Interview: Amp Fiddler

JOSEPH ‘Amp’ Fiddler has a theory that conversations are the dynamic for change in our lives and I’m with him all the way.

How true this is when you’re speaking over the phone, I’m not so sure. Surely you need to be close enough to be able to see the whites of their eyes to really have a chance to know what’s going on in someone’s head?

It’s a shame not to meet the guy in person. Fiddler cuts a striking figure. Tall  – well over six feet when you take into account his hair, which fluctuates between dreads and an impressive afro – distinguished, and a snappy dresser to boot, Amp resembles nothing so much as a latterday funky Malcolm X, stepping out to an afterhours jazz den in his wraparound shades, polo neck and leather raincoat.

But he’s in France, midway through a lengthy European tour, relaxing before tonight’s gig and I’m in the UK, midway through production day, not relaxing before the magazine goes to press. We’ll have to try our best.

Thinking about it, it’s unlikely I’d be able to see the whites of Fiddler’s eyes anyway  one, he’s on tour so they’re probably a little red around the edges (“we’ve been having a lot of fun,” he drawls) and two, he’s rarely seen without sunglasses, even indoors.

Fiddler, however, has been in this game a lot longer than I have and he fields my questions like the seasoned pro he is, his rich, melifluous  if, occasionally, a little croaky  voice booming over the line from Lyon.

The tour is going well. A native of Detroit, Michigan, he “most definitely enjoys the European way of life” and only wishes the weather was a little better, “but it’s okay. I been having a great time.”

Roughly half of the people in his audiences have already heard his astonishingly assured debut solo album, Waltz Of A Ghetto Fly he estimates (well, he actually recorded his debut for a major label at the start of the Nineties, but it wasn’t a happy or rewarding experience); the other half haven’t but, “our show is very dynamic, so if people don’t get it by the middle of the show, they definitely get it by the end. But,” he adds with a chuckle, “most of them get it in the beginning.”

Old enough to say “record” when he means “CD”, young enough to know who Dizzee Rascal is (he recently bought Rascal’s album for his son Dorian), Fiddler is also polite enough not to mention it when I get the titles of his songs wrong or interrupt him, mid sentence. He doesn’t let things bother him. He’s playing a long game. He turned 46 last week but isn’t unduly perturbed: “The older the fiddle, the better the tune.”

Interview: Steve Albini

ANOTHER reprint from the annals of GRUNT magazine, this time an interview with legendary guitar-botherer, microphone enthusiast and In Utero, Surfer Rosa and Pod engineer Steve Albini.

After Big Black imploded at the height of their dark, angry power, Albini got together with a couple of the guys from the brilliant Scratch Acid and created a band with a name inspired by their favourite cartoon character.

Steve ‘Weave’ Hawkins put them on in Leeds and the Brag editorial board (Mark, Marie, Doug and me) bugged him into letting us interview the band at their contentious Poly gig.

We were all major Big Black fans and we were all appalled by the name of the new band, even though the music they made was pretty fantastic, with Albini’s big, mad old guitar sound placed front and centre. We had to walk through a picket to get into the venue. Great gig. A bit of a strange night though.

* * *

Interview: Antisect

ALONGSIDE Discharge with their “screeching haikus”, Antisect were right at the very limit of what I deemed acceptable in terms of hardcore punk adopting the dynamics of heavy metal.

They were an intensely powerful live band, but it’s fair to say they were none too subtle. My main impression is of gigantic riffs, loads of feedback and even more shouting. And Sideshow Bob-style spiderplant hair, of course.

And they all seemed to be called Pete.

I got to interview them twice in the space of less than a year, first in Leeds and then in Gateshead, either side of the release of their debut album, In Darkness There Is No Choice. The interviews tell two very similar tales of perfectly affable people confronted with the relentless drunken negativity of a fanzine ediot who when it came down to it, just enjoyed arguing as much as anything else.

They were a little more relaxed second time around and among many world exclusives came the extraordinary and shocking news that they actually owned a television set.

Interview: Shaun Ryder*1

WHEN Shaun Ryder – erstwhile actor, author, newspaper columnist, Salfordian crooner, lyrical genius and a man who was banned from Channel Four for saying the fuck-word at tea time – sits you down in his living room and says that he wants to tell you a story, you listen.

“I was walking down Deansgate the other day,” he begins, with a sly look playing across those famously unrefined features. “And a naked man with a big wand touched me on the shoulder and turned me into a frog. And I could see meself in the shop windows. I was a frog!”

