emusic q&a: rob sheffield

“He would fucking hate this comparison, but reading Christgau the first time was exactly like hearing Bob Dylan for the first time.”
–Rob Sheffield

To mark the publication of rock critic Rob Sheffield’s second book, an “I Love the 80s”-style tribute to the music of his youth called Talking to Girls About Duran Duran, eMusic’s Michaelangelo Matos took a unique approach to the author interview: a jukebox jury in which music critics, rather than songs, were the focus of discussion. You can read the final version of the interview here. But as a treat for all you music criticism diehards, I’ve posted the uncut interview after the jump.

Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield’s first book, Love Is a Mix Tape, is a deeply affecting, frequently funny account of his romance with his first wife, Renee Crist. Also a writer about music, Crist died, suddenly and without warning, on an ordinary day when the couple had been married only a few years, and were barely finished with their twenties.

The new Talking to Girls About Duran Duran goes further back—and it’s largely flat-out funny. Where Mix Tape is a ’90s book—Sheffield and Crist met in fall 1989—and its backdrop is both the pop radio of the early ’90s (when new jack swing and Eurodisco began to assert themselves on the charts, and rap had its great pop moment) and the weird Indian summer of the alt-rock surge, Talking to Girls About Duran Duran is—who’d have guessed from the title?—about the ’80s, each chapter keyed to a different song from the decade.

Sheffield grew up in Boston, where new wave impacted his consciousness in ways both obvious and surprising. Sheffield likes to joke, but he doesn’t condescend. Throughout, Talking to Girls About Duran Duran uses music as a prism for his own experiences during the ’80s as a teenager and then college student, trying to figure out the mysteries of womankind, working a memorable summer job delivering ice cream and pondering icons like Paul McCartney: “[The Rolling] Stones, Led Zeppelin, the Sex Pistols . . . set out to piss people off. But there’s no way they could possibly piss people off the way Paul does.” And, of course, Duran Duran, whose hold over women then and—improbably, as he notes—now sets the whole thing in motion.

Clearly, Sheffield is a lot of fun to talk music with. But for this interview, I wanted to tap into Rob’s deep store of knowledge about music writing as well. Both of us were fans of rock criticism before we started writing it, and it tends to be at the center of our conversations. So I decided to tweak the Jukebox Jury format: Rather than playing him songs to react to, I read him quotes from other rock critics, mostly about artists identified with the ’80s. Plenty of the music Talking About Girls zeroes in on is touched on here. But the talk roams further, to touch on Sheffield’s early writing career, the formative impact of specific pieces of music and music writing, and the overall landscape of pop—and not just the kind featuring cheesy synths. We spoke over a late weekday lunch at Enid’s in Brooklyn.

—

“Rhythm guitar. Rhythm guitar. Rhythm guitar.”
Joe Levy, liner notes to Luna, Live (Arena Rock, 2001)

It’s by someone you know well, and it’s about a band you like.

My first guess would be Pylon.

Later than that. East Coast.

The Feelies?

It’s the liner notes by Joe Levy to Luna’s live album.

That’s funny. It’s very like “rhythm guitar,” their live album.

You’ve known Joe Levy for a long time. When did you meet him?

You could just read me Joe Levy quotes! It’s funny how now, like, “rock criticking” isn’t even one of the Top 5 things in his Q rating. When he talks about music, he can still turn that on. But if that’s all he did, he’d still be . . . [suddenly dawning] That [quote] actually sounds like an allusion to the [Robert] Christgau and [John] Piccarella liner notes to Television’s live ROIR tape, The Blow-Up! The liner notes [to it] as well—like that person Christgau and Piccarella have to make the case for Television as a great guitar band to. I’ve always wondered who that was.

I totally have a guess. You first.

I would have guessed Robert Quine.

My guess has always been Greg Tate.

That would be a good one.

Because they mentioned . . .

[Miles Davis’s ’70s guitarist and Tate favorite] Pete Cosey. Those liner notes are superlative. Also, that was the first Television album I bought.

I met Joe at Yale. Joe founded a music magazine there with Julian Dibbell called Nadine, after a Chuck Berry song. He was like the rock guy everyone on campus kind of looked up to and knew. He had all these records that were often heard about but impossible to find. For instance, nobody [had] actually heard a Stooges album. Those albums were not only long out of print, but they were unfindable. If you were lucky, you might find a compilation with something from Raw Power. Joe was the guy who had Fun House.

