Front page	From the Event Guide archive! This article refers to an event which took place on, or until, 21 June 2007 Music Interview – Devo Revenge of the Nerds – Part II Back in the 1970s, they brought Dada to punk and thought laser discs were the future. Paul Byrne talks to the founder of Devo about revisiting his band’s future shock 30 years later. When the National Guard opened fire on students protesting the Vietnam War at Kent State University, Ohio, on May 4th 1970, teenagers Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerry Casale were there. Also there were two of Gerry’s friends, Alison Krauss and Jeffrey Miller, two of the four students who would be slain that day. For art student friends Mark and Gerry, it was a turning point. The former had been playing in an ELP and Yes covers band, the latter in a blues band, but, in the three months that Kent State was closed down after the shootings, they set about creating what the latter later referred to as “a whacked-out creative Dada response”. And so it was that Devo was born, Mothersbaugh and Casale setting out to “discover what devolved music sounded like. We wanted to make outer-space caveman music”. Somewhere between Captain Beefheart and early Roxy Music, Devo would pretend to be a traditional rock covers band just to get gigs around their native Akron, Ohio, quickly getting booed off stage when, having introduced a Foghat classic, they would immediately launch into one of their own compositions, such as ‘Mongoloid’. Or ‘Jocko Homo’. The music was all spasms and stricture; the look was pure Kraftwerk roadie - neurotic, uptight and stiff-necked. The rednecks were not impressed by this “musical laxative for a constipated society”, as Casale liked to call it. Keen to remain anonymous, the five members (which also included two of Mark’s brothers, Jim and Bob, and one of Gerry’s, Bob 2) wore yellow maintanence overalls and what appeared to be overturned flowerpots on their heads. They believed that rock’n’roll was in its dying day, and the advent of laser discs meant that the sound and vision revolution was about to unfold. And so, the band set about making films to accompany their music, and to further their vaguely ominous future shock manifesto, all sci-fi apocalypse, mumbo-jumbo science and evangelical bleating. Even before they had landed a record deal, Devo had friends in high places. At their first New York show in July 1977, David Bowie came onstage to introduce the second set, announcing, “This is the band of the future. I’m going to produce them in Tokyo this winter”. In the end, the Thin White Duke’s mucker, Brian Eno, put up all the dosh (covering flights, hotel and studio) to record the band’s debut album (‘Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!’) in Germany, Bowie joining them on the weekend breaks away from shooting ‘Just A Gigolo’. The band never quite rose above cult status though, despite a Top 20 hit with ‘Whip It’ in 1980. It wasn’t long before Devo became New Wave’s Kiss, a costumed nostalgia act. In recent years, their tongues still firmly in their cheeks, Devo have reunited for the occasional gig, and helped out leader Mark Mothersbaugh – post-punk’s answer to Randy Newman - on his lucrative and highly prolific soundtrack work (‘Pee Wee’s Playhouse’, ‘Rugrats’, all of Wes Anderson’s films, plus video games such as ‘The Sims 2’, and commercials, such as ‘Get A Mac’). There are also some curious side projects, such as Devo 2.0, featuring a bunch of Disney kids singing Devo songs, and ‘The Beginning Is The End’, an in-the-works biopic of the band’s early days. As the band prepare for their first European tour since 1990, Paul Byrne caught up with ringleader, Mark Mothersbaugh, safely ensconsed in Mutato Muzika, the LA-based commercial music production studiohe founded with the two Bobs from Devo. You celebrated your 57th birthday on May 18th. What would the teenage Mark Mothersbaugh make of today’s Devo, going out there singing old songs we love? Well, you know, I’m only doing it because nobody else will. Until we find somebody else to do it, I still got to do it for a while. Our original intent, when we first started the band – I was looking at notebooks recently – we didn’t think of it as a rock band. We thought it more as an agit-pop group. We had aspirations to have our own TV network, and to make re-education films, and we were reading about laser discs, and we thought, okay, rock’n’roll is dying, and it’s going to be this new sound and vision thing, and we thought of Devo as being this performance group, of there being five or six Devos who would go out and perform the songs we wrote. We originally thought, well, we won’t have to tour. That still doesn’t answer my question as to what the teenage Mark Mothersbaugh would make of all this? Well, here’s what I think. I think we would be shocked at how fast things devolved. We would have been shocked that it stayed the course, the gloomy course that we were predicting turned out to be much more correct that we were hoping. We thought, if you pointed at things that were wrong, we were sure that people were going to come around and help fix it. It didn’t really turn out that way – it festered, and became a virus, and devolution consumed humankind. Was there a point when you realised, despite all the acclaim, and all the big label backing, that you guys were living the impossible dream? That it was all going to end in poor record sales? It started off early on. I remember being in my early twenties, living out in a boathouse on the Thames that belonged to Richard Branson. He had this funky little houseboat, and Gerry and I were staying there because we were being sued by Warner Bros. Richard had convinced us to sign with Virgin, because he was going to help us start a film company. And all we had to do, for a small amount of money, was let him have our publishing – which he took – and he was going to take care of us. And it was not six months later before we already knew that he was not telling us the truth [laughs]. That must have been a blow. Well, there is no better time for an artist than right before they make their first big mistake, so, it felt great. I remember in 1977, before we’d signed a record deal, Stiff Records in the UK started putting out the singles over in Europe that we had released ourselves back in the States, and they started to chart. And it was