Lux Interior died three years ago today  (February 4). We’re celebrating his life by putting this fantastic interview (our December 2009, issue 9 cover story) online for the first time.

“We’ve been written off as kitsch, camp, cartoony. But we’re dead serious.” Poison Ivy Rorschach is not a woman to argue with on this kind of point. Not that the 52-year-old guitarist and co-founder of the living legend that is The Cramps is in any way testy, aggressive or bitchy, despite all those sneering leopard-skin dominatrix poses she’s struck over the last 30 years. But she knows what she knows, loves what she loves, and has earned the right to let her point stand many times over.

Ivy is the historian of the incredibly strange band she formed in 1975 with the love of her life, Lux Interior, the Herman Munster of vintage minimalist rock’n’roll. If you’ve never heard The Cramps, or have but don’t understand what an impact they’ve had on global pop culture, then let me introduce you to the human interest element of the Lux’n’Ivy saga. They are one of the great love stories of rock. Met on a California freeway in 1972, fell for each other instantly, have not spent a day apart in 34 years. The couple that plays together, stays together, particularly if what they play is mondo-gonzo dirty blues punk rock’n’roll shot through with the vivid colour, satire and sex of fifties teen culture, stoopid-dumb B-movies, vintage pornography, Vegas Elvis, backwoods rockabilly, sicko sixties garage, iconic burlesque clothing, pink Cadillacs, dirty doings at the eternal American drive-in, Ms Spanks-a-lot Amazonianism, Ed Wood sci-fi and the kind of gratuitous filth that only the most romantic people on the planet can indulge in and understand that the filth is the love, L.U.V. They are The Cramps. And they transcend rock’n’roll because they are a genre of their own.

We’re talking to Lux and Ivy because… well, actually, because they’re the goddamn Cramps, f’chrissake! They have no product to promote, no new album. They have just finished remixing and remastering their 1979 Gravest Hits mini album, to be reissued next year with a slew of previously unreleased tracks from their first legendary Memphis recording sessions. And they have just finished a tour, mainly festivals. “I really enjoy that,” says Lux, “because you look out at all the faces and you can tell they’ve never seen you and don’t know what to expect.” Lux says everything with a kind of goofy drollness, reminiscent of James Stewart and the way The Greatest Film Actor Of All Time could use his down-home drawl and easy likeability to deliver stinging sarcasm while remaining eminently loveable.

Talking to Lux and Ivy about their extraordinary past is not just obvious, but appropriate, because the past is where they live. Or, as Lux sees it: “At the time when we started, and even today, you hear people say, ‘We want to do something new. We don’t wanna have anything to do with the past.’ Well, that’s okay, but you sure get a lotta crap that way.”

So let’s get right into that backstory. It is 1972, and an average day on an average highway outside Sacramento, California. A 26-year-old Ohio student called Erick Lee Purkhiser is driving with a friend. They spot a female hitchhiker and gallantly pull over. An 18-year-old Sacramento student called Kristy Marlana Wallace gratefully accepts a lift.

Ivy: “Everyone hitchhiked in California at that time. It was a very hippy era. We all thought it was safe, but it was hare-brained, looking back. I think we would have met anyway. It was destiny.”

So Lux, you pick up this hitchhiker and she turns out to be the woman you’ll not just be with, but work with, and create an entire aesthetic world with for the next 30 years of your life. One would imagine that there must have been some kind of psychic earthquake when you first looked at each other. Was there?

“Yes. It was exactly like that. She was somebody really special when I met her, we immediately got along and we’ve never spent any time apart since. She’s just… smart, and interested in all the things that I was interested in. When we first met, all we wanted to do was go to rock’n’roll shows. And at that time, going to rock’n’roll shows in southern California was great ’cos everybody got dressed up like crazy and… it almost didn’t matter who the band was. The audience was more interesting than the bands. I’d wanted to be in a band and she played guitar and we got this idea within days of meeting each other: that we should have a band.”

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It took a while for this idea to reach any kind of reality, and it didn’t happen in Sacramento, where, in one of a set of bizarre post-hitchhike coincidences, Erick and Kristy happened to be enrolled in the same art class. It was Art and Shamanism. Of course it was. Ivy: “The primary text book for it was a book called The Sacred Mushroom And The Cross. It said that the Bible was a hidden code for magic mushrooms. I didn’t see Lux until the next semester. He walked in the class and I said, ‘Sit by me, sit by me!’ It was my birthday and he gave me a drawing as a present. And then the next time we met in class we ended up sticking together for ever and ever.”

What happened next is that Lux and Ivy up and moved to Lux’s hometown of Akron, Ohio in 1973. “There was a, uh, legal issue in California,” Ivy recalls, darkly. “But I don’t want to elaborate on that. We just had to get out of town.”

The Astoria, 2008, last ever UK show. Shot by Heike Schneider-Matzigkeit

Their mysterious flit turned out to be fortuitous. Akron is one of those apparently anonymous small towns which over-achieved in the field of punk/new wave/art rock and all that. Chrissie Hynde and Devo are both Akron alumni, and Pere Ubu were stationed just down the road in Cleveland. Ivy: “Akron was very inexpensive to live in. So we had this gigantic three-storey house for the two of us. We used the attic for rehearsals. We must have talked about the band in Sacramento, though, because I actually bought Lux the fuzz pedal we use, which is a Univox Superfuzz, from a pawn shop. His brother sent him a Student Prince guitar and I taught him ‘Baby Strange’ by T.Rex.

“We were both working in a circuit-board factory. Really boring. A really fascist boss. We weren’t cut out for that kind of work; we’re too delicate and sensitive. Although, one of the early interviews we did was with Nick Kent, a really cool writer, and he thought we said surfing-board factory. I kinda hate to say that’s not true, ’cos I imagine we’d be sanding and waxing surfboards. That’s too cool.

“Through record collecting we were getting more and more passionate. Being exposed to music that most people weren’t. There wasn’t much going on in the seventies that really thrilled us… the New York Dolls had broken up, T.Rex wasn’t what it was before. I think being together — not just as a couple, but as partners in crime — that you can get each other wound up in a way that a person alone can’t. We convinced each other that it was a viable option to have our own band and that everybody would think it was really cool. It was kind of a delusion. Except that we succeeded with it.”

What Lux and Ivy were doing, at this point, was developing a perfect pop-art aesthetic, an amalgam of pop-cultural trash elements drawn from fifties rock, B-movies, glam, and the original sixties strain of punk rock. Ivy: “It was a natural, organic thing. People think we’re more image-conscious than we are… it’s really more self-expression of our personal tastes. And we didn’t know who else would be in the band — we didn’t know anyone who even knew who The Sonics were, and they were a must as an influence. We had to do rockabilly songs. When we first went into the basement of the Musical Maze record store with Bryan Gregory and his sister Pam to jam, we didn’t know how we’d sound. So we just did it. We didn’t have enough going on to discuss it! When we met Bryan we just connected. It was a chemistry thing. There was never a plan.”

