The New Cue #345 December 18: The Best Of TNC 2023
"I told my wife, ‘When I die, bury me in those shoes’."
Good morning,
Welcome to our last Start The Week edition of the year. In today’s letter, we’re revisiting some of our favourite bits from TNC interviews across 2023. It’s not our final edition of the year, though - that will arrive on Friday with a bumper selection of guest playlists that will see you all the way through to 2024. After that, we’re going to hit the ground running in January, with interviews with MGMT, Black Grape, IDLES, Bill Ryder-Jones and more helping you (and us) to shake off the cobwebs.
See you on Friday, enjoy the edition
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start The Week With… TNC Highlights Of 2023
U.S. Girls’ Meg Remy on sampling a breastpump on this year’s Bless This Mess album, from TNC 259
“The machinery sound had a warm pulsing, as soon as I heard it, I knew I was going to sample it. And I know I’m going to be saying that a lot in interviews over the next few months, but it’s true. The sound is incredible, I love it.”
“It was the relationship and the marriage, the whole thing. Me and Siouxsie did everything together. Your first reaction is to just go somewhere where you think you might pick up something, whether it be a gig or a connection. So as the divorce papers started to come together, I headed to Los Angeles. I had some friends there so I was couch surfing and people let me stay places, I got the keys to a motorbike. It became a therapeutic trip, I pieced myself back together in a small way, but it was four years before I really got back behind a kit. And that was a shock. But it was great and then slowly I kind of gravitated to being here in Berlin with a new life and a new beginning.”
Billy Bragg on the time he was roommates with Michael Stipe, from TNC 335
“We were roommates in Czechoslovakia. That was an interesting experience for both of us. I’d been behind the Iron Curtain but I’d never been to Czechoslovakia and we were there while the Velvet Revolution was coming to its zenith so the place was just absolutely alive and both of us were really excited. After one gig, we went to a restaurant somewhere and me and Stipey stepped outside and walked about 200 yards to this square where there was a plinth that previously had, I assume, some dignitary on it and was now tied with about 100 balloons gently swaying in the breeze. We stood there looking at it thinking, ‘This is history in the making here, you don’t ever get to see that’. I mean, imagine what it’s like for Michael, where they go in and out of the football stadium in a convoy with the police, for him to get to be able to have that. He said to me one time as we walked down the Unter den Linden in East Berlin, ‘This is great’. I said, ‘Yeah, you don’t often get to see this,’ and he said ‘No, to go this far and no-one come up to me to say hello or recognize me, it’s really amazing.’ I thought, ‘Yeah, I guess that is an amazing experience for him,’ so the whole thing was just brilliant.”
“The level of excitement took us by surprise. I think we’d become a bit detached from the idea of what the name Everything But The Girl meant. I don’t think we appreciated how much residual affection there was out there. I did a little casual tweet, because I thought this was the nicest way to announce it, and the response to that was incredible. It felt like lighting a beacon on the top of a hill and suddenly out of the darkness gathered all these people full of affection and love. It was really moving, we didn’t know those people were still there.”
“This is somebody that I had a lot of respect for. OK Computer had just come out and I had done some touring with them and knew their music quite well. We did a song together called Rabbit In Your Headlights. He wrote it in the studio and was very deliberate and serious about it. When he was ready to record, he just sort of went, ‘Okay, come on, let’s go’ and he did it all in one take. He held this really long note at the end and James Lavelle and I just looked at each other in the studio and just kind of went, ‘Wow, fuck, that’s it’. We had goosebumps because it was just a very cool thing to be in the studio and be a part of.”
Richard Hawley on Arctic Monkeys rolling out the red carpet for him, from TNC 329
“Recently, I went to see the Monkeys when they played in Sheffield and they all texted me individually to ask if I was coming to see the gig. All of them. There was no management or anything. I thought, ‘Well, I’ll go along and maybe there’ll be a guest area’. They got me a fucking car, man. They drove me straight into the dressing room area next to the tour buses and within five minutes we were having a beer and a joke. They haven’t changed. All that massive success they’ve had, it’s huge and I can reliably inform you that they’re not arseholes. They’ve not changed and it’s beautiful to see… That level of success they’ve had, not only can it mess with your head, but it can destroy you as a human being. There are examples of that in similar bands where people are gargantuan arseholes. Again, I’m not naming any names, but you see it all of the time.”
