The Creatures
At the time of this interview, Carpe Noctem was in full swing and we’d decided to launch a more music-oriented magazine that was to be called Bleeding Edge. The opportunity arose to speak with Budgie and, having been a bit of a fan of Siouxsie and the Banshees for some time, we of course leapt at it. I expected the usual “musiciany” interview – and surprised at many of the directions the conversation with Budgie took. His thoughts on drummers, the band’s fans, MTV, and the fine art of wearing a dress were both interestingly told and insightful. I liked this interview because it went against my expectations and my sense of who the band was. Sadly, we were unable to print it, or the beautiful photos, which were styled by Autumn Adamme of Dark Garden Unique Corsetry and shot by Tom Pitts. Still… the interview retained a special place in my heart and so it is included here.
Reconstructing Cities From Dust – unpublished
I am curious about who you looked up to then and who you think are exceptional drummers now.
The first one I knew about was the one with the big nose in the Beatles. You know, I was born in a town not twenty miles away from Liverpool and my brother and his friends would go to Liverpool on Saturday nights to the beat clubs and I remember once them bringing me back the top of a drumstick with a plastic head on it and saying this was Ringo Starr’s. It was just a tiny thing about three inches long and it could have been anybody’s but I was gullible and I went “Wow!” I was trying to play things with this little three inch drumstick. I kind of grew up listening to the charts and wasn’t aware of drummers, I don’t suppose, until the kind of people like Led Zeppelin… I was aware of James Brown. I loved the beats and stuff. It kind of varied between pop music, as far as like T-Rex, and I thought that was worthy of a place on the wall. I got more serious about music and then Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath [came along]. But at the same time, I had music by the Doors and Velvet Underground. I was going to college in my hometown and meeting people older than me. I didn’t know who Lou Reed was but I liked the sound of “Sister Ray” and “Wait for The Man” and stuff.
What about now? Are there people you are listening to?
Most recently I was listening to people who use the live drums and programming them in a way that have been chopped up and sampled. I love Stevie Wonder’s drumming. The best drum thing is “Superstition.” It is so loose and stuff. I think what I quickly realized was it wasn’t how quick or technically how good you were it was how much feel you had. To me drumming has always been about listening to the vocals, listening to the band and trying to keep the whole thing together. Like a teacher of mine once said, ‘sometimes it’s not the notes you play, it’s the notes you don’t play.’ It’s the things you leave out, definitely. The space you can conjure up and, to me, that’s why I see people going, “He’s a great drummer.” I say, “He really [is] but he’ll be better when he chills out and he’s not playing all the time.” I have always liked the drummer with Can, Jaki Liebezeit. He’s a wonderful drummer. I always liked the drummers that come from underneath. I like a lot of the base drum stuff that is very simple but very strong.
Your new album is very drum heavy and it sounds good.
It came from drums and the additional instruments come on afterwards, but most of it is from drums.
What made the two of you decide to sail under the monarch of The Creatures and not use the more chart friendly Siouxsie and The Banshees? Was it a legal thing? Did you have to share the rights of that name?
The whole thing is that the Banshees have stopped. So, it wouldn’t have made any sense that way because we made that split musically. If the three weren’t together it wasn’t Siouxsie and The Banshees. Siouxsie and Severin started the band and, really, it is one of the two that were going to finish it. We were on a hiatus for a few months while there were a few legal things to be sorted out. A band like Siouxsie and The Banshees just doesn’t go away. Straight away, as soon as we started up again, people were like, why aren’t you reforming because everybody else is? The thing is we hadn’t really stopped. We knew we wanted to do The Creatures again and The Creatures, from its inception, was a drum and voice purist type thing in addition to the Hawaiian chanters on the Feast album to the brass players on the Boomerang album. We can pretty much embrace any sound or accompaniment to our original plan, which wasn’t really a plan at all. It was just an idea to have some fun without [being] something as big as Siouxsie and the Banshees, you know. It has a lot of preconceptions with it. People who don’t know Siouxsie and The Banshees think we are dark and scary and, somehow, we invented goth. We’ve always had a sort of dark sense of humor, black comedy you would maybe call it, which is far more akin to Dennis Potter or Wright Lee than maybe an Alfred Hitchcock. In England, the Hammer Horror has always been a bit tongue in cheek and I think we are probably far more akin to that than the fine line between goth and metal and that kind of brooding contemplation. I think it took us, not by surprise, but that it has become such a massive cult, a massive thing. We wouldn’t shun it. We have always said that if you look at the bands that pay tribute to Siouxsie and the Banshees, by virtue of tribute albums, or say we are their biggest influence, they only look like at us at a non-specific period. They sound like us around the time of Juju. If you look back at an album before that, Kaleidoscope, and see an album that is really a band of two people, three people reinventing itself. Join Hands was a pretty heavy album. Kaleidoscope was totally going into places far brighter lit, but still as scary. I think we are always, I mean, still coming right back up to date, I mean Siouxsie wrote all the lyrics and there are a lot of doors that seemed to be familiar but it’s a matter of, I don’t know… I think you become more fine-tuned at being able to put your finger on what’s driving you.
