Stream: Happy Mondays “24 Hour Party People”

(from Squirrel and G-Man Twenty Four Hour Party People Plastic Face Carnt Smile (White Out) on Factory)

Happy Mondays were the actual 24 hour party people and legendarily—but perhaps not actually, says drummer Gaz here—helped bankrupt Factory Records during the recording in Barbados. They have been banned from Disneyland and the BBC (but will still appear at both) and speak now despite a million mea culpas about being boring. This interview by Dan Collins.

I’m recording you on side two of the tape I interviewed Billy Bragg on.
Gary “Gaz” Whelan (drums): Okay! Just don’t ask any political questions. He knows a lot more than me about that.
Shaun Ryder flaked on the interview today. Is he out doing something he shouldn’t?
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: He’s probably at home. We’re all really boring these days! I’m really boring. I’d lived in Australia for a few years, but that’s just too far.
You should try L.A.! It’s burning hot. I came home and poured myself a glass of Scotch and realized the Scotch is HOT!
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: Ha ha! It’s warm here. It’s fantastic! I’ve been walking about in the briefest of shorts!
What were things like when you joined the Happy Mondays?
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: From the very start of the band—from the very first song, it’s only been me and Shaun from the start to the very end. I was fifteen, back in the early eighties, and Shaun was about 19 or 20.
And you’ve always been a principal song writer.
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: Yeah! Shaun did the lyrics mainly.
I was listening to the ‘Delightful / This Feeling / Oasis’ EP from your early years. It sounds SO MUCH like Joy Division! Was that conscious?
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: That’s just because we were fucking rubbish! Maybe. We tried not to sound like Joy Division, but the first couple songs when we first started… the thing when you start a band, you start a band and learn your instruments later. And so we tended to do Joy Division songs early on, and we did a Depeche Mode song. But we made a point of not sounding like that band. Can—I thought we sounded more like them than anything. But yeah, it’s probably inevitable. We’re all miserable fuckers in Manchester. It just fucking rains and it’s grey so you just end up being miserable. So you come up with good lyrics because there’s nothing else to do.
Your first album was produced by John Cale. I heard it didn’t go down quite like you’d expected.
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: How he was then is how we are now. And he’d given up smoking the day before we started the album, which is probably bad timing. And he just ate oranges and tangerines all day. We got on quite well, but it wasn’t the session we expected it to be. I don’t think he really got us.
I was thinking about what you guys were doing in terms of the rave culture. It seems like you guys were part of the rave ‘culture’ without playing what I would consider ‘rave music.’
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: Shaun only listens—as far as I can remember—to hip-hop, and I mainly listen to electronic and soul and Felix da Housecat. There’s lots of stuff I like. So when we get in the room with guitars and live drum kit, that’s the only way we know. We tried to do electronic music organically and sometimes make a mess of it. We were big fans of A Certain Ratio, who were kind of like Joy Division but with funk and a horn section—with the great Don Johnson, a great drummer who taught me how to play. They started on Factory, but like if Joy Division had a DJ in the band and a funk drummer.
It’s funny you mentioning Shaun’s love of hip-hop. I interviewed Chuck D a few months back, and he mentioned Public Enemy being sort of the Rolling Stones of rap. Do you think with the dynamic between Shaun and Bez, you guys are like the Public Enemy of rock?
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: You know what? We’ve been likened to two U.S. acts—Public Enemy and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. That’s absolutely spot on!
Is Shaun the Chuck D, or is that you?
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: No, I’m more kind of the studio, um, who is that? Shocklee! Absolutely spot on!
It’s getting to surreal levels, with Flavor Flav becoming a reality show star in the U.S. and Bez being a reality star in the U.K. and winning Celebrity Big Brother.
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: Yeah, that’s exactly a similarity as well. Bez is good at it! He jumped off a cable car with Jack Osbourne! He’ll do anything. He always wins them all!
Bez was going to play with you guys in the States recently—at Coachella. But he couldn’t get in.
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: He couldn’t get a visa. Because he’s a very naughty boy! He’s always going bankrupt.
How did he join the band?
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: We’d been together probably four years, and we’d been doing gig shows for about two years, and Shaun was a bit embarrassed about not wanting to be seen as the front man, and so we had different friends of ours and buddies getting up and dancing with us. And he just did it once, and he’s never… we never actually asked him to join the band! He’s just never left. He just decided he’s in the band and that’s it. But it took the pressure off Shaun a little bit. He kind of took the pressure off all of us. He could just do his Flavor Flav thing! That’s all part of rock ‘n’ roll, innit? That’s what it’s all about. To me, anyway. You got to play the part.
Has his recent turn on reality TV helped or hurt the Happy Mondays?
