whig out

Rip It Up, Issue 197, 1 December 1993, Page 12

whig out

It's freezing and the snow is falling on the ground at B:2opm in Cinncinatti, Ohio when I call up Greg Dulli, singer/ songwriter from the Afghan Whigs. Now Greg has been called 'difficult' by other music writers, but I knew they'd be wrong, he is charm personified! He talks in whisky/cigarette tones, and asks me what my name is, I tell him and he repeats it in the most astonishing way, making me blush over the phone ...This is gonna be good! He asks where. I'm calling from and 1 ask him if he knows where New Zealand is. . "Of course I do," he replies indignantly "It's that little island down a bit from Australia where mammals that lay eggs live." "Umm, yeah right,” I say, "and lotsa sheep." "Sheep are nervous over there too aren't they?" "Ahh, yes I guess they are," I reply happily. I like a man who talks of mammals and sheep. From the time their debut album Up In It was released in 1990 on Sub Pop to now with their

Electra release Gentlemen there has been an obvious change to something more focused. Greg now sings passionately about his awful relationships instead of screaming about white trash parties and retards. "I think I've become a better songwriter in the years between those two, 1 think I've become less interested in screaming and noise and more interested in space and songwriting." I he subject matter on Gentlemen relies strongly on relationships, mostly the dark side. I ask him if women have been giving him a hard time lately. He laughs a deep, wheezy laugh and says "Oh , they always give me a hard time, I think I just started to notice it more recently." We spend a bit of time exchanging laughs over that one. "Just more recently?" I ask doubtfully. "Oh, they've given me a hard time always . . . but I let them." What a charitable man. The Afghan Whigs were the last of the 'famous' Sub Pop bands to leave the label. "I was happy on Sub Pop,

they're my friends, they're a great label that are beginning an evolution, they're signing a wider variety of acts, and they would be choking themselves if they stayed with some sort of grunge or whatever, but we'd just reached a point where it was hard to get our records out in a lot of places outside the States. The independent distrubution system in America is very shitty . . . I'm a pretty happy guy anyway (laffs) but you wouldn't know that from listening to our records. 1 think we realised that jon Electra) our records were getting out to places where they'd never got before, and when you're a songwriter and. musician you want as many people to hear you as you can." Are all your lyrics based on personal experience then? "Ah no, I come equipped with a fertile imagination . . . anything's true! Anything that you can think of has happened. I mean, you can think something up and it's probably happened to someone. Sometimes it's just observational, people are just an endless supply of material, plus y'know, writing

about animals is, we 11... I think all songs are about people, all songs tend to lean toward a relationship in some way, whether it's a happy one or whatever. Mine just tend to be a bit more . . . um, dark." Yes, lots of your lyrics I can surely relate to. "That's 'cause you're a human being," he says. Well thanks for acknowledging that, some people aren't. "That's true," he says. By the time you read this, the Afghan Whigs will have just done a gig with Greg's Motown hero, Martha Reeves of Martha Reeves and the Vendallas, which will have been quite an unusual combination. "I'm looking very much forward to it, she's a hero of mine. Someone at the record company asked me if I wanted to do anything special in Detroit and I just kinda half jokingly said yeah, how about I sing with Martha Reeves, and the next thing I knew they had called her and she said okay." (laffs) Do you think Martha will find it unusual? "I donT think so at all, I'm a singer and she's a singer, we have that in common." So Greg is obviously a big Motown fan, does he have any other major musical likings? "I listen to everything, I spent my childhood kinda vacilating between listening to soul music and listening to country and western with my grandparents, cause they lived in West Virginia in the hills, and I listened to punk rock when I got to college, certainly Husker Du made a big impression. When I started writing songs 1 got into lyricists like Leonard Cohen and Nick Cave ... I tend to look at bands that scratch out their own identity." Which the Afghan Whigs certainly do with aplomb! Buy their album and discover what it is like to truly be in the company of a'Gentleman' like Greg. SHIRLEY CHARLES