Author: andrea Page 59 of 71

This is the final part of the interview with Ut.

It’s funny —even though the four of us never actually sat in the same room to discuss the band’s history (variety of time zones & continents made that logistically impossible), I feel as though we’ve all been having this lovely, extended conversation for the last few months. This whole experience has just been a delight from start to finish. I hope it’s been as enjoyable to read!

For reference, my original No Wave article is here.

When you’re younger you (typically) digest music in a fairly non-discerning fashion (ie, passively). What song or band marked a turning point for you, when you realized there was a real power & expressiveness in music?

Sally: I don’t remember ever digesting music in a non-discerning fashion. But I can mention songs or bands that really hit the mark, like the first time I heard John Coltrane or Miles Davis (I used to listen to Bitches’ Brew over and over again when I was 16 because I found it endlessly mysterious and fascinating). Or the first time I heard Marvin Gaye and Al Green sing; or Billie Holliday do “I Cover the Waterfront” and “Strange Fruit.” Or listening to Aaron Copland and being entranced by what classical music could be. I was mesmerized when I first listened to Velvet Underground’s “Venus in Furs” and just wanted to make music that sounded like that. I was also really taken with the skewed rhythms of Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica. And I was totally captivated by Dylan’s singing and songwriting. His phrasing and lyrics were the most moving and evocative I had ever heard.

What were you listening to when you were 15? 20? 25? Have you rediscovered anything from that time and how did it sound to you today?

Sally: 15ish: At this age I was listening to either jazz (such as John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Charlie Parker, Herbie Hancock), or folk- or blues-based music (Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro, Dylan, Donovan, Neil Young, Van Morrison, Leonard Cohen, Loudon Wainright III). The only rock music I tended to listen to at this stage was also either heavily folk- or blues-based (Dylan c. Blonde on Blonde and “Highway 61”, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street, Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland, Derek and the Dominoes, The Doors).

20ish: The Sex Pistols, Patti Smith, Television, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Bowie, Iggy Pop, the Velvet Underground, The Incredible String Band, James Brown, Captain Beefheart, Mink DeVille, The Clash, Wire, Springsteen, PIL, Pere Ubu.

25ish: The Birthday Party, Einstuerzende Neubauten, Sonic Youth (Daydream Nation has always been a favorite), The Fall, Prince.

In the past few years, I’ve rediscovered jazz and appreciate people like Coltrane and Miles Davis with more understanding of what they were actually doing, which has been an enlightening experience. It’s also a strange feeling of coming full circle to what I was listening to at 15 when I first became aware of music as a deep and complex journey, but now I’m experiencing the journey on a somewhat higher and more conscious level.

Jacqui: I was obsessed with music. I had a little record player next to my bed when I was 4. My favorite songs were “St. James Infirmary Blues” and “Sleeping Beauty.” In my house there was Duke Ellington, Beethoven, “Mack the Knife”, Big Bad John, and records by the Weavers. I got into the Beatles and the Stones as they happened in elementary school. The first single I bought was “Jumping Jack Flash” when I was 11. A girl moved from Pittsburgh got me into Motown and Sly Stone. My older sister had a great record collection so when I was 13 I was hearing everything from Beefheart to the Velvet Underground.

In high school Sally and I were turned onto free jazz, Bartok and Ives by a jazz pianist friend. Another friend figured out how to rent Cocteau films for school and got us into Rimbaud. We subsequently discovered Patti Smith before she did Horses because she was doing some Rimbaud thing in NYC.

Another friend had an incredible avant-garde record collection and we’d hear stuff there. I was really into the blues especially Robert Johnson, Howling Wolf and Skip James. Some pivotal records were: Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde and Highway 61, the Velvets’ Banana album and White Light White Heat, Hendrix Are You Experienced?, Coltrane’s Live at Birdland, Don Cherry’s Complete Communion and Mingus’ Devil Woman.

