Some artists make films. Others chase visions. Jude Rawlins belongs firmly to the latter camp. He's a British-Irish filmmaker, musician, and multidisciplinary creator whose work moves comfortably between mysticism, underground music culture, and experimental cinema.
Born in Birmingham, England, in 1972 and now working between New York and Iowa, Rawlins first emerged through music as the singer-guitarist and principal songwriter for the Subterraneans and later as a collaborator with the Lene Lovich Band. But sound was only the beginning. His filmmaking would evolve into something more esoteric - a search for meaning through image, myth, and forgotten histories.
His 2009 feature Albion Rising resurrected visionary poet William Blake in a dreamlike meditation on art and prophecy, while Songs of Alchemy explored the angelic communications of Renaissance occultist John Dee, blurring the line between historical drama and spiritual inquiry.
His award-winning short The Divine Image captured the attention of festival audiences, earning the Ken Russell Award at the Edinburgh Fringe - an apt honor for a filmmaker unafraid of the surreal.
Rawlins’ projects often orbit cultural outsiders and visionary figures, from reinterpretations of Faust to tributes honoring filmmaker Derek Jarman. Even his early life hints at a lifelong fascination with imagination and exploration - winning an art prize at age seven for a painting of the Skylab space station and excelling as a youth chess champion.
Part filmmaker, part musician, part modern mystic, Jude Rawlins continues to create work that feels less like conventional storytelling and more like transmissions from the borderlands between art, history, and the unseen.
His art is coveted, whether it's film, ink or music. Once while living in New York, he was featured on Handsome Dick Manitoba's podcast. Cyndi Lauper heard it and tried to get him to join her band, but Jude was unable to commit because he had the wrong type of visa at the time. "One thing leads to another," he told me. And now he's in Des Moines.
 |
| Pink Flag |
Pink Flag is the name of Jude's current project, a band that is as much Des Moines as it is Birmingham, spiced with flavors from New York, Los Angeles, and regions all throughout Europe. The name comes from the 1977 album by Wire, "Pink Flag." It fits the aesthetic perfectly - Wire is considered a highly influential art-punk band from the UK and well... we can see exactly how this lines up.
"Pink Flag" the album shattered punk’s rulebook by stripping rock music down to its barest, sharpest most skeletal form. Packed with 21 songs in roughly 35 minutes, the album rejects excess in favor of precision - many tracks end before they fully settle in, turning riffs and lyrics into fleeting, almost conceptual statements.
How does this line up in regard to Jude's new band? Well, I'm excited to find out.
Pink Flag, fresh off tour with Devo, the B-52s and Lene Lovich, consists of Dani Warsdottir on vocals, Jude Rawlins on guitars, Beth Spaniel on bass, and Celestino Ramirez on drums. They will be playing this Saturday night (April 11) at Maggie's Rumble Room in Des Moines. They will be accompanying Iowa's own sonic warlords Jacob County and the Damaged Goods.
Then they play again on June 13 at Locals alongside Toon Smokes and Bhagwan.
Jude was kind enough to let me ask him a flurry of questions ranging from what his musical influences are, to his thoughts on Emergence Theory and other quantum concepts, and his interactions with the paranormal. Yeah. We went all over the place with this one.
Hey ho! Let's go!
Before we get weird — can you tell readers a little about your musical background and what kind of music you make?
My major influences are punk and post-punk and Sixties proto-punk, but I have always listened to everything except metal and jazz and shitty manufactured pop music. When I was germinating the concept for Pink Flag I was listening to a lot of Killing Joke, Wire, Gang of Four, and the first Siouxsie and the Banshees album The Scream. I’d been listening to this music forever but it started to make a new kind of sense to me. I loved American bands like X, Mission of Burma, and The Adolescents. I also rediscovered bands like Crass and The Poison Girls, Flux of Pink Indians, etc. For me there’s a musical tradition that includes all of those things, but it starts with The Stooges and ends with The Smiths. The Queen is Dead is the full stop, there’s loads of music that came after that I love, but nothing I would really honestly call an influence. I do think we have a kinship with a lot of current bands, like Amyl and the Sniffers, Tropical Fuck Storm, Wolf Alice, Wet Leg, Courtney Barnett, Sharon Van Etten. Right now is a really great time for music, the best in decades. But it still all comes down to side one of Funhouse by The Stooges. The four most perfect rock songs ever captured in a studio. That’s still the high watermark. That’s still the one to beat, but it will never be rivalled.
Do you feel like creativity and the mysterious are connected? In other words, does exploring the unknown influence the way you write or perform music?
I think creativity at its very heart is an exploration, one of the main reasons we become artists is to try to make sense of things. And we never succeed, but we keep going, we keep reaching, like the last paragraph of The Great Gatsby. That’s why I’ve never liked U2, their songs always just sound like unsolicited advice to me. They exude self-confidence, which is the dullest thing you can ever do as an artist. Take the Ramones or Joy Division or Nirvana, their power came from their fragility, their self-doubt that everyone can relate to. They looked like they could snap like a twig at any minute, yet they just soared instead, like lightning in a bottle. That’s why there are so many sonnets and poems and love songs in the world. Love is the very center of the human condition, and yet it’s still a mystery to us. Without art, it would be inexpressible. The same way nothing can only be expressed through mathematics, the number zero. Without a language or a form, a mode of expression, everything worth our time and attention quickly becomes very big and complex.
You mentioned having witnessed incidents “from the spooky to the downright weird.” What’s one experience that really stuck with you?
