Loud And Quiet 129 – Jimothy Lacoste

Beastie Boys, Rattle, Sammus, Jockstrap, Ghetts, Riz Ahmed, Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs, Charles Bradley, Marie Davidson

issue 129

Jimothy Lacoste

Looking like a million pounds

THE NEW ALBUM AVAILABLE NOW 2LP/2CD/DL “UNFETTERED, CATHARTIC, MAGNIFICENT” 8/10 UNCUT THE FOLLOW UP TO HER ACCLAIMED ALBUM ‘HAVE YOU IN MY WILDERNESS’ MOJO AND UNCUT’S ALBUM OF THE YEAR 2015

How To Dress Well The Anteroom

A single continuous piece of 21s century psychedelic music featuring Tom Krell’s most bewitching sound experimentation to date

Available Now Deluxe 2LP/2LP/CD/DL

Contents Contact info@loudandquiet.com advertise@loudandquiet.com Loud And Quiet Ltd PO Box 67915 London NW1W 8TH Founding Editor: Stuart Stubbs Art Direction: B.A.M. Digital Director: Greg Cochrane Marketing & Sales Manager: Dominic Haley Sub Editor: Alexandra Wilshire Book Editor: Lee Bullman Contributing writers Abi Crawford, Adam Badí Donoval, Aimee Armstrong, Andrew Anderson, Alex Weston-Noond, Brian Coney, Cal Cashin, Chris Watkeys, David Cortes, David Zammitt, Daniel Dylan-Wray, Derek Robertson, Fergal Kinney, Gemma Samways, Guia Cortassa, Hayley Scott, Ian Roebuck, Joe Goggins, Katie Beswick, Liam Konemann, Luke Cartledge, Max Pilley, Mike Vinti, Patrick Glen, Rachel Redfern, Rosie Ramsden, Reef Younis, Sarah Lay, Susan Darlington, Sam Walton, Tristan Gatward.

Contributing photographers Ant Adams, Brian Guido, Charlotte Patmore, Colin Medley, David Cortes, Dan Kendall, Dustin Condren, Gabriel Green, Gem Harris, Heather Mccutcheon, Jenna Foxton, Jonangelo Molinari, Matilda Hill-Jenkins, Nathanael Turner, Nathaniel Wood, Phil Sharp, Sonny McCartney, Timothy Cochrane.

With special thanks to Christopher Tipton, Dan Carson, Dan Papps, Joss Meek, Nienke Klop, Rachel Silver, Tom Adcock, Will Laurence.

The views expressed in Loud And Quiet are those of the respective contributors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the magazine or its staff. All rights reserved 2018 Loud And Quiet Ltd.

ISSN 2049-9892 Printed by Wyndeham Grange Distributed by Loud And Quiet Ltd. & Forte

Issue 129

“It’s just fun, bro.” The words in the spoken intro to Jimothy Lacoste’s new track ‘Fashion’ refer to his attitudes to coveting labels, dressing preppy and wearing primary colour trousers, but they might as well be a response to critics down on his hyped almost-rap and daft viral videos. Some people have already made their minds up on Jimothy, writing him off as a joke and a rich kid. Taking us shopping down Bond Street for this month’s issue hardly contradicts the claims, but there was a point to it. As he explained to Gemma Samways somewhere between the Gucci and Burberry stores, he’s always dressed wealthier than he is to fit in with his neighbours, sees nothing wrong with aspiration and is serious about his music. It is fun, but not just fun, bro.

Stuart Stubbs

Marie Davidson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs . . . 12 Sammus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Jockstrap . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Rattle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Reviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Beastie Boys . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 Jimothy Lacoste . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 Charles Bradley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 Ghetts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 03

GOLD STAR MON 29 OCT THE WAITING ROOM

CURTIS HARDING THURS 8 NOV KOKO

W.H.LUNG THURS 15 NOV CORSICA STUDIOS

CAR SEAT HEADREST THURS 8 NOV O2 FORUM KENTISH TOWN

OH PEP! FRI 16 NOV THE ISLINGTON

GLOWS THURS 8 NOV BERMONDSEY SOCIAL CLUB

THE LONGCUT SAT 17 NOV SEBRIGHT ARMS

WOVOKA GENTLE THURS 8 NOV ICA

TIRZAH OUT MON 19 NOV SOLD VILLAGE UNDERGROUND

OLDEN YOLK SAT 10 NOV SEBRIGHT ARMS

LUKE HOWARD TUES 20 NOV BUSH HALL

PARQUET COURTS MON 12 NOV ROUNDHOUSE

SNEAKS THURS 1 NOV THE ISLINGTON

CREWEL INTENTIONS WED 21 NOV ELECTROWERKZ

LAURA JEAN TUES 13 NOV SEBRIGHT ARMS

VICKTOR TAIWO THURS 1 NOV BERMONDSEY SOCIAL CLUB

GLORIA WED 21 NOV THE LEXINGTON

FLASHER TUES 13 NOV THE LEXINGTON

GOAT GIRL FRI 2 NOV KOKO

JUNIORE THURS 22 NOV DALSTON VICTORIA

PELUCHE WED 14 NOV THE PICKLE FACTORY

INSECURE MEN TUES 6 NOV QUEEN ELIZABETH HALL

THE WAVE PICTURES THURS 22 NOV KOKO

KELLY LEE OWENS THURS 15 NOV VILLAGE UNDERGROUND

ANDY SHAUF OUT TUES 6 NOV SOLDCHURCH ST. MATTHIAS

HOOKWORMS SAT 24 NOV O2 FORUM KENTISH TOWN

LOST UNDER HEAVEN THURS 15 NOV BERMONDSEY SOCIAL CLUB

MY BRIGHTEST DIAMOND TUES 27 NOV OSLO HACKNEY

MADELINE KENNEY THURS 15 NOV SEBRIGHT ARMS

HUGAR WED 28 NOV ST PANCRAS OLD CHURCH

SERPENTWITHFEET THURS 30 OCT ISLINGTON ASSEMBLY HALL JARV IS OUT WED 31 OCT SOLD EARTH HACKNEY LUCY DACUS WED 31 OCT ISLINGTON ASSEMBLY HALL THE KVB WED 31 OCT CORSICA STUDIOS THE GARDEN WED 31 OCT & THURS 1 NOV THE GARAGE

PARALLELLINESPROMOTIONS.COM

HINDS SAT 1 DEC EARTH JOCKSTRAP THURS 6 DEC ST PANCRAS OLD CHURCH DILLY DALLY WED 30 JAN THE GARAGE YANN TIERSEN TUES 19 & WED 20 FEB ROYAL FESTIVAL HALL JUNGLE THURS 21 FEB ALEXANDRA PALACE LALA LALA THURS 21 FEB SEBRIGHT ARMS MOTHERS WED 27 FEB OSLO HACKNEY GENTLY TENDER WED 6 MARCH OSLO HACKNEY BEDOUINE FRI 22 MARCH PURCELL ROOM BC CAMPLIGHT THURS 11 APR SCALA

Money

How much money can you make from an awards ceremony?

There’s nothing quite like an awards ceremony to show how in touch with reality you are. From dresses that cost as much per square metre as a central London flat to the insufflation of powdered Columbian herbal products, the whole concept can be summed in one word: necessary.

But how much does it cost to host your own awards ceremony, and how much profit can you extract from the distended egos of your guests? Could this be a get rich quick scheme that actually works?

Firstly, what will your awards be, you know, awarding?

Music, film and TV are already well catered for, but it is still possible to find a niche? Ideally one that intersects self-admiration and disposable cash. You can pick whatever you like – ‘The Politician Prize’ or ‘The Rich White Guy Awards’ – but since this is a music magazine so we’d probably stick with music, and name the awards after ourselves.

Now you need a venue. Unfortunately, the local working men’s club will simply not do. Yes, you can buy a pint for less than £2, but it won’t have the requisite ‘ambience’. A good awards ceremony needs to be ostentatious, or people will think that it’s not very important at all. What we’re looking for is a place that people will think is classy but is actually rubbish – the venue equivalent of Beats headphones and staircase aquariums. In other words, something a footballer would covet. How about the Indigo Room at the O2? It’s a steal at £15,000. Catering is an additional £3,000, but unfortunately even Keith Allen needs feeding so let’s add that in.

As for the host, that’s tricky. Surprisingly, the Oscars only pay $15-25,000, because it’s considered an honour to be asked.

Alas, the same cannot be said for our awards – we’re going to have to pay. I contacted agency Sternberg Clarke, who informed me that Fearne Cotton or Alan Davies would cost “upwards of £25,000”. Even Sol Campbell and Ruby Wax are £10,000 for the night. Luckily, disgraced celebrities are at a discount, and it turns out both Jim Davidson and Angus Deayton will host our awards for a mere £5,000. Result… let’s go with Angus and keep Jim in reserve.

When our prize winners take to the stage they’ll be expecting a trophy. This is where you can really squeeze the pennies, because as far as we can tell all award statues look like – and in fact are – plastic pieces of shit. Trophystore.co.uk will supply some truly tacky Oscar lookalikes for just £7.49 a pop and they’ll even engrave them with the winners’ names. Who says you can’t get a bargain in modern Britain?

Right, that’s the ceremony taken care of, so now we come to the fun bit: raking in great, hateful piles of immorally earned cash. Tickets for these fancy dos don’t come cheap – seats at the MTV Awards, for example, start at $400. As for the Oscars,

words by andrew anderson. illustration by kate prior

attending them can cost anywhere between $150-$750 (and there’s not even a buffet).

But what about our pricing? I spoke to a ticketing expert, who told me to “use a tiered pricing structure, with temporal incentives.” In English, that means charge less for early birds and more for rich folk. So those that buy sooner will pay £125, standard is £175, and the posh nobs will hand over £250 (make sure their invites have gold lettering or something). The Indigo can seat 550, so if we sell one third of each ticket type it’s a total taking of £100,650.

Amazingly, that’s not the only way to make money from awards, thanks to sponsorship. Put simply, sponsorship allows you to align yourself with a morally repugnant company in exchange for currency. Many such companies exist so the choice is yours: gambling, smoking, payday loans, dictatorships, Topshop… whatever you fancy. I put out a few feelers and frankly I didn’t hear back, but I do know that similar sized events at the Indigo have brought in £30,000, so let’s go with that.

Time for the final figures. The venue, host, catering and awards come to just over £23,000. You’ll have to print the tickets and probably hire a band (although, upsettingly, you can usually get bands to play for free if you make up an award for them to win) – let’s add another £5,000 to be on the safe side: £28,000 total.

Now our ticket sales and sponsorship will be around £130,000, leaving a net profit of £102,000. Not bad for almost no work.

So there you have it, hosting an awards ceremony is basically dead easy and a guaranteed money earner. No one needs to know that Angus Deayton is involved until the night. All you need to do now is rent your tux… or if you’re truly committed to your profit margins, get a t-shirt with a tuxedo pattern printed on it.

See you at the ceremony. I’m excited.

05

Fate

Michael Jackson called Justin Timberlake and things got complicated How you feel about Justin Timberlake right now completely depends on your age. 0-5: Trolls! 6-15: Who’s Justin Timberlake. 16-30: Mum, it’s for you. 31-40: It’s complicated. 41-50: I’ve taped Graham Norton because of JT. 51+: We had such a good dance at the wedding to ‘Happy’.

I’m in the 31-40 bracket – it’s complicated. For my group it’s been a confusing ride because it’s been going on for so long.

At first it was easy: Justin Timberlake was the leader of a boy band with no interesting qualities, who nobody now remembers affectionately, at a time when people have started buying FILA fleeces again. Growing up, I never met anyone who hated NSYNC, but I never met anyone who loved them either, or who felt anything at all. And yet, late nineties rule dictated that their lead singer is probably a bit of tit – the one going out with the queen of everything, Britney Spears. Regardless, you didn’t need to bother yourself with thinking about Justin Timberlake because he wasn’t going to be around forever. Then he danced in front of a 7 Eleven in the ‘Like I Love You’ video. I just watched it back and couldn’t stop looking at his doily beanie hat – the type sold at church fates, the type my nan would describe as “too old” for her. It must have been there in 2002 but, like everyone else, I was distracted by the song and the dancing that looked and sounded just like Michael Jackson.

Justin has it that his fateful involvement with Jackson goes beyond the homage that reinvented him on ‘Like I Love You’, the rest of the ‘Justified’ LP and pretty much everything he’s done since. It goes back to a phone call in 2001.

Around that time Timberlake had written a song called ‘Gone’ for Jackson’s album ‘Invincible’. Even with that record turning out as appallingly as it did, and with Jackson just 12 months away from calling his baby Blanket and dangling him out of a fourth story window, Michael had enough sense to turn down this complete turd of a song. You can either imagine how bad it must have been or watch its video on YouTube, because NSYNC ended up recording it and single-releasing it themselves. It certainly makes you appreciate ‘Stranger In Moscow’ a lot more – the dampest song Jackson ever recorded. The two overlong tracks even share similar black-and-whitefor-the-sake-of-it videos, although Jackson’s doesn’t appear to be purposefully cutting out four other guys in black sleeve-

06

less T-shirts who are miming to what is clearly their frontman singing all the backing vocals himself.

But Jackson didn’t simply say no to ‘Gone’. He said no right up until it was released. Then he said yes please, I’ll take it.

That sounds kind of odd, but not if you saw Martin Bashir’s Living With Michael Jackson documentary in 2003 – a film in which Jackson goes urn shopping and tries to buy furniture that he’d already bought the previous week.

As Timberlake told the Oprah Winfrey Network in 2014, Michael heard that ‘Gone’ was out and called him up to pitch that they release it together as a duet. “But it’s already out, Michael.”

“What’s your point?”

Although this idea was now impossible on account of how time works, Timberlake says he suggested that they do it as NSYNC featuring Michael Jackson, but Michael wasn’t interest in that – Timberlake took great joy in telling OWN that “[Michael] was very absolute about the fact that he wanted it to be a duet between himself and I… I think it was the first idea I ever got about doing something on my own,” he went on, “because it was the first time I had ever really felt the confidence to do it.”

It’s intoxicating stuff, I’m sure: the most famous man on the planet – a genius and a nutcase – calls you up to accept that piece of crap song you wrote for him now that he’s not allowed it. He’s telling you the rest of your band are worthless (which, ok, was fair) and it’s all about you. It’s exciting. So exciting that Timberlake decided to become Michael Jackson. Everyone wins – the real Jackson in as much as winning and losing hold no currency in Neverland, unless it’s a tickle fight, and Timberlake because ‘Like I Love You’ leads to ‘Cry Me A River’, leads to ‘Rock Your Body’, leads to ‘Senorita’, leads to Hollywood roles, leads to everything.

And we won too… for a time. In going solo, the strength of Timberlake’s music made us have to think something about him. First we loved the music, and then we started to love him. I watched Alpha Dog unprompted. And Dick In A Box a hundred times. I mean, I can’t look at the guy now – his Super Bowl show, his conceited History of Rap bit, how effortlessly he slimed through The Social Network as Shawn Fanning – but I mostly blame that on time and the insuppressible nature of a smugness that the nineties could see through. He’s a tit, right? Or not. It’s complicated.

words by abi crawford. illustration by kate prior

Lanzarote

11—18 MOTH Club

lanzaroteworks.com

Programming

Shacklewell Arms

Valette St London E8

71 Shacklewell Lane London E8

mothclub.co.uk

shacklewellarms.com

Friday 9 November

Friday 9 November

#lanzaroteworks

Tuesday 13 November

NOVA MATERIA Friday 16 November

CRACK CLOUD

CENTRAL

EASTERN BARBERS Tuesday 20 November

Saturday 10 November

PROJECTOR

Wednesday 14 November

HAARM

VERA SOLA Friday 23 November

Monday 12 November

SHINTARO SAKAMOTO Wednesday 14 November

TRUDY & THE ROMANCE Friday 16 November

ENDLESS BOOGIE Saturday 17 November

BANFI Sunday 18 November

TERMINAL CHEESECAKE Monday 19 November

KAGOULE

Thursday 15 November

CC HONEYMOON Wednesday 28 November Friday 16 November

Wednesday 21 November

Thursday 29 November Saturday 17 November

Friday 23 November

Monday 3 December Tuesday 20 November

RENDEZ-VOUS

WWWATER

JC SATAN Saturday 8 November Sunday 25 November

CHEST PAINS Wednesday 28 November

NO-GO ZONES

STUDIO 9294 92 Wallis Rd E9 5LN

THYLA Friday 23 November

HMLTD + GAIKA

PARDANS Thursday 7 February 2019

PAINT

The Waiting Room Saturday 24 November

KAUKOLAMPI

THE CULT OF DOM KELLER

Tuesday 4 December

KISSISSIPPI

IT IT ANITA

HACHIKU

Saturday 1 December

EASY LIFE

MEDICINE BOY

LEBANON HANOVER

Various venues @lanzaroteworks

175 Stoke Newington High St N16 waitingroomn16.com

Saturday 27 April 2019

TEST PRESSING FESTIVAL Tuesday 27 November

KIRAN LEONARD

Friday 9 November

JONNY ROCK

Various dates

LNZRT DJS @ Wednesday 28 November

PAUL SMITH

Saturday 10 November

DOLLKRAUT

THE PEMBURY TAVERN THE ADAM & EVE

Ageing

Sweet 16: Riz Ahmed remembers what it was to be British Asian in hopeful 1998

It was 1998, right at the height of that Brit-Asian cultural explosion. You had Prince Naseem Hamed who was up there killing it, swaggering into the ring, proud. He was everyone’s role model.

You had Goodness Gracious Me on TV. You had Bally Sagoo – he had a big hit. That seminal Bollywood flashback album came out.

This was not long before Bend It Like Beckham. This was when British Asians started becoming a real cultural force in the mainstream while also being able to hold onto and own their identities without deracinating. You know, like, Selfridges started selling the handbags with Ganesh and Krishna on the side of them.

It was an interesting moment. We were all about exploring that, and reveling in that. Paki-pride and all that stuff. But in a slightly bizarre way because I’d hardly been to Pakistan, and when I had been there when I was 15 I was like, ‘this place... I can’t really relate to it very well’. That’s when I realised that when we were walking up and down Southall Broadway waving these flags, renting limousines and Ferraris, actually what we were shouting out was ‘us here’. Us hybrid Asians, you know. It was that.

For me it was also a confusing time to an extent. I was living in north west London with my family, but I got a scholar-

08

ship to go to a private school. There was an Asian scene there – there were middle class white kids, Jewish kids and they had their own scene. I didn’t seamlessly fit into any of them. I could easily navigate all of them. I could adapt. I had friends in each of them, but there would always be a certain moment where I couldn’t cross that line where it was like all the more well off Asian kids are hanging out in this sports and health club in north west London that all their parents have membership of. I couldn’t go there. Or some of the white kids were going skiing. That wasn’t open to me. I was hanging out with my friends closer to where I grew up in Neasden and Willesden, but I’d miss out on key things.

It was an exciting time but also when I really realised, like, ‘no one place is fully you’. Pakistan isn’t. None of these social circles in London are. What are you going to do? That’s when I started to really try and forge my own individual space. Writing lyrics was a massive part of that. Quite literally trying to find my own voice. I was thinking, ‘Yeah I love MCing’. But the idea that I could do that for a living, that never occurred to me at all. Same with acting.

Acting, that was something that came out of a teacher taking me under their wing. I was getting into trouble in class, I was hyperactive and disruptive.

Back then music was a big deal. Growing up we had a Michael Jackson poster on me and my brother’s shared bedroom wall, but Tupac was the one. He was this kind of ‘fuck you, you don’t want us, but we’re here anyway’. That spoke to a lot of Asian kids. We were just starting to find our own ways of articulating that in our own cultural grammar. When Tupac dropped something like ‘Hit ‘Em Up’ that felt like it really caught the mood of the times. There was a lot of factionalism.

It was also about the clothes. That was a big part of it. It was waiting for the sales and going down to Proibito on New Bond Street and trying to swap all the prices on the clothes. Making sure you had the right Iceberg History or whatever. I was operating on the slightly cheaper level of your Sonneti’s and your Firetrap’s and then I’d reinforce that with the really good stuff where I’d get some fake bits. D&G shoes, the Versace’s, the off-cream print Moschino. It was decorating yourself, I didn’t have a load of stuff.

What we had was basically our clothes. Green and white Reebok Classics. Green and white Adidas fibre tracksuits. Green and white for the colours of the Pakistan flag. It was this kind of thing.

I look back on it as a magical time, not just for me but in terms of where Britain was at; in terms of where my community was at; in terms of where UK garage and urban culture was at; where Asian culture was at. It was a hopeful time. Tony Blair was in and it was all Cool Britannia. Oasis were taking over the world.

I look at that as a golden period before 9/11. And this century has just been brutal in many ways for many people. I really look back at it as a time of innocence and a time of possibility.

as told to greg cochrane

THU.01.NOV.18

WED.14.NOV.18

THU.22.NOV.18

THU.01.NOV.18

THU.15.NOV.18

FRI.23.NOV.18

SAT.03.NOV.18

MON.19.NOV.18

FRI.30.NOV.18 TUE.27.NOV.18

WED.05.DEC.18 THU.08.NOV.18

TUE.27.NOV.18

TUE.13.NOV.18

WED.28.NOV.18

WED.05.DEC.18

TUE.20.NOV.18

WED.12.DEC.18 THU.29.NOV.18

WED.14.NOV.18

THU.04.APR.19

THU.24.JAN.19

FRI.03.MAY.19

FRI.25.JAN.19

MON.26.NOV.18

TUE.06.NOV.18

WED.16.JAN.19

SAT.26.JAN.19

TUE.05.FEB.19

SAT.09.FEB.19

TUE.12.FEB.19

THU.13.DEC.18 WED.14.NOV.18

WED.21.NOV.18

FRI.30.NOV.18

TUE.12.FEB.19

FRI.28.JUN.19

Interview

Marie Davidson

How to get ahead on the dancefloor, by Ollie Rankine Photography by Etienne Saint Denis

10

As we now know, life on the road isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

But we’ve all been there, lost in our own picturesque dream of rock ‘n’ roll bohemia: the screaming fans, late night soirées and glamorous debauchery. Strip away the inflated expectations, though, and what are you actually left with? Badgering journalists, perpetual jetlag and countless lonely hotel rooms. It’s a reality worth ignoring, but French Canadian electronic artist Marie Davidson wants a chance to set the record straight.

