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The reason I'm asking about Monica Vasconcelos is that the musicians you surround yourself with seem very sympathetic to your way of musical thinking, or feeling. There's a lot of emotion inside this music, yet none of these players over-emote. So, how do you talk to the musicians in these settings? With these pieces, I assume they're improvised in part.

 

What I tell them depends entirely on who they are 行 if they're working musicians, well, it's a very different discipline; for example, if I work with jazz musicians, they can tell me more about my chords than I can. And they're very quick with that stuff.

    And what I try and do is, I try and prepare what I want them to play on, in such a way as it's a good enough guide to let them do what they do, and then I would sort of trust it. I mean, something Miles Davis said, it may be apocryphal, when he was asked how he worked out his arrangements, he said, "My arrangement is the musicians I choose." And somehow, there's a lotta good tenor players, there's a lotta good bass players, good singers and so on, trombone players, but I found a sort of little bunch of friends who 行 I tend not to work with them together, I tend to work each separately, and I've gotta do the whole thing just at their pace, in their way, so it depends entirely who it is.

    I mean, I was rather apologetic with this one to Annie Whitehead [trombone] and especially to Gilad Atzmon [sax and reeds], who's a soloist, you know, a straight-ahead jazz musician, he's a bebop man. I said look, I just want you and Annie to play chords that I might have otherwise played on keyboard. And he's really nice, he just loves to play, he said, We'll do this. And that's what he does. But he just gives it that physical and human edge; I just wanted kind of meta-physical objects in it, on this record.

    I do also like to give everybody their moment; not just to be kind, but when I'm listening to a record, my favorites are Ellington and Mingus, 'cause they know they just have...a flute player, that soloist 行 everybody in the band somehow steps forward as a character in their own right. And that identifies them. I love that with Ellington, that he'll have three or four trumpeters, and I thought I knew who they all are, and, some of the tenor players and stuff, and with Mingus you have that. So that's one thing I learned from those two. I wouldn't put myself in the same bracket in terms of technical skill, but just why are these the most wonderful large-group records [laughs], considering they're a wonderfully large group? And I thought, that's it: Everybody there is a character.

    And so at first I try as much as possible to organize it so they do know what the song is already. I do more or less everything as a solo record 行 my fallback is that it could be if they don't turn out always that good. I make sure I actually could do it all myself, and then that way I feel safe. If they can enhance it and bring the chorus to life or bless me with a little virtuosic solo somewhere or something, then all the luckier for me.

 

The horn arrangements all over this record are really outstanding.

 

Well, thank you very much. I mean, I sort of heard them, how it worked, and I sort of sheepishly said how it is to Annie and Gilad and indeed to Yaron [Stavi], who played quite a lot of bass; and there's a young woman named Seaming To, from Manchester, but her parents are from Hong Kong; she plays clarinet, and she's got this Theremin.

    Sometimes, within that, once I got it tight 行 I've always done this, ever since Rock Bottom 行 I really almost present them with a solo piece by me, with all the piano chords I put in, or how the voice goes, everything, and then say, "Could you cover these chords here and stop there," or whatever, and chop it together later.

    And if you're lucky, if you choose the right people, they go with it, and not only that, they kind of enhance it and bring stuff out, if you've got the right people. Like with Gilad, he loves to play, and he loves to make suggestions, and he loves to track his own parts, like "How about I add a tenor part here?" or whatever. And he and Annie, there was one or two chords I had where they said, "I hear what you want here, but I think it should be voiced like this," and I would listen to what he said and know if it would be right and I would go with what they said.

    So I said to Gilad, "Do you want arranging credits as well?" And he said, "No, absolutely not, I'm simply playing what I hear you want me to actually do." Very nice man.

 

Very nice guitar by Paul Weller on that, too. On the track called "AWOL," it's intriguing how you've got the horn parts twining with the bass line.

 

With that, actually, it's like with film, in filming where in the end it's down to the editing, where I make sense of it all, chop and change and move it all around, and lift some things and put them down, like a cross between a film editor and a conductor, in a way.

    When I get together with Jamie [Johnson] the engineer at the end of the recording process, we try and make a record out of this. With that particular one, I actually had them all playing all right through it, I mean original takes of that, I've got about eight of Yaron playing the whole thing just on bass; but at the end you only hear a little bit of that, quite early on, just overlapping. And then I had Annie and Gilad play the all chords all the way through; and only once I'd got it all recorded did I decide to just have Annie here, and then I'll bring Gilad there, and so on.

    Gilad did about five completely different solos, he ended up doing a kind of Turkish clarinet thing; but he also did some kind of little bagpipe thing, he did all kinds of different things. Then I just sort of listened and listened and listened, and then the Turkish one just sounded right.

