Deerhunter interview transcript

I did this interview with Bradford Cox of Deerhunter a few weeks ago, in advance of their upcoming Aus/NZ tour. The edited article will run in the Age next Friday, but I'm posting the transcript for the curious. It wasn't one of my better efforts, but I only had 15 minutes, and I get awkward when I'm talking to someone whose music I actually like!

You haven't been doing many interviews recently.

I kinda just shut off from that. Cause I just wanted to concentrate on making music rather than talking about it for a while.

How do the rest of the band feel about that?

I’m sure they’re pretty happy about it. It’s never fun when personalities overshadow what’s important, which is songs. That’s what we’re supposed to be concerned with, just having the best songs possible. 

You're such an outspoken person, people tend to want to focus on that.

It’s hard to calm that down, it’s hard to control that. Cause if you get me started I’ll just talk about anything. I still try to be interesting when I do talk, though. I haven’t change my approach to talking, I try to be open.

Which do you like more, Australian or New Zealand music?

Both. I like bands and I like songs, I’ve never been a person who cares about scenes. I’ve always been offended by that, when people approach music as a geographic thing, oh if you’re from this town you’re going to have this sound.

Of course I do love a lot of bands from Australia and New Zealand, but I think of them as individual bands, I don’t always associate them with where they come from.

What happened to Whitney?

Whitney’s a free spirit. It was never such a huge deal when she joined. It was a fun time for all of us, and if she wanted to go on a tour with us she could still go on a tour. We kinda needed to strip down a little bit. It’s just a musical thing, I don’t want there to be a lot of extra guitar. That way when there is a guitar chorus or something I want it to have more of an effect. And Whitney isn’t that interested in experimenting with different instruments. It’s guitar or nothing.

I saw you play in New York last year, with Times New Viking and the Vivian Girls. Have you deliberately toned yourself down on stage?

I think so. The thing about it is not so much a conscious thing of toning down, as much as it is just concentrating more on musicianship, and really just being interested in songs. I mean I’m a geek, I’m way more interested in guitars and sounds of guitars than I am in showmanship. I mean I enjoy shows when there’s a compelling frontperson, where there’s some charisma. I won't name names, but there’s just a lot of bands now that are so playing up their confrontational image.

Not even one name?

I won’t, because I have a rule about shit-talking, and I don’t want to. But there are bands that seem to just want to get as much attention as possible by showing their disdain for their audiences. Which I loathe, I can’t stand to see an artist treat their audience like shit. And also, it’s been eight years in the making for us to be able to come to Australia. I’m certainly not going to get on stage and start goofing off and acting self-indulgent. I’m going to try to put on a really good show for the band.

Has it been the good response the band's been getting that has made you start to restrain yourself?

I don’t think it’s the good response, I just think you get older. I was 22, I was really young when that stuff happened. Now I’m older and I have so many more different influences. It doesn’t make sense to do the same things over and over.

Do you still feel like an outsider?

Perhaps. Always, definitely I do, but at the same time I feel like we have achieved something and that we connect with people. I feel that I have less to prove. It’s a great feeling. When I make songs now, it’s a good vibe.

I have to just come right out and ask this one - are you still a gay virgin?

Oh yeah, I’m keeping that up. I don’t see that going away any time soon. It’s not a burden, I just enjoy my solitude, and I enjoy music more than I enjoy the company of other people most of the time.

Does Marfan's Syndrome make touring harder for you that for the rest of your bandmates?

It’s possible, but I try not to think about it very much because it’s a dark thing to think about, and there’s so many other things to think about. I just generally don’t think about that kind of stuff. It’s a dark thing.

Touring with Stereolab must have been a life highlight.

It was absolutely amazing. I just really adore them, and it was a great experience. Sometimes you meet people that you idolise and it’s disappointing, but not in that case, it was totally fulfilling.

I've met them a couple of times, Laetitia is just amazing.

She is a force of nature, I love her.

Does playing with Stereolab make you feel like there's other things you dreamed about that might happen?

That’s pretty much it. That was pretty much one of my dreams. Jamming with them on stage…and Tim sold me one of his guitars that was always my favourite guitar. It still has Stereolab press badges affixed to it, so everytime I play it I feel like I’m holding a relic from a museum or something.

Is this what you're going to do for the rest of your life?

This is it. Maybe I might try writing or something else, but I’m definitely not running out of gas. I’ve written thirty songs this month. I always have ideas, I’m always listening to new music and getting ideas.

Judging by the procession of your first three albums, is the next Deerhunter record going to be more straight forward again?

