Heyoka Magazine: You have many diverse interests ranging from rocket science,
art, music, journalism and television broadcasting, just to name a
few.
Let's start with fine art, if that's ok with you. What kind of artwork were you making when studying at London's Goldsmiths
Art
School? Was it more geared towards painting or sculpture and are
you working on any visual art projects at the present?
Alex James: I have
had no formal art training or music training, for that matter. I
did go to Goldsmiths but I was studying French. I keep telling
people I'm not an artist, but I keep getting shows. Are you an
artist because you think you are or because other people think you
are? Are you a musician just because you've sold lots of records?
Who knows.
Alex James
AJ: What is certain is
that I've just accepted the position of Artist in Residence at the
Department of Astrophysics at Oxford. I want to play with magnets
and energy and I want to know what shape the universe is. I'm pretty
sure it's flat and hyperspherical. That's just a gut feeling
though. I think scientists and artists have a lot to learn from
each other. Art and science are both methods of approaching truth.
They meet somewhere and in that place, there is music.
The esoteric language
of science is more profound than any human endeavour, but it is
unappealing to most people. On the other hand, the esoteric language
of art is a large part of its appeal. It's partly why ghastly rich
people have huge art collections - to make themselves appear
sophisticated.
HM: Yes. Did you
always want to be a musician, even before you went to Goldsmiths, or did that just sort of happen when you were there?
AJ: I wanted to be able to play
the piano. My dad taught me how to play twelve bar blues. I just
fiddled away on my own - picking out tunes mainly. Though I played in
bands from when I was about sixteen. The first person I saw when I
arrived at Goldsmiths was Graham Coxon, Blur's guitarist. He was
doing art. It was a good environment for the genesis of a band,
particularly at that time. Damien Hirst was there and Sam
Taylor-Wood, and everybody. The whole of the Brit art crowd
basically. That's where it all started.
Art colleges are good places for bands
to form; much better than those pop music academy type places. Music
is irrepressible, though. Some of the
best music has been made against all odds - by people in chains for
goodness sake.
In a way, the less you know the
better. You don't have to know everything to write a good pop song.
You have to know one thing, and sing about it, as simply and straightforwardly as possible.
.
Graham Coxon
HM: I like
this one.
I got my head checked,
by a jumbo jet.
it wasn't easy
but nothing is. no.
AJ: Damon's lyrics. I did the loud
guitars - it's two basses actually; one going through a home made fuzzer.
HM: I know you like Truman Capote. Who are some of your favourite poets and
have you read much Arthur Rimbaud?
AJ: Don't know Rimbaud very well. Love Appollinaire; 'Par hasard et
pas rasé' is my favourite opening phrase in any language. I don't
read poets
properly, I skim through them. Poems are too long for the 21st
Century. One line is all there is time for. I think Robert
Louis Stevenson is my favourite author these days. The novel peaked
in the 19th Century. I do love Truman, but he is a terrible old
queen.
HM: When you go into
a recording studio to make an album, do you prefer to plan it
out and practice a lot beforehand (to work out the kinks), or do you prefer to just wing it and leave a lot of room for spontaneity
and let things just sort of happen?
AJ: The precise moment you write
something new is a moment of pure spontaneity. To start with, you
tend to have everything prepared before you go into a studio. The
studio eventually becomes your working environment. A studio is just
where you keep everything that you need in order to work. Once
you've got that side of it organized, all you've got to do is keep
turning up every day.
Guillaume Apollinaire Jumbo Jet Head check.
Damien Hirst
It is amazing
that we can understand these things. There is a kind of subtle
language there. I think what I'm trying to get at, is the fact
that art is kind of not instantly understandable and that's often part of
its appeal. I really think it makes you sophisticated if you can
appreciate art. It kind of makes people want to understand it. That
doesn't exist in science; there's no sort of incentive, no
social incentive for people to understand science. It doesn't sort of
impress your neighbors, or your rich friends. Do you know what I
mean?
HM: Yeah.
AJ: It's funny.
It's been a huge boom, the art scene, since it all started at
Goldsmiths College in the late 80s. It's incredible what
happened and mainly it's down to Damien Hirst, who was a visonary
figure and a very intelligent man.
Now there's a
Tate Modern which is a tourist attraction in London. It has sort
of completely repackaged art as a kind of must have thing. It's
probably different in London as it is in New York. 60 percent of the
art market is in America, someone told me the other day. Is that
true?
HM: Yeah, I think
it's true.
AJ: Yes. You
can't open a restaurant here or a hotel without having a
contemporary art portfolio. It's part of the furniture and that
really wasn't always the case. There's a real sort of art in
the media - the personalities of the artists, that are
talked about in the gossip magazines.
HM: (Laughs).
