NME
Interviews, analogue keyboards, and the rest
29.01.2009Bill Drummond Interview by Mark
14/01/09
Bill Drummond is many things to many different people. In the Seventies he was a member of Big In Japan. When the band came to an end he set up Zoo Records. He later managed The Teardrop Explodes and Echo & The Bunnymen. In 1991, as one half of The KLF, Drummond sold more records than any other artist in the world. He is an artist and controversialist, having once burnt a million pounds. He runs the Curfew Tower in Cushendall on the Antrim coast, a place for artists to work and engage with the local community. He is also the erudite and engaging author of books such as 45 and his latest, 17, an exploration of a new form of making music that casts aside modern musical references and instead uses only the human voice and the surrounding environment.
The new book feels like two things – a hybrid between the personal recollections that made 45 such a fascinating read, and your obsession with this new way of making music, this idea that all contemporary music has run its course. Was it your intention always to write it this way?
I didn’t set out to write the book in a certain way – if you’ve read some of the stuff I have written before you’ll know I write in a very matter-of-fact way, and that’s still the same here. I knew that I wanted to keep the book about music and explore a lot of the things I felt about music. In doing that I had to bring in a lot of other stuff that was happening at the same time in my life. You can’t have music cut off from the rest of your life.
Your writing does have that ‘stream of consciousness’ feel to it, and there are references to the style of people like Kerouac – would you that the lineage of your writing method can be traced back to him?
When I picked up On The Road when I was 19, I hadn’t heard anything about Jack Kerouac – I couldn’t even pronounce his name. I walked into a bookshop, read the blurb on the back; there was no picture of him, nothing, and I didn’t even know what decade it was set in, but I just decided to buy it and read it. From that point onwards I thought, ‘Sod the painting, I want to be a writer’.
There’s a point in the book where you’re in Stockholm working on recordings with 13-year-old children, and you write about the extent to which, at that stage of their lives, they are just starting on this fantastic journey into music. With your idea of ‘the 17’, is it possible to find people who haven’t been saturated with pop culture and therefore influenced by it in terms of their musical perceptions?
When I get into situations when I am recording these kids, I sometimes do think, ‘who the fuck am I?’ Some middle-aged bloke who is trying to say to them, ‘Hey… recorded music… that’s so 20th century’. It just doesn’t wash with them. I know that for me personally, I have arrived at this situation because in my musical life I have gone through a lot of things. And these kids are at the start of their life, they’re finding out about who they are.
Now that we have iPods, we can conceivably have every piece of music we would ever want to listen to in our pockets and we can be listening to it anywhere at any time or any place whilst doing anything. This does fundamentally change our relationship with music and what music people will want to make. There’s a part of me that does think that if these 13-year-olds get to a stage where they are starting to think about wanting to make music they might not want to make stuff that is really accessible, that their peer group can just flip through on their iPods thinking, ‘Nah, I have had enough of that, lets hear 30 seconds of something else’. These kids might want to make music that isn’t that easy – music you have to go to, music you have to find and track down.
Up until now, every generation has had some kind of musical revolution which has defined their identities and lifestyles – from The Beatles to punk, from hip-hop to acid house and dance music. Has there been a music revolution since the early Nineties that has really affected the children and young adults now entering society, and is this in itself anything to be worried about?
I suppose the big changes that have happened are to do with lots of other things affecting people that aren’t strictly musical. The whole MySpace thing, the whole MSN thing. Text messaging. These are the things that define their generation. They haven’t had the same need for a musical revolution. I have a 13-year-old and a 12-year-old, and they listen to a lot of music, but it doesn’t seem to inform them about, ‘This is the type of people that we want to be’ or, ‘This is where we’re at’. They’ll just download a track because they like the tune.
Which I suppose is a very visceral and honest way to react to music.
Yes it’s a very matter-of-fact thing. For the generations you’re talking about, whether it was people in the Sixties or people liking hip-hop, there was still the idea that you went to a shop to buy the music, and there was clothing and an attitude that went with it. That’s changed now, and that situation will never come again. But it also didn’t exist before the Fifties as well.
Let’s talk about the Curfew Tower. Many artists from Northern Ireland and beyond have used it over the years since you bought it to make many different works of art (and I recently interviewed Declan O’Neill, who created the sensational ‘Turf War’ Exhibition). Is it true that you burned a lot of the art in the tower at some point because you felt that the works being created simply were not good enough?
