DO YOU THINK RELIGION MAY BE IMPORTANT INSPIRATION FOR MUSIC?

Deeply. I think most music came from religion anyway. Not the kind of religion that we think about now, but the original religion. It was a celebration of life forces.

DO YOU SEE YOURSELVES AS A MUSICIAN?

I used to be a classical guitar teacher. When I was twelve years old I was one of those horrible children that you want to strangle because they learn to play an instrument very early in life. I gave it up because I was sick of playing other people's music and I wanted to write my own, so I thought I would do something that nobody else does.

If you call yourself a musician then you're limiting yourself to a certain frame or reference. Music has absolutely nothing to do with how the notes are put together, that's not important. Music is absolutely not important not important at all — it's telling a story and the story is the important thing. In fact, people don't even want to hear the music, they want to hear the story. They don't want to hear the person, that's not important and that's what we in the West have, this 'personality complex' — 'the person that made this is more important than the thing itself'. The person should really disappear, and when the person can tell the story, or play the music, they can disappear. Then the people who listen can also disappear. And then time stands still.

DOES YOUR MUSIC TELL STORIES?

Sure.

WHAT KIND OF STORIES?

Well, you see, then I'd have to tell you the story. I mean, it's this whole thing of 'explanationism', as when you have to explain something then what you do is kind of kill it. Because, if I say in words what the story was, then why would I have made the record? I could just as easily tell it in words. So, I'm doing something that I can't say in words. If I could explain it then I wouldn't be able to do it. Right, that's very clear..?

DOES LIFE INFLUENCE THE MUSIC?

How can it? How can it not?

I never really understood why people say, "Oh what great weather we have today!" I mean it's not great weather, it's not bad weather. It's just weather. The weather doesn't care whether it's raining or sunshining... We place these judgements on things and they don't have anything to do with reality whatsoever. I mean, if you live in Manchester where it rains all the time and when the sun shines it's, "Yeah!", then that's good weather. But, it's all relative, and the same is with music. There is no good and bad music. There is music that can be functional, or can work with you, or will inspire you, and somebody else will think it's bad music because it doesn't mesh with their idea patterns. It has nothing to do whether the music is good or not. We impose a certain idea structure onto it. There is no good and bad music, just music.

WHAT IS TRUE MUSIC FOR YOU?

It doesn't really exist. What is that?

It doesn't exist until we interpret it. Until we interpret it, it literally isn't there. It's like the old Zen thing, like, if a tree falls down in a forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound? That's why explaining things only leads to further explanations. It just goes on and on, because it's just ideas and that's a barrier between ourselves and what we call the 'outside world'.

DO YOU OFTEN LISTEN TO YOUR OWN MUSIC?

Not if I can help it! When you're making it you get excited. and then later when it's released you have this 'thing' in your hand. It looks nice, but I mean, it's dead. You can't change it anymore, it's not growing anymore for you. It can grow with someone else, or someone will buy it and that would trigger things off, but when you've done it, it's over. In a way, it's a poor substitute for having children. You send these pieces of yourself out into the world and they go and do your work, but you have no idea how anyone else is going to react to it. You have no idea how people will care for it, you just have to hope for the best. You have no control over it, it's not yours anymore. But, why would I want to listen to it? The experience of making it was the most important part. The same as any creative act, the most important part is doing it. It's not the result that's important. The process of making and living it is most important.

HOW DID YOU COME ABOUT MAKING MUSIC?

God visited me in my bedroom in Newcastle and he said, "YOU WILL MAKE RECORDS THAT SOUND LIKE CARS GOING PAST THE WINDOW".

I don't know, why does anybody do anything? You make up the reasons afterwards. Because it turns you on. It gets the electricity flowing. Who knows?

The reason that most contemporary music is so incredibly boring is that people are more concerned with the machinery and method': of doing it and not actually concerned about the feeling. Anybody who wants to test this theory has to go to what they call a concert of Contemporary Twentieth Century Music! Especially with electronics. What you do is watch all the blinking lights and hear very ordinary computer sounds. Everybody sits there and is bored stiff, their ass gets really really tired from sitting on these wooden chairs for three and a half hours listening to something going beep... beep... beep. Nobody is interested in it, but they pretend to be.

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THE ATTITUDE OF THE PUBLIC IN BRITAIN AND IN CONTINENTAL EUROPE?

I haven't lived in England for nearly seven years. But it's different everywhere. For example, people in Amsterdam are very bored. You know, they have seen everything, done everything... Been everywhere. "Oh you're gonna make a machine that kills people? Sure, off you go..."

