BRINGING FOETUS TO A HALT

                                                                        (Photo: JG Thirlwell)

In 1980, in the still-smouldering post-punk ruins of London, a strange, many-headed sonic hydra was immaculately conceived. This miracle pregnancy would bear deranged audio fruit in 1981, with the release of the first 7” release from a multi-moniker noise myth that would eventually come to be known as simply Foetus. The father of the ectopic uterine disaster is Australian James George Thirlwell, one of the world’s top avant-garde composers.

A crosseyed drooling, hyena-laughing beast of blackly comedic revelation and dysfunction, Foetus would continue grow and churn out singles and albums under a motley clutch of slippery monikers over the coming 43 years, eagerly assaulting unwary and confused listeners with a bombastic, shrill frenzied assault of every musical style known to man. And that’s before even mentioning the ever-evolving Thirlwell’s endless sonic mutations in other elite art projects and installations: Manorexia, Steroid Maximus, Volvox Turbo, Xordox, Baby Zizanie, Wiseblood, and on and on.

What ties all these styles together is the unique disparate quality of the music, from noise rock to classical to swing to experimental, mixed in with the artist’s peerless poetic lyrical flights of violent fantasy, sexual frenzy, anger, depression, rage, hubris, hatred, self-loathing, slaughterhouse laughter, narroweyed political observation, madness, and tragedies and triumphs of the will.

Wordplay and stream of consciousness and quips and puns and pop cultural references and highbrow literary nods and lowbrow splatter movie grue and true crime and childhood chants and frightening noir prose poetry all coagulate over forty-odd years to provide a perfectly-deformed inkspiller Rorschach of the sleight-of-hand writer and poet grinning darkly behind their abortive creation. One minute we have a sly bastardisation of a line by Bob Dylan, Shakespeare, or the Beastie Boys, the next it’s an Evil Dead dialogue insert mixed with a nursery rhyme assault, topped off with a stark murder ballad throat-slice power couplet.

It’s a magpie-ear bitches brew of lyrics that read like nobody else’s output, to my eye and mind at least. Whilst I have seen Thirlwell (who is by now known interchangeably as Foetus) discuss his musical methodology many times, I have never seen him discuss his lyrical work, which is something this interview attempts to remedy a bit. After all, in 2025, the final Foetus album, Halt, will be born and die, eternally accessible vibrant stillbirth tracks smeared in the musical monster’s messy wake. This will bring a by-then 44 years of utterly unique words and tunes to terminal term, though no doubt Thirlwell will continue abnormal service as unusual for other projects.

So I figured now was as good a time as any to snap on surgical gloves and gown and perform a gutty sloppy Caesarean section on the proud parthenogenesis-fuelled father, starting toothily severing the umbilical c(h)ord, grinding through the chewy blood-pumping gristle, asking Thirlwell about his writing style in Foetus and in other projects. What rough sonic and lyrical beast, its long-gestated hour come round at last, slouches towards New York still to be born? I guess we’ll find out soon enough…

 

 

Portraits of the artist as a growing young man (Photos: JG Thirlwell)

Graham: What was the first thing you can remember writing, and reading, and what was your youthful taste in books?

Thirlwell: Oh, you mean back in my childhood?

Graham: Yes.

Thirlwell: Oh, um…the first stuff was obviously kids’ books, I remember reading Doctor Seuss. And also, my aunt was a speech teacher, and she had a lot of books. I remember, like, there was a lot of Victorian type of kids’ books, things like Peter Rabbit and earlier than that. Those type of books. And then there’s a lot of weird arcane Australian kids’ books with strange, unsettling illustrations like Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, The Bunyip and Cole’s Funny Picture Book.

I was an avid reader through my childhood and I’m still a pretty avid reader. When I was in school I studied English literature, and so I got through a lot of things voraciously. Through my teen years I was reading stuff like, say, Kurt Vonnegut. And then I discovered existentialism and I was reading Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir. I would go on binges of things like that. And I read a lot of the classics as part of my school, like Chaucer and Shakespeare, Emily Bronte and Charles Dickens. But then a lot of the pop stuff from the era I was growing up in, like Norman Mailer, things like Fear Of Flying, Catch 22 and Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint.

