Cosmic Engineering: INTERVIEW WITH JERRY DAMMERS

COSMIC ENGINEERING

JERRY DAMMERS' THE SPATIAL AKA ORCHESTRA

INTERVIEW WITH JERRY DAMMERS

by John Sinclair & Dylan Harding

Brixton Market, London, July 7, 2009

JERRY DAMMERS: Sorry, I’m feeling a little bit naked today. I’m just getting all this new material together for the one rehearsal—it’s a bit crazy. I’ve just managed to get the scores together by the end of it—just in time, you know, always the last minute. I’m not a person who really likes telling people what to do, but you have to, and it’s quite stressful.

JOHN SINCLAIR: What made you take on this project? Where did you get this mission?

DAMMERS: I just got a vision for these bands, and I just want to make them reality. They’re sort of fantasy bands, you know, that’s the thing…

DYLAN HARDING: The Sun Ra project: How long have you been thinking about actually doing that? Is it years? How did that occur to you?

DAMMERS: Well, I had this band called Jazz Odyssey, based on this Spinal Tap thing about you can’t play jazz to a festival crowd. So I formed this band based on that, and we did a few Sun Ra covers and I got that together. That must’ve been about ten, twelve years ago. But everyone was still smoking too much ganga then, and that all sort of disappeared in a cloud of ganga smoke.

HARDING: How big was that band?

DAMMERS: It wasn’t as big… it was about eight or nine people. It was one of those bands where the first person has left the rehearsal before the last person has arrived. It never quite took off. We only did one gig. You know, I had this idea of having a free pub concert inside of the Glastonbury festival, so we went and played at Glastonbury even though we weren’t officially booked, you know. We pretended to be another band, and we managed to get in, so we set up and played.

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