We all know what sound is, but are we any good at describing it?
Outside of the ₊‧.°achingly beautiful˚.‧° cliches of the music journalist or the technical jargon of the academic, sound is pretty poorly served by everyday language. (And the English language is itself strikingly dependent on visual metaphors. You see?)
This struggle to properly talk about sound is the burden of this week’s guest – a musician, writer and one of indie music’s wisest observers. Damon Krukowski has been playing in bands since the ‘80s, drumming for Rough Trade dreampop originals Galaxie 500 and, for the past 30 years, fronting Damon & Naomi with his partner Naomi Yang. (D&N’s latest album was recorded live at Cafe Oto this January.)
He’s also a poet, publisher, and the author of many thought-provoking articles about music, art, streaming, copyright, subwoofers and more for The Wire, Pitchfork, Artforum and his own Substack.
In recent years he’s published three books, all of which we can strongly recommend: Ways of Hearing (also an amazing Radiotopia podcast), The New Analog, and just now, Why Sound Matters. All of them grapple with the problem of sound and its strange, intangible properties.
Damon is also a proud member of United Musicians and Allied Workers, a very cool young labour union that has campaigned to introduce streaming legislation and kick Palantir out of SXSW.
It was a privilege to have Damon on No Tags to talk about the full spectrum of sound – from noise pollution and sodcasting to the labour of the merch table, from the ‘red herring’ of intellectual property to the hidden value of hanging out backstage.
And naturally, Damon is a Criterion Man! He had several excellent olde movies to recommend to us, including one for all you Coen Brothers fans out there. You can read the edited transcript below.
In this episode’s intro we debrief recent late night excursions to the Old Blue Last and Om (is Shoreditch back?) and the last ever weekend at Corsica Studios, which might still be going for all we know.
We also tackle your Rockufiction feedback and a potential hot new entry to the canon: Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie.
And while we have you: we both (!) have club nights coming up in London.
First, Chal’s night Get A Grip returns this Friday at The Distillery N17, where DJ-producer genius Olof Dreijer and Glasgow diva Miss Cabbage will be greeted with two kilos of Mini Eggs – the superior seasonal chocolate, In Our Humble Opinion. Tickets for that are here.
Then, Tom’s label Local Action teams up with Leeds-turned-South London club rats Triptych for a showcase at Ormside Projects. Sets come from White Hotel stalwart Tom Boogizm, Hodge (who has an ace second album coming this summer – big tip!) and SWU.FM resident Harpriya. Tickets are available via RA or new grassroots listing website Gel.
CR: Many people know you first and foremost as a musician, but you’ve written quite a lot – three books of nonfiction. Are there older, more secret books I don’t know about?
DK: I have a secret past as a poet. It’s not so secret, it’s just that nobody ever wanted to know about it.
CR: Being a poet is hard. I think it’s fair to say you’re a lifelong writer, but for people who don’t know your writing, what are the most consistent themes or questions running through it?
DK: All three nonfiction books are about sound, from an experiential point of view more than a theoretical or technological one. I don’t claim to have golden ears, like some mastering engineers do, and I don’t have a super expensive hi-fi at home. But I do have a lot of experience with sound. I think we all do, because we’re human beings.
It’s actually very easy to share ideas about the experience of sound with people. The problem is that we lack a vocabulary for it. Part of my project has been to try to build, or at least contribute to, a vocabulary for discussing sound that isn’t about quality, which tends to be mystifying, and isn’t about music theory, which I still consider myself rather an amateur at.
It started because I used to write for art magazines like Artforum and eventually Art in America. They’d have me write about music or sound art, and I became something of a go-to person for anything touching on sound. But I was writing for a non-music audience: a hip, plugged-in audience, but not one that spoke the insider language of music writing. I kept coming up against a similar problem in the art world: how do you talk about sound art without resorting to art speak, which I’m no expert in. I was really trying to build a common ground. The book emerged out of that.
CR: Your latest book is Why Sound Matters, part of a Yale University Press series where all the books are titled Why Something Matters. That framing immediately suggests the reader needs to be persuaded, as if most people think sound doesn’t matter, or simply don’t think about it. Have you found that to be the case?
DK: Absolutely. The series is a little problematic to me. There’s actually a volume called Why Food Matters, which is absurd. They originally came to me and asked for Why Music Matters, and I said no, for the same reason they should never have commissioned Why Food Matters. Also, who am I to say why music matters? It seems so presumptuous.
