THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE

JON CASIMIR - RAM - 1987 – Australia


The X–rated interview, based on The The – The Movie: in reality, Matt Johnson’s longform video of the Infected album…available soon at your local celluloid dream outlet.

HERE’S MATT……Deep in the underground gloom of the Sydney Sebel Town House carpark. Picked out by the glare of television lights. Slumped like the proverbial sack against the hood of a car, lean and wired under a black T-shirt that flaps restlessly against his frame.

Answer the question, Matt. You can see his brain move, shifting into interview mode. You want me to talk about the album? No problem. Just hit the auto-pilot. Five feet to his left, lecherous manager Stevo eyes the deeply tanned legs of MTV’s Joyce Smithers as they disappear into her barely decent skirt.

‘I want this to start with a shot up between her legs,’ he grins, completely aware that he’s annoying the crap out of everybody, ‘then pan across to where Matt’s standing, OK? I want ass in this!’ A quick flutter of the eyebrows and he’s away, attention drawn to the interview contract and the chance to make some nasty black pen marks.

Two hours after the start of a 20-minute interview, MTV are still relocating Matt.

‘Could you just stand there for a minute while we get the reaction shots?’

Here’s Matt…Running his fingers across a scalp that suggests far more than his actual years. Apologising for the state of his brain.

‘My mind is definitely going. I can’t remember words. I hope I don’t say things I’ve said before, but when you’ve done so many interviews it’s difficult not to repeat yourself…..

For six months now, Matt’s been relentlessly pounded with the same questions about his album and video. He gave up counting interviews when the number passed 600. Think about it – that’s more than four a day. He’s starting to fray at the edges, and he knows it. Last time he felt like this was after Soul Mining…scary.

Somewhere back there he had a physical breakdown, and actually lost his sight for a while. It’s fast coming time to shake free of this Infected whirlpool and pick up where his life is. Vigorous promotion is one thing, but sanity is another. As a man who never puts less than a hundred percent into anything, Matt knows something will have to snap soon.



Here’s Matt….Basking in autumn sunshine in the courtyard of a King’s Cross café with writer and editor, the pale Englishman complaining like the publican’s son he is that you can’t get a decent vodka and tonic in Australia. Losing interest mid-sentence to go into hormonal orbit over the abundance of flesh that’s taunted him since he stepped of the plane.

‘There’s so many great women in Sydney,’ he moans. ‘It’s one of the best cities for women I’ve seen. Montreal is great, Paris and New York are alright, but this is superb! They look so slim, fit and brown. With all those skimpy clothes on – it drives me crazy!’

He changes direction. Is there any oil in Australia? he wonders out loud. Are we dominated by our commodities market? Drifting off into space, his brain alights on a passing tangent, and ropes us into it with a glint in his eye.

‘Sheep farming?’

No, we say. That’s New Zealand. Matt grins, a kind of mischievous crease of his face, then swaps it suddenly for a serious expression.

‘They fuck them over there, don’t they? They do in the Falklands. They wear those knee-length Wellington boots. Have you heard of that? Is that true? Isn’t the sheep’s vagina similar to a woman’s vagina?

He sits back and waits for a reaction.

Here’s Matt….Aside from the mutton fetish, a ‘womaniser, a charmer and a man of the world,’ as he recently put it. A rock and roll animal. One of the last in captivity. It surprises people. It seems odd that someone who writes such jagged, inspirational songs should be afflicted by the base. But Matt has lived those songs of open heart surgery and destructive desire. And just because he’s sung about them doesn’t mean he’s got them out of his system. ‘I never said I was the man I appeared to be…’

Indeed, for the few days he’s been drinking and carousing, cavorting through the brothels, ostensibly in search of a good location to do an interview for The Noise – who have bizarrely consented to the seamy idea.

‘Did you hear about that? Matt chuckles – news travels fast. ‘It was funny actually. We went to a few of those places. We went to the Biggest Bed in Australia.

Have you seen that? It weren’t that big really. We had these hookers taking us around – they were in a real state. They looked like real junkies. They’ve got a turbo tub, spa bath and a rubber room too.

