By Bianca Valentino
Editor’s note. Bianca does a lot of interviews. A lot. And some of them are among some of the best I’ve read. Ever. She loves talking to creative people, finding out what makes them work and how their creativity connects with her own life. She’s not limited by genres, or styles: just passion and love. She fervently believes in positivism, which puts her somewhat at odds with me (although she might argue otherwise). She’s conducted a series of really great interviews for Collapse Board – Kimya Dawson, Patty Schemel, Nathan Howdeshell, Annie Hardy – and even more for her own site Conversations With Bianca.
She first asked to interview me shortly after we moved to Brisbane three years ago. I was a little taken aback. I didn’t feel myself interesting enough to be interviewed by someone who cared so passionately about her craft.
We finally got round to it last week. The following is just an excerpt from a much, much longer (7,000 word) article. You can find it here. Incidentally, it was me who posted this up, not Bianca. I did it by way of a thank-you.
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… that’s a funny statement in itself, writing heartfelt songs about not being able to get off with girls!
ET: [Laughs] I know, well, writing heartfelt songs – I’m being a bit cruel on myself here – and then what do you do? You go ahead and practice them or play them on stage a dozen times. When do they stop being heartfelt? When do they start being routine and start being completely meaningless? How do you invest a song with meaning every single time you sing it? Surely the one time you write it is when it matters, no other time. I wasn’t able to articulate it as good as that but I knew something was really wrong with the process, I didn’t like it at all. I didn’t like rehearsing beyond the social aspect of it. The idea of playing the same song twice on stage seemed wrong to me. When Alan [McGee] asked me to write a column for him I couldn’t write to save my life, really I couldn’t. When I started my own fanzine which came out around the time of his fanzine, I had this moment of truth: this is just like getting on stage but it’s more immediate. I can write what I feel, I can put all my thoughts into words and communicate them to other people. Communicating was the most important aspect. Bam! I can leave them and that’s as honest as you can get, that I can possibly be.
To me writing was like performing but only way more real, especially doing your own fanzine. It was back in the days of typewriters and I would quite deliberately not go back and look at what I’d written, not correct any of the mistakes, not do a second version because I felt that that was dishonest. That’s why I made the transition from performing to writing. I just felt it was dishonest to be performing. It isn’t until that I got to be in my forties that I actually started to play proper improvisational shows with musicians. Since I’ve come to Brisbane I’ve been able to reconcile the idea of performing and still being honest — whatever honest means. I’m not naïve enough to think that honesty exists but whatever it is, that integrity of the core of your being, it’s important. That is what I was trying to capture with the early fanzines. It’s always dangerous looking back on stuff …
