ny initial fears that I might have had in meeting the fearsome figure from the front cover of his Double Vulgar II (and the only man to survive 1999’s Spiritualized cull) were soon dispelled by Thighpaulsandra’s enthusiasm, openness ,and sunny demeanour. I found a bright-eyed Mohicaned gentleman pleasant and humble even though he’s relied upon by a menagerie of some of music’s wildest and finest minds to bring not only a technical wizardry but a intangible open minded ‘something’ to the recording studio and the stage. Intransigent with regard to his solo work but willing to bend and fit in with the constrictions of working with others, he’s single-handedly responsible for Coil’s return to live playing after a twenty-year break and a stalwart of the Spiritualized crew. Happy to discuss his part in past and current side projects as well as his own increasingly prolific and diverse solo output, we waited for the call to sound check for Spiritualized’s first show to feature material from the forthcoming late 2005 LP.

So how is the Spiritualized album coming along?

Well, it’s supposed to be finished by the first week in August but at this rate I don’t think it’s going to be. Its slow progress, but we have twenty or so songs completed and the problem is that we have too much material really, now it’s a question of distilling that down to make a record out of it.

What kind of sound is Jason Pierce going for with this one?

It’s hard to say what sound it’ll have as it’s not really finished but it’ll still be that ‘Spiritualized’ sound. We all sort of think along the same lines and when we’re being Spiritualized there’s a very definite path we follow. It’s nothing we talk about, but there are areas we don’t stray into. They’re all very much Jason’s songs and he’s very good at getting what he wants out of you. I don’t really bring a lot of what I do solo-wise into it, but everyone’s playing style goes into the mix. This is very much a group record, probably the most group record Spiritualized have done and it’s also looking to be a lot more intimate sounding than the other records at this point in recording. Whether it’ll stay like that I don’t know.

How did you get involved initially with Julian Cope?

I was working as a recording engineer and he was doing a track called “Transporting” which was a kind of Krautrock kind of thing and he came to the studio as a customer and I was the house engineer. We got on instantly, we like the same sort of music and both had a sort of alternative outlook but I didn’t see him for a couple of years as I went to America to work. His manager got in touch with me again and asked if I would engineer what turned out to be Autogeddon and I jumped at the chance and we went on to do six or so albums together. I think he’s a clever guy and I love what he does musically

Is it important for you to work with artists who are seen as on the fringes of the accepted Pop Rock field as opposed to more Pop acts?

If anyone ever asks me to work with them I always have a listen to what they do, and if I like it I’ll do it. If it’s out of my field of knowledge then I’d still have a go in order to have some new experiences with it. I’d be happy to work within quite narrow musical constrictions if I liked the material, there’s lot of people who make pop records I’d love to work with but the chances of them asking me are pretty slim. It’s not something I would ever shy away from. I do this sort of music because this is what I do; I’m not anti-Pop by any means. It’s quite a strange thing really because a lot of Coil fans criticise me for making the more commercial tracks and using drum kits in my solo work. I like playing with a drummer and rocking out. It’s fun.

It’s hard doing pop music, doing a load of squeaky electronics is easy; anybody can sit down and make squeaky noises but to give it some integrity is hard. That’s something that kind of annoys me about the experimental music scene because there are a lot of people in it who don’t do anything of any quality.

Didn’t your recently released Double Vulgar II take a while to come out due to problems with the artwork?

You could say that. We had problems getting it pressed and I’ve also got a bit of a feud going with Julian Cope at the moment! Beta-Lactum Records sent him a promo and through that he’s kind of disassociated himself from me. Unfortunately he won’t speak to me about it but he speaks to other people about it and he’s said things like “I can’t be associated with things like this, I’ve got a family”.

[The full artwork for Double Vulgar II features an erect penis, two pictures of bare bottoms, Thighpaulsandra with his hand in someone’s mouth and a man with blood running down the side of his head.]

What annoys me about it is that he won’t confront me directly about it, and won’t take my calls or answer my emails. I’ve heard all this indirectly! But he’s ‘not spoken’ to me before so it’s a bit difficult to tell whether I will fall back in favour at some point.

Aren’t you tempted to put flowers on the cover next time?

Funny you should say that...I’ve got flowers and erections on the cover of my next release. The whole thing really annoys me, and censorship infuriates me especially as I’m running into problems every time we do an album cover.

I’ve just done Chamber Music for Lumberton records which has nothing graphic on the cover. It’s just such a headache because when Beta-Lactum wanted to put this record out I said to them that the art is a bit graphic and were they sure they wanted to go with it. I sent them jpegs of all the shots and they said they had absolutely no problem with it at all. I did point out that they were definitely going to hit problems, if not with their staff then someone further down the line. Within a month of me giving it to the label, their printer refused to print it and then the second printer—who had Muslim women packing the CDs—refused to handle it at all.

Even with the first Double Vulgar release I had people actually writing to me asking if I was hurting the people on the sleeve art. I mean, did it honestly look that real? You know I stuck Sean’s [the model] head under the water and all that, but he’s fine and he’d let me do it again.

So if you’re aware that you’re going to run into problems with the sleeve art, why use it?

I think I should be allowed to have anything I like on my album covers; it’s not through a desire to shock. I think Sleazy (ex Coil and TG) has taken some really great pictures for my albums. Sometimes the problems and attitudes I come up against just make me want to do it all the more. It’s the same with music, people say “why don’t you do an album full of ‘proper songs’. I do have plans to do an album full of regular songs….but I’m not about to set out to deliberately water down myself to make a commercial album. No doubt there’ll still be a few things in there that challenge people. I don’t dilute what I do and I’m not about to go down that road.