We have some material recorded that’s very straight forward. I’m kind of interested in going in a less straight forward direction again. Having more improvisational things. I think that we can do that now, we have a space that we’ve built out that we can record in very easily. We can edit stuff, I’m more interested in doing something like Faust Tapes, where it’s like little fragments of songs edited together. I’m also into Bob Dylan a lot, so I don’t know if that’s going to have an effect.

Sounds like a great combination.

Yeah, Bob Dylan, Faust Tapes, Missy Elliott.

 

Xiu Xiu transcript

Here's the unedited transcript of an interview I did with Jamie Stewart of Xiu Xiu a couple of weeks ago. I'll post the link to the finished article when it's published Sunday week. He was very nice and I was quite intimidated. At the end I gushed to him about how his music had helped me to stop holding back with my own songwriting, and he was very gracious.
The interview ended suddenly because he got another call, but we were heading into uncomfortable territory anyway so I think he was glad to get rid of me!

Why are you so prolific?
A couple of reasons that I have any idea of, I mean I don’t know what the actual full answer is, but partially I spent a much larger part of my life being in bands that nobody was paying any attention to whatsoever, and weren’t putting records out. It’s only been since I was probably 30 that I’ve had the opportunity to really do anything that anyone could possibly hear, so I think part of it is partially making up for lost time and partially feeling like I’ve possibly fooled someone and I better take as much advantage of it as possible, for as long as its possible to do.
And also since I was 11 I’ve wanted to play in bands, so it’s been the thing that I love to do more than anything else anyway, so it’s not like it’s a hassle or anything. I feel incredibly fortunate to get to make as many records as we make.
You’re a touring demon these days.
Yeah, pretty much. It makes it impossible for me to have any kind of social life, so I don’t really have anything else to do other than work on records. Everyone in the neighbourhood forgot who I was cause I was gone so long.
You’ve said writing songs is not cathartic for you. Why do you do it then?
I don’t really know. I’m not really exactly sure what the personal benefit is for me, or what the underlying personal psychological benefit is it, in lieu of catharsis. It’s funny, I certainly feel a tremendous sense of satisfaction from working on music, but not enough to really explain the overwhelming compulsion to do it. I’m certain there must be some regular reason, but it’s not necessarily how easy it is to do it. I’m sure the reason is really boring.
Are your records slowly becoming more accessible?
There’s nothing that we did when we started that’s really different to what we do now insofar as attempts to be accessible or not accessible. It’s not really something that we think about particularly. We certainly since we started are more popular than when we started but I think that has more to with just that we tour a lot, and are on a supportive record label, and have put a little bit of work into people finding out who we are, and that generally equals the by-product of accessibility, which is people knowing who the band is. With different records we’ve been more interested in pop music and more interested in experimental music, like with the new one that we have, we were very interested in pop music and we made a conscious effort to be more accessible, but with the previous one we were more interested in experimental music, although there was a lot of pop on it. It wasn’t that it was tremendously less successful than the one before that which was more pop oriented, but it was a little less popular. Just in terms of the number of records we sold. There wasn’t a big difference but there was a little difference.
So now you’re trying to win back fans with a pop record?
I think I just said we weren’t doing that with this record. I would expect it to probably be a little more popular than La Foret because it is more pop oriented. But I don’t think it’s a better record than La Foret, I just think it’s a more pop oriented record.
What about the moods expressed? Are you more cheerful now than you were?
Probably, I mean fortunately my life has gotten better and the life of people around me has gotten a little better. But then again, things in politics have gotten worse, almost the worst imaginable. It’s interesting, feeling that happen, an incredible relief as well. I actually could not have gone with life if things were as bad as they were during the making of the first three records. It was an unbearably horrible time of my life, and I thank God that it has improved.
Were the improvements of your own making?
Mostly circumstantial, leading to not feeling so overwhelmed by negative events that it’s possible to make some decisions that are not completely saturated in intense depression and complete tragedy.
I’m not sure how willing you are to talk about the actual events...
