In March of 2008 I had the honor of speaking with yet another of my heroes, Cy Curnin of the Fixx. We spoke at length and it was hardly like an interview and more of a conversation. We have both shared similar experiences in life from both being vocalist and writers to divorce. It made it easy for us to discuss everything. This is an interview (conversation) without boundaries. I've edited out much of our small talk and more personal discussion to keep the interview flowing.
I've found in meeting Cy once before and again in this phone conversation he is very much in touch with life and what makes life worth living. Cy is one of those heroes you don't mind meeting as he is not full of himself and communicates just what he thinks and feels. I believe you will enjoy getting to know Cy Curnin better through this conversation. Enjoy.
LARS: How you doing Cy?
Cy Curnin: Reporting from the field, Cy Curnin, ducking bullets on
LARS: (chuckles) Where are you calling from?
CY CURNIN: I’m calling from LA,
LARS: Do you remember the state of
CY CURNIN: I do! Yeah, I do. One by the water, on a floating gig we did.
LARS: Do you remember an acoustic gig you did, in a small bar?
CY CURNIN: Yeah! I do.
LARS: It was you and Jamie West-Oram, back in the days when acoustic was a little bit of a trend.
CY CURNIN: Yeah, that’s right that was right after the unplugged thing was kicking in.
LARS: Yeah.
CY CURNIN: I do remember that actually. Why, were you there then?
LARS: I actually met you. But, you know, in meeting you I wasn’t let down. I thought you were down to earth. You seemed to be more in tune to the, I guess down-to-earth movement at the time, for lack of a better term?
CY CURNIN: Yeah, I’ve never really strayed from wanting to keep my hands on the soil, direct contact with the earth all that stuff. Now I’ve actually moved to a family. I’ve taken it one step more literally, just providing my family with meat from the field outside my door.
LARS: I think in many ways that’s what every man thinks of.
CY CURNIN: The game of playing; there are some parts that are quite attractive, and there are other parts that are just sort of, should remain nameless. I don’t like the idea of worshipping false idols and I think anything that’s music should be invisible; a messenger, really. I don’t mind taking some of the royalty checks, and that side of it, the income from it, but the fame machine never really rocked my boat too much.
LARS: I’m a positive energy person. I believe relationships of people either spiral into negative directions or positive directions and everything is what you make it so; you need to control things with positive energy. Would you say that’s pretty much in everything you’ve written lyrically?
CY CURNIN: That’s pretty much how I see things too. I mean, I think it was I realized that recently where I think it was my wife said one time “You know, when you’re shouting at me, or shouting at anyone, you’re really shouting at yourself,” and that’s the spiral of negativity is you start wild; you’re already expecting to change things around you without looking at how you can affect change within you first to relieve tension.
LARS: Yeah, it takes a really strong force to be able to stop that negative flow before you can turn it around.
CY CURNIN: Yeah, it’s like masturbation. It’s quite addictive, in a way. It gives you a very short term sense of empowerment, this rage and just kind of controlling the room with loud noises but in the end it’s more the calm approach that works, you’re not repulsing everyone around you.
LARS: I was so happy you didn’t write everything about love and I remember an interview once where you said you really try to steer away from love songs.
CY CURNIN: I guess patience is love. Giving an olive branch and stuff like that. There are ways of singing a love song without using the word “love.” So, maybe with age I’ve taken that back. If it’s got a positive energy to it, then maybe it’s surrounded by some love. I just don’t do the pillow chat thing as well as some other people have done it. They can condense it, there’s no real emotions around it. I always find that kind of try to keep the personal stuff close to home.
When you’re in a band for the boys, it’s kind of a boys club. They don’t want to hear about who I was kissing or rowing with last night instead of what’s inspiring us collectively, you know? Anger at the front page, or trying to turn some negative heat into positive stuff and whatever floats the boat of the people around you too, you know? You kind of turn off the song when it’s already working, and it’s just not going to hold their attention. So, I use them as my little jury, and they’re all a bunch of inspiring chaps and they’ve all got very relevant input into the lyrics and the emotion of the song too, not just musicians. That’s very good. They help me grow a lot.
