In the year 2000 is London a bustling youth center again?
Yeah, it’s bustling. It’s a very exciting city, a real focus, certainly for young people from all over Europe.
Different from the Thatcher years?
It was starting then. The music and fashion scene are very centered on London. It seems to have shifted from New York City, which is a sign of some sort. New York is an art center, but not particularly a fashion center, though I’m sure New Yorkers would disagree.
J. G. Ballard, a very influential sci-fi writer who has spent almost his entire life in the London suburbs writing about the certain psychology of the place, said that in the fifties people spoke of isms, of politics and despair, but by the sixties the Beatles washed all of that away.
It’s absolutely true. As Philip Larkin said, sex began in 1963. Sex didn’t exist before that. I’m not sure if it was tied in with some economic growth; I think it was. So people suddenly had some spending money, but at last people had the opportunity to express themselves through spending. There was a sense of culture and the art schools fostered the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds.
While you were living in the suburbs, what was your feeling about them?
The first area I lived in is called Highgate. We lived on the line between the rough and smooth parts of town. It was fun. The suburbs are fine if you’ve got friends right down the road, so that was great. Later, I found it frustrating when we moved further out, because at that point I was a teenager and it was a long bus ride to get anywhere, to find any friends.
Did you have a sense of dislocation?
Absolutely. I was at least seven miles out of town, at least seven miles. If you’re on foot, if you’re relying on the London bus service of the time, it was very frustrating; you ride the bus a long time to get anywhere. That just means you appreciate entertainment when you find it.
What do you mean when you say country basically goes back to Anglo roots?
Well, Tennessee was settled by a lot of Scots and Irish.
The roots of bluegrass.
Which is very Scottish. When some people went around and collected ballads in Appalachia years back, they found about five hundred that were forgotten in England. People were very isolated in the middle of that part of the country, and people really preserved things that in a more industrialized England got swept away. There were young people speaking in accents that came from a county back in Britain. The pronunciation of the words was straight out of southeast Scotland. The way people did weddings was exactly like East Anglia; in some cases it was better preserved than in England, which had changed a lot.
It seems like a natural progression to release Mock Tudor after Industry, a rather misunderstood album.
They’re both about Britain at different eras. I’ve always loved industrial Britain, however ugly.
It sounds like maybe a love and hate relationship, partially like William Blake’s “London,” with its blackened cathedrals.
Yes, and his “dark and satanic mills.” I love the industrial hardware, the steam engines and incredible factories, and the brilliance of human invention. It’s a very crude process. Every five to twenty years you get these improvements, a guy comes along and says, “Hey, I know how I can improve this spinning jenny; I can improve it if you just put two more holes there.” Another guy comes along and says, “There’s a better way of doing this, let’s just modify this machine.”
It brings out what’s best and worst about humanity?
Yes, but you can’t stop it. Technology has only become unfashionable since about 1950. Before that, they wanted to build as many dams and nuclear bombs as possible. It was all great.
Is there a total sense of idealism in that, a kind of hope that society is perfectible, that we can build that castle in the sky?
Since Newton and Descartes, since the mechanical view of the universe, science has been the thing that would lead mankind and save us all. It would eradicate poverty and would eradicate hunger, which are all fine ideals. This was the Protestant view, but not always the Catholic view. If Britain would have remained Catholic, the Industrial Revolution might have happened four hundred years later. Industry is a blessing and a curse. So we love the landscape of industrial Britain, because we grew up in it, we got used to the factories. There’s a real gray beauty to it. We got used to the grayness and bleakness of it all.
It speaks to you?
It moves your soul somehow. There’s the story of the people. Despite the hardships of some of those jobs, like steel working and coal mining, however tough it was, they were wonderful people and built incredible communities.
Like D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, which is set in a Welsh mining community and is full of a sense of hardship and pride.
An incredible sense of pride. There was a great sense of personal and community pride that you just don’t have anymore. It’s sad to see the skills go. Someone learned these tough jobs, but they learned a skill, how to do it, and then the industry closed down and they’re left without a job. But they’re only trained for one thing.
Were the Thatcher years, perhaps epitomized by your song “Mother Knows Best,” the end-all for those communities?
When Mrs. Thatcher didn’t like something, she just got rid of it.
Point blank?
Yeah. She didn’t like the Greater London Council, so she got rid of it.
Chopped trouble off at the head?
She didn’t like the unions, so she got rid of them, like the Miner’s Union.
Like Reagan and the airline pilots?
That’s right. Her way of dealing with strikes and opposition from the coal miners was just to get rid of the coal mines. At that point they shut down a lot of mines. It was for political reasons, not for economic ones.
They could have been solvent?
They were solvent. Many of them were running at a profit. It was just a political gesture, just a whim, a case of Thatcher being a Chinese Mandarin.
A lot of your songs deal with being the underdog or people struggling, like “Genesis Hall.” I’ve seen artists like Billy Bragg not exactly be apologists for Tony Blair but suggest he is a lesser of two evils. For instance, at least he does stand for education, or some kind of resolution in Northern Ireland.
