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  • The interview: Michael Clark

Lynn Barber, The Observer, Sunday 9 August 2009. He was the 80s enfant terrible who fell into depression and heroin addiction in the 90s. Now 47, the charismatic ballet star is back at the Edinburgh Festival this month for the first time in 21 years with a new work inspired by his 70s idols David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed. If only he dared have a drink to celebrate, he tells Lynn Barber. Michael Clark at London's Barbican Centre last monthMichael Clark at London’s Barbican Centre last month. Photograph: Karen Robinson. Last time I ran into Michael Clark he was sticking cigarettes on gnomes for Sarah Lucas. She had a big cigarette period a few years ago when she covered all her sculptures in Marlboros, and she’d enlisted Clark, a friend, because he was out of work and needed the money, to do the sticking. But he wasn’t good enough, by her demanding standards – “She’s incredibly precise, the way she does things: she’ll take some tobacco out to make the cigarette bend without breaking it” – so his career as a cigarette-sticker petered out. Anyway, Sarah was always urging him to get back to choreography – she coaxed him through one of his crises of confidence by telling him, “Why don’t you just try and make the worst ballet you possibly could? How bad can it get?”, and he is eternally grateful. Clark seems happy to rave about Sarah Lucas till the cows come home: I have to keep reminding him this interview is meant to be about him. But he is absolutely hopeless at blowing his own trumpet.

We met at the St John Bar around teatime, and he started off so mumbly and incoherent I wondered if he’d been permanently damaged by all his years of drug abuse, but then he had two espressos and a cappuccino and perked up. He is still beautiful at 47, a gentle skinhead with a nappy pin through his ear, though he is beginning to get that slightly exaggerated puppet look that old pop stars get. As he says, “It’s very difficult for a trained dancer to look like a normal person. They walk differently.” I see what he means when he goes to the bar to order drinks – he leans diagonally along the counter and points his leg out behind in an arabesque, and a couple of straight men nearby eye him warily./ Anyway, he is back working, that’s the main thing. At one stage, in the mid-90s, he disappeared so completely that rumours swept around London that he had died, perhaps of Aids, perhaps of drugs. He was the boy from nowhere – in fact, a farm near Aberdeen – who went to his sister’s Scottish dance classes when he was four, and ended up the brightest star of the Royal Ballet School. But then, to the grief of his teachers, he refused to join the Royal Ballet company and instead went to the Ballet Rambert and then the American Karole Armitage company. At 22, he founded his own company and spewed out an incredible stream of new works throughout the 80s, with titles such as No Fire Escape in Hell, Because we Must and I am Curious, Orange. He was the punk choreographer who strapped dildos on his dancers and had Leigh Bowery staggering across the stage in 10in heels with a chainsaw. The ballet world deplored such gimmickry but still admired the beauty of his choreography. He won commissions from the Paris Opera, Scottish Ballet, Deutsche Oper, and was just embarking on a major work for the Royal Ballet when, in 1994, he disappeared.

He came back in the early Noughties, when he created a work called Before and After: The Fall featuring a giant wanking arm sculpture by Sarah Lucas. From 2005-7 he was artistic associate at the Barbican and developed three new Stravinsky ballets, his versions of Apollo (O), The Rite of Spring (Mmm…) and Les Noces (I do). These were hailed as signs of a new maturity, a return to his classical roots. But his new work uses music by David Bowie, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop – “the holy trinity of rock” – which is bound to upset the purists. He unveiled the first piece, Thank U Ma’am, at the Venice Biennale, and will be showing it at the Edinburgh Festival at the end of this month, but he says it’s still a work in progress. He wants to include a backdrop of Bowie’s original video of Heroes so that it looks as if Bowie is onstage with the dancers, but he hasn’t got the scale right yet. Anyway, it’s a change from Stravinsky. “For myself, for the audience, for the dancers, I felt we needed something different… To be honest, it’s more simple, musically, and that gives me a kind of freedom.”

The artist Elizabeth Peyton, who saw an early version at the Galway Festival, told me: “It was brilliant and electrifying, all of it. There is something in most all of Michael’s work where he innovates from within the tradition of dance using contemporary references. These new Bowie pieces seem something like a miracle in how they are so alive, huge in feeling and so part of our time, and I think this is because they come from so deep inside Michael. He seems to focus closer, closer, closer to the thing that makes him live in a way that is impossible not to feel as a viewer.”

