Interview: Bob Mould (Hüsker Dü, Sugar) - New Zealand Tour

A towering figure in US alt-rock and punk music for more than four decades, Bob Mould returns to Aotearoa New Zealand this week, playing his first local headline dates in 22 years. Avowed fan Liam K. Swiggs (The Big Fresh Collective) got on the line with the legendary Hüsker Dü co-founder and Sugar helmsman, ahead of his nearly completely sold out Solo Electric shows in Auckland, Christchurch and Wellington. Read their chat below, touching on Mould's influential wild early days with Hüsker Dü, reinventing himself as a solo artist, his '00s side-career as a club DJ, reflections on our turbulent current political era, and more...

UnderTheRadar proudly presents...

Bob Mould - Solo Electric 

Thursday 21st November – Loons, Christchurch w/ Mim Jensen [sold out]
Friday 22nd November – San Fran, Wellington w/ Mystery Waitress [sold out]
Saturday 23rd November – Powerstation, Auckland w/ BUB

All details and tickets are at Plus1.co.nz

Liam K. Swiggs: Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to talk to me. I'm sure you get this all the time, but my father raised me on your music, and I have very strong childhood memories of my parents blasting out Copper Blue on the family stereo. So you hold a very special and dear place in our hearts over here in New Zealand.

Bob Mould: Oh my goodness, well thank you for the kind words. That's really sweet to hear. I'm glad you made it through listening to Copper Blue.

I think naturally, we found Candy Apple Grey and Hüsker Dü as we become sort of edgy teenagers as well. You've definitely been a bit of a soundtrack to growing up over here in New Zealand. Which must be crazy because we are on the arse-end of the world, as we would call it over here.

It is quite a distance, but through the marvels of modern technology...

Do you have any fond memories of (playing in New Zealand before)?

Just beautiful scenery, lush. That's how I remember it from 33 years ago. I don't know how much development or growth has happened, but Auckland was a great time. I just remember you didn't have to get very far out of the centre of town... the vegetation and the natural beauty of all of it's super obvious. And this time doing three cities, I suspect I will get a much greater sense of the entire country.

You're playing my hometown of Christchurch. That's in the South Island so that'll be the proper experience for you. It's a beautiful place down there. The tour is billed as "Solo Electric", can you explain a little bit more to us what that means?

It's stand and deliver. Me and the electric guitar and a combo amp. After a few songs once the audience gets their orientation, they'll be able to imagine everything else happening around me [laughs]. Good shows. Going back to Hüsker stuff to solo stuff, Sugar stuff, the last decade, new stuff. It cuts a pretty big swath of catalogue I guess.

I know me and my dad will be there, itching to hear some classics. Here's another one, a little bit left-field, I'm sure you get asked about it a lot. One of my first personal favourite performances of yours... the 1985 Live From London Camden Palace show. It's beautifully chaotic in its own way. I've pretty fond memories of getting drunk with my dad as a teenager and forcing him to put it on over and over. Can you give me a quick rundown of that show and any memories from it?

Well I think Hüsker Dü had just played a show at the 9:30 Club in Washington D.C. and I believe the next day we flew from Dulles Airport to London. I don't know if it was Heathrow or Gatwick. We had no work visas, therefore we could bring no equipment. You would never catch me with a Gibson Explorer, if not for this small issue of work papers. So we pretty much fell off an airplane and taped that show and got right back on an airplane. Flew the next morning to Cleveland Ohio and played that night. That sort of frames how chaotic sixty hours or so was.

The show itself, I barely remember any of it. I was still drinking pretty heavily at that time of my life. There may have been amphetamines involved as soon as we landed in London. It was all pretty mad and pretty crazy and that was our first introduction to anything outside of North America. It just literally flew by. By the time I got done playing the next night in Cleveland, I was saying to myself, "Did we just go to London?"

Oh man, that's such a wild story. Moving on — what was your life like post-Hüsker Dü and pre-Sugar? How did you reinvent yourself in that time in between?

