Jack: Hi, Karl, and hi, Tony, and thank you for talking with me today.
Karl: Hello. A pleasure.
Jack: Okay, so do you guys want to talk about where you came from? You know, your primordial origin story.
Tony: Yeah, so I grew up in small villages around a small town. The town was Northampton. It's not really known... It's known for quality footwear.
Jack: That really reflects in your work.
Tony: [laughs] Yeah, but actually, it's where Bauhaus came from. So that was something kind of interesting. And not so far away from there is Rugby, which is where Spacemen 3 came from. So they were quite a regular fixture in the big circuit there. But basically when I was at school there was a very small group of friends who were kind of like the weirdos, the outcasts, the queers. And we just grouped together for safety, maybe.
Jack: Practical sense.
Tony: Yeah, and so I just had a small group of people like that, and we just all like various different kinds of weird music. There was a very specific moment where there was an art teacher who taught some of my friends. He didn't actually directly teach me, but I think during one dinner break, I can't remember, for some reason he knew I was interested in sound or something like that and he had a record player and he played me Robert Fripp and Brian Eno's No Pussyfooting. And he put the needle on the record and he’s like, "Yeah, it doesn't really sound like much is changing, does it?" And then he skipped over the side of the vinyl and you could hear how much it was developing over the course of that whole piece. It doesn't sound like much now, but my very young brain just exploded. And it's one of those moments where the whole of the universe of sound and music shifts. What is possible, everything totally shifted. And that kind of moment was a really significant moment for me because it made me realize that music and sound could be something so different from what you heard in the pop charts.
Karl: I think in the UK, though, we're very lucky. It's completely different to America because the way that we engage with music was different because the actual bridge between pop music and alternative music, as it was called them, was so narrow you could have Killing Joke on Top of the Pops on daytime television and you would have John Peel as well, which is so central to a lot of independent bands. So it was a very narrow gap. But really here I think it was very almost proto social media, proto Internet. What happened in Manchester one day would be filtered through to every other city in the country within a week. What happened in Birmingham could be sort of felt very, very quickly because the UK is so small. I mean, it's virtually the size of New York State. So things happened a lot more quickly here. And plus we have the music press as well. We had a steeped history. So the difference between pop music, I think the sophistication with pop music, the pop bands getting in the charts, you did have great pop bands who you probably would call alternative, college bands in America, you will get Killing Joke and Joy Division and later on The Smiths and New Order. And a lot of people get into the charts. So there was this blurring, plus we had great TV programs as well. But apart from that, that was it. Often Top of the Pops on a Thursday or maybe Whistle Test or The Tube. There was nothing else, there was literally nothing else. Once they finished, that was it, you're left with your records, where in America was completely different, because we celebrate pop music where you kind of look down on pop music. You can have Strawberry Switchblade against the charts and then she could be playing with Current 93 and Death in June the next or NON or Boyd Rice. You're in touching distance of...
Tony: Yeah, you had Marc Almond releasing Tenement Symphony while he was recording vocals for Coil.
Karl: Yeah, he went from Trevor Horn to Coil. So that was the difference. But I think that comes through. If you have all that and those possibilities here, that's what definitely influenced me.
Tony: But wheeling back to Birmingham, after Northampton I moved to Birmingham to go to a technical college to study audio/visual design because it was the closest thing I could find to sound engineering, which I was interested in. And that was great because I was suddenly with a much larger group of people who had much deeper musical knowledge and just exposed me to so much more amazing music.
Jack: Can you think of anything that stands out for you in terms of stuff that they turned you on to?
Tony: I remember discovering Faust was really significant to me and that still is a cornerstone musical act. I mean, I'd already encountered people like Suicide right before coming to Birmingham because they were name checked by Spacemen 3 in the music presses, stuff like that.
Jack: So this is, just to put it in time, late ‘80s.
Tony: Yeah, this was. I moved up there in '89. And then I realized that I didn't want to be a sound engineer, so I dropped out of college, but I stayed in Birmingham and I was involved with this big group of people who were mostly involved with bands, I would say. And then I feel like I knew about two people who didn't totally hate dance music at that point. It was really ridiculed. Often it's the case where you just haven't heard the good stuff, you know, you need someone to kind of point you in the direction and say, "Hey, this is what you're going to be checking out, this is what's interesting." But yeah, at that time there were, like, two or three other people who didn't completely despise dance music, but that number gradually grew. And I remember listening to John Peel's show and that's where I first heard UR and Jeff Mills and Belgian hoover rave. I had one friend who had a job at the time so he could afford to buy records. [laughter] And then, yeah, this tiny little scene grew. And it grew from the back room of a pub that used to put on punk punk gigs in the red light area of Birmingham. That's kind of where we lived. And so, yeah, we knew a guy who had a tiny little sound system and we'd bought decks and so we just started doing these parties.
Jack: And is that House of God?
Tony: Pre-House of God. House of God began in January of ’93, so we're coming up for 30 years. But there were a few things, there was a night called Third Eye and the first one was actually called Bedlam but they were more like one-off kind of things but the funny thing is that I got involved with doing these events and this scene grew and at this time in England it was a huge sea change. The rave scene exploded and it affected all of society, I think. The way that people related to each other when they went out. I think it bled through into indie music, to bands. Everyone was influenced. Everyone was going out and doing E’s and jumping about.
Jack: By rave culture.
Tony: Yeah, I really think that's the biggest social change that I will ever experience in my lifetime.
Karl: My entrance was maybe slightly different. I actually lived in Birmingham, I actually come from Birmingham.
Jack: You actually grew up in Birmingham.
Karl: Yeah, so basically I grew up literally on the side of the M5, which is a huge motorway, so through my bedroom window I could hear the rumble of the...
Jack: Also very influential to your music. [laughter]
Tony: I grew up within earshot of the M1 motorway.
Jack: So there was a connection.
Karl: That's so weird. I can remember through my bedroom window I could hear these pylons that we have and there were strip lights, it was piss yellow, it's illuminating the darkness that was the Midlands.
Tony: It's the drone, it's the drone.
Karl: It is the drone.
Jack: The drone, yeah.
Tony: I grew up with a constant drone.
Karl: I don't want to sort of paint it as some dystopian thing, but it's certainly nothing anyone in America could imagine.
Jack: Really, in what way?
Karl: It's just the banality of it. At least in the hard, rough areas of America you can go out at 1 a.m. and buy a sandwich.
Jack: Yes.
Karl: Somebody said, it's not that we didn't have any money, there was just fuck-all to do.
Tony: There were three TV channels and they all shut down at, like, 9 p.m.
