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but I’d never really listened to the bass on a record
before. In pop music, it was always guitar and voice;
we didn’t really know what a bassline was, because
they were always turned down low.
“But suddenly, with dub reggae … It doesn’t just turn
it up, it actually says, ‘This is the centre of the music.’
The bass and the drum; everything else is decoration.
And I think you can follow that moment from there
right into club culture. Hip-hop especially, but also
house and techno, speed garage, whatever, discovering
the bass and the drum and the beauty contained therein.
“So with the post-punk scene happening as well,
you started to get this really experimental thing going
on with groups, especially bands like Pere Ubu and
XTC. You get an interesting space in music, so that
when you now get to a producer like Timbaland, you
can see that his spatial imagination is immense, thinking
about exactly where he’s gonna place this hi-hat
sound, and so on.”
Being a big experimental ambient fan myself, I
couldn’t help but notice an acknowledgement to Autechre
at the start of Needle In The Groove. Is it fair,
then, to say he simply seeks out experimentation, no
matter what the artform?
“Yeah, absolutely. I love all the stuff that happens on
the fringes of the dance scene. The stuff you can’t really
dance to, but it’s still a part of the scene. I’m really
into German music at the moment, Oval and Mouse On
BUY Jeff Noon books online from and
Mars. Again, there’s just that interest in sound.
“So the point about club culture is, it’s not so
much the rave and Ibiza scene, but more the kind of
manipulation of sound that’s going on, and the way
that that feeds back into the way people live and view
their lives these days. I know for a fact, for example,
that those young kids over there –” He points at three
young skaters across the street, “– have a very different
mindset to the one I had at their age. And a lot
of that is to do with the way they’re experiencing the
world, the way they’re experiencing music, film, TV,
the internet and so on. I’m really interested in that, and
that’s mainly why I tend to write young characters.
And these days, that experimentation with sound is
fed into the work too.”
They also have different drugs. Which is as good a
way as any of bringing up the thorny subject. It’s become
de rigeur to describe Noon’s work as “trippy.”
Are, or were, drugs as big a part of his life as it seems?
“No.” He laughs; I get the impression he’s asked
this question a lot, too. “Tiny, tiny part. In my work,
as something that I write about, it’s just a metaphor
for change. It forces the character to change. If you
look at Vurt, there are loads of ‘cheat modes’ going on
in there, by me as a writer. Vaz is the ultimate cheat
mode; Vaz will get anybody out of anything! But with
the feathers it’s more a feeling of, ‘Okay, let’s push
them onto the next level now.’ And it automatically
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