– Everybody talks about you as a former member of VAN DER GRAAF GENERATOR, but to me it’s but a footnote to your massive body of work. What do you think about the convenience of labels and difficulty of categorizing an artist: is it too simplistic or, on the contrary, involves an intellectual effort?
I find it very difficult to label myself, but I always think what I do is rock ‘n’ roll, even though it doesn’t sound like that some of the time. I suppose I’m a singer-songwriter, but it’s not a very good description. Well, I’m a sort of outlier, but not really an outsider artist. I’m not that primitive, but I’m not a proper musician, which puts me on the edge of things. I write music and I sing, but that’s it: I don’t play anything, which puts me at a big disadvantage for just about everything. So yes, labels can help. When we say “daffodils,” you know what we’re talking about, but every daffodil is different – there are many different kinds of daffodils, and each individual daffodil is different. That’s why it can be useful to guide a conversation or to give information, but it can also be very, very limiting. You shouldn’t label things down into too small groups. It’s okay to say “daffodils,” but after then it’s better to hold up the daffodil and say, “Look, here it is. This is the daffodil I’m talking about!” Categorizing can be a lazy thing to do, but in some respects it can be quite challenging to work out. Is a composer a modernist or are they neoclassical? Are they primitive or are they sophisticated? Are they a minimalist composer? Whether the label is right or not, I don’t know. I don’t know what label anyone would put on me – I’ve never heard any labels. “Strange old man”… I think that works all right! (Laughs.)
– Strange old man in an eccentric English way or just weird?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m pretty weird! I’m pretty unusual, it has to be admitted! (Laughs.) But I don’t waste much time trying to work out or classify what I do – I just do it. If I want to do something with a string quartet, I do something with a string quartet, and I don’t worry whether this makes me classical or whether it’s serious music. I think the people who like my music like it because it’s very varied: one album is not like the one before it and very usually not like anything else I’ve done. To me, they all sound like my music. They sound like Judge music to me, but other people are quite startled by how different they all are, which I like. Who wants to repeat themselves? It’s not as if I have anybody saying, “Oh, this album was good. You must do another one like that because that’s what we need to be able to sell it!” No one’s ever tried to sell anything of mine! I’m the only person who’s interested in selling my music, so I’m under no obligation to do what anybody else wants. No one is telling me what I should do or even advising me what to do.
– For all the variety of what you do, it’s very organic. It might be easier to like "Orfeas" that’s very much a rock album, but for me your most appealing record, at least at the moment, is “The Climber”: where lesser mortals would lapse into parody, you created a serious operatic work.
I’m delighted for you to say that. I’m very fond of “The Climber” that was made possible by collaboration, like all my things. I have to rely on people to help me, and in this case it was an Italian producer called Marco Olivotto, and then a Basque music professor in Norway, in Bergen, Ricardo Odriozola, who, between them, transcribed the work and started working out the choir parts and so on. I mean, it’s all my music – my rhythms, my chord sequences, my tunes, my melodies, everything – but I needed lots of help in terms of arrangement, writing a score and voicing it between the different parts of a choir, and so I’m very grateful to those guys for making it possible. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to do something like that. I have always been very lucky in this regard. There is the first world premiere performance of my “Requiem Mass” in July. It was a very early piece: soon after I left VAN DER GRAAF GENERATOR, I wanted to carry on doing music and do a big piece – because that’s what guys from prog bands like to do (laughs) – and I decided to do the full Latin Requiem Mass. I was very fortunate to meet a young conductor, an arranger called Michael Brand, who let me dictate the music to him because, at that point, I knew virtually nothing.
I’ve got a lot more educated as I’ve got older, and I use digital equipment quite a lot, which has made life very much easier for me, as I can put down a physical version of something that’s in my head that someone can listen to and say, “Ah, that’s what he means!” But back then I was sort of singing to him, and he was trying to write this down: it must have been like trying to take musical dictation from a chimpanzee! (Laughs.) For some sections, someone had given me an old button accordion, and I managed to find the chords for one piece I’d written on this thing, and I was able to squeeze it so Michael could write it down. I’ve never been able to learn a guitar – I have tried, but my fingers don’t work properly, I have no aptitude for it – but I got an old acoustic guitar, and I switched strings around, so I had three strings that played a major triad and three strings that played a minor triad, and by moving my thumb up and down the strings, I had every major and every minor chord without thinking about it. That was something I used for a long time. I also used an auto harp, which is a dreadful instrument, really, a terrible thing – I always hated it, but it was easy: just press a button, it makes a chord, and you can play anything on it, but only in one key or another. I didn’t want to be limited to what key I was making things up in my head, so I found the auto harp rather limiting. But with digital equipment I can communicate quite sophisticated chords now to the unfortunate musicians who play my stuff.
