When you started your solo career in the early 80s, in Great Britain there was a sort of generation of guitarists and songwriters like you, Roddy Frame of Atzec Camera, Edwyn Collins maybe, surely Johnny Marr and others, that in my opinion had a new and fresh attitude towards music. A sort of alternative scene at the discovery of jazz and bossa nova for example but also soul and disco, going against the most abused clichées of rock music. What do you think about it?
I think people have to remember that what punk did was rejecting what had been immediately before, and in particular it rejected the 70s, the excessive side, the progressive rock side, the indulgent side. Once it died away and post punk came, there was a generation of young musicians like myself who were looking beyond the 70s and the 60s for ideas. I grown up with a jazz musician for a father, with older brothers and sister who had quite broad tastes and so I found the music of Joao Gilberto and Chet Baker, and the early 80s seemed very receptive to music that used that kind of artists as an influence. There was a phrase that was used a lot at the time, especially in the NME, and it was “anti-rockist”. It was too macho and thickheaded to fold back on the usual rock stereotypes. If you ask to Johnny Marr, who he was influenced by as a guitarist, he would just say “Motown!”. He just wanted to play Motown riffs, a lot of those early The Smiths grooves are straight out The Supremes. So I think you are right, and there was room for a lot more in underground pop in those days, in all sorts of areas. Perhaps it was only with the coming of Primal Scream in the late 80s, when they rehabilitated The Rolling Stones and then when Oasis came along and rehabilitated The Beatles, that pop slowly grounded to a halt, in terms of its invention and I think we ended up with a backward looking, lots of different niches. There´s no sense of one continual progress, it´s like a river that finally got to the bottom and it spreads right out into this sort of delta of different ideas.
I want to try and make you laugh. I remember a Johnny Marr’s interview in which he told you used to criticize him for playing a Gibson Les Paul, while the guitars of choice in those days were the semi-acoustics, the so called jazz guitars. It´s that true?
Of course. When you are young, you have huge convictions, you are quite stalinist in your beliefs, and certainly I viewed the solid-body electric guitar as the enemy.
But you played the Gibson Les Paul later in you career!
Sure, but I was nineteen! (laughs) What do you expect? I was supposed to have opinions! (more laughs)
How would do you describe your career path? I recognize a circle that from your debut solo album comes to a close with the release of “Hendra”.
I try not to describe it, I know it´s unusual, it`s not a typical career path. I just react to what´s in front of me and what I feel is the right thing to do next. I´m very instinctive, very wrapped up in the the thing I´m involved with any one time.
I just pursue the areas that interest me in the order that they interest me. To somebody coming to me now, yes it might seem confusing. But I just do it, and if it´s good now, it´s good.
Anyway the impression that I had is that you come to the end of a career phase
in a conscious way, one can recognize a sort of pattern, of plan. Twenty years with Everything But the Girl, your remixer career as Lazy Dog, ten years with your Buzzin´ Fly label, and then you next phase again as a solo artist.
I never know what the next thing will be and I always stop when I feel the moment is right, when I feel I´ve said everything I have to say with what I´m doing and I need to change. Lots of people offered me lots of money to carry on djing, I could travel the world all the time and play, and I still get offers to go and djing house music, but I hit a level where I felt that I wasn’t expressing myself honestly by doing it, and that bothers me. I don´t like to fake things. I did ten years of making electronic music, remixing, A&R and I just hit a point where I had to stop. I didn’t really know what the next thing would be until I stopped. I knew it was something that had to do with words and songs, that was just a gut feeling. The first thing I did was to write the book about my parents “Romany and Tom” and then as I finished the book, very unexpectedly, my sister died. And that was a terrible moment for all the family. I went into Christmas in 2012 thinking “What the fuck is happening?” but I came out in January 2013 with a desire to write. I picked up a guitar and I started writing songs. I hadn’t planned it, it just come out very instinctively. And as soon as I started… it felt really good. I started experimenting with new tunings on the guitar, this is the reason why I have all this guitars (he points at the guitars hanging on the wall behind him). I find them so inspiring at the moment. That´s the background of the sound that I´m making now. It just felt fresh, it just felt like something new and I m always looking to be interested, inspired, true to myself as a creative person. I don’t want to play the hits, I don’t want to do the nostalgic thing. I just want to keep doing stuff. And if that means doing it for a few hundred people instead of thousand of people, fine. But that´s what I have to do.
In the song Young Man´s Game you described a bit your experience as a dj. I also remember an interview of yours in which you motivated your decision to retire with the incompatibility between the djs life and the family man´s life:
All djs will say: if you have a family, being a dj is very antisocial. The hours you have to live as a dj are very unusual, you have to sleep during the day and staying awake during the night so you don´t see your family working that way. Young Men´s Game is about getting older as a dj, and realizing that actually everyone in front of you doesn’t get any older, the dancefloor always seems to stay the same age, and yet you are in the booth getting older and I felt my relationship with the audience changing. I felt it tougher to keep going on all night. I felt that I didn’t want to take the next flight to the next gig. I felt that I wasn’t always looking forward to play records and I felt that it wasn’t in a good frame of mind to be in. I didn’t want to cheat people by just turning up and going through the motions. I just felt like “Let the young people have a go!”. Still, I will always love a lot of house and techno.
