July 23, 1991 in Kansas City, Missouri

First of all, i would like to thank dear brother Pat hopewell for arranging this interview, getting me into the place, and pointing us into the direction that we needed to go. i would also like to thank dear brother Brett smith for writing me and telling me about the show in the first place. Victoria (my wife at the time) and i were directed to Sabine, the road manager, who proceeded to lead us to the small, cramped dressing room in back where we were introduced to Edward Ka-Spel (vocalist and what such) who was hunched in his little chair in his little corner nibbling on the assorted nabisco snacks symetrically arranged for him on some plastic tray. Meager, yes. He was so small and seemed rather timid, all bunched up in his large, black trenchcoat. One had to search a bit to find him. He was very soft spoken and was very patient with us as we stumbled thru our questions.

Later, we were joined by Neils Van Hoorn (in charge of the instruments of wind and of the wind itself) and the Silverman (in charge of the keyboards and calm manner), just before being whisked away by babysitter Sabine to eat. there was also another man walking around who seemed in the band yet seperate from it. this turned out to be the guitar and bass player to whom we were never introduced (i was introduced to him a couple of years later in chicago, but i don’t remember his name due to all of those half-pints of rum Christian and I kept buying to drink in the park before the show).

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Christus: so how has the day been so far? pretty chaotic?

edward: almost disasterous. we tend to store our gear in the shower of the camper, and during the night the water had sort of come down, some how, and soak filled the equipment…

c: is that what you were doing on the headphones, making sure everything was alright?

e: oh, i knew it was okay, i was just working out a new bit for a song.

C: so you work out songs on the road?

e: oh yeah, things are always changing…

c: is there a central place that the band hails from or do you all come from different places?

E: we all originate from different places but we’re based in a small dutch town called nijmegen.

c: what’s the society like there? the government?

e: a little more, i would say much more, moderate than what you find here. alot more balanced than what you find here, i think. i mean, certain things quite apall me about america, certain things fascinate me as well. i mean, i would never be one of these people who say “i hate america”. it’s too interesting, too fascinating. but, you know, you can be quite shocked by some things. there’s quite a lot of lunacy around this country. we’ve witnessed a reasonable amount already in just the short time we’ve been here.

c: what kinds of things have happened?

e: well, take an incident last night when we were standing outside a club in minneapolis. suddenly we heard this screech of tires, and basically it was a parking lot attendant who had just lost his mind and was sort of like whizzing around the corner, smashed his car into a phone box deliberately and then, sort of backed it away and then, sort of, uh…yeah, he was just trying to wreck things with his car.

there was all the police there and things like that and you think “where are we?” (laughter). and i think this was supposed to be one of the more civilised towns there are in minneapols. i mean, it’s got a good reputation. but, we’ve mostly been treated wonderfully but for one exception. it was new york. that was attrocious. in a club where they didn’t pay us, they didn’t feed us, they tried basically to claw as much money out of the one thing we could make money from which was the t-shirts. it was like capitalism at it’s worst, especially when they’re like a thousand people watching the show. i don’t like the naked face of capitalism shouting at me like that.

c: does it show its face in any way like that where you come from? (i was subtley sizing up holland as a place to move to, in case you hadn’t picked up on that)

e: not like that. nowhere near like that.

c: it’s much more subtle?

e: yeah. at the very worst it’s simply polite. you know, new york has got like this intense arrogance about it. very, very blunt. but not from the audience. the audience was great. but you’re just another part of a conveyor belt of bands. you just pass thru. but that is just new york. i mean everywhere else, like here today, has been great.

c: what about the last time you were here in kansas city, if you remember, about 2 or 3 years ago?

e: 2 years ago, yeah, about 60 people or something? (laughter)

c: yeah it was just you, neils, and the silverman.

e: that’s right. it was one of the strangest shows of the tour because it was so small, and that’s why we tend to remember it.

c: it was like this disco bar. i enjoyed it very much.

e: it’s actually the third time i’ve played kansas (missouri, actually). i played solo as well in ’87 with skinny puppy, this big theater…

c: and you’ve collaborated with cevin from skinny puppy…

e: that’s right. well, we’re doing it again around august. (and they did, recording ‘the last man to fly’ and ‘sheila liked the rodeo’ in these sessions)

c: as the tear garden?

e: yes.

C: the number 16 seems to reappear…

e: it always changes. sometimes it’s 15, sometimes it’s 834.

c: so 16 means nothing?

e: no.

c: just a number…

e: just a number. whatever is in favor at the time.

c: as far as a reason for even wanting to put one’s life experiences into musick, what would you think…

e: something that’d be mighty embarrassing. it’d be a year later, i mean, if you spread it out exactly as it is, it’s at least honest. in fact, the more embarrassed i am, the more i can actually stand by the work, cause i know it’s totally honest. i know people can truly relate to it. if it was things that were outside of my experience, how could anybody truly relate to it? i like to paint all shades of a soul, basically, which is all the bits that you like to hide away as well as the bits that you like to show. it can be an uncomfortable experience but it’s extremely cathartic and hopefully for all of the people who listen to it.

c: (out of nowhere)…apocalyptic, i sense?

e: yeah, some is there (chuckles). but i wouldn’t attempt to define the meaning of apocalypse. i’ve always thought of apocalypse as change, and that change can be towards the extremely positive as well. and i do sense a transition going on. i sense a certain acceleration. i mean, the reason i have the slogan ‘sing while you may’ on every record and every tape is because i honestly believe that this is the most significant time in the entire history of the planet, and anybody living now should be pleased to live now to witness what’s going on. sing while you may. but, i’m certainly not predicting the end of the world. so many people have done it and failed. i remember jehovah’s witnesses talking about 1975. it was really funny when january the first, 1976 came and i’m rubbing my hands with glee. it worried me for awhile.

c: it worries everybody for awhile. they collect their last moments and try to plot out their last hours. “what are my last moments of life going to be and what would i do?” i suppose that kind of recollection is necessary. i think alot of people alive at this time take life for granted and they live their lives as if they had a million years to live…

e: you should never take your life for granted at all. i mean, it’s hymn to cherish every moment and to make it as rich as possible. no sleep at all.

c: or that’s not life, it’s waiting.

e: yeah, it’s pointless.

c: very pointless. growing up, the situation that you grew up in, the society, what was it like?

Victoria: what were some of the major influences that you’ve had, that are with you now?

c: people…

e: i grew up in east london. i didn’t particularly feel good then, felt like a bit of an outcast for years. it was quite a hard area. it plays a big part in many of the lyrics that i write. um, individuals? hard to say…

c: so many?

e: not lyrically. musically, i think alot, maybe. i mean, i think anything that you truly enjoy play it’s part and filters it’s way in. not necessarily consciously, but certainly unconsciously.

c: is there a maria? (‘the maria dimension’ had just come out)

e: is there a maria? there’s six of them. (laughter)

c: i’m sure there’s many more than that. as far as…you say it’s great to live in the society (i’ve never used that ridiculous word so much since or after), in the world, in what’s going on…do you ever find yourself wanting to find a place to duck, to hide…?

v: to runaway to?

e: i think everybody goes thru that sometimes. i used to particularly, but these days not so much. i find, like in previous tours, i was very happy to meet different people and things like that, but coming to america, it’s changed a little bit. but so many people want to meet you, and sometimes you find yourself retreating, not in a mean way, but it can be very hard sometimes. i’ve not experienced it like that before. it’s very much a bit unnerving. that’s the time i like to hide.

c: do you enjoy being in front of people delivering…?

e: yeah, i’d say so. i derive great satisfaction from it. i reach states of mind that sort of…yeah…i’m happy to be in. it’s sort of like an unreal sort of state. you find yourself thinking after a very good show that you’ve whipped yourself into a frenzy.

c: as far as your musick, what do you deliver it to people for, why your putting out albums, why your playing in front of people, is there…?

v: what do you hope to get across to people? (thank you, victoria)

c: do you hope to get across to people?

e: what do i hope to get across to people? what i’m doing is opening the cupboard to my own personal soul and people can do with it whatever they wish. i certainly don’t wish to preach to anybody, and i don’t wish to force my opinions down their throats. i think the lyrics leave enough space for the imagination so people can put in their own conclusions. and, i think it’s much nicer than clubbing them over the head with a slogan. i detest slogans. hopefully, the only thing i’m putting over is a series of questions so that people can question themselves a little bit and question what’s around them, and not take everything as black and white. you know, what you hear on the news is just sort of what your allowed to hear.

c: it’s filtering thru someone else’s information network..

e: i know. it can be a gross distortion of the truth. i tend to say don’t believe anything you hear…(unitelligible).

c: or what are people’s motives for delivering you that information in the first place (corporate sponsorship)? is it for their own good ($)? is it for your own good? is it for anybody’s good?

v: is it for their own walls?

e: it’s someone’s interpretation of what they think is the people’s own good, but that can be a total misinterpretation. we’re all human. we’re all islands basically.

c: i think that forms seperations. when somebody believes that something is happening in a certain way or occurring in a certain way or for a certain reason, and then they say that to people and all of the sudden they have subscribers and followers, and all of the sudden there are factions. there are groups that think this way and there are groups that think that way, and all of the sudden, they’re opposing each other and it’s created a battle that does’nt need to exist because they think that they have a ‘stance’ on life the experience when there isn’t a simplistic, unidimensional ‘stance’. i mean, it’s an individual stance, like you said.

e: yeah. i mean, that’s all i can offer is an individual stance. i don’t want people sort of, like following every syllable that i utter as if it’s ‘the truth’, cause it’s not ‘the truth’. it’s my personal truth. it could be as far away from ‘the truth’ as you can believe. is there such a thing as ‘the truth’? (laughter)

c: no there isn’t. it’s a totally subjective interpretation of…it’s like a pillar that some people cling to…

e: i agree.

