The Bush Interview
By Karen Bliss
Jam! Music
October 11, 1999


TORONTO - Three of the four members of British rock band Bush -- lead vocalist/guitarist Gavin Rossdale, bassist Dave Parsons and drummer Robin Goodridge (guitarist Nigel Pulsford is at home with his family) -- recently sat down for a chat at Toronto's Four Seasons hotel about the making of its new album, The Science Of Things (due Oct. 26).

KAREN BLISS: Your second album, Razorblade Suitcase, was fired off right after the first, Sixteen Stone. You didn't have time to look back, to relax. Did this two year break spoil the momentum or was it a much needed break?

GAVIN ROSSDALE: "I didn't stop working at all. I had one month off since we finished the tour, and then went off to write songs."

BLISS: The delay in getting the record out, was it because of the lawsuit with your label, Trauma?

ROSSDALE: "Yeah."

BLISS: What was the lawsuit over?

ROSSDALE: "Just a disagreement over what the deal should be."

BLISS: What did you think it should be?

ROSSDALE: "I don't want to go into it really. I don't think it's anyone else's business. It's just personal."

BLISS: Is it settled?

ROSSDALE: "It's settled now and it's fine but it took a year of ignoring the record label."

BLISS: Your bio says you wrote for this record in a mansion in Ireland?

ROSSDALE: "It was a hunting lodge. A friend of mine, Sasha, who was playing keyboards with us and did a bunch of stuff on the album, his family has a place down there. I was getting desperate because I was looking for this house for like a year, somewhere to go, somewhere to be away, no distractions, just somewhere I could put a studio in and write songs. Dave was doing music for commercials; Robin was doing remixes and drinking red wine; Nigel did a solo record, so it was a active, creative band. Everyone was doing stuff and fulfilling things that take their mind off being in Bush. And then, for me, because I love writing songs, I wanted to write songs for Bush."

BLISS: Is it an easy process, for you, writing? Do you labour over your lyrics?

ROSSDALE: "Depends how good I think it is first of all. If I think I've got it, and nailed it, all I do know is I know if it's done. Sometimes, I would get it straight away; some songs I have to go out with two days or three days and walk around dating them and find out what it was about them. I lived on a hill, on a massive lake and I could walk two hours in any direction with my dog every morning, so what I would do, if it was a song I was just figuring, I could just take a notepad and just be a freak and walk around going, oh yeah, that's it, into my Walkman."

BLISS: Do you work on the songs one at a time until it's finished?

ROSSDALE: "What I do is I'd write four at a time and then I'd have an engineer come and stay with me for five days and he'd engineer it, because I'm not too good at patching things in and out and all those kinds of things. And he would just supervise and then he would just record me and it would be great because he'd stay for five days and then go away and then I'd write a bunch more songs and he'd come in and record them with me. It was great having him. He saved my life -- Barry Nolan."

BLISS: The producers, Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley, you worked with them on the very first record, but not the second.

ROSSDALE: "We didn't work with them on this record."

They laugh.

GOODRIDGE: "We lost them."

BLISS: What does that mean?

ROSSDALE: "What it says. We didn't really work with them. They didn't do any production, really. I mean, Clive did a bit of arranging at the beginning. Alan has never been a producer. He's an engineer. But, for some reason, contractually, it says they produced."

BLISS: In the bio, it says you went back to them.

ROSSDALE: "Yeah, it's not true."

GOODRIDGE: "We basically did it (The Science Of Things) ourselves, but for whatever reason, at the time, we needed a third party to take care of us, when we were rehearsing."

ROSSDALE: "It won't happen again."

GOODRIDGE: "No. We've all got over it. We don't need a producer anymore."

ROSSDALE: "They were trying to resign all the time, Clive, because he didn't know what to do with it, so, no. There's another guy who worked on the album, Tom Elmhirst. He's the engineer that we really loved working with, and we've given him as much credit as we could, but because these guys are playing hardball and legal letters, we couldn't give him the credit he deserved. So we're perfectly happy if you write that in the article. He's a wonderful engineer."

BLISS: So you just need a good engineer?

ROSSDALE: "No, we just need Tom."

PARSONS: "I think after three albums, the songs have got better and we've got better at arranging them, and we've got better at getting the sounds we want, so we need less and less assistance. But as a band, in your early days, you do need someone to explain how to work in a studio."

BLISS: The electronic sounds on The Science Of Things, for instance, on the single, "The Chemicals Between Us", and "Letting The Cables Sleep", were they afterthoughts?

GOODRIDGE: "No they were current. They are the song. That's part of the song. Soundscaping has been something that, with the second record we didn't do. We worked entirely on our own on the instruments."

ROSSDALE: "There were. Obviously, there were soundscapes. With (engineer/producer) Steve (Albini), it's all about the atmosphere."

GOODRIDGE: "But they were created by guitars and feedback. We allowed the instruments and different things to create the noises that we required."

BLISS: It's fairly subtle on The Science Of Things.

ROSSDALE: "If you chuck out everything you had before and you just try and make it a Depeche Mode record, it would have seemed weird, so what we were careful of doing was maintaining stuff that was our sound in there, along with the bleep-bleeps."

BLISS: Anything fun on there?

ROSSDALE: "My dog is on 'Altered States'. He barks, in time, on an off-beat."

BLISS: Was that by accident?

ROSSDALE: "Yeah, he was in the studio when I was singing and someone must have come in, so he barked, and he barked in time 'cause he's so cool."

BLISS: Are you one of these songwriters who doesn't talk about lyrics?

ROSSDALE: "I don't know what the question is."

BLISS: The single, "Chemicals between Us", is that referring to chemical warfare or body chemistry?

ROSSDALE: "Just the difference between people. Obviously, for me, it began with a specific difference with one person. We have all separate DNA and we are all individuals. There's that great band David & David and they have that song, 'Being Alone Together,' a beautiful song, an incredible song, so what struck me was how lonely you can be lying in the same bed as someone, and also it goes further about the differences within yourself, and your own conflicts, mood swings and stuff. You know how you can feel one thing one day and then an hour latter you may feel another thing because life is fluid."

BLISS: Are you going right into touring?

ROSSDALE: "Yeah, we've been playing quite a lot."

GOODRIDGE: "In the U.K. and then we'll probably start in November in earnest in Europe, and that will go into the end of 2000."

BLISS: Are you looking forward to getting back into that?

PARSONS: "It's quite awe inspiring to think about, quite a lot of work in front of you. It's good though. It's exciting."

BLISS: As big as you are now, are you able to schedule your tour, so that you have a couple of days off in each city?

GOODRIDGE: "Yeah, we can afford to be slower than we used to be. We can afford to say, 'Okay, I'd like two weeks off in Jamaica please.'"

BLISS: Are you going to?

ROSSDALE: "No, we'd never get away with it."