Write Away Magazine - Issue No:2

Write Away
Do you still use the William Burroughs
method of cutting up text in random patterns
to write lyrics?
Absolutely. I’ll use them to provoke a new set
of images, or a new way of looking at a subject.
I find it incredibly useful as a writer’s tool.
And I’m amazed these days at the amount of
cut-up sites that are now on the internet. It’s
quite phenomenal. There are at least 10, and
two or three of them are excellent. I’ve used
them too. I’ve put a bunch of pieces of text
into the thing, then hit the cut-up button, and
it slices it up for me [laughs]. In ‘94, when I
was really starting to get into the computer in
a major way, I had a programme devised so
that I could specifically do that. Most of the
lyric content of the Outside [2003] album
came out of that programme. But now they’re
all over the place, especially on poet sites.
There are a lot of poets who still work in that
method, so I’m not alone.
This idea of juxtaposition and pasting appears
fundamental to what you do as an
artist.
I think that was my premise for writing and
making music when I was a kid. When I’d
gotten a little more sophisticated and had a
more rounded idea of what I was as an artist
– and it wasn’t immediate, by any means, but
arouned the late 60s/early 70s – it really
started to all come together for me as to what
it is that I like doing and what satisfied me the
most. And it was a collision of musical styles
as much as anything else. I found that I
couldn’t easily adopt brand loyalty [laughs],
or genre loyalty. I wasn’t an R&B artist, and I
wasn’t this artist or that kind of artist, and I
didn’t really see the point in trying to be that
purist about it. What my true style was is that
I loved the idea of putting Little Richard with
Jacques Brel, and the Velvet Underground
backing them – what would that sound like?
[laughs] That for me was really interesting. It
really seemed, for me, what I was good at
doing. What I enjoyed was being able to hybridise
these different kinds of music.
Rock ’N’ Roll Suicide, from Ziggy Stardust, is
a great example of that. Right. To go from a
50s rock-flavoured thing with an Edith Piaf
nuance on it produced that. There was a
sense of French chanson in there. It wasn’t
obviously a 50s pastiche, even though it had
that rhythm that said total 50s. But it actually
ends up as being a French chanson. That
was purposeful. I wanted that blend, to see if
that would be interesting. And it was interesting.
Nobody was doing that, at least not in the
same way. The same approach was being
adopted by a certain number of artists from
that era.
It was all this sense of “Wow, you can do anything!”
The 60s were so over, and this 70s
thing was a harder, more cynical, ironic
place, and the attitude was a whole different
thing. It wasn’t love and peace and beads.
This was something else, like “What a fucked
up society. Let’s see what it sounds like!”
[laughs]. The sense of pulling away from it all.
Rebel Rebel has one of the all-time classic
riffs.
[Laughs] It’s a real air-guitar thing, isn’t it? I
can tell you a very funny story about that.
One night, I was in London in a hotel trying
to get some sleep. It was quite late, like 11 or
12 at night, and I had some big-deal thing on
the next day, a TV show or something, and I
heard this riff being played really badly from
upstairs. I thought. who the hell is doing this
at this time of night? On an electric guitar,
over and over [sings riff to Rebel Rebel in a
very hesitant, stop and start way]. So I went
upstairs to show the person how to play the
thing [laughs]. So I bang on the door. The
door opens, and I say: “Listen, if you’re going
to play…” and it was John McEnroe! I kid you
not [laughs]. It was McEnroe, who saw himself
as some sort of rock guitar player at the
time. That could only happen in a movie,
couldn’t it? McEnroe trying to struggle his
way through the Rebel Rebel riff.
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