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DiS: So you’ve got a new seven inch single with ‘Bored Of The War’ and ‘Can’t Stop The Machine’ on.
Chris T-T: Yeah.
On your last tour you played a song about war but said it wouldn’t make a difference…
Yeah, that’s ‘Cull’ which is on ‘London Is Sinking’ and is going to be a single as well. In ‘Cull’ I say “The War is won and I didn’t have time for a protest song”, and ‘Bored Of The War’ is the protest song I was trying to write. I wrote it as a really traditional protest song as in ‘I’m really angry’ and that, but then the war supposedly finished and it felt like I’d missed the boat. But even a year and a half on it seems more relevant than when they first toppled that statue and it was a big press opportunity or whatever. So this San Francisco label called Isota have been doing a singles club but they’re finishing and the last one is me, and I thought that would be a good track to put on there because it’s quite loose, the recording, it’s very folk-y so it’ll sound good on vinyl. ‘You Can’t Stop The Machine’ should have been on ‘London Is Sinking’, it’s almost the conclusion of that story, it’s like what the girl says at the end. So you’ve got the whole album of this girl doing stuff around London and in‘You Can’t Stop The Machine’ she sits down and has coffee with the narrator – the lyrics are “The girl sat me down with a coffee and said ‘You can’t stop the machine’’. It sums it up almost but it never got a chance to be on the record because it’s quite odd sounding, it’s really nice. It’s like ‘in seven’ if you know what I mean, and it’s acoustic but percussive, a little bit like, well, I don’t know…
I thought you were going to say ‘jazz’ then…
(in mock horror) No, no! NO! Don’t say that word! I didn’t say it; your correspondent said the word J-A-Z-Z. I didn’t! It’s just a little ditty that got left off the record. It’s supposed to be the closing track off ‘London Is Sinking’ but because ‘Oil’ came out really enormous at the end and there was a really big climax, everyone else said ‘Don’t put…’, well actually only the label said ‘We want a nice ten-song album, knock this one off the end’, and I said ‘Um, okay.’ I was a bit lame really, I didn’t have the guts to go ‘No!’ so they knocked it off. But now I’ve got this wonderful track that in my head is the conclusion to ‘London Is Sinking’ and now it’s coming out on vinyl so I’m really happy. It’s kind of like what it says it is, it’s saying ‘You can’t stop the machine so fuck off’, basically. Leave. Stop moaning about London and go and live somewhere else is what it sort of says.
Does that mean that Snowstorm have a lot of say over what you release?
I think…(pause)…yeah. Snowstorm couldn’t have stopped me releasing it, even if they’d told me not to then I still could have. But he certainly has control over what he puts out, because it’s his label and it’s his money. I think that’s always the case, no matter how much indie labels want to present themselves as ‘artist friendly’, if the person running the label doesn’t like the product or has improvements that they want to make then they will do it, they may all pretend that they don’t. But it’s their cash though, isn’t it? Everyone wants radio hits. Even the most leftfield bollocks.
What was the closest you got to one, do you think?
Probably ‘Eminem Is Gay’, I think. It’s still doing odd stuff in the States right now, it didn’t get put out but somebody did an MP3 of it and we’ve just had a load of complaints from pre-teen kids in the US so I guess it’s getting out there. So either that or ‘Injured Popstars’…
I certainly heard ‘Injured Popstars’ more on the radio.
But the thing about ‘Eminem…’ was that a lot of people wanted to play it but couldn’t so just played the other side which wasn’t as memorable.
What, ‘Headcold Bit Of The Winter’?
Yeah, the Queens Of The Stone Age piss-take. Lots of regional radio played both of them and I hadn’t really had much regional airplay before, so it was really good in terms of the wider scene rather than just the London scene. I still don’t get much Xfm because I don’t rock and they think I’m a fat songwriter. Which is fair play! Fairly accurate…
Are you still planning on forming ‘The Lightness’, though? (Chris’ idea of crossing The Darkness with Polyphonic Spree)
Yeah, oh my god yeah, Christian metal! It’s going to be a great band! I think it would be brilliant, I think it would get right just what the Polyphonic Spree didn’t quite get right, or still don’t. It would be great, wouldn’t it?