“The Climber” has quite an interesting story, and if you haven’t heard the piece and you like choral music, I think you should give it a try: it’s on Bandcamp – everything of mine is on there, though I like CDs, a physical thing. I think most of the people who like my work like a CD, but increasingly, people are not using them – they want a music file, a download, so all my work is on Bandcamp, which has the advantage, or maybe it’s a disadvantage, to me. But it’s the advantage to you that you can hear everything for free three times before it says, “No, no, no, no, you must now pay!” Anyway, the “Requiem” was written very early on, but Ricardo heard about it in 2008, so I sent him scores, hwritten in pencil by my first collaborator, Michael Brand, to Ricardo in a parcel to Norway, where he transcribed it into a digital format so it could be printed and worked on. And I was able to then go to there and work on it in great detail, and get it ready for recording. It’s a big piece: there’s a big choir, a four-piece rock band – two guitars, bass and drums, – four trumpets, four trombones, orchestral percussion, and a baritone soloist. I don’t sing on it, because it needed a very good singer with a very good voice. It’s easily the most expensive thing I’ve ever done, so it took me a long while to get enough money to record the piece, which I eventually did. It came out in 2016, and it’s been pretty successful. So the distinguished choir conductor David Temple has decided to do it as a live performance, and that’s what is happening in July – with an even bigger choir – and that’s going to be very exciting for me. I’m not involved in the performance, I’m just there as the composer – to take a bow at the end, I hope.
– This brings us to an interesting point. Of course, each of your works is a reflection of your personality, or different aspects of your personality, but how do you feel about removing yourself from the performance? I mean you don’t sing on “The Climber” and you’re not involved in the “Requiem” staging,
I do sing on “The Climber” but I’m not singing on the “Requiem” – and I feel fine about it. They made a marvelous job of the recording, which I was very much involved with, rehearsing the band and working with it in detail, but that work has been done, the thing exists now, and it doesn’t worry me at all. I have also recently had a lovely experience with Ricardo in Bergen, where we worked on another early piece that I wrote, called “The Book Of Hours”: it’s a song story that had a lot of good tunes in it.
– Wasn’t it included in the “Zoot Suit” album?
There was an extract, yes, two songs. As soon as I finished “The Book Of Hours,” we did it at “The Young Vic Theatre” in London; it was directed by the comedian Mel Smith who was a stage director at that time and who’s no longer with us. That was the last time I played drums in public. But though the tunes were good, I didn’t like the story, and while I have used parts of it over the years since the Eighties, there was still quite a lot left – substantial pieces of music – and Ricardo suggested that I put them together as a suite. It had always been meant for a semi-classical ensemble – a string quartet plus electric bass and drums – so it was already halfway into that world, and he did arranged the suite for the string quartet and piano. It’s a string quintet now, and it’s wonderful. I heard the recording just yesterday – it hasn’t been mixed yet – and it’s absolutely marvelous! That’s very exciting for me, I’m thrilled, but of course, I couldn’t have done it on my own. It’s all about collaborating and relinquishing some control, and I’ve always relinquished quite a lot of control because I also use musicians, rock musicians on my albums. I say, “Here’s the tune. Here’s the chord sequence. Here’s the rhythm” – and without trying to, they change it. It is changed by virtue of someone else playing it. It’s a delicate balance: you have to have a very clear idea in your mind of what you want it to sound like, and you must be very strong-minded about that and keep that vision, but you also have to allow musicians the space to astonish you, which they will always do. And you’ll go, “Oh, the piano player does something. I wouldn’t have thought of that. That’s so clever!” So I believe, artists can get too controlling.
– Would it be right to call "Mr. McKilowatts Dances" – a there were only you and nobody else – a total opposite of that?
