Interview questions for Murdoc, 2D, Noodle & Russel of Gorillaz
Humo, August 2001
Good morning. Shall we proceed?
Russel: How you doin'? Can I get some of those frites with mayonnaise before we start?
Murdoc: You’re like some freak arse hippy with a constant bad case of the munchies. Just remember that you can’t go offloading in the chemical toilet on the bus, so your stomach will be personally responsible for that kilo of grease from here to our next stop.
Russel: And what’s your point exactly?
Some idiots on the street claim you’re merely cartoon characters, not actual human beings. Like Dame Edna is really a man, and Robbie Williams a woman, these people claim you are two-dimensional. Who spread this rumour (jealous competitors?) and why?
Russel: Listen, we’re for real, and do you want to know what the reality of this lifestyle is? This is how I’m living. Last night we had a pool party at my hotel while we were in N.Y.N.Y. You know, drinks, booty shakin’. Everyone bringing their cars. The cars tearing up my lawn with their hydraulics. I got whiplash. But someone invited The Alkoholiks, who threw up in the pool. I’m told Mariah was there walking around with these two enormous jugs, of Tequila. I’m telling you, her jugs are huge! So then you get all the neighbourhood doggs turning up. Snoop, Nate, the whole Dogg Pound. So now I gotta get room service to clean up all the crap. I got Warren G “regulating” all over the place. I tell you, keeping it real comes with bills and one mother of a hangover, so don’t come at me with none of that faggot bullshit. You get me?
Murdoc: What on earth do you mean by that? That’s just the type of second-hand, meaningless arse offering I’d expect to hear from some middle-class, west London tit in a pair of engineered Levi’s, shouting down his mobile phone to his retarded east end, media, coke, flip-flop whore of a girlfriend.
Worse, I’ve heard it said that you are really Belgian. Isn’t it time to come out of the closet and be proud of your heritage and lineage?
Murdoc: Last time I went there, a load of Goths tried to beat me up. Luckily I had 2D there to throw in their path.
2D: No, last time we were there you had that grubby list of swingers clubs that you’d got from some porno mag, and the evening ended when you threw me in the path of a couple of sweaty middle-aged businessmen trying to rut some jizz covered minger.
Murdoc: Well... Goths... libidinous Belgian businessmen, it’s an easy mistake to make.
Apparently, (to make matters worse), a Belgian girl has just filed a paternity suit claiming Murdoc made her pregnant. Police claim they subsequently got a phone call from someone with a Japanese accent who claimed this was tosh, “as Murdoc can’t get it up”. What’s the real story?
Murdoc: Listen, there was so much spunk on the surfaces of that place that I was happy not to end up pregnant myself.
Russel: Damn, I’ve gone right off of this mayonnaise.
2D: Would that be Jean-Claude Van Damme?
Russel: No, it wouldn’t.
Which pop star wished to join Gorillaz, but was vetoed?
Murdoc: I'm not gonna even contemplate that gaggle of butt ends! Pop music can be a glorious, uplifting, life-affirming revelation for the senses, or it can be a calculated soulless burden upon the pocket money of the youth all around the world. I hate all pop because that’s all it is. Same as it ever was. It hasn’t moved on at all. Pop used to be innovative. And now it’s just become as traditional and formulaic as Rock. It’s no fun.
If you had to design a new “designer drug”, what should it be able to do?
Murdoc: Actually, funnily enough, some friends of mine did invent a new drug. It was called “Normal”. It was a combination of all the other drugs mixed together, very precisely I might add, to make you go up, down, into it, out of it, and back into it again. The whole effect left you feeling normal. But really normal. Intensely normal. So normal, in fact, that it hurts.
Similarly, what should the counterfeit, illegally distributed Gorillaz dolls that are available in central Europe be able to do?
2D: I guess the advantage that any central European counterfeiter might have over any legitimate toy companies is that they’d be able to have the dolls smoking. It’d be great, you could fill them up with talcum powder and press a little button on their backs to make me blow smoke rings. Cool.
