Arthur Russell - Wild Combination

[for MOJO]

Wild Combination: A Portrait Of Arthur Russell
****
PLEXIFILM

Warm and insightful documentary traces the beguiling apparition that was Arthur Russell

Due to the scant availability of interview footage with Wild Combination’s notoriously shy subject, Arthur Russell seems ghostlike even in this documentary dedicated to his short life and voluminous works; there, but not there. Director Matt Wolf nevertheless evokes the late composer/cellist assuredly: through the words of his family, friends and peers, still photographs and flickering passages of live performance, and, most of all, his music, Russell haunts every frame.
There was always something spectral, something haunting about Russell’s music, this quality uniting a body of work that embraced such divergent strands as Avant Garde composition, introspective and fragile folk song, and ecstatic, trance-like early Disco. Born and raised in the rural wilds of Iowa, Russell was a sweet-hearted, acne-scarred misfit curious about drugs and alternative lifestyles, and consumed by music. Aged sixteen he moved to San Francisco at the dawn of the Hippy Age, beginning a journey that would draw him to New York City, and the subterranean poetry and experimental music scenes. Of seeing Russell perform for the first time, sometimes collaborator Allen Ginsberg recalls here, in footage from Russell’s funeral, that he was “like William Carlos Williams, but he sings.”
Russell thrived in New York, spending his nights working as musical director of The Kitchen – the Greenwich Village artspace located within the Mercer Arts Center – or at David Mancuso’s hedonistic and joyous Loft parties, where Disco first stirred. This breadth of creative focus perhaps both explains Russell’s relative low profile during his lifetime, operating within the experimental fringes of underground art and music, and also why his music has developed such a swarming following in the years after his death. “How could one person work in all these different ways?” ponders musicologist David Toop, one of the movie’s talking heads. “Not many people allow themselves the full extent of their complexities.”
Wild Combination conjures up a man alive with brilliant ideas – friend and early collaborator Phillip Glass remembers Russell’s dreams of composing “Buddhist Bubblegum music” – but the narrative’s turn for the tragic, with Russell’s positive diagnosis for HIV, shifts the documentary into more emotional territory, which Wolf handles with tender skill. Tom Lee, Russell’s partner since 1980, paints the man behind the music as “the person I wanted to end every day with”.
Most haunting is the footage of Russell performing late in his life, already visibly ravaged by AIDS, but still able to pluck beauty from a cello, an echo pedal and his warmly unguarded voice. “His gifts were increasing, as his strength was leaving him,” notes one friend, but the movie also traces the rebirth his music has enjoyed of late, thanks to the efforts of Steve Knutson of Audika Records, releasing unheard Russell music and curating his legacy from Tom Lee’s vast collection of tapes.
The final moments of the movie find Lee discussing the comfort those cassettes give him today, smiling at the sound of Russell’s voice, a fitting close for this affecting exploration of ghostly magic.

(c) Stevie Chick 2009

Les Savy Fav

[for PLAN B]

Tim Harrington leans back on a metal folding chair, crazed gesticulations possessing his hands, midway through the latest in a series of unlikely tales. His eyes are wild, like his thick, curling-at-the-edges brown beard, or his bedhead-of-all-bedheads blonde hair. His monkish frame clad in pastel shades, he looks like a character from Caddyshack – Rodney Dangerfield’s gregarious and gently-unhinged boho art-punk side-kick perhaps – who ended up on the cutting room floor.
Right now, he’s talking about Locusts.
“Do you get locusts here? They appear, like, once every eight or thirteen years – you see ‘em, clinging to the trunks of trees – and they eat everything in sight.
“I’ve been a locust,” he grins.
You have?
“Yeah, for a Public Service Announcement, in the States. They made me this cool costume and everything, and filmed me hassling people, stealing food from ‘em, getting in their faces. Then the voice-over comes: ‘In America, locusts are annoying. In Africa, they’re KILLERS!’
“It was such a cool costume, I really looked like a locust! I wanted to keep it, but when I mentioned this to the production company, they started talking about me taking the costume in lieu of my fee. And I wanted to get paid.” He sighs. “It was fitted for me, and everything.”
Were I a lesser writer – and who knows, perhaps I am – I would now be drawing a painful parallel between the Locust, one of nature’s hardiest of tiny beasties, and Les Savy Fav, the group with whom Tim has howled, cantered and caterwauled for twelve or so years now. After all, the group have pursued a singular, solitary path through underground rock for that decade-and-change, evading trends and scenes while making a twisted, flailing, melodic and concise noise all their own. Always eager to ditch a bandwagon at the earliest occasion, they went on ‘hiatus’ earlier in the decade, just as the New York art-punk scene they’d helped pioneer started to explode.
“I guess it all started to feel like a career,” says Syd Butler, Les Savy Bassist and honcho of French Kiss Records, the label the group have released their music on since their second album, 1999’s The Cat And The Cobra. “And we never wanted it to feel like that. We wanted to make the music for its own sake.”
“We had other ambitions we wanted to fulfil,” adds Tim. “Syd wanted to concentrate on the label, I wanted to focus on design for a while… I basically didn’t want to end up a Successful 40 Year Old Rock Star and feel like I’d wasted my life, y’know?” he laughs. “Sitting there by my pool, thinking, ‘I wish I’d pursued my passion for design’. Seriously, I’ve always had nothing but respect for professional musicians, people who play music and make their living from it their whole lives. But we wanted to do other things, too.”
The hiatus was signalled by drummer Harrison Haynes’ move away from New York, but has – as the group’s excellent new album, Let’s Stay Friends, and their triumphant appearance at the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival attest – proved temporary, the lure of Les Savy Fav proving irresistible. As well it might; the stage is clearly somewhere Tim Harrington belongs.


I still remember the first time I saw Les Savy Fav, at 93 Feet East, February 13th 2001. The date sticks in my mind, because…
“It was Valentine’s Eve,” interrupts Tim. “Y’know, how All Hallows’ Day, Saint’s Day, is preceded by this messed up holiday, Hallowe’en? I thought Valentine’s Day could do with a similar event the night before, turning it all upside down. Valentine’s Eve.”
According with this new tradition Les Savy Fav wished to inaugurate, Tim garlanded the chill, cavernous 93 Feet East in hearts he’d fashioned from the pages of the hardest-core pornography. To accent the evening, if you will.
“I’m a renowned collector of vintage niche pornography,” interjects Tim. “In New York, I’m like the only guy who has a complete collection of original editions of Oui magazine, 1972-1981, in mint condition. And also Leg Work, which is a harder magazine to collect. There are all these extra editions, Leg Work Black, Leg Work Latina…”
While the three musicians in Les Savy Fav skulked purposefully in the shadows, stirring up a noise of slaloming, jagged, haywire riffs and neon blasts of perverse pop, Tim took to entertaining his audience. First, he was tearing porno-hearts from the walls, forcing his tongue through paper vaginas, just stone waggling it. Next, he was climbing the amps and gear and clumsily clambering onto a huge speaker suspended from the ceiling by girders and steel chains, swinging it violently as he sang, a good fifteen feet above the ground. Finally, he returned to the stage, dismantling the drum kit and walking off with a side-tom which he proceeded to beat, like some deranged leprechaun drum-major, leaping into the audience and completing a circuit of the auditorium. Such behaviour fair blew the mind of the audience that night. It was, however, just another abnormal night for Les Savy Fav.
“It’s like a kind of surrealism, being an adjunct of the music,” explains Tim, of his onstage performance. “The way the group plays, a lot of it is improvised – the songs have their sections, but they’ll extend them or shorten them, keep it fresh, different. And all the stuff I do, it’s all part of the same thing, so every show’s different, so we don’t ever fall into a rut, so it stays interesting, for us and for the audience. We want every show to be special.”
What’s the wildest it’s gotten?
“Oh, there are so many stories… There was this one time, some friends gave me this huge plush toy dog they found in a thrift store as a present. It was as long as I was tall, so I ended up cutting it open and pulling all the stuffing out. The next night, the band started playing, and I got inside the dog, like it were a costume, all ready to run onstage. But things started to go wrong – the guitars were out of tune, it wasn’t quite happening. And as I made for the stage, I realised I hadn’t cut any eyeholes in the dog costume, and ended up stumbling over. It wasn’t good. We kind of cooled off on costumes after that show.”


The members of Les Savy met just over a decade ago, while studying at Rhode Island School of Art, an institution heavy with punk rock kudos. “Talking Heads were from there,” nods Tim. “Lightning Bolt also. We played our first shows with those guys in the audience. I was born in New Jersey. I loved it there, but from the age of ten or eleven, I knew that I wanted to go to art college. It was just somewhere I had to go.”
This artistic bent continues through Les Savy Fav, not just from the disjointed twists and conceptual swipes of their records, but also in the design of their tee shirts, their album sleeves. Their debut LP, 1997’s 3/5, was an art object in of itself, the disk contained within the packaging of a shower cap. They want every show, every release, not just to be the latest in a stream of product, but special in of itself; this is why they could never see music as a ‘career’, why they’ve absented themselves from the indie-rock treadmill, in favour of doing their thing at a pace that suits them. The Game is not one they want to play.
“I worked at a major label for a year,” offers Syd. “It was sickening, guys in the A&R department receiving insane pay-packets and doing nothing. There’s a concept of ‘failing up’ in operation… As the owner of a small record label, I can say that the industry is fucked. Especially thanks to the internet, there’s a generation of kids who have no problem with stealing music, who think its okay…”
“We set up an ‘honesty jar’ on the merch table on our last tour,” smiles Tim. “’If you downloaded our album for free, please donate’. We got some money!”
It’s the small victories that keep you going, and Les Savy Fav keep going. Let’s Stay Friends opens with ‘Pots And Pans’, an anthemic ode to a group who “made a noise no-one could stand”, but who play anyway, because “this tour is a test”. It’s about standing up and making your own noise, your own art, to express “a human heart that’s nowhere near its end”. Tim blushes a little when I mention the lyric, asking if the words are autobiographical.
“I played the song to a friend who worked on the album, saying, the words are just kind of a joke, about this imaginary band. And he listened to it, and he said, ‘Uh, no they’re not’. And you know what?” he grins. “I guess they’re not.”
(c) Stevie Chick 2008

...

Metallica

My first cover piece for The Guardian, revisiting one of my favourite bands of my teenhood, and trying to figure out why they don't rock quite as hard as they used to, and explaining why I think that's a damn shame.

Koushik

One of my favourite new artists of recent years, maybe he could be one of yours too?

Scarce

You can't keep a good band down, and for years I've believed Scarce were one of the best. They've reformed, sounding as painfully and beautifully alive as ever, and you can read their tale here.

Fall Out Boy 2008

Another shot at understanding the Fall Out Boy phenomenon, this time with the 08 election and wild times in Barcelona as the backdrop.

When Rock Stars Attack

Alan from Low threw a guitar at our heads, and all I got was this lousy blog.

The Heads

For Plan B

The Heads
Dead In The Water (Rooster)
Despite possessing such a deep love for noise bestowed with heavily
psychotropic effects, I've always felt something of a fraud when
writing about psychedelic music, having never personally dropped
anything stronger than a couple of valerian to ease jetlag. And yet,
I've been familiar with the relationship between contraband chemicals,
mind expansion and screaming skronk rock since the first time my Dad
played me Led Zep's 'Whole Lotta Love' and relayed in an instructional
manner, over the freeform guitargasm middle section, reminiscences of
listening to it while sprawled on the floor, between two huge
speakers, while blitzed on some illicit chemical during the halcyon
Sixties. As I was but eight years old at the time, he added a hasty
"hey kid don't do drugs" by way of a coda, and that was that.
But while my third eye has remained un-squeegied in the interim, the
magickal sounds of feedback, drone and phaser asphasia have ever
jolted my grateful brane, from my earliest pre-teen experiments with
such lysergic compounds as Hendrix and The Byrds, through subsequent
addictions to the Buttholes, Sonic Youth and Comets On Fire. This
latest slab of joy from Bristolian noisenik perennials The Heads is
certainly one heavy hit of something, a disorientating and uncut blast
set to send synapses sprawling and throbbing, administering most
pleasant bruises to the aural tender spots while a wicked light show
plays on in the foreground.
Over seven or so albums thus far, these hardy druganauts have
performed a graceful devolution, from stellar riffouts sucked into Far
Out vortices and strewn with funhouse-mirror vocals, to releases such
as this, edited from endless rehearsal jams into a mind-pummeling
symphony in four movements. The titanic riffs that first won them love
from the global stoner rock constituencies are still present, but now
freed from earthbound song structure, materializing from pools of
fugged din to build and build until they collapse into the electric
murk, to be followed by similar such behemoths. Dead In The
Water brings to mind Comets On Fire's stated intention, of
capturing those peak moments of inspiration heavy rock titans pepper
across their works, and stretching those moments over entire songs,
albums, their discography in fact. Similarly, The Heads here trade
structure for a joyous indulgence of the wonders that screaming
oscillators, acid-scarred guitars, monolithic bass and
atom-splintering drums can evince, when pushed to the absolute fuckin'
max.
Fans of Comets and Acid Mothers Temple will grok this riot in the
blink of a dilated eye, but the strongest comparison for these
inspired trips are the Complete Sessions box sets for Miles Davis's
Jack Johnson and On The Corner LPs, in the way the tracks
brilliantly vault the trap of formlessness for, instead, a fearless
freeform-ness, these epic and frazzled narratives switching from peaks
of freaked drama to passages of pearlescent drone and full-spectrum
sonix. Stitched together by snatches of pointedly trippy dialogue,
Dead In The Water comes on like some psychedelic horror flick,
where you're never sure what mind-scrambling phantasm is about to tear
from the speakers. Riding wah-pedals into the sun, sending shards of
cymbal flying like shuriken, chasing some spiral riff charting a path
to sublime Nirvana, The Heads hold the listener entirely under their
control, so their screaming noise would leave even the Straightest
Edge entirely stoned. If this is a trip, then I'm loving it.
(c) 2008 Stevie Chick

Jesu / The Bug

Are you familiar with the music of Justin Broadrick, formerly of Napalm Death, Head Of David, Godflesh, Ice and Techno Animal, currently rocking as Jesu? Or the work of Kevin Martin, AKA GOD, Ice, Techno Animal and now The Bug? You should be. Here's a crash course, published in The Guardian.

VENOM!!!!

A brief history of the man who coined the phrase, 'Black Metal'. From The Guardian.

the very wonderful Howlin' Rain

for the Guardian

Death Cab For Cutie

For the Guardian

The Breeders

I love The Breeders so very much. Here's my recent Guardian feature on 'em...

C30, C60, C90... Gone?

For MOJO

Help! I'm a Box Set Junkie

For MOJO

Psychic Confusion: The Sonic Youth Story

it exists!, originally uploaded by Stevie Chick, Foxy Boxer.

Published March 3rd, and something of a labour of love...

The Monks

Dave Day, singer and banjo player with the remarkable Monks, just passed away. RIP. This was written for the London Lite when the group played the Dirty Water Club last year. What a night...

THE MONKS are like The Velvet Underground of the garage-rock scene – few bought their sole album, Black Monk Time, on its release in 1966, but the group have since become an influential rock’n’roll cult. American GIs stationed in Germany, the Monks infamously shaved their crowns and wore only black onstage, but it was the primal invention and off-kilter psychotic quality of their music, echoing the violence of Vietnam and the tumult of the 1960s, that ultimately won them subterranean fame.

Tonight, four decades after they split, they played their first-ever London date – one of only a handful of shows they’ve played since reuniting in 1999 (sans deceased drummer Roger Johnston and retired organist Larry Clark). Their pates naturally bald nowadays, The Monks still played with the gleeful derangement of yore, their sound a hybrid of frenzied skiffle and frenetic r’n’b that indulged heavily of rumbling drums, piercing feedback and Dave Day’s rattling electric banjo.

Their songs remained as gloriously, electrifyingly odd as before, from incessantly catchy rave-ups like ‘Oh, How To Do Now’ to an unhinged ‘Shut Up’, its call-and-response chorus chanted by an audience young enough to be the Monks’ children, who discovered the group via namechecks from fans like Jack White. Moved by the response, frontman Gary Burger promised a return to these shores next year. An official documentary, The Transatlantic Feedback, is set for release next year, but tonight proved The Monks are no mere museum pieces. No, they’re still crazy, after all these years, and long may they rage.

(c) 2007 Stevie Chick

Begging For Pussy with George Clinton

I interviewed George Clinton last year and he was AWESOME.

Maceo Parker

[for Plan B magazine; meeting Maceo was, as you might imagine, quite a trip, and he was one of the coolest interviewees I've ever had the pleasure of questioning. Long may he blow...]

He was, and perhaps still is, the hardest working saxophonist in showbusiness, blowing horn and evading fines with James Brown over several stretches through the 60s, 70s and 80s. Maceo Parker lent his furious bebop bleat to Brown’s 1973 studio masterpiece, The Payback, and played on his epochal 1968 single ‘Say It Loud (I’m Black And Proud)’. Say It Live And Loud, a highpoint amid Brown’s blizzard of live albums (taped the night after Brown recorded his black power anthem, but unreleased until 1998) is as blistering evidence as you could wish for of Parker’s crucial place within Brown’s onstage sound, while anyone au fait with 1980s Hip-Hop will be familiar with the sound of Maceo’s horn, turned inside-out thanks to nefarious manipulation by the Bomb Squad, squealing like the devil’s own siren throughout Public Enemy’s ‘Rebel Without A Pause’.

Stepping off the JBs train, he led his own group, before hooking up with George Clinton to usher in the high times of disco-era Parliament. In the 1990s, he graced De La Soul with his presence for their Buhloone Mindstate album, signed up with another mercurial funk genius blowing for Prince’s New Power Generation, and guested with Jane’s Addiction and the Chili Peppers. Today, he’s promoting his latest album Roots & Grooves, a double set featuring a brace of hard-funk licks sharp enough to belie his 64 years, and an album’s worth of Ray Charles covers backed by an 18-piece Big Band from Cologne, with Maceo’s croon velvety in the foreground. “I’ve always sung ‘unh’s and grunts, just like James Brown,” he grins, “But this is the first time I’ve sung like this.”

Covering Charles’ songs is for Maceo very much a tribute to his roots, growing up in Kinston, North Carolina. He shared with his two brothers an insatiable hunger for music; this was, however, the age before internet file-swapping, so they had to employ different means to feed their curiosity. “The radio would just play country and western music in the evenings,” he remembers, “So we’d go out into the neighbourhood and visit the older people, and ask if they had records, and if we could listen to them. I’m serious, man, we went around and we wanted to hear ev-ry-thing! Frank Sinatra… Johnny Mathis... Who’s that guy, [sings] ‘I left my heart, in San Francisco’…? Tony Bennett! These guys had such wide repertoires, you learned all the songs listening to them. And who sang a broader range of music than Ray Charles?”

His mother had, he says, “a great voice. She could have been a star, but she chose singing religious music over nightclubs. I was telling her on the telephone today, that she could’ve been Ella Fitzgerald if she’d wanted to be; she’s 80-something now, but she still has a great voice.” Both parents attempted to learn the piano but quickly dropped it; the instrument remained in the Parker house, however, and so-inclined visitors would often tinkle the ivories, with Maceo gazing on in rapt concentration. “I’d watch their fingers,” he says, “really watch them. I musta been six or seven years old, but I’d remember the fingering, where the chords were. And when the grown person would get up and start talking to ma, I’d go and start playing the song. I didn’t know how to play the piano, but I was playing the piano!”

Parker describes his time with James Brown as being “like a train ride. You get onboard, and once it’s taken you as far as you want to go, you get off.” Maceo had plenty of preparation for his first embarkation, having formed a group with his brothers Melvin and Kellis when he was eleven. “My uncle had a group, the Blue Notes, and we tried to play everything they played. We tried and tried and tried, and eventually we got to a point where we could play three or four of my uncle’s tunes, and people could recognise what they were! We called ourselves the Junior Blue Notes, and began playing around town, and people we’d never met before started saying, ‘Wow! You can really play!’ That’s when we knew something was happening.”

The Godfather of Soul caught one of the group’s performances some years later, and was particularly impressed with the drummer, Melvin, offering him a place in his group. A year later, Melvin was drumming for Brown, having also secured a slot for 21-year old Maceo, for whom the opportunity offered the chance to fulfil a long-held dream. “I’d always wondered, what would it be like to walk into a bar somewhere you’ve never been before, throw a quarter into a jukebox, and hear yourself play? I knew that, playing with James Brown, we’d get to record in a studio. By the time it finally happened, it wasn’t the thrill I thought it was gonna be,” he laughs, of his jukebox fantasy, “but I was a little more grown by then, and my dreams had evolved to playing stages all over the world.”

This was another dream playing with Brown would facilitate, but the Godfather was an exacting boss. “All the stories you’ve heard are true,” Maceo chuckles, “but it’s all to make you better, to make the group better. James preached discipline, decorum, taking pride in how you dress, trying not to perform in uniforms that look like you just slept in them, just being proud of who you are and holding your head up high. Again, you’re aboard the train, and it’s taking you where you need to go, you have to trust in the driver. That’s how I viewed working with James: anyway he wants to do a thing, that’s how I’ll do it.”

A year after joining Brown in 1964, Maceo was drafted into the military, returning afterwards for another three year stint, during which the Godfather was greatly accelerating the evolution of this thing we call funk. Shortly after recording a feverish homecoming date in Atlanta, GA in 1969 (which the Godfather intended to release as James Brown At Home With His Bad Self), however, Maceo exited Brown’s employ, accompanied by the rest of the group.

“We had grievances, it was time to tell the conductor to stop the train,” remembers Maceo. “The other guys got wind that I wanted to leave, and suggested we all approach James en masse, and threaten to quit. And James didn’t like that, it was too much power for him; later on, in his book, he said he fired me, but he didn’t. I’d not wanted the rest of the band to quit, though; I wanted to look James in the eye and let him know I had enough, uh, whatever, to quit on my own.”

Brown didn’t look far for replacements, hiring a couple of young kids, Bootsy and Catfish Collins, who were always hanging around his recording studio in Cincinnati as the backbone of his new backing group, The J.B.s. The transition was signalled with 1970’s Sex Machine album, where a J.B.s-era late night session, which yielded the hugely-successful titular track, was cobbled together with the 1969 Atlanta show as a live album, with canned studio noise covering the cracks. The J.B.s would not last long, however. “Bootsy and Catfish had joined, thinking they’d get to play with us,” laughs Maceo. “Then when they arrived, and discovered us gone, they started to wonder what had made us quit. And then they found out…”

Maceo, meanwhile, had gone on to form a new band with his old colleagues, Maceo And All The King’s Men, their moniker perhaps a jab at their erstwhile King Of Soul employer. “We had fun,” Maceo remembers. “Some nights we wouldn’t make more than $80 between all of us, but that was just enough gas money to get us to the next show. We were young, we had no responsibilities, what did it matter?”

Parker would return to the Godfather’s employ during the 1970s, leaving again to work with George Clinton, as Musical Director for Parliament. Though Clinton was Brown’s only true rival for the crown of God Of Funk, their approaches couldn’t have differed more. “Where James preached uniformity, punctuality and discipline, George didn’t have any of that,” he laughs. “And that was shocking, it really was. If some guy was into Tarzan, and wanted to dress onstage like Tarzan, or like a baseball referee, or a pilot, that was okay with George. I mean really, really okay. And if someone wanted to wear the same outfit for four years and not wash it, that was okay with George. I was used to tuxedos, bow ties, patent leather shoes… Uniforms. George said, life’s just a party, so you shouldn’t be uptight about how people dress.

“And that was his concept; they’re from outer space, and they’ve been assigned to come down from their galaxy to show the people of Earth what funky music is really about. We had a tune called ‘Atomic Dog’, and George would tell the audience, I gotta find me a dog! He’d walk around the stage, and pluck a girl from the audience, throw her down and walk her like a dog…”

Did you find this hard to adjust to?

“No. It took a minute to adjust... There were some real funky players in that group, like Eddie Hazel. He was funky, and funky is funky. [mimics funk guitar] And you appreciate it when you hear it.”

In the years that followed, Maceo returned to the Godfather’s bosom a couple more times, fielded offers for high-profile collaborations, pursued several solo projects, and has been blowing horn for Prince since 1999’s Rave Un2 The Joy Fantastic. And he finally got his chance to play with the Collins brothers, as a member of Bootsy’s Rubber Band, throughout the 70s and 80s.

“Bootsy had a little of James’s uniformity, but also a little bit of the George Clinton thing too,” says Maceo. “We didn’t get as raunchy or vulgar as George, but he’d hint on a little something every now and again. And, like George, he loved flashy clothes, in particular anything that was red and white. Nobody else can play like those two, I’m sorry. [mimics interplay of the Collins brothers] It’s nice.”

At the end of the interview, Maceo asks if he can borrow my notepad and pen and, on the next available blank sheet, scribbles a word in a neat scrawl near the centre of the page. He then pushes the notepad back across the table.

“I just want you to know, everything I do… Everything…” He draws his hands up to his chest, which rises slowly as he takes a deep breath, filling lungs that have blown like the proverbial hurricane through the histories of funk, soul and pop – a gesture which unconsciously reminds just how grand an ‘everything’ that really is. “…is because of this.”

The word is “love”.

(c) Stevie Chick, 2007

Brian Wilson

[news piece / review from MOJO]

September 12^th saw Brian Wilson return to the freshly-refurbished Royal Festival Hall – where he had previously debuted Smile and Pet Sounds – for the world premiere of his newest work, a song-cycle written with Wondermint Scott Bennett and long-time collaborator Van Dyke Parks. Entitled That Lucky Old Sun (A Narrative), conceived while Wilson was “in the middle of a real creative trip”, it is a musical tribute to Southern California, a location enshrined in so many Beach Boys songs.

In typically excitable, enthusiastic mood, dressed in a black and white striped top and accompanied by his ten-piece band and the Stockholm Strings And Horns, Wilson treated his audience to a joyous opening set of Beach Boys favourites from ‘Surfer Girl’ to ‘Heroes And Villains’, slipping in a snippet of ‘That Lucky Old Sun’ as a tease; that the audience were clapping along by the fifth bar was an encouraging sign.

Following a twenty minute interval, Wilson and his musicians returned to perform the nine songs of That Lucky Old Sun, with periodic interjections from Van Dyke Parks’ dippy, loving, poetic narration, accompanied by projected animations. Brian’s most ambitious new work since returning from the wilderness, the song cycle recalls Pet Sounds and Smile, not least in its playfully baroque arrangements – a playground riot of glockenspiel, tympani, strings and harmonies all played with a smile – and melodic nods to the Beach Boy canon, complementing the autobiographical bent of the lyric-book.

That Lucky Old Sun revisits familiar Wilson themes, albeit from a newly nostalgic (and sadly wise) perspective; ‘Forever You’ll Be My Surfer Girl’ gazes back on first love forty years after the fact, grateful for the memories – and melodies – she yielded. ‘Midnight’s Another Day’, referencing Wilson’s darker days, opened with footage of the Wilson brothers in their heyday projected on the backdrop (to wild applause), giving way to a cold white moon. “Lost my way, the sun grew dim,” Wilson sang, accompanied only by his own piano; as he charted his quest to find again the warmth of the sun, the white disk behind him slowly changed to a golden glow.

‘Southern California’ closed the cycle on a triumphant, redemptive note, recalling his dream of “singing with my brothers in harmony / supporting each other”, and declaring “I’m glad it happened to me / Nodded off in the band room, woke up in history”. An extended standing ovation greeted the song’s final notes, preceding a giddy medley of Beach Boys hits, and an aching cover of ‘She’s Leaving Home’ dedicated to Paul McCartney; a similarly rapturous reception is expected when the studio version of That Lucky Old Sun surfaces next Spring.

(c) 2007 Stevie Chick

juggle tings proper

Big Dada Records is ten years old! Buy their new Well Deep compilation album and DVD! Then buy everything else they ever released! But first read this.

Because I Love It

Oh, hello. You can find my Guardian feature on the wonderful Amerie here

Fall Out Boy

[for Arena... Las Vegas, well, I hated it. The Fall Out boys, however, were lovely. Big shout to Louise Mayne who had to put up with my interminable gloom throughout this trip (seriously, June sucked...)]

“EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”

The high-pitched banshee wail is ear-piercing and nigh unbearable. We’re at Nellis Air Force Base in Clark County Nevada, North East of Las Vegas, where the majority of the US Air Force log their hours of fighter pilot training, a location that has weathered the arcing screams and sonic booms of modern jet airplanes since opening in 1941.

But this isn’t the airstrip, rather an on-base department store for local military personnel and their families. And that incessant shriek isn’t the sound of burning jet fuel and whirring turbines, but hundreds of young kids, mostly girls, assembled for a meet’n’greet signing session with their idols, Chicagoan pop-punks Fall Out Boy, playing the Palms hotel in Las Vegas later that evening. As the group sit behind a long table piled high with promotional posters, idly toying with sharpie pens, armed Military Police dressed in camo-garb manage the crowd, barking at them to stand behind the grey plastic shopping trolleys banded together like some crude velvet rope. Beatlemania was never like this.

Or perhaps it was. The group’s tour manager Charlie, a towering, shaven-headed dude who looks like a squaddie himself, yells at the slowly-moving line that “Only one item per person will be signed”; the (mostly) girls file past, bringing with them CD sleeves and promo photos and even a couple of guitars to be signed by the group. More precious even than the autographs, however, is the fleeting personal contact with their heroes, and bassist and chief heart-throb Pete Wentz in particular.

“He told me that he liked my hair and my face!” screams one hyperventilating nine year old to her mother, signed poster clutched to heaving chest. “Oh! My! God! Pete said ‘What’s up?’ to me!!” yells another pre-teen hysteric, like the greeting could cure cooties. Only a dead-hearted cynic could remain unmoved by such unabashed devotion, however unsettling it might initially seem.

“They’re reacting in the way they’ve been programmed to,” Wentz explains later, indulgently and a little bashfully, of such Beatlemanic scenes. “They only know you through MTV and the photo in the CD booklet, so when they actually meet you it blows their mind. I ‘get’ it, because that enthusiasm is what allows you to keep making music.” Still, the meet-and-greets take their toll; Wentz’s right hand, currently decorated with a deep red scar as a result of an onstage mishap, has suffered enough from crushing fan handshakes that he now offers his left out of habit.

