Two on MIDGE URE and ULTRAVOX

Part I: Text by Chris Van Valen and David G,
© FFanzeen, 1981
Part 2: Text by Abby Sheffield
© FFanzeen, 1986
Images from the Internet

The following interview and article originally appeared in FFanzeen Number 7, which was issued in 1981, and in Number 14, from 1986.

PART 1: Ultravox – Not Standing Still
By Chris Van Valen and David G., 1981

Ultravox’s song “Vienna,” their third single since reforming after the departure of lead singer/lyricist John Foxx (nee Dennis Leigh), was number one on the British charts for quite a while. “Vienna” has established the band as legitimate stars, a distinction they so richly deserve but were denied due to a disregard for fashion and poor reception by the British press. The current band’s members, Billy Currie (keyboards, violin, questionable guitar), Chris Cross (bass guitar, synthesizer, vocals), Warren Cann (drums, electronic percussion, vocals), and ex-Rich Kids Midge Ure (lead vocals, guitar, synthesizer), have avoided the danger of collapsing due to the loss of a key member by abandoning those aspects which characterized Foxx’s presence – a highly serious image, mechanical stage manner, and intellectual approach – and taking a romantic view of living in a modern world.

We met Midge Ure (who spoke with a very thick Scottish burr) and Chris Cross (whose real last name is St. John) fall of 1980, during the band’s extensive (U.S) East Coast tour. They proved to be as entertaining off stage as on.

FFanzeen: Let’s have a quick summary of what the band was doing between the first American tour (Fall ’78) and the break with Island, and then with Foxx.
Chris Cross: The break with Island was before the tour. The main reason we came over was because we didn’t have a record company. It was something that we really wanted to do, so we came over.

FF: There were tracks recorded, weren’t there?
Chris: That was before we went to America, as well. It was that stuff that we played on that tour.

FF: “Radio Beach” and “He’s a Liquid”?
Chris: Yeah, and “Touch and Go.”

FF: What happened to that stuff?
Chris: John put it on his album, being a friendly sort.

FF: What was the story behind the compilation, Three Into One?
Midge Ure: He put a writ on me and I didn’t have anything to do with any of the other albums. I had nothing to do with it.
Chris: We didn’t want it to come out. He didn’t want it t come out. The only way we could try and stop it was if he sued us or we sued him. So he sued us. Island was trying to make a free buck from us and it worked.

FF: Midge, how did you join the band?
Midge: It was just when they’d come back from that first American tour and they parted their ways. I’d met Billy (Currie) just before the tour. I didn’t know any of the guys in the band at all. I was doing a studio project with some of my favorite musicians.

FF: Was that Visage?
Midge: Precisely. I asked Billy if he wanted to do some stuff, and he was well up for it. He thought it would be just great working with some other musicians for a while. Just like a busman’s holiday. When they came back from America, I didn’t know that the band was ready to split. When they did split, I started working with Billy and he didn’t want to do anything with the band at that particular point. The whole thing had become one big pain in the backside, and he just went away and did the Visage stuff. When I got through working with Billy on it, I wangled my way into the band.

FF: What do you mean “wangled”?
Chris: Not really [laughs].

FF: The band had a direction on Systems of Romance [the band’s third and last album with Foxx]. Did this point in the direction from which you were coming?
Midge: Definitely. I think Systems was half a great album. There were some really good songs on it, but it was still a bit confused at that point. But the band was starting to get somewhere. I didn’t like the first two albums at all. When I joined the band, my idea was that it would be an obvious step up from “Slow Motion” and “Quiet Man,” while still keeping an experimental state, like “Just For a Moment,” and continue from that point. What we’ve got now is what I’d personally liked to have seen the band doing before. But it was just too mixed up before – it lacked the right ingredient.

FF: I read in one paper where you and Billy said that this album is a stopover to get yourselves together before going on to more experimental stuff in the future. What direction will the follow-up to Vienna take?
Midge: It’s started already. We recorded while we were in Miami for a couple of days. When we go into the studio, we have no idea at all what we’re going to do. We just recreated something in the studio. The track is pretty good, too. It’s only now that we can do that because we’ve been together a year and a half. We’re starting to rely on each other and bounce ideas off each other. You go into the box and you’re under pressure to be as good as everyone else has been, and make it mix.
Chris: Instead of having everything meticulously planned, we’ll do half that way and half very, very loose and free, and just see what we come up with.

FF: The set was similar to the first tour with the new band. Was the first tour just to show that the band was still alive?
Midge: Yeah, and it helped us break in the new material. We don’t like the idea of recording material before we’ve played it for a while. Once you’ve recorded it, that’s it, you can’t really change it that much.

