Photo - Violet Corbett Brock

THE QUIET LIFE OF NEW YORK

Dot Allison - B-Side - 2000

DA: Before we talk about "Naked Self" I’d like to ask you about "Gun Sluts". Ever since it was announced in the discography section of "Hanky Panky" I guess every fan has been waiting for its release. I read that it was too experimental for Sony. But why didn’t you release it on the new label?

MJ: Well, what happened was Sony heard the demos of the album and they wouldn’t fund to finish it. So I put it to one side, the project, and I worked on "Naked Self". Now when I left Sony at the end of "Naked Self", I was between Sony and Universal, it was ten months when I was out of contract. So that’s when I went to my studio in London and I recorded and finished the entire album. But I’m actually putting it out on my own label. I’m forming my own record company. So I’m gonna release it sometime next year. It’s not mixed yet, but I realize there’s projects like that that I just want to do myself. The new label is still a major label and there’s certain restrictions with major labels. It’s more restrictive than it was years ago. You’re probably aware of how the industry is going. It’s very, very corporate and difficult to do certain things. So I feel I just do it myself. So I have two careers really, I have a major label career and an independent career.

DA: In the new discography section of "Naked Self" there’s more stuff to wonder about. "Spirits" suddenly crops up.

MJ: Yeah. Well, I tell you my first albums were actually… There was an album called "See Without Being Seen", which was even before "Spirits" (laughs), and it was when I was sixteen years old. ‘Cause at the age of fifteen I’d left school and I was working in a recording studio. When I was sixteen I made my first album, but I did it on cassette only. I used to sell it at shows. Bands like Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire, I’d go to their shows and I’d sell this little cassette album that I’d made. I had photocopied sleeves and everything. Out of that album an album called "Spirits" grew. At the time, of course, because I was training as an engineer in a recording studio and I got access to various studios, I put together a little home studio at my parents’ pub. So I was working all the time, a very fertile period for me. And the "Spirits" album, one of the tracks did come out. There was a label in Britain called Cherry Red. They were a contemporary label of 4AD and Rough Trade. They were around in the late 70s and the 80s. There was a compilation album that came out called "Perspectives And Distortion", and they took one of the tracks off of "Spirits" which was a track called "What Stanley Saw". But the rest of the album… I couldn’t get a deal at the time. I got turned down by every independent and every major label. So that got shelved. And I hadn’t thought about that album for years. Then I signed to 4AD and did "Burning Blue Soul".

DA: Which everyone thinks is the real first album?

MJ: Yeah, that’s the first one that was released. But in fact you could say it’s the third album really. But then there was another unreleased album. In between 4AD and signing to CBS I did an album called "The Pornography Of Despair", which was never mixed. It was virtually finished, but I was really working constantly in studios at the time, in studios all the time. I was kind of a workaholic, I was only a teenager then. And before I’d finished "The Pornography Of Despair" I started to write "Soul Mining". So I never put that out. I signed to CBS in 1982, I think I was twenty by then. Some of the demos of "The Pornography Of Despair" came out as B-Sides on CBS. But the album itself… I came across it a couple of years ago. I was clearing up storage space. I came across all the multi-tracks of "The Pornography Of Despair". I listened to some of the rough mixes and I thought it sounded great. So I’m actually gonna put that out on my own label as well, and "Spirits".

DA: So everything will come out, finally.

MJ: Yeah, and I probably won’t do a lot of promotion around it. I’ll just put it out, maybe just through my website. I thought I’d put everything out. ‘Cause the stuff sounds pretty good when I listen to it now. At the time, as I said, I was moving, evolving so fast, I was just leaving a lot of stuff behind. But going back to it now I think it sounds really, really strong.

DA: Well, we’re looking forward to that. For this year there’s another two albums pencilled in called "45 RPM Vol. I & II". Is this a sort of singles or B-Sides collection?

MJ: Yeah, this is A-Sides, actually. There’s two volumes. This will be from twenty years of singles, so there’ll be quite a few in there. And that’ll be with Epic Records or Sony, whatever you call them (laughs). I’m recording a couple of new tracks for that as well. I think that will come out at the end of this year or maybe at the very beginning of 2001.

DA: What about B-Sides. Do you think of ever releasing them as a collection?

MJ: Yeah, there’ll be a collection of B-Sides as well that will come along.

DA: Could you tell us your favourite B-Side?

MJ: My favourite B-Side of my own?

DA: Of your own and of anybody else’s.

MJ: My favourite B-Side of anybody else’s would be… there was a band called Lindisfarne, an English band of the 70s. They had an A-Side single called "Lady Eleanor", which is quite a famous hit, but the B-Side was called "Everything But The Marvellous Is Beautiful". I love that song. It’s absolutely fantastic. So that would be my favourite B-Side of someone else’s. My favourite B-Side of my own would be… there was an instrumental track I did in the 80s. It was called "Harbour Lights". I really like that, it was very cinematic and simple. It has a nice atmosphere to it. I was always very fond of that.

