Dirty Forums - Karl's reading & poetic influences

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Karl's reading & poetic influences

Hello dirties,

I would like to collect here all the informations and quotes we have from Karl in which he talks about the pieces of literature or poetry that had an influence on his life or his work.

Please add the quote/source if you have it.

Here's what I got so far:

About his lyrics: (specially in Born Slippy)

Quote:

Rick told me that I was going to have to rethink all the crap I was writing in the 80s as it wouldn't work any more," explains Hyde. "So I used to write lists of things that were passing as we drove across America on our tour bus. Then I read Motel Chronicles, which had no beginning or end, and realised that Sam Shepard had done essentially the same thing. Then I heard Lou Reed singing in a conversational New York accent about everyday life. So I sat down in a cafe in London and wrote what I heard and saw. The lyrics became fragments; impressions of a moment that are not sequential. Consequently I'm certainly not precious about my songs: you can take any clutch of these fragments and reassemble them, as Rick frequently does.

(from the Guardian)

Quote:

D&C: Your poetry reminds me of a word-clash between Ginsberg and Mark E. Smith.
Karl Hyde: Mark E. Smith is totally wicked. He's dreadful live, but when I hear him on record, I think he's really amazing. I'm inspired by people like Sam Shepherd. He's written this book Motel Chronicles, where he'd wake up looking at a radiator after a night out in a bar - all those little snippets, those little moments. And then I like the way John Cage takes disparate words, but once you've started putting them together, they have a meaning, they have a collision.

(from Crackville)

Exhaustively, it could be also interesting to post the pieces of other forms of art (photography, cinema, painting, ...) that influenced him as well.

Re: Karl's reading & poetic influences

There's this thread concerning the origins of the Moon in Water lyrics, in case that's of interest (I happened to be hunting for it just the other day).

Re: Karl's reading & poetic influences

Yep, very interesting indeed. Thanks for sharing.
Digging into old threads is a great start, here I found a few sources of inspiration for the song Caliban's Dream:

Quote:

Smith told how the brief for the piece was given: "Frank [(Cottrell-Boyce), the opening ceremony's writer] and Danny [(Boyle), its creative director] put forward beautiful, transcendental poems by people like WH Auden, Thomas Nash, Philip Larkin. They set the tone for Caliban's Dream. Very early on Danny encouraged me not to think in terms of "Eye of the Tiger" for the final stages; we weren't looking for anything testosterone-fuelled. Those poetic ideas that we had talked about initially just seemed so beautiful; we wanted to draw them in to the story of the torch. Karl [(Hyde), Smith's partner in Underworld] spent a long time working with those words to make them flow, helping avoid all the possible cliches we could fall prey to."[2]

(from wiki)