Hello again, good afternoon. Welcome back to the penultimate event at Off The Page. The idea for this event was driven from a notion of pop music as being something that was capable of carrying more than most of us expect from a pop song. I don't mean necessarily political resonance, but even more than that, theoretical ideas, philosophical notions, and so on and so forth. The idea that the pop song was, if you built it correctly, it was going to be a rigid enough structure. You could put anything you wanted into it. You could load it with all these things, whether it's from philosophy, politics, theoretical thinking, and so on.
And not only would the pop song be robust enough to carry this, but in that process, you could almost re-energize the thing. And you could pick things that were basically fairly considered as fairly sort of disposable pop cultural ephemera, and you could inject them with a new sort of serious heavy resonance which would carry itself and carry you with it. So that was the idea. Whether we actually, that's what Mark and Green Gartside are going to speak about is another matter. But so the reason Mark are up here and Green, I've introduced them in kind of not a great way, Green Gartside, as probably I'm sure you all know from the late 70s onwards, piloted a project called Skritti Politti, which to me as a listener seemed to be very much wrapped up in this idea of a pop song that could act on you as kind of rhetorically and sensual at the same time, you know, existentially
and physically. So it could hit you in these multiple ways. And in recent years, I mean, Green has seemed to have pursued this project relentlessly, you know, during over the last 30 years or something, and Mark in recent times has come through as one of the most exciting writers, who is trying to carry forward some of the thinking that emerged around his pop music in the early 80s, people like Ian Penman and Paul Morley and so on, which is almost like a twin mission between the music and the criticism. And hopefully we invite, we asked Mark and Green to to come here and try and articulate some of this stuff. You know, whether any of this stuff is just of historical interest now, whether it just happened once and doesn't happen anymore, or whether it is still a potentially sort of viable area of operations.
But we also invite them to take the conversation in any direction they want, so not to feel constrained necessarily by these opening gambits, but we're just very, very happy to have with us Mark Fisher and Green Gartside. Thank you. Can you hear me, first of all? Is my microphone working? Okay, fine. So, at Mark's suggestion, I'm going to begin to read some sort of aphoristic notes. That's what they look like. So, a code which no one can explain, but everyone understands. Is it true we can't look through the rhythms of pop for meaning, but this doesn't mean they're tautological?
They aren't a hermeneutic structure. The search for reference becomes a search for reason. Music has no privileged relationship with the unconscious. I go to the valorized truth, recorded trace, accorded power, commonplace. I go to, to the farthest reaches and show the complicity of poles, madness and pop music. Rhythm doesn't stand for anything, it can't be proven to be in any privileged relation to the unconscious, and the same is true of melody. The pretense of innovation outside of language is a self-aggrandizing closure. And then I came to think that the universality of erasure, parentheses, inverted commerce,
leads us beyond meaninglessness, back to your job and your madness. So pop music became doubly significant, bound to the commonplace, freed into the commonplace. It was interesting how the ontology of function, utility, signification and meaning was thrown into a minor crisis by rhythm. Its topical use as a jamming phenomenon is considerable. strategic significance in confusing, tangling these metaphysical categories. There are no mechanisms obscuring the artificiality of pop music. Society's spectacle cannot be further explained. Style neutralizes, if not cancels, the worldlessness,
the silent, seemingly uncircumstanced existence of a text. Sorry, this is... In pop music, we're not dealing with a history of production that has made the improper proper. In fact, what it does say is in pop music we are dealing with a history of production that has made the improper proper. Out in the general text, resemblance passes for truth. In my little hothouse, the appearance of difference passes for truth. And it goes on. So we should say this was written in about 1980. This is from one of many notebooks books that I wrote between the late 70s and I guess I stopped writing them in maybe 80,
maybe the mid 80s. And their notes of thoughts as they come to me, some are more considered reflections, some of them are aphoristic like that just, and some of this book would be, Some of it is when I would write out sections from books that I was reading at the time. This also includes, interestingly, perhaps, the notes made. This begins, questions for Derrida. I met Jacques, and I had questions for him. I'd written a song about him, which I called him Jacques Derrida, because I didn't know how to pronounce his name.
