The Unofficial Embassy of Ireland on the Telly
Klan Kosovo, Kosovo’s national TV network visited the embassy for the opening today. We did our best to conduct the interview in Albanian, but thankfully the translators took over to save our blushes.
The Unofficial Embassy
Things are proceeding pretty well at the Embassy in Prishtina. We raised the flag and even got our first lines in the local press.
If you want to check out how we’re doing, click on the link.
The Unofficial Embassy of Ireland.
There is currently no Irish Embassy in Kosovo, so we decided to set one up. For the month of February, we’ll be living in the Dragadon area of Prishtina, Kosovo and giving out free cups of lovely Irish tea to anyone who wants to call by. We’re also going to be running an Irish language week, Irish sports days and an exhibition. Kosovo is the newest country in the world, but still only 65 countries in the world recognise its independence.
This is a link to our blog: unofficial embassy
Catch the Pigeon
This is an article I did recently for Ryanair Magazine. It’s about pigeon racing in Dublin. Con ‘O Donoghue took the photographs and got a tonne of pigeon shit all over his lenses.
Finding a pigeon in Dublin is not hard. All you’ve got to do is locate a fast-food outlet, a stretch of water or a statue of a patriot and there you’ll see them in their thousands. Finding pigeon fanciers, the men who breed, train and race the birds to Olympic levels of athleticism, is a lot harder.
There are about 4,000 fanciers in the city today, yet 10 years ago there were double that amount. The preferred sport of taxi drivers, gangsters and the working classes is entering its twilight years but, as we discovered on a recent weekend, there’s life in the old bird yet.
Pascal Mulcahy, 74, is secretary of the Dublin Homing Club. A short, chirpy man – not unlike the birds he keeps – he’s been running the pigeon show in Ireland for longer than most
people care to remember. “In some quarters of Dublin I’m the biggest b**tard there is,” he says, dunking a digestive biscuit into a cup of very milky tea. Pascal feeds his favourite birds from his mouth, and never misses an opportunity to talk about his grandchildren – his “mini pigeon fanciers”. It’s hard to see how anyone could see anything mean in his character. “Well, I’ve had to step on a few toes to keep people in their place,” he says. “Fellas want to win. There’s a lot of emotion involved in bird racing.”
Pascal is the oldest pigeon fancier in Ireland. He’s been racing for 64 years. He bought his first pigeon aged 10 on Capel Street, on the north side of Dublin, in a small bird shop that’s now a Filipino food store. He started breeding them as a teenager. “I’d bring a half dozen down to Capel Street of a Saturday to sell, and they’d be back at the house that evening. I trained them to climb out of the trap. We all did that to make a bit of extra cash,” he says.
Small pennies back then, today champion pigeons are sometimes sold for as much as €250,000. Of course that means they don’t race them anymore. Instead, they just set them up in a plush coop with the highest quality straw floors and the best bird feed, and allow them to breed their retirement years away.
“Money doesn’t come into it at our level,” he says. “You do it just so you can see your name up on the board when you go to the clubhouse. It’s a chance to slag the other lads.”
Pigeon racers fit more than one stereotype. Many drive taxis, a few are wheeler-dealer types, and you’ll come across the odd out-andout gangster. The flash BMWs in the driveway of the clubhouse – a tired-looking redbrick building on the shoulder of the River Camac – are probably owned by the latter. The building itself is only used by pigeons and their fanciers, so doesn’t need to be anything better.
Community and loyalty – alongside the friendly rivalry that maintains the sport’s competitive edge – are an important part of pigeon racing. Pigeon fanciers help each other by sharing transport, maintenance costs and even offering free emergency surgery when fellow fanciers’ birds are injured. On some occasions the men have even organised bird auctions to raise money for the widows of fanciers who have passed on.
The club is full of characters. There’s an elderly Italian gent who claims to be the long lost nephew of the real Don Corleone, a guy they refer to as Kirk Douglas’s body double, and then Heno, the master tactician of the north-side pigeon-racing league – who studies the art of breeding and employs the latest technology to get the best form from his birds.
And form, in a nutshell, is horniness. The hornier you can get a bird the faster it flies home. Cocks are separated from hens for long periods. They are allowed to see each through the wire meshing in their lofts but not allowed to touch. In some cases, they are even shown their partners having sex with other birds to drive them mad with jealousy. Science, feeding and all manner of psychological trickery are employed, but at the end of the day it’s the pigeon most desperate to get some who wins the race.
