Paris 2727

The catalogue for the street art and literature project Mythiq27 is published this week in France.
Curated and edited by Jann Suty, Mythiq27 is about the legendary "club" of artists who died aged 27: Dave Alexander, Jean-michel Basquiat, Chris Bell, D.Boon, Arlester Dyke Christian, Kurt Cobain, Peter de Freitas, Richey James Edwards, John Garrighan, Peter Ham, Les Harvey, Jimi Hendrix, Robert Johnson, Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, Rudy Lewis, Ron "Pigpen" Mckernan, Jacob Miller, Damien Morris, Jim Morrison, Kristen Pfaff, Gary Thain, Jeremy Michael Ward, Denis Wielemans, Alan Wilson, Amy Winehouse and Mia Zapata.

Suty invited 27 authors to each write 27 lines about one of the members. The collected texts would be exhibited alongside commissioned works from 27 street artists and published in a book.

I was asked to write about Kurt Cobain. Not being a poet I was curious about the idea of writing to a 27-line word limit. Moreover I was excited that the artist chosen to illustrate my piece was Invader, whose work I'd seen in London and Paris. Above is his Kurt Cobain piece, in his trademark coloured tile-style.

The full list of authors in order of subject is: Paul Vacca, Oliver Rohe, Arnaud Viviant, Philippe Routier, Marc Durin-Valois, Chad Taylor, Émilie de Turckheim, Yann Suty, Solange Bied-Charreton, Marc Villemain, Claro, Sorj Chalandon, David Fauquemberg, Laurent Binet, Jean-Michel Guenassia, Jean-Philippe Blondel, Harold Cobert, Grégoire delacourt, Laird hunt, Paulverhaeghen, Brian Evenson, Elsa Flageul, Fabrice Colin, Aude Walker, RJ Ellory, Alexis Jenni and Manuel Candré.

The street artists -- again, in corresponding order -- are: Sfief Desmet, Orticanoodles / Bernard Pras / Frank Fischer, Sp 38, Jonone / yz, Sd karoe / Charlotte Charbonnel, lnvader / Rero, Oudhout, Samuel Coisne / Yves Ullens, Seize Happywallmaker / Wen-Jié Yang, David Gouny / Antoine Gamard, Denis Meyers / Mademoiselle Maurice, Osch / lnvader/ Maykel Lima, Sd karoe / Shaka, Autoreverse / Nina Mae Fowler, Frank Fischer / Moolinex, Niark 1, Beb-Deum / kashink, Yoh Nagao / Graphic Surgery, Antoine Gamard / DHM, lnvader / Rero / Blek le Rat, Maykel Lima / Seize Happywallmaker, Ludo, Lana and Js, Oli-B, C 215 - Christian Guemy, Graphic Surgery / Johnnychrist and Mademoiselle Maurice / Lim Si Ping.

There's more information on Mythiq27 on Facebook and you can download a PDF of the press release. The Twitter feed for the publication and exhibition is @Mythiq27. If you do find yourself in Paris, the exhibition is at Espace Cardin in December. Big ups to Jann Suty for putting it all together.

Urban Mama: Neneh Cherry

One more thing. Neneh Cherry had broken big by scratching Malcolm McLaren's 'Buffalo Girls' for the single 'Buffalo Stance'. In 1989 she released her debut solo LP, Raw Like Sushi. 

In the background to this Rip It Up interview was the discussion about what sampling and sequencing was going to mean for "real" musicians. Such debate seems quaint nowadays but it was a major topic for artists and fans at the time. There was a lot of fear about the new technology and its implications for copyright and creativity.

Likewise my precious questions re: dance vs mainstream and UK vs US styles, the distinctions between which have all but disappeared. (Cherry was speaking from New York.) But would a modern musician with a top ten single name-drop Fripp and Eno? Some things were better then. 

By happy coincidence I had just done a phoner with Malcolm McLaren and he'd given me my opening line.

Well, Neneh Cherry, Malcolm McLaren says you're just doing what he did, but with a pretty face.

"Ha! Someone said to me, 'I'm so glad that you could go and rip Malcolm McLaren off because he's been ripping everyone else off for so long. It wasn't ripping him off, of course, but I thought that was so funny. It was so obvious -- 'Buffalo Stance', 'Buffalo Girls' -- y'know."

Neneh Cherry is a child of the modern dance: an intelligent talker, a muscled mover. You might recall her as part of Rip Rig And Panic who were making a lot of noise as dance was breaking into the mainstream. Black grooves were fusing with white technology, Kraftwerk were bumping into Afrika Bambaataa. Now it's crossed over, it's hard to know where anything stands.

"I think that we're all for more aware at what went down in the last 20 years than people were 20 years ago when they looked back. That's the availability of communication that you've got now -- you can sit down and watch Woodstock on TV. We're far more open in a way, and that's why music is becoming more open. You listen to the De La Soul album and sure, it's basically hip-hop, but you can hear more -- soul, 70s songs, Walt Disney."

