On Strike...
We've been in the fridge for the last four or five years - forcibly in the fridge; we've been on strike. Our contract was not a good contract. It was a classic: "signed too young, couldn't get out of it." Whenever we could get out of it, something happened that prevented us.
Around about making Nonsuch I just realized that we were never going to make any money with Virgin. They were making a reasonable sum of money out of us, but our deal was so badly slanted against us that we'd been on the label since 1977 and hadn't actually gone into profit by '92.
Now we're out of the fridge, and as soon as we can get the next record deal sorted, we'll get in that studio and get going. And we have at least two good albums' worth of stuff to get out.
They [the record label] can't make you record. See, if we'd so much as fought, they would have owned it. The only way I could work was to do other things that they wouldn't necessarily have owned. I worked with Harold Budd. In fact, I'm sort of working with him via the post at the moment.
I co-wrote with a few people, did a few production things. I mean, just things they couldn't ... were intangible. They didn't have a product they could say that they owned.
We eventually got out just before Christmas, so we have the big fishing rod out and dangling all the 36 or whatever demos to record companies saying, "Are you interested?"
And a lot of them are ... in fact, our manager is right now in California talking to people.
The Music Industry...
It's so feudal. It's like electronic feudal. There's no industry like it. What other industry do you know doesn't pay a penny for its raw product? You can't think of it. You know, if you're a film company, you have to spend money to make a film. With the record industry, we pay to have the albums made. We then don't own the albums.
We pay to have them recorded. We pay to have them pressed up, printed. We pay to have them advertised. We pay to have them shipped around. The record company doesn't pay a cent. It's pure profit. I don't think there's any other industry on earth that doesn't have to pay a cent for its raw product.
Now this sounds really stupid, but it's actually genuine: I don't see success in terms of fame or cash. I see it as achieving total and utter selfish delight. If I've made a record about which I can say, "I'm so proud of that, and if I get hit by a steamroller tonight, I am so proud of that record," I'd love to get to that stage.
But every album you finish, you think, "well, I'm proud of that, but I'd do it differently next time." And then you move on and you do another one and you think, "I'm really proud of that but, no, I'd do it differently the next time." So, it's the perfection. You're always chasing it and you can never achieve it. Perfection is something you're always going towards; it's never something you arrive at.
My advice to young bands? DON'T SIGN ANYTHING! But you have to - well you don't have to ...
I mean, the Beatles signed very little. They certainly didn't sign anything with their manager, which was a really healthy relationship.
XTC...
We're sort of married to each other basically, and that sounds really sticky and evil, but it kind of gets like a marriage. You know the good side of them and the bad side, and you get things done by playing on people's good sides and looking towards their good sides, and emphasizing their strong points.
I think it's best if one person brings, you know, puts their arm down their throat and pulls up a portion of their soul, and then the rest of you can get to ornament it or beat it back into shape. But you've got to start from something very pure, and that comes out best if it's one person's intention.
The Dukes was a band that we always wanted to be in, as school kids, because you'd take your Small Faces singles to school, and ah, listen to this, you know, "Universal, recorded in his backyard on a cassette. Listen to the dogs bark." Or, you know, you'd take [Pink Floyd's] "See Emily Play" or "Arnold Layne" and sit around the youth club. We all wanted to be in these psychedelic bands. And then history rolls on.
You've grown up and in you're in a group, but it's not what you wanted to be in when you were a kid. And so it was just this mysterious kind of bending of history, and why don't we sort of say thank you, and at the same time we can get to have some fun by pretending to be some band from 1967 that sounds like all the bands from 1967.
We were making the same kind of music a couple of years before that [punk], but nobody was biting at all. And the good thing about punk was, it really blew the doors down, and people started to say, "OK, so I'm up for something new."
And they turned and looked at us, and we were new to them although with very little change. We'd been playing the same sort of music for a couple of years before that but just couldn't get any takers. That's all it was.
Back to the studio...
I wanted to stop playing live while I was writing stuff for English Settlement. I didn't want to play it live, and - maybe I hatched it in my own seeds of live discontent too much - but I came up with the notion of if we don't have to play this stuff live, I can use other instruments.
I can use acoustic guitars which are a nightmare to try and work live. We can use cellos; we can use horns and stuff; we can try different percussive things. We can do harmonies because we don't have to sing them live.
Suddenly it's like taking the blinkers off. You can see everything in color for the first time. Now I think that affected the writing for English Settlement, and then, when we really did stop playing live, the palette just became very broad.
You could use anything you wanted to. You could use any sound. You didn't have to feel obliged to reproduce it live, because if you were going to be honest to the whole thing, you'd have to take a couple of orchestras, and choirs, and God knows what to do it.
We've built up quite a few songs. I mean, we've been rather lazy. I think it got to, sort of two albums' worth of songs. And then sort of started to get a bit lazy, and nothing...
We've sort of tailed off around 36, or something like that. But the irony of it is, I actually believe, it's our best material yet. It's unrecorded, and it's the longest gestation period ever. How long is a baby elephant in there for? You know, it's a bit like these new songs.
I can't see making an album without a producer. It's almost impossible to be ringmaster and clown, or tightrope walker and lion tamer at the same time. You have to do one job or the other.
Producers, whether you trust them or not - and unfortunately I don't trust the majority of them because I have to say it's not their music, you know, it's not their babies - but you do have to trust them to some extent to say, "This is good; this is bad".
And I suppose you have to be willing to allow their opinion in. I try and find producers that ... there's something sympathetic in their attitude to getting the baby born.
Biography...
I know it sounds stupid, but I carried a guitar to school for ages before I could play it - you know, just as a girl impresser. Girls seemed to like that kind of thing.
