On To Venus And Back

"To Venus And Back is about the power that flows from the passion. Power that you can use for better or worse. Like the evil in the song Juarez, which deals with the monsters we turn into when our hearts are broken. Its about the murder on two hundred women in a small town at the border with Mexico. When I was touring through Texas, I was really near it, and the story grabbed me. I immediately wrote the song, in the bus. The song gives you a different look on the things I wrote years ago in Me And A Gun. But both songs are about the things you can do, when your heart thinks there is no other choice. There's a line in 1000 oceans: I've cried a thousand oceans and I would cry a thousand more/If that's what it takes to sail you home. If you know you're capable of feeling that for somebody you know that the body snatchers don't have you yet."

“Sometimes, when you express thoughts to people, you leave it open for somebody to tromp in there and start tearing it down. I sing, ‘Father I killed my monkey’, to lead off the song, which explains that sometimes you even destroy your own so they can’t excavate it. When I was growing up, I started becoming very secretive about my thoughts and the sensory world I would go to, because there’s a lot of mind control that goes on constantly, people wanting access: ‘What are you thinking?’ So sometimes I’d have my own defence going, which would be to look them straight in the eye and make them think I’ve killed my imagination. But it’s like, I’ll take control.”

"The extremes of having "Me and a Gun" and "Bliss" on the record, so there was "Me and a Gun" and "A Man on my Back", the song about the rape, into "Father, I Killed my Monkey". I thought things were improving then and it was important that we take you out of this woman's rape in a way that shows you how she has transcended. It is not a love and let go experience, and I have found over the years, being part of RAIIN, the Rape Abuse and Incest International Network, and just hearing the letters from so many people, that you cannot be anywhere but where you are with it. And sometimes you may physically be gone for years, but they're still here. Now, how do you extract that? You can't find it when they probe you then, but it's as alive here, and she had to go inside herself and get out the voice that was subjugating her, and making her feel like that she committed a crime, and that she wasn't able to be passionate again. So she goes after that thinking, that patriarchal thinking, of subjugation, whether you're being raped physically, or whether it's psychologically, because the Church has done that for thousands of years, in all religions. How? They shame you, and they don't hold a place for you to become "whole", you know, they don't want you to become whole, in many cases, and that is what she's striving for." (speaking in 2003)

“I read and article about several hundred women in Juarez, Mexico, who had been taken out to the desert and brutally raped and murdered. When they didn’t come home, their brothers would go and look for them, and many times they’d find nothing. Sometimes they’d find a hair barrette or a sock or something they knew was their sister’s. The authorities haven’t really done anything about it.. they get into this serial killer theory. I mean, how much serial can one man indulge in? So as the song started to develop, I really began taking the voice of the desert, singing in that perspective.”

“Juarez was based on the abduction and supposedly the rapes, but finally the murders, of many women in Juarez in the last 10 years. I had read articles about them and then we came close to the border on tour one night, not far from Juarez. I watched as we drove one side of the border, remembering the words of the sisters who had lost their sisters to the desert, and the brothers who have lost their sisters who would go out and find a ribbon or a fragment and know that their sister is buried somewhere in the desert. In that song I sing, ‘No angel came.’”

"The voices were loud and clear and they haunted me until I finished writing it. My mother used to say that if you pray hard enough, the angels will be there for you. Well, what about those women? Didn't they pray hard enough?"

"...the desert heard the last breaths that these women took. The desert heard the breathing of the killers as well. It's the antithesis to 'Me and a Gun' because that song was very much about the girl's perspective, and this is coming from a perspective that saw both sides."

"...And it's quite strange how none of these songs started to come except for Juarez, which came while I was in Texas. Which is where I'm talking to you from right now...And only that came in bits and pieces and that was in October of last year."

"I knew it had to come from the voice of the desert. Therefore, sonically, as we started stirring the pot, with everybody in there together, it wasn't working me coming in on the piano. Finally, it was as the two or three hundred women were mutilated, the engineers looked at me, I looked at them, and it was like, 'I've got to mutilate the piano.' Matt Chamberlain, and Andy the programmer, once the mutilating-of-the-piano concept was in, then they wanted the violence, the suppressed violence...I would talk about the picture of what had happened. It was a real thing...And everybody would sit there and listen to it, the brutality of it. And yet because it's from the desert's point of view, there's the timelessness of the desert. There's this baking going on, like a kiln. We really wanted this suppressed track. You would hear the music that was coming out of the car of the guys who were gang-raping her. That's what I wanted, and the chanting of the guys...but when people talk about this track, they're comparing it to, I don't know, an 'electronica' track. But you're confusing your terms here, people. You're just confused, because it's a commentary on the real hardcore misogynistic stuff, done in a way that captures them with their pants down, literally, mutilating her."