and anyway that led to me being summoned by him for a meeting in Paris and also it just so happens that in this notebook of the time there are questions for him at the back there's some questions on the holiday inn from Paris on the eve of my meeting with him about, but anyway I was prone to keep lots of notebooks like this throughout the time that I was making music between the late 70s and, like I say, the mid-80s. Right. And I think the tendency at events like this
might be to sort of back away from the intensities of that kind of text. But I think we should do the opposite, actually. and sort of plunge into it, rather than retreating to some bon ami, oh, look at the death things we used to do in those old days, is to really think about why, how those sort of texts came to be written, what are the conditions for that kind of... The sense that music, theory and politics, the dread triumvirate that we build up today, I know, who did Billis talking about that? Belong together. I think it's important to keep faith with that gambit
that they do belong together, and that's why people are here today, I think. It is that sense of the importance of all of this. And I know, Green, that one of the concepts you were thinking of approaching this hour through was that of ill preparedness and the notion of illness and pursuing things to the point of illness and the sense that actually having like lacking these things produces illness in a certain way I think is really a testament to how important these things are and you know to the well I thought I was just an idea that had I made
lots of notes which you'll be relieved to hear I'm not going to read I mean they're down here in preparation for this weekend I was kind of full of dread and panic about coming here and talking and having to account for what I've done I don't have a systematic account of what it is that I've done or attempted to do. I have a series of fragmentary ones. And I kept thinking that I'm ill-prepared to do this. And, you know, it did make me, again, almost kind of sick trying to get ready to do this. But then, you know, when you write down ill... I don't know why we're dwelling on this, but, you know, ill-prepared, that was the sort of first thing that you write. And it's the kind of thing that, you know,
As soon as you've written those two words down, you know that Derrida would have taken the idea of ill-preparedness as a perfect point of departure, and the idea of illness and the idea of preparedness. He would have been very mistrustful of the idea of preparedness, and he would have thoroughly, I think, understood perhaps the fact that, you know, although there's illness throughout all this in a way, and I've never enjoyed the best of mental health, the project that this, to some extent, maps or keeps a diary about,
and, you know, for what it's worth, autobiographically speaking, did drive me nuts, and I did become very ill, and stopped making music for many years as a consequence. Is that what you're talking about? Partly, but I think there's multiple... No, no, definitely I'm talking about that. But I guess it will resonate for me because of similar problems of illness that have afflicted me at certain points of life and made life completely unbearable. And for me, looking back on that, that was partly to do with this notion that came up in those notes there of the commonplace or the common sense of a society at a particular time. At certain points, that became unlivable for me.
And partly what was unlivable about it was the retreat of the kind of culture that formed me in early life, which I think we've both been formed by to some extent and which I think... part of what is constitutive of the current moment is a struggle over the remnants of that culture, politically I'm speaking now. And there's another sense of ill-preparedness, I think, which is that we're ill-prepared for the times in which we now live, I think, because they've changed. And I think if we'd had this kind of conversation three years ago, there would have been an elegiac tone
into it, which was, you know, look at all those great days of the 70s when you could have politics, theory and music together, you know, why can't that go on anymore? And because the big thing missing was politics in lots of ways. Now we can't say that. Now I think we're ill prepared for living in what we have to recognise, the revolutionary times now. And can we adjust to this? The whole temporality we've had for the last 30 years is one where revolutions in the past and now we can just adjust ourselves to consumer capitalism which is the inevitable end point of anything.
Managing it as best as we can. Managing it as best as we can, right. In a broadly political sense and in a personal sense, yeah. But it seems to me now we're in a kind of inverted parallel to the late 70s in the sense that we have the militancy, but we don't necessarily have the music. Culture is falling behind in militancy, I think. That's part of the ill-preparedness of the moment. I mean, it's a thought that I'll throw out there now for the sake of it, since it occurs to me and would have occurred to me in the past. and that's this need for music, what is it?
