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Momus (musician)

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Momus

Nick Currie (born February 11,1960 in Paisley, Scotland), more popularly known under the artist name Momus (after the Greek god of mockery), is a songwriter, blogger and a journalist for Wired. Most of his songs are self-referential or postmodern. For more than twenty years he has been releasing playful and transgressive albums on labels in Britain, America, and Japan, building up a personal world dominated by values like diversity, orientalism, and a respect for otherness. He is also well known outside the U.S. as a producer. He is fascinated by identity, Japan, the avant-garde, time travel and sex. He also wears a patch over his right eye because he lost use of it from contracting amoebic keratitis.

Career

He began by recording post-punk material with various ex-members of Josef K in the early '80s, and was associated with the musicians around Postcard Records (although he never recorded for that label). However, in 1987 he moved to London and signed to Creation records, and began to record the hyper-literate, quirky pop songs for which he is best known. Around 1992, however, when Creation signed Oasis, his music started to sound out of place on the newer, more 'laddish' and commercial sounds Creation then started to produce, and he moved to Paris and signed to Cherry Red records. Since then he has lived in various countries and, whilst less popular in Britain, has had a reasonable level of commercial success in a number of countries (especially Japan).

He has been sued by Michelin U.K., for the song "Michelin Man", which compared the mascot to a blow-up doll, on Hippopotamomus (1991); and by Wendy Carlos for the song "Walter Carlos", which postulated that the post-sexual reassignment surgery Wendy could travel back in time to marry her pre-surgery self, Walter, on Little Red Songbook (1998). In response to the debt incurred from Carlos' lawsuit, which was dismissed, Momus wrote thirty songs about every person or group who commissioned a song at the price of $1,000, compiling Stars Forever (1999). Patrons include artist Jeff Koons, Japanese musician Cornelius, and three-year-old animator/superhero Noah Brill. It should be noted that Momus intended "Walter Carlos" as a tribute to the creator of Switched-On Bach; he was, in fact, at the peak of his self-described "analogue baroque" period. Stars Forever also features the winners of a karaoke contest started on The Little Red Songbook (1998).

Other Momus activities include writing for Wired.com [1], Vice Magazine [2], Index Magazine [3], AIGA Voice [4], and Design Observer [5]. Momus has also been a kind of guest instructor working on sound-art projects with students first at Future University [6] in Hakodate, Hokkaido, Japan during the early months of 2005, and then again in September at Fabrica [7], the Benetton "research centre" near Venice, Italy.

The Fotolog.Book [8] with texts by Momus on photoblogging will be published in April 2006 by British publishers Thames & Hudson [9].

He is a cousin of musician Justin Currie, the lead singer and songwriter of Del Amitri, although Momus has been critical of his musical output at times.

He lives in an igloo with two Japanese girls.

Quotes

"I was at a party last year and a little girl drew a picture of all the guests round the table except me. I pretended to be offended and drew myself into her picture, but she ran away screaming and bawling. I had to erase my self-portrait before she'd calm down. That says it all. Our little pictures and our little songs are more important to us than the life they occasionally portray. The world in the end is beyond our control and doesn't care about us. But in our pictures we have the illusion of making sense of the world, improving the world, taking control of it. And suddenly it's no longer either the world or our vision of it, it's a new world, a thing in itself. The drawing comes to mean more to us than the scene it depicts."


"I've always been accused of being the most literary of songwriters. In fact I started off doing lots of experiments with guitars, bottles, tissue paper, smashed pianos and tape distortion which, eventually, out of sheer laziness, I stuck some words on top of. They were out of a book of Brecht poetry, usually, or a hasty pastiche of Brian Eno. For years I searched my guitar for the 'missing chord' that would stop time or make the whole world weep. Now I scroll through a thousand types of digital delay to find the one that will switch the world into slow motion. It's music that really fascinates me. Words come easy, I have a facility with them, I can 'do' words."


"Ultraconformist, voyager, timelord, tennis and ping pong champion, tender pervert, poison boyfriend, hippopotamus, philosopher, folk singer, star forever." —Momus' self-description from his LiveJournal


Albums

  • Circus Maximus (1986)
  • The Poison Boyfriend (1987)
  • Tender Pervert (1988)
  • Don’t Stop The Night (1989)
  • Monsters Of Love (1990)
  • Hippopotamomus (1991)
  • The Ultraconformist (Live Whilst Out Of Fashion) (1992)
  • Voyager (1992)
  • Timelord (1993)
  • Slender Sherbert (1995)
  • The Philosophy of Momus (1995)
  • Twenty Vodka Jellies (1996)
  • Ping Pong (1997)
  • The Little Red Songbook (1998)
  • Stars Forever (1999)
  • Folktronic (2001)
  • Oskar Tennis Champion (2003)
  • Summerisle, a collaboration with Anne Laplantine (2004)
  • Otto Spooky (2005)

Listening

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