The new album David Candy Play Power from Ian Svenonius may confuse a couple of people. Previously, the hirsute singer has been noted for the way he tempered the primal showmanship of a James Brown or a Little Richard to a Marxist screed and postpunk, pro-feminist sensibilities in his groups Nation of Ulysses and the Make-Up. Indeed, Ulysses' 1991 album 13 Point Program to Destroy America is essential listening for anyone claiming to be into punk even now, especially now. Wear your hickey as a badge of pride, indeed.
The Make-Up, meanwhile, chanced across perfection with their debut Yeh Yeh album, Destination: Love:Live! At Cold Rice, a hiccupping, taut burst of energy and deconstruction that would have made early Pere Ubu proud. Realizing this, the group have since made the same record over and over. Time to move on.
David Candy Play Power is a concept album. Its sound falls firmly within European label Siesta's template: lush and orchestrated, it's bachelor-pad easy listening music full of laid-back 70s Cinemascope imaginings, bongos and keyboards, with an atmospheric cover of Komeda's lullaby from Rosemary's Baby thrown in for good measure. The key figure here is eccentric English svengali Mike Alway, the man behind a whole slew of kooky and dreamy releases on Cherry Red, El and Siesta records. There are no Ulysses rants here, or sharp Cupid Car Club riffs. This is elegant, refined music, appropriate accompaniment for grooming a Burt Reynolds 'tache or reading Leo Buscaglia. Heard Death by Chocolate yet? Imagine the Marine Girls transported by a legion of Laura Ingalls Wilder fans. That's what David Candy sounds like, unsurprisingly, since Alway is the DbC main man. Time to ask Mr. Svenonius a few questions.
Who is David Candy and why does he play power?
David Candy is an esthetic construct of Mike Alway and me. He's into collaboration and sub-vision, influenced by Fellini, the film The Singer Not the Song and maybe Lindsay Anderson's If?. He's an unreal figure, a player in somebody else's film. Alway's template of pop is fascinating for me because it dispenses with the idea of democracy that has caused so much mediocrity in rock 'n' roll. In a sense, every rock 'n' roll band has done that by trying to live on these parameters set up by the Beatles and the Stooges, but they're not being very smart about it. David Candy Play Power is taking a filmic soundtrack to a logical extreme.
Explain to your American audience precisely who Mike Alway is.
Mike is an enigmatic character. He's got a long and venerated history. He's a discreetly infamous producer of a series of surreal pop fantasy records that typically feature fake groups and fake people. The less said about them, the better. Their power stems from their understatement, their mystery.
What are you thinking of when your lips touch the microphone: making love, revolution or librarians?
I've been thinking about how my teeth are chipping away into tiny little stumps. My teeth are evaporating. It's really horrible. Making librarians. What I want to make is revisionist historians. I want to be the Joseph Stalin of rock 'n' roll.
David Candy is concerned with differing versions of history.
Some people fixate on traumatic situations [from] childhood and some people obliterate them, so everyone has their own reading of history. It's like if there's a fistfight, the reportage is so strange. For example, Please Kill Me is such a huge piece of revisionism it's bullshit. Some guy feels that New York punk had been given short shrift by historians, which is true, but he doesn't like disco or anything, just his own music, so he writes Suicide out of the history and all he does is talk about Iggy Pop and Dee Dee's sexual exploits. History is always going to be a very subjective vision. It's the Marxist truism that history is bunk. That's almost what the artist's job is, to fight the official version of history that culture propagates. The key to controlling the world is culture, more than military force. The reason America won the Cold War was because of Hollywood and rock 'n' roll. We were able to control history so Russian culture didn't come over here.
Here are some lines from "Diary of A Genius" I'd like you to comment on. "Dear Diary: have you registered to vote?? Question: if something happens and no one speaks about it, did it occur? Answer?"
It's a Schopenhauerian lament on the lack of free will. Everything in the song is talking about how David Candy is just flotsam on the sea of circumstance. What matters isn't what happens but a section of what happens. For example, we're continually living out all these conceits of the 60s generation's role in culture, and it's been examined and reexamined so often that everyone from back then genuinely believes they all liked and experienced Jimi Hendrix and Woodstock, even if they really liked the Fugs. Apocalypse Now rehabilitated Vietnam under the guise of being a liberal rock 'n' roll movie, yet it echoed the same sentiments that Nixon had about Vietnam, with a Doors soundtrack. All the myths are still present. If Russia had been able to make a film about Afghanistan, they would have had a better version. I'm upset at the revision of history, and it's the artist's job to fight that.
Right?
British imperialism is the greatest example of that, the way it made it look like the British Empire was really a civilizing thing for the world, whereas anything Spain or Germany did was by horrible murderers. Britain controlled history through John Gielgud and the Beatles. If it weren't for the Beatles maybe England would have turned into Portugal and ultimately become this shell of an imperial country whose economy had been stripped from it by America. Instead, the Beatles rehabilitated it. That's why the British music industry still clings on to that whole ethos, with this incredible vested interest in making Oasis and their music relevant.
I am not David Candy. He is a ne'er-do-well. He's the dark American. He's something that didn't exist 30 years ago. Americans used to be light and fluffy, they never used to be melancholy, but now we have the weight of our burden.
Did you conceive David Candy as a reaction against the Make-Up?
Not at all, but it is very different. In a sense, it's a continuation, releasing and refuting the idea of authenticity as a god. All rock 'n' roll people are hung up with this idea of authenticity, the blues and punk rock in particular are hung up on that?which is funny after punk began as the death of authenticity. In a sense, the Make-Up was totally inauthentic. Not to say we weren't truthful, because we were, but we were non-essentialists. Little Richard is the template that the rockers should be following, not Johnny Thunders.