The pigeons’ lofts are state-of-the-art, with heating, electronic sensors and surround-sound stereo systems to keep them relaxed before the races, and maybe to set the mood for when they get back. It’s important that their home is a sanctuary where they can relax in preparation for their marathon journeys. Irish and English birds fly home from as far away as France, Belgium and Germany. Some races can be as long as 1,800km. And with birds flying no faster than 80km/h, they can be gone for a couple of days.
But that’s not the race we’re attending. Ours is a mere sprint – a couple of hundred kilometres from Tipperary to Dublin. “The birds will be back before you are,” says Pascal. “Well, apart from the stupid ones.”
At 6am, 7,000 birds in two trucks make the trip south from Dublin. The fanciers drink tea and wait for a phone call from a man called the “liberator”, who’s holed up in an office in Dublin studying the day’s weather to find the best opening. The phone eventually rings, the cups of tea are put to one side, the conveyors man their posts, and in the blink of a camera shutter the blue sky turns to feathers and dust. After a couple of minutes circling trying to find their bearings, they head in the direction of Dublin.
“How do they know which way to go?” I ask. “It’s in the eyesight,” someone says. “No it’s not, it’s their hearing,” comes another voice. “Will you get away with that! They follow the road signs just like you and me,” says someone else.
Pigeons’ homing devices are in their heads, and work like solar compasses. But studies have shown that birds familiar with certain routes will follow landmarks like motorways and streets, even turning at junctions on their way home. And that’s where we lose them. The first group of birds dive off into west Dublin, then the last of the flock make their way out across the city to Swords and Howth.
At 10.36am, Pascal clocks his first bird home. It’s good enough to win second place and a share of the pools. The next day he gets a phone call from Carlow asking if he is missing a blue-tipped pigeon that had landed exhausted on the doorstep of a local pigeon fancier. “He was probably caught in an east wind. The bird might have flown halfway across the country and back – they’d just keep flying until they drop,” says Pascal.
Pigeons aren’t beautiful birds. In fact, they’re kind of the ugly ducklings of the skies. But they make up for that with their determination and a sex drive that hunger, exhaustion and high winds only temper. As we leave Pascal’s house that afternoon, the cooing in the bird coop rises noticeably. The winners must be getting their just rewards.
One that got away
Not just every so often, but often enough that it doesn’t hurt so bad anymore, articles get commissioned and then never printed. This piece was below was supposed to go in Electronic Beats ‘Back to the Future’ issue. They were looking for “thought-provoking” articles that reflected the decade we’re just about to leave. I gave them this. “This” wasn’t quite what they were looking for. They told me they’d illustrate it with some lovely rabbits. That would have been nice and probably a lot better than what I came up with.
Conor Creighton asks if the greatest development of the last decade has been our increased talent for solo sex, does this mean the beginning of the end for mankind?
Generation Masturbation
If you’re uncertain about your future as a human, take a train out to the countryside and spend an afternoon listening to the rabbits. The average rabbit conversation goes a little something like this:
Rabbit 1: Hey, have I seen you round the warren before?
Rabbit 2: No, I just got in today. It’s a really swell place you’ve got here.
Rabbit 1: Indeed, that it is… so, hmm, do you want to have sex?
Rabbit 2: Super! Just give me a second to put my bags somewhere.
Rabbits, like humans, are passionate creatures. Put a bunch of long ears together in the morning and by teatime their number will have trebled. It’s what rabbits do. They breed until there’s more rabbit than pasture, then some nasty manmade virus comes along, and quicker than you can say ‘rabbit stew’, they’re back down to just one cottontail sat in a field practising pick-up lines on the sheep. The sheep don’t fall for charm, and just bleat away in ignorance
Just like rabbits after a couple of warm days in the sun, we humans have also been overbreeding. In 1940 there were a little more than 2 billion of us; by 2050, our population is set to pip 11 billion. We’re simply way too many, and it’s getting cramped in here. The ecosystem is getting tired of our noise and our griping. Something needs to give but it won’t be some nasty, gut wrenching disease that finally does us in, it’ll be our expectations and our serious habit for wanking.
