Flash-back

Here's the transcript of an enjoyable interview I did in late 1998 with the Irish journalist Jonathan O'Brien, i.e. shortly after Energy Flash first came out, when - as so often happens, after the process is done - I am starting to get a clearer idea about what I was trying to do all along. Plus some glimpses of what was ahead for the music, at least as I saw it at that precise vantage point in time. How it turned out - a quite different story.  

JO'B: What motivated you to start writing the book in the

first place?

SR: I'd been writing a lot of stuff about most forms of dance music,

particularly hardcore, since I really got involved in the scene, which

was towards the end of 1991. So I'd accumulated quite a lot of stuff,

including think-pieces and essays. My initial idea was to just do a

collection of it, but then I realised that would be kinda lazy and I

should probably just really go for it, and try and do a sort of

definitive, comprehensive book on all the different styles of the

music. I knew that another book was coming out, Matthew Collins' book,

but I knew that it was more a history of Ecstasy, and crime and

gangsterism and the law. So I felt like there was a clear field for me

really just to deal with the music.

 JO'B: Did you want to avoid the sociological aspect of dance, to

a degree?

SR:You have to have that in it, but I wanted it to be a sort of

celebration and analysis of the music, because there have been so many

amazing mutant forms of it.

JO'B: Tell me about the Energy Flash CD. When

did you get the idea for putting one on the front of the book, and did

you have any licensing difficulties?

SR:Initially, I thought we'd do a CD with a . . . y'know, other

people have done this, David Toop did this thing of having a CD which

was in parallel with the book, and that was the initial idea, to just

do one like that. But then, my editor at Picador said, "We can actually

stick the CD on the book." I don't think anyone has really done that

before. Someone did a book of John Cage's lectures that has a CD of him

actually reading the lectures attached to it. Disco

Biscuits, that collection of club fiction, had a CD in

parallel with it, put out by a record label. But the actual physical

sticking of a CD on the book is a new thing.

I was a bit worried that it would spoil the design, or people would

steal it, or whatever. It seemed fraught with problems, but actually it

worked out really well. Originally, the CD was gonna be a bit more

broad-ranging, as well . . .

 JO'B: Well, certainly, there seems to be a preponderance of

hardcore on the CD itself.

 SR:Yeah. I mean, it was always gonna be like that, because

hardcore is my favourite music, and it's also the stuff I think most

people haven't heard. It's quite hard to get hold of on record these

days - there's a collector's market for this stuff, the 12-inches go

for thirty quid now. So the CD was always going to be mostly that, but

I wanted it to be more of a continuum running from . . . eh, ideally I

would have wanted it to start with something like Todd Terry, which I

sort of see as the origins of hardcore, because it's had a very strong

hip-hop influence to it, although it was considered as house anthems at

the time. It was really chopped-up, with lots of abrasive edits in it.

So the CD would have gone from that through all the Nightmares On Wax,

bleep-and-bass stuff, and Beltram. I wanted some more Belgian stuff but

we couldn't get those, it was too hard. And then I wanted it to

actually go all the way up to Big Beat. Right up to the very end of the

process, Skint Records promised us these tracks by Fatboy Slim and

Bentley Rhythm Ace. Then they signed this big deal with a major label,

and the tracks were sort of tied up because of that. Also, I think

Fatboy Slim's stuff has so many samples in it that there were problems

there as well.

So in the end the CD was very focused on hardcore. But I'm not too

bothered by that, because I think a lot of people have never heard a

lot of this stuff, so I wanted a CD that hopefully substantiated my

descriptions of the music (laughs).

 JO'B: Most people would think of hardcore as the stuff that was

in the charts in '92 - very cheesy and toytownish-sounding - but the

stuff on the CD couldn't be more different. It's a lot more complex

than I thought it would be. I hadn't heard very much of it before.

SR:Well, there are quite a few tracks on the CD that are almost

sort of toytown-like. They have high, squeaky voices . . .

 

JO'B: The Blame and Hyper-On Experience tracks are like that.

 SR:And also DJ Trax. But even then, I think this is really good

music. The beats are put together very well. The thing I like about

that music, a lot of it is real value for money. You get people going

through seven different segments of a track, instead of this thing of

dragging out one or two ideas for a whole track, which seems to be the

norm now. (excitedly)The tracks are, like,

action-packed! There are bridges and breakdowns - you can go through

literally six distinctive ideas within a track, like with that DJ Trax

thing. I just wanted to put this stuff down and make a claim for it as

great music, as well as rave anthem fodder.

