Les Claypool (Primus) interview (2009)

FRIEND OF THE FREAKS

My first experience of Les Claypool was at the very least timely, or rather not a moment too soon. Hungry for anything weird, comical, noisy and not guitar grunge – A man in a huge pig costume playing the cello while a parade of circus freaks go by was enough to seal the deal for me. That was Claypool’s band Primus and their Mr Krinkle video, coming across as the living incarnation of a Gary Larson comic strip where the animals always took the lead and told stories through an often hilarious, skewed view of the world. The man behind the pig is after a ten year absence finally on route to Australia with his new band of beasts, collection of masks and further tales of Larson-esque oddballs. Talking to Claypool pre-tour, I find out first hand - as would be expected - nothing with the bassist is exactly as it seems. In keeping with the man/animal kinship throughout his work, I begin by asking what significance Les places on animals in their relation to humans.

"Not any necessarily, at least not consciously.” Les begins slowly and thoughtfully, “I think I'm just drawn the imagery really.” The sleeve of his new album Of Fungi & Foe features four sepia portraits of Claypool and his band mates caught between animal and human transformation. Les is half donkey. “Well that’s because I’m a bit of an ass.” He laughs nasally, “Travis Louis is the artist and he did some really interesting oil paintings of us with animal parts, so once again it’s not a conscious animal thing, he did that without input from me.” He adds, “I just liked what he did with our ugly mugs!”

Fans of Primus reciting a list of favourite songs could find themselves conducting a role-call of unlikely names; Mr Krinkle, Tommy The Cat, Wynona (and her beaver)… But do any of these vivid folks exist outside Les’s imagination, I wonder. "It depends on the song, but they're very rarely about anybody I know unless it's like composites of partially fictitious and partially real people. I usually embellish a lot when I'm writing, but there are usually elements of reality as well." The populating of his songs with bigger than life characters continues on Of Fungi & Foe. Only on a Les Claypool album would you find yourself in the company of Ol’ Rosco (“He likes a drink… when he drives”), or Errol (who can’t be told anything, “coz Errol knows everything”). Les explains; “It's always better to go with what you know, especially for me as I get older. As a kid I was exposed to a lot of old-skool country music and old musicals, so I've always been drawn to songs that tell some sort of tale and make me want to listen a little harder, you know.” Despite the unmistakable sound of Claypool’s vocal twang and the identifying freakshow personnel in his songs, the man himself is much happier taking the backseat to his creations. “For me as a performer, because I've never really considered myself a singer - I'm a bass player who kind of narrates the songs. It was always easier for me to go out on stage with these characters instead of just trying to sing like a typical lead singer in a rock band or anything. That's why I like to use the masks I wear, like the pig mask, because I'm fairly introverted so having these characters is a more comfortable way for me to tell my stories. Crazy things tend to happen when I put on the masks." He says giving a long, hearty laugh.

The music on Les’s latest release, Of Fungi & Foe was originally written for two separate projects - Mushroom Men, a Nintendo Wii computer game - and for a film called Pig Hunt – before he decided the songs could form an album all of their own. “I tend to just compile albums these days from whatever’s laying around in the home studio.” He says casually, “I’ve never really been one to sit down and write a whole album.” Ah, but has Les found himself parked in front of the computer game he’s scored?, “No I'm not a big gamer or anything but my son has been playing it, so I've had a look, you know. I just like the artwork, but I can’t actually play it very well.” He confesses. “With Pig Hunt, I decided to do the score for that because, well, how could I not want to be involved with a film about a 3000 pound wild boar that terrorises the pot fields of Northern California. You don't get those kinds of opportunities very often in life." He cackles, "I wasn't involved in the score at the start, I actually got to play a small role in the movie which was shot up near my house.” He continues, “My offices are in the old Industrial Light and Magic space so there's a lot of film sets that are still being used and one day I saw them building this huge prosthetic boar and I went up to the guys there they told me what was going on and I was really impressed with the idea so I said tell your producer if he wants a guy to deliver a pizza or anything in the film, I'm in!” The film, which is yet to get distribution, sees Les in a dramatic role for his on-screen debut; "I ended up playing an inbred redneck preacher whose hell bent on vengeance." He laughs. "I don't like working away from my home very much so the fact that film was being shot in my area was great for me. I do all my work at home, it's where I'm happiest."