Love, in the classical romantic sense, is the search for our self. To fall in love with a stranger is entirely based upon falling in love with yourself. Keats described it as, “two souls with a single thought”. That single thought being, ‘me’. This kind of relationship’s a new thing. The idea of selecting a life partner who you actually loved hit Europe about 250 years ago. Before that, mama and pappi selected your other half based on economic considerations and hard proof that they weren’t a first cousin. That proof often wasn’t verified until an unfortunate and extremely ugly child arrived into the home.
The logical next step in the development of human relationships, now of course that we’ve mastered the art of falling in love with ourselves through others, is to do away with the shared element. It’s time to just fall in love with ourselves on our own. Which in a nutshell, means people masturbating more, not producing babies and the human race snuffing it in a couple of hundred years or less. And the ecosystem can just sit back and watch it happen.
On top of our masturbatory habits, we’re not helping ourselves with our expectations. We’re the pickiest generation yet. If you think about it, most people who live in cities are too busy for relationships. We can’t take Berlin as exemplary because well, it bucks most social trends and most of you probably only know rush hour in reverse, on your way home from a club falling asleep on the poor commuters. But London, now that’s a city. In London there are more registered dating site members than actual Londoners. You might see that as a sign of the enduring power of love, but I’d look on it more as symbolic of a city chasing its own tail, hopping from one half-assed fling to another in the hope of finding the answer to all their dreams inside two lunch dates. People are too independent to compromise. And that’s the gift our generation has given the world.
Our parents were all about moulding. ‘Your father was an itinerant drunk when I met him and, yes, after twenty-years he’s still a drunk, but at least he’s housebound.’ We just don’t have that kind of time to invest in someone if they don’t meet expectations by date two. And with all this lack of compromise spreading like wildfire, it leads us back to masturbation and the eventual extinction of our species. We won’t give up on reproducing because we get turned off sex, rather we’ll give up on reproducing because we’ve no time for ‘tell me about yourself’ conversations.
Slavoj Zizek is a Slovenian thinker. He’s to conventional philosophy what Peaches is to politesse. In time he’ll be remembered for remarks he made about Hitler not being violent enough, but he might also be remembered as the man who asked, “What if sex is only masturbation with a partner?” Doesn’t that mean the person you share your bed or backseat with is little more than a surrogate fist or finger?
The greatest change in sexual mores over the last decade has been the gradual acceptance of masturbation. It’s become as legitimate an after-work activity as hitting the gym or attending a life-drawing workshop. People can talk about it and do it free from shame in a way that’s never existed before. It’s a product of our own progress. The final step to complete self-sufficiency and the final solution for the human race.
We’ll no longer have a need for each other when, at heart, we know that we do things best on our own. And it’s only a matter of time before sex, involving someone other than yourself, will be about as old fashioned as using leeches in surgery.
We’re like little islands. A society of selfish wankers, and that’s the legacy this generation will leave behind. To think that our path would differentiate from animals is the greatest deception humans ever sold. We’ve no more reason than them to believe the sun will rise tomorrow. In the same way that Myxomotosis wipes out rabbits the masturbation epidemic will eventually cull our numbers too. And one day, not so far into the distant future, all that’s left of the human race will be a few lonely souls in the grey corners of cities holding on tight to their computer screens whispering ‘I love you’ into the gloom.
Eurotash in Ryanair
Ryanair, you might not think it as a passenger on their planes, are probably one of the coolest acts to work with. They accept some really leftfield pitches, and so long as you don’t mention anything dropping out of the sky or the brace position, they let it through. When they heard about our book, they went straight ahead and offered us a few pages worth of space to try and sell it. They did however run this photo. Now, small as it is here, you can’t tell what came before. So here’s a little Top 20 style rundown of how bad a shape we were in before we got the pic taken.
5 days before: London, Free Bar at the Movember Launch.
4 days before: Dublin, home where you’ve about as much a chance of avoiding a big night as you have avoiding conversations about the recession.
3 days before: Edinburgh, Movember Launch involving a bar bill that listed 99 drinks and a knife fight outside a 24hr shop.
2 days before: Berlin, back in the thick of things in the city that doesn’t let you go home to bed.
1 day before: Frankfurt at the Moustache World Championships where we had to sleep in a car then drive through the night to get home.