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: Both! When he does these TV shows, people like him because he’s very genuine. He’s who he is. He’s actually quite a likable person. And he is hilarious—he says lots of ridiculous things. One of the first tours we did of the States—about 1990—we arrived in New York and we did a bit of a press conference. And there were journalists from different newspapers, and they spoke up and said what newspaper they were from. And one woman said she was from the Pennsylvania Tribune, or something and Bez said, ‘Pennsylvania? Perfect! Where Dracula’s from!’ He takes away the credibility, I suppose—but he’s funny.
Bez has been popular on TV, but Shaun was actually banned from the BBC’s Channel Four.
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: Yeah, he was actually named in the law. It’s the ‘Shaun Ryder’ something…
The ‘Shaun Ryder Rider!’ He’s literally the only person ever specifically mentioned in the Channel Four BBC Reference Guide as someone who’s not allowed to appear! But despite that, you guys appeared on there last year, right?
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: Yeah, we did a live gig. It’s all delayed. See, we’re groundbreaking! The problem, to be honest, is that we all swear when we speak to each other, and when we come do TV we find it hard not to! We’re just rubbish at playing the game! That’s been our downfall as well.
Steve Jones swore on TV in England, but they gave him a radio show here in L.A.
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: Me and Shaun did it last year. We got taken there really late and got lost. We were supposed to be there for two hours, and we only ended up doing ten minutes.
I’ve been talking with you eighteen minutes! So L.A. RECORD beats Steve Jones. Did you get to see him play with Hollywood United’s football team when you were in L.A.?
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: No! I used to play professionally for six months for Everton in Liverpool, just down the road. I was just a rookie, and had to leave it because of the band.
Do you ever wonder what could have been?
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: Every fucking day! Every fucking day.
I think you did okay.
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: I got lucky! I can’t complain. I complain all the time because I’m British—that’s what we do.
A lot of us in L.A. really like Black Grape a lot. Which band was better, Black Grape or the Happy Mondays?
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: I prefer Black Grape! Shaun’s answer would be that they’re the same band, and they kind of were almost. We were veering towards what Black Grape were, anyway. We do a couple Black Grape songs when we play live.
I know you’ve been interviewed to death about 24 Hour Party People, but what percentage of the movie was actually true?
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: I’ve not seen it properly! I’ve only seen bits of it but it’s poetic license, you know. A lot of their stories are mixed up.
There were lots of scenes of tour buses and snorting cocaine off naked women, and things like that.
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: No! We used to play a lot. We used to play Scrabble.
You never snorted cocaine off the Scrabble table?
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: No, ha ha! Absolutely not!
I have read interviews with Shaun—and maybe you—saying that in the early days of the band, he would walk around on ecstasy like every day. Just take a quarter tab or a half tab and walk through record stores.
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: That’s back in the old days! I can’t remember when I was younger! Them days were pretty bad days. It’s like asking someone about the sixties. There were days in the eighties… I was teenaged and in my early twenties. I was out partying. I can’t remember!
Was ecstasy as important in your scene as LSD was in San Francisco in the Sixties?
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: Absolutely—without a doubt!
What do you tell your kids about your drug use?
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: The funny thing is, they’re not old enough yet. But that’s my biggest fear! My parent instincts kick in.
Most parents can just lie, but you guys are on the public record. Like right now!
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: Not me personally, so I’m okay! But I’m sure they’re going to come to me one day, and say, ‘Dad, you know your band, this and that.’ I’m sure that’s what Mick Jagger had to do.
At least your kids won’t ask if you had sex with David Bowie. But didn’t Shaun get kicked off a plane once for threatening a flight attendant with a plastic fork?
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: No, that didn’t happen.
I looked it up on Wikipedia!
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: No way! Absolutely not. That never happened. Ian Brown from the Stone Roses got sent to jail for something on a plane, but it certainly wasn’t us!
Were the Stone Roses a band you felt pressure from—like competition? Were there other bands at the time you felt pressure from?
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: We never felt pressure to do better.
Maybe it was the opposite? A rising tide hoists up all the boats?
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: Maybe. But we never thought about it. That was our problem. We never thought about things. We’d just do them!
Was there a particular show where you guys looked out in the audience, and you realized, ‘Wow, we’ve really done something. We’ve crossed a threshold?’
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: There was a gig at the Free Trade Hall, which is a famous building in Manchester where the Sex Pistols played and Bob Dylan played with his electric band. That was probably the one. Definitely. I think it could be ‘89. I could be way off.
Were you surprised when in the U.S., news about the Madchester scene became totally eclipsed by grunge band coverage?
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: Not surprised. I think punk rock was a very English thing, and grunge was a very American thing. I think it was great. I was never a huge fan, and then I saw Nirvana do MTV Unplugged, and they did ‘All Apologies,’ and I thought that was absolutely mind-blowing. Dinosaur Jr. I thought were great as well!
