
The Jazz Butcher
Press
Kelly & Whittemore
November 19, 1989
November 19, 1989
Kelly & Whittemore
The Milwaukee Interview
(Milwaukee, WI, USA)
November 19, 1989
November 19, 1989
Credit:
David Whittemore & Brian Kelly

It's several hours before showtime. Having finished
the soundcheck, Pat Fish, The Jazz Butcher, submits himself to
the same "big questions" he's been asked before.
Sometimes you see a Lou Reed
interview, and he walks in and says 'You've got 20 minutes, and I
won't talk about the Velvet Underground.' And some people say
'Oh, what a dirtbox he is for talking like that', but in a way I
think that's quite business-like. I mean I really don't think
that's offensive. I mean, God KNOWS how many times he's had to
talk about the Velvet Underground to people who don't even
understand it, you know? So I kind of take his point, and I
sometimes think 'Oh I wish I could do that'. When people ask me a
certain question, I just think 'I wish I could just walk in a
room and say I won't talk about this, that and the other. But, at
the end of the day, he's Lou Reed and I'm me...and I don't even
know what it is that annoys me until it has, you know?
The Jazz Butcher's sound changes from
album to album. For example, I can't see something off Distressed
Gentlefolk going on the new album Big Planet, Scarey Planet.
That's true. I think that's really just a
question of time. Everyone comes to an album at the same moment,
as it were. When you're in a band like the one that made this
album or Gentlefolk, you've been together for a year or two. You
start having pretty much shared experiences, and your concerns
tend to be the same. We've always thought of our records as
pretty much what we do at that moment. We sometimes use the
analogy of a postcard. You go away for two weeks and you send
back a little recording of it, saying this is what we were up to.
Records for us are not really a thing to be carved in stone for
all eternity.
You toured rather extensively in support
of the previous album, Fishcotheque. The song
"Hysteria" off of the new album-a statement about the
frustrations of touring?
It's pretty much a diary of one week we had
going down the west coast last summer. It was completely mad.
Every line in that song is true. I really did sleep through an
earthquake. Heaven is true. Heaven is a place between the
Canadian and American border on the road from Vancouver to
Seattle. If you ever drive that road, you'll know what I'm
talking about. It's hard to express, but we were there.
Do you generally enjoy life on tour?
We like to travel. Having discovered in 1985
that one could travel off the backs of albums, it's always been a
common desire running through members of the band.
What about Alex (Green- Saxophone)?
Alex has got a thing. He never tours the
States with us. He did a tour of the States with Dave J. once in
about 1984, so it's nothing he's got against the country.
Kizzy's (O'Callaghan- Guitar) absence is
due to illness, is that right?
He's pretty seriously sick, yeah. He's
finished his course of therapy. He'd already had his operations
before he went away, but there was no way he was strong enough.
He was being given radiation therapy, so his hair's falling out.
His head's in a very good state. He's got his spirits 'round it.
And he can still play guitar. One worries a lot, because when
people have surgery in their heads, you hear horrible stories
about things going awry and people not being able to do what they
did right down to being able to talk. He can still clearly play
guitar as well as ever. He had two operations, the first one they
didn't get quite right. The second one went a whole lot better.
Yeah, he should be okay.
Of your contemporaries, who are among
your favorite artists?
It's a funny old thing, I usually find that
the bands who are making good records turn out to be my friends.
And that makes me sit down and think, 'hang on, are you just
being a bigot? Are you just out of touch, now?' But I think,
no...I've actually gotten to like these guys by going to all
their concerts and meeting them.
Such as?
Such as the Blue Aeroplanes, Who I gather
were over here for the first time recently. I like Spacemen 3,
who are good friends of mine. I used to see those guys when they
were playing to eight people who hated them in a bar in Coventry.
Ever heard of The Perfect Disaster? There's a third album out
already in Britain called Up, which is one of the great third
albums. I think that bands that makes a good third album is a
serious band. First album- you make a good first album, yeah
you're in there, but of course you've had 20 years to write it.
And then there's the second album syndrome. By the time it gets
to the third, it's like the classic media syndrome, the difficult
third album. It pleases me that I've stuck by them all this time.
Of course, in Britain that's an embarrassment for people, because
I'm not supposed to be any good.
