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THE RAINBOW CONNECTION
WORDS CAT MARNELL PHOTOS BELLA HOWARD
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Remember dyeing your hair with Kool-Aid? It definitely didn’t work that well-blame early role models Jem & The Holograms and Kurt Cobain for having us believe it wouldbut we were all about it anyway. Wild-colored hair, from Rainbow Brite primary hues to Kenny Scharf neons to sherbert-y, My Little Pony pastels, has always been irreverently cool. And right now is no exception, with a veritable colour wheel of shades popping up on high fashion runways since the spring 2010 Proenza Schouler show (where models sported pastels tips). And the look was prominent in the fall collections of Fendi, Prabal Gurung, and Yohji Yamamoto, to name a few. But like any truly cool beauty trend, the style is being rocked most fiercely on the streets. “Girls in New York, Los Angeles, and especially London are wearing it like never before, pairing bright colour with sleek styles for a punk-but-polished look that’s more glam than grunge,” says Roxie Darling, a colourist at Bumble and bumble in New York City who herself sports a gorgeous cotton candy-colorer mane. Here, her tips for getting the Technicolor look at home. Bleach first. “In order for the colour you’re after to really be vibrant and have substance, your hair needs to be highlighted or lightened first,” says Darling. That way, there’s a canvas for the colours to be painted onto. Consider your lifestyle (or at the very least, your skin tone and wardrobe) when choosing a colour. “If it’s a colour
that contrasts with your life, makes it harder for you to get dressed in the morning, or requires you to change your makeup and the way you style your hair, then it is not the color for you.” When in doubt, a “sunset” or “starburst” shade is most flattering. “Warmer colors - red, pink, orange, yellow-tend to look brighter and shinier on your hair,” Darling says. “Cooler shades like green, aqua, and periwinkle can make it appear not-so shiny, unhealthy, and even dirty.” (Likely not the look you’re going for.) DIY dyeing is easier than you think-just use the right applicators. “If you just want to put a couple little pieces around your face, use a mascara wand for really controlled placement,” advices Darling. For wider streaks of colour, apply with a paintbrush; the flatter the bristles the better, and ideally just over one inch wide. Playing around with combs in key. Running a fine-toothed comb from roots to ends “will spread more of the product along your hair for a more uniform, diffused look,” says Darling.l A wide-toothed comb can be used “to blend [ colour ] a little so you don’t have harsh demarcation lines where the colour starts and stops.” Deep condition - and then deep condition some more. “It’s crucial to keep hair nourished and moisturised before, during, and after any kind of drastic dye job,” says Darling. “Skipping this step almost guarantees that your hair is going to look terrible-if not at first, then eventually down the line.” Use an ultra-emollient treatment (Darling likes Bumble and bumble Deep. $26) at least twice a week, for a minimum of 20 minutes each time. When you’re sick of your bright look, use clarifying shampoo. “For the most part, if you use a semi-permanent or “direct dye”-the term for hair color that just lays on top of the cuticle,as opposed to one that actually changed the colour of the hair by using an activator or ammonia-”it out after a couple of washes using a clarifying shampoo,” says Darling. Dish detergent does the trick, too-just lather up over and over then condition afterwards.
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COLD SNAP On a spring afternoon, four albums in and Arctic Monkeys are still raising the bar. WORDS ELLEN CARPENTER PHOTOS CHRIS CLINTON
Arctic Monkeys’ fresh-faced singer Alex Turner and drummer Matt Helders sit at a booth in a downtown Manhattan bar, drinking Coronas, and explaining the nice, friendly, totally-not-X-rated meaning of their new album’s title, (ahem) Suck It and See. “It’s like a traditional [British] phrase…” says Helders, scratching the blond stubble on his chin. “Not that common,” clarifies Turner. “But it’s be known or whatever,” Helders counters, triggering a quick vaudeville chorus of suggested meanings. “Like, Bite the bullet!” “Give it a try!” “See what happens!” “Like you’re about to go parachute jumping.” “Yeah,” Turner says with a shrug. “You might as well.” They seal their definition with a collective swig of beer, The title’s crowning irony is that you’d never have to use that phrase to get someone to listen to Arctic Monkeys. Their 2006 debut, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, was named the “fifth greatest British album of all time” by NME. All 12 tracks of its follow-up, Favourite Worst Nightmare, charted as Top 200 U.K. singles, and their first three albums all debuted in the U.K. at No. 1. They are, perhaps more than any current British band, a sure bet: You know for a fact that Suck It and See most definitely will not suck. Perhaps the phrase best applies to the band’s process for making this album, which involved embracing a new strategy: writing straight-up songs. “That’s something that we shield away from in the past--the traditional way that [a song] works in terms of cogs, lyrics, and melody,” Turner says in his broad Yorkshire accent. “That’s what everybody does. For our songs, we’d have all these puzzle pieces and painstakingly make songs. But there’s a reason why everybody else does it the other way.” Turner wrote most of the album while he and his girlfriend, Alexa Chung, were living in Brooklyn (they moved back to London last September), and you can’y help but wonder if songs like the ‘60s pop-indebted title track, with the line, “That’s not a skirt, girl/ that’s a sawed-off shot gun/ and I can only hope you’ve got it aimed at me,” are about her. He then brought the music to the rest of the band and their longtime producer James Ford and they spent two
