Hip Hop and an Earthly Approach-- Vinyl, September 1984 Words: Joost Niemoller. Translation from Dutch: Ellen Pronk.
"At the moment I'm traveling between New York and London. The recordings for Wood Beez were done in New York. After that I went to London last Christmas to finish the mixing. I wasn't happy with the result, so I went back to New York where the final mix was done by a technician at the Power Station Studio who mainly works with the Chic. "I have a contract with Virgin in England for three years now. In America I closed a deal with Warner Brothers. It took a lot of time to decide which deal would work best for me. This turned out to be the best for someone in my situation. I used to try on my own, certainly in the '77-78 period. Only after some time did I become aware of the fact that I was more involved in the politics of the music business than with the aesthetics of my own music. I thought the way independents worked was ideal, it intrigued me a lot. It took me a lot of effort and time to find out that the whole independents business wasn't that important. It was at the same time Rough Trade was doing badly, a time when groups were asked to find another label, when good friends who worked at Rough Trade were fired. I don't blame them, these economic measures were necessary. Its weird, I would have stayed with Rough Trade if they would have done the same for my records as they do now with The Smiths by signing a contract with a large distribution firm. That it took almost two years before new material appeared did have to do mainly with business problems: Leaving Rough Trade, finding a new management, getting the right contacts in New York. I met a lot of important people in New York, like Nile Rodgers from the Chic. Its been a busy, confusing time for me." It does seem to take you a lot of time to write and record songs. "The recording actually doesn't take much time. Preparation does--what I call pre-production. I wanted to have everything thought out before I went into the studio. The arrangements on the demos are exactly the same as the final studio versions. Working in the studio went fast. The standard of musicians in New York is much higher than in England. Wood Beez was a really complex song to make. I needed a lot of specialized people for that. In the future this could be done more cheaply and faster, I think. I learned a lot in New York: Which people I want to use for what. Musically I learned a lot from the hip hop movement, like the playful, earthly approach to studio recording. I hardly listened to anything else but scratch and rap from the moment I arrived in New York."
"Yes, it is certainly important to young blacks in America. It might not have that much significance to young people in England, but that's just a matter of time. Scratch to me is a very serious revolution opposed to the rock tradition. Gradually a situation arose in America where someone like Lionel Richie is alienated from a new generation of blacks: He has more airplay on white radio stations, but hardly any on the black stations in New York. Hip hop is something theoretically any young black could do. It's rather easy and cheap. In fact, all you need is a drum machine. There is much vitality in it. I did notice it was hard to get people in London to be enthusiastic about scratch. It doesn't go further than isolated cases like Grandmaster Flash and Malcolm McLaren. The music scene in London is largely trivialised and stylised. New Order is one of the few bands with integrity who is actively interested in scratch techniques." Linto Kwesi Johnson regards scratch as a from of reggae. "He could be right there. It's the same popular roots music for the working class. In New York, scratch has already grown out of being a trend. People thought rap would be dead after the Sugarhill Gang, but meanwhile it lived on for six, seven years. It even gained in strength. There is still musical development. There is a huge difference between records from the beginning and the ones being made now." It does seem to dribble through your own music. "Sure. Wood Beez is from another period. I wrote it two, three years ago. Wood Beez is influenced by mainstream black music. It's more funk than scratch. I used to be much more interested in pure pop, and black pop was the best. I always considered black pop music from the US more exciting, more sophisticated than European pop music. A band like ABC never did much for me."