FF: What was the idea behind trying to get a contract while insisting on not doing demos?
Chris: Demos are a real problem because when you do them, there’s always something on them. For example, drums: that’s impossible to recreate the magic. We have demos that we’ve done before that are much better than the finished tracks.
Midge: It’s not that we’re trying to be elitist. We blew more record deals because of that then anything.

FF: I guess Chrysalis is treating you better than Island?
Chris: Oh, yeah. The mafia treats us better than Island [laughs].

FF: Midge, I saw Glen Matlock at the gig last night. What does he think about what you’re doing now?
Midge: I’m sure he’s quite pleased. He could see what was happening when the Rich Kids started to split. I wanted the Rich Kids to sound more like the way we’re doing things now, and he wanted the Rich Kids to sound more like what he’s doing now with the Spectres. I went to his gig and I could see all the Rich Kids things from his point of view, and he saw my Rich Kids ideas from my point of view. I’m sure he thought it was…bloody awful [laughs].

FF: Where do you think Ultravox fits in right now, with Gary Numan capitalizing on the style of music you pioneered?
Chris: I don’t think we fit in with the Numan thing or electronic thing at all.
Midge: We don’t want anything to do with that.
Chris: We’re similar to what we’ve always been; we’ve never really quite fit into what’s going on. We basically don’t want to be a fashionable band because as soon as you are, it ends in six weeks. We’re really very conscious of that.

FF: In every interview that Gary Numan gives he mentions Ultravox as his primary influence.
Midge: We can’t see the connection, musically. We can see some basic ideas, but he’s taken them off on a tangent. I can’t see any similarity between him and us at all.
Chris: The whole similarity is more in his mind. It’s sort of like is version of what Ultravox sound like to him.

FF: One of his songs, “The Joy Circuit,” sounds as though it was ripped off from “Astradyne.”
Chris: We actually recorded pretty much during the same period of time.

FF: What sort of relationship does the band have with Foxx?
Chris: We never see him. He does exactly what he always wanted to do. You know, he wants to be a pain in the ass artist [laughs]. Really, all he wants to do is sit home and beat people away from the front door.
Midge: I’m sure he’ll come up with something eventually, but it must be alienating for him to step out of a band that, whether or not he admits it or not, had a lot to do with the music. The music was the band. To step out of that and try to do it all yourself must be a bit…lonely.
Chris: He has a really good keyboard player that works with him. He does all the good bits.

FF: How did you get back to working with producer Conny Plank?
Chris: He just really liked the idea of doing it. He’s the only person that we have a good working relationship with. We feel confident about the way he works and the sounds he gets.
Midge: We keep saying that it would be nice to work with somebody else. I’ve only done one album with him, and found it great and interesting working with the guy. This is the band’s second album with him so we looked around and couldn't come up with a single other name worth trying.

FF: He seems to have a handle on the electronics. He gets a good sound out of machines.
Midge: People try to use synthesizers as cold machines or an effect, like plugging in a fuzz box or whatever. He uses it like an acoustic instrument. He plays it back through a speaker cabinet and mics it up just like a guitar amp or a drum kit, an ambient thing. He treats it different ways like any other instrument, not just an electronic one.
Chris: He gets a natural sound.
Midge: And it comes across on the record. Most synthesizer groups are cold and plunky-plunky.
Chris: It’s a lively sound.

FF: Roxy Music started the idea of the synthesizer as more than just a fancy organ that makes funny noises.
Midge: I like the idea of Eno playing out front, from the mixing deck.

FF: You do (Eno’s) “King’s Lead Hat” and the encore. Have you ever talked to him about it?
Midge: He came to see us in LA, just as we walked off stage. He missed it. He said he’d liked to have heard it. We asked him what the lyrics were. He said he didn’t know, ‘cause we don’t know either. We sort of made them up. It’s the only thing we do that incredibly loose. It changes every night. We don’t know what the next line is. Really spontaneous.

FF: What’s your schedule like now? You recorded in Miami. Is that going to be your next single (this song is “Passionate Reply,” the B-side of “Vienna”)?
Midge: That was an experiment. It’ll probably be the B-side or an album track. We started recording early in 1981, after a short tour of England.

FF: The “Passing Strangers” video was very cinematic, not just the usual close-up of the singer’s face.
Midge: That’s what we were trying to steer clear of. We even added a violin that’s not on the record.

