Momus and Baker

I was not expecting to see a rabbit. Somehow I had never imagined that the oft-controversial Scottish musician and writer, who made his name with albums like 1988's Tender Pervert, would have a pet rabbit.

But, as Momus explains as he ushers me through to his living room, the rabbit is not as cuddly as he seems. Baker (his original name was Topo, and Momus's Japanese girlfriend has never accepted the name Baker, which sounds too much like 'baka', the Japanese word for idiot *) is a Lion Head and has a fierce bite. I should be careful where I put my fingers, Momus says.

Magazine pages pasted to the corners of the living room walls at rabbit height testify to where Baker's teeth have already been wreaking havoc. Other pages from Japanese magazines constitute the wallpaper on an entire wall. Ikea storage boxes, which I recognise from a recent posting on Momus's popular Berlin blog Click Opera, are stacked around the room.

If the flat is a little sparsely-furnished, it is partly because he has just moved in, but also because he barely stops moving long enough to get established in one city--he says he has boxes in storage in several places.

Originally from Edinburgh, Momus (aka Nick Currie) left Scotland straight after university--it turns out we both went to Aberdeen University and even took some of the same courses--and has spent the last couple of decades in London, Paris, New York, Tokyo, and now, since 2003, Berlin ("I have this very complicated CV," he says).

Glamorous and liberal

Berlin is a city which has long attracted him. "Being the age I am, it seemed tremendously glamorous that David Bowie had once lived here," he says. "It just seemed a very mythical place, but also a very liberal city."

He first discovered the city in 1987 touring with the infamously hedonistic rockers Primal Scream, who were signed at the time to the same record company as Momus, the seminal British indie label Creation.

"I remember coming here in a tour van with these guys and wanting to escape because that tour was just a bit too rock and roll," Momus recalls. "The city was still divided, obviously, and I got a day pass to go into East Berlin.

"I'm so glad that I saw that, because I now have this picture I can superimpose on today's city of what it was like then. The buildings were all black and it was economically very different - shoe shops with hardly any shoes and people queued up outside bookshops waiting for the new books to arrive. I'd never seen people queuing in the rain outside a bookshop."

After a stint in New York, he had originally intended to move back to Paris instead of coming to Berlin. "I'd been married and living in Paris in the mid 90s and I moved back there for three months in late 2002. But somehow I didn't really like it - it was full of shadows from my marriage."

Heeding the call of destiny

Then he came to see a concert put on by Parisian label Active Suspension at Berlin's Podewil arts centre. "Nobody came to that show, it was just me and a scattering of other people. It was a typical Berlin show where tickets are three euros and it's all intensely leftfield.

"I thought there was almost like a manifest destiny kind of feel about Berlin. I thought, we hipsters, or whoever it is, have the right to move into this city because it needs us. It's not a finished city, it’s a city always in the process of becoming.

"Paris seems finished, they should put a glass roof over it and it would just be a museum, whereas Berlin needs people to help it decide who it is and help it become something. I don't think it's ever going to reach that. I think there's always going to be cranes here and there's always going to be this transitory population of people from Britain and America and other places.

"I think of it as a great brainstorming city."

At that time he was signed to the Berlin-based record label Bungalow. "They would very kindly fly me out to promote my records from time to time and the more I came here the more I felt this would be a great place to live. I asked [Bungalow boss] Marcus Liesenfeld what his rent was for this fantastic huge apartment he had. He said, oh, it's quite expensive for Berlin, it's like 400 euros a month. And I thought okay, I'm going to move here, why not."

Distorted perspective

However his relationship to Berlin now is slightly disjointed in terms of work. "I don't have any links with the Berlin economy. I earn my money mostly by writing a column for [technology magazine] Wired.

"It gives me a distorted perspective. I do admit that, as someone who's just a consumer here, it seems like there is an endless procession of arts festivals in Berlin.

"I think a lot of people in America read that sort of thing when I blog about it, and they think, God, it just seems like a permanent post-materialist culture orgy in Berlin - let's move there and enjoy it.

"Then they move here and find they can't earn a living. Although everything is very cheap, it's also very difficult to get a job here."