There was sort of a broad swathe of stuff. I would think “What are the classics I should have read?” So I was reading that sort of stuff when I was fifteen and sixteen, you know. I felt like I was filling in a lot of my education with that. And now I go back and think that I’ve read a lot of things that are considered classics, but then I see holes…like I’ve never read Crime and Punishment, I’ve never read Ulysses. Later on I went through a binge of reading true crime, then I went through a binge of reading noir, Jim Thompson and stuff like that. Everything by Hubert Selby, Harry Crews, Charles Bukowski. I keep filling in more holes in my reading. This year I read two Patricia Highsmith books back-to-back. I still read a lot.

 

 

 

Graham: I mean, that comes through. I was actually going to ask you…you know, in some of the songs you’ve got the kind of hard-boiled defective detective thing, the vocab (Jim nods), “the woim toins,” “fiddling while Rome boins.”

Thirlwell: Yeah.

Graham: Is that from your kind of Jim Thompson detective phase?

Thirlwell: Well, those actual lines came before my Jim Thompson obsession, and that noir obsession. It was a noir thing, but it’s not what I was reading at the time. That came a bit later. I like a lot of the terminology, it’s just so engaging and hilarious a lot of the time, those sort of turns of phrase. And also, of a totally different time.

Graham: Yeah.

Thirlwell: I just read this book by James Cain, I can’t remember which one it was, it was one of his famous ones. But it’s written in the thirties, and some of the language in that, and the depictions of the relationships you just would not get away with now. It’s really extraordinary, you know.

Graham: Is that maybe The Postman Always Rings Twice?

Thirlwell: That’s exactly what it was, yeah.

Graham: I jokingly mentioned the Rimbaud joke from Lust For Death on your Facebook page-

Thirwell: -Oh yeah.

Graham: -And you indignantly said that you knew how to pronounce Rimbaud, because you did five years of French.

Thirlwell: Yes.

Graham: I was actually joking, because I knew you would know how to pronounce ‘Rimbaud’. (In the great song, Thirlwell rhymes the French poet's name with ‘limbo’ – Graham).

Thirlwell: Yeah, that’s kind of a ridiculous rhyme, you know.

Graham: Well it’s about Iggy Pop, and he’s quite a bookish character when he’s not being completely mad.

Thirlwell: He’s very intelligent.

Graham: Oh yeah, you can tell 100%, he’s a character. Now, there’s two songs that I noticed you sing in a foreign language – this is jumping all over the map with my questions – one is Mon Agonie Douce – not sure of the pronunciation. (Thirlwell nods) And the other is La Rua…

Thirlwell: La Rua Madureira, but I didn’t write that one.

Graham: No. (as I discovered in researching the interview, Nino Ferrer wrote the song – Graham)

Thirlwell: I wrote the music for Mon Agonie Douce and just felt that should be sung in French. And so I wrote the words with my limited French, and then I had a French-born person I know look at it and just adjust my grammar and things like that. And I’m writing another French song now for an as-yet-untitled album I’m doing in collaboration with (American composer) Simon Hanes. They are songs for the female voice. Just because it really feels like it should be in French. But I might sort of co-write that, because it’s going to be really complicated to nuance of what I want to say in that. I went on a deep dive about Serge Gainsbourg, because I love his work. I started reading a French Gainsbourg biography in the original language and then I gave up, thinking this is going to take me a year to read. I also wrote a song in Spanish. I don’t speak Spanish at all, but I had a Spanish translator translate it for me.

Graham: You do have a facility with language. I mean, was that song, Mon Agonie Douce (I pronounce it ‘douche’ and laugh at myself – Jim nods – Graham) “My agonised douche!” You said you wanted to write it in French. It seems like a heartbreak song, right, the guy’s angry about having his heart broken.

Thirlwell: Yep.

Graham: Love and romance are not the usual Foetus subjects to sing about, except in more negative ways about interpersonal relationship troubles. Would you say you’re shy in singing about these things?

