I was listening to the Ultimate Seaside Companion over the weekend and was struck by the feeling that it is much more mature sounding, much more self-assured. Look at "No More Changing of the Guard." That's just you--your voice--and an organ. It's fantastic. But it's not something you would have heard during the Ministry days because that was all about putting out so much sound, so many layers of noise, in the hope that something would rise out of it.

Chris: You have to really explore what it means to be creative, what it is to be creative, and why are you creative. That's what I did. It's like what we were talking about earlier. I have given up asking why I do what I do and just let myself do it without thinking about what people will think of it or what I am doing. And when you do that, you are suddenly faced with this incredible freedom. Ultimate Seaside Companion was all recorded at home. No one was asking me to do anything and I knew just what I wanted and how I felt the music--and that's what happened. It was very gratifying. It's just exploration, you know, you just keep changing and asking yourself how to move forward. It keeps happening. You can't ask why you do it. That'll drive you crazy.

Something impressed upon me when I was just starting as a writer was that you had to have two separate entities in your head: a writer and a marketer. You couldn't let one interfere with the other. After you write something you give it to the marketing half of your brain and it goes off and tries to sell it. But before the piece is finished, the marketing half has no business crossing over to the writer's side--the marketer is not allowed to attach any worth to the work because that will impact how you create it. It took me a couple of years to figure that out and I've got all these half-finished projects from that time because I started to think, "Who wants to read this? Where can I sell it?" And they're still in my closet. Unfinished.

Chris: Yeah, I'm really privileged because I keep managing to do what I do [for a living] and I'm really glad that it isn't relegated to being a bedroom project or me playing in front of three people in some bar, dying for someone to hear my voice. I'm very privileged to have that confidence. There will always be someone--though they might be hard to find--that will believe in me [and my projects] and want to release them. To invest some of their faith in it.

Have you found that the Internet and your presence on it at www.chrisconnelly.com makes a difference?

Who came up with the name for Damage Manual?

Chris: I did. There's a song on the album and a song on the EP called "Damage Addict" which originally was called "Damage Manual." It was a direct result of the music I was hearing. For me--the way I wrote this record--it was very much like going to your shrink and they use that technique where they'll say, "Bunny Rabbit!" and you say, "Chainsaw!" Or whatever. You do that game. That's the way I was treating the music. I got this cassette and listened to a track, and would just start writing there and then before anything had happened. So I wrote this stuff really quickly. The track "Damage Addict" suggested to me very, very concrete, urban, violent imagery. Kind of Clockwork Orange-y. It had a very strident, marching rhythm to it and it was very sinister. Very cold sounding and very brutal. I immediately started writing down these cryptic phrases--which is how I do all my work--about what the music was suggesting to me and what I wanted to convey through my lyrics. As a writing exercise, this album was so gratifying. And that's how the name came about.

How different is that from how you write your music? Do you start with a tune in your head? Or some poetry or a lyric?

Chris: It depends. A lot of it is auto-suggestion as well. I'll have a guitar on my lap as I'm writing, but that's kind of like being on a journey and drawing the map as kind of a common sense response, you know? When I'm writing myself, there has to be a few personal navigation tools involved so that I can get where I'm trying to go. Whereas with the Damage Manual there were things that were already mapped out for me and what was so brilliant about them was that they were directions I would have never gone myself. If you listen to the Damage Manual album and compare it to my new album, they are very, very different beasts.

Is that Blonde Exodus? I had heard that was going to be released on Invisible.

Chris: [Deep sigh] It's not out yet. Hopefully that's going to happen very soon. That's what I want to happen. But, as usual, I'm stuck in the middle of some kind of litigation and can't do anything about that. It's hard to move forward right now. Until it is resolved. I'm hoping that it will all be resolved in a very short space of time. But, c'est la vie. Everything happens for a reason.

I listened to the samples you've got posted on the website and it sounds--well, wonderful--but a much different direction than one would associate with Invisible.

