Video-meetings… Most of us have learned to live with them. Still, they remain a pain original to the 2020’s… But – just occasionally – they accidentally add a whole new dimension to a conversation. When we were granted the honour to talk to Craig Leon, his side of the video call had a backdrop of the Northern Lights. Leon had put the footage there for a previous business meeting and hadn’t since found a way to make it disappear. So, during our conversation, green swarms of light flash around Leon’s head, now and then threatening to make him disappear in this self-created nebula. Also: whenever Leon wants to show us something in his office space – a guitar that was owned by John Fahey, a Moog synthesizer, … – he points his finger into space, to quickly realise “You won’t be able to see it anyway.”

The scenery only adds to the enigma of Leon, who devoted a good part of his musical life to creating his ‘Anthology of Interplanetary Folk Music’ in three volumes, the third of which will appear in early 2026. The other parts of his career were devoted to helping shape the history of 1970’s New York – discovering and/or producing Suicide, Ramones, Talking Heads, Blondie – and in ‘classical music’, albeit Leon dislikes that term profoundly.

As an A&R responsible for Sire records, you scouted Ramones. You also produced their debut album. I recently heard somebody say he was disappointed when he first heard Ramones’ debut album, since he knew the much faster versions from their later live record ‘Loco Live’. So, I have to ask: were you responsible for the slower versions on the record?

I first must say it’s wrong to say that I discovered Ramones. The mechanics of their “discovery” is bullshit, mainly, made up for publicity. Journalists had already drawn attention to them in New York and actually it was Danny Fields and, independently, Lisa Robinson and Paul Nelson, who discovered them. But when I first ran into them very early on, they had just started learning how to play. I thought they were tremendously funny, and I thought other people would also like that. That first record was incredibly fast for the time, but I didn’t restrict the tempo. In the nineties, they had been playing for a long time, so they had it down and played much faster.

So, they did speed up along the years?

Yeah. I thought their sound was so unique, that I wanted to have their vision established. And that’s what we tried to do: establishing a unique sound for them, that was a conglomeration of the different things the band members wanted to be. Tommy, the drummer, was the spokesperson for the band, and he wanted them to be a commercial band – Bon Jovi-style, I guess. And he thought they were fully capable of having hits. And I thought: “Yeah let’s have a hit with ‘Beat on the Brat’, haha”. Johnny, the guitar player wanted to make a heavier record, and Deedee, the bass player wanted a lot of activity, he probably wanted to play faster. The singer, Joey, wanted them to be a pop band like Bay City Rollers or Herman’s Hermits. I added some old Beatles-tricks to that. But I think we did a pretty good job of capturing all of that, in a time where that was exactly not in fashion. It was so out of fashion, it was unbelievable.

So, with Ramones, you were the kind of producer that just accommodated what they wanted?

Or I found ways to do what they wanted. There’s a couple of arranged things on the ‘Ramones’ record. And there’s a lot of studio technology in it. It’s very much a studio record: it’s not the myth that everybody showed up and played and we hung up a microphone and they recorded. We took a concept of what all of them collectively wanted to do and made them an identity that they could build on in the future. And they were convinced that ‘I Don’t Want to Go Down to the Basement’ was certainly going to be number one – I really liked that conviction of theirs. And I’m pretty sure that under a different set of circumstances, they could have had their hit. But it took a fortune to get a hit back in the day, and the label certainly wasn’t going to spend that for ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’.

Alan and Marty

Another band that you produced was Suicide. Would you say your musical influence was a bit bigger with them – adding the dubby sound to what they were doing at the time?

I never was the kind of producer like Phil Spector or Brian Wilson who dictated what was going to happen on a record. The artists that I worked with in that period all had something important to say – and they were funny as well, that counted too. But Suicide was the first band I saw in New York that I wanted to sign. I was supposed to go and scout a band for a label – a bad imitation glam rock band. Instead, I wrote a glowing report about the opening act, Suicide: “I want to sign this band called Suicide. There are no guitars, no bass, and they’re going to be the future of music!” Their answer was, basically: “There’s the door, don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

So, I went to Sire Records and convinced them of signing Suicide. What I brought to Suicide was some more technology, building on their own technology. I think what drew me to them was my love for the synth music that was coming from Germany in the seventies. So, I brought a bit of that to them, although Marty Rev was well-read and knew a lot of stuff. Alan Vega brought in rockabilly and Elvis Presley and the delayed echo stuff. I increased some of those delays, with what I knew from working with a guy named Lee Perry and Bob Marley, in Jamaica a year or two before that.

