JM: Has Rip It Up and Start Again made you reevaluate music you tended to forget or dislike? Was it also a way of coming to terms with your past and experiences as a listener?
SR: There were certain groups who I hadn’t been particularly big huge fans of at that time but, through doing the book, my respect for them grew. One example was Depeche Mode, who seemed more admirable and special in retrospect than they had at the time. ABC were a group I’d fallen out of love with--to the point of selling Lexicon of Love--but through researching that chapter I rediscovered the album and decided it was actually great, and I also found myself impressed by their whole project, the sheer determination and will to power behind their attempt to become pop stars. There were other groups whose music I had really liked but through doing the book I kind of fell madly in love with, both musically and in terms of the “spirit” behind their story--Cabaret Voltaire, for instance, just seemed like these heroic figures.

One thing I found generally, though, was that there weren’t that many discoveries I made in terms of fantastic groups that I’d not known about. There were lots of little gems and second-tier groups that I’d not heard of, great little weird records like ImpLOG’s "Holland Tunnel Drive" or lots of records out of Germany and Belgium and Holland--and it was fun discovering these. But most of the obvious Postpunk Greats I already knew about. I’m a bit suspicious of people who try to inflate the legends of obviously minor figures from that era, like the Homosexuals.

Writing about postpunk was definitely like a return to my formative listening experiences. When I started writing professionally in 1986, however, a lot of my impetus was to shake off the influence of punk and post-punk, which I felt had exerted a strangehold on British music culture and led to a lot of bad music. So I celebrated a lot of American music that I felt was more visceral and intuitive, not premeditated and mediated and thought-through like the UK music tended to be. And I used a lot of psychedelic imagery, Sixties derived ideas, which I mapped onto ideas from French critical theory--Barthes, Kristeva, Bataille, Foucault, and so forth. So it was a jumble of neo-psychedelic notions--bliss out, getting lost in music, being lost for words, mindblowing sonic overload, jettisoning the ego--with post-structuralist ideas of jouissance, escaping language and identity. Which resulted in a weird hybrid theory that was both mystical and really kinda nihilistic. It was all about trying to escape the suffocating "rock discourse" but also in a sense an attempt to escape society or even reality itself. My writing at that point wasn’t so much apolitical as anti-political; today I would see what I was doing then as aestheticizing surrender, celebrating cultural forms that in some sense paralleled the defeatism and capitulation felt by a lot of people during the Thatcher/Reagan/Bush Senior era, when it seemed like there was no constructive political outlet for either your anger or idealism. Basically, "resistance is futile", so turn on, get blissed, drop out. The result of this period of thinking and music was my first book, Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock, which collected my writings of the late Eighties.

And during this period the approach of a band like Gang of Four would have been quite alien to me. I was into Butthole Surfers, My Bloody Valentine, Sonic Youth, Pixies, AR Kane, Dinosaur Jnr, Young Gods… Either that or early acid house and the more aggressive kinds of hip hop. So for a long period the postpunk records would been on my shelves but never listened to.

That said, I think my writing always had a political dimension to it, even during this period when I was quite opposed to overtly politicized bands. There was always a strong element of social analysis and placing things in terms of class, race, gender, and so forth. But generally the idea that rock could or should change the world had been beaten out of me (and out of lots of other people) by its manifest failures. In that sense, you could say it was hope-less writing! The best, I thought, that it could do was to escape society--even History itself--by building an underground culture based around self-loss, stepping outside Time. The one thing I kept from postpunk though was the idea that music itself should keep changing, progressing, although paradoxically a lot of the groups I celebrated did this by going back to the past and reworking ideas from the Sixties.

