I recently interviewed Loverboy guitarist Paul Dean for an upcoming Montecristo feature on the 45th anniversary of the band’s self-titled debut album. It reminded me of the time I interviewed Dean on the eve of Loverboy’s induction into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. Here’s the piece I wrote back then.
Give Paul Dean credit for not letting his rock-star status go to his head. When his band hit it big in the U.S. and the cheques started rolling in, the Loverboy founder didn’t squander his riches on a diamond-encrusted Rolls-Royce or a fleet of platinum-plated Learjet 25s. Instead, the guitarist invested in something far less ostentatious.
“There were a few years there where it was incredible, the amount of money that was coming in,” Dean recalls, on the line from his home in Calgary. “And my manager and good friend Lou Blair said, ‘First thing you do, you buy a house.’ And I went, “’Okay.’ Actually, the first thing I bought was a Harley, but that’s what he said, so I did it. And I’m really glad I did.”
If Loverboy had been an overnight success, Dean might have been more tempted to spend lavishly, but the project had its share of hungry years. A former member of Streetheart, the Vancouver-born guitarist hooked up with singer Mike Reno and keyboardist Doug Johnson while living in Calgary. The Loverboy story really started, however, when the three relocated to the West Coast in the summer of ’79 with a batch of songs and stadium-sized ambitions. With the addition of drummer Matt Frenette and bassist Scott Smith, the band was complete, and the real work began.
Loverboy signed to the Canadian division of Columbia Records, which released its self-titled debut album in 1980. Below the 49th parallel, a few influential DJs started to take notice of the act’s north-of-the-border success. But what really helped Loverboy crack the U.S. market was a period of intensive touring, for which Dean gives much credit to promoter Don Fox. “Don started us off on an April Wine tour, and I think there were a couple of other little ones, too,” the guitarist says. “And then we got on a tour with Kansas and one with ZZ Top, all in the space of two years. It was unbelievable. We worked 250 shows, I swear, in one year. Nonstop. But that’s what you’ve got to do.”
It paid off. Loverboy’s highly marketable sound, which combined rock-hard guitar riffs with new-wave synthesizers and mammoth pop hooks, struck a chord. And it probably didn’t hurt that Reno looked pretty good in a headband and nut-hugging leather trousers. Before the ’80s ended, the band released five albums that went gold or platinum stateside. Hits like “Turn Me Loose” and “Working for the Weekend” remain rock-radio staples, even if the critics of the day didn’t cut them much slack.
Dean acknowledges that the lyrics to “Hot Girls in Love” aren’t exactly deathless poetry, but he says he and his bandmates never aspired to rival William Butler Yeats. If they had, they might have spent a little more time on the words. “It’s like you have a motorcycle, and you’re building it from scratch,” he says. “You go out every day and you look at it in the garage, and it’s almost finished. Let’s say you’ve got five or six more chrome parts to put on it, and you know it’s going to be just perfect, but you say, ”˜I don’t care. I want to ride this sucker right now.’ So you get on it and you have a blast with it. I think that’s what we did sometimes. I mean, we were really cranked. We couldn’t wait to release the songs and get them out there. That’s not to say that I’m not proud of them.”
He’d better be. After all, he still plays them on a regular basis. Loverboy briefly broke up at the end of the ’80s, but since re-forming in the early ’90s the group has continued to tour and occasionally record. Smith died in a tragic boating accident nine years ago, but Loverboy soldiers on with bassist Ken “Spider” Sinnaeve, another Streetheart alumnus. (In recent years, the band has dedicated itself to worthy causes; in 2000, it launched Rockin’ for Research, an annual concert series that to date has raised an astounding $5 million for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.)
Moreover, Dean has a damn good reason to be proud of Loverboy’s songs: they were solid enough to get him and his bandmates inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, alongside Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and the Guess Who. “To me, that’s the most important thing in my career, is being a songwriter,” Dean says. “That’s what I take the most pride in, so to be associated with Joni and Neil and all these other people, like Leonard Cohen—are you kiddin’ me? It’s pretty incredible.”
The impending release of Jehnny Beth’s latest solo album, You Heartbreaker, You, reminded me that I once interviewed her for the Georgia Straight ahead of a Vancouver performance by her band Savages.
