I’d rather not be doing this interview,” Bradford Cox says, wincing. “But you had the audacity to invite yourself into my world. And if someone flies to Atlanta to talk to me, I better treat him with respect.”
Given the American south’s reputation for hospitality, it’s fascinating that Cox’s definition of “respect” includes threatening to “rip you a new asshole if you paraphrase my emotional moment of transparency” when my tape recorder runs out at an inopportune moment. Likewise his threat – said with a smirk, admittedly – not to let me leave his house until we’ve redone the interview to his satisfaction. This comes after 13 hours in his company. Luckily, no amount of cat-and-mouse tactics stops him from being compelling company. It’s like scrapping with an over-achieving, extremely lucid teenager.
As Deerhunter’s lead singer, main songwriter and co-guitarist, Cox is proof Janelle Monáe isn’t Atlanta’s only shining star. Though Deerhunter formed in 2000, the band only settled on their current lineup when Cox’s schoolmate Lockett Pundt joined on guitar in 2005. The brilliant Microcastle album (2008) raised expectations, made good by last year’s Halcyon Digest, which expands the band’s uniquely eerie, heavy-lidded and cryptic vision. “A southern gothic take on glam Berlin. Exile on Main Street meets Low meets Tusk,” Cox reckons, though that leaves out the doo-wop influences that set Deerhunter further apart from the uplifting crescendos of North America’s most successful alternative bands, from Arcade Fire to Grizzly Bear. On top of this, Cox’s beguiling and troubled lyrics (the recent single Helicopter is based on the story of a Russian rent boy reputedly thrown to his death after losing his youthful allure) also demand exploration.
Unfortunately, 30-year-old Cox is done with exploring himself. He admits that in his teens he would interview himself in the mirror, fantasising about the attention. Not any more. This is partly due to having inherited the genetic disorder Marfan’s syndrome. People with Marfan’s tend to be unusually tall and skinny, often with weakened lungs and spine. “People think I’m a junkie because of how I look,” he says. But as a former inveterate blogger at frequent loggerheads with fellow bigmouths, engaging with the rest of the world has left him weary and wary. “I think I confuse more than anything when I talk,” he says. After giving no UK interview for two years, Cox accepts my suggestion to try something different – to show me around his Atlanta.
He picks me up in his Volvo, and after driving around the city’s industrial outskirts, he points out Lenny’s, “a dive bar where Cole [Alexander, of the Black Lips] would do weird improv stuff, really chaotic and energetic”. Cox is still at it today, creating music almost to the exclusion of socialising. “I don’t like going out,” he says. “Except to one of three restaurants. I’m very rigid like that.” He made an exception for a New Year’s Eve party, to his chagrin. “These young fucking art school kids attacked me because I took off Duran Duran and put on [experimental minimalist] Tony Conrad. I don’t understand what kids want any more, and I’m not interested in catering to it. All they want to do is dance and fuck, and those are two things I’m completely incapable of.”
Cox has identified himself before as gay, but now claims he’s asexual, “because I’m a virgin”. While his teenage pals were having fun “on stained couches, I was in hospital, addicted to painkillers after spine surgery, addicted to that blissed-out feeling that I think has a lot to do with my taste for ambient music”.
Drinking sweet black tea – “the table wine of the south” – in Sauced, one of his three food stops, Cox talks about the music he listened to as a kid. He was just 10 when he heard the Velvet Underground, from which he moved on through 60s garage, 70s krautrock and 80s post-punk. “But we’ve always tried to blur things further,” he says. “Like the sound and the fury of a show more than the actual notes.” He pauses. “We’ve always been dismissed by avant-garde people as too pop, and by pop people as being fucking freaks.”
Over a late brunch the next day, he adopts his usual posture of perching, legs drawn under him like a gigantic bird. Relaxed conversation is clearly off the menu. Daylight makes him nervous, he says, “useless” even, and he fills time by eating, running errands and visiting family. But at night, there’s no stopping him. He recently gave away four albums – 49 songs in all – online under the title Bedroom Databank. “You come off on tour and there’s this crippling depression, like, what do I do with myself? I improvise. Fuck record labels and commercial criticism – let people hear what it sounds like when I’m making music without knowing there’s an audience, like I used to.”
We drive to neighbouring Marietta, to visit Deerhunter’s rehearsal space, Notown, a suburban carriage house full of band stuff. Cox sits behind the drumkit and starts playing the krautrock motorik pulse, before slumping on the sofa. “I get irritated when I see all this equipment and think we should be doing more. But everybody else has girlfriends and they’re lazy. But I’d probably want to settle down too with some nice girl, or guy, or whatever I fancied at the time. People with kids, I’m often struck by jealousy. Because my parents love me unconditionally. They were supportive even when we fought, so I’m not terrified of failure like many people I know.”
He suddenly springs up. “I’ll take you through the process. I set up a shitty mic and fuck around with a guitar until something melodic happens. I usually come up with a vocal feeling, trying to sound open and vulnerable and androgynous. That’s inspired by John Lennon, how he always sounded like a little boy. Then I just rap stupid shit. And then I move on to the next one.” He plays me his last effort, a slice of happy/sad pop called Right of Way that, given its origins, is breathtakingly good. “Thanks. What you’re hearing is the sound of someone really depressed because they can’t write. It’s a shit B-side at best.”
He then suddenly decides I should meet his parents. “You gotta interview them!” he barks. “I get my strength from my dad and my punk from my mum.” Cox’s love of 50s rhythms also comes from Jim Cox, a Fats Domino, Little Richard and Coasters fan. “Dad was a badass,” Bradford grins. Dad says of son: “He was creative from the time he was cantilevering building blocks. You couldn’t mould him.”
“I was an emboldened, precocious kid,” Cox says as we drive to his mother’s house. “In middle school, my best friend and I would hold hands just to attract this wild energy. I always had a thing about teenage mental institutions. I read that Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music was very therapeutic for shock therapy. I relate to those who find solace in dissonance and chaos.”
His mother, Edith, who also has Marfan’s, recalls Bradford’s childhood “was ruined” by illness and bullying. But art and music saved the day. “When he was 12, Kurt Cobain was his idol, and Brad suddenly started playing guitar. Before that, he’d write and draw stuff that was just not usual for someone his age. I have boxes of it upstairs.”
A box labelled “Keep Forever, Ages 8-11” is retrieved. “Even in my youth, I was a cynical dick,” Bradford says, searching through the cuttings: “Flame and aerosol can/ Have you lost your path in red eye watering embers?” was written when he was eight.
“Aren’t you glad I kept these?” Edith beams.
The daylight gone, Cox has brightened up, and suggests we eat tacos. “And then I’ll take you to my house.”
In a messy, dim and paraphernalia-strewn bedroom (“My sanctuary”), fit more for a student than an adult, he says: “Ask me the questions again, and you’ll get better answers. Starting now.” I ask why he is a misanthrope. “Why are you a journalist? That’s the summary of this article. Do you really think I am?” You act like it, I say. “I don’t disagree with that. But misanthropic people don’t cry at films like I do. You just see me in the context of being interviewed. For crying out loud, you have me under a microscope.”
As if suddenly remembering his dad had raised him “to have a strong stomach, and not be self-pitying”, Cox softens again. “Nothing replaces seeing someone appreciate my music, their eyes closed, singing along, and telling me after the show how much it means to them. You can’t be some cynical, whiny-arsed artist, shouting: ‘I want my space!’ There’s nothing but gratitude.”
We call it a night and he drives me home. “Thanks, it’s been fun hanging out,” he says, and he’s gone.
(Source: Guardian)
