
The Jazz Butcher
Press
KCMU Interview
1990
1990
KCMU Interview
Red Dots In The Butcher's Basement
(Seattle, WA, USA)
1990
1990
Credit:
Mucker MC
Red Dots In The Butcher's Basement

Cult Of The Basement
If things seemed weird back in February 1989, when we made this baby, the Weird were going shopping on bikes. In a farmhouse in the dead of winter, in personal circumstances too bizarre and complex to relate, we set about making our "commercial suicide" album. For the first time, I felt, we had made an album that really sounded like us. This record does have personality. One of my favourites, this.
Cult Of The Basement
the Jazz Butcher's seventh and most recent album, ranks
among his most adventurous. Like the ones before it, the
album contains far more than meets the eye. When
Pat Fish
,
the always interesting and entertaining man who is the Jazz
Butcher, visited Seattle, it was story-time. A tragic illness,
a looney French artist, and three bizarre men from Vienna,
we got it all.
PF: Over the years, we've had the food album, the bus
album, the drink album, and now, ladies and gentlemen, we
have the death album. This is the death album. It was all
recorded in the middle of the night. We went nocturnal in
the first twenty four hours of recording, from 6pm to 6am,
middle of the winter, farmhouse middle of the English
countryside. There were a lot of curious concepts going off
there. For example, there was this thing involving the
jackal-headed dead. It was a kind of ancient Egyptian death
cult thing whereby the bathroom at the studio became "the
chamber". You can sort of picture a sort of Howard Cater
thing: "I-I-I'm entering the chamber now." I actually
recorded that little 12 string bit (at the start of
Turtle Bait
in "the
chamber".
MMC: Were there secret ceremonies associated with this
cult?
Red dot.
For those of you who aren't familiar with our
policies at KCMU, a "red dot" is a song we cannot play on
the air because it includes some type of naughty word.
Or concept or cigarette. Damn!
The Basement.....
Last summer (1989) just before we came over here-
was a very weird time. Kizzy was suddenly hit with a brain
tumor. We spent a lot of time in our friend Harry's
apartment (a basement), and things got really twisted.
People were going quite mad. We went to America and did
the tour with Richard Formby taking Kizzy's place. When
we got back to England, we went straight into the studio.
We were still completely mad, and this kind of basement
vibe was still there. It was a little instrumental called
Schweinhund. It was supposed to be a kind of
Argentine-Paraguayan thing. Schweinhund, kinda sexy.
Eventually we realized that what we were really talking
about was the basement (so we renamed it The Basement) I
don't remember who originally had the idea, but we thought
we could do little, different versions of it (on the L.P.) The
version on side two before
Girl-Go
is supposed to be the
Syphillitic Argentinian Palm Court Orchestra version, and
then there's the accordion version called-never mind, I'm
English.
Yes, I understand.
Well it all makes perfect sense, if you start at the top
and go through to the end, honest. It does. It's like Sex And Travel. It's
a movie, and its flirting with the dark shit. Damn, red dot.
Its our goth (as in Gothic) album, and we're happy with it.
Kizzy O'Callaghan
....
Kizzy's far too sick to tour with us now. He might die
at any minute. He's very positive in his head, but any
minute he might go into a coma and croak. And that's how
it is. On this tour we've got a 21 year old wunderkind
named
Julian Poole
taking his place. We met Julian through the
The Blue Aeroplanes.
Alex Lee
, one of their guitarists, does some great stuff
on our new LP. When we were recording, he kept saying,
"Oh, I've got this friend who's better than me!" That was
Julian, and it's mad really. Julian is miles away the youngest
of our group.
Your albums have-from time to time-included
some rather unusual names among the credits, and I'm
sometimes not sure if its you or someone else.