If you’re a kid who’s obsessive about music, you like reading about it, because there’s just so much more information, you know? It’s weird how much of music culture in the ’80s and ’90s meant going to the ends of the earth to find a particular [record]. A group of four friends from school—we all made a pact that the first of us to actually find a copy of Dusty in Memphis would tape it for the other three.

It’s like some ’80s teen comedy where the main characters compete to lose their virginity.

Exactly! It’s like Britney’s Crossroads, except instead of riding to L.A. to find her birth mother . . .

I still remember in, like, 1989, I found a copy of the first Raincoats album, which was also an album that nobody could find. Everyone kind of knew about it because they had that one song on the [1980 Rough Trade compilation LP], Wanna Buy a Bridge? There were so few sources of information. You’d read. “Oh—there’s this band in London, the Raincoats. They have a violin player and they play punk rock and they’re women.” That’s all you’d hear about.

And you’d want to hear them.

Yes. And maybe years later, you’d be in the same room as Wanna Buy a Bridge?, and you’d hear “In Love,” and you’d think, “Oh my god—there’s more stuff like this?”

Eventually, I found the Raincoats’ first album and Dusty in Memphis the same day. It’s so funny: Later that day I went to a friend’s house for dinner, and everybody who came over was like, “Holy crap! That’s the Dusty Springfield album. Can we tape it?” We would tape the album—then put it on from the beginning and tape it again. Now it’s an album you hear at Bed, Bath & Beyond.

It’s really funny how much of it in the ’80s was being in the right place at the right time. To even hear a copy of a [rare] record—there was so much scrounging involved. I don’t miss the romance of that scrounging at all. You also bought a lot of shitty Dusty Springfield records hoping for a glimmer. There were a lot of [Springfield] records in the ’70s that just weren’t good at all.

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“Liars till the end, they pretend their decade didn’t end around 1984-’85, when U.K. new pop conquered the world and went phfft.”
Robert Christgau, review of Duran Duran, Decade (Capitol, 1989), Christgau’s Record Guide: The ’80s (Pantheon, 1990)

[In the middle of the word “around”] Duran Duran, Decade. Of course. You could have stopped after “Liars till the end.” But also, I love the presumption that that’s the end. And also that he’s still insisting that their career ended when he decided it did. And yet that’s something I love about him. I fucking love him for sticking to his guns and still hating that shit.

When did you first encounter Christgau’s writing?

The first Consumer Guide I read was in the December 1981 Creem magazine. The Kinks were on the cover to celebrate Give the People What They Want. There were reviews of Pearl Harbor & the Explosions [and] Funkadelic—Christgau spending 100 words talking about The Electric Spanking of War Babies. It was like, “Holy crap, this music exists? What the hell is this?” There was a positive review of the new Ray Parker Jr. album. Being able to read somebody in print who’d go to bat for Ray Parker Jr. was mind-blowing. It’s not like other places in Creem magazine were talking about Ray Parker Jr.

A chapter in your book takes off from Ray Parker Jr.’s “A Woman Needs Love.” I could have used Christgau’s great line about him: “Blessed with a one-track mind in a 24-track world . . .”

The writing was so compelling and revelatory. He would give everything a chance. A couple months later, he gave a good review to the first A Flock of Seagulls album, and a good review to ABC’s The Lexicon of Love. As someone who was a teenager at the time, [I] had kind of gotten used to the idea that the adult world never could and never would have any sort of respect for this kind of stuff that I loved.

Right, you talk about that in the chapter on A Flock of Seagulls’ “Space Age Love Song”—that kind of teenybop new wave.

Yeah. And [Christgau was] not just going to bat for it, but hearing what it was trying to do as well as what it did, and appraising it on its own terms as well as his. That just kind of blew my mind—the idea that there was this adult writer who was willing to take Ray Parker Jr. and A Flock of Seagulls without condescending to them: “Oh, isn’t it funny that these records are so good?” I still have that copy of Creem magazine on my shelves.

He would fucking hate this comparison, but reading Christgau the first time was exactly like hearing Bob Dylan for the first time—you can picture the facial expression he’d make hearing that. [laughs] But I remember on the Top 40 station, WACQ, hearing “Like a Rolling Stone”—just hearing that voice and wanting to know more, wanting to know everything about it.