Why is there a theme of circumcision running through your work?

It’s one of my fascinations, in fact anything to do with surgery interests me, I always wanted to be able to do some form of surgery myself. When I was younger I used to poke around in bits of my body with a dissection kit and I managed to remove both my large toenails, I anaesthetised myself with local anaesthetic spray. I found out later it’s really bad for you and you can get all sorts of complications with that, but I managed to survive those. I still have a fascination with what goes on under the surface.

So is your recently completed and soon to be released Chamber Music album going to be similar to the improvisations on Rape Scene or more structured pieces?

Chamber Music is basically four guys sitting in a room playing what was written, where Rape Scene was done really quickly and was totally improvised. That was an album that was done in a hurry, we do improvise a lot in the studio and on that occasion we really liked what came out and Talbot from Ochre Records agreed to put it out. But this new album is a lot more structured with only four tracks, it’s not really that long.

So what are you working on at the moment?

I’m doing an orchestral album that is turning out to be quite difficult music to play, I don’t know whether it’s difficult to listen to yet. Some of it I’ve played to people so far have said it’s a bit heavy going, but its no more heavy going than say Pierre Boulez or Stockhausen, not that I’m not trying to say I’m on their level. I’ve been asked “Why don’t I do something that people who like my regular records might enjoy?” I think if you enjoy one of my regular records you’re going to enjoy this.

Some of it’s quite beautiful in a way, a lot of suspended textures with really long notes. I suppose what I’m trying to do is get away from the reliance on computers with this project. As much as I love synthesisers and electronics it kind of pushes you in a certain direction and I’d like to do something where the source material is totally organic and derived from people actually playing.

Can we expect a full UK Thighpaulsandra tour at some point?

Well, we’ve done a lot of foreign gigs but very few British ones so far, it’s a question of being asked really. We’d love to do a lot more but a lot of people get put off by my album artwork assuming wrongly there will be nakedness and other I don’t know what during the show. We played in Budapest a few weeks ago and I was amazed at how many people turned up. I mean me in Budapest playing for a couple of hundred people, I though it was going to end up being two men and a dog. It’s a shame that it’s so hard to get gigs over here but no one seems that interested, even Coil had trouble doing shows in this country. We played the Royal Festival Hall a couple of times and that sort of thing, but we were never offered a show outside of London! We’d have done the Edinburgh Festival or something like that but we never got asked.

Who makes your exotic looking stage costumes?

David Cabaret. He does a lot of film work and he made all the costumes for the Leigh Bowery / Boy George musical Taboo. He also made all the Coil costumes too, some of which I got to keep including the furry suit. The shower curtain outfit we had for the last few shows was a bit impractical for day wear, we were rooted to the spot with those ones. A very strange outfit to have to wear, you’re tied to a post which holds the whole thing up.

Coil was always a challenge! I think those were designed by Geff’s (aka Jhonn Balance) boyfriend Ian Johnstone. We had a lot of strange outfits and they all seemed to have a prerequisite of being very hot on stage.

Talking of Coil, will you and Sleazy continue to work together with the project having come to an end with Jhonn Balance’s death?

It’s still all up in the air, we’re still working together in that we’ve still got a lot of unfinished Coil business—the new album is pretty much completed—and the eleven DVD box set which is a big project. It’s taken us a while to piece it all together and we still really haven’t finished it, I think if you’re doing something of that magnitude then you have to make sure the quality is there as well. We can’t really cut corners; it has to be right.

We really enjoy working together, Sleazy’s not a musician as such, but he’s very musical. He has the same attitude he has to music as he has to film and photography that he’ll find things you don’t normally notice, he’ll distil the essence of a piece, hone in on it and bring something new that you wouldn’t expect. It never ceases to amaze me how he can pull something out of nothing. Were still great friends and talk on the net all the time, he’ll be in a café in Thailand and I’ll be freezing my bollocks off on Pontypridd.

What are you listening to these days?

It’s always worth listening to Stockhausen because he’s a genius and some Bernard Parmigiani as he’s a great composer and writes a lot of fantastic music. You can’t beat a bit of T-Rex but I really don’t have a lot of time to listen to a lot of new records. The thing is, I hate music being on in the background, like in restaurants, and that’s the main reason I don’t watch television because you have to hear music you don’t want to hear all the time. I love music so much that I don’t want to be bombarded with crap, there just seems to be so much crap around.

I don’t like to really put labels on music, I don’t really draw distinctions between styles; its either good or its bad. I’ll get as excited about a Ramones record as I would a Messiaen piano piece; the idea that classical music has some genius within it and pop music isn’t valid is hopefully now ridiculous to everyone. Something doesn’t need some intellectual weight behind to excite me.

Can you say what the worst record you own is?

I’ve got some dreadful pseudo-Prog record by Suzi Quatro’s brother, Michael Quatro, which I bought in the Seventies because it had a huge list of keyboards on the back. I thought it must be good, but obviously I was wrong.


LINKS
Thighpaulsandra
Beta-Lactum Records
Spiritualized

Many thanks to Thighpaulsandra, Sleazy for the title, Gateshead Sage café and Ossarium Solferinensis for the live Coil picture.