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Mark Cunningham was the writer and bass player in one of the late 70s' most influential experimental bands, Mars. They closed out the New York movement that had started in the late 60s at Andy Warhol's Factory with The Velvet Underground and which would later spawn Ramones, Blondie, New York Dolls and Television. Mars’ sound was more experimental and extreme than that of their forebearers but equally significant in that it has gone on to directly influence some of today's most interesting groups, such as Blonde Redhead, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and TV on the Radio. In recent years Mars have been given a new lease of life through rereleases of their music and various anthologies being dedicated to them and the short-lived but highly significant movement that they started.
SF: Mark, you were a hero of the underground, but I’ve also heard you described as the forgotten man of that period.
MC: Well, personally I wouldn’t call myself a hero of the underground, but the band in which I was in is legendary for being the first band on that scene. “The Forgotten Man”: well, maybe that’s just because I’m not very big in self promotion. Even though Mars were probably the most radical of the bands, which are famous for being radical, we were the least well known because we were the least trendy. It was an anti-fashion movement. In some respects it was an anti-punk, punk movement. They were really about fashion.
SF: The punks?
MC: The punks. And you could say we were too if you looked at fashion more in the sense of Andy Warhol and the scene around Andy Warhol. He was a big influence. Him maybe not so much, but The Factory movement, the films; everything was very Do-It-Yourself. There wasn’t much music involved, although The Velvet Underground started out there. Yeah, we were definitely influenced by them.
SF: And I suppose all those people were still around when you started to make music as well.
MC: They were. Andy used to come down to our shows because somebody put it on his agenda! One time I called him afterwards and I said, ‘we were the band you came to see in CBGBs and I just wanted to call to see what you thought. You know, I’m a big fan’. And he said, ‘oh yeah, that was ok. Oh, which one were you?’ I said, ‘I was the bass player’. He said, ‘oh yeah, you were really cute’!
SF: Warhol famously said that everybody could be famous for 15 minutes.
MC: Exactly. The whole Superstar thing, his Superstars - that was all a big influence on the whole New York scene. It started from there, directly. Andy’s thing was about fashion, but it was also about content. He was very modern. It was what fed in to all the later movements.
SF: He kind of infused people with the idea that they could all be famous?
MC: Not only that, but that they were stars from the beginning. You didn’t need to go out of your neighbourhood to be a star. That was the point.
SF: So you were stars within your own micro-world. Did you ever think it was being viewed from the outside?
MC: Well, it wasn’t that much, but we had a sense that we were leaving a mark. We absolutely did. We arrived at something musically that grew into something darker and stronger and at that point we realised that we were doing something important, that it would be rehabilitated. That it would come back up because that is typical of all avant-garde movements. The good stuff gets remembered.
SF: You got your fifteen minutes.
MC: Yeah, well, it’s now that I’m having the fifteen minutes really. The references to that now are much more massive than they were at the time.
SF: What strikes me, having met you and listened to Mars, is how incongruous the match between you and the group seems. You’re obviously a serious musician and a very chilled out guy. A friend described Mars’ sound as being conjured up by a “schizophrenic thunderstorm”, and to me it seems to be an expression of some real internal pain. How did you reconcile what I imagine would have been quite a classical background with the musical chaos that was Mars?
MC: A question of perception. I'm a lot more serene now at 56 than I was at 25 for one thing. Also, I’m not as trained a musician as you think, serious yes but classical, not at all. There was no gulf whatsoever between me and the rest of the band. In fact Sumner, who was really the key figure, had more classical background than I. I started out in school brass bands but after that my education was from records, most especially Miles’s Bitches Brew and On the Corner, Sun Ra and free jazz in general, The Velvet Underground and New York minimalists like Charlemagne Palestine, as well as all primitive music and blues. And pain is central to all serious music, at least the stuff I’ve always liked, and chaos has much more to do with reality than perfection does. The key for me is to make it transcendent, which I think Mars achieved. Admittedly, what I do now is quite different, which is normal 30 years later, but in fact, Bèstia Ferida has quite similar values. Radical music is a response to radical times, so now...need I say more?
You can listen to Mark’s sound at www.myspace.com/convolutionism.
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