Exclusive Interview with Momus
Интервью · 16.01.2005
By Филипп Миронов
Momus (a.k.a. Nick Currie) arrived in Moscow travelling light: in a scruffy knitted little suit with a light shoulder bag slung across him, holding his iMac Titanium. He made it here on the second try: having arrived at Sheremetyevo a day before the concert, he discovered that his visa only started the following day, and, after a quarrel with the border guards (insofar as the word "quarrel" can apply to such a charming creature), he headed back to Berlin. And the next day he was duly admitted into Russia with all his papers in order. It should be said that music lovers always valued Momus as an ornate intellectual, a coiner of words and an essayist; few members of the intelligentsia managed to listen to even one of his albums all the way through without adjusting their pince-nez. Though his liner notes and lyrics were always dutifully read and quoted. Even his appearance is that of a wandering sage, a vagabond clochard who takes far more pleasure in braiding words into whimsical little plaits than in crafting sophisticated music. To catch a glimpse of this "woodland sunshine" at the club Zapasnik, nearly everyone who had ever half-heard the name Momus turned up — such an alluring aura Currie has created through his many-sided activity (besides recording his own albums, he produces other people's and works as a journalist).
Momus sat in the middle of the stage on a tall bar stool, with that same iMac turned to face the audience. Every so often he would pick up a guitar that had been thrust upon him back in Moscow. The atrocious sound quality was offset by the concert's extreme interactivity: Nick pulled faces, lapsed into a meditative trance of the sort typical of our bards, hopped about oddly, asked people to request songs and said that everyone should find the Cheburashka inside themselves. Momus first encountered Cheburashka in Japan. This furry creature became for him one of the symbols of Russia, coinciding with the terminological occasion of "cute formalism." The phrase was proposed by Nick to characterise everything naive and yet not simple, including his own songs. He sang for over an hour, and in that time the audience thinned out — enduring Momus's cute (but tedious all the same) droning was no easy feat. After the show, when he was offered some food, he declared that he had everything with him, and indeed, in his bag, next to the plush Cheburashka he'd been given, lay a half-eaten loaf of bread, evidently bought in Berlin. Another amusing incident occurred in the lobby of the Ukraina hotel, where he was put up and where we recorded the interview with him. A stout elderly prostitute approached Momus and offered to give him an erotic massage at a modest price. Just picture the face of a Scotsman who didn't understand a single word, whose main fear in Moscow was that someone would make off with his laptop!
Momus: They did leave their mark, quite a strong one. My parents came from a very conservative family, where you weren't allowed to go to the cinema, to drink, or to come home later than 10 o'clock. They were Calvinists, and Calvinists are something like the "Al-Qaeda" of the Christian world. Going to church was considered the most interesting way to spend one's leisure time.
Momus: Probably Theodor Adorno, and in particular his book "Minima Moralia" — it's not a philosophical work, it's more like a diary or a blog — an online journal that he wrote between the wars.
Momus: Ever since childhood I've made some sort of quasi-musical sounds, and my father — he had a doctorate in the study of how children acquire language — used to record my speech, sit me down at the piano, ask me to clown around and set the tape recording. Noam Chomsky did similar things; he believed that language develops in children structurally. When I was a teenager, I wanted to be in some pop group; later I decided to go into graphic and industrial design and was planning to enrol at St. Martin's College in London. Once I got there, I was so frightened by the sheer size of the capital that I abruptly changed my mind and enrolled at the university in Aberdeen. I was always composing something, strumming the guitar. Midway through my course I started recording songs and making demo tapes, then sending them off to Edinburgh.
Momus: I'd say I'm engaged in dilettantism, professional dilettantism. I try my hand here and there. In music, for example, I'm interested in surfaces — combinations of meanings and sounds, the textures that form when different layers collide. I don't like pop stars who devote themselves exclusively to music.
Momus: (laughs wearily) When I started performing as Momus in the early '80s, the world was in a frenzy over the problem of AIDS. In the mainstream, the gay community came under fire; even public-service ads spoke of homosexuals disparagingly. It so happened that gays were once again pushed into a kind of forced underground, and I always wanted to associate myself with a minority, with the humiliated and the insulted. The original title of my album "Tender Pervert" was actually "Homosexual." Back then a gay man as a role model was far more interesting than a heterosexual. Now the world's cultural reference points have changed a great deal, and it bothers me a little that people are ceasing to differ from one another. In the '70s there was the ideology of "coming out," when the main act for a gay man or a lesbian was to admit that they were not like everyone else, to become open about their difference. Now it's the opposite: people are trying to prove that they're the same, that gays and lesbians are just like everyone else. People are trying to hide in their normality, and now gays are getting married — incidentally, Zapatero, the new Spanish prime minister, is very keen on introducing a legislative basis for gay marriage…
Momus: …no, he's straight, just a very pro-gay politician. But same-sex marriage is also a form of concealment, of dissolving into normality. It's good, of course, that these issues have been brought before the public, though I'd prefer that people asserted their right to be different within society.