Karl: It was even too that some of them didn't start until 4 p.m. and then they show the news and that was it. So basically, if you could take your moment then to watch Top of the Pops on a Thursday night and, oh God, you saw The Teardrop Explodes... Even in the late ‘70s it was pretty shit because people have this thing "Oh, the explosion of punk" and everything. The punk explosion didn't really happen nationally and it was very, very localized. It wasn't represented in the charts at all. But you were aware of something. I think how I got into music was an older family friend sort of thing. I think they got me into stuff like Stiff, stuff like Ian Dury, stuff that I thought was punk, things like The Police. But yeah, a lot of that stuff all seemed to come from a very... Even then I knew it came from a major label.
Jack: That's interesting.
Karl: I can't explains it. Only in 1980 when a lot of the independent British labels started to get into the charts there was some authenticity in the music.
Jack: Right, like Mute or Some Bizzare.
Karl: Some Bizzare or 4AD, absolutely, yeah. The music came from a pure place and it was new and you could tell the difference between Soft Cell or Spandau Ballet because you could tell that Soft Cell were out doing ecstasy and drugs and having sex and Spandau Ballet weren't. And that came through. You can't underestimate kids.
Jack: For having a sense.
Karl: Yeah, especially then. It was different then. Things were different and I don't want to sound... But it really, really was different. I was a lot more naive, things were a lot more naive, which was fantastic. That was the main thing, kids were more naive, but in a way more sophisticated as well than they are now. So yeah, that was how I got into music. I think if there was a watershed moment for me where I really stopped being into football and [incomprehensible] it was, even though now it might be sort of a bit trad, when I saw the band Soft Cell perform "Tainted Love" for the first time. It was this time now, it was August 1981. I remember where I was when I watched and it changed everything overnight for me because I was sitting down with my granddad. He and my mum would look at The Stones on Top of the Pops or Ready, Stead, Go as it was then, my younger uncle watched Bowie, it was never [incomprehensible] but I remember it distinctly: he watched it and he watched Marc Almond with make up and eyeliner and he went, "Fuck this." He got up and he never, ever, ever watched TV with me ever again.
Tony: It's not accurate to say half, but, say, half the country saw that and just wanted to kill him and the other half of the country were like, oh my God, there's someone I can identify with, an outsider.
Karl: I mean, of course "Tainted Love" is, like, a wedding song now. And of course they didn't go on to have any of the success in America, but in the UK they did.
Jack: Yeah, that's frankly the only song I know. I mean, it's a huge hit still, it's an FM radio hit.
Karl: But everything that happened after that, it was great... And then through Soft Cell, I found, "Oh, Marc Almond and Dave Ball are working with Genesis P-Orridge, who's that?"
Jack: How soon until you got into Throbbing Gristle? How long do you think it was until from then at that point.
Karl: Basically then I got into Psychic TV; Marc Almond sang a vocal on the song "Guiltless," I think it's on Dreams Less Sweet [ed. it's on Force the Hand of Chance]. So I got into all of that. Then suddenly by default, "Oh, there was this band that they were all in before." But that was later when they re-released all the stuff. So I was quite late into Throbbing Gristle. I didn't get into them until, like, '85 or so when they released all the stuff. And I thought, "Oh wow, this is great." It kind of really made sense. So I saw that in reverse, personally.
Jack: Of course, I feel like now everything is available. Every single "best of" list links you to a YouTube link that is the most epochal music ever made that would be completely unavailable and probably out of print at the time.
Karl: It's like Tony was saying, you make musical connections with people you know, like-minded people, then all of a sudden you start to speak a different language. It's a language your peers don't speak, so then you can't communicate with other people at school. And more importantly, it's a language your parents can't speak. But then all of a sudden, all around that music everything became very, very normal. You would like The Birthday Party or... And that's what you'd like. And it wasn't that it was a million miles away from the mainstream either, because it wasn't. Depeche Mode were flying the flag for Mute and funding Boyd Rice records or NON records and Some Bizzare were funding Einstürzende Neubauten's studio time. Then of course you had Factory and everything that happened with that. And then later of course bands like the British invasion, the second, with The Smiths and The Cure later. I don't know, it was very, very straightforward for us, I think. It wasn't that we're musical geniuses, it was just...
Jack: Well, they can intermingle, they're not mutually exclusive. [laughs]
Karl: Point being, I think it was a lot harder in America to find this music.
Jack: Absolutely.
Karl: And the people I speak to who did find this, who are... At the end of the day, it's like people with tattoos. Now everybody's into Throbbing Gristle. So, yeah, I think it was natural. It was fucking different. It was absolutely different.
Tony: Well, I actually remember how I discovered Coil because that was...
Jack: That's a huge one for you.
Tony: Yeah, a huge one for me. And that was actually before I came to Birmingham. I found a book in my school library. It was called Making Music with Tape Recorders and it was basically like Musique concrète for beginners. But the weird thing is, this was totally in a vacuum because I'd never heard any of that music, so I didn't actually know what it was like. All I knew was what was written in this book that I was reading. I started playing around, I borrowed a 4-track tape recorder, I got hold of an old reel-to-reel and I just made this horrible racket.
Jack: Oh, amazing, if only you could find that.
Tony: Karl actually released this many years later.
Jack: Ah! Well, I have to hear this. Oh, amazing.
Tony: It was a single called Boys School Showers and Swimming Pools.
Jack: Oh my God, I'm making a note of that.
Karl: It's a 7-inch and it's quite upsetting.
Jack: Incredible.
Tony: But I made this weird music that was basically created in a vacuum and at school a girl in my class was dating this older guy Justin. Now, Justin ran a tape distribution service and that has gone on to become this big thing called Cold Spring. So she passed this tape to him and I heard back. He said, "Oh, it sounds like Coil." It didn't really, but I have this name. Fortunately in Northampton there was a really good independent record store called Spinadisc Records. It probably doesn't exist anymore, but it's a very key indie record store with a really great range. So anyway, they had Coil records in there and I went in and bought what was the current album, which was Horse Rotorvator.
Jack: Amazing.
Tony: So yeah, just from a vacuum I bought this Coil album and it was like, "Wow, what the hell is this?" And they opened this whole world of like William Burroughs and Brion Gysin and all this kind of stuff. It was hugely influential to me, the idea of cut-ups that relate to the Musique concrète stuff and all of that is still a cornerstone influence for me and it's still something I draw on, what Burroughs did with language and cut-ups and stuff like that. So yeah, that was a real important influence for me.
