Digging A Hole

Foster The People: live in Melbourne, 2012 (review)

2012-02-02T16:13:00.004+11:00

Venue: The Palace

Date: 30/01

There are way more kicks on offer at a Foster The People gig than the Pumped Up kind, the lads prove at thier Melbourne Big Day Out side-show. In concert, L.A.’s Foster The People run a tight ship, showing great care and precision in each and every song’s delivery. At this stage, their relatively short set must feel deeply familiar following an intense year of touring debut album Torches, yet there are no signs of fatigue or boredom from the guys. It’s easy to see the love for these songs in the band’s faces as much as it is in the packed Palace audience’s. For me, 2011 belonged to Foster The People. I knew looking around at my fellow punters, almost everybody there surely felt that same euphoric joy as I did on first discovering this band. Listening to Torches was a sharp reminder that something quite prominent had been missing from music in a general sense. Here was an album that by-passed any kind of current trend and instead declared a most antiquated purpose: music to bring people together.

Yes, Foster The People with each sample and percussion-heavy track, serve up a big spoonful of Summer of Love - California style. The utmost contemporary, tricked out keyboard/sample pads favoured by, well almost every band and his dog, are somehow sweeter in the hands of Foster and their freelovin’ vibe. Vibe is the key word here though; peel away the layers and lyrically, very few of the bands songs would stand up to scrutiny in the Woodstock poetry tent. Houdini, being a possible exception, reminds us to ‘focus on your ability’ and break out from our ‘shackles’, and tonight as the set opener, is so mood enhancing, it may as well be sold as a prescription drug. There’s more’ happy-power’ in that one song than a Flaming Lips encore, and the metre very rarely dips below ‘stupidly happy’ from then on.

Even the bands few mid-tempo songs (Miss You, Waste) evoke enthused bouncing sing-a-longs, and its on those tracks especially the band allow themselves to really freak out and break from their recorded counterparts. Miss You descends into a wall of percussion, recalling Nine Inch Nails’ March Of The Pigs, boosted by frantic strobing as singer Mark Foster leaps from his seat at the keyboard to batter a huge tom lumped in front of drummer Mark Pontius’ kit. Throughout the whole gig, when the two Mark’s aren’t vibing of each other as duel drummers, Foster is on guitar, fret to fret with bassist Cubbie Fink or head-banging hunched over his sampler. The man doesn’t rest, switching as he does between various instrument duties, all while conducting the audience in sing-a-long. Indeed Mark Foster can add sublime showmanship to his already full bag of tricks, and frankly the determination he displays to connect with all who come to see his band shows up many a live act as detached and lazy.

Aside from playing every track from Torches, they cover Weezer’s Say It Ain’t So; “because I taught Pumped Up Kicks to River from Weezer one night a party, and they started covering it in their shows!” Mark reveals. Naturally it sounds better than the original, thanks to the the addition of the Foster ‘stamp of fun’ but I was more than happy for them to get back to playing their own tunes. Namely, Helena Beat which concludes the main set in grandiose style and damnit all if Mark’s vocals don’t sound so much better live than on the recording. It’s an unusual singing voice he’s packing, with frequent falsetto parts, whistling and near-whispered refrains here and there, he’s nothing if not dynamic. All of these aforementioned stylings of course come together on the highly anticipated encore.

Pumped Up Kicks was the song that gave rise to what began as Mark’s bedroom muck-about project and ultimately landed him global top billing on the festival circuit. Tonight, predicting the reaction to the song, FTP tweak out a couple of extra minutes of ‘sing-it-back’ time from the heaving crowd. Shifting the song’s tempo suddenly from ‘Ministry of Sound club mix’ to ‘Linkin Park earnest head-bang’, they somehow make the whole thing work, while retaining the swagger of the original as the audience continue to shout the refrain long after Mark has stepped back from the mic to take it all in; a rare moment of stillness for the singer, who deftly steps into the front row, held aloft by countless hands where he remains grinning until the houselights switch on and his band exits the stage. He knows it’s been a good gig. He knows he gave his best and the fans were united with him in that. How thrilling it is to see a band so full of confidence in their music, and ability to perform it, yet remain totally devoid of arrogance. Simply brilliant.

lEIGh5

All photos by Narelle Pfitzner.

PALACE SETLIST, 30/01/12:

Houdini

Miss You

Life On The Nickel

I Would Do Anything For You

Broken Jaw

Waste

Call It What You Want

Don't Stop (Colour On The Walls)
Say It Ain't So

Helena Beat

encore:

Ruby

Warrant

Pumped Up Kicks

Jim Sclavunos (Grinderman) interview: 2012

2012-01-23T01:47:00.003+11:00

DONE GRINDING

The news of Grinderman’s unexpected end at Meredith late last year proved shocking enough to overshadow just about the entire event’s proceedings. Nobody outside of the Nick Cave-led garage rock ensemble’s inner circle knew that was to be their final performance, and the reaction to Cave’s brief, understated goodbye spoke volumes about the popularity they had garnered through just two albums. Indeed Grinderman earned the kind of reverence once reserved for new a Bad Seeds record, and so with his eyes focused on the future of that band - his musical home for almost 30 years – Cave shot down what was shaping up to be a full-time project. The question of ‘why’, at least in percussionist Jim Clavunos’ mind is a simple one, “We were finished with what we had to do as Grinderman, so its time to move on.” Yet with life-long collaborator, Mick Harvey’s departure after the last Bad Seeds album, Dig! Lazarus, Dig!! and much renewed interest in Cave through Grinderman, is all as simple he claims?

“Well, we were so devastated at losing all three of our nominations at the ARIA awards that we decided to quit altogether!” Laughs Sclavunos, his teeth somewhat gritted at the mention of Grinderman’s final show. The fall-out from Nick Cave’s announcement is down to his band to deal with, and Jim is quick to remind me, “My musical life didn’t begin and end with The Bad Seeds or Grinderman. It (Grinderman) is an important component of my life, or rather was if it’s to be no more, but I think the music we made stands on its own merit.” The 6ft-7 percussion fiend joined the Bad Seeds in 1994 for the Let Love In campaign playing alongside drummer Thomas Wydler before finally taking a leading role on the stool for a ‘muck-about between sessions’ band that had developed in the ranks. Location and accessibility determined which Bad Seeds members were invited to the Grinderman party, and along with Cave, Warren Ellis and Martyn Casey, Jim was simply available. But this side-project quickly became popular among fans - and non-fans of Cave alike - once their thrilling debut album arrived. The danger of it stealing a lot of thunder from Bad Seed activities became quite real, Jim concedes. ”We did kind of neglected Bad Seeds for a long time, I think. It’s been about four years since we've done anything so I think it’s high time we made some beautiful music together, again.”

Ending on a high, or rather enjoying the brevity of a great musical moment and getting out before it starts to love itself too much is something Jim is very comfortable with. The New Yorker’s musical life outside of ‘Cave Central’ had always been a series of short-term hit ’n’ run projects. Besides briefly drumming for core New York art-rock bands Sonic Youth and The Cramps, he, alongside post-punk siren, Lydia Lunch was directly involved in creating the No Wave movement – a kind of puritan punk scene, directly in opposition to how commercialised punk had become by the early 1980s. The point of No Wave – keep it short and noisy and don’t expect a greatest hits boxset – was never something Jim took lightly. “The whole ‘no future’ mentality was still very much intact.” To this day he is all about the moment of creation and the passion that comes with playing every gig like it may very well be the last, which was often the case. However the young Sclavunos’ foray into No Wave was motivated less by making music than the chance of getting laid, as any band will deny.

Jim with Lydia Lunch

“That, and getting into gigs for free.” He corrects. “I couldn’t play bass, so when I met Lydia (Lunch) and she asked me join her band - as a bass player - I knew that she wanted to fuck me, and I saw the opportunity to lose my virginity.” He giggles. Lydia Lunch’s infamous caterwauling monologues might have been enough to send most males running for cover, but Jim’s musical life had finally begun, significantly at the very moment his cherry was popped. He never did learn the bass either, but Jim is where he is today because of a natural instinct for what the artists he works with are looking for in a musical accomplice. Making the Bad Seeds his only real full-time band says a lot about both him and the kind of trust afforded to each artist in the service of Mr Cave. Jim was an easy fit for Grinderman, then so it seems relevant to ask was Grinderman an ideal fit for ‘Mr No Wave’ himself? ”I don’t get sentimental at all about bands that I’ve happened to play in, but Grinderman was such a natural thing when it happened. I guess the end of the band felt just as natural too.” There’s no obvious lamenting over Grinderman for Jim right now though. By the request of artistic director Jonathan Holloway, he is already busy on his next obsession - preparing a contribution to the Perth Festival - a project called The Faustian Pact. Along with musical collaborator Peter Mavrogeorgis, the pair - who perform together under the name The Vanity Set - will construct a live score to the 1926 silent cult film, Faust.

“Faust is unique in that there is no one definitive version.” Jim explains of his interest in the German noir classic, “It was re-cut several times for different audiences and different regions because of the sensitivity and suspicion people had towards the occult.” Faust director, Friedrich W. Murnau based his film on a story which dated from the 16^th century, and was already a firm favourite in German folklore. The ‘pact with the devil’ plotline has leapt from ancient text, to operas and stage shows over the decades before Faust’s cinematic debut, and proving its enduring appeal, continued its infiltration of popular culture through tales of alleged ill-gotten gifts of musical talent in the blues and rock n’ roll scenes. However Sclavunos’s intrigue with the story lies mainly in how he feels its true meaning was intentionally misrepresented in Murnau’s film so as to appease the so-called god-fearing public. For his part in the Perth festival, Jim plans to correct this. “If people are thinking they’re just going to see the Faust movie as Murnau intended with a live score, they’re going to be bitterly disappointed.” He laughs.

The Devil takes control in Faust

“Every aspect of the Christian ideology and the psychological resonance behind the film has been totally messed with. It kind of transcends the moral and the social and has been whittled down to a more basic study of man rather than a Christian salvation story.” Sclavunos’s re-cut version of Faust will form the back-drop to live performers in costume as well as the band. “It’s going to be part play, part concert and part cinema. I’m sure a lot of people are familiar with what usually happens with live scoring of films; a couple of musicians playing along to what's on screen, but we wanted to approach this in a totally new way.” Jim’s desire to re-cut and re-score Faust is a long-held one, and discussing it is justification for him. “The original film (for me) was a bad influence on my idea.” He laughs, “I liked the aesthetic of the film, but The Faustian Pact is really all about recapturing the story from the original text.” Taking so much care with this story, its clear Jim is in it for preservation purposes, opposed to his own life in music which has been considerably low on preservation. However, the final word he gives on Grinderman hints at a possible first-time feeling of loss over a band in his long career. “I'm sorry there's no big scoop on why Grinderman split up, but what I can tell you is we’ve all really enjoyed having this band, and I am sorry to see it go. It was one of my favourite bands ever to play in, but hey there’s always the possibility of the dreaded come-back tour!”

lEIGh5

Trash McSweeney (The Red Paintings) interview: 2011

2011-12-05T21:55:00.001+11:00

THE COLOUR OF MUSIC

Red Paintings singer/composer, Trash McSweeney - every bit as self-effacing as his adopted name – was never a musically gifted child, nor a particularly learned one, but rather his ability for intricate song crafting was one that foisted itself upon him late in his adolescence following a seizure resulting in the ability to visualize complete compositions in full technicolour. The condition Trash developed, known as synesthesia, landed the Geelong-born/L.A.-based artist among a mere handful of songwriters currently living with the neurological disorder world-wide. From this unplanned event, Trash and his Red Paintings cohorts have been guided by an ongoing struggle to make the music match up with the visual patterns McSweeney alone sees, often creating seismic tensions and frustrations alien to all who do not share his ‘insight’. It’s no wonder then, that after twelve years as a band, The Red Paintings are at long last set to release their debut studio album. Titled, The Revolution Is Never Coming, this marks the third year since the album was initially set for release, and in regards to its delay, McSweeney, as a synesthesia sufferer, is afforded free reign of the often cringe-worthy explanation; “the people I was working with just didn’t understand my vision.”

“This album was mixed eight different times in eight different studios around the world, and I went to some of the biggest and best studios available but what I kept finding was, people had their own shitty vision for my music.” He begins. During the album’s endless recording sessions, The Red Paintings as a collective came and went depending on either their availability or willingness to follow Trash to yet another studio and join him in sleepless, song-tweaking. “The rest of the band quite reasonably walked out and let me do what I needed to do.” He says, “We spent a lot of time writing down everybody’s parts and getting those right, but in the end it wasn’t financially possible for them to live as I was. We were all broke by that stage; I mean my string section were busking on the streets of Brisbane to make $50 a night while I was in Canada sleeping on studio floors.” Trash’s motivation to create a worthwhile album regardless of personal health or wealth seems largely down to a desire to not disappoint his fans as much as himself. “I didn’t want to put effort into something that my fanbase were going to put on and say, ‘oh the songs are okay, but the production’s pretty shit’, you know?” He confirms. “If I say I’m going to put out something – an album or whatever – then its going to be done to the best of my ability. I didn’t sleep properly for over year because I was consumed by just making these songs work.”

Fellow synesthesiac, Bjork, is a reference for Trash. “I listen to her music in a kind of ecstasy. It’s like what she creates is mathematically thought out, and that’s kind of how I approached making this record.” Trash boasts that there were an average of around 180 tracks to mix per song to get the desired result. “I guess I was trying to create a Da Vinci artwork as a musical composition.” He laughs. It’s not Renaissance painters however that inform The Revolution Is Never Coming, but rather literary giant Lewis Carroll. First single, The Streets Fell Into My Window (which was actually recorded in 2005) is punctuated by quotes from the novel, Alice In Wonderland, which Trash defines as a metaphor for passing from life into death. “I wondered if the trip down the rabbit hole Alice takes in the story was in fact the moment of death when the soul leaves the body.” He muses, “When the Tim Burton film came out, I was surprised he had played it so safe and not delved into the possibility of Wonderland being the afterlife, so when it came time to making the video for that song, I worked with this fantastic young director called Clint Lewis, and we were all about ‘what didn’t Tim Burton do but maybe should have’.” The Red Paintings live shows, which are as much renowned for their dramatic aspects as their musical intensity, reflect the Lewis Carroll theme in their current state.

“The live shows incorporate every kind of art-form; music, poetry, theatre, film, painting and narrative to make one whole performance piece which reflects what our music is about. On the last tour, I came out as the caterpillar, our cellist was the white rabbit, our violinist; the queen of hearts and so on - and that connection is obvious, right - but a while ago we did some Dr Seuss themed shows where each song became a different Dr Seuss book.” Trash describes, “The most bizarre thing had occurred to me, I realised that the themes in all of Dr Seuss’s writing were exactly what I was trying say in my songs.” Further explaining his theory Trash reasons, “Seuss could be taken one of two ways; fun, catchy books for kids, or the work of a highly analytical and complex mind.” Much like his literary idols, Trash McSweeney is an example of what happens when an artist loses all interest in convention and allows himself to push away certainty and comfort. Lead wholly by his synesthesia, Trash’s unusually heightened subconscious calls the shots and his trust in it is unwavering.

“It (synesthesia)’s never been a hindrance to me. The Red Paintings have been shaped by it and I’ve never had to worry about writer’s block. The reason the album has taken so long isn’t because I wasn’t able to write, it’s because the mixing never seemed to be the right colour and shape as I saw it in my head. I basically had to articulate what I was seeing jumping out of the mixing desk again and again in the studio, which sounds fucking ridiculous, I know, and when you’re paying an hourly rate it gets even more absurd, but I won’t stop until I get it right.” So The Revolution Is Never Coming’s long delay means fans will be getting an accurate picture of the sound inside Trash’s head, then? “Definitely. I mean I’m not doing this for any other reason than to give people the music best I can. I’m not creating something to sell records so I can buy a big comfy house, I’m making art here.” He deadpans, “I’ll never own a fucking house anyway. The amount of debt I generated for myself making this album saw to that!”

lEIGh5

Cheryl Wray (Salt-N-Pepa) interview: 2011

2011-11-14T19:51:00.001+11:00

THE SPICE GIRL

New York native, Cheryl Wray claims her 1986, 17-year-old self, knew instinctively Salt N Pepa were going to be huge. Call it a young woman’s brimming self-confidence if you like, but the lady herself prefers to think, “it may have been a spiritual thing.” But whichever force was at play, the now legendary group’s success was anyone’s guess in the male-dominated hip hop scene. Even Wray’s bravado is in sharp contrast to “the very depressed teenager with no direction” she was, but the sassy global-hit maker she would become as “Salt” in Salt N Pepa, happened only once she began rapping when, “something awakened in me and I felt so alive.” Just as well, as there was “no Plan B”, she explains.

Many international stars had already emerged out of New York’s rap scene in the ‘80s, but prior to Salt N Pepa, rap was a chick-free zone, bar Deborah Harry’s absurd jive about ‘men from Mars’ in Blondie’s hit, Rapture. As for what made Salt N Pepa boldly go where no ladies had gone before, Cheryl surmises, “A group like us was needed - there was a gap in the market for some strong female performers who could sell records on the level of the bigger, more established rap groups… and that’s exactly what we did.”

Wray, along with high-school friends Sandra “Pepa” Denton and Deidra “Spinderella” Roper, were regular visitors open mic venues around New York in the mid-‘80s, where up-coming stars like Martin Lawrence would perform comedy routines to notoriously rough crowds. Lawrence, as with every other performer, would either “make it or break it”, Cheryl says, as judged entirely on the audience’s reaction. “We were really scared, but when we decided it was time for us to perform in front of a crowd, we rocked it.” She smiles, “We did our song, The Show Stopper – which we wrote in response to Freddy Fresh’s The Show – a massive street level hit at the time - and that ended up becoming our first single out here in America.” Salt N Pepa had gained that all-important acceptance among their peers as hot live performers – the greatest level of respect a rap group could be awarded at the time – fueling their already burning motivation for stardom.

"I don’t remember it being that hard for us because we were so driven.” Cheryl recalls, “The harder the challenge, the harder we worked to get around it and we never felt like we were failing.” Moving from open mic nights to cutting records, the girl’s next challenge was getting their music heard. Their Show Stopper had worked as a live introduction to the group, and its follow-up single, Tramp was taking off in the clubs, but it was only when DJ’s started flipping the record and dropping its b-side, Push It, that Salt N Pepa became overnight stars. However, the song, a kind of throw-away dance/rap number, suggested the group were more sugar than spice, a fact that became a bone of contention, particularly for Cheryl, as Salt N Pepa continued to grow in popularity. “There were times when I felt like we were just doing what was expected of us when we should have been expressing ourselves.” She acknowledges.

For Cheryl, a far greater victory for Salt N Pepa was using their profile to address issues rap artists had chosen ignore. In the wake of that infamous HIV/AIDS ad campaign, in which a bowling grim reaper had Australia in fear of all things sex and sexuality, Salt N Pepa stepped in with a perfectly timed, realistic suggestion; Let’s Talk About Sex. “That song made us unofficial spokespeople for AIDS awareness.” Cheryl recalls. It was the right track at the right time, but from a group far removed from any reaper-based fear campaigns, yet Australia identified and agreed - intimacy wasn’t dead. Indeed Let’s Talk About Sex went to number one at a time when there were practically no hip hop acts charting locally, and AIDS was crashing into suburban living rooms on a nightly basis, forcing many an awkward dinner conversation.

“Let’s Talk About Sex was not an irresponsible song, as some people tried to claim,” Cheryl points out, “but you know, as a celebrity, especially in the US, people are always calling you to account over things you say because you’re a public figure. I mean when we were younger, we just wanted to get our songs played and go on tour and that was about it, but I think that we felt a kind of social responsibility as we got a bit older because our profile was getting a lot bigger and nobody was really saying what we thought needed to be said.” Cheryl adds, “As an artist, you wanna express what’s on your mind, and with the whole AIDS thing we never saw it as shameful but as something that urgently needed to be discussed properly. The information going around about it at the time was really that it was a thing of shame or fear, but in our song we talk about taking responsibility for your actions and knowing the risks.” Salt N Pepa’s frankness and big issue-raising is a detail that is often overlooked in place of the ‘Most Successful Female Rap Act Of All-Time’ tagline publicists like to use. Perhaps though, not unlike the statistic-obsessed media, Salt N Pepa’s own families even had difficulty knowing what to make of a girl rap group being taken seriously.

“Because hip hop was still such a new thing when we started, and no females were having success doing hip hop while we were having massive hits, my family and friends were just confused.” Cheryl laughs, “My mum and dad were in shock for a really long time. Whenever we had a platinum selling single, or won and MTV award or whatever, they would just look at me, like ‘who are you?’”. She adds, “My dad was really supportive, but mum was always more concerned that I was gonna start acting like a super star, and she would say like, ‘don’t come up in here acting like no diva. When you come home to your father and me, you’re just Cheryl, okay!’ That really kept me grounded the whole time.” In 2001, following a bankruptcy claim from their label, Cheryl and Sandra found themselves grounded indefinitely as Salt N Pepa. The two then parted ways as Cheryl shockingly revealed that she had been sick for a long time and her friendship with Pepa well and truly was over.

“Pep and I were not good for a long time before then. We were young when we started and basically we were no longer communicating at all, and we felt underappreciated by one another, so getting back to performing as Salt N Pepa again, I had to put right a lot of stuff in my mind that had bothered me up to that point and learn to accept our legacy.” The 1994 single, None Of Your Business, finally earned Salt N Pepa the first Grammy award of their career, but Cheryl who later ‘disowned that song for its sexually salacious content’, was at that stage so unwell, that the win was merely a ‘hollow triumph.’ “It was exciting on one level, but all I remember of that time was, I was severely bulimic and caught up in the whole ‘skinny is beautiful’ thing, and I felt so empty when I should have been elated, I suppose.” She adds, “My career was peaking at the same time my personal life was at an all time low. You always think when you’re young that success is measured in these certain terms, but the reality is a Grammy’s never gonna fill the void I felt when I was bulimic.” Cheryl had successfully beaten her illness by the mid-‘00s, and today is a spokesperson for bulimia awareness in American schools. Then in 2007, Pep and Wray finally burned a few old bridges, “we just needed to grow up away from each other for a time”, and Cheryl took the equally important step to rejoining Salt N Pepa; she stopped fighting with her conscience over the songs, and learned to love both the sugar and the spice.

“In hindsight, I felt like I was out of my comfort zone promoting songs that I didn’t believe in, but I didn’t say anything at the time, and that’s one of the issues that lead to me leaving, but I’ve made my peace with our legacy now.” Accepting what people love about Salt N Pepa was one of Wray’s biggest challenges, but Cheryl, who spent years distancing herself from what she perceived as the tacky side of Salt N Pepa, now exhibits a softened, almost sentimental approach to past ‘errors of judgment’. “Pep and I were actually talking about bringing out the old chunky leather jackets for fun - you know from the Push It video?” She laughs, “Just the other day my daughter was going through all my old stage clothes and her and her friend decided to dress up as me and Pep as we were in the ‘80s for Halloween!” She adds, “They had the spandex body suits on and everything, and I thought to myself, ‘that’s when you know you’ve made it – when you’re a damned Halloween costume!”

lEIGh5

Jello Biafra interview: 2011

2011-10-14T23:58:00.001+11:00

CALIFORNIA SCREAMIN'

Boulder, Colorado-born Eric Boucher began life ‘small-town USA’ style, in front of the television absorbing all the menace and mirth it could spew out into his young mind. Not being the sporty type, he fixated on music, cartoons and news broadcasts in his free time, growing increasingly fascinated - and disgusted - by how atrocious world events were televised and reported on by his country’s media. The anger and bewilderment he experienced, combined with a natural gift for writing and self-expression, ultimately gave rise to Boucher’s notorious - at first on-stage only – persona, Jello Biafra. Whatever life had in store for small-town boy Eric Boucher, it was surely crushed once the mighty Biafra was ‘born’, and to this day, it is the peculiar name of Jello that continues to raise eyebrows, hackles and conservative backs through-out small, big and all-towns-in-between, USA.

The mushy dessert of his name-sake, an easy to swallow, much loved children’s favorite may have been an ironic choice of pseudonym for the one-time Dead Kennedys' singer, but Biafra has always been an unashamed attention seeker. He knew when he chose his tag, that every kid in the USA would at some time or another been spoon-fed that very thing by a caring parental figure. Perhaps he saw his own high level absorption of crass news media as a rather tasteless kind of ‘spoon-feeding’, and so took a punt that if he was going to have a public forum to unleash his anti-establishment woes, then it was gonna come with a sweet and fluffy handle that nobody would forget!

Biafra’s most noted platform came in the form of punk legends The Dead Kennedys – once more, a name that was certain to stick in the public’s craw being a mere decade on from President Kennedy’s assassination – and perhaps for that reason, in their new home of San Francisco, Biafra and his band were treated as a blight on the landscape of a city under the spell of neo-hippie-dom and rising yuppie-dom. However, this didn’t prevent ‘Blight Biafra’ from raising sizable interest in his absurdest campaign to become mayor of San Francisco in 1979, or even prevent The Dead Kennedys from charting with singles like Too Drunk To Fuck and Holiday In Cambodia. Biafra had proved beyond doubt he had enough support to be the voice for a broadening sector of society not content to just ‘suck it up’, and its precisely that voice – one that’s never waned in its convictions despite the trouble it’s bought him and his band - that has earned him a new career as a spoken word performer. The gloves no doubt come off when Jello hits the stage for his Melbourne spoken-word debut in October – they certainly did when it came to answering some of my questions in this rare, but utterly engaging interview.

What can people expect coming to a Jello Biafra spoken word show these days? Well I haven’t done one in a while, so I’m not quite sure what I’m going to discuss at this stage. I’ll just pull it all together at the last minute I’m sure. I mean events and news stories happen so fast these days, and I like my show to be right up to the minute, you know.

Do you see a lot of your – especially political - subject matter as relatable in countries outside of the US?

