Although David Bowie is well-known as the artist who changed his image time and time again, Gary Numan has also been a pop chameleon: from alien-chic to Mad Max pastiche; from white-faced/blue haired mannequin to white-suit with red bow-tie gent; and from blonde cyberpunk to current industrial Goth. Numan was born in 1958, London, his father a baggage handler at Heathrow airport, a psycho-geographic space that would have enormous influence for him. From an early age, Newman possessed an enviable ability to know exactly what he wanted from life; he knew that music and planes were central to his plans. As he admits, his education was a disaster, but he soon channelled his energies into his group, Tubeway Army. The band’s first single, ‘Are Friends Electric’ was the surprise No.1 hit of 1979, staying at that position for four weeks. The track had no chorus, the lyrics echoed the paranoid sci-fi narratives of author Philip K. Dick, Numan’s singing possessed the tonality and warmth of a Dalek, while the brooding Minimoog synths sounded like nothing before. From that single’s success, Tubeway’s next album, ‘Replicas’ (1979) went straight to number one. Before the year was out, Numan decided to go solo and released another classic electro-pop song: ‘Cars’. It’s beefed up synth predated the meaty bass lines of techno. The next two albums – ‘The Pleasure Principle’ (1979) and ‘Telekon’ (1980) – again went to number one. In the space of a year, Numan had money, fame and a colossal fan base. The staggering influence of these records on every subsequent synth act is undeniable. Yet there was a drawback. He displeased the music press for expressing admiration for Thatcherism and belief in the individual; he had a well-publicised hair transplant; he ‘retired’ from the music business in 1981 to fly around the world; and his song lyrics seemed to be an abstruse amalgamation of JG Ballard and Philip K Dick which bordered, at times, on a semantic version of a prog rock cover.

After his so-called ‘Machine Phase’, the music began to suffer. ‘Dance’ (1981), ‘I, Assassin’ (1982) and ‘Warriors’ (1983) made him look preposterous while the sound was passé – the complete opposite of ’79. His Mad Max look in 1983 signified a major crisis in identity and musical approach which would continue over the next few albums. As chart success continued to elude him, his ‘hobby’ as a stunt pilot was showing greater promise, hence he considered giving up music to fly commercial aircraft (this has parallels with Ultravox’s John Foxx – the biggest influence on Numan – who actually did leave the music business, albeit for a decade, to do something else). Yet by the 1990s, things were looking up. ‘Cars’ was used in a car advert putting Numan back into the charts. His work was sampled by numerous artists, most notably Armand Van Helden, The Sugababes, and Basement Jaxx. Then, after listening to Depeche Mode’s album ‘Songs of Faith and Devotion’ (1993), Numan had an epiphany and found an aural map of where he wanted to go; it was a much darker industrial approach and, commercially, it saved him. His albums ‘Sacrifice’ (1994), ‘Exile’ (1997), ‘Pure’ (2000) and ‘Jagged’ (2007) were, for the first time in years, critically well-received. Simultaneously, other artists were now citing Numan as a major influence on their music; for example: Nine Inch Nails (who equally influenced Numan’s post-1994 style), Marilyn Manson, The Prodigy, Beck, Africa Bambaata, and many DJs. It seems that Gary Numan has escaped the vitriol of the music press; judging by recent comments, he seems to have finally been recognized as a major player in the birth of British electro pop/rock.

To meet Numan in the (electro?) flesh is a strange experience because of the myths which surround him. In numerous television interviews he comes across as painfully shy which makes one think of the stories of Numan the boy as a social misfit and loner. He’s stated that he probably has a mild form of Asperger’s Syndrome which would explain his communication problems with others. And yet meeting Gary is a revelation. Getting over the hair (which, by the way, looks ‘normal’), it’s apparent that, in the space of his own home, he’s great company: chatty, reflective, humble and very grounded. Although I for one will always have a particular nostalgia for Numan’s ‘Machine Phase’, he’s far less willing to revisit those purely electronic albums. For him, the recent retro-tours were an anathema. He’s a man of the present who is happier pushing the realms of industrial music. And as a final note, he loves his guitar but doesn’t love those synths which made his name. He still has a Minimoog, but it’s somewhere in his garage gathering dust. He doesn’t care.

Adam Locks meets Gary at his home in Sussex to discuss his electro past and his industrial present.

Gary, can we start by talking about your love of flying because, in many ways, it links into the music and the ups and downs of your career. Do you fly still?

Gary Numan “No.”

I didn’t know you’d stopped flying.

GN: “Well, yeah, temporarily. The sort of flying I used to do – for years – was air display flying; aerobatics and all that sort of stuff. That petered out. It got harder and harder to find work for the aeroplane. So many people did it, and so many different kinds of aeroplanes came into it, that my aeroplane became less and less desirable.”

It was a World War 2 plane?

GN: “Yeah, a Harvard. There were other people with them. The thing which really spoilt it for us was that there were a number of people who came into the air show scene who – without trying to be cruel – weren’t particularly good. The aerobatics were poor, if they did any at all; their formation flying was iffy at best, but they were very, very cheap. They did it for the fun of it, for the laugh of it. Well, we were a slightly more professional outfit. We got paid for it. The reason that we were so good is because we practiced constantly. It cost a fortune to be in the air, so we needed the money for the air shows to make it work. But then some guy from down the road with his little Harvard – unlike us who’d need X amount of money – and wanted a laugh and to impress his girlfriend for the afternoon says, “I’ll come along for nothing”. So, you’re buggered. And more and more of that sort of thing crept in to it. There were other reasons, but anyway, it all petered out a little bit. Then my close friend who I flew with was killed in a crash at Goodwood in a Spitfire a few years back and that was the end of it.”

Your flying buddy, Lee, his dad died as well, didn’t he?

GN: “Lee’s dad taught me my aerobatics. He was my mentor. Brilliant pilot. Lee’s superb too. The whole family are just gifted.”

They speak very highly of you. Apparently in the world of aerobatics, you’re known as a “Safe pair of hands”.

GN: “Well, one of my most hairy moments was with Lee. We were coming back from Ireland and the weather closed in. He was in one aeroplane and I was in another. I had my girlfriend in the back of the plane. Anyway, I’m leading and we’re coming back as a pair. As the weather closed in, Lee said that he thought we should go to the Isle of Man. So I said alright even though I had the wrong maps. So he lead and we went into the weather but the Isle of Man was still the best place to go. We just got caught out by poor forecast and being over the sea and not being able to see. We got down to – and I kid you not – about 10- 20 feet under the cliff face, under the cloud base looking up at the cliffs in heavy rain. You couldn’t see the top of the cliff, we were that low and it was that bad. And then having to do these really hard 90 degree turn just on the water going around sailing boats, but always as a pair, always together in formation until we came up over this rise straight on to the end of the runway. He got us right to the edge of the runway. Brilliant.”

Did your girlfriend dump you after that?

GN: “Well, when flying I wasn’t telling her that we’re in a grave situation. I just let her think that it was a nice low level whiz along – which she did. She thought it was all very exciting; so did I, but for different reasons.”

Do you miss flying?

GN: “No. My life now is a father to three. I drive a big white American van with three kids in the back who just want to watch ‘Finding Nemo’ on DVD all of the time.”

So I’m presuming a big reason you don’t fly anymore is because of the obvious danger factor which you’ve been talking about.

GN: “Part of it, yeah.”

I went to the Shoreham air show last year and there was a fatality. Some guy crashed his World War II fighter into one of the playing fields at Lancing College.

GN: “Oh yes, I know. My brother knew him. My brother’s an airline pilot and also a display pilot. The first display team I was in, there were six of us in it. By the time I’d finished and got out of it, four of those six were dead in different crashes. I took thousands of photographs in the years I did it and I’m absolutely convinced that I don’t have one single photograph with everybody in it still alive. Aerobatics is ferocious in its fatality rate.”

But when I’m watching these display teams, I can’t help but think, “There’s just going to be an accident at some point”.

GN: “There are different kinds of display flying. Some is more dangerous than others. But that’s not much doubt about it that formation aerobatics – which is what we did – in relatively low powered aeroplanes, is the most dangerous of all. You’re constantly fighting the fact that you’ve got a great big aeroplane which doesn’t have a huge amount of power to get you out of trouble, but more than enough to get you into it. Very demanding, but that was the challenge of it.”

Did you ever get to fly a Spitfire?

GN: “No, but I always wanted to. Big regret, actually. I decided a long time ago that the only way I’d ever get to fly a Spitfire would be to buy one for myself. That’s one of the reasons I got back into music again. There was a period for quite a few years when the career was really in trouble and it was really demoralising and humiliating for quite a while, but the air show thing was doing really well. So, in one thing I was failing and publically losing face but, in the other area, I was becoming well regarded.”

Did you ever seriously consider leaving the music career behind?

GN: “I thought it was going to happen for me or to me. There was one point in the early nineties – I put out a single called ‘Absolution’ – it sold less than the first single I put out when I was a complete unknown. That’s as grim as you can get and I thought I was finished. My albums had become increasingly poor. I sort of gave up of any ideas of trying to resurrect the career, of getting back on the radio, getting a record contract – I gave up on all that. I went back to doing music as a hobby. I didn’t know if I’d ever get another deal. I was going to try because I hadn’t ‘given up’ giving up. Essentially, it just went back to doing it for the love of doing it. I realised that when I did that, I hadn’t been doing it for that reason for quite some time. I’d been trying to resurrect the career and it had been about getting something back. Therefore, you’re not writing from the heart; you’re writing as part of a process, as a plan; you’re writing things that you think will get you on radio. It’s bizarre, because that is a classic example of selling out – that phrase that gets thrown at you all the time.”

Yes, you’ve been accused of that for much of your career.

GN: “Yeah, I got accused of selling out when ‘Our Friends Electric’ got to number one. I wrote it when I was an unknown. It’s the most unlikely single you’re ever going to hear and yet I’ve sold out because, all of a sudden, it’s sold loads of copies. That’s ridiculous. You sell out in later years when you start writing stuff which you don’t think is particularly great or at least not where your heart is because you want to get back to where you once were. That’s selling out. I did, eventually, but twelve years after they said I did.”

Well, you have had an amazing renaissance in recent years…

GN: “Well, it’s part going back to music as a hobby. When you do it as a hobby with no commercial ambitions or anything else in mind, you’re kind of freed of any pressure. It felt to me like my imagination had been crushed by pressure. I got safer and safer and more and more predictable. As soon as that’s lifted, you suddenly start finding that you’re interested in what you do again. I got interested again. I got interested in other things apart from how frightened I was about my career. You suddenly realise that you’ve got yourself in such a rut.”

Do you also think that, as you had success at such a young age, burnout and loss of creativity was inevitable?

GN: “It never felt like that because I was writing and writing all the time. It’s just that your reasons for doing it become corrupted, not your enthusiasm. Actually, your enthusiasm gets affected too. When you’ve been really successful everything you later do reminds you, to a lesser or greater degree, that you’re not what you once were. Every venue you go to is smaller and hasn’t sold as well; the records you put out don’t sell as much.”

Psychologically, that must be very difficult to cope with.

GN: “Yes, it can be. But that’s where I think one of my key strengths lie. I’ve got two key strengths, I think. One of them is that I’m crushed by nothing. No matter how bad things are, I turn that into ammunition; I turn it into anger or into a desire for vengeance; not all healthy, but none the less, it drives you. I’ve got friends around me who are very different from that. One friend in particular who makes his demos and sends them off, when he gets rejected, his world comes apart. I just get pissed off and it makes me work even harder. I go straight back in the studio and I think, “Fuck you, you cheeky little nasty letter. No need for that”. And I get really angry about it and I see that as a strength. It’s got me out of trouble so many times and I’ve never been demoralised or put off for more than a few minutes at a time.”

When was the most difficult and trying period for you?

GN: “The most difficult period was the late 80s/early 90s.”

Yet you didn’t stop. Very different to John Foxx who in 1985 walked away from the business for nearly a decade.

GN: “But I suppose if you’ve got something else to do. John had other things he could do which were also creative. In a sense, he had somewhere to go. I’m a one trick pony. I’ve got nowhere to go. There was a point one I considered, like my brother, getting commercial license and thinking I should do that. Grab what little bit of money I had left and fly because the music business seemed to be finished.”

Have you always been someone who has looked for a high – I’m thinking here of the flying and the career as a rock star?

GN: “I don’t know if it’s about adrenaline, to be honest.”

You always look very happy on stage. You always look like you’re enjoying yourself.

GN: “Oh yeah, I love all that. The hobbies have always been about machinery; but it’s not going quickly with flying that I find exhilarating (although that happens as a by-product if you like). It’s being able to control a great big powerful thing that would frighten most people and something that works too quickly so they can’t get an understanding of it. I’ve got a compartmentalising brain and I can break things down into tiny little components and work on each one until it all comes together and see how each one has a knock on effect on the next. I’m tailor made for aeroplanes. I’m borderline autistic, apparently; I’ve got Asperger’s and all that so, that sort of brain with its obsessive tendencies and blinkered approach works absolutely brilliantly in music. The reason and I’m so stubbornly persistent in keeping going is part of that, but more so with the flying and also with driving cars.”

You race cars?

GN: “I’ve dabbled from time to time. I did a TV show a while back for Sky called ‘The Race’.”

You nearly won, didn’t you?

GN: “I won the championship; I just didn’t win the final.”

That was Brian Johnson from AC/DC.

GN: “Yeah, well he won two races and I won two, though he won the final.”

Did you get a trophy?

GN: Yes, I got two. I’ll go and get them [Gary goes into another room, then returns with the trophy cups].”

Are you ever tempted to have a drink out of that?

GN: “No. anyway, the instructor who taught us on the programme said that I had an analytical mind and could do this compartmentalising thing. I could break the whole racing process – for example going round a corner – into sections and I don’t mean laboriously, I mean in seconds. I was the only person racing the whole week that didn’t spin off. I did win on the overall leader board and I got one of the trophies for that.”

Have you ever been on ‘Top Gear’ to do the celebrity laps?

GN: “No and it’s a real source of agitation to me.”

You could win it.

GN: “I think that. I think Clarkson’s got a problem with me. I really do.”

Have you met him?

GN: “No, never have. But I really do think he’s got a problem with me. I wrote something in ‘Top Gear’ magazine a while back and then I wrote something else and my little column would go alongside Clarkson’s big column. I kept thinking he’d notice me because of that and think about getting me on the show. But it never happened.”

When you think of some of the odd choice of celebrities they’ve had in the past…

GN: “They do have some big people so I can understand that I might not be famous enough.”

There’s probably going to be another series so maybe we should work on a petition.

GN: “Keep trying.”

Let’s move on. Going back to your early career, apparently your merging of synths and guitars was heavily influenced by Ultravox’s album, ‘Systems of Romance’. How important were Ultravox for you in the early days?

GN: “Primary. There have been two pivotal bands I would say. Ultravox would be the first one and Dépêche Mode would be the other from 1993 with ‘Songs of Faith and Devotion’.”

I didn’t realise they were such an influence on your later work.

GN: “Well, I was for them for quite sometime. ‘Songs of Faith and Devotion’ came out at exactly the same moment I had decided to make music a hobby again. It all happened at the same time. So, that was the album I was listening to. That album took me off in a completely different direction. Since that, my music has been much better and much darker and heavier. That album guided back to a path I should never have got off. After 79/80, I lost my way a little bit or, at least, started to.”

Also on some of those early tracks on the first albums, you used a violin. I’m presuming that was another Ultravox influence?

GN: “Yes, that was Billy Currie. I loved how the violin worked in Ultravox. They set the standard that I was always trying to reach, but never felt that I did although I had more success than them, especially compared to the band in the early days. There were plenty of people doing electronic music – especially after I’d come along. People often lumbered me and Kraftwerk together and that’s very misguided. Kraftwerk were purely electronic. I never was. I did a really safe thing in a way: I just tagged the synthesizer to a regular rock/guitar band. You know, guitar/bass/drums/singer and – oh – synthesizer. I loved it and I thought that was my future; it was a primary instrument, I suppose. Nonetheless, I added it to a professional line-up which is what Ultravox did. They had a very professional line-up, but the emphasis being on the electronic part of it.”

Did you ever see them live?

GN: “Loads of times. I probably saw them ten times.”

Apparently Paul Weller was a big fan as well.

GN: “Really?”

According to Billy Currie, he used to turn up after gigs to talk to them. The thought of The Jam being into Ultravox is very surreal.

GN: “I failed an audition for The Jam.”

Did you?

GN: “Before I was famous, I went for an audition as a guitar player to Woking or wherever they lived. Anyway, I get there and it was Paul Weller; Bruce Foxton was there as well – quite distinctive looking people. They wouldn’t let me play any of my distortion pedals and I wasn’t a very good guitar player; so, without my distortion, I’m fucked. All the stuff I could do was in using the pedals. Take that away and just get back to ability and I couldn’t do it. I didn’t get the job.”

Were you gutted? Thank god you didn’t get into the band.

GN: “No, I didn’t want to be in a band that had clean guitars. I don’t like jangly.”

I just can’t imagine you in The Jam. That would have been so wrong in so many ways.

GN: “Imagine me and Paul Weller trying to get on.”

He’s well-known for being awkward.

GN: “It’s just that he’s a driven man. He’s his own boss and I’m very much the same. We’re singularly focused people.”

I like the story of how you discovered a Moog synthesizer while working in the studio during the making of ‘Replicas’.

GN: “Actually, I used one before that. I’d gone into the studio to make a punk album at a studio called Spaceward in Cambridge. I’d done a few demos there before so I knew the place. This Minimoog had been left behind by a band and was waiting to be collected by a hire company. They let me have a go on it and it was a Eureka moment. So, instead of leaving with a punk album, I came away with this pseudo-electronic thing.”

You couldn’t play it at the time, could you?

GN: “No, no, and I’d never seen a real one before so I had no idea what all the dials and switches did. I couldn’t play keyboards although I knew what to do. So, to answer your question, no, not a clue. But again, very lucky for me that the band before me left it on a setting that was very impressive.”

Was that the setting which gave you that distinctive sound?

GN: “There was a high string sound which was a Polymoog – that was the Vox Humana preset – I didn’t even create it. Shame that. The other was just a low Moog sound which did everything; actually, that’s a lie because then I met Billy Currie and he turned me on to the ARP Odyssey.”

Do you have any of these synths lying around?

GN: “I’ve got a Minimoog somewhere in the garage. It’s in a state. I don’t have any interest in them. I’ve got no affection.”

I’m surprised you’re not nostalgic at all for those instruments.

GN: “Except for my guitar. My guitar I love. It’s been with me at every show I’ve ever done except when it’s been broken. It’s been smashed almost to destruction three times and I’ve had it rebuilt. There’s carbon fibre in it now to hold it together. It’s brilliant. It still works.”

Why don’t you have the same affection for synths like the Minimoog? Is it because they were so often going out of tune when played live?

GN: “No. Synths are just tools. You don’t have the same bodily contact with them. You don’t have the same experience with a keyboard as you do with a guitar. With a guitar, you wear it. A synthesizer is something you touch like a computer keyboard. A guitar is a raw physical thing. Even when you’re not playing a guitar, you’re holding it. You’re triumphant with it. You’re all these things. They are symbolic.”

But then again you’ve got Billy Currie who said that the experience of playing his ARP was so intense, he almost felt like fucking it. So, some keyboardists are very connected to their synths.

GN: “I’ve never had it.”

You never wanted to do that to your ARP?

GN: “No.”

Don’t you think it’s ironic that you created this excitement about electronic music? The floodgates opened once you arrived.

GN: “Well, I like the music. I’m really proud of the music. In its day, it made quite an impact, but I have no affection for those instruments. Saying that, I surprised myself a year or to ago. I was in America and I went into some guitar shop and there was a synthesizer section round the back. There was a Polymoog in there and I went, “Oh, look at that”. I was surprised that I felt like that. I do have a Minimoog; the only reason I kept it was because before the software recreated the Minimoog sound, they were quite valuable, so I thought I’d hang on to it because they kept going up and up in price and I’d choose my right moment to sell it. I missed that moment, obviously, so it’s still sitting out in the garage in a box. I don’t even know exactly where it is.”

