How does an avant-garde punk musician become involved in creating a hybrid of classical and electronic music? Colin Newman gives his version of the story.

ANYONE CALLING AN ALBUM commercial Suicide in the current musical climate is asking for trouble. The press will ignore it. The radio stations won't play it. And people won't get to hear it. Or at least, that's my feeling.

But Colin Newman, the man responsible for a new album of precisely that title, doesn't share my concern.

"There's a song called 'Commercial Suicide' on the record that originally sounded like the band Suicide - only more commercial. Hence Commercial Suicide..."

Fine.

"...And if you believe that, you'll believe anything."

But I believe it. Perhaps London on a miserable Monday afternoon has left me in a particularly gullible mood, but the reassuring smile on Newman's face suggests this isn't the case.

Commercial Suicide is Newman's fourth solo LP away from cult new wave act Wire, dormant for quite some while now. It's a curious mixture of violins, cellos and other things classical, alongside elaborately layered synthesisers. And in keeping with the classical school of thought is an almost total absence of drums, tempo being kept instead by rich, rhythmic basslines.

"It's basically a combination of synths and classical players", the artist explains. "What originally distinguished rock 'n' roll was the beat, but by the late seventies, engineers were saying: 'did you hear the snare sound on...? I heard it took five days to get'. Then the LinnDrum arrived, and at the touch of a button, you had a sound that a lot of engineers would have been quite happy with after a couple of days work. So the drums became louder and louder in the music, until you had music that was drums and vocals and not a lot else. Commercial Suicide was my reaction against that.

"There's also a musical theme, in as much as it's an attempt to reconcile popular music and orchestral music. It's something I don't think has been exploited since the sixties, with the work that Terry Riley did with John Cale, like Church of Anthrax."

The orchestral credits on Commercial Suicide are taken by no fewer than 11 Belgian musicians, leaving Newman in charge of the technology and production. Considering recent advances in technology and Newman's enthusiasm, it seems strange not to be using orchestral samples in place of the real thing.

"Anything on the album that sounds like a real instrument is a real instrument - there's no use of imitative sampling. It's not that I'm against it; I just didn't want to work like that.

"If you make every sound so perfect you can almost 'hear digital'; you hear perfection rather than music.

If you didn't know of Newman's involvement with Wire (the band made three albums in the late seventies under the guidance of producer Mike Thorne), and hence the punk movement as a whole, you'd be hard pushed to guess his background. Today, the most outlandish feature of his dress is a decidedly tasteful pair of red braces, but...

"...It all started in 1976 with the formation of Wire as a guitar-based five-piece.

"Mike taught me a lot about recording and recording studios. The first album was done mainly with guitars, bass and drums and a certain amount of heavy metal technology - lots of tracking of guitars, walls of sound, that sort of thing. On the second album we started using synths because Mike had an Oberheim at the time.

"I suppose the third album was the most hi-tech, though all the recording was still being done with the guitars, bass and drums plus a few synth overdubs. At that time people thought that anything sounding weird must be a synthesiser, so we developed a lot of guitar treatments - you wouldn't know whether the sound you were hearing was actually a guitar or synthesiser."

Having taken Wire as far as it would go, band members Graham Lewis and Bruce Gilbert began a series of separate projects, among them Duet Emmo, a trio (perversely) with Mute Records svengali Daniel Miller. This left Colin Newman free to begin work as a producer, and to start out on his own solo recording career.

"My first LP was called A-Z. That was the first time I recorded with the Synclavier. The other thing we were using then was the EMS Synthi, which was great for guitar treatments. At that point I was very much into treatments of sound using guitar treatments on voices and anything else."

And sound treatments still play a large part in Newman's production philosophy.

