Cy Curnin | A Beautiful Human Being

Cy Curnin, front man for one of the 1980’s biggest new wave artist The Fixx, spent a late summer afternoon chatting with Lars Hindsley in what was more of a revealing philosophical conversation than an interview.

This interview originally took place by phone from east coast to west coast of the U.S. in the spring of 2008. Cy in sunny California and Lars in Delaware.

Cy was an 80’s hero to Lars and they have since stayed in touch. Cy’s a private man, but remained a friendly accessible celebrity revealing very little of his personal life and with respect to that space. One example is his son Max (whom he does mention in this interview). Since the time of this interview Cy’s son Max has been acting on screen since 2014. Like Cy, Max is sure to have a promising career.

Lars:  How you doing?

Cy:  Reporting from the field, Cy Curnin, ducking bullets on Melrose. Harley’s flying past every five seconds, but that’s the way it is, life today in the fast lane.

Lars:  *chuckles* Where are you calling from?

Cy:  I’m calling from L.A., Melrose Avenue.  My favorite hall for sitting outside Starbucks because they have free Wi-Fi and I get to watch some pretty ladies go by. Feeling like an old git. *laughs*

Lars:  I actually met you once. I wasn’t let down. I thought you were down to earth. You seemed to be more in tune to the, I guess down-to-earth movement at the time, for lack of a better term?

Cy:  Yeah, I’ve never really strayed from wanting to keep my hands on the soil, direct contact with the earth all that stuff. Now I’ve actually moved to a family.  I’ve taken it one step more literally, just providing my family with meat from the field outside my door.

Lars:  I think in many ways that’s what every man thinks of.

Cy:  The game of playing; there are some parts that are quite attractive, and there are other parts that are just sort of, should remain nameless. I don’t like the idea of worshipping false idols and I think anything that’s music should be invisible; a messenger, really. I don’t mind taking some of the royalty checks, and that side of it, the income from it, but the fame machine never really rocked my boat too much.

Lars:  I’ve always taken you to be a grounded person.

Cy:  Yeah, very grounded.  That’s what comes from being around electricity so much. *laughs*

Lars:  Well, you know, that kind of segues into some of the questions I have for you.  Do you want me to move onto those?

Cy:  Yeah, please do!

Lars:  Okay.  Like yourself, I’m a positive energy person. I believe relationships of people either spiral into negative directions or positive directions and everything is what you make it so; you need to control things with positive energy. Would you say that’s pretty much in everything you’ve written lyrically?

Cy:  That’s pretty much how I see things too. I mean, I think it was I realized that recently where I think it was my wife said one time “You know, when you’re shouting at me, or shouting at anyone, you’re really shouting at yourself,” and that’s the spiral of negativity is you start wild; you’re already expecting to change things around you without looking at how you can affect change within you first to relieve tension.

Lars:  Yeah, it takes a really strong force to be able to stop that negative flow before you can turn it around.

Cy:  Yeah, it’s like masturbation. It’s quite addictive, in a way.  It gives you a very short term sense of empowerment, this rage and just kind of controlling the room with loud noises but in the end it’s more the calm approach that works, you’re not repulsing everyone around you.

Lars:  I was so happy you didn’t write everything about love and I remember an interview once where you said you really try to steer away from love songs.

Cy:   I guess patience is love. Giving an olive branch and stuff like that.  There are ways of singing a love song without using the word “love.” So, maybe with age I’ve taken that back. If it’s got a positive energy to it, then maybe it’s surrounded by some love. I just don’t do the pillow chat thing as well as some other people have done it. They can condense it, there’s no real emotions around it.  I always find that kind of try to keep the personal stuff close to home.

When you’re in a band for the boys, it’s kind of a boys club. They don’t want to hear about who I was kissing or rowing with last night instead of what’s inspiring us collectively, you know? Anger at the front page, or trying to turn some negative heat into positive stuff and whatever floats the boat of the people around you too, you know?  You kind of turn off the song when it’s already working, and it’s just not going to hold their attention. So, I use them as my little jury, and they’re all a bunch of inspiring chaps and they’ve all got very relevant input into the lyrics and the emotion of the song too, not just musicians. That’s very good. They help me grow a lot.

