It was sometime back in September 2018 that Nick Soulsby got in touch to tell me about a book he’d been working on. The book, “Swans, Sacrifice and Transcendence. The Oral History” (as reviewed here) is a remarkable achievement. A painstakingly researched and sequenced collection of interviews, it charts the tumultuous history of a band that has proved to be one of the most influential and thought-provoking acts of its time.
Quite aside from the book being fascinating in its own right, I was more than a little curious about the process of producing such a work, so, when Nick agreed to an interview, I was not only excited but also a touch daunted as I’ve had few opportunities to interview authors and it is by no means certain ground. Fortunately, Nick is a courteous and eloquent interviewee (as anyone who has read his work might well expect), and I was happy to find that we shared a great deal in common musically, both of us having grown up on a diet of US alternative, punk and no wave.
Unfortunately, for reasons that were entirely my own fault, the interview has long languished in the SonicAbuse vaults predominantly finished but unedited. Nick has subsequently written and released “Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over: A Companion To The Film By Beth B”, a highly recommended text that once again shows his passion for that fascinating period in American music that ran from the 1980s into the late 1990s.
Nevertheless, this fascinating interview serves, for me at least, as a wonderful addendum to an enthralling book, and Nick’s anecdotes regarding his experiences in putting it all together, provide a clear insight into the challenging, yet exciting world of music journalism. Offered with an apology for the monumental delay, read on and meet Nick Soulsby.
I’m very interested in your musical background because it seems that your musical journey, (certainly in terms of the books you’ve written), very much mirrors my own – I mean, one of the first records I bought was In Utero, which changed my world to some degree…
Same here!
…and I remember poring over the liner notes, getting into Sonic Youth as a result and then, from there, I found all sorts of other music and eventually ended up with Swans’ Soundtracks For The Blind, which had a huge influence on me. It seems like you followed a similar journey…
You’re not me are you? Yeah, that sounds like the same journey. I heard Nevermind and Bleach first, but In utero was the first CD album that I owned, oddly. That’s not even true – it was a cassette album back in ’93 and it was the first album that came out while I was a fan. Nevermind had been out a year before I knew who the band were. I just received a taped cassette from an older guy at school, with Bleach on one side, two Manic Street Preachers’ songs and Nevermind on the other. So, that’s how it started.
Obviously, listening to Nirvana, you hear the name Sonic Youth at some point and they opened up a lot of horizons for sure. I ended up looking back at No Wave and the early US punk scene. It turned me into a total Americana-phile, my tastes are ridiculously American, or were for a long period of time and, at a certain point, the name Swans just came up.
I think what you said about liner notes – the liner notes for the Screaming Fields of Sonic Love compilation, on Blast First – it had a whole bunch of tour posters on it with the name Swans and it’s a great mysterious name, so you couldn’t help but look. So, a strange introduction to Swans.
The first thing I got by them was a Feel Good Now vinyl bootleg – a semi-official record and a really shadowy thing to listen to! All these shrieking crowd noises and echoing space – booming songs that appear to being played in a different room! And Jarboe or Michael talking in the middle of it and Michael saying “I give you permission to get your money back – go on, I dare you! My guarantee – you can get your money back, just go away!” So, that enthralled me and then the next thing I think I got was Swans Are Dead – another live record, which I loved. And that led me to Soundtracks For The Blind and that was it – a strange way to start, but that was my musical journey.
Before we get to the writing – I remember the whole tape copying thing and I had friends who copied me all sorts of stuff, but I also remember that it was really difficult to get a lot of those American releases here in the UK in that sort of pre-internet age. I remember getting a copy of Sonic Death in some charity shop and I got the oddest look when I bought it and was then really confused when I got it home and it’s just an hour of tuning and feedback! But it was so cool finding this stuff – was it the same for you?
Yeah. I’ve never been someone who wants the picture disc version or whatever – I couldn’t care less. But if it’s music on a different format that I haven’t heard, that’s my fixation. If I like a band, I just tunnel deeper to the point of extinction. So, my experience was kind of like yours – picking stuff up in second hand record shops. I got the Amnesia / love of life 12” in a record shop on my only ever visit to Sheffield which, again, is like listening to a totally different version of Swans, so that was an interesting early encounter. It’s like finding gold dust!
