a chat with tartan keats

the silver web, summer 1996

(published with left lane brakfast)

interview by lanegan crow

Tartan Keats and I agree to meet in New York, at the Ale House on Barrow Street in the West Village. "It's the only thing I miss in New York," he says matter-of-factly. And when I arrive he's at the bar speaking with a waitress, and seems to know everyone. "This was my second home, I'd read here all the time."

Keats, for the uninitiated, has been hailed as "the songwriter 4 and a half billion years in the making", and he laughs, "it's a great nod to evolutionary biology, nice and creative." He has a look about him as though a million miles away. Two singles, two books and a slew of published essays to his credit, he played in a New York outfit called Kilgore Trout, and spent a bit of time as Echo and the Bunnymen's backing vocalist. Safe in the Ale House, New York lurked just outside the door...

What's more important in a song for you, the music or the lyric?

The lyric. Obviously the music's important, or it would just be a poem, but stupid lyrics are a societal nuisance, they should be banned in the ASCAP regulations, and I try very hard not to produce them. The music is streamlined, very basic, me and a guitar, rarely anything more, just because I don't think the need is there. And a lot of people mistake that for "boring", like Ireland's Hot Press (pause) and others get it! I call it being solo! But lyrics are no different than writing a short story, and nothing more. Maybe the music is boring, but it should be boring for something other than the fact that I just play guitar and sing! (laughs)

How do you know whether a certain idea or inspiration will become a song or story then?

I couldn't say. I know how the stories became stories, but songs are a mystery to me, they just "are". I'm not Robyn Hitchcock, not writing songs about monkeys taking over the Empire State Building or something, and neither is he really, but that sort of thing is interesting to him, no doubt, but having experienced work in the Empire State, and seeing the relevant satirical content, it made a good story. Left Lane Breakfast, having lived it, made a good book, and the poem at its beginning is a song that happened to work in the space of things. I guess it all comes down to space. I couldn't condense the entirety of Left Lane Breakfast into 3 minutes! I could take a section of it, and I have used a few lines from it in new songs, but...it was a really grueling part of my life, which I don't think even came across in the work.

Have you used the same idea for both?

Yeah, "Compass", the poem at its beginning. I rip my fiction lines off all the time, if that's possible.

How do fiction and poetry affect your work?

More so than music does, I try to read as much as I can. I don't take exact lines from people's work, more so their ideas, their construction and engineering of words and sentences. I wrote something called "Reflections in a Golden Eye", which was a Carson McCullers book, and sounds very much like a Throwing Muses song. And "Kitty, A Fair But Frozen Maid", which I may have dragged from one of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books. Camus is remarkably dense, says everything there is to say. And Kurt Vonnegut, I was briefly a student of his, he is brilliant!

Studied under Vonnegut eh? Did you meet him?

Yeah I did, shook his hand and thanked him for everything he had taught me, then someone asked for their book to be signed. He was a remarkable teacher, and though I don't believe that writing can be taught after a certain point, after the basics of grammar and so on, he displayed a great deal of "insight" I guess is the right word, into a writing mind. And also, what I think is very valuable, that you can't truly be a writer without an audience, that my end of it is only half the art. And that applies to music as well. He established a link for me. I look back over the whole experience and think about what an amazing opportunity it was, I was very lucky to be a part of that.

Now that I think about it, The World's Most Famous Observatory is a bit Vonnegut-esque.

So I've heard, and some friends of mine have said I may have learned all too well. But I discovered Vonnegut at 16, I'm 23 now, recommended to me by my grandmother, who said I had a similar style. I didn't know anything about writing style at 16, and began to read everything I could by him. I can see the similarities, but Vonnegut is self-admittedly not a satirist, and neither am I really, but it's a satirical piece, there is a villain, Grendle. And Grendle is real, and chimpanzees are a viable alternative. Imagine if that were your whole life, to hold elevator doors! It's not something I enjoyed for 8 hours at a time. (pause) My grandmother calls me "Walter Mitty", after the James Thurber character. I was a cynical youth with an active imagination. Vonnegut and I are also anti-technology.

Thurber must be an endless source of inspiration I'd imagine.

Greatest American writer ever! The only person who has ever made me laugh aloud in a New York City subway. He was prolific, and a great humorist, very unique. He could effortlessly construct a joke, which is the key to creation, as far as I'm concerned. And Thurber books make the perfect gifts, for any occasion (laughs)

Do you identify yourself with anyone producing music or literature today?

No one in literature, but lyrically, I guess, Kristin Hersh. Maybe the early Michael Stipe. This is stretching it a bit. I'm a huge fan of Robyn Hitchcock and Julian Cope, Echo and the Bunnymen, Mark Lanegan. I don't identify with them, it's more a case of aspiration. I think some of their respective works will one day be considered religious documents. Those Lanegan albums are remarkable, best thing Sub Pop has ever released. And though I may sound like Lanegan or Stipe, I have always sounded this way, from the first time I tried to sing. I've also written one Madonna-like song, with a refrain "bring on the blood flow, begin the blood flow". I should send it to her.