You’re very different from many musicians who used those synths in the 70s/80s who are very nostalgic and glassy-eyed about those instruments.

GN: “Well, I was there when that was all we had. I got the best out of them as far as I was concerned – all I wanted out of them anyway and then moved on to things that were more advanced, better, easier.”

You don’t seem nostalgic at all.

GN: “No. Hate it.”

Therefore I presume you get a bit irritated by some people asking that you make your music sound like it did in the past.

GN: “Doing that Replicas tour this year was a real case of humble pie because I’ve been so vocal about being anti-nostalgic, but it was my 30th anniversary and I was 50. It was the album which started it all. It all kind of made sense as an idea. Then I get there and I’m doing it and I’m on stage and I’m thinking, ‘Fuck me. I don’t want to be doing this,’. I really didn’t. I had loads and loads of arguments with Gemma and the band all the way through it. They were saying, “It’s brilliant. That was a really good gig and everybody’s going mad”. By the end of the tour I’d accepted my lot. I’d never stand on stage and let people know that I’m not enjoying it.”

You hid it well.

GN: “Yeah. Towards the end of the tour, I was enjoying it for what it was. I’d accepted it and kind of got use to the idea, but I hate nostalgia with a passion. Perhaps I hate it too much. Perhaps I’m a bit over the top in how much I hate nostalgia and, to a degree, I’ve denied my own history in an attempt to move away from any ‘80s label or association.”

While I can appreciate what you’re doing now, I have to admit I mourn you not wanting to revisit your electronic past a little more.

GN: “When I came out with ‘Our Friends Electric’ I was quite clearly coming at it from a different creative point of view or process than other people at the time. So, I came into it as an innovative person with a different kind of music; for example, the song was too long, it’s got no chorus, you can’t dance to it – everything about it was wrong as far as a single was concerned. I emerged as a left-field kind of artist so I would of assumed that I would be expected to carry on doing that. Each album will be another exploration of something else and yet you come along and people think you’re going to write ‘Cars’ for the rest of your life. Why would someone who is genuinely regarded as being quite innovative and so on, suddenly stop? A moment of success and you stop and you sit there and be safe. But why? I’ve got no excitement in that. There’s no challenge, no satisfaction in any of that. I didn’t get any satisfaction from that ‘Replicas’ tour at all.”

That’s pretty brave – you could easily sit on your laurels a bit and do tour after tour of ‘Replicas’, ‘Telekon’ etc.

GN: “I’ve got heavy pressure to do ‘Pleasure Principle’ next year because Beggars are releasing the album again.”

Will you do a tour for that album?

GN: “No. That ‘Replicas’ tour done me. That was my nostalgia done. Mind you, I can’t say no forever.”

One way of taking the pressure off would by releasing the DVDs of those early 80s tours.

GN: “The one we have is Wembley which is 81.”

So is that going to be released?

GN: “Well, yes if we could find a good copy of it. The original masters are long gone, lost never to be found again. We’re trying to find a decent copy on Laser Disc or something else. We’ve had loads of them sent in but they’re all iffy. We are constantly trying to find that particular show to put out.”

But in terms of retro-tours, that’s it?

GN: “For the time being.”

I went to the London gig of the recent Telekon tour and although it was being filmed for the DVD release, it was impossible not to notice your bass player losing his temper really badly. At one point he started kicking in the speaker stack, then he stormed off the stage for a number of minutes. He didn’t get the sack, did he?

GN: “Rob, no, I didn’t sack him. He’s a great bloke. Post-filming, we covered up the incident as best we could. We’ve mixed out all the crashes and the bangs. He had loads of trouble all through the gig and the back-line man who was supposed to be helping him out, well, Rob was unimpressed with him. Eventually, it was cutting out and he was having a really bad gig and he just got fed up and lost his temper.”

I loved the way you just totally ignored it.

GN: “I did see it. When he came back on stage, I said, ‘Welcome back’. I’m sure it looked dramatic. He’s fantastic though. He’s got his own band called ‘Sulphur’. Genius. He’s a much better guitarist than a bass player. He just did the last year and a half with Marilyn Manson on bass and then, at the end of it, switched to guitar.”

I’m interested in your lyrics. Apparently you’re an avid reader of science-fiction.

GN: “Used to be. I’m now an occasional reader of science-fiction.”

Well, science-fiction writers like Philip K. Dick – who’s cited as an early influence on your music – had a very alternative view of reality. Did he provide any kind of map for you when you were younger, especially in relation to the pressures of identity?

GN: “No. He just fuelled my confusion. I don’t think Philip K. Dick was the person to help figure out things in relation to mapping or guiding.”

No, you’re right. He hardly provided a map, quite the opposite.

GN: “The thing about Philip K. Dick – as with Burroughs in his own way – they leave you with a feeling or a picture. You read this stuff which is very bizarre, but you’re left with an emotion at the end of it and I found that really useful. I think a lot of my stuff attempts to do the same thing.”

What’s interesting as well is that you’re very publically an atheist I was wondering when you lost your faith or did you never have any to start with?

GN: “I never had it. I went to grammar school. I was quite bright when I was a kid. So I passed my 11+, went off to grammar school and, I think it was in my second year, I got my mum and dad to write the school a latter that I didn’t believe in anything. I didn’t want to do anything religious. I didn’t want to learn about God. I thought it a complete waste of my time. To the school’s credit, they went with it. I avoided religious instruction my entire time at grammar school until I got expelled.”

Expelled for what?

GN: “Apparently I was the most unruly pupil that had ever been taught there. Then I went to secondary school and I got expelled from there as well, actually for a similar reason. Then I went to one of these technical colleges because I felt I’d let my mum and dad down. I only went there to get some ‘O’ levels to keep them happy, but it never happened. I didn’t do enough hours to qualify for the next term, so I was asked to leave from the college. But by then I had decided that I wanted to be a rock star anyway.”

How does the asthism fit in your music because, obviously, your music has become increasingly dark?

GN: “It’s a fascinating subject to write about, I’ve got to say that, so it’s almost an easy option in a way. On a day to day basis, there are so many ways in which it flares up in my mind as being ridiculous and dangerous. It’s an incredibly dangerous thing.”

Which atheism or faith?

GN: “Faith. On my album ‘Exile’, I took the point of view that I was wrong, that what if I was wrong, and what if God was real. I decided that if God was real, it would be a terrible, frightening thing. Certain things that were said in the Bible; for example was it Abel who was asked to sacrifice his daughter or son to prove his love for God? Fuck me, that’s barbaric. You honestly created the entire universe and you need that? That is ego massage gone crazy. So it’s bollocks. Anyway, I wrote ‘Exile’ along the lines of, it’s not bollocks, it is real, and therefore it is genuinely terrifying. I loved it. I wrote all this stuff and I know that it was very lyric intensive and very melodic, it felt more like a movie soundtrack than an album. All the songs are interconnected lyrically and tie in with a theme. It was a real labour of love. I really enjoyed it and that was the second album I made after my big change of direction after hearing Depeche Mode’s album. Then I followed that with ‘Pure’, then ‘Jagged’.”

Does that mean the next album will also be driven by themes around religion or anti-religion?

GN: “The problem is that I’ve well over-done it. I just found it so interesting.”

I can understand that. Do you find not having a belief system liberating?

GN: “Well, as I’m getting older, I’m finding I’m frightened of being old and dying. I’m 50 now and so you get to know many people – who have been part of your life – who die. Also death becomes ever more present as a worry at the back of your mind. It’s worrying me far more than it should and I’m just trying to find ways with dealing with that because I’m not use to being frightened.”

Is it the fear of not existing?

GN: “I’m more frightened about becoming incapacitated, some illness that flaws you and then you’re living your life in misery and relying on other people, yet those other people just want you to die because you’re such a pain.”

Yet the fear of being dead is deeply irrational because, obviously, it’s not something you’re going to experience after the event.

GN: “Then again, now I’ve got children – and I love Jemma more than I can say – the thought of not being there, of not seeing things… the song ‘Scanner’ was meant to be a beautiful song about my family, but it ended up being not quite right; it’s about coming back as a ghost and haunting them, not in a horrible way, but trying to protect them even though I’m dead. There is so much I want to see that makes me not want to die.”

Nevertheless, I’m presuming it must be cathartic to have this artistic outlet to express all these feelings.

GN: “To be able to express all these thoughts is a lovely thing to be able to do. I’ve often said that song writing for me is more like a need than a hobby or a passion, and certainly more than a job. I’m not sure what I’d be like if I couldn’t write.”

So music is a kind of therapy for you.

GN: “Absolutely and that’s why I’ve never felt the need for therapy.”

In terms of death, it’s interesting how the vampire myth takes the opposite idea about dying in that one is alive for ever; you can’t die – that’s the other extreme in Gothic horror. Eternal life would be as scary.

GN: “Well, because your life would become one of such total misery. Mind you, if you were a vampire, maybe all your mates would stay alive as well. I wouldn’t have a problem with that.”

Are you tempted to get cryogenically frozen?

GN: “No. In terms of death, I’m going to have to deal with it better because I’m being pathetic. I know it’s pathetic.”

Are you a natural worrier?

GN: “ I seem to be becoming one, yeah. I never used to be. I’ve always been, all my life, optimistic to the point of stupidity. I always thought things would work out no matter what was going on. I always thought I’d be famous. I always thought I’d be a display pilot. I always thought I’d have a perfect marriage. In terms of death, I’ve got to keep thinking that it won’t be today.”

No, it won’t be today. I must admit that I used to have my own anxieties about death after discovering the works of Nietzsche. Obviously I found his writing extremely liberating and exciting with no god, but then panic set in.

GN: “If you take out evil out of the whole god situation – and there is plenty of it – and go back to this idealistic view that Heaven is a beautiful place where you see everyone again, everyone you’ve ever loved, and it’s so peaceful and beautiful that it fills you with joy, that’s lovely. What a great idea. It’s a great comfort for those people who believe in it. I would never want to take somebody’s faith away unless they were fanatical in which case they’re just dangerous – mind you, not that I could do anything. I’m always envious of gentle people with faith because it gives them that cushion when it gets near to the end or when they lose people.”

Moving on, some journalists have said that whereas punk was always against the system, synth-pop was much more behind Thatcherism. You’re often cited as an example of this. Your parents invested money into your career; you used various members of your family for your music business (a bit like Paul Weller in that respect); your invested profits from your music into a number of business ventures; and as you said in 1979: “Originally I wanted to be famous like I wanted to breathe. Now I just want to be rich”. Any comment on the young Numan of that period?

GN: “When the whole fame thing came, I found it to be massively overrated.”

Was that something to do with your slightly different mental wiring?

GN: “Probably. The thing about being famous is – as a young man at the peak of it – it just made you a target of every little spiteful comment, be that a journalist or someone in the street.”

Did people make unpleasant comments at you in the street?

GN: “Oh man, it was fucking horrible. That’s why famous people don’t walk down high streets because they get verbally battered.”

Was this something you were experiencing as far back as 79?

GN: “Especially when you first become famous, the resentment from non-fans is terrifying.”

What sort of comments did you get?

GN: “I got death threats. I got bullets sent in the post. My mum was under police protection. My dad had a petrol bomb put under his car which didn’t go off.”

That’s shocking. Did those sorts of events help your decision to retire from the industry at only 23?

GN: “The thing about retiring was I never intended to get away from the music; I just wanted to get away from touring. What I said was that I was retiring from touring. I got misquoted. Eventually, I got fed up with trying to correct the papers. My decision to retire from touring was because, at that time, I didn’t particularly enjoy it. I really liked being in the music industry. I thought I had an awful lot to learn about being in the studio. I thought that I’d never come close to the sort of quality that Ultravox had achieved, for example; I felt embarrassed by that. I just wanted to go back to the studio and learn how to do it properly. I’d had three number one albums by this point and yet I still felt…”

You didn’t reckon those albums in terms of their production values?

GN: “I didn’t reckon myself at all. I thought I’d just been lucky.”

Yet those albums are revered by so many.

GN: “I just thought that they could have been much better. So, I got out of touring and wanted to go back to the studio and learn; do better, be more adventurous, try different things. The whole thing about touring was – I did two world tours in one year – I just didn’t feel I deserved to be there. I wanted to go back and be proud with what I was doing. I didn’t think what I’d done was rubbish. I was happy with what I’d done, but I felt it was nowhere near as good as the people I admired. So, therefore, I felt undeserving of having more success than them. I was genuinely embarrassed.”

Besides Ultravox, who else did you think should have had more success?

GN: “Well, Ultravox was the main one.”

I presume you’re talking about John Foxx with Ultravox rather than the Midge Ure with the band?

GN: “Fuck, yes. There is no other Ultravox as far as I’m concerned.”

You didn’t like Ultravox with Midge?

GN : “‘Vienna’ is alright. I just don’t like Midge Ure.”

What, you don’t like his music or the man?

GN: “He said some stuff about me once. When I first became famous, there were lots of Bowie comments about me and I said, again and again, you’re missing the point: if you want to look at the band which has influenced me, then you’ve got to look at Ultravox. Ultravox has been my blueprint from the word go. As soon as I found them, that helped shape everything that I was doing. I said that repeatedly. I did my first tour with Billy Currie on keyboards – my Ultravox connection was just fierce. I really loved them and I really wanted them to get back together again. Then fucking Midge Ure comes along – sorry I shouldn’t swear – and reforms Ultravox with Midge Ure in it, not John Foxx, then he goes in the papers and says, ‘The only reason Gary Numan talks about Ultravox is because he stole all their ideas in the first place’. The little shit wasn’t even in it when all that happened. Fucker. I’ve never forgotten it. Never. That was 1979 or early 1980.”

Did you ever confront him about it?

GN: “I’ve never seen him.”

You’ve never met him?

GN: “No, unusually though, because you tend to meet everyone after awhile. I even did a gig in Switzerland a year or two ago and he was doing a gig in the same town just down the road.”

A smaller gig?

GN: “Yeah. Much smaller. Anyway, what he said was just unnecessary. You know, he’d just joined a band which I’d almost single-handedly help resurrect from the grave. Now he was making a huge amount of money and being very successful and I was the primary reason that happened. I’d been a one man bloody advertising campaign for Ultravox when I was one of the biggest acts in the world and that was what I got back from him.”

To be fair to Billy Currie and John Foxx, they were both very complimentary about you in previous interviews with Beatmag.

GN: “That’s nice. I was also really close friends with Warren Cann [drummer with Ultravox] for years. Lovely guy.”

When I interviewed Visage’s Rusty Egan a couple of months ago, he too spoke of Warren. Talking of Rusty, did you ever go the New Romantic clubs, Blitz or Billy’s?

GN: “Both of them. They were the only places you could go without being beaten up.”

You never labelled yourself a New Romantic, did you?

GN: “I did an album called ‘I Assassin’ in ’82 where I mentioned, not in a particularly nice way, the New Romantics in that. But, no, that label of New Romantic was separate from me. I don’t like being under any label. It pigeonholes you in an era, a time – that’s the problem with them. If you’re known as such and such band, then it kind of ties your hands. It’s best to be outside of fashion. The danger is when you’re very unfashionable. That reminds me of a story about Adam Ant. When I got famous and for quite a while afterwards, whenever there was a new band that suddenly made it – particularly an English band – I would always write to them and say welcome to the club. If you ever need to talk about it [I’m here], because it’s not what you think.”

It sounds like the AA. Did you meet Adam Ant?

GN: “Yeah, in the studio. Adam Ant said that I was the only one who said anything nice to him. Everyone else slagged him off. He said it was lovely when he got a telegram from me, so he felt he had to come down to say thank you.”

Obviously you look fantastic for 50 years of age, but is there going to be cut-off point sometime in the future when you say, I really should stop the career now?

GN: “I always thought there was and I used to think that I would have stopped long before now. I’m aging OK actually, but I am very aware of looks. If there comes a point where I feel embarrassed – when I’m too old to be sneering and talking about certain things – then I honestly don’t know what I’ll do. I would hope that I’d have the backbone to say, that’s probably enough now. But what I imagine what I’ll do is go to a plastic surgeon and try to hang on to another five years.”

Would you?

GN: “Oh yeah.”

Someone you’ve been mentioning – John Foxx – has also kept the career going successfully, although on a smaller scale than you.

GN: “I’m a big admirer of John Foxx. I always have been. I always thought it a massive shame that he didn’t become a big pop star.”

Yet he never wanted that.

GN: “Did he not?”

No. He walked away from Ultravox partly because he felt that were on the verge of fame.

GN: “That’s an admirable thing. I just wanted fame more than breathing.”

What’s the situation now when, for example, you pop down to the shops?

GN: “It’s lovely. If you think about it, I’ve been famous thirty years so if I meet anyone thirty or under, I’ve been famous throughout their entire life. So, there’s no hostility there. I’m kind of an institution for people thirty and below. For the next generation above that – from forty to fifty – I’ve been around so long, that they can’t remember when I wasn’t around. The hostility comes, the real problems come, when you first become famous. People are aware that your life has changed fairly dramatically. People assume that you’ve suddenly got pot-loads of money which you haven’t – it takes a while. They assume that there are women draped across you on every street corner and are prepared to do whatever you want; again, not quite true, but there is certainly an improvement, and yet it’s not what they think. They think that everyone falls over for you when, in reality, the vast majority of people didn’t buy your record and actually don’t like you. ‘Are Friends Electric’ was massively successful. It sold a million copies, so 59 million didn’t buy it, but they all know who you are. Quite a few of those 59 million want to tell you that they don’t like you and that they didn’t buy your record, especially when they’re pissed. So, you go out to some place in an evening which you’ve rented before with people that have know you for years. All of a sudden, you’re not wanted. You’re, presumably, a threat, because they want to pick up that bird at the bar and she’ll probably go with you because you’re a pop star. They’re jealous because you’ve got money which you didn’t have the month before. Very quickly you realise that you cannot carry on as you once did. Then you’re called elitist because you don’t go the same placed that you used to.”

That’s the frightening downside of fame.

GN: “Oh yeah.”

But what’s it like now?

GN: “That’s all faded away now. I can’t remember that last time anyone was angry or offensive.”

Talking to you today, you come across as very much ‘the glass is half empty’ type of person.

GN: “The glass is half empty, but I expect it to be fuller soon. I think it’s vital to be truthful, realist, and honest with yourself with a career. Don’t delude yourself that you’re bigger than you are. Don’t pretend you’re what you used to be if you’re not because you then can’t make the right decisions.”

Related to that then, are you a firm believer that you’re only as good as your last album, so tell me about the next album and what direction that’s going to take?

GN: “It’s going to be called ‘Splinter’ and it’ll come out in March, hopefully, next year. I want it to be bigger, heavier, and darker than the last one. We’re just done a thing with ‘Jagged Edge’ where we’ve taken all the songs from the last album and reworked them in different directions. The thing about working at the more high end of technology and music – with a computer and 25,000 plug-ins – is that you can go in a number of different directions. One of the disciplines when you first start to make the record is to pin down that style, that sound for this album, the boundaries if you like; that sounds like a limiting thing, but it isn’t at all: it gives it definition and a cohesive sound. It’s an important thing to establish. With ‘Jagged Edge’, we’ve taken the music in different directions and established different sounds for them to show people what you can do. What we were doing was experimenting with new sounds and new grooves with the long term goal of using what we learn for this for the ‘Splinter’ album.”

Thanks, Gary.

FILM Q&A with Robert Watts, a production maestro on the original ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Indiana Jones’ films.

By Adam Locks

Born in 1938, Robert Watts is one of the most respected and successful British producers in the film industry. Although his name is most well known for his association with the first three ‘Star Wars’ films and first three Indiana Jones movies, he has been involved with many other high profile projects. As the saying goes, ‘A picture speaks a thousand words’, and so does Robert’s CV: it’s an astonishing list that shows him having worked with many of the most significant players in the history of British and American cinema. He’s worked with the likes of Roman Polanski, and Stanley Kubrick, through to being the Production Supervisor on ‘Star Wars’ (George Lucas, 1977) the list really is endless. In a room full of movie props Adam Locks meets a man whose films have been the largest cinematic influence on millions of children from the 1970s and 1980s.

The first thing I must ask you is what does a producer do because many people don’t know? It’s a rather nebulous job title.

