Lest we forget

March into the archives : Swoop

The following interview with Swoop appeared in BMA Magazine ahead of their concert in Canberra of March 1996.

Friday afternoon and Phil Donahue is discussing the benefits of mushroom tea. As the credits roll down the screen too quickly to read, my telephone rings. The voice of Swoop’s kinetic frontman Roland Kapferer explodes out of the earpiece. He talks wildly, leaping between subjects and barely finishing sentences. Life flows out like a list of pop references, Valentine’s Day has left him feeling like Robert Smith from The Cure. His throat sounds husky (“Oh, I just can’t stop shouting” he explains) and perhaps it won’t survive the interview - there is no choice but to take a hold of the conversation and get some answers.



Define the funk for me Roland.
“What is the funk? The funk is like woxo. We called our album The Woxo Principle for exactly the same reason, because it’s a kind of nonsensical word. It means absolutely nothing, and so therefore it can mean just about anything. As a word it’s like the non sense that sits at the birth of meaning, and I ‘spose, for exactly the same reason, funk is a great word for us too. I’ve had arguments with people for saying anything can be funk. That’s one of the greatest things because it creates a sense of freedom. There isn’t an attitude or a physicality involved, it’s more often associated with some kind of rhythm, or dance sort of thing, which is very much what we are interested in. ...The main thing is it can mean anything...It can also be Oasis, y’know ‘What’s the story (morning glory)’, that can be a funk song as well, if you just break down some of those barriers. Prince showed that...a lot of his songs really broke down what is rigidly defined as funk music, and I ‘spose we tried to show that as well. That’s why we called the album The Woxo Principle, it’s a kind of paradoxical, non meaning, zero signifier, sort of thing we try and do”.



So the title is open space for the listener to put their own meaning of woxo?
“Yeah. I guess that’s one way of looking at it. It’s all things to all people. As long as there’s a kind of tension. Josh, the guitar player in Swoop, and I are thinking of writing a PhD on it, working on the notion of tension in music, we’re going to try and write a thesis on it. I don’t know, I’m going on about nothing at great length here”.

Which is exactly what you would have me believe the funk is all about. Do you think Freud would have connected funk with sex?
“Yeah Freud would say it’s about sex but I’m starting to disagree with Freud, even though I used to be a big psycho analysis guy. I was constantly worried that everything I was trying to do was to have sex with my Mother. I still think I’ve got a pretty big Oedipus complex and I’m just going to try and get away from that. I am worried though, has every girlfriend I’ve ever had been a replacement for my Mother? In some ways I suppose they have”.

I’d say most of my girlfriends remind me of my Mum at least a bit. It could be worse though, she’s a great standard to compare them against.
“That’s awful. I’m not putting your Mum down or anything Jason, but that’s awful”.

Speaking of girls, you should see the two beautiful examples walking down my street at the
moment.
“That’s what I hate about not sitting there doing this interview with you, it’s not interactive like that. I’m into this whole multi media thing. I need to have the words but I also need to have the vision. I need to be able to click on two hot babes walking by your window, who look like my Mother”.

So do you miss your Mum on tour?
“Yeah, I’m going to write one of those funk road songs like Bon Jovi. The film clip will have me staring out the window of an aeroplane with the rain pouring down, going on about how hard it is on the road sort of thing. That’s what I want to do next”.



Swoop’s touring schedule makes them sound like a nomadic tribe.
“Yep, we’re nomads. A band of nomads on a winding flight across Australia...”
...No, I like the idea you keep moving with the seasons, on to better harvests, picking up the fruits of your labours...
“This is great talking to you Jason. I’ve found myself”.
Flattery will always get you a good article Roland, but tell me, what is the highlight of your career thus far?
“Gee, I’d say meeting Billy Joel. I just recently did some parascending with Patrick Swayze and Tom Cruise, that was great. I’d say the highlight thus far, other than meeting the big stars you read about, that is before they tire of me and flick me off, Patrick Swayze and Tom Cruise that was a great one but I’d say the real highlight, the ultra highlight, is actually playing to increasing numbers of people. That’s great. We’re getting very big audiences these days and that’s what I’m doing it all for, aside from the huge millions of dollars that don’t seem to be coming my way...We are very much oriented towards playing live, that is our thing. We’ve been doing it for a long time and it’s very difficult for us to get used to studios and recording things, we’re still learning about that. Playing live and getting some sense of performance, that’s the ultimate high I ‘spose, oh other than Ecstasy”.

