Interview

ANDERSON: Where did you go in Texas recently?

COCKER: I went to that South by Southwest music festival in Austin.

ANDERSON: I lived in Austin years ago. They started that festival maybe the last year that I lived there, so that demonstrates my age . . . I was already finished with university—or college, as we call it in America—by the time they started that thing. And now South by Southwest is the venerated festival of everything.

COCKER: It’s huge. Did you go to it the first year?

ANDERSON: I think the entire festival might have been going a couple of years, actually, because there’s also a film festival and other things attached to it. But the music festival is what started when I was there. I think I saw a couple of bands—I can’t remember which ones. It was long, long ago.

COCKER: Maybe it’s the same where you grew up in Houston, but there seems to be a kind of rhythm to the weather there where you wake up in the morning and it’s quite cloudy and visibly cool, and then the heat kind of gradually builds up during the day. The clouds all disappear around half past 11, and then it’s really hot all day, and it’s very nice and warm at night. And then you just go through it again and again and again . . .

ANDERSON: Well, Houston is quite different. Austin is in a hilly area, and it’s dry. But Houston is on the coast and completely flat, so the weather is much more humid and muggy, and the air is filled with mosquitoes. Strictly from a weather point of view, I wouldn’t recommend it as much as Austin.

COCKER: Do you ever miss Texas? Do you ever feel like moving back there?

ANDERSON: Well, I have family there, and I do miss it a bit. But I don’t know if it’s where I would want to live.

COCKER: I recently spent quite a bit of time in Sheffield, England, which is where I’m from. I wouldn’t move back there, but it’s funny when you spend a bit of time in the place where you were brought up. You kind of realize how that place has had quite a big effect on you or made you a certain way.

ANDERSON: I always feel like there are specific things about Houston. There’s one museum in particular in Houston. So many of the things that I’m interested in now I can sort of trace back to that museum, which introduced me to them.

COCKER: What museum is that?

ANDERSON: It’s called The Menil Collection. There was this woman, Dominique de Menil—I think she was French, but she had one of the great Texas oil fortunes—and her art collection was vast. She collected lots of surrealist works—Salvador Dalí and René Magritte and Max Ernst and those Joseph Cornell boxes. She also collected abstract expressionist and pop art. So there were those John Chamberlain sculptures made from smashed-up cars and Dan Flavin fluorescent tubes and pieces by Donald Judd and Cy Twombly. There’s a building they call the Rothko Chapel that’s just these [Mark] Rothko pieces. I’d never heard of any of this before I walked through those doors. But there’s no place where I feel quite as much at home as I do in Houston. Even if Houston is not the place that I find the most exciting necessarily, it’s very peaceful for me to go there, I think, because I’m from there.

COCKER: It’s like you kind of fit there, isn’t it?

ANDERSON: Yeah.

COCKER: That’s what I thought when I was in Sheffield. You feel like you’re a proper part of the scenery or something.

ANDERSON: Do you still have friends in Sheffield?

COCKER: Yeah, a few.

ANDERSON: Yeah? Because I don’t really have that many friends in Houston. They all seem to have gone away. I mean, the one who was there the longest just moved to Austin, in fact.

COCKER: I was thinking when I came to Chicago yesterday that I must have followed a cattle trail. They would drive the cattle from Texas all the way up to Chicago, because this is around a place where they would slaughter them.

ANDERSON: Is that where they go? I don’t think they go that far up, actually. On foot, I mean.

COCKER: Don’t they?