[negative1]

i: another quite interesting song that also might be a single,
then is, boy boy boy, from the oblivion with bells album,
and i suppose there's also a special story about it, so tell
us about the song boy boy boy

k: interesting isn't it yeah, that larry mullen plays on that,
from u2, we wrote that, and um , rick programmed the drums to
sound like that, and its, its an autobiographical story, i sat
in a shopping mall, near romford, and i'm looking at all the
things going around me, and i'm just writing them down, and
its making me reflect upon when i was kid and stuff that used
to happen at home and then i sort of come back to whats happening
in the shopping mall again, and also about a kind of journey,
of you know, recovery and all of that thing that they , that one
goes through when you put drugs and drink down, and as you have
to, do to live to be an old person, and as you said
quite rightly earlier on, and we had this piece of music, and we
really really really really liked it, and rick suggested that we
give larry a call, cause he's been a supporter of the band since
the first album, and uh he was very enthusiastic about doing something
on the record, and i did some playing on this track, i think he
did a remix for it as well, larry's a really good bloke, a really
good bloke, but i think, like any drummer, probably doesn't get
to do the amount of things that the singer gets to do, you know,
so its really nice to be working with him,


i: um, you've recorded the album oblivion with bells, in the
legendary abbey road studio where also the beatles have
recorded and other bands, why uh did you go there, and
was it something special that you also wanted to record in there,
in abbey road studios then?

k: well most of it we recorded all over the place, on our
laptops, in our home studios, lemonworld, our main studio
in essex , some of it we recorded at abbey road, because
we had such a good time putting the soundtrack to breaking
and entering, with gabriel yared there, um we wanted to
go back to abbey road, our first group freur recorded
one track in abbey road, in the old beatles studio, in fact
i think we were one of the last groups to use the old desk,
and we hadn't been back since 82, when gabriel got us to
go back and record there, in that fantastic studio, we just
had to go back , um so we had a great time


i: you've also used a lot of live instrumentation on oblivion
with bells, thats also something thats not the usual way
uh so uh why that?


k: yeah, we always play a lot of live instruments , more than
people actually think, because we actually treat a lot of the
instruments , but yeah largely i would think that after our
experience with working with gabriel yared on the breaking
and entering sountrack, uh we three , gabriel rick and i
encouraged each other to play our traditional instruments,
gabriel was a very fine piano jazz player, very fine, and
um so we formed an improvising trio , i was playing a lot
of guitar, of all different sort, classical, flamenco,
whatever, rick was playing piano, and keyboards and gabriel
was playing piano and keyboards, that kind of inspired us
to carry on doing that, and of course, i love ricks keyboard
playing, i absolutely love his piano playing, and he kept
encouraging me to play guitar, so we just carried on doing
that


i: you've used a lot of vocoder stuff on the album, and uh
yeah the vocoder has become your best friend, so to say, karl,
um and vocoder is a very useful instrument or why so much vocoder
on the album?


k: we always used vocoders, always, we've got these very old
roland vocoders that we use, cos they have that very particular
sound, we've tried lots of different ones, but there were these
ones that we've got, we've got three of them, cos they're very
old and you know, once they break, its very hard to get them
fixed, they have to be sent off to a little old man (laughs)
i kid you not, its this little old man in London, who's the
only man in Britain that can fix them, and so the go off ,
and the two of them always travel on the road with us, one of
them stays in the studio so we vocode from the guitar, we use
them, its a sound we've always loved, maybe its from Kraftwerk
i don't know, we love Kraftwerk, so we've always loved that
in laurie anderson, and superman, what an legendary piece of
work that was amazing


i: you also use repetition as a kind of uh yeah, a musical idea
in your songs, yeah and there's a recurring theme of this

K: yeah, it comes from funk, it comes from funk, really loving funk,
and sly and family stone, james brown, parliament, funkadelic, you know
the great funk bands, where the guitarist plays a loop over and over
and over again, and it doesn't change, it keeps repeating so, the
energy keeps growing, the bass player and the drummer keep playing
in loops, and they're all playing in loops, and over the top of that,
other instrumentalists and singers freeform and they move around on
top of that, and then when Kraftwerk started to do that, where they've
got the machine doing the repetitive beats, and the humans moving
about over the top of it, we got so excited about that, there's
something about in the kinetic energy between the precision of the
machine and the human that plays over the top of it,i mean theres
a guitarist, its fantastic to play over the top of a machine,
because its bang on the beat, you can drift about, but keep coming
back to the beat, i did a lot of session work in the early eighties,
a very famous drummer was on one of those sessions, in california,
and i nearly got sacked from the session, i'm not going to, i'm not
going to say who it was but i i nearly got sacked from the session,
because the guy said to me, um you're playing out of time, and i'm
playing rhythm guitar since i've been ten years old, you know, thats
what i grew up playing rhythm and funk, you're playing out of time
and i'm like, i don't think so, i don't think so, and they were
discussing in the control room , sacking me from the session,
and i said, look i'm bored, give me a drum machine and i'll just
jam out in the studio, and they listened to me jamming to the drum
machine, and it was smack on, cos i had grown up playing to drum
machines, and they got me back in the studio and said its the drummer,
and i went, i know its the drummer, i know its the drummer you know,
its hard to work with drummers for me now, drummers have a natural
ebb and flow, which a lot of people find beautiful, i find it really
hard because i love to work to a machine, cos i'm not very good at
timing sometimes, and it makes me sound good.


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