Interview source: Denver Westword blog

Since 1980, the Legendary Pink Dots have been creating some of the most inventive, darkly imaginative and emotionally stirring music around. Based originally in London, the Pink Dots relocated to the Netherlands in the mid-’80s, and its lineup has long included both English and Dutch membership. Last year, longtime members Martijn de Kleer and Niels van Hoorn left the band, leaving a core four-member lineup, including the band’s charismatic and enigmatic frontman, Edward Ka-Spel, and Phil “The Silverman” Knight.

Trying to track down the band’s complete discography would be a heroic feat, seeing as how it’s made over forty albums to date, including two of its best albums, 2008’s Plutonium Blonde and the newly issued Seconds Late for the Brighton Line.

We caught up with the charming and thoughtful Ka-Spel on the eve of the band’s appearance in Denver last night, and spoke with him about the changes in the band’s sound since the departure of de Kleer and van Hoorn, and the eminent possibility of Tear Garden — the long-running recording project Ka-Spel has with cEvin Key of Skinny Puppy — playing live at long last.

Did you re-create any of those two lost songs that were supposed to be on Plutonium Blonde for your new record?

We were able to recover those two songs, and now they’re sitting safe on a hard drive, but we don’t know what we’re going to do with them yet.

In the past, when you’ve had a major lineup change, there’s been a similar shift in sound. What previously unexplored sonic territory did you discover after the departure of Martijn de Kleer and Niels van Hoorn for Seconds Late for the Brighton Line?

I feel that we were able to be more experimental in our songwriting, which I rather enjoy. Martijn and Niels are a bit more traditional than the rest of us, which is not a knock on them. Now the four of us are on the same page with what we wanted to do with our music.

To my mind, your band finds ways to push its creative envelope in terms of songwriting and the use of instruments other artists might not think to employ or, in some cases, make. Are there particular innovations in terms of sound-making that you’re introducing on your latest album?

This time around, I’m making better use of my laptop as a musical instrument. I’ve always been a bit more old-fashioned with making music in the past, but now I’ve become much more comfortable with using a computer as a compositional tool as well as with using it on stage.

I heard that Randall Frazier was involved in some way in the production of the new album. Is that true, and if so, why did you have him involved, and how did you meet him?

Randall’s a good friend but he did not, in fact, do any work on the new album. We met him years ago, and we played a few times with Orbit Service. He’s a wonderful guy, and the new music he’s been working on is brilliant.

Last year you released a new Tear Garden album. What was it about cEvin Key that drew you to working with him, and is there any chance we’ll ever get to see that project in the live setting?

Oh, I met cEvin Key when I did a solo tour in the ’80s, and we hit it off. He wrote to me afterward and told me about some recordings he had been doing on his own, and that he could absolutely hear my voice on them. So I listened to tapes of those recordings on the airplane on a Walkman, and it went on from there.

As for any chance of us playing live: big chance. In fact, last year, I talked with cEvin about that and said we should finally perform live before we’re moving about in our wheelchairs. We’ve been friends for years, and I hope we continue to be friends into the foreseeable future.

Early in the Pink Dots’ career, you had a couple of albums that sounded like they were named after cards of the major arcana of the Tarot. Does that imagery or the story contained with the Tarot resonate with your current work?

Back then, we were very much interested in the Tarot, and we would consult the Tarot after recording or after a show to get an interpretation or reading on what we had done and what to do next. But we aren’t really influenced by the Tarot these days.

Whenever I’ve seen you play, you seem to be wearing sunglasses. Is that mostly a pragmatic thing, or is there something that wearing them does for you or for an image you’d like to cultivate?

Actually, those are glasses that are tinted that way. It’s really nothing more than the fact that I am light-sensitive and need to wear them.

Not many bands make it to the thirty-year mark while staying consistently interesting. Are there particular things you can point to that have led to the longevity of the Pink Dots for you, and to your engagement with making music in your various projects over the years?

I just never get bored with making music. From the beginning, we’ve been eating, breathing, sleeping, dreaming music, and it has never stopped.

What’s This Called?
KPSU Portland College Radio
Special in-studio performance by The Silverman and Soriah.

