Actually, I don’t. Now my favorite Bond is Pierce Brosnan. I think he’s perfect.
Why?
To me, he’s handsome, dashing, and English. No, actually he’s Irish. I think he just fits the bill, really. I think Sean Connery’s films are the best films because they are a bit darker, and it got a bit silly after Sean Connery, but I think Brosnan is great.
Do the British view Bond differently than Americans?
I’m not sure anymore. Possibly a few decades ago they did. I think Americans thought it was a very British thing rather than a pop culture thing, but we had more of a history with the actual book, I mean Ian Fleming being an English writer and stuff.
How do you keep approaching the oldest topic in the world—love—in a fresh way?
It’s really strange. I do have this recurring fear that I will sit down and not be able to think of anything, but it’s never happened yet. I suppose on the other hand I’ve felt that I’ve only begun to scratch the surface because it’s such a massive subject. People are having relationships all the time, not just with their boyfriends and girlfriends, or husbands or wives. I mean right now we are having a relationship. I’m just really interested in the way people speak to each other, really. What they say, how they say, and why they say it. I think it’s more interesting in relationships at the start and end of them. It’s selfish, but there are all these great lines flying out all over the place. I’m like, “That would be a great chorus,” and all I’ve got to do is write them down, really.
You are more or less an intermediary?
I think so, yeah, like a sponge. There’s only been a few occasions when I’ve started writing, then thought, wait a minute, I remember this one, I’m rewriting one I’ve done before.
You never feel you are rehashing anything?
No, not at all. I think it’s so big. On this tour, I have written down two or three scenarios in my book here, which are new to me. Like our roadie Jessica just told me something the other day, and I thought—and she didn’t even know what I might be thinking—hmm, that’s an interesting idea for a song. I forgot what it was now. I’ll have to find it. That’s what I do. It’s a con, really.
What do you feel about people like Paul Weller, who has carved a third career after the Jam and Style Council?
I think Paul Weller broadened his appeal a bit more. He’s a bit more coffee table really. He’s a bit less extreme than the Jam. That probably increased his fan base. Well, I think, if I am honest, I have made some decisions in my life that have not helped my career, really. For instance, I should live in London. Every time I go to London, I go out with friends, and because of the circle I move in, I’m always meeting record producers, like, “He’s a record producer, he works at Radio 1, she writes reviews for the Guardian, he chooses music for films, and she’s an NME journalist.” I don’t move there, but if I would have ten years ago I probably would have been more successful.
But would you have spent more time making connections and less time observing people and making great pop songs?
Well, no, because I would have just gotten out more. I do go out in Leeds, but I just go out with my friends . . . well, I don’t have any friends. I go out with my girlfriend, as opposed to going out with movers and shakers from the entertainment industry, so I just use that as an example of the fact that I’ve probably made commercially inappropriate decisions, but then I’ve done it for other reasons.
Including?
I don’t want to be in London. I don’t want to make records that might sound like they are going to sell millions because they have to appeal to me as a person. I’ve probably made records that would have sold more if they had been produced in a different way, or arranged in a different way. You could give me a million pounds now and say write in a certain way, but I can’t do that. I’ve got to write stuff that I am totally happy with, really. Unfortunately, my taste is not the average taste of the music-listening world, so I am never going to make stuff that a lot of people want to buy, really.
David Kilgour: A Bit Dirty after All
Originally published in Left of the Dial, 2002.
Like an artful dodger, David Kilgour has made music that is lean, unprocessed, and slightly disorderly at times. As a co-founder of the Clean, he made a huge impression on the American indie scene of the 1980s, which helped shape the sonic slyness of bands like Yo La Tengo and Superchunk and anticipated the likes of Magnetic Fields. Though his music remains under the radar of the general public, it offers a wealth of tumbledown, anti-bourgeois pop that is as penetrating as it is potent. As the New York Times sums up his character, he is “a god among the ranks of similarly low-fidelity groups.”
Do you think that you would even have an audience if it wasn’t for Vehicle, which many people consider your most accessible and successful album?
Well, for most Americans that I meet, or have met over the fifteen years or so, that’s the LP that tends to model the band. I think it did a lot for us in America.
What about worldwide?
Well, we were touring quite a bit back then, pre-Vehicle, and then post-Vehicle we were actually quite popular in Germany. We spent a month just playing in Germany. The shows we used to do on the East Coast of the U.S. in the late eighties and early nineties were basically just stopovers on the way over to Europe. It did pretty well for us in Europe, especially Germany.
Has that German audience consistently stayed with you over the years?
I sincerely doubt it, because I haven’t been back to Europe but once. I really don’t know, I couldn’t tell you. Matador released my last solo record in Europe and also released Getaway, but I haven’t heard any word back. We don’t have any management, we don’t have any grand stand, we don’t have any career stance at all. It’s almost like a hobby for us. I mean, it was a complete surprise that we toured here this year. As we finished this last album, we discussed whether or not it was time to quit doing it. It was a difficult LP to make, in a way. It’s always hard because Hamish lives in New York and when he comes back he has a limited time with the band. We talked about that, so I’m flummoxed that we actually made it back to America twelve years later.
