this is the almost complete transcript (a couple of the more personal exchanges are edited for the sake of privacy) of the interview i conducted with james dean bradfield a couple of weeks back that appeared in abbreviated form for Q Magazine online recently. it's the most satisfying bit of music writing related work i think i've ever done and the whole conversation was a total joy. i hope that those of you interested enough to read the whole thing will let me know your thoughts on the piece.
JDB: Hello, is Michael there please?
MH: This is he, is this James?
JDB: It is yes, how are you doing?
MH: Very good mate, how are you?
JDB: Ah not too bad. Where are you from in
the pig’s head then?
MH: Merthyr Tydfil.
JDB: A-ha! Gotcha! Got that straight away –
I wasn’t expecting that
MH: It’s nice to hear a familiar accent
first thing in the morning…
JDB: I’ve adopted that way of asking
brethren where they’re from ‘cos Italian Americans say ‘Where you from in the
boot?’ so now I always say ‘where you from in the pig’s head?’
MH: Excellent. Is this the first of many
today then?
JDB: It is yes. But it’s alright, it’s
cool, it’s fine it’s nice to do stuff. It’s nice that ten albums in we’re still
doing it so I ain’t gonna fucking moan about it Mike, you know? Not at all.
MH: I’m glad. That’s good news.
JDB: it’s really funny this because Michael
Hall is the brother of our manager Martin and he works in the office and
obviously you’ve got Mike Hall the ex Welsh rugby captain as well, it’s a
proper name…
MH: It’s a quality name, I’m happy with it
JDB: It’s slightly stately isn’t it?
MH: I’ve got James as a middle name as well
so that’s decent…
JDB: Ah, that’s beautiful. All good. You in
London or?
MH: Yeah, I’ve got an hour out of my dayjob
to speak to you and just at this moment someone decides to repair the doors in
the hallway so drills and hammers going a full ten outside so if you hear
something like the apocalypse then that’s what it is.
JDB: Right, I gotcha.
MH: Lemme get some of these questions done
by here…20 years on from Generation Terrorists. Obviously from things Nicky
said at the time you didn’t imagine you’d last this long but did you personally
see the band as a careeer when you were making it?
JDB:I didn’t think of it as a career but I
saw the band as something I never wanted to end. There was Nick and Richey’s
mission statement of one perfect album, sell sixteen million records and then
split up in a bout of self-immolation. I remember me and Shaun looking nervously
at each other thinking ‘No, no we wanna carry on!’ I think in the back of our
heads we looked at some of our favourite bands like Echo and The Bunnymen and
it was like if they had split up after their first album you wouldn’t hear
‘Heaven Up Here’, you wouldn’t hear ‘Porcupine’, you wouldn’t hear ‘Ocean Rain’
and then we thought to ourselves, and I remember me and Sean saying to each
other ‘If The Clash had split up after their first album you wouldn’t have
heard ‘London Calling’, ‘Sandanista’, ‘Combat Rock’. Obviously this big
monolithic statement of truth came crashing through the skies from Messrs
Edwards and Wire and I remember thinking ‘Nah, nah, nah – I hope it doesn’t
really come true’. We had to revert to plan b. We obviously weren’t going to
sell sixteen million records when Generation Terrorists was released so we kind
of failed by our own outrageous standards…
MH: It was a glorious failure though
JDB: I don’t know if it was glorious but it
was a monumental failure…
(much laughter)
…on a statistical front. But I’m kinda glad
rally because I can say all those things about Richey and Nicky being fucking mental and releasing these mission
statements but at the end of the day if I hadn’t had that fear hanging over my
head I don’t think ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’ would have turned out like it did. I
don’t think ‘Little Baby Nothing’ would have turned out like it did. Ever since
then I’ve realized we’re motivated by a fear of failure. I think we were
indoctrinated into that way of thinking by Nicky and Richey at the start. In a
strange way it’s the best thing that ever happened to us, I think.