Karl: I mean Coil was definitely something that really links me and Tony. Funny enough, Tony was going through some old emails the other day as well and it was...
Tony: Oh, yeah. It's so sad, I found emails from Sleazy, Peter Christopherson. He invited me and Karl over to record with him, but that never happened. And finding this email, like "Oh, so when are we going to do this, then?"
Jack: Oh, man.
Tony: And it never happened. It's just one of those things where it doesn't happen and you think, "Oh, yeah, maybe next year, maybe next year." And then they're dead.
Karl: Yeah, it's crazy. Another connection as well, obviously, that connected me and Tony was a guy called Mick Harris.
Jack: Oh, of course. I feel like that was a follow-up for me. Could you talk a little bit about him? Tony, he introduced you to Karl, right? Is that how it went?
Tony: What actually happened was kind of before that I was playing at these techno events in Birmingham and I believe Karl was coming to them, so he heard me play before.
Karl: Yeah, it was weird. I mean, even going back a little bit before that, like Tony was saying about rave culture, I came to it... I'd almost not given up on music, but at the time I was 18 or 19 in '88 when the acid house thing came out, I was very suspicious of that in one way, because two years beforehand, nobody was into electronic music. It was a dirty word. Then all of a sudden you had all these thugs, all the school toughs who would beat you up at school, all of a sudden they were into [incomprehensible]. So I was against it in some way, but I was aware that it was very important. But most importantly, why I liked it was that you could make instrumental electronic music without any singing. And that's what piqued my interest in dance music, because a lot of my friends didn't like it. I mean, a lot of my friends used to laugh at anybody who wore sneakers. It was the way things were back then. Because if you wore a pair of sneakers, "What the fucking hell are you doing wearing a pair of sneakers."
Tony: Yeah, everything like that was a very strong message because of the tribal...
Karl: It was very, very tribal. So when dance music came along and it did blur, especially for me... I think what really got me, why I had second thoughts about dance or why I really gave it a second chance is when I heard Clonk by Sweet Exorcist, which is Richard H. Kirk from Cabaret Voltaire.
Jack: Sweet Exorcist, yeah. Those are on Warp.
Karl: Yeah, and at the same time, there's a record label from Birmingham called Network, which was pretty much the record label. Neil Rushton was managing Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson. He was managing all those three, he brought them over.
Jack: He was the first person to bring Detroit techno over to the UK in general.
Karl: Yeah, to Europe.
Jack: He was a northern soul guy before, right?
Karl: That's correct, exactly. Network was based in Birmingham and actually that's a funny thing, the XON record, which is also Richard H. Kirk with Robert Gordon from Forgemasters and stuff like that, that was on Network. And I thought, well if Richard H. Kirk can do it... Of course, you know there was Jack the Tab as well, which was Psychic TV, which is obviously Genesis P-Orridge, and Dave Ball from Soft Cell.
Jack: Yeah, ok. Right.
Karl: The first UK acid house album. All our heroes that we had from the early ‘80s were getting into it and then when Coil released Love's Secret Domain, when that came out initially it was a bit weird, "This is not what I expected." I'm not too sure I liked this because it wasn't what had gone before and it had Renegade Soundwave samples and it was leaning towards rave culture. But of course now we know... But in the late '80s, early '90s, I was working for Southern Records, which was run by John Loder and John Knight. John Loder was part of the whole Crass thing and I just noticed a shift because all the stuff that was... I remember there was this Bizarre Inc record called Playing with Knives and I used to sell the record; "Jesus Christ, these records are shifting." And to see records shift out of a place that gets into the charts and when you do these scale outs, selling hundreds of thousands, it's crazy.
Jack: It's unthinkable today.
Karl: Yeah, it's completely a world away.
[Regis “Aktion One ( Live Berlin )”]
Karl: But back Mick. So that was the climate, where me and Tony arrived at was quite a similar thing, really. Then Mick introduced us and obviously that meeting fit well for me, obviously. It changed everything. So then Mick said, "Well, you should really listen to this" because I had already started Downwards by that stage, I started it in '93 and we had a couple of stuff. Even before that, we did some records by a local guy called Antonym, who ran a really important Industrial directory called Soft Watch, so we put his record out.
Jack: So what's up with Soft Watch, real quick?
Karl: Soft Watch was this huge Industrial directory.
Jack: By directory you literally mean, like, a database.
Karl: It was like an old phone book and easy to use, but it connected everybody. He came into the shop that I worked at and I think he was selling Sleep Chamber CDs and a load of German reggae. So I liked Tony a lot because he'd seen This Heat, Robert Rental, The Normal and Joy Division in the same week. So I thought that was quite cool.
Jack: Wow, incredible. [laughs] That's pretty amazing.
Karl: Yeah. But anyway, I was doing this label to sort of find my feet, and Mick says, "You should really listen to this guy" because I was getting into the techno thing, seeing the possibilities of techno. I wasn't into it in any way until maybe I'd heard Jeff Mills or like Tony said, Underground Resistance.
Jack: Yeah, what was the first stuff you heard that would qualify as techno? Or your first exposure.
Tony: I think starting to hear Aphex Twin and stuff like that. I think that somehow connected the dots with stuff like Coil and things like that.
Jack: More on the experimental side.
Tony: Looking back, I can see the significance and importance of the kind of earlier acid house stuff. And I love that stuff now, but at the time it didn't really make sense because I hadn't heard it over a big soundsystem.
Jack: Manchester and the acid house thing was kind of not that influential to you.
Tony: I was aware that it was happening, but it just seemed, compared to the electronic music that I was listening to at the time, really primitive. It wasn't really that interesting.
Karl: And I had been to The Haçienda before acid house, I saw a band called That Petrol Emotion, so it was never a great association with that, but that's kind of a different thing. I think probably Andy Weatherall was more pivotal, he was someone who connected it really. I mean of course Mick did some drumming with Coil as well and I was in the studio for a day where Mick and Coil were there.
Jack: Amazing.
Karl: But that was early, that was just after Love's Sacred Domain. That was actually kind of interesting, I think that was the studio session at Swanyard where they... What was that distribution company...
Tony: World Serpent.
Karl: Yeah, they bankrupted World Serpent and that's why they had to go to Nine Inch Nails. They kept saying, "Oh, it's like Nine Inch Nails!" No, they're fucking shit, Jeff, they're shit. [laughter] The whole thing was coming through because, I mean, "Oh, you want to see Nine Inch Nails?" Sure. And The Wolfgang Press embarrassed them so badly [after] that Pretty Hate Machine album.
Tony: It was just rock music.