The area where Les lives also happens to be the pinot noir mecca of Northern California, so it was no great stretch to branch out into the wine making field. His signature drop is the ‘strong and fruity’ Purple Pachyderm. "All my friends in the area are wine makers so it was just one of those things I decided to try to keep me off the streets. Since my marijuana usage has waned I've had to try and find something else to alter my perspective." He crows. "Also it's a great way to indulge in some good wine without having to pay a lot of money for it." Les confides his significant pot smoking habit began having some negative effects; "The worst thing was it started affecting my memory", he continues with a sharp cough, "I felt like it was starting to fragment my hard drive. People were saying to me 'oh hey remember that time we were in Italy and this thing happened...' and I was just like 'no I don't remember that at all', so that was getting worse and I've got some fairly interesting stories to tell and I would like to be able to remember them.”

The most high profile work in Les’s career is by far the South Park & Robot Chicken theme songs. The common thread in both of those cartoons is of course influences drawn from their creators' childhood fascinations being totally fucked about with. I wonder if  Les felt a connection with the twisted ideas behind those shows, and if he sees his own childhood as an inescapable reference in his own work? "If I sat and thought about it I could probably find a lot of stuff that came directly from childhood experiences but after being on the planet for a few decades, even my 20's seem like a long time ago. There were a lot of interesting things happen to me living in Berkley and running around San Francisco like a lunatic in my 20's that I draw from continuously and now that I'm into my 40's I've got a lot of fodder." He laughs. "My road manager recently came up to my house and hung out with me and a bunch of my friends and he was like 'oh my god, who are these people', because he saw us as being such a diverse group of unlikely companions, but I've always been attracted to people who are a little off centre. I guess we're just birds of a feather and the birds I happen to squawk with also happen to be a little obscure".

The upcoming tour has a lot of Les’s fans in a flutter about what exactly he is going to pull out this time around; a suitably impressionistic answer ensues…"Well people always want to know this because I'm always doing something different but I can only answer you by saying, it'll be something like you've never heard or seen before. The instrumentation is so unique and the players such mutants.” He cracks up again, “I've got Mike Dillon who's this insane vibraphonist and junkyard percussionist, Paulo Baldi on this bastardised drum kit that I make him play and Sam Bass who plays a sort of mutated cello and finally myself slapping away on my four string piece of furniture. It's all very unpredictable and quite, quite bizarre.” He says in closing. Now there's a reliable guarantee if ever there was one.

lEIGh5

Check out Les's official site here for everything Claypool... 
http://www.lesclaypool.com

Chester Bennington (Linkin Park/Dead By Sunrise) interview (unpublished)

A FIRE WITHIN 

 

'Nu Metal' linchpins Linkin Park could've easily outstayed their welcome in terms of fickle music tastes. Yet the Californian rock/rap group somehow by-passed their peers and remained a force stronger than a rapidly weakening trend. Their last album, 2007's Minutes To Midnight was their most successful by far, yet an immediate follow-up was marred by singer Chester Bennington's declining health due to addiction and personal problems. A stop-gap between Linkin Park albums was an important choice for Bennington who, close to a mental melt-down called for a halt to his band's activities to give himself time to heal. It was in this time he began work on his most personal set of songs yet. The resulting album, Out Of Ashes released under the name Dead By Sunrise, is the final piece in Bennington's recovery. The album's personal subject matter, however didn't necessarily mean all was clear and direct when it came to seeing the project through; “I never know what a record's gonna sound like when it's done.” He begins, “Sometimes I fantasise about how I want a record to be and I'll hear an amazing album by another band and think wouldn't it be great to just make a really kick ass heavy album where every song is a teeth gnasher, and then I go to write something and it turns into a ballad. You know what I mean? ” He laughs. Listening to Chester describe the creative process, it's clear he doesn't think of it as a task. “I don't tell the music what to do the music tells me what to do.” He explains, “I tune into the cosmic fuckin' radio - the one all musicians listen to - and start pulling shit out of the air. It's definitely fun not knowing what your ideas are going to turn into, that's for sure.”

