Spiral Tribe - Interview - Part 3

Spiral Tribe Interview part 2....

Can't you apply that to any sort of music?

2: Well, it can do, but the point being, to record a band is a lot harder and more expensive than to do it with computers and.....

I don't agree with that - (We then had a discussion regarding this and came to the conclusion that you could make 'conventional' music cheaply - the evidence is on many of the demo tapes available through the pages of Organ, check out the brilliant Anorak Lovechild demo tapes made with equipment far cheaper than a DAT machine and a computer. Check out the first Sabbat demo made on a second hand four track live in a garage and far far better than anything they did in a recording studio for a record company, check out anything - Oroonies, early Ozrics, Webcore tapes, check out the Wolfsbane demos widely acknowledged to be far better than any of their albums and all down to the DIY vibe and energy...... You DO NOT need DAT quality tapes, make a tape and sell it yourself you do not need a record company you need your own creative energy and everything else will follow.... ask Ozric Tentacles......back to the Spiral Tribe interview....)

2: Basically technology is easily available, it doesn't have to be techno music, you can use it for rock music, everything , doesn't matter what kind of music you're making with it provided you're making music for music's sake, not for your ego and not for money.....
1: - The whole sort of motive is not to make money but to be creative -

So the basic word that encompasses it all is our favourite word Create -

1: Yeah! Organic, we describe the music as Terra - Technic, that's Terra as the earth
2: it maybe technology, advanced systems, whatever but its still deeply rooted on the ground, its growing, it moves with nature, that force, energy - Don't just go, urgh, Acid House, Techno Music, turn it off.... now is the time for all of us to unite together - never mind whether you like the music or not, look at what the music's doing, its bringing a lot of people together. You look across the country, look into Russia, into America, Germany, all over the world..... Techno music, house music if you like, is this new music which hasn't been stopped, hasn't been broken, swept under the carpet, hasn't sold out - it's bringing a whole load of people together in a sort of psychic awareness if you like.
3: You look at Ireland; the rave culture, the techno culture, there's festivals going on over there, bringing Catholics and Protestants together and 200 years of politics haven't done that... at the end of the day its a form of music, and if that's doing it then, what do we need these people in suits for?

These things happen when people got together and communicate, the Stonehenge festivals of the early 80's. I (Sean) went to Stonehenge just to see Hawkwind, I didn't really know about these alternat-ives, energies, about cummunicating with people.... I got in to these ideas through rock music, these things have always gone on, music is the spark, it's about an attitude rather then a sound, it's about learning to communicate

1: There you go, and what did they stop and what are they stopping now? The festivals, outdoor festivals - OK, there's Stonehenge, but there's other festivals, once you've got the awareness...... People are coming out to these festivals, young kids who haven't even been outside their f**king tower blocks in London - they've just going to a party if you like and they're being brought outdoors to a festival, to see, in this time of global awareness.. How can you know what's going on, dancing down your local discotheque and buying your recycled toilet paper, until you're out there, in it, actually experiencing.... D'y know what I mean - actually seeing how beautiful your planet is.........
2: You are right in saying it's not just hardcore though, this is the underground.

The thing that a lot of people don't like is the recent invasion of techno sound systems at festivals and not allowing the bands to get a look in. I think also a lot of people are put off by the idea of techno because all they hear is the crap that comes to the top, the watered down commercial stuff.

2: Yeah, yeah, that's rave.
3: The whole rave scene exploded around '88 with the Acid House scene, then it went into 89 with the sort of ravey - ravey culture, and seeing this happening on such a large scale the large record companies start looking into this and manufacturing it even more - you've got Bizarre Inc., N-Joi etc. in the charts..... then there's now a lot of childish pap around but it's almost like the underground is taking a more grown-up attitude towards it - forcing it back down again making it harder, making it tougher, making warmer, getting the pure element out, because we look at the stuff thats sitting in the charts at the moment - there's nothing pure about it, there's nothing realistic about what it's doing, it really is just a load of commercial old trash poured out of a sampler - Now, you look at Techno stuff, acid music, the stuff coming up on the new Spiral Tribe EP - now.... that's pure as f**k, basically! You can't get any more so.

How would YOU describe your music to people who don't know then?

