Burial: Unedited Transcript

Wire: But I think a lot of men want more than blokey music is giving them.

Yeah? They should listen to some Todd Edwards, his tunes melt anyone. People are different, but the media, the world has made them afraid to create their own space around themselves, when they should just close their eyes and trust in themselves. Sometimes a man needs a break from the darkness, and just needs a dose of chirpy, buzzing tunes.

Wire: Your music is very visual. I suppose that’s partly the influence of films? You’ve talked about that sound from ‘Alien’ being one of your favourite sounds.

Burial: The motion tracker, yeah, and the dropship, the sentry guns. My big brother would play that sound to me when I was little, and tell me the stories from the film. He recorded it on a tape. He would tell me about that motion tracker sound, and ‘Alien’ and ‘Aliens’ are some of the scariest films. But he would only show me the bit where they were loading up the weapons, but he’d say, ‘you’re too young, I won’t show you the rest, but I’ll tell you about it’. I love the sound of the motion tracker, you can feel the fear of the empty spaces ahead, it's like sonar. I like Blade Runner but I’m only obsessed with one scene in it, the bit where he’s sitting at those cafes in the rain. I love rain, like being out in it. Sometimes you just go out in the cold, there’s a light in the rain, and you’ve got this little haven, and you’re hanging round like a moth – I love moths too and that’s why I love that scene.

Wire: Is there a connection between crackle and rain?

Burial: Yeah. But I partly use the rain to cover up the lameness of my tunes.

Wire: It’s a bit like when they put on the mist on [the PlayStation game] Silent Hill because they didn’t have the memory power to render a fully-realised environment.

Burial: Oh, really? Dark. I like Silent Hill. If you hide sounds in the mist. It’s like a veil across the far wall of the tune.

Wire: That’s really important. It’s like the euphoric things are all the more euphoric because they are hidden by a veil, rather than being directly heard.

Burial: Yeah, euphoria trapped in a vial. Or a silencer. Volume's like a proximity to something. Everyone in their life has heard a muffled conversation from next door where you can’t hear the words, but you know that people are shouting. Or you’re on stairs, and you hear people downstairs, and you're aware of something not being right, just by the tone of someone’s voice. Even when you don't understand, when you’re younger, that kind of meaning in the sound, it makes you hold your breath. It’s like when dogs go quiet when there's a storm coming.

Wire: There’s a lot of pain in the records. Is that personal?

(pause) .... Yeah, maybe.

I don’t know anything about this kind of music, but I love Sam Cooke. I don’t know what it was about his songs, but he’d have some songs, and things on the surface were normal or happy, he’d be singing about having a party, there’s cokes in the iceboxes or whatever, and everything’s glowy, but underneath, it’s like he’s talking about something else, the last party on earth. Something in his voice. I’d rather do something like that than some icy cold electronic music, to try and get a bit of that in it. Because when something’s glowing, if something’s nice, it doesn’t mean that it’s not surrounded by cold things, bad things.

Wire: The glow would only show up if there’s darkness around it. Relentless dark, what I call ‘Dark TM’, doesn’t sound dark in the end.
The faceless thing. Is it just a personal thing?

Burial: Yeah, I'm just a well low key person. I want to be unknown, because I'd rather be around my mates and family than other things, but there's no need to focus on it. Most of the tunes I like, I never knew what the people who made them looked like anyway. It draws you in. You could believe in it more. I like it if it’s more secret, people can get into the tunes more. I just want to be in a symbol, a tune, the name of a tune. It’s not like it's a new thing. It’s one of the old underground ways and it’s easier.
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Everyone goes on about themselves, they reveal everything and give it away. It’s an obsession in London, people and the media are too blatant, trying to project this image, prove themselves and trying to be something. They should just hold back a bit, it's sexier.

Burial: I wanna be out of here. I respect working hard but I dread a day job. Or a job interview. I’ve got a truant heart, I just want to be gone. I’d be in the kitchens, the corridors at work, and I’d be staring at the panels on the roof, clocking all the maintenance doors, dreaming about getting into the airducts.

Wire: Looking for a space away from other people?

Burial: Kind of. A portal. As a kid I used to dream about being put in the bins, escaping from things, without my mum knowing she’d put me out in the bins. So I'm in a black plastic bag outside a building, and hearing the rain against it, but feeling alright, and just wanting to sleep, and a truck would take me away. It's stupid,

Wire: Did you have a sense of what it was like on the other side?

Burial: yeah. We all dream about it. I wish something was there. But even if you fight to see it, you never see anything. Because you know when you have a dream, and in your dream you have the weight of the decisions in you, but it has that kind of dream-like ease of everything, like the dream city. You're walking round London in your dreams, everything is alright, but you wake back in real life and it’s not like that. You don't have a choice. You’d be on the way to a job, but you’re longing to go down this other street, right there, and you walk past it. No force on earth could make you go down there, because you’ve got to traipse to wherever. Even if you escape for a second, people are on your case, you can't go down old Thames side and throw your mobile in.

Wire: This sounds like H G Wells’ short story ‘The Door in the Wall’. In it, a child discovers an enchanted garden hidden in mundane London streets. But whenever he sees the door that leads to the garden again, he can’t make himself go through it. He’s always dragged away by the pull of the worldly.

Your first album sounded so definitive, I wondered what you would do with the second one.

Burial: Kode9 chose the Ghost Hardware 12", because that was before I’d made the album so we wanted to put out something that sounded like it came off the first album, but hinted at something else.

Wire: I’m glad you moved in the direction you have. There’s lots of emotion in the culture at the moment, but it’s very sentimental and cheap. The real pain doesn’t get articulated.