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.

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.

Adam Locks meets Claudia Brücken in London to discuss Propaganda and her projects since

In the history of electro-pop, the mid-1980s could be viewed as a dead zone. New synth stars such as Howard Jones, Nick Kershaw and the Thompson Twins demonstrated how passé such acts had become.

Concurrently, many of the most significant synth bands from the late ‘70s and early ‘80s had become artistically bankrupt. The Human League (‘Crash’), Ultravox (‘U-Vox’) and Gary Numan (‘The Fury’) were all in artistic freefall. There were exceptions, most notably Depeche Mode, and a band whose reputation would rest with one album: Propaganda and ‘A Secret Wish’ (1985).

Propaganda was initially formed in the early 1980s by Ralf Dorper, Andreas Thein and Susanne Freytag in Dusseldorf, Germany, home of Kraftwerk. There were soon joined by fellow Germans Claudia Brucken (who would become the voice of Propaganda) and Michael Mertens. The band were signed on Trevor Horn’s ZTT label in 1983.

Horn produced their first single, ‘Dr Mabuse’, a track that hit the listener like a sonic tsunami. But with commitments with another band at ZTT – Frankie Goes to Hollywood – Horn passed production duties to Steve Lipson. Rather than a flash-in-the-pan, ‘Dr Mabuse’ was just one track from an album that not only had sumptuous production, but noteworthy tunes to match. The ideologue behind Propaganda – Ralf Dorper – steered the band away from frothy Europop. In name, sound, image and ideology, Propaganda were clearly influenced by the punk ethos to push at boundaries. They showcased a playfully schizophrenic identity typified by the two versions of the same song, ‘Duel’ and ‘Jewel’, resulting in the band being labelled ‘Abba from Hell’. Whereas ‘Duel’ was a more light weight electro-pop record, ‘Jewel’ performed as a sort of evil twin: thunderous beat, screaming vocals and pounding synths.

Propaganda clearly signalled themselves as ‘serious’ musicians, and arty ones too, with influences stemming from film, literature (‘Dream Within A Dream’ is based on a poem by Edgar Allan Poe) and classical music (Michael Mertens was the percussionist from the Dusseldorf Symphony Orchestra while still in the band).
The album was critically acclaimed but relations between the label and the group quickly deteriorated. Claudia Brucken’s decision to marry ZTT’s co-founder and publicist, Paul Morley, didn’t help matters and she found herself seen as another problem. Poor management helped deepen the crisis and in 1986 they split.
Claudia continued to work on the ZTT label having already recorded a track with Heaven 17’s Glen Gregory entitled ‘When Your Heart Runs Out of Time’. She then teamed up with Thomas Leer in the band Act, releasing the album ‘Laughter, Tears And Rage’ (1988). A solo album followed in 1991, ‘Love And A Million Other Things’. A reunion with Michael Mertens and Propaganda followed in the late 1990s, but after several years with nothing released, Claudia left – again.
Since then, Claudia has worked with various artists such as Andy Bell and Martin Gore and, more recently, with (ex-ZTT) minimalist composer Andrew Poppy for the unexpectedly stripped-down, yet engaging cluster of cover versions on the album ‘Another Language’. To hear Claudia sing tracks such as Kate Bush’s ‘Running Up That Hill’ and David Bowie’s ‘Drive in Saturday’ is surreal yet highly listenable.

In 2000, Claudia formed the band Onetwo with her long-term partner Paul Humphreys from OMD. Their album, ‘Instead’ continues the Teutonic themes of early Propaganda and, particularly in its opening, has a cinematic feel which echoes the cinephile spirit of Ralf Dorper. It’s a rich album that taps into the blueprint of OMD and Propaganda. Although Paul only sings on only one track – ‘I Don’t Blame You’ (about the suicide of Kurt Kobain) – his gentle vocals contrast with the power of Claudia’s voice.

Her singing is as good as anything on ‘A Secret Wish’, but operates in a musical context that nods to other acts such as the Eurythmics, Everything But the Girl, Depeche Mode (the track ‘Cloud 9’ was co-written with Martin Gore) and even Marlene Dietrich . It’s by no means an experimental album, but the tunes are strong, the themes shift between the melancholic, the joyful and the playful (there’s a disco version of Pink Floyd’s ‘Have A Cigar’).
To meet Claudia Brucken in the flesh is a strange, but highly pleasurable experience. Her image in Propaganda was always the ice queen – detached, collected and unconcerned. She came across as a pop femme fatale. In reality, she is warm, extremely hospitable and, as often as these go, nothing like her media persona…

Can I start by asking you about where you grew up and how you got involved with Propaganda?

Claudia Brucken: “I was born in a little Bavarian village. My mother’s Bavarian, but my father’s from the industrial part of Germany.”

What did your parents do?

CB: “My father was a policeman. My mother is a civil servant. A year after I was born we moved to Stuttgart. We stayed there for a couple of years, then we moved to the suburbs of Düsseldorf. Düsseldorf is very industrial. It’s very Kraftwerk.”

Did you ever bump into Kraftwerk when wandering the city?

CB: “I have, many times. When I was fifteen or sixteen, I used to go to a club which was a bit like the Hacienda: it was called the Ratinger Hof – that was like the hang-out place for all the musicians. Kraftwerk hung out there every Thursday night – one of them would always be there. There was a huge electronic scene there at that time in 1980, ‘81, ‘82, ‘83. Everybody wanted to be in a band. We had nothing else to do on a Saturday, so we all wanted to be in bands.”

And particularly a synth band?

CB: “Yes, that was the thing. Everything revolved around the synthesizer.”

What kinds of music were you listening to in your formative years?

CB: “Siouxsie and the Banshees, Can, Neu!, early Cure, Joy Division.”

How did you get involved with Propaganda?

CB: “I was in a band with Suzanne but it was like a fun band – it was really like four girls. The band was called Los Topolinos. I’m a bit embarrassed to say this, but we were a bit like The Bangles – the Düsseldorf Bangles.”

God Claudia, don’t say that.

CB: “No, but in a good way. I think they’ve done some great stuff.”

Do you?

CB: “I do. They did some good tunes. I always judge bands on tunes.”

‘Walk Like an Egyptian’?

CB: “Well, that’s a different thing. But you have to remember that we were only 17. We really weren’t taking music so seriously, you know?”

Your background was as an art student, so were you quite serious in that respect?

CB: “Yes. For me, I always liked self expression. I loved paintings; I’ve always really loved the theatre; I always really liked the 1930s and what went on in Berlin in the 20s and 30s; and Bertolt Brecht – that theatrical side made up part of my DNA, I guess.”

You always struck me as an interesting hybrid between punk and Marlene Dietrich. There was a fascinating fusion between image and sound.

CB: “I never wanted to be lightweight. I thought there was a lot more to it. People like Siouxsie and Patti Smith influenced me in that respect. Nina Hagen – a German singer – sounded so punk to me. I just so identified with an image of a woman that was a lot more tough. I was never into an image that was selling your body. I was never into that. So, Suzanne and I were in the Topolinos. Then Ralf Dorper who was one part of Propaganda with Andreas Thein, they asked Suzanne to take part in that band. So, Suzanne was then in two bands. Then Ralf, Andreas and Suzanne made some kind of recording which then was sent to Chris Bohn who was a good friend of Paul Morley who was just creating the label ZTT. Chris told Paul to check Propaganda out, and Paul really really liked it. Trevor Horn then heard that demo and invited the band over to England. They soon realised that Suzanne could talk well, but wasn’t a singer, so they recruited me into the band.”

So Suzanne never sung on any of the tracks?

CB: “Suzanne has a great talking voice. I always called her the queen of talk.”

But not singing?

CB: “Well, we can’t be good at everything.”

Your voice is wonderfully distinctive.

CB: “When I listen to music, the voice is everything which draws my attention to something. The voice has to kind of grab me.”

To the English ear, a German accent singing to electronic music sounds so good. I’m sure this is heavily influenced by Kraftwerk. There’s almost a fetish for that accent with electro-pop.

CB: “I also think German is a very poetic language. For example, when I saw Kraftwerk a few years ago playing at Brixton Academy, they sung in English, then switched to German and I just went – ‘German’. I loved Kraftwerk in German. It’s just so romantically beautiful. For me, I’ve got all the Kraftwerk albums in German and English and I always listen to the German versions. I want to hear that Düsseldorf.”

Was it difficult being the youngest member of Propaganda? You were much younger than the others.

CB: “Yes I was. That was always an issue. Obviously, I was totally inexperienced. I was still in school and ‘Dr Mabuse’ was a hit – I was just finishing my exams.”

What was that like? Did your school mates realise that you were in the charts?

CB: “I tell you what was fantastic. I had this amazing art teacher. I had to go for five days to do this video for ‘Dr Mabuse’ during school time. I couldn’t lie to her. I just said, ‘Can I please go?’ She said, ‘Do your thing. You’re excused’. A few weeks later I showed her the video. She was so proud that, during the lunch break, she distributed the videos throughout the whole school so everyone could see it. So, from all of a sudden, I went from someone at school who nobody noticed to being known by everyone. People loved that video. It just seemed to capture the mood and the kind of darker side.”

You’re referring to the black and white video because there were two videos made for that track.

CB: “Yes, that’s right because part of the record company thought that the first video – the black and white version – was too dark and wouldn’t get shown. So, they instructed us to do another video which we didn’t like, which we didn’t approve.”

Your videos were interesting because they often seemed to mix high art with high camp. I’m thinking here of the ‘P:Machinery’ video where your fellow band members are hung up like puppets on strings and you’re walking around them with this incredible dress with feathered shoulder pads. What was that about?

CB: “It was very surreal.”

Were you into conceptualism? Was it meant to be art? I was never sure how to decode Propaganda’s videos.

CB: “I think it just kind of all came together. We weren’t really thinking about it. We didn’t want to get into sexy little dresses. We just kind of had this artiness about us.”

Yet, in a sense you were being quite sexy by being so aloof. You were a sort of ice maiden.

CB: “Yes, but again we were not too consciously playing. It’s just the way we dressed at that point. Zgbiniew Rigbinsky directed this video. He was completely arty himself. He was this Polish film-maker and the song just captured his imagination. He was very much responsible about the marionettes to which you refer.”

They’re swung about quite violently in the video.

CB: “Yes. That’s a thing which caused such grief because the other band members wanted me to be a marionette.”

Why weren’t you?

CB: “Because someone had to cut the strings. Do you know what the video maker said when the others asked why I wasn’t a marionette? He said to them, “It’s poetry”. That was his answer.”

There’s a pattern here, isn’t there? If you watch the remake of ‘Dr Mabuse’, there’s a lovely scene with one of you smashing a radiator up with a sledge hammer while wearing a dinner jacket. I don’t know what that’s about. What’s noticeable is that while the others jumped around a lot, you never did. You were always cool and aloof.

CB: “Yes, that’s right, that’s right.”

Was that a directorial decision or yours?

CB: “It was just my decision. It was about standing back and being cool.”

In retrospect, the others now look rather dated and silly, and you don’t.

CB: “Good [Laughing]. I liked being that distance at that point. Now it’s different. Now I like to kind of engage.”

In a western context, the term propaganda has a rather negative association, particularly because of Nazism and fascism. Did the band purposefully choose a provocative name?

CB: “I didn’t come up with the name. Ralf and Andreas were the founders of the band, really. I thought it was an absolutely ideal name for a band. What was great about the name was that it was in every language – in every language it was the same word. It was ideal also in that we wanted to be provocative.”

There’s also something of the punk ethos going on here in the same way that some punk’s appropriated the symbol of the swastika; in other words, taking a concept or an image which is very unsettling, and doing something quite transgressive with it.

CB: “Our purpose was not to be bland pop – it was to stir and also to provoke. For ages, when I was so young then in the band, I kind of completely misinterpreted Ralf. I couldn’t quite place Ralf at that time. I kept thinking, ‘Is he a bit right-wing or is he not?’ We never had proper conversations about politics and views, but the way he presented himself had this kind of right-wing taste to it. But, knowing him now, I realise that he was punky. He wanted to be ambiguous and provocative and I kind of adore that about him now. So, I’ve changed my perception about Ralf completely. He was very much the thinker of the band in terms of image and what we wanted to portray.”

You earlier mentioned Paul Morley. What was his involvement with the band?

CB: “He did all the sleeve notes. He did the whole image side for Frankie Goes to Hollywood, The Art of Noise, Act, Propaganda. He has a writer background, plus he’s very playful. I remember that there was this thing which I thought was amazing, but the other band members thoughts he’d really gone too far where he put some Baader Meinhoff [the German terrorists] quotes on the cover of our sleeves. That was very provocative to do that. I thought it was fantastic. Go and stir.”

What sort of person was Paul. Obviously you liked him because you ended up marrying him.

CB: “Yes. He’s a very clever man. I love his enthusiasm for music. Music-wise, we always had a connection. We’re friends. We see each other regularly. He’s part of the team with Onetwo.”

Is it true that Paul described Propaganda as ‘Abba as hell’ and ‘Abba on acid? What did he mean?

CB: “Actually, I think that was Paul Lester for The Melody Maker. I think it’s really accurate. What it means is, obviously: two girls, two boys; continental Europe – but we were like the antidote to pure pop. We always played with opposites – we had this pop side, but also this disturbed side. We were more ambiguous and sinister and darker. ‘Dr Mabuse’ is Trevor Horn’s darkest moment in production.”

What were the themes which preoccupied Propaganda if you weren’t singing about being in love and so on?

CB: “‘P:Machinery’ was about the relationship between men and machinery – standing in line – not fascistic.”

You mean more Fritz Lang ‘Metropolis’?

CB: “Exactly. Exactly. That was definitely part of Ralf’s world.”

It’s interesting how both Ralf and you were fascinated by the 1920s and ‘30s.

CB: “Yes, that’s right. We had the same passions, but we didn’t know that then. We met two years ago again and all of a sudden I got on so well with Ralf after all these years. I think he finally respected me and I totally respected him because times had changed and the two of us had a really good time together doing this gig. He was very gentlemen-like looking after me. I like that. I appreciated that.”

It’s amazing that Propaganda are really only known for one album – ‘A Secret Wish’ – yet it’s well-known in the history of electro-pop. How do you think it holds up today?

CB: “I think it’s a jewel. I still think it’s something very precious. Some of the things have aged from a production point of view, but I think there are some lovely little songs. It just seemed to capture that period. Trevor only did one track, really.”

Did that cause any resentment within the band because he seemed to be focusing his energies on Frankie Goes to Hollywood.

CB: “Trevor did what he wanted to do. He was the executive producer of ‘A Secret Wish’. He’d come in every evening and ask Steve Lipson what he’d done that day. I was there all the time because I was then living there then. I’d be sitting there with Steve and Trevor would come in and say, “Ok, play me what you’ve got”. We’d play him something and he’d say, “Ok, that’s good. Why don’t you try this?” and then he’d go again and that’s the way an executive producer works.”

That period with Propaganda, Art of Noise and Frankie Goes to Hollywood are often seen as Trevor and ZTT’s golden years.

CB: “Definitely. For me, Propaganda was always the four of us, but also there was Trevor Horn and Steve on the production side. We all made this little jewel. What was also lovely about ‘A Secret Wish’ was that when it came out, it didn’t make a big chart entry; it was word of mouth with people discovering it; and people are still discovering it today.”

For such strong singles, were you surprised that ‘Dr Mabuse’ only reached 27 in the UK charts, ‘Duel’ 21, and ‘P: Machinery’ 50? Did those singles perform better in other European countries?

CB: “‘P:Machinery’ was number one in France a year later in ’86. ‘Dr Mabuse’ was number 7 in Germany. That did really well.”

I was surprised ‘Duel’ didn’t do better in the UK.

CB: “I think I did a very embarrassing ‘Top of the Pops’ performance for ‘Duel’. We were the only band to go on that show and not go higher in the charts. We stayed exactly the same.”

I remember watching you on [seminal British ‘80s TV music show] ‘The Tube’ in 1986.

CB: “What did you make of us?”

I remember a very arty performance with you covering your eyes and doing these windmill type movements with your arms.

CB: “That didn’t help?”

Well, what I found quite bizarre was you were much more guitar-based live. I hadn’t expected the guitars to be so dominant over the synths.

CB: “Steve Lipson did a lot of guitars. When we went out live, we’d take Brian McGee and Derek Forbes from Simple Minds – they were our rhythm section. Then there was Kevin Armstrong who played guitar – actually there was a lot of guitar playing on the album. Then there was Michael doing keyboards and percussion. Finally, there was Suzanne and me. I think Ralf wasn’t in the performance.”

I think I was a bit disappointed that the band were bringing in these Scots and not remaining German.

CB: “We weren’t so purist.”

No, no, I’m being very nationalistic.

CB: “Actually, I’m wondering if that had something to do with our chart performance. I always thought that a bit odd. That thought had occurred to me, wondering whether nationality was against us. For example, I did ‘Snobbery and Decay’ with Act and thought that deserved to be a lot higher and I thought maybe they didn’t want a German singing about the state of Britain and Thatcherism.”

I’m sure a lot of people wouldn’t have minded who sung about Thatcher, as long as it was critical. Why was Propaganda’s work always being remixed and released in a mind-boggling array of formats?

CB: “Because we could. It was Paul Morley having fun with it. When ZTT was still on Island, there was Chris Blackwell who was the owner of Island Records, and he gave Paul the freedom to do another ten remixes of a track or whatever – and Paul did. Obviously, this cost the artist a lot of money. Paul wasn’t thinking about this because he was an artist himself being let loose.”

As a band did you make much money?

CB: “Not at all because the album was just so expensive and we were on an absolutely awful deal then.”

There were problems with ZTT, weren’t there?

CB: “Yes, huge problems. You see, there was greed and total love and creativity. It had to come to such an end. It had to come to this big bang. With all these ingredients, it just didn’t work.”

So, how did Propaganda end?