Anyway, we weren’t looking our best when we took the photo that morning when we arrived back. You can’t see that so much in lo-res but when Ryanair blew it up on a double spread we looked a fine pair of dipsomaniacs. Plus we both had ketchup stains on our shirts.
EUROTASH – A Journey to the ends of the Upper Lip
Ryanair regulars Steve Ryan and Conor Creighton spent the last three months travelling Europe writing a book. The book takes Europeans and moustaches as its themes. They put it together on such a shoestring that they now look on a bed in a home as about as necessary as a Jacuzzi. This is the story behind Eurotash – a journey to the ends of the upper lip.
Eurotash began one day in inner city Dublin when we ran into a kid called Jason. Jason was still too young to have covered algebra at school, yet he already had two girlfriends. We didn’t understand how until we got up closer and noticed that Jason was wearing that earliest symbol of manhood: a ratty, bumfluff moustache. Clearly, his power over the ladies lay beneath his nose. It set him apart from others and gave him a bearing that raised him above his peers. Jason sparked an interest in moustaches. We researched a little and discovered that the Moustache World Championships were being held in Germany only two months later. With precious little facial hair between us and not much to go on we decided that day that we’d enter the championships. But before doing that we’d travel around Europe and try and find out what sets moustache wearers apart from the baby faced masses. Packing small rucksacks and no shaving foam, we set course for our first stop, Edinburgh.
The Handlebar Club is the oldest moustache club in the world. It was founded in 1947. Simon Whitby Brown (23) is its youngest member. On the day he was conferred to the honorary group, he got a tattoo across his midriff. His girlfriend loves it, he assured us. He also assured us that fat genes didn’t run in his family, so there was no chance of his ink moustache becoming an ink elephant one day.
Down in London we met the president of the club, Rod Littlewood (54). He was also going to the World Championships in Germany. “The Germans take it too seriously. They’re up at 6am with their own stylists getting ready for the competition. I got a German badge made saying ‘I’m only here for the beer’”
But we weren’t quite. We came back to Ireland and flew straight out to Sweden. We were on a tough Ryanair assignment. For five days and five nights we’d have to chase aging rockers in hotrods from one small town petrol station to the next and get their story. But we also had an ulterior motive: we were looking for the legendary Dan Sederowsky (45), a man who had clean shaved just once in his entire life. Dan has the most famous moustache in all of Sweden. Once he fell off the back of a truck and skinned the whole side of his face. “Save the moustache,” he told the doctors before they put him under for the operation.
Unbelievable as it may sound, in Berlin, we actually managed to convince girls to rate our moustaches based on how well we kissed with them. Steve got a phone number, I managed to make my girl sneeze. One of them claimed to able to grow a moustache larger than ours so we set our sights on finding a moustachioed lady in Germany. Many, many lesbian bars later, we stumbled across a straight woman with a pencil moustache.
Tatjana Bergius (36) is an artist who once worked with the Berlin police force. She looks on her moustache as a way of telling men “Anything you can do, I can do better.” And that she can. She’s very proud of her moustache, as is her boyfriend. One day she envisions a world where beautiful girls will work down the street with fine-waxed moustaches displayed.
On a quick trip home to procure fresh clothes we visited the most advanced waste water treatment plant in Europe. The affectionately named ‘stinkhouse’ sewage plant in Ringsend. We wanted to find out what happens to stubble when you shave.
“Working here doesn’t always make for the best dinner conversation,” say Ciaran O’Ruanaidh (52), chief engineer at the plant. Hair, and various other solids we’d rather not mention on this page, are processed and turned into some of the most potent fertilizer known to man. “It’s all about sex,” he told us. “We need to keep the bacteria at an ambient temperature so that they keep having sex and eating the solids.” They may be simple wastewater treatment operatives to you, but to bacteria they’re no less than love gurus. The fertilizer is then distributed to farms around Ireland. What’s your unwanted stubble in the morning could well be your dinner that night.
David Richardson (54) invited us to his farm for the day to see how the stubble went to work on his cornfields. Human fertilizer while unappealing to the ears or the belly speeds up plant growth like steroids.
