Zero pounds / Volume 03 / Issue 74 / the alternative music tabloid
Plus Christine & The Queens Thomas Cohen Lontalius Whitney This Heat Sam Simmons
Anna Meredith Composer in the wild
contents
welcome
Christine & The Queens – 12
You’re in London and hear a car backfire. It takes a tenth of a second to realise what that sound was, and the other nine tenths to pretend you’ve been shot, or make some other immature quip relating the bang to a gun. As if I needed reminding that a barley field in Suffolk was a different world to the city I live in, a bang went off earlier this month, I did the gun bit, or at least thought about it before checking my age, and then saw that, oh, there’s a man over there with a shotgun. While this grouse hunting was going on and I gawped like a man raised under a manhole cover, Anna Meredith posed for photographs while giving us a brief history of Aldeburgh Music and Snape Maltings – the complex of converted mill buildings that we were stood next to; an isolated getaway for classical composers to work from, away from city distractions and jokes about banging cars, and Anna’s current place of work. It really is work, too – Anna Meredith is a jobbing composer, writing and reworking symphonies on commission. I don’t want to say that her talent is a curse (and I’m sure that she wouldn’t either), but she has a relationship with music that isn’t quite like anyone else’s that we’ve featured in Loud And Quiet before. This month Anna is releasing her debut album, ‘Varmints’, but she hasn’t funded it with cash from pulling pints or working in a call centre; she’s paid for it by rearranging Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’ in Snape Maltings. It’s the first piece of music she’s made without being asked to, although there’s a good chance that it could lead to new commissions of a different kind – film scores perhaps, for movies that would compliment experimental, electronic songs heavy on drama, forever building and twisting until suddenly a twee pop song comes and goes just as easily. Anna has achieved this challenging/digestible sound of her own after a lifetime of not being a music fan at all, but a young woman with a gift, although, as you’ll see, she’d never be so crass as to admit that. Stuart Stubbs
lontalius – 14 whitney – 16 thomas cohen – 18 anna meredith – 22 sam simmons – 28 this heat – 30
Zero pounds / Volume 03 / Issue 74 / the alternatIVe musIc tabloId
Plus Christine & The Queens
Co ntact
Contr ib u tor s
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i n fo@lou dandq u ie t.com
ale x wisg ar d, Amb e r M a ho ne y, Amy Pe ttif e r , Chr is Wa tke ys, dav id zammitt, Danie l D y l a n- W r a y , De r e k Rob e r tson, Elino r J o ne s, Edg ar Smith, Gab r ie l G r e e n, ga r e th ar r owsmith, Ge m har r is, G e m m a Samways, Gu ia cor tass a , ha yl e y scott, he nr y wilkinson, IAN ROEBUCK, J AMES f . Thom p so n, J a nine Bu llman, je nna f oxton, je nnife r Jonson, joe g og g ins, jo sie so m m e r , jang e lo molinar i, kat ie be sw ick, le e b u llman, liam kone m a nn, M a ndy Dr ake , Nathan W e stle y , P hil S ha r p , Re e f You nis, Sam cor nfo r th, S a m Walton, tom f e nwick
a dve r tise @l o uda ndquie t.co m
Thomas Cohen Lontalius Whitney This Heat Sam Simmons
Anna Meredith Composer in the wild
c o v er ph o t o g r aph y G em H a r r i s
Lo ud And Qu ie T PO Box 67915 Lo ndon NW1 W 8TH Ed itor - Stu ar t S tu b b s Art Dir e ctor - Le e Be lche r DIGITAL DIRECTOR - GREG COCHRANE Sub Editor - Ale xandr a Wilshir e fi l m e ditor - Andr e w ande r son Bo ok Editor s - Le e & Janine Bu llman
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T his M o nth L &Q L o ve s a dr ia n r e a d, B e n A y r e s, ka thr y ne C ha l ke r , l e a h w il so n, sa m sim m o ns, W il l l a ur e nce ,
The views expressed in Loud And Quiet are those of the respective contributors and do not necessari ly reflect the opinions of the magazine or its staff. All rights reserved 2016 Loud And Quiet LTD. ISSN 2049-9892 Printed by S harman & Company LTD . Distributed by loud and quiet LTD. & forte
the beginning
Sweet 16 Oneohtrix Point Never recalls that magical teenage year. He spent it making mixtapes and falling for Quentin Tarantino.
D
aniel Lopatin: In 1998 I was living in a suburb of Boston with my parents in a white range, L-shaped ranch house, a mile away from the high school that I walked to everyday. Wayland, Massachusetts, was a rural suburb that had no real sidewalks to walk on, just bike paths. We moved there when I was 12 from Winthrop, which was a dreamy little town by the airport in Boston. If you were brave enough you could swim to the airport. I always missed that dreamy town, but by 16 I had my friends and we were all getting our licenses. We were all interested in getting inebriated for the first time and I remember we were in the basement of my friend Jay’s house and he had this 24-pack of Red Dog beer, which had gone extinct. It was skunky already, but I guess I was trying to impress people so I was like, ‘nah, I’ll drink this,’ and I got super sick instantly, and from that day on they called me Red Dog. We’d make mixtapes and listen to them in the car, drink and smoke weed. I only ever droveToyota Camrys my whole adolescence, and my first one at 16 was an ’88 Camry that was a weird champagne gold on the outside and maroon upholstery. We’d go into Boston, which was 20 miles away, to buy records.The closest thing you could get to a record store where I lived was you’d have to go two towns over where there were strip malls and there was a chain of record stores in New England called Newbury Comics. Everyone kind of hated it.
As t o ld t o S tu a rt S tubbs Newbury was OK, but buying a CD at the mall was the worst experience so I used to make tapes off the radio all the time because there was such good college radio in Boston. When I was 16 years old pretty much all I did was make these tapes. There was a show in the afternoon called ‘Tapedeck Tuesday’, which was ’80s Golden Era rap and hip-hop. I’d tape a lot of that and stuff like Wu-Tang and DJ Premier and Gang Starr. Then there was a reggae show on that I hated and I still to this day loathe reggae. I’d hang out and eat while the reggae show was on, and then it would be techno, and at that point in ’98 it was exclusively drum’n’bass and jungle – Dieselboy and other crap that I’d get spaced out to until 1 or 2 in the morning. The song from then that takes me back to that time whenever I hear it now is Roni Size, ‘Heroes’. The summer being 16 I went to a film program at Boston university. I went out there for a month, and I let this girl dread my hair. And I had a girlfriend who was in the theatre program, and basically I was a really, really funny, creative kid who was obsessed with music and movies. That was all I wanted to do – write these screenplays, and I would obsess over Quentin Tarantino screenplays and I would read Natural Born Killers and True Romance over and over and over. I was so fucking obsessed with him, even my Hotmail password was Quentin. He just feels like a family member
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now – his new films might not be my favourite films now, but I have to see them and I have to know what he’s up to. When I left school I strictly wanted to be a screenwriter – that was all I wanted to do. I felt so confident in the fact that that was what I was going to do. I couldn’t imagine it any other way – all my backup plans were cover stories so I could move to New York or whatever. I was not good at dating at all, until I went to film school. That was the first time I felt like I was cool and that girls liked me. In my school, the kids in my town were so stupid! So dull and uninteresting that a kid like me who was alternative had few options. In the whole school there were two kids that were into hardcore and metal. Two! It was me and a couple of friends, and there’d be one or two girls that made sense and would hang out in our clique, but there was way too much competition. I didn’t have enough game to compete, and it wasn’t until I went to film camp where I really sowed my seeds. When I came back from film school I had all this confidence, and then I had some game with the ladies, because I had this laissez-faire attitude of, ‘well, I’m not impressed with you either.’ But I had a great year when I was 16. I was a happy kid, in spite of the homogenous study body I was faced with, and I think I was cooler then than I am now. I was definitely the kid that I’d want to hang out with now. I was the best.
books + ANYONE CAN PLAY GUITAR
Bruce Willis Reef Younis catalogues the failed music careers of mega celebrities. Illustrated by Josie Sommer. / Bruno Randolini. It almost reads like a gratuitously ridiculous script – an Alan Partridge “Monkey tennis”. Bruce as Bruno didn’t endure quite the same way as Bruce as John did but ‘The Return of Bruno’ somehow managed to claim the number 14 spot on the US Billboard Album chart while ‘Under the Boardwalk’, although struggling in the US, reached number two in the UK single charts, becoming one of the country’s best selling singles of the year. He didn’t stop there, either. Follow-up ‘If It Don’t Kill You, It Just Makes You Stronger’ arrived in 1989 in straighter circumstances – Bruno Randolini replaced with some upstart named Bruce Willis – but by this point the world was warming to the silver screen sight of beaten and almost-broken Willis, not this face-contorting crooner, and Willis’ short-lived music career looked to be going the way of the brothers Gruber. Undeterred, Willis found a way back in 1996, providing the voice and throaty blues theme tune for cartoon series Bruno the Kid, adding it to a karaoke-pleasing back catalogue of ‘DevilWoman’, ‘Secret Agent Man’, and ‘Respect Yourself’ that would help shape the release of 1999’s much slept on ‘Classic Bruce Willis’. Yeah... CLASSIC Bruce.
For anyone exposed to early ’90s action films, BruceWillis will always be the sardonic perpetually bloodied cop, John McClane. Despite a few attempts to soften him up – Disney’s The Kid & Nickleodeon’s Rugrats Go Wild not withstanding – it’s difficult to remember a time when Willis wasn’t antagonisng psychopaths, chasing someone, running away from someone, or generally shooting everybody in sight. In the mid-eighties, however, things were a little different. Imagine a snake-hipped, sandwich-boarded Willis bumping and grinding his way through Harlem in Die Hard: With a Vengeance; blasting Motown classics on the Freedom shuttle as it embarks on a humanity-saving mission in Armageddon; or whispering the lyrics to ‘Under the Boardwalk’ to a distressed Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense. In 1987 you didn’t have to, because on the advent of his A-List fame, Willis released his debut album, ‘The Return of Bruno’, via the legendary Motown label, complete with fake HBO documentary. Working with backing musicians including Booker T. Jones, The Temptations, and The Pointer Sisters, Willis’ step into a sax-addled world of blues, soul and RnB reworks also came complete with a blues singing alter ego called
by j anine & L ee bull man
21st Century Tank Girl by Alan Martin, Jamie Hewlett Titan Comics
Tank Girl, beloved punk rock feminist style icon with good taste in cigars, a kangaroo boyfriend and healthy Clash obsession, is back to make her mark on a brand new century, and she’s as refreshing now as she was when she first appeared in the late 1980’s. The title has been quiet for the last twenty years or so, which has been something to do with its creator, Jamie Hewlett, forming Gorillaz with his old flatmate Damon Albarn. Hewlett has found the time though, to reunite with Alan Martin, hit the ink and remind us all what we’ve been missing. 21st Century Tank Girl finds our heroine as wild as irreverent as ever, and suddenly the modern boy’s club of superheroes look very old fashioned indeed. Welcome back, baby.
The Rock Poster Art of Todd Slater by Todd Slater Flood Gallery
Todd Slater is an American poster artist and illustrator whose work you’ll recognise, even if you don’t know his name. This beautiful collection of his work includes commissions for everybody from The Arctic Monkeys to Danzig via The Wu-Tang Clan and his images jump from the page, again and again begging to be framed. Some of the work here is ethereal and dreamy, some of it is harsh and uncompromising, but all of it manages to look both utterly new and reassuringly old-school at the same time. Slater’s trademark style is beautifully showcased and lovingly presented in what is a fabulous book, highlighting an artist reaching the top of his game.
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Photograph by Ringo starr Genesis
Ringo Starr used to carry his camera everywhere. He couldn’t have known it at the time, but the cheeky drummer from the Beatles was recording first hand with access to all areas a golden moment in modern history. As well as the photographs covering Ringo’s life from childhood to just postBeatles, Photograph contains his text, specifically written for the collection, and memorabilia, letters and scraps, which have never before been published. The resulting collection will fascinate fans and collectors alike, and Photograph also serves as a reminder of a time when a photograph actually meant something. Those included here beautifully capture a world which seems close to us, and very, very far away.
getting to know you
John Grant First a member of Denver-based alt. rock band The Czars, now a solo artist renowned for his wit and candid songwriting, John Grant is the perfect person to fill in our Getting To Know You questionnaire. Because musicians are people too. /
The thing you’d rescue from a burning building A pin cushion I made for my mother at vacation bible school.
‘Zamboni’
Your favourite item of clothing Corduroy thigh-highs. Your biggest fear Locust plague.
The best piece of advice you’ve been given Don’t eat yellow snow. The film you can quote the most of Clan of the Cave Bear.
The one song you wish you’d written?
Your guilty pleasure Undermining others’ confidence.
Your favourite word
Your pet-hate Parakeets. The worst job you’ve had I worked in the box office of a theatre. People who are buying tickets to the theatre are vicious and won’t listen to reason. If you had to eat one food forever, it would be... Corn on the cob.
‘Let’s Dance’ by david bowie
Your hidden talent Extreme crocheting. The best book in the world The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinsky.
What would you change about your physical appearance? I would have cro-magnon shelf reduction.
Your biggest disappointment Cathedral cheddar no longer being available in Iceland.
Your first big extravagance Is a decent mattress extravagant?
What is success to you? A region-free Blu-Ray player.
The worst present you’ve received ‘The Complete Ann Coulter’.
What talent do you wish you had? Pop and lock dancing. How would you like to die? Being eaten alive by hyenas.
People’s biggest misconception of you That I am compassionate and kind.
What is the most overrated thing in the world? Cheesecake Factory. The characteristic you most like about yourself The ability to seem like I’m listening/that I care. Who would play you in a film of your life? Linda Hunt.
The most famous person you’ve met I met Elton John at his place in London. He couldn’t have been more lovely. Favourite place in the world The toilet. It’s the only place where peace and quiet are available.
What’s your biggest turn-off? Complete lack of self-awareness, which, incidentally, is also my biggest turn-on.
Your style icon Janet Reno
What would you tell your 15-year-old-self? “You think this is bad? Stick around.”
The worst date you’ve been on A guy showed up at my apartment in NYC to pick me up and left without a word while I was putting on my coat.
Your best piece of advice for others Wash your hands.