The fact that he liked A Flock of Seagulls also made his dismissal of Duran Duran actually mean something.

That’s why it bugged me that he didn’t like Duran Duran! There was a New Year’s Eve party a few years ago—the “Hey Ya!” New Year’s Eve—at a bar in Brooklyn. Ally is deejaying—my wife, then my girlfriend—and she’s playing “Hungry Like the Wolf.” Christgau just says, “You know, I hated this shit at the time . . . and I hate it now!” He goes up to Ally and says, “Don’t you have any Aztec Camera?” [laughs]

Did she?

She did not. But the idea that you go up to a girl who’s deejaying at a bar and ask for Aztec Camera as a replacement for Duran Duran—that’s principle. I admire that. And also that he loved Aztec Camera. I specifically remember a Consumer Guide where he said they sounded “like U2 with songs (which is all U2 needs).” It’s funny—it just seems like a throwaway line in an Aztec Camera review, but I was like, “That’s exactly the thing about U2,” who were one of my favorite bands, who were brand new at the time. It’s one of those things he can toss off. I guess also like with Dylan, it’s easy to underestimate how hard it is to pull off that kind of voice. You know how that Decade review ends, right? “Sometimes I think the little girls don’t understand a damn thing.”

You’ve done a lot of interviews for the book. Do you ever get tired of talking about Duran Duran?

No. I’ve been like a pig in shit. I get to talk about my favorite topic every day! I’m lucky if I get to have two conversations a year about Scritti Politti, you know?

—

“A great single is an exquisite thing. It doesn’t leave you hungry for more or curious as to the mating habits of the artists. It gets in, absorbs your entire being, and gets out—no guilt, no alibis.”
John Leland, Spin, August 1985

It’s not John Leland, right?

It is. It’s from his first “Singles” column in the second issue of Spin.

I was going to say John Leland, except I didn’t laugh when you read it, and John Leland is always funny. But I guess he was just explaining it.

I was tempted to quote his Milli Vanilli column, one of the greatest pieces of rock criticism ever.

The “Singles” columns—it’s funny to go back and read them now that they’re finally archived online, [and see] how completely ahead of the game Leland was. Every time a new column came out, there’d be “The A List” at the end, and you’d physically crave hearing all the records that he’d mentioned in it, some of which would be findable and some of which I’m still hoping to find. [laughs]

When you’re reviewing an album, you’re force-feeding it to yourself. But that’s what you do as a fan anyway; you get the record and listen to it 100 times a day when it comes out. The way a fan consumes a single is different. You live with it over time. You hear it on other people’s radios; you hear it against your will; you hear it on purpose. That’s where the pop process is. To me, it’s the most exciting way of listening to music.

It’s fair to say writing a book about singles is what I did [with Talking to Girls About Duran Duran]. The ’80s was such a singles-driven moment, in part because of the way that MTV changed pop music. There was no context at all. They had 24 hours [to fill], and there weren’t 24 hours of music videos in the world. So they had to play everything. If you stayed up all night watching MTV, you’d see all this wiggy shit that no radio programmer would have allowed in the door.

It basically brought Top 40 radio back, which had been dead for a decade, under the name CHR (Contemporary Hits Radio).

And it forced even individually formatted stations to become CHR stations.

The classic-rock station in my hometown, during the MTV putsch, kind of went CHR in that period. They were playing contemporary black records—something that would have been impossible three years earlier, and impossible three years later. You write in the book about that happening in Boston.

It did. WBCM was the rock station. They played a lot of synth-driven new wave, just because there was more of it. It was kind of funny—in 1982, which was such a pivotal year, they were playing [the Pointer Sisters’] “I’m So Excited.” They were playing [Marvin Gaye’s] “Sexual Healing.” They were playing King Sunny Adé.

Whoa!

I wouldn’t have heard it any other way. It’s weird—when people write about King Sunny Adé now, it’s almost always like, “Disappointed hopes, he should have been the next Bob Marley,” which is insane. I think it’s easy to forget the impact that he had, and also the way that he changed the rock audience in a lot of ways. [Ade’s 1982 album] Juju Music was a huge record in terms of the way it arrived as a new wave record to an Anglophone world. It had this really explosive, expansive effect. Now, it’s hard to find anything that’s written about Juju Music that isn’t like, “Well, this is his failed compromise with American production techniques.” From a certain perspective, maybe that’s true. But it’s still the one I play.

