FLA 12: Ian Greaves
Fifteen years ago, the writer and editor Ian Greaves and myself were going mad. We were spending most spare minutes of our lives researching and eventually writing a 700-page book about the long-running BBC Radio 4 topical sketch series, Week Ending. We know. The BBC Written Archives Centre at Caversham, Berkshire, became a semi-regular workstation for our frankly ludicrous project.
Prime Minister You Wanted to See Me? – A History of Week Ending took us a whole year to complete. Two things, I believe, kept us going. One was the knowledge that we were undertaking a subject that genuinely interested us – how do you find new and exciting creative talent in radio comedy? The other was the amusement that we were obsessively cataloguing and analysing every single episode (1132 of them) of a programme that we never actually liked that much. The writer and critic David Quantick (FLA 6) was kind enough to give it (we think) a glowing review for it in The Word magazine in early 2009, ending his piece with the phrase, ‘makes the Domesday Book look like Baby Spice’s autobiography.’ There’s one for our headstones.
I first met Ian Greaves, online and then in person, in 2000. He was and is much younger than I am, and was already frighteningly well-informed on broadcasting in particular. He appeared to have seen far more television than even I had. We would work together regularly over the next decade or so, on articles, doomed book pitches and ultimately Prime Minister, You Wanted to See Me? We often take the piss out of ourselves for writing that book, but we remain immensely proud of it.
Together we also worked as consultants on Lucian Randall’s acclaimed Chris Morris biography, Disgusting Bliss (2010), and separately we contributed chapters for No Known Cure (2013), an assembly of new, exclusive essays on all things Morris.
Subsequently, Ian has contributed to many Radio 4 documentaries and series, and to BFI Screenonline. Plus he has compiled and edited some magisterial anthologies. The Art of Invective (2015, with David Rolinson and John Williams) presents highlights and curios from the playwright Dennis Potter’s extensive archive of non-fiction, while One Thing and Another (2017) is an incredible collection of Jonathan Miller’s writing on everything from humour to opera to surgery to theatre. ‘This stunning collection is a must,’ was US talk show legend Dick Cavett’s reaction. Dick Cavett!
One subject Ian and I have always chatted about sporadically, although we’ve rarely written collaboratively on the subject, is music, and so I knew I wanted Ian as a guest on First Last Anything. Partly because I’ve often wondered how he became so immersed in what can be some of the noisiest and most uncompromising music around. But also because he is forever tremendous company and makes me laugh a lot.
In August 2022, one Sunday, we spent about 90 minutes exploring Ian’s itinerary from novelty childhood records, through pop epics, towards what you might call The Music of Sound. Enjoy!
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IAN GREAVES
My persistent memory of the first record I had was ‘The Birdie Song’ [by The Tweets]. I’ve got a cousin, Mark, who’s a few years older than me and my elder sister, and I know him very well these days, but back in the Eighties he was this sort of distant figure who would ask for a Tom Waits album at Christmas from the family. He’s remained good on music ever since, but I’m sure he delivered ‘The Birdie Song’ to me. Maybe he didn’t want it in the house!
I’d listen to the charts with my sister. Keith Harris and Orville, ‘Orville’s Song’, that was a record we very much approved of. I’ve never really had any snobbery about novelty records, and I’ve always quite liked comedy records.
JUSTIN LEWIS
You’ve got to start somewhere, as a listener. Hardly anyone at the age of four is going to be at the 100 Club watching The Clash or whoever.
IAN GREAVES
And my parents had records. A great bone of contention in my dad’s life was that his dad got rid of all his Beatles albums as a sort of punishment – and he was a fan throughout, although I think he went off them a bit when the drugs kicked in.
But if my dad is reading this, the Beatles album in our house was Rock & Roll Music, the original double LP from 1976. And I’ve got that copy right here! [holds aloft] A weird collision of stuff. But I’ve always had sympathy with Alan in I’m Alan Partridge where he says his favourite Beatles album is ‘The Best of the Beatles’. I always say, ‘Oh I don’t own any Beatles records’ in a slightly posturing way, as if to suggest that the scenic route is more enjoyable. But it’s really because I nicked this off my dad. I think I only heard Abbey Road two years ago. They’re fine. [Laughs] I hear they’re good.
JUSTIN LEWIS
They’ll go a long way.
IAN GREAVES
So my dad had The Beatles and Ray Charles, I adore Ray Charles, my first connection with jazz really. I was slanted to the poppier end of my parents’ collection early on: ABBA, Queen, Motown compilations, there was a great 60s rock and pop CD collection… wish I could remember the name of that. Later, as a student, I was hoovering up mood albums. People like Al Caiola, who I still really love. But it transpired that my mother actually had things like George Shearing albums, Dave Brubeck. I imagine I was put off by the covers when I was younger but later I would put them on to minidisc and take them back to university with me.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Did anything happen with musical instruments and tuition?