People wax lyrical about the artistic virtues of naiveté. Do you think it's harder to find that sort of naiveté in popular music now?

"The best things that are coming out are really naive, still, because people are capable of breaking the rules. As for as I'm concerned, people have an awareness, and that's good, but they also feel they can do something themselves. They know about all these old songs, and they use them, they're playing around with them. It's great when you're in the studio; you can find a song that matches what you're doing, and make a break out of it, a drum roll, or loop it into a track. It's like a giant puzzle. And to me, creatively, that is really exciting."

I remember an old Rip Rig and Panic interview when you were slagging anyone who had anything to do with drum machines or synthesisers. Yet now you work with very little else.

"I found what happened to people when synthesisers and drum machines first came out was very embarrassing. People stopped playing the machines, and the machines played the people. Now people are actually playing them -- playing them -- so they're like new instruments rather than computers. People are taking them for less seriously now than they did a few years ago.

"Kraftwerk have done some great music, so have Fripp and Eno -- they were the start of that sound. And then guys like Teddy Riley came along, making synths sound jazzy, or whatever. Those people did what they did with a certain kind of passion. But the ones who followed in their footsteps lost it.

"So I know why I said what I said when I said that. A lot of barriers have been broken down since then. One thing that machines have done is to give people who may not have any formal, technical ability, a way of making music. Now they can throw the manual away once they've learned how to operate the instrument.

"It's great because the kids that are buying records can also sit down now and make records. That's why the energy now on the dance scene is very similar to the energy that was on the punk scene. The people that are young are making sounds, and there's a hell of a lot of difference between that and a bunch of over-bred session players making music which they think people want to hear."

Neneh's mother is a Swedish artist. Her stepfather was avant-garde trumpet man Don Cherry. (You might have seen Don Cherry when he played in NZ with Charlie Haden and Ed Blackwell as Old And New Dreams. Charlie Grey toured them here in 1980.) As a musician she's hob-nobbed with some of the cooler individuals in pop: Rip Rig and Panic, Float Up CP, Phill Chill and Bomb The Bass's Mark Saunders and Tim Simenon.

Simenon produced 'Buffalo Stance', but his name only features once on the LP. How much of your sound and success relies on him?

"I don't think I could say that I've relied on anybody. We just like each other. He's cool to the music I like, which is the most important thing. Tim is easy, y'know; he likes the same ideas and we work together well. I feel really easy about the stuff that we do; I can go in and trust him. It wasn't really a question of him doing something for me -- we did 'Buffalo Stance' together, at the same time. We've got a similar attitude.

"Sometimes I know what I like but I don't know how to get what I like out of myself. Tim is one of those people who's really good at getting that. It's a nice balance.

"'Buffalo Stance' is the only track that he produced on this album. The track 'Manchild' and 'Heart', we didn't really know what to do with, so he came into the studio and finalised things. So that's a healthy exchange -- better than giving a song to someone who's completely insensitive to what you're doing, who then goes off and makes it into their thing."

How did you two meet?

"Just from around town. Whether you're in a city as big as London or a village, the longer you stay, the smaller it gets. I'm automatically drawn to a certain type of person, I'm always hunting for my people, you know? Tim's part of the family. I met him and I thought yeah, I know you, I know where you're coming from."

One of Bomb The Boss's maxims was a search for a dance sound that London could call its own.

"If we're talking dance music, a lot of the initial ideas come from America, but England's starting to make its own interpretation of that. They've been very dogmatic in their following of what's been happening here for a long time; now it's moving in a direction. You've got Bomb the Bass, Soul II Soul; they take their music from a lot of places and I guess we've got a lot ofthe same energy.

"But England's a good place to work. People will let you be, you're allowed to carry on with whatever it is you wanna do without being pressured."

Who else would you like to work with?

"There's a couple of people over here [in New York] that I'm starting to hook up with, like Red Alert, he's a DJ who does a hip-hop show on Kiss FM. He does things like Boogie Down Productions, the Jungle Brothers and De La Soul all those people, what they're doing now is very significant. They've made the hip-hop thing a great success in the States."

What's the difference for you between the UK and the US?

"It's pretty similar. Unfortunately Acid House is beginning to break here... Otherwise it's pretty close, especially between New York and London. When you go out in London you do hear a bigger variation of music, not just hip-hop. Here you hear more dance music -- mixes rather than tunes."

What do you think are the characteristics of English dance music?

"I think it is finding its feet. Soul II Soul is the biggest dance record in this country, you hear it everywhere. It's a traditional R'n'B formula together with that street sound, it's got that garage, slick feel -- it's killing people. Soul has followed hip-hop in the studio. The sound which we've all been raised with has been taken and made into something different. So England's standing in a really good place at the moment. Also, England has a reggae heritage, and you can feel it in the songs."

(1989)

Apple Crumble: Tama Janowitz

Last flashback: Tama Janowitz on the line from New York. Her collection Slaves of New York was published in 1986. The movie came out in 1989 and was generally panned, as was Janowitz's next book, A Cannibal in Manhattan, the subject of which she hints at towards the end of the interview. I don't know how critics rate Slaves of New York nowadays but you can find traces of its DNA in everything from Sex And The City to Girls.