Murdoc: I invented a doll once called ‘Suicide Dolly”. “It laughs, it cries, it wants to die”. Weirdly, no toy manufacturers wanted to put it into production.
Rumour has it Gorillaz will play the Last Night of The Proms at the Royal Albert Hall, setting up a “multimedia extravaganza”. What should we expect?
Murdoc: Do you have anything of any relevance to ask us, or are you just going to dribble on with your second-rate jokes masquerading as questions? Light entertainment is not my forte. I may have had my own golf course built in my rooftop penthouse in Kong Studios but that’s because I’ve joined the higher echelons of rock royalty, not because I plan on hanging out with game show hosts, chat show interviewers and would be stand up comedians such as yourself.
Some of your tunes are eminently danceable. What is your idea of “dirty dancing”?
Murdoc: What kind of an answer do you honestly expect from a question like that? OK, Patrick Swayzee performing a dirty protest. Standing there covered head to toe in his own mess. No, no, wait. Someone else’s. Is that what you expected?
Russel: Probably not, but it’s what expected.
Is penis size an issue? Are communal showers installed at your pad? And whose Tamagotchi needs constant attention to prevent it from going limp?
Russel: You keep this crap up and I’m going to get angry, and you don’t want that ‘cause I’ll be all over you like the rash across your nasty ass.
Murdoc: Speaking of nasty rashes, Russ. What’s that green stuff all over your neck?
Russel: Aw man, don’t! That’s what you get if your fine, gold medallions turn out to be low-grade copper! Why d’you have to mention it, Muds? I mean, speaking of rashes and penises, this might be a good time to bring up your visit to St. Mary’s Hospital.
Murdoc: Next?
If either Tank Girl or Lara Croft moved in, would you fight over them? What do you think she’s like in the sack?
Russel: Of what relevance are either of those two late twentieth-century, consumer society anti-heroes? Thinking of publishing a fifteen years too-late, post-modern, deconstruction of simulacra?
2D: Yeah! Why would you want to put girls in a sack?
Murdoc: For the same reason as kittens.
Russel: At this point, Murdoc, I’d like to remind you that we have a ten-year-old in our midst. So let's keep it light!
Murdoc: ‘Fraid that’d be no good, my big old buddy. You gotta put rocks in the bag to make sure it sinks.
Is it a coincidence that both Russel and 2D look vaguely like Liam Gallagher (same simian yet strangely alluring features)?
Murdoc: In what way does a three-hundred-pound, squat black man with no eyes look like Gallagher?
Russel: Hey, yo! I’m two ninety-eight. Don’t you go misrepresentin’.
Most of your songs manage to be both worldly-wise, project urban sophistication, and yet at the same time, ooze a tender, lovely pastoral, childish innocence. Which one of you is the innocent one?
Russel: At the risk of embarrassing ‘D, I’d have to agree with your sentiments and say that it was he who embellishes our work with those layers of subtlety that are both naive and paradoxically, because of that, at the same time sophisticated,
Murdoc: Don’t worry about embarrassing him, Russ. You wanna worry about embarrassing yourself, “...both naive and para... blah, blah, blah.” The boy's a moron, pure and extremely simple! Anything you hear in our work is down to me, alright!?
Do any of you have any tips for lousy Belgian lovers (we have two of them – albeit they are of English descent)?
Russel: With that last question, you were beginning to approach asking us a question about something we might have a vague interest in or some knowledge about. Then you had to go and spoil it. Why don’t you try again? This is not quite what I had in mind when I was told we’d be speaking to Belgium’s greatest rock journo for its biggest music paper. I mean, are you for real? Is this the type of shit you laid on that dull little rat boy Yorke?
We had that terrible version of Popstars here recently, but we also have the Rock Rally (the Belgian equivalent of your Battle of the Bands, which spawned, amongst others, Deus, Hooverphonic, and Evil Superstars). What is your advice to participants in this year’s edition?
