The most obvious way to start a Ted Milton interview is with his legendary tales, albeit about himself.

"Another job I had was in a Wimpy Bar. I was the, as they like to call it, chef in the Wimpy Bar and that was amazing. It was somewhere down near Russell Square. It was allowed to eat anything I liked, but I never could eat a single thing when I was there but immediately I left the premises I was consumed by raging hunger. I got around this by inviting friends to come to the Wimpy Bar and giving them what I consider to be my meals, but after 10 days the manager said to me that I actually had to pay for those meals that I'd given away. He had them all written down and I completely flipped out and realized I had to get out of there and get the sack as well; otherwise I wouldn't even get the money for the days I'd worked. So I hot on the idea of painting myself with tomato ketchup, which I squirted all over my face and chef's hat and stuff like that. I stood there and carried on cooking with all this tomato ketchup running of me. There was this bloke called Freddy doing the washing up, a 93 years-old Bolivian or something, he nearly drowned himself laughing and fell into the sink, you know. And so he was cackling away with his head in the sink and the manager came up and was saying: "What? Why? Why? Why have you done this?" and I said: "Because I believe it enhances my appearance, makes me more attractive to the customers" and he said: "Go; go and change your clothes" and then he came back about half and hour later and I squirted even more on."

Ted Milton got the sack from that job

Talking to Ted Milton is like trying to put a pair of pants on a rogue rhino. It can be funny but this man is angry.

Fitly, I try to fit this rhino's pants in Paddington Station's coffee bar. On his way to Europe for 18 dates round and around he could be on a rebound because there were also 21 dates in Germany and the previous 3 weeks had been spent in the good ol' U.S. of A. Seasoned traveler that he is, did he have a good time?

"Nmm, Nmm, N…No! I had an absolutely horrendous time to tell you the truth."

Don't you like Americans?

"That sounds like racism, but it's not really so much racism as anti-Nationalism. The first time I went to America, I was totally infatuated with the American attitude, I saw it as being rally positive and open and enthusing ….enthusiastic and all that sort of stuff. Plus , Plus, Plus! but the last was my fourth visit and it really grated from the word ACTUM!"

Boogie For Block.

"Colonel Block dans l'orange, l'orange

primitive,

C'est la fruit de ma querre, ma querre orange,

Ech? Non. Ech? Non.

Balzac ma bube.

Dans l'enfer communal,

et dans le ciel Episcopal,

De Gaulle, Wilson, et Uncle Tom Cobbley

and all."

Ted Milton doesn't think Blurt are at all popular in England by virtue of the fact that they get work abroad but none in England.

"It's the old question of going where you're not understood and that's where we go down best."

Venues also in Britain seem to hold no attraction for el Blurt, with a special mention going to the managerial types at the Rock Garden where a fight would have ensued the time Blurt played there, if Ted had been more of a flash cock.

Brother Jake and keyboard player Herman Martin are now Blurt, the keyboards taking the place of the original guitar-favoured line-up, with of course, Ted.

Five years since the bands conception has not yielded an undue amount of recordings to stack and as a result – Blurt? Who? Blurt?. "Factory Quartet" (one quarter), "The Ruminant Plinth" (12'') and a self named Lp on Red Flame, - plus Mr. Milton's last solo effort " Love is a Violence", which, deliberate or not, has as much to do with Blurt's manic sax mess as America has to do with peace.

Obviously he can't stay still in person, but what about all this dodging about between record companies?

"I'm a dodgy person, also I like to sample as many different flavours as possible. Basically, I like to eat it as well as smoke it, and so that's why I like to give them all a chance to flavour. You get dull, you know, you get tried of the flavour of one lot so you change around to eat another lot from another lot."

His scorn for record companies continues to manifests itself…

"Basically what happens is that an independent comes along and it expresses an interest in the product so you give them that or you sell it to them. Then really they actually don't want any long term involvement with their performers because it necessitates a responsible attitude. Better just to take it and sever the ties as quickly as possible and then they don't have any responsibility towards you and can say things to you like: "We always know where you've been because we get orders for your records from that part of the world", which is entirely the wrong way around. So you follow what I'm saying?"

Have I proved myself to be one already or is this body used to dealing with imbeciles?

"As opposed to them begging you to go a tour to sell the record in which they've got a vested interest or might even say, own totally"

Forty One – Twenty One

"I will lift up mine eye

unto the gunsights

& aim for the Lord.

I will lift up mine eye

unto the gunsights

& squeeze the trigger

once more.

I will lift up mine eye

unto the gunsights

& even up

the score."

There was another poet Milton, but he lived sometime ago and bears no relevance to our poet Milton. Ted, who at the moment, is the Milton. One published work, " He also serves who only incubates" is an array of poems fit for madmen. Poems that are to words what his sax is to music.

Fairy Tale Poem For Crossed Fingers

"Once more unto

Once upon a Time

If we keep our fingers crossed

That is what we will surely find."

Are you still doing your poetry as a separate part? – I naively enquire.

"Not really as a separate part, it's an integral part. That is that lyrics are prose and vice-versa, usually, but last week in Montreal we arrived a day early to play and we stumbled on a poetry festival. We sorta jumped in there and did an, all around, 20 minutes sequence without music, and that was probably the most exciting thing that happened to me on the trip. There's not really much opportunity to do it but I like doing it very much. Recitations, the Milton's poetical works, "Intimations of Verbal Karate" and so forth. "

Where does he get the inspiration for such poetry? – I foolishly ask.

