[情報] Paul專訪 @ The Line of Best Fit
本來想翻譯，但標題都翻不出來就放棄惹...
大家英文應該都很好就自己看吧～有談到一些Mansun往事，還蠻值得閱讀的。
http://goo.gl/X74mD3
Mansun's Paul Draper talks about his long-awaited solo single: "It's the
arc of my life"
"In terms of doing my own thing, I never thought I'd do it again, "Paul
Draper says of his return to music after more than ten years. "I only fell
into being the singer in Mansun because I was the only one that could fucking
sing."
Appearances from Draper have been rare since Mansun released their post-split
fourth (sort of) album Kleptomania. He popped up to play a few songs with The
Joy Formidable as the Astoria's closing gig back in 2004 and recently
co-produced and guested on The Anchoress' Confessions of a Romance Novelist.
Following Mansun’s split in 2003, there’s been a steady hum of speculation
online about what he would do next as much as the reasons behind Mansun's
split.
"I literally walked out of the band during a recording session in 2003 in the
middle of a song called 'Cry to my Face' that we were recording, Draper
tells me. "I went straight to America and a lot of hell broke loose. A lot
of mental insanity and drugs. I did try and make an album for Parlophone for
four years and I just couldn't do it. I just didn't have it in me."
"I'm not really a record producer or a sound engineer and I'm not a
singer/songwriter either," says Draper. "I just put tracks together. Mansun
was really a very cryptic studio project that became a really great live band
in the end - but I never thought I'd carry on with me doing it as the
frontman or the singer. In the end the band kicked the shit out of me and I
didn't have any self-confidence at that point."
Draper's long-teased return finally came this month with the spikey revenge
anthem "Feeling My Heart Run Slow". It's as you'd expect - the songwriting
force behind Mansun amped up several notches. Draper's distinctive vocal and
stuttering songwriting are there in full effect with a production that will
keep fans of Manun's Six happy and win him over a whole new bunch of
adoration too.
"The song began a long time ago as on of the first things to be demoed for my
album. It began with me jamming melodies and lyrical ideas over vinyl drum
loops that I sampled," Draper tells me. The track was originally shelved
along with others while Draper pursued his fascination with studios - one
that led to a six-year stint running his own studio in Acton, West London.
"Acton has always been neglected and it's a mostly an old-school blue colour
part of London but one particular area is a real creative hub - there's
loads of writing rooms, production teams and rooms over there."
Draper rented out his studio to the likes of Frank Ocean, Savages and even
Pixie Lott between stints co-producing The Anchoress' Confessions of a
Romance Novelist. "Catherine had been doing some work with Bernard Butler
for an album when I met her," he explains. "I told her I was looking for a
project to do where I wasn't the singer and she was looking for a co-producer
- so we did The Anchoress record - and that led into picking up my solo
album. Catherine's album was absolutely a springboard into doing it."
"Feeling My Heart Run Slow" was eventually resurrected and is the first track
on Draper's debut solo EP. A song about "taking a good kicking and being
stitched up by one or two individuals, then lying low for a while, regrouping
and living a life beyond that experience," it's difficult not to speculate on
the song as a comment on Mansun's own dissolution. "It's the arc of my life
and dealing with the obstacles in my way to finally complete whats been my
passion for being 10 years old: making music," Draper says.
Mansun's Six remains one of Britpop's most idiosyncratic releases. The
album, frequently hailed as a work of genius ahead of its time inevitably
enters our conversation more than once. It always felt to me, I say to
Draper, that Six had more substance than a lot of the records during Britpop:
that as more time passed it would inevitably become revered.
"I can see that, yes," he responds. "For me, when I was growing up, it was
Love's Forever Changes and Television's Marquee Moon that were those kind of
records. It's always bands that split up early, never reached the heights,
and left one good record behind - and it sticks because it's a good record."
"Radiohead were in the next room to us when we recorded Six," Draper tells
me. "We were on the same label and we had the same A&R guy. We went to a
whole other place on Six but it was more by accident than design. More to do
with PTSD than genius.
"Someone said to me that Mansun were to the '90s what the Small Faces were
to the '60s: a few hits, bit of success but never like The Stones or The
Beatles. People will get it over time and I always think it's to do with the
EPs. We did fourteen EPs - more B-sides than we did album tracks. There's a
substantial amount of stuff for people to get into. Because we split up in a
hail of psychotic-drug-mental illness - not me, I might add; that all came
later - people look back and glamourise it."
We talk about Prince, an artist Draper's loved since childhood. I asked if
the segues on Six and Mansun’s debut Attack of the Grey Lantern were
something he took from Prince’s production? "Yes, and The Beatles did it
too," he says. "It was out of fashion at the time of Britpop though. '1999'
starts with talking then it segues into 'Little Red Corvette'. It's amazing.
I also used to put little Prince riffs in Mansun records too.
"I saw him on the 1999 tour which really cemented what he did for me. Even
with the last few albums, there's always one good track on every single
album. Paul McCartney's got that too (Draper actually interviewed McCartney a
few years ago for Drowned in Sound) - he did that 'English Tea' track on
Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, the record he did with Nigel Godrich. He
can still bring out a brilliant track amongst the sea of McCartneyisms."
I ask if he'll ever play live again: "I have had a few rehearsals with my
band and we are happy to move forward with shows now we've road-tested
ourselves," Draper says. "Mansun had a reputation as a fierce live band and I
wouldn't want to do anything unless it was of the same calibre."
"At the start when we started touring, I did find it stressful - but I was
quite a shy person. Later it became stressful because the others in the band
weren't my friends. I'm looking forward to it though."
Do the bad experiences of the Britpop years still sting? "My philosophy is
different now," he says with absolute certainty. "Back then I turned down
NME covers. Who turns down that in the '90s?! My younger self was a fucking
prick. My level on the angry-young-man scale was pretty fucking high."
What does he think is the biggest change to music since those times?
"It's a generalism now but people approach music more as a career choice
than they ever did," Draper says. "Noel and Liam, whatever you think of
them, transcended pop music and spoke to people. Britpop was a massive
cultural movement and there was a centralised system for music in the media
and that's collapsed now.
"Tech leads the culture. Zuckerberg and Jobs took the place of the
Gallaghers and now kids wanna start websites and write about video games and
create apps. My best mate growing up was Simon Nixon who set up
moneysupermarket.com. He's a billionaire now and lives in Jersey. I went and
became a rock n roll star. That's the dichotomy of the modern age.
"The modern rock star isn't a rock star anymore!"
The debut solo Paul Draper EP ONE is relased on 10 June via Kscope.
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※ 編輯: yijuan (210.61.193.223), 05/11/2016 17:35:49
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