2: The way that I look at it is it goes back down to energy, stuff like that - you look at all ancient religions and most will talk of a primal tone where all energy comes from, all life comes from - energy is something that transforms from one form to another, it manifests itself in life force energy..... Now what you have is a situation where in Western Music they tilted the balance away from rhythm -all these other cultures use rhythm as the main element in their music, harmony dictated by rhythm, rather than harmony dictated by melody...if you go through Western history you get to the point where Stravinsky wrote 'The Rite of Spring', and for the first time for two, three hundred years the balance was tilted back to rhythm. It was first performed in 1913...a lot of powerful, respectable people went to the performance, and on hearing the rhythmic music they rioted and trashed the building. All the way through history you see rhythmic music called 'the devil's music' by the powers that be. But what appears to happen is that they take this music, tame it, commercialise it - once it makes money it becomes polluted - the point being, its not so much how the music sounds, its the attitude of the composer that counts: if its purely for music's sake, that music is pure, if its done for ego or money that music became polluted and the energy goes back round the cycle and pollutes the earth - hence the reason the planet's so fucked up.

Do you think you have the energy to keep those egos out of what your doing?

2: Well we're trying everything we can no one in our band puts their name to the music.....

But we've noticed in the last few weeks a few people putting their name next to Spiral Tribe's name.... a lot of people who have popped up from the sixties and seventies era have suddenly put their name on flyers.... what's happening there?

1: That's an album put out by Evolution.... they're people we like very much, if you know what I mean.... we trust them implicitly and we believe a lot in what they're doing and we basically donated a track to their album....

That's basically Fraser Clark?

1: Yep, that's the man....

We've been aware of Fraser Clark for some time now and basically we find some of his ego/guru trips and the things he jumps onto, quite...... um...:
We've known Fraser for a long time, and he hasn't come along and gone, oh yeah, Spiral Tribe.....

I've got nothing against him personally, I'm suspicious of some of the things he's said, I'm not sure of his motives. I don't trust old hippies from the sixties... I don't trust the elitist thing of the counter -culture, it seemed to be about being 'one of the few'....experience has led me to stop trusting....It's good to see new blood and new energy feeding into the underground....

2: At first the rave scene was motivated by people who wanted to make money, all these parties were business, and when laws came in so you couldn't put on a party like that for money, lots of people went legal which showed their attitude, but the best thing that came out of the authorities trying to stamp things out was that suddenly there was a new breed of party organiser who comes out and does it, not for money or ego but purely for the sake that he/she loves it, following the vibe, and wants a bit of freedom. We wouldn't have gone through this much shit just to make money out of it.

Back to your comment regarding ego, the problem is, once you first discover the vibe you can either take it in a very egotistical way and keep it all to yourself or you can think, "well, I'm sorted, how on earth can I sort everyone else out?"     This is one of the things that pisses me off when travellers resent, or people resent all the ravers coming on to the festival sites because they don't know the score, y'know.... The point is, how can you expect these people to ever find out what the score is unless they come out to the countryside? You've got to realise that you've got your vision of the future, you know when your time comes you'll be ok, but you've got to try your hardest to get everyone out of cities and show them the score.

1: And at the moment that's very very difficult... The people we'd really like to reach are the police: We have absolutely no problem with the police on festival sites on a one-to-one basis, they're standing there tapping their feet, nice bit of overtime, sit back and listen to the music, at Castlemorton they were playing baseball.... but the people who are actually telling the police what to do? What's the problem? I'd love someone to stand up and answer a few questions.
2: This is another reason for getting into a public position because then you can start asking questions - eventually someone's going to have to answer if you keep hammering.

Spiral Tribe have not come from a rock/festival culture which has years of holding free festivals behind it, years during which time a lot of mistakes have been made, a lot of strategies worked out and a lot of authorities have been stomping. They seem genuinely surprised at some people's hostility to them: when we pointed out that techno/rave PAs can ruin festivals by drowning out everybody elses sounds one of them said "well they should get bigger rigs themselves!" Attitudes (or answers, since that was just one particular person's opinion) like that could help divide...divide and rule... which is one of the weapons of those who seek to stop the gathering of people for free thought, free music, free communication ..... Festivals can provide the seeds of creativity. Spiral Tribe argue that the tribal rhythms of their PAs actually bring people together and focus the energies. It's good to see people from the house/rave/techno culture thinking about things, questioning things and opening doors for others. The three Spiral Tribes people we spoke to were very genuine, enthusiastic, open people who responded to our viewpoints as much as we did to them. They sincerely believe in what they are doing. Other Tribes people wandered in and out, the atmosphere was one of enthusiasm, people discovering things , throwing ideas around. Whether or not there is some master plan behind it all, there's some good people around...Question everything, Question us, question them, question the self appointed guru figures....... The starting point is COMMUNICATION AND CREATIVITY...That's where you start to find the answers and that where you start to find the questions.