It’s been through backcopies of music media stalwarts such as Melody Maker, Sounds, and the NME that I’ve pulled together numerous interviews with the band, and these have been spliced into various places in this website. But it’s Davey Henderson whose stream-of-consciousness rants and ponderous paranoid musings that dominate these articles. So herein follows some choice cuts that I can’t quite find a home for elsewhere in this archive:
“The things about something like Acid House, for example, is that it just seems to be functional and if you wanna just go and dance to some heavy-duty beat, it’s fine for that. But, surely, Acid is just a throwback to Sixties and Seventies drug-taking, anyway, an excuse for a party. Ecstasy is bullshit. It gives you brain damage, which is pretty bad news. Have you been to an Acid club? You see people walking around quite aggressively. They do this dance” – flaps arms above his head – “it doesn’t seem very warm. I find it quite aggressive and offensive. It starts getting scary, like ‘The Stepford Wives’”.
“All these groups were really apathetic, they were really cancerous. These people just aren’t communicating anything groovy to young people. They’re not opening people’s eyes, they’re putting them to sleep. That’s the general way things are working now anyway, taboo wise, censorship wise, which is really scary”.
“Sometimes it’s pretty scary, just when you’re having a shave or something, and you’re throwing the cold water on your face, and you think … Ronald Reagan’s the President of the United States. For that split second, you start dying a wee bit. You get cancer in the tip of your toe … a hair falls out … you get a wax build-up in your ears. A lot of fun’s made of it, but it’s frightening. I keep using the word ‘frightening’. You must be able to tell that I’m pretty scared these days … in a positive way”.
“I don’t think anyone really owes us any kind of debt in that way. You know, we owe people a few things as well.”
“’Eastenders’ is a very dangerous programme at the moment. It’s breeding cancer. It’s sending messages out of that fucking TV screen to destroy vital organs. It’s scary”.
“I like ‘Neighbours’ but I hate ‘Eastenders’. It’s bad for your health, children, listen to me now before it’s too late!”.
“The thing about British TV is it’s too good, and our comedians are too good. That’s why we’ve never had a revolution … we can always laugh at politicians”.
“I dunno. I mean, who’s a hero of the young now? The Brat pack? Eddie Kidd? People that wear Fifties denim? I mean, everything’s so packaged in that way now. It’s designer everything. The way that the past is being revived through all that designer culture, yuppie sort of thing means it loses all the value it once had, as soon as it gets tagged. I find it disgusting. That’s why we’re not into categorising ourselves. We’re not a ‘soul band’ or a ‘dance band’. We just make up poppy little tunes”.
* this phrase refers to the ruling by governmant that ‘heroes of the young’ – in other words, popular bands - should not be used for the purposes of advertising alcohol.
“I’ve had “Trout Mask Replica” for many years now and I can honestly say I’m just one and a half sides into it. It’s one of the great masterpieces of 20th-century American art. One of the things that makes it so inspiring is that it sounds like it’s being poured out of a bucket. I know it was probably tightly orchestrated and arranged, but it sounds like anybody could do it, and that’s really uplifting. There are no technically perfect solos – it’s just really layered and chaotic. There’s a lot of humour on the record, too. I love the bit where you hear Captain coaching Mascara Snake before “Pena”, and you can hear the rest of the band pissing themselves in the background. It was like they revelled in the absurdity of the record, and it makes you wonder if the Captain consciously decided he was going to get these excellent musicians to play these really crazy, psychedelic compositions.
There’s so many mythologies surrounding “Trout Mask Replica” that it’s hard to separate fact from fiction, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he did keep them locked up in that big house, isolated from the rest of the world. I’ve thought about this a lot and I really think they sound like the first and only band to ever existed. There’s no obvious reference points; just this eerie post-apocalyptic feel running through the whole record. Obviously the Captain has a distinctive voice anyhow, but on “Orange Claw Hammer” and “The Dust Blows Forward ‘N The Dust Blows Back” he sounds like the only surviving American hobo.