What a coincidence I remark and my next question starts Roland on a very long winded and tall story about how Michael Gudinski, head of Mushroom records, phoned up the other day and ordered him to develop Peter Andre style abdominals or quit the label. He soon catches up with himself and tries excusing himself to make a dozen more calls this afternoon.
What already? I whinge. You haven’t given me a chance to ask my tough question. You’re wimping out on me Roland.
“All right, give it to me. Give me the big one” he dares.

OK, if I was to be really mean and harsh, I’d argue that Swoop plagiarise chunks of other people’s music. What would you say?
“Of course! The great Boy George from Culture Club said that’s all that pop music is, and we are all Boy Georgians in way or another. No, to be quite serious for a second, I think the notion of originality in pop music is really outmoded, and very 70s. The difference between originality and creation is that originality is to do with god, and Christianity, earth and all those things to do with unique and self foliation and narcissism or something like that. But we are actually very much into creativity, which happens in a group, where different things are combined. Different combinatory forms is what we’re interested in and that’s what we do. There’s a song on The Woxo Principle called ‘Ethemora’, which everyone always says “Oh that sounds like a Jackson Five song”, which it does, there’s no doubt about it. We went out to sound like a Jackson Five song. But it also sounds like other things that other people have put in. All the lyrics are fiendishly ripped off from a poet called W. B. Yeats, and there is actually a poem by him called Ethemora. Which no one else seems to pick up. All these people who accuse us of ripping things off aren’t well read or well listened enough to pick up all the references. We’re quite happy for people to go through and find references to things, just as long as they don’t do it in the kind of negative sense of “These guys are just doing that”, because we’re not just doing that. We’re putting things together in different combinations and that’s the really important thing we do. That’s what creation is”.

Is Swoop a big blender?
“A huge blender in many ways, hey do you want some champagne Jason? We really do need an interactive interiew. It seems you’ve got the girls and I’ve got the drink”.
Bottoms up.

March into the archives : Human Traffic

The following piece on the film Human Traffic appeared in BMA Magazine.

What three products define the 90s? I’d suggest they’re the ubiquitous mobile phone, the modem for the World Wide Web and the drug ecstasy (or MDMA). Aside from the coincidence that all three products claim to enhance communication between people, depending on who’s talking, they are also portrayed as dangerous as they are beneficial. Mobiles allow you to arrange anything from anywhere but might give you cancer; the WWW lets you interact with people from all over the globe but has bestial porn and bomb recipes; and while ecstasy has influenced music, fashion and youth culture, its long term effects are unknown. And there have been films that promote the same opposing messages: for every You’ve Got Mail there’s the dark side of The Net.

It’s an interesting coincidence that two films which attempt to represent both sides of ecstasy and the rave scene are being released around the same time: Go on video and Human Traffic in cinemas. Both films find humour in the consequences of using popular and illegal drugs like ecstasy but do so from differing cultural viewpoints. Where the American film Go says that using drugs means mixing with dangerous criminals, British Human Traffic focuses on personal effects, to show both the euphoria and the paranoia that can follow. The rave scenes also differ between the two films with Human Traffic portraying the variety of recent fashions and musical subgenres in a detail which makes the rave in Go look like the generic backdrop it was.

Human Traffic also takes steps to show that recreational drug use is often a phase within a life that can lead to a more mature outlook on intoxicants. Yet whatever the film makes up for in authenticity it lacks in overall entertainment. Human Traffic actually resembles a less than average night on ecstasy in that there’s a lot of excitement prior to taking the drug, a blur of activity as characters E their way around the dance floor before an extended and sometimes tedious comedown.

The film also suffers from uncertain direction as it attempts to balance its early surreal humour alongside the serious character development of later stages. These shortcomings stem mostly from the screenplay of first-time director Justin Kerrigan, as does the impression that all of the characters are different voices speaking words from the same mouth. There is no doubt that Kerrigan has potential as a director but his script could have used the constructive criticism of a co-author.

While UK newspaper The Guardian has described Human Traffic as “the last great film of 90s,” my own view is that it is a realistic film in the two-sided approach it takes to ecstasy and its influence upon the 90s, but is ultimately more grating than great.