I took it as a challenge. How do you discuss this in real terms without resorting to humanist clichés, [like] ‘Sound matters because it makes your life richer’. Frankly, this is what I think they expected me to hand back. I bristled at the title the whole time I was writing. Finally, my partner Naomi said: ‘What if you just drop the ‘why’ when you’re thinking about it?’ So I started thinking of what I was writing simply as Sound Matters. Then I was able to write the book.
I also took the title literally: sound as a physical material, the matter of sound. That’s how the book starts, with me trying to establish sound as something material.
CR: Let’s walk through a little of that argument. Part of your central case is that sound is material and has value – rather than being apparently immaterial, something that just floats around and somehow ends up in your brain. You frame this early on through noise pollution. I wondered if you’d ever come across a term sometimes used in Britain: sodcasting?
DK: No – is this the podcast about the Earth?
CR: No! It’s where you sit on the top deck of the bus and play music off your phone – or, increasingly, AI-generated TikTok videos, and everyone around you thinks you’re a sod. Very British.
DK: That’s brilliant. So the person playing it is the sod?
CR: Exactly.
TL: Very pressing topic for this podcast.
CR: So you’re making the argument that sound has value, but you’re also showing that it can have a destructive, negative value – like noise pollution.
DK: The book is ultimately working toward an argument about how musicians need to be fairly paid and how sound needs to be properly valued in our economy. I wanted to reach for a justification that went deeper than simply saying ‘support me’ or ‘pay me’, because I really do believe there’s something more fundamental at root here, which is the devaluation of labour.
When artists aren’t paid, I think we have something in common with workers across the 21st century economy. We’re not compensated for our labour. Establishing that labour is involved with sound and music is actually a stretch. It’s not self-evident in the way it is with, say, manufacturing.
I reached for the idea that sound is a material, it’s something that can be worked, wasted and abused, like anything else in the environment. Noise pollution is something we all experience. We know what it is to have our environment poisoned by sound. Yet when I went looking for environmental literature about it, I found almost none. Noise has been relegated to a lifestyle concern, a very ‘60s idea of ‘peace, love, and understanding’, while the planet is on fire and the seas are rising. It barely appears in the index of most new books about the climate crisis.
I figured I actually had something to contribute there, because noise pollution is part of the same environmental crisis, operating on the same logic: the abuse of our shared resources in service of profit and capital.
CR: One of the examples you give is the serious harm that underwater noise causes to ocean ecology: seismic testing to locate oil and gas, sonar blasts that devastate animals who rely on sound to communicate. It isn’t just an inconvenience for wildlife.
DK: It’s a disaster-level problem in the ocean. That’s the one place where I could find real scientific literature, precisely because it’s the domain we as humans can’t hear. We have sympathy for ocean mammals, but because the sound is literally beneath our perception, it’s been documented and written about without most people noticing. Above ground, where we do hear, we’re just awash in noise, and somehow that registers even less.
It was a funny turn for me to take, because my first nonfiction book, The New Analog, was also about noise, but in a very different sense: noise as communicative material. My argument was that digital media eliminates what we identify as noise and delivers only signal, whereas analogue always carries both together. Digital draws a hard line and sorts them.
There, I was valorising noise in music. Here I’m doing something different, treating noise as evidence of waste in the natural environment, accepting it as non-communicative. I broke my own terminology. But both arguments return to the same underlying question, which comes very much from John Cage: what is noise, what is signal, and who gets to decide?
CR: That brings us back to value. I was slightly struggling with the idea that sound is material and therefore it has value, because value is such a nebulous term. Are you implying value to humans? Exchange value? Somewhere between the two? You do bring in some Marxist economics near the end.
DK: The hinge is labour. What I was trying to establish is that sound, as a material in the world, must be worked. How do you work materials? Through labour. We readily acknowledge the value of materials and the labour of working with them in almost every other context, but not typically with sound. That was what I wanted to highlight. My Marxist economics are a little shaky, I’ll admit. The funny thing is that this commission came to me through the economics editor at Yale University Press, who had read some of my pieces about labour in the music industry. When he first called, I said, ‘Look, I don’t have an economics degree, I took intro economics in college and really disliked it.’ He said, ‘That’s exactly why you’re saying things that aren’t usually said within the profession.’ He was embracing my punk rock approach. The question was, how do I put it on firmer footing?