The 200^th fan having collected her poster, the signing session is ended with appropriately military precision, Charlie shepherding his boys towards the exit, the MPs dispersing the crowd. As the Fall Out boys scurry past the blouses, skirts and bras of the ladieswear section, fans disobey the soldiers’ commands and run after them, one desperate mother materialising from behind a rail of petticoats to snap Pete on her camera-phone. “Smiiiile for my daughter!” she howls, as Charlie runs interference and the group disappear through the doorway, to a USAF van waiting with its engine running outside. Welcome to a ‘typical’ day in the life of Fall Out Boy.

“When things like that become totally ordinary in your life, it changes who you are as a person,” muses Wentz moments later, as the group speed along to the Palms Hotel, and the next of their promotional commitments. He’s typing endlessly on his Sidekick; tonight’s support act +44 (fronted by Mark Hoppus, formerly of multi-platinum pop-punks Blink 182) have had to pull out, and Wentz is trying to organise last-minute substitutes in the form of Panic! At The Disco, a Las Vegas group whose career trajectory fair resembles Fall Out Boy’s, perhaps explaining their close friendship.

Sat behind him, Patrick Stump, Fall Out Boy’s singer/guitarist, pores over a package handed to him earlier by a fan, a folder containing a gift for each member of the band. “Look, she did a painting each for all the other guys,” Stump frowns, indicating three surreal watercolours enclosed, “and they’re real good. And I got a sheet containing parody lyrics for one of our songs.”

Patrick lifts up his ever-present baseball cap and ruffles the mop of butterscotch hair hidden beneath. While he sings all the group’s songs, and indeed writes all the music, it’s Wentz, the bassist and lyricist of the group, who’s considered the ‘frontman’. Where Wentz is kohl-eyed and olive-skinned, with an easy and infectious grin that doubtless glows in the dreams of his many fans, Stump is, by his own self-deprecating admission, not exactly a heart-throb. “I’m a totally normal guy,” he smiles. “I’m what we call ‘TV Ugly’, where I’m handsome enough to be cast as the ugly friend. I’m ‘TV Fat’, a ‘thin’ guy compared to most of the population, but, well, you know...”

Stump doesn’t envy the attention Wentz ‘enjoys’ from the media, focussed as it is on his puppy-dog looks, his relationship with pop singer Ashlee Simpson, and the more turbulent corners of his private life. “It’s strange, the person they sometimes make Pete out to be,” puzzles Stump. “I know him as good as anyone’s gonna know him; the guy I’ve read about is a dick, but he has nothing to do with Pete Wentz.”

Certainly, Wentz has endured a rocky ride through stardom, ever since the group’s major label debut, 2005’s From Under The Cork Tree, made them an ‘overnight success’ on their third album. The group formed in Wilmette, Illinois in 2001, when 22 year old Wentz and 17 year old guitarist Joe Trohman, veterans of hardcore group Arma Angelus, approached high schooler Stump, who soon assumed vocal and guitar duties. Taking the name Fall Out Boy in loving reference to the sidekick of Simpsons-Universe superhero Radioactive Man, the group went through a number of line-up changes and released a mini-LP before hooking up with drummer Andy Hurley and cutting their debut full-length, Take This To Your Grave in 2003, for legendary punk imprint Fuelled By Ramen (Wentz runs his own label, Decaydence, under their aegis).

Signed to Island records for From Under The Cork Tree, the album’s lead-off single ‘Sugar We’re Goin’ Down’ – a confection of anthemic punk-rock riffage, sugary harmonies and the kind of perfect-pop hook that imbeds itself in your brain without mercy – was soon an MTV smash, ensuring the album sold 68,000 copies in its first week (eventually going double-platinum) and delivering the group to the ever-rabid audience of hit show Total Request Live, typically stomping grounds for unabashed pop acts like Britney and Justin. It was a weird environment for a punk-rock band from Chicago to find themselves in.

“I don’t think any of us anticipated any of this when we formed,” deadpans Stump, of the promotional activities their fast-won celebrity demands. “I was brought up on punk rock. I’d go to shows, and when a band starts playing people rock out, and when the band stops they go and have conversations, and the band walks offstage unhassled. You love the bands, but you could give two shits about the guys who play in them. And so, the first time someone said ‘hey, will you sign this album?’, I said ‘but I’ll get marker pen on it and ruin it!’”

It was Wentz who was to feel the public gaze most keenly, especially when naked photos of the bassist, shot on his Sidekick and sent to a possible romantic conquest, leaked onto the internet in March 2006. “I’ve been so candid in the past, and its burned me,” Wentz blushes. “I used to speak without a filter, but I ended up in hot water.”

This troublesome honesty wasn’t just limited to Wentz’s sex-life; he was also candidly open about struggles with his emotional health and his experiences with anti-depressants, a rollercoaster that ran at perilous speed throughout the making of From Under The Cork Tree.

“I can barely remember those years,” he grimaces, settling himself on the sofa of his tourbus, rough-housing with touring companion, gorgeous one year old bulldog Hemingway. “I was taking prescription medication; I was definitely a Drugstore Cowboy, mixing this with this, seeing what the combinations did. I couldn’t picture myself in two years. People would ask, what are you going to do on the next record? And I’d say dude, I can’t even see myself being alive.”

It’s a common story for kids of Wentz’s generation, prescribed anti-depressants at an early age, upon which they soon become reliant; Gerard Way, frontman of My Chemical Romance, has been similarly open about his struggles with depression and prescription drugs. “It’s an over-medicated generation,” Wentz offers. “Rather than having conversations with each other, we go and see what pill we can take to make it all go away.”

A near-fatal overdose on sedative Ativan early in 2005 inspired From Under The Cork Tree’s key song, ‘7 Minutes In Heaven (Atavan Halen)’, though Wentz says today, “I’ve never described anything that happened to me as a ‘suicide attempt’. But I thank God for my bandmates every day, for their tolerance. I was completely self-aware of the situation I was in, but I didn’t care enough to do anything. The guy who doesn’t know what he was doing, you can’t blame him, he doesn’t know. But the guy who knows it, and is just sitting there putting himself through it, you’d hate that guy. And that’s who I felt I was. In America depression is treated in such a bizarre way, shuffled off and put in a closet. It seems like it’s something you’re supposed to be ashamed of, but sometimes you’re supposed to feel crappy. You figure your way out of it, and you figure yourself out, and that’s how it’s supposed to go.”

Wentz’s emotional turbulence provides much meat for his songwriting, penning lyrics that balance a scarringly confessional bent with a penchant for wordplay; sample song titles include ‘Don’t You Know Who I Think I Am’, ‘Champagne For My Real Friends, Real Pain For My Sham Friends’, and ‘I’ve Got All This Ringing In My Ears But None On My Fingers’. Like all the best pop, Fall Out Boy play adolescent conflicts out as high drama, Wentz’s lyrics allied to riffs and melodies surging with an emotive dynamism, penned and sung by Stump. “It’s like he’s writing confession, and I’m singing it,” laughs Patrick. “I’m like a priest to him that way. He gets to say it through me, and I get to absolve him.”

The lyrics speak to a generation similarly anxious and disturbed, finding succour in songs awash with anguish; but Pete says he doesn’t have answers. “People come up to me and say, ‘Your band saved my life’… I still haven’t figured out how to react to that. Because, yeah, this band saved my life too. Honestly, I feel like one of the last people who should be giving advice to anyone about anything. I’m not the Doctor Phil of punk music.”

Patrick Stump reckons he was about eight or nine years old when music began to take over his life. “My parents had divorced, and I was helping my dad move his stuff out,” Stump remembers. “I was confronted by this vast record collection. I was a little guy, I couldn’t manage a whole box of vinyl, so carried them record by record, asking my dad about all these albums as I went along.” Stump’s father was a singer/guitarist in a local group through the 1960s and 70s, with a record collection swollen with rock, blues and jazz. “He had Herbie Hancock records, and Eddie Harris records, and he really loved Van Morrison. It was the blues and jazz stuff that really got me into music. Then I became a Prince nerd, and really got into David Bowie. Now, I’d say hip-hop is probably the music we as a band all love the most. I know that’s a strange thing for a dude in a rock group to say.”

Sat on the corner of the double bed that swamps his room at the back of the other Fall Out Boy tourbus – an array of baseball caps hanging on pegs from the wall, his dapper onstage trilby perched upon a hat stand by the bedside – Stump explains that the group’s latest album, this year’s Infinity On High, was written “with a chip on my shoulder. People told us that we were making music for fourteen year olds, and I took it as a compliment; when you’re fourteen, you’re not tainted yet. I’ve been one of those totally arrogant, idiot rock snobs in my time, but if you’re an artist it makes for bad art.

“I woke up one morning in a sea of John Cage and Terry Reilly, thinking, ‘Michael Jackson is really entertaining, he makes fine music!’” Stump laughs. “That was a defining moment for me – ever since then, any time that little bastard in the back of my mind starts turning up his nose, I’m, like, ‘Shut up!’. That definitely affected the record. One of my favourite songs is ‘Do You Know Who I Think I Am?’, just because there’s something in the chord progression that reminds me of the 80s pop music I grew up listening to as a kid… Like, I always loved that ‘Who’s Johnny?’ song from the soundtrack to the movie Short Circuit…”

For the album, these fledgling pop celebrities collaborated with both Jay Z and R&B legend Babyface. “It was great working with Babyface,” smiles Stump. “He almost doesn’t have to do anything to make you play better, you just walk into his studio, and the weight of all the classic music he’s recorded makes you raise your game somehow.” The album’s lead-off single, ‘This Ain’t A Scene, It’s An Arms Race’, charted at #2 in the UK, a near-perfect synthesis of R’n’B squelch and punk-rock furore indicative of the ambitious, unabashedly pop-friendly embrace of Infinity On High.

A knock at Stump’s door signals the next in the day’s packed series of events, playing blackjack in the casino of the Palms hotel with contest winners from a local radio competition. With fans milling about the hotel hoping for a glimpse of their heroes, Charlie and his security detail ferry the group into the casino like a crack commando unit. But as the group take their places at the card tables and meet the competition winners, few in the casino seem to care, too enthralled by the endlessly blinking and chirping slot machines swallowing their cash at fearsome pace. Welcome to Vegas, baby. The gambling session is followed by another meet’n’greet in a ballroom on the other side of the hotel, the security guards marching the band over so they can have their photos taken with fan-club members who bring ‘FOB’-decorated cup-cakes and plush animal toys for their heroes.

Minutes later, the group are onstage, dashing through their anthems of adolescent heartache with joyous energy, Wentz and Trohman leaping off an onstage ramp and throwing rock shapes as the audience responds with that same Beatlemanic roar from earlier. An impressive cover of Michael Jackson’s ‘Beat It’ is momentarily curtailed while Wentz cools off a fight brewing in the crowd. Panic At The Disco’s two frontmen take the stage for a surprise acoustic set before Fall Out Boy’s encore, which closes with an explosion of pyrotechnics and glitter, and more of those teenage screams. (Wentz points out earlier that the Vegas show is at a much smaller venue than the rest of the tour, precluding such onstage FX as the props which malfunctioned earlier in the tour, leaving Patrick Stump trapped inside, much like Spinal Tap bassist Derek Smalls.)

Moments after he’s run offstage, Wentz takes time out from an impromptu aftershow party brewing backstage with his friends from the other groups touring with Fall Out Boy during the summer, returning to his bus to talk some more, about a future he once couldn’t see, and his rejection of depression and self-medication as a way of life.

“This had become a business of misery by accident,” he smiles. “The whole idea of the new album was to have a smile on your face, that you shouldn’t feel guilty about being happy. I love the adventure of being in Fall Out Boy. Sometimes I think about homeless guys, and about how I could easily find myself in the gutter someday – that’s just the kind of personality I have – but it would still be an adventure. I’ll be talking to Hobo Jim on the boxcar, saying ‘Yeah, I was in Fall Out Boy, I hung out with Jay Z!’ And he’ll be like, ‘yeah right, the guy in rags hung with Jay Z, sure man’.”

For all his fantasies of unexpected hobo-dom, Wentz is unlikely to find himself homeless in the near future, and seems to have made some kind of peace with these newfound responsibilities of fame. “I’ve got a weird brain chemistry, he admits. “Honestly, I used to wake up and wanna blow my head off. I don’t feel like that anymore. For so long, my life was like the crocodile with the clock in his stomach chasing Captain Hook; the clock always ticking and the jaws always snapping. There was a good six months where I was just toxic, over-medicated. I’m relying on that less, relying on my friends more. I think last year was the most dangerous year for Fall Out Boy, and the most dangerous year for myself, because its so easy to believe the people whispering in your ear, to get caught up in it all. I thank God I got through it, and came out of the other side.

“I picture myself having a family now,” he smiles. “Before, my dreams were about being in the biggest band in the world, playing shows all over the globe to thousands of people. Now, my dreams are of back yards and hanging out. It’s a good progression for me, trying to figure out what’s normal…”

Hemingway, gnawing at a juicy marrowbone on the floor, jumps up into his master’s lap at a click of Wentz’s fingers, Pete tugging lovingly at his ears, so the dog playfully bares his fangs. “Anyway, I’ve got Hemingway now,” he laughs. “I can’t just sleep in past noon anymore, otherwise he won’t get fed.”

(c) 2007 Stevie Chick

my... disk... drive... is... dead...

too much time behind the monitor today, originally uploaded by Stevie Chick, Foxy Boxer.

Am deep into a weekend of writing and transcribing, and going slightly mental. Earlier I fashioned a relief sculpture of E.T. the Extra Terrestrial from an old clump of Pritt Tak attached to my speaker. Now, I am several hours into transcribing an interview tape, and have hit a gloopy stew of self-congratulatory wank from my subject. "We cannot fail, because we're so talented, so passionate, so focused, so committed..." He goes on and on, as does my typing, small bones dislodging specks of cartilage and playing croquet with them through the fleshy tunnels of my fingers. CLACK/THWACK/CLACK/THWACK. "We're so good, so fucking GOOD," he continues, and I'm thinking about arthiritis and how, when I can no longer type, because my hands are but twisted claws, it'll have been the fault of said rock star and his endless blether of banal self-love.

The Drips

[featuring The Bronx's Matt and Joby, and the sons of Los Lobos guitarist David Hidalgo, The Drips delivered one of the all-time great punk rock debuts with their eponymous 2006 LP. I play the shit out of it every chance I get, if you ever loved the Descendents or Husker Du you must get this album! for plan b]

The Barfly is the biggest cheese of all Camden’s venues, most nights playing host to industry liggers and kids dressed like indie-rockstars. Tonight, however, the front row is peopled by stripy-shirted screamo waifs, a be-‘Fro’d Japanese dude and, most notably, a contingent of gnarly skinheads resplendent with faded blue tattoos and flaky black leathers.

“You know what, man?” grins Matt Caughtran, The Drips’ sweet, dough-faced frontman, “That was the raddest thing ever. I love those dudes – because I’ve always been one of those crazy dudes. To have guys like that show up really means something – when dudes who listen to GBH 24 hours a day are coming to your shows… It’s not like The Drips are a hardcore band, anyways…”

Perhaps not when placed next to GBH, but The Drips’ breakneck punk-rock plugs deep into the more melodic vein of SST Hardcore (Husker Du, Descendents), their flab-free pop – played out on swaggering metallic guitars, nailed down by machine gun snares and illuminated by Caughtran’s kerosene-doused bellow – very much a sunshine-flip to Caughtran and guitarist Joby J Ford’s day-job in steroidal thrash-punks The Bronx.

“It’s sort of a ‘circle of friends’ thing,” smiles Matt, unthreading the groups’ tangled family trees. “Vince and Dave (bassist and drummer, sons of Los Lobos guitarist David Hidalgo) were childhood friends with Joby, and he played in their group. I joined, and we became the Drips. Then Joby and I started writing songs that didn’t really fit with the Drips, and that’s how The Bronx started.”

The Drips hit the back-burner while The Bronx rode the success of their self-titled 2003 debut, a brutish rush of shrapnel guitars and deadly dynamics you really should own. When the pressure of recording the follow-up, their first for a major label, began to tell last year, Matt and Joby were glad to blow off steam with The Drips.

“The new Bronx record wasn’t a bad experience by any means,” explains Matt, “But I tell you, we busted our ASSES on it. Everything took so long, it was all done really methodically. At times, we were like, ‘FUCK! I need to be doing something else…’”

Which is where The Drips came in. Re-ignited, they added Distiller Tony Bradley on second guitar, dusted off the songs they’d written six years before (and wrote a couple of new ones) and got into the studio. The result - a blistering eleven-song amphetamine-ripped dash - is gloriously kinetic noise candy, tunes painted in frazzling neon guitars as Matt howls along as if ‘Oi!’ were the sweetest sound he ever heard. “The Bronx are full-on headbang music,” muses Matt, “Where The Drips are more of a side-to-side bob.”

Examples of The Drips’ unabashed pop sensibility include interpolating a slice of Men Without Hats’ 80s New Wave hit ‘The Safety Song’ into careering closer ‘Coastline’, drubbing Matt’s vocals with dubby echo on the lightning-strike ‘Downbrown’, so his voice scars audible traces into the galloping melee, and ’16, 16, Six’, the group’s ballad. Unfolding to a sugary skank The Police would’ve approved of, it’s a Teen Love story that’s honestly awkward, clumsy, painful - not unlike Teen Love itself. Judging by how the screamo boys yelled along to lyrics like “This is the story of a broken heart / I tried to love but it fell apart”, striking heroic poses like they were some sozzled divorcee singing ‘I Will Survive’ at Karaoke, it could make The Drips huge.

“If it sounds awkward and naïve, that’s because I wrote it a long time ago,” offers Matt. “It was the first love song I ever wrote, and it was about my first girlfriend, who I was with for seven years. It was a tumultuous relationship.”

For all their phosphorent ferocity, The Drips onstage are mostly defined by Caughtran’s amiable, excitable charisma, grinning non-stop, like every moment – sharing his mic with the moshpit, leaping into their out-stretched arms – were his best ever. Which is pretty much the truth.

“Shit yeah, man,” he affirms. “The Bronx, The Drips – we never expected people to be into any of our shit. Especially not The Drips, it’s our High School band. It’s really cool, I still can’t believe I make my living from this… I believe it’s what I was born to do, so I’m having a blast doing it. It’s the only thing I really wanna do.”

(c) Stevie Chick, 2006

The Grates

[the best part of this 'job' - aside from the joyful/agonising work of chipping a feature out of the impenetrable hunk of rock that might be your feelings about said music - is meeting people who you just think are ace in every way. and meeting the grates, an awesome young group from australia, was one of those moments; they totally won me over with their enthusiasm, their unforced bonhomie, the sheer joy they seem ed to take in what they do. this was for Plan B]

Lost in West London late one night during their first an masse trip to England, aimlessly wandering foreign, unfamiliar streets, The Grates happened upon a parked car by the kerb, disco music blaring, its lights on, an ungentle a-rocking occurring. Peering deeper into the urban undergrowth, they made an unsettling discovery: the passengers therein were engaging in proud, loud and lusty congress on the backseat.

“All the windows were fogged up, except the wound-down one we could see the arse through,” grimaces John, their very hairy guitarist, still somewhat bemused.

“We were all like, wow.” adds singer Patience, her eyes wide (but they’ll go wider still, later). “That’s bold. That takes guts.”

It is now the grave responsibility of your correspondent to explain to Grates the infernal practise of ‘dogging’, thus divesting them of their cherished innocence, perhaps FOREVER. It isn’t pretty.

“You mean,” whimpers drummer Alana, disgust etched on her face, “They wanted us to join in?”

“I have this ongoing belly problem going on. I don’t know what the story is, I think some parasites might be in my guts…”

Patience leans across our table at the Electric café in West London, and peels out a grin so wide her eyelashes tickle the corners of her lips. You or I might, perhaps, greet such knowledge with an expression of dismay or upset, maybe with the word “Bother” or some vague synonym. Patience seems excited, elated by this news. To be honest, Patience seems excited, elated by petty much everything, a naturally heightened state of excitement that translates so well onstage, as she leaps and stamps and twists across the stage, insane grin in place, a little breathless (but we’re not sure if she’s ever out of control).

This sunny disposition, this heady lust for life, pervades the Grates camp. They are, declares the winsome Alana, “The very best of friends. We even stay in the same hotel room, all three of us, when we travel.”

“We argue all the time,” adds Patience (such an ill-fitting name - her every atom seems to buzz with impatience, for all the stuff there is to do and all the fun there is to have). “Our band practices take place in John’s Dad’s shed. We play for half an hour. Then we go and eat some barbecue…”

“Then John’s mum comes downstairs, and we have a chat,” continues Alana. “Then we surf the internet for a bit. Then we have an argument. I leave the room for a bit, and then come back, and we all make up, and play for five more minutes to celebrate. We’re all the best of friends,” she says again, “So we can afford to wanna kill each other one minute, and then all share a hotel room the next.”

“I taped part of our rehearsal the other week,” adds John, grinning with a simian wickedness. “All that was on the tape was Patience wailing, ‘I’m never gonna write another good song again!’”

She’s already written several wonderful ones. The Grates’ debut double a-side is a case in point; ‘Message’ skips and stomps like these suburban kids are taking a glitter-daubed chainsaw to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ blueprint and dancing gleefully in the wreckage, a tumbling racket of revving guitars, tumbling drums, stop-start noise and Patience’s howl, ricocheting off the speakers like a squash ball.

The flip is even more charming. ‘Suckafish’ is odd, off-kilter, faintly celtic but owing more to pixies at the foot of the garden than any leprechauns. It has that lumbering, gentle heaviness you always get when typically-loud musicians deign to decrease the volume, a sweet and messy thing of vulnerability and sing-song poetry that recalls a beautifully bruised Belly. You don’t expect something so tender to be hiding underneath something so brattily brash.

We aren’t here to talk about the music really, though, or at least that’s what The Grates seem to believe. We talk for about 90 minutes, all in. I don’t ask a single question. The tape clicks on while they’re talking, and whirrs absently as the chat unfurls, of wild and arcane subjects. Like what their spirit animal would be.

“Patience’s spirit animal is the seal,” explains Alana, authoritatively. “And Jon’s spirit animal is a bear. I don’t know what my spirit animal is.”

“It’s a toss-up, with Alana, between a polar bear and a koala bear,” interrupts John.

“I don’t feel an affinity with any animal,” frowns Alana. “And that’s my spiritual crisis.”

“John’s a bear, because he’s so very hairy,” offers Patience.

“And because he’d love to be able to hibernate,” adds Alana.

“I don’t think I could manage it, but I’d love to try,” smiles John. “Sleep for a few months, get it all out of the way, and then work for nine months without sleep.”

“John, bears still sleep at night when they’re not hibernating!” snaps Patience.

“Yeah, they only hibernate in the winter because there’s no food for them to eat.” adds Alana, scarcely more gently.

“Oh,” replies John, his eyes drooping slightly, so he looks like a momentarily glum (yes!) bear.

Check out the Grates’ website and you’ll be greeted by the band’s DIY design aesthetic in full flow, a cut’n’paste glut of vibrant colours and affectionate scribbles and paintings. The band press up their own badges, design their own sleeves, do everything, in fact, because they enjoy it. That’s the only reason they do anything they do. Luckily, the Grates enjoy being the Grates a great deal.

They formed in their hometown of Whitchurch, Brisbane, having been friends for as long as they could remember. They were, by their own admission, ‘rubbish’ to begin with, until Patience went off to live in London for a while, returning with a much stronger voice than before. The Grates are burgeoning huge in their home country, beloved of influential radio station Triple J. They deserve to be massive, everywhere. But especially places with decent air-conditioning.

John: “Its so hot in Australia, and I sweat so much when we play.”

Patience: “John’s a hairy guy…”

Alana: “But the venues in Australia rarely have air-conditioning. I’ve gotten so hot I’ve felt I might pass out while playing…”

John: “I’ve had sweat pouring off all of my body! Rivers of sweat!”

Patience: “I’ve thought, maybe I might puke onstage! And I have felt like it.”

Alana: “We discuss it beforehand, if she thinks she might get sick, we have a bucket onstage for her.”

Patience: “Because that’s cooler than saying, ‘Aw, I feel sick, I have to stop rocking out now!’ I’m not a baby…”

John: “Dad’s shed is air-conditioned, its excellent. We wouldn’t have gotten anything done without that. We don’t write fast songs during the summer; we write them in the winter, to stay warm!”

John’s Dad’s shed is the Grates’ HQ, the clubhouse where they hatch their plans for twisted nursery rhyme-aided world domination.

Alana: “It’s awesome… it’s huge, it’s soundproofed…”

John: “It’s not entirely sound-proofed. I walked outside it once while Alana was playing drums, it was really loud.”

Alana: “But the neighbours don’t complain. Our next door neighbour is insane, and she’s really lovely, and she just really enjoys tracking the band’s progress!”

“We’d been eating at this Chinese place,” continues Patience later, on her digestive disorder, “and I ordered ‘vegetarian’, which was disgusting, like raw tofu floating in chicken stock. Whatevs!” she snaps, efficiently shortening a sarcastic ‘whatever’ to two syllables. “So I ate some of John’s noodles, which he had with the pork. It was a skanky restaurant, and before we got served, I kept joking to John, ‘You know what meat they’re serving?’” Patience points at her handbag, emblazoned with a big picture of a cat. “And I’m hella allergic to cats. I reckon some cat-meat touched the noodles, and I had an allergic reaction on my insides. I’m allergic to everything about cats: their saliva, their hair…”

“And now, it turns out, their meat too!” laughs Alana.

“And my body flllllllllipped out” - ‘flipped’, but with the ‘l’ drawn out for, like, 5 seconds. “Whatevs, it was the most disgusting meal ever, and it was cat. Whatevs.”

(c) Stevie Chick, 2005

an anthem in a vaccuum on a hyperstation

kim dances, originally uploaded by Stevie Chick, Foxy Boxer.

Roots Manuva

[written around 2001, getting published here in celebration of the upcoming Big Dada 10th Anniversary. Roots is a GOD.]

The setting is Pimlico school, Westminster, in the mid-1980s. "Hip hop was everywhere, everybody was writing things on their tracksuits and colouring their white trainers black, having freestyle battles on the concourse," reminisces Rodney Smith, aka Roots Manuva, aka British Hip Hop's Brightest Hope. "It was like the hip hop school, huhuhuh!"

And so it was that young Rodney was bitten by the hiphop bug - then written off as some flitting fad - as it swept through the UK's nightclubs and playgrounds. "I tried break dancing. I even tried scratching, totally wrecked a lot of records. I thought you were supposed to drag the needle across the record ... Sorry, Mum! It was something I loved, but I never imagined it would pay my rent. It never felt like something I could be a part of."

Ironic words, considering Roots Manuva's new album, Run Come Save Me, proves that hip hop is no longer an exclusively American culture but an international language encompassing a thousand tongues, including Rodney's London accent and his Jamaican roots. Whereas previous British rappers have been scuppered by their parochialism, he has taken the loose, mix 'n' match cultural identity of contemporary London and created an album that sounds global .

Roots, now 28, draws as much on the sounds of Brixton - dancehall reggae, skronky techno and smoked-out dub - as American funk and rap. Like Tricky, like Muslim agit-rappers Fun'Da'Mental, like 1970s ska-punks The Specials, his music celebrates Britain's unique, messily integrated eclecticism better than Robin Cook's clumsy tikka masala metaphors ever could.

"I'm a second-generation UK black, just trying to find his feet, spiritually and economically," he says. His lyrics are complex and spiritually troubled, and the question of identity is a key theme. "I'm just trying to make sense of this Roots Manuva character," he laughs. "Where Roots ends and Rodney begins."

His parents, immigrants from Banana Cove in Jamaica, were strict; his father is a Pentecostal deacon. A career in hip hop, Roots remembers, "was not something they encouraged; it was something they discouraged". And yet many MCs - from Fugees's Wyclef Jean to Mos Def - come from religious backgrounds, swapping preaching for another form of oratory.

The transition isn't so simple in Roots's case, however; moral turbulence courses throughout Run Come Save Me. Track after track finds Roots tussling with religion, spirituality (pointedly two separate things to him) and guilt.

"If I'd had parents who were really into music, who had a massive record collection, I don't think I would've been so into music," he says. "That I had to go next door to hear the latest reggae tune, or that our parents wouldn't take us out to the cinema or to the arcade, made me really appreciate it when we did do those things.

Have his parents accepted his lifestyle choice? "Yeah, they're cool. They still can't believe I'm making any money from it. They always ask: 'Why aren't you on Top of the Pops?'" And he really should be. Last week, when his sublime Witness (One Hope) single entered the UK charts at 45, Atomic Kitten were at number one with their insipid cover of Eternal Flame.

Which is a better representation of modern young Britain? Yet Roots is sanguine about the mainstream culture that has yet to embrace him. "Radio is all about midrange frequencies and melodies, and Witness isn't too melodic. It's harsh."

But he is convinced he's part of a burgeoning revolution. "There's a whole brand-new class, people in music and the arts and sports ... a new uneducated middle class. We're shopping in Marks and Spencer and using balsamic vinegar, but we've got no GCSEs, no A-levels and no degrees.

"Technology is changing everything," he says, and he should know. He just bought a DVcam so he can make his own movies. "They're just abstract art movies at the moment 'cos I can't work the camera properly. Maybe I should go to one of them weekend courses that teach you how to be the next Steven Spielberg."

Or maybe he could just continue being the first Roots Manuva.

(c) 2001 Stevie Chick

Lauryn Hill Loses Her Self

[this began life as a proposed MOJO blog idea, and subsequently grew into this mess of ideas inspired by a song that I'll admit I've been obsessed with most of this gloomy Summer. I have been reliably informed by my friend Tom that Surf's Up is actually a pretty good film; whatever the truth is on that score, go find this song.]

The best single you’ll hear all year isn’t actually being released as a single, despite being the comeback from an artist whose absence has been so keenly felt, so breathlessly chronicled. Indeed, to hear it at all you’ll have to undergo the indignity of catching Surf’s Up – the cruddy end of a long line of obnoxious, celeb-voiced animated kiddy movies – at the cinema, or chancing your shekels on its otherwise-unappetising soundtrack album, offering as it does such other grody confections as Sugar Ray, 311 and Incubus.