Far away from the farm we returned to mainland Europe and ended up on the Polish German border in the company of Estonian truck driver, Aksel Sepp (60). He’d grown his moustache in honour of Lech Walesa. He was the first hippie in Tallinn and used to play a game with friends where they’d sneak across the borders of the Iron Curtain, into West Germany, and bring back Emerson Lake & Palmer records with them.
“Back then there was Russian Mafia at every border with Kalashnikovs,” he says, “It was really dangerous. But back then there was also no such thing as tachometers. You drove until you saw double, and then kept going until you saw triple.”
We didn’t do that. While we may have had to sleep a few nights in cars, we never wound up driving until the two lanes in front of us turned to six.
Our adventure ended one day in September, in a small town outside Frankfurt. As usual we were waking up in a car park. The location for the Moustache World Championships.
Under the hastily constructed banner of Club Ronnie, we’d be competing against 150 of the best facial hair constructions in the world. Our opponents had been up since 6am spraying and blow-drying giant constructions beneath their noses. They had personal stylists on hand. We were also up from 6am, trying to get the heater in the car working so we’d get some feeling into our toes again. In the race to make it on time, we’d both remembered to pack eye masks, but forgotten the more essential sleeping bag.
Seven men entered our category. Wolfgang Schneider (47), the world champion was first onto the stage. He scored a perfect ten. We scored considerably less but Steve did manage to pip the president of the Handlebar Club into fifth place. After all, he was only there for the beer.
Somehow the rumour was spreading around the tournament hall that we’d offered to host the next round of the world championships in Dublin. I blame the Weiss beir. We decided it was high time that we left before we were roped into catering 150 moustache champs and their WAGs. We tucked our fifth and seventh place certificates under our arms and split.
Putting this book together we ran out of petrol, got lost and lived mostly off the food available in petrol stations. We learned a few things. Moustaches get you searched a little more diligently at airports. One in every two girls will probably take you for a gypsy and food will always worm its way north to hide beneath your whiskers. But for all the disadvantages of growing it, we have to say that we never met a bad man, or woman for that matter, with a moustache. That said, we can’t wait to lick our lips and not taste carpet again.
Pay peanuts; get monkeys – an interview with Simian Mobile Disco
Simian Mobile Disco are two English lads well aware that its not their look people are after when they buy a SMD record. We met in their hotel as they were touring Temporary Pleasure. The two of them had no problem chatting but were dreading the time the photographer would come knocking at the door. Here’s the gist of it. This is one of the press photos circulating at the moment, and having met the two of them, I can say with a fair degree of confidence, that they enjoyed this shoot about as much as water torture.
Warning: If you meet Simian Mobile Disco at a festival, a party or in a late night diner and you fall into candid conversation with them about music, recording and your untapped vocal ability, and then, buoyed on by a hitherto alien confidence, you offer to sing on their next record, and they smile encouragingly and say ‘Get us up on the MySpace mate’, you have about as much a chance of singing for them as you do of finding a bikini in Tehran.
“Now, that just makes us sound like we’re cruel,” says Jason. True, it kind of does.
Jason and Jas have a new album out in August called Temporary Pleasure. It’s heavy on collaborations. Gruff Rhys, Beth Ditto and Jamie Liddell have all contributed vocals. The Gruff Rhys track is called Cream Dream. “He came in the studio,” Jas explains, “And said, ‘I called it Cream Dream because,’ – long, dramatic, slightly awkward pause – ‘You know, it rhymes’.” The amount of vocal tracks for consideration they got sent to them was immense but their wish list was also quite long. Nick Cave and Andre 3000 didn’t pick up the phone – maybe they should have tried their MySpace?
When you were stuck for inspiration during recording who’d you turn to?
Jas: When we reached a section of a track that we weren’t sure what to do with it, we’d ask ourselves, ‘What would Todd Rungren do?’
Is it scary sending a record into a market where everyone’s skint?
Jason: For us we’re quite lucky with our label in that they let us do what we want and don’t put that much pressure on us to make a certain album. But working with other bands I’ve definitely noticed the pressure they’re under in the last 12 months.
Jas: They’re shitting it.
In light of that pressure does your label ever tell you not to cut your hair or dress like Empire of the Sun?
Jason: No, they know that would never work. We’re not really stars like that.
Jas: We were definitely not told to wear these clothes.
LCD Soundsystem got 45 minutes for their Run record; you guys got half an hour. Are Nike trying to say that English people are lazier than the Yanks?
