from my dear friend Michl (of Taken by Surprise Records, Munich)
Autistic Youth - Landmine Beach LP is out now
Hailing from Portland, Oregon these 4 youngsters are influenced heavily by classic 80's bands like the WIPERS or ADOLESCENTS but also more recent outfits like THE OBSERVERS or THE EXPLODING HEARTS. On this LP they deliver 11 songs of anthemic and heartfelt punkrock that will make you dance dance dance! Comes in a silkscreened cover. In cooperation with the cool cat from SABOTAGE RECORDS
More infos at http://www.myspace.com/takenbysurpriserecords
Ordering info: After lots of delays and postal drama the repress of the AUTISTIC YOUTH - Landmine Beach LP is finally out! Below is the info. The wholesale price is 6.50 EURO. If you reside in the USA or Canada get in touch, we have a bunch of records in NYC so the postage will be much cheaper. If you ordered already i saved your copy, but please get in touch with me and send me the shipping addresses.
Thanks and good buy...michl
Monday, June 9, 2008
Le Tigre interview
Le Tigre (JD Samson and Kathleen Hanna) interviewed by Kylie, Lucy, Melamoo
Melamoo: I thought I’d ask about the Big Day Out first and how you’re finding it, I mean it’s a big gig compared to other stuff you might have done in America, bigger and different types of acts.
JD: Yeah we’ve done festivals before. We did a festival called Coachella last summer, that was really awesome. It was really huge, it was like 40,000 people or something like that. Bands like the Cure and Radiohead, The Pixies. It was really fun, cos we don’t often play festivals. We did play the Michigan Women’s Music Festival, which is like 8000 women, so that’s really fun to do because it’s only women and we camp out and we have a really good time there.
I’ve had a really good time at the Big Day Out. I was worried about it being outdoors and playing without our video. It was actually fun without the video. But at the second show, the crowd were responding really differently and we were wondering how much of it had to do with not having the video.
Melamoo: Did you catch other bands, like local acts, while you’ve been at the Big Day Out so far?
Kathleen: We saw The Spazzys
JD: Oh yeah they were good. Oh we watched Slipknot. (much laughter from everyone)
Melamoo: yeah their crazy mask things
JD: It’s hard cos you get there and you have to prepare for your set and then as soon as you’re done, you have to go eat and you kinda miss a bunch of bands
Kylie: The first question that I have…well, you know the revised edition of the Cunt book?
Kathleen: The Inga Muscio book?
Kylie: Yeah. Like, in the revised one, I like how she was writing about how the book originally focussed on a really explicit woman-centred feminist politics and then since then in a kinda post-September 11 world with increasingly more terrible things happening, she declared: "We’re all in it together now." To me, that seems to mean making strategic alliances and capitalising on the inter-connectedness of all of us who struggle for a better world.
And I kinda thought that the earliest Le Tigre records had a really explicit feminist queer identity politics, stuff like Hot Topic. And I thought "This Island" is less obvious in a way, like less self-referential to our, or perhaps your, community, if that makes sense. And I’m kinda curious as to whether this arose out of a similar context to "we’re all in it together now", trying to make something that speaks a little more generally to our allies outside of the immediate feminist and queer communities.
[although I do have to admit that I don’t have my own copy of This Island yet, so this analysis or observation is based on my initial few somewhat cursory scans of the lyric sheet of Lucy’s copy –k]
Kathleen: It’s a good question…
JD: It’s funny that you say that, because actually a lot of people think the opposite way, and I think more so just because we’re not naming names on "This Island", but we’re making it like an open-ended invitation for people to say the names of people that they’re talking about. And for us, "After Dark" was written as –well Kathleen wrote it- but (to Kathleen) you were writing it about a specific person, but also just like the idea of becoming friends with another feminist artist. It’s interesting with "This Island", because I guess we didn’t name names, but there is still so much blatant feminism and queer-positive stuff. Like I mean, "Vis" is something that we’ve never done before.
Kathleen: I mean, we’ve always considered anti-racism and anti-classism and you know, all the isms, a part of our feminist agenda. On our EP, which is the second thing we ever put out, we had a song about police brutality which was very much in our faces at the time and still is. At that time, there had been several killings in a row in New York, and it was really upsetting. So we have always felt like that, but I think this record does read more like that, I totally understand where you’re coming from. I think to us, we can’t tell how it reads, because it’s coming from this sort of like internal place…
Kylie: An integrated, synthesised kind of politics?
Kathleen: Yeah
JD: Like, "New Kicks" being anti-war and being anti-Bush is just as much blatantly feminist to us, and also any mention of the war or any of the stuff related to 9/11 and stuff like that that we’ve been dealing with for the past couple of years.
Kathleen: Yeah. And like "Hot Topic" came about at a time when, at least in our community in the States, Riot Grrrl was sort of on the decline and there was all this weird in-fighting going on, and it was really kind of depressing. Instead of being like "Oh I disagree with your point of view, let’s figure out a way that we can still work together. Or maybe we can’t work together, and you know what, that’s okay, just because we’re feminists doesn’t mean we have to agree on absolutely everything."
Instead of doing that, a lot of the small little music scenes that a lot of us entered-and-left-and-then-entered-and-left were collapsing in on themselves because people couldn’t agree to disagree on band politics. So it was really this negative kind of time and we wrote Hot Topic out of more of a personal thing, or even an identity-politics thing of like "We wanna celebrate all the joyous things"
Kylie: A kind of affirmation?
Kathleen: Yeah, instead of giving into the negativity and being like "Here are ALL of the things that are wrong", we were like "Here are ONE HUNDRED things that are right". And in that song there’s like all different kinds of writers and activists and artists, they’re not all women. And even with that, it was more about stuff we like, it wasn’t about saying it has to be a list of women who are in our scene or something. And yeah, I do understand what you mean about how "This Island" reads like that, to us it’s all just a kind of part of who we are, part of Le Tigre.
Kylie: Yeah, I mean most progressive feminist politics see the inter-connectedness of different types of oppression and it’s hardly like they treat feminism as a single-issue kind of politics. And yeah I guess with the anti-war and anti-oppression stuff you mentioned…well, I was reading that you have collaborated with people as varying in their left-wing or counter-cultural agendas as Gloria Steinem and Green Day…Is that part of building community and building alliances with people with slightly different agendas but still within a broad-left context? Or is it just fun to reach new audiences?
Kathleen: Well I just sung on Green Day’s record because they asked me to, and because I’m always interested in singing with different kinds of music and just different experiences as a singer. And I find that because I’m a feminist singer a lot of people won’t ask me to do things because they think I won’t do it.
Kylie: Yeah I can imagine.
Kathleen: Yeah so like, when I get asked, I just wanna do it! And also, in addition to being a feminist activist, I’m a singer and I care about singing. And Gloria, she was running for Kerry..
JD: Yeah she actually asked to be a part of our show and she came and gave a speech before we started our shows, that was probably the height of our collaboration with her. But you know, it was a surprise to our crowd too, and I think it was just a really good meeting of different minds.
Lucy: You mentioned "Vis" before, and I wanted to ask you a question about that. I’m asking you JD, because I mean, did you write the lyrics?
JD: Yeah
Lucy: It’s one of my favourite songs on the album. Because my interpretation of the song –before I actually read Diva magazine and read what you said about it, so you’ve ruined my question!- was that it was kinda about the dyke scene and the fact that, despite all its flaws, the stereotyping, like the line "hey, you’re not a dyke!" and stuff like that, like despite all that, it ends up celebratory kind of thing.
JD: Yep
Lucy: And I really love that bit. And it kind of resonates with my experiences of the queer scene, in that I know it’s flawed and I dis it all the time, like I moan on about how shit all the gay clubs here in Brisbane are. But I would be the first to jump to their defence if someone tried to take them away.
JD: For sure.
Lucy: Yeah I would be like "I love The Beat! It’s my favourite club!" So I was kinda wondering if that’s what you were kinda putting across, that it’s both negative and positive?
