John Robb: Wonder and the Universe

John Robb is the author of numerous best-selling books. He was the first journalist to interview Nirvana and The Stone Roses, and famously coined the term ‘Britpop’. He’s a true visionary, and in 2010 decided it was time for a brand new type of music website which didn’t follow the preconceived rules of music. Louder Than War was born, with a search for new noise and the next buzz at the heart of its manifesto. The website seems to constantly expand and a printed version is now available. Print clearly isn’t dead.

John was the founder of influential post-punk band the Membranes, and then went on to form Goldblade. He tours constantly to quench his endless creative thirst, at the same time he’s key in maintaining the ever prevalent persona of Louder Than War.

He’s quite possibly the most enigmatic frontman you’ll ever see, and possesses an endless wealth of knowledge about all the things Joe Bloggs could only wish to understand. There’s something very compassionate about John, in the way that he’s so supportive of the freedom and success of others. At the same time, he has an admirable commitment to his own opinions and couldn’t care less whether or not you agree with what he thinks or feels.

VIVA caught up with John at Manchester’s HOME to talk about his latest creations, the Universe and what it means to be a punk.

Tell us about your recent trip to Estonia. 

I went a year and a half ago to a music conference called Tallinn Music Week. I was just doing some panels there, a bit of talking and saw some bands play. It’s got a great little music scene. Skype’s from Estonia so they have quite a lot of money. The capitals like an old town, they’ve done it all up – it’s really nice. The people who run Skype know the woman who puts on this festival, and she knows the president. It’s dead small, it’s like Manchester but smaller so everyone really does know everyone else.

Because they’re Scandinavian everyone’s really good at what they do. They’re quite quirky as well. If you’re in a band in Manchester and London, people always think you can make it. But in Estonia, they don’t give a f***, they just make good music. There’s an amazing band there called Trad Attack. They’re playing all these traditional instruments, all these weird bagpipes and stuff. It’s amazing. And there’s this whole tradition of Estonian choirs. We saw one of them play this year. I was there this year with Viv Albertine. I did In Conversation with Viv about her book, which is the best book about punk! Viv used to be in The Slits which is an all-girl punk band. They were really f****** great, total attitude – amazing. So I went out there to do an interview with her, and 400 people turned up. After the talk, I said ‘you’ve gotta come and see this’. I just looked it up in the programme. I go to a lot of these different things. If there’s a load of Indie bands playing I think ‘I don’t wanna go and see another Indie band, what’s not Indie?’ One year I went to see everything with the word black in the name. And this time I found a choir to go and see. It was about twenty women all dressed in red singing. It was f****** amazing. I reviewed it and they wrote to me and said ‘we really like your review, do you wanna come and sing on a track or let’s do a gig together…’. I got in touch with the woman who runs the conference, she’s amazing. They reckon she’ll be the future president of Estonia. She’s really organised, really sound. She’s a bit like the Tony Wilson of Estonia. So she said ‘yeah I’m really into this idea, I like what you do so let’s do a collaboration’. They have a science week on this week. We do this Universe Explains thing where I interview a scientist and do the gig at the end. So we’ve got a scientist coming out from the CERN project and we’re gonna do the gig with the choir at the end. It’s gonna be f****** amazing. Then we’re gonna bring it all over to Manchester and do it here at HOME in January/February.

So the album’s had some really good reviews. Do you read them all?

Yeah, it’s had one bad one. I did read that but I still knew it was good. One bad one actually makes it’s quite weird cos it makes you think that someone actually doesn’t like you personally. I really like the record so if everyone slagged it off I’d still really like it. I was actually prepared for no one to review it, I thought ‘no one’s gonna review this – its old people making a really weird record, that’s not gonna catch anyone’s imagination’. But it just went off, it was totally unexpected because it’s not a straight record. It’s a bit warped, it’s a bit weird, it’s a bit hard to listen to.

Where are you up to with touring? 

Got an American tour in October/ November – if we can get the Visa’s! Visa’s are always a nightmare for America. It’s just such hard work, every curve ball you could think of. You have to pay a f****** fortune. There this band called Laibach who recently played North Korea, they were the first band ever to play in North Korea. People were saying ‘what was it like getting the Visa’s?’ they said it’s easier to get into North Korea than it is to get into America!