My dad went through a really intense mental illness and ended up killing himself. A very close friend of mine…it’s so dramatic to say this, but really betrayed me in a really horrible way. A lot of drinking and drug problems with people around me and personally, just dealing with suicidal issues personally. Now I fortunately live in a safe neighbourhood, but before I was living in incredibly dangerous neighbourhoods, in different parts of Oakland and San Jose. I’m not teaching now but at the time I was teaching at an incredibly difficult school to be at, and the student population coming from most economically depressed areas in the united states. It’s difficult to see that all the time. All these things were happening, all at the exact same time, and a bunch of other boring stuff. I think if any one of those things was happening, it probably would have been difficult enough, but it was just really all that stuff happening all at once. It lead to a pretty severe and violent nervous breakdown on my part, which thankfully things have cleared, because apparently I don’t deal with stress very well!
I was having a rough time, but fortunately things are a little better now. My father’s in a better place and my family clung together during it, I moved to a safe neighbourhood. But the kids at that school, their lives are still a wreck.
What did your dad have to do with Pro Tools?
He worked at DigiDesign on a different program than ProTools. Actually the setup that I have is all just from pieces that he, I will say ‘borrowed’ in quotes. It’s all like weird prototypes and stuff. I actually had to take it in to get serviced, and the guys who worked at the DigiDesign place were like flabbergasted at the setup I had. Half of it had never been released on the market. They were really amused by it and ended up giving me some stuff for free. But he had been in the music business before that, since the 60s. He’d been a record producer and a musician, he taught me a lot about music.
I have a single by one of his bands, We Five. Did you have Tom Jones and Billy Joel in your loungeroom when you were a kid?
I was pretty young when all that stuff was going on, so I don’t remember.
Were you close to your father?
When I was growing up, no, not at all, it veered between never seeing him at all because he was working, or him being in a severe depression and unavailable. It wasn’t until I was probably 25 or 26 that we spent any time together at all. We actually played in a band together, which was really incredibly fun.
He had a nickname in that band, didn’t he?
Mittens. He wore mittens when he played bass.
Tell me about playing music in the 90s with stars from the 80s LA rock scene.
It was just totally by chance. I guess it doesn’t really exist now because of the internet, but at the time people just met each other musically through classified ads in terrible rock magazines. I was really into trying to become a real bass player, and answered an ad from a weird drummer named Barry Schneider, who I’ll never forget as long as I live beause he was my landlord for a while. He’s a very big hulking heavy metal looking guy, and it turned out that he wore a wig, I came into the house one day and he was totally bald, and then he put his wig on me, which totally grossed me out. So he very very briefly played with this producer named Geza X, who was in the Mommymen and produced Black Flag and the Germs and stuff like that. So anyway he introduced me to Geza and through Geza I met people from Devo and (?) and Paul from the Screamers, (?) and people like that. They were all super super nice to me, I kind of didn’t realise until after I moved away what a big deal all those people were. They really snapped me out of playing really wanky fusion bass, they were like ‘quit fucking around!’ I was very very fortunate, I would probably be on a cruise ship playing a six string bass had I not met those people.
Were you writing songs all that time?
I think I was trying to write songs but I didn’t really know how to write songs. Basically writing a random verse and a random chorus and then taping them together and pretending they made a song. In fact, one of the people named David Kendrick, whom I owe my life to, he used to play in Sparks and Devo, he listened to a tape I made, and told me that it wasn’t songs, it was just pieces taped together. Of course my ego was bruised, but thankfully at that point I started listening to music and paying a little more attention. Had I not, I’d probably on the cruise ship, as I said.
There seem to be some aspects of the cut-up aesthetic remaining in your music.
That certainly didn’t go away entirely, I’m still into juxtapositions of stuff, but hopefully it’s a little more coherent.
When did you stop holding back in your songwriting?
Probably right before I turned thirty. I’d been in a bunch of bands that nobody really gave a shit about, they were ok but not great, and I told myself that if nothing happened by the time I would turn thirty, I would just accept music as a hobby and go to grad school. And so it was actually my aforementioned Dad…I spent a whole lot of time working on promotion with the other bands and not that much working on the records. Cause I was freaked out I didn’t know what I was doing, but that obviously lead to not very interesting records. And my Dad told me not to worry about that at all, and just try to make the best record that you could, and then the promotion aspect would take care of itself. So then that record ended up being the first Xiu Xiu record, which is not by any means a total genius masterpiece, but it had the kernel of everything I’ve worked on after that.
It’s often seen as immature, the domain of teenagers, to express such intense emotions.