MH: So you were on a cliff edge at the
time? You were afraid that this might be your only shot?
JDB: We’d announced our own greatness
without having much to back it up. Ever since then it’s been the same feeling.
I think that’s just good management skills…
MH: Very motivating…
JDB: Yeah it’s almost like the coach of the
team…they (Nick and Rich)believe that they have talented players but they have
to motivate them, they have to put the fear of God into them. That early
strategy, that early madness, it set the standard I think.
MH: When did you realize that Manic Street
Preachers would be a huge part of your life? Like a lifelong thing?
JDB: It was quite early on. We played a gig
– it was our first London gig, actually – in the Horse and Groom on Great
Portland Street and it was connected to a fanzine that Richey had been in touch
with and it was just a small dusty room above the pub. I remember seeing the
crowd and it was a really good trainspottery indie crowd ya know…people we had
an affinity with in a strange way because we’d been through the mill of being
into our Whitesnake, being into our June Brides, then Public Enemy and Guns N
Roses, our obsession with music up until that point – we were all about 20 –
had been absolutely rabid. It showed no signs of slowing down. We were
absolutely obsessed with all types of music. Suddenly we’re in front of this
crowd that are really knowledgeable, a strange cabal of people upstairs in this
pub watching this bunch of taff oiks for the first time. We played that gig and
we got an amazing reaction and I remember thinking ‘we must be one of the most
fucked up bands of all time’, you’ve got these two amazing wingers who are
absolutely amazing lyricists with Nick and Richey on either side of me, which
gave me amazing confidence, and then you had Sean behind me that had played in
Gwent Jazz Orchestra playing his trumpet and he’d played for the Colliery Band
and then you’ve got me, the Utilitarian ditch-digger in the front. I remember
thinking ‘we’re such a fucked up, original band’ At that point we didn’t have
any contemporaries from Wales. We felt like we were completely on our own.
Because Wales had been seen as a bit of a scourge in a cultural and economic
sense at that point and we just felt as if we were on our own in Wales and we
were on our own in Britain in the music scene in a sense. That sounds really
pompous and it’s not really true but that’s the way we felt at the time. I remember
thinking ‘We’re unstoppable because we’re different from everybody else’. I
didn’t think it was because we were better, it was because I thought we were
different – slightly more maladjusted, more idiosyncratic and out of step with
everything. I thought that was important. At the end of that gig – we’d played
in front of Bob Stanley, obviously a member of St Ettienne but he was also a
great journalist for Melody Maker at that point – and I remember thinking
‘we’ve found our place without even trying that hard’. I remember having some
sandwiches on the way home, going back to the valleys thinking ‘We’re gonna do
this…we’re gonna be fine, man!’
MH: You’ve still got a place in Cardiff
haven’t you? Living in London but still got a place in Cardiff…?
JDB: No, no, no. I live in Cardiff full
time.
MH: You’re back completely? Ahhh…
JDB: I’m back there, I’ve got my Cardiff
Blues season ticket, got my dog walking routes, take my boxer out with me…
MH: Happy days
JDB: I’ve got the kid, got the garden, got
my butcher’s, got my bookies, got my newsagents – I’m back in the fatherland.
MH: What else could you need James?
JDB: (Laughs)
MH: Did the valleys inform a lot of your
early work?
