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Issue 777 Au t 2016 $9.95 (GST INC) >> NZ $9.95 5 (GST INC)

VIRTUAL REALITY WILL IT CHANGE YOUR LIFE?

MUHAMMAD ALI THE GREATEST OF ALL TIME

TEGAN AND SARA KEITH URBAN’S HARD ROAD RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS THE RS INTERVIEW

Peter Garrett Print Post Approved 100007738

Still Fired Up

F ROM CA MERON CROW E ( A LMOS T FA MOUS & JERRY M AGUIRE )

THE UNSUNG HEROES OF ROCK

FAST-TR ACK E D FROM TH E U. S .

N OW STR E AM I N G Check the classification

E X ECU T I V E PRODUCED BY J. J. A BR A M S A ND W INNIE HOL ZM A N

RS777 “ALL THE NEWS THAT FITS” FEATURES Living Legend: Diesel The boy guitar hero of the Nineties traded pop flash for a more deeply felt “cottage” career. By Michael Dw yer ...................56

The View From Here As he prepares to release his debut solo album, Peter Garrett is taking lessons from his past. By Rod Yates.............................58

Keith Urban’s Hard Road

His rise to fame, paved by talent, looks and drive, has led the country megastar to the darkest of places.

By Erik Hedega ard ....................................................... 66

Bat For Lashes’ ‘Warped, Weird’ Music

Natasha Khan finds hope in the darkness of her fourth album.

By Annabel Ross ............................................................ 70

On Tour With Rüfüs

A photo diary of the Aussie electronic superstars on their massive world tour..........................................................................72

Muhammad Ali, 1942-2016

How he conquered fear and became the greatest of all time.

By Mik al Gilmore ..................................................................... 76

ROCK & ROLL Red Hot Chili Peppers Reboot After a serious setback the band returns with some of its best songs in years................ 15

Q&A Gwen Stefani The singer on the heartache behind her new album........... 24

In the Studio Haim return home to work on their second album, promising “more organic rock” ............. 26

Prophets Of Rage Rage Against the Machine join up with Chuck D. and Cyprus Hill’s B-Real .......... 34

DEPARTMENTS DVDS

RANDOM NOTES

Eddie Vedder joins heroes the Who, while Bjork and Boy George DJ for Sydney.......... 12 RECORD REVIEWS

Soundbreaking Sir George Martin’s last production takes us behind the scenes of music making ......104 THE LAST PAGE

A re-jigged Blink return to their golden-age sound........ 91

Jon Toogood On his mum’s roast chicken and changing tyres............. 106

ON THE COVER Peter Garrett, photographed in Sydney, May 2016 by Daniel Boud.

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DAVID MCCLISTER

Blink 182

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CORRESPONDENCE LOVE LETTERS & ADVICE

. . . And Too Much Prince e igh t e e n page s f or Prince, an artist who was unarguably talented, but hasn’t released an album that was great in over a decade, and only 16 pages for David Bowie, a genius who was releasing career-best albums right up

ROLLING STONE AUSTRALIA

made it seem like I was there for the interview. It says a lot about Harley that he is as open and honest with interviewers as he is with his fans.

Corey Chen Chatswood, NSW

Oils Ain’t Oils hats off for a great interview with Midnight Oil’s

“An artist who defied classification and who raised the watermark to an extremely high level deserves high praise.”

Not Enough Prince . . . i wish rolling stone had provided so many words on Prince when he was alive rather than merely covering him in detail in death.

An artist who defied classification and who raised the watermark to an extremely high level deserves high praise, and your piece, whilst generally good (despite your picture on Pg. 65 being incorrectly attributed to the Purple Rain tour – it was Lovesexy in 1988), should have gone much further. I await the standalone issue with indepth coverage of the albums (with original reviews), the many tours, films and influences. An artist of this calibre deserves no less.

Vincent Alvaro, Casula, NSW

until he died? Not that I’m counting or anything , but that seems hardly fair!

Denise Crosby Castlemaine, Vic.

Buggin’ Out it’s a m a zing th at ja k e Bugg is only 22-years-old and is already onto his third album. Expect big things from this kid!

Ben Foley, Wollongong, NSW

In-Flume t h e a rt ic l e on f lu m e was amazing. [RS 776] That Barry Divola got to hang out with Harley and drive around his neighbourhood in his Tesla

Rob Hirst. It was great to hear that the Oils won’t be reforming just to rest on their past-achievements, and see the value in pushing themselves to write new material.

Here’s to the most exciting reunion ever!

Mark Coppack Bertram, W.A.

Only One Mossy you profiled a new artist named Mossy in your latest issue [RS 776] but everyone knows there’s only one Mossy, and his name is Ian. Change your name, young fella, or risk getting booed off stage next time you play.

Darren Glenn, Port Macquarie, NSW.

CONTACT US

WRITE TO US AND WIN Every letter published will win a CD of the Avalanches’ new album Wildf lower, thanks to EMI. Write to us and tell us your thoughts on the magazine or life in general. But please, keep it brief! letters@rollingstoneaus.com

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S SPLENDOUR IN THE GRASS FROM THE FRONTLINE

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The pioneering pop-punkers tell the story behind their first album in 12 years, out later this month.

The Canberra post-hardcore band stop by our Sydney oice to perform a stripped-back acoustic set.

Armed with a disposable camera, the rising Perth alt-rockers document their first ever overseas tour.

How Blake Fitzgerald and Brittany Harper’s violent crime spree across the U.S. gained a cult following.

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Band of Horses

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: GETTY IMAGES; U.S. MARSHALS SERVICE; AMANDA MARSALIS; GETTY IMAGES; CAMERON EMERSON-ELLIOTT; COURTESY

Our feature report from Byron Bay’s big weekend of live music.

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Björk’s New Virtual Reality Björk attended Bjork Digital Media Preview at Carriageworks in Sydney.

Bjork Digital was the premiere of the musician’s new virtual reality project, and formed part of Vivid, the annual festival that features light sculptures and installations throughout the city.

Who’s Vedder, Who’s Best?

VAMPIRES HELP Johnny Depp put aside tabloid woes to give out free hearing aids in Portugal with his Hollywood Vampire bandmates.

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KARMA CHAMELEON Boy George could barely contain his excitement as he performed a DJ set for Vivid Live at Cafe Del Mar, Darling Harbour. He was in Sydney after a sold-out six-date Culture Club tour.

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Eddie Vedder joined the Who on “The Real Me” at a backyard gig in California, which raised $3 million for cancer research and treatment. “I love Eddie,” says Roger Daltrey.

“He doesn’t copy. He does the Eddie Vedder version.”

NO PETTY RIVALRY Elvis Costello and Tom Petty attended the Songwriters Hall Of Fame 47th Annual Induction and Awards on June 9th in New York.

Leon Plays On Severe winds forced Leon Bridges to cancel his main-stage set at Washington State’s Sasquatch! Festival – so he took his guitar to the lawn for an unplugged set. “My word is bond!” he said.

BASSES LOADED Grunge gods the Melvins are touring with several new bassists – seen here is Redd Kross fourstringer Steve McDonald (right) with King Buzzo.

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Gaga’s Fast Car Racing legend Mario Andretti kicked of the Indy 500 by taking three laps around the track with Lady Gaga as his passenger. “She had no idea what she was getting into, but she was so professional – and genuine,” Andretti says. Elton John said he has heard some of Gaga’s next album, which she’s recording with Mark Ronson. “It’s absolutely brilliant,” he added.

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Q&A GWEN STEFANI PG. 24 | SUPERGROUP THE RISE OF PROPHETS OF RAGE PG. 34

CAN’T STOP Kiedis and Flea onstage in California on May 29th

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Chilis’ Red-Hot Reboot E arly l ast year, the future looked bright for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. After a year of writing, the band had come up with a batch of new songs that it was proud of. Guitarist Josh Klinghofer, who joined the Chili Peppers in 2010, was taking on a bigger role in the songwriting and had developed an easy chemistry with his bandmates.

Then frontman Anthony Kiedis and bassist Flea took a snowboarding trip to Montana. “We were jetting down the

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After a serious setback, the band called Danger Mouse, cut back on the long jams and wrote some of its best songs in years

By Andy Greene

mountain, going, like, 50 miles an hour, when I just wiped out,” says Flea. “It was like, bam. My arm started swelling up right away. I broke my arm in five places. Big pieces of bone were shorn of.”

Flea managed to snowboard down the mountain, where he was met by an ambulance. He underwent major surgery to repair nerve damage, followed by six months of rehabilitation. The album was put on the back burner as he struggled to rebuild dexterity on his instrument. “I went to play

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ROCK&ROLL RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS [Cont. from 15] one note and a bunch of pain shot up my arm,” Flea recalls. “I tried to play the simplest things and my hand just wouldn’t do it. It felt like I let everyone down, because we couldn’t work on the record.”

The Chilis used the downtime to rethink their creative process. They were looking for a radical change after 2011’s I’m With You, a commercial disappointment. “We were starting to do the same things we’ve always done,” says Flea of the sessions for that album. “I knew what we were gonna do before we even did it.”

The bandmates made a big decision: This time, they weren’t going to work with Rick Rubin, who had produced each of their albums going back to 1991’s Blood Sugar Sex Magik. Instead, they recruited Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton, whose psychedelic, hip-hop-influenced approach added new life to the sounds of the Black Keys, Beck and U2. “Brian said, ‘I love your songs, and I can really help you make them better’,” says drummer Chad Smith.

While Rubin’s approach had been largely hands-off – “He doesn’t like to spend as much time in the studio,” says Smith – Burton logged long hours, urging the band to write songs with him from scratch. “He would be there from 11 a.m. until 11 p.m.,” says Smith. “He has a studio tan, as they say.” And while the Chilis were used to jamming in a room for hours until they had a song, Burton requested they write by layering instruments separately over drum tracks. “I was really hesitant to do that,” says Flea. “I didn’t want to lose the mightiness of us as a band, our raw identity and spontaneity.”

Many of the new songs deal with heartbreak: “The Getaway” describes learning to cope with loneliness, and “Dreams of a Samurai” is about splitting with a

FUNK BROTHERS Flea, Kiedis, Klinghofer and Smith (from left) at Flea’s L.A. home. “On the last record, we didn’t know him,” says Flea of Klinghofer. “Now we’ve established our language.”

woman “too young to be my wife”. It may not be a coincidence that Kiedis reportedly broke up with his girlfriend, Wanessa Milhomem, last year. “I would say a lot of it is relationship stuf,” says Smith. “You break someone’s heart and . . . ” Kiedis also looks back to the music he grew up with on the fiery “Detroit”, which name-checks everyone from the Stooges to J Dilla. “The chorus is one of my favourites we’ve ever done,” says Flea. “Josh slays it on that song.”

Klinghofer, 36, joined the band after his musical mentor John Frusciante left to focus on a solo career. “When we made the last record with [Josh], we had never even played a show with him,” says Flea. “We didn’t really know him. Now, after five years on the road and a million arguments, and telling each other that we love each other, we’ve really established our own language.”

On the road, Klinghofer has encouraged the band to acknowledge long-forgotten

corners of its catalogue, including the 1995 funky pop hit “Aeroplane”, from its lone LP with Dave Navarro on guitar. “We also worked up ‘My Friends’ from that bastard album,” says Smith. “John just never felt connected to that record. Josh is like, ‘I don’t care, man. I like it.’ ” The Chili Peppers will hit the European festival circuit before an overseas arena tour, with Australian dates yet to be scheduled. Kiedis and Flea remain as close as they were when they started playing music together as students at L.A.’s Fairfax High School in the late Seventies.

In addition to snowboarding trips, they often surf and attend Lakers games together. “He’s my fucking soulmate,” says Flea. “Our relationship is like some weird psychological study. It’s almost like a north and south magnet. They kind of repel each other, but they have to be together for the Earth to live.”

The group goes full ‘Graceland’ on new EP

Marcus Mumford

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In January, Mumford & Sons fulfilled a longtime dream when they travelled to South Africa to play three shows. While there, they decided to create their own souvenir: “We thought it would be amazing to go into a studio and take a sonic photograph,” says bassist Ted Dwane. “None

of us are experts in African music. We didn’t know if it would work or not.”

The band spent two days in a Johannesburg studio (“The gear was kind of fucked, to be honest,” says Dwane), working with Afro-electronic collaborators the Very Best and Senegalese pop star Baaba Maal. The result is Johannesburg, a five-song EP that blends the band’s

signature rousing choruses with Afrobeat guitars and rhythms. Like the Mumfords’ electrified, divisive 2015 album Wilder Mind, Johannesburg marks another step in the band’s desire to push beyond its unplugged roots. “There were so many limitations to that setup,” says Dwane. “We’re never going to do that again. We’ll never take a step back.”

DAVID BROWNE

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FROM TOP: STEVE KEROS; ERIKA GOLDRING/GETTY IMAGES

MUMFORD & SONS’ SOUTH AFRICAN ODYSSEY

ROCK&ROLL BOOKS

REMEMBERING A JOURNALIST WHO SAW THE POWER OF ROCK New books collect the work of pioneering music writer Ralph Gleason In 1967, Ralph J. Gleason was a 50-year-old jazzhead and columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle when he wrote an essay titled “Like a Rolling Stone”. It declared that to understand “the reality of what’s happening today in America, we must go to rock ’n roll, to popular music”. Forking over $2,000 to a college dropout named Jann Wenner, he cofounded a magazine with a name inspired by that essay – the magazine you are reading right now.

A Dylan Photographer’s Back Pages

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hotogr apher daniel kr amer had barely heard of Bob Dylan when he was booked to shoot the singer at a studio in Woodstock one day in 1964. “I was only supposed to have an hour with him, but I ended up shooting for five,” Kramer remembers. “A few weeks later, I brought the prints to his management oice. Bob walked around the table where I laid the prints out, then looked at me and said, ‘I’m going to Philadelphia this week. Would you like to come?’ ” Dylan loved Kramer’s work enough that, between August 1964 and August 1965, the photographer shot the young folk singer about 30 diferent times, playing a big role in shaping our image of the budding superstar. Kramer’s most famous shots appear on the covers of Dylan’s twin masterpieces from 1965 – Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited – but some of the best are candid and quiet: Dylan backstage with Joan Baez, goofing around in Manhattan with his buddies, playing chess in Woodstock.

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Now, Kramer has assembled a new book, A Year and a Day, which mixes many of his most iconic images with unseen photographs from his vast archives.

Some of the most interesting of the previously unpublished shots show Dylan reinventing his sound, recording his first electric music at the sessions for Bringing It All Back Home in 1965. “People always say that Dylan went electric at Newport in the summer of 1965,” says Kramer. “Well, not to me he didn’t. I saw him go electric that January while it was still snowing. It was incredible the first time ‘Maggie’s Farm’ came out over the speakers. Very exciting.”

A Year and a Day is almost 300 pages long, but Kramer says he still has many Dylan photographs that nobody has ever seen – and it well might stay that way forever. “You have to take 10 pictures to get one good one,” Kramer says. “The rest is snapshots, junk. They’re repetitive.

Many I haven’t even scanned. There will probably always be other pictures.”

Gleason Gleason was a character: He would often be seen sipping from glasses of milk in nightclubs (he was diabetic and didn’t drink). As a writer, he used his platform for social critique, frequently on the persistence of American racism.

Two new books, assembled by his son, Toby, and published by Yale University Press, are fresh and defining anthologies of the writer (who died of a heart attack in 1975). Music in the Air: The Selected Writings of Ralph J. Gleason includes an early take on the Beatles, and “We’ve Got to Get Rid of Nixon” – a 1972 editorial column that no doubt helped secure Gleason’s place on the president’s infamous “Enemies List”.

Conversations in Jazz collects transcripts of chats about his first music love. Most interviews took place between 1959 and 1961 in Gleason’s Berkeley living room, and involved some of jazz’s greatest figures: John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, Sonny Rollins and a young Quincy Jones. Gleason saw the music, like rock, as an expression of our highest selves. “There were political and sociocultural threads in his work – he did not write in a vacuum,” says Toby.

WILL HERMES

ANDY GREENE

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FROM LEFT: © DANIEL KRAMER/COURTESY OF TASCHEN, 2; GETTY IMAGES

DOWN TIME: With road manager Victor Maymudes and unidentified spectators, Woodstock, 1964. Below: In Queens, 1965.

Moby’s Bad Trip The electronic-music star details his tumultuous Nineties in a highly entertaining memoir

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FROM TOP: COURTESY OF MOBY/PENGUIN PRESS, 2; GIJSBERT HANEKROOT/REDFERNS/GETTY IMAGES

n the 1990s, moby became an unlikely electronic-music superstar – a vegan Christian who grew up poor in Connecticut and suddenly found himself jetting all over the world to play house-music anthems for thousands of drugged-up ravers. Not a bad gig. But as we learn in his revealing new memoir, Porcelain, the guy was a total wreck.

“When I was growing up, I was very ashamed of being poor,” he says. “That sense of shame and inadequacy has largely stuck with me, even when it hasn’t been empirically supported.”

Porcelain tells the story of Moby’s at times thrilling and at times disastrous attempts to find community and love in the rave and club scenes of New York in the Nineties. “It’s late-20thcentury dysfunctional Charles Dickens,” he says. “The naive kid from the country goes to the big, dirty city, pursues his dreams – and is basically destroyed in the process.” The book is loaded with booze, drugs and desperate, dodgy sex;

‘DYSFUNCTIONA DICKENS’ Moby DJJ’ing in New York, 1989 (left); 995. at Lollapalooza in 19

Madonna, the Red Hot Chili P b i f cameos.

David Bowie ma e brief rare memoir to have two distinct in which the protagonist is bitten penis.

rs and h t the scenes on the

Moby wrote it himself with some editing help from Rolling Stone contributor Gavin Edwards. “The baseline criterion I applied to these chapters was, could they potentially hold up as stories that you would tell someone in a bar?” says Moby. Most do, including one where Moby tries his hand at being a dominatrix: “My aunts and uncles, who are in their seventies and eighties, have read it, and now they know that at some point I was a professional dominatrix. This is stuff that, normally, people don’t need their family to know about.”

The book ends in 1999, after Moby had a almost ruined his caeer with the terrible r rock LP Animal Rights.

I a moving last scene, In e drives around Conn necticut, pondering his f fate while listening to his next album, Play, which he expected at the time to fail just as badly. Instead, P Play was a multiplatinum smash, propelling him to a celebrity status he plans to explore in his next memoir, which he’s already started writing. “I fall in love with alcohol, drugs, touring, the attention of complete strangers,” he says, describing the narrative. “I become kind of a monster for a little while. Then I bottom out, get sober and move to L.A. The challenge is how to make that story not sound like a JON DOLAN total cliché.”

HOW B BOWIE BROUGHT US ALL TOGETHER On the morning of January 11th, 2016, Rob Sheield was in shock: His hero David Bowie had just died, two days after dropping his stellar new album, Blackstar.

Sheield’s literary agent called and asked if he’d be willing to put an in-progress Beatles book on hold and slam out a new one about Bowie. “She said, ‘Just write for a month, and that’s the book’,” says Sheield, a ROLLING STONE contributing editor. “I said, ‘Well, he recorded Low in a month. But I’ll do this without the same pharmaceutical aids he used.’ ” If anyone was suited for the job, it was Sheield, who fell in love with Bowie the

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disabusing common notions minute he heard “Fame” on (like the idea that he was a the radio in 1975 and wrote “chameleon”) and exploring brilliantly about his idol fascinating digressions over the years. “He was not such as German New Wave like other stars, even at a artist Peter Schilling’s 1983 time when being certifiably hit “Major Tom (Coming insane was almost an entryHome)”, which Sheield level requirement to be a labels the “best faux-Bowie pop star,” Sheield says. “He rip of all time”. “[Bowie] managed to have his own was the hottest tramp, the distinctive breed of insanity.” slinkiest vagabond, the Sheield barely left his prettiest star who ever Brooklyn apartment during Bowie in 1973 shouted ‘You’re not alone!’ the month he spent writing to an arena full of the the book. “It became part world’s loneliest kids,” he writes. “He made of my grieving process,” he says. On Bowie you feel braver and freer, which is why the (out now) examines Bowie’s entire career, world felt diferent after you heard Bowie.” pinpointing what made him special (his “crackpot compassion” was a big part), ANDY GREENE

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REINVENTION

Scottish trio head left of centre on latest record

By Rod Yates

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f 2013 was the year that biffy Clyro truly ascended to the upper reaches of rock’s stratosphere – Opposites, their sixth album, a double no less, debuted at Number One in the UK; they headlined the Reading and Leeds festivals that same year – then 2014 might well be considered one long come down. Rocked by a slew of deaths close to the band – including frontman Simon Neil’s grandmother and designer Storm Thorgerson, who’d done the artwork for the Scottish trio’s last three albums – and the cancellation of a series of shows due to Neil’s health, the issues were compounded when the singer/guitarist attempted to start writing songs for what would become the group’s seventh album, Ellipsis, and sufered his first crisis of confidence as

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a songwriter. “Now when I think back on the arena-friendly bombast of the followit it was kind of illogical,” he admits, hav- ing three – Ellipsis represents an opportuing just left the set of Later . . . With Jools nity to explore new sonic territory. WorkHolland, on which the band were guests. ing for the first time with producer Rich “I felt like, even though there were six re- Costey (Muse), Ellipsis incorporates trap cords, maybe I’d just fluked a few good beats (“Re-arrange”), Americana (“Small songs over my life. I wasn’t in Wishes”) and bare-bones acousa particularly positive state of tic moments (“Medicine”) into the “I felt like, mind at the start of last year.” trio’s widescreen rock. “Some of In an efort to remove himself maybe I’d the songs are a bit left-field for from the process he set his guitar just fluked us, I’m sure some of our fans will down and penned a collection of a few good think we’ve gone too pop, but I electronic music, which will sur- songs,” couldn’t give less of a shit,” chuckface next year under the monick- says Neil. les Neil. “If I was wanting to make er ZZC, and decamped to Califorsomething to sell to people then nia for two months with his wife. Slowly the I’d make fucking sandwiches. self-inflicted pressure started to melt away “My whole M.O. on this record was, no (“I thought every song I wrote should be one needs a seventh Bif y Clyro album, the greatest song of all time, and of course but they need this seventh Biffy Clyro no one does that”), allowing Neil to ar- album,” he adds. “We don’t want to be a rive at the band’s most eclectic set of songs band where you know what you’re getto date. Given that Bif y Clyro approach ting on a seventh record. I’d rather peotheir albums as trilogies – the agit-post- ple think we’d lost it and fucked up but we rock of their first three LPs contrasts with did something that was inspiring to us.”

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COURTESY

Bify Clyro Hit the Reset Button

MIGHTY QUINS Tegan (on top) and Sara, in New York in May

Sisters Gonna Work It Out How Tegan and Sara ironed out their diferences, reinvented their sound and made Taylor a fan

By Rachel Syme

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Photograph by Christa a n Felber

STYLING BY TOYO TSUCHIYA. TEGAN’S JACKET BY ALL SAINTS. SARA’S JACKET BY PUBLIC SCHOOL. SHIRTS BY ETRE CECILE, PANTS BY ALL SAINTS, SHOES BY LD TUTTLE, SUNGLASSES BY CARLA COLOUR.

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t ’ s no t a lwa y s e a s y t o tell Tegan and Sara Quin apart, but here is one way: Bring up Ace of Base. Tegan loves the Swedish pop group; her twin sister, Sara, does not. This distinction became clear a few years ago, when the Quins were trying to convert their longtime sister act from a rock band into a glossier pop machine. They decided to begin by naming some of their favourite Top 40 groups. “Tegan brought up Ace of Base, because she’s obsessed with music from our high school years,” says Sara. “That’s not what I’m into. It took a couple of years to get on the same page.”

The sisters, 35, were very much on the same page by the time they recorded 2013’s Heartthrob with producer Greg Kurstin, who would go on to work with Adele. A collection of sparkling, danceable, highly catchy tunes, the album hit Number Three on the U.S. charts, and Taylor Swift invited the twins onstage to sing the frothy single “Closer” at the Staples Center in L.A. (According to Tegan, Swift was “so obsessed with the second verse” that she asked to belt it out herself.)

Heartthrob was a shockingly successful makeover for a band that had begun 14 years before as a folk duo and later spent time as a pop-punkish outfit and a slicker rock act. “We went pop because I wanted to make music that sounded diferent from what we were doing, and Tegan wanted to be more successful,” says Sara. “I respect albums you have to listen to 10 times to get into it, but that’s not our band.

Tegan and I walk into every room like the only way we’ll survive is if we talk and charm everyone. We’re not slowburn people. I am a politician; I go around the room and talk to everybody.

I think our songs do the same thing.”

The Quins’ new record, Love You to Death, refines their pop sound while re-infusing it with some of the heavy chords and acoustic rifs that defined earlier eforts. The result is their most sophisticated album yet. It’s also perhaps their most open, with songs that tackle some of the twins’ darker times together. More than once over the years, sibling rivalry threatened to break up the band, like when an argument about musical direction boiled over into a physical fight on tour in Scotland in 2008. “We were screaming, and we attacked each other, basically,” says Tegan. “We said we would play the show that night, but that we were done.” (They weren’t.)

Sara wrote the song “100x” about a period in 2003, when she moved to

CINDY ORD/GETTY IMAGES

Montreal and found herself living in a diferent city than Tegan for the first time, and “White Knuckles” traces the ups and downs of the sisters’ relationship over the years. “When Sara started to talk openly about writing songs about me, I cried,” Tegan says, “because I still remember that low moment, and look at how far we’ve come.”

Adds Sara, “Tegan and I always have to do this dance of figuring out how to live our own lives and also be together all the time.”

It’s a dance the twins have been working on since they were “latchkey kids” (as Sara puts it) growing up in a suburb north of Calgary, Alberta.

Their parents divorced when the twins were five, and the girls shuttled back and forth between homes and learned to rely on each other. By their teens, Tegan and Sara were drinking, smoking pot, and sometimes dropping acid during the school day. But they also studied classical piano, taught themselves guitar and became immersed in Calgary’s punk scene. The sisters signed a record deal when they were 18 and soon put out their official debut, This Business of Art, a folky growl of an album that took cues from Liz Phair and Ani DiFranco.

As the sisters voyaged through their musical personae, they also had to navigate tricky issues in their personal lives. Both Tegan and Sara identify as queer. They’ve always been open about their sexuality, and their rabid fan base celebrates their candour. The Quins even took Rolling Stone to task for calling the band a “Canadian lesbian duo” in reference to their Oscarnominated song “Everything Is Awesome”, which the twins recorded with the Lonely Island. Sara posted a rejoinder on Twitter: “Lesbian Canadian duo @teganandsara is honored to be included w/heterosexual trio @thelonelyisland.”

“There are moments we are still excited to educate people, and then there are times where you just have to put your emotional earmufs on,” Sara says.

“We could be on social media fighting with people every second of every day if we wanted to.” Tegan says the duo make pop as a political act: They want to be the first queer women to dominate the charts. “I want pop radio because there are no other queer women there,” she says.

The sisters recently decided to take a cue from Beyoncé and make a music video for every song on Love You to Death. “Our version of Lemonade is more condensed,” Sara jokes. “But we are definitely in full pop mode.”

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Lennon, Claypool Come Together Beatle ofspring joins forces with Primus frontman for gleefully weird psychedelic rock When sean lennon and his band the GOASTT embarked on a summer tour opening for Primus last year, he was excited to spend time with Les Claypool, one of his musical heroes. “In my circle of oddball musicians, he’s a legend,” says Lennon. “He’s like the Tim Burton of alternative music.”

The two hit it of. “We both love Claymation and weird cartoons and have kind of a dark, pervy sense of humour.” They also played a lot of music on Primus’ bus. “He has this amazing voice,” says Claypool. “He adds elements of beauty to the barnacle-covered hull that is my world.”

After the tour, Claypool invited Lennon further into his world, to make music at his Sonoma County, California, home.

Called “Rancho Relaxo”, it’s packed with antiques, including a prized bust of singer Jimmy Durante. “Some would call it crap; I call it knickknackery,” says Claypool.

“Tom Waits once called me a ‘pawn-shop weasel’.” Between sessions, Lennon and Claypool drank a lot of pinot noir from Claypool’s nearby vineyard, and went fishing and mushroomhunting (the bassist lives near a rare patch of porcinis).

“We hunt them every fall, 21 days after the first big

rain,” says Claypool. “Sean was fascinated by the ones that would kill you.”

The result of the trip is a new band, the Claypool Lennon Delirium, and a deeply psychedelic LP, Monolith of Phobos.

The title track is about one of Lennon’s favourite YouTube clips, in which Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin discusses “a very unusual structure” on a Mars moon.

“It’s one of the most important moments in TV history,” says Lennon. Several other conversations resulted in songs; “Oxycontin Girl” is a twisted diary of the country’s pharmaceutical epidemic, and “Bubbles Burst” is a Beatles-y tune about Michael Jackson’s pet chimp, Bubbles, whom Lennon got to know at Jackson’s house while acting in 1988’s Moonwalker.

“We were tight as can be,” Lennon says of Bubbles, laughing. “He was always dressed up in these little outfits, and if you tickled him he would laugh in a cute way. It was like being in an alternate dimension.”

The Claypool Lennon Delirium recently hit the road for an American tour. “He’s like a thoroughbred and I’m like a quarter horse,” says Lennon. “It’s good for me. It will force me to rise to the occasion.”

PATRICK DOYLE

ODDBALLS UNITE Lennon (left) and Claypool

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w e n st efa n i wa sn’ t kidding when she called her new solo album This Is What the Truth Feels Like.

It manages to combine upbeat pop with bracingly honest lyrics about her split from ex-husband Gavin Rossdale, the father of her three children. “Even before I knew that my life would be forever changed and all my dreams would be crushed,” she says, “I was quite desperate to make new music.” She ended up with a flood of inspiration that she compares to No Doubt’s 1995 breakthrough, Tragic Kingdom, written in a similar breakup haze: “I didn’t even know I could write music,” she recalls. “And then my heart was ripped out, and, like, served back to me on a platter. And this album, I feel like it just fell out of the sky. It was a miracle.”

What will it be like to revisit the heartbreak in these songs when you sing them on your solo tour?

I’m not in a different place yet.

I’m still heartbroken. You can’t have your family break up and still not be going through it a year later. I was just cleaning out a room in my house before I called you. It’s devastating.

You had another solo album almost done before this one, which never came out. What happened to that?

That was a fake record. I had it, but it never felt right. I had this opportunity to be on The Voice [in America], so it was like, “You’re on TV, let’s put a song out.” But I gave birth, and I was on TV, like, five weeks later. I was still nursing. There was no way!

You worked so hard on the last No Doubt record, and it didn’t connect.

Is that band over?

I don’t know what’s going to happen with No Doubt. When Tony [Kanal] and I are connected creatively, it’s magic. But I think we’ve grown apart as far as what kind of music we want to make. I was really drained and burned out when we recorded that album [2012’s Push and Shove].

And I had a lot of guilt: “I have to do it.” That’s not the right setting to make music. There’s some really great writing on that record. But the production felt really conflicted. It was sad how we all waited that long to put something out and it didn’t get heard.

Do you have any issue with the other members of No Doubt working with Davey Havok from AFI? Of course I don’t care. Those are my homeys from when I was a little girl! I want them to be happy and do whatever they need to do to ful-

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Gwen Stefani The pop-rock icon on No Doubt’s future, the heartache behind her new solo album, working with Prince, and being a little bit country

By Brian Hiatt

fil whatever creative place they need to fill.

You’ve recorded a duet with [new boyfriend] Blake Shelton. What do you make of the country world?

Being on The Voice helped open my mind to all kinds of music. My parents loved folk and bluegrass – my first concert was Emmylou Harris. And at the end of the day, a song is a song.

You collaborated with Prince a couple of times. What was that like?

He was such a genius that you can’t believe he existed. I was onstage with No Doubt in Minneapolis in the Nineties, and I saw his silhouette in the audience. I was like, “How is this happening?” Later, I sent him the demo to this song “Waiting Room” – he called and said, “Hey, I had to rewrite the song, but I think you’re going to like it.” He played on the version you hear on [No Doubt’s] Rock Steady, and I sang on his album. He sat at the board and sang me every single note.

I was in there for, like, eight hours.

“Hollaback Girl” has become such a signature song for you. How did you and Pharrell Williams write that one?

Back then, I felt scared to be around Pharrell. He’s supercute, and he’s so talented. It hurts you! But I knew that in that song, I needed to get back at somebody for talking shit on me. And I wanted it to sound like a cheer. I explained it to him, and he said, “I have this beat.” He also said, “Gwen, you’re too good, you don’t need to holla.” When we finished the song, we were literally doing the Tom Cruise on the couch. And the label was scared to put it out – they waited until the third single! Isn’t that crazy?

Is it tough having to live up to songs like that?

You do get insecure. How do I do something new that doesn’t sound like something I did before? How do I compete with how great “Hollaback Girl” was – and aren’t we going to sound like the girls that tried to sound like that? But this album was supertriumphant for me.

The Nineties were such a dude-heavy time in music. Is it fun to see women dominating pop?

It’s such a weird time in music. Everyone is listening to whatever their playlist is. Whereas before, we were kind of told what we were all going to be into. There’s some really great stuf out there, and some really horrible stuf. I feel sorry for some people that these are the songs they have to grow up listening to. But doesn’t every generation end up feeling that?