Jas: It actually came it at even less than thirty minutes and had to ask us to lengthen it. I suppose, it’s just that we’re not very good at running.
This issue takes the theme of performance. How choreographed is your stage act?
Jason: Were not ever going to be flamboyant performers so we wanted to make something that was real and tied to a time. With an electronic music show that’s sometimes really difficult. We didn’t want it to be based around a computer and playback, so the live show based itself around those rules as we wanted it be real and organic. Because we use lots of old keyboards and equipment it can be very predictable. It’s quite a challenge just to keep it running and that kind of is the performance.
Jas: We’re trying to make a spectacle. The worst thing of an electronic show is not knowing what they’re doing, like they could be checking their emails.
Or not checking their myspace in your case?
Jason: We should never have said that. We’ll just have to use a Facebook excuse from now on.
Where do you find the best looking crowds in Europe?
Jason: The Exit Festival is pretty incredible.
And the most hardcore?
Jason: Whenever we play anywhere on the west coast of Ireland it’s always fucking mental.
And if they weren’t being beautiful in Serbia or strung-out in Ireland, where would you like people to listen to Temporary Pleasure.
Jason: Maybe floating in that blue lagoon in Iceland.
Jas: With the music pumped in underwater.
And finally, how demanding are Simian Mobile Disco?
Jason: Because of our show we have to travel with a round table. Venues tell us, ‘sure no problem we can just put two square tables together,’ but we always need to stipulate it’s a round table… otherwise we’d catch our testicles on the corners.
At home with HR Giger
In summer I had the pleasure of driving from Berlin to Zurich, kipping one night in a tent, only to have Giger cut an interview after only 25 minutes. Mad frustrating. It was supposed to be a VBS documentary but in the end all we got out of it was a print piece. He drank half a bottle of Jameson during the 25 minutes.
HR Giger, regardless of how many museum or galleries he fills with volumes of his other work, will almost certainly go down in history as that strange Swiss guy behind the Alien movie. During the 70s Giger produced a book called Necronomicon, which established him as the foremost fantastical artist at the time. Salvador Dali was so impressed by his work that he invited him over to Spain for a visit and stole Giger’s girlfriend in the process.
In the 80s Giger got involved in the movies and got an Oscar for his work on Alien, but after a couple of awful cinematic collaborations in the 90s he pretty much disappeared to everyone except the goths and metalheads raiding his back catalogue for tattoos.
He’s 69 now. Loathed by feminists and obscenity sticklers, Giger, the one-time king of darkness and the person Ridley Scott confessed to being petrified of meeting, is now no more scary than a grumpy old neighbor. He wears Crocs. He potters around the garden, mumbles to the cat, drops himself in front of the tube for the afternoon, and cracks open a bottle whenever he feels like it. His wife Carmen lives next door. Giger punched a hole through the wall to join the buildings. Giger’s side is painted black from floor to ceiling; Carmen’s, one assumes, ain’t so bad.
He divides his time between a castle in the Alps and his house in Zurich where he has a little train track running round the garden and right through the kitchen. When he sketches, he still likes to draw strange alien figures with hefty packages pinning fragile looking ladies to the floor, but his days of nightmarish visions and brutal hallucinations are over. He goes to bed at 5 AM and wakes at noon. The night before the interview, Giger had overdone it at the dinner table.
How was your fondue last night?
Heavy. Oh so heavy. After I always say, “Oh my God, why have I done that?” But it’s so good.
What are you doing with yourself these days?
You know I haven’t painted since the 90s? I’m quiet now. I like watching television. I like the Wire, and the Sopranos is so good.
Yesterday we met your good friend Walter Wegmüller, who helped Timothy Leary when he was on the run. He spoke about the “freaky times” back in Switzerland in the 70s. What were they like?
Ah, the freaky times. When Timothy Leary was in Switzerland, he was hoping to get asylum so he could stay here and not go back to prison in America. I was collecting signatures for him. My father was a pharmacist, you know? “What are you doing with this guy?” he asked me. It was funny. Timothy Leary was a very nice man. I didn’t meet him back then in Switzerland, but I met him later in Los Angeles when he wrote two articles for my books. They were very good and he was a very fine person.
Did you exchange ideas?
