THE ADAM BUXTON PODCAST - EP.155 - LAURIE ANDERSON

Episode Date: April 5, 2021

Adam talks with American artist Laurie AndersonRecorded remotely on March 26th, 2021Thanks to Séamus Murphy-Mitchell for production support and Matt Lamont and Scott Edwards for conversation editing. If you need help making your podcast, check out Matt and Scott's Podmonkey websitePodcast artwork by Helen GreenRELATED LINKSLAURIE ANDERSON SPOTIFY PLAYLISTPARTY IN THE BARDO - LAURIE ANDERSON RADIO SHOW ON WESU ALTERNATIVE RADIOLAURIE ANDERSON - O SUPERMAN VIDEO AND BIG SCIENCE VINYL - 1982 (SMARTURL)O SUPERMAN ON TOP OF THE POPS - 1981 (YOUTUBE)THE HEART OF A DOG (TRAILER) - 2015 (YOUTUBE)LAURIE ANDERSON INTERVIEW ABOUT HEART OF A DOG (DP/30) - 2015 (YOUTUBE)ALL THE THINGS I LOST IN THE FLOOD (BOOK by LAURIE ANDERSON) - 2018 (GOODREADS)ALL THE THINGS I LOST IN THE FLOOD (LIVE SHOW) - 2018 (YOUTUBE)ADAM LINKSADAM BUXTON'S RAMBLE BOOK (HARDBACK) (WATERSTONES)ADAM BUXTON'S RAMBLE BOOK (AUDIOBOOK) (2020, AUDIBLE) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening I took my microphone and found some human folk Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke My name is Adam Buxton, I'm a man I want you to enjoy this, that's the plan. Hey, how are you doing, podcats? Adam Buxton here. It is a beautiful, sunny day out here in the Norfolk countryside.

It's Easter Sunday, to be precise, 2021. And yes, to celebrate, the sun has made an appearance. I was given to understand that it was going to be a whole week of sun. In fact, the concept of a heat wave was being bandied around both Willy and Nilly. This time last week. But we didn't get that out here. Instead it's been really quite grey and cold the last few days. Still cold today. But nice. Fresh. Bit windy.

Don't know if you can hear that. Thanks for telling me about the weather where you are in the past. Buckles. That's alright. Rosie is on patrol up ahead. Come and say hello, Rosie. Thanks for telling me about the weather where you are in the past. Buckles, that's all right. Rosie is on patrol up ahead. Come and say hello, Rose. Are you excited about Easter, Rosie? Easter's an exciting time, isn't it?

Easter might be maybe my favourite public holiday. What about that? Because you don't have to go totally overboard. The main challenge for a heathen like myself is to not eat the giant Easter eggs in one sitting. Apart from that, it's all right. Pretty low stress. Rose, let's go this way. You're looking very beautiful today, Rosie, if I may say so. Come on. Yeah, let's run. Come on. Let's run.

Rosie's looking at me. Why are you running? I don't know. I just thought it would be fun. Don't drink from the puddles. Especially farm puddles. Okay, look, I'm going to tell you a little bit about my guest for podcast number 155,

which features a rambly and quite short conversation with American artist and musician, though those descriptions barely scratch the surface of everything she does, Laurie Anderson. Laurie facts. Laurie, currently aged 73, was born and grew up in a suburb of Chicago, Illinois, America. In the late 60s and early 70s, she studied art history and sculpture in New York,

she studied art history and sculpture in New York, where, after working as an art teacher, art critic and children's book illustrator, she became an integral part of that city's avant-garde art scene, producing performance pieces that incorporated often electronic musical compositions. For example, in one early piece called Duets on Ice, Laurie would play the violin while wearing ice skates. The blades of the skates were embedded into a block of ice, which gradually melted until it had liquefied entirely when the performance ended. It is art. In 1982, Laurie released her debut album, Big Science,

which featured selections from her eight-hour performance, United States Live. In the iconic black-and-white cover photograph, Laurie is wearing a white suit and big glasses with the lenses painted white. Perhaps that's why she's holding up her hands a little defensively, because she, like, can't see because of, like, the white paint. Big Science, which is being reissued on vinyl for the first time in 30 years

with a new red vinyl edition, also available on Nonsuch Records, link in the description, yielded the surprise UK number two hit, Oh Superman, after repeated plays from Radio 1 DJ John Peel. Obligatory clip. Oh Superman Oh John Superman. Oh, John.