Karl: It was just bad middle class rock music. I remember actually funny enough, what did it for me, I think, I remember I saw Einstürzende Neubauten at The Astoria in London in 1989. And two weeks later I saw The Stone Roses and I walked out of it. [laughter] If that's the future of music, I'm not interested in music. And that stuck with me. So for me it finished really there, musically. But I think what Tony was saying about techno, the first wave of techno like Juan Atkins and Kevin Saunderson and all that, of course I liked it, but it was still this electronic plastic soul thing.
Tony: To me it was weird because, what is it, Inner City "Good Life", that was in the pop charts. It was like pop dance music and it was fair enough but, I don't know, it was really hearing some of the music that John Peel was playing that was more kind of edgy and weird and whatever. That really lit up the light bulb for me.
Karl: I think for me, when I first heard Jeff Mills, what it was, was he was basically doing what Europe, especially Britain, always does to America. We get the best bits of what you do and we regurgitate them, recreate them and repackage them. And that's what we've historically always done. But what Jeff Mills did, he had this fantastic European aesthetic, wrapped it up in his own unique sort of way, very Detroit way, of doing things, in isolation, really. What Jeff Mills did, it was just fucking hard. It could have been Front 242, it could have been Nitzer Ebb, because it was heavily European. And that's not, of course, knocking any Detroit heritage, but he made something truly unique out of his influences and his influences were all in place with it. But what he did was he reduced everything to its essence. And those records I heard around Mick's as well, I think I might have turned on Mick to the early stuff, because it was being distributed by Southern and it was like, "Wow, these fucking records."
Jack: So that's how you first heard it, because I was curious about how you actually first heard Jeff Mills.
Karl: It wasn't in a nightclub. I have absolutely no connection with any of that music, probably up until '94, that was played in a nightclub. It was all home listening.
Jack: That's interesting. So it wasn't actually a club, dancing, whatever, experience. It was the actual music, it was really like a listening...
Tony: Well, at that point, no one played that stuff until I was playing that stuff. [laughs]
Karl: The first person I heard play it was Tony. I thought, "Who is playing those records that I listen to at home that I'd love to hear in a club?" But everybody else wasn't playing those records. I certainly wasn't hearing anybody playing those records.
Jack: You heard Tony play those records before you guys were friends or were talking about records together.
Karl: Yeah, I remember because Mick said there's really this guy you should listen to who DJs the records that we play at home. To be completely fair, as well, Mick did play records very loud in his house. [laughter]
Jack: It was almost like being in a nightclub.
Karl: Well, it was, yeah. It was even more... He used to play especially, like, early Killing Joke records and he used to really crank it up. And then he put the Mills records on. And plus at that time as well he was going to New York a lot and working with Zorn and Laswell.
Jack: Yeah, PainKiller.
Karl: Yeah, and then he used to be bringing back all these records from New York, a lot of things from the Midwest, all this great, really hard music that was really, really interesting as well. So there's definitely something happening that you can't sort of... And there was no scene. Of course there was no scene because it was all in its infancy. Everything was in its infancy. Yeah, so Mick said to me, "Well, there's this guy, Tony. He's been doing some really good stuff in my studio." And that was it, really.
Tony: Yeah, Mick had a small studio in his house and he just invited me to come and use it. So I walked around there with a drum machine and a keyboard pretty much literally on my back.
Jack: Do you remember what you were using at that time? For the gearheads out there.
Tony: Oh, yeah, so the keyboard was a Korg Poly-800. I remember when I was at this technical college, I could apply for a grant to pay me back for all the tapes and photography equipment and whatever, like paint, printing, paper, whatever. So I got this grant and I bought this second-hand keyboard.
Jack: Amazing.
Tony: And then a friend had this drum machine which was really crap. It was an English electronic brand called…
Karl: Cheetah.
Tony: Cheetah. And they used to make cheap computer peripherals and stuff like that at the time. And they made this drum machine and it had this “electro” card with supposedly 808 and 909 sounds, but they were just, like, 8-bit or something, I don't know. So I used these two bits of gear. I took it around to Mick's, he had a mixing desk and some outboard gear and a DAT player, so I jammed some stuff and recorded it.
Jack: This is pre-Surgeon.
Tony: That became the first Surgeon record.
Jack: Oh, amazing. Right.
Tony: So, yes, I guess Mick must have played it to Karl and...
Karl: Yeah, I loved it because at that time I could definitely see the shift from not selling any experimental records, as the first couple of records we did. I did a record, it was like an acid record...
Tony: Hygiene.
Karl: Exactly, yeah. Me, Mick Harris and Jim, as well, from O.L.D., James Plotkin. That record sold so well and all of a sudden my distributor said, "Well, can we get a repress?" "What the fuck's a repress?"
Jack: Gotta get the plates again.
Karl: Yeah, so there was this kind of thing that I was noticing in a way and when I heard Tony's record it really felt like something that was successful, which is probably not the right way to describe it, in artistic terms, but it felt like something could really, really happen with this record because it was brilliant. And it was everything that was completely correct for that time.
Jack: This the first Surgeon record on Downwards.
Tony: The first one with "Magneze" and "Atol."
Jack: Right, the EP.
Karl: The funny thing about it was I tried to pretend to be like some record boss, I tried to give some... "Yeah, well, it might need some compression," not even know what compression was to try and...
Jack: "Yeah, I might put this out, needs a little cleaning up."
Karl: But it was brilliant, it was so brilliant.
Jack: It's a classic record.
Karl: So, yeah, it was one of those things. I remember we put it out and the first initial run had a plastic bag and a postcard and I remember getting the postcards, because I was on the dole at the time. We each got 70 quid for two weeks and these postcards were 65 quid, so I had five for two weeks. [laughter] I just thought at that particular moment, "I hope this works."
Jack: This better be worth it.
Karl: Yeah, and it did.
Jack: Seems like it was worth it.
Karl: In the long term that was a pretty good investment.
Jack: That's a pretty good move.
Karl: The weird thing is, of course, me and Tony are for such a long time extremely close friends, for over a quarter of a century. But we were really two people really thrown in the deep end together.
Tony: Yeah, we really didn't know each other.
Jack: Wow, so, that was pretty early on into your friendship.
Tony: Yeah, we had met but it's not like we went to school together or grew up together.
Karl: We had just met and it's hard to explain but the success of that record was instant. Absolutely fucking instant.
Jack: Can you talk about that process of you got the record out, distributed it and then got some reception?
Karl: The big thing at that time was if you had a fax machine, you were a company. So I had a fax machine. I remember almost straight away, because I had my fax number on it, I was not getting faxes from Japan and getting woken up in the middle of night. Fucking hell, this is amazing.
