"it’s a bit of a shame that three people meet in a pub somewhere in London and decide what the country is going to hear and like."
[altsounds] Next year is your 30th anniversary, a milestone by anyone standards, do you have any special plan to celebrate?
[Justin] Yes actually, we have, but it’s still at the planning stage. We will mark it and we will look back which is something we don’t actually do a lot of. We will go out and play a lot of old stuff, which is another thing we don’t do a lot of and, if we go through the trouble of learning a lot of old stuff [which a lot of the current line up where not around for in the early days plus I have to remind myself, because I can’t remember much], if we are going to go through all that trouble which we did in the 2000 one as well, then we will do it certainly more than once or twice, we’ll do a bit of a tour playing old stuff.
[altsounds] There seems to be a bit of a trend going on at the moment...
[Justin] I know, I’m a bit nervous about it because I’m sure there is a general ill belief out there somewhere that New Model Army are some leftover from the 1980s probably tossing out their old songs to an ever dwindling band of ageing followers. I think this is what people think we do which is slightly depressing because it really really is not.
[altsounds] I would argue the opposite. I remember seeing you guys back in the days with my friends, and the same friends are coming tonight with their kids. My son is only fifteen, but he already loves ‘Thunder and consolationm,’ it’s one of his favourite albums.
[Justin] Really? Wow.
[altsounds] How does it feel to know that you have crossed over to a new generation of fans?
[Justin] It feels wonderful. It’s been like that for a while, especially outside but actually even in Britain. We have slightly distorted views because the young ones are at the front and the older ones are at the back, so every night we’re like “Hey there are a lot of young people!” and there are. Perhaps not as many as we think there are, but there are quite a lot of youngsters. Maybe they’re little brothers and sisters or the sons and daughters of, or just people that liked the record. And actually the age range of the band is stretching out. I’m well into my fifties, Marshall and Michael are still in their thirties, there’s twenty years there, so... the band, it’s an idea, isn’t it, New Model Army.
[altsounds] I think so, it’s an idea that’s passed on.
[Justin] I don’t think there’s anything else like it. Somebody said to me “How many old songs do you play?” and I looked at the Christmas set from last year: out of seventeen songs, two were from before 2000. I can’t think of any other 30 year old band who could get away with that, whose audience would accept that they’re playing what they’re doing now. They’re not playing old songs and they accept that and keep coming and actually what happened last year was we were playing ‘Today is a good day’ and ‘Autumn’ and people were actually much more interested in the new stuff than they were in the old stuff. Again I can’t think of another band this is true of.
[altsounds] You have a very dedicated following, you talk to some of them asking what they like, “New Model Army”, and what else? “Mmm... Nothing really!”
[Justin] (laughs) The good think is that they like very different stuff. You’ve got some people who like very heavy stuff... and New Model Army. Then you’ve got people who like real folk stuff... and New Model Army. Then you’ve got people who like goth stuff... and New Model Army.
[altsounds] I think people just generally like a band they can follow and grow up with. You always seem to progress. You haven’t reverted back to an old successful period which is what a lot of eighties bands tend to do.
[Justin] I think that’s what everybody else is forced to. I think it also has to do with some kind of arrogance or something? You know, the whole Neil Young thing? Neil Young is someone I’ve always been a fan of. But out of all the people from the sixties he’s the one still standing and that’s because he never gave a shit of what the audience wanted. He did what he wanted and it’s always been his thing, he’s going to do what he thinks is good and nevermind what anybody else wants for him. Suddenly, forty-fifty years later he’s the one out of all that sixties generation who’s still relevant, brilliant and inspiring. I think that’s the way to do it and I think that’s the reason why we’re still here because we always had the same attitude: “This is what WE are doing.” This means a lot to us and if some people don’t like it... you know like “if they don’t play that song I’m gonna stop coming!” I don’t mind, that’s fine. Maybe they’ll come back, maybe they won't. We’re not here to please people, we’re here to try and make something that we think is great.
[altsounds] With all the stuff going on right now, particularly in the West, recession, global warming, everyone seems to have an opinion now, also music fans. When opinions, political views and music come up your name always gets mentioned inevitably. Is it something you make a conscious effort to try and distance yourself from or is it something that you still embrace?