With Dead By Sunrise, Chester worked to his aforementioned style, but the difference was he needed to have enough material to convince his soon-to-be new band mates to step away from their own projects and help him see his vision through. “I just wrote a whole bunch of stuff before I really knew what I was going to do with it.” Bennington says of Dead By Sunrise's conception. “All I knew was I didn't think it was Linkin Park material; it was a lot more personal than anything we'd done before.” Joining him in the studio when it came time to record were Ryan Shuck and Amir Davidson (both formerly of '90s electro-goth band Orgy), who are now recording as Julien-K. Chester discusses their natural progress from old friends to new band members; “I've been very good friends with those guys for a little over ten years, and so obviously if your friends with people who are also 'architects' it's only a matter of time before you just go, maybe we should try and build something together.” He reflects.

“The idea that we would make an album together was more a fantasy than a reality for a long time, because those guys had Orgy and Julien-K and I was doing Linkin Park, so it was never very clear when or even if we could do something. This year though the time was right - those guys had an opening, and the new Linkin Park album is a little way off still, so it all just fell into place”. Chester knew when he was writing the songs that became Out Of Ashes, it would never be a Linkin Park album. “I think these songs were outside the spectrum of Linkin Park lyrically and stylistically.” He discloses, “There's a more random element in these songs in that they're kind of all over the place… They are much less easily defined as Linkin Park is.” He continues. “If you listen to Condemned, Crawl Back In, In The Darkness and My Suffering you'll hear they're all pretty diverse.” If Linkin Park was a touch too impersonal for Chester, then Dead By Sunrise has allowed him to share his inner most thoughts. Is there a line though which he won't cross regarding subject matter? “I don't know if there's stuff I wouldn't talk about, (in the songs) but I think there's some stuff that just doesn't 'sing well' you know. My music is a gate to humanity and an expression of life, so in those terms I don't think about what I can or cannot sing about, but in terms of what fits in our songs lyrically I have to be aware of what works.” He explains thoughtfully; “You know, I've never gone oh I'm sad today I think I'm gonna write a song about it. I kind of just wait for a melody or a lyric to come to me… Like a spider in a web patiently waiting for the fly to land.” He laughs “I've spent so much of my life involved in music, it just happens naturally now. Most of the time, the ideas aren't necessarily worth chasing too much and putting into songs, but then once in a while one comes along that's really interesting to me and I grab hold of it.”

A stand-out track on Out Of Ashes, Let Down comes close to Stone Temple Pilots musical territory, I'm curious if Chester feels a kinship with (STP singer) Scott Weiland as somebody who has also publicly battled addictions? “Well number one, I'm a huge Stone Temple Pilots fan - I think our voices are complimentary to each other, and secondly, I feel more that if there's any kind of kinship it's that I really appreciate what he does vocally and musically, but that is where it ends, because I have to separate myself personally from what I love in his music as much as possible so as not to unconsciously mimic his style.” Bennington, much like Weiland has been close to breaking point at the hands of his drug and alcohol addiction. Chester was reputed to be house-bound, virtually broke and suffering panic attacks due to his destructive lifestyle. “Well yeah there was a period where I couldn't leave my house, but not because of agoraphobia or anything but because I was alcoholic and I tended to run into problems when I go out drinking.” He continues, “I was having shakes and really bad and panic attacks mainly from the withdrawal from alcohol which it made it very difficult to lead a normal life.” His ongoing recovery from this period largely informed the songs which became the Dead By Sunrise album; “You draw on things whether positive or negative, but I tend to run with a lot of the doom and gloom stuff.” He confesses, “Life is so diverse and tends to throws so many curve balls at you whether it's 'oh shit I just fell in love', or 'oh crap I just lost my sanity', and it's those extremes that make me want to write. For some reason a lot of artists feel as though there best stuff comes from their hardest times and there's truth to that because there's something intriguing about life's difficulties. There's a certain poetry about unhappiness just as there is about falling in love and I think people like to feel that they're connected to those things through music.” Chester explains further; “Look at the rise of punk music in the UK during the '70s and how it was all connected to the economic strains that people were under at the time. It was the bands that spoke out loudest and with the greatest accuracy of what the country was collectively feeling. It wasn't all depressing music, but it was angry and the message was clear.”