She had the most wonderful voice. Think Janice in Friends.

New York, New York, city of dreams. Where the streets are paved with gold and the Velvet Underground were invented. Where King Kong climbed the Empire State and where the editor of Vanity Fair gets a $20,000 clothing allowance. Where Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe worked and died. Where Def Jam was born. Where the stars go for lunch. Where art dealers live like rock stars. How are things in New York, Tama?

"It's raining."

Wow! No kidding?

*

Tama Janowitz's Slaves of New York chronicles the city's urban sprawl in 22 short stories. It's her second publication (the first was the lauded but less sensational novel American Dad) and the subject and timing has captured the popular imagination. At its weakest the collection is a thin pastiche of Damon Runyon; at its best it's an amphetamine-paced chronicle of the art world that Robert Hughes loves to hate.

"I just went to New York and hung out and went home and wrote about it," Tama drawls. "I didn't see anybody else writing about this world. It was at a time when the art scene was like the rock n' roll scene. I didn't know anybody, but I could go to a gallery opening and someone would give me a glass of wine and somebody else would say, 'Do you like the paintings?' and 'There's a party on later tonight...' I mean I wasn't writing non-fiction, but I was trying to record some of the situations and problems that were occurring at that particular time and place.''

The stories first appeared in various publications, including the New Yorker. And one day Andy Warhol was leafing through a copy of the New Yorker and...

"Warhol first bought five of the stories from me to make into a movie, so I did a screenplay for him. After his death it turned out that Merchant lvory had been reading my work and they'd been interested in it for some time, so after Warhol's death they found out that my stories were available and they brought them from the [Warhol] Foundation."

Which is how the movie of Slaves Of New York came to be. Janowitz wrote the screenplay, Bernadette Peters played the central character / narrator Eleanor, and the film was produced by Ismail Merchant and directed by James Ivory.

Merchant and Ivory are the hard-nosed and starry-eyed guys who brought you Heat And Dust, Maurice and A Room With A View. They're the sort of films in which Julian Sands and Anthony Andrews ride bicycles around English colonial settlements and Helena Bonham-Carter frets over her virginity. Was Janowitz concerned that the makers of such films would miss the In Your Face style of modern New York?

"No. Merchant Ivory have been making films for 20 years, many of which have been set in social settings, and I thought in any event that if they could get down the Boston of Henry James and Edwardian England, then certainly that had to be more difficult than modern New York, which was standing right there in front of us. So I never had any qualms -- their work has always been about social mores and behaviour and rules at society and etiquette, and that was what I was interested in too."

On paper the Slaves Of New York are willing victims of the inner-city in-crowd, the Manhattan art-world madness that packs galleries and covers canvasses with some of history's most meagre scrawl. The art scene in New York has always been hyped but the 80s have seen it attain new levels of raging bullshit. Publicity-hungry painters like Jean Michel-Basquiat and Julian Schnabel make Madonna look like a hermit. The movie makes this point not without sympathy, but when it screened in New York the reaction was not good. The Emperor was naked, and in Cinemascope.

"They hated it," Janowitz says, her voice starting to whine. "They hated the whole thing. They said it was undermining the fabric of American society, and that Tri-Star was an evil company for making the film, and that Bernadette Peters was too old. Just one thing after the other. They went crazy.

"I don't think they liked New York being made fun of. They were angry that I got a lot of attention and they were angry that Merchant Ivory were doing something other than Henry James or E.M. Forster."

You'd think that New York could handle a media version of itself.

'They're like sharks here, they gang up on things. It was like the Ayatollah saying, 'Kill Salman Rushdie.'

"I'm not sure that the movie was sympathetic, or that the book was. To me, this is the way the city is. I don't think the people in it are all bad, or all good; I don't think they're all creative geniuses, or they're all hustling, ambitious people -- this is the way people are acting at this particular time at this particular place on the planet.'

New York definitely has its own folklore.

"Well, they come here from all over the place, from Holland and Germany and New Zealand, and they all think that they're gonna make it somehow. There are an awful lot of people here vying for attention -- and there are not many people willing to give any attention."

Which is something you capture -- the spectacle of intelligent people spending their lives trying to shout each other down.

"There are people living on the streets here -- I can't imagine Calcutta being much worse. These men are living in the park, sitting on lawn chairs with furniture, everything. People come from all over and they get stuck here, like on flypaper."

The premise of the title story is that apartments are so hard to get in the city that you end up being a slave to the leaseholder -- is that still the case?

"There are more apartments around now. Do you have a lot of apartments in New Zealand?"

Some. New Zealand's a place with not many people in it.

"That must be nice. My father wanted to emigrate there. You probably have good fishing."

Yes. Do you like fishing?

"No. But if I moved to New Zealand... I could take it up."

*

You had a cameo role in the film. Did you enjoy it?