What I’m saying is, if you haven’t heard Lauryn Hill’s ‘Lose Myself’ yet, don’t blame yourself; this absolute gem of a song, pregnant with quirk and joy and soul, seems to be charting a course evasive of all radars, and it’s a terrible shame. Not least as it sounds like a desperate final healing gesture from an artist whose solo debut – 1998’s The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill – promised such future riches, but in truth foreshadowed the brutal running aground of its creator.

What made Miseducation such a pleasure was the sheer joy of the album, the performances possessed of a most deliciously unforced perfection, an album nodding towards both the burgeoning neo-soul movement, and the Hip-Hop from whence Hill’s group The Fugees had sprung. The production was etched with the lush drama of 70s soul, the rich tympani rolls scoring the epic ache of ‘Ex-Factor’, the itchy clav-funk of ‘Every Ghetto, Every City’, the satin-clad afterglow calm of ‘Nothing Even Matters’, building a canvas referencing the politicised, auteurist soul of artists like Curtis Mayfield and, most abundantly, Stevie Wonder. Still, Hip-Hop’s respect for The Word, lots of them, imbued with undoubted deep personal meaning and squeezed into verses that could barely hold them, was key.

Given the rapturous reception the album enjoyed, Lauryn Hill should have been poised for glorious success; Miseducation having staked a claim for Hill as a true creative force within The Fugees – something often obscured by the considerable success of bandmate Wyclef Jean’s solo and producing careers – its follow up would surely galvanise everything the debut had achieved.

Almost a decade later, that follow up still hasn’t arrived. In the interim, Hill has visibly struggled; the gossip pages have constructed their own myth, and perhaps there is truth tangled in there, of breakdowns, and of artistic struggles, and of turbulence within her relationship with Rohan Marley, father of her four children. While she continued to collaborate with and produce and write for other artists with great success – Mary J Blige’s sublime ‘All That I Can Say’ is as close to the soul confection of Miseducation as has surfaced since – MTV Unplugged 2.0 was decidedly not the album audiences seduced by ‘Doo Wop (That Thing)’ were expecting, when released in 2002. Gone were all the ersatz soul adornments, any echoes of Hip-Hop; in their place, acoustic guitar and Hill’s voice, rawer than before, older, more characterful. The album wrong-footed many, not least the critics; where Miseducation had been honed, taut, MTV Unplugged 2.0 rambled.

Diverging from the typically-lucrative Unplugged format, Hill’s double set offered more than just tasteful, stripped-bare renderings of her hits; indeed, all of the songs – barring a cover of traditional song ‘The Conquering Lion’ and Bob Marley’s ‘So Much Things I Say’ – she performed were new, unrecorded (and still so, this release aside). These songs were often in an unfinished state, the set peppered with long, meandering, painfully honest conversations between Hill and her audience, where she confessed a lack of confidence, in her self if not her music, and evidenced the struggles she was then enduring. The songs concerned love and religion, war and politics, Hill rocking back and forth, strumming and signifying, tapping into her partner’s bloodline and recalling Bob Marley in her ragged zeal, her raw passion. But where Marley’s songs were anthems, Hill’s were soliloquies, confessionals; she wasn’t offering any more salvation than was contained in any voice honestly airing fears and pain. To these ears, Unplugged 2.0 was a fine album, worth experiencing; five years after the fact, however, and the CD nowhere to hand, I’m struggling to recall any of the melodies. But perhaps the album’s strengths lay elsewhere.

And so on to ‘Lose Myself’, being as it is the next chapter in Hill’s discography. It follows a faltering Fugees reunion, begun at Dave Chappelle’s 2004 Brooklyn Block Party and undone somewhere along the way, with Pras indicating Hill was the stumbling block. It follows rumours of completed sequels to Miseducation, rejected outright by Hill’s label as uncommercial. It follows high-profile meltdowns, like a 2003 performance at The Vatican where Hill spoke out onstage against child abuse within the church.

It is, in many ways, a redemption song, a song about returning to somewhere after a long and fateful journey that has left Lauryn changed, and seeing all anew, as never before. It’s a song of renewal – romantic, spiritual or artistic. Indeed, it’s never clear whether Lauryn is singing to her God, her lover, herself, when she sings “I had to lose myself, to love you better”; the truth is probably an amalgam of the three.

These are words sung after longer than forty days and forty nights in the wilderness, words heavy with a jittery confidence, the narcotic first buzz of healing after a long time spent just ailing. Lauryn’s left the acoustic in the cupboard this time around, switching instead to a fizzy, brash 80s sound, a symphony of neon burbles and singing synths and disco pulse; almost comically upbeat, roller-rink music. Lauryn’s voice, singing over this, chews up a blizzard of words like Subterranean Homesick Dylan, so much to say after so long spent silent, catching her breath long enough to return to a delectable see-saw refrain of “All… I… Ev-er…Wan-ted was Love”.

For all the souls bared in modern R’n’B, the heartbreaks raised to operatic cataclysms, the moral quandaries played out on mellifluously melodramatic canvasses, few are as transparently, as openly confessional, as cathartic, as Hill. Mary J plays out her every private heartache in such a public arena, but still albums like No More Drama don’t lay her persona as open as Lauryn does when she picks up the lyric book. The drama played out within ‘Lose Myself’ is a grand, deep and torturous one, for sure, a long dark night of the soul reaching its end (but not quite ended, underscoring the track with a further poignancy), a soul questioning itself and struggling with the answers.

She touches upon every troubled corner of her life, her music (“I used to do it for the love of it a long time ago”), her relationship (“I used to love without fear a long time ago”). Her current disharmony, her distance from this idealised sense of self, is played out as a lover who “Took a true love and tried to make it dirty”, but is in truth Lauryn’s own distance from her muse, as much as from her heart. Indeed, this seems the song’s key message about Lauryn and the troubles she’s been going through – that these battles haven’t been fought on a single front, that they’re all linked with and related to each other, and that’s why it’s been so hard.

In its airing of grievances, its tale of a tough road travelled, and its hopeful belief in redemption, there’s a gospel spirit to ‘Lose Myself’ which bests any blues lurking within, and yet ‘Lose Myself’ is no gospel song. There’s no chorus of voices backing Lauryn; she may have reached the end of her exile, but whatever wisdom she recovered from her journey was won single-handedly. The spectres she’s had to confront are opponents she could only best alone, because they were inside of her; the “paralyzing fear of facing failure” in her art, in her relationship, in her love for God. It’s this fear that’s most palpable, the source perhaps of her other heartaches, all presented as insoluble riddles. “Couldn’t stay but I never meant to desert you,” she sings, torn up by the conflict.

Bound up in these dichotomies is that which makes creativity, spirituality, love so very frightening, and so powerful – that it can leave one so changed, that it is so much of a risk, that none of these are games for cowardly or dishonest hearts. So many untruthful souls out there, ready to trick an honest one for kicks alone, it gets so even good love gets treated with fear and suspicion. “There’s something awkward about the selflessness it takes to give love,” she sings, teetering on the edge of a cliff she feels she needs to fling herself from, to find peace and redemption; a leap of faith, in her God, in her love, and in herself.

The trope of dream or fantasy as means of irony reached its apex in pop with The Temptations’ dulcet, hazy lullaby ‘Just My Imagination’, hyper-realist scenes of romantic bliss ultimately revealed as the simple pipe dreams of a perennially lonesome soul. “When her arms enfold me, I hear a rhapsody,” croons Eddie Kendricks, in blind love. “But in reality, she doesn’t even know me.” It’s tempting to see ‘Lose Myself’ as a song possessing a similar poignancy, that it’s a prophecy made in hope of self-fulfillment, that the song is, rather than a simple song of celebration, more a song willing the deliverance Lauryn sings of to come about. It’s a song of yearning for an end to all the lessons, a song hoping that enough wisdom has been hard-won that she can go on living again, rather than just breathing; that she’s healed, not just healing. Maybe love, spiritual peace, are just different degrees of hope and delusion anyway. The song also seems to suggest that this newfound equanimity is fragile, tentative and, like the love of which Eddie Kendricks so sweetly sang, ultimately chimeric. Certainly there’s a shiver, a vulnerability to the hope ‘Lose Myself’ expresses, a flinch skulking behind the bravery.

The sense of Lauryn reconnecting with her music, with her artistic voice, is as problematic. ‘Lose Myself’ is a wonderful song, but also definitely weird, and not exactly built to take on a popscene so tooled for perfection. It sounds cheap, the beats bursting too loud and almost overshadowing synths that sound like cheap Casio presets. But ‘Lose Myself’ triumphs as much because of this ‘demo’-esque quality, as over it, establishing an intimate tone recalling Neil Young’s ‘Will To Love’, a desolate home-recorded fragment which could never be bettered in its shields-dropped resignation. The simplicity of production – unadorned vocal, synths playing out the melodies and dynamics but little else, the sketchy feel – recall the raw honesty of Unplugged 2.0, sweetened with enough pop sugar as to be supremely palatable.

But there’s something about this song that feels intriguingly broken, naggingly ‘wrong’. Certainly, the sentiment of suffering for salvation leaves an unpleasant taste in the mouth; in places, there’s an uncomfortable echo of The Crystals’ infamous domestic-violence torch-song ‘He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)’ in ‘Lose Myself’’s sadomasochistic moral, in the self-abnegation and self-flagellation Lauryn feels she needs to undergo in the name of regeneration. And herein lies the essential poignancy of ‘Lose Myself’: the victim throughout, of a careless lover, an absent God, an abused creativity, she feels resolution will only come with her surrender to these forces, an absolute capitulation, losing her ‘self’ to better serve her man, her God, her muse. And so, rather than the brave, bright statement of survival the song seems on first inspection, it is in fact a symptom of sickness, a brief flash of something darker and cloudier than vulnerability, a window upon a very tortured soul, albeit one seemingly functioning – at least fitfully – on a creative level. The song seems strangely lucid, in its exposure of Lauryn’s tragic self-delusion; she isn’t waving hello to a brighter future, she’s drowning.

Which now leaves me a touch uncomfortable about loving this song quite so much. I’m not revelling in Lauryn’s pain by proxy, am only minutely thrilling on a voyeuristic tip, certainly no more than any listener does in the presence of raw and unmediated soul music, which ‘Lose Myself’ most definitely is. It reminds me of songs from the album I’m most likely to turn to when feeling inconsolably blue, the first volume of the late Dave Godin’s Deep Soul Treasures compilation series. Selecting tracks from the soul hinterlands, slow-dance 45s and torch-song jukebox disks, Godin collated an album of brutally bruised soul, stirring grand, near-operatic drama and tragedy. Songs like Kenny Carter’s ‘Showdown’ (a man has to tell his best friend he loves his girl), Larry Banks’ ‘I’m Not The One’ (a man realises he isn’t good enough for his woman), Jimmy Holliday’s ‘The Turning Point’ (a man acknowledges he will be haunted by lost love for the rest of his life), and Irma Thomas’s ‘Anyone Who Knows What Love Is (Will Understand)’ (a woman justifies her undying love for a man who cheats on and abuses her) painted, with scything strings and wounded but valiant vocal performances, epic stories of eternal paradoxes, problems without solutions, cognitive dissonance that made sense only to the protagonist, insulating them within their tragic loneliness.

‘Lose Myself’ fits within this lineage, even if its deceptively-bright synthesiser bounce stands in stark contrast to the scratchy soul of Godin’s selections. Like these great, grand soul songs, ‘Lose Myself’ is a story told without fear of how it will be received, a heart turned open enough to let its wounds breathe freely; and, like the great soul songs, Lauryn lays that wound open for all to see, to let others draw wisdom from her story, even if the path her protagonist takes seems ultimately a harsh and negative one. Set to a stricken but upbeat melody, sung with a sense of life that belies the pain contained within that voice, these songs hum with a potent dramatic irony, making something positive and alive from the most deathly and dark emotions, and delivering something truthful, with an unforgiving honesty. And like those great songs, ‘Lose Myself’ looks likely to remain an obscure gem, prey for the aficionados excavating this era of soul in the decades to come.

(c) 2007 Stevie Chick

Blinkered idealism defuses a time bomb blindly
Sorting through a tangle of mixed messages
Selecting only the strands that flatter bluffing fingertips
Ensuring eventual explosion

Grace Paley, 1922-2007

Words

What has happened?
language eludes me
the nice specifying
words of my life fail
when I call

Ah says a friend
dried up no doubt
on the dessicated
twigs in the swamp
of the skull like
a lake where the
water level has been
shifted by highways
a couple of miles off

Another friend says
No no my dear perhaps
you are only meant to
speak more plainly

Pissed Jeans

[for Plan B, and put up here mostly in honour of the friend mentioned in the piece, who is a dude I haven't hung with in far too long. A bit nervous uploading this one, now I know my mum reads my blog; Mum, I don't think you'll like this one, it's a bit rude]

Hope For Men (Sub Pop)

I’ll never forget the night I was devirginised by The Jesus Lizard, sometime back in the 1990s at a dingy, mirror-walled basement in Charing Cross called the LA2 (now known as the Mean Fiddler). It was everything I’d dreamed it could be, from bassist David Wm. Sims’ murderous stare and relentless foot-stomp, to David Yow’s encore appearance clad only in a nappy, which he soon shed. It was at this point that my companion that night (name withheld to protect the shameless) returned after sortie down the very front, a look of impish, irrepressible pride on his sweaty face. “I just took a piss in the moshpit,” he beamed. As I gazed at the dark patches on his trousers, and then switched my gaze to Yow, naked and fucking the stage, I had to admit it was a pretty Jesus Lizard thing to do.

I share such golden reminiscence at this juncture because that same guttural, animalistic mindset is also the preserve of Pissed Jeans, a quartet from Allentown, Pennsylvania whose second album, Hope For Men, is a more abrasive scour of ugliness than I’ve heard in a long time. They are noise rockers, adept at both noise and rock, never allowing one ingredient to get the better of the other. Often, they sound like two different groups playing at once, recognisable and gnarly melody fighting chaotic din for your attention, a tension that keeps this forty minute set so addictively taut.

Opener ‘People Person’ sets vibes to ‘bad’ from the get-go, with a knitting machine beat that feels like a drumstick hammering your temple, guitarist Bradley Fry seemingly tossing his guitar about a room carpeted in twisted steel and broken glass, furnace-mouthed frontman Matt Korvette babbling street-person talk somewhere near the microphone. Korvette sings pretty much like Jon Spencer did right back in the early days of Pussy Galore, a throat-shredding snarl thick with disgust, marshalling a group who sound as if they’d like nothing better than just whaling at their gear for an hour or so with chains and crowbars. In places, it sounds exhilaratingly like that’s exactly what they did.

Pissed Jeans are a tissue of grisly pigfuck reference, from the chainsaw-juggling sleaze of Jesus Lizard, to the molten sludge-blues of late Black Flag, to the ecstatic grind of Melvins; they share with these bands an artful, blunt fascination with subterranean ick, with a musky, ugly sense of manliness, all threats and derangement and debasement. Pissed Jeans smear fine new shapes in the mud and pus and cum and shit and sweat and dirt that is their milieu.

Neil Kulkarni once described Jesus Lizard as the sound of “homosexual panic”; certainly, Pissed Jeans are the sound of a soul in a state of deranged terror, an exorcism, a catharsis of an animalism we’re taught to abandon for civility. Frustration, fear, anger course through all this unruly sound, unleashed and, for a moment, expunged. Malevolence like this shouldn’t be kept inside to fester – the dissonant ooze of noise-poem ‘The Jogger’ profoundly unnerves – so consider this like Fight Club for ‘rockers’, maybe.

Certainly, the hurtling, ricocheting din feels good, especially when the raging shriek quietens down enough so the planet-flattening riffs can breathe, or when the raging shriek swallows those riffs whole. I dare say it feels as good as taking a piss in the mosh-pit of a Jesus Lizard show and spraying your jeans with urine, although I wouldn’t know, as I’m not the sort to do such a thing. I listen to Pissed Jeans instead, and revel in the debasement by safe, hygienic proxy.

(c) Stevie Chick 2007

TY

[for London Lite; TY is an absolute diamond]

Rap’s a genre obsessed by location, location, location. Few can forget the infamous East Coast/West Coast ‘beefs’ of the 90s that pitted Californian gangstas against their Big Apple brethren. The biggest noise in mainstream hip-hop the last couple of years has been ‘crunk’ – a lewd and loud rap hybrid from Atlanta with a peculiarly Southern swagger.

By contrast, Britain seems forever doomed to be rap’s ‘country bumpkin’ cousin. We have vibrant local rap scenes, we’ve concocted unique hybrids of the genre, like grime. We’ve even sent the cream of our homegrown talent – Roots Manuva, Dizzee Rascal, The Streets – over to ‘conquer’ the States, and while they’ve won the respect of the rap cognoscenti, America’s charts remain untroubled by Brit-accented emcees.

But tales of street-life in Stepney can’t hope to compete with the grimy glamour of Brooklyn or South Central, and the British accent remains too alien for American rap-fans to embrace (even though seminal 80s rap legend Slick Rick was born in South Wimbledon). Since British rap-fans mostly follow the American trends, even success at home can elude the most deserving Brit-rapper.

TY is aware of all of this. The Vauxhall-based rap perennial hosted the Lyrical Lounge club-night at this venue in the 90s, where young rap talent performed with live musicians to electrifying effect. His third album, ‘Closer’ (on the unimpeachable Big Dada label), matches droll wit, fiery verbals and an inventive, futuristic funk sound that should be swamping the radiowaves. If it vexes him that he’s unlikely to achieve the limos’n’Cristal lifestyle, he’s keeping it to himself, saving the space in his lyric book to mull over grander themes like love, frustration, and the numb horror of the Damilola Taylor murder.

Like his erstwhile labelmate Roots Manuva, TY’s music rejigs the hip-hop template to reflect local sounds like reggae and British R’n’B. Similarly, he doesn’t fake an American accent (like some of Brit-rap’s sorrier forebears). He speaks in his own voice – loudly, clearly, wisely. And that, more than the glitz, the guns, the glamour, is what hip-hop is truly about.

(c) 2007 Stevie Chick

Daniel Johnston

[for London Lite]

Innocence and darkness figure equally in the music of Daniel Johnston, a Texan singer-songwriter whose frail, homespun pop has won the hearts of rock superstars, and whose unlikely, unhappy life story was the subject of award-winning 2005 documentary, The Devil And Daniel Johnston.

Johnston is, in many ways, the ultimate ‘outsider’ artist; diagnosed as manic depressive soon after moving to college, he returned to live with his parents, recording his rustic, simple songs on a tape-recorder, selling his home-made cassettes through record stores in nearby Austin, Texas in the mid 1980s. These songs, while achingly amateurish in execution, won Johnson a cult audience, seduced by the lyrics which referenced both the comic book heroes he loved in his youth (Captain America, Casper The Friendly Ghost), and the obsessive, unrequited love affairs that composed his adulthood.

The Cult Of Daniel has only grown with the passing years; Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain wore a Daniel Johnston tee-shirt to the 1992 MTV Awards, indirectly winning Johnston a deal with Atlantic Records a year later (he was dropped after the album sold barely 6000 copies), while an all-star tribute album in 2004 featured covers by the likes of Tom Waits, Beck and The Flaming Lips.

Johnston’s condition has threatened his career, and indeed his life, on occasion: in 1990, flying back from a performance at Austin’s South By South-West music festival, a manic Daniel damaged the plane enough to force his pilot father to execute a desperate crash-landing. Live performances, meanwhile, veer from the sublime, to the sad, to the ridiculous, depending on Johnston’s mood.

Despite all this, though – or, for some, because of it – Johnston’s cult audience remains loyal and continues to grow, fans drawn to songs so poignantly and perpetually caught between the innocence of childhood and the disillusionment of adulthood, between blind romance and painful truth. Tonight, he performs at London’s Union Chapel, a grand setting sure to compliment the childlike simplicity of his songcraft. If the mercurial Johnston’s on form, it promises to be an unforgettable night, and those with the stomach for a more intimate experience of Daniel’s performance should be informed that he will be playing The Windmill in Brixton the following night.

(c) 2007 Stevie Chick

Sly Stone

[a preview for Sly's performance at the Lovebox weekender; wish I'd made the show, whatever it was like]

If it seems like the 60s superstars were doomed to Icarus-like fates, few soared as high or plummeted as sharply as Sylvester Stewart. As Sly, he led The Family Stone through a dizzying run of smash singles and acclaimed albums, their upbeat riot of soul, funk and rock evoking the optimism of the era as surely as their integrated line-up – men and women, blacks and whites – terrified the more bigoted corners of the establishment.

While their classics – ‘Dance To The Music’, ‘I Want To Take You Higher’, ‘Everyday People’ – remain dancefloor dynamite, darkness always stalked even The Family Stone’s brightest hits; 1969’s ‘Hot Fun In The Summertime’ was a sly comment on the riots that had razed poor neighbourhoods that year. Their next album, 1971’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On, offered a turbulent, enervated funk reflecting the mania of Stone’s increasingly drug-damaged lifestyle, as well as an America at war with Vietnam and itself.

Stone seemed to have surrendered to the chaos of his life; a regular on the TV chat show circuit, he was visibly addled but still ineffably cool, but often failed to arrive at his own concerts, prompting riots and lawsuits. The Family Stone dissolved, while Sly’s subsequent solo albums failed to stop the rot; seemingly relinquishing his throne to Prince as the 1980s dawned, Sly retreated to obscurity, any comeback seemingly a crack-pipe dream.

Then, early in 2006, Sly improbably resurfaced at the Grammy Awards, performing briefly during an all-star celebration of his music. With his shocking white Mohawk, hunched posture and neck brace, he more resembled a Gremlin than the Sly of yore, but that he even turned up at all was, by Stone’s standards, miraculous.

A year on, with the Family Stone catalogue re-mastered and re-released, Sly is back on the road. Early reviews of the tour suggest Sly only appears for a few songs of the reconstituted Family Stone set, but Youtube footage of Stone singing ‘If You Want Me To Stay’ a month ago suggests that remarkable, sublime croak is still intact. A Lazarus-like resurrection is probably too much to hope for, but this Icarus still has enough feathers to take you higher.

(c) 2007 Stevie Chick

Scout Niblett

[from Loose Lips Sink Ships, featuring amazing photography from Steve Gullick. Scout has a new album out soon, and I've been feeling a little 'kidnapped by neptune' myself lately, so I thought I'd upload it.]

The drivers oozing down the dew-slicked blackness of the road stare incredulous through their windscreens, slowing down at the same spot as if on cue, rubbernecking like this were the scene of an accident. If you could see the traffic from the sky, the cars might almost resemble some multi-coloured, tin-plated worm inching slowly along the tarmac, bunching up somewhere near the middle.

On the shores of a concrete island, a girl holds her tiny frame aloft in a perfect handstand stance, concentration etched on her face, skin reddening, her sandy hair grazing the grimy pavement. Which would be remarkable in of itself (this being the dead of night, in the bleakest middle of winter, and not some gymnastics event), even if she weren’t wearing a luminous orange tabard (which she is) like a member of airport security gone astray, or a day-glo Hallowe’en skeleton costume (which she is) that makes her look like one of Kreese’s lackeys from The Karate Kid. As the cars pass silently their headlamp beams pick out the reflective material on her tabard and skeleton, so she glints and flashes and glows in the darkness.

Her name is Emma ‘Scout’ Niblett, and she does things other people mostly don’t, like singing songs accompanied only by her own drums, recording mournful covers of reggae classics, penning poems of encouragement to Charlie Brown’s insecure playmate Linus Van Pelt, and performing handstands while dressed like Bones from Superted round the back of a dingy North London pub.

The world being what it is, a number of these things Scout Niblett does tend to aggravate people no end. Internet message board I Love Music features a thread running to 125 replies (last count) rather hysterically titled ‘Scout Niblett: the *WORST MUSIC* in the WORLD..…’, where Emma is, in turn, labelled ‘grating’, ‘retarded’, a ‘shrill little harpee’ [sic], ‘twee to the max’, and a ‘prima arsehole’.

“There’s some people, I’m sure, that don’t get it,” she shrugs later, drawing concerned stares with her tabard and bones in the pub. “But the people who get it love it! It’s extreme… Some people just write me off, some people think the music’s brilliant. There’s no middle ground.”

Those in the market for pigeon-holing have earmarked her as mere post-Cat Power fallout, but that can’t be right, because I never loved Cat Power like I love Scout Niblett (and I love cats, ask anyone), and I never looked forward to Cat Power shows like I hunger for Scout Niblett shows (actually, I never looked forward to a Cat Power show, period, after my first, but that’s another story).

She started playing guitar when she was twenty-one, besotted with Nirvana. “To me, the beauty of Kurt’s songs were that they seemed so easy to play. They were so simple, but so powerful. When I picked up the guitar, I just knew I needed to do it.”

The first song she ever played was The Pixies’ ‘Gigantic’, picking the bassline out by ear on a single guitar string. At university, she played in a group called Novachichi with Akiko, singing drummer for the awesome Comanechi and Pre, and studied music, art and performance. Regular live performance being a key part of her course, she played gigs when she could, performing at local Open Mic nights in Nottingham. “And I’m really grateful for that,” she remembers, “because being forced to do it was so good for me. I’m quite shy. I knew I’d die if I didn’t get into it, that I’d die of shyness onstage [giggles], so I threw myself into it, and got really obsessed.”

She’d been dabbling with the drums since 1997, but a fellow regular at the Open Mic nights sold her on the instrument. “He was this old man, he would play calyspo songs on the guitar. He’d been in the military when he was young, so if ever there was a drum kit around, he’d sit behind it and start playing the snare drum, singing Beatles songs. He used to play ‘8 days A Week’ And I thought it was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen, and I wanted to do it.”

Some memories of Scout: her walking through the audience, singing like a proud missionary, as Brother Daniel strummed twisted hymnals dressed like a muppet fruit tree; raging excited in the Buffalo Bar, planning a cover of Thin Lizzy’s ‘Jailbreak’ with similarly elemental grungers Winnebago Deal; close to tears one afternoon because her drum-kit has gone AWOL; glorious that evening, backed by her drummer Jason Kourkounis (formerly of Mule, Delta 72, Hot Snakes, Beehive & The Barracudas and Burning Brides), sorting through the heavy girders and sore splinters of her new album, Kidnapped By Neptune, to deliver something raw and richly melodic, vulnerable and empowered, something several leagues more starkly beautiful than her music’s cathartic origins might suggest; the day I realised that wig Emma used to wear all the time was actually a wig…

“I don’t really wear the wig anymore,” says Emma, of the ash-blonde mane she used to sport onstage, which so altered her appearance I thought she wore it to shake besotted stalker fans after the show (inna ‘Scout Niblett has left the building!’ stylee). “It’s kind of been replaced by this orange thing [indicates tabard]. It’s almost shamanistic, that the clothes you wear give you power within yourself. For me, it’s definitely about empowering myself through what these clothes do for me.

“It’s not that they create a different persona… It’s not me wearing just any wig, it’s that particular wig, or that look… Like, with the orange jacket, it made me feel safe the minute I put it on. I know that sounds stupid, but I actually do get really strong feelings off certain clothes. And that’s why I don’t have many clothes, I get really obsessed with the clothes I’ve had for years, because I feel like they allow me to be myself. It’s not like I wear them trying to be someone else, they actually bring out that part of my self.

“It’s like with music,” she continues. “I love music. It’s the only thing that really makes me feel… I used to play piano when I was little, making up songs. I’ve just got a real need to express myself, and music’s the thing that I love most. I didn’t feel I had a choice about it, I just needed to do it.”

The first Scout Niblett song I ever heard and loved was ‘Gymnastic (Fall Over)’. Those crashing drums hit like amphetamine, blood-racing, dizzying. And her voice, unaccompanied, yelling and yowling, “Let’s go! Let’s go!”, all desperate, excited, like you could hear blood-vessels breaking in her throat: this incessant and insistent sense of urgency, forcing these words out of her at such a velocity and volume… An energy that was utterly contagious.

The second Scout Niblett song I ever heard and loved (and this one sealed the deal) was her titular blues for Linus Van Pelt, Emma playing cheerleader for that wonderfully odd and terminally insecure boy from Charles M Schulz’s Peanuts cartoons, the one who believes in the Great Pumpkin, and can recite whole chunks of the bible from memory, and who looked like an owl when he wore glasses to correct his lazy eye (and that made his sister Lucy cry, but don’t tell anyone or she’ll pound you), and who drags that dang security blanket with him everywhere he goes. I haven’t met a girl yet who wasn’t a little in love with Linus.

“I’ll draw inspiration from anything,” she grins, “Something will pop into my head and have me intrigued, curious, thoughtful enough to write a song. With ‘Linus’, I just got thinking about the whole thing with his security blanket. I wanted to tell him, ‘you don’t need it!’”

Do you have a ‘security blanket’ of your own?

“I don’t know. I guess, like I was saying earlier, my clothes. The tabard.”

But you draw strength from your tabard… Maybe you should let Linus alone, let him keep his security blanket?

“Yeah, maybe,” she muses thoughtfully, before stopping herself. She wrinkles her nose and giggles. “I love that we’re discussing Linus Van Pelt like he were a ‘real’ person!”

The strip’s almost-fifty year lifespan gave Schulz the time to invest these little kids’ unnaturally-extended adolescences with enough anxiety, whimsy, weird detail and emotional depth as to make them seem real. A very adult angst pervades Peanuts; it’s evocation of childhood is so realistic, so telling, because the strip takes a child’s perspective. Adults are always telling kids that childhood is the best time of their lives, free of the responsibilities of adulthood. But, trapped within their own dramas, and lacking the maturity or experience to put their anxieties into perspective, the trials of childhood - insecurity, humiliation, struggle, loneliness - seem very real and insurmountable to the children living it. Fear is a constant theme, emotional isolation another, as these children try and adapt to the very adult complexities of their lives.

It’s not hard to imagine the elfin Emma, dressed up in her tabard and skeleton costume, telling Linus about astrology as she takes the boy from the pumpkin patch to go trick-or-treating. Peanuts and Kidnapped By Venus, Scout Niblett’s third album, share a similarly anxious mindspace.

