JM: You have a very negative view of the period that succeeds 1984. But wasn’t there some good bands after…World Domination Enterprises, Throwing Muses, AR Kane, Big Black, Young Gods...? Or was it really a wasteland? Can I infer some anti-rock stance here?
SR: Actually, the Afterchapter is really only talking about 1984/85/86 as a lull. Things really picked up in ‘87 and ‘88, that’s the period I wrote about when working at Melody Maker and that period of writing got turned into Blissed Out. During that period me and my comrades at the Maker, we were absolutely crazed with excitement about modern music--all the groups you mention were our favourites, the ones we championed. World Domination Enterprises were actually in some senses a late postpunk band--Keith Dobson was Kif Kif the guy behind Fuck Off Records, the DIY cassette label! During this period I was aggressively pro-rock, as it happens. I would write about Husker Du and in the review fantasize about the return of rock, imagine stadiums full of kids wigging out, shaking their heads and lost in noise. And of course that kind of happened, eventually, with Nirvana and grunge.

I couldn’t go into all that though with the Afterchapter as it’d end up turning into a detailed history of the last 20 years of music! So I focused instead on the current that led from postpunk directly into rave and techno and electronica. Another reason I didn’t bring it up is that I also don’t know how well the music of the late Eighties stands up. I’m almost scared to listen to it in case it doesn’t live up to all the stuff I wrote about it at the time! I think "the jury’s out" on that era, whether it was as good as me and others at Melody Maker claimed at the time. I guess we’ll have to see if bands emerge rediscovering the Butthole Surfers and all that lot. The fact that those bands were mostly so indebted to the past--sixties and early seventies music--even if they creatively reworked it, which they did, that retro-aspect might agitate against them being revived and rediscovered by new bands today. In a few years, though, I reckon I’ll be ready to dig out the Butthole Surfers and AR Kane records and see if they stand up. The My Bloody Valentine stuff has never stopped sounding good.

JM: The only chapter where you it seems you are rediscovering punk is the one dedicated to SST. Care to comment?
SR: Well, SST and hardcore in general seemed like one of the few things to get excited by at a certain point in the early Eighties, when things had gone a bit quiet--new pop had gone wrong, postpunk had gotten too dry and convoluted. So something visceral and raw and angry seemed very exciting. And the hardcore American groups were a lot better, musically, than their UK ‘punk’s not dead’ equivalents. Around that time--1983-- I also started buying Sixties garage punk compilations. Hardcore quickly turned into a dead end though, except for the SST groups who kept progressing--hence my ‘progressive punk’ and ‘post-hardcore’ concepts.

But punk in the broader sense--whether it’s proto-punk with the Stooges, or classic UK punk--Buzzcocks, Pistols, X Ray Spex, The Undertones, lots of one-off singles from the Ruts to whoever, and the Clash had their moments too--or whether it’s the classic early US hardcore of Black Flag, Angry Samoans, Descendents, Negative Approach--all this is some of my favorite music. Then there’s the New York punk which is so varied it hardly seems to fit the word ‘punk’. Television, I love totally, but they’re as much a late Sixties band as a punk band.

The trouble with punk rock in the narrow UK 1977 or Ramones sense is that its premises are so basic that it can’t be turned into a long term music culture without becoming very boring and samey. It’s more like a burst of energy that has to be rediscovered every so often, and then quickly moved beyond. I don’t have much time for Oi! Anarcho-punk interests me more for the intent and ideas behind it, the artwork and the whole anarchist culture. Nirvana, I loved, and they were pretty punky.

JM: I didn’t know you were a fan of Nirvana. I thought you thought that their music was reactionary in the face of dance culture and even recall an article you wrote that was not very sympathetic to underground rock of the nineties. Was grunge--and I include bands as Mudhoney or Tad who were very Gang of Four influenced--a backlash?
SR: I did love Nirvana but I didn’t think of them as musically progressive particularly. I didn’t think they were un-original though, they had a sound that melded elements of Husker Du, Pixies, Pistols, Sabbath, Beatles, into a distinctive sound, and of course the attitude and voice and weird impressionistic lyrics of Kurt Cobain combined with his great songwriting made them a classic band. For a couple of months when "Smells like Teen Spirit" was on rotation on MTV, it did feel incredibly exciting, like the barricades had been smashed down. It’s easy to forget how it felt in those days, you just thought that that kind of underground rock sound would never ever get into the mainstream. Husker Du, Replacements, Dinosaur Jnr, they’d all been signed to majors and then totally failed to penetrate the radio. So it was exhilarating that it finally broke through. Soon, though, grunge became the new conformity. It seemed to happen very quickly. Pearl Jam, I didn’t like at all, although they seem quite an honourable band in some ways. I liked Alice in Chains, a few Soundgarden tunes, a couple of other grungy type groups, but most of it seemed really limited.

