Married to the mob

Wire, Television, The Stooges, The Pixies, The New York Dolls . . . reformations aren’t what they used to be – they’re a damn sight better.

Boston’s Mission Of Burma are the latest cult act to ditch the day job all over again in order to convert critical kudos and namechecks into paycheques – albeit with a sense of dignity and purpose. The trio’s reunion album ONoffON holds up rather handsomely alongside their classic Vs. And menopausal rage is far more interesting in a musician than squeaky teenage/20-something angst.
“I’m as big a sceptic as anybody,” concedes bass-player and vocalist Clint Conley. “We were very self-critical coming into this, thinking, ‘God, what are we doing, how pathetic – these men in their late 40s trying to recapture their youth.’ There were so many obvious good reasons not to do it; it does seem like we are in the season of reoccurrences or something. For me the only band I’d seen reformed – and it did sort of play a part – was Wire. When I went to see them I was apprehensive, and they just completely blew me away, it was intense, it was grand, they weren’t acting like snotty teenagers, and I thought, ‘My god, this is magnificent!’ And I saw Iggy and the Stooges last year and it was just transcendent.
“All that probably added to my thinking that maybe we could do it and not squander whatever goodwill has accumulated around our name over the years. Vs still sounds pretty good; it could’ve been released last month by some Brooklyn band, and I think that’s because it wasn’t rooted in youthful angst necessarily, or the sounds of the early 80s that much – other than Roger (Miller)’s guitar style being kind of out. In some ways it was related to (Gang Of Four’s) Andy Gill, they were both slashing away at the same thing, painting outside the lines, interested in sound and skronk.”
In a rare instance of music writing actually having an impact on the source subject, one of the triggers in the Mission Of Burma reunion was a chapter devoted to the band in Michael Azzerad’s excellent book Our Band Could Be Your Life, which is, alongside Gina Arnold’s Route 666 – On The Road To Nirvana, an essential chronicle of the 1980s Amerindie underground that spawned acts like The Feelies, Husker Du, Dinosaur Jr and the SST network.
“Those are the bands that I relate to,” Clint affirms, “all these bands sounded so different. The exciting thing about that time was the world was there to be discovered; there was not a predominant trend, at least in the so-called ‘indie’ world. For us guitar bands, nobody was interested in what we were doing. The Feelies, I totally relate to them on an artistic level: up in northern Jersey in their own town making their own universe.”
In the years after MOB’s initial demise, the band saw their name crop up in interviews with everyone from Moby to REM to Blur to Sonic Youth. Was it a bittersweet vindication?
“The way I look at it is, we’ve been the beneficiary of the quirks of history,” Clint says. “The way time unfurled, aggressive guitar rock laced with a thoughtfulness, a conscious effort to explore new ideas, it sorta continued and became one of the main thrusts of independent rock. We’re lucky in that sense. We never felt gypped or short changed. We had modest success, but we never expected anything more. I don’t know if it’s harder to do now – this is the old fart section of our interview – but it seems to me like people are trying to latch onto the latest trends in such a furious way, a lot more than they did then. Maybe I’m just looking in the wrong places. The central point is find your own thing, make your own revolution.”b

Mission Of Burma play the Temple Bar Music Centre on Tuesday July 6. ONoffON is out now on Matador.