JD: Yeah definitely. The song is like, actually about going to a straight club and feeling really weird and like "I don’t really belong here", the idea of just being visible in that kind of setting feels like I’m being an activist just by existing in that space, you know? So that’s kinda why I wrote the song, because I ended up at this weird party by myself and I felt really uncomfortable at first, but then I felt really excited that I’d found another lesbian, butch lesbian, and we connected, and we had a few drinks you know. (laughs)
That’s kinda more like what I was thinking about when I wrote the song, but I definitely agree with you in terms of like, the flaws and the brilliant genius of our communities everywhere. Like in New York, we had Meow Mix, this bar I’d been going to since I was like 17 and everybody was dogging it all the time and I was like "No! It’s our home!" and it just got closed like 2 months ago and it’s a sports bar now. So it’s really depressing. But I’m like all for gay pride and power and all that stuff, I will never give that up, you know.
[this last bit makes me wish this was an audio-zine, so you could hear exactly how amazing it was when JD said it]
Lucy: I think it’s really important not to forget that we still need that kind of…like yeah it’s cool to talk about being post-gender but like we still need those spaces and those kinds of clubs to make ourselves feel GOOD in the world because it is such a fucking horrible world out there. Like, we need to feel like we belong sometimes, in some places.
Melamoo: The L Bar!
Kylie: I’m asking this question to you Kathleen, if I may. I was re-reading an old Punk Planet, the "Life after Bikini Kill" interview…
Kathleen: Oh yeah
Kylie: ..Where you were talking about image and aesthetics and how at one point you were like "it’s ok to wear lipstick and be a feminist", but in the interview you said "I take a little bit of that back now", that you thought it was more subversive to create your own definitions of beauty in a way. And I’m kind of curious as to where you’re currently at with that because Le Tigre seem to have some really fun stuff going on with image. And if we take our cue from Judith Butler, if we perform our gender…like, is the use of image and aesthetics in Le Tigre part of fucking with fashion and fucking with gender and trying to shake things up at a very visual level, at a very immediate level, and in a very fun way?
Kathleen: I think part of it is, sort of like what you guys were talking about with clubs, where all you have is the gay male clubs you go to. I feel like a lot of times in performance, we’ll be the one all-female band or the one queer band in the town. And to me, even more than dealing with gender in terms of like costume or makeup or hair, it’s more just about like putting on this big show and instead of being given this little tiny slot, giving back this full really huge thing.
Cos we don’t want to just be another band that’s staring at the floor and it looks like we’re just wearing our clothes that we were wearing on the street that day. Like, we want to give our scene and our community something that we really worked hard on in our apartments, and worked our asses off to make. We didn’t come all the way to Brisbane to stare at the ground, do you know what I mean, we came here to like put on as a big as a show as we can with what limited stuff we have.
Kylie: Yeah I guess it can rub off on the audience, this really fun, exciting kind of feeling that helps you to transcend...
Kathleen: Yeah, it’s more about that, and it’s more about a new aesthetic of music and what you can do with like mixing performance art with music. For me at least, I don’t even really think about the whole "Beauty Myth" kinda stuff anymore, it’s not like "I’m past that", it’s just like I’m pretty comfortable with the stuff that I want to do.
And I’m kinda like a professional entertainer at this point and I have the mask that I wear that makes me feel like I can actually be vulnerable. I like to wear a lot of makeup on stage because having that mask there prepares me to open my heart. I know that sounds really weird, but I’ve been doing it for a long time. It gets me ready to be Le Tigre, you know.
Kylie: I mean, we often talk about when we go out, it’s much more fun for us to put on like costumes and crazy clothes. It just takes you out immediate reality, it’s just a really easy way to transcend boring, mundane reality, and also to take on the persona you need to take on to negotiate the outside world..
JD: You guys should try dressing up all the same and then going out!
Kathleen: Like ALL DAY
JD: Yeah whoa it’s really fun.
Kathleen: Yeah we wear exactly matching costumes when we run errands and stuff and like everybody was freaks out. We did it today actually at the koala park.
Kylie: Aside from your image and costume stuff, what is the role of your performance and projection stuff.. like is that part of mixing performance with music, incorporating different visual elements and having something really fun and exciting that works on several very immediate levels?
JD: Yeah, I mean we wanna create a show that’s on a different level, or a bunch of different planes. And the audience can pick what they really wanna do, you know. We just want to give a lot of energy to the crowd, and we find that when we do, we get a lot in return, so we have matching outfits and videos projected behind us and we have choreographed dancing, you know. As much as you’re willing to put into it, that’s what you get back, and we wanna have a community moment where everybody is having a really good time.
Melamoo: I like what you said in an interview about how you’ve kind of moved out of the ghetto now and you’re kind of more anonymous in New York as well, and how that’s made you really focus on your music now as well, less of being the kinda spokesperson for riot grrrl, that kind of thing.
Kathleen: Yeah I think the 3 of us have for a long time been artists in our own right, do you know what I mean, and being in New York I think, it made me at least less like conscious of what everyone else thought of me, the community, wondering "Is this the right thing or is the wrong thing?", more conscious of other people. But we’re putting a lot of love and time and energy into everything we make, making what we really want to, instead of what we think everybody else wants. I mean, there IS a lot of conscious thought about our audience, because in a way we ARE our audience.
I think we, both JD & I, a lot of the time want to write lyrics for ourselves, at times in our lives when we didn’t have anybody. And when no-one in our scene was saying the things we wanted to say. In a way it’s selfish. Like people say you’re doing this out of altruism (for your community), and it’s not. It’s definitely really good feeling to be able to do that, it’s just like "Oh wow, I made it to this point where I have enough love and support around me that I can sort of reach out of the boat and pull someone else out of the water and that feels really satisfying.
Kylie: When you said that you write lyrics that relate to you guys, stuff that you really wanna say or hear, or stuff that you really wanna see, like is "Keep On Livin" and the Keep on Livin’ website part of that?
JD: Yeah
Kathleen: Yeah exactly.
Kylie: I mean, because you put something "out there" that is about your very personal individual experience, people tend to relate to it a lot.. Maybe because it's not trying to pretend to speak generally for everyone, but just to speak about yr specific experience that certain other people might be able to share w/you...I was reading this old interview with Kim Gordon in Rolling Stone and she was talking about how this teenage girl didn’t write in her diary, she basically wrote everything in a diary-style confessional way to Kim Gordon. Stuff about high-school and alienation and angst and crushes.. And I guess I was wondering if alienated young queer/tranz/feminist/punk kids, because of stuff like "Keep on Livin", write to you guys in that way?
JD: Yeah they totally do. That’s part of the reason why we put that on our website because we were getting flooded by letters asking questions.
Kylie: So "Keep on Livin" was your way of writing back to all of those people together, like a letter to the community?
JD: Yeah, at first we printed out that stuff and we started sending it to the people who had written to us, but then you know, it got crazy, so we just put it up on the website and now we’ve gotten like so many less letters asking those questions, and people DO go to our website and use it.
Kathleen: The song and the website was a big response to a lot of the letters we got. It was before we figured out the whole website thing! And we really WANTED to respond to a lot of things that people had written, but we had gotten so much mail…I’d gotten so much mail from the Bikini Kill times and I’d written back every single person for like ten years. And I just wanted to have a personal life, you know. And I decided, you know what, I just can’t answer my mail anymore, cos I’m so wrapped up in all these 13- and 14-year-old girls talking about cutting on themselves…I mean I could function, I got really good at functioning, but I had so much shit in my head and I really wanted to be able to separate myself from it.
Kylie: I guess I if you are putting so much energy into responding to mail, you simply don’t have as much energy for creativity..it makes sense to make art that will also express what you need to say to yr community..
Kathleen: Yeah, I mean, we started putting it into the songs and I think that’s really smart. And I mean, I think it’s funny that it took so long for us to do that, even if as a band we were saying, you know what, actually, we deserve to have a separation between our band and our personal life. We don’t need to wake up every morning and just answer letters and respond to stuff all the way until we go to bed. And after a couple of years, I was starting to be like "Hey, wait, we make art about this stuff. We don’t need to respond at the level of giving people rides to our show and writing to every single person."
