September 3, 1994
Via Record Collector, September, 2015
By Andrew Truth and Phil Smith
"(mimicking a cockney accent and singing jauntily) 'Now we've made it, I'd like to do my orchestral piece called Gemini Suite about the signs of the zodiac.' (Jon Lord's LP is) Great! It's partly Bonanza, partly every horrible cliché. Like in Warner Brothers cartoons, Bugs Bunny music. It's the funniest shit alive, all that 70s stuff. I can't listen to it for long (though). There's a difference between indulgence and exploration."
"A preparation and a curse, but everyone's childhood is. It's made it easier (for me to tour). You're the stranger constantly. People will find occasions where they're readily accepted but other times, equally (the) weight of hostility comes towards you for no reason at all. I still attract the same things from childhood. People come to the shows and either run away screaming or really like it."-describing his nomadic childhood
"Nothing (from the middle ground) comes to mind, that is 'cos I've forgotten it already. I've forgotten the effect and which art it was that gave me the effect. Either you remember Bob Dylan or you remember Michael Bolton."-on middle-ground mediocrity in music
"People project tremendous amounts of personal low self-esteem and high self-esteem upon the stage, in equal parts sometimes. That's the catharsis of going to a live show. If the performer is right, this is very co-dependent, but people go there to unload. There is this loud person who has come to a few of my gigs and her friends insist that she's a very nice person, but she can't help but shout at me up on the stage. It's something I just accept. It's not like when Murphy's Law played at The Plaza and four or five fights erupted within the space of 46 minutes. I don't look out to see whether I'm connecting because it's not up to me. I look out to see where the music should go. If the crowd is hot because their skin is hot due to the temperature, the set will be different. Or if it's very cold outside and still, I'll want to be the fireplace as best I can though sometimes I can't accomplish it. I'm aware of the energy in the room. Moods and music fly about of their own will and they have no order and you can be either open or closed to them and that's how the gig will go. Either from the stage or the audience, people open to emotions, movement, stories, feeling and dancing."
"It's usually everything about (the song that attracts me), not just one thing. It's different in the case of (Van Morrison's) The Way Young Lovers Do. That came about because my friend Michael, who eventually joined the band, had a dream about me and him singing (it). On a whim, I got it together and performed it one night. Then it became something else because the tempo I liked, the feel of it; the words and the song got into me. Any time I take a cover and wear it on my sleeve, it's because it had something to do with my life and still marks a time in my life when I needed that song more than anything ever."-about the unusually high number of cover versions on his first couple of releases
"The version I've heard is Nina Simone's. I'm not even sure who Elkie Brooks is. I don't think it's always a fair decision to have homogeneity for its own sake. I think that human beings contain many people...I do believe that there's this one soul that lies directly through Edith Piaf and the Sex Pistols, I really know that exists: Joni Mitchell and John Cage; Billie Holiday and Bad Brains. An albun in itself is a moment and the music may require for me to make an album that's totally homogenized but not as a rule. It's good to be varied because without knowing what sides there are to you, knowing your depths, you pretty much die. You never change and you stay in the same unbeatable format but, sooner or later, you become obsolete."-on covering Lilac Wine
Failure to evolve is to stymie yourself: "That's true. I'm not even that concerned with changing, just with discovery, because through discovering you may stay on one thing for a long time. Just evolving is important. Deliberately changing all the time is like making off with somebody who must change position in order to get into every (sexual) position and you never get anything started. 'Would you please keep still, throw away the Kama Sutra and love my ass!' "
"Parchment Farm Blues by Bukka White and Well I Wonder by The Smiths because I always end up doing it exactly like Morrissey does. The impetus for having covers was necessity. In the middle of a show taking people into a world that was completely my world, 'boom', right over there we're into I Know It's Over from The Queen Is Dead."-songs to which he would feel unable to add anything
"It is possible and it happens all the time, but not just in the way you want or expect it. Beyond death, I know nothing but in human life...some people have a love for people around them that is so powerful and carries so many gifts with it that even when they die, people are still accomplishing things through this person's love in them, because this person said, 'I see you're a writer. I see this postcard here and you're killing me in this, you're a great writer.' And he's saying, 'I never thought about writing before. But anyway, you're a great writer and this is a great piece of work. I don't even want to touch War and Peace, this is it, and 'boom', he gets hit by a car and this person goes on to be a great writer or remembers that belief, against his own hope. It's very strange, in that way he'll become immortal, he'll always be remembered. He'll be alive in people's hearts, inside people.
"Then there's books, records, movies, images. Here's immortality in a nutshell: Marilyn Monroe, James Dean. They're all around you but they don't exist. That's immortality in my cynical world. That's Tinsel Town immortality, which is bullshit. They've lost immortality because they've lost their appearance as mortals. They're symbols, gods, tools and puppets for people. There's a fine line between being a god and a puppet...The Bible is used as a puppet and it's untouchable and sacred but people use it as a pair of roller-skates or joke toilet paper with a psalm on every sheet. Being mortal and rooted in the earth is a very excruciating joy and not a lot of people can take it. Sometimes they just want to be famous, with no substance underneath, no work, no reason. To be famous and known and loved. They think it's being loved but it's just being worshipped and idolized and that's not even being understood. It's not even in the ballpark. It's better to have people around you who understand you and when you come up to people in the street and talk about bagels and talk about the game, to have that connection there, it's very important to me.
"If I wanted to be famous, I'd assassinate the President. There's no life in it. There's nothing wrong with being for something you do well or uniquely like if I invented the cure for AIDS, I wouldn't mind being very famous. It'd be a great achievement. Or if I wrote a song that everyone loved, I wouldn't mind that. It wouldn't mean everything. That wouldn't be the object or I'd be a junkie for fame, 'I wasn't famous fir my orange juice song. It's a great song but nobody likes it! I must suck!' I have to be attuned to that and must have an everlasting relationship with this particular thing that there's a public and then there's me. At any given time, I am the public and Evan Dando (Lemonheads) is him and I understand this exchange. It's a very strange arena and lots of people get thrown to the lions. Lots of people come away victorious for a time but then they're out of the arena, that's the end of it."-on immortality
"Dreaming, both waking and asleep, (is) a reservoir of mine. The thing is, there's no difference between for me between dream states and living. They both carry truth to them. I can read them both. I feel things in my dreams and I feel all the things human beings lives bring them, except sometimes there are purple monsters or a chocolate dog trying to wake you up, but it's still all very valid to me and I read situations in waking hours just like I read them in my sleeping hours, my sleeping hour, my lack of sleep world."-on whether he regularly wrote songs based on dreams