—

“Her position is clear. If he was rude, so what? You can excuse all that, you must excuse all that, because what it allows to exist—his music—is ultimately much more important.”
Chris Heath, “The Man Who Would Be Prince,” Details, November 1991

Is the boy in the song rude?

No, the person the writer is trying to interview is rude. It’s Chris Heath on Prince. The “her” is Martika.

[laughs] That’s awesome. That’s a pretty good summary. He had the “Rude Boy” [button] on the cover of 1999. I can hardly think of an artist less suited, and an interviewer less suited—I can hardly think of a worse pairing than Chris Heath and Prince. He tends to exhaust people by talking them out. He tends to bring out the loquacious [side of his subjects].

We’ve talked before about being big Chris Heath fans. I picked this one because it’s from Details, which you wrote for in the ’90s. Back then the magazine had excellent music coverage—about half English writers, like Heath, and half American.

A lot of that was James Truman, the editor who then became editorial director. Then John Leland took over and brought me in. Part of it was very driven by James Truman’s tastes, which were very ’80s, new wavy, Anglophile-y—mostly stuff that was Bryan Ferry-esque. If you wanted to write about anything and you wanted to pitch it to editors at Details, finding the Bryan Ferry connection to it was key. “P.M. Dawn are kind of the Roxy Music of hip-hop!” Roxy Music were so interested in everything [that] you could relate anything to Roxy Music. And there was never an editorial [directive] like, “OK, you’ve mentioned Bryan Ferry too many times in this section.”

The worst thing James Truman could say about something is that it was “rock-criticky.” He looked back with a certain amount of distaste at his own having come up through the rock-critic ranks in London. He once wrote that one of the first things he [covered] was, he saw this terrible new live band and couldn’t believe how bad they were, and wrote a terrible review. It was the Sex Pistols. He was like, “I should have known that was a sign of my future in rock criticism.”

For the most part, Details was very committed to stars. It closed them off to some things—Guided by Voices, for whatever kind of loss that was. Even writing about Guided by Voices [involved] comparing them to Roxy Music—which is stretching the Roxy Music comparison to its breaking point. That’s why they basically made Björk their house artist at a time when she was getting no airplay in America, no attention from anywhere else in America.

She was really big in clubs, though, and that’s an area Details excelled at covering. In fact, I think you were the one who wrote about the Bucketheads’ “The Bomb!” in 1994. I was really happy to see that because I’d been dancing to that song almost every night I went out that whole summer.

Too funny. [sings in falsetto] “These sounds keep falling in my mi-i-i-i-ind.”

—

“Galaxie 500, Today (Aurora): Everything you ever sorta liked about mid-period J. Richman without any of the embarrassing jizz.”
Byron Coley, “Underground: 80 Excellent Albums of the ’80s,” Spin, January 1990

[laughs] Would that be B. Coley?

Yes. He’s from Boston, right?

He was Western Mass., which might as well be another planet. And because he was always writing about, “I was listening to this record in my backyard looking up at the trees, out of my mind on windowpane and Canadian Club”—it was very non-urban. He was someone who I loved because he made no pretense at all to like stuff that he didn’t like. I mean: I wouldn’t have traded record collections with him. But you could really trust the parameters of his taste. I remember he wrote something in Spin once about, “I’ve heard 40 Jandek albums, and I’ve never heard a Janet Jackson song.” It wasn’t like he was making the case that Jandek was more important. He was explaining why he didn’t need to make the case.

Your book is almost the opposite of that—very much about mainstream ’80s pop. You also talk about the Replacements and the Smiths, who sort of epitomize “college rock,” and Pavement is a touchstone in Love Is a Mix Tape. But I’m curious about your relationship as a listener to more underground ’80s rock. Did you like what was referred to back then as “pigfuck”—bands like Big Black and Pussy Galore?

Yes. Loved it. Part of the thing with “pigfuck” is that the [term] “indie rock” wasn’t around. So people were still calling all that stuff “post-punk,” which sounds really weird now.

It has specific time-period resonances now.