Oh, Mom and Dad. Mom and Dad. That's a bit of Oh, Superman by Laurie Anderson. Hi. That's a bit of Oh Superman by Laurie Anderson. Over the years, Laurie has collaborated with artists like musicians David Bowie and Brian Eno, video artist Nam June Paik, comedian Andy Kaufman, writer William Burroughs, and musician Lou Reed, with whom Laurie began a relationship in the early 90s. Laurie and Lou eventually married in 2008, just five years before Lou's death in 2013. A major retrospective of Laurie's work, including many of the ambitious sound and video installations that she's created over the years is due to open in May of this year,

2021, at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. Currently, given the COVID situation, it doesn't look as if I'll be able to make it over. Otherwise, I would have popped across to take a look. But hey, if you're in the Washington DC area, I'd recommend it. My conversation with Laurie took place remotely via an unstable Zoom connection one Friday night towards the end of last month, March 2021. I had been given a one hour slot, less than I would normally like with a guest, but considering the stature of the guest, better than nothing. Unfortunately, Laurie's previous interview overran,

resulting in my slot shrinking, which, as you can imagine, was very painful. I hoped that we would be able to overrun too, but unfortunately it wasn't possible. And although we had a really good chat, and I think you'll enjoy it, it ended more abruptly than I would have preferred. And at the end of the conversation, you will hear me monologuing,

running through some of the many things that I failed to talk to Laurie about. I hope I'll get the chance to ask her another time. to talk to Laurie about. I hope I'll get the chance to ask her another time. After the ramble chat jingle, you will hear me talking to myself in the virtual waiting room while Laurie's previous interview was wrapping up, before I realised that actually she'd been knocking on my Zoom door for 30 seconds or so before I admitted her. Anyway, I'll be back fairly shortly, actually, with another technical note. Here we go. Ramble chat, let's have a ramble chat. We'll focus first on this, then concentrate on that.

Come on, let's tune the bat and have a ramble chat. Post on your conversation code and find your talking hat. Friday night in Castle Buckles. Tonight, we're going to watch at least part of Zack Snyder's Justice League nightmare fiasco. It's over four hours long. But Superman is dead. What will we do without Superman? I don't know. Ask Wonder Woman's. Wonder Woman's, what shall we do without Superman?

I have an idea and it involves my lasso and a kicking party. What do you think, Dark Batman? What do you think, Dark Batman? I need to wee-wee, and it's going to take me at least 35 minutes to access my bat chopper. This is weak, weak material that I'm generating while I'm waiting for Laurie Anson. I only have one hour to speak to Laurie. Oh, shit, I haven't actually been looking at Zoom. Oh, I'm a dick. Zoom. Yep,

they're trying to get back in, admit. Okay, I think. Hello, Laurie. Hi, how are you? I'm fine, thank you. How are you doing? I'm good. Me again, Easter Sunday buckles, just to explain that at this point, myself and Laurie munched through a good chunk of our limited time together, trying to figure out the best way to record, given that Laurie was not able to be in her studio that day, as I thought that she was going to be. In the end, Laurie very kindly recorded most of her side of the conversation on her phone and sent the file across to me. But oh,

what a palaver. Let's get back to the chat. Interviews are a lot more high maintenance than they used to be, aren't they? Oh my gosh. Yeah, it's really ridiculous. It's just ridiculous. Anyway, it's fine. It's fine. And you know, if it weren't for the miracles of modern technology and wonderful zoom i would not be able to talk to you so i'm grateful for that exactly i think there's going to be a lot of things that we keep from the pandemic what kind of things do you reckon i think because i'm able to talk to you now and then then I can talk to my friend in Texas right after that, and we can have lunch together. And, you know, without Zoom, we would probably say,

well, let's meet sometime, and then it would be a long time before I was able to get to Texas. So in many ways, I'm more in touch with people than I was before. And I really appreciate being able to jump around the world really fast without hopping on planes because I really have had enough of planes for a while. Yeah. Do you like not traveling? I do. Yes, I do. Actually, I never went on very many planes, but I was on the train an awful lot. Oh, do you miss trains? I actually do miss trains. It was a nice routine. I used to get on my bike, cycle to the station.

It was half an hour away. I have a folding bike, a Brompton. Nice. Bromptons are great. I have one too. Oh, yeah? What color is yours? It is dark bronzy, I guess you'd have to say.

It's a lovely bike. Yeah, they're great. But I have a lot of bike problems because between my studio and my house, the bikes are always in the wrong place. So it's a lot of bike wrangling. You've got to have multiple bikes. I considered having that at one point. I thought about having a bike in London because I'm out in Norwich in East Anglia,

about two hours outside London. And for a while, I thought, well, I'll have a bike in London. I'll chain it up in Liverpool Street and then I'll have my bike in Norwich. And then I just thought, no, this is crazy. I can't just have bikes everywhere in the world that I want to go to. So in London, there aren't those bikes that you can rent. There are, right? There are, but I never got my head around that. And I like owning a bike. I like the getting to know the idiosyncrasies. I feel the same.

