mr.bishop, sir.
SIR RICHARD BISHOP: Most Bands Would Have Called It Quits
The Sun City Girls discography, littered with titles like Horse Cock Phephner, Dante’s Disneyland Inferno and 330,003 Crossdressers from Beyond the Rig Veda, reads like the rantings of a missionary’s fever dream, the records themselves crazed excursions through the collective unconscious, as likely to feature a side-long gamelan work out as some completely trashed cover of some 70s dad-rock standard.
Where most bands court a following, the Girls’ twenty-six career was a fine lesson in how to make a living doing the direct opposite. Fiercely independent, the Girls would release whatever they liked, sometimes through record labels, sometimes themselves, sometimes dropping twenty tapes anonymously into the racks of SE Asian street vendors. On stage, they were just as likely to come on in Kabuki masks and taunt whoever showed up than play any songs. If they ever got on MTV, they once said, they’d have to kill themselves.
Though they toured, traveling was more their bag, the kind of relentless traveling of the truly obsessed, Alan a sucker for Indonesia, Richard for India, returning periodically to their HQ in Seattle to add a few more recordings to a discography so sprawling that even they can’t keep track of it.
Then, early last year, just a few weeks after their show in Berlin, drummer Charles Gocher passed on, and Alan and Richard announced that, as a recording and performing entity at least, the Sun City Girls were done. (Alan and Richard will continue to issue SCG recordings from their seemingly inexhaustible archive as time permits).
Now with more time for their solo careers, Alan as Alvarius B and Sir Richard as himself, the Bishop brothers continue to further the Girls’ legacy of arcane wizardry and astral weirdness, Sir Richard mostly through solo acoustic guitar records of astounding dexterity and range. His most recent LP, Polytheistic Fragments, shows, as if there were any doubt, his remarkable virtuosity on the guitar, his fluency in expressing all his far-flung obsessions, something perhaps partly obscured by the SCG’s sheer (and sometimes willful) eccentricity. Touring Berlin in February with Earth, Sir Richard was kind enough to answer some of my questions over the wires.
Where did you and Alan grow up? I read somewhere that it was Phoenix, somewhere else that it was Michigan? What did you guys dig listening to in your early days?
We grew up in Saginaw Michigan. Alan and I moved to Phoenix when we were 20 years old, leaving our parents behind…though they caught up with us eventually by moving to Sun City (AZ). My Lebanese Grandfather used to play us a lot of old Middle Eastern cassettes when we were young (Farid-el-Atrache and Oum Kalthoum).
The first records we got were gifts: Jimmy Soul and the Belmonts, the Beatles, Tom Jones, the Monkees, etc. This was in the late 60s when we were about 8 years old. We stuck
with the Middle Eastern music and got heavily influenced by the Beatles before I branched off into early 70s classic rock and heavy Metal (Zeppelin, Sabbath, Pink Floyd, Deep Purple). Alan leaned more towards Hendrix and Dylan back then.
What first sparked your interest/obsession with the East and its esotericism? Was there something about the geography and culture (or absence of it) where you grew up that helped it along?
It was those cassettes that my Grandfather played. He also played oud, violin, and other foreign instruments so we were exposed to that Arabic “High Art” at an early age. My father and Grandfather were both Freemasons and I am sure that led to my interest in things of an
esoteric nature, though I didn’t realize it at the time.
Did you and Alan play together when you were real young? Was there a point when you knew music would be your life?
We didn’t play instruments when we were young. When I was in high school I got my first acoustic guitar and then an electric. Shortly thereafter Alan got a guitar. We each had our own friends who played some music but we didn’t start playing together until my first year in college. We went to different colleges but we would hook up on weekends.
I was just born around the time SCG started, so can you say something about the sensibility of music fans in the early 80s that you confronted at your first shows? I’ve heard the legendary stories about the cups of urine etc, but I wanted to know: how deliberately were you trying to confound and/or provoke people? Or did you just respond to what you received energetically from the crowd? Is it much of a consideration now when you play solo?
We knew right away that what we were playing wasn’t going to be popular with the young punk crowds because they were pretty one-dimensional when it came to the music they liked. So when we noticed how much anger we were generating it gave us a feeling of power. We fed off of it, and we ate well! The more they hated us, the more inspired we were.
