Diamanda Galás’ visceral music has always sought, through her own astonishing voice, to speak for the marginalised and oppressed. This began in the early 1980s with what became known as the Masque Of The Read Death trilogy of albums, a response to the stigmatisation and cruel treatment of the victims of the AIDS crisis, including her own brother, the playwright Philip-Dimitri Galás. Often based around interpretation of music from the blues, jazz, country and Byzantine traditions, her work, utterly sui generis and uncompromising, has gone on to explore the Armenian genocide and the dead of the First World War.
‘Free Among The Dead’, from The Divine Punishment, (1986)
I used Biblical texts because I was interested in the anatomy of a plague mentality. Some were from Leviticus, a book of laws which indicated how to separate the clean from the unclean. I had just seen the first person I’d known to have AIDS die in New York, and when I came back to San Francisco, I started working on the text of Psalm 88. It riveted me and shocked me because it starts out, “O Lord, God of my salvation, I have cried day and night before Thee, let my prayer come before Thee, incline Thine ear unto my prayer.” But then it says, “Free among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, whom Thou remembers no more, and they are cut off by Thy hand.”
Those verses within the Psalm terrified me. A lot of my work is concerned with the transition between life and death. By this, I do not mean anything spiritual, but the man who’s walking up the stairs to the gallows, this absolute dread – I seem to select works that address that death chamber and that particular fear.
I recorded half of The Divine Punishment in San Francisco using ring modulation and other processes on my voice, and played a very large grand piano and synclavier. I recorded ‘Free Among The Dead’ first, and then I went to London to do the second part with Dave Hunt. He’s definitely a person who believes in the first take.
It’s interesting you record in one take, because you’ve released a lot of ‘live’ albums but I feel that there’s not much of a delineation between them and the ‘studio’ records.
I’m very glad to hear that because there was one person who was saying, ‘oh my God, another live album’ and started to complain about all the songs I hadn’t recorded yet. Why don’t I send you all the songs I’ve performed and I haven’t recorded? How about that? You can be more depressed, you know? It’s just like, fuck off, you imbecile.
‘Blind Man’s Cry’ from Saint Of The Pit (1986)
Before he died, my brother handed me a book of French poets and I selected this one, Tristan Corbière’s ‘Blind Man’s Cry’. When you see the large eyes of someone who is powerless and knows that he can’t escape the cage he’s in… I will never forget that.
‘Blind Man’s Cry’ was especially shocking, because the words are so definitive of what I’m talking about. Corbière was deaf, and there is something interesting about a deaf poet writing ‘Blind Man’s Cry’, because he understands the concept of hopelessness. It is devastating – I say this because I think a poem must be devastating. It must say, ‘Diamanda, wake up. Wake up before it’s too late!’ This is why I do the poems I do, because they are like the dead offering me a hand. I really mean that. It’s why I like to work in the dark at night. I come downstairs in the dark, I have a purple light on and I start working. I find it really annoying to wake up in the morning and open the door and see happy people on the street. I have to slam it right away. It hurts my skin. When I talk to somebody who understands, I become someone different, because I can present myself as extroverted. When I get off the phone, I will go back to that other self. This poem is essentially saying, ‘I am nailed here and there is no sympathy, there is no empathy from anyone’. He’s asking death to hurry up and he’s begging the birds, the crows to come.
You Must Be Certain Of The Devil (1986)
I finished the first part of what became the Masque Of The Read Death trilogy and brought it home. That’s when my brother was very ill. My feelings towards my brother played a huge role in the second part, which ended up being less a book of laws and more of a cry. I chose poems that are incantational, desperate cries – I’m not saying that to be dramatic. I’m saying that because that’s what they are. They’re cries from the hole.
I don’t know whether at that juncture I determined there was going to be a third record, but I got the room temperature of the virus in the United States, because in London and Berlin, people would just laugh at me when I told them what I was working on. I generally didn’t discuss it because they would just laugh and laugh – these were straight musicians, it must be said. The reason that I worked with Erasure was because we understood each other politically. I wasn’t speaking to someone who put his hands over his ears and didn’t want to hear [music relating to AIDS], who was nauseated and thought of it as a kind of a faggot special interest group. A lot of these straight guys, they were such a pain in my ass to be around because they were cornier than a motherfucker – and some continue to be. It’s really curious to me how you can write so many songs about teardrops falling from the ceiling – it’s like, hey, buddy, okay, you suffered with this girl. How many songs do you have to fucking write to get over it? I can’t write material like that. I don’t want sympathy from anyone. It doesn’t really affect me, but it made it impossible for me to hang out with a lot of musicians. There are other things that are happening in the world. I’m not saying that one has to write political songs. I don’t even write political songs. They’re more and more psychological to start with and then they become political.