I used to troop down to London with a scrap of paper with band or artist names and I’d know that, before closing time, I’d have time to do Camden (I’d have breakfast in this Mexican place by Chalk Farm), get down to Soho; down to that big record shop in Croydon, and that would give me just enough time to get back to one of my previous locations if I changed my mind. So, I’d do that for a day, trooping around London for hours and ordering stuff from weird locations around the world.
I didn’t go fanatically for that sort of thing, though, until I went to University and got my student loan – I’d never had that sort of money before. I was utterly poorly behaved and basically blew it all on records! I started to use the early internet and Young God records was always really good compared to other bands. You could actually get Swans stuff from them. That was pretty helpful because all the reissues were coming out at that point. But Sonic Youth stuff, yeah, it took me years to track that stuff down.
How did you get into actually writing about it – it seems a challenging, daunting task to even approach some of these artists?
Do you know the 331/3 book series?
Yeah…
Well, they’d been bought and there was basically an open call for proposals and I just got that kind of “Oh, I could do that!” kind of urge. It was the twentieth anniversary of Incesticide and it had never been covered, and I just carried a note pad around and was tapping stuff into emails and sending them to myself and, before I knew it, I had this vast quantity of material and I knew where I wanted to go so, the next thing to do was to approach certain people, and I found that, as long as I was nice about it, it kind of got somewhere.
I think the first people I ever wrote to were Bruce Pavitt and Jack Endino and they were very charming about it. There was also the gentleman who produced some of the radio session material for Nirvana and they all responded and that’s where it started. It reached a different level…
However, I totally failed the proposal thing! I had no history as a writer, but the feedback was encouraging. They said “look, you obviously know your stuff, the only reason we’d go with someone else is that you’re up against people with twenty years’ experience in the industry…” I knew what the deadline was – Dec 12th was the anniversary – so that gave me eight or nine months. I had twenty thousand words in note form anyway and I knew what each section should look like, so I just went with it.
I realised no one would take a chance on me if they didn’t know I existed, so that led to me starting the blog which became this fixational outpouring of material. There’s something like 600 pages up there now and I ended up writing about a million words or something really crazy on that site – just really long pieces and spreadsheet analysis of Nirvana performance patterns. Which songs did they use in the set list? How many times? How many houses did Kurt Cobain live in… just really, really obsessive geek stuff.
I did a spreadsheet analysing the bands Nirvana played with – how many times in how many years; were there gaps or what… and that led to me thinking that it would be cool to find out who some of these bands are, because they all have really wicked names like Swaziland white band – that was a good one – or Nisqually Delta Podunk Nightmare – and some of these bands were just never heard of again. I used the power of the internet to basically stalk people and track them down. And the more I did it, the more unashamed I became and, as long as I was nice to people and not pushy… you know, I’d say that I’d be curious to hear their story and I put a lot of work into the questions to make sure they were as non-generic as possible (because that was the only other way I had of showing my seriousness to people) – it became this nightly process – go home, write a bunch of questions; Google-hunt people, Facebook-hunt people.
I remember, I called a surgery up in, I don’t know, Oregon or somewhere and I asked if this lady worked there and if I could leave my email address and I explained that she’d been in this punk band called Caustic Soda and I got an email from her the next day saying that she’d never told anyone and that her co-workers thought she was so cool because she had become this crazy lady who used to be in a punk band!
It was lovely stuff and you just got used to meeting interesting people and trying to be nice to them. That got me an agent and a publisher. Another publisher offered me another Nirvana book on the basis that they couldn’t take the one I was doing and I now had a record as someone who did this kind of thing. And on it went!
I’m really glad you mentioned that thing about working really hard to write good questions, because it’s really hard, I think, to write non-generic questions, particularly for artists who do interviews regularly. I think it’s an interesting process you go through to do the research and find things that can go off at a tangent to the usual line of questioning – certainly I found my first few terrifying! Did you find that?