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JAMIE NELSON

ROCK&ROLL

The New Album feat Wo lves Of Winter and Anim al St yle

B I FF YC LY RO.COM

july 8

ROCK&ROLL IN THE STUDIO h

d

Haim Bring It All Back Home machines and samples. “This time, we came at it from a more organic rock standpoint,” says Danielle. “When we play live, we realise that ultimately we’re a rock band.” Working with producer Ariel Rechtshaid (Beyoncé, No Doubt), Haim have recorded more than a dozen tunes, including the piano-driven “Little of Your Love”, and “Nothing’s Wrong”, a kinetic, harmony-laden anthem that recalls Nineties Shania Twain. They also recorded a handful of songs with producer Rostam Batmanglij, formerly of Vampire Weekend. Haim plan to release the LP by early next year. “We make the music we make,” says bassist Este. “We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel. Right now, it’s just about coming together and JENNY ELISCU expressing what we’re feeling.”

PA AUL MCCAR NEY’S LONG AND WINDING BOX SET New collection covers post-Beatles journeys Paul McCartney was talking recently to a woman who works at his New York office when he got an idea.

She was about to embark on a road trip and wanted an extensive playlist of his music. He made one – it was

McCartney onstage in April

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released as Pure McCartney on June 10th, a 67-track collection that covers every corner of his post-Beatles catalogue, from “Big Barn Bed”, a 1973 country rocker, to “Sing the Changes”, from his 2008 album with the Fireman. For McCartney, hearing the old songs was a time trip. “Maybe I’m

Amazed” reminded him of the satisfaction he felt recording it after the Beatles’ breakup, and “Live and Let Die” evoked his children’s youthful days. “My kids said, ‘My dad wrote that’, and nobody at school would believe them,” he says.

“They said, ‘No, it’s Guns N’ Roses!’ ” STEVE APPLEFORD

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: PIERRE AUROUX; PHIL SHARP; ANDREW COTTERILL

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n early 2015, after almost three years of heav y touring, Este, Danielle and Alana Haim returned to where they started: the living room of their parents’ Los Angeles home, to begin work on their second album. It’s the same space where they wrote Haim’s 2013 debut, Days Are Gone, which helped earn the trio a Grammy nomination and an opening slot on BFF Taylor Swift’s 1989 tour. “We’ve gone through a lot these last couple of years,” says guitarist Danielle. The experience of going back home – “Trying to go back to your normal life, but realising there is a diference,” she says – runs through many of Haim’s new songs. It also brought them back to their roots as a band. Unlike Days Are Gone, their new music does not heavily incorporate drum

MY LIST

Marky Ramone

BY HENRY ROLLINS Our man in the van hits the festival circuit and finds a soft spot for metalheads

MY FIVE FAVOURITE PUNK SONGS

The former Ramones drummer is on tour playing the group’s classic tunes with his band Marky Ramone’s Blitzkrieg.

The Kinks “All Day and All of the Night” The raunchiness of the production and Dave Davies’ guitar sound were the beginnings of punk. When I first heard it I was like, “Holy shit!”

The Trashmen

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: ILLUSTRATION BY MICHAEL WELDON; GETTY IMAGES

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t is music festival season in multiple nights. As far as heavy metal Europe. My schedule has me hitgoes, this is the one. Seventy-plus thouting the stage for fests in Belgium, sand people rock out for four days every Germany, Sweden, France, Spain, August.

England, Scotland and Croatia. These I didn’t know what to expect, but when are on top of shows I have already done asked I said yes and the deal was done. this year in five of the aforementioned Months later, I was backstage at the fesas well as the USA, Holland, Denmark, tival and was told the tent was packed. I Finland, Ireland, Russia, Poland and walked out in front of thousands of metal Ukraine. By December, I will be able to maniacs and the show was great. From add New Zealand, Australia, South Afthat moment on, it’s been nonstop cool. rica and Canada to my 130+ show 2016 I will be back for my third time at Wacktour roster. It is a lot of airports, time en this August and I am very much lookchanges, economy seats and performing forward to it. ing on diferent levels of mind warp due I always thought metal fans were good to jet lag. to go. While not an aficioIt has been a long time nado, I do listen to quite since I was in a band. For “I walked out a bit of metal and have many years, I have gone more than once walked up in front of onto festival stages on my to someone wearing the Town to face whatever au- thousands of shirt of some metal band I dience chooses to face me. metal maniacs.” like and said hello and made I remember the first time an instant pal for life. It has I did talking shows in this never not been that way. setting. I figured I was in for an hour of People get lumped into groups by abuse from people who, taking a break other people. It’s one of the more unatfrom seeing bands, felt like bucketing tractive traits of our species. Metal is yours truly. wild, cathartic and often emotionally How did I find myself in this potencharged music. A big sound engendering tially volatile position? Saying yes to a a big reaction. The fans are some of the show is an almost involuntary action for most unafected, come-as-you-are types me. It’s what I do and where I want to I have ever encountered and the bands be. It’s not about money. It’s about doing are often some of the more intelligent it. If you like it so much, then even if the and funny I have come across. setting could be adverse, you go for it, The point I’m making is that if you right? I’m in. stop limiting your perception of what Perhaps the most intimidating festisomething is going to be and simply val I said yes to was years ago when the let it be what it is, you can have a realmighty Wacken Festival asked me to do ly good time.

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“Surfin’ Bird” This is an of-the-wall song that’s crazy and insane beyond description. It was diferent than anything on the radio.

Love “7 and 7 Is” This came out 10 years before the genre was really consolidated at CBGB, but it’s still punk. It should have gone Number One.

Richard Hell and the Voidoids “Blank Generation” I was in this band. This song spoke for the populace at the time CBGB was going. It reflects a moment in time.

The Music Machine “Talk Talk” The fuzz bass, production and singing on this had all the elements of punk. It’s filthy, sludgy and diferent from anything else that came out in 1966.

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ROCK&ROLL NEW ALBUM

Emma Louise’s Gallic Rebirth After a period of doubt, the singer rediscovered her creative muse in a castle in France

F

rom the outside looking in, 2013 was good to Emma Louise.

At 21, the singer/songwriter, then based in Brisbane, released her debut album Vs Head Vs Heart, which peaked at number 12 on the ARIA charts, and her 2011 hit single “Jungle” was remixed by German producer Wankelmut and re-charted across Europe.

But Emma Louise had been feeling the weight of increased scrutiny over the past two years and the pressures, both external and self-inflicted, had taken the fun out of making music.

“With that album I had such a diferent mindset to now, I was very judgmental and critical of myself,” says the singer, now based in Melbourne. “It wasn’t a very pleasurable thing to release and record it, it was painful.”

At the same time that she completed the album, her relationship ended, and for a time, she stopped music altogether.

“I think I was leaning on it too much like it was my everything,” she says.

The next two “erratic” years were spent travelling to Japan and through Europe and contemplating other pursuits – she considered starting a fashion label at one point. It was almost begrudgingly that Emma Louise agreed to meet with producer Pascal Gabriel (Dido, Ladyhawke) at his studio in the village of Sablet in the south of France, at the behest of her management.

“They were like, ‘He lives in a castle, just do some sessions. If you hate it, you don’t have to release it’,” she says.

The castle, complete with a tower, had a magnificent view of Gabriel’s vineyard, the leaves changing from orange to bruised Pascal he was like, ‘Come out’, and I wasn’t blue with the cool of winter. Gabriel’s wife afraid to grow.”

Pippa, “the best fucking cook in the uniEmma Louise’s maturity is palpable on verse”, provided nourishing new record Supercry, an emofood, and with Gabriel’s entionally charged, elegant col“I didn’t surround couragement, Emma Louise lection of songs about loss and myself with started to enjoy creating music renewal. “I guess what it says people that again. about when I made it is that “Before, I’d had my confi- nurtured my it’s sitting on the cusp of two dence whittled away from me,” creative beast.” diferent times, coming out of she says. “I didn’t surround a dark kind of time and commyself with people that nurtured my cre- ing into colour,” she says. ative beast, they stifled it, they made it These days, she’s less attached to the scared, and when I went over there with outcome of her work; the pleasure comes

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from the doing. “I’m really excited about this next album, and about music in general,” she says.

“I feel like how I felt about it before ‘Jungle’.”

Time and perspective have also allowed her to reflect on her debut in a new light.

“If you asked me a year or two years ago I would have said something negative about it, but I only feel good things about it, it is what it is in the time that it was,” she says.

“I know that it was real and honest and ANNABEL ROSS that’s all that matters.”

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RO TOURING

THE RISE AND RISE OF JOE BONAMASSA

NEW ALBUM

Broods’ Poppy Return New Zealand duo go into second album ‘Conscious’ with their eyes open

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he broods siblings have a polite but uncompromising message right upfront on their second album. “All I want is your attention please,” Georgia Nott sings on the first track, “Free”. “Don’t want your opinion or your fee.”

Her older brother Caleb chuckles unapologetically. “Evergreen was kind of accidental,” he says of the album that rocketed the duo out of Auckland onto the global stage two years ago. “This one was a lot more on-purpose. We’ve called it Conscious because there were more decisions that went into it. It was a lot more calculated. We’ve developed so much as people and as musicians over the last couple of years.

That song is [about] not letting outside influences help you make those decisions.”

External factors played a more organic part in the album’s evolution, he says, from the muted atmospheric edge of Evergreen into something that “might sound a little bit poppier”.

“When playing live becomes 90 per cent of the job, you naturally start writing bigger songs. The energy when you perform them is incredible so you want to turn up even more, and I guess that’s why a lot of the songs sound a lot bigger on this record.

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“What you’re listening to at the time comes into it, too,” he adds. “I found a new respect for pop music on this record that I maybe didn’t quite have on the first one.”

Two tours with Ellie Goulding – one in the USA, one across New Zealand and Australia – might have played into that revelation. On album two, a co-writing credit with Lorde on the track “Heartlines” will doubtless raise pop consciousness further. “We’re friends, but we don’t hang out a lot,” Caleb says. The song happened in a day, when their mutual producer Joel Little arranged a studio get-together in Auckland. “She’s really sweet. Really intelligent. Like, a slightly intimidating intelligence, you know?”

Georgia’s marriage and the siblings’ relocation to Los Angeles have advanced personal plot lines significantly this year, but “we’re still tight”, Caleb says. “I think it’s easier for us because we have each other; someone who knows you inside out and back to front. We do kind of get chucked in the deep end sometimes, which can be kinda scary. It’s like, ‘Come on, mate, go out there and do your thing.’”

So when was the last time he got scared?

“I think it’s right now. Maybe not scared.

Releasing a second record is . . . anticipation mixed with nerves. What if people don’t like it? What if people don’t like where we’ve gone now? But you can’t really think about that too much either. You MICHAEL DWYER just gotta go and do it.”

When blues guitar legend Joe Bonamassa returns to Australia this September, his touring schedule will include one very special night in Sydney. “I’m playing the Opera House – that’s a bucket-list gig for me,” he says. “We’re being filmed, but it’s just us doing the show that we do Monday through Sunday, because once you get that set rehearsed, it’s devastatingly impactful.”

Backed by a full band – horns, harmonies, the whole bit – Bonamassa hits Australia amid a world tour that’s been buoyed by the unprecedented success of latest album Blues of Desperation.

“It hit Number Five in the U.S.,” he says, bewildered. “Sandwiched between Rihanna, Justin Bieber and Adele. We all had a bit of a what-the-fuck moment with that.”

Following the direction of 2014’s Diferent Shades of Blue, the new record puts songwriting before blues shredding, an approach that has won Bonamassa more fans and fresh respect.

“Well, you can have a bad song with a good guitar solo, and you still have a bad song,” he explains with a laugh.

The guitarist also confirms rumours that supergroup Black Country Communion will be reforming in July, with a new album planned. “David Bowie’s death sparked it,” he reveals. “It made me realise [we’re not immortal] and I would have had a lot of regrets if I didn’t make peace while I still could. So I sent everyone an email, and within an hour, everyone had e-mailed back. That really felt like a sign.”

DAN LANDER

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FIVE NOTES

Stonefield THE SISTERS FINDLAY ARE BACK WITH A PSYCHLADEN SECOND ALBUM, ‘AS ABOVE, SO BELOW’

1

HOME IS WHERE THE MUSIC IS

Their Macedon Ranges family home remains Stonefield’s workplace – and for album two they turned it into a studio.

“We still jam in Mum and Dad’s shed,” says singer/drummer/eldest sister Amy. “We turned the whole house into a studio for a couple of months: Hannah was playing guitar in Dad’s armchair, so he got kicked out.”

2

3

THEY WROTE WITH KRAM FROM SPIDERBAIT

4

THERE WAS A ONE-WORD SONG TITLE RULE

5

MICK FLEETWOOD OFFERS CAREER ADVICE

After meeting Kram at a gig they struck up a friendship, jammed and he “helped take the songs to the next level”, says Amy. “Any time we’ve tried to do co-writing sessions it’s felt a bit stale and forced and weird, so it was really nice to have a musical experience with someone that was totally organic. We became really good friends.” The amount of times they asked him to play “Buy Me a Pony” though? “Um, zero,” she laughs.

Focus is a key of As Above, So Below, and one-word song titles were a result. “We felt it helped encapsulate all the emotions and moods and vibe of the songs in those titles,” explains Amy. “It looks nice as well, when you visualise it. It’s neat, and we’re a bit OCD like that.”

ALBUM TWO IS CHUNKY WITH RIFFS

Thanks in part to Hannah becoming one of Australia’s foremost rif monsters – “She really has,” grins Amy – and Sarah’s keyboard warriorisms, but also because they knuckled down and focused on perfecting their songs. “We’ve really tried to take more control and focus on who we are, what we do, and who we want to be,” says Amy. “That was the number one important thing for us on this album; that it was coming from the heart.”

The sisters fulfilled a lifelong dream in supporting Fleetwood Mac on their Australian tour, winning over one important fan: Mick Fleetwood. After watching them from side of stage, they met him after the final show. “It was incredible,” remembers Amy. “His one piece of advice was ‘keep it greasy’,” she laughs. “It was amazing. So cool.”

JAYMZ CLEMENTS

SALLY PATTI

SISTERS ARE DOIN’ IT Stonefield (l-r): Hannah, Sarah, Holly and Amy Findlay

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REFUGEES Petty and Campbell (left) with Mudcrutch in Cincinnati in June.

ON THE ROAD

Mudcrutch Finally Find Their Groove After 40 years, Tom Petty takes his original Florida garage band on tour

By Andy Greene

D

uring his 25 years living in Nashville, Tom Leadon has seen countless shows at the Ryman Auditorium. But the rail-thin 64-year-old has never stepped onstage – until tonight. Leadon, who has spent the past few decades working as a guitar teacher, recently went on hiatus from his day job after his old buddy Tom Petty called him up to get their teenage band, Mudcrutch, back together for their first-ever U.S. tour.

Tonight, Leadon grins as he rips solos during the Flying Burrito Brothers classic “Six Days on the Road” and sings lead on the bluegrass rocker “The Other Side of the Mountain”, for a crowd that includes dozens of his guitar students, plus his brother Bernie, a founding member of the Eagles. “I keep waiting for somebody to tell me, ‘Tom, this is a dream’,” he marvels. “What a wonderful turn of events this is.”

Mudcrutch feature Petty on bass and fellow Heartbreakers Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench on guitar and keyboards, respectively – along with Leadon and drummer Randall Marsh, who spent his post-Mudcrutch years playing in various

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bands, including Campbell’s side project the Blue Stingrays.

Mudcrutch built their name playing six days a week at a popular Gainesville, Florida, club that featured topless dancers. The band split up in 1975 after being dropped from Shelter Records. But the label retained Petty as a solo artist, and he recruited Campbell and Tench to join his new backing group. That band didn’t

“We haven’t earned the right to play 20,000-seaters,” says Petty. include Leadon, who had left Mudcrutch after a clash with the topless club’s owner, or Marsh, whose drumming didn’t impress the label president. But Petty became nostalgic about his first band while watching footage for Peter Bogdanovich’s 2007 Petty documentary, Runnin’ Down a Dream. The next year, Petty reunited the group to make its first LP, which he counts as some of his best work. “I don’t usually play my stuf, but I play that one,” he says. The reunion was a big moment for his estranged bandmates, who had watched from the sidelines as the Heart-

breakers found arena-size glory. “As soon as we started playing with them again, it felt like we were home,” says Leadon. But the re-formed Mudcrutch barely toured following the album, outside of a brief run of club shows in California. “Mudcrutch is kind of ephemeral,” says Marsh. “It’s here, and then it’s gone.”

The band finally got back together last year to record its second LP, 2. While the first album was bashed out in just 10 days, this time Marsh and Leadon moved into Petty’s Malibu estate for months. “They just became part of the scenery,” says Petty. Adds Leadon, “We hung out in the kitchen a lot, talking about old times.”

Planning the tour, Petty wanted to play small venues, limiting their set list to Mudcrutch material and a few covers.

“I insisted we not play anywhere bigger than 2,000 people,” he says. “I just don’t feel like we earned the right to headline 20,000-seaters.” (They broke the rule when they accepted a couple of festival dates, including Cincinnati’s Bunbury: “We only did that so we could pay our expenses,” says Petty. “We aren’t rowing in money from this tour at all.”)

Touring with Mudcrutch requires Petty to take on a new role. Mudcrutch jam extensively, and everyone in the band sings lead on at least one song. “I’m playing bass, so I’m not that free to be an entertainer,” he says. “I need to be locked into the rhythm.

It’s a totally diferent kind of gig. But I’d say, no bullshit, we’re really enjoying this.

I’m extremely engaged in what we’re doing now.” For the other members of the Heartbreakers, the shows present challenges they haven’t faced in decades: “We aren’t playing all those hits, so you can’t rest on your laurels,” says Campbell. “We live or die on how good we make the show.”

The Ryman show runs over two hours, and the crowd doesn’t seem to mind that it doesn’t hear a single Petty classic. The highlight is a 10-minute version of 2008’s “Crystal River”. As the bandmates trade solos, Petty wanders the stage, as if lost in a trance, occasionally asking them to play longer. He pogos throughout the rowdy encore, Jerry Lee Lewis’ “High School Confidential”. After taking a bow, he stays onstage to sign autographs.

Petty already has plans beyond the tour.

Next year, he hopes to release a deluxe edition of 1994’s Wildflowers, which he’ll likely support by playing the album in its entirety on the road. But he’s not closing the door on Mudcrutch. “If I live till next year, we’ll think about doing it again,” he says with a laugh.

“You never know what the future will hold,” says Leadon. “That’s one reason we’re really trying to enjoy the moment, and just treasure the time we’re having right now.”

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ROCK&ROLL SUPERGROUP

Prophets of Rage Restart the Rap-Rock Revolution

Rage Against the Machine join up with Chuck D and B-Real of Cypress Hill to fight the power once more

By Andy Greene

‘W

e’r e not a su pergroup,” says Tom Morello.

“We’re an elite task force of revolutionary musicians.” He is describing Prophets of Rage, a new band that brings together members of the guitarist’s old band, Rage Against the Machine, with two of the group’s favourite MCs, Public Enemy’s Chuck D and Cypress Hill’s B-Real.

Fans first learned about Prophets of Rage when mysterious posters started popping up around Los Angeles and a

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countdown clock was posted on Rage to join. “There was a level of camaraderie Against the Machine’s Twitter account. and purpose,” says Morello. “There’s nothSome assumed Rage would be re-forming ing like playing these songs with Timmy for the fi rst time since their last show, and Brad.” The group made plans for two at the L.A. Coliseum in 2011. That’s not warm-up club dates at the Whisky a Go happening – according to drummer Brad Go and the Palladium in Los Angeles. “We Wilk, Rage Against the Machine front- are determined to confront this mountain man Zack de la Rocha is working on an- of election-year bullshit,” adds Morello. other project.

“And confront it head-on with As Morello tells it, watchMarshall stacks blazing.”

“We’re an elite ing the nightly news at his The three groups have a task force of home in Los Angeles over the long shared history. In the revolutionary past year convinced him that early Nineties, Rage listened Rage’s music couldn’t sit out musicians,” to Public Enemy and Cypress yet another tumultuous elec- says guitarist Hill tapes in their van contion season. After getting Tom Morello. stantly while they worked out Rage’s rhythm section – Wilk their sound. “When we startand bassist Tim Commerford – on board, ed out, no rock bands wanted to take us on he started texting with longtime friends the road,” says Wilk, “so we did early tours Chuck D and B-Real, who quickly agreed with both of them.”

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DANNY CLINCH

NEW RENEGADES Wilk, Chuck D, Morello, Commerford and B-Real (from left). “It’s the hardest, most aggressive sound I’ve ever been associated with,” says Chuck D.

“I see them as this generation’s Black Sabbath,” says B-Real about Rage Against the Machine. “It was that heavy to me. In the early 1990s, I was listening to nothing but hip-hop, but they got me back into listening to heavy music.”

Prophets of Rage quietly started coming together about five months ago at tiny rehearsal spaces around Los Angeles. “It’s the hardest, most aggressive sound I’ve ever been associated with,” says Chuck D of the practice sessions. “It’s relentless power, speed and energy for four hours a day, five or six days a week. I’ve been doing Pilates to get ready.”

Onstage, the band are pulling from all three groups’ catalogues. While Rage Against the Machine songs will stay close to their original arrangements, Cypress Hill and Public Enemy tunes have undergone what the band calls “Rage-ification”. “ ‘She Watch Channel Zero’ has become a Rage-Sabbath bulldozer,” says Morello of the Public Enemy song. “And ‘Fight the Power’ has morphed into something that you might not expect.” The group has also worked up a few new songs it might sprinkle into the show.

Morello has had to brush off Ragereunion questions for years. “It’s stressful,”

REVOLUTION! Prophets of Rage onstage in Brooklyn on June 5th.

he says. “Fans are frustrated the music has not been out there.” According to the band, de la Rocha has given the project “his blessing”. “You’re never going to replace him, and we’re not trying to do that,” Commerford says. “We’ve picked people that he looks up to and idolises to see what they can do with the songs.”

At press time, Prophets of Rage have American dates booked until late-Oc-

tober. Rumours are flying that the band will play outside the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, like Rage did with a riot-inciting performance at the 2000 Democratic convention. “I enjoy rumours as much as anybody else,” says Morello with a laugh. “The one thing I’ll say is, we’re going to make America rage again.

What better place than here? What better time than now?”

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ROC &ROLL “It’s terrifying what a human will do to survive,” Kirkman says.

SUPERNATURAL

The ‘Walking Dead’ creator on his new show, how to handle the apocalypse, and witnessing a real-life exorcism By David Fear

F

or si x se a sons, robert Kirkman, the writer and executive producer of hit show The Walking Dead, has turned the pages of his black-and-white comic book into a “zombie movie that never ends” juggernaut.

The show not only spawned a Los Angeles-based spinof (Fear the Walking Dead) but also a hit in which people discuss episodes immediately after they air (Talking Dead). Every time a major character dies, which is often, Twitter practically bursts into flames. The comic, now in its 155th issue, has sold more than 50 million copies worldwide and been translated into more than 30 languages. Cosplayers dress up as Dead heroes, villains and ghouls, and reportedly at least one Comic- Con attendee dressed as a zombie version of Kirkman himself.

In a conference room overlooking a part of L.A. that Fear once engulfed in post-

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apocalyptic fire, the 37-year-old Kirkman smiles beneath a buzz cut and a bushy beard, alternating between warmth and wariness. “You going to say I have a ‘bulky physique’ like the last guy?” he jokes, referring to a 2013 Rolling Stone story that included a comparison to The Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy. He is now bringing another comic, the supernatural thriller Outcast, to television with the hope of doing for demonic possession what his breakout work did for zombies. Centred on a smalltown kid battling an evil-spirit epidemic, it’s a mix of religious horror and rural dread – The Exorcist crossed with Grant Wood’s “American Gothic”.

Despite the many projects, rabid fan base and no longer having “12 credit cards’ worth of debt”, Kirkman still has a conflicted relationship with success. “Look, I live extremely comfortably now,” he says, “more than I have a right to.” He used to worry that he would never make it, and then that he had peaked too soon. “It used to haunt me that this thing I came up with when I was 23 years old would define me,” he says. “My tombstone will say, ‘Here lies the idiot who made The Walking Dead.’ But, hey, there are worse things. I’m OK with that now.”

What do you remember about growing up in Kentucky?

My dad was a sheet-metal fabricator and an entrepreneur, and I have a distinct memory of being in my dad’s truck, saying to him, “Your job seems so hard.” He said, “That’s what you do when you’re an adult.

You get up every morning and go to work.”

I was like, “Really? This sucks!” [Laughs] When did the idea that the dead might walk among us come across your radar?

I wasn’t allowed to watch horror movies as a kid, so there was always a fascination with them. One night, there was some local Fox ai liate that happened to be showing Night of the Living Dead. I remember thinking, “This is crazy. There are people trapped in this house and zombies are trying to get in.” I’d heard George Romero had made sequels. I must have watched them every night for months.

Did it surprise you when TV became interested in the comic?

It was all fairy dust to me. I was in Kentucky when somebody told me Frank Darabont was interested in doing The Walking Dead as a TV show. I was like, “Um, who’s Frank Darabont? What’s The Shawshank Redemption? Never seen it.” I had to

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The New Master of Horror

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: GENE PAGE/AMC; IMAGE COMICS; NIKO TAVERNISE/FOX INTERNATIONAL STUDIOS

go watch the movie, at which point The show has become increasingly I was like, “Oh, he gets it. This isn’t bleak – how much of it reflects your about the prison, it’s about these view of humanity? two guys and their emotions.”

I try not to be a glass-half-empAnd then you stepped through ty kind of guy. But I do feel like if the looking-glass. society were to crumble, we would It’s weird, you go from doing this all be killing each other for resourccomic book with your best friend, es. It’s terrifying what a human will and then you’re standing on a set do to survive, you know? Monsters where there are burned-out cars are real, and they are us. Once I had and wrecked helicopters. There are kids, I remember thinking, “Yeah, if people in zombie makeup everythat guy tried to kill my kid, I would where, and Frank Darabont is firrip his head of.” Though wh knows? [Pauses] ing a gun instead of saying “Action” who W all like to think we’re while you watch a scene of a little We 2 girl being killed. I mean, someiam Neesons, but most body turned this thing into a movus are George Costan1 z able Disneyland, and I got to visit zas.

D you have an endit? It’s fucking surreal.

Do g What about when it became a game for Dead in m pop-culture phenomenon? mind?

I piss people of sometimes beFor the books? I do. cause I’m not very excitable. I knew know how the story we were one bad news story away w raps up. The big from zombies never making it to question is when and TV. After the pilot aired, [AMC how far in the distance programming head] Joel Stillthat is. erman called me and told me that There’s still plenty of something like 5.3 million people story for the TV se3 had watched it [in the U.S.], and ries. You could tell my response was, “Cool. So is that the writers where good?” [Laughs] I don’t know how you’re going. . . .

Years of the Living Dead many people watch TV. I would never do that. That’s (1) Michael Traynor (left) and Steven Yeun in The You’re an executive producer on the one thing I’m disappointed in Walking Dead. (2) The cover of the first issue of Outcast, the show. . . .

George R.R. Martin for doing. He June 2014. (3) Gabriel Bateman (top) and Patrick Fugit Yeah, but I didn’t struggle in TV. should have just been like, “Fuck in the premiere of the TV adaptation of Outcast.

I don’t know what the normal exyou. You make it up now. I’ll get to perience feels like, and that somemine when I’m ready.” times bums me out. I know that I would be now: Netflix, social media, everything is on You’ve said you’re not religious, but Outhaving a better time and I would be appre- demand at all times. Nothing is withheld. cast seems heavily influenced by it. ciating it more if I had any kind of concept You can’t do 52 episodes a year. It’s just not My mum went to a Pentecostal church of what it’s like to actually do all the work possible. If you can do something that has for a number of months, maybe years – that goes in a TV show and then have the people talking about your show in that gap people speaking in tongues and all that. world go, “How about ‘fuck you’?” Maybe between seasons, that’s great. If you’ve enMy mum would be like, “I don’t want you Outcast will give me that [laughs]. joyed the show so far, just know: Season to go to hell, so we’re going to church.”

Why do you think a zombie show hit such Seven is going to be pretty great.

But where did the idea of doing a series a nerve with mainstream culture?

You had a legal battle with the comic’s on possession come from?

It’s the global economic crisis, income original artist, Tony Moore, in 2012, when Look . . . all right, fine. I witnessed an inequality, the post-9/11 world. Everyone he claimed he was cheated out of profits. exorcism while I was at that church. I is scared shitless. It’s not the worst time Are you guys on speaking terms? don’t like talking about it. This person ever to be alive, but, you know, it’s tough He just did a cover for issue No. 150, so, was spitting and biting and growling and out there. I feel like if you worry every day yeah, from time to time. He has his take on all kinds of crazy stuf. I don’t remember about being able to buy groceries and then the matter, I have mine. I guess we just agree being scared. It seemed almost normal you go home and watch a guy get chased by to disagree. It’s a bittersweet thing. When to me. I wouldn’t say it messed with my zombies – it’s like, well, could be worse. Lis- we started [publishing] Walking Dead, I mind. It was an interesting thing. I witten, if I could wave a magic wand and make knew there was a very good chance that I nessed an exorcism. the world a better place and make Walking would have to replace him, and I didn’t want Like zombies, it’s a rich metaphor for exDead less successful, I would wave it with- to do that. I remember there was a point ploring some bigger ideas. out hesitation. I feel like I’m a misery prof- where I was screaming at him, “We could It’s terrifying to think there could be a iteer sometimes. be making $50,000 a year each on this thing out there that could go inside of you People were pretty up in arms over the book if things keep going this way. Are you and make you not you. That’s something season finale. . . . crazy?” At that point, I was still tens of thouthat we all deal with, to a certain extent.

We knew that people might be upset – sands of dollars in debt from self-publishing.

I think back to how I was as a 19-yearbut come on! Everybody wants to see what When Walking Dead took of, I would have old, and how all my life experiences have happened. That’s what a clif hanger is. I’ll chained Tony to that table to make sure we changed who I am – and if I met him, I probably get crucified for this. I feel like were able to do this. And, yeah, he didn’t don’t know if we’d get along. He’s probathere’s a culture of instant gratification want to be chained to that table. bly an asshole.

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ROCK&ROLL MY SOUNDTRACK

Van McCann

Catfish and the Bottlemen’s frontman is a blast at funerals, has a soft spot for Usher By Rod Yates The Song I Want Played at My Funeral Quincy Jones “Soul Bossa Nova”, 1962 “I want the Austin Powers theme tune, ‘Soul Bossa Nova’. Imagine the doors [to the church] fly open and you see girls doing backflips down the aisle, and then they all carry me in in a coin and that’s blaring. As soon as you hear that music you know, ‘Here he comes, the main man!’ It’s going to be epic.

I’ve got a pretty mad family, so when we go to a funeral we always try and make a celebration of it as opposed to a mourning. My family’s full of mad Irish people.”

The Song That’s Guaranteed To Get Me on the Dancefloor The Strokes “Someday”, 2001 “There’s something about the groove; every single shape I throw to that song is just spot on. It’s as if they wrote it to make me dance.

It’s on the gig playlist before we go onstage every night, we play it to the audience, cos hopefully there’s a few in there who can at least get close to the moves I’m throwing.

But they’ll never match them. How would I describe my dancing style? Captain Jack Sparrow when he runs meets Austin Powers when he blows them fembots up in the second one [Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery].”

The Song That Reminds Me Of Touring Father John Misty “Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings”, 2012 “Bondy [guitarist Johnny Bond] used to play it all the time in the dressing room.

We’ve got this Bluetooth speaker, and before anyone’s brought any suitcases in or anything, it’s just an empty room, that kick drum would reverberate around the whole room and it would sound huge. We just played Hollywood Forever Cemetery in L.A., so I was up there on the roof having a smoke and

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listening to a few songs, and when that came on all the lyrics started hitting me harder, cos I was actually stood in the place he was singing about.”

The Song That Makes Me Cry

The Song That Reminds Me Of Growing Up Van Morrison “Wavelength”, 1978

“I cried laughing at how good the lyrics are. As soon as I heard it I played the [first] verse on repeat for about a week straight, and after the verse I used to just have to stop and laugh my arse of. He just rhymes everything so simply but so direct and so picturesque, you can see everything he’s talking about: ‘She was holding hands with Trevor/Not the greatest feeling ever’.

I think that verse is hilarious, and hilariously good.”

“Every single New Year’s I’d sit down with my dad and we’d play this Van Morrison DVD, Live at Montreux, 1980, and he opens with this version of ‘Wavelength’. It’s this six, seven-minute intro of a wall of music, and he brings the band to a standstill just by dropping his hand to the side of his waist, and then he comes in with the opening line of the song. It’s probably the best introduction to any show I’ve ever seen. I’ve watched that DVD religiously with my dad, since as far as I can remember, right up until any time I’m with him on New Year’s. My dad named me after Van Morrison, cos that was his hero growing up.”

The Song I Want To Cover

The Song I’m Most Proud Of

The Killers “Read My Mind”, 2006

Catfish and the Bottlemen “7”, 2016

“I actually did that on Triple J [for Like a Version], and [Killers vocalist] Brandon Flowers e-mailed me after it saying how made up he was with the version. To get an e-mail like that, that was epic for me, waking up to a [message] from Sir Flowers, that’s quality. So I always wanted to cover that and got to when we played out there. I love the lyrics: ‘I never really gave up on/Breaking out of this two-star town/I got the green light/I got a little fight/I’m gonna turn this thing around.’ That’s a great lyric.”