FF: You got Billy Currie to sing on it, too.
Midge: That was hard [laughs].
Chris: He couldn’t remember the words. Twenty times I had to tell him the words and he still said, “What’s the second line?”
Midge: We just wanted a video that didn’t look like a band playing. That’s why we did the live stuff.

FF: It summed up the idea of the song. It must not be as hard as having him play guitar, though.
Midge: Well, that’s hard to listen to more than it’s hard for him to play.

FF: The crowd cheers when he puts it on.
Midge: Part of the crowd cheers when he puts the guitar on. The other part cheers when he doesn’t. He says, “I fancy the guitar,” he doesn’t say he plays it. He enjoys himself.

FF: Have you any idea of what your next phase will be?
Midge: Hopefully, it’ll be a step up from what we’ve done.
Chris: We’ve got four or five set songs. It’s more interesting to go in not knowing what we’re doing.
Midge: It’s a whole different way to working. On Vienna, it’s a layered thing, not more than two of us playing at one time. It was all done bit by bit. That’s hard in itself, trying to get a sound like a band playing. This time we’re going to let one person go in at a time and play whatever they want to play.

FF: Vienna suggests several possible directions, such as the title track’s use of space.
Midge: The really sparse introduction. Then we built to a crescendo.

FF: At your shows, the crowd’s mood seems to go up and down, but at the end, they all go crazy.
Midge: Dance songs. It’s got to go up and down. When I go from guitar to keyboards, there’s not much happening on stage. It’s sort of a listening period. Then we do some older stuff.

FF: Will you be stepping out more on guitar?
Midge: I’m doing one or two more solos than on the first tour. I hate guitarists that just do straight-out solos. I play a backwards solo at the end of “Passing Strangers.” It’s a great song to solo over. I never played much guitar with the Rich Kids. I let Steve New do most of the live stuff.

FF: You seem to enjoy yourself on stage. Foxx just stood there.
Midge: I do enjoy myself.

FF: How were you accepted initially by the fans?
Midge: I didn’t know that the fans thought that Foxx was the whole band until we went out on the road. I never thought that at all. I thought he was the singer and wrote good lyrics and that’s it. The fans thought that Foxx was the savior of the band, and I wanted the band to get the recognition they deserved. That was hard for the fans at first.

FF: Your vocal style is different. You’re a singer and he sort of spoke-sang. Both versions are good in their own context.
Midge: I suppose that’s ‘cause I’m a singer before I’m a guitarist and he’s an artist before he’s a singer. He hadn’t been in a band before he was in Ultravox. I’ve been singing for years.

FF: Was it conscious or a coincidence that a few of the riffs, for example “Vienna” and “Maximum Acceleration” from Systems of a Romance are similar?
Midge: Someone else pointed that out to me. It’s a coincidence. On “Vienna,” it’s much slower [Midge sings both]. We use those scales that Billy knows. “Quiet Man” and “Sleepwalk” use similar scales. Those chord progressions and scales make up the sound which is Ultravox.

FF: When Billy plays more I guess he’ll learn more scales.
Midge: Well, I’m teaching him all I know.

FF: How does the new recording techniques differ from the earlier albums, Ultravox! and Ha-Ha-Ha?
Chris: It was basically similar. “Fear in the Western World” was done live. Everything else was just bass and drums with other parts overdubbed.
Midge: “Astradyne” and “Passing Strangers” were done that way. With a synthesizer; it’s easer to mix from the control room.

FF: How’s the writing distributed now?
Midge: We all contribute. Some of the stuff Warren’s done totally. He did “Mister X” and part of “Sleepwalk.” Then Chris and Warren will change a line there and there.

FF: On stage, the vocal parts were very cleverly altered. Was this done by your sound man?
Midge: I do all that on stage. I use foot switches so I don’t have to depend on the sound man in case he’s having a chat and forgets to switch it on. I’ve got a set of switches that does echoes and megaphone, stuff like that.

FF: “Mr. X” reminds me of “Touch and Go.” Was this an effort to salvage a piece of old material that Foxx used?
Chris: We didn’t know he was putting out an album. We had “Mr. X” done before he had his album.
Midge: The band wrote the music. John used it and said he wrote it.

FF: Chris, how do you keep it together on the freak out during “Hiroshima, Mon Amour”?
Chris: I find playing the reggae really the easiest to play. Like on “Dangerous Rhythm.” I like mixing it into berserk electronic surroundings. It’s almost like dub.

FF: Did you play sax on the album cut? The record says, “Sax by C.C.”
Chris: Everyone asks me that, but no, I didn’t.