In NY around the beginning of Ut I got this Tony Conrad record, Outside the Dream Syndicate by chance and loved it immediately. I was really into Television’s first single ‘Little Johnny Jewel” —and that sound inspired Ut. I’d take records out from the library where I discovered this Daglar wedding song which was in fact the saddest song I’d ever heard. I taped [the song] and carried it around in early days of London exile but I misplaced it long ago.

I’ve always been inspired by music. I remember knowing I liked the guitar sound on the Stones’ “Last Time” when I was a kid. That was the first compulsion for a sound — the first awareness. Then when I was 14 I was in a van with some older people from California and there was this music playing —I don’t know what it was but it toally arrested me. It was like Beefheart’s “Kandy Korn” —circular guitar change which has remained this seminal illusive music for me, something I am always trying to capture.

I am interested by most music even when I don’t like it. It is a continuing education. Sometimes I am more open, sometimes I am intolerant of certain sounds and phrasings. I get into different things all the time. I go through phases —in ‘85 I got really into 20th century classical music and Duke Ellington —really thinking about the structures and sounds. Sometimes I listen in this acute way. Sometimes I can only listen to jazz, sometimes I fanatically listen to Sly Stone or Al Green.

My favorite music is probably Arabic and Turkish because I am always in the mood for this tonality. There have been many crucial songs that have influenced me but the one that captures so many things that I aspire to is “Early in the Morning” recorded at a penitentiary in the 40’s by Lomax.

Nina: I was never a real musico, but of course I was a huge fan of Hendrix, the Stones and Beatles, all of Motown’s artists, The Who, Janis, Jefferson Airplane, the Animals Michael Jackson et al when I was a teenager and 20-something Soft Machine bien sure became very important. I was always a fan of “world” music; I wasn’t exposed to much jazz or blues but a bit. Having started out life in South Africa I was exposed to rhythms and sounds from there which I’m sure influenced my style of playing later. When Punk started I did not take the Clash or Pistols very seriously, I was much more into a visual creative reality in fact and it was only when I got to NYC that the music bug bit me, and it bit me hard.

What do you do when you’re not making music? And, if you didn’t have music as an outlet, what do you think you’d do instead?

Jacqui: I write as well and I’d like to make films.

Sally: I work mainly as a book editor and sometimes music and travel writer, so I spend a lot of time writing and editing for a living. I also go to the cinema, gigs and art exhibitions. If I wasn’t continuing to do music in some way, I think I’d be writing a novel.

Pop-culture item(s) that mean(s) a lot to you (that’s not music)?

Sally: I grew up as a bookworm, so books have always been iconic for me. As a child I was obsessed with J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, and as a teenager I was transformed by reading Dostoevsky’s The Idiotand Notes from Underground, along with Arthur Rimbaud’s poetry, Jean Genet’s prose and Antonin Artaud’s theories about theater. In my 20s, it was Nietszche’s philosophy that gripped me.

With movies, I wouldn’t know where to begin, there are so many that mean a lot to me, but Fassbinder, Fellini, Nicholas Ray, Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard and Andrei Tarkovsky are directors whose films stood out for their pioneering vision and who took me places I hadn’t been before. The most exciting film I’ve seen recently is Scorsese’s documentary of Bob Dylan, No Direction Home.

I’m also a great fan of art and my way of looking at painting was strongly influenced by the American abstract expressionists. But some of my favorite art objects come from ancient cultures. I saw an exhibition of Aztec art recently that had large sculptures of insects that I thought were among the most amazing and beautiful things I’ve ever seen.

Jacqui: I was fascinated by everything and am always reading and investigating things. I thought a lot about revolution, how things grew and evolved. I’ve always written and many books and films have been essential. Emerson, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Kafka, Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Rimbaud, Artaud and Genet were seminal. Godard and films like Mean Streets, The Mother and the Whore, and Pierrot Le Fou.

What musical artist will you just never ‘get’? For me, it’s Elvis Costello, for you it’s _______…

Sally: Frank Zappa. I’ve had people try to foist Frank Zappa on me, not understanding how I couldn’t appreciate him and thinking that it must be because I haven’t heard enough or the right thing, etc. But the more I’ve heard, the more I can’t stand it. His approach to experimentation seems so contrived and soulless to me, I can’t bear it. In fact, if someone wanted to invent an effective instrument of torture to extract some well-kept information from me, they couldn’t do much better than to force me to listen to Frank Zappa endlessly. I think it would send me right ‘round the bend.

