when you were 20?” How do you tell that story, how is it connected?

LIR: Do you think you gave too much away about yourself in the autobiography?

BM: Oh, that’s fine. There are parts of the book that are unflattering to me. There are parts that show how out of my mind I could get, that I could be mean spirited at times and show how controlling I was but again go to the beginning and read those first two chapters and it will all make sense, you’ll see it. It’s not that it explains away all of my poor behaviour in my first 48 years of life and there is a lot of stuff that I am not really proud of in there but it’s an attempt to tell the story as completely as possible, those things had to be in there.

LIR: Did you revisit the Hüsker Dü back catalogue when you were researching the autobiography?

BM: No, those songs are embedded in me, I don’t need to go back and put them on to relive them, I pretty much know how those records go.

I understood going into the book that the allure for doing the book to the publishers was the Hüsker Dü story. It took up more of the book that I would have given it, if I were the King of France I wouldn’t have done as much on that but I understand and I understood it before I agreed to do the book so I have no complaints there, it was part of the deal. With all things being equal then maybe that is the way things are supposed to be and that is how it is, there is no changing that.

LIR: I understand that you must be sick of answering Hüsker Dü questions especially after pretty much everything was discussed in the book but one thing that wasn’t clear in the autobiography was whether you think that the creative and competitive dynamic between you and Grant fuelled the strong song writing in the band? Every Hüsker Dü release contained way more killer than filler.

BM: Um… I think that that’s a major consideration. I tell you, when I look back on the whole thing I think that when the band was working as just us versus the world there was some amazing output but when the band became us versus us it didn’t pay the same dividends. It begun as the 3 of us against the world but when the world noticed us and they started observing that unspoken competition and when the light got shined on it then that is when things started to go a little awry. So yes, it was the best of times, it was also the end times.

I really think that that happens in all parts of our lives, those dynamics with a significant other or with a work collaborator. It’s those things that you all know but you never say and when other people pull at that thread it starts to unravel and it can get really fucked up. Sometimes I think that you should just let it be and not try and unpack everything in your life all the time and then maybe you’ll have this really happy life (laughs). Also be mindful of letting people into your life who try and unpack your shit for you, just say “Wait a minute! We all know that, we don’t need to say anything about it”.

LIR: All recent interviews with you tend to focus on you meeting up with Dave Grohl recently and recording with him, well that’s cool an’ all but what interests me is that you met up with Pat Smear at the same time…

BM: Yes!

LIR: How was that for you being a massive fan of The Germs, how did you two get on, what was he like?

BM: Oh my god, well you know that Dave, he is like the sweetest guy in the world and I love Dave and I am so appreciative of him letting me get a little bit of his spotlight for a brief moment, he didn’t need to do that but… Going down to his place to work on that song, when I walked in at Pat was sitting there I was just like OH MY GOD! I grew up with The Germs, that album was really important to me. I was like “Well yeah this song we are working on is really great but Pat, what was it like working with Joan Jett? (Laughs)” Pat was like huuuuh?

That was a really great experience. And Butch Vig too, Butch and I worked together in Madison, Wisconsin in the original Smart studio back in 1984 I think it was recording a local band there called The Tar Babies so we hadn’t really got together in ages. The whole thing was so great, there’s Pat from The Germs and there’s Butch from the old days and there is Dave… it was like, Shit! This is pretty cool.

LIR: I can’t imagine as a fan what walking into that room must have been like, Pat Smear, My word, he is such an iconic figure in my house.

BM: Well yeah, and then when I was out doing the dates with them in the fall of ’11 we hung out, you know how people run into each other at catering and backstage and so on and Pat and I would just crack each other up. They had this kind of fancy espresso machine every day that showed up in catering and Pat wasn’t into it so I said that you have to try it, I have one at home and it’s awesome. He’s always like “Hmmmmm errrrrrr”. So anyways we had some dinner and I said we’ll have a small bit of desert and then we can have a couple of coffees. When he did it he was like “Holy shit, that stuff is so strong!” I said you are gonna play for three hours you’ll be fine (laughs). That’s the stuff right there, push button espressos.

LIR: Have you begun to put together a follow up to Silver Age as of yet and if so is it going to keep the same tonality?

BM: I’m gonna quit while I am ahead…

Nah, I haven’t had a lot of time to think about it. All I know is that right now with Jason [Narducy, bass] and Jon we are killin’ it, we are really killin’ it live, we really like playing together and its effortless and natural and I think that our interpretations of the Hüsker and Sugar stuff is pretty much spot on without sounding like a cover band. I think ‘Silver Age’ has shown what we can grow into as a 3 piece, like we can just go into a room and make a record. The smart money says more of the same. So we shall see but I can look back at my own history and I sometimes don’t play that sure bet, whether it’s ‘File Under: Easy Listening’ or ‘Modulater’. I know what I can do to my own stuff so for now all I can say is that for now we are gonna play some shows, have some fun and then write some songs and just see what happens.