Hour 1- various songs by Soriah, The Silverman and The Legendary Pink Dots

1. 7th track of Blank for your Own Message- The Silverman
2. Oceans Blue- The Legendary Pink Dots
3. Esqueleto de Chapulín- Soriah
4. New Eden- The Tear Garden
5. Doll’s House- Legendary Pink Dots
6. Delayed Chemistry- Martijn De Kleer

 Hour 2- performance by The Silverman with Soriah + interview.

1. Circle The Sun And You Become One- live performance
2. Peace of Mind- LPD
3. Interview with The Silverman- live
4. And Even the Vegetables Screamed- LPD
5. Mailman- LPD
6. improvisation- live performance
7. The Equalizer- LPD
8. improvisation- live performance

“A VERY, very special What’s This Called? for Saturday, November 22nd, 2008 finds your host Ricardo Wang joined in the KPSU studio by none other than Phil Knight AKA The Silverman, keyboardist and electronics programmer for The Legendary Pink Dots! Plus special guests!”

Tune in for a special two hour program from Noon to 2 PM Pacific Time (that’s 9-11 PM back at Phil’s home in Holland!) for a live in studio with this musical experimenter of mythic proportions. Playing live, interviewing, and sharing rare tracks off of his personal ipod! Chris McBeth of The Silverman’s record label Beta-lactam Ring Records will also be in attendance, so the 2 hours will likely evaporate quickly.

As always we’ll be STREAMING LIVE RIGHT HERE! http://www.kpsu.org/ or on the radio in the Portland vicinity via:
1450 AM for the Portland OR/Vancouver WA metro area
98.1 FM on the Portland State University campus

Be sure not to miss what will be perhaps the biggest live in studio performance ever in the 13+ year history of What’s This Called?”

Edward Ka-Spel of the Legendary Pink Dots interviewed on But is it Art with Corey Goldberg discussing Plutonium Blonde: [Listen to the podcast on Itunes]

On the eve of the Legendary Pink Dots’ two shows in San Francisco, we asked founding member Edward Ka-Spel to share 11 Things that stand out most about the band’s 28-year evolution.

1. Exotic machines: The biggest thing has been the Internet. When we first started, we considered fax machines to be exotic; now I can chat away with friends on the other side of the planet and not have a six-figure phone bill. Of course, it isn’t all good. People don’t buy music as much as they used to, which is very hard for small bands like the Dots.

2. Disappearing borders: One of our best shows in recent years was Moscow. The crowd loved the music (mostly distributed through pirate CDs). Such a show would’ve been unthinkable in, say, 1986. We now play (and thrive) in all corners of Central and Eastern Europe and are generally treated better there than in places closer to home.

3. Cherished formats: So much great music is still being made. … It’s just sad that we need to search for it harder these days as the record shops I always cherished are becoming fewer.

4. Turning tables: I have to smile at how turntables are being made again. It’s been great to see so many titles lovingly reproduced on vinyl. Big business failed to snuff it out, and I say amen to that.

5. Tolerated ignorance: The 2000s have been a time of intolerance and ignorance on a global level. Too many preachers, too many sheep, too many rules.

6. Ignoring intolerance: Now there’s a wonderful new president of the United States of America and many of us who’d secretly like to see him be president of the world. Can we stop being scared now?

7. Related relations: Saddest moment in the past 28 years was the death of second guitar player Bob Pistoor back in 1991. A lovely, gentle man and the finest musician we ever had.

8. Elated elations: Happiest moment is harder to pin down, there have been many. … Maybe that 1995 show in Mexico City when cEvin Key and Ryan Moore played drums and people came from everywhere. … Still, I have felt elated very often just this year.

9. Regenerated regenerations: I used to fear drying up, exhausting everything there was to say, exhausting all combinations of notes we found pleasing. I’m happy to say I still feel as though we hardly started yet.

10. Generated generations: Survival. We had a choice back in ’88. … Do we go on after four members left or do we end it there? The discussion with Phil (the Silverman) lasted maybe a minute.

11. And look at us now: The Legendary Pink Dots play Cafe Du Nord with Big City Orchestra. 9:30 p.m. Fri.-Sat. $17-$20 (21 and older). 2170 Market St. (415) 861-5016. www.cafedunord.com.