The album, Dark Matter/Dark Energy, suggests a real fascination with the Universe and Space. Is that something personal to you? Where did it come from?

Forever and ever. I’m 54 now, I grew up in the 60s. When I was a little kid space was technology! We thought we were gonna go to Mars by 1975. I remember when they landed on the moon. I watched it on the tele, we stayed up to watch it. I did a little project on it at primary school, I even collected baked bean tins and sent the wrappers off to get the posters of the Apollo missions. It was f****** mega.

Have you still got the posters?

I’ve got one ripped up corner of one. It was fifty years ago now. It’s mental to think it was fifty years ago when they landed on the moon. I remember watching it just thinking it was absolutely amazing. And the commentary with Gene Kranz from Nasa is on one of the tracks on the album. When we do the gig I’m gonna start the track with the original commentary. It’s gonna be f***** amazing.

How do you feel about the whole conspiracy theory that argues they never landed on the moon and that it was the Russians who got there first? 

B******t – its conspiracy about a conspiracy. It can easily be disproved that one. I think sometimes people don’t believe things could possibly happen. Like Elvis isn’t dead, you know. Well, famous people do die. Famous people do die on the bog. Elvis isn’t gonna be spending 100 years in a secret jacket is he? You know, things do go wrong don’t they? On the other hand, things go right. And there’s no reason why they couldn’t land on the moon with less technology than there is in my phone. Its f****** amazing isn’t it. Even if they faked it, it still wouldn’t effect it. For me, as a kid, it was an amazing moment. And even if I found out it was completely fake, it wouldn’t piss me off because I’d understand it as a showbiz thing. It still has an effect on me now, I just think it’s an amazing charade. It’s like watching the most amazing gig ever.

I’ve been totally into it forever. My dad worked for ICI, so he had a scientific background. Space was about the only thing we could bond over so it was always interesting to me. Then we did a TED Talk about three years ago. I talked about punk rock DIY. I did the first one and there were about 100 people there. I went to do the second one and there were about 2500 people there – I didn’t expect that many people to be there. I don’t prepare these things because talking about punk rock is quite easy when you’ve done it all your life. Then the next talk was Joe Incandela who’s the head of the CERN project – I thought what a f****** guest that is. Then afterwards we all went out for a meal. Joe came up to me at the dinner and told me Buzzcocks were his favourite band. He was from Chicago and wanted to talk about Buzzcocks and I was like ‘look Joe, we’ve got an hour, I love the Buzzcocks they’re one of the greatest bands of all time, but can we talk about the Universe?’.

And did you?

Yeah – he told me everything about how much they know and the Big Bang. He said when he started working there 30 years ago he thought they were about 10% off unravelling the whole Universe. Now he reckons that about 10% is all they know. He said dark matter was a little thing then, now they think dark matter/dark energy is about 90% of the Universe. I asked him what dark matter is and he said ‘well its dark, and we don’t really know what it is so we have to call it dark matter…’. Isn’t that amazing?! On an artist level and on a poetic level to talk about dark matter, those words are amazing – how many things can you hook on there?

So from the conversation with Joe I was thinking dark matter/dark energy is almost quite psychedelic. This other guy in the conversation didn’t really get a word in but he did ask what was before the big bang. And Joe said ‘nothing, there is no before because time comes out of the Big Bang. So before the Big Bang there is no time, therefore there’s nothing’. You can either go what the fuck are the going on about?! Or you can go, why not?! Because before Columbus discovered America, there was already 1000 people living there. People in Europe didn’t think it existed. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t there. So just because you can’t understand it in your head, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

So lots of stuff can come out of the Universe and when we started playing again I didn’t wanna play old songs because we’re not that kind of band. It’s an experimental band, it’s a weird band. Basically, we’re the Membranes and we do what the f*** we like. So if we wanna do a gig with a choir we’ll do one. And if no one likes it tuff s***. I make the rules up. And if people like it that’s great. I’m not trying to p*** people off, I just get bored. So I thought f****** hell this is it – The Universe, it’s totally the thing. I wanna make the music to match the conversation with Joe. If I could make the music fit what I felt talking to Joe – that’s the record. So I went back and told the band how the record was gonna be, I said ‘I’m gonna hit a bass line we’re all gonna go in and jam on it, and that’s the track’. 