Let me start at the middle of 1986. After Candy Apple Grey had come out and as the band was planning what became Warehouse Songs and Stories, that summer was the beginning of the end of Hüsker Dü. The three members of the band grew apart very, very quickly. By the time the group was finished at the end of ‘87, or technically the beginning of ‘88, I had moved up to a farmhouse in northern Minnesota. Greg Norton had already moved down to southern Minnesota, and Grant (Hart) was still in the Twin Cities. But I had moved up halfway to Duluth, Minnesota. I spent a year and four months in a farmhouse, mostly by myself writing music.

I had a couple dozen chickens and I had a bunch of apple trees, a granary, and I had a big barn full of hay. They could have held probably thirty horses, but I'm not a horse guy. I just spent a year in solitude writing the words and music that eventually became Workbook. It was an incredible time in my life. Once I finished the writing and recording and was back to work, I left the farm and moved to New York City. Pretty drastic change there.

That's sort of the middle of ‘86, everybody growing apart in Hüsker Dü to the middle of ‘89, where I was reconnecting with colleagues in New York City. Just let go of the farm and let go of my place in Minneapolis and started renting a cold water flat, a block from Maxwell's in Hoboken New Jersey. Then I moved into the city a little bit after that.

You're approaching about 50 years in your music career now. Considering Hüsker Dü formed back in 1979, how do how do you keep finding the energy to keep going? Has much changed over the years with your approach to creating music and touring?

It's always evolving. When I started Hüsker Dü, I was 18 years old, the first shows we did. That band was a couple years of three guys living in Minnesota who loved music, worked at record stores, shared a lot of common loves of different types of music. Those first couple of years, we tried on a bunch of different clothes in a way, just messing with sound and our style.

I think that Savage Young Dü box set that came out in ‘17 is very representative of how we were learning to be a band. We were wearing our influences on our sleeves and then eventually we fell into a sound that I think stood out from a lot of American hardcore. We became less political. I think we always were good songwriters then we became great songwriters. Really focusing on melody and smart lyrics, but very universal in nature. I think that's how the band evolved. As far as writing it, once you know what you're doing, you just lean into it and see where it takes you. You get influenced by other kinds of music along the way. Folk music, psychedelic music, Celtic music. Up through the 2000s for me, really diving deep into electronic music and house music.

It's a journey. Physically, it gets a little tougher every year. I'm very very grateful that I have pretty good health. My voice is holding up better than ever. My hands are working good. I got a crack medical team [laughs]. I do a lot of stretching, I drink a lot of water, I try to get a lot of sleep. Just basic things that everybody should do every day. Things I did not do in my 20s.

For sure. Now you said about dance music, that one particularly interests me. I actually run a dance record label over here in New Zealand myself.

What’s the name of the label?

We're called The Big Fresh Collective and it's named after a classic supermarket chain up here in New Zealand. We specialise in a lot of like Ghetto House, Chicago, sort of Footwork, Juke inspired music. That's what we're up to anyway, but I saw that you spent a bit of time DJing in the late 1990s in New York. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

In 1998, The Last Dog and Pony Show, I put down the guitar for a while, put down the touring. Living in New York City at that time, there was such a vibrant club scene. I was more out in the gay life than I had ever been and that was what I wanted to do at that point in my life — sort of embrace the community. The soundtrack of that community was club music. That was Twilo, Roxy, Sasha and Digweed in town all the time, Global Underground. That whole era, style, that was the soundtrack of gay life in New York City. I had to get up to speed really quick and figure out what this music was about, then quickly realised there was that gay bar club music and then there was also this amazing music that was deep house and a lot of just great electronic stuff, that was a little classier maybe. A little more about the artist and not about the diva. They go well together, but I look for songs.

