from NEW MUSICAL EXPRESS, July 16, 1994 (U.K.)
[This is the lead article from a profile section on the Phoenix
Festival. Phoenix is one of the biggest of the big music festivals
held in the U.K. in the summer.]
written by Roger Morton, with accompanying photographs (not
reproduced here) by Steve Double.
P H O E N I X - Phoenix Festival finally puts live techno on the
same agenda as rock, the only UK festival this year with a stage fully
devoted to all things wibbly. For being both big and clever THE GRID,
kings of the Corby trouser press, get to headline the final night.
ROGER MORTON squares up to Richard Norris and Dave Ball, and also
talks to the other prime movers in the disco dervish that is the
Trance Europe Express tent. Grid clocked by STEVE DOUBLE.
TREWS STORIES [Trews? -MMS]
"I've always been a lurker," announces The Grid's retiring synth
stroker Dave Ball. "I'm from the School Of Lurking. There was the
bloke from Sparks, Martin Rev from Suicide and the bloke out of The
Stranglers was quite a good lurker. There are a lot of them around.
Richard's developed a new technique which is The One Finger Keyboard
Pogo, as demonstrated on Top of The Pops."
It's not as easy as it might seem, lurking over a bank of sequencer
'n' sample tackle in front of a horde of supersensitised technagers.
For years the rituals of guitar shape-throwing have been an accepted
test of performance prowess. But as the flood of class electronic
acts continues to rise, a new choreography of dials and circuit
jerking has been thrust, reluctantly, into the spotlight.
"The One Fingered Keyboard Pogo is actually quite difficult," says
Grid guru Richard Norris. "You have to get the bounce and the finger
movement co-ordinated or it all goes badly wrong."
This year in the Phoenix Festival's Trance Europe Express tent the
unparalled array of ultra-skilled machine pulse manipulators presents
the sharp-eyed MIDI kid with a unique opportunity to witness the tics
of a mad range of hunchers and air-punchers. Just because techno's
high on participatory shaking doesn't mean the plectrumocracy should
have all the fun.
At Phoenix, the diversity of shapemanship spans Mixmaster Morris's DJ
twitchiness, Weatherall's monoheadphone neck cricking, The Drum Club's
beaming geezer-vogueing, Pluto's glam turntable teasing and Scanner's
frequency fiddling. And who know what kind of living sculpture
Orbital's DJing Paul Hartnoll will present when stripped of the need
for a miner's lamp strapped to his nut.
To be sure, staring at some wiggling club grub might not be the
primary reason for heading for the Trance tent, but it does at least
give some indication of the teaming techno life on offer.
The four nights at Phoenix are important for two reasons. Firstly, in
the wake of Midi Circus and Megadog, the emergence of a live dance
scene has forced the pace of change and adaptation in techno, turning
it into the most innovative sector of current music. Secondly,
paranoia and prejudice, combined with the scaremongering threats of
the specifically anti-dance Criminal Justice Bill have resulted in a
considerable diminution in the number of large scale outdoor dance
parties.
The dance tent at Phoenix is the only major techno-friendly festival
event this summer, and as such it should be cherished. With these
thoughts in mind it seemed a good idea to invade the personal headspace
of the final night headliners, The Grid, currently aglow from making
their loony bangin' banjo record 'Swampthing' a Top Five hit.
Should've known better. The last time I met The Grid they were
falling out of rowing boats on Peter Gabriel's duck pond and arranging
mass deep breathing exercises in the studio. Today they want to talk
about the Corby trouser press which appeared as a percussion
instrument on their recent Top of The Pops appearance.
"It's to press your trance trousers in, isn't it," creases Richard.
"No, I think it stems from being in hotels at 5 a.m. in various
different chemical conditions. In some hotels there'll be a whole
alcove dedicated to the Corby trouser press, or the whole decor is
built around the Corby. We rang them up and said, "We love your
trouser press, we think Corbys are completely Corbydelic, so they gave
us one for Top of The Pops."
Richard Norris might like to mindsurf into strange alcoves but he's by
no means adrift. As the William Burroughs buff who wrote the
original Space Cadet dance column in the NME back in '88-'89, as well
as being a Psychic TV collaborator on 1988's adidelic 'Jack The Tab'
and co-creator of the ambient Our Tune classic 'Floatation', he has
deep techno knowledge to go with former Soft Cell man Dave Ball's long
and synthesized roots. The pair of them are in a good position to
assess the Phoenix nights and the surrounding state of electronic play.
"I think it's become more exciting since people have started doing
gigs and playing live in whatever form," says Richard. "I think
that's certainly rejuvenated a fairly tired gig circuit and an ailing
club scene. The turnover of ideas is very rapid and that should
definitely be encouraged. It's a shame when people start to write
about it as a genre and box it in. There are so many different types
of this thing that people are calling techno and this bill shows it.
The form is really wide. Between us and Pressure of Speech and
Bedouin Ascent, that's a pretty wide spectrum."
"I think the best example of that is Megadog," adds Dave. "There are
lots of different styles of bands and people are totally up for it.
They can enjoy something that's really techno and then something
that's dub reggae-based and get into it. That kind of unites it. I
think there should be more things like Megadog."
