David J, YOU ALL KNOW WHO DAVID J IS. Will be releasing a spoken word album called “The Mother Tree” alongside a poetry book containing all the poems on the album, called “Rhapsody, Threnody & Prayer” on June 6th. Having listened to the album (A lot by the time of this interview) and read the poems, I got to do a deep dive with David over the subjects.
Jeremy: Well, David, thank you for joining us.
David J: Thank you, Jeremy.
Jeremy: I want to say, I love the new Night Crickets album. I’ve been talking to Darwin and heard Victor is out for a bit, but we’re still hoping to cover that one too. I had such a great time with the three of you last time we spoke. But this new record—it’s something special. I have so many thoughts. Where do I even start? What made you decide to go this route—spoken word with music—and put everything out there the way you did?
David J: I’ve always had an interest in combining spoken word with music. It goes back to my very first solo record in ’83, Etiquette of Violence. There’s a spoken word track on there called “Within the Indians Permanent” about Jack Kerouac. That format has appeared on several albums since—though not on everyone—but it’s always been something I’ve gravitated toward. I had the idea of doing a full album of spoken word pieces, but I wasn’t sure how to approach it musically. Whether I’d do it all myself via multi-tracking or bring in musicians. Then I happened to see this band called Rakia playing at a tiny place in downtown LA. I went to see a friend, Nora Keyes, and she played right before them. I was about to leave but decided to finish my drink and catch one song. I ended up staying for the whole set. Their instrumental sound just struck me—it clicked. I thought This is the sound I need for that spoken word project I’ve been holding onto. So I approached them, and within days we were in the studio.
Jeremy: Was what they played that night similar to what we hear on the record?
David J: Yes, that was their sound—though they’re no longer active as a band. I still work with John Bernstein, their piano and keyboard player. We’re heading to Santa Rosa tonight for a gig and then playing the Great American Music Hall on Sunday, Darwin from Night Crickets is joining me.
JH: Darwin’s kind of your right-hand man these days, isn’t he?
David J: Yeah, he’s been managing me for a while now. He’s terrific.
JH: When I started listening to this new record, I immediately thought, David J sounds like a cross between David Gilmour and Roger Waters. You’ve always had that duality in your voice—able to sing with either warmth or edge. But hearing you simply speak these poems… it hit differently. It reminded me of “Mr. Moonlight” in some ways, but deeper. More emotional. More intense.
David J: I did all of those tracks live in the studio with the band. No overdubs. I sent the poems to them and gave them creative freedom to respond however they felt was right. I didn’t even listen to the compositions until right before we recorded. Most of what you hear are first or second takes. Very spontaneous. We were reacting to each other in real-time.
Jeremy: Was it emotionally intense to hear your poems brought to life like that?
David J: Absolutely, especially with the poem “Mother Tree.” That one is deeply personal—it spans all of Side A and is about my mother. I wrote most of it after she died and finished it after receiving her ashes. There’s a moment in the poem where I describe letting them go. That’s when I knew it was finished. Recording it was extremely moving. I felt her presence in the room. It was like a communion with her. We did just one take, and you can hear the emotion in my voice.
JH: David Sedaris, the comic writer, wrote about how his mom was always smoking He said, “I could never imagine my mom smoking as I couldn’t imagine her not breathing. She, she smoked up until the day she died”, these are marvelous tributes that you guys are giving to your mother’s.
David J: Like this. And of course, it’s essential when you’re a kid, you are attuned to that sensuality, it’s formative and it’s very emotionally impacting.
JH: I’m just going to quote a couple of some lines here, right where, because I could feel this because I’d heard it from so many other people as well.
The blades cleave
Over the rink
Outside, the Luftwaffe
Delivers a rain of Hellish destruction
High explosive bombs
Incendiary bombs
Oil bombs
All come crashing down
On Birmingham
The Second City
Place of the defiant girl’s birth
When the air raid siren sounded
Everyone in the ice hall
Fled for the shelters
Everyone apart from the lady in white
She, choosing to stand her ground
And skate on
In defiance of Hitler’s ire
David J: True story. I visualized all of it, she told me that story and it was very moving, and it just made me adore her.
JH: But you’re talking about the clothes she was wearing and the blades of the ice skate. I mean, these are details that made the story so tangible.
David J: And there’s, there’s purposely a foreshadowing of that when in the first, like the first verse of this piece, and I talk about going to the, the forest with my friend cook, who’s like this shaman, local shaman character. And he wants to take me to the forest to show me this mother tree, this incredible tree and I was in the middle of winter and these, I’m in my big boots I can’t get over the fact that he’s just like impervious to this real cold on the East Coast in the middle of winter. It starts with his foot falling on the ice and snow, you know, and then there’s sort of like a cinematic foreshadowing of my mum’s boot falling on the ice rink and then I give that the brave girl was my mother, and this was her act of defiance alone that this for and for this act of defiance, she’ll always have my heart.