It was my dad's guitar which he had in early skiffle and rock and roll bands. Girls would come up and stroke the thing, and it was great. At least you could get talking to them, you know.
[If I was a guitar] I'd probably be the electric guitar I used to own called a Sway Lee Golden Tone, which was made by a company in Singapore, and it was virtually unplayable. It just sounded horrible. I'd probably be that guitar.
I tried to make it more presentable by sticking shiny Fab-lon on it to make it somehow more appealing. It was an appalling instrument. But that probably sums up my character: cheap and nasty and unplayable.
[Englishmen? They have] bad teeth, they like whacking each other's asses, and they collect something. That's... you know, you summed up an Englishman there.
Well, toy soldiers is my thing. As a teenager I collected American comics. I have thousands. Marvel, DC, and EC ... wonderful comics. But it became an addiction I had to break, and I broke it. And, unfortunately, or fortunately, found a couple of toy soldiers in an antique shop window that were like some I had as a kid, and they opened the flood gates. I've got thousands now. I'm actually making my own figures now. For years I've tried and tried to understand how the hell you make toy soldiers, and now I can finally do it.
Songwriting...
It's often the most powerful pieces of music, or the most powerful things that are said, are said quietly or said sweetly.
Like the teacher you were most afraid of at school wasn't the one who shouted; it was the one who took you aside and said, "I think you should do that again." And you knew the one that shouted and yelled and blustered was just full of hot air. But the one that pulled you aside and said it quietly with no fuss scared the shit out of you.
I think that's kind of like songwriting. You just can't stand up and say, "This is wrong. This has got to be changed," or "I think this, and therefore you should think that." You can't do it like that. You have to make it fun or you have to paint the clowns on the side of the wagon before you can get them to come in and be gassed.
Ray Davies is probably singularly the strongest [influence]. So, I still have a lot of exorcising to do with that ghost. I mean, if I could write something a fraction as wonderful as "Waterloo Sunset" or "Almanac".
Well, "Almanac" just swiped me sideways terribly ... wonderfully terribly. You know, I'm still reeling from that now. How you can have a song that's so concise yet is constantly turning and twisting and working in the everyday - the wonder it creates is everyday stuff.
But how do you do that? That is some alchemy to do that. So, I still have lots of stakes to nail through the heart of Ray Davies before I can rid him from my system.
Lennon and McCartney, obviously. I think no person with a guitar and an ear to the 20th century can deny being influenced by The Beatles.
Oddly, Burt Bacharach, although I don't really know how he does it, it's still a mystery because it comes from the piano and that's still a frightening big crocodile with grinning teeth to me. And all my keyboard playing is one of those wonderful exercises in blundering through.
So, I don't understand the Burt Bacharach magic and I still find that intensely good. Or Bacharach/David to be more precise, because I think of the combination of the two. Brian Wilson is on the top five there.
At one time I used to write nonsense songs that were just shotgun sort of blasts of modern impressionism... all that kind of stuff from White Music... just the words are for effect.
They don't mean anything other than the total blast effect of all this sort of modernity coming at you; not a cheap way of writing, but it was a way of writing that I could grab quickly and it wasn't from really deep down inside. It was a surface thing. It went with the fact that we were brand new to it all, really, and were desperate to make an impression.
And then I thought, "Well, this is a waste of air time; I should really be writing about what I know about." And so, I got that out of the way, and the songs got more personal.
Driving...
I dislike cars intensely. I really don't like them. I really don't like cars. I think in the next century when people finally wise up - well hopefully, it will be sooner than that. But when people finally wise up, they will not believe what we have done to the earth in this century with the automobile.
And most of the pollution comes from cars. And what the car has done, certainly to England, is just made it into one giant car park. And it's all for the benefit of the car. And I think people will be appalled, and they just won't believe what happened in this century. They'll just say, "How stupid they were." I think cars are ugly; I think cars are poisonous. They kill more people than... and that's why I don't own one....
Drumming...
I wanted to be a drummer initially. My father always had a set of drums which he left set up in my bedroom, and when he'd go to work, I'd kind of surreptitiously sit and bonk these things around.
I thought rhythmically long before I thought melodically. And I think for the first few years, certainly, I was playing the guitar like it should have been a set of drums. So melodically some of the things that were coming out were just a bit too triangular for some people. Although I found a lot of that exciting.
What's wrong with a little grit? Must it all be pre-chewed porridge? But I thought more percussively. I found my conversation guitar-wise was always with the drummer - the singing was some other scribble up at the top that wasn't particularly related to what the guitar was doing.
Touring, The end...
I felt the playing was suffering. I just felt trapped. You know, five years of what started out as great fun became a bit of a roving prison sentence, and it began to have a lot of physical and mental effects on me that I didn't like.
I started to get ill a lot. I started to get really unbalanced, I think. As soon as you lose control and you're trapped inside something, I think it's very upsetting, whatever it is.
Our music was not being allowed to grow live. I mean, we were personally kind of feeling trapped, but our music was...it really couldn't grow live because we were just obliged to reproduce the same thing.
There was one time where we were driving in upstate New York through a lot of snow. We were near the end of a 10-week tour in which I had a lot of memory lapses. I'd wake up and I couldn't remember who I was and where I was.
And I remember walking off in this field to pee somewhere in this snowstorm, and standing there, my trousers around my ankles in this snow. I mean, lost sight of the truck, and just thinking, "Who am I? What am I doing here?".
It was real unnerving to suddenly find yourself, like, awake on Earth, somewhere on Earth, stood in a field, up to your knees in snow, peeing, thinking, "Who am I? What am I doing?" That really frightened me.