The Jazz Butcher isn't appreciated in
England?
Well, we just don't really have a media
profile. Real people appreciate us. Real people come crawling out
of the woodwork and come to the shows, and shout and dance, but
not in the sort of numbers that happens in Germany or the U.S. or
Spain or Canada.
So where does the JBC find its most
responsive audience?
(Sighs) Everywhere we play except Britain.
It's a tragic truth. We do best in German-speaking Central
European countries. Also in, well, this whole continent really.
I've been pleased with the turnouts on this tour.
Getting back, I've always listened to a lot of American music. I
don't know how it is, I guess a lot of people in American towns
probably look at London and think, 'Wow, what a swingin' scene,
I'll bet all the bands live together, man.' I used to get that
feeling when I was about 18, looking at New York and thinking
about Television and the Walking Beds, Blondie and Dick Hell.
I've always been a big fan of some mythical New York. I even went
and married someone from there. It's embarrassing, my devotion to
that city. I guess everyone looks to the grass being greener.
Britain is very much enthralled to America in the media in
general. If you want to have a top 20 hit in the United Kingdom,
you've got to be selling records, and I mean literally, to
children. I'm not talking patronizingly about 14 year-old what
used to be called teeny-boppers, I'm talking about children. I'm
talking about the single figure brigade. This is a problem for me
because I have nothing to say to children. I don't like children.
I'm 31, if I liked them I'd have some (laughs). With me, children
are like dogs. They're all right on a one-to-one basis, but I
wouldn't want one in the house.
This seems an appropriate segue into
discussing the song "Bicycle Kid".
Ah, yes. Quite so.
Is there, in fact, an actual
"Bicycle Kid"...?
Oh, yes. There are many bicycle kids,
obviously. There's a tribe of them. There is a specific one who
lives about half a block away from me. And one usually finds him
in the street ranting and raving. He wears very few clothes and
has these appallingly awful glasses and this terrible cropped
haircut. I noticed to my complete and utter horror the other day-
he's got like these Mike Tyson tennis ball cuts in the side of
his hair now.
Do "Bicycle Kid's grow up to be
"Real Men"?
Yeah, like I say, "Bicycle Kid- grow up
and get an escort". I guess maybe people over here think
'what does he mean? He goes out and uses prostitutes?' Escort is
just this brand of car that "Real Men" drive, this
really scaggy, black, cheap car that's done up to look smart.
He'll get one.
Is he aware of the song in his honor?
I fucking hope not.
Let's talk a little bit about the
previous album, Fishcotheque. I was interested to note that it
was a departure from John Rivers as producer.
Yes, that was deliberate.
Why the departure, and why going back to
him for the current album?
Good questions. The chief reason I departed
from Rivers was that I found the production on Gentlefolk to be
just too shiny. I wasn't crazy about that album. When Max (Eider,
JBC guitarist until 1986) was gone, he went to Woodbine (Rivers'
studio) and made his album there. And I heard it and thought,
'That's good for you', but since the whole reason he'd gone was
he was getting more into that shiny stuff and that sort of 'fake
jazz'- I'm sure he wouldn't mind me calling it 'fake jazz'- And I
was getting more into the stuff like what we do. I was kind of
tired of people comparing us to Lloyd Cole. I wanted to show
people, no...we're nasty. So basically, I went to as cheap a
studio as possible. We turned everything up to 11 and went. It
was supposed to be a sloppy album. Are you familiar with Bath of
Bacon, the very first album? Well, "son of Bath of
Bacon" was the idea. When it was proposed that it come out
on CD, I was utterly horrified! I just thought, well...you're
just going to hear people falling off of chairs and belching.
It's funny, but when it came out, especially the Canadian press
were saying, "Oh, he's gone all smooth," and stuff like
this. "He's gone all, sort of 'middle-of-the-road',"
and I was saying 'what?' You should've been there! It was a filthy
racket. With this new one there was a certain element in my head
of this as a second album. Rivers is good for second albums. We
got in there, we knew he'd try to clean it up too much, so just
turned everything up to 11, fed back, snarled about, and at the
end of every song said, "Clean that up, baldy!"