months mapping out the album in London before heading to Long Angeles to record it. “We hadn’t really been that prepared since the first record when we’d been touring and playing the songs for a couple of years,” says Turner. Hleders and Turner both speak flatly and show little excitement when claiming to be excited. “That’s the way our faces fall,” says Turner. “It’s party on the inside.” So judging from the way they perk up when discussing their month recording in L.A., their visit must have been a blast. There were “a lot of smiles,” per Helders, and “a lot of hangovers,” per Turner. The drink of choice in the studio was tequila, mostly Patron margaritas or a pink grapefruit cocktail their friend invented called Corvette Summer. They rented a house, had epic ping-pong matches, and even tried to organize competitions with other bands, notably the Arcade Fire, who are also serious paddle hounds. “Apparently the only person that ever beat [Arcade Fire frontman Win Butler] was the guy from Rage Against the Machine, Zach de la Rocha, so he’s pretty good,” says Helders. “But they were busy,” adds Turner. “They just won a Grammy. Probably the last thing they were thinking was playing a game of ping-pong with us.” Despite all their success, Arctic Monkeys don’t think of themselves as stars (“We’re not Lady Gaga,” Helders deadpans). Cook, Helders, and O’Malley still live in their hometown of Sheffield, in the north of England, and they all still consider each other best friends. “Just being in this band, I suppose, keeps you grounded,” says Turner. “It’s like a group of mates--if anybody started getting out of line, you’d know about it pretty quick.” The one thing that has changed over the years? Their look. “I fucking love them early pictures of us when we’re all in tracksuits,” says Turner, now in jeans and a navy corduroy shirt, unbuttoned to a reveal a thick gold chain and a white wifebeater. “When you don’t have time to figure out what you want to be and you’re already in the publy eye, you’re in trouble,” Helders says, shaking his head at the memory of head-to-toe Puma. “But when we first started, a lot of kids at that age would dress like that,” continues Turner. “So when we’d do photo shoots in England, people would be like, ‘Oh that’s cool, they’re just a bunch of kids.’ But when we started going elsewhere to do photo shoots, like Paris, and showed up dressed like that, they’d be like, ‘Umm, we’ve got a stylist….” And we were like, ‘Naaaah.’”
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ETERNAL FLAME
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Florence Welch, one of the most enigmatic women in music, has traveled the world, sung at the oscars, and sleeps on a mattress on the floor of her mom’s house.
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WORDS LUKE CRISELL PHOTOS JACOB SUTTON
By the time I notice the full-size broadsword proper up in the corner of Florence Welch’s bedroom, on a quiet street in Camberwell, South London, it doesn’t seem in the least bit strange. A cacophonous explosion of colours, trinkets, records (Freddie Mercury, SaxanaI, so many more), perfume bottles (including Love, Chloe, YSL Paris, Annick Goutal, and Acqua di Parma), books, journals, jewellery, and clothes, strewn on every surface and hanging from the rust-colored walls, it is what the childhood bedroom of Marie Antoinette might have looked like, only with more Polaroids and exactly one more Saturday Night Live script, which hangs in a gilt frame by the mirror, above a fireplace filled with books, vases, antique china teacups, a silver skull, some candlesticks, a gold piggy bank, and about 10 empty magnums of Champagne. The script is from her appearance on the show in November 2010, as a musical guest, and her one line was “No”. Anne Hathaway, the host that night, has signed the script, writing on it in Sharpie: “Boom! Ya nailed it!” “I did!” says Welch, who is digging around in her wardrobe on the other side of the room with all the fervor of someone trying to get to Narnia. She emerges with a golden shawl and holds it up for a moment before discarding it on her bed-a mattress on the floor with red sheets and red pillowcases, with three antique prints in dark-wood frames serving as a headboard. “I totally nailed it!” She laughs loudly and unselfconsciously, something she does often. Then with mock sincerity she delivers the line again “No!” The script is one of hundreds of things hanging on the tacked to the walls. There are ornate Mexican crucifixes (arranged in a row next to a harlequin-print cat mask) maps, fans, flags, charts, flyers, photographs, rosary beads, prints (butterflies, plants, skeletons, Vermeer paintings), dresses-which hang in the bay window, filtering the bright morning sunshine into a rainbow of colours-and, above an old TV, next to pile of letters which sandwich fake vines and flowers, under some red, white, and blue bunting, are some metal lungs her mother brought back from a trip to Venice before Welch was born, which inspired the title of her debut album, released almost two years ago. The wardrobe is so full that it is barely discernible as a wardrobe ribbons, denim, and more fake flowers spill out of it ,over the doors and onto the floor; hanging from some hooks on the side are about 40 purse, both vintage and new. One, a black Valentino shoulder bag covered in studs, has been embossed with FLORENCE in gold letters. “I love that,” says Welch, putting on a navy blue Austrian military jacket she found in a vintage store in Milan. “They sent it to me and I couldn’t believe they put my name on it!” What would she save if there was a fire? She thinks for a while before going to her bedside table and picking up some photographs, faded with age. “They’re probably my most prized possessions.” The pictures show Welch, about 15, dancing around a christmas