CB: “Well, with Propaganda then, they thought that Paul and I wanted to control the whole thing. The other band members felt really threatened by me being married to Paul, and I don’t think they realised that we were actually on the same side. That created problems and bad management. You can’t really call them good management or managers because I was told to get rid of the others while they were telling them to get rid of me. That’s not good management. They wanted to leave ZTT. I wanted to stay with ZTT because I loved working with Paul and I loved working with Trevor and I adored working with Steven Lipson. I knew that if I went to Virgin or to another record company, they would have no clue to know what to do with us because the team wasn’t there. I knew that. That’s why I stuck with ZTT. I negotiated a much better deal with Act.”

It must have been very hurtful when the other members of the band turned against you.

CB: “Yes, it was. I felt misunderstood all the time.”

So what year was that stage of the band over?

CB: “1986. Then we reformed in 1996 or 1997.”

I read that you, Michael and Suzanne had an album’s worth of material which was, apparently, recorded, but the project seemed to grind to a halt.

CB: “We reformed Propaganda then without Ralf who, I think, was so integral, and I missed him, the whole concept, his cleverness, his “why are we here and why are we doing this?” In the end, Michael didn’t know what to do. He’s a musician, or one of the musicians in the band, but he hasn’t got a context of why he’s doing it. He’s also very controlling. [Claudia hands me a copy of Q magazine from November 2002] I brought this for you because people ask me why I can’t make Propaganda any more. Can I show you this?”

Of course you can.

CB: “Well, this piece came out while I was still in Propaganda in 2002. While I was still in the band, he said this about me and I couldn’t forgive him for that.”

Michael says the following: “We started to realise that the conditions of our ZTT contract meant that we would never make any money no matter how many records we sold. And we sold millions. We took them to court in 1986, but ended up making an out-of-court settlement which got us out of the contract, although it didn’t earn us any money. Claudia was often told that her voice was the reason for Propaganda’s success and she became louder and louder in the band and her nature was to be something of a plotter.”

CB: That’s the bit. That hurt me…

“I thought that Paul was trying to establish her as a pop diva and used her to try and control the band. It came to ahead when Claudia basically told the rest of us that if we didn’t work the way she wanted us to, she would leave, which she did.” That’s a pretty shitty statement about you.

CB: “You can’t call be a plotter and openly put out your dirty washing. After that quote, I said that I couldn’t work with them any more. I can’t believe Michael was saying that. I’ve received a horrendous lawyer’s letter telling me that I can’t use the name Propaganda in any way. He wants me to deny my history.”

Well, that scraps my final question which was to ask if there was any chance of you all getting back together. I presume that statement was the final nail in the coffin for you.

CB: “You understand that.”

Yes, yes I do.

CB: “I just can’t understand how he could do that while I was in the band with them for the second time.”

He must have realised that when you saw those comments you’d leave the band.

CB: “Absolutely.”

He sounds like he wanted to punish you in some way.

CB: “Yes, it’s punishment.”

But it’s like destroying yourself at the same time because, as he said, you are – or were – the voice.

CB: “Every group has a lead singer and people identify with the lead singer. Anyway, that’s the reason I can’t continue this any more. I always wanted to. Suzanne, Michael and I worked for five years together again and we still had no finished product and I just thought, “No, no, no”. I need to make music and that music needs to come out at some point – it can’t just hang around.”

What happened to your solo career because you seemed to drop of the radar after your solo album?

CB: “I’ve never stopped doing music. I had my daughter in 1992. My album came out in 1991; then my daughter was born; then I became a single mum and that kind of did it actually. I’ve worked with people like Andy Bell, Barry Adamson. I’ve done so many projects but never with anything that was marketed properly.”

So, it must be lovely being in a band again with Onetwo.

CB: “I feel like finally I’ve found a way of making music and making decisions with Paul.”

How do you feel about OMD getting back together at the time as Onetwo’s first album is released?

CB: “I was a bit worried at first because I wondered if it could over shadow our project and put it in the background, but now I don’t think it will. And Onetwo is so entirely different from OMD or Propaganda. Also, if Paul [Humphreys] is very busy I might decide to go out by myself and do some songs from my past and from my solo album and, maybe, do something from ‘Another Language’. I want to do things which really move me. Perhaps it’s a bit self-indulgent – I want to express myself the way I want to express myself. I don’t want people to say, ‘You have to do this or that’. I’ve got this freedom now.”

Will there be a follow-up to ‘Another Language’ with Andrew Poppy?

CB: “Yes. They’ll be ‘Another Language’ number two. It’s a bit like ‘Counterfeit’ for Martin [Gore]. It’s just to remind us why we’ve done music in the first place, why we started it.”

It always fascinates me how music artists have to keep making records even when they no longer need to for financial reasons. It’s like an addiction.

CB: “For me, personally, I need to sing in the same way that some people need to meditate. It’s just what keeps me focused.”

The Onetwo album sees a return to your electronic roots. Were you comfortable with that electronic approach?

CB: “Very much. I’d like Onetwo to be like what Paul wants to do and what I want to be and meet somehow. Paul loves his electronic bleeps and stuff – and that’s fine! Personally, I also love guitar and I love very organic music so, that can meet in whatever way. Ideally, I’d like there to be no limits.”

When it comes to polling the most influential British electro pop bands of the late 70s/early 80s, the results invariably follow a repeated pattern in under-valuing one of the best bands of that period: the bombastically named Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, more commonly referred to as OMD.

OMD’s ‘Architecture and Morality’ album released in 1981, contained three hits: ‘Souvenir’, ‘Joan of Arc’ and ‘Maid of New Orleans’, together selling a staggering 8 million copies. ‘Souvenir’ is, quite simply, a beautiful electro-pop record, with a sound that echoes 10CC’s ‘Not in Love’, but filtered through Kraftwerk. Whereas 10cc used multiple overdubs for the choir effects, OMD were characteristically unusual in using one of prog rocks most distinctive instruments: the Mellotron. In this respect, there was an endearing eccentricity about OMD. After all, what other British band sang about power stations and telephone boxes? And who else got an audience on ‘Top of the Pops’ dancing to a song about the plane which dropped the Hiroshima bomb (‘Enola Gay’)?

The genesis of the Liverpudlian group began with the meeting of two school friends living on the Wirral in North West England; namely, Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys. Both shared a passion for electronic music, particularly Kraftwerk. After a playing in a succession of eccentrically titled bands (such as Hitlerz Underpantz, VCL XI, The Id and Dalek I Love You), OMD were formed. The band’s break came when Tony Wilson invited them to record their first single – ‘Electricity’ – on his Factory label. The track gained the attention of Virgin and OMD were hastily signed to its subsidiary label, Dindisc, in 1979. Initially OMD were just Andy (vocals and bass), Paul (vocals and keyboards) and a Revox tape-recorder, but soon they became a four-piece band adding Martin Cooper (saxophone and keyboards) and Malcolm Holmes (drums). This line-up remained together until 1989, and now they’re back together when the band reformed last year.

Between 1980-1986 OMD released seven albums, and then a further three with McCluskey when the others quit due to musical differences. Yet it’s the first four albums which really mark OMD out as part of the British avant-garde of synth pop. The first, ‘Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’ (1980) not only boasted one of their many elegant modernist covers designed by graphic designer Peter Saville (he of Joy Division and New Order), but also introduced the distinctive OMD sound that blended a plethora of electronic influences, most notably Kraftwerk, Brian Eno, Tangerine Dream, Can and Neu!.

The next album, ‘Organisation’ (1980), was darker in tone made evident by the single ‘Enola Gay’. Nevertheless, OMD’s magnum opus was their third album – ‘Architecture and Morality’ (1981) – which fused ideas and images of high modernism (from the cover design to the experimentation of the tracks) with mainstream pop accessibility. Their last album of significance was ‘Dazzleships’, yet its experimentalism went too far for public taste and album sales slipped from the previous album’s three million to 300,000.

From the mid-‘80s, OMD transformed into a more conventional pop band which helped them finally break America with the single ‘If You Leave’, written for the John Hughes film ‘Pretty in Pink’. But it was the beginning of the end. McCluskey carried on with a few more hit singles and albums, but the band fizzled out by the mid-‘90s.

After OMD, Andy launched the highly successful girl group Atomic Kitten. Paul set up the band OneTwo with Claudia Brucken (ex-Propaganda), having just released their first album. Last year Andy and Paul decided to reform OMD with Martin and Malcolm back onboard and will shortly embark on their first tour in years, re-visiting ‘Architecture & Morality’ with a 120 piece Orchestra and Choir…

Adam Locks met Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys in London.

How and why are the original line-up of OMD back together?

AM: “We wish we had a really nice soundbite for this but, as is often the case, reality is complicated. There are lots of different reasons. The bottom line is that it’s the right time. The musical landscape has changed. Eleven years ago I stopped doing OMD because I felt that I was banging my head against a brick wall but now, in this wonderful postmodern era, things are being reassessed. We have our place in the pantheon and, hopefully, we’ll be allowed to enjoy ourselves and indulge. People want to hear it. We wanted to do it. Hence, there’s a whole load of reasons.”

PH: “It definitely is a good time. We’ve been talking about this since about ’98 when we got together to promote the singles collection. So now we’re eight years on from when we talked about the possibilities of getting back together.”

It must also be motivating to reform when you have a number of very well-known music artists citing OMD as a major influence on their own work, for example Moby.

AM: “Yeah, there are a few people who are prepared to come out the closet now. So obviously we’re not that passé anymore.

Do you think OMD were ever passé?

AM: “Musical fashions come and go. By the time it came to the mid-1990s with the height of Britpop there was nothing more out of fashion than a band that was perceived as ‘80s-synth.”

Andy, you were very successful with Atomic Kitten, weren’t you?

AM: “Yeah, which did wonders for my street credibility.”

Not!

AM: “You never know. In years to come, who knows? Actually, I’m very proud of the work I did with that band. But I take no responsibility for the band becoming a pastiche of themselves because I stopped working with them basically after the first album.”

Let’s return to OMD. OMD always had a reputation for being very high-tech, but how high-tech were you in the beginning. Obviously you started with very little equipment or money, besides the Revox tape recorder and Korg micropreset.

PH: “That Korg was the first piece of semi-high-tech gear that we got…”
AM: “And which we bought from my mother’s Kay’s catalogue for £776 and paid for over 36 weeks.”

PH: “We were really seriously low-tech. We had this Vox organ which cost us £35. Until we got that synth from Kay’s Catalogue, we were borrowing. We knew one guy on the Wirral who had a synth and he’d sometimes let us borrow it. I was dabbling in electronics and then studying electronics for a couple of years. I was bastardising radios and all kinds of things – anything that made a weird sound.”

AM: “Nobody dared lend us anything electrical in case it got cannibalised. [Andy notices four rolled up posters tapped together in the corner of the room] Paul, does that remind you of something? Do you remember the old tubaphone we used to have?”

PH: “The tubaphones. Bloody hell, yeah.”

AM: “Before we had anything electrical, we had a thing that was made of a long cardboard tube and was gaffered up. We’d drop microphones in and put the effects unit in and scream into it. We were desperate. We’d use anything that would make a noise. We made Cabaret Voltaire sound like the Spice Girls.”

So there wasn’t much money to spend in the beginning?

PH: “We both came from not very wealthy backgrounds. We had no money to sink into the band so, it was just borrow, beg and steal.”

And I suppose that’s why the Revox tape recorder was so important.

PH: “That wasn’t ours either, it belonged to our manager.”

AM: “OMD only started because, practically, we found someone who had a tape recorder. We had a four-track Teac Winston and a two-track Vox and a little studio in his garage. So, we prevailed upon him and said, ‘Listen, we don’t want to do this with our mates anymore who keep messing up our songs with bloody lead guitar solos. Can we come into your little studio and record some backing tracks because we want to go and play live – just the two of us’. So, because we met him, that’s why we could hatch this idea of playing with just the two of us. We dared to phone up Eric’s Club in Liverpool and go on stage in Autumn ’78 as a dare. We specifically called ourselves Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark because, a) it didn’t matter, and b) we wanted the most obtuse name so people would know that we weren’t a punk group or rock group.”

Why did you decide to write and perform electronic music over punk? Why weren’t you tempted to go down the punk route?

AM: “We found electronic music before punk came along. We were listening to electronic from ’75 onwards.”

PH: “We did like punk, didn’t we?”

AM: “We liked the ethos of it. We saw ourselves as a punk synth band: they go up and play two chords, we go up and play instruments with one finger. To be honest, because of punk and the rise in credibility of provincial venues – it wasn’t all just about London. For a split second there, a series of punk/new wave venues opened up all around the country and the music industry got decentralised for about two years. We just happened to get into the new wave clubs. Liverpool didn’t really have a history of punk. There weren’t that many punk bands in Liverpool. There was a more open-minded attitude to just get up on stage and do what you felt like doing.”

Yet by sticking to an electronic sound, didn’t OMD face a lot of hostility in those punk years? And, let’s face it, it was a very arty route you took as well, wasn’t it?

PH: “Well, one of the reasons we started as a two piece is because we couldn’t find anyone else who wanted to play with us. Our other musician friends they were all into rock music: Genesis, Eagles and stuff like that. We were into Can and Neu! and Kraftwerk…”

And Eno?

PH: “Yeah.”

AM: “They thought that what we were doing was absolute crap.”

PH: “They thought it was just noodling rubbish.”

Kraftwerk were obviously a huge influence on your work. Did you ever see them live or meet them?

PH: “Andy saw them live in ’75.”

AM: “I saw them in September 1975. I heard ‘Autobahn’ on the radio and, like all good teenagers, I was looking for something to create my own identity. Obviously teenagers do that with the music they listen to, their hair styles and their clothes. I found Kraftwerk and it was like: ‘This is it!’ I went to see them. I sat in seat Q36. I remember it because it was the first day of the rest of my life – it was the mid-70s, the height of long hair, flared denims, and lead guitar solos. These four guys came out in suits and ties, two of them playing what looked like electric tea trays and I just went: ‘I want to do that – that’s the future.’ Anyway, I started buying some records and had such a crap record player. I got to know Paul through some mutual friends. He built his own stereo so we had this symbiotic relationship where I went round to play the records and we got to like the same things to the exclusion of our other friends, and then we took it from there.”

Is it true that Kraftwerk came to one of your gigs?

PH: “They’ve come to a few, actually. They came to see us at the Night of the Proms show in Germany last December.”

Did you get to meet them afterwards?

PH: “Apparently they had a six o’clock flight to catch back home.”

AM: “I can remember the first time we met them. It was at a club in Germany. Malcolm [Holmes] and Martin [Cooper] came back into the dressing room having been out at the bar and said, ‘You never guess who’s come here to see us – Kraftwerk!’ We shat ourselves when they told us that.”

PH: “The worse thing was that once we were on stage, you could see the four of them across the balcony because it was a small club. There was the four of them in a line just watching us. It was so intimidating.”

AM: “All I can remember is that for the whole gig I was standing there looking at them and thinking, ‘I wonder what they think. I wonder what they think.’ There was nobody more important to us than Kraftwerk. There were other important influences – Bowie, Eno, Roxy Music, Velvet Underground – but they were always number one.”

Are they still number one for you?

PH: I still adore them. I saw them at the last tour and thought they were fantastic.

AM: “I think the interesting thing about Kraftwerk is that, effectively, they have been treading water for the last 25 years, but they’re still ahead of the game. Essentially, they are synth music’s Rolling Stones, but actually they’ve been more influential. Kraftwerk have been the most influential band on popular music in the last 30 years.”

Why were OMD so obsessed with cardigans? What was it with cardigans and OMD in those early years?

PH: “How did we get into that?”

AM: “We were very serious about the music to the point where we wanted to exclude all else, especially any discussion of style and fashion. We were serious, moody, northern, industrial boys who were only interested in music. We believed that music was going to change the world, so it didn’t matter what you wore. In fact, it so little mattered what we wore that we went to extremes to wear things that were absolutely mundane and naff. Unfortunately that backfired because by trying to have no image – wearing white shirts and thin black ties – you’re suddenly faced with the whole front row of boys at the Hammersmith Odeon wearing sleeveless cardigans with white shirts and thin black ties. It was supposed to be a non-image – you misinterpreted it.”

PH: “We did also want to cut ourselves away from the New Romantics.”

Ah, that leads to my next question. You were labelled, rather unfairly, as one of the New Romantic bands. I’ve read that you found this offensive. Why?

AM: “Nobody was more horrified than we were.”

Why?

AM: “Well, as I’ve said we were serious northern boys whose music was more important than how much friggin’ eye-liner you were wearing or whose namby-pamby clothes were in fashion.”

Aside from image, were there any New Romantic bands whose music you did like?

AM: “No. They were all shit.”

PH: “At the time it was really ‘us and them’.”

I can imagine you being offended by the press pigeon-holing you with bands such as Spandau Ballet.

AM: “Oh yeah. One of the things you’ve got to understand is that one of the reasons I wanted to do my own music was because I hated almost all the music I heard. You have to hate and use it as an engine and I just thought that everything was shit. We liked our five musical influences and everything else was crap.”

You really didn’t like any other acts?

AM: “Oh, ‘Warm Leatherette’ by The Normal. There you go, that was good. Actually, The Human League’s ‘Being Boiled’ was OK until we realised that Phil Oakey had that bloody hair do.”

What was the thinking behind ‘Architecture and Morality’? What’s the title referring to?

AM: “We stole it from a book.”

Which one?

AM: “‘Morality and Architecture’.”

Well, that’s not plagiarism then.

AM: “It was purloined from Martha Ladley who was the keyboard player in Martha and the Muffins who was the girlfriend of Peter Saville at the time, and who suggested it as a great title. We could see it was a great title because it was a sort of metaphor for our own music: we have the electronic structure – the architecture, the inhuman machine; and we have the morality which is the warmth and the empathy and the vocals and the humanity. The tension created by the juxtaposition is where we saw the strength of our music being derived from.”

What made you decide to use the Mellotron on that album because that was a very unusual choice for a synth band.