This is very, very true. I had that exactly where I wanted it, with no playing from anyone except me. And I have to say, I’m very fond of “Mr. McKilowatts” – I do tend to like my own music, I’m sorry, but I do. (Laughs.) I enjoy it very much. That is not the same as saying it’s wonderful or it’s good – that’s not for me to say – I don’t know if it’s good, but I do really like it. I’ve let nobody help me at all on “Mr. McKilowatts Dances,” except with the mixing. Since, I think, 2006, all my work has been mixed by producer called Pat Collier, who was a school friend of John Ellis. Pat was the bass player in THE VIBRATORS but went on to train as a classical recording engineer. Very sadly, he died last year, so I now am rather bereft when it comes to mixing. I’ve never mixed anything myself, I don’t like the process; it’s much better to have another pair of ears listen to your work and come to it fresh. I would send Pat all the tracks, go down there and sometimes I might say, “I’ll have have a little more of this and less of that. How about turning this up and that one down?” – so in some way there was still collaboration going on, which was a good thing.
– When are you a harsher master: when you’re working with other musicians or when you’re by yourself and there’s nobody else to blame?
Well, working on my own helps me get, as I said, that clear idea of what I intend to do. (Points to his temple.) But so often, when a drummer comes in and plays, rather than me programming drums, you think, “Oh, that’s so much better!” Again, it’s a very interesting balancing act, and I’ve got better at it as I’ve got older. Knowing when to say, “No!” or “Yeah, you could do it like that, but I would rather you didn’t…”
– You call yourself a singer-songwriter rather than a musician. So what comes easier to you: melodies or words?
I have always written words to music, either my own or other people’s, and there was only one project where I had written the words first, “Towers Open Fire”: an acoustic guitar album where I wrote lyrics and then gave them to my collaborator [Dave Brakeman] who wrote the music. But very often I’m using melody that I wrote a long time ago – or, rather, have had that tune ‘come to me’. All my life, I have had tunes just come into my head from nowhere, and very soon after I started in music, I started recording everything: I would just sing these little riffs, little tunes, little sequences into a recording device of some sort. I started off using what they call a dictaphone, then I went on to cassette recorders, carrying them around with me, and now, obviously, I use a phone to record stuff. I don’t get very many of these things these days, but I used to get a lot and I’ve kept every single one. They’re all on individual audio cassettes – I don’t think you can get them anymore, – C5’s with two and a half minutes on each side. I bought lots of those, very cheap, and I have hundreds of them in file boxes, classified. So I use these as a source of riffs and melodies. I come up with new stuff as well, once I’ve got started on something, but this is generally my starting-off point. I can make up tunes pretty well, but my best stuff is on those little cassettes. I think it was Keith Richards who talked about it and said, “You just put up an aerial, and it picks something up,” which was a good way of describing it. I’m a believer in inspiration. I channel bits of music.
– Don’t you find that, when you tell a songstory, words somehow detract from melodies?
No, because when I’m writing a songstory, I get the music more or less ready for a section of the piece, but without a vocal melody line on top. Then I get the lyrics or libretto ready, and on a songstory they generally don’t rhyme or scan, and then I make one long non-repeating melody line to carry those words over that music. It’s like playing a rock instrumental solo or a jazz solo over the existing rhythm and chord sequence. So in a songstory, the words create the melodies.
>>>
Words do tend to guide once I know what the thing’s about, and I’ve always found it quite easy to write lyrics. I like scansion. I like rhyme. I like playing with words and language. And I don’t find that very stressful. But there has to be music to make it worthwhile, good music – or what I think is good music – to make me want to do it. I wouldn’t want to just sit down and say, “Right now you have to write a tune and a lyric to go with it!” I would find that difficult. Music is more important than the words because mostly I am writing for me to sing. I like melody, but there has to be a little bit of atonality in my music, just a bit. Dissonance is like spices in cooking: without any dissonance, when everything perfectly in harmony, things are bland, so you need a little sprinkle here and there of dissonance – but then you wouldn’t want to sit down to a meal of pepper and garam masala, that wouldn’t make a good meal.
>>>
– So you’re saying the phonetic aspect is less important?