Were there some American bands in the late eighties that you were influenced by?
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: Talking Heads were a big influence early on. We were massive Talking Heads fans. We liked the Breeders; we liked the Pixies. We did our first U.S. tour with the Pixies, and became great friends. They were a massive influence. American music is the greatest music of all time!
I listen to it a lot.
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: The Rolling Stones were the biggest influence though. Charlie Watts’s killer drumming—Mick Jagger was one of the greatest frontmen ever, along with Jim Morrison.
Those guys had a bad-boy image, which definitely you guys had as well. Was there a conscious decision to play up that side of yourselves?
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: I don’t think so. That’s just who we listened to. It just found our way to our conscious soul, but it wasn’t a conscious decision. Early hip-hop was a massive massive influence, but we all read the Stones books and the Doors books.
Now that you guys are all friends again, what are some of the bad things that made you break up in the first place?
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: We did years and years of touring—the usual one in the back of the small fucking van—and then all of a sudden we’re getting all these luxuries, and people are going off getting their own friends, and there’d be five or six different parties on the bus. We weren’t hanging round together. There’d be whispering—the he-say-she-says—and because they’re old friends, you don’t want to bring anything up. And then things fester. And then Factory went bankrupt.
Some blame has been thrown your way about that.
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: Someone said we spent too much money in Barbados. When actually we didn’t spend that much money. We were forced to do an album quickly because there hadn’t been an album out for a few years—an album we hadn’t finished writing. And then everyone thinks that because Factory went bankrupt, it was due to us. I think the film kind of portrayed that…
Giant booze and drug bills?
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: I think we probably had a large bill, but I don’t think it was us at all. In fact, I think they probably owed us cash. It was just badly run financially. They were a great label—I would never have wanted another label. Tony Wilson was a great champion of us. One of my heroes—he was fantastic. At the time, a lot of major labels in the UK were interested in us, but they were trying to mold us into an image and have these haircuts and wear these silly clothes. And we went to Factory, and he said, ‘You’ve got no image—that’s your image!’ So we loved Factory, and were big fans. If we could go back to the beginning and knew what would happen, we would still go through them again because they were just fantastic. Financially, they just weren’t great. But that’s what was great about them! They just did things. A great idea—just go for it!
Tony Wilson actually introduced you at Coachella last year, right?
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: That was the biggest disappointment—that that was the last time I saw him. He gave us this massive introduction, and we went on stage. And the guy who runs our computer with stuff on it, he hadn’t configured the power supply, and something didn’t happen, and a lot of stuff wasn’t working, and all the guys were playing different tempos. And the gig wasn’t very good. I thought we let Tony down. I was ashamed. It was beyond our power—the computer went just completely fucking barmy, but I just felt we let him down a little bit.
What’s the craziest time you’ve had in your most recent reformation?
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: We’re all very boring these days. Seriously, we do the shows—and Bez is his own person—but as soon as we do the show, we’re back to the hotel, have a couple drinks, and that’s it. I never thought I’d say that, but we’re boring! I just can’t do it anymore. Shaun’s doing his own thing, I have this kind of electronic, guitar/hip hop band called the Hippie Mafia…
The ‘Hippie Mafia?’
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: It’s like Sweethearts of the Rodeo crossed with Public Enemy. I can’t party and be in two bands. I just can’t do it! How fucking sensible do I sound? That’s what happens when you grow up.
I’m in my early thirties. When can I expect that to kick in?
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: When I had kids, it kicked in. The last two years. But I don’t like flying, so I always drink when I get on a plane.
Otherwise, you might threaten a flight attendant with a plastic fork! What are you guys doing next?
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: We just got back from Australia. It was a long flight, so I had a lot of drinking to do.
Which airline has the best complimentary booze?
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: We like Virgin! Virgin business class is the way to go.
Would you let them use one of your songs in a commercial?
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: Anyone can use one of our songs in a commercial! Please do!
Where are you playing in L.A.?
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: We’re playing Club Nokia in September, and in Anaheim at the House of Blues…
That’s next to Disneyland. Have you ever been?
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: I haven’t been. But we did our second or third album in the Capitol records studio where the Beach Boys did Pet Sounds, which we didn’t realize until later. Someone went to Disneyland—I can’t remember which one, but they called the studio and had got caught for pinching something from one of the shops and thrown out. So I think we’re banned from Disneyland! Is it good?
Space Mountain is pretty good.
Gary “Gaz” Whelan: I don’t like rides. I don’t like heights. I don’t even like being as tall as I am!