 JO'B: Why do you think that things changed, that people started

using only one motif for an entire track, instead of cramming in as

many ideas as they could?

 SR:I don't know. I think back then, maybe people were more . .

.. hyped-up, just throwing stuff out. They weren't

really thinking that far ahead, and maybe later people realised they

could put seven 12-inches out instead of one. Also, in a weird sort of

way, a lot of the music made back then was actually pop music, in its

ambition, whereas now, people make stuff as kinda DJ tools - so the

reason there's only one idea is because the DJ's only going to play it

for two minutes or so, then mix into another track. So it is like raw

materials for the DJ to work with.

 JO'B: I unearthed some of your cuttings before this interview,

and I was reading some of the stuff you'd written about Omni Trio. One

theme that kept coming up again and again was the . . .

naïvetyof the melodies, in his music in particular,

but also in other acts.

 

SR:Well, I write some stuff in the book about the

non-importance of melody, but in actual fact there's a lot of great

tunes in this music. A lot of it's very catchy. I was actually

listening to a re-release of, you know Steve Reich? He did mostly

minimalist stuff. But he also did this record called Music For

18 Musicians or something like that. It was much more lush and

beautifully textured. And his whole thing is based around these almost

inane, childlike little melodies. Little plinky-plinky piano sounds.

And it's this dense weave of these little tiny melodic fragments. The

sequence of it sounds purely like Orbital or Omni Trio. Very

naïve-sounding melodies and naïvely happy textures . . . plangent

little sounds. I was struck by the fact that there were respected

composers doing this childlike thing. That's one of the things I like

most about Aphex Twin, his stuff which is most naïve in its melodies,

rather than his . . .

 JO'B: You're talking about the music from his first album, rather

than things like 'Quoth'?

 SR:Yeah. I think the other stuff he does is fantastic, but

there's something about the childlike-ness of the euphoria . . . little

simple melodies and plinky sounds.

 JO'B: To get back to hardcore itself, you say you got into it

around the end of '91. And you stuck with it until it sort of mutated

into jungle. What were the exact circumstances - did you just hear it

on a pirate station, or did you get sent a particular record, or what?

 SR: Being a journalist, I got sent some of this stuff, like what

R&S was doing, people like Beltram and that, which I loved. And my

friends, who had been indie-rock fans, had started going to these

events that The Shamen put on, or Primal Scream gigs, or whatever. I

had been really into Screamadelica, and I kinda kept

one eye on some of these things - 808 State and such.

The first two raves I went to, which I describe in the introduction to

the book - one was this event by The Shamen, and the other was what I

realise now was a really cheesy event for most people. It was N-Joi, M

People and Bassheads. I had no idea this was naff! I knew at the time

that they'd all had hits. And so I was just blown away by both these

events, and then I did start obsessively listening to the pirate

stations in London.

At the time I was quite into the hard Belgian stuff, and I didn't

really care much for the breaks. I couldn't get my head round it. But

gradually, I realised it was not only the most exciting stuff but the

most creative stuff, compared with what was being touted at the time:

all this stuff on Guerilla and Leftfield. There were a few good things

in that area, but hardcore seemed so much more

insane and crazy. Coming from a rock background, that's what really

appealed to me, the insanity of it.

 JO'B: I remember reading some of what you wrote for

Melody Maker about hardcore/jungle in '93-'94, and you

were saying that it was almost like a crusade for you at one point,

trying to get other people interested in it.

 SR:Yeah, I was just obsessed with it. It's the most exciting

scene I've ever participated in. I was into punk rock but I missed it -

I got into the Sex Pistols after they split up. I could say I was a

participant in Pixies, Sonic Youth, Loop and My Bloody Valentine, all

that stuff that happened in the late '80s, in the sense of writing

about it. But there was never really a subculture there, whereas

hardcore was the first time I was actually a participant in a

subculture.

I couldn't understand why the people I knew didn't actually listen to

the pirates. I couldn't get my head around the fact that this stuff was

FREE! You could tape it off the radio! It was insane-sounding and

interesting. And I was there defending this thing that nobody in the

world took seriously. Critically speaking, there were definitely a

couple of years where there was only me, and then, towards the end of

that year, this friend of mine - Kodwo Eshun - started writing about

it, but not quite as regularly as I was.