So we’re saying that dark matter takes up 90% of the Universe, but we don’t know what dark matter is. That means we don’t know the majority of what’s out there. It’s complex because it’s unfathomable to some people. Was it difficult to make an album out of something so complex?

You’re just sketching, I’m not claiming I’m a scientist. We’ve got a song called Dark Matter which is kind of making music that sounds like what we think dark matter is. So if I still did magic mushrooms like I did years ago, I could listen to the song and it’d probably make me get to my dark matter mind-set. So when we sketch a song out, it’s like doing a painting with sound. And that sounds utterly pretentious, but that’s what we were doing. So The Hum of the Universe, which is the last track on the album, is about how the Universe hums in B minor. That’s an amazing idea, the Universe has actually got a musical note, but it’s so deep we can’t hear it.

Then I thought meditation, in a sense, is you trying to tune in with the Universe. So you’re tuning in with B minor. Some of this I’m making up as I go along, I’m making little logical jumps but I like the idea. And I like the idea of the Universe humming. Then during the recording my dad died and that was very key. He was 94 so he was going to die in the end, but it knocks you flat. I mean, the older you get the harder it is. You think they’re gonna be there forever, you get so used to them being there. He’s been there forever, all your life, and suddenly he’s gone. He was in an old people’s home and I was making the record and I was going down to see him, talking to him. We never got on when we were young but we got on in the end. So it was pretty mad conversation we’d have because his mind had gone a little bit. So I’d go for a piss and come back and he’d go ‘oh, I haven’t seen you for months’. But we talked about the Universe and he’d get back on it again, so he’d remember all that stuff. He’s on the track, I taped a 45 minute conversation with him and put a little bit in the track at the beginning. It’s the only one my mum can’t listen to on the album. I put him in there because it was important to put him in there, the track was about my dad. I like the idea that when you die, you don’t go to heaven. That’s all b*****t, but in a way heaven is the Universe. The matter goes back into the Universe. The s*** we’re made out of is the stuff that came out of the Big Bang. The stuff we’re made out of is fourteen billion years old. And when we die it all evaporates and goes back into the Universe. That’s heaven in a sense, if you do wanna desperately hold onto the weird old concept. So the album was originally gonna be about the beginning and the end of the Universe. The first tracks about the Big Bang and the last tracks about death. Death’s a great thing to write about, I’m fascinated by death. So it was going to be the death of the Universe, but then the death of my dad got entwined. There are little references to him throughout the record. It’s a bit proggy but it’s got a lot of levels. It doesn’t matter if people don’t get it though. We’ve played punk festivals and people have just jumped up and down to the songs. I’m totally cool with that. It’s fine if people don’t get it. It can mean anything or nothing. It can mean everything to me and nothing to somebody else. And I think that’s cool. The idea that pop music has to have a meaning is ridiculous.

My favourite song on the record is 5776 because the meaning behind it is intriguing and beautiful. Can you tell us about it? 

We did that with the choir as well. Oh f*** it sounds amazing. There’s this space fact about the stars in the sky. They reckon the visible eye can see 5776 stars, which is obviously a b******t fact. I mean, if it’s a cloudy night you can only see three. I don’t know how they worked that out. But I don’t care if it’s not true because it’s actually a really amazing idea. The real fact, which is a real head-f*** stunning fact is that none of them are there anymore. I totally love that idea. The lights only just got here. And there’s another 5000 stars whose light hasn’t got here yet. If the Sun exploded right now, we wouldn’t know for nine seconds. If the Sun suddenly switched off, the light would still be getting here. So the sun would go before us. If those stars could look back at us, which they can’t because it’s impossible, but if they could see the earth they’d see dinosaurs on it. And that’s so psychedelic, it just twists your mind in a really fantastic way. Joe said the Universe is all drifting apart so in the end we won’t be able to see the stars anymore. He said it’s the saddest image of the lot.

We’re in a galaxy but we think we’re the centre of the Universe. We’re on a little planet next to an insignificant, tiny little sun on the edge of a really small galaxy. It’s like in the garden, the bit where everyone throws their rubbish, we’re there somewhere.

Do you think it’s possible to meet life on other planets if we’re so far away?