Lars:  I said I’ve always taken your lyrics as more of a philosophical point of view instead of a story-telling.

Cy:  Exactly. I think that comes from my French side, you know, I have a philosophical way of looking at things.

Lars:  Who would you say influenced your writing more, your mother or your father?

Cy:  Well, I think they both did before. My mother’s more creative, more of an artistic philosopher. She writes poems and she’s a literature teacher. But my dad was kind of, in his own silent way, he’s an inspiration too. He’s a pious man, very humble, does a lot of things to help people; councils bereaved parents that have lost kids to cancer, stuff like that, but he doesn’t really mention it and doesn’t bang a drum to say “notice what I’m doing.” He does things very quietly, and when I was a kid I was wrapped up in my own stuff.  I didn’t pay much attention to what he was doing but now I look back and I see he was a force in life, even though it wasn’t a loud life. So that was inspiring too. More now than then because as you get older you see your father in yourself as a man. They’re still around today. I gave my mom, which we had Mother’s Day in England last Sunday, I gave my mom (two Sundays ago) I gave my mom a song that I’d made from a poem that she’d given me years ago in French and that kind of was a real watermark for me because she’d give me things for years and years and years and I never felt comfortable singing in French because I don’t have French rhythm in my nature. I write as an Englishman. Though I speak French, I don’t write that way, and then she gave me these lyrics and it all came into a French style, like, “Ah! The secret ingredient!” Thirty years, I’ve been looking for that.

Lars:  You think you’ll be doing more of it now?

Cy:  Oh, absolutely. This stuff is a kick in the pants, and quite motivating.  I’m quite proud of it.  Right now we’re working with this engineer laying cable who we knew from way, way back from when I first, from KPM in London, um, he’s now producing a new record and he works a lot in France too, so it’s like perfect. An old bass player joined us for this record and I’ve got my little solo record out there. I’m using that to test the waters.  The new day’s breaking, you can’t sell records without cannons being fired from record company roofs and, you know, it’s a slow and steady process but I think it bears well for the band and the way that the musicians will carve a career for themselves.

Lars:  In regards to Dan K Brown, I remember seeing you guys at Great Adventure, back in the 80’s in a concert and Dan was on stage standing quite still, as he does in all your videos.  Is that a persona for him, or is he truly an introvert?

Cy:  It’s a persona for him. Yeah. Adam the drummer was a drama teacher, and when Danny first came in the band he’s so carried away by the music that he had to just this way of moving that Adam was like “Listen, just stand completely still. Don’t move, like a statue, and you’ll get more attention, you’ll see.”  And sure enough.  Last night too, he probably upstaged me!  I was going to strangle him halfway through the set.  *laughs*

Lars:  I don’t think that entirely true, I mean, I was always fascinated by how you behaved on stage with your hands, and you were quite passionate, there was no doubt about it.

Cy:  The puppet show.  Yeah, yeah.

Lars:  I didn’t look at it as quite such. I saw it as you acting out the words with your hands.

Cy:  Exactly, yeah yeah, right.  I mean it’s like, if you talk to yourself walking down the street waving your hands like that, you’ll find yourself surrounded by people with white coats.

Lars:  *laughs*

Cy:  You put a bunch of musicians around you; you’re just sane as can be!

Lars:  I agree.  *both laugh*

Cy:  Danny is a great presence and not that Gary was bad.  He was a fantastic bass player.  It’s just Danny brings a different ingredient to what we do and as a singer he just brings out the melody just by choosing different tones on some of the roots,  not always playing an a and an a, he’ll play an f sharp or slide it down to d or an f, move things around so the melody is seeming to evolve where it’s quite internal, and the bass is moving around it, which is quite cool.  As a singer you don’t want to have to be strident. It’s not an Olympic sport thing as Mariah Carey seems to think it is.

Lars:  I recall, I remember when I was the frontman in my band and it was the bassist who I always pulled from.

Cy:  Yeah, exactly right because you’re only singing one note, and he’s only playing one note. Together you can make sort of a kind of tonic cord that will sit over the top of everything else, you know? He plays the second and you play the ninth or visa-versa.  He has a real penchant to make it work.