It is a funny thing, I’m 34 and very very definitely approaching things from a kind of teenage obsession and lunacy about some of the subjects. But it’s certainly not intentional, largely a part of what we’re trying to do is write about things that are going on in our real lives. At the time that the band started and currently a lot of those things have been kind of overdramatic and crazy, so that commitment to writing about real things lead to it being overdramatic and crazy rather than me deciding arbitrarily to write about dramatic things.
Is is strange to inspire such intense reactions from younger audience?
I don’t know if it’s strange, I feel fortunate that people have any kind of reaction whatsoever.
It seems you inspire either intense obsession or aversion.
That seems to be people’s reactions to me as a person, generally, in our out of music. So it’s no big shock.
What does your sister think of Niece’s Pieces?
That was kind of bad news, it did not go over well. At the time that it was written no-one in my family was really paying any attention to anything, so I figured I could write about anything really directly and not have it affect anybody, but that was definitely not the case. Since then we still write about whatever we want to write about but are maybe a little more elusive about the specific person that it’s about, just in an attempt to spare the subject matter’s feelings. We definitely don’t want to make anybody feel bad. That was a big traumatic mess in my family.
If so much of your music is about intense family trauma, why are you in a band with a cousin?
I’m not really sure how to answer the second part, but just when things were falling apart she really helped me out a lot. It seemed like stuff was kind of falling apart with her also, so it was good to have somebody who was cool and who cared about what was going on, and it seemed like she needed some kind of focus, a reason to get out of bed in the morning. So it was definitely a very mutually beneficial arrangement. And totally just by chance she happened to be a fucking badass musician, so it’s all for the good.
Is she Little Panda McElroy? Where does that name come from?
Yeah. Just being drunk
What happened to Sex Life Of Destruction?
I don’t know. One story recently got published in a zine. But the person literally begged me for it, and I kept telling him – and this is why Sex Life Of Destruction is now banished – he told me that he wanted four stories for it, so I sent him four and he only liked one. I kept telling him they weren’t very good, and then he told me they weren’t very good.
Are they really not very good?
I mean it’s funny. I think if I just told someone the premise of each of the stories, then it would be funny, but I’m not a good enough writer to actually make it a compelling read.
Can you tell me the premise of the published story?
OK. In 1996 or 97, IBOPA (Indestructible Beat Of Palo Alto) had some major label interest, and there was this A&R guy who I became friends with. He came up to Santa Fe to hang out. We were halfway friends and also I was halfway trying to get him to sign my band. I didn’t know how independent record stuff worked at all, and now that I’m a little wiser I would never in a billion years take this route, but then I didn’t know any better. So anyway, long story short, he ended up wanting to do it with me but I didn’t want to sleep with him because I didn’t want to be in that position. We were also incredibly drunk, unbelievably drunk. While we were halfway messing around, I tried to breakdance and I cut open my chin really badly and blood was streaming down my chin, and he started giving me a blowjob on the corner, and then all this blood was streaming down my chin into his hair. The climax of the story, so to speak, was when I came there was this incredibly disgusting mixture of blood and come all over everything. And then we went back to my house and reenacted the entire thing. Some of the details of the story which make it more funny are a little bit lost in the retelling. Unbelievably, he and I stayed friends for a couple of years after that.
Round the time of The Promise, you said Xiu Xiu only had a couple more albums in them. Is it an indefinite project now?
My pat answer to that is that we’ll keep doing stuff until we start to suck. I mean, until that time, it seems like the setup that we have, we could probably continue to do it and not have it become dull. And hopefully we’ll know when we suck. I’m at the point where everybody who’s involved with me has other outlets for music, so it’s not like we have this incredibly monolithic, overwhelmingly dull thing. If somebody wants to do something else, they can do whatever else they want.
Has Xiu Xiu always been your band?
Never consciously, I think people’s perception of that probably has more to do with the fact that I’m the singer than anything else. Radiohead is not really Thom Yorke’s band, and the Smiths is not really Morrissey’s band. It’s not a clear subject because I am the only one who has been in the band since the beginning, but there’s no way on earth that anything could have successfully happened if I was just by myself. And the lineup now is pretty regular, Caralee and I have been touring together for almost three years, the people on my recordings are pretty set. We have a new person joining, who has actually been playing on recordings since Knife Play, but he’ll be joining for touring and recording all the time.
In a Pitchfork interview you said The Airforce was about making other people feel bad. Can you elaborate on that?
Although I don’t imagine anyone who was involved would read this in Australia, I don’t know if I can elaborate on that. I was not necessarily a good person to a lot of people last year.
Have you been to Bishop, CA?
Yep.