It is. I know a writer in North-west America and she’s a major veteran, she’s won her spurs and she says that Michael Gira is the only interviewee who’s ever made her cry and, as much as I love her, I think what must have happened is that she didn’t have any great interest in Swans and he was probably in a foul mood and if your questions aren’t serious, he won’t take you seriously and I think that’s what must have happened (because she won’t tell me!)
Do you know the band girl trouble? They were one of the first bands I reached out to interview and I basically made an error when I didn’t realise they were still together and that was basically the end of that! So, that convinced me that I needed to put the work in, and I never let that happen again.
I’ve always been intrigued as to how bands take the questions. I have a long-winded style of writing and the questions I’ll give them can go a number of ways and sometimes I’ll need additional questions… I moved from doing interviews over email to doing it over the phone because email – you just don’t get enough blood and, also, you can control the narrative far too much. It made it far too easy to send people a certain way and it’s nicer to let things be a lot freer. On the phone, people can take things the way they want and online that just didn’t happen. If I needed to fill a hole, then I’d ask the question, they’d try to answer that, and I’d have material on that topic. I found it easier to be on the phone and if they thought it not relevant they’d speak about something else instead.
So, fear… not really. I had a couple of people shout at me, but not many. Nirvana’s third drummer is quite a sensitive guy and Cobain always portrayed him as this kind of mustachioed redneck with a violent temper and drunken tendencies, which is a little unfair on this guy, and he was no more of a delinquent than Cobain was at that time; but Kurt wrote about him in his diaries and it’s in the band’s official biography and the guy is sensitive about that and isn’t very comfortable speaking, but I know there’s something going on because I woke up one morning to find this spew of swearwords on my email and then he was fine again. I assume he was just pissed!
Oddly enough, the only other guy to ever really go for me was a guy from that same town! I was doing a music compilation for Soul Jazz and that guy has a recording by Nirvana’s first drummer’s other band and yeah, that guy started shouting that he was going to sue Soul Jazz for no reason and, again, he’d just go hot and cold. I think it’s just that town.
I’ve been lucky, I’ve not been shouted at yet. I’ve had conversation hijacked – I interviewed Jaz from Killing Joke and he left me under no illusion as to who was in charge of that discussion, but I got the impression he was enjoying himself and it was really interesting nonetheless.
So, you just extracted what you could from what was left?
No, in his case, I left it untouched because I promised I would– but that sort of pre-empts my next question, which is that inevitably the writer controls the narrative in the sense that what you choose to print reflects your view – how did you work with and shape the material in order to tell the Swans’ story?
I’m very aware that it can be a controlled narrative but I don’t think I’ve come across a situation where I haven’t been able to let two voices co-exist. If two people disagree, I just put them both up because usually those disagreements are interesting. I start with cleaning up all the material, so I have all these individual transcript files – the masters and I make sure I keep them because I don’t want them to change. The way I work with the interviewees for the books is that, once I’ve finished transcribing, I send them the finished transcript because that way they can look at it and tell me if there’s anything they want to delete, change or if there’s an error (and, of course, there are errors because I’m moving so fast that I’ll put in other words by mistake). So, that reassures me that they are comfortable with what I’m working on. Once I’ve got that back, what I do with it is up to me, they don’t get an editorial on the book but I don’t want them to be dissatisfied, get cold feet or pull out. I want them to feel a part of it, so they do see the transcript. That gives me that reassurance.
I don’t put the manuscript together until the last four or five weeks, where I just stop sleeping. I’m not kidding, my normal bedtime is about two, in the last few weeks it becomes three and in the last week or two it’s four and suddenly I’m sleeping from five until seven-thirty and things would happen, like my sense of hunger just disappears and I’d find sitting in pubs or public spaces very odd, because I’d just feel so detached from what people were saying. I’d feel very floaty for a bit because my brain was full to the brim with all these transcripts.