a nice time; it finally felt like we were doing something right. But I remember thinking even then, you know what, this isn’t going to last forever, so, just enjoy it while you can. It was more fleeting than I expected though. Having people like Bowie, Eno, Iggy Pop and Robert Fripp championing you very early on must have helped enormously. That was great, having people that we respected, people who inspired us, it was very gratifying to have them offering to help us, trying to nurture us. Brian Eno paid for our first album. You don’t hear about that too often, so, that was a pretty amazing thing. Such a stamp of approval must have been worth more than having a hundred houseboats. Yeah, it doesn’t matter about the money. We didn’t have apartments, we didn’t have cars, we didn’t have anything, but, you know, we felt like we had struck some sort of a chord. We pissed off everyone in Ohio, and we were attracting everybody in New York, Los Angeles and England, so, it did feel like something was going right. Looking over your personal history, this all seems to stem from that moment when, at the age of seven, you got your first pair of glasses, and, for the first time, you were able to see birds, to see smoke coming out of chimneys. For me, it was a very pivotal moment. I started drawing pictures, incessantly, and this was at the very end of my second year in school, and I was getting detention, and spanked by the teachers, and generally being a discipline problem, as they would have called it. Now, they give kids drugs to make them sit still, but I remember at that time this woman coming over and saying, ‘You know what, you draw trees better than me’, and it was the first time she hadn’t yelled at me, or hit me on the back of the head, or made me go stand over in the corner for not answering a question properly when she’d ask me to read something off the blackboard. I couldn’t see the blackboard. But, after she said that, I remember going home thinking, I’m going to be an artist. And it really set me off on a trajectory. I never felt like I had missed out on my early years; I think I just had a special way to grow up. And it has affected me even to this day. I just got back from China, where my wife and I adopted our second little girl, and this one, she’s almost six-years old and she has congenital glaucoma, so, she is practically blind. But she just got her first pair of glasses, and she’s seeing things she’s never seen before. And she’s an artist too. I’m guessing then that the outsider approach was there with you right from the start. Yeah, I never fit in, all through my first 12 years, and it wasn’t until I went to Kent State that I actually enjoyed going to school. Part of that was because I could concentrate on the art classes that I enjoyed, but also, it was a big place where I didn’t have to worry about getting my ass kicked by Those Who Didn’t Like The Beatles. I remember when I was in High School, I was totally enamoured with The Beatles, and they combed their hair forward, so, I was the only kid in my school that did too. And I got my hair cut off with razor blades, I got my ass kicked dozen of times. There was this one pathetic store in Akron, Ohio that had this kind of Carnaby Street clothing, but it wasn’t really. It was just the closest you were going to get in Akron, Ohio, and they would have a shirt with blue polka dots on it, these big polka dots, and I got thrown out of school for causing a disturbance. ‘Because I have a blue polka dot shirt on?!’. I went to that school. It was hideous; I hated high school. And then when I went to college, it was different. I was anonymous, I blended in. And I was already not interested in being in a fraternity or sorority and all that stuff; I just wasn’t interested in any of that. I just waited until the bell rang and all the other kids headed off to their after-school social events, but I just stayed in the art department and printed and did art work all night. Just printed and painted all night, using the facilities that everyone else had abandoned because they had important beer to drink. Worked out great for me… It was all about the art back then. How about today? At that point, when Bowie and Eno were championing us, that just really inspired us to work harder. We were the quintessential young, totally-obsessed artists who would do anything for their art. Now we’re crabby old men who won’t play unless somebody pays us some money to show up somewhere. And we’ll complain about the flights and the hotel rooms, you know. Is that unsettling, at all? Devo are now a nostalgia act… Well, you know, sometimes I’m on stage now, and I’ll have this out-of-body experience where you think, this is what I was supposed to be doing at 24, not 57. But, at the same time, we’re not trying to sell anything. We have no new album to push, and we’re not trying to jumpstart a new career. We were what we were, and we are what we are. It’s not like we show up and play two of the songs everybody knows and then shout, ‘Hey, here’s our new album’, and then, an hour later, we play three more songs everybody knows. We just come out, and we strip it down to the best of everything we ever did. The show looks pretty much identical to when we played CBGBs, or Eric’s in Liverpool, back in 1977. The show looks just like that, but we folded in the songs that became popular later. It’s a pretty true looking show. We’re older-looking now, but those yellow suits are the same. We weren’t wearing slinky, hip-hugging bellbottoms; we always wore these yellow baggy clean-up outfits. We were all a little thinner and a little better-looking back then, but we still looked like cheeseburgers, with that yellow wrapping. Now we look like double-cheese burgers. No definite plans then for Devo to make another album? It could happen with the biopic movie, but, as far as the band is concerned, we see each other every day, which is rare for bands who’ve broken up. I guess that has something to do with being two sets of brothers, but I’ve started my family now, late, and my brother has started his second family now, having just become a grandfather. We recorded a new song together last week, and we really enjoyed it, so, you know, who knows…? Devo play Vicar Street, on Dublin’s Thomas Street, on Thursday 21st June. 7.30pm. €57.80. www.clubdevo.com / www.aikenpromotions.com / www.vicarstreet.com / www.ticketmaster.ie