HAPPY MONDAYS WITH THE PSYCHEDELIC FURS ON FRI., SEPT. 18, AT CLUB NOKIA, 800 W. OLYMPIC BLVD., DOWNTOWN. 7 PM / $27.50-$35 / ALL AGES. CLUBNOKIA.COM. VISIT HAPPY MONDAYS AT HAPPYMONDAYSONLINE.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/HAPPYMONDAYSONLINE.

Download: The Mekons “Dickie, Chalkie And Nobby”

(from Natural out now on Touch And Go)

The Mekons lived Leeds but dreamed Texas and Tennessee and after finding their feet in first-wave punk songs like “Where Were You,” they left the world of Rough Trade for the open range. They are working on a new album tentatively called 100 Years and singer-guitarist-activist Jon Langford speaks as he takes his dog to the vet. This interview by Chris Ziegler.

Is it true that the son of Donald Rumsfeld is a really big Mekons fan?
Jon Langford (guitar/vocals): That’s a good question. It might be true, but he has not revealed himself to us. I never got to the bottom of that but I heard he was wandering around the clubs of Chicago with a Mekons t-shirt on. Donald Rumsfeld sort of wandered around Chicago as well. He was a congressman from here so he was occasionally spotted in sushi restaurants. And I know people who actually know him and I always wonder what I would do if I actually ran into him.
Do you think you could beat him up? Mekon vs. Rumsfeld?
He’s kind of like some sort of crazy cockroach. You’d probably keep treading on him and he’d just get up and run around.
Do you think that might be an effective way for art and music to provoke social change? By specifically targeting the hearts and minds of the children of the rich and powerful?
I’d like to think something of what we’ve been singing about for the last twenty years may have rubbed off on him—he’d probably want to wrestle his dad to the ground as well, you know? But you know what? I think I know about as much about that as you do. I don’t know. Our songs were never particularly aimed at the sons of the rich and famous.
Where were they aimed?
They weren’t really aimed at anyone. They were aimed at ourselves, I think. Most of the songs we made to sort of please ourselves or to exorcise things that are in ourselves. I think a lot of the Mekons songs are quite sad, which is interesting because we’re not necessarily sad people. I think what’s good about the Mekons is that there’s always been a kind of cushion—the fact that there are a lot of people and we all kind of share the duties. There’s never been one person with the whole burden. A lot of the people in the Mekons have been through quite a lot together. I wouldn’t even say our politics are necessarily the same or our life stories are the same but there’s definitely a shared instinctive feeling about the world. Obviously, or we wouldn’t be doing this project together so long.
What is the essential sadness in the Mekons discography?
Well, we don’t come together and act sad. We come together and have a good time. But the music that comes out is often very—I don’t know, maybe gallows humor? We always try to describe the world we live in and anyone with half a brain would find it pretty difficult to write happy songs all the time.
I’ve heard that they did a neurolinguistic study of various genres of music and that country music is overwhelmingly objectively the saddest type of music they found. Do you think there’s anything to that?
Have you ever heard the music from the Bahamas? There’s some traditional vocal and solo vocal stuff that’s mostly unaccompanied that I think is the saddest thing I’ve ever heard. People who are poor and have crap lives will probably make sad music. I guess rich people who have lots of money and an easy life, they might be sad as well—but they probably don’t bother to write songs about their lives. Probably too busy spending their money.
In ‘Big Zombie,’ is the line ‘I’m just not human tonight’ a Chandler reference?
Absolutely. Yeah. It’s an L.A. song and we’ll be playing it. When we kind of started up again in the mid-’80s, we were very interested in Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. We were touring the States a lot and that was our reference for what we thought the States should be like. Dashiell Hammett was our version of San Francisco and Raymond Chandler was our version of L.A. Every time I walked into a room, I’d expect to find a body. Most of the time we didn’t.
What drew you to honky-tonks like Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge when you came to America?
When we first came to the States we got obsessed about music and it was kind of like… most of the cowboy shops we went to seemed to be full of black people, Hispanic people, Asian people and English rock bands. So it was funny—just how you can literally claim a piece of this fantasy mythical America by buying a Stetson or a pair of cowboy boots and then going back home to Leeds and strutting around in your cowboy boots. They’d ask, ‘Where did you get those?’ and I’d say, ‘Aw, I got these in Chicago,’ you know? People would come ’round my house after the pub and I’d be playing Ernest Tubb and Merle Haggard, and these were all people who thought they wanted to go listen to acid-house or something. They thought we’d lost our minds.
There’s a quote from Ernest Tubb I wanted to ask you about. People would say, ‘Aw, Ernest, you’re so flat, anyone could sing the way you can. You just got lucky.’ And he would say, ‘Well, I sing that way on purpose. I want everyone who hears this to think that they could do it. I want them to feel that I’m no different from them.’
Is that from that Peter Guralnick book? Lost Highway? There’s another great quote in there where he says he’s singing for the boys back on the farm but he says by the end of his life the farm wasn’t even there anymore. But he wanted those farm boys to be able to sing his songs. Yeah, that’s a very Mekons-type thing. When I read that, I thought, ‘There is a connection between that and punk.’ It’s been said before that there was a connection between the Mekons and country music and I thought that was ludicrous, but as I listened to that stuff and really began to love it, it became more and more interesting to me. And then to have someone articulate it like that… We always meant the Mekons to be like ‘Anyone can do it.’ Anyone can pick up the guitar. There’s a quote from Mary Harron about the Mekons that kind of sums it up: ‘Rock ‘n’ roll is probably better played by people who can’t play it very well.’ She said the Mekons were the only people to base a band solely on that fact. It was kind of a jab as well as a compliment, but I think that’s true. That really struck a chord with me—I’ve always being drawn to music that was functional rather than virtuoso. Music that kind of has to be made because there was a need to make it.
Who are you thinking of?