Thirlwell. I’m not really shy about writing about those things but I’m more interested in other subjects. The world already has a lot of songs about love.

Graham: Now, I want to tie this into something. Lydia Lunch said of you that you’re reserved, sensitive and introspective, right?

Thirlwell. (Noncommittally) Hmmm.

Graham: Now I can believe that one hundred percent. But lyrically, your main themes, I would say, of your work, are alienation, extreme mental and emotional torment…

Thirlwell: (Nodding) Mmm.

Graham: …religion…

Thirlwell: (Nodding) Mmm.

Graham: …and there’s a kind of fairground approach to sexuality, a kind of Grand Guignol, cartoonish use of sex…

Thirlwell: (Nodding) Mmm.

Graham: Now, with Mon Agonie…and I’m not going to say the last word again, cos I’m not going to embarrass myself…is that an image that you’ve constructed for yourself aesthetically, from words, like a broad sweeping image, that you don’t like going against?

Thirlwell: Oh no, that’s not true at all. I do think that those things that you mentioned, that’s true, especially of my early work. I think something like Mon Agonie Douce, I chose to sing to in French because I felt more comfortable saying what I was saying in that song in French than I was saying it in English. It is pretty confessional, and it’s not the sort of song that I normally write in terms of the lyrical content. But I think that if you really wanted to put a broader kind of global conception around what I’ve done, I would say that a lot of my work is about politics.

And in the earlier work it’s more about personal politics, like the politics of relating in society and so on. And the later work is more about party politics. It’s more about universal themes and what’s happening in the world in the last thirty years. What’s ironic is that some of the songs that I wrote for the last Foetus album, which was Hide in 2010, the content of those songs are just impressions, they’re still applicable today. But we’re in a different political climate, we’re on different administrations, we’re in different wars, but it’s the same thing.

I think it’s important to sometimes de-specify what I’m talking about a little bit so the song doesn’t become dated. There’s a song I’m writing at the moment for the new Foetus album, which is a little bit more time-specific, y’know, about what’s going on now, and will probably date itself. But normally I want to keep it a bit more universal. And I don’t deny, especially off my early work, there’s a certain amount of…shock value in some of the songs. There’s confrontational elements and transgressive elements. Because I was coming out of the punk revolution, if you want, and through Dadaism and surrealism, and using this art form as a form of confrontation. ln addition I was taking a contrary viewpoint, where I would embody a character in a song, and what that character was espousing was actually the opposite of what I thought.

Graham: (Nodding) Aye, so you were being your own worst enemy then.

Thirlwell: I was being the Devil’s Advocate, yeah.

Graham: I haven’t heard all of your early work, but I was looking at some of the lyrics again today, like Mother, I Killed The Cat (the B-side of the 1982 Phillip and his Foetus Vibrations 7” – Graham), you know, bleak but hilariously funny.

Thirlwell: Yes, the title came from a film.

Graham: Some of the things you’re saying are tallying up with certain things I was going to ask anyway. Are you able to follow me okay when I’m speaking, I’m trying to enunciate each verb and vowel for the accent-uneducated ear.

Thirlwell: My mother’s Scottish…

Graham: (Chuckling ruefully) Aye, that’s true, we’ve talked aboot that. Right. You went to London in 1978, right?

Thirlwell: Yeah.

Graham: And you first recorded Foetus in 1981, it was O.K. Freeze Mother-

Thirlwell: -Well I recorded it in 1980, actually, it came out in ’81.

Graham: Right. What I was going to ask is this. You’re clearly a very literate, poetic person, you have an admiration for the written word-

Thirlwell: Mmm.

Graham: -that’s very obvious. There’s every kind of literary and poetic technique known to man in your early work, and right through. You’ve got stream of consciousness, you’re playing with words, kind of Joycean. But it’s interesting that you mentioned Doctor Seuss, because I can see Doctor Seuss in those early lyrics as well, you know, (Thirlwell sits with hand on chin, pondering, or maybe just being polite - Graham), that word-bounce and flow, but which is also quite Joycean.

