Ludus interview, NME 5th September 1981
MILITANT WORDS IN A ROCK AND ROLL VACUUM
Another routine interview concluded, I said thank you to Ludus. I popped the recorder in a pocket and looked for the bar. There's not much else to do in a dark mid-week mid-Manchester discotheque.
But Ludus had other ideas. "Aren't you going to ask us our message for the world, then?" said Ian Devine, the group's guitarist. "Don't you want to talk about Politics?"
He wasn't smiling, but it took me a moment to see he was serious. I said that I don't usually raise politics in interviews any more, that it proved too unpopular. And while Linder Ludus sat back in shadow, the other two Luduses leaned forward, suddenly alert.
Well Ludus are a militant group, they said. Ian Devine explained "Everything we do is a reflection of what we feel about things generally. You say most people shy away from talking about it...well, hopefully the day will come when your paper's just full of people saying 'Look, we find it indecent to be talking about rock and roll in a vacuum'. Hopefully, the music papers will be full of bands saying 'We do give a toss about the world, and we are gonna do our bit, do our damnedest to change things, however small that attempt may be.' "
Tough talk from a group often dismissed as effete, artsy doodlers. Dids, aka Graham Dowdell, who's the drummer, took up the theme: "Rock's always taken a covert fascist stance really, in the way that it's always been male dominated and hero-dominated. And it's time to get away from that, time for rock musicians to look outside the stereotyped sexual relationships.
Linder's lyrics say very specific things about women's position in the world, and the music hopefully states similar things in more general terms. When we don't comply with traditional musical forms, that's a manifestation of a refusal to comply with the forms of a society that's been dished down to us...Rock isn't supposed to be put on a pedestal as 'Art' and seperated from life."
Okay. Ludus, it's fairly clear, don't approach the fun world of popular music-making in quite the same way as the majority of their contemporaries. And the three years of the group's exsistence have seen them grow more, not less, distanced from it.
Once a highly-promising new oufit who played early dates supporting Magazine, they've since split and splintered and come back in different shapes, and drifted steadily away from the mainstream of commercial potential and critical acceptance. Once upon a time, NME described them as "bewitching, elaborate and precarious". By the time of their most recent review, a former admirer saw them as "precious but worthless".
I used to rate them an awful lot. Nowadays, although I can admire their uncompromising stance, their musical output seems more erratic: flashes of magic and puddles of boredom.
Line-up wise, the one constant element since formation has been the singing of Linder, a sort of ethereal jazz. Her remarkable graphics, including drawings and montage (she was responsible for early Buzzcocks and Magazine cover work also) are another integral feature of Ludus product.This was taken to its highest stage yet with the release of 'Pickpocket', a cassette/booklet package on Manchester's New Hormones label, designed by her, compromising a six-track tape and magazine of Linder's words amd pictures by a friend, Birrer. The tape follows two vinyl releases ('The Visit' EP and a single 'My Cherry Is In Sherry'/'Anatomy is Not Destiny' and precedes a new 45 'Mother's Hour'/'Patient'.
As former musicians "drifted away", Ludus came to rest on a nucleus of Linder, Ian Devine and Graham Dowdell. As yet, no one's been slotted in as a permanent bass-player, though "live auditions" continue. And now they find themselves with a backlog of unrecorded material, to be committed to a LP (or perhaps a double 12") "when New Hormones can afford it". What can be certain is that the finished result will be intensely individual, owing little to anything else around.
For one thing, the group lay stress on improvisation, a tactic that's hardly calculated to endear them to a wide audience. Or is it?
"About a year ago," said Linder, "we were doing these gigs that were totally improvised and we thought that people would really hate it, be abusive and walk out. But they didn't - and we were really surpirsed."
Whatever the reviews say, the band's infrequent live shows demostrate there's a sizeable crowd prepared to bear with Ludus' experiments. Maybe the post-punk climate has been changing in their favour?
Ian: "A year ago we were supporting UB40 at the Factory and we just got the most terrible abuses right through the set. We were playing, then we stopped, and it was 'f***-off f***-off'. And yet tonight (a show at Manchester's Gallery) the response was much nicer. So the response has changed, but that's an active thing, due to our perserverance, rather than that an external force has become more favourable."
And Ludus are ambitious: Ian Devine, particularly, shows no fondness for cult appeal. He's fed up with them being "the oldest up-and-coming group"..."The Visit sold 3500 really quickly, and the next single sold 1000, which is really poxy - any band can get rid of 1000 singles. And our single was an attempt to be more accessible."
Lack of wider accaptance, they claim, is due to factors like limited press exposure and no funds to advertise with, rather than to their music.
"I don't think it's inaccessable," says Graham reasonably. "It's hopefully rich and interesting, but I don't think it's difficult to enjoy, or difficult to listen to. We try to make parts of it danceable." (Looking around the disco, it's not easy to imagine the sounds of, say, Ludus' 'Mutilate' inducing night fever on any large scale. Anyhow...)
Ian devine gets impatient: "This thing about inaccessability. Some bands break through really quickly: they form, three months later they're immensely popular. You get other bands who take two or three years to come through, and that's what we're gonna do. We'll do it eventually, we'll break through. We'll sell 10,000 records instead of 1000. It's just a matter of time."
Graham:"But we wouldn't be interested in diluting the music to do that. It's vital that the popularity is on our terms"
And that, I take it, means the songs remaining as committed as ever? Linder agrees, especially in the area that's loosely called feminism:"I can't help but deal with those things, because I'm a woman and I'm writing the lyrics. That's how I see the world; and I'm treated in a certain way because I happen to be female. It concerns me."
And your music? Linder:"It would be easy - because we're technically able - we could easily do a jazzy set or Latin American. It would be easy for us to think, let's become fashionable and develop a very slick, easy sound. But we're not interested.
By Paul Du Noyer, NME Sept 5 1981
, but the real thanks goes to iain and linder for okaying this and rob for putting it back out here for us!