I don't want to sound like I'm blowing my own trumpet, but what really

amazes me is that during this entire period I was spending more than

half my time in New York, and I was more on it than

those in London. I didn't think anyone had an excuse to miss out on

this stuff if you were living in London. In '93 I think I spent three

months in London, and the rest of it in New York; I was writing

The Sex Revolts with my wife at the time, so I was in

America most of the time. I would come back, and in the space of three

or four months, it seemed to have leapt another era ahead, musically.

I'd keep asking my friends and people I knew had they heard this stuff,

and nobody seemed to have.

 JO'B: Did you think you were missing out by spending so much time

in America?

 SR:I was terribly frustrated. It's very hard to get the records

in America. Although that sort of rave music had been big in '91-'92 in

the New York scene, I think the New York scene veered off, and if you

were into breakbeat you were a tiny minority. So it was pretty hard to

get the records in the USA. And there were no compilations available.

It took me a little while to work out that you had to go to specialist

stores in London to buy the stuff, although I could find the odd thing,

like the Omni Trio and Foul Play material in the local branch of Our

Price in Brixton.

There was certainly an appeal in it being fantastically underground,

but at the same time I was very frustrated that I couldn't seem to

convince anyone to investigate it. So whenever I wrote about it, I

always stressed the fact that you could get this music for free, off

pirate radio. It's there, it's accessible.

 JO'B: But of course jungle ended up splitting up into six or

seven different strands, and it seemed to peak, commercially at least,

around 1994-95. What do you make of it now? I was looking at some of

the stuff on your website, and you were having a go at people like LTJ

Bukem.

 SR:I think that stuff about Bukem, I actually wrote it about a

couple of years ago, when all that mellow sound was kind of in the

ascendant, and it kinda needed to be taken down a peg. But I actually

have a weird respect for Bukem, in so far as he's stuck to his

aesthetic guns. He could have easily gone along with something like

techstep, but he's stuck to what he believes in, and kudos to him for

that. It's certainly not my favourite kind of drum and bass, but good

things are still done in it - Adam F has done some good stuff.

Generally, I think drum and bass is like a sonic narrative that's

stalled at the moment. I dunno, it could be renewed at some point down

the line, but it feels like it's painted itself into a corner. The

current sound which rules would be the  Optical sound. It's like, they

don't wanna be too jazzy because they think that's a media fix, they

don't wanna be too dark because techstep made it too dark. So it's like

nowhere music. It often has no definable mood to it, or explicit

emotion, or anything. I just find it very numbing.

 JO'B: Have you heard the new 4 Hero album? One disc of it is

jazzy kind of stuff, and the other disc is really mechanical, metallic

drum and bass.

 SR:I thought that was a good record. I actually didn't mind the

really strings/jazzy-orientated stuff, I almost kind of feel they've

earned the right to do that, because they've done so much amazing

stuff. And the second side I probably like more. I think actually

there'll be good drum and bass albums coming out, and the odd good

track. But it's a bit of a fallow scene. I feel it's gone the way that

techno went a few years ago, that really purist techno sound.

 JO'B: What about Goldie? You wrote a lot about him in

Melody Maker for a while, but from what I can gather

from the book, you don't think much of his new stuff at all.

 SR:Well, I think Timeless was a bit overrated

and overblown. There's some really amazing stuff on it, but I

sort of came round to this intellectual, theoretical position on the

music, which is kind of my opinion on all of dance music. When it

begins to stray from the dancefloor too much, or from what DJs need at

any particular moment, it comes a bit of a cropper. It's like music

without a reason to be, in a weird sort of way. It could either be

totally atmospheric, and then it's not really any relation to dance

music at all - or it could be semi-danceable . . . there are some

amazing things on Timeless, but also some real

embarrassing things . . .

 JO'B: The jazz-rock elements?

 SR:Yeah . . . and the new one is a bit of a stinker, isn't it,

let's be honest (laughs).

 JO'B: I'm not wild about the big long 60-minute track, anyway.

 SR:Although I know someone who claims to be really moved by it,

and thinks it's brilliant!

 JO'B: Do you think these guys are just striving for acceptance

from the critics, by using "real" instrumentation, like guitars and

basses?