Anyway, I simply take the transcripts and highlight them – what was effective, powerful; what had to be there… I mean, a lot of the stuff you just wouldn’t want to read because it’s just generic: “Oh, I was driving across the country and I heard this song on the radio and I thought hmmm I really like this song…” – the general conversational nothings. So, I highlight the sections I want, take a giant word file which I structure into the chapters and move everything from the transcripts into this, so they’re generally in order, but I’ve got this mass of language. Then I start to hone that down, using the transcript to check that I’ve got the context right and I’ve not got them commenting on something they weren’t commenting on in the first place. So, honing is important because I’d rather have another quote in the book than have the word count used up on those horrible little joiner words people put in everywhere. So, I get rid of those, as long as it doesn’t destroy or warp the meaning. I just try to sharpen it, and it’s amazing how much you can remove without removing meaning. I make it clear if I have conjoined a thought, using an ellipsis to show that something’s missing. You can only put so much – the limit is usually about one hundred thousand words and I aim for that and somehow get there. It’s a totally intuitive process and I have no idea what I’m doing – that’s the way to explain it!
But I’ve not had a problem yet. There was one quotation that I wanted. I think it was Larry Mullins talking about having a psychedelic experience watching Swans in 1989 and discovering that all his friends had the same, hallucinogenic experience despite not being on drugs and I got to the end of the book and I knew I really liked the quote, so I had to find the words to put that back in. Then I just keep an eye on how the chapters are evolving, if one chapter is five thousand and the other is twenty-five thousand, there’s probably something wrong. So, I make a point of keeping some balance without overwhelming the flow of the book. Making sure one voice flows to another in an effective way; making people sound sensible as far as possible – that’s the intent.
What you’re describing is very similar to academic practice and I was wondering how far your university degree and experience helped you prepare for this?
It’s funny. I did history at University and, that’s probably where some of this focus on recorded testimony comes from, but not really as far as I remember. My main influence was that I used to run technology conferences. To build the agenda, you had this horrible boot-camp style process where you fought your way through telephone switchboards to reach people within pharmaceutical companies or whatever to see if they’d give you some help. So, I got used to hunting people down via the internet and finding names I could take to the Switchboard, so you had to let go of feeling embarrassed and keep churning this information. And likewise, using spreadsheets to keep track of it all – that comes straight out of my work roles. Now I run a team that focuses on sensibly constructing proposals and, again, that sense of how you order information and put it together… I didn’t realise that it was academic practice to make sure your interviewee always consents until I had a pal at the University of Bristol who said that’s what they do. If they don’t want to be part of it, you cut them out, end of story. I just came to it because it felt respectful and it gave me that level of comfort that people were happy with what I was doing and that I hadn’t misquoted them accidentally. It’s not a job and there’s no money in this, there’s no reason to leave anyone feeling embarrassed or upset. Which is not the same as making sure the truth isn’t there – that’s a different thing altogether. I haven’t felt compromised yet, which isn’t to say I haven’t been, but I haven’t felt it yet.
It’s tempting I suppose, when faced with such a large narrative, to see quotes that could so easily fit into other spaces and to shape the way the story flows into a pre-conceived narrative.
Yeah, I think that’s absolutely true, although I don’t think people are necessarily conscious that they’re doing it. I’ve certainly never done it deliberately in the sense that: “I want to say XYZ, so I’ll ask XYZ and then use it”, partly because I find it pretty boring to go through this kind of intense process and, when it’s done, you’ve only reconfirmed what you thought in the first place. It’s not a very… I think this is a kind of lived in experience and the book is almost an anti climax in that you get a day of “Oh wow! My book’s out!” and then, you know, you kind of move on to the next thing. The pleasure is doing it and I don’t find my voice that interesting where all I’ve done is tell people what I’ve already thought – I’m just not that fussed. It doesn’t mean it’s not there, that certain feelings aren’t reconfirmed.
You can tell that I admire the people I write about, but it doesn’t mean that I blot out the criticism. It’s tricky, but I don’t think I come with an ideological commitment. Partly because it’s just music. I know that sounds really dismissive, but if this was climate change or some really political cause then maybe I’d have more of an inclination to do that. But I don’t, I’m as much on a journey to find out about the artist as the person reading it and, while I’m doing the book, it’s kind of a day to day thing. It’s the eight to nine hours a day, every day for however long it takes me to finish the book and I think that by the time you’ve received so many words from so many people, you scrub your mind clean and it’s very hard to hold on to a pre-conceived notion when you’re been involved in gathering information for that long in that kind of concerted way.
