Interview: Justin Sullivan, New Model Army

On the eve of yet another British tour, Dirk Gently tracked down NEW MODEL ARMY's well-opinionated vox-man, Justin Sullivan to find out why they're determined to make a lasting impression with their music.

RESTLESS AND WILD

This irrepressible bunch of seemingly hard-bitten northern bastards have been providing a much-need enema for rock n' roll for nearly ten years now. And with the fire still cooking up as hot as ever, it looks like they're set to be with us on an ever-increasing scale for a good few years to come.

Hailing from Bradford in the very early 80s, New Model Army's uncompromising, hard-speaking, and unrelenting attitude has gained the band a massive and highly fanatical hardcore European following. Alongside that, they have managed to alienate just about every available form of media in the UK by their unwillingness to comply with company hype and their stubborn refusal to partake in promotional stunts.

In 1984, they managed to cause a considerable furore when they played their single "No Rest" live on Top of the Pops clad in T-shirts, proclaiming the infamous statement, "Only stupid bastards use heroin," rattling a large number of cages in the process. Radio has just about refused to play any of the top 40 singles of the Army, although now and then one did manage to slip through the net and fight its way out onto the airwaves, shocking the hell out of all and sundry, a fact that is probably due to the fiercely emotional and vehement lyrical content. Well, can you imagine "Get Me Out" sitting comfortably alongside KYLIE MINOGUE and NEW KIDS ON THE BLOCK? Exactly. And this is something that has managed to keep part-time Romany and full-time romantic vocalist, Justin Sullivan highly amused.

"We completely shot ourselves in the foot with the first single off Impurity, and it was our choice and we released it out of sheer bloody mindedness, because we knew that chances were that it would get into the top 40, even if not very high, and they'll have to play it on the radio, if only just once. The chances are that somewhere in the middle of all this dance floor craze there's going to be this horrible three and a half minutes of thrash and someone's going to get upset!"

It's this wonderfully warped sense of humour that has kept this band going for such a long time when it seemed that support for the band was coming from the fans alone.

The band is now the solid base of Sullivan on vocals and guitars, Robert Heaton on drums and vocals, and Nelson on bass and vocals - also including for live shows, Ed Alleyne Johnson on violin, keys, and mandolin, and Adrian Portis on guitar. With the struggle against the media still going on as strong as ever, I wondered how they were looking forward to the future with a Christmas tour and another album on the way and what it held for them.

"We're writing a new album at the moment and we're going to go out and play it live before we record it. We are going to do it differently from the last one. Impurity was the studio album. We wrote it, recorded it, and then went out and played it."

So how are you going to turn this new one around?

"All the other albums, except Impurity, we've written and then played before we'd recorded. Songs take on a life of their own when you play them out of a studio. They're slightly out of control. In a studio you can control things too easily, whereas live they get out of control and they go in a direction you hadn't really planned. Songs we've played once or twice and then recorded, have usually ended up being slightly different from how we originally perceived them."

Do you still get a kick out of playing live even after 10 years?

"Yeah! Strange, isn't it? It's like when we set out, I've never felt, 'Oh god, another tour.' I'm always really excited about it. There's lots of reasons for getting into the music business, the love of music in the first place, and obviously we fall into that category. Somewhere along the line, people find they either love touring or they hate it. I love it. After however many thousands of gigs we've played, I still find it romantic. Isn't that kind of naïve? Even when I was small, I loved travelling, and, before I was in this band, I used to move around a lot. Whenever I'm home from a tour, I get terrible, itchy feet. Being in a band is perfect. You get to travel all over the world, go to exciting places, meet all sorts of people, and all you've got to do when you get there is what you love doing best."

I wondered if he thought that music was the best medium for voicing the band's very uncompromising and often controversial opinion.

"It's not an opinion. There's never been some kind of NMA philosophy that we've been trying to peddle - it's emotions. Actually, there's something appealing to us about dealing both lyrically and musically with very intense emotions put across  straight. The people that don't like NMA find that deeply offensive and the ones that do like us say, 'Thank God there's someone that will just do it straight.' You can't put NMA on as background music. You get drawn into it, and you feel something. NMA music makes an impression."

Photo: Phil Kehoe

Well, he's definitely not kidding about that! Although the band have got the UK and most of Europe tightly tucked under their belts.

"In terms of record sales, I suppose the place that's taken to us in a big way is Germany and we've headlined our biggest show yet, out there."

And they've played the Far East and gone down a storm in Brazil. But, as yet, the big one, the United States, is still to come under the spell of the Army. 

Having just come back from playing some dates over there, his earlier lack of desire to break out there, has apparently been turned around.

"I love New York. In New York, the people are completely mad and they know they're mad and they glorify in it. It's completely crazed."

I wondered if perhaps the time was now right and if he thought the US would finally take to them and give them a record deal out there, to which he replied.

"In a big way, I don't know."

Not a man to mess around with words, Justin Sullivan, thank God for that. I find it comforting to know that amongst all the hypocrisy and false fluffy rock bands, there's always going to be one telling it how it really is. Come on, America, get your act together and get into this band. You might be pleasantly surprised.

Dirk Gently
Riff Raff
January 1992

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