 

That track also features Dave Sinclair on piano. He's one of my heroes from way back, from Caravan and Matching Mole days, and all those tasty fuzzbox Lowrey organ solos.

 

Oh, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Dave. You know, he lives in Japan now, he's married to a Japanese woman, and I hadn't seen him for, I don't know, it might be 20-30 years. But we got on really well; he was a bit freaked out by what happened in Matching Mole, with that total improvisation coming in, he was uncomfortable with that, so that's why he's more into a structured song-base thing, and I worked through my improvisation and drum thing with other people. But I've known him since he was a schoolboy.

    It was great, he just turned up. He just came on a rare visit to England, and he came round just when I was sort of working on that song, and I said, Dave, would you do the piano on this? And bam! Which we recorded here at home. He just played so simply, so gracefully and so authoritatively, you know, and it was so easy to take that take into London and just get Yaron to do his double bass and Annie to add her baritone horn.

    And I should say that I had them going all the way through all of it, and then edited it right down, for arranging reasons 行 and in that case it served the arrangement.

 

But what are you singing about in that one?

 

Yeah, Absent Without Leave: It's to do with the anger that you feel, the hurt, really. You think, "There you go, we're a pair, we're an item, and [laughs] come back immediately!" It's bad-mannered if you think someone's had an affair with somebody, but that's what really that's about. Alfie wrote the words, that's all that I can say. You'll have to get what she's on about then.

 

In the second act you have a song called "The Here and the Now," where you say it's "a beautiful day...but not here." Why not?

 

Well, it's funny. It's a joke. You know when you're going out shopping 行 I live in a small town, I know most of the people I shop with, and you know people talk about the weather and or they complain about the rain and so on, and they say, "Isn't it a horrible day?" And I say, "No, it's a beautiful day, but just not here." [Laughs] It's just a line that stuck in my head.

 

In "Be Serious," you sing, "Feel so sad and lonely, no one to tell me what to do." Is that with regard to religion/identity politics? Or you say, "Do us a favor," implying "just shut up." Or you flat-out say, "Leave me alone." What's going on? You're ornery.

 

I am, aren't I? It's a kind of bad-tempered thing there, because I'm not really saying there that religion is useless, I'm just saying that as well as not being able to join in any of your religions, it doesn't help me if you say, "Well, that makes you a sinner and you'd better say sorry and 行 " Look, no, no, I can't do that, because don't you understand, I have no one to say sorry to. It's not there in my head; you can't say over and over again and make it in my head if it isn't there, you know.

    So it's just exasperation, I think. Grumpy old man. I have my loyalties. I believe in Charles Mingus. [Laughs] No, I don't apologize to him, or thank him or pray to him for rain. I'm glad he's here, that's all.

 

I relate to that lyric in a strong way.

 

[Laughs] Well, that really just flooded onto the page, like a flood of tears into a tissue, you know.

 

Who is the protagonist in "Mob Rule"? And what is his attitude?

 

Yeah, well, 'cause a lot of that third section is really about the kind of exasperation and amusement of living in England, you know, whether it's walking around a rather boring little country town, so on and so on. But there's two versions of town life in England, and the one that I really like, which is this kind of time lapse that you sometimes get in cities, which is sort of represented by a [duo] between Gilad on tenor and Orphy Robinson on steel pan 行 the steel pan has that kind of connotation, and that kind of rikkity raggedy drum beat reminds me maybe of the kind of drum beats you get when you get a lot of schoolchildren, you know, their natural raggedy beat.

    I love that; I love coming across those things; not just in London, but whether I'm in Spain or anywhere, I think, "Yeah, this is the human life I like. This is humans at their best. I love this."

    So that's one way to community, a beautiful thing. But then we're suddenly enclosed with a local council meeting, of advisors, talking about what's the best way forward for the community and stuff like that. I've been to a few council meetings here, and I tend to participate in local politics, and they're so dismal, the kind of formal procedures, and the words - they just suffocate you in a kind of archaic fog. In the case here, there's a sort of pseudo mystical organization called the Masons. It's a bunch of kitsch romantic imagery, can't call it a religion, it's just a cult, but an old one; people in high places here, whether they're priests or policemen, turn up a lot in the Masons. Which is fine, none of my business, except that when in public office, you never quite know what their motive is for allowing one person to have a shop sign outside his door and another person can't. And sometimes the only answer seems to be one person is a Mason and the other one isn't.

    And then it's not tragic, but it's irritating. And I use the analogy of a mob because it has kind of traces of Mafia, and Mob Rule is a pejorative term for democracy, isn't it?

 

"A Beautiful War" was written with Eno. I suppose there's a kind of irony built in to something like that, so pretty, and such hopeful lyrics. But is irony the right word for it?

