ALEX JAMES

PART 1

Jan 6, 2007

John LeKay: 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. 

JL:  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

 

JL: 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.

 

 

 JL: 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.
 

JL: 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?

JL: 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?

 

JL: 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.

JL: (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.

JL; 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. 

JL: 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.

 

 

JL:  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.

JL: 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.

JL: 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

 

JL: 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?

JL:  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?

JL: 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.

JL: 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.

JL: 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.

 

JL: 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).

JL: 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

 

JL:  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).

JL:  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.

JL: Like hod carriers for example?

AJ: Yeah.

JL: I actually did that. (Laughs).

AJ: I did that as well. (Laughs).

 

JL: 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!

Bass on the shoulder

Continue to Part 2