He stands for compromise in Northern Ireland, he’s an appeaser, and he will sell the Protestants in Northern Ireland down the river and do a deal with the IRA, which I think he’s already done, actually, and the IRA will have won. Whether or not that’s a good or bad thing depends on your point of view. But he’ll do it. I find him slightly sneaky. You know, sometimes as you get on in life you judge people against people you went to school with.
He’s the bully; he’s the clown.
Exactly [laughs]. You think Tony is in your gang, one of the naughty boys, that smoking-behind-the-back shit. But suddenly he turns around and he’s the head boy. Then you say, “I thought he was one of us, one of the dropouts.” And he says, “Sorry lads, I had to get on with my life and someone had to do it.” He strikes me in that way. I don’t quite trust him. When he first came in, I felt he was a breath of fresh air, but I think that however radical a politician you are, at some point you become compromised by the system.
Are there any subjects or songs that you have wanted to write but haven’t gotten to yet?
I love the idea that you should be able to sit down and write a song about absolutely anything, such as writing a song about this interview, that we should just pick up the guitar and do it.
A beatnik thing, like a writer should stop just to see the picture better.
That’s the same kind of writing that just about lends itself to anything. It’s the story of Elgar, who comes home and has been talking all night to his friend about Beethoven and tells someone about what a wonderful time he had. And that person says, “Well, you always say you can write about anything—write a piece of music about that.” He says, okay, that’s a challenge, and writes the first piece o
f the Enigma Variations based on the strength of that meeting.
So you believe in spontaneous compositions?
Like a good haiku poet, you should sit down and take any situation and find the meaning behind the action, the people, and the objects, and the time and the place. That should be the aim.
David Gedge: Cinerama and Wedding Present
Indebted to modern music’s unruly early 1970s tendencies (think Velvet Underground), along with the tight-fisted pop that shook Britain in both the mod and punk eras, with a dapple of folk sensibilities and off-the-cuff blue-collar poetry, Gedge is the wise obscure rocker that critics and a hardcore fan base adore. Seminal and musically succinct, Gedge is a straight-talker that spent an hour in the van with me during the Cinerama era, when he was balancing his past with the future as modern music, with its emergent technologies, was quickly shifting underfoot.
You’ve said, “I’ve got this problem with old songs: once we’ve played a song five thousand times, I feel that I can go through the motions, whereas I am still genuinely excited by new songs,” yet you play six Wedding Present songs in the Cinerama set. Why?
Five. I think what happened was that, well, I still agree with that, but then the last time we played those songs was 1996. I think it’s just time. It’s five years later. Well, actually there’s a label in Britain called Camden, which re-released Bizarro and Seamonsters, and I was involved with the mastering and all that, obviously. I’ve not played those albums in four or five years, anyway, and I thought, actually, I quite like a lot of these songs and certainly I have lost that kind of “can’t be bothered again, go through the motions,” and it is genuinely exciting, almost like doing new songs because you haven’t done them in five years. And also, it’s a different group, so it does feel a bit different. I think we’re actually playing them better than the Wedding Present.
How so?
I think Simon, the drummer, and Terry, the bass player, are really good musicians. The Wedding Present was okay, but I think we do play them a bit tighter than Wedding Present did.
Why go back and master something that was good to begin with, because you’ve said, “Steve Albini is just the best engineer I’ve ever worked with at capturing the sound of drums, electric bass, guitar, and there’s no-one that I’ve worked with who can have that clarity, that power, that depth.”
I still stand by that. Well, remastering can mean everything from going back and enhancing what you’ve already recorded to basically going into the studio and making sure. . . . I mean, when I remastered those albums all we did was go back to the original tapes and listen to them, and the remastering engineer said, “To be honest, they sound fine to me.” I said, “If it sounds alright to him, it sounds alright to me.” All we actually did was make sure, for instance . . . it has new tracks on it, so you got to basically create a new master for which the CDs are duplicated. It’s just a matter of making sure the gaps between them are all right. Sometimes, for instance, singles will be louder than album tracks, or vice versa, so you have to equalize them all. So, remastering in that case was a matter of sequencing, really. In fact, I didn’t need to be there, but I know on the one occasion that I am not there, somebody will mix up the tracks, like this is “Crushed,” but it is not. It’s just a matter of course, but I was quite pleased with it because those albums were made ten years ago, so now they’ve only gotten better. I thought, someone will say, “Maybe we could add a bit of this or that and make it sound bigger or better.” But I didn’t think it needed that. It was quite nice for the bloke to say, “Actually, it sounds great to me. Let’s not change it.” I think those records have withstood the test of time.
Would you say the Wedding Present records you were most pleased with were the ones done with Steve Albini, or Watusi, the record that really gained you attention in America but was recorded by Steve Fisk?