“Concertina... It’s like a squeezebox.”

“Do you ever feel like you walk in a room, and you don’t know why, but you’re just so uncomfortable you’re crawling out of your skin, even though nobody’s touched you, physically? That’s in ‘Concertina’, when you feel like you haven’t excavated enough of your different personalities that when one pops up, you’re not sure where it came from, and you try to hack it out of yourself. It shocks you that you could have this kind of fault, or that other people could bring it out in you.”

"Caton really developed his character in 'Concertina'; the guitars are everywhere."

"You always have to be listening to the song itself and to the soul of the song. Because sometimes there were different directions I could have taken the songs into and it's not where the song itself wanted to go. It's funny, during Concertina, the band all looked at me and said, 'Oh, just do it like you played it this morning on the piano'. But I cut it to a loopy click track and said, 'Get in there and pick up your instruments and we'll find it'. I wanted those electronic drums that Matt was playing with because particle by particle, she slowly changes, and I wanted the sense of the acoustic piano with the electronic drums. That also re-occurs in 'Lust'. So there was this dichotomy going on and I'm really drawn to that."

"...a fierce calm. There's this wonderful humility that happens when you deal with the power of Mother Nature. I think women can be very much like that. Lionesses are very much like that -- they're just sitting there sunning, very calm and then some ridiculous tourist comes and wants to take a picture. Then all they find is his camera."

"I've always loved squeezeboxes, whether they be, you know, vintage instruments, and I know how to play one myself...But, I also like beautiful women, so it works out."

“The harpsichord is very much in ‘Glory of the 80s.’ She’s part of the bed; I cut it live, with the piano. You might not notice it, but she’s there. I love that, because ‘Glory of the 80s’ could be the 1780s.”

“Mainly the honesty of the decadence of that decade. There’s the line ‘and then, just when it all seemed clear you go and disappear’. I knew a lot of great people in the eighties but at the time I didn’t always understand them. Now, there’s such a void in the art world, people with vision have physically passed on. It’s also a stab at political correctness - you can’t say this, you can’t say that; now everybody has to be called a Spanish American, an African American and I mean Oh bloody, fucking hell!!! I understand the abuses that have happened and I absolutely think recompense should be paid, but you don’t do it just on a surface level. Everybody thinks that the debt has been paid to the ‘quote unquote’ Indians who had their land taken away from them because we call them Native Americans. It’s hard when everything is so eggshell, eggshell, eggshell. I do miss the eighties. It was great, knowing that friends were on one hand dialing a charity and on the other hand doing a line of blow—but not lying about it, being honest. None of us are this light and dark fantasy. What’s dark to you may be light to me and vice versa.”

"Looking back, I wouldn't have wanted to be anywhere else in the 80's than as a working musician in L.A. There was a wonderful decadence about that time, even being on the bottom of the food chain in the underground scene. Going up to Melrose, buying your outfit from Retail Slut, spraying and teasing up your hair...happy times."

"Well, the 80s...that was just a time where LA was a great place to be on the bottom of a food chain, because there was a real Underground at the time. And a lot of bands got their start coming out there. There was a real club life. There was an exchange going on between musicians, that was very exciting. And LA wasn't so PC then. I mean, I'll tell you no lie. During that Live Aid' thing, you know, that big Live Aid thing', there would be people that I know making that phone call when they would see that little baby, that little starving baby, that you know obviously would touch their heart, but at the same time, you know they'd be just, d'you know, waiting on the phone it'd be like you started to see that they would first go and give $50 and then they decide 'No, no, no, $25 - we're running out!' And that was what that time was about. And I kind of...I love the paradoxes of things, cause they're always living together, they're always circling and now, LA, for me, it holds those memories. I don't buy into the commercial radio, you know, they can suck my dick. I am not seduced by that anymore."

"I was out of my mind at the time. I used to chase Mexicans when they would cut in front of me driving. I'd chase them down, yelling at them -- why did they cut me off? I would go on and on, and my best friend would say to me, 'I'm not getting in this car if you're going to start chasing Mexicans.' I loved chasing Mexicans; I'd get off on it! They were kind of cute. They thought I was just ready to check into an asylum."

"The Glory Of The 80's video is coming out and this director said to me, he goes...he's French so I'll do his accent all wrong. But he goes, 'I have zis idea' and I said 'ok'... And he come and he goes, 'so I see you in a torture chamber...futuristic!'. And I'm like, 'ok'. He goes, 'no 80's reference'. And I said, 'yeah yeah ok' and he goes, 'so you're hooked, ya?' and I'm like that like a mother Joan of Arc, but, mmm, strange, like sexual, oui?'. And he's going on and on and he goes, 'and you will morph into these different creatures'. And I'm like, 'ok...Glory Of The 80's.' So I'm in this torture chamber that is supposed to be quite fashionable, in his mind. And there you have it "

"My days in LA when I would get up and...I went to 'Retail slut' and got my skull and crossbones and Tank top, before breakfast...and it was a good time."