“We released a new song called ‘7’, and back in the UK it sold as much overnight as anything had ever sold for us, without any promotion. That probably means the most to me cos it’s the first song [I wrote] for the second album, it’s the first one we learned as a band for the second album. [When I wrote it] I don’t think I had a feeling of, yeah, this is a hit, I think I had a feeling of, I know where I’m going with this second album, this one’s gonna eclipse the first.”

Tame Impala “The Less I Know the Better”, 2015

The Song With the Best Lyrics Ever Written Oasis “Lyla”, 2004 “I like simple lyrics. The lyric in ‘Lyla’ says, ‘She’s the queen of everything.’ She’s the queen of everything!

Nothing comes close to this woman! I like it when a woman is the god in a song, I like that being-on-your-knees thing for a woman. So that line, ‘she’s the queen of everything’ . . . nothing can touch this woman, she’s the one.”

The Song You Wouldn’t Expect To Find on My iPod Usher “Confessions, Pt. II”, 2004 “Absolute class! The music videos we watched when we were growing up, the bands we’d like would just stand there and play in ripped jeans. But you’d see an Usher video come on and he’d be knee sliding down a black Land Rover with his top of in slow motion, and all that stuf. The pop scene used to crack me up. I never used to not like it, it used to always be a real dream world to me.”

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My dancing style? Captain Jack Sparrow when he runs meets Austin Powers when he blows them fembots up .�

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CLASSIC SHOT

Robert Forster’s Map of Tassie, 1986 Photographed by Bleddyn Butcher “Inspired by Prince’s example, Robert Forster spent much of 1986 prancing about in a boob tube, a delightfully incongruous sight,” recalls Bleddyn Butcher. “For New Year, he devised a new image: he had his hair dyed silver in imitation of Dynasty’s improbable kingpin Blake Carrington. The result was more Goldilocks than Silver Fox but Robert was unfazed. He’d found a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles, like those Harrison Ford sported to play the impossible dreamer Allie Fox in Peter Weir’s adaptation of The Mosquito Coast, and a new model.

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He asked me to photograph him in the quizzical pose used for the movie poster. So I did. It didn’t take long. We had the studio to ourselves. Talk turned, by magical tangent, from utopian experiments in the Central American jungle to the sorry status of the Apple Isle.

Why was Tasmania so often omitted from iconic impressions of the Australian land mass, we wondered. Could it be because of its pubic shape? Robert gasped.

‘Was something the matter?’

I asked. ‘No, no,’ he insisted, handing me a maroon lipstick.

‘Can you draw?’”

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ROLLING STONE R EPORTS

Will Virtual Reality Change Your Life?

How a teenager created Oculus Rift in his parents’ SoCal garage, sold it for $2 billion and may have launched a digital revolution

BY DAV ID KUSH NER

F

or decades, virtual reality has failed to deliver on its great promise. But on March 28th, Oculus Rift, a breakthrough VR system, debuted – finally heralding the arrival of a technology seemingly pulled from a sci-fi future. On a recent spring morning, in a soundproof studio on the San Mateo, California, campus of Facebook – just days before the $US600 Rift’s release – I’m testing out the Oculus headset in a mountain-climbing simulation created by Crytek, a team of artists and coders that has spent the past year meticulously scanning and re-creating vistas from the Alps to Halong Bay, Vietnam. The experience, which teleports me to a jagged clif in a virtual world spanning 50 square miles, is so realistic that I can barely look down – when I do, my knees buckle and my palms sweat. Finally, my brain has to interrupt: Dude, you’re not really here.

In the past, heavy headsets, chunky graphics and sluggish latency have hindered the suspension of disbelief in virtual reality. But now, in Oculus’ dozens of “experiences”, as the company dubs them, you can live out your guitar-god dreams in Rock Band VR, float weightless in deep outer space in Adrift or hack through Tron-like computer nodes in Darknet.

In each of these, you’re not just playing, you’re transported.

Palmer Luckey, the Rift’s 23-year-old visionary creator in flip-flops, is giving me an exclusive glimpse into the VR future at Facebook, which bought his startup in 2014 for $2 billion, landing Luckey on Forbes’ list of America’s richest entrepreneurs under 40. For Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, Luckey and his crew are bringing the ultimate sci-fi fantasy to life. “Oculus’ mission,” Zuckerberg stated shortly after the purchase, “is to enable you to experience the impossible.”

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VR makes the impossible possible by tricking your eyes, and brain, into thinking you’re someplace else. The Oculus headset combines motion-sensing hardware, positional tracking and Pixar-level graphics to let you interact with and explore simulated worlds. To crank up the experience of climbing, the developers used photogrammetry – a scanning process through which they capture real surfaces (like the jagged cracks of a limestone perch) into a virtual space.

While companies like The New York Times have been producing and distributing what they call virtual reality, seen with inexpensive Google Cardboard viewers, their technology is more like VRlite: 360-degree videos that keep you stuck in a fi xed position as you crane around.

The Rift lets you watch these too, but also has the power to deliver a truer VR experience – essentially, putting you inside a video game. You move, look and play just as in real life, except the world around you is computer-simulated. “What gives you that next layer of amazingness in VR is that you’re the one in control,” says neuroscientist David Eagleman. “You can look

left and look right, and your brain gets the feedback it expects.”

But VR isn’t just about games. Silicon Valley, Hollywood and the military are betting on its broader implications because, says Luckey, “they know it’s the next major computing platform”. And VR is only the beginning. With so-called “mixed reality” headsets, you can see computergenerated objects – say, a flock of virtual sea gulls – float in real space around you.

Then there’s augmented-reality glasses, transparent displays that let you see information like the name and occupation of a neighbour as she passes by. And with HTC, Sony and Microsoft also rolling out VR gear this year, competition is high.

Goldman Sachs predicts all of this to become an $80 billion industry by 2025.

As venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, co-creator of one of the first browsers, Netscape Navigator, said after his firm led an early investment of $75 million into Oculus, it “will redefine fundamental human experiences in areas like film, education, architecture and design”.

VR aims to alter our lives in staggering ways. Instead of chatting with a friend on a webcam, you’ll “teleport” into a shared simulation and interact as if you’re, for example, walking down a re-creation of the same Brooklyn street together. Instead of watching Jurassic World in a theatre, you’ll look up at a dinosaur slobbering over you.

The Virtual Reality Company, a movie studio with Steven Spielberg on its board of advisers, is creating what co-founder Guy Primus calls “one of the first great tentpole cinematic experiences” for VR, expected to hit headsets this year. It will launch with Spielberg’s new fi lm Ready Player One, based on the novel of the same name by Ernie Cline, which describes a virtual world of pop-culture past called the OASIS. For the film, Cline reveals, “they’re going to create the OASIS for real as an immersive, networked virtual reality that will exist as a real thing. People will go home from the movie and log in and experience it in virtual-reality goggles.”

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At the same time, concerns about how virtual reality may afect our brains are rising. Some researchers worry that the deeper we go into virtual worlds, the further we’ll leave this one behind. “There is a very good chance that we will crave VR,” says Sherry Turkle, a director at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “But the promises that VR will enhance our humanity, increase our empathy, all of this, I am afraid are overblown.” Yet the verdict is still out.

“We as a scientific community just don’t know,” says Beau Cronin, a computational neuroscientist who studies VR. “The brain might adapt to this new environment in a long-term way. That’s entirely plausible.”

Illustration by Eddie Gu y

he long road to today’s virtual reality is littered with clunky arcade games (Dactyl Nightmare) and goofy gear (Nintendo’s Virtual Boy) that never delivered. “It always seemed like the technology is just around the corner,” says Cline. “But then the 21st century came around and it still didn’t exist.”

Little did anyone know that a prodigy in his parents’ garage in Long Beach, California, was going to make VR a reality. Palmer Luckey was home-schooled by his mother, Julie, and weaned as a gearhead by his carsalesman dad, Donald. Encouraged to explore his interests, Palmer became a gam-

T

ing fanatic with a gift for invention. His engineering mishaps are nerd lore: the time he zapped a permanent blind spot onto his retina with a laser; the day he blasted himself across his garage on a Tesla coil. “I got shocked a lot,” he once said. “Looking back, it’s honestly a miracle I am not dead.”

But the mad scientist was also an ambitious entrepreneur. Raising $36,000 from fixing iPhones, the 16-year-old built the ultimate gaming rig: a headset display that was perfect for VR. Luckey’s genius was in realising that much of the foundation for VR – such as powerful processors and motion-tracking software – was already in place. He just grabbed the parts he needed and hacked them into something new.

Luckey ripped apart early of-the-shelf VR headsets, and fixed in alternate displays.

Some left him physically sick – a problem caused by the lag between a person’s head movements and what’s displayed onscreen.

Finally, with a mobile PC and a couple of magnifying lenses, he made a VR headset that was cheap, fast and worked.

“I was just screwing around,” he says, sitting in Oculus’ office. “People who tried it started saying, ‘Hey, this is a lot better than anything else that is out there.’ ” Among them was John Carmack, co-creator of the seminal first-person shooters Doom and Quake. In 2012, he gave Luckey his big break by showing his invention at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, North America’s largest video-game trade show, calling it “the best VR demo probably the world has ever seen”. Within a month, Luckey raised more than $2 million on Kickstarter to co-found his company, Oculus, with three friends. He poached an Apple whiz, who refined the motion-tracking sensors and displays for better fidelity. By 2014, they hit the ultimate dot-com lottery: a $2 billion acquisition from Facebook.

Like Luckey, Zuckerberg sees VR as “a new communication platform”, as he put it when he announced the buyout. In the social networking of the future, we will teleport into a virtual world together. “Imagine enjoying a courtside seat at a game,” Zuckerberg stated, “studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world, or consulting with a doctor face-to-face – just by putting on goggles in your home.”

“Our visions were basically the same, in terms of what we wanted to build,” Luckey says about Zuckerberg. “I am a gamer, but if you look at virtual reality and how it’s been depicted in science fiction, it’s not depicted as a gaming technology.” According to the VR novels that line the cubicles here – William Gibson’s Neuromancer,

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Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, and Ready can focus on the big vision. “There aren’t Player One – we will work, have sex and a lot of people his age that have the abilieven die there. “It’s depicted,” Luckey goes ty to look at themselves and say, ‘Actually, on, “as a technology to create parallel dig- I’m not a Mark Zuckerberg. What I am is a ital universes.” far more creative but nonmanagerial perAll sorts of nongaming things are al- son,’ ” Rubin says, adding it’s all the betready happening in VR. A surgeon in Eng- ter for the company. “I live in today, and he land recently live-streamed the first oper- lives in the future.” ation in 360-degree video, which allows Right now, Luckey can’t get me back into medical students to view it in their head- the future fast enough. Not long after my sets as though they are seeing it with their arrival, he turns to his aide and tells her, own eyes. The Department of Defense has “Let’s put him into Bullet Train.” I don my tested Virtual Iraq and Virtual Afghani- headset and am immediately riding in an stan to treat soldiers with PTSD, which al- empty subway car through a dark, flashing lows vets to explore simulations of Middle tunnel. As the train screeches to a halt, an East scenes in the company of a thera- army of cyborgs storms at me, guns blazpist. The site YouVisit lets anyone upload and share their VR experiences (programmed on a computer or shot with a 360 camera) – from tours of Dartmouth College to fashion shows in Moscow.

As Oculus co-founder and CEO Brendan Iribe, the natty 36-year-old businessman to Luckey’s egghead genius, says of VR, games are just the beginning. “In a decade or two,” he tells me, “there will be this time when more and more of INVENTING your daily life is spent inside a THE FUTURE pair of glasses. You can teleport Luckey in San to the office. You can teleport to Francisco in London. You can teleport to the March.

Mayan ruins.” ith the deep pockets of Facebook at his disposal, Luckey spends all his time overseeing the VR factory, where T-shirted young men hunch at workstations, soldering goggles on Styrofoam heads. Unlike most antiseptic dot-coms, there’s real industriousness here. The air smells metallic. A sign on a door reads do not enter. robot experimentation in progress.

Luckey, a college dropout, seems to relish the shop class he’s made here. Like Zuckerberg, who popularised his Adidas slides, Luckey’s default footwear are flip-flops. His office is dorm-room messy, with a Back to the Future poster on the wall. At lunch, he readily joins the line at the cafe, just another man-boy hankering for mac and cheese.

“There are days when I do nothing but play games and test things all day long,” he says.

Oculus’ studio head, Jason Rubin, a veteran of the video-game industry and, at 46, twice his boss’s age, says that rather than putting himself in charge, Luckey surrounds himself with biz guys so that he

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ing. I hear bullets whizzing by my ears. A good game of old-fashioned Call of Duty can get my heart racing, but inside here it’s diferent – I can’t escape.

But the thrills come at a price. After I log out and tell Luckey I’m feeling “wavy”, he nods sympathetically. Cybersickness is a real phenomenon caused by the fact that your inner ears don’t feel the motion your eyes are perceiving. Cronin says fixing this is “going to remain a challenge for quite some time”. Luckey admits, “VR isn’t perfect right now.” Despite Luckey’s achievement, Oculus and other VR companies are still working to improve the lag between your movements in the headset and what your eyes see – which will further cut down on the queasy feeling. Plus, Luckey says, the more you jack in, the better you feel.

“People who use VR more get acclimated a lot easier,” he says.

So what’s to keep Oculus from going the way of Google Glass? One possibility that no one here wants to talk about: porn.

There’s a long track record of adult entertainment fuelling demand for new tech-

nology, and VR is no diferent. Pornographers, like all game programmers, are free to create content for VR devices, and, as Todd Glider – CEO of BaDoink, a VR-porn production company – puts it, the industry’s goal is “real telepresence”, engaging your whole body. BaDoink is working with Kiiroo, developers whose “teledildonic” vibrators and orifices pulse and pump along with the action onscreen. Eventually, we may be having virtual sex with one another via dolls, devices and headsets – and the industry is expected to grow to $1 billion by 2020. “I always say Luckey ought to pay us a referral fee for every sale of Oculus,” Glider says.

In March, when the Rift came out, reviews were mixed. Oculus launched without the wireless Touch controllers that let you manipulate objects, and an “unexpected component shortage” delayed shipment of some Rifts until August. By comparison, the HTC Vive shipped with wireless handsets and also “room scale” VR, which allows you to roam as you, say, dodge zombies. Yet Luckey is dismissive of doubters. “I don’t care if people believe in using the product that we have right now today,” he says. “It’s not the one that billions of people are going to use.” In other words, Facebook has the fortune and reach to make the long bet on VR – which could leave others behind.

Luckey says the longest he’s spent in the Rift is “about 16 hours”. He pauses. “To be clear, I had bathroom breaks and took breaks to eat.” Dr. Frank Steinicke, a professor at the University of Hamburg, spent 24 hours in Oculus VR to study its efects.

Besides dried-out eyes and nausea, he experienced strong moments of presence – in one case, feeling colder when his virtual sun went down. “We should be concerned about what VR is doing to us and what it could be doing to the brain,” he says, “and if we wear for long-term, will we lose the ability to communicate in the real world?”

Then again, every new technology provokes scepticism. Luckey is unequivocal about where he’d rather inhabit. “The more time you spend in VR, the greyer the real world gets,” he says. “In VR, you don’t have any rules. That’s a pretty cool place to be.”

So would he want to remain there forever? Luckey falls silent, as if he’s toggling back into the future, letting me fade into grey. “If the VR is indistinguishable from real life,” he replies, “yeah, very possibly.”

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The Next Wave 10 New Artists Defining the Sound of Now

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Car Seat Headrest A suburban shut-in turns anxiety into garage gold Will Toledo is garage rock’s most promising young songwriter, but for years music was something he did by himself. He started out recording alone, in bedrooms, dorm rooms and – now somewhat famously – the family Subaru, parking after school with his guitar and laptop outside bigbox stores around his hometown of Leesburg, Virginia. He wrote couplets about avoiding the sun, about reading the Book of Job empathetically, about watching too much TV. When he settled on the name Car Seat Headrest, it was in tribute to his mobile confessional booth. Since then, the 23-year-old Toledo has had a dozen-odd releases.

But 2016 is sure to be his biggest year: In May, having signed to the indie powerhouse label Matador, he released the exhilarating Teens of Denial, his first LP made in a studio with [Cont. on 49]

COURTESY

GUIDED BY VOICES Will Toledo has just released Teens of Denial

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BOTTOM: MICHAEL KOVAC/GETTY IMAGES

CAR SEAT HEADREST [Cont. from 48] a producer, and one of the year’s best rock albums. The anxiously punchy music combines the melodic charge of anthemic Sixties rock (Toledo is a big Beatles fan) with the low-fi grind of Nineties bands like Guided by Voices. “I spend a lot of time analysing myself,” Toledo says. “I’m not in therapy – except I am, constantly, in my own mind, asking why I am the way I am.” The result is a potent paradox: swaggering singalongs, made by a deeply anti-social dude.

When we meet, Toledo is driving an old Toyota Sienna minivan through the unglamorous Seattle suburb of Kirkland, where he’s lived since college. He’s fresh of a national tour, and Europe is next, but tomorrow night he’s booked at a local house show, so he’s heading into town to practice with his bandmates. “Kirkland is a pretty unhip place,” he says – it’s best known as the namesake home of Costco’s house brand – but it suits him. “I don’t like cities,” he says. Toledo says he was bored in suburban Virginia, but “rather than flee to a city to find a creative community, I went online and found a community there”.

One of Car Seat Headrest’s big themes is miscommunication. “It’s a recurring fear of mine,” Toledo says. “ ‘Are my mental operations normal, and can I communicate in a normal way to people?’ ” As a little kid, he says, he was “not that talkative, and would just watch TV and daydream, in my own world”. On one Teens of Denial track, “Drugs With Friends”, he recounts a college-era acid trip gone wrong: “I did half a tab plus some mushrooms, and when the visual part of the trip kicked in, I tried to explain what I was seeing to my friend, but then I thought, ‘How can I possibly explain it?’ So I decided instead that I just wouldn’t talk for six hours, trying not to freak out.”

Between Kirkland and Seattle we pick up Ethan Ives, 22, who plays bass and guitar in Toledo’s band. Toledo met him while playing at an all-ages show out here a couple of years ago.

Ives has braces and wears a T-shirt emblazoned with cover art from the 1993 video game Doom. At a burrito spot near the Car Seat Headrest rehearsal space, in Capitol Hill, we meet drummer Andrew Katz, whom Toledo enlisted on Craigslist. The three have the warm but slightly stilted rapport of workplace buddies, but when they get to their practice space, they’re in sync, bashing out a tremendous noise.

Toledo stands weirdly still at his mic stand, then starts to sway his hips, eyes closed – lost, happily, in a private moment. His shaky contentment reminds me of something he told me earlier: “I’m one of those people who struggles sometimes because the world isn’t custom-designed to my needs – but that’s everyone, right?”

JONAH WEINER

Photograph by LeA n n Mueller

Danish soul: Lukas Graham’s Kasper Daugaard, Mark Falgren, Forchhammer and Magnus Larsson (from left)

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ROSIE LOWE “I played ‘Woman’, by a new U.K. artist, Rosie Lowe, on my Beats 1 Rocket Hour show earlier this year.

I love Rosie’s vocals. She has a hypnotic delivery, and she reminds me of James Blake in the way she conveys mystery and beauty. Of the back of that play, Rosie got in touch with my music management company, and now we’re helping her with her career.”

Lukas Graham “i knew how to mix a molotov cocktail before i knew how to mix a Long Island iced tea,” says Lukas Forchhammer.

The Danish singer-songwriter grew up in Copenhagen’s Christiania neighbourhood, an autonomous commune founded by anarchist squatters, and routinely battled local police. “We threw rocks at them,” he says. “We used nails to make sure that their trucks’ tires were A chart-topping Danish singer punctured. We did all sorts of crazy shit with a radical because we were so angry, and there was background no place to vent that anger.” But instead of forming a leftist punk band, Forchhammer (who found his singing voice in the Copenhagen Boys Choir) ended up pursuing more-soothing soulful sounds. In 2010, he found a new outlet for his frustrations: a band, which he named Lukas Graham. Much of their self-titled debut is an upbeat mix of rock and soul, but the ballad “7 Years”, a Number One hit this year, recounts Forchhammer’s tough upbringing. “When I go back home, I meet my friends who are still dealing drugs and visit my friends who are in jail,” says Forchhammer, who now splits his time between Copenhagen KORY GROW and Los Angeles. “They’re all so proud of me.”

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“Have you heard I’m so young/And who my parents are?” Kline in Brooklyn.

6

Frankie Cosmos Greta Kline wants to meet at her high school hangout, the local diner where she and friends would loiter for a bit too long after class let out. At Eli’s Market on New York’s Upper West Side, the macaroni-and-cheese costs so much per pound it may

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An indie-pop prodigy takes off

as well be made of gold, and fussy toddlers crumble cookies into the laps of unruffled nannies. “Everyone came here after, like, prom,” says Kline, 22, slinking into her seat.

She pulls the sleeves of her oversize vintage varsity jacket over her hands and seems

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to want to hide even in plain sight. “I was really shy as a kid,” she says by way of explanation. “I’m still really scared of being seen. I don’t like my face on display.”

Shyness hasn’t kept Kline from becoming one of indie rock’s best young songwrit-

ers. Ofstage, she is an NYU student on hiatus, native Manhattanite and onetime child actor, the daughter of actors Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates. (You may remember her warbling Mr. Mister’s “Kyrie” in The Squid and the Whale.)

Onstage, she is [Cont. on 51]

Photograph by A ndreas L aszlo Konr ath

Gawurra: “I’m a voice for my people.”

Gawurra Milingimbi’s Yolngu songman dreams big “I’m a future for my people, and I’m a voice for my people,” Gawurra says, explaining the special importance of performing his songs in Gupapuyngu language. “I’m an elder, a traditional young singer, and they give me the knowledge and the wisdom.” Ranging sonically from earthy roots to tranquil moments reminiscent of the Album Leaf, transcendent debut Ratja Yaliyali – meaning ‘Vine of Love’ – celebrates the spiritual immensities of East Arnhem Land life, and netted Gawurra an invitation from Walking With Spirits festival’s Tom E. Lewis to perform material from the LP live, for the first time, in July – along with a spot opening for Peter Garrett in Darwin. “Ratja Yaliyali” and the album’s overarching songline reflect on the singer’s late mother and the feeling that binds friends, family and country across time. “The story is in the leaves,” Gawurra says of the titular vine. “It’s a story of us, connecting.”

GARETH HIPWELL

FROM TOP: COURTESY; GETTY IMAGES

FRANKIE COSMOS [Cont. from 50] Frankie Cosmos, singer of introspective odes to swelling emotions. At times on Next Thing, her new LP, Kline sounds like the millennial heir to Liz Phair’s sardonic bedroomtape sound. Her songs are tiny koans about growing up brainy, sensitive and introverted in the big city; they take the confusing “what the fuck?” moments of being young and alive and infuse them with lightness, juxtaposing heartbreak with goofy punk rifs, alienation with sunny, fuzzed-out chords.

Everyone asks Kline about her parents and her age (she was only 19 when Frankie Cosmos’ 2012 debut, Zentropy, was released to huge critical acclaim).

In “Young”, a single from last year, Kline addresses these fascinations, singing, “Have you heard I’m so young/And who my parents are?”

“Is it annoying that people ask about my family?” Kline asks. “Yeah, I wish I could forge my own narrative.

But I’m also willing to accept that if it allows me to make my music. I mean, I’m close to my parents. They come to all my shows in town.”

Kline started playing music at 14, after her aunt gave her an electric gui-

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tar. She was drawn to bands including the Moldy Peaches, the Strokes and Jeffrey Lewis, New York acts who forged a distinct, attitude-drenched sound out of relatively simple, straight-ahead rifs and chords. She began releasing a torrent of songs online under the name Ingrid Superstar. When Kline met Aaron Maine, now her boyfriend, they formed a duo called Porches when Kline was still in high school.

Soon, Kline and Maine were performing all over the country as both Porches and Frankie Cosmos (Kline retired the Ingrid Superstar name once she developed a more unique sound).

But as Kline began studying at NYU, she found she didn’t have time for both bands. “I was playing two shows a night,” she says, “and going to school, and travelling in a van all over, and managing all the tours myself.”

Once Zentropy took of, Kline decided to take a break from college, though she wants to get back someday.

“I want to study education or psychology,” she says. “Something that, you know, leads to a job. But for now, I have to follow this while it’s an opportunity.

And my parents understand. They’re artists. My mum started working when she was 16.”

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Chris Stapleton

SAM LEWIS Sam is a great singersongwriter. He reminds me of James Taylor’s blue-eyed soul, and he has a Townes Van Zandt kind of vibe. I enjoy his writing, his singing, his playing, and he’s a wonderful spirit. I kind of poached his band, but we’re still friends.

Kline still manages her own tours, in addition to writing all the Frankie Cosmos songs and art-directing her music videos. Kline now has a full band behind her: Maine’s brother David on bass, Luke Pyenson on drums, Lauren Martin on keyboards. Kline gets frustrated that she doesn’t always get credit for bootstrapping the entire Frankie operation herself. “People love to take credit from you when you are a woman,” she says. “It was written somewhere that my boyfriend co-wrote my albums. Are you kidding me? [Or] sometimes my parents get the credit for creating me and this music. They’re great, but they aren’t the ones doing the work.”

Kline may come of as timid in person, but she grows tall onstage. She throws her whole body into strumming her guitar, and allows her vulnerability to become a strength – she sings about romantic confusion, urban malaise and maintaining a sense of optimism, with the forcefulness of someone who knows exactly what she wants to say.

“All the stuf I feel in normal social situations is lifted onstage,” she says. “I try to take into account that I’m being watched as much as I’m being heard.

So when I play, I’m open to having an out-of-body experience.”

RACHEL SYME

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Anderson Paak A little more than a decade ago, Anderson Paak was a high school kid in Ventura, California, playing drums in his Baptist church and setting choppedup samples to homemade beats. A demo tape sparked deal meetings, and his dreams seemed to be taking solid form. “I thought An L.A. soul- I was going to be rap visionary Kanye,” he says.

“The producer who wowed that can rap too.”

Dr. Dre But what came next was a nightmare. His mum – a South Korean-born woman who’d been in the produce business – and his stepdad were sent to prison for tax-related issues during his senior year. Paak stopped making music and started bagging groceries.

“Just working and trying to get some stability,” he says.

By the time he was 21, Paak was back in the studio with a new perspective.

“I started making these weird little songs,” he says. “I wanted it to be anything but hip-hop.” He was listening to Radiohead and “finding all these diferent alternative types of music and punk-rock stuf. I didn’t want to go back to making music like other people.”

He didn’t – but he took a while to find his voice. Paak played drums on the L.A. session scene, trimmed weed on a Santa Barbara pot farm, had a onemonth marriage (annulled), a second marriage that has lasted (his baby boy is now five) and released two albums of atmospheric funk under the name Breezy Lovejoy. About four years ago, he decided it was time to focus and went into hibernation, studying the work of Otis Redding, Bobby Womack, Curtis Mayfield, David Bowie and the Beatles. When he re-emerged in 2014, he’d crafted the first Anderson Paak album, the hedonistic Venice.

Paak caught the attention of Dr. Dre, who tapped him for six cuts on Compton – including “Animals”, a confrontational track about police brutality and the most politically pointed song Dre has made since “Fuck tha Police”.

Paak’s work on Compton helped him recruit top-shelf producers, who brought classic West Coast hip-hop sounds to the dreamy R&B he’d worked on for his breakthrough LP, Malibu. “The visionary in the vintage Chevy,” he calls himself in “The Waters”. “I bring you greetings from the first church of Boom Baptists.”

Paak, now 30, signed to Dre’s label Aftermath after Malibu’s release. He’s already planning his next move. “This will be the first project where I have a fucking budget,” he says. “So this is going to be exciting times.”

JOE LEV Y

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The Boom Baptist: Paak in Los Angeles

Photograph by Bryce Duff y

Mind playing tricks on us: Meechy, Zombie Juice and Arc (from left) of Flatbush Zombies.

Chloe x Halle

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Beyoncé’s favourite YouTube stars break out on their own Sisters Chloe and Halle Bailey are only 17 and 16, respectively, but they have Michelle Obama as a fan, and they appeared on the video album for Beyoncé’s Lemonade. “Magic was in the air in New Orleans,” says Halle of their work in the clip for “Freedom”. “We were saying, ‘What a time to be alive.’ ” The sisters’ music is just as impressive as their endorsers. Their EP Sugar Symphony – selfproduced in their L.A. home – is an accomplished mix of R&B, jazz and alt-pop. “Our dad taught us to do Halle everything on our (left), own,” Chloe says.

Chloe “This industry is so dominated by men and older people,” adds Halle. “You have to look into yourself and say, ‘I can have wonderful ideas.’ ” BRITTANY SPANOS

Photograph by Jessica Lehrm a n

Flatbush Zombies “sometimes i like to take a trip real deep into my mind,” says Meechy Darko of Brooklyn hip-hop trio Flatbush Zombies. “I travel back into my consciousness and face my demons.” So far, that’s worked out well for Flatbush Zombies, probably the first hip-hoppers to sell blotter paper alongside T-shirts at their concerts. ¶ This year, their darkly psychedelic debut, 3001: A Laced Odyssey, hit Number One on Billboard’s Independent Albums chart. “I wanted people to An acid-loving hip-hop crew be like, ‘Damn, this is like a movie trail- takes on the dark er’,” says producer Erick “Arc” Elliott. “I side of reality wanted [the album] to take a journey that transcends into the darkness and gets happy again.” The Zombies have been buddies since grade school, and all live in the same apartment complex. Elliott took up production years ago so he could entertain his mother after she lost her vision, and part of what makes 3001 stand out is the realism woven into its trippiness (“Fly Away” addresses a friend’s suicide). “There’s no downfall [in most rap songs],” says Meechy.

“No one’s getting anyone pregnant. Nobody’s going broke. No two sides.” It doesn’t seem they’ll be running short on inspiration. Says Meechy, “They say, ‘Don’t look into a mirror when you trip on acid.’ That’s my favourite thing to do.” JASON NEWMAN RollingStoneAus.com

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How a famous dad and Miley shaped a great punk band

B y

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SWMRS co-leader Cole Becker is hanging from the ceiling. The California punk rockers are charging through bracing, hook-y songs of their debut, Drive North, at a New York show. They even

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return to the stage after their allotted set time and keep rocking unplugged.

Though just hitting their twenties, SWMRS have been playing clubs like this for years; they formed in elementary school and had assistance from their drummer Joey Armstrong’s father – Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day. “When we were 13 to 14, he was telling us to

text every time we wrote a song,” says singerguitarist Max Becker.

Despite attaining early credibility, SWMRS (who released two albums in their teens as Emily’s Army) found the scene too bro-ish (“Aggressive dudes crowd-surfing on 14-year-old girls,” says Cole). One song on Drive North was inspired by millennial feminist icon Tavi

Gevinson, while “Miley” unironically celebrates the pop star, who they admire for her work with homeless LGBTQ teens. “I think they have the potential to be ginormous,” says Zac Carper, of fellow Cali punks FIDLAR, who produced Drive North.

“They just do whatever the fuck they want, and I want to see more of that in bands.” BRITTANY SPANOS

Photograph by Eric Rya n A nderson

OPPOSITE PAGE, FROM TOP: JODY ROGAC; BEN RAYNER; CYBELE

SWMRS

Gordi Folk-tronica artist blends bold swells with quiet restraint Between luminous guitars, thrumming reverb and rich harmonies, Sophie Payten, a.k.a. Gordi, finds a melodic nexus that’s both pastoral and darkly modern. The 22-yearold performed in her local church choir in Canowindra before moving to Sydney, where her first songs echoed the stirring simplicity of her early inspirations, Billy Joel and Carole King. During a trip to Tanzania in her gap year, Gordi says she felt drawn to making music.

“I realised how much I relied on music as a form of therapy. I asked one of the leaders to go into town and buy me a really shitty guitar. I still have it. That’s what I survived on for the months I was there.”

Each song on her latest EP, Clever Disguise, is subtle and electric, creating space amidst rumbling dissonance and an anthemic drive.

“All the music I’ve written these past few years is very introspective,” she says. “You’re confronted with all this stuf. Maybe it’s not that groundbreaking, it’s universal, but here you are, and you’ve got to decide whether you’re gonna live with it or go another way.”

LUCY SHANAHAN

Go with the flow: Valle, Zutrau and Sulkow (from left) of Wet.

HEAR THIS by

Andrew Savage of Parquet Courts

B BOYS They’re a band from the same Denton, Texas, scene I come from. They have two distinct songwriters: Brendon Avalos and Britton Walker, the “B” boys. They swat lead vocals back and forth, and you can tell they’re good friends just by listening.

I fully endorse their [debut] EP, No Worry No Mind.

There aren’t a lot of records where every song is superimpressive, but that is one of them.