She’s just set off on tour, and from now until Christmas she will play shows in more than ten different countries. The run marks the arrival of her new album, ‘Working Class Woman’, and for someone who hates the necessity of lugging her work

Interview around the world with her, Davidson radiates a deeply calming presence. Sitting in the sterile lobby of her London hotel, she explains: “The biggest struggle is the constant travelling. I’m in airports all the time. Four to six flights every week, sometimes even more. The airport and hotel life is very isolating. I feel alienated all the time.” It’s a sobering sentiment and one you wouldn’t expect from ‘a dream come true’.

Her voice is soft and delicate, so much so that I’m worried the music coming from the inbuilt speaker overhead will drown out the interview recording on my shitty phone mic. Yet when giving her thoughts on a different kind of work schedule – the nine ‘til five that most of us endure – her stance unmistakably sharpens. “It’s just so crushing and I find it deeply depressing.

It works for a certain type of person, and in that respect, I have nothing against it at all. But it doesn’t work for everyone and we can literally see it. People all around are unhappy, depressed and stressed out.”

It’s everyone’s predetermined path that pisses Davidson off. You go to school, then you work, then you retire and then you die. Our bleak existence summed up in one miserable sentence. Is it too much to ask for an alternative that doesn’t leave anyone feeling inadequate? “People are fully encouraged to work but also shamed if they don’t,” she says. “Anyone could end up on social welfare just because of bad luck. It could be personal issues, poor health or you just lost your job because your company closed down or whatever. There’s so many ways you could end up on welfare but there shouldn’t be any shame or guilt connected to it. No one can be proud to say they are on benefits.”

And for those of us who are lucky enough to be employed…

“If you do have a job, it becomes your identity. Hi I’m Carol, I’m a store manager. Hi I’m Jack, I work in IT World. It’s sad because people only define themselves by their jobs. I do it too sometimes. I don’t jump to it immediately but if people ask me, I reply, hi, I’m Marie and I make music.” Whether she knows it or not, Davidson is of course privileged to be able to say, ‘I make music for a living.’ But just like Jack from IT World, she doesn’t want a job to define her own identity.

— A precarious lover — In recent years, Davidson’s relationship with nightlife and club culture has been a precarious one. The release of her name-making third album, ‘Adieux Au Dancefloor’ (my attempt at the correct French pronunciation isn’t at all flattering), literally documents her departure from her previous life entangled in club culture. This midnight apathy is mirrored on ‘Working Class Woman’, but just like any other passionate love affair, it’s always more complicated than simply goodbye. “Once you fall out of love with someone, you still have strings attached, right? You might have fallen out of love but you still care for them, desire them sexually sometimes. You might still want them as a friend or maybe you feel hatred towards them. Even in hatred, there is some attachment. So this is my relationship with nightlife right

now. I’ve fallen out of love with nightlife but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to have sex with it, you know what I mean? It’s just like having sex with an ex. Sometimes I find it attractive and sometimes I find it repulsing.”

Let’s be clear, Davidson might’ve waved her goodbyes to the dance floor, but she definitely wants you to dance to her music. Clearly somewhere, I’d misunderstood. When asked if her music could be described as ‘anti-dance music’ (a phrase I literally made up on the spot), she recoils. “Oh my god, I am not a part of that movement! That sounds like a fascist movement, that’s horrible. I don’t want to be connected with that at all.”

After two minutes of me jabbering to explain myself, we reconcile. She explains: “I think I make primarily dance music, but it’s not like that the whole way through this album. It’s a mixture of ambient and dance tracks. I like dancing to ‘Work It’, ‘So Right’ and ‘Burn Me’. They are definitely dance tracks for me, but it depends on your taste in music. These days you can dance to anything, it doesn’t just have to be pure pop or house.”

And when you’re not dancing to ‘Working Class Woman’, Davidson wants to tell you about psychology. Influenced by the works of Carl Jung, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Alice Miller, and Gabor Maté, she likes the idea of getting her brain picked. “A lot of the album is inspired by books and conversations about psychology,” she says. “It’s something I really like to discuss. I think we all want a psychologist to take care of us and solve our inner mysteries.” She also enjoys poking fun at her own internal fragility. “Tracks like ‘Your Biggest Fan’ talks about the people around me. You can hear the kind of things people have said to me and the things that I’ve overheard about me.” Laughing now, she explains, “I find it hilarious. I used to care because I was very self-conscious and anxious. I’m still anxious today but not when it comes to others’ perceptions of me. The song is about me breaking up with all that and deciding to have some fun with it. It’s very dark humour in that way.”

It’s this dark humour that makes her music so hilariously pertinent to our own lives. ‘Working Class Woman’ is a public dissection of Davidson’s own ego but also unravels itself as intimately relatable. “It’s not a selfish album” she explains, “that’s different. It’s egotistical so naturally it talks about my ego. It’s about my psyche, archetypes and ‘the self ’. But it’s not a selfish album, it’s actually a very inclusive one.”

I guess the point Davidson is trying to make is we all need to stop focussing so hard on being the big fish, because actually, it’s okay to be a little one. But I’m stuck thinking about what Jack from IT World makes of all this? Pulled straight from the masochistic tone of lead single ‘Work It’, Davidson sings the same phrase over and over again: “Work to be a winner”.

Can Jack from IT World be a winner? She smirks and choosing her words carefully replies, “the question is do you want to be a winner? If you want to be a winner, yes you have to work a lot. But it’s also okay to not be a winner. That song is a joke.

The message that’s important is if you work, work for yourself.

Trust yourself, love yourself, feed yourself and then you can be a winner.”

11

Interview

Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs

12

Interview Pleasure in doom, by Brian Coney Photography by Janina Sabaliauskaite

One Sunday afternoon last April, I wandered the dark corners of Camden basement venue Underworld, numb underfoot and bleary of mind. I was mid-way through the final day of riff mecca Desertfest and, frankly, fit for fuck all. As I coveted the cloister of my bed, unslept in, one billion miles away in Belfast, Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs strolled out on stage. Led by Matt Baty, a caterwauling knight in shining armour (1990s Newcastle United shorts) they inexplicably drove out my pining for home in sixty face-searing minutes.

Nineteen months on and Pigsx7 could, if they so wished, lay claim to being the UK’s perennial sludge-doom band. A jewel in the glistening crown of the North East’s underground scene, their newly-released second album, ‘King of Cowards’, is a skullrattling triumph of down-tuned maximalism and a featurelength flare lit by one of the very few bands to have made a dent in my solar plexus.

Having written and recorded their 2017 full-length debut, ‘Feed the Rats’, in their hometown of Newcastle, the seeds of its follow-up were sown in much less familiar climes. “We had a couple of gigs in Italy that, for whatever reason, fell through on a tour,” reveals Baty to me. “So instead of cancelling the tour, we holed up in a converted barn in the country to write. There was nothing for miles. I think the closest village was, like, a twenty-minute drive away.”

“It was a lot more relaxed this time around,” says guitarist Adam Ian Sykes. “And more enjoyable to being in a cramped bathroom in Newcastle.”

“Yeah,” says Baty. “It was nice being somewhere completely isolated from your day-to-day life. That kind of isolation that you can only get in the countryside helped.”

No matter how much you strain your ear or tilt your head, listening to ‘King of Cowards’ isn’t likely to transport you to some pastoral Italian backdrop. And it’s all the better for it. As with its predecessor, it’s a ripping blitzkrieg, bounding with doomed-out riffs and Baty’s Kilmisterian howl. From the riff-fuelled bombast of ‘A66’ to the album’s closing highlight, ‘Gloamer’, it makes for a forty-minute exhibition in pure, lysergic-dappled low-end.

With their fortuitous songwriting retreat proving successful, the band returned to Newcastle’s Blank Studios to commit their new record to tape earlier in 2018. Ten years on from being initially set up as a mobile initiative by the band’s guitarist, Sam Grant, the band were one of the first acts to record in the studio’s new premises. “It was nice for Sam to have a bit of extra time and freedom to play around with the space,” says Baty. “It made things a lot easier, from our side of things. It was going from the old studio, which was incredible but quite small. We learned to work in that space really well and make the most of what we had got. All the output was great but with the new space, there

was a lot more focus on just getting it down, getting it right and enjoying it.”

‘King of Cowards’ coup de grâce is immediate and assured: just how accurately it distils the band’s incendiary live show. Where the scuzzed-out psych-doom ambushes of ‘Feed the Rats’ carried with them a certain condensed, lo-fi charm, the likes of ‘Thumbsucker’ and ‘Cake of Light’ on album number number two are widescreen and cohesive. It’s curious, then, to discover the band were a little apprehensive before stepping into Blank Studios this time around. “We were a bit worried,” reveals Sykes. “With ‘Feed the Rats’, we had been playing most of it for about four years before we recorded it. So that made it super easy when we went into the studio. With this album we didn’t have that luxury. Although we had everything written, around 75% of the album we hadn’t played live before. In the end, it was almost like we had played them live and it felt just as easy as the first album to record.”

— Shouting indecipherable things — Without a shadow of a doubt, at the epicentre of Pigsx7’s seismic craft remains Baty’s larynx-tattering bawl. Although they’re not always legible, from where do his rabid words stem?

“I don’t sit down with a pen and paper,” he tells me. “When we’re forming songs I tend to shout indecipherable things along to what the guys are working on. Lyrics sort of gradually form themselves. In the first instance, I much prefer to go with the flow with whatever everyone else is doing. In Italy, it was mostly just a case of me shouting indecipherable things to begin with.”

Seeing as his words slowly emerge over time, snowballing from subconscious flickers into something much more substantial, it’s no shock to learn that Baty’s upbringing makes an impression on ‘King of Cowards’. “I went to a Catholic primary school, and then a Catholic secondary school,” he says. “From the very get-go, when I was four or five years old, it was heavy on the religious side of things and really top-heavy on Catholicism. ‘There is a Heaven and Hell; whenever you pass over to the next life, you will be judge. So here are your guidelines for living a wholesome life. If you break any of these rules, this is what’s going to happen.’ They’re pretty heavy subjects for a really young person to take in, especially when you’re at the age where you’re learning a lot about life, from every angle, and trying to work things out. But then you’re sat down at a school and told these things – it’s very, very challenging. I do wonder, in my adult life, how much of that has affected me, you know?”

Though it flirts with reductionism too much to outright call it cathartic, it would be foolish to shirk that particular descriptor in relation to the band’s crushing sorcery. I say that presumably

13

Interview

“I’m a firm believer that projecting your voice in such a way has all kinds of benefits for your mind”

Baty finds relief in wielding his thunderous primal screams? “It’s definitely beneficial,” he says. “Like all forms of vocalisation, it’s beneficial, whether it’s talking, shouting or singing. Especially singing. I don’t know what kind of science there is behind it, but I’m a firm believer that projecting your voice in such a way has all kinds of benefits for your mind. I wish I knew of any studies to back it up and I suppose I can only use myself as a case study, but it makes you feel good. Certainly, the physicality of it does have benefits.”

Physicality is a defining element of what sets Pigsx7’s live show apart from so many acts of their ilk. “It’s a rare calm in my head, coming off-stage,” says Sykes, “unless it’s a really bad gig, which is few and far between, frankly.”

“Yeah,” says Baty, “I would have to agree with that.

For me, I rarely go back and listen to the music that we’ve recorded, mainly because it doesn’t give me the same thrill as it does performing it. I feel like I can’t reach that kind of high listening back to it. I think that says a lot.”

Off the back of two launch shows for ‘King of Cowards’ (one in Newcastle and one in London) the band are set to zig-zag across Europe in November. When I ask them how they prep for these bigger jaunts beyond the UK, Baty says: “We’ve got some pretty sweet spreadsheets. I suppose there’s a certain element now whereby if we’re going to be so busy over the next while there has to be a lot more forward planning. We just have to think a bit

14

more carefully about making things work. There’s always going to be work commitments, and family commitments, but we’ve always found a way to keep pushing forward.”

“We’ve been very lucky to get funding for ‘King of Cowards’ from PRS,” says Sykes. “We’re just aware of how much that helped our situation. There are a lot of bands in a similar position to us where that would really help. It’s an option people should be looking at.” And how, I ask, is it having to deal with people who struggle with the perfect fact that they’re go by the name Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs? “It’s fine,” says Baty.

“We don’t have to deal with them. Seriously, though, funny story: I work for a music publisher, and it’s quite handy that we publish Pigs; the last album and this album. I recently got one person who completely put their foot in it and replied to my e-mail saying that’s a ridiculous name, I just can’t bring myself to listen to the music. And I replied saying, ‘This is… this is my band.’ He made a few backtracks after that. But it’s fine. If anything, if people can’t get it or understand it or see the pleasure in that name, I don’t want to know them!”

Interview

Sammus

A PhD student and rapper moves beyond her sad songs,

by Katie Beswick. Photography by Levi Mandel

16

Interview

On her most popular track to date, 2016’s ‘1080p’, the rapper Sammus exorcizes her demons, spitting bars about her struggles. She’s trying to find a place in academia as a black woman, undergoing therapy, dealing with imposter syndrome and navigating a breakup. The song goes so deep into her pain, she tells me, that she often cries after performing it live. “I think what ended up happening was that I started to be, how can I put it, it’s almost like people would come to the shows to consume my sadness, if that makes any sense.”

She isn’t complaining as she says this, rather she’s trying to articulate the emotional toll this performance of sadness takes, and the consequences of performing her pain not just for herself but for her fans and the world. It’s got her thinking about what she wants to put out there, she tells me. More specifically it’s got her thinking about how she can translate the more joyful aspects of her life into deep, textured music that feels just as connected as the sad stuff.

“Folks will, right from jump, be ‘play ‘1080p’’, ‘Do the song about depression’, ‘Do the song about sadness’ or, you know, ‘I love that you talk about being in your feelings and what it means to be hurt.’” She laughs as she’s saying this. We are not having a miserable conversation. “Because there’s a natural audience for those kinds of songs, people feel those are the most meaningful, often. Folks love to see it. I think a lot of fans of music, myself included, will think the most beautiful songs their favourite artists have written have come from moments of deep hurt or deep tragedy. But with joy it can come across as corny, or not as emotionally deep as the other side of things. So I want to challenge myself to write songs that are of course grappling with the moment and the heaviness of some of the things we’re dealing with, but temper that with who I am. Because I’m not just a sad girl. I have tremendous joy.”

Thinking about her work in this nuanced, careful way is characteristic of Sammus’ style. She’s been labelled a ‘conscious rapper’, because of the intelligence and political inflections of her music. But this label, like others (she earned a reputation as what she calls a “nerd-geek rapper” after releasing the album ‘Another M’ in 2014, based on the video-game Metroid), she rejects. Her latest music, she explains, is about showcasing the complexity of who she is outside those labels. 2016’s ‘Pieces in Space’, her debut release on the Don Giovanni label, was the beginning of that journey, and the album she’s working on right now will extend her exploration and rejection of the identities she’s forced to wear by others. “I started to become acutely aware of how my work was being read and try to find interventions to that. So for example, a lot of folks would say you’re really lyrical, we love that you don’t talk about your body, you don’t talk about sexuality. Part of my intervention was trying to say

‘No.’ There are all these different aspects of who I am and I want to reflect that in my music. So I started making music that was about rejecting these ideas.”

— Music and academia — Sammus is the alter ego of Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo.

Raised in Ithaca, up-state New York, she’s spent a lifetime juggling other people’s expectations of her. An eighth year PhD student based in the Science and Technology Department at the prestigious Cornell University, she balances her hip-hop career with academic explorations of the politics of community studios (“multi-purpose music recording studios that are built with the goal of serving so-called ‘underserved’ communities.”)

Her forays into academia inflect her lyrics with a precision and accessibility that deliberately pushes against the obscurity and vagueness of much academic writing.

The musician-academic role might seem incongruous, but it’s a mash-up that makes sense in the context of her upbringing and family life. Both parents were college professors who spent her childhood emphasising the importance of education, while her brother rejected the family’s sole emphasis on academic achievement and filled their home with music.

“Music spoke to me mostly because of my older brother, he’s a musician [Disashi of Gym Class Heroes], a self taught guitarist. And he would come home and kind of show us all of the music he picked up in middle school or high school. And I was his kind of mini me, so anything he did I wanted to do too.

So I used to record music videos on MTV before he came home from school to show him all the things I had found. And in that process I started really deeply connecting with some of the cool stuff I saw.”

Throughout this period Sammus was experimenting across art forms, creating alternative worlds through story writing and drawing cartoons (she currently performs live wearing an arm cannon). “All these stories and illustrations for a TV series I wanted to have as an adult. And I didn’t know how to animate, didn’t know who you could talk to about making a series come to life. But I thought making the music for something like that would be easier, or more accessible. So my older brother ended up showing me how to produce beats on a computer. A digital audio workstation on the computer called Reason, and I just started making beats that summer in high school and just kept going with that.”

Early influences included Daft Punk and Bjork, who Sammus describes as “interesting, strange and untethered.” But it was Kanye West’s early-2000s work that really spoke to her, and prompted a move into the hip-hop genre.

17

Interview

“I feel like him speaking about his experience made me think I could be an artist. That it might be interesting to explore my experiences too. So I started making bass beats, started rapping a few years later.”

— The credit of working alone — Sammus still produces all her own beats, and works pretty much solo, despite some high profile collaborations, including on Noga Erez’s recent single ‘Cash Out’, an experience Sammus describes as inspiring. Both because she was able to watch Erez curate her specific vision, and because it opened her up to the possibility of working with other people, a move she’d been apprehensive about before. “I think I was anxious about that because so often the credit is taken from women when they do collaborative projects. So I think my inclination has always been, ‘Nope. If I’m not working with somebody else then no one can say somebody else did this.’ But I have enough music to share and showcase what I can do. So I think this is really positive and made me think it was something I want to do in the future.”

Allowing her work to evolve organically, reflecting on and learning from the past, is a pattern that Sammus actively follows in her practice. It’s what has moved her from working with academic objectivity to sharing deeply personal material in

18

her music. “I think initially, when I first started, it was like, ok, I’m going to talk about racism and speak about it with almost an academic distance. Like, ‘these are things that are happening in the world and I’m going to give you some examples of them.’ But as I progressed in my career and I had sort of emotional breakdowns and issues of confidence, and wondering if I was doing the right things, I moved inwards. And I realised that although I was doing things that were deeply personal it started to speak to the universal. In a way, like, being very specific in my experiences allowed folks from a wide variety of places to connect. Because it wasn’t necessarily the specificity of the experience they were connecting with. Although sometimes it was, like if I mentioned a cereal I’d have countless people saying, ‘Oh I love that cereal’, ‘or I watch that cartoon’, or ‘I do that too!’” She pushes her glasses back onto her face. “I think in willing to be vulnerable that has seemed to speak to a lot of different folks who are struggling with that, or who are made to feel that their experience isn’t significant or isn’t meaningful.”

I ask if she ever worries that such personal material won’t connect universally, and she nods. “All the time I have anxiety about something being too particular. Or even being too personal or too raw. There have definitely been lyrics that I’ve edited out because I wasn’t ready to have that conversation yet. And that comes from experience, the experience of writing personal songs and realising that folks were really listening to what I was saying. And at the same time it was really exciting, it gave me a lot of anxiety. ‘Oh shit, I really have to be mindful of what I put into the universe’, and that once it’s in the universe, which is kind of the conceit of ‘Pieces in Space’, it’s not my property anymore. It’s public and universally consumable. I think a lot about what it means to release these very intimate moments into the world and part with them like you part with your kids or whoever. Watch them walk along the street and around the corner.” She smiles. “I just hope that the road will be gentle with them.”

Make-up: Keanda Snagg, Hair: Franchon Pryor, Arm Cannon: Daniielle MacDonald

“I feel like Kanye speaking about his experience made me think I could be an artist”

SOLD OUT

SOLD OUT

SOLD OUT

SOLD OUT

SOLD OUT

SOLD OUT

Interview

Jockstrap Eating curry with a band inspired by Louis Theroux and meditation, by Dominic Haley Photography by Tom Porter

Jockstrap aren’t messing around tonight. Running slightly late as usual, I discover Taylor Skye and Georgia Ellery sat in the Jai Krishna curry house in Stroud Green (their favourite spot) having already ordered two thalis before I’ve even arrived.

“Sorry, but we haven’t really eaten anything today,” smiles Ellery, offering me a glass of wine across the table.

Eating with strangers has never really been my forte, so already I’m desperately glancing around searching for an icebreaker. Fortunately, I spy a holdall sat next to Skye. “Have you guys been at practice?” I blurt out, with a barely concealed note of triumph in my voice. “Oh, no, I’m going on a five-day meditation retreat,” comes the matter-of-fact reply. “I know, it’s kind of a radical thing to do, but it’s a bit like going for a run – it’s not natural, but you do it to have a better life.”

“It’s quite rare that you’ve realised that at an early age,” adds Ellery, her eyes following the two ginormous thalis that have just been delivered to our table. “I feel like most people don’t worry about this kind of stuff until they’re a lot older?”

“Yeah, it’s weird,” says Skye. “The year before I started school I had a few weeks of being really broken down without any reason for it, and that made me realise that I needed to take my mental health seriously. These days, though, I feel like it’s become the basis for a lot of what I do. It’s more than a defence against breakdowns and more of how I live if you know what I mean?”