c: …and they title it ‘the truth’, and then they hide and say “well, this is my truth and everything else is false.”

v: i think also alot of americans are looking for something to grab on to, to follow.

e: they’re looking for messiahs.

v: somebody to lead them.

e: yeah. that’s where you get the jesus freaks with the loud hailers yelling up off the road about (using an evangelist’s voice steeped in dementia) how the world is full of sin and how you’ll burn in the fires of hell unless you follow jesus! i mean, i can’t understand why more people don’t laugh. people lose the ability to laugh at themselves, they lose the ability to laugh at something that is that absurd…

v: they’ve lost their identity. i mean, what identity do they have here in this melting pot of so many people, all these different things…

e: but in a way, that should give america the best chance because it is such a melting pot.

c: because there are so many things to choose from.

e: but what happened? it’s sort of like different races, they segregated, kept apart, ghettoes developed. they have so much to learn from each other, you know.

v: i mean, even myself, living in america, being hispanic, i feel when i go to apply for a job, i feel very aware that they may not hire me because of the color of my skin.

e: but what is a true american? what is a true american?

v: there isn’t. but, its so much there, engrained in my head.

c: it’s an indian.

e: it’s an indian, but the indians have been downtrodden right here, you know.

c: they’re forced to live on trailer courts and they fuckin’ kill their cheif because he has all the welfare checks and they go out and spend it on alcohol. things have gotten very desperate on the reservation.

e: yeah, it’s ridiculous. i mean, a true american is black, a true american is white, a true american is hispanic…

c: a true earth person. fuck nations.

e: basically that’s how it is the world over.

c: as far as you’ve traveled, is there any place that you can see at least a little bit more peace than anywhere else?

v: i think out past that star over there.

e: if i’m honest, i think holland has a very good chance. i just remember a certain incident. i mean, there’s the bad guys in holland too. there’s this party called the centrum aparthied and it’s like the equivalent of the ku klux klan here, or the national front. they’re like closet nazis. and there was an incident in holland where these mallacans (sp?), who are a minority in holland, held up a train and somebody was killed and the centrum party seized upon this incident because an election was coming up and they thought, right, everybody is going to vote for us because we’re against the mallacans and the syrinians and whatever…

neils: they want them to go back to their countries.

e: …they got less than 1 per cent of the vote. (laughter and applause) well done holland, you know. that gives me hope, things like that. i just think these assholes are everywhere. but you know, there is hope in some places.

v: we were just feeling the other day, there’s no hope, where can we go?

n: you are welcome in holland. (laughter)

e: there’s lots of good people in this country too.

c: yes there is. that’s the paradox. i mean, i’ve noticed in america the paradox. like when you have people who are becoming more aware of things and people who are starting to realize what’s happening, which is kind of being more mediacized. you know, the earth is dying, you have to do this and this to save it, but also the opposite side is rising, too. ignorance is getting much more prominent, and killings, just people getting into gangs and just fucking mowing down people for no reason other than they can. both sides are rising and it’s hard to deal with that constantly rising paradox…

e: like a polarization. yeah, i don’t like to feel that i’m in some kind of battle or war with my life. life’s too short for battles and wars.

c: it’s time to bridge gaps. (and, into another hamhanded segue…) ‘hellsville’…

v: you know, i think there’s a hellsville in kansas or missouri.

e: i mean, my impression is not so bad. (i think at this time edward misunderstood us as meaning that we saw kansas and missouri as ‘hellsville’, when actually i was intending to ask about the song of that title. going back and listening to the interview tape, i got the impression that he felt we were complaining very frequently of our situation, whereas i heard him complain very little. i feel very ‘american’ as i listen. very much like i have taken for granted the constructive elements in my enviroment.) like it’s a place where nothing really happens. i don’t know if that’s right.

c: things happen, like bubbles in a pot that hasn’t quite reached boiling yet.

n: it’s under the bubbles.

c: yeah, exactly. under the surface.

silverman: it’s not quite ku klux klan territory though, is it?

c: well, the ku klux klan were actually trying to secure a channel on kansas city’s local cable station. (‘klansas city kable’. i kid you not.)

n: yeah, i heard about that.

e: oh no.

v: my parents have a little house out in kansas about 2 hours from here, where there’s an active ku klux klan, and my friend who lives out there said “be very careful. be very careful.” and i drove out there one evening and my car broke down in this little town right around the place where the ku klux klan is and they were peeking out of their houses, you know, looking at us. it’s pretty scary.

e: i mean really, the way to deal with people like that is simply to laugh at them. if people laughed at hitler, sort of like strutting around with his stupid little mustache and waving his arms in the air…i mean look at the guy! he’s funny!! if they’d laugh at him there wouldn’t have been a nazi germany. i mean, why can’t people laugh at these idiots with their, sort of like, white hoods, and sort of like…i mean they’re ridiculous!! they should be figures of fun!!

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…at this point, Sabine peeks in and reminds the band that they must eat and when they play so we then transfer ourselves to Cafe Jerusalem a few blocks away where we continued to converse with Neils and the Silverman (Phil) despite the consistent interuptions by some fellow who claimed to be selling t-shirts for the band and who was very, very ‘American’. I have to commend Phil for possessing and executing such extreme patience and tolerance while interacting with this person.

Anyway, we spoke of being able to feel the flutter of a butterfly in Japan at our very table, war by means of kazoos and silent dog whistles, Turkish coffee and the generosity and support which Holland has for it’s artists. They were all very kind and passionate people. I have even that much more appreciation for their music, the timeless music of the spheres.

The show later that evening was a spectacle to behold. The prophet Ka-Spel looming in front of the congregation with eyeless sockets and flowing veinious limbs, animated by the light of life and of the dancing sunspots on the eye of Venus. It is music by which the light at the end of the tunnel fades for it was indeed the beginning at which the end has not yet been seen, and until it is sighted, anything could take place. I would like to thank the Dots for their cooperation and their kindness in sharing with us their words and their music so that we may prosper and benefit how we may. So we may recollect and project, listen and appreciate and weep such pure tears of calm lunacy. Thank You.

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That interview took place on July 23, 1991 in Kansas City, Missouri. Looking back, I would have asked very diffrent questions than I chose to then. It was interesting to see how my questions refelected so much of where I was at in my life. Dissatisfied with American society (there’s that word again), looking to move to Europe (which I finally will possibly be doing in 6 or so months, Berlin, to be exact), freaked out about what I called “the rising paradox” (my views now are much different). I have spoken with them in person one time since then in Chicago about 2 years after the above interview. In the basement of Lounge Ax, Neils, Edward and I talked for about 40 minutes before they went on and I’ve had very little contact with them since due to personal chaos. I read that their fax # is no longer available, but they now have a private one. Would someone who knows this please ask for Neils consent for me to have it? It would be greatly appreciated! If he remembers me, I know he won’t mind. Anyway, I hope someone enjoys the interview. It actually never made it to print (I stopped doing the magazine after that) so I am glad to be able to get to those who are more likely to appreciate it. Hope everyone is well…

Christus

 

FAT EAR, a program guide/zine of sorts put out by the happy folks at KSJS radio for San Jose State University.

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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 Nimegen, 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 April, 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 mentioned…

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 do 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.

 

 

 

Edward Ka-Spel is the voice and keyboard player in the LEGENDARY PINK DOTS, who are surely one of Europe’s finest, most original, and intelligent bands. Their music combines aspects of many different styles, from classical to experimental to psychedelic. Since 1980, the Dots have been releasing recordings that are unclassifiable and cryptic, radiating both light and darkness. When listening to them, one always experiences strange and filmic visual imagery (especially with headphones in total darkness). Besides producing Pink Dots material, Ka-Spel periodically records with cEvin Key (of SKINNY PUPPY) as THE TEAR GARDEN. This project is not dissimilar to the Dots, with it’s mellow, seething, swirling psychological drama and emotion. Both bands prove to be excursions into worlds unlike any ever before experienced–truly music with an atmosphere and feeling. The latest LEGENDARY PINK DOTS material is now available in America through Wax Trax!/Play It Again Sam Records. Recently, Edward took the time to answer these questions for us. Interview conducted via post by GODSEND’s Clint Davis.

(original link — The date of this interview was approximated.)

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GODSEND (G): What is the current lineup for the LEGENDARY PINK DOTS?

Edward Ka-Spel (EKS): The Silver Man (keyboards,samples), Edward Ka-Spel (voice,keyboards), Niels Van Hoorn (saxophone,flute), Hanz Myre (electronics,sax,flute), Bob Pistoor (guitar,sitar).

G: When did the band form and how?

EKS: We formed in August 1980 (The Silver Man, Edward, April Iliffe) in a dilapidated, reputedly haunted squat in East London. We were all friends for some time.

G: Has any band member besides Edward done outside work?

EKS: Phil (The Silver Man) worked on a side project called “MOISTEN BEFORE USE” (2 cassette releases), in England.

G: Do you have any influences in your music?

EKS: We’re influenced by everything we like (from ABBA to XENAKIS), but if you really want to know the common favorites (those rarely off the turntable at Le Dots), we have to mention BRAINTICKET, CAN, AMON DUUL II, ASH RA TEMPEL–mind warp psychedelia.

G: What is your position on bands like SEVERED HEADS, FRONT LINE ASSEMBLY, OR MINISTRY? Does your relationship with cEvin Key go as far as professional?

