We Shot Guns with Drew McDowall and Talked About the Gang He Was In

Photos by Joshua Zucker Pluda

I’m particular in who I go shooting guns with. Having gone twice in my life, you could even say I’m very exclusive. I know elitism is ragingly out of style right now, one for all and we all go down watching Titanic together, but I have snobbish tendencies and must be true to them. This extends to firearms. I’m not an enthusiast by any means and being a libtard to the extreme, I extremely can’t shoot for shit. But I enjoy it and I enjoy the company of people who enjoy things: and Drew McDowall (ex-COIL, Ex-guy who did all those wonderful and strange remixes of Nine Inch Nails songs in the ‘90s, currently, along with Psychic Ills’ Tres Warren, of psych-drone-new music-astral plane-spirit fuckers Compound Eye) really enjoys shooting guns. One of the first times I met him, he showed me, with the glee of a feral child, videos of him firing off a semiautomatic. So, when I suggested we go to a range ourselves, Drew jumped at the opportunity.

It would be a contrivance beyond my talents (and, yes, I tried) to draw a useful comparison between Drew McDowall’s use of a shotgun on the freezing range of Thunder Mountain in Ringwood, NJ and his use of modular synths and patch cables in his current band, Compound Eye, but there are obvious surface similarities. Danger doesn’t always have to be literal. It can be, obviously, the use of recreational killing machines or it can be of a, forgive me, spiritual nature. Playing without a net in either regard. Now that I’ve seen Drew both shoot a gun and make music in a packed third floor room of the Silent Barn, I can assure one and all that his demeanor remained the same for both.

“I deliberately build in a ton of chaos using the modular,” he says. “Most of the patches I come up with have a quality of instability. There’s a set amount of control but there’s a lot of chaos of instability. Not chaos in a random way, like someone throwing a bag of milk bottles down the stairs or something, but you know in terms of chance or a stochastic process, you build in an amount of randomness that you want to achieve. Sometimes it’s great when it all collapses, but for me it’s randomness within a certain amount of limitations…Once or twice I’ve felt like, ‘Holy shit, this is getting away from me,’ you know, like I’ve fallen flat on my face and then you just go with it and it turns into something really unexpected. That’s a huge sense of satisfaction when you ride the chaos through into something else.”

I suppose the most obvious point of convergence between shooting guns and making sublimely unsettling and beautiful minimal synth “experimental music” is the desire to not be subsumed by the banality of the every day and to, you know, live the life worth living (the novelty of shooting only extends to soft metropolitans like me mind you). But even Drew’s take on experimental music is as populist in its intent (if not execution) as your average gun show.

“Experimental music doesn’t have to be unlistenable or excruciating. Sometimes you’ll listen to a piece of experimental music and you try to find your way through it and it can trip you up. For me, it doesn’t have to be something that doesn’t give you access to the normal emotions that a piece of pop music or rock music can give you. I think it just comes from a different perspective… you know, a three-minute perfect pop song is probably one of the most sacred things that anyone can do for other human beings. You know that feeling that you get when you listen to a perfect piece of music, it’s fucking sacred,” he says.

My usual kneejerk stance is to distrust any artist who sounds too nice, too sane, too reasonable; they’re probably selling something I already have six of. That’s why Drew is such a rare and profound bird. He talks about art and the world around him like an older brother talking you down from the edge; clearly, concisely, and with a wry humor about heavy, heavy shit. Of course it helps that he was a total monster in his youth and his previous unholy redcap-ness is just barely covered by the veneer of a charming Scottish lilt (that you should be sure to imagine while reading the interview). And, like I said, he’s awfully nice now.

A few days after we went shooting, Drew was kind enough to have me at his Williamsburg apartment that he shares with his longtime partner, Jess Gordon, and two cats, Professor and Shane, to talk a bit about his process, his youth and his new album with Compound Eye, Journey From Anywhere. We talked for a long time and it breaks my heart that there isn’t enough room to include all he had to say about chaos magik (ambivalent), Kanye West (pro), Lady Gaga (con, but without venom), Douglas P. (“If it goosesteps like a duck…”), pop music (VERY pro), or Nine Inch Nails (ask him yourself). Instead I’ve decided to start where all good starts start, at the beginning, discovering kraut rock, and, uh, joining a gang.