Chris: Yeah, that record I wrote over a two-year period. One of the most rewarding writing experiences I've had. Because I think it was the first time I've actually written the whole album myself. And I had a very specific--albeit very oblique--sense of direction with this album. I went for it and my instincts proved to be correct. I ended up--lyrically and musically--with what I wanted. There were no compromises made with the writing. It all happened very easily for me.

Chris: Removed from the water! Yeah. It is. It is dealing with things on a more human level, I think. It's not so metaphorical as it is literal. It's my overview of certain human conditions and the way people--especially boys and girls--react to each other and how complicated it can be. I suppose, in a way, Blonde Exodus is more cinematic in that respect. I wanted that. Because I'm such a fan of cinema. I've always wanted to tackle something that can be very visual in terms of the way chord structures go, in the way that lyrics and vocal melodies can go. I wanted to do something a lot more subtle than Ultimate Seaside Companion which relied maybe a little bit more on dynamics to get that feeling across. Like you said, there's a track with just voice and organ. And there's a track with voice and guitar. And one with a full band playing. I was trying to achieve that through dynamics. Whereas in Blonde Exodus I was trying to get there through imagery more than anything else.

Now, will that be Chris Connelly and The Bells?

Chris: Yeah.

I noticed that Ultimate Seaside Companion was just The Bells. These are all essentially solo albums.

Chris: Yeah. I used the name The Bells because I wanted to give a name to what I was doing. I had a lot of problems really with people who would purchase my records and think they were going to sound like Ministry records. And I thought by calling something "The Bells"--and there was a lot of prejudice from people who didn't like that sort of thing and wouldn't touch it--I thought that I might win over a new audience. And, you know, discourage people who wouldn't be that interested. But as a result, it kind of backfired. [Laughs]

I noticed that as you went into more solo things that some issue was made that you cut all your dreadlocks.

Chris: Yes.

I wonder if there was any resonance to that act for that period. Like Samson losing his strength or a shedding of skins...

Chris: I think every white boy should cut off their dreadlocks. I had them for a while--they've been off for quite a long time--I saw them one morning and thought they looked absolutely ridiculous. I thought, "I can't walk around looking like this!" And I thought that I didn't want to draw any more attention to myself. Anonymity is a great thing. So, yeah, they had to go.

You've recently been back to Scotland. There has been some discussion that it is easier to make music here than there. Do you see the lure of the homeland to be too strong and that you'll return there and make music or are you going to have to always have that conflict with wanting to be there but your music and your career are here in America?

Chris: It seems that way and that's unfortunate. I'm in a very weird position in that I've been here [America and Chicago specifically] for twelve years and there are a lot of friendships that I've forged here that are very important to me. However, there are friendships over there that, you know, are equally important to me. This is one of the reasons I love the Internet. I've been keeping in touch with those back home a lot more. If I was ever in a position where--on a more global level--I was yielding more revenue and I could do that, I would live half the time there and half the time here.

There's a certain freedom from lyrics that comes with techno. If you're listening to something with lyrics, there is some message there that you have to decode or absorb. You have to get some emotive impact through what is being said instead of just getting it through the sound. For a lot of people it is easier to just go out and hear the sound and not have to worry about anything else. I was trading email with Percy Howard recently and he mentioned that emotive male artists were getting chewed on in the press because it is something that the people are having a difficult time connecting with; while on the other side you have women artists doing the same thing and selling lots of copies. People are uncomfortable with the expressive connectivity with these male songwriters.

Chris: I think a lot of people have a very lackadaisical attitude towards lyrics. A lot of lyrics don't turn me on. Though there are some brilliant songwriters out there--few and far between now. Pop music lyrics just aren't what they were on every single level. I could list a hundred thousand songs from the past that have beautiful, poetic lyrics--that were very popular at their time--or are very clever or very witty. [Chuckles] My favorite example of a pop lyric that I hate is--and there is a million of them--I can't remember what the name of the band is, but the hook from the song--and this is recently--goes something like: "Being with you girl is like being stoned." And I thought, "Is that the best you can fucking do?" It's so knuckleheaded. It needn't be that way.