Tony: Sonic Groove.
Karl: Yeah, Sonic Groove, people like that and then you had Josh Wink, "Hey, can I send you some t-shirts?" And then you had all these other people.
Tony: People saying, "Oh, Jeff Mills is playing your track." And I didn't believe it.
Karl: It was instant. It was really instant. Because also nobody was doing that sort of music back then. There was Jeff. And there was us.
Tony: And the thing I remember is that the thing that totally threw people was the fact that this record came from Birmingham. They couldn't believe it, there was no sort of precedent for that. I mean, you had Network Records but that was something quite different.
Karl: Yeah, it was completely different.
Tony: It was a different kind of music. This high impact techno stuff, they had no idea. And didn't the catalog number really throw people off? They thought it had something to do with Plink Plonk.
Karl: Ah, that's right!
Tony: And everyone assumed it had come from London as well.
Jack: So what was the catalog number?
Karl: Well, that was in classic disastrous Downwards fashion. I just thought, "Catalog number? I don't know, whatever." Then all of a sudden we had Mr. C, who was in The Shamen, phone up because his label was [Plink Plonk], "Well, you can't do that! You can't do that!" The only reason he found out about it was because we got a license from something and they thought it was him and he was so worried about it. You have to pay for catalog numbers now, the similarities to do that. And then he got really pissed off that we got this massive licensing deal that had come through him, that it wasn't his.
Jack: It wasn't actually his, right.
Karl: I said, "I'm so sorry, mate." But I remember also we were so naive back then, I mean, we didn't know what tempos things were at. Yet he asked me, "What tempo are your tracks at?" And I had no idea what tempo was so I said, “Like, 700." [laughter]
Jack: Like really extreme gabber.
Karl: He thought I was taking the piss. I thought 700 was a pretty good ballpark figure for a BPM!
Jack: A pretty high esteemed number.
Karl: Yeah, well, the thing is that we were quite naive with it because we actually phoned Mark Broom and asked, "What's the best tempo for a techno record?".
Jack: Wow.
Karl: We hadn't a clue. Mark says, "Well, you know, tempos should be this and maybe this long and that's fine." But it was that naive. I mean, I remember telling Mr. C, "Yeah, about 700," and he went up the fucking wall because he [incomprehensible]. "Sorry, mate."
Jack: This cheeky motherfucker.
Karl: These are good, right? But then it just went from then and... So we had this big fucking success and then we thought, "Oh Jesus Christ. So what do we do? We should follow this up." So then DJ Hell, who was brilliant, he was playing it, Dave Clarke... But like Tony said, the fact that we were from Birmingham, which is really an artistic wasteland other than being very heavy metal, it's not like Manchester or Sheffield, for instance, which have a deep working class heritage but that is also entwined with arts. And Liverpool as well, they really combine the intelligent working class people, where Birmingham isn't that sort, in fact it's the polar opposite of that. There's nothing electronic from Birmingham. There was nothing, not even back then, there was never really anything. I mean, the closest you could get to something electronic was probably Pop Will Eat Itself, a band that Clint Mansell, who is now the Hollywood soundtracker, was the lead singer of. But that was about it, there was nothing else. So there was this massive success and me and Tony were, like, manacled and thrown into the deep end... But the real connection was they invited us to go to some tribal gathering in Munich because of the success of Tony's record. So I then became Tony's self-appointed manager. [laughter] I thought, "Well, we're never going to get a free holiday again, this is the end of it, so I'm going to go with him." The weird thing on that journey, as has often happened with me and Tony things go really kind of weird and mad and then go really sort of psychotic and dreamlike and we find out stuff about each other, Tony went, "Oh yeah, I used to send tapes to Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth in the '80s, noise tapes." I went, "You're joking, I used to do that as well."
Jack: Wow.
Karl: We haven't even known about each other. And it was like, "Jesus Christ." We both used to send demos to Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth because it was obviously on the back of the records. There was a real something that formed during that trip. Yeah, so that was kind of interesting.
Jack: So that was to Munich. DJ Hell.
Karl: Yeah, we went to a place called...
Jack: Ultraschall?
Karl: Yeah, exactly.
Tony: Yeah, the original Ultraschall, it used to be in the kitchen of the old Munich airport.
Jack: That's some classic post-unification location.
Karl: Well, the thing is that was quite common because there was a great techno/EBM club in Frankfurt I used to go to quite a lot in the late '80s, early '90s and that was the Frankfurt airport. So there's the formation of Talla [2XLC] and all that. It must be a German thing. But Tony played and he was just amazing and I remember we met Hell and these type of people.
Tony: Yeah, we met Jeff Mills and that was it.
Jack: At this gig.
Karl: Yeah, at this gig.
Jack: Amazing, so this is... '94?
Tony: ’95.
Karl: '95.
Jack: Amazing, so that was the first meeting. Was he aware of Surgeon or Downwards at that point?
Tony: Well, the thing I said earlier, how someone had told me that he was playing my first record and I didn't believe him at first.
Karl: He knew Tony was and he was just it was instant because the camaraderie was different then because it wasn't many people doing it. It was just so different.
Tony: There was a strong connection straight away with the music.
Jack: So if this was '95, at this point this kind of music was being played live?
Karl: It was absolutely in its infancy.
Tony: That was our first experience of the European scene which we would... This is this huge party and that's the first time I'd ever seen anything that big with that music.
Jack: How big was that club, you think?
Karl: It was like a tribal gathering, wasn't it?
Tony: Well, I went over to play at the club called Ultraschall and I didn't actually realize beforehand that there was this other huge event that weekend, kind of next door to that in the old airport. The Ultraschall was in the kitchen, I was playing in the kitchen. [laughter]
Jack: Right, and then the big party in the big room.
Tony: It was, like, in the airplane hangar or something. I mean, the stuff I'd seen up until then was like a couple of hundred people and this was...
Jack: This was thousands of people in an airplane hangar.
Tony: But to some extent that's still the difference between the UK scene and the European scene.
Jack: Well, so, actually do you want to talk a little bit about House of God?
Tony: Yeah, that was a bunch of friends. I mean, we still do events now and to me it's insane that we are coming up for 30 years now and it's the same people, the same... It’s kind of weird to say and I know Chris, who runs it, gets kind of quite insulted when I say this, but it's run in a very kind of amateurish and naive way. [laughs]
Jack: That's great. Hey, to me that's a compliment.
Tony: Yeah, it's retained that. It's never been a professional operation because it's stuck to its roots. We just want to blow people's heads off.