Sitting in curry houses chatting about meditation and smartphone addiction isn’t the most conventional way to start an interview, but, then, Jockstrap aren’t really a conventional band. An eclectic mix of influences have coalesced around Skye and Ellery, and their sound is a glorious hodge-podge of pop, jazz and synthetic sounds, that effortlessly manages to navigate romantic, big band-style compositions through kaleidoscopic seas of electronic dream pop.

20

Interview

“We were in the same halls at the Guildhall School of Music,” Ellery recalls when I ask her about how Jockstrap got their start. “I was listening to a lot of Paul Simon and writing songs when I came across Taylor’s productions on Facebook. I had all these bare bones of songs, and I started to envision them through his aesthetic. It made perfect sense to start making music with him.”

“To be fair, we didn’t have any specific influences, we both liked what each other did and we just thought it would be interesting to see what it sounded like meshed together,” continues Skye, picking up the story. “We didn’t start out trying to make a certain sound or anything like that, in a way, it’s almost like we came at it the other way.”

— My mum hates it — With the music being a blend of ethereal chamber pop and delicate synths, I’m curious to find out the reasons why the duo landed on the jarring name Jockstrap. “I love how people don’t like it,” chuckles Ellery, with a mischievous glint in her eye. “I love the effect it has on people and the contrast it has to the music. My mum hates it!”

Remarkably, Jockstrap haven’t been a band for all that long. Having officially been together for a little under a year, the beginning of 2018 found Ellery a member of the hotly-tipped post-punk band Nervous Conditions – she was only composing with Skye on the side. That all changed when her band imploded in the wake of sexual assult revelations concerning their lead singer, Connor Browne. “Yeah, it’s certainly been a bit of year,” sighs Ellery when I ask her about it, “but we’ve come out of the other side. As well as Jockstrap, I’m also doing [new band] Black Country, New Road, and it’s great that something amazing has come out of it.”

21

Interview

“Backup options are a difficult place to start as they’re sort of like admitting that you might not make it”

Even though I don’t really believe in it, it’s hard not to chalk-up the rapid rise of Jockstrap to karma. Even before releasing any music at all, the band had already become hotproperty on the back of a series of well-received live dates. Now, with two singles out and a mini-album about to drop, the band have secured upcoming bookings at Pitchfork Paris and Iceland Airwaves, and have featured alongside ASAP Rocky and Mica Levi on Dean Blunt’s latest EP ‘Soul on Fire’.

Almost overnight the band (two at its core, five in total) graduated from a bedroom project into a fully fledged live group, featuring friends and coursemates Melchior Giedroyc, Michael Dunlop and Lewis Evans. They’ve recently supported Let’s Eat Grandma at Heaven and have some marquee slots in their immediate future, so I feel out Ellery’s and Skye’s thoughts on all this sudden attention. “We’ve generally been doing a normal amount of gigs,” smiles Skye with practised understatement.

“It’s been cool to play some proper venues, although we mostly play with synths and sample pads, so it always feels like something is about to go wrong.”

“Live, we’ve tried to keep things as close as we can to the records,” says Ellery. “Four of us are on the jazz course at Guildhall, and we’re all improvising musicians, so we want to keep that element when we’re playing live, but do it a way that is also very regimented. It’s cool when you can play live and sound exactly like you want – it’s such a skill.”

— Jockstrap’s weird weekends — With our curries demolished, the conversation turns to the band’s brilliantly weird videos for ‘Joy’ and ‘Hayley’ which have been released to promote the band’s forthcoming minialbum ‘Sounds In the Key of the City’, due out on Kaya Kaya in early November. Directed by Ellery and featuring a recurring cast of friends, the two videos perfectly capture Jockstrap’s idiosyncrasies with their dream-like production quality, romantic story-telling and quirky characters.

“I slaved away over those,” laughs Ellery. “We had just done the video for ‘I Want Another Affair’ (a track that was until recently the band’s only recorded output) and it was really fun, so we just thought it would be funny if we had a bit of running

22

theme to our videos. Like all the same people just playing different characters.”

The band’s latest single, ‘Joy’, is a beautifully lush sounding slice of romantic jazz accompanied by a video that starts like one of those home movie girlfriend montages that the depressed character in a revenge thriller watches while obsessively drinking, before taking a sudden turn into surreal electronic pop. The video for ‘Hayley’ feels a lot more familiar, however, and it’s no surprise to find out that it was inspired by Louis Theroux’s 2003 documentary about sex workers. “I only really started watching his documentaries about a year ago,” says Ellery as we talk about the concept behind the video. “The song is really about the woman in it, I thought she was so cool. Usually, he’s very distant with the subjects of his films, but in that one you can tell that he really likes her and wants to hang out with her. I was very taken by that.

“It filmed near our old house in Dalston on a bleak-looking road just behind Bardens,” she continues. “The idea was to make a bit of a ‘mock western’ so it was perfect really, as it’s a private lane so we could get away with whatever we wanted.

At first I was hoping to film it at a petrol station, but there was no way we’d get away with drawing a fake gun at one of those without permissions.”

With our meals eaten and our time rapidly running out, I ask Ellery and Skye about their plans after they graduate. After all, it’s easy to forget that both are still students and have their whole careers ahead of them. “There is literally nothing else I want to do, so I have to plan things out,” says Skye, reaching into his wallet to pay the bill. “I mean, people are always saying what are your backup options? But, to me, backup options are a difficult place to start as they’re sort of like admitting that you might not make it. Yeah, it’s risky, but it also motivates” I aim the same question at Ellery, who seems completely nonplussed. “It’s like anything, I suppose. If you work at it, you’ll come up with something good.”

Interview

23

Interview Two experimental drummers need nothing else but symmetry, by Hayley Scott Photography by Simon Parfrement

Rattle Nottingham’s Rattle – the ongoing musical project of Katharine Eira Brown and Theresa Wrigley – have built their sound on the unexpected, concerned with experiments in rhythm, metre and tension. With just drums as the focal point, occasional vocals flitter throughout, acting more as an instrument than a narrative. Imagine a more stripped-back, considered take on the tribalism of The Raincoats – though it’s difficult to assign any label to Rattle, who are an anomaly in terms of what’s happening in DIY scenes all over the country.

Following the critical success of their debut album, their second, ‘Sequence’ (out this month on Upset The Rhythm), captures the atmosphere and tension of the duo’s live performances, thanks to the input of their live sound engineer Mark

24

Spivey, who fills the room in the sound of the band’s drums filtered through reverb and delays. Their drumming style is the antithesis of macho, ego-driven drummer culture, simple and unassuming, but well thought-out and meticulous. On ‘Sequence’ they’ve simplified things even further, while also maximising them too.

There aren’t many bands around doing what you do. It must be an advantage in terms of getting noticed?

Katharine Eira Brown: I suppose, but we’re definitely a Marmite band. We stand out and people absolutely do not get it or like it – even hate it – or it goes the other way and people say they love it and that they’ve never seen anything like it before. We might be doing something unusual but we’re not running about the venue

Interview thrusting our drums in people’s faces, so I think we stand out in quite a quiet way.

How much of your live shows are spontaneous/improvised?

Theresa Wrigley: We have sections in songs, particularly the newer, longer ones, that are more suited for freer improvisation, where it’s fun to play with ‘unknown’ factors that happen at a live gig – the sound of the drums on that day in that space, the sound of the room – but most of the parts in the song are quite meticulously written. Because there is so little, if something radically changes in a ‘written’ section, it can sometimes feel like a guitar that’s out of tune, or a band that can’t hear each other properly on stage. The vocals are written to compliment the drum parts, so if the drum parts change radically it can feel a bit like a communication breakdown.

What is it about this type of drumming that you think works so well?

Katharine: When I started drumming everyone would tell me how unusually I played the drums, or that they liked my style of drumming, which often confused me, as I didn’t think I was doing anything special or unusual. I think you just play an instrument in the way you play it – in the idiosyncratic way that you would deal with any other situation in life! At the start I felt like what I was doing wasn’t enough, maybe it was too simple, and that I wasn’t really drumming, and with time and practice maybe I could build up to ‘proper’ drumming. I never had any lessons, so I’m very aware that I have very bad habits which probably mean my arms will stop working properly at some point. Theresa had been playing the drums for much longer than me, she learnt to play the drums properly and knows all her stuff, so she will notate what I am playing before she works out her parts. I think it compliments together really perfectly. Two of Theresa and we’d be too flashy, two of me and we’d be all over the place.

I first saw Jim White play with The Dirty Three when I was 16 and that was an amazing thing to see. He made me realise drumming is like dancing, and could be delicate and soft and beautiful and gentle. I also realised then that the empty space in a drumbeat is as important as the actual hits.

How do Rattle fit into Nottingham’s music scene?

Theresa: One of the reasons we like Nottingham is that it doesn’t try too hard to have its own sound or identity, so it’s fairly eclectic. I suppose that comes from being a small city with relatively little ‘success’ in comparison to Manchester, for example, but there’s a lot of positives to that. We’ve always had so much support from brilliant small venues and promoters here that have been completely happy for us to do our own thing and try something out without being perfect or defined straight-away.

I don’t think we’d have felt as comfortable brewing-up ideas in somewhere exasperatingly big or career-driven like London. I see us as two of the very many creative people in Nottingham who are ambitious in what they want to create, but don’t feel like they need to be in competition or comparison with others.

I often notice the fetishisation of women drummers. Have you experienced this? I’m especially interested in the way you’re written about because I’m always trying to get music journalists to change the way they write about women.

Katharine: I’ve definitely been told, “you are so great, for a girl!” – that kind of thing. Or, “I love watching female drummers. But you guys can actually drum too!” I honestly don’t feel I have to prove myself or anything.

Theresa: We very occasionally get that kind of thing – “TWO female drummers, woo!” – but I think partly because it’s JUST us and you can’t dismiss one of us as in any way the token or novelty part of the band, then generally people know not to go there. You’d go a bit mad if you wanted to respond to or secondguess anyone’s weird prejudices in your music anyway, so you just have to do what you do and hope that it inspires people in a positive way.

Your music is known for being sparse and uncomplicated. Have you ever been tempted to incorporate other instruments or do something completely different?

Katharine: I love playing with other instruments, but we haven’t been tempted to do that as Rattle. To play with other musicians as Rattle is another thing, though, and we’ve loved the few times we’ve done that. Ideally, all your time would be free to make music and then you could try out everything you wanted to!

Theresa: Yes, we’d love to expand it with more voices and work with other musicians, different artists, a film-sound track, the list goes on. But having said that we’re still happy trying to play around with all the things we can do in this small parameter, which still feel really infinite.

How important is it for there to be a theatrical element to your performances?

It is important, but not as important as making a good sound, in my opinion. I think I gravitate to more subtle theatrical elements too. We’ll try to coordinate what we wear, we’ve experimented with coordinating our movements for a one-off art performance we did earlier this year, and we’ve experimented with having visuals, which is something we would like to explore more too.

We’re quite lucky; we’re quite symmetrical, so sometimes we just go with that.

There’s not much lyrical content in your music. Do you prefer to tell a story using the music rather than focus on lyrics?

Theresa: Yes, I do. That’s something again that blew my teenage mind when I saw The Dirty Three. Warren Ellis would tell all these long stories about what each song was about, and then they would play a long instrumental song. As a teenager I thought I would explode. “How can music without words be about anything?” I love imagining what might have inspired a song as a listener. It’s like tarot – you can apply a song to your own life and experiences and give it your own meaning. I think that’s when music can feel so special. I’m not saying for one second we do that, but I love that in music.

25

NEW RELEASES OUT NOW

TY SEGALL ‘ Fudge Sandwich’

In The Red CD/LP Take a tour through Ty Segall’s musical psyche with his new solo album, Fudge Sandwich, a collection of Segall’s take on eleven songs that were originally done by other people.

STRAIGHT ARROWS ‘On Top’

Agitated LP/CD “Straight Arrows: the fuzziest, most catchiest, escapist, good-times vending, rapscallion trampoline shiners this side of the Murray River” - John Dwyer (Oh Sees/Damaged Bug)

EXIT GROUP ‘Adverse Habitat’

Castle Face LP/CD From the dank warehouse recesses that brought us Useless Eaters and Dry Erase, Castle Face introduces Exit Group—sharply futuristic post-punk with a pissed-off lean, antisocial lyrics spit over an abnormally locked-in guitar / bass / drums triangle, wound up tighter than a Swiss watch

THE WHITE STRIPES ‘Complete John Peel Sessions’

Third Man Records 2LP/CD Capturing Jack and Meg at the precipice of international renown in the hubbub of “White Blood Cells,"their two live sessions with famed BBC DJ John Peel are arguably the best document of the White Stripes at that time.

OCS ‘Live In San Francisco’

Rock Is Hell 2LP Here we have OCS - recorded Live, at The Chapel, San Francisco, CA in December 2017 to be exact.

Bandleader John Dwyer assembled his ensemble for these shows with players from the album and current Oh Sees members.

D.U.D.S. ‘Immediate’

Red Wig/Opal Tapes/ Et Mon Cul C’est Du Tofu LP The latest release from D.U.D.S. is a deepening of the sinister sonic territory they have been exploring, in various forms, since their inception.

LP / Indies Ltd LP / CD out 2nd Nov ON TOUR Oct 23rd w. Melvins – BIRMINGHAM Oct 24th w. Melvins – NORWICH Oct 25th w. Melvins – CARDIFF Oct 26th w. Melvins – LEEDS Oct 27th – GLASGOW Oct 28th w.Melvins – MANCHESTER Oct 29th w. Melvins – BRIGHTON Oct 30th w. Melvins – LONDON Nov 1st – BRISTOL Nov 3rd – NEWCASTLE Nov 4th – NOTTINGHAM

MOLLY NILSSON ‘Twenty Twenty’

Night School LP/CD In 2018, we see the climate changing, democracy crumbling, inequality and injustice erupting. 2020 examines the near future, seeking out clarity, reflection, renewal and opportunity. It contains anthems so tall as to induce vertigo, leaving the taste of Euro Dance in your mouth, albeit without a four on the floor beat. Here, the pop auteur is haunted by the late Prince, channelling Courtney Love and Lou Reed, anger and love.

LES BIG BYRD ‘Iran Iraq IKEA’

PNK SLM LP/Ltd LP/CD Long awaited second album from this stargazing psychedelic pop collective, with a slick production that ensures the trip is an aural joy.

DANIEL BRANDT ‘Channels’

Erased Tapes LP/CD A deeply enthralling listening experience, which sees Daniel Brandt build upon his distinctive percussive sound whilst exploring new and expansive horizons. RIYL: Detroit techno, Steve Reich, Tangerine Dream, Floating Points.

UT ‘Early Live Life’

Out Records LP/CD Latest release in the ongoing reissue campaign, Early Live Life is a compilation of some of UT's best live performances from 1979–1985, spanning their origins in New York City to their migration to London in late 1981.

4th Nov – 5th Nov – 8th Nov – 6th Nov – 9th Nov – 10th Nov 11th Nov

Birmingham Newcastle London Glasgow Liverpool – Cardiff – Sheffield

info@fortedistribution.co.uk

Reviews

27

Albums

Hen Ogledd — Mogic (domino) Sometimes, reviewing albums is relatively straightforward – listen to the thing a few times, frame the music with some observations, make a couple of comparisons, slap on a mark out of ten and send it to your editor. Other times, it’s not so simple. Other times, a 40-minute-long piece of music can prompt the kind of questions whose answers lurk only in the deep recesses of Wikipedia wells or within the algorithmic sorcery of Google’s cache, and before you know it, it’s dark outside and you still haven’t drawn the curtains, you’ve got cramp in one leg and a mug of cold tea beside you, there are twenty open tabs in your browser and you’ve lost a perfectly serviceable Sunday afternoon to stories of the power vacuum caused by the withdrawal of the Roman army from Britain in 407 AD, a historically important early-Victorian collection of medieval Welsh literature that may contain entertaining forgeries, and a seventhcentury abbess and twice-married virgin queen of Northumbria who later became an Anglo-Saxon saint and the etymological root of a Shakespearean adjective. Those times, reviewing albums feels a little like playing Only Connect. In a foreign language. Blindfold.

‘Mogic’, the third album by Hen Ogledd but their first for Domino and with the present line-up (and thus resembling something of a debut), is a textbook example of one of those times – from the band’s name onwards (the Old Welsh for “Old North”, describing the region of Britain running from roughly presentday North Yorkshire up to the foothills of the Scottish Highlands and governed

by Celtic Britons in the Early Middle Ages) there’s a density of lyrical content, reference and multiple meaning to this record, all presented with an enticingly screwy elipticality seemingly designed to

28

elicit double-takes and pricked ears, and tracks demanding to be restarted after 45 seconds to check What Exactly Is Going On Here. By the record’s end, the effect is not so much a musical experience as a multidisciplinary one, taking in storytelling, bricolage, poetry, linguistics, and even a dash of psychogeography.

To its immense credit, however, despite the entwined thickets that ‘Mogic’ presents to its listener, never does the album feel heavy-going. Indeed, through all the comings and goings of medieval monarchs and contemporary paranoias of malfunctioning mainframes (the comparison of the old with the new, the rational with the unexplained, and the organic with the machined, is well explored here) the record retains a charmingly earthbound personality to the extent that a thoroughly enjoyable encounter with the album could be had without pursuing any of its arcane deviations at all. Songs are brushed with instantly heartwarming elegiac grace or likably playful pranksterism, moreish melodies abound around deceptively funky rhythm sections, and free-associative lyrics float by, sung in a gorgeous array of Northern British regional accents, in a pleasing volley of language for language’s sake. Never is this wilfully “clever” music, but more the sound of four curious minds having a conversation, with listeners simply being invited to eavesdrop as much or as little as they choose.

A deeper dig reveals more treasure, though, and it’s at that level that ‘Mogic’ transforms from an entertaining folly into something more enthralling, strange, and also, despite the band’s medieval preoccupations, sporadically and obliquely reflective of the modern world, too. The deeply romantic ‘Sky Burial’ starts off like a paean to ancient love but ends up evoking online dating, as the kindred spirits described in the song are compared to “motherboard and solder” while the interactions of time, space, and heartache – three phenomena that Tinder et al seem so keen to compress – are also considered as Sally Pilkington sings “I’ve been waiting for you at the black hole/At the edge of love.” An aching guitar yawns underneath, amplify-

ing the poignancy and fleeting sense of a missed connection. Equally, ‘First Date’ hints at the digital stalking of a potential companion: “I know you well – three clicks and you’re alive, I should be a detective,” our narrator tells her date, although here the music is, fittingly, far creepier and more insular, an almost nightmarish amalgam of haywire synths and off-kilter electronic percussion.

Elsewhere, ‘Tiny Witch Hunter’, with its listing of scientific disciplines alongside more incantationary singing, elides the often mind-blowing discoveries of modern technology with the pre-enlightenment age of alchemy and witchcraft. That it does so atop a delicious post-punk groove and rounds things out with an ecstatic sax solo, all the while acknowledging the inherent absurdist humour by leaving in a cracked, giggling vocal in the chorus, only adds to its eccentric charm. The psychedelic experimentalism of ‘Transport & Travel’, similarly, wants to connect disparate ages: a robot voice recites modes of transport, both literal and metaphorical, in order of everincreasing technological complexity, from “horse-drawn cart” to “yellow submarine” and “expensive yacht”, concluding with “ayahuasca”, the traditional spiritual medicine with psychoactive properties used by indigenous Amazonians.

Meanwhile, a poem comparing a ceremonial bronze-age plate in the Kingdom of Strathclyde with modern-day satellite dishes in terms of their capabilities for information transport, is sweetly recited.

If this all sounds fairly outré and not a little bonkers, that’s because it is; in the moment, however, Hen Ogledd manage to make it feel like the most natural juxtaposition possible.

And then there’s ‘Etheldreda’, the album’s closer and highlight, named after and potentially about our aforementioned virgin queen of Northumbria, a hymnal, glacially pure elegy to faded glory and the interaction of memory and technology. “I built a new world from your memories,” sings Pilkington, “familiar but strange, confusing data streams, with visions from your dreams.” On the one hand, it’s a beautiful ode to an overlooked historical

Albums character; on the other, a desire to rebuild society based on past greatness in an environment full of unreliable networks, presented with such doomed/hopeful wistfulness, it could equally be an oblique comment on Brexit. Such is the phantasmagorical weirdness of ‘Mogic’, though, it could also be both.

Ever since Little Richard wailed “a-wop-bop-a-loo-mop-a-lop-bombom” 60-odd years ago, there’s been no shame in making music that’s as nonsensical as it is infectious. However, that Hen Ogledd have managed to create something that’s instantly accessible, superficially daft, and also full of slowrevealing wrinkles and crannies packed with genuine intrigue is proof that depth needn’t be dull, obscurity needn’t be off-putting, and that the gamut of what constitutes pioneering pop music in 2018 is potentially as broad as it’s ever been, despite the backdrop of disappearing live spaces, constricted cash flow and algorithm-driven discovery that can frequently appear so dispiriting.

In that way, in fact, ‘Mogic’ is actually slyly inspiring. This is a record that’s not out to teach you anything in particular, but simply to stimulate your curiosity and leave you to your own devices. That’s a generosity of spirit that’s hard to deny, and, with that spirit, ‘Mogic’ offers a particular variety of hope that overspills its own rather idiosyncratic boundaries. Sometimes, describing albums can be far from simple. Hen Ogledd seem on a mission to demonstrate that simply listening to them, on the the other hand, can be a dream. 9/10 Sam Walton

Active Bird Community — Amends (barsuk) Taking everything that’s great from the past 25 years of emo, grunge and American and UK alt-rock, Brooklyn’s

Active Bird Community have pretty much nailed their first proper label-released LP. ‘Unwind’ is one minute The Crocketts’ chaotic delivery, the next Fountains of Wayne’s measured rock with the poppier bits of Jimmy Eat World.