Do you know what I mean? We're brought up, there's that whole distinction that I used to get, there was a history of it, you know, about, you know, you can go back to Adorno and pop music perhaps being complicit in a whole cultural industry that led us to false needs, didn't it? And there were the remnants of that idea, along with lots of other ideas about music that came from 19th century philosophy or lazy rock criticism or whatever, that this is all against in a way. But it's also kind of bound up with ideas of needs and desires. And when you say that we need a music
or a series of musics now, I'm just throwing this open. What is that need? The need for... I mean, clearly not just some sort of, you know, a soundtrack to what's happening. Yeah, well, it's not so much music that I would need, but it's what... Because music was never just music. No, that's true. I mean, that's the other... The worst, you know, when one's interviewing musicians, you know the worst thing you can come up against is well you know music speaks for itself you know just we just do our stuff that's right and now so you know paraphrase Freud sometimes a guitar is just a guitar yeah but I mean but of
course in in you know not period that was formative for both of us I think that the last thing the musicians would talk about will be music but in a way it was all talking about music but there's that sense that you know that me when music is just music not even music you could say you know when we know and so when it's what the need is I mean it's obviously so what you what you're what you don't you're talking about the lack of a kind of critical admixture around music that's that will animate it in some way that will that that that's
what's missing I mean it perhaps it doesn't you know there's a kind of fantasy at the beginning when it said that we were you know we had to talk about music and politics you kind of imagine that that that the ideal situation is something like you know some enormous revealing cinematic camera pan that looks at the, you know, say a few notes or the relationship between a few notes in a given song. And as we pan out, we see the structure of the song, you know, and we see the textures and the rest of it. And then we come to the, you know, how it's produced, distributed and consumed. And then we come out to the critical admixture around it. And finally, it's, you know, it is revealed, this piece of music, is it complicit with capital or is it against it and there's the you know the fantasy of that of that
the ghost of that remains alive in a way for me but there isn't any discussion I don't know why I said that but no I don't mean I read very little well I don't know maybe there is a delirium of talk about popular music at the moment that stops there being what do you mean by the delirium I mean the internet and and blog after blog after blog of seamless opinion. I mean, this comes up against another key thing for us is being thrown back into a time of mere opinion, of doxer, not episteme.
You know, all there is is like a, you know, opinion and no knowledge, no traction. But anyway, if it's the talk about music that's... I could carry on. No, we're not. The talk was supplementary in a veridium way, I suppose. It was embedded into the music. It wasn't something that was just extrinsic to it. It would have been... That's arguably true in my case. But, I mean, I don't know how... You know, music and talk about music. I don't know.
But it isn't just talk about music, is it? It's the sense of a public space that music was contesting, was contributing to, had a critical role in relation to? Well, we certainly thought about that. We dreamt that. We imagined with it, engaged with it in some sense, practically. In my case, that would have... Although I started in the Young Communist League when I was, I don't know, 14 or 15, and that was sort of, in some ways, a kind of pre-theoretical just hating the ugliness and irrationality of capitalism and the
injustice and later became more theorized but you know that's we talked about sort of Gramscian well we did we thought there was some there was a contest of ideas in the space in music and around music, definitely. Is that what you're talking about? Right. The want of a better way, an old-fashioned way of talking about it, yeah. And I guess what is lost, what has been lost, is that sense of a contest. Because of what we said earlier, that the battle is lost. Well, there's absolutely... Has been seen to be lost. Yeah, that's absolutely true. And that point of apostasy
and atomism and adriftness is certainly something that I experienced. You know, I personally felt, and at a moment when I may have found a way through, you know, kept something alive through thinking critically about stuff, I was a bit more concerned with staying, you know, mentally healthy enough to make music than I was trying to find ways to rethink my way through what had been destroyed. Does that make sense? Yes. But it's significant that you say you stopped doing these notebooks around about the mid-'80s. Was that related to the...
Well, there must be some relation between that and Squitty being at the heart of the pop mega-machine at that point. Well, you know, there's a lot of this is, you know, apart from being, you know, analytical, that's the word? Yeah, about trying to be, but failing, but nevertheless interestingly, systematically analytical with whatever tools there were about music, popular music, you know, using that broadly as a term. And so it's... there was both a kind of... I stopped making the kind of music I began making and wanted to make a kind of big-peep pop music.