Karl: I mean, I think Chris, the promoter, goes out of his way to not make people come. If you see the flyers, the flyers have been [incomprehensible] for obscenity. It's serious, it's a way of thinking that's unique to the people. Everybody is so unique within it. I mean, if you go in there expecting a techno club, you might be sorely disappointed. If you go there expecting something that is really, really beyond anything you might sort of imagine from a nightclub. I think that might be good. I think that's the best way of doing it. It's a pretty unique place. That's why when you go anywhere else, it sounds kind of, oh...
Tony: It's a bit of a letdown.
Karl: It's a bit of a letdown.
Jack: So where do they happen now? Has there been a club that they...?
Tony: Yeah, it's moved around, but for how long? For a really long time. For the better part of 25 years it's been at the same venue. It's like just the old railway arches. It was called Subway City, I think it's called the Tunnel Club now.
Karl: Tunnel, yeah.
Tony: They just kind of let us get on with it, really.
Karl: It's very unique.
Jack: Chris Wishart is the guy who...
Tony: He ran the Punk and New Wave Society and it kind of grew out of that.
Jack: That's amazing. Did you go to university with him?
Tony: I had a lot of friends who went to Birmingham University, but I went to a technical college.
Jack: Right, right.
Tony: He did a night as a Punk and New Wave Society night. The first night was called the House of God and I remember I was at his house and he was trying to think what to call and I said, "What's your favorite record?" And he said, "The House of God." So that's how...
Jack: Oh, yeah. DHS.
Tony: Yeah, exactly. We were big fans of that. Amazing record. So, yeah, that was where that name came from. I think they were two or three nights that were at Birmingham University at the Punk and New Wave Society and then we moved to a club in Birmingham. We were in the basement of a club called the Institute and it was owned by the keyboard player from Duran Duran. [laughter]
Karl: John Taylor.
Tony: Yeah, John Taylor owned the club. We just had these crazy nights in this basement.
Karl: Roger Taylor, sorry. [ed. Roger Taylor, the drummer for Duran Duran, owned the club]
Tony: We actually got to this point where our nights in the basement were doing better than the nights in the big room. It was insane. It was absolutely... The intensity was insane. I always tell the story about DJing there: when I would start to mix the next record in the roar, the noise from the crowd was so loud I couldn't hear it, so I had to just stop mixing. When they hear the next track come in, they're like, "Ahhh!!!" And you can't hear anything so you just have to just throw it in.
Jack: Incredible. That energy... I mean, there's so much music now, but at that point I can imagine every track is so important that you're playing.
Tony: Yeah, UR, stuff like The Seawolf and things like that. And people haven't heard music like that and it was just absolutely melting their brains.
Karl: Every single DJ at the House of God was so wildly different, it wasn't the same thing. Tony was probably the only DJ who played that type of music. Everything was so uniquely different.
Tony: Yeah, it was very much based around the resident DJs and it still is, really.
Karl: It's all residents. You're not going to hear Jeff Mills all night, that's for sure.
[Surgeon “Single Celled Protist”]
Karl: That's the way rave culture was to an extent, still in his absolute infancy. We were really on the cusp of something new. There was no real industry involved with it. There were just a few disparate people we knew through Tony. There was this great label in London called Blueprint, and they were doing this similar stuff to us.
Tony: Yeah, so what happened with that was through the distribution arm of Network Records someone gave me the white label of the first Blueprint release and, as was the way at the time, they wrote their phone number on the record and I dialed the number and said, "Oh, hi, this is Tony, Surgeon. Is that James?" I just phoned him up because the number was on the record and I arranged to get the train down to London and just hang out with them for a weekend.
Karl: And I remember around that time, really pretty early on actually, maybe it was '95, early '96, we did a combined night in Brixton at the Crypt. And if I think back to that night then and the people in that room, it was just a bunch of kids but really, like I said, on the cusp of something, there was some invisible momentum, there's something pushing there. The momentum was so powerful with what was happening at that stage, what we did. Because we weren't self-aware, there was no scene, there was no real press that would be interested in it. I mean, nobody knew what I looked like until the end of the '90s. Everybody assumed I was Tony. That's how great things were. I think even at that stage I didn't even want to make music.
Tony: My understanding is that Karl initially wanted to run the label.
Karl: I just wanted to run the label because I was into techno, but I'm not really... When people say, "How did you get into techno?" I've never really been into it. [laughter] I think it's okay, it's great. And I really love this moment we're talking about. But yeah, I never really wanted to do it. So the problem was Tony followed his first record up with another successful record and I thought, “Oh God, it's a label, we might need to get more artists. Oh, shit, maybe I'll have to do something." Because I've got no friends, [laughter] certainly none that had any talent. So I just looked through some of my old DATs and stuff and I cobbled together some stuff that I'd recorded and I thought, "That sounds kind of okay, yeah." And then we [incomprehensible].
Karl: That was Montreal.
Karl: Yeah, Montreal. I had recorded it around the same time, just a little bit after when Tony did "Magneze." I was just messing around at that time and we put it and Jesus Christ almighty, then that was massive and "Oh, shit, I've got to do this, I've got to follow this up." No, no intention of being an artist, certainly not a desire. I had no interest of being a DJ or any of that. No, no. Or even making techno records. Not at all.
Jack: Wow. It seems like you've failed, unfortunately.
Karl: I've come on holiday by mistake.
Tony: Yeah, I think for me as well, I feel like it was something that just happened to me. I didn’t draw up some grand plan in my bedroom about DJing around the world. That wasn't something that I aspired to, it just happened to me. I was unemployed, I had no job, and that just kind of happened.
Karl: It's back to being naive again, but that was the beauty of it. It really was that naive and that was how we really approached it. Because we had no ambition with it, because there was nothing to have an ambition about. There was no structured scene that you could step up or network with people to get so-and-so gigs.
Tony: It was literally the phone would ring and I'm living in a shared house, really cheap accommodation. The phone would ring and it would be, like, Felix da Housecat on the phone. "Oh, Tony, there's a guy called Felix da Housecat that wants to talk to you." [laughter] Yeah, it would be so kind of random I guess because it was written on the record or something, someone would phone and say, "Oh, we want you to come and play in Japan." And you're like, "Oh, well, I guess, I'm not doing anything else."
Karl: The thing is as well, it was so rudimentary at that stage. And we really were in the Wild West because, yeah, you want to do a gig, sure, where do you want... It's getting on an airplane to Spain. Forget about pre-Internet, this is pre having mobile phones. And plus as well, it was pre-Euro. So you had to get loads of pesetas. We had no currency. And you could be left in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of rural Spain.
