GB: Do you agree with the Simon Armitage quote on the cover that the postpunk period was "the most exhilarating moment in Britain's pop/rock history"?
SR: Well, it's one of the claims I'm making with the book. I'm not making the claim it's the last time the music was great or anything like that, because I wrote a whole book about late-80's music, Blissed Out, and then I wrote the rave book, Energy Flash, which is about the 90s. So it's not saying that was the last time things were exhilarating, but there was a certain combination of forces that occurred in the late Seventies and early Eighties that made it especially exciting, and the claim I make is that it was as exciting and turbulent a pop music epoch as the 60s. And that it deserves that same degree of emphasis the 60s get, but because it's such a diverse period and it's not as neat a package as the 1960s can be made to be, it has been neglected. It's easy to construct the 60s as this breakthrough decade. So in a sense I had my work cut out for me to substantiate that claim. But I think I do. Obviously Joy Division weren't as big a band as the Doors, say, or Jimi Hendrix, but I think in terms of pushing the boundaries of rock music, the work they did is equivalent. And they also created waves within an audience that existed then that was looking for figures to show the way forward--in the same way that in the 1960s people were looking to musicians to lead the way forward.

GB: The idea to write the book came in 2001. What brought you to that decision?
SR: A combination of things. I had been very caught up with the whole rave scene, and I'd kind of followed through where dance music had gone and electronic music had gone. And by the end of the 90s it seemed that a lot of the energy of that scene had gone--it was still pretty popular, but it didn't really have as many claims to being edgy or disruptive or subversive as did in the early part of the 90s, when it really had this aspect of being an uncontrollable explosion--anarchic and very exciting and radical. By the end of the 90s the club scene had become like a professionalised leisure industry, and when people went to clubs they knew what they were going to experience. So there was less of a sense of adventure, less of a sense of event about things. Also, the music itself was less edgy on the whole. Well, there were still people doing experimental stuff, but on the popular level for dance music, it was very much about warm, nice sounds. Which I kind of explored--I had gotten into house music, and had been catching up with the history of house. I was listening to all this really "nice" music, but it was a bit cosy. So I got bored with all this pleasant sounding stuff, and I started craving difficulty and challenge--a bit of edgy spikiness. One thing I did was to start buying loads of avant-garde classical records and musique concrete and electronic stuff like that. Then for the first time in quite a long while I started remembering the postpunk records and digging them out. There was another thing that was going on too, though, which was that rock, especially British rock, was in a really poor state, and it seemed like there was almost nothing of interest. It was the tail end of Britpop, and the whole ideal of white bohemian British rock that was daring and experimental had almost been wiped away completely. I felt very discontented with that. Then I chanced upon this record by a group called Position Normal, who are really not very well known at all. It's basically one guy really, he put out these records that in some ways had a connection to dance culture-- he was using lots of sampling--but it wasn't dance music, it was this dreamy, strange, very English music with lots of found sounds and voices. Samples you could imagine he'd taken from old 8-track tape reels he'd bought at a church sale or something like that. Position Normal reminded me of a certain style of quirky postpunk, the sort of things that John Peel would have played--some of the things I highlighted in the book, like the Native Hipsters. And there was also guitar on the Position Normal record, and it reminded me a bit of Durutti Column and people like that. And there were other aspects of the record, Stop Your Nonsense, that reminded me of postpunk poets like John Cooper Clark. It tapped into this eccentric bed-sit English pop thing, which I'd pretty much forgotten even existed. I chose it as my favourite record of the year in The Wire's Christmas issue, and it just reminded me of John Peel, someone I listened to avidly when I was a youth, but really didn't listen to much in the 80s or 90s. So it was both those things--getting fed up with dance music and wanting something more edgy, and really this one record by Position Normal that reminded me of the joys of wilfully eccentric lo-fi experimental pop. And slightly later than that, around 2000 or so, I began to notice the first glimmers of people harking back to that period. I did a piece on postpunk for Uncut magazine, and it was like I had hopes it might be the cover story, which would be 10 thousand words at very best, which would justify me spending three weeks on it. But I basically spent like nearly three months researching this piece! I let myself get carried away with it, I did loads more interviews than was warranted. And in the end they didn't make it the cover story, it was a smaller piece than I had hoped, so it was really like I'd expended way more effort and energy on it than was warranted by the cheque I was going to get! So that's when I realised I'd become obsessed with this period! In fact, through doing that Uncut piece, I already had the germ of a book. The first draft of the story was 19 thousand words, and I ended up putting an 11 thousand word director's cut version up on my website. This piece was pretty comprehensive, but it really only touched the surface, so I just knew there was this fantastic story there that had never been told, except in some of the biographies of individual groups, people like Wire. But there was nothing that covered the full scope of it.