Using a credit card to ride a bike is awful. Yeah. Also, in my experience, it's not reliable. I haven't done it for years, mind you. But when I did try and do it, I couldn't figure it out. I was too embarrassed to ask anyone for help. Yeah, that is pretty embarrassing. I think they've gotten better.

You might want to check it out again sometime. I will. But no, I do miss getting on the train and staring out the window and having my nice little train routine. And I am slightly nervous about the prospect of reintegrating a little more once that's possible, once the restrictions are lifted. I'm supposed to be touring around and reading from a book I wrote later on in the year. Oh, what's your book? Oh, it's a kind of a memoir thing. So it's me talking about a lot about my relationship with my dad, who used to be in a TV show I used to make.

And he would review popular culture. And the joke was that he is quite a grumpy, posh old guy, very conservative man in his mid-70s when we were making the TV show. And we'd take him to festivals and he'd watch the Foo Fighters and try and join in and reflect on popular culture, which he did not enjoy. He thought popular culture was bad, especially rock music. It's good to have that curmudgeonly point of view. Yeah. Did you ever have that? Were your parents supportive of your efforts?

Oh, I don't think they noticed what I was doing. You know, there were eight kids and we did whatever we were doing. I don't think they, like they knew what we were doing particularly. I always envied it. Were you an only child? Are you an only child? No, I'm the oldest of three. Oh, okay.

So that's a little bit of a herd. But that's a tough spot, number one. Yeah, maybe. I think their parents are very nervous at that point, aren't they? They think they're going to break the child and they fuss too much. When you said kind of a memoir, do you mean that you forgot a lot of stuff or what does it mean? Kind of a memoir is partly fiction. Well, I haven't had so far. I'm 51 years old and I have not had the kind of career that needs to be

detailed exhaustively. So I'm dipping in and out of some things that I've done in my professional life. And it's mixed in with some essays about being on the train, getting into arguments with people on the train. A few pages are dedicated to a log which contains various arguments, domestic arguments I've had with my wife, things like that. Wait a second. How does she feel about that? She's cool that I'm sure, right? She has read it. I checked it with her, obviously. I'm not that insane. And she was fine about it. Some of them are somewhat fictionalized, and they're mainly meant to demonstrate how petty and stupid I am. And they're not like really detailed arguments about like our children's education, the real arguments, in other words. So she wins the arguments in the book.

Does she win the arguments in real life? Yeah. In the book, it's fairly clear that most of the arguments are ridiculous and I'm in the wrong a lot of the time. And that reflects real life. Okay. But it was a real fantasy I had though to actually keep a detailed log of all our confrontations so that I could refer to it. You know, like sometimes you lose track of where you're at

with certain arguments that roll on. No kidding. Especially the ones that you keep having again and again, just in slightly different forms, because I find like those arguments tend to be very repetitive and loop-like, you know, you think you're arguing about that, but you're really arguing about that same old thing that you always argue. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe that's just cheap psychology probably is. No, that's got to be right. Doesn't it? It's like you argue about pathetic small things, but it always comes back to the big unresolved conflicts underlying those yeah and it takes a lot of nerve to really see what you're

doing like because sometimes if i'm in an argument let's say and i'm not saying really what i feel which is often like i'm afraid but i'm saying and said i I'm right. And if I really looked at what I was saying, I would see that it's coming from my being afraid of something. And I get, especially under those circumstances, you get really defensive and start like pulling in the wagons, you know, I'm right. I'm right. You're wrong. Yeah, that's right. So anyway, those are the dynamics of some of the arguments I'm recalling right now. It's not even about the thing anymore. It's about the relationship.

And in some ways, you know, I guess who can get the last word? I mean, you have more or less described the exact tone of modern cultural discourse, especially on social media. Oh, social media is something else. You have a little extra time to think of your comeback then, especially on social media. Oh, social media is something else. You have a little extra time to think of your comeback then, you know. It's like, what is that French word? Yeah, l'esprit d'escalier. Yes. And you're going down the stairs after a party and you think of that really great response

that you did not say. That's right. And as you're thinking about it, it starts to seem like you did say that. And then the next time you're describing it to someone, you did say that's right as you're thinking about it it starts to seem like you did say that and then when the next time you're describing it to someone you did say that really funny hilarious ironic perfect thing in that circumstance so i don't know that's the trouble about making your so-called memoir is you're collaborating with your memory i'm writing a book like that too that's a combination of stories and essays that's so called about my life. And I'm running into the same kind of thing. You know, where do your

theories in your real life differ? And how honest do you choose to be? Because also, it's about other people's lives too. Like, as you know, when you're writing about your wife, it's like, it's your story, but it's also hers. So you got to like tiptoe around some things that are, you know, can be like a little eggshell, you know? Absolutely. Writing is a wild exercise. I've been collaborating with a supercomputer lately on writing, and it's really been amazing. I started about a year ago in Australia. I was the artist in residence at a big AI thing connected to the university. And it's one of the biggest linguistic supercomputers

anywhere. And they said, what do you want the supercomputer to do? And I was like, I can't think of its own thing to do. I don't know if it needs me to suggest things for it to do. But I said, you know what it should do? It should learn to read the Bible. And so for the last year, we've been doing a huge number of really weird experiments with language and stories. So for example, one of the first things we did was take all the streams of the languages that go into the Bible, Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew, and we mix them. We're able to control the amounts of the contributing languages. So if you then analyze one chapter and you increase the Greek to 90%, is that chapter going to be more rational?