Human Traffic is the story of five friends who spend a weekend escaping the pressures of daily life by taking drugs, dancing and recovering. One of them is Moff, a small-time dealer who’s described as a “pill monster.” He’s played by 22-year old actor Danny Dyer who called from London recently where it was a weekday morning in late-Winter and he sounded the worst for wear. “Yeah I need a cup of coffee, it’s quarter to nine in the morning and I’m fucked” he explained before answering these questions about the film, drugs and the London club scene.

What do you think are the strengths of the film?
“You can go into the cinema having sunk 6 pints of lager and still understand what the film is all about. There’s no complex plot to get a hold of, it’s just about a group of young people going out and getting fucked over the weekend. Basically that’s it and it’s so honest that people can relate to it. That’s why the film works.”

Is Human Traffic an accurate representation of club life?
“Totally. For the majority of people in Britain that’s what’s going on every weekend, y’know. All the little drug jokes gel the film together and it had to be funny otherwise it would just be too intense. I think the whole thing works very well.”

What did you think of the location in Cardiff?
“It’s not a very nice place, a shit hole to be honest. 6 weeks was long enough to be there for me. The location was chosen because Justin’s from there and the film is about his life, it’s what he’s lived. My character was ‘sposed to Welsh but I couldn’t do the accent. I’m from east London, born and bred so we went with the cockney thing and it worked, y’know.”

What’s been your experience of the club scene?
“The clubs in London y’mean? It’s alright mate, y’know, I’ve lived it. I’ve done it and it gets to a point where you have to calm down, I’ve got a kid now, a 3-year old girl, so I’ve had to focus on my career a bit more.”

How important were drugs to making the film?
“I don’t know whether you’ve taken ecstasy before but it’s a buzz that you’ll never forget. And it’s easy for an actor to just click back in, y’know. [Speaking quietly] I’ve taken it. [Normal volume] So we all did that because we’ve all lived it, obviously none of us would’ve got the part if we hadn’t lived it a bit. It was weird but we all slipped back into it and had our own ways of doing it. I used to down 3 cans of Red Bull before every scene, for the energy and to feel wired. We had a few joints as well but there was no Class A going on.”

Are drugs important to the club scene in general?
“I think they’re very important, it goes hand in hand. From what I’ve experienced growing up, on the way to the club you’ll always stop off and get yourself a couple of E’s. It’s just the way it’s done, for me and for most people I know. I don’t know why but they seem to just go together. A perfect match and millions of people are doing it every weekend. I’ve tried clubbing afterwards without doing any [drugs] and it’s just not the same. Without drugs you stand there like a plum, so you’ve got to dabble a bit. Or you can no longer dance. It’s got to be done.”

Do you know what the title means?
“It’s just something that Justin’s father used to say to him as a kid. He’d come home from work and say ‘Hi Dad, what’s it like outside?’ And he’d say ‘Human traffic son, human traffic’. And it always stuck in his mind and I think it makes a good film title.”

March into the archives : Feeling Sexy

The following interview with Davida Allen appeared in BMA Magazine on 24 December 1999.

Feeling Sexy is the directorial debut of Davida Allen, a painter from Queensland who won the 1986 Archibald Prize for Portraiture. The film follows on from Allen’s two books about Vicki Myers, the semi-fictional/semi-autobiographical character of an artist struggling to transcend the roles of mother and wife. The conflict between these occupations is exasperated by Vicki’s belief that marriage needn’t limit her desire for passion, life and that feeling of butterflies in her stomach. It’s essentially the plight of the modern woman attempting to juggle her career alongside the expectations of motherhood whilst maintaining a satisfying sexual relationship. On the page this reads like chick flick material but Allen proves to be a stylish storyteller who uses humour to connect with her audience.

Critics who emphasise comparisons between Davida Allen and the character of Vicki have often overlooked these skills. Allen acknowledges her experiences contributed to the character of Vicki and has explained in a previous interview that “It’s hard to paint snow if you’ve never seen snow.” When the question was raised recently she answered: “Yes but, interestingly enough, I think the reason it strikes a chord with people is because I am, coincidentally, human and most people who are watching the film are also human. I think the film works because of its humanity. Sure I’m a woman and have had kids and have been there but I wonder if I could make films about stories I haven’t experienced.”

Glenys Rowe, the producer of Feeling Sexy, believes the story is successful because audiences respond “to the warmth in the film and because it is about real people’s lives. It’s interesting to talk about sex and it’s place in the world because we are surrounded by a sea of information about sex and so little of it is helpful. Y’know, I read all that Cosmo stuff and it doesn’t look anything like my life. I feel sorry for kids growing up in an era where - if you’ll pardon the expression - sex is thrust down their throats. Sex is sold as a commodity but that’s not what it’s about.”