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Wet brooklyn has become a top exporter of great synthpop bands in recent years. But Wet have set themselves apart with music that combines the elegant ache of Nineties R&B with the raw honesty of indie pop. “I feel like that’s a very pure thing,” singer Kelly Zutrau says. “When you can get as close as possible to a pure emotional intensity – that’s when people hear something real in it.” The songs Synth-poppers turn quiet on Wet’s debut LP, Don’t You, wring drama angst into an out of lyrics that often suggest snippets excellent album of actual relationship dialogue. Onstage, Zutrau delivers her confessional lyrics with an eyes-closed forcefulness that can be captivating and a little uncomfortable. The 28-year-old grew up a fan of Cat Power and TLC, dropping out of high school in Massachusetts to pursue art and music in New York, where she met multi-instrumentalists Joe Valle and Marty Sulkow. Wet released an EP in 2013 and pulled down opening gigs for Chvrches and Tobias Jesso Jr. For Don’t You, the bandmates retreated to a house in western Massachusetts, where they wrote in a meditative isolation that comes through in their songs. Lately, Zutrau has been living in L.A. and writing with Rostam Batmanglij, formerly of Vampire Weekend. “[Don’t You] is about relationships,” she says. “About managing ideas that are hard to deal with.

It helped me process them.”

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END LIVING LEG

DIESEL The boy guitar hero of the Nineties traded pop flash for a more deeply felt “cottage” career that continues to burn steady ✦ By Michael Dwyer✦ PHOTOGR A PH BY JOSHUA MOR R IS

n the sunny corner of a melbourne café, Mark Lizotte sits coiled like a spring. He’s eyeing a large beetroot juice and exquisitely presented fruit salad but holding out for one crucial detail. “This conversation is not gonna go far unless I get caffeine,” he says, pushing dark glasses towards a low-slung black baseball cap. The disguise might be a hangover from his pop idol days as Johnny Diesel. But if that experience taught him anything, it’s never to settle for good enough.

I

Does anyone still call you Johnny?

Yes. [Squeals] “Johnny Diesel!” That snapshot is everything to them. They know I’ve made albums after that but I’ll never kill it.

Your website displays 68 releases, going back to the first Innocent Bystanders single in Perth in ’84. Do you love all those babies equally?

There’s this kind of healthy detachment I feel with all of my songs. I know they came through me and everything but ultimately I know they just turn back into the soil of the universe [laughs]. I guess that’s a defence mechanism on my part too. But I play them so much that they come out diferent every night and I just allow them to. Records are just one destination for a song. It’s like sex or a great meal. You can’t go back to that again.

How do you look back on that first rush with the Injectors?

It was a great mechanism for me. I wrote to fit that thing that we had: bass, drums, one guitar, sax. It was like a little jazz combo but cranked up, bluesy. [The Rolling Stones’] Tattoo You was probably my most played album in the years before that.

How crazy did it get?

Ibiza [circa 1990]. As soon as I got there I realised, “This is just an excuse.” We were the only band that played live. Everybody else mimed. Grace Jones was there and Milli Vanilli and Fine Young Cannibals and Swing Out Sister. And there’s us. That’s where I met the Zappa famiA u g u s t, 2 016

ly. Dweezil and Moon were reporting for MTV. We all sailed out to this beautiful island and Dweezil was like, “I’d really like a swim but I didn’t bring any bathers.”

Five minutes later, Grace is on the shore with her legs up in the air: “Here, Dweezil, you can use mine!” I’m like, “There’s Grace Jones and I can see what she’s had for breakfast.” That was only months after we won all those [ARIA] awards.

Did that bubble burst or did you pop it?

I’d go crazy when I’d see my face in those Dolly magazines. “I don’t wanna be next to Jason Donovan!” But what was real-

Well, the first solo record [1992’s Hepfidelity] was a nice, slow sort of burn. I made the blues record with Chris Wilson [1996’s Short Cool Ones], which was really engaging and fulfilling for me musically. Then yeah, New York was a circuit breaker. I went back to being unsigned.

[Laughs] In another 10 years it’ll be like, “What’s signed?” But yeah, that was the beginning of the cottage for me. Whether I knew it or not.

You tried to ditch the Diesel handle then.

Are you at peace with it now?

That very year, 1999, they start putting up these billboards for jeans. [Diesel] was just breaking into the States.

I don’t even think about it anymore. It’s only when I see my name on one of those scrolling LED signs: “Diesel . . . Puppetry of the Penis . . .”

[Laughs]. It’s just a word.

You can be called the Flying Burrito Brothers. You get used to anything.

You’ve been digging for roots since Short Cool Ones, 20 years ago.

You’ve done Project Blues, Under the Influence, now Americana. What makes a man want to play his heroes’ songs as he gets older?

I think it’s obsession. It’s hat-tipping.

It’s also maybe wanting some recognition from mummy and daddy, you know?

“Please tell me that I’ve reached whatever status . . .” For instance, with the Neil Young song on this album [“Don’t Let It Bring You Down”], I’m really proud of that.

Maybe he’ll hear it and go, “You ruined my song!” But I think I made some really cool embellishments that add to the darkness of the imagery. It’s a song about the debris of life and how we just step over it. I feel that in my own way.

You’re often called a guitar hero. The kid in you must kinda like that.

The only thing that’s heroic for me is I use really, really thick strings and they hurt.

ALL OF THE INSTANCES WHERE FURNITURE HAS BEEN THROWN, ALL WERE BECAUSE OF ALCOHOL.” ly taking over my life was this feeling that I just did not think there was another album in this band. I could see the machinations turning, producers coming out of the woodwork. I could see we could make another record that sounded like the first one and that, to me, was really frightening. I called a meeting and said, “OK, we’re gonna do one last tour.” My managers were like, “I hope you know what you’re doing.” I stopped drinking on that tour. I sat on my own and read books. The party was over.

Are you still teetotal reading guy?

As of about 10 years ago, I don’t drink at all.

I realised that adrenaline, for me, was not a good combination with alcohol. All of the instances where furniture had been thrown . . . all were because of alcohol. I have been known to go into the crowd and take people on during a gig. Not good.

Were you trying to leave something behind when you moved to New York at the end of the Nineties?

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Garrett in his Sydney garage in June

As Peter Garrett prepares to release his debut solo album, the singer is taking the lessons from his past and applying them to a very busy future

By Rod Yates Ph o t o g r a p h b y

DA N I E L B OU D

PETER GARRETT

P

eter garrett bursts through the door with the energy and intent of a man on the run.

He ofers his hand in greeting which, in keeping with his 6-foot 4-inch frame, feels like it swallows yours as you shake it, before quickly scanning the deserted downstairs area of this inner city Sydney pub and darting of in the direction of the toilet. At 63, there is nothing remotely senior citizen-esque about him, save, perhaps, for a few more lines carving their way indiscriminately across his angular face. Dressed in blue jeans and a blue collared shirt emblazoned with small, white rectangles, today Garrett’s bald head is covered by a black flat cap, which he discards upon sitting down on a stool and

taking a sip of his takeaway soy chai latte.

He is personable if business like, small on small talk and big on attending to the business at hand. Which, on this sunny Wednesday morning in early June, is his debut solo album, A Version Of Now [out July 15th].

A week earlier, Garrett stood in the Hercules Street Studio in nearby Surry Hills, surrounded by record label people, management personnel and a select few media, for whom he hosted a playback of the record. For a man airing his first solo album – a man, let’s not forget, who hasn’t issued a note of music since quitting Midnight Oil in 2002 and taking up a position with the Australian Labor Party as the member for Kingsford Smith in 2004 – it must have felt like a loaded moment.

“No,” he shrugs, cradling his Styrofoam cup. “I’m pretty chilled about it. Before Adam was a boy scout, I ceased worrying about what people think about things. And having been a pin cushion of sorts for years, particularly through political life, you very quickly come to realise that there’s an infinite number of responses and understandings, perceptions, awareness, prejudices, that exist out there. So if you start thinking about that, or losing sleep about that, then you’re going to be unhappy.”

A curious mix of political realist and creative romantic, Garrett says he heard his acoustic guitar calling to him as he came close to completing last year’s memoir, Big Blue Sky. “I was sitting there with my jaw on the floor as a song popped out of the sky and landed on my shoulder,” he says, “and I thought I’d better grab it before it’s too late and start working on it.”

Today he thinks it was simply a matter of allowing space in his life for music and for song, which, given that the book process was wrapping up, he was in a position to do. The solo project gathered momenEditor Rod Yates profiled Matt Corby in RS 774.

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tum around July or August last year when he took a trip north through the settlements of Papunya, Yuendumu and Kintore with Midnight Oil guitarist Martin Rotsey, Gondwanaland’s Charlie McMahon, and one of his brothers, during which he played Rotsey a couple of songs. “Have you got any more?” the guitarist enquired.

Within a few months Rotsey had joined Garrett in Sydney’s Oceanic Studio, owned

by Midnight Oil guitarist Jim Moginie, where they demoed four songs, which Garrett later played to producer Burke Reid (the Drones, Courtney Barnett, Sarah Blasko). Reid’s response was a familiar one: “Have you got any more?”

Garrett continued writing over Christmas, and in January entered Rancom Street studios (owned by former Sherbet keyboardist Garth Porter) to start recording A Version Of Now. Having assembled a crack band of cross-generational musicians – Mark Wilson of Jet on bass, Heather Shannon of the Jezabels on keyboards, RocKwiz/Paul Kelly drummer Pete Luscombe and Rotsey on guitar (Bluebottle Kiss singer/ guitarist Jamie Hutchings also contributed) – they laid down nine tracks in 12 days; songs which Garrett refers to as “simple folk songs, made electric”.

“I was blown away by his energy and enthusiasm for the whole process,” recalls Reid. “There was no nervousness, it was more like, ‘This is fun.’”

This month Garrett will take the band on the road for a series of solo shows, with Western Australian solo artist Abbe May taking up duties as second guitarist, and

Rosa Morgan (Red Ghost) replacing Shannon on keys.

For a man who’s spent much of the past decade battling bureaucracy in the halls of Parliament House, the speed and organic manner with which the project has come together is something Garrett is clearly relishing. Over the course of a couple of hours, he speaks with childlike enthusiasm about the project, the cast of musicians and Reid, while also addressing his reunion with Midnight Oil – announced at the same time as his solo project – his formative years as a musician while studying at the Australian National University in Canberra, and life in politics.

On occasion, when deep in thought, he closes his eyes mid-sentence, as if reading the answers of the back of his eyelids. More than once he shifts on his stool in an attempt to relieve a nagging pain in his back.

An enquiry as to its cause is waved away.

“It’s not an issue,” he says. “It’s not healthy to spend 15 hours a day sitting doing whatever it is you’re doing. Which is why it’s time to be dancing.”

Save for a few dates with Midnight Oil, prior to ‘A Version Of Now’ you’d not sung publicly in over a decade. Was there a process of having to get your voice back?

Not really. I played the songs “in” myself, just sitting around at home, and singing them a bit and trying diferent things out as I was writing them. So I started singing again as they were starting to slip through the cracks. But no, you just go in and open up your mouth and hope that it’s still there.

What was the process of putting together the studio band?

Craig [Hawker, Sony A&R] sent me some stuf and a few links to diferent people. He sent some new things that Mark Wilson had done, post-Jet, which I didn’t know about, but I just loved his playing.

Same with Heather Shannon. I knew the Jezabels, I’d heard a few things on Triple J but didn’t know them that well.

But I loved the keyboard playing, it sounded like she really had a handle on keyboard sounds.

Was it refreshing to surround yourself with young musicians?

It was deliberate. I didn’t want to do it as a, “Rule One: get young players”, but I thought, if I hear what I like and they’re some young players I think it will be good,

“I’ve come back to two types of home.

My home with my girl, and my spiritual home, with music.”

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GETTY IMAGES, 3

(1) Garrett in 1985. (2) With wife Doris in Sydney in 2013. (3) In Question Time as the Minister for School Education, Early Childhood and Youth in 2013.

“I thought the ambition and the reach, of both governments, but certainly the Gillard government, was big and deserved a little bit of oxygen,” says Garrett.

’cause it’s humanity at work. It doesn’t really matter how old anyone is, yet there’s no question what younger musicians bring . . .

It’s not so much the playing, everything’s just fuller when you’ve got those combinations. It gives it some freshness on the way through.

Lyrically, home is a recurring theme on ‘A Version Of Now’. Is that simply because after years on the road as a musician and a politician you’re finally getting to experience it?

I’ve come back to two types of home.

My home with my girl, and my spiritual home, with music. I’ve been a troubadour, lived out of suitcases, essentially been on the road and on the move ceaselessly and never endingly, with some breaks, for most of my working life. And I tested the patience of my family in particular. But I think without doubt I’ve finally got myself into this thing called a house and a home, and sat there for more than a day or two, and I could really feel its arms wrapping around me.

Was it a big adjustment?

Sure, unbelievable. I’ve never had the normality of getting up and having breakfast and listening to the radio and

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spending the day working and having a cup of tea, dinner at night. I discovered Netfl ix for the fi rst time with my wife!

We’re sitting there going, how cool is this?

[Laughs] It’s all a new experience!

The song ‘Kangaroo Tail’ contains very vivid Australian imagery: “The kangaroo tail glints in the sun/And the freckle boys paddle out at Curly/Mascot smells sweeter than eucalypt gum/I’m coming home to blue hills in the morning”. Is it fair to say Australia remains one of your greatest muses?

It’s always been important to me. It was always important to the Oils as well. We never made the call to lob elsewhere and stay there, in part because there was a row of pipes coming out of the continent into our brains, and if we had cut those pipes of I’m not quite sure what would have happened. The other thing is, I believe the physicality of Australia is so powerful, it’s so elemental in the First People’s culture, and I think it breathes. I think the land is a really important part of who we are as people.

“Only One” reads like a love song to your wife, Doris. Is that a new lyrical approach for you?

I’d say so, it is pretty new. There’s the odd song in the Oils repertoire, but it’s all a bit abstract. The louder, more upfront, big chorusy sort of stuf tended to sweep over whatever abstractions we managed to sneak on the records.

The thing about this stuff is, if you’re doing it on your own terms, I feel comfortable about it ’cause I feel the song is true to my feelings and I’m quite happy for other people to listen to it. As opposed to someone prying into your life and wanting to exfoliate your private life for the purposes of s selling something. This is my exfoliaion. I’m comfortable with that.

Since you were last musically act tive the music industry has changed a almost beyond recognition. What are ou finding hardest to get your head a around?

It’s totally turned on its head, ’cause it’s a digital delivery system. And songs and performances have become completely devalued in some ways, but are much more accessible and have the capacity to travel greater distances than before. I guess I’m comfortable with it because I have no choice.

Have the changes been good?

Apart from one aspect of it, which I think frustrates and saddens many musicians and artists, which is this idea that there isn’t any intrinsic worth 3 in what they do, and they can be commodified very quickly, and screwed over without a moment’s pause.

And there’s a public who’s loving the idea that they can get this music whenever and however, and the returns to the musicians to make even a basic living – I’m not talking about myself, I stress that – is totally of secondary consideration.

I believe copyright is still important in the digital age. I think the rubbish that I hear spewing from the mouths of digital captains of industry about “copyright’s an old fashioned concept” is just greed in disguise. We have worth in what we do, as a writer would, as a sculptor would, as someone who creates something new. And I think that is disintegrating under the new model. The plusses of course are that you can do it all yourself, you can do it quickly and easily and cheaply, there’s lots more live touring. And you can be creative across the platforms in ways that really mesh your creative ideas as an artist, and someone can be listening to it in Bolivia or Finland at the same time as they’re listening to it in Brunswick or Rooty Hill.

That’s pretty amazing.

When we spoke at the listening session, you mentioned you’d had to disengage the creative side of your brain when you

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What stars had to align?

Availability of people.

A sense of, what do we have to say, what have we got to do musically?

How can we do it in a way which feels true to what Midnight Oil is as a band? And has it got a hard centre and some content and a bit of heart to it?

And do you have the answers to those questions?

Some of them I think, and we’ll work our way through the others.

Have you played together yet?

We haven’t.

What did you miss most about the Oils?

The hours. [Laughs] Full stop?

And the company. The hours and the company.

Rob Hirst [drums] told us he thinks you all became better friends after the band split. Do you agree?

The five of us? Maybe that’s right.

[Pause] I think that holding a band together is never an easy thing for a long period of time, and I think the thing that’s al-

“I’m at this stage of my life where I consider myself incredibly lucky to be alive.”

ways bound us together pretty strongly was the music, plus add-on values. If you’ve got a singer who’s thrown himself into a whole range of other things, but part ic u l a rly s ome t h i ng as serious and as big and potentially career threatening as politics, it’s either going to finish you of all together, or bring you closer. And I think the fact that it’s brought us closer is probably one reason why we can go out and play.

How did it bring you

closer?

People would have known, because we’ve all spent so much time together, that I wasn’t going to let them down in what I did, and that no matter what the day-today ratbaggery was, that ultimately someone would emerge out the other end of it who’s still vaguely recognisable as a Midnight Oil person.

Even in the Oils’ heyday you were involved in myriad political and social causes via your work with organisations such as the Australian Conservation Foundation and Greenpeace. Did that

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MACLAY HERIOT

entered politics. Did it feel like part of you was missing?

I don’t think quite in that way. It’s inevitable that the more you engage with the mechanistics of social change campaigns and all of the nuts and bolts that go with that that the free, open space that you need for creativity shrinks bit by bit. And certainly by the time I got to politics it had shrunk down to the size of a cashew. I was vaguely conscious of the fact it was gone, but I never had time to worry about it.

While your solo project has come together very organically, the reunion of Midnight Oil has also been bubbling away, presumably in slightly less organic fashion. When was it first mooted?

I can’t remember the exact order of events or timing. [The other members] dropped a couple of hints over the last year or two that they’d be up for it. I never thought it wouldn’t happen, it was just a question of would the conditions be right, would the stars line up? Would the Ides of March essentially pause for a second and allow spring time to come through and get us all somewhere where we could talk about it and see if we wanted to do it, and if the answer to that was yes, which it is, then how are we going to do it, which we’re still talking about. It’s got the elements of the juggernaut and we want to turn it into a hot rod.

Recording A Version Of Now with Martin Rotsey (centre) and producer Burke Reid.

give you a grounding to deal with the follies of the music industry?

Yeah, quite often it just looks like a silly joke, and people take themselves too seriously and carry on as though they’re a cross between Rodin and Shakespeare, and they’re nothing of the sort. By the same token, I’m never happier than when I’ve got a big loud rock band onstage and I can just jump.

You were in your late-30s when ‘Diesel and Dust’ exploded around the world. Did that also play a role in steering you away from the excesses on ofer?

I think rumours of our semi kind of Amish characters are slightly exaggerated.

[Laughs] I don’t mind hanging out until 5 o’clock in the morning playing pool with a bunch of musos, drinking beer and carrying on, but just stay out of jail at the same time. [Laughs] The Oils were always a very driven band, but at the same time quite contemptuous of success. You famously turned down an offer to play at the Grammys in 1988 to return home and co-host a reconciliation event. Do you think you could have been bigger had you played the game?

I think we could have, but I’m not sure we’d still be here today. And it wasn’t going to be the right place for us to be as people. There’s a stubbornness and a singu-

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larity about the character of the band that doesn’t suit constant schmoozing and putting yourself out there and doing anything to get to that next point that an industry reckons is the place for you to be. And I think we derived so much of our meaning from what we were actually doing and what we were playing and how we were sounding and some of the things we were involved in, that you can feel it draining.

The longer you spend out the more the tank is starting to be drained. And then eventually, once the tank is drained, one of two things happens – you’ve either got to fuel it up with other things, or you just end up on automatic. And the Oils were never a band that played on automatic. And if we ever heard it starting to creep in we’d think, where’s that Qantas plane?

So what are you looking forward to with the reunion?

I haven’t really thought that far ahead.

Seeing Bones [Hillman, bass], I haven’t seen him for a while, he’s probably got some good war stories from Nashville. I think when we get in a room and put the “Do Not Disturb” sign on and start to play, that will be a distillation of a life in a moment. There’ll be a period of quiet and then it will be incredibly noisy, but in that noise I’ll hear and see the stories and the relationships and the character of music makers and performers and writers, who have been in a partnership for a long time.

And I think from that point on it can only get better.

In ‘Big Blue Sky’ you write about the scene of which Midnight Oil was a part in the Seventies. It reads like a lawless place where promoters locked fire exits to overcrowded venues to stop people sneaking in, and alcohol regulations were almost non existent. Is that a fair assessment?

It was the outlaw land, and you had to be reckless and a little bit fearless, at least when you were in the moment.

Jimmy Barnes once told me a story about an Oils pub gig that was so hot, he was throwing full cans of beer at the windows to try and break them in order to get some fresh air into the venue . . .

[Laughs] I guess I’m at that stage of life where I do consider myself incredibly lucky to be alive, even though it wasn’t like we were courting death. But we just pushed it way past the point that you thought you would go. But the music carried you there, and the crowd as well, and we were sharing something that you couldn’t get anywhere else in suburban life. And particularly for people, in periods of high youth unemployment, this was it.

We weren’t going to places that had been built for music, we were going to little places that had been built to drink beer in, so the fact that suddenly the walls are changing colour, and you’ve got your own internal ecosystem happening, and rain

is falling from inside the room, and oxygen is literally getting sucked out and the air’s getting all dead, but the sound is still there, and the amps are almost peaking themselves, ’cause that’s all you’ve got left, the electricity that’s coming of the stage into almost a cauldron of bodies. It is actually hard to describe.

But for me, even though I think fire regulations are a good thing to have and we were lucky more people weren’t badly hurt, I think we’ve swung too far the other way now. And the tameness and the placidness of overly protective environments that we have to make music in . . . even national parks have got 75 signs telling you what you should and shouldn’t be doing, and take care walking here, and look over there because there’s a cliff. I find the nanny state aspect of mini bureaucracy and regulation across things like entertainment and the outdoors utterly stultifying. And I feel furious about it. I want kids to skateboard down mountains.

It feels like a peculiarly Australian condition at the moment.

We’re more bureaucratic than you can ever believe, it’s totally out of control. It’s funny, it’s the sort of thing that doesn’t really go with our character, but it’s certainly happening.

In things like the lock-out laws?

It’s ridiculous. I came down to have a drink with my daughter and some friends at a pub [in Newtown], and a [bouncer], it has to be said a few years younger than me, asked me what I’d been doing and whether I’d been drinking or not. This is at 7 o’clock on a Saturday night. And I told him to get stufed, it was none of his business. And then he wanted to say, “Well stand over here”, and I said, “Under no circumstances! Furthermore, I’m about to give you a lecture on about 10 diferent subjects. Get your superiors here while we go through them.” And eventually I had him, the manager, his supervisor, and I was just giving it to them, and they were like, “Oh, OK, Peter, we’d better let you in.” There is no power or authority whatsoever. Where have the rights of the citizen gone in this nanny state that we’ve created in New South Wales? It’s totally outrageous.

What do you think the solution is?

Two things. You’ve got to liberalise licensing laws, so that you get precincts that buy into the idea of civilised drinking, and you don’t allow people to litigate against noise [and] music if they happen to come into an area and buy a house or a flat next to a pub or club.

But on the other side, we’ve got a long way to go with alcohol and alcohol culture generally, and that’s an education process that’s going to take time, and it requires us to change our attitude about what a good night out actually means.

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PETER GARRETT In your book you write of seeing the Faces live in the early Seventies and being disappointed. Did that experience reinforce for you what you wanted to be as a live performer?

I don’t think in a classic, a + b equals c, it was more [that] it reinforced to me that what I would want to do is do what I would want to see.

You also reference the fact that in the early days you weren’t much of a singer. Is that why you threw so much at your live performance? To compensate?

I’ve never been under any illusions about my technical abilities as a singer, but I’ve also never bought the idea that I can’t sing.

Not even in those early days when record companies were passing Midnight Oil by, ostensibly because of your singing?

No. That’s why I ignored the singing teacher. In fact I think everyone can sing.

And I think I’m evidence of that. I believe in the democracy of the voice, and of voices; that no one is tone deaf, no one can’t sing. Some people can sing better than others, but it’s really what you bring to that business of singing, and what you’re singing about, that ultimately makes a diference. Give me a Welch choir singing about coal mines, give me the blues artists of the U.S. singing about coming out of slavery, and give me world music artists singing about their own country and describing what’s happening there and the feelings they have for it and what they want to see happen, and I’ll give you life.

Who encouraged you when you were coming through the ranks? Was there someone who saw something in you and really encouraged you to keep going?

Not a lot. Greg Macainsh and Red Symons and the guys from Skyhooks I’d run into very early on when I was still in a student band in Canberra, and they were about the only people who ever encouraged me, in that period. But I am the kind of person who does have a reasonable amount of self belief. I’m not trying to second guess what people think. I love music, I’ve been listening to it all my life. I’ve sung in choirs, I thought the sound that the Oils were making was just cracking the place apart, so I knew I could be in the middle of it all, making it work. It was obviously going to take a while to figure out how to do that, and you’ve got to work at it. But no, I’m not somebody who sufers the anxiety of other people’s opinions.

Who nurtured your interest in music?

Growing up in a house where music is played, for any musician, gives you a great starting point. And particularly if your parents have got pretty eclectic taste, which mine did. So I grew up listening to classical, blues, early rock & roll, Presley et al, Gershwin, and then the expanding popular music genres. That, and choral

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music, were my first two big loves. So on the one hand it’s the classic thing: the devil’s got the really good sounds, but sometimes the good melodies and the structures you find in the cloisters.

Were your parents supportive of you favouring a music career over law?

They were. They were pretty happy for me to keep going with it and give it a go.

Parenting is so hands on nowadays. They just kind of let me do it: “OK, if that’s what you want to do, go and do it and who knows where you’ll end up.”

In the song “I’d Do It Again” you make it clear you have no regrets about your move into politics. But are there things you know now you wish you didn’t?

No, of course not.

I’m not suggesting you didn’t go in with your eyes open. But were you prepared for the level of “twisted egos and ambitions” and “glory hunters... basking in false smiles” that you sing of in the song?

Well, I didn’t expect to get Rudd as a leader. When I went into the Party Mark Latham w a s t he le a der. A nd there’d been leaders before that who I’d known well, and I liked Kim Beazley. I would have suppor ted Bea zley. With the benefit of hindsight I think he would have been a really good prime minister. But apart from those sorts of things, the what happens there and how it works, those people are no diferent to you and I. For some of them, politics has been a calling, and you could argue quite rightly it’s made it a bit narrow, and it’s not as inspiring as it could be, but it’s not a bunch of people with horns. It’s just a bunch of Australians who happen to be elected to office.

Can you understand why the public loses faith in those people? Politics often feels like it’s been reduced to a slanging match between two major parties who aren’t elected for long enough to make a real difference, fought out on the front pages of the papers, each of which has its own agenda and bias.

The democratic state is much more difficult to work in efectively, because of the things you’ve just pointed out. When Menzies was the Prime Minister of Australia he used to get on a boat and go to England. Chifley used to catch a train to go to work. Media stopped at 5 o’clock in the afternoon and started at 9 o’clock the next morning, and [now] it’s insatiable. It’s ever demanding, it’s relentless, it’s constant-

ly critical, it’s always looking for the worst and never the best. I’m not saying it’s the problem, I’m just saying it’s the character of the media now, or a lot of media.

The terms are too short. Government’s a big, complex beast, and the kind of reforms that I rolled my sleeves up and got stuck into are the kinds of things that take years and years to get done. And the fact that we got some out the door was nothing short of a miracle, given everything that was going on around us.

Australians are too tough on Australia at times, because we’re frustrated about the things that we want fixed now, and can see need fixing, and we want the system to deliver that, and we have every right to shout about that, and to vote for it, and to get on the streets for it. But we’ve got to balance that up at some time in our thinking with understanding what we have done that’s been pretty good, why people want to come here, and what do we have that others don’t and how can we build on it. And that’s about participation, as opposed to just complaining. We just can’t keep on complaining. I believe very strongly you’ve got to participate, in whatever way you can. And I don’t mind if people participate and vote for the National Party. The fact that Barnaby Joyce is a goose who doesn’t believe in climate change is actually not that relevant. At least get involved.

Do you think we as a country whinge too much?

I believe very strongly in the country, and democracy is not perfect, there’s no doubt about that. It just happens to be the best system we’ve devised thus far.

But it’s not simply enough to continually criticise it and nothing else. And to sit and believe that at any time of the day, because someone says something a bit dopey, or makes a mistake, that this shows how the system is completely wrong. Well, you either have people who are human, or you have a general telling you what to do, or you have a wacko like Donald Trump, who’s saying whatever he thinks ’cause he’s playing to a certain crowd.

You mention the media – when you were in office how frustrating was it to see successful initiatives or achievements overlooked in favour of salacious headlines around intra-party squabbling, leadership challenges, and so on?

I think the key thing is you’re not there to get something done, say like a new fairer funding system for schools, so you can

“Where have the rights of the citizen gone in this nanny state that we’ve created in New South Wales?”

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FROM TOP: GETTY IMAGES; COURTESY

Above: Garrett onstage with Midnight Oil at the Lyceum in London in 1980. The band will reunite in 2017. “The thing that’s always bound us together pretty strongly is the music, plus add-on values.” Right: An early Midnight Oil promo shot.

have your name up in lights. You’re there because you believe that this might make a diference to the country, and it will.

But it is intensely frustrating when no one knows that you are doing it, and so either has no opportunity to agree or disagree, or provide input, because the daily colour and movement is all about conflict and inanity. And I certainly did find that frustrating. That’s partly why I did the book, because I realised that people didn’t know what had been done and what I was proud of and what I was proud of the government doing. And I’m honest about the things that went wrong for us, but I also thought that the ambition and the reach, of both governments, but certainly the Gillard government, was big, and deserved a little bit of oxygen.

In ‘Big Blue Sky’ you address the home insulation program and the fact that four young installers lost their lives, leading then Opposition leader Tony Abbott to accuse you of “industrial manslaughter”. The book ofers you the opportunity to explain your position and the circumstances surrounding those tragedies. The press didn’t give you that chance at the time, which

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must have been more soul destroying than frustrating?

But once the media’s made up its mind that it needs a scapegoat, particularly a pretty visible one, the facts cease to count on that issue very early on. You’ve just got to hang in and do the best that you can.

So you could just shelve your emotions?

If you’re going to enter public office, you’re not baulking at the first sign of grapeshot, you’re there to get the job done the best that you can. And I think you have to be quite clear and focused on that, otherwise you will get swept of course.

In the song “No Placebo” you sing of being at ease with your mortality. How are you finding the ageing process?

You can’t hold it of. And this idea that you should try and hold it of, and that when you get there it’s just seven grades of shit, is craziness. There are plenty of people who’ve done their best work when they’re well past three score and 10 years or five years or whatever the [saying] is.

You’re lucky if you clock up some years and get a bit of perspective on things but still have an appetite for doing more.

So I’m not really thinking about the numbers at all, I’m thinking about the view.

But the word retirement is a word that’s not in my vocabulary. I don’t like the sound of it – re-tire-ment. I like the sound of, “Can we record this now?” [Laughs] So there are no plans to slow down?

Of course at some point you’re heading towards six feet under, but it’s what you’re doing on the way. I’ve come across people who’ve almost been heading towards six feet under and it didn’t look to me like they were much over 30, and I’ve hung out with a few that have been twice that, and it seemed to me that the party never ended.

What are you still passionate about?

Everything. My passions and enthusiasms are pretty much what they have been ever since I started thinking about life and responding to things around me. I don’t think you change that much in life. Sometimes you’ve got to drag yourself, sometimes someone is underneath you, sometimes you sprout wings for half an hour and you flutter to this higher point, sometimes the wings melt and you crash. But that’s life in all its beauty and ugliness, and all its joys and all its sorrows.

The fullness of it, that’s what the passion for living is about, and if you’re lucky enough to still be standing, and you’ve got songs dancing around you, then you should record them and sing them.

And play them live. What are you expecting of your upcoming solo shows?

Playing WaveAid and Sound Relief [the benefit shows that brought Midnight Oil out of retirement in 2005 and 2009 respectively] brought home to me that we did such a phenomenal amount of relentless road work for so many years in that early period, and like any artist or any person, what you do at its most intense in your teens to your early 20s tends to stick with you. And that certainly had stuck to us. It’s not like riding a bike, there’s more chemistry at play, but it felt entirely right, and I think the stage has always been one of my hangouts. I didn’t think I’d be hanging out onstage with other people, but that’ll make it more interesting and more unpredictable, and that’s a good thing.

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Keith Urban’s Hard Road His rise to fame, paved by talent, looks and drive, has led the country megastar to the darkest of places

By Erik Hedegaard n keith urban’s world, it had been going so well for so long that something was bound to happen, and it happened today, in Nashville, at his mansion-size home, while he was cutting his toenails. He’d woken up at 6:00, slid of his bed to the floor to say his morning prayers, which he’s done daily since getting sober 10 years ago, dressed and fed the kids (Eggo wales for Faith Margaret, 5; Raisin Bran for Sunday Rose, 7), bundled them into the family Audi, dropped them of at school, returned home, worked out,

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K EITH URBA N towelled off, got the clippers and bent down. This is where everything went kaflooey. He was within minutes of heading out the door to the Bridgestone Arena downtown, where he and his band were practicing, getting ready for his upcoming world tour to showcase songs from Ripcord, his eighth true solo album since arriving in the U.S. nearly 20 years ago.

Half country, half something else entirely, heavy on the electro-pop and drum loops, light on the twang, riddled through with the charged-up surreal pluckings of his beloved ganjo (a.k.a. a six-string banjo), its first single, “John Cougar, John Deere, John 3:16”, was already Number One on the U.S. country charts, bringing his total Top 10 hit count since his first solo release in 1999 to a record-setting 35. At the age of 48, he was on a roll. But then, toenail clippers still in hand, he straightened up and a sudden back spasm hit him so hard he doubled over and shouted, “Oh, motherfucker!”