PH: “Yeah, well, we started dabbling with choirs.”

AM: “It’s like drugs. We started dabbling with choirs and then we moved on to the Mellotron.”

PH: “We started messing with the idea of a choral sound just by chance. Someone had been recording a choir and they got the choir to sing all these individual notes and they didn’t know what to do with them. So they came to our studio and asked us to make loops out of the sounds. As payment they let us have a copy. So, we made all these loops and, of course, that’s how ‘Souvenir’ started. We liked the combination of electronics and the more choral theme, so the next progression was obviously to get the Mellotron where you can have those sounds on a keyboard – that was the only thing available; nowadays you can have samplers, but at that time, the only way you could have full control of a choir on your fingertips was the Mellotron.”

The Mellotron was usually a prog rock instrument, wasn’t it?

AM: “Yes it was, even at that stage. But the Mellotron allowed us a whole new palette. Even after only making two albums, we were bored with the synths we had. This was one of the driving forces behind us: everything we did had to be something we hadn’t done before – every sound, every subject, every drum pattern, we trying to do something we hadn’t done before. We never wanted to repeat ourselves which worked for four, maybe even five albums. So, the Mellotron seemed logical because we were always looking for something new. But also the choirs and violins on the Mellotron didn’t sound quite like the real thing so they had that nice…”

PH: “…Quirkiness which we liked.”

AM: “Yes, quirky element which we liked. If you wanted a violin you didn’t have to go and get a violin player because we were quite intimidated by very good musicians because we weren’t. So, we could play the Mellotron and violin with one finger in the safety of our own studio without the fear of getting someone in who might be better than us and look down upon us.”

What sort of musical ability did you have when you first started the band?

PH: “We never had a music lesson in our lives.”

AM: “He taught himself to play keyboards and I taught myself to play bass.”

PH: “We learnt off each other, really.”

AM: “We can’t jam with people. We can’t play other people’s songs. We can play our own, quite well really.”

Your song lyrics were always very diverse. One minute you’re singing about Enola Gay on ‘Organisation’, then it’s Joan of Arc on ‘Architecture and Morality’. How and why such unusual topics?

PH: “We really didn’t want to do this traditional love lyrics. We always hated those kind of ‘I love you’ and ‘You love me’ kinds of songs. Kraftwerk always sung about really unusual things as well. Also, another influence on us was Brian Eno and he always sung about some very unusual topics. So, we kind of followed that line.”

AM: “Again it was us wanting to do something new and not be clichéd and repeat things.”

PH: “So why not sing about ‘Enola Gay’.”

Indeed. Who else had sung about Hiroshima in the pop charts?!

PH: “Yeah, who dares to sing about that?”

AM: “I tortured myself. On the third album, the song ‘Joan of Arc’ has the word love in it and I kept thinking, can I use this word?’ But love here is kind of third party – it’s not you or me, it’s she. She fell in love, so I can get away with that. It’s not a first or second love.”

PH: “Because we thought love was such a cliché. There were so many love songs, particularly at that time. We just thought they became meaningless, really.”

But you did sing about love on later albums.

AM: “Oh, we sold out by then.”

Talking of song lyrics, what’s the obsession with power stations and I know that you’re doing some audio-visual work with Peter Saville next year which, again, involves, power station imagery.

AM: [Very-tongue-in-cheek] “Let me quote Peter Saville [Andy reads from a PR statement about next year’s project which is written in a highly abstruse style].”

That’s bloody pretentious, isn’t it?

AM: “I’m sending it to Pseuds Corner in ‘Private Eye’.”

What the hell does that mean?

AM: “You don’t know? Call yourself a journalist?”

I’m sure there’s a simpler answer. Didn’t one of you have a dad who worked at a power station?

AM: “Yeah, I did.”

After all that.

AM: “We were children of the modernists and I think we held in our minds that still slightly utopian vision of technology and the future which Kraftwerk were doing as well. Certainly, I had a soft spot for powerful industrial complexes. The fact that my father and sister worked at Stanlow oil refinery gave it a certain personal empathy. Also, in a much more prosaic way, we seemed to often be playing Manchester or Sheffield or even London; whenever we’d come up the motorway and turn on to the 56, when we saw Stanlow oil refinery which was all lit up at night, we knew we were 20 minutes from home. So, it was our beacon. We wanted to write songs about different things. We had an emotional response to an inanimate object which kind of made sense. And because it was unusual, it made me even more determined to write those songs.”

It’s interesting how the technology you sung about is often both utopian and dystopian.

PH: “We touched upon some awkward subjects like genetic engineering.”

The only other band I can think of who were singing about genetic engineering was The Stranglers with ‘Genetix’.

PH: “Yes, they did.”

AM: “Certainly in my mind, I’m not black and white. I can see both sides of the argument. I can see why you would drop an atom bomb and why you shouldn’t drop an atom bomb. I can see why you need electricity, but you wouldn’t want to generate it with coal power because of sulphur omissions and CO2s. I can see both sides of the argument. So, I’m drawn to very extreme arguments because I like that extremity and that impossibility for finding resolution. I find that fascinating.”

PH: “Our songs are dark subject matter wrapped up in a fluffy pop song.”

AM: “Here’s one about tens of thousands of people getting nuked and getting cancer – put your hands in the air! As Carol Wilson from Dindisc records used to say, which we took to be a compliment, ‘The trouble with you guys is that you just don’t know whether you want to be Joy Division or Abba’.”

So you were influenced by Joy Division?

PH: “Well, we were both on Factory Records.”

I presume you knew Ian Curtis. What sort of person was he?

PH: “We did.”

AM: “He was a nice down-to-earth normal bloke. Smoked and drank. Danced like I did which was quite strange.”

I’d like to ask you about your dancing in a moment.

AM: “It’s funny, people’s perceptions from the outside.”

His death has become heavily mythologized in popular culture.

AM: “He died after two albums. He’s never been able to do anything that’s embarrassed his reputation.”

How did Peter Saville come to design the album covers for OMD? Did the band give him a brief in terms of what sort of visual style they wanted?

PH: “Peter was the designer for Factory Records so our initial meeting was that he design the ‘Electricity’ single sleeve. We then signed to Dindisc which was owned by Virgin and Dindisc basically poached Peter from Factory to do all the art work for all their artists.”

AM: “Peter was great but, boy, did you have to wait. He was the notoriously late Peter Saville.”

Is that because he was so busy?

AM: He tortures himself. He can’t deliver on time and, particularly in those days, he was completely nocturnal – he didn’t start work until five or six at night. It was difficult. I’m sure that 50% of people bought the first album cover that he did because they were thinking, ‘What’s that? I must buy that’.”

They are striking modernist album covers.

AM: “I think the first album and the ‘Dazzleships’ album were amazing. For ‘Dazzleships’, Peter said to us that he’d found this great Vorticist painting called ‘Dazzle Ships’ and that he’d love to do a Vorticist sleeve for it, so could we write a song with that title.”

With the huge success of the three singles off ‘Architecture and Morality’, what was it like suddenly becoming household names and getting on the cover of magazines such as ‘Smash Hits’?

PH: “Quite uncomfortable, really, because this was pre-celebrity culture. In those days, fame was just a by-product of making music. We didn’t set out to be famous. We didn’t really want to be famous.”

Was it awkward being famous because you were ‘serious’ artists?

AM: “I didn’t mind being on the cover of ‘Smash Hits’. It was a classic moment in pop history when we did a cover for ‘Smash Hits’ for the album ‘Dazzleships’. We were in Eric Watson’s studio doing the ‘Dazzleships’ front cover, dressed in grey shirts with red ties and looking just like Franz Ferdinand from two years ago, being interviewed by Neil Tenant just before the Pet Shop Boys started.”

PH: “It was his last interview, I think.”

AM: “…and looking at Eric’s desk at these pictures he had and asking, ‘Who’s she? She looks funky’. He said, ‘Some fucking American dancer who thinks she can sing’.”

Madonna!

AM: “Yeah, it was Madonna! Quite a moment in pop history. The funny thing was that right up to and including ‘Architecture and Morality’, Paul was still living at his house where he had grown up; I was still living in the box room in my house – my mother had all the gold and platinum albums on the wall downstairs on the mantelpiece. We sold millions of records and we were paying ourselves about £75 pounds a week. Paul didn’t have a car. I had a car with mushrooms growing in the footwell.”

So that very nice car we see you drive in the ‘Souvenir’ video didn’t belong to you?

AM: “No, that was Peter Savilles. And completely by chance, I remember the Christmas of 1980 I’d gone to a club and met a girl who’d I heard about because she’d done some modelling. Anyway, we started going out. That January, we were on tour in France and my manger phones me and says, ‘Andy, what’s the name of your girlfriend because you might want to look at the tabloids’. I saw in one of them: ‘Sexy Miss Great Britain goes out with pop star Andy. Why does Andy always look so glum when he goes to bed with this girl?’ I’ve turned into Rod Stewart without even trying. That was embarrassing, especially as she wouldn’t be seen dead in the car with the mushrooms in the footwell, so she insisted on going out in a car she’d been given for winning Miss Great Britain which had, ‘Tracy Dodd: Miss Great Britain’ all down the side. You’d pull up at the traffic lights and it would be horribly uncomfortable being looked at.”

PH: “We were uncomfortable with the whole thing. You’d go to the shops and be signing autographs at the check-out.”

AM: “It wasn’t why we did it. We did not go in for Pop Idol. We went in for Kraftwerk Idol.”

Mind you, the adulation at live gigs must have been very pleasurable.

PH: “That’s a different environment from the supermarket. You put yourself on stage to be adored in a way, to have people.”

AM: “Did you want to be adored?”

PH: “Musically.”

AM: “I never knew that.”

PH: “We put music out to the public because we wanted people to like it.”

AM: “When audiences applauded I just found it to be a great relief because I was always terrified that we were going to die a death on stage. I was always very nervous before we started but, once we got going, it was enjoyable.”

Since you had so much electronic equipment on stage, I’m presuming you had your fair sure of technological nightmares where things would go wrong.

PH: “I remember we did the Rose Bowl in Pasadena in 1988 with Depeche Mode in front of 90,000 people.”

AM: WWe started ‘Enola Gay’, you hit the drum machine, it started. I counted us in. Malcolm and I came in with the bass and the drum and just before he and Martin came in with the keyboards there was a millisecond power spike on stage which wiped the RAM out of the two keyboards. So, it was, ‘One, two, three, four!’ and it was like this dub version of the song with no keyboards. We were dying, but the audience thought it was some dub intro.”

PH: “They loved it!”

You managed to reload?

PH: “Yeah, we managed to reload. We got there in the end.”

AM: “I remember walking out on stage at the Manchester Apollo when we supported Gary Numan. I forgot to start the first song in the set and it was in the middle of ‘Messages’ because we hadn’t rewound the tape. So, there we were on stage saying, ‘Sorry about this, we’ve just got to rewind the tape. It’s all live’.”

I’ve read that while you toured with Depeche Mode in the 80s, Dave Gahan used to do a fair bit of coke. How much did drugs become part of OMD’s lifestyle?

PH: “Particularly in America in the mid-80s, it drove the music industry, so it was around everywhere you went. People just shoved mirrors in front of your nose. It was either sniff or don’t sniff.”

I have read that Dave Gahan was particularly hardcore. There’s a nice story of how while playing cricket with Depeche Mode, Dave did a line before batting and you got him out straight away!

AM: “Yep! We were touring with our crew and on our day off – the Depeche Mode boys weren’t there because they weren’t touring with their crew – our bus and the other crew bus met for a game of cricket, and we beat the Depeche crew. They weren’t very happy about this so they arranged for a rematch in New Jersey and they beat the pants off us. Obviously Dave Gahan was wired off his face and was just swinging for Britain.”

PH: “Swinging for Britain and snorting for Britain!”

Andy, I came across one comment on Youtube with regard to the ‘electricity’ track. This person wrote under the video: ‘This is one OMD song that still stands the test of time. A classic. They never could dance though’. Harsh?

PH: “You should have seen Andy on the tour in Germany last. He swore he wouldn’t dance.”

AM: “I really did want to try and salvage some dignity, but faced with an audience and our music, it all went out the window. It’s hard enough coming back at the age of 47 because I can remember sitting in a pub at 20 years old saying to someone that if I’m still in the music industry at 25, please shoot me. Now I’m 47, there is an element of me that is reminded of the young lad who would have been horrified to see his middle aged self still trying to dance; mind you, he’d be even more horrified about Atomic Kitten. So, I struggle with that. I know why I used to dance like I did. It was largely part of the fact that I was so determined to show people that there was energy, there was passion, there was enthusiasm, that we weren’t standing there pressing buttons and being boring. I was trying to sell it and show my enthusiasm for it and it was a particularly stupid way of doing it, but that’s the way it was.”

OMD fans seemed to enjoy seeing you so kinetic on stage.

AM: “Some people think it wouldn’t be a gig if you didn’t do that, other people are like, ‘I don’t get it. Why are you doing it?’ You know what, it was my clumsy, dysfunctional way of trying to project to every single person in the house a 100% of how much I wanted them to like this because I was frightened they weren’t going to. It was completely the wrong way to go about it, but it happened that way. All I can say in my defence is that it made Paul look good.”

Well, with Kraftwerk, the last thing you want is them to move during a live performance. I remember being disappointed when they waved at the end of a gig. But with OMD it was different. Moving on, how faithfully will you try and recreate that distinctive OMD sound for the ‘Architecture and Morality’ gigs which are coming up in May?

PH: “We’ve gone a bit nerdy, really. We’ve gone back to the very original sounds and resampled them into very high-tech instruments. We were astounded in a recent rehearsal. We played a couple of songs and they sounded like the record, if not better.”

AM: “Basically, we don’t have the sounds anymore. We don’t have the instruments anymore. Our songs are quite sound specific. ‘Souvenir’ and so on has to have that sound. And, since we don’t have the instruments to make that sound anymore, we had to go back to the two-inch tapes. So, it’s going to sound like the record because it is. We sampled it off the record.”

Do you have none of the original synths?

PH: “We used to use a synth called the Prophet 5 and now they do these virtual Prophets.”

The Pro 53?

PH: “Yeah, the Pro 53. It’s been very important for us to recreate that sound.”

AM: “And we’re proud of it.”

As you mentioned earlier, you played some live gigs last year at the Night of the Proms, although that was with a live orchestra. How was that?

PH: “It was a bit scary at first with a full orchestra and choir who we had only had one rehearsal with. The first night in Hamburg, we were crapping ourselves. After a couple of gigs, it sounded great.”

AM: “And for ‘Seven Seas’ which you wouldn’t think sound great because it’s all based around non-linear reverb on the drum machine, we just said, ‘Everyone who has a percussion instrument, play percussion,’ so there were about six or seven of them all banging away. Then with the orchestra, we said ‘and the kitchen sink’.”

PH: “When the orchestra kicked in behind us, it was just fantastic.”

I hear you might be touring with the London Philharmonic Orchestra as well next year.

AM: “Yeah. We’ve got a couple of tracks out for arrangement and we’re going to try some workshops. They seem very keen and we’re very keen. The ‘Energy Suite’ will be premiered at FACT in Liverpool as part of the Capital of Culture celebrations. The first half of the show they’ll play ‘The Energy Suite’. They’ll be these great big screens with all these industrial landscapes on with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. We’re not even going to grace the stage.”

Now OMD are back together with their original line-up, can we expect a future album?

AM: “It’s the one thing that we’re rather nervous to discuss. We all know that 99 out of 100 bands of our age who come back and make a record, the record’s bloody awful. So, you’re almost embarrassed to say you’re going to make a record because the anticipation is that it’s going to be crap. There will be a release, probably a DVD of ‘The Energy Suite’, then we have a couple of other things which I don’t want to talk about. There’s ways and ways of making records and there’s a way which we feel we can start getting ourselves back in.”

You could quite easily take the Kraftwerk route and not produce any new material.

AM: “There is an element of me – the younger Andy – which is saying that I don’t want to be just going out and playing old material, but the scary thing is you’ve got to be realistic and say that unless the new material is…To be honest, not even unless. Even if the new material is genius, the chances are of it crossing over so that everybody knows it is quite difficult. I have to say that I want to do this now. I’m excited by it, but there are elements in me that are nervous about it. There’s an 18 year old me inside thinking, ‘You sad old bastard’.”

PH: “It’s difficult.”

AM: “You want to still be relevant and you don’t just want to be relevant for your back catalogue, but at least it’s reassuring that it would appear that our back catalogue now at least has some respect which I don’t feel it had ten years ago. That’s a start. That’s a nice start.”

On April 30th, Virgin/EMI will release a special deluxe double CD and DVD of a digitally re-mastered ‘Architecture and Morality’, including a live DVD of OMD’s Drury Lane concert from 1981; in May they play in Dublin, Glasgow, Liverpool and London; an audio-visual installation with Peter Savile will be premiered at FACT in Liverpool in March 2008 as part of the Capital of Culture celebrations with the working title of ‘The Energy Suite’; finally, OMD are also working with The London Philharmonic Orchestra for a major tour in Autumn 2008.