The work includes a solo for him – “But only because the dancers need to change costumes!” he says – and it is a “pedestrian” piece. At 47, he says, he can’t really dance any more, except when he’s showing his dancers new moves. “I can’t just sit in a chair and choreograph. But I couldn’t sustain it for an evening, as they do.” He has had five knee operations and has learned his limitations. “It’s sad, of course it’s sad, but at least I can still choreograph.”

He would love it if David Bowie came to see the work, but he’s never met him, and is not sure he wants to. “Maybe it’s better just to let the fantasy live on.” Bowie meant an awful lot to him when he was a boy growing up in Scotland because, “I’d seen this man on Top of the Pops put his arm round another man and I thought, ‘O my goodness, there are other people like me! Maybe. Somewhere.’ And I felt I had to understand what it was all about. It’s unbelievable to think now that that was such a provocative gesture but I don’t think I’d ever seen that before in my life.” Had he even heard of people being gay? “Not then. I must have been nine or something. I think maybe I’d touched tongues with my best friend, that was all.” Later, when he knew he was gay, he plucked up courage to tell his mother and she said “Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone!”, which rather missed the point of coming out.

He is still extremely close to his mother, Bessie, and hopes she will be well enough to attend his Edinburgh premiere. Back in the 80s he actually had her perform on stage, bare-breasted, giving birth to him in his ballet O. She toured with the company for two years, and loved it. “It was a great way to spend time together and for her to see what was going on. I remember my nephew came home from school and said someone had said to him, ‘Is it true your granny’s a stripper and your uncle’s a poofter?’ That’s when it dawned on me that things that I say or do have repercussions for other people. I didn’t realise that my poor nephew was going to be picked on. But when he asked that question I said, ‘Yes, it’s true!'”

He wears a big silver ring saying “Dad”, but his feelings towards his father, Bill, who died when he was 18, are more ambivalent. He was a farmer who hated farming; he was also a gambler and a drunk. Clark remembers him as an entertaining drunk, “a bit like Hurricane Higgins”, who would run through the room naked with a banana tied to his penis, but he also remembers how his hand used to shake in the mornings as he raised the first drink to his lips. And then – this is something Clark has not spoken about before – he committed suicide in the most painful way possible, by drinking weedkiller. “I was 18 when he died and I’d been fascinated by suicides like Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf. I thought it was a respect-worthy thing to do – why shouldn’t one end one’s life when one wanted to? But then when it really happened, with my Dad, it put me off altogether. Anyone who’s experienced that in a family would never do it because it’s such a loaded thing.”

But for some years, in the late 80s, early 90s, it seemed that Michael Clark was bent on self-destruction by other means. He dabbled in drugs and was caught glue-sniffing while he was at ballet school, but he knew they would never expel him because he was their star pupil. “And when I first danced at the school on speed, I remember knowing I felt amazing, but also knowing it was the drug – I wasn’t suddenly an amazing dancer.” But he was always looking for mind-altering experiences. “I was misled into believing that as an artist you were meant to explore different states and report back to normal people. Something a bit ridiculous like that. And I thought if I was going to dance on heroin, it wasn’t enough just to take it, I had to become an addict. It was just because I was curious, really. I wanted to find out. And I didn’t believe you could find out by reading about things, or believing whatever people told you, it seemed to me you had to experience it. But I didn’t know that the whole narcotics thing was such a long process. I thought that once you’d taken it three days in a row, you were an addict and had to keep taking it every day. But then it took years really.”

Everything came to a head in 1994. He was deep into drugs, depressed by a knee injury and the death of Leigh Bowery, he’d split up with his boyfriend, choreographer Stephen Petronio, and he’d flunked out of choreographing a new work for the Royal Ballet because “I got to the point where I just couldn’t make decisions – it was beyond Stanley Kubrick – and the dancers were getting very, very frustrated, so I had to withdraw.” He fled to Cairnbulg, near Fraserburgh, to live with his mother – he only learned later that Fraserburgh is the heroin capital of Britain – and disappeared for four years. For the first six months he didn’t leave his room. “I could hear human activity outside and I hoped I could be part of it again some time but I knew I wasn’t ready. But I’m lucky in that I knew my talent hadn’t gone away – that was always my anchor. And by chance I met two artists living nearby who said they’d moved there for the light. I thought, light? I couldn’t see any light. But we became great friends and used to go on adventures together, so I was very fortunate in that way. It was a strange time.”