I might digress. The original mantra that we had, which we borrowed from our friends, the Desperate Bicycles, was that it was easy, it was cheap, go and do it. and when it came to going to America to make big P pop music you could argue the only difference was that it was difficult it was expensive but go and do it I mean if you go and doing it that was still important and it was still animated by you know these concerns apart from there are lots of other considerations about it it was a kind of there was a rhetoric no no no the kind of political gesture to moving towards pop and and and it was a forbidden area and there are lots of other reasons but you know once once I did start making
pop music and went to America and had any degree of success with it what all all of that entailed in having to promote it and realize it was so awful that it made me very very unwell and very unhappy and very unwell. And that's when the writing stopped. That's when I thought, I threw the last Beaudrillard book out the window, this fucking prolix, confusion of language this you know and and and and pop music this sugary teleological three minutes of leading you through a song with a nice resolution and beginning a middle and an end and the only and I went I went to
you know epistemology and hip-hop and and hip-hop was didn't have that the little sweet teleological journey through record progression or a melody with its consoling, you know, sonic fireworks and the rest of it. And it, I don't know, it made, I was done with theory and I was done with pop music. And I went and lived in isolation in Wales and just went back to trying to understand where this contest for truth had begun. and the soundtrack for that, for me, was DJ Premier, really,
and Pete Rock and hip-hop. Why DJ Premier? Premier? Oh, my God, why DJ Premier? Well, I mean, that's just... His beats were always the most... In preparedness for this, I meant to bring a whole bunch of musics that included a bunch of Robert stuff. There was a song that Robert did called Starting in the Middle of the Day, We Can Drink Our Politics Away that was very important to me. In fact, to digress, 1972, when I was 15, I think, went to the Reading Festival to see my two favourite bands who were The Faces and Matching Mole. And, you know, just sort of beard-scratching lefty
and the crotch-rubbing face. and there wasn't any contradiction at that point for me. They were both sort of celebrations of job dodging in one way or another, perhaps. Which was a big thing. But where was I? What was the last thing I was talking about? We're sort of going towards DJ Premier. Oh, DJ Premier. OK, well, I don't know how we got back to that. But I don't know, just his beats were the most on point. Oh, that's right. So it was due to be matching mole and unfortunately all I did come away with, because I'm crap at this, was 127 DJ Premier instrumentals. And I would much rather be sat playing those.
Well, you know, Premier was in some ways the starkest, but the most beautiful. I mean, that whole business of the kick drum sample with its dirt and its grain and the smack of the snare that in its reverb has the ghost of the string section or whatever from which it was taken. And the little piano run that's in there, like I remember saying this to a... I don't know why. I remember this only because I said it to a bloke from The Guardian the other day. I kind of said it off the spirit of the moment. And I said, this little piano run that was something like a Duchampian objet trouve there. And the bloke from The Guardian said, Oh, soothes corner. I've been in Suits Corner, yes.
So, anyway, Premiere was just... Now I'm off, I'm headed for Suits Corner again. You should never leave it. I mean, that's... So when did you first encounter hip-hop? Because it was obviously already playing... Yeah, hip-hop was a big deal already. It wasn't long after punk that hip-hop got to me, and it was as powerful I can remember being in New York. I did go to relatively early places like the Mud Club and I was in New York when, you know, Run DMC were played on the radio for the first time. I was the first person, I think, in England to play a Run DMC song on Radio 1
and so I can go to my grave happy. But it was... That's the second Run DMC first of the weekend, isn't it? After Dave Tompkins. there are you know of course one important thing that we haven't talked about here which is because we can't you know music is the locus of the unsayable is there was a power to hip hop that it would be difficult to easily talk about in our remaining but suffice to say it was a difficult in some ways it was a challenging sound to hear Run DMC and just a drum machine. And I always liked challenging music.
That's something, well, in fact, I owe everything to the Beatles, you know. It was because of the Beatles that I began asking questions initially about, you know, why does this next single not sound like the last one? What do these lyrics mean? Why do they dress like they do? Who is the Maharishi? Mummy, why is that man in a bag? You know, or whatever the equivalent was. which would lead you down to the only bookshop in Newport in South Wales where I grew up in search for a book on Buddhism and in the philosophy section there was A.J. Eyre's Language, Truth and Logic which was the only philosophy book they had which I would still recommend as a read and if it weren't for the Beatles I mean this is to be trite about it I wouldn't have gone to that bookshop and looked for that book
and as a consequence found the A.J. Eyre or because of the Beatles artwork, I wouldn't have looked for books about art that would have led me to conceptual art and beginning to question why and how art was significant, which was a habit that continued on into making music. And I've drifted off again, haven't I? No, drifts are good. One of the things that I'd like to pick up is this question of illness, because it seems to me in a way the avoidance of illness figured illness in different ways. It seemed at a certain point illness was figured as to do with too much immersion in theory, politics, etc. So the avoidance of that was the move towards pop.