Billy Currie

In our new regular transcription interview series about heroes of electro-pop, sung and unsung, Adam Locks hooks up with Billy Currie
When it comes to reminiscing about early ‘80s British electro-pop, more often than not, it’s The Human League and Depeche Mode who get first mention. However, it was the two incarnations of Ultravox – first with John Foxx and later with Midge Ure – that produced some of the most significant and experimental albums of the ‘70s and early ‘80s. Ultravox’s ‘Vienna’ (1980) and ‘Rage in Eden’ (1981) offered an aural landscape that was infinitely more complex, atmospheric and textured than any of their rivals and this was down to a major pioneer of the synth: Billy Currie. Currie was the band’s main keyboardist and, unusually for a synth band, an accomplished violin/viola player (he’d once turned down a place at the Royal Academy of Music in London). Currie’s originality can be heard, for example, in his violin/viola playing for the track ‘Mr X’ from ‘Vienna’ with some incredible wails and howls coming from the electrified strings. But it’s his ARP playing which is even more startling. Take a listen to Currie’s scorching ARP solo at the end of Ultravox’s ‘The Voice’ and the barmy electronic screeches he gets out of his synth in ‘All Stood Still’, both from a 1983 concert in Berlin on ‘You Tube’. Aside from Ultravox, Currie was the main song writer for another hugely influential electro band – Visage – co-writing their most commercially successful and iconic hit: ‘Fade to Grey’. He also worked with Gary Numan for the ‘Touring Principle’ tour in 1979, playing his ARP to breathtaking effect on tracks such as ‘On Broadway’. Since Ultravox’s messy demise in the latter part of the 1980s (the rot started with the sacking of their drummer – Warren Cann – in 1986), Currie has continued as a solo artist. To date, he’s released seven solo albums, the first of which was ‘Transportation’ (1988). His latest, ‘Accidental Poetry Of The Structure’, shows an artist still experimenting with music, but now through virtual or soft synth technology. Beatmag visits him in early August at his North London to discuss his work, past and present.
With the recent reissue of the first three Ultravox albums, what’s your view of them now?

BC: “I got a copy sent from the record company which was a miracle! No, it’s really nice! I thought the art work looked good, especially on the first album ‘Ultravox!’. They’d treated it, worked on it. When I first saw the first album cover I thought it was really good whereas back in those days, I didn’t like it because I was thinking, ‘Shit, why didn’t we go for a black and white one’. A black and white one would have looked tougher, more street, and still kept the over-the-topness we wanted. Instead, because of the colour being rich and slightly Roxy decadence, it tendered to look shiny and expensive and so gave credence to the accusation from the NME that we were a manufactured band made up of rich session musicians. Unbelievable really because we were all broke and doing shit jobs to make ends meet. We worked hard rehearsing the band four evenings a week and all day Sunday. I lived with my girlfriend I’d invited down from Yorkshire, but saw very little of her. She stuck it out for four years though. Not bad!”

You were really hammered by the British press, weren’t you?

BC: “Yes, yes, but we don’t have to go down that road do we?”

No. Let’s go back to those first three albums. How does the music sound to you?

BC: “Well, I got the albums sent from Universal which is more than what we got from Chrysalis when they were putting out their horrendous Midge Ure and Ultravox remixes. You don’t even get sent a copy since it’s all done behind your back. Who is bitter and twisted?! I listened to a bit of ‘Ha!Ha!Ha!’ because that tends to be my favourite one. I thought they’d gone a bit over the top with the EQs. Someone had been let loose probably a little bit too much, but that’s only from listening to a couple of tracks. I really like ‘Artificial Lives’. I listened to that straightaway. I was thinking that they’d brought out some frequencies that I’m not sure I’d have brought out. It’s very sharp, but they’ve changed it a lot and I found it a bit unsettling and rather annoying, actually, after a few tracks. But this is just one brief listen. I have to sit down and concentrate and listen to the whole album, so I should give the person a chance, yet I’m not interested enough to actually do that. I probably will some time, but I’m not that interested. I am interested in Ultravox, don’t get me wrong, but it’s the sort of thing I’ll do probably when I’m pissed! You know when you get a few beers down you and you really tune in?! What I did find fascinating was that, for the first time since 1977, I heard the ARP part that I put in the chorus of ‘Distant Smile’ which went to the same melody as the guitar. I was annoyed at the time because the synthesizer was being mixed out and I was pretty pissed off. But I got my own way on other tracks. I was a bit like that, you know. And I can hear it, and I can hear the LFO – the vibrato – and that was quite mind-blowing. My instant feeling on that particular album, the mastering guy /girl, wanted to bring out the keyboards, that’s what I thought. So, it was quite interesting.”

You’ve mentioned Steve Lillywhite, but Ultravox also worked with other producers, namely Brian Eno and Conny Plank. What do you think they brought to each of those albums?

BC: “He died in 1987 and I suddenly realised that he was exactly ten years older than me and that’s terrible. He died of lung cancer. He was working on a solo album. I was talking to him when I was working on my ‘Transportation’ album in my studio. He sounded very weak. It’s just a shame because I would have loved to have worked with him more. It was great working with Conny Plank.”

What’s interesting about Conny Plank is that Ultravox continued to work with him after ‘Systems of Romance’ with ‘Vienna’ and ‘Rage in Eden’. Why did you keep him on as a producer?

BC: “We’d found something with ‘Systems of Romance’ and, obviously, when John left he realised that as well, and also other bands: Depeche Mode, Human League and so on.”

‘Systems’ was a very influential album.

BC: “Yeah. Anyway, there were other things going on and things happening, like Gary Numan. And we later brought in a pop musician – Midge Ure – which, to his own admittance, hadn’t got a great background. But we welcomed him with open arms because he was a musician and we wanted that after working with John as a song writer more than a musician. John was very much a words man, but he was quite a good guitarist, actually. Midge was quite happy to come in with some ideas already created, a sound that was already created and then to take it from there. He has a work ethic mentality, not particularly an originator, but that was okay because we wanted to sort of catch up. So it made sense to stay with the person we’d just been working with and sort of develop it, because ‘Systems of Romance’ was very intense. We had to do it very quick and I have memories of John mistakenly writing two lyrics for the same track. I don’t mean that as a put down, but I mean that he’d got all this going on in his head. It felt it might be nice to capture this again with just a little bit more time. ‘Dislocation’ was done as a last track out of necessity for ‘Systems’. I’m a 120% kind of person and I have to love what I do and I always did, but even at that point – because I felt that John was hanging on to things a bit too much there – I didn’t do as much co-writing as I wanted to. Frustration was creeping in because I wanted to be a developing writer. To give credit to John, he let me in more than the other guys.”

So, did John write most of Ultravox’s material?

BC: “Most of the stuff, yeah, and it was always originated from John which frustrated me. The one where we did collaborate, like ‘Dislocation’, I had to be dragged out of bed to do it because I’d got a little bit like, ‘We’re finished. This band is going to be dropped’. I’d dropped into a bit of depression.”

Really?

BC: “Yeah. And I was in the room smoking a big weenie with Robin Simon and John burst in with his SS sidekick Warren [Cann] and demanded that I get down there and write the next track which, in some ways, was really good. Of course, I was very kind of angry about it because it was a bit like, ‘Well, if you want me to write this track, why didn’t you let me help you more when we were doing the album?’ I haven’t actually spoken much about this, especially this, because it was a bit of a special time because, earlier on in the summer of ’78, I took a Revox home from Island Music. They were just opposite us in the rehearsal place – it was all a very cosy left-field feeling to it. It was quite nice atmosphere. Too cosy sometimes with the rush matting and everything; quite trendy for the time. Anyway, as I said, I took a Revox home and composed five tracks, played them to the band in the hope that John would pick up on the fact that I’m actually wanting to collaborate. He didn’t take up that option.”

Did those five songs you wrote survive in another album?

BC: “No. I actually lost the tape. I was fast moving at the time. I might have subconsciously used them for the Visage album, but I can’t remember. I think there was one that I sort of…yes, actually, no…one very arty piece that I did. I was getting into textural rotation stuff; it became the intro to ‘Mind of a Toy’ by Visage. Yes, that was one of the tracks which I presented. Yes, that was one of them. I have to rattle my brains a bit. I’m saying no, but in fact I did! And I think I used a couple more on the first Visage album because the first Visage album came at a point of continuing frustration for me of really wanting to be a writer.”

You were the main song writer for Visage, weren’t you?

BC: “Yes, I came up with the music. I’m not actually a song writer. My position is that I’ll write the music and if I can work with songwriters like Midge Ure who can put a vocal part on top of my music, I’m happy. John didn’t work like that, but that’s fair enough. Each to their own. John came in with the song and I helped it. John accommodated and trusted me after working together for quite a while. For example, he’d say, could you write some music for this bit like ‘I Want To Be A Machine’. I came in with a piece of music once there was a complete section and John said, ‘Oh look, I’ve written this song. Why don’t you put your piece music at the end?’ like on ‘Slip Away’. We did work well together, but the point I’m making is that we didn’t really collaborate.”

So did Chris and Warren not have much of an input into the music of Ultravox during Foxx’s tenure in the band?

BC: “Chris [Cross] did. He was quite quirky. He did have some input into the music. You could do things like I was doing, playing around with the form: the middle and the top. I used to be into the form. But, if it doesn’t sound right on a bass, you’re fucked, you know. So, quite often, he’d play through these things and actually make it work.”

What was Chris like?

BC: “He was a kind of a light person even though he played a bass. He was a real funny mixture.”

He played the Minimoog as well, didn’t he?

BC: “The Minimoog was introduced when Midge joined. Before then he bought what was called an EMS suitcase synthesizer which was all buttons and putting in little coloured things. It was a very off the wall thing which Brian Eno talked about when we did the album in ’76 and Chris just went out and bought one. So, he was doing some very weird things when we were doing the ‘Systems of Romance’ album like on the beginning of ‘Slow Motion’ – that lovely beginning to the song is Chris; that was the only high bit he did, though. The rest would be bass. That was the beginnings of synthesizer as a bass part. As a piece of technology it was very unreliable. It was analogue and the two oscillators used to drift massively. It was something you experimented with in your electronics workshop. It could just go mad. But when we went to America in early ’79 we used to use it deliberately. We used to start pieces off with it just going berserk. The Minimoog thing – to clarify that – was played by Chris with the ‘80s line-up.”

I’ll come back to’ 80s Ultravox in a moment, but I’d like to turn to ’93 where you took part in a German film project which was dedicated to Conny Plank. Can you tell me more about that and weren’t Kraftwerk involved?

BC: “Yes, in reference to Kraftwerk, it was the percussion bloke.”

Wolfgang Flur?

BC: “I can’t remember his name. It’s the guy who does a lot of touring by himself. Yes, maybe it was Wolfgang Flur. I did meet him. I can’t remember thinking, ‘That’s him!’ because there were a lot of people around. There was a guy from Cluster…”

And Can?

BC: “Yes, Can. There were a lot of people involved. It was a bit mad all that, really. It was slightly tinged with the fact that Conny’s wife was against it. She felt that all the musicians were cashing in and I felt that was going against her slightly. And this event I saw as a celebratory thing, but it was tinged with the fact that she didn’t give a thumbs up and the main guy from Can who played the French horn – he didn’t turn up. My friend Geordie from Killing Joke was there and the lead singer from the band [Jaz Coleman] – I didn’t know him but we got on quite well. Peter Hook was there from New Order. Yet, I ended up not working with them. They all did something together which was more conventional, more of a song to go with the film – it was all for a film. I ended up doing a big jam in a circle with all these people. So, it was good but pretty off the wall. I must admit, I was a little bit strange at that time. It wasn’t a good time for me. But the film did come out. The highlight was that I tried to get the violin player from TuxedoMoon – Blaine Reininger – to come along to do a violin and viola thing. Funnily enough, I did end up working with him in Brussels three years later and me and him went around promoting this film around Germany in 1996 in cinemas. The film was so badly promoted it just wasn’t funny. We had to laugh. Some places there were some audiences, but I remember playing in Stuttgart and I think there was about five people there.”

Does this film still exist out there now?

BC: “Yes, it does. It’s out there.”

Do you ever visit YouTube because there’s a fascinating Ultravox concert from ’83 in Germany?

BC: “Yes, I’ve seen it. There was one in YouTube which showed Ultravox’s special guest slot at Reading Festival in 1978 which I’ve never seen before, so that was bizarre and to think we’d actually never seen that footage. That was a very sad end to what I’d thought was a bad time because we did that and I got problems with my electric piano: it got picked up by the lights, so I had a terrible noise all the way through. Yet, when I listen to it on YouTube, I thought it didn’t sound too bad.”

Weren’t the Jam playing at that same Festival?

BC: “Yes, they were top of the bill. Paul Weller was a fan of Ultravox. He used to always be backstage in the tiny little dressing room at the Marquee Club. He was always a fan, always quiet and just hanging out. He is a really nice guy. It was just amazing to have a fan, actually.”

Billy no-mates!

BC: “Yes, at that time from other musicians. People used to want to usually punch the crap out of us, after all this was the punk time.”

So, to move on a little, after Reading, after ‘Systems’, John Foxx left. It’s fascinating to ponder what the next Ultravox album would have sounded like if he’d stayed. What did you make of Foxx’s first solo album, ‘Metamatic’, when that came out in 1980. It’s an interesting album because a couple of tracks were, apparently, rehearsed by Ultravox.

BC: “Yes, ‘He’s a Liquid’ and ‘Touch and Go’. They were not only rehearsed, we performed them on the American tour. It was frustrating really because we were working as a unit and, yet, we knew he was leaving so it was a bit odd. We were going over playing tracks and trying them out pre-recording them; so it had an extraordinary brutish feel about it for the fact that he was just leaving. We weren’t happy that he’d recorded those tracks.”

None of you are credited on those tracks on the ‘Metamatic’ album.

BC: “No.”

Did you co-write those tracks?

BC: “Yes. I did my usual bits that I did with John for ‘He’s a Liquid’. I wrote the music section which rises which he still kept in his version, but he changed it slightly which is cheeky, but I let it go. It rises to a certain key where you play the melody in a different way in an instrumental break. Instead of the melody going down the notes stay the same, so you get this major discord which was great to play live and he kept that. In 1979 I met Midge in the studio and I said, ‘Right, we’re doing this track and it’s in C’ and it was quite similar to a track me and John wrote together, but you know, so what? What was he going to do about it?! I started it in C and it really had a very similar atmosphere to ‘Just For A Moment’ which John and I wrote together. That became ‘Vienna’. After ‘Systems’ we just left each other alone. Of course we would have influences coming from each other and it’s good that we didn’t end up in court, really because that could have been awful. It was only slight areas. For example, the melody from ‘Touch and Go’ ended up cropping up in Ultravox’s ‘Mr X’ on the ‘Vienna’ album.”

What was it like working with John Foxx?

BC: “I enjoyed working with him because he had some original ideas, otherwise I wouldn’t have stayed for six years. To work with John was like, ‘Ah, I’ve found something really interesting’. Also, he was a Northerner and he was still at Art College, although he played that down. But I’d just turned down a place at the Royal Academy of Music, but mostly because I was kind of a confused teenager. I was up to here with it all. It was only ‘A’ levels – ‘A’ level art and ‘A’ level music and they were all getting a bit much and I was doing a lot of music outside. Typical teenager, doing drugs, acid and I thought, ‘Fuck it, I’m off’. I get offered a job in a really good band, so I just buggered off. So, me and John had something in common there.”

When Midge Ure took over from John Foxx, why did the band very quickly stop playing any of the Foxx-era material?

BC: “The idea was to play the band live before we went and made a record [‘Vienna’]. So, we couldn’t just write twelve or thirteen or fourteen tracks – it was just out of necessity. And when we came up with ideas of what to play, Midge played and sang them very proficiently, you know, and we knew he was capable of doing it live, so that was good. To be honest, I didn’t particularly like doing those songs at all. I’m very much like that. I am a sort of black and white person. I would have loved if, in a week, we could have written a whole new set, but it’s just out of necessity; whereas Midge Ure’s quite a practical person. I’m quite unpractical in some ways. So, that was quite a good combination for a bit – for about a week, no sorry! I didn’t particularly like it to be honest that much. When we were doing the ‘Vienna’ tour, ‘Quiet Man’ was still in there and even ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’. It was nice to play them in front of a big audience like at the Hammersmith Odeon. That was very satisfying.”

I’ve never heard any recordings of Midge Ure singing those versions. It would be interesting to hear.

BC: “Yeah. When we did a thing for the BBC at the Paris Theatre in London – a live album [‘Ultravox: Live in Concert’, 1981] – I don’t think there are any of those tracks on that even though we were doing some. We deliberately kept them out. They only exist on bootlegs.”

There must be loads of unreleased recordings of Ultravox in concert.

BC: “Well, we have at the CMO management office. We’ve just got them out of a cage that Ultravox Limited – the company, the ‘80s line-up – has being paying for for about twenty years. We’re all too proud to say, ‘What are we paying for this for? Why are we paying for it and not using it?’ I don’t know whether it was me – it might not have been – but me and the accountant down at CMO just recently decided to do something about it. So, we got the tapes out of there and they’re now sat down at CMO if there’s any thief listening. I just can’t be arsed to go down there. I mean, I can. It’s not like I can’t be arsed, it’s just that the onus seems to get dropped on me – this is how suspicious we are about each other. If we can’t have a meeting about this, then I just can’t do it.”

Well, you’re obviously no longer talking to Midge, I understand that.

BC: “I’m not talking to any of them.”

You’re not talking to Chris or Warren?

BC: “No. It’s not a case of me not talking to them. We’re not talking to each other. Going back to those tapes, I think they are all remixes. I said, ‘Look, if you get them out, I’ll come down and help. I’ll come down to CMO’ – and they were like ‘shock, horror’ thinking, ‘How can we get out of this one!’ There are no never before released tracks, so I’m not very interested because I am quite a black and white person. I was never that bothered about remixes. Once you’ve found the mix – maybe I’m a bit narrow minded – I mean if I went down there and listened to them, I might be blown away and think, ‘Why didn’t we use that?’ But I don’t really want to get right back into it. I’m not really that interested. I do like Ultravox. I don’t want to piss people off. I do appreciate the band, but you’ve got to understand that I’m not all that interested now because it’s been a long time. If there were some never before released tracks, I would go down. In fact, I did speak to Midge Ure last year when he phoned me.”

Why did he ring you?

BC: “Well, he had to phone because I’d threatened to sue his arse. He put out a ‘Trigger Happy’ tour CD and DVD. Two thirds of the tracks were Ultravox tracks from the early ‘80s that I co-wrote and he was not paying writer’s royalties. I wrote to him and he didn’t answer my letter. It was a pain in the arse this. It took about six months to sort out. He ignored my letter so I had to phone this woman who is his manager who got my sympathy by saying he’s an alcoholic. So, I calmed down and, fuck it, he’d got my sympathy. She immediately started to be an absolute smart arse, so I just said, ‘Look, if he doesn’t get in touch with me by a certain time…’ – I didn’t want to go through all the legal stuff – but what else can you do? You’ve got to make a threat. So, I said, ‘If he doesn’t phone me by this date, I’ll have to take legal action’. He waited right up until that deadline. But he was very apologetic.”