Lars:  You can anticipate changes too, where they’re headed.

Cy:  Yeah, exactly.

Lars:  It helps take you in their direction. You find yourself playing off each other.

Cy:  I really do, yeah, and I look forward to it. It’s quite an emotional thing for him, because he pulled off the touring thing when we took a break in the early 90’s. He got hit with a case of bowel cancer, which luckily for him it wasn’t too severe and it got discovered early on, but it did throw the wobbles in him with the Sword of Damocles over him and now he’s been 4, 5, 6 years in remission and he’s filled with so much energy coming from him again to go out on the road and pick up where he left off.  It’s going to be fantastic to just see his life journey going on.  A little personal victory.  And having had gone up Everest with Jamie and the Last Hope Springs campaign, being surrounded by a lot of cancer survivors, that was a real insight to what it is to be on the other side of that fear, not just being a survivor anymore but picking up, moving on with your life and forgetting the past. You know, prisons of the body.

Lars:  I think he found that the journey is the reward.

Cy:  Yeah!  Exactly right. And being alongside anyone can be, in terms of floating without company, there’s times to be alone and there’s times to be with people.

Lars:  I’m sure he was appreciative for the people that were there.

Lars:  Are you going to do anything like that again?

Cy:  You’ve got my solo record, I presume?

Lars:  I actually paid for it.

Cy:  I paid to promote that as well. The Fixx is really my day job, and the solo album is just a little detour of a collection of songs that, as I said earlier there’s certain songs that are a band collective thing, these just came out in a certain period where I just need to keep them for myself.  I collected those songs up twice in my life. The first one was Mayfly which is a very distinct LA, college-sounding record.  Chuck put it out anyway just because that’s what it is and then I bounced back with Returning Sun that I just put out now.  It’s much more of a New York sound through it.  I was going through a divorce and it just a pretty over-the-top period but I enjoyed it nonetheless. So I think I put it out through the new way of doing things on the internet just to sort of test it out for doing things in the Fixx later. So far, so good.

Lars:  You said you went through a divorce yourself?

Cy:  Yeah.

Lars:  You know, I found that divorce seems to be one of the most cathartic things itself. I mean, look at Phil Collins Face Value, one of the best albums created due to a divorce.

Cy:  Yeah, exactly, because it just faces you to a kind of honest and I think sometimes when a marriage is bad, it’s bad cause there’s a lot of numbness and no communication so that blocks the communication you have with the outside world too.  When you blast that out and things are pouring from the main arteries, not all is lost, especially if you get it on tape.

Lars:  I hear you. I’m sorry, I feel like I’m leveraging off of every other band as well as yourself but I’m truly a fan of music and Fixx being one of my favorite bands in my entire life I don’t want this to sound like a slight, but then there was a saying that I don’t know if A-ha borrowed it or wrote it for themselves but it was Out of Blue Comes Green, you know?  Out of every sad situation, again it’s that whole positive, negative energy turning it into a positive thing.

Cy:  Yeah, yeah, exactly right. You know, like there’s no, I take from the British teachings, there’s no real right, there’s no real wrong.  Better or worse, yes.  In the end day all there is, is just hostile energy it seems.  All things in time, all things are healed; guilt, shame, are all different ways of blocking you from feeling your body’s natural state of bliss, what is that? Trying to hold on to it when you ought to be letting go of it and joining in with the bigger force.  Easy to say, and it’s a cliché but in practice it really does help you calm your mind and your body benefits because when your mind is calm there’s less stress on the body.  Then from there on you attract more because people feel attracted to your calmness, they come to you like a scared cat won’t come to you if you’re all tense, but if you’re calm it’ll to you when it’s ready.  That’s like life; things come to you when they’re ready, if you’re ready to receive them in time.

Lars:  What made you decide to become a singer?  I know it sounds like a real simple question, but I know I had some things influence me, I’m sure there had to be influences on you?