[Justin] Well, logically I can’t do that because I’ve written a lot of stuff about it all. I think one of the things people like about our songs is that they are about something. But there are bands that exist for political reasons: Chumbawamba, Fugazi, Crass, Conflict, Redskins. That’s what they wanted to do, I’m not knocking that. But that was never true of us we didn’t exist for political reasons, we existed for musical reasons and we were never putting across some kind of coherent political philosophy, never. If you take “the body of work” it is all contradictory. You can say there’s a vaguely left leaning thing going on, but that’s about as much as you can say. Because songs are about emotions and emotions are contradictory.
Everyday you feel something different and some days, just like everybody else, you wake up thinking “I love the world, things will work out OK somehow,” but other times you feel like “fuck it, humans are a virus on the earth, give me the power, I will press the button, fuck them, fuck the whole world, fuck my life, fuck it all!” We write songs about both and that confuses people because they think “what is your attitude?” It changes everyday, every hour. Global warming: some days I think “God, I should watch my carbon footprint” and some days it’s just like “fuck it, what difference does it make?” Inconsistence. At an emotional level, I’m inconsistent, and music is about emotions, therefore our music doesn’t come with a great consistency.
And yes, we’ve written eco songs back in the eighties, but we’ve also written ‘Vanity’ for which I still stand. We talk about saving the world, it’s our vanity gone mad. Saving the world?... The world would be perfectly fine without us! Sadly we will take most of the mammals with us when we go, but the cockroaches will inherit the earth... Whatever. Opinions... I think people expect me to have a very fixed set of “we should be doing this” and “everybody should do that” and maybe when I was eighteen or twenty I thought “everybody has to do that” but whatever you might think everybody ought to do, you can bet that everybody won’t because that’s the nature of human beings. We are clever, wilful monkeys.
[altsounds] (laughs) I think it’s difficult for you guys, because everybody jump on the political thing a lot and they revert it to such a long time ago... When you look at a band that is 30 years old, there must have been some evolution there, but a lot of people take it very slow to accept the change.
[Justin] Yeah, I think that’s true. Once you write something it’s set in stone.
[altsounds] That’s it. He thinks that. You can’t change your mind.
[Justin] Yeah, of course. We all change. I think my basic attitude to life hasn’t changed a lot but I think I’m more accepting of the complications of the world. I think when you’re young you have kind of a simplistic view of the world but the more years you’re alive, the more you meet all the exceptions to all the rules and then you find that there are actually more exceptions than there are rules. And that the world is weird, and amazing, and complicated, and strange, and amazing again! I’ve heard this great story the other night... I’m going completely off tangent now!
[altsounds] (laughs) That’s fine!
[Justin] I have a friend called Toby who is a cello player from East Berlin, he’s in a band which I produced in 1991. We became good friends after that. A couple of years ago we were playing in Berlin on the anniversary of the Wall coming down, and I said “Toby, I never asked you: where were you that night?” and he said “Because in the summer of 1989 they threw me out of East Germany” - and they used to do that with people that wouldn’t do what they were told, like Nina Hagen most famously. They threw her out and she ventured out in the west - he said “I was living in a flat in West Berlin on my own, I turned on the telly and fucking hell, the wall was coming down! I’ll go and visit my mum!” So he phones his taxi place, and say “The wall is coming down, I have to go and see my mum in the East” and the taxi driver “My auntie is in the East, I’ve got to go and see her too!” So apparently while the Wall is coming down and all of East Berlin is climbing down into the West, a taxi is trying to break back into the East!
[altsounds] (laughs)
[Justin] Whatever you know about the world and history, there’s always some exception!
[altsounds] Very true! What a story...
Sadly, as it’s been the case for many records, they seem to get lost in the media. Do you have any particular hope or expectation for this particular record?
[Justin] Well... It’s too late now! (laughs)... We’re three months on, of course we sent the record to all the music magazines and all the daily papers all of whom if they would have bothered listening to it they would have probably found it quite interesting on a number of different levels but because it had our name on the top they wouldn’t listen to it. There are quite a lot of journalists around that quite like the band, but their editors have decided that quite obviously we’re not flavour of the month. We’re not flavour of the decade either! So most people will listen to it but if they want to write about it they’ll be told they can’t by their editors.