Yeah, very much less important to me. Some words or syllables can be easier to sing than others, and that might be important for someone who sings in a different way, someone with a smooth, romantic voice. I have written some libretti for classical composers like Joseph Horowitz and I’ve had to change things, when a word sounded not right for a melody, but when it comes to me, no, I’m quite happy to sing anything. I sing, as you know, in a rather distinctive way, which I’m quite proud of having worked out. And I find I don’t have any difficulty with singing most things I want.
– But you have quite a few guest singers on your albums!
Yes, but I haven’t had any complaints – no one said, “Oh, I can’t sing that!” – so I don’t really think about it. There’s a new album called “The Overstayer” that’s about an illegal migrant worker and that’s written for organ, saxophones and vocals, and Dorie Jackson sings exactly what I wrote there. I pick vocalists because I can hear the words they are singing. I’ve always had problems with the operatic or the classically trained voice: these singers are wonderful musicians – they’re like athletes, and it’s an amazing to be able to make that sound and achieve that volume and that purity of tone, and so on. However, I find it very difficult to understand any lyrics that they might be singing. I think this is different in different languages. I think Italians can listen to Italian opera and actually understand what’s going on, and the Germans can understand a lot of classical music sung in German, but you can’t do that in English – the vowels are completely wrong for singing in bel canto.
– “The Overstayer” is a concept work I assume. So is a concept important? Is it a thing unto itself or just something loose to thread songs on?
The idea for “Requiem” and “Curly’s Airships” came first, and I wanted to tell the Orpheus story too. But in 2013 I wanted to work with David Minnick, the American arranger and producer – he’s amazing, he’s one of the most extraordinary musicians I’ve ever come across – and that was where “Zoot Suit” came from, where he does almost everything except for singing, so I had to find good songs for David to work on, some of which I had recorded before and some of which were new. But there isn’t a thematic thing for that collection of individual songs, and neither for the album I recorded with Robert Pettigrew, "The Trick Of The Lock": I wanted to work with Robert and to do an album of piano songs, so I’ve tried to arrange them and put them in a certain order. There aren’t any hidden connections between those songs, though.
– How much research comes into a songstory? Is it research of a subject that leads to a musical idea or you have a musical idea and then you start researching to bring it to fruition.
Well, let’s look at “Curly’s Airships”: I wanted to do a really long piece of factual reportage with rock ‘n’ roll, and I thought it better be something I’m really interested in, because it’s going to take years and years to do, and I had always been drawn to the story of the R101. So I did six months of research – proper research: I read everything. I visited various specialist libraries, I found original documents… I did actual research for that and then I thought, “I will be very free, I will not plan too much, I will just start to write!” I wrote for another six months, and I came up with an hour of music, and I’d just covered the first little bit of the story, so I had to throw it away because, if I’d have carried on in the same way, in far too great a detail, the whole thing would have been about six hours long! (Laughs.) I was able to use most of the basics of the music, the themes and the structures, but all the lyrics had to go, though. And it’s not only me who’s had this problem. You see this in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Evita” where one of the big pieces is such a tiny part of the plot – “Another Suitcase In Another Hall” is a beautiful song, but it doesn’t push the story on at all – and then it all has to be made faster and faster as the thing moves on. It’s not an easy thing to pace a long piece. So I had to go back and start the story again from scratch, and it was a salutary, valuable lesson about how stream of consciousness equates to being very long-winded. With “The Climber” my motivation was to write something for an Alpine choir. I was working on another piece in a studio in North Italy, in the foothills of the Alps, with Marco Olivotto, and he took me to hear the local male voice choir who had a very special sound, very special voicings. I was mesmerized and decided to come up with a mountaineering story for these guys to sing.
– You might as well write something for yodeling! It’s an Alpine thing too.
(Laughs.) I don’t think the Italians do yodeling, but it’s a good sound. FOCUS is the only instance I can think of when it comes to yodeling in rock music, though. Same with tap dancing: I think that’s a great sound, and I’ve put tap dancing in two or three things of mine.
– If we’re talking about vocal techniques, could you tell me about your vocal lessons with Arthur Brown?