These songs are all sung by Jacqui Ham. “Evangelist” and “Homebled” are both from In Gut’s House, which will be readily available again in August.

There are two versions of “Bedouin” —this comes from the Confidential 12” rather than fromConviction.

Ut, “Evangelist”

Ut, “Homebled”

Ut, “Bedouin (12” Version)”

UT gained notoriety for its markedly democratic approach to making music, having no lead singer per se and making a point of switching off on instruments. Was this non-hierarchical approach difficult to maintain? (We’re so used to fixed focal points in bands, even ones with avant-gardist tendencies, that any other arrangement automatically seems potentially fraught.)

Jacqui: We came to it because we were all musical that way. We wanted to subvert the hierarchical thing but we were mainly into the heightened perspective you get playing from every vantage point. We were into how it expanded the sound and the character of the songs —it was thrilling for us to have all these different combinations beside the fact that we were conceptually into shaking things up. But we were not strict about it.

We had different sounds and complexions on the instruments and exploring the merge and combustion was inspiring to us. We were always discovering and attempting new things —we had the sense that all was possible. We had this way of spontaneously composing and the main thing for us was to serve the music and to take everything further.

Nina: Our “democratic” thing sprung entirely from who we were as people and our natal politics as it were, and so for us it always made sense —even if at times it caused problems, like every system in fact.

We decided to change instruments as well as all other “jobs” in the band —we had a kind-of saying that we each got to be both the “controller and the dustbin collector” at different times!

We were often accused of being aggressive in both our music and our approach so I’m not sure at that time it was ever seen in any way as a “quiet radical” thing!

Sally: Our decision to switch instruments didn’t come about as a dogmatic idea or conceptual plan. It was just more fun and stimulating that way, as we all enjoyed the experience of playing different instruments and exploring what we could do on them. We didn’t think our identity was limited to playing just one particular instrument (that is, none of us felt we were just a guitar player or just a singer or just a drummer, etc.) and it kept us in the mode of constantly experimenting without getting into ruts with any one instrument. Swapping instruments probably did have the innate effect of negating any potentially hierarchical developments within the band, as well as keeping audiences and the media from pigeonholing us in specific roles. The only difficulty we had in maintaining this approach was a practical one, as during performances it took a certain amount of time to move from one instrument to another and to set oneself up in a different sphere.

We tried to take this into account when deciding on the order of the set, to avoid the awkward time gaps that switching instruments could lead to. But our consideration first and foremost was the dynamic and aesthetic order of the songs —we’d take in practical considerations only as long as they didn’t jar with this. For example, if there were two or three songs in the set that Nina drummed on, we’d try to put these next to each other, unless the songs really didn’t complement each other aesthetically/dynamically in such close juxtaposition.

We always put a great deal of thought into the order of our sets for gigs and our tracks on albums to attain the strongest dynamic movement and progression, like arranging scenes in a play. As for people being used to fixed focal points in bands, I’m sure that audiences may well have found us disconcerting. But then I don’t think disconcerting is such a bad thing to be. CONT’D>>

Have you attempted this arrangement in subsequent bands, or some variation thereof?

Jacqui: In [my current band] Dial I do the vocals but the composition is improvised together. It is the same process. Rob Smith and Dom Weeks are extraordinary musicians; we play mainly the same instruments but it is fluid.

What bands did you find the most kinship with (both in NYC and London)?

Sally: We felt a strong kinship with The Fall, as mentioned. Mark E Smith’s lyrics were something Jacqui and I in particular felt a great affinity with and his approach to singing and music made a lot of sense to us. As Jacqui and I lived in the same apartment in NYC, we would often end up listening to the same music. Jacqui listens to music a lot and picks up on things that are happening very quickly, and she had lived in NYC for a few years before I moved there, so she introduced me to lots of music. We also went out to gigs together all the time.

