After 26 years: New album from Membranes!
A musical journey that includes all kinds of feelings…
Interview by Zülal Kalkandelen, Photo by Aylin Güngör
Membranes, a band that has existed since the beginning of the post-punk era, are back with a new album after 26 years. The main inspiration behind the album Dark Matter/Dark Energy is vocalist/bass player John Robb finding out about the birth of the universe, dark matter and dark energy when he met with Joe Incandela at CERN. These scientific concepts are used as metaphors for love and death in the album, resulting in a highly effective recording on the parallels between the universe and life. It uses a truly wide spectrum of sounds – a unique sonic adventure.
Undoubtedly one of the best albums of the year, I asked John Robb what I want to know about Dark Matter/Dark Energy. Also the founder of Louder Than War and a celebrated music journalist, I also asked him about punk rock, the industry and the book he’s been working on lately. He replied them all at length and in a sincere manner.
After a 26 year hiatus you’re back with a new Membranes record, and it is a triumphant comeback! What’s it been like being with the band again? Is it a relief?
It’s always a relief to be making music or making anything! There’s not much space left in the modern world for this kind of creative madness and we were stunned by how good the reaction was to the new album. I like the idea that the band does not operate on conventional rules. We can take 26 years off it we want and return without a heartbeat. Originally we were asked by My Bloody Valentine to play ATP festival about four years ago and it was meant to be a one off but as soon as we did the first rehearsal for that gig the whole thing felt perfect. Initially we played old songs because that’s all we had but I wanted to move forward and swiftly realised the most interesting thing about the Membranes is the idea of the band more than the songs. The idea was that we could create anything we wanted and that there were no rules, no boundaries, once we worked that out then we were off!
After all those years, what is it that fires you up, that keeps you going?
Ideas! my head is full of ideas raging like an infernal din! The real definition of genius is not originality, it’s not inventiveness it’s actually having the disciple to get stuff done. Of course there are varying levels of creativity but you have to be slightly insane and permanently hungry and take the idea and finish it off this was true of the Membranes album it took a year of saving up money and going into studios to get the thing made. I had the vision and the sound in my head and the band were hot we were coming up with music with great instinctive jams built around the bass and I was honing it down in the studio. Once I got the idea for the Dark Matter/Dark Energy concept then it all fell into place very quickly.
How did the rebirth of the Membranes start gaining momentum?
It went off to a great start at the ATP festival that My Bloody Valentine invited us to play at. The room held 3000 and before we went on stage I looked around the curtain and the room was empty and I thought well I will enjoy this anyway and then we went out to play 5 minutes later and it was packed that was an amazing moment and there was a lot of love in the room from people all over Europe. The same thing happened when Shellac asked us to play ATP a couple of years later another great crowd including a lot of people from Istanbul that we met after the gig! The moment when it really started to become a serious thing was when we started playing the new songs and the Membranes were properly reborn I took the bass over and the heart and soul of the band’s sound was back in place the bass guitar is the key instrument in post punk it defines all the music from that period from the experimental bands to the so called Gothic bands. Build the music around the bass!
A lot of acts from your generation seem to be trading on nostalgia. They play the same songs the same way for the last 30 years. But you still sound just as fresh as you did 30 years ago. Have the band’s working methods changed over the years?
I have no problem with bands playing their old songs Bauhaus and the Stranglers sound great playing old songs and Neubauten are doing a brilliant so called greatest hits set at the moment although they also did a great set of their last album Lament next year. Sometimes old songs stand the test of time and are themselves, timeless. Even when we play an old song (two have remained in the set) we change them all the time. The type of music we play is open to change and we like to keep changing it. I get bored very, very quickly and I like to have no safety net. Making this album was a huge risk this is not a U2 style guaranteed supermarket of half interested fans waiting to have their hard drives clogged up with the band’s latest music this is more a case of an underground band with a vision and a compulsion to create stuff and hope that people get what they are doing so they can survive! We didn’t realise that it would take off like this. To maintain a freshness in sound you need a discipline and also not get tempted by the cliches of music whether it’s the rock n roll lifestyle or the banal cliches of the rock music itself. Also you have to trust your instinct no matter where it is leading you and you have to be fully immersed in the music and the culture. You have to feel the moment and not be scared to expose the emotions to the world and you have to be in love with the poetry and the art and live the whole thing 24/7.