JDB: There’s an inevitable circuital route
you take when you’re young. You grow up in the place that you’re in and I don’t
know whether it’s your metabolism or your hormones rolling ‘round your body but
I think, especially young people who are mad about their music end up wanting
to escape the place they grew up. As soon as they leave it they spend the rest
of their lives trying to get back to it. That’s what happened with us. At the
start we were slightly embittered by the fact that all our fathers had told us
about the great things, the valleys culture where we grew up in terms of the Miner’s
Institutes that had been bought and paid for by the miners themselves, about
great writers like Gwyn Thomas and poets like John Almond who all came
from our area and the idea of the Chartist march…all those things had been
forced into us, we’d been taught about it. Suddenly we looked ‘round and
thought ‘well, there’s not much of that left any more’. We were kind of
embittered and disappointed by missing out on this great age of the valleys
being a political, intellectual, physical and industrial powerhouse. We
suddenly weren’t in that age. We spent a long time just resenting the fact that
we were teenagers in the eighties. Immediately we wanted to leave Wales. When
we left we realized we were not of
the rest of the world – we were particularly Welsh, we realized it was our
inspiration and we went back to it like scolded cats.
MH: You should have known better?
JDB: Yeah, well we just realized we were of
it and it was what had inspired us for better or for worse. It was our birthright.
There are certain songs that have…not a
myopically domestic reach but more a national reach. Songs like ‘Natwest
Barclays Midlands Lloyds’ which people laughed at at the time but I think was
quite prescient lyric considering now what’s happened…
The only way Wales was represented was
through TV footage of the miner’s strike going past streets that you lived on
or you recognized and in a strange way that connected Wales to the rest of
Britain. So on songs like ‘Repeat’ and Natwest…’ it suddenly felt as if we were
connecting the dots between our economic situation and the Thatcher government.
Which all sounds really didactic and quite punk but that’s the way things
were.
Then there were songs like ‘Little Baby
Nothing’ which were just about gender politics in a sense so it went beyond our
Welsh borders. If you look at the songs lyrically I think anybody from Britain
can connect with any of those songs but we soon realized we were part of that
Welsh tradition where heavy rock was just such a massive South Wales tradition like
it was in the Midlands etc. and we had to take our inspiration from it – not
fight against it.
MH: I still notice when I go home the sheer
volume of Guns N Roses and Iron Maiden t-shirts…
JDB: (Laughs)I know. I think the weird thing about us as
people is from the age of 13 I was into ELO, from the age of 15 to 17 I was
just a massive indie freak into bands like The Bodines, June Brides, Big Flame
and the Shop Assistants and then Public Enemy and Guns N Roses came along and
…by the time I got to 20 and I was going through the old Aerosmith back
catalogue I’d been through every phase possible and the one thing that drew us
all together apart from the social situation and being born in Wales was that
we just digested music to an absolutely mental degree. Richey was a massive
Einsterzande Neubaten fan, an Echo and the Bunnymen fan, a Killing Joke fan,
Nick was a massive Smiths fan, a massive Rush fan, a massive Whitesnake fan, a
massive Orange Juice fan. Sean was a massive Kraftwerk fan, a massive Residents
fan and I was into my Motown, my ELO, my Big Flame, my Jasmine Minks, early
Aerosmith. We didn’t have any snobbery about music. We were just obsessed about
it all. That smash-up between musicians who were fiercely into jangly-jangly
music like Jasmine Minks morphing into something like ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’
didn’t occur to us. It was just natural.
MH: So that’s how you end up with a debut
double album with 18 tracks – through digesting all sorts of music?
JDB: Yeah it is. But it’s really funny
because we’ve been going through all our old demos for the album and it was
almost like archeological work. I realized a song like ‘Love’s Sweet Exile’ did
start out life when we were about 17 years old as an early My Bloody Valentine
kind of song – before they became a noise band, when they were a proper indie
band with a different singer – it’s just weird.
‘Motorcycle Emptiness’ started out as a
kind of Motorcycle Boy ripoff – Motorcycle Boy was a band that came out of The
Shop Assistants – and I looked at other stuff…’Repeat’ is a complete Pistols
homage. Then something like ‘Another Invented Disease’ that comes from me being
obsessed with the Joey Kramer shuffle in terms of Aerosmith? He’s one of the
only rock drummers that can do that shuffle and I thought I’d try to write a
song around it. If we’d ha a manager or somebody at the record company that
would have pointed any of this stuff out to us we might have questioned
ourselves or thought we were too mixed up to ever get anywhere but that’s the
other thing that happened to us.