FF: Would you like to do dub records?
Chris: I’d like to do one. I was trying to think of a song that would suit it and I couldn’t think of one.
Midge: I like the way Andy Partridge (of XTC) does it because it’s not very reggae-ish. He totally changes things. I’m sure we’ll eventually do one, but it’s very expensive; studio time and everything.

FF: Whatever happened to Stevie Shears?
Chris: Last thing we heard, he was playing in Cowboys International. I haven’t heard anything since then.

FF: The album cover of Vienna looks very robotic. What that intentional?
Midge: To me, it looks like a ‘40s fashion photograph of a band. We were trying to get a natural look and it just turned out that way. We stole the crumpled up paper idea from an old Vogue magazine picture. It was a lady standing there in an evening gown with all these shadows in the background. It looked really nice. And it was just crumpled paper. But ours just looked like crumpled paper.

[Special thanks to Jackie Boone]

PART 2: Midge Ure: A Recollective Conversation
By Abby Sheffield., 1986

It’s an 82 degree day in Miami. Images of poolside leisure or a cruise to the beach usually accompany days like this. Midge Ure, affable Scottish spokesman of Ultravox pushes such thoughts aside – at least temporarily – for the duration of the afternoon. After all, it’s not that tough a choice; a challenging interview with another journalist or a few more hours in the hot, baking sun. No choice at all.

When Sir Bob briefly left Boomtown and proposed an idea to Ure, one that would introduce some charitable ideas into the music marketplace and aid a suffering nation, little did either musician realize that the result of this collaboration would be on such a grand scale. The Band Aid project brought a slew of rock heroes to the forefront and propelled Bob Geldorf into knighthood. Ure actually had an equal partnership in the beginning of the project, musically and in the business sense.

“I actually saw some of the Band Aid shipments getting there,” Ure recaps. “Everyone said to me that it must have been an amazing feeling knowing that you’ve been involved since the beginning. That was the best feeling of all, to be able to take the supplies over there.”

Ure still waxes enthusiastic over rock’s charitable snowballing efforts since his project moved to the back of people’s minds. Gone but not forgotten.

“I didn’t see them as jumping on the bandwagon. I see them as taking over where Bob and I left off. It was great to see that when the (“Feed the World”) single start to die, ‘cause it was a Christmas record, the Americans took over; then the Canadians, then many more.

“I think the music business, when it all pulls together the way that it has, can become a very powerful piece of machinery. It’s nice to see that power channeled into something worthwhile. I don’t see why the musicians and the music business in general can’t get involved by helping in various ways.”

The Scotland-born, English-bred Ure interestingly enough introduced his most recent solo work into the conversation. A solo project from an artist may differ form his band’s collective release in a variety of ways. There’s, perhaps, less reasons to compromise and the artist may pursue a style that the entire band may not have agreed on. A Phil Collins situation was discussed, since the drummer/vocalist of Genesis successfully forged a path that Ure aspired to follow. It’s tough being one of the creative beings in a group and then stepping out alone. Dedicated fans may know where to apply the credit for such inventiveness, but what about the rest of the world?

Granted, Ure (and partner Chris Cross) have written the music and produced the videos for Ultravox and is well versed on several instruments, and even is designated as the main warbler in the group, but what happened when this creative being unleashed his talents with only his name on the album’s front cover?

By now, we know that Ure’s solo album did not do as well as his collaborations with his band. Moreover, the album’s appeal did not go unnoticed.

“I didn’t think that it was radically different form what I do with Ultravox,” he recalls. “My only thought was to make it half instrumental-half vocal. I was rebelling against the fact hat everyone knew me for my voice, rather than as a musician.

“There were influences propping out that I didn’t know I had – touches of Laurie Anderson and Brian Eno.”

Would the musician in him want to expand and experiment with other instruments?

“I bought a koto from Japan. It looks like a softball with strings on it. It’s that classic Japanese plucked instrument sound that you hear on any Japanese music. I had the idea for a piece of music with a slight oriental sound to it.

“The album sounds very orchestrated without having to use an orchestra.”

There were several opportunities for the versatile musician-songwriter if he wanted to grab the solo spotlight. He was, after all, involved in the Prince’s Trust; an annual benefit sponsored by Price Charles, and had a couple of solo singles released. Why was that specific time chosen for the solo?

“Well, Ultravox had a phenomenon happen. When “The Collection” was released, it sold a million copies in Britain – more than ever before. All of a sudden Ultravox became a household name. It gave me a bit of breathing space. After the success, it would be nice to take a break. This gave me the time I needed to go into the studio. The time was right. I don’t think that if I had done it two years before, that I would have been satisfied.”

