Q&A
What turn you into music in the first place? Which were the first records you bought?
My grandfather was passionate about Jazz and Blues and he passed his enthusiasm for American music onto me. My antennae started flapping in 1962, when I was nine (b.1953): I loved Del Shannon and the Everly Brothers, and then of course was totally taken over by the Beatles and British Beat in 1963. The first record I ever bought I think must have been “Little Town Flirt” by Del Shannon. I was given all the Beatles’ albums in the mid-sixties. The first album I bought for myself was the Byrds’ Greatest Hits in 1967.
Do you still buy records? If so, which was the latest one you brought?
I still get sent promotional CDs but I buy a lot of old sixties/ seventies vinyl. The last few ones I bought were: the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band Volume III, Robbie Basho “Songs from a Stallion”, a bootleg of Neil Young and Crazy Horse in March 1970. The last CD I bought was secondhand, Phil Manzanera’s “Diamond Head”, for Eno’s fantastic “Miss Shapiro”. Before then, the new A Guy Called Gerald: “To All Things What They Need” and three or four albums by Six Organs of Admittance.
Are you into this “new” post-punk revival of bands like Radio 4, LCD Soundsystem, Block Party, etc?
In theory. In practice when I hear them my mind wanders, then I go and pick up the Josef K’s ‘Only Fun In Town’ CD or Orange Juice’s “You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever”. The problem for me with rock is that while it remains so retro, I’ve heard these new bands’ sources first hand so I can’t summon up the requisite naiveté to fully enjoy them. I’m 51, not 21.
You have a very different background (law degree from Cambridge) from that of the other major punk scenesters. Did this enable you to have a unique view over the punk movement?
It gave me perspective: the long view. I got punk on an emotional and visceral level within 10 seconds of seeing the Clash for the first time, but the education helped later in making me see that this was important and how it was important. Sitting on the stairs at the Roxy Club, I realised that I was witnessing something historical. It also helped me to write and structure a very long book. But the emotion is the vital element: people tend to assume that if you have a brain you don’t have any emotions. Well, obviously, not so.
A point of information: My degree was in classics (Latin and Greek and Ancient History). My law qualification was post-graduate, professional entry. Before I went to Cambridge, I had eighteen years of living in pop-saturated West London. So I was a pop fan before I was a graduate, and unlike others, I did not think that this was a part of childhood to be left behind.
You have compiled ‘Meridian 1970′, an overview of off-the-radar singer-songwriters and lost songs from the early 1970′s. Comparatively, the songs chosen for this project were more unexpected than those for the “England’s Dreaming”. Was this your way to re-analyse the early 1970′s as interesting time in rock music?
It was more an emotional time trip to remember what I had actually liked when I was 16/17 in 1970. It began with some friends of mine of about the same age, who had also been through punk. We were laughing about the fact that, if you were to believe the later punk propaganda, we should have been listening exclusively to the Stooges and the MC5 then. We weren’t. Although I liked the VU and Nico (The Marble Index in particular) in 1970, I was also listening to West Coast rock, British folk rock and the rather more outré singer songwriter material you can hear on Meridian 1970. Over 80% of the choices were actual favourites of mine 35 years ago: the others were in because they fitted the mood.
Plus it’s so stupid to think that just because I liked Punk I couldn’t like Leo Kottke. Like many others, I was a wannabe hippie before I was a Punk. What irritates me now is how for so many people Punk has become this fundamentalist, unchanging style just like the Teddy Boys in 1977.
If you were to compile a time-capsule CD (like ‘Meridian 1970′ or England’s Dreaming) for 2005, what band would be on it? Would it be very different from the one you did for Trikont last year?
Do you mean a compilation of 2005 music? If that’s the case, not much, apart from electronic music. However I plan to do another CD with Trikont about weird and forgotten gay and queer (in the widest sense) records from the early sixties’ onwards – like the Tornados’ “Do You Come Here Often?” or the Brothers Butch, “Kay Why”. And I’m going to do another comp with Heavenly, to be discussed.
How did you end up doing “England’s Dreaming” compilation for a German label, and why was it named the same as the book?
I was asked to do it. It was named the same as the book so as to help sell the book. I wanted to do it because I actually love the music. It was like putting the discography of England’s Dreaming onto CD, which I’d always wanted to do.
You‚ve also created a virtual compilation tape for Mojo January 2004 issue which is a sort of complement to your Post Punk 01 Rough Trade one. Which are the may differences between both, apart the fact that one them is virtual?
I didn’t actually put together the Rough Trade one. The Mojo comp does exist on CD (and I can copy you one) and it’s better. But you can never get the ideal compilation because of licensing restrictions, etc. That’s the way that the music industry is killing itself, when you have to pay a lawyer £250 just to look something up in a file. That’s why people burn their own CD-R’s and download MP3’s. The technology has outstripped the ability of the music industry to control it: as always happens.
