BIG AUDIO DYNAMITE OPTS OUT

BIG AUDIO DYNAMITE OPTS OUT ...and Mick Jones explains why

BY

NDY HUGHES

As I walk through the doors of the cavernous nightclub that will be home to Big Audio Dynamite and friends for the next eight hours, I’m greeted by the usual visuals that accompany a touring band. There’s the dance floor jittered with flight cases and spare guitars, clusters of fans chatting quietly together, waiting for the soundcheck to end so they can get their albums autographed, roadies walking purposefully towards the stage carrying rolls of cable, and a leather jacketed Mick Jones walking towards me carrying a bunch of roses. OK, so maybe that visual wasn’t so usual, but then Big Audio Dynamite are far from being a usual band, and Mick Jones stopped being usual around 1976.

Mick Jones does not like interviews. He does them for two reasons only—his publicist tells him they’re important, especially for a magazine such as this, and it gives him a chance to explain what Big Audio Dynamite, a.k.a. B.A.D., are all about. Even allowing for those two good reasons, Mick Jones still doesn’t like doing interviews and he’s not into pretending any different. I suggest that he looks somewhat incongruous wearing his normal wardrobe—leather jacket, jeans, boots and slightly mocking sneer, whilst carrying a bunch of flowers. He fixes me with a fierce stare and demands that I explain what I mean. We are off to a bad start.

As luck would have it, we are forced to adjourn after only a few seconds as the constant booming “One Two...” and thrashing drums of the soundcheck is making conversation impossible—or should that be more impossible? Whatever, we stroll towards the backstage dressing rooms in search of some peace and quiet, and I inform Mick Jones that I was forcefully ejected from a Clash concert about six years ago for unwittingly sitting in the guest seats. He looks unimpressed. It’s the only show I’ve ever been thrown out of, l tell him.

“Yeah, it’s the only band I’ve ever been thrown out of, as well,” he replies and we smile at each other. It’s going to be OK after all.

Most people who leave major bands and then start something else don’t do very well, unless they learn to try something radically different. Mick Jones understands this perfectly, which is why he’s taken time out to ensure that B.A.D. are right before he lets them out to play. After a few low-key support gigs around Britain with the Alarm, Jones retired the band to the basement for a total rethink, lasting a year.

In an industry with such immediacy, does this detailed planning pay off?

“It can,” reckons Jones—and the success of B.A.D.’s two albums would seem to show that he knows what he’s talking about.

“I’m a great believer that if you want something, you have to spend time getting it right; it doesn’t just happen automatically. I had to shut myself away in my room for about two years to learn to play the guitar in the first place.”

One lesson that Jones has learned very well is to avoid the political posturing that began as a spear for the Clash to wave at the world, and ended up impaling them, leaving them to twitch in their ugly imploding death throes for all the world to see Fighting the “system,” it seems, is something of a waste of time, and Mick Jones will have no part of it. My suggestion that he was still up there with the vanguard of protest unleashes a vitriolic stream of denial.

“Listen, we tried that—for a long time we tried that with the Clash—and it’s like banging your head against a wall. Things change when individuals change, and you can’t change anything except some individuals. If at some point all the individuals get together, then something might change. It’s like having a party.”

So does the light of experience show Mick Jones as a man who has had all his idealism blunted?

“No it hasn’t, it’s just made us react differently. We’re trying to adapt to the times we’re living in, and not be too stuck in the past. We don’t want to be retrogressive, but then again we can’t go into the future, so we’re in the best place; we’re here and now, and we know where we are.”

Where Big Audio Dynamite are is precisely in the present. They are a band of the late ’80s. Through their two albums, and even more through their willingness to take their sound out on the road for people to look at and listen to, B.A.D. show the method of their style—to infuse segments of the most influential music they know and combine it with an aural collage of effects and idioms, providing a soundtrack for the street. B.A.D.’s influences could well show the way out of the musical cul-de-sac that hip-hop and rap has lead us all into. It’s an extension of an idea where a music collector can take an album, strip off the two good tracks, commit them to tape, and jettison the rest.

“Yes, it’s a bit like that,” Jones affirms. “You can be selective. We take certain ideas from American music, like the beat box and the bass from reggae, and some ideas from film soundtracks, and attempt to make our own film music. At least that’s what I think it is. We take the most atmospheric parts and use those, but not in a way that makes us any kind of style pirates.”

Having thought it over on the way to the interview, with B.A.D. s No. 10 Upping Street album (a clever verbal antidote to Downing Street, where the beloved [?] Mrs. Thatcher is in residence) smashing through my Walkman, I decided that they skate the ultrathin line between tribute and ripoff quite neatly, thank you.

“That’s what I meant when I said we’re not pirates,” agrees Jones, warming to his theme. “We’re trying to make the sound our own and that’s the difference.

“Now we’re trying to create our own film clips, and if we do borrow from films or videos, we’ll always use something really obscure. We’re not into reproducing The Terminator or anything like that. It’s not so much a question of where the idea comes from, it’s how you put it together and the chemistry you bring to it that really counts.”

With such grounding in basic strategy, the lessons learned from the Clash, and the favorable reaction to the albums, B.A.D. sound like any record company’s answer to their accountants’ prayers. Certainly they’re a band worthy of CBS investing some of the profits from all those Bob Dylan and Santana mega-unit shifts, aren’t they? It seems not. This, then, must be the 1980’s dragon that Mick Jones can slay in the way that politics was the Clash’s target. Fighting the system...hey Mick, you can’t beat it.