Jack: Yeah, not a lot of people speaking English out there.
Karl: With no money, no means of communication. You just wouldn't do that now because it's so dangerous. It was the Wild West. We were at the edge of it and it was on the cusp of something genuinely exciting. Me and Tony as well, I remember, we used to have layovers of about 6 hours in Madrid airports and we’re too mean to even buy a sandwich that costs, like... We were there just walking around like fucking shell shocked mental patients. Just to say this, I used to steal the toilet rolls from the hotels.
Jack: Oh, yeah. Classic.
Karl: Because it was just like, “This surely can't last.” But so that's pretty much the climate.
Jack: Well, I'm curious with Downwards, for the first Surgeon release, what did you do for distribution? How did you get these records out into the hands of people?
Karl: Well, I was quite fortunate, actually, because I used to work for a company also called Plastic Hair Distribution, primarily a heavy metal distributor, so they got it out. Germany had a really big distributor as well. There wasn't a dance distribution as such.
Jack: So how did it get sold or marketed or whatever, this is just new electronic music?
Karl: This is the funny thing, marketing... We've never done that ever.
Jack: No, of course, but just to get the distributors to buy it.
Karl: I had a funny phone call one night. Somebody phoned me up and it was EMI. [laughter]
Jack: When was this?
Karl: This is, like, '96. And they wanted to know who our PR agent was and who our press agent was because Tony's album gets so much press and everything everywhere and I said, "Well, we don't have one, maybe you should just make good music." And again they thought I was taking the piss. Because we'd never paid for press.
Jack: Amazing, so they were fishing for your press agent because you guys were doing such a good job, quote unquote.
Karl: They wanted to know how our press agent was, EMI.
Jack: Incredible.
Karl: It was this girl at EMI, I remember, and she thought I was taking the piss again.
Jack: That you wouldn't give her the name.
Karl: I said, "Honestly, we just don't do that."
Jack: Unthinkable to her, I'm sure.
Karl: Yeah, so as the '90s progressed Tony was getting bigger and bigger and then he did his classic Berlin trilogy, like David Bowie and all that, and he became the universal superstar we all know and love today. I just moved to New York and became a junkie.
Jack: There you go.
Karl: The problem was I celebrated so hard with our initial success that I hadn't stopped celebrating by the end of the '90s and realized, "Fucking hell, it's all over." The train had gone. [laughter]
Jack: Yeah, it's gone. It's left the station. It's over, boys.
Karl: Music styles had changed and the money had run out, the good times had turned into bad times. Another important thing, during those early days of those fax conversations, I got a really interesting fax of a guy from a guy from America called Dan DC, and he said, "Oh, do you want to come to America and play some gigs?" I thought, "Fuck it, yes, of course I do." America and New York in particular for me was always... Even though maybe musically a lot of my stuff was very European based, to get to New York was what I always wanted to do. And it's not a lot of people, I just wanted to be there, so I got a flight with a friend.
Jack: What year was this?
Karl: '96. This was Regis live. I had no idea of how to do anything live, so it was, like, a backing track. Basically at that stage it was me and my friend Richard Harvey. That's what that was, Regis. So we got off the plane in Newark and we ended up the first night in Edison, New Jersey.
Jack: A very esteemed city.
Karl: It was so interesting we were headlong into suburban...
Jack: Did you just stay in Edison or were you playing?
Karl: We stayed at their parent's house, Dan's parents house. Now, the funny thing is Dan now is one of the most successful lobbyists in Washington. You can see him on the news all this morning. I won't name... Well, you can't comment on his YouTube posts anyway, because everybody knows his past. [laughter] He's one of the most esteemed lobbyists and you can see him on TV all the time in the States. It's really funny because I know the shit from then.
Jack: Yeah, he better not fuck up.
Karl: He was a massive Regis fan. So basically then after three days we said, "Can we go into the city?" I really wanted to see New York. So he said, okay, I've got this friend in the city. You can stay with him. "That's great!" And that friend turned out to be Dave Sumner, Dave Function.
Jack: Wow, right. That's so funny.
Karl: He had this place on 30th between 7th and 8th Avenues. It was overlooking the Garden. It was this huge apartment that they had the studio in. And it was above Rogue Music, if you remember. It used to be in this building. The view was mind blowing, you had the Garden and then the Empire State Building. And I think they were paying, even then, which was, of course, an extreme amount of money... about $1300 a month. [laughter]
Jack: It would be about ten times as much as that now.
Karl: Oh, you couldn't get this place now. You could not get this for under... Yeah. So Dave was there and Dave introduced me to that New York world, a very unique generation of New Yorkers that I thought were normal. [laughter] People like Reade Truth, Heather Heart, Maria 909. These people probably were some of the most extreme people I'd ever met but were complete New York characters, so street-level New York. For me it was fantastic. Basically we had the drug dealer who lived upstairs then you had down on the 10th floor where Rogue Music was, you had all this gear, the music shop where Dave worked at that time. So David lived on the 14th floor, all he had to do was go down four flights in the elevator to get to work. And what happened? He got fired for being late. [laughter] New York at that particular time was really the last of old New York, I feel. It was extremely dangerous, blah, blah, blah, we all know. But it really had an amazing feel about it. It really hasn't had it since for me personally, it's day and night almost. But it was just electric. It was great because making these records that we'd made at home in the Midlands, in Birmingham, all of sudden you're on dance floors in New York City and people are dancing and playing your records, you're the star of your own B-movie. Things like Twilo and through Dave as well I met all these fabulous nightlife characters, Arthur Weinstein in particular, the legend.
Jack: Right, he's notorious.
Karl: Notorious. For some reason, Arthur really took me under his wing and he was fabulous. He really loved Dave.
Jack: Amazing, I didn't know that. That's great.
Karl: He loved Dave but he hated a lot of people. During this period we were actually touring, me and Dave, we were part of the touring act that Dan was [incomprehensible]. Tony was off doing his thing, being a global superstar and then Dave and me were just doing these little tours, he was coming to Spain and we were coming back, so we were part of this real kind of very interesting New York, Birmingham type of thing. He'd come over to my house... Yeah, it was kind of so odd, all of a sudden you had all these disparate people coming through my house, one day there’d be Robert Görl from DAF and then one day there'd be Martin Atkins from PiL. It was really weird. And then we'd go back to New York and then had all these other kind of... It was just amazing, a really amazing time, to experience that in my mid 20s was just fabulous. But obviously entwined with all of that was a pretty sort of nihilistic [incomprehensible] that I never experienced because I was completely straight edge up until this point. I didn't really even drink until I was in my late 20s, to be honest. That was just hanging out with James Ruskin, how I got into drinking. It was kind of quite interesting, all of that was. So the timeline, that really took us all up to the early 2000s or late '90s and we were just making all these great records.