Melamoo: Is there going to be another calendar?
JD: Yeah, actually, I was gonna make it soon but I can’t because I’m on tour, so I think it will be in the next year. It’s really hard to do the calendar on tour, because it takes a long time to prepare and you have to be done with it 3 months before you want to sell it.
Melamoo: And you’ve got another side project…are you currently working on that as well?
JD: Yeah, I’m in a side-project band. I don’t know if we’ll do a release, cos it’s just a really small side-project band. It’s called New English Rose
Kylie: Oh yeah, Melamoo was looking at an online messageboard, I forget which one, and she witnessed frenzied discussion about what any future possible covers could be, like after the Pointer Sisters one
Kathleen: Oh, oh, I actually started working on one at home!
Melamoo: Really? Yeah I love 80s covers
Kathleen: Like, it will probably be Yazz
Melamoo: The Only Way is Up, or…?
Kathleen: I don’t know that one!
Melamoo: (singing) the only way is up
Kylie: baby
Melamoo: for you and me now
Melamoo: It’s a really uplifting song that would totally work being politicised, like what you did with the Julie Ruin project using the song 'I wanna know what love is"
Kathleen: See, that wasn’t the big song in America. We had "Didn’t bring your Love Down" and "Situation" was her biggest hit [JD and Kathleen sing "Situation"]…You guys didn’t get that one?
Lucy: No! We have no fucking idea about that
JD: The album "Upstairs at Erics" is like the one that was big in the States
Kathleen: Yeah, it will probably be something by Yazz. We’re gonna have to do it in a totally different way, because there is no way that we can sing anywhere like her.
[this is basically the end...it was all very hyper-excitable and hard to transcribe after here]
Melamoo: I thought I’d ask about the Big Day Out first and how you’re finding it, I mean it’s a big gig compared to other stuff you might have done in America, bigger and different types of acts.
JD: Yeah we’ve done festivals before. We did a festival called Coachella last summer, that was really awesome. It was really huge, it was like 40,000 people or something like that. Bands like the Cure and Radiohead, The Pixies. It was really fun, cos we don’t often play festivals. We did play the Michigan Women’s Music Festival, which is like 8000 women, so that’s really fun to do because it’s only women and we camp out and we have a really good time there.
I’ve had a really good time at the Big Day Out. I was worried about it being outdoors and playing without our video. It was actually fun without the video. But at the second show, the crowd were responding really differently and we were wondering how much of it had to do with not having the video.
Melamoo: Did you catch other bands, like local acts, while you’ve been at the Big Day Out so far?
Kathleen: We saw The Spazzys
JD: Oh yeah they were good. Oh we watched Slipknot. (much laughter from everyone)
Melamoo: yeah their crazy mask things
JD: It’s hard cos you get there and you have to prepare for your set and then as soon as you’re done, you have to go eat and you kinda miss a bunch of bands
Kylie: The first question that I have…well, you know the revised edition of the Cunt book?
Kathleen: The Inga Muscio book?
Kylie: Yeah. Like, in the revised one, I like how she was writing about how the book originally focussed on a really explicit woman-centred feminist politics and then since then in a kinda post-September 11 world with increasingly more terrible things happening, she declared: "We’re all in it together now." To me, that seems to mean making strategic alliances and capitalising on the inter-connectedness of all of us who struggle for a better world.
And I kinda thought that the earliest Le Tigre records had a really explicit feminist queer identity politics, stuff like Hot Topic. And I thought "This Island" is less obvious in a way, like less self-referential to our, or perhaps your, community, if that makes sense. And I’m kinda curious as to whether this arose out of a similar context to "we’re all in it together now", trying to make something that speaks a little more generally to our allies outside of the immediate feminist and queer communities.
[although I do have to admit that I don’t have my own copy of This Island yet, so this analysis or observation is based on my initial few somewhat cursory scans of the lyric sheet of Lucy’s copy –k]
Kathleen: It’s a good question…
JD: It’s funny that you say that, because actually a lot of people think the opposite way, and I think more so just because we’re not naming names on "This Island", but we’re making it like an open-ended invitation for people to say the names of people that they’re talking about. And for us, "After Dark" was written as –well Kathleen wrote it- but (to Kathleen) you were writing it about a specific person, but also just like the idea of becoming friends with another feminist artist. It’s interesting with "This Island", because I guess we didn’t name names, but there is still so much blatant feminism and queer-positive stuff. Like I mean, "Vis" is something that we’ve never done before.
Kathleen: I mean, we’ve always considered anti-racism and anti-classism and you know, all the isms, a part of our feminist agenda. On our EP, which is the second thing we ever put out, we had a song about police brutality which was very much in our faces at the time and still is. At that time, there had been several killings in a row in New York, and it was really upsetting. So we have always felt like that, but I think this record does read more like that, I totally understand where you’re coming from. I think to us, we can’t tell how it reads, because it’s coming from this sort of like internal place…
Kylie: An integrated, synthesised kind of politics?
Kathleen: Yeah
JD: Like, "New Kicks" being anti-war and being anti-Bush is just as much blatantly feminist to us, and also any mention of the war or any of the stuff related to 9/11 and stuff like that that we’ve been dealing with for the past couple of years.
Kathleen: Yeah. And like "Hot Topic" came about at a time when, at least in our community in the States, Riot Grrrl was sort of on the decline and there was all this weird in-fighting going on, and it was really kind of depressing. Instead of being like "Oh I disagree with your point of view, let’s figure out a way that we can still work together. Or maybe we can’t work together, and you know what, that’s okay, just because we’re feminists doesn’t mean we have to agree on absolutely everything."
Instead of doing that, a lot of the small little music scenes that a lot of us entered-and-left-and-then-entered-and-left were collapsing in on themselves because people couldn’t agree to disagree on band politics. So it was really this negative kind of time and we wrote Hot Topic out of more of a personal thing, or even an identity-politics thing of like "We wanna celebrate all the joyous things"
Kylie: A kind of affirmation?
Kathleen: Yeah, instead of giving into the negativity and being like "Here are ALL of the things that are wrong", we were like "Here are ONE HUNDRED things that are right". And in that song there’s like all different kinds of writers and activists and artists, they’re not all women. And even with that, it was more about stuff we like, it wasn’t about saying it has to be a list of women who are in our scene or something. And yeah, I do understand what you mean about how "This Island" reads like that, to us it’s all just a kind of part of who we are, part of Le Tigre.
Kylie: Yeah, I mean most progressive feminist politics see the inter-connectedness of different types of oppression and it’s hardly like they treat feminism as a single-issue kind of politics. And yeah I guess with the anti-war and anti-oppression stuff you mentioned…well, I was reading that you have collaborated with people as varying in their left-wing or counter-cultural agendas as Gloria Steinem and Green Day…Is that part of building community and building alliances with people with slightly different agendas but still within a broad-left context? Or is it just fun to reach new audiences?
Kathleen: Well I just sung on Green Day’s record because they asked me to, and because I’m always interested in singing with different kinds of music and just different experiences as a singer. And I find that because I’m a feminist singer a lot of people won’t ask me to do things because they think I won’t do it.
Kylie: Yeah I can imagine.
Kathleen: Yeah so like, when I get asked, I just wanna do it! And also, in addition to being a feminist activist, I’m a singer and I care about singing. And Gloria, she was running for Kerry..
JD: Yeah she actually asked to be a part of our show and she came and gave a speech before we started our shows, that was probably the height of our collaboration with her. But you know, it was a surprise to our crowd too, and I think it was just a really good meeting of different minds.
Lucy: You mentioned "Vis" before, and I wanted to ask you a question about that. I’m asking you JD, because I mean, did you write the lyrics?
JD: Yeah
Lucy: It’s one of my favourite songs on the album. Because my interpretation of the song –before I actually read Diva magazine and read what you said about it, so you’ve ruined my question!- was that it was kinda about the dyke scene and the fact that, despite all its flaws, the stereotyping, like the line "hey, you’re not a dyke!" and stuff like that, like despite all that, it ends up celebratory kind of thing.
