Pagan Poetry

Pagan Poetry
I’d always wanted to work with music boxes but it was waiting for the right occasion. I’de been collecting them and stuff. The main thing was that I wanted to write my own songs in music boxes. In the beginning, the music box company weren’t very excited. They’d made wooden boxes for eons and I wanted see-through plexiglass. They couldn’t get their head round it - they were like ’Why ?’ They wanted to make the plonky sound softer with wood but I wanted it as hard as possible, like it was frozen. In the end, they said it was the best thing they’d ever done.

Record Collector, August 2002

Pagan Poetry
That’s probably the only song that’s full-bodied, with blood and muscle. There’s something rather uncomfortable about the experience of that song. It feels like an invasion of your privacy. Yeah. Hmmmm. I don’t know. When I hear that sort of stuff in other people’s work, I usually find it quite rewarding, so I wouldn’t look at it as uncomfortable. I would say that’s generous. But it’s about wanting to communicate, for sure. It’s less cocoon-ish than the rest of the songs. It’s definitely wanting to tell someone something. An obvious question, then. Who are you referring to ? [Coquettishly] It’s so obvious, innit ? Matthew Barney, right ? [Smiling] I didn’t say a...

Q Magazine, July 2001