Ian Svenonius Interview
The Hedonist - Feb. 1998
http://www.southern.com/southern/band/MAKUP/Int_Hedonist_feb98.html

Right, as you may have guessed by now, The Hedonist has something of a policy with regards to interviewing bands, that we only interview them once. This rule is seldom broken, but in this case I feel an exception can be made, if only because Ian Svenonius gives such great interviews. Now, I'm not saying he necessarily tells the truth, I mean he gives you a hint in the song "make-up is lies", but the truth he speaks seems to hold to different rules from normal truth telling. Anyway, we met with the man on the Make Up's second trip to Glasgow in November 1997, as usual, he talked the talk.

Hedonist (Bob) - The last time I interviewed you, you were moving from stage one to stage two, to pure Gospel sound or something, so in the course of the last couple of years, I was wondering how close you feel to that pure discourse now?
Ian - It's funny that you ask that, because while our intention is to march on a dialectic towards more gospel purity, to invert the relationship that capitalism has towards music, which is to downsize every ten years or so years. To utilize the congregate more and more and to relieve ourselves of the responsibilities of singing and performing. But unfortunately it's taking longer than we thought. It's kind of like a five year program, but it's alright that it is still our intention and goal and what we are trying to do. Our new record is a studio record and while the songs are more repetitive and hypnotic and more suited for gospel music and our version of Gospel music especially.
H - Are you talking about Sound Verite?
I - No, it's our new record, coming out in February.
H - So is there something holding you back?
I - Well, this is why we choose to play live in the first place, because the convention in rock and roll, the paradigm of the rock and roll recording was set up by the Beatles in 1966/67, when they were making their lavish recordings. They gave up touring and retired to the studio. Everything became a sound collage, who could be cleverer than the next person. Before this, recording a record was more or less an instantaneous document of the song, and it had much less to do with production.
H - You hear that on the first Beatles records and on the first Rolling Stones records.
I - Exactly, but I'm not saying that this reliance on the production is bad or evil, I'm just saying that the problem with that is that in music it almost encourages as introversion, an abstraction. Because if you're playing live and the recording is more of a document of the song, then you will record as if it were to be played toward people. So if it weren't for the production techniques and technology progressing in the late 60s, then obviously you couldn't have all this fusion and fantasy music, high concept. Well high concept is always used as a bad thing, but conceptualism can be good.
H - Do you feel that there is anything conceptual about the things you do?
I - Oh yeah, that was why I was backing down from my negative use of the phrase high concepts. I love concepts they're great. Even the cup or the glass is a concept. A lot of people who were critical of artists for being involved in conceptualism, but if it weren't for conceptualism where would we be, a bunch of mangy dogs.
H - So essentially, what is holding you back is the Construction of the way rock and roll is created?
I - Yeah, that's what sidetracked us because we went into A proper Studio and recorded and were seduced by all the gadgetry, the gimmickry. We had producers, because another thing that the Beatles introduced into rock and roll was this idea that a band should be self-sufficient, they should compose, arrange and produce their own music. And it's true that Paul McCartney brought all of this into the Beatles, he thought of all the conceptual angles to the Beatles, the Magical Mystery tour was his, the White Album and Let It Be's idea of cinema verite was Paul's. Abbey Road's sequencing was Paul's idea. They were pretty self-sufficient, but George Martin was with them. So we decided that we wanted to go into the studio with producers, you know in the old days...It's like Marx said, people would be more alienated from the means of production, they would be more and more like cattle, while the lords of industry would cull all the fruits, the profits of their labours. You can see this in music since the industrial revolution. You can see the Symphony being downsized to the jazz band for economics sake, down to smaller jazz bands, especially after the World Wars when the prosperity of the black community was smashed. And then came electrification, you see the rock and roll band being pushed by the industry as the premier mode of expression and this wasn't because people really liked rock and roll, it's because it was pushed. It's like the Spice Girls, what makes a hit is not what people like, it's what the radio determines will be played. It's obvious. And the most recent manifestation of this economic downsizing, first it was rock and roll, with self-sufficient groups denigrating themselves to a hard living ethic, like drug abuse and sleeping on the floor. And this culminated with punk rock and the idea that people weren't real unless they were living like squatting glue heads. If you see this whole thing as an industry, which it is, it is an exploitation of labour by the bosses. It's encouraging people to romanticise their lot in life as opposed to demanding better conditions, so with music the form of production was rock and roll and the way of life was the individualistic mute rebel who destroyed himself, that gave the industry more power by making people disposable, having more control of the way the market fluxed.
H - So you don't want to be self-sufficient as a band?
I - Well, in the old days, rock and roll was much more a relationship thing, a community, with writers, producers, arrangers and musicians. Is that necessarily bad or corrupt. We wanted to use producers who could determine what our record would sound like, so we chose Royal Trux, so they produced our new record, because we knew they had a particular vision, we admire their art and we didn't want to go with the obvious.
H - Do you not feel that in some way they are the definition of the rock and roll rebel destroying themselves with drug addiction?
