Robert Rotifer at Barnaby’s Lounge

The Austrian musician, pop critic and radio DJ comes to Hastings for a special one-off gig. He talks to Jude Montague about his life in music.

Robert Rotifer – tell us about your life in music in a nutshell – where are you from and how did you get here?

I was born in Vienna, Austria, around the time the sixties took their final few breaths, and I spent my first 28 years there, most of those besotted with pop culture, starting from your Beatles and Who and Kinks to the whole fantastic world of sixties music, as an alternative to the old socialist battle hymns my parents used to listen to, though “Songs of the Spanish Civil War” was an early favourite.

Anyway, old music seemed to hold so much more interest and excitement than the 1980s big snare DX7 pop of my teenage years, so I got deeply into psychedelia but also folk and soul, some jazz and everything in-between. For some reason, I always found myself drawn to music that seemed to come from the UK rather than the US, so I soon developed a romantic idea of living there one day, at the source if you like.

Along the way, while playing guitar in bands around Vienna and adjacent places, give or take a few hours on the Autobahn, I also became a pop critic and radio DJ in my early twenties, interviewing lots of British bands and finding myself in and out of London half the time. So I eventually moved there with my wife at the start of 1997 to work as a sort of pop correspondent for media in the German-speaking world, which is still basically what I do for a living.

By 2004 we had two kids, and we’d run out of space, so on a whim, following the legacy of Robert Wyatt, The Soft Machine, Caravan etc., we moved to Canterbury and have been living there ever since. I still have a lot of links to Vienna where I co-founded a public radio station I’m still working for and an annual publicly funded music festival called Popfest Wien, showcasing new and otherwise interesting artists.

Initially, I felt insecure about my English as a songwriter, but from the early 2000s on I started to put out records through various labels, both as Robert Rotifer and Rotifer, which is kind of my band identity. I’ve always been lucky to find amazing musicians who are happy to play my songs with me. At one point in 2010 I had Ian Button on drums, Darren Hayman (of Hefner) on bass, and we were recording at Wreckless Eric and Amy Rigby’s house in France for an album that came out on Edwyn Collins’ label AED. It was called The Hosting Couple, and I thought, what with all that endorsement, it might have a chance of getting noticed, but it did absolutely nothing commercially. I’m still proud of it though.

There were lots of other interesting line-ups and records, and at the same time I’ve played a lot in other people’s bands, from backing Robert Forster, Fay Hallam or Twink to playing in Papernut Cambridge and the first line-up of Swansea Sound to forming The Night Mail with Ian Button and Andy Lewis, making albums with the underrated post-glam hero John Howard and Anglo-French Baroque pop genius Louis Philippe.

I also worked, again with Andy Lewis and Ian Button, as a producer, guitarist, co-writer and musical director for André Heller, a legendary artist/writer/singer in Austria. It was his comeback decades after his last album and I used my Popfest contacts to assemble a cast of great young Austrian musicians. It was the only time I actually got a gold record.

I also recorded two EPs of bilingual co-writes as McCookerybook & Rotifer with the brilliant Helen McCookerybook. We play shows together on and off.

What are you doing now in music? Tell me about your latest releases and projects.

The second Louis Philippe & The Night Mail record The Road to the Sea has just come out and got some really good reviews. There’s a live show coming up as well, plus I’m in the live line-up of The Penrose Web, the new project of Allan Crockford of the Prisoners and Ian Button of Papernut Cambridge. I’ve been working with Ian pretty much continuously in the past 17 years.

A recent project he’s been helping me out with is called Radical Friendship Theory. The album is finished but will take a while to come out. It’s songs I’ve written sung by good friends with very good voices, and a couple by myself. I don’t want to give too much away, but it might be the best thing I’ve done. But then, of course, I’m saying this about about every new record, or there’d be no point putting it out.

What are your concerns right now in music – what is troubling you and how are you addressing that?

Same as most people, I’m sure. The appalling state of the world, the full-blown return of Fascism only with much better tech, the catastrophe in Gaza and elsewhere, escalating inequality, the fact that I don’t see a sustainable future for my children and that we seem further away than ever from addressing the systemic problem of a profit-driven, rather than a rational and socially conscious way of organising our society. Sorry for stating the obvious.