IAN GREAVES
I probably lasted two piano lessons. Back then, if it was something I was really interested, I’d be really good at it. Anything so-so tended not to get that treatment.
JUSTIN LEWIS
What sort of age are we talking there?
IAN GREAVES
About 12.
JUSTIN LEWIS
An age where it could go either way: obsession or apathy.
IAN GREAVES
And because I was 12 in 1990, we’ve neatly arrived at the year of my first record.
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FIRST: FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD: Welcome to the Pleasuredome (ZTT Records, 1984, released on CD, 1985)
Extract: ‘Two Tribes (Annihilation)’
[NB: During the early years of Trevor Horn’s Zang Tumb Tuum label, especially 1983–85, numerous versions of its releases appeared in the shops, with different mixes, sleeves and contents. Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s singles and first album was no exception – the CD version of Welcome to the Pleasuredome, which came out nearly a year after the LP and cassette versions had a noticeably different running order, including this first 12” version of ‘Two Tribes’ rather than the three-minute single. More recent CD reissues of Welcome to the Pleasuredome have reverted to the running order of the original LP, and so this 12” version (subtitled ‘Annihilation’) can only currently be found on compilations.]
JUSTIN LEWIS
It’s interesting that you bought a copy of Welcome to the Pleasuredome on compact disc in 1990. Holly Johnson had been a fairly big solo artist a year earlier… but why this, and why then?
IAN GREAVES
My memory is that my dad had definitely subscribed me to the local record library. You had to be registered by an adult for some reason, so whether they were stocking Derek & Clive albums, I don’t know. But that’s how I discovered The Goons, borrowing things like Tales of Old Dartmoor, those 70s issues with loads missing off them. And I definitely heard Holly’s Blast by borrowing that, too.
But the reason for ‘Two Tribes’ is very specific. On 1 January 1990, Radio 1, they broadcast The Top 80 of the 80s, the best-selling singles of the decade, all in a six-hour block, hosted by Alan Freeman and Mark Goodier. I taped the whole thing and it was a good way of consuming pop music cheaply. A real mixed bag. Like, ‘Coward of the County’ by Kenny Rogers was number 78.
JUSTIN LEWIS
One of the darkest number ones ever.
IAN GREAVES
And very near the top was the ‘Annihilation’ mix of ‘Two Tribes’… Nine minutes. I listened yesterday to what I think is the standard version of ‘Two Tribes’, and it sounded a little ordinary. But when I listen to the ‘Annihilation’ 12-inch mix, there is no other version as far as I’m concerned.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Just before it came out as a single, in 1984, Frankie said something like, ‘Radio 1 will play it to death’, as if to over-compensate for the banning of ‘Relax’ a few months earlier. And they did. In one week alone, in July 1984, ‘Two Tribes’ was played by Radio 1 twenty-five times.
IAN GREAVES
I bought the CD of Pleasuredome with a voucher for my twelfth birthday, so this is March 1990. I dragged my dad down Woolworths, to help me use this voucher. Which I assumed entitled me to the CD automatically, but it actually entitled me to something like one-tenth of the price. My dad was slightly annoyed by this point, but we’d got this far, so he just bought it for me anyway.
I don’t know what happened to that original CD, but for recent reissues they’ve changed the running order: just the single version.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Yes, now it just duplicates the running order of the original LP and tape. But the first time I heard that ‘Annihilation’ mix of ‘Two Tribes’ was on Peter Powell’s show on Radio 1 because he used to count down the new Top 40 on a Tuesday teatime, and when he got to number one, he played this much longer version instead. Quite often, it was common with 12” versions back then to hold back the main song for as long as you possibly could – and it’s five and a half minutes before the main vocal arrives.
IAN GREAVES
I wasn’t used to remixes, and it’s actually a terrific way of discovering the art.
JUSTIN LEWIS
As a teenager I was obsessed with how things worked, how they fitted together, and the 12” mix is like laying bare the components of the song. The bassline is there, uninterrupted, there’s that guitar riff exposed, which is buried when you hear the song on the radio. And some of this was merely a way of extending the track for the sake of it, to fill the space, but it’s like an inventory of sound.
IAN GREAVES
Like an Airfix kit. It’s perfect for that age, really. Also, it was tapping into all the things that would interest me in music. It’s such a clatter of a record, so busy, so much happening that you can’t really take it all in at once. It’s got samples in it but they’re not samples.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Yes, it’s Patrick Allen re-reading or reading slightly different versions of his own commentary from the Protect and Survive government information films.