I met Arthur a couple of times as a fan when me and Peter [Hammill] were starting VAN DER GRAAF. But then, when I left the band and I started another group, called HEEBALOB, we played at the Plumpton Jazz and Blues Festival, which I think was the forerunner of the Reading Festival, and we were spotted by Giorgio Gomelsky, who had been the first manager of THE ROLLING STONES and was a big mover and shaker in the music business. He had a record label called Marmalade, and had some hit records with acts like Brian Auger and Julie Driscoll, and also MAGMA. I was summoned to meet Giorgio backstage, and I was sitting on the floor there, looking up at the great man and not looking like a good potential rock ‘n’ roll star figure. (Laughs.) And Arthur, who had by that time had his massive hit with “Fire” and was very, very famous, but had been in America for quite a long time, for the best part of a year, and just come back to the country, was walking by. He wasn’t appearing at the festival, but he was backstage and saw me sitting transfixed, like an animal caught in the headlights, in front of Gomelsky, so Arthur made out that he and I were great friends. “Hi, man!” he said, although we didn’t know each other at all. “Lovely to see you! What have you been doing?” He shook hands with me, nodded politely at Giorgio, and off he went. Gomelsky asked, “Oh, you know, Arthur?” I said, “Yes, yes, me and Arthur, you know, go back a long way!” (Laughs.) He softened a bit, and we ended up being allowed to go and do demos in Trident Recording Studio in the West End.
Nothing much came of it, because we wanted to do kind of Zappa-esque jazz rock, only we weren’t really good enough. The only person who was good enough in the band was David Jackson, but we got a deal with Gomelsky, and I went in to get our first paychecks for the band. I turned up at the offices, and there was a van outside and guys carrying down all the office furniture. I went upstairs, and there was a secretary clearing out her desk. I asked, “What’s going on?” “Marmalade Records have gone broke,” she replied. “Where’s Giorgio?” “Oh, he’s gone to Paris!” So that was the end of that. It was very disappointing. We had our demos, but the band didn’t really survive, because we’d run out of money. but I introduced David to Peter. VAN DER GRAAF were not operational at the time, but Peter was going to start it up again, and David joined the band. So I feel legitimately like a godparent to that group.
– What would you consider your most important achievement with regard to the band, then: coming up with the name, helping set things in motion, or bringing Jackson into the fold?
Probably, bringing Jackson in, because I’ve always been a huge fan of his, he’s a great musician, and he was made for a big success for them. And also persuading Peter to go down a rock ‘n’ roll route because he was, essentially, a singer-songwriter. He was a folk singer when we met up, and I thought a rock band was the way to go. The whole VAN DER GRAAF thing was great: it was a great opportunity for me, and it’s brought a lot of people to listen to my stuff, so I’m very grateful that I was involved in it. I learned a lot from Peter – he’s a great composer and a great lyricist. A real poet.
– Still, how did you start working with Brown?
I was friends with Lene Lovich from the early Seventies and was writing songs with her, and many years later, Arthur got to know Lena too – they’d become friends in America where he lived – and when he moved back to the UK with an American band, initially, I saw them, and we met up again. He lived in a town called Lewes or near the south coast of England, and I lived quite nearby, just five or six miles away, and we became good friends. It’s nice when your idols do not have feet of clay! I would go in a church in this town, where he used to do vocal exercises, because the church had nice acoustics. He’s always looked after his voice very carefully, and as far as I know, it’s still completely intact, he still can hit all those notes. So I would go in there with him and I had several singing lessons, which was very interesting.
Also, Arthur’s a qualified psychotherapist. He did this sort of work in America, amongst other things, including having a painting and decorating company with Jimmy Carl Black, called “Black & Brown, Gentlemen of Color”! Very funny! Arthur worked a lot with damaged children, and once, when we were doing singing in this church, a very disturbed man came in, running around and screaming and waving his fists in the air. My reaction would be to run quite quickly in the opposite direction; Arthur, on the other hand, just walked slowly up to the guy and got very close. I didn’t hear what he said, but he was talking very gently, and this guy gradually calmed down and eventually walked quietly out of the church. Arthur has quite a lot of voltage, a lot of spiritual energy that he’s able to direct, and this was a very impressive demonstration of his ability to deal with people. I haven’t seen him for a few years now.
– You recorded with him prior to that, you continue communicating with Peter, and you’re still working with David. What does friendship mean to you?
