If you know Martin Gordon’s work, it’s probably for that unmistakable Rickenbacker sound on Sparks’ Kimono My House that influenced everyone from Morrissey to Björk. Or maybe you remember Radio Stars’ “Nervous Wreck” from the late ’70s punk scene, that peculiar band that seemed to be taking the piss out of everyone while writing genuinely good songs. These days, the 70-something Gordon is based in Berlin, where he’s released His Mother Was a Woman, an album built entirely around the rhythmic patterns of Trump’s public statements. It sounds absurd, and it is, but there’s serious musical thought behind it. Gordon’s even published an academic paper about his method for extracting time signatures from speech, complete with references to medieval alchemy and Frank Zappa. In his conversation with Jason Barnard that follows, Gordon is as sharp and sardonic as ever, self-deprecating and uninterested in playing it safe.
Trump seems to have driven your last few albums. What is it about his way of speaking that makes it work musically? Is there something genuinely rhythmic happening, or are you finding patterns in chaos?
Ah, you have unmasked me. I am a great believer in retrospective justification, not unlike Frank Zappa’s ‘conceptual continuity’ (and my own ‘Mammal Trilogy’, I confess), where you later perceive patterns in stuff that apparently just happened. So my basic conceit with the Trump thing is that I (pretend to) believe that all his semantic improv, meandering and embellishment are in fact deliberate and pre-composed. The research questions would be – how to get a musician to perform these things? What was going on in the composer’s head at the time of composition? Can I reverse engineer the composition to find the metric map? So it’s embellished perception, shall we say…
His Mother Was a Woman takes Trump’s speeches and turns them into music. But you’re not just making fun of him. How did it go from him inspiring satire to becoming a serious compositional method?
Well, after experimenting with various approaches and with various forms of text, I decided that extemporised speech was a likely source of inspiration and then I attempted to explain to some students what my approach was. I wasn’t getting anywhere with the explanations so I decided to formalise it, and it was suggested that I submit these thoughts for publication. After peer review and revisions, they were accepted and thus it became Martin Gordon’s Compositional Methodology. Which is very nice at my advanced age – my first academic publication.
You describe the process as “chrysopoeia”, turning base materials into gold. But some of these songs actually sound pretty good – ‘Mudbath’ is genuinely catchy. Is there a risk that you’re accidentally making Trump sound better than he deserves?
Well, it’s all a matter of perception. I hope to undermine his nonsense by, for example, setting his words to wildly-inappropriate music, such as in ‘Shining Over the World’ and ‘Dismissed From Their Institutions’, which came out as a kind of anthem. I also experimented with keeping his trademark droning delivery in there, as in ‘Dumber Than a Rock’ from the expanded version of ‘Another Words – the Phonecall’. Or you might have ‘But Have They Moved the Inner Parts of the Machines?’ as a rather plangent example of the apparently limitless potential for bathos. But I should point out that I am following in the musical footsteps of Hanns Eisler here, who led the way with ‘Zeitungsausschnitte’ in 1925. I think generally the Big T does a better job of auto-undermining than I ever could, however, so we are a good team, in this respect.
You’ve written about being “trapped in the metric tar pit of common time.” As someone who played with Sparks, Jet, and Radio Stars, bands that weren’t afraid of odd time signatures, why do you think modern music became so much more conservative rhythmically?
Humans are bipedal, after all, so there is probably an in-built preference for twos and fours. And the fixation of our species with symmetry and pattern-finding may explain the dominance of 4/4, at least in the west. I also suggest that technology has not helped here, in that all DAWs power-up in 4/4 – my students are comfortable fiddling with tempo but not with meter. Or at least, they weren’t until recently… This was confirmed to me by a product manager at a major German music tech company, who indicated that managing calls to their helpdesk was one of their major concerns, and that making default settings of 120bpm and 4/4 helped to reduce calls for assistance. If you ever have the misfortune to hear German Schlager, you will understand why this awful, mind-numbingly dull genre is Germany’s biggest selling music form.
Actually, Radio Stars’ sole experiment with irregular time signatures (an extra bar of 5/4 in ‘Dirty Pictures’) caused enormous problems with all the drummers we were blessed with, and continues to do so up to the present day. Radio Stars later attempted an entire tune which mixed 4/4 and 2/4 but this was really an experiment too far, and I had to wait until Mammal times before I found suitable irregular-meter-friendly companions for ‘Greenfinger’.
What were Ron and Russell Mael really like to work with, and was there any warning before they kicked you out?
I think the relationship between the Maels and myself could be described as fairly tepid. Clearly, I was cast as the lukewarm water between their fire and ice. However, I now see that my contributions, such as they were, rather undermined their roost-ruling ambitions, which were then distracted further by the overnight success of the developed formula and of the ‘Kimono My House’ album.
Were there warning signs? Yes, I think so – my diary notes many earnest discussions between me and their manager of the time, although the content is not documented. And I guess that their lack of warm embrace (I don’t mean literally, of course) of such antics as my reading of the newspaper in preference to rehearsing the song might well have given me pause for thought. Did it, though? Not really.
After Sparks, you formed Jet with Roy Thomas Baker producing, members from John’s Children, The Nice, Roxy Music. Jet should’ve been huge, but weren’t. What happened?
Here I could refer to disastrous artistic decisions such as pretending that the entire new Jet album was in fact one long 45-minute song, our wearing of bizarre riding costumes and our having green hair (not me, you understand) as the main suspects. But basically, I didn’t possess the musical, compositional and personal skills that (I later discovered) were necessary for ‘being huge’.
