Derin Sular

Justin Sullivan: … and you have a very interesting prime minister.

Serdar Kaya: Prime minister?

Justin Sullivan: [Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan is an interesting guy.

S.K.: I can’t say I hate him.

Justin Sullivan: I can see why you wouldn’t. He’s a very interesting guy. At one night, I was up in the mountains in the northeast, near the border with Georgia and Armenia. We were sitting there watching television one night together with this guy, and I was talking about Erdoğan. We didn’t really speak English, and I didn’t speak Turkish, so I said [turns his thumb up and down], “Good man? Bad man? Good? Good?” And he went [turns his thumb up], “Very good! Very good!” Then the call to prayer went out across the village. It was the night time prayer, and I said, “Are you going?” And he went pffff….

S.K.: But he was still supporting Erdoğan…

Justin Sullivan: Exactly. He had no interest in religion, but he thought that Erdoğan was a good guy. Interesting… Erdoğan is kind of a street fighter, ain’t he?

S.K.: This is going really good, so I’m afraid we’re not going to be able to go through all of my questions. Because, I already have two [new] questions at this point: (1) What makes you interested in Erdoğan?, and (2) What makes you want to go to northeast Turkey? That’s very rare. You didn’t have any gigs there, right?

Justin Sullivan: I’ll tell you why. We had a gig in Istanbul, and then I had no special reason to go home. An the rest of the band went home. And you know the band Mor ve Ötesi? We’re friends with them. We were playing in an old place near Izmir, a seaside resort. So I went down there, and spent two days on the beach with them. It was lovely. But then I thought, “Well, I’m gonna see some Turkey!” But it was July. So all the sea is gonna be full of people on holiday, and the middle of Turkey, which is really interesting, is too f**king hot! And I had a guide book, and it said “northeast mountains!” Nobody goes there; cool in the summer; nobody speaks English… So that’s perfect for me!

S.K.: Did you go on your own?

Justin Sullivan: Yeah…

S.K.: Whoa!

Justin Sullivan: But it was interesting.

S.K.: I know you’re an interesting person. That’s why I wanted to interview you, but this is…

Justin Sullivan: Have you ever been to a place called Ani?

S.K.: Ani?

Justin Sullivan: Have you heard about Ani?

S.K.: No.

Justin Sullivan: The most amazing place I’ve ever been. Anywhere in the world, really, almost…

S.K.: In what city is it at?

Justin Sullivan: Ani is very near Kars.

S.K.: Oh my… I’ve never been to Kars.

Justin Sullivan: Okay, so… At the east of Kars, very near the Armenian border. And this was closed for a long time because of that thing between Armenia and Turkey. But there was an old city called Ani, which was the capital of Armenia [probably] in seventh, eighth, ninth century? And they built this amazing city. And then Genghis Khan smashed it on his way through. And then they had some more earthquakes. And then, most importantly, the trade routes changed. So this city became abandoned in 12th, 13th century. And there it is… Most of it is just rocks – rubble. But some of it, it’s kind of a big cathedral, and some are huge buildings from the eighth and ninth century. You can see Mount Ararat [from Ani] in a distance. It’s kind of on the grassy plains. And it sort of sits there, and nobody knows… I was there in July. I was there for seven hours, just looking… Just amazing… In seven hours, I saw ten Turkish family tourists. No Western tourists or nothing else… No one knows it’s there… [But] they will…

S.K.: Whoa! I’m amazed.

Justin Sullivan: You must really go there, it’s really interesting.

S.K.: I will. [...and I did, two weeks later!]

“Fascist Governments, in the End, Always Fail”

S.K.: In your songs, you talk a great deal about issues such as war, immigration, the environment, and justice or injustice. There are lots of references to natural and man-made phenomena as well – as in the city, the lights, or the hills. And we just talked about these… What makes you eventually come around and tell stories about these topics?

Justin Sullivan: It’s what I do…

S.K.: It’s just the way you are?

Justin Sullivan: It’s just what I do… The world’s interesting…

S.K.: And more specifically, do you think your strong sense of justice or injustice is influenced by your religious upbringing?

Justin Sullivan: No, I think it’s influenced by growing up in the sixties in a kind of liberal family. The sixties was an amazing time. I was a kid in the sixties. I wasn’t part of the hippie. I was too young. But my older brothers and sisters were kind of like that. But there is more the atmosphere of the time was very kind of “We’re gonna make the world better!” It’s the kind of natural phenomenon to have growth, and decadence, and then war; and then rebirth, decadence, war… We’re well into the decadence phase now. But the sixties was the rebirth after the Second World War. I picked up this atmosphere as a child. The world was gonna get better… But then it changed. In the seventies and eighties, and particularly in the eighties, that was over. It’s very over now – [that is] the sense of hope in the future… I think it must be terrible to be eighteen now.