I know you guys, for a time, were never completely comfortable with people going “Oh well, you are just a goth band” and yet, people continued to categorize all the Banshee stuff specifically. I am just curious, as time goes by, have the two of you become more at peace with that?
I think you have to kind of go “It doesn’t matter” or it will drive you down. Peepshow, “Peakaboo,” “Kiss Them For Me” right down to the last album “Oh, Baby,” we couldn’t have gone anymore bubblegum, you know.
Did you say, “Let’s do this to sort of shake them up?”
I can’t think of any other reason for releasing that track. We had been pushed into a corner at that point by everybody and it was our way of saying, “This is all too serious.” At the end of the day, we started out this thing, it should be a lot more free, unrestricted. This whole thing is like an expression of us and the things that turn us on, that fire us up, that make us laugh, that make us sad. I think we returned to The Creatures because it’s not strong pre-conceived ideas.
So much of what you guys are doing is lumped into what they call alternative music. But at this point, alternative music has become so corporate that it’s almost become the mainstream. Now what do you do when that happens? Do you feel a drive to do something completely different or ride the waves?
Right now, all we can feel is not alternative but truly independent. Because we are. Apart from the associations we have now are the distribution companies or our label. Alternative, I really don’t know what that means, either. I have been talking to Martin Atkins at Invisible, in the future, maybe he is going to help out at some point. I have his catalog with anything from Psychic TV to… I suppose that’s alternative, but it’s been around for a while. Alternative seems to be quicker and quicker assimilated because they can’t risk it being around somehow like a loose cannon somewhere. We can’t be influenced by something as tiny as the UK chart system. We can’t get on the UK radio and we are almost going to give up trying because it’s not about the song it’s about payola. It’s obvious. It is probably similar in the states as well I imagine.
It’s that big monster MTV, you know. I am convinced you can take the worst song in the world and put it in heavy rotation sooner or later it’s
gonna lodge itself into everyone’s subconscious and then you’ll have a hit.
Right now, over here, or in the UK rather, songs are making it to rental car adverts as the single is released. [It] etches itself into your subconscious and then you find yourself humming car adverts.
Here in the States, there is a lot of the folky chick singer thing, Jewel and the other bands that are just a girl with an acoustic guitar warbling and, unfortunately, there are like 15 of them and they all sound the same.
We have a few of them in England and, fortunately, they didn’t last long. Those are the people I really hated. I couldn’t stand them, bad female versions of Dylan. It sounds terribly dismissive but it’s like, people, there’s more to it somehow. Let’s get the idea and do something with it.
I was talking to someone recently and I was saying how music used to be something that would move your soul and bring you to tears or bring you to joy or actually make you feel something and now it’s like hard candy. You put it in your mouth and it tastes pretty good but you aren’t going to be able to live off of it. But it’s no longer about Art. It’s more about commodities and what your demographic is and that’s sad. I wonder if someone like Dylan or the Beatles or whoever would make it today because people would say, “Oh, they are just too heavy and they are dealing with subjects that I don’t want to deal with.”
It’s a good discussion. I think it needs to be discussed on like MTV, but we never sit down, seriously, long enough because people’s attention span is so limited. If you think [about] what the Beatles tried to do to their own career, in a way, at the end of their recording career, I think their White album was a kind of fingers up to the controversy they were trapped in. All we can do is take solace in the fact that there are intelligent people out there. There are people who won’t be drummed down.
Give me a little insight into your creative process. When you sit down, do you go “Okay, we need to come up with something” or is it a matter of just doodling around? Do you have a specific mental road map to where you are going?
No. This last album was like turning a couple of taps on a faucet. Siouxsie just kind of had a lot of words that just came automatically almost. We wrote in the simplest way, which is me literally behind the drum kit banging out a beat and we kind of follow each other, and then flesh it out afterwards. Sometimes there’s an idea, like the last track on the album, it is as it was written. It started as a series of little moments and following a series of emotions that were coming out. We knew we wanted a lot of beat and I was full of those, so that’s okay. I was writing a bit with the Banshees on the acoustic guitar. I think there are songs that didn’t make it to the US album, but I think they are on the Japanese version and [there] is also a new single that’s not on the official US album.
Are you guys on the Internet and all that?
[The Creatures site is no longer active – ed.] That’s our site and I think, for instance, we are doing a special thing for the US tour where there will be a single, which wasn’t available in the UK.
Did you guys have an active hand in that?
We don’t have six people running it, but we do try as much as we can. We have such an active hand in running the tour as well and in all [the] everyday setting up the label. We will be able to allocate different people for different parts of it. It is very time-consuming trying to keep a handle on everything. I’d love to be on the Internet a lot more than I have been able to recently. But that’s because my power went down and I can’t do anything.