scott walker article

the finished article can be found at:
http://www.theage.com.au/news/music/scott-free/2006/05/18/1147545456695.html
i did the interview on a thursday and my deadline was the following monday morning, so I would have liked to have a little more time to work on it. But that's show business!

Scott Walker speaks

I interviewed Scott Walker last night, here's the transcript. My questions are edited to make me look smooth and professional, instead of a stammering idiot, but Walker's responses are faily much as is. This will be written up as a 1500 word article over the weekend to be published May 21.

What expectations did you have on the release of The Drift?
I didn’t have any, to tell the truth. I never know which way it’s going to go. I work on the stuff, I’m interested to see what will happen, and in the end I just hope it connects with someone else.
Each new record seems more bare bones than the last. Is this a deliberate process?
What I have to say about the process is that it’s a quite mysterious one, in that it’s all dictated to by the lyric. That’s why I take so long to do the lyric, because the lyric is going to tell me what to do with everything else - tell me what to do with the track, how to sing it, all kinds of things. So in a way it’s all determined by that. On this record you’re right, there are no lush arrangements or anything like that, because there’s nowhere in the lyric that calls for it. So that’s kind of the mysterious process of it all.
Is there a progression in your lyric writing that would account for this process of paring back?
I think there seems to me a kind of mood running on, but who knows when it will change. If I had a romantic lyric or something that pertained to that, then I would have a romantic string section.
But will that really ever happen again?
That’s what I don’t know, because the lyrics aren’t coming up that way, the ideas aren’t coming forth that way. I try to let the process flow as much as possible, because I believe that’s the best way to do it. If I’m forcing it at all, I can always tell. I can always hear it on other people’s work and I can definitely hear it on mine.
Do you have a daily working routine?
It can’t be routine really, because it’s not like writing a novel, because a novel you can get up every morning and do so many pages, you might not keep them all but you can do them. With this, although it isn’t poetry, it’s a bit like writing poetry, you just have to wait for it to happen. Sometimes it’ll take years to do something, or I’ll be working on three different things at once, until the next piece fits in for one of them. And then when that process is done, I’ve got to find the right music to go with it, and I’ve got to find the right arrangement, or non-arrangement, noise in this case.
How much of The Drift was arranged in your head before you recorded it?
Practically all of it. When I go to a studio, it’s only because of discipline learned from the 60s really, because I was taught to think on my feet, in this particular case all the bass parts, all the drum parts, everything will have been done. Because I work with such great musicians, when I get in there they will be able to play them fabulously. It’s pretty much all done, but things happen in the studio and we always allow that to happen. Because when you’re dealing with sound and all kinds of extraneous stuff you have to be open to that as well. It’s pretty faithful.
People always focus on the Heart Of Darkness moments in your songs. Is there humour that they're not picking up on?
I think there’s quite a lot of it, well it’s absurdity, a lot of it. It’s absurd humour, and I just think people have a certain mindset about these things. But if they can manage to listen on a bit to the record then that other stuff will start emerging.
The Donald Duck noises on The Escape are definitely absurd. Where did they spring from?
I was trying to get something matching up to the lyric at the end there, because you know he’s not saying what Donald Duck says, he’s saying what Bugs Bunny says, so you have a kind of combination of two creatures together. They're kind of morphing into each other. I guess that was what was running through my head. With most of my stuff, I’ll leave it to the listener a lot, because although it all takes a long time to put together, nine times out of ten their interpretation of it would be as interesting as mine or moreso. That’s partly what it’s all about.
The songs are densely packed with contrasting political and artistic allusions. Do you want them to be closely examined by the listener?
I’m happy for it to happen, I don’t think it will, I hope that they’ll take it on just as they would perhaps - although like I said it isn’t poetry - but perhaps something like an Eliot thing. Or they’ll just let the rhythm of everything take over, wash over them and accept it for what it is. Many times the songs will start with something we all know, a political idea for instance, but they will end up at the end with the self on its own, whatever that is. The mysterious self on its own. So it takes political things and they act as a springboard into another world basically, they open up as something else.
I'm always left faced with the unknowability of others when I listen to your music.
Of course, we cannot know each other, and we can never really put ourselves in somebody else’s place, in a firing squad or something like that. We can’t know each other basically.
Is The Drift an endpoint?
Well it certainly feels like it. How much further can I explore this? But who knows, I’m always optimistic that I can start something that I can actually tour with, something on a smaller scale. Then my imagination takes over and suddenly I’m working with big forces again, which makes that impossible.