When I was in London I saw a particular emotional reaction among many people to the stigma of AIDS, to the idea of something being dangerous. I’m not complaining about it because the when you do work that you feel possessed by, you’re not losing time. If you do work that’s for somebody else and you’re mid-range about it, then it could be a waste of time. I have never felt that I had the time to waste. I, like a lot of Greeks, obsess about death every day. It’s in the genes. Death is in the genes.
‘See That My Grave Is Kept Clean’ from The Singer (1992)
My interpretation of ‘See That My Grave Is Kept Clean’ is ‘don’t add anything. Don’t spread rumours about imagined follies of mine or imagined transgressions of mine. Keep it clean, ma’am. Don’t fuck around.’ You don’t think about how to interpret a song like this. You just sit and it comes. I get right down the chord changes and I start. That song came very quickly. It is magnificent and you can see how it can work within an AIDS phenomenology because people die and then suddenly have no control over their legacy. Journals can be opened and I think of all the essays and letters I’ve written on my computer that I’m going to have to delete. And I just say, I don’t want to do it today, but when are you going to have time? There are so many things in my house alone that I’ve collected over many years. I’ve got to get rid of a lot of this stuff. What do I keep? Where do I send it?
To the dead person, the most painful thing would be having a relative, a mother for example, read journals that were composed from the bathhouse. Why the fuck would you want your mother to read that? I won’t get personal with it, but there was a time when that was a moment. And so that’s what that poem is about.
Vena Cava (1993)
This concerns a patient who is in hospital with AIDS, and that person has reached a level of depression that is unreadable and can be confused with AIDS dementia. It’s not possible to medically test for that until an autopsy, but doctors would make guesses. If you had something on your chart that said you had dementia, then you had no control. You had no say in those little investigations that doctors will do on a soon-to-be-dead corpse – spinal taps and so many invasive procedures. These can be done while the person is alone, in a delirium and defenceless. That is what this piece is about, because albeit it wasn’t discussed that much, I felt that it was imperative for a person’s friends to say, ‘no, he does not have dementia, he’s very depressed, and why wouldn’t he be?’ The fluorescent lights that never go off, the cold of the hospital, the nurses that keep waking him up and saying stupid things, and visitors that will say the wrong things. Now, about that I would always tell people, ‘go to the hospital. Yes, you may say the wrong thing, but the most important thing is for the person to remember that you were there, and that you love them’. Some people would say ‘hospitals aren’t my thing’. What the fuck are you talking about? You’re an activist, but hospitals aren’t your thing. You just fucking try me with that one. Come on! A lot of my work is about trying to seek a dignity for people in death, with the same voice I say that it is fatiguing to listen to parlour room romance stories. Yeah OK, he left, and he came back, and then he left again? Well that is really so far out. What can I fucking say?
‘Last Man Down’ from This Sporting Life (1994)
I discovered how amazingly John Paul Jones performed the lap steel. And I said, ‘what? You play like that and you haven’t considered playing it for the record? Well, you’re playing it’. That’s it. He just sat down and played the shit out of it and it was so gorgeous – that, for me, is one of the great music pieces on the record. The title is what my gay husband used to say while his friends were dying – ‘I guess I’ll be the last man down’.
‘Burning Hell’ (first version on La Serpenta Canta (2003)
I did this song twice on La Serpenta Canta because every time I’ve performed it, it has been completely different. I do that with a lot of songs. That’s when people say they’re covers, I think who the fuck are you talking to? You’re talking to an improvising musician, just as Ornette [Coleman] would do a version of something completely different every time and it would never be called a cover version, so stop it, don’t even try that one. So I put two versions on the album and then some guy wrote, ‘it remains to be seen why she would repeat herself on this record’. Yeah, well, it remains to be seen why you can’t even fucking hear the song both times and realise the difference. That was a blues tradition and it’s funny, because people say ‘well, they just wanted to be paid twice’. Right, take it to the bank, you asshole. There are so many ways to do a song – I’ve had to do [the same] song during two sets in a night and of course, I do the songs differently. Why would I want to do them the same? I’d be bored. ‘Burning Hell’ – the man is just saying ‘I don’t know what’s happening to me, maybe I’m going to burn in hell’. He’s talking about asking the preacher, ‘what can I do?’ or ‘what’s going to happen?’ That preacher doesn’t know. Nobody knows.