Dove pretty deep into that and then in 2002, I moved down to Washington, D.C. and met up with a with another musician named Rich Morel. Rich had been doing a lot of stuff with Deep Dish. We hit it off and started working together as a DJ unit called Blow Off in 2003, that's when I really started DJing. The Blow Off party went for 11 years, it went all over America. We were drawing 15,000 people a year to our parties in D.C., it was sort of crazy. We had big parties in New York and it would be fun. Cindi Lauper would come down and Alan Cumming would come down. If Scissor Sisters had a new remix, they'd bring it to Blow Off. It was that kind of, y'know, Lady Gaga showing up to play ‘Bad Romance’ in D.C. for the first time ever with her bodyguard and CD in the decks. Sorta bad and sort of crazy, right?

I think in New Zealand, at least, electronic music has sort of become the new punk rock music and it's very much aligned with the political movements that are going on. It's almost unavoidable, everyone seems to be into dance music over here these days a lot.

What's funny about that is to me, '90s rave culture was the logical extension of '80s punk rock. Or a friend would drag you to this unknown place and on the way out, you get a flyer and that's the only way you know where the next one is. There's a lot of punk rock in that. I feel what you're saying about the current state in New Zealand.

I think as a country, New Zealand's political landscape somewhat mirrors that of the United States more and more as time goes on. With a very similar sort of serious divide down the middle of the country. You mentioned in your past interviews that the current US political landscape reminds you a lot of the 1980s. It's very similar with what's going on in New Zealand here at the moment, it feels like we've stepped back in time and we're making really big movements in the wrong direction. I know that the feelings of political unrest inspire some of the best and most important art coming out of this country. Do the feelings play into your creative process in any way?

I think in 2020 with the Blue Hearts album, that was perhaps incredibly on-the-nose about the state of things. In 2016 I had a flat in Berlin Germany. My then- partner now husband, we would go back and forth from San Francisco to Berlin, splitting time. Spending three and a half years in Berlin, I think by osmosis and by educating myself, I think I understand what happened in Germany in the ‘30s and ‘40s. I also in the writing of Blue Hearts, took a look back to the ‘80s. I felt incredibly marginalised as a young gay man, not even out, having to deal with an evangelical-driven government marginalising me and telling me that I'm zero, or less than zero. In 2019 and in early 2020, when I was making Blue Hearts, I really thought back to the '80s. Trying to remind myself, maybe using that as a way to use the experiences of the ‘80s, Hüsker Dü — I had a guitar, a duffel bag, an amp, a little bag, that was about all I had and did pretty good with that. Putting Blue Hearts together and just thinking about all of those things.

When any country starts to deny its own shortcomings and rallies behind charismatic leaders, trouble will ensue. I try to tell my story without beating up the opposition too much. I think you just find them beating themselves up in public. All I can really do with what's going on right now, or what's happened over the past decade in America, is just share my stories — and try to, as I tell stories, put a little bookmark as I go by something. I tell a story and say, "There's a bookmark", And then people go, "Oh right, that was normal back then. Like, that was the good days". When everybody had health insurance, or everybody had food stamps when they needed it. Oh that’s when public education was good. For me to get too worked up about what has just happened or what may happen, I can't control that. All I can do is share my experiences with people and sort of put a finger in the air and go, "This is the part that you should keep within your head as I continue my story".

It feels very much like, like I said in New Zealand, exactly the same feelings of kind of hopelessness and "what can you really do?" Is there anything else you'd like to say to your adoring New Zealand fans before we wrap up?

I can't believe that I'm coming back. I can't believe I'm going three cities deep. It's going to be super, super crazy to hit the ground running and every morning fly in the morning, play at night. Sleeping on each interval around that and hope for the best. Hopefully get some great food and breathe some fresh air and see some people and do my work and I think it's going to be great. I'm really excited to be back. It should be a fun time, a really good time.

We can't wait to see you as well. Again, I'd just like to say thank you so much for giving me the time today to speak to you. You are truly a hero for me and a lot of my friends over here, so we can't wait to see you.

Thanks Liam. Which town will I see you in?

Christchurch. I'll make sure to come and introduce my dad to you. Because he's gonna be pretty starstruck to be honest.

Excellent. I can't wait to meet you and I can't wait to meet your dad as well.