‘Lighthouse’ then has the guitar tone and lo-fi feel of Willy Mason as singer Tom D’Agustino laments his fractured childhood, watching his mother paint lighthouses.

Originating from up the Hudson River, north of New York City, the band avoid the sound of the metropolis.

Instead, chiming in on the back of Car Seat Headrest’s rough-around-the-edges approach, the vocals are overreaching to the point of bordering on cracking in anguish, teetering on the precipice of collapse. Of course, it’s this DIY aesthetic and the ramshackle, off kilter performances that gives this record its charm.

And with ‘Amends’ being ABC’s first album on Barsuk Records, rather than a self-release, there is just the right amount of production to lift the tracks from their home demo forms, so that it’s just big and bright enough. 7/10 James Auton

J Mascis — Elastic Days (sub pop) In front of a couple of flat-topped mountains – half looking like a desert crag, half like the BFG’s dining-room table – a drawing of a grown woman in fairy wings is prodding the sleeping feet of someone covered by a rug. The artwork attached to J Mascis’s ‘Elastic Days’ looks like the emo-kid’s sketchbook descent from 2014’s ‘Tied To A Star’ (a comically glum scene of furry owls with feet and horns) and 2011’s ‘Several Shades of Why’ (a furry ghost floating on half an upturned coconut). It’s an unsurprisingly awkward scene for a vocalist who you can imagine feels a little embarrassed about the switch

to acoustic introversion from a career shied away in 30 iterations of the same muff and fuzz pedal with Dinosaur Jr. Vocally J Mascis sweeps into ‘Ghost Tropic’-era Jason Molina or ‘Lousy Dance’-era Simon Joyner – mopey and nostalgic, scant but surprisingly selfassured. Reclining in a sturdy routine of vocal warm-ups for a reformed Dinosaur Jr’s touring schedule and singing lessons, it’s a less didactic approach to being a slacker. It’s also oddly melodic. The brilliant opener ‘See You At The Movies’ is wry with self-denigrating couplets like “Finding you was easy / Finding me is hard” and “I don’t peak too early / I don’t peak at all.” J later admitted in an interview that the album actually does peak here.

It’s not strictly true. Ken Miauri’s keys create a triumphant fully-textured alternative to Mascis’ penchant for major guitar outros on ‘Drop Me’ (although it also sounds like someone’s kid has got to the final peg of the piano and is just constantly pressing it), and ‘Picking Out The Seeds’ takes the singer’s vocals to a captivatingly wistful falsetto. ‘Everything She Said’ seems to acknowledge all the criticisms that will be lodged at ‘Elastic Days’. Each song is built with the same base structure; a ’90s jam-session that’s found its way into the new world where originality is applauded no matter what. As he sings “I wanted to build the same mistakes,” he dutifully falls into the same unoriginal pit hole as 2014. But that doesn’t matter. This is just a bit of fun, isn’t it? 6/10 Tristan Gatward

Dead Can Dance — Dionysus (pias) If playlists had existed in the seventh century BC then it’s possible that Dionysus would have used Dead Can Dance’s ninth album to soundtrack one of his debauched parties.

29

Albums An exploration of the Greek god’s myth and cult, the Australian duo present the work as an oratorio that stretches over two acts and seven movements. It’s a highbrow concept but one that’s immediately accessible.

Written and recorded over two years, it continues the tensions that have existed within the band since they emerged in 1981. Firstly, they’re not a dance band but they’ve been sampled

by Future Sound Of London, and the hypnotic beats on much of the album, especially the hallucinogenic ‘Liberator Of Minds’, make it impossible to sit still.

Secondly, they’re not a world music act but the instruments Brendan Perry employs here originate from nearly every corner of the globe, from the pivana (Corsican horn flute) to the gadulka (Bulgarian bowed string instrument). The vocals, likewise, transcend any one country, with Lisa Gerrard’s mezzo-soprano being used for universal ululations and choral chants on ‘The Mountain’.

The result is a magical sound collage of folk instruments, especially percussive, that’s woven together by place-setting field recordings. ‘Sea Borne’ opens with the ripple of waves while, elsewhere, there’s bird song and bleats to indicate mountainous regions.

At times reflective, the overriding tone is nonetheless so joyful it can be enjoyed and understood without any prior knowledge of the musical form or mythology. 9/10 Susan Darlington

Brix & The Extricated — Breaking State (grit over glamour) A band comprising of ex-Fall members, reworking classic Fall songs, was always going to be a divisive act. Indeed, Mark E Smith was The Fall, but Brix Smith-Start

30

also played a crucial role during the height of the group’s existence – if she co-wrote ‘Hotel Blöedel’, then why shouldn’t she be able to do what the hell she wants with it?

But unlike their debut album, confusingly titled ‘Part 2’, ‘Breaking State’ strictly focuses on brand new material. Still, naturally the spirit of The Fall haunts this record, in a way that’s subtle, as though it’s an intrinsic aspect of their musicianship. There is no escaping the potency of Steve Hanley’s skilful bass playing, for instance – a chugging, aggressive style and the driving force behind some of the most memorable tracks here, particularly the opening ‘Alaska’. Elsewhere, the rockabilly tinge of ‘Prime Numbers’ is buoyed by the technical dexterity of Jason Brown’s guitar contrasting the chiming delicacy of Steve Trafford’s atmospheric riffs.

There are moments here that dangerously delve into generic rock ‘n’ roll territory, but there are occasional instances of post-punk idiosyncrasy that brings the record back to life: the sporadic, jagged belligerence of ‘Dog Face’, for example, elicits the bold experimentation of New York No Wave.

Brix’s pop prowess also shines brightly throughout: there are even times when ‘Breaking State’ recalls the likes of Blondie during their prime, particularly on ‘Heavy Crown’. This is an album that’s lyrically emotionally engaging. It denotes hope and female empowerment and you can tell that this process was a cathartic experience for Brix. And with a backing band with as much history as this, it’d be pretty hard to get it wrong. 7/10 Hayley Scott

Jacco Gardner — Somnium (full time hobby) In 1608, Johannes Kepler wrote the novel Somnium. Regarded as

the world’s first work of science fiction, four centuries later Jacco Gardner has taken its journey into space as the inspiration for his third album. Albums like this send music journalists into a frenzy of right-clicking for synonyms, and, indeed, the thesaurus only has so many entries for space-age, dream-like and cosmic. They jolt us into a scramble for touchstones that might adequately explain to our readers what the strange new sounds produced by these vibrations of air can be reasonably compared to. And, indeed, if you’re a fan of Tangerine Dream, NEU!, Brian Eno or Mike Oldfield, there’s a fairly good chance you’ll enjoy this too. But ‘Somnium’ is not pastiche. There are touches of space rock, krautrock, prog and ambient, yes, but what does that really tell you? If you haven’t actually experienced ‘Levania’’s wiry bass grooves, gorgeous analogue synth arpeggios and eerie Hank Marvin guitar lines, I may as well read you out the instructions for a flat-pack wardrobe for all the good it will do to try to describe it.

I’ll tell you this, though: if Radiohead had the balls to release this, we’d be talking about ‘Somnium’ as a classic. 9/10 David Zammitt

Bill Ryder Jones — Yawn (domino) For the onetime Coral guitarist, 2015’s ‘West Kirby County Primary’ was something of a watershed record – finding a new audience by embracing a unique take on slacker rock, dealing in Pavement-esque dynamic contrast and lyrically unpacking the mental health conditions that have been a consistent feature of his life. “There’s a fortune to be had,” he reflects on opening track ‘There’s Something On Your Mind’, “in telling people that you’re sad.”

‘Yawn’ is a much gentler record than its predecessor; one that’s much more ornate with moments of quite straight-

Albums forward prettiness, and to Jones’ credit there’s no attempt to turn the last record’s success into a formula. The instrumentation is broader too – note the sparse but haunting strings on the delicate ‘Recover’ and the glistening feedback that seeps through ‘No One’s Trying to Kill You’.

The first of his albums to be recorded at his newly built studios in Merseyside, Jones’ focus has shifted to the local and the familial. ‘Mither’ (that’s North West slang for bother) observes his relationship with his mother, and to emphasise the locality includes lyrical contributions from Jones’ Liverpool songwriting hero Mick Head.

To be sure, ‘Yawn’ offers few surprises, but near the close of the record tracks like ‘Don’t Be Scared, I Love You’ land harder through the accumulated weight of the album behind it, locking you into its woozy, late night motorway melancholia. 7/10 Fergal Kinney

Shit & Shine — Bad Vibes (rocket) In the late 1990s, a condition known as “Czech Neck” was invented by producers of Channel 4’s satirical masterpiece Brass Eye. Caused by the fictitious drug “Cake”, it turned rats into space hoppers, made recipients throw up their own pelvis bones and led Conservative MP David Amess to use the phrase “big yellow death bullet” in parliament.

Sensationalism has rarely left acid house and its experimental noise offshoots, and its frontrunners have rarely been allowed a platform to hit back. While it possesses little political agenda, Shit & Shine’s fourth album on Rocket Recordings strikes with an edge of satire and absurdism that clicks with the custard gannets of Brass Eye as much as stands it out as a demolition job within its own genre worth listening to.

Musically, the 303-led acid nostalgia of ‘Bad Vibes’ soundtracks the exercise video for the apocalypse. A reductive interview sample on ‘Bottle Brush’ opens by asking “You don’t want to talk about what happened?” “No, not at all”. It leaves that there. The binary BPMs on ‘Northwest Pool’ call for imminent takeoff. The brilliant ‘Yeah I’m On Acid!’ samples a heavy metal parking lot into techno mayhem, like Gazelle Twin’s ‘Better in My Day’ minus the red latex Pied Piper. ‘Backstage Passes!’ drowns a scratching hip-hop riff into muddy water over a whiney sample of basic VIP hype, before an even whinier sample rebuts with “Madonna can go to hell, as far as I’m concerned she’s a dick.”

Shit & Shine has curated the sound of a parallel world in which the UK’s bygone rave culture has mapped itself onto the social media generation. That exploration of excitement ends with a sharp and self-conscious social framing. Title track eschews the expansive noise of Yellow Swans’ ‘Going Places’ and protrudes into a convulsive, slow-mo eruption of the worst comedown. Where its artwork negotiates the alpine passivity of David Hockney’s California, Shit & Shine’s aggressive nods to acid and transgressive noise beckons the third summer of love, but one that’s built on a self-satirising sense of nostalgia and dissatisfaction. 8/10 Tristan Gatward

Crooked Man — Crooked House (dfa) As one of the first DJs to play ‘house’ music in the UK, a pioneer of the Northern bleep/bass scene, and a one-time member of cult ’90s act All Seeing I, Richard Barratt (aka Crooked Man) has always been iconoclastic. It’s a feeling that’s played out through his mercurial music career as a DJ, producer and trailblazer,

and that freethinking approach, alongside some of his more esoteric tendencies (he quit DJing in the early ’90s) saw DFA (via Tim Sweeney’s Beats in Space show) pick up on Barratt’s work. Not that he’d even really heard of the DFA label.

Still, despite his absence from the club, his dedication to spinning bassheavy house grooves and soulful vocals into fun dance-pop endured. He once said, “I can never quite get my head round DJs that don’t like dancing themselves,” and that spirit fundamentally fuels ‘Crooked House’.

The power keys of ‘Walls’ bounce off the mellow house of ‘Turnaround’; ‘Long Time Dead’ gets bleepy and breathless (think Alison Goldfrapp stilettostrutting across a disco-era NYC loft); and ‘Echo Loves Narcissus’ builds into a brilliant, interstellar mix of dubby bass and drizzling synth that underscores this album’s most compelling traits: music from a place of happiness, inclusivity, Sheffield. 7/10 Reef Younis

Baxter Dury, Etienne De Crécy & Delilah Holliday — B.E.D. (heavenly) Return to 2017 and Baxter Dury was sniffly-nosed on the heart-broken ‘Prince of Tears’. In a bid to rebound he’s been catching the Friday morning Eurostar for a series of “cheeky weekends” away in Gay Paree. And he wants you to know he’s been up to no good. This new project with French producer Etienne De Crécy and Skinny Girl Diet vocalist Delilah Holliday isn’t described as a band, it’s a “tryst”. They weren’t recorded in sessions, they were “liaisons”. Nudge, nudge. “It ended up being about an experience I had in Paris that I can’t talk about in detail because there are various parties involved,” says Baxter with a long, slow, guilty wink. The album is called ‘B.E.D.’

31

Albums (also their initials). You’re still not getting it? Sex, guys. It’s about sex (I think).

Basically, when Dury and De Crécy weren’t lunching on beef bourguignon they were getting up to “antics” and sometimes making this music. But the music isn’t all that lusty. De Crécy’s electronic arrangements are crisp and unfussy – like early Metronomy. If anything, it’s all a touch forlorn. Like the mists of a hangover dissipating to reveal inescapable reality. ‘Fly Away’ sees Holliday recalling tenderly “there’s nothing like us”, while Dury sounds fed up on ‘Only Me Honesty Matters’: “We’re just obvious / Listening to Florence + the Machine an having a roll up.”

A body of work that’s a distractory bit-on-the-side for all involved, yes, but it sounds like no-one’s truly out running their troubles by escaping to the City of Love. 7/10 Greg Cochrane

Chorusgirl — Shimmer and Spin (reckless yes) Experiencing anxiety as a creative person is a big hurdle to face. For most, there are two ways of dealing with it: take a step back to the detriment of your art, or battle through against the odds. On ‘Shimmer and Spin’ Chorusgirl not only overcome their personal grievances but also use them as an anchor to create something cathartic. It’s a record that deals with anxiety head-on, rather than eluding it for the sake of pop escapism.

Unveiling all of your vulnerabilities for the world to hear is a bold move and a quality that gives the band’s second album substance. Their occasionally poppy, optimistic sound acts as an effective juxtaposition to the undercurrent of darker lyrical themes, too. Chorusgirl have always shown a predilection for melodies that gnaw away at your subconscious – see the infallible ‘Oh, To Be A

32

Defector’ for conviction – but here the emphasis is less on the frivolity of pop music and more about the lyrical content.

You could still easily dismiss Chrousgirl as a band too caught up in ’80s post-punk revisionism (those chiming, reverb-laced guitar lines of The Cure, in particular) but there’s a fine line between outright derision and using your influences as a tool to make something of its time. In that instance, one thing that makes a record sound like it belongs to now is whether or not it reflects the mood of its listener via the society we live in. I have a feeling that a lot of us can relate to the issues Chorusgirl confronts here. 8/10 Hayley Scott

Miya Folick — Premonitions (terrible) It’s hard to pin down an identity for Miya Folick. Born and raised a devout Buddhist in sunny California by her Russian and Japanese parents, not much restricts her to any ordinary cultural convention. After years spent trying to catch a break at crap acting auditions, Folick decided to throw in the towel and set up a Tinder profile titled “looking for a band”.

Almost four years and two EPs later, much like Folick herself, her music’s character is manifold. This, her first fulllength album, is an impressive collection of quirky pop sensibilities that Folick employs through her own unique and charming vigour. Her beckoning vocal prowess on opening track ‘Thingamajig’ spells out the album’s bleary conceptual drive – something you can’t quite recall the name of but you know exactly what it means and feels like.

Folick’s lyrics are often deeply personal yet relatable. On lead single ‘Stop Talking’ she paints her own anxiety and insecurities with vibrant, dance-

inducing pop. On ‘Leave The Party’ Folick’s classically trained background and vocal pyrotechnics allow for the illusion of an extra instrument. Her ability to accent each lyric with her own fluctuating pitch and bubble gum eccentricity is yet another tribute to her music’s character and is sure to be developed further in the future. 6/10 Ollie Rankine

David Allred — The Transition (erased tapes) A meditation on growing older, ‘The Transition’ was inspired by the time David Allred spent working in a retirement home. The followup to the Californian musician’s collaborative album with Efterklang’s Peter Broderick, it has a nostalgic and reflective tone that’s in keeping with the theme.

Mostly recorded with a core double bass and reverb-heavy church piano, it continues his exploration of minimalist folk. At its most stark is ‘Randy And Susan’, on which his soft voice narrates a story of love and betrayal that ends with her needing “special care”. The unusual subject matter deserves centre stage but his delivery lacks emotional weight.

It fares better when he uses additional instrumentation to create warm layers of synthesised sound, whereby he renders Spiritualized’s ambition on a small scale. The sprightly instrumental ‘For The Penguins’ combines piano with Broderick’s layered strings to almost orchestral effect, while on ‘The Garden’ Allred generates Beach Boys style harmonies using just his own treated voice.

The subtle melodies nonetheless tend to meander between pleasant and slightly dull, much like Sam Amidon’s early work. This means that while individual phrases are evocative the overall album is too transitional to make a significant impact. When he wavers, ‘We’ll all

Albums be old some day soon / So we must start making a list of things to do’ on ‘For Only All’ it’s unfortunate for him that listening to ‘The Transition’ isn’t going to be on most people’s bucket list. 5/10 Susan Darlington

Joseph Shabason — Anne (western vinyl) Joseph Shabason’s second LP is built around interviews that Shabason conducted with his mother who is struggling with Parkinson’s disease.

This carefully constructed collection of music intertwined with snippets of speech and narration from the conversations aims to shed light on the unseen aspects of living with degenerative diseases, similarly to The Caretaker’s multi-stage album ‘Everywhere at the End of Time’.

Here, however, we’re confronted with blissful ambience, soft, jazz-y atmospheres and glossy electronics, rather than with distortion and literal degeneration of sound.

Shabason’s decision to clothe his mother’s words in music that mostly feels uplifting and relaxing is one that easily, and quite often, backfires. If one isn’t paying enough attention to the content of their conversations and centering their listening experience on the album’s conceptual core, many tracks on ‘Anne’ can easily be mistaken for downright predictable new age music.

The third track, titled ‘Dangerous Chemicals’, is a prime example: it almost seems like a misnomer, as it pleasantly lulls along for nearly 7 minutes. Similarly, the opening ‘I Thought That I Could Get Away With It’ is warm, slow and punctuated by charming trumpet melodies.

‘November’ – one of the album’s lead singles featuring ambient maestro Gigi Masin – is musically engaging but again, the lack of narration or context makes

it seem slightly out of place; what do its triumphant filter sweeps reveal about living with degenerative illness?

A few tracks on side B of the LP express the themes of the album more successfully. ‘Fred and Lil’, full of breathy textures and propelled forward with a Frahm-esque una corda, manages to expresses feelings of anxiety, while the following voice-driven ‘Toh Koh’ is disorienting and fascinating. The closing ‘Treat It Like A Wine Bar’ feels appropriately tragic too, closing the album with somewhat of a sigh of a song, and an acceptance of the passing of time, of mortality.

The highly conceptual nature of ‘Anne’ is its biggest weakness. Joseph Shabason’s decision to build the album around rare snippets of speech that carry most of its emotional weight means that overall the record feels pleasant enough, even though I doubt that was Shabason’s intention. The few moments when it all clicks aren’t quite enough to make ‘Anne’ emotionally heavy or engaging, which is what one simply expects from an album accompanied by such a powerful narrative. 5/10 Adam Badí Donoval

Dog Power — Dog Power (flying nun) Take an indie-pop singer songwriter and an experimental composer, both from New Zealand, and relocate them to Belgrade, Serbia, to work on an album, only to have them come back to their hometown of Christchurch to record it in a studio set between an abandoned stadium and the city’s industrial zone.

That’s how you get Dog Power: quite an introduction for a duo whose music is at its most cinematic. Their 7-track/32minute debut album is a dark trip into a world of piercing guitars blading through rarefied synths and ticking drum

machines, just waiting for Sam Perry’s voice to be released and burst.

Chameleonic and extraordinarily expressive, Perry’s vocals are clean and sharp even when his deadpan delivery melds with the drone sound of the musical base, only to get back to full-on singing immediately afterwards.

Dog Power’s love for the ’80s’ sinister new wave sound is unmistakable, but it’s once again a surprise to hear the sudden opening of ‘Love Potion’ sample the Stranglers’ ‘Golden Brown’ and then fade into the romantic mood of the following track, ‘Actress’. It’s probably the best example of the potential of the duo’s sound clashes – velvety yet obscure; attractive yet somehow hideous. 8/10 Guia Cortassa

Ian Sweet — Crush Crusher (hardly art) Jillian Medford released her first record under the Ian Sweet moniker in 2016, but really she was still hiding.

Titled ‘Shapeshifter’, it was a result of collaboration whilst she remained concealed behind neutral nomenclature.

‘Crush Crusher’, therefore, is a major bloom for Medford. Its ten tracks are all scouringly personal, each one a fulsome analysis of what she perceives to be her own personal shortcomings.

“You’ll go and I’ll get swallowed by someone else’s spit,” is the refrain on standout track ‘Spit’. It’s a sentiment as old as songwriting itself, but from her pen it is boosted back to torturous, tactile, visceral life. She finds matter-of-fact in the poetic throughout the album, when too many waste their time trying to do the reverse.

It would be reductive to describe Medford as a confessional writer; yes, she tells truths about herself, but only in an effort to navigate adult life and its maddening tangles and unpredictabilities.

33

Albums In ‘Holographic Jesus’ she describes her body armour and how she uses it to protect others, a typically complex composition, simultaneously vulnerable and confident, unsure and determined.

Opener ‘Hiding’ meanwhile finds her raw guitar fill out an arrangement that is expanded to meet the complexity of her writing; indeed, growling guitar textures dominate throughout, alongside song progressions designed to wrongfoot. The prettiest track is then saved for last. On ‘Your Arms Are Water’ Medford comes to accept her imperfections as positives.

She undertook to write truthfully about herself, and not only does it result in great music, but she even liked what she found.