It’s arguably the most prestigious honour in British music, so it’s no wonder that Jehnny Beth seems somewhat bemused by the fact that her band’s scrappy debut album is in the running for the Mercury Prize alongside releases by past winners such as Arctic Monkeys and honest-to-God icons like David Bowie.
“We didn’t start this band to win prizes and to get rewards on that kind of mainstream level,” says the French-born frontwoman of the London-based postpunk quartet Savages, whose Silence Yourself LP has made the Mercury shortlist. “That’s not where we were aiming. That’s not why we write music. We don’t write music to enter any kind of competition or win any prize, so obviously when that happens it’s kind of funny and surprising.
“I don’t think I take it very seriously, although we’re very proud of this album,” continues Beth, who is speaking to the Straight from a tour stop in Columbus, Ohio. “The Mercury Prize is for the album exclusively, so it’s more like a prize for this object. I don’t really take it for myself, in a way. I feel like ‘Oh, yeah, Silence Yourself, well done,’ more than ‘Well done, myself,’ you know?”
Beth is perhaps being a little too modest. Her assured singing and sometimes confrontational lyrics are as responsible for the success of Silence Yourself as is the sound of the band—a spare and taut attack that often detours into firmament-shattering white noise courtesy of guitarist Gemma Thompson, while bassist Ayse Hassan and drummer Fay Milton swing from tense punk pounding (“Shut Up”) to dark-end-of-the-street slow grooves (“Waiting for a Sign”).
Critics have been nearly unanimous in their praise of Silence Yourself. The LP currently boasts a score of 81 on the review-aggregator site Metacritic. Because what Savages delivers is a dark and brooding brand of cathartic art-rock, its music is a direct hit to the pleasure centre of music geeks’ brains.
What’s harder to discern is where Beth and company are coming from politically. The band has posted a series of manifestoes on its website that decry modern life while pointing toward art and music as means for young people to liberate themselves from the tyranny of the everyday. A recent Pitchfork feature used words such as uncompromising and strident to describe Savages, but in truth Beth seems to relish ambiguity.
“A song like ‘Husbands’, for example, can sometimes have a different kind of meaning for people,” she says. “I think it was in New York on the last tour—or the tour before, I can’t remember, but this year sometime. We were in New York playing ‘Husbands’ and I remember in the front row there was this gay couple, two men, and they were kissing each other and saying ‘Husbands, husbands’ into each other’s face. It was revealing a meaning to the song that I didn’t really think about originally. So I quite like that.”
On a sonic level, Savages will strike a chord with anyone who lived through the heyday of postpunk or just wishes they had. Beth points out, however, that the group’s intention has never been to echo the urgent agitation of Joy Division, PiL, or Siouxsie and the Banshees.
“We didn’t go in the studio and think, ‘Okay we’re going to do a retro album,’ ” the singer insists. “We were trying to do something on the opposite—very modern to us, and very forward. Or just trying to write good songs and trying to make them sound great. That’s all we were trying to do, really.”
I spent some time thinking about the fact that I have now been unemployed for four months. This is a new experience for me. Since I started my career in journalism in 1997, I have never been unemployed for any length of time.
Spring and summer have not been the worst times to be jobless, especially for someone who likes to walk places. I had a nice little stretch of time when I would walk to a coffee place to sit with a laptop and peruse the job postings on LinkedIn or work on my resume.
Then I realized that I was spending money I didn’t really have. So now I stay at home.
The thing is, going for coffee got me out into the community and gave me an excuse to put presentable clothing on instead of wallowing in my pajamas all day.
So what do I do with my days?
Well, here’s what I did today. Not necessarily in this order.
I wrote a freelance article for Stir about an upcoming immersive audiovisual installation by local soundscape artist Yota Kobayashi. My interview with him touched on the nature of reality and the power of perception, along with Shinto beliefs about the infinite “divinities” that keep all of nature in balance.
I finished a TikTok video promoting an upcoming performance by my band.
I applied for two jobs.
I walked over to the public library to return some books, including a biography of television pioneer John Logie Baird. I recently wrote an article about him for Mental Floss, which hasn’t been published yet.
While at the library I picked up Rick Rubin’s book, The Creative Act: A Way of Being. Only later did I notice that the book was written with Neil Strauss. Or possibly by him. I enjoyed reading The Dirt, but I have some reservations about Strauss as a person.