Self, or the sense of ‘self’, or the periodic loss of that sense of ‘self’ (and how that’s scary, and dangerous, and exciting, and healthy, and entirely natural, and perhaps the work of mysterious celestial forces) is a central theme of Kidnapped By Neptune. The sleeve artwork is mostly black, printed on card not unlike the paper you’re currently reading, sucking in light and reflecting none back (even the CD tray is cast in black plastic). There are only two photographs: the first, on the cover, is a blurred shot of Scout walking, back to the camera, into blackness, the reflector strips on her orange tabard flaring wildly. In the second photograph, the CD inlay’s centre spread, freezing waves erupt in frothy grey and white from the darkness. A closer stare into these choppy waters finds Emma drowning, not waving, her blonde hair lank and sodden and masking her eyes, willing herself softly swallowed by the waves.

The title is a reference to the several years Emma has spent with the Roman God of the sea fucking up her astrological shit. “Neptune’s been really strong in my chart,” she explains, “and the whole thing about Neptune is you lose control of who you are. That can be a bit demoralising. But at the same time, it’s a good thing; you’re able to see yourself in a less-fixed way. But it’s quite scary...

“Because I do astrology, I’ve been able to see what’s been happening… Neptune just affects everything, it makes everything foggy. My whole experience’s been not very solid, it’s been up in the air since Neptune came in the frame. It’s been there for two years; it’s always moving, but because the constellation passes so slowly, when it enters your chart, you’ll feel that for a long time.”

Emma’s dad bought her a book about astrology when she was six, which she would pore over for hours, researching her sun sign. As she grew older, she got deeper into the subject, composing her own charts by the time she was nineteen.

“I can do charts for other people, too, people ask me to write their charts all the time…” she smiles proudly. “It’s mostly maths, initially, because you have to calculate things. The art of it is trying to interpret what all that data means, what’s indicated by the pattern of the stars on the day you were born. And that’s just a matter of sitting down for hours and writing it all down.

“When someone does your first chart reading on your personality, it’s just astonishing. And it feels so true, what it says about you just hits home. And then, through experiencing things over the years, you can see astrology working in front of your eyes, all the time. Astrology can help you be dynamic with what’s going on, instead of just being a victim of it. It’s empowering.”

Neptune’s disruptive influence, she says, anticipated several years of personal upheaval; her charts didn’t predict exactly what challenges and misfortunes would beset her, but the knowledge that she would be enduring some choppy emotional waters at least reassured her that she wasn’t losing her mind, that this was just a necessary period of astrological unrest that would surely be followed, at some later date, by calmer seas.

So she endured the insecurity and displacement of pursuing her art, travelling the world, relocating to America, finding kindred spirits in Danielson Famile, in Jason Molina and his country rock renaissance friends, in Swearing At Motorists and in Steve Albini, who records her at his Electric Audio studios in Chicago, his tight-focus, no-Vaseline-on-the-lens technique serving her sparse and brutal blues to the ground, capturing every gutteral growl, every sly lick, ever tender moan. She broke a few hearts, took a couple of lumps of her own, let her self melt a little with someone else’s, and when that didn’t work out spent some time licking her wounds, pulling herself back together again, and working out just exactly who that self was.

Sometimes, in a relationship, the line between yourself and your partner becomes blurred, and you find your own essential make-up somehow altered by this other person, what they mean to you, what they do to you, how they make you feel. And then, one day, they aren’t there anymore, and at first all you feel is the shock of that loss, that absence. But then you start to recover, and have to begin the painful process of working out just who you are again, when you aren’t a part of someone else, and which of these many component parts is really you anyway, and which of them you want to remain.

Which is where Kidnapped By Neptune comes in. Loss, absence, longing and displacement are all constants here, a sequence of songs mood-swinging between anguished melancholy and a desperate sense of self-assertion. It essays this period of ‘losing control of who you are’, as Scout’s world is scattered to the winds, and she sorts through the debris, trying to make sense of it all. Like the stars that make up a constellation were suddenly thrown out of their orbits, and struggled to pull themselves back into order.

It opens with ‘Hot To Death’, all swooning guitars and heavenly croons, a junk-sickly Breeders lullaby, slipping sharply into the cold, sobering nightmare of ‘Kidnapped By Neptune’. Fogged with the chilling gloom of ‘Moody’-era ESG, finding a funk similar to Free Kitten’s mantric ‘Never Gonna Sleep’, it’s a maddeningly-hooked breakdown, or maybe a ‘coming-to’, a bid hello to a self forgotten. Over a martial stomping drum break, an urgently pinging bassline, ‘shoop shoop shoop’ coos come on like The Flamingoes’ deliciously eerie ‘I Only Have Eyes For You’ set to a motorik beat. Then, a slaloming low pulse sweep, a repeated refrain of “Where’ve you been? Where-where’ve you been?” melting into an ecstatic, yawning “Yooooouuu craaaaaaaaazy giiiiiiiirl!”. Repeat twice and finish; you cannot imagine how fantastic it sounds.

“I’d had that drum piece, the ‘barumdum tish’, in the back of my mind for ages,” Emma grins. “I started playing it… It was a drum song really. It felt good to be so sparse, strip everything down to the element. I hummed the melody into my computer.”

‘Kidnapped By Venus’ is a certain kind of break-up song, greeting the person she was before the love she just lost, a cautious welcome like you might offer to a dear but errant friend who always drags you into their wild and chaotic turmoil when they come around (not that you don’t love every minute of it). Retelling Little Red Riding Hood, with Scout as both predator and prey, it gives way to the funereal, wallowing ‘Pom Poms’, Scout slumped in her own little corner, unloved, murmuring “Everyone needs a cute girl with pom-poms to spell out their name in song”. Skip forward to ‘Valvoline’, those rasping, rigid traps slamming petulantly, Scout shouting, “I am the driver! I am the driver! I am the driver!” And while she’s logged plenty hours behind the wheel of the tourbus, this is not just a song of motoring primacy.

“It meant two things,” she smiles. “It was definitely about driving, but the main thing it was about for me was saying, I’m driving myself, I’m doing this. Yeah. If that makes sense. Reclaiming my self, I guess.”

‘Wolfie’ is breath-taking, Scout picking out a Crazy Horse blues, mourning a dying love and dreaming what could have been. “My hand held yours, and who was prouder to be with the other?” she asks in hazy remembrance, the waning melody telling a more uneasy story. “I think it was me,” she answers, sadness creeping in. The tempo slows, becomes hypnotically erratic, melting into a wounded strum, roaring into volume then recoiling penitently, as she sloughs into a sentiment that stings, a painful desire. Her face pressed against the railings, yearning for what cannot be, she sings darkly, “In the end, I would have loved you forever. I know it to be true, because though we’re not together, love is never through.” She sounds utterly bereft, like she knows this will never heal.

“Periods of emotional instability are when I do my best writing,” she says. “Like, when I’m feeling really alright and happy, I don’t really feel as much need to write a song. I’m just someone who has extreme emotions, it’s not like I’m always ‘sad’ or I’m always ‘happy’, and I know that’s not going to change, so I know I’m always going to need to write songs. And some of the songs are celebratory, it’s not like I can’t write when I’m feeling good. But it’s a different kind of energy. It feels good to get stuff down on paper.”

There’s an old Paul Simon lyric lodged in my head, about heartbreak leaving you open, “So everybody sees you’re blown apart, everybody feels the wind blow”. And there’s a lot of debris being cleared up across these tracks, a lot of very raw feelings being worked out.

“A lot of what I sing about, I don’t really know what it is I’m singing about until it’s done. I never sit down and think, ‘I’m gonna write a song about this’. It’s like my subconscious is trying to get some message to me, through my lyrics. Music’s helped me find myself, and define myself; it’s always really cathartic for me. And it’s helped these last few years, when I’ve been ‘Kidnapped by Neptune’.”

Most striking of Kidnapped By Neptune’s songs is the haunting, electrifying ‘Lullaby For Scout In 10 Years’. A song penned for whoever Emma will be in a decade’s time, it verbalises the fears and anxieties soothed by the Doris Day Easy Listening favourite ‘Que Cera Cera’ (check Sly & The Family Stone’s Stand LP for a soul-slaying take on this old standard), Emma asking herself “Is there someone to hold you tightly in their arms?” over tentative, twisted strings. “If there’s no-one, then drink a glass with me,” she reassures herself, before yelling, over the kind of splintering, charred guitars Kurt Cobain struck on In Utero, “Honey, If you’re still around”. It’s such a startling line, not least for that opening “Honey,” sung like this Emma-from-the-present might be the only friend Emma-of-the-future has (or maybe the only constant from this moment to that), but mostly for even questioning that she might see out another decade.

“I do think about it, yeah, what I‘ll be like in ten years’ time,” she laughs, “But I have no idea what I’ll be like. The whole point of that song, to me, is if I’ll still be around. Because I don’t even know if I’ll even be alive or not. Not for any specific reason, just because we don’t know.

“I think it’s interesting to think ahead ten years,” she continues. “Even though we all know we’re going to die eventually, we tend to have this feeling that we’re going to be around until we’re at least 65, 70. But I think it’s good to question that, to question whether you’ll still be here in ten years’ time - I say ten years, but I could’ve written a week. I think it stops you taking everything quite so for granted.”

In the ten years since you started learning to play guitar, you’ve made records, travelled the world playing music, relocated to America, collaborated with wonderful musicians… Could you have predicted any of this then?

“No! It’s amazing to me, it’s the best thing... And it’s funny, considering I’m so obsessed with astrology and predicting the future… The paradox is, I love the fact that I can’t really predict what’s going to happen.”

What if someone came into the bar tonight and said they could tell you what the Scout of ten years’ time would be like, where you’ll be in a decade?

“I wouldn’t want to know. [pause] Well, I would want to know, but I know it would be bad for me to know. Because if you know what’s going to happen in the future, you’ll just give up on the present.”

She’s doing better now, is Emma, better than when she wrote and recorded this album anyway. Neptune is making his slow exit, and she’s making some kind of sense of what’s left, after his disruptive visitation.

“I’m very independent,” she asserts. “I think I’m like that because I do have a strong sense of who I am, even though I have periods when it feels difficult, and I feel wobbly, trembly. But underneath, there’s something I’ve got… That I know… I don’t know how to describe it…”

A sense of self?

“Yeah. Maybe that’s strange.”

Not really. You’re sure of yourself, because you know how it feels to be at odds with yourself. How can you know who you really are, what you can achieve and withstand, if you don’t challenge yourself?

She nods. “It’s those times when things are difficult, when you learn who you really are.”

(c) Stevie Chick, 2005

The Raconteurs win MOJO album of the year for Broken Boy Soldiers

[written for MOJO, obv., for their year-end issue 2006]

A luxuriously-appointed drawing room overlooking Hyde Park, the Royal Suite of London’s Mandarin Hotel doesn’t often play host to rock’n’roll groups – especially not those who only released their debut album a scant five months earlier.

But then The Raconteurs are no ordinary rock’n’roll group – a fact that both privileges and plagues them. Throughout 2006 they’ve enjoyed a profile their peers would kill for, not least thanks to the presence of Jack White on vocals and guitar. But Jack’s celebrity also dictated their first public appearance was a sold-out show at Liverpool’s Academy, rather than something more comfortably low-key, while the media focus on White (to the detriment of the others) sometimes harshes the mellow of a group who want most of all to be seen as ‘just some four guys’.

Those four guys stride into the Royal Suite around lunchtime, still on a bleary-eyed high from the previous evening’s triumphant show at Manchester’s Apollo, though they greet MOJO photographer Mattia Zoppolera with a little suspicion when he asks to shoot individual portraits, seeking a guarantee that the magazine will print portraits of all members of the group. Bonhomie is restored, however, with the award of MOJO’s Album Of The Year accolade for their joyously-rockin’, abundantly-melodic Broken Boy Soldiers.

“Well, cheers to that,” grins singer/guitarist Brendan Benson, as the group clink their glasses and coffee mugs with his bottle of Berocca vitamin supplement.

“You should’ve told us that before the photos,” laughs a visibly-surprised White. “Nice one.”

“Making this record was super-easy,” smiles Benson. “We didn’t try to come up with ‘the best album of all time’ or anything; we were just playing, screwing around, which is always the best way.”

“We made it like groups have always made their first album: quickly,” adds White. “It comes out of your head, you put it down on tape, it’s done.”

“Broken Boy Soldiers is almost like a demo,” nods Benson, “especially when you hear how we play those songs live now. Really, the next record will be our ‘first record’.”

Yes, the cat is out of the bag – new Raconteurs and White Stripes albums are due next year, schedules permitting.

“I’m over-flowing now with so many ideas,” offers White, gleefully. “I have a lot of White Stripes songs I want to record, and I want to make another Raconteurs record – I don’t know what should come out first.”

“How about we take all the good songs?” suggests drummer Patrick Keeler.

“In fact, just give us all your songs,” laughs Brendan, “We’ll sort them out for you…”

2006 was, by the Raconteurs’ own varying accounts, “long”, “busy”, “a blur”. They are unanimous upon the year’s highlight, however: the MTV Video Music Awards, held at New York’s Radio City Hall in August, the group joined by Lou Reed for a chuggin’ ‘White Light White Heat’, and ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons for a short boogie through ‘Cheap Sunglasses’.

“Who would’ve thought, learning to play Velvets songs on the guitar at the age of sixteen, that you’d end up playing with Lou Reed?” reflects bassist ‘Little’ Jack Lawrence, softly. “He was… real nice!”

“Surprisingly so,” nods Jack, “having heard all the ‘stories’ about Lou. There’s a moment when we were playing ‘White Light’, and we hit the ‘oohs’ just right, and you can see him just grinning.”

“When we were rehearsing with Billy Gibbons, he plugged in and started playing, and we all looked like excited little kids,” adds Patrick. “My mouth hurt from smiling so much.”

It was a year The Raconteurs spent mostly on the road, playing high profile gigs like Lollapalooza and the Fuji-Rock festival in Japan. In their eyes, though, the ‘biggest’ show was their first, in Liverpool.

“I remember being backstage and thinking, for all we’d done together in the past – touring, recording – the four of us had never walked out onstage together before,” reflects Jack. “It was like we were all starting over again, at stage one – on purpose.”

Still, there are some who dismiss The Raconteurs as a mere side-project, another of Jack’s ‘premeditated’ follies.

“To me, that diminishes what The Raconteurs is,” muses Brendan. “That makes it sound like just some ‘side-project’. I mean, it is, but it’s so much more, as well. We all put our heads together and created something different, and it’s not entirely a reaction to something else – mostly it stands on its own.”

“People think everything I do is ‘pre-meditated’, because of The White Stripes,” bristles Jack. “They don’t understand that all the pre-meditation happened back in 1997, on that day when we said, ‘we’re only gonna wear red, white and black’. We never discussed that again, just followed it. But they think I sat down and decided what the Raconteurs would look like and sound like. And they’re so off the mark. It’s really unhealthy to have that kind of cynicism around you, it’s worse than having drug users around you.”

Cynicism from some corners of the media seems the only cloud souring the view from the Royal Suite this afternoon; soon they’ll be touring America with Bob Dylan, and then – at some undefined point in the hopefully not-too-distant-future, returning to the studio.

“When The Raconteurs make our second album, the dust will clear, and people will see us for what we are,” promises Jack.

Little Jack nods, and grins. “We’re gonna aim for Album Of The Decade on the next one!”

(c) Stevie Chick, 2006

The White Stripes: Icky Thump

[for the London Lite]

It’s more than five year now since the White Stripes first arrived in the UK, amid a hail of hype (and whispered rumours as to the exact nature of singular frontman Jack White’s relationship with drumming ‘sister’ Meg) but our national fascination with the group shows no sign of abating. The groups who surfaced with them in 2001, The Strokes and The Hives, have been replaced on the nation’s tee-shirts and iPods by the likes of the Arctic Monkeys and Snow Patrol, but the allure and mystique of the Detroit duo remain intact, six albums into their career.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Since the Stripes’ last album, 2005’s blistering, wounded Get Behind Me Satan, Jack White has wed Mancunian supermodel Karen Elson (who contributed the album title, a corruption of Lancastrian colloquialism ‘ecky thump’), fathered two children, and enjoyed acclaim and success with his extra-curricular supergroup, The Raconteurs. And Icky Thump wasn’t recorded on a shoestring in the front room of singular singer/guitarist Jack White’s house in Detroit, or London’s fabled low-budget garage-rock haven Toe Rag Studios, but is the result of a marathon (by their standards) three weeks at the relatively luxurious Blackbird Studio, in White’s new home of Nashville.

Still, anyone fearing that such salubrious surroundings and Jack’s newfound domestic bliss might have smoothed away The White Stripes’ electrifying rough edges can rest easy: Icky Thump is every bit as endearingly ‘hand-made’, as wilfully noisy, as tenderly crafted and as lyrically tart as anything the group has yet released. ‘You Don’t Know What Love Is (You Just Do As You’re Told)’, for example, hides a stinging rebuke for a wayward lover within riffs evoking the ragged glory of Neil Young and his Crazy Horse, while ‘300 MPH Torrential Outpour Blues’ finds Jack juggling a Dylan-esque vocal and some of the most searing guitar heroics of his career.

A certain timelessness, a fascination with the thornier thickets of rock’n’roll’s past, has long been par for the White Stripes’ course, evidenced no clearer here than on ‘Conquest’, a cover of a tune made famous by Patti Page (the best-selling female artist of the 1950s) boasting a truly jaw-dropping duel between guitar and mariachi horn, or the bagpipe-augmented Highland folk of ‘Prickly Thorn Sweetly Worn’. They aren’t just living in the past, however: the lyrics of lead single ‘Icky Thump’ form a rare diversion into political songcraft for Jack, aimed squarely at hypocritical anti-immigration protestors (“White Americans, why don’t you kick yourself out, you’re an immigrant too”).

Confidence is the key to this album’s success, White’s ability to shift from raucous rockout to tender balladry, from broken-hearted blues to pointed polemic, with nary a flinch. Fashioning songs that sound classic the first time you hear them, and performing with a passion that electrifies, they’ve held our attention for over half a decade now, and show no sign of faltering yet.

(c) 2007, Stevie Chick

Seasick Steve, The Borderline

[this was for Plan B, in February I think. Seasick Steve rools]

“Not bad for an old man, eh?” he croaks. He looks like he’s made of American redwood, with hard bitten baby blue eyes like an astronaut, a beard dredged from the bottom of the Atlantic, tattoos on those great tree trunk arms, exposed by his wife-beater and dungarees. He’s played with Modest Mouse, though he’s easily at least twice Isaac Brock’s age. The assembled audience, younger than you might expect, lean in close to Seasick Steve, to breathe in the perfume of the zillion down-home joints where he’s played his home-made slide guitars, much as he does tonight.

It’s a low, wise talking blues Steve plays, lean lone licks ringing out, guitar strings yelping as his metal slide presses down on ‘em. He’s not the only one talking tonight, and he stops the show for a moment to listen to the wankers babbling at the bar, seemingly shook. Maybe they didn’t talk all those years he spent as a hobo, travelling America with his guitar. Awesome songs like ‘Dog House Boogie’ and ‘Save Me’, ancient and sepulchral and electrifying, suggest the wankers should shut the fuck up and listen.

(c) Stevie Chick 2007

The Black Lips, Old Blue Last

[I wrote this in April, I think, for Plan B, one of the few bits of journalism while tucked away writing my book (out October 9th, i believe!) and marking my students' coursework... I heart the Black Lips]

Live, The Black Lips sound exactly like their records. This is a trip, and worth mentioning, because The Black Lips’ din is a blind and fearless leap into that monoaural Crypt Records sound, that Mummies budget-rock ethos their golden gospel. Their latest slab of goonish, lairy r’n’b pop, Let It Bloom (to be found on the near-faultless In The Red Records) sounds like a 60s garage-rock rarity you just found in some suburban American yard sale, alive with crackle, gold-dust furring the needle and coaxing up some gauzy, soft-focus vibe where bum notes and musical primitivism are an aesthetic, an integral part of the group’s charm. And don’t ask me how, but in this sardine-can room, rubbing shoulders until sparks fly with curious hipsters and those garage-rock freaks usually found lurking at the Boston Arms, The Black Lips perfectly translated their lo-fi charisma and dirty-vinyl warmth.

A healthy fetishisation of certain classic rock’n’roll elements aside, the Lips are a most deliciously alive proposition. They bundle onstage with scruffy but clean black hair, four brothers of the same blood, one with a nefarious gold grill glinting in his gob, another with a lime green felt Smurfs hat pulled down over his mop. The vibe is The Monkees meets the Manson Famiglia, a near-psychotic happiness.

Their songs are true vintage stuff, an ersatz clutch of rooster-raw early Stones rumbles, weird garage-vignettes, blasts of woozy druggadelia and charmingly lop-sided pop songs. Their hooks are beautiful, misshapen things, like the maddening loop of drone-psyche madrigal ‘Hippie Hippie Hoorah’, sung as a psychotic round, burrowing into your brain like a television babbling absently while you sleep, or the dumb lope of ‘Boomerang’, a lazy boozalong with a twisted, off-kilter guitar lick like a warped, off-centre vinyl warble, a symphony of wow and flutter.

Like I said, it’s fetishised, but in a deliciously subtle, knowing fashion, a loving pastiche leavened with wit. For recent single ‘Dirty Hands’, a barber-shop valentine set to ‘Be My Baby’ drums on a burnt-out street corner, the boys sing like Peter Fonda badboys in some Roger Corman exploitation flick, locating some tender, innocent romance in its milieu of tattoos, drugs and an exquisitely summery laziness. “I’m wearing leather, cuz I really think it’s cool,” they strut, before wailing, like bullyboy biker choirboys with fool’s gold in their hearts and unmelted butter in their mouths, “Annnnn, do you really wanna hold my dirty hand?” It’s knowing, and coy, and sweet: a cocktail unique like only the Lips could pull off.

The sly self-conscious pleasure of the song-writing collides head on with the adrenaline-rush of their live performance, the three guitar-toting fellas almost tumbling off the tiny stage in wriggling reverie, the barking drummer invisible at the back: a fine chaos emanating from their general direction. Hair is shaken, guitars thrust in the air and swung above their heads in reckless fashion that still doesn’t upset the loose chime of their pop.

The aftermath of the Hives/Stripes insurgency of five or so years ago is a lot of professional dadrock retro chancers plying their high-budget necrophilia under the veil of garage rock, Jet being most heinous offenders. Like the Hunches before them, The Black Lips redeem this trend with a hurtling, helter skelter ricochet into the urchin-like mischief of the garage-rock template, snatching for golden tuneage with endearing, enthusiastic amateurism fraying their ends, an idiosyncratic mess of avant-pop with shades of Monks-esque lunacy haunting their stomp.

Thirty minutes after they shambled onstage, and they’re off again, grabbing the smoke machines and aiming them at the audience for the last thranging chord, our ears still ringing with their hazy, lusty, anarchic songs. Rock’n’roll hasn’t been plied with such dog-eared, homely and wonderful bonhomie since the last time Love As Laughter trod the boards, and The Black Lips are a similarly cherishable, riotous group. Prepare to fall in L.U.V. love.

(c) Stevie Chick, 2007

BRIGHT EYES

[this ran in MOJO in March 2007]

An arctic January afternoon in New York’s East Village. MOJO is sitting in a handsome, wood-floored apartment staring at the thousands of alphabetised vinyl records and music and interior design books that occupy every available wallspace, awaiting the arrival of Bright Eyes’ frontman, poster-boy and sole permanent member, Conor Oberst. The flat belongs to Nate Krenkel, Bright Eyes’ former A&R man who, since 2003, has acted as Oberst’s manager, confidente and surrogate big brother. After a fifteen minute wait, the front door creaks open to reveal the slim figure of Oberst, struggling with an armful of brown paper sacks, his cellphone ringing off idly in his pocket to the customised trill of Willie Nelson’s Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys.

“I knew we had a photo shoot today, so I went shopping,” he grins, emptying the contents of the bags – navy cardigans and sweaters, an off-white knit jersey, in keeping with his generally dressed-down style – onto a nearby table in Krenkel’s front room. In person, traces of stubble and the odd laughter-line temper the fresh-faced boyishness Oberst radiates in his most recent press shots. Dyed black hair, parted in the centre, hangs down to just above his shoulders, framing his arresting, and oft-commented-upon, lime-green eyes. He talks gently, moves slowly, a little awkwardly, his head and hands seemingly too large for his slight body, like he’s still in the middle of a growth spurt, in that awkward space between adolescence and adulthood. Fittingly, that’s also the position Oberst occupies in American music right now, the one-time teen pin-up of sensitive music fans besotted with his Salinger-esque tales of misadventure and regret, who, in recent years, has set about establishing himself as a perceptive and impassioned political song-writer.

He has toured alongside Springsteen and REM in support of the Democrat party, while 2005’s anti-Bush salvo, When The President Talks To God, saw him canonised by the press as “the next Dylan” (a status he bashfully acknowledges today as “flattering, but ridiculous”). However, despite being hailed as the saviour of American political songwriting, Conor Oberst says he is still able to a life of quiet anonymity in New York, roaming without fear of being recognised around his local neighbourhood, which also happens to be home to thousands of students from nearby New York University.

Or maybe Oberst has just adjusted to living his life in the public eye. After all, having performed onstage since he was twelve, and recording searing, disarmingly intimate albums since he was thirteen, twenty-seven year old Oberst has done much of his growing up in public. Since his breakthrough, with 2002’s *Lifted, the media have documented every step and mis-step, from a brief dalliance with Winona Ryder in 2003 to his occasional, infamous chemically-enhanced onstage performances.

While Oberst excuses himself and pops into Krenkel’s bedroom to pose for MOJO’s photoshoot, Krenkel slips a freshly-mastered CD of *Cassadaga, Bright Eyes’ new album, onto his stereo system, volume turned as loud as his no-doubt-wealthy neighbours will allow.

Oberst’s earlier recordings – and there are many – could often be messily emotional, wilful things, his voice breaking across songs that read like (and sometimes were) cathartic diary entries. *Cassadaga is a different beast. The album takes its name from a Floridian Spiritualist community Oberst visited last year where he received readings from the local Wiccans. The singer admits to an enduring curiosity with spirituality, born out of his regular thoughts upon mortality (which first surfaced in his songwriting with ‘Padraic My Prince’, describing the death-by-drowning of a fictional brother).

Pedal steel, violins and warm, buzzing guitars dominate, opener Four Winds recalling the bucolic bonhomie of The Band, and suggesting a new-found maturity in his sound. The lyrics essay love, religion, death in a most distinctive, contemplative voice, painting an America where ‘Genocide sleeps”. The bleak No One Would Riot For Less blackly posits that “War has no heart” while If The Brakeman Turns My Way articulates a disenchantment with drugs, a tale of “Cocaine souls” who “tried to listen to the river, but you wouldn’t shut your mouth”. On the closing Lime Tree, Oberst reaches for a lovelorn poetry akin to The Replacements’ Paul Westerberg at his drunken, remorseful best. The saturated emotions that made earlier records sound shrill to all but the faithful are restrained, resonant here; Cassadaga leaves the impression of Oberst assuredly leaving his awkward adolescence behind him.

“I’d like to think that I’ve gotten a little more nuanced,” Oberst agrees later, reclining on a vintage chaise-longue in Krenkel’s similarly book-lined bedroom. “When I first started, there was no audience, there were no expectations. When you’re 17 years old, it feels pretty good to scream into a tape recorder. That’s how it went, for a long time, until this gradual realisation that I don’t necessarily like how that sounds, just letting it all out. Maybe it would be better if it was a little more subtle, more refined.

“Cassadaga’s much more of a ‘complete idea’,” insists Oberst. He spent a year working on the album, recording in New York, Portland, Lincoln, Chicago and Los Angeles with Bright Eyes mainstays Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott, and a slew of guest musicians. “And in-between those sessions, we got the chance to think about what we’d recorded, to try things a different way. We’d never had that luxury before.”

While he treasures the musician’s peripatetic lifestyle, New York has been his base of operations since 2003. “It’s a romantic place,” he smiles. “Your whole life, you’re reading about it in books, seeing it in movies, hearing it in the records made here. But I was more attracted by all the friends I had here, and how comfortable I felt in the neighbourhood. That first year, I couldn’t get enough of it, going out every night, seeing shows and partying, walking the streets and just feeling the pure energy of New York. It was refreshing to be in random contact with other humans all the time, where no one really cares what you’re about. It’s the total opposite of Omaha, where everywhere I turn there’s someone I grew up with, someone’s brother, or cousin, or whatever…”

Conor first visited New York when he was sixteen, on tour. “And I hated it,” he laughs. “It was too much, too full-on; I wasn’t ready for it. But then I spent some more time here, I hung out with Nate at his old apartment for a few months and thought, wow, this is where I wanna be.”

Though he’d travelled the world with Bright Eyes, until 2003 Oberst had only ever lived in Omaha, the urbane Nebraskan city whose vibrant music scene supported Conor’s many early endeavours. “I was at that point where I just felt, man, I have to leave my hometown. Enough was enough; I have to go do something for myself.”

Having formerly handled Oberst’s publishing, Krenkel assumed managerial responsibilities for Bright Eyes. Together, he and Oberst formed their Team Love record label, now home to Willy Mason, Tilly & The Wall, Minnesotan singer-songwriter David Dondero and former Shudder To Think frontman Craig Wedren. Soon, Oberst found an apartment of his own, nearby. He’s reluctant, however, to describe himself as a New Yorker – a certain restlessness persists. “I still really like it here, but I’ve realised in the last year or so, I’m not one of those people who wants to be a ‘New Yorker’ for life. Sometimes, I really need space.

“I have a sort of ‘grass is always greener’ mentality,” he smiles. “The most peaceful place for me is in-between cities: you’ve got your friends, you’ve got your band, and you’re out there, suspended from the world. It’s an escape. Being a musician, being able to spend a year isolated, recording music, and then spend the next year travelling the world, playing it for people, is really good for my well-being.”

Conor Oberst’s political awakening came with the American Presidential Election of 2000, which saw George W. Bush awarded a keenly-contested presidency over his Democrat opponent, outgoing Vice President Al Gore.

“When I was a teenager, politics weren’t even within my realm of reality,” Oberst remembers, “But in 2000, I remember reading some of his statements and thinking ‘Wow, I hope this young Bush doesn’t get in!’ We were touring in Europe when the election happened; I was just in absolute shock when he ‘won’. And then 9/11 accelerated everything.”