tree with her hands in the air; playing violin at about age seven; her mother in her early twenties, on her wedding day, looking modestly at the camera as someone makes last-minutes adjustments to her hair; and her parents at there wedding, with Andy Warhol standing between them. “Look: He’s got a camera around his neck.” says Welch. “My dad always said that it meant that somewhere, there might be some pictures Andy Warhol took of them on their wedding day. “I am definitely into maximalism,” she continues. “I guess to the untrained eye, this room might look messy but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been in here for like, half an hour at a time with one fake rose going ‘Wait, should that go there, or there?’” Reassuringly the room is much as you might expect from the 24-year-old singer. The eccentricity and theatrics she brings to her lyrics, music, and her live performances, are present here, too. It’s in the notes pinned to her door (one reads “FOR THE WAGES SIN IS DEATH; BUT THE GIFT OF GOD IS ETERNAL LIFE. £3 ONLY”), and in the way she seems to dance rather than walk when we go into another room so she can show me the stuff she has no space for in her bedroom anymore, including a Chanel dress given to her by Karl Lagerfeld in Paris after she sang at the Chanel runway show in March, and a platinum disc of Lungs. We’re only going to get some lunch at a tapas restaurant that’s about 10-minute walk away, but she can’t leave the house without trying on about five outfits; she eventually chooses what she calls a “chintzy” floral vintage dress and some white lace Opening Ceremony heels. “These are my favourite shoes,” she says, her bright red hair falling in her face, which is pale as marble. “I bought them in L.A.. They were my ‘pre-Grammys, I feel nervous’ present. That evening was so wound up I accidentally spilt a whole bottle of red wine on one.” She laughs. “But I quite like them now. I was gonna do the other one actually, so they match.” Florence Mary Leotine Welch spent here first 13 years in a house four doors down from this one, on the same unassuming street of semi-detached Victorian houses in a peaceful part of London that seems a world away from the hustle and bustle north of the Thames. When her parents got divorced in 2000, her mother, an art historian, moved in here with the father of a boy who was Welch’s best friend at the time and brought het three children with her. Welch is the eldest and her brother, JJ, now 17, and sister Grace, now 21, found themselves living in a house with three other children, who, not long afterward, became their stepsiblings. “It was total chaos! Six kids all hating each other and screaming!” she says, trying on a brown leather camera bag and looking herself in a full-length mirror. “Now everyone get on really well.” (The two eldest stepbrothers have since moved out.) When Welch eventually got her own room, she painted it red and decorated it with posters of
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Cobain, Shirley Manson, Gwen Stefani-while saving up her pocket money to buy albums like Dookie and Nimrod. She says she always had an affinity for music and, when she was 11, had a band at school called the Toxic Cockroaches. “The drummer had a pair of drums in her dad’s garage and we graffitied it with the names of all the bands we loved, like NOFX and Silverchair,” she says. As she grew up, though, Welch began to feel a deeper connection to music. “I would find songs and they would totally save me,” she says, as we walk down the street. “It was just me alone, in my bedroom, dancing by myself, wearing weird clothes. Now I do it on stage, but I had a lot of practice.” We arrive in the restaurant, take a seat in the corner, and order about half the items on the menu, deciding to drink Rosé in celebration of the unseasonal, un-British warm weather. “I think the Arcade Fire album Funeral and the Beirut album [Gulag Orkestar] were informative for me in terms of how i wanted my album to turn out,” she says. “That feeling was so overwhelming! It’s what i was looking for in music: being completely overwhelmed by soundthat rush, that feeling of release. It’s funny because I’m not actually very good at saying how I feel in person. I think songwriting is a way for me to deal with my ow emotional failings in life. When I’m making a song, it’s almost as if I can express how I feel. It’s almost as if, to get a message across to one person, you have to sing it to a couple of thousand.” She laughs brightly. “When you’re singing you can escape yourself, and lose yourself in the music. I can at least pretend to be graceful, then I come off stage, fall over, and scuff my knees.” In her late teens, Welch began to get swept up in the South London arts scene, the epicentre of which was Camberwell College of Arts (she attended the school for a year and a half, between 2004 and 2006, cultivating an aesthetic she describes as “gothic chintz”). She would sing anywhere she could, at open mice, at squat parties in basements (“for a lot of my first gigs I was really drunk and would just stamp my feet and clap and sing a cappella”), and started to date a guy in a band called the Ludes. “I would get dropped off at school straight from the tour
bus,” she says. “It was so heady! That combination of first love, first getting drunk…it was like, ‘There’s life outside school!’ It was so exciting.” They boy introduced Florence to another personality on the scene: Isabella Summers (who had actually been her sister Grace’s babysitter for a period), and she and Welch began to hang out. “I was obsessed with hiphop and was making rap music on my own,” Summers says. “But one day I got bored of making hip-hop with big dudes and wanted to work with a girl, so I was like, ‘Oh, Florence! Do you want to make song?’” The pair called themselves Florence Robot Isa Machine and ended up recording an entire album, Someone Spilt Snakebite on my Espadrille. “She came into my studio [a minimal equipment] and was like, ‘Oh God, I was out all night and someone spilt Snakebite on my espadrilles!’ And I was like ‘That’s what we’re gonna call our album!’” remembers Summers. (No tracks were officially released, but you can find some of them on YouTube.) Then, one night in 2007, Welch was at a club in Soho with her friend, musician Jack Penate, when she found herself in the bathroom with Mairead Nash, a fixture on the London nightlife circuit and one half of DJ outfit Queens of Noize. “She just said, ‘I’m a singer,” Nash remembers. “And she sang me an Etta James song and I was like, ‘Wow, that’s incredible.” Nash asked Welch to sing at a night she was putting on a few weeks later, and Welch turned up and sang songs she had made up just a few days before, rather than the rock ability Nash had requested. “They were songs I had been improvising,” Welch says. “It’s almost like holding a séance-- you have to let whatever is in your head come out. That’s how I wrote ‘Kiss With a Fist’-it was just me stamping my feet and singing.” “I’ve never seen anything like it,” says Nash. “I turned to Tabitha [Denholm, the other half of Queens of Noize] and said, ‘I have to manage this girl.’” Nash has since set up her own company. Luv Welch Management, and still manages Welch, regularly travelling true world with her. “A lot of work goes into everything,” Nash says. “But then all of a sudden you find yourself at the Oscars or the
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Grammys and you’re like, ‘Wow, is this our life? We’re in a penthouse at the Chateau [Marmont] dancing around the room with Baz Luhrmann?’ I’m really proud at how she’s dealt with it all.” Welch began calling herself Florence + the Machine (“I liked it because Florence is like an auntie’s name, and I liked the idea of it being with something is hard and industrial”) and continued making music in much the same organic way she and Summers had developed. She tried to play the guitar, but her dyspraxia made it impossible. “I’ve never had any problem reading, it was just maths and organisation and remembering dates, names. I could always sing them back. My brain’s just weird and funny.” She didn’t want to use programmed drums, so it became, ‘Here’s a bucket, here’s a teacup, and how about we bang a wall, too?’” says Summers. (If you listen carefully to “Dogs Days Are Over,” you can hear the sound of Welch pounding her fists on the wall of Summer’s lo-fi studio.) “That’s why my music is a primal thing,” Welch says with a laugh. “I had no idea what I was doing! Whatever felt right, I just went with it.” She played some demos for producer James Ford, who had a studio in the same building as Summers. “I ran in with demos of ‘Dog Days’ and ‘Between Two Lungs’ and he was the first person who ever went, ‘Yeah, I really like this,’” she says. I think everyone else was more confused.” She started performing more regularly around London (often with Devonte Hynes, of Lightspeed Champion) at small venues such as the Lock Tavern and the Old Blue Last, where she was once on a bill with Emmy the Great, Adele, and Kate Nash. After getting attention from BBC Radio 1 she played the BBC Introducing showcase at the South by Southwest music festival in 2008, on the same bill as MGMT. “I was more enthusiastic than skilled,” she admits. Before she left Austin, Texas, Welch got a tattoo of her best friend’s nickname, “Sad Sack,” on her left forearm. She has another just below it, of a heart, and she pulls up her sleeve to show me them. “I got this one with a hangover in East London,” she says, stroking it and smiling. “Sometimes the best cure for a hangover is getting a tattoo.” Off the strength of the performance, MGMT asked Welch to support them on their upcoming European tour. “We were desperate to do it, but obviously has no money,” she says, pausing so I can order some more wine. “But my dad said he’d take us around in his camper van. So I told Izza [Summers] she had to come and play keyboard. I had two boys in the band at the time, so the four of us and my dad chugged around Europe for a month! We’d get to these tiny European towns and just look for the biggest thing there, which was always MGMT’s tour bus. That’s how we found the venus. They must have thought we were insane, turning up with pots and pans rattling, hanging out the window and like, ‘Helloooo!’” When they got back, the now fully formed Florence + the Machine (rounded out by Robert Ackroyd on guytar, Chris Hayden on drums, Mark Saunders on bass, and Tom Monger on harp) put out the split-single “Kiss With a Fist” and “Dog Days” on independent label Moshi Moshi. The majors soon came calling, and Welch signed with Island, released the single “Rabbit heart,” and finished writing
and recording the rest of her debut album with producers including James Ford and Paul Epworth. “I had heard rumours of this girl with a huge voice, but I didn’t fully appreciate what Flo’s gifts were, or realise what she was capable of, until she was in a room with me and I heard her sing,” says Epworth, who first met Welch when she came in to sing backup vocals on a Jack Penate record he was working on. “I think she overloaded the mic; you could hear her singing through two soundproof walls,” Epworth, who has been recording the as-yet-untitled second Florence + the Machine album for the past year (he says it could be out as early as this fall), talks reverentially about Welch, “I believe her voice comes from a higher, spiritual place,” he says. “I feel like she’s a conduit for something. She’s the only singer who’s ever brought me to tears on the spot. When we first recorded her, we had to put the mic six feet away from her because she was flailing around like a banshee. That on its own is invigorating, but what comes out is this voice that cuts through glass.” Epworth also alludes to aspects of Welch’s character, which, after spending some time with her, ring true. “I’ve come to know that Flo is probably psychic,” he says. “She sees things other people don’t see.” There is definitely something a little otherworldly about Welch. Talking to her, I get the same feeling I got when I interviewed Björk in Reykjavik in 2006--that she’s operating on a slightly different plane, one the rest of us can see, but never foot on. The wide-eyed wonderment in her music is there because she’s viewing the world in a genuinely different way, and trying to communicate that to the rest of us by the only means she knows. “ I wanted to be a witch when i was a kid,” she says, a little shyly. “I was obsessed with witchcraft. At school, me and my two friends had these