“In the seventies you had people that were the pop stars of the period like Elvis Costello, The Jam or The Clash and their subject matter was heavy and now it seeems like a lot of people aren’t saying anything that makes any real difference to me.”
“In the seventies you had people that were the pop stars of the period like Elvis Costello, The Jam or The Clash and their subject matter was heavy and now it seeems like a lot of people aren’t saying anything that makes any real difference to me.”
Our very own Tiffany Davenport speaks to Radio 4
I spoke with Radio 4’s Anthony Roman on February 15, an hour before they played Amsterdam’s legendary Melkweg. We spoke about the re-mix of their single Stealing of a Nation – by Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and Mad Professor, the new sound on their latest CD, and why his contemporaries don’t seem to talk the talk when they walk the walk.
TD: How did the Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry remix come about?
A: The label asked us 6 months ago if we wanted him to remix Nation and we wanted it, but we didn’t expect it would ever happen.
TD: Were you a big fan of his?
A: Yeah, huge. Two months later a mp-3 of it showed up in our e-mails. It comes out next week in England and France. Part of this tour is to promote this single coming out. It’s Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and Mad Profesor, two people I’ve listened to for quite some time… I’ve even named my cat after Lee.
TD: But you didn’t get to meet him yourself?
A: No, I think with someone like him you’re lucky enough for it to be happening, let alone try to go to the studio.
TD: You guys get a lot of people doing remixes of your music. How does that come about? Do you approach them or do they approach your record company?
A: Generally when we make a record we come up with a short list of people we’d like to see if they want to do a remix. Other times we’ll get offers from people we didn’t even think of sometimes didn’t even know of. We’ve been pretty lucky because a lot of the people we wanted to a remix have offered to do one. There’s still a couple we didn’t get to but we’ll get them.
TD: Like who?
A: I’d like to get Bassment Jaxx to do one and we’re on the same label so I don’t see why it can’t happen.
TD: Max Heyes did a lot of work with Paul Weller, Ocean Colour Scene, Colleen Anderson and that whole Mod scene in the UK. So I thought he was a strange pick for Radio 4. Why did you guys choose him to produce Stealing of a Nation?
A: Well, he’s also produced The Doves and Primal Scream.
He approached us because he’d seen us at The Glastonbury Festival and he was really passionate about working with us and that accounts for more than their resume. He was really excited about doing it and he worked very hard.
TD: How is his signature on it? What can you say that he got out of you all?
A: Some of the things that are a bit more accessible came from him. We tend to be more disjointed and jagged and he smoothed out some of those edges which maybe isn’t the best thing in the world. He has more of an ear for radio and he’s worked on big records. We consider ourselves more like a punk band and I don’t know if that’s his thing. Some of the stuff he’s done for us like the way he mixed Absolute Affirmation made it a much bigger song that what we ever imagined it to be. And it’s got a fair ammount of commercial radio play in the States. And I don’t think any of that would have happened had he not worked on it.
TD: Yeah, there was a lot more melody on Stealing of a Nation.
A: Conceptually, the idea for the record was to try and make dance music that had songs rather than dance music that was a repeating riff with some chanty vocal. So we purposely tried to write songs with a verse and a chorus that were a bit more melodic and still keep the political thing and the dance thing, but have real songs. I like Gotham a lot and I like it’s energy. In some ways it’s short on songs. Nation has a lot of good songs but it doesn’t have quite the energy of Gotham.
The next record will bring the two together. It’s a process. You always try to do these different things and then you can look back and say that works for us and that doesn’t. I kind of like the mentality of people in the sixties and the seventies when people put out records at least once a year. Now it’s like, “Our album is coming out and for the next two years that’s all we’ll think about!”. That’s the way the record industry works currently but The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Clash and The Talking Heads would put out records at a much rapid pace and they were still touring and obviously having tremendous success. I don’t understand why the record company tells you to wait to put a record out. I think between Gotham and Stealing of a Nation there was a period of the band that was not documented of the way the band was sounding because of the gap between the two.
TD: Are you already writing for the next cd?
A: Yea, we’re playing a new song tonight.
TD: The last time I interviewed you it was just before the 2004 presidential election and we spoke a lot about politics. How do you feel about everything now and are you putting that into the new cd?
A: We don’t have that many lryrics yet but I’m sure we’ll touch on similiar things like we talked about in the past. I kind of feel like America’s in a worse position than it was previously. We all wanted a different outcome from the election and a lot of people want to give up but I’m saying you gotta stay in there and fight for what’s needed.
TD: Did you guys ever get any backlash to your lyrics?
A: No. The only thing is that sometimes the record got criticized for being negative but we were just trying to be honest about what we saw. So if that can be percieved as negative then there isn’t much we could do about it.
TD: Are there any other bands out there doing a similiar thing?
Lyrically?
A: May be Ted Leo but he seems to write about politics in a different way than we do. I would think that there would be more. I think one of the things that’s weird is that a lot of bands say they’re influenced by Gang of Four and The Slits and stuff like that. There was a social agenda to that music. It was very political and topical and its seems like now people are referencing that period musically but not adressing things lyrically. In the seventies you had people that were the pop stars of the period like Elvis Costello, The Jam or The Clash and their subject matter was heavy and now it seeems like a lot of people aren’t saying anything that makes any real difference to me.
People should be able to do what they want, they shouldn’t be political because they think they’re supposed to but it does seem odd that you could live in America in 2004/05 and not touch on some of those things because they are so much a part of your day and what you do. Politics affect you even when you think they don’t. For the most part the bands that come out of the dance/punk world that we’re associated with don’t seem to address those issues.
TD: Maybe by the end of this term they will be.
A: Maybe, you would think at least… yeah.
Interview : Tiffany Davenport
Photograph: courtesy of Michael Lavine – www.r4ny.com