EKS: cEvin is a friend for some years. He’ll still be that whether or not TEAR GARDEN continues. I (Edward) honestly feel that the hard beat music that SKINNY PUPPY produces is the best (much pain and emotion that others lack). I’m also fond of SEVERED HEADS. Oh..and FRONT LINE ASSEMBLY are a wonderful live band (just saw them in London)!

G: What are your views on animal rights?

EKS: FIREBOMB the furriers and the abbatoirs (when they’re closed, of course). We mean it. Abuse to animals makes me angrier than just about anything. The only “political” cause we EVER supported was Animal Liberation Front–the so-called “Animal Terrorists”–we still stand by their actions.

G: What are the future plans for the LEGENDARY PINK DOTS?

EKS: There’s the Legendary Pink Box (3 albums in a box)–2 years work. A new album currently in progress documenting in gory, glorious detail the events of the Crushed Velvet Apocalypse.

G: Any closing comments?

EKS: For Fundamentalist Christians in Indiana, Fundamentalist Moslems in Teheran–you are of the same breed. Religion in whatever form is boxing(?), formulating spirituality. Religion is man-made. Free yourselves, think for yourselves. Sing While You May.

 

 

Option Magazine October/November 1987

A single lit candle is brought onto stage. This pre-performance “mood-setter” would normally give a crowded concert hall an air of solemnity, ritual and intimacy. However, rather than placed conspicuously upstage, where it might be a silent call to attention, it is set off to the side, almost backstage. Obviously, the candle is not meant for the audience, but for the private ritual of the performer. Such is typical of Edward Ka-Spel, whose moving performances offer access to an original and deeply personal vision of the world. As founder of the Legendary Pink Dots, Edward and company have put out some of the most absorbing and richly diverse music around-ballads in epic proportions without concessions given to chorus, hummable melody, or neatly coategorized style. Instead, it is almost operatic, full of radical stylistic shifts, and bound with sophisticated and sometimes grating elecronics. Edward Ka-Spel has just finished a solo tour (in which the other Pink Dots were present through the magic of pre-recorded magnetic tape) with Canadian mud rhythm monsters Skinny Puppy.

The Legendary Pink Dots have become well, legendary – for their almost uncanny ability to be included on compilation recordings. Their songs can be founnd on countless cassettes throughout Europe along with many of the leading (and lesser) lights of the experimental and avant-pop underground. Through releases on Belgium’s Play It Again Sam label, the band is stepping into it’s own and earning a somewhat higher profile.

At his performance in Los Angeles, Edward Ka-Spel sang from a veil of dry-ice fog against slide backdrops od beautiful and ornate religious paintings, all of which contrasted nicely with the tough electronic rhythms and hard-edges textures. The audience, many of who sported such post-industrial apparel as Psychic TV t-shirts and Current 93 baseball caps, were delighted with Edward’s show. We had the chance to talk afterwards.

 

The music of the Legendary Pink Dots is a pretty disparate combination of elements. It’s highly melodic, but there are some rapid-fire cut-ups and Biblical references to temper-an unusual combination.

Extremely wide territory. Why are there Biblical references and collages in the midst of the beautiful tunes? It’s meant to be painting that goes on inside of me, which is hardly the most balanced human being to use as a reference point in the first place. So any beauty that is inside me, any chaos that’s inside me-they sort of fuse inside me. I paint them as they are going on all the time. The music I write is a representation of this. It’s sort of like painting your own soul.

Is there a collective unconscious in the music of the Legendary Pink Dots or is it a mutation of different ideas?

Well, it’s unified lyrically because all the lyrics I write. They are all interconnected verses-the same themes, the some characters keep popping up. The Pink Dots on the whole are a group of obsessive individuals, and for that reason the music gets more extreme as it goes on.

Your music has a wonderful ability to shift suddenly from stark, electronic textures to lush, orchestrated pop-oriented material. Is that a conscious effort to diversify?

Yes, it’s like turning a kaleidoscope. An observotion seen from different angles. The kaleidoscopic vision is always changing. I’m providing the soundtrack to that observation-music to match our sensory overkill.

I can’t help but hear a superficial resemblance to American Broadway show tunes in some tracks.

That must be a coincidence. I never listen to Broadway musicals.

It’s hard to escape the quote from West Side Story on your Asylum album. “So Gallantly Screaming.”

Oh yes, that’s because in a way, that song represents America. You read the lyrics? It’s about the death of America.

Do you have any distinct impressions of the States?

Television. It’s never ceasing. You hear it in the motels through the walls. I’m not surprised there’s so much psychosis in America with so much televised violence. You’re saturated with it.

Were you worried that you wouldn’t be able to get a visa to tour here?

Yes, I was terrified of that. It’s disgusting. Julio Iglesias never has trouble getting a visa.

What are your opinions of the American music market?

From what I hear, it’s obsessed with the bland. I was sitting in the car yesterday pressing six stations on the car radio, hearing six channels of stupification. I think there are good American bands here and there. The Residents justify the entire American music scene to me. Most Americans probably have the some impression of music from Great Britain, from what they hear.

I’m sure you’re absolutely right. 99% of what comes from Britain is absolutely perfect for American radio, which is rather a tragedy. Do you play live in England very often?

Four times, lately. We’re based in Amsterdam now. That was a decision we made because of for greater response in Europe than there was in England. Most interesting English bands never get recognition in their own country. My favorite bands in England, at the moment, are Coil and Nurse With Wound.

You’ve worked with Nurse With Wound in the past.

Here and there. To say I’ve worked with Steve Stapleton is maybe an exaggeration. I mean, you do something in the studio, and Steve will do something with what you’ve done and you won’t recognize it later.

He did the editing on Asylum?

We didn’t have any experience with editing an album-just the musical side, so it was a case of putting the songs together on the sides, really. In his own music, he’s a master of editing the art, rather than just the tool.

Will the next project you do be a continuation of the post one?

The idea in the interconnection is to destroy the concept of time-to shift backwards and forwards. To create this other world like a huge tapestry …

A sort of cubist perspective of time from record to record …

Yes, and within the songs themselves.

Stravinsky said that music should not be listened to with the eyes closed. Would you agree?

Yeah, I would. I like music to be almost hallucinating. It should take you places, even with the eyes wide open. To destroy the line between reality and dream. Have you ever had the experience, when you seem to remember something, and you realize what you’re remembering cannot be placed. You’ve never been there before, and you couldn’t possibly have been. Then you realize that you’re actually remembering a dream.

Which gets into the Australian aboriginal idea of dreamtime being as or more real than waking time, and that line disappears. In performance, do you try to destroy that line between what is actually taking place and the subjective perceptions of the audience?

I wouldn’t say destroy it, just … ignore it.

Do you see your music as political?

No. I hate politicians. I hate politics. I go to the left, the right, the middle -whatever- and I see ambitious, greedy people. The only politician I even remotely admire is Gandhi. But no, I couldn’t see myself waving a red torch.

I’ve seen the phrase “concept album” applied to your music more than once- are these in fact “concept records?”

No particular album is in itself a concept. Each is part of a huge jigsaw puzzle. When they’re put together, they’ll make sense.

Will the puzzle ever be complete?

(laughter) When I finally go to that big jig-saw puzzle in the sky …

Where did the name Legendary Pink Dots come from?

Well, we started in this old, delapidated squat in East London, and the only instruments we had were this tiny synthesizer, and this incredibly cheap piano-a very old get-up-with these mysterious bits of nail polish on the keys …

So somebody knew which were the right notes …

Yeah … and people always took a look and said, “Ah, those legendary pink dots!” Well, we thought that would be a great name for our band. We used to be called “One Day… ” before that. Because we’d say, “One day we’ll do this, one day we’ll do that … “

And now you’re doing it.

Maybe we’ll change the name to “Doing It.”

 

Snowdonia #4

This interview was for a booklet which came with a 7″ split single with DsorDne

[Translated from Italian, and typed in by Nancy Everson]

SNOWDONIA is an Italian fanzine committed to all the usual fanzine ideals you have been hearing bandied about for years… but with a distinct pride in originality and variety. You won’t find in us any boring Rock bulletin, instead long interviews like the one you’re going to read (hopefully), ‘fringe’ groups playing to the dedicated ones, be it pop, creative rock, punk, experimental. What makes Snowdonia the fanzine it is is not so much the music we talk about (which purely reflects an eclectic madman’s tastes) but the way we talk about it, so if you don’t read Italian, tough luck!

On the other hand, we so have a nice distribution catalogue specializing in Italian fanzines, plus the following: a few English fanzines (like GRIM HUMOUR, VAGUE, RAYGUN, UNDERGROUND, INTERCHANGE); a few selected records (we are now stocking fab Italian band Screaming Floor, likewise Gronge from Rome, and Membranes from England, beloved EX from Holland, and LEGENDARY PINK DOTS “Asylum”, “Island of Jewels”, “Faces in the Fire” records; plus an experimental catalogue with lotsa Italian tapes, may I suggest “Phlegmaticus” by our own Gerstein ?)

To cut a long matter short here is our address: SNOWDONIA, c/o Marco + Maurizio Pustianaz, Via Alteni 12, 10046 Poirino (TO) ITALY. Send for our catalogue and tell us what you think of this!)

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This booklet is largely made up of a transcript of long hours’ passionate talking with Edward Ka-spel and I, one of Dots’ keyboard-players, in an Amsterdam cafe. If the interview turned out to be such a sincerely poetical statement of the Pink Dots’ music, this has nothing to do with my interviewer’s skill at all. but despite my being exhausted after a long trip to Holland, the pleasure of communicating easily got the upper hand. Maybe there was something in my eager eyes that urged Edward and I to try to explain things to one another, in the first place, and therefore, indirectly, to me. Hardly any straight question/answer cliche, as you’ll see … Another `Snowdonian’ miracle?