Sadly it’s true, yeah. And I feel bad about it. I got quite angry because a lot of people had been staying there and part of the concept was that everyone who uses the tower leaves a piece of work behind. It felt to me that everyone was leaving the worst elements of what they had done behind, and I felt that was an insult to the people of Cushendall. So I had a ceremonial burning in the back garden.
Because as I understand it, engagement with the people of Cushendall and the wider community is an important element of the usage of the tower…
That is the idea, yes, that the artists somehow engage with the landscape, the tower itself, or the people of the village.
How did you originally come across it?
This goes back to 1992. Before my book Bad Wisdom was published I had this idea that the Internet (which was in its earliest stages of creation) was somehow going to affect the written word, and literature. The idea I had was that the Internet was going to make the book, the paperback, redundant. And so I then thought that this would push the hardback the other way – that the hardback would become the hand-written artefact; a one-off piece of literature that the reader would have to make a journey to engage with, like it used to be in the middle ages. I wanted to get a building that was something like a toll-box – something where we could keep hand-written copies of Bad Wisdom, that people would have to travel to read.
Mark Manning, who I was writing the book with, saw an advert in The Sunday Independent for a tower. It didn’t say where it was; it just had a phone number. I phoned up, found out it was in Northern Ireland, and found out that it wasn’t expensive. So I had the idea that we’d have the hardback copy in the tower, and then we’d put the book on the Internet. Of course, then Penguin came along with a chequebook, and we ended up using the tower in a very different way. The interesting thing is that we did get the big hardback book made, but we didn’t use it, so now it stays in the tower and the artists can draw in it or write a log. For me, this is the best thing about the tower.
FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE 17, VISIT WWW.THE17.ORG.
Grant Gee Interview by Mark
21/12/09
I Interviewed him for a magazine-he’s one of the most prolific music documentary film makers in the UK today with films such as Joy Division (Director), Radiohead’s Meeting People is Easy (Director)and Scott Walker: 30th Century Man (Cinematographer/Editor) to his credit.
■ Given the amount of time you’ve spent around bands I was wondering if there had ever been a time when you’d been filming them and thought to yourself “I wish it was me up there…?”
“Absolutely not! Never. The problem is that as soon as you start working with a band, then it becomes the world of work, and as such it’s very dangerous working with music at all because it very often screws up the simple fan-like enthusiasm you have for things. It’s like seeing the strings and wires behind the illusion – it’s work, it’s constructed, it’s rehearsed and it’s repeated … so no.”
■ I was reading about Scott Walker and the Meltdown festival he curated which you filmed – do you have any thoughts on the musical journey he has taken? The ride from The Walker Brothers to albums like “Tilt” and “The Drift” (which some people find as difficult to listen to as Lou Reed’s “Metal Machine Music”) is really unparalleled in terms of figures from popular music culture…
“Yes, I don’t think there is anyone else like him. That’s why you can make a film like 30th Century Man about him. I love albums like “Tilt” to death – I bought it when it came out and it took me about 5 years before I got my head around it, and now it seems to me like a pop record. And there’s not anything like it.”
■ I noticed a recent reference by the singer from the Arctic Monkeys to “Jackie” in terms of music he found inspiring, and for me I love that part of his career as well, the Jacques Brel stuff.
“The funny thing is that when I was working on that film I got used to thinking of the career as starting in one place and ending up somewhere completely different, but as we were listening to tracks we started to notice similarities. For a start you have to try and imagine what it was like to hear his solo records in 1968, because they did upset people and people did stop buying them – “Scott 4” got to number 70 something in the chart. Talk to people like my parents and they picked up that there was something wrong with those Brel songs. There is a track on that record we heard, and suddenly we could start to see a continuity in his later stuff because there are string drones going on which are very similar to what’s going on on “The Drift” – you can tell that he was trying to do that stuff in the ’60s, it’s just that he didn’t have the vocabulary because there was no-one like him to copy.”
■ Moving on to the Joy Division film – will we ever see another (Joy Division manager and Factory records impresario) Tony Wilson in the music industry again, and is that a good or a bad thing?