8/10 Max Pilley

Georgia Anne Muldrow — Overload (brainfeeder) “I’m on overload and overdrive / I’m overwhelmed,” sings Georgia Anne Muldrow on the title track of her latest album, an intense exploration of love. Despite the overflow of emotion here, Muldrow describes ‘Overload’ as being an “experiment in restraint”. Yet its lead track’s smooth yet funk-tinged RnB licks are merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the amount of ideas that she brings to the record. Yes, it’s often laid-back and hardly frenetic (the exception being the twisting jazz fusion spirals of ‘Bobbie’s Dittie’) but ‘Overload’ is also crammed with variations of hip hop, trap, psychedelia and even glimmers of vintage pop. There’s the occasional moment where the diversity feels jarring, but these moments are few are far between.

These textured and often sumptuous soundscapes still leave room for Muldrow to weave often wise words on life. Across the album’s course she muses on treasuring the here and now (“Cherish the ones who love you because

34

you’ll never know when it’s over”) and the prevalence of social media (“Life is too short to have alternate selves”).

With ‘Aerosol’ she paints vivid imagery that moves from “Ice on the leaves in the grass / Bright balloons with kids attached” to “Bones break for a smoke under concrete canopies.”

‘Overload’’s most political moment comes on ‘Blam’, a track centred on self-defence with a defiant coda from Muldrow: “Before I be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave.” Throughout, Muldrow is boldly, unapologetically herself, unhindered by any concrete notions of genre. 7/10 Eugenie Johnson

Kelly Moran — Ultraviolet (warp) Kelly Moran’s breakout second album, last year’s ‘Bloodroot’, was an exercise in restraint: everything on the record originated exclusively from the piano being plucked, struck, ebowed or otherwise tampered with in order to break away from the traditional sound of the world’s most ubiquitous musical instrument. That restraint is gleefully discarded for her follow-up and debut for Warp, as acoustic instruments nestle alongside synthetic ones to create a soundworld just as unorthodox as its predecessor but this time far broader. Moran’s established prepared piano techniques are now joined by warm, fuzzing bass washes, detuned gongs and Eno-esque swathes of ambient drone, and her sense of precise investigation is replaced by something more impressionistic, abstract and macroscopic.

That’s not to say that ‘Ultraviolet’ is a wholesale reinvention – her piano playing remains spidery and exact, and her production aesthetic continues to draw attention to every timbral detail in the music – but more of a natural growth.

‘Helix’ is the sound of Moran stretching

out, revelling in newfound space to create a nagging, nervous environment of sparkling, delicate voids, like some towering, terrifyingly pure underground ice-cave.

Similarly, album centrepiece ‘Nereid’ presents a dense thicket of sound, its constantly shifting and clashing modes and restless percussions evoking a humid rainforest thunderstorm, while the ripples and eddies of ‘Water Music’ refract Debussy-indebted romantic impressionism into fluid, overlapping and pleasingly complex lines.

Indeed, while little on ‘Ultraviolet’ could be described as conventional, Moran nonetheless lets that love for romantic piano music and traditional prettiness run far freer than hitherto. All seven pieces here occupy very specific emotional spaces, offering a utopian tenderness to proceedings that tempers any potential to veer into the dry, academic technicality of her avant garde training. Earlier this year, Moran told Loud And Quiet, “I like the Cageian approach, but I like applying it to different harmonic worlds, applying experimental processes to pretty music, and seeing what happens.” The result is an exotically spliced hybrid bloom of a record: thorny but soft, talkative but concise, relentlessly modernist but also welcomingly, dreamily lush. 9/10 Sam Walton

Laura Gibson — Goners (city slang) What’s the point of starting a relationship when the world’s going to shit? This is but one of the happy questions that broods throughout the sixth album from American singer-songwriter Laura Gibson.

Relationships were central to her last record, ‘Empire Builder’, but now Gibson is looking at family and domesticity through the lens of past trauma.

Gibson’s father died in her teens, and ‘Goners’ is explicitly focused on the resur-

Albums facing of that grief as Gibson, now an adult, considers parenthood and setting up a proper home. ‘You’re the only home I’ve ever wanted’ she states on ‘Slow Joke Gin’ – one of the album’s clear highlights – but will that ever be enough? There is, thankfully, salvation on the track ‘Tenderness’ – an invitation to vulnerability, and its various possibilities. ‘The future is dim,’ she acknowledges on that track, ‘but at least it’s clear.’

You don’t listen to Gibson for sonic innovation, but all the same there’s consistent surprises and depths on this record. Take ‘Domestication’, lifted by a soaring, widescreen string section and an insistent, almost motorik drums. And in her writing, your assumptions are always there to be questioned – ‘Marjory’ begins as an after-hours character study, before its central character transforms into a werewolf and the track morphs into an Angela Carter-esque comment on femininity. Hope despite the times on a thoughtful and direct progression. 7/10 Fergal Kinney

Eyedress — Sensitive G (lex) Eyedress’ third album, ‘Manila Ice’ (forgive the title), was a collection made in Manila, about Manila, for Manila. That was Idris Vicuña returning home to the Philippines after a stint in the UK in 2015 to work with the most “passionate and serious” artists in his town to produce something that was “about my friends, about my family.”

‘Sensitive G’ is a more isolated pursuit, recorded almost entirely by himself in his bedroom. Once again he mixes the local, national and global.

There are songs informed by his recent parenthood (‘My Child Old Soul’) and love (‘Suntory Times’). Manila appears as an influence again on the prickly

Suicide-esque punk song ‘No Love In The City’ (“The problem with society gives me anxiety,” he sings with an almost cartoonish snarl). And then there’s, well, some even bigger stuff. ‘Toxic Masculinity’, ‘Cure for Cancer’ and ‘Xenophobia’ each tackle a separate societal scourge.

It’s self-editing, or lack of it, that trips ‘Sensitive G’ up, though. There are 20 tracks here, and when the majority are delivered in Eyedress’ trademark loungey lo-fi melding of the sounds of Connan Mockasin, Luke Steele and Mac DeMarco, even the sharpest of attention spans begin to stray. 5/10 Greg Cochrane

Ty Segall — Fudge Sandwich (in the red) For someone with the prolificacy of Ty Segall (this is something like the fourth release of 2018) you’d think that a covers album might have at least allowed him license to relax a little. But, predictably, ‘Fudge Sandwich’ isn’t just an eleven track rehash handholding his garage rock forefathers. The fuzzy follow-up to the exultant ‘Freedom’s Goblin’ and his piercing collaboration with White Fence, ‘Joy’, takes from a roster of folk, funk and soul, swallows them whole and lets some psychrock digestive system work its magic.

The downside is that this magic rarely happens. Most tracks sound chewed up in the same homogenous stodgy texture of a fudge sandwich. The self-conscious rendition of Krautrock pioneers Amon Düül II’s ‘Archangel Thunderbirds’ stamps all of the magic out of The Breeders’ dreamscape version of the same song earlier this year. An energyless version of The Spencer Davis Group’s ‘I’m A Man’ plays like Axl Rose on laxative – the squealing guitar solo over FM-noise/ fuzz silences the Trojan-like production of the original. ‘St Stephen’ lacks imagination, removing the careful prog silence

that builds up through The Grateful Dead’s ‘Aoxomoxoa’. Even John Lennon’s echoing ‘Isolation’ loses its environmentalist intent in Segall’s exhaust pipe.

The greatest cover albums of the last few decades have articulated something: Johnny Cash rejuvenated the pervasive straw-chewing persona of country music on his ‘American Recordings’; Rage Against The Machine premeditated their split by constructing MC5 and The Stooges as politically reverent to their fanbase on ‘Renegades’; even Nick Cave’s ‘Kicking Against The Pricks’ – essentially a punk-rock karaoke record with more spelling mistakes than musical moments – was joyously alive.

The first bite of Ty’s fudge sandwich is tasty enough; a brilliant version of War’s hot-rodding funkadelic ‘Low Rider’ swaps car horns with croaky vocals. The delivery of The Dils’ ‘Class War’ plays like an energetic call-and-response between two bands pivotal in San Francisco’s nascent punk scene decades apart. And Gong’s ‘Pretty Miss Titty’ finds a dirgelike highlight in its esoteric protagonist, the big bad businessman (have you any love?). MAGA, etc. But at the end of it all, Segall’s fourth (a fifth has since arrived) outing of 2018 is the low point of a very successful year, an intriguing addition to a songwriter challenging psych-rock conventions, but a little hard to digest.

5/10 Tristan Gatward

Jessica Moss — Entanglement (constellation) When you’ve spent fifteen years as a member of a post-rock band like Thee Silver Mt. Zion, nobody’s expecting you to start making pop records. And so it has proved for Jessica Moss, whose second album is billed as post-classical but could just as easily be described as string-heavy post-rock.

35

Albums It’s not a promising start as a series of high-pitched, high-frequency beeps pan from left to right for a good couple of minutes. Try to imagine “future space music” as envisioned by a futurologist in 1976 when everybody thought we’d have flying cars by now; the soundtrack to a low-budget sci-fi. But via strings and brass the track builds and builds into something epic, something of real substance, imbued with a sense of power and importance. This opening track lasts over twenty minutes, and there are movements within it – its closing few minutes, by contrast, feel and sound very human and organic, though carrying no less of a sense of dread. The discordant strings of ‘Fractals (Truth 1)’, meanwhile, bring to mind the apocalyptic feel of Godspeed You! Black Emperor.

This is music heavy with its own importance and seriousness, carrying real weight, somehow cerebral and visceral at the same time. Vocals are rare, and where they do appear they are hazy and ephemeral.

And as a sense of deep, foreboding drama continues to run through ‘Entanglement’, at its finest moments it is very moving indeed. Although there’s not much to separate it from other fine examples of its genre, it remains an inventive, powerful and deeply engaging album.

7/10 Chris Watkeys

Pill — Soft Hell (mexican summer) Nothing is more tedious than the conversation about where all the political music disappeared to. There has never been a year with more American artists addressing the big picture, but even so, few embody the fury better than Pill.

On their second album, the New York quartet compress their brittle punk into even tighter nuclear boxes, Benjamin

36

Jaffe’s howling saxophone the emergency siren ringing throughout, a mutant variation on the familiar X-Ray Spex/LiLiPUT strain of punk history.

Veronica Torres’ lyrics are ready for every fight: late capitalism, female rights (“In a crusade over who owns the right to my body / What am I allowed to create or destroy?”), right-wing media, post-truth, you name it. The delivery is sharp and staccato, maintaining composure against the deluge of horror.

The album title itself is an encapsulation of the end times and at points Pill sound like the bloke from Munch’s The Scream leapt out of the frame and moved to Brooklyn. But, then, perhaps this is how we should all be reacting. This band took a breath after the 2016 election, looked inward and outward and found inspiration in the carnage. One of the punk albums of 2018. 8/10 Max Pilley

Planningtorock — Powerhouse “I was five years old, my mum was sick / Our dad was away and you were a prick,” sings Jam Rostron on ‘Dear Brother’, its light, flute-like whistles sounding joltingly breezy when matched with the story of a childhood trauma suffered at the hands of a sibling. It’s devastating, but Rostron is less focused on reliving the past than truly living the future. “I’m ready to let it out,” they declare. “I write this song so I can forgive you.”

‘Powerhouse’, Rostron’s fourth album as Planningtorock, is full of stories about strength and resilience: on the infectious shuffle of ‘Beulah Loves Dancing’, Rostron recalls how their autistic sister would dance so enthusiastically in her bedroom she’d make the whole house shake, and the gorgeous, slow-pulsing title track is a tribute to the mother who protected them. Such

vignettes are less explicitly political than 2014’s ‘All Loves Legal’, but ‘Powerhouse’ is no less staunch in its resistance.

The opening ‘Wounds’, with its woozy, electronic smog, is about the strength of “learning to live” with old scars rather than existing in fear of them; the bright, blurting synths of ‘Non-Binary Femme’ finds Rostron repeating the title over and over until it feels like a defiant mantra; and the sultry, RnB-kissed ‘Transome’ is a suitably sexy soundtrack for their account of enjoying physical pleasure “with my body all femme and my face all masc.” It’s a refusal to be boxed in or live by anyone else’s terms, and throbs with freedom, pleasure and unexplored possibilities. 8/10 Ben Hewitt

Stephen Steinbrink — Utopia Teased (melodic) In December 2016 a fatal fire broke out in the Ghost Ship warehouse in Oakland, California. The warehouse was home to an artistic collective informally known as Sata Yugya, and on the night around fifty people were in the building to watch a host of house acts.

Thirty six people died in the tragedy, including a friend of local DIY musician Stephen Steinbrink. In the months that followed, Steinbrink stayed locked away in his studio, taking LSD and writing and recording around the clock. The resulting album, ‘Utopia Teased’, works through his overwhelming feelings of loss with surprising lightness.

The album’s beating heart is the idea that most people are made up of other people, that we are all pieces of one another. The spaced-out ‘A Part of Me is A Part of You’ tackles the pain this causes in romantic relationships, while ‘I’m Never Changing Who You Are’, the record’s wounded closer, finds peace in resigning yourself to the state of things

Albums as Steinbrink sings ‘I only got the time I’ve got, and I’m not spending it in pain.’

Similarly, the bubbling, acoustic ‘Mom’ dreams of childhood contentment and safety, and is the most tender point on an album brimming with it. ‘Zappa Dreams’ is almost as sweet, Steinbrink’s version of Rosie Steffy’s original spinning into psychedelia in a way that is (probably) only partially down to all that LSD. Born as it is from grief, ‘Utopia Teased’ still glimmers with life. 8/10 Liam Konemann

Nao — Saturn (rca) Anybody intimately acquainted with Nao’s first record will no doubt have certain expectations for the follow-up. What they probably won’t expect, on the basis of ‘For All We Know’’s sultry, laidback R&Bcum-soul, is that anybody might end up describing the Londoner’s second LP as a jarring listen. Repeat listens, though, reveal ‘Saturn’ to be exactly that – initial run-throughs of its thirteen tracks won’t scratch the thematic surface, but further investigations begin to give you a unflinching glimpse of Nao’s mindset at the time she was writing these songs; a time riddled with insecurities at the prospect of turning thirty.

‘Make It Out Alive’, featuring a subtle guest turn from SiR, is a sharply relatable lament of late-night existential crises, whilst opener ‘Another Lifetime’ is nervously preoccupied with the quickening emptying of her personal hourglass. “I guess I’ll wait another lifetime,” is the line she repeatedly coos at the realisation that life-defining relationships don’t come along every day. Taken at face value, though, you’d never know that these tracks represent a dark night of the soul; they both simmer with more of an implied drama than an obvious

one, and the same handsomely languid influences that informed ‘For All We Know’ are on display once more – Sade, D’Angelo, Aaliyah.

It’s a dichotomy that Nao wields deftly and yet, with pop in 2018 increasingly defined by its diversity, you wonder whether it’s enough to clear the sky-high bar that the Jorja Smiths of the world have set with their genre-bending fearlessness. That concern aside, though, ‘Saturn’’s sonic palette and millennial anxieties are both strikingly modern, a testament to Nao’s perceptiveness as a songwriter. 7/10 Joe Goggins

Robyn — Honey (island) Now that purism in music has become all but synonymous with small-mindedness, it seems increasingly bizarre that rockist attitudes were widespread as little as a decade ago. The idea of indie darling Dev Hynes producing Carly Rae Jepsen, Beyoncé borrowing motifs from Yeah Yeah Yeahs songs, or Pitchfork naming Lorde’s coming of age opus ‘Melodrama’ “Best New Music” would once have seemed vaguely ludicrous. That they don’t is arguably thanks to the groundwork Robyn laid.

A star since her teens, the then 25-year-old singer bought herself out of her deal with Jive Records in 2004 so that she might pursue her creative vision without label interference. The risk paid off: 2005’s self-titled record – featuring the emotional thunderbolt of a single that is ‘With Every Heartbeat’ – successfully blurred the perceived parameters of pop.

Abrasive electronic textures were underpinned with hip hop beats and overlaid with symphonic strings, while Robyn’s assertive, often melancholic lyrics possessed an emotional truth that truly resonated with listeners. 2010’s ambi-

tious ‘Body Talk’ – her last LP proper – only pushed the envelope further, and its sparkling synthpop received deservedly rapt reviews from more traditionally rock-oriented publications.

In the time since its release, musicians of all genres have clamoured to emphasise Robyn’s influence on their craft. Combine that with Lena Dunham co-opting ‘Dancing On My Own’ for a key scene in ‘Girls’ – subsequently introducing the Swedish singer’s work to any stragglers – and the levels of excitement surrounding Robyn’s comeback are nearing fever pitch. It’s an unenviable level of pressure for any artist to face, but there’s no trace of trepidation to be found anywhere on ‘Honey’, even if it’s not quite the record that many expected.

Admittedly, it all begins where ‘Dancing On My Own’ left off, finding Robyn crafting euphoric dancefloor fare out of tear-stained introspection on the exquisite opening track ‘Missing U’. Shimmering synth arpeggios dance around Robyn’s feather-light coo, as she explores the dissolution of a long-term relationship at 120bpm. It’s testament to her skills as a lyricist that she takes a topic explored a million times before and offers fresh perspective on the subject, aiming straight for the heart without seeming mawkish in lines like, “There’s this empty space you left behind now you’re not here with me,” and “All the love you gave, it still defines me.” It’s the purest pop moment here, followed by the title track.

Also co-produced with longtime collaborator Klas Åhlund and Joe Mount of Metronomy, ‘Honey’ feels even more club-focused. Its balmy melody is powered by the steady throb of synths, hi hats and the occasional cowbell, and it was reportedly inspired by DJ Koze’s blissed-out single ‘XTC’. The niche reference point won’t surprise anyone who’s followed Robyn’s career post-‘Body Talk’, which has included collaborations with Röyksopp, Mr Tophat, and a project with Markus Jägerstedt under the banner La Bagatelle Magique.

Robyn remains rooted to the dancefloor throughout, whether she’s pairing deliberately vacuous party chat

37

Albums with staccato keyboards on ‘Beach2k20’, exploring celestial, string-flecked disco on ‘Because It’s In The Music’, or offering slow-burning sunrise cuts with ‘Send To Robyn Immediately’, which was written with Adam Bainbridge AKA Kindness.

Those seeking melodies with the immediacy of ‘Call Your Girlfriend’ and ‘Hang With Me’ might struggle with the likes of ‘Between The Lines’, which blossoms into four to the floor house from its minimal beginnings of pitchshifted vocals and a frazzled, one-note keyboard pulse.

There’s a subtler strain of songwriting on display, and the high impact gloss of the ‘Body Talk’ era has gone, lending a softness to productions that feels organic.

These developments are demonstrated particularly effectively on ‘Human Being’, a beautifully melancholy collaboration with Konichiwa Records’ other signing Zhala that’s hewn from minimal percussion and muted synth textures. Like much of the album, its charms only truly unfurl on repeated listens.

Consequently, ‘Honey’ isn’t the mainstream-conquering comeback that many fans might have hoped for. It is, however, the logical next step for an artist who has always prioritised creative fulfilment ahead of external expectations, and a fascinating statement in its own right.

And by filtering her innate melodic nous through the prism of club music, Robyn pushes the dance-pop hybrid into exciting new territory. As ever, purists need not apply. 8/10 Gemma Samways

DUDS — Immediate (opal tapes) In 2018, can anything sound truly authentic? Everything is a rehash of everything that came before it. It’s already hard enough for new releases to escape the confines of genre, and our obsession to attach a neatly tied label on anything

38

even remotely exciting doesn’t exactly help move things along. But in times where the occasional oddball does reveal itself, its alien characteristics create its own separate source for spectacle.

Although it’s easy to pinpoint a few of their distinguishable features, there’s still no other way of wording it, I’ve never heard anything that sounds quite like DUDS. The band’s 2017 debut, ‘Of A Nature Or Degree’, presented itself as the official declaration to their music’s myriad manifesto – a take on Manchester post-punk never before executed with such jaunty and defining character.

Speaking this time last year to Loud And Quiet, singer and guitarist Giulio Erasmus described it as “a slinky rolling down the stairs.” It’s a great analogy and he’s right. It’s like DUDS are routinely tripping up and falling into the back of themselves, each time repeating in completely contrasting and calamitous fashion.

Their new album, ‘Immediate’, continues to expand on this theme, except this time by rubbing shoulders with some of the Manchester music scene’s more discernible traits. Introducing brass sections and a more industrial punch, the charming calculated clumsiness of their debut suddenly feels cold and sinister. If you didn’t pick up on it before, you certainly can now – ‘Immediate’ is smeared with the sort of Manchester grit that can be found only within the walls of the northern stronghold.

Pretty much all of ‘Immediate’ is baffling to get through. Broken up into twelve tracks, each no longer than two minutes thirty, it remains inconceivable how so much can be squashed and jammed into each fleeting section. Each song explodes into its own sporadic symphony, every time fulfilling its bizarre theme or purpose. From the triumphant fanfare of ‘Humour and Friction’ to the otherworldly industrial clang of the title track, ‘Immediate’ just sort of happens before your eyes with no chance of clarity or straightforward answers.

Strangely detectable themes run through tracks like ‘Nu Nu Nu’, which feels like the soundtrack to a weird ’80s crime series, except the serial killer wins

and murders all the protagonists in the most brutal and fucked up way possible.

It’s this kind of shock factor and unexpectedness that engrains DUDS’ music so clearly in your head. There aren’t any single standout tracks and there doesn’t have to be – ‘Immediate’ is quite literally immediate upon making impact and is one of the most convincing and standalone sounds to reach our ears this year.

8/10 Ollie Rankine

Smashing Pumpkins — Shiny and Oh So Bright, Vol. 1 / LP: No Past. No Future. No Sun. (napalm records) Set against years of controversy, acrimony and, more recently, telenovela levels of social media bickering, The Smashing Pumpkins (almost original) return is a diplomatic miracle. Lining up with everyone except embattled founding bassist D’Arcy Wretzky, Billy Corgan, James Iha and Jimmy Chamberlin face the usual questions about reuniting for an album 18 years after the last one.