How did you both get on?

BC: “It was very…I didn’t really want to get involved. I was pleased he phoned. He’d really come down off his…There was a certain humility, talking about the fact that he’d been dropped, and then absolutely reassured me that he’d get it sorted out. But it was very difficult for him to make me have to phone that woman because she’s an absolute bitch, and she’d inferred that I was actually chasing after him because I wanted to work with him again. I mean, how fucking out of order is that? That’s really out of order.”

With all these ‘80s bands reuniting, I’m presuming then that that would never happen with Ultravox?

BC: “Well, I never say never. But I mean, I just found that so insulting. Then, when Midge phoned me, he was so amenable and chatty and pally and he was waiting for me to say one thing. I put my foot wrong by saying, ‘We sold a lot of records’, you know, when he said we’d helped him a lot financially. It meant that’s how we could help him and he goes: ‘I’ve moved on now’. Basically, that’s his pride and he didn’t want to talk about it and I think he might have taken it that I was wanting…that he was suggesting some more because I’d said, ‘We’d sold a lot of records’. He thought that I was saying that we should do some more and I wasn’t saying that! He’s a very proud man. I was thinking, ‘Shit, why did I say that!’ But I didn’t rise to it. I didn’t start saying, ‘Well, if you’ve moved on, why are you putting out records and DVDs that are two thirds full of early ‘80s Ultravox’. I just thought it was so funny that he, after speaking to his manager – she is his manager – she obviously has put that into his head as well that I was chasing after him. It was quite nice to talk to him again just to talk to him as a person and as a musician. When you are a solo artist, you do feel a bit cut off sometimes. It’s nice to talk to other musicians. So, it was quite nice to see where he was at.”

It would be great to hear some more live Ultravox because there’s been very limited released material in concert. If you look at the live ‘Monument’ EP, there are only six live tracks and it makes you think, ‘Why didn’t they release the whole concert?’ I don’t know why that was.

BC: “Well, we recorded the whole concert at Wembley when we did the U-Vox tour in 1986. I had some tapes of that for ages. I think some people could be interested in it, but it was just the three of us by then and we were definitely going well pear-shaped by then.”

Yeah. We’ll come to that topic later! Critics from ‘Vienna’ onwards have tended to see Ultravox’s musical arrangements as sometimes overblown. What’s your opinion?

BC: “I tended to overblow them a little bit myself. At the end of ‘Cut and Run’ is a perfect example of me completely taking over and trying to fit as many melodies into play at one time together and that’s a little bit like a classical musician having a license to kill, you know. So, I agree, but I still love it. It was in 1982 for the ‘Quartet’ album because I used four different melodies in the track, so I thought, ‘Right, let’s make them all work together’. It’s like being Mozart, you know. I think we could be rightly described as being overblown as soon as we did our second album.”

‘Rage in Eden’.

BC: “Yeah, because what happened was that Midge built up a relationship with Chris and rather dropped me, but I could stand on my own two feet, so that wasn’t a problem.”

Midge dropped you from what?

BC: “Friendship kind of thing. It tended to be those two together.”

Is that when the cracks started to appear in the band?

BC: “Oh yeah.”

That early?

BC: “Oh yeah, that early. Me and Midge were friends in Visage, but then he wasn’t the lead singer in Visage. As soon as I invited him into Ultravox and he became the lead singer and we got success, he separated himself a bit and he rushed ahead.”

Why do you think he separated himself?

BC: “Because, basically, he wanted to try and take over. His kick was to take over. That was what he was into. But I could hold my own in music because music was kept first in Ultravox. You had to have to have the music first, but it was stressful from that point. So, when we did ‘Rage in Eden’ they jumped in two feet deep together and came up with ‘The Voice’ and the first bit of ‘We Stand Alone’ which are the first two tracks of the album. I fitted in my bits to finish them off. If I didn’t originate something, then I would finish them off. But anyway, I think we could have been accused of being overblown from ‘The Voice’ because – this is very patronising – it’s two non-classical musicians – Midge with a pop background and Chris with an interesting pop background but not having much of an idea of classical – taking over the reins thinking that they’re dishing back to me what I can do, but doing it like a pop musician would write a classical piece. We were actually finishing that track off when we were putting it down in the studio – that was very clever. Midge was very good at winding people up and I found myself chasing after it. He’s very good at that. He’s got no one do it with now, so that’s why he’s been dead on his arse for so long. So anyway, I responded positively and, of course, Conny knew what was going on. So I finished it off and the way I was finishing it off was a fair deal really; I was writing myself a long solo. This is how bad it got. It was very competitive and, of course, I was getting the daggers looked at me by Warren who didn’t involve himself in writing but, in fact, was taking 25%; we were equal which was fine. So, I remember finishing that track off and Warren got mental at me because I was still writing it. Some people might think, ‘There goes Billy Currie winging again’, but that’s what happened. That’s what happened. It’s not a matter of winging. That was it. I took it on and I made it successful. A lot of other musicians might have said, ‘Fuck off, I don’t like it’.”

Well, it’s certainly interesting to hear your perspective on events especially when compared to Midge Ure’s autobiography. Also it’s interesting about what you’ve just said about your solo in ‘The Voice’ because the live solo for that song – and I’m particularly thinking of the Monument Tour – is probably one of the most electrifying moments in Ultravox. Those noises you produced from your ARP Odyssey are incredible.

BC: “Thank you very much. The verse for ‘The Voice’ was good, don’t get me wrong. I used to wind Midge up saying that he sounded like Gene Pitney. We were just very competitive people and quite nasty as well sometimes. But those chords were good to blow over, to improvise over because it took me right back to when I worked with my first band when I was 19 in 1969; I learnt how to improvise, so I was picking up things from that. But I was very influenced by German bands like Neu! because that solo at the end of ‘The Voice’ live, yes, it did go on quite a bit didn’t it? That going on for a while was quite German. I mean, the second track on my new album is quite German. It’s called ‘William’s Mix’ and you could certainly give a nod to Conny Plank there.”

What was it like working with the producer George Martin on the Ultravox album ‘Quartet’? Wasn’t he a bit deaf by 1982?

BC: “We used to have a right laugh with him! The good thing about Chris Cross was that he had a good sense of humour. Acrid, cockney sense of humour. I remember we were eating there…”

In Montserrat.

BC: “Yeah, in Montserrat with the Sun coming down at this long table, and he’s sitting there like Prince Charles with his wife and us. I remember his wife saying, ‘I’m off first thing tomorrow’ and Chris Cross saying, ‘Thank god, I’m knackered’. I mean, to actually say that in front of George Martin.”

Midge Ure stated the sounds you produced from synths sounded like an electronic Jimi Hendrix. How did you discover the ARP Odyssey and how did you develop that trademark sound which became the electronic voice of Ultravox?

BC: “That came up through the punk period right in the middle of ’77. Island still backed us financially even though our first album didn’t sell very well; they were still behind us for the second album which was good. They gave us some money and so I bought a fender violin and an ARP Odyssey. The ARP Odyssey was a grand. John pointed out that he bought it for me! I did read that one. That was very nice of him! Anyway it was a grand.”

That was a lot of money at that time.

BC: “Oh yeah. It was a case of bringing the ARP into the music like with ‘Man Who Dies Everyday’ and going mental with it in ‘Artificial Life’. Immediately I started to get total mental sounds. I also started to get a tougher sound from some of the tracks like in ‘Quiet Man’. You can start to feel this style coming through of a stronger sound, but also like in the verses of ‘Man Who Dies Everyday’ there’s a soft sound coming in which is high up and I used to double it with the strings. So there were these things developing. But I must say that John’s song writing had a big influence on me because he was a man that liked the melody and I liked the melody because I’d been brought up on pop music like The Stones – I knew how important pop music was then, but I also knew the importance of classical; for example, Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto and how the big melody comes in the middle. It was interesting for John to anchor me because I’d been through so much improvisation and, before I left music college, I’d been into twelve note stuff like Schoenberg , more modern music, ‘40s stuff, totally dissonant stuff. More recently, for my new album, there’s an influence I mention through the title of my album, a guy called John Cage who did a first tape electronic piece, splicing tape in 1952. The second track on my album is called ‘William’s Mix’ and that’s what that track was called. See, I was just getting into that when I was leaving college. The point I’m making is that as well as me cutting through – a bit like a violin player – it’s a frustration about being able to cut through as a violinist – I could now do it with the synthesizer and really cut through using the vibrato. But there’s also a softer side which is just doing melodies. John Foxx helped me rediscover melody.”

In the early ‘80s in another interview, you commented how while playing the ARP Odyssey for the track ‘All Stood Still’, you’d liked to have fucked the synth because playing it was such a physical thing. Can you explain that?

BC: “Well, it’s just like being a guitarist if you feel like fucking it because you get so much off on it; you’re enjoying so much release, sexual release as well.”

You can see that in your playing. You were always a very physical performer.

BC: “Yeah, it was very much that. It was a great experience. It was revelation not to be stuck behind a big keyboard for a start. It was certainly small enough to feel like you could still be seen by the audience and you were a physical being doing it, not someone hidden, although I don’t like people knocking someone like Keith Emerson because – okay, he had a lot of keyboards but you could still see the guy, couldn’t you? I don’t like it when people knock those guys because they were good. They served their purpose at the time.”

In Ultravox you had a lot of keyboards around you.

BC: “Yes, but I fixed it so when I played a keyboard, people could see me. I wanted to be seen. It was frustration, really because when I played the violin they weren’t advanced enough to have a good sound; there was always a problem, even with the Barcus-Berry transducer mike. But all this frustration I’d had from playing the violin, especially during the punk period, I took it out on the keyboard and I got the nastiest…not necessarily the nastiest, but the loudest cut-through sound I possibly could; it was almost lowest common denominator – it was a bit punk mentality and I was going to take people’s heads off with this.”

Have you ever heard anyone else play the ARP as expressively?

BC: “People were playing it differently. I saw the band Magazine because I worked with Dave Formula in Visage and I liked the way he played his ARP. I saw them play at Drury Lane where I met Gary Numan, and he asked me to work with him. He was quite subtle, Dave Formula, but it was great working with him in the first Visage album. He used to do some farty sounds and – I shouldn’t put myself down – but he was quite subtle whereas, with me, I used to do the soft sound, say at the beginning of ‘Fade to Grey’, or the loud sound! That was it, you know.”

Yet fans loved the much harder sounds which you generated from the ARP.

BC: “I was battling with putting the synth on in ‘Ha!Ha!Ha!’ It could really put a massive chip on your shoulder being in a group like Ultravox playing the violin and keyboards. It says a lot to the other guys because they knew that I was a fairly sensitive soul, but they didn’t actually screw me which is quite good; they let me have a chance. When I listen to ‘Ha!Ha!Ha!’, the ARP work is quite mild. The ARP wasn’t used much for the next album. Robin [Simons] influenced me to use guitar pedals. I tell you what, there’s one thing that I’m most proud of on ‘Systems of Romance’ because we moved away from just hitting people between the eyes on that album. There’s a track called ‘Someone Else’s Clothes’; when John sings ‘Ah ah oh’, and what comes in is not a guitar – it’s me playing the ARP. It’s just me playing three or four separate notes (I didn’t play duophonic because it went out of tune with those two oscillators); so, I had to take it about four times – these are separate notes, but they’re treated with guitar effects and I’m most proud of that as a sound because it’s like, ‘Fucking hell, what the hell is that?’ But that was Robin Simon who helped me get that. It wasn’t just me in the room going, ‘Fuck, let’s try this and that’. I’d got a like a pal in there helping me who was a guitarist who, instead of thinking, ‘Well, there’s the keyboardist and I’m the guitarist’.”

The solo in ‘Man Who Dies Everyday’ is one of the most exciting sounds you produced in early Ultravox.

BC: “I feel it’s a bit timid myself, but I think they’ve cranked it up a little bit on the new master. I got the benefit of playing live a lot by the time we did the ‘Vienna’ album. I think that’s absolutely crucial to the development of my style of ARP playing because you’ve just made me realise how little I did of that kind of style on ‘Systems of Romance’, but I was still out there touring and experimenting.”

John Foxx has commented that with the ARP, you produced a language that was taken up by others. Do you hear your influence in other artists?

BC: “Not so much by that kind of lead sound. I think that’s kind of out on its own isn’t it, really? People have got into the melody thing. People who I used to like at the time – Psychedelic Furs – have been influenced by Ultravox – and Talk Talk. At the time he was in this mod style band with a mod style name, and he had his ear to the rehearsal studio wall when we were doing ‘Systems of Romance’!”

You mean Mark Hollis?

BC: “Yeah. When we finished ‘Systems of Romance’ we heard his music and thought, ‘Hang on, that sounds familiar!’ No, but I used to like Talk Talk. I haven’t heard people using the synth like I did. I think there are some people who have used it with a lot of welly in the dance genre like using nice cheap sounding synths which I really relate to; but they’re not so free because they are being triggered, but I’m quite into dance stuff. I don’t care if they’re triggered or not. You hear some dance tracks and think, ‘Yeah, fucking right!’ I like dance stuff and Ultravox was influenced a lot by dance music.”

Was it?

BC: “Yes. And I got to see that thing as well from YouTube of that concert you mentioned from 1983 and that’s when we were probably at our fucking maddest. It was all saying ‘Technology, technology, technology’ – it was extremely heavy, energetic, but quite hyped up. We were innovative in that we used to make our own electronic systems to run them; I know that Human League did as well.”

What do you mean by your own electronic systems?

BC: “Well, in those days you would have an internal clock and you used to keep quiet how you did things. We used to have a constant clock going and the drummer would be playing along with it but, to play along with it, you’d have it in his headphones so it was all very, very uptight. Occasionally it would trigger through a CV gate and that is a very powerful sound – that would trigger the mini-Moog in a very powerful way. It’s more powerful than Midi, so these dance guys use Midi; mind you, not all of them do. Some of them buy equipment that’s relative to the old analogue which we were using because it zaps it more so. I mean, I’m not that technical. When we did ‘Dislocation’ that was done very old school – it was quite modern at the time. When I was dragged out of my bed with a huge joint in my mouth, it was like, ‘You are writing this track’ and I was angry as hell, but then I was like, ‘Alright then, the onus is on me. They’ve finally realised that I can write!’ And I plugged in my sequencer and basically…actually, Warren Cann’s being going on about this on the recent sleeve notes to the released albums and he’s gone on and on about the rhythm which is fantastic but, he seems to have omitted the fact that it was originated from my synthesizer part that I wrote.”

Maybe that’s an example of why you should all speak to each other!

BC: “Yes, we should speak to each other. But it doesn’t matter because the rhythm track was very important.”

Midge Ure paints you as not only wild on stage when you played your ARP, but also being somewhat wild with your off-stage antics. For example, in his autobiography he tells the story of you being chased through a hotel by a chef with a meat cleaver. How sex, drugs and rock n’ roll were Ultravox?

BC: “A lot, but we were too cool to let on. We would have been more interesting. I think we had three guys who were a little bit scared of the world seeing it. We were too scared to show it and when I was chased and put in jail, it was just one old photograph on the ‘Daily Mirror’ and it was an old shot as well. I was disgusted! It was from 1977. I was just made to feel like a crook, but there was nothing funny about it. I mean, it was funny, really. I didn’t do any harm, yet the other three guys were really disapproving. I was literally brought out of jail. I had no shoes on. I’d got a white suit on – very ’84 or ’83, whenever it was – actually ’82, sorry. I’d been dragged in there; I’d been made to sit with criminals who stunk of shit.”

Which jail was this?

BC: “Southampton. I was brought out by the tour manager and pretty much taken straight to the gig. And I had these three women, Les Dawson types, saying, ‘God, how terrible’. But the type I am, again, I just got on with it. I did the gig and when the gig was finished we forgot about it. The next day, where were we? It was a bloody seven month tour, so I just didn’t care. If I was the type who was really nit-picking, the band could have broken up very early, but I wasn’t. It was like, ‘Fuck it’, the music’s important. Even when things were going bad and I could see that Ure was trying to take over with the help of Chris Cross which was fucking disgusting, you know, doing things behind your back, it was the music that was important to me.”

Going back to sex, drugs and rock n’ roll, didn’t the others get up to various things off-stage?

BC: “Of course. I mean Midge, fucking hell, how many girls did he shag in one night? But it was all done behind closed doors. Midge didn’t like drugs. He was always lecturing about people and drugs.”

But he was drinking heavily, wasn’t he?

BC: “Yes, and yet he was drinking like a fish. My technical bloke who did all this custom built technical stuff – he was a friend of mine from Huddersfield – he was always telling me how Midge was telling him to stop smoking; or my keyboard roadie gets a slap on the wrist from him and Midge goes back and swigs another bottle of Jack Daniels. It was very good at hiding it the next day or giving the impression that you’re the problem, not him.”

Did you know he had a drink problem at the time?

BC: “No, I was too concerned with my problems, I think. We knew he was drinking a lot. When we did the last tour – V-Vox – and it was just me, Chris and him, Chris didn’t drink at all and I became a bit aware of it then. He was dragging these people who were working with us. Danny Mitchell , who wrote ‘If I Was’, would be roped into a drinking session and I used to see how much they drank. Danny used to be like, ‘Fucking no way!’ the next day because he tried to get him to drink before we were going on stage again and Midge could. Sometimes I saw Midge and Chris pissed on stage and I got very pissed off with them.”

They played pissed?