Billy Nomates on the hardest lesson she’s learned since starting the project, from TNC 251
“I think that you have to live and die by your own decisions. Some days, that’s really empowering and some days it’s utterly devastating. You have to really reason with yourself and you have to navigate this quite hostile environment by yourself on your gut feeling. That’s hard because you don’t always get it right and, as much as people might not believe, I’m incredibly sensitive and not particularly hardened to any of this stuff. Some days, you get cut really deep by what people make of it, which is silly because you don’t make anything with the intention of pleasing everyone. I certainly don’t anyway, I always know that it will be a divider. Some days, it’s a lot because you make music and you write songs and it comes from this pure place and you put it into this very unhealthy, unnatural environment. Some days that’s really hard.”
Pulp’s Nick Banks on gifting etiquette in the group when it’s a band members’ birthday, from TNC 327
“We don’t really do a lot. Everyone sort of says just come to the do rather than bother with a present, so we don’t bother unless you see something that’s screaming out at you that you think is completely on point for someone. Jarvis gave me a radio once, that was quite nice. An old radio that probably didn’t work, but that’s kind of par for the course.”
OMD’s Andy McCluskey on the shock of early song Enola Gay becoming a massive hit, from TNC 325
“I wasn’t really sure about a song about the airplane that dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima, whether that lyric would work as a pop lyric. I liked the song, but I wrote it. Paul Humphreys and our manager at the time described it as cheesy pop shit, they didn’t want to be associated with it! I remember the first time we ever went to Italy in early 1981 and we flew in and the rep up picking us up at the airport said, ‘We’ll just go to the hotel to do a quick press conference before we go to lunch and then to the TV show’ and we were like, ‘Press conference?’. We walk in and we go into this room and there’s about 50 journalists there. The first person gets up and says ‘Hi, I’m such and such, how does it feel to be Number One in Italy?’ We’re like, ‘Hang on, is this candid camera?’ and the record person goes, ‘It was a surprise. We didn’t want to tell you’. It was crazy. So yeah, we’ve had some nice surprises as well as some negative ones.”
“[High Llamas singer and Sea Of Mirrors producer] Sean O’Hagan is friends with him. I think Sean did the soundtrack to his first ever film that went straight to video or something. He’s one of Sean’s best friends and he mentioned it to him. I didn’t think anything of it and then got an email off Cillian saying he was a fan of the band and let’s have a chat. We just chatted and I gave him the pitch and he pretended to know what I was talking about. We ended up chatting about books and films we like and he said he’d help us out. I listened back to what he did in the studio and it was like the cherry on top.”
Ash’s Tim Wheeler on the story he pulls out when he wants to impress someone, from TNC 315
“I guess the fact that we were the youngest headliners of Glastonbury is quite a good one, even if it was by accident. We headlined the second stage in 1997 and that was the Friday night and the weather got so bad over the weekend that by the time Sunday rolled around the headliners, Steve Winwood and Paul Weller, couldn’t get on site. We’d stayed around to party and hang out so we got a knock on our tour bus door and asked, ‘can you guys headline?’. We had to sober up really quickly and do that show. I think the point where they realised that Winwood and Weller weren’t going to be able to make it was late on the Saturday night and we’d just come back from watching Radiohead play the OK Computer set. We were absolutely wasted and it had been a brilliant gig and we were like, ‘oh crap, we have to get our stuff together’. With Billie Eilish, they had to say that she was the youngest ever solo female performer because myself and Mark [Hamilton, bass] were still younger than her when we headlined.”
The Hives’ Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist on the time ABBA’s Benny Andersson joined the band, from TNC 308
“He played organ with us on a Swedish TV show. We did a song for a horror movie called Blood Red Moon, it was a while ago, and we played it on a Swedish talk show, a Letterman-ish thing, and Benny played organ. I think it’s the first time he’s played organ since the 60s - he was in the 60s garage band called the Hep Stars - and I think that was the first time he's played organ since then. That was kind of cool. Benny Andersson has kind of been in The Hives, how’s that for a headline?”
The Kinks’ Dave Davies on the prospect of new music from the band, from TNC 343:
“We spoke about it only last week. Me and Ray are going to meet up again this week and see where the journey might take us. We’ve had loads of stuff in the can for ages so who knows. Stuff we’ve had in demo form or things we didn’t use. There’s quite a few songs we’ve either revamped or done slightly differently so we’ll see.”
“Him and me never fell out, we never had an argument. There was one time I was going to fall out with him, he said something that wasn't quite right, we had a disagreement and you know what he did? He went out and bought these Nike shoes and he says, ‘I've got a present for you Lyn’ and he gave me these shoes. I said, ‘Thank you Terry, what made you do that?’ and he said, ‘I just wanted to buy you something.’ I've only worn those shoes once and that was at Terry's funeral. The shoes are back in their box now and I told my wife, ‘When I die, bury me in those shoes’.”