LIR: Mr Bob Mould thank you very much for giving us your time today.

This interview I conducted originally appeared in pennyblackmusic in May 2013. Click the link. Read till bedtime.

SWANS // Interview

(March 2013)

Before November of 2012, my knowledge of all things Swans was miniscule. I knew they were a band, I knew that much at least, and in 2005 when I saw Dinosaur Jr. in Florida I said to someone in the crush on the way out of the show, “Jesus, that was loud,” and this guy said to me, “You should’ve seen Swans.” After reading a great review of the band’s latest record late last year I Googled them, and in principle at least they sounded fantastic, so I bought their latest album which is called ‘The Seer’.

Needless to say the seed that grows in a music fan when they fall in love with an artist afresh has blossomed in me. With each pay day I buy more of the back catalogue, and each time I get another album or EP it adds to the already exquisite body of work that I can listen to from the band. It turns out that Swans are today as unconventional and un-mainstream as they were when they began shortly after the birth of the New York no wave scene. There may be a huge difference in time and in musical space since they released their first album ‘Filth’ in 1983, but the essence remains the same. Swans do not compromise.

When the opportunity arose to converse with Swans main man Michael Gira via a Skype link connecting me to his HQ in New York, that fanboy in me jumped at it.

LIR: As a newbie to Swans what initially drew me to the group was first of all a positive review of ‘The Seer’ in a magazine, and after an internet search on the band I found the following quote: “If anyone stage dives or moshes at one of our shows, I’ll stop the music. I really hate group identity rituals like that. They are just a microcosm, a little factory workshop exercise in conformism.” I truly identified with that statement. You said this in the 80s. Do you still feel the same way today?

MG: Well yeah, if people do start doing that kind of thing I usually do stop the show, or I at least call out to whatever idiots are doing stuff like that. That’s probably a remnant of our previous, err, hostile relationship with our audience from the 1980s and 1990s.

LIR: It happens a lot in my town and the surrounding scenes, sometimes as soon as an audience is confronted with a distorted guitar. It’s depressing.

MG: It’s just like a football match or something. Well, I went to punk gigs in the 70s in LA, but that shit didn’t really happen there. People were pogoing which is pretty harmless (laughs). When I moved to New York, I would go to the hardcore shows at CBGB, and that behaviour started up about then and it was just frightening beyond description. It was just so stupid and that’s probably where my perception of it comes from. I just thought that latter day punk and certain kinds of hard rock was basically like a training ground for, well, until you go to work at an office or something. There’s no thought.

These days our shows are pretty overwhelming I suppose, and certainly the audience seems to receive it in a pretty intense way, but thankfully we don’t inspire that kind of behaviour.

LIR: Was there a point when you were watching punk and hardcore shows where you thought, “I can do this”, or even “I can do better than this”?

MG: I already knew I could do better than that shit. Going to those punk shows in LA, I became rather nonplussed by that era. There was a lot of music and art in New York at the time that was pretty intense and interesting and not conventional by any stretch of the imagination, so I moved to New York thinking that would be a propitious proving ground with bands like Suicide, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks and the Contortions. It just seemed really powerful to me. It was emotionally raw, but without relying on the typical three chord punk structure and so I moved to New York. It took a long time for me to find my voice and the band to find its voice, but once we did I think we did a good job.

LIR: Even ‘Filth’ has an ominous finality to it.

MG: Yet we went quite a distance and did a lot of different things. You can’t rely on troves. You develop and you have to put yourself on unfamiliar ground which is what we are still trying to do.

LIR: Is there a big fuck you! I’ll do what I want with Swans?

MG: I don’t see Swans as a fuck you, I’ll do whatever I want kind of thing. I look at it as a very positive and joyous experience.

LIR: But you don’t play by conventional rules.

MG: My heroes in life are people that decided to live that way such as, for instance, Jean Jeunet, Francis Bacon or even Genesis P-Orridge; they have all lived their lives through active imaginations.

LIR: The way the 80’s and 90’s press clung onto the mantra of “Swans are so loud and intense you will be sick if you watch them live.” The press was turning your live reputation into a gimmick. That must have infuriated you?

MG: It’s such a cartoon perception of the music. What can you say though? That’s the music press.

LIR: You haven’t faced too much of that gimmicky press since the reformation though.

MG: Yes, that is gratifying. I think that what has happened at least in terms of the audience that comes to see us is that with the advent of the internet being so ubiquitous now that the people that we would naturally gravitate towards, who like the kind of music or experience that we provide can find it, and it weeds out people that would just be reading the music magazines or looking for something trendy or something to just glom onto as an identity. So now people that really want the experience come. That has been an Elysian moment because there have been a lot of years with me banging my head against a wall, all kind of frustrated.

We had an audience in the 90s certainly, but now people just really want the experience so we attempt to provide what we can do.

LIR: With me being a Swans newbie, I find myself each pay buying myself another record in your back catalogue.