Noisey: You were born in Scotland?
Drew McDowall: Yeah, I grew up in Paisley, which is just outside Glasgow. It’s a part of the metropolitan area of Glasgow. You know, I was listening to all the regular pop music – I loved David Bowie. But I got - this is a bit of a touchstone for me - the band Faust, the German Krautrock band, they released this record on Virgin records, it was like fifty pence, it had this beautiful sleeve by Bridget Riley. It was very very eye-catching. I was just a kid, like thirteen, and I saw this record and immediately it had this disorienting sleeve, so that was compelling. I probably only had fifty pence in my pocket, bought it, took it home and it was just the strangest, weirdest music I’d ever heard. It didn’t kick off this immediate love of Krautrock. That didn’t happen for another couple of years. There was no internet, it wasn’t what you were reading about in NME. It’s like The Gods Must Be Crazy! This thing just kinda landed on me out of nowhere. [Laughs]

So that did plant a seed. The seed that music could be, something else, something different than what I was listening to. I don’t know what it was like here, but the British “chart music” at the time was pretty insane. There was Roxy Music, going back to the pop/experimental dichotomy, Brian Eno and the first Roxy Music records, this was stuff everyone was listening to in the UK. Brian Eno with his little modular synthesizer doing the weirdest shit… so you know, it’s always been there, embedded and a part of the fabric of pop music. For me, that sort of planted the seed, kicked off the love of weird music.

I was digging around the other day in my albums. I hadn’t listened to this in years; it was another record I discovered at thirteen, The Missa Luba. It’s this beautiful Congolese Catholic Mass.

This was a great thing about growing (up where and when I did). It was also the music from Lindsay Anderson, who is this underground British film director who did three amazing films, If….

Oh yeah, sure, that’s Jarvis Cocker’s favorite movie!
Right, right. [Laughs] I didn’t know that, but it’s every British person of a certain age’s favorite movie. It’s one of those things where we probably all saw it at the same time when we were thirteen on BBC 2! It’s a part of that shared cultural experience that you don’t really have anymore because culture is so fragmented. BBC 2 had the stuff that kinda came out of left field. Growing up you were exposed to French Avant Garde, you were exposed to Lindsay Anderson, just right there on TV, it wasn’t cable or anything like that.

That stopped in American television well before then, but you look at showsfrom the 50s and 60s where they’d have these avant-garde composers, and like explaining serialism to the kids!
Yeah, so the music I came across in a serendipitous way…. People like Delia Derbyshire, who was this fantastic British composer who worked for the BBC. She did the theme music for Doctor Who, and she wrote a bunch of fascinating pieces.

I know the KLF Version. Rather, the Timelords.
Oh right, that was hilarious! Did you ever see the footage of them burning the million?

No, I just remember when it happened it just sounded so heart wrenching.
The documentary really captures that “Too much coke, too much quid” thinking it would be this groundbreaking thing, but it just ended up being a big bummer. It was really compelling. It was called KLF Burn a Million Quid or something. It’s brilliant but really grim.

It seems like a good example of bringing experimental ideology into the real world and realizing, “Oh fuck, I can’t live by these standards.”
But I think Bill Drummond would completely acknowledge all of that. He just be like, “Yeah, that’s exactly what happened, that was our intention and that was what happened.” [Laughs] KLF is amazing; Chill Out is still one of my favorite records.

All right, we got sidetracked by KLF, let’s go back.
You know, growing up working class in Glasgow, it’s not an easy gig. At the time, it was the third most violent city in the world, after Mexico City and Rio De Janeiro. It was tough avoiding being in gangs. People joined gangs for protection, or for the thrill of it – I think I did all of that. But at the same time I was reading stuff like JG Ballard.

Wait, were you in a gang?!
Yeah, I joined a gang when I was like, thirteen.

What were you called?
We were called the Young Hun. Glasgow is a complex place. People used to joke that it was the least racist place in the UK because there wasn’t any hatred left because the religious hatred was so all-encompassing that there wasn’t any leftover for people of other cultures. [Laughs] When I say religious hatred, I’m talking about Catholics and Protestants.