In early 2001, Oberst formed Desaparecidos, with local Omaha musicians. A punk-rock group who took their name from the political dissidents who were murdered by the government during Argentina’s Dirty War, they recorded a venomous and angry album, *Read Music/Speak Spanish, with lyrics that were, Oberst says, “Anti-consumerism, anti-commercialism, and – if you want to define it as that – anti-American.”

The group had just finished recording their album when the attacks of September 11^th happened. “I had this sick feeling in my stomach,” remembers Oberst. “I felt, Can we release this record now? It was a fragile time, everybody was freaked out. I was too. But the most American thing you can do is to speak your mind. Freedom of speech, freedom of expression, these are the things I love about democracy, about America. What better time to put that out? It got a mixed reaction. Some people said, ‘Stupid middle class white kid, what do you have to complain about?’” he sniffs. “But I’ve gotten that ‘critique’ forever, it’s not such a big deal.”

As the build-up to war progressed, Oberst became a self-confessed ‘news-junkie’, poring over the daily papers and watching hours of cable news broadcasts. Politics bled into the lyrics of 2002’s Lifted, and the two albums he released simultaneously in early 2005, the yearning, acoustic-based I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning (featuring Emmylou Harris’s unmistakeable harmonies on three tracks), and its dark, electronic twin, Digital Ash In A Digital Urn, an album Conor described as “dealing with the fear of death, and trying to move past that.” A vegan, he voiced his support for PETA, and boycotted the Clear Channel network of music venues in protest of their corporate policies. And in October 2004, at Michael Stipe’s personal request, he toured America alongside REM and Bruce Springsteen for the Vote For Change Tour, a decidedly-partisan, anti-Bush voter registration drive.

“That whole experience was real empowering; participating in the political system, representing my beliefs in the public forum,” he remembers. “I’ve been so lucky to get to meet and play with REM, and Springsteen, and Neil Young. They’re all musical idols, but the way they conduct their business, the way they are as human beings, is inspiring. It gives me hope – I could last that long, and maybe never be that great musically, but be that intelligent, that compassionate.

“And then, the election.” He sighs darkly. “I was convinced Bush couldn’t win. I was sure of it. And when it happened… Total devastation. It was probably the worst I’ve ever felt. We straight away went to Europe for a press trip, and I was so down about it, so frightened. I couldn’t see how we could even survive another four years under that maniac.”

On a stormy ferry trip from Ireland to the UK, Oberst channelled these emotions into a new song. The sulphurously rancorous ‘When The President Talks To God’ was debuted that night, November 17^th 2004, at London’s ULU, where lyrics like “When the president talks to God / Does he ask to rape our women’s rights / And send poor farm kids off to die?” tapped into a growing antagonism toward the ‘War On Terror’. The song was rush-recorded and released as a free mp3 download on iTunes, and Oberst performed the song on national US television in May 2005, on the Tonight with Jay Leno show.

“When I played it that night in London,” he remembers, “I didn’t even really know the lyrics, I was reading them off a sheet of paper. That night marked a change: I’m not gonna just sit here and get depressed. I’m gonna get louder.”

Oberst’s political awakening doesn’t mean he’s above making a drunken fool of himself and getting into trouble. No, if a man ever truly learns from his mistakes, Conor has gleaned plenty of painful wisdom from the last few years. He shifts uncomfortably in the chaise-longue as he recalls his misadventures at the Glastonbury festival in 2005, when, while headlining Sunday night on the inaugural John Peel stage, he drunkenly muttered in front of thousands of woozy festival-goers that “John Peel was a cokehead; I suppose that's why I like him, we have a lot in common.”

“I regret it,” he sighs, sincerely. “It’s the exact opposite of how I really feel. There’s a record store in Omaha called the Antiquarium, and the guy who runs it, Dave Sink, had a buddy in England tape the John Peel radio shows for him, and send them over. He’d play them in the store, and we’d all hang out there and listen to them.

“I was just out-of-my-mind,” he frowns, fidgeting like a naughty little boy in the headmaster’s office. “We were winding down towards the end of a year on the road, partying. We’d just flown in from Europe, and it had been raining for days, and everyone at the festival had just given up. We didn’t have any English money, we literally had to beg to buy some beer. We got real drunk, and I’d taken a lot of mushrooms. I basically didn’t have an idea what I was saying, I was just randomly spewing words. I’ve always had a bad habit of defaming whatever people find sacred, when I’m in a certain mood. I don’t really mean it, it’s just this terrible little demon side of me.”

He says that when Bright Eyes take to the road again, later this year, they will be “A little smarter, not kill ourselves. Getting ‘fucked up’ is such a part of rock’n’roll, because it becomes all you can do. When people say, ‘I’m gonna party like a rock’n’roll star!’, they don’t understand that rock’n’roll stars get fucked up because they’re far away from home, dealing with peoples’ expectations of them, and sick half the time. It might look romantic from the outside, but it really isn’t. It’s an occupational hazard, a negative side-effect of what we do. You just have to grow up and deal with it better, watch out for yourself and your friends, try and keep everyone healthy in both body and mind. We’re learning along the way.”

With maturity often comes a bitter exchange, of innocence for wisdom. You’ll find that wisdom scattered across Oberst’s lyrics, sharing lessons learned, detailing his failings and foul-ups, trying to make a sense of it all – even the things you can’t make sense of. It’s his way of surviving.

“There’s a certain clarity I get from songwriting,” he explains. “If I’m depressed about something I try express that in a form that’s positive and soothing, like a song. It actually does make me feel at peace with whatever I’ve been struggling with.

“Is it still fun?” he asks, rhetorically, of his career. “Not all of it, but it’s more fun than not. I think I have less fun in general, now. Sadly, I think that’s just part of growing up. When you’re young, your world’s not yet formed – everything’s possible, nothing’s been decided. Then, reality sets in. A lot of the things I found exciting at first have worn off, a little. The obvious things: girls, drugs. Even performing, a little. It just has to be that way, I guess.”

In the intervening hour or so since the interview began, the moon has risen, the New York skyline turning with wintery speed from pale aquamarine, to deep blue, and finally black. Oberst sits silhouetted against the window, his green eyes glinting in the gloom. Save for light from the front room leaking in from under the door, the room is entirely dark. By way of a closing question, I ask Oberst if the “fear of death” which inspired *Digital Ash For A Digital Urn has eased at all.

“Um… I guess, no. It’s been a shitty week,” he sighs, sadly. “A girl who played in the band with us passed away this last weekend.”

Clearing his throat, he begins to talk, about the girl, and the pain of her death, his words trying to make some sense of it all. Open and unguarded, he speaks with the same sensitivity, the same fearless honesty that makes Bright Eyes’ music so compelling, so deeply affecting, and sometimes so hard to take.

“She was the most amazingly brilliant, beautiful girl, and she was just 24 years old,” he continues. “So perfect, so irreplaceable… It’s so tragic. When you lose someone... That’s the most unfair thing about life. That it changes. I want to understand this, and accept this, but I can’t. I can’t really process it all properly right now.”

Boyish in the half-light, he’s visibly struggling with the loss, peace eluding him for now. As we gather our things and make our way for the elevator, Conor is quiet, still lost somewhere in his thoughts, searching towards something.

(c) Stevie Chick

Where To Start With... Nirvana

[from Kerrang!, 2007]

DAVE GROHL recently said, “People think Nirvana travelled with a black cloud following us, and it’s absolutely not true.” Kurt Cobain’s tragic suicide threatens to overshadow his group’s brief blaze of glory, but they remain a crucial flashpoint in rock history. Fusing metal, punk, and pop with a deft underground sensibility and multi-platinum success, Nirvana became uneasy celebrities with 1991’s ‘Nevermind’ – the album that ‘broke’ grunge to America. Wilting in the limelight, Cobain was an awkward anti-rockstar, railing against rock’s sexism and homophobia, at his new ‘jock’ fanbase (the sort of kids who bullied him at school) and, ultimately, himself – a man just too-sensitive to handle the pressure. But it was that very sensitivity that connected so profoundly with Nirvana’s fans. Today, Kurt’s haunted blue eyes stare out from countless tee-shirts, worn by kids too young to remember Cobain as anything other than a Pretty Rockstar Corpse. But the fierce intelligence and passion of Nirvana’s music hasn’t dimmed in the years since, and none of their multitudinous followers ever spliced acrid emotion and brutal melody so brilliantly.

ESSENTIAL PURCHASE 60

‘NEVERMIND’

(GEFFEN, 1991)

POLISHING COBAIN’S fertile melodicism to a gleaming napalm shine, this was a subversive treat. A blast of high-impact pop played with punk fury and metallic precision, Novoselic’s colossal bass, Grohl’s pulverising drums and Cobain’s howl offsetting the strychnine-sweet harmonies. Almost every track could have been released as a single; those that were, are among rock’s very greatest tunes.

FOLLOW-UP PURCHASE

‘IN UTERO’

(GEFFEN, 1994)

WITH STEVE Albini at the controls, Cobain drew upon the raw angst wrought by their newfound fame. Moments of blood-stained beauty (‘All Apologies’) nestle alongside acrid sludge (‘Milk It’) and self-lacerating pop (‘Heart Shaped Box’), angst, art and autobiography blurring into an uncompromising, uncomfortable mess. The sound of a breakdown, captured in unflinching verite style.

ALSO RECOMMENDED

‘BLEACH’

(SUB POP, 1989)

RECORDED FOR $606, Nirvana’s debut portrayed a band in thrall to friends The Melvins’ stunning sludge-core sound, tempering the uncut grunge with Kurt’s budding knack for pop songwriting. Scuzzier and heavier than what came after, ‘Bleach’ thrums with downtuned menace and ennui and Cobain’s acidic lyrics, but ‘About A Girl’ points to a more palatable future.

WILD CARD

‘INCESTICIDE’

(GEFFEN, 1992)

WITH ‘NEVERMIND’ still selling and no follow-up on the horizon, Geffen released this stopgap compilation of out-takes and rarities. A mixed bag of ugly grunge and brash pop, it acquainted new fans to Nirvana’s more self-indulgent side, but also featured bona-fide classics ‘Sliver’ and ‘Aneurysm’. Also includes covers of songs by Kurt’s beloved Vaselines, Glaswegian indie-tykes who probably still live off royalty payments from this album.

AVOID

‘MTV UNPLUGGED IN NEW YORK’

(GEFFEN, 1994)

WORTH BUYING for Bowie cover ‘The Man Who Sold The World’ alone, and the Meat Puppets covers (featuring the Puppets themselves) are great, as is the blood-curdling take on Leadbelly’s ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night’. Otherwise, Unplugged presents lesser versions of Nirvana classics for Coldplay-loving yuppies who couldn’t see past ‘Nevermind’’s metallic noise and truly appreciate Cobain’s genius. Their loss.

BURN THESE: THE ULTIMATE NIRVANA MIX CD 30

‘LOVE BUZZ’

THEIR DEBUT 7”, a limited pressing of 1000 on Seattle label Sub Pop: a metallic cover of Shocking Blue’s bubblegum curio that’s heavy, and heavily ‘pop’.

FIND IT: ‘Bleach’, 1990

‘ABOUT A GIRL’

MORE BEATLES than Black Sabbath, Kurt’s gathers the courage to record an acoustic ditty, discovering a hitherto-hidden gift for bittersweet melody.

FIND IT: ‘Bleach’, 1990

‘SCHOOL’

HEAVY SLUDGE riffage in extremis, over which Kurt snarls, “You’re in high school again,” like that were the worst fate imaginable. “And no recess!”

FIND IT: ‘Bleach’, 1990

‘SCOFF’

KURT’S WHITE-TRASH roots show on this Melvins-esque stomp, the lyric dissecting grim, alcoholic realities of life in a trailer park. The sense of alienation is palpable.

FIND IT: ‘Bleach’, 1990

‘SLIVER’

KURT’S SINGALONG howl of “Gramma take me home!” touches on childhood terror of abandonment. The fusion of melody and distortion coined the Nevermind blueprint.

FIND IT: ‘Incesticide’, 1992

‘BEEN A SON’

MORE ALIENATION, as Kurt – a most feminised rocker – sings of a girl smothered by her parents’ unrealistic expectations, to a nagging, harmony-drenched crunch.

FIND IT: ‘Incesticide’, 1992

‘SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT’

THE SONG that sold a million plaid shirts – a razor-sharp riff, intriguing lyrics and a chord change stolen from Boston swiftly make Nirvana the biggest band in the world.

FIND IT: ‘Nevermind’, 1991

‘ANEURYSM’

‘TEEN SPIRIT’’S B-Side is a squalling, nightmarish anthem, a spidery riff drawing tighter as Kurt screams “She keeps it pumping straight to my heart,” dark drug references abounding.

FIND IT: ‘With The Lights Out’, 2004

‘COME AS YOU ARE’

WITH A loping bassline half-inched from Killing Joke, ‘CAYA’ was hypnotic, heavy on ‘radio friendly sheen’ – the sound of Nirvana stealthily seducing the mainstream.

FIND IT: ‘Nevermind’, 1991

‘LITHIUM’

NAMED FOR an anti-depressant, ‘Lithium’’s tale of loneliness and disaffection chimed along to their sweetest tune yet, riding hard on that crucial quiet/loud dynamic.

FIND IT: ‘Nevermind’, 1991

‘TERRITORIAL PISSINGS’

PROVING THEY could still bare their fangs, this was one of ‘Nevermind’’s three balls-out hardcore thrashes, a chaotic, revving, vaguely pro-feminist anthem.

FIND IT: ‘Nevermind’, 1991

‘D7’

COVERING PORTLAND punks The Wipers’ gloomy alienation anthem for BBC’s John Peel, Kurt nods in respect to hero Greg Sage and unleashes a killer barb-wire guitar solo.

FIND IT: ‘With The Lights Out’, 2004

‘VERSE CHORUS VERSE’

HIDDEN AT the end of AIDS charity compilation No Alternative, this keening blast of melancholic pop mused subtly on patriarchal society via a doomed-love song.

FIND IT: ‘With The Lights Out’, 2004

‘SERVE THE SERVANTS’

BITING THE hand that feeds, a snarling, cynical Kurt counts the profits and costs of stardom and notes, “Teenage angst has paid off well”. He doesn’t sound happy about it.

FIND IT: ‘In Utero’, 1993

‘HEART SHAPED BOX’

FREUD WOULD have had a field day with this lyric and its references to wombs, and suffocation, and love (the emotion), and Love (Courtney).

FIND IT: ‘In Utero’, 1993

‘MILK IT’

MORE FREUDIAN angst, as Kurt howls of parasites, shit and suicide, over a chilling chainsaw-massacre riff. ‘In Utero’ at its brilliantly-bleak best.

FIND IT: ‘In Utero’, 1993

‘ALL APOLOGIES’

DEBUTED AT Reading ’92 and dedicated to Kurt’s newborn daughter, this achingly beautiful statement of confusion and resignation closed ‘In Utero’ on an uneasy calm.

FIND IT: ‘In Utero’, 1993

‘THE MAN WHO SOLD THE WORLD’

KURT SINGS Bowie’s haunting song of winning the world but losing your soul like it was his own, closing out with a glorious, sad, eloquent guitar solo.

FIND IT: ‘Unplugged In New York’, 1995

‘WHERE DID YOU SLEEP LAST NIGHT?’

CLOSING THEIR landmark unplugged session, Kurt’s take on bluesman Leadbelly’s murder ballad is so wracked and from-the-heart it’ll leave you with an unshakeable chill.

FIND IT: ‘Unplugged In New York’, 1995

‘DO RE MI’

FRAGILE AND wracked, Kurt’s ‘last song’ is a happy-sad acoustic strum clouded by child-like confusion and yearning, an odd, affecting, unforgettable and magic thing.

FIND IT: ‘With The Lights Out’, 2004

I HEART NIRVANA

MARK HAMILTON, ASH

“THEY’RE THE first band I truly loved and felt connected to on a personal level; they were anything but the pretentious cliched rock-stars of the time. The music wasn't complicated, it was raw, loud, honest and heavy as fuck. Kurt's voice was both vulnerable, melodic and chaotic but with none of the macho bullshit that's way too prevalent in a lot of metal. We'd just played a show in Southampton when we found out he’d died; it didn't seem real, like a bad joke no-one wanted to believe. I had a hard time dealing with it when we got off that tour and got home to Downpatrick. It honestly felt like losing a relative – it was surreal mourning someone I didn't personally know. As much as Kurt didn't want to be a role-model or spokes-person for anyone, Nirvana were a big deal in a lot of kids’ lives, and his death had a profound effect on us. There's not been a band since that have had such a following or made such an impact. I prefer to remember Nirvana for that exciting period when there were kids everywhere trying to emulate them and starting bands, not caring that they couldn't play a note. Half the bands that are playing today wouldn't exist if it wasn't for Nirvana. They changed the face of music completely and put heavy guitar bands onto mainstream radio. Metal owes them for making people wake up from up their hair-metal arses and rethink their lives! At the end of the day does anything sounds as great as when Teen Spirit comes on the PA at a club? Go take a history lesson in rock and get all their albums.”

(c) Stevie Chick 2007

Great Grandad, Nan, the late 60s (?)

Great Grandad, Nan, the late 60s (?), originally uploaded by Stevie Chick, Foxy Boxer.

great old picture from my nan

Where To Start With... Husker Du

KRIST NOVOSELIC once said Nirvana’s blend of pop, punk and metal was “nothing new, Husker Du did it before us.” A trio from Minneapolis, featuring singer/guitarist Bob Mould, singing drummer Grant Hart and moustachioed bassist Greg Norton, Husker Du started out the fastest punks on the block, mellowing their pace but not their intensity for a faultless run of albums on the influential SST label. Perfecting a marriage of melodic thrash and emotionally complex lyrics, they were one of the first hardcore bands to ‘cross over’ to a Major Label, releasing two fine albums with Warner Bros, before tensions between Hart and Mould – hardcore’s own Lennon & McCartney – tore the band apart in 1988 (the suicide of manager David Savoy, and Hart’s escalating heroin addiction, were key factors). Mould would later enjoy success with his grunge-pop trio Sugar, and as a solo artist with an interest in electronica, while Hart formed the ill-fated Nova Mob, and intermittently pursues a solo career. Norton, meanwhile, is now a chef running a successful restaurant in Minnesota.

I HEART HUSKER DU

MATT DAVIES, FUNERAL FOR A FRIEND

“I always read interviews to find out what my favourites bands’ influences are, and Husker Du were always a name I’d heard being thrown around in circles. They influenced a lot of the groups I loved when I first got into them, like Jawbreaker – that post-punk sound, verging on aggressive, but balanced it with great melodies and complex parts. It’s almost ‘thinking man’s punk’; it wasn’t just abrasive, it was very cathartic, as well as being very passionate. I took a chance on ‘Candy Apple Grey’ in a record store one day – it was nice and cheap! That’s their first album for a major label. It took me a while to ‘get it’ – because I’d been into Bob Mould’s band Sugar before, and they were a lot more melodic than Husker Du. It took a while to adjust to that fiery sound. Then I got ‘New Day Rising’, which is my favourite – I have a New Day Rising tee-shirt which I tracked down in Boston when we toured there.

“I think Bob Mould was my favourite Du songwriter – I was such a huge fan of Sugar, and his method of songwriting – capturing the sense of a moment, making you feel like you were actually there, to make you feel as angry or as down as he was feeling. Husker Du made me realise that there’s more to punk rock than just sheeny-shiny production and uber-wicked backing vocals. Don’t get me wrong – I love Bad Religion to death, but it was nice to get an alternative to that.”

ESSENTIAL PURCHASE

‘ZEN ARCADE’

(SST, 1984)

RECORDED IN 40 hours, this ambitious double-album chronicled a homeless punk kid’s descent into madness, leaving his broken home for the refuge of the streets, and its junkies and hookers. Encompassing nosebleed hardcore, acoustic strum, psychedelic pop and 15 minute jazz-mantra improvs, this dark, psychologically-scarred album won the mostly-overlooked hardcore genre a new respect in the mainstream.

FOLLOW-UP PURCHASE

‘NEW DAY RISING’

(SST, 1985)

FIRST OF two pop albums they released in 1985, ‘New Day Rising’ captures a band on fire and perfecting their sound, sunshine melodies gleaming behind the scouring guitars and serrated vocals. The Beatles-esque ‘Books About UFOs’ and the whimsical ‘Celebrated Summer’ were highlights, mature songcraft signalling the group’s move away from hardcore’s tunnel-vision, coining a template Nirvana would ride to success.

ALSO RECOMMENDED

‘WAREHOUSE: SONGS AND STORIES’

THEIR FINAL album was another double, twenty crushed diamonds of punk-pop poetry drawn from the roaring guitars and heart-attack drums. They never sounded more melodic, more accessible, but the darker lyrical content spoke the truth: the band were already done, Hart’s psychotic, groove-driven closer ‘You Can Live At Home Now’ a fierce farewell note to Husker Du.

WILD CARD

‘LAND SPEED RECORD’

(New Alliance, 1981)

17 SONGS in 26 minutes, this live set rushed past at fierce velocity, a whirlwind of napalm-spitting fretboard runs. The gonzoid thrash of ‘Bricklayer’ – 2 verses, 2 choruses and a guitar solo in 53 seconds – is a highlight, but this molten mess of frantic riffage is best experienced as a whole, remaining one of the most extreme statements of the hardcore genre.

AVOID

‘EVERYTHING FALLS APART’

(New Alliance, 1982)

WHERE EARLY Huskers’ hardcore flared furiously on Land Speed Record, it sputtered in the studio. Warners’ later CD reissue adds awesome early single ‘In A Free Land’ and the anthemic ‘Do You Remember?’ (the title translating their band name, taken from a Swedish boardgame), but the album itself is frustratingly limp, save for the angsty power-pop of the title track.

BURN THESE: THE ULTIMATE HUSKER DU MIX CD

‘IN A FREE LAND’

OLD SKOOL guitar heroics abound in this melodic, hard-riffing rant, evidence of Husker Du’s short-lived period as politicised punks.

FIND IT: ‘Everything Falls Apart & More’, 1993

‘BIG SKY’

OF ALL Land Speed Record’s lightning-strike whirlwinds, Big Sky punched hardest, its riffs like fighter-jets screeching into the ground.

FIND IT: ‘Land Speed Record’, 1981

‘IT’S NOT FUNNY ANYMORE’

THERAPY? COVERED this EP’s rape/murder fantasy ‘Diane’, but the chiming pop melodies and whip-smart lyrics made this the highlight.

FIND IT: ‘Metal Circus’, 1983

‘NEVER TALKING TO YOU AGAIN’

BITTER FAREWELL-letter to abusive parents, set to heart-broken acoustic strum. Huskers’ growing maturity and ambition inspired the hardcore community.

FIND IT: ‘Zen Arcade’, 1984

‘PRIDE’

SIDE TWO of ‘Zen Arcade’ was a furious, unbroken rush of bloodthirsty thrash, ‘Pride’ the most venomous, Mould’s self-lacerating vocal shredding the speakers.

FIND IT: ‘Zen Arcade’, 1984

‘PINK TURNS TO BLUE’

‘ZEN ARCADE’’s nameless hero discovers his junkie girlfriend’s corpse, to the tear-stained strains of Grant Hart’s psyche-pop lament. A career highlight.

FIND IT: ‘Zen Arcade’, 1984

‘WHATEVER’

THE PUNK kid explains his secret life to his parents, perhaps a veiled reference to Mould’s own (then-secret) homosexuality.

FIND IT: ‘Zen Arcade’, 1984

‘EIGHT MILES HIGH’

DOUSING THE Byrds’ psychedelic classic in kerosene, this 7” almost buckled under the weight of Mould’s gut-wrenching howls and lacerating fretboard runs.

FIND IT: ‘Eight Miles High’, 1984

‘CELEBRATED SUMMER’

A LUMP-IN-THROAT farewell to adolescence, Mould’s startlingly mature, poignant lyric is well matched by the sort of melodicism Get Up Kids would later explore.

FIND IT: ‘New Day Rising’, 1985

’59 TIMES THE PAIN’

FRACTURED, ODDBALL, this brooding hurricane of anguish posited Mould as his generation’s insightful bard of dysfunction and disaffection.

FIND IT: ‘New Day Rising’, 1985

‘BOOKS ABOUT UFOS’

HART’S BUDDY Holly-esque croon perfectly matches the giddy pianos and frazzled guitars on this light-hearted love song – perfect Summer mixtape music.

FIND IT: ‘New Day Rising’, 1985

‘MAKES NO SENSE AT ALL’

MOULD CALLS the emperor out as naked in this phosphorent jangle-driven thrash, mid-period Du’s apotheosis.

FIND IT: ‘Flip Your Wig’, 1985

‘DON’T WANT TO KNOW IF YOU ARE LONELY’

HART’S UNFLINCHING analysis of the aftermath of a broken relationship evidenced the maturity and intensity of Warners-era Du.

FIND IT: ‘Candy Apple Grey’, 1986

‘TOO FAR DOWN’

MOULD’S SUICIDAL confession is breath-taking in its honesty and darkness; accompanied by brittle acoustic, he sounds bereft.

FIND IT: ‘Candy Apple Grey’, 1986

‘HARDLY GETTING OVER IT’

FEW PUNK bands would dare record such sombre musings upon mortality; Husker Du had the balls, and the skill to make it darkly electrifying.

FIND IT: ‘Candy Apple Grey’, 1986

‘FRIEND, YOU’VE GOT TO FALL’

A NEON psyche-pop riff accelerated Mould’s account of a friend living too fast – Hart, perhaps – into a savage grunge-pop classic.

FIND IT: ‘Warehouse: Songs & Stories’, 1987

‘ACTUAL CONDITION’

HART AFFECTS a rockabilly holler for his haywire country-punk response, a perversely-upbeat admission of emotional deterioration.

FIND IT: ‘Warehouse: Songs & Stories’, 1987

‘NO RESERVATIONS’

MOODY PROTO-EMO scores Mould’s philosophical admission of defeat – or, at least, acceptance that his future lies elsewhere.

FIND IT: ‘Warehouse: Songs & Stories’, 1987

‘VISIONARY’

CRUNCHING METALLIC riffage and multi-tracked harmonies glimpse at the direction Mould’s post-Du group Sugar will take.

FIND IT: ‘Warehouse: Songs & Stories’, 1987

‘KEEP HANGING ON’

RECORDED ON their final tour, Hart’s optimistic ‘Flip Your Wig’ anthem is recast as anguished last-ditch attempt as reconciliation.

FIND IT: ‘The Living End’, 1993

(c) Stevie Chick 2006

Where To Start With… Screaming Trees

They formed in the rural wastelands of Ellensburg, WA. Van and Gary Lee Connor were man-mountain brothers playing in a covers band; Mark Lanegan was a local wild-boy always in trouble with the cops, driving trucks for the Connor family’s repo business. When Lanegan took the microphone Screaming Trees were born, touring the US and recording albums of psychedelic proto-grunge for SST Records, penned mostly by drug-abstaining Gary Lee (Lanegan had been selling drugs for some years by this point). They signed to Epic at the start of the 90s, their Lanegan-penned ‘Sweet Oblivion’ - a set of anguished country and blues-influenced classic rock - the most potent and profound album of the Grunge explosion. But deserved success never arrived for this fractious band, and the tempestuous, Josh Homme-aided tour for the majestic ‘Dust’ was their last. Lanegan fought his addictions, pursued an acclaimed solo career and joined QOTSA as a floating member; following a farewell set opening the Seattle Experience Music Project in June 2000, Screaming Trees finally withered.

I HEART SCREAMING TREES

Dave Grohl, Foo Fighters

“Sometime during the first few months of living with Kurt, we went up to Seattle to visit Mark Lanegan and his friend Dylan Carson [of the drone-core band Earth], who shared a house. We went out drinking that night and we got back about 3am, and they put me on this pullout couch in the living room, where I passed out. I remember waking up, and there was Mark, sitting in a chair at the end of the bed. I looked up at him, and he said, who the fuck are you? I said, I’m Dave, Kurt’s new drummer. We sat there talking for a while, and that was the genesis of our relationship. [laughs]

I remember listening to his solo album, ‘The Winding Sheet’, over and over again, when I was living in Olympia. It was Winter, when the sun wouldn’t come up until 8am, and would go down by 2 or 3pm - it was like a rainy Scandinavia, it was fucking depressing. And that album was the perfect soundtrack for that season.

Mark is one of the most gifted and tortured artists you’ll ever hear. I have nothing but respect for that guy. I remember Nirvana playing Roskilde festival in Denmark with the Screaming Trees, 1992. In the middle of their set Lanegan freaked out, picked up a monitor and threw it into the pit and beat up three or four security guards. We had to hide him in the dressing room. But you don’t wanna mess with that dude. Give him a microphone, let him sing, then get the fuck out of his way.”

ESSENTIAL PURCHASE

‘Sweet Oblivion’

(Epic, 1992)

DEEP STEWED angst filtered through soaring riffage, ‘Sweet Oblivion’ showcased Lanegan’s burnished vocals and Gary Lee’s howling, poignant solos. ‘Dollar Bill’, a brilliantly-wretched farewell ballad, became their signature tune, while the disarmingly-pop ‘Nearly Lost You’ features on the soundtrack to ‘grunge’ rom-com Singles. But it’s the pulverisingly bleak, heroic ‘No One Knows’ that kills hardest, Lanegan audibly wracked with guilt and regret.

FOLLOW-UP PURCHASE

‘Dust’

(Epic, 1996)

AFTER SCRAPPING two albums’ worth of material recorded after ‘Sweet Oblivion’, the Trees hooked up with legendary producer George Drakoulias (Aerosmith, Black Crowes) for this psychedelic epic, Drakoulias honing the cinematic breadth of the Trees’ classic riffage. Strings, tabla, sitars - all were enlisted for this grand, finely-detailed canvas, and Lanegan was never in finer voice. Still, the mainstream remained unmoved, and subsequent drug- and violence-fuelled touring finally killed the band.

ALSO RECOMMENDED

‘Anthology: SST Years 1985-1989’

(SST, 1991)

LATER DISOWNED by Lanegan, the Trees recorded three albums and an EP for legendary hardcore label SST during the 1980s, tentative tracks that spanned garage-rock, psychedelia, and the classic-grunge that later won them fame. ‘Anthology’ compiles choice moments from these impossible-to-find albums, at times amateurish and awkward, but more often grandiose and glorious in the Trees tradition. ‘Grey Diamond Desert’ is worth entrance fee alone.