 

It is, and irony is something I really worry about. In principle, I wouldn't think anything I do ironic, because it's hard enough to understand what anybody's saying anyway without them deliberately saying the opposite [laughs], but sometimes that's just how it came on the page, so "This feels right, here we go, I better do this."

    Yeah, it is irony, and it's just sort of someone else, I don't even know where it came from. I don't even know how I feel about this person. We have to be grateful for the great bombers in the second world war 行 you know, it's the curse of the Good War; we had a good war once, so you can't always say it's a bad thing.

    I live in Lincolnshire, which is called Bomber County, large tracts where the British air force launched bombing raids in the second world war; it's quite resonant around here, and you get romantic pictures around the local shops, you know, from an airplane height, looking over the beautiful valleys of England as they fly off to bomb a foreign country and so on.

    So what can I say? I missed the second world war, I don't know what that's like, and they sure were brave 行 I mean, they'd come back absolutely...if they came back, they were tired, and they were young men and doing their best. You can't argue with that.

    But since then, the English-speaking people have bombed about 20 countries 行 if you work it out, about one every two years. And I think it's getting to be a bad habit...[Laughs]

    We're cheating these young men by telling them we're defending our country, telling us everybody is a Nazi horde about to take over Western civilization. This is kind of turning into a lie, really. And it's not fair to these young men to abuse their innocence further.

Here in America, it's seen as an employment program for underprivileged young people 行 an opportunity.

 

Yeah! I understand that, and you won't see ever in an advert for the armed services 行 they'll tell you about how you can become an engineer and make, like, friends, if you go to other countries and kill people. And they'll try and kill you. They would never say that.

    We have a romanticized view of war as a subject. It doesn't end there. There's always this sense that if you just bomb enough people, just kill all the bad people, everything will be all right. But the people have sons and daughters, and they're gonna want to get back at you someday. "The sins of the fathers..."

    This isn't the way to end things; it may be the way to do some things, but it doesn't end things. It just takes you somewhere else.

 

How much does ambiguity figure in your musical thinking 行 how not to be too literal about the emotions, political views, etc.

 

Like with irony, I don't look for it. I don't want to hide behind a thing, you know, that "I'm an artist, I don't have to make a decision here." I really do try and think clearly with as much scientific precision 行 my mind is untrained 行 as I possibly can to work out what's going on and what to do. But even then, in the end, the further I get with that, I'm left with this paradox, this insoluable paradox, and so that's how it ends up on the page.

    But I don't want to get into this "us artists are above certainty, we're in a higher realm," I don't feel that at all. People ask these questions, and sometimes people do find answers, and they get it right, and I'm full of admiration. We've got a whole generation of kids now who are so tuned into global ecological problems, since people like Naomi Klein have alerted people to things, and a lot of kids go out to do brave and tough work in different parts of the world.

    And there's another thing that's happened in my lifetime, which is that, although I think there's just as much racism in the sense of dividing the world up into good guys and bad guys, the kind of day-to-day color prejudice that you took for granted when I was a boy has almost evaporated here. And most places I see, it isn't an issue as much, I mean it is if people don't speak the language or they're associated with a particular event or paranoia at the moment.

    But on the whole in England, there are people in all kinds of colors in all kind of roles in society, and it's just sort of taken for granted now, it's not even an issue. And that's a beautiful thing that's happened, so it'd be really cruel and ungrateful just to say the world's going to hell in a handbasket, 'cause it isn't.

    I think Trotsky said, you know, there are two sides in this, always, there's two great powers: one is the government and the other one is the people, and there's more people than the government. So, get a grip here. [Laughs]

 

I hope that the same will be true for the Arabs and Muslims in England and elsewhere.

 

It's seen very different in America than it is here. We in Europe have a large, significant Muslim minority, and I know that there's one in the States, too, but it's not as established as it is here. This goes back a long way with us.

    It is definitely a very complicated relationship. And here, it is definitely a love-hate relationship. Whereas my impression from people who live in America, people are completely baffled as to what's going on there. We sort of just go, when somebody blows something up, and says, "This is a war of ideas, a war of the worlds!" you know, we think, "Oh, come on, this is an 8 1/2-year-old's way of looking at things; what you have here is a bunch of dreadful young men doing dreadful things; they're criminals, find 'em, catch 'em, put 'em in prison." It's a mad young men crime-management program, not a global idealism. To turn it into...to play the game of Bin Laden, of turning it into a global ideological war 行 he's the only person who's to benefit from this, you know, because he gets people to see it that way. He's crazy.