(Laughs) John is kind of like...every instrument is a lead
instrument. Everything's got its own space with a nice little bit
of reverb around it to make it clean and bright. Which I find, in
a way, quite attractive. I'm not 100% on the album. It's too many
lead instruments, and not enough rhythm. I mean, you've seen us
live, and a lot of what we're about is this kind of double rhythm
guitar helicopter hell, right? That perhaps doesn't come across
quite as well as it might.
In reading the liner notes on your
albums, one gets the sense that you have a genuine appreciation
for your fans.
I never knew there was going to be any!
Honestly, this sounds so fake and crap, but when I set out to
make Bath of Bacon, I was just making silly tapes at home, and I
sent one to Dave Barker because I knew him and I thought it might
amuse him. When he phoned up and said, 'Do you want to make an
album?' I was just having dinner with my parents, I had no money
at the time, I was living with my parents in the middle of
nowhere. And I just thought, 'What? Are you kidding? Does the
Pope shit in the woods? Here we go!' Having made the album, my
only hope was that we'd just make enough money for him to let me
do another one the next year. It never occurred to me that people
would start buying it.
Sometimes people say, 'Why did the first band split up?' It was
really because we were totally unprepared. We became a band
because we'd made a record and a few people wanted to see us.
Suddenly we were on tour for two years, and our lives got
neglected...and everyone grows up a bit. We couldn't hold it
together, basically. It would have been wrong.
The original band being...?
Me, Max, Dave J, and (O.P.) Jones. Dave went
off to do Love and Rockets, that was understood. We just fell
together, we didn't know what we were doing. At least when I put
together this new band at Christmas of '87, at least we knew what
we were in for. Yes, I'm deeply grateful to people. If I'd kept
on at my day job I would have gone abroad for one city for two
weeks each year. I'd have seen nothing but the hotel. I'd have
spoken to bar men and to people selling stamps for postcards.
This, I mean...what a way to see the world! What an education.
I'm deeply grateful to everybody.
Now David J (Bass), he had joined up
post-Bauhaus, right?
Yeah, just about the time that "Ziggy
Stardust" hit the top 10, they were doing some shows at
Hammersmith Pallais, which is kind of a big venue. Now, I knew
Kevin (Haskins-Drummer for Bauhaus and Love & Rockets) and we had
a phone call when I was at work. I got home and Alice said, 'Pat,
they want us to support Bauhaus at Hammersmith Pallais." I
thought, 'FREAK OUT! GET A BAND!" So we rounded up a few
people, we got Rolo (McGinty, guitarist-The Woodentops) and Alice
and Max and me and this sax player we used to know. We went up
there and they hated us, it was brilliant. There was 2,000 people
going, "FUCK OFF! FUCK OFF AND DIE!" We'd never been on
a stage where there'd been guerrillas to protect us from the
audience, but this time there was, so we thought, 'Great! Now
we'll do 'Partytime'. Now we'll do 'Love Kittens'', and we just
played all these ballads at these rabid gothics, it was great.
And they hated us. After the show, I said to Kevin, 'Well, thanks
for asking us to do it, mate. It was quite an experience.' And he
said, 'It wasn't me.' And it turned out it was his big brother,
Dave, who I'd never met at that stage. We just got on really
well. We all sort of started hanging out. When he joined the
band, we knew he was going to leave again. He joined officially
for six months, but he ended up doing about ten.
Earlier, you had mentioned comparisons to
other artists, such as Lloyd Cole. On the insert to the Spooky
EP, you commented on a critic who likened you to Robyn
Hitchcock...
Ah, that was one particularly nasty review.
A really stupid review. He basically accused me of peddling the
English 'eccentric' angle, and said, 'I'm so tired of this Robyn
Hitchcock business. Let me tell you, there is no one more tired
of this English eccentric Robyn Hitchcock business than I am. I
like Robyn's records, and I get on with him all right as a bloke,
but I get kind of tired of living in his shadow, because I don't
think we're doing the same thing. I just think we're a group that
writes halfway decent lyrics and has a few tunes. I mean, I've
been following Robyn since 1978 when he was in the Soft Boys. I
used to like them, and I'd see them now and again, and nowadays,
we play with him. I've had a lot of trouble being compared with
people, I don't think I'm comparable with him. Okay, we both play
telecasters, and we both write tunes, which might be kind of
rare, and indeed in the context of rock these days might be
tagged 'eccentric,' but only in a rock way. He's into messin'
with words much more than I am. He writes in code, I write in
plain English. It's very rare that you'll not find me writing
in...
