Interview with David J Haskins about grief memory and poetry across decades

Transmission 202: Interview with David J

David J Haskins has spent the past four decades moving along the outer edges of popular music, literature, and performance. As co-founder of Bauhaus and Love and Rockets, he helped shape post-punk’s darker undercurrents, but his solo work has often moved in more introspective directions—toward the esoteric and the devotional. His latest release pairs a spoken-word album, The Mother Tree, with a poetry collection, Rhapsody, Threnody & Prayer, issued by Erototox Decodings and Fonograph Media. For these projects, Haskins uses his full name—a deliberate decision he describes as marking “my most personal work yet.” The two works were conceived as parallel expressions: one recorded in Los Angeles with members of RAQIA and percussionist Brad Dutz, the other composed over decades with minimal revision.

Title: The Mother Tree
Artist: David J Haskins
Release Date: 2025-06-06
Genres: Art Rock, Avant-garde, Experimental Music
Label: Erototox Decodings, Fonograph Media
Description: Interview with David J Haskins about The Mother Tree and Rhapsody Threnody and Prayer, out now on Erototox and Fonograph Media.

The album centers on texts written in response to key life events, including his mother’s death in 1997, while the book collects poems that span from the late 1970s to the present. Several pieces pay tribute to cultural figures such as Mark Linkous, Ian Curtis, and Kurt Cobain, with Haskins favouring an intuitive structure over editorial polish. “There weren’t that many poems excluded… the ones left out were excluded because I didn’t particularly care for them,” he explained. These works follow Tracks from the Attic, a triple LP of archival cassette demos restored and released by Independent Project Records. A follow-up titled Tracks from the Attic Revisited—featuring ten of those songs fully re-recorded with a full band—is due later this year, part of a backlog of completed albums Haskins has lined up for future release.

What made you decide to present The Mother Tree and Rhapsody, Threnody & Prayer as interconnected works, rather than treating them as separate entities?

Well, I’d always had it in the back of my mind to one day publish a poetry book. These poems have been collected over decades, going back to the 70s. The earliest poems were written when I was 21, in 78, 79. And it goes right up to a couple of weeks ago because I came up with a poem when the book was actually going to the printers. I just had this moment of inspiration, like, “Oh, I really want this poem to be in it.” They got it in at the 11th hour. I know this is a rather circuitous way of answering your question, but I’m getting to it. Anyway, finally, this poetry book exists. Another thing I had in the back of my mind was to make an album exclusively of spoken word with music. I’ve always had odd tracks on the albums, going right back to the first one, 1983, Etiquette of Violence, where I had a spoken word track with music—but not a whole album of that. And that finally came together. So these things were just sort of coming together at the same time. It was perfect, really—the idea of releasing them through the same auspices, which is the Erototox label. It just makes a nice package for the two to be simultaneously released.

Did you initially imagine The Mother Tree as a spoken-word record, or did that direction emerge as the texts came into focus?

Actually, that was written as a poem. It just came out of me when my mother passed in 1997. It was a very emotional, visceral response to that big life moment. I wrote most of the poem in three days after she died. Then I put it aside. When I received her ashes and finally released those ashes into a very special place, I could complete the poem. I talk about that whole process in the poem. That is the poem, The Mother Tree.

How long did you spend sequencing the order of the texts in the book—did the structure shift over time?

The book was pretty much written in one flow, and I didn’t alter that too much. A tweak here, a tweak there, but it really is as it came to me and as I put it on the page. So very, very little in the way of editing there.

Were there poems that you deliberately excluded from this volume, and if so, what criteria guided that decision?

As far as writing poetry goes, I’m not that prolific. My energy tends to be focused on lyrics much more so. Poetry is a bit of a sideline for me when it comes up. There weren’t that many poems excluded, and the ones left out were excluded because I didn’t particularly care for them. But as I say, very little was left out.

Did you consider including photographs or artifacts in the book from events narrated in the poems?

No. That was suggested to me a couple of times by different people. But I wanted the focus to be purely on the words, with no distractions from that.

Did you write any of the tribute poems (e.g., for Ian Curtis, Kurt Cobain) immediately after their deaths, or were they composed much later from memory?

Later on. The only one that was written right after the passing was Mark Linkous from Sparklehorse. We had a mutual friend, a drummer I was working with, and through him I was invited to go down South and shoot with Mark. He had a collection of guns—not for shooting animals, just shooting clay pigeons or beer cans. But I declined because I had some touring and couldn’t do it. Shortly after that, he shot himself. I was really shocked when I heard the news. I’ve always loved Sparklehorse—such beautiful, poetic music. I saw them play once in L.A., and it was very magical. He had these bouquets of flowers, and the mic was buried in the bouquet. So whenever he was singing, he was sticking his face into this big bunch of flowers. That stayed with me. I refer to that in the last line of the poem.

Were there writers or visual artists that you found yourself mentally returning to while writing this book?

Not specifically, but I have my favorites, and they’re always there—these ghosts gathered around behind me. I feel their presence: Rimbaud, Arthur Rimbaud, and Baudelaire. Neruda is probably my favorite poet. Lorca, Dylan Thomas. Yeah, that gang.

What led you to bring in members of RAQIA specifically, rather than longtime collaborators or solo instrumentation?