I don’t know how much this influenced me really, but grunge came along shortly after I had read Carducci’s Rock and the Pop Narcotic and also Chuck Eddy’s Stairway to Hell metal book, which is very slanted towards early Seventies heavy rock, when metal had a groove to it. In the year before grunge, those books plunged me into exploring that whole area, buying obscure Seventies boogie and raunch and even southern rock, all very unfamiliar, because as a postpunk kid you just never listened to that stuff. So when grunge came along, sourced in that kind of Seventies rock, but combined with punk energy--it was exciting. But that same winter of "Smells like Teen Spirit" was when I got into going raving in a big way. In fact seeing Nirvana play live in London was within a few weeks of the first time I did Ecstasy at a rave. This would have been November/December 1991. Come to think of it, it was at the exact same North London venue, my first Nirvana gig and my first full on rave experience. So grunge very quickly couldn’t compare to the futurism and excitement of the whole rave thing. For me the ideal solution, I suppose, would have been a group that combined the music of the early Prodigy with the rage of Nirvana. And then five years later Prodigy combined the music of rave with the music of punk rock! They had this sort of simulated rage without any politics. It was an enjoyable cartoon but not exactly what I had imagined.

Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys once did an interview and talked about how he loved 'Smells Like Teen Spirit’ but qualified that by saying "it didn’t seem like rock at all, more like some kind of rave record--the amazing production". And the Butch Vig production is amazing, so glossy and sharp. I hadn’t liked the earlier Sub Pop stuff. I reviewed the Sub Pop 100 compilation in 1989 and said it was a backward step after Daydream Nation, back to a more old fashioned idea of teenage rebel rock. I really didn’t understand why Sonic Youth were so hot for Mudhoney.

But going back to your original question about punk, what I don’t like is most of the punk of the Nineties onwards--Green Day and all who came after them. The musicianship is always suspiciously good in those bands, really slick. Like the drummer in Green Day is so obviously a real virtuoso. Generally with pop punk there is no darkness or real corrosive anger in it, just this puppy dog-like exuberance. And it’s a very clean sound, very produced-sounding.

JM: Besides some genres I don’t know much about--grime--what can we find as aesthetically and culturally vital in today’s music?
SR: Well I’m a big fan of grime, and do like some of the free-folk. And if they’re part of that--I’m not sure--Animal Collective, who I think are amazing. In both cases--grime and free folk-- there is a commitment to musical progression combined with a cultural stance of undergroundism. Grime isn’t actually politicized but is political in the sense of having lots of rage and some social realism, and also this peculiar conflicted relationship with the mainstream, the desire to be famous stars rubbing up against their undergroundism. But no, I don’t see anything at work in modern music--and certainly modern white music--that is on a par with the aesthetic and cultural and political vitality of postpunk. Perhaps those circumstances were just unique and unrepeatable.

JM: Also when you say "the current wave of postpunk revivalists or bands influenced by that period has distorted the sense of what actually happened then, by focusing on only certain bands from that period" are you suggesting that Wolf Eyes can put be side by side along Franz Ferdinand?
SR: I wouldn’t say they’ve got anything in common except the fact that there’s an element of strong debt to specific areas of postpunk. Wolf Eyes are very indebted to Throbbing Gristle, Factrix, Whitehouse and power electronics, and really obscure noise tape stuff from the early Eighties. You could say that noise is an ongoing culture and not really something that is "returned to" but I did feel, when I saw them live, that it was like a tradition now, and in a sense they were almost like a blues band--genre stylists.

JM: I would like to believe in the idea of dormant genres as stories opened to new progressions, or the possibilities of new crossovers. Maybe white music can merge again with the black ones?
SR: Well, the failing of the neo-postpunk bands like LCD Soundsystem and The Rapture and so forth is that they’re returning to an earlier period’s black/white fusion. LCD Soundsystem have one or two tracks with influences from house or recent hip hop, but mostly it’s returning to the sound of punk-funk and mutant disco, groups like ESG and Liquid Liquid. So it’s a long past encounter between rock culture and disco/funk/dub, rock and the black music that was state of the art in the early Eighties. Whereas the equivalent of postpunk or punk-funk today would be a band combining rock with grime, or dancehall, or something like that.

