Interview by Jason Gross
PSF (Perfect Sound Forever): Before Henry Cow or Cambridge, were you
studying music or in any bands or have any active interest in music?
No I never studied music, but like so many I was in bands at school from
the age of about 14. I messed about with the Banjo, Guitar, Trumpet,
Flute and finally settled for the drums (because I wanted to be in a
band and everyone else played the guitar). So I did a lot of
Shadows/Ventures style instrumental music, then standard 'dance' stuff
(a lot of chuck Berry, hit parade & party music!). I was in a Soul band
for a while and then an R&B group. Round 65 I was in a group that slowly
became stranger and stranger and ended up sounding like Soft
machine/Barrett Floyd at the same time that these groups emerged
(similar history), so then we played at the psychedelic clubs. After
that I formed the Ottawa Music Co. (a rock composers orchestra) with
Dave Stewart (egg) and finally joined Henry Cow.
PSF: What was the original idea behind Henry Cow?
That's a question for an original member - I joined later, but I
understand there was a mixture of stuff - a lot of Bonzo Dog type humour
and experimental music combined. But ask Fred of Tim. I think usually
the main idea is to be in a band...
PSF: Did anyone in H. Cow have exp with the record industry?
No.
PSF: Why did you decide straight away to oppose traditional ways of
working as a band?
I'm not sure we did, although just being in a band was soon not really
the point - we wanted to do something INTERESTING. I think that was the
point for us - all. The going against was in order to get somewhere we
felt worth getting to - and I think we worked very much as a group all
along, sometimes to the point where it strained our personal relations.
We had regular minuted meetings, delegated responsibilities, ran the
whole machine of the group on a no majority (unanimity only) rule on
decision making - including musical decision making. Even compositions
brought to the group were provisional; anyone could propose changes,
cuts and so on, so that the eventual shape of a piece would be what we
ALL agreed about. This can be hard on the composer, and on the
equilibrium of the group. It can even be counter productive. Going
against the industry structures on the other hand, was simple
self-preservation.
PSF: How did this manifest itself?
We had our own PA system, lights and a Bus for us (with kitchen
equipment and bunks for sleeping) and a Lorry for all the equipment. So
we were completely self contained. Then we organised all our own
administrative affairs, tours and finances and acted as our own
management and agency. All the money that came to the group we spent
according to unanimous decisions made at meetings - on necessities (like
repairs). We didn't pay ourselves until the last two years, and then the
amounts were symbolic. Eventually we even released our own records,
becoming to all intents and purposes completely dislocated from the
usual support networks and exploitation machines.
PSF: Where there any repercussions for Cow's political stance? Town
councils, promoters, distributors?
Only positive ones - we toured Italy regularly at a time no other groups
could get there, organised by the PCI and the Partito Radicale. They
liked our politics. I can't remember a time we were refused anything
because of them.
PSF: From the Rock In Oppostion (RIO) declaration, 'Henry Cow, virtual
exiles from their own country for 5 years drew the bulk of their rapport
& sustenance from Europe where audiences & organisers alike showed
interest & generosity' Could you expand on this?
Not really - we toured continually on the mainland of Europe where there
were people willing to promote concerts for us, and to attend them. No
one in England could be bothered, so we more or less never played here.
We toured around, effectively living on the mainland for months at a
time, just visiting England now and then between times - usually to
rehearse new material.
PSF: Did you feel distant from your own country then, like exiles?
I don't think we felt like exiles (as if we MISSED something) but rather
we felt like EUROPEANS. But you'd have to ask the others too. I don't
remember having negative feelings, or thinking that England was
specially important. We were glad to travel and to be where we were
wanted.
PSF: Also from RIO... 'The music industry makes all its decisions on the
basis of Profit & Prestige... they have ears only for the rustling of
money, hearts which only pump with the blood of murdered.' Do you think
the climate within the industry is any different today? If not, what's
needed to better the situation?
If not the same, worse - big companies don't take anyone on for musical
reasons; music is an investment which has to pay back with interest.
Nothing is needed to better the situation - who WANTS the industry to
have anything to do with our work? Better they keep their sticky hands
off. I think we can look after ourselves best. In the satellite economy
we are able more or less to control without too much compromise.
PSF: What about independent labels? A number of them start small,
expand and then get bought out by major labels.
Some independents follow the money because they can, some never have the
chance, a few might refuse. I don't think there's a rule but power
tends to corrupt. That's a rule. The safest way not to be swallowed is
to be unpalatable I guess.
PSF: From RIO Requirements: (A) That of musical excellence. This
depending on their collective evaluation of the same. (well, who thinks
they're bad ?) (B) That of working actively outside the establishment of
music business.(mostly that's forced on you anyway) (C) That of having a
social commitment to Rock.