IAN GREAVES
Panorama had covered them earlier [If the Bomb Drops, 10/03/1980], they were public knowledge, and so there was nothing to stop Patrick Allen revoicing them, but it has the effect of being a sample, so it’s also commenting on something that was emerging in music at that time.
JUSTIN LEWIS
And having Chris Barrie from Spitting Image and A Prince Among Men doing his Reagan impression, but using that impression to read out extracts of statements from Castro and Hitler.
IAN GREAVES
And getting it on to Radio 1 without any citation. You either know or you don’t. I may have done more homework for this than I needed to, but I listened to the whole album again, and it is not a good album. And there’s also this 3-CD Frankie collection called Essential, which came out this year, but it’s already in the bargain bins. So many mixes. It's got all but the last two tracks from [the second album] Liverpool which by any measure does not reflect the meaning of the word ‘essential’.
JUSTIN LEWIS
No.
IAN GREAVES
Also, I never want to hear ‘Warriors of the Wasteland’ ever again. But Welcome to the Pleasuredome’s four singles are all great, even if the title track tends to get forgotten.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Way too many covers on it.
IAN GREAVES
‘Born to Run’ is like: Can we expose ourselves to the fact that we do not have Clarence Clemons, because boy does it show.
JUSTIN LEWIS
One of ZTT’s big ideas in the early days was to have a cover version on the B-side of every single, an experiment which lasted until ‘The Power of Love’, when Frankie reportedly flat-out refused to cover The Velvet Underground’s ‘Heroin’.
IAN GREAVES
The first Frankie session for Peel, end of ‘82, is a sort of primitive funk-punk. And the early version of ‘Two Tribes’ – everything about the arrangement is all there. I wish I could hear more of that side of them because the song structures are really interesting.
JUSTIN LEWIS
The big question with ‘Relax’ was ‘how much did Frankie play on it?’ and I’ve seen Trevor Horn quoted as saying that because ‘Relax’ ‘needed to be a hit’ – because the label was getting started – it needed to have this epic production sound, and I suspect the real ‘Frankie group sound’ would not have been as big a hit.
IAN GREAVES
No, they’d have been a cult band like 23 Skidoo or something. I don’t know what my dad thought he was doing, really, letting me have this album! All the sleeve art – I’d forgotten the ‘bang’ symbolism is sperm. I wonder if that made it easier for me later to get into bands like Psychic TV and Throbbing Gristle and Coil… who used sexual energy – and often gay sexual energy – as a central theme.
But the other thing about Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and what you said about quotations – they’re putting in references for you to work out. A more obvious version of that would be the Manics who are like a reading list with guitars. Take The Holy Bible, the only album of theirs that I really really love. Probably my first awareness of Pinter is on that album, and Sylvia Plath – and I was the right age for all of that stuff too. [“I spat out Plath and Pinter”¸ ‘Faster’]
And musical threads. If you discover The Fall, as I did when I was sixteen, then you will discover Beefheart, the Monks, Can, the Groundhogs (god help you if you get Groundhogs albums), Henry Cow… They covered Henry Cow… How many people have covered Henry Cow?
JUSTIN LEWIS
I think I first knowingly heard The Fall in about ’84, doing ‘C.R.E.E.P.’. You were telling me that this festive John Peel Session from December 1994 was the moment you fell for them.
IAN GREAVES
I tuned in because Elastica had a session, that was pretty good, they were doing Christmassy stuff. And it was the first Festive Fifty I heard.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Which was the sort of listeners’ poll Peel held every Christmas.
IAN GREAVES
Where I first heard ‘Dirty Epic’ by Underworld, which was obviously thrilling. But above all, in that show I heard The Fall, with Brix Smith who I love, returning to the band and being fantastic. (I was there the night after she walked out again. My first Fall gig, and they didn’t even make it to the stage.) But no-one can truly be prepared for their Peel Session version of ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’ because, outside of Brix, it’s not often you hear a female voice on a Fall record. Which is Lucy Rimmer.
I put that Fall session on a tape for John, my mate, who I’ve known since ’89, and we’d swap records all the time. He became as much of a Fall fan as I did, and I do not judge him for this, but the next day he thrust the tape back in my hands and said, ‘That was shit.’ [Laughter] This horror that anyone considered that to be music. But eventually he realised that The Fall is as much a sort of organised chaos at its best as [Beefheart’s] Magic Band ever were.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Together, you will remember, we interviewed Stewart Lee live on the radio, on Resonance, nearly 20 years ago. And he said something like, ‘The first time you hear The Fall, you think, “Oh my God, what’s that? It’s awful”, and then a few weeks later you hear the same record again, and you think, “Oh my god, what’s that? It’s brilliant.”’ It’s like getting used to a cold bath.