Well, actually I was talking to Peter Hammill of Van der Graaf Generator who came to town the other night. I got to hang out with them and I was talking to them about what they were listening to on the bus and they were telling me about Olivier Messiaen who is an avant-garde composer who wrote something called The Quartet for the End of Time while he was in a P.O.W. camp or a concentration camp. As Hammill said, that was music that had to be made. It was a quartet because that’s what he had at the camp and they thought they were going to die, so they wrote this music. I’ve been listening to it and it’s like—you’ve got something as primitive as the Mekons when we first started and then you’ve got Ernest Tubb and reggae music that was there because it was on the street with a message that people could dance to. And then you’ve got Olivier Messiaen which is like music that couldn’t be kept in. It had to come out. It wasn’t anything to do with any commercial desires or all that. It’s just music that had to exist. There’s a lot of music like that and I find that I’m just drawn to it. It was actually great talking to those guys because they’re much older than me. To be sitting on a tour bus with a bunch of old guys drinking wine and talking about things you’ve never heard of—it was really, really cool. Peter Hammill said, ‘Yeah, that’s the secret, as long as you don’t pander.’ ‘No pandering allowed!’ he was shouting. ‘That’s the trouble with all this bloody music nowadays. It’s all just fucking pandering!’ And I thought that was pretty good. That’s what the Mekons do.
Steve Wynn said that it’s better to make a record that is just one person’s favorite in the entire world than to make a record that everyone thinks is just pretty good.
I totally, totally agree with that. I think that something happened to music when the idea was that everyone would like it. I think that’s completely unnatural. When we were on A&M, they told us that 25,000 records sales wasn’t very good and we were like, ‘That’s good enough for us!’ We’d feel very uncomfortable if more than 25,000 people bought our record. That’s more people than ever go to see any of the football teams I supported! But that was a failure. There’s a hierarchy in the music industry where you have all these people floundering around not making a living who are—to me— doing what they should do and doing a good job of it. And then you have these people who managed to hit on the magic formula—finding what it is that everybody wants and it’s all backwards. They should be punished for learning that secret. Paul McCartney should be taken out and punished.
What particular punishment would be appropriate for that?
A good lashing. No, I’m only joking, I’m only joking. Again, the structure of the industry is the problem. That’s what it’s geared to—it’s just not geared to having lots of different types of music for lots of different types of people to enjoy. It doesn’t recognize the fact that people are different—that not everybody wants to listen to the sort of crap that’s on the radio everyday. It’s very hard anywhere in this country when you listen to the radio to find stuff that’s worth listening to. I don’t think that makes me weird.
You said once that ‘society dehumanizes from the top down.’ I’m wondering if that reproduces within pop culture.
Yeah—most of the stuff that I’ve written and the paintings that I’ve made about country and western music, it was kind of about using that as a microcosm for the whole society. The trend is there and you can see it so obviously in what happened to country music. I think that goes through everything. And actually that quote, that’s not me—I didn’t say that. John Peel said that. I might have been quoting him because he said that about ‘God Save the Queen’ when that record came out and everyone was up in arms and he made that quote defending the record. He said it was a pretty simple record and that the message was society dehumanizes from the top down.
I have to commend your memory for quotes.
I know where I pinch all my best stuff from. You know, Peel was a Radio One DJ and to come out with something that profound was pretty powerful. To have somebody in the BBC defending the Sex Pistols when it looked like—when that record came out, you know… they could have been hung from lampposts and the majority of people in the country would have been really pleased. It was a very scary time for a little while.
Have you seen that kind of response to anything else in music?
Ice-T’s ‘Cop Killer’ was kind of interesting as well. It brought up an interesting debate about whether he really wanted to kill a cop or talk about someone else. It brought up the debate about what you can write about. Why is a song always in the first person? People always think when you write a song that it’s you talking. I had that problem singing ‘Cocaine Blues’ which, you know, is a Johnny Cash song. Obviously I’m not someone who takes cocaine and kills people, but it’s still a great song. The history of those songs is old and ancient.
Someone once asked you if there was a light at the end of the tunnel and you said that now that you have kids, you’re going to hijack the train, turn it around and drive it back.
I just felt like a lot of people tell me to shut my mouth because I’m not from here. I’ve got that a number of times. Mostly in hate mail, especially when we were doing the anti-death penalty stuff. I really got some quite extraordinarily vicious and unpleasant stuff. But I just felt like having kids was definitely a galvanizing moment for me. It made me feel like this is when you have to get involved. I can’t just be like non-American anymore and just shrug my shoulders and go, ‘Oh yeah, they’re just all fucking crazy.’ Because I’m one of you now.
What kind of world do you want to build for your children?
We need to dismantle what was created over the last fifty years, really. The food industry for a start. It’s a fucking hideous Frankenstein that’s killing us all, you know? I really believe that. I don’t think I’m some kind of freak. I’m not some kind of hippie vegetarian. Not that there’s anything wrong with hippie vegetarians, to be honest. I was always prejudiced against people who had, like, strong views about things like that. Now it’s kind of like, ‘Fuck, things are really, seriously wrong.’
How do you avoid becoming discouraged?
I see a lot of people feel the same way. I see the election of Obama, which I thought was impossible, you know? I’m encouraged because it wasn’t just me sitting in my bedroom. Wow, that’s change. That’s real serious change. A lot of sort of naysaying cynics that I know were like, ‘Aw, it’s never going to happen in America. The only reason this happened is because he’s just the same as the other people.’ I don’t think he is, you know? I don’t think he can be. It’s got to change, you know?