I bought cat food on the way home. It’s very convenient having a pet-food store in the condo complex where I live.
I worked out.
I chatted with some neighbours on the terrace. Another convenience: our patio leads directly out onto the communal eighth-floor terrace, which happens to be where the barbecue is. It has proven to be a great way to meet people. I may have chatted my way into some session work at a new recording studio, but that remains to be seen.
Is any of this interesting to anyone but me? I’m not sure. But maybe an accounting of my days’ activities will help me feel like I’m not simply wasting time or finding myself in a Groundhog Day-esque loop of fruitless existence.
I already noted in my last blog post that my band has new music out soon. Well, it’s my blog and I can mention it as many times as I want!
Come see the Starling Effect play live on September 19 at LanaLou’s in Vancouver! This is the official release date of our new single, which features the songs “Pile of Ash” and “Memory Palace”. We’ll be joined for the occasion by Combine the Victorious and Asterous. Check out the Facebook event page and let us know if you plan on attending!
Can’t make it out to the show? Here’s another way to support us. These songs have been sent to just about every campus and community radio station across Canada. If you could take a moment to call, email, or otherwise contact your local station and request us, that would help us. Like, a lot. Because they will only play what they think people want to hear. Thanks in advance!
Click here to pre-save our new single on Spotify or pre-order it on iTunes.
Have I ever mentioned that I play in a band called the Starling Effect? Maybe once or twice?
We are super excited about the fact that we have a new single, featuring the songs “Pile of Ash” and “Memory Palace”, coming out on September 19 via our label, Submerged Records.
If you are also excited about that, you can pre-save this release on Spotify right now by following this link. Thanks for your pre-support!
If you’re not a fan of Spotify (and many are not these days), you’ll also be able to find the songs everywhere else you usually stream or download music. But of course the best place to listen is our very own Bandcamp page, where you can help us out by tossing us a few of your hard-earned shekels. (We will also accept dollars.)
If you happen to be in Vancouver on the release date, you can catch us live at LanaLou’s, where we’ll be playing with guests Combine the Victorious and Asterous. It will be an awesome night that could only be made more awesome by your presence.
I recently interviewed Canadian improv-comedy great Colin Mochrie, of Whose Line Is It Anyway? fame, for Montecristo magazine’s website.
I asked Mochrie about his debut appearance on the original British version of the show. Here’s what he had to say:
“On my first show, I sucked,” he says, “so I thought, ‘Well, that’s it. I’ll never be part of that again.’ I was just lucky that my good friend Ryan Stiles had become part of that group and he talked them into giving me another chance, so it worked out from there.”
It worked out so well, in fact, that Mochrie became a regular on the series, appearing in 71 episodes—a record bested only by his fellow Canadian Stiles, who racked up a total of 92. Mochrie figures the show kept them around to ensure that an excess of dry British wit didn’t make Whose Line too highbrow for its own good. “I think the producers wanted some dumber North Americans just to do the goofy stuff,” he says. “Instead of, you know, doing riffs on Ulysses, we’d pretend we were chickens.”
Back in May, I wrote this LinkedIn article to share my thoughts about the impact of AI on the livelihoods of professional writers. (Like me!)
If you haven’t read it, I do encourage you to do so. I promise it’s worth your time. (A promise should not be construed as a guarantee.)
I recently followed that piece up with more musing on artificial intelligence, with the intention of answering the musical question, “Should you get ChatGPT to write your band’s bio?”
Why would ChatGPT lie to me? It does so because, as the term “large language model” implies, its entire job description is to create a convincing simulation of natural language. It is incapable of caring about whether it tells you the truth or spins an epic web of confabulation.
As researchers from the University of Glasgow write of LLMs in their delightfully titled Ethics and Information Technology article “ChatGPT is bullshit”, “Their goal is to provide a normal-seeming response to a prompt, not to convey information that is helpful to their interlocutor.”
In that same article, the authors write of ChatGPT that “if we view it as having intentions (for example, in virtue of how it is designed), then the fact that it is designed to give the impression of concern for truth qualifies it as attempting to mislead the audience about its aims, goals, or agenda.”
I can attest that ChatGPT does indeed seem to be programmed to “give the impression of concern for truth”. When I called it out on the high bullshit quotient of the band bio it wrote me, it tried to convince me that it was sorry. “I apologize for providing inaccurate information in my previous response,” it said.
