SQUEEZING out pips

“The overrated hit the stage/Overpaid and over here/And their idea of counter-culture’s/Momma’s charge account at Sears/And they’re wondering why we can’t connect/With the ritual of the trashed guitar/One more paltry gesture/The ashes of a burned out star/Yes here they come, both old and young/A contact low or high/The gathering of the tribes descending/Vultures from a caustic sky/The rotting carcass of July/An ugly sun hung out to dry/Your gorgeous hippy dreams are dying/Your frazzled brains are putrefying/Repackaged, sold and sanitised/The devil’s music exorcised/You live, you die, you lie, you lie, you die/Perpetuate the lie/Just to perpetuate the lie.” ( Edwyn Collins from ‘The Campaign For Real Rock’ on Gorgeous George.)

“The only thing that validated Grunge and vindicated the whole thing for me was Kurt Cobain’s suicide. I think when you look at the interviews they’re basically peddling angst. It’s the mendacity and hypocrisy I don’t like. For every Kurt Cobain, for every Nirvana you get twenty Australian Nirvanas. I think I have a good instinct for phoneys and when I see the bloke in Smashing Pumpkins and the bloke in Pearl Jam, they’re all peddling the same line. They’re just a product of market forces.”

Edwyn Collins, the good-looking boyish individual often considered too clever for his own good and who fronted the brilliant Orange Juice on Alan “refreshingly spiteful” Horne’s Postcard label way back at the beginning of the Eighties, has just released his third solo album, Gorgeous George, much of which is concerned with the various ways in which we make and receive popular music – and the economic and aesthetic factors which can help or hinder that process. All of this may sound heavy, but thankfully, Edwyn Collins’ critical polemics against the business are backed up by words and music of real substance.

“There’s a line in ‘Campaign For Real Rock’,” says Edwyn of his maledictory opening song on the album, “which goes ‘Their idea of counter-culture’s/Momma’s charge account at Sears’. That about sums it up for me. But I don’t want to seem to be making blanket statements about hippies either. The original Woodstock was a genuine expression of the psychedelic New Left, the counter-culture. Whereas with Woodstock 2 it’s all down to market forces. At the sight of this thing called Grunge the fashion industry swooped down on it and you get Grunge articles on morning chat shows, on the Richard and Judy Show. People sometimes called it the New Punk but the great thing about punk was that it couldn’t be defined initially. It was moving so fast nobody could really tie it down. When Johnny Rotten and Paul Cook got beaten up by Teddy Boys, the next week Johnny Rotten was dressed up as a Teddy Boy!”

Now, Collins believes, that buccaneering spirit has been well and truly corralled by the industry.

“The problem is that when people talk about Independent labels now, they’re mostly talking about a marketing gimmick that’s owned by Sony Records. Sony Records own most of the Independent Record Labels by and large, though, they certainly aren’t behind my record. I would think that in ’79 Joy Division were a popular group but they were also an underground band. It’s hard now to make something genuine. What’s happening is every time an independent signs a record deal with Sony or a major corporation they’re destroying the underground. The underground has to move on. There’s huge amounts of money involved and market forces come into play and it somehow corrupts or debases what was good in the first place. Perhaps that’s what Cobain couldn’t deal with.

How did Edwyn react to Cobain’s suicide?

“I was surprised by what he did really because I’m quite cynical and I was wondering was he just another phoney. Obviously he had the approach of an artist. If he was a painter he’d be cutting off his ears.

“More generally, what I had in mind in writing ‘The Campaign For Real Rock’ was just something about the Zeitgeist of music. Just the way I saw music at the time. The second verse is obviously casting aspersions towards the Grunge movement. But there’s a lot of different characters in the first verse too. A lot of it’s black humour and it’s not all totally scathing. There’s millions of musicians who come to Dublin, say, to find their muse. Loads of American and British musicians. Without naming names they’re the ‘raggle taggle plastic gypsies’, the ‘Robert Zimmerframes’ who could never in their wildest dreams, despite their self-delusion, compete with Dylan at his peak. They probably couldn’t even make a fair job of it even with Dylan as he is now. It sounds as though I’m contriving some argument because I’m in Dublin here but it’s totally apposite.

“I wanted also to see why I wasn’t impressed with the Grunge movement without resorting to jingoism or xenophobia. I still regard myself as a drawing-room socialist and it depresses me the proliferation in the past two years in Britain of all the supposed ‘cutting edge groups’, in inverted commas, posing in front of the Union Jack. So I wanted to do something slightly more eloquent than saying ‘Britain’s great and we still swing and America’s crap’, this horrible nationalism and patriotic thing.”

But it’s not as if Collins has simply upped and switched camps.

“I’m naturally ambivalent about American culture but I’d be the first to admit I’ve drawn heavily on American musical influences both black and white,” he says. “I felt it was right when I came back with Hope And Despair to fly the flag for real rock even though it was partly tongue-in-cheek but now I find myself listening more to Soul and even the more Hip-Hop oriented stuff. I don’t necessarily like the lyrical content of a lot of Hip-Hop but, again, the production values of Hip-Hop have influenced me. The way it’s very dry and kind of in your face. All the production techniques are very clear.

“The problem for me with a lot of the groups being championed by the NME and the Melody Maker at the moment is that they don’t pay any cognisance to black music at all. It seems to me to be very retrogressive. Hip-Hop seems to me music for liberal white people and radical black people. Whereas Gorgeous George, the album, is an album for liberal blacks and radical whites!” (laughs)

I should say at this point that Edwyn Collins laughs a lot during our interview. At times it’s as if he gets a wicked pleasure out of his own lambasting of what he clearly perceives to be the complacency of many of his peers in music. Meanwhile, there’s barely enough time to chew over his last delightfully constructed epigram to see if it’s as digestible as I think it is, before Edwyn Collins is off again.