Yeah, I mean it seems as if nobody is spared the heavy handed moves by the banks and the super rich to step on the gas and ramp up the whole corporate coup, pushing the idea that community is a bad thing, and it doesn’t work. They just want it to be every one for themselves, conditioned to just make more and more money regardless of how and who it affects and that mindset is why you see basic social services suffering. The banks are desperately trying to save their own arses and so its community and environment be damned. I’ve heard rumblings from Australia about a carbon tax, and I’m sure any argument against that would bare more than a passing resemblance to the American Tea Party – a grass roots movement who were actually funded by oil barons and the like. These guys know not to pull out the white hoods, but you can see clearly where their loyalties lie.

The song, Invasion of the Mind Snatchers from your last album, Enhanced Methods of Questioning digs neatly at the US’s problem with insane religious right-wing nutters getting into positions of power, but are people like Fred Phelps and Wolf Blitzer a genuine threat in your opinion?

Well, Fred Phelps hasn’t got a lot of support, but he’s obviously getting money from somewhere. I’ve been to his compound in Kansas, and they’ve taken over an entire block in a residential neighbourhood, apart from two houses whose owners wouldn’t sell, and so excluding them, there’s a gigantic fence around all the Phelps houses, which is floodlit 24 hours a day and it’s covered in the usual ‘god hates fags’ kind of crap, but that compound is really the only place he holds any power in thankfully. He has no political support, in sharp contrast to Blitzer and Sarah Palin, who are just as extreme as Phelps is, the only difference is, they know how to package themselves more cleverly.

What do you get out of spoken word performance that maybe is lacking from fronting a band, such as Dead Kennedys? Well for a start, activism, spoken word and music is all connected for me, but you don’t get the great adrenalin rush doing spoken word as you do playing music live of course, but then touring as a spoken word artist, you can go deeper into ideas and into people’s brains. I mean I never expected spoken word to take off, but I have to thank those fascists at the LAPD and hate-mongers like Tipper Gore who dragged me through court over the Dead Kennedy’s Frankenchrist album. (1985’s Frankenchrist holds the ‘honor’ of being the token reason for banning and censorship of music in the US, resulting in massive legal costs for Biafra and ultimately the end of the ‘Kennedys). That was the first time a charge of ‘distribution of harmful material to minors’ had been brought against a music album in American history.

Frankenchrist - killed the Kennedys?

Are fans encouraged to actively participate in the spoken word shows and enter into a discussion with you?

It all depends; sometimes I have time for questions sometimes not. When people come to see me though, I think they already have some idea of what I’m about and what to expect, and the kinds of things I talk about are what they probably discuss among their friendship groups already. So I’m just offering a viewpoint that can maybe add something to their own conversations. I mean I’m not afraid of being asked questions, but doing just question and answer sessions can quickly turn into a forum for a handful of conspiracy theorists wanting to debate the Roswell space alien or the whole 9/11 inside job thing.

Do you subscribe to any of the popular conspiracy theories yourself?

In my mind, the biggest conspiracy was that America went to war while being governed by Spinal Tap. But in reality, part of the problem was the FBI had all this so-called intelligence and voice recordings in several different languages that nobody in the US government could even understand. Conspiracy theories are great, but I much prefer to make my mind up using logic and fact. 9/11 happened because our (the US’s) powers that be at the time were completely ignorant.

Being in the privileged position of two public forums – spoken word/punk music - do you think you’ve always been successful in expressing your viewpoint?

Well yeah, I mean I’ve encouraged people for all these years to not hate the media, but to become the media. That doesn’t mean living your whole life on Facebook, and sending out little tweets from your phone, it’s about grasping the potential of the new media and saying what we’re being offered isn’t good enough. There’s a lot of people power going to waste on obsessing over pointless celebrity culture. But to answer your question, I’m just one guy and I’m not a mainstream force to be reckoned with, I’m just making a living off my art, and I’ve tried to use my art in a positive way, but now I’m saying it’s up to you to go out and inspire people in the same way I’ve perhaps inspired you.

Do you think running for mayor of San Francisco in hindsight, you were in fact much better positioned to make a difference outside of politics altogether? Yeah for sure, but I was never going to be that guy who put on a suit and went door to door telling people a different lie each time just so they’d vote for me. What I was trying to say is politics doesn’t have to be just that one thing, but as an artist I didn’t have to try and change a whole system to get up there and say ‘this is exactly what I believe in, take it or leave it.’ I’m living off my big mouth and bad attitude, yeah, but that’s gotta be better than bullshitting as a career.

Does coming back to Australia fill you with good memories of your last tour here with the Dead Kennedys?

What comes to mind immediately is, after a show in Brisbane one night myself, DH Peligro (Kennedys’ drummer) and members of The Johnnys were having a few drinks out on the street and a police car pulls up and they arrest Peligro basically for drinking while black! They didn’t go after anybody else and so that to me was a first hand experience of the banana republic dictatorship of Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen. Then after a second show in Brisbane, fans were coming and telling me their favourite stories about Bjelke-Petersen, and I think the most outrageous one I heard was about a dude who got arrested in broad daylight for carrying a concealed weapon in a bag of groceries – it was a pineapple! I mean doesn’t Queensland grow like the entire pineapple stock for the rest of the country? You would think they would know the difference between a weapon and a piece of fruit is all I’m saying.

One of your most interesting ‘projects’ was helping launch the music career of Wesley Willis. Australia has a special kind of love for Willis’s brand of laugh out loud, apparently nonsense tributes to his favourite celebrities; Alanis Morrisette, Oprah Winfrey etc..; I wonder, what do you miss most about him? People say ‘oh such-n-such is a larger than life character’, you know, but Wes really was larger than life. I mean, every single person he came in contact with was just blown away by his energy and his wit, but Wes was utterly exhausting as well. I mean, I would be doubled up in fits of laughter and unable to breathe because of some bizarre observation or statement he would make. Like one time I had to get on a plane with him and make sure he was okay getting to where he needed to go, and this was only in a short space of time after 9/11, and we’re in the airport lounge and all of a sudden Wes just yells at the top of his voice, “Hey Jello, do you think if I hijack a plane they’ll put me in jail?”, and I just froze thinking there were going to be all these security dudes come running out and crash-tackle us or something, and I said to Wes, you know, “You gotta keep it down, man you can’t say that stuff!”, and so he went “okay”, and then sure enough ten minutes later, “Hey Jello, do you think if I hijack a plane they’ll put me in jail?”. He was always doing shit like that and that’s what I miss so much about him not being around. I thought a lot about Wes the night Obama was elected and when he got up to do his speech, all I could think of in the back of my mind was how much that moment would’ve meant to him. Wes would’ve been in that crowd at the White House, and even if he was 100 metres back, his booming voice still would have come through, and he would have been singing, “Obama is the greatest, he can really whip Saddam Hussein’s ass! He can really kick a mule’s ass!” That’s how Wesley was man - just a great communicator of emotions. Nobody could sum up the feeling of a moment like Wes.

lEIGh5

Hey Bono, Jello's onto you, you fatuous swine!

Joanne Catherall (The Human League) interview: 2011

2011-10-07T00:19:00.005+11:00

SUPREME BEINGS

In what could've been seen as a bid to off-set the synthetic-foundations of their music, the ‘human’ side to the Human League was always overtly the central focus. The spotlight was on three radically styled and made-up vocalists - Phil Oakey, Susan Anne Sulley and Joanne Catherall – each presenting a strong individuality, yet functioning smoothly as unit, delivering warm, yet exclusively machine-made tunes. In the early days of electronic music, the embryonic Human League (Mk I - before Catherall and Sulley), were among a handful of groups who saw potential in dragging synths out of the underground clubs and into the mainstream. Once they shook-off a few computer programmers posing as musicians - and a Kraftwerk obsession found on first two albums, Reproduction and Travelogue - a band emerged that would set the blue-print for a whole new direction in music. In 1981, following a smart line-up change which remains to this day, The ‘League Mk II’ was born and it is they who are celebrating the 30th anniversary of the ‘new romantic’ movement’s first ever break-through record, Dare! - an album fashioned on the hope that ‘this synth-pop thing was gonna take off’.

Everyone either had or wanted a synthesizer in 1981 - or so it seemed - but it’s interesting to note now that this must-have addition to any band was treated with great suspicion by established artists in fear of redundancy. It was the marker of the times, forcing many acts who’d trail-blazed in the 1970s into an ‘adapt or die’ situation, which saw many four-piece rock acts suddenly scramble to work a bit of ‘new wave’ into their sound. Meanwhile artists like New Order, Vince Clarke, and Thomas Dolby were fast taking over as the ‘new innovators’, as their mastery of the synth gradually helped earn it acceptance. The Human League however, were young enough that this new synthetic sound was a mere formality and rather than make a ‘press-play-and-go’ programmable keyboard their main feature, it was simply the engine under their swanky hood, upon which leapt a wave of image-conscious front and centre singers, all reaching for the lippy and hairspray, while busting out robotic dance moves.

Ahead of Human League’s Australian visit for the ‘80s Rewind Festival, speaking with me today in defense of the humble synth - and dodgy robot-dancing - vocalist Joanne Catherall from her home in Sheffield begins by recalling the massive influence of, Dare!, and how her band had to fight to release the record that would ultimately define the new romantic movement.

“Our first record deal was for ten albums, which is just unheard of today, but the catch was, we were told in no uncertain terms, we could not make Dare! the way we wanted to.” Catherall says, “But we decided we had nothing to lose really by ignoring them (Virgin), I mean none of us owned a house or any of that, and so broke as we were, we went ahead and made the record that we had in our heads and it obviously became very successful. But we made Dare! almost in direct opposition to what the label wanted us to do. They wanted us to get in a full live band, but Phillip (Oakey) was only interested in using synthesisers, as that was how the first two Human League albums (Reproduction, Travelogue) were made, but the group was changing, myself and Susan (Ann Sulley) had joined, and I think the label thought we might as well get a guitarist and drummer too… Phil wasn’t having any of it, though.”

In what sounds like a quaint notion by today’s standards, The Human League was singled out at the start of the 1980s as reluctant poster stars for a campaign called ‘Keep It Live’. Using synthesisers was viewed by the media old guard as ‘cheating’ and some sectors of press launched attacks on the burgeoning new romantic scene, claiming the bands shouldn’t be seen as ‘performing live’ in the traditional sense. “It is quaint to think of that now, as you say when you have tours by artists like Britney Spears who, it is claimed, do not even sing live.” Joanne continues, “The dancing has become so elaborate that it must be impossible for them to sing and perform, which is why you always saw me and Susan just doing our sort of robot routine,” she laughs, “It was the only way we could sing live and dance at the same time!” Making their own mark within The Human League was important for Joanne and Susan, so as not to be seen as just ‘backing dancers who sang a bit’. So after fronting up as co-lead vocalists on Dare! single, The Sound Of The Crowd – which became the band’s first chart hit – Joanne’s confidence bloomed.

“I was genuinely thrilled that people reacted so strongly to that song, I mean, it’s very unusual in a lot of ways, and honestly Susan and I didn’t think it was going to be a hit at all, but our careers really did take off because of that song.” In Australia, The Human League enjoyed a level success on the back of Dare!, only rivaled by the UK. The band’s first tour in 1982, Susan remembers, was ‘akin to Beatle-mania’. “There were hoards of fans at the airport with banners when we arrived, and camping in the hotel’s reception area. I mean, we couldn’t even leave our hotel rooms without being mobbed.” She giggles, “It was like ABBA: The Movie!, and I can tell you, we hadn’t had that kind of reaction anywhere else in the world, so Australia will always be a bit special to us for that reason.” The Human League were in Australia just two years ago promoting a new album, Credo, yet their current billing on the ‘80s Rewind Festival places them squarely in the ‘coming out of retirement’ sector. Never in the past has Joanne been comfortable with the retro tag, but she is content to claim her band are nothing if not survivors.

“The thing about the three of us, is that we’re all too stubborn to just give up on The Human League. Never have we sat down and all said ‘let’s just call it a day’, you know, and we got a lot of strength by proving how wrong the people were who wrote us off as a ‘80s flash-in-the-pan act.” Surviving has also meant remaining close with her ex-partner, Phil Oakey - whom Joanne was romantically involved with for most of the 1980s - and enduring periods of declining interest. However, these days the trio are tighter than ever, and it seems, are rarely out of each other’s pockets. “We go away on tour so much together that even now there’s never more than two weeks in the year where we don’t see one another.” Joanne says. “But we couldn’t have stayed together as a band for 30 years if we didn’t get on though, and our secret to success has always been knowing our roles in the band and not stepping outside of those. I mean I would never go into the studio and start telling Phillip how to use the synthesiser – I wouldn’t know one end of it from the other – and Susan and I aren’t involved in the songwriting either, but we take care of the business of running the band, which means that we see each other pretty regularly when not on tour as well.”

The business side of things goes from typical band activities, to Joanne’s appointed role as Human League’s accountant. It became apparent that to get through the tough times, minding the band’s economy, as with all other aspects themselves, was essential. “We were burnt a few times financially, and there were some very trying years personally.” Joanne adds, “Our label went bust the day our 2001 album Secrets came out, and we obviously very depressed about it, but instead of walking away, we decided to tour extensively and reconnect with our fans, and it was tough at first, but it kept us going and we have hardly stopped since then, I’m happy to say.”

lEIGh5

Motley Crue live in Melbourne, 2011 (review)

2011-09-26T23:26:00.007+10:00

Venue: Rod Laver Arena
Date: 24/09/11

Motley Crue’s The Dirt is one of the most notorious reads in the entire genre of rock biographies, which lead to the LA glam/metal band to be crowned undisputed kings of excess and bad behavior. No surprise then that their live show is equally excessive and totally over-the-top in a way that suits the band’s image, yet at the sacrifice of its ability to perform. This current tour is in celebration of 30 years of sex, drugs, arrests, messed up shit… oh and some rock n’ roll as well for good measure. The tour also boasts that fans are getting Motley Crue’s original line-up of Nikki Sixx, Mick Mars, Tommy Lee and Vince Neil - as if anybody could name the band member’s occasional replacements in the ‘down-time’, or early ‘90s to mid-00’s hit-free period – but then it is a testament to the ‘Crue that any of them are still talking considering the brutal in-band bitching that’s become as famous as their unhealthy lifestyles.

But Motley Crue are all now in their 50s, and have surely grown into well balanced men with a wealth of experience and know-how, right? Nah, who am I kidding!? The young bushy haired men who proudly sang about Smokin’ In The Boys Room and Girls, Girls, Girls refused to die, if the twenty-foot high expressions on Motley Crue’s craggily faces, peering down at us from the live-feed projection screens are anything to go by. Alas though the band’s aggression and prowess, much like their long-gone youth cannot be sustained for very long following the tremendous first rush of Too Fast For Love.

Despite the 30 years of ‘Crue action, its hard to ignore the feeling that Vince, Nikki and Mick don’t seem particularly comfortable with one another as they shift around the stage swapping mics so that fans can get a good look at each member. In particular, Vince’s attempt to finger Nikki’s bass strings mid-song results in a quick and very awkward retreat by Sixx, who gets a pretty stern glower in return. Meanwhile guitarist Mick Mars, with his frozen expression, begrudgingly joins the other two on a narrow raised platform in a woeful attempt to show solidarity that fails to translate as anything other than forced. The show is only three songs in, and already the seams are unraveling, so what a better way to distract from this fact than by wheeling out a huge mirror-balled grand piano that even Elton John would consider ‘a bit camp’ and getting drummer Tommy Lee to play it under a cool blue spotlight.

Tommy always had the 'extra spicy' curry before a performance.

Now Tommy Lee may be the owner of the most famous penis in rock, but he’s here to prove that there’s more to him than just an over-sized schlong, dammit! Lee makes a big show of prepping for his piano solo - as he would have done at every concert on this tour no doubt – and cue the big ‘80s power-ballad moment that, eh nobody appears to have been waiting for. Home Sweet Home, quite frankly dies mid-way through, as even from up in the bleachers, the audiences boredom is palpable. A rather telling long break follows and the stage lights are cut as the band hurriedly cross off every ballad from the set list and re-emerge with nowt but cock-rock left.

Next up, its stage two of Tommy Lee’s attempt to steal the show with an even more pointless display than his piano fiasco with the mother of all Spinal Tap moments; his kit, which has been mounted at the base of a circular vertical roller-coaster track, begins to edge up and around as he plays the most obviously not-live drum solo of all-time. Lee’s strapped in to his stool, so you know he’s gonna go the full 360 degrees, he does, and the effect is sickening, but not particularly ‘sick’. For about 10 minutes, Lee, after hauling a completely non-plussed fan up to join the ride, continues his rotating drum solo, aided by bursts of flame and showering sparks, but by now my mind is just wandering to things like ‘what happened to the rest of the band’ and ‘the level of insurance they would have to pay incase the ‘lucky’ audience member slips out of the restraints must be astronomical’.

Finally the rest of the band return, and we are in the home stretch of Motely Crue’s 30th anniversary concert, which so far has been every kind of absurd, but served up without a shred of irony. Not much so far has happened to cause any offense or ruffle feathers, but despite the long break off stage, Vince Neil appears to have given just about all he’s got and so he puffs his way through Dr Feelgood, forgetting half the lyrics and walking where he previously would run. The performance only continues to become more and more shambolic after this, and no amount of fire balls, smoke jets, sparks, cannons or revolving drum kits can hide the fact. Nikki Sixx barks into the mic to rouse up the audience as the show concludes – again with no sense of irony - “When we first got together, we knew we needed a singer like Steven Tyler, Robert Plant and Bon Scott… and with Vince Neil, we got all three!”

Even Vince wasn’t entirely convinced of Sixx’s comparison, but in a final act of forced unity, the band embrace and hold one-another’s arms aloft, and remind us how much better we were as an audience than… insert any capital city that isn’t Melbourne. But by then it was all too late for Motley Crue’s fans here at Rod Laver. I’m going out on a big general limb here, but if Australian audiences can be summarised at all, I think it’s safe to say, you just can’t bullshit us. Motley wanted to be loved so badly that they were literally turning on their heads to impress us, but in reality a few more weeks in rehearsals would’ve sufficed. The biggest shocker of all though is, who would have guessed the most notorious hard living, hard drinking, hard shagging band this side of the Rolling Stones damn well fake it?

lEIGh5

Ed Kuepper interview: 2011

2011-09-05T19:57:00.001+10:00

KUEPPER'S BREW

As guitarist in the Australian punk legends, The Saints, Ed Kuepper played the withdrawn, thoughtful foil to the rumbling brick shithouse that was Chris Bailey. But however uncharacteristic a thing ‘thoughtful’ may be in punk guitarists circles, as co-songwriter, Kuepper is credited as one of the two men who gave birth to punk in Australia in 1976, with a little sulk about being Stranded (so far from home). Despite the blazing debut of I’m Stranded, unlike Bailey, Kuepper had viewed punk as a mere minor bump in the road along which he was traveling, continually searching for something that moved him. Then in 1980, the German-born Queenslander, committed musical sacrilege - combining jazz with punk – in Laughing Clowns, but this hybrid-flaunting band demonstrated Kuepper’s formidable arranging and songwriting prowess, as well as gaining him widespread respect in his birthplace of Bremen.

It was Ed’s move to making solo records in 1985, beginning with Electrical Storm, that drives our conversation today as Kuepper takes stock of this, and 1986 album Rooms Of The Magnificent, through a series of acoustic performances, and planned re-rearrangements of the albums his punk and jazz roots never saw coming. The two albums, although not strictly his most prolific work, have gained an almost indescribable significance for Kuepper over time, he begins. “It feels like an odd thing for me to be doing right now, but the material seemed to be calling out for my attention. I recently began to see links between the songs on those albums, as well as on Today Wonder (1990), and I want to get to the core of what those connections are, and why I they were suddenly making themselves known to me. All I really know is I couldn’t ignore them any longer… It’s like psychoanalysis I suppose.” A debut solo album, I propose, can be a frightening concept for a man who walked away from such a ‘sure thing’ as The Saints, and the massive overseas fan-base Laughing Clowns earned. Was the common thread one of self-doubt?

“I would say I was rather more relieved.” He laughs. “Both of those bands ended quite poorly in terms of our friendships, and so I had no trepidation about recording on my own, however those first two records were very rushed affairs, which is why they were so raw and now demanding my urgent attention.” Kuepper, motivated by re-visiting his early solo work, is putting together an entirely new album to be released as a follow up, “I’m wondering if the new record will be informed by what I discover in re-working those older songs.” But his search seems to be based on an ideal, rather than any real dissatisfaction with how those records sounded. “I had forgotten quite a lot of those songs until recently when Mark Dawson (Ed’s drummer, 1985-’95 who is involved in the re-workings project) and I began this process, and hearing them again they seemed so mysterious to me. I’m not expecting any great revelations to occur, but it does feel as though a story was being written and somewhere along the way I lost the thread of that, which is what I’m exploring now in order to move it forward.” Since 1985, Ed has written and arranged 20 solo records, often direct and emotionally raw in tone, so untangling the story of his subconscious is certain keep the artist busy for some time yet. One brief but certainly memorable chapter in Kuepper’s story outside of his personal songwriting, was of course the tense musical partnership he shared with Chris Bailey in The Saints. Ed has on occasion reunited with The Saints for tours, but he understands the only rewarding part of his and Bailey’s union was during the band’s formation.

“There was focus, and the kind of fighting between us that was very good for creating music, but not for creating dear friends.” He recalls. “Chris was much happier after I left so he could get on with doing his campy vaudeville act… that’s his thing, but it was never really for me.” The last Saints reunion tour in 2009 coincided with the news that Mick Harvey was leaving The Bad Seeds after 30 years in the service of Mr Cave. As a long-time associate and peer of the band - The Birthday Party’s deceased guitarist, Tracey Pew had briefly joined Laughing Clowns – Ed was approached to step into Harvey’s place. But if his role extends to writing the next album with Cave, he’s unsure. “Oh look, we haven’t discussed those finer details, but I would imagine just being in the studio with the band we would work out the songs as a unit, but being involved as a songwriter is not an issue. I think Nick writes most of the lyrics, and I certainly wouldn’t knock back the chance to write together, but I’m still ‘the new guy’ in a lot of ways, which is nice.” He laughs. “I haven’t been the new anything for a long time!”

lEIGh5

Clouds, The Wonderstuff, Jesus Jones: live in Melbourne 2011 (review)

2011-08-24T02:28:00.007+10:00

Venue: The Palace
Date: 19/08/2011

“Did that really just happen?” I say to myself in the moments following Jesus Jones’ final exit from the Palace stage, after an encore that concluded a night 20-plus years in waiting. This triple bill of bands that all peaked quite some time ago, could only truly tickle the fancy of a very specific age group – children of the early 1990’s – and it is precisely those ‘children’ who’ve flocked to the Palace tonight to rejoice in and lament the last ever pre-internet era in music, known as the early ‘90s.

Jesus Jones in particular were a major part of my education, as I slipped from top 40 radio into this new wow thing called ‘alternative music’. Remember that? Looking back, Jesus Jones were the perfect vehicle to carry a newbie into lower-end-of-charts comparative weirdness. At the time, they represented everything that had been missing from the music I had known, but suddenly found myself needing. Meanwhile closer to home, Sydney’s Clouds had blipped on the radar around the same time, with their strange but sing-a-long tunes and a reputation as the must-see live band. I didn’t see them, but as first band up tonight Clouds, who hadn’t played together since 1997, deliver an eerily powerful and dust-free set, safely securing that reputation. However, time wouldn’t allow them a sound-check for this show, and as a result there is something slightly mechanical about watching them perform some of their most-loved tracks. Soul Eater, 4pm, Immorta, Say It and Bower Of Bliss are undoubtedly superior to the recorded versions, but the band’s rigid presence suggested they were anxious to just get through the set – as marvelous as it is – and leave. They end on a meticulously rendered Hieronymus, playing as though every fragment of the song was burned into their collective brains, and leave us hanging with no encore.

Perhaps not all that many were here for Clouds tonight, and they picked up that they weren’t playing to ‘their crowd’ as such, but no doubt the vibes are still good all round as most people are just here to enjoy three fine examples of a great period in music. Although it’s a seemingly unrelated line-up of acts - a Jesus Jones fan is basically indistinguishable from a Wonderstuff fan, at least until the many British-accented punters present chime-in following Clouds' set. One ex-pat speaks hazily into my ear between bands of how important it was to ‘choose your tribe’ during the British post new-wave in the early ‘90s. Jesus Jones, EMF and Age Of Chance fans would never have been seen at a Wonderstuff gig back in the day, for those bands were worshipped by a totally different clan and mixing was off the table. This tribalism however looks to be long-gone, as no Pulp ‘Mis-Shapes-style’ war on the dance floor takes place and it’s thankfully still too cold for the Balmy Army to make an appearance. Further evidence of tribalism’s death needed? The Wonderstuff have only gone and got ex-Pop Will Eat Itself drummer Fuzz Townshend to bash the bins for them, and their placing on tonight’s bill could be read as ‘Jesus Jones’ opening act.’

But whoever decided on the running order of the bands was probably tossing a three sided coin. Jesus Jones had top billing, but exactly why so is not obvious by any traditional ‘biggest seller’ means… Until Wonderstuff take to the stage and things became a little clearer. Performance wise, Wonderstuff are incredible. They deliver a riot of, mainly drinking songs that would make Shane MacGowan proud, and all the energy of an out-of-control Red Bull delivery truck. However, the spectacle of singer Miles Hunt at 47 years of age in Play School presenter’s regalia – stripy t-shirt and ill-fitting denim overalls - and the mysterious return of his circa-1991 bushy mane (heads it’s a wig….) probably seemed like a good idea on paper, but I found the music more enjoyable when I wasn’t actually watching him. Presentation wise, they would have been far more suited to headlining a fancy dress barn dance is all I’m saying.

Some part of me really wanted Jesus Jones to emerge in their (now) vintage skate gear, and still sporting enormous fringes, but perhaps fearing a Wonderstuff-esque pantomime, they opted for smart casuals. Besides their new dressed-down look, vampish lead singer, Mike Edwards hasn’t aged in any obvious way whatsoever, but rather seems to be transitioning into a dandy-ish fop. With not an ounce of fat on Edward’s body and barely a wrinkle on his chiseled face, somewhere out there, Jarvis was seething. The rest of the almost-all-original line-up (they have a new drummer) resemble archetypal aging ravers with a bit of a nod to heavy metal thrown in for good measure. Basically Jesus Jones look exactly like they sounded at their peak, and just as both bands before them tonight, deliver a set pooled only from their first three albums – or the ‘hit period’ - Liquidizer, Doubt and Perverse. It’s been 20 years since the Jones boys have played in Australia, and with tongue slightly in cheek, Edwards declares, “We’ll just do a few songs you used to know.” They kick off with Doubt’s Who, Where, Why? – a song of lost identity which could not be more fitting for the band now. Jesus Jones self-confidence early on verged on arrogance. Mike Edwards fully believed his band were making ‘the music of the future’, but in saying so, he placed his band’s heads neatly onto the block and the brutal lashing he received from the press resulted in rapidly dwindling interest/product post 1993 album, Perverse.

