Click Opera Interview: Rhodri Marsden

For a while now I've thought it might be interesting to do interviews on Click Opera. I always think there's something cool about people like curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, who apparently interviews everyone he meets and has built up a huge personal archive.

Well, here's my first Click Opera interview. It's with Rhodri Marsden, the singer-songwriter behind The Free French, the band I'll be co-headlining a London show on April 27th with. I got to know Rhodri thanks to a shared interest in 1980s conceptual English pop group Sudden Sway. I then discovered he had one of the most active and amusing blogs on LiveJournal, rhodri, with a huge and devoted following ready to leave 70 comments on a subject as unpromising as the confusion surrounding London's telephone codes.



Many things intrigue me about Rhodri's blog. It seems incredibly English to me (although I believe Rhodri is at least partially Welsh). It's so different in outlook, tone and emphasis from my own blog that I almost feel Rhodri and I are like a yin and yang of Britishness; complementary opposites. (Rather in the same way that Marxy's views on Japan and mine end up complementing each other.) And I'm fascinated that, in this age of self-mediation, Rhodri chooses to project such a doleful and self-effacing public persona. (Rhodri is far from an ineffectual bumbler: he writes for The Guardian and co-presents a show on Resonance FM.) Read Rhodri's impersonation of a brand consultant PowerPointing the reps from Momus Synthetic Derivatives Inc and all will become clear...

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