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  (SUGAR in their vitamins?)
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Subject: er, um... well...
Date: Sat, 08 Dec 90 18:24:24 PST
Status: OR

i don't think i need to bother with introducing myself, i hope... if
not, well then life sucks i guess. 2:^)

in any case, i just picked up the latest ish of FAT EAR, a program
guide/zine of sorts put out by the happy folks at KSJS radio for San Jose
State University and inside is an interview with Prophet Qa'Spell! check it
out...



PINK and LEGENDARY: Interview with Edward Ka-Spell of the LPDs

By: Hans Dresden

HANS: The group's popularity here has grown since WaxTrax! started putting
out the stuff domestically. Do you get the same impression?

EDWARD: Yeah, we're rather surprised at the size of the crowds we've been
having, which, I mean, it's not been earth-shattering, but it's bigger
than we expected.

HANS: How does the reaction compare with Europe?

EDWARD: Um, we have our really good countries in Europe and we have our
lukewarm countries in Europe, and we have our terrible ones. The north
of Germany tends to be the best area, and France. There it's absolutely
great for us to play. We play to a thousand or more people in some places.
England, which is the country we originate from, basically we can't even
play there at all, you know. It's just terrible there: no publicity,
no press, no concerts.

HANS: Is that because there's no British label pushing your you, or be-
cause the British press is just being snobby?

EDWARD: I think it's a bit of both, actually. I mean, Play It Again Sam,
our label, now has a British base as well. It's grown quite a bit in the
last years--but, it just seems to be... England is very much a country
where money talks, and to get into the music press there, generally the
space is bought by domestic (U.K.) labels. It's something we can't com-
pete with; we have no money!

HANS: I was actually under the impression that you were a European band.
It's hard to tell without any information. You've had releases on Toros
Records (Netherlands), and of course, Play It Again Sam releases. Are
you the only band on PIAS?

EDWARD: There's others. Chris and Cosey (Nettwerk in the US) and The Sound
are on PIAS.

HANS: Aren't they from Australia?

EDWARD: The Sound? No, Adrian Borland is from Liverpool...

HANS: Do you live in Europe, or are you still in England?

EDWARD: No, I live in Nymwegen, which is a small town in Holland. Half the
band is actually Dutch, cause we went through a huge lineup change last
year, in which we're using saxophones and flutes, now. There's three of us
on stage, but we're entirely Dutch based now. Two members are English, two
are Dutch.

HANS: Some of the names that are used as credits on the albums... It's a
bit hard to distinguish whom they're referring to. You go by the Prophet
Qa'Spell and various other names, for instance. Whom did you start with,
and what are these people doing now? Why did they leave the band?

EDWARD: The first LPDs lineup was also a three-piece. There was myself,
Phil the Silverman, who stayed in the band with me, and a girl called
Apri, who's still a good friend, but she just simply wanted to settle
down. There's been thriteen people in and out of the Pink Dots over the
years. It's never been exactly the most stable lineup in the world and
usually people have parted on an amicable level. We've stayed friends. It's
just an old thing of wanting to settle down and finding the band very hard
to survive from, because in Holland, music is all we have, and we have to
live from it, and that isn't easy for a band that sells maybe 10,000
records.

HANS: The Dutch have some sort of a state system for supporting artists.
Does that extend to music or just to painting?

EDWARD: We've actually never seen any of it! Holland has this image of
being the extremely social country, and we've found it to be actually quite
the opposite.

HANS: Why did you move there?

EDWARD: Lots of reasons. It's the first country that picked up on the Pink
Dots. We played Amsterdam a couple of times, two of our first shows, and
they went very well, had lots of radio support. We built up lots of friends
and contacts there. It seemed logical to get out of England where we couldn't
play at all, and set up a European base, and it was a risk, but it still
proved to be a worthwhile risk for me.

HANS: You seem to have certain themes that continue over the scope of several
albums, one of them being this "Lisa" person. Who is Lisa?