Plus, as I said earlier, I’m just not convinced by the new post punk retro acts, at least to put them next to records that did mean a lot to me – like Public Image’s “Home is Where The Heart Is”.
How do you choose the bands/songs for a particular compilation?
By what I like. Then by what you can get. So you start out with you’re a list and have as many again in reserve for when you can’t get what you first want (…) the Sex Pistols: John Lydon did not want to give us anything. I wasn’t upset about this, because everyone’s heard the Sex Pistols already. So we chose the Bizarros and Devo and Metal Urbain instead, and it still plays great. That’s the main criterion: do you play it yourself? I love playing the ED CD in the car, it’s just fabulous. I make CDR’s all the time anyway, by theme or by year.
Since you’ve organized a few compilations, many of them around punk and post punk, do you think it will get to a point where it will become redundant to do such compilations?
No, because now there is so much music available that people need a guide through it all. The pop economy is so different from how it was in the late seventies. Then records were deleted and out of stock: you had to work to discover things, do your research. Now almost everything is available, thanks to the CD representing such a good return for record companies. Old music at current prices = a good result for them. But Pop has a history now whether anyone likes it or not, and there are still many forgotten gems out there.
To you what is the allure of the punk and post punk periods? What makes those two periods to really stand out?
Experimentation, Freedom, Independence, Do-It-Yourself, Mutant Psychedelia, Lack of corporate involvement, no Nike sponsorship, energy unleashed.
Now that everything is so predetermined, people look back to the late 70’s and can’t believe how pop fans could create their own economy to the extent that they did. You can hear that self-determination in the music. It was the last great period before total mediation and total recuperation: the society of the spectacle has occurred. When I was 22, the vision of David Bowie in “The Man Who Fell to Earth” sitting in front of a wall of TV screens seemed so exciting: now that we have all those TV channels, isn’t it a fucking bore?
Which are your all time punk and post punk favourite 7″ and albums?
The Ramones first album. The Saints first album. The first four Sex Pistols singles and b-sides. All the tracks on the England’s Dreaming CD, which means that I like West Coast punk a lot. The Sleepers. Wire. Subway Sect. All the tracks on the Mojo post punk CD. The Joy Division “Heart and Soul” boxed set that I assembled in 1997. The reissues that I’ve been playing recently are The Prefects “Are Amateur Wankers”: mandatory for anyone interested in post punk, and Josef K “The Only Fun In Town”.
Regarding “England’s Dreaming” the time periods the book deals with were in social and political terms anything but a dream to (in) England. Was culturally and musically England really dreaming by then?
Yes, because England was still dreaming about the fact that it had won the war. The Silver Jubilee was an attempt to revive the dream of empire. It was such a blatant lie and so nostalgic that it seemed to us almost fascist.
If England was by then dreaming what happened to the dream?
It had turned into a nightmare, and we were the people who exemplified that nightmare. That was the point. That’s why everyone hated the punks: one on very important level, they were telling the truth. That England was fucked. The problem with the country now is that it still is in thrall to the idea that it is a world power: hence the disastrous involvement with Bush’s Middle East crusade. This would never have happened if England wasn’t in hock to America both economically and spiritually. As far as I’m concerned, England should be closer to Europe. Plus I should say that I don’t actually live in England anymore: I live in Wales, which is very different.
To an outsider, modern England seams to be an economically strong country, with a powerful music, but no really so interesting, music industry. How do your perceive English music popular right now?
Rather dull. Kaiser Chiefs = Britpop revivalists. Blur were shit the first time around, so what does that say about a xerox of Blur? I want music that sounds as though it could have been made in no other year but 2005. So that means electronic music, for the most part. But the focus has moved back to guitar groups, and nobody has done anything really new in that field since Nirvana or My Bloody Valentine in 1991. The problem is that there is no underground, because the media gets in there far too quickly.
And as for the press? The NME seams to be but a shade of what is was in the past, MM is dead, and magazines like Mojo are quite good but don’t really take many risks.
Well that’s a symptom of the above. I can’t disagree, but I would say that this unadventurousness goes right through the mainstream media – you know, all the usual symptoms, the PR agenda, the journalist thinking he or she is more important than the subject.
Are you involved in anyway in the movie adaptation of “Touching From a Distance” What are your feelings concerning this project and what do you think of Anton Corbijn directing it?
I’m not involved. I know Deborah Curtis and so I wish the project well. I may be involved with a TV documentary about Joy Division but that is in negotiation.
What is the book you are currently writing about?
Youth in the first Mass Age, 1895-1945.