Rave culture was in some ways the continuation of the bliss-out phase--with, for the first time, drugs actually accompanying the druggy imagery I used in my writing. But rave was also the beginning of my re-politicisation--because this really was, at least in the early days, a counter-culture or at least an underground. There were all these elements of postpunk-style autonomy involved: the free raves, the pirate stations, the small labels and lone do-it-yourself operators working in their bedrooms. There was a real attempt to build something outside the mainstream. The music also often had a kind of abstract, pre-political rage to it--people trying to escape their constrictions, a rage to live that was simultaneously very Sixties and very punk rock. Also the jungle scene especially made me think hard about questions of class and race, technology and the future. The other thing was that the actual music itself, its strange rhythms and eerie textures, occasionally reminded me of postpunk, especially the more avant-funk and electronic outfits like 23 Skidoo, A Certain Ratio, Cabaret Voltaire, and DAF. Also the darkness of some of the music, its apocalyptic quality, seemed both political in the sense that it reflected the state of the world, and also an obvious flashback to the sinister imagery of the avant-funk and industrial groups. And above all rave music--especially jungle--was committed to innovation and futurism in a way that was totally postpunk in spirit. Whereas the bliss-out late 80s rock bands had mostly been quite postmodern, using elements from the rock archives and at best combining them in ways that multiplied their impact. So I would say that the whole rave experience in a way set me up for rediscovering postpunk. Rave was like a transitional phase between my blissrock period and the rediscovered interest in postpunk ideas. But it was only when the rave scene totally lost its edge and became just entirely a superclub culture, if you can even call it a culture--very bland and controlling with no underground element whatsoever--around 1998 that I started listening to postpunk records again.

I can actually remember a conversation with a fellow dance journalist, Tony Marcus, a writer who I respect a lot. It was sometime in 1998, and he surprised me by saying that he’d been listening to Crass, the anarcho-punk band, recently--"to remind me who I am". I guess being slightly younger than me that had been the band of his youth in the early Eighties. My younger brother was into Crass as it happens. And I think Tony Marcus had been through the whole dance and drugs adventure and then found himself a bit adrift by the end of the Nineties, wondering "well, what was all that about then?" And to reorient himself, he dug out his Crass albums. And that remark of Tony’s stuck with me, and as my disillusionment increased with what dance music had degenerated into, I started wondering about the journey through music I’d been taken--how did I end up here, and where did the journey begin? So doing this project has kind of completed a circle for me.

JM: You recall in the beginning of your book a time when you would only buy music from your present and not from the past. From your vantage point today what do you think the more adventurous young people are doing now? Or can do now...?
SR: The difference now is that there is a huge reissue industry vying for young people’s attention, so that at any given time they are "in" 1977, or 1982, or 1969… as much as they are in 2005. Also because they have so many great things from the past to keep them amused they don’t notice how shit current music has gotten! Well, it’s also true that there’s so much music made today that you can find enough to amuse and stimulate yourself, if you explore all over the spectrum, but still, I think the glut of reissued music definitely creates a false impression of musical bounty and plenty. During the postpunk era, reissuing was hardly done at all. When 2-Tone hit, a couple of Sixties ska compilations came out. Records from the immediate past would go out of print--I distinctly remember things like Tim Buckley records coming back into print and getting reviewed, or the Faust stuff being put out again after years of being unavailable. It was simply very unusual to have an old record be in the music papers’ review sections. Scott Walker--his records were unavailable, and it was a big deal when Julian Cope pulled together the Fire Escape in the Sky compilation of solo Walker stuff. Most of all, people just didn’t go on and on obsessively talking and thinking about the past. A magazine like Mojo or Uncut just wouldn’t have existed then, partly because rock was still relatively young then, and partly because there simply wouldn’t have been the demand--there was so much going on in the present. There weren’t endless documentaries on TV about the rock past. Just generally, there was a dearth of documentation--which allowed for a total immersion in the present.

I would like to write an essay exploring the effects of retro-culture on our sense of "now". Because I’m as bad as anyone, I love crawling over the past like a fly on a turd, finding strange obscure records in used record stores. Obviously, it can be interesting and creative, re-imagining the past, or just finding strange lost stories from forgotten artists or eras. But overall, I think it’s a pernicious thing.

JM: Your comparison between the sixties and the eighties as musical periods connected to the political and social turbulence of its times is interesting. But wasn’t the 60´s impact a more exposed one as in the 80´s things were a little more disguised? Most of the messages were lost in the songs or rhythms. And in the sixties for the good or bad, people tend to remember the catchphrases… I’m referring to new pop, mainly here. People tend to remember the visual aspect of it more than the ideological one.
SR: Actually, I think there was probably more overt political songs in the punk/postpunk/new wave period than in the Sixties--if anything the expression was more oblique (and Dylan-style allegorical) in the Sixties, in part because all Sixties rock, by its very nature, was somehow "political"--the expression of a generational energy that was oppositional. Simply demanding pleasure and fun and groovy freaking out was a form of insurrection then. The Rolling Stones saying "let’s spend the night together" was subversive! Or Hendrix saying "I don’t live today". More than the overt protest songs, sixties rock politics was a politics of vitalism, of energy, of romantic utopianism, of desire and freedom, encoded in the sound of the music and the tone of the singing voices as much as the actual words. Postpunk tended to spell things out a lot more lyrically. Although the most interesting, and arguably successful, political songs from the era are the more subtle and oblique ones. New Pop, though, you’re right, was a retreat from the overt politics, and perhaps more to do with the internal politics of pop, of gender and androgyny, sexuality and desire.

