Saturday 5 April - 4:19 p.m.
here's a sneak at The Vichy Government interview which is soon to appear in Butterfly Crush fanzine:
How did The Vichy Government come about (and how would you like to go out)?
The Vichy Government is, like many of my favourite groups, a great pub idea that has spiralled out of control. I met Andrew when I went to university. I was lucky enough to discover his club nights on the edge of town, and promptly set about getting to DJ there. When we realised we were the only two people in town with Associates/Scott Walker/Motown obsessions, our mutual fate was sealed.
I’d like to go out in notoriety and dishonour, but all that really matters is that we stop before we become shit. I find the people who walked away when their stock was at its highest (Scott Walker, Billy MacKenzie, Howard Devoto) far more admirable and fascinating than those who have desperately clung to fame long after their welcome was outstayed (Numan, Morrissey).
Lyrically, visually and in name as well The Vichy Government are a provocative proposition. How would you react to the suggestion that such provocative style goes arm-in-arm with a lack of real ‘substance’?
Why can’t you have both? I can’t stand musos who get suspicious of anyone that puts a bit of effort into their image. I place image above ‘authenticity’ and I think Springsteen is guilty of greater crimes than Sigue Sigue Sputnik, probably the most obvious example of a striking band who had no songs. People always say that Adam Ant or the Pistols only had a handful of good singles, but for me those singles wipe the floor with 99% the tripe that enjoys ‘classic’ status. Vichy aren’t using the provocative elements to hide the fact that we’re threadbare on ideas, we’re using them because we think pop groups should- and to complement what we think is good music.
From what I know of your listening tastes, your main love seems to be ‘Pop’ with a capital P, which is at heart almost always romantic and idealistic. If The Vichy Government are also a pop band, do you feel there’s any great contradiction in letting loose with such caustic (possibly anti-romantic) lyrics?
We do love Pop dearly and there’s a part of me that would rather get onstage and just sing ten Diana Ross ballads. However, the fact is that we’re just too warped and emotionally stunted to do that sort of thing. We’re pessimists and we don’t hold the human race in very high regard. As unhealthy as that probably is, it will inevitably come through in the songs. Andrew says that we write ‘evil pop songs’ and I think that is what we’re aiming for- taking the pop format and dragging it into the gutter with the rest of us. I suppose we’re the Sociopath Supremes!
Does using a spoken-word style of delivery make you put a lot thought into catchy phrasing and intonation that’ll stick in people’s heads?
The initial reason behind spoken-word was that, to be blunt, I can’t really sing and didn’t have the confidence to do so; but it seemed to work, to be different, and to give it a theatrical flavour. ‘Orange Disorder’ was the first song we wrote and it is a monologue- I don’t think it would be as effective sung to the tune of ‘Dancing Queen’. As for intonation, I’ve never acted or anything like that, but if I’m being sarcastic I’ll usually try and sound sarcastic, etc. Guilty as charged on the sloganeering front- when I was a kid I did the Manics thing of the spraypainted shirts and it’s stuck with me.
What affect has living in England for a few years had on your perspective on Northern Ireland and its problems? Judging by songs like ‘Orange Disorder’ and ‘The Protestant Work Ethic’ your strength of feeling about it all hasn’t been significantly lessened.
It makes it worse, I think, because it gives you a wider perspective. When you know what normal life in a normal city is supposed to be, Northern Ireland’s problems are five times as glaring. Going from Cambridge to the Shankill Road, you might as well have been beamed down onto Mars. Evidence that greed conquers all. There’s something about the place that leaves a mark on you, a rage inside you. James Joyce spent almost all his adult life in Switzerland but couldn’t write about anything other than Dublin.
How do those songs –very specific to Northern Ireland- play in London?
Well, I feel a bit safer! They just accept that I lived through it and let me get it off my chest, I think. It does make a difference; people like late Simple Minds and late Spandau Ballet just sing about Belfast when a social conscience is that year’s fashion accessory. How dare they manipulate us like that?
Having tackled topics as diverse as the war against terrorism, ‘The Prisoner’ and the corruptive music industry, what’s fuelling your pen at the present time?
We’ll have two new songs at our next gigs, in London on the 14th and Cambridge on the 27th. ‘Cowboys & Indians’ is another critique of TWAT, but more specific than ‘Shoulder To Shoulder’ which was really about apathy. The other song will be our second ever cover version; an old favourite that finds us on even dodgier ground than with Gary Puckett’s ‘Young Girl’.
Do the recordings you’ve made/will make differ much from The Vichy Government live sound, or are you intent on keeping things primitive and powerful?
