Ian Svenonius Interview
December 1997
http://www.southern.com/southern/band/MAKUP/Int_damnyou.html

Damn You Fanzine

Leicester Princess Charlotte, 1st December, 12:40pm. We've just witnessed a typically incredible mAKE UP performance. We've waited around for ages, because it seems everyone wants to talk to them, including us. Having done about four interviews, we finally manage to attract Ian Svenonius' attention and we get round to having a chat, despite the late time.
Thanks to Ian for his time and patience. It makes a refreshing change to speak to somebody who actually has something to say. We only wish it could have gone on for longer.

DY: Why did you form the mAKE UP?
IAN: Besause you need to have a language to, uh...no, no, no, let me start that over again. Because you need to utilise the medium of your time to communicate with people. And also because we all love the power of music, y'know, it's undeniable. It's an opiate. It has all these other possibilities, like communicating ideas, aesthetics, the congregational happening uh, aspect. I like performance. All these things.
DY: Could you ever see yourself not being in a band?
IAN: Oh yeah, there's lots of things to do. Basically we're given the form of rock 'n' roll music, when I was a child it was the official form of expression. It was what was promoted most heavily by radio and television. It was our culture, thus it was given all this cultural relevance. It was supposed to have all these ramifications - what people said, or wore, or did, or the people involved. Now, if we look at the history of music in the last 100 years, since the industrialization of the West, you can see that there's been a movement towards downsizing music for greater gain on the part of the industry. To minimize the cost and to maximize the gain for the industry. That's why rock 'n' roll prevailed over its predecessor jazz and be-bop etc, and the predecessor of that was swing, in which a bigger band was employed, with more skilled people. And of course classical music before that, which had a symphonic orchestra with say, 50 or so workers. You can see a direct analagous relationship with factories, the kind of consolidation...y'know, Marx's whole prophecy about the dismissal of the skilled worker, in lieu of the kind of camel or herd animal. Now you can see this dialectic manifesting itself today in the form of techno and electronic music. So that's why we use gospel music, because it's an inversion of this trend, it uses everybody in a congregation, ideally.
DY: So it's the next stage in the evolution?
IAN: Well, we're fighting against the stage, so it's de-evolution. We're fighting against it by inverting industries, or capitalism in relationship to industry. But y'know, I think there's lots of things that you could do. You could say the same thing by doing underground theatre, that's another thing like rock 'n' roll music, because the production costs were too high. You have to cease to look at these things as art and see them as trends in industry. Because that's what it is, and you have to look at the people involved as the workers. The people involved are being encouraged to sleep on floors or take heroin, then maybe you might see that as industry's encouragement of an aesthetic that ultimately costs them less. You have to remember that rock 'n' roll prevailed over jazz because of the mythology of authenticity built into it. Wherein the players were suppose to live hard and die young, etc etc. Now all this maximizes gain for the industry. So you can look at it as the traditional exploitation of the workers by business, by the boss class. But there are lots of things that you could do to, uh, critique society.
DY: You've recently appeared in a film, is that right?
IAN: A friend of ours made a short film of us. It's about 25 minutes long. It's called 'Blue Is Beautiful'. It's about our excape from America. It's fairly abstract. It's mostly a concert film.
DY: Why did you do the 'Free Arthur Lee' single?
IAN: Arthur Lee was the singer in the sixties band Love, and he's been making records ever since. I've seen him a couple of times and he's really fantastic. But he's really a symbol of people's complacency, someone who's not party of the industry hierarchy. He's not like David Crosby, who's totally inured within the industry. He's not somebody like Lou Reed, some little industry hack like that. Arthur Lee is a misfit. He didn't fit within the cause of the industry quite as well, and therefore he's been relegated to the junk pile. Americans on the junk pile eventually end up in prison. It's a traditional class thing - the poor end up in prison for misdemeanours. He happens to be in prison for possession of a hand gun. It's part of the 'Three Strikes and Your Out' law, so called. Which means after three misdemeanours you're treated as a felon and given hard time. If Arthur Lee was part of the Industry he wouldn't have been put in prison, y'know? I'm just saying that in America prison is a private industry, and it's in the interests of that industry to keep people in prison as long as possible, to make sure they're coming back. Because for each person in prison they're getting more stipends from the government. Similarly, overcrowding of prisons is better for them. You have to remember these are the laws of capitalism. Because of these privitisations of prison, America has more people per capita in prison than any other country. There are several million people in prison in America. It's something like 1% of the population. It's crazy! A lot of them are in prison for marijauna possession, it's absurd.
DY: Do you notice many differences to America when you come over here
IAN: Oh yeah. Well, unfortunately the homogenisation of the world has been pretty successful. It's not as different as you might think. Our shows here are a lot like our shows in America. They vary from being very stiff to being very enthusiastic. American capitalism is based on British capitalism. The American empire is kind of inherited from the British empire. It's just a more subtle neo-colonial version. Because of that the countries are actually fairly similar. People make a lot more of the differences than there is. People are obsessed with the little English words for potato chips or something y'know, as if that's like...y'know?! Because Americans are obsessed with their European roots, it's part of the inherent, it's part of the inherent racism that the country is founded on. So everyone is talking about how European they are, they have a very strong emotional relationship with their mother countries. It's just a bunch of bullshit basically.
DY: What effect do you want your music to have on the listener?
IAN: Uh, I dunno. I wouldn't want to prescribe some specific reaction. Tonight was a nice reaction.
DY: Is the crowd participation important?
IAN: Oh yeah. It was great, we had some friends here playing tambourines, and of course John John got up on stage, to help with the visual aspect of the show (Gangling John John, clearly drunk and the worse for wear, was hauled up onto the stage to provide Ian with some support (literally) after he'd tripped over a monitor, and was later disposed of with a hefty boot up the ass).
DY: Do you feel an affinity with any bands?
IAN: I feel we're alone in presenting Gospel Yeh-Yeh music. We're a liberation theology. I feel like we're probably the most overtly political band that I know of, of our type. But also I'm a big fan of a lot of types of music, a lot of contemporary music.
MICHELLE: (shouting from the other side of the room) Ian, are you going to help load up tonight?
IAN: I help load up every night.
MICHELLE: That's a load of bull!
IAN: You'd better, uh, shut the hell up for once in your life! But, yeah, I love Lung Leg. There's lots of great groups.
DY: You're whole image seems very important.
IAN: Of course it is. The way we look onstage is to minimize this association with our individual personalities, to exhalt the higher ideology and the meaning of the band. But also to create an aesthetic appearance of unity on stage. Our record covers of course, we love beauty. Just because you're an ideologist doesn't mean you can't love beauty. We're very aesthetically concerned people. We think one of the most horrible aspects of society with mass industrialization is the sameness and uglification of the world, via things like McDonalds. Y'know?
The mAKE UP are truely inspirational. They'll have a new studio album called 'In Mass Mind' out early in 1998. It's been produced by Royal Trux.