IAN GREAVES
I did like The Fall immediately, but I thought it was absurd. I stuck with this rule for years, and it’s always true: if a Fall album doesn’t make you laugh, then it’s not a good Fall album, and sadly that began to happen in the 2000s. I think there's still great stuff in that period, and I saw loads of gigs, but it does kind of drift for me.
JUSTIN LEWIS
So the humour is the key to it?
IAN GREAVES
Yeah, because Mark E. Smith’s a contrarian, isn’t he? So you either get into that or you don’t. But his phrasing is funny. His choice of words is funny. The noises he makes are funny. For my dissertation at university, I did ‘Lyricists from Manchester’ so I interviewed John Cooper Clarke, Howard Devoto, Vini Reilly – and eventually Mark. That was an experience. I tried to get answers from him about a couple of songs and he just refused. He could be a bit of a self-caricature at times in interviews, but it was a game for him because he wanted you to work a bit.
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LAST: DEREK BAILEY: Domestic Jungle DAT (2022, Scatter)
Extract: ‘DAT Edit 5’
JUSTIN LEWIS
I had a number of thoughts on this.
IAN GREAVES
Can you tell me what you made of it?
JUSTIN LEWIS
I listened to bits and pieces. The ones I especially enjoyed was the Guitar, Drums ‘n’ Bass album he made (1996). I was just fascinated by the idea of this guy who would have been – what? – in his sixties by this point…
IAN GREAVES
He had a bus pass by the time of recording, yeah.
JUSTIN LEWIS
…And improvising guitar over pirate radio stations in London playing drum and bass. Is that about right?
IAN GREAVES
Essentially. That album was done in a studio, and he’s playing against tapes done by someone in Birmingham to get around the whole kind of white label copyright grey area. With the release I’ve picked, Domestic Jungle DAT, no-one seems to care about that! [Laughter] And also, Shazam helps these days so we know what things are. I’m not sure if Guitar, Drums ‘n’ Bass is the first Derek record I bought, but it’s one of the earliest. It’s still got the receipt in it. It’s on John Zorn’s label Avant. I bought it in Virgin in Leeds, so I’d just started university. 4 October 1997, one minute past four. £17.99. And still to this day, if I see a first pressing of a Derek Bailey album in a shop, I just buy it. Regardless of the price, almost. I just want everything by him.
JUSTIN LEWIS
When we were setting up this conversation, you used the word ‘elemental’, so it obviously really made a fundamental impression on you.
IAN GREAVES
It cuts to the heart of my non-musicality, while also being very interested in music. You know when Blur came to John Peel’s house and he said the reason he hadn’t played their records before that was ‘dangerous amounts of melody’. [Laughter] I’m not against melody, that would be a ridiculous position, but my default is kind of noise, I suppose, and sound.
Derek Bailey, early in his career, used to work in the orchestra pit playing for Morecambe & Wise. But when I first heard him, he was playing with a very noisy Japanese group called Ruins on Radio 3’s Mixing It, recorded at the Purcell Rooms [03/04/1997, transmitted 14/04/1997]. There was this exoticism, and implied seriousness, and also people were being allowed to do this. [Laughs] And I’d listened to metal, I’d loved Iron Maiden as a kid and all that sort of thing, so that was fine, but in the middle of this maelstrom, there was this man outdoing them. And then I found out: Oh, it’s this old guy from Yorkshire. I instantly know when it’s him playing.
I am aware that people hear improvised music, and think, ‘It’s just a load of noise, they’re just making it up.’ But that line ‘between thought and expression’, as Lou Reed said – it’s such a short line with Bailey. There’s loads happening, and instantly. He joked somewhere that he’d spent almost 50 years of his life tuning up in public. [Laughs] Which is what it may sound like to people. Here he’s listening to those pirate stations, playing jungle, and remember this is a 65-year-old man in his living room in Hackney. There’s no artifice here. Later on, he referred to jungle as ‘fast as fuck and really shifting’.
There’s two things there. The ‘fast’ – that’s the speed his brain still works at. But the ‘shifting’ – he loves to perform with other people, not to trip them up or argue with them. A lot of improvisation is quite conversational, but often with Derek, he’s trying to drag everyone out of habit. There were very few musicians he would continue to play with over many, many years.
JUSTIN LEWIS
So was the frustration that collaborators would lapse into their default way of playing, and he would get impatient or bored?