Can I join?
Sure! What do you want to play? Do you want to sing?
I could do tambourine, I guess.
Superb. But you do have to love Jesus. Only rest once a week.
Yeah, he’s a nice chap. But what about his church?
No, you don’t have to love his church. I don’t think he’d love his church. He’d be very embarrassed, I feel. Imagine if Jesus came back now, I mean he’d probably be a Palestinian for a start, and he came back and be like, ‘Oh my…!’ I can’t imagine the horror of coming back now if you’re Jesus and you died to save humanity and you discover George Bush and so on. Tony Blair’s a big Christian, he’s a church-going guy, what they used to call Christian Socialists but they’re too embarrassed to say that now. But I can’t imagine… poor old Jesus. Imagine the shock!
What’s the worst advice you’ve been given?
Oh dear… possibly to go to University and study pop music, because what you have to be to be a pop star is preferably a teenager, and certainly on the street and playing gigs and not studying pop music for three years. Those vital years between 18 and 21 should be spent taking loads of drugs and shagging your way around the seedy venues of this country, rather than at school. Pop school!
Do you think that studying pop music and how it’s made takes the romanticism out of it, then?
Oh yeah I think it does, I mean I’m joking when I’m so negative about it because it was a really positive thing for a lot of reasons but the key thing it does is shows you how it’s all done, and once you lose that… I think that’s why there’s this thing about a lot of bands make an amazing album and then end up being shit forever is that bands are amazing because they don’t really know what they’re doing and then it cocks up, once they learn the tricks… do you want something to eat?
No thanks, just had something. But go ahead… (Chris goes in search of food and returns with a plate of pasta that Jim Bob’s entourage have left over.)
Are you sure you don’t want anything to eat? Well they’re saying this is horrible anyway. (Into dictaphone) For the record, we’re at Southampton Joiner’s Arms, and the food is a kind of lasagne pasta thing, and it’s stone cold. (Tries some) Oh no it’s not, they’re just moaning. That’s the thing that comes from touring with pop stars, they’re used to really higher things. This food’s fine.
You’re not going to sell out then?
(Laughs) Chance would be a fine thing. No I’m not going to sell out, I love it too much.
But do you feel like you’re in this line of British songwriters, you mentioned Billy Bragg and in a sense Carter as well and Ray Davies, of having a working class ethic and writing really quirky songs?
I guess so, yeah. The problem is I’d like to say ‘Oh but I’m different’, though I’m really flattered by the comparisons I get so I can’t really complain. I do think there is partly a problem to do with dance music, in that all of these songwriters, almost including Jim Bob as well even though he did the sort of disco-punk stuff before or whatever, is that they’re very anti-production. Although I don’t know enough about for example what Ray Davies does now, this idea of the classic songwriter, this edgy, punky songwriter that you’re talking about, or the ‘working-class lyricist’ or poet, is to do with stripped-down-ness and authenticity, just a guitar and singing or a kind of work ethic of ‘we gig a lot’ and so on. It’s very little to do with production, or to do with making things sound interesting or lovely. I might be doing somebody a great injustice here, there might be some songwriters out there that I’m not aware of that really make beautiful records, but I find that the weakness is, and this is particularly true of the folk scene where the folkier a songwriter gets and the better they are at their instrument where you get these finger-picking folk guitarists, is that they still put horrible echoes on their stuff. You know, they’ll record this thing where they spend three months getting the performance perfect and then slam a cheesy echo on it and leave it. Another example is when they try and be hip and I just find it really difficult when you get somebody who’s a folk musician or an acoustic musician who puts a little funky beat on, and you just think ‘Oh for fuck’s sake, if you want to sound like electronica go and find the best electronica and listen to it, don’t buy a little drum machine and put that in because it’ll just sound stupid’. I think that’s the bit of me that makes me want to say, ‘Oh but I’m different’, because I like really psychedelic production and stuff. There’s a lot of great, well-produced music, and it can be really nasty, noisy guitar stuff or something really mellow and loopy and liquid-y and psychedelic, and I think that’s what we miss out on. It can sort of be the musical equivalent of what I was saying earlier about lyrics and only being allowed to have one ‘mood’, it’s like, ‘Why do these people feel that they can only be stripped-down’? It’s like David Gray, it’s a little guitar, one funky beat, a bit of keyboard. He wibbles around one emotion lyrically and he wibbles around one vibe musically. I mean, why can’t he just get a metal band in and go ‘Bang! Bang! Bang!’? Of course he can’t, but he should be able to, and that’s the kind of blinkered-ness that’s about.