Why has it taken so long for the band to make a new record? When Blur released their first new album for 12 years, Damon Albarn compared birthing “The Magic Whip” to a middle-aged couple unexpectedly having a new addition to their family. How did you feel while making “Dark Matter/Dark Energy”? Did you have intention of having another kid? Or did it appeared miraculously?
There was no plan to have another kid. It was an immaculate conception! It was actually easier to make this music being older. This is only the kind of music that older people could make it’s full of the contradictions of ageing whilst we kept our energy and lust for life of our youth we are scoured with death and broken hearts, we are burned with wisdom, lust and longing, we still want to change the world but we know how desperately fucked up it really is, we are still on the barricades of idealism but we can hear the clock ticking and we can see the finishing line and know that death is one of the key themes of the album the death of a parent but in reality it could also be about our own deaths and our own finite amount of time left to get stuff done. For some bands this can make them scurry back into their caves and hide and try and pretend that everything is okay and that the are still eternal teenagers but we want to embrace the inevitable and the idea that even the universe lives and dies and that everything will end up as eternal matter floating for ever in the hum of the universe somehow that makes everything much easier.
Musical diversity of the album is really inventive. It is full of free jazz, dub, krautrock, classical music, electronica, psych influences. It has a great sound! The first time I heard itI was pretty stunned. Did you feel the total artistic freedom to experiment during the whole process of making the album?
It was absolute total artistic freedom. There was no one to stop us this time! in the eighties we were often prevented from doing what we wanted by studios who hated the noisy element of the band’s sound and would always stop you getting the explosive mix you wanted. A few times we got the beautiful noise that we wanted but often it was flawed. This time I was the producer and I allowed everything to breathe not that the album is one unholy racket it reflects the beauty and the danger of the universe itself. Some of the actually sounded far better with more space between the noise and it is oddly easier to listen to than if it had been conventionally made. The reviews have been unanimous in their praise for it people are calling it one of the albums of the year and we had no idea that this would happen. The album soaked up all the music we loved without copying it from psych to dark dub to neo-classical to angular noise to post punk to even punk rock itself all this music presented possibilities to us and we took them all. Nothing was contrived the music poured out some of it was jammed live in the studio and it sounded so great that we kept those versions.
The response to the new album has been great. Obviously, you have managed to sound fresh by challenging yourselves. What sort of things were you going for and do you feel accomplished everything you set out to do with this album?
The key backdrop was the idea of the mystery and melancholy and dark matter and dark energy both in terms of the universe and also in our lives it was such an interesting play on words that summed up so much of what we felt that I had to go with it. The initial conversation with the head of the CERN project, Joe Incandela was so thrilling when he explained the mystery of the universe that it really fired me up and I loved the idea of using the Universe as a metaphor fro life and death and sex and love and human existence itself. Like I said above we had no idea that the reaction would be so positive to the album we made the album in isolation in small Yorkshire town and hidden loft studios in Manchester city centre. It was a covert operation! Lots of time there would be just me and the engineer mixing stuff and adding keyboards in here and there and thinking about vocals and how to twist the mixes. What I wanted the recordings to be live most of them are the guitar bass and rums live int he studio I hate that thing of going back and recording the bass or the guitar it had to be live and we were tight and instinctive and intuitive enough to make this work. We did not use click tracks I hate click tracks I don’t mind the ebb and the flow of music like a sonic tide! I don’t mind when things speed up the human heart speeds up if it you think of a beautiful idea or see a beautiful girl that’s nature and music should be like nature, like the universe reflecting the ebb and flow and the music should move its cosmic hips to the hum of the universe. I also wanted an album that somehow captured all the amazing music that I am so in love with without copying it. We certainly had no interest in pastiche or erratic copies of other people’s labours but we were open to the doors those sounds opened between us we listen to punk, post punk, prog, gothic music, free jazz, African desert music, classical music , black metal, drone music, electronic music we are in post genre times and everyone listens to everything now, there are no limits which in a sense made it like how I understood punk in the first place. When I first got into punk in 1977 the greatest thing about it was that it was an idea and not a sound it became a sound later on and a very good sound but not one that I wanted to be imprisoned by.