PICCOLE EPIDEMIE, di Vittore Baroni Gregorio si sveglio quella mattina nel suo letto con il corpo ricoperto di puntini rose…. [Ooops, sorry, wrong version of the booklet!] `Temporary epidemics’, by V. Baroni

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‘Temporary epidemics’ by V. Baroni

Gregory woke up that morning in his bed to find his body spotted with pink dots. He couldn’t explain rationally this sudden occurrence: it certainly wasn’t one of those children’s contagious diseases (as for measles, he’d had it twice!), or a recent indigestion, or a tropical disease (his eating habits were healthy and he hadn’t left his country for ten years). And yet, the spots were there, even over his palm and in his armpits, spread at an even distance, all of them the size of a match head.

Gregory washed and got ready to go to work, like every morning, but suddenly felt faint and had to sit down at his desk, holding his head in his hands.

Edward wasn’t in the habit of arriving late for soundcheck, but he’d been chasing the reflected image of a young waitress in all the towncentre’s shopwindows, on that morning, forgetful of the bleeps from his Japanese watch.

Patrick was swearing in the angels’ language, when he at last joined the others on the dusty, narrow stage. “Olgevezzysh, gzzrasfg grrttizihh venijji”. Only two hours to go before the concert, and there was no sign yet of the extension leads for gloxes and kavedan-barooms. The mixing desk had clearly seen better days over its long glorious past and shreds of paper full of notes were glued with chewing-gum onto the equalizers. Three youthful fans were insisting on an interview; the Silverman dispatched them with an abrupt “Thee pazhkahla war warhook” that couldn’t be argued with. As they were being escorted to the exit, the threesome succeeded in shouting a few frantic questions, stretching their microphones out to the stage: “Is the neo-muezzin fashion to be preferred to the stockfish look?”, “Has Aradia, the witches’ Gospel, had a decisive influence on the final sequence of bass chords in ‘Wall Purges’ Night’?”, “Which ointment does the young British lyricist use in order to look so trivially inspired?”

Somebody started burning some unashamedly lollipop-smelling incense (mint, gentian, Sicilian orange), while the electronic keyboards were playing over the white noise of the soundcheck. I was the only intruder in that small, close-knit community of busy technicians and artists. I was sitting on my own, feeling an indescribable void within. Maybe I’d better get up and find an open bar for a quick snack, but the band’s brisk movements on stage kept my eyes transfixed on them.

I would have dome anything rather than write a professionally objective piece of musical criticism. I was envious of the three young fans, who at least could afford to throw grammar to the dogs. Ultimately, fanzines ought to be just this: journalism turned upside down, words focussed right in the bottom of our hearts, without feeling one’s own ‘moral obligation’ to objectivity; even though there are all these cages that are all the time unobtrusively coming down to encircle us, just as you believe yourself to be free; even though our words, as soft and harmless as foam rubber, tend to bounce back in a dull imitation of the status quo. Until we’ll all be turned to dust, our records will melt and the playlists will be food for gargavezzh.

Nearly asleep at the DJ’s desk, I was woken up by the intro of ‘Agape’, with all but a few instruments in the right key; the only thing I cared to know was that I wasn’t wasting my time; on the contrary, I was drinking music down as though it were a glass of fresh water (and once you have quenched your thirst, you got to stop drinking and do something else – dangerous to carry on drinking!)

The Dots, like Van Morrison, like Peter Hammill, like all the others with that same kind of ‘heart’, always write the same song, and always make the same record, but repeating oneself doesn’t matter if one is saying the right things, things that are sincerely felt. I was scribbling notes on my squared writing pad, meaning to rub out subsequently the most embarrassingly sentimental thoughts that were coming to my mind.

They are friendly and deeply personal.

They are a Carroll-like voice, honest albeit slightly decadent, the musical arrangements gently cushion the listener as though to remind one it is all a dream, a good-humoured melancholy yearning for angels, a fable-like croaking electronics…

I was lost for words, and it was getting too dim to write anyway, as they were switching the lights off in the hall.

As the public started to get in, I glanced at my watch: there wasn’t even time for a sandwich! My eyes met those of Poison Barbarella (the exact reverse of Poison Ivy !), just as I was becoming yet again alive to the outside world. Beauty is all around you, and you don’t even have the time to relish the millionth part of it.

“Ladies and gentlemen, here is ….”

The needle was on the last groove, the unexpected silence awoke me from my daydreaming, rocked me to sleep, away from my slumbering wake.

Gregory got to his feet, moving away from his desk with a subtle desire for some tropical fruit. He went into the bathroom and looking in the mirror he noticed that the tiny pink dots had vanished.

He then hastily picked up his briefcase and took the lift downstairs, or he would be late for work.

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TOWER ONE

Faces at the window. Fingers clutching at the bars. A fly skips from an eyebrow to an elbow across a scar. Stars are laughing as the wind bites – doesn’t leave a mark. Cos The Tower stands impregnable – a beacon in the dark… And no-one names a crime committed, no-one blames a soul. The cases heard so long ago, forgot about parole. And faculties are failing ‘cos they’re really very old, and sick, and tired, much to tired. How they weep, cos how they hate it. Sky-dye on her fingers – the air was turning blue… As Captain whispered ‘Blindfold’s optional – you wouldn’t like the view… She shook her head and shouted back, ‘I’d like to see this through…’ The joined the line of hostages – was 13th in the queue… Rusty chains and armoured pillows, stuffed with silver pins…. Collecting lives like butterflies. Keep them all locked in. Tattoo with a star and write a number on the chin, It’s not for turning, slowly learning. Stomach churns, the fires burning. No-one has a key to The Tower

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HERE’S HOW THE TAPE BEGINS …

“I was anorexic. And you never lose anorexia, you’ll always have it. And I quite enjoyed it, the delirium when you haven’t eaten.”

AND ANOTHER VOICE BUTTS IN: “He just deliberately mistreats his body so that he gets more inspiration…”

Sn: I’ve always wondered about the many reviews Legendary Pink Dots have had in the past, going on about a psychedelic side to your music and I could never fathom really how deep that was.

E. There IS a psychedelic side to it …

I. It’s quite natural, though…

E. I mean, not by design. I do like a lot of early psychedelic music, sure, but we just want to go our own way, the way it started, really, we just followed our own kind of paths. There is an overall concept which is “Terminal Kaleidoscope”. The Psychedelic references are mainly something the press dubbed onto us, not ourselves; people always go on about how apparently Legendary Pink Dots was a form of acid, which is like there are rumours of how much acid we take, and in fact nobody takes any kind of … y’know smoke the odd joint but that’s as far as it goes. No one is into drugs, not that we could afford them, for a start!

I. I think we would all prefer to live with a clearer perception

E. But that’s how I’d like it to stay. I think drugs seem to cloud the mind rather than expand it or suppress things and I don’t want to suppress anything, all I want to do is expand them

I. If people want to expand their minds, they should be doing it by discipline, you know, meditation, yoga and things like that. That’s the best way if you want to expand your vision and search out new things, not via artificial substances, really. We are psychedelic I think in the true sense of the word in that we are many-coloured and that comes very naturally, everyone likes to put in as many different colours as possible into our pieces of music.

E. I’ve tried various things in the past but it was a decision by me to stop. I wasn’t actually getting the benefit by the drugs (nothing particularly heavy), so I found, yeah, the most open state you can get, you can get naturally just by simply process of brightening

Sn: Musically, do you feel close to any sixties’ groups?

E. No, probably the closest for me – although every member of the band would cite different influences – are the early German bands, Can, Amon Duul, Faust …

Sn: Sometimes you can hear a cosmic resonance or a feeling of wide spaces in the Dots’ music …

E. It should be like a kind of movie for the ears where anything can happen, one of those most wild pictures and the wildest are outside reality, and yet grounded in reality

I. The music forms pictures in the hearers’ minds

E. Without a doubt the idea is to create altered states in other people. What we are involved with is this dividing line between reality and fantasy, which is a very thin dividing line anyway! I don’t know if you’ve ever had recollections of things you’re certain you’ve done, really vivid memories, and in actual fact you’re not remembering something you have done, you’re remembering a dream! That dividing line has gone then, and that happens to me all the time

[Hmmm, Robert Smith of the Cure has said the same sort of thing, maybe there *is* a connection (in my mind) between the Cure and LPD…. NE]

I. It’s transcending the different levels of consciousness, if you see as levels in a building, as some writers have described the human being. It’s like, in certain states even if you are not someone who has trained himself to do so, well in certain states of mind you can accidentally climb up the stairs to those other levels and find yourself there …

Sn: You might get frightened!

I. You can get frightened, very easily

E. But you become frightened of less the more you go through each particular barrier

I. Just becoming aware that there’s more to the world than initially meets the eye!

E. I’ve never wanted anything to be a closed book to me, my life I want to keep on discovering things, I want the edge to be kept, just wandering naively into this experience and that, that’s what makes life great. And once you think you’ve seen it all, you know it all, you’ve heard it all, then the life’s finished; and that’s why Pink Dots’ music tends to change all the time as well, it’s always expanding and once it’s stopped expanding that’s the time to stop altogether. But I don’t see that for quite a while … we are on a long trip at the moment!

Terminal Kaleidoscope

I. Coming back to our influences, the essential thing for me is finding your own path and steering to your own goals so that you are creating a unique vision and something that will eventually stand up amongst other things

Sn: Do you think an album is going to be stronger if it lets itself be obsessed be a single idea that runs through it, I mean, are you bothered at all by ‘concept albums’, like “The Tower” seemed to be?