Mars and DNA were important bands for us. We also loved the “30 Seconds over Tokyo” era of Pere Ubu. We both related strongly to Patti Smith, Television and Richard Hell and the Voidoids, and it was really those three bands that led me into the downtown NY music scene at first.

PIL, too, were quite important, especially Keith Levine’s guitar playing. Soon after arriving in London, we saw The Birthday Party, who were a big inspiration, and we enjoyed playing some gigs with them. And yeah, we felt in good company with other Blast First bands like Sonic Youth and we got on well with The Butthole Surfers, who had a great approach to both music and humour.

Jacqui: Bands in our area around the time of Ut: Mars DNA Red Transistor Pere Ubu The Fall PiL Joy Division Television Richard Hell Voidoids Iggy Pop This Heat Birthday Party and later Neubauten, the Virgin Prunes, Sonic Youth, Bad Seeds, Swans, Big Black, My Bloody Valentine, the Dead C.

Nina: Yes, all those bands. I especially loved the Voidoids, Television, Pere Ubu, Mars, DNA, Swans, The Lounge lizards -—NYC was just saturated with great music. We were awash in it all the time, then in London we had The Birthday Party, Neubauten, PIL who were so important for their brief life, Joy Division. Of course Patti Smith for me was an enormous influence too, primarily in sense of her attitude and stance. I saw her play at the Roundhouse in London not long before going to NY and came away really inspired, ready for what happened to me when I got there —which was I got co-opted fast into The Gynaecologists because my best friend Robert Appleton (whom I knew from art school in London) had met Rhys and started a band together. They asked me to play guitar w them, which I duly did! I had never played music before except for a kind of Terry Riley-esque drumming workshop in London, I had studied mime briefly with Lindsay Kemp and was into performance art. In fact a large part of my work at art school was performance and film with my partner in crime Peri. In 1976 I chose between going to Germany to be where Joseph Beuys was teaching (except I didn’t speak German) or to NY to check it out —I went to NYC.

What factors led to the band’s dissolution?

Jacqui: After 11 years we wanted to do our own things. The musical bond is always present but we are onto different things now.

Sally: I think it just ran its course. We’d been through a lot together in 11 years. We’d toured in America and all over Europe (we’d even done a tour of Eastern Europe while it was still behind the iron curtain that was an incredible experience). But anyone who’s toured knows what hard work it is, especially how it puts people up close against each other in an uncomfortable way.

We’d also put out 3 studio albums, a live album and tape, and two studio EPs. The three of us were straining in different directions by the end. We had created a very fertile environment for growth, development and experimentation for a long period of time. But, in even the best groups, the time eventually comes when it’s better to go your own way. I think we managed to stay the course pretty well until then and provide a receptive and motivating vehicle for each other’s creativity.

Nina: We really gave UT our all, we truly loved creating music together. We knew that we were a match made in heaven musically, which is so rare. Also we managed not to be in competition with each other beyond small stuff. We worked hard and consistently [but] it was tough to continue after a point. There were many factors, including financial, and also although we had wonderful people helping us we never got quite as much help as we needed for the physical and organizational practicality of touring and gigging. Blast First did not organize or finance our tours, we did… I was getting itchy feet and felt a real need to get out of London. So in the end it seemed to us all the natural thing to do. I decided to go live in LA where my brother was. Amazingly I’m very glad I went, but that’s another story!

What musical projects have you been involved with since the end of UT?

Sally: I formed a band called Parachute soon afterwards, which was short-lived and only made it as far as a few gigs, as we eventually discovered as we progressed that we had different goals. I then formed a band called Quint, with a line-up of guitar and vocals, bass, drums, trumpet and violin. That lasted about five years, in which time we put out a single on vinyl (“Blueprint to a Blackout”/”Sawtooth”) and an album on CD (Time Wounds All Heals). Quint meant a great deal to me, but changes in the line-up eventually led to a band whose chemistry was askew and that wasn’t functioning properly, so it came to an end. At the moment, I’m singing with a jazz and blues band that gigs about once a month in Soho in London.