Oh not much. What could I say? He was a very intelligent man with a lot of knowledge and I’m, well, I’m just an artist.
Did you ever take LSD with him?
Ah, you know you can’t talk about that on record. LSD is still forbidden, so it’s not good to talk about those things.
You’ve said before that much of the inspiration for your art comes from dreams, and more specifically nightmares?
Everyone always wants to know about my dreams. The inspiration is mostly from literature actually. I have read so many things that have inspired me. Beckett was very much an inspiration for me. His theatre especially. I made paintings as a homage to Samuel Beckett [Homage to S. Beckett I,II,III]. They were some of the very few colored paintings I’ve done.
What other writers were an inspiration for you?
Crime writers especially. I started with Edgar Wallace and then all sorts of Western writers.
Your work comes from a much darker place than Beckett or Wallace?
Darker, yes. It came partly from Chur where I grew up; partly from the war. I was born in 1940 so I could feel the atmosphere when my parents were afraid. The lamps were always a bluish dark, so the planes would not bomb us. Switzerland and Germany are close. The targets weren’t always very well marked. I felt the fear of that very much.
Later on at a certain time I saw a lot of witchcraft books and stuff like that. H.P. Lovecraft and these kind of people. I’d say my inspiration comes from books mostly, but dreams also.
Is there any way that you can control the dreams and manipulate your surroundings from within the dream?
Yeah sometimes it happens and I can remember when I’m in a dream. Or I get the feeling like I’m out of my body. A long time ago, about 10 or even 20 years ago, I had that. But it didn’t happen to me often. Probably four or five times but yeah, that was strong.
Was it frightening?
No. It wasn’t frightening. It was just, well, I was so surprised. A dream where I can’t get enough air, that’s frightening. Or the kind of dream where I was stuck in a grave or something like that, that was frightening. But later I developed these passages paintings [Passage I-XXX] and they were very good for that. I got some sort of relief. I got no more bad dreams when I painted these passages. It was helpful.
Does that happen often?
No, not often, but I did the right thing because at the time these passage dreams were ruining my work. It was the right thing to make me feel better.
Can you tell me about the dream behind Necronomicon your book that Ridley Scott used as the template for Alien?
These things come from H.P. Lovecraft. In the 70s I was very familiar with Lovecraft.
And the Alien figure itself?
Well it all comes from the same place. I had already done Necronom IV and V, these monsters with the long heads. That’s what Ridley Scott saw. I showed them in a gallery in Paris. Jodoworsky visited the gallery and so did Ridley Scott and later on I got an invitation to do some work for movies. First it was Jodoworsky for Dune then later on it was Ridley Scott for Alien.
What ever happened with Dune?
Dune never happened with me. I was asked to do it two times. Once with Jodorowsky and then another time with Ridley Scott, but the daughter of Dino de Laurentis had the rights for Dune and she gave them to David Lynch. And David Lynch was not very happy with me.
Why’s that?
He said that I had stolen his ideas, that I’d stolen his baby. I said I liked his baby from Eraserhead. I always said very nice things about him but he was a little strange. And he was jealous because I exhibited in a New York gallery and he couldn’t. He was sour. But I like him.
Do you have a favorite Lynch movie?
Yes, I mean all of Twin Peaks. That was really fabulous. And of course it all started with Eraserhead. All the films he did were wonderful.
How much control were you given during the production of Alien?
Well Ridley Scott directed it and I hadn’t much to say. Ridley Scott knew exactly what he wanted. I was happy that he accepted my book and he showed it to all the crew like it was the bible. He said, you have to do it exactly this way, and I was happy with that. I like him very much. He’s a great guy.
Giger’s preliminary sketches for the Batmobile.
Certain other projects you did after Alien, like Poltergeist II and Killer Condom weren’t as well received, why did you choose to work on them?
After Alien things didn’t turn out so well in the movies because I didn’t get involved enough. I didn’t want to stay in another country. I had spent several months in Shepperton Studios working on Alien and wanted to be home. Later on when it came to doing these other projects I spent only a few days in the country for each one. When the movies eventually came out I thought, “Oh shit.” But I couldn’t change it. There was no more time. So I thought that’s the wrong way to work. If you work on a film you have to be there all the time and be always looking at what they’re doing otherwise they’ll do what they want. In film, everybody wants to bring his own ideas in and make his own style, so it’s terrible. I was very depressed when I saw that.