Were you raised Catholic or Protestant?
My barber is Scottish and we were laughing today because he said he was a product of a mixed marriage, because I was too, and I knew exactly what he meant. Anywhere else, a mixed marriage would be black or white or Jewish/Muslim, but in our case it’s two Christians. A Catholic with a Protestant, that’s a mixed marriage in Glasgow!

[Laughs]
So “hun” is a derogatory term for Protestants in Scotland. It basically means you’re of German extraction. So we were called the Hun, but we were a mixed gang of Catholics and Protestants. Then I got inducted into this really brutal core gang of seven or eight people, the Hun was maybe, fifty people, and then there was this inner circle called the Suicide Hun that was about seven or eight maniacs that would just do anything. For some reason I thought I was one of those people.

The gang fights were really brutal in Glasgow – stabbings and slashings. I saw someone get a garden sheererin the face. There were shotguns, all kinds of stupid shit going on. But a lot of it was a gang of thirty or forty people fighting a gang of thirty or forty people. Sometimes, when there’s that many people it’s hard to get hurt because it’s just like mayhem. People have got like, sticks and bats; it’s not so concentrated. It’s much worse to get beaten by two people than ten, chances are they’re going to be kicking each other’s ankles before they get to your head!

Gang culture in Scotland has a long history. These gangs traced the lineage back to the 1800s, and it’s an unbroken lineage as well. There’s an amazing book called “No Mean City”that’s about gang culture in Glasgow in the ‘20s; the razor gangs where everyone had open razors. By the time I was in a gang it was tough to carry knives because the sentences were so extreme. It was like carrying a firearm in New York. You would just automatically go to prison. So, you basically gave your knife to your girlfriend and she carried the knife because they didn’t search the girl.

Were you all still minors at this point?
Yeah, I was like thirteen then. So yeah, our schtick was, four or five of us would go into another gang’s territory and just attack them to see what happened. The whole point was to come back alive and get our bragging rights. Surprisingly, most times it worked because people were so freaked out. You know, if thirty or forty people are coming into your territory, you know that they’re coming, but five or six people can get right in amongst you before you even realize it. People are easily spooked. People would just run and there would be five of us chasing them.

[Laughs]
[Laughs] Occasionally it would backfire when they realized it was only five of us. I got held down once, this was the worst beating of my life, they held me down and they grabbed a drain cover and smashed it into my face. I still got the bump on my nose. I just got home and crawled into bed and wouldn’t get out. My mum tried to get me up to go to school and I told her I had the flu. [Laughs] She believed that for a couple of hours but I finally emerged and my face was just a swollen mess.

You know, it’s weird, it satisfied something in me, I don’t know what it was. I got out of gang culture when I was sixteen, and it’s tough to get out. There was a friend of mine, and he got me into punk rock, he was a cool guy and wasn’t in a gang and he was the same age as me and in school. He was really trying to get me out of gang culture and the thing that did it was punk rock. He invited me to this show, and I can’t even remember who it was weirdly enough, but that night was one of those life-changing moments. So I left and I had to buy a shotgun to protect myself from my former friends.

That former friend that got me into punk rock died, not having anything to do with my situation, it was just the brutal time, someone cut his throat. He got caught up in the violence, he saw his brother getting into something and someone basically slashed his throat. He was only sixteen. It was a couple of months after he managed to get me out of gangs, and he died at the hand of it.

Some parts of Glasgow the life expectancy is worse than the height of the war. That’s insane. It’s not city-wide, but parts of it. Violence is just the lifestyle.

When I got into the punk scene and what became post-punk it wasn’t that uncommon to find people with a similar background. It was strange – the gangs they were strictly territorial - and there was this gang that was our nemesis, they were called The Disciple. Actually this was sub-gang called The Logie (after Logan Drive in Paisley), gangs often had sub-clusters. The Disciple was a feared gang that had roots from 1800s. They were pretty terrifying. I was no longer protected, and these people hated me. At one point there was supposedly a bottle of whiskey reward if someone got me. [Laughs].