R W: I have a stock answer to this. It’s ironic. A producer nurtures talent because he hasn’t got any himself. Obviously though, the director is directing the film, the producer has the overview – what’s yet to come, what’s behind you, and what’s going on now. I was always on set first thing in the morning, middle of the morning, before the lunch break, after the lunch break, the middle of the afternoon, and before the wrap at the end of the day. But I’m not on set all the time. I can’t be. It’s not my job. If I’m sitting on set all day, I’m not running the film. You get a lot of producers who really should be called Executive Producers because they sit on set throughout the day.

It’s amazing how many films you’ve made with George Lucas.

RW: There were six films which defined Lucasfilm really: the three ‘Star Wars’ and the three ‘Indiana Jones’ and I was the only one in the producer capacity who survived all six.

Clearly you were doing something right.

RW: I don’t want to blow my own trumpet…

Why not?

RW: I did what I did, but I got to solo produce the last two Indiana films, ‘Temple of Doom’ and ‘Last Crusade’. Like a lot of us, you suffer from a great deal of self-doubt because these films are so intense and you’ve got to be on all the time because, basically, you’re looking for the problems which are going to occur and delay the production.

Let’s go back to how you got started in the movie business.

RW: The time I got into film in 1960, there really were no film schools. The National Film School had not begun yet; there was the odd course going, but nothing like today at all these universities. The only way in was to become a runner. There was that difficult situation whereby you can’t get into the union until you’ve got a union job, but you can’t get a union job unless you’re in the union.

Catch-22.

RW: Eventually you break through and my first film was ‘A French Mistress’ made in 1960 and I was a runner. Then after the films ‘Fury at Smuggler’s Bay’ and ‘The Secret Ways’, both from 1961, I got a permanent job with a company that made TV commercials and the odd documentary; that was Francis-Montagu Productions. I was with them for two and a half years. While I was with them, I got the union card and then I went back into the film industry as a Second Assistant Director. The Second Assistant Director is basically the lisaon between the office and set; I was the one to tell the actors what time they had to be at the studio, what scenes we were shooting. So, anyway, that’s how it began.

Going back to ‘A French Mistress’ from 1960, it’s a wonderful cast with Ian Bannen, Cecil Parker and Irene Handl. Were you star struck on your first film?

RW: It was ridiculous. Here I am with all these people I’d seen since I was a boy. One day at Shepperton I was walking past the stars’ dressing rooms and I walked up to a door and two people were coming so I held the door open. I heard this “Thank you”, and it was Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. They were doing that film ‘Road to Hong Kong’ which was the last of the seven comedy films they’d done together. Joan Collins was also in it.

‘Fury at Smuggler’s Bay’ was very Hammeresque, wasn’t it? Wonderful title.

RW: I didn’t do the whole thing. I did the studio end of it. That was the film where I first met Peter Cushing. The director was John Gilling.

He was a big Hammer director directing films such as ‘Plague of the Zombies’.

RW: Yes, yes. I also did a Hammer film with Freddie Francis called ‘Hysteria’. I joined that company making TV commercials and then went back into features of which ‘Man in the Middle’ was the first. That was 1963 and starred Robert Mitchum.

The director of ‘Man in the Middle’ was Guy Hamilton, who became a major Bond director. Was he your way into the Bond films later on?

RW: No. I ended up doing two Bond films, ‘Thunderball’ and ‘You Only Live Twice’. On the second film I became Location Manager. I had to live in Japan for six months. I was there way ahead of the crew and then stayed afterwards. When I arrived, I was the only Englishman there. All the rest were Japanese.

Had you had any experience as Location Manager?

RW: Yeah. For example, on ‘Thunderball’ the opening is in France. Because we started the film in France and I could speak French, I worked directly with a French Production Manager. I set up the whole of Paris with his help. So anyway, I knew what I had to do.

I should point out that between the two Bond films, you were working with Stanley Kubrick on 2001.

RW: Yes, but I didn’t stay for all the model shots because they took forever. Stanley didn’t want me to go, but I kept telling him that I wasn’t doing anything. Eventually he let me go. So I then went on to ‘You Only Live Twice’.

What was Kubrick like to know and work for?

RW: He was one of the funniest people I ever met. He was quite an amazing person in the sense that he could assimilate the project. He was using someone on the film, who worked at NASA and Kubrick almost knew more about the stuff than he did. He was able to assimilate everything really well.

Moving back to You Only Live Twice, what was Japan like to visit in 1964?

RW: Very archaic. I was only 27. I had to negotiate a contract one day with these four Japanese guys. I had an interpreter and he said that to start with, just talk about bugger all. Promotion in Japan is an age issue and hence they couldn’t understand why this young boy – me – was meeting with them. Then I had a brainwave. I had one other English person, George – he was the catering manager for the film. He was about 60, grey hair and he had a pin-stripped suit. I told him that every so often I’d be asking him to come to a meeting and he’d have to pretend to be my boss. I told him not to ever say anything. I’d just look at him and he’d nod. I insisted on doing the talking. So the next time I had George sitting there in his pin-stripped suit.

So it worked?

RW: Yes, but what they could never understand….They’d draw up the contract there and then. They’d then pass it on to George who’d give it to me. You could see the puzzlement on their faces: “You mean the boy signs the contract?”

While making the two Bond films, did you get to know Sean Connery quite well?

RW: Yes, I got to know Sean very well. He was very professional. On ‘You Only Live Twice’ he was getting a bit pissed off with it all. When he arrived in Osaka Airport in Japan with masses of Japanese there to see him, Sean refused to put his toupee on. Broccoli and Saltzman didn’t like him appearing in front of the press bald. In terms of character, Sean was very professional, he doesn’t suffer fools gladly. 19 years later I worked again with Sean on ‘Indian Jones and the Last Crusade’. When he saw me on that film I was now the Producer. He said, “Oh, you’ve done well” and I said, “You haven’t done too badly yourself, Sean”.

And what were Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman like as personalities?

RW: They were very different. Harry was far more severe. Cubby was very nice. After I did ‘You Only Live Twice’, I was location manager on ‘Billion Dollar Brain’ with Michael Caine and that was produced by Harry as well. He was the one who asked for me.

And, of course, ‘Billion Dollar Brain’ was directed by Ken Russell. He has a reputation as a very odd director.

RW: He’d say things like, “Don’t do what I say, do what I think”. I got on with him though.

Going back slightly, how did you get involved with Roman Polanski on ‘Repulsion’?

RW: Basically, I was the Second Assistant Director on ‘Repulsion’. I worked with the First Assistant whose name was Ted Sturgis – that was the only ever time I worked with him as second. The film was made by a company called Compton Cameo Films – it was run by Tony Tenser and Michael Klinger. That company’s claim to fame at the time was making soft-core porn – ‘Confessions of a Window Cleaner’ kind of thing. They embarked on ‘Repulsion’ which, in a sense, was a departure for them. This was a very different kettle of fish. They were also taking on a director who’d never worked in the English language before and didn’t speak much English at the time. I’d seen ‘Knife in the Water’ which was his previous film in Poland. He spoke fluent French which I did too. There was actually one more murder in the film which we shot but isn’t in the final movie. I’d need to see the film again to remember who was murdered. In the film, Catherine kills two people; when we shot it, she kills three. I think that was thought to be a little excessive. The set was quite claustrophobic. If you remember the rabbit in the film, that actually was rotting as we went along; it was pretty horrible. Polanski being the kind of auteur director he is – you know, he has his own mind – was taking a long time shooting. It wasn’t my fault because I wasn’t in charge of that. I went in the evening to my office to give the actors on call the next day their in-and-out times; two offices up was Tenser and Klinger. I’d hear the most screaming rows coming out of there between them and Polanski because he was going over schedule. It was quite possibly the most successful film they ever made.

I’m sure in was Tenser, yes?

RW: It was certainly a class act for them in a sense.

Repulsion was part of that ‘Apartment trilogy’, which included ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ and ‘The Tenant’. Was Polanski like as an individual?

RW: He was OK. He was very enthusiastic. I didn’t have a problem with him at all. Catherine Deneuve who was in the film was extremely young then – she was in her early twenties. What year was that film?

1965.

RW: So it was made in 64. She was a very contained actress. Strikingly beautiful. Bit of an ice maiden which people still say today. I also worked with her sister, Francois Dorleac who I worked with in ‘Billion Dollar Brain’, but she was sadly killed shortly after in a car crash.

Would you have liked to have worked with Polanski again?

RW: Well, yes. It’s an odd one really. My life just unfolded in the sense that one film finishes and you’re either out of work or someone has made you another offer. Polanski’s next film was ‘Cul-de-Sac’ with Donald Plesance and that was a very strange film. I worked with Donald Pleasance later on ‘You Only Live Twice’ when he played Blofeld. Thinking about it, Cul-de-Sac was also produced by Tenser’s production company.

A number of the films you’ve worked on had actors well known for heavy drinking and being difficult because of this. I’m thinking particularly here of Rex Harrison in The Yellow Rolls Royce and Ian Hendry in Repulsion. Did you have any experience of this?

RW: I had no problems with Ian Hendry or Rex Harrison. I know Ian Hendry had a terrible reputation. Rex Harrison’s was less well-known. He may well have been. He was a pompous arse.

I know he was abhorrent while making Dr Doolittle.

RW: Yes, I read a piece about that recently with interest. When we were making the film ‘Yellow Rolls Royce’ with Rex in 1964 – I had to deal with the actors as second assistant – he was pompous, but he put in a good performance. He had this thing about one side of his face photographed better than the other .. He did have a brilliant career.

Going back to Hendry, so no problems with him?

RW: No, no. I tell you who I also worked with who was a heavy drinker: Peter Finch. I remember he visited us on the film ‘Pumpkin Eater’ which was directed by Jack Clayton.

Who, of course, directed the Great Gatsby in the 1970s.

RW: He did. He also directed ‘The Innocents’ based on the Henry James story. Quite a brilliant film-maker.

Returning to the subject of troublesome actors, I presume most aren’t difficult?

RW: Yes. Generally actors are pros. They come on set and do a job. The audience by and large have a very strange view of the film industry; they only see it as premieres. It’s actually very hard work. Occasionally you get a Christian Bale type outburst.

What did you make of that incident? Did you ever experience anything like that?

RW: No, no, no. It strikes me that he’s got a bit of a problem because it’s a bit over-the-top. I can understand that someone may have walked into his eye-line. I thought it was the cameraman, but then reading about it, I think it was one of the lighting crew. The cameraman would normally be behind the camera. So I don’t know who it was, but whoever it was, I do understand that actors are hyped up and maybe it’s just a question of that. When you add it to that case where he was over for the premiere and, apparently, assaulted his mother and his sister in the Dorchester – maybe there is an anger-management problem coming along here.

Clearly his anger could be linked to all kinds of factors. For the Batman films he’s been very bulked up and maybe he’s taken the Stallone path of using certain muscle enhancers.

RW: You never know. I know Empire magazine has an interview with him so I’ll be interested to see what he says about that event.

I’ve read it and all he says is “No comment”. The journalist quickly moves on. I’d loved to have been a fly on the wall for that interview.

RW: I met him once. He was 13 years old then. He was doing ‘Empire of the Sun’. Spielberg was doing that while I was working on ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’?

Can we move on to ‘Star Wars’? How did your involvement with that film come about?

RW: I was doing this film down in Mexico – ‘Wrath of God’ – with Robert Mitchum, Rita Heyworth and Frank Langella.

Frank later played Dracula in 1979. He was very good in the role.

RW: Yes, that’s right. Anyway, this was an American movie and I was a British Production Manager and wasn’t a member of the Producers Guild of America. The only reason I could do the film was because it was entirely shot in Mexico. Once we’d finished shooting, I went to LA just to wrap up and hand over. I went to MGM studios where I had an office and I got a call from someone who’d heard that there was an English Production Manager around. They wanted to come and talk to me about shooting in England. The guy who came to see was Gary Kurtz who would become the Producer of ‘Star Wars’. This was just before Gary was to work with Lucas on ‘American Graffiti’ in 1972 . Anyway, I finish wrapping up and don’t think anymore about it. Two years later I’m working on a film in Greece and I get a call from the head of Fox in England. He told me that Gary Kurtz was asking to see me. So I flew back from Greece and went into Twentieth Century Fox in Soho Square and I meet Gary again. Then I possibly returned to Greece the next day, then came back again and that’s when I discovered it was ‘Star Wars’. So my involvement with ‘Star Wars’ started 1975, September time but we still hadn’t got a green light for the film.

Fox weren’t very supportive of the movie, were they?

RW: No. The only supportive person was Alan Ladd who was working for Fox at the time. We didn’t get our green light until after Christmas. We had a budget of around $12 million dollars and our shooting schedule was 12 weeks.

That’s very little time.

RW: Oh god, it was a scramble. We didn’t have a Second Unit operating until the last three weeks. Gary eventually formed a Second Unit and filmed things such as Princess Lea’s holograph and things like that. I did the Third Unit – I did the close-up of R2-D2’s leg coming out. The technology for R2 was very primitive at the time; for example, it could only turn its head when Kenny Baker was inside. When we finished shooting, ILM who were based in a suburb of LA at that time, took over for post-production. They used Motion Control which had never been used before. When you look at the film’s opening with the Star Destroyer, that was the first time Motion Control had been used which meant we could do all kinds of moves. That was so different from 2001. In that film everything was a static frame. We couldn’t do any shots of movement, whereas with Motion Control you could; hence, that opening of the first ‘Star Wars’ (as an aside it was originally called ‘The Star Wars’) was very impressive.

The impression I get from reading about the making of Star Wars is that much of the crew didn’t have much faith in the film, while it was being made.

RW: I thought it would do quite well, but more in line with how the Bond films were performing.

And the sets were very impressive, particularly at a time when location shooting had made sound stages rather unfashionable.

RW: They were very impressive.

A bit of a sad question, but was there anything actually inside the Millennium Falcon?

RW: Well, we had an exterior set and an interior set. Because George had always said this film was part of a trilogy, we took things like the Millennium Falcon set – anything which we might use again – and did what’s called pack-striking. That means you take a set apart with care, put it into pieces and put those into containers. We kept anything we possibly could: costumes, bit of set and so on.

Because George had always said the film was part of a trilogy?

RW: Yes. We thought those sets would be very useful if there ever was a sequel which, of course, there was.

What kind of person was George Lucas?

RW: George is so shy. Superb editor.

Where were you when ‘Star Wars’ became such a huge hit?

RW: Well, after ‘Star Wars’, I then went to Afghanistan of all places to do this film, ‘Meetings with Remarkable Men’. Terence Stamp was in that. I was in the middle of Afghanistan when ‘Star Wars’ opened. The only way I kept in contact with the outside world, besides dodgy short-wave radio, was by buying Time and Newsweek. One day, I opened it and there were several colour pages on ‘Star Wars’ and suddenly, for the first time, I knew it had been incredibly successful.

When did your involvement with ‘Empire Strikes Back’ begin?

RW: 1978. What was very different to ‘Star Wars’ was that I had about a year’s prep on ‘Empire’ – locations to find and so on so that we could get it together properly. For example, I chose Norway to stand in for the ice planet of Hoth.

Did you encounter any problems on ‘Empire’?

RW: Well, it did go over schedule and budget. But I do think it’s the best film of the three. While we were doing some blue screen work at the end of ‘Empire’, George came up to me with a script and it was ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’. I took it away to read and thought it a very busy script. I was told it was going to be directed by Steven Spielberg.

Had you met Spielberg at this point?

RW: No. I was taken to meet Steven by Frank Marshall who was Producer on ‘Raiders’; when I met him Steven was doing post-preview edits on the film ’1941′ , a film that was a disaster for him. Understandably I was a little anxious working with Spielberg because that film had not gone well; it had seriously gone over budget. Once I was officially involved with Raiders I did the thing I always do first, I scheduled the film. I laid it out over 23 weeks. When I showed it to Steven he said he was going to do it in 17 weeks. That made me even more worried, but he managed to shoot it in only 15 weeks. In fact, we were two weeks under schedule which was something I’d never experienced before. That’s unheard of. Both Steven and George told Paramount – who funded the picture – to take out a full-page advert in the trade papers thanking the cast and crew for finishing the film two weeks earlier than planned.

After the problems with ’1941′, that makes Steven sound like an incredibly efficient director. Tell me about working with Steven Spielberg.

RW: He was a brilliant director. He’s a natural director. He was very challenging. When filming a really complex shot take one, he’d then say, “Print”, then move on. I’d say, “Hang on a minute, Steven. We always do a second one in case there’s a scratch on the negative, a hair in the gate” etc. He said, “No, move on”.

So he was quite a risk taker.

RW: In a sense, yes and in a sense, no. He worked so quickly. The way he shot it, that energy is in the film.

What followed Raiders?

RW: Then I returned to work on ‘Return of the Jedi’.

You were Co-Producer on that film, weren’t you?

RW: Yes. And then after that film George made me producer of ‘Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom’.

That must have been amazing moment.

RW: It was.

Moving back to Jedi, you were in it, albeit briefly.

RW: Yes, I played AT-ST driver Lt. Watts. I was the only character in ‘Star Wars’ to be called by his own name and his own rank (because I’d be in the army). I’m only in it for a second. I’m killed by Chewbacca.

Is that the film’s director, Richard Marquand, with you in the vehicle?

RW: Yes. I don’t know if you know, but my half-brother is Boba Fett. Originally the costume was white; it was going to be a super stormtrooper. Anyway, it eventually was altered and we needed someone to play the part of this bounty hunter. I phoned him up and told him that if the suit fit, he could have the part. And it did! That was back in 1979 and he’s still doing Star Wars conventions. We never expected that character to be so popular with the fans.

Moving on to ‘Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom’, I’ve read that Harrison Ford was suddenly pulled out of the shoot.

RW: Yes, we lost Harrison for eight weeks because of a disc problem, but we kept going for six. Steven was prepared to go into scenes we hadn’t yet started using a double for Harrison.

Who was the double?

RW: Vic Armstrong, who was our stunt co-ordinaor. He was a brilliant double. You could almost hold him full figure. You couldn’t go in close, but Steven shot over his shoulder and in long shot. I don’t know of another director who could do that.

As Producer, you must have been very stressed during those weeks that Harrison was away recuperating from a slip disc. I presume there was the worry that he might not have been coming back.

RW: One has to live in hope. We’re technically on an insurance claim. With Harrison gone, I said to Steven that we should close today. He wanted to continue. So we accelerated the dance sequence at the start of the film which Harrison wasn’t in. The choreographer moaned like hell when I said we needed that scene ready.

It’s a very Busby Berkley scene. How did you re-schedule the film while Harrison was recovering?

RW: We decided to go as far as we could and then I did a schedule for when Harrison came back. We had a two week drop. We went to California and shot some Second Unit during that time. I’d never done a schedule like that before. I was only one day out so I was really pleased. The insurance claim, had we closed the day of – which was our right – would have been about $3,000,000 dollars. It was actually just under $1,000,000 dollars. The insurance broker who came was not the normal one I dealt with who was really good. This other guy went through everything and I said to him, “I’ve just saved you $2,000,000 dollars”.

Unlike the first Indy film, the ‘Temple of Doom’ didn’t get very good reviews by many critics.

RW: No, I think they thought it was too dark. I liked it.

You were also producer on ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’, but that was a very stressful film for you, wasn’t it?

RW: Yes, very stressful. There were three executive producers and they all buggered off to do ‘Empire of the Sun’ leaving Bob and I. It was the most difficult film I ever made. All the animation was hand painted. We also broke all the rules mixing live action and animation.

I presumed the actors struggled as well.

RW: Yes. And we tested all kinds of people for Bob Hoskin’s character, Eddie Valiant. Gene Hackman really wanted the part. We offered the role to Paul Newman and he was offended. We tested Bob and he was absolutely brilliant. Bob acted to a life-size Roger Rabbit which we had on set just to show where he would be. Charles Fleischer, who was the voice of Roger, was off-set doing the lines. He was a stand-up.

Wasn’t some of the filming done in London?