Perhaps Jesus Jones weren’t so wide of the mark though. The Prodigy proved the masses were open to the idea of a slightly daft electro-metal act, but alas, if only Jesus Jones hadn’t thought so hard about it all. At least for a time, they were music’s baggy jeaned fortune tellers. Sounding very fortuitous now, 1991’s anti-pop hit single, Real Real Real blasts forth its claim that pop music is on a downward spiral into ‘safe and samey’ terrain. It might not have rung Nostradamus’s bell, but at least someone was saying it. Nostalgia concerts are strange things when the band in question once stood firm against ‘repeating the past’ but its undeniable that Jesus Jones would not be touring at all were it not for a single piece of music - 1991’s Right Here Right Now - and its impact beyond the charts. Politicians campaigned with it playing in the background, advertisers sought its power to push their products and street demonstrations rang with its message of instant revolution. It’s also the song that a large number of fans tonight were happy to leave once hearing. Mike waves goodbye from the stage as the exodus occurs leaving the hard-cores with some very welcome extra dance-floor space.

The rest of the set is a fan’s dream list of b-sides, near-forgotten album tracks and even one new song, which was promising to say the least, but it’s their debut single, Info Freako that gets the warmest welcome. A cry of ‘FINALLY!’ rings out from one punter at the barrier, who had been waiting possibly years for Perverse stand-out track Idiot Stare, and further voices are raised in response to the ‘song we haven’t played live in 20 years’ – Blissed - another from Doubt. All up, Jesus Jones play a well-considered set, but by the time their one-song encore is over, there’s two gaping holes in the shape of The Right Decision and Devil. Incredibly, they chose the far less interesting Zeros & Ones as major representative of their dense electro-metal phase (Perverse) which was certainly not the right decision. Still, the concert felt way too short despite the band covering so much ground, which translated means, it was a fucking brilliant ride to be on, and knowing that every song played was one closer to the end of an unlikely to ever be repeated event, was enough to cause minor welling up in these eyes.

lEIGh5

JESUS JONES - PALACE SET-LIST: 19/08/2011

WHO, WHERE, WHY?

MOVE MOUNTAINS
INTERNATIONAL BRIGHT YOUNG THING
CARICATURE
REAL, REAL, REAL
NOTHING TO HOLD ME
GET A GOOD THING
NEVER ENOUGH
ALL THE ANSWERS
MESSAGE
RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW
ZEROS & ONES
BRING IT ON DOWN
INFO FREAKO
IDIOT STARE
BLISSED

Wild Beasts: live in Melbourne 2011 (review)

2011-08-01T04:24:00.004+10:00

Venue: Corner Hotel
Date: 28/07/11

Good news, music lovers! The lost link between XTC, Friendly Fires and Crying Light-era Antony and The Johnsons has finally been found… about bloody time, you might say. Wild Beasts - as it is they - bring together the power of a stadium rock show, and the intimacy and heart of a folk festival, which although sounds atrocious in print, the Leeds based neo-psychedelic rock/soul act, saw to it tonight at the Corner, that fans were unanimous in their agreement – the combination somehow works.

The very, very indie, mostly male crowd found themselves robbed of a whole two hour’s composure, on this second visit by Wild Beasts to our shores, as part of the amazing Splendour 2011 line-up. On record, these guys impressively strain and simper over rolling percussion and strings, favouring unstructured spacing - as is the will of bands in the post-Sigur Ros world – only much like Mariah Carey’s urge to use every fucking note on the octave scale - just because she can - Wild Beasts perhaps could do with reining in a bit that ‘desire to dazzle’ so much on stage as they are quite clearly gifted musicians, and have a solid cannon of songs working in their favour.

To give an example of just how well versed and ‘in control’ they were in setting up the right vibes, the band managed to drink enough alcohol between them to dull the pain of three Christmas’s, and although they were, “still really, really jet lagged”, as co-lead singer Tom Fleming states, nobody dropped a single musical baton in their multi-multi-instrumental set-up. These guys are switching instruments in every direction tonight, and taking to it like it ain’t no thang. But hey, if any one of the four guy/one girl team were slackin’ off – guitarist Ben Little did spend a considerable amount of time on the floor - drummer Chris Talbot proved a sensational distraction for them to catch a break. Holding a steady gaze throughout, Talbot played his enormous kit – which included a timpani – as though he were leading a charge into battle.

Despite the drummers commanding presence however, it was all eyes on Wild Beasts’ remarkable lead vocalist, Hayden Thorpe and his roof-raising falsetto. A lot was made of the fact that Brett Anderson (of Suede) and Jeff Buckley sang in falsetto because ‘it just wasn’t done’ in the days of flannelette-shirted rawk, otherwise known as the ‘90s, and I wonder if it’s because of those two artists that more and more male singers are finding their inner eunuch now? Or is it all down to Justin Hawkins from The Darkness? Probably. But whatever the cause, Thorpe is a magnificent on the ‘shrinking balls’ choral vocalising, but not as high pitched live as on the band’s three albums, surprisingly. But Thorpe, as unique as his voice is, has found a wonderous foil in co-lead singer, Fleming. The duo, who are positioned either side of back-to-back keyboards, never outshine, but virtually match one another note for note, and it hits me that I never knew it was two guys I was hearing all along on those tracks.

Of the band’s back catalogue, their set is a pretty generous serve of second album, Two Dancers, which clearly pleases the crowd, who get rowdiest during We Still Have The Taste Dancing On Our Tongues and Hootin’ & Howlin’. Although the stand-out performances were of The Devil’s Crayon and Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants from their debut release, Limbo Panto by far. To these most festive of Wild Beasts’ songs, a core group of fans gather on the smaller side stage to dance. “Hey I love the Top Of The Pops thing you guys have got going on over there!” Thorpe cracks, only to be met with confused expressions from the ‘too young’ invaders.

Maybe it was a little harsh to say the band over do the ‘dazzle’ in a clear desire to go against typical indie band clonery, but on reflection, their show would simply have worked better in a stonking big arena. In other words, Wild Beasts were a jet engine blasting in a two-car garage in this setting, and their performance was far from ‘considerate of the neighbours.’ If my prediction’s anywhere near right, we were lucky to see them in such an intimate venue tonight because somebody soon is gonna see what these Beasts are capable of if let out to play, in which case it’ll be ‘watch your arses, Muse’.

lEIGh5

CORNER HOTEL SET-LIST:

Play Thing
Loop The Loop

Deeper
The Devil's Crayon
We've Still Got The Taste Dancing On Our Tongues
Albatross
Invisible
This Is Our Lot
Bed Of Nails
Hooting and Howling
Reach A Bit Further
Lion's Share
Brave Bulging Bouyant Clairvoyants
All The Kings Men
End Comes Too Soon

Trish Young (Clouds) interview: 2011

2011-07-26T03:56:00.002+10:00

RAINING PLEASURE

The current ‘90s reunion tour juggernaut continues to prosper and throw up some pretty surprising, half remembered names. Some are more obviously deserving of our attention than others - it’s a personal taste thing for sure - but the last time Sydney band Clouds played in my hometown, I was so teasingly close to experiencing their show, I've always reserved a special place for them. The over 18’s-only gig in question, resulted in a cold night stood in the venue’s car-park straining to enjoy every morsel of muffled sound cranking from the speakers. This so close, but not quite moment never abated, but only rose to a lingering obsession with one day being in the same room as the band while they played - after all, their music had already made a fan-for-life of me.

Clouds’ reunion this year falls on the anniversary of their left-field, ARIA-winning debut album, Penny Century, a record that pooled together a whole career’s worth of ideas, and one that the band would never quite equal again in popularity. Yet the most endearing elements at play remained throughout Clouds’ eight year run; the perfectly synchronized harmonies of Jodi Phillis and Trish Young - who also provided lead guitar and bass – the well-measured guitar feedback/melodic tune-ship and some seriously creative drumming, was their ongoing signature. It was after a frustrating US tour, during which time they were signed and dropped within just three months, Clouds ended tidily with the single Never Say Forever and final album, Futura in 1997. The following years were good to Trish Young, she confesses today from her home in Sydney, but she's quick to add, “Though I am really looking forward to getting out there and playing some of the old songs again!” Young explains the timing of the tour - which see’s Gen-X favourites, Jesus Jones and The Wonderstuff on the same bill - had an added benefit for Clouds’, who were already considering making a return.

“We had put out the feelers already to see if anybody would be interested in booking us to play a couple of shows before the Jesus Jones/Wonderstuff tour came about.” Trish claims, “In the start we were told it would be a five band line-up with us, Jesus Jones, Wonderstuff, Frente and Caligula, but by the time the booking was done, Frente and Caligula had vanished from the roster. I think in the beginning the promoter wanted a full mini-festival of bands from that era.“ The planned triple bill might seem like some cobbling together of completely unrelated acts in any musical sense, but between them, they recall a very specific time in music and had all laid claim to equal billing on the alternative music charts. So much like cask wine and orange juice, it’s not strictly an obvious mix, but then all three bands had previously crossed paths during their respective peaks. Trish recounts.

“I can’t remember the exact year – it would have been around 1992 I think – but we actually supported The Wonderstuff once before, and Jesus Jones used to open for them in England quite a bit.” She continues, “ I do vaguely remember hanging back stage and chatting with (singer) Miles (Hunt) and the guitarist and having a great time, but recently I read in an interview, Miles said none of them (in Wonderstuff) got on back then and tours were always really tense, but it was not the impression I had of them at all. But who knows, maybe the tour with us was the only one they enjoyed!” Clouds frequent tours, including the first ever Big Day Out in 1992, were near legendary events on the live music calendar and attracted sell-out crowds all around the country. Trish recalls Clouds’ touring years fondly,

“When Clouds started, that was exactly the kind of life I had wanted ever since I was in school.” She exclaims, “Opposed to a lot of bands, I actually enjoyed living on the road and staying in a different hotel every night, meeting fans and doing in-stores, but then it was tough on Jodi. She used to suffer terribly from insomnia when we were on tour.” Jodi’s fatigue was never offered as a reason for the Clouds’ eventual split in 1997, but it seems reasonable to think it was a factor. “No it really wasn’t that, but it is true that Jodi wasn’t enjoying the same things that I was about being on tour.” Although Trish admits she misses Clouds, and Jodi continues to slot her 'old band's songs' in during her live solo gigs, no plans are afoot to revive the group. “It’s only a reunion in the sense that we’re playing these three shows... there won’t be any new music or plans to continue beyond the tour. There just isn’t the time anymore for us to commit to that kind of lifestyle.” At the start of Clouds’ career in 1990, the release of their debut self-titled EP in 1990 - which featured Triple J favourite, Cloud Factory – saw the band lumped in with stand-out 4AD acts of the day, Cocteau Twins and Lush. It looked too many reviewers as though fans of ‘jangly guitar/girly-harmonies pop’ had a new band to slip nicely among their This Mortal Coil collections, but Clouds were already in the process of losing their innocence.

Cloud Factory’s gentle acoustic delivery was a false indicator of what was about to come and in 1991, the band dipped into darker terrain with the release of the Loot EP, in particular, the murder ballad 4pm, which beat Nick Cave at his own game. Following Loot, and its radio single, Soul Eater, Clouds managed to chart with a gothic tribute to Flemish impressionist painter, Hieronymus Bosch (Hieronymus), giving the band a green light to go darker and stranger still. Their debut album, Penny Century released at the end of ’91, carried on their sweet but sinister turn and a sizable section of the record-buying public went along for the ride. At this stage, Clouds guitarist Dave Easton was tuning into Pixies/Sonic Youth’s cosmic radio while Jodi and Trish’s writing seemed to be channeled through punk goddess, Siouxsie Sioux. Then in 1993, the much anticipated come-back single, Bower Of Bliss - with a vagina-worship narrative that would’ve made Serge Gainsbourg blush – signaled the end of Clouds mk.1, and unfortunately the end of long-held support from Triple J. Radio barely touched Bower… or it’s parent album, Thunderhead, but Trish holds no regrets about Clouds’ rapid shift towards a heavier, ‘less popular’ sound.

“Even if there had’ve been a ‘Clouds-sound’ to use as a reference, I doubt that we could have maintained such a thing. There were four people in this band at any given time, all with different musical tastes and wanting to do different things, so just that alone meant we were never going to be about one idea, or one person’s idea of what Clouds were meant to sound like.” Indeed Trish and Jodi are the only members of Clouds who remained from start to finish. A crew of six players all-up came and went between 1990 and 1997, however the current reunion shows will feature Clouds’ longest term line-up; Dave Easton, who played guitar during the band’s peak period, ‘91-’95, and Raphael Whittingham, who drummed between ’93 and ’97. Preparations for the three-date run, Trish explains, have been a mix of spirited gatherings of old mates, and the odd memory lapse. “I’m pretty pleased actually with the amount of songs I could remember, almost start to finish, but there were a couple of times where everyone just stopped playing and no-one could remember how the next part was supposed to go!” She laughs. “We used a lot of weird structures in our songs and it was kind of funny how everyone forgot the same parts because of these sudden changes where the music would just stop, or get really fast!” Trish says, surely describing Clouds’ superb 1992 single, Anthem, in which the band knowingly replicate The Troggs’ Wild Thing before freezing mid riff, as a chiming music box replaces an expected glam-rock guitar solo. “I’m glad you picked up on that, because there were quite a lot of gruesome guitar solos around at the time, and we were trying to sort of go against that in our own little way.” Fourteen years on from their split, regarding the Clouds catalogue, Trish reckons that the music her band made within those eight years, stands-up today, and has aged very well indeed. “I think some of the songs sound a bit dated, but most of them still feel surprisingly fresh to me.” She adds, “I honestly think we didn’t sound as though we belonged to particular time, or decade... to me it’s like Clouds could have happened at any time really.”

lEIGh5

Jodi and Trish; an unbeatable combo.

Isobel Campbell interview: 2011

2011-07-21T19:02:00.002+10:00

BEAUTY & THE BEAST

Possessing one of the sweetest voices in contemporary music, meant Isobel Campbell slotted rather neatly into Glasgow folk-pop ensemble, Belle & Sebastian – the band she started with former lover, Stuart Murdoch - but just slotting in, by her own admission, was never Campbell's intention. “Nah…. holding back has never been something I’m particularly good at.” Isobel left Belle & Sebastian in 2002, having provided them with their biggest hit, Legal Man just previous, and emerged from her Gentle Waves solo side-project to finally record under her own name from 2003 onward. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, a serviceable grunge act called Screaming Trees had ended their ten year run with a whimper, and brooding front-man, Mark Lanegan was part-timing with Queens Of The Stone Age. Seemingly adverse to maintaining another full-time band, Lanegan stuck to his 'casual basis only' habit all decade-long, leaving a trail of collaborations in his wake.

Lanegan's reputation as a sleeping bear never reached Campbell ahead of her request for Mark to 'sing on a couple of tracks she'd written'. The voice she had in mind for her songs was, 'that guy from Screaming Trees', knowing nothing of Mark's volatile nature and problems with addiction. Campbell simply says, “All of us have something or other to contend with… I believe”, and whether or not his demons affect their creative output, Isobel maintains, “Everything affects everything else, doesn’t it?” Her attitude to Mark is based on mutual respect and certainly Lanegan displays uncharacteristic warmth in Campbell's presence during rare joint-interviews. Their collaborative efforts to date amount to three acclaimed albums, the last of which, Hawk, released in 2010 spells the end of their partnership. Looking back over their work together, Isobel's lasting impression is, “I would say 99.9 percent of the time we saw eye-to-eye musically. We trust and respect each other a lot, and I think that is pretty obvious by the music we made.”

Isobel and Mark's work has allowed Campbell much greater expression. She utilises their shared vocal lyrically to direct a conversation, often willfully personal, courting comparisons with Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin's explicitly charged duets. In her writing, Campbell has addressed the messy break-up with Belle & Sebastian's Stuart Murdoch, but she's equally at home playing fictional storyteller. “Sometimes it can be a vent for things, yes, but sometimes it is just pure fantasy. If the song is for someone in particular then I usually have their voice in my head, but usually I just concentrate on writing a good song and that may or may not tell some kind of story, or reveal something about me, but either way it's some form of personal expression.” Although Campbell and Lanegan's last tour winds up this year leaving Isobel to pursue new collaborations, she reveals a long-term retirement plan she hopes will include Mark.

“I think when we're really, really old it'd be nice to get together one more time and do something with our combined history and the experiences we've had separately as well.” She laughs, “I'll be like Mark is now – kind of broody and dark – and he might have mellowed out, so it could be really interesting!” While Campbell fantasises about possible future role reversals, she reveals exactly what their current collaborative roles are. “Mark always says I am the head and he's the body in this arrangement. He likes to leave the thinking to me. I think it's worked out well though because, I was really willing to be that person and it suited Mark also because he needs somebody to push him to work sometimes.” Geographically, Isobel and Mark are closer now than ever – Campbell recently moved to LA, while Mark calls Washington State home – but her shift to the US has offered Isobel new opportunities, helping her transition away from the safety net of the Lanegan collaborations.

“I'm really proud of the three albums (I made) with Mark, but that cycle is completed for now.” The musically fertile Arizona desert, unlikely as that sounds, drew Isobel in. “I've found it's the perfect place for me, being from Glasgow, you can't get a greater contrast. Also, I've fallen in love with the music scene out there.” She reveals, “I've been writing with a singer called Victoria Williams, and our record is about half done now.” She adds excitedly, “ Calexico play on some of it, as well who are just amazing, but as for what the end product will sound like, I will quote Victoria, who always says…. 'We’ll see….', but you just know she has it all mapped out in her head.” Both Mark and Isobel have grown considerably through their in-obvious bond, and certainly a great deal more than if either had stayed within their respective bands. Between them they've forged one of those, for all intense and purposes, mis-matched duos who like, Kirtsy MacColl and The Pogues or Nick Cave and Kylie, although usually short-lived, we continue to have an enduring fascination with.

lEIGh5

"Is the glass half full, or half empty, Mark?"

Charles Jenkins Mid-Winter Ball, 2011 (review)

2011-07-11T04:07:00.002+10:00

Venue: Corner Hotel
Date: 09/07/11

At the third annual Mid-Winter Ball event, host and super-connected musician, Charles Jenkins once again rallies Melbourne’s finest for a heart and hand warming night of song. Jenkins’ band The Zhivagos are joined throughout by enough guest artists to bash out a modern day Do They Know It’s Christmas at the drop of a hat – which we are thankfully spared. Instead, the desperate to stay warm crowd gathering rapidly in the Corner, enjoy the proven talent of the Ball’s wondrous line-up minus the smugness usually found at charity events. This year’s beneficiaries of tickets sold are Foodbank Victoria who distribute much needed grub to everyone from those in disaster affected areas to the homeless.

However the thrill of helping provide some well needed funds to charity isn’t what’s on our minds when opening act, Ron Peno & The Superstitions take to the side stage with zero fanfare. Having the ex-Died Pretty front-man as a ‘warm-up’ act speaks volumes about the musical acts on offer tonight. This being the first of two sets Peno performs with his new band, the captivating singer takes his time in building up the mood and momentum for the night’s proceedings. By third song in, Death O’ Me, Ron – refreshed, following a recent Died Pretty reunion show – is commanding our attention with a set of entirely new, yet somehow familiar tracks. Peno’s Ian Curtis dance is still a part of his live delivery, as well as touches of the American Wild West in his songwriting (Train Whistle).

Over on the mainstage, Charles Jenkins is preparing to unleash his many guest artists, while indulging us with songs from his latest album, Walk This Ocean. What happens over the course of his first of two sets, is a wildly veering, rough round the edges blast of rock. When singers like Mick Thomas (ex-Weddings Parties Anything) and Lisa Miller cosy up with Jenkins for tantalising duets, the arctic chills of Melbourne at night feel like a memory. Even the decorative cardboard snowflakes hanging from the ceiling seem in danger of melting at the sound of Thomas’s gruff and throaty punctuations. In equally fine fettle, Kat Spazzy (from The Spazzys) brings some youthful energy to the stage, while Georgia Fields cuts through the wailing guitars proving she can work her magic in any situation. It is those guitars in the end that dominate however, with no less than four maestros of the axe whooping it up as he concert draws to an end.

Having never seen one of Mark Seymour’s famed live performances for myself, I was triple-thrilled to see him at last join Jenkins and co. for punchy Hunters’ classic, Everything’s On Fire. Mark’s presence noticeably stirs up the crowd, so Jenkins chooses his moment to surprise us with an unrehearsed, but effective, cover of David Bowie’s Boys Keep Swinging, backed by every one of tonight’s guests. The rabble-rousing glam-rock rendition was a hit, and only topped by the full line-up’s closing number, The Kinks’ Victoria - in the style of The Fall meets the Sex Pistols, or some such brutal marriage. The mess of artists filling the stage sharing mics and trying not to bump into one another while showing great camaraderie, is a warming image to hold onto as the deafening chorus of Victoria throbs in my ears on the long, chilly walk home. The freezing weather is a crappy part of life here in Melbourne, we all know, but with events this good, it’s so worth chucking on the thermals and braving the snap to bask in Melbourne’s other claim to fame; it’s awesome musicians.

lEIGh5

Meeting Mark Seymour!

The Bedroom Philosopher's Croxton School Assembly (live review)

2011-07-07T01:52:00.004+10:00

Venue: Thornbury Theatre

For both audience and the many and varied acts tonight at the Thornbury theatre, school is a comfortable enough distance away in time, that mocking its regiment feels like a rite of passage we can all relate to. Justin Heazlewood (aka; The Bedroom Philosopher) who established himself as one of the best observational comedians on the album, Songs From The 86 Tram, taps into that powerful uniting source of mirth and agony we call our school days in this latest in a series of themed concerts. Anybody who grew up attending an Australian school, recognised tonight the painfully accurate bad student poetry/music/acting in a show that - although aimed more at a Gen-X crowd –managed to remain broadly accessible.

Heazlewood’s type of humour works simply by identifying factors specific to average Australians. While Justin might laugh in a different part of the story to most of us, he usually manages to get his audience in on the joke without much effort. School, for those who excelled, was probably not particularly funny or remarkable, but for most of us, the experience is a source of pained amusement, which is precisely what informs Justin’s soft attack. Seated in what could easily pass for a typical school hall, we are presented with the atmosphere of a typical assembly, except for the first time, nobody is really expected to sit quietly and pay attention – or remain sober. The realisation sets in that Heazlewood has thrown his audience a golden opportunity to talk back, lounge around and generally rattle the nerves of those tiresome teachers and staff with no fear of a dreaded parental phone call.

Save from delivering actual canings, the performers in the Croxton School Assembly show maintain an engaging illusion of those uncomfortable, over-long school gatherings complete with authoritarian MC/Principle, (Ben Pobjie) and a better-than-in-reality school band, (Sex On Toast). The mumbling MC, who manages to embody every bored school Principle addressing a restless classroom, ever, becomes a figure of contempt as the night wears on. Between the main acts, he cops a deluge of paper planes and booing and hissing from the cross-legged ‘students’ spread out along the floor in front of the stage. Building on the already realistic atmosphere, he deals out ‘detentions’ in raised voice to even greater objection. But Principle Pobjie’s in-character droning, means reception for the performers is highly enthused whenever he leaves the stage, and with Tripod’s established guarantee-of-fun in place, the boys are swamped by applause after a particularly long head-masterly speech.

Tripod’s routine of songs, ‘unplanned’ cut-aways and geek-ified self-mockery is right at home in the Assembly, as is some stunningly awful poetry courtesy of Emilie Zoe Baker. The broad range of age groups – some with their own kids, some probably just out of school themselves – all respond with the same enthusiasm for being propelled into the horror of an amateur talent-night vibe. Crammed in among the ‘amateurs’ with his cover blown, Damien Cowell - ‘the guy who was in TISM’s’ new band, The DC3 displayed fitting irreverence for the whole event, (and Henry Wagons). Improvisational hooligans, Lime Champions fulfilled the role of class clowns, alongside stiff competition from The Bedroom Philosopher himself, who’s own set allows one notorious local identity to live out a school-age fantasy. Justin and his band, The Awkwardstra, deliver highlights their marvellous 86 Tram CD, plus newbie, I’m Leaving My Hairdresser, before unleashing their surprise guest.

The by-now even rowdier fans, roar their disapproval as Justin asks, ‘who here likes Aussie hip-hop?’ Not to be deterred, he jumps into We Are Tramily, a freakishly spot-on Hilltop Hoods send-up, during which the one and only John Safran, decked out in a silky tracksuit, bursts onto the stage, freestyling like a pro. Anyone who saw Safran’s Music Jamboree series, will recall the failure he endured getting his rap group, Raspberry Cordial taken seriously, but tonight he commands respect. That is, at least until he runs out of rhymes, and resorts to yelling ‘Raspberry Cordial’s in the house!’ randomly until the song ends in total disarray. Yes, it’s unplanned and a complete mess, but so much in the spirit of the Croxton school assembly, no-one cared. The Bedroom Philosopher along with a slightly embarrassed John Safran, file off stage to thunderous approval as our Principle returns to deliver joke-certificates to the performers. Closing the night, the mess of bodies played out on the floor hurling paper at the stage are treated to a medley of ‘90s rock songs by now partly de-trousered school band, Sex On Toast.