JD: Yep
Lucy: And I really love that bit. And it kind of resonates with my experiences of the queer scene, in that I know it’s flawed and I dis it all the time, like I moan on about how shit all the gay clubs here in Brisbane are. But I would be the first to jump to their defence if someone tried to take them away.
JD: For sure.
Lucy: Yeah I would be like "I love The Beat! It’s my favourite club!" So I was kinda wondering if that’s what you were kinda putting across, that it’s both negative and positive?
JD: Yeah definitely. The song is like, actually about going to a straight club and feeling really weird and like "I don’t really belong here", the idea of just being visible in that kind of setting feels like I’m being an activist just by existing in that space, you know? So that’s kinda why I wrote the song, because I ended up at this weird party by myself and I felt really uncomfortable at first, but then I felt really excited that I’d found another lesbian, butch lesbian, and we connected, and we had a few drinks you know. (laughs)
That’s kinda more like what I was thinking about when I wrote the song, but I definitely agree with you in terms of like, the flaws and the brilliant genius of our communities everywhere. Like in New York, we had Meow Mix, this bar I’d been going to since I was like 17 and everybody was dogging it all the time and I was like "No! It’s our home!" and it just got closed like 2 months ago and it’s a sports bar now. So it’s really depressing. But I’m like all for gay pride and power and all that stuff, I will never give that up, you know.
[this last bit makes me wish this was an audio-zine, so you could hear exactly how amazing it was when JD said it]
Lucy: I think it’s really important not to forget that we still need that kind of…like yeah it’s cool to talk about being post-gender but like we still need those spaces and those kinds of clubs to make ourselves feel GOOD in the world because it is such a fucking horrible world out there. Like, we need to feel like we belong sometimes, in some places.
Melamoo: The L Bar!
Kylie: I’m asking this question to you Kathleen, if I may. I was re-reading an old Punk Planet, the "Life after Bikini Kill" interview…
Kathleen: Oh yeah
Kylie: ..Where you were talking about image and aesthetics and how at one point you were like "it’s ok to wear lipstick and be a feminist", but in the interview you said "I take a little bit of that back now", that you thought it was more subversive to create your own definitions of beauty in a way. And I’m kind of curious as to where you’re currently at with that because Le Tigre seem to have some really fun stuff going on with image. And if we take our cue from Judith Butler, if we perform our gender…like, is the use of image and aesthetics in Le Tigre part of fucking with fashion and fucking with gender and trying to shake things up at a very visual level, at a very immediate level, and in a very fun way?
Kathleen: I think part of it is, sort of like what you guys were talking about with clubs, where all you have is the gay male clubs you go to. I feel like a lot of times in performance, we’ll be the one all-female band or the one queer band in the town. And to me, even more than dealing with gender in terms of like costume or makeup or hair, it’s more just about like putting on this big show and instead of being given this little tiny slot, giving back this full really huge thing.
Cos we don’t want to just be another band that’s staring at the floor and it looks like we’re just wearing our clothes that we were wearing on the street that day. Like, we want to give our scene and our community something that we really worked hard on in our apartments, and worked our asses off to make. We didn’t come all the way to Brisbane to stare at the ground, do you know what I mean, we came here to like put on as a big as a show as we can with what limited stuff we have.
Kylie: Yeah I guess it can rub off on the audience, this really fun, exciting kind of feeling that helps you to transcend...
Kathleen: Yeah, it’s more about that, and it’s more about a new aesthetic of music and what you can do with like mixing performance art with music. For me at least, I don’t even really think about the whole "Beauty Myth" kinda stuff anymore, it’s not like "I’m past that", it’s just like I’m pretty comfortable with the stuff that I want to do.
And I’m kinda like a professional entertainer at this point and I have the mask that I wear that makes me feel like I can actually be vulnerable. I like to wear a lot of makeup on stage because having that mask there prepares me to open my heart. I know that sounds really weird, but I’ve been doing it for a long time. It gets me ready to be Le Tigre, you know.
Kylie: I mean, we often talk about when we go out, it’s much more fun for us to put on like costumes and crazy clothes. It just takes you out immediate reality, it’s just a really easy way to transcend boring, mundane reality, and also to take on the persona you need to take on to negotiate the outside world..
JD: You guys should try dressing up all the same and then going out!
Kathleen: Like ALL DAY
JD: Yeah whoa it’s really fun.
Kathleen: Yeah we wear exactly matching costumes when we run errands and stuff and like everybody was freaks out. We did it today actually at the koala park.
Kylie: Aside from your image and costume stuff, what is the role of your performance and projection stuff.. like is that part of mixing performance with music, incorporating different visual elements and having something really fun and exciting that works on several very immediate levels?
JD: Yeah, I mean we wanna create a show that’s on a different level, or a bunch of different planes. And the audience can pick what they really wanna do, you know. We just want to give a lot of energy to the crowd, and we find that when we do, we get a lot in return, so we have matching outfits and videos projected behind us and we have choreographed dancing, you know. As much as you’re willing to put into it, that’s what you get back, and we wanna have a community moment where everybody is having a really good time.
Melamoo: I like what you said in an interview about how you’ve kind of moved out of the ghetto now and you’re kind of more anonymous in New York as well, and how that’s made you really focus on your music now as well, less of being the kinda spokesperson for riot grrrl, that kind of thing.
Kathleen: Yeah I think the 3 of us have for a long time been artists in our own right, do you know what I mean, and being in New York I think, it made me at least less like conscious of what everyone else thought of me, the community, wondering "Is this the right thing or is the wrong thing?", more conscious of other people. But we’re putting a lot of love and time and energy into everything we make, making what we really want to, instead of what we think everybody else wants. I mean, there IS a lot of conscious thought about our audience, because in a way we ARE our audience.
I think we, both JD & I, a lot of the time want to write lyrics for ourselves, at times in our lives when we didn’t have anybody. And when no-one in our scene was saying the things we wanted to say. In a way it’s selfish. Like people say you’re doing this out of altruism (for your community), and it’s not. It’s definitely really good feeling to be able to do that, it’s just like "Oh wow, I made it to this point where I have enough love and support around me that I can sort of reach out of the boat and pull someone else out of the water and that feels really satisfying.
Kylie: When you said that you write lyrics that relate to you guys, stuff that you really wanna say or hear, or stuff that you really wanna see, like is "Keep On Livin" and the Keep on Livin’ website part of that?
JD: Yeah
Kathleen: Yeah exactly.
Kylie: I mean, because you put something "out there" that is about your very personal individual experience, people tend to relate to it a lot.. Maybe because it's not trying to pretend to speak generally for everyone, but just to speak about yr specific experience that certain other people might be able to share w/you...I was reading this old interview with Kim Gordon in Rolling Stone and she was talking about how this teenage girl didn’t write in her diary, she basically wrote everything in a diary-style confessional way to Kim Gordon. Stuff about high-school and alienation and angst and crushes.. And I guess I was wondering if alienated young queer/tranz/feminist/punk kids, because of stuff like "Keep on Livin", write to you guys in that way?
JD: Yeah they totally do. That’s part of the reason why we put that on our website because we were getting flooded by letters asking questions.
Kylie: So "Keep on Livin" was your way of writing back to all of those people together, like a letter to the community?
JD: Yeah, at first we printed out that stuff and we started sending it to the people who had written to us, but then you know, it got crazy, so we just put it up on the website and now we’ve gotten like so many less letters asking those questions, and people DO go to our website and use it.
Kathleen: The song and the website was a big response to a lot of the letters we got. It was before we figured out the whole website thing! And we really WANTED to respond to a lot of things that people had written, but we had gotten so much mail…I’d gotten so much mail from the Bikini Kill times and I’d written back every single person for like ten years. And I just wanted to have a personal life, you know. And I decided, you know what, I just can’t answer my mail anymore, cos I’m so wrapped up in all these 13- and 14-year-old girls talking about cutting on themselves…I mean I could function, I got really good at functioning, but I had so much shit in my head and I really wanted to be able to separate myself from it.
