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