S.K.: But, when you look at people, there are certain times when people are more inclined to do something or feel something about these issues, but then it fades away like in the cycle you talked about. But it didn’t fade away for you.

Justin Sullivan: Oh, I don’t know… I don’t know… I think I’m not the same. People think of me this way, because I wrote some songs about justice when I was young. I’m perhaps not the same. I’m not this great political warrior that sometimes people think I am.

S.K.: I heard you say things like, after the age of 40, you felt different.

Justin Sullivan: Yeah… I see everything in the world now according to nature’s laws. I have a religious upbringing. But now I’m basically a pagan.

S.K.: Like nature and God are the same thing…

Justin Sullivan: Nature and God are the same thing. Rule #1 of nature is constant change. Anything that is not changing is dead – which is why, in a strange way, capitalism is a kind of natural phenomenon. Because, it works according to laws of summer and winters. But, you know we had a big bubble, and it burst. That’s very natural. What’s not natural is the politicians and the financial people that were telling us three or four years ago that this will go on forever. After summer you can have more summer, and then you can have summer, and then you can have summer… And that now we’ve abolished winter, we’ve changed rules… There’s not gonna be a winter, there’s just gonna be summer. That was the unnatural part.

S.K.: The way you put it makes me think of John Maynard Keynes. Like you change the way business cycle works, and try to always make it summer.

Justin Sullivan: Yeah. It’s nonsense… It’s nonsense… The business cycle is like every other f**king cycle. It has summers and winters. The interesting thing about the current crash is that ordinary people are not out on the streets screaming, shouting. Ordinary people go, “Oh, we had a good summer, and now here comes winter…”

S.K.: But what do you expect? They’re not the ones who control the economy.

Justin Sullivan: That’s true. But nobody controls the economy…

S.K.: But maybe some people have more impact on the economy than the others.

Justin Sullivan: It’s debatable whether anybody controls the economy. Now there are some greedy f**kers who know how to play the economy. OK, that’s always true. Perhaps, the most interesting thing about the crash is that if you could’ve said to me a year ago that we’ll be in the situation we are in now. This is the most unlikely thing to me – that we would’ve given them all the money they wanted. The foxes killed all the chickens, and now you just give them more chickens…

S.K.: Because they’re too big to fail?

Justin Sullivan: But they’re not too big to fail… It just means that the next crash will be bigger.

S.K.: That’s another way to put it, and yes, it’s a legitimate perspective…

Justin Sullivan: You know I was a socialist when I was a kid. I was a communist, very left wing. The problem with socialism was not that it didn’t deliver economically. It didn’t, but that’s not the point. The problem with it is that it tried to freeze a moment. “This is the way the society is, and it will remain like this…” Nothing is more unnatural – which is why fascist governments, in the end, always fail; which is why democracy “sort of” works. Or there is a series of revolutions; that’s very natural too… As for the idea that you can create a perfect society and maintain it in the same rigid way; it’s very unnatural…

S.K.: It’s not gonna be as perfect as we thought it was after the passage of time is involved…

Justin Sullivan: Exactly. That’s right.

S.K.: If I may insert a question here [in regard to the song "Today is a Good Day"], how did it occur to you? Like were you watching the news, and saw the two big financial companies go down, … and bam! Today is a Good Day! Is that how it happened?

Justin Sullivan: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

S.K.: And you just wrote that song?

Justin Sullivan: Yeah.

S.K.: Whoa!… I thought you were gonna say something like, “Not exactly, but close…” Was it exactly like that?

Justin Sullivan: I write words all the time. The way we write is that we have a cupboard called “musical ideas.” And into that cupboard goes guitar riffs, drum beats, bits of bass line, bits of jamming, pool sequence, melodies… Chunk in the cupboard… Bits… They’re just bits, they’re not songs.

And in the other cupboard goes all the things I write all the time. And then, we have to stop, because I never write on the road… Because, we’re always tired… And writing songs requires even more focus than gigs. In order to write songs, you have to be really focused. So then we stop, we pull out all the musical ideas; and all the lyrical ideas, I just say, ‘That goes…, oh… there! That’s a good line, I’ll have that. And the chorus are there, that’s great. That works with that.” You just make it work… That’s the process of making an album. We wrote the whole of Today is a Good Day in three weeks – around last October. Except for Arm Yourselves and Run, which belongs in the time that it talks about, the early nineties in Yugoslavia, I wrote it then but never finished it. So I went back, and finished it for this album. Ocean Rising, obviously, is from my solo album; and the last song, North Star, which is written about our manager who died. You know the story… So everything else is written in October.