"I didn't care for that too much. I couldn't remember my lines. It took me like three days to memorise them and it was agony. You have to say them over and over again and you have to get your face to make the same expression. But what the hell do you look like it you say 'Hi there, how are you?' I don't know how your face is meant to look to match that expression. I mean how do you look when you say something like 'Well I'm used to Roger cooking for me, would I have to cook for Bruce?' Am I smiling at that point or what? I dunno."

Playwriting, not prose, was Janowitz's main interest after leaving college. She is currently working on a new play for a Louisville theatre company ("Right now there are 12 players, but some may die") and reading the work of other playwrights to get ideas.

"I'm reading Joe Orton and some Pinter and Sam Shepherd and Beckett. And I like George Orwell and Nabokov and Saul Bellow. It depends on what style I need. I read Marquez for his style. I read a lot of true crime books. And I like to read News Of The World."

News Of The World -- that's the classy one, isn't it?

"It's a little different over here. It has a lot at stories about Siamese twins and women impregnated by aliens."

Is that a source of ideas?

"It makes you kind of ashamed, because if those things aren't true then somebody out there has a fantastic imagination. If they are true then all the better. If they are true, then why bother to write anything at all?"

(1989)

The Camp of Trying To Get It Together: Scritti Politti

Second-to-last article from the archives: Green Gartside, 1988, promoting Provision. After this Green dropped off the map for over a decade before reemerging with a flinty hip-hop album of varying quality, Anomie and Bonhomie in 1999 and then, finally, in 2006, White Bread, Black Beer, a digital bedsit Carl Wilson-tinged collection that at last reconciled the distance he had travelled from North London to New York and back again. It was the second stage of this musical journey which I inexpertly quizzed him about here. OCR'd from the original RIU interview with a lot of my dumb chatter cut out.

"I was disposed not to like pop songs for a while. When I first started out, nine years ago now, I was concerned, in a silly and juvenile way, to be different. I would have hated the kind of songs I play now if you'd played them to me then. I was concerned not to have things that sounded slick, not to have things in 4/4, not to have verse-chorus-bridge. I was concerned with not doing a lot of things, and that all started to look dead-endish to me. When I wrote Songs To Remember I was just coming out of that and had started writing songs; that album sort of has one foot in the camp of Amateurishness As Virtue and one foot on the camp of Trying To Get It Together."

Green Gartside reconciled with pop in 198l with 'The Sweetest Girl'. The bass and drums were milk and honey, and the lyrics struck a balance between sentimentalism and intellectualising. The B-side, 'Lions After Slumber', showed Green getting into a funky frame of mind. After the Songs To Remember LP he split with the other members and took the band name to New York to recruit two new musicians, pianist David Gamson and drummer Fred Maher. Their first single, 'Wood Beez; (Pray Like Aretha Franklin)', was a pumping piece of groovy and a dancefloor hit. Suddenly Scritti Politti had A Sound: focused, simplified, vodka-clear.

So what made Green get it together -- was it the work of Gamson and Maher?

"A lot of it was to do with the decisions made on my part, the aesthetic moves I'd made that pre-existed my meeting David and Fred. But one of the reasons that we worked so well on these last two albums is that we do have a lot in common. They came from the same sort of histories that I'd come from -- listening initially to pop, then to a lot more marginal rock musics and then R'n'B.

"I think that the Scritti Politti sound which people will be familiar with at the moment is a group sound. If I went off now and made a record with someone else, I don't know how much of it would go with me, or how much I'd want to take with me."

ln New York, the hip-hop scene was advancing hand in hand with new technology. Cupid + Psyche '85 used cut-up techniques and sampling, and Green admits a boyish fascination with the gadgets of dance.

"Musical technology, the advances that have been made in the last six years, that's been completely transformatory, what that's enabled me to do. You can get involved with the possibilities and present yourself with far choices than it's healthy to have. If that's a sin, then we're guilty of it! Once you realise that things can be manipulated in all these myriad ways by tiny increments, your head and ears quickly get into that.

"If Cupid + Psyche was an influential record -- and I'm told by a lot of musicians in America that it was -- it wouldn't have been for those reasons. We swiped the whole sampling thing from a lot of other places. It was our approach to arranging the material, on the one hand, which was popular, and we were quite concerned to push the technology we were using to its limits.

"A lot of the arranging ideas come from David Gamson, but we got a lot of it from groups like The System, and Solar Records, people like Shalamar and Leon Sylvers. I was gonna say it's all been done before (laughs), but that's not quite true; it's all been influenced."

Miles Davis plays trumpet on 'Oh Patti'. Others might regard that as a vindication.

"I hadn't thought of it like that. I was as surprised as anybody when Miles covered 'Perfect Way' and he let it be known through friends we have in common that he'd be interested in meeting up. After I'd written 'Oh Patti' it seemed that it would suit him and it would be nice to get him in.

"Were we interested in getting big names to glamourise our project we could have, for whatever reason -- it and still mystifies me a bit -- we could have got an awful lot of well-established Americans to appear on the record. But Roger Troutman and Miles were the only two people that we wanted.