 SR:I had an interesting e-mail from someone who took issue with

my idea that it was a legitimation complex or a secret inferiority

complex - that they wanted to be taken seriously. I think that's part

of it. But this guy said something which is quite true: that's it's

overconfidence, in a sense. Maybe the tons of really

over-the-top praise Goldie got made him think, "I have the unlimited

power to do whatever I want."

Also, there is this weird sort of thing within that culture of always

wanting to go further. At a certain point you just go too far into

artistry and conceptualism. That's one of the things I find interesting

about the whole world of dance culture and particularly drum and bass -

how a lot of the people involved do conceive of themselves as capital-A

artists, aesthetes. And they don't really have any connection with

literary culture, like they don't read books. A lot of it comes from a

weird mish-mash of style, fashion, and film.

 JO'B: Certainly, a lot of these fellows seem to name-check films

like Scarface.

 SR:And Bladerunner. I mean, I think

Bladerunner was a huge aesthetic experience for a

whole generation of people. It's like their equivalent of reading

Dante's Inferno or something. Same with The

Godfather and Apocalypse Now. . .

JO'B: One thing apparent throughout the book, especially when

you're writing about acts like The Future Sound Of London, is the way

you line yourself up with - for want of a better phrase - the sweaty

ravers, against the goatee-bearded chin-strokers.

SR:Well, partly that's me trying to avoid my own . . . class

destiny, or where I should be. And partly I just associate better times

and a better vibe with those sorts of clubs and scenes. You go to these

events, like chill-out events and eclectronica, eclectic nights, and

nothing really ever happens. There's no real spark, no energy in the

air. I mean, I can move in that world, and it's sort of an obvious

place for me to be, in a way, given my background. I have really broad

taste in music and quite a lot of knowledge of it, and I write for

magazines like The Wire and stuff. But in some ways

it's the least interesting place for me to be.

There's a weird sort of class tourism thing, as well. You could make

fun of it, but in actual fact I think it's quite a good thing. I

actually got a lot from encountering the real energy and desperation of

working-class people, the way they really take their pleasures, living

like there's no tomorrow. It's really inspiring.

But it's more the case that working-class culture in Britain kinda

moved by its own dynamic towards my territory anyway. I was always into

psychedelic music, avant garde music and

avant-funk, such as early PiL. And it's almost like

the music moved into my area anyway. So it's not like I'm making this

trip into some exotic, other place. It's come nearer

me in a way.

 JO'B: I've read some of the stuff you wrote about bands like The

Young Gods, and if I can get all high-faluting for a minute, you're

obviously more of a Dionysian than an Apollonian . . .

 SR: Hahaaa. I try to be.

 

JO'B: You're obviously well into the idea of the "head-rush".

 SR:Yeah, 'cause I'm naturally a quite cautious, organised,

well-planned kind of person. So anything that can take me out of that

frame of mind, I find very rewarding. And that's what I tend to value

in music. My crowning moments in music are things like the Stooges and

Sex Pistols, Hendrix, My Bloody Valentine . . . stuff that's really

about chaos, in a way.

 JO'B: In the book, you avoided - studiously, it would seem -

writing about the more popular, song-based bands like Orbital,

Leftfield and Underworld.

 SR:Well actually, I like some things Leftfield have done, and

especially early Orbital. I like most of the things they've done, like

'Halcyon' and 'Chime'. Immense tracks. I actually wanted to get 'Chime'

on the CD, but it didn't work out. There are certain people in that

scene who are doing more art-oriented stuff, who I really respect.

Someone like Björk, who I think has done really amazing stuff, is

stealing ideas from dance music and presenting them in a song context.

But I still really think the motor of the music comes from the

dancefloor and not from a really song-oriented thing. Although I

actually do like stuff that has vocals in it, such as the speed garage

stuff, with these twisted, warped vocals.

 JO'B: Reading the chapter on ambient, I get the feeling you

regard it as the successor to prog rock - music for white students who

are afraid to get their hands dirty with jungle and hardcore.

 

SR:There is that element to it. There was a lot of good stuff

produced, and there was a period when I was equally enamoured of it;

had quite a bit of interest in that whole area of music. But I think it

just became a dead end, wispy and not very interesting. And especially

if you compare it with the whole grand tradition of ambient atmospheric

music, a lot of it was not nearly as good as Brian Eno or Jon Hassell or Harold Budd

and other people in that field.