Or if you increase the amount of Hebrew, will it be more mystical which way is that going to go so right it is one of the most wild experiments i've ever been involved in and we are now doing really really nutty things that um are going to be part of this book that i'm writing because it's it's great to have a collaborator, especially if it's a supercomputer. Like half of the stuff it writes is, you know, monkey shit. It's a typewriter. It's just idiotic. And a quarter of it is pretty interesting. And a quarter of it is hallucinatory.

I remember an interview with David Bowie where he was talking about the way that he knows a piece is finished as being the point when he can no longer recognize his hand in the work as it were nice i suppose that's what a lot of artists are doing they're trying to remove themselves from the equation so if your collaborator is someone or something that is generating stuff where you can't divine the logic or the origin or the references, then that's an ideal scenario, isn't it? You know, David Bowie called me up one day. When was this? I don't know, maybe like 97 or 98. And he says, I think you can read minds. I said, no way, I can't read minds. And he said, said I think you can and I want to do an experiment with you and I said all right so he said sit at your fax machine okay we had fax machines then we

have to say and so he said sit at your fax machine with a pencil and a paper we sit there and we try not to think of anything and he said when I say go we each make a drawing and one minute later we fax it to each other I said okay so I got the pencil out he said go and we each make a drawing, and one minute later we fax it to each other. I said, okay. So I got the pencil out. He said, go, and we both did a drawing and faxed it to each other. And the drawings. Okay. The first one, and these are cartoon drawings.

They're done in a minute, so they're not like paintings. The first one had a house, a spiral over in the corner, something sticking out of the second window of the house, and hanging from that thing that looked like a stick was a man hanging by his neck. No, both drawings had that. Really? There is no way that that could have happened.

What does he have, a camera in my house? So I said, okay, let's do this. We did it ten times. This set of drawings was in his show that was going around. I guess it started in London. And this set of mind-reading drawings. And it's going to be in the show that I'm doing in the fall at the Hirshhorn Museum in D.C.

But it was really baffling to me because each drawing had something of, you know, like a box in the left corner, a word down in the lower right, things like that. Just things that make it absolutely 100% impossible that it wasn't mind reading or something. Yeah. Certain things in my life I do not understand. Certain things in my life I do not understand. For example, I don't believe in ghosts, but I have seen three ghosts, but I don't believe in them. Okay, so I accept that situation, and I no longer, you know, try to scratch my head about it.

It's just the way it is. I don't believe in mind reading. I do not. But I have ten drawings with David that were the same. They were the same. So I don't know what to make of that. And I just figured, guess what? We don't know everything. Guess what? You know, this is why I try to use the wrong sense sometimes to just remember how completely deaf and dumb I really am. Like I try to smell with my ears. And you're kind of like, I can try, I can try, I can try. Try to smell. And then you realize you can't. And there are many things that are blowing by us or that all are around us

that we really see and hear and smell in very, very, very limited frequencies. And we're just wandering around. We think we know everything. But our senses are very, very dull. Yeah. And so we try to compensate with information and trying to extend our resources of understanding and information gathering. But those are so faulty sometimes.

I mean, in the last four years in the U.S., we've realized how utterly faulty they are and how you can get so-called information about what's real and you start living in a world that is not real anymore. Do you know the filmmaker Adam Curtis? Yes, I do. He's a friend of mine. We've done some talks in film festivals together. And I love his, I love following his, it's kind of like a, I don't know, a Christmas tree interior with lots of lights kind of going, flashing here and there.

And like, ooh, his mind is really interesting to walk around in. And Century of the Self is one of my favorite films. The theory of his most recent work is the loss of individualism is something that has been on my mind for years and watching it develop. And so he was able to articulate it in his own way, which I found really fascinating and pretty crazy and wonderful. But even people like, you know, John Cage in 1950 was saying things like that. You know, Adam Curtis is not coming out of the blue. When Cage said, okay, it's 1950, and we have just crossed the border of the number of people who are alive today have just outnumbered the dead. And what does that mean? Does that mean there are 25 Goethe's around now?

