RUPERT HINE: Hine-Sight [1981]

Text by Julia Masi / FFanzeen, 1981 / 2020
Images from the Internet

RUPERT HINE: Hine-Sight [1981 Interview]

This interview with Rupert Hine was written by Julia Masi, and was originally printed in FFanzeen Number 8, dated 1981. Rupert Hine died recently on June 4, 2020. Along with his own material, he always produced worked by the likes of Rush, Saga, The Fixx, The Waterboys, Tina Turner, Howard Jones, Chris De Burgh, Thompson Twins, Stevie Nicks, Bob Geldof, and so many others. – RBF, 2020.

 

In his effort to “avoid the usual,” Rupert Hine tries to experience situations from both sides. At an interview, he insists upon pointing a loaded Super-8 sound movie camera at an innocent FFanzeen reporter and firing off a few cliché questions. After thoroughly interrogating her, in a whisper-soft English accent that’ll make any kid from Brooklyn crack and spill her guts, he agrees to discuss his career.

Rupert Hine started out in the business as a singer/songwriter, “just before the war,” though he’s not saying which. He captured the spotlight briefly with the British band Quantum Jump in the mid-‘70s, then went on to producing people like Yvonne Elliman, “in her more adventurous days, before she was Stigwood-ized.” These days, Hine owns and operates his own recording studio where he recorded Immunity, the A&M album that re-establishes his singing and composing career.

With a sound that is sort of aesthetic, esoteric, bordering on science fiction but not exactly electronic, he is trying to shock us out of our apathy.

“It’s not immediate music,” he says, his grey eyes fixed in an intense stare. “it’s not immediately accessible.” It is also, at this point, undefinable – even by its creator.

“It’s the categorization of music that has kept it so backwards and prevented more adventurous, spirited music from coming through.”

He admits that when he set out to make the album, he was not thinking in terms of a hit single or a particular market of sales. He believes that you shouldn’t “actually do anything musically unless you’re committed to the music.” In this case, the music is presenting something powerful enough to affect the listener, “not necessarily pleasantly,” in the same way as film.

“It doesn’t worry me that I might be disturbing, provided it has some reason – provided it isn’t angular sound for the sake of it, which is also something which we have experienced in the past couple of years with punk and New Wave music.” Hine was both exhilarated and disturbed. Although he was happy to see a rebellion against music’s “mega-stars” and record company bureaucracy, Hine was worried that independent record companies might think it meant that “anybody could make a record.

“I heard a lot of anti-reaction from old wavers, obviously, saying “Good God! Listen to that racket! These guys just obviously can’t play.” And I can remember when my father said that to me when I was playing the Rolling Stones’ records. Here was proof that the next generation was coming up, because contemporaries of mine were putting this music down.

“I went through a short period where I found it difficult to take. And realizing that, in hearing all these comments, everybody had lost focus. What was apparently happening was the very thing I was speaking about, that musical ideas were what was important and the craft and all that bullshit didn’t count. If you have something to communicate, something worth saying, that was important. If guitars were out of tune or anything else, that was not important. The spirit was really committed. They knew what they wanted to say and they were saying it.”

 

Hine is very much in tune when he plays. There are few three-minute songs on his album. Most are longer and, at times, it seems that all the songs on the album run into each other. The main theme running through the album is, “fear and/or fearlessness.” He is trying to wake us up to our surroundings with songs like “Psycho Surrender” that has a solo made out of a yawn, “Samara,” which is laced with traffic sounds, and “Controlled Voltage,” to give it a rhythmic feel; they are dually humorous and profound.

Hine describes his songs as “a series of actualities. Each track represents a fairly specific idea.” The music is very effective, although sometimes elusive; it can be the audio of a horror film or the bells ringing in the ears of your subconscious, but it’s definitely not Top-20 material.

Hine wouldn’t be surprised if his music was shunned by American radio stations. And he is only minimally concerned with the business impact of his record. “At least I’ve gone out on something I believe in.”