JH: I felt very similar when I was living in France and also in the Netherlands when I met these old guys who had been in the resistance, you know, and they were telling me these stories about being in the resistance, fighting the Germans, sacrificing a lot. I met one woman who said I couldn’t tell the public that I was working for the resistance, and I went and slept with these German soldiers to get information from them. I learning about the resistance fighters or just anyone. I developed the same respect for your mother because of how you told that story. Probably the hardest line for me in this Oh, there were a lot where you talked about your dead brother, I guess your mother had a miscarriage, you talked about him and would he have been the guy to protect me from bullies.
David J: Yeah, yeah, My mom, she had bad stomach pains and went to the doctor and he prescribed this medication and she, she didn’t realize she was pregnant at that time, but the better. That’s what killed the embryo. And then the irony of ironies went much many years later when immigrated to Australia. They had to see a doctor to sign off on certain forms, and it was that same doctor.
JH: When you said the line about this letter sent first class expedited still was beat by four days.
DJ: The letter to my mom and, it was a dried leaf that I’d picked from the park near where I was living.
JH: I’m sitting here listening to and reading this and I’m just having such great visuals, thinking to him all these things out of sequence. This was great about your, mom.
David J:This part really sucked, This hurts mom, I miss you, you know, all of this just wove in and out there, I loved it. I mean the abiding feeling I know is love for her.
JH: It’s like right after that the Love and Rockets show that I covered for you guys in Salt Lake, my wife’s mother was in a wheelchair and the wheelchair rolled and she broke her shoulder and that just caused everything to cascade and get worse and she passed away a month later.
DJ: I’m. Sorry.
JH: I was the one who found her and I had to walk back to my house and tell my wife after I told her father, she’s passed, that was probably the hardest thing I ever had to say to somebody that I loved. I want to give this one to my wife and let her hear it. I hope that it can help her. I think my wife would get a lot out of it so I’ll pass this on.
David J: That would be wonderful.
JH: I’ve always wanted to ask you this, what was the song Rainbird about? It was one of the coolest songs on that record. It felt just enough out of place, but it felt like you were walking in a wet, muddy construction yard out there somewhere between 2 buildings.
David J: It was about Daniel Ash, Daniel, has always tended to get comfy about commitment to projects, to tours, to doing albums. And he didn’t want to make “Earth + Sun + Moon”, he didn’t want to tour. He was thinking about leaving the band and then he was like humming and hawing. And then he did want to do it then he didn’t want to do it and he finally did it. Of course. During that time, I wrote that song, and I didn’t tell him that it was about him till after we recorded it.
JH: And how did he respond on that one?
David J: He used an expletive.
JH: I think you and Daniel, at least musically, hefted so many of the same duties right as vocals. You would switch off. I remember when we’re talking about when just that came up the night crickets interview and you talked about how you and Pat Fish had you’re at the tail end of a party, sitting there smoking a spliff while the sun comes up and you’re listening to Victor’s record and you’re like, that’s the next record I want to make.
David J: I remember the track that was playing there so, so clearly, like it was last week and that was. It was one of these mad parties at Pat’s and Flat in Northampton, it was sunrise and everybody else passed out and it was just us 2 still awake.
JH: And that gave us one of the greatest records of all time, I told you this last time when I die, I want my ashes pressed into a record print of “Earth + Sun + Moon”. You know, that’s so that’s how much I love that record.
David J: I’m touched by that, Jeremy, “We” collectively “Love & Rockets” love that first Violent Fans album and we were playing it all the time when we were making the album Express John A Rivers, who was engineer Co-producer and John hated it, the benchmark was that Violet Femmes album. And so if John didn’t get that, then he’s not the man, to help us make this album. So then we, we, we contacted our original mentor, Derek Tompkins, who was the guy who had the studio in Wellingborough called Beck, where we recorded Bela Lugosi’s Dead and other tracks and we brought him out of retirement to do that one.
JH: I remember talking to you when you were here with Peter in what, 2019, I guess. And you and I were talking just talking about how much reggae there was in Bauhaus.
David J: Yeah, we used to go to the Africa Centre and that was a big like Rastafarian stronghold in the town centre. And we weren’t really the only white guys there, we were accepted and it was wonderful, they had sound systems, and guys toasting, they had a goat’s head soup in a big vat, and smoking ganja. It’s very rich, we owe a lot to the immigrants.
JH: It sounds like an amazing experience man, see growing up in Salt Lake, we didn’t have anything like that, we had one punk club where we could go and hear the punk stuff live, had a couple of dance clubs discos that we would go to and everybody like them, there was one that was all goth and they were always playing Bela Lugosi’s dead. So now we’re crossing streams here, OK, savior in the city.
David J: Ok
JH: I was raised Mormon here in Utah, and there’s a lot of religious imagery there applied to us today and how we would, you know, we would have seen it. “He looked up at the skyscrapers and down the scars on his feet. He bought a pair of cheap shoes from a street vendor. Brown canvas slip-ons” I mean the details here, then “When we walked through the crowds when it came to XXX porno spot he stopped and went inside, I followed an embarrassed apostle. He placed his hand on the door of each private Peep Show booth, and he blessed the occupants.”OK, Give me the story here, David.