The few tracks that we’ve demoed have been received politely enough. I hope it doesn’t lose potency away from the confrontational intimacy of a performance. When we record with someone who has ‘real’ synthesisers Andrew will add little washes of sound and dabs of colour, but it’s not radically different. I’m glad you think our live sound is powerful because a few people have said “Your songs are wasted on one toy keyboard, you need a full band”. We strongly believe that less is more and that it’s quite in-your-face to have such an unusually skeletal set-up.
This hasn’t much to do with The Vichy Government, but I’m really curious to know about your apparent correspondence with Harold Pinter?
He gave a talk to Queens’ English Society when I was 17. New European and I blagged our way in and afterwards I gave him a copy of a play I’d written called ‘The Old Man’, which was a macabre, cheeky parody of his own work. A week later I received a letter that read “Dear Jamie, ‘The Old Man’ pulls no punches and hits where it hurts. Next time you run into this Harold Punter bloke, tell him to keep at it.” Pinter is the greatest living writer in the English language so it’s a lovely keepsake.
What would be in your top five of a Hornby-style list of life-changing songs, and why?
Nick Hornby took the same course as me at the same college, and my tutor said he was a nice enough bloke with no remarkable features whatsoever. He’s made that his strength, hasn’t he? Not my cup of tea, but I can never resist a list:
Pulp, ‘Sorted For Es & Wizz’: the song that, at the age of 14, first aroused my interest in music. In my school you had to like either Nirvana or 2-Unlimited and the whole charade bored me rigid. When Jarvis Cocker hit the scene it was a revelation, I’d never seen or heard the like of it. A weedy geek who was crap at sports and dressed a bit weird was at No.2 in the charts, and his lyrics seemed to be about real things- I was too young to get anything out of love songs. To someone who knew their Bowie and Roxy Music, his whole act and his cod-and-chips lyrics might have seemed naff, I don’t know- but I never looked back and I’ve never stopped loving that whole album.
Scott Walker, ‘Rosemary’: his first solo albums were the soundtrack to my days of student squalor. I milked the romanticism of being a bedsit loner for all it was worth. Walking along the river Cam with Scott on the walkman every night, swigging cheap whisky and going to bed at sunrise. Pompous, full-on orchestras, Brel’s flamboyant misanthropy, and that voice. Scott was the perfect accompaniment to what was undoubtedly the most self-indulgent phase of my life, but a happy one.
Duran Duran, ‘The Chauffeur’: Duran may not be the finest example of this kind of music but they turned me on to it, and this song represents the moment I realised that synthesisers were infinitely preferable to the guitar. I’d love to have been around for the New Romantic era because I do think it was the golden age of pop music; they fused disco and glam with the DIY ethic of punk, whilst rebelling against punk’s contempt of glamour and otherworldliness. Of course, it has its limitations and a lot of the electro bands we play with in London are no different from the Mojo-reading musos I was trying to escape from in the first place. Singing about Eastern European cities and robots is old hat now but the originals have, I think, retained the chemistry of creation and new possibilities.
Sandie Shaw, ‘(There Is) Always Something There To Remind Me’: I can never resist a piece of soppy 60s girl-group pop, and I think of this as the perfect two-and-a-half-minute pop song. It’s one of those truly potent songs that gives me the shivers and the butterflies, and conjures up a thousand embarrassing memories. People think of this kind of music as being flighty and throwaway, written by some Brill Building cynic in it for the money- but Sandie puts her all into it and it manages to transcend all of that. The sheer neurosis and darkness of these records is something that goes unnoticed far too often. Wonderful string arrangement as well.
The Auteurs, ‘Light Aircraft On Fire’: simply because Luke Haines is my favourite musician of them all, and this is possibly my favourite song of his. It does actually sound like a light aircraft on fire- highly flammable and with his customary lyrical prowess. I like records without flab. No album needs to be longer than 45 minutes. Luke’s normally last 35 minutes, with more worthwhile ideas than most people have in their entire careers. I heard Nick Hornby read some of his book on Radio 4 the other day, and he said that someone or other made him think “This is me, if I wrote a book this is exactly what it would say”. The two instances where I have experienced this were on discovering Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Luke Haines.
You suddenly find yourself calling the shots in an ‘actual’ government – who’s on the New Year’s Honours List and who gets detained on suspect sex/terrorism charges?
I don’t hold much stock in Knighthoods or other honours. Nor do I think I’d particularly like to be the head of an actual government in a world that’s controlled by oil companies and banks. However, I wouldn’t mind having Patrick McGoohan as Home Secretary, Tony Wilson presiding over the Treasury, Feline1 in the Foreign Office and Glenn Hoddle as Archbishop of Canterbury. The temptation to send the Bush/Blair regime straight to Camp X-Ray would be strong; likewise everyone involved with the Mail, Express, Telegraph, Times and Sun, all the propaganda-mongers from the BBC- not forgetting certain individuals from Norn Iron….