EDWARD: Lisa is a closely guarded secret about which I reveal to no one!

HANS: But you must reveal something in the songs...

EDWARD: Yeah, but that's for the listener to decide...

HANS: That's all you reveal?

EDWARD: Yeah.

HANS: Is it a real person?

EDWARD: Lisa's a real person.

HANS: A friend of yours, or just someone you know?

EDWARD: Um, sometimes Lisa's a friend of mine...

HANS: What about some of the other themes? "The Hill", for instance, the
theme of insanity, a lot of the songs have very bizarre twists of progression,
maybe similar in a way, to Robyn Hitchcock songs. Is that something that just
comes from your nature or something that you're interested in?

EDWARD: It's basically, I mean, all the songs are written from an emotional
base, sort of... Things I feel... Things I fantasize about... Even the darkest
fantasies... You know, the things that maybe embarrass me at a later date.
I'll scream them out and put them on paper. It can be at a certain time, you
listen to these lyrics, and you're curled up in an armchair, blushing
profusely because you think, "Oh my God! Is that ME saying that?" But, you
know, at least it's honest.

HANS: Some of the stuff is very hard to decipher, if it's decipherable at all;
but it's quite interesting and shows a certain ammount of thought going into
it.

EDWARD: I take the lyrics very seriously indeed.

HANS: How did you meet up with cEVIN kEY of sKINNY pUPPY and decide to work
together as the Tear Garden Project?

EDWARD: cEVIN had actually been a good friend by mail for years. He collected
all the Pink Dots releases right from the start. He wrote to me, actually
before sKINNY pUPPY began, and I was invited to Vancouver for a few solo
shows and we met then. It was just and idea: let's go into the studio to
record. He had a whole piece of music, which was "The Center Bullet", which
was ready, but he couldn't think of the vocals for it, and he asked me to
sort of produce some lyrics for this piece. It went really really well and as
a result we carried on and started recording music and words to produce a
mini-LP. Then we followed up with "Tired Eyes Slowly Burning" and I came over
for a whole tour with sKINNY pUPPY. Now we're talking about the third one.

HANS: Have you been on the PIAS label for the entire career of the LPDs?

EDWARD: No, we've actually been around a few labels. We began with a small
English label called In Phaze, who treated us appallingly.

HANS: They released "The Tower" album, right?

EDWARD: That's right. It's re-issued on PIAS.

HANS: That accounts for the two different covers, then...

EDWARD: That's right. In Phaze released three of the first four Pink Dots
albums and the first two solo records, and basically burned us and ran off
with the money, laughing, you know. It was an awful experience. PIAS, on the
other hand, has been just the other side of that. They've been very fair
to us.

HANS: Have all those records on In Phaze been re-released, like those on
Terminal Kaleidoscope?

EDWARD: "The Curse", "Brighter Now" and "The Tower". The first two solo
records, though unfortunately have completely vanished.

HANS: What were they called?

EDWARD: "Dance China Doll" and "Laugh China Doll"...

HANS: I've seen a few of your solo records, at least one of them, on Torso. I
think one of them doesn't even list a label on it... What one would that be?

EDWARD: That will be "Khataclimici China Doll" on Dom Records in Germany, a
small, very nice company.

HANS: Are they readily available?

EDWARD: They are, yeah. It's only the first two that, uh, they kind of just
totally vanished now everywhere.

HANS: Was there anything for you before LPDs? Any other bands?

EDWARD: No, Pink Dots was the first...

HANS: How did you form?