Suicide’s live sets are quite legendary. Their show in Brussels, that’s immortalised as ‘23 Minutes Over Brussels’, famously ended in riots.

They were very confrontational with the audience. When I first saw them, Alan Vega was swinging motorcycle chains, hitting pretty close to the heads of the three people in the front row – myself included. He was looking absolutely fierce, banging down on the tables, shaking things up. And I guess in Brussels – I have the poster hanging here somewhere – they had people throwing stuff back at them.

Was that sense of danger present when you worked with them in the studio?

No, they were completely professional. The thing was: they wanted to show the danger of living in New York with their music. And at that time, it was dangerous there.

I have a weak spot for musical moments when the underground and mainstream touch each other. I know Suicide’s ‘Dream Baby Dream’ isn’t a production of yours – it’s from the second album, produced by Ric Ocasek – but Bruce Springsteen’s cover of that song always strikes me as an absolute victory of underground beauty.

Well, Bruce was very underground at the time, he was a part of the New York folk scene. I remember him playing Max’s Kansas City for a week, with about ten people a night attending. And how’s this for a double bill: Bruce Springsteen and Bob Marley at Max’s Kansas City in 1973? That happened. I see that type of visceral rock-‘n’-roll as a real form of folk music. And I’m a fanatic about folk music, as you could probably tell from my ‘Anthology of Interplanetary Folk Music’, being a homage to Harry Smith…

‘State Trooper’ on Springsteen’s ‘Nebraska’ record is almost like acoustic Suicide, completely with screams that could’ve been Alan Vega’s…

‘Nebraska’ is one of the best folk records ever made.

Lee and Bob

You just casually mentioned working with Lee Perry and Bob Marley, as if it were the most random thing.

Well, I worked at Sire, and did a lot of records for them, before the ‘Ramones’ record. One of the artists that was on Sire, was a wonderful lady named Martha Veléz. She had been in the original production of ‘Hair’, the musical in New York. And Seymour Stein of Sire really believed in her. He set her up with tremendous backing bands, that really didn’t do her a favour. For her debut, she wanted to do a blues-oriented album, and Stein put together a band with Mitch Mitchell from the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce… And Martha was good, but they were better. For another record of hers, the Van Morrison Band And Street Choir was her band. So, one day she walked into my office and played me a 45’ with Johnny Nash’s version of ‘Stir It Up’, which was a bit of a hit in America. So, I told her I knew the composer on the label, B. Marley: “If you want a reggae band, The Wailers will do the real thing…” (laughs)

Now, Bob Marley and the Wailers used to make their earliest records at Criteria in Miami, one of the studios where I first worked. They weren’t a big deal in the day; they hadn’t broken in America yet. So, Bob came to the office one day, and asked me “Is this girl from the islands? She’s not American, is she?” Which was funny, because Marley was half American himself. I told him she was from Puerto Rico, and he agreed to do the record, together with me.

They took about three or four months, I think. I’m pretty bad with time, especially on that record, because the joints we smoked were like the size of trees… I wasn’t with them in Jamaica for that whole period, though, I got more involved when we did the mixes in New York. The Wailers did about two days’ worth of recording, and about three months of playing football and smoking pot. (chuckles)

The only commentary Bob had on the mixing that we were doing was “More bass.” Coming from Florida, I could do that: it’s the same thing as in Jamaica, I always get as much bottom end as I can – I still do. Bob used that record to try things out for the Wailers, so it’s got early versions of songs like ‘Get Up, Stand Up’. But it ended up as another case in which the band overshadowed Martha.

What was the role of Lee Perry in making that record?