Wiggedout Music presents the Starling Effect—that’s my band!—at the Painted Ship (2884 West Broadway, Vancouver, BC) on Saturday, August 16, with guests Shimbashi Station and Thomas Van Alstine.
We’re pretty excited about this one for a couple of reasons. The first is that we played at the Painted Ship last September and really enjoyed it. The second is that we were supposed to play with Shimbashi Station at the start of this year, but that show ended up not happening.
Cover charge is $15, and best of all, the venue is all-ages.
I have a very extensive catalogue of old articles that I think are worth revisiting. Here’s one of them, published on this day exactly a decade ago. (This article originally appeared in The Georgia Straight.)
A$AP Rocky does what he wants to do
A$AP Rocky is not an easy man to get on the phone, which is no great surprise. As befits someone on the verge of superstar status, the American rapper has serious demands on his time.
Somehow, though, the Straight manages to get Rocky on the line twice. During the first interview, he’s in Berlin on a European festival tour. For the second—which takes place a full three hours after the scheduled time—he’s in New York City, his hometown, sounding exhausted after an Adidas photo shoot that went longer than expected.
Each time, Rocky comes across as affable and unfailingly polite, but it’s clear he has no time for small talk, which makes establishing a genuine rapport difficult—and the strict time limits placed upon the interviewer don’t help matters. With a bit of prodding, though, the man sometimes known by the lofty title of Lord Pretty Flacko Jodye indulges the Straight by discussing what sort of music he enjoys during his almost nonexistent downtime.
“I listen to classic music sometimes when I’m in the car,” he says. “I might listen to blues. It depends what mood I’m in. I’m open to listening to anything at certain times. I’ve been listening to psychedelic ’60s rock. That shit’s cool.”
That last admission is hardly shocking after exposure to Rocky’s latest studio album, At.Long.Last.A$AP. While it’s not self-consciously retro in any way—Rod Stewart samples notwithstanding—many of the LP’s tracks are delivered in a narcotic haze.
On the spare and screwed “Fine Whine”, for example, the MC’s voice is pitched down and slowed to a codeine-cough-syrup crawl. Consider also the Christmas-light twinkle of “Excuse Me”, with a tunefully reverb-blurred bridge sung by Flacko himself. And then there’s the Kanye West coproduction “Jukebox Joints”, which coasts along on a looped sample from obscure early-’70s Indonesian psych-prog act Rasela, until it switches gears and instead incorporates a Smokey Robinson beat as its backdrop.
There’s a case to be made, in fact, that At.Long.Last.A$AP is itself a psychedelic record.
“I think so, yeah,” Rocky says in reply to that suggestion. “I would agree. I would say it’s a form of psychedelic music, because it does add different dimensions that are definitely trippy. As far as the sequencing of the tracks, of each individual song, it’s like every track seems like it takes you on a maze of, like, three or four different songs in one, but they’re all cohesive.
“It’s hard to describe, and that’s the really dope part about psychedelic music: it’s really something that you don’t describe, it’s more something that you feel and experience.”
For the 26-year-old hip-hop star, who’s one of the major draws at the upcoming Squamish Valley Music Festival, the psychedelic experience goes beyond the sonic sphere. The title of the pupil-dilating rap ballad “L$D” nominally stands for “Love Sex Dreams”, but the lyrics to “Pharsyde” are less ambiguously about acid: “It’s the irony how LSD inspired me to reach the higher me/Used to never give a damn, now I don’t give a fuck entirely.”
On the surface, that seems like nihilism, but the kind of not-giving-a-fuck Rocky refers to is less about apathy than it is about shrugging off self-doubt—and the naysaying of haters—and tuning in to one’s innate talents.
“With most of these psychedelic drugs,” he reflects, “it’s about awareness, right? Enlightenment, to an extent, to some degree. Most people who take it, after they’ve done it, when they try to reiterate everything that happened, they just tell you, basically, ‘It was amazing. I get it now. I get life, I get this, I get that,’ you know? For me, LSD just kind of complemented my initial attitude toward life. It was just like, ‘Fuck it. It doesn’t matter. Do the best you could do, be the best you could be. Fuck everything. Do some dope shit. Just do what you want to do.’ ”
Doing what he wants to do is working out pretty well for A$AP Rocky these days. At.Long.Last.A$AP debuted in Billboard’s No. 1 spot—not just in the rap and R&B categories, but on the overall album chart. (It reached No. 1 in Canada a few weeks later.) His debut studio record, Long.Live.A$AP, achieved the same hat trick.
