BCR: (You’ve got the preamble) Who is Officer Bentley?
BA: I’m going to answer that question in a non-specific way, because I’m still asking those questions of myself and I don’t understand sometimes when I open the door and start singing the chorus of Officer Bentley, which is what happened. Then I have to work out, or not if you like, what is going on with this. Various things will filter in. Various ideas about what I’m trying to get at will enter my frame. I’ll start to remember things like… When I was at college I met this guy, got friendly with him, he says “do you wanna do something on Saturday?” I’m like, yeah sure. We met at this place and he was dressed in this full American police uniform from head to foot. I’m seventeen years old, and I’m thinking, what the hell is going on here. I didn’t understand it at all. So some of him was in there. And then there’s my own ideas on discipline and then there’s a slightly twisted sexual thing. There’s that world going on. What I think you do with a character like that is offer it out. There’s a million things you can see. I think one of the things that I’ve found, that I’ve started to enjoy now is now, after all this introspection and coming out and going “I don’t know”, I’ll have a problem with it as much as anyone else. Maybe I don’t have to figure it out and have to reveal. Because the truth is I’m not really sure. Even the other day I heard a record and thought, Oh my god!… That is in Officer Bentley, as a reworking of something that I was quite attached to thirty years ago, in a psychedelic way, its come out. I didn’t realise it was happening. This record says more about the world today, what’s happening now.
BCR: Is My Friend The Fly About gear?
BA: well, that’s the beauty of it. I have never even thought about that for a second. The beauty of it is that you can bring your frame of reference and enjoy in it that way, and say like, I see what’s going on.
BCR: What inspired Whispering Streets?
BA: You’re very clever, you’re very perceptive. It’s actually a letter to the parents of Stephen Lawrence. I’ve never revealed that, and I was gonna reveal it at the Jazz café, but I turned around to the Man and said, we’re not doing Whispering Streets. I don’t know why, but it was my response to the murder of Stephen Lawrence. And I’m not a political man, so I thought to play political would sort of fuck up my fans. “All the lines feed into the idea” and “after I’ve taken revenge I’m the person who walks around with either their head high or hanging”. It has more of a belt to it once you know what it is.
BCR: People whose bodies contain metal implants have often made claims for its telemetric receptivity; the people who (apocryphally) receive radio broadcasts through their fillings for example.
Shostakovitch, who received a nd retained some Krupps steel in the form of shrapnel to his head in ww2 insisted that this was where he received the transmissions that inspired his work. Could you be receiving transmissions to the heart of the pelvis?
BA: That’s very probable actually, very good, well… If I’m not I’m certainly going to blame it all on that from now on. The Six Million-Dollar Shostakovitch Man. It’s very possible. I kinda knew I was going there with that song Set The Controls and now here I am, years later with my middle being made of well....
BCR: The Motorlab stuff… are you intending to do anything along those lines again?
BA: I’m always on the lookout, I guess, my ears are open. It’s not something I do in my every day creativity so I really like it when something enters your mind, this other vista of possibilities. And I also like stuff that I can’t necessarily do myself. I become an excited kid, about the creation thing. Watching Pansonic work, I’m all like quietly myself “Whoaa, that’s amazing…” You know! There’s a few people I won’t mention right now, it’s on the horizon…
BCR: Was this done by sending stuff between studios or did you just sit down with these boys?
BA: Yeah we did, we got together with Pansonic in Iceland and the Haflers remixed it. That was obviously a sending thing.
BCR: Finally, do you have a special plan for this world?
BA: Well, it’s the Central Control Manifesto, flood the world with beautiful creation. ‘Cos I’m that kinda guy… I kept thinking back to the days of punk where you didn’t have a barrier which was like I wanna make this stuff but until I get this amount of money or this company finds me I won’t be able to do. So what happened with me, my own journey, was about going to a shop, buying a coupla strings for my Bass, seeing an advert in a magazine, calling it and getting into it. The same with doing my own stuff now, making Moss Side Story as a calling card to film makers saying I can score films. I am very motivated and I know alot of people where it’s very difficult to get past this thing that’s sort of goes to be a writer you have to have this agent, this publicist, you have to have written ten best-sellers already and then to suggest to someone I really like the way you write, why don’t you write a novel? And they go to what extent? and you go, I’ll publish it and I’ll go off and find out how you publish stuff. I don’t know what part of me that comes from but it’s just become a very enjoyable part of what’s going on.
BCR: Alot of people need to be nudged
BA: You get nudged enough and it spurs you and then you become a nudger.