DA: Turning to "Naked Self", which sounds very raw – especially with those baritone guitars…

MJ: Yeah, no keyboards, samples or harmonica or no reverb as well, actually.

DA: How did that come about? Was that a conscious decision?

MJ: Yes, whenever I start an album I always make a lot of notes about where I’m going. It’s like setting off on a journey. I like to have a destination in mind. I don’t mind the route I take, but I like to have a good idea of where I want to go. So I write down exactly how I want the album to sound, the subject matter, what I’m trying to do. I made a decision to get rid of a lot of those instruments because I found the last ten or fifteen years a lot of music has started to sound the same. The reason is that people all use the same equipment. They use the same pre-sets and there’s not a lot of imagination going on. I decided to cut out a lot of the options. It’s a paradox really, but sometimes the more options you get the less creative you get. ‘Cause you just spend a lot of time going between one option and another and it becomes a very indecisive process. So I decided to set out these very simple and strict parameters and stay within them. It was gonna be a four-piece band, it was just gonna be these instruments, this equipment, these musicians – and within that format and within those parameters it forced me to be much more creative I think. I also went back to all the techniques I learnt when I was a teenager in a studio. It’s not that I don’t like digital. I think digital has its place. But I just think there’s a big rush to throw out the analogue. I think analogue and digital coexist very well. There’s some people that have a tendency to just want to forget all the old analogue processes and machinery and just go complete digital. And I’ve never really been a person for doing that.

DA: How did you get your new band together?

MJ: Well, Eric Schermerhorn joined the band for the Hank Williams project. So he’s worked with me now for probably five or six years and we’ve known each other about seven years. He was in the Iggy Pop band before he joined me. He played with Iggy for a few years. He lives in New York, so we became friends there. He was involved in this project from a very early stage, actually, in fact co-wrote some of the songs as well.

DA: There’s even three songs where he’s credited to the music alone, which you haven’t done before, have you? Except for one Johnny Marr collaboration ("Gravitate To Me" on "Mind Bomb").

MJ: No, in fact Johnny and myself didn’t really write as much as we should have done together. But Eric brought some ideas and I liked the stuff that he brought. So I decided to develop those ideas. And it gave him a lot of incentive, he was very committed to the project. So I felt it was fair to give him some kind of incentive and reward for his commitment. Then we work well together, our guitar styles mesh very well I think. And that’s important, to have a two guitar band where your styles dovetail. Our styles weren’t clashing, I think they work very well. And Spencer Campbell, the bass player, is very famous throughout Nashville. He played bass with a lot of famous people like Frank Sinatra and Kenny Rogers and Johnny Cash. So he has quite a reputation. He’s also a singer within his own right. Of course, I’d obviously heard about him for many years before I met him. But when we were in Nashville with the Hank Williams album he was disillusioned with the way the country music scene was going. It had become very commercial the past ten years. He felt uncomfortable with that. And he loved the Hank Williams album, so he sat in on some sessions we did, some TV shows, and he said he’d like to be part of the new album. So that’s how that came about. And Earl Harvin was also quite a famous musician from the late 70s, early 80s. He was a child prodigy and he played drums with a lot of famous people like Tony Bennett, Sly Stone and MC 900 ft Jesus. He’s an interesting guy because he had become a recluse. I think he went off to India for a while and no one heard of him, but MC 900 ft Jesus discovered him again in Dallas because he was playing in his own jazz band called The Earl Harvin Trio. And I heard him through MC 900 ft Jesus, the guy is just a phenomenal musician. So I was very, very excited to be able to get him into the band. I know a lot of people had tried and he hadn’t wanted to move out of Dallas for a long time for personal reasons. So that was a real coup for me to get Earl Harvin.

DA: Do you want to stick with those guys for the future?

MJ: They’re on the road with me, so we’ll see how it goes. I do like to collaborate with lots of different people. But I certainly really enjoy in this band working with them. They’re good guys, they’re professional, they’re talented, they’ve got a good sense of humour. So I’d like it to continue for certainly as long as we all want to do it.

DA: When you write third person lyrics such as on "The Whisperers" or "December Sunlight", do you have any particular persons in mind that inspired you to write them?

MJ: Yes… (laughs).

DA: Okay, I won’t go into that any further. Do you think that New York is a greater city of even greater solitude than London?

MJ: Well, I’d say they’re sort of equal in my mind. Obviously being a Londoner I have very deep affection for London and always will do. There are lots of similarities between the two cities, but when I first went to New York when I was a twenty year old I also felt very comfortable there, very much at home. In some ways I’d say London for me is a greater city of great solitude because it’s my home city. It’s inexplicable that I should feel alienation there. That’s what makes it strange. In spite of the fact that New Yorkers have a reputation for not being friendly, I’d say that New York is a much friendlier city than London. Londoners and English people can be a bit reserved and cold. I find London has an underlying aggression now that it didn’t use to have for some reason. Like I said I do have a deep affection for the place, but I sort of feel quite alienated.