Not that we were interested in being earnest about this, the music has to be exciting and the kind of music that you can play in a room and make people move and dance and feel alive that is important. Even music that had dark ideas and a melancholy to it has to be there to dance to ‘dance dance dance to the radio ‘ as Joy Division once sang and they are an excellent example of this. I saw Joy Division play live and they were a thrilling band to watch. Their music was melancholic and euphoric all at the same time and that was the key Ian Curtis may have an interest in the dark side but he wanted his band to be a dance band as well and that is the beauty of the contraction at the heart of all great music. Same with Morrissey he can be laugh out loud funny, serious and dark all at the same time that is the beauty of these northern poets everything works on so many levels at the same time.
“Dark Matter/Dark Energy” is lyrically metaphorical, and the theme of the album seems to be about love, loss and and death. And I find it very smart that you used dark matter/dark energy as a metaphor for the meaning of life. Because a lot of people spend their lives to search for love. For most people, life is all about searching for something you may never find… just like searching for dark matter. Was this parallel between human life and the history of universe your starting point for the album?
Quite definitely and it’s brilliant that you have noticed this. On one level it’s not that important that people have to understand what any of the record is about. They could just get off on the bass sound or the wonderful drumming on the record or the way the guitars don’t sound like trad guitars or they may like the choruses or the mosh pit pace of the faster songs or they may like to get lost in the dark dubs and these are all valid reasons for liking a record but it’s also great when people get to the heart of the record. The Dark Matter/Dark Energy idea came from that meeting Joe Incandela and also the Turkish scientist Umut Kose. Joe said that the more they found out about the universe the less they knew and I loved that idea the endless mystery which is a beautiful and romantic idea. They were talking about Dark Matter at a TEDx talk and because I have always been fascinated by the universe so I spoke to them in depth about it. I was already interested in making record that was far deeper than the records I was making with Goldblade. I wanted to tap deeper into the romantic and melancholic side of myself the part that northern men keep to themselves but find very easy to get out when music is involved. Inevitably this is a darker side, a see saw of darker and sad emotions probably cause by our inclement weather and also the death of a parent. The yearning and the emptiness and also the seeking and all this is so perfectly reflected in the universe and its endless beauty and imperfections the universe can be a metaphor for so much but on the album the basis was the life and death of the universe and that was reflected initially in my own life and then when my father died it was his life and death and how death is more than just part of life, it is life itself, even the universe is a comma in the endless void and I loved that idea.
I loved the poetry of the universe and I loved the idea that the universe is all around us and not just this thing that floats away in the distance. Some of the album celebrates the universe itself and some of it reflects on all parts of life like love and sex and death and uses the universe the metaphor…a song like 5776 is about standing with a girl you love looking at the sky in wonder at the tiny pinpricks of light that are all you can see of these violent explosions of stars themselves, stars that don’t even exist any more and yet their light is only just getting here that is such a profile and yet romantic idea. The couple are talking about that and blowing each others minds with this intense idea which brings you even closer the sheer scale of the distance makes you feel small but love makes you feel between the two lovers talking of the immenseness of the universe and the ideas of the universe and the long lost stars, 5776 figure is, apparently, the number of stars in the sky that the human eye can see it is, of course, a mythical figure but a friend of mine a Labour MP called Kerry McCarthy told me the number and I loved that idea that there was actually a number of stars you could see even if it was a myth!
That very idea of the vast unknown is very compelling the idea that 80 percent of the universe is unknown! The meeting with CERN so was key to the album a year and a half a go I was doing a TEDx talk about punk rock and DIY culture and one of the other speakers was Joe Incandela from the CERN project. At the time he was heading the Higgs Boson project and we were sat next to each other at the post-talk meal and he was telling me how much he loved the Buzzcocks when he was growing up in a small town near Chicago but I was far more interested in all the knowledge he had on the universe as that has always been something I have been fascinated by.
In the conversation he told me everything they knew and the stuff they didn’t know and what they were guessing for the future and it was mind blowing. The stuff you see on the TV now, well, I’m about five years ahead with the information now! the talk was about endless universes, the big bang theory and the fact that they just don’t know so much one phrase in the conversation really struck me when he said ‘the more we find out the less we know’ at that point I knew we had to make something musical out of this.