But if it was so organic, how did little Erick and Kristy wind up with those brilliantly conceived stage names?

“I was Poison Ivy in Sacramento. I still have a driver’s licence that says that, and this was before any thought of a band. Lux was Flip Flop on his driver’s licence. When we went to Ohio, he was Raven Beauty and eventually changed to Lux Interior. For some reason that doesn’t make sense to me now. I thought I needed a last name, and Rorschach [named after the inventor of those infamous ‘inkblot’ psychiatric tests] came to me in a dream. But I was already Poison Ivy before The Cramps. We were reinventing ourselves, but not because of the band. Only our shrink knows why.”

The first completed Cramps line-up from 1975 featured Lux, Ivy, guitarist Bryan Gregory (The Cramps, famously, were the first primal rock’n’roll band to dispense with bass) and Bryan’s sister Pam Ballam on drums. But even though Akron produced great bands, the fledgling Cramps were not part of the cool art rock scene. “One thing people assume,” Ivy continues, “is that we knew those people. We didn’t. We weren’t aware of them playing, except that we saw Rocket From The Tombs [precursors to Pere Ubu] supporting Television in a hotel in Cleveland. We didn’t meet any of them until we moved to New York. We didn’t know anything in Ohio except our stupid jobs and mainstream gigs. We didn’t know there was an underground. So we had to get out of there.”

In America at that time, there was really only one place for a pack of proto-punk weirdoes to move to. In September 1975, The Cramps hit New York. Ivy again accesses her total recall and sets the scene. “We’d done the nine-hour drive from Akron twice and seen the Ramones and Television, so we knew it was all there. Get a few days off, take speed, drive there, see the bands, drive back and there’d be nothing left of us when we got back to Ohio. But those two trips convinced us we had to move. We had enough money for a hotel for two days, and couldn’t find a place to live. So we slept the third night in the car at a truck-stop in New Jersey and said, ‘If we don’t find somewhere tomorrow, we’ll have to forget it and go back to Ohio.’ That day we found our apartment. So we moved and proceeded to starve. But that was okay. We had to be there.”

The 1975 lightning conductor that was Hilly Kristal’s CBGBs, which finally closed its doors in October 2006 — yet another victim of the post-Giuliani disinfecting of New York culture and nightlife — provided instant focus and opportunity for the nascent Cramps, as they quickly found like-minds, got gigs and printed up the posters and flyers that invented the term ‘psychobilly’.

“It was easier than you’d imagine,” reckons Ivy. “That’s why we feel so grateful and so fortunate with the scene that was there at the time. Monday night was audition night at CBGBs, but not everybody could get on. We did straight away because we’d made friends with The Dead Boys, who were really hot at the time. So The Dead Boys headlined this audition night, and we played our first show to a packed house. A lot of people saw us, as chaotic as we were, including Peter Crowley who booked Max’s Kansas City. He loved us and immediately booked us. Hilly Kristal thought we sucked, which we probably did. But Peter loved us and we started playing Max’s regularly, supporting Suicide. We got a following just from that. We put these flyers up all over town and that’s where the ‘psychobilly’ tag came from… we thought it up just to get people interested in us. We clicked straight away. The biggest break was when the Ramones saw us, and dug us, and then they let us open for ’em. Their audience loved us. New York was just a magnetic Mecca for people and there was just this swell of energy. We were hanging out at CBGBs and Max’s every night of the week, and so was everybody else. A swirl of creativity. It must be so hard for bands now. People are much more jaded.”

Supporting two of the counter-culture’s most influential bands also helped The Cramps find their own peculiar X-factor. “The Ramones were just like this blast of light onstage. The energy influenced us. And Suicide’s Alan Vega intimidating the audience. He showed us that antagonism could be fun.”

I ask Ivy if the story of her working as a New York dominatrix was truth or fiction. “That’s true. It was a very interesting time. I was making way more money than anyone else in the band. And the work suited me. We didn’t struggle in the way we would have if I’d just stayed waiting tables. It enabled us to be independent.”

The Astoria, 2008. Shot by Heike Schneider-Matzigkeit

I realise more salacious info is not immediately forthcoming. I prod, warily… So, no horrible, sleazy nightmare moments from your stint in the sex industry?

“No, not at all. I was cut out for the work.”

There is a finality about the statement. Guess we’ll have to wait for the uncensored autobiography.

Nevertheless, the initial filth and fury of punk rock had pretty much come and gone before The Cramps, now with Pam Ballam replaced by Nick Knox, made their first record. For the 1978 sessions that became Gravest Hits, the rockabilly obsessives went straight to the source — Memphis — with Box Tops/Big Star cult legend Alex Chilton as producer. With half of the sessions recorded at Phillips Recording, the post-Sun studio owned by Sam Phillips, the man who didn’t just discover Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis, but signalled the birth of the modern world by putting out records by fifties legends both black and white on the same label, from the same studio. Were the novice Cramps in awe? Lux: “By that time we had almost collected every Sun label single. We’d gone to the Sun warehouse. When I first met Ivy we drove all the way across the country to visit Memphis. So we were really in awe of that building and Sam Phillips. And then we met him. We had to stay overnight in the studio because we got locked in and we met him. It was like a dream or something. Could this be happening? We were told he never comes to the studio, but he showed up with a chainsaw to cut down the vines that had grown up over his name plaque. It was a magical experience.”

What was he like? “A million laughs. We didn’t talk to him too much. But we told him that we had every Sun single, and he says, ‘Well, you know something?’ And we said, ‘What?’ And he just says, ‘You’re lucky.’ He had these huge glasses on that magnified his eyes until he looked like a monster from outer space. He’s a real character.”

The first flurry of Cramps releases, from 1978’s debut single, ‘The Way I Walk / Surfin’ Bird’, through to 1981’s Psychedelic Jungle album, remain the band’s greatest, and felt like a punch in the gut at the time. The Cramps found a way to merge the wildest backwoods rockabilly of the fifties and the freakiest beats of the sixties with the art punk of the late seventies, allying a comic sexual mania with white noise feedback fuzz and a feral rhythmic buzz that seemed to sum up every rebel rock genre that had ever made a square squeal, “But that’s not music! It’s just noise!!!” at a budding teenage hedonist who really didn’t care because they’d just been shown a place better and realer than the so-called real world. But even as legions of kids — particularly in Britain and Europe — fuelled a rockabilly revival, adopted and adapted the term psychobilly, merged The Cramps’ horror show threads with their own punk or goth or futurist accessories, and made ‘Human Fly’ and ‘Garbageman’ into hardy alternative clubbing perennials, the band were facing two major crises which would prevent them taking advantage of their instant cult status and scoring mainstream hits.