Jacqui: After Ut, I formed Dial with Robert Smith, both of us on guitar. Lou Ciccotelli was our drummer for 2 years and Dom Weeks (of Furious Pig) came in on bass and synth. In ‘93 Lou left and Rob started to play the drum machine as well as guitar.

Dial has released two CDs, Infraction and Distance Runner, and a third is to be released this fall on our label Cede.

Do you listen to your own music with a critical ear, or is it possible to lose yourself in it?

Jacqui: You always get lost in music to some extent —I can be swept away while having a critical ear. A bad movie can be engrossing. Film and music operate as hypnotics.

With my own music I know the flaws and sometimes this messes up the experience but it’s a mood thing —everything we’ve released has some dynamic that outweighs the problems.

Sally: I have to admit that I find it particularly difficult to listen to my own music without a critical ear. But sometimes I manage to shake off the critic and find myself surprisingly moved by music I’ve made in the past. We’re working on re-releasing Ut material, so I’ve been listening to a lot of Ut’s music lately. Some songs feel shockingly close to home and have even moved me to tears, while others feel strangely alien. It’s a great experience to hear things you’ve done in the past when you haven’t listened to them for awhile, as time provides a distance and objectivity that allows you to hear and discover things in the music that you may not have tuned into before. Other times, you recognize the same old problems you remembered having with the music at the time. But it can potentially refresh one’s perspective.

Is it disheartening to you that women in mainstream pop are still —by and large— airbrushed and cookie-cutter, not to mention fairly problematic as role models? It’s true that the males are too, but that’s hardly moving in the right direction as far as enlightened equality is concerned. Is there anything inspiring going on in mainstream pop right now?

Jacqui: The doll-like diva thing pollutes every part of the music scene, the mainstream just flaunts the essence more, everybody is complicit. Creative role models inspire you to create —it is irrelevant if they are male or female. Every woman can be a role model for other women no matter what she does. What matters is how she handles herself.

Sally: I agree that sometimes it seems as if women haven’t come very far. But there are some exceptions. There’s a lot more women picking up instruments and playing them focusing on the music rather than how they look or whether their gender is an issue.

The drummer in my band Quint (Stephen Gilchrist, aka Stuffy) has since formed a band called The Fuses in which there’s a girl guitarist named Jen Macro who is how I’d imagined girls to be in bands by the 21st century. She’s a fantastic guitar player, completely natural (dresses like she’s hanging out in her living room), yet has a great presence and exudes both toughness and vulnerability. You can just tell she’s up there thinking about the music and her singing and guitar playing and making it happen. There’s no other agenda. It’s pure substance rather than appearance. She’s definitely the kind of girl who should be a role model for other girls who want to be in bands. Every time I see her, I find her an inspiration.

There are others like her, just not enough. A lot of girls either vie for center of attention as the diva, so to speak, or take a meek decorative background role. It’s inspiring to see a band where it feels like the gender doesn’t matter.

TO BE CONTINUED

The songs that follow are all sung by Sally Young. | “Sham Shack” was originally self-released in 1984 as part of an eponymously-titled 12” on the band’s own label, Out. You can find it on the New York Noise Volume 2. | “Wailhouse” is from the band’s final release, Griller. Initially released in 1989 on Blast First, it will get a re-issue this August from Mute. | “Phoenix” is from the group’s first proper full-length, Conviction. Currently unavailable (try GEMM or Ebay in the vain hopes of scoring a copy), it will hopefully be re-issued soon.

More info on “New York Noise Volume 2” can be found here. To purchase, try Amazon, Rough Trade UK, or Insound.

For DIAL material, try Forced Exposure, Crucial Blast or Amanita Records (a French record label that also offers mail-order). You can also write to cede (at) optonline.net.

Ut, “Sham Shack”

Ut, “Wailhouse”

Ut, “Phoenix”

To London-based, New York City-bred pioneering power-trio Ut, No Wave meant “…breaking things down to the raw essential, ignoring rules and inventing new ones.”