2D: I didn’t know that there had been any good version of Popstars?
And, in connection with the previous question: what do you think a Belgian band sounds like anyway?
2D: Plastic Bertrand? Oh, hold on. Aren’t our great look-a-like band “Das Apes” from Belgium?
Murdoc: No, they’re from Germany. I think it’s a stretch for anyone's imagination to believe that lot look anything like us
Russel: Oh come on, ‘D, they were a traveling troupe of performing bears from deep within the Black Forest. I gotta agree with Mud’s on this one.
2D: Well, at least they got the hair right!
Russel: Man, I’m bald so I don’t know what are you talking about!
Christina Spears and Britney Aguilera are groupies who claim to have slept with both Ricky Martin and 2D, and claim “we couldn’t tell them apart”. True?
Murdoc: Who are you, the doctor of Ha Ha? D’you think I’m not a busy man? You talk in riddles, you want that I should have somebody sent 'round to kill you? How about them apples, Hardy Ha Ha? Who’s laughing now?
Russel: The man sells a couple of records and he thinks he’s Robert De Niro already. He does have a point though.
We have, thankfully, no gutter press in Belgium. Please give your fans over here an example of an outrageous rumour in one of your tabloids, to give them an idea of what they’re like.
2D: Funnily enough, one of the worst papers we have over here, The Sun, has been responsible for some of the best reporting about us over in England. I’ve been really surprised.
Murdoc: I hardly think that on this basis we can start praising The Sun. They asked me to comment on Hear’Say's bad ticket sales last week for a piece entitled “Popstars to Flopstars.” When I finally thought of something to say, they told me that I wasn’t being serious enough! Serious, I ask you. How on earth are you supposed to be serious about a bunch of nobodies who have fallen out of favour with the under fives? This from a paper who can run a whole front cover photograph of Victoria Beckham because she might have had her lip pierced, then give the rest of the paper over to her retarded husband's kneecap.
At MTV, they have this plasticine figure wrestling contest. Who would you put in the ring?
Murdoc: I’m bloody warning you, if you want someone to be a bit “we are weird” then you’re out of your depth. I’ll fuck you up and make you my bitch, mate. Why don’t we chat about your huge collection of downloaded porn MPEGs? The ones you’ve beavered away on the office server, in seemingly harmless files, named after bland adjectives. Which you then loop and watch over and over again masturbating, stone-faced, as every fifteen seconds a semi-conscious Asian teenager's track-marked skin is covered in a gritty web of grey German spunk, ay? How do you like them apples?
Russel: I don’t agree with Murdoc too often, at least not on a moral level, but he’s got a point. Please, let’s try and take this to a higher level,
What is the most extreme Rock ’n' Roll behaviour you’ve indulged in?
2D: I thought Murdoc’s trick on the plane was pretty funny.
Russel: I hardly call drawing all over my face while I’m asleep Rock ‘n Roll. It’s hardly Ian Browne, is it?
2D: You’re just upset because of what he wrote!
Russel: Well, I fail to see what’s funny about the statement “Too fat to live, too greedy to fast”.
Whose fifteen minutes of fame (as Andy Warhol said) have gone on too long?
Murdoc: At a wild guess, I’d say yours
I attended a gig you did in London, a couple of months ago. You played behind a curtain. A guy standing next to me suggested this was because you’re really Westlife, and everything was taped (he did have a Mancunian accent). Your comments, please.
Murdoc: I’m glad you mention our gigs. You wouldn’t think they were from the media scrum that surrounded them and the amount of vitriol that has been issued from impotent, alcoholic, bitter, middle-brow hacks about them! We’ve been accused of everything from racism to manipulation when all I’ve got back from the audience is an amazing buzz, a reciprocated high. I feel like King Kong when I’m up on stage, no, I feel like King Dong! Yeah, it’s not an ordinary gig but we’re no ordinary band!