The Cramps had signed to I.R.S., the label owned by Miles Copeland, infamous former CIA man and brother of The Police’s Stewart. Band and label fell out, and Copeland played hardball, freezing payments owed to the band and legally preventing them from either recording or leaving for another label. I ask Lux if this was the worst time to be in The Cramps.

“Absolutely the worst time. We’d just toured Europe and they made up this stuff about Bryan leaving our band to join a voodoo cult! Crap that we wanted nothing to do with because it wasn’t true. That was terrible. And it ended up breaking up that line-up because Bryan couldn’t take it anymore. We weren’t getting our money… people think we sued them for money, but the only thing we wanted was off the label. We couldn’t record and it went on for a long time.

“We learned the lesson about not getting involved with anything like that again. There’s plenty of places to record cheaply, so we decided to pay for our own recordings and license records to labels. So that was the lesson — stay away from the music industry.”

The Cramps decided all this too late for Bryan Gregory. One day in May 1980, after a Cramps show, Gregory drove away with the band’s gear and never came back. “We didn’t see him for years after he left,” Lux recalls. “Then in the late nineties he got in touch with us again and we were writing letters.” The reconciliation was brought to an abrupt end when Gregory died suddenly of a heart attack in January 2001, at the age of just 46. “I enjoyed the first line-up,” Lux says, “which a lot of people love because Bryan was in the band. Actually, the Bryan and Nick Knox line-up wasn’t the first, but I consider it the first line-up. They’re all really great memories. Bryan could just do so many weird things. He was just such a weirdo at first. Later on he became… more of a rock star, unfortunately. But at first he’d go out onstage, fold himself up in the yoga lotus position, and run around on his knees. Then he’d spin around on one knee and jump into the audience, which was so dangerous. He really frightened people. That band was a real four-pronged attack.”

Gregory has had many replacements down the years, but the best-known was Kid Congo Powers, who spent time in The Gun Club and Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds. Powers has an online journal, in which he says that joining The Cramps was a shock because Lux and Ivy ran such a tight ship. Lux proudly agrees.

“We’ve heard people say that we’re the band that can’t play and that our schtick is being amateurish. But that has never been what we are. We always wanted to be a good band that plays powerfully and tight. It’s like movies that are labelled as trash — the people who were making those movies thought that they were making really great movies. If someone watching doesn’t think so, that’s too bad. All of our songs have specific parts and if someone’s gonna be in our band they have to play those parts. Before we started a band that’s what we thought a band was. We went by the Creedence Clearwater Revival model where there’s a perfect lead part for a particular song and that’s what gets played, as opposed to some bands who just… jam.” Lux sneers the word ‘jam’. “The idea that it’s different every night is boring. You should find the perfect thing and just do it. People who do that jamming stuff, it’s just an arty attitude: ‘I’m so special that whatever I play people will love.’ Anyway, The Gun Club had only played two or three times before we saw Kid play with ’em, and they were amazing.”

So you stole their bassist? “Yep. And got rid of the competition in one fell swoop. Heh.”

The Cramps got through the early eighties and refused to get bitter about missing the pop boat. They’ve made 13 albums in the last 26 years, including the definitive ‘best of’ Off The Bone and their most recent, 2004’s double CD of rarities and live material, How To Make A Monster. More importantly, they’ve played around the world and spread the word on an aesthetic they invented. In every major city on the planet, and particularly cities where many counter-cultural youth go out to party, there will be a club. It will be called something like Born Bad or It Came From Outer Space or Voodoo Lounge or Untamed Youth. It will play fifties rock’n’roll, sixties punk and kitsch mambopopsleaze, and the boys and girls will be dressed in a magnificent mutant strain of vintage chic and DIY gothic fetish wear. Posters and films of Bettie Page, Mamie Van Doren, Elvis, Russ Meyer and Vampira will provide the visuals, and an atmosphere of pervy innocence will pervade. And the boys and girls, whether they’re old enough to know it or not, will be living, in those few hours, in The House The Cramps Built. And I dare say new boys and girls will be doing something similar long after you, I or the Cramps have joined the legions of the undead. How many bands invent an entire culture? “I do totally agree, and I hope that doesn’t sound too arrogant.” It doesn’t, Ivy. It doesn’t. “I think it wouldn’t exist if we didn’t. However, it’s been around so long now that some of the later versions are innocent in the sense that they maybe don’t know it came directly from us. But without us setting that ball in motion, it wouldn’t be around. I’m sure of that.”

Is your LA home still a shrine to The Cramps’ obsessions?

“Yeah, it is. We had to have some extensive remodelling about 10 years ago, because… it wasn’t quite as bad as the guy’s house in American Splendor where the house is sagging, but it was starting to sag under the weight of paintings and records. So we had to jack the house up and put more posts under the floor. There’s a lot of leopard-skin. We’ve got a very Polynesian thing going on.”

It’s tempting to conclude that The Cramps are pioneers of ‘the trash aesthetic’. But our perfect couple don’t see it that way. Take it away, Lux: “People will never understand the blues. And they understand it less today than they did back then. Even black people today, a lot of them disown the blues. When people say trash, they’re saying that they think the blues is trash, because that’s all rock’n’roll is. When people say trash they mean you’re not doing something like Pink Floyd. You know, good music. It’s probably worse here in America than it is over in Europe for people understanding what rock’n’roll is. It’s not trash. It’s a folk art. Which makes it more important than anything that comes out of a major studio. I’m more interested in Marcel Duchamp taking a bicycle and jamming it in the top of a stool than some artist who’s spent his life in front of an easel perfecting his brush-stroke.”

‘Tear It Up’

Ivy: “For us it was like, the sixties were great — the sixties bands who were influenced by blues and rhythm’n’blues. We loved the early Rolling Stones, The Kinks, Pretty Things, Yardbirds… Later on, it turned from rock’n’roll to rock music — the more progressive, suburban, and more commercial thing. It seems a lot of that is revered now. We loved Led Zeppelin, but we also knew the blues music that it came from. Now people only go as far back as Zeppelin… even Aerosmith.” She can’t resist a dismissive snort. “So everything’s just watered down. What Neil Young represented in the seventies was panhandling hippies singing ‘Heart Of Gold’. It’s just weird. It’s confusing to us that there are punk bands who say they’re influenced by Stevie Nicks! Ha! What the hell?”

