Phil Minton has been a totemic presence in British improvised music for over 50 years, a distinctive presence first on trumpet and in the decades that followed as an untamed, outrageous vocalist exploring every facet of human expression with his voice. As he celebrates his 80th birthday with an upcoming weekend of performances and collaborations, he talks to Phil England.

Do you remember when you first started making unconventional sounds with your voice? How did that develop into a career?

Since I can remember I’ve compulsively copied voices that I hear. I was (am) very annoying. It was the only thing I was quite good at, apart from throwing pebbles from the beach out to sea. I could throw about ten foot further than even the big, stronger kids.

Most of the sounds I sing come from very conventional, but unique voice placings that I heard as a kid, like Kathleen Ferrier, Aneurin Bevan, Louis Armstrong, Jussi Björling, my Mum and Dad (both singers), and people on the wireless like Churchill, George Formby etc, all stirred, mixed and mangled. I then tumbled and slid into a career more than developed. I left school at 15 and worked in a printing works. I hated it, the constant machine racket. I thought a better job would be as a musician playing music all over the world. I started to learn the trumpet and was a passionate jazz fan. I loved the music of the late 50s Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis, Mingus, Coltrane, Roland Kirk. The rhythmic intensity of this period is still a big influence in my music and the free jazz drummers that I’ve played with like Louis Moholo-Moholo, Tony Oxley and Roger Turner, all as fast as light and even though they're not on the gig, I imagine they are, even through silences.

I had a friend who was a visual artist and he introduced me to the work of Jackson Pollock, “so why can’t music sound like a Pollock painting looks”, we thought. I also loved dancing and would do a sort of acrobatic break dance, rolling around the floor making noises as my painter friend Mike Tolliday threw paint around an old derelict space. When I was around 20 I was in a local Torquay band and at a jam session in Newton Abbott I met up with some of the Mike Westbrook band from Plymouth and John Surman said “Why don’t you come and join the Westy band up in London?”, and I did.

I lived in the same house with John and Keith Rowe, where there a was a lot of talk of free music and some tentative attempts. I was mostly playing the trumpet and didn’t have the confidence to go full throttle vocally into the new music. But playing with Mike in the early 60s was a great experience. I think at this time most of the Westy band were students or had day gigs. I had to make money to survive, so I left and did cover bands, and ended up in Sweden with a popular Swedish group that had a repertoire of about 700 songs, the hits of the late 60s that required me to seriously work on voice placings so I didn’t damage my chops. Singing songs like “In The Midnight Hour”, “Bridge Over Troubled Water”, “What A Wonderful World”, “Proud Mary”, “Reach Out I’ll Be There” and many more. Also in Sweden, I was playing to mostly no one with the improvising group Up Umeå, and still do today, with fantastic improvisors Lars-Göran Ulander and Sten Öberg. I rejoined Mike Westbrook in the 70s, improvising and singing composed songs and I still sing the William Blake songs with him until this day.

What different qualities of communication are possible with the types of extended vocalisations that you use?

I once did a voice workshop with some young, high achieving scientists, and I noticed that they were reluctant to change the pitch and timbre of their voices. They explained that when they have to present theories and data vocally, they have more credibility using a monotone delivery. When I’m improvising, I’m not trying to tell anyone anything, just, ‘this is what I'm singing now’. It might go well with what comes next or what went before and with what somebody else could be doing at the same time. So, the qualities of communication are always going be more abstract than A Brief History Of Time or “Ride a painted pony, let the spinnin’ wheel turn”, but great for gobbledygook, gibberish, balderdash, and other stuff called music. Extended vocalisations have been around in the universe much longer than a metal frame inside a wooden box containing carefully measured bits of taut wire that are struck with small hammers that are connected to moving keys of black and white slivers of elephant tusks.

In performance it becomes clear that your vocal work is bound up with the rest of your physical body. Is that important to accessing and expressing some of the emotional states you convey?

Yep, I’ve noticed that I move about a lot since there’s so much filming these days, but I think what I’m doing is more like abstract action dancing than emotional gestures to enhance the narrative, but it’s often hard to read other people’s body language.

Now the ground has been broken, there are lots of improvising singers. Are there still innovations to be made, or are people simply reinventing the wheel at this point?

To continue the analogy, wheels can go a lot of different places. There are infinite sounds and noises that can be put in different orders, as there are still combinations of the 12 notes of the tempered scale that can still surprise and thrill us. And seven billion unique voices out there all ready to go. So scream and shout the lot of you!

The Feral Choir is a workshop format that you have carried out all over the world that is mainly aimed at non-professional singers. What kinds of effects have these workshops had on the participants, yourself and audiences?

The Feral Choir is for anyone who wants to be part of it. Since the 1980s I’ve sang and improvised with thousands of singers worldwide, "belching obscene incoherent rubbish", and only twice have choir participants said “fuck this, I’m leaving”. After one of the first Feral Choir performance in France nearly 40 years ago, the husband of a choir member told me that since his wife had been in the choir, she felt very happy. That’s the sort of feedback that keeps me Feralling.

What do you find is the best way to prepare for a concert of improvised music?

I used to like to have a joint and a ‘pint of the best, sir’ but since I stopped smoking nicotine, just one puff of a pipe and a glass of wine to relax the chops are welcome if available. I still do written music and songs, like The Westbrook [William] Blake programme Bright As Fire – no puffs or sips pre gig for those occasions, I don’t want to fuck up arrangements. The only thing prearranged, before an improvised voice concert is, how long roughly shall we play, and, when shall we start. I always prepare my voice with voice warm-up exercises that I’ve developed through the years.