Lee Perry did about a day’s worth of percussion, that was his way of producing: walking around in the studio, shaking things, and then deciding which one worked. He was great. I have some good Lee Perry Stories…

Ok, one more for the Belgian readers. In the early nineties you produced ‘06:21:03:11 Up Evil’, by Front 242.

Jean-Luc (De Meyer) and Patrick (Codenys)!

To me they feel like the ultimate self-producing band.

Yeah, they were that. But they were making a record for their American record label, and they wanted help with the vocals, to make sure their lyrics were understood in America. So Cassell and I produced the vocals for that record. And of course, I got involved in making it sound a little bit heavier, which wasn’t too difficult with them – they were brilliant. They had engaged a ‘secret weapon’ at the time: a young guy – one of the Pauly brothers of the Belgian band Parade Ground – for writing the lyrics. Daniel (Bressanutti) believed that he would help Front 242 to conquer the American music market, but the guy barely spoke any English. So, he would come up to us the whole time, asking stuff like “Can I say ‘I’m gonna hit you with my blunderbuss of love’?” (laughs loudly)
In fact, there’s another very rare record, that’s a spinoff of Front 242, called Cobalt 60 that Jean-Luc did with a fellow from France, that I worked on. That’s a really good record, if you find it you should buy it.

We’ve talked about quite a few productions now, and you’ve downplayed your role in each one of them.

Well, I always do, because I don’t want to take over. I actually do a lot more, but I don’t want to be one of these guys boasting ‘I did this’. George Martin was a mentor of mine, and he was the same way. If you would’ve asked him, he would’ve answered he didn’t add anything to the Beatles’ music and he added a hell of a lot. That’s all stuff that was produced when I was younger, but there’s probably recent things that are really well-produced, but what I’ve heard isn’t. But that’s just me being an old guy probably.

Well, I recently watched an interview you did for Red Bull Academy, from nine years ago. At the end of the interview, there’s a young man from Antwerp, Roman Hiele, who asked you a question about Harry Partch. Roman has made some beautiful records since, maybe you should try those.

Oh, I’m curious, I’ll look them up and get them. Good guy… It was great that he was talking about Harry Partch… I loved those young people there. We wanted to organise a spontaneous composition with all of them, but they didn’t have the facilities to organise it, so it ended up like a 1967 San Francisco band jam with electronic instruments.

Anthology of Interplanetary Folk Music

Time to talk about your own music and the ‘Anthology of Interplanetary Folk Music’. ‘Nommos’, the first record in the series, was released in 1981 on John Fahey’s Takoma label.

I have one of his guitars lying around here somewhere… (points his finger to the Northern Lights) But you can’t see it anyway. My friend Denny Bruce, who was one of the original drummers in The Mothers of Invention, ran Takoma records with John, mainly for John’s own music, but they also released things that he liked. And he didn’t only release guitar records, he’d release synth records occasionally, too, by Joseph Byrd or Beaver & Krause. Actually, there’s early records where Fahey is using all kinds of musique concrete. So, he was very experimental and into synthesizers.

One day he had commissioned a synth record, by a guy who had just bought a Fairlight synth, which was new at the time. But when that artist decided he couldn’t do it, Fahey had already told their distributor they had a synth record coming up. So, he asked me if I had any ideas, and I told him I had this one about the music from another planet. And since John was a big fan of Harry Smith’s ‘Anthology of American Folk Music’, we decided to call it ‘The Anthology of Interplanetary Folk Music’.

Listening back to ‘Nommos’, part one of that Anthology, it strikes me how foreboding of new music it was. I’m pretty sure you can still get a dance party started, if you play it loud enough.

It’s very much an amalgamation of what was coming, yeah. I wasn’t trying to do anything that innovative, though. I just wanted to create a mythological folk music. In 1973 Cassell and I saw an exhibition with works of art by the Dogon, a tribe from Northern Africa, near Timbuktu. All their art was basically the same: representations of elongated figures, the Nommos, that they believed came from space to teach them how to grow crops and build things… Each and every image they made, had a Nommos in it.