DA: I was there recently and I just found the traffic really aggressive.

MJ: Oh, it’s unbearable. It’s rush hour twenty-four hours a day, basically. It’s really bad. They’ve really got to invest in public transport to get people off the roads. It’s too much. And that creates a hell of a lot of stress and tension within people. It’s quite an aggressive country, Britain. It’s quite an aggressive personality trait generally I find within British people. So that’s probably why I wanted to get away. The quiet life of New York (laughs).

DA: Some of your lyrics like "Voidy Numbness" or "Twilight Of A Champion" off "Infected" remind me of a book called "Money" by Martin Amis.

MJ: I never read that book. I should read it.

DA: You should, it’s really good. The similarities I think are in that there are characters who realise that drink or pornography and consumerism in general ultimately fail to suppress a feeling of loneliness and spiritual emptiness.

MJ: Yeah, I should read it. I will do. I’ll check it out.

DA: "Swine Fever" deals with shopping addiction.

MJ: Oh yeah.

DA: Do you feel that nowadays Western societies are even more consumerist and materialistic than in the 80s?

MJ: Yes, it’s funny because people thought that the 80s were the peak of that. I’d say it was just really kicking in then. That was like the beginning of a twenty year or so period, I would say. I mean even on a corporate level these mergers are getting bigger and more aggressive. That was a real symptom of the 80s, the merger mania. But it carried on through the 90s and has got even bigger. Just the aggression of advertisers now is incredible, whether you’re on the internet or you get this junk mail through. You walk out the door and there’s billboards bombarding you with commercials. Just to cut through people’s numbness I suppose they’ve just got to keep notching it up a level. So it becomes incredibly aggressive and day to day life is utterly saturated with advertising. It’s hard to get away from it.

DA: Have you seen "Futurama"?

MJ: No, what is that?

That’s a new cartoon from the creator of "The Simpsons".

MJ: Oh, really?

DA: It takes place in the future, in the year 3000, and there’s a brilliant scene where there’s even advertising in your dreams. People dream and suddenly they dream adverts, or even if they have a dream of their own at the end it says "sponsored by so and so" in their dreams. It just takes it one step further.

MJ: Ah, that’s funny. Yeah, I’m sure it’s all on the way. I’d say the most important thing for the future of democracy would be to really bring corporations under control, to cut them down in size and to start taxing advertisers. I think it’s got out of control.

DA: In Germany there’s also real peer group pressure among school kids to wear certain kind of clothes. If you don’t wear the right brand you become an outsider.

MJ: Oh yeah, it’s the same in America. That’s the problem, peer pressure.

DA: Since "Dusk", your last album proper, was released there’s been happening a lot in popular music from Britpop to drum&bass…

MJ: And Grunge, of course.

DA: Well, that was even before "Dusk". Did you follow any of that and what kind of contemporary music do you listen to at the moment?

MJ: I didn’t follow any of that and I don’t really listen to contemporary music. I like to listen to short-wave radio and obscure broadcasts. I like to listen to Korean music or Cuban music or Chinese music on short-wave radio. I’m a big fan of short-wave. It’s a dying world, I suppose, because of the internet, but I have a collection of short-wave radios that I really enjoy listening to.

DA: On some of the tracks on the new album the drum sounds are very industrial. Is there an industrial influence especially as you are on Trent Reznor’s label (of Nine Inch Nails)?

MJ: No, I don’t like that term ‘industrial’. If you listen to my earlier albums going back to like "Burning Blue Soul", that was quite industrial sounding, I suppose. If there is any industrial influence it would go back to the early Throbbing Gristle stuff. That’s the only stuff that I really was into and really liked. The late 70s post punk industrial groups were an influence of mine, but certainly none of that industrial music since has really affected me.

DA: So it’s more like going back to your own roots.

MJ: Yeah.

DA: Tell us about the single releases.

MJ: "Shrunken Man" will be the first one. That’s an EP. Instead of doing a remix what we decided to do was to get other artists that I admired to do cover versions of the same song. And we got Foetus, DAAU and John Parish on the first one. It’s a fantastic EP. I’m really happy with the way that it sounds. It’s amazing, they’re all completely different interpretations, they all take different aspects of the song. I think they’ve all done a fantastic job, I’m really proud of that.

DA: And the second single?

MJ: Second single is… we’re not sure yet, actually. Could be "Global Eyes" or "December Sunlight".

DA: My favourites at the moment are "The Whisperers" and "Phantom Walls". They’re really beautiful.

MJ: Oh yeah? Thank you. I really like those songs. Do you think they’d be good singles?

DA: “The Whisperers" certainly, "Phantom Walls" not, not as a single.

MJ: Yeah, maybe "The Whisperers".

DA: Well, it’s been nice talking to you Matt.

MJ: It’s been nice speaking with you too, Dot. Thanks. Bye bye.