“Rock’n’roll Is Night Language”

I visited Atlanta for this profile of Deerhunter and their unforgettable frontman Bradford Cox for MOJO a bunch of years ago, and the piece has always been one of my favourites. 

The Tall Guy

We’re in the upstairs bedroom of a modest clapboard house near the Cabbagetown neighbourhood of Atlanta, a dark cubbyhole where tea-lights and strips of coloured LEDs cast faint light over the many piles of records, books, CDs and trinkets that divide up the room. On a far wall hang the framed remnants of a torn, partially destroyed Lou Reed poster, advertising 1974 live album Rock’n’Roll Animal, with a gold-tinted Reed frugging wildly in bondage gear and make-up.

“This hung in my cousin’s bedroom when I was a baby,” says Bradford Cox, sat on his single bed beside the poster. “I would stare up at Lou Reed’s face while my mom changed my diaper and cleaned my genitals. I used to think he was the bogeyman. It terrified me.”

From this suitably vivid first encounter with rock’n’roll, Bradford Cox would grow into one of its most unique and notorious practitioners as guitarist, singer and song-writer of Deerhunter, a group whose luminous, haunting and fractured dream-pop and punk-rock place them apart from an indie-rock generation Cox describes as mostly “mithering”. Their status as tall poppies in the indie-rock glasshouse is confirmed by their role as curators of this Spring’s All Tomorrow’s Parties festival, where they will play – in sequence and in full – the three albums that built their legend: Cryptograms (2007), Microcastle (2008) and Halcyon Digest (2010). But it isn’t just their music that has established Deerhunter as subterranean stars of high media visibility: Cox has proven a voluble, intelligent and outspoken frontman, an instinctive star in an era of mumbling worthiness and bearded conformity.

“I don’t think I’m interesting,” he demurs. “But when I look at my contemporaries, everyone else is so fucking boring. Because they’re so concerned about what you think of them. And they’re also concerned with what their girlfriends think, and how they look, and all that kind of shit. I mean, I’m concerned with how I look, but only in the levels of hideousness I can achieve, or caricature.”

Cox’s band-mates in Deerhunter – co-founders guitarist Lockett Pundt and drummer Moses Archuleta, plus new additions Frankie Broyles (guitar) and Josh McKay (bass) – are crouched amid the stacks in their singer’s bedroom. Reluctant to be interviewed alone, Cox insists the band are present, but frequently talks over their rare interjections, explaining “I like to provide footnotes. I like to narrate.” It’s a situation, it should be noted, they seem fine with.

“We were the least likely to be picked at kickball,” says Cox, of Deerhunter’s core trio. “A very anxious group of boys. Unfit.” They burned through a rolodex of bandmates – many of whom, Cox says, met “horrible fates: death, heroin addiction” – and soon evolved towards a sound Cox envisioned as “as if we were playing punk music in a giant room, and you were hearing it from the next room. We were all very stoned, except Moses.”

He leans over to fiddle with his iPod, and a dreamy, echo-drenched ballad with ghostly twang guitar pours out of the speakers beneath his bed. “It’s a band called the Fantastic Deejays, from the 1960s,” he offers. “Hey, Let me play you this Ferlin Husky track that sounds like shoegaze,” he adds, placing the Missouri Country singer’s 1961 LP Walkin’ And A Hummin’ on his bedside turntable and dropping the needle on the ghostly Living In A Trance. “I mostly listen to this old music, and it is very haunted-sounding. I wasn’t drawn to reverb, so much as I was drawn to music that sounds haunted. I never heard Slowdive; I never stared at my shoes; I stare people right in the eye.”

On Deerhunter’s new album, Monomania, the reverb is mostly absent, but the haunt remains. Recorded at Brooklyn’s Rare Book Room studio, sessions were scheduled between 6pm and 7am. “We are a nocturnal rock’n’roll band,” says Cox, who keeps those hours more naturally than his band-mates. “I really did not see the sun for days,” adds new arrival McKay, as Cox waves around a neon blue lamp he bought especially to simulate daylight during the sessions. “Music is made at night,” Cox insists. “Rock’n’roll is night language.”