Do you think because you released albums on Mute and you were around people who write conventional songs that people when responding to your music were confused?
When I released Divine Punishment, man, some music critics who were pretty big in London just hated it: ‘This isn’t music. I don’t know what hell this is. It’s not music’. Okay. All right. So then I do the Plague Mass and Masque Of The Red Death, which had established a context for it, and having performed it at St. John the Divine during the height of the AIDS epidemic everyone knew what was going on by then. When that record came out, it was very well respected, but Saint Of The Pit was hard for people to figure out and You Must Be Certain Of The Devil – the reviews on that were just make me howl.
‘Holokaftoma’ and ‘Hastayim Yasiyorum’ from Defixiones – Last Will And Testament (2003)
‘O Prósfigas’ [on new album In Concert] refers to the refugee, who is on a death march from Turkey into Aleppo, Syria. That’s where during the genocide of 1914 to 1923 they walked the Armenian men, the Greek men, the Assyrian men, the Yazidis, the Azeris – everyone who was not Turkish was walked to their death. On the roads were mountains of skulls in pyramids for them to see so they knew what their death was going to be. The Greek genocide was called the Holokaftoma. It means, ‘burning of the whole.’ ‘Holokaftoma’ is a Greek word that refers exclusively to the Asia Minor Genocides between 1914 and 1923. Last month search engines removed our genocide, and the word is only used to refer to the Jewish Holocaust as a translation. This second genocide took place between 1941 and 1945. The word ‘Holocaust’ comes from our word ‘Holokaftoma’. These are two different genocides! People have to understand that our genocide preceded the Holocaust. The Holokaftoma was the model that Hitler used, which he got from his mentor Kemal Attaturk, who counselled him saying, “Who remembers the Armenians?’
Now this is being erased, if the word ‘Holocaustoma’ refers only to the Holocaust of the Jews and no longer the ‘Holocaustoma’ of all of us between 1914 and 1923. And that is really egregious. I would say that in large part, Erdogan is responsible for that, because he and the EU have a massive press campaign to destroy Greece. Part of that campaign is to say that the Greeks are irresponsible about bringing in the refugees and caring for them, but you’re talking about a country under austerity measures from the EU, who can’t get more than $50 out of the bank at a time, and people who don’t have work anymore, and the payment for work is so low. And then at the same time, they’re trying desperately to take care of the Syrians. There are many Syrian Orthodox who have come in, who have been relieved to be in Greece. The truth is that many of the Syrians have been rerouted over many years by Turkish police boats to the open harbours of Greece, because Erdogan wants to ruin Greece, and he hates the Arabs. He believes in Turkishness. There are institutes for Turkishness where they say the books written by Homer, by Socrates are written by Turkish authors whose real names are ‘Sokrati’, ‘Omeron’, and so forth. They claim that the music is now Turkish music, but it was the mixture of Greek music, Byzantine music and Arabic speakers music, Armenian music, Azeri music. These musics that were made together were hashish music or outlaw music, a place where people would get together and sing dark music, this dark music that spoke of suffering and fear. Erdogan’s threat to Greece is ‘don’t make trouble because any night we can go back to Cyprus (meaning the invasion of Cyprus), and any night we can go back to 1914 or 1922, the burning of Smyrna’.