"Miles is a little bit scary and little bit different, but once we got talking to him and met him on subsequent occasions we found him to be quite charming and very nice to us, and very supportive. He does have a very elliptical and peculiar way of going about things but he's not as crazy as people think by any means. He really is straight these days. He doesn't drink or do drugs or do anything else. He drinks his herbal tea and has his injections of lamb hormones or whatever. He's a regular guy."

Provision is also more of a regular album -- Cupid + Psyche '88 -- but what it lacks in innovation it makes up for in maturity. The most it has in common with the days of the Confidence EP and Songs To Remember are the puns and references. Green is the only lyricist cheeky enough to rhyme "Gaultier pants" with "Immanuelle Kant" but po-faced journalists fail to get the joke. I mean it is a joke, no?

"Oh, of course. I think the lyrics are always tongue-in-cheek. They're meant to be funny. It's not side-splitting humour but there's a lot put in there in the hope that it' ll be appreciated with a wry smile. Not enough people get the joke and realise that Scritti has to send itself up, having arrived at this faintly preposterous position. To be fair, I can get into all that after a few pints. If people want to lead me that way I'll be a bar room theorist with the best of them. But that's certainly not the whole story. I don't read interviews anymore. They're so painful -- they never get right or I never get it right. It never, ever comes out right.

Would Scritti ever leave the dance floor, especially now it's become so crowded?

"British pop has always been indebted to whatever version of R'n'B is current, from the Beatles to the Stones to the Bowies, and it will continue to be so. But you're right; there is a lot more black music in the charts at the moment. Hip-hop is very healthy; it looked a bit jaded about three years ago, for a short while, but it's coming back strong. That's the sort of thing we think about. We thought, should we make a hip-hop album and fairly promptly decided no, even though we all listen to a lot of it. Many hip-hop records are made fairly quickly, cheaply and nastily, and I like a lot of that.

"Having said that, I don't know what's next, and I could well imagine being lured elsewhere."

As well as Miles and Roger Troutman, you've worked with Chaka Khan and Arif Mardin.

"I don't feel proud. I don't ever feel particularly confident about myself or about what I do, and in a way working with people, moving up or across a couple of rungs doesn't exactly impart confidence to you. In a way it makes you a little more worried about your own worth.

"As much as one would be fairly frightened of failing, there's a certain kind of fear attached to the threat of success as well; being able to live up to it, or feel that it's honest or you're worth it. So it hasn't had that effect on me; perhaps if it did I'd be able to work a bit faster, or be a bit bolder."

Provision comes after a break of three years. Green says only two were spent in the studio ("on and off -- more on than off"). In the interim he gave away one song, 'Best Thing Ever', for Madonna to include on the Who's That Girl soundtrack.

"'Best Thing Ever' was recorded between albums, and everybody at Warner Brothers had a copy and Madonna heard it and we were asked if we would mind it being included and I didn't mind at all. I didn't go and see the movie and I've no idea what they did with it. I didn't feel proprietarily interested in its fate; it was just something that I'd done and it was gone and out of my hands.

"As soon as l've finished something I don't want to hear it again. All that I'm concerned with is that the album gets a fair hearing and I know that's an impossible wish but that's the most I could hope for. I'm thrilled with it now. That's all I can say. And I'm through with it now -- make of it what you will."

(1988)

An Opera Sandcastle: Dieter Meier

Conceptual artist, gambler and pop star Dieter Meier is one of my heroes so I was excited to get him on the line from his home in Switzerland when Yello were promoting Flag circa 1988/89. I wrote up a version of the interview for Rip It Up but this the full transcript. I've corrected some of the grammar, but he really did talk like that. 

I'm sure I asked more questions than this but chose to save precious time by not entering them into the RIU computron's floppy disc input panel. The faded dot-matrix printout has been sitting in a box since 1988 waiting for a time when I could photograph it with a pocket digital camera, transfer the images to a pencil-thin SSD laptop and upload them to a OCR translator to be shared online. But now that time has come.  

CT: Hi Dieter.

DIETER MEIER: Hey you sound very close! Ja, we have an incredibly good line. I am in the house and I was about to fall asleep.

CT: Have you had a busy day?

DM: Today? What did I do, well let's see ... we were discussing several things, we are planning a film in Poland , this is a little Yello opera which we are hopefully beginning in Breslau in a big old film studio, and we were getting closer to the beginning of this.

The film is a fantasy-type story, based on music which was written for it about a young man, a young musician who is kidnapped from planet Earth by the underground empire of the Duke of Shadows where he is used to create images of the world with his music. He plays an instrument down there, and playing this instrument creates real opera scenes inside a snowball. This is the title of the whole movie -- and this snowball is a huge opera set.

CT: Are you directing?

DM: Yeah, sure.

CT: It sounds like a very typical Yello idea.

DM: Ja ja, it has a lot to do with Yello. People call us film soundtrack makers and our music is very visual. This time we are fulfilling the visuals with the reality.

CT: Do you draw inspiration from films?