So a lot of the sonic hallmarks which people decide signify

"experimental" are actually conventions in a weird sort of way. You

can actually change the conventions. So within a

couple of years' time, breakbeats, which had been considered totally

crap and degraded and stupid, became the hallmark of what was

experimental. All the bands that had been doing "intelligent" stuff all

started using breakbeats, and mostly not very well.

It's weird: a lot of the signifiers of supposed intelligence or

experimentalism are actually just conventions that are constructed in

particular moments in the music, constructed by labels, fans, artists

and critics together. So whenever a concept becomes too calcified or

rigid, you try to disrupt it in some way - which is what I've been

trying to do by pushing gabba (laughs).

  JO'B: I was just going to ask you about that. Gabba is the polar

opposite of a lot of the stuff you write about in the book. It's

probably the most prole-centric of all the musical art forms you

mention. It seems even more . . . again, for want of a better phrase .

.. . more down and dirty than even hardcore.

 SR:Yeah. It's weird, gabba . . . um, is it popular in Ireland

at all? Or Northern Ireland, given its relationship with Scotland?

JO'B: No, it's all 4/4 techno over here. David Holmes is the big

dance figurehead in this country.

SR:Oh, right. I think the gabba audience does have a mass sense

of proleness - but then you find that there are all sorts of odd people

involved in it, like Technohead. Michael Wells is from an industrial

background originally, and he went to art college and stuff. All kinds

of odd people can actually move within that scene, and a lot of the

people doing it now are actually from an avant garde

background or anarcho, y'know, a lot of anarchists are into it. It's

weird - the anger in gabba seems to attract types from right across the

political spectrum, from right-wing people to really left-wing or

anarchist people. A lot of it is moronic, but I think there's a lot of

ideas in it that are actually quite interesting: the noise of it, and

the textures in it.

 

JO'B: And the sheer speed of it.

SR:Yeah, that in itself is quite radical.

JO'B: You were saying there are certain melodic ideas in it that

are interesting, but if you were to just cast your eye over it and take

it at face value, you would think it's merely boing-boing-boing stuff

for mad Ajax Amsterdam fans who are out of their boxes on speed. But

from what you're saying, there's obviously a lot more going on inside .

.. . to be fair, I haven't heard an awful lot of it.

SR:Well, there's a sort of outer fringe of people who tend not

to like using the word "gabba" - they say "hardcore". They have all

sorts of new terms for it, like "stormcore" or "splatter-breaks".

 

JO'B: It must be difficult, living in America, trying to keep up

with all this stuff that seems to change on literally a weekly basis.

SR:Well, I actually find it easier to keep up with it in New

York than when I was in London. Because the scene here isn't so big,

any given specialist store tends to have a little of everything. You go

to one store and they'll have a little bin of hardcore, a little bin -

well, a big bin of trance, and Big Beat. You would just have the full

spectrum of stuff, often. In London, you can't find any gabba, I don't

think. You have to actually mail-order it from these fanatics.

JO'B: In Holland?

SR:Well, there's some guy who operates a distribution company

out of his bedroom in South London. It's like a really tiny, incestuous

scene in London. But in New York there seems to be a representative of

every scene or sub-scene. Very small, but they bring the records over

just to service these people.

JO'B: This seems to be one of your pet subjects - rescuing

obscure 12-inches from anonymity. In another interview you said you

were trying to "save these records from the dustbin of history", such

as unknown Omni Trio 12-inches that no-one will ever hear again.

SR: (laughs)Well, a phenomenal amount of music

was made: I don't know when it really went into hyperdrive, I guess it

was around 1991. But it seemed like one in five people who went to a

rave made a record, or something like that. You could probably work it

out, but it does seem like nearly everybody had a go.

Initially, when I listened to stuff, it was on pirate radio, and I

didn't know who the creators were, because the DJs never said. But then

later you find out who made it, and often it's by these people who go

on to do great things. A lot of early things I liked, and didn't know

who they were by, turned out to be by Goldie, 4 Hero, or Rob Playford,

2 Bad Mice, or Sonz Of A Loop Da Loop Era. But a lot of stuff was just

inspired one-offs by people who hit upon a good idea, or sometimes they

were sampling someone else's good idea, but they fucked it up in an

interesting way and created something different.