E. Every album is actually a part of same concept, which is a different thing. If you go back to the earlier albums or the earlier cassettes and there are characters, situations that will occur later and that will be developed (characters like Lisa, the Captain, Monkey, Astrid); lots and lots of different strands in the same massive story that starts in our first cassette and continues right through to “Island of Jewels”. And all the “China Dolls” works are tied up to the same concept and so it “The Tear Garden” (a collaboration between me and Kevin [sic] of Skinny Puppy); lyrically, there are references throughout: we are building our own reality.

I. If the concept is big enough, then there is no problem. I mean, if you’re limited to a very narrow concept, then of course you’re gonna have big problems. I see it in slightly different terms to Edward, although basically we are on the same wavelength, in terms of the philosophy behind the band

E. Terminal Kaleidoscope is a philosophy!

I. I agree with you, but I think I tend to see slightly more of that aspect, than you do. I am not so much involved in the characters and that, in the finer details, which you obviously are, as lyricist.

Sn: What did the Terminal Kaleidoscope stand for?

E. It takes the premise that the planet is rather like a drowning man, and like a drowning man sees his life flash before his eyes, you take it on a planetary level in that the one thing that is for sure is that everything around us is accelerating; we take the premise that eventually we’ll reach overload, saturation, which will be a time of cataclysm, and that is the Terminal Kaleidoscope, when you are being bombarded all the time by images … I do believe you come out the other side of this cataclysm, because that’s the other basic concept: everything is eternal. Yeah, you can’t do anything to prevent this, you can’t slow it down, you can’t change the world, all you can do is cherish it and embrace it, feel lucky that you are approaching this time of cataclysm. It may be a thousand years before overload time, it may also be happening in eight seconds’ time …

I. I personally hope, I sort of agree with Edward in that it’s very difficult to do something to arrest the approach to this cataclysm because there are so few people who realise it and the majority of people are part of it, careering on towards it, but I think possibly you can make it more possible for us to survive AFTER it, by creating some kind of groundwork now. I think some people do an excellent work, pan-national groups like Greenpeace and that, which have realised that they transcend politics now because politics is too individualistic, too nationalistic to have any real meaning in the long term, according to basically ecological grounds, ‘coz either we help this planet live or we help it to die

E. It can’t die, it just transforms because that’s the eternal law ‘Nothing will be created or destroyed’, just simply takes another form, human life can become entirely different!

I. Yeah, but you would agree that we can turn it into a wasteland!

E. Of course, but there’s always a way out of the wasteland. I do believe in spiritual life, and that’s another thing: you cannot kill the spirit.

I. That harks back to the different levels of consciousness.

E. I mean, we are no Psychic TV, or sort of some religion. The idea is that we are simply providing a soundtrack in the terminal kaleidoscope. We tend to do no more than present it to the world: we don’t give listening instructions, we don’t tell people to go to rituals, nothing like that. Just: be aware.

Sn: I think most people are aware of this acceleration in the change, the information that is coming to us with greater and greater speed, but perhaps most people would agree that’s a positive thing! We live in the information age, everything is becoming global … you start with the premise that you can’t arrest this and you think of it as a negative thing, don’t you?

E. I don’t say it’s a negative thing, or a positive thing. I say it’s inevitable, it’s something that’s happening that can’t be slowed down. But there is obviously … where is there peace anymore? We’re sitting in a cafe in Amsterdam, there’s a radio playing over there, people are talking there, clattering of glasses, and the noise level is going to get higher, and all other levels with it, the radiation levels are gonna get higher in the air, it’s just the natural development!

I. There is a large negative aspect to it, though, because these new developments are in the hands of people who believe in the current systems that we have and think they are never-ending. And they aren’t. There’s an ‘n’ number of factors involved, they don’t even know, and the holes and pitfalls of this capitalist system we have generally in this world are getting larger and larger…

E. Isn’t it true that a lot of the real beneficial developments have actually come as a result of weapons research, like sidelines, as if they managed to build the weapons first and the found a beneficial sideline. We’re going to have a bomb that can actually crack the planet in half, that’s for sure. I don’t say they’ll ever use it, I don’t think that will ever happen. I don’t think there’ll be an atomic war, simply because thankfully I think the awareness is high enough to know what it would mean. But still, when the breakdown comes I believe it will do in a natural way, something like this thing that happened in Cameroun: poisonous gas, mountains and heavens blowing up, or some geological changes suddenly coming to the surface…

I. It’s like a little boy playing with dynamite, man cannot control nature. What we have to do is learn how to work in harmony with it, trying to control it is ludicrous. Irrigation schemes and massive dam building in California, in China have actually backfired, because man hasn’t been able to foresee the outcome

Black humour

Sn: I was thinking, there’s another aspect, they say that Legendary Pink Dots have got ‘black humour’. How does this tie in with this realisation of what the world is coming to?

E. If you look around, you laugh, you really laugh!

I. You need humour to survive!

E. This world is so bizarre: it just amuses me incredibly. There is a lot of dark humour, and there is a lot of very emotional things as well. Part of it is very very personal, may be a love song or a lost love song, and it’s real.

I. I think people when they listen should be prepared, there’s a very light side to the band, some light humour as well…

E. Light humour? Where?

I. I think so. Well, take “Fifteen Flies in the Marmalade” [off “Asylum” double LP], that has to be one of the most humourous tracks the band’s ever done, and I can’t see anyone taking that very seriously!

E. That was meant to be a song rather like Marlene Dietrich. I’ve always liked Marlene Dietrich. I thought ‘Well, what’d she sing about?’ and then I thought she’d sing of fifteen flies in the marmalade. I wanted to sing it in German originally, but my German isn’t good enough.

I. But you can’t really call that heavy dark humour!

E. No, but that’s the only one I can think of that fits into that category …

I. Also in the musical side, though, there’s a lot of humour in music, like “Glory Glory Hallelujah”, that cut-up at the end of…

E. That’s cynical!

Sn: Also like wordplay, in the track called “Rope and Glory”…

I. I agree that’s slightly heavy!

Sn: Do you write all the lyrics?

E. In “Asylum”, “The Hill” was written by Patrick, Julie wrote the one she sings on “Femme Mirage”, otherwise, yeah.

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OUR LADY IN CHAMBERS

Our lady on the Bleeding Ground; her satin gown is trailing in the mud. She ducks a football cos it’s Christmas Day and the shells are duds. And Tom and Jerry drink their Bovril, crawl out from the trenches, swap their wives and swap addresses Our Lady’s calling time. Then back in line behind your pistols. Swines in schnitzels. Zyklon Tea. You hear him plea, you watch him grovel then you give it to him right between the eyes

CHYEKK

You’re quite alone, your pockets empty, staring at the river. You are convinced that whatever you attempt will end in failure, no matter how noble your intentions may be. Then realisation dawns. God’s will is mysterious; God’s will is all-consuming and an infinite number of holy eyes are locked on you. An infinite number of hands controlling an infinite number of strings, pulling, teasing. Somewhere over the rainbow, the children of God lick giant ice creams, laugh and jeer as Judy takes it on the chin again and again. The game is cruel. Chyekk. The game was no beginning. Chyekk. The game has no end. Chyekk. But at least you are aware of the situation. CHYEKK.

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*** … it was difficult to argue with the trenches and the guns … ***

Sn: One of my favorite records is “The Tower”, as I got hold of the lyric sheet. I was impressed. I wanted to know whether your coming away from England, the fact you particularly view England in such a bad state, whereas the situation we were talking about before is actually happening all over the world, so why is Britain particularly singled out to represent today’s evil?

E. I believe in England it is worse. I don’t like the way England is turning into a kind of Nazi Germany, and you are getting all the signs: first the decay, a hard sort of government that is there, that is gradually becoming harder and harder, much more subtle than the way Hitler did, for sure, but the racist laws, the fact that if you come from India you now need a visa. And they have such a huge backing even among working-class people; firebombs against immigrants’ homes, families are known to have been killed by sort of equivalent of Nazi stormtroopers.

Sn: Is that what “Vigilantes” is about?

E. Yes. I detest that. I am totally apolitical. I don’t go for any particular party that exists, or has ever existed, but for me there are degrees. Fascism is like the lowest of the low. There’s a lot of aspects to what is called Communism that I detest, too. In fact, if I’m honest I think the only politician I could say I ever really respected is Gandhi. I can’t relate to any others I can think of, at all.

Sn: I remember those words at the end of “Tower One”: “No one has the key to the Tower”

E. The Tower is one of the oldest political prisons in the world: the Tower of London. We’re taking the premise that if you take things to their logical conclusion of the trends in England: they are going to be saying ‘why don’t we open the Tower?’ But it will be for the deviant, and the deviant can be any colour other than the white, the deviant can think in any angle except the straight line, the deviant can be just plain ugly. They will reopen the Tower and they will turn it into Tower Town, the Tower Complex. “The Tower” itself musically as well as lyrically reaches back to the time when the Tower was a political prison, in the Middle Ages. But it’s mixed with futuristic overtones; ultimately you get something which is timeless, ‘cos that was always another thing about the Pink Dots: we destroy the concept of time, I suppose in a way like the surrealist paintings. “Island of Jewels” goes even further, lyrically it is set 5 years on from “The Tower”, when it is turned into Tower World, that’s actually when the cataclysm comes.

Sn: Are there any books that you had in mind when describing this sort of ‘science-fiction’ vision? I have read some SF books that depict a future political society where everybody is going to be confined…

E. No. It was a reaction to a particular occurrence. When I was living in England, the Conservative government had been in for 4-5 years and there was a general election. For the first time in my life ever I voted, for Labour. And the Conservatives just got in again. I couldn’t believe it. “The Tower” was written in anger, and that’s why we say “you chose your grave. Now lie there”.