The ever-prolific Cox – who employs automatic writing and says “every lyric I write is shocking to me. I say things in that trance that explain to me who I am” – brought 287 songs to the studio. The eleven selected for Monomania tell a story, he suggests, but one he says he can’t share with us. “Because it would get into a personal zone that I don’t feel comfortable with,” he explains. “And that’s really unfortunate, because it would really explain the new record in such prismatic, crystalline detail. But I can’t do that. I’ve overshared in the past…”

These words are uttered with a ‘book-closed’ finality, but minutes later he’s hinting again, unprompted, at the secret behind Monomania, like he can’t stop himself. Compulsive, he recalls John Lydon in The Filth And The Fury: opinionated, bristling, theatrical, vulnerable, hilarious and, above all, wilful. He has a well-honed sense of the ridiculous, but gets impatient when his humorous gestures – like a March 2, 2012 show by his ongoing, prolific Atlas Sound ‘solo’ project at Minneapolis’ Cedar Cultural Center that closed with a cacophonic hour-long jam through The Knack’s My Sharona, in response to a heckler’s request – get misinterpreted as grand statements.

“God, will I ever be allowed to forget that night?” groans Cox. “I’m now associated with the worst song. Why couldn’t I have played Judy Is A Punk for an hour? Or Hank Williams’ Your Cheatin’ Heart? People are trying to make it into such a ‘statement’! It was a bit of humour! But rock’n’roll needs its mythologies, I guess. Otherwise, why are you here?”

I’m here because I want to get to know the real Bradford Cox.

“The ‘real Bradford Cox’?” he laughs. “Okay, let’s go ask my dad.”

 

 

Before we reach Bo Cox’s house in nearby Marietta, we stop off at Mary Mac’s Tea Room, an Atlanta soul-food institution. Both prim and homely, Mary Mac’s legendary status in Atlanta is signalled by a wall of autographed photos from local luminaries, including former American president Jimmy Carter. We sup on catfish and mudbugs and collard greens and smothered chicken, surrounded by tables of church-going family folks whose eyebrows raise when the very tall, very thin young man says “boner” so very loudly.

“When I was nine,” says Bradford, between mouthfuls, “the sound coming out of the amp would make my little pre-pubescent cock twitch; it’d give me a boner. When no-one was home, I would ‘hump’ the feedback. It was like getting a massage down there. But I wasn’t old enough for it to be a truly sexual act.”

Born with Marfan syndrome – a genetic disorder of the connective tissue he shares with Robert Johnson, Joey Ramone and Olympic gold-medallist swimmer Michael Phelps, explaining his gawky, slender frame – Cox says he “knew from an early age that I was going to perform, to entertain. I was going to be ‘not-pretty’, a bit of a sideshow.” Inspired by John Waters, Cox ran a film club at High School, where he made movies in which teenage schoolgirls vomited blood over their desks. When the Fellowship Of Christian Athletes tried to get the club shut down for producing “borderline pornography”, Cox and his entourage donned ghost costumes fashioned from black garbage bags and chased the FOCA screaming through the school halls.

“My parents cultivated a weird defiance in me,” Cox says, “although they were religious, and very conservative. When the New York Times printed a review of one of our early gigs with a huge colour photograph of me onstage, in a little girl’s Easter dress splattered with fake blood, deep-throating the microphone like it was a cock, my dad proudly pinned it to the refrigerator with a magnet he got from his church. That was the first time I felt like I didn’t have to answer to anyone, ever, because the only person that I’ve ever been truly afraid of alienating is my father, and my mother and my sister.”

At the age of 30, Cox remains a virgin. “I don’t practise any kind of sexual lifestyle. I’ve had unfortunate run-ins with my lifestyle becoming ‘breached’, but they were brief. When I was a little boy I was very attracted to girls. I think maybe I was so attracted to girls that I ended up wanting to be them. And then I wanted to have the boyfriends that they had. I was so interested in girls that I wanted to imagine what it was like being the girl being fucked. Sometimes I identify as ‘queer’. Sometimes, I’ll be honest with you, I wish I was ‘straight’. I don’t have a choice; you are who you are.

“Nothing gets me off as much as music does,” he continues. “And people always let you down, unless they’re your family. The truth is, Monomania is about a failed relationship. It’s about finding out that shit’s not gonna work out for me. And it’s frustrating. I’d love to have a wife and a house, to have kids. But that’s just not who I was born to be. I was born to be a fly in the ointment. Lockett and Moses got married. And here I am, in arrested development. I spend most of my time in my room, in hiding. I’m a 30 year old man that probably has severe psychological problems, and lives in a filthy world of dust.”

