NescaféLife, 2002

Future Sound of London and The Meaning of Life
We listen in to the inner-workings Gary Cobain – what makes him tick?


“I believe there’s a spiritual revolution happening in the world, it’s the only revolution that hasn’t yet happened. This is also what’s been happening with my music. We’ve had a technological revolution but science has sold us short and I think people are beginning to realise that.”

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.


Interviewer: What are you trying to achieve when you make your music?

Garry 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.”

Interviewer: You spent a lot of time in India, what happened there?

Garry Cobain: “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 to be able to always enjoy life.”

Interviewer: Your website has a section called Ramblings of a Madman, did you feel you lost your mind at any point?

Garry Cobain: “Er, yeah, because my perspective on the mind is that you’re born with a brain and the mind is rubbish. The mind is what’s been stuffed into a brain, all the junk from your parents and teachers. In the last five years, yes, I’ve lost my mind- I’ve tried to lose as much of it as possible. My mind has done nothing but imprison me. Meditation is all about losing the mind. It’s about re-igniting your instinct. The problem is that your instinct only starts to scream and shout when you give it room to scream and shout. In order to do that you have to do some kind of healing because most people are pretty fucked up, and imbalanced and toxic.

It’s only when you begin to address that balance that your instinct starts to rule your life. From my point of view, instinct never does you any harm. It always takes you to your true home and true path.”

Interviewer: Did you go through any psychedelic drug experiences?

Garry Cobain: “I never felt well enough to take drugs, I only ever dabbled. I was always enough in touch with myself to realise that there was something different about me, that meant I couldn’t indulge. My tolerance was very, very low.”

Interviewer: Many of your ideas coincide with stories of psychedelic drug users…

Garry Cobain: “My opinion on drugs is that it’s important to always be the master and never the servant when you take them. Drugs have been used for many centuries for spiritual insight, my problem with them is that they offer a fast track and the problem with fast tracking is that you’re instantly flung to another state and the reason you think you’re there is because of the drug, but it’s not. That’s a natural state, and what all the spiritual masters and yogis have done, is achieved that state via the slow track of self discipline, taking a small step every day.

That’s my only problem with drugs- that people attribute the wisdom to the drug and become its servant forgetting that they’re the master. With a slow track you accrue wisdom every day. It’s like the difference between earning your own money and being left 15 million pounds in a will. You understand money and you’re in balance with it.”

Interviewer: How do you view the upcoming conflict in Iraq?

Garry Cobain: “You’ve got to remember that for the last six years I’ve devoted all of my efforts to tidying up my own backyard on the assumption that if you find out who you are and what your centre is you’ll realise that it’s the same centre that everybody else has. When you reach that point you’re undivided from anybody and you can’t kill anyone on the basis of their race, religion gender, bearing or social position.

In a way, I’ve been instigating my own personal revolution, so when I look at the Iraq situation I see it as another typical manifestation of a world that’s become crazy via the conditioning of power and the divisions caused by money, segregation, corporatisation and chemicalisation. All of these forces are pitting man against man, making people very imbalanced and able to act within the insanity of crowds, which is where violence has always occurred - within the unconsciousness of the crowd.”

Interviewer: How does that translate to life here in London?

Garry Cobain: “Every day I see others hitting each other because they’re annoyed at being in a car, for example (his studio overlooks the notoriously congested Old Street triangle). Basically 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’. That’s all we have in the world; billions of individuals. That’s what Jesus meant when he said ‘I don’t have a mother.’ “

Interviewer: Jesus’ virgin birth..?

Garry Cobain: “That’s the point where you don’t have a family, you don’t hide within families, you’re not Christian- you’re a Christ. The idea that you can hate somebody because of religion is another example of the way in which we’ve been conditioned to act within the influence of families. You understand it as soon as you realise that you’re an individual and you’ve found that divine seed.

We’re all born out the same energy that created this planet so we all have a divine seed whether you like it or not; that creative, creatable energy within us. If everybody took the initiative to find their seeds, how would this world be?”

Interviewer: We’re a long way away from such universal self awareness though….

Garry Cobain: “No! (with emphasis). Consciousness always expands and we’re constantly expanding the energy from our parents, we don’t bring children into the world the same way our parents did, everything is constantly evolving, some of it bad, some of it good, simultaneously. I believe there’s a spiritual revolution happening in the world, it’s the only revolution that hasn’t yet happened. This is also what’s happening with my music.

We’ve had a technological revolution but science has sold us short and I think people are beginning to realise that. Science is great, but the whole emphasis has been on travelling thousands of miles outside people’s bodies; ie to the moon but it hasn’t travelled an inch within its own soul, which is what the East has explored.

Nowadays the East wants to travel into space, while the West wants to travel inside itself. I’m speaking to journalists in America right now and God, they need this stuff. People are desperate to find a balance beyond the mundane things we’ve been hoodwinked into believing life is about. We were brought up with the idea that getting money will bring happiness; Get a wife, get a house, that’ll bring security; study to get a job; that’ll bring security, not because you enjoy it and gain creative energy. People are fed up with this approach and realise it’s a fallacy (‘something that is believed to be true but isn’t’).

Spirituality is always about a very selfish search, then through that selfish search, releasing it’s what connects you to everybody else. So, yes, I do think a spiritual revolution is happening and it’s hitting science. The first day that science admitted that 90% of all matter is air, they acknowledged what men meditating in forests who hadn’t travelled for many years understood- that there’s an energy gap, a chaos from which all life and creativity comes. They call it the Om, scientists call it Quantum Theory, that day was the day that science began to be spiritual.”


Future Sound Of London Present Amorphous Androgynous- The Isness, is out now on Hypnotic Records.