You said something similar in an interview long before The Drift came out.
Well, it obviously didn’t work out, did it? So after I’ve had a little break I’m going to start again and we’ll see where that takes me.
When was the last time you toured?
Oh god, I can’t remember, probably the late 70s or early 80s.
How do you feel about the prospect of touring again?
Well, I’m not the happiest person on tour but it’s simply that this kind of stuff is very difficult to tour with, because it would cost a fortune and nobody would make any money, promoters or nobody would do it. And things like synthesized strings, I mean I would not do that. So that’s my attitude so far. If I find something that I think ‘I can do some gigs with that’ then I’ll do it.
Everyone wonders of course whether the next record will take as long as the others have.
That was a process. During those ten years I’ve been doing other projects as well. Of course half was the record company, and I’ve had deaths in the family, you name it. I’ve had just a lot of things, I mean this record didn’t take ten years to write, it might have taken four or maybe five, but not ten. There were other things happening, people always come and say ‘you took a decade to write that’, but it’s not the case.
How much time have you spent in America in the last 40 years?
If I compound the time, a little over three months, maybe.
Why so little?
I’ve had a good life over here, I was always drawn to Europe anyway, and I don’t know, there’s just never been a call for me to go there.
Has this ever caused any conflict with your family?
I have no family left apart from my daughter. I have a cousin somewhere, but I have no family left.
How about in the past?
Of course, I had people saying ‘why don’t you come over’ but it wasn’t unlivable. Sometimes I’d bring the family over or stuff like that.
Where else have you lived since you left America?
I lived in Holland for about a year and a half, and I lived in Copenhagen for a couple of years.
When was that?
Holland, that would have been probably 69, and Denmark, probably the early 70s I would imagine.
What happened in the late 70s to bring you back to recording your own songs?
We were with a record company that was folding, basically, and they went to all their artists and said ‘look we’re folding, everybody make the records you want to make’. So we got together and made this record Nite Flights, we basically got a free hand to do what we wanted to do. And from then on it kind of clicked, cause I was in some kind of abyss for years, basically. That sort of reopened everything for me.
How do you feel now about your covers album period in the 70s?
Well I was working off contracts. I’d gotten to my fourth record over at Phillips, and we were starting a new record called Til The Band Comes In, not with any particular purpose, we were kind of floundering along. We were carpeted, along with the guy who produced with me, a guy called John Franz, we were carpeted and told ‘well, the fourth album didn’t do that well, you’ve got to come up with something, do some other material, someone else’s material’. And he took me aside and said ‘look, we’ll finish this album that we’re doing, then we’ll do what they want, and later on we can sneak in another thing.’ And of course it didn’t happen, and I started drinking quite heavily. That continued on and on, and finally CBS wanted to sign me so I went over there, and they led me to believe that I was going to be able to do an original album, and that didn’t work out either. Instead of just stopping, which I should have done, I’d take on some expense over here and I’d just keep going. It just got worse and worse, and I was acting in bad faith basically for years. It was a bad thing to be in, so when I did Nite Flights it kind of freed me.
When did you stop drinking?
It would probably be in the mid 70s. I was hanging around with people who were really really drinking quite heavily and started looking at myself and thinking ‘oh dear’. I started to sneak out of it then. Luckily I’m somebody who if really want to stop something I can will it, you know. I was on Valium for years during that period as well, and I know a lot of people can take a long time to get off Valium, they have to cut down their doses gradually, but I just cut it off and sweated it out for a week, and that was OK. It was kind of the same with the booze. I still drink, but it’s like on the weekend or something.
Did fatherhood have any impact on you sobering up?
Oh, no no no, because like with all popstars who have children too early, I was terribly irresponsible. Especially in those days. I was talking to Jarvis Cocker, who’s had a child recently, and I said ‘you’re so lucky to have had your child now’ cause he’s in his forties now, because early on it’s just chaos. Your career’s still going on and all kinds of things like that, it’s just unfortunate for the children.
What's your daughter's name?
Lee.
There's a quote I read where you said 'Once I was a romantic, but I'm not a romantic now'. Is that still accurate?
I would have to go back a long way to find when I was, I was very very young when I was romantic. I can see a romantic situation – I’ll explain something about the song Clara, in a sense it’s a fascist love song and there is romance going on there, but I’m not myself romantic.
What brought about the change away from romance?
I think the romantic thing was all bound up with the first flush of success, and fueled with booze and everything else. By the time I get to Nite Flights it’s pretty much gone.
What do you do with your time when you're not making music?