Rob Stringer who had signed us at Sony
never questioned our magpie sensibilities or our obsessions. He never
questioned it he just thought it was our strength.
Martin Hall and Phillip Hall never
questioned our scatterbrained philosophies they just kind of accepted that it
was part of our strength.
We were incredibly lucky with the people we
met in the record industry. A lot of people piss and moan about the record
industry and how badly it’s treated them but we had nothing but good luck.
MH: I have always wondered – insisting on a
double debut, all the shit you were stirring in the press – how you got away
with it?
JDB: I just think that between Nick and
Richie they’d got to a point in their lives where they just felt that a lot of
things that were going on were an affront to them intellectually. They had
that…Raymond Williams you know, that Welsh writer, they had that sense of being
from Wales and having no inferiority complex. They thought that they had better
ideas than everybody else and that everybody else was wrong. I think we’re a
bit more humble than that now (laughs) but when you’re young you feel
indestructible and they just felt that things affronted them in an intellectual
sense and they were just confident. Phillip Hall and Martin saw that strength.
I think they were fed up of bands just tipping up and saying that it was all
about the music…
MH: If anyone else likes it it’s a bonus…
JDB: yeah. I think they liked that these
four gobshites actually enjoyed their own dose of tourette’s and didn’t try to
tame it. All of those people just saw our misguided stupidity as our strength
and like I said we’ll never moan about the record industry because we met lots
of courageous people that just had faith in us.
MH: Were you working with Caffy St Luce
then?
JDB: of course! Well, you know Caffy, she’s
gloriously idiosyncratic in every sense of the word. I suppose you join the
dots. Phillip had massive faith in us without us actually having any proper
evidence or proof that what we were saying was true or would work he just had
massive faith in it. So much faith that he was 30 grand in the hole from us
smashing equipment for like a year. It’s the same with Caffy. Caffy – you’ll
never meet anybody else like her, especially back in the day, especially back
in the early 90s. I remember Caffy just turned up in the office and it was like
‘this is Caffy. She’s a bit mental but she’s brilliant’ and that was it.
Obviously Phillip had this habit of gathering people around him who had an
acute perception of the world, and having faith that it would translate to
other people sooner or later. That just goes to prove that Phillip had faith in
things that might initially be lost in translation but would eventually settle
into the cultural landscape.
MH: You’ve had this devoted fanbase for
such a long time. Have you ever come to terms with this idea of thousands of
people obsessing over you – especially in the early days, there was a very
intense relationship with with the fans wasn’t there?
JDB: Yeah I was slightly uncomfortable with
it for a long time. But I think as the band is…we’ve got to our tenth album
with ‘Postcards from a Young Man’ and I think that side of it has slightly
dissolved away and what is left is people that perhaps are not so bothered
about the ephemera that’s attached to the music they actually realize that we
load the music so much with all our intentions and all our effort, that our
records are so loaded with what we are that they don’t need to be bothered with
the ephemera around the band.
But yeah, around the time of The Holy Bible
it was slightly disquieting the kind of stuff that would be attached to us in
terms of some fans. I was never
comfortable with that. It was easy to shrink away from that kind of in-depth
analysis of what you did. I’ve always loved music journalism. in a sense
that..i grew up in an age when I would read about a record before I’d hear it
for another two weeks sometimes because it was so hard to get the record and
the way the journalist had written about it, whether it be Simon Reynolds or
Steven Wells, the way they’d actually written about the record could sometimes
make it disappointing because they’d described it in such over-triumphalised
ways but it did inform the record and you’d grow to love it because of what had
been written about the record. So I’ve always loved in-depth analysis of music
BUT even for me the way some fans over-emotionalised and over-intellectualised
some of the stuff on the Holy Bible became something that I wanted to be
distanced from.