Avoiding the distraction of language

How is his German? "It's enough to get by in some basic situations. But I'm not really learning German very consistently. I was very pleased with myself with being able to phone the phone company and describe to them that the Anschluss was not actually working.

"I learned German at school for a year, and I read German literature like Goethe and Rilke in translation at university. So I've always been very attuned to German culture in translation.

"However I rather enjoy the idea that you can almost pick up more about a culture if you don't speak the language. In a way language is a kind of distraction--it's such a powerful mode of expression that it blocks your peripheral vision, blocks the body language or someone's facial expression or the smell of a place, the visual impressions you're getting.

"So when I go to Japan, my very limited Japanese makes me see it the way a baby or prelingual child might see it. You're much more attuned to sense perceptions.

"That’s my excuse anyway," he adds with a smile.

Remaining foreign

Was it a conscious decision not to learn German?

"I think I'm a little bit scared [of assimilating], I don’t want to become naturalised in any way. I really enjoy being a foreigner. As [American composer and author] Paul Bowles said about Tangier, it’s a real luxury and privilege to be a foreigner and to remain foreign.

"I also have a whole political thing about assimilation versus integration. I'm not one of these people who thinks that immigrants need to assimilate, although I do think they need to integrate. For example, there's a Turkish market near here which is very much part of the vital life of Berlin, but it hasn't assimilated--the people there have kept the Turkish way of life. I want that non-assimilated integration, and I kind of want to be that also myself. I want to be in Berlin but not of Berlin.

"I think people have the right to be somewhere else without necessarily adopting the way of life of that place and they enrich that place as a result."

A very small country

What is his relationship to Scotland now?

"I've become one of these unbearable people that Scottish people hate, the kind of people who just come for the Edinburgh festival. I like to go back for the festival because I can almost imagine that Scotland is this amazingly vital place, a bit like Berlin, but better, because Edinburgh for that one month is. It's just got so much going on.

"Maybe this sounds snobby or something, but Scotland still feels like a very small country. If you compare Scotland with Japan for instance, it's a pretty telling statistic that the average Japanese male lives ten years longer than the average Glaswegian. Japan has a culture which is richer than Scotland's and vastly more technologically exciting, etc etc.

"If I get to play in New York or Tokyo I'd much rather be there than in Edinburgh, surprisingly enough. But that's a good Scottish tradition--leaving Scotland is paradoxically the most Scottish thing you can do."

Weird business as usual

Momus's fascination with Japan is also in evidence on his new album, Ocky Milk, which is coming out in September and forms the third part of his 'Berlin trilogy'. "It's business as usual really, sort of weird underwater songs. It's actually a bit influenced by enka, Japanese sentimental drinking music.

"You could call it Google torch songs because the lyrics are often translated Japanese journals which make very little sense when you feed them through a web translation engine but then are very suggestive poetry. I'm crooning this absurdist Google-spawned poetry alongside what sounds like 1950s sentimental Japanese drinking songs. I'm sure it'll sell absolutely nothing, as usual."

Interview over, Momus takes me to see the Turkish market near his flat, one of his favourite places in Berlin. He buys a can of chick peas for later ("I live on these things," he says). Time is wearing on and I have to regretfully decline his suggestion to go to nearby Japanese restaurant Musashi for lunch.

It is only the next day that I realise that my notebook no longer has the page marker ribbon it once had. Baker had eaten it during the interview.

* The original version of this article erroneously claimed that Baker used to be called Baka. David Gordon Smith apologies for any confusion caused. A full discussion of the controversy behind naming Topo/Baker can be found here: http://imomus.livejournal.com/221797.html.

Links

Momus's home page: http://www.imomus.com
Click Opera: http://imomus.livejournal.com/
Momus's Wired columns: http://www.wired.com/columns/imomus.html

Momus's new album Ocky Milk is out now on the labels Analog Baroque/Cherry Red (UK) and American Patchwork/Darla (US).

29 August 2006

Copyright Expatica 2006

Subject: Momus, Nick Currie, Ocky Milk, Scottish expats in Berlin, Scottish musicians, Baker