DM: No, I never go to the movies myself. It's more based on fantasies; it's not real movies, but movies for your head, movies of your imagination.

CT: Will you appear in the movie?

DM: Definitely! Boris [Blank] is playing a part, I'm playing a part and [so is] an English actor called Paul McGann. And a lot of Polish actors because the whole thing is basically a Polish production.

CT: Do you think of yourself as an actor rather than a singer?

DM: Ja, that's true, ja. I've said this before. I don't think I'm a typical rock star; as you said, I'm an actor in Boris's sound pictures for your head. I change my part for each song -- always the same actor but with a different part.

CT: The part has seen you travel the world musically.

DM: Yeah of course, but it's intentional to be very open and to use all kinds of musical subjects. It's not intentional to write an African or a south American piece. It's like two kids sitting at the beach, building a castle made of sand: an opera sandcastle -- a South American or African sand piece -- it's not an intentionally based on a technological piece of music. When there is a rhythm you land in certain territories, and not in others. Like Norwegian is not a rhythmical piece.

CT: And you have no fear of the studio.

DM: Ja that's of course all Boris who is responsible for this. I never touch any equipment and Boris touches it every day for ten hours. Our advantage probably is that, starting with little cassette recorders and later a four-track machine, we really grew with the jungle of technology. Boris is at ease with it: it's not an enemy you have to overrun, it's a friend with whom you are talking. I always said that for Boris, all this technology is nothing more and nothing less than a jungle of the 20th century. For him, the whole studio is one big instrument.

CT: Are you comfortable in the 20th century?

DM: Yeah, sure. Well, in classical music I think in the 20s and 30s -- people from the new school -- everything more or less stopped. And the other things that came out of this century after the 30s to me are either endlessly experimenting.

Of course it is very good to have music that experiments but it gets kind of boring, this sort of John Cage approach. It's a historical monument if you are destroying things, if you you are destroying a piano -- if you are fooling around with sounds, that's important -- but I think that nothing really came out of this after a while.

I think pop and rock -- I believe that till the early 60s apart from some examples, this was a very slow movement. Then rock and pop made this incredible step -- early Beatles and Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix -- [they were] just like an explosion, and now you see mainly the last little tiny glowing fires of this explosion. Now there is not much, for me, happening.

If you listen to the English charts for example, it's more and more producers squeezing the last drops of blood out of young musicians; young musicians who bleed for a producer's musical non-impact. It's a very dull moment right now. Of course, there are always exceptions, but basically I think most pop and rock music now is very epigonal.

CT: Yello is an exception.

DM: As I say, I think we were very lucky to grow with all the technology and then I think we were lucky not to come out of a country where the last drops of life have been squeezed out of the rock circus. We truly had to invent ourselves, invent something else. To be to become ourselves, because of course rock music has no tradition at all here [in Switzerland] -- if people and bands are moving in the traditional rock and pop direction they are to me like yodelling Japanese: technically very good, but they are doing something that is not their thing, their spirit, their movement. They become as ridiculous as yodelling Japanese -- they change their style, they listen to that then they do that, it's sort of epigonal fashion.

Because we never started as a commercial band, we just did what we had to do to become like this. We had all the freedom and the commerciality of it, at the beginning, was a highly unimportant sideline. It was not something we aimed at because if you aim at becoming an international act then you should be sent to loony home straight away -- it is impossible. So you have nothing to lose, and a lot of time to become yourself, because you don't belong to any traditions. Being alone in a territory without rock and pop in this age was an advantage to us.

CT: A lot of bands that start off sounding different soon fall into traditional forms, yet Yello sound more and more like Yello.

DM: That's true. Of course sometimes people, especially in England, they tell you since the first Yello album, they all sound the same, and I am very proud of this, because if you have found your style, how can you change over the years? When a painter has found his way to dance, to express himself -- how do you call it -- 'on canvas' that is a very slow process, and there is not a dramatic change each year. Only people who have no style change their style every year, because they haven't got one. If you listen to the Cure, it's always the Cure, and if you listen to Mozart, even if you have heard only three pieces from the chap, you can immeditely say, 'Aha! This could be Mozart!' Every strong artistic movement has a style which slowly develops, and does not change like fashion.

CT: You have a lot of other singers on this album -- I'm assuming you don't suffer from ego.

DM: No, I don't suffer from it at all. In fact, I'm the promoter of this idea because Yello really is soundtracks for your head -- movies for your head, and these movies sometimes employ other actors. On the last album we concentrated more on me again, but you can never tell.

CT: How'd you come to use Shirley Bassey?

DM: A friend of mine knows Shirley Bassey very well: and he heard that she kind of likes our music, and she expressed that if we had a track for her, she would be interested in singing it. So we wrote 'The Rhythm Divine' and she liked it and came into the studio. It was very simple. You could get Michael Jackson to come in and sing a few tracks if liked them -- it's not a big trick.

CT: And Billy MacKenzie?

DM: Yeah, he's a friend.

CT: You are known as a performance artist. Do you consider Yello an extension of that?