spell books: I always wanted a more magical reality. I had a little shrine at home and I did a spell to try and make the boy in other class fall in love with me.” Live, Welch can sometimes seem to enter into a kind of trance. She often climbs on speakers and equipment and, in 2010, at Reading Festival in England, ascended up a lighting rig in heels, letting go with one hand at the top. I ask her if she thinks she was born to be on stage. “When I would see live bands, I wanted to do it like they did it,” she says. “I was drawn to male performers and that aggression and how debauched it was. It was almost shamanic, and I always thought I would love to be able to do something so powerful.” She takes a sip of wine, swirling it around in the glass. “It’s a feeling of being possessed,” she continues. “It’s a strange sort of witchcraft, almost like voodoo or something. I see people in the audience and it’s like we’re all in it together but at the same time, you’re disappearing.” She glances around the restaurant. The lunch crowd has emptied out and only the bartender , a waiter polishing silverware at a table by the window, and the two of us are left. “For me, being on stage is a clear place to think. It’s a moment of peace, even though I’m making the most noise ever.” She laughs. “It’s kind of like losing yourself in the music, but you want to take everyone there with you, too.” That place is not always an easy one to visit: Lungs, clearly, is a record born from bitter heartbreak. Although some of the early songs, written when Welch was
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much younger, are a bout her breakup with her boyfriend at the same time. Stuart Hammond, the the literary editor of Dazed and Confused (the pair have since got back together; she occasionally writes reviews for him under a not-very-well-disguised pseudonym). There’s a desperate, almost feral passion buried deep in the core of Lungs, and Welch’s sadness seems to linger on almost every syllable. Yet as personal as it is, it has resonated, loudly, with an international audience, selling 2.65 million copies worldwide to date. “From the moment I heard her sing, I knew Flo was going to be a megastar,” says Summers. “But when we were making [Lungs] we were like, ‘Who the hell is gonna listen to this?’ It sounds like forgotten ‘90s grunge music or something. I still can’t believe it when I hear ‘Dog Days’ on the radio.” “I was looking oblivion in any way I could,” Welch says, as we order yet more wine and pick at the remaining food. “You know when you’re really sad you just have that manic energy? Being heartbroken is really intoxicating…. It’s like, you’ve been so hurt that you feel almost invisible; it’s a kind of terrible freedom. I was playing all these festivals at the time and I was a total whirling dervish. You know that stage where you don’t care about yourself anymore? I was just like, I’m going to go out and not come home for three days and not have to call anyone because you feel like you don’t have anyone to answer to, because you’re not in the relationship anymore and there’s nothing to ground you.” IT’S ALMOST FOUR hours after we arrived at the restaurant but before we walk back to Welch’s house for some tea in the conservatory, we decide to order some coffee and a couple of glasses of the house special, “antique” rum. Straight, like the waiter suggests. Welch now seems to be in a calm and incredibly happy, almost joyous, place, enjoying her life and embracing her status as a fashion icon (her whimsical, vintage look, cultivated in part by her stylist, Aldene Johnson, has been imitated everywhere from high street to the runway), and even as a celebrity: She has played the Grammys the VMAs, the Oscars (and Elton John’s Oscar party; she sang a duet of “Tiny Dancer” with
him), and, not long after our interview will play the Costume Institute Gala in New York City. It begs the question: With no immediate pain to draw from, what’s the new album-which Welch has written with Summers, Epworth, Francis “Eg” White, Kid Harpoon, Amanda Ghost, and James Ford-going to sound like? “I think the last four tracks we did for the work ever,” Epworth says. “The new record is much more coherent. It’s more bombastic, kind of an Animal Collective, Kate Bush, super-heavy rock kind of thing. It could only be Florence.” He continues: “She’s found a new backdrop against which to set her tales of unrequited love and devils and Tim Burton-esque romantic stories. She’s more relaxed, more level. This time, it’s more about the battle between her head and her heart and that transition everyone goes through in their mid-twenties, where you let go of the chaos of your youth. I think she’s ready to take on the world by this record.” “A lot of the songs on the new album, are about imaginery things, things that you can’t touch-ghosts and rumours, my dead grandmother, things visiting you in a dream,” Welch says. “It’s almost like I am taking the Oscars and all those amazing aevents and trusting them into something that brings you back to your reality. I was dressing up to go on stage from the beginning, but instead of a designer outfit, it £2 cape from Oxfam or a lime green catsuit I borrowed off Andrew [VanWyngarden] from MGMT.” The rum arrives and we sniff (“smells like Friday night,” she notes), clink glasses, and sip. “It still feels like I’m very much drawn to dark metaphors in the new songs,” Welch says. The last of the afternoon sun is spilling through the stained glass windows of the restaurant, the colours running together to form a sort of painter’s palette on the floor. “It always feels like as if with each song you write, you’re trying to understand something about yourself: Why am I this way? What’s wrong with me? It feels as if there’s still a lot of questioning left to do. Just because I’m happy in my relationship, I’ve still got issues to deal with . I feel like your life is sort of always a battle between safety and freedom.” She drains her drink, and puts the glass down emphatically. “You know: Do you want to throw yourself into something head first, or do you want to be cautions?”