Lux: “I think it would be great if we were considered the band that made people pay attention to the past again. The blues is something different from other music. It’s the music of real crazy people, and it’s different from popular music. Sometimes it becomes popular music, but it’s a whole different thing. And the thing with those old movies and Bettie Page and custom car culture… I think we had a lot to do with making people pay attention to that. And once they pay attention they realise that that’s not something to be thrown away and forgotten about. We made people turn around and think about where things came from.”

Our time with The Greatest Living Rock’n’Roll Band is coming to an end. There’s just time to ask about some of the curious byways of Crampsworld, of which there are many. For example, in the build-up to this feature, The Stool Pigeon’s esteemed editor travelled to see The Cramps in Norway. Your correspondent received a delighted text: “Cramps brilliant, as always. Lux got his dick out, as always.” Indeed, Lux is probably second only to Iggy Pop — with whom The Cramps have toured and collaborated — in terms of rock penis sightings. Does Ivy ever say, “Oh, put it away!?”

“No,” Lux drawls. “Only when the cops are at the show. Then she’ll say, ‘Don’t do anything tonight. Those cops don’t look friendly.’ But no, it’s really not a part of the show. It just happens sometimes, ’cos… I don’t want that to be part of the show. We’re not Marilyn Manson or one of those bands who are there to shock people. That’s not our main message.”

How did you end up doing a song for the SpongeBob SquarePants cartoon? Lux: “Our nextdoor neighbour does the background artwork. And he just came by and said, ‘I’ve told my boss that we live next-door and he asked if you would do a song for us.’ That simple. It was a lot of fun.”

Lux, is it true that all the screams in Francis Ford Coppola’s version of Dracula are you? “Well, not all of them. We did go to his house and record me screaming, sobbing and sighing for three hours. But I don’t think all the screams are me. Sofia Coppola is a really big Cramps fan and came up with the idea: ‘Daddy, The Cramps would do a beautiful job.’ We’ve been around long enough now that the little monsters who came to see us when we started out are now in positions of power. It’s a wonderful thing that these people come to us.”

Nonetheless, you have no major hits and have remained resolutely cultish. Have you ever got disillusioned, and wanted to give up? Ivy: “No. Because we really love playing, we love writing songs, and I love playing guitar. It is hard work doing gigs but we’re outside the music business so we don’t have all that dispiriting crap to put up with. As far as income, we’ve done quite well. You can look at it and say, ‘We deserve more,’ or you can look at all the bands who crashed and burned and didn’t get what they were entitled to and say we did really well. We’re paid well for gigs and we have a couple of songs in commercials which are very lucrative. There’s one in a Cadillac commercial at the moment. We do well enough that this has been worth doing in every possible way. We do what we love for a living and live a good life. Some people go on about having a big house… but Lux and I are both psychic, so that would just frighten us, ’cos all those empty rooms would be full of ghosts. Maybe it’s because of our awareness of musical history that we’re aware there are so many unsung heroes who never got anything, and we’re sure doing better than them. Entitlement is a stoopid thing for anyone to feel.”

That’s what makes you different from the Ramones. They were desperate for that big hit.

“They stuck together when they hated each other.”

The Cramps never seemed like that.

“It’ll cost you your life. It’ll eat you up, and to not realise that is just deadly. And… they’re dead.”

If I had to pinpoint a single thing that makes me admire Lux Interior and Poison Ivy Rorschach as much as any living rock band, it’s the idea that two ordinary kids could, and did, create an entire self-contained world out of nothing more than music, movies, clothes, working-class history and… love. Big, romantic, lustful, lifelong love for each other and for the things they both adore.

Ivy, you live on Planet Cramps, a fantasy world that you made into a reality, don’t you?

“We do. And thank you for understanding that, because some people think it’s a band with a career. It’s not. It’s our life. It’s about the right company and creating an atmosphere. It makes us happy but it also promotes creativity and… vision. It keeps us free.”

“Every record sounds the same, you gotta step into my world…” so go the lyrics to Madonna’s hotly anticipated collaboration with Nicki Minaj and MIA – and, funnily, she’s not wrong. Madge hasn’t made much of a departure on ‘Give Me All Your Luvin’’, but her video does feature some moderately racy footage of MIA and Minaj in the cheerleader outfits. Never a bad thing.

The video, directed by Megaforce, features kitschy American football imagery, coinciding with Madge’s Super Bowl half-time performance scheduled this Sunday.

Madonna’s new album, MDNA, is scheduled for release through Interscope on March 26. MIA is also slated to appear on another track on the album called ‘The Birthday Song’.

* * *

Ah, now this is a bit good: the official video for MIA’s new single ‘Bad Girls’, as directed by ‘Born Free’ / Justice’s ‘Stress’ provocateur Romain Gavras. The single was announced along with news of a fourth album from the London agit-pop star earlier this week.

* * *

Try keeping this tune out of your head: it’s The Magnetic Fields’ NSFW video for lead single ‘Andrew in Drag’ from their forthcoming album, Love at the Bottom of the Sea, out March 5 on Domino. The above photo by Ross Trevail is an outtake from our shoot with Stephin Merritt, the cantankerous mastermind behind the band, taken to accompany our feisty, in-depth interview with the songwriter in issue 36 of The Stool Pigeon – out next week.

A bedroom producer named Reark claims he was the beat-maker behind ‘Natalia’s Song’ by Zomby, the lead single to his 2011 album, Dedication. In a post to his Soundcloud profile, Reark uploaded his original track and broke the backstory into bulletpoints:

1. I wrote this loop back in October 2007, entirely by myself, posting it on myspace.

2. Zomby, with whom I was communicating, hears the loop and offers to collaborate to finish it. I agree and send him the original Reason song file + Rex file of the vocals.

3. Zomby posts the loop on his myspace without crediting me, I complain, he takes it down.

4. In the next months Zomby suggests where the track might get released. I continue to remind him that it’s a collaboration.

5. Without my knowledge, a slightly revised version is aired by Mary Anne Hobbs on Radio 1, you can hear Zomby’s revised drum variation from 1:06 — 1:36. This is the only significant change he’s made to the track. The rest is looping, and some slight editing of the vocal cuts.

6. The track gets released on 4AD in May 2011, I notice in August 2011. I complain first to Zomby with no effect, then to 4AD, to whom I send this loop plus an e-mail sent from me to Zomby with the original Reason song file from October 2007. 4AD accept my evidence and change credits to include my name.

Zomby has been vague in interviews when asked about the vocal sample. The singer is Natalia Ladygina (hence the name of the track), a Russian friend of mine. She is singing a cover of Irina Dubcova’s song ‘O nem’. I have other samples of her, so you can expect to hear more of her in the future.

