Q&A: Simon Bonney of Crime & the City Solution

Noise Floor chats with singer-songwriter and veteran post-punk frontman Simon Bonney about his return to music and the stage. 

For the past couple decades, you’ve been more likely to catch sight of Simon Bonney during a Wim Wenders retrospective than on a stage. The Australian singer-songwriter and erstwhile leader of post-punk outfit Crime & the City Solution has spent long stretches of time out of the public eye during a career that got its start back in 1977. Meanwhile, the band’s appearance in Wenders’ classic 1987 film Wings of Desire has served as many a fan’s introduction to his music in the intervening years (my own included).

Crime reactivated to record and tour in 2012 after a two-decade hiatus, but the reunion was a short-lived affair. Rarer still was attention to Bonney’s solo catalog, which comprised a pair of stirring but barely toured 1990s LPs that fused Crime’s gothic tension with an alt-country Americana sensibility. A third installment was in the works back then, but never saw the light of day amid persistent label troubles.

This year, all that changed for Bonney, who’s currently on the road with troubadour and grunge icon Mark Lanegan in support of Past, Present, Future – a new compilation highlighting 1992’s Forever and 1995’s Everyman alongside a selection of those once-lost tunes from their planned followup.

Calling from Detroit, Bonney took some time to chat with me last week about new songs, old ones and what brought him back to music.

Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity

Noise Floor: So tour’s begun already for you?

Simon Bonney: Tour began in Nashville, three or four days ago, then Chicago and Detroit.

NF: And how’s it been so far?

SB: I would say that Nashville was great, Chicago was great. Chicago was particularly good. It was a learning experience for us all – well not really a learning experience so much as…were trying out something very different, which was just to play as a two-piece. It’s just me playing acoustic guitar and singing and Bronwyn [Adams, Bonney’s bandmate and wife] playing violin and singing. So we had to reinterpret a lot of the songs. And you know whether or not that would work, A, and B, whether or not it would work in front of an audience that was waiting to see Mark Lanegan, were both unknowns.

And I would say the Nashville audience and the Chicago audience…they got into the mood of it. They listened to the lyrics, which is an important part of playing for me. And it felt great. I have to say that the Chicago show in particular… I haven’t felt that good about being on stage, or inspired, you know, in 25 years. I felt like I was in the right place.

NF: So these are some rare U.S. shows for you, and revisiting these old songs as well – how often have you presented this material live at all?

SB: Really very few concerts. I don’t know, ten back in the 90s? Never went outside the U.S. Really not that many shows.

I feel like we’ve worked out how to do it now, you know, in a way that kind of does justice to the songs, allows me to be me. Back in the nineties is was kind of, “What is this music? Is it alt-country?” Alt-country kind of existed but it really wasn’t similar to what I was doing. I used a lot of country instrumentation for sonic reasons but I was not in any stretch of the imagination coming from a country background. I’ve now combined the love of those sort of sounds and the storytelling.

I mean, I got hooked on Willie Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger. It was like, “Wow, I didn’t know there was someone in country doing what I had been listening to Jim Morrison doing on songs like ‘The End.’” I like narrative songs and that’s why I just kept going further and further into country, cause it’s stories that they were telling.

Now I just feel that…people are sort of ready for it. The songs, lyrically, are more relevant now than they were then. I wrote “Everyman” in ’96, based on a trip across America with Bronwyn, and she was pregnant. We had a small child with us, toys strapped to the top of the vehicle. People talk to you when you’re like that. You’re not a band…it’s just a family. A lot of people were expressing their happiness, but they’re also expressing a lot of fear about the future. Industry was disappearing. Like, “Is there a place for me in the future?” And I can only feel that that the process has sped up. And there’s a lot of genuine and justifiable anxiety about “What is the future for me?” And for a lot of people it doesn’t feel like it’s going to be utopian.

A lot of jobs will be gone. We are in the equivalent of the industrial revolution with the digital revolution and it’s very hard to predict what will happen over the next 10 years. And you feel a lot of that sort of fear coming out in the divisiveness, and that’s what “Everyman” was all about. And it felt great to sing that song, and those kinds of songs on this tour.

NF: Those songs both sonically and lyrically do feel very prescient – so it sounds like it wasn’t too much of a challenge then for you to re-access the material?

SB: I’ve spent 10 years in developing countries. I saw a lot of things. I was in Bangladesh, Papua New Guinea…Marshall Islands, Indonesia…worked in the outback of Australia. And for my sanity, I needed to do something different. I just picked up an acoustic guitar and I started playing, and the songs started flowing and I thought, apparently, this is what I’m meant to be doing.

So it’s been…maybe a year in the making. Sort of trying to work out what we should be…just stepping back from what I was doing in work. I just wanted to get a sort of fresh perspective on things. Geopolitics is something I studied through work for a long time…I just wanted to write about it. I wanted to write about the experiences that I had over the last 10 years. Emotionally…I just wanted to process. The best way for me to process it was through music.

NF: So as far as that goes, writing new material, are you working out any of that on the road?

SB: We’re only playing the old songs at the moment. There’s the unreleased stuff, I thought we need to play that, because it’s never been played. Need to play some old favorites. I didn’t choose songs based on whether or not they were my favorite, I chose them based on where I was as a person and if the lyrics reflected what I was thinking about.