With a lot of video games, level seven is the hardest one, or at least special. What would we find at “Level 7” if you designed a video game?
2D: We had a game made when Clint Eastwood came out called Noodle Fight. Funnily enough, there was a huge boss gorilla on level seven.
Prince sang “23 positions in a one-night stand”. Now, we Belgians believe quantity is not quality, so let me amend that Prince quote to: what happened during your wildest night of romance?
Murdoc: Okay, I’ve had enough now. I can feel you feebly twisting and contorting your pathetic psyche trying to offer us some form of hip, satirical, and oh-so-irreverent line of questioning. Stop it, you’re embarrassing yourself, and quite frankly, you’re doing my fucking head in.
Why aren’t you at number one in the charts? Conspiracy?
Russel: Our singles and album have been in every chart across the globe since the day of their release. In England, our album entered the top ten twice in the time it took Hear’Say to appear and disappear. Longevity is what counts, not just flashes in the pan.
Any hidden messages in your tunes? What is heard when you play the last line of your single backward?
Murdoc: There’s nothing hidden about my message to the kids. I’m loud and I’m proud, and I say smoking is cool and, for that matter, snogging. Love bites and Chinese burns are all cool too. Remember, nobody likes a four-eyed brainiac teacher's pet, so bunk off and stay at home watching crappy daytime TV! Hail Satan!
It is said that the best indicator of real fame is if the person in question has their own stalker. Do you? Bonus points if it’s a famous person stalking you.
Murdoc: I tell you, everywhere I’ve been recently, every corner I’ve turned, every plane, train, or automobile I’ve stepped out of, those two goons Hewlett and Albarn have been there, grinning like idiots. I wouldn’t mind, I mean, they obviously both have a lot of time on their hands now they’ve retired and it is I guess only understandable that they’d want to try and bask in some of my reflected glory. I do object to the cheeky bastards getting their own press agents though! If I have to read one more time about their involvement in my band, I’m going to sue! I don’t know what the world is coming to, you give people a chance and this is how they repay you.
Russel: How you doin'? Can I get some of those frites with mayonnaise before we start?
Murdoc: You’re like some freak arse hippy with a constant bad case of the munchies. Just remember that you can’t go offloading in the chemical toilet on the bus, so your stomach will be personally responsible for that kilo of grease from here to our next stop.
Russel: And what’s your point exactly?
Some idiots on the street claim you’re merely cartoon characters, not actual human beings. Like Dame Edna is really a man, and Robbie Williams a woman, these people claim you are two-dimensional. Who spread this rumour (jealous competitors?) and why?
Russel: Listen, we’re for real, and do you want to know what the reality of this lifestyle is? This is how I’m living. Last night we had a pool party at my hotel while we were in N.Y.N.Y. You know, drinks, booty shakin’. Everyone bringing their cars. The cars tearing up my lawn with their hydraulics. I got whiplash. But someone invited The Alkoholiks, who threw up in the pool. I’m told Mariah was there walking around with these two enormous jugs, of Tequila. I’m telling you, her jugs are huge! So then you get all the neighbourhood doggs turning up. Snoop, Nate, the whole Dogg Pound. So now I gotta get room service to clean up all the crap. I got Warren G “regulating” all over the place. I tell you, keeping it real comes with bills and one mother of a hangover, so don’t come at me with none of that faggot bullshit. You get me?
Murdoc: What on earth do you mean by that? That’s just the type of second-hand, meaningless arse offering I’d expect to hear from some middle-class, west London tit in a pair of engineered Levi’s, shouting down his mobile phone to his retarded east end, media, coke, flip-flop whore of a girlfriend.
Worse, I’ve heard it said that you are really Belgian. Isn’t it time to come out of the closet and be proud of your heritage and lineage?
Murdoc: Last time I went there, a load of Goths tried to beat me up. Luckily I had 2D there to throw in their path.