WILD CARD

‘Whiskey For The Holy Ghost’

(Sub Pop, 1993)

LANEGAN’S SOLO career began in 1989 with an aborted EP of Leadbelly covers accompanied by Nirvana’s Kris and Kurdt; a version of ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night’ from that session made the cut for his solo debut, ‘The Winding Sheet’. This follow-up is Lanegan’s favourite, compiled from various aborted sessions over 4 years, a darker and deeper vein of blues than Screaming Trees ever mined. The thunderous ‘Boracho’ is the highlight.

AVOID

‘Uncle Anaesthesia’

(Epic, 1991)

FROM ITS grotesque sleeve to the weedy production job from Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell (Don Fleming would prove on ‘Sweet Oblivion’ to be the Trees’ perfect match), everything about the Trees’ major-label debut is a misfire. Even the songs, caught between their psychedelic past and their classic-grunge future, never quite inspire. Its failure temporarily split the forever-feuding band, and inspired Lanegan to finally take the reins.

BURN THESE!

Cold Rain

A STROLL across the Northwestern landscape during a thunderstorm-abetted acid trip, soaking up addled magic, this whimsical, rough-hewn stomp captures early Trees at their naive best.

FIND IT: ‘Even If And Especially When’, 1987

In The Forest

BRUTAL STACCATO guitar slashes open this vicious garage-rock throw-down, pondering the primal Law of the Jungle. “This animal’s wild, he roams where he wants,” warns Lanegan.

FIND IT: ‘Even If And Especially When’, 1987

Girl Behind The Mask

A GHOSTLY, shimmering ballad, the earliest indication of where Lanegan’s muse would later wander. His baritone rings like Seattle’s answer to Nick Cave, swaggering and mysterious.

FIND IT: ‘Even If And Especially When’, 1987

Grey Diamond Desert

LANEGAN’S WEARY vocal hovers wisely over echoing sand-dune guitars and reverb-drenched pianos. Stunningly evocative and bravely experimental, it’s the best of their work for SST, and maybe their career.

FIND IT: ‘Invisible Lantern’, 1988

End Of The Universe

THIS WONDERFULLY ludicrous epic of bubblegum psychedelia delivers Armageddon with a whip crack riff of planet-levelling proportions. Lanegan sounds almost grateful for obliteration.

FIND IT: ‘Buzz Factory’, 1989

I’ve Seen You Before

THEIR EARLY psychedelic experiments redrawn with a new confidence, this sliver from their sole release on Sub Pop is a trip of karmic guitar, death-rattle tambourine, and Lanegan’s stoned, immaculate vocal.

FIND IT: ‘Change Has Come’ EP, 1990

Disappearing

A BRIGHT spot amid the mire of ‘Uncle Anaethesia’, this elegant, eerie Calexican waltz indicates the influence Lanegan’s solo work would soon have over the later Trees output.

FIND IT: ‘Uncle Anaesthesia’, 1991

Shadow Of The Season

AN EXISTENTIAL blues written from the brink. Over a spidery Old Testament squall, Lanegan sounds impressively ancient, pondering options of “pain and misery” or “sweet oblivion”.

FIND IT: ‘Sweet Oblivion’, 1992

I Nearly Lost You

LANEGAN’S TALE of a relationship run adrift infests Gary Lee’s wah-wah riff with fear and paranoia for Screaming Trees’ lone MTV-approved almost-hit. Elemental and elegant rock.

FIND IT: ‘Sweet Oblivion’, 1992

Dollar Bill

“I DON’T want to hurt you,” rails Lanegan, over sombre and graceful guitar and strings, “But that’s all I seem to do.” Sometimes “Goodbye” is a harder word to say than “Sorry”, but you still gotta say it.

FIND IT: ‘Sweet Oblivion’, 1992

More Or Less

A MORDANT slog etched with regret, Gary Lee’s wailing solos ringing with poignant, bitter wisdom. “Just be glad that it’s all over”, sighs Lanegan, offering the coldest of comforts.

FIND IT: ‘Sweet Oblivion’, 1992

No One Knows

“WHAT HAVE I done wrong?” howls Lanegan, noble and wretched, as Gary Lee’s guitar screams a soaring, sad refrain. That voice again, desperate now: “Won’t somebody tell me, what have I done wrong?”

FIND IT: ‘Sweet Oblivion’, 1992

Julie Paradise

THIS CLIMACTIC murder blues is a pounding, desperate brawl of wounded wailing and lashing fluorescent guitars, sounding like the band trashed the studio in the process

FIND IT: ‘Sweet Oblivion’, 1992

Paperback Bible

FROM 1994 sessions for ‘Sweet Oblivion’’s abandoned follow-up, tying its redemptive message - “Mercy’s there to find” - to a buckling Zep riff. Colossal, and grimly hopeful.

FIND IT: ‘Ocean Of Confusion: Songs 1990-1996’

Caught Between/The Secret Kind

CAPTURED FOR a B-Side while touring ‘Sweet Oblivion’: the Screaming Trees live. It’s a searing, animalistic noise, Barrett Martin pummelling his kit to atoms on this chainsaw medley.

FIND IT: ‘Sworn And Broken’, 1996

Halo Of Ashes

THE OPENING rush of sitars announces the grandiose flair of Drakoulias-era Trees: crushing riffs couched in eerie harmonies, adding a mystical heft to their already-considerable weight.

FIND IT: ‘Dust’, 1996

Dying Days

AN ELEGY for all the dead rock-stars, this song of survival sharpened by a spitfire guitar solo from Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready. “Ghost town used to be my city,” mourns Lanegan of Seattle.

FIND IT: ‘Dust’, 1996

Sworn And Broken

FRAGILE AND beautiful, this secular gospel of regret was one of Screaming Trees most sombre, subtle and austere songs, melting into a choir of celestial organs for its heart-breaking coda.

FIND IT: ‘Dust’, 1996

Make My Mind

“JUST WANNA leave this world behind,” croons Lanegan, on this chiming classic rock hymnal, caught between abandoning his sinful life for a better one, or for that which follows death.

FIND IT: ‘Dust’, 1996

Gospel Plow

THEIR FINAL gasp opens like an Eastern spiritual, and closes only after a monolithic, prehistoric riff has reduced their collective neuroses - life, death, love, drugs, God - to ashes and dust.

FIND IT: ‘Dust’, 1996

(c) Stevie Chick, 2006

Where To Start With... Fugazi

Former leader of Minor Threat Ian MacKaye’s second great group are perhaps punk’s most fiercely inventive and fiercely independent band. United by a desire for musical experimentation and a love of James Brown, MacKaye hooked up with drummer Brendan Canty and bassist Joe Lally in 1987 to form a trio soon augmented by second singer Guy Picciotto (of emo progenitors Rites Of Spring). Taking their name from military slang meaning ‘fucked-up situation’, Fugazi mixed political stridency with skulking, funk-informed riffage, capping gig and record prices, shunning merchandising, and confronting hardcore’s ingrained culture of violence and bigotry.

Beyond their legendary integrity, Fugazi have restlessly challenged hard-core’s creative frontiers, while Picciotto’s balletic flailings and MacKaye’s feral bark ensured Fugazi shows thrilled right up until their (hopefully temporary) hiatus, announced 2002. Any band who ever believed ‘punk’ means more than some mainstream-approved pose owes plenty to Fugazi. Sample that spirit at the source…

I HEART FUGAZI

RODDY WOOMBLE IDLEWILD

“AS FAR as rock music goes, and certainly as far as pure rock music goes, there is no better band on planet earth than Washington DC’s Fugazi. And by ‘pure rock music, I mean the true essence of plugging an electric guitar into an amplifier and expressing something as honestly as you can, which is the true essence of Fugazi and their music. They have an impeccable drive for political action; for decades they’ve been playing benefit shows for worthy causes (every show in their hometown of DC has been a benefit show), and bringing important issues and positive political and social organisations to their audience’s attention.

“But even disregarding their political affiliations, they are the best live rock band around, full stop. Their complete absence of rock star pretensions (they always play under neutral coloured lights), the sense of entertainment, euphoria and also, importantly, the sense that you're all part of something together is what has made
them such a potent musical force since the 1980s. Having two of the most watchable frontmen in American music also hasn’t hurt.

“Their records have always pushed the boundaries of what people expected of them, In On The Killtaker and The Argument in particular. Brilliant performers, activists,
musicians, Fugazi mean everything to the people who know them. And for people who don't? Well, they don't know what they're missing.”

ESSENTIAL PURCHASE

‘13 Songs’

(Dischord, 1990)

COMBINING THEIR first 2 EPs, Fugazi and Margin Walker. The former is a taut exercise in reggae-influenced, rhythmically-adventurous rock, where the fist-pumping riot rock (‘Waiting Room’, covered by the Chillis) shares space with atmospheric and edgy vignettes like ‘Glue Man’ and ‘Burning’. Margin Walker finessed that formula, with literally incendiary results on the Picciotto-fronted title track.

FOLLOW-UP PURCHASE

‘In On The Killtaker’

(Dischord, 1993)

WITH NIRVANA having dragged the underground overground, and Eddie Vedder name-checking them at every opportunity, Fugazi’s moment in the post-grunge spotlight saw them at their most focussed and purposeful. ‘Facet Squared’ opened like a Molotov, before tracks like ‘23 Beats Off’, ‘Public Witness Program’ and the scarifying ‘Walken Syndrome’ compiled another bleak vision of America eating itself alive.

ALSO RECOMMENDED

‘Repeater’

(Dischord, 1990)

WHERE THEY tied their political leanings to the mast; Repeater was a fury-fuelled manifesto of independence, adrift in an ever-more corporate America. “You are not what you own!” they howled, on ‘Merchandise’. “I’m not playing with you!” they scorned, on ‘Blueprint’. Elsewhere, they dragged sharp eyes across a crumbling America, penning scorching accounts of poverty and violence ‘Greed’ and ‘Two Beats Off’ with unforgiving ire.

WILD CARD

‘Red Medicine’

(Dischord, 1995)

BUILDING UPON the previous album’s darker, murkier passages, Red Medicine was drawn from loose and experimental rehearsal sessions, the band loosening their supposedly-rigid rock to encompass dubbed-out melodica instrumentals and askew lullabies. Of course, when the riffs did gel - ‘Target’, ‘Back To Base’ - Fugazi rocked with greater precision than any, but the rewardingly adventurous tone of this album indicated the weirder paths subsequent Fugazi LPs would follow.

AVOID

‘Instrument’

(Dischord, 1999)

THERE ARE no bad Fugazi albums (their Quality Control was scrupulously tight), but this soundtrack to Gem Cohen’s 1999 documentary of the same name - compiled of murky instrumental rehearsal takes and studio experiments - is probably the least essential album in the catalogue (but worth checking out, especially if you love their later material). The documentary itself, compiled by Fugazi from footage spanning their entire career, is the most comprehensive document of the band’s essence, and essential viewing for any rock fan.

BURN THESE!

‘Waiting Room’

Echoing with space, dominated by its swaggering, itchy bassline and Guy and Ian’s call and response vocals, this chunk of agit-funk announced Fugazi’s ass-shakin‘ revolutionary arrival.

FIND IT: ‘13 Songs’, 1990

‘Suggestion’

Wherein MacKaye attacks explicit and implicit sexual oppression, preaching that true punk-rock enlightenment only comes with the rejection of society’s many prejudices.

FIND IT: ‘13 Songs’, 1990

3. Glue Man

Picciotto’s nightmarish vision of suburban drug addicts brilliantly applies primitive echo machines to the band’s own feedback-fringed cacophony: a chilling punky reggae death-party.

FIND IT: ‘13 Songs’, 1990

4. Repeater

A brilliantly odd pop song, blending a turbulent hardcore chorus with a chiming indie-rock chorus to celebrate those who make a living outside the mainstream, by any means necessary.

FIND IT: ‘Repeater’, 1990

5. Blueprint

“I’m not playing with you,” spits Guy Picciotto at the rotten, corrupt music industry, rightly proud that Fugazi - thanks to MacKaye’s righteous Dischord Records - will never have to ‘sell out’ to The Man.

FIND IT: ‘Repeater’, 1990

6. Song #1

“Song #1 is not a fuck-you! song!” yelled MacKaye, but this single was the group’s most accessible moment to date, a shout-along polemic that bade farewell to their early sound.

FIND IT: ‘Repeater’, 1990

7. Reclamation

Where the spooky chainsaw guitars get absolutely torn apart by the heaviest bassline punk-rock has ever heard. If you ever needed proof that Fugazi listen to a lot of reggae and dub…

FIND IT: ‘Steady Diet Of Nothing’, 1991

8. Dear Justice Letter

As guitars burn like newly-looted store-fronts, Picciotto reads the government a missive from an underclass denied National Health Insurance, whose “lungs are all leaking”.

FIND IT: ‘Steady Diet Of Nothing’, 1991

9. Facet Squared

Opening like a ticking time-bomb, this dragstrip punker includes MacKaye’s killer anti-patriot couplet “We draw lines and stand behind them / That’s why flags are such ugly things”.

FIND IT: ‘In On The Kill-Taker’, 1993

10. 23 Beats Off

Demonstrating their broadening musical palette, this oblique tale of a celebrity HIV sufferer ignites from glowing embers, into a scorching feedback drone-out. Stunning.

FIND IT: ‘In On The Kill-Taker’, 1993

11. Great Cop

Simple and brilliant, a devastatingly heavy return to hardcore roots on MacKaye’s edgy, hammering tale of inquisitive ‘friends’ who ask too many questions. A live favourite.

FIND IT: ‘In On The Kill-Taker’, 1993

12. Do You Like Me

The noisy piano opening announcing Red Medicine’s murky, subterranean sound, razored guitars suddenly lash in for this savage, scouring burst of Picciotto vitriol.

FIND IT: ‘Red Medicine’, 1995

13. Bed For The Scraping

For those double-tracked unspooling guitars… A real axe-hero favourite, as the choruses explode with Picciotto and MacKaye’s duelling high-register guitars, like licking flickers of flame.

FIND IT: ‘Red Medicine’, 1995

14. Target

Picciotto’s wry, snotty attack on punk rock’s new “grouching young millionaires” who’ve made him hate the sound of guitars. Ironically, this tune proves six-strings in the right hands always electrify.

FIND IT: ‘Red Medicine’, 1995

15. No Surprise

Sweeping, dubby walls of noise, countless false-endings, lilting hooks and Guy Picciotto’s sweetest vocal yet carved this perfect paranoid pop song.

FIND IT: ‘End Hits’, 1998

16. Five Corporations

Over a riff that sounds like dive-bombing fighter jets colliding, MacKaye fires spittle and rage at conglomerates choking the free world with their monopolies. Their angriest moment.

FIND IT: ‘End Hits’, 1998

17. Arpeggiator

Weird and wonderful instrumental, with MacKaye and Picciotto playing catch with a tricky little riff, like punk-rock’s answer to Deliverance’s ‘Duelling Banjos’. Prog-power!

FIND IT: ‘End Hits’, 1998

18. Ex-Spectator

A rattling, angular burst showcasing the drums of Jerry Busher, the long-time onstage percussionist who joined the band in the studio for the first time for this album.

FIND IT: ‘The Argument’, 2001

19. The Argument

A beautiful exercise in controlled dynamics, this slow-burning epic explodes with distorted guitars and scything strings, evidence that Fugazi never eased their intensity as they matured.

FIND IT: ‘The Argument’, 2001

20. Furniture

Their last single (for now) was a tune written during their first years, a return to the brutal slogan-and-riff sucker punches they built a revolution upon. The formula still thrills.

FIND IT: ‘Furniture EP’, 2001

(c) STEVIE CHICK 2006

Where To Start With... Sonic Youth

This'll be the first of a number of these 'Rough Guides' I've written for Kerrang! materialising on the Blog. You need to see them in the magazine, really, to appreciate how well they work - which is tribute to the great art team who work at the mag. Otherwise, they're fun to write, to try and play with the restrictions of the format, and to seduce Kerrang!'s youthful readership into the same music that perverted my music tastes when I was their age.

I'm currently working on a book about Sonic Youth, for publication later this year. More info as I get it.

Hailing from NYC’s cerebral avant-garde scene, but pointedly obsessed with Pop Culture, Sonic Youth have spent the last quarter-century as rock’s most influential mavericks. They pioneered the ‘reinvention’ of the electric guitar (detuning it, attacking it with screwdrivers, and artfully ‘playing’ feedback), covered Madonna and jammed with Iggy and Neil Young, and grunge would never had happened without them. Along the way, their fluorescent, discordant noise split rock’s atom, redrawing the blueprint several times over and breaking every rule with subversive brilliance. Following Nirvana’s Youth-abetted breakthrough, 1992’s Dirty saw the group attempt a thrilling ‘crossover’ of their own, selling pro-feminist anthems and atonal rock’n’roll to MTV, with impressive success. Subtly expanding rock’s horizons and IQ level without ever losing touch with the kinetic thrill of overdriven, abused guitars, utterly committed to their exploration of all things Sonic, and ever-Youthful - fourteen albums later, they’re making the best and bravest music of their career.

I HEART SONIC YOUTH

by NICK ZINNER of YEAH YEAH YEAHS

“I THINK I was around 15 when I first saw Sonic Youth. They were playing a matinee all ages show in Boston; I hadn’t really heard much of their music before, but
was making a transition of my musical interests and my identity, from metal to punk, and my friend Jim was super into them. It was a small club, it was loud as fuck, and I remember Thurston was wearing a racing driver’s jacket. I was completely blown away, in every way, and basically the next day scrounged up every tool in my moms house and got to work making noise with my guitar on my 4 track. Suddenly, noise wasn’t just noise, but the start of an entirely new vocabulary - soft noise, beautiful noise, drone-y noise, melodic noise, noise-y noise... Basically, they had flipped the notion of what is music, what is guitar playing, and what is a song for me, remaining an influence to this day.
“Before I moved to New York city, my friends who lived there would tell me about SY sightings there, like ‘I saw Thurston in Other Music!’ Well, what records did he buy?! ‘I saw Lee coming out of a hardware store!’ What crazy tool of sonic destruction did he get?! They were heroes, yet totally accessible, and normal - like me
and you. Now, living in New York, they continue to have a strong presence in every artistic area: Art shows, improvisational collaborations at small clubs, DJ nights, and obscure film house benefits, to name a few ,while still playing amazing shows, making great records, and being more clued in to new experimental music than any critic or magazine could hope to be - no offence!”

ESSENTIAL PURCHASE

‘Daydream Nation’

(Blast First, 1989)

FINESSING THEIR detuned mayhem into something resembling Classic Rock, ‘Daydream Nation’ was a romantic, psychedelic vision of the violent magic of New York City. ‘Teenage Riot’’s ragged punk was an anti-hero ‘anthem’, while epics like ‘Cross The Breeze’ and ‘Trilogy’ were ambitious and often strangely beautiful. A perfect album, ‘Daydream Nation’ announced Sonic Youth’s triumphant ascension from the murky underground that birthed them.

FOLLOW-UP PURCHASE

‘Bad Moon Rising’

(Blast First, 1985)

ITS DISTURBING sleeve (a burning pumpkin-headed scarecrow) promised evil, and ‘Bad Moon Rising’ delivered, with atonal crescendos, menacing drones of feedback, and the Lydia Lunch-fronted nightmare surf-punk of ‘Death Valley 69’. Elsewhere, ‘Ghost Bitch’ glowered, while ‘I Love Her All The Time’ was psychotic psychedelic brilliance. The CD version adds their dread-laden ‘Hallowe’en’, and profane feminist statement ‘Flower’. Their bad-trip best.

ALSO RECCOMENDED

‘Murray Street’

(Geffen, 2002)

OTHER BANDS would’ve given up, had their arsenal of irreplaceable, modified guitars been stolen, as happened to Sonic Youth in 2000. But the setback inspired a renewed vigour within the band, the turbulent likes of ‘Rain On Tin’ and ‘Karen Revisited’ boasting brilliant rushes of avant-garde musicianship, and guest appearances from free-jazz saxophonists. ‘Murray Street’ was Sonic Youth’s most fearless - and also most accessible - album for years, an autumnal triumph.

WILD CARD

‘Washing Machine’

(Geffen, 1995)

AS THE grunge bubble burst, Sonic Youth abandoned more conventional structures for ambient noise and improvisational experimentalism. The title track (where Kim Gordon’s street poetry is swallowed up by waves of tranquil white noise) and noise-laden Cobain lament ‘The Diamond Sea’ are standouts, but the group’s adventurous nature on this album delivered an hour’s worth of passionately inventive music. Egghead space-rock perfection.

AVOID

‘Goodbye 20^th Century’

(SYR, 1999)

A SINCERE tribute to their avant-garde roots, Sonic Youth collaborated with, and covered the works of, some of the greatest composers of the century. The result involved the destruction of a ‘treated’ piano (also included as CD-Rom footage), and puzzling versions of impenetrable pieces by John Cage and Yoko Ono. The concept and their ambition are to be applauded, but few are actually going to want to play this one twice. [This isn't actually true, but rather an attempt to justify suggesting that there's a Sonic Youth album you 'should' avoid, and betraying a desire not to frighten K!'s readership off from the joys of SY.]

BURN THESE!

‘Brother James’

Slashing detuned guitars and Kim Gordon’s inhuman howl collude over death-disco grooves for this blood-splattered rejection of religious dogma and guilt.

FIND IT: ‘Confusion Is Sex’, 1983

‘I Love Her All The Time’

Showcase for Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo’s instrumental abuse, a dippy love song exploding with drumstick-applied guitars and fierce screes - lunatic brilliance.

FIND IT: ‘Bad Moon Rising’, 1985

‘Death Valley 69’

No-Wave punk poet Lydia Lunch co-sang the Manson Murder lyric, as Thurston invoked surf-guitar godhead Dick Dale for the killer-bumblebee riffs. A Hallowe-en party classic.

FIND IT: ‘Bad Moon Rising’, 1985

‘Expressway To Your Skull’

Neil Young called this “the greatest guitar track of all time”, fitting tribute to the swooping symphony of atonal noise that drones throughout it’s epic climax.

FIND IT: ‘Evol’, 1986

‘In The Kingdom #19’

Ranaldo’s injurious car-wreck beat-poem is set to churning avant-noise, and the lit firecrackers Thurston threw at an unsuspecting Lee as he recorded the vocal.

FIND IT: ‘Evol’, 1985

‘Catholic Block’

Avowed lovers of pulpy Trash Culture, Sonic Youth knew Catholic Guilt only made the sin more delicious, as this psychotic, switchblade-wielding thrash declared.

FIND IT: ‘Sister’, 1986

‘Teenage Riot’

An irresistible, lazy melodic hook made this ragged, glorious rocker a perfect Summer alternahit. Written in salute to ragged, glorious (and lazy) Dinosaur Jr guitarist J Mascis.

FIND IT: ‘Daydream Nation’, 1988

‘Total Trash’

Brilliant, cacophonic slice of mischief, Sonic Youth dousing a dumb bubble-gum punk song with fearsome, dub-quaking noise, and dancing in the (audible) wreckage.

FIND IT: ‘Daydream Nation’, 1988

‘Tunic (Song For Karen)’

The Karen in question was the tragic anorexic singer/drummer with easy-listening legends The Carpenters. A sad, savage musing on stardom and it’s price.

FIND IT: ‘Goo’, 1990

‘Youth Against Fascism’

Featuring Ian MacKaye on guest guitar, this righteous salvo railed viciously against oppression, while expressing Thurston’s discomfort with the protest song as a format.

FIND IT: ‘Dirty’, 1992

‘Drunken Butterfly’

Shrieking vocals, guitars that sound like broken glass, walls of impenetrable noise, explosions of neon drone: this was how Sonic Youth played ‘pop’ music.

FIND IT: ‘Dirty’, 1992

‘100%’

Their big ‘hit’, a laconic slab of heavy riffage and revolutionary guitar squall, dedicated to recently-murdered Youth roadie (and Rollins’ buddy) Joe Cole.

FIND IT: ‘Dirty’, 1992

‘Bull In The Heather’

Sonic Youth were just as powerful coiled as unleashed, as this muted but brooding Kim Gordon groove attests. A slithering, sweet menace, from an underrated album.

FIND IT: ‘Experimental Jetset Trash & No-Star’, 1994

‘Washing Machine’

Embracing the looser approach of the album, Kim’s elliptic lyric toys with contrasting concepts of womanhood, before the song is swallowed by beautiful walls of white noise.

FIND IT: ‘Washing Machine’, 1995

‘Little Trouble Girl’

Kim Deal added girl-group harmonies to this beautiful, skewed song, about a mother/daughter relationship adrift on the choppy seas of adolescence.

FIND IT: ‘Washing Machine’, 1995

‘The Diamond Sea’

A powerful epic, its lyrics obliquely referencing Kurt (“The mirror’s gonna steal your soul”), over poignant, ear-scouring improvised feedback. A painful peak.

FIND IT: ‘Washing Machine’, 1995

‘Wildflower Soul’

Glorious moment from a difficult-to-love album, ‘Wildflower Soul’’s tender melodies gave way to some brain-splitting career-best skronkin’ from Moore and Ranaldo.

FIND IT: ‘A Thousand Leaves’, 1998

‘New York City Ghosts And Flowers’

Lee Ranaldo’s poetic lament for New York’s fading Bohemian under-culture, eradicated by Mayor Giuliani, barely contains its ire behind acrid, black-noise crescendos.

FIND IT: ‘New York City Ghosts And Flowers’, 2000

‘The Empty Page’

Referencing, perhaps, the fresh start signalled by the theft of their precious gear, this psychedelic howl of defiance opened an album recorded in the shadow of Ground Zero.

FIND IT: ‘Murray Street’, 2002

‘Kim Gordon And The Arthur Doyle Handcream’

Inspired by Mariah Carey’s recent career hiccups, this savage and hallucinatory attack on modern pop culture was Sonic Youth at their most satirical, and most sonically vicious.

FIND IT: ‘Sonic Nurse’, 2004

(c) Stevie Chick 2005

Sonic Youth Accelerator Festival Sweden 2005 Mosaic

Loose Lips Xmas Party 2006 Mosaic

The White Stripes, Get Behind Me Satan

[this LP review ran in Plan B]

Welcome back, Jack.

There was almost a point, deep into Elephant, where you could sense something slipping away from Jack White. Not that The Whites Stripes’ fourth album didn’t impress, its hefty stomp and regal prowl evoking its animal namesake. On the surface, Elephant was perfect, down to the dust-to-digital production of Toerag’s Liam Watson. But there was an eerie emptiness at play, the blood splattered in Meg‘n‘Jack’s sibling scraps washed clean off the walls. Too little dysfunction.

Elephant sounded like The White Stripes making a White Stripes record, or at least what Q magazine et al, their newfound champions, defined as a White Stripes record. Classicism in the Zep/Beatles lineage was the order of the day, a studied retroism, tongue-in-cheek lyrical playfulness. What was missing, though, was the spook, the voodoo that fires Jack White into howling like a love-stung angel when he nears the mic. What made Die Stihl so refreshing, back in 2001, was not its ragged traditionalism, its craftsmanship, but rather the fervour with which Jack invested and infected these forms, a righteous fire that burned away years of studied cool and critical baggage and canonical familiarity, scorching to the very soul of a music re-awakened in their hands.

Seemingly using the ornery hide of Elephant to shield himself through the media shit-storm of what was surely the peak of White Stripes-mania, Get Behind Me Satan finds Jack throwing off the covers and revealing himself to be vulnerable and confused and, possibly, heart-broken. It’s the same Jack who tears into Dolly Parton’s ‘Jolene’ with not an iota of irony, just cutting deep to the bitter emotional bite of that song. And few can essay heartbreak with the brittle, cutting wit of a sulking Jack - as Jason Von Bondie learnt to his cost, White can be savage when cornered.

It opens with the single, ’Blue Orchid’, Jack’n’Meg pouring their jackhammer funk into a glitter ball-glancing, Glam-drenched disco-stomp that echoes similar noises ground out by DFA1979. For the record, Jack sounds like Emotional Rescue-era Jagger here, but not a bit as jaded. So far so (quality) indie disco. But track two, ‘The Nurse’, is where the fog creeps in, and things take a turn for the darker. Absent is Jacks plastic Sears guitar, replaced - as in much of the album - by piano and vibraphone. Until, that is, a most uncouth blast of distortion-hazed noise tears through, like a drunken, unwelcome visiting hoisting a brick through your window past the midnight hour. Clumsy and messy, like a hopelessly breaking heart, it intrudes on the track several times, arhythmically and with little artfulness, until it collapses into a barrage of bursts, like a corpse’s final flail. The result is to be left on edge, unsettled. Creeped thee fuck out.

What follows includes ‘Doorbell’, so naggingly catchy it could well be White Stripes’ own ‘Crazy Frog’ (there’s gold in them thar ringtones); the deliciously Big Star lament ‘Forever For Her (Is Over For Me)’; ‘As Ugly As I Seem’ painting the word ‘regret’ in gently Byrdsian tones; ‘The Denial Twist’, like Beck jamming with The Electric Mayhem; and the sick gothic country of ‘White Moon’. Then and only then do we commence …Satan…’s third, and darkest, side.

‘Instinct Blues’ is everything Elephant‘s ‘Ball & Biscuit’ should’ve been: bone lean and acid-fried blues, agitated by animal lust, and speared by atonal guitar freakouts and walls of frustrated din. There follows a bizarre and impenetrable nursery rhyme from Meg, a sorbet before ‘Take Take Take’, a truly startling song that bolts a tumbleweed strum to a heavy piano chorus, booming like something off a Morricone score, Meg thumping tympani with elan as Jack ponders the vampirish qualities of fame (the celeb in question being Rita Hayworth - good taste, Jack). Call the lyric Jack’s ‘International Jetset’, though the music itself, a grandiose tantrum, is more Dylan than dub, but a new beast all its own.

‘Little Ghost’, a morbid dustbowl ditty, is another brief segue, before perhaps Jack’s grisliest, most viciously odd song to date, and possibly his best. Slide guitar picks out an eerie melody, accompanied by toy piano and weary falsetto, tumbling into a brutal duel between Jack’s roaring guitar, slashing out a twisted-razor-wire blues, and his increasingly-unhinged vocal, like an insane preacher swollen with the spirit. Messy, eerie, chilling, it’s a murder ballad with evil seeped into its core, the lonely, desperate, snarling darkness of the blues.