But he’d get a lot of stick for it too. I mean, take Radiohead for example…
That’s one band I was almost going to name as an example of a band who did it right. For me ‘Kid A’ is an amazing electronic record, on a par with some of the people they claimed to be influenced by, like they’d just discovered Boards of Canada and…
Squarepusher…
Yeah and all these people. I enjoyed that record on those terms enormously because I thought it was great, but you’re right because they got a lot of stick. But then again they get a lot of stick whatever they do because they’re miserable bastards! Again, fair play, because they’re very good at being miserable bastards…
Does that mean you carry a sort of idea about who your ‘audience’ is?
What I’m trying to do is have two audiences, I’m trying to have the rock kids like what I do, I’d love to go on tour with these sorts of bands, like the sort of bands on the posters around here (points to the Joiners’ walls) like… if a band like The Libertines… well actually not The Libertines but more like Reuben or the heavier bands. If Eighties Matchbox said to me ‘Oh come on, bring your band on tour with us’ then I’d be in absolute heaven because I love the fact that people still jump around at those gigs, I’d rather have a load of people fucking moshing their heads off and stage-diving than having a load of beardies going ‘Oh, very clever lyrics Christopher!’ But long-term, twenty-five years down the line, the audience is going to be the beardies saying ‘nice lyrics, I like what you do emotionally’, so what I’m trying to do is have my cake and eat it with both of those crowds, the Mojo-reading thirty-somethings who are really clever and have a sense of musical history enjoying what I do for that sense, and to have a load of nineteen-year-olds jump around and wear black t-shirts. That would be awesome if I could do that, and I’m not quite good enough. If I could just get about ten percent better at both then I could fucking rule both of those worlds. It’s the classic thing where we always argue whether we should get a booking agent, where we go on a headline tour of reasonably big venues and fill them like we’d try and fill here, and it would be a worthwhile thing to do, but I’d much rather in a way play support to a bigger band who were much younger and punkier so people would go, ‘Oh yeah, actually it works, they can rock out and support Kinesis or go on tour with British Sea Power' or whatever, I don’t know… but I’m still knocking on that door and I don’t think it will ever really open because I’m too old and not quite that, really…
Hence why you’ve got the band and the acoustic stuff, then, to focus those sorts of things.
Yeah definitely. If I was a bit more famous I would be bullying people around me to try and create those two things, those different kind of identities. But I haven’t got the resources, so we do it a little bit by playing. In a way the acoustic bit is my retirement, I could still be playing acoustic gigs in twenty-five years’ time but now I’d much rather be jumping around with the band. It’s always going to be frustrating, but at the same time it’s really brilliant fun and I can’t really argue with it, I’m earning my living from it so I can’t really complain.
’Best job in the world’, then?
Oh, too right.
I think we’ve gone full circle there.
Yeah. That’s a classic band cliché isn’t it, ‘best job in the world’. Oh, and, ‘I do what I do, if anyone likes it then that’s a bonus’. Put that in.
We can’t really end there… um… what’s your favourite colour?
Red, I imagine. Yeah, red. Red encapsulates the area of my everything, because people put red into passion and heart, but it’s also a political colour. It’s more loaded than any other colour. (Pause) Nobody thinks the blues are blue but everyone knows that the reds are red. Perhaps.
‘Bored Of The War / Can’t Stop The Machine’ is out now on Isota Records. The album ‘London Is Sinking’ is out now on Snowstorm.