Suddenly, and very coincidentally, "Heaven" by Robyn
Hitchcock comes on the stereo
(Incensed, screaming) GO AWAY! LEAVE ME
ALONE! LEAVE ME ALONE! I'LL DO ANYTHING JUST LEAVE ME ALONE!
Great song though, isn't it? He's imaginative. He uses codes. I'm
much more down to Earth. One thing I keep meaning to explain, it
comes too early in the set for me to start gabbing at the
audience, in case I don't stop. But I've noticed in the song
'Chickentown,' there's a line about 'smoking forty grotty fags a
day'. Now to me that's just basic colloquial English. Smoking
fags, I mean...it sounds like NWA, doesn't it? I mean, it's like,
'I see a fag, I SMOKE him!' Sometimes I think I should just stop
and explain to the audience what's going on here. Because if
anybody hears that going by, they're going to think, 'What is
this, Axl Rose in a suit?'
What songs do you enjoy playing live?
'Angels' I really like playing, when it goes
well.
That's one of my favorites, although
there's an obtuseness to the lyric, I've never really been able
to piece it together.
I'm glad you like it, it means a lot to me.
I was very pleased, the other day I was reading 'Melody Maker,'
and Phil Parfitt, who is the songwriter for the Perfect Disaster
had been asked to write down his top ten songs. And there it was;
Angels. And Phil's words were something like, "It's about
having an international telephone line to angels, it's about
dying...I don't know what it's about (laughs). I don't always
know what the lyrics mean myself until I've been listening to
them six months after it's done. You're right, that lyric is kind
of obscure in a way.
When I wrote that song, I'd already recorded the music, and I
had a lyric which was kind of a nasty lyric...basically I'm
trying to write songs about death, sometimes, and whenever I get
too involved in it, I sing the lyric, check out the tape and
think, 'No, Patrick...forget it.' So I did that. I checked it
out, and I went down to the studio kitchen, and I just got a
piece of paper out and 'Angels' appeared on the page. I think I
had to cross two lines out to make it fit the music. It just
happened. I'm kind of a morbid chap. For someone who's got a
reputation for being a jolly drinking song player, I'm actually
quite a morbid sort of fellow.
I don't know how evident that is in the
music, for the most part.
Basically, I don't want to send people home
in a bad temper. I think if people are going to pay money to see
me, I want to give them a bit of a lift, you know? Hence this
slightly demeaning spectacle of us doing 'The Devil is My Friend'
at the end of the night, which was only really devised as a joke.
But there's a bunch of people out there who, you know, they won't
really go home happy unless you give it to them. Well, I don't
want to make people unhappy.
You do have more than a couple drinking
anthems, I mean besides 'Partytime,' there's 'Drink' and 'Soul
Happy Hour'.
I wrote that song at, like 10:30 in the
morning at my typewriter at work. I had a hangover, and my boss
was giving me trouble and I just hated the world. I thought, 'I
just want to get really, horribly, vengefully drunk.' So I wrote
this totally irresponsible song, and it actually says that
Special Brew is good for you. Special Brew is not good for you,
Special Brew will turn you into your parents. I'd sooner
encourage people to take amphetamine on a daily basis than to
become Special Brew addicts. It's just wicked.
I kind of get worried when people identify us with drinking
tunes too much. Me and Max, when we were working together, would
wind each other up to do a lot of crazy things. He really
can...you wake up on his floor, and it's like 10:00 in the
morning, he really will have you in the bars first thing.
Is there a lot of partying on tour? What
happens after the show?
It's a very simple life, touring. Basically
it's singing, sitting, and talking is what it's about. There's
not a lot of sex and drugs or anything. There's a fair amount of
Rock and Roll. It's a cross between a fact-finding mission, a
bombing raid, and one's hobby.
This interview was conducted at Shank Hall in Milwaukee,
Wisconsin
by Brian Kelly and David Whittemore .
by Brian Kelly and David Whittemore .
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