“I really got that what lust meant to me in my 20s was very different. I’ve loved people and not lusted them. But I found that I hadn’t experienced lust until I had some kind of trust for someone.”

"'Lust' is a really strange effect on the piano and in the voice, so it feels like she's in a shape she can't get out of, but it's a shape that's able to bleed into itself. Creating sounds like that, it's pretty intangible to try and talk about it."

"..let's put it this way. When I was aware that I was getting married and it sort of, it dawned on me that, you know when a zit comes that freak you out. When you see these people married and you're going, 'oh my god, is that my life with those ridiculous fuzzy slippers on? I mean, that's really not-this cliche kind of life that got so screwed up with bad television and I think I started to write 'Lust' once I'd been married for a while and I realized that I had no idea what I was getting into. Does that make any sense?"

"So girls, I just want to make something a little clear to you. When anybody tells you that marriage is about fuzzy slippers and baggy underwear, I am here to tell you there is another reality."

"It's strange because I didn't know that marriage would bring trust like that. And I didn't know that trust would bring lust, and I think there's a song on the record called Lust and I've loved people in my life and not trusted them, and not lusted them. And it's a strange thing, marriage, for me. It's a lot different than I thought it was going to be."

“There’s this moment in Suede where the narrator’s being called ‘evil’ by this other person because of whatever she’s done to them in their minds. But there’s this side of obsession and passion where one party thinks the other party is doing something to them - and sometimes people aren’t always looking at their part in something. In Suede, she knows what she’s up to; she knows what she’s been doing.”

“You know, there’s always galactic reference going on in this record. There’s a scientific vocabulary going on in this record. Suede is about seduction, but there’s always a science reference, a physics reference, because that’s the realm of Venus. So I hung maps all over, and I knew I didn’t have it right, coming up with things. Then finally I got that whatever dimensions the song had to cross to find the being that she was devoted to, whether it was her mother or her sister or her lover or her friend, nothing could stop her. That kind of resilience was a real anchor for the record.”

“Suede is the danger of not always the physical fornication of anything. It’s the dangerous games that we play with mind control - the power of seduction, and how so many people put their hands up and say, ‘I didn’t do anything,’ because they didn’t fornicate.”

“Riot Poof is English from a Dutch saying that is homosexual reference .. Sort of like a queen. And one of the guys on the crew came out and I wrote it in honour of him.”

“To me Riot Poof is about one part of my family that is the conqueror and the other part who where being conquered. They fought at both sides. And you have to find out who you are. Many people don’t want to see that they’re partly victim and partly the executioner. Every evening I get letters. Hundreds of letters. A great part of them are letters from young women (and men) who where sexually abused by adults they trusted. They hate themselves because they think they made the adults do this. They are all wearing a little victim sign. Like they belong like some elite group. They’re drown in a lake called victimhood. Instead of saying: ‘No! I have the pride of a lioness. I will hunt. I will escape from this all. I found this place when I lost my baby. Then I understood the life force you can get from it. So I could go to Venus, to make passionate records there. I can’t define my new record yet. I only see this picture in front of me, like it is filmed from a camera that is circling round the heart of Venus. So I can look at her in all her darkness.”

“...For the most part, we’re developing a theme from ourselves in our own loops. Even if we want something to sound like, I don’t know, something that was recorded in 1981 in a linoleum room with Naf plastic boots on, there is a design element. We are the design team; we design. With “Riot Poof,” there’s cocoa butter on that golden ass. And that ass is chocolate. A lot of R&B has no ass right now. Some of it does, some of it doesn’t. And there’s a sterility to a lot of electronica. Sometimes you want something to be sterile; that’s your point. But the whole idea of “Riot Poof” is the concept of when I say “you burn your pagoda through the Congo,” “pagoda” being a spiritual reference, and we all know what’s happened on the Congo, and if you want you can use it as black being the shadow, being the rhythm, being the holder and the keeper of secrets, not the acceptable material world but the witch doctor who sees what we masturbate to, what we fantasize about—the things we don’t find acceptable about ourselves, that we’re always constantly cutting out but sometimes we get tripped up when we drink too much to keep it down, or we go have an affair with God knows what.”

“Riot Poof is for all the jocks out there who need to deal with their secret sexuality.”

“Datura is this plant that if you put too many leaves in to steep - even though it does have altered-state potential in a big way, like bella donna - if you don’t steep it correctly, I hope you like to fly....”

“I’m talking about the times when lines have been crossed by men. Men can be dangerous, like in the song Datura about how sometimes they can bring you gold and sometimes they can be the bearer of poison. The plant Datura is a hallucinogen and it’s like men. If you get the right amount you’ll walk into the garden and become a woman, but if too much seeps in in the wrong way and at the wrong time - it’ll kill you.”