LARS: I said I’ve always taken your lyrics as more of a philosophical point of view instead of a story-telling.
CY CURNIN: Exactly. I think that comes from my French side, you know, I have a philosophical way of looking at things.
LARS: Who would you say influenced your writing more, your mother or your father?
CY CURNIN: Well, I think they both did before. My mother’s more creative, more of an artistic philosopher. She writes poems and she’s a literature teacher. But my dad was kind of, in his own silent way, he’s an inspiration too. He’s a pious man, very humble, does a lot of things to help people; councils bereaved parents that have lost kids to cancer, stuff like that, but he doesn’t really mention it and doesn’t bang a drum to say “notice what I’m doing.” He does things very quietly, and when I was a kid I was wrapped up in my own stuff. I didn’t pay much attention to what he was doing but now I look back and I see he was a force in life, even though it wasn’t a loud life. So that was inspiring too. More now than then because as you get older you see your father in yourself as a man. They’re still around today. I gave my mom, which we had Mother’s Day in England last Sunday, I gave my mom (two Sundays ago) I gave my mom a song that I’d made from a poem that she’d given me years ago in French and that kind of was a real watermark for me because she’d give me things for years and years and years and I never felt comfortable singing in French because I don’t have French rhythm in my nature. I write as an Englishman. Though I speak French, I don’t write that way, and then she gave me these lyrics and it all came into a French style, like, “Ah! The secret ingredient!” 30 years, I’ve been looking for that.
LARS: You think you’ll be doing more of it now?
CY CURNIN: Oh, absolutely. This stuff is a kick in the pants, and quite motivating. I’m quite proud of it. Right now we’re working with this engineer laying cable who we knew from way, way back from when I first, from KPM in London, um, he’s now producing a new record and he works a lot in France too, so it’s like perfect. An old bass player joined us for this record and I’ve got my little solo record out there. I’m using that to test the waters. The new day’s breaking, you can’t sell records without cannons being fired from record company roofs and, you know, it’s a slow and steady process but I think it bears well for the band and the way that the musicians will carve a career for themselves.
LARS: In regards to Dan K Brown, I remember seeing you guys at Great Adventure, back in the 80’s in a concert and Dan was on stage standing quite still, as he does in all your videos. Is that a persona for him, or is he truly an introvert?
CY CURNIN: It’s a persona for him. Yeah. Adam the drummer was a drama teacher, and when Danny first came in the band he’s so carried away by the music that he had to just this way of moving that Adam was like “Listen, just stand completely still. Don’t move, like a statue, and you’ll get more attention, you’ll see.” And sure enough. Last night too, he probably upstaged me! I was going to strangle him halfway through the set. (laughs)
LARS: I don’t think that entirely true, I mean, I was always fascinated by how you behaved on stage with your hands, and you were quite passionate, there was no doubt about it.
CY CURNIN: The puppet show. Yeah, yeah.
LARS: I didn’t look at it as quite such. I saw it as you acting out the words with your hands.
CY CURNIN: Exactly, yeah yeah, right. I mean it’s like, if you talk to yourself walking down the street waving your hands like that, you’ll find yourself surrounded by people with white coats.
LARS: (laughs)
CY CURNIN: You put a bunch of musicians around you; you’re just sane as can be!
LARS: I agree. (both laugh)
CY CURNIN: Danny is a great presence and not that Gary was bad. He was a fantastic bass player. It’s just Danny brings a different ingredient to what we do and as a singer he just brings out the melody just by choosing different tones on some of the roots, not always playing an a and an a, he’ll play an f sharp or slide it down to d or an f, move things around so the melody is seeming to evolve where it’s quite internal, and the bass is moving around it, which is quite cool. As a singer you don’t want to have to be strident. It’s not an Olympic sport thing as Mariah Carrie seems to think it is.
LARS: I recall, I remember when I was the front man in my band and it was the bassist who I always pulled from.