AJ: There's real interesting art figures in the media firmament. Science is
languishing where art was languishing before Damien Hirst; and
Charles Saatchi is largely responsible as well. He is a very clever
man with a brilliant idea. He just went around all the degree shows buying
the stuff that he liked and he bought it cheap and kind of invested
in the artists themselves rather than buying further down the food
chain. He basically bought from artists that were selling
work for hundreds of pounds and had faith that he
could judge what was good. I think he and Damien really started the
whole thing. They sort of found each other.
HM; Yes, I remember
Damien saying - one minute he was virtually unknown and then all these London taxi drivers started recognizing him and
saying are you the guy that cuts cow's heads off.
Damien Hirst
AJ: Yeah. It works on
a lot of levels like that. I think he was the
first person (first artist), an interesting enough person for the
tabloid newspapers to really sort of get interested in. He was
very good at engaging people with his work. It was hard to ignore.
It did have that mass appeal.
HM: Yes it did.
AJ: It did have
sophisticated layers of meanings as well. Like nobody really knew
what was going on. There was a fucking cow chopped in half and that
sort of lets you notice it.
HM:
What about the
esoteric language of music and how
that affects us on various
levels. Have you
done any scientific
research on music and this sort of thing?
AJ: Well, I think
listening to music is a lot like looking at ink blots. There's
absolutely no meaning there whatsoever. It's purely complete, it's
abstracted from any kind of meaning; it doesn't have meaning does
it? You just project what you feel.
HM: Like a
Rorschach test.
AJ: Exactly, yeah. I think if you listen to pop music and say this is boring, then
you are really talking about yourself (laughter) to a certain
degree. Good music isn't such an esoteric language. I mean, it's kind of a unifying, universal language; especially melodies that last
hundreds of years. Old folk melodies and nursery rhymes. Singing
nursery rhymes for my kids.
HM: Yes.
AJ: It never really
occurred to me that these are priceless works of art; some of those
old melodies. A good simple melody is definitely a sublime work of
genius; it's such a hard thing to do. We take all these tunes that we
know for granted. Especially, the simple one's that we learn in the
nursery. I sort of think that's where I'm at with music at the
moment. Melody appeals more and more as I get older. More than words
that used to, or drums. Music's a lot about the drums. (Laughs) So you
can bounce up and down to. Something to sort of dissipate your
anger. (Laughs) But melody, more and more as a language is sort
of intriguing me at the moment. That's what I'm thinking about. I've
been listening to a lot of classical music; just keeping a good ear
out for melodies that I can steal. (Laughs).
Rorschach
test card
Alex James
HM: What about exotic
music from various other cultures or anything like
that?
AJ: I kind of do, but I've been going back to the great western
composers. The 12 tone western scale. I've been reading about
other harmonic systems and the western one isn't the most
sophisticated. It's not idiom; its what I know. I
still feel there's a lot I could do with that. The way pianos and
guitars for that matter are tuned . Do you know much about
intonation?
HM: Just a little
bit.
AJ: It's pretty
complicated. Basically the way the 12 tone scale derived is
that if you start with a note, say an A which is 440 hertz (440
vibrations a second). And if you double that number of vibrations a
second, 880, you get the next A above it. That's an octave and that's
the most simplest harmonic relationship.
The second most frequent
harmonic relationship is times one and a half. So, you times 440 by 1
and a half which give you 660. Which is a fifth, the perfect fifth
above A, which is an E. That's the next most important harmonic
relationship.
Now how you get a 12 tone scale is you start off with
your fundamental base frequency and you multiply it by one and a
half and divide by 2, when necessary, so that you are staying within
the 440 to 880 hertz range. Do you follow?
HM: Yes.
AJ: How you get the
12 notes that there are for the 12 divisions; if you multiply by 1 and
a half 12 times, you get back to almost 880 hertz.
HM: So the
mathematics of harmonics is really a science?
AJ: Yes, absolutely,
it's very scientific. If you do that with 440, multiply that by 1 and
a half, 12 times, you don't actually get 880, you get something like
890. So it's not mathematically perfect. So what you do is lose the
10 extra cycles per second. You sort of spread them over the whole
octave, so that when you play a piano, the notes aren't actually
perfectly in tune. Which is why violins can sound sweeter than
guitars. And why barber shop harmonies and a-capella voices sound particularly resonant; because they are singing perfectly in
tune. It's very interesting and it does absorb me.
Alex James
Blur
The upshot is it's
kind of experimental. And I think what you want to do with a
piece of music is to be as clear as you can. It's
a way of expressing yourself. Do you want to express yourself
with primary colours or with an infinite number of subtle shades.
And pop music is all about primary colours. It's very simple,
bright, in your face, kind of sloganistic. It's kind of like adverts;
records have the same kind of principle - very trite.
I find harmonic
analysis fascinating; and I've worked on scales putting everything
exactly in tune. You can play in tune in one key only. If you tune
the guitar, actually you can't do it on a guitar because the hertz
would have to be moveable. The reason why an E minor sounds fucking
fantastic on a guitar and an E Flat cord (E Flat majour hardly
has any oomph) is because you are tuning your strings on the guitar
to an E. Or an A, so E minor is a fucking lovely cord, but E
flat majour is very satisfying on a guitar. If you play
an E Flat Tuba, it sounds great in E flat.