RW: Yes. We shot a bit of LA (where the film is set) opposite the BBC. It was March and I was thinking, “Christ, I’ve got to make this look like summer”. We got some palm trees which we got from the same place that Kubrick got his for ‘Full Metal Jacket’. We got this place all set up and the morning was brilliant. It was completely clear, but cold because it had been cold that night. The problem was breath and there are ways you can deal with this. If you’ve got breath and you want to get rid of it, you have the actors suck ice. If you want breath, you have them sip a hot drink and you get breath. If you look at that scene, the guy playing the lieutenant in that with Bob Hoskins – Rick LeParmentier – we couldn’t get rid of his breath completely so, if you look at it, he’s smoking a cigarette so you never know.

Very film noir smoking a cigarette.

RW: Oh extremely. Anyway, that’s why he was smoking. They’re some of the tricks of the trade.

You said the shoot was stressful.

RW: The film had a $30 million dollar budget and it ended up costing $50 million dollars. I must say that most of the over spend was because of the animation which I didn’t budget. The film took two and half years to make unlike ‘Star Wars’ which took two. That extra six months was for the animation and all of that. I was a million dollars over on the first day of shooting. It was a nightmare. I remember at the end of the first days shooting Bob said to me, “We’re dying on the vine”. But we got through and the film made a lot of money.

After ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’ you then produced ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade’.

RW: Yes.

After that film was there any offer for working on further TV and cinema projects with the Indy character?

RW: Well, George was going into the young Indiana television series. I’ve never done television. It’s a very different medium. Very different typo. Generally speaking, slightly different crew. I didn’t know anything about it so I decided that it was time to go.

Are you still in contact with George?

RW: Oh yeah, on and off. I haven’t seen him for awhile. Next time I’m out in California, I’ll go out to his ranch to say hello.

Looking through your CV, I notice that you were executive producer on the film ‘Labyrinth’ which George Lucas produced.

RW: Jim Henson had written the script and he did ask me to produce it. I couldn’t because I was busy with something. Eventually to get the film going financially, it became a Lucasfilm with Henson and that’s when I now became involved because, at that time, I was Vice President of European Production for Lucasfilm – that was actually the same thing which brought me to ‘Roger Rabbit’. So I found myself on it, but not on it. I wasn’t there all the time. I used to go on set and watch a bit of shooting. I used to look at the dailies (rushes in the old days) and talk to Jim or whatever because I was like the Lucasfilm rep.

That title must have given you a very high status in the industry.

RW: Well yeah, but it didn’t mean a great deal. It was just that they asked me to do it and I said absolutely. And they paid me and gave me an office at Elstree Studios which they paid for. I should point out that George also wanted me to do the movie ‘Willow’ directed by Ron Howard.

The film with Val Kilmer?

RW: Yes. I eventually found him a producer and I did ‘Roger’ instead.

That was lucky.

RW: Yes, because ‘Willow’ was actually a flop. I suppose I got lucky really because ‘Roger Rabbit’ was such a hit.

Going back to Labyrinth, what was Jim Henson like?

RW: He was lovely. I went to his memorial service at St. Paul’s Cathedral. There was Big Bird walking around which was really strange. Jim died very suddenly. My involvement with Henson had come through ‘Empire Strikes Back’ with Yoda. As good fortune would have it, across the road from Elstree Studios where we were shooting, was another studio which used to be called The British National – it was then owned by ATV and that was where they made ‘The Muppet Show’. I could walk across the street to the studio.

RW: Yes, Mark Hamill was in it and Anthony Daniels, Peter Mayhew, Kenny Baker. Therefore, we were in direct liason with them.

As The Muppet Show was being made across the road, did you ever go and watch them filming the programme?

RW: Oh yes, and so did my kids.

Your children must have the most amazing memories or was it very normalised for them?

RW: It was very normalised because they grew up with it. In terms of the films, I didn’t have the children hanging around the studio all the time. They didn’t know anything else. I’ve got a picture of my youngest son, aged about eleven, and his friend on that huge set at the start of Return of the Jedi’. You can see Vadar’s shuttle which has just landed in the Death Star docking bay. For my youngest son’s birthday party, Anthony Daniels came along one day – he didn’t have the whole outfit but he did have a golden glove on. It’s good to have those things.

Those words must haunt, and amuse actor Bill Mumy in equal measure. Mumy played young Will Robinson in the classic TV series ‘Lost In Space’, kick-starting a career as child actor. Somehow, instead of crashing out early like so many child actors, he has managed to create even more iconic characters in classic Sci-Fi shows, from Babylon 5 to The Twilight Zone. Will tells Beatmag’s Khalid Mallassi, his first love has always been making music.

I grewup watching you on TV, either on ‘Lost In Space’, ‘Twilight Zone’, or ‘Babylon 5′. It must be an interesting experience having millions of people feeling like they know you a little bit. What are the best aspects of this, and what are the least enjoyable parts?

I’ve never really felt like it was a negative thing, being somewhat of a “celebrity”, but there were times when I was a kid going to places like Disneyland, or the beach, where somebody would shout, “Hey, that’s Will Robinson!” and then it got a little spooky with a big crowd… but that didn’t happen too often. I’ve never been “George Clooney Level” famous. Honestly, the perks of it are getting into concerts, or free Nike’s. I never really thought to “exploit” the fact that I was recognized when I was a kid. My parents certainly didn’t think that way. When I was in my mid twenties and playing guitar in Shaun Cassidy’s band touring the country, that’s when it kinda dawned on me, “I can USE this old “Lost in Space” thing!”

Can you tell me a bit about your parents and your upbringing?

I’m an only child. My father was a cattle rancher and had some investments here in LA. My mother was a housewife who used to work at 20th Century Fox, as a writer’s secretary for 10 years, before she married my dad. They both had been married before and had me kinda late in life. My dad was 49 when I was born, and my mom was 41. I grew up on a cul-de-sac in Beverlywood with tons of kids my age all around me. My parents weren’t crazy strict, but they didn’t let me get away with too much. My dad was somewhat wealthy when I was little, so we had nice things. I honestly can say I had a great childhood. Both my parents encouraged me to follow my own creative path. My mom is now 96 and doing pretty good.

Why do you think you survived and blossomed, while other child-actors had a much rougher time of it?

Well, I can name you lots of child actors who turned out swell… But I won’t. I don’t know. I could’ve gotten in trouble or busted for stupid little things lots of times in my young life, but I didn’t. Just lucky I guess. I was no angel. I suppose I should credit my parents for not letting me go too crazy, but… I went pretty crazy. I just kept working in creative arenas. It kept me from robbing 7-11′s!

What, if anything, do you remember about playing Anthony in the classic ‘Twilight Zone’ episode ‘Its a Good Life’, and how did it feel to revisit the story in 2003 with ‘It’s Still a Good Life’? At the time you were playing the part, did you realize what a heavy character Anthony was?

Well, I think the Twilight Zone is the best TV series ever. So, the fact that I was in three, “Long Distance Call”, “It’s A Good Life”, and “In Praise of Pip”. I did a cameo in the feature, then I wrote one of the newer ones and starred in “It’s Still A Good LIfe” with Cloris Leachman and my daughter, Liliana… anyway, being a part of that series and the subsequent projects that sprang from it is a real honor. Rod Serling was a true visionary. What a fantastic writer he was. In terms of memories from shooting the original episode, I have plenty, but you know, they’re a little kids memories… not very astute in terms of sharing. Making the sequel forty years later was fantastic. That’s a very rare treat. To return to a project, that has been classified as “classic”, with the original cast, and do a sequel, not a remake, a true sequel… that’s really cool. Working with Cloris is amazing. She’s is turbo talented and I like her a lot. I was in a band with her son, George, in the 80′s. Anyway, to be able to include my daughter, who gave such a great performance… that’s probably the highlight of my entire career in a way.

Why do you think Anthony made a deeper impression on viewers than some of your more benevolent Twilight Zone roles?

I don’t know. It’s just really creepy to think this little kid can read your thoughts and if he’s not pleased with them… you’re toast. It’s a great little film. Brilliantly written and very well shot and acted by everyone. I love it.

Would you be interested in returning to the character of Anthony again in a future Twilight Zone?

Anytime!

When you were playing Will Robinson did you have any inkling of how lasting that portrayal would be?

No. There were no big organized fan conventions or anything like that back in the 60′s when we were making the series. And hell, I was 11-14 while playing “Will”… I didn’t think about life beyond the next school grade in those days! But I can tell you, I never had a bad day on that show. I loved playing Will Robinson and I loved all those people dearly. Still do.

What do you remember most about Brigitte Bardot from working with her on ‘Dear Brigitte’ in 1965 when you were only 11 years old?

Her boobs. I got to check them out from a great angle! Seriously, She was very nice. We flew to France to shoot her scenes… She had a major “entourage” taking care of her. She was a major pop star. She and I exchanged letters for the first time in many decades in 2005. I signed some pictures from the film, and so did she. All the money went to her animal foundation and we had a brief exchange of letters. I sent her one of my albums. She’s worked hard for animals and I respect her for that. She was amazingly gorgeous in 1964… I was the first American actor to receive an onscreen kiss from her.

What began your interest in science fiction?

Comic books. Super heroes. Guy Williams, as Zorro and George Reeves, as Superman. Nothing’s changed.

You’ve been involved with many of the greatest Sci-Fi TV series of all time, including arguably the biggest: Star Trek. How does it feel to be part of the Star Trek universe?

Great! Growing up working on ‘Lost in Space’, people always assumed there was some wacky “competition” between ‘Star Trek’ and ‘Lost in Space’… which of course is ridiculous. The shows were very different and we never felt competitive at all. To me, ‘Lost in Space’ is a “pioneer family against the alien environment” or just a campy space comedy and Trek was a military show or just a fairly campy space romp… In the late 80′s, I wrote three issues of DC’s “Star Trek” comic book with Peter David, that was fun… Then while filming “Babylon 5″ (something I did for 5 years), Ira Behr, the executive producer of ‘Star Trek’: ‘Deep Space 9′, he’s a neighbor and friend of mine, Ira invited me to do a guest shot on the series, but because of my shooting schedule on B5, I had to turn it down, then when we wrapped after 5 seasons, he invited me again, but it was the part of an alien, and I’d been playing an alien of B5, and I didn’t want to deal with alien makeup anymore or be thought of as the guy “who plays aliens”, so I passed on it… and I thought that was the end of it, but then he called again and offered me the part that I did do, which was a Starfleet officer who’s in the middle of this big firefight in a war episode, and it was a nice part, and I’m really glad I did it. And my character, “Kellin” dies at the end of the episode. And I remember Ira was super happy, almost giddy about the fact that ‘Star Trek’ killed “Will Robinson”! Anyway, I’m glad I did it.

I was a big fan of your Star Trek comics with Peter David. Would you be interested in doing any more comics work in the future?

I’ve written scores of comic books for DC, Marvel, Dark Horse and other publishers. I love writing in that arena and would very much enjoy doing more of that in the future. Peter and I created and wrote a television series together, “Space Cases” that ran for two seasons all over the world ten years ago. I always enjoy writing with Peter. He’s a really nice and very talented guy. Lately, I’ve been concentrating pretty exclusively on music, though.

Lennier was my favourite character from ‘Babylon 5′. At the end of the series his fate is never fully revealed. Is this something you’d be interested in telling in a future ‘Babylon 5′ movie?

No. I’ll leave ‘Babylon 5′ storytelling to Joe Stracynski. It’s his baby. But I’d be interested in returning to that character for a film.

You’ve done a lot of work doing voices for animated features and series, what’s the most fun about this sort of work?

I love animation. It’s just a great arena to be a bit “larger than life” in and play around in. I loved working on “Buzz Lightyear of Star Command” because for the two episodes of that series that I did, I got to work with Jonathan Harris again. We recorded all our stuff together. It was really fun doing that with him. I also really liked the Batman episode I did. And the Ren and Stimpy was outrageous.

Have you always had an interest in making music?

Music has been number one in my life since I was ten.

Who are some of your musical inspirations?

Yikes… I could give you an almost endless list… but the Kingston Trio inspired me to play and write in the first place. Their albums made me love harmony and simple songs that had something to say. Beyond that, major influences were and continue to be The Beatles, Dylan, Brian Wilson, CSNY,(collectively and individually) Muddy Waters, the Stones, Chrissie Hynde… basically the GOOD stuff!

What instruments do you play?

Guitar, bass, keyboards, banjo, harmonica, mandolin, drums and percussion.

Tell me a bit about your musical history?

Check out the discography and “Mumy Music” pages at www.billmumy.com. I’ve been making music nonstop since I was a teenager… I’ve been lucky to work with a lot of great people and the muse continues to visit me on a regular basis.

Tell me how Barnes and Barnes (the comedy band with lifelong friend Robert Halmer) came together, and are you surprised by the success of the song Fish Heads?

Barnes and Barnes JUST finished recording our first album together in 17 years! It’s great! Check it our when it’s released in the next several months. It was really cool to go back and work from that place. Total freedom. I play and sing and write much differently when it’s a B&B project. Beyond Fish Heads, we made 7 albums in our original run and they’re full of quirky, cool, unique songs. It’s like doing a Twilight Zone or something. It’s just a different headspace that’s hard to explain. Fish Heads has been very, very good to us. I’ve made a decent amount of money off that song and I still think it’s a cool little tune. Hell, Homer Simpson did it! “I took a fish head out to see a movie, didn’t have to pay to get it in…” I wrote that and I dig it! Nuff said. yeah.

You’ve put out a number of very good albums, and your latest Circular is one of your best, can you tell me a bit about how it came together and what inspired it?

Circular is my 7th solo album in 11 years. I’m proud of it. I’m lucky to have a nice studio in my home and for better or worse, I do play a lot of instruments, so when the muse strikes… I go into the studio and record. I’m always making music. The songs on Circular all came within a short period of time, a few months, a couple of them had been around for maybe a year… It’s not a hardcore thematic album, but lyrically the songs do share a look at the past and how it effects the present and the future. Musically, Circular explores the fact that certain styles of music continue to come around, be that classic rock ala Chuck Berry or the blues or even folk. If music comes from an honest and truly inspired place, then I believe it’s going to work and stand the test of time. All the songs on Circular were genuinely inspired, not crafted for the sake of wanting to write, but created because they were a gift from the muse in a way. I know that sounds kind of hippyish, but I also know it’s true. I can be hired to write you a song and it’ll be a good song, but it’s not the same as having to get out of bed or pull your car over to the side of the road because a song is being given to you… it is a different experience. And the songs on my solo albums, for the most part, are those kind of genuinely inspired songs that come when you least expect them. I played most everything on the album, but Chris Ross played the majority of the drums and percussion and several great harmony parts were supplied by Sarah Taylor. I’m just now getting to the place where I can hear it all objectively. It’s hard when you’re the guy writing it, playing it, singing it, recording it and mixing it. But… it’s sounding pretty good to me these days.

Your song History is a remarkable piece of work. It reminds me a bit of some of Brian Wilson’s work, can you tell me a bit about it’s creation?

I take that as a great compliment, and obviously you can hear Brian’s influence in the music on that song. I was watching the Ken Burns documentary, “The War”, and it inspired me to get off the couch and go into the studio and write that song. At least to write the first part of that song. Up through the first, “…makes you wanna cry” bit. Then I thought I was done with it. I thought it was a cool, very short little piece. I sent an MP3 of it to my friend, Harrigan Logan. She’s a terrific songwriter and I wanted her to hear it. She wrote me back, something like, “I love it. Can’t wait to hear where you take it.” And as I said, I kinda thought it was done, but her email inspired me to see where it might go beyond that initial part, so I sat at my piano downstairs in my living room and within a half hour all the other music, which is pretty complicated, came out. It’s probably the single most ambitious song I’ve ever written musically. I went upstairs to my studio and recorded it right there and then. No click track, just went with the feel. The time swims a tiny bit, but that’s okay with me. The rest of the lyrics came within the hour. I played the drums and percussion on that one, I played everything on that track, and it’s definitely got an homage to Brian’s “Cabinessence” SMILE period… That music is the greatest ever in my opinion. I didn’t want to rip him off at all, but the arrangement of the track is certainly inspired by Brian’s mid sixties work. Sarah Taylor sang many tracks of harmony on it and she made it sound right. I wouldn’t have released it without her vocals, cuz I couldn’t have pulled it off on my own. The single note banjo part is also a nod and a wink to Cabinessence, but… hey, why not? I’m so lucky to know Brian a bit. I went to one of his rehearsals last week, where he and his amazing band were working on songs from his brand new “That Lucky Old Sun” album. Man, it’s so great that he’s inspired to write, record and gig. We’re a better world because of his music. His new stuff is great.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of making your own music?

Well, I can’t say it’s the great financial rewards or chart success… I don’t know if the word “rewarding” really applies. I’m compelled to make music. If I were stranded on an island somewhere all alone, I’d figure out a way to do it. I’ve had tape recorders and a home studio since I was a teenager. Making music keeps me from going totally insane. I’m constantly playing and writing. It’s just what I do. It’s who I am. I very much appreciate it when other people listen to it and enjoy it. I love playing live within a good band and a great groove in front of an audience of fifty or fifteen thousand, but I’ll continue to write and record music whether anyone else listens and cares or not. I have no choice.

What inspires you?

The muse, reality and fantasy.

Have dreams or dreaming ever inspired your music?

Many times. I don’t want to ramble on here for pages and pages, but one song in particular, “Nero’s Fiddle”, the first song on my first solo album, 1997′s “Dying To Be Heard”… I was asleep and was dreaming that I was at a Rolling Stones recording session with Miguel Ferrer. In this dream, the Stones took a break and Miguel said, “Play ‘em your new song, Mumy!” And I picked up a Gibson Hummingbird acoustic and played, “Nero’s Fiddle”… Well, I woke up and knew not to dismiss the muse, so I went into my studio and recorded it into a cassette… it wasn’t the entire song, but it was most of it… Over the next few days I finished writing it… Well, I don’t know if you’re familiar with that song, but when I listen to it, I realize that it’s about two things… My friend Brandon Lee’s death, and the LA riots… However, Brandon didn’t die until several weeks after I’d written that song. And when I go back and listen to the lyrics.. “Twist one up for old time’s sake, life’s a show shot in one take… Raise your glass to those who fell… I hear the Crow calling, I hear the sky falling…” it’s definitely about Brandon. He and I shared a birthday and were fairly close… so, there’s a ghost story and a dream song in one.

Tell me a bit about The Heart’s Fantasy?

Interesting that several people like that one a lot from Circular. That song gave me more trouble than any other song on the album by far! I almost didn’t include it because it was a struggle to get it right, and usually the songs just come our fast and I feel those are the best ones. But, The Heart’s Fantasy was difficult to pronounce done. I recorded several versions of it. I kept tweaking the lyric, I changed the keyboard part several times, etc… It’s a song about two things; acknowledging the fact that we long for things that aren’t real or necessarily achievable and the fact that we need to let go of those longings to appreciate what we have. Just goes to show you never know what people will like. I guess it came out okay. I like the keyboard sound on the chorus.

Since you play all the instruments, produce all your music and are constantly writing, how do you decide which tracks make it to the album?

Well, when it comes to making my solo albums, I usually end up writing and recording at least twenty tracks in a fairly short amount of time… I tend to write and record a lot for a month or two, then the muse moves on for awhile. It’s hard to be objective when you’re doing pretty much everything yourself. I live with the mixes and sequencing for quite awhile before pronouncing albums finished. I hope I make the best choices. The songs that get left off usually don’t fit with the general theme or feel of the rest of the album as well as the others. My son Seth is helpful with me making those decisions. I trust his ears. On Circular, I had some very strong vocal help from Sarah Taylor, whose solo album I’ve just finished producing and largely writing, and of course Chris Ross played drums on several tracks. I also co-wrote “Man of Pride” with Gerry Beckley. So, I had some other folks helping me on Circular.

What’s next musically and film wise for you?

My next solo album, “Carnival Sky” is just being completed and is set for a summer release on GRA. It’s quite different from “Circular”. It’s edgier and much less polished. There are no harmony vocals on it at all, either. First time I’ve ever approached a project like that. I’m feeling really good about it.

Also, as I mentioned, Sarah Taylor’s album will be coming out this summer. We had some fantastic players work on that album and it sounds great. Sarah’s a wonderful singer and I’ve known her a really long time. The title of her album is “The Cure To Everything”. I hope people will check that one out. It’s a very strong project.