There comes a time in the life of a nascent fan of the Legendary Pink Dots when a simple interest in the British-Dutch band morphs into an obsession. Maybe it’s the way that abstract electronics meld with psychedelic rock to suggest 1970s Germany while hinting at industrial influences. Perhaps it’s the voice of Edward Ka-Spel, often likened to that of the late Syd Barrett, as he weaves together space rock love songs, sci-fi horror tales and absurdist fantasies. Or maybe it’s the knowledge that there is so much more of this bizarre, intoxicating music out there, so many recordings in existence that even the most thorough of discographies might contain a hole or two. Even Ka-Spel, who co-founded the band with fellow keyboardist Phil “The Silverman” Knight in 1980, cannot stop to fathom how much material he and his cohorts have released.

“Not even to the nearest 20, I think,” Ka-Spel says over the phone from his home in the Netherlands. “I just had to stop counting a long time ago. I don’t even know if I did it with a great passion in the first place. It just keeps going, basically. They keep creeping out all over the place.”

To become a Dots completist is to embark upon a Grail quest through record stores, swap meets and eBay. It means accumulating a mass of side projects (the best known of which is Ka-Spel’s collaboration with cEvin Key of Skinny Puppy, the Tear Garden) and tracking down cassettes that every fan knows exist but few ever find, while still keeping up with the rapid succession of new studio albums. In October alone, Dots-related releases included reissues of two out-of-print albums, new and repressed solo work from Ka-Spel, The Silverman and guitarist Martijn de Kleer, a book of Ka-Spel’s lyrics and the band’s latest effort, Plutonium Blonde.

Plutonium Blonde, which took more than a year to record (seemingly forever for a group that has put out multiple albums in 12-month spans), nearly became the Dots’ lost album when, well into production, both the stand-alone hard disc recorder and its backup drive crashed on the same day.

“I was so shocked, I didn’t even make a note of what the day was,” says Ka-Spel. “If I had, that would be marked as a date in the future where I would definitely lock myself in and not go out anywhere. It was a very ill-fated day.”

Eventually, they were able to retrieve all but two tracks, which were scratched from Plutonium Blonde with the intention of re-creating the lost work for a future album.

The album itself reflects a 10-year evolution that began when bassist/drummer Ryan Moore left the group to pursue his then–side project, Twilight Dub Circus Sound System, full-time. It is, overall, a trance-inducing yet largely groove-free mélange of guitar noise, analog synthesizer swirls and eerie samples marked by Ka-Spel’s twisted tales of misadventures involving health insurance (“An Arm and a Leg”) and cell phones (“My First Zonee”).

“I think it’s never that calculated, unless a major member leaves, then something radical is needed,” Ka-Spel says of the band’s growth. “Otherwise, you hear the development — more noise, the collage, it’s an organic change.”

The Legendary Pink Dots developed against the post–Throbbing Gristle British musical landscape, a scene marked by cassette releases filled with the experiments of novice electronic artists. Much of the group’s early work reflects this, boasting a stark, synth-based template in line with contemporaries like Fad Gadget, Virgin Prunes and pre–Dare Human League, highlighted by the energetic violin work of Patrick Wright. During this time, the Dots laid down the conceptual groundwork that would continue to appear throughout the ensuing years: “Chemical Playschool” as a code name for its most experimental releases; metaphysical references; and the adventures of a recurring character named Lisa, who Ka-Spel acknowledges is his “mischievous” alter ego. At the start of the 1990s, though, the band went through the first of its two major sonic upheavals when Wright left the fold. In the aftermath of the departure, folk melodies and psychedelic elements began to surface, immediately resulting in two of the Dots’ fan-favorite albums, The Crushed Velvet Apocalypse and The Maria Dimension.

During their first decade, the band earned the support of the one network that would go on to play a major role in its stateside cult popularity, goth clubs. With songs like “Curious Guy” (1984), “Blacklist” (1989) and “Just a Lifetime” (1990), the Dots became staples of after-midnight playlists, not so much because the music was maudlin or overtly spooky but because, lyrically, it embraces the fantastical; and with its quirky time signatures and abrupt pauses, encourages dramatic motions and copious skirt-twirling on red-lit dance floors. At clubs like the now-defunct L.A. haunt Helter Skelter, velvet- and PVC-clad teenagers became hooked on the Dots, sticking with the band long after its sound had evolved into psychedelic jams more similar to Stereolab or Spiritualized. But, even today, one can still hear those 20-year-old club hits at local spots like Friday night party, Ruin.