MH: I understand. Do you remember the
Cardiff Astoria gig from that tour?
JDB: That was one of the hottest gigs of
all time.
MH: It was mental.
JDB: So hot…
MH: A good gig though…
JDB: (Laughs)
MH: I feared for several people’s lives
during it…
JDB: Yeah, I think people were scared that
they were becoming dehydrated and they’d get out of the venue looking like the
life force had been sucked out of them! I remember that as like being in one of
the seven rings of hell, an inferno. I think the air conditioning had broken
and everything just felt like it was…a molten lake of some kind of fury. It’s
really weird that you bring that up. It’s not one of my happiest memories that
gig.
MH: No balaclava that night then?
JDB: I’d have fucking been finished let’s
face it! I’d have been gone.
MH: Right what’s next..am I keeping you
timewise?
JDB: Whatever mate – if my mobile rings
I’ll call time kinda thing but I’m fine, cool.
MH: Thanks. Seeing as you mention it then – if that was a bad memory of
The Holy Bible period then can you tell me a good one?
MH: The actual recording of The Holy Bible
is a great memory because the first two records – we’d done standard record
company things of going to a big palatial studio and going to a residential
studio and doing the record. I think Nick had a bit of a meltdown after Gold
Against the Soul where he felt as if we’d lost a sense of ourselves in terms of
living in these palatial studios and being away from Wales. This is where the
road back to Wales began, at this very point I think.
It was kind of Nick’s idea to go and use
this little studio in Cardiff we’d used for b-sides and stuff and suddenly it
was amazing to be back in this studio in the red light area of Cardiff which it
was then – more the gluebag area of Cardiff to be honest – but it was amazing
to be back there. We were all confined in this tiny studio, we’d all meet there
ten o’clock every morning. Everybody would clock off at 8 o’clock and leave me
there ‘til 2 oclock in the morning working on through the night and I was going
back home every night to my mam and dad’s. So here I was on my third album on a
major label and I was recording that album and sleeping at my mum and dad’s
house every night after working. It felt brilliant. It felt right you know? We should come back. This is the
right move. We actually did lose ourselves a bit and it was great to be able to
be waking up in the Valleys every morning, going back down to Cardiff and just
recording. Just seeing Richey coming in every morning wearing a donkey jacket, no
like a sheepskin jacket, a complete John Motson replica from the ‘70s thing,
he’s open a little tinny “pfffft” and that would be the start of the day. He’d
have these reams and reams of notes and his typewriter was set up in the corner
and nick was chipping in with lots of titles, not as many lyrics as usual, as
everyone knows Richey ran with the ball on that record but yeah Nick would be
standing over him like some kind of headmaster then he’d pop in with a verse
and then, I remember one day Nick went over to him and just gave him the title
‘Faster’ and then Richey just wrote the words to the title which is brilliant
it’s…
MH: I’d no idea of that…
JDB: Yeah, it’s like the fact that Nick
came up with the title and Richey wrote the words to it, took it home and
finished it off and stuff. It’s amazing. The way they work with each other.
Richey was stuck one day, Nicky just gives him a title and it sparked him
off…that’s just really good…that’s team work buddy!
We were all crushed in together and we were
using this engineer from Cardiff called Alex Silva who is a Welsh Italian who
has been a friend ever since and he lives in Berlin now and works with Herbert Gronemeyer.
He’s been really successful but we were just all there on top of each other and
suddenly my old influences that I’d had from when I was 16 and 17 of being a
massive Magazine fan, a massive Wire fan, suddenly that was all coming to the
fore because I was back home at my parents’ house where I still had my records
and I was every morning playing my records before catching a bus down to
Cardiff and suddenly I could hear that come to the fore in the music and it was
a great experience.
People think that The Hoy Bible was
traumatic from top to bottom but the actual recording and writing of it, the
rehearsing of it and of us all being back in Cardiff was just an amazing
experience – it was just such a gloriously happy time.
