Ian MucCulloch – HuffPost 4.3.14

Mike Ragogna: What advice do you have for new artists?

Ian McCulloch: Every now and then, I bump into people who I like. Glasvegas was one, I said to James [Allan], “Whatever you do, don’t wear white and don’t look like a geisha girl with your next record,” and guess what? He wore white with a little geisha parasol. I also said, “don’t ever go up your own ass and certainly not anyone else’s.” Unfortunately they have a Support Tour with U2 and there’s no margin when you do that. And Jake Bugg is someone I know, we met somewhere in London recently. I think Jake Bugg is fantastic, especially when he does the ballad-y kind of stuff, the slower, less skiffle-y Dylan stuff, which I like as well, but when he writes one of them beautiful ballads they’re kind of beyond his years in a way. I just think he’s great. I told him, “You seem as cool as you get, don’t listen to anyone’s advice apart of mine and don’t go up your own ass or anyone else’s.” That’s the advice I give. If you stick to that, hopefully you’ll still write the great melodies, but even if you don’t you can say to yourself, “I didn’t go up anyone’s ass.” That’s a great rule to live by I think, otherwise you’ve let yourself down. You’ve got to be strong enough to know when you’re good and when you’re brilliant. Jake Bugg is kind of knowing that. It’s going to be tough because he’s a solo act, leading a band. It’s hard when it’s your name and you can’t share that weight of your own sense of who you are. You can share that in a band because it then becomes… The Bunnymen, we know, there was always an underlined, shared knowledge of what we were and it can be defined by what you don’t do. There would be times you can’t possibly do that because it wouldn’t feel right, you know sometimes you can get manipulated, but we were always the vocal bastards of that kind of scene and music. “We don’t do cowboy hats, we don’t do religion, and we don’t do arse licking, never mind arse fucking buttholing.”