Hip hop does feed on the past but in a way that somehow transcends homage and that postmodern citational thing, and just becomes part of the ongoing living tradition of black music type. Somehow it transcends the citational pathos syndrome when Kanye West samples Shirley Bassy’s "Diamonds are Forever" or Chakha Khan’s "Through The Fire". Weird! It’s a mystery how it does it, something I would like to write about actually: the fact that Ying Yang Twins can do a whole track based around Art of Noises’ "Beatbox", or they can sample Al Green’s "Belle" but for some reason isn’t the same as Stereolab sounding like Neu! or LCD Soundsystem doing a track that’s a copy of Eno circa Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy.

JM: Aren’t most of the contemporary bands terribly pressured by the copy complex? Isn’t pop/rock as grand narrative dead? Or must it feed on technology gadgets (telephones, computers, television ads) or… maybe we can expect some novelty from the realities outside the Occidental cultural complex?
SR: I don’t know. It seems unstoppable--the flood of documentation. People are still finding areas to write about in rock history, little zones that haven’t been explored. As much as I am committed to discovering and celebrating new music, I am also part of that retro industry--I write for mags like Uncut which is in large part retro-oriented. Rip It Up is part of a wave of books this year--there’s Jeff Chang’s incredibly substantial--literally, it’s massive--book on hip hop Can’t Stop Won’t Stop; Peter Shapiro’s equally hefty and authoritative book on disco, Turn the Beat Around. It’s like three big genres of music--postpunk, hip hop, disco--getting their definitive books done this year. There’s a whole load of other music books coming out this year too. Barney Hoskyns, who already did one massive book on Los Angeles music, has one specifically on Laurel Canyon and that whole soft rock, singer/songwriter, country rock crew around Asylum Records--the Eagles, Joni Mitchell. So I can’t see any end in sight to this retro industry of people chewing over the rock past, rewriting the stories and reworking the music. There’s TV documentary series, there’s endless recycling of period influences and reissuing of period records. People artistically reflect what they consume and if this is what is being pumped into their creativity veins then... I don’t know.

At the same time, people do rework the past to compelling effect. My favorite records of this year are Ariel Pink’s Worn Copy which is a sort of phantasmagoria of American radio--pop-rock, eighties new wave, blue-eyed soul, lite-metal--all passed through the psychedelic visionary filter of his strange sensibility. And the other favorites are all on the Ghostbox label, and based around sampling old library music albums and soundtracks, creating this phantasmagoria of a bygone, lost England of the 60s and 70s.

In terms of getting past this obsession with the past, there is also, as you say, the possibility of a jolt, caused by technology, or drugs, or some kind of political rupture that rejoins Culture and History. I say that because I do feel like pop culture, at a certain point, got disconnected from History--at least white pop culture did. It began to reflect back on itself, rather than reflect the present or stuff outside itself. Whereas black music for some reason seems to be able to stay in the present more easily; "the social" leaks into black music inevitably, not by any conscious choice on the part of its makers.

As you say, there is also the possibility of things coming from outside the West, from a place where culture is less exhausted in both the "used up" and "tired" senses. It could be from Eastern Europe, or East Asia, or Latin America. Whether the Anglo-American entertainment industry would let it come through though, is another matter. But perhaps it’ll be so vital it won’t be stoppable, because people will crave the renewing energy it’ll possess.

JM: What’s your opinion then on the current UK rock and pop scene? After the end of the 80´s. I found few bands to be interesting. Have the British Isles forget how to rock?
SR: British rock has been a disgrace for a while, hasn’t it? Obviously there are exceptions. I really liked Stereolab, and Radiohead I grew to admire a lot. Neither of them are exactly rock bands though. It does seem like the art of rocking has been lost in Britain, just basic simple rhythmic knowledge. I think it’s because all the people with any rhythmic sensibility went into electronic dance music, and they applied it to programming and building rhythm tracks in a computer. So the people who are left are those who just want to be in a band and there’s a gap in their mates’ band for the drummer and so they pick up the drums. It’s not an instrument they particularly have a flair for. Hence the astonishing lack of rhythmic heat in British rock bands. I suppose in a sense Radiohead have been a bad influence, in that they don’t exactly ‘rock’, it’s more about guitar texture. There’s probably some good UK rock bands I’m forgetting. But generally I think after about 1993, almost all the musical intelligence in UK went into the electronic side of things.