I do a lot of painting at home. I have a lot of that going on all the time. And I’m always just thinking about the next set of songs coming up, trying to gather ideas. It takes time to do all that stuff.
How much time do you spend alone?
As much time as I can, because that’s where everything comes from, especially now that I’m like this. Everything worth anything comes out of silence, so you have to allow a lot of time for that, and you have to forego a lot of things that other people do to achieve that.
What are you foregoing?
For instance, if you’re invited for drinks or something like that, oftentimes you’ll just have to say ‘no, I’ve got two weeks of this, I’ve to nail this’. I don’t want that distraction, I don’t want to go see the latest thing I don’t film need to see, although on another occasion I might.
Do you have much interaction with popular culture?
Maybe not as much as, I know what’s going on, I know what’s out there. I don’t go to a lot of concerts, but then I never have. If Radiohead’s on I’ll go and see them.
Who do you see as your own musical peers?
I can’t think of anyone who’s exactly doing what I’m doing. My favourite band is Radiohead cause in a sense although the music is different, in another way as far as mood goes or textures, there is some equivalence there. But I think that they’re incredible, the whole band, they played at the Meltdown festival that I curated over here, and everybody’s so good in it, it doesn’t seem to have a weak link. I’m very impressed by them.
Why is the Pulp album your only production credit?
That was quite time-consuming, it can be time-consuming, I mean that went on for nearly six months that record. We weren’t recording the whole time but we were in and out, in and out. You can’t do anything else while that’s on the table, you can’t really settle down to something else. It’s just the time-consuming thing about it. It would just depend on who came forward for whatever reason.
Have you turned down other offers?
A few others. I’m not going to mention any names!
Why didn't your collaboration with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois work out?
It’s a strange thing, I don’t quite remember, but I just remember we all went out to Phil Manzanera’s studio, that’s where they wanted to record it, and he worked in a totally, I never realised, I mean I’d had a couple of meetings with Brian, and I never realised the extent that we worked so differently. Materially I’m pretty prepared when I go in, and I’m not really married to doing absolutely everything from scratch in the studio. I like to have some kind of blueprint or something, and of course my work is a totally different process, it takes so long cause that’s how long it takes. When I get my stuff in, like I said I wait for spontaneity to happen in the studio, but I don’t like to start absolutely from scratch, and that was sort of their method and it just didn’t work out.
A friend asked me ask about your feelings for the filmmaker Robert Bresson.
Well I’m a very big fan and have been for years. In fact when I was working with Leos Carax on Pola X, Leos knew him very well and he was still alive then. But you know he was not getting any finance for his films, still even for who he was, and I think he was in his 80s then. He couldn’t raise the money, cause no-one would insure him you see. Leos said ‘well next time you come over, I’ll introduce you’, and of course he died in the interval and I never got to meet him. He’s a fabulous fabulous filmmaker.
Do you feel an affinity with him in your own struggle to get records made?
Oh yes, although to be honest I haven’t had to struggle too hard. The struggle is a process of making them, for instance when we parted with Phonogram, that was a process that went on and on, but once we parted with them my manager said to me ‘we shouldn’t go to another major, because it’s ridiculous, we don’t make demos, it’s so tough, we can get through it, but it’s so tough to do it. And then they don’t appreciate it when you bring it in, because they don’t know how to market it. We should go somewhere else’. He knew these people at 4AD you see, so they were about the first people he approached. We hadn’t been wandering from company to
Are you happy with the way things have been going?
So far so good, I haven’t been with them that long, but I’m very happy.
Do you still feel like a leper in the music industry?
That's just because when you bring something in to a major, you’d have one fan there, he might be the A&R man there at the time, and he was driving everybody else on, but when you bring it in, people’s faces are on the ground. It’s like you’re bringing in the plague to a major company. Especially nowadays, they’re just a money making machine. They want to make money and that’s understandable, but it’s not always understandable, they should allow for other things to happen. But that’s not the case today.
What do you want from the next few years?
I guess that I don’t know until it happens. It’s a strange process, I would like to reach a point where I can make something quickly, which I’m going to have to do, and see where that takes me. Maybe I’ll do some gigs with it, who knows. And things tend to open up for you unexpectedly, like they did with Tilt. Things will come in, very strange stuff, but you don’t know until they arrive.
Are you a happy man?
At the moment I’m very happy, because I seem to be with this record connecting with a few more people than I’ve ever done before. So each time I hope to move further.
How is your health?
My health is fine, I’m OK in that direction.
Do you have any sense of urgency about releasing more music?
Not really, because like I said before you can’t force it. I guess I’m never going to be as productive as, say, Elton John, but then again I’m not really doing the same kind of thing as him.