The first thing was gig called the Universe Explained where we got a scientist to do an in conversation with me about the universe and particle physics, then we showed films, conducted experiments and then the Membranes played at the end we did this at a sell-out show in Manchester and it was a brilliant evening and at that point I decided to make an album trying to make music that was as out there as the concepts and combine the beauty and the violence and the mystery of the universe into one album but you could still dance around to it. Dark Matter and Dark Energy were the two biggest mysteries in the conversation that we talked about, Joe said when he joined CERN 30 years ago they thought they had a grip on what the universe was about but Dark Matter and Dark Energy has thrown them and he said they still were not clear what it was about apart from the fact that it was dark and they didn’t know what it was and there was lots of it!
The first song on the album is about the big bang, sex and death. And it is a very explosive track. A team of astronomers has found the best evidence yet for the very first generation of stars, ones made only from ingredients provided directly by the big bang. Isn’t it fascinating that the universe is like a giant woman that keeps giving birth? But at the same time, death is everywhere, everything dies… like you say in the last song on the album.
I love the idea of ancient religions thought that god was a woman the giver of life. It must have seemed so powerful before science, this giver of life, men could hunt and swear and throw spears just like we do nowadays but when it came to the really important stuff like giving birth it was the woman and that was the focal point of religion from the fertility goddesses of places like Malta and other older cultures to the very idea of Mother Nature which is a more modern amalgamation of the true goddesses.
Somewhere along the line, of course, men got to retell the story of belief and religion and the gods, bizarrely, all became male with the occasional reminder of the true nature of religion like with mother Mary etc. I love your idea that the universe is like a woman that keeps giving birth I wish I had heard that before! That would have made a great image to build a song out of. That’s the great thing about this topic there are so many variations and sparks of ideas that can go off on endless tangents and ideas. It’s also strange how so called respectable society is still terrified of sex and death and yet that is what everything is ultimately about. The idea that everything dies is the most exciting idea there can be. It puts everything into context and in a good way. It does not make any of our work any less important just because it is finite. Or less important because in a million years it won’t mean anything because of the idea of the endless void. The idea is of the now and ‘the now’ is so important we are in this second of time and what we feel and communicate it is about that moment in time…that is , of course, if you prefer to believe in the linear notion of time! When I was talking to Joe Incandela about the universe at that TEDx meal we talked about how they had tracked the beginning of the big bang back to the first trillionth of a second and someone asked what was before that and Joe said, well there may be no ‘before’ because time itself comes out of the big bang and didn’t exist before the big bang so why should there be a ‘before’ and I totally LOVE that idea!
The song “Magic Eye” is quite surprising with its folk inspired sound. It also deals with an interesting subject the relationship between science and religion. It reminded me of an old New Scientist article in which scientist argue about this topic. There are some scientists who rhapsodically say, “Science can’t provide a sense of magic about the world, or a community of fellow believers. Religion fills very basic human needs.” And by contrast others say, “Let’s teach our children about the story of the universe and it’s incredible richness and beauty. It is so much more glorious and even comforting than anything offered by any scripture that I know of.” Should science do away with religion? What’s your take on it?
Or science is just another religion! as some people like to claim… science and religion are our ways of explaining the world in whatever terms we can grasp. Science is coming up with the better answers though! It’s interesting that Joe said that, when he joined CERN they thought that they understood 80 per cent of the universe but now they realise they are barely scratching the surface…’the more we find out the less we know’ he said! Which was a thrilling idea.
Maybe religion’s role is more about explaining the wonderment of all this more than explaining how it actually happened. Maybe its role has changed over the years, religion should not have to explain why but maybe explain how we feel. Maybe this god is the energy that makes all this happen, maybe its a handy word for the the gravity, the dark matter and the dark energy and the mysterious forces god doesn’t have to be a human idea it can be far more esoteric or even scientific. Also religion is about community surely. Joe said that when the universe fell apart at the end and went back to all the particles they glowed for ever and I said, wow that sound like a religious idea of heaven and he said the strange thing was even as an atheist he sometimes felt there was a hand putting the parts together the big bang could only happen if a 1000 things were in line for it to come together…some of the key scientists were religious and were trying to grapple with two opposing ways of explaining everything that contradiction is quite fascinating. The song Magic Eye is about religions suspicion of science and persecution of free thinkers and people who questioned things they persecuted these ideas and then a few hundred years later take them on board! the Magic Eye in the title is a bout the telescope and how it saw things it was not meant to see and created a whole now set of questions that the religions could not answer at the time and that process has been going on for ever.