It means a lot. I’m still on good terms with Arthur, and I think I’m still on good terms with Peter, though I haven’t had any communication with him for a long time. I don’t think I’ve been cast into outer darkness. But I have to say, I do tend to exploit my friends. I get them to play on my records, and I’m quite shameless about that. (Laughs.) I’ve always done this. If I meet someone who is an expert nose flute player at a party, I think, “Aha, I will go write a piece for the nose flute!” My friendships often seem to be based on creativity. When I made “Curly’s Airships” – the biggest thing I’ve ever done – I just got everybody I knew in music, just about everybody in my address book, and some people who weren’t in music, including an 81-year-old actress. I twisted everybody’s arm to be in it.
Peter sang a part of Lord Thomson of Cardington, the Air Minister: marvelous, he was wonderful at it. Arthur Brown was fantastic as a deranged airship commander and as the head of a government committee. Pete Brown was very helpful too. He was very supportive of the early VAN DER GRAAF, and we liked each other, he was a nice man. A great lyricist, he became a very accomplished percussionist and singer, and did a lot of production work. Of course, David Jackson was on that album too. And then there were various actors, like David Shaw-Parker who sings and plays banjo and guitar, which is great. Funnily enough, I don’t listen to my own work a great deal, but I played “Curly’s Airships” – which I hadn’t heard for several years – yesterday, and I absolutely loved it!
– And there was John Ellis, another of your old friends, who came up with this songstory thing. How did the two of you meet?
Peter Hammill worked with him in various bands, such as THE K GROUP, so he said “You really ought to meet John, you’d get along!” And we did. John’s a great man, and he became my go-to guitarist, because he is unbelievably good. And the combination of Hugh Banton on organ and John on guitar in “Curly’s Airships” is just stunning: if they’d ever formed a band together, it would have been epic.
– About epic things… Why there’s no lyrics to Hammill’s “The Fall Of The House Of Usher” in your book?
Because it was a very collaborative process. I don’t think I contributed to the music at all, but Peter would throw in bits of lyrics, phrases, ideas, and so on, and quite frankly, I don’t know which is him and which is me, and there’s no way of telling without going through it, line by line, with him, and I can’t see him being particularly interested in doing that. It was very organic. I mean, the libretto is mostly me, but there’s certainly significant pieces of Hammill in there, and I didn’t want to include collaborative lyrics in my book, as I’ve hardly ever collaborated on lyrics, so that’s why I left it out. No other reason. But I scratched my head about it. Also, it was getting to be a very fat book, so I thought it was better to miss it out.
– That’s not your first book, right?
Yes, I have another book, a self-published thing called “The Universe is Made of Voices” (reaches out to the shelf beside him and shows the tome) – that came out in 2017. In fact, earlier versions were published under other titles [“The Universe Next Door” and “The Vibrating Spirit”] by the very wonderful Center of Fortean Zoology.
– Since we’re talking about lyrics again, tell me, please: is there anything in common between structuring buildings and structuring lyrics? You worked in architecture, so you should know.
Oh, dear. I was never in the creative side of architecture. I worked for a long time as a freelancer for Maxwell Hutchinson, who I had a band with, HEEBALOB. After all that fell through and we met up again, he was starting a branch of his father’s architectural practice in London and needed some help with that, so I went to work for him. But I always was doing the things that architects don’t like to do, like talking to clients, filling in forms and making applications of one sort or another – I didn’t get involved in the aesthetic side of it. There’s only one independent building that I put up, which was a block of lavatories at the King’s Cross potato market and which I was very proud of because I did that all on my own. This whole area of London, near King’s Cross station, was developed and redeveloped, and is now covered in offices and huge buildings, but for a couple of years that place was a wasteland, just piles of bulldozed brick and concrete, a wasteland, and the only building that remained was my lavatory block for the benefit of the workers. Some friends of mine kind of broke in there and took a lovely photograph of it! (Laughs.) Having said that, a knowledge of building techniques and terminology came in very useful for lyrics on “The Fall Of The House Of Usher”!
– Around the same time you worked in that company, you became a scientologist. I always pictured you as an agnostic, so how did you fell for the Hubbard thing?
