Robert Courtney Perspective on Excuse Me While I Borrow Your Head

I like to collaborate with open minded, technically literate, knowledgeable artists.

My dream performance is when the very air you are standing in becomes alive.

The concept of only listening to 3 artists for the rest of your life is impossible to contemplate, though I know many people do it, I'd rather have a guitar, a harmonium and a drum and make new things.

The favorite song is always the next one as I'm sitting on a literal goldmine of them and it's always a new adventure.

If I could attend any performance by an artist in time it would be my first one, armed with a tape recorder, and the one  that we did, referred to in Julian Cope's book 131 as the tape recorder jammed on the final song as I would love to know if it was as great as he describes it.

My music is like running between marble columns in a warm mist with the scent of honeysuckle as a cobalt blue electroplated brass bell rings.

My favorite artists music always has something that surprises me, a novel way of looking at the world, some killer lines, and a melody you can't ignore. So I'm always trying to create something that takes me by surprise.

Having to pick an artist to tour with would immediately pigeonhole me so I'll just leave it up to fate, we have a good relationship.

I have a very active mind and lots of interests, these find their way into the songs sometimes blatantly, sometimes coded. For me, a song is a 3 to 5-minute adventure in sound and words with no rules, anything that piques my interest can be the subject and the beats and melodies can come from deep within or chance happenings.

Over the last 3 years I've refused to be pigeonholed into a particular style but just kept on trying to perfect the sound of whatever one the song leads me to, everything starts as a three-chord pop song that is then overlaid with sound design a bit like doing a painting which probably comes from starting at art college rather than being a musician.

This track has elements of 80's electro, 70's rock, and slow funk, recorded on a defunct daw because I liked the sound then put into a state-of-the-art one and given a modern sheen. I'm incapable of staying in one genre.

I started playing music at college but have never been formally taught apart from by Michael Nyman who insisted we mustn't use electricity or tune the instruments, so I blame it all on him!

Everyone probably has similar musical memories in the West, children's songs and folk melodies, church hymns when they are good, then TV show themes, and radio hits of the day until you start to build your own identity and choose what you listen to. Most people stop at a period in their teens or early 20s when they 'grow up' and stay with that style of music, whereas I never did. I was a club DJ of punk, alternative, rock, funk, rap, house, and jazz in the past. These days I mainly listen to either extreme meditation or hypnosis tracks with some modern pop and Italo house thrown in if I'm being sociable, I rarely listen to anything old though there are lots of echoes in what I create.

Apart from music, my main interests are Magick and what was once known as 'New Age' type technologies, trance music, and meditation. ‘Excuse Me While I Borrow Your Head’ is about a Russian Mind Control Experiment that claimed to be able to turn anyone into a genius or play a musical instrument that they had never touched. I’ve done it a few times, a very strange experience, becoming someone else for a while, whether it’s worked I’ll leave it up to you! Who did I become? That would be telling, who would you become?

Robert Courtney (Rock Section) is the creative force behind One Million Fuzztone Guitars and Skin Patrol.

Parts of my songs come from adventures in other worlds and other times in a trance state but I'm not at liberty to disclose the context in which they are discovered.

Uplifted, there's enough doom and gloom in the world, there's a lot of humour and hope in the new songs.

Real honest fun, , I might make that a song title.

I have trusted collaborators that I send new tracks on Messenger to make sure I'm on the right track, and I listen to their feed back, I'm very lucky to have them.

I don't really practice as I'm always working things out, I have a magical elixir I made myself that I apply to the fretboard if I need to be slicker.

I was in the toilet after a gig and this biker walks in stood at the next urinal and goes "that singer was shit", I agreed with him.

Success changes all the time, the minute you reach something there's something else, so it's best to enjoy your day and appreciate the ride, then you can look back and go "Wow, what's next".

If I find myself in a genre I'll change.

There was a great book in the 80s called 'The Death and Resurrection Show", the history of showbusiness from hunter-gatherer tribes to the present day. The artist is an aspect of the shaman in a digital universe.

'Success' by Iggy Pop, sums it up the best.

Having a gun pulled on be and being told to stop making music, I didn't listen.

Playing bass live, we'd been rehearsing for months, walked on stage and my right hand froze, afterwards the promoter said "I'm not sure if that was the best bass playing I've ever seen, or the worst, anyway it was interesting and I liked it!"

For me it's going in the right direction technology-wise, I couldn't have done what I do now before.

After my initial stint in bands, I was a DJ as I've said before, and then I got involved in the artistic creative side of the film industry and advertising, I carved the original maquette for the Pink Floyd Division Bell heads and made 3 different sized versions of them for the album cover, the tour and adverts with John Robertsons Model Solutions. After that, I worked in fashion in Paris and Newyork and designed a tarot game called Suna Tarot named after its creator. 

Everything feeds into it, I've never lacked inspiration, quite the opposite, I learn new things every day and am both outgoing and introspective, I need to clone myself to keep up with it.

It can be at times, but I do have a family to counteract this. I was working when the lockdown came and continued remotely throughout, I started music full-time last year when the job came to an end and while this was transformational it was also more isolating, I am aware of it.

My mother once said to me "I don't want to be old, I still feel 18 inside, what happened?", the key is to never stop, settle down or look back, I think there's a song there apart from Alice Cooper's classic. '18 Inside', it's on the to-do list!

There are a few, I always fancied myself as the Marcel Duchamp of Rock, so 'The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even'. Chris Burdens Medusa's Head. Boltanski's Black and White Angels of Art found their way into my track 'Apocalypse Now!', Panamarenko's, The Ideal Beauty Of Failed Design, Dali's existence.

I stopped making Art when I discovered music, apart from the covers. The physical realization of conceptual art.

Duchamp, Boltanski, Panamarenko, I would have said Chris Burden at one point (the self-described Alice Cooper of Art) but I'm not about to nail myself to a Volkswagen.

No one cares and no one will do it for you, it's down to you if you want it. There's a great quote by Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, “People pay money to see others believe in themselves.”

I have to do it, I can't stop, even in times when it's been impossible I've just created songs in my head, waiting for their time, that's what I mean by 'Sitting on a Goldmine' it's more like a Golden Iceberg, only the tip is visible, but I'm the only person who can dig it.

The next song will be better than the last.