VIVA Chats to John Robb

Ahead of the The Membranes gig with the BIMM (British & Irish Modern Music Institute) Manchester Choir, their frontman, John Robb talks to Viva about this unusual collaboration and all things music!

Your ridiculously busy lifestyle (as well as performing live) demands a lot of energy. How do you deal with that?

I have banned lightweight concepts like sleep from my life. Punk rock taught me the amphetamine lifestyle without the powders -the all night neon rush of cramming ideas and cool stuff into your fast decaying life. Also I learned from hanging out with scientists, that time is human concept and may not even exist – once I freed myself from that idea there was plenty of so-called ‘time’ to do stuff! I also rebelled against the rock n roll lifestyle- backstage at festivals is full of chemical zombies – it’s like an old people’s home of stoned wrecks – I prefer to be a high decibel warrior!

Heritage versus modern: does the perception that there is a preoccupation with Manchester’s (impressive) musical heritage stifle creativity today?

Not really. The city is seething with lots of great new bands – The Blinders and Cabbage spring to mind and slightly longer since they started PINS are great as well. There are more bands in the city than ever before and more venues. On the other hand it’s great to be in a city that has a history and sometime that can be good thing as people all round the world have an expectation and interest in Manchester. When I go to Europe or the USA people know the history but don’t expect new bands to fit in with it – the same as they would not for bands from New York or LA…and no-one complains about that – no-one goes on about London having a preoccupation with its musical history event hough nearly every documentary is about its back pages!

The past six months have seen the loss of Lemmy, Bowie, Prince…and more…have you ever known times like this? How did you feel about the loss of these huge music icons?

It’s been shocking on one level – the people seemed like permanent fixture living in the never never land of Peter Pan pop soundtracking our lives for ever. And yet it’s a sign O’ the times… because we now trapped in the digital forever when fame is permanent:  ‘In the future, everyone will be famous for 140 characters’ as Andy Warhol certainly didn’t say. Because of the internet, fame has become really warped – people stay famous for ever. Of course the three icons you mentioned above were big enough to transcend any time zones but the feeling that famous people seem to be dying like flies is down to the fact that there are more famous people around than ever before – deep frozen into our consciousness in the digital permazone. There are now more famous people alive than any other time in history and their deaths will shock. Despite that the deaths of the big three mentioned above was numbing – even Lemmy, who I’d met a few times and seemed indestructible.

What are the 3 most influential tunes that made an impact on your life?

Music impacts on my life every day but if you want the tunes that started the fire then over a period of a few years in the seventies from glam and into punk it would be…

Mott The Hoople ‘All the Young Dudes’ – the record that made you a teenager in 1972

Buzzcocks ‘Boredom’ – the record made you make your own records 1977

Iggy Pop ‘The Idiot’ – not an album but a template for living.

 As a writer/journalist, who has been the most entertaining/fascinating person you have ever met and why?

I think everyone you meet is fascinating – one of the things about interviewing people is being interested in them. I guess if there had to be high points then the intellectual madness of Killing Joke; in hindsight, the time spent with really early Nirvana in the USA after I had done their first ever interview; early Manics for their high IQ belief; John Lydon for his irascible acidic manner which was great; and for the many in-conversations I conduct Viv Albertine is always amazing – never flinches a question and tells it like it is; Poly Styrene for her loveable eccentricity; Julian Cope for his 3D vision; Public Enemy for wisdom; Henry Rollins for enthusiasm; Lemmy for being Lemmy; and Morrissey for being Moz. 

Is there anyone you’d like to interview? From the past (not with us any more) and also living?

Elvis would have been interesting – even the grand entrance with cape flying would have been enough! What made him tick? Was he even aware of what he was doing, or aware of what his awful manager should have been doing?  Marc Bolan because he should be recognised as being Bowie’s equal; and Bowie of course; Kate Bush and Siouxsie for breaking the rules. 

You have written a few best selling music-focused books. Who is in the pipeline? 

I’m working on a book about the dark side of post punk – the stuff that people dump into the Goth box – so many of those bands were brilliantly innovative – Bauhaus and Killing Joke, the Birthday party, the Cure – not linked in any sense but by an audience and whose music has been written out of the narrative but were ground breaking and highly influential. Post punk has been edited into a different story and it needs retelling!

 In recent years, BBC 4 (for example) have produced some excellent music documentaries. If you could pick a subject (band/artist) not yet covered, who would it be?

I don’t watch a lot of TV so they have probably covered some of the without me knowing! The Stranglers are always edited out of history and they were a huge and key band, plenty of Manchester stuff doesn’t get a proper telling and also really cool weird stories like bands like prog heroes Magma or pranksters Laibach, also music from other countries like Gnawa from Morocco of Rembeitka from Greece…or Norwegian back metal when is develops into real wonky weirdness like Wardruna.

Having performed a superb BBC 6 Music session for Marc Riley earlier this year with the BIMM Manchester Choir, you are now re-creating it live – how did this unusual collaboration come about?

It started in Estonia last year. I was at Tallinn Music Week which is the best music conference type event – really amazing diversity and ideas – and I went to see a choir play because I wanted to see something different. It was the Sireen Choir and they were mind blowing. After they played I asked them if they wanted to do a collaboration because I could see that they would somehow fit into The Membranes sound. So in October we did the concert in Tallinn and it worked really well – in fact it made the national news! Recently we used another choir for a concert in Portugal that went really well and in the UK we have yet another choir – the choir from the BIMM music college in Manchester, put together by Claire Piling who has done a great job. It’s just a case of taking risks and trying to stretch our sound out as The Membranes is not meant to be just a band but a rolling risk taking experiment!

Following your widely acclaimed album, Dark Matter/Dark Energy..what’s the next musical *goal* for the Membranes?

We have loads of new songs so there will be another album – will start work on it next year – this year is too full of festivals! Just need to keep moving and changing what we do and not become boring. Being boring is the only crime a band cannot commit. 

(John Robb talking to Alison Bell)