2D: No, last time we were there you had that grubby list of swingers clubs that you’d got from some porno mag, and the evening ended when you threw me in the path of a couple of sweaty middle-aged businessmen trying to rut some jizz covered minger.
Murdoc: Well... Goths... libidinous Belgian businessmen, it’s an easy mistake to make.
Apparently, (to make matters worse), a Belgian girl has just filed a paternity suit claiming Murdoc made her pregnant. Police claim they subsequently got a phone call from someone with a Japanese accent who claimed this was tosh, “as Murdoc can’t get it up”. What’s the real story?
Murdoc: Listen, there was so much spunk on the surfaces of that place that I was happy not to end up pregnant myself.
Russel: Damn, I’ve gone right off of this mayonnaise.
2D: Would that be Jean-Claude Van Damme?
Russel: No, it wouldn’t.
Which pop star wished to join Gorillaz, but was vetoed?
Murdoc: I'm not gonna even contemplate that gaggle of butt ends! Pop music can be a glorious, uplifting, life-affirming revelation for the senses, or it can be a calculated soulless burden upon the pocket money of the youth all around the world. I hate all pop because that’s all it is. Same as it ever was. It hasn’t moved on at all. Pop used to be innovative. And now it’s just become as traditional and formulaic as Rock. It’s no fun.
If you had to design a new “designer drug”, what should it be able to do?
Murdoc: Actually, funnily enough, some friends of mine did invent a new drug. It was called “Normal”. It was a combination of all the other drugs mixed together, very precisely I might add, to make you go up, down, into it, out of it, and back into it again. The whole effect left you feeling normal. But really normal. Intensely normal. So normal, in fact, that it hurts.
Similarly, what should the counterfeit, illegally distributed Gorillaz dolls that are available in central Europe be able to do?
2D: I guess the advantage that any central European counterfeiter might have over any legitimate toy companies is that they’d be able to have the dolls smoking. It’d be great, you could fill them up with talcum powder and press a little button on their backs to make me blow smoke rings. Cool.
Murdoc: I invented a doll once called ‘Suicide Dolly”. “It laughs, it cries, it wants to die”. Weirdly, no toy manufacturers wanted to put it into production.
Rumour has it Gorillaz will play the Last Night of The Proms at the Royal Albert Hall, setting up a “multimedia extravaganza”. What should we expect?
Murdoc: Do you have anything of any relevance to ask us, or are you just going to dribble on with your second-rate jokes masquerading as questions? Light entertainment is not my forte. I may have had my own golf course built in my rooftop penthouse in Kong Studios but that’s because I’ve joined the higher echelons of rock royalty, not because I plan on hanging out with game show hosts, chat show interviewers and would be stand up comedians such as yourself.
Some of your tunes are eminently danceable. What is your idea of “dirty dancing”?
Murdoc: What kind of an answer do you honestly expect from a question like that? OK, Patrick Swayzee performing a dirty protest. Standing there covered head to toe in his own mess. No, no, wait. Someone else’s. Is that what you expected?
Russel: Probably not, but it’s what expected.
Is penis size an issue? Are communal showers installed at your pad? And whose Tamagotchi needs constant attention to prevent it from going limp?
Russel: You keep this crap up and I’m going to get angry, and you don’t want that ‘cause I’ll be all over you like the rash across your nasty ass.
Murdoc: Speaking of nasty rashes, Russ. What’s that green stuff all over your neck?
Russel: Aw man, don’t! That’s what you get if your fine, gold medallions turn out to be low-grade copper! Why d’you have to mention it, Muds? I mean, speaking of rashes and penises, this might be a good time to bring up your visit to St. Mary’s Hospital.
Murdoc: Next?
If either Tank Girl or Lara Croft moved in, would you fight over them? What do you think she’s like in the sack?
Russel: Of what relevance are either of those two late twentieth-century, consumer society anti-heroes? Thinking of publishing a fifteen years too-late, post-modern, deconstruction of simulacra?