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SKIN DEEP Stars in their native New Zealand, the Naked and Famous are living up to their name stateside—the famous part, anyway. WORDS MIKAEL WOOD PHOTOS MAHDALENA WOSINSKA
It’s been a couple of weeks since New Zealand electro-pop group the Naked and Famous tore through Austin’s annual South by Southwest music conference, playing eight shows in four days, but singer Alisa Xayalith is still reeling. So much so that selecting an item from the brunch menu at an upscale eatery in Venice, California, on this sunny afternoon os proving to be a bit of challenge. But she knows one thing: No cheese, please. “Americans put cheese on everything!” Xayalith marvels to the wide-eyed agreement of singer-guitarist Thom Powers. “I kind of wanna document it by taking picture of every meal we have while we’re here.” She shakes her head in disgust. “It’s fucked.” As their names suggests, straight talk comes naturally to the Naked and Famous; soon Powers is admitting that he’s hard-pressed to see the point of SXSW, which he describes as “an opportunity for the people responsible for hyping bands to get together and say, ‘Yep, we were right!’” If they’re direct in conversation, though, these dance-rock rookies get much loopier on their debut album, Passive Me, Aggressive You. A No. 1 hit at home last year in New Zealand, it’s a woozy, psych-inclined ramble informed equally by grungy guitars and murky synths. Think “Time to Pretend”-era MGMT with accents and a darker sense of humour. “They have some swagger and grit, but there’s also a lot of depth to what they do,” says Chop Shop music chief Alexandra Palsavas, who recently licensed the band’s tune “Young Blood” for use on Gossip Girl and Chuck. “It’s very, very rare that the producers [of those series] will respond to a song so much that they’ll use it in both shows.” Powers formed the Naked and Famous (the name comes from a line in a song by trip-hop legend Tricky) at music college following a string of bands that failed to satisfy him creatively. The catalyst was Xayalith, whom he approached on the bus one day; their connection was instant, and it quickly led to long hours in the studio. (The band also includes synth player Aaron Short, bassist David Beadle, and drummer Jesse Wood. Eventually “Young Blood” found its way to the tastemakers at Neon Gold, the blog-turned-label that’s released 7-inches by Passion Pit and Ellie Goulding, among others. Buzz promptly estab-
lished, a succession of “old-fashioned ‘90s-style record-label dinners” soon transpired. “I think we were the last band that got that,” Powers says with a laugh. The musicians admit the attention was gratifying, but it was also exhausting. New manners, so they ended up spending many nights repaying empty compliment with innumerable thank yous. Besides, Powers says, he didn’t get into music to be told how cool he is. He grew up in the Kiwi equivalent of the American Midwest and still remembers how much it meant when a beloved group would come to town--a feeling he says he tries to reproduce every time the Naked and Famous play a gig. “You got to the show four hours before the doors opened, then you went and stood in the front row to see you favourite band play this music that got you through high school when you were really depressed,” he recounts, his eyes misting over a little, even now. “It was special, you know?”
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THE XX: BLACK IS BLACK IS BLACK IS BLACK With the runaway success of their debut album, this young British trio went from shy lovelorn teens to in-demand stars. WORDS DAVID MARCHESE PHOTOS ALEXANDRA WAESPI
They’ve always been together, these two. Best friends. Their hearts beating in unison, quietly making life go. Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sim understand, cognitively anyway, that they first met when they were two or three years old and living with their respective families in the blandly pleasant London suburb of Putney. They get that. But neither can remember a time when they didn’t know the other. And thus, even when parents have passed and confidences breached, neither has truly ever felt alone. Now, though, when their white-hot band, the xx, which also includes Jamie Smith — a sympathetic soul who entered Madley Croft and Sim’s world at the advanced age of 11 — have become the target of prying eyes and curious minds, the solitary space that these shy Brits have built for themselves has been reconfigured. Strangers have encroached. Strangers hungry to know precisely what it is that the xx love, and for whom their shimmering opalescent songs are written. Strangers who gather by the thousands in dark, cavernous clubs to loudly sing the band’s conspiratorial melodies back at them. Living with this paradox, trying to protect the powerful intimacy of their music from the alienating scale of the big shows and endless prodding interviews that their success demands, is not easy for Romy,
Oliver, and Jamie. Which makes their friendship, for the first two in particular, a keystone. They have never been strangers, nor will they ever be. “It was quite a fun show,” says singer-guitarist Madley Croft, with courteous enthusiasm, speaking of their performance last night before a sold-out crowd of 3,000 at New York’s Terminal 5. She has warm, forgiving brown eyes, a coolly severe haircut, and is seated on a leather couch in the plush lobby of the Bowery Hotel in lower Manhattan. It’s a sweltering, early August afternoon. “Often times big venues are scary, and we don’t like people looking at us,” she adds. “We three are very private.” The rest of the xx are close by, sitting on different couches, talking to other journalists. “Even whilst we were playing small shows back in London five years ago, it was quite awkward,” Madley Croft continues. “We do hope people like our songs, but selling ourselves is not something we’re good at.” (Like Sim, Madley Croft is openly gay, and getting more comfortable with revelation. A while back, she posed with her girlfriend for a spread in Tourist magazine.) Despite any timidity, the band’s 2009 debut, xx, has sold 370,000 copies to date. In 2010, it was awarded the U.K.’s prestigious Mercury Prize, beating out albums from the likes of Mumford & Sons and Dizzee Rascal. The wave of adulation for the hushed, moonlit album swept its makers onto the stages of Glastonbury, Bonnaroo, and Coachella (where in a rare moment of sartorial sensibility, the band wore off-white under the burning desert sun). AT&T used “Intro,” a wordless beam of eerie guitar light and drum-machine ripple, in its ads for the 2010 Winter Olympics. The xx’s whisper has carried a long way.
