Greta Brinkman interview

Women bassists are cropping up everywhere - Paul Weller, Robbie Williams, David Bowie, Crispian Mills, Mike Oldfield, Tricky and a host of others are relying on the talents and grooves of the fairer sex. The almost two year long tour that has followed the release of Moby's Play album has seen New Yorker Greta Brinkman holding down the low end and bouncing round the stage with a loping dance not too far from that favoured by Anthrax axe-wielder, Scott 'Not' Ian! Steve Lawson hears how this unreconstructed rocker ended up with the biggest dance music gig on the planet.

Greta's introduction to bass was unconventional to say the least, "When I was 16 I moved into a rooming house where someone had left a bass guitar behind' remembers Greta, "a homemade piece of junk, carved out of one piece of wood, really badly put together."

Despite being right handed, the shittiness of that first bass caused her to play left handed, "The action was so bad that I couldn't fret it with my left hand," she says, laughing at the memory. "So I flipped it over and learned left handed, upside down, which freaks some people out. If I had to do it again I don't think I do it again 'cos techniques like slap and pop, and some chordal ideas are pretty much impossible."

Growing up playing in Punk bands and listening to English groups like The Cure, Joy Division and The Stranglers, it's amazing that Greta never ended up a plectrum-thumping punk.

"I never could play with a pick," she confesses, "although I did learn to play listening to pick players in bands like The Ramones and The Cure - Simon Gallup's bass lines still sound great today. Right around then - 79-80, the English music scene had it all over the American scene, all the music that blew my mind was English - Ultravox, The Stranglers, The Sex Pistols, The Cure and Joy Division.

The issue of being a woman on bass fortunately didn't rear its head until many years later, as she explains, "At that time, there was this shining moment in American DIY music when everybody was in their own bands, driving around in the back of a beat-up van and putting on shows in their basement. And every band had at least one woman in, it seemed, it was no big deal. It wasn't until the late 1980s when everything went testosterone-mad that the scene became hostile towards women, but in the early to mid 1980s there was a time when it was great for women." A solid theory, borne out in the list of high profile women bassists around at that time - Tina Weymouth of Talking Heads, Kira from Black Flag, Kim Deal of the Pixies, Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth. Though, strangely, Greta wasn't too aware of the whole 'woman bassist' tag:"When I started I was in a small town in Pennsylvania, and had no frame of reference for things like that. It was just that I had a bass and could play in a punk band, I didn't think about role models too much."

After punk, Ms Brinkman's music took a quantum leap forward to, er, rock... "To tell the truth," Greta says, leaning forward as if to emphasize what's coming, "I've always been a rock bassist and probably always will be. Different types of music resonate with different people, and jazz or white boy funk do nothing for me, so it's not a problem that I can't play it. I love rock - punk got a little dull. Some of what we called 'math rock' in odd time signatures that we were doing in the 80s was great, but it was still rock first and foremost. Though strangely, at home I've always listened to all that early 80s new wave stuff."

The mid-80s drift from New Wave into computer-based dance music scared a lot of bassists, how did that affect Greta, "I wasn't that aware of it then," she says, pausing before elaborating, "like every musician, I go through long periods of inactivity and think about giving up and getting a proper job, but it seems to me that it's only in the last 5 years with ProTools and such like that musicians are genuinely threatened. But having said that, it does seem to be swinging back again - there's only so much a computer can do..."

And there are always artists around who will blend live musicians and technology. Like Moby, for instance, where the band are often doubling the parts on the backing tracks, with Greta's bass an octave up from the subsonic synth bass, adding a breadth to the sound and that all important live feel, "Yeah, on stage with Moby we do play to a Minidisc to get the sound of the album, and we're there almost as a flavour enhancer, and for the obvious visual element that having a band on stage adds."

But between the MINDISC tracks, the band do seem to have some fun, as evidenced by the inclusion in the Brixton Academy set of a very punky version of Led Zeppelin's The Immigrant Song. It seems the range of cover versions that can be dropped in at a moment's notice is pretty wide. "Sometimes we'll do his song Revolver from his 'Animal Rights' album, or Black Sabbath's Paranoid, or Walk This Way, or The End by The Doors. Moby's a very musical person - he plays keyboards, guitar, percussion. He's been mislabeled as a DJ, which is something he's not done for 15 years!"

Before Moby, Greta's biggest gig was with one of New York's most famous exports, Debra Harry, who she met through Debra's fellow Blondie-ite, Chris Stein, "I was in a hardcore band touring the States. Chris Stein was in Kansas, visiting William S Burroughs. Chris came to see my band playing in a two car garage miles from anywhere. We stayed in touch and in 1993 when Debbie Harry was going to England and didn't have a bassist, I jokingly offered to go, and he was like 'when can you be here?' I moved to New York, we toured for 4 weeks and I was hoping it would be like a real band, but Debbie was too busy doing everything else. Still, the move to New York was my time to get serious about music, to ditch the day job and make a go of it. It took three years to get people to take me seriously, and eventually I built up a client list of singer/songwriters for showcase gigs and some recording. And then Moby came along...

"I'd like to say it was because I'm so talented and well regarded, but it really was a case of who you know. I was friends with his old bassist, and his soundman and my husband had played percussion for him. So when Ali his old bassist called it a day, I was put forward. I went over the Moby's house to talk it over, and he'd already seen me play in local bands so knew I could do the job."

But as with every touring musician, Greta has things that she misses at home, "I do miss domestic stuff, and hanging out with the cat!" she laughs, before adding "But I do really enjoy being on the road, getting to go to places like Australia and Ireland. Irish audiences are so up for a great night out, unlike New York or London where the concert goers get very blase about seeing great music."

Sadly, despite some moves forward in the last couple of years, that misogyny in the music industry so prevalent in the late 80s and 90s is still there, "People sometimes ask me what it's like being a woman playing rock, and I usually answer that it's no shittier than being a woman in any other walk of life. I'm not going to whine, but it's hard to get taken seriously. The thing with this tour has been that while the Moby gigs are great, the radio shows that we've done have been with up to 20 bands like Limp Bizkit and Slipknot and so on, and I'll be the only woman playing an instrument in the entire show! And then back stage is just like the 80s with groupies who work in the sex industry - it's all so demeaning, with no positive female role models.

"It's sad and depressing for women in general. I just wish the sexes could try to understand each other a little better and get along, and I don't know what to do about that except try to be a positive role model as much as I can. I get a lot of e-mails from young girls who say that it was inspiring to see a woman on stage playing a real instrument, and some then go on to get guitar lessons, which means such a lot to me."

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