‘I Ain’t That Lonely Yet’ is as sweet a closer as you could hope for, a fragile, gospel-infused note of hopefulness that somehow quells all the bared-fangs and broken hearts it follows. But the jagged edges are what you’ll remember and return to. Jack’s mastery of rock’n’roll was never in question but, as he sits and ploughs diesel-soaked Buicks of riff into moments of folk-hewed vulnerability, like a naughty boy attacking his sister’s teddy bears with a fearsome toy dinosaur, his ability to play out his heartaches, his inner dramas in such a flamboyant but still resonant manner, is confirmed.

(c) 2005, Stevie Chick

Scritti Hearts ATCQ

[from MOJO, 2006. Green was a STAR]

Green Gartside on A Tribe Called Quest’s Midnight Marauders

"I’D BEEN in love with hip-hop since the first time I went to New York in 1979 and visited the Mudd Club and saw Afrika Bambaataa spin records. But then I grew tired of it. I was seduced by Dancehall; I heard Clement Irie and Robert French’s ‘Bun & Cheese’, a dancehall version of ‘Earth Angel’ and it blew my mind. During that period I worked with Shabba Ranks – I think I was the first person outside of Jamaica to collaborate with him. And I got a lot of stick for it, because he said some bad things about gay men, which was regrettable. But I also worked with Miles Davis, and he also said a lot of objectionable things. What are you gonna do?

"I was living in Wales at the time. I was sick of the music industry: I had a music room I never went in. But Midnight Marauders rocked my world all over again. I’d sit and play it over and over and over... It got me back into wanting to make beats, to make music, and reignited my obsession with Hip-Hop. I hated anything that wasn’t hip-hop.

"Midnight Marauders is like a hip hop Sgt Pepper’s – it really repays repeated listening. One of its great strengths is its musicality, the way producer Ali Shaheed Muhammad programmed the beats, the samples he chose, the crunch of the crackly vinyl and the drums. Something shifts musically every 32 bars or so, a new loop or some new idea; the tracks develop almost like ‘proper songs’. Although, ironically, what I first loved about hip-hop is that it wasn’t like ‘proper’ songs, just voices and a drum-machine. Lyrically, they shifted perspective brilliantly, from rapping about getting a milk-shake to something like ‘Sucka Nigga’. Q-Tip’s voice is a trip in itself, and I loved all Phiphe Dawg’s dancehall references.

"Midnight Marauders got me back into the music room, getting away from writing ‘proper songs’. I had enough technology to sample some drums, getting that vinyl noise – the grit, the dirt – up front. That’s what led to Anomie And Bonhomie; I worked with Bob Power, who engineered Midnight Marauders, and Ali Shaheed Muhammad did a remix for a single, though I never actually met any of Tribe. I’d love to, though.

"I still play it all the time; we listened to it while packing up our gear in the rehearsal room the other night, and it gave us a sudden burst of energy. Our drummer’s 21, he knew all the lyrics, from growing up with it! It got me listening to some of DJ Premier’s old stuff, Nas’s Illmatic, the Jeru The Damaja shit – all of which changed my life. But they’re much harder albums than Midnight Marauders; I thought Mojo readers might better appreciate its musicality."

(c) Stevie Chick 2006

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

[For MOJO, early 2005 (i THINK)]

In a nondescript London hotel bar, Alec Ounsworth shields his tour-worn frame behind dark sunglasses, flicked-up peacoat collars and strong coffee. A year ago, the Philadelphian never imagined he’d be touring Europe (even on a shoestring and no sleep); he’d just formed Clap Your Hands Say Yeah on a whim, visiting his sister in Massachusetts and bumping into guitarist Lee Sargeant, whose band were moving to Brooklyn. Ounsworth handed Sargeant a demo-tape, soon finding himself commuting five hours to New York to rehearse his songs.

“I’d been writing for ten years, since I was seventeen,” rasps Ounsworth, enthusiasm burning away a jetlag fug. “I had tried writing short stories, but it wasn’t for me. Music is like an umbrella of ideas, you can draw influence from everywhere, from Van Gogh, from Kubrick, from Raymond Carver, from anyone you want. Songs came naturally, in a way other writing didn’t. I had to get involved.”

Sentenced to piano lessons from an early age, Ounsworth stumbled across copies of Sergeant Pepper’s and The Freewheeling Bob Dylan in his parents’ collection when he was ten. Soon, he was visiting the record store on his own, buying albums because he loved the cover, or recognised names on the sleevenotes from other successful purchases.

“There’s a lot of different ways to branch off from The Beatles and Dylan,” he smiles. “The magical impression certain songs left upon me from childhood were more resonant than anything else.. Listening over and over, to those great rock albums, you work out why, say, ‘Astral Weeks’ sounds so perfect, so finished. You figure out what you need to put a great album together, subconsciously.”

Certainly, the group’s eponymous debut album, a glowing set of amber anthems, betrays the confidence, the ambition, the brilliance of a classic, its subtle, subterranean indie-rock accented by Ounsworth’s vocal, a vulnerable, keening oddity recalling David Byrne, Jeff Mangum and Jonathan Richman. Following a glowing 9.0 review on influential American website Pitchforkmedia.com, the album’s modest first pressing sold out; Ounsworth estimates current sales near the 40,000 mark, though he hasn’t checked the figures lately. The singer’s vagueness might be a symptom of tour fatigue, or it might be his way of handling being the biggest underground phenomenon since kindred spirit’s the Arcade Fire. The pressure of following up the debut doesn’t noticeably perturb the laconic front man.

“I have a backlog of demo tapes at home, enough for the next couple of albums, but they‘re not too well filed,” he grins. Before ducking out for another cigarette, another cardboard tumbler of caffeinated rocket-fuel, he pauses, considers those tapes. “It’ll be interesting to meet the me I was again, back when I recorded them.”

(c) Stevie Chick 2005

Tapes'n'Tapes

[from MOJO]

YOU MIGHT have thought that the humble cassette-tape had gone the way of the 8-Track cartridge, a nostalgic relic from our Hi-Fidelity yesteryears. Josh Grier, however, begs to differ.

“Tapes are making a big resurgence,” he insists, over a Guinness in a Camden hostelry. “There are cassette-only labels, bands using cassette images for tee shirts and album covers - even kids who wear old cassettes as belt buckles!” And then there’s Tapes’n’Tapes, Grier’s bristling indie-pop quartet, tipped by some as the next Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, named in reference to “all these recording sessions we’d done on our 4-tracks, these piles of tapes’n’tapes’n’tapes of songs and ideas, cluttering up my apartment.”

The group formed in Minneapolis in 2003. “I always wanted to be in a band, it’s something I just couldn’t suppress,” laughs Grier. “Finally, when I graduated college, I thought, dammit, I’m going to start a band! And if it sucks, well, at least I tried.”

The first sessions began in Grier’s kitchen, using the oven-timer for a metronome. Grier and a buddy played shows backed by a CD-walkman playing drum tracks Josh had recorded (it even had a ‘blog’ on the group’s website), while housemate Matt Kretzmann, a trumpet and euphonium player, was taught to play the bass. “It was a challenge,” admits Matt, “But the fingering wasn’t actually all that different…”

Kretzmann later moved to keyboards while Jeremy Hanson (veteran of a blues covers band with his dad and brother since he was 8) took the drumstool. For their eponymous debut EP, self-released in 2004, Grier wrote and recorded a new song everyday. “Then I got carpal tunnel syndrome from playing my guitar too much,” he chuckles. “I have a lot of ideas that aren’t very good, left on the back-burner. There’s a lot of ‘filtering’ wheat from chaff.”

Bassist Erik Appelwick recorded their debut album, The Loon, last Summer. Unspooling with the literate pop savvy of Pavement and The Breeders‘ hazy invention, The Loon’s charms might never have escaped Minneapolis had the group’s manager Keri Wiese not leaked tracks to the online blogging community. The resulting buzz meant demand soon far outstripped the group’s fledgling Ibid Records imprint’s ability to supply; XL Records recently signed the group, and will be re-releasing The Loon worldwide in August.

“It all weirds me out more than I thought it would,” admits Grier. “The other day, we were filming a music-video on this huge soundstage, and I had to ask myself, ‘What do we think we’re doing??’ Our biggest ambition right now is just, to not fuck it all up, not make the ‘fatal wrong decision’. We just want to play the music we like, try out lots of new ideas, and,” stresses the man with tapes’n’tapes’tapes of discarded song ideas carpeting his floors, “Just not be redundant, you know?”

(c) Stevie Chick 2006

Catfish Haven

[for Plan B.]

'Catfish Haven is soulful howling over an acoustic guitar turned way up. Hopeful yearning for better days echoed through amps and a drum kit.’
website bumpf

Three lush wet slashes of acoustic guitar open Catfish Haven‘s debut mini-LP, Please Come Back, before a breathless testifying voice barks, “We’re Catfish Haven and this is what we do…”, as the group launches into some joyous, drunk-on-love hoedown that sounds like Neutral Milk Hotel conducting a symposium on ‘soul’ Dexy’s Midnight Runners. What it is that Catfish Haven ‘do’, is overhaul classic AM Radio rock with a ramshackle, moon-gazing romanticism, tracing an ecstatic emotional leyline from Creedence to My Morning Jacket. It’s pretty lovely, actually.
George Hunter (that voice, that guitar) sits shivering in the Chicago winter, but warm memories shared over crackly telephone line keep the blood from freezing.
“I grew up in a place called Catfish Haven, deep in Missouri,” he begins, a hairy Marcel Proust caught in rapture. “It was a total of seven trailers spread out on a piece of land in the middle of nowhere; you had to take a gravel road to the main highway to get into town. I went to this weird school and sat next to this guy called Gus on the bus, who ate fuckin’ glue. [laughs] It was a crazy fuckin’ time as a kid, man, but it was one of the better memories of my life. Calling the group ‘Catfish Haven’ makes it feel a little more like home to me.”
The music is, appropriately, dreamy, nostalgic, warm. “The fun never ended at Catfish Haven,” he chuckles, whimsically. “It was a real ‘Huck Finn’ experience.”
Innocence and purity and love make up the key threads of Catfish Haven’s lyrical concerns, for which George is unrepentant.
“I like to focus on the positive things in life,” he nods, “and I think the most positive thing in life is love. It’s something you can’t really define, but you know it… Its almost like a religion, you can’t touch it but you know it, but you can’t really explain it, but you understand it…”
It makes sense that you’d spend so many songs trying to unravel it.
“It’s a mystery,” he agrees, before his words take on a more solid, assured tone, “but I have been in love before...” But, having nailed down his elusive obsession quite so firmly, he retracts into a kinda warm, profound vagueness. “…and, uh, yeah… I guess I just try to focus more on the positive things…”
Just over half a decade ago, Hunter relocated to Chicago, hooking up with bandmates Miguel Castillo (bass) and Ryan Farnham (drums), two Illinois homeboys who helped him adjust to big city life. “It was pretty overwhelming at first,” he admits, “But now it feels like home.” And if he ever misses those carefree days, Catfish Haven will continue to offer him a way to tap into that magical, never-forgotten past.

(c) Stevie Chick 2006

Wives

[from Loose Lips Sink Ships. the members of Wives now play as no-age - check 'em out]

A bar in Hoxton, an autumn evening. Outside, diamond drips of freezing rain spot the window, orange streetlamps setting the tarmac aglow, like the streets of London really were paved with gold.

Across several worn leather sofas as crumpled as their slept-in tee-shirts and jeans, the three members of Wives - Californian noiseniks free of mind and mostly empty of pocket - slump with tour-exhaustion like the contents of an upturned suitcase, their faces pale, their eyes dark, their spirits dented but still rallying.

On my left, Randy Randall. Randy sports a patchy beard that only highlights how young and innocent he looks, pale eyes wide open, his ruddy face resembling a young Richard Dreyfuss (circa American Graffiti). Like Dreyfuss, there’s a slightly-insane enthusiasm that revs like a chainsaw in his throat when Randy talks, a growling, gravely buzz of wild ideas and creative freedom, of possibilities. A dude who doesn’t blink before bright light, he opens his eyes wider. On my right, Dean Allen Spunt. Dean’s tired of the story of how an automobile accident with a semi-famous rap-rock star financed Wives’ early recordings, but what the Hell, it’s a good story (and almost true). Amiably laconic flip to his bandmate’s wiry fervour, Dean’s striking and gaunt, like a model might be, or an actor, which Dean sometimes is (catch his lead role in Ben ‘Friends Forever’ Wolfinsohn’s wonderful High School Record, should it ever see the light of screen). He talks with a dry Californian drawl, but his words are as alive with that same irascible creative energy. They make a good pair. Collapsed between them, eyes shaded behind midnight bangs, their drummer. I didn’t catch his name, and he said exactly zilch during the interview. He seemed very, very tired.

Upstairs, in a bare red room, their bruised and busted equipment lay in wait for their show that night. This is Wives’ first European tour. And, as they possibly decided this very evening, their last.

But this isn’t a story about endings. It’s not even a story about beginnings, but rather that ecstatic, chaotic distance between both points, when anything and everything seems possible. But stories need beginnings, and ours begins at The Smell, a communal artspace in Downtown LA, between 2^nd and 3^rd Street. The only all-ages venue in town, it’s a long brick room with art hanging on one side, and a stage and musical equipment set up on the other. There’s no alcohol for sale but you can always get some vegan food, and shows rarely cost more than $5; the kind of place where kids who turn up to see their first show there walk away inspired enough to book their own show for the following week (and The Smell’s booking policy is flexible enough to facilitate that).

The Smell’s influence on their restlessly, relentlessly inventive music is indelible. They were eighteen when they formed, and numbered Jeremy Villalobos on drums (he left the band last year), while Randy and Dean abused samplers and noise machines.

“It was never our intention to be a ‘guitar-rock’ band,” understates Randy. Asked for influences, he cites “what we wanted to hear; we knew what rock bands sounded like, so the aim was to do something that didn’t sound like that. A new sound...”

“It wasn’t just the music itself, it was the way we wanted to present ourselves,” adds Dean. “Where we live in LA, most of the musicians are kinda ‘rock dudes’. Glamorous Hollywood ‘professional rockers’, or jaded indie-rockers. If we were in a band, we’d fuckin’ jump around and have a fit, instead of standing up there like, ‘I’m being paid, I’m a professional’.”

“We were always the young, excitable kid in a band who wanted to do something different,” continues Randy. “We’d be told, ‘You can’t do that, do what you’re supposed to!’ [laughs]. We’d be like, okay, like good little brothers. Then we thought, fuck that! When we met, we were doing none of that. Because we’d finally met like-minded people. Let’s do that ‘something different’.”

That ‘something different’ began with abstract noise bursts, static electricity painted violently over primal drumbeats. They spent a year in the rehearsal room, experimenting more than practicing, then played that first show at The Smell.

“I think it was a really good show,” laughs Dean. “We played in the centre of the room - which was still unusual then - with the lights off, and headlamps on our heads. People got offended when we played. The Smell is definitely very art-orientated and open-minded, but we were beyond even that… People would say, ‘that’s not art!’ We wanted to make art and have a good time and laugh, and that concept was alien to people. We were, like, we’re gonna do this our way, fuck you for having this ‘old guy’’s attitude. People were taken aback, they thought we were being snotty or whatever, but it was never meant like that.”

A first self-released 7” caught the band sparking and glitching on the avant horizons; a second saw them employing a guitar, though as noise-making device rather than musical instrument. Their debut album, Erect The Youth Problem (recorded at the beginning of 2004) pitched them somewhere to the left of Lightning Bolt, blasting a staunch wreckage of blackened guitar noise at acute counter-points to an ever-evolving, ever-collapsing bustle of drums. This was Black Flag’s Damaged - the Chopped and Screwed version. Of course, it was a noise all it’s own, everything Wives had been aiming for, and had been, for their two years so far: a chaos of barked lyrics as overloaded, disjointed and synapse-jolting as the music itself.

But there’s a sense, perhaps, that this great album was the beginning of Wives’ undoing (because, to spoil the surprise ending, they are now undone); within its coagulation of a previously-liquid, flowing sound, its snapshot of one millisecond of musical evolution, Wives would find themselves trapped, unnaturally static, and at odds with their group’s very essence.

“Once you write a song, you better fuckin’ love it because you’ll be playing it for a while,” observes Randy. “There was no real concept behind the album, it was just a bunch of songs we’d written. It’s funny to still be playing them, two years later.”

“I can guarantee the next record we make won’t sound like this,” adds Dean. “We’ve always considered this an evolving thing. This record’s just one step along the way.”

“I don’t know though,” avers Randy. “The steps take longer now. When we started, it was one week to the next, new songs all the time, each setlist was different. At some point, things started to take longer, so every year there’ll be new songs, then every two years, instead of every week, like we started.”

That sense of time dragging is perhaps what mars the set that follows that night. Or perhaps it’s the broken equipment, the unreliable PA. Or perhaps it’s just the fact that touring the world on a non-existent budget is really fucking exhausting. Whatever, Wives flail valiantly, but their every thrust seems only to tug the plugs from their sockets. Sound cuts out, songs break down… But still, in the impotent chaos, something pure and lustful; moments, like Randy tumbling and twirling into the crowd, guitar jagged and painful, during the brutal stutter of ‘All Dad’s Alike’, matching the desperate venom of the album.

Whatever, another London date weeks later (ending in onstage destruction and clumsy bloodshed) marks Wives’ dissolution. Music - and especially improv music like Wives’ was at its best - is like the shark Woody Allen compared relationships to, it either moves forward or it dies. And perhaps, in this one embrace of how Rock Bands behave - touring, playing songs off the album, standing still long enough for the world to suss out what you are - Wives died.

“We broke up because when its time to move on and leave something behind, you just know,” wrote Dean in an email a couple of weeks later. As an epitaph, it suits Wives perfectly, but for a clue as to why they were so electrifying for their short life, seek out Erect The Youth Problem at your earliest convenience.

Corinne Bailey Rae

[from Mojo. Corinne is awesome!]

Late afternoon in New York, on the second day of her first promotional trip across America - three cities, four shows and a plethora of radio appearances in just under a week - Corinne Bailey Rae went missing. Not for long, mind you, but, slipping out from the sound-check for that evening's show at the Mercury Lounge, she spent a stolen hour exploring the streets of downtown Mahattan. With her next video-shoot in a week, she window-shopped for clothes along Bleecker Street.

"I saw this dress on a mannequin," she explains, "and it was this perfect, gorgeous white dress." She asked to try it on, but the stern shop assistant refused, saying it was “just a sample…not for sale”, the dresses “not yet available”. She offered to order one; again, he refused. “It won't fit you,” he snapped.

"But I knew it would fit!" she hisses. "But he still wouldn't sell it to me. I said, 'I'm making a video in England, I'm a singer…'. I didn't say it to 'drop' my name, I didn't tell him my album's at number one, but he just cut me off, got all imperious, said 'I'm not going to ask you your name…' So I left.

The record company rang the store owner later that afternoon. “And he was all, 'Of course you can have it!'"

She grins and frowns at once, tuts a little, looks up at the deep Californian sky. "People can be so phoney, can't they? I hate that."

On the peach stone steps of California's Le Parc Suites, the dishevelled members of Corinne Bailey Rae's band soothe their jetlag-enhanced hangovers in the morning sun. Last night, the CBR tour touched down in LA, and Corinne's band, manager, and accompanying UK label staff and production company ate out at hip Japanese restaurant Katana, before spilling into the legendary Sky Bar, the model-frequented hotspot within the luxurious Mondrian hotel on Sunset Boulevard. Corinne, however, can be found sunning herself by the rooftop pool, reclining in petite elegance on a sun-lounger in a fitted vintage dress, looking for all the world like some off-duty 50s starlet. She chose to skip last night's Sunset Strip sortie in favour of a good night’s kip. The night of the show in New York was a similar story.

"There was a party at this club called Butter," she grins. "I'd stayed up as late as I could, the jetlag was kicking in, and my manager said I shouldn't go because I was tired, and it would be really phoney, full of models, all loud dance music. But it turns out they played loads of great hip-hop and R'n'B, and Sting and Lenny Kravitz and Axl Rose were there!"

That afternoon, a window of opportunity opening in her cramped schedule, Corinne makes a bolt for California's tourist attractions. She dawdles along Rodeo Drive's parade of ridiculously upmarket boutiques, a random Californian stalking her throughout with his digital camera, sensing she must be a celebrity of some kind, he's just not sure who; she pores over the celebrity imprints at Hollywood's Grauman's Chinese Theatre, hopscotches along the Star-studded boardwalk, past lunatics dressed as Chewbacca and Mrs Shrek, her eyes trained on the sidewalk, scanning the tributes to celebrities from the past.

Last October, unknown, Corinne scored an appearance on BBC2's Later… With Jools Holland performing her 'Like A Star', her Billie Holliday-esque purr deemed 'fabulous' by Burt Bacharach, and winning her a spot that hogmanay's Hootenanny special. A limited edition EP featuring the song grazed the Top 40 in November, while Put Your Records' debuted at #2 in the UK Singles charts this February, a week before Corinne Bailey Rae debuted at #1 in the Albums charts. A steep trajectory for a New Star.

"I still think, people know the song on the radio, but they don't know me, they don't know what I look like or anything," she says, with a distinct sense of relief. "If it stayed like that, it would be perfect. I've heard that some journalists visited my mum's house while I was in Europe. And apparently someone was camped outside my friend's house in a car. Weird. I'm not gonna be at parties or famous nightclubs, I live in Leeds!"

She wrinkles her nose, bemused by the attention. "I went to my local Borders, and I was on the cover of the Leeds Guide, on sale there, and my album was on display behind the counter. Nobody noticed. I even paid by Switch - my name was on the card! I'm a boring person, I'm not going to be shit-faced, falling out of the Met Bar or anything. You don't see KT Tunstall in the Star, stumbling out of a taxi cab, do

you?"

Outside the iconic 'stack-o-wax' Capitol building, dwarfed by its carpark fresco of jazz legends. A nearby LA Times reporter canvasses for her opinion on rumours that EMI might be selling the building and carving it up into condominiums; she politely

and proudly explains that, as an employee of Capitol Records, it would be improper of her to offer a quote, adding an off-the-record, heartfelt "It'd be a shame."

Corinne's not here for the dreaded 'meet'n'greet', just to take in the view from the roof. But while she tries to remain incognito, quietly walking the circuitous hallways of the cylindrical skyscraper, heads of departments like Sales and Marketing spot her and pull her into their offices, for impromptu meetings where she grins and chats warmly, easily with the industry bods, while still ensuring things are done her way.

"Sometimes, when British artists come over here - especially black artists whose music doesn't fit what people consider 'black music' - the label will want to remix the record for America." she offers, forty-five minutes later, finally surfacing atop the Capitol Building, walking to the edge of the rooftop and taking in its panoramic view. "I'm not willing to do that. That's what those meetings I just had were about... I'm really pleased that all the people I've worked with so far seem to 'get' how I want to work it. I don't want massive posters all over Sunset Boulevard, I want to keep it low-key. I want people to discover me. I just want to play my songs, and see what people think. I like the fact that my album is more singer-songwriter based, played on guitars, raw. It totally doesn't make sense to the R'n'B scene here. So it's good that it's different.

"If it stays underground over here… I'd be overjoyed to be an 'underground sensation' here," she smiles, contentedly, looking across at the Hollywood Hills. "I'm not trying to dominate the world."

Hours after the Austin Music Hall show the night before she flies back to Leeds, to normality, at a showcase for supportive, influential US radio station KCRW in the plush 18^th Floor ballroom of an upscale Austin hotel, Corinne strums an acoustic and sings from a tall stool, her band playing deftly behind her. It’s a startlingly confident performance; but then, Corinne has been singing for a very long time.

“I always loved to sing, when I was really young,” she offers, afterwards. “But I never thought of myself as a singer; my voice was croaky, low. To me, a singer was someone like Mariah Carey, or Whitney Houston. It wasn’t like Sister Act 2, I’d never had any ‘Hey, that girl can sing!’ moments!”

She sang in church throughout her childhood; though, she points out, not a gospel church as many assume her skin colour would dictate. Her mixed-race background causes confusion in many she meets, like the European journalists who ask her what she learned from her ‘black side’ and her ‘white side’ (“There isn’t that division,” she sighs, “It’s not like anyone displayed ‘ethnic traits’.”). She played violin and learned classical composition. When grunge hit, a fifteen year old Corinne responded to the simplicity, the immediacy of guitars, drums and vocals - “Suddenly song-writing didn’t seem this impossible, impenetrable thing.”

She formed a band, Helen, with her best friends and boyfriend. They played youth clubs and venues in Leeds, revelled in the thrill of writing a song one day, and playing it that night. NME gave them a favourable review, David (son of Don) Arden became their manager, and said he had a development deal with Roadrunner Records on the table. Then their bassist became pregnant.

“It didn’t sink in,” she remembers, the disillusionment still smarting. “I guess we’d seen Neneh Cherry on TV with a bump and thought, we can still do the band. David said we shouldn’t mention it to the Roadrunner people, that we should start searching for a replacement. We told him we didn’t need a replacement. Two, three weeks passed and he never called. And when the record company never called back, we wondered, did he even have the deal? It was devastating.”

By 1997, aged eighteen, she was studying English literature at university, working part-time at a local jazz club called The Underground. Sometimes the bands would invite her to sing with them, a ballad perhaps, or ‘God Bless The Child’.

“My mum had bought one of those ‘free-binder-with-issue-one’ partworks, called Jazz Greats or something,” she grins, “And the first volume came with a Billie Holliday CD. I was like, why didn’t you play me this before?? I fell in love with that music, this different scene that I’d never heard, that I felt a lot closer to.”

Her music took a new direction. While in Helen, labels had tried to lure Corinne into a solo deal, which she’d steadfastly resisted. Now, she worked on crafting her song writing, perfecting her sound. Good Groove, a production company co-owned by former Radio 1 DJ Gary Davies, had enough faith in her talent to finance the recording of the album; meaning that, when they shopped her around the record labels at the beginning of last year, it was with the final product, the album, already finished to her exact specifications.

“It was a case of ‘Do you like this or not?’” she smiles. “Some labels didn’t even talk to me, they spoke to my manager. They were off the list. EMI understood it. They weren’t saying that we needed to re-record the album or anything. We put a lot of thought into the recording, we left all the ‘imperfections’ in there, the bum notes, the string section coughing or dropping their bows… Once its all layered together, those details make it sound somehow richer. I didn’t want it to be some perfect, airbrushed image, I wanted everything to be real.”

At the KCRW showcase, she charms the invited industry bigwigs with both her music, and her natural onstage manner, cracking jokes and just enjoying the moment, like this wasn’t a critical juncture in her career, in her life, like there wasn’t anything at stake.

“I wanna have a life, you know?” she offers, afterwards. “I’m married, I want to see my husband, I want to see my family, I want to write other music and I want to live, to enjoy it. I’m not a ‘pop star’, I’m not going to ‘cane it’ to sell as many records as I can. That’s not me.”

(c) Stevie Chick 2006

Gaz Mayall

[really proud of this feature from The Times, and really enjoyed meeting the wonderful Gaz Mayall]

“My name is Gaz Mayall, and I am a musicaholic,” confesses the dapper, effervescently-youthful 47 year-old Boho, over grilled Salmon at his regular table in Portobello’s legendary Spanish eaterie, Galicia. Son of pioneering British bluesman John Mayall, who launched the careers of Eric Clapton, Peter Green and Mick Taylor, Gaz was born into his addiction, fondly remembering hassling a Santa-costumed John Lennon at an Apple Christmas party back in the 1960s, and watching Paul McCartney tickling the family ivories way past his bedtime. But Mayall Junior has never rested upon his father’s laurels.

“I’m like a musical farmer, I like to rotate the crops,” Mayall grins. He’s a label owner (Gaz’s Rockin’ Records), producer, singing musician in his own ska band, The Trojans, and has assembled acclaimed ska and rhythm’n’blues compilations. But he’s most fondly famed for his long-running club night, Gaz’s Rockin’ Blues, 25 years old last July. The Pogues, The Stray Cats and Fishbone have graced its tiny stage, while celebs like David Bowie, Boy George, and even Bruce Willis (who grabbed a mic to sing soul standards) have all soaked up the vibe, as Thursday night bleeds messily into Friday morning. A Soho institution and regular attraction at the Notting Hill Carnival, it’s a rough-at-the-edges celebration of Mayall’s passions: ska, blues and rock’n’roll.

Mayall’s first spoken words were “boogie woogie”, but it wasn’t until his parents divorced and his father moved to the hippy utopia of California’s Laurel Canyon in the late 1960s, that he truly caught the music bug.

“I found this box of old boogie 78s my dad had left behind,” he remembers, “And I got a real taste for it. Then I moved onto old rock’n’roll. I was obsessed, scouring Portobello market for boxes of cheap records.”

Coming across a box of Bluebeat records, he mistook the early Ska imprint for a rock’n’roll label and chanced 50p on the find, soon falling for the likes of Prince Buster’s joyously foul-mouthed ‘Big Five’. Reggae’s R’n’B-influenced ancestor, Ska was omnipresent over the PA systems at snooker halls and football grounds through the 1970s. It quickly became his new obsession.

His mother soon remarried and relocated to the Cumbrian idyll of Llanddewi Brefi, location for TV’s Little Britain. Mayall dropped out of school at 14, living in the basement of their rented-out Notting Hill home. Selling sharp vintage clothes at Kensington Market, his loyal clientele thrilled to the rock’n’roll and ska constantly spinning on Mayall’s Dansette record player.

The punk scene did little for Mayall, turned off by its aggression, and its often-fatal affection for heroin. But the subsequent Two Tone movement, fusing punk’s energy and ska’s skank, suited him perfectly. Violent football hooligans had closed Oxford Street’s Two Tone club, where Gaz sometimes DJ’d, but Vince Howard, owner of Gossip’s (a nightclub on Mead Street which began life as a seedy drinking den called The Gargoyle frequented by Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon) offered the Hillbilly boho a home in Soho. On July 3^rd 1980, Gaz’s Rockin’ Blues was born.

Mayall delights in Soho’s grubbily colourful history. “My dad played blues all-nighters in the early 60s, at Wardour Street’s Flamingo Club. The owners, Rick and Johnny Gunnell, paid off the police every week so they could stay open until 6am, refilling regulars’ colas with illicit whiskey from under the bar.”

