Interview with Jay Babcock (LA Weekly)

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WHAT IS ALAN MOORE"S PROFILE IN NORTHAMPTON? IS IT DIFFERENT NOW THAN IT WAS, SAY, IN THE '80S?

It’s changed over the years to a degree. As far as I can make out Alan has become rather hermetic. A bit of a recluse. Not that he was a gad about town, but... He has withdrawn, I think, into his own world. You know, I once said to him, I was on tour a lot then and we were trying to hook up, and I said, Are you doing any traveling, maybe our paths will be crossing? He says, ‘I have no desire to travel, Dave.’ I said Really it doesn’t interest you to visit some foreign clime you could draw on for material...? ‘Travel broadens the mind’ and all that. And he says, Not really. In my mind, I can go anywhere, within a split second I can be in New York, present time, or in the East End of London at the turn of a century, and I am -there-. I’m fully present in my imagination. So. That is Alan’s vehicle: imagination. I think he’s gone more and more that way. But he does make his odd...saunters out into the metropolis that is Northampton. There’s a small community there that know him, and have known him for years. They have a certain view of Alan Moore, being fully cognizant of his work. So they have a great respect for him. And also... Even those that know him I think are a little fearful... and then there’s the general population who I think probably see him as an enigmatic eccentric.

HE'S BLIND IN ONE EYE, RIGHT?

Yes. His working eye is that much more intense. It’s the most penetrating gaze. I think it was a childhood accident, hit in the eye, or he fell down, or something like that.

HOW DID YOU FIRST MEET ALAN? WAS IT VIA THE MUSIC YOU WROTE FOR THAT EPSIODE OF V FOR VENDETTA?

I met Alan in ‘76... [re V] That was in ‘84, after Bauhaus had split. He had the idea of writing an entire episode and setting it to music. But he wanted a piece of music to exist, so he asked me to write something. He just posted the lyrics, they came through the mail. It was a strange moment. I picked them up and went out to the piano, put them up on top of the piano. I’d just read them through once and then I just basically played that piece through. It seemed to come from some...elsewhere. I dunno. I was a channel. 'Just played it. Within ten minutes it was finished. All finished. And then I played it to him, he liked it, I went back in and recorded it with some strings. It’s a hard song to sing as it’s so dense, there’s such a lot of words. In the comic, you have the music transcribed, which was nice. We’d been doing things, working together, when Bauhaus was going. There used to be an event called the Deadly Fun Hippodrome that he was partly behind. It was a little like a mad anarchic surrealist cabaret. There’s another guy called Pickle who was heavily involved in that, who later formed a band called the Mystery Guests. All the eccentric artists in Northampton would crawl out of the woodwork and turn up for this event. It’d be great. A lot of cross-fertilization going on. It was held in an old Edwardian pavilion in the middle of the Northampton race course, the old racetrack. It was an ideal old haunted ballroom. So we put on things like that. It was a natural extension of that to make the recording.

DIDN'T ALAN HAVE A BAND? 'SINISTER DUCKS' OR SOMETHING?

Sinister Ducks consisted of Alan, myself and Alex Green, a saxophonist. Also there was a floating member,(no pun intended!) Glynn Bush, who now is with Rockers Hi-Fi. We did two performances. Alan’s role was chief provocatueur. He came on dressed like a head waiter -- penguin suit -- and heavy leather motorcycle gloves. We performed the two pieces that’d we recorded, March of the Sinister Ducks and Old Gangsters Never Die. Old Gangsters Never Die being a precis of a play Alan had written right around the time of the Hippodrome. They put on plays as well. ... I played guitar in a quite unconventional manner, Alex honked away upon the sax, one song the entire vocal was, we used those dolls where you pull out the string and get them to talk. We put the doll to the mike and put it through effects. That would be the vocal. Alan would stare at it with malicious intent. Experimental!

HOW MUCH HAVE YOU SEEN HIM IN THE YEARS SINCE?

I haven’t lived in Northampton for seven years. But all the time I was in England I was there. That was the base. So I’d see Alan.

SO: WHAT WERE YOUR THOUGHTS WHEN ALAN INITIALLY TOLD YOU HE'D BECOME A MAGICIAN?