Justin Heazlewood took a huge leap of faith in making this theatrical, pretend-amateur show work. Whereas it could easily have come across as confusing and ‘just amateur’, Justin relied on, successfully it turned out, his audience’s willingness to go along with the joke for the duration of an event that gave little indication of what, if anything was expected of his fans. I suspect though, that the sight of half his audience turning up in school uniforms and behaving as if they were extras in the show, was the ultimate pay-off for Heazlewood and co. Other would-be comedy/musical acts should note: The Croxton high class of 2011 final exam results are in, and its distinctions all round people; time to pull your socks up.

lEIGh5

Del Tha Funkee Homosapien interview: 2011

2011-07-01T16:02:00.007+10:00

FUNKEE BY NATURE

At hip-hop’s high end, there’s a lot of cringe-worthy behaviour that apparently serves as an enviable lifestyle. While these, often overnight, star’s pavement to penthouse stories continue to impress bogans everywhere, it’s comforting to know that for every overblown clown in a white suit with more jewellery than Kleins’ factory warehouse, there are fringe artists like Del Tha Funkee Homosapien, sharing more in common with the bohemians than the Fresh Prince of Bel Air. This Oakland, California native shunned the potential of an ‘easy street ride’ after cutting ties with his well established cousin Ice Cube, who helped launch the then 18-year old’s rap career. Del’s 1991 debut, I Wish My Brother George Was Here – a reference to his idol, Parliament’s George Clinton – showcased a decidedly less popular hip-hop/funk style, more in tune with Brooklyn based acts like 3rd Bass, than Cube’s/NWA’s West Coast gangsta rap, which was peaking at the time. His break-through single in the same year, Mistadobalina, openly stung the corporate hand which was already starting to dig deep into the hip-hop scene to check for potential cash-in-ability. But while it’s a credible thing to be seen as shunning The Man in hip-hop, Del – one time seen as ‘rap’s court jester’ – it turned out, was a little more serious than many of his contemporaries, and hence is still around to claim a sizeable share of respect, without so much as a hint of white suit-ery.

To celebrate his new album, The Golden Era, and 20 years of solid work, Del is making his first Australian visit since 1992. “I haven’t been out there since back in the 'Dobalina days, man but I got a lot more stuff behind me now.” Anyone who’s followed Del’s progress since would concur, the man is tireless. Nine solo albums, collaborations with Handsome Boy Modelling School, Deltron 3030, Gorillaz, Souls Of Mischief and even Dinosaur Jr, amounts to shit-loads to choose from for his live show. “I’m bringing everything I’ve done in one neat package for you all.” He teases. As for the hotly anticipated new Deltron 3030 album - his on/off group with cohorts Dan The Automator and Kid Koala, who slaughtered the competition in 2000 with their self-titled debut – Del urges ‘it’s coming’. “It’s still under wraps, you know, it’s not performance ready yet, so I won’t be doing any of that on this tour. It’s half-written though, so we’re hoping to get that out this year some time.” It’s often overlooked, but Deltron 3030’s debut was way ahead of its time in terms of where hip-hop was heading. While Kanye’s enjoying his view from the top, he should probably raise a little toast to Deltron – the first futurist hip-hop act on the block.

Del's Deltron 3030 persona

“It’s weird because that first record was pretty huge, you know, but we don’t know what we’re gonna do with this next one because the industry’s kinda fucked up now. We don’t know how we’re gonna release it yet, but that’s cool.” He adds, “I like change, you gotta move with the times and find new ways to get your stuff out there.” Del’s a stronger, wiser man these days since deciding to take the fate of his career into his own hands. Starting the Hieroglyphics label in the early ‘90s, Del was able to sustain his and several fellow underground rap acts releases when the major’s all backed out. But wiser still, it proved, Del began teaching himself music theory, and was soon digesting the lesson’s final examination text; How To Write A Hit Song. “For me it seemed natural to learn all I could about music, being a song writer.” He confirms, “If I was a visual artist, I would have my crayons, my oils, my easel and I’d learn about shading and all that; I’d have all the tools. So, by learning music theory I was adding all the colours to my paint box, you know what I’m saying?” He laughs, “But I make music for a living so I knew instinctively from that and from listening to it for so many years the how-to, but music theory taught me all the names for the parts in composition. I got tired of kinda winging it, you know, it was time for me to get professional.” Del’s tidy link between music and visual arts went beyond theorising, when in 2001, he became immortalised as Del Tha Ghost Rapper in Gorillaz, complete with his own animated on-screen character; a genuine dream-come-true situation, he claims.

A ghostly Del haunts 2-D in Gorillaz "Clint Eastwood" video

“When I saw the artwork for Gorillaz, I already knew it was Jamie Hewlett’s work, man!” Del hypes, “I used to collect the Tank Girl comics man, that shit was tight, you know what I’m saying? When Dan (The Automator – Gorillaz/Deltron producer) introduced me to the project and showed me all the artwork, I was into it before I had heard any music just because Jamie was involved. He’s the reason I said yes.” In its infancy, Del was the first artist on Gorillaz, now overflowing, guest list. However, the previous year, he worked with Damon Albarn on a track for Deltron 3030, perhaps even informing Gorillaz ‘futuristic’ musical direction. “I dunno man, Damon already had platinum hits in Blur, right, so he wasn’t trying to recreate that, he was trying to make this cult thing - which was only gonna be online at first - so I think he just wanted it to be as far from what he had done before as he could get.” As Tha Ghost Rapper, Del performs elaborate rhymes - which he claims he wrote in under half-an-hour - on the Gorillaz tracks, Clint Eastwood and Rock The House. He explains. “Me and Dan were just finishing up in the studio on some Deltron stuff, and he was gonna take me home, and then at the last minute he says, ‘oh, do you think you can put some lyrics to this song Clint Eastwood’, and I’m just wantin’ to get home, you know, so I did my thing real quick so I could leave.” He laughs, “They already had a rap on that song, but the lyric wasn’t great you know. Anyway its Dan I gotta thank coz now I got a platinum disc on my wall, it (Gorillaz) paid for my house, and I got my own character by Jamie “Tank Girl” Hewlett. That shit turned out good for me!” Saying ‘yes’ to Gorillaz, learning his trade, starting Hieroglyphics and generally avoiding the rap star clichés, have all clearly helped Del survive in uncertain times. He discusses.

“I got a lot of guidance from Ice Cube back in the days but also, I’m a Leo man, that’s like the super-instinctual sign,” he laughs, “I’ve always just known what to do. What can I say?” In more practical terms, Del offers, “More importantly though (producers on Del’s debut album) Boogiemen and DJ Pooh taught me all about getting my tracks up to scratch.” When Del wrote his first hit in late 1991, Mistadobalina, cousin Cube was quick to bow out. Del recalls, “I remember at early shows, Cube would come on and introduce me and hype me up to the crowd you know, and it was like, well I don’t need that now.” He grins, “I think a lot of people would’ve been happy to sit up under him and get a name just for that alone, but that’s not what I’m about.” Dobalina was Del proclaiming himself rap's dissident from the very start. The music industry’s ‘compliant suits’ - as he portrayed them in this track - could have risen straight from the pages of 1984, with Del painting himself as the stories' protagonist, Winston Smith. In fact even a cursory glance at much of Del’s work, particularly Deltron 3030, smacks eerily of George Orwell’s vision of futurist, near-parallel funk-less world. He responds. “That’s the stuff I like to think about – how the world ain’t what it’s cracked up to be sometimes. It’s not just about corporations though, there’s people who’ll try and keep you down no matter what, you know. I’m from Oakland, California and there’s some serious pimpin’ going on down on every street corner; people will tell you anything just to get something out of you, and that’s what 1984 boiled down to for me. If they think they can, most people will try and keep you in line with whatever their agenda is.”

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Fatty Gets A Stylist: interview with Kate Miller-Heidke and Keir Nuttall (2011)

2011-06-27T00:52:00.002+10:00

STYLE AND SUBSTANCE

Fatty Gets A Stylist masterminds, Kate Miller-Heidke and Keir Nuttall are taking tea on a rare sunny June day at a South Melbourne café, discussing the finer points of what constitutes taking a risk in music these days. For one, both agree calling a band Fatty Gets A Stylist earns a big tick, but the most intriguing development in the risk department is, the brand new release – a co-write with hubby/long-time collaborator Keir – is Kate giving a big middle finger to her the sound that made her a star. The self-titled album - which claims XTC, Goldfrapp and Kraftwerk as reference points – started life on-tour as a between shows muck-around project for the couple, before blossoming into a throbbing multi-layered extravaganza. Fatty takes the listener through trash-spiritualism, cartoon theme-song terrain and post-punk with out a hint of Heidke’s sober pop artistry to be found. It seems as if Kate is flexing some newly developed muscle, all while snuffing out her ‘fluffy balladeer’ label in the process.

Being a Heidke album though, albeit one with zero relevance to her former work, that voice is, on one occasion, heard carrying a record-breaking sustained note that’s sure to leave even the listener out of breath. “I’m so glad someone picked up on that; it was done in one take you know.” She says of the track The Plane Went Down, “I can’t wait to do that live, but then I might possibly faint at the end if I have to do that night after night.” Kate’s classically trained voice – the one that has served her so well up til now – is the first of many surprise elements on Fatty Gets A Stylist. For a start, Heidke has been discovering the joys of using a much lower octave range than ever before. “I think we shocked ourselves a lot of the time making this album.” She remarks. “But you know, it started out as a passion project, just us two, and the thought of anyone else hearing it didn’t really cross our minds.” Kate adds, “I was singing a lot in the shower and getting comfortable with a lower range to what I’m used to, which is why I don’t really sound like ‘me’ on the record,” she laughs, “and I said to Keir ‘what do you think of my funny voice?’ and that kind of got us thinking about having this album be a completely anonymous thing without our names attached to it at all.”

The projects name chosen to keep an air anonymity could be read as nod towards the overabundance of surface-obsessed reality TV dirge currently on offer, but Keir explains, it’s less about the ‘make-over myth’ but rather an imagined tabloid headline. “The idea was to use a name that tells a story; ala Frankie Goes To Hollywood, who got their name from a newspaper headline, but I think ours is more in line with current obsessions with weight and appearance.” While Frankie suggested we all should relax, Fatty Gets A Stylist go one further with references to Zen Buddhism and pre-religious spirituality. Kate picks up the thread, “Even though some of the songs are very silly, I guess there’s also some obvious spiritual references like on The Tiger Inside Will Eat The Child, which has to with the Buddhist belief that you only really grow through letting go completely of your past systems.” In Wiccan lore, it’s taught that people possess power animals which they have to get to grips with - the intention being, it makes you awesome. After discovering this, Keir shares some concerns over what his animal might be.

“I dream about dogs a lot, but not cool ones like wolves or dingos, its always garden variety spaniels.” Kate, cracking up, adds, “Maybe you’ll graduate to a poodle.” While Keir contemplates his K9 dilemma, Kate maintains that the dream animal concept in songs has become an indie band staple; therefore best avoided. “I’ve got a natural resistance to this dream strength-animal thing, but I do relate to the inner child as a way of helping me creatively. You have to sort of get to that place I your head which is unaffected by just day-to-day crap and allow yourself to be playful and fearless.” Keir adds, “The tiger is more the self-conscious side of your mind – like the battle between the left and right brain that happens when you write or create music.” Although much of Fatty Gets A Stylist was written on a lap-top while Kate and Keir were on tour, it’s liner notes boast a long, impressive guest list of session players. The album was still in its demo form when, while supporting Ben Folds, Kate played him the album who then persuaded her to record it with a full band and release it. With the Folds tick of approval, all was left was to find the right artists for the job. Keir explains.

“Ben Folds called it ‘lower chakra music’, which basically meant it was more rhythmic, or more animal so we wanted players who came from that side of the spectrum.” He adds, “We ended up going with Pete McNeal (ex-Cake drummer) who plays in a band called Z-Trip, who has this strong, crazy improv style. Then you have Justin Meldal-Johnsen, who played bass with Beck, Air and Nine Inch Nails, bringing this really huge range of experience.” He adds, “I think those guys are what Ben was talking about when he said lower chakra music.” Kate then simplifies, “It’s about listening with your hips and not our head!” When Heidke’s solo albums, Curiouser and Little Eve, established the her as a spirited and clearly gifted singer/songwriter, she was probably seen as a safe bet in the industry - especially once the awards began rolling in. To drop the psychedelic bubblegum pop of Fatty Gets A Stylist on the heels of such plaudits, would surely have had a few men in grey towers pulling out their hair. Kate responds.

“Our management were really supportive of us putting it out, but there is a slight scary element to how fans will react to me doing something so different, for sure. I expect some people will think I’m putting on this strange voice, and already I’ve heard people say they don’t like the name and that they think its offensive, but as I said before, we went into this with no fear and I accept that not everyone is going to get into it, or see why I’m doing this now, but as I get older, I feel I’m gradually taking more and more control creatively of what I want to do.” Keir adds, “The reaction has been really interesting so far. I mean before anyone knew we were doing this, I played some of the songs to our band (Transport), and they didn’t spot it was Kate – I just told them it was this new band I’d met in London.” He laughs, “Usually whenever you play something new to friends, it’s a pretty loaded atmosphere and you know they don’t want to hurt your feelings, so this was the best way to get a completely honest reaction from them.” Kate recalls, “They didn’t think it was me, so I said ‘what do you think of her voice?’ and one of them said, ‘oh she’s nowhere near as good a singer as you, so after that, I didn’t want to let anyone know it was me!”

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Wendy Matthews interview: 2011

2011-06-23T02:07:00.011+10:00

STRONG ENOUGH

Wendy Matthews was about as far removed from the meat-pie and beer Aussie rock landscape as her Canadian roots, but persistence in a realm way outside of her initial comfort zone, resulted in the willowy former session vocalist appearing on nearly every notable Oz rock album in the '80s. Finally stepping into her very own spotlight, from 1990 onward Matthews' true passion for poetic tear-jerkers reminiscent of her idol Joni Mitchell’s work was at last successfully indulged. Now, 21 years on from her against-the-grain solo debut, Émigré, the Australian (officially since 2005) vocalist, is celebrating the anniversary in a retrospective tour she’s calling Standing Strong, yet this landmark, I discover, is barely half of her remarkable story.

“I guess now is a good time to celebrate what I’ve been doing for two decade before my next album comes out.” She says in an accent equal parts Canadian and Australian. Work on Matthews’ new album of originals is already underway, following on from two covers sets (She and Café Naturale). Her anniversary tour will help fund its completion as, although despite multiple-ARIA wins and serious chart success in the ‘90s, Wendy found herself out of contract in 2007 and so began her own independent label, Barking Bear to release her music on. “I’m so glad I have this label as a resource, but I am crap at the business side of things. I wish I kind of cared more about how the whole thing works, but I am singer and a songwriter, not a business woman." She adds, "I’ve moved into the category of singers who don’t sell so many records these days, but I’m also part of this world of artists who make great music in their kitchens or whatever and with no record company judging what your musical life-span is.” A passion for singing since very early childhood, Wendy claims, was the only guide in what direction her life was to take.

“I’ve been a bit of a freak for most of my life, frighteningly enough. I’ve never had a real job!” She laughs, “This is all I’ve ever done and it did determine quite a lot how my life would turn out back when I was 15 and having huge doubts about what I was going to be.” Matthew’s continues, “I realise now that I was setting myself up for something that would last and was satisfying for me. I mean if I had’ve been making dance beats, as a lot of people were, it would never have driven me like say a Joni Mitchell record does.” She adds, “Don’t get me wrong, I think music should fulfill many functions – I can get up and vacuum the house to dance music in my undies and its great – but that’s never gonna stimulate me like Joni, you know.”

Her future direction became a little clearer when, while living in LA in 1983, Matthews - who was getting casual work as a backing vocalist - by chance met legendary Australian music mogul Glenn Shorrock, who convinced her to sing backing vocals on his album and fly to Sydney to tour in his band. “Glenn, almost to his detriment, was always passionate about music above and beyond the industry. He was the sort of guy that would come off stage after a gig and still want to sit around the piano and play music just for fun, so we had no problems connecting.” Wendy recalls. Her motivation to start a new life in Australia however was hampered at first by a fear of rejection by what she perceived as an unforgiving pub rock scene. “My first experience of a female singer who’d made it in Australia was Chrissie Amphlett of Divinyls and it kind of scared me a little, because she had this machismo - which I guess she’d developed because it was a very male oriented rock scene - and I thought I was never going to be accepted into that kind of world.” Matthews, in reality was not only accepted into the Australian live music world, but was in hot demand as a session singer with many of the top rock acts at the time.

“There are a lot of years of my life that have gone into making music and sometimes I glimpse back to those times and I’m so grateful to those bands.” Wendy says. For the rest of the 1980s, her singer/songwriter roots were largely put on hold while Matthews bumped shoulders with the crème of Aussie rock – Icehouse, Models, Richard Clapton, Barnes to name a few, were demanding her services – and even found time to dabble in advertising jingles to keep the land lord off her case; “I was the ‘L.J. Hooker… you’re the best’ girl for quite some time.” She laughs, “But you know not everything I did back then I’m proud of!” Her rise to top billing artist was still a way off, but during the late ‘80s, Matthews performed on three of the biggest Australian albums - Models, Out Of Mind Out Of Sight, The Rockmelons, Tales Of The City and Kate Ceberano’s You’ve Always Got The Blues - helping to shrug of any self-doubt she may have been harboring. The turning point came when her Models’ band mates split the group into two halves in 1989, resulting in the James Freud-led Beatfish and, importantly for Matthews, her then partner Sean Kelly’s project, Absent Friends. At last the Canadian chanteuse was on lead vocal for the 1990 single, I Don’t Want To Be With Nobody But You - a cover of an Eddie Floyd song – which was so far as most Australian’s were aware, Wendy’s debut – and they liked what they heard. The single beat huge competition from a Skyhooks come-back, award-magnets Midnight Oil, INXS, Barnsey AND Farnsey to take home ARIA single of the year, cementing Matthews’ Midas-touch run.

“Things come in waves, and I guess that was my time for things to work out, but I know now that it’s impossible to keep the vibration going at such a high level for very long!” Wendy laughs. “I mean the thing about being independent is that you don’t get that level of marketing now, which is what labels are so good at, and so I see that time as wonderful, but also impossible to repeat.” Absent Friends only saw out the year before Sean Kelly went off to form The Dukes, while Matthews - still on her first wave of glory - went on to record Émigré – her solo debut. Nobody But You’s success was equalled by Wendy’s Token Angels single, and again she was picked as the industry’s favourite. Matthews was by now 30 years old, and having spent half of her life performing, acknowledges the weirdness of her bestowed ‘best new-comer’ status. “I’ve debuted more times than I can count!” She exclaims. But, discounting any uncatalogued nappy commercials, technically Wendy’s public debut as a vocalist, was at the age of four, witnessed by half of the Western world’s pre-schoolers… or so a large yellow bird informs me.

“Oh, god.” Matthews’ moans, “I got to do Sesame Street because I think they realised I was kinda able to hold a note.” This debut – which came about through family friends’ involvement on the show’s production - although undeniably glamorous, was hardly a sign of things to come. “All I remember is it was an alphabet song, and I just did the letter ‘O’ part, to which they put an animation of a goat with all letter ‘O’s coming out of its mouth.” She laughs heavily, “So, I guess my debut was as a singing goat on Sesame Street, yeah.” It’s hard not to get side-tracked by Matthews’ Sesame Street connection, but the ‘wow moments’ in her career keep piling up as our discussion continues. During a brief stint singing with The Rockmelons in 1988, a support slot on James Brown’s Australian tour led to Matthews sharing the stage with the Godfather for a couple of songs. “I hear myself talking about that, and it almost doesn’t feel real.” Wendy acknowledges, “It’s like I’m talking about somebody else’s experience, but you know, although it was amazing and everything, really I’m just glad I can say I’ve got a good James Brown story!” Many great music moments have come and gone for Wendy, but her finest hour was less a personal experience, but a song that most of Australia it seemed, claimed as their own.

Wendy's award-winning The Day You Went Away video

“I was honestly terrified of releasing The Day You Went Away into the climate of what was on the radio at the time. I mean it was just a piano and heartbeat and I thought I was gonna be eaten alive, but that song proved to me that your average radio listener out there was wanting different stuff to what was being offered.” Released around Christmas 1992, The Day You Went Away - from Matthews' second album, Lily - was arguably given gravitas by the fact Australian’s were still serving in the first Gulf War. Coupled with a video depicting a couple separated by war, the single outsold every other local release that year, which finally dissolved Matthews’ old fear of being seen as an outcast in the ‘hedonistic Aussie rock scene.’ “I’m somebody who loves to be moved my music, and the success of that song proved I was in good company.” She says, “It was a huge compliment to me that so many people responded to it in the way they did, but you know, reactions to it have been so, so varied, I mean I have had women say to me, ‘nothing helps my baby get to sleep like your voice in that song’!” She laughs, “So for a while I thought, ‘Oh my god, I’m going become known as the baby whisperer!’”

lEIGh5

Lou Rhodes (Lamb) interview: 2011

2011-06-13T00:05:00.006+10:00

FRIENDLY WITH FIVE

Manchester duo, Lamb were written off by just about everyone – including themselves – come the middle of the last decade. Following a short-lived peek into world-wide success at the end of the ‘90s, vocalist Lou Rhodes and musician Andy Barlow, began to fall out of love with the music once it became a pressure game of commerce and repetition. However, a core of devoted fans had the foresight to not give up on the pair and this year, their devotion has finally paid off – although at a price. Lamb, embracing a little numerology, not to mention some grass roots marketing, announced their long awaited fifth album, 5, funded entirely by fan pre-orders. It may seem a long way from the runaway success of 1997 single Gorecki, but as Lou Rhodes points out, with fans like theirs, who needs labels?

“The scary bit was selling something that we hadn’t even made, so you’re asking for quite a leap of faith from people, you know.” Rhodes begins. “But then, I think it’s a great basis for a creative endeavor. That desire to make something that we felt truly proud of was stronger than ever." Lou explains, “We were making an album for the first time ever with absolutely no funding from some nervous corporation looking for big hits, as was our experience in the past, which definitely had an effect on the music.” After what began as a four-date tour in early 2010, which then grew into months of advance bookings, Lamb were approached to do a short Australian tour in February his year. It was at these shows that for the first time in seven years, their set included brand new music.

“When we were asked to do those shows in Australia, we panicked a bit because we hadn’t even finished the record, but actually it turned out to be a good opportunity to see how well the new tracks worked along side our older stuff. We ended up premiering only four new songs, but that really was the acid test we needed to say what was working and what needed to change.” She continues, “The songs do metamorphose whenever you play them live, so it was important to let the new ones begin their journey of tweak and change.” Rhodes laughs gently. “The process of playing new songs live is like a game of Chinese whispers. You have a blueprint, and you think you know what the outcome will be, but little surprises always emerge in the actual telling.” She adds, “I’d really like to do that a lot more, because the problem with being in the studio, is you usually finish an album and then go on tour and that’s when this kind of growth happens within the songs, but by then it’s too late.” Already 5’s mini road test has Rhodes rethinking the band’s future performances.

“In the past we had always kept in mind what we were going to play live and how, and it was never more than half the record, but with 5, we found that we couldn’t decide what not to play. At this stage we’re doing eight out of the ten songs and we’d like to work in the other two at some point because it works so well in its complete form.” Rhodes adds that she has always struggled with the concept albums judged only by the singles – no doubt a concern that has sprung from personal experience. Lamb’s mammoth hit, Gorecki from their self-titled debut, although rewarding the band with obscene levels of exposure, also bought with it ‘unreasonable expectations’. While recording their second album, Fear Of Fours, the inevitable pressure of matching that song’s success was applied to the duo by their label, causing Rhodes to remark following their split in 2004, Lamb had long felt restricted by what was expected of them. “It was always tough for me to see Lamb as a singles band, because I don’t really listen to very much commercial music or even claim to know how to make ‘hit singles’ on command.” Lou retorts. “In the old days we had to endure conversations that went like, ‘can you sound a bit more like Bis, because they’re selling a lot of records at the moment’, which was quite soul destroying for us.” Lamb released three more albums over the next seven years before acrimoniously splitting. It wasn’t until Lou Rhodes was recording her third solo album One Good Thing in 2009 that she and Andy’s reunion occurred. “I was looking for somebody to produce my album and Andy just said, why not him!” At their rather organic reunion, creative sparks soon began to fly and Lamb’s future was decided on – only with a few clear changes to be made.

“When we decided we were going to make another record, Andy and I had a very honest conversation about what Lamb should and should not be about.” Rhodes explains, “I felt that I had compromised quite a lot on some of our albums and we kind of lost something along the way, but this time we agreed to keep it raw and just gently add to the songs as they needed, like we did on our first record. Also it was really important for us to not overproduce this album. I mean all up it only took five months to make which was very, very quick for Lamb.” Rhodes’ words are suggestive of somebody running from their past mistakes, but Lamb were always spared the often harsh criticisms of the UK press usually reserved for non three-chord rock bands. One doesn’t have to dig very far to then to see Lamb are in fact their own strongest critics, and although many band’s have long lulls following initial peaks, few return with their shit so fully together as they have. Lou reflects on what the refreshed Lamb we hear on 5 was bringing to the come-back party, and some of what was quite cheerfully thrown out.

“I’m a great believer in your first idea is probably your best before the ego kicks in and says oh but why not add this and add that, but simplicity was definitely the key in this case.” She points out, “Also I think for me as a vocalist, too many times on previous albums, my voice had been extremely processed, or rather I was affecting it in certain ways, feeling that I needed to be something that I wasn’t. But having that time off and doing my acoustic albums gave me a chance to let my voice grow and I allowed myself to get comfortable again as a singer.” Rhodes naturally understates her sensational talent as a singer, but evidenced particularly by the tracks She Walks and Wise Enough, is an artist shaking off self-doubt and indulging her love of singing. Lamb’s new-found confidence doesn’t end there, either. Album closer, Existential Itch is a brilliantly executed reminder that in today’s self-absorbed world, we can easily forget that the human experience is a shared one. Lou divulges,

“That song kind of sums up a lot of the record and going through this period of questioning everything I had once believed in. Not just with music, but life in general which I think most of us go through at some point.” She adds, “With the title, I thought existential crisis seemed too strong a word because what I was going through seemed quite natural in a way. I think the word crisis carries the wrong implication, or at least I didn’t see it as a crisis personally, I recognised that it was a much needed time of learning.”

lEIGh5

Ah, the gorgeous Lou and Andy... You know, I never made the Little Britain connection until I transcribed the interview... !!