With much of the new album's content dealing with personal expression - does the singer feel like a more contented person? “Not contented in the 'I can take it easy now' sense, because the more I work, the more productive I feel like being. Now because I feel good about the album, I have a rejuvenated desire to go on to the next thing and keep pushing myself.” The 'next thing' to which Chester refers is a new Linkin Park set, due mid-next year. I ask how the new songs are shaping up; “It's hard to explain what they sound like, but from my point of view I really feel like we're making our best stuff. We went through a process of rediscovering who we were as a band after Minutes To Midnight, and I feel like we've tapped into that while making the new album. It's been really fun working again together after our break also.” The expectations for Linkin Park's next album will surely be pretty high considering who's producing the work - the slightly scary Rick Rubin. So what is the man really like to work with?; “It's Rick man, he's probably the most knowledgeable person I've ever met in terms of what he likes in music as well as what's already been done. If we try and just do stuff we've tried before, it ain't gonna wash with him. He'll tell us straight out he doesn't like it or that we're just repeating ourselves.” Chester mimics Rick Rubin; “Yeah guys that was great when you did it ten years ago, but let's not do that again, okay!” He laughs, “His honesty is really important to us because he knows our music. He says things like, oh that what have been a great track to put on Hybrid Theory (2000) but it's not gonna work now. We're ready to do something completely new.”

lEIGh5

Fever Ray album review (2009) (unpublished)

FEVER RAY

Sometimes, amazingly, hype is actually not misplaced. In the case of Sweden's The Knife it almost defies belief that their last album Silent Shout (2007), a dark and uneasy listening venture, in contrast with so much dumbed-down over-hyped music, had became so widely applauded. The brother-sister duo made no attempt to follow up the multi-Swedish Grammy winning album, but instead retreated from the spotlight in a desire for anonymity. Vocalist Karin Dreijer was about to expand her family, and so decided that The Knife, for the time being, should retire. Stepping away from her brother and creative partner Olof, Karin discovered a new freedom to work without the boundaries automatically imposed by a split input. Post-natal, she found herself working tirelessly on what would become Fever Ray, writing in an often exhausted state between nappy changes, bedtime stories and bottle feeding. This situation, unique to new mothers, resparked Dreijer's creative drive into overload. All through this mainly solo effort, we are witness to the most powerful extremes of a writer pushing themselves to be entirely selfless while still absorbed in, and open to, their subconsciousness.

The haunting If I Had A Heart begins with an ominous mechanical humming reminiscent of German industrial noise makers Einsturzende Neubauten. It's quite a misleading introduction, but does set up the theme of vocal manipulation integral to the many moods weaving throughout the ten tracks here. If I Had A Heart starts out sung slinky and soft, artificially transposed to just below a natural human voice pitch, then soaring in a yearning, child-like soprano, highlighting Karin's arresting accent. Occasionally there are multiple Karins singing the same lyric all in different pitches, then layered to give a contrasting warmth when the music reaches its sometimes icy depths. In places it is evocative of glaciers and frozen lakes, the severe north Scandinavian weather garnering more than one mention. There are many and varied topics at the heart of the songs, but Karin writes mainly in an interpretive, sketchy manner. Much of what is said is second to how it's delivered. On I'm Not Done for example, Karin's vocal is down unusually low in the mix. The effect is of a voice drowning in the music's stormy waves, yet still determined to be heard until the final breath. As one of the most impacting tracks here, its heavy tribal conga drumming and amplified echoing finger clicks draw in the listener, forcing them not to ignore that fading voice in amongst the din. On most of the rest of the album, there is little urgency in Karin's delivery. She likes to stretch all her notes and often lets the instrumentation take over for several bars, when suddenly her unaltered natural voice reappears in response to a dark menacing robotic one. This gives the effect of a parent reading a story book to a child and doing the different character's voices – the creepy voice for the villain and the sweet spoken voice of the heroine. Karin, as the mother of two young children, perhaps has subliminally taken her role as the storytelling villain/heroine into the studio.

The album's first single, When I Grow Up, is lyrically a playful look at an untainted child's view of life's endless possibilities, and yet avoids sounding remotely sugary or schmaltzy. From first listen, Triangle Walks’ gorgeous Eastern strings and enchanting whistled melody will attach to your brain and sit in your ear until you're humming it over and over. Seven thrives on a cyclic, sexy looped beat awash with an eerie wind sound effect and gloopy synth line. It’s a wonderfully uplifting moment and brings an expertly placed mood shift to the proceedings. On the pulsing Concrete Walls, Karin experiments to the extremes of the voice-tone enhancer, creating a gloomy unsettling atmosphere echoing The Dreaming era Kate Bush. The contrast of a gentler sound and crystal-clear singing on Keep The Streets Empty For Me is sublime. This desolate hymn finely embodies the sweet feeling of an exhausted, relaxed state. Dry & Dusty is melodically perfect. It exists in a world beyond clunky design, effortlessly speaking from the subconscious. The album closer, the epic Coconut, is the hot spring in a freezing lake evoking some of Joy Division’s most shimmeringly beautiful moments. Portishead came close to this sound on their last release (on which The Knife's influence can be heard all over) but Fever Ray have nailed it.