Sn: In what way is it better in Holland?

E. I moved here specifically because my girlfriend lives here. I mean, I have to eat, I have to live, and I want to live on the music alone. I couldn’t keep up this double life, going to boring jobs during the day and trying to work during the evening. I wanted to make a step and if I’d made a step in England then the whole thing would have fallen flat on its face, ‘cos I couldn’t play anywhere, couldn’t survive, and here I can.

Sn: Do you think also that in Europe you fit in with what Tuxedo Moon have been doing? I’d say perhaps in England you are considered a bit too ‘arty’, whereas in Europe we are more used to this kind of music as well…

E. That’s very true, actually. I mean, Tuxedo Moon are as big as we are in England.

I. As SMALL as we are!

E. We certainly don’t follow Tuxedo Moon musically, they go their way, we go ours. I enjoy their music very very much and they enjoy ours. That’s the only kind of band I respect. I don’t care in a way how well they do it, as long as a band follows its own path. And there are a lot of good bands and people like this: Steve of Nurse with Wound, for a start. It’s just purely personal, pure self-indulgence, he does it ‘cos he loves it and a lot of the time he’s laughing, it’s full of humour right from the start, which people have missed. But the guy’s also a genius, he does things that if he wasn’t Steve Stapleton he would be a respected avantgarde classical composer. I think he’s brilliant, there’s never been a bad Nurse with Wound album as far as I’m concerned, they’re always different and if you knew him you’d love the music even more. I mean, Laibach, another band that really intrigues and fascinates me, ‘cos people always think “Are they fascists, are they not?”, I think they’re obviously not. They’re very very clever, in that they use the words of Tito, who’s one of the ‘good guys’, but it sounds like fascism, they could also be Buddhism!

Sn: Pink Dots have done a lot of recordings, but they’ve also embarked in solo projects and collaborations with other people. Weren’t the Legendary Pink Dots enough to convey everything you wanted to do?

E. Not exactly. Partly, it ties in with the concept: the acceleration means an acceleration for me too, you must continue, you can’t slow down. It was also during a particular time in the band when I was coming up with new numbers that the rest of the band didn’t necessarily think they fitted into the Pink Dots…

Sn: Well, it doesn’t seem to me that the music of your solo records is that different, that’s because I was wondering.

E: “Chyekk China Doll” is very much a sort of Pink Dots album, without a doubt. The others maybe not so. Once I started it, I enjoyed doing this, so I keep it going, too. There are also a lot of projects: the “Tear Garden” is an ongoing project with Kevin of Skinny Puppy, there’s supposed to be an album with members of Minimal Compact and Tuxedo Moon, there’s an album with Steve planned …

I. Patrick, the violinist is recording a solo album, and I should be doing at first just small performances, maybe just piano recitals or keyboards, and then working with Patrick. Soon we’ll all be together here in Holland; Phil Harmonix, the other keyboard player, will be moving shortly from London.

Sn: Why such exhilarating names?

E. They’re all extensions of our own characters, they’re not just made up for the sake of it. When somebody asks me, what are your real names? I say ‘These are our real names, it’s the old ones that are false’. It’s who you are at the time, which changes all the time, and we can change our names with it.

Sn: All part of the creation, isn’t it, you assume new names, a new language … Gralnezh khazh ….

E. It comes out basically when you scat-sing, you’re just improvising vocal sounds and it sounds rather like a language, it goes beyond, the pure language of emotions. I like the sound of it, sounds like Russian, we aren’t the first who have done these things, it’s just for the pleasure given by the sounds…

I. Some of them, it’s strange, tend to mean something emotional: those words that I like have a strange correlation with your brain.

E. It’s the equivalent to ‘speaking in tongues’, which no one ever explains, but that’s what it is. It’s the language of the trance state and oddly enough it does have meaning. You can’t explain exactly how you feel, all you can do even with your rational, day-to-day language is give some vague reference.

Energies

Sn: Some of the tracks do have some religious connotations, references to rituals, like “Lisa’s Baptism” in Edward’s “Chyekk” solo album….

E. I am fascinated by witchcraft, the old religion which is the pre-Christian religion… I. … nature worship…

E. It’s not something I’ve actually practiced, a way of tapping other deeper forces, which you do all the time and often you do not realise it.

Sn: You think that the ‘official’ religion, by turning it into an institution has lost a very important link with these elementary forces?

I. I’ve been to some Christian services, and it’s undoubtedly true that some people get something out of it, but, you know, I can’t really agree with most organized religions just because to present them to the people they have to water them down so much and include so many rituals to the point where the ritual becomes more important than the message, and therefore totally meaningless. I mean, one of the religions I have a lot of time for is buddhism, which undoubtedly has some rituals in it but they’re generally for the adepts and not for the average person. The average person who is a Buddhist has virtually no rules he has to follow, he can do it in his own time, it’s totally up to him how much he wants to put into it. That’s something I can identify with, without, say, having to appear every day at the same time somewhere, or every week.

A lot of religions are coming from the old religion, nature worship, of the forces that ran along ley lines, and the moon and the sun… I don’t know a lot about it, I’m personally embarking on a study of these; I’m reading a very interesting book by Robert Graves called “The White Goddess” which is about mythology and the presence of these associations between mythology and poetry. I mean, there are so many forces that float around in the air that the ancient people were aware of because they didn’t have this general noise level which obliterated them all. But you can feel ley lines … you go to churches, and most old churches do feel very holy and the reason most of them do is, especially in England, that they’re actually built on the old sites of nature worship which were specifically along ley lines, at the crossing of ley lines. Modern churches which haven’t been placed without that in mind at all, they just don’t have the same feel, they feel very cold, they are just a building. I want to explore all that because I don’t like living on the skin of this earth, I want to understand. You’ll never understand it all, but you can expand your knowledge. We live in a multicoloured planet, we may as well make use of it, try to gain all the pleasure we can from it.

Sn: I was thinking of people like Psychic TV, they do exploit these religious themes. On the surface, I suppose they go back to the basics, to destroy what Catholic Church has superimposed, and corrupted. But this kind of ‘anti-religion’ may well conceal a fascination for those aspects they would like to undermine, so that in a way they’re trapped within it. What do you think?

E. I try to strike a balance. Some of my things are very religious, but it’s my own religion. I don’t feel bound to any existing philosophy or religion, it’s just what I feel and what I live. OK. I do occasionally attack other religions, like “The Price of Salvation”, I don’t like money-grubbing Bill Grahams. A lot of it has to do, again, with my own personality and imperfections, yes, I do have sometimes messianic illusions. I am aware that I’m really an imperfect human being …

I. Listening to a great piece of music, the best way I can describe it is like ‘being a very religious feeling’, it’s the right word to use. It just takes you out of yourself, it frees you, you become less aware of yourself and more aware of the whole.E. You should drink it, you should achieve nirvana.

Sn: You yourself were saying that your live concerts are a sort of church experience…

E. They are.

Sn: You were holding a candle in a photo I’ve seen! Does it help your concentration?

E. Everybody who is present at a gig, they should not be merely observing a spectacle, they should not be merely entertained, they should feel the emotion, feel the laughter, the sadness … everything as one. The perfect gig is where the audience to a man flies out of himself and watches it from the ceiling! The band will never just go onstage and just play, for the money, ‘Ah, let’s get this gig done’. You have a spare atom of energy, well, the audience gets the lot. Some people – you can tell when you’re looking at the audience – they have to look away, they get really frightened. In Germany it was happening, ‘cos I always stare into the audience, a lot of people can’t take that, so they went a bit to the back, and we’re not gonna do anything, attack them! But they felt this extraordinary energy emanating from the music.

Sn: Doesn’t it often happen, tho’, that part of the audience may be puzzled by the variety of styles you play?

E. I think they’re hit by the emotions, not just by the music. People tend to be scared by very intense emotions.

I. When we’re playing we’re not just standing there, we’re actually thumping instruments, or even laughing … giving our all! Any good gig, there’s so much emotion and energy in it! I’m a really great believer in giving the audience everything.

Sn: How did the critics back in England use to treat you? I think, you got not so many reviews, but the ones you did get were quite good.

E. Pathetic. It’s not worth talking about it. I mean, the concept of what is ‘experimental’ in England is laughable: the Smiths are highly respected as a band because they’re considered to be breaking new ground!

Sn: Of course now there’s a wide street-credibility connected with renewed pop-attitude….

E: The best guitar ‘psychedelia’ band, the ones I really enjoy are totally ignored, ‘cos they have their own albums out for their own little label are The Deep Freezed Mice. I really enjoy their music because it’s done from the heart. A lovely band.

(AT THIS POINT I REMEMBER HAVING BRIGHTENED UP BECAUSE I CARE FOR THE DEEP FREEZE MICE QUITE A LOT MYSELF…)

Sn: What exactly do you have against all the old rock’n’roll ‘ethics’?

E. It’s down to personal tastes, really. It doesn’t take me anywhere. I like to be affected emotionally or spiritually by something and rock’n’roll doesn’t do it, apart from some of the Velvet Underground, sort of like “Sister Ray”. I do like Pink Floyd right through to “The Wall” ‘cos I always thought they had a sound of their own, and it’s dishonest the way people looked upon them especially after 1976 as though they were big dinosaurs; they weren’t dinosaurs, they just carried on going their own way!

I. It was just a big reaction against complex music, which although some bands did overdo it and there were bands that came up which were copying the Genesis, you can’t take away the fact that there were an awful lot of bands doing that kind of stuff extremely well, with their own sound, and their own individuality. And to sort of slag it off as all pompous or as three chord wonders really gets right up my gullet.