EPK on Lamb recording their beautiful new album, "5".

Lou Barlow (Sebadoh) interview: 2011

2011-06-09T03:07:00.009+10:00

LO-FI WAY

Lou Barlow’s musically formative years were spent not only avoiding the synthetic sounds of the first new wave, but rather languishing in the potential of low-fi analogue recording before it became the must-have sound of a whole scene. His grasp of what would one day be known as the ‘slacker sound’ and love of chunky, distorted bass was eventually put to good use in indie monsters, Dinosaur Jr. – the band he formed with high school mate Joe (later sheered down to simply ‘J’) Mascis in 1984. But it was Barlow’s home recordings side-project Sebadoh which has reigned consistently in the artist’s life. Now with sackings, bickering and ego-clashes behind him, Lou is back working with both Dinosaur Jr. and Sebadoh; the latter of whom are currently celebrating the reissue of 1994 breakthrough album Bakesale.

Giving his side of the story of two bands, that never really split up but rather went from functioning to malfunctioning in ongoing cycles until their fractured fairytale finally gained its long overdue happy outcome, Lou Barlow begins from the rarely known comfort of his home. “I’ve been home in LA for almost two months, which is so weird. I haven’t been at home for this long… ever in my life!” Barlow’s chosen path – two active bands and a solo career – has of course meant that the road is always calling. Although a self-confessed DIY junkie preferring to work alone, Barlow couldn’t be more removed from loner-dom, but not as begrudgingly as one might expect. The re-formed ‘classic line-up’ of Dinosaur Jr. have been regularly touring since 2005, while Sebadoh continue to have reunion tours every couple of years. But for Barlow, this duality is just the card he’s been dealt.

“The two bands occupy different parts of my brain; they both have their own very distinct musical identities. I play different songs with different people in the two bands and that separation has ruled my existence for most of my life now, so it’s not something I really think about anymore.” He continues, “Dinosaur are touring the US in about a week before I bring Sebadoh out to Australia, so the two are almost overlapping at this stage.” Most fans are in agreement (and Lou himself), that Dinosaur Jr. produced their best work with Barlow in the line-up. Their first three albums, Your Living All Over Me, Dinosaur and Bug - for the most part - defined the growing, underground indie scene in America which culminated in the grunge explosion. Now that the original line-up are touring and recording again after many ‘lost years’ - during which time Dinosaur Jr. produced albums Lou is only too happy to offer his opinion on - Barlow concedes it was an inevitable reunion.

“In hindsight I think, how could Dinosaur not get back together.” He shrugs, “In Sebadoh, we never had the kinds of problems that I did working in Dinosaur, I mean, I’ve never felt the need to split Sebadoh up. We never had a falling out or anything, it was more of sigh than a shout,” he says of their regular hiatuses, “We were like, ah, this isn’t going so well at the moment let’s just go do something else for a while. But Dinosaur felt like a very definite end… for me at least.” Lou laughs, recalling his unceremonious booting out by Mascis in 1988, “I really didn’t know if it would be possible for us to work together again until J (Mascis) was actually right there asking me, you know. It was wonderfully natural when it did happen and I didn’t even have to think about how I was going to respond. The bottom line is, I love the music we made together way more than I disliked anyone in the band or any of the personal bullshit that went down between us.” At the start, Lou and J Mascis bonded well as both were singers, writers and fans of weird, musical cross-pollinations, but Mascis soon began throwing his weight around as leader in Dinosaur Jr. Lou’s contributions to the albums became lesser as Mascis’s in-band domination grew until there was no room left for anybody else. Barlow continues,

Dinosaur Jr; "Going somewhere, Lou?"

“Music makes it all better for me, but looking back I am really glad I was kicked out of Dinosaur. It was an amazing gift awarded to my mental health.” Lou laughs, “Murph (Emmett Murphy – drummer) and I talked about this - he stayed on longer in Dinosaur than me - but we were both having these panic attacks and neither one knew at the time about the other. When I got kicked out of the band, my panic attacks stopped and the same happened to Murph.” He adds, “When we both rejoined the band (in 2005), thankfully they didn’t return, but the difference was I knew what I was getting myself into rejoining that band. I wasn’t going like ‘yay, it’s gonna be all different now’, it was more like I felt I could take it.” When Barlow found himself out of Dinosaur Jr., he already had his own back catalogue of music – some of which had been released independently – to continue adding to. The name Sebadoh was given to all his home-done tape albums, which had up until the late ‘80s, all been solo recordings. Although free to do as he pleased, Barlow didn’t automatically jump at the chance to launch Sebadoh – the band – onto the world.

“Well I never really wanted to be in another band after Dinosaur. I kinda just wanted to be on my own and play my ukulele,” He jokes, “But Eric Gaffney (Sebadoh co-founder) convinced me to make it into a proper band, and so we got Jason (Lowenstein) in to play drums and I decided that after Dinosaur, if I was going to be in a band again, it was going to have to be fun.” Lou suddenly had the resources to make his own mark alongside Dinosaur Jr. with Sebadoh - only in his band, Barlow insisted on an even, split-three-ways approach that Dinosaur Jr. had completely lacked. “Just the way in which Sebadoh formed, and the fact that we all wrote and were equally responsible for the output of the band, meant a natural democracy kind of happened anyway. Dinosaur was J’s deal – he was The Man and that was that as far as anyone was concerned.” J Mascis, carried on with Dinosaur Jr., replacing Lou and Murph with Mike Johnson and George Berz, having some post-Barlow successes with the albums Where You Been and Without A Sound. But the momentum - and any shred of a recognisable ‘Dinosaur-sound’ - had dried up completely by 1997 and the band ended with a whimper.

"Yeah I thought the records J made after I left were just awful.” Lou recalls of this time, “They were kind of like this weird hair metal version of Neil Young.” He dead-pans, “It just sounded like a bloated half-assed, crap version of Dinosaur Jr. and so I was glad to be off doing Sebadoh and not making shit records.” Lou finally cracks up after his onslaught, taking the edge of his harsh words. “But J totally needed me back in the band. I don’t think either of us realised how much better we worked together until we completely fell out and went our own ways.” After signing to Sub-Pop in 1992, Sebadoh gained moderate popularity with their wistful, unpolished rock albums before making their breakthrough record; 1994’s Bakesale. Having dropped a lot of the more experimental sounds found on previous Sebadoh albums, Bakesale felt like a push towards a broader audience which, if in fact true, worked for them. Now as its fully tricked-out reissue is set for release, and a Don’t Look Back-style tour is to follow, I press Lou for his honest opinion of Bakesale, and if it at all matches the general consensus that it was Sebadoh’s finest hour.

“I liked the record when it came out.” He pauses before adding, “I remember it being a really happy time in my life and there’s a good spirit on that album, but I guess as time went by I found I didn’t think it sounded very good. Then when we had to go back and listen to it for the tweaking and remastering, I think I finally - for the first time - got why people think it’s our best album. I mean I don’t personally think it is our best, I like our earlier, fucked up shit more, but I do think it is our most consistent record.” What has always driven Barlow from the time spent making his strange and murky home demo tapes to his clashes with J Mascis over Dinosaur Jr.’s direction, may well be the belief, as he was quoted as saying in an interview, that all music is mired in clichés. Lou, no doubt thankful our time is nearly up, takes the opportunity to explain his possibly off-hand observation.

"The reality is, whatever you do is gonna be clichéd once you’re aware of avoiding clichés.” He sniffs, “The way I make music is with an economy of sound in mind, if you know what I mean. Instead of adding layers and guitar solos or any of that, I like to strip it back and to sing in the purest, most unaffected voice I can find. If there’s any clichés I’m avoiding, it’s just in having nothing where the guitar solo should be, and clipping off extended intros and outros, I guess, and there’s your economy of sound.” Lou adds, brightening up, “You know, I just thought of that expression today and I decided I needed to use it in a sentence. I hope that ‘economy of sound’ comes across better than ‘music is mired in clichés’ as a quote - I think that sounds a bit fatuous now. I actually love clichés; I love pop music, and none of my pleasures are guilty ones, but I guess when I’m writing my own music I just try to side-step all that is what I’m saying.”

lEIGh5

David Bridie (My Friend The Chocolate Cake) interview: 2011

2011-06-05T23:57:00.014+10:00

RECIPE FOR DISASTER

In 2005, Melbourne musician David Bridie toured in support of his second solo album, Hotel Radio, playing to small pub crowds around Australia. When the night of his Hobart gig rolled around, I found myself in a state of barely suppressed excitement to finally see an artist who I’d revered - albeit from some distance - for a time, without really knowing what to expect. Ahead of his set, I overhear a pre-show conversation in which Bridie was surprisingly referred to as ‘the guy who used to be in The Reels’. While David Mason’s ears where hundreds of miles away, burning, it saddened me to think an artist like David Bridie should face such indifference after 20 years of creating so much beautiful music. He went on that night and performed one of the most astounding concerts I have ever seen, despite playing a set devoid of songs I previously knew, and no doubt confounded those mistaken Reels fans in the process.

Bridie was however wearing a very different musical hat that night, perhaps making him harder to spot for the more casual fan. This was, in a way, the start of a new era in his long career. Not Drowning Waving – his former full-time band – had recently split after 20 years while My Friend The Chocolate Cake – his stop and start second band - were on one of their regular hiatuses. Bridie had started living between Melbourne and Papua New Guinea, which was having a notable effect on his music, but while Hotel Radio reflected his island life, Bridie, back fronting My Friend The Chocolate Cake, has released a new, fully localised album. Location aside for now, Bridie, on the eve of My Friend The Chocolate Cake’s latest release, Fiasco, is the first to admit he is a man hard to pin down, especially when drawing from his broad musical interests.

“I have a low boredom threshold, but also being a musician in Australia, I think you have to multitask a little bit.” He begins, “Doing my soundtrack and production stuff is really important to me, seeing as My Friend The Chocolate Cake is an all acoustic outfit. Those other things mean I get to play around with the resonator button and synthesisers a bit which can be just as much fun.” David had long worked world music into Not Drowning Waving’s records, can talk for hours equally about programmable synths and folky acoustic pop. He continues, proudly. “I’ve got pretty diverse tastes is all. I can spend a day just listening to string music from Papua New Guinea and then the next getting out my old punk records or some Nick Drake, so I think keeping in touch with the broadest range of music I can helps me become a more interesting musician.” MFTCC began in 1989 while David and co-founder, cellist Helen Mountfort, were on holiday in New Zealand and having a break from commitments to Not Drowning Waving. There they wrote a set of acoustic-based songs, clearly in oppose to all previous NDW material which would ultimately form the start a steady side-project, ultimately outlasting NDW.

“Not Drowning Waving was my first passion and they were a great bunch of musicians, but we had a much different agenda in what we were trying to do with that band than we do in ‘Cake.” David surmises, “Also NDW was an expensive outfit to operate. It was a large group with a lot of equipment and so it would’ve had to get a lot bigger than it did to really pay for itself in the long run. But with my solo records I get to satisfy a lot of the urges I had doing NDW, but with MFTCC I get to have that collaborative, social urge fed as well.” Not Drowning Waving, you could argue, fitted awkwardly within the Australian music landscape of the mid-to-late ‘80s. Their lean towards world music and sparse instrumentals probably kept them from reaching the broader audience MFTCC has. Indeed by the time MFTCC had released their second album, Brood in 1995, they were gathering ARIA's and landing on radio playlists.

“MFTCC was a priority for me from very early on.” David adds on transitioning between bands the first time, “Working with somebody like Helen in Not Drowning and then us both shifting into MFTCC was great because she has always had such a different ear to mine in arranging and producing and so forth, so it was always going to be fascinating to see where we could take this little idea of an acoustic chamber band with our kind of opposing views on music but also with respect for the way we each did our thing.” Wearing their boffin hats, production on the band’s sixth studio album, Fiasco was down to David and Helen - as has been the case on all MFTCC albums - with mixing by Tim Cole. David describes his relief as the final piece was added to the long-awaited new ‘Cake album.

Bridie with Helen Mountfort - The core of 'Cake

“I remember on the last night (of mixing) sitting with Tim Cole and realising with some satisfaction we really had done the best album we could. I think over time we have developed a kind of ‘Cake sound’ if you like, and when I hear that, I know it is a good indication that we’re clicking.” So in sync they appear to be, that even violinist Hope Csutoros’s baby arrived right at the start of the band’s usual extended between album break, meaning her band commitment wasn’t compromised. “Hope happily was able to come back on board in time for this album after some time off for motherhood duties and that was obviously special to Helen because of how they work so closely together in the studio on the string arrangements.” David confirms, “Also it helps to have the same band in the studio as you play with on tour.” Aside from the predominant dueling strings, another constant in MFTCC is the suburban landscape oil paintings and collages that adorn most of their CD sleeves. Fiasco’s cover at first glance feels a little familiar, and then it dawns that this street scenario had graced the cover of Brood – only now the developer’s have been through.

The "Brood" sleeve-art

“Warwick Jolly’s done most of our album artwork so far and I think, like the music, the more you look at his collages the more you find.” Indeed you’ll see a train track tearing up the middle of the image, surrounded by cut-outs of Melbourne buildings and people past and present. In the centre, sits the unmistakable red brick overpass on the way to East Richmond station – an often by-passed location for metro travelers - which forms a tidy subtext for an album concerned mostly with journeys big and small and those who get left behind. “I guess the metaphor is fairly obvious isn’t it?” David laughs. As for the title, Fiasco, Bridie claims he was forced to compromise. “I wanted to call it Somewhere Between The Sacred and the Bleeding Ordinary but was somewhat dissuaded because of how long the band’s name is – like it wouldn’t all fit along the spine of the CD - so I was a bit disappointed about that. But Fiasco in this instance is more a bun fight in a bakery than a tragedy. Despite it being an Italian word, I think a lot of Aussies happily use it to add gravitas when describing something like a failed relationship.” It seems a natural choice of words considering the album’s centrepiece, Madang Panic Attack. This uncharacteristic, somewhat guttural release from the band – written by Bridie in Papua New Guinea - is one of the few tracks David will admit to being a very personal one.

"Fiasco"

“Madang Panic Attack was me going through a break-up and being in a different country with a bottle of duty-free whiskey.” David recalls, “Some of the locals had set fire to the store and the church in the village so the air was just hot and sweaty.” He adds sighing, “Anyway my troubles got on top of me one night and I just spewed forth all these lyrics trying to make sense of everything.” Madang Panic Attack stands as MFTCC’s darkest song thus far, both lyrically and musically. David describes, “It’s pretty edgy stuff for us and after we had it down in the studio, Andrew (Richardson – guitars) put a load of electric guitar on it, but Helen rightfully said, ‘look we’ve stuck to this acoustic thing all along, there’s no point in breaking from that now’ so it was redone for the album, but at some point I wanna put out that other version. I think people who have followed us for a long time might get a bit of a shock with Madang... but then I sometimes think being in a band, surprising your audience is one of the things you’re supposed to do.” Further hints of personal loss lurk throughout the album, but none is more startling than on Black Ice with its eerie refrain; ‘Black ice took her away from me’. David responds.

“I’m really using Black Ice as a metaphor here. There was no real car crash I was describing.” He reveals, “It was more to do with childhood memories of being driven on these winding mountain roads and seeing black ice warning signs. To me they always seemed to imply life’s greatest dangers are the ones unseen, which is just one of those things that has stayed with me through my own life.” Changing tact, David adds, “I’m actually really pissed off AC/DC called their last tour Black Ice because now we can’t use it for ours.” He laughs, “They kind of pre-emptively stole our thunder there… those bastards!”

lEIGh5

Kate Bush: Director's Cut (album review)

2011-06-03T02:56:00.006+10:00

KATE BUSH

Director’s Cut
(Fish People)

Kate Bush fans desperate for new material from the reclusive star have been awarded an intriguing prize in the form of Director’s Cut. Calling this new however is misleading as all songs are entirely updated versions, culled from roughly two halves of previously released albums. The track list is compiled from 1989’s The Sensual World and 1993’s The Red Shoes, with only the former’s title track receiving a completely new set of lyrics. Re-named Flower Of The Mountain, The Sensual World could largely be seen as the catalyst for Bush’s latest move. At the song’s conception, Kate intended to use part of poet James Joyce’s novel Ulysses in the lyric but was at the time denied rights. Last year, with full access finally granted to Joyce’s words, Kate re-made the song as she had always intended and so began work on ‘correcting’ more and more of the songs that have dogged her over time. The fact that the entire album is comprised of music from those two particular albums won’t surprise many long-term fans of Kate.

The artist has been casually critical of the two records in question, just as the media had been upon their respective releases. Now that Kate has put right what she had long seen as errors in her last two pre-millennium albums, I can’t help thinking that the same things that will please many long-time fans are the very same that will disappoint others. As a hopeless devotee, I can’t help but feel heavily critical of the re-workings in both positive and negative ways. Whereas I totally respect Kate’s decision to remake a few songs that she has long felt uncomfortable with, there are mixed results with no noticeable consideration for what her fans may have loved about these tracks in the first place.

My first criticism would be that the vastly different albums (in their original state) The Sensual World and The Red Shoes don’t mesh particularly when assembled as the one piece. The Sensual World – always the black sheep in Kate’s catalogue - had a distinctly down-tempo, almost grim prevailing mood, whereas The Red Shoes was a spiky pagan romp through tales of black magic and mythology. Bush herself always claimed she felt a deep disappointment over how The Red Shoes was received, and in many cases the criticisms were unusually severe for a Kate Bush album. The fact that she disappeared from the public eye completely after, it’s been suggested, was partly down to being so brutally scorned over the album and its accompanying film - The Line, The Cross & The Curve – which leads me to wonder if re-recording that album alone would have sufficed. The Sensual World tracks after all are the least altered by far among this collection.

This Woman’s Work (from The Sensual World) for example, is thankfully only slightly tweaked here with the most notable change being Kate’s cleaner vocal. She exercises further welcome restraint on Song Of Solomon and Lily – both of which retain all of the magic of their parent versions, and Top Of The City also remains glorious, if not a little less starry-eyed than its 1993 counterpart.. However, the Red Shoes most powerful six minutes – Moments Of Pleasure – has been sheered down to its bare bones, omitting everything from its beautiful, climactic refrain to its strings and all the original’s dynamics. This simple piano and choir version does however carry greater melancholy suited to the song’s meaning, but less is definitely not more in this case.

But all the nit-picking so far aside, let me be totally clear, Director’s Cut is by no means a hatchet job done on some old songs in a vain effort to drag them into modern, shiny perfection. Instead Bush has re-done her vocals - in nearly every case - to simply suit her matured, lower octave range and swept away a lot of the layered post-production in favour of some raw jam-style live band mixes. These versions are essentially concert-ready performances which, considering a snowball’s chance of a full world tour, is a really a massive tease. The biggest tease of all however, is the actual possibilities here not realised on some of these tracks. The brassy rumba of Rubberband Girl (from The Red Shoes) has been reduced – and not improved upon at all – to a vocal, electric guitar, drum and harmonica plod. I find it mind-boggling that Kate would seriously envision this track as needing such a lacklustre makeover.

Far more satisfying is the album’s single, Deeper Understanding, which is unusual here in that is works perfectly in its updated form because of its lyric – written in 1989 – about computers taking the place of meaningful inter-human exchanges. However Bush’s own reliance on current technology in making this record is limited to that song with its jarring auto-tune refrain being the only in-organic sound throughout. As the project’s initial purpose was to strip away the slightly saccharine digital production of these song’s originals, all bar Deeper Understanding have been recorded entirely using analogue equipment which, for the most part, provides undeniable warmth in the sound. Although the kind of warmth that comes from non-digital recordings is pleasing, especially when it is a rare commodity in music now, it seems an odd that Kate should shy away from these advances considering the remarkable use of digital techniques and effects on her 1985 LP, Hounds Of Love. There’s evidence-a-plenty in Kate’s back catalogue of an artist who could always comfortably marry the timeless with the very latest.

The perfectionist that is Kate Bush coupled with the amount of time passed since these songs were written in theory should really have produced outstanding results rather than a sizable percentage of confounding ones. Perhaps the long-gestating gripe Kate had with the too-many-cooks sound on The Red Shoes and the occasionally flat-lining Sensual World should have been addressed sooner rather than later. A stunning semi-acoustic rendition of Red Shoes’ track Why Should I Love You – originally a messy sounding duet with Prince - was released in the late ‘90s, offering a more tantalizing indication of what might have been, yet it is missing from this set. The best news surrounding Director’s Cut for fans is probably the fact that Kate, when re-imagining these songs, was inspired to write an entirely new album in the process due out later this year. In the meantime, listeners reacquainting themselves with Kate’s newly re-nurtured back catalogue ‘mis-fires’ have plenty to mull over, find renewed love for or even straight-out hate. Which ever her unwavering disciples choose, one thing that is for sure, having Kate Bush back in any form at all is still a delight worth indulging in.

lEIGh5

Jason Pierce (Spiritualized) interview: 2011

2011-05-11T03:10:00.006+10:00

ROCKET MAN

So-dubbed ‘space-rock’ band Spiritualized’s accolades have included some definite ‘out-there’ moments in their 21 year career. While playing the ‘highest ever concert’ in print sounds typical of a band known for neo-psychedelic rock and drug-referencing, the fact is altitude alone is the basis for the record. Apart from performing at the planet’s northern most point - the Arctic Circle - and delivering career defining, poll-topping album, Ladies & Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space, the UK band’s leader, Jason Pierce, was actually revived from clinical death in 2005. His lack of interest in staying earth-bound seems almost too fitting for a man most commonly known as J. Spaceman. Interviewing Pierce therefore, I’m not surprised to discover someone struggling with the idea of 'down-to-earth'.

New material from the band is reaching completion as we approach the four year mark since Spiritualized’s last album, Songs In A & E, but Jason doesn’t claim the time-frame was in anyway a break to ‘reconnect’. “No, I still feel quite disconnected from myself, actually.” This opening quote, it turns out, is almost a crutch with which Pierce moves about on – especially when discussing his music. It’s true that the quiet, evenly spoken singer has long had a turbulent relationship with the press, but his former band, Spacemen 3 and to some degree, Spiritualized haven’t been spared Pierce’s apparent turbulence either. Hiring and firing musicians – or at least failing to retain them for any length of time – has ensured Spiritualized remained Jason’s own project. On this subject, however, he is quick to point out, “Most of the current line-up has made the last four albums with me.” He adds further, “I actually feel encouraged by this band, which is something that has taken a long time for me to feel.”

Stable band in place, Spiritualized’s seventh studio album is finally nearing completion following almost a year of imminent release date teasers. The as-yet untitled album, according to Jason, “Is more about my voice this time, which has happened I think because of doing the Acoustic Mainline shows.” Spiritualized have long divided their shows between Acoustic and Electric Mainline billed performances, dependant on what level of 'plugged' or 'unplugged' they happen to be. “I’m not hiding away behind the music this time around and it feels… just good to step forward like that.” He confirms. Pierce’s music in pre-Spiritualized indie psyche-rockers, Spacemen 3, was a big ol’ bag of drugged-up crazy - in scientific terms. Spiritualized, although an easier listen, have scarcely delivered anything like a ‘pop’ album thus far, but mention of a rumoured pop direction on the forthcoming record has Jason scoffing.

“Did I say that?” He snorts, “I must have because I don’t think anybody’s heard any of the songs yet. Most of them aren’t even complete.” Although I can’t offer a relieving source to the rumour, I wonder if Pierce has at least an interest in creating a pop record. “Not in the sense that it has to be about slick sounding pop in that ‘gotta be bigger and more overblown than the last album’ way artists go.” He adds, “I hate that mindset where everything has to keep getting bigger and louder and more. I have no interest in making albums that takes what we’ve done before and just serve up a slicker, more polished version of that.” Spiritualized’s 1997 album, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space - which was widely praised at the time and has become something of a classic since - was again toured in 2009 as part of the Don’t Look Back concert series. Revisiting their most popular album while work was beginning on their latest, Jason reflects on how much his interest in jazz-like deconstruction has grown.

“On the tour for Ladies and Gentlemen... we had a string quartet and a choir on stage with us and rather than have everyone just learn their part, I wanted the musicians to feel the music and add to it as they saw fit.” He says, offering a peak into what the next record might actually offer. “I have no interest in standing on a stage and just recreating the same concert note for note over and over. When we play the songs on our current album, it won’t be any different to that.” He adds, “But that experience (playing Ladies & Gentlemen...) was a beautiful, wholly successful, and extremely satisfying one.” If Pierce sees Spiritualized’s music as a very personal expression for him, it is hard to determine. The obvious drug or break-up songs etc… he refuses to confirm as autobiographical. In fact he dislikes talking about his personal life at all, and retreats from any inquiries to that effect. He reasons that whatever music he is makes shouldn’t be overshadowed by amateur profiling.

“A lot of people in the press want a story to attach to you whenever you have an album coming out, you know some angle to try and read into, and I learned that when I made Songs in A & E.” He says referring to his band’s 2008 album, written entirely while Pierce was recovering from a bout of pneumonia which almost killed him. “Really though, the truth is I have not spoken about music for about a year and a half and the words have quite simply deserted me.” To summarise, Jason in his way of avoiding answering questions wherever possible, offers, “I honestly don’t know to what degree external influence in my life find their way into our music, because I’m always just filtering.” Attempting to get Pierce to open up is tough, but then reading between the lines proves to be a fun challenge. The fact is Jason sees his music as the most honest, undiluted expression he could possibly offer, while interviews to him offer only weak, inadequate platforms. So by the time I ask if he feels a sense of pride regarding any or all of Spiritualized’s albums, I’m starting to warm to his non-committal responses.