‘We ended up filming in the World Famous Love Machine. It’s so tacky. We had to scrape the sperm off the seats. There was this great track playing when we went in. I asked them what it was, but they didn’t know. It was all this heavy breathing with a great bassline. I was walking up the stairs past all that tacky red velvet. There was a hooker on each landing, just leaning against the wall. It was like a scene out of a thriller film. That was what I wanted, but we couldn’t use it because the owner wanted to know what was in it for him.

‘Then there was the little room where we did the interview. There were about five rows of four seats, red plastic, all kind of ripped up. It was so sad, so disgusting…’

He trails off, simultaneously repelled and attracted by the thought. There is, however, a point to doing the interview in a brothel. One of the more powerful songs from Infected, ‘Out Of The Blue (Into The Fire)’ deals directly with the sort of weakness and desire that leads a man into the arms of a prostitute. The accompanying video, set in a brothel in Harlem, only adds wide-eyed dynamic to the gripping song.

‘That was strange. It wasn’t the tacky red velvet in Harlem. It was actually sort of tiled and functional. The toilet had the window blacked out. I meant to carve ‘The The’ into it but I forgot.

‘It gets to the point through where you start glamorising the sleaze. I’m getting a bit tired of that. I used to work in Soho when I was 15. I used to be propositioned all the time. The whores used to try to get me to mess around. I was delivering a tape once and this grabbed me and said ‘I’ll give you 20 quid to star in a porno film.’ I was quite intrigued at that age by what went on behind closed doors, but it does get to the point where you’re glamorising it. It’s like people masturbating in their own excrement.’

Such scatological fascination of often a Catholic preoccupation, but Matt has no experience of that in his upbringing. His songs are obsessed with the shades of light and dark, the saint and the sinner in all of us, the way we live by standards we know we can’t reach. He’s never even read the bible, but his songs drip with the imagery of sin – the strong iconography of it so compelling to him.

‘Maybe it proves that there is some kind of inherent God-fearing thing in humans. I wanted to do it for those tracks, to do the video in the most authentic place possible, so it was hanging out in Harlem. Harlem is a great area though. It’s so lively.

‘It’s still dangerous for whites. There are a lot of crack gangs hanging around, but there was another gang which was really friendly to us. They almost stood around us. I’m a real boxing fan, so I was chatting to them about that and they must have thought we were cool. They’re curious too. They see cameras and gravitate towards them.

‘I’ve always said I wouldn’t like to wander round Harlem on my own, but I did actually walk back once because some cunt on the film crew left me and the producer there. He said there was no room left in the van. That was a bit worrying. It’s like with animals though. A friend of mine’s got a massive Dalmatian, and it really hates me. I get really nervous because it’s so big, and it senses that. My girlfriend’s fine with it. With me, it senses the fear. It’s the same in places like Harlem. You have to look as if you know where you’re going, as if you’re the mugger and not the victim.’

Here’s Matt….Video-maker extraordinaire, off and rambling about the five-week jaunt he spent shooting footage for the eight clips that accompany the Infected album – all of which have been collected and spliced to make a home video, available shortly.

When he wasn’t in New York or London he was in Peru or Bolivia with four directors in tow, looking for the buzz, the footage with that perfect mix of surreal colour and inherent danger. But South America he maintains, is not as threatening as North America…

‘The people down there are purer, less likely to do anything to you, although there are areas where the West meets the Third World, like Tijuana. It’s a real gross place. Have you ever been there? It’s not representative of Mexico at all. The San Diego Military Academy is nearby, so there are all these Top Gun extras walking around, throwing money to the locals. It’s so disgusting.

‘Then there are the bars, full of fat Mexican whores. You’ll be sitting there and they’ll come up and sit on your knee and start rubbing your balls. It was quite a laugh in a way. You don’t have to pay anything…..Those areas are similar to the Bronx and Harlem, volatile areas.

‘In Bolivia, you’ve got the 11 year old virgins you can buy for 5 dollars. We bought tons of them. They were falling all over the hotel. No, that’s a slight exaggeration. They were 16. I say 11 because I think it offends people, but nobody has ever been offended. People are unshockable now.’

