Pat Geary speaks to Pete Burns on September 17th, 2000. Recorded in the UK. A RIGHT STUFF exclusive!!

Pete: When "Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know" came out in 87 or 88, various things happened during that period. Like I did a gig, and some guy booked me for the gig in a church, and said it was a venue for a spiritualist and wanted to regress me. And during the period when he was trying to convince me to do regression, he'd regressed Lene Lovich. Do you remember her?

Pat: Oh, certainly, "Lucky Number"

Pete: And he played me seven hours of very disturbing tapes of Lene Lovich under regression. And I wasn't ready for it. Because you go through your death and you see it. She was so accurate, it checked out, and I think it left her a very changed lady. She just kind of...disappeared.

Pat: Yeah, definitely.

Pete: And I've seen her on interviews and spoken to her on the telephone to collaborate. And I think that experience of 14 days of regression in Rochdale in the north of England...I think there was definitely something there. I mean, come on, not everybody's been Napoleon. Some people have been blind beggars and they've got nothing to say. But there are previous incarnations, and my affinity with certain places is really quite disturbing. And I could probably bury it in a pop sensibility and be a real bubblegumming girly about it, but there are some things I feel very strongly about.

And, like, we were in Tokyo, initially for five days promo, and the demand for interviews and press took off so big, that the next thing we were told to do was a video. For some reason I insisted on doing it in Japan and wanted to use Japanese people.

Well, we were told in no uncertain terms, by every A&R and marketing and TV promotions person that it would be a great offense to use Japanese people because "we don't want to see them".

Anyway, I took a walk in Yahogi park, and there was...it's amazing, every Sunday in this park separate groups of performance artists do their performance every fifteen minutes. And there's some really impressive ones.

And there's a drag parade and stuff like that, you know. So we're going down the street and I saw this one group. I knew nothing about them. All dressed in black suits with black shirts and red ties. Then started the show. And it was 102 degrees, 87% humidity, and it was only our second day of getting out of the hotel.

And I said, "I've got to see these guys". And everyone said, "Why?" And I said, "I don't know, I've just got to see them." It was like a real disturbing thing.

And one in particular, whose name is Hiro...just seeing him I felt as if someone had walked over my grave.

He spoke no English and I spoke no Japanese. And after seven days of battles, they were in the video...barely.

Pat: (laughs)

Pete: We'll edit them in properly. But now our Japanese record company think it was a fantastic idea.

I've been trying to contact them [the performance artists] since we got back. It's been impossible, because Hiro's phone doesn't accept unidentified phone callers. Record company people aren't passing on messages accurately Hiro is the the head of the Kurage Theatre Productions, so you have to deal with him. And I've just had a letter translated into Japanese by an interpreter to explain that this is a professional operation.

I met and went out with the boys one night before we left, to thank them for their performance in the video, which is breathtaking, although you hardly see any of it. The way they'd learned the track. The fact that they took me out on a drive when I was really trapped in the Hilton for eleven hours doing interviews, they turned up and took me out for a drive. They were like bodybuards, but not in a heavy way.

TO BE CONTINUED

Copyright (c) 2001 by Pat Geary. Not to be reprinted or reproduced in whole or in part without written permission.