Oh, really? But then pop itself becomes a form of illness itself. And so where is the line of health? I didn't see... I think the move to pop I've always had, you know, there was... There's some notes about this here somewhere. But, no, I didn't ever think, in fact, quite the contrary. I didn't think that this, you know, move to pop was an escape from anything that made me ill. Right, OK. I thought, you know, I was quite aware that you were on, you know, both in terms of accounting for it. I always felt I had to account for what I did to myself and, you know, to, for instance, the musicians that I worked with in the early Skritti.
When I first got ill, I went to Wales and prepared a kind of document that was my account of why we could and should make pop music and not... At that point we were going one of two ways. We were doing a lot of improvised live music. More and more of our live set was improvised. And there was the other option, which was to try and write pop songs. Anyway, I wrote this lengthy defense of that and I didn't ever think it was an escape or an easy option. And I sort of knew that that way madness lay.
because it was clearly there. You could hear it. So it's an embrace of a different kind of illness then, right? Yeah, I didn't think it would make me well. You thought it was a duty then, probably? A duty? Well, in some ways you couldn't read, or I couldn't, or didn't read Lacan, Derrida, what I did read of Deleuze, Guattari, anybody around at the time, Foucault, to me as I read them they led me absolutely to pop music and away from other marginal, you know, so-called marginal
musics. I definitely began to see that the marginal is only marginal in a conservative and reactionary definition, in how you simply measure it from from a conservatively given center I didn't think there was anything I definitely I began to think that it was a the so-called marginal was a place that possibly only reinforced things and didn't challenge things and I don't mean this in an interest way there was nothing nothing about that it was just that the the interesting stuff the stuff that accorded with the the unsettling of truth and the decentering of the subject and the all of the binary oppositions that Derrida talked about overturning
you know that pop music was on the other side do you know what I mean in a way and for all manner of reasons that was the place to go it you know it had a a gestural aspect to it and it was obviously somewhere that you know I wanted to know what it felt like to make those records you know I'm talking about principally an American R&B influenced pop music I wanted to know what it felt like I wanted to know what the problems with it would be I wanted to know if I could do it I mean could I even you know there were lots of reasons for the move to pop, but an escape was never any of it. Right, okay. I mean, having had those ambitions and achieving them,
I mean, I have to say that surely of all of the attempts to move from post-punk into mainstream pop, well, I'm not asking you to agree with this, I'll say this as a statement. Squitty's was the most successful in a sense of seamlessness, really. That's the uncanny quality of Cupid and Psyche 85, I think, is the seamless surface sheen of it, that immaculate design down to every last sort of sound there. and well it's just that I don't know if there's anyone else who'd
it moved so dramatically no it was and you know it was you know it's obviously not something I did alone you know I did with with you know it would none of that would have happened without me, I guess, me beginning to feel, you know, somewhere in this, the feelings that I had and what I was trying to do would have in some ways been discussed with Jeff Travis and people like Bob Last, who had Fast Records in Edinburgh, where they're going to Ford began and the rest of it. And it was particularly with the help of Jeff and people like Bob, I think, that would have facilitated any of that happening.
And so there was an enormous lot of help in realising those records, both politically, tactically, professionally, sonically, everything. But that was the plan, anyway. Yeah, I think it's probably worth pausing on this point to just emphasise the role of managers, actually, in this moment. and just think about the way in which neoliberal culture, managerialism figures management. Managers are there in this tailorised model to screw as much work as they can at workers.