That 2013 release, however, was a more direct assault on the mainstream, containing the double-platinum single “Fuckin’ Problems”. Built on a dead-simple slamming beat (courtesy of Canadian producer Noah Shebib) and featuring single-entendre me-so-horny verses from Drake and Kendrick Lamar with a hook delivered by 2 Chainz, “Fuckin’ Problems” is an unapologetically populist club banger. There really isn’t anything like it on At.Long.Last.A$AP; although the ScHoolboy Q–featuring “Electric Body” is just as sexually charged, it isn’t aimed at the cheap seats in quite the same way.
“If you really listen to this album and my first mix tape, I think those two are more compatible than the first commercial release, Long.Live.A$AP,” he says. “This album kind of complements the first mix tape, if you ask me. It’s like a final chapter to it, or something like that. I wanted it to grow on people, because it takes some getting used to if you’re not an open-minded person. This is definitely for people with a higher taste level for art, culture, and music just in general.”
In Rocky’s view, there is a clear line between those with “higher” and “lower” tastes, and he knows which ones he’s trying to cultivate as a fan base. Not content with being considered a mere entertainer, he considers himself an artist.
That attitude carries over from his in-studio and on-stage work to his social-media presence, particularly on Instagram. Although some of the images he uploads are confounding when looked at individually—and some just seem to be blank—when you view his entire feed, they invariably combine to create complex collages, some of them quite beautiful. It’s an innovative use of a platform that is too often simply a tool for promoting products. In fact, Rocky sees his activities on Instagram as a push back against online commercialism.
I’m just trying to spread some positivity, because life is real fucked-up. You’ve just got to make the best of this shit, you know what I’m saying?
“What, am I gonna sit here and promote brands all day and shit?” he asks rhetorically. “Nah, fuck that. I got tired of the whole cliché thing of people posting shit just to be like, ‘Na-na-na boo-boo, look what I got; look what you don’t have. Look how much cooler my life is than yours,’ you know?”
In May, the rapper partnered with artist Robert Gallardo to turn his Instagram feed into a “digital installation”. Over the course of 10 hours, it all added up to something, even if it at first appeared to be nothing more than a series of grey squares. This project reportedly cost Rocky more than 100,000 followers, but that apparently didn’t faze him: “If you have a low taste level, you might find it annoying that I post so many posts, you get what I’m saying? But if you have patience, you’ll grow to like my feed and appreciate art, and actually do something artistic with your Instagram. That’s just how I look at it. It’s not like I’m doing something that no one else can do. Anyone can do it. I just want people to do it. And people started doing it, and I like it, man. It’s cool.
“I’m just trying to spread some positivity, because life is real fucked-up,” Rocky says of his online endeavours. “You’ve just got to make the best of this shit, you know what I’m saying?”
If anyone knows just how fucked-up life can be, it’s A$AP Rocky. The man born Rakim Mayers in Harlem in 1988 had what could best be described as a hardscrabble urban upbringing. When he was 12, his father (who died in 2012) was jailed for selling drugs, a path that the younger Mayers seemed destined to follow. When he was 13, his older brother, who had taught him to rap, was shot and killed about a block from where Rocky was born. Moving from one homeless shelter to the next with his mother and kid sister, young Rakim started selling marijuana, graduating to crack by the time he was 15.
A$AP Yams
Things began to change for the better when he met Steven Rodriguez in 2007 and later joined him in the already extant A$AP Mob collective. Tragically, Rodriguez, better known as A$AP Yams, died of an accidental drug overdose in January. He was 26. Although the topic is now implicitly off-limits, Rocky has said recently that his psychedelic experiences—of both the musical and chemical variety—have helped him process that loss. Yams, aka Cozy Boy, was Rocky’s friend and his partner in the A$AP Worldwide label, but he was also much more than that. In many ways he was instrumental in the MC’s rise, working behind the scenes to promote his career and helping him shape the sound of his music, including his first mix tape, 2011’s Live.Love.A$AP. Yams had been working on At.Long.Last.A$AP at the time of his death, and he received a posthumous executive-producer credit for the album.