This album will be enough to send many a worthwhile electronic act back to their studios with hands-in-the-air frustration at their own shortcomings. Fever Ray is the sound of an artist with a finely tuned skill in drawing on previous experience, while remaining full of fresh discovery. Dreijer sounds so focused and precise in her ambition to present otherworldly music, imbibing her interest in film noir. This breathtaking work will not only satisfy fans of The Knife, but also show that Karin is a powerfully unique talent, perhaps even more so than The Knife’s combined strength.


I'm calling it album of 2009... What I love about Karin is she puts so much love and care into her music. She doesn't just serve up any old shit and hope it sells enough copies to pay for itself!


Fever Ray review links (official website)

Fever Ray article (unpublished)

From The Knife to Fever Ray - the story of 
Karin Dreijer-Andersson.

Electronic music received a soulful boost at the start of the naughties by quiet and consistent achievers, The Knife. Where as Daft Punk and their peers before presented music with the emphasis on the machine and the synthetic, Sweden's The Knife, had the far greater ambition of adding a brain, a voice and broad palate of subject matter. Everything from references to their Nordic heritage to bulimia is sung over tracks carved with laser precision. Their unblemished musical legacy is set to continue with a new solo project for vocalist Karin Dreijer called Fever Ray. In the meantime, let's take a look back at the origins of this unique and unconventional duo, a brother and sister who created their own little world with the soundtrack as the beating heart.

PRIMITIVE BEASTS
In the beginning, two monkeys isolated themselves in a tiny cabin in the Stockholm wilderness with the intention of creating music completely uninfluenced by the outside world. They surrounded themselves with instruments both organic and electronic. There they stayed, learning the instruments and perfecting a sound all of their own. The boy monkey was named Olof and the girl was Karin. They were siblings who thrived in their isolation, only ever speaking in telepathy about their music. The sound of which was becoming stronger and more powerful than any words could hope to be. The monkeys lost all concept of passing time. How long had they been in that cabin making music? Neither one showed signs of having aged. Then one day a stranger arrived at the cabin. The stranger, a rabbit, was drawn to the sounds coming from within. So disillusioned with the music of the world, he cried uncontrollable tears of joy upon hearing the two monkeys' work. The monkeys introduced themselves. 'We are The Knife, we have been waiting for you".

The story of The Knife is one shrouded in fairytale mystery. Rabbits with heightened music appreciation is just the start. The reality is you can probably google their back story and find where Karin and Olof Dreijer were musically trained, how they got signed etc... However, listening to their music is an invitation into a very vivid world created entirely as an alternate reality. In The Knife's dimension, one foot must always stay in grim reality, while the other may wander into deep waters occupied by half-human beasties. Juxtapositions are important to The Knife as they present clear relate-able situations in the songs, but told by an alien observer. As with fairytales, which often use very human situations as their base and build around that using strange creatures as the storytellers. When Alice followed the white rabbit down the hole, it was the beginning of the journey we all go on. The journey called growing up. Lewis Carroll's story would hardly have become a classic, had it been told as a straight forward adolescent angst tale which is where The Knife come in.

Karin and Olof cast themselves as Wizards behind the curtain, allowing the image of two grinning monkeys to tell their stories from a fantastic and escapist angle, freed from limited realistic impositions. It may also have been a cheeky statement on how every chimp with a keyboard now is making 'arty experimental' (i.e. boring as shit) records. The rabbit, in the story of The Knife represents us, the eager listener in theory going to despair over the radio's terrible music constantly pouring into our ears. The rabbit is overcome by hearing them, and any music lover can relate to that first discovery of a band so amazing that it makes any music heard before seem like bad noise. The Knife confess that like many of us do, that they enjoy tacky pop songs and big 80s ballads as a way to relax after intense studio sessions. They even released a grand homage to Berlin's anthemic Take My Breath Away, a song which Karin would blast repeatedly on her car stereo while driving around trying to cure a bout of writer's block. Effectively that song's edgy but sweet simplicity was the contrast needed to push Dreijer out of her mindset. As a songwriter, she understands that to access her muse she sometimes has to sort through its cluttered room, allowing herself to get distracted along the way.