The argument against neoliberal managerialism isn't an argument against management, it's an argument against that figuration of management, isn't it? Why couldn't the model for management in culture in general general be this one where you know that like that like the post-punk managers who saw their role as to you know get the best out of artists not to screw them and into the land unit yeah I mean to an extent uncomfortably for me Jeff Travis is in in the room and he you know he's he's he's a much you should have got him really he's more value than I am but yes I mean the the extent to which any of this at all, my beginning to be able to be professionally involved in music,
comes down to Jeff, and the fact that there were definitely, at Rough Trade and at other places at the time, there were men and women of ideas and vision, and that's a whole discreet and powerful history that's part of this story but has its own, you know, structure for want of a better word. But you're quite right to talk about, you know, management. What was interesting also at the time, one of the other things, you know, just anecdotally that made the move to making, getting lots of money to make pop music, only because making music that, for me, that was that complicated and sophisticated meant spending a lot of time in a recording
studio was the fact that at Warner Brothers in America there were there were it was the last period there where there were cultured and intelligent men at the top of the company men of music and in their way men of ideas who had you know I was amazed to know you know I used to occasionally appear in the NME I never read any of what I said but I think it was fairly you know hyperbolically kind of it was Sue's Corner probably and but they they they had read this as had the people at Virgin in the UK there was some some fairly bright people there too that were kind of struck with this I mean they professed perhaps not to understand it but when Bob last who became with Jeff's
suggestion my manager another very clever man of ideas went into the offices of Warner Brothers or whatever, there was a kind of ability to sort of, this possibly would never work out, dazzle them with just, you know, just being able to put a sentence or three together. And they'd read these things they didn't understand. And there was a kind of funny, I don't know if Geoff would bear this out, there was a kind of, that did earn you a kind of respect and a sort of bargaining power. So we were able to get quite a lot of money out of these people. having been fairly articulate about the problems of capitalism and culture. I think nothing highlights the contrast between then and now more than that, really.
The idea that you could go into big record companies and they would give you money because you were theoretically articulate. There was an element to that, I think, certainly. I guess that management yes that was all of this was perhaps that's the other I've mentioned this elsewhere the other thing that facilitates any of this happening were the twin poles of Compendium was it Compendium the bookshop? Compendium the bookshop in Camden where in a sense all of these ideas came from and Rough Trade, a cycle ride across the park in a way, to those two...
They were the key places that, from where these ideas came or conduits to them to where they were allowed to have any kind of expression. And I guess it's thanks to Jeff and that's worth saying. Because I think, you know, 1985, it's significant that Cupid and Psyche had the 85 in the date. And it just, I mean, what strikes me is the contrast between how things must have felt at the time and how we might look back on them now. like Cupid and Psyche in 85 presumably felt like a part of a dialectical process
that had come out of stuff that was going on in the 70s whereas now if you look at it it just seems like the end of that the kind of process which led up to you being able to make Cupid and Psyche wouldn't continue well I don't know the chaos at the end of it which for me was where the easy thing to say about it is that whatever ironical distance I thought I could sustain between what I was doing and the world, the industry, sort of collapsed under the pressure of bullshit and as suspicious as I am of ideas of sincerity, the amount of insincerity, which is a difficult thing to talk about,
that you were suddenly face to face with. The idiocy of it, the vulgarity of it, the horror of it, was enough to make the sanest of us sick, I think. Along with having to... It's still the case that I've been doing some promotion recently for something, and when you go, even with the best of intentions, when you go to a radio station or a TV station and hope to have something enlightening to say, you know, you can't. Do you know what I mean? There aren't the spaces, there aren't the people, there aren't the minds, there isn't the... And that's one of the places where it all...
It all died in trying to... in me collapsing under the whole thing of trying to draw attention to it in an interesting way. So from an illness in a way becomes a symptom of a... I think what we can see is, or what I'd say, is that we've seen a replacement of that sort of... that critical art theory kind of politics kind of matrix by PR, entertainment, managerialism. And you seem to be right at the leading edge of that switchover in a way. switch over in a way. I was an early casualty, I suppose. But, you know, as you talk about
the era of there is no alternative, you know, I obviously refute any there's some sort of stupid people that, you know, try and conflate what, you know, the so-called glittering surface of Cupid and Psyche with Thatcherism, which is just not worth taking seriously. But there was a a point at which the era of there is no alternative where the ideas that had come from the left the left it's interesting actually one of these things in here is an angry letter to Marxism today complaining about what they were writing that I never sent
that's by the by But there was a... What were you complaining about? The state that Marxism today was in. There were a couple of... One of which... There was two letters to Marxism today that I didn't send. One was complaining about their complacency in light of what was then called recent continental thought. Right, OK. And there was a later one, you know, when Marxism today seemed to be... I don't know if it ever did become full of recipes. and, you know, but somewhere, yeah, both of those things I was writing to complain about never did get to, I was so angry actually that the notes get progressively more crossed out and in bigger letters and that's why I never got to send them.