BC: “Not very often, but they were good at hiding it. Just occasionally they would show it. I never did anything before I went on stage, but I used to do it all after so, by the time I had to go on stage again, I got used to my mental state and I used to work it out on stage. I used to feel like shit all day sometimes, but I used to work it out on stage which is really bad for you. So, by the time I’d finished, I felt high as a kite again and it was like, ‘Where’s the party?!’ And that is a very serious cycle to get into. I was living in a different time zone. I still looked like I was about ten years younger and you just knew, because the skin was nice – I had this special kind of skin; I had better skin than the rest of the guys. Midge would be all creased fore head and hair falling out. Then, vwoooom! Like clockwork – I think it must have been early 1985 – I just fell to fucking bits.”

That’s interesting stuff because it’s the one side of Ultravox which has remained hidden.

BC: “We used to look at Midge and take the piss. We used to have a right laugh. I don’t know why they shouldn’t come out and say so. I’m not going to insult the rest of the guys, but I find them really boring. I’m more interested in John Foxx. It’s nice to hear that he’s doing some touring, but I find the others really boring. They’re just very ungiving and they’ve rolled up the drawbridge. I did read Midge’s autobiography; I had to, you know.”

What did you make of it?

BC: “Well, it wasn’t written by him, was it? The chap who wrote it makes him seem like a really clever guy! I thought the bit about the stuff we were doing in my studio in 1985/86 before Warren got thrown out. He stayed away for a couple of weeks and ended up staying away for six weeks so, he took that as an opportunity to say we were a spent force. I thought that was all really fucking disgusting, very out of order.”

That sort of erosion in the band was visible when Midge and Chris were seen in the studio session for Band Aid, but you and Warren weren’t there. Why was that?

BC: “No, we weren’t there because what a great opportunity to eclipse the other two.”

Ultravox’s performance at Live Aid was rather bizarre too. It was quite a disappointing set which seemed a little lacklustre.

BC: “We were sort of in the middle of a year off and Midge was just concentrating on his solo album. We were very fragmented and we only had a few days rehearsal. There was no interest in getting the two guys – Danny Mitchell and Colin King [The Messengers] backing us, and Midge didn’t fucking turn up either sometimes. I remember him turning up four hours late and I was saying, ‘Where the fuck have you been?’ and he says, ‘I’ve just been mixing my album’. But he could say that because he was so in control at the time. You give someone like him too much power which charity gave him, you’re really up for a problem, aren’t you?”

A review of the ‘U-Vox’ album in Q music magazine back in 1986 and it was a pretty disappointed review and said something along the lines of, ‘Why are they producing a half-baked album when the door has been opened for them to be even more successful?’

BC: “Midge had another motive, another agenda. We were getting really big but, by the ‘Lament’ album he wanted to…He couldn’t hack it himself in the group. He couldn’t hack it because of all the things of being in a group. He was the one who couldn’t hack it so he set about muddying the waters and started rubbishing the group during the making of the ‘Lament’ album. That was going on all the way through that. I should have quit really, but I’m not that type.”

That’s rather ironic because ‘Lament’ is a strong album.

BC: “I realised that it was the wrong time to start getting paranoid and, in some ways, I was the one that was a stabiliser at that point and brought in quite standard Ultravox tracks. I wrote in my home the chords and the melody for ‘Dancing with Tears In My Eyes’ which is very Neu! influenced and German influenced, but it was a hit.”

That was your biggest hit since ‘Vienna’.

BC: “Yeah. So I stabilised it, but he was saying that we were getting boring and slagging us off, yet not coming up with any interesting stuff, although one or two things were interesting but I was a little bit out of it then. It was all to do with him thinking that Ultravox were no longer cutting edge. He was just building himself up to go solo.”

It’s somewhat ironic that his solo career hasn’t been very successful.

BC: “No it hasn’t. And he did a very clear, quite light-weight pop album, very Scottish influenced. He didn’t have enough guts to leave the group and he didn’t want to do the ‘U-Vox’ album, and I hadn’t got enough guts to throw him out.”

Do you regret that it was Warren kicked out of the band and not Midge?

BC: “Yeah, I do. But Warren was turning up six hours late. The ‘Lament’ album we did in Midge’s studio and so it was now time to do one in my studio. I’d built my studio in the basement of my house. I knew that Midge needed a couple of weeks off and I agreed to that. We started working in my studio. Chris turned up bang on time, but Chris and I had never worked together by ourselves. Warren knew that, but still didn’t turn up till five or six hours late. Then, when he arrived, he was quite happy to sit and twiddle away on the drum machine, putting in a drum machine part to what was written during the day, and I found that really fucking out of order because me and Midge were getting a little bit – him more than me – pissed off about Warren walking away with 25% . And he used to hold us back while he spent hours on his drum part to music that we had written. That used to piss me off, so that hit me right in the face at that time and he was wanting us to let him play guitar as well. I was quite prepared to cope with it, but I didn’t reckon on the fact that Midge then coming in and starting throwing his weight around which suggested throwing him out. I know people can be weird, but we were never really irresponsible, but that was irresponsible. We used to get out of our tree, but we used to still try and do it and Warren pissed me off. So when Midge suggested kicking Warren out, I didn’t say yes, but I wasn’t exactly in favour. But Midge had got too powerful as well because he hadn’t turned up for six weeks.”

Was Warren’s sacking a bolt out of the blue for him?

BC: “Oh yeah, yeah. But of course as he’d gone…I think it was all just a case of getting it out the way and Midge hadn’t got enough guts to sort of say, ‘ I don’t want to do it anymore’. When he did his second album, it bombed because he knew he’d have to do something more defining than his first pop album and he isn’t that kind of a guy. He doesn’t have ideas; he’s not an originator; he’s more someone who can connect to someone like Bob Geldof’s Band Aid, sorry; he can connect to that, he can connect to Ultravox; Visage wasn’t his idea. When I say all that, I’m not knocking him; that’s just the kind of musician he is and there’s a space for that, you know. Going back to Warren, I should have called a meeting. Ultravox never had meetings.”

What was Chris Morrison like as a manager for Ultravox?

BC: “He was good at organising things. I don’t get on with him at all.”

When did he become Ultravox’s manager?

BC: “When we were doing ‘Systems of Romance’, we were being managed by Island Artists which was just ridiculous. We’d been ripped off by one director and I said to John, ‘Well, come on, we’re going to sue the cunt’ and a few weeks later I said, ‘What’s happening’ and John said, ‘He’s going to counter-sue and I’ve backed down’ and I’m like, ‘We need a fucking manager’. So I’d been out looking for managers and if any fans listening to this thinking, ‘Oh here he goes again Billy Currie: me, me, me’, it’s true: I was the doer, really. I did have quite a bit of experience before I joined Ultravox. I’d been with this guy – Geoff Stars – and Mark Plumber from Melody Maker was helping us do stuff and Chris what’s-his-name from Melody Maker. So, I had a bit more touch with the business and stuff. So I thought, ‘Fucking hell, we really do need management’. So, I got this whole list and John didn’t want to know. In fact I mentioned Chris Morisson and John said, ‘You want to be managed by someone who manages Thin Lizzy?’.”

It was a good point!

BC: “Yeah! Anyway, when I brought Midge in we were rehearsing at Island – I won’t go into that story, but they nearly impounded our gear, but Chris Cross had a relationship with a woman who worked at Island, so we managed to wrangle it. Anyway, we were rehearsing with Midge and we came out one time to have a break and I said, ‘I’ve got this list. I’m going to find a fucking a manager’. So I picked up the name Chris Morrison because I’d tried some others that had…I can’t remember this list now because it was so long ago, do you know what I mean, but there were some other ones. And I found Morrison and it just went from there. But it was a bad sign right from the start because Morrison met up in a curry restaurant in Shepherd’s Bush with the three of us and Midge separate. I didn’t like that.”

Why did Morisson do that?

BC: “I don’t know. His excuse was that Midge had legal problems with his other manager. Utter crap, but that was his excuse. Chris Morrison thought from the beginning that I was a bit of an upstart, I could tell. I’d experienced fame with Gary Numan. I’d been on Top of the Pops the other week and I did that biggish tour.”

What was it like working with Gary Numan?

BC: “It was fantastic. Great fun. I did an improvised solo on ‘On Broadway’. We finished off the concert with a version of ‘On Broadway’ which I really liked and Gary gave me a long solo at the end and used to shout my name. It’s on the 1979 live album from the ‘Touring Principle’ tour. I actually listened to it again – I hadn’t listened to it for years- and the melody at the end, I used for the sixth track – ‘Matsang River’ – on my new album. It was such a pleasant surprise to work with Gary. Initially, Gary was pursuing an area like we were and seemed to be getting nowhere. His was more basic kind of music; that’s not a very nice thing to say, but it was still quite guitar orientated, so some of the chord progressions were quite simple; his music was simpler than ours, not as developed. But then he was replacing it with Minimoog.”

And you played the ARP for him?

BC: “Yes, of course, I’d forgotten about that. I did a lot of ARP on that because Gary liked it. That’s what he wanted. So, that’s why, when I got to get Midge later on, that was at the forefront because I did a whole tour in front of a big audience playing ARP.”

Were you ever tempted just to leave Ultravox in 1979 after Foxx’s departure and permanently stay with Gary Numan?

BC: “No, no. I was quite a dedicated guy. I still loved Ultravox and still felt we could do something. Because Gary had changed it from Tubeway Army to the Gary Numan band, that put me off big time. Also, I wasn’t really a session man. I’m not any kind of a musician like that. I’m terrible. I have done some sessions, but for friends, you know? I only do what I want. Gary offered and wanted me in. He was really pissed off that I didn’t stay and do the European tour because it meant he had to rehearse someone else and I can understand that. But, you see, he was offering the other guys – I had to be careful what I said because he was offering guys a percentage of the record royalties – but, really, I knew, I was long in the tooth enough to know that what was the use of those royalties when it was all being spent on stage sets. 10% of what, you know?”

It was a very elaborate tour.

BC: “Yeah and I had to be careful what I said because I didn’t buy it because I knew that most of the money is through publishing royalties, writer’s royalties and that’s where I was heading. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to get that with Gary because I was in the rehearsal studio when he was showing me ‘Cars’, but there wasn’t an opening, just like working with John Foxx. If Gary offered a few openings, I might have been interested, but he was definitely a one-man band, so that’s why I didn’t take the offer up.”

John Foxx recently said that he would like to work with you again if the possibility arose. Would you be tempted to do an album with him?

BC: “I don’t know. I love the idea of being with an audience again. I used to find it very exciting, but surprisingly, I haven’t missed it as much as I thought I would. It was always a leveller for me to come out of the studio and do interviews or television – it was such a leveller to come and play to the public. Never say never, but there’s not a lot I can respond to, really.”

Well, you did work with Robin Simons [guitarist on ‘Systems of Romance’] again didn’t you?

BC: “Yes, in the Humania project in 1989 [Because of legal difficulties Currie was forced to call Ultravox’s next incarnation Humania with a proposed album 'Sinews Of The Soul' which never appeared].”
.”

You haven’t worked with him since then?

BC: “No, I tried to get him in when I carried on Ultravox. When I did the ‘Revelation’ album, I tried to get him to come along to be involved with that, but he wasn’t interested and that’s fine [Midge Ure’s tenure with Utravox ended in 1986 with the ‘U-Vox’ album. Currie reformed Ultravox with singer Tony Fenelle for 'Revelation' and later another singer, Sam Blue, for the 1996 album 'Ingenuity']”

Do you look back to ‘Revelation’ and the attempt to continue Ultravox as a pretty bad idea?

BC: “No, it wasn’t a good idea but, in retrospect, it’s always easy to say that.”

Your solo work is much stronger.

BC: “Yes, of course it is. I think I just like the way I still have it on my label. It’s all up there. All my dirty washing’s out for people to see. I think some of the ‘Revelation’ album is absolute crap. It was difficult to try and do something new with a singer and a producer who was more the singer, so this terrible soft soul crept in there. But I do quite like ‘Perfecting the Art of Common Ground’. I started writing lyrics in ‘Revelation’ and ‘Ingenuity’. It was something I had to do. You see, I still loved the project and I had no intention of doing it for Midge Ure, but the fucking arsehole wouldn’t get out the way. So, I did Humania, and then got stuffed: that was meant to be a new Ultravox album. That was stopped so I had to give up. Eventually I got all that sorted out and, by the time I’d sorted it out in 1991, that’s a long time, isn’t it? So, I’d had the wind taken out of me. But that’s what they do. They do that deliberately. Chrysalis would say, ‘Well okay, let him have it, but two and a half years too late’. So, I was fucked. It’s all water under the bridge, really.”

Obviously you’ve been really prolific since the end of Ultravox. The new album is your seventh. Can you tell me something about the album ‘Push’ which is interesting because you see to move into dance territory. I know you said something about this earlier, but is dance music an area you’d like to explore further?

BC: “Yeah. I had a chance to work with a dance artist who was managed by Duran Duran’s management company in 1987/88 when I had my own studio. This guy was absolutely mad, but I liked him. But, to be honest, I’m not sure. I’m quite happy keeping a little bit of my own space because I’ve been so…accommodating is not the right word, but a little bit accommodating as a musician for the first half of my life bearing in the mind that, from the age of eleven and twelve, I was working in quartets – string quartets, so I’ve always been involved with other people. So, I’m quite happy being my own self. But that was interesting getting involved with the dance scene. I quite like the ‘Push’ album. It’s got a bit of grit, hasn’t it?”

Yes it has. Can you tell me something about the new album?

BC: “The title for my new album ‘Accidental Poetry Of The Structure’ came at the end. Actually, ‘The Poetry Of The Structure’ is a quote about one of the first electronic tracks made ever using tapes by John Cage and I just loved it when I heard it. When I listened to it I thought, ‘I can relate to that’. And that track was called ‘William’s Mix’, so I used that for the second track! Basically, he got eight tapes of electronic sounds – New York traffic: the city, country sounds and so on – and he used the I-Ching to get some numbers, and he changed those numbers into measurements; so, he’d have the tape and the I-Ching would dictate where he would splice it and loop it, and I think that’s just so bizarre and so 1950s because those people were into pieces of religion at the time. ‘Accidental Poetry Of The Structure’ means when I get ideas by myself, they only come to life when I start making the structure, and that’s almost by accident.”

What sort of equipment do you use for making music nowadays because all I see here is one keyboard, a mixing desk and a computer?

BC: “Basically what you see here.”

What about your ARP? Where is it?

BC: “When I did ‘Push’, I had the ARP here and I was blasting away.”

When did you start using the Oscar synth?

BC: “1984. I discovered it right at the end of the recording of the ‘Lament’ album
before we started mixing. I just had time to lay it on the track ‘Friend I Call
Desire’. Used it on the solo for ‘Love’s Great Adventure’. I also used it on
the solo for ‘India’ from my solo album ‘Transportation’ and on
’Ukraine’ from my second solo album, ‘Stand Up And Walk’.”

So, is all your synth software on your computer?

BC: “Yes, it’s on there. It’s virtual synths. I programmed 128 sounds. God, it was hard work because I’m not really like that, you know? With ‘Rage in Eden’ I could just use about ten sounds. I can honestly say it was sixteen sounds at the most. Anyway, that’s what I do now. I used to have loads of synths when I lived across the road in around 1999 and I just got rid of them all because of moving to a smaller house. I had a Yamaha CS80 and all these synthesizers.”

So, what equipment’s up in the attic? I’m fascinated to think what might be up there.

BC: “The ARP’s up there.”

Would you ever bring it down again?!

BC: “Yeah, probably, I reckon I would…”

Billy Currie’s new album ‘Accidental Poetry Of The Structure’ is on his Puzzle label and is available from www.billycurrie.com.

John Foxx was the original lead singer of Ultravox and is widely perceived as a key influence on the development of British electro-pop. He continues to release albums both as a solo artist and in collaboration with other musicians. Aside from music, Foxx lectures in digital culture and art, and is currently working on a series of ‘cut up’ digital movies. During his tenure in Ultravox, Foxx’s charismatic vocal delivery and the experimental sounds made by keyboardist Billie Currie (via an ARP Odyssey), made the band distinctive, yet unpopular with a British press who found them too artsy during punk’s heyday. Between 1976 and 1978, Ultravox released three albums (co-produced by Brian Eno, Steve Lilywhite and Conny Plank), but critical and commercial success eluded them. Their final album, ‘Systems of Romance’ from 1978, is credited by Gary Numan as a major influence on his own work. In 1979, Foxx went solo to be replaced by Midge Ure who’d met Currie in another electro-pop band: Visage. Foxx released ‘Metamatic’ the following year from which came his most successful single, the stark electronic ‘Underpass’. The ARP Odyssey and Minimoog synthesizer had been a key to the sound of Ultravox; however, ‘Metamatic’ used these instruments to produce something much colder and minimalist. After his fourth solo album, ‘In Mysterious Ways’, Foxx disappeared from the music scene, not resurfacing until 1997 with two new records: the ambient ‘Cathedral Oceans’ and the hard-electronica of ‘Shifting City’ with Louis Gordon. Since then, he’s released ‘Cathedral Oceans’ II and III, ‘Translucence / Drift’ with Harold Budd, and two further albums with Louis Gordon: ‘The Pleasures of Electricity’ and ‘Crash and Burn’. His latest work, ‘Tiny Colour Movies’, is based around fifteen electronic instrumentals. Adam Locks meets up with him in London before a UK and American tour with Louis Gordon.

John, you’ve remained a rather enigmatic figure when in the public eye. Why is that?

JF: “I just think I’m not very good at being in any sort of limelight. It’s something that doesn’t appeal to me so I try and avoid it, and it’s not really wise to do that if you’re in music. Half of your job is, if you like, to show off on stage and I’ve never been any good at that at all”.

You seemed good at that when you were in Ultravox.

JF: “Well, I did that because it was what I was supposed to do, I suppose.”

But you weren’t comfortable?

JF: “I’ve never felt comfortable on stage, no, never. What I like doing best is writing songs and making up stories and telling stories and recording things. And there’s a big conflict. I like a quiet life.”

The ‘Quiet Man’!