JM: JM: How was having the participation of Joe Carducci? You both have very opposite tastes and defend quite different ideas about pop and rock.
SR: Well, I like most of the stuff Carducci likes. I love that late Sixties and early Seventies groove-oriented style of rock: James Gang, Led Zep, Mountain, AC/DC, Steppenwolf. I’m a huge Sabbath fan. The difference is that Carducci doesn’t like hardly any of the postpunk or synthpop or New Pop stuff! Although apparently he was a fan of Eno and German synth music before punk. He’s a great interview, very scrupulous and considered in his responses. A good memory--perhaps on account of never having taken drugs!. Even though we come from different worlds in a lot of ways--politically, certainly--I have the utmost respect for him as he is such a rigorous and stimulating thinker about music. I don’t know what he will make of the postpunk book as so much of that stuff was either trying to dismantle rock or was by his standards inept--nothing going on in the rhythm section. He did like the Pop Group, though, as they had a burnin’ rhythm section! Generally I agree with him about the importance of the good drummer, and that’s what wrong with UK music these last 15 years or so. In Coldplay, for instance, the drummer contributes nothing to the music, he’s just marking time. There’s a total lack of rhythmic thrust and push-and-pull in British "rock" these days. The other thing that won’t resonate for Carducci in my book is the political slant of the bands and their anti-American bias. Generally he’s also quite suspicious of bohemian art-school types, which is obviously the core of Rip It Up.

JM: In the end you compare Frankie Goes To Hollywood to the Sex Pistols. But as you point out only the latter has offered some kind of legacy. Was it because of the evil of punk (in Rotten’s voice)? Can we say it has ignited in some ways the post-punk rush?
SR: In the book I tend to dramatize postpunk against punk, and that might seem to demean punk and write it off as reactionary, on a musical level. For rhetorical purposes it was necessary to build up postpunk’s stature at the expense of punk, just because punk has had so much attention and so many books about it. But obviously it’s impossible to overestimate the importance of punk, both as music, and in the sense that nearly every one in Rip It Up and Start Again was propelled on their musical adventure because of initially being excited by punk. Incited by punk. And, you know, I love so much punk music--just a few weeks ago I had to review the reissue of Germfree Adolescents by X-Ray Spex, and it’s incredible, glorious music. So in the book I refer to me being catalyzed as a 15 year old by the double impact of Never Mind the Bollocks and Metal Box, because it was totally both those records that set me on my path. If I was to do the book again, I would at some point also explore more the "punk" in the word "postpunk"--what survived from punk, beyond just the impulse to keep changing and moving forward. The "evil", as you put it, in Rotten’s voice, is one thing maybe--that impulse to confront the darkness, even at the risk of becoming it, as with Throbbing Gristle’s flirtations with fascism.

I just spotted just another echo of the Pistols in Frankie--when Holly Johnson sings "are we living in a land where where Sex and Horror are the new gods?", I think that is an echo of Rotten singing in "God Save the Queen" about "if there’s no future, how can there be sin?". It’s that notion that in the Last Days of Mankind, an apocalyptic decadence will reign, with all moral rules abandoned. It’s similar to the idea in Jeff Nuttall’s Bomb Culture, that the Sixties freak-out was a response to living with nuclear annihilation over our heads--"live today, because there might be no tomorrow". Just the fact that "Relax" was the first banned single since "God Save the Queen" is another echo of the Pistols. But yeah as I say, in the end, the Frankies don’t compare to the Pistols. Not as original or powerful musically. The Pistols were a great band, and punk wasn’t entirely a rehash of the rock’n’roll past, more like a distillation of its essence--quite a new sound in some ways, it’s just that you couldn’t do much with it beyond a certain point except reiterate it. Nor were the personalities as powerful--Holly doesn’t compare with Lydon.