That’s where I reached, quite literally, for the terra firma of material. You have iron ore in the ground, you plant seeds in the earth, you work materials. We’re completely comfortable with that framework. But because sound seems immaterial, we don’t consider the work that goes into shaping it. A good example in the book is Foley, the art of making sound effects for film and radio. That’s always been acknowledged as labour, as paid work. Foley artists still use boxes of sand and shoes of different weights to make footsteps for films. You can see, very concretely, how the soundtrack is being worked with human labour.
But then you get to the James Bond theme song, and we leave all of that completely behind. Now we’re in the netherworld of intellectual property, celebrity, supply and demand. I wanted to ask, could we talk about music using the same framework we use when we discuss value in terms of labour elsewhere?
CR: You mention well-known field recordists Bernie Krause and Chris Watson and posit that value comes into play the moment they turn their expert ear and attention toward something like a wave in the Pacific Ocean, and press record. Some value is added through that act of focused labour, even if it doesn’t immediately translate into market value.
There’s also a mirrored quality to your thinking. You’re just as interested in the non-commercialisable, almost non-musical aspects of music. The world around music, the life of music, which isn’t always about playing music at all. You illustrate this beautifully with an anecdote about Rolling Stones’ drummer Charlie Watts.
DK: The connection between Krause, Watson, and Charlie Watts is this: there’s no other way to get what they made than to have everything that surrounded it. You can’t just put Charlie Watts on a drum stool, press record, and get that backbeat. You need Charlie Watts in the Rolling Stones, living everything they lived. The anecdote is from an interview he gave, I think in the ‘80s, when they’d been together 25 years. He said something like, [his career had consisted of] 20 years hanging around and five years being in the Rolling Stones. The idea is that you cannot have the five years of music without the 20 years of hanging out.
That cuts straight to what we’re facing today, because digital media and the tech logic that drives it cuts all of that out. These platforms are always driving for efficiency, eliminating everything they don’t think generates value in the conventional sense: saleableness, capital attraction. So they just get rid of it.
The classic example is London black cab drivers versus Uber. You don’t need ‘The Knowledge’ if you have satnav, but now nobody actually knows how to get around London. When Naomi and I arrive to play shows, we can’t even fit the two of us and our equipment into one car anymore. A black cab could have managed that. You didn’t improve things [with Uber] – you hollowed them out. What Charlie Watts was doing in those 20 years hanging around was acquiring knowledge, the same kind of knowledge as a cabbie learning every alley in the city. It looks like waste from one angle, but from another it’s the only way to build the real value of what comes afterwards.
TL: You write about merch tables in a similar vein. From a pure Silicon Valley efficiency standpoint, a merch table is just a slower, messier version of an online store. But I grew up going to alternative and noise shows, and the ritual of hanging around after the set, meeting the artist, buying a T-shirt was a key part of both the economy and the experience. Dance music has done a poor job of embracing that culture, which I find interesting and slightly frustrating.
DK: That’s exactly it. Is it because it’s just too loud in the room to chat at the merch table?
TL: Possibly. There’s also this trend of a DJ headline show being presented like a concert rather than a club night. If you’re going to do it that way, you should lean in: have a merch table and create that social exchange, rather than just playing for an hour and disappearing.
CR: I think there’s something unavoidably embarrassing about a T-shirt with a DJ’s name on it, though.
TL: I dunno, I could see TIESTO written out in the classic Swans font.
DK: There’s so much style involved in dance music culture, you’d think you could market all kinds of things. You’re right that the merch table is crucial as a site of exchange. Interestingly, even when you get to a certain level where the artist isn’t physically present at the table, something of that personal quality still clings to it. I went to see Mitski at an enormous venue in Boston and her merch table was mobbed with young fans. Nobody was going to meet Mitski there, but there was still this feeling of intimate personal exchange, fans talking to the tour merch staff in the same warm, slightly conspiratorial way you’d talk to someone at a tiny DIY show. It resembles the way neighbourhood shops used to operate: lots of hanging out, chatting, gossip, connecting around the transaction rather than just executing it. Those moments are crucial for community building.
The way I link this back to the book is through the idea of labour that isn’t economically rewarded. There’s a lot of literature about emotional labour, the feminist argument that the types of labour our culture decides to compensate financially tend to be very specific, while equally necessary labour – like childcare, community maintenance, the social work of a musician’s life – goes unrecognised.