So what is it about The Knife's own music that prompts them to seek escape through somewhat bland pop songs? There is often many fine layers of dark underplayed synth bleeps and squeaks, clean razor-sharp beats, strings, echo effects and possibly The Knife's defining sound - their love of the steel drum. A wonderful contrast is at work when you hear this most tropical of instruments coupled with Karin's frighteningly low pitched affected vocals, and Olof's bleak synthesised strings. What observations are these monkey's are making that leave them needing a little 『dirty pop' to cool down after? Their second album Deep Cuts (2004) includes Pass This On, which deals with the possible subject of teacher/student sexual relationships. This is a good example of the Dreijers' interest in some bizarre and confronting topics. They do not however, wallow in macabre stories but simply walk through their landscapes, uncriticizing. As further proof of their detached attitude to the dark subject matter in Pass This On, the video humorously captures Olof in full drag miming to his sisters vocal while Karin hides amongst a crowd of solemn observers, seething and giving him the evil eye. Those monkeys weren't about taking themselves seriously, but the evolution wheel turned and the previously detached primates were soon to find themselves no longer simple observers but participants in the human experience deeper than they could have imagined.

The Knife had officially embraced their new found popularity and revealed to their increasing audience, a new evolutionary phase - two black winged bird-like creatures, who instead of isolating themselves from the world, took to the sky with their further evolved sound pouring out of their bodies for all to hear. The reality of Karin and Olof's mother passing away during the making of their triumphant third album Silent Shout (2007), caused the duo to focus on previously untouched, personal subject matter. On the frantic and gripping We Share Our Mother's Health these wounded birds mourn of losing the link to their ancestors through a parental death. The exploration of more relatable themes continued on the title track Silent Shout which had Karin and Olof immersing themselves into the world of adolescent fears and self-doubt. The topic of sex, the song claims, suffers from purposefully negative miseducation in Stockholm schools, designed to deter youths from experimenting. Hence the issue becomes one of paranoia at a vital stage in maturing. The Knife fairytale was by now a rather serious and even grim one, and coming close to chapter's end. They had evolved super fast and perhaps their ambitious 'flying beasts' weren't as sustainable as the curious grinning monkeys had been? Reality once again intrudes in The Knife's story and we find out that they simply grew tired of working together... for now at least. They wrapped up the first decade as The Knife with a brief series of incredible live showcases (appearing in concert as their primate alter-egos) before stepping back from the accolades and expectations to vanish for a while.

FEVER ALL THROUGH THE NIGHT
Karin decided to take one year off after having a baby (her second) but instead found herself writing constantly. That creative outpouring was the birth of a project called Fever Ray. The new mother found herself working throughout the night, sleep loss fueling the dream like quality of the new work. Dreijer embraced half-consciousness, allowing it to lead her through the creative process. There was no longer a need for story weaving beyond the songs. The topics were not detached observations but enveloping, sparse daydreams. Working this way meant that Karin could be more evocative lyrically without spelling out every detail for the listener. We could interpret these pieces how we wanted based on an overall feeling. The presentation of The Knife as evolving, non-human entities was a way of delivering music not restricted by flesh and blood limitations. In Fever Ray, Karin has maintained that lack of restriction by playing the ghostly chameleon speaking in the language of dreams. This latest evolution as a spirit between worlds, only accessible during sleep has afforded Dreijer greater freedom than ever before to present herself as the humble conductor of music rather than the physical creator. Though inevitably, the predominant factor in her waking life, her two young children, does emerge in the music. In new track, If I Had A Heart, Karin tells of their behaviour and constant questioning, from a first person account; "My feet dangle from the window frame/will they ever reach the floor?" On The Knife track Marble House (2007), Karin reversed this plot and played the mother, scared of failing the fragile life in her care; "I cut your nails and comb your hair/I carry you down the stairs/on the inside of this marble house". The previous over-protector becomes the happy observer full of childish wonder. Whether the Fever Ray project is a one off or not, is unknown. Karin Dreijer has a restlessness fascination with pushing herself musically to extremes, and how that will manifest next is impossible to say. In the meantime, an album bursting with ideas and originality has emerged. In its creators own words, "When you work with music, you have the possibility to create magic.」 That possibility is realised on Fever Ray.

lEIGh5

Click here to check out Fever Ray's official site.