Was the new record made like Modern Rock, which happened almost accidentally because everyone in the band ended up in Dunedin at the same time?
Well, Hamish had flown back to Dunedin for an art festival, and we decided to do a short tour of New Zealand while he’s here. We weren’t going to make it an LP, we thought let’s not make another LP, let’s just tour. But in the rehearsal we had a four track and started to jam and before we knew it, we made the decision to make an LP.
At the same time that Ira and Georgia were visiting New Zealand?
They were playing way north, about a three-hour plane ride north of Dunedin, doing a gig on their way to Australia and Japan, so they stopped off for three or four days before their gig really just to have a holiday.
How long have you know them?
The Clean toured Germany in 1989 and we ran into them there or in Amsterdam. I think they were staying at the same hotel. We were aware that both bands had been on a Homestead compilation called Human Music. We already knew something about Yo La Tengo because they had already released an LP by then, so we talked and connected, and I’ve known them since then.
The Flying Nun website says that the “on again, off again nature of the Clean is by design.” Is it really that intentional or just haphazard?
It’s purely coincidence that we end up in the same city at the same time, really. There’s no plan.
Well, I’m sure people wonder why, since one of your first singles, “Tally Ho,” went to number nineteen on the New Zealand music charts.
Sure, obviously with that first lineup of the Clean we were exceedingly ambitious. We were quite organized in our own cottage industry way, but since the early eighties it’s been a stop-start thing. But with that first lineup we were very ambitious.
Would that same kind of ambition today make the Clean less interesti
ng for you?
I don’t think so. We have a pretty good way of working with each other. We don’t take any music into our rehearsal space. We try to write spontaneously. I mean, if Getaway does really well, we’d consider making another LP, but at the moment I can’t see it. But who knows? Whether we’d get serious about it . . . I really don’t know. We have our own lives that we live, and we have our own creative projects going as well, so who knows.
What kind of challenges do your solo records present?
Well I guess that the first three that I made were vague attempts at making commercial pop rock LPs. I was trying to walk a fine line between making accessible pop and pleasing myself, but on the new LP, I threw all that out the window. I decided this time I should be selfish. I recorded most of the LP at my home. I basically just had a collection of songs I’ve done over the last four years.
The new solo record is much more varied than the Clean record. For instance, you have everything from cinematic-feeling instrumentals, to acoustic tracks, to drum ’n’ bass beats.
I recently installed a 24 four-track studio in my house. Quite a few of those tracks were experiments with my tape machine. With “Today Becomes Tomorrow,” I was with a friend of mine who is an engineer and does a lot of drum and bass, and he engineered my solo records as well, but basically I used some drum tracks that my drummer had recorded on tape at my house that I was going to record some songs over, but he basically turned out a whole piece of music and I just sang over the top. The whole LP is coming from different areas, like four-tracks, sixteen-tracks, and twenty-four-tracks, and some of it I wrote just twenty minutes before I recorded it, so there’s a freshness to the tracks. A lot of it was recorded as soon as I wrote it. So I thought, this is good demo, I’ll fix all this up and use some studio overdubs, but at the end of the day I didn’t, and I decided to just go for it.
Every song almost feels like a risk or a challenge.
I certainly didn’t plan it that way. Like I said, it was a collection of songs that I like from the last four years. There wasn’t an attempt to make it experimental. I mean, I kind of did, but there was no conscious attempt to do it. Sure, I probably had grandiose plans at one point. At one point, it was going to be an LP with strings on it, but at the end of the day I became less anal about it and just gave in. I feel I can’t help myself because it allows me to do the things the Clean never allows me to do.
The site also says you come from the Brian Wilson school of songwriting, where “dumb is the essence of pop’s appeal,” but I don’t listen to your records and hear anything that’s very dumb.
That’s a boring cliché—Brian Wilson. They also seem to drop the names Skip Spencer and Syd Barrett. Sure, I loved the Beach Boys and Syd Barrett as a kid. I’m not sure I’m in the vein of any of those people. I mean, I love them, but I love a lot of music.
Did you not say, “I am a sucker for sweet melodies”?
I hate [laughs] that quote. I said that in the early 1990s. I am a sucker for little sweet melody things. . . . What does that mean? I like melody [laughs]. Melody is hard. I do struggle with it.
How did playing with Yo La Tengo differ from your other experiences?
It’s a lot harder playing somebody else’s music, and that was a great challenge for me, and I knew it would be to do those shows, but I like to put myself in those situations. We only had like five days of rehearsal, though we knew what songs we were going to do many months before the tour, so it’s not like we were getting up on stage without knowing the songs. But it was a really great challenge for me, and I did push the envelope of my playing ability. I learned a lot from doing that tour. It’s one of the most interesting experiences I’ve had, actually. It was grand. Kinda stressful, but really satisfying.
