Future Sound Of London & The Meaning Of Life
Author: Jonty Adderley
Saturday, October 19, 2002
Sitting on a stool inside the luxury loft apartment of his long-term collaborator Brian Duggan, Future Sound Of London frontman Gary Cobain smiles as he outlines his philosophy on life. With his long hair, beard and painfully sharp, Hollywood good looking angular features he projects a strikingly stereotyped image of Jesus, though is anything but stereotyped in his ideas and approach.
"We need one hell of a big cleanup, starting right inside each person with a personal cleanup—it's the only thing we have, we have to get back to this way of thinking 'I'm just an individual'," he continues.
"That's what Jesus meant when he said 'I don't have a mother.' Jesus meant that he'd found out who he was; he'd become enlightened. He meant nothing different to any enlightened master. All the enlightened masters have talked about the second womb-less birth, the birth that doesn't come from a mother."
Surf FSOL's website and you'll find an extensive section labelled Ramblings Of A Madman, a graphically compelling audio-visual description of Cobain's 6 year descent into ill health, virtual insanity and eventual redemption. Setting off on a global trek to meet maverick healers and assorted visionaries in 1996, he eventually healed himself through removing the mercury fillings in his teeth, in the process revising his entire design for life.
The Isness, the duo's first album since 1996's Dead Cities, reflects the musical fruits of Cobain's hard earned wisdom, being more organic, eclectic and markedly less electronic. Guest spots from former Captain Beefheart guitarist Gary Lucas, 60s icon Donovan and sitar maestro Baluji Shrivastav help distinguish what's a gloriously ambitious fusion of sounds, styles and visions, marking a return to form for the always interesting duo. Yet while Duggan prefers not to talk at all in interviews (despite being otherwise cheery and upbeat) Cobain is difficult to stop, wandering far and wide from the usual musical mix.
Skrufff (Jonty Adderley): What are you trying to achieve when you make your music-
FSOL (Gary Cobain): "Self realisation and ultimately global personal revolution. Not my revolution but rather the idea that people personally realise they've got their own part of God, their own little seed of divine energy. This world is very beautiful and human life is very important. It means nothing, so if you personally get snubbed out, it doesn't matter one jot, but each of us has a fantastic opportunity to experiment and experience something and to be part of something bigger. Life is an incredibly important thing. Yes I sound naïve but I've made a very conscious decision to become naïve. I'd rather be naïve than being full up of junked up false facts that have no connection with my personal realisation and experience."
Skrufff: You spent a lot of time in India, what happened there-
FSOL: "I went to India primarily because through my healing I got involved in Ayurvedic Medicine and became a devotee of that. I went to be treated there and ended up in Kerela and had a couple of months of purification there. Most people go to India to go raving, when I went there, the first thing I did was check myself into a hospital, which is typical me. I'd started really enjoying looking after myself and feeling well. After India I began to travel.
I'd learnt meditation here in London when I was seeing a psychiatrist around the time of Dead Cities. When you're becoming ill, you need to look at your mind because 90% of illnesses are psychologically prompted. So I began to see a psychiatrist and he showed me how to meditate the second time I saw him. He gave me the tools to sort myself out, to find myself out and< Tags