And, after a hiatus of 18 years, Barnes and Barnes have recorded a brand new album of all new material and that will be coming out this year as well on our own Lumania Records label. It’s called, “Opbopachop”. It was really fun returning to that after so long. I don’t think there’s anything that compares to Barnes and Barnes. Love it or hate it, but when Robert Haimer and I put on the “Barnes and Barnes” identity, it’s a unique sound. I write and play much differently when coming from that perspective. Although almost 20 years have passed since our last album, it really has a strong feel of continuity in that quirky rock arena. It has also matured of course, but it hasn’t been tamed.

Gerry Beckley and I are writing some new songs together right now and we’ll see where those end up going. Some of them could find a home on an America project or a solo project of mine, or his, or maybe we’ll record something together. Gerry sang all the harmonies and played keyboards on my “With Big Ideas” album a few years ago and I think our voices blend really well together. Who knows? Current information and updates on all my projects are posted at www.billmumy.com.

I’m writing some sci fi projects and doing voice over work. You never know when you’ll get a call to act in a feature film, or tv project that may last 5 years! But mostly, it’s the music I’m focused on now.

by Khalid Malassi

Lost and Found Interview

When you consider the term ‘hunger’ in hip-hop nowadays your thoughts can’t help but lurch clumsily towards memories of a sturdy Big Pun on stage, spluttering out rhymes punctuated by short rasping breaths, the ever-cuddly Fat Joe with his belt-bendingly massive jeans that could be converted into a denim pigeon-loft or the Notorious B.I.G making an ungodly racket on his debut album, thanks to the combination of a headboard, a wall and a shrieking grateful recipient of his apparent morning-glory. Whilst these men stand (or stood) tall, celebrated in graffiti throw-ups in and around the Bronx and Brooklyn, it’s fair to say that in many respects none have come close to matching the status of a man whose nickname ‘Baldhead Slick’ suggests that he could have been quite a swimmer had the hip hop thing not quite worked out as well as it did. With a recording history that traces back to 1988 as the founder member of the legendary Gangstarr, Keith Elam a.k.a Guru would have been entitled to sit on his behind with a cup of tea in his hand and look back over a glorious career once the Gangstarr project hit the wall in 2004. However, the desire and durability that got him this far means that he finds himself not only dropping rhymes on studio album number 12, but also heading-up his own 7Grand label alongside his partner in beats and rhymes of the past 4 years, Solar. Beatmag caught up with the pair as they hit England on the European-leg of a tour that started in January at the Sundance Film Festival and hit London after passing through some heavy U.S ski-country, culminating in a show at the X Games Finale, an occasion that must have seemed an unlikely arena for performance when Guru started out in the business?

“Well back then my vision was just to get it poppin’. I had that hunger and that’s something I held onto. The hunger is still here but in a different format. I never sold-out, I never wanted to. I never strayed from my connection with the streets or with the hip hop culture, and actually that whole extreme sports crowd has graced hip hop – they are really very close; the fashion within hip hop is very much inspired from this – even the skate-sneakers, the hats, the jackets – it’s pretty similar. And these guys are rocking out and doing their tricks listening to hip hop”.

Embracing new cultures and new ideas is certainly the name of the game for musicians nowadays. Whilst many amongst us may wish for another golden Gangstarr project (or another hip hop golden-era for that matter) the reality is that time marches relentlessly on, and as the planet keeps spinning today’s artists can’t afford to look backwards and have to stay on top of new developments, new trends and new technologies. This enables them to maintain varying forms of contact with audiences who’s attention span can be measured in minutes, and who’s interest is frequently won or lost in the short time it takes to post a nonsensical rant on You-tube.

“Anything, that’s going on that’s futuristic and digital we’re embracing it. This is a Back To The Future experience. We can’t go back but yes, we can take things to the future. Embrace the technology but don’t forget where everything came from – all these principals, so you form a firm connection between the past, the future and the present. Then it all connects as opposed to being disjointed and fractured.”
Long tours, hotel room existences and extended press-junkets that mean breakfast, lunch and dinner have zipped past on room-service trolleys are all happily dismissed as “all part of the grind” as the pair embrace the need to throw themselves headlong into their work. As masters of their own destiny running the 7Grand label, it’s clear that they vibe from one another and if words of encouragement or a foot up the backside are sometimes required then so be it. Guru explains how he and Solar first met and hung out as friends before they’d even begun to make music.

“One time I was with Solar complaining about all the A+R stuff, all the execs and whatever and he was like ‘listen man, you’re an icon – what are you doing? Start your own label if its that bad!’ So now we are true owners. At the end of the day this is our thing. We have the control and our vision and we’re taking it where it needs to go. It’s surviving by the will of the people. We don’t have a large corporate entity or some secret benefactor hooking us up so we’re not flossing any super-fly rides and all kind of bling or whatever – it ain’t that type of party. This is the realest, and the most integrity, you’re gonna see.”

Guru acknowledges that this is a whole new chapter for him. His work alongside DJ Premier in Gang Starr contributed heavily in pioneering the early 90s hip-hop sound of New York, and he incorporated a jazzier aesthetic into hip-hop with his well-received Jazzmatazz project. Having grown-up listening to jazz (thanks to the guidance of his uncles and father), he developed his own specific tastes (“Parker, Coltrane, Nat Colman etcetera, but then that’s just me”) and alongside new partner Solar, the project has swelled into the number one best-selling hip hop jazz act on the planet, something Guru is obviously proud of yet not content to be measured by. “We could’ve just plugged Jazzmatazz records and rolled on that but no, we felt compelled to put out some pure hip hop because that’s what we come from, that’s what we’re made of. Hip Hop runs through our veins and we felt a void and so we need to stimulate the thought that ‘hip hop needs to grow’ so instead of talking about going back, this new album is real hip hop right now.”

Discussing the album, each has his particular favourite track. Solar nominates Devine Rulez, a song he also directed the video for as his personal highlight. “I consider myself every time I enter a project to be free and I just want to make the best that I can by keeping my mind open and delivering music that’s gonna get people excited. Not necessarily the most commercial music or the music that critics are gonna love but just music that I think stimulates the culture and brings hip hop to a higher level”. Sampling the disco-classic ‘Super Nature’ by Cerrone, Devine Rulez certainly raises the bar to a whole new level although it’s potentially a track that one can see heads struggling to warm to immediately, with it’s obvious crossover appeal a potential red rag to anyone who fears a hint of creativity seeping in hip hop. As if anticipating such a response from the die-hards still stuck on hearing Guru rhyming over Premo’s chopped-up drums, he explains how Devine Rulez takes us back to a time when hip hop was about more than polishing your necklace and name-checking your particular favourite aperitife. “I’m rhyming about a glorious time and about fun. What a lot of people don’t know is that in the early days, when cats were rhyming, when emcees were rhyming, they were doing it over rock breaks, jazz breaks and disco breaks. Alongside funk-breaks, DJs had collections of disco breaks too so Divine Rulez is really revisiting the history of hip-hop with a futuristic approach. Hip-hop has been taken in all kind of other directions because people felt just like they could do it, and we really need to recognise that in order for this culture to grow and move forward – heads gotta be real heads and real heads need to come together and kick the truth.”

Citing his own favourite tracks as ‘Lost and Found’ (“it’s the theme music”) and ‘After Time’ (“When I first heard that track as an instrumental it was like crack, I went fucking nuts! Boom!”), the passion and enthusiasm Guru has for hip hop has appears to have never faltered. Having contributed so much to the culture over the years, it’s heartening to hear that the positivity he’s injected time and time again has taken the 360-degree route and returned to the source, helping him through occasionally difficult times and inspiring him to continue to do what he loves.

“Where I’m at, I’m in the light right now. If there’s any darkness it comes with the fight because we’re in a fight for sure. For a lot of things to create positive change there’s always gonna be a fight because for some people it’s easier for them to hate – it’s easier for them to purvey negativity than it is to overcome it with positive thoughts. But for me, darkness is not really there. There’s more light involved right now and it’s representing a new chapter that’s never been done before; exploring new things and being actual president of my own label, cultivating new talent. And Jazzmatazz is of course positive in itself. So here we are putting the message in the music, but at the same time keeping it funky, keeping it street, so again, taking those principals to new heights. So that’s what it’s about, evolution and so forth – it’s a good look.”

by Tim Aldous

“You should never really ask a musician what music they make or you get a really vague, ubiquitous answer.” One can’t really be surprised that someone of Nathan Fake’s calibre would come out with this gem of information when describing techno.

His first record came out when he was 18, the infamous ‘Drowning in a Sea of Love’ and the tour supporting this propelled him into the sphere of nightclub DJ booths, across the land and the world soon after. Something that has certainly tainted the new LP ‘Hard Islands’, which is six tracks of hard edge, electronica techno. This may come as a bit of a surprise to the fans of the synths, and fake guitar riffs from his previous offerings, but the evolution is seamless.

While most boys his age were discovering girls, football and what happens after necking a bottle of 20/20, Nathan had already become au fait with knob twiddling synthesizers, and took the first tentative steps into production at the tender age of 15. He delivers a coy explanation of how he didn’t really know what he was doing to start with, getting some equipment and making sounds; inspired by the faultless sounds of Orbital and Aphex Twin on the radio and skirting round the usual past time of football, that most of his peers were into at that time to focus on fun in the bedroom.

“Everyone thought I was a bit weird at school, wanting to buy samplers and making music, so I did it on my own completely,” says Fake, rather matter-of-factly. “Not really much going on music wise in Norfolk, anyone into music at school was playing guitars … no one else was into the whole techno thing.”

Growing up in Norfolk is something that has not consciously influenced him, however one could presume that lack of post school activates lent an opportunity to devote energy elsewhere. He comes across as very bright, well spoken and polite. Mindful of what is important to him, surroundings and nature, it takes just a little bit of coaxing to pull loose the thread of his multicoloured make-up to reveal the man behind the noise.

A slightly more delicate sound of the first album has perhaps put Nathan into a pigeon hole that is a little unfair; he can go hard with the best of them. Earlier work and certainly the most recent EP offer a full spectrum of his capabilities. ‘Drowning in a Sea of Love’ is perhaps a more mum-friendly techno album? “Ha, you could say that, well my mum really likes it!” he exclaims. “As a musician you make all kinds of stuff, but it’s up to the label what gets released. Playing live came off the back of the first album, touring and gigging ever since has really taken up a lot of time, even when I am not actually touring I am recovering.” Influenced by the club scene, people, music and dancing have resulted in a colourful techno EP, which has evidently matured from the first release.

The move to London has not really affected the pace, tone, style of the new stuff, subconsciously perhaps, but with the same gear and attitude to making music, he constantly reinforces the fact that his music is very “me” and no matter where he lived it would still be Nathan Fake. “I don’t think that my music has gone all London,” he concedes.

At the improbable age of 26, Nathan possesses the back catalogue that even Andrew Weatherall would be proud of. More recent influences shine predominantly towards James Holden, who runs the record label Border Community and incidentally released a blinding mix of his spine tingling signature tune ‘The Sky was Pink’. “James has always been an influence to making music. The friends that I hang around with inspire me too and there is quite a few of us that do it, so it’s great to hang around and bounce ideas off each other,” he says. “I am not trying to sound all cool and stuff, but I don’t really listen to much music” He giggles, then goes on to cite Chris Clarke as an artist he admires (released as Clarke) on Warp Records. According to Nathan “it’s completely brain wrecking, production is mental”, so enjoy!

The bedroom production of music is more and more prevalent, so much so, that almost anyone can get a track out there. So, does this make it easier to let the creative juices flow, or is this just diluting the talent?

“There is too much. I don’t want it to seem that I am more deserving than anyone else, but anyone can down load or rip off some technology or programme and get a track out there on a net label. In the early 90’s there needed to be a more dedicated approach; save up some money and get all the equipment; devoting a lot more time and effort. It’s cool that its not just rich kids and nerds that are into it now… But anyone can have a go and unleash some talent that they didn’t know that they had, at the same time it has oversaturated everything”.

With many genres and hybrids of different music out there, trying to get a straight answer in regards to what is it that he is/plays/produces seems a difficult question. Generally speaking it’s techno or at least sharing that broad umbrella (Rhianna is very accommodating). It’s not minimal, a very prompt correction at this suggestion was fired back “Its not minimal at all actually, that’s a phrase that has completely lost its meaning. It’s from the early 90’s when it was all about the sound. Plastic Man, people like that, literally two sounds, really flat. ‘Minimal’, is now a buzz word used to sell records, minimal should be just bleeps, now there are swishes and splats… My music is layered and complex arrangements.” Surely the fundamental reason for categorising music is so that people can buy it then? “I guess when people are creating it, its not a subconscious thought a track that fits in with a genre, it gets put there after.”

The crux of what is heard from Fake is all sound, but can he sing? “Er….yes and no… Well I did a track for a German label that I sang on a while back, but it was meant as irony, however the irony seemed to get lost on them. I wrote really stupid inane lyrics but instead of it being the joke they just came across as stupid and inane… stupid of me really. I use my voice a lot though in the tracks, but not really in a singing way; more making noises, it’s quite an interesting way to make a new sound.” It was safely assumed that there will never be a bastardised techno track with some “uplifting soulful house” session singer warbling over the warping.

Fake is very much of the era where an artist, or band, is a brand. This is, however, very much his own doing; he is a man at the helm of his own ship, the styles, iconography of the album covers, along with his website and myspace, all have an ethereal, kooky feel to them and are generally taken, or drawn by Fake and his friends. Blurred pictures from photo albums of a bygone era of his life are mixed up with shots from the coast and the country around Norfolk, taken with a Lomo camera for a very specific kind of look. This all contributes to make Fake a very nice cute package, but with a great deal of depth and edge. There certainly seems to be a lot of mystery surrounding the coy boy from the fens. Have a dig around on YouTube, particularly ‘You are Here’. It’s short film of wing watching with Fake and a mate cruising the beautiful countryside. This fun soon transmutes to Fantasia, but on a really nice mushroom trip, all bee’s and flowers, just pure innocuous revelry.

Complimenting this is the hair. It’s something of a signature look, particularly if you catch him at a live event; head down, elbows ferociously flailing to the sides as he creates the live mash up and crescendos of bleeps and sounds. It’s the focal point and a fitting framing a of face deep in concentration. He is a maestro conducting his loyal techno audience.

Though, like many a musician, he cuts the hair himself, not much thought into it. (It’s encouraging to see that the move to London has not resulted in a Hoxton Whore mullet.) Having had the privilege of catching a live gig a couple of years back when ‘Drowning in a Sea of Love’ was being promoted, the intimacy of a small venue allowed the energy to flow from the crowd to Fake and back again. So, is size important when over the last couple of years he has been propelled to the forefront of massive arenas supporting the likes of ‘Squarepusher’?

“Small places are definitely more intense, people are right there in your face, really react a lot more,” he reflects. “ At the same time playing at a festival out doors is really fun. The biggest venue I ever played was called ‘I Love Techno’ in Belgium which was a set of massive warehouses. The stage and DJ Booth was elevated really high, about 10 meters, so it felt like I was playing into nothing. I couldn’t see anyone, their reactions, if people were having a good time. It felt like what ever I did didn’t matter, as I couldn’t see what people make of it”.

In smaller venues, he goes onto explain, you are able to feel peoples faces, if you wanted to do that, but, ultimately, be able to react. If the crowd like a sound you can play it again louder and everyone shouts “yea”. Yea! The live set allows him to sponge the feelings and vibe, with every set delivering unique, layered bleeps and a responsive looped mechanism allowing him to build his sounds on the spot.

It is clear that Fake not only pushes the boundaries of the techno mould, he gets a great deal of satisfaction doing so.“If it’s a really full on place I can let rip and go really hard. I did a gig in Italy once, where I turned up and it was like a theatre, everyone seated and I had a pretty hard techno set planned, but yea, managed to tone things right and everyone really enjoyed it!” Fake worked closely with a VJ to create dramatic visuals in order to compliment and project the music on screens and frequently accompanied him on past sets. However, this was to support the first album and he is now steering away from this so there is just a focus on pure music.

Fake’s music and touring has taken him all over the world, particularly in Europe where the techno pulse beats strong. But, it’s not just Berlin where you can have a nose bleed in a gutter after some crazy warehouse part. “Everyone goes on about Berlin, but it depends where you are and the rest of Germany is really different. Watergate in Berlin is cool, but you have to be at the right place really.”
The modern club scene is seemingly more fickle, with the crowds caught up in what ever craze is going down and to play to some amnesic piss heads who don’t get the music is an occupational hazard. “In regards to crowd reactions, the Spanish go absolutely mental for it. Mexico, again totally nuts and dynamic…. They let you know they are having a good time. People in London are almost too cool and subtle with their reactions. Glasgow is another place where people go nuts… they really like the music up there, very passionate.”

Dropping a few names of where to hang out in Barcelona, Apollo and Razmataz is where it’s at. Judging a venue on the calibre of its toilets is generally a reliable rule of thumb. If they’re shit there will usually be a diverse line up, in this instance Apollo comes up trumps.

Drugs, like toilets which are deployed to consume them, are possibly part of the techno clubbing experience, so what’s the score with the score? “I don’t think that drugs can make you like music, it can perhaps enhance your perception of it. Five pills are never going to improve your experience of a shit dj.” Well said. He is, however, extremely grounded and totally sober and focused when doing a gig so he can get lost in the music to deliver a kinetic performance.

The Ketamine scene that seems rife at the moment does not lend its self well to techno, as he has seen first hand; you have to actually be able to move to dance to techno. Its affiliation with dub step seems more appropriate. On that subject, is Fake about to dip a toe into this any time soon? “I certainly think that it’s huge in popularity at the moment, stemming from drum and bass defiantly has a strong sound and the staying power, but I am not going to be producing any dub step soon. Anyway, you have to be from Corydon if you want to make dub step, it’s like they are all in a really bad mood!”

Looming on the pink horizon is a record release in May, which is the EP ‘Hard Islands’, but he is also working on a new full-length album scheduled for 2010. The year will also be peppered with plenty of touring, so keep a fervent eye on his myspace for deets (and bleeps).

by Catherine Pryce

www.myspace.com/nathancake

A Q&A with the recently revitalized emperors of electronic dance, The Prodigy

The Prodigy have made a spectacular comeback. Some would argue they’ve never been away as they consistently tour, however, they’re now back at the top end of the UK charts and a new generation has embraced their rave-rock beat-blast.

The Prodigy were forged in the fires of the Essex rave scene when keyboard whizz Liam Howlett was encouraged by his friends Keith Flint and Leeroy Thornhill to form a group. They suggested he put a set together and they would perform, dancing onstage and hyping the crowd. Once they were joined by ragga MC Keith ‘Keety’ Palmer, better known as Maxim Reality, the line-up was complete.

Howlett’s natural pop ear ensured he created some sweaty classics from the era, such as ‘Your Love’ and ‘Out Of Space’, but with 1994’s ‘Music For The Jilted Generation’ the band embraced a tougher, leerier sound which bloomed into the guitar crossover album ‘Fat Of The Land’. In 1997 this briefly made them the biggest band on the planet, forever encapsulated in the popular consciousness by the cartoon punk videos for ‘Firestarter’ and ‘Breathe’ featuring Reality and Flint on snarling vocals. It was a feat they weren’t immediately inclined to top. Instead they retired from the limelight. Thornhill quit in 2000 and the band seemed to disappear, coming back with the limp ‘Baby’s Got A Temper’ single in 2002 and the album ‘Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned’ in 2004. The latter was the first Prodigy album to arrive without any sense of occasion, simply a just passable club-centric album featuring guest vocalists such as Juliette Lewis and Liam Gallagher (Howlett’s brother in law).

This year, however, with the single ‘Omen’ and the album ‘Invaders Must Die’, all on their own label Take Me To The Hospital (through Cooking Vinyl), The Prodigy rediscovered their rave roots, crashed them into the rock guitars of ‘Fat Of The Land’, and came howling back onto the stages and into the charts.

Thomas H Green caught up with them in London.

How is it being back on the promotional treadmill?