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Christine & The Queens Gender performance and the power of dance Ph otogra p hy: Dus d in con d ren / writer: gemma samways
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interviews LE f t : H él o ï s e L e t i s s i e r on t he r o o f o f a Ne w Y or k l o f t o n t he l o w e r e ast s i d e
“T
hat’s interesting, right? That’s something I could talk to a shrink about…” Surrounded by stacked chairs on the first floor of Le Pavillon du Lac – in Paris’ Parc des Buttes-Chaumont – one of France’s most critically-acclaimed artists is laughing as she recalls how she always “hated” her voice growing up. If it’s a surprisingly candid start to an interview, it’s an even more implausible beginning to the career of the singer-songwriter behind multiplatinum-selling, bilingual pop project Christine and the Queens. Born and raised in Nantes, the musical tastes of Héloïse Letissier and her older brother were shaped by their parents. Mixing classical and jazz music with pop and rock, their eclectic record collection included French artists Christophe and Alain Bashung, plus David Bowie and Klaus Nomi. “It was really sometimes daring, the choices they made,” Letissier remembers fondly. “They opened me up to really different artists, and to strong personalities as well.” Letissier was tutored in piano and solfège but she describes her early relationship with music as “ambivalent” at best. “I was surrounding myself with music, but I was sure that I couldn’t make any. Funny, right?” she exclaims, grinning. “I always considered myself a lousy musician before I started to sing. I was studying Theatre and Music, and the teachers wanted me to have singing lessons and I was just running away from it because I was feeling like my voice was a bit bland and boring.” Letissier was 22 before she found courage to sing in public. In 2010, reeling from a romantic break-up and feeling unfulfilled by her studies in Theatre Design, she departed Paris for a three-week sojourn in London. “It was like a weird holiday of a depressed young girl,” she remembers with a wry smile. “I’d been before because of my father, the English teacher, and I always feel more alive in London than I do in Paris. I guess I just wanted to try to find new inspiration, and new reasons to be happy. “So I had my Time Out in my hands, and I did stuff that I wouldn’t do usually, because I’m an introvert. I was going in the evening to parties and just
sitting there alone, waiting for something to happen to me. And this is where I met The Queens, actually, in [now defunct Soho cabaret club] Madame JoJo’s. “They were doing a number called ‘How To Make Music and Cook At The Same Time’ so it didn’t make any sense, cynically speaking, but the energy was so strong and so liberating that I started thinking about having a character that could overcome what I couldn’t overcome myself.” The trio befriended Letissier and, having heard her humming, encouraged her to sing. “Weirdly enough, it was so liberating all of a sudden to sing,” she remembers. “Something clicked, and I have to say I still don’t know why. But what’s interesting is I now use [my voice] as an instrument, so I find things within it I probably wouldn’t find if I really loved it, you know? I stretch it – I try to work and make it stronger or thinner.” It’s a startling voice – lissom and smooth, with a sensuous huskiness in the lower register – and Letissier explores its range to powerful effect on her full-length debut. Written in Paris, ‘Chaleur Humaine’ was recorded in London with Metronomycollaborators Ash Workman and Gabriel Stebbing, and Michael Lovett of NZCA Lines, a team she refers to fondly as “La famille, les partenaires du crime” in the liner notes for the album’s original French release. Having previously tried out with several producers who tried to supplant her musical vision with their own, Letissier was initially wary of Workman. “I was like, ‘I’m not sure this is going to work,’” she recalls, reenacting the scene, eyeing me suspiciously, arms folded. “I said, ‘I love hip hop. I love Drake,’ and he was like, ‘Yeah, me too.’ I had really advanced demos with precise sounds, but I didn’t know how to do it, and he was really chilled, and gifted technically. So not all men are like that, but still some are. Being a female in the studio, sometimes, it’s still a problem. But I can’t just be a singer; I come with my whole songs.” Gender bias was one reason why Letissier decided to “discard femininity” post-adolescence, abandoning her “overly-feminine
dresses and heavy make-up” and becoming “obsessed with the idea of having a dick, and being a man.” “I was tired of being a woman,” she says. “Not physically, but because of what it meant to other people. It’s tougher to be a boss and to be in charge, and to be loud, and to be rude when you’re a woman. It’s like, the stereotypical woman cannot be complex: you have to choose between being the Madonna or the whore. I constantly change my mind, and I think it’s because I don’t see gender as anything but a performance; I see it as something I can play with. It’s not a given to me to be a woman. I still have to recreate what it means everyday, because I’m not sure.”
L
etissier confronts these ideas head-on throughout ‘Chaleur Humaine’. Sonically rooted in minimal, propulsive synth-pop, the record is concerned with “selfdefining; craving to be loved but afraid of being a monster. The things I’ve been experiencing as a teenager, and as a queer, young female.” Those experiences are directly addressed on ‘iT’, which finds Letissier repeatedly asserting “I’m a man now” over a scuffed hip hop beat, and vowing, “I’ll rule over all my dead impersonations.” For the LP’s forthcoming UK reissue she enlisted Perfume Genius and Philadelphian rapper Tunji Ige to duet with her – on ‘Jonathan’ and ‘No Harm Is Done’, respectively – because she wanted “a queer one, and a tough one, for it to be a statement.” In Christine and the Queens, performance is more than a mere thematic concept: it’s an integral facet of what is, essentially, a multidisciplinary art project. As a result, even the ballads bubble with kinetic energy. “I know if I’m going to keep the song if I can dance on it,” Letissier confirms. “If it’s not possible, I just dump that song. For me, writing a song is thinking about how I could perform it, how I could film it. “Before I wanted to make music, I wanted to be a stage designer, and pop music for me is the best way to be a stage designer now. Music is contagious and it can be really democratic as well.
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When I was into theatre, I realised it was always the same people coming to the theatre, because it’s expensive and because of the culture. With music you can bring theatre to people.” In live shows and promotional films, Letissier performs complex choreography combining elements of ballet, modern dance and mime, inspired by her two biggest inspirations, Pina Bausch and Michael Jackson. Aside from pure aesthetics, dance provides another outlet for Letissier to explore the liminal space between reality and imagination, high art and pop culture, masculinity and femininity, aggression and grace. She describes dance as “a sacred thing for me to do, because it protects me and at the same time it frees me.” It was the choreography in the video for ‘Saint Claude’ that compelled Madonna to invite Letissier to dance on-stage at her Bercy show in December 2015, or at least direct one of her entourage to do so. “The only time I actually got to meet Madonna was onstage for three minutes, with lots of people watching,” she laughs. “But I was publicly spanked by Madonna, so… And it’s the only time I will be publicly spanked, let me tell you!” During our hour together, I find it difficult to reconcile Letissier’s battles with self-confidence with the vivacious, witty individual before me, let alone the idea that an “introvert” would put themselves forward for scrutiny in such a cut-throat industry. “I see what you mean,” she says slowly. “[Writing the album] was about trying to relate to people, for the first time in my life, by being really sincere and unmasked. It was a conscious way of reaching my hand towards someone. What happened after was surprising, because people shook my hand back, and I discovered that I was not doomed to be a loner forever. I could relate to people, and maybe be braver than I thought. “It’s such a different thing to be on the stage than in life: it’s a delimited place. I’m really shy in everyday life still now. I’m not overly confident because of what happened to me; I’m still struggling with lots of things. But when I’m on the stage the rules change. And I own the rules.”
Lontalius From a generation with no genre bias, Eddie Johnston is making indie songs sound like Drake Photogra p hy: rob burrowes / writer: ian roebuck
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interviews LE F T : e d d i e jo h n s t o n photographed near his h o me i n Ne w t o w n , Well i n g t o n , Ne w Ze a l a n d
“I
used to get upset that people would say this is a great song and he’s only 16.” On the other end of the phone is self-proclaimed brat, Eddie Johnston. It’s 9am in New Zealand and for a teenager he’s putting a brave face on it. “That pissed me off as I want to make great music no matter what my age is. I am a bit too jaded for someone my age anyway, so I get annoyed.” He might get annoyed but right now Eddie is a laconic delight – as softly spoken and precise, in fact, as the deftly melancholic pop songs he regularly scatters on Soundcloud under the name Lontalius. Right now he doesn’t seem to mind about being labelled as a youngster, or indeed about anything at all. I decide to park it, though; best not mention his amount of years on earth anymore. So instead, Eddie tells me about Wellington and its wide-open spaces. “I have been here my whole life; it’s the cultural and liberal city in New Zealand and a nice place to call home. You do feel quite isolated from the rest of world so being able to go overseas recently has been really exciting. It’s like the height of summer here, though, so it really is beautiful.” I tell him it’s deep midwinter in the UK but the frozen landscape and early nightfall make the perfect backdrop to listen to ‘I’ll Forget 17’, the debut album from Lontalius out late March on Partisan Records. He laughs, almost in slow motion, and I imagine he’s just got out of bed. Eddie has produced a heartbreak hotel of an album that draws on a dazzling array of influences. Achingly now RnB in one corner and mournful indie soundscapes in the next, with plenty of space in-between. It’s obviously a piece of work put together by someone in touch with popular culture, a young man from a generation without genre bias – inspired by Drake and shoegaze – and one who spends a lot of time on the internet no doubt. He laughs again. “Yeah, I guess so.” As a matter of fact, I don’t know of another new artist out there who has harnessed the Internet’s power as expertly as Lontalius has. “Thanks, I think… I remember I went to this music conference thing and they were telling the audience Lorde has this fantastic Internet presence. I was like,
of course she does, she’s 17, you know. We’re all the same.” There goes Eddie bringing up his age again. The Lorde connection, though, there’s kinda something to that. “We just had a mutual friend on the Internet and we hung out a few times but that was just before she blew up,” says Eddie. “I haven’t really seen her since! I’m sure she would be cool if I reached out to her again though.” At the same time Lorde was blowing up, Lontalius was evolving into something of a quieter online sensation. His Casio covers of popular hits, by Drake, Pharrell and Beyoncé, produced a word of mouth following that spread like wildfire. “I’m not scared of the Internet, for sure,” he says. “Especially for people my age, it’s been a breeding ground for people like me who put songs on Soundcloud. We have all these opportunities that we wouldn’t get otherwise because I live in New Zealand that’s as far away from the rest of the world as possible.” The Lontalius we hear on ‘I’ll Forget 17’ has an originality and confidence far beyond the confines of his bedroom set-up, and Eddie explains: “The way trends work, music that gets put on Soundcloud, it all happens super quickly. If I were to make a song with all the trends that were around right now and got it released properly with my label it wouldn’t come out for a year and the trend would be gone. It’s easy to copy other people, it’s definitely a lot harder for any musician to try and be original but I think I have been lucky. I went to far too many DIY punk shows when I was 13 and quickly got bored with the DIY thing. Even though I do a lot of stuff myself, the lo-fi element disappeared and it was pop music and RnB that started to really excite me in the music world rather than shoegaze or punk bands.”
A
fter a brief chat about the DIY scene in Wellington we find ourselves back at his album, a body of work he’s clearly proud of. What’s interesting, though, is his hesitation and self doubt, a trait that you can hear in Eddie’s vulnerable vocal and lyrics. “Yeah, I get nervous about it. Some of
the stuff I gained popularity from was the more electronic, more trendy stuff – the covers really. The idea with this album is trying to round up all of my musical influences from the last 5 years or so. So that means there are maybe some indie rock moods which don’t translate as well on the Internet.” Tasked with condensing Eddie’s broad taste (he’s quoted everyone from Crowded House to MF Doom as inspiration in various interviews) into a collage of sound was Ali Chant, a Bristol based producer with an eclectic CV. From PJ Harvey to Perfume Genius, Chant has been drawn to original talent. “One of the main things he brought to the table was he kind of represented a general music listener,” says Eddie. “I worked on the album a lot myself and had a lot of strong ideas but when I presented them to him he was like, a good judge for me and would tell me what would work and what wouldn’t straight away, which was what I needed. Working in the bedroom by myself I am not the most skilled engineer so that was also really helpful.” I wonder what he made of the UK and if the country’s grey skies walked within ‘I’ll Forget 17’. “I did enjoy Bristol,” he says. “The UK always interests me because obviously New Zealand is a colony and it’s been super cool seeing what aspects of the culture I am already familiar with. It was kind of scary when I had a cold in London I went and bought Strepsils and it was all these brands I recognised, so completely different to America where everything is brightly coloured and exciting. It was comforting, though, for the two or three weeks I was over.” Despite his obvious interest in RnB (Eddie lightly autotunes his vocals on a couple of tracks), I tell him that it’s the rockier elements of his album that shine, although admittedly this changes with every listen. Certain builds can remind you of Mogwai or even the Twilight Sad. “Well, Ali seemed interested in my RnB elements and pop music but he kind of represented the indie rock side, which was good. That element was definitely needed. I was trying to mix like it was an RnB album when it should have been focusing elsewhere. Ali did the two most recent albums with Perfume
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Genius – that was kind of the appeal: they are an indie band who I thought were interesting and not just another guitar band.” Eddie also records under the name of Race Banyon, making strikingly different dance music that showcases his whip-smart ear for honing a sound. He’s even supported Jamie XX on his recent stop off in Auckland. “I guess both projects are releases really. I love dance music; it’s been a big part of the last few years as well. It just never felt like I should do it under the same name. In my head they’re pretty separate. I am not interested in singing on a Race Banyon song – singing in a club just doesn’t work.” It seems there cannot be a Lontalius interview though without Drake, whose music permeates right through everything Eddie touches and when you hear him talking about his favourite artist it’s easy to see why. “I really adore him as a musician and the sound he is refining, and the artists that he works with. “As a person I don’t really feel comfortable being tagged with him all the time but the sound that he is working on really resonates with me and probably a lot of people my age – that kind of late night, bittersweet feeling. That’s really been the biggest drive for me when I started making music.” I ask tongue in cheek if he really is as sad as he sounds? “No, no,” he says. “When you’re a teenager you have too many emotions. I love being an emotional person but as I get older it doesn’t happen as much. That’s what the album is about really, all those feelings. I am not super mature, recently at least… I have my moments.” So he really can be a brat but after this conversation it’s hard to imagine. As we say goodbye I ask him when his birthday is. “I’m 19 today actually.” He hangs up.