"I'm not sure what is rock since the punks. Now it's called U2, Simple Minds, Big Country, Echo & The Bunnymen, or even a group like The Smiths. It's hard for me to think of these bands as 'the new rock bands'. It isn't innovative for sure. Some parts are ok.... a song from Big Country or Echo & The Bunnymen perhaps. But take for instance Speed Your Love from The Simple Minds, the hollow pathos, emphasized by echoes and the drum sound of Steve Lillywhite. it has no soul. It gets worse when you see the videos. Its filled with symbolism which doesn't refer to anything apart from itself." In the video of Wood Beez you see a lot of honey. What stuck in my mind is the hand which squeezed a lump of honey. Honey does have a sexual meaning in black traditions. For someone like Yellowman its a symbol of sperm. "That's right. I didn't think of that when I used it in the song though. First it caught my attention in the work of Joseph Beuys, an artist I really admire. An image from a totally different corner came after that, namely from the bible. Somewhere in there is the saying 'Out of the strong comes forth the sweet'. I felt it said something essential about my music. The soft, the sweet (but not weak) that comes from the strong. In England there are pots of honey with that saying and an old drawing of a sleeping lion with a cloud of bees above him. That saying does have the same ambiguous meaning in relation to sperm. I won't deny that the ambiguous meaning began to play a part in the song. But mostly honey is a symbol for something organic, soft and vital." Do you consider pop music to have a religious meaning? "...I think so, yeah...I have to say the religious experience is something alien to me. But I do see a relationship between girls buying a Culture Club record and negroes singing a gospel in the US. But I prefer to talk about that in sociological or psychological terms." There is something odd in your fascination with black music. They are roots which aren't your own. "It's not like that at all. There was a time when the black tradition was completely separate from the European tradition. But in the past hundred years there was this fusion, it's impossible to speak of it being separate. The reason I talk about black music is mainly because it's such a good example of the essential feelings in songs. It's a line which goes from gospel to scratch. Those feelings are universal, but in the black tradition the song has such vitality you can't deny." Was Smokey Robinson a important influence on your style of singing? "No, not at all. I can imagine your thinking that. It could have been. I do like that boyish way of singing. I always disliked that masculine way of singing, unless it was ironic. I've never been a fan from Isaac Hayes. It was typical that all black singers I liked were singing with high voices. Michael Jackson is just one of many. Personally, I was more influenced by female singers. I always felt I could do more with the style of Aretha Franklin than with the one from Otis Redding. Apart from the fact that Otis Redding's style is so unique, it's hard to think of even emulating his style."
"I would love that! But it all depends on money. I can only think of that when the record starts selling. I would like to have someone on stage like Marcus Miller. My music needs to be performed by good people, or else it will be a weak resemblance of the record." Your music always had something ironic. Sometimes, as in Faithless, it's more a musical comment on the 'sound' of a 'pop song' than something on its own. There is a hard to define schizophrenia in it: You seem to mean it on one hand, but on the other you take your distance. You see that in the older music of Todd Rundgren for example. "That's right. You're the first to say that to me. The irony was always there. I just can't be naive when it's about pop music. There will always be distance, no matter how emotional I experience something. Especially with lyrics, I can be very detached. Most pop musicians don't seem to take this distance, apparently in fear of degenerating into some kind of intellectualism. It's always been a quiet ambition of me to write something about the role of 'the girl' in pop lyrics, but it probably won't come of that. It's strange, you can be aware of clichés in lyrics, but it's impossible to escape them. You can't say: 'that whining about the unreachable girl in pop songs has got to stop, now I will write about a dog.' At most you can question a clichE like I did in The 'Sweetest Girl'. Wood Beez is an ironic song, but you don't have to hear that. Maybe my songs got more direct than on Songs to Remember, the previous album. It does have a different atmosphere. But that is for the most part influenced by the fact I'm recording in New York instead of London. American musicians do have a different attitude towards music as compared to English musicians. And that was felt directly, their function was much more important than mere session
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...A Marxist intellectual discovers the beauty of true pop. With this
undercurrent slogan Green Gartside and his band (?) Scritti Politti was known
until two years ago. The album Songs to Remember was praised. An
interesting album, also because it was the first attempt of the English
independent Rough Trade to gain success. The attempt succeeded only partially
and Green disappeared in anonymity. He was busy though. Wood Beez and Absolute
are becoming his first real hits....