You can really surprise people in Scandinavia. The cowboy audience is really good. Tennessee has one of the best audiences. Any wonderful musicians out there, go to Tennessee. Knoxville, Memphis, Nashville, they arc great audiences. We played our stuff in Knoxville and everybody went YYYAAARGHHH! Off you go, get your tickets booked now. You'll have a whale of a time I tell you.

WAS THE TRILOGY OF MASTURBATORIUM, FUCK AND.... PRE-MEDITATED?

No, it was not pre-mediated. It's turning into a trilogy. A trilogy in three parts, as Tony Hancock used to say! There is a woman called Annie Sprinkle, who calls herself a Post- Porn Modernist For twenty years she was a porn star and prostitute. She has done everything that God has forbidden, except with animals and children! She came to Amsterdam to do her one-woman show, in which she tells her life story basically. The first half is more or less her life as a prostitute and sex-star and then the second half is more of a new thinking... She calls herself a 'Sexual Evolutionarian', which is based on more ancient sexual techniques such as Tantra or, ancient Chinese Tacist forms of sexuality, which are so completely opposed to the Western forms of sexuality that people at First laugh at because they don't believe it. You know, people having orgasms for six hours and stuff like that..., which is actually perfectly possible. And she explains all that, and at the end she does a sort of masturbation ritual. Hmm, she basically makes love to the audience. When she came to Amsterdam she had this dreadful soundtrack made by this guy in New York, and I said "I can make you a better one", so I played her some of my records and she was really kind of "Wow. Yeah, great, great". So I put this thing together. We had the first rough version and the second time she did the show was in Hamburg and I did a new version for that, and it gradually evolved that way. And then I thought we should do a male version... (I should explain that Masturbatorium was mainly made out of her own sexual sounds — it was one of the strangest jobs I ever had!) So, I locked myself in a room with a microphone and tape recorder, and made a lot of... sexual sounds! Then of course the next part would be to do a heterosexual version.

A lot of people in the whole of Europe are very much ready for this, because there's a whole new way of thinking about sexuality. You know the average length of sexual intercourse in America is two minutes. TWO MINUTES, imagine that! Basically, the western sexual reflex has become a nice metaphor for like blowing a balloon... Tension, tension, tension and you take a pin and you go POP. Then all the energy disappears. So, the time is actually right for introducing these sort of ideas again. It's pretty good for men and women. The gay side somebody else has got to investigate, but I've known theories about that as well!

MOST OF YOUR WORK DEALS WITH NOISE, I THINK YOU WOULD AGREE?

You are wrong. Sound.

As far as I'm concerned I have a similar sort of altitude to Islamic people, who regard taking photographs as stealing part of somebody's soul. And I think the same thing is true for making sound recordings. I think you have to be very careful when you start mixing them together. When you take a sound recording of someone on the street and you don't know that person, you're dealing with all sorts of influences and feelings. If you mix it with something of your own, then it's a bit like sympathetic magic. You make a connection between that person and yourself let's say. So, now I'm very careful that nearly all the stuff that I use is all under my control, and I know what the feelings — if you know what the feelings that are involved you can mix those together in some sort of way. The Dutch have some great words for this sort of stuff, but you can send it out.., like a radio. A radio is a good metaphor. When you buy a radio, you don't want to hear the radio when you listen to the radio — you want to hear the signals coming through. Nobody wants to hear KKRRRR! You paid a certain amount of money for it or whatever, it's nice to look at, but you don't think about the radio. What I'm interested in is music that does this. I'm not interested in the personality of the person who made it or the CD that it comes out of. I'm interested in the actual force of energy that comes through the active creation, the passing on of that energy. We are all connected on some level anyway, and that energy goes through everything. To pass that energy on more and more purely, without interference is what I'm interested in. That I think is what all really great writers and musicians were all in touch with, whether they gave it other words or other theories, or whatever. Those are the people who really communicate, because they stand aside and say: "this is a force which is actually greater than I am, and I am just a receiver and transmitter of this energy". All the people I really admire (or have admired) are good at doing this, who will just let it come through them.

WELL, WE'VE JUST ABOUT FINISHED THIS INTERESTING CHAT...

No, we've not. There's another five hours of this. So, if you're out there listening — of course you are — and you're hanging onto every word and probably recording it all, so you can write it down and publish it in some sort of manuscript, then I'd advise you to... Turn the radio off!

OK. Toop... Poing... Ting.

Music From The Empty Quarter, #6, November 1992