I always really considered him to be something of a magician. But I hadn’t really identified him as specifically a magician in the same way that, say, Alesiter Crowley was magician. Or somebody like Kenneth Anger is a magician. But when he told me of this passion, it just made complete sense. His passion for it did ignite something within myself. I’d always been interested in magic, from childhood really. I didn’t know that that was what it was. But thinking back, I think I had a magical sense of the world, not in the way that all children have a magical sense of the world, I dunno, just a strange kind of ritualistic view. Right about the time I first met Alan I was reading a lot about magic. We never really talked about it. I first tried to do a ritualistic spell in ’83...at the time I was reading books about magic, talking about the technique of a sigil, and I was also reading William Burroughs. I was just completely immersed in Burroughs. And I thought, Well it’s time to put this into action. Hm, I’ve got Burroughs here and I’ve got magic here, so I made a very simple spell, which was simply to meet William Burroughs. Six weeks later I got an invitation through the post to perform at William Burroughs’ 70th birthday celebration in Toronto, all expenses paid, etc. So it was an instant result. But I always respected it, and felt wary about using it. So I only used it occasionally and always for what I perceived to be towards a creative, positive end. And it kinda ebbed and flowed, but it was always there in the back, on the backburner. Then, Alan invited me around one night and told me about his new passion, and suggested that we do a working together. So we worked out an appropriate time and we had an incredibly intense night, out of which The Moon and Serpent was born. Seeded.

HOW DID THAT PROJECT DEVELOP?

The text came first. Alan wrote the narrative. Then we went into the studio and recorded, pretty spontaneously, composed on the spot, recorded the music, the sounds, myself and Tim Perkins. Then there was this performance. We had all the backing recorded, and so it was simply a matter of Alan narrating over that. My role in that performance was to be something of a...I don’t like ‘mime’ on the whole, but I suppose I was being a mime artist, but also I was ‘acting out’ spontaneously the text in a ritualized manner. I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do. I’d started really intuitively collecting elements that I felt had some resonance. I didn’t really understand why entirely, I thought it will all come together when we actually did the perforemance, and it did. Amongst these articles were candles. I took some earth from St. Paul’s cathedral in a little box. I had matches there and incense. I had a mirror. I did the whole thing wearing a white Death mask. It was a matter of really listening hard to Alan’s words and being very much in the moment, and being invisible when I needed to be invisible and letting the words speak and dance and then coming forward to illustrate points in the most simplistic and elegant way that I could. Tim wasn’t involved in the live performance. I think it was an enormous success. As a piece of theatre. I think it had a connection to the ideas of Antonin Artaud, the theatre of cruelty. It was not specifically a theatre of cruelty piece but I think it was very involving for the audience. It broke through some kind of barrier, that fourth-wall thing. I think it was very transporting and disturbing and ultimately liberating for everybody who was there, performers and audience both. I think also there was a...presence. There were several entities present, outside of the audience and the performers. And indeed, there seems to be some kind of weird evidence that that was the case. A photo was taken while we were rehearsing. We had a very brief run-through and Alan’s partner, Melinda Gebbie, she took this photo. Alan called me up a week later, said I think you better come round and have a look at these photographs, one of them is very strange! As far as I can make out, it’s a woman dressed in Victorian garb, maybe a wedding dress, and there’s a wedding train coming out from one of her hands, floating out over Alan--it envelops him. In the original print you could see that it’s very very fine, sort of gauze. Alan had put the negative in a drawer and locked it. Later, he had the idea of using it for the cover. When he went to retrieve the negative, it was gone. Nobody had been into the drawer. It was only Alan who had had the key. So we had to use the one print that we had.

I ASSUME THAT KIND OF PRESENCE ONSTAGE WAS RARE -- NOT SOMETHING YOU FELT REGULARLY.

I have felt [a presence] with Bauhaus sometimes. We did a performance in Chicago--we had a song called ‘Antonin Artaud‘--and we intended to just play the one song for the entire set. There’s a point in that song -- there’s a bridge in the middle of the song where it’s just a beat, a very primal beat, guitar scratching, and Peter’s incanting ‘red fix/red fix/red fix’ over and over again. On the recording it lasts about eight bars. We decided just to keep that going. We did a radio interview the day before and invited the audience to bring anything percussive: bits of wood, trashcan lids, bits of metal, to be involved. We didn’t say what it was gonna be, but to be involved. So when we came on, we were all stripped down, just had pants on and painted ourselves with UV-sensitive paint. It was very ritualistic, the whole thing. And we got to this point, we kept that thing going, and it’s really fascinating, I’ve got a film of this, it’s really interesting to see on film the reaction of the audience. At first they’re into it: they start joining in, banging and.. Then it’s going on and on and on, and you see a shift in the sensibility. They start to get edgy. It threatens them. Then they get angry. Then they start hitting the pieces of wood and metal again but with a different kind of force. A very very intense energy is building up. Then it goes into another level -- it’s sort of like hysteria: people laughing, swerving around, delirious. Then it becomes somber. Then it begins to pick up again and becomes celebratory and really really transcendent. Then at a given point we had a signal, we crash the cymbal and go back into the song and just play it like that hadn’t happened. And that was the set. We played that song for about half an hour or so. When that was going on, I felt a presence, but it wasn’t as specific, it wasn’t like it had a specific individual personality, it was more of broad spirit, which I think was evoked by everybody in that place. But this, with Alan, it was more like different individuals somehow... It’s very hard to describe, of course, an intuitive perception. But it was...strong.