IAN GREAVES
Totally, totally. He was going off to Japan in the 70s, finding guitarists, and other new people to play with. Evan Parker, the saxophonist, would do that as well. They ran a label together, were touring together. Bailey’s discography is enormous. There’s lots of good solo records, but I think his best stuff is with percussionists, and probably his best records are with Han Bennink, his most enduring collaborator, because Han would play anything. Ostensibly, he’s a drummer, but whatever happens to be in his vicinity gets played as well, so when I started to hear those records, it freed up all my notions of what music was. And it wasn’t jazz either. I think there’s this kind of interchangeability when people say ‘improvisation’ and ‘free jazz’, and they’re not necessarily the same thing. We need Philip Clark [FLA 4] here to explain that properly!
JUSTIN LEWIS
I’ve found a few really great quotes about Bailey, or from him. He wrote a book, you will know, around 1980 called Improvisation.
IAN GREAVES
A brilliant book. Based on the radio series [Tuesday afternoons, Radio 3, Feb/Mar 1974].
JUSTIN LEWIS
Aha! Like Hitchhikers Guide.
IAN GREAVES
Exactly like that.
JUSTIN LEWIS
This is from The Guardian review of the book, and it says of him, ‘He’s not interested in the competitive spirit, which drives so many jazzmen now.’ So it’s not ‘Right now I’m in the spotlight, it’s my turn’, fine as that can be, but he appears to have no interest in that. It’s all about ‘the conversation’, rather than a soliloquy.
IAN GREAVES
Yeah, and it’s important to say ‘conversation’ rather than ‘argument’. Sometimes if it’s loud, it’s assumed it’s hostile. But it’s often not.
JUSTIN LEWIS
This quote is from the LA Times, in the 1980s, which describes him as ‘pursuing sounds and textures, rather than melody and rhythm’. Melody and rhythm are prioritised in music, but the sounds, the textures, are also key, whether or not they’re connected with the melodies or the rhythms. I mean, some of the most famous pop songs ever written have all sorts of splurges of noise in them, but we don’t necessarily think about those things.
Phil Oakey once said that when they first got synthesisers in the Human League, the equipment didn’t come fully programmed or even constructed so they had to work out how to get a sound out of them.
IAN GREAVES
You know Robert Rental and Thomas Leer made this album The Bridge (1979), which got reissued by The Grey Area earlier this year. That came originally from Industrial Records: Throbbing Gristle, I think just for a laugh, gave them some money and equipment and sent them off to the studio for a week. And they literally had no idea how to get the thing to make noise. They ended up making a fairly good album at the end of it.
I should just say, by the way, because there may be pockets of Derek Bailey Twitter, who will be appalled. Guitar, Drums ‘n’ Bass is a divisive record among the fanbase because it's not the purest stuff. And we've waited until 2022 to get the real thing – Domestic Jungle – which are tapes that he’d either send out to friends or make for himself of him playing along to jungle stations.
The point is: I’ve chosen a Derek Bailey record with a tune on it. And that’s unusual – he didn’t do much in the way of tunes. Gavin Bryars managed to get him to play one every now and again. But that was about it. Derek’s on ‘Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet’.
But Domestic Jungle is not just a 65-year-old keeping up with jungle. On that track I’ve picked out, ‘Edit 5’, he’s saying, in a broad Yorkshire accent, ‘Come on, lad, faster!’ [Laughter] He's infuriated, because this kid is keeping him back. When Derek speaks on his records, and sometimes it's him just chatting to the audience or plugging his record label, you get such a powerful sense of his personality. And he has an often comic way of playing guitar against his speech as well.
JUSTIN LEWIS
You kindly sent me a copy of the interview he did with The Wire in 1998, for the feature ‘Invisible Jukebox’, where the guests get played records with no context, or identification, and have to react… He gets asked about what it would be like to hear his own work in a lift, I think [Laughter], and he says: ‘Imagine you’ve got to pass a bit of time. It would be nice to play this in a railway station. It’s just something to listen to instead of being reminded of something.’
Now that made me think about how we react to art of all kinds. Do we react to art as ‘something new’, or as ‘this is like that other thing we know’. So much of my approach to hearing new music centres around ‘what are my reference points’, because I have so much past music in my head all the time. It's very hard to get past that. Do you have that, or have you been able to free yourself?
IAN GREAVES
No, I haven't freed myself from that and I think it happens retrospectively as well. I have this awful habit of listening to older music at the moment just because I'm buying so much older stuff. It sort of worries me that I'm not listening to enough new stuff. I listened to something this morning and I just thought, ‘Oh this is just that, that and that’, a combination of three things, and when I was 18, I thought that album was the bee’s knees. Which is unfair, because, you know, Bowie was a magpie. That’s pop and it’s how it goes. You could listen to, say, LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver, which I think is a terrific album – and you could say, grumpily, ‘Oh, that’s just Bowie’s Lodger, and that bit’s Liquid Liquid’, but it’s a DJ trying to turn the music he plays into an original piece of music. It’s turntablism through the prism of a band. And you can ruin this kind of stuff for yourself if you overthink it.