"Basically having sat on a series of mind potties in infancy."

Eh? I don’t quite follow you Ted. Do you mean where one collects experiences?

"No! I`m just saying that the need to do that sort of thing is probably rooted in something unsatisfactory about the infancy."

"I think anybody who actually needs to make art or performance is basically sick and mostly basically unhappy or twisted.

Anyway the kind of performance and the king of art and the kind of music that has anything for me is generally not there just to pleasure people but is obviously a screaming necessity of the people involved to do it. A compulsion, if you like; a need to do that kind of thing."

So is he unhappy?

"Er, I`m not grossly happy all the time. I don`t claim to have a good day every day from start to finish. I mean, have a nice day everyday from start to finish. Can`t claim that, no."

Ted Milton reckons that he performs to pass the time or alternatively because he enjoys it – there must be a difference there somewhere.

"What else could I do, I mean actually I think about it sometimes and realize that probably I`m only capable of doing some kind of permutation of what I`m doing at the moment, because there is nothing else I`d care to do really."

Not so. As well as the spell along with the rest of the mafia at Wimpy, Mr. Milton has also been by turns – deck chair attendant on Brighton beach, bus conductor, and park attendant in Holland Park.

"I had this idea, because actually I used to write a lot of poems about park life. In fact I used a sequence out of one those poems sort of stuck in the middle of a song:

The Little Death.

"In Milton`s academy of je ne sain quoi,

you gotta keep a secret,

I say to the lady that`s walking in the dark.

Grey light falls from propellers and fills all

The park. "

"… and I wrote that ages and ages ago when I was living in London and used to spend the whole time flopping about in parks looking at this curious landscape. Human landscape.

"But I got this job in Holland Park because, I thought, you know really, I spent so much time in the park. Why don`t I actually get paid for being in the park. So I went along there and it was ridiculous, it was something like a 10 hours day, I went down and the guy said, "Right, here’s the brush, take the brush, you see that tree?, you see that tree? Right, you sweep from this tree to that tree and it takes you `till 10.30 or 11.00 or something like that, then you join us at break." I said "o.k.", and well actually they`d allowed 3 hours for a job which would have taken 20 minutes to do. Then after the tea break I got another similar sort of ZEN task and I just wasn`t up to it. I went completely bonkers. I just ran away. I actually ran away before even the first day was finished."

As any angry young man, Ted Milton was ‘Mr. Pugh’s Blue Show’. For 15 years this one man travesty of theatre played to the audiences of Europe from behind his obscene hands. Was this man angry?

"It was just gratuitously violent and pervert and grossly anti-authoritarian. That’s what it was all about. That was the ‘Blue Show’, which I ended up doing and that was the final show that I built and having done the circuit of pot-smoking art venues in Holland and France and Germany and Italy and I.C.A. and the Crucibal Theatre and Sheffield and the Bush. All that stuff.

"I ran out of audiences, when basically, I knew who they were and all I wanted to do was attack them to upset them. Like in the ‘Blue Show’, I was doing the Inspector Deep Throat Nosey Parker who was vomiting a whole series of objects accompanying gagging sound effects.

"He would vomit chains from eating the incarcerated prisoners and he would vomit Christmas decorations, he would vomit sausages and he would voimt wet-lock Union Jack. Now the audience which I described as being an audience well adjusted to this and that and sexual this and that but the one thing, which they couldn’t take was the sight of the wet-lock Union Jack coming up. That’s when they would all get up and run out of the theatre. And I knew that was it. That was the crack. I knew what would hurt them and I did it to them and they left! "

"Puppeteers of the world unite,

Don’t make love make war,

Keep finger upright,

And be a bloody bore,

Puppeteers of the world unite,

Don’t be cool be uptight. "

So these liberal-minded people ….

"That is all bullshit. Toadies to a man. "

Was puppeteer a protest against the fact you couldn`t play anywhere?

"No, I just couldn`t bear the prissyness of theatre and more and I realized what the main function of it was, to pleasure a particular section of society. The section of society that has as, along with their aspidistra-type values involving, I dunno, a half timbered car or a taste for wine or a penchant for reading to Guardian or some stripped furniture or something for the Habitat store or experience of higher education and a need to go to the theatre from time to time. So they were the only kind of people who came to a theatre. I’m not by definition that kind of a person. I, until recently, was never able to hear opera without wanting to go and break some-thing. "

Time he was on his way was Ted Milton. Ted describes himself as a Cod musician, a noise maker, a poseur. Well, he along with brother Jake and Herm, under the guise of Blurt, have a new 12" out mid-Septemebr.

We’re thrown out a British Rail`s café as Milton attempts to re-enact Inspector Deep Throat Nosey Parker’s antics – with a half baked sausage roll and B.R`s best stew a lé thé. He jumps on another European excursion and leaves us with a poem.

Aerial Combat Poem from Crossed Fingers.

"My Sky is the best sky,

There ain`t no sky like my sky,

If you lay just one finger on my sky,

I’ll blow you right out of your sky.

When skies are blue,

I cross my fingers,

And think of you. "

All poems: © Milton

© 1985 Rob Deacon/Sweatbox Records   taken without permission

thanks to Roger F.

Back to Press