It’s the conjecture that makes reunions such tricky things to navigate, particularly with The Smashing Pumpkins’ loaded history. With Chamberlin in and out of the band over the years, Wretzky claiming that Corgan’s wrestling-related money problems are the driving factor behind the reunion, and Corgan saying Wretzky has no interest in returning to the band in any scenario, at least some of that existential angst and energy found its way onto the album.

At just 8 tracks, it’s not the gargantuan 44-track concept Corgan once had in his head, but there’s a feeling of ‘Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness’ reimagined, as well as some healthy flashes of the grinding guitars and stadiumsized fills that once made the band an MTV staple.

Albums ‘Solara’ finds some of that “rat in a cage” rage, ‘With Sympathy’ drifts towards lighter, melodic ‘1979’ territory and ‘Marchin’ On’ angrily switches gears the way The Smashing Pumpkins did when they weren’t in their early 50s.

Even with the limited tracklist, there’s still enough room for ‘Alienation’ to reach ‘November Rain’ levels of pomp, though, like a bad pre-game rendition of a national anthem. We’ll call this a slight return, then. 6/10 Reef Younis

Fire with Fire’ injects some much-needed vitality at the midpoint, and an unlikely hookup with Barns Courtney (on closer ‘Give me a Signal’) pays more dividends than you’d expect.

‘No Tourists’ will doubtless fare better in a live environment than it does on record, but it does leave you with the unshakeable sense that The Prodigy are in considerable need of an ‘Invaders Must Die’-style reinvention if they’re to remain relevant in the studio. 5/10 Joe Goggins

The Prodigy — No Tourists (bmg) When The Prodigy signed with BMG earlier this year and announced what, surprisingly, is only their seventh studio album (they never seem to stop touring), Liam Howlett attempted to elucidate the album’s themes, and its title, by explaining that ‘No Tourists’’ ethos was that “there is always more danger and excitement to be found if you stray from the set path.” Put bluntly, that’s a difficult statement to square with the ten tracks contained herein, because they don’t meander far at all from the basic blueprint of latter-day Prodigy that the group laid down on 2009’s ‘Invaders Must Die’ and then doubled down on in 2015 with ‘The Day Is My Enemy’. The basic idea seems to be to pummel the listener into submission, with opener ‘Need Some1’ setting the tone, which runs at three minutes and twenty seconds, but plays like the same 32 bars of wonky synths on repeat, with not much in the way of a beat.

The title track and ‘Champions of London’ follow a similar formula, whilst the tracks that hint at the group’s nineties heyday – ‘Light Up the Sky’, ‘Boom Boom Tap’ – feel stuck half way between the then and the now. The standout moments come courtesy of the collaborators; a fierce guest turn from Ho99o9 on ‘Fight

audiobooks — Now! (in a minute) (heavenly) There’s a story about audiobooks that I wouldn’t believe of others.

It’s about how singer Evangeline Ling travelled across London from Wimbledon to Shoreditch in her Batman pajamas.

She was too exited to be working on music with David Wrench (the Welsh producer and mixer for Frank Ocean, The xx, David Byrne and others) to get dressed. Ling says she’d been up all night with “crazy adrenaline”. I can believe it.

All of it. Having been to a few audiobooks live shows, where Wrench sits surrounded by banks of analogue synths and even emulates Rick Wakeman’s hairstyle, and Ling spontaneously River Dances around him and hyperventilates into the microphone, “crazy adrenaline” is, if anything, a downplay. She definitely seems like the type of 21-year-old who wears Batman pajamas, although not because she’s a kook in the check-out-my-Pikachuonesie sense of the word – she’s a more convincing free spirit than that, like a child whose hyperactivity connects to their eccentricities and presses on into psychosis. ‘Now! (in a minute)’ supports the claim – an anything-goes debut made up of easy-to-dance-to pop songs and hard-to-explain spoken word odysseys.

It all starts with ‘Mother Hen’

and a mechanical swing beat and North African synth line that weaves around Ling’s angelic vocal. It’s a gentle and instantly interesting beginning, and no doubt twelve more tracks like that would be very welcome indeed. It also sets out Ling’s voice early on, confirming its everyday charm while making it clear just how good it is.

The remaining twelve songs aren’t the same, of course. First there’s ‘Hot Salt’ – the synth hook now has a twist of the Middle East, the beat thumps for the dancefloor and the vocals, shared by Ling and Wrench, become a mix of The Human League’s ‘Don’t You Want Me’ and White Town’s sole ’90s hit ‘Your Woman’.

It’s as good as pop gets until ‘Friends In A Bubblebath’ later squashes it quite impossibly – a track that combines Italo Disco with the type of euphoric stings that made the Pet Shop Boys so deadly in the ’80s. Ling meanwhile desperately explains that she doesn’t actually want to sleep with you, she just wants to share a bubble bath, y’know, as friends.

It’s lyrics like these that make the album what it is. David Wrench’s part of the deal is to make ‘Now! (in a minute)’ sound as good as it does, and his years of composing and working with sound files are evident in a record that would have fallen prey to getting by on Garageband plugins and zero budget. Ling is audiobooks’ eccentric voice and she’s bold enough to not hide behind even doubletake lyrics but rather lay out the absurdity in full view. On the heavily autotuned ‘I Get Be So Swansea’ (even the title appears to feature a strange typo) that’s cooing “Eating muscles, staring at your muscles” and later squealing “All of his children/ He’s got seventeen/ And they don’t like science/ They only took up P.E.” Although spoken word tracks ‘Grandma Jimmy’ (a pervy, dubby number about a trip to the seaside) and ‘Call of Duty Free’ (a nauseous soap opera about air travel) are where Ling gets really weird. audiobooks also do drone about menstruation (‘Womanly Blood’), in-thered glitch metal (‘Dealing With Hoarders’) and more. They definitely take the tube in their pyjamas. 9/10 Stuart Stubbs

39

Live

Tim Hecker Barbican Centre, London 6 October 2018

When Haruomi Hosono played his debut UK show this summer at the Barbican, it was introduced with the straight-faced precept that there would be no visual accompaniment. It’s not that his show needed one (for the most part he swerved clear of the audio-visual produce that saw YMO pioneer Japanese experimental and electronic music) but the intimation that it would have somehow diminished the worth of his compositions did a disservice to even the most audiophilic listener.

Over the course of a career spanning nearly two decades, Tim Hecker has never been one to hold the same divinity to music and music alone. He regularly shrouds rooms in a permutated mesh of fog, dry ice and darkness, while performing as little more than a silhouette behind it all. To play through his latest album, ‘Konoyo’, the lighting display is all the more insidious from the depths of previous collaborations with Darren Johnston.

Four players join Hecker on stage with a 13-stringed koto and a selection of traditional Japanese reed instruments – a melodic double-reeded flute called the hichiriki, a bamboo ersatz of an organcum-bagpipe called a shō (it looks like a

40

cardboard hat from the Spanish Inquisition), and something that’s known simply as a dragon flute. It’s later revealed that he’s also brought along a swimming pool.

There’s no pause for air from the impenetrable drone of Kara-Lis Coverdale’s support, which merges into Hecker’s set, distinguishable only by the radar-green stage lighting fully dulling her – and everyone’s – face. ‘Konoyo’ was a shift for Hecker, a man generally at peace with directness in his experimentalism. From being human in the face of electronic-music-as-a-glitchy-CD (‘Haunt Me’) and aggressive in a tide of ambient (‘Ravedeath, 1972’), conversations with his late friend Jóhann Jóhannsson seem to have stirred a much more reflective eminence. The opening track is entirely within itself, much more akin to the ambient destruction of Basinski’s ‘Disintegration Loops’ than the modularity of Four Tet or the noise heritage that invades Oneohtrix.

In this swelling to find a point, ‘Konoyo’ in a live environment becomes a huge, all-enveloping drone. The lighting display splays into a flat plain across the entirety of the Barbican, a pyramid forms as dust swims around looking like cirrus on top of chain-smokers on top of exhaust fumes on top of central heating breaking out on a crisp afternoon. Visually, against another tune it would bring serenity.

It’d take a brave person to estimate a setlist. It’s fully unstructured. You can’t see the instruments that you know are being played. There’s no chance to tell your friend how good you think it is.

The volume keeps increasing. You can faintly see two dancers tiptoeing painfully slowly through the swimming pool at the front of the stage. You become confused that the swimming pool’s been there all along. It feels as if you’ve been submerged in some dark and murky water and you’re not allowed up for air. It’s the kind of equation that Hecker’s misplaced before – the aggressive volume and a muddy mix is like being yelled out without an origin. The Barbican is the perfect space in which to experiment, and while ‘Konoyo’ is undoubtedly Hecker’s boldest stroll into ambient music, it’s also the kind of stroll that has unlocked just how powerful and menacing the genre can be.

Tristan Gatward

Virginia Wing Oslo, London 11 October 2018

Other acts might be referring to their music as joy as an act of resistance, but it’s Virginia Wing who are doing it – really doing it. After two records of so-so psychedelic synth pop, this year’s ‘Ecstatic Arrow’ was a clear statement of intent, and a successful crystallisation of their influences into something strident, ecstatic and wholly distinct from their contemporaries. Alice Merida Richards is often described as a glacial, understated vocalist – vaulting across the stage in a white boiler suit, this assessment couldn’t be further from the actuality of her onstage presence.

Under-remarked in reviews of ‘Ecstatic Arrow’ (do we have to read them compared to Broadcast one more time?) was the influence of Japanese avant-jazz pioneer Yasuaki Shimizu. Check tonight the spacey, looping drums on the sparkling pop of ‘the Second Shift’, not to photography by marilyn kingwill

Live mention its well-judged sax intro. There’s a clear influence too of the more cerebral end of new wave – Talking Heads, Lizzy Mercier Descloux, Laurie Anderson.

Virginia Wing have found an undermined sonic resource that gives real expression to the themes of utopia and hope despite the times that leak into every track this evening.

“I made plans for the future I want” sings Richards on tonight’s final track, ‘Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day’, “I’m tired but I’m not giving in.” It’s this defiance, and how forward-facing the expression of it is, that marks Virginia Wing as one of the most interesting, artful groups in Britain today. Fergal Kinney

Gwenno Islington Assembly Hall, London 18 October 2018

There’s an ancient Cornish proverb, so Gwenno says, that starts, “Eus keus?”

The full translation is: “Is there cheese?

Is there or isn’t there? If there is cheese, bring cheese, and if there isn’t cheese, bring what’s easy.” This curdled slice of Kernow mythology has lent its lyric to an electrifying track on her second album, ‘Le Kov’. It got her a BBC News headline

photography by maggie koo

over the weekend for spiking the number of Cornish language exams being taken by 15%. On the night, its English translation becomes a histrionic piece of spoken word poetry.

With one song, Gwenno’s a Welsh balladeer, with another she’s an intoxicating Stevie Nicks, floating around the stage bashing a tambourine against her wrist to a deliciously hypnotic synth lick.

Essentially a Cornish smash hit, a bassled ‘Tir Ha Mor’ features early and transitions into head-banging, then a love song about a computer (‘Jynn-amontya’), then a chilling couplet denouncing “the man who’s lost his tongue has lost his land.” It feels like Gwenno’s come to spread some ancient wisdom; slight of hand and Gaelic riddles feel rationalised and relevant, hidden at first within a lush soundscape then potent in silence.

‘Hi a Skoellyas Liv a Dhagrow’ sounds like ‘Ray of Light’-era Madonna with jam-before-cream, while ‘Den Heb Taves’ is a psychedelic exorcism.

When she admits she used to live here, the crowd replies “fuck London.” She’s almost bullied into an encore – “you don’t expect this reaction when you make a Welsh language record followed by a Cornish language record.” But even in the most saturated of big smokes, Gwenno’s provincial tales of mythology and kin become much more important than the last bus home. Tristan Gatward

slowtai The Underworld, Camden 3 October 2018

Slowthai arrived on stage at the Underworld riding the shoulders of his balaclava-wearing hype man. It was a fitting entrance for the Northampton MC, who emerged last summer with a sinister mix of trap and grime and an energy that sits somewhere between Taz the Tasmanian devil and Sid Vicious.

Met with a roar from a crowd that had been warming itself up to a selection of the year’s biggest rap hits – ‘Jumpy’, ‘Mo Bamba’ and more troublingly XXXTentacion’s ‘Look At Me’ – slowthai launched straight into a set that would see him steal a phone, lose his shoes and invite his mum on stage before the night was through, in a basement usually played by nu metal and goth bands.

His back catalogue is relatively small but the crowd at his second sold-out date at the Underworld knew it by heart.

Tracks like ‘Murder’, ‘North Nights’ and the quasi-feminist ‘Ladies’ all turned the Underworld on its head, but throughout his set slowthai demanded more. At various points the MC stopped the show to berate those still standing at the back and even climbed off stage to perform from amongst the more stubborn members of the crowd, bringing the mob of rowdy teenagers down upon them.

The name of slowthai’s current tour is ‘slowthai’s circus’, and at the Underworld he made every aspect of the show lived up to that name. At one point of on-stage banter, he revealed that he’d been ill for the past week and proceeded to throw up at the back of the stage while his DJ played ‘God Save The Queen’. As soon as he’s had stopped vomiting he led the crowd in a chant of “Fuck Theresa”. But the most theatrical moments came during distorted hell-raised ‘IDGAF’ and the closing ‘T N Biscuits’ when slowthai split the crowd for a wall of death and ignited several small fights by throwing his shoes, signed posters and other merch into the crowd at random. Mike Vinti

41

Film and Books

Dead in a Week (Or Your Money Back) (guild of assassins) They don’t seem to make films like Dead in a Week (Or Your Money Back) these days – contemporary, low budget, not-quite-a-rom-com, British indies that feature a fresh, young cast and a couple of ageing actors in love with the spirit of the thing. Films like A Life Less Ordinary (although not quite as highend), The Full Monty (although not quite as good) and Martha, Meet Frank, Daniel

and Laurence (although quite a bit less dreamy). Shooting Fish is a good example, or The Parole Officer: homegrown, knockabout capers where the love interest is there but comes second to the comforting joy of seeing our hero walk past a Nissan Micra on a suburban London street.

Despite it good intentions, the finished article of Dead in a Week is perhaps why they don’t make films like this anymore.

The sell is good, and very, very British: a theatrically tortured and failing writer who has tried to kill himself nine times already finally outsources his death to a professional, ageing hit-man struggling with the idea of retirement. A black comedy that’s not too black, but rather predictably absurd. On this premise and the movie’s title, I’m sure you can accurately fill in the blanks, one well-meaning gag at a time, from the illustrated choose-your-death brochure that assassin Leslie (Tom Wilkinson)

presents to troubled soul William (Aneurin Barnard, who plays him very troubled indeed) in a café in broad daylight, to the introduction of Ellie (Freya Mavor), who suddenly puts the whole ‘dead in a week’ part of the contract out of whack. A parking warden is then stuffed in a bin.

Predictability of narrative isn’t the issue here, though. It’s the hammering home of one joke in one cute fashion – the continual deadpan discussion of murder by the murderer and the murdered, set in overly normal scenarios (Leslie sharing a TV dinner with his Alison Steadman-lite wife; William appearing putout that he has to pay for his own death upfront; and so on).

Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if the dialogue wasn’t so on-the-nose, which even challenges a brilliant actor like Wilkinson, while Christopher Eccleston’s assassin co-op boss Harvey appears to have been given one misguided direction – “Vinny Jones, but more.”

Stuart Stubbs

Beastie Boys Book — Michael Diamond and Adam Horowitz (faber & faber) With the loss of Adam Yauch to cancer in 2012, the three bad brothers with the New York Sound were no more and it fell to the remaining two Beasties to document the band they had devoted their lives to.

Appropriately, the Beastie Boys Book takes the form of a grab-bag of cool stuff, mixing up memories and myths from the early days to the end. It’s a genuinely loving tribute to a friend. The hard work that has gone into this long-awaited, beautiful object is obvious and maps the journey of three lucky friends who in their own way conquered the world.

Lee Bullman

Back to Amy — Charles Moriarty (octopus) Seven years on from her death, the girl on the pages of Back to Amy is light, bright-eyed and full of promise, talent and optimism as she records ‘Frank’, the album that introduced her to the world and laid the groundwork for ‘Back to Black’. The title sounds easy and opportunistic, but it’s more than that. It offers a reminder that before the hollowed out remains of another star ravaged by heroin, cocaine, booze and fame there was a North London girl with a once in a lifetime voice. We know how the story ended; it’s nice to be reminded that there was a journey first, rather than merely a grim destination. Lee Bullman

Ripped and Torn — Tony Drayton (ecstatic peace library) Ripped and Torn binds together issues of the seminal Glasgow punk fanzine that documented the movement first hand from 1976 onwards. A museum of snarling feedback curiosities overseen by a gallery of safety pins and amphetamine rogues, the book hails from a time when youth culture was genuinely dangerous, fresh and on the edge of something great. The aesthetic is high contrast cut ‘n’ paste Xerox rock ‘n’ roll in all its sleazy glory, its source material compiled by founder Tony Drayton.

Still anarchic, raw and confrontational, this collection looks how good punk rock sounds. Still. Lee Bullman

42

STEADY HOLIDAY

TONY MOLINA

NOBODY’S WATCHING

KILL THE LIGHTS

THELONIOUS MONK MØNK

• BARSUK• OUT NOW

• SLUMBERLAND RECORDS • OUT NOW

MAKAYA McCRAVEN

WEAKENED FRIENDS COMMON BLAH

OUT OF MY HEAD

•INTERNATIONAL ANTHEM• OUT NOW

• DON GIOVANNI • OUT NOW

• ALIVE NATURALSOUND • OUT NOW

UNIVERSAL BEINGS

• GEARBOX RECORDS• OUT NOW

PAUL COLLINS

THE JACK MOVES FREE MONEY

• EVERLOVING • OUT NOW

TONY JOE WHITE

DEAN WAREHAM & CHEVAL SOMBRE DEAN WAREHAM vs.

CHEVAL SOMBRE

•DOUBLE FEATURE• OUT NOW

SUN KIL MOON

BAD MOUTHIN’

THIS IS MY DINNER

• YEP ROC • OUT NOW

• CALDO VERDE • OUT NOV 2

M NN 22 00 11 88 AA UU TT UU M

W RR EE LL EE AA SS EE SS NN EE W

Midnight chats Available via all podcast apps and at loudandquiet.com

Oral History Ad-Rock and Mike D zero in on three pivotal relationships that built the Beastie Boys, by Dominic Haley

Beastie Boys & Friends

44

Oral History In their manager’s office in downtown LA, it’s weird to think that Adam Horovitz and Michael Diamond are both guys in their early 50s. Talking over each other as they attempt to be the first to crack a joke or get their version of a story across, my conversation with them feels more like talking to two excitable teenagers than a couple of middle-aged men. The pair’s ability to derail any serious music conversation into one about iPhones and lukewarm hotel shrimp is certainly impressive, but it’s also really funny to listen to these two massive stars bickering like real friends do.

It’s kind of fitting that it feels unlikely that these two guys were two-thirds of one of the most iconic acts of the last forty years, because the Beastie Boys have always been one of the unlikeliest success stories in modern music. In between forming in Manhattan in 1981 to founding member Adam Yauch’s untimely death in 2012, the group metamorphosed from a group of obnoxious bratty punks into a real force for musical and social progression. More than just shaping the zeitgeist, for a generation of kids they defined what music could be. From bringing hip-hop to the suburbs to inspiring acts like Fugazi, Rage Against the Machine and N.E.R.D., and the theft of millions of VW radiator medallions, if you got your musical education in the nineties, then it was hard not to think that the Beasties were the coolest band on the planet. What’s more, they were also one of those groups who got you into other bands. Not only did their records turn you on to acts like Zulu Nation, Minor Threat and Lee Scratch Perry, they were also a gateway into a world of different musical styles. It was the Beastie Boys who introduced a lot of us to jazz, bossa nova, thrash punk and electronica.

More than that, as time went by the trio also grew to become the heart for the whole hip-hop DIY movement; and were one of the first bands to show how music could be a political and progressive force in society.

One of the coolest things about the Beastie Boys was that they always seemed to lead from the front, be it organising massive, festival-sized benefit concerts for the Tibetan Freedom Movement or addressing subjects like toxic masculinity and feminism. Looking back now, for example, a song like ‘Sure Shot’, where Yauch recognises his band’s earlier misogynistic behaviour and calls for the respect of women, is the kind of song a few male artists could do with these days.

Despite all these glittering achievements, perhaps their most impressive accomplishment was coming up with the band in the first place. Because, even though the stories of the hotel room trashing, cage dancing and subsequent redemption has been retold by a whole host of books, TV scripts and Internet chat rooms over the years, the story of how a bunch of spotty teenage kids hanging around the punk clubs of Manhattan rose to be one of the most beloved bands in the world is no less compelling.

Fortunately, Horwitz and Diamond have teamed up with a few people from the early days to tell the definitive story in a new memoir that came out in October, published by Faber Social.

Inspired by the band’s cult magazine, ‘Grand Royale’ (which, sadly, we didn’t manage to get into), it covers the entire history of the band, from their early days in the New York hardcore

scene right up to the Beastie’s final show at Bonnaroo festival in June 2009. It really does cover a lot of ground. However, with only a small amount of time to talk to the pair, our conversation fell on their relationships with three acts that seemed to define the early years of the bands.

Pay to Cum: why there wouldn’t be the Beastie Boys without Bad Brains Michael Diamond: “I’m not sure how I can bring any excitement or flair to it, but the story behind us and Bad Brains starts because, as a kid, I wouldn’t buy lunch. I’d get some lunch money from my parents, but instead of spending it on actual lunch I would just buy a cinnamon toasted bagel with butter and save the rest of the money so I could buy records on the weekend. I can’t remember who turned me on to it, but one of the first things I bought was the ‘Pay 2 Cum’ 7 inch by the Bad Brains.