Which film made you the most depressed?
All of them. I was only pleased with Alien and with the other things I was not very happy with.
After all your involvement in Hollywood, are you filthy rich?
Ah no. I’m actually poor. I had to sell several paintings to pay for the castle. That was shit. I had to sell some very nice, very important paintings.
When did you get the castle?
I did a show in Gruyeres in 1990 and fell in love with the town. I heard that they wanted to sell the castle, so I got it at auction. It was very difficult as I’m really not rich, you know? I got the money from many different places. I was always looking for something, a place for my paintings and sculptures, and I think a castle is the right place for me, no?
Is the castle a work in progress or is it finished?
More or less I’m finished, but it’s not done so well. I mean it was done on a really small budget. I can always make it better, but what I’m doing now is putting on shows in different countries to get publicity for the castle. And to find out where my paintings are.
What happened to your paintings?
Some of them were sold and I don’t know to where, and some of them got stolen. It’s horrible.
Were they stolen from your house?
Some, yes. And during the transport to shows. That’s shit. The two paintings for Emerson Lake and Palmer, for their Brain Salad Surgery album, were stolen.
What can you do in that situation?
Nothing. I tried. I said I’ll pay 10,000 francs if someone knows anything about them. I don’t know where they are. It upsets me so much. I like those things and I did them in 1973 and Emerson Lake and Palmer even came to Switzerland to see them.
If you were rich, what would you like to do with the castle?
I’d like to buy back some paintings. There was an idea for a train set running through the castle, but it’s too crazy. It’s fantastical. It costs too much to make such a train and you could never pay if off. It would be very funny to have, but I still have to pay for the castle. I have two million I have to pay back to the bank for the castle, and that’s heavy.
The castle gets a lot of visits from young rockers and goths. They seem to look on it as a bit of temple of darkness. Do you get any bizarre requests from them?
Oh yes. I get a lot of strange people who come to see my work in Gruyeres. It’s very nice. You know people from the village they know my fans when they see them. They’re all in black. They want to marry there, do photo shoots, all kinds of stuff.
Do you think they ever have sex in the castle?
Ha, it’s possible. I don’t know. We don’t have everything so tightly controlled.
Apart from art, is there anything else you collect?
I have weapons. I never want to be without weapons. As protection. I like weapons. From a child I always had weapons.
What’s your favourite weapon?
I have a small 5mm, 22 calibre, it’s a small revolver. That was what Li (Giger’s first wife) shot herself with. It’s very small. I have three revolvers with gunpowder in the barrel. You can fill them up. That’s fun.
Would you recommend the film industry to a fine artist?
Oh no, not at all. It’s very hard to work for film and you never have time to finish things in a really good way. Films make you crazy. You know once I wanted to work in Switzerland for the film industry. That was for the movie Species. Oh that was wrong.
Why was it so bad?
These guys I was working with, they didn’t want to work on Saturday and Sunday. It was terrible. They blamed me because I wanted them to work late. Film is great. I mean, I see what they do today and it’s wonderful. They know how to do it, they have all kinds of things but it really makes you crazy.
Movember – The Prostate Exam
This is another video we did for Movember. It was probably the scariest yet, although our doctor, Professor Waxman, was very gentle with us.
Smell my finger
Recently, we were asked to make some videos for a prostate cancer charity. They wanted us to encourage men to get involved with their bums. This is what we came up with.
Most straight guys know next to nothing about the inside of their asshole. True, they might have dated a fruity chick with wandering fingers. And she might have lead them down the mucky path to bum wanking. And they might even have got off on it. But it’ll be quickly forgotten once that long drunk summer ends. Because bums, like alleyways in the ghetto, are nasty, dangerous places. You wouldn’t want to get caught with your fingers down one on a dark night.
Having a doctor slide his finger up your bum is a very humbling experience and in hindsight maybe it’s not so unpleasant. For those of you who’ve never enjoyed this rare medical pleasure before, we came up with some parallels.
1) Having a dump in reverse
2) Riding a bike with a tiny saddle
3) Pulling your pants down in strong wind
4) Anal sex with an Asian man
If you listen really carefully to the start of the video, you can just about hear the doctor say something about a big willy. That’s mine.
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