One last thing. You said earlier that you’d never compare Madness to The Beatles, but I’ve long had a theory that Madness are an as good, if not better, singles band than The Beatles.
Hahahahaha! Make that the headline.
Seriously, single to single you’ve got Love Me Do versus The Prince. No contest. Please Please Please in the blue corner, in the red… One Step Beyond. They’ve got you on She Loves You versus Night Boat To Cairo, maybe, but if you go through song by song you give them a run for their money.
That’s hilarious. They were a huge influence on us, but I can’t compare us to them. We have done some good singles.
John Lydon on what he thought of Danny Boyle’s Sex Pistols’ show Pistol, from TNC 294
“I expected better from Boyle… it was painful. Painful, misguided and mis-directed. Openly abusing something that was truly real - and terrifying at that time - into some kind of middle-class schoolboy fantasy. It felt like it was a script for Grange Hill. The advance publicity of it was incredibly difficult for me.”
The Clash’s Paul Simonon on The Guns Of Brixton being the first song he ever wrote, from TNC 283
“I always had lots of things brewing, but I was distracted by working with Bernie on the artwork and clothes or chucking paint over clothes. From day one, we were pretty much non-stop touring. We didn’t have a holiday for as long as it lasted. It was seven years non-stop. Things were brewing that never came out and then it went into that song… Mick and Joe were always really encouraging. In fact, I initially gave the lyrics for Guns Of Brixton to Joe to sing. He just said: ‘No, you’ve got to sing it, they’re your lyrics.’”
Don Letts on how having good taste is his greatest talent, from TNC 323
“Over the last few years, I’ve had the Late Night Tales comp out, the book came out, There And Black Again, somebody made a film about me called Rebel Dread that came out, and it made me start thinking, ‘What the fuck is all the fuss about?’. It made me own the fact that my work has connected with X amount of people and that gives the work meaning, so that’s got to count for something. But I’ve come to the conclusion that my only real discernible talent is having good taste and in the 21st century, apparently, that’s serious fucking currency. Ironic really. I’ve always just been honest about what I liked, that’s why they call me the Rebel Dread.”
“It was great. It was really great. I did feel vindicated. I felt really good. The problem is when you’re confronted with so many people’s realities that are directly opposed to your own, and you’re the only one with your reality. Even the record label, after first saying, ‘Oh, it’s great!’ They were like, ‘This is crazy...’ If everybody’s saying you’re fucking crazy, you’re kind of left wondering. All I did was wear a fucking dress! It’s absolutely ridiculous, isn’t it? It’s unbelievable. I took it personally. Even now, it’s difficult. I try not to read the comments.”
DJ Semtex on being an early champion of Kendrick Lamar, from TNC 271
“I remember driving around Compton with Kendrick [Lamar] and he was talking about his frustration that Dr Dre wasn’t noticing what he was doing and then a year later Dre did reach out to him and signed him and then everything else happened. I was just this crazy English guy who had reached out to him on the off chance while I was in town. It’s fascinating to watch all that happen and unfold. It was the same with Drake, seeing him going from being this actor to being one of the biggest acts in the world.”
Former mechanic Steve Mason on whether he could still cut it in the garage, from TNC 267
“My problem was that when I quit being a car mechanic, which was around ‘93 or ‘94, everything within car technology was changing over to electronics and engine management systems and stuff like that. I could certainly service a new car but I’d be more probably more value and more at home in a classic car garage these days, which is quite tempting at times.
Do your friends call you if they have a car issue?
They do! They do it all the time. With scooters as well. When Mani got himself back on the road, he would regularly call me up by the side of the road with an issue. I get a lot of that. I’m the rock star’s mechanic!”
Feist on the time she appeared on Sesame Street, from TNC 275
“The seven-year-old in me couldn’t believe that I was there. It’s funny because my daughter just saw it. In the last couple of weeks, she walked into the room holding four bananas and then counted to seven. She kept skipping numbers, she was like, 12789… I was like, no, honey it’s 123… Oh, actually, wait, I have something I can show you!”
Lightning Seeds’ Ian Broudie on the first time he heard one of his songs on the radio, from TNC 341:
“We’re in the kitchen, got the radio on, waiting for it all. Sure enough, Pure comes on and it gets to about halfway through and he takes it off. I’m like, ‘Oh my god, I knew it wasn’t finished, I knew it wasn’t up to the standard, he literally thinks it’s that bad he’s taken it off’. I was devastated. And then he goes, ‘Who is this? The Lightning Seeds, I’ve never heard of them, this is fantastic! I’m gonna play it again from the beginning’. So he plays it again, and then he goes, ‘I’m gonna play it again’ and he played it again, which never happened.”