2D: Yeah! Why would you want to put girls in a sack?
Murdoc: For the same reason as kittens.
Russel: At this point, Murdoc, I’d like to remind you that we have a ten-year-old in our midst. So let's keep it light!
Murdoc: ‘Fraid that’d be no good, my big old buddy. You gotta put rocks in the bag to make sure it sinks.
Is it a coincidence that both Russel and 2D look vaguely like Liam Gallagher (same simian yet strangely alluring features)?
Murdoc: In what way does a three-hundred-pound, squat black man with no eyes look like Gallagher?
Russel: Hey, yo! I’m two ninety-eight. Don’t you go misrepresentin’.
Most of your songs manage to be both worldly-wise, project urban sophistication, and yet at the same time, ooze a tender, lovely pastoral, childish innocence. Which one of you is the innocent one?
Russel: At the risk of embarrassing ‘D, I’d have to agree with your sentiments and say that it was he who embellishes our work with those layers of subtlety that are both naive and paradoxically, because of that, at the same time sophisticated,
Murdoc: Don’t worry about embarrassing him, Russ. You wanna worry about embarrassing yourself, “...both naive and para... blah, blah, blah.” The boy's a moron, pure and extremely simple! Anything you hear in our work is down to me, alright!?
Do any of you have any tips for lousy Belgian lovers (we have two of them – albeit they are of English descent)?
Russel: With that last question, you were beginning to approach asking us a question about something we might have a vague interest in or some knowledge about. Then you had to go and spoil it. Why don’t you try again? This is not quite what I had in mind when I was told we’d be speaking to Belgium’s greatest rock journo for its biggest music paper. I mean, are you for real? Is this the type of shit you laid on that dull little rat boy Yorke?
We had that terrible version of Popstars here recently, but we also have the Rock Rally (the Belgian equivalent of your Battle of the Bands, which spawned, amongst others, Deus, Hooverphonic, and Evil Superstars). What is your advice to participants in this year’s edition?
2D: I didn’t know that there had been any good version of Popstars?
And, in connection with the previous question: what do you think a Belgian band sounds like anyway?
2D: Plastic Bertrand? Oh, hold on. Aren’t our great look-a-like band “Das Apes” from Belgium?
Murdoc: No, they’re from Germany. I think it’s a stretch for anyone's imagination to believe that lot look anything like us
Russel: Oh come on, ‘D, they were a traveling troupe of performing bears from deep within the Black Forest. I gotta agree with Mud’s on this one.
2D: Well, at least they got the hair right!
Russel: Man, I’m bald so I don’t know what are you talking about!
Christina Spears and Britney Aguilera are groupies who claim to have slept with both Ricky Martin and 2D, and claim “we couldn’t tell them apart”. True?
Murdoc: Who are you, the doctor of Ha Ha? D’you think I’m not a busy man? You talk in riddles, you want that I should have somebody sent 'round to kill you? How about them apples, Hardy Ha Ha? Who’s laughing now?
Russel: The man sells a couple of records and he thinks he’s Robert De Niro already. He does have a point though.
We have, thankfully, no gutter press in Belgium. Please give your fans over here an example of an outrageous rumour in one of your tabloids, to give them an idea of what they’re like.
2D: Funnily enough, one of the worst papers we have over here, The Sun, has been responsible for some of the best reporting about us over in England. I’ve been really surprised.
Murdoc: I hardly think that on this basis we can start praising The Sun. They asked me to comment on Hear’Say's bad ticket sales last week for a piece entitled “Popstars to Flopstars.” When I finally thought of something to say, they told me that I wasn’t being serious enough! Serious, I ask you. How on earth are you supposed to be serious about a bunch of nobodies who have fallen out of favour with the under fives? This from a paper who can run a whole front cover photograph of Victoria Beckham because she might have had her lip pierced, then give the rest of the paper over to her retarded husband's kneecap.
At MTV, they have this plasticine figure wrestling contest. Who would you put in the ring?