I wonder if people are too scared of being personal or being judged or whatever their fucking problem is. If you're going to write music, you owe it to your listeners to pay as much attention to your lyrics as you do your music. Having said that, the music for that lyric was just as deplorable as well. You do get songs that are decent until the singer opens his or her mouth and then it just gets silly. I think people--well, I don't think, I know--people get busy with the business of honing their music and then with two days until their recording budget is used up say, "Oh, better get the rhyming dictionary out." The rhyming dictionary is the most terrible invention next to the nuclear bomb that mankind has ever come up with. Lazy. Lazy! Writing lyrics is a real pleasure for me. Maybe I'm lucky. But you listen to something like an old David Bowie song, like "Ashes to Ashes." It's fantastic lyrics with fantastic music. It's really amazing poetry. And a lot of the punk things that were happening twenty years ago when people didn't give a shit were a hundred times more creative than a lot of stuff that I hear these days. [Pauses] I'm sounding old.

You refer to the words more as "poetry" than "lyrics." Do you find your audiences to be more well-read, more familiar with poetry than lyric?

Chris: I think what I do might lead people to...if they haven't before...I've talked with people on the website who have picked up on literal references I've made and gone to check things out. I'm quite an avid reader myself. You know, reading books isn't an intellectual process by any means. That's what I try to say. Neither is lyric writing. Neither is poetry. It wasn't meant to be. You just have to read any Dylan Thomas to see that. The guy was not an intellectual, he was just a brilliant poet. There is an awful lot of snobbery attached to it and I think a lot of the fault might lie with the intellectuals. They will start to hypothesize about a certain poem or about a certain book. That guy Greil Marcus wrote an entire book on Bob Dylan's The Basement Tapes--which I've not read. But, I don't need to read it! I don't need to read what someone else writes about something. The author [of the poem or book] wrote the text for a specific reason--at that specific place and time. They weren't trying to run rings around the intellectuals by proving themselves to be the ultimate intellectual or the King of Intellectuals. They write because they write. And to intellectualize something like that--something as seemingly ubiquitous or as global as Help by the Beatles--and that's a brilliant lyric and it's a simple lyric. But you don't need to intellectualize it. Because it is there and it is what it is.

Plus I think a lot of the fault lies with the record companies. These days record companies seem to have all their restrictions in order and it is perfectly simple for a company to turn around to a band that has just played its guts out and say, "We like the music, but we don't like the lyrics." Or, "You need some help with the lyric writing." Or, "You need to simplify this lyric or no one is going to understand it." And so you have pop music in the year 2000. Thankfully there are still bands out there like Radiohead who kind of shot that album OK Computer out of nowhere. One can use that as a yardstick to measure contemporary brilliant songwriting in the pop forum. It's a fantastic record. I think the music and the lyrics are very, very well accomplished. I'm extremely happy that I found that record when I did. It came out at a time when things were looking rather dismal. Probably about the time that that "being stoned" song was a hit. Yeah, it's the same everywhere, really.

Having said that, I think I am much happier these days with the way movies are written and the exposure they get as compared to music. You just have to go and see a film like All About My Mother. It just won an Oscar for Best Foreign Film and well it should have. It was a masterpiece. It's a simple film on so many levels and a complicated film on so many other levels. The characters are so well-developed. There is someone's mind really, really working. It's great that a film like that can get exposure, but it seems that music can't get that same level of exposure. If that movie was a record album by some artist--and a foreign artist at that--it wouldn't stand a chance. But it was a movie and on pretty general release and people liked it. I'm much happier with the way that kind of thing goes these days than I am with the way contemporary music is going.

On the web:
Chris Connelly
Damage Manual

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