    I mean, I know Palestinians and Arabs, they're much more sophisticated and varied and pluralistic than you would know from news broadcasts. I've got great friends all over there, I mean obviously Gilad and Yaron are from Israel, you know, so they sort of keep me up to speed on their side of things. In fact, there's a friend who, without my help, runs a website for me, and he's from Israel. But I also work with Israeli Arabs, and I've got a friend, a Palestinian refugee who lives here, and it's a much more kind of personal, complicated thing here.

    There's a lovely young artist living here named Karen Russo, an Israeli who's working in London, and she was in the Defense Force, and she's a bit embarrassed to speak out here, because that kind of us-and-them thing is part of London life; for them that's very difficult. I don't get the impression that it's a part of the fabric of life in the U.S.

 

Not quite yet. Yet so much suspicion and fear has been raised in recent times, I'm just afraid for those people, that they're not going to be able to live their lives normally, without having to deal with this kind of distrust.

 

Absolutely. But there are long-running discontents, and I don't think the people in the U.S. understand the humiliation and hurt that was felt at not the foundation of Israel but the way it was done. I know that the Palestinians had had years of colonialism under the Turks; they thought, "Right, at last we'll be free of the Turkish empire," and then suddenly the powers that be say, "Well, no, you don't get that, we need your space."

    A deep kind of unwitting racism was felt throughout, and the sad thing is, in those days, life there wasn't particularly religious, it was just a lot of liberals left and this kind of stuff, and there still are, but in the end the only people who've got that kind of blind certainty are the extremely religious people. It puzzles and embarrasses a lot of Arabs that this has happened. And the reactions of the West at the moment are like trying to put out a fire by pouring gasoline on it.

    Suppressing people is not the way to make them like us. I'm just trying to gather together the various things here, but I have some good friends on all sides of this stuff, I haven't got the right to come to a definite conclusion, certainly not to come down to dictate the answers to these things. It's not I'm being an artist and aloof, it's just I don't know what to do.

 

Back to the album. Again, the structure or arc of the entire thing has its own very personal symmetry, I guess you could call it. For example, why'd you choose to close with a song sung in Spanish?

 

It was kind of an exit strategy from being an Englishman in our times. And to dissociate myself a bit from the culture that I'm a part of, to remove myself in some way, and step outside it. The last section is to do with exit strategies; the first piece, for example, is done in Italian, and it seems to be a kind of strange mystical mixture of feminism and fatalism, but it's all gonna be all right in the end because women keep having children and they regenerate life, and so it's a glorious thing.

    And I love the feel, the sound of it, and that's one of the things 行 that it goes somewhere. That's an exit strategy. It's not nihilistic, it's not like suicide, it's like really finding somewhere else in your head.

 

You reference Garcia Lorca in this final section as well.

 

He was a classic surrealist, and as an added poignancy, he was killed by Hitler. He was homosexual, which wasn't a good thing to be at the time, and so on. But his were classic surrealist strategies for poetry writing. It's funny that he's so popular in Spain, because his writing is impenetrably surrealist. But he's still taken as a kind of war-hero poet.

    Then I had Orphy Robinson playing a kind of controlled free jazz 行 in fact, it wasn't free, because I actually put a grid there for Orphy to play to, then I took the grid away.

    Let's keep our fingers crossed for Latin America. In Chile they have a prime minister who was a torture victim during the Pinochet years, so that's a nice exit strategy for that; another country has an indigenous Indian elected premier, so that's a first, and that's a kind of survival strategy which I hadn't expected or hoped for.

    So I look for these moments, and you have to be skeptical that the world's going to be a better place because of that, but that's my Che Guevara moment. I really, really need them. [Laughs]

 

Irony might be an inadequate term, but surely an ode to Che done in 2007 feels different to one done in 1967.

 

Oh, of course. I'm showing my age. I'm in my 60s. And this is all our exit strategies, as was free jazz kind of the new wave of art. A good detective, an Agatha Christie character, could tell my age just by checking through my nostalgic references for exit strategies. [Laughs]

 

It's a thrill to hear you continuing to do such unique, great music.

 

It's so nice to hear that from the other side of the world. Believe me, I really need that.

 

Well, we're going to try and make you a superstar in America.

 

[Laughs] I don't think I'd look one. I'd have to go on a diet for that.

 

This piece just may do it.

 

[Laughs] I just need to keep on making a living at this stuff. I don't have a pension, you know.

 

I wish you good health.

 

Thank you very much. Someone told me I was easy to talk to, but I don't agree, because I tend to ramble and switch from one thing to another. The only thing I think I can ever get right is the music, and then people ask me to talk about it. I will, but I can't do it in the same disciplined way. It's so hard to put things into words which at the point of doing were beyond words anyway. 

 

 

 

 

 

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