Adam Horovitz: “I definitely remember you and those cinnamon bagels…”

Mike: “Anyway, I get this record home, put it on and I was like, ‘OK, I’ve gotta see this band.’ Literally about a week later, I’m hanging out at this record store and saw an ad saying that they were playing. I thought they must be like this huge band like the Clash or whatever, but instead they were playing this little bar in Chelsea and there was maybe like twelve people there.”

Adam: “That was the cool thing about New York at the time – you had to go out. You couldn’t just stay home if you wanted to hear new things, you had to head into the city and find it. I remember having to walk around and actually ask people what they were listening to. Things really didn’t come to you.”

Mike: “Yeah, you would go to things and things would just happen. I mean, I was so lucky to go to that show because a.) they were incredible; the Bad Brains were one of the best live bands ever when they were at their peak, and b.) that was also the show where me and John met Yauch, so there wouldn’t even be a band without it.”

Adam: I think they inspired everyone to form a band.

Everyone listened to punk music and had friends who were into the same kind of shit, so we all started bands. I mean, I assume that’s still the thing to do. Back then, it felt like all of a sudden everyone you met was in a band, even though whether they played shows or not was another matter. I mean, Mike was in a band called Young Aborigines that played one show and didn’t record anything, and I had a band called New Wave, Old Hat that lasted for one day in 1982 and recorded a few songs onto a cassette. I still don’t know who has that tape.

Mike: “It’s weird, but New York really was radically different back then. I mean, it’s always changing – that’s the thing with New York, the only constant is change, but the NYC that I grew up with had all these different types of music happening all at the same time. You’d find something and meet someone

45

Oral History there and they would be, ‘if you’re into this, you should come to this thing tomorrow night.’ I had this process of just doing random things that would, in turn, switch me on to all these other things.”

Adam: “I feel like you don’t really have that kind of randomness anymore. One of the great things about the Bad Brains is that they were just there, all the time. When they moved up from DC they would often come in and hang out at this record store that we used to hang out in. That was really incredible to me, as they were like real rock stars. It was like Mick Jagger hanging around who you could just ask questions to.

“It’s a thing that people of our generation says all the time, but these days things are a lot more figure-out-able. You don’t have to sit at home trying to figure out how to play that Ramones song or ask someone how to play it – you can just YouTube and have it right there. It’s the same with discovering new stuff; you can do so much shit on your phone now and you have so much more access to information. It’s like, if you hear something, you can just Google that crap.”

Mike: “Yeah, but you’ve got to get with the times though, right? I mean, you can do all sorts of shit through your phone these days.”

Adam: “Yeah, tell me about it…”

Like a Virgin: Touring with Madonna Adam: “We’ve never really known Madonna. We didn’t know her then and I still don’t know her. I mean, when she took us on tour back in ’85 we weren’t actually with her that long. It was like just a couple of months, really. It feels like it was this big major thing, but in actuality it was only a summer. We only really hung out a couple of times, but even then she was a big, big deal doing big things.”

Mike: “Yeah, even now that whole tour seems crazy to me. At the time she was like the biggest thing on the planet and we were like these three bums from New York who got to go on stage and piss everyone off. I think we got booed off every night.”

Adam: “Even so, it was significant because it was the first actual tour we ever did. It, like, set the gold standard for touring. We got to watch Madonna every night and be on this big stage with a massive superstar without even a real record out. It was like, this is school, right there.”

Mike: “It was like we got to see what a real professional musician looked like. We never really got to that point, we never got to write anything as good as ‘La Isla Bonita’. It could still happen, but I sort of doubt it at this point.”

Adam: “‘La Isla Bonita’?”

Mike: “Don’t front, Adam, that is a good fucking song.

Have you ever heard it come on at a wedding, people go crazy.”

Adam: “I’ve always been more partial to ‘Lucky Star’...”

Mike: “‘Las Isla Bonita’ kicks ‘Lucky Star’s ass.”

Adam: “I’m still not sure how it all happened. We were basically these three pimply douchebags who were only concerned

46

Oral History about where the nearest White Castle was so we could get burgers and she was thinking about private jets to Greek islands. I mean, I wouldn’t have liked to hang out with us back then. I think the only reason she kept us around is because Madonna was kind of punk…”

Mike: “I don’t know, man. If this was my game show appearance I would say ‘no’. It seems bold, but Madonna was zero punk. There were a couple of photographs where she looked like Siouxsie Sioux but that was about it.”

Adam: “New wave, then?”

Mike: “Yeah, I could get behind that. She was certainly a little bit new wave…”

Adam: “Yeah, but Mike, if you put on ‘Shack Up’ by A Certain Ratio right now, Madonna would 100% know and love that song.”

Mike: “That still doesn’t make her punk, though. Her ambition wasn’t punk. She always wanted to be the biggest thing on the planet and I mean, she’s Madonna and should always have been the biggest thing on the planet. It wasn’t like she was trying to make something that was going to turn the system upside down. She was no Vic Godard and the Subway Sect.”

Adam: “Dude, she was on ZE Records. That was like Alan Vega’s label...”

Mike: “Yeah, that’s true. I’d forgotten about that. I loved that shit.”

Adam: “Saying that, the whole thing was very exciting.

We definitely didn’t expect to be on such a big tour and I definitely didn’t expect to be staying in all those really nice hotels.

Room service was awesome – we had to pay for all of it, which we definitely didn’t realise at the time.”

Mike: “The escargot story is in the book, but it’s really your story to tell, Adam. I was an innocent bystander in the whole thing.”

Adam: “I mean, yeah, the whole thing is in the book, but the long and short of it is that I had a whole plate of steaming hot escargot dropped on my crotch.”

Mike: “In fact, y’know what, I owe you an apology, Adam.

I’ve thought about it, and if I’d really been on it in the same capacity of, say, Neo from The Matrix or one of those superhero type dudes, then I could have stopped it. There was a split second there when I saw the waiter unsheath the escargot and before it fell on your lap I could’ve dove across the room and saved you.

But I didn’t.”

Adam: “It’s OK Mike, I definitely wouldn’t have saved you.

I would have just watched a steaming hot plate of edible snails fall right on your dick.”

Sucker MCs: Learning the ropes from Run-DMC Adam: “Oh man, I can still remember first hearing Run-DMC’s ‘It’s Like That’ back in ’83. That song was like a massive hit in New York. I mean, it was a real game-changing record in the history of hip-hop, so we were completely in awe when we first met them.”

Mike: “We first met them through Russell Simmons, who is Run’s brother and owned Rush, which was ours and RunDMC’s management company. We used to hang out in his office or at Rick’s [Rubin] dorm room a lot. You might think, who would even want to hang around an office or a dorm room, but we were psyched. It gave us somewhere that wasn’t just a record store or a street corner to hang out on.”

Adam: “I mean, we were nineteen at the time and we really had nowhere else to be. We had to be somewhere…”

Mike: “Exactly, we were just finishing high school and I used to think it was super exciting to be able to hang around with all these college kids. Like, Rubin’s room had this big PA at one side of it where he’d play all the Def Jam stuff he had coming out and it was super exciting to even be there.”

Adam: “Yeah, and although Russell’s office might have been this super crappy office, you never knew who would be happening by. One day, you might have Kurtis Blow down there, and the next it might have been Whodini or someone like that. It was really cool just to hang out and talk to people.”

Mike: “Anyway, Russell was also our manager, so the friendship with Run started from there. It was cool to hang out with them and learn from them. Sometimes when you meet your idols, it doesn’t work out so well, but they were always really open and generous.”

Adam: “In fact, one of the reasons we got the Madonna tour was through hanging with them. Madonna’s people kind of wanted Run-DMC to open for them and Russell was like, ‘yeah, but they’d be twenty grand a show. They were like, ‘thanks, have you got anyone else?’ And Russell went, ‘well the Beastie Boys could do it for maybe $500 a show?’”

Mike: “It’s actually hard to imagine us being able to do rap shows without them. Jam Master Jay, in particular, was a visionary architect kind of dude. He was the first guy to really figure out how you should do a big rap arena show.”

Adam: “I mean, if you ever watched them play, they were easily the best rap group live and were the band that everyone wanted to emulate. Even when they played clubs they treated it like a massive show.”

Mike: “Yeah, and that was totally down to Jay. You have to remember that rap music up to that point was kind of designed for the club and Run-DMC was really the first band that realised that the sound had to be at a certain level if you wanted to play at a certain level. Before that, people would just show up and try and make it happen; they were the first people to really plan that kind of stuff out.”

Adam: “We ended up touring with them in ’86 and ’87 and even though those two tours were fucking crazy, I think those shows with Run-DMC was a continuation of the lessons we learnt with Madonna. Being able to watch them every night really taught us how to be a rap group.

47

48

Interview

I love In the high-end stores of Bond Street, Jimothy Lacoste preaches the positives of aspiration, acceptance and convincing the world that he’s a spoilt rich kid, by Gemma Samways Photography by Sonny McCartney

to dress 49

Interview

At Burberry’s New Bond Street store, the stairs leading to

the menswear department are lined with immaculate, heavy pile carpet in a fantastically impractical shade of cream. Sleek, Art Deco-style banisters guide the way to tastefully-lit chambers on the lower ground floor, its walls sparsely lined with clothing rails and covered in staff-sanctioned customer graffiti. Shop assistants glide around the space silently, smoothing shirts and straightening rows of signature trench coats, which currently retail at £1,495 apiece.

Jimothy Lacoste is stood examining the shoes. In his hands is a fawn-coloured loafer, decorated in Burberry’s trademark tartan, edged with navy blue, calf leather piping and embellished with a buffed gold chain. “Classic. The more simple, the better,” he nods approvingly, turning it over to inspect the sole. “£450. The perfect price.”

As we prepare to exit, Jimothy chooses a black marker pen from a selection on a ledge, crouches and carefully adds “Jimothy” to the lower regions of the wall in capital letters, the tail of the Y spiralling inwards like the shell of a cartoon snail.

— Slazenger socks and Prada trainers— As predicted on 2017’s breakout track ‘Getting Busy’, life has suddenly gotten quite exciting for Jimothy, real name Timothy Gonzales. Following a steady string of standalone tracks with enjoyably low-budget music videos, the Camdenraised rapper is now signed to Black Butter Records, the home of Rudimental, J Hus and Octavian.

His first release for the label was September’s single ‘Fashion’, the premise of which provides an amusingly literal framework for today’s interview. As he explains in the intro to the song in his leisurely drawl, “You know, I love to dress…

Clothes is there – you might as well take advantage of it. It’s just fun, bro.” To ram the latter point home, props in the accompanying video include a real life zebra and a white Rolls Royce.

Meanwhile, Jimothy lolls on a leather sofa in a cobalt fur jacket and crystal-covered Gucci shades, steals a bottle of champagne from a Sainsbury Local, and does his trademark hip wiggle in a succession of primary-coloured slacks.

It’s this vague whiff of the ludicrous that has made Jimothy a divisive figure. His deadpan delivery is less fire in the booth than easy-going Sprechgesang, the well-to-do North London accent and clear diction jarring with the use of street slang.

Lyrics are literal and rhymes often ridiculous (“I’m gonna have to dip, I’ll see you soon / Baby, don’t get sad, when I’m rich I’ll take you to the moon”). So far, all the subjects covered have been simplistic, including his love of London transport (‘Subway System’), bilingualism (‘I Can Speak Spanish’) and plans for romance (‘Future Bae’).

Mirroring the minimal production of his iPad-pop, his homemade videos have an endearing DIY quality, and through

50

them he’s established his own visual language. For example, by now we know to expect sporadic subtitles, rotating £20 note graphics, and Jimothy in smart-casual dress, showcasing his extremely gif-able dance moves in an array of urban locations, including on top of high rise buildings and bus stops. In a genre that prides gritty authenticity, Jimothy’s benign playfulness stands out, earmarking him as either endearingly naive or wilfully provocative. After our afternoon together, I decide he’s probably both.

Certainly, he seems to benefit from an enviable lack of self-consciousness. In the opulent Gucci store on Old Bond Street he breezily dismisses their trainers as “horrible”, within easy earshot of staff. In the walnut-panelled rooms of Ralph Lauren, Jimothy tells me that, unlike most people, he much prefers the Polo Bear motif to the iconic Polo player logo. “It’s cute,” he explains. “Shows you’re not insecure. Shows you don’t take life too seriously.”

Though still probably only in his late teens (his exact age is being withheld to preserve mystery), Jimothy is a seasoned aesthete, with a precisely defined personal style. He aspires to the preppy look preferred by “posh, old people”, boarding school kids and city workers, citing his staple pieces as cable knit sweaters, gilets, cords, pinstriped silk shirts and heritage labels. He’s not precious about seeming androgynous: the Gucci glasses from the ‘Fashion’ video were from the ladies department, and he intends to start wearing handbags as necklaces.

He loves primary colours, happily philosophises on his favourite shade combinations (red with blue, and green with black) and proudly offers an itemised rundown of today’s outfit. It is as follows: navy and white Prada sneakers (£460), scarlet Ralph Lauren cords (£50 from eBay), white Oxford shirt from Uniqlo (£24.90), Gucci belt (£265), Prada shades and Coach messenger bag (gifted), cream fur jacket (on loan from his older sister), Slazenger socks (£2), and briefs from a Spanish supermarket (around €1 for 3 pairs).

Jimothy will happily concede to being materialistic, but he retains a sense of perspective about his expensive purchases: “I love brands. But if [something I buy] breaks the next day, I’ve got no right to be upset about it. No right. Because as soon as I buy something, it’s already money down the drain.” If he seems surprisingly sanguine at the idea of squandering cash, it’s a position he’s only had the luxury of indulging in recent months.

“The first time I actually went shopping by myself and bought something was literally six months ago,” he recalls later, reclined on a sofa in a quiet nook of Soho House. “That was Lacoste. Basically, I got money from merch, and that was the very first time I had any money ever in life, despite what people think. Lots of people think I’m a rich kid and I’m really not. My mum would only give me £10 maybe every three weeks and every time she did that she was so upset that I would just spend it on spray cans.

51

52

Interview

“My mum would only give me £10 maybe every three weeks and every time she did that she was so upset that I would just spend it on spray cans”

“It’s weird because I’ve never had money, but I’ve always dressed really smart. And that’s because my older sister worked in retail and she was really into fashion. She would be onto me, like, ‘Do you want me to get anything for you?’

“But I don’t shop in these shops regularly. I had guilt when I first went to the Gucci store the other day. I felt really weird. I felt a bit depressed, even. But I need to remind myself that I left this much money in my savings account, and I’ve left this much money to spend on food and clothes. And that I’m here because I am becoming a little successful in life.” He describes designer clothing as “a medal” in that “it reminds me that I’m doing well, and it motivates me more and more each day to carry on and chase my dreams.”

Aside from the influence of his sister, it was graffiti culture that first sparked Jimothy’s interest in fashion, when he was hanging out around Gospel Oak from the age of 11. “I was always just in a typical tracksuit with quick [Nike] Air Forces. I had no style,” he laughs. “Because that’s just how everyone dressed, and you’ve got to look the same and what not.

“There were these older graffiti writers in London that I looked up to. I thought they’d be dressed exactly like me but then I met some of them and they were all extremely classic and smart. They just dressed like they had money: slim trousers, tucked-in shirt. I looked at that and then I looked at my situation and I thought it would be so cool to do the same, first of all because I love this style, but second because dressing like a rich guy even though you’ve got no money is fun. Even though your mum’s been on the dole for over 25 years and your dad’s never worked a single day of his life. Because no-one in my family has money. But when I was dressed like a rich guy, I just felt amazing.

I felt amazing. So ever since then I was just dressed really smart.

“And then later I watched this documentary on kids in New York in the ’70s. And they all dressed how I dress now: colourful trousers, [Adidas] Sambas or any slim trainers, tucked in shirt, sweater, a nice old-man-looking jacket, flat caps. I was like, ‘This is where he got it from. This whole time I’ve been dressing like these kids without knowing.’ And after that I really, really stuck with my style.”

— The Lamborghini — We exit Burberry and head towards Prada on Old Bond Street, past a gaggle of wealthy teenagers and two immaculately coiffured ladies being helped into a car by their chauffeur.

It’s an uncharacteristically mild October day, and businessmen are visibly flushed in their bespoke suits as they plough past us. A chrome Lamborghini cruises past, driven by a man in his 50s. While my default response is to roll my eyes, Jimothy is delighted. “He looked so happy,” he smiles, as it vanishes around the corner, “I love it!”

— Jimothy the blessed — Jimothy’s parents split when he was barely one, and he, his sister and brother were raised by their mother. They lived in Primrose Hill, a notoriously well-heeled enclave of Camden, at the top of Regent’s Park. “The council gave us the flat in Primrose Hill thirty years ago, so it’s all a blessing,” he says, gauging my surprise. “See, this is the funny thing: the way I talk, the way I walk, the way I dress, where I live – people are convinced I’m rich. But I talk like this because I’ve been around lots of posh kids, and because it’s a better way of talking.

“And of course, my mum’s from Spain so she has class.

So she’ll be poor but she’ll also be dressed like a rich woman, and the house will look well designed even though it’s a council house. A lot of people have money but they have no class. A lot of people have money but they don’t know how to dress. Do you know what I mean? Money doesn’t mean anything.”

He mixed with affluent kids at the local park from a young age, only to be separated when they went to private school.

When they hit their teens, Jimothy invited himself along to their house parties, and his socialising then snowballed to the point where he was hanging out almost exclusively with rich people.

“Literally, I don’t have a single friend in my situation, living in a council house,” he says, shaking his head. “It makes me sad sometimes. But if it wasn’t for those friends I wouldn’t be the person I am now.”

I wonder if Jimothy ever felt intimidated by his friends’ wealth. “Definitely,” he nods. “At first I was very insecure about it. But that was when I was 13 and dressed in a certain way, and all the other kids would be dressed really smart.

They would make me feel really bad. The funny thing is, now I’m the one dressed really smart, and they’re dressed like they’re from a council house. They go to private school, and they’re trying to dress like a roadman, trying to dress like a hood kid.”

While there was once an element of Jimothy dressing to deliberately confound people’s preconceptions, he now feels

53

Interview conflicted about being mistaken for a rich kid. “The reason why it hurts my feelings so much – and no offence, because I love rich kids – is they all know how to play the piano. Their parents could afford to lend them a decent amount of money or a car for their music videos. They could start a career easier than someone with not much money. Me, I literally started with nothing. It was all me, me, me, me, me. So when people think [I’m a rich kid] it implies I didn’t work for anything; that it was given to me. And that really, really disrespects me, my family, everything.”

If Jimothy was initially a fish out of water in his friendship group, he felt even more out of place at the special school he attended from the age of 13, due to his dyslexia and dyscalculia.

The way he tells it, he knew he didn’t belong there but stayed because the work was easy. Had he left, he might never have pursued music.

“At the special school there are no kids with insecurities,” he explains. “So I wasn’t shy to write a song and put it out there.

I wasn’t shy to make a music video. That school made me do music, basically. And the work was easy but that was freeing.

That school gave me a free-thinking mentality and a higher consciousness.”

In some respects, he believes the school protected him.

“It did get to a point where it was then scary to go to a mainstream school. Because I thought to myself, actually, if I go to a mainstream school and someone laughs at me for dyslexia, or for my parents having always been living off benefits, or for not having a father figure, I don’t know how I would react to that. [I don’t know] whether I would fight them, whether I would then

54

not go to school and end up on the streets selling drugs. If I went to a mainstream school – and it sounds really harsh and kind of depressing, but it’s true – but if I went to a mainstream school I’d either be dead or I’d be prison. And that’s why I always say with my songs that Jimothy is blessed.”

— The Gucci store — The floors of the Gucci store are covered in geometric patterns, in tiles of purple, red, grey and white. There are mirrored walls and staircases lined with plush velvet in a vivid shade of oxblood. In the womenswear section, we’re admiring the craftsmanship of a collection of luxe satin bombers in jewel colours, each intricately embroidered and painstakingly stitched with sequins. Jimothy’s eyes are drawn away from the glitz to a monochrome coat in the iconic interlinking GG pattern. “I’d buy that for my future bae,” he nods.

— The attention-seeker — There wasn’t money for piano lessons growing up, but Jimothy believes he inherited a “gene of rhythm” from his dad, and a fascination with melody from his mum, who was always playing R&B at home. Grime was a formative influence, as was UK garage, which he was exposed to via the older graffiti writers.

“I’d listen to anything,” he remembers. “If it sounded good in my ears, I’d put it on, whether that was Somali pop or classic house.”

Playboi Carti, Lil Uzi Vert, Octavian and Sheck Wes are all mentioned when I ask Jimothy about who he sees as his peers.

“Basically, it’s music that you can dance to but music you can sit down in your room to by yourself,” he explains. “Tomorrow, I could come out with a house tune, I could come out with a rock tune, I could come out with a bedroom pop tune.

Nothing is ever intended. You’ve got to come to [my music] with no expectations.

“A lot of people think I don’t take music seriously,” he continues, “and that’s super disrespectful. I will not put out anything I don’t like. So many producers send me so many instrumentals, and I am super particular. It offends me when people come up to me like, ‘Oh mate, I love your stuff – it’s funny.’ I wanna hear, ‘I love your stuff, I love your instrumentals, I love your lyrics.’”

And yet, I counter, surely he must concede that there’s a vein of humour running through his work? “Oh yeah, definitely,” he smiles. “And I love to shock people. I’ve always been a bit of an attention-seeker. But I think it depends. If people only find it funny and they don’t appreciate anything else about it, it offends me. Like, I find my own stuff funny, but when I’m doing the instrumental, I have so much passion and love.”

