Breaking the mould

Bob Mould's in spiky form. He's never come close to writing the perfect three-minute pop song - nobody has. He dislikes touring - yet he's back on the road and he'll even be throwing a couple of classic Husker Du and Sugar Tracks into his set. Tony Clayton-Lea talks to the reluctant minstrel.

'IT'S what all of us aspire to do - to write a stupid or smart three-minute life affirming pop song. None of us ever leave having written a perfect song, however. Really! None of us has. Brian Wilson or Lennon and McCartney? No, but they're probably the closest. Jimi Hendrix? Very close, but you know, it just doesn't happen."

Bob Mould is clearly in a pesky, some might say argumentative mood. For a man whose previous bands have included the highly influential Hüsker Dü and Sugar (not forgetting his mercurial but often melody-soaked solo work) to state that he has never come close to writing a perfect pop song is either denial of the highest order or scorching self-criticism. Still, he's the songwriter, so he should know, right? "That's a daily struggle," says Mould from his Washington DC home. "Two days ago I started to come up with ideas that are different to anything I've ever done before. Whether I'll like them in a month is open to debate."

Mould is opening up old war wounds with his latest album, Body of Song. Reverting to a guitar-driven format - his first foray back into loud melodies in almost 10 years - Mould takes the record out on the road this autumn, stopping at Laois's Electric Picnic boutique music festival along the way. What is different about this particular jaunt is that Mould is performing material from all points of his career for the first time in a full band format.

Surely the sense of expectation is immense? "Yes. My own personal experience relates back to Hüsker Dü, which was a very unconscious act until everybody started hyping us up - like, say, the New York critics - and then all of a sudden the world was looking at the band. And you get self-conscious; I was just going about my work, just the crazy ride I was on, and I didn't know anybody was watching. I knew people liked the records - but the Next Big Thing? Now I understand what it's about - I just do my work, I shrug off both the good and the bad, and appreciate the fact that people care."

Those halcyon Hüsker Dü days seem a lifetime ago, according to Mould. Recently, however, a little bit of history came back when a close associate of that band died. "With such a tragic event like that you take inventory, and nothing amounts to that type of loss. It's like a hard reset - you look back and sort through what you've done. And thinking about Hüsker Dü brings back mostly pleasant thoughts and a few regrets. Ultimately, what we do is stupid, silly, simple stuff - we try to write a song that rhymes within the space of three minutes.

"People regularly ask why I don't play the Hüsker Dü songs, and it's a good question. I think this tour those songs will be fine. I've sort of reconciled all that, putting my work into different drawers. In a sense I saw the uselessness of that. Now I look at my whole body of work, the different things I'm trying to do, and I come to the conclusion that it's all about me, and it's about what I do."

It's something of a truism, offers Mould, that as artists get older they come to the realisation that indeed it is all about them, rather than peripheral bits and pieces. It is also, he says, about protecting the integrity of the work in its original context. "The beauty of pop music is that it's a sacred art form, but it's not so sacred that one has to ignore one's legacy. I wrote those songs and there's no way I could pretend that if I play Hüsker Dü songs in September, in Ireland, that they're going to have any semblance of the impact they created 20 years ago. It just can't be. So I gave up the idea of that, and decided just to play the songs."

Whatever way it sounds is as good as it's going to get, for Mould - unlike, say, Brian Wilson - has no wish to recreate his music note for note. "It's impossible. It just can't be done. Some people do, but what's the point? Well, the point is only if you want to slavishly appease the audience, but I would have thought that people would be happy if the show was good, coherent, and that the band is enjoying playing. Surely that's the best you can hope for out of a live experience. I've never been one for trying to recreate on stage note-perfect renditions of album songs. Isn't the beauty of a live performance that it should be spontaneous, reactive, interactive?"

So Bob is not a fan of Brian Wilson's facsimiles of Pet Sounds and the much hyped/lauded Smile shows? A diplomatic pause takes place. "They're incredible exercises in and of themselves, but at the end of the day if he got up from the piano because he didn't want to play, or because he wasn't into singing a particular song on a particular night, then people would gasp at the magic of it. But the fact people know they're going to watch a faithful reproduction of a masterwork - eeerrrr, then they're just going to look for the flaws, aren't they? Really, wouldn't it be more interesting to see him forget the words of a song and then just have to change direction completely? It's not that we like to see people fall on their faces, but it's about the humanity of the thing, isn't it?"

It is inevitable that the man whose weblog is subtitled 'a quiet and uninteresting life' ("It's a good thing I have the weblog, because otherwise I'd forget what I did last month; I'm old and I forget") isn't looking forward to touring. "Yes, it's true, I'm not looking forward to the travel or getting sick on the road. The drudgery of it; the inevitable wiping my eye after I've shaken hand number 147, and ending up with a cold for a week. The not so good diet." But the performance is always worth it? "It is, because if that's not worth it then you might as well go home. I can find other ways to make money. Hey, it's about 26 shows this year and I want to make all of them count. We're not the kind of people who are planning to go back out in three months' time and open for - who knows? - a band like Pearl Jam. So, yes, the shows had all better be good!"

www.bobmould.com www.electricpicnic.ie