Rocky is planning to honour his late collaborator’s memory by getting some of his own tracks out into the world. “I’m working on the Cozy Boy album right now, the Cozy Tapes,” he reveals. “It’s A$AP Yams’ album. I’m starting with that, trying to figure out what to do with it. It’s at the beginning stages, so we’ll see.”
As for his own art and what shape it might take next—will it bring him back to the club, or even further down the lysergic rabbit hole?—he refuses to speculate, insisting that it’s too soon to tell. One thing is almost certain, however: by this time next year, it’ll be even harder to get A$AP Rocky on the phone.
For a little while in the early 2010s, I was a regular contributor to the “Sound Check” column of a Canadian magazine called Concrete Skateboarding. This was before the era of “everything must be online, always”, so my contributions ran in the print edition but never made it to the web—until now. Back in 2012 I had the opportunity to interview Kevin Parker of Tame Impala for Concrete. I have always really enjoyed Parker’s music, but this is the one and only time (to date) that I have interviewed him.
Sound Check: Tame Impala
For someone with a reputation as something of a recluse, Kevin Parker is a pretty friendly guy. Or at least that’s the impression the frontman for Australian psychedelic-rock outfit Tame Impala gives when he’s reached on tour in Austria. You could be forgiven, though, for assuming Parker lives a hermetic life. After all, he does live in Perth, Australia, which has been described as the world’s most remote city, and he did name the latest Tame Impala album Lonerism. The previous one, released in 2010, bore the navel-gazing title lnnerspeaker, and its standout track, “Solitude Is Bliss”, contained one of Parker’s most telling lyrical couplets: ”There’s a party in my head/ And no one is invited.”
On the line from Vienna, however, Parker refutes the perception that he’s a loner. “At the moment I’m not alone at all, because I’m on tour with my friends,” he notes, adding with a laugh, “The last time I was alone was when I went to the toilet.”
There may be something to the notion that the musician relishes his moments of isolation, however. Consider the fact that Tame Impala is essentially a one-man creative outlet, with Parker writing all the songs and recording all the parts himself. “Generally it’s just me slowly putting songs together,” he says. “That’s just the way it’s always been. It’s totally a solo project in the studio, but no one seems to consider it that. Everything I’ve read has just been ‘Tame Impala, the band.’ I’m not really put off by that or anything. It’s just the way people see it, because they see a bunch of guys on a stage playing the songs, so they assume it’s a band, but it’s totally not. When we play them live, we all get together and take the song that’s already been recorded and interpret it. We just sort of have fun with it, basically, and that becomes the live version.”
Impressively, Lonerism sounds like the product of a group of people. It’s all Parker, though, and while the Fab Four vocal harmonies and acid-washed guitar licks of songs like “Mind Mischief” and “Apocalypse Dreams” suggest he hasn’t lost his taste for paisley-skies psychedelia, there are plenty of elements that set this LP apart from its predecessor. Foremost among these is Parker’s ample use of keyboards, adding layers of pastel-washed synth tones to tracks like “Why Won’t They Talk to Me?” and “She Just Won’t Believe Me”.
“I was just feeling like looking to other things to get new crazy sounds,” he explains. “I’m always trying to find the craziest sound, you know—the thing that sounds the least like it comes from Earth. It’s really difficult to do that with guitars, because whatever you do with a guitar, it’s usually going to end up sounding like a guitar. It’s going to have that kind of earthy, rock ‘n’ roll feel. But with synthesizers, they just start in a completely different place. It was just really kind of exciting to have this whole new playing field of sounds and emotions.”
As much as Tame Impala’s music makes ideal bliss-out fodder for those who like to indulge in things green and leafy, Parker’s command of melody makes it worthy listening for those who simply want to hear a good tune. Some might hesitate to call it pop, but not Parker, who claims he’s got an entire album’s worth of songs just waiting for his fellow Aussie Kylie Minogue. The man loves hooks, and he doesn’t care who knows it.
“As long as you do something that feels cool, or sounds cool, or gives you some sort of emotion, then nothing’s ever too cheesy, or not cheesy enough,” he says. “It really just depends what you consider to be pop and what you consider not to be pop, which is a totally subjective thing anyway.”
John Lucas 