DM: Well ja somewhere in one way it is, I think. Boris and my performance is always live in the studio -- it is live. People ask me why don't you ever play live, I say, we play live every day.

My role, which in very much that of a painter, is painting life. Painting is always life -- you're not reproducing, you're only producing. You're not like a band which is writing a piece, then rehearsing it and then sometimes bringing it to the studio to reproduce it -- we only go to/the studio to produce. We are a very live band.

CT: Did performance art give you confidence in that process?

DM: No. If you ask me now why did I do this, I can't even tell you. It is to me a very strange wonder how I became a performance artist, how I succeeded in having museum exhibitions and becoming quite known in this area. It was something where I obviously followed a track where I somehow had to go, but I never started with the intention of becoming a conceptual artist or a performance artist -- it just happened to me, like everything. I never planned to become a feature film maker. I always wrote down little ideas and little scripts and someday somebody asked me to direct one of these little ideas, and I said why not? I became a movie director overnight -- I never intended to be one.

CT: You also used to gamble.

DM: Mm-mmm. Not seriously, now. If you do this, you are either a professional or a hobby free-loader. If you do it really you do it like a job, an everyday's work. But that was years ago, I stopped when I was 23.

CT: What's it like as a job?

DM: It's the most complete escape from the world possible. Like being a boxer. I only played poker, and with the very simple idea of standing in the ring to knock down your enemy, the sooner the better, and he wants the same thing. This is such a thrilling but simple parameter of existence that you can consider it an escape from the world. You are living in a hermetical situation, standing in this boxing ring, only when you play poker you can play it 14 hours a day. You can't box 14 hours a day -- well, they did in the 19th century, but this would be crazy. Poker, when you sit at the table, you're given a new hand each few minutes, and you can work with that hand, and you're carrying your fate in your hand, and this thrilling moment is the most total escape: it makes you feel good, it makes you feel important, it gives you immediate sense for those minutes.

CT: Francis Bacon was a gambler, a blackjack man.

DM: That's interesting. I never gambled in casinos -- I was interested only in poker playing. When you're gambling with and against individuals.

CT: Since Dada it's been respectable to draw a direct line between chance at the gambling table and chance on the canvas, in the studio.

DM: Well, it has a lot to do with this. This is, of course, true.

CT: What's in store for Yello's future?

DM: Well, the movie is Yello, you know? The most logical extension of what we've always been doing in our video work, this time, it's a feature story and hopefully strong enough to entertain people for 100 minutes. There has never been anything more Yello than this opera. I think this is gonna be the future, I think we will make more films like this. I'm also planning some other features, more in the thriller area. I hope we will enjoy ourselves, and be good entertainers.

CT: Is it a musical or a written idea?

DM: We did have a verbal idea, which was then turned into music which is now turned back into a movie, with a lot of verbal ideas.

I hope to make it sooner or later to your most beautiful country. A cousin of mine was there for two months, and everyone says it is one of the last resorts. Is that true?

CT: "The last resort"... yes.

DM: A very famous Austrian painter, Hundtertwasser lives there, keeps a big farm in new Zealand. The only problem is there's a lot of work here and it takes a long time to travel.

(1989)

The Rules According to Ice T (1988)

Digging through paper I discovered some articles I wrote for Rip It Up, including this interview with Ice-T at the Regent Hotel in Auckland in 1988. He was in New Zealand to promote the Power LP and play the Box. Photo by Darryl Ward. 

Darlene says 'Hi darlin" as you come in the room. And Ice T opens his mouth.

"Man, I've been doing 38,000 interviews. I been waiting on yours, though. I been doing so many interviews for the past year and stuff. I'm just used to it. I don't mind talking, that's why I'm here.

"My style of rap is a very opinionated rap, a rap that isn't set for everybody but for a certain group of people who have a certain opinion about certain things. And of course it's gonna get people uptight because we're very blatant, my rap just says 'Yup, this is how I feel'. So whoever disagrees is gonna be uptight about it, but I think that's what makes it sport.

"To me being an artist is being opinionated. It's saying what you feel and not trying to go down the middle of the road. It's too easy to do that. Radio can't deal with it because radio has to deal with what they call a safe format, they don't what to end up getting anybody mad so they end up playing Tiffany, bubblegum. Nobody SAYS anything on a record anymore.

"Rap came to music with the DJs in New York playing the breaks in the record. Islam was my producer, and he explained to me that it came to the point where the break on the record was what everybody was waiting for. He'd say, 'Here comes the break, here's where I do my best moves and move in on the girls' and all that kinda stuff. So the DJs said, why play the rest of the record? The break was perfect for talking over, and the DJ would give the MC a mike and say 'Tell everybody how great I am'. Notice the early raps, the Furious Five and the Grandmaster Flash, the raps were always about the DJ. And the kids would dance to the breaks in the music -- that's where breakdancing came from.