He says, again, that he can’t name Monomania’s target – the partner who inspired the bereft ache of the ghostly Nitebike, the unhinged snarl of Leather Jacket II – even though I’ve not asked him to. “The only things I won’t talk about are things that would personally affect people who read them, because they’re such pathetic junkies,” he adds, compulsively. “They don’t need to be destroyed any further, they already destroyed themselves when they tried to destroy me. He has no talent at art, he has nothing to say, he’s just a junkie. An opportunist. And a bastard. So why annihilate someone who’s so helpless?”

He pauses for a second. Then, venomously: “No, seriously. Gimme a reason, I’ll do it.”

How do you think he’ll feel when he hears the record?

“I think they’ll feel it like a switchblade going down their ear canal. I have honestly wondered if they might kill themselves.”

Would you feel guilty if they did?

“Yes, I would.”

 

It’s past 10pm when we reach Bo Cox’s place, a roomy modern two-storey house in Marietta, and Bradford’s father has just returned from an evening rehearsing with his barbershop quartet. Throughout the interview, Bradford has spoken only of his love and respect for his father: “If my dad hadn’t whupped my ass with his belt when I got caught doing stupid shit, I’d probably have become a junkie.” In his father’s company, though, Bradford behaves as if half his age: acting up, showing off, and riling up Bo’s boisterous bulldog puppy Churchill so he’ll bark and wake up Bo’s second wife Nancy, asleep upstairs.

“I thought it was a total waste of time, but I didn’t stop him,” says Bo, of Bradford’s music. “I was worried how he’d make a living. He would just make noise. I paid for him to get guitar lessons, and I came to pick him up afterwards, and Brad’s teaching the guitar instructor how to make feedback. [feigns exasperation] But I saw ‘em play at Radio City Music Hall [with Spoon, in 2010], and Frank Sinatra sang there, so…”

“Y’see, my dad doesn’t read Pitchfork,” interrupts Bradford. “He understands we’re a big deal when he sees my bank account. Hey dad, you wanna hear my new album?”

The opening seconds of Neon Junkyard peal out of the speakers. Bo doesn’t seem to care for the song, nor Leather Jacket II’s distorted, needling guitar and echo-sliced howls, though he prefaces all his comments with respectful disclaimers that he understands he isn’t the market for this music. Bo likes The Missing better, which aggravates Bradford as it’s Lockett’s song; he also appreciates the dulcet lullaby pop of T.H.M.. Bo blanches, though, as Bradford stomps around, pumping his fist at his father to the anthemic, autobiographical chorus to Dream Captain: “I’m a poor boy / From a poor family.”

As Monomania’s epic five-and-a-half minute title track reaches its cacophonous climax, Bradford’s yelling that the roaring, distorted feedback is supposed to sound like the fires of Hell, that the guitars are supposed to sound “demonic, like rats with gold teeth!” Bo sits stoic, impassive. Earlier, he’d admitted he doesn’t like a lot of what he reads about Bradford. “I’m poker-faced, I don’t like people knowing what I’m thinking. But Brad, he don’t have anything he’s holding back.”

As we clamber back into Deerhunter’s van afterwards, Cox seems deflated, Monomania having failed to vault the cultural and generation gap between father and son. It’s a passing blues, though. “I still think what I’m doing is twenty million times more honest than anything I see in a lot of these shit loser fuckin’ bands,” he muses. “I’m tired of watching attractive people trying to be ugly, struggling for authenticity. Why not be yourself?”

It’s advice Cox has put into practice all his life. Monomania, a product of that very honesty, is Deerhunter’s finest album yet, distilling that honesty into songs that sting, beguile and sear, as conflicted, intriguing and laid-bare in its “prismatic, crystalline” truths as the man who penned eleven of its twelve songs. Songs that come, Cox says, “as easily as the desire to eat or sleep”, that won’t leave him alone, and that show no sign of easing up yet.

“I haven’t written any today,” he says, of this song-writing compulsion. “I’ve been trying to not write songs, to just watch box sets of Law And Order, to fully disassociate myself from the creative process for a while. But I did start writing a new song last night, if that answers your question.”