How is the experiment with your music lottery going? Any interesting G's?
“Not as good as I was hoping it was going to be”

No surprises?
“No surprises. Well actually in a boring kind of way, there was one that... my son gave me a CD for Christmas and it was a Classical thing. I have listened to it lots of times while driving. I think it's by someone called Gorecki, it's ok.”

But not something that you are going to find it hard to be without once the year is over?
“No. It's been a lacklustre year, I wish I could tell you more positive things. I didn't have an I-pod until the beginning of last December and in January I went on Lime Wire and downloaded tons of stuff. It was over 500 tracks and it just bored me. I'm not saying it was all crap, there was a lot of good, even great music there but it didn't have the desired effect. I didn't hear anything that didn't sound like anything I had heard before”.

Have you been doing this as a private activity, you don't invite anyone around for it?
“It's definitely a private thing. [Laughs] I actually have get out clauses though. When I'm driving with my work colleague, John, and we are travelling to all the various places where I do my work, he is usually the DJ and I hear lots of stuff other than G's. So I don't inflict my experiment onto other people. And although I'm telling you that I haven't heard anything phenomenal this year I still feel determined to stick this out, to go through the whole of the alphabet”.

So is the whole idea an unusual way to try to find new inspiring music?
“It's not so much about discovering new stuff but more about giving a value to what you are listening to. Right, I'm thinking if I don't listen to whatever it is that begins with whatever letter, this year, I might not live long enough to hear it again. So for me it suddenly gives music another value altogether. Not the value it used to be, like you had to have twelve quid, or whatever it is, to get a CD, or the value of cheaper downloads. But this gives it another value, in a weird way. It's kind of an enforced value, an almost fake value but it's still the value of realising I may not hear certain music again”.

And you are a principled enough person to stick to this?
“Yeah I'm just trying to think has there been any times.... yeah. I'm pretty certain I've stuck to it. There was one instance where someone sent me a CD and asked me to listen to it. You know, I get sent quite a few things, but this was a friend. And he was really wanting me to write something about it, so because he was a friend I listened to that. I would have felt like an arrogant tosser if I'd have said no”.

So all of these thoughts and feelings essentially gave rise to the No Music Day idea? Does music lack surprise for you now, are you mentally full of music so to speak?
“I don't know if it's an age thing.... It probably is. There is the idea that your music tastes become jaded but I want to refute this, I want to deny it. I want to hear something that I haven't heard before. I recognise that this could be a very arrogant thing in me, that I can't believe that a group of lads want to get together and do this thing that has been going on for forty years. But it hasn't been going on for forty years for them, it has for me. And I can understand they are thinking, fucking hell we can make all this noise and isn't it great? While I'm thinking why do they want to play music that their dads were into? Maybe I'm asking the impossible. Music evolves slowly, that's the nature of it. I just want it to evolve faster. I got rid of my CD collection with the intention of avoiding nostalgia and hoping to find new music.”

I was going to ask about the idea of sacrificing things in your life in order to appreciate new music. Like maybe avoiding new work by musicians and bands you may have followed for years. It appears you are doing this.
“I know people who are committed to certain artists who over the years have collected every record they have released. I have a friend who has done this with John Martyn. I don't know what that is about, I have never wanted to know everything by any musician or band. I have followed certain bands but after about two or three LPs I find that it becomes irrelevant. I never had that commitment even when I was younger. Usually when I got the next LP by a band I would think it just sounded like a polished version of the previous one. Or that they were still pretending to be seventeen or whatever. I suppose there is that pressure for bands to continue in the way that they started and then it's very hard for bands to evolve, so it becomes irrelevant”.

How do you feel about the responses you have been getting to the No Music Day idea?
“I'm kinda pleased. I think I may have made my website for it too restrictive. By having a response section of, “ I will be observing no music day by”, I haven't freed it up enough. I should have made it more open. Next year I wont do it that way because it doesn't allow for dissension. Although there were funny things from Americans saying, 'fuck you this sucks, and, 'get laid instead'. And obviously I think that's kind of good as well.”

So there has been as much criticism as praise?
“Well it's not about, Bill Drummond said this and it's really important, I'm not trying to pull that one. I'd rather it instigated some sort of debate. You see, another big thing that this is about, and it may be a bit subjective, is that I got it into my head that recorded music is very twentieth century. Now music is so easy for us to get, and we can listen to it wherever and whenever we want, so you could be at the top of Mount Everest with an I-pod and listen to any music from anywhere. I know that everybody in the world doesn't have an I-pod, but enough people in the world do. And this is going to change things somehow. When everything kicked off with Napster I thought it was great. Suddenly you were going to get music for nothing and it was going to change the whole way music is sold, consumed and thought about. But a couple of years back I started to feel that it wasn't so good, that it cheapens music, although not in a financial sense. That was one of the reasons to start the alphabet experiment.
More recently though, I have started to see the problem more to do with music as a recorded medium. Now that music is so freely available I thought I may start to want to hear music that was time and site specific. But not about going to watch a band at a gig because they have an LP out, I mean going to hear a piece of music that is only applicable at a certain time of year, or only available at a certain place so you have to go there to hear it. So the music can have more value and be more alive. From this I think you would get musicians who are only making music for it to be performed live.

Are you saying you want people to work harder in order to hear music?
“No it's not simply about that. For example something like Christmas music only works at that time, it would sound out of place in the summer. That's the only hangover we have left in our society, were there is music that fits for a certain time. Okay this is subjective and I don't know how it's going to evolve but I can see people wanting to make music, or get into music, that works in this way. For me recorded music has become this two dimensional thing, whereas it could be three dimensional.

Your getting away from music into more arts based projects, has that come from your overall boredom with music?
“What I do now is consciously small scale. I will be remembered for the money burning thing and pop success but I try to ignore all of that. If I wasn't to do that.... I know loads of people who have had success and are always suffering from trying to get back that success, and it's never going to happen. Now what I do is more community based and I love it because a lot of the time people don't know who I am. So what I'm doing isn't so much reliant on what I have done in the past. My past does carry some weight in determining certain projects I become involved in but I do avoid mentioning my past in promotion.

I was going to ask you how you feel about your past associations with Liverpool, but if you don't want to that's okay.

“No that's okay. I have a huge love hate relationship with Liverpool in a kind of weird way. It will always be my favourite English city. I have just written a piece for Tate Liverpool who are doing an exhibition to celebrate the eight hundredth anniversary of the city. This is for next spring. The essay is basically me ripping into Liverpool. I think it starts with, “Liverpool serves no purpose what so ever”. I want to challenge the people of Liverpool. It's that love part thinking the city is great but there is nowhere near enough good things coming out of Liverpool. There is a creative vibe in Liverpool that I haven't experienced in other cities but I can't understand why more great things are not produced. Too many bands and musicians think they are owed something just because they come from the city. I know it's harsh saying this with me not being a Liverpudlian, but it's how I feel.”

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