Ure is well practiced on reviewing his evolution from Scottish pop-belter to the versatile performer we know today. When Ultravox revamped the personnel involved at the time and omitted the exclamation following the name, there was a vacancy looking to be filled. Along rambles Ure, the survivor of such bands as Slick and the Rich Kids. After an invitation from friend Cross, Ure passes the audition and joins right in. Fueling the band financially meant outside touring to Ure and his guitar joined Thin Lizzy. His part in Ultravox’s Vienna established him as a potent musical force.

Musical credits aside, Ure has also directed the band’s last eight video clips, as well as the promotional pieces for Bananarama, Fun Boy Three, Visage, and the late Phil Lynnot.

As time marched on, Ure held more of a creative place in his band. Keyboards are added to his ever growing list of accomplishments. Though the group was always democratic in their decision making procedures, Ure was noticed as more of the creative force. When he built a small studio in his English country home, the opportunities became more frequent for his experimentation. Soon, other projects were thrust in his direction.

Ure concludes, “I’m very happy with what I’m doing with Ultravox, but there’s something inside me that wants more.”

Stay tuned.

PHILIP GLASS: A Touch of Class

Text by Dave Street
Interview © 1983 by FFanzeen
Images from the Internet

The following article on composer / musician Philip Glass was originally published in FFanzeen magazine, issue #11, in 1983. It was conducted by Dave Street.
Philip Glass is a modern musical phenomenon. At the same time he is sort of a modern Beethoven, an innovative classical composer who has challenged the traditional classical music world, and has simultaneously had an affect on contemporary rock’n’roll, as a producer and friend with many of the new music bands and musicians. He’s discussed music with the likes of David Bowie and Brian Eno, and produced LPs by two new pop bands, Polyrock and the Raybeats. Unlike any classical composer, he also frequents New York’s rock’n’roll club scene in search of new talent and ideas.

He has also attracted a lot of young people to classical music as well. At his recent brilliant sold-out concert at Carnegie Hall, there were even a few pop, punk, and New Wave musicians in the audience. His new album, Photographer, is one of the few classical LPs ever to hit the pop music charts. In this interview he talks about his music, rock’n’roll, and his life as an artist in America.

FFanzeen: What affect has pop music had on your own compositions?
Philip Glass: It’s generally something I’m very familiar with and live with all the time. My kids listen to it all the time. And often they’re listening to people who are friends of mine. One specific way it works, too, is that we’re often using the same technology of a recording studio. We’re working with the same kind of equipment that rock bands do. We use overdubbing and we use 24 tracks.

FF: Is that new in classical music?
Philip: It’s not done in classical music. The way classical music gets recorded is they think of a record as a sonic photograph. When they record a string quartet, it’s like taking a photograph of a string quartet. They record it as a performance. And from our point of view it’s like a very primitive way of working. When we do a record, we think of the record as a completely different thing form the performance, so we do it by doing just the basic tracks the way a rock band does. We’ll put on the keyboard tracks first, then we add the wind tracks and the vocal tracks. I can pretty definitely say that simply does not happen in classical music.

FF: So you’ve adapted the modern rock technology to your recordings?
Philip: Well, they grew up at the same time. In 1970, we began with an eight-track machine. Fifteen years ago, you didn’t have a 24-tradck machine. We have mastered the technology at the same time as other people were doing it. So I could talk to someone like Brian Eno about how he records this or that. Or talk to David Bowie about how he works in the studio.

FF: Has the traditional classical world held it against you for working the way you do?
Philip: They’ve held everything against me. The only thing they wouldn’t hold against me would be if I took a job teaching harmony at some jerk-water conservatory. But the main thing I’ve done that allies me more with pop music is that I actually play my music. I don’t just write music and send it out for other people to play. Except when someone’s doing a big opera, I’m there on stage playing the music.

FF: Aren’t your recordings shorter than most classical compositions as well; perhaps another influence of pop music?
Philip: Some are and some aren’t. Einstein on the Beach lasted five hours.

FF: But that was a spectacle unto itself.
Philip: Well, in some cases I’ve made shorter pieces with the hope that I’ll get on the radio a little bit more. And sometimes that has happened. But generally, pieces like Glass or the Photographer can be 20 minutes. A Mozart symphony is only about 18 minutes long.

FF: What kind of music did you listen to when you were growing up as a young boy?
Philip: My father had a record store. In fact, when my brother and I were only 15, my father put us in our own record store in East Baltimore. And we had our own rhythm and blues record store. So we listened to everything from “Ghost Riders in the Sky” to Elvis Presley. I was still working there when Presley came out. So from the point of view of someone who was selling records at the time, I was really seeing the birth of rock’n’roll.