Coming back to something you mentioned before, I found myself wondering how did you find the strength to tell your own story in times of illness and the story of your family, in the books “Patient” and “Romany and Tom”. You are not the kind of artist that´s a show-off on the stage, Iggy Pop style, getting naked and stage diving and still, you seem to be exceptionally brave writing about very personal and also traumatic events of your life in a very open way:
I´m not interested in what I think. I´m interest in finding common ground between people. If I think about something and I feel very strongly about it I say to myself “Other people must feel the same!”, and if I do this in a very evocative way that tries to capture the moment exactly as it is, people will respond to that and we´ll have a communication and that´s surely what this is all about. That´s one side of it, you could also argue that me and Iggy Pop are both terrible exhibitionists, but in different ways.
There are some recurrent themes in your lyrics: the resilience, the hope in a better future. One can notice that in songs like Spring or Hendra, in which you sing “This rooms are cold but heavenly, and the sun is shining, you know what they say about silver, and lining”:
That´s the lining that never goes away. Hope can fade, but just when all seems lost it can be found again. Even when things are at their worst you have to believe that things will get better because they do. There´s always a break in the clouds. Samuel Beckett wrote “We can´t go on, we must go on!”. It´s an existential conclusion. What else is there but more life? I´m quite a negative, melancholic person but I live with Tracey and she´s very much about finding the good in life. She´s been very good for me in that instance and I think I try to put it in my songs because I think it´s the right way to be. Otherwise, it´s just self pity.
We leave that to Morrissey.
(laughs)
Talking about your collaboration with Bernard Butler, started with the album “Hendra”. You seem to share a certain common ground, a certain british traditon between folk and rock, and to be on the same wave-length you seem to complement each other very well musically:
Right from the beginning we have tried really hard not to talk about other musicians by name, but to talk about the emotion of the music. I don´t say “Be more like that musician”, I just say “Can you be a bit darker there? Can you be a bit angrier here? Can you not play so much there?”. This is the way we talk to each other. We just play. And this is one of the things I love having come from djing, which is not about playing, it´s about playing other people´s records and being almost like a librarian, combining together all this pre-recorded pieces of music… and suddenly I´m back in the room with live drums and a stand-up bass and Bernard and me and it´s alive! And I love it. It´s almost like a jazz quartet, we just play.
It was interesting some time ago, we did a benefit concert for Bert Jansch. Bernard played with him for the last ten years of his life, and I didn’t really know Jansch´s music until Bernard introduced it to me. I thought I wouldn’t like it, I thought that it would be too folky. But I got really into it and I felt that it was a really interesting mixture between beauty and aggression. He seems to be right on the edge between folk and rock. Interestingly enough Neil Young was a big fan and when he found out that Bert was dying in his last years he invited Bert in America to play with him. When I did the concert with Bernard I was really interested in the way we both came to the music. I was looking for the lyrical, melodic side of Bert and Bernard comes from the aggressive string-bending side of his music. It was a great meeting and in a way a little microcosmos of the way we work together. My instinct is for atmosphere, suspension, melancholy. Bernard is like the guy that slams the door, he makes the noise, he cuts across something I do. I play something beautiful, he plays something ragged. It´s a moment that really works, we don’t get in each other´s way but we both be very true to ourselves. It was the same when we recorded “Fever Dream”. We go in the studio, we play similar guitars, pedals, amps but each makes a completely different sound, we come from two different directions. It´s very fascinating.
Can you tell us something about the other artists featured in “Fever Dream”, Marissa Nadler and His Golden Messenger?
A friend of mine in America sent me the first His Golden Messenger album about five years ago. It was just Mike C. Taylor sitting at his kitchen table, recording songs. He´s been in an industrial hardcore band, then in a West Coast rock-pop band called The Court & Sparks, and he resettled back in North Carolina, he studied folk music and he decided that this is what he wants to do. I thought he was really interesting character because he been through this process and he come out of the other end and then he made this record “Bad Debt”, and I loved his voice and his delivery, I like the honesty in his approach. I thought it was quite spiritual but raw at the same time. I wrote to him, I just said “Great record!”. And he got back and said “Thank you very much!”, and we started emailing each other and then we talked about working together and finally this was the right occasion and I invited him to sing on “Fever Dream”. He understood the music, he knew where it was coming from. It was very easy talking to him about music and the way we could do things.
About Marissa Nadler, again I became a big fan of her voice and that kind of gothic atmosphere combined with folk songs, a very interesting combination. I started to have this idea that I wanted a female voice on the final song on the album. The lyrics are about a man reflecting on a relationship and I wanted a female to appear in it. And I could hear the sound of her voice with my voice and it seemed like a really good sound in my head. I didn’t know how to find her so I looked for her on Tweeter. I asked “Is there any chance we could do this?” and she wrote back “I´m coming to London in two weeks, to go to a festival in Belgium. I´ll be at this hotel, for an hour. If you can pick me up and take me to your studio I´ll sing for you”. And one hour turned into three hours.
I have two more questions for you now. Do you ever wake up thinking “I want to work on this beat I have in mind because I want to make some electronic noise again”?
No.
And do you ever write a new tune with Tracey´s voice in your mind?
No! Two honest answers… The other thing is, I don´t write all the time. People imagine “Oh Ben, get´s up everyday and one minute is making a beat, one minute is writing a song the next minute his writing a chapter for his book”. It´s not like that. I have a lot of periods where I´m just thinking an absorbing ideas and finally I feel ready to start a new project, and when I sit down a lot of that stuff seems to just come out. I write quite quickly at that point. It´s a bit like the old school of classical Japanese painting, where they spend years and years thinking about the simplest thing and then… (laughs) after seventeen years thinking about this painting they go (Ben draws quickly in the air something abstract)… and it’s done. Maybe I’m a bit like that.