“I have a kind of distance from my work once it’s recorded and released.” He sniffs, “I don’t sit and contemplate my music at all.” Following the singer’s 2005 (obviously temporary) clinical death from complications surrounding pneumonia, a clichéd ‘new lease on life’ character has not resulted. Perhaps the extraordinary amount of pharmaceuticals – legal and otherwise – apparently ingested by - and certainly sung about by Pierce - had long ago dulled any sense of his own mortality. But then even a quick glance at the band’s visual output – albums in prescription medication packaging – hints at an ongoing reliance in Pierce’s life, or perhaps an unspoken ‘music is medicine’ philosophy. “Making music has probably kept me alive, yeah. I’m not sure if that’s what you mean, but all I know is I feel so alive when I’m out there playing (live) and that makes me want to keep going more than anything else.”

lEIGh5

Tom Ellard (Severed Heads) interview: 2011

2011-05-09T03:13:00.007+10:00

HEADONISM

Severed Heads main-man Tom Ellard’s 30-year career should really be defined by his prophetic technological foresight, but in reality it's a decidedly old fashioned ‘whodunit’ narration on one major hit, Dead Eyes Opened, that really grabbed the spotlight. 17 years after that single, during which time Ellard remained quiet, yet musically active, he has decided to end Severed Heads once and for all. “Seriously, 30 years is long enough. I mean… Jesus!” Ellard, who has often been quoted making anti-nostalgia diatribes, discusses his musical past self-effacingly, while his successes in the form of innovation are worn as honour badges. Now as he prepares his farewell shows - opening for new-wave innovator Gary Numan's Pleasure Principle Revisited tour - Tom explains, in some frustration, Severed Heads may be harder to kill than he had initially thought.

“Well we already put it to bed at the end of 2009 which was the actual 30 year mark.” He begins. That last Severed Heads show was performed at the Sydney Music festival with little fanfare. “Some people thought it was a bit rude of me to just shut it down without a proper farewell tour and so we decided we would drag it out just one more time and say our toodly-doodly’s.” The Gary Numan tour was in Tom’s mind an oddly perfect way to bring his band to a close, he explains. “I think it works having us and Gary Numan on the same bill because, although we were a generation after (Numan), he put out The Pleasure Principle album while we were still very much in the bedroom making noise nobody wanted to listen to, but at least we were operating in similar musical mediums.” He adds, “Gary and us both put out a record in 1979, but then again there’s a big difference between his top 40 album and whatever the hell we thought we were doing.” Tom’s set for the farewell tour will cover Severed Heads 30 years, however the audio-perfectionist he is, won’t allow Ellard to just plod through a vintage Severed Heads concert.

“I look at a band like Kraftwerk who just stopped dead creatively in 1990, and since then have toured the same old show, and I think ‘I would never want to do that’. Although we don’t play any new music, we are constantly updating how we play the songs live and improving on them.” Re-interpreting songs aside, the visual side to Severed Heads shows has remained integral since Tom’s very early interest in 3D video art and how it could be mixed live with the audio long before the technology made such displays cheap and easy. Sadly his style of 3D looped motion clips also spawned a thousand dodgy rave videos, but Tom’s rough, yet no-less impressive animations trail blazed non-performance music video in Australia.

“The promoter gave us a list of what he wanted us to play in these shows so I just said, right well we have to make new videos for these songs to use in the concerts because some of the songs are so old now and the original clips are pretty weak by today’s standards.” He laughs, “It’s fine though, it has given me an excuse to fix up some stuff that has always bothered me about how the videos looked. The one for Heart Of The Party for example could have been so much better if I had’ve had more time but they (the label - Volition) wanted it done quickly, so it ended up looking only half finished to me.” Through the now defunct Volition label, Severed Heads along with other notable dance acts Paul Mac, Single Gun Theory and Boxcar spearheaded a sizable underground movement counteracting the rock/grunge dominated early ‘90s. When the label folded in 1996, many of its discoveries where never to be heard from again, but many friendships formed within the label continue to this day. Tom discusses.

“An old friend of mine Stewart Lawler from Boxcar – who’s basically ‘the other guy’ in Severed Heads these days - will be joining me on stage for these shows.” He confirms, “I need somebody who can play the keyboard, you see. I can’t play a thing, but I do push a damn fine button, I think.” At Severed Heads inception, music in Tom’s mind was undeniably heading away from the traditional four-piece rock band. He would often lapse into heated arguments with his old band mates Richard Fielding and Andrew Wright over this very point and as a consequence, Ellard soon found himself the sole constant member. Without compromise, he was then free to create his often twisted, dark industrial tracks utilising a strange new device known as a ‘home computer’. “I had a home computer in 1977, and it just seemed like such a normal thing to have.” He recalls, “The whole idea of making music electronically was actually a lot more active in the late ‘70s than even now. People were much more interested then I think in its possibilities over and above what you could do with a guitar, because that medium had already been exhausted in many ways.” He reasons.

“It’s funny to put on a live show when you’re an electronic band, because you kind of have to redefine what a live show is.” He says continuing, “What Stewart and I decided was if we wanted it to kind of feel like a real live show, the potential for things to go wrong had to be there.” He laughs, “Its not very interesting watching a couple of blokes playing keyboards, but that leads us back to the whole 3D video thing.” In the 1980s, Tom painstakingly tried to sync his music clips on analogue video machines during the live shows, but the digital revolution has offered a seamless and simplified alternative for acts like Severed Heads, surely? “It only gets easier if you get better at what you do, so that rules me out.” He offers, self-mockingly. But Tom’s front hides a true DIY obsessive who excelled in drawing the most out of even basic analogue gear, sampling and early digital technology to great effect. As quaint as it all looks now, Tom made a memorable 1994 appearance on serious science TV program, Beyond 2000 which saw him declaring everyone in the future would buy stuff with cards and CD-Rom was poised to revolutionise music. So CD-Rom has been consigned to the dustbin of the multi-media museum, but he was half right. “I remember I said about card’s replacing cash and everyone around me was like, oh wow!” He laughs. “What I didn’t predict though is the kind of evil side to certain so-called advances, and how everyone would one day be conned into selling their privacy.” Ellard scoffs.

“One of the reasons I don’t wanna be in a band anymore is that at our peak time, we were kind of at the forefront of our little sector in music – with our video art and so on – but now, bands all just want to have an iPhone application as their contribution to things, and I find it a bit depressing.” Tom is adamant there will be no more Severed Heads music or activities after the Numan shows. In fact, if he had his way, the self-imposed ban would be extended to all musicians. “There’s no real need for any new albums. There’s plenty to listen to out there and in a way its kind of immoral for bands to keep putting out new music when you could already spend a lifetime trying to hear everything that’s available now.” He concludes, “Basically I think the world just doesn’t need anymore watered down Led Zeppelin cover bands.”

lEIGh5

Severed Heads Heart Of The Party video

Grace Jones live in Melbourne, 2011 (review)

2011-04-16T21:43:00.004+10:00

Venue: The Palais

Date: 14/04/2011

The many phases/faces of Jamaican mega-star Grace Jones unfold at the Palais tonight, as the queen of subversion unleashes her craft on Melbourne as part of her Hurricane world tour. Australian fans have waited a long time for Jones, so she isn’t about to sleep walk through a show she’s been touring for four years now, in fact Grace demands her audience’s attention from start to finish in an exhaustive two hour showcase of costumes most drag queens would consider ‘over-the-top’, comical rants and that deep arresting voice.

Once a very late Jones decides she is ready to see us, the Palais curtain raises to reveal a body sheathed entirely in a silver satin sheet, looking like some forgotten mannequin left behind in Studio 54’s attic. From beneath the shroud only a rumbling voice and minimal movements indicate human involvement, but the exaggerated height and shape suggest something even more sinister lurks beneath. Here (almost) before us, larger than life, is the original pop provocateur and shock-style icon poised to prove she’s still very much boss of her quarter. Suddenly the shroud slips away, revealing Jones - dressed as a zebra - and the whole crazy ride kicks off as she prances animatedly about the stage under an orange spotlight.

Each song in the set, which heavily covers 2008 album Hurricane and most of her ‘80s hits, is accompanied by different, equally extraordinary Grace-look; horror/demon drag (Devil In My Life), walking mirrorball (Pull Up To The Bumper), tropical Rasta-chick (My Jamaican Guy) etc… but proving you just can’t beat a little black dress; Grace wows us the most in a subtle cocktail gown, performing a flawless tango partnered by a pole-mounted legless dummy of herself during I’ve Seen That Face Before. These kinds of choreographed pop-circus’s are usually so strategised they fast become bland-fests, but Grace from inside her hyper-surreal concert display, serves so much personality she easily remains the sole focus throughout... If not her appearance, then at least because things generally look to be teetering on the brink of collapse throughout.

In what could have been a momentum killer, Jones’ costume changes demand she spend a considerable amount of time off stage. To ensure focus does in fact remains on her, mic in hand Grace’s offbeat commentary keeps the crowd roaring as her minions prep her for yet another grand entrance. “I nearly didn’t make it here tonight.” She quips from back-stage, “I passed out at the airport with a bottle. They had to call a doctor.” She continues with a half-arsed attack on the twitter-verse, “Does anybody out there twit? Should I backstage twit you? Okay… Twit, twit, twit.” But the hilarity peaks as she shamelessly professes, “My vanity’s gonna send me straight to hell. I just hope hell has straws so I don’t mess up my lipstick when I have a drink.”

Her adoring fans are collectively gasping in awe one moment and laughing out loud the next, but for me its the chaos element which provides the most delicious aspect to Grace’s show. The failed attempt to get fans up on stage during Love Is The Drug, the confetti cannons misfiring, Jones forgetting her band member’s names all helped to make us feel connected to the person behind the performer and not just spectators of some faded star being wheeled around in pre-arranged motion. If there’s one thing Jones has repeatedly asserted since the late ‘70s when she shifted from modelling into music – don’t expect a compliant clothes horse offering nowt but a blue steel gaze. The fact is, the 62 year-old’s movements on stage were so incredibly lithe - even wearing a dress the size of a small house and ten-inch heels – she becomes almost dizzying to watch.

By the close of the main show, the audience are on their feet and it feels as though we at last have arrived on Grace’s plain. Hurricane is performed in a billowing cape, engulfing the entire stage with the assistance of wind machines, while huge projected black clouds roll across the backdrop. Grace’s voice soars above the faux storm and the alien vision on stage melts away all sense of reality. Then before a hysterical crowd, Grace returns for one encore and drives home her legend status with a rousing Slave To The Rhythm. Grace is at last fully unveiled as she extends her signature song’s refrain to lead a sing-a-long, and her simple enjoyment of this moment is plain for all to see.

Whether it’s a sign that Grace has relaxed too much or some well planned whimsy, the whole bonkers extravaganza ends with the weak, tinny sound of Grace sloppily crashing two cymbals together. “This is for you,” she enthuses the audience, before holding the cymbals between her knees and awkwardly making them turn, kind of like she was miming riding a bike, but not really…? In its lame inadequacy, this act was the perfect end to a seriously impressive show. By that point Grace had overstimulated and confounded the audience so much, it was as if she had read our need for some relieving daftness to go home on. Many great and not-so-great artists have tried, and continue to do so, but after spending a night on planet Grace, I don’t see how anyone could hope to keep up with this Jones.

lEIGh5

PALAIS SET LIST:

This is
Williams' Blood
Private Life
Devil In My Life
Love You To Life
Demolition Man
Sunrise Sunset
La Vie En Rose
My Jamaican Guy
Corporate Cannibal
Well Well Well
Love Is The Drug
Libertango (I’ve Seen That Face Before)
Hurricane
Pull Up To The Bumper
Slave To The Rhythm

Irma Thomas interview: 2011

2011-04-12T19:15:00.003+10:00

THE QUEEN OF NEW ORLEANS

As far as royal titles go, Soul Queen Of New Orleans is an impressive honour whichever way you look at it. In what will be a first for Australian audiences, the owner of that title, Louisiana-born Irma Thomas, will finally bring to this year’s Bluesfest what she’s been celebrated for in the US for over 50 years now.

“People are gonna get Irma honey, that’s what’s bringing me over there to Australia.” The soul diva snaps, “They know me as Irma the soul queen of New Orleans and that’s what just what they are gonna get.” Her star might not be the biggest in the soul galaxy, but Irma Thomas can sure talk up a tour. She first hit the stages of New Orleans in 1960, and was for a time the hottest ticket in town. Her career however had several stops and starts and Thomas found herself being re-launched to new audiences as each decade passed. Australian fans have waited a long time for her to launch on them, but Irma’s promising a full retrospective to make up for lost time.

“I try to do a mix of my ‘60s hits and my current stuff too, and if there’s time I let fans make requests - and if I remember it I’ll sing it - but I don’t always remember some of the older songs.” Irma adds surprisingly, “I will have my iPad though with my lyrics all on it, and if I can work out how to use it then everything’s gonna be just fine.” She laughs. “Hell I’m 70 years old now, I can’t remember everything I’ve sung, but hopefully fans will get to hear their favourite Irma song.” Thomas’s joy at discussing her childhood memory of music’s impact on her is striking. In her voice is the sound of a woman who never forgot the first girlhood rush of hearing soul music for the very first time.

“Oh it (soul music) was all over where I lived - in my house, in the street, just all around me. When I was growing up most neighbourhoods had clubs with live music in them, but as a kid you couldn’t go in those places so we would stand outside and listen to all the performers or else they’d turn up the jukebox for us and we would dance right there in the street.” She laughs. The impression this early musical exposure had on Irma was a little different to her many brothers and sisters. At the age of 13 she was singing in a Baptist church choir and already laying the groundwork for what would be a life-long commitment to soul. But despite early set-backs – she had two failed marriages in her teens and had started a family by the age of 19 - Irma never took eyes off the prize.

“Life throws you all kinds of situations, but everyday is a new chance.” She says brimming with wisdom, “And that’s the way I’ve always looked at life. Nobody else in my family was an entertainer, I was it, so I got to fulfill my dream and that has kept me going through everything life has thrown my way.” Irma’s title of Soul Queen is something she’s extremely proud of. Her commercial success never reached the level of say, Aretha Franklin or Tina Turner, but her accolade was based on her ability as a vocalist above all. “I am proud of that because a lot people mistakenly call soul a genre and it’s not a genre, it’s a feeling. You can be a pop, jazz or rhythm and blues singer and still have soul for what you’re doing. So to be thought of as queen of New Orleans soul is a huge compliment to me. It means they know that I get it.”

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina toppled the city of soul, including Ms Thomas’s own home and the club she performed at. Irma however wasn’t home at the time and it would be two years before she could move back to her beloved city. Six years on and Irma believes New Orleans’ music is strong as it ever was. “There are parts missing from my town, and some folks who used to live here now have to come visit when they want to play a show, but I think New Orleans still has its soul.” She adds defiantly, “Katrina couldn’t take that away from us.” Irma, in a strange twist, was recording an album out of town during the hurricane titled After The Rain. It was an almost custom designed ray of hope for the local residents who rallied around the record as they rebuilt their town and gave Irma cause to question coincidence. “That entire album, apart from one song was completed before the hurricane, and that last song was called Shelter From The Rain – a Stevie Wonder song that I covered. I don’t know if I believe in coincidence or any of that, but every one of those musicians who played on that record were in some way personally affected by the storm when it hit.” In closing I wonder what, if the 70 year-old soul legend had taken a different path in life, would she had liked to do differently.

“Well I never thought I would end up doing anything other than singing.” She offers after some thought, “I mean at one point, I would maybe have liked to become a teacher, but now I realise still singing at my age, I am kind of a teacher anyway. Younger performers tend to watch what you do when you have been around a long while and take pointers from you.” Irma laughs, “But I have been told many times I’ve been an inspiration by other singers. In fact when I met Randy Newman he told me he had always written his songs with me in mind. So yeah, I got to fulfill both my dreams in a way – singer and teacher, honey.”

lEIGh5

Imogen Heap interview: 2011

2011-04-11T01:58:00.002+10:00

DONATIONS WELCOME

“I haven’t got a lot of time because I still have to write the last verse of my new song before I get to bed. Is fifteen minutes alright with you?” Imogen Heap is at home in London cramming in dinner between phone interviews while she pieces together the beginning stages of an album not due for release until December 2013. Despite this fact, her sense of urgency is high. After all, she has committed to releasing one entirely new song every three months until the project - known as Heapsongs - is completed with a level of input from her fans never before attempted by a singer/songwriter.

Utilising the social network phenomenon, Imogen Heap has thrown a huge bone to fans of her jaunty pop songs – to suggest song topics, compose music and generally help create what will ultimately be her fourth album piece by piece. “The idea scares me a little. I know I’m really going to have to trust my instincts a lot with these songs. I’m not going to be able to rush back into the studio at the last minute and change anything if I start having doubts it.” She begins. What’s remarkable about Imogen and her decision to leave so much in the hands of her adoring fans is that previously her methods of creating have been almost entirely solo affairs. The Romford-based artist is a producer, multi-instrumentalist (13 to be exact) and composer in serious demand. I wonder then what has pushed the driver to so readily take a back seat?

“Well the original idea was to find a way to develop as a songwriter without the whole process taking over my life.” She explains, “When you make an album usually, you take about two years and think about little else but the album. The exciting thing then becomes those little side projects that come along because you can carry on working but have a bit of distance from your own headspace. Heapsongs is a way of making it all about the unexpected little surprises that keep you hungry and juiced up creatively.” She adds, “I got tired pouring everything into making albums and putting everything else in my life on hold. If I had a group of songwriters, a band and someone looking after my studio I probably wouldn’t have arrived at this decision, but because it’s just me I had to re-think how I was going to make music and keep myself connected to the rest of the world.” Imogen has been making her particular brand of garage-pop since her 1998 debut, I, Megaphone. However the album that should have launched her became something of a cross-to-bear. Heap found herself having to re-promote the record two years after its initial release following dismissal by her label ahead of its take-over. Considering the time spent on promoting her debut and writing its follow-up, 2005’s Speak For Yourself, it’s easy to see why a re-think was in order. She discusses.

“Making albums in a traditional way is very an insular process. I mean you do feel fantastic when it’s finished but I wanted to think more about my future this time. If I was making an album the regular way I would have to put all touring on hold for two years, but working this way means I can come to Australia and do some shows and continue working on songs.” The internet has of course helped turn Imogen’s notion into a reality. She explains. “On twitter or on my blog, I post an idea - it may be just a thought I have at 3 in the morning – and immediately people add to it and it can become an idea for a song or a video.” She continues, “I have a word-cloud on my blog for example that people can add things to and I can see what fans would like to hear me sing about. Most recently the words “Japan”, “seismic” and “tsunami” have been coming up a lot.” Imogen decides, “Songs should capture a moment in time, and so I thought, well this is on everybody’s minds right now, and I do want these songs to mean something to people – I don’t want to just write about nothing. The problem for me was how I could possibly connect with something so large-scale to write a song about it.” She adds, “Then the answer came to me after reading in the paper about a journalist who had witnessed from a helicopter one man on a bike literally peddling for his life with the wave closing on him. I just burst into tears when I read that and I thought what would’ve been going through his mind at that moment?” Ensuring the success of Heapsongs, Imogen’s fans have feverishly pounced on the chance to be a part of the project. She has been sent everything from complete ukulele solos to sound clips of eggs being cracked into a bowl and every day more and more pieces are added to her skeletal song structures. Sorting out what is and isn’t song-worthy however isn’t always an easy task. She considers.

“I have had a lot of quite rough, organic sound seeds sent in that don’t obviously fit into a song.” She says diplomatically, “I’ve been sent things like water being thrown into a hot pan or a squeaky door on a dishwasher from fans who’ve then just gone ‘Hey I’m the guy who sent you the sound clip of water in a pan – can I come to your house for a party?'” Imogen laughs. “But I think all the fans involved in making Heapsongs so far kind of feel like they’re part of a big extended family which is really nice.” The uncertainty of this project’s outcome feels hard to ignore as I speak with Imogen. The album will take two years to complete with one new song released every three months. If she feels any sense of doubt, though it isn’t one she wishes to share. “No well, albums often capture a brief period of time that’s relevant to the artist, but in doing this kind of release, I will be able to look back at the end of the project and have a catalogue of songs relevant to a much greater time frame and will have had a lot more experiences along the way than I would being sat alone in a studio. So my decision to make an album in this way is more a lifestyle choice really.”

lEIGh5

Imogen Heap Lifeline video

Mojo Juju & The Snake Oil Merchants - interview: 2011

2011-03-30T19:18:00.001+11:00

INTERVIEW WITH THE SPELLBINDER

Popular traveling Burlesque show, The Jitterbug Club, has reached the end of a five-year run celebrating all things vaudeville. The show’s originators, an eight-piece rag-tag band called The Snakeoil Merchants, in a further blow to local cabaret fans, will in turn wind down with one last explosive Melbourne show this week (April 2011). Speaking to me today is singer and master-mind behind the double-act, Mojo Juju, a kind of conduit between titillating 1930s escapist shows and modern performance art. Along side tales of drunken home-done tattoos and causing audiences to blush, she enlightens this novice on the finer points of being cabaret star in today’s world.

"There are a lot of performers out there who believe in what they do, and I think when you convey that, your audience can’t help but be disarmed." Mojo begins, "If you go out on stage and don't believe in what you're doing though, I think people can tell and they won’t go along for the ride with you." It's this very approach to her act that has kept audiences coming back to The Jitterbug Club's shows. Juju believes not in quaint, cheap-shock stage shows, but in bringing a sense of fun and danger back to the fore. "For me the aesthetic of what we do is nostalgic but it’s about the transference of the impact cabaret or vaudeville had in the 1930s and '40s to now. I understand that it is not exactly relevant to today, but what you wanna do is make it contemporary being a little confronting which actually still is an anomaly in live shows." She pauses, "You know, it’s not just pretty dancing girls, it has a sense of humour, and it has a shock element… Basically I want my audience to blush when they come to one of our shows." Juju laughs. I wonder does Mojo believe people perhaps like to be confronted, and if that's what keeps these kinds of shows from fading out.

"What keeps the art form alive, is understanding the impact it had in its day, and adding to that what is maybe provocative and taboo today. The differences really aren’t that great I don’t think.” Earnest performers, it seems, have always muscled to the front of the cue, while the provocateurs frolicked down the back. It's a sign of music's bizarre conservative undercurrent – a forever clinging barnacle it picked up once it realised it also had a political voice in decades gone by. Mojo believes that now is as good a time as any to celebrate the subversive when you take in to account the fact that vaudeville began in far less conservative times than ours. "We're living in very self-aware times I think. People seem very concerned with how you are supposed to behave in certain situations or out at a concert, but that leaves me feeling very stifled. Vaudeville throws all of that out the window and gives free expression room to breathe. I honestly think people are longing for that, though they don’t always know, but you see a kind of relief in audience's faces at these shows." Mojo's view on burlesque's shift into the mainstream - via a certain recent film starring Cher – but mostly through acts like The Dresden Dolls is mostly positive. She continues.

"I haven’t seen that film (Burlesque) yet, I’m a bit scared to be honest!” She laughs. “But I think people like Amanda Palmer, Mikelangelo (from Tin Star) and Mick Conway - who's one of the last true old-school vaudeville performers still out there - are incredible. They're authentic, you know – they don't use vaudeville as a gimmick. I think their work only strengthens our little branch of the showbiz tree." As a singer/songwriter and conceptual artist, Mojo by more happy accident than design, found herself gravitating to the underground cabaret scene in Australia. Once she realised her vivid ideas of stage shows were in fact a shared passion, exciting things began to happen. "I guess The Snakeoil Merchants were born in Newcastle at a time when I found myself on a kind of seachange there. There were many musicians this very small area and through several lucky chance encounters I soon had a band of like-minded souls." Juju laughs, "I remember things happening like, our saw player just getting up on stage at an early gig and playing with us with no reservations at all about not being asked" She continues, "We liked his spirit, so after that gig we drank and we drank and we drank until finally we tattooed a skull on his chest and said, he couldn’t leave the band until he managed to scrape it off!" Mojo smiles, "That's one of many weird little scenarios that happened early on and led to us forming this band." With the band she had always wanted together at last, Mojo felt she was able to unleash her bigger plan of a full-blown vaudeville extravaganza.

"It all started with a bunch of songs as these things tend to do, but there was more to it than that, because when I write I tend to develop the visual side to the music as much as the music itself, so with Snakeoil Merchants, I finally felt I could turn develop my ideas into a cabaret." Mojo adds that a point of frustration for her was seeing bands that weren’t 'engaging their audiences at all' and wanted to 'offer people more'. “I got so sick of watching bands with just four people standing on stage and I felt like there was this whole pool of wonder that they wasn't being drawn from in live shows." She adds, "Who are we to stand on stage and just play and expect everyone to nod along and then go home? I want to engage with the audience and have them engage with me." A room filled with expectant punters can be hard to judge I propose, so couldn't it be equally risky offering too many distractions from the music? "Well I say kudos to people like Jason Webley (from Evelyn Evelyn) who can just go out on stage with an accordion and be utterly captivating. There's something authentic about that you can't deny. Then on the other side there's things like Muse, whose visual side to their show is kind of over-saturating and a bit too clinical I think. That kind of display doesn’t leave your audience wanting more. We try and prod our audience a little bit at a time instead of battering them over the head with stimulus." Mojo adds, "I mean our show is visual yeah, but not in a way that creates a wall between you and the audience."

The Snakeoil Merchants may be putting their Jitterbug Club show to bed, but Mojo is in her own words, 'bursting with new ideas for a show'. The end of a successful run like the 1930s New York-themed Jitterbug Club, is a bittersweet affair, Mojo admits, but as the prime designer she is obviously keen to make some new wow. "Ending these shows is just so sad in a way because of the relationships I've built up with the other performers, but at the same time, I'm so excited about the possibilities of doing something new. I've been working with a collective called the Hoodoo Emporium to help see my next fantasy through to fruition. One of the shows is a Wild West type performance called The Devil Rides A Rocking Horse, with can-can dancers and all of that kind of thing." Mojo laughs, "I could talk for hours about what I want to do next, but really what it boils down to is working on the Jitterbug Club shows has made me realise my twisted fantasy's can actually become real working within the realm of vaudeville."

lEIGh5

Chris Geddes (Belle & Sebastian) interview: 2011

2011-03-26T18:16:00.005+11:00

LOVE WRITES

The latest chapter in the tale of Glasgow's bookish anti-stars, Belle & Sebastian is titled simply enough, Write About Love. It’s as though a light-bulb went off in their collective heads at some 'new album ideas' meeting and it read 'go do what you always do'. They did and the results were unmistakably Belle & Sebastian; in other words another enchanting and rewarding listen, devoid of any 'Mills & Boon' sentiments.