He says coming off heroin was relatively easy; it was his much longer addiction to methadone (prescribed as a heroin substitute) that was the real problem. “It was hard for me because I loved it. And it suited me because I’m a control freak and at least I knew what I was getting. But I kept getting more and more of it and it must have changed everything about me for a time. I had no sensitivities to anyone or anything whatsoever. And I probably damaged my body quite a lot. Sometimes I’d injure myself and it felt interesting, you know? Because you have no feelings, no pain. During the methadone years – as I now refer to them – I would try and drink myself to sleep but I couldn’t. And then, before I knew it, I was drinking in the morning, taking the first drink of the day with a shaking hand. Which was an awful thing, when I’d grown up seeing my father like that.”

What saved him in the end was going back to his old Royal Ballet School teacher, Richard Glasstone, and taking private lessons. “That was great. I don’t think either of us were under any illusions that I was going to be like the 13-year-old he taught, but it was almost like a sped-up version of being taught by him in the first place, and the work that we did probably reflected a cautious re-entering of the world.” Another reason for re-entering the world was that in 1998 his mother announced that she was getting married again – to her first husband. She was married to him for just a day before he went off to fight in the war, but while he was away she had a child by someone else, and he divorced her. But in 1998 she found him again and they had a few happy years together before he died. Michael saw her marriage as a sign that she believed he could cope on his own.

He is evasive when I ask if he will ever take drugs again. “I can’t really answer that – it’s an ongoing thing. My mum says: ‘Just wait till I’m dead till you do drugs again.’ She asked me if I was going to be all right, and I am, I will be all right. But like anything new, it feels different, you know? If you’re used to having something, you sort of miss that support. I don’t even drink now. Not at all. But I miss things about it – the bonding with your colleagues after a performance, when you’ve gone through this experience together which is almost life-changing – and it still feels a bit strange. Rescue Remedy is as far as I go – I think it’s got drops of brandy in it.”

One regret about his methadone years is that he forgot to keep up payments on the storage unit in London that contained all his costumes, souvenirs and notebooks, so they were seized and auctioned off. He has always been useless with money. Three years ago art gallery owner Sadie Coles had to organise a big auction of artworks donated by his friends (Sarah Lucas, Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Anish Kapoor) to keep his dance company going. For the past three years, while he was doing the Stravinsky Project, he was supported by the Barbican, and given a flat there, but he says he’s lost the flat now because there were complaints about noise. He has a year’s grant and sponsorship for his present work but no idea what will happen after that.

The trouble with choreography, he says, is that there’s no sellable end-product. “But that’s the beauty of it really! I always hope it might change but it’s still an ongoing struggle. And any money that I raise goes back into the work. But those dancers I work with are an investment really. The knowledge that they carry in their bodies – you can’t put a price on that.”

He is looking forward to showing his new work at the Edinburgh Festival. It will be his first time there since 1988. “If I look at the work then and look at the work now, I can feel OK, things have moved on. I wouldn’t show now what I showed then. That was an excessive time, in terms of the costuming and the theatricality – I find it kind of obscene. Whereas this one I hope is all about the choreography and not the extraneous stuff.” He talks a lot about his admiration for Frederick Ashton, and says he has a dancer in his present company, now in his early 50s, who used to be Ashton’s muse. “I just want him around to teach us, because I want my dancers to understand Ashton’s épaulement – the use of the shoulders, use of the back – because it’s becoming extinct and I really want that to be passed on. I love Ashton’s work and those were the roles I fantasised about doing – there was a very fast solo in Enigma Variations which I would have loved to do.”

