By Aaron Richter
It sure must be great to be back. Although he claimed he wouldn’t be jumping around much onstage with Damon Albarn’s The Good, the Bad and the Queen, original Clash City Rocker Paul Simonon—who, for the past 15 years, ditched music entirely to focus on his career as a visual artist-has been seen in footage of his new group’s early performances having an absolute ball. He wields his massive bass like it never left his arms and throws his whole body into every note. “What I meant was that I’m not going to be donning leather trousers and doing scissor kicks,” Simonon says with a laugh, as he speaks to URB during his London tea-time. “There’s an element of dignity necessary. If you’re 18, 19, you can run and jump around. But at another stage in life, you have to approach things in a different way. You can still give out as much energy as possible, but you do it in a more controlled way, which is probably just as powerful. It’s not as though I can’t.” Slated as one of Coachella’s most anticipated acts, The Good, the Bad and the Queen—also featuring Afrobeat legend Tony Allen on drums and the Verve’s Simon Tong on guitar—is guaranteed to leave the audience (and maybe even Albarn) a bit starstruck. Here, Simonon waxes poetic about shaking the earth and licking paintings.
URB: Damon Albarn is known for putting on special performances in non-traditional venues that live outside the rock’n'roll ethos of tour, tour, tour. How does a U.S. festival performance like Coachella fit into this?
SIMONON: Up until now, we’ve pretty much done our own thing, so the environment that people have come to see us play in has been created by us. To be onstage in a festival situation is different from that whole thing, and we’ll obviously have to adapt in one way or another and hopefully get across, as much as we can, that element of coming to one of our shows. They haven’t been really like a normal rock’n'roll show because we don’t have flashing lights and lights that spin upside down and back down again. We just use pretty simple lighting.
Do any festivals where you performed with The Clash stand out in your mind?
There were a few festivals in Belgium that were very extreme, as far as being near-riotous scenarios. Also, I suppose the US Festival in 1983 was memorable because it was like playing on the side of the moon. There were so many people there, you could actually see the earth shake. People were driving around in moon buggies.
That was a crowd of nearly half a million.
Yeah, you could see the planet actually curving slightly. It was that big. I do recall that we wouldn’t go onstage unless [festival sponsor and Apple co- founder] Steve Wozniak donated a certain amount of money to various people in LA.
What thoughts run through your head when you step onto a stage in front of that many people?
The difficult thing is that, unfortunately, they have a barrier between you and the audience. The bigger the festival, the bigger the barrier, it seems to be. The audience is like half a mile away. It’s not easy to get into the concert because it’s nice to have people close up so you can see their faces, and vice versa. It gives you and them more of a lift. It’s a shared thing rather than us just running around like ants in the distance. I’d prefer the audience close up.
That’s interesting because many visual artists, such as yourself, struggle with the interaction between the spectator and their work. For example, some argue that if someone is moved to touch a painting in a museum, the person should be allowed to do so.
It’s pretty much the same thing with us. That’s funny because I know there are certain paintings, specifically ones by Frank Auerbach—he’s sort of a contemporary of Lucien Freud, his paintings are amazing—you just want lick the canvas. They’re delicious. Maybe that’s a bit extreme, but they do look delicious.
The Good, the Bad and the Queen touch on quite a few political, social and cultural cornerstones relevant not only in London but also the U.S.
And around the world, too. We’re all affected by the Iraq war in one way or another.
Is a festival setting a proper venue for espousing such an agenda?
If people are willing to listen, any place is, really—whether it’s on a street corner or from a stage. If people don’t like it, they can always go away and get a hamburger or something. Turn on their iPod.
But it also seems like bands catch a lot of grief from crowds nowadays when they start into their politics.
Preaching to people is a bit boring. There are other ways of going about it. It really depends. If you’ve got something to say and if you can put it through in lyrics that aren’t preaching yet still have something to say, and can get people dancing at the same time, that’s not a bad starting point. Get their feet moving and get their brains ticking.
In the years you spent away from music, what did you miss about it?
I supposed I missed working with Mick, Joe and Topper and the audience, all of ‘em, the angry ones and the happy ones. I missed that immediate reaction, whether it was good or bad. And it wasn’t always good, ya know?
What have you learned about being a musician in your time away from it?
It’s one of those things that doesn’t really leave you, insofar as it’s like riding a bike: You step off and don’t get on that bike again for a couple of years, but once you’re back on, you just fall in. Maybe with that bit of distance, you have a bit more intelligence on how you’re going to ride.
Did you have to take some time to get reacquainted with your instrument?
Not really. I just had to make sure I didn’t go down any dead ends. One way! Accelerate!
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