I was accused by people who think that Courtney Love killed Kurt Cobain – they truly hate me – they think I eliminated criticism of Courtney Love from the Nirvana book I did, but I didn’t. The truth is, that it was a book about Nirvana, not Courtney Love. So, it’s not that you can avoid it altogether (and I didn’t), but unless it was a story about Kurt Cobain and the guys in Nirvana that someone witnessed, I just didn’t include it. The only things I didn’t include were a couple of people saying she’s a bitch, and one story about someone’s first encounter with her in LA in the early 80’s.
I guess it’s such a contentious issue, that it’s difficult for people to approach it with anything like objectivity. I tend to avoid that discussion – I grew up on Nirvana, but it’s become so polarised and bitter that I don’t really pay much attention to that discussion.
Yeah, it just becomes an… internet churn machine where fact versus opinion becomes irrelevant and it’s all portrayed as opinion. If you pile up enough half-truth and then use the existence of all these things that are half-true, or nonsense, as evidence that something exists under it then of course you’ll see all sorts of conspiracy. I find it fascinating. Pile up enough nonsense and then use it as proof of something underneath. I guess that kind of shows where I stand, but hell, I could be wrong! But I don’t think I am.
For me, one of the things I really enjoyed about the book is that it gives voice to a part of the world of the Swans that I knew very little about and there doesn’t seem to be a lot out there…
I don’t know if it’s a generational thing, where each generation kind of writes its own history and starts to document itself. There are so many books out there about punk and I only read so much of it because it’s not my generation, whereas that kind of American, 80s scene, and even the UK industrial scene – I was listening to that and it’s interesting to dig back and I think a lot of these scenes are at their most interesting when you’re not sure what they’re going to become. Once people become professional musicians, the truth of it is that it’s not much more interesting than the life of any professional person . I think for some of them it does become record-tour-repeat. I think a touch of that happens with any band, which has fed into this feeling that a lot of music writing is kind of soap-opera, where it’s about the people and the debates and the baggage and it’s hard to get away from that. I try to keep some sort of balance where it’s still about the music and where it comes from and how it’s constructed and what goes into that, rather than being about the human beings around it. It’s a subtle distinction, maybe, but I try to think “is this soap-opera or is it still about the music?” and I try to find the line.
There’s a very big distinction between creative tension, which is inherently interesting where it feeds into the music and there are stories in the book where the band are travelling and Michael and Jarboe aren’t talking and the others are trying to figure out their place in it all, and that’s interesting because that sort of passive-aggressive conflict that fed into the music rather than the somewhat ghoulish interest some publication shave in the fall outs that occur between band members.
That said, people’s lives do feed into music. Swans is a crucial case because Swans is music about emotion, not about chords and song structure. Those things are, of course, there, but the guiding force in the middle is Michael Gira who doesn’t have formal training and the way the songs stretch and the way their structures are formed is a consequence of how it’s making it feel on stage. Does it feel right, does it fit what he’s trying to get out or say. So, it’s impossible not to gut someone and serrate them. At one point Gira got on the phone and, joking, he said he felt like he was on his way to the dentist for another ten hour session of root canal surgery. And immediately, because he’s a very polite man, he said “you know I’m kidding right? It is just a joke!” So, yeah, I knew exactly what he meant. Jarboe, interestingly, is a much more private person, which I found very interesting. There’s this tension – she’s a believer in mystique and limiting the supply of something and keeping things veiled and vague and not being so totally exposed. Gira is the other extreme.
If you’ve grown up following people’s music in that way, it’s difficult to articulate in a personal setting what made them so special.
I don’t want to bore people. If I see someone I’ve written about socially, I want to talk about the world in general and everything in it – I don’t want to just talk about their music or whatever. Finding the time and space to do that… it’s nice when it does happen, but yeah. It’s tricky.