It wasn’t anything that ice, a massage and a brace couldn’t patch up; nonetheless, over the next few hours, certain changes had to be made: a lunch date cancelled, an upcoming preevent ride in Mario Andretti’s two-seater Indy car at the Indianapolis 500 scotched. “I feel pummelled,” Urban says when he finally makes it to the arena, a brace forcing him to stand ramrod-straight. It could have been worse, of course, and certainly much worse has happened to Urban, including past problems with drugs and alcohol that nearly wrecked his marriage to actress Nicole Kidman, in 2006, when it was just four months old. In the main, however, Urban thinks that many of his fans believe he’s had an easy go of it, not so much the hardcore country ones but the vast number of newer ones who tune in because of his marriage and his four-year stint as the most afable of American Idol judges, signifying to them a happy cakewalk from Australia to Nashville.

“They know me now as being married to Nic,” he says. “They’ve seen me on TV. And they just sort of think, ‘He’s the luckiest guy in the world.’ ” Which it’s hard not to. Movie premieres with Kidman, four Grammys, 10 Country Music Awards, a Golden Globe nomination, a stable of cars that includes a Bugatti with paddle shifters. And yet, he says, “There’s just so much shit underneath all that that you didn’t see.” In truth, the hard times were harder than almost anyone except his wife knows, and more desperate, and more frightening, up to the point of should-I-live-or-should-

I-die, with him favouring the latter. “No, man,” he says later on, “I didn’t just walk into this gig.” And then he proceeds to open up a little bit about some of the stuf that happened. ne of the things you notice upon fi rst encountering Urban is how ter rific he smells. Whatever he’s wearing, it radiates of him like a bloom of musk, jasmine and tobacco, pepper and unmediated amber, thickly, almost a fog. It’s a pretty dramatic, mind-expanding cocktail and tends to swamp you with good will toward its wearer before he even utters a word. It’s some kind of chemistry thing that’s compounded by the dimples in his cheeks, the highlighted, centre-parted curtain of boyish hair, the muscles plumping the sleeves of his T-shirt, the novelty (a word he hates, by the way) of his Australian accent, etc.,

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drinking alone and pick-’em-ups, with songs like “You Look Good in My Shirt”, “Tonight I Wanna Cry” and “Boy Gets a Truck”. Conversely, his guitar skills are nothing short of freaky.

Actually, he’s kind of gearhead-obsessed with guitars and can talk about them endlessly and emotionally, especially when it comes to the sorrow he felt when the great Nashville flood of 2010 rolled over his collection of axes stored in a local rehearsal space, rendering them a sorry, soggy mess.

Among the presumed lost was his treasured 1988 Fender Telecaster, the 40thanniversary edition, which he’d named Clarence, after the guardian angel in the sentimental Jimmy Stewart classic It’s a Wonderful Life, and purchased during an early trip to Manny’s in New York, at a time when he was basically penniless. “It cost $2,500, or around $5,000 Australian, which is, like, $6,000 more than I had,” he says. “But I feel like if a guitar is in your possession, you’re the current caretaker and your job is simply to take care of it. The fact that they all drowned on my watch just was devastating to me.” He drops his head. That a Nashville luthier was able to painstakingly restore Clarence and most of his other guitars back to health doesn’t matter. Six years on, and he still feels guilty.

Which makes you wonder if he cried about it, and if he has cried recently.

He nods, his blue eyes turning melancholy. “This morning. Nic was filming some pretty harrowing, abusive scenes last night, and she was telling me about them.” As it happens, he’s a big believer in the therapeutic value of crying. He goes on, “When I haven’t cried in a while, I can tell I get pentup. Then maybe once a month I have a good cry, one big avalanche of a torrential downpour, and I feel amazing for weeks afterward. The streets are cleaned, the skies are blue, there’s no humidity and it’s beautiful.”

“They see me on TV and just think, ‘He’s the luckiest guy in the world.’ But there’s just so much shit underneath that they didn’t see.”

Contributing editor Erik Hedega ard wrote about Mike Love in RS 773.

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etc. All of it adds up to make him a talkshow favourite, especially with Ellen DeGeneres, who always appears comically ready to switch sides for him, and once went so far as to let her hands and lips roam over his entire body, even dangerously low, for a phony-baloney commercial meant to mock-hawk his signature cologne, Phoenix, which is not, by the way, what he’s wearing today.

And then there’s his music. In Nashville, he’s about as progressive as they come. His self-titled first album toed the country line fairly well and led to his first Number One single in the U.S., the (perhaps) panderingly titled “But for the Grace of God”.

Ever since then, however, he’s steadily expanded not only his own boundaries but also the genre’s, bringing to bear influences ranging from Dire Straits to Fleetwood Mac to Bruce Springsteen to Meat Loaf, rocking pretty hard throughout. On Ripcord, he hired disco don Nile Rodgers to produce the glitter-ball-ready “Sun Don’t Let Me Down” and brought in rapper Pitbull for a midtune musical break. If it’s out there, he’s got his eyes on it. Lyrically, he’s maybe not so far-ranging, his themes revolving around country’s traditional themes, more or less: girls, loss of girls,

n fact, it’s dismal outside today, the wind blowing rain away in sheets throughout downtown Nashville. That’s when Urban, once again in the arena’s bowels, takes off his hoodie, scratches at his chin stubble and first starts to tell his story.

Technically, he’s a Kiwi, but he was raised in Australia, where his parents, Marienne and Bob, loved country music, always had Glen Campbell, Dolly Parton and Ricky Skaggs on the stereo. They ran a convenience store in Brisbane, then moved to a farm an hour north when Keith was 10. “I had to clean out the pigsties and shovel shit out of the chicken coops,” he says. “But even

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Life in Music City, USA

PREVIOUS SPREAD, LOCATION: DINO’S RESTAURANT, EAST NASHVILLE. THIS PAGE, FROM TOP: ANDY SNYDER; GETTY IMAGES

After eight solo albums and 25 years in Nashville, Urban is about as progressive as they come in the country-music capital, where he lives with his wife, Nicole Kidman (below), and their two daughters. But it took time for the Aussie to settle in. “I was very insecure,” he says. “I was just an alien.”

after our house burned down and we had to live in our tin tractor shed for 18 months, my older brother, Shane, and I sleeping in a single bed on one side of a big workbench, my parents on the other, and it looked like a squatter’s residence – all that, for me, is a great memory.”

His first instrument, at the age of four, was a ukulele, but two years later, his folks gave him a cheapo guitar, and it quickly became clear he had a gift. Sometimes, at school, he’d get hassled for being overly blond and dimpled, but because he could play the guitar he pretty much skated by.

Then, in eighth grade, he won the lead in a school production of Oliver! and got his first taste of fame, with all his classmates wearing promo buttons that featured his picture. “My first merch,” he says, happily.

“And when the musical started, I suddenly had a lot of girlfriends, which I thought was fantastic, but when the run ended, they all ran. I remember very vividly thinking, ‘Right. I get it. This is all just fantasy bullshit, don’t get caught up in that.’ ” At the age of 15, with his parents’ blessing, he dropped out of school to tour and play fulltime in every rough-stuf roadhouse and flea-bitten pub he could find.

Throughout, he was a good kid who never got in trouble. Didn’t drink much, didn’t smoke much dope, didn’t have runins with the law, didn’t fight. “Actually, I’ve never even physically punched anybody, ever. I’m just not a fighter.” His tidy, bordering-on-idyllic childhood reached a high point in 1990, when he was 23 and won a major televised contest called Star Maker, which led to a recording contract with EMI and four hit singles on the Australian counA u g u s t, 2 016

try charts. “Suddenly, I had bumper stickers with my name on them, T-shirts with my picture,” he says. “I was selling merchandise. I toured with a road crew.” In other words, he was a big deal, about to only get bigger. So what did he do next?

He moved to Nashville, where he spent the next seven years going nowhere but down the crapper.

It was the early Nineties, the mild-mannered, so-called hat-act era, Alan Jackson and Garth Brooks leading the shule, and here comes this guitar-slinging longhaired weirdo with an even weirder accent. Nobody wanted anything to do with him. “Nothing I’d done before meant shit,” he says. “I felt like I was meant to be here, I had this absolute burning belief, but I was out of step with everything. I mean, what do you do when you’re doing your best and it’s not enough? I had no plan for that.” He lived in a rotten part of town, stowed a big metal garden scythe in his car – “a psychopath’s fucking tool” – just in case, and had as a roommate a guy who loved to freebase cocaine. “And then one day he ofered me this massive pipe,” Urban says. “I’d never had it, it looked good, so I took it. Things didn’t immediately go pear-shaped, but that was the beginning of it.”

He was confused and lonely and not playing in any of Nashville’s clubs, because you didn’t perform threadbare covers in dive bars if you wanted to make it as an original recording artist. It was the first time in a decade that the entertainer in him could not freely entertain, and it began to mess with his head. “When I was onstage, I felt good, but if I was not onstage, I was very, very insecure,” he says. “I felt like I didn’t have much of anything to ofer. I was just an alien. And then I was on the phone with this girl I was dating. She’s trying to break up with me. I’m saying, ‘What the hell? What’s going on? What’s happened?’ And eventually she said, ‘For fuck’s sake, can’t you see that the novelty of you has worn of ?’ You might say, ‘Big deal.’ But I was feeling insecure, and the fact that me and my accent would be a novelty to somebody cut me to the core. Oh, my God. Really bad. It devastated me. It was a turning point. After that, shit started to really go awry. I stepped up my drinking. I started doing more drugs. Yeah, man. The whole back end of the Nineties were just awful.”

Drugs and more drugs, coke and Ecstasy in particular. “They were my thing. I loved them.”

And with that said, it’s time for him to get back to work. t’s dark inside the arena, but the music is loud and thumping. The boys in Urban’s band – guitarist Danny Rader, drummer Seth Rausch, bassist Jerry Flowers and new member Nathan Barlowe, on a kooky homemade sampling device he calls the Phantom – are blazing through the middle moments of the catchy hit tune “Somewhere in My Car”, from 2013’s Fuse.

Urban isn’t playing today, however. His back is hurting, so he’s standing in front of the guys, stif as a bird colonel, hands on hips, nodding and saying, “Yeah, yeah, OK, good. That’s the way to do it. That’s right.”

He’s endlessly encouraging and positive with his remarks, which is entirely unlike how the early Nashville cats were with him back in the day.

In 1995, he cobbled together a trio called the Ranch, had the good fortune to land a deal with Capitol Nashville, and the misfortune to spend the next two years in record-making hell. “It was mind-blowing,” he says. “We recorded some of those songs 12 times, the same song in diferent studios, diferent producers, always trying to get the right combination of radio-ready stuf.” Saying this, he kind of snorts. “One night we’d finished a track and this famous producer, who I won’t name, said, ‘A ll right, boys, what do you want? Fiddle or steel?’

I said, ‘I don’t want either.’ [Cont. on 105]

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BAT FOR LASHES’ ‘WARPED, WEIRD’ NEW MUSIC Natasha Khan finds hope in the darkness of her fourth album, ‘The Bride’

BY A N N A B E L RO S S ver the past 10 y ears, nata- is intercepted by someone out of the blue”. Khan sha Khan, better known as Bat for plans to turn it into a feature film.

Lashes, has presented variously Filmmaking is the latest in her ever-growing as a pagan priestess (held large- list of creative pursuits. The daughter of an Engly responsible for encouraging the headdress lish mother and Pakistani professional squash phenomenon at festivals); as a wanton blonde player father, since wrapping touring for The alter ego, Pearl; and as an unvarnished warrior Haunted Man Khan has fronted psychedelic woman, as on the cover of 2012’s The Haunted world music cover band Sexwitch, attended boMan, shot by Ryan McGinley, where she stands tanical drawing classes and yoga retreats, and naked with a man slung over her shoulders, his sated her love of nature with regular visits to the limbs strategically unfreeing her nipples (and Redwood pine forests of Big Sur. pubis).

London-based Khan says she’s content in all That the twice Mercury Prize-nominated areas of her life but one. At 36, her desire to have musician should inhabit the titular character a baby is “visceral”. of her fourth album, The Bride, seems a rea“It would be easy to just be married to my sonable progression. In recent shows she’s ap- work for the rest of my life,” she says. “And I’m peared on stage in wedding gowns and veils really frightened for that to be the case because with lurid make-up, as per the album cover; in I think the greatest thing in life is to love somesome cities she’s been performing in churches. one unconditionally, and that’s kind of my mis“I mentioned to my manager I’d sion, and I feel like I’m getting closer like to perform in Hollywood Forto it but it’s hard. I really admire peoever Cemetery and then we started “It’s good to ple who manage to do that.” stick to your thinking about unconventional venThe Bride was recorded in the guns,” says ues and he said, ‘You should do an Catskill Mountains with Simone Khan.

“Listen to ill-fated honeymoon tour of churchFelice, who co-produced the record yourself. This is with Khan, and little intervention es’, and I was like, ‘Fuck yeah, that’s what I did.” such a great idea’,” says Khan from from her label, Parlophone.

New York.

“Labels generally try to A&R it, Ill is the fate that befalls her bride protago- and they thought they could bring out the sinnist on the noirish, dreamily rendered album. gles, but I think they quickly realised that it’s Left standing at the altar when her fiancé dies not that kind of album,” she laughs. in an accident en route to the church, she finds Her favourite song is “Close Encounters”, herself “Honeymooning Alone”. a cinematic, ghostly lament. “I scrapped evWhile the Lynchian narrative developed with erything I’d done on it four days before we visual artist Neil Krug might be stuf of fancy, were supposed to finish the album, it was a The Bride is very much rooted in the real, says pop song girl-groupy Shangri-Las sounding Khan. With her white knight fantasies dashed, thing,” she says. “The record company were her heroine is forced to save herself. quite pleased about it and I was like, ‘Nooooo, “I actually think it’s a really hopeful, roman- I want warped, weird strings all over it and I tic record about real love as opposed to the il- want it to be really scary and dark!’ And they lusion of love,” she says. “There isn’t someone were like, ‘Oh no’, but I just wasn’t happy with who’s going to rescue you and you won’t have a it, and I knew it wasn’t happy being dressed up perfect partner, but coming to terms with that in those clothes. is quite a grieving process.”

“I’m pleased I stuck to my guns because I Brides have proven fertile creative fodder for think it’s actually a highlight on the album and Khan; in April she had a short in the Tribeca people have been responding to it really well Film Festival called I Do (also the name of The live,” she adds. “It’s good to stick to your guns.

Bride’s lead single), in which the bride almost Don’t listen to anyone, listen to yourself. And stands up her husband-to-be “because her life this is what I did.”

O

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Tyrone enjoying some sunshine in Palm Springs before the show. Great way to start the day.

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Rüfüs share some personal photos from their recent world tour

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fter releasing our sophomore album Bloom in January, we were staring down the barrel of our biggest tour yet; 37 shows across the UK, Europe, America, Canada and then back to Australia and New Zealand. It is one thing to have so much love and support when releasing an album, but to feel that love reciprocated when we took our music from the studio to the stage and played it to the world; that has been incredible. This tour has tested us as both a band and as individuals, playing our longest shows yet, to some of the biggest crowds on a gruelling tour schedule. Some highlights include two sun-filled weekends at Coachella, a never ending uproar of applause in Melbourne following that special ‘Innerbloom’ moment, and the final Australian show of the tour at Brisbane’s Riverstage. Here are a bunch of special moments captured across those three months by our photographer and friend, Jack Lawrence.

JON GEORGE (KEYBOARDS)

Right: There are many ways that we approach a pre-show ritual; sometimes push-ups, sometimes vocal mantras, but in Berlin we embraced a fresh basket of fruit and some Polaroid action. (From left: Tyrone Lindqvist, Jon George, James Hunt)

PH OTOG R APHS BY JACK L AWR E N CE

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Don’t Want To Come Down Above: We’d just played our first set at Coachella and were celebrating watching the sunrise on a rooftop in Palm Springs. One of our mates almost crippled himself jumping off the roof! Left: On our week off between the Coachella sets we had a show in Santa Barbara.

Grabbed some glorious seafood and jammed out on the shitty little piano backstage at the venue.

Out in the Streets Walking through the beautiful streets of Barcelona checking out buskers and having boozy meals. Grabbed a snap with this legend. Flamenco vibes were strong.

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Studio Tans

Family Ties

ALL IMAGES JACK LAWRENCE @JACKLAWRENCEEEE, EXCEPT POLAROID OPENING SPREAD, BOTTOM RIGHT: HARRIET BROWSE @HARRIETBROWSE; AND OPPOSITE PAGE BOTTOM LEFT: MIKE PORTLOCK @MIKEPORTLOCK

We found some time to jump in the studio to finish off a collab with some friends whilst on tour. Collabs are rare for us to take the bait, but we were too excited to not take this one.

Practicing on our new toy we bought in Canada; a Mexican Fender Jag.

Above: It was pretty surreal to play the last show of a pretty intense threemonth tour on the Sunshine Coast. This is us hugging it out with our crew.

Below: Cheeky climb on the scaffolding at Coachella. The security guard was pretty dirty about it.

James warming up before the first Sydney show – wide stances were encouraged.

Coachella was one of the biggest shows of our lives.

It was so humbling and electrifying.

Coachella was one of the biggest shows of our lives. This moment kind of sums up how stoked we were to have ended up playing to a packed tent. It was so humbling and so electrifying – a total bucket list moment.

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THE GREATEST OF ALL TIME 1942-2016

By Mik al Gilmore

Age 20, May 17th, 1962, in Long Island, New York

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MUHAMMAD ALI

People scorned him, even reviled him. Some feared him. Even when the young man proved himself to be what he claimed – the fastest, most astonishing boxer we’d ever seen, as well as a black man who wouldn’t seek permission for his pride In 1996, he appeared at the Olympic or submit to conventions of image and val- Games in Atlanta, as the world’s most uniues – he was still too bold to be endured. versally acknowledged hero, his disrepute He was an implicit threat. Some – mil- long before faded into dust. He had been a lions, for that matter – watched him just 1960 Olympic gold-medal winner but said to see him knocked down, razed. he’d discarded the prize in disgust over That was just the beracism. During a basketginning, before things got ball-game intermission in serious with Muhammad Atlanta, the president of Ali, before he changed the International OlymAmerica and made himpic Committee presentself into a courageous exed him with a replaceample before the world. ment for the lost prize, On the day following Ali’s on a ribbon that draped death – on June 3rd, at from his neck. Ali studied age 74, after years of sufthe medal for a moment, fering from a degenerasmiled and lifted it to his tive disorder – President lips with his right hand Barack Obama quoted – his left hand trembling something the fighter had steadily – and kissed it. once said: “I am AmerHe said no words for the ica. I am the part you occasion. Muhammad Ali won’t recognise. But get no longer spoke in public used to me – black, con– he had been too ravaged fident, cocky; my name,

by Parkinson’s disease, not yours; my religion, not which many speculate yours; my goals, my own. was a result of his years Get used to me.” in the boxing ring.

Ali signified America, He would have half as it moved through dechis life to weigh his past ades of hatred, fear, viboasts against unknown olence, as it doubted its eternity. “I conquered DESTINY’S CHILD Cassius Clay, age 12, 1954. better promises, somethe world,” Ali once said, He learned to fight after his times touching transfor“and it didn’t bring me new bike was stolen. mative grace, other times true happiness.” Still, he unchaining its worse parknew he had justified his adoxes, from dilemmas of civil rights and time here. For better and worse, Ali alpurposes of war to disputes over one of its lowed only himself to set his bounds or to fundamental ideas, freedom of religion. He undo them. Former heavyweight champion shed light on it all, making his own sins and George Foreman, who once famously tried incurring irrevocable losses along the years. to shatter those bounds, later came to recognise what impelled Ali. “He found someContributing editor Mik al Gilmore thing to fight for,” said Foreman, “other wrote about the Ramones in RS 775. than money and championship belts. And A version of this feature ran in “Men’s when that person finds something like Journal” in 2011. that, you can’t hardly beat them.”

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this is a story of how a young man took fear – personal fear, and dread instilled by the history of his people in America – and transmuted it into something that fear itself should be afraid of. Muhammad Ali was born Cassius Marcellus Clay, on January 17th, 1942, in Louisville, Kentucky, the firstborn child of Cassius Clay Sr. and his wife, Odessa. Odessa was light-skinned – she had some white lineage in both her parents’ families. She was a genial woman who worked as a cook and house cleaner for wealthy white families. She tried to impress dignity on her children, and some believe Ali inherited his good humour from her.

Cassius Clay Sr. had a diferent temperament. He was named after a white 19thcentury plantation owner who became an ardent abolitionist and freed his slaves.

Clay Sr. took pride in this legacy, but he knew as well that life in white America, in the border state of Kentucky, had checked his hopes. He had wanted to be an artist; instead, he was a sign painter. Ali recounted his father telling him of the horrible fate of Emmett Till, a black 14-year-old from Chicago who was beaten and shot in the head in Mississippi during the summer of 1955 for speaking to a white woman at a grocery store. The images of Till’s mutilated corpse stayed in young Ali’s mind.

“In one,” he said in his autobiography, The Greatest, “he was laughing and happy. In the other, he was swollen and bashed in, his eyes bulging out of their sockets.” He later told Gordon Parks, in Life magazine, “I used to lay awake scared, thinking about somebody getting cut up or being lynched.”

When Clay Sr. brooded, he drank and saw other women, and when he came back home, he could be menacing; Odessa called the police more than once. Growing up in tension, fearing a parent’s volatility, can leave a young person with painful but shrewd premonitions about possible danger and with acute impulses to protection.

It can also leave him wanting to build shelter in some other part of his life.

In October 1954, when Clay was 12, he was upset to discover that his gleaming new bicycle had been stolen. He sought a policeman, who was coaching boxing at a nearby gym, and told the oicer he wanted to beat up the thief. The policeman, an older white man named Joe Martin, told Clay he had better learn how to fight first.

In a picture from that time, the young, slight-looking Cassius Clay wears an expression that is nervous and unwavering at the same time. He won his first bout and informed his family that he would be champion. Cassius’ father wasn’t happy that his son was being trained by a cop; Cassius spent less time at home and more in the gym. “He’d build himself up into a regular frenzy,” Martin later told author Mark Kram, “letting that fear out by tormenting his opponent.”

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After fighting 108 bouts by age 18 (winning 100 of them) and garnering two national Golden Gloves championships, Clay boxed for the 1960 U.S. Olympic team in Rome and returned home with a gold medal. A consortium of all-white local businessmen formed to sponsor the young boxer and protect him from the corrupt influences in professional fighting. In December that year, the group sent Clay to Miami to work with Angelo Dundee – one of boxing’s most respected trainers.

“Angelo understood immediately,” said Ali biographer Thomas Hauser in PBS’s Made in Miami, “that Cassius did things all wrong from a technical point of view, but he could get away with them because A u g u s t, 2 016

LOUISVILLE SLUGGER (1) At the 1960 Olympics in Rome, where he took home the gold at age 18. (2) With his mother, Odessa, in 1974, three days before the Rumble in the Jungle. (3) The young contender between training sets at the Main Street Gym in October, 1962.

of his speed and his reflexes.” One of Clay’s most unorthodox traits was holding his arms low, which could leave him without guard against fast-arriving blows. Also, whereas many fighters slipped – that is, dodged – punches by ducking or quickly moving their head to the side, Clay tended to pedal rearward rapidly, pulling his neck back at an acute angle, his eyes fi xed on the incoming missile, measuring the eva-

sion to an inch or less. Ring commentators sometimes anticipated that this technique would land him flat – though those occasions were rare to the point of proving historic. Whatever his anomalies, Clay knew how to get a jab in and how to make it sting. “He flicked it,” said Ferdie Pacheco, who met Ali in Miami and served as his doctor for many years. “He called it snake-licking.” This, too, was a hallmark of Clay’s style; he aimed almost exclusively at a fighter’s head, not at his body. Clay himself, though, did not like being hit in the face. “Your face and teeth is all your life,” he told The New York Times’ Robert Lipsyte.

Clay’s manner became hard for other fighters to cope with. In early 1961, SwedRollingStoneAus.com

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MUHAMMAD ALI 1942-2016 ish fighter and former world champion Ingemar Johansson spent a few minutes sparring with Clay at Dundee’s gym. “Come on, what’s the matter?” Ali taunted him. “Can’t hit me?” Johansson told Dundee, “Get him the fuck away from here. I can’t touch him.

Nobody is going to touch the guy!” Clay’s treatment of Johansson foretold what became, in varying ways, his most notable quality: He wouldn’t pay deference to conventions or to boxing’s ranking fighters. Instead, he goaded and bewildered them. He learned this tactic after witnessing professional wrestler Gorgeous George’s outrageous character in Las Vegas in the summer of 1962: George would strut into a ring wearing beautifully coifed waves of blond hair and then genuflect derisively to the heckling crowd. “And all the time,” Ali told Hauser, “I was saying to myself, ‘Man, I want to see this fight. It don’t matter if he wins or loses.’ ” Black athletes were expected to act respectfully toward competitors – especially white ones – and never to display arrogance or boast in triumph. That had been the case after the notorious Jack Johnson, in the early 1900s, used to diminish other fighters so effectively – including white champion Tommy Burns – he could conduct casual ringside conversations in the process. After Johnson, no African-American was allowed to compete for the title until Joe Louis won it in 1937. But Louis had to abide by a code of humility. Now, in the early 1960s, Clay ridiculed rivals and trumpeted his abilities before an increasingly sceptical press. “To beat me,” he declared, “you have to be greater than great.”

When Clay upped the ante by beginning to predict – with uncanny accuracy – the round in which he would defeat an adversary, he drew even more disdain. Louis cautioned him, “Boy! You better not believe half the things you say about yourself.”

That didn’t deter Clay. “By the end of 1963,” he said, “I will be the youngest champion in history.”

At the same time, his braggadocio stirred an excitement that hadn’t been seen for any boxer in years. Those who watched him develop as a professional in Miami and saw him defeat 19 competitors in the period from late 1960 to summer 1963 – losing to nobody – received him as the anointed hope. “Everybody thought that this is our guy,” Pacheco later said.

“This guy’s going to be the guy.” By late 1963, Clay was headed for a title match with the man he called “the big ugly bear”: heavyweight champion Sonny Liston, the most forbidding man in boxing history, and one of the most disreputable. Liston had a criminal past – he’d learned to box in prison – and rumours tied him to the organised-crime element in boxing. Liston, as Joe Flaherty put it in The Village Voice, was “a blatant mother in a fucker’s game”.

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KING OF THE WORLD After beating the heavily favoured Sonny Liston for the first time, February 1964

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MUHAMMAD ALI 1942-2016 Clay pursued Liston hard for a title shot, sometimes in foolhardy ways. On one occasion, he followed Liston into a Las Vegas casino where the champion was losing at dice. Promoter Harold Conrad, who was present, said Clay kept making fun of Liston’s bad luck. “So Liston throws the dice down,” Conrad told biographer Hauser, “walks over to Clay, and says, ‘Listen, you nigger faggot. If you don’t get out of here in 10 seconds, I’m gonna pull that big tongue out of your mouth and stick it up your ass.’ ” When Liston arrived in Miami in early 1964, set to fight Clay on February 25th, the challenger met him at the airport and followed him into the city. Liston pulled his car over and said, “I’ll punch you in the mouth!” Clay still followed. “Get your last look,” Clay told the crowd outside Liston’s gym. “I’m the real champ.”

Behind his bravado, though, Clay harboured doubts. “[Liston] can hit a guy in the elbows and just about break his arm,” he said. But the challenger also had a secret source of inspiration. In fact, Cassius Clay had a hidden life that was about to become notorious.

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“I REPRESENT THE TRUTH. THE WORLD IS FULL OF OPPRESSED PEOPLE. THEY ALL WANT ME TO BE THE VICTOR.”

y e a r ly 1964, Cassius Clay had developed strong views on the dilemma of race in A merica. Whereas most civil rights leaders – Martin Luther King Jr., notably – counselled nonviolence, Clay didn’t subscribe to those ideals. “I’m a fighter,” he told the New York Post’s Pete Hamill.

“You kill my dog, you better hide your cat.”

Clay had been studying the doctrines of the Nation of Islam, more popularly (and disparagingly) known at the time as the Black Muslims. He responded to the organisation’s declaration that AfricanAmericans needn’t seek assent for civil rights – rather, they should be proud of their racial identity and govern their own ends. The public face of the movement was Malcolm X, who since 1954 had served as chief minister at the Nation’s Harlem mosque and as a right-hand man to the organisation’s leader, the soft-voiced but steel-minded Elijah Muhammad. Their message had a powerful appeal to a young man who used to have nightmares about the fate of Emmett Till.

Malcolm hadn’t heard of Clay when they first met, in 1962. The Nation viewed boxing as a practice that exploited black men.

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body, who addressed Clay’s uncertainty.

“This fight is the truth,” Malcolm told him in Miami Beach before the match. “It’s the cross and the crescent fighting in a prize ring – for the first time. . . . Do you think Allah has brought about all this intending for you to leave the ring as anything but the champion?”

Clay had tried to keep his new alliance secret, but in early February, Cassius Clay Sr. told a Miami Herald reporter that “Cassius had become a Muslim; that they’d brainwashed him to hate white people, and as soon as the fight was over, he was going to change his name.” Under pressure from the fight’s promoters – who threatened to cancel the bout – Malcolm X left Miami Beach, though he returned the day of the match and sat ringside with R&B singer Sam Cooke and his manager Allen Klein. Clay had started to signify something unsettling, even threatening, in the American moment. As a result, Liston found himself, for the first time, with a mandate from boxing pundits: to put the loudmouth upstart in his place.

The morning of the match, Clay crashed into the weighin ceremony, yelling, “You ain’t got a chance. . . . You whupped!” One repor ter said the fight should be called of, that Clay was hysterical and was endangering himself. New York Times reporter Lipsyte had been told by his newspaper to map the shortest route from the fight to the hospital. “I understood perfectly,” he said, “that I’d never see Cassius Clay again.”

But that night, when the fighters met at ring centre, perceptions changed. “This is the first time we had really seen them together,” said Lipsyte. “There was a collective gasp: Cassius Clay was much bigger.” Once the bell rang, the challenger moved immediately into his opponent, circling constantly, making himself a shifting target. Liston threw hard but desperate swings, sometimes of-target by a foot or more.

In the third round, Clay caught Liston with a sharp blow to the left cheekbone, drawing blood. “I saw his expression,” Ali later said, “how shook he was that we were still out there, and he was the one cut and bleeding.” Between the third and fourth rounds, Liston reportedly took a dishonourable course. In King of the World, author and New Yorker editor David Remnick relates the tale that Liston instructed one of his cornermen to “juice his gloves” – that is, apply a strong liniment or coagulant that, if it made contact with the eyes, would burn and temporarily blind. It

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worked: Clay left the fourth round blinking wildly, his eyes hurting intensely. He wanted to stop the fight – “He was telling us to cut the gloves of,” said Pacheco. Dundee had to hold Ali back from complaining to the referee about Liston’s dirty fighting.

He knew that if the bout was stopped, it might be impossible for Clay to get another chance at the title. The trainer instead washed out the young challenger’s eyes and stood him up for the next round. At that crucial moment of Muhammad Ali’s career, Dundee pushed him forward, saying, “Big Daddy, get in there; this is your night.”

At the end of the sixth round, a disheartened Liston told his trainers, “That’s it,” and spat out his mouthpiece. The fight was over: Clay was the new heavyweight champion. He pushed through the crowd that swarmed him to the ringside where reporters sat, looking shocked. “Eat your words,” he told them. “I told you and you and you.

I’m king of the world. You must all bow to me!” Moments later he asserted, “I shook up the world!”

In defeating Sonny Liston, Cassius Clay had – in the words of baseball’s Jackie Robinson – “outsmarted a scary man”. But he had also upset a proud press, most of whom regarded his victory as both an anomaly and an afront. Influential sportswriter Jimmy Cannon wrote scathingly, “Clay is part of the Beatle movement”, lumping him in with “the boys with their long dirty hair and the girls with the unwashed look and the college kids dancing naked at secret proms held in apartments and the revolt of students who get a cheque from Dad every first of the month”. Cannon had one thing right: Major changes were underway.

Earlier that same month, February 1964, the Beatles had appeared for the first time before an American audience, on Ed Sullivan’s TV show. Several days later, while visiting Miami, Conrad arranged for the band to visit Clay’s gymnasium. Beforehand, John Lennon cracked, “That loudmouth is going to lose”; he had originally wanted to see Liston. But Clay and the Beatles got along well, joking, mugging, revelling in the joy of their irreverent ascendancy.

When Clay met reporters the day after he won the championship, he came of as a diferent man – more subdued, sobertempered. One reporter asked, “Are you a card-carrying member of the Black Muslims?” Clay responded, “Card-carrying – what does that mean? . . . I know where I’m going, and I know the truth, and I don’t have to be what you want me to be. I’m free to be what I want.” It was a pivotal statement. “When I first heard that on television . . . ,” said boxing historian Gerald Early, “it was like an electric current went through me. I never heard a black man say anything like that, least of all an athlete.” The new champion went on to declare that his name was no longer Clay; blackA u g u s t, 2 016

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American surnames were often inherited from the family names of white slaveholders. “I will be known as Cassius X.” In the span of a day, Cassius had gone from an annoying braggart to a young black threat for much of white America.