"You'd get young, 16, l7 year old kids telling sexual stories or stories about how much power they had. But you gotta remember you're dealing with street kids, and that's the only sorta thing that's gonna hold their attention. So you'd have to sneak a message in, like 'I was with this girl, she was real fly, man and she said -- come on, let's get high, but I don't do do that, 'cause I don't need dope' -- they slipped that message in. But the main point of the rap was how wild could you talk.

"The sampling brings it almost back to the original sound. When they first did it they had no drum machines, so they would cut records with music, with a bassline. So the sampling brings you the actual feel of a record being cut. You listen to the samples coming in and say, 'Hey remember we used to rap off that?' When Run DMC cut 'Walk This Way', that was a break people used to rap off.

"Now people are begging for an original form of rap music, saying can you do it from scratch, but it's not really the point of it. The point of it is to take something tha's yours, and make it mine -- not steal it, but take it and flip it and make the funkiest thing.

"And the kids don't know where it came from; the joke is, 'Look how funky I made something you didn't know was funky.' That's what it's all about.

"Also radio programmers are susceptible to playing something with a musical content they can remember. One of the funniest stories is when I made 'I'm Your Pusher' I was down South in the States and some old guy said, 'I don't like rap but once I heard that Curtis Mayfield singing on your record I thought, if it's okay for Curtis then it's okay for me.'

"Now you get rap at all these different levels. Public Enemy is more like war politics, Black awareness. I'm more street politics. I deal with the police level, I don't take you any higher into govennent.

"Run DMC have unwantonly shot themselves to a full commercial level, marketing themselves to the point where they can no longer be street, they're on the Michael Jacksons Of Rap trip. Then you have the hardcore rap, like the Circle Jerks or the Black Flag of rap -- people like Easy E and NWA who just don't give a fuck about nothing. They're just saying fuck everybody, fuck the police, fuck life, I'll kill you. Which is another form.

"Then you get people like Tone-Loc who are getting dropped in as superstars, who haven't found where they are, don't have a rap base anywhere, and are kind of being loved by the pop audience.

"My environment is being reflected all over the world at different levels, though. You don't have gangs like LA, but you have gangs here. People can listen to my music and I can take you to a trip to Los Angeles. I'm like a motion picture, people are interested. Hip hop is universal, hip hop is gonna get in here where RnB can't. We sell more records than Bobby Brown and Al B Shure in Australia, sneaking in through a different route, through the kids. Kids out here don't care if it's white or it's black. Pretty soon you're gonna have a big rap scene here.

"The bottom line is that music doesn't have a colour, people give it a colour. Rock 'n' roll was always followed by white and black kids together. There will always be a racist out there saying, 'I don't like white girls screaming for Little Richard, I don't like white boys pumping their hands to Ice-T' but the kids aren't dealing with the politics of the world, they' re just dealing with what they like. That's some real healthy shit.

"Gangs in LA. are double, triple times as bad as what you saw in Colors. Now you've got cocaine in there. You got 16, 17 year-old kids making half a million dollars a week. Now to tell them to stop, it's like me taking a couple of Columbian drug dealers up to a hotel in Vegas and saying, 'Hey, now why don't you guys quit?' Now they're dealing in the capitalist system, where the ends justifies the means. I can try and get some of them out alive. It's like genocide out there.

"You used to watch the old gangster movies? When the people saw Colors they saw the drive by shootings and got scared. But the Crips and the Bloods didn't invent drive-by shoootings, I used to watch those in old Al Capone movies. It's gang warfare.

"As long as the world is corrupt and people are kept down in certain areas, people are going to join gangs, they're gonna say, 'Hey, we can't get employed -- fuck the system.'

"If we're all working, we're okay. That's why New Zealand and everybody else has be concerned that everyone has a job. Why are they breaking the law? It's because you ain't giving them a job. That's what's going on In Los Angeles.

"You can't manufacture cocaine in the United States. You can't manufacture it in New Zealand. Somebody is letting it in here. LETTING it in here -- that's the enemy. It's above the police.

"It's deep man. I wear a peace symbol round my neck because every year the president takes my money and says he spends it on peace. To me that would be making jobs, opening schools. But they just spend it on weapons.

"The sad thing about me is that people will say, you're just pessimistic. But I don't feel that. I'm a realist. There's never been peace in the world since the beginning of time. It's always been global. But what you gotta do is stay out of the system, don't become a piece of firewood while the big guys are making all the money. The world is so uptight right now, who knows, they might even give Ollie North a sentence. But the day they put Ollie North into jail, the same people that jail him will move a hundred tons of cocaine into the United States.

"People have to learn to discipline themselves, and that's the bottom line. Everybody in the end is only in control of their own actions. Like Angel Dust was big in the States until kids said, it ain't hip. And that's what'll happen with crack. People like me say it ain't hip, and kids will say, yeah, I don't want it. Rap is slowing it down, to an extent. But if there wasn't rap saying that, who would tell them? You haven't heard any RnB records sayin' it. The only person you've heard is Nancy Reagan, and she looks like she's on dope. We're the only music that really spends time talking about the situation."

Ice-T shuts his mouth.

© Chad Taylor 1988

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