Ryder, TV remote in one hand, bottle of lager in the other, pauses for effect. Maybe coming to the Peak District to interview him in his natural element wasn’t such a good idea after all.

“I turned around the corner and turned back into meself and an alien spacecraft picked me up and took me off on a journey, right?”

What are you on about?

“Every time I go to court, they quote all this stuff I’m supposed to have said in the papers as fact – even stuff from the Sport, which has had ‘We find B52 bomber on the moon’ as its front page headline,” Ryder finally explains. “So I’m telling you that little story there. I can pull that out in court now.”

Nothing is ever as simple as it seems with Shaun Ryder.

Interview: Crow People

CROW PEOPLE came from some pit village near Doncaster but they seemed to play an awful lot of gigs in the ‘industrial garden town’ of Scunthorpe.

I first remember coming across them at one such packed, sweaty gig in the mid-Eighties, although when I ran into Mark (who now has a teenage daughter and a career as a teacher) at the Flux gig at the 1in12 in Bradford last year, he told me that we’d actually met a good few years before when I was wandering around the Arndale in Doncaster, trying to sell records I didn’t want to unsuspecting punk rockers. It’s news to me.

Although they only released a couple of records throughout their career, they never got any press attention (apart from the stuff I wrote myself) and were barely known outside our little patch of South Yorkshire / North Lincolnshire, Crow People were a tremendous live band.

I used to get absolutely blasted, sit on the floor cross-legged and spin-out to their chugging, swirling, psychedelic space-rock. Way fucking cool.

I even ended up putting them on in Leeds, at this mad Leeds Abortion Fund benefit at Leeds Poly with the Wedding Present offshoot the Ukrainians and LS6 indie-sirens Sharon. Coming through a decent PA, Crow People just sounded extraordinarily powerful and intense (though the evening was marred when, at a crazy post-gig party at the Sharon girls’ house, one of their knobhead mates from Donny had an argument with his missus and trashed Paddy’s bedroom ). Their lack of recognition always baffled me.

They released a couple of records on Armstrong’s Meantime label but I have no mp3s for you, I’m afraid. I lost my copy of Cloud Songs years ago. Anyone has a spare, or even photographs of the band, well, you know where I am ..

In the meantime, here’s an interview I did with Mark for GRUNT magazine in 1988.

Interview: Bebel Gilberto

I’D LOVE to be able to pretend that bossa nova has been a big part of my life for years and years, but the fact is I didn’t really get it – or any of that easy, lounge stuff – until I heard Bebel Gilberto’s major label debut, Tanto Tempo, in 2000. After that, there was no stopping me.

She didn’t play up north until a few years later and I made it my business to sort out a face-to-face interview with her when she finally made it.

She was lovely, the gig was great, the interview was okay.

This is a reworked, slightly longer version of the piece that eventually ended up in the Big Issue in the North. It’s followed by the transcript of a phoner with her I did for City Life a year or so later.

* * *

“I WAS always a traveller,” says Bebel Gilberto, glancing out of a hotel window across the Manchester Ship canal, as she pulls on a lock of jet-black hair. “I started travelling when I was a baby with my parents, because my father was touring, and I have been travelling ever since.”

Over the last few days, Gilbert has been in Spain and Holland playing gigs before coming to the UK for a meeting with the producer of her new album in London and travelling up to Manchester for tonight’s gig.

She is in Manchester as part of a short solo UK tour before she supports Simply Red around Europe.

“Sleeping is a big problem, I have trouble, I guess because of being in so many different places,” she says in charmingly accented English. “But lately I don’t know .. I don’t even want to talk about it because I think my body can hear – and then I’m not going to be able to sleep again. But I’ve had like 11 hours of sleep. So I’m in a very good mood.”

Born in New York and raised in Mexico City, São Paulo and Rio de Janiero, much of the early childhood of the only daughter of Brazilian bossa nova legends João and Miúcha Gilberto was spent touring the world. Her “totally hippy” parents were not exactly what you would call conventional.

A couple of lives dates in Mexico City, en route back to Brazil, for example, turned into a two-year stopover.

“We had a beautiful house with a big peacock walking around in it,” she tells me with a big smile, “but we had no furniture at all. We did have a TV and we all watched Brazil in the 1970 World Cup and it was fantastic.”

Her parents weren’t the only entertainers in the family – her uncle, her mother’s brother, is the poet, playwright and singer Chico Buarque.

But while the songs on her astounding major label debut retain the Zen-like simplicity of her father’s best-loved work, while her honey-toned voice recalls that of her now famously reclusive mother, Bebel Gilberto is more than merely a chip off the old block. However, growing up in a showbiz family – even a globetrotting Brazilian bossa nova hippy family – brings its own problems.