I think it’s great that Zappa produced the album, but the stories I’ve heard suggest he didn’t have to do much. Apparently he arrived at the studio, switched on the recording desk, and the band played the album from start to finish in one long take. I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s great to think they might have rehearsed for nine months, then recorded it in one go.
Without Beefheart, I doubt I’d have ever picked up a guitar or formed the Fire Engines. Getting the opportunity to play with The Magic Band last year was an absolute honour. It would’ve been a thrill enough to watch them play, but to actually share a stage with Rocket Morton, that was quite something. Even without the Captain, they were absolutely mind-blowing”.
"No - I've been through all that pop stuff with Win, and it's not a time in my life I like to go back to. Once in a while one of those pop songs pops up and I have to get rid of it. It's an unbelievable nightmare process, but I think that's a good thing: I'd hate to be happy, I'm actually taping over Win albums at the moment because I can't afford blank tapes."
“Margaret Thatcher, Saatchi and Saatchi, Reagen’s policies on South America, Reagen’s policies on Scotland, the general state of the world, and Barry Norman, though the Spitting Image puppet is great!”
“I’ve started liking Paul Daniels because of that new quiz show, Every Second Counts. That and Blockbusters – they’re good”
“They’ve been heavily marketed and really gone for it, but how enigmatic is it eh, baby? They’re bland to listen to, and as pinups, they’re less interesting than Wham!. I can’t seem them lasting, and we’re not really in competition with them.”
“I’d buy a massive field, a massive bulldozer and dig massive holes. There’d probably be some other positive creative thing on the side, but digging a big hole, aye, I could go for that”.
“Invent silence on a Walkman, so you can cut everything out”
“Get our own food chain, have really good products, invent new flavours, and promote them on TV with our own song”
“Aye, they’re brilliant. They deserve every million. They’re really gamey. It takes a lot to do that and commit yourself all the way down the line, cutting everything and going for it”
“Syndicate are alright. They’re an up-and-coming groovy band. They’re not introverted like Paul Haig. He hasn’t got an ounce of talent in his little finger”.
“We’d make a great Eurovision band but these days it’s so scrappy. I remember when it used to have REAL stars on it like Cliff Richard, but now it’s all these terrible people. We’d be able to write a winner easily, we’d have them hooked in seconds”.
“The TV stations in America are incredible. You see the way it works and you realise that some watch without a break for the rest of their lives. I’ve got this picture in my head of a businessman at a hotel. He’s just taken his shoes off and he’s sitting on the edge of his bed watching TV a couple of feet from the set. He’s there for the rest of his life. It’s dangerous”.
“I’ve been eating quite a lot of Caramels lately. I really love that cartoon hare in the advert – she’s really sassy when she wiggles that cute wee tail!”
“It’s great being on a big label. We tell them that we need a holiday to write some songs and they rent us a cottage in the Lake District. It’s great, we have real fun, get drunk, watch telly away from our girlfriends for a week and then write 10 songs on the train home”
"You know how much is made of the fact that the 1967 European Cup-winning Celtic team all grew up within a 12-mile radius? Well, the Fire Engines all grew up within 500 yards of each other".
"We loved the Slits, Buzzcocks, Subway Sect, The Fall, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Contortions, James White and the Blacks, The Velvet Underground, Television, The Pop Group, Public Image, Johnny Thunders... we loved Snatch ... Girl singers and primitive drums turn us on - and boys who wanted to be girl singers with primitive drums ... To me Mark E Smith is a soul singer - he's like the Mancunian Whitney Houston, only better. He can squeal - check out "Rowche Rumble" - and he doesn't show off. We were also very in love with Captain Beefheart's "Clearspot", and "Strictly Personal" was a real favourite to lick Star Wars stamps to... "Doc At The Radar Station" was the permanent soundtrack to our campaigns down stairs".
“To think of that man and that woman doing all sorts of … you-know … rude things”.