Kylie: I guess I if you are putting so much energy into responding to mail, you simply don’t have as much energy for creativity..it makes sense to make art that will also express what you need to say to yr community..
Kathleen: Yeah, I mean, we started putting it into the songs and I think that’s really smart. And I mean, I think it’s funny that it took so long for us to do that, even if as a band we were saying, you know what, actually, we deserve to have a separation between our band and our personal life. We don’t need to wake up every morning and just answer letters and respond to stuff all the way until we go to bed. And after a couple of years, I was starting to be like "Hey, wait, we make art about this stuff. We don’t need to respond at the level of giving people rides to our show and writing to every single person."
Melamoo: Is there going to be another calendar?
JD: Yeah, actually, I was gonna make it soon but I can’t because I’m on tour, so I think it will be in the next year. It’s really hard to do the calendar on tour, because it takes a long time to prepare and you have to be done with it 3 months before you want to sell it.
Melamoo: And you’ve got another side project…are you currently working on that as well?
JD: Yeah, I’m in a side-project band. I don’t know if we’ll do a release, cos it’s just a really small side-project band. It’s called New English Rose
Kylie: Oh yeah, Melamoo was looking at an online messageboard, I forget which one, and she witnessed frenzied discussion about what any future possible covers could be, like after the Pointer Sisters one
Kathleen: Oh, oh, I actually started working on one at home!
Melamoo: Really? Yeah I love 80s covers
Kathleen: Like, it will probably be Yazz
Melamoo: The Only Way is Up, or…?
Kathleen: I don’t know that one!
Melamoo: (singing) the only way is up
Kylie: baby
Melamoo: for you and me now
Melamoo: It’s a really uplifting song that would totally work being politicised, like what you did with the Julie Ruin project using the song 'I wanna know what love is"
Kathleen: See, that wasn’t the big song in America. We had "Didn’t bring your Love Down" and "Situation" was her biggest hit [JD and Kathleen sing "Situation"]…You guys didn’t get that one?
Lucy: No! We have no fucking idea about that
JD: The album "Upstairs at Erics" is like the one that was big in the States
Kathleen: Yeah, it will probably be something by Yazz. We’re gonna have to do it in a totally different way, because there is no way that we can sing anywhere like her.
[this is basically the end...it was all very hyper-excitable and hard to transcribe after here]
The 15 Fame-Filled Minutes of the Fanzine Writer
[billy bragg interview part ii]
[the interview time is almost up]
Kylie: I have another question I want to ask you...
Billy Bragg: Go baby....
K: I think that songs like "Valentines Day is Over" take an approach to love that go beyond the simplistic Top 40 romantic lovesong formula...as a man, is it important for you to write about love and relationships and responsibility in a way that other men can relate to?
BB: Yes, I mean "Valentines Day is Over" is a very good example of that, because when I first wrote it some feminists came up to me at a festival and they said "Look, you've written a song from a female perspective, how do you know? How can you write this as a man? You don't know what it feels like to be the victim of male violence."
And I said "Yeah, you're completely right but you know, there are many great songs about this subject written by women, but I am trying to write a song about this for other men and say as a man, to other men "this is not acceptable." And the best way I feel I can say that is from a female perspective, to be brave enough to write and sing "as a female" so I can say to these men "Look, as another man, it's just not acceptable that this happens."
And so I also like "Valentines Day is Over" because it's both personal and political, it talks specificially about how brutality and the economy are related, how I understand that the pressure of trying to live in a capitalist society does put stress on relationships, that's not to make an excuse but...I think the best songs are not either personal or political but for me the best Billy Bragg songs are the ones in which...
K: the two are definitely not separate but are interrelated, in the way that our lives are not either simply personal or simply political...?
BB: The world is like that, the world is not only political or only personal, all of these things are interrelated. Sometimes I can write a highly political song like "There's Power in a Union" and another time I might write a purely personal song like - what did I play tonight? "The Fourteenth of February", something like that or "Saturday Boy".
But to me, the real good ones are where I can manifest the way the two fit together, which doesn't always kinda come off, but I do try, particularly with the ones with regard to violence to women. "Levi Stubbs Tears" tries to get into that position as well.
K: Actually at the end of the set when you held up your cup of tea to the audience...well, we were just talking on the way here about George Orwell's essay about how to make the perfect cup of tea...and it's interesting because he's kinda known for being so purely "political"...you know that essay?
B: Yeah, of course! I'm a huge Orwell fan. We were just in America last November doing a tour against media consolidation against Clear Channel. They own a lot of radio stations in America, like 2000 radio stations, and they have one playlist, so the Americans were concerned.
I was on a tour bus with Jill [Jill Sobule, who played the show tonight -k], Steve Earle, Tom Morello, Boots Riley from The Coup and Mike Mills from R.E.M and we were travelling on this tour bus and the most amazingly weird thing happened.
It turned out that Steve Earle, Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine and Mike Mills were all huge Lord of the Rings fans! So they got into this argument about Lord of the Rings and then Earle went out and bought the Two Towers 4 CDs on the bus, and it was just driving me fuckin' mad!
And they're saying to me that this is the greatest novel from the 20th century and I'm saying "Listen, guys have you ever heard of George Orwell???" Okay, the greatest novel of the 20th century is 1984, it says more about the 20th century than any bunch of fuckin' hairy-toed hobbit bastards running around.
So I am a huge fan of George Orwell. I'm very interested in Englishness because my last album England-Half English is trying to address that and of course Orwell is the kinda king of all that shit, if you know your Orwell. Maybe I should get a kinda George Orwell tshirt together with the explanation of how to make the perfect cup of tea on it, I wonder if I could get away with that, or maybe I should set it to music..?
P: Boots Riley would have known Orwell though...
BB: Yeah Boots and me...Boots wasn't interested in Lord of the Rings, we had another video of Parliament "Funkadelic" and that was put on instead of Lord of the Rings, if we could get on the bus first.
M: Okay another question we came up with on the way here: how the fuck does one dance to your music?!
K: How does one dance to Billy Bragg?!
BB: Well firstly, when I'm solo it's not dance music. When I play with a band it's more dance music and people do dance then. The toughest thing is the audience themselves are not prepared to dance, but they're much less prepared to see me dance! And when I have the band with me I sometimes dance and it really freaks them out because I can only dance one way -- and that is like somebody's dad because I am somebody's dad!
Before you have children your dancing is different and once you have children you spend five years dancing to make someone laugh. You dance with your kids making them laugh, so when you go back to dancing in a disco, there's nothing you can do man, you're fucked. That's the way I dance cause I'm someone's father, it's more like ska, I can do an awful lot of ska!
M: thanks for your time..
and then! the tape-recorder was turned off and we kept talking.. about zines and independent media. and BB said one more thing, which for the purposes of documenting, went a little something like this:
"George Orwell said if there's any hope, it lies in the proles, and if there's any hope for punk, it lies in the fanzines."
(and then we continued to loot the backstage buffet, like any good self-respecting punks would)
[the interview time is almost up]
Kylie: I have another question I want to ask you...
Billy Bragg: Go baby....
K: I think that songs like "Valentines Day is Over" take an approach to love that go beyond the simplistic Top 40 romantic lovesong formula...as a man, is it important for you to write about love and relationships and responsibility in a way that other men can relate to?
BB: Yes, I mean "Valentines Day is Over" is a very good example of that, because when I first wrote it some feminists came up to me at a festival and they said "Look, you've written a song from a female perspective, how do you know? How can you write this as a man? You don't know what it feels like to be the victim of male violence."
And I said "Yeah, you're completely right but you know, there are many great songs about this subject written by women, but I am trying to write a song about this for other men and say as a man, to other men "this is not acceptable." And the best way I feel I can say that is from a female perspective, to be brave enough to write and sing "as a female" so I can say to these men "Look, as another man, it's just not acceptable that this happens."