Cutting out everything but the essentials began with the name: UT. Two letters, seemingly reductive but also highly evocative —it’s a primitive, declarative sound, ut. Hard T sound like cut glass. UT. Tongue to the roof of the mouth, an expelling of air — Motion. UT. Like the photo of Yves Klein’s leap into the void that graces their first proper full-length Conviction, there’s a constant taking of risks at work here. It’s not safe, this sound. Not comforting, nor narrowly circumscribed.

To listen was to constantly risk freefall, and whether or not you landed softly was immaterial.

Writer Mark Sinker once characterized Ut as a band who, at their best, “snatch[ed] grace out of disaster.” It’s a marvelously evocative phrase, because it precisely captures the knife’s-edge of tension that the band consistently and compellingly walked during their existence, which spanned a decade-plus from the first inchoate rumblings of No Wave in New York City’s then-desolate East Village through to their lengthy time as ambassadors of abstract, gritty, often beautiful NY noise in England, where they toured with like-minded iconoclasts the Fall and were signed to forward-thinking label Blast First.

Ut —consisting of Nina Canal (Dark Day, Gynaecologists), Jacqui Ham, and Sally Young— began life in late 1978. Although founding members Sally Young and Jacqui Ham had already begun making music together, it wasn’t until a mutual friend introduced them to Nina Canal that the entity known as Ut took flight.

In the broadest sense, Ut was a democracy. Three women trading off on instruments and vocals —the set-up represented “internal democracy in a non-hierarchical structure,” to quote critic Dan Graham. They weren’t interested in having a single focal point, a Star in the spotlight, center stage. Their goals were slyer, and deeply radical: to find the beauty in chaos, the calm at the center of the storm. To wrest the purest expression out of potential anarchy. Their name may have been deceptively simple and declarative, but the music was hardly easily reduced. But then, with Ut the journey was more important than the destination. You never knew where a song might veer next —they weren’t built linearly but ran scattershot, pell-mell.

And they worked, held together with those fascinating harmonies, complex rhythmic structures that turn on a dime and powerful, irresistible bass lines that anchored everything with resolute, effortless determination. From the delicate (spirals of violin and darting harmonies on “Homebled”) to the uplifting (“Safe Burning”’s moving exhortation to “You’ve got to save yourself/For a battle that counts”) the music is full of epiphanies, small and large. As a band they were equally at home with groundswells of daunting noise as they were with quiet moments of surprising delicacy and emotional clarity. Time hasn’t dulled the intense but playful vocal harmonies —the way the voices weave around one another, the way they coo and howl and chirp. If Ut were trying to build a new musical language for themselves, they largely succeeded.

And if that sometimes made them seem a bit isolated or isolating —aloof even— it’s because they were hewing resolutely to their own path. And it seems clear from this vantage point (nearly 20 years after the release of their masterpiece In Gut’s House) that they knew precisely what they were doing. It was the rest of us who were slow in catching up, in understanding just what they were up to. Hopefully light will begin to dawn in August when Mute re-issues In Gut’s House and Griller, with the promise of more rarities to follow. (I can only hope Conviction is next in line.)

Strange coincidence first put me in touch with the band (I happen to work with Sally Young’s brother) but I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect time: Mute reissuing the Ut back catalogue, an upcoming volume of New York Noise in which they figure prominently. It’s been a busy few months for all three band members, who have suddenly found themselves in the position of revisiting the past with an eye towards presenting it to a new audience. Here’s what they had to say…

The definition of what, precisely, constitutes “No Wave” is somewhat in the eye of the beholder, thanks to the music’s genre-fluidity. But one pattern to emerge that sets the music apart from what came before is the intersection of players coming from a certain musical naïvete (or lack of training/DIY) with those who came from an academic background. Rather than there being a dividing line between the two disciplines it seems that the East Village environment encouraged not just mutual curiosity but a real cross-pollination, resulting in music that pushed boundaries (both of rock and of modern composition). Does this seem accurate to you? How would you define “No Wave”?