HOW DID THE 'BIRTH CAUL' DEVELOP?

That came about in a very similar way, through magical ritual. Tim Perkins was present during that. Alan asked for a desire to be fulfilled. Basically for creative inspiratioin and for 'magic' to reveal it's nature. Alan would then start meditating and then conjure up a couple sentences. He really wouldn’t try and be thinking too much about it. He’d write something down, and those sentences would suggest something, and he would just read it aloud. And then he would just carry on from there. It had a flow, a beautiful flow. Looking back on it, it almost looks like a piece of planned theatre, but it wasn’t -- it was totally spontaneous. The fact that Alan has such a retentive mind, he could look back on everything that happened over eight hours and condense it and write it all down and then that would be the narrative. Then he’d come to me and Tim with that, and say read this... does it provoke any sounds? A soundscape? And it always worked. Instantly.

JUST LIKE WITH THE V THING. SOUNDS LIKE YOU GUYS HAVE A RAPPORT.

There’s a rapport, yeah. And with the Birth Caul, a lot of that’s to do with childhood. He read the piece, and he said, what sound conjures childhood? I said, I know. In fact, let’s go and make it now. I said, Alan have you got a bicycle? Yeah. So we went down into the cellar. I turned this bicycle upside down, and the sound was... When I used to ride my bike, when I was a little kid, I used to peg bubble gum cards on to the forks, so that they would catch in the spokes and make a clicking sound.I would hear that sound all the time. Where ever I went, that sound came with me. Then we miked up the wheels and fed it through effects units -- pitchshifters, specifically -- and recorded it. We cut it up, sampled some of it, some of it’s just running in real time, and that’s the musical theme that runs through the whole thing. That is the glue that holds it together. It’s very evocative.

WHAT DO YOU THINK IS HAPPENING IN THESE WORKINGS?

I think it’s the Aldous Huxley thing. The doors of perception... I think it’s cleansing that veiled view, and just being receptive. I think it’s also, going back to Burroughs again, Burroughs and Gysin talked about the third mind you get in collaborations, it would evoke, if there’s two, a third mind... That’s a kind of spirit, in some way. It’s very magical. It’s allowing for chance and spontaneity, but because it’s done in a magical context, it’s that much more intense because you’re drawing on the potency of the elemental...and the power of nature, in its broadest sense. There’s a lot going on there that I don’t understand at all--but that’s part of its power as well.

SEVEN YEARS ON, HOW DOES ALAN SEEM. STRONGER? STRANGER?

When I look into his eyes now, I’m looking into the eyes of a person who has looked into the abyss for a long time...has -stared- into the abyss. Although, that look was present to some degree, even before he had that experience -- Now this is a magical perception relating to time. When I first met him, there was something in his eye that was a portent of where he’s at now. It’s almost as if he’d already been there.

WHAT DID YOU THINK OF THE PAINTINGS ALAN WAS MAKING AFTER SOME OF HIS EARLY MAGICAL RITUALS?

They were beautiful. He’d obviously been somewhere and brought something back. One of those pieces was destroyed by Alan in order to bring about a certain magical outcome. It was sacrificed.

ANY CHANCE OF FUTURE COLLABORATIONS?

When the time is right. I feel there’s something waiting, and I think it’ll be different to all of these Cds, even the performances. I don’t know. Maybe something involving film. ... The way I approached those projects was like a film soundtrack, a soundscape.

ALAN'S GREAT AS A LIVE PERFORMER -- EVEN ON THE PHONE, HE DOES ALL THESE STAGE WHISPERS AND STUFF--

He’s got a real sense of drama. What was impressive as well was he did the piece, it had really flowed. The first thing he said to me when he came off was that he’d got to page 7 and turned it over, and there was page 12. All those pages were missing. So without missing a beat, he just remembered it. And you know how dense that text is... I was enormously impressed by that.