“We don’t bother with that anymore!” retorts Jones with an edge of exasperation in his voice. “We used to do that with the Clash, but now we just get on with our job and try and do it as well as possible, and let the record company get on with what they should be doing. If they’re doing their job right, they’re selling our records, which is what they are supposed to do. We give them all the stuff they need; we’re in control of it. We do our own photographs, our own record sleeves, our own art work, we make our own records, and we hand it all over as a finished article. There’s no one trying to tell us what sort of record we should be making and no one is designing T-shirts that we don’t like. We’re in charge of the whole thing, trying to keep it all at a fair price.”

The obvious answer to the problem of corporate manipulation and/or indifference is obvious—form your own label, go the whole way.

“I can’t do that,” sighs Jones resignedly. “I’m still under contract to CBS. I don’t mind the American CBS because they’re very nice to me, but the ones here in England...” his voice trails off in disgust.

I’m finding all this a little difficult to understand. The world is full of record company executives who ignore an obvious success even when it’s waiting to be invested in. Since the day someone turned down the Beatles because “guitar bands won’t last,” it’s been a fact of life. But here are B.A.D., selling gigs and records; there must be money invested in them to make the whole machine.tick.

“No—quite the opposite, in fact,” notes Jones, in a cheerful, mocking tone that only partly hides his obvious contempt. “They don’t give a toss about us; we just go ahead and get on with it. They’re great ‘reactors’ these people—you get to a certain level, you get a gold album, and they react, eventually. We’ve gone gold, and they still haven’t reacted—we’re still waiting for the reaction. The point is, we made the album go gold by going out and playing it and showing people that we’re a group that there’s nothing fishy about, no hype. With our band, the values we have are where we put them, which is on the street. There’s an excitement about our group, people talk about us, there’s no one telling them they ought to like us, we’re out there, the people’s choice.”

TURN TO PAGE 54

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 30

On to a safer topic, in theory at least—what about radio play, the vital link in the U.S.A, where physically taking your music to your audience on tour is rendered impossible by the sheer size of the territory. In Britain, you can cover the nation’s major venues in three weeks and sell records even if you’re ignored by the one and only national pop radio station.

“It doesn’t worry me,” is Jones’s simple dismissal of a situation that has other bands scanning the airplay lists as if their lives— instead of their livelihoods—depended on it.

“Nothing like that worries me. I told you I don’t worry about radio or record companies or anything like that, I just concentrate on the group. I’ve heard a rumor that we’re too blackwhite for radio—that’s gray, isn’t it?”

Too ‘blackwhite’? The tension seems to have lifted for the time being, so I feel pretty safe asking Jones to explain the term, which he cheerfully does.

“It means you’re too black for white radio and too white for black radio, so you’re in a sort of limbo. How are we doing for gray radio?” and Jones laughs loudly, relaxing for the first time since we sat down together.

Having surmounted the unenviable hurdles of the “first/second/album crisis” (delete the one you feel doesn’t apply!), there are other difficulties waiting to rear their ugly heads. You wouldn’t expect a seasoned performer of Jones’s experience to be unaware of future hassles, and you’d be right. I can think of at least two straight off—the inevitable ego problems that must crop up in even the best-run bands, and a potential danger of the third album collapsing under the weight of its own effects and imploding out of existence with a loud twang. Jones appears utterly unfazed by my slightly pessimistic version of the future for his band, and his part in it.

“The idea that people want their bit on the album is going to happen, I know that. And yes, it will lead to some conflicts, but that’s the way it is: every dictatorship has to topple, there has to be a revolution sooner or later, doesn’t there?

“As for the sound becoming over-cluttered, yeah, we are aware of that already and we’re trying hard with it. We’re trying to control ourselves—control shouldn’t be confused with complacency. It doesn’t mean that; control means discipline. We’re trying to avoid a situation where everyone is going all at once. You have to be aware of the spaces in the music, listen to what other people are doing, and fit your bit around them. That’s part of the job of learning about your music, and it will improve as we learn to communicate as a group.”

On the subject of communication, I feel it’s an appropriate time to inform Jones that he’s the first musician I’ve interviewed who doesn’t spend so much time toeing the record company line and being polite that we never get any real opinions at the end of the day.

“I don’t know how other people go on—I’m just a regular dude, doing what he likes,” he opines with a smile.

So there’s none of this ‘‘You’re the journalist and I’m the star” routine, then?

“That’s a load of old bollocks, that is!” retorts Jones, returning to his earlier venomous denial style of answer. “I don’t talk to anyone differently than I’m talking to you now. I just talk to people straight, and if they get up my nose, I let ’em know, and that goes for fans as well. Don’t come up and worship me. I refuse to deal with anyone except as another human being, and you’d better believe that’s all we are, we’re nothing more. That’s how I deal with people. I don’t take no shit from no one and they respect me for that.”

I’d go along with that. It’s approaching show time, the rest of the band is wandering in and making preparations to get changed. It’s time to go.

Mick Jones has been a fascinating interview subject, and I can’t leave without asking him if he’s enjoyed this interview, allowing for the fact that he doesn’t enjoy talking to the press per se.

“It wasn’t too bad,” Jones reckons with a smile. “Come and see us again, won’t you? Come and have a drink, you’ll be welcome.”

I usually get the feeling that’s a common rockbiz courtesy with no real meaning behind it. Then again, I don’t usually make a point of taking up such invites of for the same reason—-who wants to hang around a dressing room like a spare dinner guest? But this time I feel it’s for real. We shake hands and Mick Jones wanders off in search of some refreshment. I know we’ll see each other again.

I wonder if he ever put those roses in some water? It’s hardly rock ’n’ roll, but Mick Jones always was one to break the rules. E