Whitney Country music from a couple of ex-indie gunners Photogra phy: david kasnic / writer: katie beswick
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interviews LE F T : J u l i e n Eh r l i c h a n d M a x K a k a c ek a t te n t a t t av e r n , c h i c a g o
O
n his Twitter feed, Julien Ehrlich has posted a message from his father. It’s a screen grab of a comment about Whitney, the new band he has formed with Max Kakacek, since the Smith Westerns, of which they were both formerly members, went on permanent hiatus. ‘I come to Whitney for the guitar,’ says the comment, ‘and stay for the cute fuckable post-hipster bros.’ It’s funny because it’s true. The band I meet are certainly cute, certainly, erm, fuckable, although they wear it lightly (Julien and Max have teamed up with five new recruits to make up Whitney: Tracy Chouteau, Malcolm Brown, Josiah Marshall, Charles Glanders and Will Miller, whom they have just given a rather fetching haircut). But the thing that strikes me most about them is their sincerity; their unabashed, unapologetic passion for the work and the obvious excitement they have for this new venture. If the hipster movement encompassed a counter-cultural cool that was about irony, kitsch and detached insincerity masquerading as depth, then Whitney, as the antithesis of that, are definitively post-hipster. “We’re not going to pop up with a synth record any time soon,” they tell me halfway through the interview, as if to prove a point. The forthcoming album sounds archetypally American, which struck me as odd given the Smith Westerns’ well-documented Brit-Pop influence. But this is a new project and the sound reflects the journey. “We discovered this dude called Jim Ford halfway through making the record and we realised his music is so awesome. It fortified the idea that we already had in our heads about the record we were making,” Julien tells me. “We wanted to write poppy songs that also kinda sound like country songs.” You can hear that country influence in Whitney’s music – it’s epic, transitory; there’s a sense of change and movement, with an enchanting, narrative quality. It’s a cinematic sound. I tell them that ‘No Woman’, their latest single, could be on the soundtrack to a Cohen brother’s film and I’m relieved that they are pleased by the comparison. “I completely see that,” says Max. “I don’t think it was necessarily conscious, the transitional
thing – but writing the album we were both in moments of transition. We were in and out of relationships at that point, we had both just left a band, things that had been steady in the past were gone.” They are keen for Whitney to be recognised in country music circles. Max tells me that they sometimes describe themselves as a ‘country’ band. “People tell us, ‘that doesn’t sound like country music to me,’ but to us this is what country music is. For us it was the most authentic way to make the kind of music we wanted to make. With a different style of music we might have come off as cheesy or overdramatic. Country has this nonchalant way of being really serious, but it’s presented in a way that’s listenable, and really pretty.” Julien cuts in, as Max rolls his eyes, (‘here we go’), “We make a point in every interview to say we wanna play Stagecoach, which is the country music version of Coachella. It’s our goal to play there – but we know we’re in more of an Indie sphere, so we want to get that into every interview until they see us.” You want me to put that in print: Whitney wants to play Stagecoach? I ask him, because I can’t quite tell if they’re serious. They are. “Yeah. Definitely. That would be awesome.” The lead single, ‘No Matter Where We Go’, is folky and pastoral, its onthe-road theme evoking vast American landscapes. “We imagined making the record as if we were – not in the woods, that shit’s so played out – but somewhere beautiful.” Julien tells me. They wrote some of the album at Max’s family cabin in Wisconsin, although Julien is quick to point out that any Bon Iver connection is purely coincidental. “Our lives were kind of fucked, for a while we didn’t even have an apartment; we were finding places to sleep in Chicago. We were recording while we were more or less homeless for a couple of months in the middle of winter last year. All we had was writing this album.” The trips to Wisconsin were a necessity rather than a choice, and although it can’t have been fun writing an album betweenhomes, the process sounds idyllic, told retrospectively. “It was cool to be out there, without any distractions. There
was a nice out of tune piano that was fun to bang away on – it hadn’t been tuned in, like, fifty years.” That nostalgic quality has seeped into the music; listening, I drift into imaginary lives: I’m a character in a John Steinbeck novel, dreaming of a better future, or somebody’s highschool sweetheart, cruising the Pacific Coast Highway in a Camaro at dusk. Julien concedes that their unsettled personal lives have led to something of a heartbreak album, in more ways that one. “For me there was a specific girl; Max was also going through a weird breakup at the time. So, lyrically, there’s one girl. Some of the songs are about getting drunk. But my grandpa passed away in the middle of winter, while we were homeless, and there’s a song written about him that they played over speakers at his funeral, which was kind of…” he breaks off. “Yeah. Heartbreak in general I guess.”
B
ut the heartbreak is over now, and Whitney are having fun. They are touring Europe in the lead up to their album release, and they arrive in England in mid February, playing at the Moth Club and Soho House in London. ‘“We haven’t been to England since 2013,” Max says, “and the band we were in wasn’t in a very happy fun headspace – but now everything’s 180-ed and we’re having a blast at the moment.” And, to add to the fun, they hope to bring a twist to the tour in the form of avoiding hotels and crashing with fans and friends. “Every other UK/Europe tour we’ve ever been on has been hotels, and we’re trying to make a point of crashing on people’s couches and floors and stuff like we do in the States.” I’m sceptical about how this will work out, never having toured myself, but the band laugh at my concerns. They’ve done this kind of thing before, in Italy and the US. “Both of us have toured enough,” Max reassures me. “We’ll maybe try and find places to stay from the stage. And I have this great friend called Jack Shankly who lives in London. He has his own label called Weird World. They put out awesome music – so shout out to Jack Shankly.” (I resolve to put this in the
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write up of the interview because, frankly, I’m a little worried that if Jack doesn’t step up, the boys might find themselves homeless again.) They are hoping to replicate some of the buzz around their US shows in Europe. “Our live show is really important to us. We put a lot of work into making the live version of the songs as powerful as they can be.” Julien gestures over at Will, who hasn’t spoken yet, apart from to debut his haircut. “This guy, this guy right here does some crazy shit on horns. He plays horns and keyboard at the same time. You just have to see it. It’s a oneman horn section. He uses the keys to harmonise the horn while he’s playing the horn. It’s crazy. That’s something specific to our live show – that experimental stuff that should be fun for people to see.” But it’s not just the experimental edge that they hope will attract people to their gigs. “We get real emotional. It’s fun but emotional,” Julien says. “A girl fainted at our last show. We didn’t realise but there was a real buzz about it. It was sold out and a girl fainted in the front row. That was our first show in three months in Chicago, our hometown. It is so great to feel that support and that emotional atmosphere.” He laughs. “I mean, fainting’s not healthy but we were psyched that we’d created that emotional connection.” That emotion is there in the music, and it’s there when they talk about the music too. “We want to create music that’s beautiful but not too crowded,” says Max, describing how Whitney have built on their experience playing in other bands to create the sounds they make now. “Finding that balance is really hard to do. I don’t know that we’ve achieved it completely, but we aren’t taking this lightly. There’s something about our music that resonates as soulful. We enjoy playing music. We love it.” The atmosphere has become serious; the sincerity, that post-hipster passion for the work, is palpable. “We just want to keep playing music,” Julien says, looking me straight in the eyes. “We want to write songs that we want to listen to over and over again. We like stuff that seems like it’ll last forever. We just want to write songs that’ll last forever.”
interviews
Thomas Cohen The ex-S.C.U.M. frontman who has nothing to hide Photography: phil sharp / writer: james f. thompson
“I’m not hiding anything. There’s nothing hidden. There’s nothing more a perverted ear with a certain outlook can find out from this record. There’s nothing new to learn if you’re looking for some tragedy.” Hiding just about anything has long since been impossible for Thomas Cohen. From the moment he married the daughter of one of rock’s most famous elder statesmen, right through to his young wife’s untimely death and even now in trying to move on from grieving her passing, Cohen’s life has been made public property by a rabid gutter press. Yet if the telephoto lenses were predictably voyeuristic when Peaches Geldof was alive, they’ve become even more intrusive since she’s been gone. A widower by the age of 23 and with two small children to look after, one might have hoped Cohen would have been left alone to try and reassemble the shattered remains of his life. Unfortunately, we know all too well how the British tabloids work. So instead, between Geldof’s death from a heroin overdose in April 2014 and today, the now-25 year-old has had to deal with a forensic examination of the relationship he shared with his late wife under the harsh glare of the public spotlight, the minutiae of a cruelly curtailed marriage and existence raked over by millions. It’s not as though Cohen’s background especially prepared him for the experience either. Rather than being a member of the rock aristocracy, his dad is a social worker for Lewisham council, while his mother is an artist. Growing up in south London within a loving Jewish home, Cohen’s first experience of the music scene was as a teenager, having formed post-punk band S.C.U.M. in 2008 with some school friends. The group released an album and a few singles, becoming associated with the likes of TOY and
The Horrors in the process (not least because former S.C.U.M. member Huw Webb is the brother of Rhys Webb) before folding in 2013, by which point Cohen had married Geldof. Sitting opposite Cohen in an East London photography studio for the first of two intimate interviews, the confident figure before me seems to have weathered his tumultuous emotional experiences well, at least outwardly. In fact, rakishly thin, dressed in all-black and enviably handsome, Cohen doesn’t look like any kind of victim but a bona fide rock star, right down to the oversized silver jewellery dripping from his fingers. He reels off influences and speaks with considered confidence about ‘Bloom Forever’, his debut solo album set to be released in May on Stolen Recordings. Nearly two years after losing the mother of his children, Cohen is back doing what he so evidently loves: making music and talking about it. “It’s brutally honest and there are a few reasons for that,” he says of the new record. “First, I wanted it to be, but second, it had to be, really. I didn’t want to make something that was dishonest; I started out with this record wanting to do something in the vain of the musicians I love from the seventies. I mean go and listen to John Lennon’s first album (‘John Lennon/ Plastic Ono Band’) – it’s painful, it’s brutal, it’s so honest. “It was just the only way I could create. It made sense to listen to a record by (Texan singer-songwriter) Townes van Zandt, where he’s just taking you through what you would perceive to be his depression. Now I don’t have depression, but I did want to face those things that I had to face – well, I had to write songs about them.” It doesn’t take much in the way of sleuthing to start unpicking Cohen’s
lyrics when the album is, he says, sequenced in the order that it was written – between 2013 and 2015. The title track, for instance, which is the second on the album, was written on the day his second son, Phaedra, was born in April 2013. “Obviously I didn’t have my new-born son in one arm and my guitar in another,” he helpfully clarifies. By the time we reach ‘Country Home’ though, Cohen’s words have begun to take on a sense of dark poignancy, as he sings: “Morning has gone / turning so cold / keep your eyes closed / you couldn’t make it through.” It turns out that the song represents the apex of Geldof’s influence on the album. “I thought about it and it didn’t feel wrong to write a whole record about it but I just thought, if I put [my feelings about her death] all into one song on the record then I will have really achieved something.”
T
he track holds particular significance for Cohen because it chronicles the time he and Geldof spent in their country retreat in Kent. It’s also where Geldof tragically overdosed on heroin one evening in Cohen’s absence. The whole family – Cohen included – had battled tirelessly to prevent Geldof succumbing to her demons and emulating her late mother Paula Yates in the process, but in April 2014, her addiction finally got the better of her. In the months beforehand, she had allegedly also grown tired of life in the countryside and expressed a desire to return to London – a position apparently not endorsed by Cohen, not least because it would involve Geldof being within much closer reach of the city’s dangerous vices. ‘Country Home’ is certainly where Geldof’s presence is most acutely felt but she naturally casts a shadow over
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other parts of the record too. On ‘Ain’t Gonna Be No Rain’ Cohen seems to allude to some of her all-too-publicised struggles with the temptations of London: “Take the city by its cold hand / What you been doing with your life?” Elsewhere, he seems to offer a protective vigil: “Hold on darling / lay down tonight” he sings on ‘Only Us’. By final track ‘Mother Mary’, it seems as though Cohen if finally trying to let go (“Trying to leave part of me / in love with you”), though the singer himself suggests ‘New Morning Comes’ is more of a “conscious goodbye.” Cohen suggests that the scattered approach to writing and recording the album has somewhat diluted its focus on Geldof. All the same, I wonder whether there’s any sense of apprehension about releasing what is such an honest album when there’ll undoubtedly be a degree of press scrutiny involved regardless, given the circumstances. “Not at all,” Cohen says firmly. “I think there was a point when I was [apprehensive], maybe straight after I’d made it, but I don’t feel like that anymore. Then again, this is just my first interview.” So there’s definitely no concern about how the papers will interpret all this then? “No, because I don’t care,” he says, slightly exasperatedly. “I think if I’d cared [about the press] and I’d thought about it and it was part of my life at the time when I was making the record then yes, maybe. But I’d made – it wasn’t even a firm decision – the obvious thing to do was to just not have that be a part of my life. Because when you think about something else when you’re creating, then you’re not actually doing what it is you should be doing, which is creating!” Cohen is still close to Sir Bob and the wider family – he spent the winter holidays with them, along with new girlfriend and friend of Peaches, model Daisy Lowe. Have they heard
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interviews
Thomas co h e n’s d e bu t albu m was wr i tt e n betw e e n 2 0 1 3 and 2 0 1 5 and r u ns c h r o no lo gic ally
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interviews
“I’m not hiding anything. There’s nothing new to learn if you’re looking for some tragedy.”
