The best things in life may be free but they won't get you an eight-track or see you through to recording a string of irreverent pop-art singles.
    David Cunningham has been tagged an avant garde rocker but his feet are planted firmly on the ground. Not quite the cerebral aesthetic many take him for, he's a man who knows intentions are only realized in this world when backed by hard cash; "Your loving gave me such a thrill, but your love won't pay my bills," right?
    Back in the Seventies he found himself with a headful of ideas and nowhere to go. That was until Bob Black, now manager of The Modettes and then Wayne (later Jayne) County and The Electric Chairs came along.
     "He'd heard some stuff I'd done with The Pop Group and thought I was a young, hip producer and certainly I had new directions and could probably drive that group into the Seventies, as it was then. I turned them (The Chairs) down a couple of times because I thought they were a pretty solid rock group and considered that I might diminish that energy not knowing anything about bass and drums, which I didn't then. And then one day Bob told me how much producers get paid.
    Slicing:
    "You know you get an advance - I got $2,000 and these days I'd probably get a lot more than that and probably two or three parts of the album sales. And I thought, my goodness, if I do that I can buy a TEAC. So I did it (the album was 'Things Your Mother Never Told You') and bought a TEAC and recorded 'Money' and the rest is plain to see."
    Not content with expertly splicing and slicing one classic, he'd already had one cult hit with a remake of Eddie Cochran's "Summertime Blues", his most recent stab at popular electronics was a new, but not weird enough, rendition of Curtis Mayfield's "Move On Up".
    Does this suggest then, that production is merely a means to an end?
    "Oh no, not for me. I don't have to think about bread and butter anymore - not at all. There's a production company that does all the stuff like This Heat and basically I've got a very small scale but highly profitable company at the moment. Whether it will stay that way I just don't know of course."
    In a discreet flat on the border of Clapham Common David Cunningham masterminds his latest projects and it was here that I met the man and his music. In a hand-knitted, sleeveless jumper and baggy trousers he comes over as a guarded ("but why do you want to talk to me?"), oblique individual with a sublime sense of humor and an eclectic taste in music - "Once the only three albums I owned were Lennon's first solo album, The Beach Boys' 'Surf's Up' and King Crimson's 'Lark Tongue In Aspic'."
    We discuss the new album, to be released hopefully in January, and on hearing some of the tracks it sounds a good deal more substantial than their first stab at a long player.
    The inclusion of Smokey Robinson's "Get Ready" inevitably prompts a question about this recurring fascination with creatively sabotaging and systematically rebuilding the past.
    Originals"
    "Well for a start, 'TV' was our own composition, but there's something about cover versions. You can take them a bit further than the originals. It's useful to focus in on the irritation factor when you're doing a single. 'TV' is the only track that was written by us and is still irritating."
    "I think singles are irritating by nature really though. They repeat so much, like the snare drum on 'Money'. That's my theory of pop singles which is why I selected the things I did to release."
    Interestingly the irritant factor once proved too much for Cunningham's record company, Virgin, who - always conscious of what is and is not good marketable product - rejected his bash at "The Laughing Policeman".
    "Everyone at Virgin hated it so I took it to Arista and they put it out under The Suspicions. Yeah there were a whole collection of foul-ups surrounding that record."
    The new album has taken the best part of four months to record and features the rhythm section from The Electric Chairs, Robert Fripp, Michael Nyman and the Lizards' latest singer Patti Palladin. Seemingly pleased with the result, Cunningham confesses to being "absolutely wrecked" after his exhausting sessions of multi-stage recording whereby the musicians lay down their individual parts and he later welds them together in the recording studio.
    "The idea is to reorientate the function of each instrument to some extent. To have them doing different things from what they might be normally do."
    On first hearing the results sound like a strange hybrid of Can and contemporary Grace Jones tinged with the Chairs dub rhythms and Nyman's one-dimensional repetitions.
    Patti Palladin's contributions appear at least intriguing so I await her scheduled arrival at Mr. Cunningham's abode with a sharpened sense of anticipation.
    "She's late," David observes brusquely, "incredibly bloody late as usual." In fact she arrives two hours behind time, cursing the London tube which finds little favor compared to the subway of her native New York.
    Entering in a flurry of bad-mouthing and black lace we are confronted by a street-wise version of Kate Bush on speed. She calms herself and explains how she sees her role in this amorphous band.
    "I would not have just come in and done the vocals for 'Move On Up' because that certainly would have been derogatory to my career at large. I don't want to be recognized for something I'm not or mislead people about where I'm coming from, that's why this new album has material of mine on it."
    Millions:
    Asked about her past career she replies in the sharpest of Brooklyn accents: "Well I guess I am a cult figure of sorts (she's worked as Snatch with Judy Nylon and other left-field luminaries) I don't want to suddenly get out to millions of people. The Lizards are a commercial as I'd like to get but I don't think they're making just novelty records. People who think that will have to think again when the new album comes out."
    "Besides," David interjects, "I'd say that any pop record is a novelty record. It's the uniqueness of the sound that does it and the pop industry functions on the novel."
    When it's time for me to leave Patti is as ostentatiously ebullient as ever, demanding more time to talk and hailing their coming live debut as the musical event of the next decade.
    "It's going to be brilliant. It'll be a Cecil B. De Mille production. I tell you if it isn't incredible at the sound check I'm not going on."
    The outcome at Hammersmith Riverside Studios hardly lives up to her extravagant claims. In fact much of it is a solemn, flat and unprofitable occasion. Patti sounds like a hoarse Patti Smith and their alignment with Michael Nyman, David's old music teacher from the Maidstone College of Art, seems a highly contrived affair which benefits neither.
    In the center of an awkward collection of chamber instruments, combined with a straight rock formation, Nyman conducted the assembly through a selection of pieces as the young, liberal audience looked on with artificial reverence and pretentious programs.
    Cunningham stayed seated, stage right, with his guitar, adopting the studied air of fixed concentration normally assumed by his spiritual mentor Robert Fripp, sometimes wandering to the front for a precious introduction - very much a night of brown rice and empty musical statements.
    Still, there's an album to look forward to and, who knows, the definitive version of "Land Of Hope and Glory"?

- interview by Ian Pye/1981

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