Interview: Bogshed

THOUGH it’s now routinely derided by the latest crop of fat, bitter and aged pop historians – that’s my gig, thank you very much – the NME’s C86 cassette was an essential purchase for those of us not in thrall to the emerging sound of hip hop.

A ragged and patchy but essential overview of some of the best bands working the UK’s vibrant DIY live circuit at the time, C86 featured contributions from the likes of Primal Scream, Stump, the Pastels, the Shop Assistants, Big Flame, A Witness and Miaow. As well as being musically diverse, it also featured a number of women among all the little white boys with guitars. Radical.

Of course, I’d been into a lot of the bands on C86 for ages before it came out. Cool huh? Well, I thought so at the time – but I’ve been wrong about this kind of stuff before and no doubt I will be again.

I was writing odd live reviews for the NME and was fully immersed in fanzine culture, as well as still being an avid listener to the venerable Peel, so I was hearing a lot of new music one way or another.

I bought Let Them Eat Bogshed on John Robb’s Vinyl Drip label and absolutely loved the weird, jerky guitar pop of the Hebden Bridge funsters, so I decided to put them on in town.

Taking my cue from my fanzine, Airstrip, I renamed the Henry’s function room the Hangar and booked the Membranes for the first gig and Bogshed for the second. Both gigs were big successes, although they were probably a bit unusual for the bands themselves.

Rather than the happy-go-lucky indie Last Of The Summer Winos I’d expected, Bogshed were actually Scousers (apart from drummer Tris King) who just happened to live in Hebden Bridge, and they were as miserable as fuck to boot. I was quite taken aback. True, it was a pretty shit venue, most of the crowd had never even heard of Bogshed before and were too busy skinning up to really get excited by the band’s performance, but apart from the Membranes, the last band who’d played here were Theatre of Hate four or five years before.

People knew how to react to their mates doing a load of well-worn cover versions but proper bands like Bogshed were another matter entirely. I actually thought they got a pretty decent reaction given that hardly anyone knew their stuff. They were probably used to going to shit-hole towns and finding people were so grateful that anyone had made the effort to visit that they just went bananas. And while that sometimes happened in Scunthorpe, it didn’t tonight.

Anyway, after the gig I paid them the full whack and somehow cajoled them into doing an interview for the fanzine.

They weren’t happy.

* * *

Interview: Andrew Weatherall

HE MIGHT describe himself as the “classic underachiever”, but Andrew Weatherall doesn’t seem to have done so badly.

A music and fashion nut from Windsor with an unhealthy obsession for the minutiae of the rituals and mores of a string of different youth cults, Weatherall is part of that charmed generation who were just about old enough to experience the first wave of punk rock first hand but not too old to appreciate acid house 10 years later.

Inspired by Peter Hooton’s The End fanzine, Weatherall and his friends Terry Farley, Cymon Eccles and Steve Mayes – already seasoned clubbers to a man – created the football, music and fashion Boy’s Own fanzine in 1987.

They threw some very groovy guerrilla parties styled on the scene they’d experienced at places like Amnesia in Ibiza, before Weatherall, Farley and Steve May launched the hugely-influential Boy’s Own record label (look out for 20th anniversary events coming up this year), which has gone on to bring people such as the Chemical Brothers, Underworld, X-Press 2 and Black Science Orchestra to the world’s attention.

Weatherall is probably as much to blame for the horror that was ‘indie-dance’ as the Great Satan Oakenfold. His remix of Primal Scream’s I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have – which he transformed into the downtempo Balearic masterpiece Loaded – spawned a thousand tedious de-facto cover versions by everyone from Blur to the Soup Dragons.

Since then, the former Shoom resident has become synonymous with the heavier, more intense end of electronica, with club nights like Blood Sugar and Sabresonic and production outfits like Sabres of Paradise and Two Lone Swordsmen. But Weatherall has a million other aliases and guises. He’s a difficult man to pin down.

The last time our paths crossed, a couple of years ago, I busted my knee dancing around an open-air club at 6am after a long, long night at the Benicassim festival in Spain.

I’d somehow got separated from Dr Drew and, decidedly dazed and confused, made friends with some lovely boys from Zaragoza who, amongst other kindnesses, blagged me into the party.

Weatherall  wasn’t playing punk, but I felt the need to pogo. It was that kind of night/morning. In fact, he’d actually gone a bit disco, well, in a deep house kinda way. It was an entirely unexpected turn of events, but it was a laugh a minute.