Here’s Matt….A sheep in wolf’s clothing. Tired and drawn, but not above a little dig here and there. A little sparkle in the worn out orbs. It’s like a game to him. A spurious desire to offend, thrown with hook, line and sinker firmly attached. He’s testing you, offhandedly tossing something disgusting or brutal in your direction, daring you to swallow it. Genius or not, you take Matt with a grain of salt. So does he. Every time something likes this falls from his mouth, he chides himself sotto voce ‘Disgusting!’.

He is, it must be remembered, the man who tried to put his brother Andy’s painting of the devil masturbating on a record cover.

‘It’s such a great image! There’s a funny story behind it – I was looking through my brother’s work trying to find a good sleeve for Infected. He’s got tons of work around. I saw that one and said ‘Oh, that’ll be so fucking great! This is the most horrific thing I could imagine!’ He was wearing a little rubber washing-up glove. I thought, ‘This is so disgusting I’ve gotta use it’. It would have been the album sleeve if I could have got away with it.

‘He did it, but the funniest thing was that when he was doing it in his studio at the back of my parents pub, my Mum kept coming up and watching him and going ‘That’s disgusting!, and then going away again. He finally said, ‘Well if you hate it so much whey do you keep looking at it? She was drawn to that…Actually, I modelled for that one myself.’


Here’s Matt…The man who took video by the scruff of the neck, poured a few chemicals down its throat and shook it until it turned into artform. The man who elevated the status of the medium to a new high, who put his head down and explored its artistic and creative potentials – all the time remaining aware that it had to sell the record.

‘I was to an extent, but no more than when I’m writing songs. It just so happens that me and Jim (Foetus) are often compared, but I’m more commercial than Jim. I’m doing as much what I want to do as he is, but his tastes are less commercial. If it were the other way around, he would be sitting here and I would be sitting in my loft in New York getting depressed.

‘Visually, I did pretty much everything I wanted to do.. There were certain scenes that maybe I did tone down. I was going to have a simulated sex scene in a brothel, but I toned that down because of my own shyness. Being in front of the camera, surrounded by 15 people, with this girl I’d never met before…she was a go-go dancer with the Beastie Boys! They kicked her out. They claimed that she gave them all the clap and she says they gave her clap.

‘Also, it’s not good my stuff getting banned. A lot of it did get banned, but I wanted to get as far as I could within the censorship parameters, and Tim Pope’s philosophy is that suggestion is more important anyway. You can see gratuitous violence just by hiring a cheap video. To suggest it is more powerful.

‘But there were certainly no commercial reasons for toning it down…People objected to the gun in my mouth too. They found that offensive.’

Ah yes! The famous sweaty-faced gun in the mouth scene from Twilight Of A Champion, the interesting thing about which was not so much the image as the fact that the gun was both real and loaded at the time of insertion. Matt apparently feels you have to live out your songs….

‘Oh yeah, it was a real gun. How did you know it was loaded?

‘I talked about this thing called method songwriting once as a joke, and I’ve had it held against me ever since. It was quite funny, that. I do believe it in a way. And everything is quite autobiographical, apart from Sweet Bird Of Truth – I’ve never flown a plane above Arabia….

‘But going back to method songwriting, I think it’s got to the situation where you give yourself artistic licence to be a bastard – to do certain things which are offensive and hurt people close to me, which I don’t like doing. Now I’m starting to grow out of that, like the fascination with sleaze. Glamorising it for its own sake is beginning to wear off.

‘I still find it (sleaze) fascinating, because I think most people are total perverts anyway. The reason I like those kind of places, brothels, is because it’s the only time people are being truthful. They’re overwhelmed with their own desires.’

Hence the ‘regular Western guy with desires that can’t be satisfied?’

‘That’s one of the key lyrics on the album. I think there’s a deep spiritual hunger which makes a lot of people dissatisfied. That’s why there’s a lot of restlessness. Some people turn to smack, some get obsessed with their careers. For me, music is the outlet.’

The other thing that’s offended people is perceived sexism in the clip for Slow Train To Dawn, a duet which features Neneh Cherry tied to the railway tracks, nipples skyward, steamtrain blasting its way towards he open legs. The song itself is predominantly about male weakness, so the accusation comes as something of a surprise.