I think most bands would have called it quits if they went through this as long as we did but for us it was the best thing that could have happened. We found ourselves pushing ever harder in order to make the crowd feel uncomfortable at those shows. And at the same time we were developing new musical ideas that were just way over their heads and they couldn’t handle it.
We really had fun with it and never once did we give in. We always finished our set and left the stage with a great feeling of accomplishment. Years later most of those kids grew up and admitted that they didn’t appreciate it back then but that now they understood. I don’t believe them.
When I play solo there’s usually no problems because I’m not playing anything quite as far out as when the band played.
There’s a great quote on your site from Byron Coley saying that without you guys, the American underground ‘would just sound like Merzbow.’ Can you see any of your influence in, or do you feel any affinity with, what has been titled the ‘New Weird American’ scene of music – bands like Wooden Wand and the Vanishing Voice, No Neck Blues Band, Jackie-o-Motherfucker etc. – the kind of stuff that combines bits of an American sensibility with occasionally exotic improv, instrumentation and imagery?
I’ve never liked that phrase New Weird America. Didn’t the Wire magazine come up with that? God, you’d think they’d know better. It’s not new, it’s not weird, and it’s certainly not American. The bands you mentioned are all friends of mine and maybe there was some influence from us but they have taken that little bit and then gone in their own directions.
And that’s really what its about. Whether the music is similar or not doesn’t really matter. There’s a sense of freedom there that anybody can latch onto and how they approach and express it is up to them.
How often did you travel? I heard legends that it was almost half of the year, and that you used to make recordings and drop them into local shops at random, but I don’t know how much is legend and how much actually happened. I guess you’re traveling a lot more through touring now. Do you get to play in the same places – say, India, for example – that you have a strong interest in visiting for their own sake?
I travel as often as I can. It depends on how much money I have. I have traveled for half a year before but certainly not every year. Besides touring I still try to get to Asia every couple of years if I can and I usually try to stay 2 or 3 months. If I had more money I would stay much longer. When I’m traveling as opposed to touring I usually don’t play any shows at all. I might jam with the locals if I have an opportunity but that’s about it. There’s so much more to do over there that playing music is usually the last thing on my mind.
How’s the book business these days? Is the music more or less a full-time concern?
I’m almost completely out of the book business. Music now occupies most of my time. I may sell a few rare books here and there but it won’t happen too often at this point.
I saw a couple of your videos at an Australian festival a while back. It was wild (though we all got kicked out before you could talk about them when the library closed). I especially enjoyed the really simple broken folk song at the end, accompanying pictures of village life in what looked like Indonesia. Your musical discography is enormous, but is the video catalogue comparable? Are you still making them? Are they getting the re-release treatment?
We have a lot of old footage lying around. Some of it’s good some not so good, but there is a lot that nobody has seen. We will eventually get to releasing something. We made those earlier videos a few years ago and I think most of them have sold out. They might be re-released on DVD at some point. We are currently working on a DVD of Charlie’s film experiments that we plan to screen when Alan and I tour later this year. I don’t know exactly when it will be available to purchase but there is some great material there.
You’re building up a pretty impressive discography as a solo artist these days. Are you focusing more on guitar music now, or is it not that conscious? I know you put out a locust release of some foreign electronic frequencies a little while ago. What’s next?
I’m not sure what’s next. I am getting a little tired of playing just playing the acoustic guitar so I’ll probably start playing electric guitar more, just for a change. Or maybe I’ll become a noise artist, you know, twiddle a few knobs, push a few buttons, and just stand there like
something’s really going on. All the kids are doing it!
I can’t really imagine you having a set list before you go out to play a solo show. Do you have much of an idea what you’re going to do before you head onstage and do it?
I never use a set list. I usually decide what I want to do after I see the venue room and what kind of audience shows up. For this European tour with Earth I will be trying a lot of new things just to see what happens.
I love your new record, Polytheistic Fragments. I’ve always dug the more narcoleptic stuff you’ve done, so I particularly like the extended piano number Saraswati. You’ve said you don’t write songs as such, so what is the recording process like? Can we expect to hear much (or anything) off the new LP in Europe?
I may play one or two things from the new record now and then but I really want to concentrate on different material. With the electric guitar and a loud amp it will be a totally different vibe and I’ll have to approach it differently. I’m excited about it because I don’t know what will happen.
— Sir Richard Bishop appears with Earth at Lido, February 26th, and we have a few words on his latest release Polytheistic Fragments (Drag City/Rough Trade here.
sir richard bishop