the record? Yes, apparently. I ask whether anybody has offered an opinion yet but I get given short shrift. “Yeah everyone’s heard it, no-one’s given me any thoughts,” begins the rather terse reply. “Nobody has come to me and said I’ve done this great thing or had any opinion on it, since literally the basis of creativity is your experience and your life and you transform that and you turn it into something else.” Fair enough, though it’s still hard to imagine that the family wouldn’t express an opinion about such a direct record. Unsurprisingly, efforts to tease out much else in the way of lyrical commentary from Cohen are largely unsuccessful, though he does say that the candour of ‘Bloom Forever’ isn’t as rare as we might think. “I’m sure every musician, pretty much whether they’re making disco or grime or whatever, they’re all trying to be or actually are being honest,” Cohen argues. “That’s music; that’s being a lyricist and that’s art. With their music there’s nothing new, [the difference is] just that you don’t already know their stories. They’re telling you for the first time. A lot of times with songs you’ll listen to something for ten years and only then you get what it’s about.” Like David Bowie’s final work
before he died, I suggest, which was misconstrued when it was released – or was it? “Exactly! I mean when he put ‘Blackstar’ out it was meant to be about ISIS! It’s only when you listen back to the song now…”
I
f Cohen is slightly evasive in discussing his lyrics, he’s far more at ease talking about the new record from a musical perspective. A few days after our initial conversation, he speaks animatedly and candidly about his influences. For instance, it was in 2013, he says, listening to Scott Walker incessantly, that the seeds for ‘Bloom Forever’ were planted. “I think Scott Walker is a good example of somebody who left a band and made music on their own terms, you know. That’s what I did. I very much wanted to make a record which had my name on it, had an image of myself on the cover, much like a Scott Walker record or any solo musician’s record. I wanted the same level of honesty – no particular alter-ego.” Like Walker’s masterpiece ‘Scott 4’, ‘Bloom Forever’ is a proper singersongwriter’s album, the kind of rare full-scale affair that stands at odds with the sparse, DIY-style productions
you’ll find on most solo records nowadays. For anybody who’s heard Cohen’s work with his old band, this will all come as quite a shock: the icy, ’80s-influenced post-punk of old has melted away and been replaced by ’70s-tinged bluesy Americana and piano ballads. “I was fully conscious of the fact when I was making the record that I was making an entirely unfashionable, out-of-touch record that is really fucking weird,” he says. “But that’s what I am – entirely unfashionable, highly out-of-touch and really fucking weird! I don’t fit into this high-profile projection of somebody else’s concept of my life. At all.” So, people like Loudon Wainwright III, his son Rufus and Alex Chilton loom large, while Van Morrison was another major influence, Cohen says. “I really got into him on the record, while making it. What I did while making the record was find musicians who I really trusted, speak to them a bit, play them the songs, then allow them to just improvise on the top of it. I think it was that kind of element of them emotionally responding to what they were hearing and just playing in a certain style that I’d requested. Then we just improvised and improvised on the top – some of it was incredible and some of it we wouldn’t use – and I found out later on that that was what Van Morrison himself did. “We tried to keep instrumentation to a real minimum, too. I don’t know if there’s particularly any overdubbing or filling out. What you’re hearing on the record at all times is just two guitars, bass guitar, drums, one vocal, backing vocal, a Rhodes and then there’s a saxophone solo. For me that was an amazing way of making an album because it meant every mistake you could possibly make couldn’t really happen, because you’re not allowing yourself to overindulge in anything.” The album was written between 2013 and 2015 but was recorded in two stints in Reykjavik, Iceland – the first in August 2014, then again in
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2015. The entire cast of session musicians involved were Icelandic and coupled with the tranquil environment surrounding the recording studio, it’s entirely understandable that a sense of unhurried contemplation managed to permeate each of the nine tracks. The quirky limitations of the studio itself helped to lend the record some character too, Cohen says. “We were in Reykjavik and I said, guys I really need a piano, but the studio didn’t have one. We ended up locating one via my engineer. His brother owned the studio and his wife’s great aunt had one, so we ended up heading over to her house – her piano was pretty much the only grand piano we could find in Reykjavik! Her husband was in his nineties but they were very sweet and accommodating while we were recording.” In keeping with the chronological sequencing, ‘Honeymoon’ was first recorded and released as a “nonsingle” back in 2013 before the rest – a six-minute, late-night stroll through Cohen’s mind, replete with a jazzy saxophone solo. “I spent four months working on that one song, but that was at a time when I was able to do that – I had absolutely zero pressure or whatever,” he says of the track, alluding to events to come. “Plus I needed to create what it was that I wanted to create, and figure out how to get there and do that. It was learning how to produce the music that I wanted to create without a label, without a manager or a band, and how you go about creating a six-minute song with a saxophone solo without all of those things!” Certainly nobody could ever accuse Cohen of taking the easy route to solo success. Elsewhere across ‘Bloom Forever’ he takes in influences ranging from Big Star through to what he calls the “insane piano” of cult baroque pop singer Judee Sill in developing increasingly complex arrangements. “I’d much rather make a record that has some sense of fucking delusion in it than something that’s perfect.”
Anna
Something Photogra phy: gem harris
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Meredith
For Me loudandquiet.com
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writer: sam walton
After years of only making music when commissioned to work on classical compositions, Anna Meredith has made an experimental electronic album for herself The first note of music Anna Meredith ever wrote was for her Scottish Standard Grade music coursework. It was a composition for those beige, plastic, single-finger keyboards that were a fixture in every early-90s school music department – the ones where each key produced an entire chord in a variety of synthesised instruments that were selected via a bank of buttons along the top. Her piece was called ‘Relfections’ (she misspelled ‘Reflections’ on the cover sheet), and the quirk was that the performer was required to change
the instrument’s sounds throughout using his or her nose. “So it would be like,‘Pipe Organ!’,” exclaims Meredith, amused by her own teenage ridiculousness as she dips her nose to the table like a chicken pecking at grain. “Then, ‘Sea Shore!’” she chuckles, diving down again. “So I wrote this piece,” she continues, “and apparently the examiner was like, ‘what this kid’s got, you should keep an eye on.’” She raises her eyebrows, as if skeptical of her own story. “So my teacher asked me if I’d thought about writing anything else.”
As it happens, Meredith hadn’t. Indeed, she’d only started playing the clarinet a couple of years earlier to make friends, finding kindred spirits in the after-school music groups of Edinburgh. “I wasn’t very popular at school,” she confesses with an apologetic smile. “I was a bit of a weirdo – big scarf, plaits, clarinet badge, that kind of stuff – in an edgy school, so music was where I found people a bit more like me.” She fell for the engulfing sound of an orchestra at full tilt, but the idea that it might be someone’s job to write
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the music, or that you were even allowed to do that kind of thing, never occurred to her. “As a teenager, I was just doing what I was told to,” she remembers. “I don’t think I thought I was especially musically talented, and wasn’t taken too seriously, but I enjoyed it.” In fact, Meredith didn’t think about writing anything else again until she was once more required to for school coursework, this time her Scottish Highers. Another idiosyncratic piece of music received high praise, another writing hiatus followed, and a pattern
l ef t : a n n a mer ed i t h in t he en t r a n c e h a l l o f s na p e ma l t i n g s , S u f f o l k
was formed that she took to the music department at the University of York and through a masters degree at the Royal College of Music: if it’s asked for, Meredith gladly delivers. Otherwise, she keeps herself to herself. It’s a pattern that endures, in a sense, today: for the last fifteen years or so, Meredith’s full-time day job has been as a composer of music for other people. She makes a living off commissions from international orchestras, operas and cultural institutions, writing symphonies, songs and string quartets for body percussion, beatboxer and boomwhacker. She’s always funded and fully briefed before a single clef has been drawn, these days turning down more approaches than she accepts. In short, everything Meredith writes is requested, by someone, somewhere, all of which makes the latest chapter in her compositional history something of a first: next month, her debut album, ‘Varmints’, will come out, and while it has enough support to be released on a modest indie record label (Moshi Moshi), no one approached her to write it. No one asked her to sing and play on it. No one paid her to do it, either. “My composer mates go, ‘oh I see you’re doing some electronics, you’re selling out’,” she says with a smile, “and they have no idea – my contemporary art music funds my electronic pop.” In Meredith’s world, things don’t always operate as expected. But Anna Meredith’s appeal isn’t about her imminent debut being punted into the record-buying public with crossed fingers, lots of goodwill and even more debt – that story gets told every week. Nor is it about an eccentric musician established in one area chancing her arm at something different out of restlessness or curiosity – that’s been the preserve of highfalutin rock stars since the ’70s. Instead, Meredith’s appeal lies somewhere to the left of all that, not just in her music – screwy and addictive and disconcerting and eye-popping as it is – but in how her approach, her process and her background makes her one of the country’s most topsy-turvy musicians. The intrigue lies less in the musical whiplash inflicted by her
woozy polyrhythms, or her apparently unique ability to turn a drumbeat into an earworm, and more in how she found the belief to commission herself for the first time: ‘Varmints’, it turns out, is not just a knotty vine of intricate electronics, acoustics and animalistic beats, but also a record borne of enviable conviction, confidence and self-imposed accountability developed over a career of being told what to write. It’s a story about what happens when a master architect decides to design her own house – and how she lives in it afterwards.
F
ive miles outside the Suffolk seaside town of Aldeburgh, among the open fenland of East Anglia’s Sunshine Coast, sits a set of imposing Victorian barley-malting houses. When the malting business dried up there in the late sixties, Benjamin Britten spearheaded a project to convert the largest of the disused buildings into a concert hall to house his thenburgeoning annual Aldeburgh Music Festival. Fifty years on, with several of the other buildings on the site now converted into rehearsal rooms, studios and performance spaces, the entire Snape Maltings complex is home to Aldeburgh Music, an international creative centre for contemporary music that hosts concerts all year round and offers residencies to composers and enables them to develop new work. In the context of Austerity Britain and, more generally, the culture industry’s financial contraction over the past two decades, it feels like a minor miracle that a place like Aldeburgh Music exists at all. Bucolically flanked by the river Alde to one side and rolling barley fields to the other, with giant sculptures by Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth dotting the grounds, the entire site is inspiringly tranquil. Curious noises emanate from the practice rooms within the complex’s various buildings, amplifying the stirring, other-wordly feel, and the overall effect is one of seductive dissociation: there’s a sense that the creativitysapping drudgery of real life just doesn’t happen here, that this place is a
greenhouse for those exotic musical plants that would struggle to thrive anywhere else. Anna Meredith has been in and out of Aldeburgh Music in one capacity or another since graduating, be it teaching, studying, performing or writing. She’s currently in residence there to complete work on her reimagining of Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’, a commission from Glasgow string orchestra The Scottish Ensemble – not that she’s too familiar with Vivaldi’s original. “When I got the score, I was like, ‘I know the Four Seasons!’, and then I realised I only know about half of it, and some of it I don’t ever remember hearing,” she admits, with a smile, as we sit in her long, atticroom studio. At one end is a grand piano, a MIDI keyboard, some manuscript paper covered in cryptic scribbles, and Meredith’s MacBook on which the composition program Sibelius idles patiently. At the other, almost laughably in contrast, are two antique harpsichords and a small library of multi-volume composer biographies and musical encyclopaedias that look like they were last read shortly after the Suez Crisis. Meredith’s Vivaldi confession is made breezily enough – there’s no sense of her rabble-rousing or attempting to be edgy. Indeed, given the style of her writing, there’s no reason that she should be any more au fait with a 17th-century baroque composer than Taylor Swift should be with the Sun Ra Arkestra. Nonetheless, it’s a real-life confirmation of another facet of Meredith’s unusual composer personality: she doesn’t really listen to other people’s music. “Music was more of a social thing to me, to be honest,” she remembers, of her formative musical experiences. “I wasn’t the kind of kid who was like, ‘I must check out the other bits of Beethoven’ – I had little interest beyond the repertoire I was doing. I loved the pieces I was playing, and I would listen to those obsessively on my Walkman, but beyond that I wouldn’t go out of my way.” That initial ambivalence stuck: once she started composing more regularly, Meredith discovered that listening to a lot of current music was actually counterproductive to her own
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creative process. “I found that if I heard something that I thought was good, I’d end up emulating it and making a shit version of it,” she explains. “Like, when I first started messing around in electronics, I wrote some stuff that was basically ‘shit James Blake’, but really I’m not someone who’s trying to make a genre. I’m not trying to make a pastiche of this or that, or a bit of hiphop or whatever. I’m just trying to do my own thing, which sounds maybe a bit ego-y, but it’s the only way that I can do it.” “But it’s also about accountability,” she continues. “People say to me, ‘oh you must’ve heard this’, but I’ve never heard any of it, which is actually useful, because I honestly want to say I’ve made this stuff out of my own passion and excitement about the musical dots and material, rather than fashion or trend.” Of course, as the saying goes, one should never trust a thin chef – and it’s difficult to think of another writer, filmmaker, artist or musician who’s so open, and positive, about their own (relative) isolationism. However, you needn’t spend long in the company of Meredith to realise that her reluctance to devour hours upon hours of music in the way that many other musicians do lies not in snobbery, nor laziness or even being stuck in her ways, but simply because her relationship with music appears to be fundamentally different to most: where the majority of the population might describe their most fulfilling musical experiences as involving some sort of abstract emotion evoked from hearing sound, Meredith’s are far more interactive. Listening to her talk, it seems that for her, music is about the giddy, lightheaded feeling you get when you’re playing, exploring and creating; the addictive element for Meredith is the interactivity she feels and the taking part, the seamless flow and reciprocal synergy, rather than the one-way, insular act of simply paying attention to the music itself. She describes getting physical sensations when music is working for her. “Especially playing in an orchestra,” she remembers, “when I get to the end of a piece, there’s a specific rush of blood that runs from my head to my toes to my back. When
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when A n n a mered it h l ist en s t o curren t music her o wn so n g s so un d l ike “shit james b lake”
I’m writing,” she goes on, “I can physically tell if the material’s good because I feel it very clearly in my hands.” This almost synesthetic sensory crossover is her yardstick – a nowfamiliar tool that she uses, instead of comparison to her peers, to assess her work. “I’m always searching for that feeling of something being physically, viscerally right, and I now know how to actively search for it a bit more,” she explains. “So sometimes, when I’m trying to work out a bit of music, I’ll literally audition ideas – singing them out to myself, one by one, and when I’ve got the right one, I’ll know it’s right because I’ll physically latch onto it.” She stops herself, tailing away, suddenly bashful. “It sounds a bit flaky, doesn’t it…”
H
er moment of self-doubt is telling: Meredith in full-on writing mode would never call her process flaky. In contrast to more heart-onsleeve musicians who try to render their compositions as extensions of themselves, Meredith is open about needing to get into a very specific headspace before she writes. “I need to be somewhere like here, away from distractions,” she explains of her preparation, “and, most of all, I need to be feeling quite good about myself – emotionally stable and feeling quite strong. “I look to get into a mentality where I can respond to the pressure of saying, ‘you will write something good!’,” she continues. “It’s about
getting that mind-set, so that when I have an idea that makes me chortle, one that passes my audition, I know I have the balls to deal with it. I need to be feeling quite wired – quite ‘come on, let’s go!’ to make music,” she adds, clenching her fists like a tennis player at break point. “Quite often, though, it goes the other way around. I might not be feeling very confident or ballsy or energised or angry or anything like that, but the song has its own identity and in some ways, I’m subservient to the thing that gets created.” That wired sensibility spills onto ‘Varmints’ in gloriously, splatting
rather than minutiae of production,” as Meredith puts it. One of Meredith’s calling cards from her classical work, that of almost perpetual rhythmic unpredictability, is present all over ‘Varmints’ too, which adds a real impish joy. “There’s a real delight when you’re listening to a piece of music and it completely pulls the rug from under you,” she agrees. “I really enjoy misleading people, so that you feel like you’re in one feel, and then,” she rocks her head back like a cartoon witch preparing to cackle, “ahahaha! The other beat comes in!” One track on ‘Varmints’, however, feels different to the rest. The closing
“My composer mates have no idea – my contemporary art music funds my electronic pop” Technicolour as mazy instrumentals that squirm through impossible crevices and angles like some shapeshifting sea creature, or as superficially dainty songs whose sometimes worrisome lyrics contrast with the unyielding musical boldness that accompanies them. Patterns emerge across the album’s running time but are never duplicated, creating a sense of elegant structure and comfortingly mountainous, widescreen pacing – or “big brush strokes, big graphic shapes,
piece, ‘Blackfriars’, with its elegiac strings and plaintive rhythm, has none of the chaotic chutzpah of what’s gone before. Indeed, it makes for a somewhat soothing epilogue. However, it’s of note because it’s Meredith’s only example of what she produces when she isn’t in her usual all-conquering headspace. “I had some crap stuff happen last year and I was in a wobblier place, and I wasn’t really able to do the thing I normally do,” she says, detailing the genesis of the track. “I was trying to work that one out while not being able to access the normal skills I needed in order to compose, not being able to tap into the strength that I needed, and that’s what came out.” Far from disrupting the mood, though, ‘Blackfriars’ is perhaps the key to the whole album. Not only does it complete the running order but it also deepens ‘Varmints’, acting as a cipher that demonstrates how the rest of the record isn’t just the work of some brash, hyper-confident maniac, but of different facets of Meredith’s personality. That’s just as well: “It’s not like I have a Sasha Fierce character to fall back on,” she jokes, referring to Béyonce’s notoriously bombastic alter ego. “Whether it’s this stuff, a piece for kids, a piece with no instruments or whatever it might be, MRI Scanners or a million harmonicas, it all comes from a really honest place. I have to believe in it fully.”