Some of us (well, me mainly) had a lot of fun, though. And working with the (recently-deceased) Roy Thomas Baker and his sidekick Garys (Lyons and Langhan) was highly entertaining, and also instructive. For example, I learned to leave a cassette player running in the control room when I popped out for refreshment, and I discovered various bits of useful information through this somewhat underhand methodology.
Of course, I also learned various things which have stood me in good stead in subsequent years. For example, I learned that it’s not a terribly good idea to go out and get pissed with bandmates who basically don’t like you. Because if you then decide that you have to throw up, they may well offer you a suitable receptable such as your own suitcase, and then zip it up for the remainder of the two-week rehearsal period in the countryside. The moment of realisation had quite an impact, I can tell you this much.
You went from Top of the Pops with Sparks to studying gamelan in Bali and working with Asha Bhosle in Bombay. What were you looking for that you couldn’t find in Western rock music and what did you learn?
Actually, it was less that I was looking for something rather than my inadvertent discovery that something existed. What I discovered was a world outside my (somewhat limited) experience up to that time (1990) which I later realised was restricted to Western guitar music in the environment of studios. In Bombay, I discovered that virtuosos exist in a variety of guises, in Denpasar that trouser-flapping bass frequencies are not restricted to bass guitars (in the form of jegog gamelan, if you are interested), in Essaouira that gimbri bass players can groove with the best of ‘em. I also stumbled across ethnocentricity, which in due course led me to social anthropology and a variety of other until-that-point hidden pleasures.
What are your three favorite tracks from your time in groups, and three from your solo work? What makes them stand out?
Sparks – ‘Here in Heaven’ – great arrangement, which dispenses with an intro and just gets on with it, and it has a nice, if short, guitar solo. The form is quite interesting – choruses are often a release of tension, whereas here things tense up at the chorus and are released in the following verse. Plus there’s a bar of 9/4 before the final outro (or 3 bars of 3/4, depending on your preference), which is the kind of thing I was up to even then.
Jet – the infamous ‘Mudley’, in which we stuck together bits of our favourite Jet tunes into one seamless whole, following CBS’s rejection (a couple of decades earlier) of exactly that approach. Even delayed, revenge is sweet. Here you will find ‘It Would Be Good’, ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’ and ‘Whangdepootenawah’, in pretty much that order.
Radio Stars – ‘Nervous Wreck’ – pastiche but done with affection and no small amount of humour, always essential in pop music.
Solo: ‘Baboon in the Basement’ – One of the first things I did with Pelle Almgren, and a peerless vocal from him. And Chris Townson does not balk at the 7/4.
Solo: ‘The Captain of the Pinafore’ – Live in the US and A, featuring a number of musical breakdowns through which we (Pelle, Tristan da Cunha and myself) steam with full aplomb.
Solo: ‘Booster’ – In which I began to experiment with using speech as part of the compositional process. Here you find the smarmy tones of ‘Britain Trump’, as the amusing catchphrase went at the time, integrated into the whole.
What are your plans for the rest of 2026 – anything we should look out for?
Well, WWIII permitting, I may attempt to present some selected works as a kind of musical/thespian/cabaret multi-media hybrid, and I am currently mulling this over. It would probably take place here in Berlin, given that my audience is more discerning of late.
Where can we get His Mother Was a Woman and more information about your projects?
Everything you could possibly need can be found at https://martingordon.de-his-mother,
especially as it’s now back online after mysterious interference…
I wonder if Martin realises his bass sound appears to have been appropriated by JJ Burnel of The Stranglers?
I certainly hear elements of it in a lot of their songs.
Blimey, is that where it went? I’ve been looking for it for about 48 years, finally I know where it is, ta!
I have to contradict Mr. Gordon. “Schlager” is far from being “Germany’s biggest selling music form”. Recent numbers (2024) about sales, streaming and downloads consist of 24,6 % Pop, 19% Hip Hop, 17% Rock, 11,8% Dance and far behind is Schlager with “massive” 2,5% !!!
I guess his impression of “Schlager being the biggest thing in Germany” comes from the TV, that overrepresents that kind of music for whatever reasons…
Ah yes, ‘TV’ – I think I used to have one of those. Naja, Helmut, you may well be right, and it is perhaps the case that Heino has blinded me to reality with his teeth. Schlager is hard to avoid, though, especially in Sachsen-Anhalt. For an excruciatingly-detailed analysis of the genre, I frequently (well, OK, not THAT frequently) turn to https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/popular-music/article/taking-stock-of-a-discourse-an-integrative-content-analysis-of-musical-structures-and-cultural-stereotypes-in-top10-german-schlager-songs-from-2009-to-2019/1814AB6B1244027A1A40A6A66322AA5C. Prost!
Hi Martin, thanks for that link. It’s very funny, what all these people try read into “Schlager”. First of all the term “Schlager” is just an equivalent for the english word “hit”. In the 60s everything, that was a “hit”, would be labelled as a “Schlager”. I have several “Schlager”- samplers from the 60s featuring worldwide hits by “The Who” or “Herman’s Hermits”. Today “Schlager” stands for a very special genre of german popmusic. It is often very simple and often cheap in terms of production, the lyrics have no deep meaning. And it is also important, WHO is singing a particular song, this will often decide, whether it’s “Schlager” or “Pop”, although it’s the same song! I don’t mind the existance of this genre, but it’s far from being a big as it sometimes seems.
BTW – I always loved the intro to “Barbecutie”!
I suppose you are right – schlager is in the ear of the beholder. The ghastly Heino reinvented himself as a ‘rocker’, so clearly definitions of the genre are flexible, to say the least. ‘Barbecutie’ – now nobody has tried to define that one as schlager. However HP Baxxter and the Scooter boys had a go at ‘Amateur Hour’, which was quite disturbing, from my PoV.