One of the most striking features that Davida Allen brings to Feeling Sexy is the perspective of an artist. She describes the film as a fairytale and, like paintings, believes the imagery can be interpreted on a metaphorical level. One example is the dog that becomes a family pet after Vicki tells her husband Greg that she has been unfaithful. Allen describes the dog as “the metaphor of punishment. It represents the notion of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. In fairytales metaphors mean different things to different people so it is open for interpretation. There’s no one road to go down to get to the end of the story and I’m the last person to want to tell the whole story in the nutshell of a newspaper headline. I want people to discuss, to walk out of the cinema and be talking about the film. There are so few films where people will want to talk about the experience a week later. That’s exciting. I love intellectual debate and there’s not enough of it.”

Allen is certainly a filmmaker with a message about the role of fantasy within everyday life. This had been the original theme in the series of paintings which caught producer Glenys Rowe’s eye more than a decade ago. The process of translating Davida Allen’s material from one medium to another may have taken a long time but it hasn’t lost any of its poignancy. (Allen attributes the delay to the success of the film Babe that was directed by Glenys Rowe’s husband Chris Noonan). Producer Rowe describes that Allen “knew exactly what she wanted to say and it was a complete joy, [I’ve] never had such a fantastic creative experience working with anyone.” This raises the question as to whether Davida Allen will direct another film. Rowe says “She’s got the bug now” and Allen answers “I definitely hope so. It would be a great thing now that I’ve got the hang of it.”

March into the archives : Resin Dogs

The following interview with Jigsaw from The Resin Dogs was published in BMA in August 2000 and a different version appeared in The Canberra Times a month or two later. Pics above from their performance at the 1999 Sydney Big Day Out.

The Resin Dogs are a rare beast, a band who perform live hiphop with all of the textures you’d expect to hear on a recording. It’s a fusion that’s nicely summed up on their new CD single ‘Daily Trouble’ with its photo-collage cover. “In fact,” says sample operator and sometime disc jockey Jeff (AKA Jigsaw), “the ceiling above the crowd is hallway out at the University of Canberra although the crowd is from Adelaide.”

It was a surprise to learn that playing live was something of a new experience for Jeff given the strength of their performances. But he explains that the four core members of the band have different backgrounds with drummer Dave and bassist Chris coming from the live scene whilst Jeff and DJ Katch had been releasing mixtapes and hosting community radio shows in Brisbane.

“It’s good to have a crowd because you get an immediate response and all those other clichés,” says Jeff. “And I do find that I change my songs because of a crowd’s response but when it comes to songwriting I tend to delve away from the band and go straight into my record collection. Even though I’ve got a drum machine and analogue keyboards I’ll stay away from them too. I’d rather to find a drum machine which has already been recorded because someone will have spent four hours getting the kick drum to sound huge. You can just sample it off the record and steal the production. I’ve always been hellbent on keeping everything on the track a sample, so when I write songs I try to keep it that way.”

But this style of musicianship is becoming increasingly difficult.
“Because we’re getting more exposure I’ve got to be selective in what samples we use. Which makes it a bit hard. You can always sample on note of a trumpet and then play that as a riff on a keyboard but it’s like writing a song from scratch. Personally I like writing songs where you can hear half a bar from somewhere else. Where if you listen hard enough you can find where a song has been taken out of context and used in another way. I like that deal but the legalities of it often don’t let it happen.

"There’s been some interesting stuff we’ve used. I’ve sampled a cover of the MASH theme. There’s one track on the new album with a Deborah Harry sample, a George Michael sample, a Pet Shop Boys sample and they’re all used in such a way that it sounds like it was recorded today. It’s just from taking the production on a drum sound.

"There’s a song Dave’s written which uses a Michael Jackson sample but it’s always about contributing to the sound rather than stealing a hook – if you know what I mean. I get into stuff from the late 60s and early 70s, especially parts in a song where there’s a key change. You take the bar from before and the bar or half a bar after and create something that’s not from that record. Just by getting a part that’s not a whole on its own you can get something totally different.