I’m addressing it mostly by writing articles for magazines and websites, producing radio features, writing songs, going on the odd march. I wrote a song called That was the Time” about how my generation dropped the ball as we didn’t do enough to change things when it still seemed possible. I wrote another one called “Man in Sandwich Board” about what would happen if you went back to the past and tried to warn people about all the bad stuff that was going to happen. They would never believe you, you’d sound like an utter crank.

 

A more philosophical question. What do you think music is for beyond enjoyment?

I think enjoyment is hugely important, but people usually have a very narrow idea of what “enjoyment” might mean. I’m the sort of person who really enjoys an unexpected chord change at least as much as I enjoy a good groove. But there’s a lot of music that’s pumped out in public places that I don’t enjoy at all. Still I must assume that others do. I don’t think music should be hard work to listen to. But I guess another way of reading your question is whether music can change minds, bring people together, move them to do things. It clearly can, to a degree, but the older I get the more I see people who’ve always been into their Curtis Mayfield, their Dylan or their supposedly lefty punk come up with the most deranged reactionary opinions, so I’ve become a bit sceptical about music as a means of affecting change. It can definitely, as the cliché goes, make you feel empowered. I felt that myself as a kid jumping through my bedroom, but it’s not what I look for in music now. Music I love will make me cry with raw emotion, and it can make me feel connected with other humans.

 

What’s your attitude to lyrics?

Extremely important to me. I learnt more English from song lyrics than I ever learnt at school. Conversely, I love writing songs that make people listen to the words. I love it when I sing a certain line, and it gets a reaction. I’m aware that being a non-native speaker means I sometimes use turns of phrase that will sound unusual to people. It’s a fine line for a non-native speaker, you shouldn’t copy colloquialisms cause that will inevitably sound fake, but you can make up new stuff, at the risk of it not working.

 

Tell me about one of your songs.

I’ll tell you about “The Frankfurt Kitchen”, a song from 2008 that I wrote about the Viennese architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, who was a friend of my grandmother’s and lived to almost 103. She was in the anti-Nazi resistance, spent a lot of time in a Gestapo prison and narrowly survived. In 1928 she designed the first ever properly built-in kitchen for Ernst May’s social housing project in Frankfurt. I wrote a song about that because there’s not enough songs about kitchens, I liked the natural rhythm of her surname, and she deserved a tribute. Then I drew and painted the video for it, and ever since then there’s been a constant trickle of people asking me to talk about it, museums showing the video, people mentioning it in books… MoMA in New York bought a copy for their collection and flew me in to play it to their season ticket subscribers, which was surreal. So in that sense it’s my most successful song by far, even though it’s about a really niche subject, which just goes to show: If you’re niche, be proudly, properly niche! If I’d had any sense, I should have done a whole album of architect’s songs.

Why come to Hastings to play?

Because you invited me. I saw Montague Armstrong play in Rochester, and I loved them. They’re truly original, it’ll be great to see them play again. I’ve been to Hastings before because I have a DFL friend Aram who lives in St. Leonards, and we took a walk up the coast a few years ago. Again, I loved it, it’s just beautiful the way the town sits on a hill above the seaside and opens out towards the beach. Also I’m looking forward to seeing Aram again.

Any influences you haven’t mentioned that you’d really like to share?

One thing I didn’t mention earlier is that I really enjoy old French music too, Dutronc, Polnareff, Gainsbourg, Hardy all that stuff, but more obscure stuff too. And tango, I dance Argentinian style, don’t laugh! There’s a good scene in Bexhill, by the way, I’ve been to one of their milongas. I also read a lot, and my most recent recommendation would be Owen Hatherley’s “The Alienation Effect – How Central European Emigrés Transformed the British Twentieth Century”. People from the Hastings area will be interested in what he writes about Erich Mendelsohn’s De La Warr Pavilion, but the whole book is just fantastic.

ROBERT ROTIFER plays

Barnaby’s Lounge 

Thursday 28 August 8pm

FREE entry

Suggested artist donation 5 pounds

Barnaby’s Lounge, Robertson St, Hastings

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