Stephen Mallinder Quotes

I think underneath it all [in the Big Funk] was a little bit of a Europeanness in it.

We were coming from a completely different place, which was saying "sound" is what you want to define it as, and you can shape it into music in whichever way you want.

We've always been observant of things, and I think Crackdown was very much like that and the film interpretation was that journalistic view of that situation.

I think that's the fascinating thing that exists now. This contrasts with a celebrity art and celebrity music culture.

Music doesn't have to be so rule-based - and so strict in its structures, construction and perception.

I think probably underneath it all, film [Kino] has its own rhythm and its own dynamic, and we were trying to capture the movement of film and cross-reference it with music.

[Kino] worked really well as a song title, and to build into a lyric, and also how we embraced mulit-media at the time.

We've always been journalists - and have seen ourselves in that way. But we sort of recontextualized it through music.

In that period, we had the Cold War mentality imbued through us - the Post-war [environment] and the Cold War. I think we were reflecting some of that. This was before the Wall collapsed, etc.

In the 80s, we were still living in a kind of Cold War environment.

It was an important period for us, because even though we weren't a "punk band", and what became a model for a punk band, we were able to be dragged along by the spirit of that time.

This was in the sense that if Dada was reacting to the morality and aesthetics of pre-WWI, then we were very much a reaction to the pomposity of rock that existed within music at that time.

I don't think it had a name when we started. If punk has any roots, Dada is part of it. And we saw ourselves as part of a kind of Dada tradition.

We were iconoclastic. We weren't there to sort of follow the trends really. So it was important that we were making a statement against that.

We were sort of coming from an angle where we wanted to break rules.

Going there [Japan] in the early 80s was quite a culture shock. I think the bombardment of Shinjuku and all that would have filtered through, which certainly informed things we later filmed.

I edited Big Funk, some of the footage was shot by Peter Care. We were film buffs as much as music buffs, and so there are film reference as well as sound references.

We were responding to a period in the 70s when we started that it was very much you cannot be involved in music unless you studied to do music.

We were working in entertainment, in the music industry, with popular music, it was important, but it was something that we also felt was a responsibility.

Crackdown had Dave Ball playing on it. Flood worked on our next album, and Adrian Sherwood worked with us on Code.

Looking back, I think we were very much a part of democratizing music, and we wanted to demystify the process of making music - to show it's a myth.

We had always used found sound, but we had always used it in an analogue way. And it was the early days of using collage and sound in a digital way. MTV, a couple of years later would be that way.

One of the tropes of our videos is that they were very rhythmic with clipped edits.

If you're going to change things, one of the things we had to change is to get away from that traditional model of rock music, and we were a part of that.

I think what we tried to do lyrically, vocally and musically was to capture a sound.

Crackdown, the video, interpreted and reflected a sense of authority and austerity and a sense of slight, impending doom.

We also worked with Marshall Jefferson for Groovy, Laidback and Nasty. So we were lucky to work with some really great people.