The Gunnells also managed British soul sensation Georgie Fame. “When Georgie had a hit with ‘Yeh Yeh’, he tried to switch management. Rick stole the keys to Georgie’s brand new Jaguar, and rammed its repeatedly into the pillars of an underground car park. He handed Georgie the keys back and said, ‘If you leave me I’ll do the same to your fingers and you’ll never play the piano again!’”

The Gunnells knew they were small fish in a big pond, however. “One night, some bruiser got drunk and caused trouble, so Rick threw him out of the club and gave him a hiding. At closing time, hoods grabbed Rick and bundled him, blindfolded, into a car. They drove him to a deserted warehouse where the Krays informed him that the drunkard was one of their lads. Sensing he was in deep schtumm, Rick told them the lout had been out of order. The Krays apologised, had the bloke’s jaw broken, and set Rick free.

“People talk about sacred places and ‘leylines’,” Mayall continues,“ Soho is like that for me. It’s the heart of London. Thank God these buildings have preservation orders, so all that history that survived the Blitz won’t be replaced with glass and steel shopping malls, like in Shepherd’s Bush.”

Gaz himself fell foul to such ‘urban regeneration’ in the early 1990s, when Gossip’s went ‘upmarket’ and banned live musicians, for graffitiing the dressing room. Gaz’s Rockin’ Blues promptly moved a road down to St Moritz, a Swiss restaurant with a basement club steeped in nightclub history.

“People who came here when it was a mod club in the 60s, or a jazz joint in the 30s, come back to visit,” marvels Mayall, “And they all swear it’s never changed. The owner, Sweetie, is a real Soho legend. Joe Strummer’s pre-Clash band, the 101ers, played here and wrote a song complaining about him, ‘Sweetie Of The St Moritz’, that’s on my new compilation album… If you check the wall by the stairs in the club, Sweetie’s got Joe’s original lyrics framed on the wall.”

St Moritz is the perfect home for Gaz’s Rockin’ Blues. A perennial in this decidedly here-today, gone-tomorrow field, Gaz’s ponders the New Romantic scene dominating clubland when the Rockin’ Blues started up.

“It was all so pretentious, I wanted to offer an alternative to that,” he smiles. “We do what we want. Where else will you hear Little Richard, and old ska, and drum’n’bass, and some Louis Armstrong record from 1928? We’re like musical chefs, mixing the ingredients.”

He laughs, and stifles a sleep-deprived yawn. “The late nights, the loud music, the smoky atmosphere, all this ‘bad’ stuff keeps me fresh and bubbling. It’s good for me!”

(c) Stevie Chick 2006

Jose Gonzales

[for MOJO, Summer 2006. Ah, Barcelona...]

Riveted and silent, festival-goers fill every seat and clutter the aisles of Parc Del Forum’s Auditori. Outside, in the blazing Barcelona sunshine, the fifth annual Primavera festival plays host to the neon lunacy of the Flaming Lips, the ear-quaking roar of Mogwai. In this cavernous room, however, illuminated by a single spotlight and armed with only a stool, a microphone and an acoustic guitar, Jose Gonzalez holds his audience spellbound with dextrous finger-picking and a lulling hush of a vocal, conjuring an intimacy reminiscent of Nick Drake.

Those in the audience familiar with Drake’s music possibly discovered him via a 1999 Volkswagen television commercial that used his ‘Pink Moon’ as soundtrack, remarketing the tragically-cultish artist’s back catalogue with startling success. Gonzalez himself is a late-convert.

“It was after one of my first shows, in 1999,” the soft-spoken singer-songwriter explains, shortly after clambering offstage. “Some guys came back afterwards saying, ‘you must have listened to a lot of Nick Drake.’ But I’d never heard him! Since then, that‘s all changed… ‘Pink Moon’ was my point of comparison when recording my debut album ‘Veneer’. Thirty minutes of just vocals and guitars, and it still worked - why shouldn’t it work for me? I don’t really know much about his life - I keep meaning to see that documentary. I’m too lazy with my rock history…”

Famed in his home country of Sweden, Gonzalez was similarly brought to wider attention last year when film-maker Nicolai Fuglsig scored footage of several thousand multi-coloured rubber balls lazily bouncing along a San Francisco street with Jose’s acoustic rendition of ‘Heart Beats’ (originally by eccentric Swedish electro-pop duo The Knife), to advertise Sony’s BRAVIA HDTV line. Taste-making teen-drama The O.C. had already featured Gonzalez on its soundtrack, his ‘Crosses’ scoring the tear-jerking finale of its second season and laying groundwork for success in America.

“It’s all about getting the music heard,” reasons a sanguine Gonzalez. “The companies want your music to sell their products, but they’re also offering a chance to present your music to an audience that would never hear it. There hasn’t been the backlash to the advert that I expected; a Dutch fan sent me a 2-page email, he was really angry. He asked, ‘Would Nick Drake have been applauded if he’d sold his music to an ad company?’

“The thing is, I get a lot of fan-mail via Myspace, people writing that they went out and bought the album after hearing the advert. We released ‘Heart Beats’ as a single,” he adds, proudly, “but people bought the album. It’s about the music, not just one song.”

Parc Del Forum, at the foot of Barcelona’s bustling La Rambla boulevard, is a breath-taking sweep of concrete overlooking the harbour and the sparkling Mediterranean. Wandering about its surrealist sculptures, the Yeahs Yeah Yeahs sound-checking on some distant stage, the bearded, drab-casual Gonzalez blends in with the festival-goers, chatting in Spanish with some fans before switching, with impressive fluency, to Swedish to talk to his manager, and then English for us.

Born to Argentinian parents, Gonzalez grew up in the suburbs of Gothenburg, Sweden, surrounded by other Latin American families. He picked up the guitar aged fourteen, at his father’s urging, inspired by Bossa Nova, The Beatles and Cuban singer-songwriter Silvio Rodriguez.

“There was a summer where I sat down every day for hours a day, teaching myself,” he laughs. “When I get into something I get into something. I learned Spanish classical guitar, which is related to flamenco music, in how hard you hit the strings and the body of the guitar. It’s aggressive, dramatic. I like the drama! [laughs]”

You don’t seem a very aggressive person.

“One of the first interviews I did, I was asked to describe my music, and I said, ‘Aggressive’. And they laughed! I suppose it sounds very mellow, but there’s a degree of aggression to how I play, in the way I feel when I‘m playing.”

In his teens, Jose played bass for Gothenburg punks Back Against The Wall, indie-rockers Only If You Call Me Jonathan, hardcore act Renascence. Creative fulfilment eluded him, however.

“I never felt comfortable making music with anybody else,” he sighs. “People that know me think that I’m private. I’m very protective. Before I can share any idea with someone else, I need to work on it until I feel it’s presentable. That’s why I recorded Veneer at home.”

He began writing the songs that would compose Veneer in 1998, playing guitar alone for hours, discovering the chords and melodies as he went along. The newest song, opener ‘Slow Moves’ was written in 2003. Early sessions were recorded on a 4-track cassette-recorder, before Gonzalez upgraded to a computer loaded with Cubase software. Every track was recorded in his tiny, 21 square metre Gothenburg flat. When Swedish label Imperial Recordings originally released Veneer, in 2003, Gonzalez quit the PhD he was researching in DNA replication in Herpes viruses for his music. Last April, British label Peace Frog released Veneer in the UK, Hidden Agenda repackaging the album for America five months later.

“When I wrote Veneer, I wasn’t considering the audience,” he muses. “A listener, maybe, but not a million of them. It’s different now. Veneer is a really moody, introspective album, so people think I’m moody and introspective. And there’s probably a little truth in there. [chuckles] I faced this in 2003, when my album was released in Sweden - going from nowhere to a Gold album at home was a much bigger deal than making the transition from the success in Sweden, to the success I’ve had internationally. I spent a lot of time thinking it through then, and it was hard.”

The spectre of recording Veneer’s sequel looms large. “I’m pretty sure I want to make another, similar album, and I’m pretty sure people won’t respond like they did to Veneer. If it sells a tenth of the first album, I’m okay with that. I’m amazed so many people liked Veneer; the things I like usually aren’t successful, and the things that are successful I usually can’t stand. Most people’s first albums are their best, anyway,” he says, almost glumly, “the second album is just a self-conscious attempt to repeat what worked first time around. That’s the topic of my song, ‘Deadweight On Velveteen’: ‘Vulgar, when brought to light’.”

The album’s half-written; however, Jose plans to be on the road for the foreseeable future (“I don’t have a girlfriend or a cat anymore, so I don’t mind not coming home for months on end,” he explains), and he can’t write songs on tour. And then there’s the album he’s planning with Junip (post-rock band formed with school friend Elias Araya), his vocal work for downtempo duo Zero 7’s new album, the music he’s recorded for Swedish teen drama Livet enligt Rosa… Those waiting on a second Jose Gonzalez album had better be patient.

“If you ask me what I’ll be doing in a year’s time, I can tell you,” he smiles. “I’ll be on the road. I’m more interested in where I’ll be in five or ten years. I have a plan: I want to record one more solo album, maybe two. And an album with Junip, and maybe a side-project of some kind. So that’s four albums, over five or ten years; that’s enough. And if they all flop, and I get bored, I can always go back to studying Herpes…”

(c) Stevie Chick 2006

Fucked Up

[from Kerrang!]

Vaulting the barricades of decorum and good taste, Fucked Up are a brilliantly brutal hardcore quintet from Toronto, Canada. As their name suggests, compromise is not on their agenda; following a slew of cult-classic seven inches, the group’s debut album, Hidden World, pulls no punches, welding savvy, political lyrics to anthemic, gravel-gargling punk.

“The 7” singles were often produced under hellish conditions,” explains guitarist 10,000 Marbles. “The album sessions were like Shangri La by comparison – we had two or three months to record. The label even paid for an on-site Tarot card reader!”

Such luxuries haven’t dampened Fucked Up’s lust to provoke and confront. Marbles describes their combustive gigs as “a real mess, a writhing mass of sweat and blood”, while the group are renowned for their forthright lyrics and sleeve-art.

“The artist has a responsibility to provoke,” offers Marbles, “To shed light on things that have become obscured, to shock their audience into a new mental state, and make them aware of new and dangerous things.”

“A lot of bands dumb themselves down to appeal to a popular audience,” adds singer Father Damian. “When they do address politics, it’s usually to offer a dumb simple solution to a huge problem. But the world is not ‘OK’. I don’t for a second think we have the ‘answers’, but we hopefully at least make people think about the questions.”

Hidden World’s music is similarly fearless, piling up the revving high-decibel guitars, with most tracks blasting past six minutes. Impressive stuff for a band whose initial ambition was simply to be “abrasive and caustic, in the tradition of the early Discharge singles.”

“This band has taught me that anything can happen,” reasons a thoughtful Damian, “But the fact that the hardcore kids can dig our long songs is a miracle.”

(C) Stevie Chick 2007

The Drones

[Cover Feature, Loose Lips Sink Ships #6]

This is how I remember rock shows being: baking hot, cramped, earachingly loud and uncomfortably sweaty. The stage is only visible through bobbing heads and past a mist of steam, and sweat, and dry ice coloured by harsh beams of amber, scarlet and mauve light, so all we can see is a raging, fiery colour, the heat suffocating, intense.

Onstage, the rock’n’roll band play hard and clumsy and loose, and very, very loud. The venue is the Garage in London’s Highbury, where I spent many happily self-destructive evenings back when I went to a show a night (doubtless explaining this eerie sense of nostalgia), where those vibrating walls of black mesh either side of the stage are, in fact, part of a colossal PA system designed with the sole intention of rattling flesh from bone. I love this place. I love this band.

Cutting through this atmospheric reverie, Gareth Liddiard, a tall, sinewy man with a striking nose and liquid-acid eyes ringed by exhaustion that make him look the spit of a young Pete Townshend, pounds and shakes a chord that sounds like wrought, rusted iron from his guitar, and howls one more time into the microphone, stomping his boot hard onto the gaffer-taped stage in time with drummer Mike Noga’s primordial beat, so hard his body shakes a few sluicing beads of sweat from his forehead and slickered mop of hair, like every blow of stick upon drumskin were impacting on his spine, knocking him from an even keel, so he tumbles around like a marionette with a slit string, helpless, tortured, exultant, released. The mesh walls roar and shake with the resultant noise, crashing cymbals shattering into silver mist, bass heavy like a submarine scraping the ocean floor, twin guitars shrieking and squalling in reflexive pain, like parallel shards of lightning, or two fluctuating waves on a seismograph, electric with drama and meaning. And that voice, shredded, swerving and screeching like a drunk driver about the melody, accusatory, righteous, angry, spiteful and bitter, but really really fucking alive, and desperate, like it hasn’t anything to lose, like it already lost everything.

Urgency, romance, tension and feedback crackle through the air, as the group tear through the set, rough in execution but pure in spirit, loosely lashing at the songs to give space for those aching, blood-splattered guitars to breathe and roar, pulling together in glorious, unified crescendos of arcing, screeing wail. And they so look like a rock’n’roll group, Mike feral and caged behind racked drums, bassist Fiona Kitschin coolly scanning the audience from the side of stage, lending piercing backing vocals that twist into seductive harmony with Gareth’s, guitarist Rui Pereira raucous and violent with his instrument, a wild genius, and Gareth, trapped in a one-way screaming match with his microphone, poised with such a powerful authority (which comes natural, I guess, to someone who’s spewing a lifetime of his own bile up for our entertainment, knowing that some of us at least will dig this, and wanna thank him for it).

The song is ‘Baby Squared’, a brash, brawling garage-rock poesie to maddening love, spiked and sparked up like if Neil Young and his Crazy Horse ever dug the music of the Sex Pistols as much as Johnny Rotten’s pop-cultural significance and shared-outsider status, the amps so loud they’re glowing, the guitar tones serrated to their very centres, bolts of frazzled and angular fury bouncing out a nagging, neo-classic melody. You’ll find it on Wait Long By The River And The Bodies Of All Your Enemies Will Float By, the second album from Melbourne’s The Drones, a rock’n’roll band characterised, as their album title suggests, by a heady mixture of black humour and bitter recrimination.

“It’s a rawer emotional element,” muses Gareth Liddiard earlier, over an afternoon pint, of The Drones’ exquisitely anguished blues (which are, incidentally, teeming and crazed with life in its most brutal forms, in case the moniker ‘The Drones’ suggested altogether more egghead pleasures). “It’s all about booze, isolation, cheap amps and cheap guitars. And there’s an emotional element to it as well, a lot of grief filters through. It depends on your mood, but it can be cathartic, to get that shit out there. If I’m having a good time, if I’m happy, I never feel compelled to write a song, and that song would probably be pretty fuckin’ boring anyway.”

Gareth struggles a little to describes what the Drones do. It’s just rock’n’roll, he offers, safe in the knowledge that we both understand that, in the right (calloused) hands, ‘just rock’n’roll’ can be a scorching, singular, special thing. But for the benefit of the uneducated masses out there, he elaborates. “It’s, uh, semi-traditional weird folk blues, and we bend shit, pervert it, tailor it to suit us.”

The Drones are a group steeped in rock’n’roll. Gareth talks affectionately of his youth in Perth, of tuning in to the local radio, and the great stations in Melbourne that pumped out a neverending mix of ugly/beautiful noise, so by the age of ten these wise radio waves had already grounded the young Gareth in the likes of The Stooges and Led Zeppelin, along with local legends like The Saints and The Scientists.

“I remember hearing ‘Immigrant Song’ on the radio, as a kid,” he remembers, “And I didn’t catch the name of the song, just that Led Zeppelin was the band. And I was desperate to hear that song again. So I started saving up my pocket money - I got ten bucks a week, and tapes were ten bucks, and there were nine Led Zeppelin albums. It took me nine weeks, and Led Zeppelin III was the last one I bought, because it was hard to track down, and there it was, first track, side one, this insane heavy-metal thrash song that sounded like it was from the future…”

Born in Australia, Gareth moved with his family to London shortly after he was born. They lived there for a few years before moving back to Perth, but Gareth remembers seeing Blondie on the television, as a kid, one of his early memories. “It’s a pretty atmospheric and intense song, it really hooked into me as a kid,” he grins. “The video was pretty hot too.

“I remember, back then, pop was really depressing and dark. There was great stuff, like Bronski Beat. Now, its all ‘you can’t have sad shit in pop because you’ll scare everyone off‘! But back then, everything was all echoey and dark, and that really rubbed off on me, I dug that. It spoke to me. And hearing shit like Prokofiev, Peter And The Wolf. There was more of a ‘Brothers Grimm’ bent to popular culture back then, it seemed.

“My family had all the Beatles records. I know people who deny the Beatles… The great converter is ‘Helter Skelter’, though. I’m always, like, Dude, listen to this. It’s so intense… It’s fucked up. I wouldn’t fuck with Paul McCartney, he’d fuckin’ take your head off. Boy has got some thumbs…”

High school was an education in itself, in music and, uh, related chemistries. “Stooges, Hendrix, Zep, The Byrds occasionally,” he lists. “Marijuana, acid, that sort of shit. Lots of Sabbath, smoking pot to Pink Floyd - which is the best thing anyone could ever do. Listening to Syd Barrett on acid was our education. My old man had Smash Hits, that Hendrix compilation. I listened to it on my walkman travelling to school one day, and it begins with ‘Stone Free’, and the first minute or so is kinda dull and sounds shitty. I thought it was terrible. Then it stops, and the wah-wah kicks in, and I went on this insane psychedelic journey, like I saw people falling out of the bus… I just thought, oh my god… One of the greatest moments of my life. My brain just went pfffffblrrrt!

“And after that, Townes Van Zandt, Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, Karen Dalton, Charlie Parker… Everything really. If its good, its good. If its shit, its shit. I listen to the good stuff.”

Gareth is, as you might sense, a pretty opinionated music fan, though with a broader embrace than The Drones’ monolithic rock might suggest. “ I never liked posers, although a bit of pretence is cool - like The Smiths, there’s a bit of showbiz going on there. No bullshit, and a bit of imagination, rather than the same old shit. People trying to make their own thing - AC/DC and the Stones are the only people allowed to rip off Chuck Berry, anyone else, forget it. It’s been done to death. Being in Melbourne, we know Jet, and the keyboard player on our record is Jet’s keyboard player. It’s a semi-small town. I don’t hate anyone for doing that shit, but it can be a bit naff,” he sneers. He shivers a bit. “You’d bore yourself stupid, wouldn‘t you?

“My family weren’t great communicators,” he remembers. “Obviously, I needed something that gave me what I needed, what I was lacking. And that was music. I remember hearing Bob Dylan as a kid, just thinking, fuuuuuck. Music’s one of the best ways to communicate; as an art form, its probably the most popular, the most universal. Even some idiot selling fish and chips could understand music… He probably likes Tom Jones [laughs].”

The Drones began in Perth. Gareth brought his girlfriend, Fee, on board, to play bass and sing backing vocals. And Gareth’s old buddy, Rui, played guitar and violin and sang. “I’ve known Rui since High School, we’ve always been fucking around with music,” grins Gareth.

Gareth, Rui and Fee loaded their gear in a van and drove across country, to Melbourne. There, they hooked up with drummer Mike Noga, and plugged into Melbourne’s vital, history-soaked music scene. “There’s a history of really cool shit there,” he enthuses. “The Saints, Radio Birdman, The Scientists, Nick Cave… Groups from Melbourne play without compromise, we have this kind of autonomy because we’re so isolated, so far from the rest of the world. There are major labels in Australia, but they’re only interested in the most banal pop shit, if you’re doing anything remotely interesting or worthwhile they’ll never be interested in you. Which is good, because that means there’s no incentive to sweetening your sound, no razzing it up to impress a Major.

“Talk to the old crew from Melbourne, people like Kim Salmon or Nick Cave, they’re all getting on for fifty or whatever, and then there’s us upstarts coming up beneath them. And they’re all saying, ‘we hate tradition’, but, for better or for worse, they all started something, and once you’ve heard it, you can’t get away from it. And we were brought up on it.”

Wait Long By The River is The Drones’ second album, preceded by 2002’s Here Come The Lies. They’re a productive band, with two more finished albums in the can; “Productive, when we’re allowed,” he adds, grouchily. “For the last two years we’ve had this fucking legal shit with our old record company, we had to bail on them, paid a huge amount of money to do it.”

Their music is at once familiar and unique. The rock’n’roll they grew up on is a key influence, and Crazy Horse references abound. The Drones’ masterful slow songs glide like spectres doomed to eternally haunt the brooding opening chords of Neil Young’s ‘Cortez The Killer’, sombre, sincere, unbearably melancholic. Their faster songs adopt a more ‘punk’ lick, tribal stomp drums, charring plane-wreck guitars blasting away, but still that coruscating guitar tone remains. And, over all, the heavy karmic weight of ‘Cowgirl In The Sand’, the betrayed rancour and recrimination of ‘Down By The River’ dominate.

“Some things are so basic and so ingrained,” he explains. “If you get a Les Paul, put a bit of distortion on it through a Fender amp, and play basic chords with your fingers, with a straight drum beat behind you, you’ll sound like Crazy Horse. Shit like Dirty Three, its so basic that it’s genius. You can’t get away with it, the moment you run a violin through a Marshall you’ll sound like the Dirty Three. Like, the minute you start fucking around with your tunings, you sound like Sonic Youth. You can’t help it, man! It’s base stuff. And Neil Young, once you’ve heard him, how could you not sound a little like him?”

They definitely plug into a tradition of ragged and glorious Australian punk bands, murderous rabbles like The Beasts Of Bourbon, The Birthday Party, The Scientists, The Saints, and Dirty Three. “These people are friends, we know people like Rowland S. Howard, and Spencer Jones of the Beasts. We hang out, and we’ve borrowed gear off them. Growing up watching these dudes murder guitars must’ve rubbed off somehow. The Beasts were an awesome band, so rough and ugly. It’s mean, it’s what rock’n’roll’s meant to be, what it threatens to be that… Their shows were like Black Flag shows, ambulances would be waiting when you got there. It was pretty rough stuff. Not that violence is cool, but it’s kinda fun.

“Our fans are cool, it gets pretty rough down the front. We’ve been touring with Deerhoof,” he continues, brow furrowing, “playing to the ‘indie’ crowd… Deerhoof are an amazing band, and I love what they do, but they play is pretty much devoid of anger or aggression - it’s ‘indie’ stuff. Whereas, we come from a place that’s nasty, mean-spirited - which can be fun. Everyone’s thought “You fucking cunt!” when someone fucks them over, but not everybody comes out and says it. It’s like the Sex Pistols, they were mean-spirited, but it was fun.”

Regret, frustration, and depression are prime fodder for The Drones’ art. The guilt-etched dirge, ‘The Freedom Of The Loot’, is a fantastically bleak song of crime and injustice, of good people made to be bad, and how lives down mean a shit in the face of cold cash. Later that night, Gareth’s face is twisted with rage as he sings the hopeless, scorning refrains, his voice splintering, bruised. He sounds like he’s gargling a mixture of his own blood and grievances, like Joe Strummer with an ounce of vim in his nostrils, like in ‘The Right Profile’ when he perfectly apes a speed’n’booze-blocked, stammering Montgomery Clift, only it’s disgust that’s tearing Gareth’s words to a messy mulch in his mouth.

It is perhaps unsurprising to discover that booze figures largely in The Drones’ lives, given their occupation. “Alcohol and music go together, traditionally,” he laughs. “Take flamenco music… All those dudes playing it are pissed, you know? They get drunk, they play music, they dance. The greatest elements of any culture are booze, music and art. But then there’s the downside of booze…”

It’s this side that The Drones’ music most evokes: the sour outlook of a hangover, the regret caused by drunken indiscretions, painful emotions amplified by booze.

“I’m 29 now,” reasons Gareth, “My twenties were a series of horrible disasters, so I was probably an alcoholic, for better or for worse. I need to figure that one out. You just get depressed, because you’re drunk. If you’ve been drinking for three days, you don’t have to have been drinking hard, but you’ll feel like shit, and you’ll fix it with more booze. If you have three or four days off the booze, you feel so fucking good, happy, and then you go straight down the pub and have a great night and you’re back on it. It’s a vicious circle. Australia has a massive drink culture And don’t forget drugs. You’ll be fucked if you overdo it. But they’re fun too.

“I got stoned when we played Amsterdam, and thought, fuck, I should do this more often. I’d been getting really uptight, like, getting tunnel vision, I couldn’t really see things clearly. And after smoking pot, I had a totally different perspective. I thought, fuck, I should do this at least once a month, to keep my ideas fresh. But with booze, its an emotional drug, it can fuck you up with grief and frustration… It’s a double-edged sword. But booze and an electric guitar are beautiful things, turn it way up loud and BLAAAAH.”

The slow-burning blues of ‘Sitting On The Edge Of The Bed Crying’ is a standout, a folksy minor-chord guitar figure cracking a whip over Gareth’s glum lament. “Every now and again I think its borderline mawkish,” he confesses, of the song. “I don’t like mawkish songs, so there are times when I think, is this a terrible song? But it’s not mawkish, it’s inconsolable. Everyone’s been inconsolable in their lives… Look at Leonard Cohen, some of the best music ever written was by Leonard Cohen. It comes from a dark place, but it’s still funny. Melancholy’s beautiful, there’s a sweetness there. It’s all about perspective, and different experiences give you different perspectives… It’s wisdom, you know… That’s what I call it. Bad things happen…”

Sincerity seems important to you.

“You’ve got to be sincere,” he nods, sharply. “You can tell when someone’s ‘faking it’, or not. I remember the first time I heard Black Flag, Keith Morris was the singer, and I thought it was perfect… He was being himself, admitting he’s a wounded idiot, and just having a sense of humour about it. It was sad and funny, I thought it was beautiful, and very sincere.”

‘Locust’, an eerie and stripped-raw, drunken mourn, eked out on piano, atmospheric guitars and percussion, is an exercise in under-rehearsal (a method which explains the album’s one-take ferocity) a la Crazy Horse, the group played and played, the song building to an unexpected freakout of avant-guitar, electric violin and malevolent drone, before dying away. “There was supposed to be a chorus,” laughs Gareth. “But we went into this big, epic freakout, and we totally forgot to play it! It’s hilarious. The tape just fades out on the album; moments after the fadeout, Mike yells out, ‘We sound like a bunch of pissed fuckin’ idiots!’ But it sounded amazing… What Tom Waits called the ‘hair in the gate’ effect. ‘Mistakes’ are what make art. Who would want to perfect rock’n’roll? That sounds so fuckin’ boring.

“Some people treat rock’n’roll like it’s something to be afraid of,” he continues. “Like the guy who runs Triple M, the big commercial station in Australia, he says the trick to running a radio station is to find a song that doesn’t offend or upset anyone, but that doesn’t quite bore them to death, and just play it a thousand times a day, and you sit back and rake in the ad revenues.

“It’s fucked. People like art, they aren’t afraid of it. But that’s the way things are now; people look at forests and think, ‘Hmm, I could make a lot of money here, gotta chop all these trees down!’ Everything is commerce now, and its fuckin’ horrible. Everything has to justify its existence through making money, why can’t it just exist? Why can’t culture just be culture? That’s one of the beauties of travelling through Europe, culture’s not there to make people money, it’s there because it’s an important thing. It’s part of the soul, and we all have souls, you can’t deny that.

“Something has died,” he adds, warming to his theme. “You had your industrial revolution, and the machine became so well-oiled, we forgot why we built it in the first place. It’s become such a machine, it’s hard to get through the bullshit. I mean, Jesus, pop culture used to be cool, it used to be Alex Chilton and Andy Warhol; now, it’s not that at all. It’s Simon Cowell, it’s terrible. It’s sad. Shit gets so bad, but it just helps you to see the good stuff more clearly. You got to spend a little time looking for it, is all, but that’s part of the fun of it.”

Onstage, later that night, the guitar heroics abound; instruments are battered and held aloft, in some weird cycle of worship and abuse, and hammered into mic-stands, and hoisted towards the crowd. Shapes are thrown, and at one point, Gareth’s contortions send his amp toppling, causing a dramatic pause, a drone-streaked intake of breath before, with preternatural timing, they tear back into the song. I’m loving every histrionic, over-the-top minute of it, this kamikaze ballet of self-destructive rock’n’roll heroics.

Watching Gareth hurtle about the stage, screaming way past the comfort zone, I think of Guy Picciotto’s quote, circa his time with Rites Of Spring, that hurting yourself on a guitar was a more worthwhile gesture than just sitting in your room crying to yourself. It’s heroic, and self-destructive, and it doesn’t quite make much sense, and, well, that’s pretty much the definition of old skool, dumb ‘heroism’ Hollywood fed me for all those years. And if these grisly songs deal mostly with how can fuck you over, plunging their fists into the maw of the depressions that hold the artists down, at least they do so in some glorious, exhilarating fashion, even if that heroism is ultimately doomed, even if they pull off their onstage whirlwind at the expense of their equipment, their health and their sanity. It’s like the war movie where the hero saves his platoon and takes out the enemies, only he kills himself in the process; The Drones play out their inner dramas as blood-splattered death-matches, and its this drama, this stage play, this sense of high adventure and moral intrigue that makes this music, these musicians, so heroic. And, cliched though it may seem, it’s the art that makes the unglamorous grind of being a touring rock band worthwhile.

“Rui was brought up damned poor,” laughs Gareth, finally, telling a story that perfectly illustrates the group’s collective ‘shit happens’ mindset, drawing beautiful art and raw humour from life’s dark stuff. “We wrote this thing for the biog on our website, ‘Rui pereira rides the other guitar like the admiral of a Portuguese man o’ war with a hangover. The master of disaster leaves guitars in plaster and it’s no secret that the Portuguese freak born in Mozambique during the war was brought up poor, which keeps him more than keen to make a scene’. His parents saw the biog and, being ex-poor people, were fuckin’ furious. Because poor people don’t like to be reminded about that kind of shit. We meant it as a joke, but they’d lived through a war, and grinding poverty, and they didn’t need that shit.”

Gareth shoots me a well-meaning look, and tries to explain why he made the joke in the first place. “I tried to explain to them, man, ‘It’s war and it’s poverty…’” he grins, eyes flashing wildly. “‘That shit’s hilarious, man!’”

(c) Stevie Chick 2005