Said Malcolm X: “Clay is the finest Negro athlete I have ever known, the man who will mean more to his people than any athlete before him. He is more than Jackie Robinson was, because Robinson is the white man’s hero.”

“I remember the day I became aware of the Champ,” author Walter Mosley later wrote of Ali. “My mother was driving me to school after he won the heavyweight title from Sonny Liston. At a crosswalk, a black man passing in front of our car suddenly turned and, raising his fists into the air, announced loudly, ‘I am the greatest!’ I was frightened by the man’s violent outburst, but even then I heard the pride and hurt, the dashed ambition and the shard of hope that cut through him. Cassius Clay’s declaration had become his own. The Black Pride movement was on.”

In Malcolm X, Cassius had discovered a comrade and role model. But it proved to be the most troubling relationship of his life. Tensions had recently emerged between the fiery minister and Elijah Muhammad, and Clay would have to choose between the two. On March 11th, 1964, A u g u s t, 2 016

MEET THE BEATLES Days before his 1964 Liston fight, with Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Ringo Starr and George Harrison in Miami. The band originally wanted to meet Liston; Lennon cracked of Clay, “That loudmouth’s going to lose.”

Malcolm X spoke publicly of his separation from the Nation of Islam. He would start a new action group and hoped to work with other civil rights leaders – such as Martin Luther King Jr. – with whom he’d earlier been forbidden to work. In response, Elijah Muhammad told Louis Farrakhan, who eventually replaced Malcolm as minister and national spokesman, that hypocrites like Malcolm should have “their heads cut of ”. Days later, Elijah Muhammad openly embraced Cassius and bestowed on him a new name: Muhammad Ali, meaning “beloved of God”. (The New York Times, among others, refused for six years to acknowledge the honorific, still referring to Ali as Cassius Clay.) The young fighter’s proud acceptance of the designation made plain his choice between the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X. The two former friends spoke only once more, later in the spring of 1964, during a chance encounter outside a hotel in Ghana. Malcolm told Ali, “Brother, I still love you, and you are still the greatest.” Ali replied, “You left the Honourable Elijah Muhammad. That was the wrong thing to do, Brother Malcolm.” Then Ali

turned his back and walked away. Malcolm looked emptied.

On February 21st, 1965, as Malcolm X stepped to a podium to speak to an audience at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, three men brandishing guns approached and shot him to death. Within minutes speculation spread that the Nation of Islam had been involved in, or sanctioned, the killing. That same night, Ali’s apartment on the South Side of Chicago caught fire. Some thought the event was an immediate strike against Ali for his rejection of Malcolm. Others, though, including Ali’s young wife, Sonji, suspected that the blaze might be a warning from within the Nation of Islam that the boxer should stay faithful. At the time, Ali expressed no sympathy for Malcolm X’s death. It wasn’t until 2004, in his book The Soul of a Butterfly, that Ali would say, “Turning my back on Malcolm was one of the mistakes I regret most in my life. I wish I’d been able to tell Malcolm I was sorry.”

Ali’s rematch with Liston – held in a small youth centre in the town of Lewiston, Maine – proved even more startling than the first. Ali entered the ring to loud booing and, after the bell sounded, took to circling Liston adeptly, as he had in the first match. In a moment when Liston was hurling a clumsy punch and his balance was susceptible, Ali threw what looked like a RollingStoneAus.com

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MUHAMMAD ALI 1942-2016 swiping right graze at his opponent’s head.

Liston crumpled to the canvas, where he stayed for several seconds, sprawling, rolling, groping. It happened so fast that many thought it had never happened at all. Confusion overtook the moment. Referee Jersey Joe Walcott tried to shove Ali to a corner to begin a 10-second count on Liston.

Ali, though, was as shocked as everybody else. He towered over Liston, a gloved fist cocked, yelling, “Get up and fight, sucker!” Liston finally rose, but he doubled over in fright when Ali resumed his assault. A moment later Walcott stopped the match.

Ali had won his first defence of his heavyweight title in less than two minutes. The audience broke out in another chorus of boos. Liston, they thought, had thrown the match. Ali himself had doubts. “It was a good punch,” he later said, “but I didn’t think I hit him so hard he couldn’t have got up.”

Liston lived in Las Vegas for the next several years, still fighting and winning matches, though never to any glory. On January 5th, 1971, his wife, Geraldine, returned home from a holiday trip and found her husband slouched against their bed, dead of a possible heroin overdose (many also suspected foul play). Biographer Hauser recounted a moment, years later, when Ali wished aloud that his early foe were still alive, that they might sit around and talk about what was past. When asked what he would say to Liston, Ali replied, “Man, you scared me.”

Cong,” he told a reporter. “They never called me nigger.”

Ali applied for conscientious-objector status, which would excuse him from military service, on grounds of the Nation of Islam’s religious beliefs. The Selective Service department ruled against any exemption, determining that Ali’s religion was “racist and political”. On April 28th, 1967, Ali refused induction into the U.S. military. Within an hour, the New York State Athletic Commission stripped him of his title and any licence to fight in the state; other state boards quickly followed suit.

Muhammad Ali was no longer champion anywhere within the U.S. and could no longer work in boxing or leave the country to work. He would be convicted of refusing to serve and sentenced to the maximum penalty: a $10,000 fine and five years in federal prison. “[If] all that was left now was to serve the five-year jail term and forget boxing, I was prepared,” he wrote in The Greatest.

For the next few years, Muhammad A li became one of the most popularly reviled but also one of the most admired persons in America. The U.S. government’s wayward prosecution of him caused many – including black leaders who had earlier been troubled by his association with the Nation of Islam – to view him more sympathetically. Julian Bond, a social activist who had been elected to the Georgia House of Representatives in 1965, said, “When Ali refused to take that symbolic step forward, everyone knew about it moments later. You could hear people talking about it on street corners. It was on everyone’s lips. People who had never thought about the war – black and white – began to think it through because of Ali. The ripples were enormous.”

On the day he was stripped of the title, Ali was already anticipating the long banishment ahead. “I strongly object,” he said, “to the fact that so many newspapers have given the American public and the world the impression that I have only two alternatives in taking this stand – either I go to jail or go to the Army. There is another alternative, and that alternative is justice.”

WHEN ALI REFUSED THE DRAFT, “THE RIPPLES WERE ENORMOUS. MORE PEOPLE BEGAN TO THINK ABOUT THE WAR.”

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li’s retention of the heavyweight title continued to rankle critics, including some in powerful positions. The champion was dismayed a few months later when told he was in danger of being drafted into the U.S. military, just as the war in Vietnam was intensifying. At age 18, he had been classified 1-Y, which meant he’d failed the standards of service (Ali was dyslexic and struggled with reading). But the classification had just been changed to 1-A: Ali was now eligible for the draft. “Why are they gunning for me?” he asked. The U.S. was likely trying to defuse the possibility that he might loom as a role model for other young African-Americans. (Ramsey Clark, U.S. attorney general at the time, later admitted that “the government . . . would have loved to put him in the service; get his picture in there”.) But when Ali reacted by proclaiming that he did not share the U.S.’s purposes in the Vietnam War, his influence on young Americans – both white and black – only grew. “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet 84 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |

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ustice proved slow in coming for Ali – and it could never really undo some injuries. The World Boxing Association staged a series of elimination bouts that, in February 1970, yielded a new champion, Joe Frazier. It was something of a hollow achievement. “Joe Frazier is the champion of nothing,” said sportscaster Howard Cosell. “The heavyweight cham-

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pion of the world was, and still is, a man called Muhammad Ali.” Ali’s three and a half years of exile from boxing spanned what might have been his peak period, in his mid-twenties. In 1969, Cosell asked if he would consider a return to boxing. Ali said, “Why not?

If they come up with enough money.” In July 1970, a Georgia state senator, Leroy Johnson, took on a bold project. Georgia had no state boxing commission, which meant that Atlanta could grant a licence of its own accord. But he was hindered by Gov. Lester Maddox, who had come to office on an anti-integrationist stance. (After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968, Maddox called King “an enemy of our country” and reportedly told state troopers that if any demonstrators got out of hand at King’s funeral to “shoot ’em down and stack ’em up”.) Atlanta gave permission for Ali to fight Jerry Quarry, on October 26th, 1970. Maddox tried to stop the fight but found he had no legal grounds. The event at Atlanta’s Municipal Auditorium proved a triumphant return. Ali was fleet and dominant, and in the third round, he rendered Quarry too bloodied to continue. Weeks later, after a win over Oscar Bonavena, Ali announced, “Now we have a chance to see who the real heavyweight champion of the world is.”

It would be a true struggle. Joe Frazier was no less formidable than Ali. Like Ali, he was an Olympic gold-medal winner, in Tokyo in 1964. In 1970, when Frazier won the heavyweight title, Ali claimed he didn’t begrudge him. “He wasn’t given this,” he said. After Ali’s title had been taken, Frazier told him, “It’s unfair.” In 1969, Frazier visited Washington, D.C., where he spoke to President Richard Nixon on Ali’s behalf.

“I was more than decent,” said Frazier. In The Greatest, Ali tells of a good-natured car ride the two men shared from Philadelphia to New York in the late 1960s. They talked about their inevitable appointment in the ring. “After I whip your ass,” Frazier told Ali, “I’ll buy you some ice cream.” Ali was dumbfounded that anybody imagined beating him. After that car ride, said Ali, “we never looked eye to eye”.

There would be good reason for that rift.

Interestingly, Ali never disparaged a white opponent in racial terms, as he often did black opponents, whom he probably saw as more serious competitors. Instead, Ali transmuted black fighters into stand-ins for white America. He worked this tactic with particular vehemence on Frazier, impugning his authenticity and purposes as a black man. “He’s the wrong kind of Negro,” said Ali in a TV interview. “He’s not like me, ’cause he’s the Uncle Tom. . . . He works for the enemy.” Ali meant some of this talk as promotion, but Frazier took it all literally. It hurt, and it felt like a betrayal. “I just wanted to bury him,” Frazier said.

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(1) In August 1966. (2) Malcolm X joins a group seeking autographs in March 1964.

(3) After refusing induction into the military, a group of top African-American athletes gathered on June 4, 1967, to give support and hear Ali explain why he rejected the draft.

The psychic war between the two men afected everything about their title match, billed as “The Fight of the Century” and set for March 8th, 1971, at Madison Square Garden. “I represent the truth,” Ali told Rolling Stone in 1971. “The world is full of oppressed people, poverty people. They for me. They not for the system. All the black militants . . . all your hippies, all your draft resisters, they all want me to be the victor.” By contrast, Frazier took on the role of outmoded power, compliant duty. When the two men arrived at Madison Square Garden that night, they entered the arena of an America disunited. In the private moments before the match, Frazier sat in his dressing room and uttered a prayer: “Lord, help me kill this man because he’s not righteous.” Nothing, though, could discourage Ali. “If Joe Frazier whips me,” he said, “I’ll A u g u s t, 2 016

crawl across the ring and kiss his feet and tell him, ‘You are the greatest.’ ” Frazier was in his prime – a hitter who bobbed and weaved as he advanced on his foes like a train. Early in the fight, Ali showed that he could outmanoeuvre Frazier and surprise him with the strength and precision of his punches. But Frazier pushed into him inexorably, as if he savoured what Ali threw at him and intended to pay it back.

The momentum edged back and forth throughout the hour. Then, in the 15th and last round, Frazier cracked the night’s mystery. With his left glove, he flicked Ali’s right bicep, making him drop his arm just enough, and then lunged forward with a full-force left hook to the jaw that felled him spectacularly. Ali hit the floor on his back, rolled to his left knee, then rose to

full height – all in less than a two-count.

“He surprised me,” Frazier said. Ali looked matter-of-fact, as if the instance had been a slight snag. But the knockdown settled things for the judges: Frazier won a unanimous verdict and retained his world title, becoming the first man to beat Ali as a professional. Back in his dressing room, Mark Kram reported in Ghosts of Manila, Frazier walked restlessly, tears streaming, and said, “I want him over here! I want him to crawl to my feet! Crawl, crawl!

He promised, promised me!” Later, Frazier checked in to a hospital, where he remained for many days, sufering from extreme high blood pressure and fatigue.

Doctors monitored him constantly, fearful he might enter a coma.

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that failed to win him the respect he needed. It was Muhammad Ali, instead, who accomplished an unforeseen transcendence that night. He had been knocked to the ground decisively, but by rebounding in that same instant, Ali redeemed his meaning as a hero: He was the black man who would not stay down, no matter what.

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igrated him for his brashness, who spat on his religion, who called him a coward because he wouldn’t be an accessory to mindless slaughter”.

Ali’s scruples evolved when he returned from exile. He could still be cruel – as in his treatment of Frazier – but some of the physical ruthlessness was gone. In the 1960s, between his Liston victory and his banishment, he had sometimes displayed a shocking vindictiveness. When former world heavyweight champ Floyd Patterson, in 1965, and contender Ernie Terrell, in 1967, refused to address him by his new name, Ali demeaned and devastated each of these men in the ring; he even severe-

ly injured Terrell’s right eye. When Cosell, who was usually supportive of Ali, asked about the apparent malice against Terrell, Ali responded, “Malice? I’m out to be cruel.

That’s what the boxing game is about.” This became less true after his return to the ring. In 1975, in the late stages of a bout with Ron Lyle, he worried that he might destroy him. “I knew I was winning . . . ,” Ali told Hauser, “so I backed of. I lost all my fighting instinct and hoped the referee would stop it.” He told reporters afterward, “I’m not going to kill a man.”

Nevertheless, he still fought to win. In the early 1970s, following his loss to Frazier, Ali concentrated on what he saw as A u g u s t, 2 016

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li had no doubt moved too quickly toward his first appointment with Frazier, but he’d had little choice: His legal appeal was headed for the Supreme Court, and if denied, he would have to enter a federal prison for up to five years. In April 1971, the court heard the arguments and decided that Ali should go to jail. But a pair of clerks prevailed on one justice to read The Autobiography of Malcolm X. The justice came to a new view: The government’s argument that Ali’s religion was racist was a misrepresentation of the fighter’s true beliefs. The justices reconsidered and agreed unanimously that the draft board had erred, that Ali was sincere; they overturned his conviction.

He was now free. In efect, Malcolm X’s words had saved him. In turn, Ali emboldened others. After Ali’s death, sports journalist and political writer Charles P. Pierce remarked that Ali was “a better American citizen than were the people who den-

RUMBLE IN THE JUNGLE Above: Ali winning the heavyweight title from George Foreman in Zaire, 1974; he let the powerful Foreman punch himself out, then prevailed by knockout in the eighth round. Left: Ali won over the African nation in the weeks before the fight, saying, “I’m fighting for black people who have no future.”

his most important exoneration: regaining the championship. Almost everything was working against him. He was in his early thirties at a time when a younger generation of commanding fighters, who owed much to his inspiration, was emerging. To persevere, much less to thrive again, Ali would have to develop diferent defensive strategies. “He was still ahead of the pack,” said Lyle, “but that’s when they started reaching him. Before that they wasn’t laying a glove on him.”

Ali’s goal had been to beat Frazier in a dramatic rematch – “because he beat me”.

The fight eventually took place in January 1974, again at Madison Square Garden, but it was short of the meaning of their first bout. Frazier was no longer heavyweight champion: He had lost his title to George Foreman a year earlier in Jamaica.

When Ali and Frazier met for their second contest, each was battling to win a shot at Foreman. Ali prevailed over Frazier after 12 rounds in a unanimous decision.

But to take on Foreman – at 25, seven years younger than Ali – seemed reckless.

By his own description, Foreman had been a dropout, shoplifter, carjacker and purse snatcher in the Fifth Ward of Houston, until he entered the Job Corps and realised a talent for boxing. In 1968, he won a gold medal at the Olympics in Mexico City. By 1974, he was a battleship in the ring: When Foreman met Frazier, in a stunning display, he crushed him to the ground six times in the first two rounds – twice in the last 20 seconds of the first round. After that, Foreman was seen as absolutely terrifying, the hardest-hitting heavyweight champion ever. When the Foreman-Ali fight was announced – to take place in Kinshasa, Zaire, on September 25th, 1974 – The New York Times speculated that Ali could be out in the first round. Foreman thought so as well.

“People telling me, ‘There’s never been a puncher like you, George.’ All those compliments, I started eating them. ‘I’m gonna fight Muhammad Ali – he’s the least of all these guys. I’m not nervous.’ ” This was the inaugural extravaganza managed by Don King, who was intent on making himself boxing’s first major black promoter. By securing a deal from the government of Zaire to pay the fighters an extraordinary $5 million apiece, King engineered a championship fight where none had ever been presented before, in Africa.

Zaire was ruled pitilessly by Gen. Mobutu Sese Seko, who decreed himself the Father of the Nation; he’d appropriated the immense funds for the match – dubbed by Ali as the “Rumble in the Jungle” – from his nation’s treasury. Still, Ali immediately appreciated the meanings available in the location, and he laid moral claim to their provenance. “I’m not fighting for me,” he said. “I’m fighting for the black people who have no future.”

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ALI AND ‘ROLLING STONE’ The most dynamic athlete of his generation was on the cover three times, and the subject of five profiles, as he protested the Vietnam War, spoke out for racial justice and reclaimed his title. In these excerpts, two of America’s greatest journalists tackle the meaning of Ali.

Plimpton in the Big Easy RS 277 November 2, 1978 George Plimpton wore Ali’s robe while writing about the late-career rematch with Leon Spinks at New Orleans’ Superdome:

It was not going to be easy for Ali to climb down from the heavyweight championship of the world. He had once told me, “It stays with you always. You can be overweight, with an old pair of shoes and an old coat, but you can always wake up and think back.” But he had not ever acted like he believed that.

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Dr. Gonzo’s House Call RS 265 May 18, 1978 Late one night in New York, Hunter S. Thompson was granted an unexpected hotelroom interview with Ali, who was already in bed with his wife:

I tried to hide my confusion at this sudden plunge into unreality. I felt like I’d been shot out of a cannon and straight into somebody else’s movie. I put my satchel down on the bureau across from the bed and reached in for a beer. The pop-top came of with a hiss and a blast of brown foam dripped on the rug as I tried to calm down.

“You scared me,” Ali was saying. “You looked like some kind of a bum – or a hippie.”

“What?” I almost shouted. “A bum? A hippie?”

I lit another cigarette, or maybe two, not realising or even thinking about the gross transgressions I was

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THE HEAVYWEIGHT (1) A portrait by Annie Leibovitz, 1978. (2) His return to the ring, 1971. (3) The year of his memoir, 1975. committing by smoking and drinking in the presence of the Champ. And why not? I was, after all, the undisputed heavyweight Gonzo champion of the world. I sat back on the bureau with my head against the mirror and thought, “Well, shit – here I am, and it’s definitely a weird place to be; but not really, and not half as weird as a lot of other places I’ve been.”

Ali was doing most of the talking: his mind seemed to wander around and every once in a while

take a quick bite out of anything that caught his interest, like a goodhumoured wolverine. Muhammad Ali decided not long after his 21st birthday that he was not only going to be King of the World on his own turf, but Crown Prince on everybody else’s.

That was always the diference between Muhammad Ali and the rest of us. He came, he saw, and if he didn’t entirely conquer – he came as close as anybody we are likely to see in the lifetime of this doomed generation.

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MUHAMMAD ALI 1942-2016 After weeks of delay, the fight finally took place on October 30th, 1974, in the Stade du 20 Mai outdoor coliseum before an enraptured crowd of 62,000, at 4 a.m.

(The odd hour was necessary in order to accommodate American closed-circuit viewers.) In Ali’s dressing room, Pacheco remembered, a mood of palpable dread prevailed. “The question,” he said, “was how much damage would George Foreman do?” The only one who seemed unconcerned was Ali. “I see Sonny Liston glaring at me 10 years ago at Miami Beach,” he said. Meanwhile, wrote Norman Mailer, in Foreman’s dressing room, one of his cornermen, former light heavyweight Archie Moore, also felt dread. “I was praying,” said Moore, “and in great sincerity, that George wouldn’t kill Ali. I really felt that was a possibility.”

Ali, it developed, proved right. He took command in the opening moments of the fight, bouncing right and left around Foreman, throwing sharp mixes of punches that stymied him. Foreman could hit incredibly hard, but that was part of his problem: Too often he hit air. Moreover, Ali’s guard style was now impregnable – he held his forearms and gloves up before his face, forming gates that Foreman couldn’t get past but that Ali could break from to land cutting blows.

In the second round, Ali stole into the scheme he used for much of the rest of the fight: He began leaning back into the ropes, which were stretching from the Zairian heat. It’s the last place a fighter is supposed to find himself – a zone that leaves him easy to bludgeon and pick of.

“We all yelled at him to get of the ropes,” Pacheco said. Ali later said, “George didn’t do nothin’ but attack – that’s the only thing he knows.” Ali later called the strategy rope-a-dope: The tactic depleted Foreman, while allowing Ali to rest.

By the end of the seventh round, Foreman had largely exhausted his own considerable bulk. It was getting close to dawn. “I’m getting tired,” Ali said to trainer Dundee. “Maybe I’ll just knock him out.” Dundee replied, “Why don’t you go ahead and do that? It might help the situation out.” There were 30 seconds left to the eighth round when Foreman hurled a looping swing against Ali on the ropes. Ali sidestepped it, and Foreman blundered, swapping positions with his challenger, as Ali clubbed him with a head-dazing right blow. Foreman tried to steady himself and go after Ali but stumbled into rapid-fire combinations that spun him around like a drunken ballet dancer – punches

with enough impact to throw a spray of his sweat across the ring. Foreman tumbled downward in a dizzy, slow-motionlike crash, full-weight, a helpless giant, insensible. It was the most splendid finish in Ali’s career. Immediately after, Ali said, “I told you today, I’m still the greatest of all time. Never again defeat me.

Never again say that I’m going to be defeated. Never again make me the underdog until I’m about 50 years old. Then you might get me.”

Years later, in Facing Ali, Foreman said, “Probably the best punch of the night was never landed. Muhammad Ali, as I was going down, stumbling, trying to hold myself, he saw me stumbling. . . . Ordinarily you finish a fighter of; I would have. He got ready to throw the right hand, and he didn’t do it. That’s what made him, in my mind, the greatest fighter I ever fought.” m u h a m m a d a l i wa s once again world champion, seven years after he’d been divested of his rightful title.

The Foreman fight sealed his vindication with an exhilarated reception throughout the world. “People like to see miracles,” Ali said. “People like to see underdogs that do it. People like to be there when history is made.” The Times’ Lipsyte said it best, in 2013: “In a strange sort of way, I don’t think that he totally transcended boxing until he went back to boxing, until he went back on that platform.”

Ali had planned to make the Foreman fight his last, but he defended his reclaimed title three more times, before he hinted at his retirement in June 1975. When a reporter asked, “What about Joe Frazier?”

Ali grew bright at the prospect. “Joe Frazier! I want him bad.”

Few really expected a great bout when Ali and Frazier met a few months later, for the third and final time; both men were regarded as beyond their prime. But the personal drama between them was incontestable. The bout took place on October 1st, 1975, in the Philippines, outside Manila.

Inside the Araneta Coliseum, temperatures hovered around 38 degrees. Frazier gave Ali the worst beating of his life, slamming his midsection, round after round, with blows meant to send his kidneys and heart into unbearable anguish. Ali told columnist Jerry Izenberg that the ordeal was “the closest thing to death”.

Ali had often shown amazing recuperative ability in a fight’s late stage. In the 13th round, he hit Frazier with a right punch forceful enough to send the rival’s mouthpiece flying across the ring to the

“PEOPLE LIKE TO SEE UNDERDOGS THAT DO IT. PEOPLE LIKE TO BE THERE WHEN HISTORY IS MADE.”

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fifth row of the press section. After the 14th, Frazier’s trainer, Eddie Futch, told Frazier they were quitting. He did not want to see his fighter hurt for life or be killed. “No, c’mon, Ed,” Frazier protested.

“Don’t you stop the motherfucking fight.”

Meanwhile, Ali was ready to throw in the towel, telling Dundee the same thing he’d said at the critical point of his first bout with Liston: “Cut the gloves of!” A friend of Frazier’s, sitting by Ali’s corner, overheard and tried to signal Frazier, but it was too late. Futch had halted the fight.

Ali, hearing he’d won, looked astounded and numb. He stood up, raised his right arm in victory, and collapsed. “Frazier quit just before I did,” he said years later.

Just after the fight, Ali said of Frazier, “He is the greatest fighter of all time, next to me.” Ali would make further overtures of reconciliation, but Frazier never forgave him. Instead, he claimed restitution from the infirmity that Ali lived with for years.

“I’m proud to let them see how much damage I’ve done to this man, both mind and body,” Frazier said later. Years later, Ali said, “Manila was the greatest fight of my life, but I don’t want to look at hell again.”

Ali had 10 more fights after Manila, a few of them legendary, many of them heartbreaking. In February 1978, he lost his title to Leon Spinks, a novice professional. Ali was in torment – the night after the fight, he was running down the street at 2 a.m., yelling, “Gotta get my title back! Gotta get my title back!” He regained it from Spinks six months later – the only man to win the world heavyweight championship three times. But by then, he was already showing troubling signs: His speech, for one, was turning thick. “They say I slur, but I’m just talking black,” he said. He retired in mid1979, but within months was training for a title match with the new champion, Larry Holmes. He never had a dominant moment in the fight, but he wouldn’t drop. Holmes just kept hitting a man who had the will to die on his feet. (Ali was Holmes’ hero; the younger fighter cried after the fight.) Ali fought one more match, with Trevor Berbick, on December 11th, 1981. He lost by decision. After 21 years as a professional boxer, he never again entered the ring. He would not have been allowed to; his impairment was now too evident.

“You can overstay your welcome in boxing,” Foreman said in Facing Ali. “You can get physically hurt, wiped out, devastated mentally.” Ali was eventually diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease – an outcome that could not be repaired. His mental faculties stayed as agile as ever, but his pace became a painful-looking amble, and in time he stopped speaking publicly. A terrible irony had invaded Muhammad Ali’s being: He had prided himself, throughout all his years of boxing, on avoiding head blows and facial scars. He instead had allowed fighters A u g u s t, 2 016

to pummel his midsection, his sides and arms, in defiance of the boxing dictum that if you “kill the body, the head will die”. Yet it was likely those body blows, Pacheco observed, that helped ruin his nervous system. Ali had absorbed his fears into a physical place where he could withstand them and make them work for him. All along, they were also working against him. l i w e n t on t o a t i r e l e s s, of ten rema rk able, post-boxing life, described by author and friend Davis Miller, in Approaching Ali, as a work of reclamation.

With Zaire, he had found a heroic world image – shortly after, President Gerald Ford invited Ali to visit the White House, which would have been unthinkable in earlier years – and he intended to live up to it. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter sent Ali on a diplomatic mission to several African nations in an attempt to win their support for the U.S. boycott of that year’s Summer Olympics in Moscow. In 1990, he met with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and secured the release of 15 American hostages. He also visited South Africa after Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, delivered medical provisions to Cuba and travelled on missions to Afghanistan and North Korea. In 2005, he and his fourth wife, Yolanda Williams – known as Lonnie – started the Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville, in support of the local community. The couple also founded the Muhammad Ali Parkinson Center at Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix.

Ali and Lonnie had married in 1986; the two had known each other since 1963 in Louisville. Ali’s personal life – his marriages, extramarital afairs and relationships with his children – were evidence of another conflict for the man. Once, this resulted in a notorious public incident: When Ali went to Manila, to prepare for his match with Frazier, he brought his girlfriend Veronica Porché, a Los Angeles beauty queen. When his then-wife, Belinda, learned about the visit in Newsweek, she travelled immediately to Manila to have it out with her husband. Belinda and Ali divorced in 1977; Ali and Porché married that same year, having two daughters, Hana and Laila, before divorcing nine years later. (Laila would follow her father into boxing, and enjoyed an undefeated 24-bout career from 1999 to 2007.)

In total, Ali would have nine children, including two daughters from extramarital relationships.

There were tensions between Lonnie and some of Ali’s children from earlier relationships. But Lonnie also became his great helpmate: She oversaw important financial decisions and, more important, his legacy. Some – such as Thomas Hauser – have felt that Ali’s circle tried too

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hard to soften the boxer’s once-firebrand image and transform him into a beatific, near-saintly epitome. “All of the dangerous edges of the angry young man had been sanded away by time,” noted The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi. Time had turned him into a symbol of endurance, reconciliation, struggle and triumph. Still, Ali stayed true to his hard-earned spiritual views and well understood that distortions of those beliefs could result in considerable mortal and political costs. After the September 11th, 2001, attacks, Ali spoke publicly for the first time in years, at the America: A Tribute to Heroes benefit concert in New York.

“I think the people should know the real

OLYMPIC REDEMPTION With the torch at the XXVI Centennial Olympic Games, Atlanta, July 1996

truth about Islam,” he said, despite tremors. “People recognise me for being a boxer, a man of truth. And I wouldn’t be here representing Islam if it was really like the terrorists made it look.”

In December of last year, he spoke up again. “There is nothing Islamic about killing innocent people in Paris, San Bernardino or anywhere else in the world.

True Muslims know that the ruthless violence of so-called Islamic jihadists goes against the very tenets of our religion.” Ali went on to aim his remarks at Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who had proposed a ban on future Islamic immigrants and visitors from entering the United States. “Speaking as someone who has never been accused of political correctness, I believe that our political lead-

ers should use their position to bring understanding about the religion of Islam and clarify that these misguided murderers have perverted people’s views on what Islam really is.” The day after the fighter’s death, Trump dismissed the censure.

“Who knows who released it? I have a feeling he wouldn’t say that to me,” Trump said on Fox News. It proved a vivid and timely reminder that, even in death, Muhammad Ali stood for ideals that remain troubling to some.

In William Klein’s 1975 film, Muhammad Ali: The Greatest, there’s a sequence from just prior to the 1964 fight with Liston in Miami Beach, in which a camera moves down a line of men who cite Liston as the odds-on winner, in a few rounds at best. The scene moves to black girls on a Miami street, clapping their hands to the beat of grinding rock & roll, chanting, “Liston! Liston!” Minutes later, after Clay has won, both young and adult black people surround his car, celebrating him.

“Cassius Clay, the greatest of them all,” says one man. In between those two segments, which represent the span of perhaps a day, history changed. Ali demanded respect and warranted it; he wouldn’t be refused. In the process, he transformed the possibilities of pride, courage and recognition for many other black people – in athletics, certainly, but also beyond. “One of the reasons that the civil rights movement went forward,” television journalist Bryant Gumbel said, “was that black people were able to overcome their fear. And I honestly believe that for many black Americans, that came from watching Muhammad Ali. He simply refused to be afraid.”

That bravery went beyond both the remarkable feats and punishment he met within the ring. For half his life, he was stricken with Parkinson’s; he could have been impatient, even bitter, about how his condition had undermined him for far longer than his prowess had served him. On occasion, when he felt uncomfortable with his slurred speech, he might cut short a conversation, either out of embarrassment or a desire not to be pitied, as he did during an interview with Ed Bradley on 60 Minutes, in 1996. But Ali was nonetheless reflective about his disorder. “I know why this happened,” Ali told David Remnick.

“God’s showing me that I’m just a man like everyone else. Showing you, too. You can learn from me that way.”

Nothing, though, would ever undermine all that he had done. For years, Muhammad Ali was history in motion, headed in the right direction, turning the improbable into victories we hadn’t thought possible. It couldn’t last forever, but to see that it could be done, that was something else.

That was hope made flesh, and for longer than anybody expected, it could not be stopped.

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Blink-182 Restart the PopPunk Party Adding a new member, the band return to (and build on) their goldenage sound

Blink-182 California BMG ★★★½

BY JON DOLAN

It’s been almost 20 years since Blink-182 first blazed a pantsless trail across rock radio. But the pop-punk trio are still a generational touchstone: If you missed your formal because you passed out in the back of a rented limo while your date took of to hook up with the captain of the rugby team, Blink’s mix of good-natured snottiness, teen-movie humour, fumbling vulnerability and Big Gulp tunefulness will forever move you in a way no art can. And even if you weren’t on their wavelength, it’s tough to argue against “All the Small Things” or “Rock Show” as grade-A bubblethrash bangers – Green Day with the angst blunted just enough to make coming-ofage feel like a benign belly-flop rather than a suicide screed.

After two weirdly restrained albums (2003’s Blink-182 and 2011’s Neighborhoods), the Illustration by Goñi Montes

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REVIEWS MUSIC

This is still the catchiest music they’ve made since 2001’s ‘Take Off Your Pants and Jacket’.

Of Your Pants and Jacket, a feast of “summer, yo!” rifs and petulant “na-na-na” refrains.

“She’s Out of Her Mind” builds a cheery singalong moment out of the term “anti-social”, and on “No Future” and “Kings of the Weekend”, hooks pile up like empty beer cans.

The band’s old porn-addled side pops up on “Brohemian Rhapsody” – not a Queen cover but 30 seconds of precisionstrike punishment and a single icky lyric: “There’s something about you that I can’t quite put my finger in.” But there are endearing signs of growth and even wisdom. On “Sober”, over Barker’s brat-Bonham thwack and carpet-burn guitars, Hoppus sings vividly about how hard partying leads to hard choices, and the heartfelt title track is a sweet evocation of their home state, not as endless party palace but as a place to grow up, staying indoors in perfect weather and passing celebrities on the beach.

At its best, California shows Blink trying new ways to freshen up yesterday’s racket.

