Coca Cola Awards
Interview By...
D: Hi, I'm David Bowie
T: Hi, I'm Tony Sales
R: I'm Reeves Gabrels
H: I'm Hunt Sales and we're Tin Machine.
D: My feeling is that it's far more aggressive and I think it's more overpowering live than it is actually on the record
T: Yeah, absolutely
D: From what the rehearsals that we've been doing, I think we're a superior band onstage than to the album, quite definitely
R: The album, you're hearing the band learning the songs on the album, too, which is another thing. We're not as sure-footed as we might be now, or -- I don't know if "sure-footed" is the word --
T: Because what we did was we'd get together and write the song, or come together with the ideas for the song in the studio and just put it down and leave the results up to whoever else was out there, helping us, but we were feeling each other out, like Reeves said, enjoying working with each other and bringing all of our past experience to that moment and Rock and Roll is a live situation, isn't it?
D: If you want to see our stage lighting, it looks like this -- [silence] -- just like that.
T: It wasn't a forethought that we'd go and "sound" live
Q: As you said, Rock and Roll is a live medium, although it seems like the industry has been getting away from that feeling over the last ten, fifteen years.
D: Yeah, it's moved into -- and unfortunately, all of us have been part and parcel of it -- it's very easy to be fixated by the idea that it's also a consumer medium and the idea of producing ambient music for people's homes has sort of been in there, and that was the advent of the -- possibly -- the textural music of the mid-70's which created the idea that Rock and Roll doesn't have to be continually exciting. We've just -- We just kind of kicked that. We just thought, "Hey! This is--"
H: It's not perfect music for perfect people, you know?
D: Nobody said it was.
H: I know.
T: We didn't want this album to be another nipple that would just pacify everybody. It's a --
D: A nape. No, a nipple. You're right.
Q: No elevator music.
T: No. Not from this band. No one's gonna have their teeth done while they're listening to this.
D: What did we hear yesterday? In the elevator?
T: Uh...
D: [sings] La, la la, la lover, you keep me hanging on
T: "Keep Me Hanging On"!
Q: And "Anything Goes"
D: It's unreal to hear something like that as elevator music
Q: You might hear a couple cuts of Tin Machine in the elevator
D: "I Can't Read"! "I Can't Read"! Listening to that as you're shooting up to the 13th floor...
R: I think our music is actually closer to if they didn't play music in the elevator, and you just listened to the sound the elevator made, that would be more like Tin Machine.
D: For me, there's a certain kind of -- There's a desperate quality, cause I think when you write so fast, and so spontaneously, there's like a watershed, and I think a lot of your -- maybe unconscious -- emotional drives come through, so there's a mixture of maybe a certain kind of righteousness, and a simplification inherent in what I'm doing. I'm not sure if it's anger or not. Yeah, I guess there's probably anger in there somewhere. Maybe it's anger at myself as well as -- objectively -- with that which is taking place around me. It's certainly emotionally driven, yeah. It's not intellectualized, or as little as possible. That's why the words on some of the songs seem to be so simplistic: because they are direct, without coloration or literacy.
Q: Because, like "Prisoner of Love", which -- it's a very interesting song, because it seems to us that it's talking about protecting somebody from what the world is really all about and something that we've all gone through -- maybe some of us more than others --
D: Yeah.
Q: And that must be difficult to do that in a studio, when you're with a bunch of buddies.
D: Well I think that because these guys -- we're pretty close to each other, I think we find no real problem opening up.
H: And there's a vulnerability amongst --
D: Yeah, it's not like we're a bunch of session men and we clock in and nine and clock out again. I mean, we know a lot about each other; we've been through a lot together, one way and another. We've all had a lot of very similar problems. And I think that -- it gives you a kind of an atmosphere where you can really understand why you want to write or why you want to play, and it goes deeper than just "Yeah, that's a good chord."
Q: David, do you think that "Prisoner of Love" -- anybody can protect somebody --
D: Of course not.
Q: --From the sleaziness of the world?
D: No, no. It's a romantist's notion, that it's -- thematically, with the music that was going down in the studio at the time, it just felt right, it's as simple as that.
Q: What kind of come-on would you have if somebody said "I heard the Tin Machine album, and it has a real hard edge to it -- real hard rock and roll"? Would you think that was the result of only one listening? Or would you agree with that?
H: I'd think that was some good ears.
D: I think, ostensibly, it has that kind of edge, but I would like to think that underneath that, it's texturally quite interesting.
H: Yeah, once you --
D: Maybe on several listens, it becomes more diversified
R: That is the first impression, but I don't think it was a hard rock album at all, really. And I --
D: It comes on like a steel wall.
T: Yeah.
D: That's what I heard on CNN today. The steel wall of the Socialist Motherland, the exact expression. Where do they get them from?
Q: You kept the lyrics in a first-draft form, is that true, basically?
D: Prevention is better than cure, I think, is the basic idea. I was not allowed to re-write on this. Which, being left to my own devices, would certainly have done so. But they were very firm that I wasn't to -- once I'd blurted out what I thought the thing was about, then I should pretty much keep it like that.
Q: These three gentlemen --
D: Yeah
R: And likewise, we weren't allowed to replay.
T: We figured that if we were gonna put the track down and that was it, David's the fourth member of this band.
D: One of the charms of really getting into the album is the amount of mistakes on it. But thats --
T: No...
D: It's rather like the old soul...