So does he ever regret not joining the Royal Ballet? “No! For the few times I would have been able to do the roles that I wanted, there were other things I would have had to do that I didn’t want. I knew what my life would be like if I joined that company and it wasn’t for me, it really wasn’t. So I have no regrets there. And I’d tasted something I didn’t understand. That was always the thing with me – finding the next thing to understand. But I’d still like to have danced those Ashton solos.”

• Michael Clark’s new work is at the Playhouse, Edinburgh 28-31 Aug and then 28 Oct-Nov 7 at the Barbican, London EC2

1962 Born in Kintore, Scotland. Begins dance lessons at four. 1975 Enters London’s Royal Ballet School. 1979 Joins Ballet Rambert. 1980 His father commits suicide. 1982 Choreographs first piece at London’s Riverside Studios. 1984 Launches Michael Clark Company. 1986 No Fire Escape in Hell features Leigh Bowery in 10-inch heels with a chainsaw. 1988 Heroin addiction forces Clark, aged 26, into a form of retirement. 1989 Begins relationship with American dancer/choreographer Stephen Petronio. 1992 Creates dramatic ballet Mmm 1994 Depressed by death of Bowery, breakup with Petronio and a knee injury, he retreats to Kintore. 2005 Becomes artistic associate at the Barbican. They say “[He was] always the compulsive rebel. Yet what was so impressive was… this gift for making lovely phrases, ballet steps with a modern twist.” Richard Glasstone, Royal Ballet School teacher He says “This God-given gift they think I’ve got… I think my responsibility is to abuse it, find a different way of using it.”

michael clark – hail the new puritan
Michael Clark photographed by Richard Haughton.
MICHAEL CLARK BY DAVID BAILEY, circa 1985
Sam McKinniss, untitled (Michael Clark), 2011, collage 14 x 15 inches.

  • Hail the New Puritan

  • Michael Clark Company – review

The Guardian, Thursday 18 October 2012 21.00 BST

Michael Clark Company Otherworldly … Michael Clark Company at the Barbican, London. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

Does it matter that Michael Clark‘s latest work has no real title? Probably not, as his choreography tends to be one long work in progress. This latest piece, with music by Scritti Politti and Relaxed Muscle, has evolved out of dances staged earlier this year in Glasgow and New York. It is an evening of different halves, and disparate material – but it also often fabulous. / Clark has eight top-flight dancers in his company, including the hauntingly pristine Julie Cunningham (formerly of the Merce Cunningham Company, although no relation). During the first half, their movements are simple classroom steps that are torqued into resonant sculpture, spun into shifting patterns and angled into flights of art-deco chevrons. Irradiated by Charles Atlas’s lighting, they are also cushioned by the surprisingly lyrical accompaniment of Scritti Politti (which came as a surprise to me, considering that the last I heard of them was the wittily abrasive 1982 single Jacques Derrida). / When Clark is at his purist best, his choreography has an otherworldly beauty at its core. At his weakest, however, the simplicity of his movement can look sketchy. The central duet in this section barely transcends a warm-up exercise as its two dancers slowly wind and unravel their bodies. Clark sometimes seems to be just filling time, not using it. / Everything changes with the crazed dynamic of the second half. With the sound of Pulp warping around the dancers’ bodies, and an accelerating display of projected graphics, we’re led into the other main element of the evening: Jarvis Cocker singing live with two backing musicians. ///// Skinny, mincing, camp, sardonic, wearing 1970s gear and Halloween makeup, Cocker is a class act. He takes us back to the good old days when Leigh Bowery used to be the rogue anarchist stomping through Clark’s productions. Yet, for all the fun Cocker delivers, I wish Clark had attempted more stage chemistry between him and the dancers. By dialling the latter down and rendering them into little more than a backing group, he inhibits the way Cocker’s energy and theatricality could have infected Clark’s choreography. (I don’t care! )One brief moment, when a sultry Oxana Panchenko rides off stage on the back of her partner, as if astride a wild panther, gives us a snapshot of what kind of party this closing section could have been.

  • Michael Clark Company, Barbican, review

Michael Clark’s latest creation at the Barbican is the most exhilarating new piece of contemporary dance to appear in Britain this year, writes Mark Monahan. 3:07PM BST 19 Oct 2012. .The Telegraph.