MH: Speaking as someone who was growing up
in Merthyr when that came out, for the group of people I knocked about with it
was a very empowering record rather than anything dark or upsetting
necessarily. Hearing ‘Faster’ for the first time is an almost incomparably
empowering experience…
JDB: I think you’re right. I think ‘Faster’
particularly is self-empowering, it’s a complete direct statement of intent and
it actually frees you when you play it sometimes. It still feels like that. I
remember the lyric…I had to write the music for that song twenty times exactly.
I knew I had to get it right. In the end the easiest idea was the right idea,
musically. I remember the lyric just made me feel better – it just did. It gave
me that old sense of righteous arrogance back which I’d lost at that point I
think. There are other songs on there where people might assume that everything
is wrapped up in some dark maelstrom of emotions but a song like ‘If White…’ I
actually just loved that song. It is self-empowering. A lot of bands at the
moment are not actually engaged with any kind of political culture whether it
be in a domestic sense or an international sense and it felt liberating just to
try to sing those lyrics. Just to know that you were in a band that was engaged
with the world and it’s own world.
‘This Is Yesterday’, it still gives me a sense of melancholic
victory. A lot of people assume
that album is a massive comedown but for me sometimes it just feels like a
great pre-match speech.
That’s enough of the sporting analogies I
think.
MH: You’ve got a good half a dozen in so
far! Going through the old material – does it have a weight of sadness to it?
Harking back to a time when you still had Richie there – is it sad or is there
a balance to it?
JDB: First of all I think you can answer
that on two levels. First in terms of how the album actually turned out
musically I think going through the demos did make me…most bands have big
regrets about their first album, about the way they did it because naturally
you go on and you realize you could have done things better. When I listen back
to some of the demos I mean there’s a demo of ‘Stay Beautiful’ which is called
‘Generation Terrorists’ itself…there’s a demo of ‘Repeat’ and there’s a demo of
‘Natwest’…’ just for those three songs perhaps the album versions are just a
bit too glossy. We lost a bit of that kind of …punk edge definitely. One of our
favourite things that unified us at the time was we all loved the Spunk
Sessions the Pistols did? All the demos they did before Never Mind The Bollocks
essentially and if you listen to ‘Generation Terrorists’ which became ‘Stay
Beautiful’ the ‘Repeat’ demo, ‘Natwest’ and perhaps ‘Crucifix Kiss’ there’s a
demo of that too… we smoothed things off a bit too much. So there was an
element of regret where I thought the album could have been a mixture of what
‘Motorcycle Emptiness’ ended up being and what ‘Motown Junk’ was. That ‘Motown
Junk’ edge perhaps…but ultimately if we hadn’t gone so deep into that studio
craft or whatever you want to call it we wouldn’t have ended up with
‘Motorcycle Emptiness’ it just wouldn’t have happened. Steve Brown was a
massive part in developing ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’ because there was a demo and
he said we had to write other parts and we cannibalized parts from old songs
for ‘M.E’ and if I Steve hadn’t left it on the desk for so long and become
obsessed with it I wouldn’t have come up with the guitar riff for it and
inevitably ‘M.E’ was a kind of saving grace because it was the first hint that
we could walk it like we talked it and it was the first hint that there was a
certain, not originality to us but a uniqueness to us. I think that is the song
that wasn’t a hit around the world but is our best known song around the world
except for ‘If You tolerate This…’ and ‘Your Love Alone’ surprisingly. Those
three songs are the songs that everybody around the world knows so if we hadn’t
gone so far down the road of trying to be polished ion the studio we wouldn’t
have come up with ‘M.E’ and perhaps we wouldn’t have got this far – I think.
It’s a bittersweet irony of we lost some of our ‘Motown Junk’ edge but if we
hadn’t have gone down that road we probably wouldn’t have survived I don’t
think.