CY CURNIN: Yeah, exactly right because you’re only singing one note, and he’s only playing one note. Together you can make sort of a kind of tonic cord that will sit over the top of everything else, you know? He plays the second and you play the ninth or visa-versa. He has a real penchant to make it work.
LARS: You can anticipate changes too, where they’re headed.
CY CURNIN: Yeah, exactly.
LARS: It helps take you in their direction. You find yourself playing off each other.
CY CURNIN: I really do, yeah, and I look forward to it. It’s quite an emotional thing for him, because he pulled off the touring thing when we took a break in the early 90’s. He got hit with a case of bowel cancer, which luckily for him it wasn’t too severe and it got discovered early on, but it did throw the wobbles in him with the Sword of Damocles over him and now he’s been 4, 5, 6 years in remission and he’s filled with so much energy coming from him again to go out on the road and pick up where he left off. It’s going to be fantastic to just see his life journey going on. A little personal victory. And having had gone up Everest with Jamie and the Last Hope Strings campaign, being surrounded by a lot of cancer survivors, that was a real insight to what it is to be on the other side of that fear, not just being a survivor any more but picking up, moving on with your life and forgetting the past. You know, prisons of the body.
LARS: I think he found that the journey is the reward.
CY CURNIN: Yeah! Exactly right. And being alongside anyone can be, in terms of floating without company, there’s times to be alone and there’s times to be with people.
LARS: I’m sure he was appreciative for the people that were there.
CY CURNIN: It will be great looking to going out on the road this summer, if we can organize it.
LARS: Are you going to do anything like that again?
CY CURNIN: You’ve got my solo record, I presume?
LARS: I actually paid for it. I picked the link up off of your website and went over to CD Baby (www.cdbaby.com) and paid for the mp3 zip file.
CY CURNIN: I paid to promote that as well. The Fixx is really my day job, and the solo album is just a little detour of a collection of songs that, as I said earlier there’s certain songs that are a band collective thing, these just came out in a certain period where I just need to keep them for myself. I collected those songs up twice in my life. The first one was Mayfly which is a very distinct LA, college-sounding record. Chuck put it out anyway just because that’s what it is and then I bounced back with Returning Sun that I just put out now. It’s much more of a
LARS: You said you went through a divorce yourself?
CY CURNIN: Yeah.
LARS: You know, I found that divorce seems to be one of the most cathartic things itself. I mean, look at Phil Collins Face Value, one of the best albums created due to a divorce.
CY CURNIN: Yeah, exactly, because it just faces you to a kind of honest and I think sometimes when a marriage is bad, it’s bad cause there’s a lot of numbness and no communication so that blocks the communication you have with the outside world too. When you blast that out and things are pouring from the main arteries, not all is lost, especially if you get it on tape.
LARS: I hear you. I’m sorry, I feel like I’m leveraging off of every other band as well as yourself but I’m truly a fan of music and Fixx being one of my favorite bands in my entire life I don’t want this to sound like a slight, but then there was a saying that I don’t know if A-ha borrowed it or wrote it for themselves but it was “Out of blue comes green,” you know? Out of every sad situation, again it’s that whole positive, negative energy turning it into a positive thing.
CY CURNIN: Yeah, yeah, exactly right. You know, like there’s no, I take from the British teachings, there’s no real right, there’s no real wrong. Better or worse, yes. In the end day all there is, is just hostile energy it seems. All things in time, all things are healed; guilt, shame, are all different ways of blocking you from feeling your body’s natural state of bliss, what is that? Trying to hold on to it when you ought to be letting go of it and joining in with the bigger force. Easy to say, and it’s a cliché but in practice it really does help you calm your mind and your body benefits because when your mind is calm there’s less stress on the body. Then from there on you attract more because people feel attracted to your calmness, they come to you like a scared cat won’t come to you if you’re all tense, but if you’re calm it’ll to you when it’s ready. That’s like life; things come to you when they’re ready, if you’re ready to receive them in time.
END PART ONE - VISIT SOON TO READ PART TWO