Although no such light-bulb moment took place, the band did take their longest between-album break so far in their 15 year career. Suggesting Write About Love was an aural face-palm and a reminder of what they did best as a collective seems like a good place to start my talk with keyboardist Chris Geddes today. He says little to re-enforce my thoughts on their new album's title, but instead offers, "We just didn't ever want to get to the point where we are going through the motions and that's partly what lead to us taking a break for a while. Plus Stuart (Murdoch) wanted to work on another project, which ended up taking a couple of years." Chris adds, "I don't think there was any doubt we would get back together though. Without really discussing it, we were all I think under the assumption that there would be future Belle & Sebastian activity.” Experience has taught me that asking the artist involved to describe their work usually results in many awkward pauses, but Chris in interview is almost an enthusiastic fan of Belle & Sebastian’s work, as though his contribution to the band is far from his mind.

"I think it has some very strong tracks on it." He dutifully states, “Sarah (Martin)’s writing is probably my favourite thing about the whole record, but also Tony Hoffer did a really good job with the production again." Tony previously worked with the band on 2007’s The Life Pursuit. Chris continues, "Also, I think Stuart (Murdoch)’s and Stevie (Jackson)’s songs (on Write About Love) are among the best they have ever written in Belle & Sebastian.” Chris claims that it was producer Tony Hoffer who provided the starting point for the new record’s direction. “At the start, he said he wanted me to try using old synthesisers on this record, and I guess because we had already decided we wanted to use less orchestral stuff than we had on the previous records, that seemed like a great place to begin." He continues, "There wasn't an abundance of songs going in either, so we had to work out a lot of the album in the actual studio, unlike on The Life Pursuit, where we had a lot of half formed ideas already on the go by the time we started the sessions." An outsider might see this as a less stressful way of making a new album, but Chris reckons, “It (Life Pursuit) felt like we were trying to keep too many balls in the air the whole way through the process." As a producer in his own right, Chris felt he could 'buddy up' with Hoffer on the album sessions, perhaps more than anyone else in the band.

"Yeah I love working over there (in LA) with Tony because its such a brilliant studio, and whereas I work from my little home set-up in Glasgow, being around Tony is like playing with the big boys and seeing how a true professional operates." His own production work, Chris decides after only a brief pause, could never include a Belle & Sebastian album. "No I couldn’t do it because nobody in the band would let me tell them what to do." He quips, "As much as I’d love to do it, and get a proper studio together from the huge amounts of cash I'd obviously make from it, at the end of the day, nobody would listen to me." Poor Chris – the man they call Beans is in possession of one of the softest speaking voices I’ve ever encountered doing interviews. Indeed I had met Chris in person during Belle & Sebastian’s last Australian visit and was struck by how incredibly timid, although engaging, he was. To be the 'quiet one' in Belle & Sebastian suddenly seems like a hilarious concept considering so much of their music, even during their rare moments of gay abandon, is almost apologetic in delivery. Our talk turns to the 'other project' Stuart was working on during Belle & Sebastian’s hiatus and how it inturn lead to Write About Love’s surprising guest vocalists.

"Norah Jones (who guests on Little Lou, Ugly Jack, Prophet John) I think came on board because a good friend of Stuart's from years ago turned out to be an ex-housemate of hers…” Chris laughs, possibly at the sound of himself name-dropping, “And Carey Mulligan, well Stuart just saw her in a film and was quite keen to get her into the studio because he was working on the script for his film, God Help The Girl and he thought she'd be good for a role in that." The script and score for the musical film is entirely Stuart Murdoch's work outside of his commitment to Belle & Sebastian. He had written stories exclusively about women and for women to sing and went about auditioning artists, mostly unknowns, to play the parts. Carey Mulligan was an exception in that she had an already developed career as an actress, mostly in bonnet dramas, however, she makes a rather impressive singing debut on the title track to Write About Love.


Chris featured on the 2nd album's sleeve

"I think she was amazing really," Chris continues, "but I read in an interview she did after that she was extremely nervous about the whole thing." He laughs, "You would never have known at the time though, but I guess that's the actor in her." At this stage in Belle & Sebastian’s career, pre-album release and tour press is a standard activity but I remind Chris that it wasn’t always the case. Back in 1996, just as the media-hyped Brit-pop scene was starting to lose steam, Belle & Sebastian, perhaps disturbed by the level of attention shown to anything new that could be held up as the saviours of Brit-pop, chose to withdraw as the spotlight drew nearer. It was a renegade card they played but it only served to strengthen their appeal especially once their debut album Tigermilk became the indie buzz album of the year.

"We were just sort of making it up as we went along. We decided to not do interviews or promotional activities because of how difficult we felt it was to portray what we were about through just talking about it, if that makes sense." It does, I tell him. The particular topic reminds me of seeing early Belle & Sebastian promo items, like badges and posters, often featuring basic line drawings of kids on bikes or soft toys with a simple 'B&S' slogan to identify the culprits. These kinds of DIY, anti-publicity bands are common, but rarely succeed in the way Belle & Sebastian have. Chris hints that a desire for anonymity was loosely the reason for this. "When the band first started, Isobel (Campbell) and myself were pretty young, we were still students, and Stuart I think felt quite protective of us. He didn't want the pressure of loads of attention on us because I think he felt it could spoil what we had together." Chris adds thoughtfully, "Think of how many bands that are talented but maybe get to only make two or three albums because they burn out from that first rush of overexposure. Stuart understood this and didn’t want us to suffer the same fate."

It's clear that Stuart takes his role as band protector quite seriously. He has guided them through eight successful albums, from playing house parties to stages the world over and into the fringes of popular culture without compromising their work. Chris probably doesn't spends his time thinking about this fact, but his ease in discussing it suggests he's confident they made the right move. "Obviously you can never know for sure what you're doing is totally the right thing at the time, but now I think everyone in the band agrees, we are happy with how things have worked out for us."

lEIGh5

Mark Gardener (Ride) interview: 2011 (Part 1)

2011-03-15T00:10:00.004+11:00

ON THE ROAD TO NOWHERE

It's near-impossible to think of a more fitting image to sum up Oxford's Ride than the huge arching wave, captured moments before breaking that adorns their debut album, 1990's Nowhere. The band who would later be dubbed the premier shoegaze act, offered up a whole new brand of guitar-based rock with the emphasis on layering, effects and slow-building walls of noise, which they captured in a rare, startling potency. Now, 21 years after Nowhere, ahead of its anniversary reissue, singer/guitarist Mark Gardener is on the phone from his home studio in Oxford, admitting that the wake of that album was more powerful than he, or his band could have imagined… or even hope to have survived.

Unlike many of his Creation records co-signings, Mark Gardener and band have resisted the reunion tour trap, despite their once rocky friendships now fully repaired. Ride had ended badly, but as Mark unfolds his bands' story, he does so affably and remembers it as being a good time, if not always a healthy one. To help jog his memory of those days, I begin by asking Mark to take me back to his last tour with Ride in Australia and whatever lasting impressions he has.

"I did a few solo shows in Australia probably 7 or 8 years ago, but the last time I was there with Ride was too long ago to contemplate!" He says cheerily. In fact it was 1992 when the Oxford lads last toured here. Mark, upon being reminded, snaps his fingers and begins to ease into story-teller mode - his most natural state I discover... "That’s right!" he exclaims, "I mean the years just go by when you get to my age, but I remember we supported Ratcat and, I haven't spoken to him for a while, but I got along really well with Simon (Day) and we actually stayed in touch for years." Mark adds, "It was a great tour for us to be a part of because Ratcat were so huge that year and we got to play to much bigger crowds than maybe we would have on our own. Australia was our last stop on that tour also and I remember feeling this sense of just winding down a letting some kind of normality creep back in, and knowing we could go home soon." After walking out of Ride in '96, Mark's sense of 'normality' needed some readjustment as he explains later. But despite messy endings, for the 21st anniversary edition of Nowhere, the original four members all sat in on the remastering sessions, "just like old mates". Mark describes his finely tuned ear's impression of the 21 year-old debut and the feeling it has left him with.

"It's strange because at the time we were so involved with it, but now because I'm doing a lot of production myself I listen to it with a kind of producer’s ear I guess and to me it sounds very unconventional.” He decides. "There's a naivety about it but I think it kind of works. Recording it was haphazard at the time, and it felt like we were doing a tightrope walk and we could fall off at any minute I guess." He continues, "Listening now though it takes me back to being in the studio and us all just being nocturnal for the whole process. Alan McGee (Creation label boss) was coming down to the studio a lot too, I mean it was early days for Creation so Alan was very keen on encouraging us and just making himself available for whatever we needed. I think it helped a lot having that kind of support and it's something I always try and do with bands I work with now." McGee, it is proposed, was barely hanging on financially when Nowhere was being made. The recording of My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless record was costing the label enormously, and so is it reasonable to think he was hanging high hopes on his latest signing?

"Yeah at the time, our first two EPs had gone into the mainstream charts - which was a first for Creation - so Alan was excited but also just into letting us get on with doing our thing. He was a keen observer of our progress though." In those early stages of making the album, I wonder if Mark had the sense of a great plan coming together. "As far as having any kind of plan for Nowhere, we had the material written and just set up as though we were playing live and kept belting out songs all through the night in this old converted church called Blackwing studios." He adds eerily, "I remember just weird, spooky stuff kept happening with the recording equipment and we were convinced there were spirits in the room!" Mark exclaims. Naturally, Gardener is understated when describing Nowhere, but the confidence to pull off such a non-derivative record at the age the band were still seems remarkable, I propose. Mark responds.

"Interestingly when I hear Nowhere back, I totally get that we were all clicking and being very instinctual with the music." He offers, "We were at a place in our minds collectively that was all about fulfilling our childhood dreams of making an album. We knew that if it failed then we would probably just go off to university and get real jobs, so it was also a time of no pressure, let's-just-see-how-we-go, which was a great feeling." Mark adds, "But having said that, I had made a decision, and I think Andy (Bell) did too, that being in a band was all I really wanted to do." Gardener delights in remembering Ride's beginnings without a hint of remorse for what would prove to be a short-lived halcyon time. "It was the best time of my life (in Ride) and I wouldn't wish to change a thing about it. I mean we had our first record contract when I was 18 and its only really now that I can see it all for what it was – four mates who were incredibly lucky to be connecting with people through music we wholly believed in." Inspiration for the incredible sound on Nowhere, Mark states, was best summed up by Ride co-lead guitarist, Andy Bell.

"Andy once famously said his childhood memory of hearing The Beatles playing while his mum was doing the hoovering had a huge impact on him!" He laughs, "That whole melody and droning noise clash kind of sums up what Ride were about in the early days, but we were all into My Bloody Valentine as well and how they were doing really interesting things with guitars after the '80s big solo thing was kind of dying a death." As a vocalist, Mark added perfectly matched monotone voice-scapes, seemingly more for the purpose of offsetting the wailing guitar, than offering insightful lyrics. He decides, "With my singing at the time, I really didn't know what I was doing so I just sort of mumbled a bit," Mark laughs, "I think I’m a more confident singer now, but listening back to that album I think my voice actually kind of works on those songs." His impressionist singing on the album's most colossal moments, Vapour Trail, Dreams Burn Down and Paralysed gave Ride their only real subtlety, while the main focal point was always on Andy Bell's and Mark's guitar washes filling every possible space in the music, while rhythm section Steve Quarelt and Loz Colbert added heaving bulk for contrast. With the one exception of My Bloody Valentine, no other band had at that time succeeded so fully in stealing soaring guitar music off dreary dinosaurs (fuck you, Santana) and harnessing it with such youthful flair. Sadly though, Ride's rare chemistry was also a timebomb and Mark knew it, or so he claims.

lEIGh5

(Interview continues on next post)

Mark Gardener (Ride) interview: 2011 (Part 2)

2011-03-14T04:09:00.006+11:00

"We left at the right time I think. A lot of great love affairs don’t go on for 20, 30 years just as Ride's season of intense creativity wasn't meant to. I think a lot of bands kid themselves quite well that they can maintain the intensity of their first rush, but we opted not to fool ourselves or our audience by doing that." Gardener adds that his life was becoming all consumed by Ride, "The strange thing was when our bubble burst, I suddenly realised I was about seven years behind my friends who weren't in bands in terms of building an actual life. That's probably why I went a bit funny and ended up living in a walnut orchard in France for a couple of years." As Mark continues elaborating on his life after Nowhere, living with nuts soon stops sounding like such a bizarre life choice.

"When Ride finished, life just seemed to be such an anti-climax really." He reveals, "I filled that gap by turning my house in Oxford into a kind of non-stop night club, but then after a year of that you just go 'shit, this is really not good' and I had to get away from there altogether. So that's what I did." I wonder with time being touted as a great healer and considering some of Creation’s most popular acts are touring again, is the temptation to re-join the party there at all? "How would you feel about maybe going back to your past and reliving a part of it that was so intense and ridiculous…?," He says searching for the words, "Playing together again would be like going back to an ex partner and shagging them long after you’ve moved on…." He pauses again, "I mean we always get gig offers and so it's been brought up a lot and we've all discussed it and agree that no time thus far has felt right." Despite that fact, Gardener has maintained a love for Ride playing acoustic versions of their songs on tour and frequently giving interviews discussing the band at length. But more recently he been integral in a new project celebrating Creation Record's boom-time.

"In the last week, Alan (McGee) and I have been doing press conferences around Europe for a new film about Creation to be released later this year." Mark, who has also written the score for the film, reveals he and Alan have remained close ever since Gardener's initial signing to the label. "Alan, as well as being my manager, used to be my drug brother but our friendship has thankfully lasted longer than Ride or our indulgences." Mark laughs, "I've always seen him as like an older brother really. Alan didn’t bail out when the business or drug side to our friendship ended and that makes him a true friend in my eyes." The film, titled Upside Down, aims to put Creation Records - "The last great independent label"'s - wild story into some kind of context. Mark explains.

"This film is the last word on the whole Creation family. It covers absolutely everything and everyone of the acts Alan signed, but at the same time it’s not a pat on the back to him or the bands involved." Mark adds, "There was no room for big egos when you're in a meeting with the label boss smoking a joint and sitting on a crate." Ride, like many of the acts Alan signed, were there because McGee liked them as people. Mark continues, "That's probably why in the end he had to walk away. He invested so much of himself into his acts because he believed in us and wanted us all to be great mates as well. In the finish I think he was kind of heartbroken from some of those friendships failing for various reasons and he had a break-down." Gardener has hinted in the past that he himself suffered a near-breakdown in 1996 resulting in him walking out on the band one week before their infamous final album Tarantula was released. "I was starting to get bored with it all, and I'm a restless sod anyway.” He decides. But as far as Ride's drug-use goes, Mark refuses to admit it destroyed the band and that he was "never out of control and just attempting to pass the acid test".

"That can help you decide if what music you’ve made is… you know great or not." He laughs, "Plus when you do drugs with people you tend to cut through the crap a lot. I mean I wouldn't say we were fucked up on it, but for a little period in our lives that was going on and it added a lot of fuel to our fire." He then adds, "The only thing with adding fuel like that is you can get burned quite easily. We lasted just long enough to realise that I think, but you know we when were writing and actively recording our albums we were working fucking hard man.” He confirms, "Working hard to do our best possible music and not just sound like a bunch of wasted guys bashing out some tunes on the weekend."

As the film, Upside Down testifies, virtually no one involved with the label sacrificed the quality of their music for a cheap thrill and a few hits. While the music of the Madchester scene sometimes came second to the band's excesses, Creation celebrated the making of music above all else. Mark, being the musical director of Upside Down, had the mammoth task of making sure all of Creation's bands were represented in the all-important score. "I also did a lot of the incidental music for Upside Down." He adds, "I mean there are obviously two or three tracks by each of the bands featured, but all the music playing during the narratives, I made. It just goes from house music whenever somebody's talking about that scene to this weird discordant noise used when Bobby Gillespie's talking about having a drug psychosis." He laughs, "So it was a kind of fun soundtrack to work on."

As for who had the final word on what music ended up in the film ,that was down to the artists themselves. "I think that apart from My Bloody Valentine, everyone was quite happy to be on it." Mark says, "When they realised the legacy was in good hands and the film wasn't going to be some ridiculous dramatisation or whatever, I think everyone was okay with clearing their music for use in the film." My Bloody Valentine's departure from Creation has been well documented. The general gist of it is, they were "unceremoniously booted off" by Alan McGee for putting the label in debt, coupled with the fact that McGee and Kevin Shields couldn't stand one-another personally. "It was all over between those two parties very early on." Mark confirms. My Bloody Valentine however remain one of the labels greatest success stories, perhaps second only to Oasis - another band who's extravagant demands cost McGee's struggling label dearly. Despite Oasis's familiar bravado however, Mark reveals a surprising reaction by Noel Gallagher to the film during it's pre-production. "Noel said to me, 'It's just gonna be another film about bloody Oasis, mate!'" He laughs, "I think even he was fed up with hearing about Oasis at that stage and about how important they were." He continues, "Oasis in fact come in quite late in the story, you know. They were actually the end of the Creation story as it happened." Mark recalls, "When Oasis played Knebworth to a quarter of a million people, that's when Alan had his moment and said, 'this isn't us anymore. It's not Creation as I saw it.' It was like the moment when the Roman Empire got to its zenith and immediately started to crumble." Mark adds dramatically.

"Strangely enough, it was the early period of Creation when there was no money that felt like the strongest time within the label." Mark says, "We were refusing excesses, refusing to repeat ourselves, refusing to become over-blown or self-important and the same can be said for Primal Scream, Swervedriver, The House Of Love and many of the other bands, but Oasis I think started to repeat themselves after their first two or three albums until they ended up just referencing everything they'd done already." Mark suggests, "Ride were kind of criticised for making album's that didn't sound like our first one, but we simply weren't interested in repeating what we had already done, you know." Mark touches on a good point, but I can't help thinking that making a follow up to such a striking debut album was never going to be a simple task for a young band still deeply interested in experimenting. Nowhere was a sizable bump in the road, and a revelation to my ears at least. In hindsight it was for me perhaps what The Byrds' Eight Miles High might have sounded like to a youth in the 1960s. Digressions aside, Mark shifts his focus from the discussion and briefly moans about how cold he is as I'm suddenly reminded that England is currently going through its worse winter in decades.

"I can't complain too much though, at least its warm in the studio, where I spend most of my time these days." He smiles. His comment sparks a further discussion of one factor in making music I'd rarely contemplated. "I would love to be out in the Australian sunshine all the time but I wouldn't get any work done if I was." He laughs, "There's something about the dark skies and that slight feeling of melancholy that I find creatively stimulating. I've heard people say that because it rains so much in Manchester there's so much music being made. You almost can't deny the connection between that kind of environment and the kind of bands that came from that scene. A prime example of a band that appears to be affected by the climate here in Oxford is Radiohead. If they had've come from LA or somewhere like that, I can't imagine they'd be making album's like Kid A." He says, cracking up.

"I think LA would be the most boring place on earth to live, even though the Beach Boys came out of LA who were genius, but whatever, I see it as being incredibly one-dimensional." He ads, "In Melbourne I know you have sometimes quite weird weather patterns which results in quite interesting music, but LA is pretty much the same season all year round and therefore seems to be a very creatively dead place. I think because of how people need varying dimensions in their environment to keep kind of mentally stimulated, the weather must play a role in that seeing as we are circumspect to it." I suggest to Mark that a global meteorological/musical hot spots map could easily prove or disprove his theory, "All I know is that when we were making Nowhere, it was during many long cold nights and as I said to you before, that is my overriding memory of that time, and the feeling I get from hearing those songs back now is largely connected to the climate." Just as our conversation turns to Kate Bush's 1985 single, Cloudbusting and the songs' proposition that science could possibly harbor the secret of the weather control, and further more what that could mean for music, Mark's manager calls to remind him he has a cue of callers waiting. "I think this means we have to stop talking!" Indeed it does feel like a cliff hanger ending to our talk, but Mark is a man in demand, as you would expect of the creator of Nowhere - one of music's great indefinable pleasures.

lEIGh5

Jon King (Gang Of Four) interview: 2011

2011-03-04T15:52:00.004+11:00

ALL WE MAKE IS 'ENTERTAINMENT!'

Any self respecting punk historian will delight in telling you, while fingering their well-worn vinyl copy of Entertainment!, Gang Of Four were one of the most important bands there at the birth of the scene. But that album, their debut, was for me an image long before being an aural experience, like the many albums you discover are worshiped long before you actually discover them for yourself. The bright crimson sleeve, slightly cynical exclamation point and the name itself; Gang Of Four, all suggested a cautious approach.

The band's founder, Jon King is on the phone today from his home in Leeds, and every bit aware of the reverence/caution he invites. "All I can hope for is that I might have encouraged and stimulated people to be creative. That's all I would want for." Certainly countless artists have rarely stopped singing Gang Of Four's praises, but now Jon, along with original co-founder Andy Gill, are back with their first new album since 1995, all the man cares about now is getting a few of their famously brutal shows over and done with.

"It's a bit out of the ordinary for us to be touring at all, so I suppose I should be a bit more excited about it." King laughs, "I'd much rather be doing the one-off festival appearances, like we are in Australia. The road rat way of living I've never found to be very rewarding, you know what I mean?" Taking 16 years to record a new album…? The last tour must've been total sensory obliteration, Jon? "Not at all, you just have to be a lot more organised than I am to make much in the way of quality music while on tour. I’m sure it must be nice to be Damon Albarn sitting in a hotel room between shows making his next album on an iPad, but not me mate." Indeed the long wait for any new Gang Of Four material is simply a matter of fact. Bar actually asking why they like to take years off between records, I wonder when the last time Jon felt he was under any pressure to get an album done and released.

"Not since our first record, mate." He laughs, "I remember when we were finishing Entertainment!, we were a just couple of songs short of a full album and so we took ourselves to a farm in Wales and stayed there for a couple of months to write, and Andy (Gill) and I came up with Return The Gift down there, so it was obviously worth our time getting out of the studio. But I think very interesting things happen within a band when you've got a deadline. I think all creative people to some degree need someone indirectly involved intelligently managing time for them. I'm like the painter who stands around all week looking at the walls and then on Friday at 5pm works frantically throughout the weekend to get it all done in time." Gang Of Four's notable influence and reverence arguably sprung from a filthy sordid affair between prog rock, New York punk and reggae. They pre-dated the ska-punk movement and unlike many of the late '70s punk bands, Gang Of Four didn't discount prog's musical merit. Punk's a title they still happily own, but Jon’s willing to use a much dirtier word to describe his music.

"I always say - though it’s probably quite wrong - what we do is kind of like jazz, you know where you improvise and try and push things." He says provocatively, "Just take a song like He’d Send In The Army for example (from their second album, Solid Gold), that one is always completely different whenever we play it live. I mean, Andy and I might not play anything at all for a few minutes just to see how long we can stand it before we're compelled to drop in again, which could only work on a song with so many stops and starts." He adds, "Songs that have so many trigger points telling the artists where to come in and what to do next aren't terribly interesting to me." Plenty of "musically deconstructive" acts have declared Gang Of Four as an influence – Bloc Party, The Rapture, Franz Ferdinand – so it's not surprising, Jon took his lead from the original demolition man. He explains.

"When I see artists who I admire, like Bob Dylan, they don't respect their own material." He claims, "Dylan when he plays, will change the melody line, the chords, the whole phrasing of his songs and often not care much about getting the words right either. I think that to me, even beyond his natural ability as a performer, is the most entertaining thing about his shows. We're not quite like that, in the sense we try and keep true to the essence of the songs… what I mean is there's no point in playing a song about aggression in a kind of pussy like way, you know what I mean?" He laughs. Whatever the case may be, the band's debut album Entertainment! released in 1979, was hardly the aggressive powerhouse that Never Mind The Bollocks had been. But it oozed with subtle anti-political content, a lot of which would only take on any great meaning in time. Jon discusses.

"A song like Anthrax has taken on a life of its own online from people continually remixing it and reworking it into all these different styles. I’m talking about fans here who have taken it upon themselves to do this with no input from us, and I think it's brilliant to be honest. People have taken that song to heart and drawn out so many different meanings. I’ve seen one which is a kind of allegory to the British landscape and other equally fitting ones where it's all very post industrial and dark, so rather than us holding up our record and saying 'this is important!' its out fans who've shown us what a powerful track that was for them." Jon reflects, "I guess it's become our Star Spangled Banner in a way!" He exclaims, referencing Jimi Hendrix's infamous rendering of the US national anthem at his Woodstock appearance.

If Anthrax was the rallying cry for those who never gave up on the ideals of punk, then what has the latest phase of Gang Of Four got to offer its hungry children? The album is called Content, which I can't decide is pronounced/meant as content (filling) or content (happy), to Jon's amusement, "Well I wouldn't say Andy and I are necessarily contented people, so it can be seen as a bit tongue-in-cheek really. On the other hand, you and I are in the same boat - you used to be a journalist and I used to be a musician but now we're called content providers. That term springs from the media creeps who dominate the world and who make a fortune out of other people's work but don't invest a penny in it." By this statement, it's clear the importance of releasing new music for Jon is low. Indeed Gang Of Four have put out only seven albums in 30 years. Instead King firmly sees his band as very much a live act. "I think I could live without recording music." Jon decides, "It’s the emotional experience of playing live that I’m in it for. It's always been about the rough, sweaty carefree performances and being face to face with your audience for us. The kind of instant joy that comes from that never gets old for me. However, long fucking tours…!"

lEIGh5

Tricky: live in Melbourne 2011 (review)

2011-02-19T01:39:00.001+11:00

Venue: The Forum
Date: 16/02/11

Tricky walks a very fragile line between total chaos and controlled calm at his Forum live debut. To shape the kind of concert experience Tricky offers, takes a kind of mad genius and an absolute disregard for 'expectations'. The world's premier trip-hop artist since releasing his debut album, Maxinquaye, has over time been forced to shrug off the tag he once comfortably inhabited. Massive Attack – his former band – evolved so gradually it was near impossible to gauge, while Tricky as a solo artist hit the slightest bump (a bad review) and threw out most of his old tricks for fear of repeating himself into obscurity. The result of this is one hell of a disjointed concert style-wise, but scarcely a boring one.