People just have influences, and it comes through and it’s inevitable. And yeah, one thing that is increasingly obvious as I get older – and you'll know this – is that my reference points mean nothing to anyone half my age.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Yes, this has been happening to me for some time now!
IAN GREAVES
The alarm bell was when I realised I was writing books about things that appealed to mostly people who’d be dead… So… that was a problem. I thought, I might need to just wind this back about 30 years.
JUSTIN LEWIS
And that’s going to get even weirder for the people behind us, believe me.
IAN GREAVES
It’s a common culture thing as well, isn’t it? You can’t help but key into all the stuff that you and lots of other people your age have enjoyed over the years: songs, films, catchphrases... And popular art feeds other popular arts. I don’t think this has really addressed your original question! But I still react to the past all the time, and it’s fine. I don’t get upset about it.
JUSTIN LEWIS
I find it harder to work out what I think on one listen now. Which reminds me of a direct Derek Bailey quote where he said he hated records. Once you’ve done it, what’s the point of listening to it?
IAN GREAVES
One thing missing from that Wire piece, because he hadn’t quite started doing it then, was that at the turn of this century, he was just making too much music. He would mail out CDRs to friends of him playing and talking, instead of letters, and then he started to do print-on-demand CDRs of concerts and whatever else. And I think he’d be mortified – he died in 2005 – that those CDRs still work!
JUSTIN LEWIS
That they’re supposed to have obsolescence.
IAN GREAVES
Yeah, and he probably quite contentedly used poorer resources for them as well. I just think that’s funny. But yeah, these CDRs go for a fortune, and you buy them, thinking, ‘…Is this gonna play?’ [Laughs] But then, maybe in this case, a CDR that skips and jars is fitting.
JUSTIN LEWIS
He’d probably love that.
IAN GREAVES
Yeah. I love it when people say what dead people would love! [Laughter]
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JUSTIN LEWIS
So roughly when did you start to explore this very different direction of music?
IAN GREAVES
I was at college. It was 1996/97. And I got a job in a record shop. A couple of years earlier, when I was getting into other bits of Radio 1, going to second hand shops… I went to a record fair, and they had a collection for sale of the first 90 issues of Q magazine [covering autumn 1986 to early 1994]. So I bought them, and honestly, I think I read them all within six months, and then – like a firecracker – I was off.
JUSTIN LEWIS
You had your map.
IAN GREAVES
I had my map, and I’m pretty sure the reason I got a record shop gig was because I now had a working knowledge of a lot of different music. I don’t think I’ve listened to George Thorogood and the Destroyers since Live Aid, but I could wing that conversation, you know?
JUSTIN LEWIS
Record shops before computers: it required a lot of knowledge from us underpaid staff.
IAN GREAVES
A copy of Music Master [big doorstop of a catalogue], that was it.
JUSTIN LEWIS
And your own memory.
IAN GREAVES
And your opinions.
JUSTIN LEWIS
And between you all, you could work out most things.
IAN GREAVES
Our folk section was very strong, Blues and prog, all that sort of thing in our back catalogue, but I was there as the young guy who knew about the ‘young stuff’. I’d get all the college kids chatting to me. One of them brought in a comic strip of me once – it was of me getting annoyed about them not knowing enough about industrial music. [Laughter] They did it in such a way that they probably thought, ‘This will wind him up.’ I actually loved it. Still got it somewhere. I was like Douglas Hurd buying a cartoon of himself.
I worked in that record shop when Be Here Now came out, and I took the day off, because I couldn’t stand the idea of serving people who’d be buying it. I went to Newcastle for the day, to my favourite record store, Surface Noise – and we just listened to Ivor Cutler and Beat Happening and whatever else. So my idea of a ‘day off’ was to go to another record shop! That’s fairly dysfunctional.
Meanwhile, I was reading The Wire magazine, listening to Mixing It. And both the Derek Bailey and the next record are sort of cheats, as my ‘Last’ and ‘Anything’ came to me – as artists – at about the same time. I like your premise for this series: what’s changed your listening, or what’s changed the way you listened. Which I think is what Tim Gane of Stereolab said about Nurse With Wound.
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(Link to Scatter page at Bandcamp.)