Cy:  What made me become a singer is that I just had this naturally loud voice I noticed in school.  When we were singing I was always told to go to the back of the class and sing solo stuff.  I just had a lot of punch and mainly I had been exposed as a child, I think, and it gave me, with the exercises I had to learn to get out of it for class, it really helped my breathing, and so I had a loud voice; I liked music; the piano at home was something I used to sneak off from school when I knew no one would be at home so I could just sit in front of it and start with words I didn’t know were coming from my subconscious, fueling my mouth.  I always felt better afterwards and when I was ten and eleven I played truant from school with friends and played for them and “Oh, it’s really good,” we started a school band, and then my sister she, her boyfriend’s band, which is Adam the trumpet, and I cockily suggested that I could write better songs than they were doing, forced my way into that environment, and then I was singing loudly for them. *laughs* I haven’t looked back yet.

Lars:  Sounds like a great thing. I guess it’s easy to say then that you have imagined yourself on stage when you were a boy?

Cy:  No!  Not really.

Lars:  No?

Cy:  I mean, I wasn’t, I mean I used to maybe do the hair and glasses when I was a little older, I think that started at around 12, 14.  I wasn’t one of these kids who watched John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Keith Richards or Mick Jagger, and I didn’t associate myself in their role.  That came later, and I was always quite, not shy, but the kind of attention I liked, I liked to see it more uncomfortable for the other people rather than myself, and I think that shine is back, just a little weirder.

Lars:  It’s funny, I’ve always kind of categorized music into two categories, and that’s artists and performers; Madonna being a performer, you being an artist.  Quite frankly, having seen you up on stage, for all of your artistic talent I’ve found you to be just equally as strong a performer.   I guess that just comes from the heart.

Cy:  That’s very kind of you.  Yeah, I mean I like singing too.  That’s a prerequisite.  If I miss a note I really, it really pisses me off for the rest of the show.  I concentrate quite naturally on singing in tune, but then at the same time I also like to be every night a place where the show should be, and not just sort of play the room and get lost in people’s eyes.  I prefer to turn inwards while I’m singing a song.  It’s a natural process for me, so therefore these hand puppets that would help me exercise the demon of the song or pump it out a bit more became useful tools to get me back to that place every night.  You always want to do a good show every night and you don’t let your day get in the way.  So it was always a fantastic cure-all and still is.

Lars:  What was your favorite time with the Fixx?  I mean if you could reminisce?  Are there any times at all that were more special than others?

Cy:  All periods have been great, but the early times was months when we didn’t know where we were going; we didn’t know how far we would get; we just felt the excitement of things starting to flourish; being in Germany, Berlin, Market Store, West Berlin and going to the checkpoint to East Germany.  I was inspired to write politically.  There we were running around going through check point Charlie and it had a real sense of living in the movie?

Lars:  Yeah.

Cy:  Seeing the old Europe, new Europe, and touring around and smoking after the show and just reaping the rewards of backstage conversation, backstage talks.  It was great, it inspired me to get back to writing.  It’s still stuff I carry with me today.  I love to meet people after the show and take it a little further sometimes.

Lars:  If you don’t mind, I want to step back in the 80’s again for just a moment.  With the advent of YouTube, all of the old videos are starting to make another play.  Do you think videos were done right back in the 80’s?

Cy:  That broke up, that question.  I heard the YouTube videos from the 80’s.

Lars:  Hang on, I’ll wait until the cars pass.  Can you hear me now?

Cy:  Yeah.  Can you hear the cars flapping through there?

Lars:  Yeah.  I can hear a lot of background now.  My question is do you think music videos were done right considering having to look at them all over again on YouTube?

Cy:  Yeah!  The videos were made in a kind of innocence, so there was an innocence to it early on.  The most successful things hadn’t worked out yet, so people were trying anything.  There were some copy-cat videos, but you know, I was liking; I remember Ultravox in Vienna where they just went there and hosing down the dark streets to get this magnificent architecture out to match the moodiness of the track.  It’s really great!  And then on the other end of the gambit you have this sort of James Bond wannabe Duran Duran in exotic climes.  Our videos that we were making for like two pound, the tunnel was a wood construction across a church hole outside London with two quite expensive video cameras.  I think it ended up being the price of the lunch bill on the last video we made!  So there was a bit of a new push to it all.  The curiosity behind visual music was, the jury was still out, but it had to show music as yet, it was showing another generation of performance and stuff like that.  The one aspect I didn’t quite understand was that it was taken outside of the band collective.  We would often hire people to come up with ideas for us and we were lucky to have someone who could at least understand it intelligently, the lyrics, and come up with sort of a fairly interesting if not oblique image.  There were a couple of videos that were just kind of hard, and we suffered the price because of that I think.  Saved By Zero was one, Secret Separation was two, and Driven Out was three.  It was a dark, weird, little video.  Looking back on it, it didn’t really do us much justice at the time.