GB: It was also a period that greatly affected you when you were growing up.
SR: There's a sense that when you're growing up and first discovering music whatever's around becomes special. But I was lucky that I was at that really impressionable age, and it happened to be a remarkable period--as objectively as you can be with this kind of thing. But there were critics much older than me, like Greil Marcus, who were just totally captivated by the music coming out of England in the late Seventies, early Eighties. And he'd probably have been in his late thirties then, with kids and everything, but he was totally obsessed with Gang of Four and Delta 5 and the Raincoats and Essential Logic, and thought they were amazingly innovative and a whole new direction for music. So I think there's a certain objectivity to the fact it was a very adventurous time. And it was also one long scene, because then it went into this pop phase, 'new pop', when it was the same kind of people who had been making very leftfield music decided they wanted to infiltrate the mainstream. Which to me was equally exciting. It just seemed like the logical fulfilment of these ideas, that at a certain point you didn't just want to be preaching to the converted, you needed to take it as far as you could. So really, it was this long rush of excitement which I don't remember having any kind of real ebb to it until about 1983 when suddenly it didn't seem like the really exciting New Pop groups were getting in the charts anymore--it was more like the Duran Durans and people like that.

GB: You've spoken to a phenomenal amount of people - were they on the whole easy to find and happy to talk?
SR: There were some people who I couldn't track down, who just totally eluded me. I wanted to speak to the other original members of Scritti Politti, but no one knows where they are. I found a tantalising reference on the web to the former drummer Tom Morley--it was on a French business news website and it was about him being some kind of business consultant! But that was all I could find. And there others who didn't want to do interviews or made conditions. I sent a letter to Johnny Rotten or John Lydon--I'm not sure what he calls himself now. Somebody had given me his home address, but I never got a reply. Siouxsie Sioux didn't want to do it--I guess she's talked too often, Jerry Dammers, he kind of wanted to do it but wanted copy approval, he wanted to read what I wrote. So did the German group DAF, which is just ridiculous! But nearly all the people I got hold of were pretty up for it, and very helpful. A lot of them, when I mentioned postpunk, didn't quite understand what I meant. Which is odd, because I did all this research in the music papers, and that was what people called it, even then. It's always been known as "postpunk", it's not something I've invented! But the interviewees didn't necessarily have a grip on it, but when I started explaining what I wanted to do and what the book was about, maybe halfway through the interview they'd suddenly get very animated. Like they'd forgotten what a great time it was, and what a great time they'd had. Even though there was a lot of fear at the time, and political anxiety and bad stuff going on, they would get really animated as they remembered it. Nearly all the people I spoke to were very congenial, very accommodating.