 JO'B: To you, this music is obviously good enough to stand up

alongside the likes of The Young Gods and My Bloody Valentine.

 SR:Well, I don't know how damaged my perspective is, through

having been a raver and getting almost neurologically addicted to these

kinds of sounds. I've become a bit of an obsessive about it. If I was

being objective, maybe I wouldn't honestly rate some of this stuff in

the top 300 records of all time. But then again, there are so many odd

little weird records.

There's this record, 'Bad Girl' by Bad Girl, on Ibiza, which was one of

the first jungle labels - and it's just a really strange and marvellous

record. It's like hardcore meets early jungle . . . just a strange,

wonderful track. There are so many examples of tracks like that which

people will never have heard of again. Maybe they (Bad

Girl) resurfaced as somebody else later on. That's why I had

such a huge discography, to commemorate some of this stuff.

 JO'B: Did you feel that unless you recorded it for posterity, it

would all be lost forever?

 SR:I think so, yeah, because within the dance scene there's a

lot of auteur theory - I didn't totally escape it

myself - where people are always following the careers of these great

artists, and a lot of that wayside stuff is forgotten about. Stuff that

was actually kind of grist to the DJ's mill at any given time is

inevitably disposable.

 JO'B: It's outlived its usefulness?

 SR:Exactly - so, in a weird sort of way, I went against some of

the spirit of the book, by trying to record this stuff and trying to

put it into history.

 JO'B: Earlier on, you were referring to neurological addiction

and that kind of thing. With regard to the sort of material you got off

on when you were out raving, surely you'd be the first to admit that a

good deal of that music would sound rather poor in the cold light of

day.

SR:Well, it does sound good in the cold light of day to me, but

I don't know if that's because I'm kinda sens-E-tized to

those sounds, y'know? I mean, when I was in America I would listen to

these tapes constantly. I was leading a very sober, boring,

stay-at-home life, because I was working on The Sex

Revolts, but I was still listening to it, and it was kinda

reactivating memories - and I almost think that the memories are

somehow encoded in your nervous system.

It's impossible for me to say if they sound good. People have listened

to that CD on the book and said, "Oh, that's really good" - and these

are people who've never had any E experiences or proper rave

experiences. So I think some of it stands up. Some of

it just is pure drug noise, I think, but . . .

JO'B: Do you still go out raving these days?

 SR:Now and then, now and then I go out. New York isn't that

good a town for it, really, but I was in Berlin recently and had a very

good time, as I did the last time I was in London. And I went to this

dance convention in Miami and had a wild time there as well. So I do

still have my Dionysian moments now and again

(laughs). But it's not like a lifestyle for me. I'm

like twice the age of a lot of the people involved in the American

scene - I'm 35, which is a source of grief to me

(laughs)- so yeah, you do sometimes feel a little bit

odd when you're surrounded by . . .

In England it's better, because more people are still carrying on, so I

see people my age or people much older than me. Maybe they're the same

age or younger than me, but they look older because they've really been

caning it, but they just won't stop.

But in New York it's a much younger scene. It's very fashion-oriented,

and you do kind of stand out if you're 35 and not dressed in enormous

trousers. One time I went out and people kept asking me and my friend

if we could get them ketamine and all these drugs, and we realised with

horror that they actually thought we were the dealers, and that that

was the only reason we were there (laughs).

JO'B: Your first couple of books were about rock, but you've been

writing about dance music for a good while now. Do you think there's

any mileage left in rock? Is there anything currently out there that

would inspire you to write another Blissed Out?

SR:Um, probably not. I hate it when people say rock is dead,

because they're always just talking about their own self, and it's

usually a sign of their own energies fading. I could say that rock is

dead for me, or at least in a coma, or hibernating. I hear the odd

thing now and then, like I was quite taken with Radiohead after I

stayed with a friend in London and she played the album 25 times while

I was there. Eventually I conceded it was actually really good!

(laughs)

There are certain things a rock band can do that a dance band

can't do, like when it's a good rhythm section and the band is really

raunching or whatever . . . y'know, that's something that techno can't

quite deliver, that kind of spark. And I hear the odd thing that I do

like, the odd sort of pop/rock hit in America on MTV . . . I think

that's kinda cool. But it's pretty few and far between.