Liam: “I forgot we had to do it.”
Maxim: “The best buzz is being back on stage and that’s it for me.”
Keith: “What pisses me off is everything we do, we like to do it 100%. Now, if you talk to me, Liam or Maxim about what it was like to write the album we want to do it with the passion that’s on the album. But, if you’re the sixth or seventh person to interview us in a row…”
Liam: “…which you’re not…
Keith: “…we’d be, like [makes bored droning noise] and you’d be, like, ‘Fuckin’ ‘ell, these cunts don’t give a shit about their album. If they don’t want to tell me about it, I’ll go home’.”

You’ve made yourself a bit more media accessible for this album.

L: “Very slightly. The biggest [new] thing with us is the internet. Before, we were like, ‘Nah, fuck this shit.’ Now, you’re a fool if you ignore that. We don’t feel like we’ve compromised ourselves. We still don’t do TV. We feel the final untouched frontier is seeing a band play live – you can’t download live. If we go on TV, that’s just watering it down.”
M: “It’s not real to us, being onstage in front of 250 people cordoned into a studio, told when to dance, five girls put at the front – it’s not a real performance. People who are passionate about the music come to the gigs.”
K: “Our buzz is from the crowd. We suck off them and spit it back. They ignite and we’re the fuel and then they’re our fuel. Together we’re volatile and then there’s an explosion.”

I used to go to [long defunct sweaty north-east London rave Mecca] The Labyrinth in 1991-1992, which was where you did your first gig.

M: “I used to go there before it was The Labyrinth, when it was just the Dalston Four Aces Club so going there and meeting these guys, I went, ‘Oh, I know this place, I used to come here when I was 15-16’.”
L: “We just appeared in a DVD about it, the film covers the club’s whole history, from reggae sound systems to the Specials.”
K: “Crazy place – The Rat Pack, Billy Bunter…”
L: “…Evil Eddie Richards.”

How do you respond when an audience doesn’t react energetically?

L: “If they don’t give it, you get angry with them and it comes out as another energy.”
K: “Sometimes, back in the day, someone would put on a flaky rave, no one would turn up but we’d still put 100% into it, still always rock it, because we enjoy the music, we enjoy performing it.”

In those days, around 1993, you used to perform in matching pyjama-style outfits.

L: “They come up a lot in interviews. We can laugh at ourselves but I don’t think any of us are embarrassed by that.”
M: “We weren’t the only ones doing it, we were just the ones highlighted.”
K: “Who doesn’t look through photos from the last five or ten years and say, ‘Fucking hell, what was I wearing there?’.”

Do you have to go to a private space and warm up before you perform?

K: “We’ve done an interview minutes before we go on. I used to smoke a lot of weed – I don’t smoke weed anymore – people used to say, ‘You smoke all that before you go on – fuck, where do you get the energy from?’ That’s what we do, we walk out there and we’re fucking alive.”
M: “I don’t understand what you’re making a big deal about, it’s just the way we are.”
K: “If you were listening to your favourite song on your i-Pod at the bus stop, well, you wouldn’t be like, ‘Fuckin ‘ell,’ going mad [starts doing rave arm movements], doing a running man, wouldja? But when that track played in a club you’d be fuckin’ ‘avin’ it. It’s the same thing.”

You have one of the best-selling albums of the year so far in the UK – it must feel good to be back on top.

L: “I tell you what’s good is having that array of new tunes to play. Fuckin’ ‘ell, we’ve got too many now – what are we going to put in the set? That’s really exciting. We haven’t really ever gone off the road, we’ve always done gigs, it’s important for us, even when we’re writing a record.”
K: “There’s certain tracks that have become pinnacles of the set that I never thought would be on a par with ‘Smack My Bitch Up’, ‘Firestarter’ and ‘Breathe’. When we play ‘Take Me To The Hospital’ I can’t even describe it.”

On tour to promote the singles collection ‘Their Law’ were you growing a bit bored of the whole thing, a bit bored of playing live?

K: “In comparison to now, maybe, yeah…”
L: “Not bored, though, never bored. The singles tour we all enjoyed, we came off the back of it really energized. It was kind of weird because it was a no-brainer, all these records had already been out so there was no real challenge, people wanted to here the hits so they were going, ‘Here comes ‘Charlie’, here comes this’n’that’.”
M: “Doing that tour was when we saw a new younger crowd coming out to see us, which was inspiring.”
L: “It’s fair to say that the tour on the back of ‘Always Outnumbered’ we really weren’t together.”
K: “What I can say, with all sense of reality, is that if you saw us now, you’d say this is as good as I’ve ever seen this band. I sat with Liam at the front of the tour bus in Europe recently and said, ‘Am I kidding myself or has it never been this good, this exciting, this much camaraderie?’ That’s not even bravado.”
M: “We were good then but we’re better now.”

At the end of the new album, ‘Invaders Must Die’, there’s a funky horn-led number called ‘Stand Up’ which is very different to your usual style. Is this a new direction you’re heading into?

L: “Definitely not. When you’re out sometimes the DJ drops something slower at the end to take you on a different journey. I think I heard P.I.L.’s ‘Rise’ at a rave, dropped at the end of all this mad dancing. We liked that effect. ‘Stand Up’ was originally an instrumental, maybe for a collaborative record, but we decided halfway through that this was going to be more of a band album so all the collaborations were shelved. We all agreed that although half the people wouldn’t get it, it had a certain feel, an up feel, almost triumphant.”
K: “For someone listening to the album thinking, ‘Fucking Hell, this was worth the wait,’ that track is like a fist in the air – ‘Yeah, my boys are back’. It is triumphant for us and it’s the track we play as everyone’s leaving the venue, the same as at the end of a rave.”

‘Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned’ was almost a Liam Howlett solo album. The first time I thought that the full Prodigy experience might be back was when I heard the cover of The Specials’ ‘Ghost Town’.

L: “I generally don’t tackle cover versions, not unless I can do something totally different. I feel strongly on this. I think anyone who covers a song exactly the same as the original is a complete fucking waste of time; it’s an exercise in going up your own arse. When Tricky covered [the Public Enemy song] ‘Black Steel [In The Hour Of Chaos]’, he took it in a totally different direction. We actually did ‘Ghost Town’ to play live and then it came out on the ‘War Child’ album.”

Did you used to go to The Barn Club in Braintree, Essex?

L: “The Barn was a great club, you know, it was in the top ten in the country at one stage. Everyone passed through that club – Mr C, Frankie Bones was resident DJ there. We formed in that club. I remember [ex-Prodigy member] Leeroy [Thornhill] had a discussion with Keith. I’d given Keith a demo. On one side were some tracks he’d asked for and on the other was my music. He and Leeroy had a discussion about it and approached me. That’s how the group began.”

House music, techno, all modern dance music seemed to bloom originally in America but find its home in the UK.

L: “Americans don’t know what to do with music, that’s the problem. Americans know they’ve got hip hop and country & western but if you take rock music, apart from Nirvana, all the best rock bands are English, all the best dance music comes from England, all the best electronic music.”
M: “They only come over here to get signed.”
L: “Kings Of Leon – [the Americans] don’t know what the fuck to do with them. White Stripes – they don’t know what to do with them. They only know how to do certain things; they don’t know how to nurture certain cultures.”
M: “America hasn’t got the melting pot coming through tying it all together.”
L: “Apart from hip hop.”
M: “Even hip hop’s not a melting pot of different cultures, it’s still segregated, black people doing their thing, Jewish people doing their thing, Hispanics doing their thing, not really mixing it up and creating a new style. London is a melting pot of different cultures – he’s got reggae, he’s got hip hop, he’s got something else, and then they make music together.”
L: “The dance scene in America was mainly a gay thing. When Americans started to learn about English rave culture they were like, ‘What the fuck is this?’ They didn’t know what was going on and they tried to adopt it back again, then it turned into something else.”

In Britain, when you first came through in the early ‘90s, there was already an element of the dance scene that rejected you, the Balearic old guard.

L: “We were always the punks who rode on the edge of it. In the beginning it was the Belgian style we were trying to push. When we got respect for the second album, we started to get tagged as techno, especially in Europe. Because we were experienced in techno and had a lot of respect for proper techno artists, we were like, ‘No, no, we aren’t techno, those guys are’.”

So how did the rock elements come in?

L: “We went to America. I remember going to LA and Keith bought a Rage Against The Machine album. I played it non-stop, that and [Dr Dre’s album] ‘The Chronic’. I went back [to the UK] and it was at a time when the rave scene was really taking a dive.”
M: “We were listening to mix-tapes, rave mix-tapes, not any other kinds of music, before going to America.”
L: “My head had gone off it. I remember standing in a rave in Scotland going, ‘Fuckin’ ‘ell, this is no good, I’m not into this at all anymore.’ I came back from LA wanting to write a tune with the funk and power of Rage Against The Machine. I didn’t even register it as rock music, just as another form of getting some noise across. It wasn’t even rock music [we made], it just had fucked up guitar on it. The closest we’ve come to making a rock record is ‘Their Law’.”

‘Their Law’ was adopted as an anthem by anti-road protesters in the mid-‘90s and you made a comment about being happy roads were being built to get you into London quicker. Have you changed your mind about that?

L: “Nah, I’m not a crusty, man, I’m a fucking B-boy.”

There was a painting on the inner sleeve of your second album, ‘Music For The Jilted Generation’ – an image of a long-haired bloke chopping a rope bridge to stop police reaching a rave…

L: “We didn’t want him to look new age but he came out a bit like that.”

Do you accept your music will sometimes be adopted by causes?

L: “We do accept that. It was when people were asking if we’d act as spokesmen, we were like, ‘Nah, it’s great when you’re into it but we don’t want to do that,’ so we kind of rebelled against that. We were angry that whole fucking period as we were getting attacked by everybody. People just didn’t understand where we were coming from.”

Do you get recognised when you pop to the shop for a pint of milk?

K: “Three days out of seven.”
M: “Now and again but… nah.”

Is it a hassle?

K: “No, that’s what you do as a job.”
M: “Most people who come up to me are just people who like the music. They give me a bit of respect and I like that. I prefer people to come up and give me respect than to just stare at me from a distance. What the fuck are they looking at? Do they think I’m going to get in a fight [with them]?”

On your old long-form video ‘Electronic Punks’ you do some mad dancing – did you used to practice?

K: “No, never, that’s just from loads of nights out. I wouldn’t call it dancing but thanks for the compliment. A number of years ago I jumped onstage with The Prodigy and never got kicked off.”

Your legs don’t move so fast anymore, though.

M: “You wanna come and fucking see him.”
K: “Yeah, they’re on fire.”
M: [Sings, “Legs on fire,” to the tune of The Prodigy’s ‘World’s On Fire’] “He’s still got it, man. If Keith didn’t have it we’d say so, and vice versa.”

I’m not saying you don’t project energy onstage, just that your legs don’t move as fast as, say, in the ‘Everybody In The Place’ video.

M: “Obviously the tunes were 170 BPM in those days. You can still carry that energy with slower tunes. We proved that with ‘Poison’.”
L: “After ‘Fat Of The Land’, after Leeroy left, we decided that was the end of that phase and that we enjoyed not doing that anymore. It’s come back a bit lately, though, but if someone asked me to do the dance for ‘Everybody In The Place’, I couldn’t do it.”

You’ve all come across in interviews over the years as obsessed with speed.

M: “I’m not obsessed with speed, I’m more obsessed with rollercoasters, the adrenalin rush.”
K: “I’m a proper hick. I love motor vehicles. I like driving anything, the faster and more edgy it can be, the better.”
L: “We went go-karting in Australia, we took our crew.”
K: “I was the daddy, I came third.”
M: “I came in twelfth out of 25, just to show you I’m not in that league, man. I was driving along like I was taking the kids to the beach.”
K: “Funnily enough, I once came alongside him coming out of London. He was in his car, I was on the bike and I thought, ‘Ah, it’s Keety,’ powered up to this roundabout and pulled alongside him. He was like, ‘Whaaat? Who’s this fucking geezer?’ He floored it and was off.”
M: “I didn’t realise it was him. He could see me but I couldn’t see him because of the helmet. All I could see was this guy pointing – what the fuck does he want? – I thought he was gonna go off on some road rage thing.”

Do you have any competitiveness with the Chemical Brothers?

K: “Not in the slightest.”
L: “Tom [Rowlands] and Ed [Simons] are friends of ours. I see Ed nearly every day when I’m in the studio. They mixed ‘Voodoo People’ when they were still The Dust Brothers and they made ‘Chemical Beats’ which is a classic.”
K: “Liam used to DJ sometimes on tour. I remember the Dust Brothers was something I pulled out of the box suggesting it should be played every time.”
L: “The thing about the dance scene is no one’s really doing the same thing as anyone else. Justice do their thing, we do our thing, Pendulum do their thing, everyone’s doing something different. It’s not like rock’n’roll where there seems to be a lot of imitators of every band around.”

What did it feel like to conquer America in 1997?

K: “That period of time, we didn’t assess anything other than we’re going to do a gig, we’re going to bang it, then move onto the next one, in fact, try not to look too far ahead, or you’d just see gig after gig flying at you like warp speed on ‘Star Wars’. Japan, Finland, Denmark, Austria, LA, New York, fucking South America – we never stopped to celebrate.”
L: “When that record was at No.1 in America everyone was going, ‘You have to go over there and do a three month tour.’ We were like, ‘Nah, we don’t want to do that, but we did six gigs in America during that mad time when we were No.1.”

Will you ever be too old for all this malarkey?

L: “We don’t think about the stage when we might be. We think we ain’t now and that’s good enough for me. I only ever live the moment, it’s the way I am.”
M: “We always have, from the first gig we’ve always lived the moment.”
K: “If you’re in a band that’s all you can do because that’s all you’ve got.”
M: “You can’t think about what happens when you’re 50 – what you thinking about that for? Live for now, enjoy now.”

You sound hungry again.

K: “100%.”

I mean obviously you’ve got money…

L: “I spent it all.”
K: “I spunked all mine – I’m Spenderella.”
M: “I got nothing.”

…so you really are hungry.

K: “Hungry? I’m fucking starving.”

The Prodigy’s new single ‘Warrior’s Dance’ is out 11th May on Take Me To The Hospital/Cooking Vinyl

On listening to Future Chaos you’d be forgiven for assuming it’s another in a long line of tidily produced electronic albums dropped by a twenty-something bedroom producer this year, but in fact what you’re hearing is the latest chapter in the rather long story of Bomb The Bass.

Despite his youthful appearance and with no apparent skin-care routine abound, Tim Simenon can lay claim to being an elder statesman on the music scene. Coldcut & the newly botoxed NKOTB aside, not many who jostled for chart-space on the Top 40 podium when his first single ‘Beat Dis’ hit the streets are still plying their trade in the entertainment industry (unless you include pantomimes). That was 1987 and since then he’s worked with the likes of Neneh Cherry, Jah Wobble and Sinead O’Conner. Throughout the years his musical output has developed, evolving in sound and entwining itself with an electronic and futuristic edge the variety of which only an obsessive can create. His music career started at an age when most people’s idea of a tangle with technology meant faking IDs on photocopiers, yet when ‘Beat Dis’ was released it propelled him to the front cover of NME.

“The interviews I did covering my first few releases always felt a bit uncomfortable because I didn’t really have much to talk about. After all, what could I say? I’d only just released a single whereas now it’s been 20 years since Beat Dis, so at least there is a fair bit of history that I can natter on about.”

After being born in Malaysia he grew up in London from the age of seven and rather than experiencing displacement he refers back to his child-hood positively. It’s evident in his confident manner that even back then he was comfortable in his own skin and knew what made him tick, suggesting a knowledge of self that kids who’ve seen parts of the world beyond their own place of birth often appear to have. Furthermore, listening to his experiences as a teenager growing up, it’s easy to see how Bomb The Bass came to be, influenced as it was by much of the music that was around him.

“I remember going to the Kitkat club and seeing the DJ playing Killing Joke alongside Afrika Bambaata, as well as funk tunes and hip hop. The punters who used to go there would be punks as well as B-Boys and I always remembered how great it was that anyone could go to this club, no matter what they looked like or were into. Bomb The Bass has always been about a collection of so many various styles of music.”

Having bought himself a drum machine, a monophonic synth and a turntable as well as plenty of vinyl, it was a natural progression to indulge his love of music and technology. This led him to study sound engineering at college in Hammersmith although his impatience and desire to start recording prompted him to depart within months.

“I was very focused on what I wanted to do after leaving school – music! I just wanted to be in the studio but of course at that time they had only the one [studio] and it was always geared towards the last year students – I’d just joined and couldn’t wait that long so after 3 months I buggered off!”

His bold and incisive decision-making proved to be the making of him and within months he’d raised enough cash through DJing at The Wag Club in Soho to get into a recording studio. Although effectively self-taught, he acknowledges that his technical skills at that time were poor so he relied on engineer Pascal Gabriel to do the programming. “Essentially I was a DJ. I went into the studio for a couple of days with some ideas and a bag of records and that’s pretty much how Beat Dis happened!”

Though there have been many releases since then the tune still remains a firm favourite with fans, so much so that the Live dates that coincide with the release of Future Chaos include a drastic reworking of the song as well as another old favourite, Megablast. You’d get pretty good odds on Ralph McTell refusing to perform ‘Streets Of London’ ever again and while the Gallaghers of Oasis often have a whinge about performing ‘Wonderwall’, yet you never get the sense that revisiting his past is a chore.

“It’s actually interesting for me because I’d left them [the tunes] alone for 20 years and it’s only over the last few months before the start of the live shows that I started going through the multi-tracks again and grabbing bits that I thought might be suitable, so for me it hasn’t been a harsh experience at all and re-doing them in a new way is quite refreshing.”

Technology is such nowadays that the VJ is as much of a part of a show as the DJ. With the right software, chopping up images while cutting up tunes can be as simple as boiling an egg and it’s this (the visual aspect, not the egg boiling) that’s got him energised about the doing the live thing after a considerable break from performing.

“It has been quite a while since I’ve been doing anything live. Back in 88 the stuff I was hoping and wanting to do, I really couldn’t. The thought of integrating screens and syncing it with the music is an idea I had back then and now it’s possible to do that and run it live which is one of the things that excited me about doing this these dates. Being able to represent a bulk of Future Chaos in a reworked live environment – it’s even more stripped down than listening to the album at home and the dynamics are gonna be different because Paul Conboy’s gonna be singing, we’ll have a DJ cutting up vocal samples and I’ll be mucking around with the loops live.”

With audiences nowadays frequently spoiled by flashy lights and nubile dancers with tambourines between their bum-cheeks it would be easy to be intimidated by a return to the Live arena. “The expectations that I put on myself are pretty high anyway and I hope out of that it’ll translate to a few other people ‘getting it’.”

Future Chaos is an album that isn’t bound by genre: At times it’s moody, at times it’s reflective and occasionally it’s sombre, but what emerges when the dust has settled is an album that sounds both positive and confident of its own quality. Rather than churning out an album every two years and living on past glories, the infrequency of releases can be attributed to the approach of a perfectionist rather than that of a sofa-dwelling has-been, and there’s laughter at the suggestion that age may have blunted any effectiveness in the studio.

“What actually slowed it down for me is choice [of technology]. I put a lot of pressure on myself to get the best out for this album because it had been such a long time coming so when I decided that I didn’t have to reinvent the wheel I found that I could make something that I liked and not worry about it because I had been for a bloody long time! It all fell together really quickly on rediscovering the mini-moog and saying ‘right – lets just use this and a drum machine essentially to build the backing tracks.’ Most of the songs were actually already there throughout the 10 yrs and the only new additions are the Mark Lannigan track which came in about a year an a half ago and then two years ago was the collaboration with Fujiya and Miyagi on Butterfingers.”

The alliances built over the years have often taken Bomb The Bass in some interesting directions. Aside from the aforementioned ventures with Sinead O’Conner, oxygen, studio space and pot noodles have been shared with Justin Warfield, Benjamin Zephaniah and even Mini Driver who sang as ‘River’ on the 1995 album ‘Clear’. He is course far too polite to admit that any collaborative artist has been a pain in the arse, simply suggesting that while it hasn’t always been easy, new experiences were gained. “I seem to be the type of person who’s generally up for a bit of a challenge! I’ll go for things that may be tagged or labelled as ‘unsafe’ sometimes but then I’m more than happy to do that.” So how about the shoe being on the other foot? What’s the likeliness of a quivering vocalist emerging from the booth, fresh from a bollocking if they don’t come up with the goods after a tenth take?