KEY TRACKS: “Bored To Death”, “Sober”, “California”

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Flea and Kiedis in San Francisco

Liz Stringer All the Bridges Vitamin

★★★ Prodigious Melbourne indie gets homesick in America

The Cali-Funk Kings Refine Their Grind Danger Mouse and Radiohead’s producer help on an adventurous Chili Peppers LP

Red Hot Chili Peppers The Getaway Warner Bros.

★★★½

BADBADNOTGOOD IV Pod/Inertia ★★★½ Canadian group experiment on fusion-friendly fourth album

Being a Red Hot Chili Pepper is a challenging gig to age gracefully in; literally or metaphorically, tube socks on your johnson ain’t a good look at 50. To their credit, the Peppers’ 11th LP is a bold attempt to jibe their past party-dog selves with their present-day artistic ambitions – not always a perfect fit but a compelling one.

With production by Danger Mouse, and Radiohead sixth man Nigel Go- KEY TRACKS: “Go Robot”, drich on the mix, the sound is top-shelf “Dreams of a modern-rock splendour: shimmering Samurai” guitar fractals, flashing string arrangements, artisanal rhythmic flourishes. Yet Flea’s bass still grounds the music, as sinewy as Iggy Pop’s musculature, with Anthony Kiedis dirty-romanticising L.A. as he macks his way through. There are surprising moves (the Chiccum-Daft Punk mash-up “Go Robot”, the grinding blues rock and shout-out to late producer J Dilla in “Detroit”) and also familiar flourishes (the plodding rap rock of “We Turn Red”). Lyrically, the vibe is often wistful. On the ambient nostalgia trip “Encore”, Kiedis invokes the Beatles, while the sultry psych-funk jam “Dreams of a Samurai” finds him naked in the kitchen of a woman “too young to be my wife” and subsequently “taking acid in the graveyard”. As visions WILL HERMES of mortality go, sounds promising.

★★★★★ Classic | ★★★★ Excellent | ★★★ Good | ★★ Fair | ★ Poor

Liz Stringer’s car wheels hit the bitumen on the first beat of “Anyone”, a rock-solid dedication to friendship with an urgent edge that doesn’t let up till “Half-Filled Cup” five tracks on. The threads of distance and deep reflection might be due to the Melbourne singer’s Portland base, tying up loose ends from a past life in “Protecting Myself” and “putting out spot fires raging in [her] head” in “If You Mean It”. The whine of steel in the latter is the only overt country motif, but especially in the swelling heartstrings of “Live On Love” and “The Fever and the Fall”, the stranger’s West Coast American embrace feels as natural as Christine McVie in Fleetwood MICHAEL DWYER Mac.

It’s jazz, but not exactly. This Toronto group has taken on saxophonist Leland Whitty full-time now, and he makes his presence felt. Post-bop heads should go directly to the Coltrane-esque flights of fancy on the title track or “Confessions Pt.II”, where guest saxophonist Colin Stetson also throws down. But it’s not the whole picture. Samuel Herring from Future Islands adds his husky baritone to “Time Moves Slow”, Mick Jenkins lays a slurred rap over “Hyssop Of Love” and Canadian R&B chanteuse Charlotte Day Wilson sweetens the already sweet “In Your Eyes”.

There’s a danger this could get lost in a cul-de-sac of café soundtrack music, but there are enough left turns to make the trip worth taking. BARRY DIVOLA

Ratings are supervised by the editors of R OLLING S TONE .

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band are aiming to recapture their golden-age sound on California. But it won’t be easy: Tom DeLonge, who gave the group their prankster-dweeb appeal, is no longer a member, leaving his husky-voiced, more introspective-sounding co-founder, Mark Hoppus, and new recruit Matt Skiba (of emo vets Alkaline Trio) to pick up the slack. “It’s a long way back from 17,” Hoppus admits, defining the album’s nostalgic challenge on “Bored to Death”, before pensive guitar churn and Travis Barker’s swirling drum clatter explode into a highfiving chorus.

Skiba wisely doesn’t try to fill DeLonge’s shoes, throwing in some earnest vocals and generally riding along as Hoppus’ assist man. But if DeLonge’s pencil-necked pique is missed, this is still the catchiest music they’ve made since 2001’s Take

’Til Death Do Us Part A concept LP about a tragic romance does not live happily ever after

The Felice Brothers Life In the Dark Red Eye ★★★½

Bat For Lashes The Bride Parlophone/Warner

★★★

Efortless, charismatic Americana from New Yorkers

Girl meets boy, girl and boy fall in love, boy gets killed on the way to the wedding, girl loses her mind, takes off in the honeymoon car and possibly has sex with an alien.

OK, laying out the bones of this concept album on paper doesn’t really bear scrutiny. And it doesn’t always hold up on record either.

Part of the problem for Natasha Khan, the Englishwoman who trades under the name Bat For Lashes, is that the lovelorn tragic heroine persona is rapidly becoming a cliché in a postLana Del Rey world. And perhaps Khan would argue it is her character speaking, not the songwriter herself, but the lyrics can be purple-ish and border KEY TRACKS: “I Do”, “If I Knew”, on greeting card rhymes: “You “I Will Love know I love you ’til the stars Again” don’t shine, you know that you always fill this heart of mine.”

Musically, she works in baroque-pop flourishes (“I Do”) and Joni Mitchell-like reveries (“If I Knew”). With the heartbeat rhythm, twin-

kling electric piano and eerie vibrato guitar of “Joe’s Dream”, Khan could easily land the gig of soundtracking the Twin Peaks remake.

“Widow’s Peak”, which opens with screeching tyres, crunching metal and smashed glass, then proceeds with breathy spoken-word about blood, wine and mountains to climb, conjures up the fevered romanticism of Bat Out Of Hell. So, yes, The Bride is a bold concept all right, if not an entirely BARRY DIVOLA happy marriage of ideas.

The Felice Brothers have largely perfected their sweaty, masculine brand of folk-rock – despite that strange excursion into electronic pastures on 2011’s Celebration, Florida. On one level, Life In the Dark is the expected hearty and enjoyable romp through familiar folk idioms (Appalachian, Irish, Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams et al), complete with Ian Felice’s cutting, witty lyrics. Further listening, however, reveals a darker atmosphere, thanks to grim depictions of 21st-century deprivation – something retained from 2014’s Favourite Waitress. “Dancing on the Wing” showcases the Brothers at their best musically, a highlight on an album of ragged glory from a band to relish. BARNABY SMITH

Oh Pep!

Diesel

Emma Louise

Stonefield

Stadium Cake

Americana Liberation Music ★★★½

Supercry Liberation ★★★½

As Above, So Below

Inventive two-piece embrace folk, pop, and much more

Guitar Johnny makes bold, blissed-out tribute to his heroes

Solid, interesting second album shows signs of maturity

The sisters Findlay dirty up their epic psyche rock on album two

Oh Pep! may take their name from members Olivia Hally and Pepita Emmerichs, but it’s still an ideal omen for their bubbly music, which jumps between genres. “Happenstance” opens with a casually grabby hook not far removed from hip-hop, while “Trouble Now” channels Fleetwood Mac and “Crazy Feels” sweeps up strings with Kate Bush-esque vocals. It can be hard to follow all those shifts, but everything coalesces on lead single “Doctor Doctor”, which nails Taylor Swift’s pop smarts and sloganeering alike (“I know what I want and it’s not what I need”).

The best moments of this debut LP retain the Melbourne duo’s folky intimacy, even as they stretch their sound every DOUG WALLEN which way.

The genre of the century has to mean something else to an American kid who grew up an Aussie guitar slinger, and sure enough, “something else” seems to be the guiding principle for this heady f lick through every Seventies boy’s dog-eared record stack. Faithful tilts at Tom Petty (“Here Comes My Girl”) and (yikes) “Born To Run” are exceptions to a recasting principle that shifts “Fire and Rain” to Memphis, Joni Mitchell to Nashville and “Rave On” to, well, Cold Chisel. Crazy Horse might well dig the heavyosity of Neil Young’s “Don’t Let It Bring You Down”, but Diesel’s own Spaghetti Western pastiche, “Hank’s Dream”, personalises the story up front with wit and M.D. trademark flair.

Cairns native Emma Louise has an efortless, naturally affecting voice that has made her a favourite with beatmakers around the globe. On Supercry she sounds more mature (she’s now 24) and, thanks to travel and a breakup, more worldly, but it’s a less immediate record than her debut. Repeat listens reveal its muted charms, whether it’s “Underflow”, riding on an aqueous, lilting chorus, or the darker “Talk Baby Talk”, marred slightly by predictable whirring synths. Fizzier cuts such as “Illuminate” are more effective, evincing producer Pascal Gabriel’s pop savvy, and while Supercry lacks a knockout punch, Louise’s voice remains eminently enticing; it’s hard not to be coerced by her ANNABEL ROSS conviction.

The Stonefield of album number two are more focused, more confident, and possessing a more concise vision for their dirtied-up psyche rock than on their often meandering 2013 debut. From the bagshredding riffage of opener “Sister” through the heavy-lidded “Eyes”, As Above, So Below offsets heaviness and atmosphere with skilful aplomb, using Sarah Findlay’s keys to add melody and Hannah’s guitar work to create space, letting the record breathe. The aptly-titled “Changes” mixes a shoegaze airiness with a tight stoner groove, while “Stranger” and “Love” are wiggling garage rock gems. As Above, So Below is finally the album worthy of the sisters’ talent and potenJAYMZ CLEMENTS tial.

Barely Dressed/Remote Control

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★★★

Wunderkind/Mushroom

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M. Craft

Metronomy

Blood Moon Spunk ★★½

Summer 08 Warner ★★★½

Time in the desert brings out the meditative ambience in Craft

Slick producer makes summer sound a cold afair

Ever wondered what spending time alone in a cabin on the edge of the Mojave Desert can do to a songwriter? Here you go. Martin Craft, who made skyscraping psychedelic pop with Sidewinder in the Nineties, goes interior on his third solo LP. Limpid piano, brooding strings and ghostly vocals slowly wash over the entire album. Craft sounds like he’s aiming for a sweet spot somewhere between Scott Walker and Beck circa Sea Change, but his songs lack the grandeur of the former and the melodic spark of the latter. “Love Is the Devil”, with its massed chorus and a grittier vocal, is the closest he gets to illuminating his intentions, but too much of Blood Moon is B.D. obscured by clouds.

Joseph Mount makes airtight pop. His electronically-inclined indie band, Metronomy, broke out in the electro haze of 2008 with DIY-dance LP Nights Out, and they’ve since developed a sophisticated streak thanks to Mount’s skill as a producer.

Metronomy’s best records, like 2011’s The English Riviera, are studies in economic pop. Mount says Summer 08 is a companion piece to Nights Out, but it’s not nearly as wonky – Mount is too slick now. “16 Beat” rocks on a Prince-like LinnDrum strut, while “Mick Slow” is a slow jam featuring Mount’s best Bowieimpersonation. “Old Skool”, with its vinyl scratching and cheeseball sounds, verges on parody, but Mount’s polish makes it a guilty-pleasure. M.T.

The Avalanches’ Second Coming Long-awaited follow-up to acclaimed debut is a trippy, dippy mess of samples

The Avalanches Wildflower Modular/EMI ★★★

Floating Points Kuiper EP Pluto/Pod ★★★½ UK producer lets his band’s impressive improv chops shine

Producer Sam Shepherd walks a fine line between live electronics and pure production.

His skill is melding the two into something that feels elemental.

A live recording of the band he put together to perform his full-length debut, 2015’s Elaenia, Kuiper is just two tracks long, but shows the group at the top of their game. The title-track builds on ominous drones, skittering drums and flecks of quickly-picked guitar.

Huge swathes of synth drop in around the halfway mark, the drums lock and the track turns interstellar. “For Marmish Part II” is more contemplative – a choppy electric-piano lick providing the skeleton for just Shepherd’s falsetto and a simple shaker to suggest some widescreen alien landscape. M.T. 94 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |

Sixteen years – well, at least they beat Axl Rose, who took 17 years to follow up the Use Your Illusion albums with Chinese Democracy. The Avalanches’ 2000 debut, Since I Left You, was universally acclaimed for its sample-adelic soundscapes, so after years of rumoured new material that never eventuated, the weight of expectation on Wildflower is huge. Inevitably, it can’t hold up.

Robbie Chater and Tony Di Blasi are killer crate-diggers, but across 21 tracks they have a severe case of sonic ADD, resulting in a woozy, glitchy mash-up of flotsam and jetsam.

That said, they’ve got great taste, getting their fingers dirty on sunshine pop (the KEY TRACKS: “Going Home”, Association, Harpers Bizarre), female “Frankie Sinatra”, soul/R&B (Honey Cone, the Fuzz) and “Sunshine” random audio clips from cult films such as American Juggalo and Putney Swope. The bouncy single “Frankie Sinatra”, heavily based on Wilmoth Houdini’s 1940s calypso romp “Bobby Sox Idol”, aims for “Frontier Psychiatrist” territory, but lacks that track’s maniacally inventive cut-ups.

Wildflower aims for a sweet spot between Smile and Paul’s Boutique, but despite its epic gestation, it sounds like it’s been randomly diced, sliced and thrown in a blender. When guest vocalists such as Mercury Rev’s Jonathan Donahue and Royal Trux’s Jennifer Herrema appear, they struggle to make it through the traic jam of dusty vinyl. It’s trippy and it can be fun, but it’s a messy patchwork rather than a BARRY DIVOLA stunning sonic mural.

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Spring King Tell Me If You Like To Dew Process /Universal

★★★½

Mancunian post-punks confront identity crisis with debut LP

“Who am I? What does it matter?” asks singer-drummerbandleader-producer Tarek Musa amid the frenetic drums and sheeting guitar noise of “City”. They’re questions the much-hyped UK four-piece only halfway answer. In terms of mood, Tell Me . . . evokes industrial collapse and the Thatcherite wasteland (“Take Me Away”) – the pulsing “Detroit” more than name-checks a city having much in common with the band’s native Manchester – while there’s a nod to electro precursors in “Rectifier” and an unlikely, fuzzed-out earworm in the unhinged title track. But the soupy, industrial wash Musa lavishes on proceedings is like a coat of sprayon rust: grimy, yet smacking of GARETH HIPWELL afectation.

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Trust Punks Kiwi punks take a more political focus on thrilling second LP Double Bind Spunk ★★★★

Gemma Ray The Exodus Suite Bronze Rat

★★★★

On their 2014 debut LP Discipline, Auckland’s Trust Punks took a familiar Dunedin-sound art-punk jangle – not far removed from the early work of fellow Kiwis Surf City –and derailed the linear directness with frequent experimental diverts. Empowered by a strong protest perspective, Double Bind injects feedback-guided noise and an angsty snarl to this core, as the quintet reimagine an anti-establishment punk spirit for modern predicaments – most notably Antipodean refugee policies. This clear thematic focus is kept lively via side dishes of irony, sarcasm and bitterness and, although they occasionally resurrect the brighter pop tones of their former self (“Pig”), it is within the exploitation of their newfound, unfiltered aggression – whether that be spitting barely audible exhortations (“Paradise_angelwire”) or surrendering to the sufocating clangour (“Leaving Room For the Lord”) – that the record really comes to life.

JONNY NAIL

UK singer-songwriter reaches a new level

BAND TO WATCH

KEY TRACK: “Good Luck with That”

KEY FACTS HOMETOWN Auckland BACKSTORY Mem-

bers were involved in several experimental Auckland-based bands before coming together in 2013, including Grass Cannons and Nevernudes.

UNLIKELY GUEST

On album opener “Paradise_angel-wire”, the band sample a leaked speech by thenImmigration Minister Scott Morrison which is aimed at detained refugees.

The seventh album from British songstress Gemma Ray is deepand-meaningful seduction delivered at arm’s length. The Exodus Suite sees ice-queen musical atmospheres juxtapose sublimely against the warm humanity of the lyrics they enfold, as Ray wrestles emotions bigger than she is in a spirit that somehow marries Bjork to Jim Morrison. Recorded almost live in a Berlin studio situated directly above temporary housing for 8,000 Syrian refugees, this album captures the strange combination of compassion and distance such a situation must inevitably evoke, but distils that into seemingly – almost deceptively – unrelated songs of genuine, personal inDAN LANDER timacy.

Gypsy & the Cat

Mitski

Jemma Nicole

Hey Geronimo

Virtual Islands Alsation ★★★½

Puberty 2

My Darkest Hour Independent ★★★½

Crashing Into the Sun Chugg Music/Inertia ★★★½

Moody debut set from the shadowy streets of Melbourne

Brisbane collective deliver a debut that was worth the wait

Nicole’s self-described ‘country noir’ frequently recalls narcotic moments from Dirty Three with its resonant backwoods guitar tones, Hannah Foley’s forlorn fiddle parts, and drummer Joshua Barber’s expressive percussion lines. Proceedings open slow with lead-footed folk dance “Too Late to Save My Soul”, and more ponderous entries – including the somnolent title track – founder beneath the weight of their own gravitas. “Perfume, Cigarettes and Wine”, though, is a vocal high point, and Nicole’s bleak country vision is perfectly realised in “Whiskey Shivers” and a desolate take on “Jolene”. Although falling just short of the psycho-spiritual bottoming-out it promises, My Darkest Hour G.H. is a stylish debut.

Australia’s avalanche of psychy, indie guitar-pop bands makes it harder to stand out than a racist at a Trump rally, but Hey Geronimo’s playful inventiveness and muscular musicality – the strings of “One Way Driver”, the noir-pop of “India” – skilfully avoids crossing the line into cheesy twee territory.

2013 single “Lazer Gun Show” remains syphilitically catchy, while lead single “Boredom” shares a filmclip concept with TISM, but treads a tremendously fun skewed grunge-pop path. The underwater psychepop swirl of “Bermuda”, along with the scuzzy sunshine-pop of the title-track and “The Girl Who Likes Me”, deliver myriad delights, making Crashing Into the Sun an unpredictable, J.C. enjoyably bonkers ride.

Dead Oceans

★★★½

Melbourne duo bliss out with dreamy pop

Arty Brooklyn songwriter bares her scars, and does it brilliantly

Admit it, that band name immediately puts images of waistcoats, beards and banjos in your head. Wrong, wrong and wrong again. On their third full-length, Xavier Bacash and Lionel Towers put the words synth, trip and dream in front of pop. With “I Just Wanna Be Somebody Else” they pretty obviously wanna be MGMT or Empire of the Sun. It’s blissedout stuf that gets more interesting in the back half, with the shoegaze floatiness of “Leaving Home”, the hymn-like Beach Boys vocals of “Odyssey of the Streets”, and “Tragedies of a Love Song”, which is a virtual tribute to Eighties New Order, right down to a bass line that urges you to check the credits to make sure it’s not Peter B.D. Hook.

“My body is made of crushed little stars,” 25-year-old AsianAmerican indie rocker Mitski Miyawaki tells us – a perfect greeting from an artist who specialises in incendiary malaise. Her fourth LP veers from the art pop of “Happy”, with braying sax and a rhythm track built from CD skips, to the Pixies-loving “A Loving Feeling” to the glitchy, ghostly “Crack Baby”. The centrepiece is the binational anthem “Your Best American Girl”, where she sings about the cultural challenges of dating an all-American boy.

“Your mother wouldn’t approve of how my mother raised me,” she moans over slowguitar fuzz. “But I do.” Her mum should be proud.

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REVIEWS MUSIC

Søren Juul This Moment 4AD ★★½ Melancholic Scandinavian a ghostly presence on latest LP

This Danish purveyor of atmospheric, brooding synth-folk has cast off former moniker ‘Indians’ in favour of his real name, and his second album offers introspective, confessional songs that, in their minimalist production and echoey vocals, could easily function as incidental music on The Bridge.

Unfortunately, that is what this cinematic, emotionally wrought afair represents: incidental background filler that rarely approaches anything original or compelling, save for stand-out track “Epic Moon”.

Were you in Svendborg – the small Danish coastal town where Juul now lives – contemplating a bleak, windswept seascape, this might seem meaningful enough, but otherwise it is rather too easily ignored. B.S.

When Peter Garrett says he’s back, it’s not fanfare, just fact

Peter Garrett A Version of Now Sony ★★★★ To understate, Peter Garrett has lived. And while there’s clearly no need to retell his story here, it’s worth noting that he is still living – emphatically.

A Version of Now – the first collection of Garrett’s songs alone – is anything but nostalgia. Framed by stark, honest production from man-of-the-moment Burke Reid, the album wrestles elements of Garrett’s colourful chronology, but finds the singer reflecting not on what he’s done, but on what he’s learned, the implication being there’s more to come.

Nothing here is as edgy as the Oils, but an understated intensity nods to history without ever pining for it. “Tall Trees” announces Garrett is “back”, not with self-congratulatory bombast, but KEY TRACKS: “It Still Matters”, rather a happy sense of fate, before “I’d “I’d Do It Again” Do It Again” reinforces that feeling with a sublime shrug of the shoulders that basically says, “After all I’ve done, why the fuck shouldn’t I be back?” When “It Still Matters” airms its title, the connection between the young man and his older self is strong, proud, unbroken, while “Homecoming” turns that emotion into something much bigger than the singer himself.

“Only One” brings sentiment without sentimentality, vague about whether the subject is human or something more esoteric, a theme redoubled by “Night & Day”, both songs adding to the depth of an album that was never likely DAN LANDER to be shallow.

Margaret Glaspy Emotions & Math ATO

★★★★ New York singer-songwriter impresses on intimate debut

Margaret Glaspy describes Emotions & Math as 26 years in the making. Picking up fiddle as a child before switching to guitar, Glaspy has spent the past decade refining her sound, arriving at this surprisingly restrained self-produced debut.

The sparse recording retains an afecting intimacy as Glaspy navigates the relationship between love and identity. With both striking vulnerability and a prickly aggression she indulges her neediness one moment (the title track) only to declare emotional independence the next (“Somebody to Anybody”).

This tension is enhanced by Glaspy’s vocal range – likened to a gravelly Norah Jones – and overdriven guitar, which shifts from complex blues rifs to infectious indie twang. SARAH SMITH

Róisín Murphy

Alesa Lajana

Take Her Up To Monto PIAS/Mushroom ★★★½

Frontier Lullaby Ind. ★★★½

Former Moloko singer continues her crusade of quirky pop

Eight-year gap between albums for special homegrown talent

After disappearing for eight years to raise her two children, Róisín Murphy has been more prolific than ever over the past 18 months. First came an oddball EP of Italian pop covers in 2014, then last year’s Mercury Prize nominated Hairless Toys, and now her fourth solo release. Motherhood hasn’t softened Murphy’s approach; she’s becoming increasingly eccentric, and dives into calypso pop, lo-fi disco, bleak electronica and cascading reggae in typically skittish fashion. On paper, Monto sounds chaotic, but Murphy’s consistently detached, breathy vocals (especially on “Whatever” and “Ten Miles High”) give it a strangely cohesive and seductively refreshing edge. MICHAEL WILTON

This Queenslander’s follow-up to Celtic Gypsy (2008) displays a restraint, humility and soulfulness found all too rarely in local trad-folk and roots. Frontier Lullaby’s sparse acoustic balladry elegantly showcases Lajana’s thoughtful songwriting and her plaintive narratives of Australian rural existence; it’s not exactly ‘protest’ music, but it does point to overlooked injustices. Her Australianness is pronounced, yet her vocal clarity is reminiscent of British folk singers like Anne Briggs and Sandy Denny. “Wild Rivers” is among the most graceful examples of her maturing gifts, while the fact a collaboration with Bela Fleck is among the more so-so pieces is testament to her captivating artistry. B.S.

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DANIEL BOUD

Garrett’s Time to Sing Again

Soul Kind of Feeling

Bree Tranter Another Night On Earth Ind.

★★★★

British-Ugandan soulman makes like a harp with your heartstrings

Impressive debut from musical all rounder

Michael Kiwanuka Love & Hate Polydor ★★★★½

PHIL SHARP

Nothing says serious intent like a five-minute overture. Strings simmer and angels cry. The piano finds a slow, stately route to heaven as Michael Kiwanuka’s exquisite guitar tears open his “Cold Little Heart”. “Maybe this time I can be strong,” he sings in a searing study of faith and doubt that strips his flesh to the bone, “but since I know who I am, I’m probably wrong.”

So the confessional tone and smouldering orchestral pitch are set for the London soulman’s second album. Its marKEY TRACKS: riage of celestial atmosphere, “The Final heart-sinking melodies and Frame”, “Cold spiritual quest invokes all the Little Heart” parallels that shadowed his 2012 debut – Curtis Mayfield, Isaac Hayes, Marvin Gaye – then plots its own troubled course to redemption. With a lightly sandpapered voice born to the soul tradition, Kiwanuka wrestles

with chains and aspirations via the unvarnished sentiment of “Black Man In a White World” – cue gospel handclaps and funk urgency – and the 3am anxiety of “Rule the World”, with its phased guitar strum and haunted headful of strings and voices.

From the liquid sigh of “Falling” to the slow blues strut of “The Final Frame”, New York DJ/ producer Danger Mouse is a crucial accomplice in sparse, weighty, classic soul arrangements that manage to bypass homage to resonate more like prayers – the kind that could make Jesus weep.

MICHAEL DWYER

Pieced together over a two-year period, Another Night On Earth remains blissfully unhurried.

Over 11 slowly unfurling tracks, the Middle East alumnus and multi-instrumentalist Tranter crafts a debut that nimbly switches between dream pop confections, jazz daydreams, and glitchy electronica. For all the varied stylings it flows, held together by Tranter’s lilting soprano – whether it’s iced to the nines (“Twenty Two”) or swollen with harmonies (“Your Rhythm”). Even when Tranter removes her vocals she reveals some of her most beautiful arrangements: “Daintree” hovers a jazz flute above soft synth drones, and “Fluteloops” falls even further down a dark jazz J.L.F. rabbit hole.

Tracy McNeil & the GoodLife

The Julie Ruin

Laura Mvula

Shura

Hit Reset Inertia

Nothing’s Real Polydor

Thieves SlipRail/MGM ★★★★

★★★

The Dreaming Room Sony ★★★½

Dazzling fourth LP from Melbourne alt. country traveller

Veteran punk rockers try their hand at self-reflection

Airborne future gospel from 2014 Brits heroine

Nostalgic bedroom pop casts a bewitching spell

A masterful follow-up to the much-admired Nobody Ever Leaves (2014), Thieves mediates assuredly between freewheeling Hollywood-and-Vine country-rock circa 1976 and the set-in-the-bones feeling of peers like the Delines (“Ashes”).

It’s a technicolour West Coast dreamscape: the sound of sunrise over cedars and noonday Joshua Trees and high desert dusk. Guitarists Dan Parsons and Luke Sinclair (Raised By Eagles) pair so many keening, arcing licks with crisp rhythm parts (“White Rose”), while McNeil herself is the very embodiment of Seventies indulgence, channelling Fleetwood Mac with “Paradise” and sweltering country-soul in closer GARETH HIPWELL “Finer Side”.

Kathleen Hanna has always pushed outwards – in her politics, in her music, in her fierce dedication to feminism; she’s never turned the looking glass inward. Remarkably, Hit Reset, coming 20 years into her career, is a heady exercise in introspection. Borne by the gritty punk and surf rock of the Julie Ruin – featuring a new reliance on Sixties harmonies and locked-in hanging grooves – she seems utterly lost in her memories. There’s even a piano ballad: the softly tinkling closer “Calverton”. But TJR are at their best when cutting loose: see “Mr So & So”, a spoken word crack piece about a guy who’s supposedly a feminist and into ‘girl bands’ but is actually your JULES LEFEVRE standard jerk.

“Keep your mind on the Lord,” Laura Mvula’s nan counsels.

“Write a song I can lift me spirits. Write a song I can jig me foot.” The brief phone chat is the centre of gravity on the Birmingham singer’s second album, the higher purpose to which her voice soars in layers and rounds, busting clouds like truth-seeking missiles. It’s a thought taking form on “Who I Am”, before scaling mountains in “Overcome” (Nile Rodgers on unmistakable guitar scribbles) and reaching for the stars in “Bread”. The earth answers in the subterranean drums of “Let Me Fall”; in Wretch 32’s grainy rap on “People”, and in the climactic funk airmation, M.D. “Phenomenal Woman”.

Mancunian singer/songwriter/ producer Shura owes more than a passing debt to Blood Orange, aka Dev Hynes. You can hear it in the slap bass of 2014 single “Touch” which appears here, but overall she’s clearly influenced by his pastel palettes and synth washes – these are songs to soundtrack a new generation of John Hughes movies, and share their teen confessional qualities, as in the wallflower wake-up call “2Shy”. Shura’s breathy emoting is all her own, though, and spoken word interludes ripped from home videos and moody finale “The Space Tapes”, all weird vocal samples and hazy atmospherics, suggest that Eighties-flavoured nuR&B is but a starting point for ANNABEL ROSS her.

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★★★★

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REVIEWS MUSIC

Bear’s Den

Plutonic Lab

Red Earth & Pouring Rain

Deep Above the Noise

★★

Wax Museum Records

U.K. band attempt sonic reinvention

Welcome return from awardwinning producer

Despite a drastic shift in compositional foundation – replacing the folk acoustics of 2014 debut Islands with a denser, electrified focus – on their second outing London’s Bear’s Den remain stuck stretching for Springsteen-levels of anthemic passion. Aside from centrepiece track “Love Can’t Stand Alone” – which teasingly sways on the edge of selfdestructive grandeur – and the mildly more experimental, wobbling synths of “Broken Parable” – Red Earth & Pouring Rain recycles a partnership between predictable paths of dramatic light rock crescendo and punctuating plainspoken poetic one-liners, ofering very little in the way of variance across the album’s JONNY NAIL 12 tracks.

Eleven years since his last album, Codes Over Colours, veteran Melbourne producer Plutonic Lab returns with a swag of stylish cuts and eclectic guest spots. After the old-school intro, dubbed out gem “Pushin” slides into the DMs before Pluto drops the polished and radioready “Sliced Bread”, a faintly Kid Cudi-esque banger featuring Canadian crew Notes To Self BBRC. It’s a striking introductory triptych, its message clear: Plutonic Lab isn’t afraid to mix things up, playing multiple instruments and working filmic samples into his broad hip-hop landscape. It’s where he’s backed by rhymes, though, that everything gels best – see “The Crib Ft. Guilty Simpson”, a mellow but relentless cenDAN FINDLAY trepiece.

Bify Clyro’s New Noise Scottish trio reinvent themselves yet again on seventh album

★★★½

Biff y Clyro Ellipsis Warner ★★★★

Ella Hooper Venom/New Magic Ind. ★★★½ Former Killing Heidi singer finds solace in song

Heartbreak is a bitch. Just ask Ella Hooper, who, in the wake of a shattered romance, poured every tortured emotion into the Venom half of this two-EP set.

Resolutely bleak and downbeat, Hooper’s voice drips with despair, at times barely able to rise above a whisper as soundscapes swirl around her. The New Magic set is more upbeat, awash with gorgeous vocal harmonies and beautifully crafted pop (“Daily Detritus”, “Break Up Blonde”) as she emerges from her post-break-up funk.

Still, even in happiness Hooper can’t let the past go completely, and her lyrical bluntness bruises: “Do the tampons on the cistern remind you of me/ When you’re standing in the R.Y. bathroom taking a pee.”

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“We have achieved so much more than you possibly thought we could,” remarks Simon Neil in “Wolves of Winter”, before adding: “You can achieve anything, just remember no ‘i’ in team, but there’s two in brilliant.” If it sounds like Bif y Clyro are in bullish form on their seventh album, it’s with good reason. The opening song is not only an us-against-the-world anthem that takes aim at the band’s detractors, but is the link between the arena-levelling rock of their previous three LPs (the Scots approach their records as trilogies) and the uncharted territory they explore here.

Witness the trap beats of “Re-arrange” (inspired by listening to A$AP Rocky and Kanye West), the pop-rock of “Friends and Enemies”, the black metal blast beats that infiltrate “Herex” before “Medicine” strips things back to basics with just Neil, an KEY TRACKS: “Wolves of acoustic guitar and minimal backing Winter”, “Reaccompaniment. arrange”, “Howl” It might sound like a recipe for sonic disaster, but the Rich Costey-produced efort is grounded

by Neil’s particularly Scottish vocal delivery, and the band’s trademark ability to pull earworm melodies out of twisted musical places. So while trap beats on a Bif y album may be of some concern to longterm fans, in truth “Re-arranged” is just at home here as a song such as “Many of Horror” was on 2009’s Only Revolutions.

On occasion Ellipsis can feel like Biffy-by-numbers (“Flammable”), but it’s a sensation that’s swiftly obliterated by the twisting, convulsing “On a Bang” and the irresistible pop-rock of “Howl”. Given that this is the first album in their next trilogy of records, it looks like we’re in for an interestSIMON JONES ing few years.

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Orb Birth Remote Control

★★★ Emerging prog-rock trio search for balance on debut LP

There are only minor distinctions between the opening four tracks on Birth, the debut album from Geelong progrock trio Orb, with dominant sludgey riffs and sprawling psych edges favoured over any structural sensibility. Fifth and final song, “Electric Blanket”, drifts far further afield.

