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Hi Carl, I’m Wes. Hi Wes, how are you
doing?
I’m doing well how are you?
Yeah, pretty good. Thank you.
Have you been
doing interviews all day today?
No, just this evening. We were in the studio today so I just come home
and go out again and do some interviews.
Your live shows have been known to be some of the most intense and
energetic out there, particularly in your genre which so many other
live acts haven’t been as well received by such a wide audience. What
do you think it is about Underworld that sets you apart so drastically
from a lot of other electronic acts?
We’re totally improvised. We don’t have a set list and we don’t
rehearse. We respond to the moment and just try not to repeat things
even if they worked fantastically the night before. And we welcome
disaster, even though I’ll regret saying that one day. ::laughs::
Excellent. That leads me right into my next question. What was your
most embarrassing moment ever onstage, that you would want to talk
about?
No, it would be years ago in the 70’s in a covers band I had. And we
were given our big break to play our own material in this fantastic
theatre in town and the bass player broke a string and he hadn’t got a
spare guitar. So I ended up telling jokes on stage and my mother was
there. And my mother’s toes would curl to see me on stage at the best
of times. That was pretty bad. That was pretty bad. It didn’t get any
worse than that.
No mom jokes though?
No, I didn’t tell any
mom jokes. I’m not a comedian. Well, hey, you know, people see me
dancing that might think who is that guy kidding, but, um no. I’m not
telling jokes.
Have you seen any live shows, electronic or otherwise recently that
have really impressed you?
I went to see Neil Young do his latest album. That was fantastic. He
was talking as well. I’ve never seen him talking, I know he has kind
of a reputation for being pretty non-communicative. But he was really
talkative and it was great, I really enjoyed that.
Hmm. Very cool. This one’s a little long winded so bare with me. I
read an interview recently with Jason Pierce of Spiritualize and he
said that once you finish a record that’s where your success ends.
Everything else outside of that is somebody else’s deal. The amount
you sell has to do with the marketing and the chart placement has to
do with the efficiency of that marketing. This seems to be an awfully
cold look at the music business but it also seems to be at least
somewhat accurate. I know there are so many talentless bands and
performers who become so successful and vice versa so many talented
bands that, you know, never become successful. What’s your take on
that statement?
Well, um, be that as it may, you know, what does one do accept lie
down and take it or accept it and do something about it and I would
say we try to be in the latter. And accept that there are systems that
have been around for decades that are geared towards changing by
increments the rough diamond that comes in at the beginning and can be
molding into fitting an easily rackable shape, an easily programmable
style. But what we discovered in the early 90’s is with this dance
scene, when we no longer had a record deal and no longer had a
publicist and promoters and people that could take our music to press
and to radio and tv that there was kind of only one other way left to
us… because also we couldn’t afford to take a band out anymore and
play live for a while… was to make records and get them played on the
dancefloor. And that was our instant access to people outside of the
studio and it was thrilling, really thrilling, and empowering as well,
because if you can make something cheaply and get it across to people
and turn them on. And then they go out and buy what you just made, as
happened to us when Rick was selling Big Mouth out of the back of the
car. And especially when we were in London, and there we were testing
stuff out with Darren Anderson on the dancefloor, and if people liked
it we pressed it up and hey presto! they bought it and there was no
middle-man inbetween. There were no marketing people telling us what
the kids want, we could see what people wanted because we were there
standing in the crowd with them listening to our own music coming
back. And that was very empowering and something we try to hold onto.
So even though we are in business with people that are employing quite
traditional systems within the music industry we try not to loose site
of the fact that we are empowered and we’re free to make our own
descisions. To go so far with traditional systems, or to supplement
them, or to augment them, you know, with our own ideas. Or to kind of
go completely mad, apparently, but actually never, by doing something
our own way. Rick and I have been doing this for 23 years now, and
it’s like we have a fairly good idea when to let go and when to say I
think you should try this, what seems like a mad idea but it’s going
to work.
Like the DVD was an example. Here in the UK it went from people
not knowing what a DVD was or could to to people saying you know, “Why
would a dance band put out a live DVD?” Even one that had a reputation
like we have live. So Rick and I had to put our hands in our pockets
and fund that project for a long time until we could get it to the
point where we could show it to people and they went, “Oh, okay, well
that’s really cool. But I still don’t know that there’s going to be a
market for DVD’s.” Can you believe that anybody said that? But it was
being said to us and understandably because people can’t be everywhere
all at once. Which we do have the freedom to be because we’re kind of
a small mobile unit, tying into a much larger industry.
Yeah, that’s actually a good point about the DVD’s because the
market here is so completely different from the way things are over
there in the UK.