E. I mean, I like quite a wide range of things, I do like the early Genesis, also some of the P.I.L. (not now, but something like “Metal Box”). As Pink Dots we came out actually of new wave industrial music. I wasn’t moved to do anything by the Clash, the Damned, but when the Cabaret Voltaires, the Throbbing Gristles came on, I was interested again, even though I think Cabaret Voltaire have always been a second-hand band and never went as far, always stayed roughly within safe limits while other bands were bounding all outside those limits, but they did at least spark something in me. Originally our music was a fusion of industrial music but with a heavy melodic side to it which nobody else was doing in 1980.

Sn: Were those the very first cassettes you were releasing?

E. Yes, it was that kind of fusion. Some of it was very beautiful, but it could be very hard! We used to mix those two sides together and what everybody said was ‘it was psychedelic!’ which is crazy, but there again I don’t mind. I like psychedelic music if it means a mind-expanding music.

I. It really depresses me, the general musical atmosphere in England. I can’t help thinking that all these guitar-bands … I mean, the Beatles were great, so were the Stones, and the Kinks, but for a start they don’t even approach their simple yet complex music of those bands, they’re just boys playing with toys, they might be having fun but I can’t see what they’re doing as having any relevance, really.

E. That happens in so many fields. You take industrial music. I was always interested in that; Throbbing Gristle really affected me and “Second Annual Report” would send shivers down my spine, their lyrical content and overall philosophy. But there are so many sub-TG who just say ‘let’s get in a bedroom, let’s make a noise and let’s call it art’ and it’s garbage! I think industrial music should have stopped completely after SPK made “Leichenschrei” because that was the ultimate, it was a brilliant album that nobody could make a better, more definitive work in industrial music.

Sn: But then it dragged on and on and on …

I. The trouble is in some fields some people put themselves in a box and then they can’t get out of it. I don’t see the point. Music is about melody, rhythm, harmony, sound and space and you should be free to use any of those, and I’m for anyone who can do that with a bit of imagination, or the awareness of their own individuality and originality. Young people or “in” pop-writers are all into ‘well-crafted pieces of pop’ and I hate the idea of disposable music. If I write a piece of music, I want it to be heard in a hundred years; it’s not for now, then next year this is it, this stuff is old, it’s no good anymore. It’s not how we work! I’d like to see musical barriers broken down more, because there’s so much snobbishness in the music world, you get classical or serious music, and there are people working in what they loosely term the avantgarde … and they won’t accept anything unless that person has a certain history, a certain background. And there’s people outside that, what they call ‘experimental’, a term I hate. We are dubbed ‘experimentalists’, we are not experimenting, we know what we are doing! we’re not just throwing things into a pot and hopefully they will come out OK. We’ve learnt an awful lot of things and we know if we wanna create something we’ll do it.

Sn: I think you play a very structured music, although there are some moments that seem more improvised. Do you actually do that?

E. There have been totally improvised gigs! and you don’t know what you’re going to do: all the words were improvised, the structures, the combinations, but it’s only recently we reckon we are able to improvise well in that the level of skill within the band has to reach a certain point before you can do it well. Technique IS important, because the more technique the more freedom …

Sn: On the other hand one could argue that what you call pop music or punk was a necessary outlet for young people to go and do something, without saying ‘I’ve got to go to school first and learn music’, no, just as a spontaneous expression. Of course it is restricted in a way, but that first impulse …

I. I agree with that totally. What I don’t like is the general attitude that that is totally where it’s at, 16-17 year-olds make music but when you’ve reached 23 you should hang up your guitar and go onto something else because you’re an old hat, and you shouldn’t be cluttering up the ground so that the new youths can get in.

E. When somebody decides to CREATE, that’s brilliant; I don’t care what they’re creating as long as it’s done with the thought in mind ‘yeah, I’m doing it because I wanna create something, not because it’s an easy way of making money. Do it because you wanna create something and don’t stop! Just keep this going, finding new things about yourself and what you can do with things. Keep moving; if you wanna keep it in a channel and say ‘I hate that, I hate everything else apart from what I’m doing’, then forget it. A lot of people just build their own little tunnel and stay in it; I like people that want to create WORLDS!

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TOWER THREE

The echo of a thousand marching boots hammers on the air. They’re singing anthems, chanting oaths and whistle as Salome lifts her skirt – ‘cos they’re ‘real’ men and they’re healthy, happy – own the place. Raise hell when they’re sober, wrestle tigers when they’re drunk.In their living rooms a picture of the queen nestles in between Miss August and a placard saying ‘Home is where the heart is – keep it pure, keep it white, keep it free from undesirables cos freedom is so valuable and getting scarcer. Fight.’ So they march, smashing windows, splashing slogans, pushing petrol bombs through doors ’till a uniform appears, gentle whispers in the ear of the leader – “That’s against the law but we’ll ignore it this time” – Peace Krime’s got to be official….Keep it clean, keep it quiet… In a lonely moor, the digger’s working. Bigger holes hold more. And the patriots stay in as convoys rattle down the street. No-one hears the weeping. No-one listens for the cracks at dawn…The shovelling goes on and on and on. But the patriots aren’t frightened. They heard it on T.V. that a Golden Age lies round the corner (any day now).

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Asylum

Sn: How do you stand within the music market, because I’m sure you realise that no matter what kind of music you do, you are in a sense a part of the music business. Does that get in the way …

E. It’s caused us more problems than anything else. We’ve been cheated, robbed right throughout our history. Four of our first five albums we didn’t receive a penny. The music business continues and will always disgust us; it’s not about music at all, it’s about money. But unfortunately it’s a necessary evil. We are lucky now in that finally after years of trying we found an honest record company, who actually treat us fairly, that’s all we ask. We got to a point where “Asylum” nearly became our last album, because we had been cheated so badly by Ding Dong… They pressed 2000 of “The Lovers” and we got a copy each! It’s a very long involved story, but they almost split the band up. “Asylum” was waiting to be recorded and that was like a scream, that’s what we felt we were in at the time, the thing we were witnessing: an asylum. It took longer than any other Pink Dots album to record: over two months’ recording sessions. We would sort of begin and then stop before we’d even started because somebody was becoming emotional and he would run out, almost at breaking point. But we came out the other side.

Sn: Are you satisfied with that?

E. Yeah, I’m very fond of “Asylum” because it represents very purely the emotional state of the band. Very little bad blood around because of the type of band it is, because of the struggling involved, and the poverty!

Sn: I bet you become very close!

E. … sometimes people can’t take it, all the emotion. I mean, we’re all very close friends. I could never be in a band where I hated everybody, or everybody went their own way. A lot of these bands exist, you know, but it’s not for me.

I. There is tension in the band. I think it’s kind of healthy tension. Out of that comes a blend …

E. A six piece band, six people whose ideas all sort of try to find their space, but the one thing nobody would tolerate is compromise … It sounds really like an impossible situation, but somehow it works!

Sn: What about this new album, why is it called “Island of Jewels”?

E. Originally it had to be called “After the Tower” ‘cos it’s the sequel to “The Tower”. Really coincidentally all the albums have actually taken up tarot cards, like “Curse”, “The Tower”, “The Lovers”, “Asylum” (that was our first deliberate tarot card reference). So we wondered ‘What’s the card that comes after the Tower?’ and we came up with “Island of Jewels”…

I. Which was perfect!

Sn: Have you ever thought of Legendary Pink Dots as having a potentially commercial crossover? Have you tried even to pursue that? Like “Curse” was perhaps ‘poppier’ …

I. I think that was done naturally.

E. I mean, if we had a hit, then it would’ve happened by accident. As long as we retain the total freedom, and we’ve done a catchy song and some people like it and then it’s bought in their millions, we’d reserve the right to make a follow-up single with a 15-minute piece of backward running tapes with a slowed down cello!

Sn: Given your following a strictly individual path, you don’t have a particular relationship with the punk or squatters movement, the social centres here in Amsterdam…?

E. I don’t believe in following movements. You follow a movement or a trend, then you have to accept certain st rules and I’m not going to accept any rules other than the rules that I make myself.

Sn: You wouldn’t describe yourself as an anarchist…?

E. I suppose I am, in a way. In the true sense: anarchist as one who lives by his own rules. The thing that makes me laugh is when you get someone who calls himself an anarchist and immediately join up with other so-called anarchists and draw up a set of rules, which isn’t anarchy! Even though they are not anarchists, one set of people that I really admire is Crass, and they are not anarchists, nor communists: they are ‘Christians’! Early Christians, even though they deny the whole concept of Christianity, they’re living by those rules, and they live it as a group. The Pink Dots don’t do that, we are a group, but everybody is such an individualist!

I. There are basic set of ideals which I would like to think were common, just compassion, helping someone when they need it, respect … the very early Christian principles, people like Jesus Christ, Gandhi, I can’t argue against those kind of principles at all!

E. But you don’t need to read them in a book. If you are aware of them, you should feel it rather naturally!

Sn: Do you feel strongly on issues such as vegetarianism?

E. Vegetarianism is right for particular persons, they’re right following it. Four of us are.

Sn: Well, your way out is eating less and less!

E. It’s true. I forget to eat, mainly when I’m making music. I sort of become a bit entrenched in it, totally obsessed by it.

Sn: Do you respect your body, or you just think it’s an accessory to your mind?

E. I think it’s an accessory to my mind. Its use is functional. I dwell too much, in a way, on higher things and forget the day-to-day living. It’s just my way, I don’t say it’s right or it’s wrong, but it’s right for me.

Sn: It seems to me that the spiritual side to your music is quite important…

E. Everything revolves on music. I look at it as a form of art, not because we feel superior, but because we care for it, we put all our better energies into it, to turn it into an emotional soundscape, something with its own perfected shape, its own depth, the bitter and tragic beauty of a work of art.

