Interview with Green

-- Eden website, July 1999

Words: transcribed by Eden press dept
Full interview will soon (week of 12-18 July) be available at the Eden Records website.
Thanks to Eden for allowing AoF to offer up a preview.

Well I suppose the first most obvious question is why has it been so fucking long, what have you been doing?

GREEN: That is an easy question. I mean it is an easy question to ask. You didn't have to write that one down. What did I do...Well I made an album called 'Provision', which was a long time in the making. It wasn't all together succesful as far as I was concerned because I tried to produce it myself with David Gampson, my partner. It was just really difficult to write the stuff, sing the stuff, mix it yourself, edit it yourself.

I was living in White Plains outside New York City, which is a terrible place...oh no, it's not a terrible place, it's a great place! And I got really cheesed off making ['Provision']. Then I had to go around the world and promote it. And, you know, everytime you're not feeling 100% about [what you're doing], I think a little bit of you dies--you just think "oh shit". So I got really sick of doing that. Then, when I came back and my manager quitted to go into [the] movies [business], I thought "I'll take some time out [too]." So I went back to Wales, which is where I was born, and got a cottage in the country. I lost all track of time and cut all my ties with everyone I knew, pretty much, and er...went to the pub for how many years it was...I don't even know how many years it was.

But I used to write tunes as well. I mean, I'd occasionally drag myself out of the pub to go home and write some songs. I kept the flat in London so I could come here and buy records and stuff. Then I got...I guess in the end you get bored. You know, it's idillic in the country--a little white wash cottage, the church yard at the end of the lane, village pubs, barbers, darts team--thats all great, but even that got boring after how ever long it was. So I went back to America to make a record. That's it in a nut shell.

Is there one thing that just made you say "I've gotta do it again"?

GREEN: I've got to do it again? Just, just er...there probably was one moment when I kind of thought "I can't take anymore of this rural bliss, I've gotta go make a record." But exactly what precipitated that I can't remember, other than sort of mounting boredom and isolation. And, erm, also the sense that I had hit upon something that I really wanted to try, which was, for a long time, the whole thing of working with rappers and hip hop--stuff [that's] all I was really listening to. It seemed like a very ordinary thing to do. I didn't know exactly how I could do it without kind of just bandwagonning or something. I had a few ideas that I thought might work. I just wanted to try them out really. I thought "try the whole record out, the whole approach out", which meant me playing guitar again, not sequencing everything, getting the live musicians to play stuff, and with some MC's.

Had you been keeping in touch with the music world?

GREEN: Oh, music I kept in touch with. For years I would listened to anything other than hip hop and then slowly I started...I used to think, "if it was, sort of, white men [can only] played the guitar, then you were better off dead". But then, I realised the floor in that argument--that I was white and I played guitar and I didn't particulary want to die. So, I started listening to some guitar-based stuff again, along with the hip hop. Yeah, I stayed in touch. I stayed a long time in the dancehall--raggae and stuff. Then I drifted back to hip hop and guitars. Yeah, I'd go up to London, buy CD's and records, listen to the radio, and then take it all back to Wales to see what I could do with it really.

Were you writing songs throughout that peroid which have ended up on the album?

GREEN:Yeah yeah, radically. I was also just learning the technology. You know, getting more into protals and apple mac and different samplers, different ways of writing. Playing the guitar again, yeah. I was...I mean, I am a really, really lazy man. I've got friends down in Wales who would...most afternoons they'd pull up in a car and say "come on, we're off to a country pub X, Y or Z", or to some barbecue, which was very nice, but I didn't get much work done. I mean, their capacity for talking bullshit and drinking is even more than mine. So there was a lot of that that went on.

Full interview will soon
(week of 12-18 July)
be availabe at
Eden Record website

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