Following the exciting news that the ICA are to screen The The's Infected The Movie in September, I thought I'd post my Album By Album interview with Matt Johnson from April last year. It involves the clash of civilisations, "strange, quite dense soundscapes" and a cameo from Tom Waits. Incidentall...
NAKEDSELF
[NOTHING/UNIVERSAL, 2000]
Johnson returns to tackle familiar subjects: alienation, global corruption and urban decay
At this point, I was living in New York permanently. I had my first child over there, so I’m taking longer than the label would have hoped to make another record. The relationship with Sony was always warm, but my main beef was how artists are generally treated for their contracts. This is where the Gun Sluts album comes in. They hated Gun Sluts, it was my version of Metal Machine Music. I wasn’t doing it to break the contract. It’s just where I was at the time, going in some interesting new directions, listening to experimental music. So I wrote NakedSelf, which coincided with me coming to the end of my contract. I was happy to stay with Sony, but I wanted a proper contract. They said, “We can’t give you what you want at this stage, we just don’t see big hits.” I was quite upset, but they were right because there weren’t any big hits on it. I then shifted over to Universal Interscope.
I hated it. There was only one part of Universal that showed any interest, the German outlet, they were fantastic. Strangely, NakedSelf got the best reviews of any record I ever made! I thought it was crazy. The tour support ran out for a six-month world tour, so I started to pay for it out of my own pocket, because I really believed in the album and the band. Earl Harvin on drums, Spencer Campbell on bass and Eric Schermerhorn. It was like the Charge Of The Light Brigade, really. If I was to put another band together again, it would probably be the NakedSelf band. We’re still talking about playing together again.
TONY
[CINÉOLA, 2010]
Johnson forms his own company, Cinéola, to release the first major collaboration with his brother, filmmaker Gerard, and their cousin, actor Peter Ferdinando
I played David Bowie’s Meltdown with Jim Thirlwell in 2002. After that,
I pretty much retired. I didn’t pick up a guitar for years, put all my stuff into storage and started living abroad, in Spain, Sweden, and in America. I was being offered contracts by record labels but after the Universal experience I was so disillusioned. Then, gradually, the soundtrack thing came about. My younger brother and my ex-partner who is a Swedish documentary maker, started to ask me to do stuff. There was a bit of insecurity: do I want to do music anymore, and how do I do it? But this seemed a good way of getting back into the studio. I have worked on Hollywood films, I did the Sylvester Stallone Judge Dredd film, but I’d rather work on smaller projects and have more of a collaborative involvement with the director. Gerard, my brother, had already made a couple of short films, and he used some of my pre-existing instrumental music. With Tony, we talked about the sound palette. I like soundtracks that have a specific tonal range, otherwise it can end up becoming a bit too much. We decided to go with a more acoustic tone, with a bit of electronics, but the main theme would be a simple piano motif. It went very, very well. Gerard was very happy with it. He did the whole film for £40,000. That’s even more impressive than Burning Blue Soul!
HYENA
[CINÉOLA, 2015]
Another self-contained experimental score, this time harking back to techniques deployed during the earliest days of The The
It was a more intense experience due to the time frame. I had about two weeks to write and record it. I’d already worked with Gerard on the tonal palette, we experimented and got the right sound. I revived the old Terry Riley machinery, the Time Lag Accumulator. I used to play around with tape loops when I was younger, around Burning Blue Soul and I decided to bring that technology back for this as I thought it would build up these strange, quite dense soundscapes. But I had all sorts of technical problems in the studio. The speakers blew up, the tape recorders blew up, everything that could go wrong, went wrong. It was a bloody nightmare. Then between the recording and the 5:1 mixing, I had to pop to Sweden for 24 hours to deal with a personal issue. I was so run-down at this point, I got tonsillitis on the way back! So during mixing I had a jug of Solpadeine in one hand and Lemsip in the other, to keep myself going. It was like going back in time, finding that energy I had during Burning Blue Soul. But we got through it. I think it’s the best soundtrack I’ve done. Gerard was thrilled, which was the most important thing for me. There’s a few other soundtracks that haven’t been released. I also did a Turkish/Lebanese film and a series of Scandinavian documentaries. They’re going to be released as one volume, along with some spoken-word recordings. So there’s a lot of stuff in the pipeline, but I’m anxious to get back to writing the music, to be honest.
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