In response, Zomby tweeted: “Allow it I have thousands of songs its minor”

Judge for yourself here:

The original:

Zomby’s 2011 version:

There’s a moment in ‘The Troggs Tapes’, the sixties band’s legendary studio outtake, in which drummer Ronnie Bond, during a heated debate over the sound of their new single, argues, in a richly agricultural accent, “You’ve got to put a little bit of fucking fairy dust over the baaastard.”

If any man on earth knows all about putting a little bit of fucking fairy dust over the bastard, it’s Trevor Horn. If you hear any record from that golden period between punk and Live Aid which shimmers and sparkles and seems to fly above the earth, it was either produced by Trevor Horn (see: The Buggles, ABC, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Grace Jones, Dollar, Pet Shop Boys, Propaganda, Malcolm McLaren and countless others), or trying to sound as if it was (see: pretty much everyone else). The immaculate cleanliness of what Paul Morley christened ‘the new pop’ was Horn’s handiwork. He is, essentially, the man who invented the eighties.

Lenses as thick as milk bottle bottoms, he relaxes on a brown leather sofa in the loft of his own Sarm Studios, the converted Notting Hill church whose history dates back to legendary seventies sessions by Led Zeppelin and Bob Marley And The Wailers. It’s very much a working studio: intermittently, the conversation is disrupted by thunderous bass explosions from the floors below, and he explains “Sorry, that’s The Prodigy recording their new album.”

The pretext for talking to Horn is his involvement in 30/30, a collaborative project between the EMI label and the Roundhouse venue which offers unsigned artists the chance to work with top producers for free (Trevor’s recorded a track with 22-year-old Londoner Azekel), but at any given time, Horn has several plates spinning. He’s just announced, for example, that his old band The Buggles will go on tour for the first time ever in 2012.

“I’m keen to get out on the road and play live,” he says, smiling and habitually squeaking his shoes together as he speaks. “I’ve been stuck in a studio for 30 years. The Buggles never played live at the time! That was the joke. When that thing [he means ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’] was a hit, I’d been a bassist for years, I’d played on all kinds of things…”

Born in 1949, Horn’s early life, growing up in Durham with schoolteacher father and a mother from a mining family, could barely have been further from the swing of things.

“I didn’t come to London till I was 21, and it was a different world then: all these ballrooms like the Hammersmith Palais would have a DJ, but they would also have a band. And it was a way to earn a living as a musician. Two nights a week, the ballroom dancing would stop, then we’d play whatever was in the charts. I could read music, and I could play bass, which was a very new instrument in the early seventies, so if you could do those two things, you could make a living. And I was really stupid and I used to behave badly and get drunk and do all kinds of silly things because I was bored out of my mind.”

That boredom proved productive.

“When I got to 25 I left London, went back to the provinces and built a recording studio — me and another guy, with our bare hands. And I started fixing up other people’s songs — people who’d won a local songwriters’ competition, and someone said to me, ‘You know, what you’re doing is called being a record producer.’ I’d seen that credit on records but I never knew what it was. And I just had this moment where I knew that was what I was going to do. From that moment, it took me six years to get my first hit, and I earned my living playing crap and whatever.”

That “crap and whatever” included an album with CBS-backed flop John Howard, and his own “sci-fi disco” project Chromium, whose single ‘Caribbean Air Control’ featured an early example of Horn’s sonic inventiveness.

“This was ’77, and I made a ‘drum machine’ using tape and getting my drummer to play fours,” he says. “People would say, ‘It sounds like fuckin’ machines!’ and I’d reply, ‘That’s exactly the point!’”

Even though punk was going on around him, Horn was never a convert. “Being a muso, it wasn’t easy to be a fan of punk. Although I think I became more of a fan of punk when I was in America in 1982, and I got so angry with American radio, and then ‘Should I Stay Or Should I Go’ by The Clash came on the air and I had tears in my eyes. I thought, ‘It’s so crap, it’s fantastic!’”

Nevertheless, in a roundabout way, the punk explosion did affect Horn’s thinking. “In the seventies there were rock gods — Elton John, Rod Stewart — everyone sounded fabulous, everyone could sing really well, and it was daunting. Then the punk thing happened, and I thought, ‘If people will listen to that, what am I afraid of? I can do anything!’”

Horn wasn’t a lover of disco either, despite a stint playing bass for producer Biddu and his protégée Tina Charles, of ‘I Love To Love’ fame.

“I hated that shit,” he remembers, “but that’s what I played. I was Tina Charles’s boyfriend for a while. I learned a lot from her. Tina came home one night with the first backing track from a professional producer I’d ever heard. I’d tried making my own backing tracks but they sounded wrong. Biddu knew what he was doing: the drum machine was tight, everyone played exactly what he told them to, it was all really well put together. And I played it all night, thinking that’s what I’m trying to get to: that coldness, that precision.”

Horn’s dreams of being a renowned session man were starting to fade. “I flirted with jazz rock. I wanted to be Stanley Clarke. Tina Charles told me that if I practised for every minute left in my life I would never be as good as Stanley Clarke, and that all I was was a loser.”

However, it was while he was on Charles’s payroll that he and bandmates Geoffrey Downes (keyboards) and Bruce Woolley (guitar) conceptualised what would become Horn’s ticket to stardom: The Buggles.

The Buggles, ‘I Am A Camera’

“The idea came about because Bruce and I loved The Man-Machine by Kraftwerk, and the records Daniel Miller was making as The Normal — ‘Warm Leatherette’. We even read JG Ballard’s Crash because of that. It was an interesting time, you could feel something was coming in the eighties. We had this idea that at some future point there’d be a record label that didn’t really have any artists — just a computer in the basement and some mad Vincent Price-like figure making the records. Which I know has kinda happened, but in 1978 there were no computers in music yet, really. And one of the groups this computer would make would be The Buggles, which was obviously a corruption of The Beatles, who would just be this inconsequential bunch of people with a hit song that the computer had written. And The Buggles would never be seen.”

That hit song, ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’, took a while to materialise. “We had the opening line for ages — ‘I heard you on the wireless back in ’52’ — but couldn’t figure out the next line. Then one afternoon we were chatting and it just came — ‘lying awake intently tuning in on you’ — because we were talking about Jimmy Clitheroe and Ken Dodd and the classic age of fifties radio comedy. And I’d read The Sound-Sweep by JG Ballard, and some of that was in there — the abandoned studio, ‘rewritten by machine on new technology’… ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’ just popped out.”

