Alan Moore: Conversations

The Mustard Interview: Alan Moore

182 The Mustard Interview: Alan Moore ALEX MUSSON AND ANDREW O’NEILL / 2009 Mustard 2.4 (March 2009): 14–21, 28–34. Reprinted by permission of Alex Musson, editor, Mustard Magazine. The below is nearly the complete Mustard interview, which spliced together a 2005 and a 2009 conversation. Edited out are some brief sidebars wherein Moore talks about some of his older work, mostly covered in greater detail elsewhere in this book. EB Alan Moore sinks into a chair behind the coffee table in his home, an unassuming terraced house in Northampton. Bookshelves, tables, and parts of the floor overflow with impressive looking volumes and occult paraphernalia. Comparatively, the kitchen—into which we follow him, tape recorder in hand, at several points during the afternoon—is like any you would come across in Midlands suburbia. Moore himself is a similar contradiction. He cuts an imposing Rasputin-like figure, impressive of hair and beard, with snake walking cane and skull-ringed fingers, but his manner is extremely warm, and his Northampton accent belies a massive intellect. And boy, can he talk . . . Q: Do you see humour primarily as a tool for developing character, as comic relief, or simply for its own sake? A: I see it as an invaluable tool, as all of them are. It’s one of the notes on the piano that I’ve got to play on. If you’ve had a really horrific scene, then to strike a note of humour at exactly the right point without diffusing the horror can give it an entirely new contrast. I mean, some things I like to do just for their own sake. Just because I think they’re funny. Jack B. Quick is the thing which, since Bojeffries, made me laugh the most when I was writing it. There’s a story called, “I, Robert” where he comes up with an artificial intelligence which is just a scarecrow, a tape-recorder, and some junk in a wheelbarrow. But it passes the Turing test authentically. So alex musson and andrew o’neill / 2009 183 these things are mass-produced all over the world and eventually take over. Even though they’re just a scarecrow. So, eventually Jack comes up with the solution as to how to overthrow the robots—the “Roberts”—which is: “If we just stop pushing the wheelbarrows . . . they’ll be helpless.” When I wrote it, I thought, “Actually, I’ve just said something profound there.” Probably the answer to all mankind’s technological problems. If we just stop pushing the wheelbarrows, they’ll be helpless. In some instances, I just want to do comedy for its own sake, but comedy that makes people think about ideas in a different way. But most things benefit from a little touch of comedy here and there. Except perhaps funerals. Wait, no! I went and did the reading at my great friend Tom Hall’s funeral. One of the finest musicians Northampton’s ever produced. The best funeral I’ve ever been to, and I got some great jokes into my reading. There was another guy I knew that ran a local heating company, The Dimmer Brothers. At the end of his funeral, his brother said, “Trevor chose this piece of music because he wanted to be remembered for his contributions to the plumbing and heating industry.” And, as they went out of the church, they were playing Rawhide, because he was a cowboy. Everybody was walking out of the church laughing and weeping. That’s gotta work. Everything benefits from a bit of humour. I mean, this is probably a bad thing to say to someone from a comedy magazine, but I don’t like genre. I think that genre was something made up by some spotty clerk in W. H. Smith’s in the 1920s to make his worthless fucking job a little bit easier for him. “It’d be easier if these books said what they were about on the spine.” My experience of life is that it is not divided up into genres. It’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction, cowboy , detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you’re lucky. In the novel I’m writing, Jerusalem, there’s an awful lot of funny stuff, and there’s supernatural stuff. There’s stuff in the prologue that’s as good as Stephen King, and it’s just a description of walking through a block of flats...