The first time I met Andrew Weatherall was in Leeds towards the end of 1993 after a gig at Soundclash.

Interview: Chuck D

I DID this interview with Chuck D in August 1999, ahead of the release of Public Enemy’s seventh album, There’s A Poison Goin’ On. Can you tell that I didn’t really know what I was talking about when it came to all the downloading e-webnet business?

Thought so.

* * *

THE bar and grill of the Regent’s Park Hilton is perhaps not the most obvious place to meet a musical urban guerilla of the stature of Public Enemy rapper and chief propagandist Chuck D. But sure enough, walk through the swing doors held open for you by a liveried concierge and there he is.

He’s easy enough to spot. Aside from his manager Walter, busy taking care of business on the other side of the room, Chuck is the only black man in the place. Alone at a table between interviews he seems at home, comfortable even, among his well heeled fellow guests, using the free time to jot down notes in the ever present notebook.

Despite the baseball cap and the head-to-toe black Adidas, Chuck doesn’t look like a successful hip hop artist supposedly should. With body adornment limited to a simple silver chain around his neck, a not particularly ostentatious watch on one wrist and of all things, a copper rheumatism band on the other, he exudes an understated style a world away from the fat gold chains of LL Cool J and the Rolex-cool of Jay-Z.

But we wouldn’t expect anything less. Public Enemy have always eschewed the dubious delights of hip hop’s love of conspicuous consumption – choosing instead to concentrate on harsh realities which affect us all rather than the exclusive pleasures of the lucky few.

PE adopted a genuinely revolutionary stance, at once uncompromising, unforgiving and, it should be said, pretty uncomplicated. They were tightly focussed, structured like a military unit, distrusting of outsiders and seemingly unperturbed that their radical, pro-black mesage was often percieved as being anti-white.

They called their third album Fear Of A Black Planet. Assuaging the fears of white liberals and rednecks alike wasn’t – still isn’t – high on their list of  priorities.

“We do songs, we play our music and we hope that we make some of those songs come alive in performance,” explains Chuck. “We hope we make some people think about the things we talk about. It’s as simple as that.”

Of course, there’s much more to it than that.

Interview: Neon Leon

MORE tales of house music madness.

I was editing a short-lived Leeds listings magazine by the name of Brag and went down to Nottingham with Earnshaw to interview Neon Leon, a San Francisco DJ who was on tour in the UK at the time, ahead of a couple of dates in Yorkshire. Those naughty House of Maya boys in Bradford had played me a tape and I was very impressed. I think they’d got it from the DIY lot, some of whom had recently relocated to California.

He was playing at that place on the Lacemarket – at various times it was called the Ad-Lib and the Garage, and maybe also the Zig Zag. Paul had taken me down to an alternative disco there a couple of times in the early Eighties (Graeme Park was playing upstairs but it didn’t seem all that so we went back down to the basement to dance to the Birthday Party and X-Ray Spex instead), a couple of years later we went to see the Subhumans there, and here I was, a decade later, getting down to some seriously groovy house and garage in the same venue.

It was a good night. Me and Earnshaw got pilled up and danced our socks off but had been a bit too messy to really make any impression on the lovely ladies of Nottingham – needless to say, I was inexplicably single again at this point. Neon Leon did a great set and afterwards we went to some late-night café and I did this interview with him. We may have done another pill at this point ..

* * *
“HOUSE music saved my life! I’m not kidding. It saved my life. It gave me a focus when I was doing a lot of bad things and a lot of cocaine. If I wasn’t doing this I don’t what I’d be doing – probably gang-banging somewhere.

“House music is my life. It’s expression. House music has all the elements of gospel, soul, R&B, rap and disco but – I can’t describe it,” says reformed character and fierce San Francisco house music legend Neon Leon.

House is a feeling?

“Yeah! House is a feeling! That’s exactly what it is,” he replies with a gap-toothed grin.

I first heard Neon Leon doing his thing in a house of ill-repute in Bradford. Our hosts fussed around trying to find this amazing tape someone in the States had sent them over. They finally find it, after a long and slightly frantic search. Gradually, all the idle drug chit-chat and post-club bullshit diminish to nothing as everyone tunes into the gorgeous sounds slinking out of the speakers – a live recording of one of Neon Leon’s riotous hometown gigs.

Neon Leon plays dance music for grown ups. He specialises in layering sparse, booming, bass-heavy rhythms in a smooth, seamless mix, slipping in assorted vocal tracks and acapellas on top to create completely new music which sounds like it wasn’t meant to be played any other way.

But what really separates Leon from the rest of the pack is what he does with the microphone.