Well, it’s almost impossible because we’re so far away. But how far advanced are they? I mean, they may not be physical things, it might be beyond that. They might be energy forms. They might be able to zip around the Universe. They might be beyond technology. They might be light forms or something. If you was talking about this to dinosaurs, they wouldn’t be able to imagine mammals ruling the earth. So there’s no reason why anything can’t happen is there. There’s definitely life in the Universe and the idea that there’s only life here is so utterly arrogant and stupid.

Why do you think people are so committed to that view?

Because that’s what we’re used to and that’s all we can see. When you talk about the Universe people think it’s something up there, but we’re in the Universe! The Universe isn’t another place. We are the Universe. We can only see what we can see. And it’s always been like that, with religions and cultures. But there’s life everywhere. Even on Mars, you can see on the photo’s where water has been. They’ll find fossils on Mars. But Mars isn’t even an ideal place for life. There are other planets but they’re too far away from us. It’s amazing how far we’ve come but we’re still f****** miles away. It’s annoying isn’t it, there’s not enough time to find this s*** out before we die.

As a performer and as a writer you have this really magical drive and passion – it comes across when you’re performing. You must feel it too. Where does it come from?

It’s a massive rush, music is so magical when you hear stuff you really like – the rhythm and the groove. I like funky bass lines. Everyone’s got their own personal funk, and okay I’m a white bloke from Blackpool but I still have my own personal funk. I’m not Bootsy Collins, I’m me and this is my personal funk. Also, I believe in instinct. I just like what I like and if its s*** I don’t care. Guilty pleasures is such a b******t notion, people in England worry too much about that they’re meant to like. I don’t give a f***.

Why do you think people worry so much about what they’re meant to like?

Because music got mixed up with cool and fashion. Instead of style being more important than fashion. Basically fashion is someone telling you to wear a purple jumper because purple’s in. Instead of just wearing the stuff that you’re wearing. It’s quite interesting. Going back to the Mondays, we used to rehearse next door to them in the Boardwalk years ago. We’d always be really dressed up and my hair would be high and they’d always be super dressed down, but they always looked really cool. I thought they were really cool and they must of thought we looked like completely weird f*****s. There was a weird kind of mix in there of people doing different things. But somehow everyone just understood what everyone else did. ACR used to rehearse in there and we always thought ‘f*** they’re great’ nobody else was doing stuff like that.

My understanding of punk is that it can be loads of different things. What’s your definition of punk?

Everyone’s got their own version. If I say this is what punk is someone could say no its not! It affects people in different ways. For some people it just used to mean collecting records. For some people it just meant to drink loads of cider. For me it was just an excuse to escape from Blackpool. Punk was a tear in the fabric. Right from the start we never wanted to sound like a proper punk band, we just wanted to go off on our own little tangent. We didn’t even know whether there was a space for doing that – we just went off and did it. It was the energy of punk and the space to be creative that was so great about it.

So it’s more about an attitude as opposed to a physical image?

Yeah, it’s an attitude. Punks don’t have to listen to that kind of music. It’s an empowerment to give you the confidence to go and do something.

Can you tell us about you record label?

It’s an extension of being a fan that writes about music. So you go and see Evil Blizzard and think ‘fuck that’s amazing’, I’ll set up a label and put it out. It’s as simple as that really. So I put the record out and it did quite well, the new ones gonna do really well. I’ve got to contain myself to stop putting stuff out though because it’s a lot of work really.

There’s a print version of Louder Than War now isn’t there?

Yeah it came out this month. It’s national, it’s in every WHSmith’s in the county. God knows how it’ll go. Prints battered isn’t it but maybe we’ll find a niche.

Your gig reviews always seem to be positive, I love that about your writing. 

I haven’t got time to focus on what’s s***. What’s the point in me going to a band I don’t like? I haven’t got time to watch it then go home and slag it off. I’m running out of time, I’m getting older.

You’re so happy to celebrate the success of others’.

I always hate when bands say ‘…how have they made it!? They’re f***** s***’. But when anybody gets to the top of the greasy pole I’m the first to cheer them on cos I know how tough it is. I wanna see good s***. I don’t wanna see crap stuff, it’s boring. I’d rather hear stuff that’s good. I know there’s a value in saying what’s good and bad – and that’s being a music critic. But I’m a fan. I’m not really a proper music writer. I’m more of a fan that writes about music. I don’t care if that’s wrong or right – that’s my thing.

@johnrobb77

@louderthanwar

Photography: www.charlottewellings.com