David J: It’s just that I just had this vision, I was in the cab in New York City and I had, I don’t know, they just, it flashed into my consciousness. I had this vision of Christ in present times, which was at that time, it was the early 90s. And what? Brown canvas sandals, right? I’d let my imagination just go, you know, and you see, I’m not I, I don’t, I’m not Christian as search, but I, I’ve always had a, a deep kind of reverence of and, and love for the idea of Jesus and what, you know, in, in essence, the Christ represents and how heroic and how beautiful all of that is. And for him, you know, like standing up for the disenfranchised, the outcasts, the ones that, you know, the outcasts, outcasts from society. He would embrace them and see the beauty that’s there beyond, the surface upon which they are judged by society, you know, and all of that. I don’t know, it just still came, just bubbled up. And I just imagined it happening in New York City at that time.
JH: When I was in 9th grade, 14-15 years old, and everybody at school was talking about football games or wanting fast cars or what so and so was wearing in this $78 pair of jeans, etc. I was given an assignment in a class about Buddhism, to go and study, and write a big project about it. I read this book, the teachings of Buddha, and while I was putting this big poster together that was the first time I did a binge listen of “Express” and then “Earth+ Sun + Moon” while doing this whole Buddhist experience understanding it from a very different Christian perspective. That gave me this mind-expanding moment. But here you’ve got Jesus popping into the porno shop. I could see that Jesus is a very modern compassionate, nonjudgmental person.
David J: And then they’re walking through the crowds and then they come to a stop sign, and then I’m walking with him, went across, and then they scream and I’m walking across. And then I noticed that he’s gone, he’s stayed behind. So I looked around and he’s gone and there’s a dog that’s been run over and then in the distance a siren, wales. And then I say it was it was 3:00, which is when he was crucified.
JH: WOW!!!, ok David, just to have an hour to talk to one of my favorite guys like this is fantastic to just ask you these kinds of questions here. Macclesfield Sunday. One of my other fave bands at the top is all things Joy Division, and I rank you up there in my fave list with like JJ Brunell, Peter Hook, and Mick Conroy. But now I’m reading this, and we’re talking about Ian. And I’ve read 1000 books about it. The affair with Yannik, the Belgian attache, his epilepsy. Even Peter Hook talked about it a while ago, and they realized he was given way too much of his epilepsy medicine and that would have killed him anyway. I feel like everything I’ve read, there’s still a gap in there that nobody wants to talk about about Ian. Did you ever meet Ian Curtis?
David J: Yes, yeah, he came down to see Bauhaus play in London. We were playing at a club called Billy’s that later became the Bat Cave. We had a residency there. And he approached us after one of our sets and he said how much he loved the band and he had 2 records. We had two records at the time, “Bella Lugosi’s Dead” and “Dark Entries”, he said he plays them a lot and was just admiring of the band. And I remember looking into his eyes and he had these very, very vivid, like, blue eyes, and there was something, to me he looked like a St. something very sort of divine and also sad and otherworldly removed. Somehow there was part of him that wasn’t there, So that was my that was my only meeting with him. But then years later, there was going to be a movie made. This was before “Control” and it’s going to be again, loosely based on his wife’s book, “Touching from a Distance”. They wanted me to do the music for it, and as part of the sort of process, the director lent me all of Ian’s letters to Annik. I read them all and in one sitting I got to 1 of them and he’s talking about this moment gave me chills when he went down to London, he was telling her “I really love his Bauhaus. I’ve got both their records and I’m going to be recording our next album when they’re playing because I really want to catch them live.”
JH: Oh wow that was a that was the moment for you.
David J: It gave me chills reading that, then reading through the letters and he talks about Macclesfield on a Sunday, which is where he was living, and how depressing it was. And he talked about going down to the canal in his overcoat and it was raining and just sort of the atmosphere of that, you know, and all of that’s in there. And that’s really what inspired that, that poem. On a Macclesfield Sunday, the last letter, which is a very long letter to Annik, he’s talking about looking forward to going to America and he’s excited and all this, and my heroes coming from there, Iggy Pop and Stooges and Lou Reed and it’s just such an up exciting thing, you never think like reading that letter there a few weeks later, he killed himself. When Bauhaus was touring it in those days, I mean, we were aware of that situation because we worked with Annik, and she booked us in Belgium.
JH: I think that the band called her the Belgian bombshell, OK, she was an attractive woman, but yeah, there was something that she filled in his life that that he didn’t get. I’m not placing any blame on anybody, you’ve had more insight in having read all those letters. I would have considered that quite an honor.
David J: Absolute honor, yeah. It was such a privilege.
JH: Well, he was one of your peers, but I’ve grown up listening to both of you, neck and neck.
David J: Well, obviously you read all those letters and I was moved to write it, yes.
JH: The world hasn’t seen them, have they? I don’t think that it’s all been made public.
David J: I don’t think so, I recorded that piece on a Macclesfield Sunday as an extra track. It wasn’t on a record, it was just a download. And the music that I put to it was the little bit of music that I’ve done for this movie.
JH: It’s been fantastic, I hope we can get enough interest for people to go and get this poetry book. Well thank you so much, David , All the best.
DJ: Thank you, Be kind.
The full audio can be heard here. https://open.spotify.com/episode/2GkHqdWQBPu2zccwmf6A0e
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