JF: “Yeah, and it’s hard to reconcile that with the music, but you have to somehow which means you become schizophrenic. So, I guess, I’ve become a professional schizophrenic!”

Do you still lecture in graphic design and multi media at a University in London?

JF: “Yeah, yeah, but what I talk about is digital culture and art. It’s hard to define. It’s about cultural change that’s brought about through technology and art meeting. The intention is to give a background that would be useful to anybody who wants to work in any kind of modern media. That was the brief I gave to myself. It’s not as big a part of my life as music is, for sure. It’s a spin-off from music. It’s what you learn when you’re engaged with some kind of media. As opposed to the theoretical side of things which has got a bit baroque lately…”

Some of those theoretical ‘gods’ have been knocked off their pedestals in recent years.

JF: “Yeah, yeah. I remember that fake essay thing that was knocked up by a computer rearranging lots of sentences that were culled from film theory essays and I thought that was very funny when it got a First by a student who decided to play a joke. The same thing happens in the art world. I remember a friend of mine wrote an essay about an artist he invented who gave an impression of colour by a very subtle use of black and white. It was beautifully written and it sounded very plausible, but actually it was complete nonsense and he got a First for that! So, that kind of endeavour is always attractive!”

What do students and staff know of your alter ego, John Foxx, because obviously, you go by your other name of Dennis Leigh in your other life as a university lecturer?

JF: “Well, some of them pick up on it. I don’t know what they make of me really. I suppose it’s useful in some ways because if you’re doing something which you can actually demonstrate, then it makes what you say a bit more plausible. Sometimes people take more notice of you than they might do otherwise and, sometimes, less. I mean, it has a negative effect too because sometimes you’re seen as only a rock n’ roller, or only a pop musician, or something like that.”

You’re a bit of a Renaissance man.

JF: “It’s not that, it’s just that you can’t help but cover a lot of bases because you work with video, then you do some film music so you get into the film industry for a bit, and then you do some animation, then you have a skirmish with fine art on the way through, and so on. And, without realising it, you’ve touched a lot of areas, cultural areas. Then you get interviews and you see that in print and how that gets changed and how images develop. And that’s always fascinated me: how stories get about; how they develop; how fiction can be truer than true stories. You get this true lies situation which is wonderful and really interesting. You know, accidents happen and get taken into some sort of myth and blows up and so on. I find all that fascinating. I remember, for instance, being on Top of the Pops and walking away three minutes later thinking, ‘What was that about? Why was that so interesting?’”

Was that ‘Underpass’?

JF: “Yes, I think it was the first time I was on Top of the Pops. The next day I came into London. I came to Oxford Circus on the tube and people were looking at me, and then I got asked for my autograph and that kind of thing. I thought it was all interesting, but a bit disconcerting really because I wasn’t used to it. Then I suddenly realised the connection to music hall. Music hall artists invented a character and the character does the work for them. Essentially, that’s what pop stars do. They invent this character and then the character does the work for them. I realised that I was doing a little bit of that but inadvertently; it’s almost an instinctive thing. Hence, I was just like a music hall artist in a way, except that my stuff was being recorded. Then I realised those people spent their lives travelling around England and lived off that ‘act’ which was very dangerous in music halls because they were violent places. But what I’d done in that three minutes on Top of the Pops – and I added up the performance time – 10 million people for three minutes: that’s about 98 years of solid performance time, and that’s the power of the media. It really struck me at that moment and that’s a practical experience of the power of media like nothing else I’ve experienced in my life. It brought it home to me how media is being changed through technology to such an extent…It’s no wonder that someone like Chaplin got hold of film and danced with joy because it meant he didn’t have to tour any more and I can sympathise with that totally! Chaplin was the person who really consolidated this technology and made it work. So, you have the equivalent of 20,000 actors going out playing live gigs which, in other words, the films in cinemas bearing their image, and they all bring the money back to you. So, it makes you tremendously rich and Chaplin became one of the richest people in the world. When you think of it in those very down-to-earth terms, it’s quite stunning isn’t it? It’s the way you don’t look at media and I try to look at it like that for my students at a very practical level about what makes it powerful. Why is it powerful? What’s the power? Where does the power come from?”

Your new album ‘Tiny Colour Movies’ seems to echo a wide range of sources – Kraftwerk, Vangelis’s ‘Blade Runner’ soundtrack, Brian Eno, and your own work from the ‘Metamatic’ period, most notably the instrumentals ‘Glimmer’ and ‘Dr No’. Were you consciously referencing other sources?

JF: “No, not really. You’re quite right, of course but, no. I just sat down and worked with what I had. There’s a point when you use older instruments that they sort of tell you what to do because they can’t do anything else really, and a lot of that happened. But I just let it happen. Sometimes I’d fight that, but then I thought, ‘Why fight that when it sounds perfectly good?’”

What’s the story behind ‘Tiny Colour Movies’?

JF: “The story is: gradually, over a lot of years, noticing that there were other kinds of film apart from commercial cinema which is the one that gets all the attention. I began to collect bits of Super-8 film that I got particularly on Brick Lane and a Flea market in Brussels, which is a wonderful place. On one visit I got a diary of a girl from 1925 to 1928, I think, hand-written and with photographs in it which was beautiful. On the same stall, or at least a stall nearby, I got four or five reels of Super-8 film which I looked at and these displayed very mundane family things. But I realised that there must be a lot of this stuff in the world and no one’s ever taken it seriously, yet it tells a lot of interesting stories and it’s moving media and it has special qualitities. And now we’ve got digital video which is one of these media that has no content, really; it doesn’t have any flaws and it’s a sort of a content free, blank, perfect medium, isn’t it? And what we started doing is roughing it up. All the new film makers and all the people on TV who work with digital media are busy trying to give it texture because it doesn’t have any texture. And, to do that, they use bits of old film. And, also, Super-8 becomes part of visual language because what it does is indicates the past. So, if you show pieces of Super-8, you know your talking about the past; it’s either a memory, or it’s a recollection, or it’s a re-visit, or something like that. Super-8’s become part of visual language while us not really noticing that process. Also now, you have entire programmes made from that kind of materials. There was a beautiful series called ‘The Century of the Self’ which I saw recently – a fantastically interesting series and almost all made from old home videos that had been referenced from someone who had mercifully started collecting that stuff. So, there’s a whole subculture. Also, there were people like Stanley Brakhage. Do you know him?”

No, I don’t. I know you mention him in your sleeve notes for ‘Tiny Colour Movies.’

JF: “He makes fragments of Super-8 film. He paints and scratches on them and manipulates them but with ‘real’ materials and then keeps working on these layers of re-filming until you get this unrecognisable stuff which is really beautiful. It was that awareness that there was a sort of unnamed genre of filmmaking which, I think, is at least as important as commercial cinema and that people are beginning to collect these things.”

I found that as I listened to your music, I really wanted to see these films.

JF: “Yeah, good. They’re all fragments of film that I have seen but where, sometimes, contained in other films. Another friend of mine – Mike Barker – has started accumulating as much of this stuff as he can because he loves it and not with any particular aim in mind, but just to have it, and to be able to display it sometimes. He was showing some of the images. There’s a beautiful wedding dress that someone had got. It’s really surreal and enormous. The dress looked like a heap of dough; it was so elaborate with all its folds and so on – it was from about 1930. And then there was some woman that he’d got who’d aged through all these films; so, she started off quite young and then in her fifties in the end and then, that’s the end of it. So, you see her life, really. It’s quite moving. If you edited that together, you could make quite a moving film without explaining anything; you’d just see someone aging. Hence, there are these moments that you get from these little films that I think are worth looking at.”

So there might be a follow-up to ‘Tiny Colour Movies’ if you are so interested in this genre?

JF: “Yeah, I’ve already written some cold, grey suit music. I like the ‘Quiet Man’, really. Actually, I started a ‘Quiet Man’ film in 1970, but I couldn’t do anything with it because it was too expensive. I shot it on Super-8 and I thought I’d transfer it to video to edit, but that would have cost me about £20,000 pounds then and I just didn’t have the money.”

I knew you were writing a ‘Quiet Man’ book, but not a film as well.

JF: “Literally it was just this suit that I’d bought in an Oxfam shop and I got some friends of mine to wear it. I’d film them in various locations in London. I had the idea of putting it together at some later date. But it wasn’t finished because I gave up with it because it was so expensive to make.”

It’s amazing how that suit triggered all sorts of effects in your life.

JF: “Oh yes, it was really interesting. Then it was a process of wearing that suit and seeing what happens to you after being a punk rocker, or something. It was a very interesting change in how people view you.”

Anonymity, is that what you mean?

JF: “Yes. So, all that led to these other things. Over the years that suit’s made its own sort of story up and that’s what I want to concentrate on for the next project. I’m going to continue to shoot it on Super-8 because now I can digitise that and edit it myself. It’s taken thirty years to get to the point where I can work on the film now.”

So we can expect a film in the not too distant future?

JF: “Yes, there will be some film soon. It will probably take me about a year yet because I’m just shooting at the moment.”

In a recent interview, you made the comment that Kraftwerk’s ‘Neon Lights’ opened up a whole new area for electronic music which is, as yet, still unexplored. What did you mean and have you started to investigate this unchartered territory?

JF: “Well, I think artists often do that. They do a track and you want to hear the follow-up, but they don’t follow it up like the Beatles with ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. There was that one track and I thought, at the time, ‘Wow, this is the future,’ and then nothing happened. So, that was the end of that. It was like a dead end, but an intriguing dead end. Lots of bands do that kind of thing. ‘Neon Lights’ happened to be one of them because Kraftwerk never really tried to do any ballads after that and they never did anything that was almost without percussion. It’s very rhythmic that piece; it’s a very nice electro-ballad with a very simple melody and it’s almost sentimental. It’s a got a romantic, nostalgic, technological sentimentality. I thought that might be the beginning of a new phase, but they never followed that up at all – they just went the opposite way.”

And you’re suggesting that no one followed it up.

JF: “Yes, no one followed it up. It’s like a pointer that will be taken up at some point later on by someone else, just like ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ was taken up by people like me and the Chemical Brothers, and people who are interested in drone music or drum loops or chants or that kind of thing. So, you might have to wait another ten or fifteen years until someone takes that track as being the foundation of their next phase.”

Clearly you have a dedicated fan base, but how difficult has it been to finance various projects, particularly when some of your music is so avant-garde?

JF: “It’s been alright, actually. I’ve always had the philosophy that one project finances the next project and it’s worked out so far. That’s all I can say, really. Sometimes it’s been close!”

Looking back at your three albums with Ultravox – ‘Ultravox!’, ‘Ha! Ha! Ha!’ and ‘Systems of Romance’ – what’s your impression of them now? Do you ever listen to them?

JF: “No, I don’t listen to my old records much.”

Why?

JF: “Well, there’s so much else to get on with. If you spend too much time listening to what you did, you get imprisoned by it and that’s a danger. It’s like believing your own publicity. It locks you into a fool’s paradise and you have to avoid that. It seems like someone else did them because it was thirty years ago almost exactly since we started the first one – 1976. What I hear is an idealistic art student who is a bit rebellious and who is bored in London because London didn’t have any scene at all at that time. There was nothing on the streets at all. Nothing. Punk rock and that was it. I had a lot of ideas that I wanted to play with and this was the playground – London – in ’76 which is an interestingly dull, grey, grainy place. It drizzled a lot and it hasn’t changed a bit, really!”

‘Systems of Romance’ is often seen as a musical blueprint for Gary Numan who has been very complimentary towards you as a major influence.

JF: “Gary has been very generous about that album. There are lots of other little blueprints in there as well, like Robin [Simons] guitar playing. For me, he’s one of the most important guitarists ever because he simply invented that modern techno guitar style.”

You often say in interviews what an excellent guitarist Robin Simons is. Would you like to work with him again?

JF: “Oh yeah. I did work on a couple of albums with him on my solo stuff. There’s still a lot more to do with Robin. There’s a lot more to do with all of them, to be honest because Bill [Billie Currie] was also a real pioneer in the way he used synthesizers and the sounds he got from them with very limited means at that point. He got some of the most powerful sounds that have even been recorded by a synthesizer.”

Billie Currie’s playing on the ARP Odyssey was electrifying. The expressions he produced through that instrument were incredible.

JF: “Yes, he’s a phenomenally good player and he invented all that himself.”

He managed to produce some astonishing acid-like squelches through that ARP.

JF: “Oh yeah, he produced a language that was taken by other areas later on. He blueprinted it.”

He hasn’t really taken any credit for this, has he?

JF: “Never got any credit for it, no and the same with Robin. Robin invented new guitar and everybody’s used that from the Edge onwards. Everybody uses it now. It’s so much part of the language that everyone thinks it’s always been there. But that’s a compliment to Robin because everyone assumes that’s how a guitar should sound now, but it didn’t sound like that before Robin got hold of it. Chris [Cross] was also the first to use synthetic bass properly live on stage.”

Was that the Mini-Moog?

JF: “He was the sort of bass player who played very fundamental bass using a synthesizer and do lead lines as well. He was the sort of bass player who played very fundamental bass using a synthesizer, but he also contributed to other parts of the songs too, so he wasn’t just a bass player. And then Warren [Cann] with drum machines. We were the first band using drum machines.”

For example, on the track ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’.

JF: “Yes. All that was working together at the time ‘Hiroshima’ was the first track which blue printed ‘Systems.’ I wanted to try and follow that song. I wanted to see what we could do with a more mechanical romanticism.”

‘Systems of Romance’ was the album where Ultravox really gelled, but why do you think the band received such a negative press at the time? The music press were very hostile to you, weren’t they?

JF: “Yeah. I don’t really know. I think punk became a very conservative movement very quickly, so by ’77 it was like talking to a bunch of old Conservatives: they had their rules and that was the way things should be. You couldn’t step outside of that. It was a kind of cultural Stalinism.”

You didn’t really fit into to any of this, did you?

JF: “No, we were sinners. We were unorthodox heretics…”

And, unlike most punk bands, you could play your instruments.

JF: “We weren’t really great musicians, but that wasn’t the premise of the band. I think people [in Ultravox] became good in the areas they got hold of and that’s what happened. I think if you make a space, then you have to fill it and that’s what we did. We cleared a space from what we thought was getting dull. We let everything rush by us. I remember taking that decision very deliberately at the end of 1977 thinking, ‘This is a year old now, this movement, and it’s as dull as ditchwater and it’s still rushing on headlong and it doesn’t know where it’s going, so we’ll let it rush past us. Let’s just stand aside and let it go past us. We’ve got a quiet place we can work in and where we can make our music.’ It was real conscious decision and that’s what happened. Of course the whole thing went rushing on and it felt like we’d missed the train and we were there at the station. So, we just decided to set up camp and wait, and that’s what we did.”

After ‘Systems of Romance’ and with regard to ‘Metamatic’, did you float the idea to the other members of the band to make a stripped-down, purely electronic album or did that just happen when you left?

JF: “No, because I didn’t think you could do that with a band. In a way I didn’t need to because you only need a drum machine and a couple of synths and that was it. And I realised that because I’d already made some demos. I remember working on ‘Quiet Men’ and realising that I could work like that my self. Also, you can’t keep people waiting around for a year or two while you do something that may or may not work out because, at that time, it wasn’t sure that anyone would like it. It might have been a complete waste of time. But, I just felt it so strongly. I think it was become of electric guitars. I’d seen, when I was a kid, how being able to get cheap electric guitars had made a big difference; suddenly there were a whole lot of bands and that would never have happened if you couldn’t have afforded an electric guitar. Synthesizers had just suddenly got within range; after being fifty thousand pounds, they were suddenly a thousand pounds, or something like that.”

That’s still a lot of money.

JF: “Yes, that was an awful lot of money then, but you could buy a few of them second hand. You could begin to acquire them.”

Is that what you did?

JF: “Yeah, yeah. Hence, you could begin to get them at a reasonable price. So, you had these marvellous noise making machines that could make noises like nothing else had ever been able to and I wanted to explore that. It was so frustrating waiting to do it. I remember having to do that last tour with the band and thinking, ‘I just want to start work on the album and I have to tour.’ I just wanted to get on with it. I knew what I wanted to do.”

‘Metamatic’ seems influenced by British science-fiction, particularly JG Ballard.

JF: “Yes, I wanted consciously to do that because I’m very interested in this idea of thought experiments; you know, what happens if you take elements. I thought, ‘What would happen to music, popular music, if you took America out of the equation. What would it sound like?’ So, that’s what I tried to do and that was ‘Metamatic’. The idea was that you shouldn’t have an American influence in it. That was the whole point of it. It’s European. It looks to Europe rather than America, although there are strains of America in it, but they’re American-European – it’s Bernstein which I’ve always liked. I’ve liked some of his scores, some of his modes of writing, because that’s what informed some of the melodies on Metamatic as well as European melodies that I’d heard when I was hitchhiking when I was very young. You’d stop and have a cup of coffee in a bar and you’d hear this strange music from the jukebox and it was always this minor melody French or German schlager music, or some odd stuff sounding like The Shadows, but European. That’s the kind of music I really picked up on and remembered and tried to reproduce in ‘Metamatic’, but the memory of it rather than the actuality. So, it was a kind of European motorway music that I was trying to make. But at the same time, America is undeniably a big influence because that’s where Hollywood is established.”

Were ‘Touch and Go’ and ‘A Blurred Girl’ from ‘Metamatic’ written with the other members of Ultravox?

JF: “No, I did write the songs. The way it worked with the band was I wrote the songs, usually on a guitar and I’d write the basic chords and the melody and have a rough idea of some of the parts. Then I’d go in and whistle the tunes to everybody, and then we’d work on them and people would put things into them, and we’d rearrange things between us and see how it worked. If you had a good drum beat, that would change the songs slightly. Gradually these things would make a shape that satisfied everybody. So, I wrote the basic stuff. So I’d already started those songs; we’d attempted them, we’d rehearsed them.”

It’d always been a bit of a mystery to me because on the ‘Vienna’ album – the first Ultravox album without you – there’s ‘Mr X’ which is very similar to ‘Touch and Go’.