I was very young, I read a couple of books, and I thought it looked pretty interesting, so I became involved. I went to work for the London Scientology organization in Tottenham Court Road, and I ended up going to L. Ron Hubbard’s boat. He lived on this old ocean liner which he used to sail all over the oceans trying to avoid the people he thought were after him. I spent a few months on this boat, and then I came back and came to the conclusion that Scientology did not do what it says on the tin, and I left. I don’t regret doing Scientology, but I don’t regret leaving it, either.
– Would you call yourself a spiritual person?
Yeah, yeah. My first book is all about the paranormal, spiritual stuff, so I am very interested and personally engaged in that whole thing, but I wouldn’t call myself religious. religious. “The Solar Heresies” piece of 2020 expresses my beliefs pretty accurately. Periodically, Periodically, my girlfriend and I go to a Quaker meeting every few weeks: it’s a silent worship, which I think is very nice. I get a lot out if it, I find that very enriching. But I’m not pushing any particular religion.
– Being not religious and bearing the name Judge: that, and the fact that you attended public school, raises a question about your childhood. What’s your background?
My father was one of the early management consultants in this country, when it came over from America as a profession but, before that, he was an apprentice at the Woolwich Arsenal. Both my parents came from the working class, from Woolwich, and all my family, on both sides, made guns – they were government armaments people. But my father was very bright and educated himself, he got a university degree, and he was basically a mechanical engineer. So he sent me to public school, which was what you did if you could afford it in those days. This was a boarding school, which was interesting. I also went to a preparatory school, which is what you go to beforehand, from eight to thirteen years old, and that was pretty grim. That was pretty awful! I was ill a great deal, the food was impossible, so I was not well at all. But public school after that was fine. It was a captive audience: if you wanted to put out a magazine, there’d be people to read it; if you wanted to do plays, there’d be people to watch them; if you wanted to do music, there were people who would come and listen to you do it. There was a built-in audience for anything that you wanted to try, and it was great – I was able to try out a lot of stuff, theatre, music, art, poetry… Only I realized quite soon after leaving school that I was not a poet, and then, not long after that, I thought, “Well, if I won’t be a poet, maybe I can be a lyricist?” However, the two jobs are very, very, very different. They are not the same. Some lyrics approach poetry, but not very many, certainly none by me. So that was my educated middle-class background, that was my childhood.
I have no brothers or sisters. As for being called Judge, I have various names and that’s one of them: I was christened Christopher John Judge Smith. The “Judge” comes from one of my grandmother’s maiden name – Judge is a Welsh surname, I believe – but I got it as a first name, as a given name. With a name like Smith, it’s a good idea to have something a bit different if you’re involved in the entertainment business in any capacity. There are a lot of Smiths around. Everybody called me Chris, which I hated. I’ve never liked that! And when I did “The Kibbo Kift” – my first theatrical show, again with Maxwell Hutchinson whom I wrote with at that time – the director was called Chris [Parr], one of the cast was called Chris, one of the band was called Chris, and it was one Chris too many. But they thought Judge was a nice funny name, so they started calling me Judge. And then, shortly after that, I took up with a girl called Christine! (Laughs.) Well, that finished me being called Chris. I became Judge, and that’s all people know me as now.
– Do you know there’s an American artist called Judge Smith?
Yes. I think he’s a drummer. But I doubt if anybody buying my records will get his. If they do, good luck to them.
– What do you think about artistic integrity? I mean “Orfeas” has this open ending, with its protagonist either perishing or quietly retiring and losing all his money after investing in a chain of pubs, What is better for a creative person, to die or to sell out?
I don’t know. I’ve never had that option. I never sold my soul, because no one offered to buy it! (Laughs.) I’ve never had any commercial pressure. No one’s ever pushed me to do more records. There’s never been a manager, there’s never been an agent. Not that I would mind having one, but I don’t know anything about these people: where they come from or how to find them. Not that I think I could make money. I’m listening to all my music in sequence at the moment – I haven’t done that for many, many years – so I’m looking forward to “Orfeas”: maybe I’ll hate it, I don’t know. But I didn’t really take much of a moral position on this. I mean, he’s not a very attractive, not a very splendid character: he’s coarse and very full of himself, so I enjoyed putting him through various ordeals, including being dead. And it was a wonderful opportunity for me to have him go down to hell so I could do some nice death metal, which I’m very fond of. (Laughs.) I was pleased to be able to do that.