‘O Prósfigas’ refers to our genocides. I use the Amanés, or Amanéthes, they’re also called. It’s one of many melodies sung by those persons considered to be infidels by the Young Turks. They would get together for improvisational singing that preceded a song. This is a great art form, and I’ve spent many years working on this. You can hear it if you go into Greek Orthodox Church. You’ll see a psalti, who sings the music of the church, and then you’ll see him at night, and he’ll be singing an Amanés/ Amanéthes with people in a bar. It’s because they’re using the same scales, which are the same scales as the scales used in the Turkish mosques – this is what is interesting. A lot of Greeks want to deny it, claiming that they’re completely different. To them I’ll say don’t let your anger get in the way of your hearing. The big paradox is that these musics are all part and parcel of Byzantium. Many Persian scholars will say the roots were originally Greek, and there are different assessments of what the roots were originally, but that doesn’t matter so much to me as it matters that it is not put under the rubric of the Institute for Turkishness, the music of Turkey, because that to me that’s a part of genocide, robbing the culture of its most precious jewels, its most precious blood. That’s what I see is happening to Greece. Greece is being treated like an old man who they’re trying to put in the nursing home – ‘he can’t really do it for himself anymore and we have to put him in the nursing home’. It’s as if they say. ‘We love Greece. It’s the Greek people we don’t like! We need to get rid of the Greeks so we can get back our cradle of civilization’. No fucking Amaneres singers from eastern Greece on the islands considers themselves to be a European. They say ‘it’s not Europe. Greece is not Europe’. I continue to lay my fist down on the table and say that. There may be many Greeks that get angry with me about that, but let’s face it, they’re not being treated like a European country. They’re being treated like an ashtray for the EU, for Britain to a certain degree and Turkey. And that’s it. And the United States as always.
I was worried about doing ‘O Prósfigas’ because of the insults the Greeks have taken, because it means the refugee, referring to our own genocide in the refugee status that the Greeks had to take. But I said, ‘no! I’m doing it! And I’m going to tell people why’.
‘O Death’ from All The Way (2017)
Death says, ‘I’m sorry, it’s your time. I’m sorry, but I’m hungry now, and you don’t want me to starve to death, do you?’ People who could understand that humour would be Hank Williams, Johnny Paycheck, those outlaw country singers, musicians who sang with this ‘in your face’ quality. They were not going to be coy about anything. People have very curious perceptions of country music. I’ve heard some in alternative rock try to sing country and I am just laughing on the floor thinking, ‘why haven’t they been shot yet? You can’t do that, man. You just can’t do that.’
I was going out with this guy, a kind of outlaw, an ex-con. He said, ‘you know Diamanda, ‘O Death’ is a cowboy song’. It’s a lonesome song. The cowboy stands up and confides, just sings to the blackness of the sky and howls to the moon. I’d only heard the song in the movies, and I’d never liked any of the interpretations. When he told me that I got right on it. People that say that there’s no blues in country music, there’s no country music in the blues, there’s no gospel in country, or that there’s only black gospel, there’s no white gospel, they’re all full of shit.
‘La Llorona’ from In Concert (2024)
This is a traditional Mexican song that I’ve been singing for years. I heard Chavela Vargas sing it, but my version is completely different because it takes influence from the Byzantine scales and also the cante jondo of Spain, southern Spain, which is it means deep song, especially Manuel Agujetas – his singing is ferocious. I’ve been influenced by these different traditions, so my version will be different but these musics all connect. I feel this way about ‘O Death’ because I start with a Byzantine incantation, which is not the blues at all, and then I got into ‘O Death’ which I sign very improvised before I got into a more or less blues country song. I feel that it’s counterintuitive not to sing what you hear and if you hear all those things at the same time, you’ve gotta sing them. Otherwise, we return to the prissy little shit people do when they hear a country song and they want to preserve it. That doesn’t mean anything, it’s a footnote of the song. When a person is beholden to a tradition because they can’t hear outside of it and refuse to mix.
People would say to Ornette, ‘how do you become avant-garde?’ And he said, ‘what are you talking about? I play the blues. I play it now. I play it tomorrow and I play it the day after.’ You don’t become avant-garde by trying to be avant-garde. You’ve just evolved the music to a station in the frontlines. It comes to you because you’ve heard so many things – like Charlie Parker used to say, if I hear a car ad on television, it’ll be in my solo the next day if I like it.
There would be these improvising groups in the 70s that would say ‘we make sure we don’t listen to any music at all and then we get together at night and we improvise, but we never, never listen to any music’. And I thought, so you’re going to improvise based upon all the stuff that you learned before the moment in which you decided not to be part of a dialectical process. That was so naive.
Diamanda Galás In Concert is out on 14 June 2024 – find out more here