ANYTHING: STEREOLAB/NURSE WITH WOUND: Crumb Duck (1993, single, Clawfist)
Extract: ‘Animal or Vegetable (A Wonderful Wooden Reason…)’
JUSTIN LEWIS
Now, as I understand it, you are – certainly were – a big Stereolab fan anyway. But then you’ve become perhaps a bigger Nurse With Wound fan.
IAN GREAVES
Oh god, yeah.
JUSTIN LEWIS
And we should probably give a content warning here about some of their music and certainly some of the artwork, particularly if someone is hunting down sleeve designs.
IAN GREAVES
Yeah, don’t do what I did, in the 90s, before the Internet. I asked my parents one Christmas for two Nurse With Wound albums, in amongst all the other presents and the Terry’s Chocolate Orange.
JUSTIN LEWIS
No!
IAN GREAVES
Innocently! One was A Missing Sense (1986) which has quite an odd cover, but it looks like a painting I guess so it was just about acceptable. But the other was The 150 Murderous Passions (1981), which was a collaboration with Whitehouse, and I can’t fully describe the cover. I think you're just going to have to find it for yourself in the comfort of your own home, and definitely not on a work laptop. And that Christmas Day, I don’t think we even had a conversation about it. I think we just moved on very quickly.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Did they wrap it?
IAN GREAVES
Well, they must have done! Honestly, you’re unwrapping it, you’re thinking, ‘This isn’t very Christmassy…’ But ‘Animal or Vegetable’ is another record I’ve chosen for potential conversation purposes. This is not the best Nurse With Wound record, or the best Stereolab record, and it isn’t my favourite record of all time. But I think it does connect to a lot of things.
My first Stereolab record was Refried Ectoplasm (1995), which was a collection of seven-inch tracks and rarities, and the rarities had all had handmade sleeves or been in very limited runs and were consequently very hard to get hold of. In the middle of this compilation there are two songs. One is ‘Exploding Head Movie’, a kind of remix of part of ‘Jenny Ondioline’, which had been on the album Transient Random-Noise Bursts with Announcements (1993). What a title. And the B-side is ‘Animal or Vegetable (A Wonderful Wooden Reason…)’, the bit in brackets being a quotation from Faust’s ‘It’s a Rainy Day Sunshine Girl’.
I don’t think I’d heard of Nurse With Wound. I heard this, this 13-minute thing, and then Steve Stapleton (who essentially is Nurse With Wound) was on the cover of The Wire pretty soon after [Issue 160, June 1997], my first issue of The Wire. I was still somehow absorbing everything and hunting down everything that was being mentioned, and he sounded like an incurable record collector who was more than twice my age, so I thought, ‘Well, he’s probably alright.’ Then I was down on the Darlington town market record stall one Saturday and they happened to have this Nurse With Wound collection called Crumb Duck which also featured these two tracks from the Stereolab collaboration. So it was like this divorce, basically, with the same tracks on two separate artist collections!
Again, some Nurse With Wound fans will be very disappointed that I’ve chosen Crumb Duck because it’s got rhythm, and when Steve Stapleton had started to use rhythm, around 1992, lots of the fans thought, ‘I’m not having this’ because it had been very noisy or very weird or very cut-up music for a long time. I mean, my favourite NWW record is The Sylvie and Babs Hi-Fi Companion (1985), which is 40 minutes of just relentless cut-up – and very funny with it. It’s my ultimate record because – even though I’ve probably heard it 100 times and know it really well now – a lot of the appeal of this kind of music is that it’s so overwhelming, and it’s often so tuneless [Laughs] that you can never feel like you’ve drawn the map of it in your brain. You can’t recall it exactly, and so it always has this ability to surprise you.
JUSTIN LEWIS
It sounds like a puzzle you can’t solve, perhaps?
IAN GREAVES
A very big jigsaw, but it’s taking you ages, and every time you get up in the morning, some poltergeist’s taken all the pieces apart again and you have to put it back together. [Laughter]
JUSTIN LEWIS
You’re like Sisyphus pushing that rock up the hill every day.
IAN GREAVES
That is me getting through a Merzbow box set, that’s right.
JUSTIN LEWIS
We met in the early 2000s because of our interest in comedy, and broadcasting, and so on, and it struck me how much of 90s comedy on the fringes – late night radio and TV in particular – traded in the surprising, even the unsettling. Was that part of the appeal with this kind of music?
IAN GREAVES
It all goes back to the Goon Show records. I think you're onto something, mainly that I have never been of the view that all avant-garde music is serious. I like it when it’s got a glint in the eye or a sense of humour, and you’ll have heard in ‘Animal or Vegetable’ those two minutes of complete madness, which are just obviously meant to be funny and astonishing. It’s not that boring Paul Merton whimsy, it’s rooted in dada. It’s got a kind of intellectual edge. It scalped me. Changed me forever.