Michael Clark’s latest creation has no title, beyond the gnomic New Work 2012. There are no programme notes at all, nothing about exploring notions of this or raising questions of that. And, in two “acts” of only 25 minutes (plus an interval), it is audaciously short. / It also turns out to be the most exhilarating new piece of contemporary dance to appear in Britain this year, by turns ravishing, outrageous, borderline certifiable, and sometimes all three at once. Set to a clutch of dreamily electronic songs by Scritti Politti, the first half is a blissfully lean exercise in physical geometry, with the witty overture of a lone man being lowered at snail’s pace from the flies, his feet dangling in the breeze. / Thereafter, Clark’s eight superlative dancers – performing in simple, loose-fitting costumes, against a plain cyclorama, and fleetingly joined by Clark himself – engage in what looks like a wilfully dismantled and artfully reassembled ballet class. Every second of it is recognisably Clarkian (from the skewed classicism of the steps to the dancers’ straight backs, loose pelvises and preternatural air of detached composure) and the individual movements themselves are often very straightforward – at one point, the octet simply trot hither and thither on demi-pointe. But it is all utterly hypnotic, and the 25 minutes seem to pass in seconds. ////// The second half instantly feels glossier, edgier, more urgent. (Yes!!) With the dancers now wearing iridescent unitards, huge projected words flashing across the backcloth and an unseen Jarvis Cocker growling charismatically over the loudspeakers, Clark serves up plenty of fantastic passages, with one particularly astonishing duet for Ben Warbis and the ever marvellous Melissa Hetherington. Then the show decides it also wants to be a rock gig, completely loses its marbles – and gets even better. (Of course!!) / It really shouldn’t have worked to have Cocker – here, as part of his lubricious electro-duo Relaxed Muscle – suddenly join the dancers on stage, decked out as a cartoon Baron Samedi complete with whip, heels and great fluffy tail. But it does, fantastically. As he menacingly shrieks, “It’s gonna be a hard, hard night!”, that elegantly gawky posturing of his somehow knits perfectly with Clark’s choreography – never better than in a brilliantly constructed passage involving, of all things, several mirrored footstools – and there no sense of him distracting from the dancers, or vice versa./ No, Clark’s core physical vocabulary hasn’t changed that much over the years, and nor, for that matter, has his teenager’s taste for mischief. But, in the face of this beautiful, sexy, adrenalin rush of an evening, you won’t hear me complaining. Until Oct 27. Tickets: 020 7638 8891

  • SONGS & LIVES:

Pulp Feeling Called Love lyrics was added to the site 24 Jun, 2009 and since that time has 1 hits and voted 0 times. Other popular Pulp lyrics are: Lipgloss, The Fear and Babies. Songwriters: BANKS, NICK / COCKER, JARVIS BRANSON / DOYLE, CANDIDA / MACKEY, STEPHEN PATRICK / SENIOR, RUSSELL / WEBBER, MARK ANDREW
The room is cold
And has been like this for several months
If I close my eyes
I can visualize everythin’ in it
Right down
Right down to the broken handle on the third drawer down
Of the dressing table
And the world outside this room
Has also assumed a familiar shape
The same events shuffled in a slightly different order each day
Just like a modern shopping center
[ Lyrics from: http://www.lyricsty.com/pulp-feeling-called-love-lyrics.html ]
And it’s so cold, yea it’s so cold
What is this feeling called love?
Why me? Why you? Why here? Or why now?
Ah, it doesn’t make no sense, no
It’s not convenient, no
It doesn’t fit my plans, oh
It’s somethin’ I don’t understand, oh
F E E L I N G C A double L E D L O V E
(I’m just standing across this room)
(I feel as if my whole life has been leading to this one moment)
(And as I touch your shoulder tonight)
Oh, what is this thing that is happening to me, oh
(This room has become the center of the entire universe)
So what do I do? I’ve got a slightly sick feeling in my stomach
Like I’m standing on top of a very high building, oh yea
All the stuff they tell you about in the movies
But this isn’t chocolate boxes and roses
It’s dirtier than that
Like some small animal that only comes out at night
And I see flashes of the shape of your breasts
And the curve of your belly
And I may have to sit down and catch my breath
And it’s so cold, ahh, ahh
And it’s so cold
What is this feeling called love?
Why me? Why you? Why here? And why now?
Ah, it doesn’t make no sense no
It’s not convenient no
It doesn’t fit my plans
But I got that taste in my mouth again, oh
F E E L I N G C A double L E D L O V E
([inaudible])
([inaudible])
What is this thing that is happening to me
(Oh yea)
F E E L I N G C A double L E D L O V E
What is this thing that is happening to me
Oh yea
(Oh yea)
Oh yea, oh yea, oh yea
Feeling Called Love lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group