And so I also like "Valentines Day is Over" because it's both personal and political, it talks specificially about how brutality and the economy are related, how I understand that the pressure of trying to live in a capitalist society does put stress on relationships, that's not to make an excuse but...I think the best songs are not either personal or political but for me the best Billy Bragg songs are the ones in which...
K: the two are definitely not separate but are interrelated, in the way that our lives are not either simply personal or simply political...?
BB: The world is like that, the world is not only political or only personal, all of these things are interrelated. Sometimes I can write a highly political song like "There's Power in a Union" and another time I might write a purely personal song like - what did I play tonight? "The Fourteenth of February", something like that or "Saturday Boy".
But to me, the real good ones are where I can manifest the way the two fit together, which doesn't always kinda come off, but I do try, particularly with the ones with regard to violence to women. "Levi Stubbs Tears" tries to get into that position as well.
K: Actually at the end of the set when you held up your cup of tea to the audience...well, we were just talking on the way here about George Orwell's essay about how to make the perfect cup of tea...and it's interesting because he's kinda known for being so purely "political"...you know that essay?
B: Yeah, of course! I'm a huge Orwell fan. We were just in America last November doing a tour against media consolidation against Clear Channel. They own a lot of radio stations in America, like 2000 radio stations, and they have one playlist, so the Americans were concerned.
I was on a tour bus with Jill [Jill Sobule, who played the show tonight -k], Steve Earle, Tom Morello, Boots Riley from The Coup and Mike Mills from R.E.M and we were travelling on this tour bus and the most amazingly weird thing happened.
It turned out that Steve Earle, Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine and Mike Mills were all huge Lord of the Rings fans! So they got into this argument about Lord of the Rings and then Earle went out and bought the Two Towers 4 CDs on the bus, and it was just driving me fuckin' mad!
And they're saying to me that this is the greatest novel from the 20th century and I'm saying "Listen, guys have you ever heard of George Orwell???" Okay, the greatest novel of the 20th century is 1984, it says more about the 20th century than any bunch of fuckin' hairy-toed hobbit bastards running around.
So I am a huge fan of George Orwell. I'm very interested in Englishness because my last album England-Half English is trying to address that and of course Orwell is the kinda king of all that shit, if you know your Orwell. Maybe I should get a kinda George Orwell tshirt together with the explanation of how to make the perfect cup of tea on it, I wonder if I could get away with that, or maybe I should set it to music..?
P: Boots Riley would have known Orwell though...
BB: Yeah Boots and me...Boots wasn't interested in Lord of the Rings, we had another video of Parliament "Funkadelic" and that was put on instead of Lord of the Rings, if we could get on the bus first.
M: Okay another question we came up with on the way here: how the fuck does one dance to your music?!
K: How does one dance to Billy Bragg?!
BB: Well firstly, when I'm solo it's not dance music. When I play with a band it's more dance music and people do dance then. The toughest thing is the audience themselves are not prepared to dance, but they're much less prepared to see me dance! And when I have the band with me I sometimes dance and it really freaks them out because I can only dance one way -- and that is like somebody's dad because I am somebody's dad!
Before you have children your dancing is different and once you have children you spend five years dancing to make someone laugh. You dance with your kids making them laugh, so when you go back to dancing in a disco, there's nothing you can do man, you're fucked. That's the way I dance cause I'm someone's father, it's more like ska, I can do an awful lot of ska!
M: thanks for your time..
and then! the tape-recorder was turned off and we kept talking.. about zines and independent media. and BB said one more thing, which for the purposes of documenting, went a little something like this:
"George Orwell said if there's any hope, it lies in the proles, and if there's any hope for punk, it lies in the fanzines."
(and then we continued to loot the backstage buffet, like any good self-respecting punks would)
Billy Bragg Interview Part i
originally in cut-and-paste handwritten zine format, now on *the internet* omg..probs a bit harder to read all that text on a computer screen, so maybe make a cup of tea before you start reading and defo get comfortable first xx
Billy Bragg interview, backstage at Rohre, Stuttgart
interview: Kylie + Michl + Possum
Kylie: Can you tell us a little bit about the way or ways that you were politicised or became politically aware, and was punk a part of that for you?
Billy Bragg: YES
K: But then I saw you play and you mentioned the Miners Strike...
BB: Yeah well it was before the Miners because punk, punk where I lived was 1977, and the Miners was 1984, and what the Miners did, it took my politics that I already had and it made me express them in an ideological way...you know, more focused on ideology rather than just general politics. I didn't have any politics when I was growing up, my parents were not political. When I first had the opportunity to vote, I was 19 in 1979, and I didn't vote. And that was the year that Margaret Thatcher won, so I felt really stupid about not voting.
The very first political thing I ever did was 1978, I went to see The Clash, and they were going on the first big Rock Against Racism march, which was through London to a park in Hackney in East London. And I went on the march with the Anti-Nazi-League and Rock Against Racism. There were about 20,000 people on this march and I saw The Clash play in the park, but also on that day was a guy called Tom Robinson.
And Tom Robinson had a song that was called "Sing If You're Glad to be Gay" and when he played this song, the men standing where we were in the crowd began to kiss each other. And you know I grew up in a working class area, and I'd never seen or met any gay men who were out - well I mean I'd probably met gay men - but never gays who were out. I'd never seen gays before. And they had a big banner which said "Sing If You're Glad to be Gay" and my first feeling was "Why are these people at an anti-racism march? This has nothing to do with being gay, this is about black people."
But I realised quite quickly that the fascists hated anybody who was different in any way, and so I promised from that day to be as different as I could be, and to ask as many awkward questions as I could. So the lesson from that is not just that I'm politicised, but that music, although it cannot change the world, it can change your perspective of the world. Because I came away from that concert with a different perspective about politics. And so that was the first political experience for me, thank you to Joe Strummer for bringing me there and to Tom Robinson for showing me that song, and to those gay guys and to the whole moment to make me political - it still inspires me.
Possum: Can you think of, off the top of your head - like sometimes you see something and you just have such a clear image of it in your head, and it stays with you for the rest of your life...can you think of anything?
BB: Yeah, I mean that day in the park, seeing those gay men, stays with me. When Joe Strummer died, that's the first thing I thought, you know, Joe had been my great inspiration, in that sense he'd been the most political person in punk, he made The Clash political. So there are these moments for me... a moment where you see something in perhaps a clearer way and you find a way to articulate that in a way that people can understand. That's the real art, I think, of a songwriter.
If you're gonna write stuff that challenges people, ya gotta be able to articulate it in a way that engages their interest. If you just bang them over the head with it all the time, it's like a fanzine without pictures, you know, it's tough, ya gotta draw people into it. So you're always looking for ways to say things that are entertaining, ways to attack capitalism in a smarter way than just saying "capitalism is shit" is approaching it through Farenheit 451.
P: Like in the way you approach a larger audience, a festival audience, compared to a smaller audience, like in small pubs...?
BB: Well, a festival audience is different, you can't talk so much to a festival audience. Because in a festival, a lot of people are there just to see whoever's on, they're not really there to see you. But with an audience like this (at a small-ish rock venue -kylie) where you can talk very early on. After playing 3 or 4 songs, I was able to talk a little bit and people were listening, it's that kind of audience. So you find in your first few songs what the audience is like, some nights you can't talk and the audience are sometimes more enthusiastic than you. Like suddenly you realise "Fucking hell! It's Saturday night", everyone wants to have a beer and is up for singing the songs, and you just go for it and you just maybe at the end talk a bit.
K: Speaking of audiences, what do you hope happens in terms of audience participation at your shows? Like, if music cannot change the world, but it can change your perspective of the world, what would you like people to do with the information you give them at a show? What would you like to see happen at a show, or perhaps more importantly, what do you hope that people take away with them from a Billy Bragg show?
