READERSVOICE.COM: Can you recommend a few books you’ve read since the last interview and say what you liked about them?

BARRY ANDREWS: The Edgier Waters (a compilation of writing from 3AM magazine: some great stuff about the US power cuts, from Sonic Youth – encouraging the view that not all us musos are illiterate dullards), and a brilliantly crazed pseudo hardboiled cop story from a bloke called Steve Aylett: fantastically inventive language.)

Will Self’s Book of Dave -a dystopic vision of a future London whose religion and culture are based around the poisonous journal of a present day cab driver called Dave. I like Self’s work but always thought it tended to, well, sprawl a bit. Here he keeps it focused and creates a bit of a classic, I think.

Dolores Hayden’s A Field Guide to Sprawl: fantastic little book of aerial photos of modern sprawl features, described in a dispassionate, pragmatic way. Examples: TOAD (temporary, obsolete, abandoned, derelict); LULU (locally unwanted land use -say a slaughter house or sewage farm); ALLIGATOR (an investment producing a negative cash flow) and many more. A scary little beacon of the future.

RV: What sorts of specialist magazines or periodicals do you read, and which papers and magazines?

BA: The Guardian on Saturday -a four cups of tea in bed ritual now.

The scurrilous Viz magazine (source of ‘Clown’s Pie’ on ‘Devils’ Onions’) and sometimes Sound on Sound (the chief of hi-tech wank mags), but only when I have money to spend on all the new equipment without which I am all too readily persuaded to believe that my life is worthless.

RV: I was wondering what sorts of poets or poetry you liked. I know you’ve sampled T.S. Eliot in the past, and form-wise you’ve mentioned the influence of Bob Dylan’s multi-verse big songs on Devils’ Onions on your new album, Glory Bumps.

BA: Just discovered the difficult poems of Wallace Stevens (I had only read ’16 ways of looking at a Blackbird’ before; turned onto that by Robert Harbison’s book: ’13 ways..’ in which he looks at architecture, poetically and in -er- 13 ways. I then parodied both of these in my -deeply low-grade- ’50 ways of Looking at a Cormorant’ series of cards which accompanied the promotional eggs from the last album). Phew.

Anyway, Wallace Stevens is a trip even when he isn’t counting the ways he looks at things. Something glacial and jewel-like about his work which doesn’t give itself up easily.

James Fenton‘s stuff is great (check out the ‘Ballad of the Shrieking Man’ [yes, I know – but not just ‘cos of that].)

RV: Do you collect colorful phrases that you hear or read, and keep them in a notebook eg. for a flat fee; a pair of very fucked-up bunnies? What are some of the sources for these and other lyrics?

BA: Very much so. I love the beachcombing part of the job. Especially when words are being newly minted to describe a new experience (qv ‘Sprawl’).

A few such items from ‘Glory Bumps’ might include:

‘going on the pavement’ -a description of good old fashioned armed robbery (‘wiv shooters’) by good old fashioned London villains nostalgic for an age before computer crime (‘Ross Kemp on Gangs’ tv doco); ‘Prole Dazzle’: term descriptive of, say, Saturday night tv shows where, amongst glitzy sets and coarsely attractive women, large amounts of money are given away (Guardian TV Guide);

‘renting some exhilaration’ from ‘you can’t buy happiness but you can rent exhilaration’ -an American chum cracking wise; ‘we ride hard, fear the Lord and live for ever’: motto embroidered on to the leathers of a Christian motorbike gang (from a colour supplement -can’t remember which);

‘we unloaded our loads on the rocks in the roads’ paraphrasing: ‘Je jouis dans les pavés.’ (‘I come (ejaculate) into the paving stones”) exuberant graffiti from the Paris riots of ’68 expressing the ecstasy of violent revolution (I think).

RV: If you keep a diary or journal, how long have you been keeping it, and what sorts of things do you note in it?

BA: Since always. I get through a lot of notebooks, but then I’m a bit pervy about stationery so it’s no hardship. I use them to beachcomb, as I said, and to plot ideas and words and, though less often now for some reason, to try and clarify my inner landscape (perhaps it’s now got beyond clarification).

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