I - Well, maybe they have a public image problem, but it was their artistry that attracted us to them, their production adeas and also the fact they are unlike anything that we do, it was less obvious than having the Cramps produce us, they don't have a set aesthetic per-se, it's a fertile ground. It sounded intriguing. But the most recent manifestation of this dialectic march and the relationship between music and capitalism, you could say is the DJ, they are shutting rock and roll music out. You know the premier economic power in the world, Germany, in the 80's there was a huge scene there, but now, no-one can get booked there. It's all techno, techno, Techno, jungle or whatever.
H (Ewa) - Cologne is the new Chicago.
I - That is absolutely right.
H (Bob) - Do you still believe in your concept of the music being a discourse with your people?
I - Well yeah, every night's performance is different and alights on different subjects and has to work itself in tandem with the context of the evening. We like having a discourse, unfortunately sometimes the music gets in the way, but the music is needed for that hypnotic... for that true Gospel hypnosis and mass rapture. Music is the only way that oratory has survived into the 20th century, or into the 1990's because we all need that abstraction.
H - Do you not agree with this abstraction then?
I - Abstraction is fine, but we need this collage of sermonizing over the top. But we love the power of music itself, and we love instrumental music, it's just a form that we choose.
H - In the first interview we did with you, you said that you loved Gospel because you felt it was pure and hadn't been co-opted by anything. I was just wondering if you felt whether you or your music had been co-opted in any way and if you do/don't, what weapons do you use against this co-option?
I - Well, number one, we are part of the music industry, just because some group is on some minor-league label, it's still business. There is money changing hands and product being made. I don't see anything inherently noble about running a small business. But at the same time we try to present our ideas. It's the nature of the medium, the magazine, it literally flattens you, people don't think about this. You can look at a horrible picture of yourself, and you'll say "I don't look like that" and other people will say "You do, you look just like that". But no-one looks like a picture, a picture is flat. Film is a little closer, think of a film, an enormous projection of life on a screen, it's not real, that is not what people really look like. People take it as a representation of reality, but it's not at all, it's a complete abstraction. So it's like speaking into a microphone, it's not your real voice, it's an electrical amplification of your voice. It has very little to do with the reality of the thing. Just as oratory on the page is very different from oratory live. Fidel Castro is a great public speaker, other people are not. I doubt Morrissey would be a great public speaker, if he was speaking in Revolution Plaza in Havana, I doubt he would get his point across very well. In the interview format, quipping is like a different medium. They're almost like different forms of music, quipping, bluster, rhetoric. In the magazine you are thoroughly a characture, it's an obscenity, but what are you to do. Marshall MacLuhan has a lot fof good ideas about type, about the Gutenburg press and the revolution it had on people sensibilities. The way it changed the space people acted in, people used to be much more touchy feely orientated, but once type was invented people became much more visual and he says TV is kind of a return, a step-backward from printing induced social systems.
H - I understand what you mean by a magazine though, in that whatever you say will never represent you as the 3-D person that you really are.
I - But you can't get worried about that, in fact I would never, that's why we never talk about our personal lives. I mean most performers would pontificate about the tawdry details of their lives.
H (Ewa) - Like what their favourite colour is, joke!!
H (Bob) - Yeah, actually we are going to get personal, I just wanted to know what motivated you to do this?
I - Well you know I'm more or less a savage... I don't know, a lot of people are... to me it's just that congregational thing, the power that music has and the medium of music, how it is essentially the only oratorical or idea thing. It's the only living art, it's the only real form of expression available to most people. It's not just totally corrupt don't you think?
H - No, not really, not at all. I'm most interested in why you aren't something like a painter for example?
I - Well, in America, painting is more of a ghetto even more than music, it's way more driven by money. Basically, you look at the relationship between different artforms and business and government. And of course the government is just the juducial wing of business. If you look at art, in the 40's the socialist world, the communist partisans had led the resistance against the Nazis and had earned the sympathies of the people with them. When America and the UK went into these countries, they killed off the socialist resistance and installed people who had been Nazi collaborators, thus ensuring that a system of capitalism prevailed. You notice that the big 3 after the war were Germany, USA and Japan, the facist powers. In Italy for example, the communist partisans won the war basically against the Germans and the allies took over and installed Victor Immanuel, the King under Mussolini, they made pacts with the mafia. And they basically made sure that Capitalist interests would prevail. But the point is, that in the post-war period, socialism was gaining ground and it had a lot of support, especially among the intelligentia and the artists. What the USA had to do was prove that a capitalist, free market country could support an Avant-guard movement. So the CIA introduced abstract expressionism, through Clement Grunberg. Grunberg basically told abstract expressionists and Jackson Pollock how to paint. And then they constructed a formula in which notably socialist art, socialist realism or Constructivism and anything that had a political programme was excluded. You'll notice that before the 1940's art was very political, whereas Abstract Expressionists, like Pollock, De Kooning had no politics, and art that had content was declared to be adolescent, and that's prevailed ever since and that is why Art is not interesting to me.