Lars:  I agree.

Cy:  I’m not trying to be negative about it.  I’m happy the way things are and I think now videos don’t really need half the music that’s in them.  It’s just a piece of music and I think a lot of the chill-out charm generation understands what extacy visions can be.

Lars:  The metaphor or Reach the Beach, it meant a heck of a lot to me and my generation.  Was that just something you had fun with, or was there something really important about the beach to you too?

Cy:  I mean, every year I lived on the beach.  Every year I would be there.  I always felt that the music you need to hear is, not January but Summer.  The Summer period you would go to the beach and you felt almost like you would do all your emotional growing and transformation during the Summer.  Peer pressure, school, life, all would like disappear, and the self was there.  Loneliness, inspiration, early love, growth and so Reach the Beach represented all of those elements.  The fact that mankind has to step out of the water, and then looking back at the ocean it represents my impression of life because we all know that life comes from the sea but you can’t really see it on the surface.  We don’t really understand much more than just the surface of our existence, so it’s kind of a paradox being on the beach.  It’s very deep in one way but it’s where you can actually let go of events and everything, and it’s just sort of a nothingness which is why Saved By Zero turns  up on that record as well in a way.  Those two kind of work together.

Lars:  What’s funny to me is that Reach the Beach was a real futile song, but it was this song of hope.  I mean, my friends and I akinned it to trying to reach this woman where you could never quite get there because the ebb and flow of the tide was holding you back and but yet you had this ever questing, you know optimism that you could get there and that’s what it meant to us.  Is that how you truly meant it?  Because.

Cy:  I mean, to put it in a biblical sense, not much comes by just thought or moments of wanting, moments of yearning.  I think the most biblical state of it is when you look and you have a thought of the sexual nature and your body responds in the obvious manner, but there are ways of that in terms of the soul getting a boner as well!

Lars:  (laughs)

Cy:  Get closer to something and you kind of feel that you’re on a track and you can safely let go of some negative way of looking at something and just breathe in and as you let that breath go all the poison goes with it.  You open your eyes afresh, really.

Lars:  All I can say is hats off to you with lyrics like When in your eyes I see the sign of teasing passion for a desperate man, it’s, that’s to me you must have really had it for somebody because those are extremely proper words that you just can’t come to by accident.

Cy:  Yeah.  I know exactly who that was about but I’m not going to say.

Lars:  I’ll respect that.

Cy:  It’s in the history of the ocean, now.

Lars:  Speaking of lyrics, what would be your favorite song lyrically, if you have one?

Cy:  Well, funny enough Phantom Living is pretty emotional for me.  I Will song that was fairly emotional as well.  I still sing that one quite a lot and then right back to the last record that we had out there’s a song called Brave on there and Hollywood Ending are two songs that I’m really quite happy with the lyrics on.

Lars:  Do your songs come together quickly or…

Cy:  Muse.  I don’t want to bang some, I think they’re all good.

Lars:  I don’t it as though you’re unhappy with any of them.  Obviously some shine more than others.

Cy:  Orbit too, there are some songs where you really like more.  They just all come around in the right sense of events in your life, they’re just pulling your star out more than other times.

Lars:  Yeah.  If you don’t mind me asking, do you think music today is kind of in a funk?

Cy:  Some of it is, but I’ll tell you what, if you go and listen to this track by Sunny Levine, do you know who he is?

Lars:  Not familiar with him.

Cy:  If you can find this track called Sunny Levine, Gun to My Head and it’s on an album called Love Rider just tell me if you think music’s in a funk.  It’s in a funk because that kind of music isn’t being heard by the mass public.  But it is out there, and it is being pushed out.