MG: Thanks, that’s great to hear. Thank you. I mean that’s how I got into music; it’s the best way to discover artists, just to slowly do it. It is the same with books.

LIR: The album that has struck me the deepest so far is in fact the most recent one, ‘The Seer’. Out of the seven Swans albums that I own it appears to be your most complete work, but you have said that it’s unfinished. What do you mean by that?

MG: Well, it is a revelation that over the last four or five years I suppose that in actuality the music is never finished. It’s just in different states. For instance, most of the songs on that album began by my playing an acoustic guitar and singing a basic groove or melody in my room, and then I will take them to the band and we will patch them out for sometimes months on end in rehearsals, and gradually they morph into a Swans experience rather than just me with my acoustic guitar. That might be just one version of the music. We are constantly pushing the songs live. They are changing with each show and they are always developing and stretching. We find nuances in them and maybe we’ll discard parts and move on to something else even after the record has been recorded, so it is always in movement.

Of course I struggle mightily to make that something that resembles a finished piece in the studio but anything more… I just look at it as that’s how it was then. Even the songs from ‘The Seer’ now that we are playing live are much different than what’s on the record and they keep growing.

The song ‘The Seer’ itself has been known to have a duration of an hour live (Laughs). There are some moments on ‘The Seer’ album and moments on the last cycle of touring that I heard that were inspirational to me, and showed me a way to move forward. Those are these sorts of grooves we have been developing as a band so now we are really pushing that aspect. It doesn’t always work of course, but we always try to push it. It finds us rather than us finding it really.

LIR: That song with its lyric of “I see it all” has an ambiguous spirituality about it.

MG: It is meant to be that way; it is not like the lyrics are telling a story. It is the singer, i.e. me I suppose, but really it is the singer inside this experience and hopefully the channelling of what it provides. When the music is really lit, when it reaches a high point, it feels like we are being lifted up to heaven inside of it and hopefully that translates to the audience as well.

LIR: Have you found time to work on a new record?

MG: I have actually been writing and we have been working on material. What we do is that we have the basic structure of a song and then we take it and play it in front of an audience, like I mentioned, and then it grows and transforms just by attentive playing as a group in front of people. Half the set right now is new and unrecorded material that is still finding its voice, and the other half is things from ‘The Seer’ that are still finding their voice. They are always changing.

LIR: How much stock do you take in the fact that Swans have found a fan base once more and that the love for the band is still passionate, if not more devotional than it ever has been?

MG: Uh…yeah but the thing is with accolades. Obviously they feel a little gratifying, but if you pay too much attention to them you start acting like a parrot and try to replicate that experience just like any Pavlovian dog would. It is great that more people love the shows and we have the ability to keep making music which is really what it’s about.

LIR: You have said that you are inspired by death and the fear of living a pointless life.

MG: Hopefully that should be everyone’s credo (Laughs). We have a finite amount of time on earth, and I think it is important to find your potential and push yourself. Like everyone else I fall into rogue behaviour but, yeah, that is what I am looking for, particularly in the music live. It is a moment of complete abandon when all the work that you have done over the years just empties out and you have an experience that is the result from it. It can be fairly ecstatic live and I live for those moments.

LIR: Let’s talk about the band you created between both of these incarnations of Swans, Angels Of Light. Now Swans is back up and running, can you do both?

MG: That band is on permanent hiatus… well not permanent, but it’s on hiatus. That first album, ‘New Mother’, is quite good; there are lots of great moments on it. Well, that’s what I think when I go back and listen to it which I rarely do because I am quite dissatisfied with my voice. That project was begun after I terminated Swans in the late 90s, and I wanted it to be centred around my ability to write a song on acoustic guitar, and sing it and have it be a strong experience, and then place orchestrations and everything after that fact.

At that time I wanted that to be the way of working. I don’t know if I ever attained that level I should have as a singer but now Swans takes up all of my time. Even my record label, Young God Records, I don’t have time for now. I do the minimum possible. I put out Swans records but I can’t produce and work with other people’s music. Well, at this juncture anyway.

LIR: So where would you recommend a newbie like myself should have started with your vast back catalogue of music? Did I do it right to begin with ‘The Seer’?

MG: Oh yes, absolutely. It contains a lot of elements from the past work but of course it is moving forward as well. I think that’s a good crucible, a good place to test yourself if you want to explore our music. Personally of course I am always interested in what is coming next. I have no idea whether it will live up to ‘The Seer’ or be worse, but the important thing for me is to try and be in a new place and experience a bit of surprise and joy in the music

LIR: Finally is there any record I should avoid?

MG: Oh, ‘The Burning World’, yeah. There are a few good songs on there, but I can’t stand my voice on it. It didn’t really gel. It was a tiptoe in the water towards a more Angels Of Light direction and I think it was an abysmal failure. I would avoid that.

LIR: Got it, I will not spend my hard earned on that one then. Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to speak to us and we can’t wait to hear what Swans comes up with next.

This interview I did with Mr Gira originally appeared in pennyblackmusic magazine.