Thirlwell: (Long pause) Hmm…

Graham: (Laughing) Lyrics that you haven’t thought about for thirty years..

Thirlwell: (Nodding indulgently) Ummm…yeah. I mean, I can’t see the through line to Doctor Seuss, apart from the fact that he makes things rhyme. I wouldn’t say that he was one of my muses.

Graham: No, but talking about rhyming…complex rhymes, surrealist, absurdist, the way that he does that sort of thing…don’t worry, you don’t have to admit to a sort of (laughing) Doctor Seuss fetish.

Thirlwell: There’s a lot of pop culture in that early stuff, too.

Graham: Yes, there is.

Thirlwell: And it’s unbridled, you know, it’s real stream of consciousness, those cultural references. But I’m interested in form, and internal rhymes, and also the times when you don’t rhyme. You know, cadence is very important in carrying a song, the vowels that you choose are important in carrying a song, too. So those are all things that have to be considered, although on the early stuff, probably the first ten years, I never really sang the song before I got into the studio and put on the headphones and did the vocal. I wrote the lyrics in advance but had never put it to the track. Now I really try things out, and I have a lot of different ways of approaching lyrics.

Graham: So what would these new different ways be, any examples?

Thirlwell: I know many people do this already, but I've started putting down vocals with a hand held mic, and sometimes starting with pure phonetics just for rhythm and melody. I fill in the words later.

Graham: Now, I keep going back to this, but…in 1980, you say you recorded the first Foetus single, and it was released in 1981. So you had a couple of years there, 78-80, where you were…what, just starting to learn how to record, or write lyrics?

Thirlwell: Yeah, well…78 to 80, when I arrived in London I was just finding my feet, I would go out to see a lot of music, I originally bought a bass guitar and a synthesiser and I was making music in my room, and eventually got together with pragVEC, which turned into Spec Records. We did an album, and making that album was kind of what made me realise I didn’t wanna work in a democratic way, I wanted to work in a way where my ideas succeeded or failed on their own merits, so that I didn’t have to accommodate other peoples’ ideas. Also in that period I started working with Steve Stapleton from Nurse With Wound, and that was very pivotal for me. So there was plenty happening in those eighteen months before the first Foetus record emerged.

Graham: Were you writing lyrics for songs, though, before the Foetus material?

Thirlwell: Yeah, well, I’d written a couple of stupid songs earlier on. No, I wouldn’t say I had a body of lyrics, I was kind of writing them for the projects, y’know. I always had notebooks with ideas in them. I don’t remember that the books had writing in them, I think they probably had a lot of drawings in them.

Graham: What was the writing in the insert for Nail, that you said you wrote in Helsinki jail? Was that just a way to expand on what the songs were about lyrically?

Thirlwell: Yes, it was to contextualize the through lines of the songs. The connective tissue was oppression.

Graham: You see, that’s what strikes me when I go back…and I did go through every lyric of yours that I could find, there are very, very few holes in the thing, which is good, but…it did strike me that right from the start your lyrics are fully formed. That it’s not just some dilettante thing, where you’re obviously feeling your way over years to be able to produce some sort of usable lyric. It wasn’t like you were learning to write in front of everybody, you are very clearly a poetic and literate person, your love of words comes through.

Thirlwell: I was definitely learning in front of everybody, and I think if I was to go back and evaluate…well, I am gonna do a book of annotated lyrics-

Graham: Aw, brilliant, brilliant!

Thirlwell: -and I think some of the things I would go back and find a bit cringey, but a lot of the stuff isn’t cringey as well.

Graham: No, it absolutely is not!

Thirlwell: Yeah.

Graham: There’s amazing stuff there! I mean, you’ve got…sometimes it’s just like stream of consciousness, but you’ll randomly throw in a bit of Shakespeare. Or free association, too, you’ve got “oil flow, Orwell, or well.”

(Follow this link to the second part of the interview: https://whorattledyourcage.blogspot.com/2024/10/bringing-foetus-to-halt-part-2.html)