EDWARD: Just out of friendship, really. Phil was a childhood friend. We'd
lost contact with each other for a couple of years. We came back together, and
one day we went to this free festival at Stonehenge, and it was quite a
magical occaision. There were small bands playing right through the night,
with maybe five people watching them at the end of this field,and there was
such a special feeling to it that we actually wanted to get a band together
in hope of maybe playing this festival. I bought a synthesizer and a twelve
track drum machine. We had a piano, um, that's the piano that actually gave
the band it's name. It had sort of like, blotches of pink nail varnish on the
keys, and that was the birth of the Pink Dots who sort of played 15 hours at
a time. People popped their heads around the doors and laughed. I mean we did
make noise in those days, but that was how it began.

HANS: So Phil is the one who calls himself "The Silverman"?

EDWARD: Yeah, that's Phil...

HANS: And on "The Curse" would that be you who is "Archangel" or
"D'Archangel"?

EDWARD: "D'Archangel", yeah.

HANS: How do you select these names?

EDWARD: Oh, there's usually a meaning behind it, depending on the persona I
assume for the album, but a lot of people miss the humour in it as wel. I
sometimes get people at gigs, sort of yell out, especially in France, going,
"Ze Prophet! Ze Prophet!" and they don't see that it's actually meant to be
funny.

HANS: There are quite a few religious themes in the songs. Do you take
religion seriously? Is it a serious subject for you?

EDWARD: It's a serious subject in that I pretty much detest most religions. I
mean, to me religion is just a way of taking spirituality and formulating it,
putting it into a box. I mean, spirituality is fine, sort of. A need to try
and find higher things, higher states of mind. But religion has just given it
sort of like a hundred, a thousand and one rules, and spirituality and rules
don't go together.

HANS: The album, "Chyekk China Doll", what does that mean, by the way?

EDWARD: Chyekk? It's just a... for the game. It's the game we all play, the
game we're all a part of.

HANS: Each of those China Doll albums has a strange name at the beginning,
except the In Phaze ones you mentiond...

EDWARD: Yeah, these obviously are not English words, or words of any
particular language. It just reflects a kind of overall feeling. You can't
actually select an English word that conveys the feeling that is behind it,
especially Khataclimici. Yeah, there is sort of, it, um, kind of a very
personal word. That sounds extremely pretentious, but it's not meant to be.
Partly, there's a bit of fun in there in that I like strange words, but sort
of it feels like Khataclimici to me, sort of the meaning and the ominous side
of the music.

HANS: The CD release on Torso Records, "Chyekk China Doll" says on the cover,
"bonus tracks" and it lists two bonus tracks which are not on the CD. Do you
know the story behind that?

EDWARD: Ah, the record company basically, I mean, there WERE two bonus tracks.
I submitted two bonus tracks. I was even told that they were on it as they
handed over the CDs, because nobody at the record company had actually
bothered to listen to the CD, and um, I was just totally shocked, you know,
those tracks have got lost now. They just basically made it wrong, and
there's nothing I could about it at all, except complain and scream a bit,
but what do you do? The record company has the power, I don't.

HANS: Are the tapes gone too?

EDWARD: The tapes still exist. I'm gonna try and release those tracks
somewhere else.

HANS: DO you have a whole repertoire of songs that maybe haven't been released
or haven't even been recorded?

EDWARD: Masses of them! We're playing songs in our set at the moment that
haven't been released or haven't been recorded yet, at least four of them.

HANS: What can people expect in your shows, as far as material?

EDWARD: It's a cross section of old and new. It's a very emotional set. It
varies from night to night, depending on how I feel. For me, I think my
favourite show show so far, is Montreal. There's such an excitement in the
place. Los Angeles, in some ways, cause there's such a scary atmosphere
around the whole city and where we played. It just sort of seemed to bring
the best out of us.

HANS: So you don't actually go in with a plan of what to play?

EDWARD: There's a plan in that there's a set list, and the set list tends to
stand. But, in the encore section, which sometimes can be as long as the set
itself, that changes and changes and changes, and we extend our repertoire
every few shows just by bringing in a new song. []

*phew!* so like, did they get their visas and come play in SJ and i
missed it? puhleaze say no... waaaaah.

--d

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