Simon Reynolds - Totally Wired: Postpunk interview and overviews

Thanks to my editor Denise Oswald and all at Soft Skull; to my American agent Ira Silverberg; to my research assistant on the original Rip It Up Geeta Dayal; to cover designer Jason Snyder; and to my wife Joy Press and children Kieran and Tasmin.

Thanks to the editors who commissioned the various overview essays: Dan Fox at Frieze, Chris Chang at Film Comment, Sia Michel at the New York Times, Dominic Molon at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and David Annand at GQ Style. Thanks also to those at Faber & Faber who worked on the original UK edition of Totally Wired, in particular editor Lee Brackstone and copy editor Ian Bahrami, and to my UK agent Tony Peake.

Thanks to the interviewees (I shant list them again, theyre in the Contents pages!) for their brilliance, candour and time.

And thanks to the interviewers: the final transcript is woven in large part from interviews I gave around Rip It Up and Start Again and Bring the Noise, so for their provoking questions, big ups to Gavin Bertram, Wilson Neate, Julian Weber, Jose Marmeleira, Andy Battaglia, Yann Pereau, Jonathan Gharraie, Rossano Lo Mele, Tricia Romano, David Stubbs, Stephen Metcalf, Andreas Hartmann, Anindya Bhattacharyya, Philip Matthews, Andrea Tramonte, Daniele Cianfriglia and Peter Smith, plus anyone else whos slipped my mind.

PRAISE FOR SIMON REYNOLDS

If I had to choose just one commentator to guide me through the last quarter-century of popular (and not so popular) music it would have to beon the basis of depth of knowledge, range of reference, soundness of judgment, and fluency of styleSimon Reynolds.Geoff Dyer

Reynolds writing [is] a perfect alchemy of lightly worn erudition and focused enthusiam.Jessica Winter, Village Voice

... and Totally Wired

A compelling oral history... On every level, Totally Wired is never less than fascinating.Q

With... Rip It Up and Start Again... Simon Reynolds became the flag-waver for the importance of post-punk to pop music from 1978 to 1984a scene... where The Cure, Echo and the Bunnymen, Public Image Limited and Scritti Politti could exist in the same space simply by sharing the same double-headed ethos of innovation and oddness... [Totally Wired] brings together a col- lection of people who recall that spirit of possibility so vividly you end up wanting to believe them all... Theres so much to take in and enjoy.Metro

Reynolds sets about getting to the bottom of what made these peo- ple tick creatively, why they made the strange and often magnificent music that they did, and what the social and cultural forces behind that music were... Theres no shortage of laugh-out-loud moments either.Sunday Business Post

Plenty of entertainment and interest for the post-punk reader.Mojo

As an interviewer, Reynoldss boyish enthusiam is a joy. The Wire

TOTALLY WIRED: POST-PUNK INTERVIEWS AND OVERVIEWS

Simon Reynolds is the author of numerous books, including Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 19781984 and Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, Spin, Slate, and Artforum, among other publications. Born in London, Reynolds now lives in Los Angeles.

Also by Simon Reynolds

The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion, and Rock n Roll (with Joy Press) Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 197884 Bring the Noise: 20 Years of Writing about Hip Rock and Hip Hop

SIMON REYNOLDS

TOTALLY WIRED

Post-punk Interviews and Overviews

Soft Skull Press New York

First published in the U.K. in 2009 by Faber and Faber Limited First American edition, 2010

Copyright 2009 by Simon Reynolds. Except The Blasting Concept, which originally appeared in a slightly different version in the U.K. edition of Rip it Up and Start Again, copyright 2005 by Simon Reynolds American edition copyright 2010 by Simon Reynolds

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Reynolds, Simon. Totally wired : postpunk interviews and overviews / Simon Reynolds.

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-59376-286-5 1. Rock musiciansInterviews. 2. Rock musicHistory and criticism. I. Title. ML385.R49 2010 781.66dc22 2010013032

Cover design by Jason Snyder Interior design by Faber and Faber Limited Printed in the United States of America

Soft Skull Press An Imprint of Counterpoint LLC 2117 Fourth Street Suite D Berkeley, CA 94710

www.softskull.com www.counterpointpress.com

Distributed by Publishers Group West

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To my brother Jez

CONTENTS

Introduction ix

PART ONE: INTERVIEWS

Ari Up 3

Jah Wobble 16

Alan Vega 27

Gerald Casale 40

Mark Mothersbaugh 54

David Thomas 57

Anthony H. Wilson 69

Bill Drummond 79

Mark Stewart 94

Dennis Bovell 103

Andy Gill 108

David Byrne 118

James Chance 131

Lydia Lunch 143

Steve Severin 154

Nikki Sudden 159

PART TWO: OVERVIEWS

John Peel 168

Alison Statton 174

Green Gartside 177

Gina Birch 194

Martin Bramah 203

Linder Sterling 216

Steven Morris 229

Richard H. Kirk 244

Alan Rankine 258

Paul Haig 272

Phil Oakey 277

Martin Rushent 295

Edwyn Collins 307

Steven Daly 319

Paul Morley 323

Trevor Horn 337

John Lydon and Public Image Ltd: Two Biographies 351

Joy Division: Two Movies 358

Ono, Eno, Arto: Non-musicians and the Emergence of Concept Rock 367

The Blasting Concept: Los Angeles, SST, and Progressive Punk 381

London Glam City: Poseurs, Dreamers, Heroes and Monsters, from the Bromley Contingent and Blitz to the Batcave and Leigh Bowery 397 A Final Interview: Simon Reynolds 404

Acknowledgements 429

Index 431

For bonus transcripts, go to the Totally Wired blog: http://totallywiredbysimonreynolds.blogspot.com

For the footnotes to Rip It Up and Start Again, visit http://ripitupfootnotes.blogspot.com

One of the hardest parts of writing a book is the process of cutting it down: working out what can and should go; being tough enough to actually implement the excisions. With Totally Wired, I got a rare oppor- tunity to undo and restore. Starting out, I thought, Fantastic, this is an authors dream: the chance to put back all the good bits that got thrown out, or at least some of them anyway. This will be fun.

Well, it was enjoyable, but it was also hard work, involving its own set of difficult decisions. Narrowing down to around thirty interviews meant leaving out twice that number that were just as worthy of inclu- sion. The interviews that made the cut then had themselves to be cut. Nobody not the reader, not the interviewee, certainly not yours truly the interviewer would be well served by a verbatim transcript of these dialogues from first utterance to last. Interviews, in my experience on both sides of the mic, emerge gradually out of an amorphous preamble of meandering pleasantry before they find a rhythm. At the other end, they wind down into amiable chit-chat. In between, youll generally get a fair few digressions and dead ends. Overall, theres plenty of redun- dancy and raggedness that can be discarded with no loss to anybody. In addition to shedding bulk, some of the interviews in this book under- went minor resequencing to eliminate double-backs in the conversation and maintain a more shapely, logical flow. What you get here is the heart of the dialogue, the fruit without the peel or pips.