What message would you most hope listeners would get out of this album? What is the word that you want to spread across the world?
I wanted to create a world, or a universe, for people to get lost in, a musical adventure that tagged in all different emotions and angles. I hope that people feel the melancholy but also the euphoria and also get a rush from the energy or breathless in the moments of beauty. I wanted to make very personal album that people could relate to everything has to deal with sex and death the real definers of life and I wanted to thread them into poetic songs and I wanted to make a record that matched the mind blowing strangeness of the universe itself those endless ideas and theories as science tries to grasp with the vastness and the strangeness of what envelopes us but also relate it back to a very personal level of your own personal universe.
In the song “Money Is Dust” you liken human greed to dust played out against the backdrop of the universe…
The more you think about the infinite vastness of the universe the less our normal conversions and lusts make any sense. Of course it would be great to have lots of money it would certainly make life easier I’m no fool and I need the money like the next person but to dedicate your whole life to just making money seems to fragile and so inconsequential played out against the idea of the huge universe I love the idea that the earth itself is an inconsequential lump of rock in forgotten corner of a minor galaxy it certainly put things in perspective. I also liked the idea that everything is made up of Universe dust space dust the dust from the big bang and the particle dust that makes up everything. That idea of tiny particles and the hugeness of the universe itself it so contrasting but equally fascinating and is a big part of this song. The race for greed, the idea that greed is good has accelerated in the past few years, the fascination with celebrities and with money the Kardashians people who are famous and yet no one ever knows why is like a society on the edge of a nervous breakdown as well as being supremely boring.
People say that whenever The Membranes perform it feels like they give all that they’ve got. As a passionate live act, how do you keep it at that level and not get burnt out? What fuels your passion?
I’m passionate about everything I do but when it comes to live it goes into overdrive. Live performance is the ultimate expression on very level and the thrill of performance will always drive you. Also performance is about breaking the bonds and trying to get to the primal, feral state in a sense. The noise and the visceral power of the music drives me and I love toying with off kilter rhythms as they affect you in a way. I don’t live the rock n roll lifestyle no drink and drugs and I’m vegan and I keep myself fit everything is part of the process to get into a pinnacle mental, physical and spiritual condition to play the music with the right level of intensity.
The Membranes supported The Stranglers on their UK Tour in March this year. How was it?
Great! We have played with them a few times over the years as Goldblade or the Membranes and we get on with them really well. We were big fans of the band when we grew up and it has always been really annoying that their influence has been downplayed. the sound of the band with the dominant bass was so key in punk and post punk and they wrote amazing songs and were genuinely dark and aggressive and, with their Black and White album, they released, arguably, the first post punk album where they found an escape route from punk and created whole new soundscape. These days in the UK they are playing to their biggest audiences for years and their annual tour is one of the highlights of the calendar. They always really look after us and make sure we get a good sound and are good guys. Respect!
You’re one of the hardest-working men in the music business at the moment. How do you recharge your battery, given the stress of modern life, and all the things you have going on in your career? Do you ever have to get away from the music or your responsibilities for a moment in order to recenter? If so, what kind of things do this for you?
I guess the training is my break. I like running/lifting weights. That is the time to switch off. Sort of. But then when you are running ideas start pouring into your head and you have to record them on your phone. That must look pretty strange. It sounds pretty strange when I play them back later! When I’m touring I love running it’s a great way to see a city in fast forward! I went for some great runs in Istanbul along the coast until the path ran out. With music like this it’s quite all pervading. I think that when you do music properly you have to be immersed it all the time and let it sound track your reality.
Punk has clearly shaped your outlook on life. Is Punk an evolution or something that had a beginning and an end? Or do you believe that Punk didn’t end in the late seventies? If so, do you still use the punk attitude on a day to day basis?