“IT IS ABNORMAL TO KNOW EVERYTHING ABOUT ANYONE. IN THE SPAN OF HUMAN HISTORY, PRIVACY IS THE NORM” “Romy and I,” says Sim, having swapped spots on the couch with Madley Croft, “we’re learning how to share the xx with people who aren’t in the xx.” His speaking voice is as deep and seductive as the one with which he sings. “We wrote the songs for our first album by sending each other lyrics over IM and e-mail, and then sending our demos to Jamie for beats,” he says. “We sang into the speakers of our computers and tried not to wake up our parents. It was just a little project we were doing.” Sim clears his throat. He’s been talking with reporters for hours now, and will continue to do so for much of the next three days, until the band leaves New York City for the Terraneo Festival in Croatia. He often looks over his shoulder when he speaks, as if someone might be listening in. “We put the songs on MySpace and didn’t think anything would come of it,” he says. Then you see that a record label wants to sign you and that Courtney Love
is posting that she loves the band. It seems like a weird dream.” Weird? Or bad? “I did worry about the size of our audience when I began writing for Coexist,” says Sim. “When you write songs for your best friends and maybe two other people to hear, and then realize that a million other people are going to hear them, it can be a bit worrying. You get concerned about what you might reveal.” Sim asks a waiter for some sparkling water. “Jamie has the right idea,” he says. “He keeps quiet.” If Sim and Madley Croft give the xx its heart, Smith provides the spine. After Sim and Madley Croft assemble their demos — which consist of them trading off vocal melodies and minimal guitar and bass lines (no chords, always single notes) — they give their music over to Smith, who, during lengthy late-night studio sessions, gilds them with diaphanous rhythms and insinuating percussion, a kind of fractal Quiet Storm. On Coexist, Smith even found a way to organically add elements of house-music thump (most keenly on “Swept Away” and “Sunset”) to his bandmates’ spare, crepuscular romanticism. The effect is like a house of cards made of love letters: precarious and painstaking, a structure of secret wants. The skeletal starkness of the xx’s music has become a beacon. The default setting for today’s pop is densely layered and highly compressed, while Coexist, though sonically bolder than its predecessor, offers a stealthy, enigmatic restorative. “They help you realize how much you can do with minimalism,” says Vampire Weekend keyboardist Rostam Batmanglij. “One guitar line, one bass line, and a drum machine pattern — it focuses things so sharply.” The production style of Smith, the primary sonic engineer for the band’s two albums, has drawn praise from British dubstep artiste James Blake, earned him the chance to remix Gil Scott-Heron’s final album, 2010’s I’m New Here (as the 2011 full-length releaseWe’re New Here), and drew
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the attention of Drake, who asked him to produce the eventual title track to his multi-platinum smash Take Care. I ask Smith, who speaks so softly as to make a dormouse sound like a loudmouth, if he was surprised by Drake’s offer to fly him to Toronto to collaborate. “No,” he says to the tabletop. “He’s a very nice guy.” This is Smith at his most expansive. Madley Croft says that Smith, whose uncles were DJs, is the only member of the band to “know the names of chords and stuff.” That knowledge does not translate into explication. I ask him what sounds influenced his approach. “Lots of things,” he says in a reedy murmur. “Everything.” He makes these comments in a way that feels neither rude nor insolent. The corners of his mouth even suggest a grin when he looks up from the ground, an event that occurs perhaps five times during our 19-minute conversation. His silence is efficient, and fits with the band’s methodology. (No group is more musically economical than the xx.) The only time Smith seems more than perfunctorily engaged is when I ask if he ever loses himself in rhythms and sounds. Which is to say that he nods and replies, “Yes, in the studio. I imagine it’s like what meditation is.” He is not interested in words — his bandmates’ included. “I don’t pay attention to lyrics,” he says when I ask him if Sim and Madley Croft’s words affect the sounds he creates to accompany them. “I can feel what they mean without knowing the words. I don’t worry about the specifics.” For more curious types, the band’s Tumblr serves as a sort of mood board for Coexist. On it, cryptic pictures of the band on tour share space with YouTube videos of anguished soul ballads, deep house tracks, and one lengthy interview with Sim and Madley Croft’s beloved Sade. Even if Smith was sweating the specifics, Coexist resists parsing. No line of any of the album’s 11 songs contains more than nine words. No verse is longer than seven lines. There are zero proper nouns and maybe five distinct similes. “You light up the sky / Unshadow the moon” is what passes for purple prose. Oversharing is anathema; these three are interested only in oblique suggestion — a hand drawn away from another, the slight but irreversible emotional shift from lover to friend. The music, which is serious without being somber (“Perhaps someone could dance to one or two of the songs,” says Smith), delivers catharsis through restraint. Coexist, like xxbefore it, is a reminder that even now, when the personal and public commingle ever more closely, few things are more magnetic than holding back. “They play with space and simplicity to such a beautiful degree,” says avant-pop alchemist Matthew Dear, who has released his own remix of the xx’s “VCR.” “There’s not a note or lyric out of place. There’s just no,” he searches for the right word, “interference.” This is intentional. “I don’t want to kill anyone’s stories,” says Sim about the band’s pared-back lyrics. “The songs I’ve always really connected with are the ones that don’t have names or specific places. I don’t want the details of our life to limit the imaginations of the people who listen to our music. Romy and I have been thinking a lot about someone like Sade. Her music of course — it’s so sensual — but more the fact that you don’t know anything about her. That to me is the height of cool. Remaining mysterious like that. It’s abnormal to know everything about anyone. Maybe in the last few years, there’s been the expectation that we should know everything Katy Perry thinks and does, but in the span of human history, privacy is the norm. That’s what people protect.” And it can be what draws people in, as well. “The band has this intimate presence about them that’s impossible to turn away from,” says Caius Pawson, who signed the