Murdoc: I’m bloody warning you, if you want someone to be a bit “we are weird” then you’re out of your depth. I’ll fuck you up and make you my bitch, mate. Why don’t we chat about your huge collection of downloaded porn MPEGs? The ones you’ve beavered away on the office server, in seemingly harmless files, named after bland adjectives. Which you then loop and watch over and over again masturbating, stone-faced, as every fifteen seconds a semi-conscious Asian teenager's track-marked skin is covered in a gritty web of grey German spunk, ay? How do you like them apples?
Russel: I don’t agree with Murdoc too often, at least not on a moral level, but he’s got a point. Please, let’s try and take this to a higher level,
What is the most extreme Rock ’n' Roll behaviour you’ve indulged in?
2D: I thought Murdoc’s trick on the plane was pretty funny.
Russel: I hardly call drawing all over my face while I’m asleep Rock ‘n Roll. It’s hardly Ian Browne, is it?
2D: You’re just upset because of what he wrote!
Russel: Well, I fail to see what’s funny about the statement “Too fat to live, too greedy to fast”.
Whose fifteen minutes of fame (as Andy Warhol said) have gone on too long?
Murdoc: At a wild guess, I’d say yours
I attended a gig you did in London, a couple of months ago. You played behind a curtain. A guy standing next to me suggested this was because you’re really Westlife, and everything was taped (he did have a Mancunian accent). Your comments, please.
Murdoc: I’m glad you mention our gigs. You wouldn’t think they were from the media scrum that surrounded them and the amount of vitriol that has been issued from impotent, alcoholic, bitter, middle-brow hacks about them! We’ve been accused of everything from racism to manipulation when all I’ve got back from the audience is an amazing buzz, a reciprocated high. I feel like King Kong when I’m up on stage, no, I feel like King Dong! Yeah, it’s not an ordinary gig but we’re no ordinary band!
With a lot of video games, level seven is the hardest one, or at least special. What would we find at “Level 7” if you designed a video game?
2D: We had a game made when Clint Eastwood came out called Noodle Fight. Funnily enough, there was a huge boss gorilla on level seven.
Prince sang “23 positions in a one-night stand”. Now, we Belgians believe quantity is not quality, so let me amend that Prince quote to: what happened during your wildest night of romance?
Murdoc: Okay, I’ve had enough now. I can feel you feebly twisting and contorting your pathetic psyche trying to offer us some form of hip, satirical, and oh-so-irreverent line of questioning. Stop it, you’re embarrassing yourself, and quite frankly, you’re doing my fucking head in.
Why aren’t you at number one in the charts? Conspiracy?
Russel: Our singles and album have been in every chart across the globe since the day of their release. In England, our album entered the top ten twice in the time it took Hear’Say to appear and disappear. Longevity is what counts, not just flashes in the pan.
Any hidden messages in your tunes? What is heard when you play the last line of your single backward?
Murdoc: There’s nothing hidden about my message to the kids. I’m loud and I’m proud, and I say smoking is cool and, for that matter, snogging. Love bites and Chinese burns are all cool too. Remember, nobody likes a four-eyed brainiac teacher's pet, so bunk off and stay at home watching crappy daytime TV! Hail Satan!
It is said that the best indicator of real fame is if the person in question has their own stalker. Do you? Bonus points if it’s a famous person stalking you.
Murdoc: I tell you, everywhere I’ve been recently, every corner I’ve turned, every plane, train, or automobile I’ve stepped out of, those two goons Hewlett and Albarn have been there, grinning like idiots. I wouldn’t mind, I mean, they obviously both have a lot of time on their hands now they’ve retired and it is I guess only understandable that they’d want to try and bask in some of my reflected glory. I do object to the cheeky bastards getting their own press agents though! If I have to read one more time about their involvement in my band, I’m going to sue! I don’t know what the world is coming to, you give people a chance and this is how they repay you.