I’m guessing you’ve done some strange gigs over the years. Can you tell us about a couple that stand out?

After a wild day with performance artist Ian Hinchliffe we found ourselves on the steps of [London’s] Charing Cross station leading up from Villiers Street. Ian had made an incredible headdress of 700 spectacles that had been the main ‘focus’ for an arts college gig earlier that day that had gone not that well, to say the least. It was late in the evening and Ian walked up the steps to the station wearing the spectacle headdress at about one-step-a-minute speed (Ian could make picking his nose the most important art performance of the 20th century). The whole area was pretty quiet at the time we started, I was accompanying him with vocal serenading of equally profound meaningless content. A large crowd gathered and watched and listened totally transfixed for about 20 minutes, when Ian was about half way up the steps, a copper appeared and really did say, ‘Hello, hello, what’s going on ’ere then’, I said, ‘I don’t know, but it’s fantastic, innit’. He said, ‘You gotta stop, you’re causing an obstruction’. There was genuine appreciative applause for us and boos for the cop.

Then there was the time I was completely buried in a hole in a field unheard and forgotten. And what about the raw mackerel, the helium balloons, and then the blindfolded man singing “I believe” thrashing about with a stick on the altar of a church, that was not that far from the opening of a new improvising venue that was closed on its first concert night by the landlord that turned blue with rage, was it the polystyrene skull of a mannequin being bowed in harmony with the explosive screams from fingernail electronics augmenting the sound of trombone condensation dripping on to tinfoil takeaway trays. Or the London Musicians’ Collective concert that Roger Turner and I did to a audience of one mum and her two newborn twins – "That was just what I needed to hear" she told me afterwards…

Someone you’ve toured widely with over the past 15 years is fellow vocalist Audrey Chen. Can say something about that collaboration and how it has endured?

Yes, we’ve done some amazing tours and gigs. Singing with Audrey is like working with all the possible noises of the universe and beyond, earthquakes, colliding galaxies and slugs sliding down a wet window, very quiet. It’s endured because we love working together and some people in the world ask us to perform for them and give us a meagre wage.

Can you say something about how you approached songform in your work with Mike Westbrook, Veryan Weston, Lindsay Cooper and others?

I try and sing songs with as little decoration as possible. As everyone knows, songs are words sung on different pitches. I try to give the words and pitches the same value. Melismas and grace notes feel redundant when singing the words of William Blake’s “Let The Slave”. It's another part of my brain that I use for songs. I have to learn to sing songs.

Your song projects with Veryan Weston have drawn on anarchist and anti-imperialist figures (Nestor Makhno and Ho Chi Minh respectively). What role do you think music can play in political and social life?

Nestor Makhno was one of the world’s great revolutionaries. His small band of anarchists took on the world it seemed when they were fighting in 1919, not only the White Russian army, but the Bolsheviks and Ukrainian nationalists, plus the Germans who didn’t surrender in 1918. All good causes to me, and he should be acknowledged and be made aware of. Veryan found the book of Ho Chi Minh’s Prison Diary poetry in a charity shop. What struck us at the time was there was very little reference to politics, it was mostly about day-to-day life in prison, and we both felt that he was a very decent and sincere human being who wanted to make the world a better place for everyone: “I dream of riding a dragon up into heaven”. I only know of one right wing musician personally, out of hundreds. So playing music must have some positive influence on how people are and think, and hopefully this positivity is absorbed by the listener.

In your 2004 interview with Ben Watson for The Wire you expressed a preference for performing without a microphone. As awareness of the threat of climate change has developed, have the number of opportunities to do this increased?

Not that I’ve noticed. I am aware of the dilemma that most musicians have to travel for work and so our carbon footprints are mega. If this will change after Covid, and there develops a culture of online performance that really feels live and transcendental, I honestly don’t know. I’m getting help with all the possibilities of recording improvising online. I have done Zoom sessions with folk as far apart as Tokyo and Newfoundland, but the sound still needs a lot of work.

How have you been affected by Covid-19? What coping mechanisms have you used to survive? Is there anything you think might change in the long term in the music scenes you have worked in as a result of the pandemic?

No travel, practicing the trumpet, walking the dog, cooking and eating great food. With the double negative of Covid-19 and Brexit, the changes will be less traveling for everyone, not just musicians. And if (when) the whole digital global communication system crashes or is destroyed, singing and dancing around the campfire will be OK with me.

How do you feel about turning 80?

It’s not as depressing as I thought it would be. Five years ago I had hip problems. That’s all been fixed, and now I feel like a 50 year old, but the acrobatic break dancing is not as accurate, ho ho.

How do you feel about your career looking back on it now?

I do on occasion talk with strangers, usually when travelling, who ask me what my profession was, is. I try and explain. They have no idea what I’m talking about. So I think that, myself and all of us that were and are playing improvised music together all over the world, should have then and even now, projected not just our music, but all of our values with much more conviction and urgency, from Ban The Bomb, Support The Miners, The LMC, No War In Iraq, to Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion. 50 years ago I thought that by this time the world would be a better place to live in than it was then. It's not. My generation should be ashamed of itself. It wasn’t ignorant or stupid, just selfish.

Phil Minton will be in residence at London's Café Oto for his 80th birthday on 19–21 February 2021. Subscribers can read Ben Watson's 2004 interview with Phil Minton in Wire 246 in the online archive