Considering the rigour he applies to every other area of his life, I don’t doubt Jimothy’s discipline in the studio. Today he’s fasting, which he does two consecutive days a week, the rationale for which is apparently to “repair DNA”. “When your digestion isn’t going your body then focuses on cell replenishment,”

55

Interview

“Literally, I don’t have a single friend in my situation, living in a council house. It makes me sad sometimes. But if it wasn’t for those friends I wouldn’t be the person I am now”

he elaborates. Then there’s the cold showers he takes every morning, and the nights spent sleeping on a hard floor.

I wonder at the rationale behind his asceticism. What tangible benefits does he actually take away from such restrictive rituals? “The main benefit I see from it is mental strength.

So when someone says to me, ‘Can you do this?’ it’s easy for me to do it because my brain is so strong. You know, I’ve had no father figure whatsoever. I’ve never had someone to say, ‘Good job. Focus on your goals.’ I had to find that in myself.”

— The paps — En route to Soho House for our sit-down chat, there’s a pretty uncanny coincidence. We’re discussing fame and the loss of anonymity. “I’d love paparazzi following me,” Jimothy insists.

“I’d love it.” Suddenly, a young man steps into Jimothy’s path.

“Can I just interrupt, man?” he asks, clearly attempting to play it cool. “I think your shit’s dope.” They take a selfie together, the fan departs and we continue our journey, Jimothy wearing a contented grin.

— Simple aspirations — As our conversation draws to a close, the subject turns to aspiration. For Jimothy, is success ultimately measured in luxury clothing, or is there something loftier he’s aiming for? “A good

56

income,” he replies without any hesitation, “to the point where I’ve got my own house and I can treat myself, and I can have kids and I can have a wife.” So in essence, he’s seeking security? “Definitely. It’s something I’ve never had. It would just be amazing to have it. Something that seems a little bit impossible.”

What else? “Having a fan base that loves me and I love them. I love being a role model. I want all my fans to be happy to express themselves and to have fun at my shows and to just go crazy. To let their emotions out and to let go of stress, and to not be insecure and not be those kids that judge other people. I want my fans to just be nice people. Like me. Don’t judge people, don’t call other people names, treat everyone with equality. Simple things really.”

While it’s heartening to hear the connection Jimothy feels to his fans, I wonder if his increasingly lavish lifestyle might eventually create resentment. “It should be the opposite,” he insists. “They should look at me and think. ‘1. I’m happy for Jimothy – he’s doing well. And 2. that’s motivation for me.’

“When I now see someone with a sports car it makes me happy, like, that could be me one day. That motivates me. I’m not gonna hate on them; that’s how unsuccessful people think.

You’ve got to be happy for that person and aspire to those levels.” The way Jimothy reacted to the owner of the Lamborghini earlier, I ask? “Yeah exactly. Stuff like that makes me happy. You’ve got to use it as motivation. You can be like that one day if you just follow your dreams and you’re smart.”

Interview

ALBUMS OF THE YEAR

idris AckAmOOr & The pyrAmids

ThOuGhT GAnG

an angel fell

thought gang

e.l.k reCords

strut

saCred bones

Tim BurGess

WhiTe denim

TelemAn

JOhnny JeWel

aS i WaS noW

Performance

family of alienS

themeS for televiSion

gHostly international o genesis

City slang

mosHi mosHi

italians do it better

hinds

khruAnGBin

mOlly Burch

Amen dunes

The Vryll sOcieTy

i don’t run

con todo el mundo

firSt floWer

freedom

AnnA VOn hAussWOlff

luCky number

late nigHt tales

Captured traCks

saCred bones

City slang

courSe of the Satellite deltasoniC

Tess rOBy

sunflOWer BeAn

The WAVe picTures

Wild nOThinG

dJ kOze

inVisiBle minds

beacon

tWentytWo in blue

indigo

knock knock

italians do it better

luCky number

look inSide your heart mosHi mosHi

Captured traCks

pampa

make uP your oWn StorieS mosHi mosHi

Our Girl

AdriAnne lenker

dreAm Wife

Gulp

Stranger today

abySSkiSS

dream Wife

all good WiSheS

Cannibal Hymns

saddle Creek

luCky number

VAriOus

mATTheW deAr

agneS obel: late night taleS late nigHt tales

bunny

dead magic

great albumS every home Should have available at all good indePendent record StoreS SuPPort your local indePendent retailer WWW.rePublicofmuSic.net

57

A year on from his death, Charles Bradley still embodies hope in the face of adversity,

by Daniel Dylan Wray

Black Velvet

When Charles Bradley “the screaming eagle of soul” passed away last September of stomach cancer he was 68 years old.

He had released three albums in his lifetime, all of them in his sixties. This November 5th he would have turned 70. His final – posthumous – album, ‘Black Velvet’, comes out the same month.

During a period of what feels like unprecedented turbulence in the world, as we seemingly plunge deeper and deeper into chaos, division and inevitable environmental collapse, it can become difficult to latch onto moments of unadulterated joy and escapism. Unplugging yourself from the world becomes harder and harder as it spins around with such dizzying pace it creates a sense of perma-nausea. It’s led me to think about Charles Bradley a lot recently and about his ability to turn pain of excruciating proportions into moments of overpowering beauty and flooding catharsis. And how much I miss it.

Charles had an extraordinarily difficult life (which we covered in detail in our 2014 cover feature with him) that involved homelessness, jail, a lot of death, pain and suffering and a deeply buried musical talent that wasn’t truly presented to the

58

59

Essay world until his was in the final stretch of his life. Yet the six years he got being able to be a full-time touring and recording artist he used as a giant connecter between audience and performer to inject a mainline hit of love, hope, peace and equality.

— Thank you, Arcade Fire — The first time I saw Charles Bradley was at Primavera Sound in Barcelona in 2014. As people flocked in the tens of thousands to watch Arcade Fire, a small cluster of friends and I wandered aimlessly for an alternative when we walked past the stage Bradley was playing on. I heard this yelp that cut through me like a jolt of electricity. Turning to the stage I saw an elderly man in a jumpsuit with a little potbelly, spinning and dancing and gyrating. His band were flush-tight, locked into a soulpop groove, all dancing bass lines and tooting brass as Bradley unleashed flooring vocal take after flooring vocal take. It was like watching someone pull out every single ounce of themself until there was nothing left to give. It was an exorcism of sorts, yet one you could dance to.

This wasn’t a one-off special performance however. This was the go-to performance mentality for Bradley. I would see him another three or four times over the next couple of years and it was the same every time. He would be the artist I would drag people to see at festivals regardless of their tastes. His records were great, and some tracks were knock-you-on-your-arse brilliant, but nothing could capture the magic, guts and raging emotion of his live performances. He was a furiously boiling pan of torment that was always ready to boil over, and his performances were such a furious catharsis of melancholy and beauty that they never lost their potency – he was like a sadness well that refilled itself.

— Taking your misery and dancing to it — Bradley had built up a lifetime of so much pain, death and anguish that he could endlessly tap into it night after night and deliver it with nuance, blending joy and despair. Like all the best soul music it was taking your misery and dancing to it. I cried at every single one of his shows. He was capable of reaching into something so deep inside of himself – or perhaps his emotion was always so close to the surface – even just to watch him felt like a purge of sorts; a man shedding something, stripping away a layer. Even when covering Black Sabbath’s ‘Changes’ he was able to stamp his own story to it so firmly that when he would rip open his heart and lungs to scream “I’m going through changes” every word felt like it belonged to him.

The opening lines of “I feel unhappy, I feel so sad/ I’ve lost the best friend that I ever had/ She was my woman/ I loved her so” were almost predestined to be sung by Bradley, especially so shortly after the death of his mother, who had been his literal best friend. Look at clips of him performing that song, pick any from across a few years from anywhere in the world, and he never performed that song in any way other than looking like he

60

was about to burst. Never so much as a glimpse of insouciance crept into his delivery.

Seeing him live became like being part of a club. If you met someone who had also seen him you’d immediately be able to communicate the feeling without words, like a sly wink or intricate handshake between a select few. Everybody I took to a show was floored. I remember dragging along someone who I had just met at SXSW in 2016, who worked at Warp Records and ran his own grime label (hardly an artists sketch of your typical fan of overly-intense and emotional classic soul). Yet I watched him look on, glide into the groove with the band and saw the silence wash over him. His jaw began to sag and droop before dropping entirely when Bradley would hit one of those big lungbusting moments.

You’d then witness the connection people would have with the still palpable sense of suffering that Bradley possessed during songs such as ‘Heartache and Pain’ when he would cry “your brother is gone” as he retold the story of coming home to find the murder scene of his own brother.

Yet one of the many profound beauties to be plucked from the music of Charles Bradley was not wallowing in the misery of it or voyeuristically lapping up the pain of a man. These instances were delivered with a pronounced belief in love and sharing; it was Bradley’s way of connecting with a world that he had fundamentally been disconnected from for so long. He had every right to be a bitter and choleric man. He was abandoned and homeless as a child, left to sleep on subway benches and live amongst drugs and crime and violence, only to later take on the role of full-time carer for the same parent that was once unable to look after him. He grew up to be illiterate, working bit jobs and moonlighting as a James Brown impersonator in the evening.

He nearly died from being given penicillin and then watched his brother die on his doorstep, before seeing his mother and uncle pass too. He lived in a crime-ridden neighbourhood with bullet holes in the wall and yet all the pain and suffering and difficulty was not soaked up and expelled as anger and resentment. It was re-focused as positivity, hope and love. Bradley would profess peace, spirituality and equality at his shows, physically connecting with the audience in a voyage of unity.

— Why was is so hard? — Bradley was almost childlike in his wonder of the world at times and the connection his music made across continents.

There’s a scene in the 2012 documentary on his life, Soul of America, in which he goes out to pick up a copy of the New York Post to find himself in it and he’s so filled with unbridled joy he is bursting with exhilaration. He stops the nearby postman walking past to show him, he stops passers by and locals he knows in the streets who hug him in return. It’s a moment that is a distillation of profound and truly pure beauty and humanity that Bradley himself managed to recreate through his music and performances.

His tale could be construed as something resembling the American Dream, a tale of someone who has experienced

Essay

“All the pain and suffering was not soaked up and expelled as anger and resentment. It was re-focused as positivity, hope and love”

homelessness, jail, death, pain and isolation and managed to turn it all around and make it in the world of music. But too often these stories that are hooked on ‘making the dream’ ignore the living nightmare some people are expected to live through in order to find a modicum of happiness. If Bradley’s story is one of what is possible in America, then it’s one that highlights how much unrelenting suffering one person can go through with little support and assistance as much as what they are still able to achieve with some luck and unwavering belief.

On the 2011 track ‘Why Is It So Hard’, Bradley sang the refrain “Why is it so hard to make it in America?” before wrapping up the song by declaring, “We gotta make a change in America.” Sadly, this sentiment is now truer than ever and it’s a deep shame and great loss that an artist so rooted in the possibilities of love, hope, perseverance, positivity and peace is no longer around to help lend his voice to make such changes possible. A year after his death, he’d probably have something more positive to say on the matter. Indeed, we were lucky to have found him at all, eventually.

61

Tell Me About It

Ghetts

A reluctant pioneer reflects on turning his life around and if ‘traditional grime’ is even a thing,

by Mike Vinti. Photography by Phil Sharp Ghetts is a grime icon if ever there was one. Known for his dynamic, rapid-fire flow and lyrical integrity, Justin Clark is a cult favourite among grime fans, hailed by the genre’s new generation as an influence as crucial as Skepta, Kano and even Wiley. His bars have been reused and referenced by other MCs for years; if you ever hear a grime MC telling you to ‘ask Carlos’, and plenty of them do, you’ve got Ghetts to thank.

While he may not have enjoyed the commercial success of Dizzee, Skepta or, more recently, Stormzy, he’s a lynchpin in grime’s history and although he argues otherwise, Ghetts has been as important to the genre’s development and progression as any MC: a member of the legendary grime collective NATSY Crew back in the day, alongside the likes of D Double E, Kano

62

and Jammer, and a founding member of The Movement with Devlin, Wretch 32 and more.

On his debut mixtape, ‘2000 & Life’, he was Ghetto, a whirlwind of an rapper, riled up and ready to take on the world, the emerging grime establishment and anything else that got between him and a mic. A study in ferocious, wheel-up inducing grime, it’s still considered one of the most important projects in the genre by those who know what they’re talking about.

Then came ‘Ghetto Gospel’, a more mature, reflective mixtape that saw Clark musing on his relationships with the women in his life and delving deeper than the tear-out grime of his debut. Ghetts had evolved again, an unrecognisable MC from the man who just a year earlier had unintention-

Tell Me About It ally made grime history by asking for Carlos. Well, almost unrecognisable – as well as playing host to a more thoughtful Ghetts, ‘Ghetto Gospel’ also helped launch his career, with tracks like ‘Top 3 Selected’ and ‘Stage Show Don’ taking off in the underground.

His latest album ‘Ghetto Gospel: New Testament’ is the follow up to that 2007 mixtape and sees the Plaistow MC on incredible form. An expansive project, it’s his second studio album and without a doubt his best project in years, tackling a diversity of styles and subjects with the help of a roll call of grime and British rap’s best talents. On tracks like ‘Black Rose’ and ‘Next Of Kin’ he gets political, exploring anti-blackness, misogynoir and inner city violence, engaging with each without getting bogged down in the mire of ‘conscious’ rap. Elsewhere, on tracks like ‘Pick Up The Phone’ and ‘Shellington Crescent’, he teams up with fellow veterans President T and Chip, respectively, for a case study in gas-up grime, switching into his old school Ghetto persona with a blink of his eye.

To celebrate the album’s release, Ghetts took over a railway arch in East London for the first-ever Ghettsibition, a collection of photography and art that mirrored the themes and concepts of the album and of Ghetts’ life. As if that wasn’t enough, he’s also just made his feature film debut, playing the lead in British crime thriller The Intent 2. I met him in Shoreditch after a long day, to let him do the talking.

“I didn’t plan on making a follow-up to ‘Ghetto Gospel’” Last year I did a show at the Roundhouse, which was Ghetto Gospel: Ten Years. That was an album I never got to perform at the time it was released; I’d only performed songs like

‘Top 3 Selected’ or ‘Stage Show Don’, what we class as bangers.

Also, my show has always been high energy. When I performed that album, I did a lot of songs that people connected with emotionally. That was the first time I actually saw that. So when I went back to the studio, it happened naturally again. For the first time I never had the title name before the album – normally I have the name and then do the writing around that. So when I had whittled the album down to a respectable amount of songs, it felt like a new testament of Ghetto Gospel, so that’s what I called it.

“No one really knows what a traditional grime album is” Considering that people are aware of maybe only four albums – ‘Konnichiwa’, one of JME’s, ‘Home Sweet Home’ and ‘Boy In Da Corner’ – what you’re left with is people judging a hundred artists by four people’s work. What I do think is that people label everything grime. Until the rise of drill, people labelled everything grime, so in terms of sound, somebody that’s black that makes music will be labelled grime. So what’s grime now?

“I don’t feel like a pioneer” I’m not part of that generation. What it is is that the lines are blurred because of the time that some people have been able to survive. But Wiley’s like two generations before me. I grew up listening to Wiley, I listened to Pay As You Go, I listened to Heartless, they were my heroes. I came in when things were already started; More Fire had already blown up. I came in late, so I already felt like there was a culture there. A lot of what I made has influenced the culture, but I don’t think I invented a sound. I know that I changed the dynamic of how people spit or

63

Tell Me About It the way they approach grime music, but I still don’t feel like I made this scene. I think I helped clarify what grime is.

“Having a daughter has changed how I write” My daughter’s aware of who I am and what I do so I want her to be proud and not live a double standard. I need to be able to raise her in the correct way and also lead by example. It’s affected my music a lot. She listens to my music now, she’s six, she can sing along to everything. It’s very weird, but she is me.

“I wrote ‘Black Rose’ for my daughter” One day I went in the booth and I never said, ‘this is what I’m going to talk about’. I started a line, I don’t write things down ever, I just went in the booth and said, ‘my daughter, she a princess, the world ain’t slaughtering her skin yet,’ and there you have it. Those two lines built the concept. My agenda behind ‘Black Rose’, in all honesty, and truth, I’m speaking for my daughter, first and foremost, so that in the future if she faces these things she’ll be strengthened by what her dad did with his platform at a certain time when nobody else did.

That’s why I did that. Other women have been able to relate, which is beautiful.

“But I don’t feel like I need to speak on other people’s behalf ” Now I’ve made ‘Black Rose’ people are, like, coming at me, like, ‘what’s next’, but to me, it’s a concept, it’s one instalment.

Tomorrow I’m going to make another tune about something else.

I still believe it, but it’s not something I’m gravitating towards because people have taken a like to that. That’s not who I am; I can talk about so many different things because that’s how I live my life.

“I’m conflicted about how to deal with knife crime in London” If you listen to ‘Next of Kin’ [off the new album], I’m talking from all perspectives. I’m trying to understand them all. I find myself conflicted anyway, that’s why I did it like that. The conflict is that I’m of an age now where I’ve survived certain things, and I don’t like to hear about fifteen-year olds dying and being stabbed to death. But then, being from it, I understand why fifteen-year-olds are being stabbed to death so I can’t look at them and say ‘but why do you want to retaliate?’ I know how they feel. Understand that when you say ‘put the knives down’ you’re saying that to a frightened teenager who’s thinking ‘If I leave home without my shank, I might not come back tonight.’

That’s why I’m conflicted in having the full understanding.

“The Ghettsibition happened because I didn’t want to a listening party” I think they’re shit. It was knowing that we had created a piece that we wanted people to connect with on a different level, you know? Thinking of things nobody’s done before and treating the album how it should be treated. We’re just getting started, there’s loads to come. You know what it is? People don’t really make good albums, so they don’t work them, they just look for

64

the first week sales, see if they can gas everybody and crack on to the next album. When you’ve made a good album, you want to work it and get it out to the world.

“I was just meant to be doing the soundtrack for The Intent 2, then the main role got offered to me” I said no about four times, and then my mum told me to say yes.

I think I’m a better actor than MC. Nah, I’m playing. When I said yes, we were shooting the next week. It’s so long making films; it’s the longest thing! But when you see everything back, it’s worth it. We were shooting for three months, back to back, for maybe sixteen hours a day. I was working on the album as well – work haffi run, you know the saying!

“I feel like the possibilities of what I can do are endless” People ask me how I transition into certain things, but you have to understand, one day I’m in jail telling everybody in jail that I’m going to be me today. That transition is the biggest transition, everything after that is just whatever. Not whatever – I’m grateful for the opportunities that come – but every transition from being in jail and you’re a repeat offender, and you’re surrounded by repeat offenders, and you’re saying, ‘see when I get home, watch what I’m going to do.’ To everybody in that place that sounds wild. When you leave that place, and you tell the guv ‘I’m not coming back’. He hears that everyday someone leaves, how does he know how to take this one guy seriously?

Until, oh shit, this guy’s not actually been back. So many people I was in jail with have reached out and said I don’t know what you’ve done to be it but well done. For someone to make it from that place to where I am, you have to follow rules and be disciplined. I’m one of the most disciplined people you’ll meet. If I say I ain’t smoking, I ain’t smoking. If I say I ain’t drinking, I ain’t drinking. That’s it. There’s nowhere that that level of discipline can’t take you.

Subscribe to Loud And Quiet Loud And Quiet is free from nationwide stockists but they get picked up pretty quickly.

It's probably best if you subscribe to be on the safe side, from ÂŁ35 per year.

We appreciate your support. www.loudandquiet.com/subscribe

It’s finally happened. William Shatner has recorded a Christmas album. He’s called it ‘Shatner Claus: The Christmas Album’, and you’ll be able to buy your copy from November 16. I’m not convinced that he needed the reassurance of ‘The Christmas Album’, but I’m also not completely sure that he doesn’t realise that ‘Shatner Claus’ isn’t even close to a workable pun. I have since emailed him stating a case for ‘Captain’s Yule Log’ with a little feedback on his finished artwork. He didn’t ask for it, but I’m 100 percent sure he would have appreciated hearing from me. My email read: Dear William, Can I first begin but saying congratulations on ‘Shatner Claus: The Christmas Album’, and the success of the record’s first single, ‘Jingle Bells’, featuring Henry Rollins. At the time of writing (23 October 2018), I see that the song has already received 1,163 plays on YouTube since it was uploaded on September 25.

Despite being a visual man myself (I’m an art critic – more on that below), I did of course check out the song and have to say that it was really quite different. I liked how you made it sound both jolly and extremely aggressive, which

I’d never heard done on a Christmas song before.

To the matter at hand, though.

As I say, I am something of an art critic and wanted to send over some notes on ‘Shatner Claus’’ sleeve art. Which I think is generally great, btw. The Christmas graphics I think make a lot of sense – the gold bow, the gold frame (I don’t know why that is Christmassy, but it is, isn’t it?), the flash of deep red that ‘Shatner Claus’ flows atop in a perfectly festive font. I see that you’ve squashed ‘The Christmas Album’ down the bottom there, which I’m a little less keen on, but I’m splitting hairs.

And then there’s you, of course. Peeping through a Christmas tree. Wearing your aviator shades. I’ll admit that at first I was a little thrown by the peeping. Does peeping not suggest creeping? Preying upon? These are just some thoughts more than anything.

The shades, although cool, do add to that up-to-nogood vibe a little, and I’m not sure that your grin, although well-intended, is helping matters. The black T under your Santa suit definitely isn’t.

And speaking of Santa, how married are you to the title? If it’s a pun that you’re after I was thinking ‘Captain’s Yule Log’ could be quite cute?

These are just some thoughts more than anything.

Keep up the good work. Yours forever, Clive.

Celebs Go Dating got ugly last night

66

illustration by kate prior