But there was that point, you know, which what you could broadly, I don't know, intellectually and theoretically a collapse on the left and politically as well, that left me alongside ill health, brain damage from pop, there was the apostasy of having lost faith politically in light of what was happening. Yeah, because we could see that move into pop and the rationale for it as part of a broader moment. of the left itself, which, you know, the Marxists, if you talk about Marxism today,
the whole New Times movement, the whole idea, not that so much there's no alternative, but that times have changed, you know, the structure of the economy and the world around us has changed, and actually in lots of ways it's not desirable to go back to how things were, but we need a left-wing take on all of this, all of this change, and, you know, that New Times project sort of failed, and the end result of it was we can all see new Labour, another version of there was no alternative. I don't know what there was at the time, you know, when you say that failed, there was nothing in position to succeed, was there? That's a good... Well, that's a good way of getting to have it, yeah. It's worse than failing, I think, in a way. No, to come back to this point, though, about...
I think that sort of facile equation of Cupid and Psyche's glycering surfaces with with satirism and okay that is kind of ludicrous but at the same time what what did you see the tensions as being well that prevented it being absorbed into that consumer culture what was different about it I'm not sure there was anything discreetly different about Cupid and Psyche. I mean, I never ever listened to my own music, but I was forced to the other day go into a mastering room where a compilation was being assembled. So I had to listen to bits of Cupid and Psyche. And, you know, like this.
And what struck me most forcibly through clenched ears was the ratio of kind of pop banality to kind of smart-ass little mention of philosophy. I would always sneak. It would always be somewhere in there. You know, you'd get some... I mean, it started with, you know, back in the early days, there was always like a little bit of some mention. You know, Skank Block Bologna had the, you know, the block bit came from Gramsci, and, you know, it went on through all my songs. But by the time you get to that record, that's what struck me. The ratio of pop banality to wise-ass little was alarmingly high.
But I had my reasons for embracing pop banality. You know, what people on the left had traditionally thought of as the vacuity and banality in pop music were two things that I found exciting and potentially powerful. And in here, believe me, I'm quite articulate about that. I possibly am as articulate now. But so... And I wonder what, you know... I don't know. So I'm not sure how it was heard then and what the passing of time has done to the way it would be heard.
I mean, I will say that in its defence, there are, and this is purely anecdotal, I've come on my travels, come across a number of bright young men, and it is usually men, that have come up to me and pressed into my hands either publications or theses or the odd book. They're usually men now teaching philosophy who surprisingly will credit to me, amazingly, an awakening in them of an interest in theory and ideas. and some of them would locate that as late as Cupid and Psyche,
for what it's worth. Perhaps we come back to this question of compulsion, need, etc. Because perhaps a need that seems to keep coming up in your music, well, it is precisely not a need, It's an excess of... It's what's beyond need. And this issue that you mentioned, sugar, I think sugar and sweetness as a... The lure of sugar and sweetness as a really powerful lure throughout your work, and also the dangers of that lure, that seems a major sort of tension that's operating right through.
And, you know, that's... is delivered through music that is highly compulsive. For me, Cupid and Psyche is like audio crack. If I start listening to those tracks, I have to listen to them about 50 times. I can't get rid of them. There's an excessive sweetness. That's part of that kind of addiction. And obviously the question of addiction and compulsion comes back with Boom Boom Bap on the last record, and that maybe ties a few things in together, because it was a love song to hip-hop in a way.