RAQIA—that came about by chance. It was pure serendipity. I bumped into an old friend of mine, Nora Keyes, and got chatting with her. She’s a musician I’ve worked with in the past. I asked her what she was doing, and she said, “I’ve got a new duo, and we’re playing tomorrow night in this little place downtown.” She said, “If you can make it, come down.” So I did—I went down there to see Nora. She was in the middle of three acts. I saw her set—very good. I was just nursing a little drink while the next band was setting up. I thought, “I’ll finish my drink and watch their first song,” with the intention of leaving. But they really captured my imagination. They were brilliant. I was enraptured. It was all instrumental music, and halfway through their set, it occurred to me that this could really work as the accompaniment to my spoken word—and maybe beyond that, maybe songs. With that idea in mind, I approached them at the end of their set and asked if they’d be into doing this. And they were. So within a couple of days, we were in the studio recording The Mother Tree. Very spontaneous.

Can you recall the first piece of music that truly unsettled or fascinated you enough to make you think about creating your own?

Oh, hmm. Well, yeah, that would probably be T. Rex, going way back. That period—Hot Love, the single, Get It On. That band was huge for me when I was 14, so that was very influential and inspiring. And then, of course, Bowie came along. The first album I got by Bowie was Hunky Dory, so I was into it a little before Ziggy Stardust. But when Ziggy Stardust happened, that was an explosion—a really galvanizing experience, and all very inspiring. Yeah, so those are the real seminal influences.

What kind of records or environments surrounded you as a child—was music something that came from inside the house, or from outside?

Well, my parents had a limited music collection. They had vinyl, and my dad had a collection of eight-tracks that he would play in the car. I remember from that period he had Bread, and I liked them. Later on, I recorded a version of their song The Guitar Man with Dave Navarro featured on it, years later. Aside from that, they had Frank Sinatra, the crooners—Johnny Mathis, things like that. They were into Burt Bacharach, which I really liked. Dionne Warwick, Django Reinhardt. But it was a small record collection. Aside from that, it was just the radio—Radio One, until Radio Luxembourg happened. That was like a pirate station. I used to listen on my little transistor radio under the bedsheets at night with a torch, because it was late at night. That was very magical. It was like being privy to this underworld. Some of that music just seeped into my consciousness and has remained there ever since. This would be the 60s—late 60s, early 70s. Late 60s, like The Move and The Kinks. Psychedelic music. Flowers in the Rain and things like that. Psychedelia has always been a love of mine, and it goes back to that time.

Was there ever a point in your youth where you considered not pursuing any kind of art at all?

For a while, I was laboring under the delusion that I could become a professional football player. That was inspired by George Best—Georgie Best—who was my hero. I was fortunate enough to see him play a couple of times. I loved football. I was very caught up in that. Then I broke my leg really badly playing football. I broke my ankle, my leg, and tore my cartilage. This guy did a flying tackle, both feet in the air. It was so bad—I didn’t realize this until afterward because they didn’t tell me—but I could have ended up with one leg a foot shorter than the other. Fortunately, that didn’t happen. But I was laid up in the hospital for a long time. And this actually ties in with your previous question and my previous answer. There was a moment—I remember it so distinctly. I was in a shared ward in Northamptonshire, in the middle of the afternoon. All these guys, much older than me, in their beds. There were about 10 beds there. It was a sunny day, shafts of light coming in, and I remember all these dust motes floating. I was on some painkillers, so I was in a bit of an altered state of consciousness. They had Radio One playing, and this record came on—Hot Love by T. Rex. It was their new single, just released, the first time I heard it. I was utterly transported to this magical place. And it was like, in that moment, I made the switch from wanting to be Georgie Best to wanting to be Marc Bolan.

Is there any medium you still want to work in but haven’t yet?

I can’t think of anything, because I’ve worked in theatre, which I love. I’ve worked with film, photography, I’m really into painting, collage. There’s nothing I haven’t dabbled in, really. So no, I just like to hone my skills in all of those areas and get better. There’s always room for improvement.

Next projects?

Ah, well, there are multiple albums. I’ve got about eight finished albums in the can. Some of these are collaborations, some are solo. They’re all stacked up, and I’ve got deals for most of them. So I’m working out a release schedule, which is kind of hard to plan because there are so many—it goes out about three years hence. I’ve been very prolific, more so than usual. The next one, after this spoken word record, is quite an interesting project. My last release—I don’t know if you’re familiar with this—was a collection of old demos. These were cassette demos that were remastered, digitized, and processed, and released as a three-vinyl album set on Independent Project Records. It was a very deluxe presentation—really an art piece, you could say. They approached me asking if I had anything in the area of demos, lo-fi, unreleased material that went back decades. And I said, yes, I have all of that. Funnily enough, they’d just been digitized by a friend of mine in Hungary who volunteered to do this Herculean task. I had all these tracks, and they liked them to such a degree that they wanted to release most of them. So that’s why there are three albums. It’s done quite well—surprisingly to me. It’s being played on the radio. These are just me with an acoustic guitar or a piano, bashing out these demos. They were really just notation for myself. I never intended for them to be released or even heard by anybody. But here we are. There’s also a super deluxe set that contains, in each copy, one of the original cassettes. So they’re all different—it’s one of my cassettes, nicely packaged in a little box. The next release—this album we just finished—is where I’ve gone back in and selected ten of those tracks and made them fully realized, with a full band and full production. That will be the next record. The album that was released was called Tracks from the Attic, and this one will be Tracks from the Attic Revisited. That’ll be the next, and it’ll come out in the autumn.

Photos courtesy of David J. Haskins

Matteo Damiani

Matteo Damiani is an Italian photographer and author. Curator of the sites Retrofuturista.com; weirditaly.com; china-underground.com and others