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On one hand, Meredith’s reliance on her own internal barometer of quality, coupled with her stated desire to capture music borne of a crack-free, bulletproof self-confidence, might appear a touch bullish, even alienating. On the other, however, that outward display of mega-strength is balanced by an on-going reluctance to acknowledge wider success that would seem pathological if it wasn’t delivered with such affable self-effacement. Again and again during our conversation, she talks in terms of “moving the goalposts as you reach them” so as to avoid complacency, and not allowing herself ever to think that she’s actually successful. “You always have to feel as if there’s work to do or stuff to be done,” she insists, conscientiously. “You have to keep moving forward – I can’t imagine ever going, ‘well, I’ve made it now.’” Given the circumstances of ‘Varmints’, too, this aspect of perfectionism looms larger than ever: “When I’m writing a commission,” she explains, “there’s a deadline: players are going to be waiting, a concert’s been booked so you’ve got to get your parts written and there’s an element of just going ‘ah, fuck it’. But with ‘Varmints’, I’ve done a bit less ‘fuck it’ than usual because this is my thing, so I’m accountable – for me, doing a self-starting thing to this scale is quite big in terms of the time and the commitment that you put towards something that nobody’s asked for and nobody’s paid for. “Everything else I do is people coming to me and paying me to write stuff, so then to have to make the time, and ask my band members to give up months and months of time, is a massive effort, so it has to be good enough to justify me asking so much of them, and of myself too.” “And yes,” she acknowledges, “I’m putting myself under quite a lot of pressure, but I sort of have to: if I want to do it, this is the way you do it. I mean, I’ve been chucking in so much time and money to try and get this album made, but I could never have lived with myself if I hadn’t made it. I feel like all my electronic stuff has been riding up to here. If I’d been too casual about it – ‘ah, yeah, let’s just do this electronic pop’ – I don’t think I could’ve justified it to myself, let alone to other people giving up their time.” “Anyway,” she adds, with a furrowed brow, “a bit of self-doubt can be quite healthy…” In the course of our day together, Meredith describes herself, variously,
as not brilliant, vain, lazy, flaky, egotistical, frumpy, ridiculous, pretentious, ancient, uncool, narcissistic and dickish. None of it is true. In fact, such proclamations belie a self-awareness and sense of empathy that makes her such a warm personality. More than that, though, it also serves as oblique proof of what it is that Meredith actually uses music for: confidence. For Meredith, it seems that making music acts foremost as a psychological shield against the grittier, less comfortable things that life throws at her, giving her both a defence against the bad and the endorphin rush to enjoy the good; the more traditional reasons – expression
of emotion, desire to move people, intellectual exploration – come afterwards. What’s more, that shield effect becomes a virtuous circle – when she listens back to her own music, it directly empowers her to write more: “I can get quite psyched up listening to something of my own,” she says. “Or if I’m trying to write something new I can listen back and go ‘hey look! You managed to do this – look what you can do when you put your mind to it! Get on with it!’” Frequently, she contrasts that version of herself with her normal, resting-state personality: “music writing brings out the most confident,
no-fucks-given version of myself, and the normal, nicer, slightly more anxious me will be a bit, ‘argh, maybe we shouldn’t… hang on!’,” she tells me at one point. At another, she says, “I think composing brings out the best in me. On the spectrum of my personality, the bit that provides the right energy to compose is the most confident, the most ‘fuck yeah!’, the most energised. But like everyone else I worry and I procrastinate and I feel insecure and I faff – I do all that business too.” In that context, listening to ‘Varmints’ becomes not just a sensory day at the zoo, but also a rather cathartic experience: it becomes a literal record of Meredith’s best moments, her
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ultimate best-foot-forward, her at her happiest and at her most courageous, and that realisation helps mutate an album of enjoyably furtive, propulsive but frequently abstract music into that rare thing in the world of intelligent electronica – a relatable, threedimensional, honest experience. “As you get into your 30s, you realise you’re not really on the same path as some of your friends, not married, no kids, doing your own thing,” she responds, when asked about that unusual candidacy. “And as you peel away from that security that you got from doing the same stuff as everyone else, you have to really believe in your own trajectory and values. You have to just keep on going. The stuff that I don’t know about is all the surface kind of stuff – life stuff – that I shouldn’t be worrying about anyway. But the music-writing me seems to know what I want.” There’s a sense of steely groundedness to Meredith as she says this – she’s not in her ultra-fearless writer mode now, but some of that still lingers. Perhaps her foray into selfcommissioning, rather than simply being told what to write, has been more empowering than anticipated. “Well, I’ve definitely left this year a bit more open than usual, to do more with ‘Varmints’,” she says, optimistically. “I’ve turned down quite a lot of work, which feels like quite, er… I’m not sure.” She falters for a moment, smiling apologetically once more. “It feels like there’s a lot of space this year now to make things happen. And maybe they won’t. Maybe I’ll just be sat about. Worrying about stuff. On my own.” She pauses again. “Or I could be touring the world with an animatronic dragon!” she laughs, confidence flowing back through her. “Either way, I feel proud of this thing, no matter what happens to it.” Earlier in the day, Meredith confessed that if ‘Varmints’ doesn’t come to much commercially, then she’d have to reconsider what role this kind of work has in her professional life, because it takes up so much time. But if this kind of purity, satisfaction and musical accomplishment is what she achieves when she’s left to her own devices, a more apt question might be whether she can afford to stop.
tell me about it
Sam Simmons The Australian comic who appreciates nothing more than complete silliness Ph otography: sonny mccartney / writer: stu art stubbs
When I meet Sam Simmons in the bar of Soho Theatre something happens that wonderfully befits his standup persona. A small plastic horse falls out of his pocket and skids toward the door. He chases after it. He skulls an espresso straight from the machine and we walk out into the rain for some photographs. “Last night was fucking terrible,” he insists in his pinched, Australian whine that helped land the most absurd of punch lines in his 2015 Edinburgh Comedy Award-winning show, Spaghetti For Breakfast. “Just awful! Seriously. It says on the poster that it’s ‘work in fucking progress’, and tickets are only a fucking fiver!” he starts to rant, “but it was a real TV crowd, of people who’d seen me on 8 Out of 10 Cats and thought, oh, he’s good… Fuuccck! One guy’s sat there live tweeting through it, saying how shit it is!” I saw Spaghetti For Breakfast last year with a friend, not knowing who Sam Simmons was. An hour of crafted, surreal comedy passed, made to look altogether freewheeling and looseygoosey, and I learned that Simmons was anarchically somewhere between Vic & Bob and an Aussie Basil Fawlty. Pretty damn funny, then, and very, very silly. Simmons, who now pretty much lives in LA, is boiling comedy back down to its purest form of unpretentious daftness, while somehow managing to remain subversive enough to please Daniel Kitson fans. He does this via devises like ‘Things that shit me’ – an overdubbed shopping list of his pet hates that come and go between him pouring Rice Crispies over himself and spontaneously comparing the hue of different audience members’ blue jeans. It’s best to just go with it, as the stupefied panel on 8 Out of 10 Cats realised a week before I meet Simmons in Soho, and as he wished last night’s audience had while he work-shopped new material. “I start the new show with a prosthetic cock on, hitting myself with a shrub. I think it’s fucking hilarious, but everyone last night was like: ‘Urgh, shit, he’s got his cock out. Yuck!”
“It’s a turd rolled in glitter.”
The T-shirt philosophers – the Russell Howards and Russell Kanes – I regale against that, and sometimes in my show I’ll go, ‘whose cock do I have to suck to get on that panel show? Is that what it’s really all about?!’ I can’t stand that everyman shit. I guess what made [Spaghetti For Breakfast] relatable was something that happened by accident this time last year as I was working on putting the show together. I had to earn money by doing the club circuit here in the UK and I don’t do straight standup, so I didn’t want to bend to their rules, so I put in the device ‘Things that shit me’. It’s very relatable stuff, but it’s still in my world. These club guys would be loving that and I realised I could sneak in a really subversive story here as well. So it’s shiny shit, shiny shit, shiny shit, oh, that was a bit weird, shiny shit, shiny shit. You just sugar up the dark shit, and I try to do that a lot. This year, the new show is going to be more of my weird stuff.” “I’m looking forward to getting out of grim England.”
I do totally like it here though. I like performing for you, because I find it difficult. I think there’s a bit of anticolonial… how do I say this? … Australians can beat you in sport, but they can’t beat you in other things, especially the arts – Brits don’t like that, so it’s harder for me to win an audience over, I feel. It’s still there in the muscle memory of the Brits that you banished us to paradise – there’s a bit of resentment there. ‘You can beat us in sport, but don’t you dare beat us in philosophy of art!’ So I find that a challenge, but I LOVE it.”
“Dan Kitson is the head of the fucking comedy mafia, that fuck!”
“Americans are better people than the Australians.”
He’s the head of the wooly mafia. I love him very much but he came and saw me very early in my career. I did a show here called Fail and it was a fucking terrible show, and I think he came along and saw me once and just thought, ‘yeah, you’re no good.’ And I just want him to love me – ‘please love me, Daniel’ – and he just doesn’t. Whenever I’m having a bad gig I say, ‘I bet Daniel’s here.’ He has seen me twice actually. The other time he came with Stewart Lee, and Stewart left halfway through, because he has tinnitus, or so he says (I’m friends with him, so it’s fine), and my show was too loud for him. There was a bit in the middle of the show with a little bit of sentiment and Daniel heckled me… well, he went, ‘oh no!’ to really feel the sentiment. He never sees me do any good, so if it’s going badly I say: ‘tonight’s shit, Daniel Kitson must be here.’”
And they’re better than people from the UK. Just in terms of being kind. I know they shoot each other, but they’re kinder and more open to stuff. They’re a bit more can-do. So I’d have them coming up to me after a show going: ‘Oh my god, man, I didn’t know you could do that onstage. So you can do that? Oh my god. Good for you.’ When you ask if comedy is competitive, it is there. ‘Silly’ is getting ultra competitive now. There’s a silly mafia here now; a little crew bubbling underneath. I had an article written in the Guardian about me by a guy called Brian Logan that basically… the show had a bit in it about child abuse [not so much a joke, but a story that is true to Simmons’ past], and he said that I shouldn’t try to thread that into my absurdity. I can do whatever I want, thank you very much! Also, he said that I shouldn’t denigrate other standups. Well, why are you telling me what I should and shouldn’t do? Like I should stay in my absurdist box and not try anything new. Fuck that. I love going on a rant. Bill Burr is my favourite comedian – just an angry Bostonian.And Romesh [Ranganathan] is the funniest guy in Britain. None of this ‘what did I learn’ shit – he’s just bitter!”
“My hit rate is one in five.”
One in five gigs are just appalling. Absolutely. It doesn’t matter what I do – sometimes it’s me – I mean, you can’t be funny every day of your life – and sometimes it’s an apathetic audience. Fucking hell, man, posh audiences – I get them here in Soho a lot, and it’s fine, but it’s a bit ra-ra-rah regatta. You get the banker crowd in, but I love it – they’re really supportive. Saying that, there was one guy at the end of one of the shows who heckled: ‘You fucking should have killed yourself!’ I was like: ‘Oh my god!’ Not that that’s going to affect me emotionally, like, ‘yeah, I should have,’ but the words hurt, like, ow! I just performed for you for an hour!”
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“There are comedy gangs.”
I’m not really in a gang. I feel like a bit of a lone wolf over here – I feel like people appreciate what I do, and feel like I’ve done something a little different in comedy, but I don’t feel like I’m part of a gang. The Kitsons and the Stewart Lees and Josie Longs have built careers without having to be on television, and that’s pretty extraordinary. But I see respect out of ticket prices as well – if I’m charging five pounds for a work in progress I’m going to fuck around; if I’m charging
tell me about it
top dollar I’m going to try to… not broaden myself… but I don’t want people to walk away thinking they don’t really get it, or feeling stupid, like they don’t understand it. There’s something about that intellectual mafia comedy – I get it, it’s fine, but I feel like Betty and Sue on a Friday night out might be missing out on something. Not with those guys [Kitson, Lee, Long], they’re great at what they do – don’t take me out of context, please – but I feel like I want to make it funny in a way that is digestible and palatable.” “Bad absurdism is the worst.”