That's important still, but qualified and transformed as time has
passed. Rock has another meaning now; something to do with
electrification, rhythm, physical projection and reference to the
improvisational and performative values of music learned. through R & B,
soul rock and all the stages beyond. This doesn't preclude a, however, a
commitment to aspects of any other musics inasmuch as they enrich and
expand the language of what was formerly known as 'rock'. So our
commitment to Rock was informed by our commitment to improvisation,
electronic music, contemporary composition and so on. And Vice Versa.
PSF: Do you still maintain these ideals? Can you think of other
bands/labels that do this?
Essentially yes. I think an awful lot of people would recognise what
they do under these headings - though they are rather formally
expressed, in the manner of the times. Motive is one thing, qualitative
self-assessment another and historical evaluation something else again.
PSF: When the punk movement sprang up, did you feel that they were
suitablyanti-establishment (as Cow and RIO) or were they just co-opted?
There was something real happening on the ground, but what surfaced and
the way it surfaced was almost wholly and immediately coopted by a
failing record industry looking for new blood to suck and new markets to
create and exploit. Most 'punk' bands turned out to be middle class art
students. 'Oi' bands - who stayed 'punk' after the fashion faded- were
political fascists -that was too grim for the fresh out of college guys
in the music press who 'discovered' and hyped up Punk to contemplate by.
In other words: confusion. One the punks had kicked the door in the 'New
Wave' rapidly colonised the opened space. Underneath it all was a great
revolution of independent production and a head clearing attitude to
music - although not so much of this saw the commercial light of day.
Its good effects however are still with us, and this is it's important
legacy: the moves toward independence, sexual equality and stylistic
diversity. The Sex Pistols and other money hoovers had nothing at all to
do with this.
PSF: Devil's advocate question. Why is music your focus instead of
politics? Sometimes do you think it would make more sense to work with
a political party?
I'm a musician, sometimes a writer - it's what i do. I'm afraid all the
career political party people I have ever met are more or less
philistines. Can there be a decent society without Art? It is a
dimension party people seem always to miss or marginalise. I put it down
to lack of vision and lack of culture - and that's a bad model in my
book. So I stick to making things that speak to aesthetic and
imaginative questions, as well as political ones , where relevant.
Concentrating on the politicalis too one dimensional for me.
PSF: ReR Records has had low price packaging, high production, high
royalties, higher CD price. Has this been effective?
I'm not sure about that word. Effective in marketing terms? I didn't
really ever consider that. I just made the work as well as possible, so
that it would last. I don't quite see that our packaging is much
different from anyone else's - certainly not cheaper. And the CD's are
pretty average in price (except as exports of course but that's someone
else adding too much profit). We sell to distributors at a normal
price, same as any other CD. We sell our CD's direct for £11, which is
decidedly cheap. It's effective in the sense that I still like and can
stand by the work I have produced. In the end that is the only reason I
produce it.
PSF: ReR artists- Is there a common thread (Plastic People, John Oswald,
Slapp Happy, Faust, Cow, David Thomas, Univers Zero) other than the fact
that you worked with them- agit-pop aesthetic idea perhaps?
I didn't work with all these people, although I appreciate their work.
The thread, i suppose, is that none of us works in a vacuum - we are
contributing to a body of work, as if we constituted a loose community
of ideas. This means that we not only position ourselves within an
active community, identified by a musical tendency, but also help to
create that community and define that tendency. Artists on ReR are
selected by me, according to my personal assessment of how they
contribute to the vocabulary of music in general and to our area of
musical experiment in particular. I am not pretending to be right or
fair - I am just saying , well I like this, or I think it's important in
some way. It's my opinion and on the strength of that I recommend this
work. If I had to say more it would be that I think quality and
imagination are the most important qualities they all share.
PSF: Could you talk about your recent works with Zeena, and the Bach
trios you did with Rene Lussier and Jean Derome- it's interesting as you
seem to be taking on more classical approaches or sounds lately.
The Bach material is now about 10 years old and I'm not sure where the
classical approaches come with zeena (with whom I began working in the
late 70's) but I think you are right. Until recently my main concern
was with extending rock through complexity and new sonic resources, and
with introducing elements from other fields, as well as continuing to
experiment with song form and ex-nihil improvisation. Maybe because of
the rise of sampling and turntable-playing, the introduction of mediated
chunks of other material has become musically more interesting - because
it is now possible to 'play' them and not just run them in. Certainly
with my p53 project I had this aspect of real-time montaging in mind,
with both pianists using 'classical' pieces, and Marie acting
essentially as a human Sampler (with a flexibility and sensitivity that
a real Sdampler can't deploy) What fascinates me is how memory now
acquires a compositional power. To use recogniseable material because
of it's associations and recognisabilty is new to my practice, although
l did quite a lot of this, though in a very different context. I think
the work of people like Christian Marclay and Otomo Yoshihide has been
quietly important in developing this blatantly referential language in
way infinitely more subtle than simple pastiche. They play their
quotations.