What does it mean? You know, we have surpassed everything. And what does that do to the sense of the individual? We can see what that does. Everyone is desperately trying to be an individual, stick out from the crowd, make their self-image coherent and original, which is really hard to do now because you have to go into such a tiny niche to make yourself, you have to go into such a tiny niche to make yourself, you know, I'm a cook of only octopus that are like grilled, you know, that's your niche and you do that really well. And you try to publicize that. Yeah. Yeah. It's absurd. You know, I think people should just forget trying to be an individual and give that up completely.

Just be one of the group and like fish, you know, or birds. Let's go in bigger patterns. Forget being such an eccentric, exotic individual. And I think, you know, things may turn out better that way if everyone just dropped their own trumpet for a while. It's me. It's me. It's me, the individual. i am so important read my book oh my god it's so interesting and you know stop it there are too many of us you know in my lifetime it's three times as many people in the world as it was when i was born okay so that means three times as many people in every restaurant on every road in every discussion in every art show. You know, I started out as an artist when there were like 100 artists in New York.

Tops. That was it. That was called the art world. We love to say, you know, it's a world. It was just a tiny little neighborhood in Soho. But we thought of it as a world. And now that world, that art world, is full of millions of people, some of whom call themselves artists, some of whom call themselves creatives,

some of them who call themselves whatever, and everyone's scrambling for their own little niche of style. And it's insane. It's just out of control. People will not be able to do that. It doesn't make any sense anymore. just out of control. People will not be able to do that. It doesn't make any sense anymore. You know, so here I'm somebody who worked on my style or I wasn't thinking of it so much like that. I was just trying to make something that was interesting for you, you know, but it turned into my style of stuff in a certain thing that I was doing. And it was a signature and it was like the persona all of that stuff that got created almost as a joke you know because when I uh started making records they they were

like okay now now you need to like do your PR stuff so I made that as a joke and my worst nightmare is that what if like artists now think that that was that's a serious thing to do you know and they do they do think they have to create a persona that is going to be first of all a number one marketable as you know distinct so they're knocking themselves out to stand out from the crowd and And it's just exhausting because the crowd's too big. And Adam Curtis knows that better than anyone. You know, there's, it's just, yeah. I heard him saying in an interview that he feels the most radical thing a person can do nowadays is to create something and not record it and not share it in any way.

Just keep it totally private. But then would you be happy with that scenario if you were told tomorrow, well, listen, Laurie, you've had a good run. You've been a great celebrated artist. But now we're not going to give you any more publicity whatsoever. We're not going to put out any more of your stuff. You're not going to be allowed to do any more shows. How would you feel about that?

First of all, everybody, myself included, has a kind of complicated relationship with the audience. I mean, I make things first for myself. And then I am assuming that you're enough like me that you're going to find what I find funny also funny, what I find sad also sad. But I'm not trying to, first of all, see who you are, then try to do that. You know, I'm trying to first find a part of myself that is vulnerable, open to something, and then to talk to you in that way. You know, there's no final word on this. It's just, you know, you do your best, and you try to be honest with what you're seeing

and try to make something that would be interesting, you know, and trust that you're an average enough person that it's going to cross over somehow. Yes, that you'll connect. Yeah. You said before that when you were making music, you weren't being serious or you weren't trying to be serious. In fact, you were sort of being silly. I did not say that. I was never trying to be silly, even though I like silly.

I'm just saying in branding myself, that was the idiotic, fun, silly thing that I was not serious about. Got you. Creating the image was stupid, you know, and just a joke. But the work was not a joke. I didn't write that music as a joke. I was going to say, it doesn't sound like jokey music. No joke. Branding is a joke.

Even though, I mean, the cover of Big Science, that's one of the great album covers. Who took that photograph? A friend of mine who was on the set. It was just what I was wearing in the show. You know, I've done some really stupid PR stuff like that. And I have my Elvis period of white jackets and like glitzy, like, ha, look at me, you know, it's like, it's pretty embarrassing, some of it. I'm just cutting myself some slack in certain cases, you know, it's like, it's pretty embarrassing. Some of it, I'm just cutting myself some slack in certain cases, you know, because, you know, you just do stupid things. It looks good to me. But I'm interested, though, and I'm sure a lot of people have talked to you about this, but it must have been strange being an artist and making work that was not immediately accessible to everybody, let's say, in the way

that most pop music is trying to be. And then suddenly you had a hit on your hands with Oh Superman, a song that was written in no way to, I imagine, try to connect with a large audience. Are you sure? Maybe that was my attempt to make a pop song no it wasn't um i was a complete snob i thought pop music was stupid and i was a new york artist who had ambitions to be like work in a german theater with really exotic kind of like imagery and and i had an idea of who my audience was at that point because it was where it was working you know it was like experimental music scene and so i made a lot of things and it was because of british radio that that song was heard by anyone yeah it's john peel john peel

