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New Model Army Remix Contest
Interview with Justin Sullivan
 It is September, a cold autumn night, and I clutch to a cup of tea while I guard the phone from unsuspecting flatmates and rewrite my notes. Justin Sullivan, singer of New Model Army, is supposed to call for a telephone interview. Not, as expected, from the States, but from somewhere on the English coast, as the US-tour had to be cancelled the US refused the band visas. When the phone rings, I've decided not to open our conversation with questions about this unpleasant issue. But it is Justin himself who brings it up instantly, explaining about the unscheduled holidays he is now taking and making it quite clear that he's not going to discuss politics. No problem, as we're not exactly a political magazine, we could talk about something else, like for example music?
 S: Thank you for offering a track for our readers to remix! Do you have a personal connection to electronic music?
J: Well, it's all music, isn't it? I don't see any massive seperation between electronic music or rock music or classical music. I get bored by machine music, I have to say. But machine music that has an element of humanity in it works very well, like Hip Hop music, which is all done with loops, but the vocals are all human and have human timing. And in terms of rocks music lots of rock music is done using technology. The new New Model Army album is done using ProTools, at home I use Logic. I do quite a lot of electronic projects. I did a project last year, creating a soundscape of the city I live in. I interviewed lots of people in the town, and cut up the interviews, and wrote kind of electronic music behind it. But what I was doing was I wasn't creating sounds, I was editing sounds that exist. And that's different to me from making sounds. The physical act of making music, like beating a drum, or playing a guitar string, or hitting a piano it takes a certain something to create music that way. When you're making electronic music, what you're basically doing is editing. I find it very easy and very satisfying to edit. I can do it for hours and hours, through the night and through the next day. You're just moving things around. But creating sounds requires something more from you. So when I have to sing or play guitar it's a different kind of act from editing.
S: And playing together in a band is a whole different story. That is an almost magical, alchemical thing, you create something together that you couldn't do alone in a studio.
J: Yes, the tempo is kind of random, but you find it together, and the tempo moves. The worst thing about electronic music is that in most of it the tempo doesn't change. You get your 130 *makes a click sound to demonstrate a beat* and then your stuck with this. And it kind of makes a boring music, I think.
 S: I think the magic happens in a different place in electronic music. It doesn't happen in the music itself, or in the process of making it, but only when the music hits the audience and people start to move to it.
J: The other thing about raves is I grew up with something called Northern Soul, which was played in these kind of clubs in North England that would get all the obscure records from Detroit and Chicago. These clubs would open at midnight, and there was no alcohol, but there were lots of pills, and everybody danced till it got light. Which was kind of exactly like rave really, but 20 years before. But the big difference was that in raves it doesn't matter how you move, you do what you want, whereas in the old Soul stuff being a good dancer was half of the art. It was very athletic and very beautiful and very cool. In these all-night-dances, there were kings of the floor, you know. And the raves are perhaps more egalitarian, but ultimately rather more boring, because everybody's smashed and noone really cares how you dance.
S: You played at Fusion festival in Germany a couple of years ago
J: Yeah, it's a great festival! Obviously it's rooted in that Berlin rave and art scene and now they're trying to mix it with some other stuff, which is great.
 S: Yes, and very successful so. Last year it simply exploded, there were so many people there that I thought the venue has reached, or even exceeded its capacity.
J: It's really difficult, because when you have a good festival, everybody wants to be there. And then very quickly it can turn not good, you know. Or you can do what Glastonbury did. I mean, Glastonbury is the biggest and still the best festival, I think. In order to guard itself it had to build a big wall around it to stop people coming in without paying and stuff. It's about 180 000 people now. But it is still a magical festival. The important thing about Glastonbury, which I hope it keeps, is that Glastonbury was never about the bands. They always had lots and lots of fantastic bands playing and lots and lots of stages. But the last time I went I didn't see a single band and I had a fantastic weekend. There's so many other things to do!
S: That's the thing about Fusion too, it's a big playground, it's so creative.
J: That is what I liked about Fusion. It wasn't watching things or doing anything in particular. It was just being there and the kind of mixture of people and that feeling. And then how beautiful with all the lights in the trees and the lights in the water.
 S: And they also have a bit of a political attitude that you hardly find in these festivals. Most festivals are rather un-political, but they have things on their agenda like "we don't party with nazis" and "take care of others" and inviting groups with a political background to do information desks.
J: And not at all any corporate advertising.
I think there's always a kind of countercultural thing going on. And interestingly enough the ideas behind counterculture remain the same. They're kind of libertarian, they're necessarily anti-government, anti-corporate. And at different times the counterculture movement adopts different kinds of music. At times it's been rock music, at different times it's been rave music, at different times it's been folk music, it keeps changing. Wherever the cutting egde is, I think. And at this moment there isn't one particular place where the cutting edge really is. There are a lot of different things happening simultaneously.
S: In your songs you're analyzing society, maybe also criticizing, but basically I feel it's just a way of describing what is there. Do you see music playing an active role in society?
J: I think there's a countercultural element in the music. But basically it's just stories. All the lyrics have stories in them. They're like little scenes from films, all the lyrics have got weather, and time of the day, and what the light is doing and the place "All-Consuming Fire", the track we gave to your readers to do the mix, has loads of different imagery. I mean, obviously it's about ... the end of the world *laughter*, but there's a lot of different imagery in it. It starts off with Fritz Lang's Metropolis, this idea of False Maria. If you just imagine the moment in Metropolis where the false Maria, the Maria they make out of the metal, rises, and everybody runs around and says 'ah, isn't she beautiful'. To me that is the perfect analogy of Western civilization.
 S: So it's all about the Western civilization going astray.
J: Yeah, it's a hate song. Sometimes we write those.
S: Well, that might have something to do with visa.
J: Uh, I don't know. I always have trouble singing that song, because in some way the lyrics are very dark. They're so dark that it's almost funny. So I found that the way to do it was to become somebody else to sing it. It was like a voodoo preacher or something. I was talking to the producer and said 'I don't know how to do this ', and he said 'wait for the moment'. And then we both looked at each other one day and I said 'well, the moment has come and I want to sing it', and it felt like I was somebody else. And I did 2 takes, then halfway through the 3rd take I changed back into being me, and then I couldn't sing it anymore. It was very strange, it never happened to me before. But it worked for the song really well.
 S: That's really a challenge for the people to remix it into Trance music.
J: But musically it's kind of simple, the parts are kind of repetitive. Musicwise it's fairly easy to remix. I'm really looking forward to hearing it, to see how it comes back!
S: Thank you for the interview, and thank you again for making "All-Consuming Fire" available for our readers to remix!
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