Tricky's latest album Mixed Race has failed to really take off in Australia, but his fanbase is well established enough now to fill a decent enough space for the man. In the not-quite capacity crowd, it's difficult to typify a Tricky fan. There's no '90s-era tour shirts… no obvious die-hard hip hop types etc… But then apart from a home-done Tricky t-shirt (drawn with permanent marker, I'll add) made in my youth and long since lost, my own fandom is hardly obvious. Perhaps like myself then, many fans are here tonight to see a curio of the past whose moody, noir-ish tracks and reputation as a volatile individual share a strange connection.

It's a thin-ice walk for almost two hours once Tricky's anti-rock show begins with him leading his band on to the stage and taking his place not at the mic, but in front of his keyboardist – his back defiantly to the audience. He jiggles around for what seems like ages ignoring us on his platform as his live drummer, guitarist, bassist and synth man plough through an instrumental, You Don't Wanna. Whereas warm-up act Wolfgramm poured their all into grabbing our attention with their slick DJ & vocalist set to little response, Tricky delights in taking the hard road to winning us over. But saying exactly what he does to win us in the show is quite, well... tricky.

His vocalist Francesca Riley performs a great deal of the songs solo while Tricky stalks the stage adding only occasional vox. His band, although in top form, are at the constant ready to stop playing or change song as Tricky bizarrely commands. The concert's uneven start - which includes his early hits, Black Steel and Overcome – makes its first sudden shift of this kind when during the serene Pumpkin, Tricky points at his drummer and without warning, the band launch into a cover of Motorhead’s Ace Of Spades. Tricky begins hauling fans out of the pit at this stage and doesn't stop until the band are completely obscured by dancing punters. The shocked security staff can do little but make sure nobody falls during their frantic climb to the stage. Nor do they do anything much about Tricky's almost constant joint-smoking tonight or even stop him passing that dutchie around his new buddies.

There's no doubt from this moment on Tricky's finally found the vibe he needs to work within and the show turn into a soaring, chaotic rumble. He's still in command though, and a quick exodus from the stage invaders is followed by a crazed run through of Vent before Tricky and band flee the stage also. The encore although just offering more of the same madness as the main show, also revealed Tricky's warped motivation for his radical stage shows. A second wave of fans were quickly gathered by the artist - at which point I lost my own shit and joined him – only this time, Tricky wanted more. Security finally begin blocking people once half the packed dance floor's been transferred to the stage. Although I felt a bit of a fake dancing around to a song called Ghetto Stars, (I’m about as ghetto as a pavlova) no one on the stage looked fully comfortable with the situation. Then among the confusion of dancing bodies, I catch the sight of Tricky slinking off stage only to re-emerge at the bar beside the dance floor. The grin on his face as he sips casually from a freshly acquired drink and watches his handy work is priceless. The band power on making their leader proud, until finally security herd everyone back into the arena. I could probably rail against Tricky and say he's a lazy performer, or go on about how much happier he seemed watching fans dancing with his band than actually singing, but the truth is he worked harder than any band I can recall to make sure everyone who came to see him had the fucking time of their lives.

lEIGh5

All pics by myself & Fruitbat

Adam Franklin (Swervedriver) interview: 2011

2011-02-15T02:14:00.004+11:00

BACK BEHIND THE WHEEL

Oxford's Swervedriver are best remembered for thrilling and enchanting fans into the heavier end of the shoegaze/fuzz-guitar scene spiraling out from Creation Records stable around the birth of the '90s. But from their debut album Raise, up til their final effort 99th Dream, the band experienced the greatest extremes from critical adoration to being left high and dry following the first true wave of mass-label disintegration. Swervedriver's story could've just been another one of those was-never-meant-to-be sidenotes, but in their absence, a notable crop of late arrivals were all but bursting to name-drop them in interviews to grab a little extra cred. So for Swervedriver's actual story, it's over to singer/guitarist Adam Franklin; A generous interviewee, who ahead of his band's long-awaited reunion tour, reminds me that Australia was in fact intricately connected to Swervedriver's initial demise.

"It's true, the last time Swervedriver played together (before reforming) was in Australia was 1998." Adam recalls. It was on an extended break between gigs that Adam and the rest of the and decided to finish the Australian shows and call it a day rather than simply ''fade out of existence''. "Well, there was also a lot of shit going on in the band leading up to that, so the time just felt right to say goodbye." Adam continues, "Doing this interview now, actually reminds me of the first time we played there," he says, brightening up, "I remember we'd landed in Perth and were all completely jet-lagged, so when we got to the venue we just passed out back-stage. Anyway the tour manager was at us to wake up because we were literally due on stage in, like two minutes." He says, "Next thing we knew were walking on stage rubbing the sleep out of our eyes and ''bang'' the crowd gave this huge roar and we were just lifted.... it's still the best kind of alarm call I can think of." But not all of Adam's tour experiences are told with such relish I soon discover. After Swervedriver decided to bow out in '98, solo touring kept Franklin away from home (and his old band) for much of the next few years - but not exactly for the love of it.

"My take on touring is now much the same as it was then; there's a lot of drudgery about it." He moans, I mean we played loads over in the States in '90s and as great as that all was there were just endless road trips… I know I sound like I'm complaining, and yeah I am, but anybody who tells you touring isn't drudgery is lying." Unlike many of the floppy-fringed Creation acts who enjoyed great success in Britain, Swervedriver found a receptive audience in the US. Put it down to their songs apparent themes of gas-guzzling cars or masculine perspectives on love if you like, but whatever they were selling, America identified with. It's reported that Creation founder, Alan McGee signed Swervedriver after hooning around LA listening to their demo on his car stereo - perhaps the ideal environment, as he saw it, for the then fledgling band. McGee typically got it right with Swervedriver, but despite their initial US interest, timing it soon proved was against the band. Dropped by Geffen before the ink had dried on their contract due to management changes, Swervedriver's taste of victory over their Oxford peers was all too brief. But the second blow to the band's plan came not from overseas, but Creation itself when the label was in its death throes.

"The lack of label support did probably have a huge impact on us looking back." Adam comments, "I think when we first got dropped by Creation, we were still on a roll as I saw it. We had just put out our third album (Ejector Seat Reservation), but Creation had just bought in all these new music biz guys in an attempt to capitalise on Oasis' success who weren't really in the spirit of Creation. I remember one of these executive blokes asking me at the time; 'oh, what are you gonna do now - is Swervedriver breaking up?' and I must've just glared at him and I said, 'no we're not breaking up - the band can survive without fucking Creation!'" Adam exclaims, annoyed in his memory of the exchange. "I think in a way that made me feel stronger for a period, but then Geffen signed us (in America) and they wanted to put out our third album, but we were already recording our fourth." He continues, "The person who'd signed us got that sack and we were dropped right in the middle of making our album, so it didn't look good for us. To be fair though, there were also bombs going off with the four of us at the time, so the end seemed inevitable." Following several reunion shows in 2008, Swervedriver have rebuilt their friendships and, in Adam's words, still play like they've 'never lost that feeling'.

"Playing together again now hasn't hardly changed since then. I mean the amount of time Swervedriver was asleep for has been a bit longer, but like that concert in Perth, we just plugged in and played like no time had passed at all." In fact its 20 years since the band first peaked on albums like Raise and Mezcal Head - albums that according to Adam, he can't listen to anymore. "The way people know the songs, the versions we ended up recording in the studio all those years ago obviously sound quite different to how we play them live now and because of this everyone in the band can't listen to the old recordings because of how flawed they seem to us now, but that's the beauty of taking the songs out on the road." Adam smiles, "That's where the songs really exist for me, in their live form…. not on a bunch of old tapes." The band's four albums in 2008 were given the full remastered/reissued treatment, but Adam's detachment from the recorded versions of his songs kept him from overseeing the project.

"No, the last time I went through the recordings was in 2005 for a compilation album Sanctuary records put out." He confirms, "They contacted me and said they wanted us involved in putting it together and it was really good to be there for the remastering and we got to choose the order of the tracks." Adam smiles, "That was the first time we had all listened to those songs in a studio since they were originally recorded." He adds, speaking for his band mates. "I think because so much time had passed, we can listen to the songs now with enough detachment that it's like hearing them being played by another band. We could have ironed out the wrinkles here and there and cut out some excess fat, but at the time when you're right in the middle of recording music, you're taking just a snap-shot of one of many ways a song could be played. I know now that it takes a long time to hear our music the way other people do." In at least one case however, Adam claims embarrassingly, he was caught out 'hearing' his own song as someone who'd never even heard of Swervedriver.

"I remember being in a bar in New York with friends a couple of years ago and all of a sudden someone looked at me and was like, 'Oh hey…!', This music had come on and my friend was gesticulating towards the jukebox, and I asked him what it was… he said 'It's you, you fool.'" Adam laughs, "It was the most bizarre thing. Although, in my defence it was some recording from 1993 which I hadn't heard in ages, so it sounded totally foreign to me." The band's return to the stage in many ways has been one of the least surprising reunions from that epoch of British groups. Poor management cost them dearly, and those who invested in the band, felt Swervedriver had ended long before they'd run out of steam. Adam responds.

"Well probably, but I think we were kind of bored with it somehow. It didn't seem like that much fun, you know. I agree that we hadn't run out of steam though, and I continued working on music immediately after Swervedriver, but there was a general feeling that the band had run its course for sure. That's not to say, I'm not proud of what we achieved and it seems so many bands have sprung up since who've cited Swervedriver as an influence, but then that's a relatively new thing. Nobody was saying that in '98 when we split up; that's only hstarted happening in the last few years."

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Dave McCormack (Custard/The Polaroids) interview: 2011

2011-02-15T00:38:00.011+11:00

SERVED CHILLED

For the sixth Between The Bays festival, Custard and Polaroids front-man Dave McCormack has grabbed the headline slot for the popular event. The dapper Queenslander - who for some reason reminds me of the illicit offspring of a Dave Graney/Olivia Newton-John affair – wants to know ahead of our talk, "Do you think a lot of the folks from Frankston go down to Between The Bays?" He doesn't pause for an answer, "God I haven't been to Frankston in so many years. But The Fauves come from down there you know, so it must be a fertile landscape for music."

McCormack's particular way of phrasing his words often leaves the witness wondering if he's serious or not. At any moment you expect him to rail against some point of frustration, "I still watch Channel V and Music Max. They're… um, great." but instead any gripes are only hinted at – and always served up with humour. "I think I'm a pretty easy interviewee these days." But Dave's calm exterior hides a true fascination with disarray. His old band Custard's shows often fell into a kind of chaos, befitting a much heavier band, while Polaroids concerts are centered around Dave as the slightly-creepy Master of Ceremonies. But before we discuss his calamitous Custard days, Dave deadpans on what he's been up to recently.

"Let's go back to a year or so ago…" He beckons, "I put out an album called Little Murders, and then did a tour in early 2010 with The Polaroids and then I did the music for an ABC program called Rake." Dave recalls, "I did some kooky sort of soundtrack music for that – all done live which was lovely – and finally Custard got back together to play Meredith in September." To the thrill of Custard's devoted fans, the band Dave retired from duty 10 years ago in favour of The Polaroids, have made a casual return to performing - and casual is the operative word – I discover as Dave reminisces about Custard's whirlwind preparation for Meredith in 2010.

"The thing about the Custard show was we had one 45 minute rehearsal before Meredith a couple of weeks ahead of the gig. Then we went down to Melbourne and played, and just went home. Easy." He grins, "In the early days I was a big one for rehearsals, but in the last couple of years I've become much more interested in people (in the band) vaguely knowing the songs and just sort of winging it. That always feels much more exciting for me." Seeing as Dave's in a playful mood today, I remind him of a rough, seemingly unrehearsed Custard concert I saw in Hobart during 1998.

"It wasn't the show where me and Matt (Strong – guitarist) had a punch-up on stage was it?" Sadly it wasn't, I tell him. "That was an exciting show - so shambolic. We only played two songs and then Matt and I got into a fight and everybody stormed off. I wish more of our shows had've been like that." Staged punch-ups don't appeal to McCormack though, "No because then it just becomes the Brian Jonestown Massacre or one of those bands." He laughs. It's a good thing that McCormack isn't precious about his often unstudied messy live appearances since one fan in particular has launched a warts-and-all Custard YouTube channel. One of its features is an endless amount of live TV footage, particularly from Recovery, acting as a reminder of just how prolific Custard became after their winning Music Is Crap declaration.

"It felt like we were on Recovery every couple of weeks back in the '90s." Dave exhales, "I think it was just because we were always around. I worked out recently that Custard – at the height of it all - were on tour for 200 days of the year on average. We were very much a touring band, and when we weren't touring we were in the studio, so it's no wonder we were around a lot back then. Nowadays I just like to pick and choose my gigs." Regular SBS viewers/Dave spotters would recall McCormack's brilliant gig guest-hosting RockWiz a year-or-so back while Julia Zumero was on break. But, I wonder, how does one prepare for the roll of quiz-master?

"I wasn't terribly concerned about preparing…. Once I discovered it's actually highly scripted." He laughs, "They had the autocue and probably half was pre-worded, but you know, it was still live TV and plenty happens on the fly." Dave claims he (possibly) has the TV presenter bug in his system. "I'd like to do a current affairs type of show or host a talk show maybe. A little half-hour interview spot late night on SBS would be cool." He adds, "As I mature I could see myself heading that way." Since 2011 will mark two years since The Polaroids last release, I wonder will McCormack be hitting the studio this year and how does the man plan to follow up the five-star rated record - according to Rolling Stone magazine - that was, Little Murders.

"I'm not feeling the pressure, but yeah, I got a get a new album out this year and pick up my game. Get my run rate up." He adds, "But that five-star rating - I think they only gave that to me as a long-service reward. It's like one of those academy awards they give people when they're really old… They think oh well he might not be around much longer, we better give him something." He muses, "But now they're gonna have to invent a new six star rating system for when my new album comes out." Like a lot of '90s Aussie groups who gave it a shot, Custard failed to win overseas popularity at the time. There was however no uncertainty about the love for these Brisbanites in Australia, even to this day. Without hesitation, Dave says on the subject of a permanent revival, "Look, anything is possible. After the last gig we had no future plans but now we're doing the flood relief concert up in Brisbane on the 6th (Feb.). We did a gig in 2009, Meredith in 2010 and now we've got another gig in 2011, so if it feels right we may as well just do it I say."

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One dedicated fan has set up an all things Dave and Custard youtube channel - take a look-sie:

"copsrtops" Custard youtube channel

Mayer Hawthorne interview: 2011

2011-02-15T00:15:00.002+11:00

THE FUNK SOUL BROTHER

Mayer Hawthorne's a realist when it comes to his place in the great musical scheme. He wears his influences on his well-tailored sleeve - see pretty much any of the '60s Motown greats - and thus makes traditional soul music. Pure and simple…? Well no, Mayer Hawthorne is merely the invention of Detroit native Andrew Cohen, who in reality is a hip-hop DJ, multi-instrumentalist and former-headbanger. The work he's produced under the Mayer Hawthorne banner is a funk-lightly album of dissin'-that-ex-girlfriend tunes, called A Strange Arrangement. Cohen's alter-ego, even though he's coy to admit it, is next the progression of the Gnarls Barkley/Mark fucking Ronson-popularised retro soul movement.

Now based in LA, Cohen's life took a dramatic turn once the DJ decided to cut a soul record in vein of his much loved Detroit-based forefathers. He was soon signed to Stones Throw records on the strength of debut single, Just Ain't Gonna Work Out, and the reluctant - "I only really wanted to be a DJ" – singer's fate was sealed. As his second Australian visit approaches, I begin our talk by asking Cohen what it meant for him to grow up in the city of soul. "You kinda take it for granted that it's not like everywhere else, you know." He shrugs, "When I was growing up and getting introduced to music, I didn't realise Detroit was actually the best place in the world for music." He laughs, "But I consider myself unbelievably fortunate to have had that right on my doorstep." While a singing career is the newest aspect to his life, 31 year-old Cohen has actually been performing for crowds since his early teens as a DJ. He talks me through his favourite phases in music and being "underrated" as a disc jockey.

"I listen to a lot of hip-hop stuff now, but going back a few years I was a bit of a metal head. I was into Nirvana, Iron Maiden, Smashing Pumpkins and Helmet, which might surprise a few people who only know my Mayer Hawthorne stuff." He giggles. Cohen still plays the decks to this day, but he claims, he's underappreciated in that field. "Nobody who comes to see a Mayer Hawthorne show even knows I've been a DJ my whole life and that that's what my first love is." He rails, "I'm primarily known as a singer now but it still feels weird to me to be thought of in that way. I always wanted to be known as a DJ." Cohen as a singer has been likened to some of the great female soul vocalists due to his extremely high falsetto. Andrew's singing style, he hints, could possibly be traced back to childhood visits to the barber's shop.

"When I was a kid and my parents would take me to get my haircut, I would always have a tempter tantrum and start screaming at the top of my lungs because I hated it so much." He grins, "So they would buy me a record to keep me occupied and to take my mind off this trauma." He adds laughing, "It really was my parents that got me into singing and collecting records, and also that's how I got my DJ name – DJ Haircut!" Cohen built up his collection over the course of many haircuts and gained a deep respect for music and his parents' tastes, "I owe them a lot in terms of educating me about music." Although a typical DJ Haircut set is less about reflecting less of his own tastes, he claims.

"When I DJ I freestyle it, I never put a set together, I just go wherever the mood is taking me." He adds, "But I always throw some Motown in there. I gotta have that in my set every time." Cohen's alter-ego Mayer Hawthorne (named after two streets in the neighbourhood in which he grew up) looks set to break him internationally as a soul vocalist. When asked if his beloved hip-hop and DJing will continue along-side Mayer Hawthorne, Cohen sounds unsure. "Yes… Maybe…. I mean I still listen to hip-hop and pay attention to that scene, but the way I make music as Mayer Hawthorne is quite a bit different to the stuff I grew up with or DJ with. I gotta look after my own style now, but you know it's really not that separate." He adds, "I started making soul records because I wanted stuff to sample when I play my hip-hop records. It was just simpler doin' it that way rather than digging through all those old records to find just a couple of good samples I could use."

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Mani (Primal Scream) interview: 2011

2011-01-19T04:26:00.020+11:00

COCKED AND RE-LOADED

Whether it's a public image he's created or just a day in the life, Gary 'Mani' Mounfield – Primal Scream's riotous bass player – still exhibits a burning-the-candle-at-both-ends young man's energy and wit. But the man at the centre of two of the UK's most influential bands of the last 20-odd years has earned the right to play whatever hand he damn well wants. It was after all Mani's smacked-out bass gave The Stone Roses their signature sound and has since 1996, rumbled through all of Primal Scream's records. But it was while he and his Stone Roses buddies were enjoying what looked like start of a long, exciting career that a little Scottish band, who so far had little to crow about besides two lack lustre '60s influenced rock albums, dropped the biggest acid-rock record of the times. The fast-changing underground club music scene in Britain finally got the benchmark album in Screamadelica it had needed to set the bar high. Primal Scream had arrived and The Stone Roses suddenly seemed to get very wobbly indeed.

20 years on and Mani - who could in another reality have been discussing a Stone Roses 'Don't Look Back' tour - is instead shooting the shit on his adopted band's re-visit to a defining moment in music. While singer Bobby Gillespie has continued to guide his band away from the warped psyche-rock of Screamadelica – Mani, who missed the wild, hedonistic 'Scream of the early '90s, defies his leader's wish to 'chill-out' with age. "I've been bugging the band to get stuck into the back catalogue for years and Bob (Gillespie) was dead-set against it." He begins proudly. In his time as a member of Primal Scream, Mounfield hasn't felt first hand the level of hype that was created by Screamadelica. He's unabashedly in agreement with the media and the public that the album was their peak and in turn had the objectivity to convince the rest of the band to bring it back to the stage.

"Well I think I'm more enthusiastic about it than Bobby or any of the other guys who played on the original album." He says, grinning, "I'm playing like a fucking juvenile you know, and seeing the sheer beauty in it. I mean I've been part of Primal Scream for the last 13 fucking year's man, playing songs off this album but the difference now is we've put a lot of effort into keeping to its original sound by stripping everything back and building it back up again for the shows. We've kept a lot of (producer) Andrew Weatherall's original stuff – and it's been a grind – but I tell you what, it was such a pay-off to see 11,000 people the other week going mad for it at the Olympia in London." He continues, "To me, the songs on that album deserved to be brought to people who maybe weren't old enough to hear them the first time around or weren't even born yet. Playing to the festival crowds, like we have been recently, you're not always playing to the converted you know like in the club shows, so I hope we can turn those people onto something they maybe wouldn't have ordinarily liked or heard before. That's the power of music, man."

Gillespie & Mani

The frank-talking bassist was enjoying Stone Roses first year of success when Screamadelica hit like the freak storm nobody could've predicted considering Primal Scream's patchy past and slow-to-capitalise follow-up. Of the two bands to emerge triumphant years later, most people's hard-earned would surely have backed the 'Roses to carry on. History had other plans for Mani though, and while he saw his old band through to their end in 1996, he'd made a new home in Primal Scream before the amps had even been unplugged for the last time at camp Stone Rose. "I think I've learned a lot more from playing in this band than I would have if the 'Roses had kept going." Mani claims, "I broadened me horizons when I joined this band, no question. I was always a big fan of Primal Scream because they were so similar to us (Stone Roses), if not musically, then personally. We had a lot of the same values and similar backgrounds and so we were all firm friends early on." He remembers, "We used to always be slobbering over each other in clubs, ecstasy'd out of our fuckin' minds out in Glasgow or Manchester and so there was no doubt when the 'Roses split up where I was headed."

Mani (middle back) with Stone Roses

Just as the hazy groove-rock of the Stone Roses wiped out the competition in 1989, the following year-and-a-half belonged to Screamadelica. A young Mani was paying close attention and, he claims he saw a connection between what his old band had done previously to what Primal achieved in 1991. "I kind of looked at it as the natural progression from us having, say break-beats on Fools Gold, and also the progression of a bunch of like-minded guys wanting to do something new." He confirms, "You have to remember, guitar bands weren't being played in the clubs and acid house was taking over and there's nothing wrong with a bit of cross-pollination in music if you can make it work. Primal Scream were ballsy bastards to try it, and only a very few bands have managed to really pull off a thing like that." One of keys to Screamadelica's sound was the work of not one, but five producers. Apart from Andrew Weatherall's overall weaving of samples, loops and thick beats, it was DJ Dr Alex Patterson (a.k.a The Orb)'s co-production on Screamadelica that had dance fiends grabbing for the twelve-inches'.

"It was all just a time of pure fucking genius on many levels, you know." Mani says, "The world's greatest DJs came from that scene and Alex (The Orb) did, in my mind, the fucking best mixes of those songs on Screamadelica." The Orb remixes of Higher Than The Sun and Slip Inside This House have arguably become the essential versions over the album mixes. Those all-class singles extended the album's shelf life for two years as Loaded, Movin' On Up and Come Together continued their assault on the UK top 40 between February 1990 and February '92. Each one demonstrated a different side to the band while remaining identifiable as Primal Scream. The Glasgow lads had somehow tapped into the mystic cosmic funk and nothing they turned their hand to seemed to fail. How else could they have passed as a soul, psychedelic pop, acid house and blues rock band all in one release?

"Too many bands out there now are scared to deviate from whatever their last album sounded like and Primal Scream was never interested in doing that, you know." Mani offers, "I mean if you want to do that you might as well get a job in a fucking hat shop. Music should be a fucking tight-rope walk done by outsiders, ne'er do-wells, junkies and vagabonds mate." Mani encapsulates the 'Scream in this one sentence but his bravado, he reckons, isn't reinforced by any universal love for the band. "Back home we kind of get ignored in a lot of respects. I mean, I don't give a fuck what they say about us in the UK – I still think we're one of the best fucking bands still doin' it, but we don't get a lot of support." He adds, "But you know what, Primal Scream isn't our job, man it's what we do twenty-four-seven and we know how to kick it from arsehole to balls and I don't see any other rock n' roll bands playing with the kind of feeling we give it."

While Stone Roses' front man Ian Brown spent most of the '90s in and out of trouble/prison, Mani fought, mouthed-off and shocked for all he was worth, but somehow got away with it. That is at least until last year when supergroup Freebass, on the verge of releasing their debut album, ended suddenly with a very public serve of humiliation from Mani to Peter Hook – the group's founder and ex-New Order bassist. Freebass, which also included ex-Smiths bassist Andy Rourke, was in Mani's words, "Something to keep me match fit while the 'Scream were doin' nothing." He confesses, "I might have tainted a good friendship there, I'm such a gobshite sometimes, but we put a lot of effort into making that album and I should have been there to promote it instead of slagging Hooky off." Mani accused Hook (via Twitter) of getting fat off Ian Curtis's blood money for touring Joy Division with none of original members. "God bless him though, and look, I apologised to Peter and we're friends still, but in the end everybody bailed out of fucking Freebass." Mani laughs, "What can I say, I'm from Manchester mate and we're a bunch of gobby bastards so whatever I said at the time that was just me being me. That's what comes from spending time with the likes of Ian Brown and Liam Gallagher in the pub!"

Mani's salutes 'The Man'.

The big gob, the much bigger than required bass amp and the cheeky stoned grin all suggest Mani has his priorities in order and Stone Roses reunions or failed supergroups aren't among them. Right now his sights are set on winning over his Australian fans again following 2009's sensory-annihilating shows. "I'm countin' the days off on my wall chart until I can get on that plane and come over to Melbourne mate." Mani barks, "Love the fuckin' place, love the people and can't wait to come and play for you all again." He adds in a festive tone, "Melbourne for me is like Australia's Manchester, man. It's got that pure love for music and I never have to worry about having a shit time when I'm there." When the Screamadelica Don't Look Back shows wrap up, it is already widely rumoured that the band are heading straight back into the studio to record album number 10. Mani's sure of only one thing though, the new stuff will be 'unlike anything they've done before.' "Well we could end up doing a fucking skiffle album, you just never know." He laughs, "That's something we haven't tried yet and we've been around for about 8,000 years now so maybe it's time." Mani says, cracking up. "We're gonna turn into travelling freak show freaks like the bearded lady or the fucking human dick, you know what I mean?" He splutters, "There's a kind of voyeuristic way in which people see Primal Scream, I think. They're just staring going 'what the fuck is that all about?' So we can't disappoint 'em can we?"

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