uh it was because of john peel who called me up one day and just ordered a bunch of records i was like well what are you what are you talking about you mean it's more than i can take to the post office right now the way i'm posting these records i was my own distribution company so then i tried to do it with a sense of humor and anthropology. In other words, recognize that this is like a real fluke. A real fluke. You know, here's the thing. When you get something that you don't want or that you haven't been like dreaming of

and it just falls in your lap and you're going, oh, that's weird. It's a different kind of getting. Now, I can't say that I wasn't, like, impressed by that because I was like, wow. Because people, I would be driving in London or in a car in London, people would start rocking the car. And I was like, why are you rocking this car and screaming like, you're not. You know, and I thought this is just absurd. And yet it is really a lot of fun. So I tried to at least have a sense of humor about it and realize next year this won't be here. And I'm fine with that. or helped me a lot with that situation because I think, you know, some people get into that

and they then feel like they have to, like, stay on that level and get the next hit out. Right. And the record company starts coming to the studio and going, you know, you need more bass in that song. This is really good. Kids are going to love that. You know, so I didn't really have much bass

in any of those songs. I had a lot of birds, but I think those guys would have felt really stupid sitting in the back of the studio going, I think you need more birds in that song. That's going to put it over the top. You know, so they didn't know what to do with me. I didn't know what to do with them. And isn't that a nice way to work with people?

You know, you're not strategizing all the time about the future and what your career is gonna be it's just fluky and um you know since then i'm doing lots of different kinds of things and yet at the same time i think back to john peel with great fondness you know what a wonderful guy who just could play stuff that he felt like playing unlike anyone in the u.s who's you know radio was like completely kind of rigged you know it's all about payola and you know who's gonna like it was really like that you'd have to pay to be on the radio but it was wonderful because it created this little explosion of strangeness in the lives of people like me i was 12 years old when you were at number two in 1981 in the UK charts, held off the top spot by a cover of Leslie Gore's It's My Party.

Oh, that's right. I love that song. It's my party and I'll cry if I want to. Oh, that's such a great song. I'm honored to be on the same chart with that song. Whoa. I'll cry if I want to. Now, that's a great line you knocked the birdie

song by the tweets off the number two spot you're an expert it was you were a 12 year old expert like that yeah i was so into the top 40 i used to listen religiously to the top 40 i loved everything in there that was my era and uh suddenly oh superman comes along and it was like wow what the hell's going on here i don't understand this at all 12 year old adam yeah it's hard to think of anything since then that's really you know poked a hole through from one world into another in in such a successful way and it made a huge impression and it's hard to imagine that being possible now everything seems so kind of subtly separated everyone keeps to their own areas and the charts now everything in there is sort of unsurprising things are more or less

surprising if they're incredibly shocking or you know like thematically they can be shocking and surprising but not really in that kind of artistic way exactly that's what brings us back to adam curtis and the difficulty of being an individual right now there is just so much going on i mean if i were a young artist today, I would really, it's very challenging. It's very challenging because you do kind of have to like separate yourself from the herd. As much as I'm saying, let's be a flock of birds, everyone, every artist would like to have their voice heard, you know, and that it's just a different world where it's really, really, really hard to do that, you know. And now, in a way that it's really wonderful what's happened

in the pandemic is that there are so many outlets now. It's not going to work in the same way, but there are many, many, many satellites of interesting worlds orbiting around all sorts of different places. So it's difficult to have a top 20. What does a top 10 mean now anywhere? But a top 10 in your own world that you've created is very meaningful. So we have a very different culture. Some would call it more fractured. Some would call it more varied and wonderful.

So I think let's stop with the top 10 and let's start thinking of all the many different fantastic, wonderful scenes that are being created now. And you can do a great show in your podcast that can be as meaningful, as wonderful as any giant network show that has a couple thousand people working on it you know you have the potential to have a big audience or an audience that is listening to you and that is increasing so that's a really positive thing about what we're doing now is people are making their own pods and realizing you know it's not gonna work with we're not living in one big world that the world is way too big for that now but we're living on these like really interesting um i not exactly islands because they're all connected but i would just say pods pods is a

good you know because just because we've been in our pods for our peeps for a while. And it's nice to have that sense of community. So I know that's like a really overused word, but community is, I think, what a lot of artists long for. Some people who understand them. It can be 10 people. That's enough, you know, for plenty of people. Let's just go super local. Yeah, exactly.