Pulp — DISCO 2000

Well we were born within one hour of each other.
Our mothers said we could be sister and brother.
Your name is Deborah, Deborah.
It never suited ya.
(They said that) when we grew up,
we’d get married, and never split up.
We never did it, although often I thought of it.
Oh Deborah, do you recall?
Your house was very small,
with wood chip on the wall.
When I came around to call,
you didn’t notice me at all.
I said let’s all meet up in the year 2000.
Won’t it be strange when we’re all fully grown.
Be there( 2) o’clock by the fountain down the road.
I never knew that you’d get married.
I would be living down here on my own
On that damp and lonely Thursday years ago.
You were the first girl at school to get breasts.
Martyn said that yours were the best.
The boys all loved you but I was a mess.
I had to watch them trying to get you undressed.
We were friends but that was as far as it went.
I used to walk you home sometimes but it meant,
oh it meant nothing to you,
cos you were so popular.
Deborah do you recall?
Your house was very small,
with woodchip on the wall.
When I came around to call,
you didn’t notice me at all.
I said let’s all meet up in the year 2000.
Won’t it be strange when we’re all fully grown.
Be there( 2 )o’clock by the fountain down the road.
I never knew that you’d get married.
I would be living down here on my own
on that damp and lonely Thursday years ago.
Oh yeah,
oh yeah.
Ah do you recall?
Your house was very small,
with wood chip on the wall.
When I came around to call,
you didn’t notice me at all.
I said let’s all meet up in the year 2000.
Won’t it be strange when we’re all fully grown.
Be there( 2) o’clock by the fountain down the road.
I never knew that you’d get married.
I would be living down here on my own,
on that damp and lonely Thursday years ago.
Oh what are you doing Sunday baby.
Would you like to come and meet me maybe?
You can even bring your baby.
Ohhh ooh ooh. Ooh ooh ooh ooh.
What are you doing Sunday baby.
Would you like to come and meet me maybe?
You can even bring your baby.
Ooh ooh oh. Ooh ooh ooh ooh. Ooh ooh ooh ooh. Oh.

Pulp — THIS IS HARCORE

You are hardcore, you make me hard.
You name the drama and I’ll play the part.
It seems I saw you in some teenage wet dream.
I like your get up if you know what I mean.
I want it bad. I want it now.
Oh can’t you see I’m ready now.
I’ve seen all the pictures,
I’ve studied them forever.
I wanna make a movie so let’s star in it
together.
Don’t make a move ’til I say, “Action.”
Oh, here comes the Hardcore life.
Put your money where your mouth is tonight.
Leave your make-up on & I’ll leave on the light.
Come over here babe & talk in the mic. Oh yeah I hear you now.
It’s gonna be one hell of a night.
You can’t be a spectator. Oh no.
You got to take these dreams & make them whole.
Oh this is Hardcore –
there is no way back for you.
Oh this is Hardcore –
this is me on top of you &
I can’t believe that it took me this long. That it took me this long.
This is the eye of the storm.
It’s what men in stained raincoats pay for but in here it is pure.
Yeah. This is the end of the line.
I’ve seen the storyline played out so many times before.
Oh that goes in there.
Then that goes in there.
Then that goes in there.
Then that goes in there. & then it’s over. Oh, what a hell of a show
but what I want to know:
what exactly do you do for an encore? ‘Cos this is Hardcore.
There’s nothing to do so you just stay in bed,
oh poor thing,
why live in the world when you can live in your head?