There’s nothing more insufferable that someone going: ‘I’m a cheesecake man.’ Oh shut up! ‘There’s a pug on a skateboard. Yeah, crumpets.’ That’s really, really annoying. It’s hard to get it right, and I get it more right than wrong, I think. I think I’m really good at it. I know where to go with it, intuitively. I know that sounds really dumb, but it’s just where it’s come from, and that’s maybe from my upbringing, of being like: ‘I’m going in here [his mind] for a minute.’ But yeah, there is a lot of bad stuff. I understand people getting upset at bad absurdity but I don’t understand it when people out and out hate my
ab o v e: s a m s i mmo n s i n s t . an n e’ s c o u r t , s o h o , l o n d o n
show. I don’t understand it, and it’s not because I think I’m the best guy in the world, but I think that at the purest end of comedy and joy is being silly and stupid; can’t you just for a minute go with it? It’s only going to be an hour of your life, it’s going to be good, I promise you, just switch off for an hour. I wish more people would be like that, but people can be so closed to it. It’s mainly men, and it’s mainly an older demographic, and I feel that there might be a homophobic element as well. I feel like when they see an effeminate man on stage dancing around with a lettuce or being weird they’re like: ‘what’s this fucking poofter up to!?’ They switch off and are like: ‘I don’t want to be seen laughing at this; he’s a bit weird.’ I think people feel threatened, that if they’re caught laughing, they’re worried that their mate will be like, ‘oh, you find this shit funny do you? I don’t wanna be associated with this shit!?’ T-shirt comedians are telling you how it is and it’s safe. It takes a lot more guts to like something that is on the edge. “I never thought I’d do standup.”
And I’ve never done standup, really. Some people would call it performance art but it’s not – it’s just being a weirdo.
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I was working in St. Kilda in Melbourne and my friend got her handbag stolen so we put on a benefit gig at the local pub to raise money to replace her handbag. Me and my mate Greg dressed up as Bert and Ernie and sang parody songs. It was terrible, but it did really well, and I did more and more. I’d started working at Melbourne Zoo though, and was going to become a zookeeper, and I was about to go to Thailand to live with three female elephants that were going to be shipped to Australia. I was going to sit with them in quarantine for 6 months, but at the same time my comedy career was doing something and I got offered a radio job, and I thought, well, that’s easy money and I don’t have to pick up shit in a paddock. But I loved the keeping days – sometimes I think I fucked up there. Nicer people. The zoo people, not the elephants. The [comedy] industry is full of terrible fucking cunts. It’s an industry full of narcissism, and what I was saying before about not having many friends in comedy, it’s for a reason. [Laughs]. I’ve got my childhood friends and my dear friends in life, which a lot of comedians don’t have, because they’re fucking psychopaths.
retold
A b o v e & t o p l eft : t his he at i n co l d st o rag e, 1978. L e ft : t he ban d in 1981. B el o w: On t o ur in ho l lan d
here are some bands that seem born to confound genres and eschew labels and then there are others that seem to exist as a very means to destroy them altogether. The latter is an attribute most certainly applicable to the inimitable This Heat. The band were a trio who were originally active between 1976-1982, consisting of Charles Hayward, Charles Bullen and Gareth Williams. Hayward was primarily a drummer, having played in groups before, most notably Quiet Sun, who disbanded in 1972 with their guitarist, Phil Manzanera, going on to join Roxy Music. Hayward put an advert in Melody Maker (“I think some of the words used might have been ‘wasteland’ ‘mutant’ and ‘aqualung’,” he reckons) and Bullen responded, turning up for an audition at Hayward’s parents’ house in
Camberwell. “It was a tiny room with egg boxes on the wall,” says Bullen, “one he used as a drum rehearsal room – it was about six foot square and we just squeezed in an amp and a person.” Despite a number of reputable musicians turning up, including David Toop, Percy Jones and John Etheridge, Hayward gravitated towards Bullen’s unique style of playing. “Charles could play very hard and fast,” remembers Hayward, “but he would use an effect and make it feel like it was coming in from miles away. The sound would then feel like it was getting nearer because he was using a swirl peddle.” The pair continued as a two piece for some time, experimenting and pushing the limits of their number, until they realised they were not quite complete as a duo. They brought in
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retold
Three men in a Fridge The story of This Heat, recalled by Charles Hayward and Charles Bullen Photogra phy: Les l ey E vans / writer: danie l dy l an wray
Gareth Williams, who was a complete non-musician. “Gareth had big ears,” Hayward says, “which was more important than his abilities as a musician.” This Heat was born and the combination of Bullen’s and Hayward’s profound musical ability and shared vision of experimentation, and William’s non-musician presence, solidified a truly unique export; one that challenged the conventional structures and approaches of music in the 1970s, often because one of their members simply didn’t understand them. “One of the most effective things about working with Gareth was that he just didn’t know,” recalls Hayward, “so he questioned everything.” The birth of the group also bore a concept in many ways, too, as Hayward tells me: “It was this idea of all channels open, so not about just tuning into a song or tuning into what would be some sort of music concrete or electronics or tuning into free improvisation or sound art or rock. It was none of these things because it was all of these things. So you didn’t ever confine the group, you let it be what it wanted to be.” “This Heat was formed from the collective desire of its individual members not to be in other people’s groups,” says Bullen. The idea was that everyone was equal in This Heat – all roles as important as each other; this was not somebody’s band that other people played a part in, it was a collective output. The group found a home for their improvisations and experimentations in an old meat factory in Brixton, setting up in what was a disused cold storage room. The room-come-studio was named, fittingly, Cold Storage. “It was an old industrial space that was earmarked for demolition at some
point in the future but there wasn’t going to be any money for it for a good few years,” remembers Bullen. “So it was leased out by its owners to Acme galleries, who were an artist collective, and the place became filled mostly with visual artists. The actual cold storage room that we used had no windows, big thick metal doors on it, a low ceiling with metal zinc sheeting on the walls – it wasn’t really any use to visual artists because there was no natural light. When we moved in there was no air in there so we had to pull off one of the sheets and hired a kango hammer and drilled a hole in the wall, just to get some air in it.” Here the group toyed with tape loops, billowing drones, eerie echoes and a continuation of generally sideways approaches to the use of guitar, bass, drums, vocals and keyboards, resulting in a sound that seemed to somehow construct the foundations for post-punk whilst also pulling them apart. A fog of ominous doom may hang over some of their recorded content in tone but a sense of fury and violence was something Hayward was trying to channel when approaching their work. “There was a need to acknowledge that there is a violent streak in the world and probably inside all of us and that it’s one of culture’s functions to control that. I used to be really emboldened by The Who, that they dared to sound like that and be that aggressive with sound. It was like how I imagine going to see some primitive ritual would have been. There was a lot of po-faced jazz rock going on at the time, with people taking their instruments very seriously – including me and I still do – but people were getting caught up in the niceties of doing it and playing it, nobody was painting any nice pictures or making any journeys. It was just
very well played music... you want to go down the road that lets you be good at your instrument but you can also be trapped by being good at your instrument.” Essentially, this was a group anticipating and constructing the formula of punk but presenting it in a style that already seemed bored of the primitive growl of punk before it had even really been heard. Bullen recalls being excited by the prospect of such a movement but less so with the reality. “I remember reading about this scene in NME in 1977, about people singing lines like ‘no more Rolling Stones’ and we were thinking, great, imagining some sort of musical revolution was coming, but then when we heard this purported revolution, we were like urgggh, just sounds a bit like the Rolling Stones. Although at least they weren’t singing in fake American accents like Jagger.” Looking at the group’s output retrospectively, they stick out like jagged nails in a wall, but this was something the band were more than aware of at the time, too. “That was sort of self evident but at the same time we tried to maintain a sense of connection with other musicians… just not so much with trying to be like them,” Hayward reflects, with Bullen adding: “We knew we were out on a limb but on the other hand we were quite arrogant… maybe arrogant is too strong a word but we were quite sure of ourselves – we knew we were doing something specific. Most of the early gigs we promoted ourselves and were small, arty, London gigs. Later on we did get lumped on stage with random rockier bands, then later still we did end up on the bill with some bands we felt a sense of solidarity with such as 23 Skidoo or the Pop Group or the Slits, especially by the time of the second
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album [‘Deceit’] when we were on Rough Trade as there was definitely more of a scene around that label.” The Pop Group’s Mark Stewart was so emphatic after seeing This Heat that he proclaimed he would give them half of the £1 million record contract they thought they were just about to sign. “They still owe us that,” says Hayward. The group were something of a template band for John Peel’s tastes around that period, too, and arguably his whole life: noisy, freaky, newfangled, peculiar and exciting, a seething ball of indefinable fury coming from god knows where. A fridge in Brixton, it turned out. The sessions that This Heat did for Peel really are some of the finest recorded and this is something Bullen recalls doing with glee. “We sent in our demo and then I phoned John Walters [session producer] once a week asking if he’d listened to it and then he eventually gave us our session. That was a great thing for us. I’d grown up and been radicalised and turned onto music by John Peel for years before. It was great when he gave us a session. We did two in ’77 within a few months of one another, which was a bit unusual and I guess showed how much he loved the first one, but I think he found our second one a bit self indulgent and didn’t offer us another one after that.”
T
he primary reason I am speaking with the pair today is because This Heat are back. Sort of. They play a twonight residency in February at Café Oto under the guise of This is Not This Heat (with more offers of future shows coming in as we speak), which technically is true as Gareth Williams
retold This is This Heat A small but perfectly formed catalogue, re-issued This Heat (1979)
passed away in 2002. Instead, the band have taken on the services of some new members, including Thurston Moore and Daniel O’Sullivan. The occasion ties in with the reissues of their recorded output via Light in the Attic Records, and marks 40 years to the month that they played their first ever gig, which Bullen recalls as having “a small audience but interested and appreciative.” Hayward remembers it being about three weeks after Williams had first picked up an instrument. “We had a few ideas put together but not very much,” he says. “We had a skeleton to hang improvisation on. We didn’t really know what the group was. Later on things got a lot more fraught and I would get stage fright… well, not quite like that, it wasn’t that I didn’t want to go on stage but that I was scared of letting the music down. Later on I would be walking around in this pre-gig state for eight or nine weeks, which was like fucking hell. The first one wasn’t like that at all, it was more like bloody hell I’m on stage with Charles and Gareth!” Looking back at This Heat now, it seems like attempting to place any kind of even vague descriptor on them is as difficult as ever, if not more. “I hate genre,” says Bullen. “What I’m into is trans-categorical music, which I think is what This Heat did.” He’s fairly clear on what he wants the band not to be called, though. “One classification I hate – and always have – is industrial. It seems to have died out now but a lot of people used to throw us in with Throbbing Gristle or whatever and that really annoyed me.” Forty years since their first gig and thirty-four since they broke up, Bullen admits he’s finding it strange to be working through these songs again. “My initial thought on getting back together was ‘oh shit’ but then if not now, when?” he says. Hayward has had some bizarre moments in re-connecting too. “History repeats itself, so instead of singing about a loop that you saw your father and grandfather go through, suddenly you’re singing about a loop that you’ve gone through. It’s very, very, very, very weird, Dan, it’s a fucking weird one,” he says with real
Heavy on tape loop experimentation, as found on tracks such as ‘24 Track Loop’, for every eerie clang and ghostly what’s-in-the-basement? clatter there is the blistering force of tracks like ‘Horizontal Hold’, which sounds like a helicopter taking off in the middle of a battlefield. It’s a lean record: tight, muscular and forceful, dry and sparse in tone but rich in its experimental depths. There’s a lurking sense of paranoia that floats over it like an unwelcome apparition. The influence of the Canterbury Scene – particularly Robert Wyatt – can still be detected, too, but ‘This Heat’ is an album of a band very much forging its own personality. Health and Efficiency (1980)
abo v e: T h i s h ea t c i r c a 1 9 8 1 . L -R : C h a rl es b u ll en , gare t h w i lli a ms a n d c h a r l es h a y wa r d
emphasis. “You’re singing about something observed but then you’re singing about something experienced… this last couple of weeks it has been like relating a song about a loop to my own life.” He lets out a maniacal laugh that is almost comic-book super-villain, clearly lost for a moment in the oddity that he’s living in a conceptual musical sphere he shaped decades ago. “The whole theory of the thing being an object is gone – it’s no longer an object it’s a natural lifespan. It’s blown my fucking mind. Although I say let the irony of the material being performed today do its work. ‘Twilight Furniture’ was about a surveillance society, it was about cameras everywhere, it was about having your mind shaped by what you were told. ‘Escaping Gas’ is about getting the things you deserve, a nation votes and it gets the politicians it votes for, so your air is also your vote – it’s what you breathe.”
“That’s another loop, another spiral,” he says. “It’s like I’ve met this 25 year-old drummer, and I’ve been trying to learn his parts and this guy is whacked, he’s a whacked young man in a very extreme place.” Re-visiting the group’s material and their influence becomes indisputable. It can be heard echoing all the way from the early guitar clangs of Sonic Youth, right the way through to contemporary groups such as Viet Cong whose wiry prang and pummelling drums are projected from the forces the band ignited so many years ago. Despite This Heat being deeply thoughtful, conceptual and experimental the reason they have succeeded in acquiring such cult longevity is because they still hit on a base level. They have gut-busting guitars and deeply rhythmic songs; they assault and impact the body whilst tickling the mind and a great deal of their music is as physical and overcoming as it is intellectually rewarding. Such is that sense of overcoming power going back to these songs again that Hayward himself has been bowled over by their force. “I burst into tears after one song. It feels so beautiful to be making this music.”
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A two-track, twenty-minute EP that contains the group’s most pop-leaning moment in the exquisite title track. It’s probably the band’s finest moment, simply because they manage to do so much with so little, and yet whilst ‘Health and Efficiency’ may be two tracks long, they are ones teeming with propulsion, ambition and oceanic levels of depth. The title track charges with gusto and Hayward’s drumming is frenzied in its rattling attack but also joyfully restrained. ‘Graphic/Varispeed’ is a cinematic in scope piece of ambient static, the eerie whirl of the tape feeling like an uncoiling anxiety attack. Deceit (1981) More paranoia here but this time perhaps more realised, with the fear of nuclear war acting as the sonic mushroom cloud. It’s a more complete, denser and varied record than ‘This Heat’, opening with the lullaby-esque ‘Sleep’, which is as beguiling as it is bewildering, and a truly unique opening to an album. It plants you into a world that already exists, no introduction, straight in there. If anything, |you feel like you’ve arrived at the end of something – perhaps precisely being the point of nailing that nuclear level fear. Terrifying, utterly odd and sublimely original, it still sounds like nothing else.
