Momus. A Walking Interview

By Francesco Tenaglia

"Momus. A Walking Interview" is a long conversation between the Italian critic Francesco Tenaglia and Scottish born artist Nicholas Currie aka Momus that took place during a day-long stroll in various areas of the city of Milan with an always-on microphone. The different neighborhoods elicited different topics including musicals, Chinatowns, enterism, Italy, Sehnsucht, David Bowie, word processors, death, classic rock, politics, isolation, future, and much more.

Momus started his career in music making during the '80s first with the band The Happy Family then as a solo artist for Creation Records and Cherry Red Records. He has written for various publications such as Wired, Vice, Index Magazine, 032c, and Mousse. He has also been active in performance art and as an author: he wrote "The Book of Jokes"; "The Book of Scotlands", and "The Book of Japans" for Sternberg Press; "Herr F", and "Popppappp" for Fiktion.

Foreword by the journalist and dj Fabio De Luca.

More info: www.nochpublishing.com

• Language: English
• Publisher: Noch
• Release date: Sep 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9781783018086

Book preview

author

Introduction

Momus. A Walking Interview is a long conversation between the Italian critic Francesco Tenaglia and Scottish born artist Nicholas Currie aka Momus that took place during a day-long stroll in various areas of the city of Milan with an always-on microphone. The different neighborhoods elicited different topics including musicals, Chinatowns, enterism, Italy, Sehnsucht, David Bowie, word processors, death, classic rock, politics, isolation, future, and much more.

Momus started his career in music making during the '80s first with the band The Happy Family then as a solo artist for Creation Records and Cherry Red Records. He has written for various publications such as Wired, Vice, Index Magazine, 032c, and Mousse. He has also been active in performance art and as an author: he wrote The Book of Jokes; The Book of Scotlands, and The Book of Japans for Sternberg Press; Herr F, and Popppappp for Fiktion.

My Pervert Doppelganger (Confessions of a Fan)

Fabio De Luca

Right before closing down Firefox in order to write this preface, a piece of news popped up in my feed reader about a Canadian indie singer-songwriter who, during a concert in Williamsburg, between one song and another did what the reporter called the human water fountain. Basically, he took a sip from a bottle of water and then began spewing it out of his mouth on the people in the front row of the audience. The reporter observed that the fans were trying their best to catch the spewed water in their mouths, like hungry baby birds in a nest. Uhm. [insert here cunning albeit painful comparisons to Johnny Rotten spitting in 1977] [actually no, don't]

At a certain point in the long conversation you're about to read, Nicholas Currie says he was on the side of the people who booed Dylan at Newport. Because, he argues, what moved Dylan was not the desire to experiment or push the limits, but pure and simple ambition. I'm not sure I completely agree, but we can talk about it. [insert here a quote from Ambition by Vic Godard & Subway Sect] [incidentally, my favorite Momus quote – Facebook status at least once a year – is that passage from Nicky which goes: ...between Vic and Jean-Luc Godard]

I discovered Momus almost immediately, in 1987, on an Él record label compilation which included his song – a sort of Nick Drake with a better friendship with auto-eroticism – entitled Paper Wraps Rock. His own Dylan-in-Newport moment came possibly with the sudden mid-'80s Hi-NRG switch of Don't Stop the Night: but instead of having me boo him, I was an enthusiastic supporter. In my eyes, Nick Drake and Neil Tennant to a piano house beat was even better than Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat (cf.: Pet Shop Boys' Left to My Own Devices). And, oh, ambition is curiously present here as well, yes. The linear ambition and cocaine addiction of the late '80s, of London riding between Thatcher the Witch and Tony Blair, embodied by a long line of antagonists and rivals to Momus' beautiful and self-saboteur narrating self (see Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, A Complete History of Sexual Jealousy Parts 17-24, and The Hairstyle of the Devil, for example).

Momus' 1992 album, Voyager, is simply one of my all-time favorite records. It's very strange, when you are no longer a teenager and you find someone – an artist which is also your contemporary – who describes an emotional world which is exactly yours. Wow. Back then, references to The Man Who Fell to Earth were totally lost to me (forgive me, mr. Roeg), while I was more than amazed that there was someone able to place into the same frame William Gibson's Burning Chrome and Banana Yoshimoto, Juan Atkins when he says I'm probably more interested in Ford's robots than in Berry Gordy's music, Deee-Lite and the post-human humanism of the first issues of Wired magazine (which us kids avidly read without understanding a single word). Oh boy. That impatience for a future of collective isolationism that was on the verge of beginning, that sense of anticipation (pure adolescence) and ending (If love ... has left the arena), the continuum of sadness of a verse like We dance to dead men – Marley, Marvin, Otis and many others, which closed any possible conversation