Momus: Ten years ago, in the mid-'90s, on our label we were trying to realise… um… let's say a pre-retro sensuality. Back then everyone was into rock, listening to Judas Priest and other rubbish, whereas we wanted to present ourselves as something opposite — clean and very British. At that time many people were on heroin, or pretended to be taking heroin, while we, in that situation, just wanted to drink tea.
Momus: I don't know… some people think the real '80s were more interesting than what is now being made about that era. Others are convinced that everything is much better now. That's not my Tao of music. I'm more interested in what the magazine RE/Search produced with its compilation "Incredibly Strange Music," which featured Perrey-Kingsley, some funny covers of musique concrète, Georges Brassens singing reggae…
Momus: Well, that's how it always happens; those are the laws by which all processes develop.
Momus: My favourite is "cute formalism," which applies to your Cheburashka and to the whole Japanese sensibility. It's a conceptual vision of the world through the prism of silliness, a deliberate simplification of situations, a naive way of being. My theory is that in the West formalism was tied to the heaviness of urban life. Recall Dickens, Dostoevsky, who turned the city into the very form of their narration. In Japan, where a safe, closed society has taken shape, formalism is something childlike and friendly.
Momus: In my essay on "cute formalism" I wrote about ostranenie — a term invented by Shklovsky — a state that makes things appear strange. And this method works wonderfully in closed societies. People who live uncomfortably, whose world resembles a video game, won't play frightening games, and conversely — with a safe life they'll strive towards the scariest virtual realities. And I thought that Russia, a country known for its troubled life, at least in the '90s, when a mass of crimes were committed and the economic level was low, when people were lonely and unhappy, was least of all suited to "cute formalism." I was very surprised when Timofey (Timofey Ovsenny, a Moscow club promoter who throws so-called "Cheburashka parties," with whom Momus corresponds by e-mail — F.M.'s note) told me about his movement. It means that Russia is becoming a more peaceful, even innocent country.
Momus: I often travelled to Tokyo because my girlfriend was studying there (later Momus's wife — the singer Kahimi Karie — F.M.'s note), but I spent most of my time in New York. Then September 11th happened, and life changed a great deal — people became sad, the city was in a hopeless state, so I decided to move to Japan. There I lived as a tourist, on a tourist visa. To understand Japan, the main thing is: don't watch Sofia Coppola's film "Lost in Translation."
Momus: She betrayed many things — visual culture, her husband, Japan; she betrayed all the secondary characters in that world. Her vision of Tokyo doesn't strike me as original. She laughs along with everyone at the short stature of the Japanese.
Momus: Yes, perhaps acclimatisation and the state after an abrupt change of time zones is a form of ostranenie.
Momus: Yes, there's a lot that's strange in nature.
Momus: What I saw from the taxi window struck me as very interesting. Majestic architecture with hints of the Asiatic. I like this fantastical element; it makes Moscow resemble a development of Japanese love hotels. They stand in clusters of 20 buildings and are heavily decorated. When the Japanese see buildings like these in Moscow, they're probably thinking hard about sex. (looking around) It's understandable, really — just how many prostitutes are there in this bar?
Momus: In this artificiality it is very comparable to love hotels. Although in the West, and here with you, these things are taken seriously, whereas in Japan such spaces are like a game.
Momus: A mix of ritual and game. They have this concept of "kepu," sex-friends — it's like shopping, when you look them over, assess their merits, choose a partner, decide whether to take them or not. I like Takashi Murakami's term "superflat." According to his idea, Japan is built on a flat perception; everything exists on one level — entertainment, mass culture, television, painting, cinema, theatre. High culture isn't needed there. Sublime in Japanese means amusing. I'm a bit tired, you know (Momus keeps slumping over; in four hours he has to fly to Izhevsk — F.M.)
Momus: I really do have a rather serious infectious disease; the infection happened because of dirty water. I didn't treat it for a long time, everything started to double, and I got worse and worse. Then I went through a heap of operations. At one point I began having terrible hallucinations: it seemed to me that a woman was growing out of my eye, and I was looking at the world with three eyes — hers and my one. Now the disease seems to have been halted. Some people fall into depression over such a thing; I didn't.