“That’s the funny thing about America. Things don’t date so fast,” Ka-Spel says. For a band like the Dots, still relatively unknown in the country that hosts its largest fanbase, that can help. A healthy presence on iTunes allows fans to find albums that previously involved mail order and waiting lists, while the Dots’ reputation for mutating old material into new forms during live shows keeps audiences engaged. When it comes to The Legendary Pink Dots, it’s not simply a case of “What have you done lately?” It’s about following the course of 28 years of uninterrupted sonic madness.

The Legendary Pink Dots play the Knitting Factory on Thurs., November 13 2008.

For nearly three decades the Netherlands-based Legendary Pink Dots have thrived in the weird and wonderful outer reaches of psychedelic rock, weaving a dense, and often times esoteric catalogue of ethereal and experimental musings. The band, under the direction of enigmatic frontman Edward Ka-Spel, has cranked out scores of albums that wander through formless, textured atmospheres, psychedelic folk and industrial-leaning pop songs that sway from sinister to serene. Their performance at The Earl on Sat., Nov. 1st is billed as “an evening with the Legendary Pink Dots,” which will span the group’s dark, rich legacy, leading up to their latest CD, Plutonium Blonde (ROIR).

Despite the group’s far-out leanings, Ka-Spel has consistently held the reins as the mystical and prolific frontman who doesn’t fit the profile of the Songwriter with a capital “S.” But his place is stamped in history as an artist who pushed the boundaries of the craft to develop a voice and style that are distinctively his own.

The Legendary Pink Dots were born in London circa 1979 if I’m not mistaken. That’s a time and place that’s lauded as an era when punk and new wave / power pop came to a head, giving us great songwriters like Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe et. al. What was your relationship to those scenes?

Actually it was August 1980. To be honest it was a fertile time in London but I cannot say we had much connection with Elvis Costello or Nick Lowe etc. They’re fine songwriters for sure, but we tended to listen to Joy Division, This Heat and Throbbing Gristle at that time. The latter of which really showed me that you didn’t have to be a virtuoso musician in order to make vital music. That’s encouraging when you are just starting out.

How do you separate your solo work from the LPD’s?

LPDs’ dynamic is very very much to do with the ideas and concepts of Phil (The Silverman) too, and how we collaborate after all of these years. The beauty is that the music continues to bound forward like an excited kitten. I think there’s a big difference between the Dots and my solo records, especially the recent releases. Dream Logik 1 and 2 follow a very peculiar path which really could only be taken by an individual.

Do you prefer vinyl over CDs, and do you pay attention to the overall presentation of the music with the intention of giving your listeners something more that they can’t just go download?

I grew up with vinyl and still there is this nagging feeling that it isn’t real until it’s etched on black plastic. I confess, I DO prefer this medium.

The press release for Plutonium Blonde says it’s your “most commercially appealing album to date…” I disagree. “Rainbow Too” is a classic LPD number that could have been plucked right off of Crushed Velvet Apocalypse or The Maria Dimension. And the opening number, “Torchsong” really gets the blood pumping. Was it your intention to put together something with a little more commercial potential?

Certainly not. I haven’t read the press release as I stay away from that kind of thing, but we simply set out to take lots of time to make an album that we find deeply satisfying. No corners cut… A roller-coaster ride. I’m proud of it but I have no definition for the word “commercial.” If it is commercially appealing it’s an accident.

What is this “Zonee” that you sing about in the song “My First Zonee?”

A zobile zhone…

Your songs often address topical things but you aren’t obvious about the subject matter. There’s a lot to them in terms of personal and political narratives, but the ideas are obscured. Is this an intentional part of the songwriting process for you?

Sure. I’m no dictator or preacher. I let people fill in the spaces for themselves, and I will always leave those spaces. We seem to be living at a time when too many people are keen to tell us what to think, what to believe in, whom to fear (ah there’s a key word…). I remain fearless in this respect. I hope some of it rubs off on those who listen.

by Chad Radford
October 29, 2008 – 11:16 AM