[altsounds] Do you think the past, your ideas have something to do with this?
[Justin] Well I was an obnoxious, self righteous, little, snotty, horrible, arrogant fuckhead when I was young but then you’re meant to be like that when you’re young!
[altsounds] We all were!
[Justin] Exactly, we all were! But my transgression for some reason is not to be forgiven.
[altsounds] (laughs) That’s the thing, when you release songs you can’t gloss over the naivety of being young like the rest of us...
[Justin] I think it’s sad, but I don’t lose sleep over it. Every time you release a new record you think “yeah, a lot of people are going to enjoy this record” but in reality they won’t even know you exist. It’s a shame, but then I’m probably not the only one.
[altsounds] No, there seem to be a lot of good records that get buried by the press in favour of some “Flavour of the Month”.
[Justin] The sad thing about that is that when I was young anything coming from England and hyped up by the English press was of interest across the world and now I find that the rest of the world don’t think that any more. They don’t believe the English press any more, it’s all bullshit. I think it’s a bit of a shame that three people meet in a pub somewhere in London and decide what the country is going to hear and like. This is a nation of sheep. Music in this country is really associated with fashion and cool, which is OK because it does mean it’s a fast turnover which is good, but the downside is that no one is actually into the music. It’s to do with fashion and cool. It’s really, really frightening to like something that is not fashionable or cool and people in this country are afraid to do it. Newspaper editors more than anyone.
[altsounds] Everything seems to have a lifespan now...
[Justin] Yeah, a very short lifespan...
[altsounds] In a couple of months there’ll be something else coming along...
[Justin] Hard work to be a young band right now, there is a band from Bradford called New York Alcoholic Anxiety Attacks, and Joolz (Justin’s wife, ndr) has been helping with the management and I’ve been keeping an eye on them, helping them along the way, and I think they’ve got IT. They’ve got something, they’re still defining it, but they’ve got the magic IT. But it’s a hard hard time to try and make your way....
[altsounds] Highglights and lowlights of your career?
[Justin] Oh no! I tend to live by the maximum that a happy life is good health and bad memory. I don’t tend to spend much time looking back. Highlights- hundreds, really hundreds. Lowlights some, which I try to forget. I always try to look forward you know, tonight will be the best show we’ll play ever! Why not? It could be. It’s a case of always looking forward.
[altsounds] Filesharing, downloading: being in a working band, do you see it as a good thing or is it something that you are opposed to?
[Justin] I’m so used to it now, it’s been around for ten years. I remember when we released “Eight” someone brought me something at a gig that look very much like “Eight,” the artwork looked very much like “Eight” but it wasn’t quite like “Eight.” And he said “Oh yeah, I have downloaded it and I got copy of the artwork so it look exactly the same! Would you please sign it?” And I thought “Fucking cheek!” (laughs) but I still signed it. It is actually stealing but it’s just how it is, I don’t lose sleep over it.
[altsounds] Ok Justin, thank you very much for your time! Before letting you go, here’s a chance for you to say what you want.
[Justin] You know, sometimes you see those strange family trees in rock music? We’re like this weird twisted branch which grew up at a weird angle and just went our own way. We’re part of the same tree but I don’t know what we are. No one knows what we are and that’s both our strength and our weakness. Weakness from a media or marketing point of view, ‘cause no one knows what the fuck we are. But of course it’s our strength because it gives us total freedom.
One journalist once said to me that his fellow journalists were terrified to say they liked us because they didn’t know what we were going to do next week and if an artist can have any accolade, that’s about as high as they can get. If we’re still unpredictable after thirty years, that’s an amazing accolade.
A few pictures and a couple of autographed vinyl covers later, we leave Justin to rest before his sound check although strongly tempted to invite him for a pint and a few more stories. I hope you all enjoyed this insight as much as we did; now go get your copy of “Today is a good day” if you haven’t yet and keep your eyes open for news of the 30th New Model Army Anniversary tour ‘cause that is going to sell out pretty damn quick. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.
