Colin Newman
Bastard (World Domination)
An interview with Colin Newman
by Nik Rainey
The former lead singer for Wire speaks out about his label (Swim, now distributed in the U.S. by World Domination), the perversities of the music industry, and why David Bowie shouldn’t sing.
What was the appeal of starting your own label? Was it an electronic adjunct to the do-it-yourself, pioneer spirit of punk?
I don’t know how pioneering it is, but Malka (Spiegel, his wife and collaborator) and I are very much like parents when it comes to Swim. We run it out of a part of our house, so it’s very much a cottage industry. It’s the original Mouse That Roared. That’s how we like it to be! I know in America everyone’s gone mad on (enormously sarcastic American accent) ee-lec-trahhn-ic now, but it’s old news here, this is music that’s ten years old. Originally there was house, then techno, then more styles and the styles have developed, people are very familiar with this here. There’s a lot of history, which a large part of the American music culture has not necessarily absorbed. It’s the classic “Coals to Newcastle” bit: the Brits take American music, dress it up and flog it back to the Yanks ten years later! That’s an, ahem, “slightly” cynical way of looking at it, but it’s true in part! Five years ago, people who were absolute nobodies in Detroit would come here and be welcomed like heroes. The situation right now in Britain is, of course, completely different – as Brit electronica rises in stature in America, it loses stature here. That’s typical British peculiarity – if somebody else suddenly decides they like it, then the Brits don’t want it anymore! This is the culture we are living in, London is the most peculiar city that you could possibly imagine. They’ll buy any old crap as long as it’s fashionable. It goes round and round and round – who knows how it’s gonna shake out in the end! Our approach to all this is that we’ve always based ourselves much more broadly, we’ve never gone for what’s fashionable – it’s what we like. That’s the philosophy, that’s the only thing that the people on the label have in common.
How did your fascination with this style develop?
We were living in Brussels and not getting very far there, and we were doing the Oracle thing with Samy Birnbach, who used to be in Minimal Compact with Malka and later became DJ Morpheus. We all got into dance music together about ten years ago, we just thought “If you got some hip-hop beats and put some singing on top of it” – not cod “black-style singing”, because that would be insulting, white-boy rap is not (laughs) very smart, really – “and just do the kind of melodies that we would normally do, that would something new…” and we were five years too early. What they later called trip-hop, though it was different from the way we did it, was kind of our original idea, but nobody was interested in people like us doing that. The industry is very conservative. They want you to do what you’ve done before, which is very stultifying, especially if your currency is in doing things which are new and exciting. Maybe if you played blues or something, and never played anything but three chords all your life, you might be so deep in it that it’s kind of all right, but it’s not the kind of tradition we belong to. It just came to us, we were building up loads and loads of stuff and nobody would release it, so finally we decided to just do it ourselves. Since then, we obviously got involved much deeper with the whole dance music scene through the artists we work with to the point that to the DJs, Swim is g-man and Ronnie & Clyde, not that bloke from Wire (if they ever heard of him)!
Has it proven successful? Financially, I mean?
Oh, no, we’re not making any money. (laughs) Doing a record company has nothing to do with making money, it’s all about spending it! You make a bit from it, but that mainly has to do with just circulating the same money round and round and just performing some kind of balancing act to keep going. Perhaps you get lucky and something sells, but we haven’t had anything do that so far. People will say “I’ve sent you my demo and you didn’t say anything,” and we’ll say, “as a record company we have to be prepared to reach into our pocket and drop five thousand quid if this doesn’t sell one copy. Would you do that for something you weren’t 110% about?” That’s how much you’ve got to believe in it. You’ve got to be prepared for worst-case scenarios, the fact that possibly no one will like it apart from you, you’ve got to say “I don’t care, I want to be associated with that, and I think that it can work on a long-term basis.” In different ways and for different reasons, both here and in America, the industry is denying itself its future. Their attitude is “sell ’em any old fucking crap – they’ll listen to it twice and chuck it in the bin – if you sell it to them cheaply enough they won’t care.” And then people stop buying records because they’re boring and they’ll start buying something else instead. This happened already in the eighties when video games came up, the music companies were all “the kids aren’t buying records anymore!” It’s because they were crap! Mind you, Malka and I have been involved with the industry for a long time and we’ve seen it from every angle, so we can make these kind of pronouncements. It’s not just a matter of sitting in the pub and saying “nobody wants my precious art.” There’s more to it than that.
So, if it’s so frustrating, what drives you to continue?