Released in September 1979, the fiendishly catchy single was a number one across the world (and, famously, became the first song ever played on MTV). Suddenly, at the age of 30, Trevor Horn was a pop star.

Regarding never touring, he says: “We were eminently able to play live — we were musos and ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’ was relatively easy to play. What held us back was we went all over Europe promoting that single, then the follow-up ‘Living In The Plastic Age’, then we met Yes!”

In one of the most incongruous transfer deals of the eighties, the sugary synth-pop act were swallowed up by the monsters of prog rock, who had a vacancy for a singer and a keyboardist.

“Suddenly I was impersonating Jon Anderson in front of 24,000 people,” says Horn. “When someone offers you something like that, c’mon, you’ve got to do it…

It was a great experience. And it makes you a bit fearless in a recording studio. What else can life throw at you?”

Life in a touring stadium rock band wasn’t to Trevor’s liking, and after seven months he quit. Downes, however, stayed on board. “Geoffrey had had a taste of something other than novelty hit pop-dom, and he wanted to go and rock. And I didn’t blame him. The choice between staying in The Buggles and selling five million albums with [supergroup] Asia, as he went on to do, was an easy decision.”

ABC, ‘The Look Of Love’

Adventures In Modern Recording, the second Buggles album, was practically a Trevor Horn solo effort. Considered a cult classic by aficionados of studio-craft, it was a commercial failure. “I think the songs are terrible,” he admits, “but the production is great.” By the time of its release, however, Horn had already found his vocation: producing records for other acts.

“It was kind of unconscious,” he continues. “My wife [Jill Sinclair] owned a studio. And when Geoffrey left The Buggles, Jill became my manager. She said, ‘My first bit of advice is that as an artist, you’ll only ever be second or third division, however hard you try. But if you go into production, you’ll be the best producer in the world.’ She was quite purposeful. And the first thing she suggested was Dollar. I said, ‘Why would I wanna work with Dollar!? A cheesy pop duo.’ And she said, ‘Do a Buggles record, but have them front it.’ So I met them, and that’s exactly what they wanted.”

The saccharine duo of David Van Day and Theresa Bazar were all but washed-up till Horn took them on as his playthings and used them, on a run of singles including the sublime ‘Hand Held In Black And White’, as a vehicle to showcase his ideas.

“There was something sweet about them — these little people living in this techno-pop world — and we wrote ‘Hand Held In Black And White’ on the spot. The same afternoon we wrote ‘Mirror Mirror’, which was about them looking at each other. I thought it came out well, but I never thought much about it until I ran into Hans Zimmer [Hollywood composer and Buggles collaborator], who said, ‘I heard your record with Dollar, it’s really good,’ and loads of people seemed to like it. Then an astounding thing happened: the NME liked it! Paul Morley liked it. And then I was on a roll. It was epic. I only did four songs, and the final one, ‘Videotheque’, was about them seeing themselves on film. So it was like a little opera.”

The Dollar project led onto Horn’s masterpiece, ABC’s The Lexicon Of Love.

“My wife found ABC, again. She was looking for a bright young band, and they were smart guys. And they were hilarious. They said to me, ‘If you work with us, you’ll be the most fashionable producer in the world, because this week, on Thursday, we were the most fashionable band in the world.’ They went to this club in Sheffield, where they were at university, and they used to dance to soul records, and they wanted to make their soul record. It took me a bit of time to get what they wanted, because to me, it was disco. But it was disco a generation on.”

Horn says that “samplers were just starting to come in on that album” and indeed he and his team were pioneers of the use of sampling in pop.

“Geoffrey had one of the first Fairlights [a digital sampling synthesiser] that made it to England. We used them on the second Buggles album, and with Yes on Drama. I think we were the first people to put a human’s voice in it, on Dollar’s ‘Give Me Back My Heart’.”

Given that Horn’s aim was “coldness and precision”, the sampler was the perfect tool.

His next big project was Duck Rock with Malcolm McLaren, who had just discovered the black American craze for scratching — a technique of ad hoc ‘sampling’ which must have seemed strangely primitive next to the Fairlight.

“That’s what drew me into it!” he says. “At first, Malcolm was talking about ‘world music’. All that South African stuff that Paul Simon took up later, we were there two years earlier on ‘Double Dutch’. But Malcolm said, ‘In New York the black kids scratch European techno records.’ And I was like, ‘What? Don’t they like soul music?’ He said, ‘Nooo! They’re into Kraftwerk and Depeche Mode!’ And it was all starting to kick off. The first time I heard scratching was on ‘Buffalo Gals’, and I thought it was fucking amazing. It was the same thing as the Fairlight, really. What a great guy Malcolm was. If he grabbed onto an idea, you couldn’t stop him, even if it seemed so hopeless at times. You could listen to him talk for hours. I remember being sat on a New York street with Malcolm and [engineer] Gary Langan, going there at lunchtime, and the next time I looked at my watch it was eight o’clock in the evening.”

In 1983, Horn reunited with Yes, this time as a producer for the album 90125, featuring one of his most revered creations: ‘Owner Of A Lonely Heart’, a berserk piece of sliced-and-diced symphonic metal.

Grace Jones, Slave To The Rhythm

The Art Of Noise, the entirely electronic act Horn formed with Gary Langan, Anne Dudley, programmer JJ Jeczalik and journalist Paul Morley, grew from those Yes sessions. They were the first band on ZTT, the Futurist-inspired label Horn set up with Paul Morley. It was a strange union: the studio boffin and the arch-conceptualist.

“I didn’t realise what music journalists did,” says Horn. “Not really. Then I kind of got it with Paul. What they do is romanticise us. And there’s a need for that, because I’m not really going to romanticise myself. So I thought Paul would be an exciting guy to start a label with. And it was exciting for a while. The problem with record labels, however, is that when you start, everybody wants your input, but the minute the artists are established, they want you out of the way. And it’s ‘theirs’. If you wanna hang on in there, you need to be more pragmatic. And Paul, in 1984, was mental. He and my wife Jill would fight like hell, and I had to be in the middle of that. But out of that comes friction, fire…”

ZTT’s biggest success, by far, came after Horn spotted a quintet of pervy Scousers in leather jockstraps on television.

“I’d had a big row with Yes and I wasn’t speaking to anybody in the band. Then this group called Frankie Goes To Hollywood came on The Tube and Chris Squire [Yes bassist] said, ‘They look like the sort of band you should have on your new record label.’ I can’t remember being particularly smitten by the song, but what I did like was the drummer — the way he was playing four-on-the-floor. And then I was driving home listening to David Jensen on Radio 1, and he played a session of ‘Relax’. And the song was all about gay sex, but they were being ever-so-polite when he interviewed them. I came in and I said to my wife, ‘I think we should sign this band called Frankie Goes To Hollywood.’ I remember meeting them, and they said they wanted to sound like a cross between Kiss and Donna Summer, and I thought that was great.”