That was your value. [Laughs]
I was at the town center one day, maybe a couple of months out of being out of the gang. I saw this bus drive up, and these guys, and one guy in particular who really hated me. They all just came stomping off the bus and I just thought, ‘I’m dead!’ I literally thought I was going to lose my life here. I was this punk rocker and they came up to me like, “This is amazing! This is great!” They wanted to know more about punk!

Oh wow!
And then those guys started joining bands! They became a part of the scene. It was so weird it was one of those classic cultural unified moments. It was all these people that were basically thugs that started playing in bands together and going to shows together which was just so much better.

Where you were, it was all generally working-class?
With the punk rock thing?

Yeah.
No, it was all totally mixed. That was what was amazing about it; it just cut across all sectors of society. It was project kids, art school kids, it was upper class kids. It didn’t matter. The UK is incredibly class-based, and still is, but it has this ability every now and again of having these discontinuities and everything gets jumbled up and people just… hang.

You know, I have to ask you, Drew, to repeat your Screwdriver story.
[Laughs] So one of the guys from Skrewdriver, who I knew from…around. He was from Scotland. He wasn’t like a Nazi, or anything like that when I knew him, just a scurve.

A scurve?
Just like, a sleazebag. [Laughs] I think it’s like a Hell’s Kitchen/Irish word? I’d never heard before I got to New York. It’s weird, I love that you get micro-regional dialect. [Laughs] It gives me hope.

So you know, we had mutual friends. I heard that he joined Skrewdriver, which was a huge surprise to me. I raised an eyebrow but I didn’t care about it either way. I had a friend, Caroline Crawley, she was in this band called Shelleyan Orphan she was also a part of This Mortal Coil, you know the 4AD supergroup. She was in no way “street” or good with coping with the rougher characters. She was definitely a Pre-Raphaelite. She called me one day and said, “That guy you know moved in downstairs from me, and he’s playing his music really loud and being a dick, and he threatened me with violence.” So I got his phone number and called him up and was like, “Pack it in, this is a friend of mine you’re fucking with.” So he was like, “Fuck you! I’m in Screwdriver now, I’m gonna get Skrewdriver and all these skinheads to come over to your place…” And I was like, “You know what? Hold tight. I’m going to grab a knife. I’m going to come over. And I’m going to fucking stab you.”

[Laughing]
I just lost it. I had bad anger management skills back then. [Laughs] First of all, you’re threatening my friend, which isn’t cool but then you’re threatening with Skrewdriver and skinheads… So I grabbed a knife, went over and parked outside. I could see him and his girlfriend in the second floor window. I could see them both twitching by the curtains, looking out the window. So Caroline buzzes me in and his girlfriend came out with a bunch of “He’s really sorry, he’s so sorry Drew, please don’t do anything!” So I was like, “Tell him he has to come up and apologize to Caroline.”

So I went up to Caroline’s to make sure she was okay, and he came up very meekly and apologized to her, and she was like, “Okay, apologize to him too!” [In sad sack voice] “I’m sorry, I won’t get Skrewdriver or the skinheads to come after you.”

[Laughs]
So that’s my Skrewdriver story….

Thanks. Okay, we probably should talk about the record you just made.
[Pauses] I just wanna tell the fun stories. [Laughs] But I should at least mention it.

Yeah, sure, mention it!
So it’s the Compound Eye record with Tres Warren of Psychic Ills. It’s the third record that we’ve done. A lot of people have been reviewing and they mention Coil, which is inevitable, but I don’t think it sounds like Coil. It definitely comes from the same processes that were part of what I brought to Coil when I was asked to join. That mixed with Tres’ very peculiar bent, it’s a nice amalgam of those different worlds.

Do you mind that? Do you feel like Coil is something you can’t escape?
It’s a part of my history. I may have felt that a few years ago, but it’s a legitimate and important part of what I did. I’m really proud of the stuff I did in Coil. I see this album as a part of the same trajectory. It’s not something I can compartmentalize…it’s a continuity.

Zachary Lipez is a noted writer, humanitarian, and non-Republican. He's on Twitter - @ZacharyLipez