This is our culture. I grew up in this music, this medium, and the thing moves, it’s always changing. How can someone stick with just one style? – “yeah, I like Texan rock, man, and that’s all I listen to” – what a boring old bastard! I’m just using that as an example, I’m not on some kind of hate tirade against Texan rockers – whatever it is, it’s about everything kind of changing all the time.
I think there was a great loss of innocence in the eighties. What happened then was that the mainstream music industry discovered two things: first was CD re-releases: “Hey, man, you can sell the same record twice! Hey, that’s genius! That’s really good!” and then they discovered that you could sell a CD that sounds very similar to something that someone else did twenty years ago. Rock music in this Britain has been infiltrated by groups who sound like a group that their dad was in that never fucking got anywhere that sounded like a bad copy of one of the sixties groups! It’s insulting really, and the only reason that music like this succeeds is that somebody at some major company has decided that this is “what the kids want” and they can just buy it into popularity. It is very corrupted, maybe the consumers got so corrupted by crap that they don’t really care if the music is any good any more. Maybe we’re just innocents abroad and we should just expect things to be the worst and keep our mouths shut, but somebody has to say something. We’re releasing stuff which we think is good – please don’t tar us with the same brush!
I’ve noticed that electronic music has only started to gain popularity now that they’ve borrowed some of rock’s cult of personality.
Yeah, and that’s got a good and a bad side to it. Take somebody like Bowie. I know he’s something of a soft target, certainly over here he is. How I understand it is, that what Bowie does is what Bowie’s always done, he knocks out his tunes on the acoustic guitar and then he gets a bunch of people in to do the music for him. Like a lot of people who front projects, he doesn’t really “do” the music. (This applies equally to plenty of people half Bowie’s age!) Hearing his album was something that certainly informed things around the making of my album (Bastard), as an example of what not to do with this music. You get (A Guy Called) Gerald to come in and do some jungle and then just sing your normal song on top of it – first, I don’t need Gerald to show me how to do jungle (we did Drum & Bass tracks as Immersion two years ago), and secondly, I’m not gonna sing over the top of it (although to be fair to Gerald, he does sing on his own records). Perhaps his attitudes are not entirely terrible, perhaps he feels like he’s bringing electronic music to the masses or something, and he has made some awesome records in the past and he deserves credit for that. But it’s something that makes people around here kind of uncomfortable, and they didn’t really like it very much. It would have been something entirely different if he hadn’t sung on it, but the problem is he has to because he doesn’t really do anything else! The other thing he made me realize is that well-known voices are iconic. As soon as you know the singer, the artifact is placed in time and space, like the Traveling Wilburys going along in a sixties/seventies kind of way until Roy Orbison comes in, then it’s suddenly fifties. Maybe from the old fan’s point of view I’m kind of putting one finger up in the air by making a record and putting no singing on it, but I’m also making a comment that if it’s a Colin Newman record and there’s no singing on it, then Colin Newman must do something else besides sing. I can also do the cool thing underneath it as well.
What about Wire, Wir or whatever you call it now? You never officially broke up – does that mean there’s a chance of future work with Graham (Lewis), Bruce (Gilbert) and Robert (Gotobed)?
Well, it’s kind of a possibility, but I think it probably won’t happen, to be quite honest. We have quite little in common by now, and I think it would be hard to work in that way again. It was hard enough in the eighties, you know, a lot of it was very tense – it was tense in the seventies as well, come to think of it (laughs) – it was pretty fucking tense, like, always! Bruce moves kind of vaguely in the same social circle as we do – I saw him the other day, actually. I gave him a copy of my record and told him he wouldn’t like it. (laughs) Robert is living at his parents’ place in Leicestershire and I don’t think he’s really involved in the music industry, and Graham’s living in Sweden, he’s got a couple of kids and he does his projects over there, so the practicality of it is that as soon as you agree to it, you have to find the financing to get all of us in the same place, then the thing’s already kind of compromised. There’s just no way that anybody in the music industry’s willing to put up so much money against the possibility that something might not happen, or that everyone’ll turn up and immediately get into a big scrap. So I think it’s not really a practical possibility right now.
So there you have it, you got your – whatever. Did I say anything stimulating or did I just spout off? I haven’t really got it in for Bowie, it’s only because I want him to be better!
Oh, I think you did fine.
I hope so. What sort of magazine is Lollipop?
Music, entertainment, culture, all mixed with a large dose of sarcasm.
Ah. Good.