xx to his Young Turks label in 2007 and now serves as their co-manager. “I remember seeing them as a three-piece before Jamie joined,” he adds, alluding to the time when the band performed with pre-recorded beats, while their schoolmate Baria Qureshi manned guitar and keyboard. “They had this alluring side because they seemed so intune with each other. It felt like watching people have a genuine emotional dialogue, almost like you were eavesdropping on a private conversation. I hadn’t seen anything like it before.” Though the xx likely will never be rafter-reaching performers, the band’s live show now feels much less like watching bookish kids forced to play dodgeball. The shy and awkward quartet that I saw at Manhattan’s cramped Mercury Lounge in October 2009 is now plainly confident, if not quite comfortable, on stage. Sim has developed an insinuating leer, occasionally rolling his shoulders in ecstasy. Madley Croft smiles appreciatively. Smith, who used to try and hide behind his DJ set-up and drum kit, has spotlit moments of percussive crescendo. The xx’s development has come with costs. The aforementioned Qureshi was a classmate of the trio at London’s Elliott School (alma mater of Hot Chip, Burial, and Kieran “Four Tet” Hebden) and began playing publicly with the xx in 2005. She was still with them at the Mercury Lounge show that I attended in 2009. A month later, in November of that year, she was gone. Her split from the band was bitter. In interviews, the remaining members cited “exhaustion” as the reason for the departure. Qureshi, via Twitter, responded, “Am I exhausted?? nope. got kicked out by txt.” For six months in 2011, Qureshi played the part of digital Fury. She tweeted about “back stabbing,” and the band’s taking “credit for other peoples [sic] work.” In June of the same year, she wrote: “if anyone needs any advice on being an evil prick then message the xx!” Since then she’s been silent, and did not respond to my request for an interview. “It’s sad about Baria,” says Madley Croft curtly, now seated with Sim. We’re back at the Bowery three days after our last conversation. I’m meeting with them during their last round of press before they leave for the Balkans. After cooing to the Croats, the xx will be on touring till Christmas. It’s a tough schedule. On this day, though, only Smith has won reprieve from interview duties. His publicist explained that he would be unlikely to utter a word in the presence of his bandmates. When all three are together,
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Smith lets the other two do the talking. Which leaves Madley Croft and Sim to discuss Qureshi. “Honestly,” says Sim, “we all just started living our lives a little bit and realized we weren’t the same people that had started the band. It’s a shame and it’s sad because she was a friend, but I guess growing apart is a part of growing up sometimes.” He looks at Madley Croft, who looks at me and says, “That’s about all we have to say about Baria.” Madley Croft is equally hesitant to discuss a far more painful loss — that of her father, who died in February 2010 (she’d lost her mother at age 12). “It’s fair to say that I’ve experienced the highest highs and lowest lows since joining the band. That’s why it’s so important to have true friends like Ollie and Jamie with me. I couldn’t imagine being in a band with people I didn’t really know.” She gives a sad little smile and looks at her iPhone. “Would you like some water?” Madley Croft asks. She changes the subject to Smith, who is awaiting the arrival of his girlfriend from London. “We’re not going to let him get away with this not-talking crap anymore,” she says sweetly. “He’s actually a very good talker. He can explain things just as well as we can.” Madley Croft and Sim’s conversational cautiousness, I suspect, isn’t just about the mystique of the music. Aura only means so much. Obsessives have written day-by-day chronicles of Elvis’ life, yet “Love Me Tender” still kills. Frank Ocean can take to Tumblr to open a vein and Channel Orange still soars. Songs withstand excavation. It’s the songmakers who might suffer. “I think Frank Ocean revealed something about
himself in a very lovely way,” says Madley Croft. “But I don’t think our songs would be any different if I was writing about boyfriends instead. Everyone approaches these things in the way that’s best for them. If there’s any message I want to be out there, it’s that emotions are emotions. They don’t change because of who you’re attracted to.” Sim fixes me with a peevish glare. “We talked about our sexuality in a few very early interviews,” he says, “and it became this thing that people brought up every time. We don’t want to be thought of as a gay band or a straight band. We just want to be the xx.” “Our Song” is the last track on Coexist. Sim and Madley Croft wrap their voices around each other, singing, “And there’s no one else / Who knows me / Like you do.” Smith swaddles his bandmates’ declarations in a deep blue cloud of backwards drums. “What I’ve done,” the two sing, “You’ve done too.” A guitar glints, a bass pumps a languid pulse, then it all slides into silence. Only here will the band members’ agree to fill the biographical void. “The song is about the three of us,” says Madley Croft. “We don’t mind telling people that.” The xx are due at the airport in a few hours. I get a signal from the publicist to wrap things up. “It’s a song for us,” says Sim, “about how much we love each other.” Sim and Madley Croft stand to leave. They both shake my hand and thank me for my time. Then they walk through the lobby, towards Croatia and the wideopen world, continuing down a path started as children in Putney. It’s a path known only to them. No matter what happens next.