While the patience-pushing 16-minute closer is aided by a stronger vocal presence – adding much-needed colour to the composition – it also showcases the band’s spectrum-covering aspirations, as harsher punk aggression and Sabbath-like stadium grandeur are segmented by a series of ambient inserts, providing an immersive contrast sorely absent across the rest of the album. J.N. A u g u s t, 2 016

Eric Copeland Black Bubblegum DFA/[PIAS]

Beyond the Wizards Sleeve

★★★

The Soft Bounce PIAS

Serial experimenter goes pop – sort of

★★★★

Fans of Black Dice’s excitable electronic abrasion might need time to adjust to Eric Copeland’s lo-fi pop LP, which he recorded without any expectation that people would ever hear it. Over jumbled rhythms and oozing guitar fuzz, Copeland locates a bleary, zonkedout tunefulness. He dabbles in dub (“Rip It”) and glam (“Radio Weapons”), while “Honorable Mention” strangely echoes Big Audio Dynamite’s “Change of Atmosphere”. These soggy oddities feel charmingly accidental – “Fuck It Up” stumbles straight into its chorus and “Cannibal World” wields its title for a long-running singsong chant. Resembling unstable pocket universes, the songs fascinate in passing without quite holding together. DOUG WALLEN

Kaleidoscopic psych from British pioneers of electronica

Erol Alkan and Richard Norris have been collaborators for several years, but have only now mobilised to produce a debut album, with this playful extravaganza testament to their grasp of melody and groove. The Soft Bounce sprawls every which way, exploring each sound or mood with equal sense of wide-eyed joy. Opener “Delicious Light” thuds with a Suuns-esque urgency, while “Iron Age” hints at both Goat and early Beck. The more minimal passages suggest a dreamier LCD Soundsystem, while the fusion of funk with strings is pure Serge Gainsbourg. The restless jumping between ideas ensures there are no dull moments throughout this intoxicating, sensory overload. B.S.

Peter Björn & John

Grace

Breakin’ Point Kobalt ★★★½

FMA

Swedes still in rude supply of killer pop hooks on seventh LP

Bright flashes of potential from Brisbane teenager

History hasn’t been entirely kind to Peter Björn & John.

Ten years on from “Young Folks” (aka “that whistling song”), the Swedish trio are remembered chiefly as Naughties one-hit wonders. Even a cursory glance over the band’s discography, however, provides ample proof of their ability to write catchy indie pop, and here they’ve decided to go all-out on their glossiest, poppiest album yet. Indie rock diehards may cry “sellout”, but the look suits them well: with the help of producers Paul Epworth (U2), Greg Kurstin (Adele) and Emile Haynie (FKA Twigs), the group have crafted a consistently enjoyable album that casually tosses of killer choruses like it’s no JAMES JENNINGS big thing.

At the highest points of FMA – which are also the most subdued – Grace Sewell touches a maturity that should belong to a 49-year-old, not someone of 19. Her vocals, a bright mix of husk and honey, drift inexorably close to the untouchable Amy Winehouse on tracks that at times eerily resemble the late singer’s debut, Frank. Grace has been quietly assembling FMA for the better part of two years, with help from a glittering cast of producers, including legendary Quincy Jones. The first half is a little rocky: big and brassy soul rubs against dark and demure jazz lines with varying results. But when it’s good, it’s really good: “From You” is a devastating love song, and “New Orleans” is neo jazz J.L.F for the dead of night.

Pop-Punk Revival

Why We Run Holograms AWAL/Kobalt

★★★ Indie Sydneysiders present a tight, polished debut album

The Madden brothers reunite Good Charlotte for polished sixth album

Good Charlotte Youth Authority MDDN ★★★½ Twenty years after bouncing out of Maryland, Good Charlotte now find themselves in the slightly peculiar position of being poppunk scene elders. They admit as much in the single “40 oz. Dream”: “Now all the punk rockers are over 40/They’re coaching little league and reading stories”. Which begs the question, where do Good Charlotte belong in today’s world? Co-founders Joel and Benji Madden must have asked themselves the same thing, not least because the brothers have carved signifi- KEY TRACKS: “Life Changes”, cant careers outside of the “WAR”, “Keep band since it went on hiatus Swingin’” in 2011, building their TV profile (The Voice) and a music media company (MDDN), amongst other ventures.

In truth, you could argue Good Charlotte never belonged – too pop for the punkers, not A u g u s t, 2 016

RCA

★★★½

credible enough for the critics – but with sales of 10 million albums to their name, they’ve clearly had the last laugh.

Largely devoid of the Eighties synth-pop they veered into before going on hiatus, Good Charlotte’s sixth album plays to their strengths: polished pop-punk bangers (“Life Changes”, “Makeshift Love”), quirky radio fodder (the Sublime-esque “40 oz. Dream”) and lyrics that veer from the defiant (“Keep Swingin’”) to the confessional (“The Outfield”). It sounds like it cost a million bucks, and unapologetically so; it’s clearly the work of a band that understands what made it successful in the first place, and wants that success back again. The record is not without its problems – see the syrupy “Cars Full of People” – but devotees and those wanting to re-live their teens will welcome the band’s best album since ROD YATES 2002’s The Young and the Hopeless.

On first listen, this Sydney band’s debut has all the right things in all the right places.

It’s cohesive and well-polished, their sound comprised of driving drums, dreamy echo vocals, measured keys and introspective guitar. It’s uncrowded and the kind of record you want to listen to on a Sunday.

What you might not be ready for is finding yourself haunted by the tick-tock chimes and lilting vocals of “Hallway”, the perpetual motion of “A Moment to Return” and the atmospheric grit of “Comfortable Lie”. On “Where I’ll be Waiting” it feels like they’re just getting started, and it’s this thoughtful tempering of restrained release that Why We Run do best. SELISE MCLAGGAN

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REVIEWS MUSIC

The Mountain Will Fall Sony

★★ Beatmaker loses steam on largely sample-free fifth LP

Twenty years on from his classic Endtroducing . . ., Josh ‘DJ Shadow’ Davis has (mostly) stepped back from the sampling technique through which he made his name in favour of creating compositions entirely by himself. The first couple of songs (the widescreen instrumental title-track followed by the lewd, lively “Nobody Speak”, featuring Run the Jewels rapping over a Spaghetti Western beat) make the case that the move is no cause for concern, but the initial burst of energy and inspiration quickly dissipates as the majority of the album’s remainder slides into what sounds like an abrasive, glum soundtrack to despondency. There’s little here you’ll want to endure a second JAMES JENNINGS time.

The Hotelier Goodness Tiny Engines

★★★

A country visionary puts a fresh spin on drinkin’, cheatin’ and small town life

Brandy Clark Big Day in a Small Town Warner Bros. ★★★★ Brandy Clark’s 2013 debut, 12 Stories, heralded a Nashville songwriting renaissance, alongside pathfinders like Kacey Musgraves and Eric Church. Its sequel, and proper majorlabel debut, ups the ante: It’s music tooled all for f stadiums and songwriting circles, commercial ternately and public radio, line-dance bars and cofee shops.

Clark’s a badass who likes raw guitar – see “Broke” (rhymes with “generic Coke”), a low-rent Southern rocker, and “Girl Next Door” (rhymes with “Virgin Mary metaphor”), a synth-chromed KEY TRACKS: “Since You’ve kiss-off pledging “I ain’t your Marcia Gone to Heaven”, Brady” that, like Church’s “Springsteen”, “Broke” doesn’t aim its referents solely at the Snapchat set.

Clark is good at bending country boilerplate: On “Drinkin’, Smokin’, Cheatin’”, she teetotals while listing a downward spiral of coping fantasies. She also spikes the comic with the grim; in the cheerfully deadpan “Big Day in a Small Town”, a high schooler passes out in class when her water breaks, and a dude drunkenly flips his pickup en route to his son’s football game. Clark’s tear-jerkers are no joke either. “Since You’ve Gone to Heaven” is about the death of a father and the subsequent fallout. It ofers no cheap palliatives; just the consolation of a beautiful voice delivering a well-built song, cold truth rising from it like fog WILL HERMES of dry ice.

The John Steel Singers Midnight At the Plutonium Create Control

★★★

Brisbane band get the funk on a trippy collection

Didn’t Robert Forster produce these Brisbane-ites’ debut album? Admittedly, they did always like psych-pop flourishes and weird angles with their indie pop. But half a dozen years later, their third album takes off on a space-funk odyssey, with the sliding, loping, fingerpopping bass of Scott Bromiley providing the booster jets.

You’ll also find breathy sax solos that conjure up Eighties music videos of a bloke in a linen sports coat with sleeves rolled to the elbows. “Weekend Lover” sounds exactly like its title, the Chic-like guitar matched by guest Donny Benet’s squealing keyboards. Some tracks are more like jams than songs, and on “Luke Perry’s Lips” they sound Beverly Hills rather than Fortitude Valley. BARRY DIVOLA

Blood Orange Freetown Sound Domino

★★★★

Indie rockers make strange epiphanies seem heaven-sent

Dev Hynes draws from the past and points to a bright future

The people on the cover of this Massachusetts quartet’s third LP are naked. So are the songs inside it: raw-hearted bursts of bald guitar churn backing lyrics that hunger for meaning in terms that’d be corny if the music didn’t hit so hard.

There’s some latent emo here (one song is called “Opening Mail for My Grandmother”), but usually the Hotelier recall dorm-rock questers from R.E.M. to the Dismemberment Plan. “My eyes greet hers and hers do mine/And then the room becomes her shrine,” offers singer-bassist Christian Holden against the breakneck jangle of “Piano Player”, just one of many times here where goofy desire feels almost reliJON DOLAN gious.

Befitting an album that is concerned with looking back – Dev Hynes stating his third LP as Blood Orange is a summary of his life thus far as a black British man who now calls the USA home – Freetown Sound is dusted with an Eighties NYC haze, drawing in elements of electro, R&B, gospel, soul and jazz. To Hynes’ credit, it never feels like it uses these sonic touchstones as ironic punchlines, resulting in his strongest and most diverse record yet. It’s also his most personal, examining racial, sexual and gender politics in a way that’s heartfelt but never preachy. It rarely wanes over its 17 tracks, and as a defining artistic statement it singles Hynes out as a major force to be reckoned with. J.J.

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PAMELA LITTKY

DJ Shadow

Brandy Clark’s All-American Heartbreak

Radiohead: The Guide Ranking every album by rock’s most innovative band – from space-guitar epics to glitchy symphonies. By Jonah Weiner MUSTHAVES

OK Computer 1997

A reputation-securing masterwork. Jonny Greenwood’s guitar wizardry made for sweeping space-rock epics, while Thom Yorke bemoaned techno-dehumanisation and “yuppies networking”. The result: one of the Nineties’ best LPs.

In Rainbows

Amnesiac

2007

2001

Maybe Radiohead’s most adventurous LP, and their sexiest. The pay-whatyou-will marketing strategy was game-changing, and the deliciously glitchy grooves and Yorke’s prettiest singing found the perfect space between bliss and oblivion.

Culled from the Kid A sessions, their fifth album has a dizzying, polyglot vibe – from “Pyramid Song”, a stammering piano ballad full of disconcertingly gorgeous suicide imagery, to “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors”, a sneakily funky, melody-free textural delight. Amnesiac served notice that there’d be no retreat from the outré impulses of Kid A.

FURTHER LISTENING

A Moon Shaped Pool

I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings

2016

2001

In time, their latest may reach classic status too.

Recorded after the dissolution of Yorke’s marriage, MSP is sublimely spectral – by turns enigmatic (“Daydreaming”), somber (“Desert Island Disk”) and quietly furious (“Ful Stop”).

Radiohead could’ve existed solely as studioscience geniuses – a Steely Dan for our times.

But they’ve always been a live colossus. Recorded while touring to support Kid A and Amnesiac, this concert LP is explosively raw: The twisty, insular “Idioteque” lashes out, and on “Like Spinning Plates”, Yorke holds an arena enrapt with just his beautifully chilling voice.

GOING DEEPER

Hail to the Thief Kid A

The Bends

2000

1995

The controversial left turn that became the consensus pick: Goodbye, guitar fireworks and verse-chorus-verse structures; hello, drum-machine twitches, song-form sabotage and exquisite synth-craft. A new 21st-century rock language was born.

A u g u s t, 2 016

The first quantum leap in a career that’s been full of them, taking the band from Brit-rock also-rans to budding artistes. “Fake Plastic Trees” is a dystopian lighter-waver, while “My Iron Lung” pointed the way toward the icy grandeur of OK Computer.

2003

The King of Limbs

Radiohead’s evergreen grimness coursed with special urgency on an album that arrived just three months after U.S. and British forces invaded Iraq. That nightmare scenario was evoked in tracks like “2+2=5” and “There There”, where the band channelled its anger into the most unabashed guitar assaults it had delivered in more than half a decade.

2011

Pablo Honey 1993

If this was all they’d ever done, they’d be a platinum-plated Nineties relic, synonymous only with the killer misanthrope kitsch of “Creep”. The rest is bad, often embarrassingly so: future greats not quite getting it together yet.

RollingStoneAus.com

Set the mood to dirge. Set the vocals to moan. Set the beats to skjfdklsjdljsfkppft. Radiohead pushed toward their gloomiest recesses here and largely left out their core pop gravitas. Still, there are entrancingly of-kilter flashes (“Bloom”, “Lotus Flower”, “Morning Mr. Magpie”) scattered throughout. | R ol l i n g S t o n e |

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Greta Gerwig and Julianne Moore delight in Maggie’s Plan.

Bizarre Love Triangle Romantic shenanigans and unusual twists turn comedy into screwball delight By Peter Travers Maggie’s Plan

r e be c c a m i l l e r m a k e s movies that feel lived-in and way out there – two modifiers that don’t often co-exist.

Maggie’s Plan, Miller’s fifth feature, could be conventionally labelled a New York romance for a generation bookended by Woody Allen and Noah Baumbach. It’s a love triangle involving Maggie (Greta Gerwig), an arts career advisor at the New College, who falls for John (Ethan Hawke), a real “panty-melter” of an anthropology prof, who chooses Maggie over his Danish wife, Georgette (Julianne Moore) – a legend in ficto-anthropology – and their two children.

Think you know where all this is going? You’re wrong. Miller thrives on complication, on irresistibly f lawed characters who refuse to stay in the neat outlines drawn around them.

That’s why Maggie’s Plan feels so exhilarating, so hard to pin down, so lyrically adrift.

Take Maggie, a character Gerwig plays with larky appeal and no trace of cuteness. Love is a concept Maggie fixates on, but can’t sustain in life. Her relationships evaporate with depressing regularity. She looks up to Tony (Bill Hader), her no-bull friend from college, but he’s married to Felicia (the ever-wondrous Maya Rudolph). Their child makes Maggie think she should have one. Forget finding the right man. She finds a guy named Guy (Travis Fimmel), a math wiz making his career in ar-

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★★★★★ Classic | ★★★★ Excellent | ★★★ Good | ★★ Fair | ★ Poor

Greta Gerwig, Ethan Hawke, Julianne Moore Directed by Rebecca Miller

★★★★

tisanal pickles, who agrees to fill her turkey baster. OK, he’d like to do it the normal way.

But normal is not part of Maggie’s plan.

That’s a setup for sitcom, which happily is not part of Miller’s plan. Basing her screenplay on an unpublished novel by editor-publisher Karen Rinaldi, Miller refuses to sand of the rough edges or hit the usual beats. John’s seduction of Maggie comes out of nowhere. In one swoony scene he undoes the buttons on her nightgown with sensual slowness. Then she’s pregnant . . . the real way. Then – props to Miller for the ballsy move – the plot skips the usual blahblah and leaps three years into the future. Maggie and John are married and parents. He mopes around like Proust 2.0 trying to finish his mountain

of a novel. Maggie does the bill paying, raising their adorable child, Lily (Ida Rohatyn), and also nurturing John and Georgette’s two kids (Mina Sundwall and Jackson Frazer).

Most women in Maggie’s shoes would freak. Not Maggie. She hatches a plan, another one. The upshot is to get John and Georgette back together so these two like minds can find unity in their shared passion for ficto-anthroplogy (the barbed digs at academia are indeed intentional). I won’t give away Maggie’s methods, except to say that Miller makes them hilarious and surprisingly heartfelt. In these scenes, the emphasis shifts from Maggie to Georgette, leaving the magnetic Moore to pocket the movie and take it home.

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model of Teutonic terror. But Moore, in a remarkable portrayal of subtle shifts, plays her for real, that means for the hurt as well as the humour.

At one point, Maggie describes, not unkindly, John’s novel-in-progress as “screwball surrealism”. That’s an apt definition for this film as well, with its main characters propelled by the internal creative impulse. Miller is an authentic original, playful and casually profound. In Maggie’s Plan, the verbal and the visual dance to her bidding. Without pushing or showing of, Miller creates a breezy comedy that pulls you up short. Buoyed by faultless actors who mesh beautifully, Maggie’s Plan tickles you with laughs that can – suddenly or even days later – choke you up with emotion.

the emotions bubbling up under the film’s cultivated surface have a this-just-in tartness.

A sublime Kate Beckinsale digs into the role of her career as Lady Susan Vernon, a widow with impeccable taste and the scheming ambitions of a Kardashian. Her base of operations is the Churchill estate owned by her brotherin-law Charles Vernon (Justin

tion. She pushes her hapless daughter to marry Sir James Martin, played by the pricelessly funny Tom Bennett as an idiot who literally blithers on any number of topics, including what he calls “the 12 Commandments”. Frederica is horrified. “But marriage is for one’s whole life!” she insists.

“Not in my experience,” laughs mummie dearest.

Kate Beckinsale, Chloe Sevigny Directed by Whit Stillman

★★★★

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Demolition Jake Gyllenhaal, Naomi Watts Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée

★★½

Love & Friendship

the first time i saw whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship I fell head over heels. And like anything you love at first sight, you want to see it again – not just to get closer but to put it to the test. Love & Friendship passes with flying colours. I can’t think of a more wickedly modern romantic comedy, even though the film is based on Lady Susan, an unfinished epistolary novella that Jane Austen wrote in 1794 when she was about 20, and that remained unpublished until after her death.

So right away, we know something’s up. Stillman doesn’t adapt the works of others, even a genius like Austen.

He’s a lone wolf, known for writing and directing his own elegantly witty films with large gaps in between: Metropolitan (1990), Barcelona (1994), The Last Days of Disco (1998). It wasn’t until 2011 that Stillman gave us Damsels in Distress, another comedy of bad manners among today’s young and restless. Happily, Austen and Stillman prove to be soulmates.

Though the deliciously barbed dialogue stays firmly in period,

scenes that delight the eye and challenge the ear with verbal loop-the-loops. Austen often used the word “amiable” to describe something that tickled her fancy. Love & Friendship is far more than amiable.

Above: Jake Gyllenhaal plays a grieving widow who finds solace in breaking things in Demolition; and (left) Chloe Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale are wickedly seductive in Love & Friendship.

Edwards), whose wife Catherine (Emma Greenwell) is onto Susan’s wiles. Men, notably Catherine’s hottie younger brother, Reginald De Courcy (Xavier Samuel), find Susan’s beauty hard to resist, despite Catherine’s not unreasonable attempts to slut shame Susan.

Something below the belt is calling the shots for Reginald and fitting right into Susan’s plan to marry the wealthy young man for play and profit.

All goes well until Susan’s daughter, Frederica (Morfydd Clark), shows up at Churchill, having fled school for reasons unknown. Seeing Reginald’s interest, Susan springs into ac-

Lady Susan’s ally in finding financial and sexual satisfaction is Alicia Johnson (Chloe Sevigny), the American wife of a wealthy Brit (a terrific Stephen Fry) who threatens to ship Alicia back to the wilds of Connecticut if she sides with “the most accomplished f lirt in all England”. Of course, Alicia does just that, giving Sevigny and Beckinsale another chance to plot like conspirators and let it rip. The language, a lyrical blend of Austen and Stillman, is a kind of music, the kind that bewitches even as it stings. Austen wrote her novel in the form of letters, which Stillman translates into

w hen humour is serv ed black, they call it dramedy.

When it’s done in this movie, I call it indigestible. Jake Gyllenhaal stars as Davis Mitchell, a sleazy Wall Street banker who can’t feel anything when his unfaithful wife (Heather Lind) is hurt in a car crash. At the hospital, just before she dies, Davis tries to buy a bag of Peanut M&Ms from a vending machine. When the bag gets stuck, Davis is crushed. He begins writing letters to the company in charge of maintaining the machine. “I think you deserve the whole story,” he says.

Get it? The letters are a way of expressing his grief.

Davis can’t let his emotions out. His boss and father-in-law (Chris Cooper) cries like a baby.

Not Davis. He opens up a bit to Karen Moreno (Naomi Watts), a lonely mum who works at a vending machine company. It’s an appalling plot contrivance that made me want to write a letter to the producers. And there are more, many more.

Davis stays numb until he decides to demolish things. His father-in-law gave him the idea by saying, “If you want to fix something, you have to take it apart and put it back together.” So there goes Jake, first by quitting his job and joining a wrecking crew and then by taking apart his posh suburban home with a sledgehammer, often while grooving to classic rock suggested by Karen’s snarky son, Chris (Judah Lewis). Are you laughing yet?

Gyllenhaal does his best to find the fun and the feeling in Brian Sipe’s quirk-riddled script. But director Jean-Marc Vallee (Dallas Buyers Club) keeps pounding the point that Davis must destroy his old self to build a new one. It would be funny if it wasn’t so profoundly unprofound.

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The Business of Making Music Documentary series evokes all we love about music

By Michael Adams Soundbreaking Adele, Brian Eno, Paul McCartney Directed by Maro Chermayef, Jef Dupre

★★★★★ Soundbreaking was Sir George Martin’s last production, debuting at SXSW in March just a week after his death at the age of 90.

The timing makes it his Blackstar: a gorgeously fitting and somehow prescient self-penned eulogy from one of modern music’s most influential figures. But, while the show charts his work as the “Fifth Beatle”, it fulfils his life’s role as producer by ringing out the best in everyone else involved.

Subtitled “Stories From the Cutting Edge of Recorded Music” and co-produced with his son Giles Martin and American broadcaster PBS, Soundbreaking offers eight episodes, each circling a specific subject, from the recording artist and the role of producers to the evolution of

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sampling and how music videos changed music. While the format – a lot of clips, archival footage and talking head interviews with 150 members of musical royalty, from Brian Eno and Adele to Paul McCartney and St Vincent – is necessarily bitsy, the series also impresses with its deeper dives into not only the canon (Pet Sounds, Sgt. Pepper’s) but lesser-recognised pioneers and landmark moments (Charlie Chris-

a

tian’s use of the electric guitar; the Eurythmics’ role in shaping music videos as art).

At approximately six hours in total, Soundbreaking can’t claim to be comprehensive. For one, it has 20 years more to cover than 1996’s excellent 10-part Dancing in the Street. But the show is by turns uplifting, searching, revelatory, familiar, sad and joyous. In short it evokes all the emotions we get from the music we love.

Grimsby

Hail, Caesar!

Occupied

Eye in the Sky

Sacha Baron Cohen

Josh Brolin, George Clooney

Vegar Hoel

Helen Mirren

Directed by Louis Leterrier

Directed by the Coen brothers

Created by Jo Nesbø et al

Directed by Gavin Hood

★★★

★★★½

★★½

★★★★

That Sacha Baron Cohen’s soccer-hooligan action-comedy f lopped might’ve had something to do with trailers that couldn’t quite capture its big set-piece jokes. After all, how do you craft a trailer showing a film’s stars inside an elephant’s womb and masturbating a bull pachyderm’s penis to gratuitous geysergasm? Grimsby, which has Cohen as the Brit lout who discovers his long-lost bruvva is Mark Strong’s MI-6 agent, is lazily assembled and spectacularly crass. But it’s also occasionally hilarious – so long as you don’t mind visual gags about elephant jizz, scrotum sucking, poo handling and arse rocketry.

Like Trumbo’s comical twin, the Coen brothers’ 1951 Hollywood-set flick has Josh Brolin as studio fixer Eddie Mannix grappling with multiple crises, including a star (Clooney) kidnapped by Commies and a starlet (Scarlett Johansson) whose illicit pregnancy is ripe for scandal. Harking back to lighter successes like The Hudsucker Proxy, the Coens ofer a breezily satirical celebration of the picture biz. The dance number starring Channing Tatum is worth the price of rental. Same goes for charming Alden Ehrenreich as a cowboy – you can see why he’s to play young Han Solo.

In the near future, Norway’s green-leaning leader abruptly ends the nation’s oil and gas exports, prompting Russia to occupy the country to ensure Europe can get keep getting its fossil fuel fix. Co-created by Jo Nesbø and hyped as the new Homeland, this strives for a nuanced portrait of political pressure, expediency and collaboration. That’s commendable and intriguing initially. But as the season creaks along, a certain Scandi blandness sets in. Occupied’s self-contained stories rarely feel high stakes enough, while the momentum of its larger arc is muted by the month-by-month structure.

How quickly a nine-year-old African girl can sell her bread at a roadside stall in Kenya becomes one of the tensest cinematic dilemmas of the year in Gavin Hood’s drone thriller.

As British and U.S. politicians and military commanders try to balance the importance of killing HVI (high value individuals) against an acceptable CDE (collateral damage estimates), we are asked to share in their terrifying choice between terrible evils. With Helen Mirren, Aaron Paul and Alan Rickman in his last role, this is a coruscating examination of a war on terror that appears to have no winners.

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★★★★★ Classic | ★★★★ Excellent | ★★★ Good | ★★ Fair | ★ Poor

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KEITH URBAN [Cont. from 69] He said, ‘Look, kid, I don’t make the fucking rules. You choose, fiddle or steel. I don’t give a shit.’ Those two years were full of moments like that.” The album tanked and the band split up, which led Urban into yet another downward spiral. In 1998, however, he fell in with a simpatico producer named Matt Rollings; together, they created his first solo album, released the next year, which got him his first hit songs.

“Capitol presented it as ‘We’re giving you one chance as a solo artist’,” says Rollings.

“We turned some tracks in and they said, ‘Let’s do this.’ His timing couldn’t have been better. I don’t know if he was the antiGarth, but he certainly wasn’t like Garth.

His intuition is amazing. He saw his opening and went right through it.”

Right now, Urban is on the phone with Kidman, then wandering of to eat a chicken sandwich. He says he talks to her “multiple times a day”, which makes perfect sense. She’s been his salvation. He’d entered rehab twice before, only to relapse, but when she staged an intervention in 2006, he left home for three months of in-patient hard work and returned dedicated to his sobriety. The only residue of those last few saturated days is guilt over what he put her through. “I caused the implosion of my fresh marriage,” he says. “It survived, but it’s a miracle it did. I was spiritually awoken with her. I use the expression ‘I was born into her’, and that’s how I feel. And for the first time in my life, I could shake of the shackles of addiction.”

On the one hand, that his rejection by Nashville could lead to multiple addictions resonates in a certain apt way; on the other, it seems oddly incomplete, like he’s skating around something, and the obvious place to look for it is back in his childhood, which he’s always presented as anything but fraught. Just yesterday, he’d said his only traumas as a kid revolved around his parents moving a lot. But maybe today it’ll be diferent.

If he could change anything about the way he was raised, what would it be?

He doesn’t hesitate. “I’d like to have been raised in a much more intimate house.”

What’s that mean?

He tilts his head, scufs his feet. “My dad was an alcoholic, and I grew up in an alcoholic’s house. No intimacy.”

Was he abusive?

“My recollection is that he was a physical disciplinarian. Ten years ago, I would have said, ‘He never did anything I didn’t deserve.’ Now I realise it’s not about deserving it.” He leans forward, says, “I don’t recall him ever telling me he loved me as a kid. I’d do a gig I thought was fantastic and the only thing he’d say is, ‘When you

speak onstage, you’ve got to slow down.’

He never commented on anything else.

And the way he disciplined me, he seemed to have forgotten about it as he got older. I don’t think he was in denial, he genuinely had no recollection. ‘Hitting you? I never did that!’ ” This comes as a bit of a shock, mainly because Urban has never publicly mentioned it before, and it does explain a few things: his love of performing, and then, years later, in Nashville, how destructive it was for him when he stopped playing on a stage. And even why he plays country music at all. “[My dad] was into it, and I wanted his approval,” Urban says.

“I feel very sure if he’d been into African music, I’d be living in Zimbabwe, having the same talk about ‘Wow, they must have thought you were strange when you got to this town.’ ” He pauses, exhales. He’s going back in time, to 1998, seven years since he released his four hit records in Australia, five years since that girl called him a novelty, another long year away from success. He was at a house out in Franklin, about 30 kilometres south of Nashville, staring at a big pile of coke, about to embark on another one of his binges, which is how he used to roll – a few days or weeks of, then blammo.

“I had plenty of stuf,” he says. “I didn’t seem able to stop. There was no stopping this time. I’d go to sleep, wake up a couple of hours later, go at it again, drinking to take the edge of. I remember thinking, ‘I’m probably not going to make it until tomorrow.’ And then I thought, ‘Fuck it. I really don’t care. It’ll be a relief to not have to. I’ll take an Ambien and at some point I’ll pass.’

I was taking everything. I remember thinking, ‘Oh, good, this is the end of it, yahoo.’ I was quite happy about it.” He leans back in his chair, smiles and shrugs. “Well, I woke up the next day at lunchtime, in my bed, sweating, going, ‘Fuck! Guess I’m not going to get to go this way.’ I thought the choice to quit would be taken from me, which would be easier than me trying to do it on my own.

There was coke left, so I went at it again.”

Standing up, he throws away some trash, moving his back around to see if it still hurts. For as heavy as these last few revelations have been, he seems oddly unmoved, maybe because the events are so long in the past. “You know, early on in my sobriety, there was a period when I wished I hadn’t succumbed to drugs and everything the way I did,” he says. “It sucked up so much creative time, when I should have been in the studio working. But I don’t know what came from that time, other than that I’m where I am. Because of, or in spite of, nobody knows and never will.”

Then he returns to the main stage of the arena, leaving his scent to linger here and for anyone standing nearby to hope that it hangs around for a lot longer than most.

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Jon Toogood, Shihad Shihad’s frontman on pissing of bandmates, swearing at the Treasurer, and his mum’s roast chicken By Rod Yates The last time I swore at the telly Today, when [Treasurer] Scott Morrison was saying on ABC 24 that every time Bill Shorten opens his mouth, he spends more of your money, and all he’s doing is making all working people’s tax bills higher. And all I thought was just, “Why don’t you ask your rich fucking mates to pay their fair share of fucking tax and we’d have beautiful hospitals, and beautiful fucking schools, and beautiful roads, and you can go get fucked.”

The last fight I had The closest I’ve had to a physical fight was actually with the quiet one in Shihad, Phil Knight, the guitarist. He’s a lovely guy and is placid most of the time, but when he does fire up he fires up harder than anyone I’ve ever seen. It was on tour, we did the classic side-of-the-road piss, and Phil doesn’t like anyone seeing his cock. He always sneaks off and finds a really quiet place to wee. Knowing that, I followed him.

We walked about 20 minutes into a forest, and he was getting so frustrated. But I just wanted to see how far I could push him, so I pushed him 20 minutes into a forest until he turned around and ripped my shirt in half and told me to fuck of! [Laughs] The last time I threw a tantrum Oh, fucking every day. Usually I’m pretty mellow. But when it comes to music and live shows, I want everything to be fucking perfect. When Shihad play good, we are as good as any band in the world live. I really believe that. And it comes from setting really fucking high standards internally, and also demanding that of people Was quite a while back. I was in Auckwho work with us as well, i.e. the techs and land finishing the Adults record, and I stuf like that. We’ve been lucky enough to just recorded “Nothing To Lose” with work with some of the best in the business, Ladi6. She happens to be Scribe’s cousbut it won’t stop me from bollocking them in, and after a day of recording she says, if my guitar doesn’t magical“Hey it’s Scribe’s birthday, ly appear in my hand after a do you want to come [to the OUT NOW song’s finished. I always apolparty]?” So I went along, it ogise afterwards. was an awesome night, we The last time I said “never got wasted. And then it was again” like, “OK, we’re going to this Changing our band name. house party, everyone jump Yes, never again. I’m not in a car.” So I jumped in a fucking doing that. car with a bunch of his cousMy last meal would be ins, and all of a sudden they Shihad Hmm, probably my mum’s started having this huge Shihad’s 1996 album roast chicken circa 10 years argument. And I was like, was reissued digitally ago. She was better at it 10 “Woah, what have I gotten and on vinyl in April to mark its 20th years ago than she is now. I myself into?” [Laughs] The anniversary. They’re think she just can’t be fucked driver was arguing so hard currently on tour. anymore. [Laughs] that she drove up onto the The last time I changed a tyre pavement and totally burst 106 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |

RollingStoneAus.com

The last time I threw a tantrum?

Every day.” the tyre. Then one of the other cars full of family members stopped, and they got out, and all of a sudden all of the family members started brawling in the street! Leaving me, this non-family member, to go, “OK, how the fuck do I change this tyre?”

So I actually had to change a tyre while I watched Scribe’s family lay into each other.

The last time I got starstruck I have immense respect for Mick Harvey, the bass player from the Bad Seeds, who are, aside from AC/DC, probably my favourite Australian act ever. Not only did he come up to me [at the Big Day Out] to say, “Your band fucking rules”, but he said, “Hey Jon, I know you like PJ Harvey, this is PJ Harvey.” I didn’t know what to say. I felt like a fucking kid. PJ Harvey’s got an x-factor, man. And she was really lovely, but I was a goober, basically. I felt like a total little fan. And there was nothing I could do to make myself a human.

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