"I'll use anything I can lay my hands on, especially old guitar effects. The old effects are much more extreme; more modern devices are so safe they actually sound nice. I've got a few old boxes: put them on one setting and they sound awful, put them on another setting and they sound worse, but I'd rather have something like that. I like the idea of putting very cheap guitar effects onto synthesisers. That's very anti-purist, but my basic attitude is 'if you've got it, use it, and don't moan about what you haven't got'."

THE RELEASE OF a second solo LP, The Singing Fish, marked the end of Newman's association with producer Thorne, so the third album, Not To, found the artist in the role of producer with a renewed understanding of commerciality.

"Not To was a kind of pop record which was much more straightforward than anything I'd done before. The most important thing in popular music is the voice, and that doesn't come out of a machine. A good vocal performance with a lousy backing is always going to be more successful than a great backing with a lousy vocal. You have to make the voice work - then the backing will fall into place.

"I like to get the vocal down fairly early, because it tells you a lot about what you can't do with the piece. Alternatively, if you want to subvert the voice, it'll guide you through that.

"...My main working partner on Commercial Suicide was John Bonnar, a composer who knew nothing about pop music or multitracking before this. He was writing arrangements for instruments he'd never worked with before - he'd only worked with dots on lines - so it was pure excitement for him. But when we got to actually making the record, we realised we didn't know how to do it. With pop music you do the drums or a click-track first, and if you're not using drums you do the bass, so we started with the bass. We used four DXs, a Mirage and a Roland, MIDI'd together to make the fattest noise I could imagine.

"I think MIDI chaining is great in that respect. The only synth I've ever actually owned is a Casio CZ1000, which I like in combination with a DX and an analogue synth rather than on its own. The CZ is squeaky, Rolands are big, and the DX somewhere in between, so I like the kind of complete, round sound where you get a bit of everything chucked in."

Listening to the sensitive, highly distinctive textures on Commercial Suicide, it's hard to accept Newman's assertion that some of the sounds are DX presets.

"I won't program a DX7", he maintains.

"I just keep paging through presets until I get something that vaguely resembles what I want, and then stick something else with it. I know I shouldn't do it, but put together with another sound, the two completely subvert each other.

"Every synthesiser has its own sound including sampling synthesisers - and the problem is how to overcome that. I think MIDI chaining is the best way: mixing the tonal qualities of one synthesiser with another. Especially now you can sample non-MIDI synthesisers - you can use totally different technologies together. The problem with working like that is sometimes you get to the stage where everything sounds like an organ, but that's another kind of challenge, I suppose.

"Combinations of the same sound also work very well - six synthesisers all playing the same thing can sound great. If you track a part you can never match the two parts perfectly. Something I did a while ago used an Emulator II cello preset which I tracked about five times, and it acquired a totally different character to the original patch. If you track a sequencer and alter the varispeed, the timecode will keep it in sync but the pitch will vary. You can do that as many times as you want and get massive sounds."

In conversation, Cohn Newman skips between the role of musician and producer - subjective and objective - with alarming frequency. But maybe that's not surprising, seeing as he chooses to see himself in both roles simultaneously.

"In the last six or seven years the producers that have emerged have been engineer-producers, so there was a tendency for the music they produced to be dependent on sound, rather than music. As a musician-producer, what's important to me is the music.

"You need that sympathetic crossover: there's nothing worse than working with a producer whose only interest is sound. Sometimes things fight each other so what might work musically might not work in sound terms, but in trying to make it work, you create something that's outside both disciplines - that's called magic!

"When I read interviews with musicians their attitudes are usually either 'pro-' or 'anti-', but why not use everything you can get? One thing I've learned is not to reject anything from the past. But equally, you can never be precious about things; you've got to be prepared to chuck it all away and start again. You can't be objective - you just have to follow your nose."

Following his nose has taken Colin Newman from the dangerous ground of punk to the (equally) dangerous ground of sixties-style experimentation, but it's never allowed him to lose sight of his music. Right now, Wire have reformed and are soon to begin touring. I wonder what dangerous ground they'll tread this time...