“I cant imagine you would in music now … no is the simple answer. It’s funny actually because talking to him and (Factory graphic designer) Peter Saville, if you asked them if there would ever be another “Factory”, they would have said “There is another Factory, and its called Urban Splash Redevelopment Agency”. That was the way they moved, it became not about music, it was about architecture. There’d be no need for a Tony Wilson now because at that time he was a kind of link-man between music culture and a kind of higher culture, and now there’s no need for that link because there’s no underground and there’s no overground. Everything’s on the same plain now.”
■ Which seems a little disappointing …
“I don’t know – pop culture is so completely different now in terms of its position with the wider culture, I can’t even begin to think whether it’s better or worse.”
■ I find it very hard to imagine what it feels like in 2008 to be a 16 year-old starting to be exposed to vibrant, challenging and fresh music.
“Well exactly because if you do want to discover music you go to your laptop in your room, and you can discover the history of popular music without leaving that laptop, and you could do it, if you took a crash course, in about two weeks. You could hear everything, see everything, read about every artist, and buy the documentaries about them. In a world where everything is available to you, that weightlessly, it’s a completely different scenario to having to spend literally years digging stuff out and being a total obsessive and collecting this stuff. Now, no matter how obscure something is, you could find like-minded people to talk all day every day about that stuff, whereas 30 years ago you might go years without meeting someone who had heard of, say, Love. And 30 years ago if you did find someone who had heard of Love you’d form a band with them”.
■ Which reminds me of the now legendary Sex Pistols concert at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall in 1976 – there may have only been about 30–40 people in the room but those people went on to form Joy Division, The Buzzcocks, The Fall and The Smiths – it literally changed the lives of every person in that room, which then changed popular music culture.
“An event just can’t be as obscure as that anymore – it’s not going to have that intensity. It’s like an explosion in a field, because it was completely off the cultural radar. These days everyone would know everything about it immediately.”
■ And it would be on you-tube …
“Of course – and within a week everybody would be able to download everything that band had ever done, rather than having to seek out and make the effort to do that. Once you’ve made that effort and put that investment in, it’s going to mean more to you. Which is why Joy Division are precious in this day and age - it’s because you still have to put some work into finding anything out about them”
■ And I know about the work you did in seeking out this kind of original footage for the film.
“Yeah. Most of it was out there, I knew there was a bootleg called ‘Here are the young men’ made in 1984 with a lot of this stuff on – like all bootleg stuff it’s out there if you want it, but the problem is getting back to the source. That’s where it gets interesting because the closer you get to master footage the more odd the people and situations become. Jon (Savage, author and writer of the film) has a fabulous personal archive – mention anything to him about music from the last 40 years and he’ll probably have it. We both loved that aspect of making the film.”
■ Had you read and been aware of Jon Savage’s work – stuff like England’s Dreaming (his landmark work about Punk and British youth culture in the 1970s)?
“Its weird because I can remember him writing for Melody Maker in the late ’70s and early ’80s, so I always knew about him and who he was. For me I was always very interested in music journalists around that time, because people like Jon and Paul Morley were a serious part of my education really. They were people who were referring my generation to books, art and artists way outside of what we were getting exposed to at school. England’s Dreaming is a fantastic book, and as much as anything I was struck by where that generation of journalists could go – Paul Morley’s become a media pundit of a pretty high order and Jon’s going towards more of a professorial academic angle – the fact that this was about scummy kids in 1977 doesn’t mean that you need to treat the subject less seriously than say the Weimar Republic”.
■ Having now made the film has your opinion changed on the reason why Ian Curtis took his own life?
“What hit me was how in the 1970s, if you had anything wrong with you that was on the borderline of mental health issues, the treatment would be brutal. Epilepsy isn’t a mental health issue but alongside it goes a kind of depression, and the way he would have been treated by the medical profession, and the drugs he would have been put on, would have not helped him in any way. If you’re in a band anyway and are having emotional issues, then taking large amounts of prescribed barbiturates is going to give a 22 year old kid serious problems.”
■ Given your passion for music from this era, do you think John Peel’s assertion that “Teenage Kicks” by the Undertones is the best song ever written, is true?
“Nah. I think ‘Roadrunner’ (Jonathan Richmond) would be my one.”
■ And what’s next?
“Not sure – I’ve been trying to get a film called The Western Lands commissioned this year, it’s about a guy called Jim Perrin who was a climber and is now an astonishing writer. I made a short film about him last year which won some awards, and I thought “Great, the full-length version, 2008, let’s do it” and I just couldn’t get a penny for it which I just couldn’t understand. So I am still kind of pushing for that.”