Jacqui: Originally there were two kinds of aesthetics going on: the sound of the so-called “No Wave” was more dirt, raw, dissonance, harder in every way, and the Soho sound was arty, intellectual, detached. This division was present even in the Talking Heads vs. Television and the Ramones, which were the East Village thing. The line was blurred, but there was a kind of reverence in Soho, in part because they were interfacing with the idea of being serious composers or they were artists coming in from that perspective.

The “No Wave” thing was more irreverent, but it wasn’t a case of academic vs. not. Only a few people were coming in from a trained perspective, but everyone was influenced by avant-garde classical composers. You heard Einstein on the Beach blaring out of windows mixing with “Lady Marmalade.” This was the environment. How much musical background people had varied, but it wasn’t necessarily influencing what they were doing, it depended on how much they were, or chose to be, indoctrinated by their past.

Nina: NYC in general has always been a creative melting pot, and THE Avant Garde city of cities, so yes, everyone was certainly influenced by those composers amongst many other influences. Some No Wavers came out of a New Music background like Rhys Chatham, Jeffrey Lohn, Jill Kroesen. There were people from literally all musical corners and many other disciplines who quickly gravitated toward this scene, which was so wide open, and either participated in a band(s) like me, Robert Appleton, Barbara Ess, or Robert Longo did (Theoretical Girls) etc. Or [else] they created their own version in other media like Rhys Chatham with Karole Armitage (i.e. Drastic Classicism).

At the time, was there a sense of No Wave being a movement of sorts, a marked break from what had come before? Or was it a lot more organic than that? I have this possibly naïve notion that everyone in DNA, Theoretical Girls, Mars, UT, etc. all lived in the same four-block radius, shared rehearsal spaces and talked art & music together, leading to a cross-pollination of musical styles and influences happening all at once. What was it really like?

Nina: NYC in late 77–1980 was in a magical zone of sorts. I had come from London after the swinging 60 & 70’s and NY actually blew my mind completely by being a place where ANYTHING was creatively possible! The scene that happened came about organically and spontaneously and burned out fast because it went against the “normal” grain of the way of things from the start. It was at once anarchic and inclusive: everyone was equal for the blink of an eye, so the field of possibilities just went wide open – BANG, just like that. And also just as suddenly there were other people of all disciplines starting up bands to play what I call “weird loud music” or spoken word stuff too, and yes, it was very village-like in many ways, with most living in the East Village or at least downtown.

Jacqui: There was a consciousness of making a new music, of progressing. You make the sounds that you need to hear —every generation does.

There was a natural progression from the Velvet Underground to Mars, as there was from 60’s rock to the Ramones. It was organic, but it was radical. It was stripping down to the essence, taking things further, taking things as far as they would go.

How did the band coalesce? What were the early shows like? Theatrical? Confrontational? Aloof? How did audiences respond to the band’s lack of a single focal point?

Sally: Jacqui and I were living in an apartment on 5th Street in 1978 and had begun writing songs together. We were going out and seeing a lot of bands and were interested in forming a band ourselves. A mutual friend of ours and Nina’s, Peter Gordon, suggested that Nina might be a good
person to play with. Jacqui knew Nina a bit and liked her and we’d seen her play with other people. We all got together in a rehearsal room in 1978 and were excited by what happened musically, so we soon became a band. Our first gig was in 1979 at Tier 3 and it was hard to tell how we went down. We had no intention of being confrontational or aloof. We were, however, trying to be theatrical in the truest sense, in terms of doing a performance that was dramatic, powerful, captivating and emotionally moving. We were just up there concentrating on making music that we felt strongly about and that made sense to us —that was our single focal point.

I don’t remember anyone at the time ever appreciating us changing instruments, and we got a lot of flak about how impractical it was. But we were very intent on making the kind of music we wanted to make, and, as I said before, that involved us not being pinned down to just one instrument or role, so other people’s disapproval didn’t prove to be much of a deterrent. However, we certainly never wanted to alienate the audience either. Personally, I would find it more dramatic and interesting to watch a band that swapped instruments, as I would be fascinated to see how each person approached each instrument differently and how the various line-ups affected the sound of the music. But that doesn’t interest people who are looking for a quick fix.