FF: Did you play rock’n’roll yourself at first?
Philip: No, I never did. I’ve never played popular music. And the funny thing is I’m working more with it now than I ever did before. I think the thing to remember is that I come from a tradition of notated music. In other words, music that is written down. And that’s really a tradition. When you talk about music the question is: do you improvise the music or are you playing things that you’ve written? I’m a guy who plays things that I’ve written. Of course, this has made me helpful to some of my friends in the pop world who don’t’ really read and write music. Like when I’m working with the Raybeats or Polyrock, people who generally work in written-down material. I can write things for them. For example, if they decide to bring in voices to put on top of something I can write the voice parts down. Stuff like that. That’s a very useful skill that helps when I work in pop projects. Which is something I really like to do. First of all, it’s a lot of fun to work with pop bands, and secondly, I might make money on it. Money’s important.

FF: Does it take longer to achieve financial success in classical music than in rock’n’roll?
Philip: It takes never in classical music. The only way you can make money in classical music is by teaching. You don‘t make it from writing music. When I was a student at Julliard, my teacher was a very well known composer. He did a lot of music. I asked him how much money he made from his publishing. He looked at me and said, “Forget it. You’ll never make a living writing music. Get it out of your head right now.” And, of course, I never did. But most classical musicians don’t’ make a living out of it.

FF: Do you make money playing out?
Philip: Not so much playing out. I make it on commissions. Like an opera company asking me to write them an opera. I make it from what they call “mechanical rights” from record sales. Or from “synchronization rights.” For example, like in the new remake of the movie Breathless, they’re using some of my music in it. It’s the new Richard Gere movie. That’s called a “synchronization right’; when any time music is synchronized with an image in video or film, that synchronization. The “mechanical rights” mean any time it’s on record. There are called the “subsidiary rights” that go along with a pieced of music. The performance rights are very little. Actually, when I go on tour, I pay the band members and I pay myself the same, but I don’t actually make money from that. Those kinds of things are to sell records and establish a presence in the record world.

FF: Do you enjoy playing out?
Philip: I do. I enjoy the playing. And I enjoy being in different cities. I didn’t enjoy the things in-between, like the bus rides or the plane rides. I don’t like being in 14 different hotel rooms on 14 different nights. I don’t particularly like the Howard Johnsons, which are all the same. The eating and sleeping, which is most of what touring is about, is kind of boring. What I do like is going to a town where I haven’t been before, like Santa Fe, and seeing a theater packed with people and playing music for them.

FF: Did you have to suffer much before you started being able to support yourself as a musician?
Philip: I was about 30 when I formed the Philip Glass Ensemble. We called it PGE for short. I had gotten out of college and lived in Europe for a while, and I had won a lot of prizes as a student, so I actually didn’t have to work hard until I was 30, because I had won so many prizes from grants and stuff like that. Then I completely changed the way I wrote music to what is recognizable as wheat I do now. And then the grants stopped totally. Is started the PGE that time and I’d say it took about 10 to 12 years of doing other kinds of work to support myself while I was trying to make a career from writing music. I don’t consider that very long. Twelve years isn’t very long when you consider that what I was doing was virtually unprecedented. The other thing is, I don’t mind it very much.

FF: You didn’t mind having to work a day job?
Philip: I liked it. I was a plumber for three years and I enjoyed that.

FF: And you were still doing your music at the same time?
Philip: I always had the music, because I had to write music for my band. I wrote at night or during the days I didn’t work. I worked for a moving company about 10 days a month; the 5 days at the beginning of the month and the 5 days at the end of the month. That’s when people move their furniture. I worked real hard for about 10 or 12 days and then spent the rest of my time writing music. And then I drove a cab for about 5 years, and I liked that. The thing is, I never thought that I was suffering. If I thought I was suffering, I probably would’ve had a hard time. But I liked being out on the street, meeting people, driving my car around; New York is a circus.

FF: So it took you about 12 years before you were a self-supporting musician?
Philip: That’s right, but I don’t think that’s very long. The trick about all these jobs is that they were transient. My first job I was working for a friend of mine. He was a plumber. And he was sensitive to my being a performer. And if I had to leave town and tour for a month, they’d let me go. And with cab driving, I’d just go up to the dispatcher at the garage and say, “I’ve got to visit my mother in Toledo. I’ll be back in a month.” And they didn’t care. These are all transient jobs. They are jobs that have no future, no security, and therefore there’s a big turnover. You can drop in and drop out of a job. So what I did is that. I would go on tour, and usually I would lose money in those days. I’d come back from our tour about $2000 in dept, and I’d work until I paid off the debt.