THIS IS PART 2 OF A 2 PART INTERVIEW.
TO VIEW THE FIRST PART CLICK HERE
[Justin] Yes actually, we have, but it’s still at the planning stage. We will mark it and we will look back which is something we don’t actually do a lot of. We will go out and play a lot of old stuff, which is another thing we don’t do a lot of and, if we go through the trouble of learning a lot of old stuff [which a lot of the current line up where not around for in the early days plus I have to remind myself, because I can’t remember much], if we are going to go through all that trouble which we did in the 2000 one as well, then we will do it certainly more than once or twice, we’ll do a bit of a tour playing old stuff.
[altsounds] There seems to be a bit of a trend going on at the moment...
[Justin] I know, I’m a bit nervous about it because I’m sure there is a general ill belief out there somewhere that New Model Army are some leftover from the 1980s probably tossing out their old songs to an ever dwindling band of ageing followers. I think this is what people think we do which is slightly depressing because it really really is not.
[altsounds] I would argue the opposite. I remember seeing you guys back in the days with my friends, and the same friends are coming tonight with their kids. My son is only fifteen, but he already loves ‘Thunder and consolationm,’ it’s one of his favourite albums.
[Justin] Really? Wow.
[altsounds] How does it feel to know that you have crossed over to a new generation of fans?
[Justin] It feels wonderful. It’s been like that for a while, especially outside but actually even in Britain. We have slightly distorted views because the young ones are at the front and the older ones are at the back, so every night we’re like “Hey there are a lot of young people!” and there are. Perhaps not as many as we think there are, but there are quite a lot of youngsters. Maybe they’re little brothers and sisters or the sons and daughters of, or just people that liked the record. And actually the age range of the band is stretching out. I’m well into my fifties, Marshall and Michael are still in their thirties, there’s twenty years there, so... the band, it’s an idea, isn’t it, New Model Army.
[altsounds] I think so, it’s an idea that’s passed on.
[Justin] I don’t think there’s anything else like it. Somebody said to me “How many old songs do you play?” and I looked at the Christmas set from last year: out of seventeen songs, two were from before 2000. I can’t think of any other 30 year old band who could get away with that, whose audience would accept that they’re playing what they’re doing now. They’re not playing old songs and they accept that and keep coming and actually what happened last year was we were playing ‘Today is a good day’ and ‘Autumn’ and people were actually much more interested in the new stuff than they were in the old stuff. Again I can’t think of another band this is true of.
[altsounds] You have a very dedicated following, you talk to some of them asking what they like, “New Model Army”, and what else? “Mmm... Nothing really!”
[Justin] (laughs) The good think is that they like very different stuff. You’ve got some people who like very heavy stuff... and New Model Army. Then you’ve got people who like real folk stuff... and New Model Army. Then you’ve got people who like goth stuff... and New Model Army.
[altsounds] I think people just generally like a band they can follow and grow up with. You always seem to progress. You haven’t reverted back to an old successful period which is what a lot of eighties bands tend to do.
[Justin] I think that’s what everybody else is forced to. I think it also has to do with some kind of arrogance or something? You know, the whole Neil Young thing? Neil Young is someone I’ve always been a fan of. But out of all the people from the sixties he’s the one still standing and that’s because he never gave a shit of what the audience wanted. He did what he wanted and it’s always been his thing, he’s going to do what he thinks is good and nevermind what anybody else wants for him. Suddenly, forty-fifty years later he’s the one out of all that sixties generation who’s still relevant, brilliant and inspiring. I think that’s the way to do it and I think that’s the reason why we’re still here because we always had the same attitude: “This is what WE are doing.” This means a lot to us and if some people don’t like it... you know like “if they don’t play that song I’m gonna stop coming!” I don’t mind, that’s fine. Maybe they’ll come back, maybe they won't. We’re not here to please people, we’re here to try and make something that we think is great.
[altsounds] With all the stuff going on right now, particularly in the West, recession, global warming, everyone seems to have an opinion now, also music fans. When opinions, political views and music come up your name always gets mentioned inevitably. Is it something you make a conscious effort to try and distance yourself from or is it something that you still embrace?