JF: “Well, Billie contributed to those melodies and some of that was his style, some of that was mine, so it’s a mix of things.”

I saw you and Louis Gordon supporting The Human League in 2003 at the Dome in Brighton. Phil Oakey seems a big fan of ‘Metamatic’ and your more recent work. He said you’re the best support act he has ever had. Do you mind that ‘Metamatic’ is the album most people still associate with you?

JF: “No, not really. At least there is one! I think the important thing is, if you’re an artist of any kind, to make something that people do remember. The fact that it might not always necessarily be the best one or the most interesting one almost doesn’t matter. Actually, I don’t have a problem with ‘Metamatic’s’ popularity because I like that album.”

But do you have a favourite album which you’ve written?

JF: “No, I don’t have a favourite one. There are bits of each album which I still listen to and I can still think, ‘Oh, that’s interesting,’ and it surprises me to hear it. So, those things are dotted all around. But with regard to ‘Metamatic’, I’m quite happy with that album. It was a very ruthless album. I just decided it was going to be two synths and a drum machine and that’s it.”

In electro-pop circles it’s a revered album.

JF: “I don’t know, but if so, I’m glad it is. That’s about all I can say about it really. It was just a decision to make something in a very ruthless basis and kick out everything I knew about making songs and to substitute machines for that and see what happens.”

It’s rather Germanic electronica; the sound is really stripped bare.

JF: “Yeah, yeah. It was a bit scary to do because I do remember after listening to it, thinking I may have gone too far.”

You’ve made three albums with Louis Gordon and a fourth is out in August. Has it got a title yet?

JF: “It’s called ‘Impossible.’”

That partnership with Louis seems very productive and your work together seems to be greeted with great enthusiasm by fans. Will you continue to follow the techno-hard electronic theme from ‘Crash and Burn’ with him?

JF: “Yes, I think so because I think that’s what he does best. Actually, that’s not quite true because Louis does lots of things very well and he’s as found of ambient as I am. But when we work together it tends it tends to get like this; well, what we call it is ‘electron-rock’ because it’s not dance music and it’s not particularly techno – it’s a sort of electronic-rock that we make.”

Although ‘Sex Video’ from ‘Crash and Burn’ is probably the closest to techno that you and Louis get.

JF: “Yeah, so there are visible edges of all that in and we’re happy that that’s the case because that’s what we are. Louis’s just great to work with because we don’t talk much. We just sort of do things and they work out. You have to know where someone comes from and you have to have a mutual understanding of what you’re about to be able to do that. Indeed, that’s very valuable. We can both go into a studio and three weeks later we have an album and we’ve hardly spoken apart from afterwards.”

Is the album finished?

JF: “Yeah, it’s just a matter of editing it down.”

Who is Louis Gordon because I can’t find any information on him?

JF: “He’s a Manchester electronic wiz, really. He’s a sort of punk electronic genius. He was around in Manchester since the 1990s. He was part of that whole Manchester thing around Sankeys which is a sort of derelict industrial zone. There was a guy called Crom who used to have a studio there and a guy called Roger who works with New Order. There was a whole group of musicians around there and Louis has always been around that area, but never really consolidated anything, but he didn’t care as long he was making music, he didn’t care what he did. He’s had records out on Transmat, the Detroit label, but no-one’s pieced together what’s he’s done. He’s been around a lot.”

I did try and track him.

JF: “It’s not possible because he’s done it under lots of different names. There was a band called Digital Justice. They used to make names up all the time. So, there’s a whole Manchester-techno and Detroit-techno area and it’s almost impossible to understand! In Manchester we used to listen to these records by a band called Le Car, who has now become ADULT. We discovered that it was a whole label and the whole scene out in Detroit, Chicago, New York and Toronto to a certain extent, that likes that kind of very electronic music. So, there are all kinds of strange links. I remember just beginning to get a picture of them, of all these connections. So, Louis’s part of all that. I met him when a friend of mine said, ‘You’ve got to come and see this guy play because he’s really good.’ Louis was playing in Shropshire in a country house.”

Was this a private party?

JF: “Yeah. It was a sort of squatters’ country house, a derelict place in which people had set a commune up. It was very tatty. We went in and I just remember this room full of lights and smoke and huge noise. When the lights cleared, it was Louis! He was playing by himself with this drum machine, guitar, and a very old synthesizer. He played for about five hours straight and it all sounded wonderful. It was dead simple, but really effective.”

What sort of stuff was he playing at that time?

JF: “It was dance music because he kept a beat going all the way through so people could dance to it – that was the function. But during it, he played acoustic guitar, electric guitar, plus synthesizers and sequencers and arpeggios and all kinds of very straightforward stuff, but it all worked and that was the impressive thing about it. He didn’t put a foot wrong in four hours which is pretty hard to do.”

Were you watching him the whole time?!

JF: “Yeah, I was just thinking, ‘This is brilliant,’ and I just wanted to watch because it was so good. I don’t know who was most exhausted by the end of it, him or us! It was a great experience. Then I got talking to him afterwards and it turned out that ‘Metamatic’ was one of the first records he’d bought and he liked it a lot. So we decided to do some work together. We went to Manchester and got in Crom’s studio and did some recording. We did two tracks and they worked out right away so we decided to make an album.”

Bizarre question for you: do you still own a 6-foot Yamaha concert grand piano?

JF: “No, I had one in the studio once. I wish I still owned it. It had to stay with the studio, The Garden, in London. I hated leaving it, but it was too big to take away.”

Do you still have a family in Chorley, Lancashire?

JF: “Yeah, yeah. It’s a big family. There are lots of cousins. My mother had seven brothers. Very biblical, isn’t it?!”

Are you a Catholic?

JF: “No. My father’s side of the family is. My mother’s side, which I’m closer to, is Protestant. They all have lots of kids, so there are lots of us.”

You and Louis are on tour next month. You’ve stated elsewhere that Louis has been the one who likes to tour while you’ve been more reluctant. Was that the case this time round?

JF: “Oh yes, always the case! Louis loves it. He loves being on stage, loves playing, loves everything to do with that. Louis loves every aspect of the whole thing, so he’s great to have around. He takes the impetus off me, so I sort of just watch it all happen.”

Are you not happy when you’re on stage? Are you okay when you’re up there?!

JF: “Oh, I’m okay when I’m up there. I’m alright when it’s all going on. When we play, that’s all right. But it’s the rest of the time – the other 23 or 22 hours that irritate me because I want to be doing more than just sitting in some kind of vehicle travelling somewhere.”

Do you always need to be doing something because that’s the impression I get?

JF: “Yeah. I’m not neurotic about it or anything, it’s just that what I like doing is taking a walk in London and just watch what’s happening around me or daydreaming. I think London is a very good instrument for daydreaming.”

Do you daydream a lot?

JF: “Yes, I think it’s great. I figured out that you can make some kind of sense of it because it’s something to do with when you come to a city like London, and you don’t know it, you have to go with associations before it feels comfortable. It’s a blank and you walk around and you feel completely alienated, and then gradually as you walk down the same street five or six times, you begin to get to know things; you begin to make some friends, you go out to familiar places. So, what you’ve done, you’ve sort of programmed yourself and your memory by walking through these places. And, every time you do it, you build up another layer of association so it makes the whole thing richer. So, the more you walk around those streets, the more it becomes a part of you and you become part of it. Gradually, you become comfortable in it by literally programming yourself with the city and I think that’s something to do with what happens. When you walk around the city you’re picking up accidents and associations; you know, there’s a bit of memory of someone who looks like someone else, and you pass a familiar place that’s shut down and maybe been replaced by another restaurant, or it might have been a club years ago which is my experience of walking down Wardour Street and seeing where the Marquee was which is now a Conran-owned restaurant. So, with all those kinds of changes, you realise that you’re part of a living organism, you know, I think cities are. As part of it, we’re a cell in that organism, so you gradually programme yourself with it and that’s what daydreaming is. It’s not really daydreaming; it’s sort of acknowledging all the randomness and richness of it and using that to make a mythology of your own which you can use in various ways. My mum and dad took me around London when I was about seven and the memories of that really stayed with me. When I walk in certain places I can see certain shop fronts that I know were there when I was a child so it brings a lot of associations.”

Are you familiar with Ian Sinclair’s take on London because what you say reminds me of his work?

JF: “Yes, it’s the same sort of thing. It’s interesting to read what he’s written about London. I haven’t read the whole book, ‘London Orbital’, and I’ve only read bits of it. It’s one of those books I’ve got on my bookshelves to read and I’ve dipped into it and it’s very interesting. I’m anxious to read it and I’ve got some time to do that. But, yeah, it’s right, there is a lot of writing to do about this city yet. I remember about fifteen years ago an author saying that London hadn’t been made into a myth land yet; writers hadn’t really made it into a myth land as they had with New York or Los Angeles – you know, you had Raymond Chandler; it had also been done for Paris but no one had done it for London. Then along came Peter Ackroyd who did ‘Hawksmoore’which, effectively, began the same process for London. People like Ian Sinclair are doing the same thing, but with modern associations as well, so it’s great to see that happening because this is a city which is actually very rich and deep and not many people have got into it yet. Ackroyd has to some extent; Sinclair has done the modern work.”

Would you consider writing an instrumental piece for the City of London?

JF: “Yeah, I’d like to. That might come.”

You’ve played a range of older Ultravox and John Foxx material in your live sets with Louis. Is there any other material from the past that you might revisit in this tour which we haven’t heard yet?

JF: “Oh yes. We’ve just being doing ‘Slow Motion’ and ‘The Man Who Dies Everyday’ and maybe a couple of others will be in this new set. Louis likes those a lot anyway. He’s the one who wants all that lot, so I just go along with it!”

You seem to be very popular with music journalists and musicians working in the genre of electro-pop. For example, Dave Clarke cites you as a major influence. You’ve been approached by several figures in dance music to do various projects, for example, Lee Norris and the single ‘Free Robot’. Can you tell me something about that particular project?

JF: “Well, Lee’s a great guy. He’s a very enthusiastic character and a very capable musician with a lot of strong ideas which I think are really interesting. He said let’s do a mix of that and so I said, ‘Okay, let’s swap some tracks and see what comes out of that’ – and that’s what we did. I hadn’t really done that before. I’d worked in the dance genre in the beginning of acid house when I did Nation 12 with Bomb the Bass’s Tim Simenon – the ‘lost’ album.”

I thought the Nation 12 album’s been released.

JF: “Yeah, it’s just out, but that album never got finished so it’s like a snapshot of an album in progress. It’s not the finished article, but it’s interesting to listen to. So going back to what I was saying earlier, I’d worked with those kinds of people but things have really moved on a lot since then and people like Lee have come in. I think the Nation 12 thing is interesting because it was when things hadn’t gelled. You had a lot of DJs who were trying to shoe-horn into what they did and it didn’t always work. Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn’t. It was a very interesting exercise to try and shoe-horn things together and it gelled a couple of times, and a couple of times it didn’t. By the time we came along, he’d grown up with that stuff, with my stuff and grown up with all the dance genres too. So, it was easy for him to put the two together and make it work and I found that fascinating because mixing genres is always very risky and, sometimes, very difficult unless you can do it in an instinctive way, and that’s what he managed to do.”

What are your projects for 2007/2008?

JF: “Well, there’s a thing with cutting up movies which I’m going to do. I’ve realised that you can cut up video in the same way that you can cut up music and, as we know, a whole musical form came out of sampling, a revolution in dance music in itself. Now you can do the same with video, so everything’s up for, what I call, ‘repurposing’ – that’s my self-invented term for it.”

Repurposing?

JF: “Repurposing. It’s another word for theft, really!”

Or homage?!

JF: “Yes, yes, homage, collage, you name it, but the newer term is repurposing. So, I think repurposing will be the theme of the next generation of film and what will happen is that people will appropriate film and repurpose it according to their own wants. So, in other words, you could take several movies, chop them together and make a new narrative and use them live on stage with music which is partly what I intend to do. I’ve already made a short film which is about thirty minutes and it’s called ‘Man Made of Shadows’ and it’s a cut-up of several different movies with a voice-over that makes another narrative for all those moments in the film. I think they’ll be a lot more of that. So, I think music and video will get much more integrated. People are already beginning to do VJing which is the same thing and video mash-ups which is another interesting manifestation of the same idea. I think it’ll get more serious and interesting. Also, the other interesting thing is virals which are those short movies which people fire at each other through the internet. Virals are 30-second or less movies. Some of them are moments of violence or pornography or other fascinating things that they like to fire at each other during the day. It’s developing into a whole little world of virals, everything from the very nasty and slap-happy sort of video (which I detest), but they do point to a new use of video and film.”

So you’re going to explore this area?

JF: “Yeah, but I’m not going to go around slapping people, but I have begun to design 30-second video squirts that you can fire around and I think that’s completely fascinating. There’s a whole mythology around who shoots these things and why. I’ve detected one or two serious presences there who are actually making imitation movies – agencies make these things to do advertising and there a few who are the equivalent of Banksy who are in there making videos that are like Banksy videos and firing them around which are imitations of the imitations. So, there’s a whole world, a whole subculture which will emerge quite strongly. What it means is that those people who are getting good film-making skills, and they’re subverting another medium which is always a good start in life, they’ll produce something very interesting, just as Banksy’s emerging as a serious artist because he is a serious artist.”

OK, so there are all of those projects. Will there be another album with Louis Gordon?

JF: “Oh yes, I’ll continue to work with Louis. I’ve just begun to work on some stuff with Harold Budd. There’s some stuff with Robin Guthrie out of the Cocteau Twins. We’ve just finished an album. There’s an album with two of the people I worked with on that concert that I did with Harold in Brighton, one of them is Steve Jansen from the band Japan. Steve is a seriously good percussionist and drummer, very inventive guy, one of the best which came out of British rock. It’s been great working with him. We worked on some gong percussion things which sound unlikely until I saw him performing one of the pieces, and he made this beautiful improvisation with a gong – it’s a great piece of music and the frequencies which are available from that kind of instrument are phenomenal; really deep gut-wrenching bass that came out of that.”

So what are you are Steve Jansen doing together?

JF: “We’ve recorded a lot of sounds that Steve made using different kinds of percussion, different kinds of gong and I’m going to work with them because I can sing to them because they’re all pitched. I know I can sing to these sounds because I tried it as he was playing and I know it’ll work. So, what I’ve got to do now is put a voice to it and also some very minimal instrumentation, very minimal because I want what he’s doing do be the focus of it.”

Will there be a fourth ‘Cathedral Oceans’?

JF: “No, that might be it for ‘Cathedral Oceans’. Three albums just about covers what I wanted to do with it. We’ve just done a surround sound version of the last one and a DVD with visuals.”

Haven’t you done some exhibition work connected with Cathedral Oceans?

JF: “Yes, I’m going to continue to do that too because I’ve finally got it into the shape that I wanted it to be in. I’m also going to start doing performances with it.”

Performances where?

JF: “In public spaces. I think we’re going to do one at the ICA next March. What’s going to happen is that we’re going to project ‘Cathedral Oceans’ on a couple of screens if possible, so that different images will be playing at different times and we’ll loop the whole thing so it just keeps on moving with one soundtrack – so that will be working on automatic. Then in the evening they’ll be a performance where I’m going to work with the French film ‘Last Year at Marienbad’. I love that film. It’s an interesting film because it coincides with a lot of things I’d like to do musically. We’ll see whether it works or not. I think I’ll do that at that ICA show.”

Has anyone else approached you from the dance music scene for a project?

JF: “A lot of people want to do some work. I did some stuff with Jori Hulkkonen and that worked out really well. I enjoyed working with him. I’m not that knowledgeable about that area. The thing I’m most familiar with is what we’re going to do in America which is work with that group of bands which are a sort of modern dance electronic; it’s not really dance, it’s an electronic scene that does the same thing as we would do, which is a kind of mutated electron-rock, and oddly enough, there’s a great deal of common understanding. So, we’re going to do some work together this September. I’m also going to do some tracks and see how they work out with Vincent Gallo (as in the film ‘Buffalo 66’).”

From the mid-1980s you had a period where you disappeared off the music scene for quite a while and now, since you’ve been back, you haven’t stopped.

JF: “Yes, I don’t know why that is particularly. I think things have changed. Now it’s a lot broader, isn’t it? There’s a whole scene in the arts and music.”

Pop music wasn’t in a great way in 1985 at the time you left.

JF: No, no, that’s one of the reasons I went away. I thought I’d rather do something visual.”

Where did you go?

JF: “I went to Italy for a while and enjoyed myself because it’s a great country. I went to Rome to work on a Antonioni film, ‘Identification of a Woman’ in 1983 which is a very haphazard existence, but very interesting. It was a great experience. Also Rome was great.”

I’m surprised you haven’t done more film music because what you write is so suited to that medium. Obviously you are applying music to film, but not commercial film.

JF: “I think a lot of commercial cinema is a very locked form and doesn’t allow much new stuff into it, but I think it will change; things are beginning to open up. So, I think what Vincent [Gallo] wants to do is do something which might work with film, although we don’t know yet; it’s very non-specific what we’re going to do. We want to keep it that way and I like him as a film director because I like ‘Buffalo 66’ a lot. It’s a great film. I like that sort of film making attitude. I think more of that will happen.”

You mean guerrilla film making?

JF: “Yes, exactly. It’s a very interesting way to work and working outside of Hollywood is interesting, but working inside of Hollywood would be interesting too.”

Would you ever contemplate touring America with Louis?

JF: “Yes, we’re going to do that. We’re going to do some gigs in America in November. As far as I know, we’re playing in New York, Detroit, Chicago, Toronto, maybe a couple of other places around there. My music seems to work either in the rustbelt or high-techno places! Detroit’s a bit both; it’s like Manchester with machine guns!”

John Foxx’s new album ‘Tiny Colour Movies’ is out August 7th on Metamatic. Ultravox’s first three albums, remastered and expanded, are out now.