"I think you can analyse it up its own arse if you're not careful,"
continues Richard. "A lot of it is basically music for going out and
having a really good time but of a fairly leftfield nature, and I
think that it becomes a bit dry when you get down to who played what
record at what club. I'd much rather it was less techno transpotters
and more going out and having a good time."
The run of 2 p.m. to 2 a.m. nights at Phoenix provides all manner of
goodtime opportunities. The opening Thursday offers sets from
esteemed Rising High label DJs Caspar Pound and David Conway, plus
Cornwall's Wagon Christ and live assaults from Bedouin Ascent, FLF,
Cranium HF and Union Jack. Friday has a trio of up and coming
scenesters - Doi-oing, Salt Tank and ex-Woodentop Rolo's
spacechickturntableorchestra Pluto - leading into the assured good
trip of The Drum Club and Andrew Weatherall.
Saturday provides top notch DJing from eccentric Irresistible Force
man Mixmaster Morris, Orbital's Paul Hartnoll and Underworld's Darren
Emerson, plus a zooful of odd live beasts including Pentatonik,
Pressure Of Speech, System 7 and Scanner's bizarre cellphone-tapping
voyeurism.
Sunday brings you NME's own impossibly glamorous Ben Wilmott spinning
tracks from the same DJ booth as Ollie Sugarlump, with live lurking
from the increasingly accomplished Transcendental Love Machine, Inner
Space, Megalon and the newly-directed High Electronica of The Grid.
"It's a good bill," says Richard scanning the line-up. "It's all our
faves. Ollie Sugarlump's quite groovy. And Mixmaster Morris, also
known as the Patrick Moore Of Ambient. Spooky we like a lot. I think
they're a vastly underrated band, there's something very right about
their records. I think a lot of that furrowed brow, trainspotter
approach to techno isn't where we're coming from and I think that
bands like Spooky can do things that are quite hard, but there's an
element which isn't really taking itself too seriously and that's what
we've always been about I think.
"We like Scanner, because the things that he's doing in terms of ideas
about communication and who owns spoken words and who owns electronic
signals that go through the air are very interesting. It relates to
loads and loads of other wider debates about sampling and copyright
and artistic freedom.
"I think we got ourselves into a position where people were thinking
that we're multi-media spokesmen. But we're not wholeheartedly
accepting these new bits of hardware and technology. I think the
important thing is what you can do with it in the way that the sampler
got non-musicians' ideas over quicker."
The Grid's cracking of the charts with 'Swampthing' is something of a
vindication for Dave and Richard's belief in new pop methods. The
easy route would have been to enlist a disco diva and play backing
boys to a radio-friendly sing-along. 'Swampthing' may have a novelty
edge to it but it's still very much doing it their way.
"It certainly wasn't a calculated attempt to get in the Top Ten," says
Richard. "When we decided to do a bangin' record with a banjo in it
we thought it was a real risk. We wanted to make one of those 'What
the f--?' records."
Three record companies down the line you can hardly begrudge The Grid
their success. Particularly when you hear their horror stories of
previous labels dropping electronic bands on the grounds that 'Oh,
we've already got one of those bands, why do we need two?'.
"We've been on three different labels and it's taken quite a long time
for them just to let us get on with it," reflects Richard. "But now
people do understand it and a precedent has been set. But it's taken
people four or five years to catch up with the emergent dance culture
and suddenly see that you can do it in other ways than having a sexy
singer at the front and you can do it with some old geezers twiddling
knobs."
Resting on their swamp-encrusted laurels certainly seems to be the
furthest thing from The Grid's thoughts. Their list of forthcoming
projects reads like a delusional schizoid's forward planner.
The follow-up to their multi-pronged '456' album, the neatly titled
'Evolver', is due out in September. Two further non-Grid albums are
in the pipeline, including an electronically enhanced reinterpretation
of parts of RCA's library of classical music, with Robert Fripp doing
sampler Frippertronics. A single with former Electribe 101 vocalist
Billie Ray Martin has been completed ("Marlene Dietrich meets Abba").
There's additional production work to done on the new Marc Almond
album, pop prodigy Elton Jackson is to get The Grid treatment and
they've helped out professional poseur Leigh Bowery with a "rude"
single.
Weirdest of all, they're re-mixing a single for U.S. guitar-grandad
boogie bunch ZZ Top. Chart success, you see, hasn't touched them.
They're still not trouser impressed.
"I don't think it's changed our lives at all," says Richard. "We're
just rubbing our hands with glee because it's now that we can start
doing some right leftfield madness and from a better position. If we
can get 12-year-olds listening to this bizarre wibbly wobbly record
that we're going to put out then that'll be fantastic."
Whether the 12-year-olds of the future get to hear bizarre wibbly
wobbly records in their natural habitat - a seething, slamming outdoor
party - depends, however, on the continued flourishing of the
experitechno underground and on-going resistance to what Richard
describes as the "hugely disrespectful" Criminal Justice Bill. For
the sake of fun and for the sake of the future, pile into the dance
tent at Phoenix. A word to the Midi-zenship, Richard?
"I'd just like to say come on all days 'cos you're just going to get
such a wide spectrum of types of dance music, and not to be blinkered
to any of them because they're all worth investigating."
[The dance section of the this Phoenix profile concluded with a shorter
section that featured comments from Lol Hammond of The Drum Club, Paul
Hartnoll of Orbital, and Steve Hillage of System 7.]