1. Thank you very much for your time! Before we introduce your new release to our readers – what kind of drink would you recommend to sip on while they listen to your new music?
Depending on one’s politics, either a Flaming Monk (45ml rye, 30ml Frangelico, 2 shakes orange bitters, 2 shakes chocolate bitters) or a heavy Bordeaux blend, perhaps Kanonkop’s Paul Sauer if one’s willing to try a South African wine.
Though I fear these would likely be my recommendations whatever the music.
2. Please give us an update about – new single, new album, tour dates, new videos?!
Bible Stories, which is out in April, is my first album in a decade or so. It was recorded in the Joshua Tree desert with my dear friend the producer Robert Harder, and some of the finest American musicians with whom anyone could ever hope to work.
The first single, What Doesn’t End, was written in, to put it politely, a rather dark time, during my daily three hour walk up a mountain in Baden-Baden in the Black Forest of Germany. I think it’s rather beautiful, though I suppose I would.
The video was shot exactly where it was written, on that mountain. The production designer, god, really pulled out all the stops on the day we filmed it.
3. We live in times of many conspiracy theories. Which, harmless, theory would you wish were true? (For example Dinos living inside Earth or E.T. living in a home in California)
Somewhere in the sea between Iceland and the east coast of Greenland is a clam (of the ocean quahog species, I should probably specify, for those who’re into clams). It has, astonishingly, grown to almost twenty centimetres in diameter, from which we can determine that it has been there since well before the Renaissance. During that time it has been slowly, painstakingly, plotting the greatest novel ever written, a piece so epic in scope and sweep that Tolstoy would blush to swim beside it. And all of our dramas, the grandest of geopolitical shifts, of interpersonal crises, these, and we, of course, are simply the objects of that brilliant mollusk’s wild imaginings. But nothing can live forever, of course it can’t, and the clam knows that it has only decades, or perhaps a century at best, left to go before it meets its maker. And a work so large cannot be left unfinished; it would be unforgivable. And so the ending must, inevitably, be rushed. And so we find ourselves in an age that we experience as terrifyingly fast-moving, filled with one crisis after the next after the next. But such is the cost of rushing to the ending, and in that clam’s great book, we live in the finest crescendo that ever will be written.
To be clear, though I should love this to be true, I can identify at least one logical problem with the theory.
4. What fashion style or brand would best describe your music?
This album? Probably someone stuck, for better or worse, in those Alexander McQueen tailcoats, you know the ones, and recognising that they’re insufficiently light of spirit and movement to pull off the Edward Sexton suits that Bowie and Jagger wore so finely, though perhaps once they might have done so.
5. Tell us more about your songs! Topics! Message!?
They’re a series of postcards to friends and fellow-travellers, sent from after the endtimes, sent from all the boutique locations you’d expect: California, Hell and Baden-Baden, mostly. It’s a religious album (or maybe just straight out prayers, if one’s to be less materialist about it) by a devout but confused Christian atheist. I suppose, most of all, it’s an attempt to write love and pain honestly, without camouflaging it in biography and fact.
6. Beside music, do you have any special talents?
Sadly not. Though out of a surfeit of stubbornness I do tend to keep myself busy directing films and hologram dramas, and writing, and the like.
7. Name 5 things we all should know about you as an artist?!
At age six, I determined that if I should grow up, I would become a poet, a rock musician or a vampire. Showing a lack of business acumen that has haunted me all my days, I foolishly abandoned only the last of these, years later, as not being financially viable under capitalism.
Following from the above, it was only in my mid-20s that it occurred to me to question my childhood presumption that the only reason AC/DCs lyrics were poorer than Coleridge’s poems was because they lacked the ability, rather than, heaven forfend, that they had never aspired to grander poetry.
Around a decade ago, I decided I agreed with the central argument of a leftist French philosopher’s book on Wagner, and consequently spent the next three years creating and directing the world’s first fully holographic stage drama and writing the symphony that underpinned it, and have never recovered from this.
I’m currently building an animatronic, which is likely to first be exhibited some time next year, that will look like me and will be able to answer questions as me, and so hope to finally render myself redundant.
I have, especially in my larger works, often tended towards big themes, complicated literary allusions and the like. But What Doesn’t End, this single that’s out, is exactly the opposite; the accurate expression of rather painful emotions, without histrionics.
8. The road so far…. who or what was your biggest support??
My dear friend the photographer Magnus Arrevad. Many, many years ago in London, while I was working on Immortality, my first solo album, I was living in a warehouse, and Magnus came for an interview to take a room in the place: it was one of those sort of terribly democratic places; no doubt you can imagine, and you’d not be too far wrong. I was absent at the time of his interview, but upon my return, saw a photograph he’d left from what would become his great male performance series, Boy Story, and somewhat fascistically determined that no-one who could produce so brilliant an image could possibly be turned away. It later transpired that the artist who produced that picture was the most wonderful person I’d ever know, and I am unreasonably blessed to have, half way through my life so far, gained such a sibling. As is no doubt true of everybody, we’ve shared more failures than successes, and more pains than joys, and without him I’m quite certain I’d not be here now. He’s in Berlin now; we speak daily. On balance, I think our lives have improved since those days.
9. A question you’d like to answer, but never been asked in an interview before?! + Answer pls
To what extent can one get a sense of your work by talking to you?
Not at all.
Instagram: @adamdonen