Streaming has stripped away most of what remained of that. You don’t even get the record store exchange anymore. At HMV or Virgin, you could still find someone in a given section who really knew the records. Now, you’re dealing with nobody. For musicians on tour, the daytime used to be spent chatting up record shop staff, distributors, local radio – that was the rhythm of touring. Now there’s nothing to do except sit on your computer managing social media.
Go backstage for many of the bands I know and everybody’s working, literally working! Catching up on emails or doing remote jobs. The 20 years’ hanging around that Charlie Watts did was person-to-person, because that’s all there was. Ours is online. That’s a completely different kind of knowledge you’re accumulating.
CR: It’s something you feel in so many aspects of life. We often talk on this podcast about the erasure of the middle tier – not just in music, but across culture. You can be a DIY artist operating at a loss, or you can be Taylor Swift. But the sustainable middle – consistent touring artist on an indie label, playing small clubs, next album, repeat – is almost impossible to pull off now.
You write about this happening not just in music but in your own neighbourhood – about the arrival of what you call the non-human scale in cultural spaces and the streets we live on.
DK: I was struck by it on a recent trip to London. We played Cafe Oto, which is a favourite venue, and we stayed in Dalston and Stoke Newington. I wanted to go into the centre to buy Monmouth coffee, so I took the bus in. The street life in Stoke Newington and Dalston is marvellous, incredibly mixed and lively. It felt like the kind of human scale that makes for a rich urban environment. Small businesses, local in character. Then, as the bus moved south, slowly and then all at once, it became chain stores. By the time I was in the Covent Garden area, every shop was identical to the shops in Boston or New York or any other city centre, literally the same international chains you see in the airport. You could stop at Heathrow and see the same shops.
That loss of character is total. For old time’s sake I walked down Denmark Street to look for where the 12 Bar was, which was the first place Naomi and I played as a duo in London. Gone, of course. It’s this feeling: the homogenisation through the consolidation of capital. Once you’re in Covent Garden, stores have to be chains, how else do you afford the rent? By definition, only something with major capital behind it, duplicated across dozens of cities, can survive there.
What’s changed isn’t the physical scale of central London. Covent Garden still has small streets and small shopfronts, what’s changed is the scale of the businesses inside those spaces. Each one is a node in a global enterprise and with that comes the loss of human-scale exchange. If you work in one of those shops, you could be anywhere. You’re not invested in the place. I’ve watched the same thing happen in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I live. It was an economic backwater when I arrived in the ‘80s, a slightly frayed college town still running on counter-cultural fumes from the ‘60s. Now it’s Covent Garden in Harvard Square. We don’t even have a grocery store within reasonable walking distance anymore. Last night Naomi had the car, we needed something for dinner, so I faced a half-hour walk to a supermarket – because when Jeff Bezos moved Whole Foods in, the local market couldn’t compete and closed.
I’ve watched the same consolidation in music. Casey Wasserman – who’s now in the Epstein files, his emails with Ghislaine Maxwell are unambiguous – runs one of the biggest booking agencies in Hollywood. Wasserman bought [talent agency] Paradigm. Paradigm had bought Tom Windish’s agency. Windish had absorbed Red Ryder in Chicago, which was the agency I was on. So my little Chicago indie rock world has been, link by link, absorbed into the orbit of literally someone in the Epstein emails. The only reason I’m not on Wasserman’s roster now is that our agent dropped us when he got absorbed, because we weren’t selling enough tickets!
TL: It’s not just indie rock – Wasserman controls dance music, rock, sports. It’s one of two or three agencies that essentially dictates the American festival circuit.
DK: Right. It includes my whole coterie, people booked by little Chicago agents working out of small offices, who’ve been absorbed into this structure without choosing to, just as indie labels got swallowed up under major distribution umbrellas.
We used to have a parallel world: independent venues, independent booking agencies, independent labels, independent shops, independent in the sense of not owned by giant capital. That’s gone. It’s the same logic as the high street. I can’t buy vegetables at a corner stand anymore – I go to Whole Foods, which is owned by Amazon, which owns the two nearest supermarkets to my house. We lost our local market the moment they moved in.
Part of my project in the book is to connect what we experience in music and the arts to what we experience everywhere else in our lives, because they’re operating on the same rules.