You know the Internet for me is such a wealth of information and there so much great stuff out there but there also another side to it. You get into some personal sites and some places you go that are really truly dark and scary.
I think you have to kind of have a discipline. Any new situation, you find out how to use it. If you go with the idea of aimlessly wandering around, you know, you don’t achieve anything. We used it during research for some lyrics and things, like who was that person and [what was] the name of the film. The ideal thing is that you know a little bit and you go hunting around for it. It can open up and you can find things that way and you can flesh out your ideas very quickly. I like it for that. It is as good a library system as you can get. When we were writing the album, you can feel isolated when we aren’t in any major city, but I was able to log on to some of the bulletin boards and just see what people are talking about in relation to what we were doing. Sort of eavesdropping on a conversation about yourself, sounds a bit weird.
Do you ever go into some of the chat rooms or whatever?
Not really. I am just kind of curious as to what people would say. They had heard we were doing a tour and hoped they play here and then I could say, “Well, where’s a cool place to play?” rather than relying on the promoters to give us the brush off and tell us all the bands play here. Get it from the horse’s mouth, in a way. That’s where it can be a real winner. We end up playing the cool clubs on this last tour or we take it up to the next level, but it means don’t play there play here, you know? And that stuff, you don’t know about until you arrive into town. You know, you pull into town and they go “If only you’d played down the street.”
The flip side is that the people that are using the newsgroups can be brutally honest. You’ve released an album, or in our case released an issue, and it’s like suddenly people out there are talking about it and they are saying things when they have no vested interest in kissing your ass, so suddenly you are being told you suck and you are like “oh man, what’s up with that?”
It’s like being in every bar, in every town. When your magazine or our record comes up in conversation, it’s only in passing, it’s like with bulletins, you re-read them religiously sometimes, and you think “Oh, did they say that?” and “Oh, they said it again.” We have to re-learn the way we take in this stuff.
We talked to Tom Pitts and saw the photos you shot with Dark Garden [Unique Corsetry]. I am wondering how that came about.
First of all, that was probably the best photo session we have done ever because we got along so well with Tom and we’ve got Autumn [Adamme]. We arrived in town and we were ten days in San Francisco rehearsing for the last tour. I had seen the cover of, I forget which magazine it was with Nina Hagen on the cover, and I found out that Tom Pitts had done that. He was currently coming down to meet us that morning, so it was uncanny that the one magazine that stood out on the newsstand was the cover that Tom had done. The next day, we were fit into some clothes and we went out before rehearsals and shot, I don’t know how many rolls of film it was, but not many. We are hoping to do some more work with Tom. I think we are going to get in touch with him. It is just one of those things where you really connect. The chemistry just seems to work. We loved the photos.
Hajime Soryama
When we first started Carpe Noctem, we attended Comic-Con International: San Diego every year to find talent for the magazine. We watched the con grow from a little industry gathering to the behemoth it is today. One year, I met Hajime Soryama and, through an interpreter, made arrangements to talk once the con was over. I had been a huge fan of his work for years and the idea of talking with him was a dream come true. A few weeks passed and the laborious process of communicating through the interpreter began. I was amazed how clear and concise his responses were even while passing through another person. Sadly, this is another of the interviews for Bleeding Edge that never saw the light of day. I humbly offer it up to you now exclusively in this book.
The Sword and the Chrysanthemum – unpublished
Japanese born Hajime Sorayama is an artist in every sense of the word. His images are arresting and moving while possessing an innate sense of truth and beauty. The women in particular are stunning examples of just how beautiful the female form can be. The portrayal of feminine flesh set against a rippling sheet draped demurely over an exposed thigh is nothing short of breath taking. His style is utterly photo-realistic and yet there is a surreal edge to it that lifts the im
agery to another plateau that is his and his alone. Sorayama’s work is held in high regard by all of the artists I have come into contact with and, with one mention of his name, you get eyes raised to the heavens and sighs of appreciation. One artist went so far as to say, “Sorayama, man, he’s a god!”
I was fortunate enough to meet Mr. Sorayama recently and through his delightful representative, Miharu Yamamoto, arranged to talk to him via email from his home in Japan. I feel wholly fortunate and quite honored to have had the opportunity to speak with him. Further I am quite proud to present his work to you now in these pages.
And so, without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, may I present to you the incomparable Mr. Hajime Sorayama.
I understand that you were born in Ehime Prefecture. Tell me a little about growing up there, what you were like, what your interests were, etc.
Imabaru city in Ehime prefecture is a very conservative small town and I always wanted to move out to the big city. I was always very attracted to a cultural center of a big city like Tokyo. I was a kid who didn’t like a small town; I rebelled but could not do anything outrageous.
What do you think that you came away with from your education at Shikoku Gakuin University and the Chuo Art School?
Carpe Noctem Interviews - Volume 2 Page 17
