Ian Svenonius Interview
Steady Diet fanzine - April 98
http://www.southern.com/southern/band/MAKUP/Int_Steady_diet.html

no.1
Conservative Image
"what could be mistaken for conservative is the inversion of the self, for the good of the greater body. Basically, we propose something like a rhythm high - a Gospel congregational setting. We've assimilated the trappings of gospel music to revitalise rock'n'roll. What could be mistaken as conservative is just us presenting ourselves as a united body, not as a bunch of individualistic freaks. We're not so much interested in freedom as discipline. Laibach aren't into fashion. They just utilised an iconography. Unlike them, we wouldn't be so vague in our political alignment."

no.2
The Class War
"People have said we are anti nationalistic as it were, proponents of an understanding of the Class War, the Cultural War that goes on all the time. We need people to understand that the middle class does not exist. There's people in power, there's people not in power, and race is an irrelevance. In America, black people are just as concerned about identifying themselves with the things that they buy; black people for example are just as guilty of conspicious consumption as white people are. You know, we're all immigrants to the country as slaves. We took industrial capitalism and refined it into the most grotesque form that it is. I think the problem is that the high creatures are the server mechanisms of the technology and the system they have created, meaning that we're dictated to as much by cars. We've turned the world into a parking lot. Similarly we use musical technology that we create, and it finds a use for itself."

no.3
Rave and Techno - Music Of The Working Class
"We're not interested in countering it. It makes sense to me that techno, rave and dance music should go over in the face of rock and roll because it's democratic for everybody to express themselves. Whereas a lot of rock and roll isn't even entertaining at all let alone allowing people the voice for expression. That's what the Make Up has come to remedy. We want to be at once entertaining and inclusive in terms of using the Gospel form to sort of breathe life into the old frankenstein monster. Rock and roll is the broad based marketing trend. Because rock and roll overtook theatre it kind of swallowed everything."

no.4
The Audience
"You think it's a paradox that we wear uniforms? We never jam. There's a discipline to it. There's a skeleton that we create and the form of our shows is unchanging - there's an intro, an outro, a middle break. It's very vaudevillian in form, but we're that disciplined we can, with that skeleton, we can flesh it out. The flesh is the moment and the things that are happening in the room, and in that day, everything like that, these are the things that dictate the monsters that we've built. It's very much a frankenstein experience."

no.5
The Purism of Make Up
"Well, we love music. I talk about philosophy, but we're also huge music fans. One of our things both for musicality and doctrine's sake is that purifying of the music into our dialectic goal, which is gospel music - pure gospel music stripped down to its bare essentials to an absolute blurring of the audience and band. We do a club every week - it's our church - it's called Cold Rice. It's just where our congregation meet and it changes all the time. It's a place where we can go to escape... It's a just the fact that there's something for us at all. That we're disenfranchised - fucked. It's actualy held in an Etheopian Coffee Bar and there's a huge West Indian community in D.C. so they come by."

no.6
The Studio
"We just wanted to record at Dub Narcotic. They have some nice tube compressors, some good sounding analog things - it's just to battle that musak, flat quality of sound. We like working with Calvin and the songs were basically arranged in the studio, played once and completely ad libbed. It just took another form that the live show would have."

no.7
Sexuality
"Sexuality is a big part of performance - sexual tension is not something we would deny or reject, but it's not something that makes us feel special. There's a very capitalistic hoodwink about sex. It's suppose to be this exclusive club, but really every creature on Earth fucks its whole life. The billions of people on Earth are all testaments to the sexual act. Sexuality is very nice, but when bands elect that as their identity, it's kind of boring. Prince is a gemini, and I'm a gemini, and we're both singers so I can understand that. But, Prince is great, I'd be flattered if anyone thought we were like Prince. He's not a direct influence, but maybe we're influenced by some of the same things. Playing live is always a very sexual experience. That's nice, when people meet other people and have it."

no.8
Why Has Pop Music Gone Wrong?
"I think the problem with the major lables is that you end up talking to lawyers your entire career. You never make music. Also, the digital sound has flattened everything out. There's no dynamics. Also people play music in a really inverted way which is alienating to the listener. It's not freaky enough because there's all these established sounds and everything. People often accuse us of being garagey. If you think about what Paul McCartney did in the Beatles it might sound trite and or dumb now, but it's actually really quite mind blowin'. 'Yellow Submarine'. If a band now wrote 'Yellow Submarine', that'd really be a heavy song. The Grateful Dead are a jam band. I don't like jamming except maybe Can. Grateful Dead - they're too... I've never heard them before."

no.9
The Band History
"Nation Of Ulysses broke up because the epoch changed with the advent of digital music and the Nirvana explosion. We were faced with what's now known as indie rock, a sort of vacuous form. We had to determine our next move and this is it: Ian Svenonius (vocals), James Canty (guitar, organ, vocals), Michelle Mae (bass, vocals - ex Frumpies), Steve Gamboa (drums). Releases: 'Blue Is Beautiful' 7" on Black Gemini; split 7" with Metamatics on Black Gemini; split 7"ep with Slant 6 on Time Bomb; split 7" with Dub Narcotic on K; 'Destination Love: Live! At Cold Rice' CD on Dischord; 7" on Time Bomb; 'Make Up After Dark' CD on Dischord; 'Sound Verite' CD on K; 'Free Arthur Lee' 7" on K.