Yeah, Rick was watching the market there and was asking questions
over there and was seeing how it was going. And I know over here he
was going into some of the major record stores that had like a little
DVD section, mostly some films, a couple of little music titles, you
know, Metallica was doing at that time very innovative things with DVD
and they were in a way the benchmark because they were doing the most
innovative things outside of film. And then the Matrix came along and
blew us all away and we were like, “Oh my god, you put it in your PC
and it does this and it connects to a website and that’s what we want
to do.”
But over here Rick had done his research and shops were saying
these things are the fastest growing music carrier we’ve ever had,
ever. Even though there’s only a small rack of them at the moment, by
Christmas it’s going to be five times the size of that. So we kind of
knew. In a way you’re having to convince people who were already busy
focusing on systems that are already in place and we accept that and
understand that. And so therefore it’s kind of, a long-winded road of
answering this, it’s up to us to kind of say well I accept what you’re
saying but I don’t accept that what you’re saying as being the only
way of doing it. And we will, with respect, try to bring something
fresh, bring another perspective to the way of doing things.
You’re tracks are some of the most bootlegged and remixed of any
band I’m aware of. I actually manage a record shop and dozens, I mean
every other month there’s tons and tons of new bootlegged remixes of
your tracks.
Fantastic.
How do you feel about these records coming out with your name on
them and your music attached to them?
Ah, you know, I think if people aren’t making a ton of money. It’s
weird. It’s weird. If it’s really not taking a ton of money off of,
although I shouldn’t say it, I don’t really have a big problem. We
certainly don’t have a problem with people bootlegging our gigs. We’ve
taken kind of a Grateful Dead approach, which is look we’re different
every night you can’t tape every gig. So you know, if you’ve got the
gig in Carolina you’re not going to get the gig in Italy, you’re not
going to get the gig in Tokyo, or the one in Glasgow. And again as
long as people aren’t making money off of it, or they’re not making
you know… a ton of money off of it, you kind of go hey… We’ve met some
quite cool remixes that way.
Obviously one of the biggest topics in the industry right now and for
the past few years has been piracy and some artists I’ve spoken to
have said that it’s helped their careers and spread their music to
places they never expected they’d end up playing and now they’re
getting gigs there and in places they’ve barely even heard of. And
other artists at the same time feel that it’s destroying a lot of
their career. So the industry is obviously going through some dramatic
changes right now, can you tell us how it’s affected you and what you
think should change and what direction you’d like to see it go in?
Oh I think it has affected us, there’s no question. And because we are
a cottage industry albeit one that plugs into the regular music
industry from time to time it has an impact on us. Which is fortunate
that not all of our revenue is generated from one thing you know? Or
that most of it is. Back in the 70’s we were taping our mates records
because we couldn’t afford them and I think a lot of it is driven by
that. Its just the expense of records, records are really expensive
and I don’t think they need to be that expensive. They don’t. We as
artists don’t need to charge that much. So there kind of needs to be
something looked at there for sure, like how much it actually costs
them to make these things and how much is being charged at the other
end of it. I understand that people who now have choices ranging from
music through clothes through to software and games are probably going
to choose games over something which is fixed like music, which is the
same each time you play it. Which is one of the reasons why we’re
moving into gaming platforms with our music. Not games as such, but
using those platforms to explore alternative ways of looking at our
music in a non-linear way, in a non-fixed way. We’re releasing a
Playstation 2 based project with Tomato early next year which in all
intents and purposes is finished and put to bed now, as a way of
exploring our sounds and Tomato’s art and images. That’s been a real
catalyst for making our next album on more than the CD or DVD
platform, but looking at gaming platforms which change all the time
and aren’t so fixed.
It’s not really,
it wasn’t totally driven by the idea of combating against downloading
at all actually, actually we were just really inspired by what you
could do with a different carrier for our music. But you know, I can
see given the choice of spending, I don’t know how much a CD is over
there right now but over here say 15 cred plus, which is a lot of
money, on a CD or on a game, you know a game is going to last you for
years. Because there’s a different attitude toward music now, it’s not
as important as it was to my generation.
Right. And pretty much everything that is digital gets downloaded,
games and everything. I know people who have stacks and stacks and
stacks of games, they don’t buy games but they buy music. So it’s
different for everyone.
It is. I’m obsessive
about buying music. At whatever price. Somebody recommends something
to me I’ll go into a record store with my one record that I want to
buy and come out with a carry bag full of records. Because there are
so many cool looking record sleeves and such, you know, because I’m a
browser, I love to browse and check out different sounds.
Well that’s interesting that you’re going into gaming as a
different industry, have you ever considered doing movie scores or
have you ever done one?
We did. That’s how we got the name originally. In ’86 we did the score
to a movie written by Clive Barker and it was called Underworld.
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