The only other imagery they had, was a depiction of the star system, where those aliens were supposed to have travelled from. I had this idea that I should make a record, not of the Dogon’s music, but a record based on the musical system that the big, long guys had on their planet. So, I made folk music from another planet, and I figured I’d have to take the earliest things that we know from African rhythm and the pentatonic or even four-tone scales from that part of the world. So basically, I made the music that those guys would’ve had playing on their walkmans.

Did you know what the actual music of the Dogon tribe sounded like, at the time?

I didn’t know it then, but I found out later it doesn’t sound too far away from what I came up with. But I guess, if you get primitive enough, it all goes back to the roots. When the reissue of that album came out, the cultural department of the government of Mali started following me on Twitter by the way, reposting ‘Nommos’ and stuff.

Next year you will be releasing Volume III of the trilogy.

Yes, it has only taken me forty years. (chuckles)

Do you still have the visiting aliens in mind when composing?

No, this one, titled ‘Nyphos’ is different. The first album shows pretty much the root of what’s going on with the principles of the Dogon, that were supposedly taught to them by the Nommos. Their philosophical beliefs and a lot of their building principles are actually very close to those of ancient Egypt. The second album – ‘The Canon’ – shows a progression of that, being adapted in an earthlier music, that still has a concept that was originally done by the aliens.

The third album is the most earthly of the three and will probably be the hardest to listen to. One side contains the most rhythmic music of the trilogy. The other side has no rhythm at all. It’s a very introspective record, which has more to do with inner alchemy: it evokes ways to be more introspective, to try and get some of the principles that are more philosophically larger in the old tradition.

Would you say that the concept of the trilogy is like your vehicle to do Craig Leon-music? Like the story is worth continuing?

I do other music too, of course. But the trilogy is worth continuing because it shows a development. All three records are in fact one long album. So, if there was ever going to be a Nommos-festival, it would take Wagnerian proportions and go on for four days. (laughs)

When you played Summer Bummer in 2018, the second part of the trilogy had just come out. How will your set be different this time?

I’ll play with Cassell again. We’ll play some of the pieces from the third volume, but not the whole thing. Part of the show will be some of the older material, but different pieces than those we played in 2018.

So, you won’t bring strings?

No, this third part of the trilogy is very orchestral, but it needs a whole lot more than just a string quartet. Plus, to optimise its impact, we’d need spatial audio as well.

Most acts on Summer Bummer will be playing improvised sets. I suppose your set will be pretty much composed?

If we want the visual, we have to work with a locked backing track, to keep the thing in rhythm, to be able to go with the video. But I don’t mind doing something improvised. I did some great duo shows with Marty Rev (from Suicide), where a lot of improvisation was involved. And a year ago I did one with Alex Paterson from The Orb as well. I saw there was a band called The Art Ensemble of Brussels programmed, which sounds like something I’d like to jam with.

You mentioned earlier you have a lot of Lee Perry stories. I guess I can’t let you go without hearing one.

Well, many years after I first worked with Lee, a UK-based reggae artist wanted Lee Perry and me to produce him. We didn’t have much interest in the project but decided to check it out anyway. So, on a cold December morning, I heard a car honking in front of my London house. It was Lee, coming to pick me up. He had a driver in an open-topped jeep, and he sat in the back, raised up on a wicker throne, dressed in a completely authentic shaman’s costume complete with a spear and a shrunken head on a stick.

I got to ride ‘shotgun’ up front with the driver, but it was still open top – freezing! Luckily, we got down to Soho fast and without causing too much commotion. We went into the meeting and found a well-meaning A&R guy who obviously didn’t know much about reggae and an artist who didn’t either. So, our already low interest in the project went down to pretty much zero. The meeting ended with Lee waving the shrunken head at the A&R guy and the terrified artist, asking loudly “Does your label pay royalties? You’d better. I tell you why. You see… this is the head of Chris Blackwell (Island Records, sb). He did not pay me the correct royalties.” We got out of there with no problem – no idea who the artist was or if they ever made the record.

Thanks for that. And let’s smoke a tree on Summer Bummer, in honour of Lee.