Message #265585

[Parisot]

And now he’s a politician.                 

There’s a lot more stories like that, but I find it vaguely embarrassing. I don’t behave like that anymore. The most I get up to is too many glasses of wine, like last night.

Despite all of your success, you still seem somewhat like a cult band – the kind of band that people can discover for themselves.

We were on Factory to begin with, and we — not just Factory — were incompetent as well, so we weren’t clever enough to ram [our music] down people’s throats. In a weird way, this backfired in our favour. I think the secret of our longevity is that we make good music. The attitude is, “If you feel like discovering us, take a look,” rather than world domination. You either burn really bright for a short time, or you glow for a very long time, and I think we glow for a very long time. I don’t love being famous; I love music. [Being] a super worldwide famous guy—not like me—just means you can’t do anything. You can’t go out of your hotel room; you can’t go shopping; you can’t go on a plane without someone making a fuss out of you, so probably the only upside is you can get a really good table at a restaurant. I like the way we’ve done things, in a very natural way.

You wrote that in ’93, when you’d been playing to bigger venues than ever, you decided to pull back from the band.

Yeah, I think all of the stress would have made me super-unhappy… After I finish this conversation, I’m going to go up to the swimming pool and lay down by the pool, have a recuperative cocktail, lounge about in the sun, and that’s going to make me happy. You’ve got to learn to observe little things like feeling the wind on your skin or getting out of the city and going for a walk on a beautiful lakeside path, or watching a really good movie or reading a really good book. Of course, other human beings make you happy, but things made out of plastic and glass don’t.

Apart from CDs, sometimes.

[Laughs] That’s just the delivery method. Can I just mention, too, that there will be an album coming out called “Complete Music”; it’s extended and reworked versions of the [“Music Complete”] tracks, and is coming out very soon—not quite sure when. We’ve given [the music] to different mixers, and they’ve chopped it up and rearranged it and stripped it back, so it’s like another take on the original album.

Can you tell me some of the people who were involved?

Erm, I don’t know if I can release that yet. I’ve got to speak to Daniel Miller [head of New Order’s label, Mute] —it’s only a couple people. That’s what’s nice about it as well.

We’d send it off to the mixer, and then he’d send it back and make suggestions; we’d send it back, and we played Internet tennis with the songs. Some of them are radically different, but rather than like a remixer who would write a new set of music, they used the music that we’d already incorporated in the songs, but warped it in a way that was very interesting.
More Mike Doherty.