FF: You were known and famous in Europe at this same time?
Philip: We were known in Europe very well. We had played in Europe from 1970 to 1976, and very little in America. People in Europe had no idea that I was going home and driving a cab. Because in Europe, they support their artists as if it’s a real sort of profession. A composer there would never consider working as a night porter or a salesman in a dress shop. They would get money from the government. There’s a different respect for the arts there. Not that it’s always good. Basically, what we like in this country is television and sports. Our main entertainment is television, sports and movies. When you get into being an artist, you’re dealing on the fringe of society. Except for a few stars who support themselves, there’s no system to support creative people here. But when I went to Europe, they had no idea what I was doing here to make ends meet. In the garage where I worked, it was filled with painters and writers. This is generally how people do it in America. And it’s not unusual. It’s not a particularly romantic thing to do. People make a big deal out of it, but if you want to be an artist or a musician in this country, it takes a certain amount of grit just to get through it. The best way to get through it is not to feel sorry for yourself because no one asked you to be an artist in the first place. No one said to me, “Hey, why don’t you become a musician?” To the contrary, everyone told me not to do it. So you only have yourself to blame. You do it because you want to.

FF: You’ve worked with pop groups like Polyrock and the Raybeats. How did you get involved with them?
Philip: First of all, it’s music that I listen to. I go to the clubs and hear it. In the early days, it was CBGBs and all those other places in the East Village. I was at tone of the first B-52’s concerts. That was about 4 or 5 years ago. I was standing in this bar and Brian Eno walked by and said, “There’s this really good band I want you to hear.” So I went and listened to them. The other thing is that when I was playing in Europe in the 1970s, I met a lot of guys who formed their own bands and became very well known. Like Tangerine Dream. I was playing in Berlin in 1971 when they were just getting started. So they knew me. A lot of people like Robert Fripp were all going to the Royal College of Art school. Like Bowie and Eno, as well. Like a lot of American musicians come out of art school. And so they started coming to see me and they wanted me to hear their work. That’s how it happened. Actually, they got me interested in what they were doing because they were interested in what I was doing. I just started forming social connections. In a way, at the beginning, it never occurred to me that I would work with a rock band.

FF: How did it happen?
Philip: RCA Records signed Polyrock and they needed a producer, and they asked the band who they wanted to work with and the said me. And the funny thing is that the lady at RCA Records, Nancy Jeffries, thought I had never heard of rock’n’roll. She thought I was only a classical composer. She said to me, "Do you go to rock clubs?” And I said, “I go all the time.” And I’ve known the Raybeats for a long time. Donny and Jody used to play with James Black, so and so I knew them from the Contortions. It was really fun going to see them at Max’s (Kansas City) because James would go into the audience and get his face smashed in. And the thing I liked was that the band kept playing even when he got dragged out. No matter what happened to him, they kept playing. And they sounded like a band. They left and formed the Raybeats, which has become one of the prime influential dance bands. They asked me to write a song for them and I had always wanted to. And at one point, it just happened.

FF: Are you constantly looking for new acts to work with?
Philip: I don’t have to look. They just pop up.

FF: You get lots of offers from the pop world?
Philip: Not that much. Just enough to keep me interested. I do about one or two things a year. Like I just got through working with Ray Manzarak. He was the piano player of the Doors. I just did a big record project with him. Just a few weeks ago, I worked with Paul Simon in the studio on something he wanted to work on. So some of my collaborators are older people from my generation. But there are younger bands around. I don’t go looking for bands. I’m busy writing operas and ballets and really don’t go looking for projects. When something comes up that interests me, and someone asks me to do it, changes are that I will. It’s also another financial thing; it’s partially how we make a living.

FF: It seems that rock’n’roll lyrics are mainly concerned with teenage problems and young romance. Does classical music intentionally try to reflect any such area of the human experience?
Philip: I wonder. Most of the music isn’t literal that way except for the theater pieces I do. And the theater pieces I’ve worked on were people like Einstein and Gandhi. What I’m interested in with these cases is the dramatic impact these people’s lives made on us. And sometimes there can be violence in it, too. And there can be apocalyptic visions, too, like the Einstein opera. And the Gandhi opera had a whole piece about civil disobedience. And, of course, that’s starting to surface again, directed toward the anti-nuke thing. But all those kinds of political experiences I went through during the Viet Nam days and the civil rights days.

