Budapest 2009 interview with The Quietus

[Pista]

This popped up in my google alerts this morning.

Lop Off The Retro Heads: An Archive Interview With Andrew Eldritch

[Being645]

... ... long time since we had that ... lovely it was ... ...

[alanm]

Good interview. Straight answers to a couple things:

On I presume the Rhino re-releases:
"I was told that there’s a version of ‘Never Land’ on there that never existed until they started f**king with the masters, which really annoys me. It was made up of outtakes and other bits and pieces."

On Patti's contributions to Floodland:
"I had expected her to be more involved than it turned out she was. Let’s leave it at that."

On "I Was Wrong":
"No, it’s not a conversation about anybody in particular."

On Von's guitar skills:
"I’m a reasonably competent bass player and a reasonably incompetent guitar player. I was an awful drummer."

[markfiend]

There. From the horse's mouth. As I long believed, "Never Land - Jazz Odyssey version" is a record-company fake.

[lilac]

But it's interesting because (a fragment) implies the final version is part of a longer song and only the full length version's lyrics make any sense of the title and Andrew's explanation of the song being about a psychedelic vision of people traveling through space and flying through the earth and out the other side

"I had this vision. You know in the summer if you lay on the grass and
stare at the sky, you can almost see beyond the stars, but cannot quite get a
grip on what's there? Well, sometimes it's very difficult to work out exactly
what it is that keeps you pressed between the earth and the sky and why you
don't whoosh off into oblivion. _Neverland_ is coming about this the other way:
the entire population of the earth starting to travel from some indefinable
point in space toward the earth at increasing speed. It would take an eternity
to reach the earth -by which time you'd be reasonably spiritualised - and even
when you reached the destination, you wouldn't actually hit the ground. You'd
be going so fast you'd just go through and out the other side, where there is
another eternity of nothingness. I just tried to write a song about these
impressions."

It was soon after this that Eldritch stopped taking hallucinatory drugs.
"It felt very liberating at the time. Like the fifth day of playing 24 hour
Scrabble when you don't want to use any letters because each one means
a world to you because you're so deranged."

Or I guess the title in the context of the fragment version could still mean never "landing" or settling in place in life
Still, obv a longer version existed in some form so just how much of the full length mix is Von's creation and how much is the record company messing with the tapes afterwards?

[H. Blackrose]

The way to square this circle is that:

1. Von wrote a "verse" ("I had a face on the mirror...") and a chorus ("they are coming down but we will never land"), and demo'd them both.
2. For release, he ditched the chorus and just released the verse.
3. The record company decades later, stitched the two together and fleshed them out in some obscure way.