"Similarly a lot of the tracks on the album are stuff we’ve been playing [live] for years but we haven’t attempted to get a live sound. Eventually we’ll put out a live CD with live instruments but it’s a totally different area. It’s a lot like how when people hear our music live they’re having a ripping time because of the alcohol or whatever and if you go and listen to it on CD it’s totally different because they’re in different mindset. There are live tracks floating around but that’s a different side of the band.”

March into the archives : Alex Lloyd

The following interview was published in BMA Magazine in September 1998. At the time I credited Donna Haraway as co-author in reference to her cyborg manifesto that I'd recently read.

Alex Lloyd is a cyborg.

You can forget those apocalyptic images from science fiction because his flesh won't peel back to reveal a steel frame, but as a musician he is literally part man, part machine.

Alex was assimilated earlier this decade when the singer quit playing in Sydney's Mother Hubbard to pursue his solo career with a sampler and an old Atari. This former Catholic choirboy has undergone a digital conversion.

Since then his song 'Snow' has leapt from the Scream 2 soundtrack onto FM radio. His recent single/EP 'Black the Sun' continues on a similar circuit, programming atmospheric effects and beats alongside guitar, strings and melancholy vocals.

"There's more to sing about in a minor key," says Alex of the music's reflective properties. "My music gives me an overall feeling which I describe as old grain, crystal clear. A kind of mix of old and new."

The blend is distinct, embodying those feelings of loss and alienation that defined soul and grunge with the infinite possibilities of digital manipulation. It's a kind of post-grunge angst with a sense of triphop's emptiness, like an existential ghost in the machine.

"It is a kind of cyborg thing but that's the way we're going. As long as people don't forget about the sun and the trees and remember that we need oxygen," says Alex, emphasising those natural fuels for the organic elements in any cyborg -- what's required to remain the human.

"You have to keep the soul in a song. Sometimes I sit in front of these screens thinking 'What are you doing to yourself?' Then I'll go home and play the Playstation! It drives me crazy sometimes but at the end of the day I love what I'm doing and you know when it's got soul."

Alex gives the impression that his music draws from the alienation in the songwriting process itself. The benefits include having a programmed band that will do exactly what he wants. "And I can turn them off too," he notes.

But despite being able to dictate the direction of his music, Alex still requires human interaction. "It's difficult when you're working on your own. You really do have to find the right mood. I'll ask friends for their opinions and my engineer Trent helps out by playing harmonica and slide guitar on the EP. The beauty of the arrangement is that I can collaborate with whomever I want," says Alex, his words echoing the promise of the digital medium.

Alex Lloyd isn't the only cyborg who isn't about to forget his humanity and offers some melancholy pop music that's burned (almost) directly from his soul. Expressing distinctly human themes through the machine without sounding like just another product. Download some today.

March into the archives : Stone

This interview with Sandy Harbutt, director of the classic Australian biker movie Stone, was published in BMA Magazine in 1999.

Five years before Mad Max drove across cinema screens around the world, ‘Stone’ provided a local version of the 70s cop movie. It’s got car chases, gunfights and machismo with sideburns. If an Australian Dirty Harry had gone undercover in ‘Easy Rider’ it might have looked something like this.

Live to Ride magazine called it “The best biker movie ever produced” and it has a fondness for these outlaws. Sandy Harbutt says he made ‘Stone’ as a reaction against the representation of bikie culture.

“They put bikies in ‘Homicide’ and they’d be pathetic guys about seventeen years old, weighing six stone and riding Honda 250s. I thought it was a lie. The truth was something dynamic and it was just a matter of coming up with a story to frame it.

"There were other contemporary stories to tell but I knew I’d have the support of the motorbike community. Which helped as I pretty much conned everything in that film. It was made for almost nothing. It was all begged, borrowed and stolen. You’d say that the shots themselves were stolen.

"While shooting the race sequences the police would turn up and say we couldn’t do this. We’d ask where they were from and they’d say North Sydney. So we’d tell them that we got it cleared with some bloke in Chatswood we’d spoken to about something else three weeks earlier and it would be okay. We got away with it but it took enormous discipline to get it down and get out.”

Audiences in 1999 might think that the last 25 years have been unkind to ‘Stone,’ it’s so retro that it can provoke laughter. But the film needn’t cringe because it offers an interesting window into Australian society of 1974. Aside from images of policemen driving HQ Kingswoods there is thinly veiled discussion of how returned soldiers from the Vietnam war had been marginalised by society, a subject which didn’t appear in American cinema until ‘The Deer Hunter’ in 1979.