GB: Can you distil the general feeling about that time from those that were involved in it?
SR: There's no really common experience. Some of the people made it and did really well, and others never made it. Like the Gang of Four, who did one really amazing album, and then another album, Solid Gold, that some people think is also really good and it even made them quite big in America. But then they also released some less good records and kind of faded away. So obviously, every group has mixed feelings about that period, and wounds they carry, like some members getting kicked out by the other members. I guess one thing that came through is that there was nobody I spoke to who disowned what they'd done or thought it was ridiculous now or pathetic. Maybe it took them a while through the interview process to get excited about it again, but there was this sense that they had at the time and which they'd retained deep down, which was that it was an urgent thing that they had been doing. And that's one of the things that was the hardest to recreate in the book. I don't know if it comes across. On a couple of occasions when I've done interviews on the radio and stuff, with younger people, they'd get a certain look in their eye, slightly bemused or humouring me, as if they're thinking 'Oh really? Did you really think this was subversive or was going to change the world?' It's like they can't even imagine that it would be possible to believe that. And that's what I was trying to get across, that rightly or wrongly, whether it was a delusion or not, people really thought that what they were doing mattered. All the things the Gang of Four did, all those Brechtian things they were trying to do, they really thought these gestures meant something, and that if people were exposed to them it would change them in some way, or alter their consciousness. All the little things that people were anxious about, like Scritti Politti constantly critiquing themselves, and constantly doubting the validity of what they did and trying to avoid lapsing into reactionary modes, as a project that was felt to be a very consequential thing to be undertaking at that point in history. It all came from punk, I suppose. Although I have my polemic in the book about punk rock as a style of music being conservative and backwards-looking, the "punk" part of the term postpunk is very important. Punk supplied this tremendously reinvigorated and revived sense of the power of music. That's why I link it with the 60s, because it's this rebirth of that feeling, after the early 70s- which had been this kind of fragmented, drifting, if very musically interesting period. Then punk comes along and regalvanises rock culture's sense of its own power. The fact that the Sex Pistols could release this record that was so threatening that even though it was selling enough to be number one, the people that manage the record charts in Britain engineered it so it only goes to number two, and even blacked out its name on the record charts so number two didn't exist.... So all those events, the Sex Pistols drama, the Clash, etcetera, that revived a sense of rock's power. Because people had felt that power and been transformed by it, and inspired by it, by extension it gave people this feeling of an ethical imperative to think really hard about what they did next. Not exactly a moral burden, but definitely that punk was something to live up to. So as much as they rejected the standard rock'n'roll format that punk rock was by and large rooted in, the punk element of missionary zeal was something they tried to live out. And it even carried on with those pop groups I refer to, like ABC, who saw themselves as living out punk, just by trying to excel and make the most spectacular record they could. To make a record that sounded like a classic disco record but with biting lyrics--they felt that was an extension of punk. Martin Fry from ABC said "I am a punk, I always have been and always will be".

GB: It's an interesting point, because as you say you've been humoured by younger radio DJs, so it seems to have been something that's been lost from music.
SR: It's been beaten out of it, I think. That "change the world" idea survives in pockets, and it's like a minority taste perhaps. But people have learnt through experience, from failure after failure of these things in the past--so it has made people avoid making those kinds of statements or operating with those beliefs. In some ways it's unavoidable that people have become more cynical or ironical, but I'm old enough to remember when we believed these things without any irony at all. There was irony in some of those pop groups, they would have an ironical relationship with mass culture imagery, do playful things, but in a weird way it was a terribly sincere irony. It was not this jaded, disengaged irony that sort of took over in the 90s. Even the irony had an edge to it back then. The campness of the B-52s or Human League, still had something vaguely emancipatory about it. It wasn't a kind of defeated irony. It's actually interesting, this year there's been a clutch of meta-music, like the LCD Soundsystem record, which has this song 'Movement' which is kind of sung by this guy who wants there to be some kind of movement or mission in music, but is cynical in advance, he's kind of mocking all these scenes, these pseudo movements. Then there's this group Art Brut who've got a song called 'Formed a Band' and all these other songs about popular culture and rock'n'roll, and 'Formed A Band' is about the kind of futility of being a rock band, yet still feeling like you want to be in a rock band. And that seems to capture where music is at right now-- people don't seem to have much belief right now, there's a feeling of inconsequentiality.