MH: Gotcha. When you’re looking back, for
instance doing the Holy Bible package and now this one for Generation Terrorists,
even now in this interview there’s instances where Richey comes up a lot and
memories of that time. Are you at peace with looking back or does it get to
you?
JDB: In terms of us being bandmates we’re
completely at ease with it. We’ve been through lots of anniversaries now and
we’ve done ‘National Treasures’, ‘Greatest Hits, the re-issue of The Holy Bible
and we’re used to coming across beautiful curled up photos and old lyrics with
his doodlings on. We’re used to coming across old interviews and hearing his
voice and yeah, it used to be like a punch in the stomach. We used to roll on
the waves every time we’d come across these things but inevitably we’ve done so
much in terms of retrospectives and reissues that we’re used to it. It actually
makes us smile to see him. It actually makes us smile to see some silly Nietszchean
cat cartoon on the side of an old lyric or to see a picture him in the studio
from when we were doing the Holy Bible. I came across one and he’s wearing the
most awful Henry Rollins t-shirt in the studio which someone wouldn’t equate
with him. They think he was always a glamourpuss, he was always dressed to the
tees but there he is…Oh no sorry, it’s not a Rollins t-shirt it’s a Dub War
t-shirt…
MH: Dub War? Excellent…
JDB: Which is fine in itself but it’s four
sizes two big for him and it looks like a fucking tent on him! We’re used to
those moments now and they make us…the only really overriding bittersweet
emotion we have these days is…and of course you’re still gonna have…there’s
still gonna be stuff in your subconscious which you just keep back there. But
the overriding emotion we have in terms of anything apart from us being happy
when we hear his voice or see his picture or some old artifact connected with
him… the only negative emotion we have these days is when we see a new
interview from a band or hear a record from a band or we see an interview in
one of the broadsheets with somebody who’s supposed to be the benchmark of
something glorious, and we just think fucking hell if he was around now he
would just destroy. He would just fucking…intellectually he would just kill
everything! He’d have the biggest Twitter following in the western world. He
would. For better of for worse he would clean up at the moment because it’s an
easy competition out there at the moment. Just investigating things and coming
up with some convoluted, fucked up answer? He was the king.
MH: I appreciate you answering that. How
come no gig for Generation Terrorists?
JDB: We can’t in Britain because when we
did the O2 show at Christmas we actually said that it was our last concert in
Britain for two years. We’re desperately trying to hold ourselves to that
(laughs) we’ve done our best. We might put something up online in a couple of
weeks time, we might go through a couple of songs that we never play live, we
might go through some in the studio and put them online. We would have lied to
but we’d put this UK live embargo on ourselves for the O2 show so we can’t…
MH: Fair play. If you’ve made a promise…
JDB: (Laughs) yeah, and we always keep our
promises don’t we?
MH: Yeah absolutely, that’s self-evident
that is James… I didn’t get to see the O2 but I saw a few on Journal For Plague
Lovers and the full run through that album went really well it seemed. Were you
happy with that?
MH: The first half was respectful. I think
and then the second half…there was the more kind of cerebral set and then there
was the dancing set is the way we saw it by the end of the tour I think and it
did work. I think its something that is going to colour the way we go on and
play live in the future actually. In terms of dividing sets up like that? It’s
an easier way to actually do things and make things more interesting for people
and for ourselves.
As you get older, mixing the past, the
present and perhaps the future in one concert perhaps becomes more and more
troublesome in terms of how you pitch things – whether you can put ‘Motorcycle
Emptiness’ next to ‘Archives of Pain’ or if you put ‘If You tolerate This…’ or
‘The Everlasting’ next to ‘Revol’…it’s something that becomes harder and harder
to program in terms of a setlist. I think we’re gonna go farther down that
route of doing two sets as time goes on I think.
MH: Have you looked at the possibility of
another solo record?