CR: Even sympathetic people have a reflex reaction to the plight of artists: if you can’t make a living as an artist, well, maybe it’s because people don’t value what you’re doing! But there are plenty of jobs – like marketing consultants and B2B SaaS specialists or whatever – that provide no discernible value and pay very well.
DK: I love that defence – ‘we have bullshit jobs just like everybody else!’ I’ve genuinely never heard it put that way before. It’s very good.
TL: Scale it up further and you have companies losing tens of millions of dollars a year that are seen as market leaders. Where’s the tangible value in that, beyond keeping their shareholders happy?
DK: The scale problem is central to all of it. When I entered the music business, the understanding was, if you could sell 10,000 records you could make a living. That number has been completely evacuated of meaning. 10,000 streams or 10,000 downloads doesn’t translate into anything financially. That’s the same loss of scale we see in our towns. You can’t just have a local laundry that takes in enough jobs to sustain itself, you need a chain that can cut labour costs and scale up or build value for acquisition.
The pressure in entertainment has always been toward growth. Every album has to be bigger than the last, otherwise the industry reads it as decline. Underground music always had another way. Cultivate an audience at a sustainable level, figure out how it works, stay there, do the work. What we’ve really lost is the possibility of that sustainable middle, at any level below the staggeringly large.
TL: I want to ask about piracy, because I think it’s sometimes the elephant in the room in these conversations. You could argue that piracy stripped music of its financial value long before Spotify did. I broadly identify as pro-piracy, or at least pro-universal access, but it’s something I do wrestle with when we talk about streaming.
DK: I lived through Napster as a working musician, so I can speak from direct experience. It wasn’t damaging. It was, in fact, helpful to our career. Greater access to our work meant our profiles went up, like removing a paywall from a review. More people heard of us, which meant we could be booked in places we’d never played before, because our music could reach markets where we had no physical distribution. Our actual record sales went up, because more people had a chance to discover and like what we were doing. That was the general experience in our milieu at the time.
The major labels and certain pop artists hated it, with some justification at their level. If you’re Madonna or Metallica, your work genuinely can be pirated for profit. That’s categorically different from file-sharing of Galaxie 500, but the labels conflated the two. They’d always tolerated a certain level of piracy: you could buy bootleg cassettes on any uptown New York street corner in the ‘80s. What they couldn’t tolerate was losing control of the paradigm, so they panicked and shut down Napster. What did they get for it? Apple stepping in and taking control of digital distribution with the iTunes store, undercutting them completely. Then Apple lost control to streaming, now everyone’s losing control to AI.
If you watch how the majors are responding to AI today, it’s the same flailing – trying to litigate something they fundamentally don’t understand. The tech industry keeps rushing in to fill the gap, which is how we ended up dealing not with music people, but with tech barons. I’m still pro-access, for the record. I still download things. If I’m going to use something personally, I don’t believe I’m harming commercial interests. But the scale thing applies here too. If you’re trying to sell hundreds of millions of copies and resent losing a fraction of that, you shut down Napster. What you actually achieve is handing the entire industry to Silicon Valley.
CR: Which brings us neatly to something in your book that I found particularly striking: your argument that musicians should consider rejecting what you call the allure of intellectual property. So much of the current AI debate is framed around protecting copyright, but you’re suggesting that’s the wrong framework entirely.
DK: It’s about power. The allure of IP is that it seems to represent power. It’s even called ‘property’, which makes it feel solid, ownable, defensible. But if you have no negotiating power, your copyright isn’t going to protect you anyway. The moment you sign to a label, you sign on their terms, because they have the power and you don’t. The copyright doesn’t help you collect royalties fairly, it doesn’t protect you from Spotify abusing your work, or from AI training on it. It’s always actually been a mask for a power struggle between capital and labour.
AI is now exposing this completely. These corporations, who own all the copyrights, are suddenly saying that they don’t need copyright to be respected when it comes to AI training. Under US law, you can’t copyright AI-generated material, so the output also isn’t protected. The entire edifice is crumbling.
Some music advocacy people call me copyleft when I say these things, as if I want to abolish copyright. I don’t. I just want to see it for what it is: not a magic symbol, not a guarantee, but one tool among many and not a substitute for actual power. The C-in-a-circle [of the copyright mark] doesn’t stop anyone if you can’t enforce it. So where does power actually come from? From each other, from organising.