Frankie’s first single, ‘Relax’, was one of the biggest-selling singles of the decade (with the unwitting assistance of a “ban” from Radio 1’s Mike Read), and pioneered the format of the multiple 12”.

“We ‘performed’ the 7” version — the band playing their instruments, JJ on the Fairlight, me operating the drum machine, altering it as we went along. Then we did a version for 14 minutes that we called the Sex Mix that I did some pretty gross things over — just fucking around — and it didn’t have the song anywhere in it. The first 10,000 12”s that came out didn’t have the song: they just had ‘Ferry Cross The Mersey’, the Sex Mix, and a Paul Morley interview on the back. And we got LOADS of complaints, particularly from gay clubs who were angry about some of the noises on the Sex Mix.

“The record had been out for a few weeks and it wasn’t doing much. Then I was in New York with [then-Island Records boss] Chris Blackwell, and he took me clubbing to Paradise Garage, which really opened my eyes. The DJs — the New York Citi Peech Boys — were playing records including a lot of my 12”s, like the ABC ones, but they also had projectors and drum machines and synths, and it was huge. And when I saw that, I realised I needed to go and do another mix of ‘Relax’ so it would go over at a place like that — ’cos when you play it really loud, through those bins, you barely need anything else but the drum machine. So I went to the Hit Factory in New York, and the engineer there… I could tell he didn’t like it and I had to really push him, saying, ‘Look, I know this is all drum machine, but that’s what you have to do to make it work. Push that there, push this here.”

The Art Of Noise, ‘Moments In Love’

Not everyone got the Frankie thing, especially Stateside.

“I remember I was working with Foreigner when ‘Relax’ came out, and someone sent over the video — you know, the pissing one. Foreigner said, ‘You think this is GOOD!?’ And I was like, ‘Um, yes I do, actually! Although I wasn’t expecting the pissing…’”

Another eighties tour de force was Horn’s one-off collaboration with cuboid-headed, chat show host-slapping fembot Grace Jones.

“Grace was a trip. I only did one track with her, ‘Slave To The Rhythm’, but I got a bit carried away and did six different versions. When she did that song at my Prince’s Trust Concert at Wembley in 2004, it was such a moment: I saw hardened musos in the band with tears in their eyes. But when I asked her to do it, she had a right go at me about how I never return her calls, how she hated the music business, and at the end of it all I said, ‘Sorry, but will you do this show?’ She said, ‘I’ll do it, but it will cost you.’ I said, ‘Cost me what? From my pocket? From my soul? From whatever else?’ And she said, ‘ALL OF THEM!!!’”

I wonder whether Horn consciously distinguishes, in his own mind, between records where he’s simply doing a professional job and records where he’s creating art.

“It’s an interesting question,” he says. “They’re all pop records, really, and they’re either hits or they’re not. ‘There You’ll Be’ by Faith Hill is a very good record, but it’s completely different from ABC. But there was a point in the eighties where I suddenly just stopped messing around with all the sampling stuff. I’d had enough of it. There was too much of that stuff by that point anyway, and everyone was all over it.”

One of Horn’s biggest post-eighties successes, Seal’s ‘Kiss From A Rose’ (for which he won a Grammy), is also one of his most conventional.

“Yeah, well I don’t determine those things. The song determines it. ‘Kiss From A Rose’ was unusual. It reminded me of a song from the sixties or something. I always try to make records that aren’t going to date too quickly, because if you do records that are exactly what’s now, and make the song fit into some sort of… new brutality, it doesn’t work. ‘Kiss From A Rose’ is meant to be normal and lovely. The originality comes in all that stuff he does: [sings] ‘Baby!!!’ in amongst that funny old folk song vibe he’s got going on. And he had all that in his head. I grabbed it as fast as I could.”

One of Horn’s most eyebrow-raising hook-ups in recent years was Belle And Sebastian’s Dear Catastrophe Waitress in 2003: the master of hi-gloss studio sheen meets the icons of ultra-schmindie lo-fi.

“I know, but I loved that song of theirs, ‘Stars Of Track And Field’. My daughter used to play it all the time. And my PA in LA, a girl called Marianne, did their caravan at Coachella, and she set it up. They’d had a bad experience with a producer, and I thought, if they’re gonna be produced, I don’t want anyone to spoil them, you know what I mean? The album after Dear Catastrophe Waitress I didn’t like as much, because I thought the guy tried to make them sound like something, whereas I just tried to get the best version of them.”

And then came a two-headed pseudo-Sapphic pop phenomenon called T.A.T.U.

“I went to see [Interscope chairman] Jimmy Iovine, who’s a real character. He played me the Russian version of ‘Not Gonna Get Us’ by T.A.T.U. and I loved it. He said it was the first time he’d sold a million records in Russia, which probably meant 40 million, because most of them don’t get accounted for. They asked me to write an English lyric, and I sat down with the Russians, which was daunting. So I wrote ‘All The Things She Said’, and I was gonna imply it was more of a teenage infatuation rather than embarking on a lifetime of… whatever.”

Weren’t they really lesbians, then?

“Naaaah! They weren’t really 14, either! They were under 20, which in music business terms means you can get away with it. But they were great girls; a good laugh. As my daughter said, ‘They snogged their way across Europe.’”

There are so many other records we haven’t had time to discuss. I’m kicking myself for not mentioning Marc Almond’s Tenement Symphony album or Propaganda’s ‘Dr Mabuse’ single. As I hand him my copies of the fairy dust-coated ‘Hand Held In Black And White’ and a rare ‘Relax’ white label to sign, I wonder how he’s avoided burning out.

“I have a really good team,” the über-nerd genius says, peering up through those milk bottle specs. “We’re diligent. We don’t go to the pub in the evening. We’d rather work on some vocals.

There’s no second-guessing Hans-Peter Lindstrøm, even though everything he does seems natural and organic when you examine it in retrospect. Coming from a background in alt country and indie rock, he certainly didn’t seem like someone who was going to take the dance music world by storm a decade ago; let alone become Norway’s most in-demand remixer to the likes of LCD Soundsystem, Roxy Music and Telex, as well as the lynchpin of the neo-cosmic disco scene.

Not bad for a “dilettante” who took up DJing, producing and remixing “just to see how it was done”. As well as setting up his own label Feedelity, he has been responsible for some landmark releases, including the deep-space noodle of ‘There’s A Drink In My Bedroom And I Need A Hot Lady’ (2004), the ecstatic disco of ‘I Feel Space’ (2005) and his essential long-player Where You Go I Go Too (2008). And that’s not mentioning his amazing, exploratory expeditions with Prins Thomas and his serotonin-flooded pop with Christabelle.