In many ways punk has always been there. In medieval times there would have been mistrals at the local market singing songs against the king or the state or dude bits of doggerel that would have offended someone. Punk in the seventies was unique moment looking back now it seems like a very British moment of electric folk music. It was the most unusual of youth cultures in that it had no form and no rules. It became codified but the original idea was that it didn’t really exist! It was an idea and an attitude and it didn’t even have a sound. A lot of the people that came out of it are not recognisable as punks. There was some powerful ideas in there the one that really affected us was the idea that you could make your own culture without anyone’s permission. DIY culture was the key. The idea you could put your own records out and write your own fanzine was powerful. People like me and many people still involved in creative stuff never went to college to learn music or journalism we just did it. Punk attitude is still there on a day to day basis. The idea of having no fear and just daring to create.
What cultural force, movement or ideology most inform your aesthetic? What are your key nonmusical inspirations?
You would have to say punk but I don’t want to be defined by it. The original punks in London were a couple of years older than me and I don’t want my life to be dictated by their history and their aesthetic. people could say you say you are punk but you were not at this gig or you didn’t hang around with Johnny Rotten in 1976 and the Clash said this but you do that to me that’s not important. there was meant and an energy and a chance to do something and we did it. But we have our own history and our own journey and our journey from Blackpool where we grew up and through punk and post punk and onwards is just as important as the people who were in London in 1976. In the end our fellow travellers were the people who took the energy of punk but went of in their own direction like the Birthday Party, Shellac, Einsturzende Neubauten, the Fall etc we were fellow trailers to these groups, around at the same time and coming form the same big bang but we were not a scene really. We were using an opportunity to get heard.
When you look back over your musical output in the last 35 years, do you see a common spirit or ambition to what you do? Could you define your underlying drive in making music?
There are always idea. Ideas in the head. i think creativity is part having an idea and also part making sire you finish the idea perhaps that’s the most important part. So many people will have ideas and then let them go a true artist will hear the idea and then go right how do I do this? It may seem impassible to finish something but the journey to finish it is the real key. At the moment the idea is to record two of the tracks off the album with choir in Estonia. It is ridiculously difficult to make it work but i will make it work somehow. The driving force in the lat 35 years has been to fishing the idea I am working on at given time and then try and get it released and listened to. We don’t operate in conventional music circus. Not by choice. But the mainstream is a strange and dark place that rates music like baggage and we can’t operate there. There is an outsider spirit to all of this like being pioneers heading out in their wagons across the West! and at the very worst this is an adventure into the unknown.
Recently, some British musicians have taken a swipe at the state of modern music, stating that the artist used to drive the industry and now bands go to the industry and do what they are told to do, and the working classes have not got a voice in music anymore. Would you agree with them?
Whilst it’s true that music could well have become a playground for the rich there is still great music being made. The problems are more cultural than creative. One of the great things in the UK for so many years was the dole you could be a musician and get money off the state to survive whilst you pretended to find a job. What was interesting about this is that people thought being in a band was a great way of avoiding work but in the end the workload was for more being musician with all the organising you have to do and the pay was far worse! These days in the UK that world has all but gone and you need to be subsidised by your parents to survive if you are a young musician and that has changed everything. Modern music is still great though and I have no time for people who harp on about the good old days one of the great things about doing a music website like Louder Than War is that I am constantly aware of all the great new music that is coming through. I just wish that it was coming through from all parts of society.
In your opinion, what’s the biggest problem in the music industry today?
Like all entertainment and every aspect of our lives it is becoming increasingly corporate. Too much power and money is concentrated into too few hands and they are making the decisions on what we listen to and how we listen to it. It is happening in all forms of entertainment look at the mess football has got itself into in the Sepp Blatter era. People’s passions are being commodified, our food is being poisoned and the corporates are running wild bankrupting countries and zombifying people everywhere how did we let this happen! We are being turned into the robots that punk rock warned us about!
You are writing a book on Goth music a genre that I like a lot! When do you think it will come out?
Probably early next year now it’s a very big subject and a fascinating one. So much great innovative music came out of the so called genre but it has been ignored by the media. There have been great books written about post punk but the goth scene has become materialised and ignored and that makes it even or fascinating. So much ground breaking music came out of that area just listen to Bauhaus Bela Lugosi’s Dead a stunning piece of ground breaking music dark dub recorded by a band that had formed three weeks before. It’s breath taking how original that is as a piece of music and yet it gets so little credit. The book is an attempt to redress that balance.
Thank you very much for taking the time out of your schedule to answer my questions, it is sincerely appreciated!
Thank you very much!