[Justin] Well, logically I can’t do that because I’ve written a lot of stuff about it all. I think one of the things people like about our songs is that they are about something. But there are bands that exist for political reasons: Chumbawamba, Fugazi, Crass, Conflict, Redskins. That’s what they wanted to do, I’m not knocking that. But that was never true of us we didn’t exist for political reasons, we existed for musical reasons and we were never putting across some kind of coherent political philosophy, never. If you take “the body of work” it is all contradictory. You can say there’s a vaguely left leaning thing going on, but that’s about as much as you can say. Because songs are about emotions and emotions are contradictory.
Everyday you feel something different and some days, just like everybody else, you wake up thinking “I love the world, things will work out OK somehow,” but other times you feel like “fuck it, humans are a virus on the earth, give me the power, I will press the button, fuck them, fuck the whole world, fuck my life, fuck it all!” We write songs about both and that confuses people because they think “what is your attitude?” It changes everyday, every hour. Global warming: some days I think “God, I should watch my carbon footprint” and some days it’s just like “fuck it, what difference does it make?” Inconsistence. At an emotional level, I’m inconsistent, and music is about emotions, therefore our music doesn’t come with a great consistency.
And yes, we’ve written eco songs back in the eighties, but we’ve also written ‘Vanity’ for which I still stand. We talk about saving the world, it’s our vanity gone mad. Saving the world?... The world would be perfectly fine without us! Sadly we will take most of the mammals with us when we go, but the cockroaches will inherit the earth... Whatever. Opinions... I think people expect me to have a very fixed set of “we should be doing this” and “everybody should do that” and maybe when I was eighteen or twenty I thought “everybody has to do that” but whatever you might think everybody ought to do, you can bet that everybody won’t because that’s the nature of human beings. We are clever, wilful monkeys.
[altsounds] (laughs) I think it’s difficult for you guys, because everybody jump on the political thing a lot and they revert it to such a long time ago... When you look at a band that is 30 years old, there must have been some evolution there, but a lot of people take it very slow to accept the change.
[Justin] Yeah, I think that’s true. Once you write something it’s set in stone.
[altsounds] That’s it. He thinks that. You can’t change your mind.
[Justin] Yeah, of course. We all change. I think my basic attitude to life hasn’t changed a lot but I think I’m more accepting of the complications of the world. I think when you’re young you have kind of a simplistic view of the world but the more years you’re alive, the more you meet all the exceptions to all the rules and then you find that there are actually more exceptions than there are rules. And that the world is weird, and amazing, and complicated, and strange, and amazing again! I’ve heard this great story the other night... I’m going completely off tangent now!
[altsounds] (laughs) That’s fine!
[Justin] I have a friend called Toby who is a cello player from East Berlin, he’s in a band which I produced in 1991. We became good friends after that. A couple of years ago we were playing in Berlin on the anniversary of the Wall coming down, and I said “Toby, I never asked you: where were you that night?” and he said “Because in the summer of 1989 they threw me out of East Germany” - and they used to do that with people that wouldn’t do what they were told, like Nina Hagen most famously. They threw her out and she ventured out in the west - he said “I was living in a flat in West Berlin on my own, I turned on the telly and fucking hell, the wall was coming down! I’ll go and visit my mum!” So he phones his taxi place, and say “The wall is coming down, I have to go and see my mum in the East” and the taxi driver “My auntie is in the East, I’ve got to go and see her too!” So apparently while the Wall is coming down and all of East Berlin is climbing down into the West, a taxi is trying to break back into the East!
[altsounds] (laughs)
[Justin] Whatever you know about the world and history, there’s always some exception!
[altsounds] Very true! What a story...
Sadly, as it’s been the case for many records, they seem to get lost in the media. Do you have any particular hope or expectation for this particular record?
[Justin] Well... It’s too late now! (laughs)... We’re three months on, of course we sent the record to all the music magazines and all the daily papers all of whom if they would have bothered listening to it they would have probably found it quite interesting on a number of different levels but because it had our name on the top they wouldn’t listen to it. There are quite a lot of journalists around that quite like the band, but their editors have decided that quite obviously we’re not flavour of the month. We’re not flavour of the decade either! So most people will listen to it but if they want to write about it they’ll be told they can’t by their editors.
