The Stool Pigeon music newspaper

Berlin is a truly beautiful place. Four-hour working weeks, no one’s obese, toddlers run free from the preying eyes of cracked glam rock stars, and cracked glam rock stars run free from the prying eyes of the Daily Mail. Annoyingly though, for some reason New York City’s Adam Green is not performing here. Rather he’s ended up in the suburb of Potsdam at an all-seated venue, which appears to have been unwillingly dropped in the midst of a dusty industrial estate car park, stations away from Berlin bohemia. More disturbingly, a German woman clad in leather trousers interrupts our photo shoot by waving frantically at Adam from the distance. “I think she’s confused me with Ozzy Osbourne,” he sighs, visibly bemused.

It’s moments like this that must make the doe-eyed songwriter feel like he’s been on the road for too long. After all, he hasn’t released an album since the string-drenched Jacket Full of Danger back in April 2006. A staggering further eight years have past since Green introduced himself to the world through the sound of art outsiders The Moldy Peaches. Rising from the New York underground, the group came to prominence brandishing acoustic guitars and dressing in silly costumes. Following their second official LP, the project dissolved as founding members Green and Kimya Dawson pursued solo careers.

“Listening back to that stuff makes me feel good,” says Green, smiling. “There were so many songs that we never put out. People missed out on the full writing processes that went behind the records; we had so many failed attempts at writing stuff before we got it right. Our first record is really fun ’cos it was recorded over seven years, starting from when I was about 12, until I was 19. Kimya used to baby-sit for me, so she’d come over and we’d write in my basement.”

Eschewing the outdoor surrealist wasteland drama, we retreat inside to a backstage lounge area. Reclining on a beanbag, Green discusses the greater scheme of things, seemingly content to contradict the old Manic Street Preacher-enforced chestnut that ‘libraries equal power’.

“I’ve very much been over-estimating the intelligence of those in power,” Green mumbles. “There’s a comic book about the history of the world. I love that. I’m not that formally educated and I’m not that self-educated, so it’s great to learn about the world in cartoon form.”

Obviously acquiring such speech bubble inflicted wisdom has caused Green to question things, people and places. Most specifically, the wisdom of drug dealers:
“I had this pot dealer telling me that business had gone down since 9/11, which seemed retarded. It happened like six years ago! I’ve seen my fair share of terrorist attacks, in Manhattan and Madrid, but I try not to be too fatalistic. There’s always the possibility of some kind of dystopian government…”

Charmingly, knowing he is to be photographed, we hear Mr Green has made extra effort with his appearance today, although he still looks remarkably dishevelled. It’s easy to understand his kinship with fellow New York scruffs The Strokes who shoot for the same tousled look that Bryan Ferry’s nightmares are made of. Unsurprisingly enough, Green himself does suffer from strange J. G. Ballard reminiscent night visions.

“I have a lot of dreams about shopping malls and an imaginary suburb,” he says. “My favourite ones are sexual. They involve transsexual types. In the first dream I can ever remember having… I got lost in McDonald’s, I couldn’t find my mum, then I started going down a yellow brick Ronald McDonald road.”

Was it perhaps, an early, vividly coloured metaphor for Big Mac heaven and fries?
“I go out at night, actively trying to see ghosts,” continues the 26-year-old. “I go to haunted houses in New York alone in the dark, where murders and stuff have happened, but I always see nothing. If I saw a ghost it would make growing old less scary, even though I already think that my afterlife will be better than most people’s.” He pauses. “I don’t believe in an afterlife, actually. I just believe the world will end when I die.”

When I ponder out loud that a number of good songwriters have indeed died without wielding the apocalypse talk turns to the late Portland genius Elliott Smith.

“I saw Elliott after one of his shows a few months before he died and he was not charmed by my attempt to make a humorous remark,” Green recounts. “He told me he would never move back to Brooklyn as the area had become really gentrified. I replied, ‘God damn white people!’ implying that he was one of those responsible for gentrifying it. He didn’t think it was funny. He just shrugged his shoulders and walked away.”

Encouragingly, over the advancing years Green has not lost his knack for pissing off notable people. Let’s hope this fighting spirit slips into his next album, promised for early 2008. In the meantime, where does he currently stand on Mr Beck ‘I’m a loser baby’ Hansen, who some have compared him to?

“I think that Scientology is just a religion like any other,” he says. “I think you’ll find equal strangeness with the extreme Baptists, the Catholics, the Jewish…” He’s trying to be diplomatic while simultaneously provoking a sizable percentage of society to burn life-sized effigies of him. “I feel bad because when I was bored I told a foreign interviewer that Beck had tried to convert me to Scientology; that they’d taken me to the celebrity Scientology centre. Beck’s a nice guy and I want to apologise for saying that about him. It was unfair. He couldn’t defend himself, he wasn’t there.”

Another unfortunate misunderstanding. Perhaps Green, Beck and Smith can all be songwriter buddies again one day in Heaven, or at a similar afterlife meeting place they all can agree on. Not everyone is welcome to this ethereal party, though. Green now has taunts going spare.

“I’m not terribly fond of Justin Timberlake or anyone from The Mickey Mouse Club,” he divulges. “I’m not that fond of the child star impulse, although I have nothing but good things to say about Macaulay Culkin. I always thought he had something special…”

With that we head outside for a second round of photos with a visibly more relaxed Green, who stumbles about in front of the camera like a latter day Norman Wisdom. He even does a convincing impersonation of Chun Li from Street Fighter 2, before inviting us out for an after-show drink that night in the real Berlin.

Adam Green? Nice guy. Unless he’s bored, that is.