“I work with people that I really like to be honest, so I know that nine times out of ten I’ll get something back that I’m really pleased with. I’ll have a basic sketch, send it off to whoever, say ‘do whatever you want’ and edit it afterwards. I’m not a trained musician and if it wasn’t for technology I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing. I happen to work with people who are amazing musicians but fortunately what I enjoy is putting the whole thing together.”

As a fan of music it’s clear that working with other people charges the batteries and gets him motivated to achieve things in the studio when the pressure is on.

“If you work in a studio for example there may be four or five of you in there and it helps to bounce off one another to take it up a notch if you hit a wall. There’s a certain energy that means you have somehow got to progress and that’s how the production thing used to work – you’d have the record label booking you in the studio for a day or a week and everyone watching the clock!”

While much of the early Bomb The Bass back catalogue nods heavily towards hip hop, Future Chaos steers clear enough from the form to draw a bit of a line, though whilst he acknowledges that as far as hip hop goes “there’s a lot of shit out there”, it’s clear that there’s still a lot of passion for the genre coursing through his veins. “Hip hop to me has always been about great ideas because it is such a simple format yet the fact that it is so basic means that the ideas presented have got to be fucking great, otherwise it ain’t gonna work! It’s about what you do with it – it’s about creativity” After imagining a fantasy collaboration between himself and Beans he enthuses about the good work done by the Def Jux label owned by ex Company Flow producer and mc, El-P.
“I was a big fan of Company Flow. El-P’s a great producer so if there was a single label, that’d be the one I’d go back to the most with regards to hip hop. I really like the spirit of it: kick snare and an attitude!”
So a future hip hop track by Bomb The Bass isn’t out of the question?
“I’m still open to the idea. If I bumped into Biz Markie for example then that could be an interesting collaboration. But again it’s about the ideas. If you present Biz Markie in a completely different way then I think there’s some potential there. If you present an artist out of context to what people are normally expecting of them then that becomes an interesting thing.”

Clearly, Nick Cave’s dumping of Kylie in a river doesn’t trouble him. “Well that works! That’s the kind of twist that I like.”

Words: Black Belt Jonez

Stereo Mc’s interview

Mix tapes, baggy jeans and funk fuelled hip hop are the nostalgic memories of the boys from Brixton. A firmly established yet unique outfit spawned during the hedonist years of the 80’s. Still pushing the limits, they know how to mash-up it up. Fresh from back to back touring in the Ukraine, Beatmag and Rob Birch – the enigmatic front man of the Stereo Mc’s’ chew the fat over the new album “Double Bubble”, having the Mrs on tour and what’s burning a hole is his record bag.

Still upbeat and lively despite a gruelling schedule, all appears good in Rob’s world: “I’m good man… Spilling out of the bus, sound check, gig, then back on the bus… Its alright man – I kinda like it. But keeping busy with making some new tracks. Got some DJing coming up too between shows and some time with the family”.

It all started 20 years ago in Lavender Hill where Nick and Rob got together through the inspiration for the same music; hip hop and electro. Bored of the 80’s music scene they started listening to early rap, which made them want to re-educate themselves musically. “We decided to forget everything that we knew about music and start again. All we had at the time was reel to reel 4 track, an old belt driven turn table with a radio cassette plugged into it and started to make beats: Play a drum break and press record then rewind it, play it back with the record flying in and record it again. These were before the days of samplers. We just used to mess around with anything. It was the wild west of sampling”. It seemed like somewhat of a musical adventure playground. Yet to arrive were the software packages such as Ableton and Cubase, improvisation and a resourceful nature appear to be what has shaped the unique style of a quite significant band.

In 1986 they started their own record label G Street Records so they could get the music out there. Coming into some money to invest in themselves, they pressed their own record with Richie Rich (not the Beastie Boys one) and after getting the Jungle Brothers and Queen Latifah on board it built from there. Island Records saw the sparkle in them so an LP was created. We get an explanation of how things were back in the day: “A label like Island didn’t just say ‘Here you go, here’s half a million quid’. It was more like here’s fifteen hundred quid and we’ll pay for you to go on tour. They developed the group rather than give you stupid money, was a much better way of doing things. These days bands just get it thrown at them then if there isn’t a hit they get shelved”. The first album got a lot of people listening but didn’t sell much and they began an intermittent tour that eventually lasted an epic four years. Their second album, ‘Super Natural’ was finished off in New York then supporting bands like the Happy Mondays and De La Soul, gradually building up steam along the way. ‘Elevate my mind’ a track from the second album was a hit on the west coast of America, convincing Island to produce the third LP. “They had faith in us as well, there was a lot of love back in those days”. After recording ‘Connected’ it was back to more touring, doing their own shows and even a stint with U2 whilst constantly remixing along the way. “It was good that it didn’t happen too early for us. You get to have a body of work behind you so if there was ever a hiccup we could sit back, write something that we were happy with and not just have to chuck something out to keep things sweet. This was why we didn’t release anything for 7 years apart from a few remixes. We were just a bit burnt out at the time needed to check in with the family”. The years it seemed to have kept them away from emerging genres and how music had evolved so fast, particularly the dance scene. “We went away and it was all acid house and hip hop and came back to drum and bass and rave music and because you have been on the road you haven’t even heard this musical evolution going on.” Some much R&R was in order to reset to goals and get some stability back in the lives of a band whose motto up until now seemed have followed the ethos of ‘no rest for the wicked’. I just wanted to go down the supermarket and get some beans you know?” says Rob, laughing at how the simple things in life are really what make humanity tick.

He is incredibly sincere with a down to earth nature, seemingly unfazed but the flashy rock and roll aspects of being in the industry. Frustrated by conformity of clocking into a bling studio, the parameters of their free spirited approach to music felt close, so the boys took to the challenge of renovating a derelict building and making their own studio without time restraints (and an abundance of baked beans). It was all about creature comforts and hopefully some good ventilation. “You can do what you wanna do, and that’s how it should be really”. Inspiration and the creative juices don’t always flow between 9-5 (unless you happen to be Dolly Parton).

“Double Bubble” is something different to its predecessors, with a strong vibe taken from dance music, particularly break-beat. Stereo Mc’s have created something that translates straight to the dance floor. DJing over the last couple of years had reignited their spark for club music. “Five years ago we weren’t really felling a lot of dance music, it was all too generic and didn’t have a voice. Now we’re listening to Sinden, Duke Dumont and Baby Funk, and people like Diplo” says Rob, listing the inspirations with much gusto. “We started getting in to breaks but it all had big dirty baselines, more ghetto and grimey feel to it with a hip hop mentality that we could relate to.” Taking a very hands on trail and error method to progress, their translation of breaks into their music resulted in making a tune, pressing it and playing out in a club to see how it firstly heard in such a venue and the reaction from the crowd.

The next chapter is the introduction of a local whipper snapper: Tic Toc, a young guy yet to be tainted by the music industry was willing just to hang out with them for a few months and live what they were doing. A fresh mind and experience of music from a different place gave Nick and Rob a different view and education on how things are now for the kids. “It hopefully bought us up to speed and a renewed enthusiasm and fresh energy to be on the laptop all the time making music, making dub plates and mucking around with other people’s tunes, creating mash-ups and then playing them that night!” His passion and gentle melodic tones of story-telling spill out as an impressive monologue, citing his late discovery of online music and downloading. There is still a place in his heart for vinyl, but most of the music is based now on the laptop where he can take a record, manipulate it, give it a rough edge, a different feel. The new style and sound of the album lends itself to have something stronger to say, it’s a little less spiritual from former works and from a different angle.

Trying to find the narcissist in Rob proved to be fruitless. Asking about who he has inspired over the years he has a humble opinion. “The best comments we get are when people say that the music has helped them through a bad time, or ‘Me and my girl go to bed when and listen to it’ – things like that are the best part of being in the industry. And on Myspace you can see it from all sides. I leave a message on the page of some kids that are making dub step and they come back all “thanks man, that really inspiring coming from you” so its great to hear the feedback.”

It’s a diverse shopping list of genres that inspired them; “Kraftwerk, Schoolly D, Africa Bambaatta, Public Enemy, Beastie Boys right up to what’s going on now Dizzie Rascal, Santa Gold and I am really feeling some of the dub step that’s around at the moment like Benga. We played in the same tent as him at Bestival and I really liked his set”. Tours constantly peppered with festivals throughout Europe offer up the chance to take in some bands that they wouldn’t normally see “Ronnie Size has still got loads of energy. I’m not really a drum and bass fan because I don’t play it, but every now and then I hear a wicked tune man, but I cant go and play it out! I don’t know my arse from my elbow with that – cant be an expert on everything.”

“What I really love at the moment is that everything is melting down a bit, you can hear the baselines underneath electro. Artists now are taking a little lean from each other and everyone is dipping onto each other’s pot a little. You don’t really know what you’re listening to anymore.”
New music and Nu Rave and this overall blend of styles and people take Rob back to the day when the yuppies, dealers, b boys and ravers all used to party together creating a unique atmosphere and electricity at the honeymoon of rave music. “Back in the day you would be coming home on the night bus, and it was before the scene was awash with drugs so there would be b boys, and rockers and futurists all partying up there. People with their stereos so loud that you could here them. There was a lot of Mantronix played back then, I remember that. Good times”
People today seem to be slipping back into that trend and chilling out a bit more, experimenting on different styles. “Its not all baggy trousers anymore. You don’t have to pretend to be something your not”.

How would describe your music to a Beatmag reader’s mum? “With a bit of luck after a couple of sherries it would get her dancing on the table!” To coin a phrase from the horse’s mouth, its ‘dirty electro funk’.
He goes on to discuss his fashion sense, his wife and why he has the reputation for a bit of a club casualty. “When we got back from making ‘Connected’ there were rumours going round that I had died – it was even written in a paper! Admittedly I did feel pretty rough but I wasn’t dead and I wasn’t a junkie either! People just thought that because I looked like one…” There are pros and cons of such a physique and even now he gets followed around in shops by security guards with a shifty glare. No longer clad in the massive baggy jeans that were the signature look of the latter years, Rob now rocks the stage in some skinny jeans “Even with them I have to have a break every now and then. They get a bit much!” Considering the grip of an obesity epidemic, shouldn’t you wear them just because you can? “Ha ha – that’s what my wife says ‘why don’t you wear something that fits you man?!’. Not everyone can get away with it, but they still do it! I think it’s a woman thing. They notice it more.” With the wife (who is also one of the vocalists) now on tour with him, domestic bliss has its place, even on a tour bus. They still do their own thing with an air of professionalism “She still watches that shit on TV I never watch and I have to wait to use the bathroom cos she will be doing her make up for the gig and stuff. Its nice really, kind of normality”.

Many a mix-tape throughout the years has featured their wares, such as ‘Now That’s What I Call Music’ so what’s it like to be sandwiched between the likes of Elton John and George Michael? “It doesn’t bother me to be honest with you. It’s the nature of the beast of a label releasing your music. At least we’re not going out making excuses for writing songs with them which is what a lot of people do. You know, get really successful and make a song with Elton John and they are like ‘O well Elton John is ok’ and its like, no, sorry”. Despite this it gave the Stereos the chance to be shown to a wider audience in a place where they may not usually be heard, so for that he is happy. Always of the presumption that their music was quite underground (although a certain mobile phone company who utilised the lyrics to ‘Connected’ springs to mind) it is easy for him to forget this has spanned two decades and they are still going down well to the kids in the club today while keeping to their roots.

A few days later, armed with a guest list for the Brixton Jamm, London and a bottle of Jerry Sailor rum for the night train back to Brighton, Beatmag are treated to a home coming gig and a showcase for ‘Double Bubble’. A cute little venue rammed with a diverse collection of locals, hardcore fans still decked out in apparel from the 80’s and kids all enjoying how accessible their music is. After some random support acts including DJ Rubbish (great name, dubious mc but a pretty good DJ actually) the atmosphere had built up to fever pitch and the crowd were baying for band. They eventually burst on stage in a flurry of colour, hair and moody shades to deliver the bouncing tracks from the new album chopped with a couple of the crowd pleasing classics such as ‘Connected’. As a performer, Rob is professional, controlled and can really hold a note. He casts a spell over the audience who seemed to be enthralled, the music was very up beat and smothered in breaks. new tracks such as ‘Black Gold’ were extremely catchy and left you humming it all the way home and ‘Show Your Light’ was a chance for a quite ethereal use of his voice fading it out to a spooky climax. For a small man his stage presence is huge, when we finally see his deep, sparkling blue eyes you can see a lot of warmth and fun hidden behind the serious gaunt expression. With uncapped energy bouncing around the stage anddancing in-sync with the girls (who were extremely hot) it was clear that they know how to put on a good show.

Considering they span over the last 2 decades, the core of the band have remained true with Rob, Nick the same drummer and one of the backing singers, a couple of others drifted in and out over the years. “It’s a character, and if things are working why change it?”

Words: Catherine Pryce
Photos: Mary Pryce

http://www.myspace.com/stereomcsofficial

Click here for Rob’s recent Bamjam mix – Quality!



In the recent popular sci-fi/cop drama ‘Ashes to Ashes’, a group of detectives go under cover at a London nightclub. Since the narrative is set in 1981, the venue is frequented by (what became termed that same year) ‘New Romantics’. It’s a scene that’s a homage to the Blitz club, a London location where, back in 1981, Steve Strange and Rusty Egan ran a new kind of night club that stridently moved away from the spitting and brawling of the entropic punk scene. The music and fashions were sophisticated, cool and danceable. This wasn’t a clientele in clothes appropriated from bin liners and toilet chains. Such a grouping celebrated the flamboyant, the narcisstic, and the eccentric as exemplified by the dandified Regency designs by Vivienne Westwood which were seen later with the likes of Adam Ant. The bands under this journalistic label – Spandau Ballet, Visage, Ultravox, Japan, Culture Club, Duran Duran – offered up a new style of synth-pop that was as bombastic as a box set of Sky albums and as pretentious as Tara Palmer-Tomkinson’s Swiss apartment in Klosters.

Rusty Egan was the DJ who defined the sound of that moment by playing records which might have previously got a DJ lynched: Kraftwerk, David Bowie, Roxy Music, Ultravox, Magazine, Japan, Brian Eno, and electronic film soundtracks. Strange became the doorman whose increasingly eccentric door policy resulted in him refusing entry to a pissed-off Mick Jagger.

Visage was formed in 1978 by Rusty Egan, Midge Ure and Steve Strange. They were soon joined by Ultravox’s Billy Currie, and a trio of musicians from Magazine: Dave Formula, Barry Adamson, and John McGeoch. In 1980, Visage released their most successful single, ‘Fade to Grey’, an earlier guise of which had been written by Billy Currie and Chris Payne (titled ‘Toot City’) during the 1979 tour for Gary Numan. The single was followed by other top 40 hits, most notably: ‘Visage’, ‘Mind of a Toy’, ‘Damned Don’t Cry’, and ‘Night Train’ – but Visage never captured the glory of the iconic ‘Fade to Grey’.

In spite of this, Visage was highly influential in sound and image for the glut of more successful imitators that followed. Visage’s achievements were all the more remarkable in that they weren’t really a band at all – they existed solely as a studio project designed to, yes, make money, but also give Egan the kinds of records he liked to play to a home crowd. The beginning of the end came with the third album, ‘Beat Boy’. Most of the band members had jumped ship. Egan and Strange decided to take Visage out as a live act – but the band quickly folded. In the late 1990s, Strange brought back Visage, though this time as Visage mkII. They played a beefed-up version of ‘Fade to Grey’ in ‘Ashes to Ashes’ to impressive effect, but their occasional live appearances have generated generally poor reviews.
Rusty Egan is the DNA running through a whole cluster of bands both before and after Visage. He nearly became drummer for The Clash; he then became the drummer for The Rich Kids with Midge Ure – from which they formed Visage; he introduced Ure to Phil Lynott which resulted in the collaborative single ‘Yellow Pearl’ (becoming the Top of the Pops theme from 1981); Rusty persuaded Ultravox’s Billy Currie to let Ure become the new lead singer for the band; during the recording of Visage’s first album, he went on tour with The Skids as their drummer; his Djing in the latter half of the 70s and early 80s influenced the sonic tastes of many groups of the time and future DJs – he almost single-handedly introduced German electronica to the British club scene; in the mid-80s he opened Camden Palace which featured appearances from pop neophytes Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Madonna.
At present, to quote from his website: ‘Rusty has been Resident DJ to Roger Michael’s ‘ Rock star’ night at Boujis, South Kensington since the onset and it was awarded the ‘Best Night’ Award at The 2005 London Club and Bar Awards where he also received ‘Best DJ’. He continues to play on a weekly basis at many of London’s top clubs and parties including Boujis, Chinawhite, Umbaba, Boutique 60 and Aura’.
Adam Locks meets Rusty at the Mahiki club in London to discuss Egan’s work past and present.

To begin with, can you tell me how you and Steve Strange got involved with the clubs Billy’s and the Blitz, the latter which became the birthplace of the New Romantics. Looking back at footage of the scene, it looks an amazing time, plus you all look so bloody young.

What, young now?

Well yes, young now, but especially then.

You’ve got to understand what London was like at the time – it was Thatcherite Britain: it was grey, it was horrible, and it was disgusting. If that was London, can you imagine Manchester at that time? We were very bright and colourful young people; a lot of them were students at St Martin’s College etc. We were listening to an alternative style of music – i.e. we were punks at one point. Previous to being punks we were probably into Bowie or Ultravox! or Kraftwerk or Eno. So, the bottom line was, where do we go and play that music and hear it and hang around? The answer: no where. There was literally no where to go. So it was like me grabbing my record collection and saying all back to mine, except we did it in this tiny little gay club.

Billy’s?

Yeah. Actually it wasn’t a gay club, it was just that on the Tuesday night at a miserable time like that in Soho, probably most of the customers were. That’s it, really.

How did you meet Steve Strange?

I met him in the punk days.

Where?

King’s Road.

In a shop, a pub, a club?

You know, walking down King’s Road and you go, “Hey mate, you look fantastic. Where did you get that coat?” You know, where did they get that German leather trench coat?

As you do.

Yeah, as you do. I used to hang around with Billy Idol. Him and me were mates. We used to go out and pull. Then Steve and I became mates – he hung around with me because Billy began to get a bit busy.

With Generation X?

Yeah.

Steve had a well-publicised fall from grace from the late 1980s, didn’t he? It was a pretty sad moment when he was caught stealing a Telly Tubby from a shop.

Well, who didn’t have a fall from grace? Adam Ant, how’s he doing?

Judging from a documentary I saw not that long ago, not great. Ok, going back to the clubs, did you feel at the time that you were behind a cultural revolution of sorts?

Well look, you and I have just arrived at this club tonight. It’s Monday night. It’s ten o’clock. I’m playing music that I like in the background. The barmen, the manager – most of the staff here are foreign. Most of them don’t care about the music, as long as the customers aren’t complaining. So, if you had 150 mates – when you arrived at this club it was full of suits coming out the office. For example, I’d play Frank Zappa, ‘Dancing Fool’, which was basically ridiculing everybody on the dance floor saying, “I’m an idiot with a hairy chest and a gold medallion and a little bit of coke”. So, basically, I played really bad records and people used to come up to me and tell me how crap I was, and I knew that soon all my mates were going to arrive and then we could play what we wanted to play – but I had to get rid of the suits. So, here I am twenty-thirty years later and I’m playing to 20 year old people what they want to hear. What I want to hear maybe on my ipod. The point is, what we did at that time was play music to a very small contingent of people in London who wanted to hear it.

A niche.

Yeah, a little niche.

Perhaps you’ve already partly answered the question, but did you think New Romantics were a continuation of punks – you know, ‘Peacock Punks’ – or a breakaway?