When I was a teenager I had a close friend who took her own life. About a year or so after if happened I was sitting on a wall in front of the local library with another friend, and across the parking lot we saw this girl walking down the street, and we both immediately recognized her as our dead friend. Her hair, her clothes, the way she walked, everything. We exchanged a look of complete shock, then jumped to our feet and bolted across the parking lot. She passed behind a wall just before we reached her, and when we got there, there was no one there. Like, nobody, the street was deserted. We still talk about it to this day. I don’t believe in ghosts, but the discovery of Higg-Bosun opened the door for me to Multiverse Theory and the whole world of Quantum Mechanics as something worth exploration. If you are serious about wanting to understand the universe then you have to take Einstein and Stephen Hawking seriously.
You also mentioned ideas like emergence theory, quantum echoes, and Hermetic concepts. What first drew you to those ways of thinking about reality?
It all started for me with William Blake. As a choirboy I was required to sing hymns on a Sunday, which are all basically the same. Then one day we were singing “Jerusalem” and it was like a thunderbolt. I started reading Blake and everything changed. I discovered the Sex Pistols around the same time, and the relationship between William Blake’s urge to create your own systems or become enslaved by the systems of others’ and Johnny Rotten saying you don’t need permission for anything, was almost immediately obvious to me. I became interested in Alchemy because of Carl Jung, who thought the Enlightenment was too quick to throw everything away, that there was still stuff to learn from the Ancient Wisdom. I found myself disappearing down the same literary rabbit holes as people like Patti Smith and Jaz Coleman, so I knew I was on to something. I don’t know if Emergence Theory will turn out to be correct, but I feel it is by far the best we have at present.
If you could play music at one truly mysterious place - Area 51, Skinwalker Ranch, Easter Island, or somewhere else - where would you choose and why?
There’s so many. I’ve recorded inside the Teufelsberg in Berlin but I’d love to play a show there. Maybe in front of Newgrange in Ireland, or on the steps of the Sacre Couer in Paris. Or in the volcanic caves beneath Naples in Italy. Part of me really badly wants to play in the Badlands, but another part of me thinks we should just leave it alone.
What was the specific moment in your life when you realized the world might be more supernatural than we’re told? What happened?
I don’t really think of anything as “supernatural”. I think everything is implicitly natural, whether we understand it yet or not. But I do find it pompous an arrogant when people claim the righteousness of their position, be they religious fanatics or atheists. The only certainty is uncertainty, and one of the most valuable life lessons is coming to terms with that. People want to believe in an afterlife because, quite reasonably, they are afraid of dying, because of the simple fear of the unknown, which gives us a healthy respect for life until you interfere with it and start laying down beliefs instead of suppositions. To me, spirituality is the opposite of materialism, but I can’t think of anything more materialistic than bribing people with promises of everlasting life. You’re just exploiting their deepest fears. We have a need for certainty that can never be met. I suppose that makes agnosticism seem like the most sensible proposition, but then an agnostic is still an unbeliever, so it’s just atheism without the vitriol towards religion. It’s none of my business what other people choose to believe, or why, or how. I just think that life is the most valuable thing we have, it might be our only time-off from non-existence, so I think the right to life is the most existentially important thing that we should all agree on. Thou shalt not kill. I can live and let live with anyone who truly believes that.
After everything you’ve experienced or thought about over the years, what’s your personal feeling about that supernatural side of reality? Are we dealing with unknown phenomena, something paranormal, or something else entirely?
For me, unknown phenomena, 100%. We may figure it out, we may not. There are things we know and things we don’t. It’s fine to have theories about the stuff we don’t know, that’s how we may eventually get to understand them, but anyone who claims to know anything about them is actually committing a form of blasphemy in my opinion. Ironically, the Gnostic scriptures, the true historical basis for Christianity, agree with that position entirely. The Gospel of Mary Magdalene warns against following leaders, that all prophets are false. There will always be things we don’t know or fully comprehend, and we just have to accept that. But when there is empirical evidence, then that should have precedent. For example, if we were to see water flowing uphill, natural law says that is impossible because Gravity is one of the few constants in the universe. So if it were really flowing uphill, what would the best available explanation be? It would be that it is actually flowing downhill (which doesn’t break natural law), but backwards through time (which, and standby for this, ALSO doesn’t break natural law.) As outlandish as that sounds, once you obey the law of Gravity, and you get into Emergence Theory’s ideas about time not being linear outside of our experience of it, which is what creates Quantum Echoes (you think of someone and they are the very next person to call you, or you remember and episode of an old TV show and the next time you catch it that is the episode on air) whereby the future influences the present as much as the past does, but we experience it only when we reach that point in the future, which we call Déjà vu. Is it the right explanation? Who knows, but it’s a lot better than any theory that doesn’t follow the empirical evidence.
If you could witness one unexplained phenomenon with your own eyes—Bigfoot, a UFO landing, a ghost, or something else—what would you choose?
I’d take the UFO, definitely. When we were on tour last year we went hundreds of miles out of our way on a dodgy tire to see Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, because Close Encounters of the Third Kind is such a wonderful, inspiring and hopeful movie. It’s a statistical probability that we are not alone in the universe, and I would love to know for sure.
Finally, what are you currently working on musically, and where can people find your work?
We’re just putting the finishing touches to our debut album, and we’re booking shows wherever will have us. The best place to find info and links is via the website, www.pinkflag.band - that will lead you to Facebook, Bandcamp, YouTube etc.
Now Playing: "Next Big Thing" - The Dictators (RIP Ross)
No comments:
Post a Comment