"I was woken up in the middle of the night at about 5:30 in the morning or something. And a woman's voice was singing it to me. She was African, quite ancient. And I couldn't understand any of the words, but she was humming the first couple phrases. So I crawled out of bed and found my way to the piano and I put in on a little ghetto blaster so I wouldn't forget it and in the next few weeks I started to shape it. It wasn't about one event. It was clear to me that there was this endless determination that the song had to reach her love. And I don't know if that was a child or a lover or a friend who the song couldn't seem to be able to make contact with anymore. So when I finally found, and I was looking through a map and when I look for lyrics I go hunting. So, as I was looking through all the maps and finding places, I was looking on maps of Dartmoor and I was working with a lot of different regions. And finally it hit me, that it was through the solar field and it wasn't listed on the maps. Because I was being dragged away from the maps to go to sort of a physics book, actually an astronomy book, a book on all sorts of laws and principles of the universe that Marcel had. And, as I finally found solar field it was like I started to feel her jump up and down. Sometimes the songs do that. You get a sense of that they really are alive. So, my husband had lost his father and he would swing by where I was playing and he would say to me, can you play that little song about the oceans? And that seemed to be sort of a way that we would talk about his dad when no other words could work. So, I think it means different things for different people. But the sense that I got was I couldn't measure the amount of love that this song had for the person that she was singing it about. And it was quite...it moved me. It was like a resolve, an endless resolve to follow her love. And, she's not a stalker by the way."

"But there was a moment when I knew that, 'I can't believe that I would keep, keep you from flying'. I kept circling that and circling that, never knowing how I would get out of it. Then to finally go up, 'and I would cry 1,000 more', it took me weeks to get there. It was real tortuous to find that, because I didn't know how I was gonna get past 'keep you from flying.' I didn't know, lyrically or musically. So finally, 'and I would cry 1,000 more' - and it had to sound like it. She had to have progressed to that; she had to have done that musically. And 'home' had to be something. What's 'home'? Well, 'home' had to be G minor."

"I didn't know that passion could spread to friendship, to a marriage. 'I've cried a thousand oceans And I would cry a thousand more if that's what it takes to sail you home.' To know that you feel that for somebody--you know that the bodysnatchers haven't taken all of you yet."

"Some months ago, as I was working on my new double album in Bude in Cornwall, I had a really important dream. A voice appeared in my head. I call her my dark angel. She was a soul sister, who sang in my head. She was humming a melody to me. It was about half past five or six o'clock in the morning. I got out of bed and went over to the studio. In the country, the people there leave everything unlocked. So the studio was open. I went in and recorded the melody. From this melody the song 1000 Oceans developed. I worked very long on it until it was finished. Sometimes it takes an incredible amount of time for me to understand a song I have recorded. Because I am so much in it and I can't distance myself from it. Sometimes I don't really understand my songs until I go on tour and live with them. They are like girls for me that keep me accompanied. But sometimes I only understand my songs through the reactions of other people. This was the case with 1000 Oceans. Mark had just lost his father. The two were very close, because Mark was an only child. Before the death of my father-in-law they talked on the phone everyday. His father fooled us into believing he was getting better. He had cancer and one day he was just dead. It was a shock for Mark, because he had really believed it got better. They had already made plans for his father to come to visit us in the USA. He had never been there. After the old man had died my relationship with Mark got very difficult. He was inconsolable. You can't do much for somebody who has lost the most important person in his life. I often held him in my arms and took long walks with him. I was just there for him a lot. But I never really got through to him. I still have my mother and my father so I didn't have the experience. I only reached him with 1000 Oceans. After Mark heard the song, he always came to me, sat down next to the piano and said: 'Please, play that song again.' And I played it to him. Through that we got in contact once again. I took him back from that other galaxy he was in a million miles away from me. So that dream was very special to me. It renewed the connection between Mark and me." -

"The director is French, and the riot scene was his idea. We were in LA, part of a riot he was creating, and my god, some of those guys got really banged up...but you know guys bruising, they got empathy from all the make-up artists and women on the set."

"In the song there is this ferocious commitment to finding this person. I don't know who the song is singing about - it's different for different people when they hear it. She has this depth of love for a daughter or whoever it is. I think some of the other songs look to her sometimes for that kind of resilience."

"You don't just walk into the Winter's and the 1000 Ocean's because they are difficult to deliver live. There has to be fluidity to pull that off. At the same time you have to have your own personal rhythm, you can't let the audience determine it for you. You don't make records by committee, just like you don't do shows with other people setting your pace for you. Although sometimes if I know it'll be a moment of love, I'll give them what they want."