Freak magnet

Peter Murphy: Tracks like 'Action' and 'Brother Interior' off the new album Get Some Go Again employ a recurring image in your work that of the Travis Bickle-like misfit cruising the metropolis at night.

Henry Rollins: Well, I'm really drawn to cities, I live in 'em, I travel through up to 50 or 60 of 'em a year. I wrote that tune ('Action') and the lyric driving in LA one night unable to sleep. Taxi Driver? Totally. That's the imagery fully, it's very Travis Bickle, watching the lights go off the windshield as you're driving wordlessly, no radio on, with the windows down, not cruising, just looking around. And I'd go to these war-torn parts of LA and drive my car at night and just check it out.

PM: These loner characters you favour always seem to be moralists, albeit in a somewhat twisted way. They're like a cross between Iggy's 'The Passenger' and one of Chandler or Hammett's gumshoes, jaded from scrutinising the human condition.

HR: Well, yeah, you see everyone with their pants down in a way. Morality is implicit in our lifestyle, in civilisation, it's in everything you do. It's why you don't run the guy over when he doesn't get across the street before the green light goes off or whatever. Is that, 'Thou shalt not kill' or is that just an instinctive, 'I'm not gonna run this guy over with my truck'? It is a moral take: 'I don t wanna kill the guy, I'll wait an extra five seconds and drive to work without having murdered somebody.' Whether you like it or not, there are things you will not do, cos you were taught not to do them.

PM: It's societal rather than instinctive...

HR: It's fascinating to me where somebody has their whole different set of right and wrong, y'know, where they work very studiously with their rulebook like I work with mine. A guy like Ted Bundy, who could kill two women in one night, one in front of the other, and then go to his girlfriend's house for dinner. Someone who can just do that, no problem, like I can go buy lunch no problem, that's very Nietzschean. People in prisons, maybe they're not criminal, maybe they're just too strong for this society. Maybe if you put 'em in the jungle, they'd be chiefs. And you'd be looking up to them because they're the ones who have the balls to rob the bank and shoot the cop and grab the girl.

And there's no wonder to me why serial killers who've killed women get female groupies.
And criminals, like the guy who shot all these people in a bank shootout, get chick mail. 'Cos there's a certain attraction to that male who goes, 'Fuck you!', there is that whole alpha-male lore, books have been written about it, it's a cult, it's a way of life. Some guys are tough guys 24-7. You always see the gross biker dude with the beautiful little girl. What the fuck is that? Well, it's a very strong primal thing is what it is, and it fascinates me.

PM: How did you come to exchange correspondence with Charles Manson?

HR: He wrote me a couple of times in the '80s cos he saw me on MTV. I probably have the letters around somewhere. Yeah, he was a pretty interesting guy. I can't say I know a whole lot about him. I think I read Helter Skelter when I was like 14, and I still don t know the whys and wherefores of his incarceration, and I don't understand the big cult around him. I guess it's just one of those culture things. But yeah, he was kind of interesting, kind of insane. Basically I remember him saying, 'Just make sure you tell the kids the truth and tell them to stop polluting the environment and to take care of the air, water, trees and animals.'

PM: Did you hear any value in his music?

HR: Can't say I've heard a lot of it, and I can't really remember what I heard. It was an acoustic/vocal, kinda had a bluesy thing to it, so I'm not really the expert.

PM: SST Records had planned to release something but pulled it after allegedly receiving death threats from a guy calling himself Icepick.

HR: Yeah, I think they were going to put out a record of stuff he did in Vacaville. And then they didn't. That tape actually was sent to a whole bunch of indie labels, a lot of people have that cassette. Touch And Go got one... his lawyer apparently sent it all over, so that tape is, I think, very bootlegged and traded, it was not a hard thing to get. I think that you can find it on CD.

PM: Anyone else we should know about?

HR: A couple of years ago I got mail from Lawrence Bittaker, a Death Row... kind of had minimal notoriety as a serial killer who had mangled with pliers, they called him Pliers Bittaker, and it was just really bizarre.

PM: Oliver Stone has said that if he'd met you in time, you would've had the lead role in Natural Born Killers. What did you think of the cult of celebrity around serial killers in the 90s?

HR: American media has really turned into Peyton Place. It started with the OJ thing, that became OJ TV, and when it was over, I had a very cynical take on it. Y'know, I would say to audiences, 'You all hate OJ? You know what? You really don't. You kinda like him 'cos he gave ya 16 months of great TV and I bet you wish someone else would get killed so you could have more great TV. I'm right. And all of you watched the verdict. Me too.

PM: Why did you watch it?

HR: It was good television. I wanted to know 'cos it was just like the end of the series of Dallas or The Dukes Of Hazzard - you wanna know if he dies of cancer or gets the girl and goes into the sunset. We all got pulled in. We all are guilty, we all are voyeurs. I just wanted to watch the legal process interact with American media and watch commentators turn into authorities on the law. And all these people became fake stars right down to the Greta Van Susterens on CNN doing their little legal wrap up - everyone got a book deal. The lawyers got a book deal. OJ got some kind of weird Stagger Lee immortality. Michael Jackson! There are these weird icons that the '90s gave us, and it fascinates me to no end. It's good TV. What would you rather see, a thing on the rebuilding of the sewer system in Dublin, or Black Athlete Hacks The Heads Off Chick With Boob Job And Male Model Waiter Leaving 40 Quarts Of Blood In Front Of An Apartment Building? Everyone's gonna watch when it's dressed up like that.

PM: Tell me about working with David Lynch on Lost Highway a couple of years ago.

HR: The man is amazing. Kinda how you'd hope he'd be. A little weird, not like, dangerous weird, but just different. And he's real friendly and real sincere and really, really wonderful to be around. It was a fucking blast. His casting lady called me and said, 'You like David Lynch?' and I'm like, 'Oh, about seven days a week.' And basically I did it for lunch. And for Lynch. And months later I'm in New York, he called me: 'Hey, it's David. Come and let's have lunch, let's hang out! And we hung out all day and just talked about everything from surrealism to movies to Dune and all kinds of stuff, and he's just an ace. He's very bohemian; I like him 'cos he thinks differently. Thank goodness.

PM: In a recent interview with Mark Cousins, he said he was often afraid to leave the house because 'bad things might happen'!

HR: Well, check it out: he's got this Frank Woodwright Jr house, beautiful. You go up the street to this next house on the same side of the street, that's asymmetrical, his production company. Then you go up to the third house next to it. He just bought it. That's his studio, that's where they did a lot of the interior shots for Lost Highway. There's nothing in it but a film crew. And I go to his assistant and I go, 'Okay. What's up with buying three houses on the street?!' And this woman is kind of there to defend him to people, and she goes, 'Oh well, um, David doesn't really like neighbours, so whenever a house on the street becomes available, he just buys it.' And I go, 'What, he's gonna buy the whole block?' And she says, 'Well, if he could, yes!'

And so he has this little universe. And I don't think for him it's like 'I am the king', I think it's like, 'I really don't wanna be around a lot of people'. You get the idea that he'd be happy living in a one-bedroom apartment as long as everyone was nice to him. That's the vibe you get. He's not trying to be a rich guy, he's just... David Lynch. That blew my mind."

Rollins Band's Get Some Go Again is out now on Universal.