Pulp — Monday Morning

Mmm when you can go out late from Monday,
till Saturday turns into Sunday,
and now you’re back here at Monday,
so we can do it all over again.
And you go aah ah ah
I want a refund,
I want a light,
I want a reason,
to make it through the night, alright.
And so you finally left school,
so now what are you going to do?
Now you’re so grown up,
yeah you’re oh oh oh oh oh so mature oh.
Going out late from Monday,
chuck up in the street on Sunday,
you don’t want to live till Monday,
and have to do it all again.
and you go aah ah ah
I want a refund,
I want a light,
I want a reason for all this night after night after night after night.
Oh I know that it’s stupid but,
I just can’t seem to spend a night at home,
cos my friends left town,
and I’m here all alone ow.
Oh yeah they say the past must die for the future to be born,
in that case die little mother, die – ooh.
Stomach in,
chest out,
on your marks,
get set, go.
Now, now that you’re free,
what are you going to be?
And who are you going to see?
And where, where will you go?
And how will you know,
You didn’t get it all wrong?
Is this the light of a new day dawning?
A future bright that you can walk in?
No it’s just another Monday morning.
Do it all over again, oh baby.
La la la la la la
Do do do do do do

  • Relaxed Muscle

Relaxed Muscle are a British electro duo formed in 2002 by Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker and Jason Buckle. In early 2003, Relaxed Muscle began playing gigs. Cocker and Buckle maintained anonymity by assuming the alter-egos ‘Darren Spooner’ and ‘Wayne Marsden’ respectively. Billing themselves as “the sound of young Doncaster”,[1] Darren claimed to have met Wayne “planting flowers” while doing community service for burglary.[2] Their fictional criminality fitted the project well, with their songs about sex, gambling and domestic violence complementing the depraved character of Relaxed Muscle. While on-stage as Darren Spooner, Cocker, took to karate-chopping balsa wood and breaking sugar glass bottles on other band members.[3] However, soon Cocker and Buckle’s cover was blown while playing a gig in London, despite wearing full eye make-up and skeleton suits.[4] Even with their identities revealed, the band continued playing gigs, capitalising on their electronic sound to play the likes of Trash club on 20 October 2003. Relaxed Muscle seemed to fade away after their album release in 2003. Pulp remained on a hiatus. However, Cocker and Buckle worked on the soundtrack for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire which was released in November 2005 and have since worked together on Cocker’s solo album Jarvis (2006). From 5-8th April 2012 Relaxed Muscle appeared as part of a special event titled “Who’s Zoo?” created by British choreographer Michael Clark. The event featured music accompanied by dancers – both professionals and untrained volunteers – plus, special lighting and projections. The New York Times reviewed the first night and reported that Relaxed Muscle played four of the show’s six songs with The Heavy, Let It Ride, Beastmaster and an encore of B-Real from their album A Heavy Nite With….Discography
Singles: Heavy EP (2003) #135 UK Singles Chart
“The Heavy”
“Rod of Iron”
“Branded!”

Billy Jack/Sexualized (2003)
“Billy Jack”
“Sexualized”
“Year of the Dog”

Album: A Heavy Nite With… (2003) #13 UK Indie Albums Chart

A Heavy Nite With… is the debut album by British band Relaxed Muscle fronted by Pulp‘s Jarvis Cocker, using the pseudonym Darren Spooner. The other member is Jason Buckle. It has been alleged that Jason Buckle is a pseudonym for Pulp guitarist Richard Hawley, but this is not the case – Hawley does contribute guitar to the album, however, under the pseudonym Wayne Marsden. Relaxed Muscle only recorded three other songs not included on this album: “Branded” and “Year Of The Dog” as B-sides and “This Is As Good As It Gets” on the compilation album “The Electronic Bible”. Track listing:

  1. “The Heavy”
  2. “3-Way Accumulator” (a/k/a “Let It Ride”)
  3. “Beastmaster”
  4. “Billy Jack”
  5. “Rod Of Iron”
  6. “Tuff It Out”
  7. “Sexualized”
  8. “Muscle Music”
  9. “B-Real”
  10. “Previous”
  11. “Battered”
  12. “Mary”

(I’ve been turned on directly when I saw Jarvis’s appearing on the stage, sexy as hell… he’s singing the fucking great songs in his fucking sexy red leather high heel, hippies style wearing, halloween make up and rock star shine…October 24, 2012 [Michael Clark Company, new work] at Barbican Theater, London )