We’ll get back to your question [Laughter], but it drives me mad when people are at concerts for this kind of stuff at places like Café Oto, where it’s a full house, and I’ve heard things that I think are hilarious yet no-one else there is laughing. Jandek – how do you describe Jandek? Every album sounds like a suicide note, but he was doing a show at Oto once where he had this kind of John Shuttleworth big keyboard, and he was playing it the way Leonard Cohen does it on I’m Your Man [the album]. There was something in his phrasing, and I just said to my mate, ‘This is clearly supposed to be funny.’ But for everyone else it was ‘We’re watching Jandek, we’re not supposed to laugh.’ No! We’re supposed to be having fun.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Music is often sold to us as relaxing, reassuring, familiar, benign – all well and good. But it tends to be written off if it’s funny, perhaps because people don’t quite know what to do with humour and music, or with the disruptive in general. It might not be for everybody, but nobody questions cinema’s role in reflecting the unsettling aspects of life.
IAN GREAVES
Loads of film music nowadays is like Nurse With Wound or industrial, quite strange or directly avant-garde music. We went to see Nope last night and that’s terrific. Mica Levi, the stuff she does, Cristobal Tapia de Veer who scored Utopia – the Channel 4 series. For a long time, we went through a period in film and television where soundtracks were ostensibly classical music. But way before that, when I was growing up, it was radiophonics… Anyone from about… 1958 onwards was subjected to that in the mainstream of the BBC. You ask the KLF and the Orb and that generation, and that’s what they were all listening to. That’s the music that corrupted them. It was the Doctor Who and the Sea Devils music – Malcolm Clarke.
David Stubbs, who wrote that book Fear of Music asked ‘Why do people get on with Rothko but they’re scared of Stockhausen?’ I think in truth people accept this stuff osmotically, but they don’t necessarily know it. What about cartoon music in the 50s and 60s! Pierre Henri would fit in on those, you know.
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IAN GREAVES
I don’t think I’ve told you, or anyone, this before. I was nearly blinded by a seven-inch single when I was twelve or thirteen. We were in the school assembly hall. There was a teacher at the other side of the hall. There were six or seven of us just arseing around in that pointless destructive way that children do. And there was a box of scratched seven-inch singles, which I think had been used for country dancing lessons. So already a relic of a thing to be doing. Screamadelica was out; we were doing country dancing.
There was a lad who shall not be named and also, I can’t remember his name. They’d already been snapping the edges off the records, and some of them still had airborne potential. And he just started throwing them, not in a deliberate [targeted] way like a bully would. But he just span it towards me, and it was probably one of the snapped-off bits on the edge that caught me, as near as you could have got just under the eyebrow… It cut me, not that badly, but the teacher was horrified, realised they hadn’t been paying attention. I never told my parents, I don’t think. They would have just gone spare.
I wish I could tell you what the record was. [Laughter] Does that count as my first single?
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Prime Minister, You Wanted to See Me?: A History of Week Ending is published by Kaleidoscope.
Dennis Potter: The Art of Invective: Selected Non-Fiction 1953–94 (edited by Ian with David Rolinson and John Williams) is published by Bloomsbury.
Jonathan Miller: One Thing and Another: Selected Writings 1954–2016 is published by Bloomsbury.
You can follow Ian on Twitter at @GreavesIan.
FLA PLAYLIST 12
Ian Greaves
(NB: Derek Bailey’s ‘Edit 5’ from the Domestic Jungle album is not currently on Spotify, but should that change in the future, it will be incorporated into this playlist.)
Track 1
‘Birdie Song’
The Tweets
Track 2
‘Drive My Car’
The Beatles
Track 3
‘One Note Samba (Samba De Una Nota So)’
George Shearing
Track 4
‘Two Tribes (Annihilation)’
Frankie Goes to Hollywood
Track 5
‘The Anal Staircase’
Coil
Track 6
‘Faster’
Manic Street Preachers
Track 7
‘Dirty Epic’
Underworld
Track 8
‘Glam-Racket/Star’ (Peel Session, TX 17/12/1994)
The Fall
Track 9
‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’ (Peel Session, TX 17/12/1994)
The Fall
Track 10
‘N/Jz/Bm (Re-Mix)’
Derek Bailey
Track 11
‘Morale…/You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling’’
The Human League
Track 12
‘Get Innocuous!’
LCD Soundsystem
Track 13
‘Animal or Vegetable (A Wonderful Wooden Reason…)’
Stereolab/Nurse With Wound
Track 14
‘Doctor Who: The Sea Devils’
Malcolm Clarke