Karl: Things were getting very, very easy. Not easy, but it was very fluid at that time and it was fun. But I think then things changed, styles changed. Things were a lot more professional as well and the things that we could get away with in the early and mid '90s in terms of being a professional and ragged and raw...
Tony: I'm still surprised what we can get away with now, Karl. We still do gigs now and I can't believe that we get away with it.
Karl: That's some heritage thing or they feel sorry for us. We're not careerists, we just work [incomprehensible]. The same way that Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash and Elvis weren't careerists when they were doing five gigs a night, popping blues in the back of a car.
Jack: Yeah, absolutely.
Karl: And that's the truth. It's it's the same for everybody, a lot of the English electronic bands of the early '80s were there because Suicide did the groundwork to some extent and so that's the way it is. I think if you're happy with that then you understand the way things are. I think there's nothing worse than trying to pursue something, especially if it's a youth thing as well... There's something really unsavory about seeing people in their 30s, 40s and beyond trying to recreate something that happened. And a lot of people are trying to do that as well. What I actually do love about techno [incomprehensible], it actually broke down the DNA of rock 'n roll and the structure, it distilled it to its essence. There was no verse, chorus, verse, chorus. Even the most experimental punk band, like TG or anything like that, they still had those... TG were the Velvets, there were still four of them, they still, they still stopped in between songs. [laughter]
Jack: Yeah, they stop.
Karl: It wasn't a continuum like dance music was. And I think that's what I really loved about our form of techno, not so much what's thought of as the early techno. Definitely what UR did and Jeff Mills and Rob Hood and Claude Young, they were absolutely that.
Jack: I know you've talked about, what was the term, "exotic hypnotics"?
Karl: Yeah, exactly. Tony really noticed it because Tony being a DJ, he said, "Well, it's really interesting, some of these tracks that we do," mine in particular, "don't really have much change." There's nuances and after a while playing them, all of a sudden when people lock in, it's that magical hour or that magic second where people are locked into something and they go euphoric again and nothing's actually happening. So you don't have to have all the traditional things, you have to have a breakdown or this or that.
Jack: To kind of cut time up in a way.
Karl: The type of stuff we did didn't adhere to any of those rules but still had the same effect. That's real experimental music. The Velvets are central to what we do, I'm not sure how central the Velvets are to the majority of people who make techno. Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band are central, British absurdists.
Jack: Really? Oh, that's amazing. I never would necessarily have thought that.
Karl: Monty Python, Beefheart. All this stuff is central. I'm not too sure how central that is to somebody at this particular moment is playing some mega rave in Holland.
Tony: I've said for a long, long time that British Murder Boys are the UK's best-loved absurdist space rock duo.
Jack: Yes. That might be the tagline for this interview. [laughter]
Karl: Of course, in full circle, Sleazy authorized the name British Murder Boys.
Jack: Really? Wait, talk about that for a second.
Karl: Well, Tony can. [laughter]
Tony: During that time that I mentioned about how he invited us over, I told him our project name and he... I think it turned him on basically. [laughter]
Jack: In maybe a literal way.
Karl: Yeah, absolutely. And he said, “Oh, yes, I like that! Oh, absolutely, that's the dream!" [laughter]
Jack: That's amazing. There must be footage of these sets, because these live sets were notorious.
Karl: There was a great one we did in Birmingham that was filmed by locals, some local students, who had obviously never picked up a camera before in their lives unfortunately.
Tony: Technical disaster. [laughter]
Karl: Yeah, but that gig was great. But, I mean, we were always out of step with British Murder Boys as well. But all great art in the 21st and 20th centuries is made by true outsiders. But you can't be an outsider now because everyone's inside, because you're all on the same platform. Everyone's a fucking insider. But you know, we just try to be outsiders, as much as you can.
Jack: Well, I would say with Downwards and with both of you guys going back to the primary conversation of influences of UK DIY, it is really apparent in your guys's work, especially from the the genesis of it that there is very punk, if you want to say that, but really just DIY, ethos.
Karl: We're informed by things other than dance music, we're informed by the music. This is completely natural to us and a lot of people that came before us, obviously. That's it.
Jack: You guys, this was extremely, extremely fun. I'm completely flattered you guys wanted to do this. I hope it wasn't too painful for you guys.
Tony: It was fun!
Jack: It was completely thrilling for me to get these anecdotes and hear this stuff. Just for me, just selfishly, personally, just to hear that trajectory of how you go through it, to hear about how someone else did it, especially in a time that is not so distant, but distant enough now that it's a little mysterious to people today.
Karl: I definitely feel there's a connection. Me and Tony, I think, genuinely do feel it. Not only feel, there is a direct connection from all of the people that we love, like Coil and the people before that. You could trace that and then it's a direct connection back to the Velvets and even before and that's it, you see?
Jack: There is 100% an unbroken thread.
Karl: And for you as well, it's the same with you, the same with the same with everybody who cares, who gives a fuck about music, that's the way it is.
Jack: Absolutely.
Karl: With Nina, I just find it very satisfying, the independence of it, the pure independence away from...
Tony: Yeah, that totally resonates with us, I'm sure it's kind of obvious, really.
Jack: For sure. I mean, I think it goes without saying that we were all listening to your music before we ever got in contact with you and before we ever started Nina. I mean, both Mike and I ran labels. Mike started a label when he was 15. And I started a label in my late teens, early twenties, and it's like... There's no other way for us. That's where we come from. There's kind of no other option.
Karl: It comes through, as well, with both you and Mike. There's something that's unquantifiable that happens with what you're doing and I really, really like that. And back to [before], I feel that I'm on the cusp of something that could be really potentially interesting and I never felt that with any other platform, by the way. It was just the same old site, the same same old of what was happening before, archaic setups of distribution. The only thing is how you get paid quicker. You do what you've done, but people have taken a fucking fair wage off you for that. But we'll see how everything transpires.
Jack: Well, in addition to being early adopters, you guys are the ones who are determining where it's going. So don't fuck it up, first of all. [laughter]
Karl: Well, that's the end of Nina, then.
Jack: Yeah, exactly.
Karl: The thing is, we'll get fucked and some kids down the line will be professionals and make a killing out of it. [laughter]
Jack: That's all.
