New Model Army’s Justin Sullivan talks to Dave Woodhall ahead of the UK leg of the band’s current tour.
You’ve been touring in Europe, which we’re forever reading about as a potential trouble spot, with the rise of the far-right and fears of being swamped by refugees. You were talking to the reality, so what is the situation as you’ve been seeing it?
“They think the same about us. Someone asked this German comedian if Britain was part of Europe and he said ‘Just by a map’. We’ve got a common history with a lot of these places. Everywhere you go in Europe there are normal people going about their lives doing the shopping and bringing up their families, worried about the future and concerned about the same things. And everywhere you go in Europe there’s a nasty little whisper in your ear going ‘Poland for the Polish…Britain for the British…Germany for the Germans.’ We’ve got very short memories. Don’t we know where all this leads? It is everywhere in Europe but nowhere is any worse or very different from Britain.”
“There are people around Europe that are angry and in some places there are people focusing this anger on each other or on other groups of people trying to get by in the same way they are. Then the people who own the media that are showing this anger are buying another yacht. That’s the real enemy.”
Billy Bragg said that when you start out as a political musician, everything you do after that gets linked to politics. Do you sometimes think that the political angle to your music is overplayed?
“Completely. With Billy I think it was a big motivation but with us it was never to put across some message. It was just fun playing music and it’s still like that. It motivates me to write about what’s going on in the world but that’s not the purpose of the band at all.”
Do you wish you could be asked a bit more about your musical influences and a bit less about the state of the economy?
“If you write about what going on in the world it’s easy to comment on, because it’s easier to write words about words that it is to write words about music. Somebody once said writing about music is like dancing about architecture. What can you say about music? It’s an extraordinary form of magic that can transform one thing into another. It’s an amazing thing, you can’t say much about it and it’s pointless telling people what they ought to like because it’s all to do with stuff you can’t put in to words, you can’t say much about music. Music is made up of moments, it’s like chance – the singer does one thing, the drummer another and it all has a reaction.
“When you’re growing up, adults try to tell you how the world is built, education is about the way it’s all constructed then as you grow up you learn about the world. What they can’t explain is how it feels, so when you’re ten, eleven, children find some form of art. With some it’s books or drawing but for a lot of us it’s music and that tells you how you feel, and you discover your own music. I hate the labels of metal, reggae and whatever; music is music and we all have our favourites.”
To me, a great piece of music evolves even after it’s been written. I can look at something like Waterloo Sunset or the Clash’s Stay Free now in a totally different way to how I did years ago.
“We all carry around these ghosts with us. People become ghosts, they either die or we lose contact with them. Music becomes a ghost but the form of the ghost changes.”
We talked about your unwillingness not to be labelled political, but it’s difficult when you live in such interesting times not to have opinions about almost everything and have your life tinged by them.
“I don’t think so much about having an opinion about everything but life does get richer as you get older. The more you know, the more you see the connection between everything. There’s a song on the new album called Die Trying about the Jungle at Calais, because I drive past it so often, see it grow up, get knocked down, grow up again, knocked down again, it’s impossible not to feel something when you drive past it. Like when we started all the industries were closing so it was impossible not to notice what was happening.”
That album, Winter, which came out in August, got your highest chart place since The Love of Hopeless Causes in 1993. Is that because your message is becoming more accepted now?
“I don’t think it’s a message. As a band we’re on a bit of a roll. Bands that have been together a long time have productive periods and less productive periods. With us every five years or so someone new arrives. I can’t imagine being in a band with the same people for a long time because it would get stale, you’d find the areas of conflict and then try to avoid them which means turning in smaller and smaller circles. But as soon as one new member arrives all the relationships change. We’re in a very productive phase now and a really good place. We’ve made a couple of good records and people seem to have re-focused on this band from Bradford.”
Talking of which, do you still think of yourselves after all these years and all the personnel changes as a Bradford, or even as a northern England band?
“That’s a fair question. I’m a southerner who moved to Yorkshire forty years ago. Bradford’s in a beautiful setting, surounded by the moors. It’s an interesting place, a nineteenth century boom town that mushroomed and for a while was very well off. If you go back more than five generations everyone’s an incomer, which gives a city a certain vibe. There’s also the thing about not being from Leeds, which has always been a rich city.”
Sounds like the divide between the Black Country and Birmingham.
“Our first following came from Wolverhampton and that area. It’s weird that you can get little pockets of support like that. We once had an American band touring with us and they couldn’t believe you could drive 25 miles and have a completely new audience. But, I was once in Kings Cross and I went into a cheap pizza shop. The guy behind the counter was Iranian, he came over after the revolution in 1979 and when I said it must have been sad for him to have to leave home and end up in Kings Cross, which was a really rough area then, he said, ‘There’s good people everywhere’.”
You’ve always seemed quite defiantly on the outside. Could you have reached out to more people if you’d compromised a bit?
“Not really, we do what we do. There was a time in the early nineties when we were set to become quite big but we shot ourselves in the foot so many times that it never happened and we ened up as a middle-sized band forever. A couple of things stoppeed us, but then I think what did we really do wrong? Here we are in 2016, we’re in a position where we can play any music we want, any way we want, tour wherever we want. How much better does it get?”
I suppose that unless you’re at the level of U2 or the Stones there’s always another step up the ladder to get even more success so what’s the definition of ‘making it’?
“Bigger, better, more albums sold… When you start in a band and talk about making it, what you mean is making a living and once you’ve crossed that line it really doesn’t matter. Where you are in the charts is irrelevant. If you’re making a living from music you’re blessed.
“In the history of mankind musicians are at the bottom of society. They’re scum. They scrape a living by playing, they have chaotic personal lives and end up with an interesting but impoverished lifestyle. By a strange set of coincidences, for a short forty year period in the West after World War Two a lot of musicians could make a lot of money. Now we’re going back to the natural order of things where most musicians have to scrape around and dedicate their lives to music. They’re never going to be rich, they’re going to have chaotic lives but on the whole they’ll enjoy themselves.”
New Model Army play the O2 Institute, Birmingham, on Sunday 13th November. Tickets https://www.academymusicgroup.com/o2institutebirmingham/