And in terms of it being a culture, or a cultural formation . . . for

me, as well as the music, there's always gotta be this buzz of it going

somewhere, or a narrative of resistance, or some kind of sense of it

culturally mattering. I just can't see how anyone could make a cogent

or convincing argument for that for rock right now. It just seems so

defeated by its own history.

JO'B: Too much to live up to, you mean?

SR:Yeah! And also defeated by its own awareness of its history,

and referencing points. You get all these bands who are valiantly

trying, like The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. I can't take them

seriously myself, but I can see that they're trying to bring back this

lost fire that early rock 'n' roll and blues had. But it's happened too

many times for it to affect me. Still, you never know. I thought rock

was pretty played out, around the time that Nirvana came along. I was

briefly rather excited by that, so . . .

JO'B: But you live in America, and although I've never been there

myself, based on what I see on MTV and in the magazines, it does seem

as if American rock has been dreadfully dull for God knows how long.

SR:Well, the big things here, in a weird sort of way, are like

people wanting to dance again, but they don't want to dance to dance

music. So it's like, they get into ska. And the swing

revival is huge here. Under the term "swing", it could mean bands

ripping off 1920s hot jazz. You know Brian Setzer? Remember him, from

The Stray Cats? He's got a no. 14 album in the American charts at the

moment!

JO'B: Yeah! I saw that on one of the MTV chart shows the other

day! All of a sudden, Brian Setzer pops up, and I was like, "Christ!

Who the fuck let him back in?"

SR:It is pretty unbelievable, when you think about it.

JO'B: From reading the articles on your website, it's obvious

you've got a thing for swingbeat at the moment.

SR:There hasn't been so much good stuff this year, but there

have been a few really good tunes. I really like that stuff! I can't

remember who said this, but someone made this point that people go on

about electronica, but actually some of the most amazing electronic

music on the planet is hip-hop and swingbeat - or R&B, as they call it

here. It's very, very technological: the rhythms, especially with

someone like Timbaland, are just really amazing and very complex.

The stuff I like most this year in the British dance scene is the stuff

that's come out of speed garage but which has more of an R&B feel. It's

got more of a breakbeat . . . it's almost as if the jungle influence

has come back a bit. But then it's like slow-motion, and it's very

sexy. It has an R&B influence, an American, Timbaland-like influence.

That's the stuff that has most excited me in recent months.

JO'B: What are your future plans - like, what exactly is your job

description at Spin? It says here on the back of the

book that you're Senior Editor there.

SR:Well, that's just a title. I'm not really sure what it

means, but my specific job is to be the album reviews editor, and I

also edit the occasional feature. But mostly it's the albums section. I

guess I was brought in to bring more dance music in, or more of a feel

for it, anyway. But y'know, Spin is basically still an

alternative-rock paper, and there's only a certain amount of dancey

stuff they'll take on. I usually do one record review a month, or a

column or something. I haven't done any features for them; I might do

some later on, but . . . editing is quite hard work.

JO'B: Before I let you go, tell me about your website. When did

you set that up?

 SR:I was just working on the book, and I was kinda taken with

the idea of doing something amateur, for the love of it. There were

various ideas and opinions I had, that couldn't really be sold in the

marketplace as a freelancer - pieces that were too vicious or

self-indulgent, but which a certain number of people would probably be

interested in.

People particularly seem to like the Over-Rated section - you don't

really get that much unbridled negativity in dance journalism, it's

very supportive and boostering. It's like racing tips: "Here's one to

watch". It's all like that. And you also notice that people very rarely

give less than 7 out of 10 to a record.

It's kinda like a bit of a flashback to this fanzine I used to do with

my friends before Melody Maker: we did this thing

called Monitor. Plus, my wife is really into

cyber-stuff. She's really good at constructing websites. Also, the idea

was for it to be a kind of electronic billboard, like "I've got this

book coming out". I don't think it's that effective, actually, because

I don't get that much traffic. But there are a few people who have

followed my books and stuff, so as a little service to them, I just

wanted to say, "This is what I'm doing now".

Additionally, I'd done a lot of writing for obscure magazines that most

people would probably not pick up, like art magazines and things. I

thought a few people might be interested in seeing the pieces. So I

just put them up there. But I have done stuff that's appeared

nowhere, like my Rave Theory Tool Kit, and all the

Over-Rated and Fave Records pieces.