The last single, "Freshwater", there's quite a story awash in there.

I didn't write that but yeah, a very personal story, written by my great friend Jake Brockman, who was with the Bunnymen. That story was sent to me so that I could record it for his project BOM, with Damon Reece, who now plays in Spiritualized and features everyone from the Liverpool scene. It's my take on it, and in both versions it's spoken, though I like the BOM version better, a great soundscape to it. And it's the story of a man drowning off the coast of Rio, and if you twiddle the knobs a bit, there's more vocals in one speaker and more music in another. Deliberately mixed down for required repeated listens. (laughs)

What are your thoughts on the "Indeed" single?

Now or then? At the time, in November of '93, I thought it was damn brilliant, but I think I was the only one who understood what the whole thing was about. It was another harsh time, I was leaving New York City, again, and I had no clue what it took to make a record or anything, you know, the first time is always messy. "Indeed" was not supposed to be my first single, nor was I supposed to be solo, but that's another story, and there were a few songs ahead of it for the a side. Nonetheless, it was written in 10 minutes, and then there's "Noah's Arcs", which was originally a blur of sound, and I sort of eased up on it with a chorus pedal. And the initial reviews were really painful, and I actually listened to them and took what they were saying to heart, which killed me. And people I really respected and whose opinions I valued were saying they liked it, and I couldn't tell if they were just saying it, but gradually, other music "critics" Marcel Feldmar in Insight and Dave Thompson in Alternative Press understood exactly what I was after. I have a problem with music writers, because it's just their opinion, and they think people should care about their thoughst rather than relaying some idea of what the music is, mental dictatorship! But I'd really like to hear some of their records. I mean, who gives a damn what the writer for Oil magazine in Moline, Illinois says but still, "avoid this" is a bit harsh! (laughs) You should read the Hot Press review, like half a column of print. I wrote him back.

But overall, I think it was an unrealized track, as maybe "Freshwater" was and my next one is definately not.

Let's move on to Left Lane Breakfast, a bit cynical about relationships with that "death of love" theme?

Yeah. Well, it was an attempt to exorcise the romantic in me, to kill the romantic in me and I have tried very hard to quit being one. And I realized within the past month or so that I can't change that aspect of me, I am a romantic in the classical sense, I believe in love, and believe I have found it and lost it and that I'll never be able to find it again. And I don't want to believe in love. Love is a creature like any one of us, it grows old and weak, feeble and dies, and I was more than willing to keep it on life support long after it was apparently dead! I thought it was a matter of distance, we were an ocean apart, it's a horrific, romantic notion.

And that was a painful part of my life, driving about, and then going off to Dublin, for months more torment, the root of the whole problem. It will probably make a bit more sense in part two, when characters who lurk in the shadows get named and will retrospectively be seen everywhere.

My new theory on love, without so much background with regard to the mechanics of evolution, is that loves hold on us, and it's power to destroy us will bring about a race of parthenogenic humans, who reproduce themselves due to the frustration of relationships. We'd be a race of self-cloning females. And I think it's apparent by the social activity of the day. (laughs)

Possible song?

Not for me!

Does Dublin help things? Is it different than New York?

Immensely! I've lived here long enough, and I was educated here. I find New York suffocating, and I take it for granted now, I would not be who I am today without having lived here, it has opportunitites you cannot find elsewhere. But there's a price to pay for those opportunities. And Dublin is an easier place for me to write, and it's because I get up, leave the house for 9 hours and walk about, sit in St. Stephen's Green and write, then head to Temple Bar in the afternoon and put it all together. In New York I don't want to leave the house, so I sit and play guitar all day. I have to balance myself between two worlds to get my goals accomplished.

Anything you've read recently and recommend?

Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was a remarkable piece. Camus' Caligula, the Julian Cope autobiography Head-On. I began to read Sartre's Nausea the other day, and I'm not sure if this is a good thing or not, and I doubt it is, but the main character is very familiar to me, it's quite often how I feel, and I'm a bit worried about that and have to pick up the pace. Have you read it, is that a bad thing?

No I've not, but I've heard some strange things of Sartre. Any new material to be expected?

I recorded R.E.M.'s "Fretless" for their next tribute record, with a pianist and guitarist, and I think it's a really great, dark version. I'm now trying to release music on par with the "Until the End of the World" soundtrack. (laughs) And the next EP is done, delivered it the other day, very good pieces there. I have a story due with a major New York magazine and two or three more books with Spiffing, full lengths, as well as a re-write of Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception, which I've been contracted to do. I think it's a bit too English and very dry.

And we order another round of beers and stare out the doors to New York beyond...