How did you end up receiving the New Zealand Order of Merit?
I have no idea. Someone would have nominated me. A politician, somebody upstanding, obviously. Someone nominated me, but I have no idea how. It’s not really a choice whether you want to accept it or not.
Do you see it as significant, or as vacuous?
It’s always nice to get a slap on the back. You know, my mother was extremely pleased. It was funny, a few musicians that I never hear from out-of-the-blue wrote me and said that’s great. I think that some musicians felt that it was nice to see the government say well done. I think in a way it was a slap on the back of everybody.
It wasn’t a slap on David’s back as much as one on the back of musicians you grew up with and played with?
I wouldn’t have gotten it without the Clean. But it felt kind of funny getting it without Bob and Hamish getting anything. But I did a lot of press and raged on about things on TV. It was sort of on the news and stuff, so I tried to do my bit and rant and rave about how horrible the music scene was in New Zealand and blah blah blah, all that good stuff.
Is it true that the Clean were one of the first bands to play original music in New Zealand?
In the 1960s, there were people writing original music. There were some great garage pop bands that came out of New Zealand. Even in the 1970s, probably the most well known to Americans were the Slodines, who ended up being pretty much a standard pop band, but in the early seventies, they were an extremely experimental and creative band. There’s always been original music in New Zealand, but it was certainly nothing like us at the time when we started out making music. Our first singles sounded like they were recorded in a toilet but were chartered without any hope of radio play. There were no college radio stations in New Zealand until the mid-1980s, so we toured without any radio play at all. We had videos, and they had to play them only because we charted. But we toured all the time in New Zealand, and people would go out.
Did Radio Birdman reach the shores of New Zealand?
Radio Birdman certainly got through, but the Saints had a major effect.
With I’m Stranded in 1976?
It was a big album in the punk scene in New Zealand, but you have to remember that the punk scene mostly hit New Zealand probably two years after it exploded in England, so we were always a little bit behind. But we had a friend in Dunedin who was importing all those records, so two weeks after “Anarchy in the UK” came out, we were getting it in Dunedin. We were all avid vinyl collectors, and music collectors, especially Chris Knox, who was music obsessed. We were always paying attention to music.
It was a cottage industry that ended up being quite successful. Can a New Zealand band in 2001 do it the same way and chart without radio play and get through to people and sell records?
It’s still possible but a hell of a lot harder.
What makes it harder?
The New Zealand music industry is in the saddest state it’s ever been in. The corporations completely control it, even to the point of actually owning the media. New Zealand’s a tiny country. There are only three million people that live there. So it’s tough. But I still think it’s possible to succeed on your own terms. Maybe not as easy as it was for us.
Were you listening to the Velvet Underground a lot?
We had already been listening to Velvet Underground before punk hit, via Lou Reed. Lou Reed was huge, like Transformer, and Rock n Roll Animal, so we found out about the Velvets through that.
Did Lou Reed tour New Zealand in the 1970s?
I saw him play live post–Rock n Roll Animal, the tour right after it. He came to Dunedin twice. The thing about New Zealand in the seventies and early eighties was that everybody came and played—I saw so many people play as a kid in my town, from Lou Reed to Chuck Berry to Graham Parker and the Rumour. There was early Talking Heads, the Cure—it’s hard to believe, but it’s actually true. I saw so much music.
How did you and Hamish begin playing?
My mother played piano, but we didn’t really pick up music at all. I think when I was about twelve I tried to play the guitar, and Hamish did too, but we both gave it up because it was so difficult. But then punk rock came along to Dunedin and that gave us the excuse
to pick up a guitar and play noise, so that’s how we started. Sure, it was a punk rock thing.
When you play guitar today, is that still the vein where you are coming from?
I don’t think we do it intentionally, but it’s funny, we’ve met a few people on tours that come up and say, look, we’re in a punk rock band, blah blah blah, I really love you guys. But I’ve never thought of the Clean as a punk band. Hamish told me the other day, David, we are. Maybe he’s right, I don’t know. I think there’s still some punk music in it for me, we’re rather shambolic live. We can be pretty pop, but we can also shred it and give it the right noise experimentation, so there’s a punk attitude too.
What did you think about God Save the Clean, the Clean tribute album that had all small bands, even though bands Sonic Youth and Pavement were fans?
I have a bad taste in my mouth about that LP because we basically had nothing to do with it. I really liked some of the stuff on it, and I am flattered all those acts were on it, but I haven’t heard of a third of those bands. I think the guy who organized it got his friend’s bands to play the songs. Quite a few of those acts I’ve never heard of before, but I am really flattered that they all wanted to do it. But we had nothing to do with it, though we asked to have some sort of input into it. But at the same time, I’m flattered.
Do you see yourself playing with more people beyond Yo La Tengo?
If I were asked, I’d play with anybody. I’d be willing to take on anything within reason.
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