THE MEKONS ON SUN., JULY 26, AT McCABE’S GUITAR SHOP, 3101 PICO BLVD., SANTA MONICA. 9:30 PM / $16 / ALL AGES. MCCABES.COM. AND ON MON., JULY 27, AT THE ECHO, 1822 SUNSET BLVD., ECHO PARK. 8:30 PM / $12-$14 / 18+. ATTHEECHO.COM. VISIT THE MEKONS AT MEKONS.DE OR MYSPACE.COM/THEMEKONS.

Via BBC—author J.G. Ballard has died after what is being reported as a “long illness.” Ballard was one of our favorite authors here at L.A. RECORD headquarters and we are very sad to wake up this Sunday morning and find him gone. In his honor we suggest re-reading “The Watchtowers” or “Build-Up” and listening to Pere Ubu. An artful obit from the BBC:

JG Ballard’s novels, disquieting, visionary and often apocalyptic fables of technological and social anarchy set him at the very pinnacle of contemporary writing.

The self-professed “architect of dreams, sometimes nightmares” enjoyed a cult status, and Steven Spielberg’s film of his book Empire of the Sun brought him a a popular fanbase, too.

Fusing external landscapes of futuristic visions with the internal workings of his characters’ minds, Ballard created a series of montages in which the world was, in turns, flooded, desiccated, crystallised and concreted over.

He was, some said, the seer of the post-Hiroshima age.