Lars:  It’s funny you should say it’s not being heard by the public; I think that there’s something on the horizon that’s going to change things, kind of like the fax machine changed things for a period of time, the cell phone changed things for a period of time, the internet broke things open, equalized the industry in business.  Something’s going to happen to the music industry and I don’t think it will be mp3.  I think there’s something else on the horizon that’s going to make it so that people truly are able to break out from everywhere, you know?

Cy:  Yeah, well to me I kind of, to not much of a spiritual awakening, but just a need to get out and about and see things live.  It’s been easier with the internet which in a full connectivity that you have with the cell phone and email and stuff, you’re allowed to spend more time alone and that’s not fundamentally your condition.  We’re social animals and we learn pheromones and our eye and body language, and music brings people together to share a moment, collectively and that is another role for the impact of popularity.  It is for the kids but they have so much, their collection, their gathering tends to be voicing their anger.  I’m talking about more of a generation on the other side now, more discretionary income yet feeling a little numb in their lives and hoping to get back out and get into what was beautiful about their youth through the music they’re listening to today.

Lars:  Speaking of the internet, if you don’t mind me asking a silly question, do you play any video games?  If so, do you play any online gaming?

Cy:  No, I’m not a gamer at all.  I have a 22 and 18 year old. The 22 year old is a non-gamer; he’d rather play with a clitoris than a remote control button, where as the other one Max is a complete game-a-holic.  He’s always playing with somebody around the world somewhere, on these online games. Each to his own, I mean, I hope the guy that flies my plane is a good gamer because their reactions are a lot faster than mine. Then again, I hope the guy that writes my epitaph isn’t a gamer, and can take time to look for me outside of the game.

Lars:  Do you find yourself, I mean, speaking as poetically as you write from time to time? Do people catch you in that or is that just a mode you have to go into?

Cy:  No, I’m pretty much like this all the time. Sometimes I might get a little bit clichéd when I step back at the supermarket in jeans and I get poetic questions but sometimes I’m going to be very poetic and sometimes when I’m talking about my career I do some poetry of life and philosophy wherever they meet. I think it’s good to stay in method as per the madness. There’s some madness in my method. I don’t know. *laughs*

Lars:  Okay.  I’ve got a few personal questions here that hopefully you won’t be uncomfortable with.  Nothing really invasive.  Docking on this concept of music infiltrating every aspect of lives, there’s a song by Del Amitri, I don’t know if you heard of it, it’s about selling out your soul, it’s called When You Were Young.  Have you ever heard that song?

Cy:  No, I haven’t.  I’ll have to write that down.

Lars:  Okay, it’s really, Del Amitri it’s good on both a musical plane and lyrically.  Few songs make me flat-out stop and ask a deep question about myself, and that one did.  There’s a line in it that goes “Look in the mirror, do you recognize someone?  Is it who you always hoped you would become, when you were young?” And I guess, you know, that brings up my next question; do you think you became the person you wanted to become when you were young.  I know at the end of the day today perhaps you will look in the mirror and ask this question on a deeper plane. Are you, Cy Curnin, at your current age everything you wanted to be when you were a child?  Can you answer that now, off the cuff?

Cy:  Well, I don’t know if I’m everything I wanted to be, yet.  I’m a person who’s learning to live as who I am, though.  Which that’s the person I’m supposed to be, and I can live with that.  I will accept that as I look in the mirror.  If I look a little deeper, and I look at the dreams that are hanging in the background behind my head, backwards painful, I don’t know.  Maybe they’re, maybe you have to look at them in the mirror, backwards in the mirror, to see them the right way around.

Lars:  Take, for instance, getting divorced.  I’m divorced, you’re divorced.  Would you have ever..?

Cy:  Yeah, divorce is one of the biggest scars you carry in life because it’s, it tells you that you have failings.  Again, learn to live with those failings.  I don’t know.  Through life I’ve kind of gone from one divorce to another and found the same mistakes, always blaming other people, saying they’re the ones making the mistakes and then realizing it’s me.  I’ve learned that one too.

Lars:  I’ve been there.  I call that blame shifting.

Cy:  Yah, exactly right.

Lars:  And there’s a song in there.

Cy:  Yeah, you could be right.

