Daniel Figgis doesn't ask for much. Just to control the people he works with. Oh, and nature too. Peter Crawley hears about the former Virgin Prune's next projects
'You're doing it again," chides Daniel Figgis, composer, musician, installation artist, former child actor, recovering rock musician and self-confessed control freak. My pen retreats guiltily from its notebook. Perhaps the surprise of Figgis's earlier phone call has made it difficult to remember the rules. After all, his publicist couldn't locate him, he will normally be interviewed only by e-mail and he won't say how he got my number. But it is becoming increasingly clear, even to the patrons of this sleepy, dimly lit Rathfarnham pub, that the incongruous figure with peroxide-blond hair, in a sombre suit and impenetrably dark, deeply ostentatious Karl Lagerfeld sunglasses, is used to getting his way.
It's not that Figgis is reluctant to talk. Far from it. So long as I keep my hands where he can see them, refrain from recording him or from jotting down any notes, he will chat for more than an hour about his career, his music, his experiments with power chords and harmoniums and his two forthcoming performance pieces for Kilkenny Arts Festival and Dublin Fringe Festival, which are called Daniel Figgis' Motor and Daniel Figgis' Tamper. He will be articulate, witty and honest. Over the following four days he will call me 14 times and I will consider changing my phone number. And when his e-mail - our actual interview - materialises, three days and seemingly several drafts later, it will read like a collage of fortune-cookie aphorisms, a proposal for a visual-arts PhD and a very pushy press release.
" 'Daniel Figgis' MOTOR' has a little fun with the (post) post - industrial revolution's revelation of the natural world's phantasmagoric machine - tyranny's engine rebooted*," it reads.
"* yes, engines are not 'rebooted' as such but I wished to allude to digital intervention and interactivity, if anyone believes in such a thing anymore. . . . I do but we may need a new dialectic."
Reading such an e-mail moves me to cry out for a new dialectic. But perhaps in this hermetically one-sided form of communication, where nearly all signs of Figgis's more earthly persona have been bleached from the page, there are echoes of what he had referred to earlier as the impetus for these sound sculptures: the abnegation of personality. "I'm trying to disappear into the work," he had said. And for that to happen Figgis insists on total control.
The Dublin-born musician, who is Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council's composer-in-residence, has been toying with a germane idea, a compositional approach he calls imposition. He describes it as the imposition of structure on musical improvisations but steers clear of conceding any jazz allegiances. "I like collaboration," he says, "but only on my terms." This week, for example, he is bringing the Ottoni Ensemble, a local brass quintet, to Marlay House, in Rathfarnham, where he will establish strict parameters for performing.
Prescribing a tempo and the keys in which they can work, he will allow them to improvise for 30 seconds. He will then take the recordings and process the improvised material digitally. When he has achieved the order that he wants he will notate the composition and, finally, hand it back for the original performers to play.
This may seem like aesthetic authoritarianism, but it is typical of Figgis. When the experimental electronic music label Front End Synthetics approached him with the idea of remixing Skipper, his sublime and understated instrumental album, which has endeared itself to both classical and electronica listeners, Figgis naturally had some conditions. None of the 40 contributors, from Roger Doyle and Donnacha Costello to Cathal Coughlan and the Warlords of Pez, could incorporate any extraneous material, ensuring a faithful "recomposition" of Figgis's work. Like subletting an apartment, they could rearrange the furniture but not radically redecorate.
Although he is more concerned with its artwork - digital images of violence in nature that express "this idea of the bucolic but very disturbed" - the double album is a cohesive work in its own right.
Figgis appears slow to embrace the tribute, however, pointing to the title, When It's Ajar: The Music Of Daniel Figgis? and stressing the question mark. "How often have I been accused of collaboration?" he wonders in his e-mail. "I think that we differ on this, Peter - are you and I now collaborating . . . or communicating?"
There is at least one strongly collaborative aspect of Motor, he earlier admitted, in the contribution of his lighting designer, Arno Nauwels. When surveying the hidden glen of Kilfane Park, in Kilkenny, upon which Motor will project videos, with Figgis's music played live in "true surround sound", Nauwels wondered if they could "turn off" the natural waterfall. One can imagine why the idea of bending nature to man's will would appeal to Figgis.
"I'm certainly a control freak," he says in one of our conversations. "If that's good or bad, I don't know. It works for me. It's got me to the position where I can walk away from everything that I had and find the energy and support to generate projects on this scale."
Finding the traditional gig format deadening - "second only to the diktat of music for architects" - he recalls an out-of-body experience, brought about by sheer tedium, when he performed at Galway Arts Festival in 2002. "I floated above the stage and I thought, I will never do this again." It was for similar reasons that he parted with his record company, the well-respected Rough Trade.
"Who but Geoff Travis [its boss\] would have had the balls and the rather flattering confidence in me to underwrite SKIPPER?" he writes. "By 2002 though it was very clear to me that RT were the least well-placed of anyone to facilitate the career arc and development to which I had long aspired." Or, as he might have put it, no record company in the world could work with someone who wants to turn a waterfall on and off.
His time as a child actor includes the memory of Peter O'Toole "scaling the outface of the lord mayor of Nottingham's residence in 1971" while, inside, the then 10-year-old Figgis "coined the notion of the actor as blank canvas". (His e-mail continues: "Proud of that one when Tom Hanks reiterated it at the Oscars, although he may not necessarily have been quoting me directly.")
He seems to have maintained a fear of being "typecast" and set himself up for a life of invention and reinvention.
By the early 1980s, under the name Haa Lacka Binttii, Figgis could be found wreaking artistic havoc alongside Gavin Friday in the Dublin art-rock group Virgin Prunes, although he now refuses to discuss the group.
After an acrimonious departure Figgis continued to record for Rough Trade under the name Princess Tinymeat, but he became dismayed that the attention of his audience snagged on such small details as his transvestism. He went "on strike" from music for 10 years and only reverted back to the name Daniel Figgis with the release of Skipper.
"I know exactly where I am now. This is what I was meant to do in the first place," he says. This is why his career, he thinks, has finally come full circle, suggesting that Motor and Tamper will be extremely theatrical works.
During our chat Figgis had spoken of seeking the mechanism in nature, its underlying principle. "There's always an order," he told me. But when I follow up the idea in our e-mail correspondence, wondering whether his sound sculptures are trying to find an order or simply impose one, his reply is more cryptic. "We will reveal a benign and congruent chaos in our possibly foolhardy stab at re-imposing or, at the very least, revealing the 'order' to which you allude." Hmm.
The jargon generator that has apparently replaced a perfectly amiable Figgis neglects to mention the inspiration of W. Heath Robinson, whose parodic illustrations of guffawingly complex contraptions suggested something both monumental and fun. In this possibly foolhardy stab at reimposing or, at the very least, revealing the "character" of Daniel Figgis I appear to have lost my subject behind a morass of official e-mailed biographies and contraband quotes.
I far preferred the Figgis who agreed that these installations involved too much but admitted: "I love 'too much'. Rock music was far too little." But from even the arcane recesses of an abstruse e-mail a glimmer emerges of the man whose abnegation of personality involves taking a bow atop a waterfall in a white suit. "The warmth is in the work," he writes, "and you can 'find' me or 'forget' me there." Is that such a tall order?
Daniel Figgis' Motor is at Kilfane Glen & Waterfall, August 11th-14th, as part of Kilkenny Arts Festival, which starts on August 6th, www.kilkennyarts.ie; Daniel Figgis' Tamper is at Marlay Park, September 24th & 25th, as part of Dublin Fringe Festival, www.fringefest.com