PSF: What happened with the loss of money with RéR and the reformation
of RéR Megacorp?
This is a long story. In brief, Recommended was always a touch and go
project financially, and as we grew we lurched through various crises .
Also, as I'm a full-time musician, it means that i have to leave ReR 's
affairs in other people's hands a lot. For a long time this didn't make
for stability. At a certain point, I decided I had to stop trying to
run the label and the distribution and just concentrate on the label.
The people then working with Recommended took the distribution on as an
independent enterprise, with exclusive links to the label. This worked
fine for a couple of years until there came a point where distribution
had sold vast quantities of label records, spent the money and couldn't
pay for it. This left me thousands of pounds down and the label in
serious jeopardy. In order to save the label I had to set up a new
distribution - this is ReR. I guess something was learned from all
these mistakes, at least things run a little more steadily now.
PSF: What about distribution in the US, current and future? You've been
working with Pink Bob at Ponk to put the ReR catalog online, and there's
a prototype page in the UK.
Our distribution partner in the USA is Cuneiform, with whom we've worked
for a very long time. It's been a good association. The ReR label is
effectively run in the USA by Bill Sharp of Biota, and without he and
Steve between them we'd have little presence in the US. We have
licensed one or two titles are to other companies but essentially we are
happy to stick with Cuneiform. Reliability is worth a lot. As to the
website, Bob started setting it up before ReR had it's own and it
seemed foolish for us to replicate all that work - it's also against the
whole structure of the net, the point of which is hypertext linking. So
we maintain the site together. We'll see how it goes - it's still very
new... So comments and suggestions for improvements please.
PSF: RIO- why didn't it last long?
I think this is pretty well covered in my book? I guess RIO was
essentially a moment of consolidation and once it had made it's mark it
didn't need to exist any more. There wasn't any agreed long term
programme, and the groups involved were all very different. It's hard
to know what it could have done except become a kind of monolith, which
would really have been against the spirit that informed it in the first
place. So it slipped easily into the public domain, which I think was
pretty fine. A lot of good things grew out of it.
PSF: How did Henry Cow's relationship sour with Virgin?
Virgin got a sniff of money (a lot of it) through the runaway success of
(Mike Oldfield's) TUBULAR BELLS and like any business, money was what
they wanted out of life, so they followed it. It meant they didn't have
much time or interest for groups like Henry Cow who didn't shift a lot
of units. So they pretty much gave up on us. We had to get our own
concerts (the Virgin agency was useless) but we did just fine. Then our
CD wasn't available in any of the countries we were touring in, because
the people who wanted Mike Oldfield didn't want Henry Cow and Virgin
couldn't be bothered to look elsewhere (why should they; no money in
it).
After a few years of being completely self contained, we were ready to
make a new record and to get away from Virgin (their contract with us
was really very disgusting - we never got any money and at the end they
said we owed them a huge amount and told the tax authorities that we had
had huge advances - in the form of recording time at The Manor - their
own studio - repayable in full out of our miserable royalty - plus all
our publishing earnings). We got out by insisting they honour the
contract they wrote. We said OK, time for the next LP and we want 4
weeks at the Manor (as they wrote in their contract). They didn't want
to pay so we were able to get out.
PSF: Why did Henry Cow end? Is a reunion possible?
It's a long story and every member of the group probably has a different
version. I suppose we found ourselves in a position where our raison
d'etre didn't seem so clear any more and we could no longer agree about
what we were doing anymore, and why. At a meeting after recording what
later became HOPES AND FEARS (released as the Art Bears), we decided we
should stop while we were ahead. Then we organised last tours of all
the places we had always played, wrote a whole new set of music, set up
RIO and recorded WESTERN CULTURE. Eight months later we 'retired' as a
group though we never got to play at our last concert.
Subsequently, most of us have worked together in various combinations.
I still work with Fred, Tim, Dagmar, John - though I haven't done
anything with Lindsay since Oh Moscow (but we made 2 CD's as News From
Babel, and I played on 'Rags' and in her film music group). Fred and
Tim work together still. Tim has a new project with Dagmar. And so on.
A reunion? Who can say ? If we ever did (and I think there'd have to be
a very good reason or a very serious invitation) then I'm certain we'd
write a lot of completely new music. I can't ever see Henry Cow doing
its old material gain. Nostalgia is not on our map - we have none of us
stopped since hose days and we all of us work forwards, not backwards.
It's something to look at our current CV's and discographies. This was
and still is a hyper productive group of individuals.