I would have seen them as more of an evolvement. Don’t forget that Boy George auditioned for Bow Wow Wow as lead singer. I managed Matthew Ashman who was in that band and they then formed the Chiefs of Relief with Paul Cook from the Sex Pistols. We all kind of knew each other. I was in punk bands. I was in The Skids. So, at the end of the day, I would have thought the New Romantics were an evolvement of punk without the violence, without the spitting, and without the “Oi” – sorry Gary Bushell.

So, the New Romantics were an evolvement which was much more loved-up?

Yeah, we were more loved-up. They were more gay, you know. New Romantics were the more fashionable side of punk. New Romantics were the Vivian Westwood designer side of it, rather than the Malcolm McClaren New York Dolls music side of it.

Going back to Boy George, I can’t imagine what it must have been like having him as the cloak room attendant in your club. What was that like?

Nor could anyone who arrived. They felt a bit dodgy about giving him their coat. He did take things from peoples’ pockets. Things did go missing every night, but he was very good at lying. The bottom line is that everyone knew that they were going to be a star or successful in some way or other, so nobody was looking for a job. Everyone was looking for a way to make just enough money to keep them in the lifestyle to which they were accustomed. Did you know Marc Almond was a cloakroom attendant in a Leeds warehouse? So, if you were making music all day and you worked for one night and nicked whatever you could and picked up your doll cheque, you could make your music. I mean, for Jarvis Cocker, it went on a little bit too long.

Again, you’ve answered this in part, but obviously there was a lot of make-up involved with the look of the clientele who frequented your clubs; there was certainly something very gay in the appearance of many of the New Romantic bands in the beginning of their careers. I mean, what was it with leather hats worn by Midge Ure singing ‘Vienna’ on ‘Top of the Pops’, or Depeche Mode – they all looked like something out of a Tom of Finland drawing (excluding the displayed genitalia).

Then again, Lou Reed wasn’t gay and yet the back cover of ‘Transformer’ has him dressed what you’d now say is a real gay outfit – actually, there was a member of the Village People dressed exactly the same.

Sure, but what I’m wondering if was there a conscious or not so conscious mimicking of gay subculture going on?

No, no. How can I put it? When you went out dressed up trying to attract girls, you didn’t go out dressed up looking like a yob off the terraces. At the end of the day, it’s what you were because, in fact, you were some suburban kid. So, you were trying to get away from that identity. So, you were going, “No, no, no – all my mates I don’t see anymore. They don’t understand the music or me”. You were therefore in-between the two. You were not like a suburban yob off the council estate, yet you were, but you were trying to move way from this.

That leather wear looks incredibly gay now, but judging by your comments about Lou Reed, did then as well.

Well, I drew the line. I’d been the heterosexual throughout the whole era. But I’d wear certain things which were on the edge of “Is he gay, is he not?” Soon as I opened my mouth, you kind of knew that I wasn’t.

My biggest shock about the period was a story about Steve Strange sleeping with The Stranglers bassist – JJ Burnel – after a gig in the 70s. I’ve always been a Stranglers fan, so I’m amazed that I never heard that one. Was that common knowledge in your social circle?

No, I didn’t, no, not at the time, although I did read about it in Steve’s autobiography. From my understanding of the gay world, there is a man and a woman in the relationship. One man takes one role. So it would be a very heterosexual looking guy in the relationship. Sometimes they’d be hairy blokes and what have you. So, I don’t know. I don’t know if JJ ever had anything to say about that matter.

Did you know JJ?

No, I didn’t know him. I knew Hugh Cornwell better and have continued to know him for many years. I saw The Stranglers when they were a three-piece before they had a keyboard player.

Crikey, before Dave Greenfield?

Before they had the keyboard player. I saw them in the Greyhound pub in Fulham Palace Grove. I saw everyone. Don’t forget, I was a tea boy in a recording studio in the 70s.

You are known for DJing at Billy’s and the Blitz and your play list from that time is like a who’s who of electronica. How many of these acts frequented your clubs and who else did you meet later on? I know, for example, that you’ve always been a huge admirer of Kraftwerk.

Well, I jumped on a plane and flew out to Düsseldorf to meet Kraftwerk in 1979 to meet Ralph and Florian. I also went to Conny Plank’s studio.

Why did you go out there?

Because I completely loved them and I wanted to meet them. I knew Düsseldorf was a small town, so I just went into the town in the afternoon and asked people were I could meet Kraftwerk and I was told them that I could find them at the club Malesh. So I went there and guess what I had with me? I used to carry around with me David Bowie singing in German ‘Heroes’ – ‘Helden’ – and I’d go up to a DJ in a club and ask if they’d got this, and they’d say “No”, then I’d say “I have” – then I’d give him the record. It was my favourite record.

What were Florian and Ralph like?

Very subdued and quiet. I told them what I believed was happening in London and said that I thought ‘Man Machine’ was a complete work of genius and that they would be discovered. Sometime later they came to my house in 1983.

Why? How?

I tried to turn the Camden Palace into Kling Klang Studios for a week and paint it black and red – the whole building. The plan was to do two shows a night. Wasted Talent was our agent. I never got the gig, but I was in contact with them at the time saying, “Look, take over my entire club every night and turn it into Kraftwerk land”. It didn’t work, so when they came over, they had dinner at mine and then played a gig at the Hammersmith Apollo instead. I’m still in contact online with Karl [Bartos]. I think his music is fantastic. I think everyone I’ve either adored or loved, I’ve kind of met.

How did you become drummer with The Rich Kids?

Well, I had been one of the drummers with The Clash in the 1970s. Me and Jon Moss – he rehearsed for The Clash. I introduced Jon Moss to Boy George. As I’ve told you, I was friends with Billy Idol, and Mark Laff – who was in Generation X – also rehearsed for The Clash. So, it was Mark Laff, Jon Moss and me. I used to be in a band with Malcolm [Owen] from The Ruts and his girlfriend was the lead singer. I got Topper [Headen] to meet The Clash because they weren’t looking for a fourth member of the band – they were looking for a drummer. They had a drummer called Terry Chimes and they weren’t treating him like a member of the band. When I came along, they thought me a nice perky little kid who they could pay a few quid to play the drums. But I was saying, “No, not really” because you’re either in a band or not.

How competent a drummer were you?

I’m just a good straight forward rock drummer. I believed in being like a machine. I believed the drummer was the backbone to the song. My drum idol of the time was probably Simon Kirke from Bad Company as a straight forward rock drummer. And, obviously, I loved electronica, so I loved to play like a machine.

The Wolfgang Flur approach?

Yeah. But look at Ultravox’s drummer, Warren Cann. Warren Cann was a fucking phenomenal machine. ‘Herr X’ we called him.

Warren Cann was very techy, wasn’t he? Apparently he was always customising his Roland CR-78 drum machine.

Well, that’s because we were all discovering at the time. Also, as a person, he was someone who would always intellectualise everything.

Moving on, what did you make of Glen Matlock because the other Sex Pistols weren’t particularly nice about him once he’d left the band?

Me and him are very good friends. I’ll being seeing him at the Isle of Wight because I’ll be DJing and the Sex Pistols are headlining, plus his kids live there. You got to understand where Glen is coming from. Number one: he wrote the bloody stuff – he was the writer in the band. He was like the grammar school kid compared to council estate kids. So he was the one who could express what Lydon was trying to say. The fact that they did a couple of Monkeys songs and an Iggy Pop song in rehearsals and a few Small Faces – they were basically a pub band playing all their favourite songs which just happened to be things like Iggy’s ‘No Fun’. They also loved the Small Faces because they were really like a British-English band, so there was none of that ‘American shit’. Obviously McClaren had an influence which Lydon and everyone does not want to acknowledge. When Glen was dropped, Lydon grabbed his mate – Sid Vicious – who couldn’t really play.

Did you meet Sid?

I did meet Sid and he was the kind of guy you don’t want to meet. He was just a fucking idiot. He’d just gob in your face. It made you want to lay him out.

Was he that aggressive?

The whole of London was that aggressive.

Did you get on with Midge Ure from the first time you met him because you’ve always been incredibly complimentary about him in interviews?

Midge had been offered to be made a star in the 70s and took that deal for the band Slik. Very soon he was on the fucking slag heap. So, from being number one with ‘Forever and Ever’ and being a pin-up in ‘Oh Boy’, you’re now back on the dole because you didn’t write the song. He took the cheap deal. But really, underneath it all, he was a very talented guy. He got an offer to front The Sex Pistols. I mean, what other offers were coming in? Anyway, with Slik he’d gone for the shit deal and there was a price to pay. He took the shit deal, went to number one and then, a year later, punk happened. So he started a band, PVC2 who released one single – ‘Put You in the Picture’ – which got nowhere. His manager moved to America and opened up a club called Visage. I think taking that shit deal taught him a very big lesson and I think he said, “You know what, I am a star, I have got a lot of talent, I’ve got a lot to offer, and I’ll probably get a lot further if I just take it at a day at a time”. So, he was a lot wiser than me and others because he’s already had his moment in the record industry.

You introduced Midge to Billy Currie and pushed for him to become the next lead singer in Ultravox to fill the gap left my John Foxx. What did you think of Ultravox, both with Foxx, then Ure? When thing I noticed about your Blitz play list is that you played lots of Ultravox tracks, in fact far more so than any other band.

They were absolutely pioneering. I loved them. Don’t forget, the first Ultravox album was produced by Brian Eno. I mean come on. Then later they were produced by Conny Plank. Fantastic.

I presume you saw them many times live?

Yeah yeah. But, you know, when everyone is going one way, there is always someone going the other and you can be ridiculed for it. Ultravox were being marketed by Island Records as a punk band when they were not a punk band. They did release a single called ‘Rockwrok’ but that wasn’t them. That was not what they were about. Then they lost their guitarist after the second album.

Steve Shears.

Yeah. By the time they got to the third album the record industry – i.e. the press – didn’t know what to make of them either. They were a bit like XTC. You know, what the fuck were they? Ultravox songs like ‘My Sex’, ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’, ‘Quiet Men’ and ‘Dislocation’ were amazing. They also brought out white vinyl 12” singles – it was something to do with the cut; the records were so powerful on the deck. I really loved mixing those records. They really made people dance.

Did you think Ultravox were one of the more significant electro-pop bands of the time?

Oh yes, I was a complete fan. I saw Ultravox before they had a record deal with Midge. We went to LA. They played at the Whiskey a Go Go club in Hollywood. They played two shows a night and on New Year’s Eve I played ‘King’s Lead Hat’ on guitar which was one of our favourite Brian Eno songs. I did the sound for them on the mixing desk because I was the only bloke who knew their music at the Electric Ballroom before they got their record deal. I just loved their music. And don’t forget that when Midge joined Ultravox, they went from a five or six piece – John Foxx lead singer and five musicians – to just four. And Midge played keyboards, and he played the guitar and he did the singing. And don’t forget, I created Visage with Midge from the bands Magazine and Ultravox – the two avant-garde punk bands. By the way, I thought John Foxx’s solo album – ‘Metamatic’ – was also fantastic. And I loved Japan and Talk Talk. I saw Talk Talk at the Embassy Club, but the lead singer’s ears…

Mark Hollis.

Yes, his big ears put everyone off, but what a voice.

Midge has commented that the Rich Kids broke up because he bought a synth which split up the band between those who wanted to go down the electronic route and those who didn’t. He stated that you and he went off with the synthesizer and did some demos which would later become the basis for Visage. Which songs did those demos become?

That synth was a Yamaha. Believe it or not, but one of those demos became ‘The Dancer’ from the first Visage album. The other one was ‘In the Year 2525’.

That was a cover version, wasn’t it?

Yes. Then there was another one which Steve wanted us to do, but none of us liked it. We also did Ronny’s ‘If You Want Me to Stay’. Ronny is an androgynous girl I found in Paris. Everybody thought she was a man and the song – ‘If you want me to stay, I’ll be around some day to be available for you’ – it’s like the transvestite burlesque show. That was Midge and I, Barry Adamson on bass, and Dave Formula on keyboards. Beautiful song.

Billy always had an amazingly distinctive sound with his ARP Odyssey. Did you all encourage that sort of sound? I’m especially thinking of tracks such as ‘Tar’ and the rather interesting ‘Frequency 7’.

I loved him more for his violin. My idea for an ideal band was a mix of magazine and Ultravox with Steve Strange and Boy George. I wanted to bring nightclubs alive with the musicianship and ambience created by Magazine and Ultravox.

Some music critics have suggested that ‘Fade to Grey’ is the greatest British electro-pop track of the period. What do you think?

Nah. I’d put Vince Clark in there with all that pop stuff.

Ok, what would be your top five most significant electro-pop records?

No, no, you’ve got to understand something. What did ‘Anarchy in the UK’ mean as a song? It was the voice of an entire revolution of the music industry taking the power away from the record industry who were fat cats from Mars – Mars Bars. One minute they were selling Mars Bars, the next minute they’re selling pop music. Sex Pistols came along and it was bye bye. Right? ‘Fade to Grey’ – which is what our life was – “Just go away. You have no future. You’re a nothing. You’re a nobody. Just get a job in a factory in a Thatcherite Britain while a certain amount of us will have the meat off the bone”. With ‘Fade to Grey’, we weren’t political. We were trying to be a positive message. Spandau Ballet were the face of New Romantics. Boy George became the icing on the cake. The geniuses of the 80s would probably have been the Eurythmics, it may be also Trevor Horn; but Visage were basically a night club DJ (me), some musicians from my illustrative past (Midge and the rest of the boys), and some twat from the toilet or the cloakroom.

I’ve hard you say in an interview that, “Visage were a creative roller coaster which I told everyone to get on, but then I fell off”. Can you elaborate?

Well, I tell everybody about everything that I think is brilliant, but I don’t take advantage of it and profit from it. I did a party for Depeche Mode and Daniel Miller of Mute Records had just made £45 million. He arrived in a limo with a cigar – it was like something out of a movie. I was a DJ for £500 quid or something because I’m friends with the band. He’s spent the last twenty years going to the office every day building up new records, supporting Barry Adamson, supporting artists he really believed in. But I don’t spend my life going to the office every day. I spend my life going, “Hello girls”. I was there for Adamski, I was there at all the raves, I was there for Seal, I took Seal to Trevor Horn – I’ve been there for years for lots and lots of people, giving people advice, promoting things – none of this means that I’m going to become a fat cat with a big cigar. It’s still just music.

Related to this then, is it true that you and Steve were not included on the Visage contract? Do you get any royalties?

No, no, I am, I am. I always was. I’ve just got a few problems trying to collect record royalties and what ‘they’ are trying to say is can I produce my 1981 agreement? Well, why do I need that as everyone else is being paid? I need to know.

John McGeogh was guitarist on some of the first Visage album, but why was he needed when you already had Midge on guitar?

As I said, I loved Magazine and I loved Ultravox.

Wasn’t there a class of guitarists?

No, because they were completely different styles.

Why did John, allegedly, see Visage as a bit of a joke?

Because Magazine were very serious. Then the Armoury Show were very serious. Everyone was very serious about their art. A lot of bands become like an organisation and they have their whole itinerary printed out for them. Visage didn’t have a manager. We had a production deal with Midge’s manager.

Was that Chris Morrison?

Yes, Chris. We just booked the time and then went in and made the record and that was it. Every now and again we did a John Peel session or something.

Who chose the title for the second Visage album – ‘The Anvil’ – because that was the name of a New York gay club which was particularly infamous for acts with dildos? Was it Steve?

Yeah, it was Steve because we were a club band and we loved the gay nightlife.

It’s a very gay album isn’t it?

That’s what we were trying to do.

There was a fair bit of media controversy with the album title wasn’t there?

With the black leather? Nazi-chic. We were all fans of German film noir: ‘Metropolis’. We were into the Kraftwerk hard image.

Were you always so filmic because you did used to play soundtracks in those early club nights?

Yeah. For example, I used to play the main theme to the movie ‘The Warriors’ by Barry De Vorzon, the Blade Runner theme by Vangelis, stuff by Morricone, Walter Carlos and so on.

Which of those two Visage albums do you prefer?

I think there both equally as good. Obviously we didn’t have a ‘Fade to Grey’ on the second album, but that’s the end of it. I thought ‘Damned Don’t Cry’ was a good effort.

‘Night train’?

Nah. I like ‘Whispers’ off ‘The Anvil’.

When did things start to go wrong in Visage?

As I’ve said, we didn’t have a manager. When we completed the recording of the Visage album, it was before Ultravox’s ‘Vienna’ was recorded. We couldn’t get a record deal. We put out a single – ‘Tar’ – and we were not taken very seriously. Spandau Ballet were playing in the club and various celebrities; so we were having this real success, but where’s the fucking record? Chris Morrison came with a kind of take it or leave it offer. In my own life, this offer caused a rift that took a long time to settle. The offer stated that Midge produced the album, and Midge and Billy wrote ‘Fade to Grey’ – the offer was to take it or leave it. It wasn’t to include me or Steve.

Steve once commented that he should have been credited on that track because he came up with the idea for your Belgian girlfriend to talk on the song which is, perhaps, not a good enough reason to be included as one of the composers.

Juggaknots interview

The Juggaknots are Breeze Brewin, Queen Herawin, Buddy Slim and DJ Boo. Their second album ‘Use Your Confusion’ got joyful reviews in Beatmag a while back and since then we’ve been trying to track them down to squeeze some further info out of their busy heads. It’s been quite a mission but we eventually made it, and they’ve even been kind enough to donate a free download (link below). Beatmag hip-hop heads – get your teeth into this;

What you been doing since ‘Use Your Confusion’?
Just working the album and keeping it moving along…

How did you feel about it when you finally finished recording what Beatmag regarded as a classic album?
We felt good about it, but always felt we could tweak a few things. But, deadlines always hold precedence…
However we just try to get all the elements in each song. Make sure the drums are right, cuts if any is proper, verses in the front, bass is in the right pocket, and also making sure all samples are cut to perfection and are in the right time.

What were your expectations of it?
We just happy people appreciate the music, it was definitely harder to finish than the previous

Harder how?
Harder because back then we didn’t have as much responsiblities, then. Now we all have children, plus we have mortage payments, and we didn’t have full-time jobs back then either. So taking all that into consideration, it was just a different time for us.

Do you all have jobs aside from being musicians?
Acting, Teaching, and being fathers and mothers. We are all certified New York City teachers, and we all teach in the same area of the Bronx where we grew up. As for acting, we are all looking for parts to audition for in plays, film, commercials, whatever while also collectively and individually working on our own screenplays. And we’ve got some movie ideas in the works

You still listen to hip hop yourselves?
No doubt, we live it – it’s in the DNA! I believe we all are going to be listening to this music till the end.

What other sorts of music you into?
All types, Rock, Jazz, Soul, and Reggae mostly

Some of your favourite albums?
Bob Marley “Rastaman Vibration”, Marvin Gaye “Here My Dear”, Curtis Mayfield “Superfly”, Jungle Bros “Straight Out The Jungle” and on and on and on

Is it an age/sentimental thing or was hip hop really so much better 15 years ago than it is now?
Both! but it doesn’t have to be. These times are tailor made for the communicative power of hip-hop. These times need some good hip-hop, from the kids for the subtle edutainment to the old fogeys like myself for a good laugh, to wild out a bit.

What would define a return to the ‘good old days’ for you or do you think we should accept that a ‘golden era’ will never return and just be happy that we were lucky enough to be around when it happened 1st time round?
I think all music is diluted now; rock ain’t Zepellin no more & jazz ain’t Weather Report. If anything we’ve advanced as a music in its sound and scale. Technology has totally changed how money is transferred, I think when we catch up with the tech, and maximize it, we’ll get back to productive times economically and musically.

Is it too soon to ask about new Juggaknots material?
Not at all, we have new Juggaknots material on the horizon; we are packaging it like a three-headed monster. The Brewin is working on his solo effort, Herawin is doing the same and Slim (Fever) is working on his compilation. So even though they are separate projects we are all rocking on each other’s joint, but having the personal freedom to do what we want individually.

Check out the title track from the album ‘Use Your Confusion’ here;
http://www.zshare.net/audio/12347639f36d2827/

http://www.myspace.com/juggsmusic
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZlY71RGRMk

‘Use Your Confusion’ is still available on MATIC RECORDS/AMALGAM DIGITAL from the usual digital sources (or you can keep it real and buy a copy on vinyl from www.discogs.com!)