‘Stone’ is also prescient in featuring a rally for the environment, a theme which was popularised in the 80s. Harbutt explains that the shots in the opening sequence were a contemporary event which had been integrated into the screenplay. “I was sitting at home on a Saturday morning and heard on the radio that Georges River had been polluted and all the fish were dying. The signs saying No Fishing, No Swimming and Pollution were all real. A lot of people have said they look fake but it was actually true.”

Harbutt says the two themes of Vietnam and the environment were part of a larger argument he wanted to make. “We were seeing pictures of B52s bombing Vietnam and pictures of napalmed people in the streets. They were telling us that napalm could clear 50 hectares of forest so that they could find the enemy. And for what? ‘Stone’ reflects part of what was going on in the world. In those days people were keen to fight capitalism, something they’re not doing today. With the Soviet Union gone there is no check for capitalism except for the voice of the artist.”

It’s an interesting argument coming from Harbutt, who learnt filmmaking through working in advertising. But perhaps it is because of this that he is aware of how effective entertainment can be as a method for provoking thought. “I believe the cinema is the most powerful medium because if you get someone sitting in the dark with no choice but to look, listen and take part with the audience in this experience then you have a chance to say something to them. There are genuine intellectual battles to be fought and I think the motion picture screen is a great place to fight them.”

Whether audiences have recognised these political messages or not, ‘Stone’ is definitely a lot of fun. So much so that in 1991 there was an unsubtle American rip-off made called ‘Stone Cold’. Sandy Harbutt says he thought about suing them but admits “I ‘spose that’s a compliment.”

March into the archives : The Avalanches

The following interview with some guy from The Avalanches was published in BMA Magazine in November 1998. Picture with the author taken by 'Pling at their Canberra show earlier in the year.

You may have been fortunate enough to see The Avalanches earlier this year at the BMA sixth birthday or just recently when they were here supporting Public Enemy. They'll return to Canberra this month and spoke to us to bring everyone up to date on their show.

You've just finished touring with Public Enemy, would did that go?

"Excellent. We expected the most unfriendly hardcore dudes and they were almost nicer than anyone we've ever met. In fact I think PE perceived us as 12-year olds. They kind of took us under their wing and explained the facts of life to us."

So they were paternal?

"Chuck D especially. Flav in a kind of supercilious way. Flav's pretty much unlike anyone we've ever met but he was fantastic. They were all so friendly, I mean we had soundchecks where I think they sort of dug it to a degree and Chuck even talked about the possibility of distributing our records."

So when are we going to see an album from The Avalanches?

"Maybe next year. I think the plan is to do an EP again. I especially want to aim it at 12 inches. We want to get in the clubs. I'd love to get DJs to play our music. It's kind of moving in different directions. And that's gonna kind of help us with doing our EPs in that we don't need a concept for each one. Kind of like the way we started, we never really thought we'd be hiphop. We wanted to be all yelping and screaming but it's sort of -- I mean we all listen to hiphop but -- the new stuff doesn't go down that route."

When The Avalanches came out it was so obvious there'd been a vacuum for an Australian hiphop act.

"It does but we don't want the responsibility."

You live show doesn't really seem like a hiphop show. You've got those influences in your music but there's a whole different icing on top.

"Yeah, it's like everyone wants to talk about how we sound like the Beastie Boys. I don't think say that about our new stuff though, it's sort of '70s electronic music and a lot of house music and disco. The other thing we're trying in the studio -- I don't know how, we're still experimenting -- is to get orchestral parts and jazz chords and string songs together which have structures without beats. It's sort of like pop music, kind of psychedelic like Mercury Rev or the Beach Boys."

Sort of like you're drawing on whatever sonic elements you can get your hands on?

"Yeah, well, we've got a pretty nice abount of vinyl to draw on and to go crazy with. I still don't really play any parts. We still pretty much sample everything."

Have you guys really got a garage full of vinyl?

"Yeah, I got a garage and I got a house full. The garage is only for seven inches! They're useless. There's no point in having them. That was just a by-product of a steal I got, it was only $500 for the room! Two thousand LPs and four thousand singles!"

So, there's some good stuff in there?

"The best bit was 150 production records from '60s soundtracks, I would have paid $500 for these alone. It's just ten seconds of either jingle music or sound effects or spooky noises. That itself is free of copyrights, so that was the best thing about it."

Speaking of samples, there's one that I am curious about...

"Ha ha! We haven't cleared any! Only if it's live can I tell you."