Always single launch

Off the beaten track, there's a new record out on my label Chapter Music by Melbourne boy genius Always, called Cruising + Gross Odour. It's a 9 track vinyl single featuring acapellla or percussion-heavy songs about Bear Pride, hanky codes and scandalous gay beats in rural towns. You'll love it a lot, I know.
If you're in Melbourne, come to the single launch on Friday May 12 at Bus Gallery, 117 Little Lonsdale St in the city, from 9pm. I'll be playing first, followed by another Chapter recording artiste Lakes, aka Sean Bailey. Also inter-band music provided by DJ Mystery Caller.
Please come!

keilly

the thing that has stopped me actively looking for keilly is that i have no recollection of her last name. it feels strange to be haunted by people i can only half remember, a little pretentious because if they meant that much to me, surely i'd remember more about them. but i guess the fact that in my mind these women are faded and incomplete only makes them more ghostly.
keilly went out with damien, the first boy i officially fell in love with, when i was sixteen years old. damien moved into the inner-city house where i'd started spending nights between the end of high school and my first year of uni, when i didn't want to or couldn't afford to go home. i'd sleep on the foam sofa in searing summer heat and my tight black jeans would start to stick to my body.
damien was skinny and cute and alcoholic, he played acoustic guitar and made up songs about beer. i knew he probably wasn't gay but i told him i liked him, the first boy i ever did that to, and he said fine, whatever. it didn't really change anything, we remained friends. keilly was at university when i got there, almost impossibly old and mature at the age of about 23, and slumming in perth from sydney for some reason. she seemed sophisticated and intelligent, but she fell for the inarticulate and the immature. other girls didn't like her because she had a reputation for sleeping around, but she preferred the company of men anyway, most of whom were intimidated by her.
as was the fashion in perth during the height of grunge and shoegazing, keilly had long straight henna-dyed hair, and wore flowing, post-hippy dreses. she had a round, pretty face and an excitable, sometimes sarcastic nature. keilly and damien started going out, he was younger than her by three or four years. i had no idea what she thought of me, but i was still hanging around that house and mooning a lot so we got to know each other. one night she told me that i had 'a kind of natural cool' which of course i remember vividly even though so many other details have disappeared.
we became good friends and remained so even after she dropped damien for being too young and hopeless, and started going out with uni's resident death metal head, who was a big soft baby inside a fearsome exterior. keilly also had a pet rat and i stayed a few nights at her house (i wasn't to move out of home until the next year, age 17), in her bed with her white, inquisitive rat.
as well as the young and dumb, keilly also loved older, hairy guys. she fantasised about her professors and her boyfriend's older brother, singer in a local thrash band called elf and the goon gut babies. one day she told me i would get better looking as i got older and said 'won't it be great, when you're 25 we can meet up again and have an affair' . keilly said that about fifteen years ago, and it has been a while since i was 25.
then at the end of the year keilly announced she was going back to sydney. she organised a party at the same house i always crashed at, and everybody went. i had to take a friend to her year 12 school ball (i did a lot of that that year, i was the non-threatening date for gothic girls and their tough younger sisters) but i went afterwards, and when i got to the party keilly was very drunk.
i didn't stay long because i was getting a lift home, but as i was leaving, keilly grabbed me and started making out with me. i had almost no idea what to do, but tried to kiss back. then i left and keilly went back to sydney, and i didn't see her again.
the next day at uni there was a lot of talk that i had gone straight and been seen making out with a girl. i had to laugh.
many years later i went to a bush dance party for new years eve (once and once only!) and ran into damien, who was living in adelaide with another old perth friend. he had no idea what had happened to keilly, or was embarrassed talking about her in front of his new girlfriend, and i couldn't remember why I had been in love with him.

monique

i have a sieve for a brain so i can't be sure i even remember this girl's name properly, but all i know is that whenever i think of monique i get a sad and troubled feeling.
it was my first year of university and i was still a child, only 16 and always trying to turn female friends into my mother. monique was a couple of years older, small, slender and cute, and played pool better than any of the boys at the uni bar. she smoked hand-rolled cigarettes and listened to great music, introducing me to neil young (i must have known "heart of gold" but i'd never heard "down by the river" and in her little white car on the way to the beach it was a revelation), donovan (not quite so cool but still cool) and ed kuepper.
she lived just a few houses away from campus so i took to inviting myself over and sometimes staying the night. i was still living at home in the suburbs at that point, so staying over at a friend's house was an act of freedom for me. also, one of her housemates was good friends with a boy i had a crush on, so in my mind i was killing two birds with one stone, although nothing came of that.
after a while of putting up with me, monique said "guy, i think we'd get on better if you didn't come over to my house so often". i was hurt but i loved her for it.
despite her air of assurance, her great dancing and her skill at pool, the thing was that monique had no confidence. she thought no boy would ever look at her and didn't realise whenever one did, which was often. maybe that's why she stuck with the first guy who made his intentions unavoidably clear, a slightly creepy guy i think i met once at a party, who got monique into heavier drugs than pot or acid. everyone at uni was doing those except me - i hated pot and was too scared to try anything stronger in case i exposed something unacceptable about myself.
for the last year or two of uni i didn't see too much of monique, she finished (dropped out or graduated i'm no longer sure) and i have a feeling that i was a little worried about her, although that might just be hindsight. in 1996 i graduated and moved away to melbourne, but in perth for a holiday a short time later i heard that monique had gone to cambodia with her boyfriend and there died of a heroin overdose.