 Dead Or Alive are certainly not dead but very much alive and heading back to
Australia once more. The group have even re-released their "Sex Drive" single
with new mixes and Pete Burns explains more about the 80's phenomenon still with us in the
90's.
Last time we spoke you described the
shows you were doing as a "Promotional Tour". How will these shows differ?
Well we've got a couple of extra people that worked with us in the studio, we're also
doing a different set. There'll be stuff from the "Nukleopatra" album but we're
doing older stuff as well, right back to the "Sophisticated Boom Boom" album. I
don't know how it will change, we just do what we do. We seem to be going all over
Australia right through to places like Canberra and Perth... I'm quite surprised that
there's not that many places to play. It's such a big place with such a small
population...
When we last spoke to you said your
interests in remixes came about through the Australian remixes of "You Spin Me
Round".
Yeah! It's really strange, the people we worked with in Australia through our record
company, like John Ferris was the hands-on person for them and they just seem to have more
of a commercial sensibility about remixing. We've just received the remixes from France by
very prominent French remixers and I've never heard such a load of old shit in my life!
People who go in studios to do remixes are usually so out of their minds after hardcore
nightclubbing that they don't know where to put the sections of the song. Australians seem
to be very reliable and still send us the song back, but with a different mix with a
different slant.
I was really surprised with the remixes they did with "Sex Drive", 'cos they
rewrote the music as well as the chords. We've been really lucky out there, they seem to
keep some commercial sensibility about what they're doing. We don't really have that in
England and the rest of Europe. People just take the vocal off, put a lot of bleeps and
blops and a jungle beat on it and it's no longer your song, the music that you wrote and
you no longer recognise it and therefore I was quite against remixes. And when John Ferris
talked us into letting him have a try to get some stuff remixed it came back really good,
I was really pleased with him.
Yet you did some remixing yourself for
the "Rip It Up" EP.
But we didn't radically change anything. Once you've written it there's only so far you
can take it. So remixing it seems to me is to take away the backing track, which is very
good if they come back with something better or diffenrent and as I say our remixes were
always done with the actual chord structures in mind.
Would you consider remixing someone
else?
If it was a great song from an interesting artist, yeah. But, if it was a
middle-of-the-road thing or not our personal taste, well no, what's the point? On the
other hand, if it's brilliant, then leave it alone!
"Sophisticated Boom Boom" is
such a radical departure from the earlier Goth-influenced work. I was just wondering if
you were always heading toxards dance music?
Oh, god yes! I have to stress that the earlier work that we did was purely a means to an
end. When I started off in Liverpool trying to get a band together, which I was pretty
desperate to do, that was the only type of musicians available that was on those early
sort of Goth records, they were the only people I could get to work with and that was the
maximum of their ability.
When we started in music, the idea of someone owning or learning to use a sequencer was
unheard of. The only person using sequencers when I started was people like Giorgio
Moroder. As far as we knew they were really expensive space-age gadgets that we couldn't
possibly afford or even lay our hands on, or even pronounce what the instrument was
called. So basically making those albums in the late 70's and early 80's was really
treading water because without a record, you don't get a gig. Without a gig, you don't get
money. Without money, you don't get anything done at all, or attention from major records
companies.
Those records were about as close as I wanted to do (the pre "Sophisticated Boom
Boom" ones) as tap dancing on broken glass! I hated them, but it was a way of keeping
myself working in that corner of the industry. I always wanted to do dance music, always,
always, and I think I always will.
Much seems to be made with your
connection with Stock, Aitken and Waterman. The thing that strikes me is you were already
working in hi-energy music with Zeus B Held, even including two tracks produced by him on
the "Youthquake" album.
Thanks god somebody's noticed that! I'm not trying to claim any credit that does us
favours, but S.A.W. added absolutely nothing to what we did other than the fact that, how
can I say this, in those days to go into a studio, to get a record company to put up the
money up-front to do an album, you had to have producers there to keep things in check.
Producers are there to, say "Right we start at eleven tomorrow morning and we work
through to seven or eight at night". And then we go home. It's a sort of sharing of
the responsibility of the completition of the project. And that's all they ever did for
us. And also when we did "Youthquake" with S.A.W., they'd done absolutely
nothing of any prominence before that, I mean it was a good while after that, maybe a year
or eighteen months, before they did Bananarama's "Venus" and started to work on
Rick Astley and stuff like that. They were just three people who saqt in a grotty old
studio and basically made sure they were there at a certain time, and set up the mixing
desk and everything. But they didn't add anything artistically at all.
And when people concentrate so much on it I just thing it's an angle, it just makes it
easy to put some names that are better known than our in the piece. They didn't add
anything, though they took certain elements away because there were huge fights over the
completition of any project, because they decided that dance music was dead, and they
wanted to be doing what was current at the time which was maybe Spandau Ballet or Culture
Club. They wanted to be making records like that, whereas we wanted to be making records
which were like a cross between Divine and New Order. It wasn't their thing when we doing
those records, they didn't want to be doing that. They wanted to move on into the
mainstream middle-of-the-road. But we were doing dance music before and we've been doing
it since. They're in the middle of a huge battle at the moment, S.A.W. They're suing the
heel out of each other, the whole team's split up, and I'm so glad I'm not involved in
it...
You once said that S.A.W. were always
looking people to produce rather than actual bands...
They were desperate to take over the wheels of everything. They orchestrated pop stars.
They think the life of a pop star is very glamorous and different that it actually is, and
they wanted to be pop stars. They were failed pop stars themselves. They were musically
proficient, they wanted to make music, they realised they could get away with it with
people like Jason Donovan and Kylie Minogue (thank you Australia for doing that to us...).
They thought, "Right we don't even need them, we could get anybody. We could make a
record with the cleaner..." It was a constant fight to keep our identity as a band.
They would think, "We could do his jod, blah, blah, blah and you just need the
fucking record at the end of the day". It was a constant battle really, it wasn't
very pleasant!
The thing that horrified me from our
last conversation was that you don't have a record collection...
I don't. I have had one through the 70's and 80's, but I did prefer vinyl for a start
which is extremely rare in Europe. And records just come to me in passing and disappear in
passing. I've got too much in my life to have a record collection and also it's a bit like
working in a restaurant when you maybe spend three months of the year in a studio making
and hearing your own record, supervise the pressing and the artwork, I really don't want
to hear other people's records. There is the occasional record that I'll go and buy, but
not that many.
So what inspires Pete Burns?
It just sort of happens! For instance I spend a lot of time in the gym round the corner
from my house and I run like a bastard, maybe six or seven miles a day. And they'll be
playing music and I don't even know what it is or who it is, but some of it obviously
seeps into my subconscious, just something I'll hear in passing that maybe a month later
it'll regurgitate itself into my head. You don't remember where you heard it, but you'll
have some chord ideas. Maybe it's come from anybody else, because I'm not a hand son
thief, I don't own the reocrds, I don't know who's done these little glitches of music I
may hear... It just happens.
(ZEBRA, 23rd April 1997) |