Interesting comments
on some of the songs, you're right to concentrate on Andy's lyrics, they
were always very good, though I must confess I never noticed he was quite
so psychedelic at the time. But then, Andy was a Bob Dylan fan, who I hated
and still do (Dylan that is not Andy), but he also loved Mark E. Smith
(Andy that is not Dylan) who was my big hero at the time. A lot of the
songs on the first album were written before I joined the band - when they
were a four piece with Andy trying to play the guitar (only joking AB)
- I always liked those songs, they were the main reason I joined the band,
but the rest of the group were sick of them, trying to get them to play
stuff like "Let's Make Some Plans" was like pulling teeth. The first songs
I wrote were "Pimps" and "In Spite of These Times", which is amazing really
because they're both quite sophisticated songs and I could hardly play
at the time, I mean I didn't know the names of any chords or anything,
I just used to make my own up or play little patterns that sounded good.
John Rivers, who produced the first album, thought "Pimps" was like a country
rock song, which it is in a way, though entirely by accident. Songs like
"Kiss the Flower" had very Rock (with a capital R) chords, almost Bryan
Adams like, which is why they were great and didn't sound like that weak-kneed
lily-livered piss-poor shambling shite that passed for indie rock at the
time, coincidentally I notice that Noel Gallagher has been recycling those
same 3 or 4 chords endlessly but still hasn't come with a song as good
as "Flower".
Actually, I learned
guitar by playing along to Blue Orchids records (I told you I was a Fall
freak), I loved them, the Lobsters never really sounded like them though,
another good band at the time were The Chills - "Apprehension" on "Headache
Rhetoric" was influenced by them. The musical tastes within the band were
very different, the only bands we all liked were The Only Ones and The
Go-Betweens, it was my ambition that we sound as close to the Go-Betweens
as humanly possible but thankfully we never managed it because the band
was pulling in so many different directions. When I joined the band I hated
indie music and guitars, stuff like The Smiths (who I quite like now) didn't
interest me, I'd liked electronic/experimental music like Cabaret Voltaire
and Throbbing Gristle but got bored with it, I also liked a lot of Krautrock
like Can/ Kraftwerk/ Faust / Neu!/ Popol Vuh but nobody was interested
in that stuff in those days (how times change) - I used to record "pieces"
on my own or with my brother, Andy asked me to join the Lobsters because
we used to have drunken arguments about Mark E. Smith at
the local nightclub. Interestingly, there
are Krautrock influences on "Foxheads Stalk This Land" if you look hard
enough, I stole the chords for the middle section of "Sewer Pipe Dream"
from "Silver Mist" by La Dusseldorf (on "La Dusseldorf", Teldec Records,
1976 - check it out). "Mother of God" was total Neu! - well it was
when I played it, in fact that song grew out of trying to do a cover version
of Television's "Marquee Moon" and not being able to get past the opening
10 seconds - well, Tom Verlaine did the same with The Velvets' "Inside
of Your Heart" and called it "See No Evil" - what goes around comes around.
I notice in my previous letter which you have put online without my permission,
that I seem a bit dismissive of "Headache Rhetoric", well I'm not really
- but it would have been a lot better if we'd recorded it 3 months later,
stuff like "Nature Thing" and "Knee Trembler" was a lot better
live. I don't know if you are familiar
with our singles and b-sides, we did a lot of good cover versions - "Paper
Thin Hotel" I've mentioned but also Soft Cell's "Say Hello, Wave Goodbye"
which we did for a radio session, I also remember playing it in America
a lot.
One of my main regrets
about the band is that, inadvertently, we were responsible for the formation
of the Manic Street Preachers. We played in Newport in Wales, which if
not actually the arsehole of the world is a compacted piece of shit dangling
from it, anyway, apparently the three cunts from The Manics and the dead
one were in attendance and so disgusted were they by our drunken and untogether
"peformance" that they vowed there and then to form a Retrogressive Rawk
(with two capital R's) band to appeal to spoiled neurotic middle class
schoolgirls and closet Springsteen/Alarm fans - well three of them did,
the dead one was puking up his second lager & blackcurrant of the night
in the bogs at the time. This is all true, it was in the Guardian. Anyway,
I was musing on all this, when I happened to see the Manics on late nite
TV and I was thinking: "My God this is Wishbone Ash (or more pertinently,
Man), did my older sister fight in the Punk Rock wars for this!!??!!" The
gist of all this is that I'm almost tempted to reform The Lobsters just
so I can say, "Yeah, well of course, it was
seeing shit like The Manic Street Preachers
that made me wanna reform the band..."