Yes, that was a love song to hip-hop. And, well, yeah, and addiction. I don't know about the sweetness thing. I mean, I do know what you mean. and I was on one of those early records, I think on the sleeve, it had something, which I think possibly comes from the Old Testament. It always looked like something that you might find on a reggae record, but it was also on the back of a tin of treacle, which was, out of the strong comes forth sweetness. Wasn't there, anybody remember this? Was that Tate and Lyle, isn't it? Tate and Lyle. I think it was a picture of a lion's head surrounded by bees. I mean that was fantastic enough in itself but out of the strong came forth sweetness
and I don't know what to say about that that's one of the other than you know there's something more than the metaphorical use of sweetness there and again in the notes there's probably a pretty pretty wordy exposition about that. But that's difficult for me to follow or to account for. OK. One thing I want to move on to was studio angst as a problem.
How much? Studio what? Angst. I wonder about... Because of having access to those studios and also having, perhaps if you were sort of early victim of the PR clampdown, also an early victim of kind of digital anxiety because of the amount of revisions that were now possible for... It's absolutely true that when digital technology came in and you could move sound around in milliseconds, you learnt to hear in milliseconds. We really, I mean, it didn't take us long to be able to adjust our ears to be able to distinguish a snare drum hit that was 10 milliseconds later.
I mean, people before would have said, I don't think that's possible. But you could, you can, you know. and we spent a long time shifting high hats around by... It's something I still find... Because of the habits of the 80s, in pursuit of this kind of kinetic, I don't know, perfection, which all comes from the elaborate syncopation of sophisticated R&B, and that's a whole other story. But the pursuit of that, the technology that suddenly afforded you the ability to get the microscope out and go into, well, how does this feel if the snare drum is 10, 20 milliseconds later?
Once you can hear like that, it's kind of tragically impossible to go back. It's a bit like the awful thing once you've learnt to hear a record in its constituent parts. I wish I could remember the prelapsarian time when I heard a pop record or any piece of music as a thing. You know, I wouldn't have known, my ears wouldn't have known how to pick a bass line out or a hi-hat out from the total, you know, sonic, what's it. And once you can, you know, with what is gained, something is lost. And, you know, once you've found the ability to manipulate sound in there, you know, as a result of technology, in that way something is gained and lost as
well. Is that part of the dynamic of the longer and longer periods between the records? That had more to do with depression and anxiety, I mean, but it's true that you can, you know, can fanny about now you've got the technology to forever and defer the moment of completion which is you know obviously the dreadful point at which you will be judged and the technology existed to be able to do that and and sustain you in this awful state of you know depression anxiety boredom you know which but that's one of the blessings of the technology. So during
the ill periods did you were you unable to work or did you continue to work but it was just very difficult? For a long time I didn't you know I had a music I went and lived alone in Wales I severed all my tires professionally and personally and lived alone and would I had a room with all the musical gear in it but you If you open the door and you could smell the smell of a guitar case, or a flight case, that would be enough to set you off. And so what there was was there was hip-hop and there was epistemology. So again, the hip-hop side, but what was the epistemology? Just back to... away from... just trying to get back to sorting my head out with ideas.
It was always important to not just have an opinion, but to have knowledge. And this went back to childhood. And it's that, you know, the battle for knowledge over opinion is something that continues in philosophy and politics today. And I wanted to look at the beginnings of that. You know, stuff that would take you back to Kant and early bifurcations of what was out in the world and what was in your head. To try and get to grips with all of that, as an autodidact, as someone who didn't study any of this stuff, I wanted to know where it began. It's funny you should say that,
because that's one thing I sort of wanted to move towards ending on, is this question of autodidacticism. because it seems to me that part of the installation of kind of PR entertainment culture is the removal of kind of conditions for autodidacticism. And as someone who tries to teach people stuff, you realise you can't really teach. All you can hope to do is create conditions for autodidacticism. and you know that I just wondered if you want to Well you know we mentioned this just before we came out I can remember saying that the if people ask is there still any what potential is there
you know for I don't know for what we used to call the counter hegemonic what you know is there popular music and anything that might in and around it work against the common sense assumptions and the idea of the given and the natural and the ideology of late capitalism. And, you know, the only limits to music's potential in these areas are the limits to the education of the listener, I think. And so as a consequence, what's really more pressingly at stake than wither music or wither pop music at the moment
is what's happening to education in the UK. And I know you have thoughts about that. And we've run out of time. Yes, I think we have. Seems like a relatively good place to end. I think we're done. Thank you very much. Thank you.