“There’s two silly things in the music press at the moment,” he recommences. “The New Squad of New Mod and the New Wave of New Wave. I think the problem really is down to Postmodernism and people not really having any sense of history whatsoever. It’s an old cliché that those who don’t know their history are condemned to repeat it. I suppose, looking back on it, postmodernism was what Orange Juice were trying to do. Originally what it meant was a kind of radical eclecticism. So you took from everything. What it didn’t mean - to draw the analogy with architecture where the phrase was first coined - is that everyone lives in modern Georgian houses, you know, exact copies of original Georgian houses. What postmodernism meant was mixing things up and hopefully getting something new. And I think anyone worth their salt has a sense of musical history.

“But for journalists and groups to be so ignorant as to actually associate themselves with New Wave is a little incredible. When the term New Wave was first coined in music in 1977 all it was was a convenient tag-line for opportunists. Punk was quite literally a four letter word. In the UK there was a clandestine ban on Punk Rock on daytime national radio, Radio One, which is still the way records are broken in the UK. DJ’s like Tony Blackburn wouldn’t play Punk Rock. The only person who would play it was John Peel.

“Then you got every Tom, Dick and Harry, people like Stuart Copeland from The Police saying we’re not Punk Rock, we’re New Wave. Even people like Elvis Costello - who I’m ambivalent about - all these like Costello who came out of the pub rock scene such as Joe Jackson, Graham Parker and The Rumour. The Boomtown Rats even. They all said we’re New Wave just to appease Radio One. So you’re getting all these groups who purport to being radical and really they’re no different to Plastic Bertrand!” (laughs).

Edwyn may laugh but the man has clearly reached the end of his tether.

“I’m just not having it. I’m not having another fucking Mod revival,” he declares. “A revival of a revival. What are we going to have next? The New Romantic of New Romantic of New Romantic? No thank you! Julie Burchill, before she became a little spiteful Tory bigot, had a great line after Punk Rock. She had a picture of Johnny Rotten next to a picture of the New Romantics and the caption was ‘You didn’t want life - here’s death warmed up.’ That’s what we’re doing at the moment. The parameters of that kind of thinking are so narrow.

“To get back to the idea of radical eclecticism I don’t see why there’s any reason you shouldn’t start off with a Motorhead influenced rhythm section and on the top of it have samples from Gilbert O’ Sullivan’s ‘Do Wack A Do Wack A Day’. It sounds totally stupid but I mean I would prefer that to this kind of thing where in the New Squad of New Mod it has to sound like The Jam, a bit of Madness and The Kinks, and you’re not allowed to bring in any influences of what’s happening now.

“For example, that Portishead record. That’s a new record. You just put it on and it sounds completely fresh. Of course, you can detect the influence of ‘Sixties Spy movies. Obviously, Hip-Hop, loops and all the rest of it. To me it sounds a bit like Julie Cruise. I suppose it has a kind of ‘Fifties resonance to it and a Bête Noire feel to it yet at the same time you know it couldn’t have been made in the ‘Fifties or the ‘Sixties. You know intuitively when something’s new. Or you should know.”

You certainly won’t hear anything else like Gorgeous George this year. Without doubt it is genuinely a new sound, something, Collins readily admits, which had quite a lot to do with his freelance production work opening his eyes and ears to new and different recording and production techniques. One of his collaborations, of course, was A House.

“I was playing an acoustic concert in The Baggot Inn to promote the Hellbent On Compromise album when A House came up to me and asked me to produce their I Am The Greatest record,” he recalls. “It must have been Spring ’91. In 1987 I had two singles out on Elevation and to promote the second one ‘My Beloved Girl’ I did a fairly extensive UK tour. There was quite a bit of excitement around that time and A House had just signed to WEA and they were the guests on the tour. I have to say they were cocky, arrogant fuckers at that time. They’d just done this two album deal. But they were personable enough all the same. When they came up to me in The Baggot Inn four years later I was quite touched ’cause I could tell that, to a certain extent, they were kinda down on their luck. I have to say that perhaps I was in a similar position. It wasn’t as if I’d broken any ground after Hope And Despair. Hellbent On Compromise reached some kind of plateau. They asked me would I be interested in producing this LP. I’d done a couple of things with Paul Quinn but I thought this would be a really good learning experience.

“Part of my motivation to produce other people was a means to an end to produce the Gorgeous George LP I wanted to familiarise myself with engineering and production techniques because the most important thing for me with this LP was the sonic aspect of it. At least amongst the cognoscenti, people generally think that I can write interesting lyrics and consistent melodies but I really wanted this album to stand out, by default, sonically. A lot of productions seem to me still stuck in the ‘Eighties and have this very superficial sheen to them. Really it boils down to the boring old thing of style over content and you grow tired of records like that. I wanted my album to have a bit more substance to it.”

Along with ‘The Campaign For Real Rock’ the other song on the album directly concerned with the slimier side of the music industry is the title track. But just who exactly is ‘Gorgeous George’?

“The ‘Gorgeous George’ character is Johnny Media really,” says Edwyn Collins. “You’ll meet him in the music industry. You’ll probably meet him in the television and film industry. He’s in his mid-forties. He loves nose candy. As he calls it. He has greying receding hair tied back into a pony-tail. Because he takes so much cocaine it deludes him into thinking he’s always right. People think I’m Gorgeous George but the character I am in that song is the mocking bird.

“To a certain extent it sounds ludicrous because I’m out on my own and for a lot of people I’m still a marginal figure really but what fuels the songs of invective on Gorgeous George is the old punk ethos: in order to create you must first destroy.”