‘Neneh loved being tied down to the tracks….’

‘Actually we had to keep tweaking her nipples to keep them erect.’

Somewhat like the way Hollywood starlets had an assistant off-camera to rub ice on them between takes?

‘Oh really?! We were doing it with cold wine…But look, I’m not here to idealise about women, or anything for that matter.’

Here’s Matt…Staring fixedly at the campy waiter, trying to explain that his raw tuna looks more like raw girl. Having no Stolichnaya was one thing, but you promised the tuna would be like sushimi…

Here’s Matt…The man who puts references to other songs in his work, like Ghost Town in Perfect and Pills And Soap in Flesh And Bones. He can’t resist doing it in the videos either. Witness the cheeky Springsteen parody at the end of Heartland…

At the beginning of Mercy Beat too, it’s got the T.S.Eliot book – the one Marlon Brando read from in Apocalypse Now. Apart from that, well…there were things in the Heartland video. I chose the pictures very carefully. There are a lot of references in those.

‘At the beginning of Sweet Bird Of Truth, you’ve got the picture of Christ which symbolises the beginning of the Aquarian Age, and the fish dying which symbolises the end of the Piscean Age, which we’re about to experience. We go into the Aquarian Age after the bomb drops don’t we?

He chuckles low and long, then turns on us….

‘There’s a reference to the quality of cocaine down there (in South America) by the look on my face. Actually, it was pretty wild in Peru and Bolivia. It was five weeks – a couple in New York and then straight down. It was really intense work…..Every day, up at dawn. I really had my ass kicked. I was exhausted. The ones where I don’t look tired are when I was coked out of my head.’

Here’s Matt…..Moving up close to the wind. Wrestling with the thoughts decrepitude always brings. One video not even out yet and he’s not the next one, contemplating the possibilities.

‘What I intend to do next is make one major film, not eight small ones. I think I would be expected to find bizarre locations now, but I want it set entirely in Britain – with a totally different way of looking at it. You know Edward Hopper’s paintings? What I’d like to do is capture a similar atmosphere, but in modern-day Britain – because I see a parallel between what happened in America in the depression era and what is happening in Britain now. There are areas in Britain which are so beautiful and poignant. If you’ve got a day like this, which you occasionally get there….

‘When I wrote Heartland, the sky was like this, but the shadows were really dark and hard and cold. In Britain, a day like that has more meaning than it does here because you have so many of them. Everybody’s state of mind is affected. The place becomes almost bearable. A phrase I thought really summed up Britain was ‘a country that cannot forget its past and therefore cannot participate in the future’. We’re just being left further and further behind, hanging on to the wreckage….’

Here’s Matt….Interview winding down. Planes to catch. Bags to pack. Melbourne’s women blissfully unaware of his impending arrival. Downing the last of the unsophisticated local drop. Graciously putting pen to album cover for a friend of mine called Krip.

‘Is that your girlfriend?’

No.

‘Does she have nice breasts?’

As a matter of fact…..

Here’s Matt….I can tell. Scrawling something perverted, chuckling to himself on the other side of the table. He pauses, looks for a target. Time for one more tag game, and editor Phil is it.

‘Have you ever done that? Sucked on a pregnant girl’s breasts? Tasted mother’s milk?

Yeah sure…Phil hedges, playing along.

‘Jon must have done it’

No, actually I haven’t.

‘No, nor have I’.

Here’s Matt….Collapsing into hysterics, stopping mid-laugh to follow a train. In for an penny..

‘Pregnant women’, he muses. ‘What’s the latest in her pregnancy you’ve slept with a woman, Phil?’

Seven months.

‘Yeah’, Matt beams wildly, on a roll. ‘I fucked a girl who was nine and a half months, and I could feel the baby’s head. It grabbed the end of my prick. I pulled it out and the baby was stuck around it, going berserk. That’s how I met Stevo….’

How am I going to get this into print Matt?

‘I think you should. I come across too serious all the time. I think you should make it really disgusting. No references to me being unfaithful, though. I’ll get told off.’

That’s Matt.

All over.