[Back then], you would call the Minutemen post-punk. You would call the Feelies post-punk. You would call ’Til Tuesday post-punk, you know? [laughs] You would call Lloyd Cole and the Commotions post-punk. A lot of people would call Run-D.M.C. post-punk. It was becoming really useless and difficult as a catchphrase, and “indie rock” was a couple of years away. So “pigfuck” was awesome because it described a specific sound. Those were such great records. I never saw Pussy Galore live. I’ve been told I didn’t miss much. But those records are fantastic.

—-
“‘I Feel Love’ is the windmills of my mind.”
Chuck Eddy, The Accidental Evolution of Rock & Roll (Da Capo, 1997)

Is that Frank Kogan?

Close.

Chuck Eddy?

Yes.

Chuck would listen to everything, and had this amazing ability to come to a record cold—to say what makes it sound good right now. He had this thing about Jason and the Scorchers in Creem. He said, “Why would anybody who ever heard Lynyrd Skynyrd ever listen to Jason and the Scorchers?” I was really kind of shocked by that. I thought, “Shouldn’t Jason and the Scorchers get extra credit for trying something different?” He didn’t grant anybody extra credit for trying anything different. It was all about what got done.

In the 1986 Pazz & Jop [Critics Poll, the Village Voice’s annual survey], he said, “One of the things 1986 really brought home to me is that the average rock record is as useless and a lot less durable than its average pop competitor”—I think “competitor” is the word he used. He listed a lot of bands nobody remembers now, like Scruffy the Cat and the Lucy Show and the Mighty Lemon Drops, and said, “They’re sloppy, they can’t write songs, and their tiny budgets don’t allow for production values, which does make a difference when catchiness is the only virtue you’re peddling.”

Did that crystallize something for you?

Definitely. Part of it is that he was writing about stuff that otherwise wasn’t getting a lot of critical attention. Maybe my favorite piece of his was “Whitesnake Can Go Eat Puke,” in the Voice in 1987. It was a roundup of pop-metal bands. It was Def Leppard, Poison, Bon Jovi, Mötley Crüe, a couple of others, and Whitesnake. He was ranking them: “Poison and Bon Jovi are great, Leppard’s going down the tubes”—later revised, obviously—“Crüe’s improving, and Whitesnake can go eat puke.”

The leeway that they gave him to do something like this—he talked about how Pussy Galore and Mötley Crüe were very similar bands, both trying to do the same thing. He said, like, “Pussy Galore made better records, but Mötley Crüe can probably put on a better live show than the one Pussy Galore did when I saw them last week. So could Peter Tosh.” Peter Tosh had probably been dead for a week at that point. Too soon!

Obviously it became kind of a standard trope for him to compare a record to something that was getting a lot of print media attention. That’s too easy to do. That later became something he would repeat past the point where it was useful.

I’ve always enjoyed reading him more on singles than on albums. Because the Voice section was so album driven, sometimes he’d have to squeeze an album into a few grudging sentences. They let him review Lou Gramm’s “Midnight Blue” when it came out. He said, “This is the greatest single of 1987—and Byron Coley doesn’t know it exists.” It’s like, “Who’s gonna get this joke?” That’s something I admired about Chuck. He never let that get in his way.

—

“Though Chris Lowe’s airy, bohemian dance rhythms again seem to suggest a salon more than a disco (nothing wrong with that), there’s a difference in Neil Tennant’s voice, and in the cadences he builds his words around. His naïveté—the assumed, artificial, self-protecting naïveté of someone who could too easily have given himself over to cynicism—is gone.”
Greil Marcus, “Real Life Rock Top Ten,” Artforum, October 1993

[Simon] Frith?

It’s Greil Marcus.

He’s writing about Very?

Yes.

Very is a strange record, my friend. It doesn’t fit into their career at all. It doesn’t fit into 1993 at all. It doesn’t fit into the history of pop music at all. It’s a fluke. It’s completely bizarre.

I think it’s their best album.

I agree.

I was tempted to quote him on the Pet Shop Boys’ “Rent,” from the 1987 Pazz & Jop.

[Quoting] “What possible words could we have come up with to fit this melody?” There was a Greil Marcus comment in the 1986 Pazz & Jop as well, about why his favorite record of the year was Billy Ocean’s “When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going.” Have you read this?

Yes, where he calls pop radio “a good, weird machine.”

That was a huge, huge, formative statement. The way it talked about a way of listening to pop music—it’s so ingrained as a pop fan. That was a time when Pazz & Jop would come out and people would use it for a manifeto-y sort of platform.

When did you begin reading Greil Marcus?