Is there one last thing you want to cover or goodbyes um oh man there's so much i wanted to ask you but i know we're just starting i suppose invite me back well i i definitely will that'd be great i'll take you up on that okay but um the i'll ask you this what is one thing that has lifted your spirits that you have seen or heard in the last few months? The happiness of people at the Javits Center, it's our big trade center, who are coming in to get vaccinated and their faces on the way out right just you know there was a lot of soldiers there and they were kind of trying to direct people like go this way get in that line and they were i'm not like a support your troops kind of person generally but i saw them and they were like really happy i mean i think they were happy just not to be shooting someone,

but just kind of pandemically directing them here and there. And I had a feeling of such love for all the people there. I mean, first of all, you know, it's the most people I'd seen in a year. So I'm like desperate to see people. So I was like, I would have been grateful to a groundhog, you know. to see people. So I was like, I would have been grateful to a groundhog, you know. But it was a feeling of love for my fellow human beings. And that was a really great feeling to feel part of that and part of people making an effort to make life better. So that was what lifted my spirits. All right, good. That's a perfect answer. Thank you so much, Laurie. It's a real pleasure to

meet you and talk to you. Oh, well, all right. I'll see you. Take care. Bye-bye. Thank you. Okay. End meeting for all. Well, yeah, that was a little bit shorter than I was anticipating. And I guess the sound won't be the best. But she's a legend of the art world. And I asked exactly none of the questions that I wrote. I wrote quite a few questions.

Here are some of the things, listeners, that I was going to ask Laurie about. Maybe I will be able to get her back at some point and I can ask her all these questions. I wanted to ask her about her film Heart of a Dog, which is really good, a beautiful kind of impressionistic visual poem about death, about the death of her dog, Lola Bell, a rat terrier. This is a film that came out in 2015 and about the death of her mother, about the death of her partner, Lou Reed. She writes movingly about that. So I bet you're already guttedted you didn't get to hear me talking about death a little bit more i've heard her talking about lou reed before she seems okay with it so um i wanted to ask her about lou reed's rules to live by don't be afraid of anyone get a good bullshit detector

and learn how to use it and be tender those Those are good rules. But I wanted to ask how he applied those to journalists. I mean, get a good bullshit detector. He definitely applied that one to journalists. Lou Reed, of course, was famously wary when it came to journalists. And there are many entertaining clips on YouTube of him just being absolutely withering with journalists. More when he was younger, actually. When he was a bit older, he mellowed out. I wanted to ask Laurie about her book, All the Things I Lost in the Flood, Hurricane Sandy in 2012, All the things I lost in the flood, Hurricane Sandy in 2012, which flooded so many people's houses in New York when the Hudson burst its banks, flooded Laurie's basement studio where

all her gear and notebooks and sketchbooks and old pieces of work were stored and all of it was destroyed. I wanted to ask her about the aftermath of that, how she felt. I wanted to ask her just about keeping things in general. This is interesting, isn't it? This is my new podcast talking about the interview I didn't do. I was going to make a joke about Hurricane Sandy also being known as Superstorm Sandy. And I was going to go, oh, Superstorm. And then she would have laughed and laughed. Probably she would have gone, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. And if she didn't, I would have asked her to. And then she would have laughed more. But no, All the Things I Lost in the Flood, her book is excellent. A kind of catalogue of all those things.

And an excuse to write essays on some of the work she's done in the past. I was going to ask her about making political art. I was going to ask her about her attitude towards interviews. And how it contrasted with Lou. Sort of covered that already. I was going to ask her about humor and the humor in her work, of which there is a great deal. One of the reasons I like her.

I was going to ask her about the fact that one of her favorite TV shows is Doc Martin with Martin Clunes and Katherine Parkinson. She's obsessed with it. She's watched all of them. I was going to ask her about that. I was going to ask her about the theme park that she was working on with Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno. It was going to be called Real World. If things were going really well, I was going to tell her that my career was started by a song I wrote called Randy Tart about a New York performance artist. And I sang it over a

Velvet Underground backing track. And really the character, Randy Tart, this performance artist, was sort of inspired a little bit by Lou Reed and someone like her as well. This was way, was it way before they got together? I think it was. I think they got together in the mid to late 90s. And my Randy Tartt song was before that. So I made that connection. I guess that wasn't such a difficult connection to make. New York art scene, Laurie Anderson, Lou Reed, their royalty in that scene, I guess. You know, if we'd been getting on really well, I would have played her a little clip of Randy

Tartt, which I've played probably on this podcast before. Hello, good morning. My name is Randy Tart. I'm from Manhattan and I do performance art. I think you're boring. Let's get that straight from the start. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, ha, ha. That's how that would have gone. Would have been amazing. She was the NASA artist in residence. It became a political football with, I think, the Republicans sort of rolling their eyes and saying, why the hell is NASA paying all this taxpayer's money for an artist in residence? Anyway, I like the idea of a NASA artist in residence. She's funny about that. I was going

to talk to her more about the inspiration for Oh Superman, a very interesting song and a beautiful song. And part of the reason this interview came about in the first place was that i was talking to stewart lee earlier in the year and we both remembered our experience of hearing that for the first time when it was in the charts we must have been around the same age and what a big impression it made on us even though certainly from my point of view i didn't really know what to make of it and sort of thought it was half ridiculous, really. But it's an amazing piece of work. Beautiful video.