JDB: Nowhere near my horizon. I just love
being in the band, I just love it. I’m living in Cardiff, I catch the bus into
work, I’m there in 25 minutes then we’ve got our studio in Cardiff, I go there
and Nick’s watching Sky Sports News and pissing and moaning about the seedings
in the Heineken Cup as usual and Shaun’s unwrapping some fucking new piece of
technological gear that he’s bought for the studio and it’s a nice world to be
in at the moment you know? We’ve got our HQ in Cardiff and every time we go
there it’s almost like an episode of ‘Only When I Laugh’…are you old enough to
remember that?
MH: I am..James Bolam…
JDB: (much laughter) it’s like everyone’s
lined up in their same old positions in the studio and everyone’s pissing and
moaning. It’s a lovely little nest we’ve got there. To be fair we’ve been
furiously demoing all year and I think we’re twenty songs in now. It’s so great
to be in a band. It’s sickeningly lucky to be in a band with your best friends
that you went to school with and you grew up with, but it’s just absolutely
fucking amazing. I’ve got absolutely no inclination to be a solo artist again
if I don’t have to!
MH: (Laughs) So is 70 Songs of Hatred and
Failure still a viable album title?
JDB: I’ve downgraded Wire’s monolithic slab
of intent to 35 songs at the moment. I’m working on 35. I’m chipping away, I’m
chipping away with my chisel.
MH: Excellent. I’ve got a stupid question
to ask you last.
JDB: Cool!
MH: Have you seen WWE wrestler Wade
Barrett’s tattoo?
JDB: I’ve heard about Wade Barrett, yes.
One of my friend’s sons is a massive WWF…uh, WWE fan and yes he’s got a
‘Culture, Alienation, Boredom and Despair’ tattoo I think?
MH: He certainly fucking has…Yeah. It’s a
beautiful tattoo but it’s so incongruous. It’s excellent.
JDB: Right well let’s just put this out
there – if you’re listening Wade Barrett we will do your fucking theme tune –
just get in touch.
MH: That’s what I like to hear…
JDB: That would be the ultimate
Situationist bizarrist spectacle wouldn’t it?
MH: It would be perfect.
JDB: Us being played over the airwaves in
some Enormodome in front of 20,000 mad Yanks in Colorado somewhere…
MH: That’s the definition of breaking
America
JDB: That would be THE Situationist
spectacle. Guy De Bord would be proud.
MH: Thanks so much for this then.
JDB: Ah, it’s a pleasure man. You back
there much at all in Merthyr? You get back and see people?
MH: Yeah I was back over the summer to see
my mam, I’ve still got mates there, go to Cardiff for gigs. I love going back –
it’s like you were saying earlier, as soon as you’re out of there you’re
looking for ways to go back.
JDB: Yeah. It’s amazing…the best café in
Cardiff at the moment next time you’re here is the Trade Street Café which is opposite
Brains brewery the street opposite…er…it’s round the back of Central Station.
Really good café.
MH: I’ll have a look
JDB: You been to the Mochyn Du as well?
Good pub serving good beer.
MH: I’ll have a look. I’ve been going to
the City Arms
JDB: Well off Cathedral Road is the Mochyn
Du which is lovely – really nice. Then further up in terms of real ales – a
really good selection – at the top of Cathedral Road the Conway pub on Conway
road. That has Vale of Glamorgan stuff, lots of Otleys stuff it’s really nice.
City Arms – it’s a new guy that’s taken over there and they do have a lot more
guest ales now but in terms of a kind of more sensible sit-down pint, a wee bit
gastrified but you know, whatever, the Mochyn Du – the Black Pig, just behind
the cricket ground – it’s a good pub!
MH: I’ll pop my head in.
JDB: Alright then butt – take care Mikey,
man.
MH: And you mate. Pleasure to talk to you
JDB: Absolute pleasure. And if you’re ever in Trade Street Café stick
your hand up and I’ll come and say hello.