HM: Yes.
AJ: I think the
more absorbed you get in music, the more these sorts of things
intrigue you. But at the end of the day, there's a million brilliant
melodies that haven't been written on a piano and it's like - do you
want to deconstruct the piano and take it to bits and invent
everything, or do you want to write a cracking melody.
When you're sitting at the piano, it's like you are sitting on top of a huge
mountain of research and centuries of evolution and Pythagoras working out that a bar is twice as long as another one.
So much hard work has been done for you. When you sit at a piano, all
you've got to do is have one decent idea. (laughs)
I am kind of interested
in the science of it but you don't have to know everything.
It's sort of like you don't have to have a huge vocabulary to
be a good writer. You've got to have some good
thoughts.
HM: How do you
usually get inspiration or these ideas?
AJ: I think the most
important thing to do is just to get to fucking work in the morning.
Just turn up and stay there, go home at the end of the day and think
about something else. I think when you're
starting, it's just kind of waiting for inspiration and you're waiting
for your great ideas to happen; but if you just turn up in the morning
and you just start to do things - things happen and sometimes
they're shit and sometimes they're great. Certainly with music.
That's why the
long playing album exists. That's because you have to make 12 songs
to get 4 good ones. (Laughs). It is very rare that you get an album
that's consistently brilliant.
So it's 99
perspiration and 1 percent inspiration. I think that's what works for
me. Just turn up and get on with it. You know it's the hardest thing.
You can learn anything; you can learn particle physics, rocket
science - anything, but the most difficult thing to do is to make time
to turn up and do it. That is the hard thing. (Laughs).
HM: The discipline of
it?
AJ: Yeah, exactly. I think that's a real disappointment. I thought it was all
about being a genius and staying in bed all day and just having
brilliant thoughts occasionally and you can do it like that but it's
much more effective to haul your ass out of bed and get yourself to
a studio.
Alex James. Photo by Julie
Hod carrier
HM: I remember Lawrence Olivier described himself as being
a workman
once. Do you see recording or even doing rock concerts as going to
work?
AJ: (Laughs).
HM: I mean do
you see it as a regular kind of job?
AJ: It is very much a
job and no matter how good your job is, it's not as much fun as what
you do after work. When the band was beginning, the shows were
kind of very shambolic, chaotic, visceral, energetic events and we
thought that was the right way of going about things. Just being as spontaneous and creative as we could possibly be
- the whole time we were on stage; but when you are doing it night after night,
it does actually get a bit hit and miss like that. I do think people
want to see a show and I think you have to decide what it is
you want to deliver and deliver it.
It's sort of a hard profession.
It's a repetitive process playing music. Life does involve repetitive
tasks and playing music is some of the most delightful repetitive
tasks there is, but it's really a matter of embellishing exactly what
it is your going to play and playing it as well as you can. So I
guess that sort of means it is work, but it's good work. Building,
that's work, but that's a kind of primal primitive good kind
of work as well. Its very sort of human, when you think of people on
building sites.
HM: Like hod carriers
for example?
AJ: Yeah.
HM: I actually did
that. (Laughs).
AJ: I did that as
well. (Laughs).
HM: That's funny.
That's quite an interesting comparison, going from hod carrying to
doing these rock concerts. (Laughs).
AJ: You know, when I worked on
building sites I dreamed about being in a band. I couldn't think of
anything further removed. But, building, or being a hod
carrier, you're not really at the creative end of things but, it's a
very primal human need to build something. When your making music
you are building something. It's not something physical, but a pop
song is a very kind of, not contrived, that's not the right word,
but it has a very formal structure - very formal. To get a
song on the radio it's got to be a certain length, a certain shape.
You know things have got to repeat themselves and it's as tight as a
sonnet really. As songs go into verse, chorus, verse, chorus,
different bit, chorus chorus. That's a blue print for a rock song,
but it's not necessarily restrictive, it's just the way it is. And
it doesn't stop you from
expressing yourself but it's very formalized.
The way that music
works is you buy an album which is a 3 and a half minute pop
song . It's changing actually which is exciting, but why should music
be sold in those quantities, why an album. Why should everybody make
12 track albums, half an hour, 3 minute, upside down back to front
violins and bongos, but it's all you have to sort of engage.
It's not so much
like that for art, unless you've got the gallery and museum
infrastructure. But music is
omniscient, you
can't go to the shops to buy a loaf of bread without hearing a pop
song - it's everywhere. There's a huge infrastructure disseminating
music everywhere. It's inescapable. You have to decide if you want to
plug into that or sort of be on your own, and nobody knows what
the fuck you do and gives a shit about you. If you can use all the
resources that are there, that's brilliant!
