Interview conducted
November 12th 2002 in Paris
by Yaron GAT

Lynchland : David Lynch & John Neff about Blue Bob’s concert at the Olympia (Interviews)

Yaron Gat : Did you ever imagine that someday you would be on stage playing guitar for thousands of people ?

David Lynch : No ! No, that was something I didn’t imagine. I imagine a lot of things but not that.

Yaron Gat : So now it’s David Lynch the rock star ?

David Lynch : No, you know it’s funny. The star thing is not a part of it but it’s making sound and making music. I always loved the sound and it bridged into music, but it was always meant to be a thing for the studio.

And as you know, we’ve just released the record on my website (davidlynch.com) and have segments that people could be listening to, and that was going to be it.

You know, the thing in the world about record companies, there is a big change going on, huge change. And they are kind of sad and different nowadays. So I thought, well, the Internet is the way to go. But it’s still in the middle of this transition and then Pascal, John’s friend Pascal and now my friend Pascal, came along and he has a record company, but a different kind of a record company, it’s just Pascal ! [Pascal Nabet-Meyer, Blue Bob’s Manager and director of the record company Soulitude Records] And Pascal, the soles of his shoes are very thin now because he's been all over Europe with a little bag of albums making it happen, and people like Pascal, and he is doing a great job ! Better than a normal today record company, because, it seems to me, the fire has gone out in the furnace. And it’s just a lot of strange smoke coming out of the chimney but the heat is going down.

Yaron Gat : From where did the idea for Blue Bob come?

David Lynch : The idea of the music ? The idea of the name - John, you know, set around thinking of names, said Blue Bob and that’s where the name came from. The music came out of experiments, the idea that machines would marry with music. That was the point of departure.

Yaron Gat : I noticed that the lyrics of Blue Bob songs are very different from the lyrics you used to write. Until now most of them were love songs or yearning for it, here it’s more about jealousy, anger and disappointment. Why do you think is that ?

David Lynch : I will tell you exactly why ! Music and sound are so powerful ! It just starts talking to you, so if you have a certain kind of music it’s going to conjure up certain kind of feelings that lead to a certain kind of words and that's how it goes. Blue Bob, the lyrics always came last. For Julee Cruise, many times the lyrics came first. I would just write out things and then I showed them to Angelo Badalamenti . And there it was the reverse, the words would conjure some sort of melody. So it can go both ways. In Blue Bob it was the lyrics that followed the music.

Yaron Gat : You think maybe it’s because here you wrote for a male singer and before for a female ?

David Lynch : No. It’s because it’s factory music. There is a certain San Fernando Valley married to factories, married to maybe gasoline power engines and night. You start getting a feel, and Julee Cruise’s lyrics don’t marry to that. Know what I mean ?

John Neff : Questions in the world of smokes (laughs)

BLUEBOB

David Lynch: 'Blue Velvet' to BlueBob by Steve Hochman, Special to The Times.

Music has been nearly as important as the scripts and visuals in such influential David Lynch film and TV projects as “Twin Peaks” and “Blue Velvet.”

And Lynch has been active as a producer and collaborator with composer Angelo Badalamenti and singers Julee Cruise and Jocelyn Montgomery. So his opinion probably is worth noting in a discussion about the music and marketing strategies of a new act called BlueBob.

“It’s all horse manure,” says the director, sitting in the combination screening room/recording studio of his Hollywood Hills home, smoke trailing from his cigarette as he gives his hand a dismissive flip.

Sitting with him, John Neff and Pascal Nabet Meyer roll their eyes. It’s not just that they’ve heard this act before. It’s that Neff is half of BlueBob, while Nabet owns Soulitude, the label releasing its debut album.

Oh, and also because Lynch is the other half of the group.

Lynch writes the lyrics (little vignettes of paranoia and underbelly cruising) and plays guitars and various percussion items, while Neff adds everything else and handles the gruff, largely spoken vocals. Overall, the space-age bluesy atmosphere and dark scenarios make it perhaps a cousin to Tom Waits and Captain Beefheart more than to the stark, haunting beauty of Lynch’s other collaborations.

“BlueBob started because I love machines,” Lynch says. “I said, ‘John, I want beats like machines, like dogs on PCP — when they bite down you feel it.’“

Lynch and Neff became acquainted in 1997 when the latter, a longtime studio engineer and designer, built Lynch’s home facility and wound up being hired as the director’s audio specialist.

Soon they started some musical experiments and officially teamed to produce Montgomery’s 1998 album, “Lux Vixen,” which featured interpretations of compositions by medieval mystic Hildegard von Bingen. It was released in this country by Mammoth Records.

BlueBob, Lynch says, started as an experiment. “There was no thought of an album at all, until we got four things recorded,” he says.

More serious about it, they continued writing and recording and last year finished the debut BlueBob album. It was released in Europe last month and got strong press interest and is due here in February or March.

The group, with the two joined by Nabet Meyer and three other musicians, made its first and so far only live appearance Nov. 11 at Paris’ historic Olympia Theatre, sharing a bill with Portishead singer Beth Gibbons.

Lynch, with no real musical performing experience, is thrilled about the opportunity but dubious about his own live role. “John is a performer and we had a killer band,” he says. “I am not a performer. I just sat there like an idiot. It was torment.”

However, with much radio exposure outside of public and college stations unlikely,

there is talk of designing a multimedia theater presentation to bring the music to the public. Lynch is not committing. “It just depends on how much torment you can put up with,” Neff says to his partner.

LA Times