CR: Tell us about what you’ve been doing with United Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW). What are the campaigns, and what have the wins been?
DK: UMAW is mostly younger musicians than me, people in their twenties and thirties, at that point in a career when you’ve made a couple of records and done some tours and you look around and think: everything seems to be going right and nothing is actually working. What’s going wrong? I had that moment myself around 1990. I’ll say openly that the younger generation is far better at organising than mine. My cohort was trained in a culture of competitive individualism. You don’t compare contract terms, you don’t talk about ticket sales, you maintain the appearance of doing fine even when you’re not. The younger generation doesn’t operate that way. Partly it’s a generational shift, partly they simply have nothing to lose, because they’re genuinely not making a living. So they’re going for it.
We’re growing fast. Our mailing list is up to around 90,000 musicians and music workers in the US who have taken individual action with us on one of our campaigns. That’s significant, because it’s what gives us access to power. When you walk into a congressional representative’s office and say we have X number of constituents in your district, they take the meeting. When you say 90,000 nationally, they actually read the materials.
In the streaming committee, which I work on, we’ve drafted actual legislation with a Harvard Law School team working pro bono built on language from laws Congress has passed before, so it’s not pie in the sky. It’s been introduced in the House and we’re actively lobbying. Whether it passes is another question, but we’re prepared.
We’ve also had a successful campaign around SXSW, changing some of the pay structure for performing artists and getting them to cut ties with US military contractors who were sponsoring the festival. That happened in coalition with Palestinian rights groups in Texas, so it’s coalition building, which is another form of power.
If I’m honest, the biggest win so far is simply that it’s happening at all. Everyone told us organising musicians was impossible. It isn’t. Musicians, as it turns out, already know how to do it: creating scenes, starting bands, building something from two or three people in a room. Organising works the same way, the skills overlap more than you’d think.
TL: Have you encountered any AI-generated music that’s moved you?
DK: Fully generated AI? No. But AI tools are embedded in so much production software now that I probably couldn’t tell you whether everything I’ve heard is untouched. It’s genuinely hard to know where the line is.
TL: Can you imagine circumstances where that might change?
DK: Possibly. At UMAW, we’ve polled members informally and the consensus early on was that we shouldn’t attempt any kind of ban on AI tools, because it’s a tool – as synthesisers were, as sampling was, as recording itself was when people called it ‘tinned music’. If you rail against the technology, you cut artists off from it. Many of our members who are engineers, producers, and mastering engineers are already using AI-adjacent software, so that door is closed. The conversation quickly gets to the same place as copyright: what’s really at issue is power. Who controls AI? Who owns it? Who benefits from it? Who decides our access? It’s the same people, the same corporations that own the copyrights, the tech platforms, the distribution channels, the same logic, again. UMAW doesn’t have an AI policy as such, except to keep redirecting the conversation toward the power imbalance and working on ways to correct it.
I read an article recently by Kieran Press-Reynolds, and Kieran’s argument was essentially: something artistically interesting has to come out of this. I have sympathy with that, but I also understand the pushback from hardcore organisers who say: making a transgressive statement with technology is not enough. Both things are true and they don’t have to be in conflict. One is an argument about art. The other is an argument about power. You can run both simultaneously, but we know now that art alone doesn’t overturn power structures. We need, to quote Iggy Pop, raw power. And that comes through organising.
I went to an AI conference and it was the most god-awful, depressing environment, though Cambridge is full of that. The Echo Nest, which is what made Spotify work algorithmically, was just down the block from me, I knew some of the principals there. They were real music people. Then they sold to Spotify, cashed out and took the whole operation with them. I always think of that Ginsberg line from Howl, ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed,’ and think, I saw the best minds of my generation just… cash out. It’s a horrible thing to witness, but it’s the dominant pattern in tech: build value, exit, repeat.
TL: Your piece on Robert Wyatt, which you originally wrote for The Wire and recently reposted on your Substack, is really beautiful. It made me wonder, who are the other musicians you hold dear to that degree?
DK: Robert Wyatt is a particular hero partly because he’s a drummer, as I was, and then after his accident he moved entirely to songwriting and harmony in this extraordinarily beautiful way. My own career mirrored that in a much less extreme sense. When Galaxie 500 ended, Naomi and I couldn’t perform our songs as a bass-and-drums duo without hiring people to stand in front of us, which we didn’t want to do, so we moved to the front of the stage. I lost my instrument in live performance and Robert Wyatt’s solo work spoke to me very directly during that transition.