Jacqui: Sally and I had been improvising and constructing songs together and planned to do a band from high school. I met Nina in NYC. The three of us played together and it was instantaneous.

Shows were intense. That quote “snatching grace from disaster” was probably a show with a tech breakdown then the music recovered the spirit. But this also toward our aesthetic of taking things to the edge even within a musical phrase. I like the unsteady, the untamable course. We were into friction and tension is good —it is the dynamic.

What prompted the band’s move to the UK? Was it dissatisfaction with the NYC scene? Or something else entirely? How did you find Blast First?

Jacqui: We moved to England because we could gig with the Fall and make a record for free with John Loder [of London label Southern] but we had no long-range plan. At the time the scene in NYC was a ghetto, there were only 3 or 4 places to play and our record had just fallen in the ether whenCharles Ball (Lust/Unlust) went AWOL. I heard the Fall’s “Spector vs. Rector” on the radio in Nov ‘80 and was electrified. The music and the speed rap monologue with characters was on my wavelength like no other.

About a month later Ed Bahlman, who ran the 99 record shop, told me the same thing and said I should get a tape to them because they were coming to NYC in the spring. So he mid-wifed this connection and it happened that Scott Piering, an American who worked at Rough Trade at the time (and who is responsible for breaking the underground to the overground) was coming with them on tour. So I passed the tape to Scott; the Fall were into us and we ended up gigging with them until we broke up. Scott subsequently helped us a great deal and was crucial to Ut.

Sally: We were interested in what was happening in the UK music scene and the fact that a band like The Fall was thriving there intrigued us. But the idea of actually going to the UK began, on a realistic level, when John [Loder] saw Ut play in NYC and said he’d love to record an album with us. We weren’t sure if he really meant it until he came back a few months later and saw us play again and said the same thing, so we started to think he must be serious. We’d just recorded an EP for Charles Ball’s Lust/Unlust label before it collapsed, which therefore never got released. And we really wanted to get some of our music out, so it was very tempting.

Around the same time, The Fall were doing a US tour and Jacqui was determined that we should play with them. So she managed to get a tape of Ut to Mark E. Smith, who really liked it and let us know he’d definitely give us some support slots with The Fall if we came to the UK. So we had two offers that were pretty irresistible.

On top of that, Nina’s brother, who had been a film editor at the BBC for many years, had a house in London that he was in the midst of trying to sell after having just moved to LA and he said we could stay there until it was sold. So we had a chance to record, do gigs with The Fall and a place to stay —going to London suddenly seemed like the obvious thing to do.

Nina: I had also been playing guitar with Rhys Chatham, and he asked me to play “Drastic Classicism” in France for a summer festival. So I took that opportunity to take a break from NYC. While I loved [it] madly and [it] had totally changed my life forever, [it] had started to feel like a vortex, ever tighter and more intense —I had the sense that I was losing touch with the rest of the world… I went to London “for a while,” not intending to stay or leave NYC. I met with Scott Piering to discuss and cement the Fall tour, etc. and we fell in love. Jacqui and Sally soon followed and I stayed in London for the next 9 years!

Jacqui: Blast First was no accident because Paul Smith was into our NYC aesthetic. He filled a gap because no other label at that time was onto the No Wave after Charles Ball disappeared. Basically Smith was recruited to our scene by Lydia Lunch. We met him in London around the same time and knew about his plans for Blast First a few years before it actually happened. Meanwhile we released Ut records ourselves on Out Records.

TO BE CONTINUED

The songs that follow are sung by Nina Canal . “New Colour” is from the eponymous 1984 12” that also includes “Sham Shack” (which is also found on New York Noise Vol. 2); “Tell It” is from 1985’s “Confidential” 12”.

Ut, “New Colour”

Ut, “Tell It”

PHOTO BY SIMON VIDA