What about the guitar riff at the beginning of the second verse in 'Rock city'?

"We've used that sample on about four different tracks. That's from the record that changed our life. It's by Koichi Oki and the name of the record is Yamaha Superstar. Seriously, we were a guitar band when first heard this record. It's a demonstration record for this fantastic, out of space organ that Yamaha brought out in the late '60s and this guy does covers. The best example is the first track, 'Light my fire'. The organ is so out of time and so extremely mixed that we were just blown away. So we just threw away the guitars and bought organs!"

March into the archives : Ben Elton

The following interview with Ben Elton was published in BMA Magazine in April 1997. Picture taken at his appearance in Canberra.

Ben Elton talks fast. His sentences overlap in a way that commas cannot do justice. Add to his manic monologue the delay of a transatlantic phoneline and you have an interviewee invincible to even the quickest interjection.

His output as a writer alone seems incredible, never mind the fact he's also a stand-up comedian. Since writing television highlights such as The Young Ones and later series of Black Adder, he's written the novel Stark and appeared in the adaptation, written Gridlock, the play Gasping and Popcorn, which is both a novel and a play due to open in London's West End.

Four months into his stand-up tour of the UK, Ben Elton recently answered questions on his prolific output and responded to the view his most recent novel Popcorn reads as an attack on the stylised violence produced by Hollywood.

"That's been misunderstood. I mean sure there's a lot of satire, because as you know, I take the piss out of myself and everything around me, but the initial inspiration was very clear. On the plane out to Australia from Britain, I'd been reading that Natural Born Killers had been banned in Britain because there was a real fear that violent movies directly influence people to commit violent acts. I'm less interested in that debate than what the repercussions of the actual debate are.

"If you have eminent journalists honestly saying 'I think NBK creates murderers' then if I were a murderer and got caught then I'd blame Oliver Stone. Amazingly that's begun to happen, well not because I wrote the thing, but I seem to have been about the right time because Oliver Stone is getting sued. Not by the villains, but that will be next, he's being sued by the victims.

"This is a dark and hilarious and deeply dramatic thing because where lies personal responsibility in that? Where lies justice? Are we to see a society where Hollywood producers are in prison for murder and murderers are on Oprah whining about how Hollywood rendered them dysfunctional?"

One observation is your heroes never get the girl. Is this something carried over from your personal life?

"Well, more recently I've been very fortunate and am married now and am very happy but I know what's like to be a straight git and we've all been there. My comedy tends to celebrate uncool. I like uncool. I think that people trying to be cool is a real worry for the world. We have this horrible term in Britain, an anorak. If you call someone an anorak, it's like calling them a dag. Well, people wearing fucking anoraks because it's cold and it rains in Britain, not because they're trying to impress anyone.

"I've always been on that side and I think a lot of British comedy has. If you look at Basil Fawlty or Rik in The Young Ones, they're about dags. Whereas American comedy, not to have a go at it because I think some of it's wonderful, but it tends to celebrate cool.

"If you look at the heroes of Friends, they're so wonderfully cool and even something brilliant like Seinfeld, they're still kind of cool at the end of it. They get the last laugh, whereas Basil Fawlty never did.

"I don't think that's better or worse, it's just a cultural thing. I think I'm in that tradition, so if my heroes don't get the girl or the boy or whatever, it's because I 'spose we're all scared of not getting the girl or boy and there's a lot of comedy in that."

So your characters flaunt their defects, like Zimmerman in Stark -- a masculine action hero without a dick.

"That's right. I like to see the heroism in not being very heroic. None of us live up to the images or whatever. Have a look at a McDonalds or a Coke ad and then go see the people eating McDonalds and drinking Coke, which is you and me. We just don't look like those models, do we? And that's where I base my comedy, it's in the real McDonalds."

What can you tell us about your new show?

"Well, it's two hours of brand new stand-up comedy basically. I never describe comedy because it always sounds boring and I always give the same example.

"In 1981 we went to the BBC to pitch the idea of The Young Ones to the head of light comedy there then, and he'd been told 'Hey, these kind of wild, mad people are coming in with this weird stuff.' And we sat in his office and he said 'So scare me, you're apparently the scary guys.' And we said, 'Well, it's this story about four not-very-clean people who live in a house together' and it sounded so weak we were about to crawl out and agree to do Terry and June or whatever.

"So I never try to describe a gag, you've got to come to the gig."