BB: Well, I hope that they take away that information about what's happening in Holland (he's talking about the Dutch government's approach to refugee issues -k) and that they find out something about that. I mean you can't follow the audience home and make sure that they do what you were talking about, it doesn't work like that, ya know. You have them for that hour or two hours, and you have the opportunity to put some ideas in their heads. First, to make them relax and make them smile, make them think about love songs. And then after you've done that, to just focus on the one thing you want them to take away with them, the Dutch thing, you know at the beginning of that rap, they laughed, at the end of that rap they weren't laughing.
I was talking about all that stuff about reunification and that's one of the most important things that has happened in our lifetimes, the result of very difficult situations that have been resolved positively. I think reunification is important because the East Germans managed to do it without having a Vaclav Havel or a Lech Walensa, they managed to somehow do-it-themselves. I think that's a very good encouraging thing...it's a shame it turned out the way it did, but there's something very encouraging in the way it happened. It was genuinely people putting pressure on the SED in Germany that actually made that change.
You know I've just been up to Berlin, and I've seen a lot of my old friends from those days and I still find it very positive that they managed to achieve that in Germany for all of Europe, you know, for all of us...that the Russian soldiers went home, the British soldiers went home, the French soldiers went home - and maybe one day the American soldiers will go home, probably not for awhile, but maybe they will.
I know I can't change the world from singing songs, but I can challenge the perceptions of people. You know, like tonight when I say to the people "I want you to aim your anger at the Dutch", everyone laughs, but I'm not joking, I'm serious about that. And I want them to go away and think about that. It would be easy for me to attack the Americans, everybody in the audience already has those negative feelings or else they wouldn't be here. I wanna push them further and bring 'em another perspective and talk about that shit that's going down on their continent which is important. When I'm in Australia, I wanna talk about Christmas Island and all that shit, you know.
So that's my job to challenge the perception of the audience, not just to be the person they think I am, and when they come to my gig, I don't wish them to just have their political view confirmed. I wish to challenge them as well. I do wish to entertain first, but I also wish to challenge people, which I hope is what you try to do with this, and what you try to do with your fanzine as well.
Michl: Coming to the business aspect of it all, how much influence do you as a person have on the whole "Billy Bragg" thing, in terms of prices of shows and choices of venues...obviously this was not your favourite place to play...
BB: No, I wouldn't say that, no...I do like these kinds of venues, I play a lot of venues like this..
K: stand-up deathmetal clubs...
BB: We haven't played in Stuttgart for probably 15 years and we really wanted to play. So if we have to put up with Nosferatu's fucking dressing room...! You know, I'm sure a lot of that audience doesn't come on deathmetal night, but you know, I like these kind of nights, I like these kind of audiences.
I was very fortunate to be on stage on Saturday night in Hamburg at the Grosse Freiheit, which was a fucking great night. And you know, I had to play a festival set there because the audience was so fucking rowdy, so up for it, they were singing louder than me. It was just brilliant and I came away with twice as much adrenaline as I put in. You just have to judge the audience, some nights you have to ramp it up, you have to close up the gaps. You don't have the long slow songs, you can't play a song like "The Wolf Covers its Tracks", it's a song people are not familiar with. Some nights you can't play those songs because people really want to sing "New England" and that's cool, I don't mind that.
So yeah...I do have some control, but in the end I've got to make a living doing this, so it's trying to balance that. Plus you don't want to be away from home a lot, or as much as I used to be. When I was younger I didn't give a shit because I didn't have a home life, you know, this was how I lived and it was great. And now I have a son and a wife and like everybody else I try to make a balance between my work and my home.
So you try and make sure you play the places where you know for sure you can pack them out, like Frankfurt, Berlin, Hamburg, but also you have a chance to play Stuttgart or Munich. And well fuck, we went to Munich last time, but when was the last time we went to Stuttgart? It might be 20 years, it might be that long, certainly 15 years, so you want to try occasionally to come on tour...
M: Back to that business aspect, you have a professional management that organises stuff for you, but are you yourself involved in the business side of "Billy Bragg"?
BB: No no no...I have no interest in all that shit and I have a manager, the same manager I've always had. Before he managed me, he managed Ian Drury and the Blockheads, the Clash and he managed Pink Floyd back in the 1960s and he's the last of the old style managers. He's not a rich man, but he's very political. Everybody else I've ever worked with, the bands are very political but the manager is always not very political and says "We shouldn't do this, this is bad for our career." But my manager is the opposite, he finds more interesting things for me to do and I think without my manager I wouldn't have been been able to do things like Red Wedge because he could understand why I would want to do that.
Instead of saying to me "Are you sure you want to do this?" he would take the idea and he would run with it, so my relationship with him has been like a collaborator. He's a very very important person to what "Billy Bragg" is, he's really helped me to be true to myself, to make it possible for me to be true in that sense, and because he managed The Clash as well for awhile, he understands where I'm coming from.
P: What is Red Wedge, what did you say about that...
BB: Red Wedge...in the 1980s, after the Miners Strike ended, those of us who'd been doing gigs together to support the miners and other issues like Nicaragua and anti-apartheid and Rock Against Racism, after the Miners Strike we sat around together and said "Well, what the fuck are we going to do now? You know we feel very strongly about this, we found each other, and we do have a power here, so what can we do?" So we decided that the best opportunity to get rid of Margaret Thatcher was the 1987 election and that the best vehicle to do this would be the Labour Party, the British Labour Party.
At the time the BLP were unilaterist anti-nuclear anti-racist, they were much more left-wing than they are now. So we went to the BLP and said "We would like to do some gigs with you, where we bring young people in and say to them 'Look, you know, you must participate in the election, you must think about this, here's the Labour Party, let's have a debate about whether or not they're a good idea." In the music press at the time, there were 3 big weekly music papers in England so we ended up doing a tour which was me, Style Council, Jimmy Sommerville and other bands came and joined in, Madness came, Lloyd Cole came, the Smiths (gratuitous use of bold font, ha!) came, Prefab Sprout came and we had an incredible tour, it was just brilliant. And the 1987 election happened, and Thatcher won again. And after that, it was very difficult to get people's energy up, but it was trying to make sense of that whole thing of making a difference with your music.
[the interview time is almost up]
Billy Bragg interview, backstage at Rohre, Stuttgart
interview: Kylie + Michl + Possum
Kylie: Can you tell us a little bit about the way or ways that you were politicised or became politically aware, and was punk a part of that for you?
Billy Bragg: YES
K: But then I saw you play and you mentioned the Miners Strike...
BB: Yeah well it was before the Miners because punk, punk where I lived was 1977, and the Miners was 1984, and what the Miners did, it took my politics that I already had and it made me express them in an ideological way...you know, more focused on ideology rather than just general politics. I didn't have any politics when I was growing up, my parents were not political. When I first had the opportunity to vote, I was 19 in 1979, and I didn't vote. And that was the year that Margaret Thatcher won, so I felt really stupid about not voting.
The very first political thing I ever did was 1978, I went to see The Clash, and they were going on the first big Rock Against Racism march, which was through London to a park in Hackney in East London. And I went on the march with the Anti-Nazi-League and Rock Against Racism. There were about 20,000 people on this march and I saw The Clash play in the park, but also on that day was a guy called Tom Robinson.
And Tom Robinson had a song that was called "Sing If You're Glad to be Gay" and when he played this song, the men standing where we were in the crowd began to kiss each other. And you know I grew up in a working class area, and I'd never seen or met any gay men who were out - well I mean I'd probably met gay men - but never gays who were out. I'd never seen gays before. And they had a big banner which said "Sing If You're Glad to be Gay" and my first feeling was "Why are these people at an anti-racism march? This has nothing to do with being gay, this is about black people."
But I realised quite quickly that the fascists hated anybody who was different in any way, and so I promised from that day to be as different as I could be, and to ask as many awkward questions as I could. So the lesson from that is not just that I'm politicised, but that music, although it cannot change the world, it can change your perspective of the world. Because I came away from that concert with a different perspective about politics. And so that was the first political experience for me, thank you to Joe Strummer for bringing me there and to Tom Robinson for showing me that song, and to those gay guys and to the whole moment to make me political - it still inspires me.