Reviews / Albums
08/10
Poliça United Crushers Me mp h i s In d u s trie s By s tu ar t s t ubbs. In sto re s Ma r 4
When Poliça arrived in 2012, they did so via a soothsaying blog post from Jay-Z (so much for ‘Death of autotune’) and an over-excited endorsement from Justin Vernon, who’d just been validated himself by the Grammys. It’s easy to see why the music was always mentioned second. It was a brief time, though, and soon enough Poliça’s ‘Give You The Ghost’ LP was revered not for who told you about it but for its genuinely inventive take on modern RnB. Combining elements of triphop and dub with love-bruised robo vocals, an Aaliyah obsession and cloudy beats for late nights abandoned by love, Poliça’s melancholia didn’t just sound like nobody else, it felt unique, too – an impressive trick that they’re still pulling off two albums later. Part of that early appeal was down to the group’s origins, though – the
romance of accidence, and how ‘Give YouThe Ghost’ was an album of Ryan Olson’s leftover hip-hop instrumentals, over which fellow exGayngs member Channy Leaneagh lay sweetly gargling confessionals that bubbled on the strange half notes produced by a calculated extreme amount of auto-tune. Follow up album ‘Shulamith’ was in turn cleaner, more planned, and the magic of a group ‘making-do’ was noticeably absent. In isolation it was more than a fine record, but next to ‘Give You The Ghost’ it was looking like Poliça’s silent weapon (serendipity) was naturally impossible to ever recreate. ‘United Crushers’ is here to debunk the notion that Poliça are doomed by their own experience with the simplest of tools – better songs. Leaneagh’s switched up a couple of things here. Most notable is how
much she’s dialled back the vocal effects, save for on the first half of the opening ‘Summer Please’, where she’s dropped a few octaves to make herself sound like a deep-voiced man. It’s a red herring for what follows, although even though there’s only a touch of auto-tune on ‘United Crushers’, it’s kinda beside the point – as before, her lyrics are somewhat abstract in their repetition, and Leaneagh sings as if pulling back the ends of words to make a lot of phrases even more difficult to decipher. More than ever it’s worth cocking an ear, though, as ‘United Crushers’ not only laments relationships gone wrong once again but also guns for social injustice, war, celebrity and what it’s like to live in trigger-happy, modern America. This is a record that opens with the line “Whatchya wanna be when you’re big enough to see it’s all shit?” and
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later adds to the rhetoric on ‘Melting Pot’ with “How you gonna suck off fame while you pull your corset tighter?” A little further down the line, on ‘Fish’, Leaneagh is more familiarly vulnerable when confessing to not being as strong as she may appear on stage, and tracks like the funky ‘Baby Sucks’ and the closing ‘Lose You’ are more in Poliça’s heartbroken mould of old. But yes, you do need to really listen to pick up just how pissed the lyrics of ‘Wedding’ are (it’s about police brutality), but victorious, also – joyous even. That’s what Ryan Olson has always balanced so well throughout this project – producing a deep, dubby backdrop that fills in the gaps in Leaneagh’s clarity, meaning you can feel the theatrical weight of ‘United Crushers’’s themes even if you can’t out and out hear them.
Reviews 0 7/ 1 0
Meilyr Jones 2013 mos h i mos h i By h e nry w ilk inso n. I n store s fe b 26
Ever wondered what it’s like to live a year in the life of Meilyr Jones? Probably not, but his debut album, ‘2013’, conceived of as “an anthology, a collection of my songs and what happened to me in that year” provides a snapshot of just that. Besides a brief sojourn to Italy, though, there’s no life-changing event or Hollywood ending rendered in gut-wrenching song, but there is plenty to get you thinking.The former Racehorses front man and graduate of The Royal Academy of Music possesses that great artistic ability of making the quotidian and mundane profound and theatrical; in fact, it’s hard not to envision an accompanying stage show or musical while
listening. Full of affectations that are initially a little unwelcoming, give ‘2013’ a chance and you’ll be rewarded with an unlikely sound of originality. At first the high-brow references, baroque instrumentation and thirty strong orchestra can be a little offputting, coming across as grandiose and, if you’re like me, hard to relate to. However, as it unravels there are plenty of pop culture references too and a whimsical sense of humour that brings everything down to earth. In ‘Featured Artist’, for example, Jones sings with a knowing smirk, “I am this week’s featured artist / I’m the face of The Observer’s free magazine,” while the strangulated chorus of ‘Strange Emotional’ is so over the
top it sounds like 3am drunken karaoke. Fittingly, karaoke is an influence cited by Jones himself, alongside other contradictory and inconsistent passions: the poetry of Byron and the Romantics, medieval literature, field recordings, music journalism, architecture, musicals – it all combines disparately to work under a sort of internal logic that unfolds slowly the more you listen. Life is rarely consistent after all. ‘Don Juan’ combines harpsichord and Celtic sounding flute with a straight up pop chorus chant of “Love is a weakness that I can’t get through,” while the lyrics of ‘Passionate Friend’ (“What is this thing, this thing / To which my body clings”) is far too
(deliberately) clunky to be considered pop. There are changeable arrangements here, and throughout the album certainly carries a good amount of theatricality, but the injections of humour are never far away, recalling Lawrence Arabia and Of Montreal. Other musical influences are harder to pin down though, because in truth, Meilyr Jones has managed to produce something fiercely original. It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, and initially it’s hard to engage with, but it’s an album that seems to care little for trends or fashion, or even to notions of what an album should sound like. Instead it is bold, original and proudly anachronistic.
Existential angst is a tough nut to crack, with rock music, deep meaning and reverb soaked power chords being unlikely bedfellows. But by the time ‘Mt. Storm’, the third track on LNZNDRF’s 4AD debut, has blown through your brain, you’re left with a strange sense of euphoria and the feeling that the New Zealand trio might just have pulled it off. “Rock minimalism meets sonic maximalism” the claim, and that’s pretty accurate; it’s also accompanied by a short essay titled
“A Postcard On Time And Space From Cincinnati, Ohio” that pulls in elements of multidimensionality, linear reality, and the “doorway of one’s own awareness” to explain just how special the record is. Heavy shit, right? But LNZNDRF have that rare ability to burrow into your brain and get the dopamine flowing. It’s impressive enough that these eight tracks are the distilled essence of thirty-minute jams: that they were recorded over just two-and-a-half
days in an abandoned Church makes their power and immediacy all the more remarkable. Sure, it’s easy to spot a few key influences – hints of Joy Division abound, as does the mystic drone and hypnotic repetition of Föllakzoid – and there’s plenty of feedback and distortion. But by the time ‘Samarra’ collapses in on itself in a cacophony of noise, while it might not be clear where the band have transported you, you’re just left with the elation that it was a hell of a journey.
08/10
LNZNDRF LNZNDRF 4a d By de rek robe rtson. In store s fe b 19
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Albums 0 4/ 1 0
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Gazebos Die Alone
Rangda The Heretic’s Bargain
BOY We Were Home
Seth Bogart Seth Bogart
Ha rdl y Ar t
dr ag c i ty
g rö nl a n d
b u r g er r ec o r d s
By ha y l ey s c ot t . In sto re s Feb 19
B y Guia C o rt a s s a . I n s to re s Fe b 1 9
By g e mma s a mwa ys . I n s tor es m a r 1 1
B y ha y ley s c o t t . In s t o r es m a r 1 1
Seattle quartet Gazebos’ debut album, ‘Die Alone’ bounces along with breakneck campiness: like the live recording of a prom band in the final scenes of an eighties teen movie. The nine tracks on offer, veer between surf-rock melodies, grunge riffs, post-punk squawks and the lightest hints of prog. Given time – or greater focus – this could have made for a noteworthy mixture, but the reality is a mess. A sugar glazed patchwork of ideas, which tries hard to please and consistently fails to deliver. Of course, it’s not all bad: lead-singer Shannon Perry’s vocals are a saving grace, while album standout ‘There Are Worse Things I Could Do’ hints at something rather wonderful. Although perhaps, that’s because there’s less room for laborious sonic tangents when you’re doing a straight cover from the Grease soundtrack. ‘Die Alone’ is neither innovative, nor inventive, just a retread of stuff you’ve heard done better before, and while the band might self-describe their sound as ‘Whoa-Pop’, on the basis of this, Oh,No!-Pop seems like a better adjective.
Psychedelia and dark, wicked folklore has always found a special connection in musical ventures. Rangda is no exception: a supergroup made of fellow Drag City signees Ben Chasny, Sir Richard Bishop and Cris Corsano, who have borrowed their group name from a Balinese demon queen, like a composite creature born from the inner depths of guitar picking.Though its structure remains pretty much the same as Rangda’s first album – just a few long, instrumental guitar and percussions jams – ‘The Heretic’s Bargain’, released after 4 years of silence, takes the band a step further from what they were, with a fuller and more consistent sound, extremely fascinating in its lighter and wider psych approach that now includes a mix of world-folk and does away with vacuous virtuosity. Obscurity is not forgotten though, and ‘Hard Times Befall The Door-to-Door Glass Shard Salesman’ sees Rangda’s noisier experimental side resurface, reaching the top of the exotic sensorial trip of the record. An exploration worth embarking on for all the weird psych lovers.
Though firmly established in Germany, BOY are best known here for the Feist-like folk of 2012 single ‘Numbers’, and for Lo-Fang’s later reworking of ‘Mutual Friends’ albumtrack ‘Boris’. For this follow-up, Valeska Steiner and Sonja Glass took two years out to focus on songwriting and acquired a Juno synthesiser to take their gentle, guitar-driven sound “one step further.” In practice, ‘We Were Here’ is the subtlest of evolutions, with synths employed as a softening texture in what is essentially another set of pleasant, mid-tempo indie-pop songs. This approach works particularly well on the wistful title track, which features sweet vocal harmonies redolent of Tegan and Sara, and on the School Of Seven Bells-eque ‘Fear’. ‘Hit My Heart’, however, simply sounds like a more MOR rehash of their big hit ‘Numbers’. Undoubtedly, the duo have an innate gift for melody, but their arrangements throughout are disappointingly safe and ‘We Were Here’ simply doesn’t furnish listeners with compelling enough reasons to remember it.
Seth Bogart’s debut album seems made for those with a predilection for the sophisticated electronic music of Broadcast et al, especially as the Hunx And His Punx singer cites the band as a primary influence. It’s the more playful side of electro – and Bogart’s affinity for ’80s French pop and Le Tigre – that’s most prominent here, though, and the record’s tongue-in-cheek tendency to forgo the more serious side of electronic music is inevitably divisive. It’s Bogart’s rejection of boring earnestness that makes this album refreshing. Of course, it isn’t easy to like. Its primitive, child-like beats veer from pleasingly Kraftwerkian to discordantly outdated, and ‘Flurt’ has a knowingly irritating discourse on lust where Bogart’s vocals are obscured using a vocoder. He prevails when he negates all the gimmicks (‘Forgotten Fantazy’), and Kathleen Hanna’s vocal contribution on ‘Eating Makeup’ is familiarly petulant. Less hiding behind effusive vocal effects and more focus on an obvious ability to create brilliant electro-pop songs would make this album a triumph.
Héloïse Letissier throws some serious shapes, and her angular movements and sharp suits give her an androgynous form and an identity she’s happily claimed back home in France for some time. ‘Chaleur Humaine’ is set for rerelease with songs in English and added tracks, and with Phildelphia’s Tunji Ige and Seattle’s Perfume Genius on board it looks like it’s aimed squarely at the alt. American market. There’s more to it than that, though, and Letissier’s creation
myth is rooted in a moment – when lost and alone in London, three drag queens took her under their wings and birthed a musical invention. Letissier never shies away from big themes. The album pushes at boundaries, obliquely dealing with feminism, gender identity and queer culture, particularly on ‘iT’. ‘Chaleur Humain’ is a synthy affair; a roundtrip of electro outposts, from glitchy numbers like ‘Science Fiction’ to softer ruminations like ‘Paradis Perdus’. The stand out is ‘Jonathan’
(feature Perfume Genius), bringing out Letissier’s prosaic and experimental side, and playing to the strengths of Mike Hadreas’ dark, frisson-filled vocals. Both artists plaintively ask: “Can you walk with me in the daylight?” Letissier is an empowering figure, and that can sometimes mean music becomes an avenue to explode down. What’s so striking about this album is its restraint. Letissier holds back enough to make you crawl deeper into her world.
0 7/ 1 0
Christine & The Queens Chaleur Humaine bec aus e By jade fr en ch. In sto re s fe b 26
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Reviews 05/10
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Andrew Weatherall Convenanza
Public Memory Wuthering Drum
MMOTHS Luneworks
Prince Rama Xtreme Now
r o tt er s g ol f cl ub
Fe lte
Be ca us e
C a r pa r k
B y Sam walton . In sto re s feb 26
By davi d zamm i tt . I n s t o re s ma r 1 8
By R e e f Yo uni s . I n s t o re s M a r 1 1
By j o e g oggin s . I n s t o r es M a r 4
With 2016 marking ‘Screamadelica’’s 25th anniversary and, therefore, that of Andrew Weatherall’s most significant contribution to British pop, the veteran producer’s second solo album could be forgiven for resembling a sort of victory lap. And in many ways, that’s exactly what ‘Convenanza’ is: all Weatherall’s calling cards (and his perennial mixing-desk presets) are all over this album, with chewy dub-flecked bass out front, wacka-wacka guitars chiming above and spectral keyboard twinkles filling everything out. Were this presented as an instrumental record, it would be indistinguishable from any number of enticingly trippy acid house remixes that bore the Weatherall insignia in the early ’90s, and make for an enjoyably retro folly. Unfortunately, however, it’s not, and Weatherall’s dry, flat vocals (recalling the disengaged drawl of big-beat nohopers Audio Bullys, no less) are at odds with the underlying beatific mood. Factor in lyrics that mean nothing and evoke little more, and it becomes clear why Weatherall’s greatest records all have other bands’ names on their covers.
Public Memory, the moniker of Brooklynite RobertToher, is a vehicle for music that is rooted firmly in life’s murkier moments. With titles like ‘Ringleader’, ‘Cul De Sac’, ‘Earwig’, and ‘Lunar’, a quick scan down the sleeve gives you a quick idea of what you’re getting yourself into, but it also does Toher an injustice. For these are songs that throb with heartache and ache with emotion; songs that are still raw regardless of the time that might have passed. Not only that, these are songs that are unapologetically catchy, but not chart-catchy. They are brutally bare, offering up their grooves, their melodies and their gorgeous vocal motifs without the need for sugarcoating or excess decoration. It’s an album of two halves, the latter better than the first, so start with ‘As You Wish’ if you need an entry point. By then you’ll be hooked. ‘Interfaith’, ‘Earwig’ and ‘Lunar’ are also excellent. Recalling Siouxsie, ‘Pornography’-era Cure and, more recently, early Twin Shadow, Toher – Korg MS-20 and drum machine in hand – crafts songs that trust the intelligence of his audience.
