A sort of homecoming

Beck's head is back in the samples, even if his mind is lost to Scientology, writes Neil Dunphy

THE worn velour sofas backstage in Dublin's Olympia Theatre are an apt place to interview Beck. Soft, quiet and shabby, the theatre lends a majesty befitting the prince of alternative rock music. Also soft, quiet and shabby, the LA native is painfully thin and looks a good deal younger than someone who turns 35 next month. He answers questions deliberately and maintains eye contact most of the time. Sometimes his answers are so long and rambling that you regret having asked the question in the first place. Time is too precious.



It's over 10 years since Bek Hansen (the 'c' came later) shot to fame with 'Loser', the anthem that defined the so-called slacker generation. The irony was considerable given the refrain "I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me?" was merely a filler lyric written by an incredibly driven guy who had never had a silver spoon in his mouth.



His first single was titled 'MTV Makes Me Want To Smoke Crack'. Soon 'Loser' was to catapult him to fame and fortune . . . largely thanks to MTV.



"Yeah, that particular song ('Loser') and situation was something I wanted to get away from, " he says an hour before Monday's BudRising show. "It is the opposite of what people hope for when they hope to have a big hit.



They want everybody to hear it and it to just be the big song. I don't know if I got to really enjoy that moment, like some bands that I can watch now that are enjoying their success. I was trying to bury it." How come? "I thought of myself as a singer songwriter. I looked up to people like Leonard Cohen, Hank Williams, Nick Drake, and here was this song that was kind of a novelty and I didn't want to be defined by it. But in retrospect it's just another song and people love it."



In 1996, Odelay cemented Beck's reputation as innovator extraordinaire and Coolest Dude in the World. After touring for almost two years he took a left turn and recorded the pared-back Mutations in two weeks. Perhaps it all got a little too much.



"A lot of the songs on Mutationswere written before Odelay. So much was being made at the time about me being the guy who uses samples and technology. I wanted to do something with no samples."



While Midnite Vultures saw him experiment with Prince pastiche, drifting dangerously close to self parody in the process, he returned in 2002 with the beautifully introspective melancholy of Sea Change.



His latest album, Guero, is a homecoming of sorts. As close to Odelay as anything he has written since, it sees Beck reunited with the Dust Brothers on production, and features samples, heavier guitars and loops, as well as video-game bleeps and big beats that are redolent of a childhood spent break-dancing in the predominantly latino suburbs of Los Angeles. "Everybody has certain signatures, things they just do naturally. I did two or three albums where I was trying to stretch that out a bit. I was consciously trying not to do what the natural first instinct would be."



Forcing yourself into a corner to see what you come up with?



"Yeah, Odelay was all the areas that were interesting to me and putting them in with the exact aesthetic that I wanted. Guero is going back to that. I never thought I'd be going away from it, but albums take years to tour and promote and the next thing you know it's eight years later."



While the lyrical content of Sea Change was informed by his break-up with longterm girlfriend Leigh Limon, in the intervening years Beck married and had a baby boy, named Cosimo. It's a surprise Guero isn't lyrically a little lighter. Try these for size: "I push I pull the days go slow into a void we filled with death", or "I prayed heaven today would bring its hammer down on me and pound you out of my head."



There's some dark stuff going on there. "I was trying to keep some of those serious matters and introspective qualities that Sea Change had and bring that into songs that are kind of fun or cute, " he says. "I mean, look at the world we live in. Every time you fuckin' turn on the news there's another 30 people killed in Iraq. Then there's a 12-year-old kid getting shot half a mile from my house. How can you not reflect that? Those songs were mostly written a year and a half after 9/11. Living in that climate in America. . . you're just being fed death for breakfast, lunch and dinner. And besides that, a really good friend of mine committed suicide literally the week I started making that record."



Was it drug related? "Yeah, well no, he stabbed himself. We did a memorial right in the middle of recording this record so the couple of weeks I was actually writing all the songs was during that time." Just like Elliott Smith, the singer-songwriter who died of multiple stab wounds in an apparent, but inconclusive, suicide in October 2003. "Yeah that's who it was.



So yeah, that was in there. Then the last couple of months when we were mixing and putting the finishing touches to it me and my wife were having our baby. It's summertime, you know, friends are popping into the studio, so the lyrics don't necessarily reflect what was going on then but maybe that period right before we started making this record."



Fourteen minutes in to the allotted quarter of an hour and I can't wait any longer. During the past year, stories of Beck's membership of the Church of Scientology began to appear.



They coincided with his marriage to the actress Marissa Ribisi, also said to be a member of the religion-cult. Research on the internet had led me to a site which contained a 13-page "guide for the professional journalist" aimed specifically at Beck. There are some crazies out there all right. It contains the usual warnings that I might be told not to ask about his personal life, that I might be monitored or thwarted if I pursue too personal a line of inquiry.



But then a funny thing happens. The exact moment the word 'Scientology' leaves my lips a girl walks into the room and engages Beck in some delirious nonsense about how great it is to be here. The more I listen back to the tape the more bizarre it seems. Maybe I'm losing my mind, but just because you're paranoid. . .



"Yeah, I'm a Scientologist, " Beck resumes once she has left. "My father has been a Scientologist for about 35 years, so I grew up in and around it and stuff."



So you're okay about it, willing to discuss it?



Here, have a look at what I found.



"It's strange. I haven't read it, but it's crap on the internet."



It is crap, but what's interesting is that this kind of thing exists at all.



"Type yourself on Google buddy, " he suggests with a steely calm. "I'm sure you'll find some great stuff. I mean, look, I'm a public figure. I mean, I don't know what that is but yeah, I mean, you're a journalist so you're gonna look for controversy, but I think people can sort of say and do whatever they want. All I can do is live my life with integrity and raise my child and work hard and work hard for the people I work with. I don't have anything to hide. I am completely proud of my life. I don't subscribe to a lot of the trappings and weirdnesses (sic) of this business. I try to keep my head in reality and just work hard and make music and play good shows."



Things are getting a touch spiky now, but it's interesting. What's Scientology really all about and why all the bad press? The explanation is, well, a bit flaky.



"What it actually is is just sort of, uh, you know, I think it's about philosophy and sort of, uh, all these kinds of, you know, ideals that are common to a lot of religions." It's easily the most inarticulate he's been so far.



"There's nothing fantastical. . . just a real deep grassroots concerted effort for humanitarian causes. I don't know if you know the stuff they have. It's unbelievable the stuff they are doing. Education . . . they have free centres all over the place for poor kids. They have the number one drug rehabilitation programme in the entire world (called Narconon). It has a 90-something % success rate. . . When you look at the actual facts and not what's conjured in people's minds that's all bullshit to me because I've actually seen stuff first hand."



'Guero' is out now on Interscope Records