Possum: Can you think of, off the top of your head - like sometimes you see something and you just have such a clear image of it in your head, and it stays with you for the rest of your life...can you think of anything?
BB: Yeah, I mean that day in the park, seeing those gay men, stays with me. When Joe Strummer died, that's the first thing I thought, you know, Joe had been my great inspiration, in that sense he'd been the most political person in punk, he made The Clash political. So there are these moments for me... a moment where you see something in perhaps a clearer way and you find a way to articulate that in a way that people can understand. That's the real art, I think, of a songwriter.
If you're gonna write stuff that challenges people, ya gotta be able to articulate it in a way that engages their interest. If you just bang them over the head with it all the time, it's like a fanzine without pictures, you know, it's tough, ya gotta draw people into it. So you're always looking for ways to say things that are entertaining, ways to attack capitalism in a smarter way than just saying "capitalism is shit" is approaching it through Farenheit 451.
P: Like in the way you approach a larger audience, a festival audience, compared to a smaller audience, like in small pubs...?
BB: Well, a festival audience is different, you can't talk so much to a festival audience. Because in a festival, a lot of people are there just to see whoever's on, they're not really there to see you. But with an audience like this (at a small-ish rock venue -kylie) where you can talk very early on. After playing 3 or 4 songs, I was able to talk a little bit and people were listening, it's that kind of audience. So you find in your first few songs what the audience is like, some nights you can't talk and the audience are sometimes more enthusiastic than you. Like suddenly you realise "Fucking hell! It's Saturday night", everyone wants to have a beer and is up for singing the songs, and you just go for it and you just maybe at the end talk a bit.
K: Speaking of audiences, what do you hope happens in terms of audience participation at your shows? Like, if music cannot change the world, but it can change your perspective of the world, what would you like people to do with the information you give them at a show? What would you like to see happen at a show, or perhaps more importantly, what do you hope that people take away with them from a Billy Bragg show?
BB: Well, I hope that they take away that information about what's happening in Holland (he's talking about the Dutch government's approach to refugee issues -k) and that they find out something about that. I mean you can't follow the audience home and make sure that they do what you were talking about, it doesn't work like that, ya know. You have them for that hour or two hours, and you have the opportunity to put some ideas in their heads. First, to make them relax and make them smile, make them think about love songs. And then after you've done that, to just focus on the one thing you want them to take away with them, the Dutch thing, you know at the beginning of that rap, they laughed, at the end of that rap they weren't laughing.
I was talking about all that stuff about reunification and that's one of the most important things that has happened in our lifetimes, the result of very difficult situations that have been resolved positively. I think reunification is important because the East Germans managed to do it without having a Vaclav Havel or a Lech Walensa, they managed to somehow do-it-themselves. I think that's a very good encouraging thing...it's a shame it turned out the way it did, but there's something very encouraging in the way it happened. It was genuinely people putting pressure on the SED in Germany that actually made that change.
You know I've just been up to Berlin, and I've seen a lot of my old friends from those days and I still find it very positive that they managed to achieve that in Germany for all of Europe, you know, for all of us...that the Russian soldiers went home, the British soldiers went home, the French soldiers went home - and maybe one day the American soldiers will go home, probably not for awhile, but maybe they will.
I know I can't change the world from singing songs, but I can challenge the perceptions of people. You know, like tonight when I say to the people "I want you to aim your anger at the Dutch", everyone laughs, but I'm not joking, I'm serious about that. And I want them to go away and think about that. It would be easy for me to attack the Americans, everybody in the audience already has those negative feelings or else they wouldn't be here. I wanna push them further and bring 'em another perspective and talk about that shit that's going down on their continent which is important. When I'm in Australia, I wanna talk about Christmas Island and all that shit, you know.
So that's my job to challenge the perception of the audience, not just to be the person they think I am, and when they come to my gig, I don't wish them to just have their political view confirmed. I wish to challenge them as well. I do wish to entertain first, but I also wish to challenge people, which I hope is what you try to do with this, and what you try to do with your fanzine as well.
Michl: Coming to the business aspect of it all, how much influence do you as a person have on the whole "Billy Bragg" thing, in terms of prices of shows and choices of venues...obviously this was not your favourite place to play...
BB: No, I wouldn't say that, no...I do like these kinds of venues, I play a lot of venues like this..
K: stand-up deathmetal clubs...
BB: We haven't played in Stuttgart for probably 15 years and we really wanted to play. So if we have to put up with Nosferatu's fucking dressing room...! You know, I'm sure a lot of that audience doesn't come on deathmetal night, but you know, I like these kind of nights, I like these kind of audiences.
I was very fortunate to be on stage on Saturday night in Hamburg at the Grosse Freiheit, which was a fucking great night. And you know, I had to play a festival set there because the audience was so fucking rowdy, so up for it, they were singing louder than me. It was just brilliant and I came away with twice as much adrenaline as I put in. You just have to judge the audience, some nights you have to ramp it up, you have to close up the gaps. You don't have the long slow songs, you can't play a song like "The Wolf Covers its Tracks", it's a song people are not familiar with. Some nights you can't play those songs because people really want to sing "New England" and that's cool, I don't mind that.
So yeah...I do have some control, but in the end I've got to make a living doing this, so it's trying to balance that. Plus you don't want to be away from home a lot, or as much as I used to be. When I was younger I didn't give a shit because I didn't have a home life, you know, this was how I lived and it was great. And now I have a son and a wife and like everybody else I try to make a balance between my work and my home.
So you try and make sure you play the places where you know for sure you can pack them out, like Frankfurt, Berlin, Hamburg, but also you have a chance to play Stuttgart or Munich. And well fuck, we went to Munich last time, but when was the last time we went to Stuttgart? It might be 20 years, it might be that long, certainly 15 years, so you want to try occasionally to come on tour...
M: Back to that business aspect, you have a professional management that organises stuff for you, but are you yourself involved in the business side of "Billy Bragg"?
BB: No no no...I have no interest in all that shit and I have a manager, the same manager I've always had. Before he managed me, he managed Ian Drury and the Blockheads, the Clash and he managed Pink Floyd back in the 1960s and he's the last of the old style managers. He's not a rich man, but he's very political. Everybody else I've ever worked with, the bands are very political but the manager is always not very political and says "We shouldn't do this, this is bad for our career." But my manager is the opposite, he finds more interesting things for me to do and I think without my manager I wouldn't have been been able to do things like Red Wedge because he could understand why I would want to do that.
Instead of saying to me "Are you sure you want to do this?" he would take the idea and he would run with it, so my relationship with him has been like a collaborator. He's a very very important person to what "Billy Bragg" is, he's really helped me to be true to myself, to make it possible for me to be true in that sense, and because he managed The Clash as well for awhile, he understands where I'm coming from.
P: What is Red Wedge, what did you say about that...
BB: Red Wedge...in the 1980s, after the Miners Strike ended, those of us who'd been doing gigs together to support the miners and other issues like Nicaragua and anti-apartheid and Rock Against Racism, after the Miners Strike we sat around together and said "Well, what the fuck are we going to do now? You know we feel very strongly about this, we found each other, and we do have a power here, so what can we do?" So we decided that the best opportunity to get rid of Margaret Thatcher was the 1987 election and that the best vehicle to do this would be the Labour Party, the British Labour Party.
At the time the BLP were unilaterist anti-nuclear anti-racist, they were much more left-wing than they are now. So we went to the BLP and said "We would like to do some gigs with you, where we bring young people in and say to them 'Look, you know, you must participate in the election, you must think about this, here's the Labour Party, let's have a debate about whether or not they're a good idea." In the music press at the time, there were 3 big weekly music papers in England so we ended up doing a tour which was me, Style Council, Jimmy Sommerville and other bands came and joined in, Madness came, Lloyd Cole came, the Smiths (gratuitous use of bold font, ha!) came, Prefab Sprout came and we had an incredible tour, it was just brilliant. And the 1987 election happened, and Thatcher won again. And after that, it was very difficult to get people's energy up, but it was trying to make sense of that whole thing of making a difference with your music.
[the interview time is almost up]
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