Chris Matthews (Headless Chickens) interview

SOMETHING TO CROW ABOUT

The land of the long white cloud has produced many a rare bird but few as unique as the Headless Chickens. Perhaps it was a combination of its relative isolation to the world at large and the fact that NZ boasts a self-sustained, rich music scene that helped create a band like them - we may never know. But whatever primal forces were at work, founding member Chris Matthews managed to guide his band to success without ever compromising creatively. Headless Chickens break-through album Body Blow (1991) has become legendary, producing hits as diverse as Gaskrankinstation and Cruise Control and still stands today as one of the most successful albums ever by a Kiwi band.

As the roadies at Melbourne's Hi-Fi Bar set the stage for Headless Chickens’ first Australian show since 1993, I corner Chris Matthews for a lively pre-gig chat. I begin by asking him if it was difficult getting most of the original band back together for this year's reunion. “Not really for them,” he laughs, “I live in a place called Dunedin and they are all in Auckland, so I had to leave my home and go to them!” The reunion, surprisingly was not Chris’s idea. “No, it started with our drummer Bevan whose girlfriend works for the promoters of Homebake (NZ). They asked if he would consider a one-off reunion show and he had been wanting us to get back together for a while and Homebake was a motive for me.... So I said yes because I was doing sweet FA after the break-up.”

The band’s last official release was 1998’s ‘Greedy’, a highly successful album in their homeland. So what lead to their seemingly untimely split in 2000? “There was just a definite time when I knew we were over. Fiona (McDonald), for one, had left. We had tried working with different people, I had some new songs, but it just wasn’t the same. They were good musicians and everything but we didn’t have the friendships and drive that I had been used to. Work was also very slow and so I just decided to break up the band.” In preparation for the reunion tour the band rehearsed for seven weeks – but was that enough time in retrospect? “Well, we just thought that’d do. Mostly the setlist has stayed the same on this tour as we just didn’t have time to rehearse everything we might have wanted to play.” (At that moment Chris shows me the set list and it’s a goldmine of the Chickens best loved tracks… but I’m still not satisfied.) Chris, where is your amazing cover of Abba’s Super Trooper? (recorded in 1996 for a Flying Nun bands Abba tribute CD.) Looking highly amused he says, “Oh we didn’t rehearse that because there were virtually no live instruments on our version. We wanted to do it really quickly so we just used samples. The guitar on that is actually from a Motorhead song!”

The thought of Abba meets Motorhead doesn’t sound so ridiculous in this era of the mash-up. It’s also a reminder of how innovative this band really was. Our talk turns to possible future releases and I want to know if there are plans for a much overdue Headless Chickens DVD. “A recent show in Auckland was filmed so we might be doing something with that, even if it’s only uploading it to YouTube." He says "You don’t need permission or record company clearance to share privately filmed live performances.” Chris still clearly sees his band as truly independent. “We have a lot of unreleased footage taken by friends of the band performing, some of which dates back to the early days and it’s those things that would really make a DVD release worth doing.” The Flying Nun label has a huge catalogue of superb bands, surely they’re eager to throw open the vaults now that many classic NZ bands are reforming to tour? “Warners bought out Flying Nun and therefore own our back catalogue and aren’t doing anything with it. That does mean that our early vinyl releases, especially Children’s Hour (Matthews’s pre-Headless Chickens band), are gaining value.” He tells me proudly that the first Headless Chickens EP can fetch up to $150 among traders. He should know - Chris is a serious collector of rare, out-of-print Flying Nun releases.

As long as the vaults stay closed the collector market can continue to flourish, a fact I’m sure Chris is content with. He shows great interest in the finer details of the CDs fans bring to him for autographs during our chat. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of his band’s catalogue. “That’s the later Australian edition of our album on Mushroom,” he tells a delighted fan holding a copy of Body Blow. “That was a good release. They added four new mixes that didn’t appear on the NZ version, but the cover art wasn’t as good.” It was a great nerd moment. I felt a thrill knowing some of my own Headless Chickens collection has become rare as hen’s teeth.

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