I have many heroes, and a lot of them come from growing up in a house shaped by jazz. My mother is a jazz singer. She’s 95 and wants to make a new record this year. She took me to see live music from as early as I can remember. Her friends included the Modern Jazz Quartet and their drummer, Connie Kay. I had all these formative experiences watching jazz players in small rooms.
I think it’s no accident that my own career has stayed at roughly that scale – the underground jazz club, the Cafe Oto. I was always comfortable in those rooms. I discovered Tim Buckley much later in life and found out he’d played the same rooms. The Folk Center on West Bleecker, just up from Le Poisson Rouge, where we played in New York, where Sonny Rollins had recorded live. It was my mother who saw Dylan on Bleecker Street too, because her A&R man Nat Hentoff took her. She told me she thought Dylan wasn’t very handsome and couldn’t see how it was going to go anywhere. But Nat was right. Nat always knew.
I do keep up with new music constantly. If it weren’t for the access that digital affords, I couldn’t hear a fraction of what I hear now. That is a genuine gain, I don’t want to pretend it isn’t. The losses are real, but so is that.
CR: That brings us to our final question. Could you recommend a film?
DK: Naomi and I watch a lot of films. We’re lucky to live near the Harvard Film Archive, which shows real film screenings, and we watch films on DVD and, reluctantly, online, though not when it comes to the Criterion Channel.
TL: I suspected you might be a Criterion household.
DK: Very much so. It’s our only paid subscription. After our last visit to London and Oto we took out a two-week trial with the BFI streaming service and watched everything we could. I watched Slade in Flame, which if you haven’t seen, you must. It’s one of the clear sources for Spinal Tap – you can spot specific moments that Christopher Guest clearly borrowed. Then I saw London by Patrick Keiller.
CR: A previous guest has already chosen it! But please tell us about it anyway.
DK: I can’t say I loved it, exactly. The narration drove me slightly berserk, but it’s visually stunning: fixed camera, 35-millimetre, extraordinary framing throughout. It’s set in ‘92, which was a London I actually knew, because we’d been coming over regularly with Galaxie 500 since the late ‘80s. We were on Rough Trade, so it was strangely nostalgic for me, even though it isn’t really my nostalgia. Taking that psychogeographic tour through a city I knew at that moment, in the filmmaker’s extraordinary eye – that was something. I’ll probably go back to it in a few years and appreciate the narration more.
TL: Being on BFI Player has really helped its profile I think. I’ve noticed much more awareness of it in the last few years.
CR: The images of the city feel a million years ago even though it was made in 1992. It was already half-empty.
DK: That’s how it felt when we first arrived in ‘88. Rough Trade brought us over and it was genuinely empty compared to New York, still carrying something of the post-war atmosphere, a bit down-at-heel, the streets near their office by King’s Cross felt genuinely rough. The inner city felt truly haunted. All of that is completely lost to the boom years and globalisation that followed. The film preserves it.
In terms of what we actually watch most, it’s Golden Age Hollywood. We’re huge fans of pre-war American film. If you’ve never seen Preston Sturges, start with The Lady Eve, with Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck, which is genuinely off the charts. If you’ve been watching Coen Brothers films and thinking they’re sharp, go back to Sturges and you might not be able to return. Or Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be, set in Nazi-occupied Warsaw but somehow a comedy with Jack Benny, is both absurd and extraordinary. We watch these films over and over until we know them by heart.
My mother was born in 1930, she took me to revival screenings in double features when I was small, and she still has essentially a 1930s vocabulary. She sings classic American songbook material, which all comes from that era. The emotional connection is very deep. And Naomi has come to love them too, which is a real pleasure.
I do have a personal cutoff somewhere around 1943 or ‘44. Then there’s the blip of New Hollywood in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and then for me it largely goes dark again. Apart from things I’ve watched on aeroplanes, I’m genuinely ignorant of most Hollywood films from the past few decades.
TL: No television either, I suspect.
DK: No TV. None.
CR: Putting us all to shame. Damon, thank you so much.
DK: That was a delight. I’m leaving with plans to start a sodcast: a podcast about gardening, played at full volume, meant to be heard in a crowd.
CR: Deep focus on soil quality.
DK: Exactly. ‘Rotate Your Crops!’
