Melody Maker, September 22, 1984

Sentimental Education

Adam Sweeting shares the pleasures of literature with 10,000 Maniacs

The name came from a Fifties cult horror movie. The group began to fall into place some three years ago now, in a place called Jamestown, at the top end of New York State.

"It's a dying northeastern city," explained Dennis Drew, quietly spoken and scholarly looking behind his wire-rimmed glasses. "But it's pretty around there, lots of trees."

Jamestown: Population 35,000-ish. Closer to Canada than to New York. "Across the lake from London, Ontario..." People move to Jamestown to paint, write or just hang out away from the pressures of Cleveland or New York City. 10,000 Maniacs, tired of Jamestown and its ever narrowing circles, had another ambition - "to play in Buffalo!"

Far removed from the rock'n'roll barnstorming circuit, 10,000 Maniacs came together "just to entertain ourselves", according to Natalie Merchant. Natalie writes the Maniacs' lyrics and sings them. Natalie is the band's secret weapon. While Drew will discuss Spinal Tap or Ghostbusters or why the Maniacs like reggae so much, Natalie might spin off at a tangent about infighting among Dadaists, the uses of criticism or the death of her grandparents. The latter event affected her deeply - her grandmother died after years of contented married life. Her grandfather, unable to put the pieces back together, week later,

Armed with a Penguin edition of Flaubert's Education Sentimentale, Natalie is the classic sponge-ingenue, scuffling around the world in a group beginning to sense its own possibilities, better equipped with literary models and theories of art than with hard experience. She's learning as fast as she can.

She looks like a gypsy, wears strange old-fashioned dresses probably like the ones her grandmother wore, and sometimes talks about herself in the third person. Back in Jamestown, a place she can no longer bear to be in for very long, she has a friend who writes "very well". When Natalie comes home from tours on the American East Coast or down South, her friend picks her brains with an air of desperation - "where did you go? What movies did you see? Who did you meet?"

Natalie wasn't raised on rock music. Dennis Drew's version of the origins of 10,000 Maniacs goes like this: "One thing we all liked in common was reggae music. We liked the whole thing that happened in England at the end of the Seventies, whatever one called New Wave or Punk. Cos it was exciting again - I think all of us got pretty bored around 1976, it was pretty boring then - too much Bicentennial."

But as Natalie says: "In '76? I was 11. I was pretty far removed from being bored with the music scene. The whole punk explosion and the revolution.... I was not aware of it. I was too busy learning world history and cutting gym classes." She giggles, her voice inflected with something that sounds very like French. [webmaster's note: in 1976 Natalie was 13 not 11; either she doesn't know what year she was born or she's very poor with math!]

When did you start listening to records then, Natalie?

"Well.... when I was about 15 I bought close-out (remainder) records cos that's all I could afford, I only had an allowance, and I'd get Roxy Music records in the close-out bins. That's how I was introduced to rock music. I never heard psychedelic music.

"I'd heard Sixties pop that my mother owned, she was really young. She had Buddy Holly, she had Fifties records and then she had The Beatles. She was in the Columbia Record Club so we had all the Beatles records.

"She had show tunes, she had the soundtrack from West Side Story and South Pacific. And then eventually... she'd always liked classical music and then she married a jazz musician, so that's the kind of music I was into. I never really had friends who sat around and listened to the stereo and said 'hey, listen to this one', so I'd never even heard of who Bob Dylan was until I was 18.

"I just bought this Jellyroll Morton record and I bought a bluegrass compilation a couple of weeks ago, all kind of Twenties religious Carter Family kind of music. I love it. There's just so much music, you can't restrict yourself."

Natalie stands at the microphone, her arms wrapped around herself, her face glistening with sweat under the lights. She recites, as though reading from an ancient text: "There were women holding rosaries on the day Manolete died, teenage girls in soft white dresses, standing silent peace respecting...."

She turns and skips to the back of the Digwalls stage as the other five musicians begin to set up a throbbing pulse, over which stocky guitarist Robert Buck lays ghostly wails of sound. Steven Gustafson is on bass, Jerry Augustyniak pounds away on his drumkit, while John Lombardo looms stage-left behind another guitar, set-faced and menacing. Drew, his face strangely animated, sits at his keyboards, apparently directing operations. "We always wanted to have John in the band," he'd tell me. "He was the coolest guy in Jamestown. He's played in lotsa bands, jazz bands, stuff like that. John was teaching in high school at the time."

There's no simple phrase which will adequately describe a 10,000 Maniacs performance. Apart from anything else, they play about half a dozen different styles of music, one for each member of the group, perhaps. There are various outbursts of reggae, the highlifey Daktari, slices of haunted melodic pop like Grey Victory or Pour De Chirico, and insane switches between country-folk and screeching electronic rock. All are sung by Natalie in a clear, piercing voice whose pitch isn't always certain but whose sense of urgency can never be ignored. She makes you listen, both to her voice and to her words.

Don't be fooled, either, by the attractive accessibility of almost all of this material. The Maniacs' EP Human Conflict Number Five, was poorly recorded and sounds thin and amateurish. It's successor, Secrets Of the I Ching album, is a great improvement, cleaner, tougher, though still lacking entire dimensions of power and authority present in the live show. (Both records are Press/Christian Burial co-releases).

Death of Manolete is about a bullfighter, the sort of subject generally left well alone by today's pop scribblers. "That was from a film documentary these people saw," Natalie explained, indicating the other members of the group. "Then John came up with the riff and said 'this is great! It sounds like a matador! I saw that movie!'

"And then they said write a song called The Death Of Manolete, and I hadn't seen the movie. So I said okay, I'll create an epic poem about some matador I've never heard of who's gored to death."

Natalie explains her working methods thus: "I keep journals and sometimes the words come from those, and sometimes they come out of incidents. If I see a movie that really strikes me, maybe. I like the images, like in Tension, but it took a while for me to chisel it out. I get real verbose.

"Sometimes I research things, like the song Grey Victory is about Hiroshima, indirectly. In the refrain it says 'please build a future, darling, with our bomb'. I saw a propaganda film, something about 'be thankful that we lead the world, freedom lovers' - it was made in the Forties. And just the way this woman was talking to her baby, it really struck me. 'The world will be a safer place for you because we have the atomic bomb', that's pretty much what she was telling this child. But to research it...

"I didn't know that the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima was actually called Enola Gay, and when I found out I wanted to put it in the song, because the way the name sounded and just the image it makes doesn't sound like something that could kill 20,000 people like that."

Behind the sly menace of Katrina's Fair lurks the strange tale of a girl with a multiple personality. In Pour De Chirico, meanwhile, Natalie has indulged her fixation with the history of art.

"I remember when I was taking Art Theory classes, it was always 'oh, poor De Chirico' - he was expelled from the Dada community because he was such an old fart, pretty much. He would keep on saying 'I'm a classical painter, I'm not a surrealist', and they were dubbing him The Father Of Surrealism. He was a little crazy.

"And Breton kept writing all these essays about how wonderful De Chirico was, and he just kept on repeating 'no no, it's not me', so..." She laughs and lets her hands flop into her lap. "So ... do you have any more questions for Natalie?"

I don't, really, though I glean the information that among her favourite writers are William Blake ("I love William Blake - he's the man who made me not so embarrassed to be a poet"), Colette ("she's like syrup but I love the images she creates") and Flannery O'Connor with her arsenal of bigots and casualties of faith.