FF: Were you politically active then?
Philip: I didn’t’ do much marching. I wasn’t that politically active. I was in a few marches. I found marches scary. I didn’t like being chased by cops. I didn’t want to get my head busted. I was always sympathetic to it. But I never put myself in a position where I could get my head cracked. The interesting thing is that by dealing with social issues in theater pieces, you’re saying what you have to say. But in terms of the emotion of it, there’s really not that big a difference between, say, a classical work like Rite of Spring and the music of the Sex Pistols. I think that the music is radically different, of course. Stravinsky and the Sex Pistols couldn’t be more different. But in other ways, what you’re dealing with, the range of human emotions, is available to all of us. The difference between long-haired composers and short-haired composers in not very different when it comes down to emotional content. The means of expression may be different, but the human experience has got to be pretty much the same.

FF: It’s rumored that you’ve worked with David Bowie.
Philip: I haven’t worked with him. I’m friends with him and we’ve talked about music from time to time. As a matter of act, we have a project coming up right now. It has to do with Bob Wilson’s new piece on civil wars. The fifth act is supposed to be the American Civil War and he’s asked David to play Abraham Lincoln. And David said if I write the music he’s going to ask Iggy Pop to write the words. David and I have talked about doing things in the past, but either he'd be in one place or I’d be in the other. He comes to my concerts and I’m trying to get a ticket to see his. We’ve known each other for a long time. When he appeared (on Broadway) in The Elephant Man in New York, I went to see it. And a couple of weeks later I was playing at the Peppermint Lounge and he walked over from Broadway. And this up and coming project could be our first real collaboration. But we’ve talked about doing a lot of things.

FF: Is it true that you invite strange people up to your house for dinner?
Philip: Oh, sure. But the kids also bring a lot of people around to the house. If they want to have someone over for dinner, I make the dinner. The kids are with me very other week. The weeks they’re with me tend to be fairly sociable evenings. The weeks they’re not with me I don’t go out at all. So I guess I’m kind of a Jekyll-and-Hyde person that way.

FF: Do you do most of your composing at home?
Philip: Yes. I have one piano in our apartment. I live in a tow-room apartment in the Lower East Side. Most people seem to think that musicians all live in nice, fancy lofts though.

FF: Especially since you’ve been going the Johnny Walker ads. People must think you ride around in limousines for fun.
Philip: I’d like to. And maybe someday I will. There isn’t a lot of money right now in the music business. But remember, I see a lot of records for a classical composer: 80,000 to 90,000 records. But by pop standards, it isn’t very much.

FF: Do you find more younger people coming to your concerts?
Philip: Yes. The funny thing is, as I get older, my audience gets younger. On the average, I’m probably 20 years older than the audience. But that wasn’t always true. When I first started playing, the people who came to my concerts were my friends. And generally, that’s what happens: you get an audience and the audience grows with you. I think about the people who liked Bob Dylan and bought his records before are the same people who like him and buy his records now. I remember playing Bobby Dylan for my kids when they were about 8 or 9, and their questions were, “Why does he sing so funny?” Most people get locked into their generation. But there have been successively younger generations that have gotten interested in my music. Now, when I do a concert, there are usually a lot of people there in their mid-20s. And I’m in my mid-40s.

FF: Would you like to play in a rock’n’roll band someday, if only for fun?
Philip: I think it would be fun. Maybe some time that will happen.

FF: What attracted you to classical music over the pop music you had access to at your record store?
Philip: I liked the classical music. My father liked classical music and that was the music we played at home. He didn’t like to bring pop records home. I was studying flute at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, and I started down the road of classical music. It’s what I was closest to, and that still remains to be true. But I have a very wide interest in all music. I’m not a snob about music, obviously, but my main outlet has always been classical.

FF: What are your favorite current pop bands?
Philip: I just heard this group, the Major Thinkers. I think they’re terrific. The Raybeats have always been favorites of mine.

FF: How do you meet new bands?
Philip: Friends of mine work in recording studios. And they recommend a new group that I should hear. And I still go to the clubs and hear new bands there.

FF: Have you listened to any of the hardcore music?
Philip: Not yet, but I guess I should.

FF: Do you have any closing words of advice for would-be musicians?
Philip: To the people who are interested in playing and writing music, I think that the craft and technique of it is something you can spend a lot of time at before acquiring it. The more you acquire, the easier it’s going to be to do the kind of work you want to do. If it’s an instrument you’re playing, really learn to play it. Those things take time. And there’s a certain period in your life when you have the time to do this, and that’s when you’re younger, because generally when you’re younger, you don’t have the pressures of family and financial pressures so much. So, it’s bets to master your craft when you’re young.