A very funny performance exists of it on top of the pops where they got Pans people. I think it was Pans people, the dance troupe. days on top of the pops if the artist wasn't available to perform live in the studio and there wasn't a video that they wanted to play they would get their in-house dance troupe called pan's people to dance to the track on stage they would choreograph a routine and there's quite a funny and quite literal choreographed routine for oh superman that you can see on YouTube. I mean, really, that's the tip of the iceberg. I had loads that I wanted to ask her. Okay, let's wrap up this section of me just talking to myself. Play the music and transition to outro.

Here we go. Wait, this is an advert for Squarespace. Every time I visit your website, I see success. Yes, success. The way that you look at the world makes the world want to say yes. It looks very professional. I love browsing your videos and pics and I don't want to stop. And I'd like to access your members area and spend in your shop. These are the kinds of comments people will say about your shop. to launch, use the offer code BUXTON to save 10% off your first

purchase of a website or domain. So put the smile of success on your face with Squarespace. Yes. Continue. continue Rosie come on let's head back

hey welcome back podcats that was Adam Buxton there just crapping on to himself about some of the things that I would have liked to have asked Laurie Anderson. We should have just asked her then, Buckles. Yeah, I know, but I just thought I was going to have more time at the end to get into my questions. Anyway, fingers crossed I'll get the chance to speak to laurie again i'm very grateful indeed

to her for talking to me at all and to matthew rankin for setting up the conversation in the first place cheers matthew and thank you laurie a couple of links in the description of the podcast one of them to the video for oh super Superman on a page that also has details for getting hold of that vinyl reissue, the red vinyl, if you so choose. What else is there in the description? Oh yes, there's the Top of the Pops performance of Oh Superman, a Laurie Anderson Spotify playlist, not one that I made myself, but one that I found, which looked good to me. There's a trailer for Laurie's film Heart of the Dog, and there's a good interview that she did around the time of that film's release, 2015,

and there is a video of a live show that Laurie did in 2018 around the time of the publication of her book, All the Things I Lost in the Flood. She's reading from the book, showing a few videos and slides, playing a bit of music, going back over certain parts of her career. It's like a, well, I guess it's a sort of augmented book tour type show. And perhaps quite a good thing to check out if you're not that familiar with Laurie's stuff. There's a good mix of bits and pieces from her career in there.

I'm sure many of you are desperate to know how things went with Zack Snyder's cut of Justice League, which me and the family sat through in two sittings last weekend. It was fine. Much better, though, in almost every conceivable way, was Series 3 of Unforgotten, way was series three of Unforgotten which we've been watching all week and now we've just started watching series four and this is a party that I've come to very late after years of hearing people saying oh it's very good I don't know why I didn't explore it before I think I think I thought that it sounded a bit too depressing and I wasn't up for watching any more shows

that started with the body of a young woman being discovered. And even though that is how Series 3 of Unforgotten begins, it's really, really good. So much better than most of those other types of show detectives cassie stewart played by nicola walker she was in last tango in halifax and very good in that and sunil aka sunny khan played by sanjeev baskar of goodness gracious me and spam a lot to name but two of his credits they try and solve a series of cold cases involving murders and historic disappearances uh why is it so good well i've only seen the third series and the beginning of the fourth one, but it was just very, very...

Everything was done really, really good. Very well acted. Nicola Walker and Sanjeev Bhaskar, excellent. So naturalistic. But the whole cast is very good. Like, everyone is well cast, you know? Lots of interesting faces and very believable, well-drawn characters. And it's just well directed. Who directed it? Andy Wilson directed it.

And it's written by Chris Lang. It feels real and dramatic and poignant and it's also very, what's the word, kind of humane and compassionate, I suppose. You know, really making an effort to not just toss in two-dimensional characters for the sake of a bit of drama. for the sake of a bit of drama. It's really having a good go at thinking about what is motivating everyone in the plot, you know, both the goodies and the baddies. It's good. I'm giving it ten bags of popcorn on cinema style. So anyway, there you go.

Late to the party recommendation for you. No, that's fine. You're welcome. Thank you very much indeed to Seamus Murphy Mitchell for his production support on this episode. Thanks to Matt Lamont and Scott Edwards for their help with the edit. If you need help making your podcast, check out Matt and Scott's Podmonkey website. I put a link in the description. The artwork for this podcast is by Helen Green. There's a link to her website where you can see all the amazing, beautiful illustrations that she has done over the years and continues to do,

thanks to ACAST, for their continued support. Until next time, take the best of care. I hope you're doing all right and that your spirits are being lifted somewhat by the arrival of spring. Shall we have a hug? Come on! All right, see you. Oh, I love you.

Bye! alright see ya oh I love you bye Thank you. Bye. Thank you.