Uh, no. It depends on what mood I am in, honestly. I think the Albini records sound a lot different than the Steve Fisk records, and it’s hard to say which are better, and what’s good and what’s bad. Watusi was always meant to be more of a pop album, and we wanted to get away. . . . Well, it’s quite easy when you are in a rock band to kind of stick distortion pedals on in the chorus because it makes it sound bigger and more exciting and everyone goes, “Whoa.” We just thought, okay, we’ve done that, now let’s try something different. Let’s try to achieve some dynamics within the actual writing, and that’s what we set out with when doing Watusi. I think it’s a different kind of record, really, and I can’t really compare that to the Albini stuff, in the same way I can’t compare the Albini stuff to the stuff I did before him. But the Albini records sound really good.
When you played the Jonathon Ross show on the BBC, he said he liked the fact you retain your northern accent [Gedge is from Leeds], whereas many pop stars cover them up in what you called “American droll.” Did you think that punk explosion in 1976 put an end to the cover-up done by everyone from the early Beatles, the Who, and Rolling Stones to Tom Jones?
I think those bands were more influenced by American music, weren’t they? The kind of R&B stuff of that time? I think the stuff from the 1960s, like Nick Drake, well, he’s English isn’t he? I just think it’s a bit pretentious. Obviously, we are not American. But having said that, I have sung in French, Spanish, and German as well. I’m not displeased with my accent, so I think it’s a bit weird to suddenly. . . . Well, I’ll say it’s very kind of cabaret, you know, like British singers . . . like Tina Turner are big stars, so they sing in that kind of fake American accent. It just sounds horrendous, really.
Two of the singles were in French, right?
Well, we did a Spanish 7”, then French, and then we just did another one.
You learned French in school, but on the Spanish one you were helped by a non-native Spanish-speaking American . . .
And it was wrong [laughs].
I can understand the French one, but why do a German and Spanish one? Was it just a market opportunity, or something from the heart?
The Spanish one was because when we recorded it the. . . . Well, why did we? Because we re-recorded “Hard, Fast and Beautiful,” which is a track on the first album, and we did it a bit differently, and I just thought, “Is there a way we could make it even a bit more different so it’s just like re-doing the same song?” And one of the engineers who works for Albini just happened to mention that his girlfriend spoke Spanish, so I thought, let’s do it in Spanish, and she translated the lyrics. Then for the other side of the record I got a real Spanish person to do it. I think she made a few mistakes, apparently. But it was purely that. It was the right place at the right time. For the German one, we just recorded a 7” single in Atlanta a few days ago. The studio belonged to Man or Astroman? and the a-side is a Cinerama original song, and we just thought we’d do a cover on the b-side. Simon lives in Germany now, and he just got some friends in a band called Klee and we just had a go at one of those, really.
Though you hate 1980s synth music, early on in Cinerama you tried to use more sampling and programming. Why?
I just felt that it was something that I’d like to know about. I generally did think it would be interesting to try it, and if you remember, I’ve been in a band since I was in school and it has always been the classic rock ’n’ roll line-up: guitars, bass, and drums. I just felt a little bit jaded, really. I felt this was something else I could do. It was just a bit different. There seems to be a lot of people who are getting a lot out of samplers and sequencers. I think that the sampler is one of the best things ever invented for music, and even now I use it even though it’s as a band. I think I use it as more of a writing tool now. Also, I’ve always been interested in film music and that kind of orchestral arrangement, but I can’t score music and I can’t write it. I can’t arrange that kind of music, so it was only with the advent of sampling technology and computers and sequencing software that I could actually do that.
Did it make you appreciate the genius of peop
le like Morricone and John Barry?
God, yeah. Definitely.
They were able to do it all without such equipment?
I don’t think the equipment has anything to do with it really because they were trained to do it at music college. I think that is the same as me doing it on the computer, so the genius of John Barry is in the songwriting. It’s breathtaking, really. It’s something you always know is there because the Bond theme sounds really exciting. You think, yeah, these are great sounds, and your heart’s beating faster because of the way it’s building. Then when you start thinking about the soundtrack albums and you listen to them more carefully, like we covered “Diamonds Are Forever,” the chords are so clever and dramatic. Yeah, then Morricone as well. Those kind of cinematic soundscapes are just fantastic. It’s changed my life in a way, though it sounds a bit pretentious to say things like that.
But you never really listened to the music until fairly recently?
No. I think with pop music, in every record I hear I start to analyze it and realize that bass is a bit quiet, but with that stuff, I just thought, yeah, those James Bond themes, they are brilliant, aren’t they, and not think why. Suddenly, I sat down and spent a couple years thinking about why they were. I realized it’s the way they are written and the way they are arranged. It’s just certain instruments. It’s certain instruments he used, which I think are really exciting. I don’t know what the instruments are, and I don’t know how to write for those. When I first started doing it, I didn’t have a clue. I had my little computer with my keyboard, and I was writing these parts for trumpet players and strings and stuff, and you play it on the keyboard, and the computer prints out the score, and then they go play it, and they’d say, “I can’t play this, because my violin doesn’t go that low,” and “The trumpet doesn’t make that note. I need three hands to do that.”
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