Sn: Tell me that ‘story’ of the statues, the myth of the statues as symbols of perfection.

E. Imagine a deserted wasteland, ravaged by destruction, at a time when the memory of the human race had been cancelled by the lapse of time. On that planet, only a ghostly shade of the former Earth, there land a group of visitors from other worlds. The only thing they can see (books, films, records will have crumbled into dust by then) is these gigantic statues, like an avenue lined by collapsing temples, where these sculpted images of men, women, and gods, are still standing, untouched. It may well happen that the aliens will take this people of statues, motionless but nonetheless perfect, for the original inhabitants of the Earth, and that they will say: This is really a divine race! The irony is that we’ve never been a divine race, we had been the first and foremost cause of our own destruction; but these monumental statues will remain, retaining for a long time, even ‘afterwards’, the idea, the ideals. Because the ideas don’t die so easily, they are turned into cold stone, long after our bodies have stopped leaving traces.

The statues will be our spiritual heritage, a spirit embodied in matter, apparently dead, in reality the only living thing left of us.

And music, I think, creates this emotional landscape, surreal if you like, of statues, of memories.

There’s also another version of this tale: the sculptures will hold within themselves something of our vital spark, like the bleeding religious icons, these statues will perhaps still show our mortal wounds, and one day the statues will shine in the daylight, the sunrays will shed light on the stigmata inflicted on them overnight.

Sn: And the dolls in the “China Doll” series are like replicas of those statues …

E. They are the statues of our childhood!

---

SO GALLANTLY SCREAMING

d’archangel rises with eyes that accuse. A bouquet of black orchids for you as you weep in the ruins of all that you knew, of all that you cherished, of all you possessed. It’s a mess! And the message is scrawled on the wall. It says << God bless America ! >> God bless what’s left… And what’s right ? And what’s wrong? Well, we still have the songs – but where are you Gershwin now that we need you? God how we need you… And down in the city of heartbreak and needles, a needle is rammed and a new dream begins. And the subway’s a hospital – beds on the tracks. And the victims are cracked under bandages, wrapped in their oxygen tents. Looking tense because the doctor’s demented and holding a pin… and if they cry out, he’ll hammer it in. Yes, Gershwin is grinning << Come join me! >> God how I need you right now… Watch Washington wash in what’s left of the Whitehouse. Hear Hendrix make love to his ghost. Hear Abraham, Marin and John sing a song as they snip at your hair, as they butter their toast. Fred Astaire sings along as he skips down the stairs of the Pentagon. Gone! It’s all gone – the American dream.
… Christ, it’s only a dream. But where are you, George? Now that we need you…

***

Sing While You May

You wanted easy answers.
you want a tidy end?
You wanted shining heroes,
you wanted sparkling knights.
But they’ve all gone.
You choose your grave. Lie there.
Sing while you may.
(“Tower 5”)

---

When the message is so frightening, but it comes wrapped in smooth and comforting layers of keyboards and violins, it sounds like a dream, only the sirens are wailing for real and if I lean out of the window I can see military officials and the prison camp opposite, where I am going to work tomorrow as a DJ.

Years ago (Edward was then an exile, just as the Atlantic Empire was about to launch its last-ditch attack on behalf of the Holy Galactic Liberty and the Multisided Constitutional Democracy), he surreptitiously sent me some vinyl carefully concealed in a parcel, containing tracks censored by the Police Inspectors from the Ministry of Culture and Education, that I regarded as irresponsibly doom-laden and hardly objective.

In the exchange of letters that ensued, I pointed out how the apocalypse depicted in the lyrics made me smile (on account of the large number of puns and their typical dark humour), but at the same time annoyed me because of their obsessive poetics (cf. my enlightening article “Pink Dots will never sell Black Discs”, Shockerilla, Sept. 1939).

This article of mine, written in the traditional late-capitalist pastoral style our Association of Critics so much insisted upon, seemed to have settled the Pink Dots controversy once and for all. The only answer I got from Edward (who had meanwhile been put on a blacklist and whose freedom was severely restricted), was a postcard with a picture of an atom bomb, and the following caption cast in Gothic type “Bigger Holes Hold More”. Enclosed was a recording, too, of a rather dubious quality to say the truth, of one of the Queen’s speeches, overdubbed with the looped screams of sexually abused boys in Aldershot Juvenile Detention Centre (the tape’s artistical quality was so promising, though, as to give me hopes for a subsequent experimental collection called “The Deviants’ Archives”, which would undoubtedly prove a commercial success and could well be released by our own fabulous Government-sponsored National-Socialist Recording Prod. (NA.SO.R.P) The necessity in our modern world of a music both visionary and prophetic (“premonitions”, Edward used to call them) wasn’t as clear to me then as it is tragically apparent today.

I had fallen in love with a well-known pornostar and my affection for her had obviously dulled my understanding; my subsequent marriage with a tap-dancer was an eye-opener, a revelation of the political lethargy induced by an excessive addiction to erotic excitements.

Talking of which, I suspect the lyrics to “The Diary”, recently found in a samizdat Pink Dots recording, hint with a somewhat indirect irony at my sexual experiences with Lotty, which I had perhaps rather too rashly related to Edward.

[…]

My dearest friend David passed away just as it is described in “Tower One”.

Blindfolded prisoners lined up. A speaker calling out their names, reading out a short profile of each, reciting the prisoners’ eulogy just before their execution.

Thanks to that song I realised for the first time that the Providential Plan for the Civilization of the Earth had miserably failed, since all barriers separating Art’s lies and objectively Perceptible Reality were absurdly crumbling down.

The end of “Tower One” is still ringing in my ears. Voices are calling out the prisoners. The spine-chilling (there’s no other word to explain the feeling) “It’s me”, “It’s me”, “It’s me” echoing right through to the end. Spine-chilling because as long as you call Peter, Jeffery, Martin, Paul, you’re talking of other people, but when those “Me!” turn the previously abstract names into a bundle of living throbbing flesh, you understand that you can kill people just as though they were mere names amongst other names; when a hundred, a thousand “Me!” are amplified with their terrified voices, then that is the real holocaust.

I joined the Antartic Resistance (code denomination) and learnt to play the violin like Patrick of the Pink Dots.

One lyric after the other, each Dots’ premonition came true, materialising scars all around us. The pretentious although sometimes fascinating obscenity of the decline stared everybody in the face from the TV sets and the papers – from what the Brigades for Entropy and Disorder (a radical guerrilla group fighting for the Post Revolution) called “arse-media”. They used to hit upon the most ingenious tricks in trying to circulate their leaflets, by planting their pirate messages in between the pages of acceptable magazines, such as “The Christian National Family”, or “Your spare time: how to spend it”.

Fortunately we are past those days of dictatorship now. The military presence is discreetly felt, but necessary, and the rate of consented rapes is on the increase.

Therefore, all in all, I do not think the records that the Pink Dots keep putting out, only God knows how, are, objectively speaking, progressive any longer (it’s true that when they WERE progressive, everybody turned a blind eye and a deaf ear, but anyone who chooses to be a prophet knows that this will happen, knows it right from the start!)

The Allied Forces have set us free with their tanks, God bless them (yes, I’m learning English!), but Edward is still harping on barbed wires, State murders, killings, final days and new dawns in a way that still rather moves me, disturbingly so…. in any case tomorrow I’ve got to go to the Prison Camp, I’ve signed a contract to work as a DJ in the Political Block, and I am highly respected as an Arts’ Promoter.

I’ve already chosen the records. I will also be playing an old hit, “Relax”, which they say it’s still an all-time favourite among the sordid gay crowd interned therein.

But no track by the Dots. No, definitely not. […]

I have received one last postcard from Edward. It says: “Even though we wanted to change things, fact remains we never tried.” I know only too well this tone of impassive sarcasm. Some people are born prophets, and as prophets they will die… Together with the postcard, spotted with tiny pink dots, I found an old time-worn tape: “Premontion 11”.
Hmmm, here we go again …
Hold on! Those canaries singing …
David loved canaries …
Bladderbill jr.
today, December 7th, 1945

__________________________________________________________________________

And God said, “I’m sick of fucking harps.” She sipped her apple juice, visibly agitated, clouds of steam funnelling out from her ears.

“You sit on those clouds day in, day out plucking those things… endlessly chirping on about how glorious I am. The same fucking songs, the same boring, trite little poems, the same bland, cherubic expression on your faces – I’m sick of it. I want passion! I want noise! Goddamn it, I want something with a bit of SOUL!”

And lo, the Angel Gabriel placed the Legendary Pink Dots hot new platter, “Island of Jewels” on the holy turntable.

“Yowza!” said God
She was clearly excited; she furiously tied knots in her invisible beard; her head rocked back and forth with the irresistible beat.

“Who are these gods? Who is responsible for those neat little melodies, those infectious rhythms, those splendid words?”

Gabriel whispered the answer, and God rose from her throne, raised an infinite number of arms and roared – causing the very fabric of heaven to quake, earthly cities to crumble, tides to rise like writhing green cliffs advancing on the twitching tower flames.

And God said, “The Legendary Pink Dots alone will bring my message to the wretched Earth. They alone will tell of the cataclysm to come. They alone will show the way to a new Eden!”

And a messenger of God materialized in an untidy, squalid, squatted house in Amsterdam where the Legendary Pink Dots were drawing straws to find out who had the right to eat the last portion of a takeaway pizza.

Reverently the messenger delivered his tidings, and the six heads looked upward, and as one, they said “We’ll think about it…”
by. E. Ka-Spel