Lars:  What song would you say, then, that most defines you, that you’ve written?

Cy:  Brave.

Lars:  Brave?

Cy:  Yeah.

Lars:  I’ll have to give that another listen, then.

Cy:  That today defines me.

Lars:  Do you still make hats?

Cy:  Make them?  I have them made, now.  I’ve got them on my website coming up soon and I did use to make them, but I farmed them out.

Lars:  Do you have a website specifically for the hats?

Cy:  What’s that?

Lars:  My question is, do you have a website specifically for the hats?

Cy:  No.  They’re going to be molded on to the CyCurnin.com space with the t-shirts and any other merchandising bits.

Lars:  You’re married now, right?

Cy:  Yeah.

Lars:  I guess this is a silly question.  I wrote an article on this.  I do a lot of blogging.  If you haven’t noticed, I’m quite, I wax poetic in the way I speak as well, and I give a lot of advice.  I guess my question now; do you enjoy the complacency of marriage?  Have you learned to appreciate the complacency of marriage?

Cy:  It’s the golden compromise, I call it, because in the end compromise is traction.  Otherwise you would never make a decision and the contact between the two surfaces would never connect, and no movement.  So in a way there’s staticness to that complacency and there is growth in there, but there are, people do grow different ways in different directions.  I can see televisions being sold for months.

Lars:  I guess here’s my next question then, that is, do fans in general intimidate you or do you feel, since we are all older now and you are a hero from the 80’s, do you think everyone’s settled enough to be of no concern when you meet them?

Cy:  You’re absolutely right.  Everyone’s got a very valid point of view that you can quickly work out if they do or not and I love their energy, the action.  Yeah.  Very good.

Lars:  If you could do anything…

Cy:  I’ve got another interview turning up, I’m waiting for the guy to turn up, but he hasn’t so we can keep on going.

Lars:  All right, I’ve got a few questions, I’ll try to make them quick.  Here’s a little game for you, I used to do this a long time ago when I was younger, you might enjoy it:  Two questions, actually it’s four in total.  First one is what is your favorite color?  Are you there?

Cy:  Yeah, blue, yeah.

Lars:  Blue, and now quickly without thinking too much, one adjective that describes blue.

Cy:  Dark.

Lars:  Okay, and what is your favorite animal?

Cy:  Panther.

Lars:  Can you describe a panther with one adjective quickly?  The first one that comes to mind.

Cy:  Sleek.

Lars:  Okay, and thus you’ve pretty much defined how you see yourself.

Cy:  (laughing)  Dark blue, sleek panther.

Lars:  Yeah, you’re dark and sleek, that’s how you look at yourself.  I thought you’d enjoy that.

Cy:  Yeah, pretty good, thank you for that new look at myself.

Lars:  I’ve got a couple leftover questions, if you’ve got time for them, since you’ve got somebody you haven’t quite moved on to.  With the album being at a non-traditional site, how does it feeling being your own man, not being tied to a label?

Cy:  Fantastic!  You know, it’s good for me to be associated with the upstart more organic elements.  I kind of like the juxtaposition.

Lars:  There’s an old saying in music, “Your audience will find you.”  Do you think a young artist should consider this trade-off in terms of going with a small label or should they seek out big labels?

Cy:  Not really.  I think they just have to get out there and do the work that it takes people to get to find them, which is to play live, go do that. You’ve got to get out there and shake hands and kiss babies.

Lars:  Okay.  Who came up with the band name, The Fixx?

Cy:  Adam.  It just sort of meant the point of view that we had, the direction we were moving in.  That kind of stuff.

Lars:  Did you guys ever argue?

Cy:  We used to argue all the time.

Lars:  Did it ever get to the point where you would really get into a bad fight?

Cy:  No.

Lars:  No?

Cy:  No one ever leaves the room.

Lars:  Got you.

Cy:  We’d lock the door and throw away the key until the argument’s finished.

Lars:  I won’t tell you then about the time my best friend and guitarist almost spiked me on a high hat. *laughs*

Cy:  *laughing* Must have been a good argument.

Lars:  I can’t even remember what it was  about.  As they all should.  Until Next time.

Cy: Cheers.