So I want to play those songs and feel my way into those. But there are some other songs that are coming out of that, that are sort of slowly percolating. We have this house in Thailand through the end of the year and it’s got amazing acoustics. So yes, the idea is to record an acoustic record there of some description and we’re just trying to work out the logistics of that.

Mark Lanegan, it’s been a treat to be on tour with him. I never met him before, and it’s been an absolute pleasure. He’s an incredibly supportive man. I love watching him play live. I am a music lover, but I know that I go through periods when I will listen to music, and then I will step back from it. I might step back for five or six years just not listen to anything. So just getting to see him live…there’s just something about him, because he’s got a lot of pain, but there is beauty to this pain that comes out in his voice. And the two of us together, it made me inspired in a way that I had not been for a long time. I don’t like to play music if I’m not inspired. So that’s the long answer is that yeah there are new songs, because I’m inspired to write them. 

NF: So how did the tour with Mark come about then, if you two had never crossed paths over the years? What brought you together now?

SB: He knew me. He is a music fan, like most musicians he listens to a lot of music. And one of the people he listened to was me, fortunately. I think our management companies put us in contact, and he wrote a beautiful letter in support of my visa application, which under the present circumstances…it’s always a struggle to get a visa. And you know, I hadn’t done anything in 25 years. And he was one of the key people who wrote this letter in support of my getting a work visa.

But the first time that I actually, you know, face to face, was the tour bus. So it could’ve gone either way [laughs]. You can like each other’s music and not like each other, but it wasn’t like that. He was like a brother.

NF: So what came first, in terms of your return toward music, the new compilation or the tour?

SB: It was the new songs. I sat back, I had time off. I wasn’t working these insane sort of 60 hour weeks. I had a few dollars in the bank and I thought, I’m going to Thailand, just gonna sit back, do Daoism for a while and just chill out. Which is not something I normally do. And I started writing songs, and then I spoke to Mute and said look, this record has been about to be released by, you know, 70 different labels over 20 years. It would get to the point…where it was just about to be released and a big company would collapse or close down or whatever.

So I just went to Mute and said, “how ‘bout it?” And dear old Daniel Miller…I don’t think my country leanings are particularly to his style, although he did say, “I love it when…Mute releases a record and [people] say ‘Gee, it’s really a surprise for me that you’ve got that kind of music on your label.’” He likes that. He’s a huge Crime fan, he said one of his greatest regrets is that he couldn’t get Crime that bigger audience that he felt we should’ve got.

Anyway, so he said yeah. So here we are. But it wasn’t even clear that that would come out first. It’s just the way it happened. And now the other songs, we’re just trying to work out how best record them.

NF: And for the compilation, how did you go about picking from those unreleased songs? It’s not the full record as it would’ve been released?

SB: It is not. And there was a lot of talk about that, “Will it be cohesive?” If it had been released like that in the 90s or maybe even the early 2000s, it would have been less cohesive. What you have now is my American experience. That’s my life with two small children, moving to L.A. …it’s a time capsule, and it has a trajectory of my life.

NF: So you did mention Crime & City Solution, so I’ve gotta ask, are there any plans to reactivate that at any point?

SB: A band like that, we were seven or eight people, logistically, financially, interpersonal relationship-ly…managing that size band in today’s climate is just impossible. Could there be another Crime? It’s possible. I have nothing but goodwill to every other member of the band…but I haven’t talked to them either. I went 20 years without talking to them [laughs], or talking to Alex [Hacke, guitarist]. And not intentionally. You just didn’t talk, we didn’t run into each other.

The good thing about now is you can play music ‘til you’re 100 and there doesn’t seem to be an age limit to it. There could be a new Crime record when I’m 87. Never say never, but there’s certainly no concrete plans to do it.

I would have to say, Bronwyn, I can’t say I could do a Crime record without her. And likewise, no disrespect to any of the people I’m not about to mention, but just because they were so core to the actual sort of sound, if it didn’t feature Mick Harvey or Alex Hacke, I just don’t see how that could happen, because both those guys together, even more so than individually, I can work with them in the way that I sing, and there’s communication. There’s this way of communication that really holds a cohesiveness, because Crime teeters on the edge of chaos. And unless I’ve got one of those two in the band to communicate with, it’s too easy to tip over into the chaos side.

NF: So, just one more thing, to shift gears a little bit, I’m always curious when I talk to artists, what are you listening to these days? Is there anything that’s been catching your ear?

SB: The only thing I can really tell you I’ve been listening to is…Mark’s catalog. I’ve been listening to Mark Lanegan and that’s it. I haven’t listened to a whole lot of new songs.

I can get locked into five favorite songs, and I can listen to that forever. I still listen to Lynyrd Skynyrd, “Simple Man” and “Tuesday’s Gone” when I’m in a particular mood. I listen to Willie Nelson. I listen to Waylon Jennings. I listen to the Allman Brothers. And that was kind of a phase I went through. And to date I have not come out of it. So you know, at some point, something else will sort of pique my interest and I’ll dive into that.

But for me music’s kind of about…it brings back memories, smells, visual triggers, that will bring back a particular period in your life. I’m inspired musically now, so that means I’m probably open to music. Something will happen, I will hear something, and that will take me down the rabbit hole, and I will discover a whole lot of other music on the back of that. So that’s exciting.

Simon Bonney plays The Sinclair Monday night with Mark Lanegan.