BAND OF HOLY JOY

Immensely so... we found soulmates who expressed an equal desire to make music / sound / visuals that existed outside of the tired artistic formulas and musical constraints of the time... but whereas TD were very proactive, political, physically expressive... we were more personal, inward looking, poetic, fragile... we shared the same anger and passion about life and existence though and an ideal of creating beauty out of junk and finding form in the wasteland around us, hence the junkyard instruments for them, and the junkshop instruments for us

Yeah i guess it pretty much derailed all the hard work we had put in over the years preceding it, but you know, we were never ever going to be a solid commercial proposition anyway, despite what a lot of people at the time thought, so Rough Trade or not I always sensed we were two weeks away from disaster and ignominy and we'd be sent back packing to the wilderness we came from. In hindsight it could have been a great thing and brought us back to our more hardened creative roots... it didn't though, we were on a path to pop by that time, not my favourite era personally but we had some awesome adventures abroad...

Britain first, England specifically, as in Blake's hymn. Middle East second, with Palestine in mind and all the horrors there absolutely, and then a global thing third, WE ARE ALL SCORCHED JERUSALEM

I don't know, it's like a bad drug, i honestly wish i could kick it and move on...

Probably by never thinking that i'm presenting my songs to indie music fans... though i'm grateful that they listen. I really don't know, what i do understand and i'm grateful for is that the core practice of what i feel and write hasn't really changed over the past forty years, but it still manages to take stock of a changing world around us... also, have i changed, loads? i've had a straight job for twenty years or so, and just the nature of that, in terms of general humanity has coloured my outlook somewhat, I'm not as angry or hungry as i was back then, so there is that too... so actually, maybe i'm on course still and in tune with the ageing indie music fan...

Ha, here we are again, I just can't kick the punk... In this case, if you listen to the show you will hear that there is no punk there at all... it's a soundscape show with text by poets and actors, but very noisy, sometimes ugly, oftten beautiful gristley sounds going on... the name Bad Punk just sounds good, it's an Oxymoron... what is a Bad Punk? How can Punk by definition be Bad, when the word itself is the very meaning of bad. It just sounds great when you say it, come on say it after me BAD PUNK, BAD PUNK, BAD PUNK....

Wow, well, we could be here all day, it's still pretty vivid. We toured twice... once pre perestroika in the depths of winter when we flew everywhere and once in summer post perstroika when we took trains everywhere. Both were beautiful mad extreme experiences. I guess the very first night of the winter tour in Vilnius, who were in the middle of their liberation struggle, walking on stage and giving Russia the finger by way of introduction, as you do, to kick off the night in a certain raucous style, and then the very last night of the summer tour, again in Vilnius where because of our pro liberation stance at a crucial moment, we were booked into the Opera House and treat to a proper hero's welcome, it was very much a moment! The best thing i brought back from one of the tours though was a cassette tape of recordings by the great punk folk poet singer Alexander Baschlachev, who Frank, you should release on VOD. His music sticks with me to this day, and i still have the cassette

That's a difficult question to answer because the process is quite intuitive. I think of the projections as another instrument rather than simply a backdrop, helping to create an atmosphere that draws the audience more deeply into the performance. To prepare, I listen to the music and reflect on how it makes me feel and what images or textures it evokes. Johny's performance is highly expressive, so the projections need to work with that energy - sometimes heightening the tension, other times pulling back to create space for the performance to breathe.

Yes, not always, but generally, yes... and more so recently

They are both exactly the same thing. A stage, a room, your thoughts, your intentions, your expression, your energy, your means of communication...

It has had spells of being more professional, it got very straight for a while, straighter than i would have liked, I once had to sack all three members of an iteration of the band because they confessed to liking Sting. That was just a bridge too far that needed burning fast. For VOD fest we are staying as true as possible to the very first cassette tapes, absolutely minimal, one Roland String Syth, One moog type synth, a mouth organ, some shakers, a vocal and some drum beats... so no junkshop instruments i'm afraid, but on the plus side, no Sting-ish guitar nonsense

Well... maybe we will trade in some light industry on the night

The odd one out is always where we wish to be, but, well, let's see, all the songs are about the trials and tribulations of human existence when it comes down to it, we are very much screaming from the same dirty tattered hymn book, but in the same way we used to complement Test Dept, we will stand and make our case here... and besides i think you are doing that bill of industrial and noise acts a disservice here, also Lydia Lunch doing Suicide... both a major, major fucking influence on Holy Joy then and Holy Joy still... let's have it!

This would be a long boring answer... You never think of these things rationally at the time, but you always follow your instincts and are looking for change and progression, I guess it was just circumstance and people we found ourselves around... we got obsessed with pop music, that became a quest to play the instruments better, that soom morphed into a hunger for some kind of success, and we were touring loads and got more inward and what have you, so the song writing changed. The one saving grace personally is that i'm not and never will be a great conventional singer, so you know, that, and Karel's prodigous heroin habit and his anti violin stylings always put the mockers on any real chance of the band sustaining both melody and success.

He was brilliant, and absolutely out of it. He coated our playing in pure noise and we loved it and were looking forward to some wild weeks working with him. Rough Trade hated it though and we got a slap on the wrist for wasting ten thousand pound and sent meekly back to Nick Tauber to make a proper decent record. Martin died a few weeks later, and all of us, we always regret that we couldn't have made the whole of Positively Spooked with him.

We had a really good manager at the time Nick Hobbs who guided us and protected us. There was a break up full of poison and recrimination at some point and everyone went off to live other lives and i felt a bit lost and still very much holding this torch, which I still do. It was the nineties though by then and things were beautiful free and wild, so i took myself off with a box of dance records and just played in fields in Europe and wrote a few plays and what have you. Holy Joy eventually reconvened and i love it more now than I did even then. I've been with James Peter and Inga for twenty years now with Bill always on the fringes of the action, we've made something like forty records, our radio show on resonance, Bad Punk has been solid for 24 years. I'm a very lucky fucker...

I'd like to say yes, but at the time we were so young and mad and full of ourselves, we just brought the circus to town without really acknowledging what was really going down in the places we were partying through. I later became friendly with Art Troitsky though and started thinking more seriously about the place, and as i have said previously i brought back that great Baschlachev tape which has inspired me ever since

I love Soviet rock from that period, Kino, Aquarius, DDT etc

I have a friend whose mother was assassinated around the time we were there and who has lived in the UK ever since and a good pal who I grew up with, Howard, who played guitar on those tours now lives in Kyiv, so current issues are always on my mind...

By taking the mood and the feel rather than any didactic means, and also outright theft rendered wholly new and original by devious Burroughsian cut up methodolgy

The personal will always be political for us, the outsiders and the losers always where we are

Beatitude - and the endless search for that beatitude

Very same answer - Beatitude - and the endless search for that beatitude

Fuck, where do we even begin? Anger is absolutely still the engine, though deployed differently maybe with age and experience under the belt. From Thatcher onwards, every single one...