[altsounds] Do you think the past, your ideas have something to do with this?
[Justin] Well I was an obnoxious, self righteous, little, snotty, horrible, arrogant fuckhead when I was young but then you’re meant to be like that when you’re young!
[altsounds] We all were!
[Justin] Exactly, we all were! But my transgression for some reason is not to be forgiven.
[altsounds] (laughs) That’s the thing, when you release songs you can’t gloss over the naivety of being young like the rest of us...
[Justin] I think it’s sad, but I don’t lose sleep over it. Every time you release a new record you think “yeah, a lot of people are going to enjoy this record” but in reality they won’t even know you exist. It’s a shame, but then I’m probably not the only one.
[altsounds] No, there seem to be a lot of good records that get buried by the press in favour of some “Flavour of the Month”.
[Justin] The sad thing about that is that when I was young anything coming from England and hyped up by the English press was of interest across the world and now I find that the rest of the world don’t think that any more. They don’t believe the English press any more, it’s all bullshit. I think it’s a bit of a shame that three people meet in a pub somewhere in London and decide what the country is going to hear and like. This is a nation of sheep. Music in this country is really associated with fashion and cool, which is OK because it does mean it’s a fast turnover which is good, but the downside is that no one is actually into the music. It’s to do with fashion and cool. It’s really, really frightening to like something that is not fashionable or cool and people in this country are afraid to do it. Newspaper editors more than anyone.
[altsounds] Everything seems to have a lifespan now...
[Justin] Yeah, a very short lifespan...
[altsounds] In a couple of months there’ll be something else coming along...
[Justin] Hard work to be a young band right now, there is a band from Bradford called New York Alcoholic Anxiety Attacks, and Joolz (Justin’s wife, ndr) has been helping with the management and I’ve been keeping an eye on them, helping them along the way, and I think they’ve got IT. They’ve got something, they’re still defining it, but they’ve got the magic IT. But it’s a hard hard time to try and make your way....
[altsounds] Highglights and lowlights of your career?
[Justin] Oh no! I tend to live by the maximum that a happy life is good health and bad memory. I don’t tend to spend much time looking back. Highlights- hundreds, really hundreds. Lowlights some, which I try to forget. I always try to look forward you know, tonight will be the best show we’ll play ever! Why not? It could be. It’s a case of always looking forward.
[altsounds] Filesharing, downloading: being in a working band, do you see it as a good thing or is it something that you are opposed to?
[Justin] I’m so used to it now, it’s been around for ten years. I remember when we released “Eight” someone brought me something at a gig that look very much like “Eight,” the artwork looked very much like “Eight” but it wasn’t quite like “Eight.” And he said “Oh yeah, I have downloaded it and I got copy of the artwork so it look exactly the same! Would you please sign it?” And I thought “Fucking cheek!” (laughs) but I still signed it. It is actually stealing but it’s just how it is, I don’t lose sleep over it.
[altsounds] Ok Justin, thank you very much for your time! Before letting you go, here’s a chance for you to say what you want.
[Justin] You know, sometimes you see those strange family trees in rock music? We’re like this weird twisted branch which grew up at a weird angle and just went our own way. We’re part of the same tree but I don’t know what we are. No one knows what we are and that’s both our strength and our weakness. Weakness from a media or marketing point of view, ‘cause no one knows what the fuck we are. But of course it’s our strength because it gives us total freedom.
One journalist once said to me that his fellow journalists were terrified to say they liked us because they didn’t know what we were going to do next week and if an artist can have any accolade, that’s about as high as they can get. If we’re still unpredictable after thirty years, that’s an amazing accolade.
A few pictures and a couple of autographed vinyl covers later, we leave Justin to rest before his sound check although strongly tempted to invite him for a pint and a few more stories. I hope you all enjoyed this insight as much as we did; now go get your copy of “Today is a good day” if you haven’t yet and keep your eyes open for news of the 30th New Model Army Anniversary tour ‘cause that is going to sell out pretty damn quick. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.
THIS IS PART 2 OF A 2 PART INTERVIEW.
TO VIEW THE FIRST PART CLICK HERE