I first read his byline in the Village Voice–a review of Bonzo Goes to Washington’s “5 Minutes.” It might have been the [same] Voice with Richard Goldstein on MTV. I wish I still had a copy. The headline was “What’s Art Got to Do With It?” He was talking about David Lee Roth, Cyndi Lauper, Billy Idol. I wish I still had a copy of that. I wish there was a handy anthology of all this really cool ’80s music criticism that you can only find on microfiche. I know how to use microfiche, but kids today . . .

They seem to think those things only exist if they’re on the Internet.

And trying to tell them to go to the library and read something . . . [shakes head]. I was a librarian. Part of why I loved being in and working at a library is that it meant reading and listening to my Walkman, which were my two favorite things. After I got off my shift, I would go to another room in the library with the microfilm. You could often find Village Voices and Boston Phoenixes archived, back to the ’70s.

You could read Greil Marcus’s [Voice] review of [Van Morrison’s] Veedon Fleece six months after it came out, when he said, “This album came out, I wrote a good review, forgot about it. Then I heard it at a friend’s house the other day for dinner and was like, ‘This is great. What is it?’ ‘Well, it’s Van Morrison. I bought it because you said it was good.’” And he does a whole new review. Writing about records six months after they came out is usually more interesting.

You obviously have gotten to do that with the new book.

A lot of listening to music is memory, and a lot of memory is listening to music. It’s funny that music is always in the present. It always confronts you with the new, the right-now. But it’s always connected to memory. Even if you’re writing about a song that’s playing right now, you’re always writing about it after the fact. It’s always after the moment. Especially writing about dance music—if you can call it a genre of pop-music criticism, it’s my favorite genre, because that’s built into it. The impossibility of trying to recapture that moment—even if you’re writing about something you heard last night, the immediacy of it makes it more exciting to read. There’s something retrospective built into it.

—

“Marshall Crenshaw presents our hero as prime date bait: he longs for a ‘Cynical Girl,’ doesn’t have any interest in ‘The Usual Thing,’ and promises to take his pick ‘Rockin’ Around in NYC.’ Sign me up.”
Renee Crist on Marshall Crenshaw, Spin Alternative Record Guide (Eric Weisbard and Craig Marks, eds., 1995)

Yes, Renee wrote that.

Obviously Love Is a Mix Tape is about your relationship with Renee, but I wondered if you could talk a little about her as a critic.

It’s funny, because she was an obsessive music fan and a writer who’d never done a lot of writing about music. Like a lot of [fiction] writers in the ’80s, she would always have music in there to set the scene, or characters discussing music. But the idea that you might cut the bullshit and just write about music seemed like cheating in a way. She was like, “I’m not an expert.” The idea that she could do this and was qualified to do this is something that she just needed encouragement [for]: “You don’t need to fit it into this really elaborate, boy-brain framework.” More than anybody, Madonna gave Renee a voice of freedom as a critic, I would say, and a writer. The first time she wrote about Madonna, she turned a corner.

I think it kind of surprised her how much it freed her up as a writer to write about music, without having to do the thing of, “I’m going to have a character who listens to this kind of music.” It freed her to listen to all sorts of different stuff. Just because as a writer, you would write about De La Soul, and you could write about Pavement, and you could write about Madonna, and that could all be part of who you were.

Her family was so musical. They were readers but they weren’t academics. Her grandparents were coal miners. She was the first one on either side of her family to go to college. [But] everybody in her family sang, played—and she could do that. She could pick up a guitar and learn a song in a couple hours. I was so fucking jealous, you know?

It’s interesting that she had that musical background, and was a writer, but came to music writing in such a roundabout way.

And also that she came to things as a fan, and as a girl fan. I was always amused by the ways boys and girls listen to music differently. One day I came back [home] from working at the library. She said, “I’ve decided I like the Fall. They’re just like the B-52’s: One guy with a guitar playing this one surf riff over and over again, and a girl in the background going, Ooo-ooh-wah! Ooo-ooh-wah!” She played that song “L.A.”: “[Mark E. Smith] is just Fred Schneider, except now he’s got a Northern English accent, and the girl is Brix [Smith] instead of Kate and Cindy.” I was like, “I’m not saying you’re wrong, I’m saying that really fucks me up to hear you say that.” I can think of friends who’d become violent at that suggestion. But she was right.