So when Lindstrøm sings, “Don’t you get the feeling that you’ve been here before?” on ‘Magik’, a cut from his mind-boggling new album Six Cups Of Rebel, the answer is an emphatic “no”. Because, while this glorious album, out in February, isn’t entirely without precedent, before he was only paying lip service. This time he’s fully immersed himself into a self-created mutant hybrid world of space disco, acid house and prog rock. Perhaps it’s understandable, then, that he seems unsure of how the record will be received, comparing it to Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music and Vangelis’s Beaubourg — not necessarily for positive reasons.

You don’t need to talk to him for long to see that he takes what he does extremely seriously. He’s already back in the studio working on something new when we speak to him, claiming that as soon as he finishes one project he starts another to clear his head. He laughs a lot but there is also something quite nervy about him when he says, “I always try and work without limitations and to not repeat myself, but I think this album might be hard for my label. I think I’ve gone further out than before but I’m not sure if it’s for the best.” He laughs. “I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing. I’m really happy with the album but I don’t know if it’s… too much.

“I really like Vangelis and I was really excited when I first heard the album Beaubourg, which is basically two long tracks made on the Yamaha CS-80 with a lot of weird ring modulator noise, and it’s just noodling — it’s really far out if you compare it to ‘Chariots Of Fire’. I would compare [my album] to Metal Machine Music — it’s a very different kind of album to Transformer! But they are the sort of artists who will try different weird things when they do their songs and that’s the reason why I like them — they were really taking chances.”

Speaking about the unique influences on what he perceives to be a risky venture, he says: “I’ve always been interested in prog music, which has weird time signatures and key changes, from when I was a kid listening to Jethro Tull, Genesis and Pink Floyd… What’s really been inspiring for me over the last year has been getting into some of the weirder stuff by Todd Rundgren, especially his 1970s albums, where you might have a weird a cappella track followed by a straight-up rock number and then some really far-out cosmic noodling. I really like the idea of making a track with weird elements but at the same time having some sort of real, traditional song structure at the bottom of it. Some of Sun Ra’s music is really great but some of it is too much, because it is literally just freaking out. If you combine that with some kind of pop music [laughs], it can be really interesting. I have no idea whether this makes sense to anyone other than me, though.”

But from the celestial church organ of ‘No Release’ (Lindstrøm used to practice on such an instrument when he was younger) onwards through the Wendy Carlos Williams synth funk of ‘Magik’ and iridescent acid disco of ‘A Quiet Place To Live’, the album is a thing of joy and boundless fun. And even if it might be his most headphone centric record to date, you’re never far from a stone-cold dance beat.

He says that it is almost definitely his background in guitar music that makes him less conscious of the strict rules imposed on electronic dance music producers: “I think I got to a point where I just thought, ‘I’m not too impressed with these rules anymore.’” And his defiantly un-muso approach probably helps: “I don’t think I’m any good at playing anything, really. There are people who play all of the instruments that I do much better than me, but that’s not the point. That’s not what it’s all about. For me, it’s just about getting all of the ideas and mixing them together and seeing what happens.”

This maybe the furthest out he’s gone so far, but where he goes anyone with any sense and taste goes too.

SENSITIVE lover Drake has been announced as headlining the second night of this year’s Wireless Festival in London.

The Grammy-nominated musician tops a Saturday bill also featuring sets from Example, Professor Green and Wiz Khalifa.

Meanwhile Rihanna will be doing her rude-gal thing on Sunday night, following performances from Calvin Harris and Jessie J.

Friday’s headliner is yet to be announced. Wireless takes place July 6-8 in Hyde Park. Visit the website for ticket info.

Picture: Alan Lomax, left, with youngster during Bahamas recording expedition

Around 17,000 tracks comprising ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax’s phenomenal folk music archive will be made available for streaming at the end of this month, the New York Times reports.

Lomax’s field recordings of folk music styles from across the globe helped bring the talents of artists like Muddy Waters and Woddie Guthrie to the attentions of the wider world, but the Texas-born archivist had ideas diametrically opposed to your typical A&R:

“We now have cultural machines so powerful that one singer can reach everybody in the world and make all the other singers feel inferior because they’re not like him,” runs one famous quote. “Once that gets started, he gets backed by so much cash and so much power that he becomes a monstrous invader from outer space, crushing the life out of all the other human possibilities. My life has been devoted to opposing that tendency.”

Ten years after Lomax’s death, the ‘Global Jukebox’ he envisioned in the latter part of his life will become a reality as some some 5,000 hours of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of film, 3,000 videotapes, 5,000 photographs and piles of manuscripts, much of which will have only been seen by a very few, will become available.

In addition, the Global Jukebox imprint will digitally release a 16-recording sampler titled The Alan Lomax Collection From the American Folklife Center comprising material from across his career.

There’s a wonderful photo archive already online over at the Library of Congress website, and you can get a feel for some of Lomax’s work with the picture and music gallery below.

* * *

“Lightnin’” Washington, an African American prisoner, singing with his group in the woodyard at Darrington State Farm, Texas

‘Hammer Ring’ (Lightnin’ Washington & Group)

* * *

Prison compound no. 1, Angola, Louisiana. Leadbelly (Huddie Ledbetter) in the foreground. Lomax and his father, John, helped Ledbetter beat an attempted murder rap after agreeing to make a record of his petition on the other side of one of his favorite ballads, ‘Goodnight Irene’, and present it to the local governor. Said Lomax Jr of his subsequent pardon: “I was sitting in a hotel in Texas when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I looked up and there was Leadbelly with his guitar, his knife, and a sugar bag packed with all his earthly belongings. He said, ‘Boss, you got me out of jail and now I’ve come to be your man.’”

* * *

Legendary bluesman Blind Willie McTell, with 12-string guitar, hotel room, Atlanta, Ga.

* * *

James Baker (Iron Head), Sugar Land, Texas

‘Black Betty’ (James Baker)

A sign-language interpretation of Gnarls Barkley’s smash hit ‘Crazy’ has been removed from YouTube at Warner Music Group’s insistence that it constitutes a copyright violation – roundly ignoring the fact that most people viewing the clip won’t actually be able to hear any copyrighted content. As media blog TechDirt have pointed out, this is appalling on various levels – especially since the video certainly constitutes fair use.

The video has since been re-uploaded, spliced together with the song, and made available on Vimeo. Catch it while you still can:

Signs of [Crazy]: an ASL Interpretation from Nina Paley on Vimeo.