Created in a month-long haul of 12 hour sessions, ‘Luneworks’ sighs every second of its nocturnal isolation. As L.A. slept, Jack Colleran cocooned himself from the world, committed to his laptop, and emerged with a debut of sublime dissonance. It allows his fractured, high-pitched vocals to compensate for the lack of beat-driven snap as they drift and weave behind gnarls of squall on ‘Eva’, and helps ‘Lucid’ feel less of a throwaway piano interlude, and more a contemplative break from the dramatic sonance layered into the album’s 14 tracks. From the slow saturation of opener ‘You’ to the creeping euphoria of the MBV-esque ‘Deu’, it’s all unapologetically elegiac, and Colleran’s catharsis is largely as inspired as it is indulgent. Yet, even with the standout numbers, it’s the subtle momentum driving ‘Luneworks’ that make it so immersive. As the static of ‘Para Polaris’ begins to fade out, ‘Verbena’ is already starting to bloom; as the last chord of ‘Lucid’ hangs heavy, ‘Body Studies’ starts to stir. It’s a minor detail but one of many on a debut that deserves your attention.
“In the year 2067, I witnessed an aesthetic landscape where art museums are sponsored by energy drink beverages and beauty is determined by speed. I saw a vision of ancient tapestries... and people base-jumping off planes with the Mona Lisa smiling up from their parachutes.” That’s just one small nugget from Takara Larson’s absurd description of the Brooklyn sisters’ new record. According to its creators this is the “world’s first extreme sports album” and a lot of the time it’s every bit as brash, boisterous and daft as that sounds. That doesn’t mean its without intelligence or nuance. It’s synthpop with verve and swagger. The soaring harmonies of ‘Your Life in the End’ and the folky flutter of ‘Sochi’ are two pertinent examples, whilst there’s a touch of krautrock to the album’s standout, ‘Now Is The Time Of Emotion’. At points the silliness threatens to bubble over, like on ‘Xtreme Now Energy’’s guitar dirge, but it really shouldn’t be so refreshing to encounter an electropop record that puts fun first and everything else second.
Discussing the significance of her band’s name, Kristine Leschper explained: “The act of being a mother is tragic; you have to eventually let go of the things you created.” As an interpretation of one of life’s most celebrated occupations, it’s arrestingly bleak, and yet strangely beautiful and moving in its candour. The same can be said for the debut of the Athens, GA-based quartet. Self-doubt, anxiety, loneliness, heartbreak: Leschper shares her darkest thoughts without apology,
and consequently transforms admissions of vulnerability into expressions of strength. Her spellbinding vocals echo this polarity. Tremulous and sweet – akin to Joanna Newsom or Angel Olsen – there’s still a steely determination in the way she drags single, mournful syllables across several notes. Mothers began life as a solo project for Leschper, and the skeletal, mandolin-led folk of ‘Too Small For Eyes’ hints at how wonderful that might still have been. However, were
Mothers not now an ensemble, it would have been difficult to deliver the level of sonic variety found in songs like ‘Copper Mines’ or ‘Hold Your Own Hand’. On the former, they shift between drowsy indie-rock, cantering math-pop and hypnotic post-rock, while the latter juxtaposes minimal passages with a waltzing outro of shimmering strings and dancing guitar runs. If Leschper is sad to relinquish control of these astonishing creations, we can only be thankful she did.
09/10
Mothers When You Walk A Long Distance You Get Tired
moshi moshi
By ge mma s amways. I n sto re s feb 26
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Albums 0 4/ 1 0
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Thao & The Get Down Stay Down A Man Alive
Wintersleep The Great Detachment
Palehound Dry Food
So Pitted neo
r i bb on
Din e a l o ne
H e ave nl y
S u b p op
B y sa mue l c o rnfo rth. I n s to re s ma r 4
By j o e g o gg i ns . I n s to re s m ar 4
B y a lex w is ga r d. I n s t o r es f eb 1 9
Wintersleep have often felt like the also-rans of the early ’00s Canadian indie invasion. But despite an influence that hasn’t resonated far beyond their home nation – in the same way as, say, Arcade Fire – they’ve continued to walk a steady and reliable path, with five pleasant, if somewhat indistinguishable, albums released over the last fifteen years, and a Juno Award along the way for their troubles. Album number six has three main gears – anthemic stadium sing-alongs that will play well live (‘Amerika’ and ‘Spirit’), tracks with a little more bite, which play well on record (‘Santa Fe’ and ‘Love Lies’), and songs like ‘Shadowless’, with its whirring, hypnotic denouement, that nudge them closer to esoteric territories. There’s enough here to keep established fans involved, while being accessible for people new to their expressive indie rock hybrid, even if, no, ‘The Great Detachment’ will not see Wintersleep suddenly rule the world. Still, in adding a layer of freshness to their sound, and a rousing new collection of songs to their catalogue, they feel like a band invigorated.
In a marketplace that isn’t exactly suffering from a dearth of charming lo-fi singer-songwriters peddling tales of heartbreak and loneliness, it’s clear from the off that Ellen Kempner is going to have to set herself aside from the pack on her debut LP under the Palehound moniker. With ‘Dry Food’ she just about pulls it off, having crafted a beguiling pop record out of her own idiosyncrasies. Based largely around her first big break-up – she was still only 21 at the time of recording – the album is a showcase for her consistently abstruse observational lyricism, finding metaphor in clogged shower hair on ‘Dixie’ and musing on her own lifestyle choices on ‘Healthier Folk’. She wears her influences – Kim Deal, Elliott Smith, her old camp roommate Sadie Dupuis of Speedy Ortiz – pretty firmly on her sleeve, but there’s room for experimentation, too, the awkward guitar and scratchy reverb on the Mac DeMarco-esque title track being a case in point. Like Waxahatchee, Palehound are here to authentically remind us all what it was like to be just out of our teens.
Seattle trio So Pitted peddle a brand of bludgeoning hardcore noise that sounds like the product of digesting every chapter in Our Band Could Be Your Life, but stopping before Beat Happening.That sounds pretty good, and ‘pretty good’ is about right where this record is concerned. Named for a viral video in which a rad surfer dude spouts inane clichés, their debut album, ‘neo’, is the kind of album that could only come out on Sub Pop – eleven tracks of petulant, snarling grabyou-by-the-throat riffs and shredded vocal cords. The likes of ‘No Nuke Country’ could be Parquet Courts, if their yen for Lou Reed was replaced by a deep immersion in the work of Einstürzende Neubauten, and the title of the none-more-industrial ‘Woe’ speaks for itself. ‘Feed Me’, meanwhile, sounds like Wire, if they’d traded art school for three years of living under a bridge. Like their long-ago labelmates Tad or current touring buddies No Age and Metz, So Pitted’s is a barbed tarpit of sound which is tricky to like, easy to get stuck in, and impossible to ignore.
For all their inherent weirdness it should be noted that, in 2016, Animal Collective find themselves very much in the bracket of arena-sized indie rock. Long gone are those incongruous, half-genius-halfmaddeningly-frustrating mid-2000s EPs. Instead, we now have a reliable piece of psych-pop apparatus and a group who have settled into a relatively stable groove, with all the expectation that comes with it. Brian Wilson’s sunny melodic blueprint is drawn on in a similar
manner to 2009’s ‘Merriweather Post Pavilion’ here. However, while that album was striking for its warmth, ‘Painting With’ embraces cooler temperatures. Far from clinical, it is a much sparser effort than previous albums, relying primarily on filtered vocals and electronic percussion, while modular synthesisers rasp and twist. Think a full LP inspired by Boards of Canada’s ‘Telephasic Workshop’ (see ‘Spilling Guts’, ‘Recycling’), or ‘WIXIW’-era Liars writing and producing the new Ariel
Pink album (‘On Delay’). ‘Hocus Pocus’ and ‘Lying In The Grass’ – both standouts – are pure dub, relishing silence as much as noise. And they work. This might be a band who have the commercial currency to put on Guggenheim installations and occupy mainstream American television airtime, but Animal Collective’s quality control is more rigorous than ever. If ‘Painting With’ isn’t a leap into the unknown, it is certainly a confident step forward.
By C h r i s Wat keys. I n sto re s mar 4
When an artist who has built a whole career upon their musical idiosyncrasies finally seems to hit a creative brick wall, the results aren’t pretty. Thao Nguyen’s fourth album, ‘A Man Alive’, feels and sounds like an unreconstructed musical discharge, the sonic equivalent of randomly hurling clods of earth at a white canvas. The creative contribution of Tune-Yards’ Merrill Garbus, who produced the album, can be keenly heard. Here is a similarly haphazard feel and unrefined sound. But there is a difference between pleasingly raw, and lazily random, and at times this record feels like a demo, or even a recording of a rehearsal. Dotted amongst the cacophony are brief moments of engaging joy; the great single ‘Nobody Dies’ is a vaguely grungy gem with a superb vocal melody, while ‘Millionaire’ has the superb lyric, “Oh daddy, I’m broken in a million pieces / That makes you a millionaire.” Elsewhere, though, ‘A Man Alive’ is only sporadically listenable, and is far more often tiresome.
08/10
Animal Collective Painting With domi n o By davi d z ammi tt. In sto re s feb 19
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Reviews 06/10
0 6/10
07 /10
08/ 10
Heron Oblivion Heron Oblivion
Essaie Pas Demain Est Une Autre Nuit
Haelos Full Circle
Chin of Britain The Weasel is at The Bridge
S u b P op By jame s f . T hom pson. In store s ma r 4
ma t a do r
DFA By r e e f youn is. I n sto res fe b 2 6
B y S am wal ton. I n sto re s m a r 1 1
Wa l t z tim e B y C h r is wa tk ey s . In sto r es m a r 4
Seeing Meg Baird’s name on a record sleeve is invariably a harbinger of the freak-folk ahead, and so it proves again with this debut from Heron Oblivion, which sees the Espers songstress joined by former members of Comets on Fire, Six Organs of Admittance and Assemble Head in Sunburst Sound. The San Franciscan super group have leveraged their impeccable psychedelia credentials in producing an album of West Coast weirdness that sounds like a lost artefact of the 1960s, offsetting Baird’s serene, breathy vocals with the molten lava guitar of Charlie Saufley and Noel von Harmonson. As might be expected, the album works best when the right balance is struck between these two, like on restrained slow-burners ‘Seventeen Landscapes’ and ‘Rama’. Elsewhere, Saufley and von Harmonson are a bit like bulls in a china shop, gleefully smashing Baird’s fragile confections to pieces with their guitar theatrics. ‘Faro’, for instance, chugs along unsteadily right from the start before getting utterly derailed by white noise. Still, it’s mostly great fun.
Essaie Pas exude a black-clad je ne sais quoi. From the chilled indifference of their pulsing electronica to the ardent spokenword delivery, ‘Demain Est Une Autre Nuit’ is an artistic exercise in detachment. Underpinned by clean motorik beats, understated techno and effortless Italo, it falls somewhere between chic gallery background and red-light club basement, and the sultry ‘Depassee Par Le’ is the embodiment of both, shifting with the same sensual charge as Glass Candy’s ‘Digital Versicolour’; all cherry lips and femme fatales snaking in the shadows. But where ‘Retox’ blares into life with air raid siren, bleeping melodies, and Pierre Guerineau and Marie Davidson’s withdrawn vocals embellish the apathy, the relentless tom-tom rhythm pushes ‘Facing the Music’ towards Factory Floor-esque heft. It’s a force that follows through on the door-slamming thump of ‘Lights Out’ – twisted techno that comes to life on dark nights. And on an even, if uneventful, album, it proves to be the difference between mediocre and monochromatic.
The opening ten minutes of ‘Full Circle’ has an air of such assured, compelling and composed melancholia that by the end of ‘Dust’, its second track proper, there’s a sense that this might be as strong a debut as ‘Dummy’ or ‘xx’ – it certainly bears those albums’ hallmarks, with its smoky 3am poignancy, introspection and warm reverberating instrumentation. Unfortunately, though, Haelos can’t maintain their early stratospheric standard, and the rest of ‘Full Circle’ is far more pedestrian fare. While not fatal, that dip in quality is anticlimactic: as each track drifts by in a haze of breakbeat, dual vocals and space echo, positioning Haelos more as fans of Portishead than their peers, it’s difficult to ignore the sense of a missed opportunity. Indeed, when closer ‘Pale’ builds into something increasingly reminiscent of Rob D’s Matrix-soundtracking trip-hop cheese-fest ‘Clubbed To Death’, the overriding desire is simply for a less front-loaded record. Nonetheless, Haelos’ presentation leaves a tantalising taste of a classic album.
Former skinsman with East London outfits Quickspace and Dark Captain (amongst others), Chin Keeler went on to prove his remarkable solo talents with an extremely well received debut solo album in 2013. The stories around his Chin of Britain project seem willfully odd; this follow-up record is apparently the tale of a weasel trying to cross a bridge that’s guarded by an owl. It’s an interesting allegorical construct, but the music itself is a deftly melodic, hook-heavy, riff-packed take on krautrock, with high-toned, multi-tracked vocals that sometimes steer things into sped-up glam rock. It’s densely layered, yet sometimes has a lightness of touch, which is quite pop. Then there’s the circus organ vibes of ‘We Are New Here’, and ‘Time In Mind’, which sounds like The Jam’s ‘David Watts’ covered by Moon Duo. Of course, all of this is nothing particularly original. Had this album been released in 1970, it would have been startlingly, thrillingly inventive, but here in 2016 it’s just an absorbing, satisfying, damn fine listen.
For anybody slightly intimidated by the hyper-intellectualism of Holly Herndon and ‘Platform’ last year, perhaps Anna Meredith is for you. Sure, a glance at Meredith’s biography should be enough to signpost that this debut LP won’t entirely be an easy ride. Former composer-in-residence with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the London-born, Edinburgh-raised 37 year-old has scored for the Proms, wrung bassoons (yes, bassoons) through guitar distortion pedals and
produced aural accompaniments for MRI scanners for previous projects. Unlike Herndon’s collection of glitch-filled, vocally-contorted ruminations on big ideas, though, Meredith’s record balances its avant-garde indulgences with fullyformed songs and recognisable instruments to delve into the minutiae of modern life. Granted, instrumental opener ‘Nautilus’ throws the listener right in at the deep end, a phalanx of processed horns marching atop a wobbly bass
line. Immediately thereafter though, the arpeggiated melodies of recent single ‘Taken’ and ‘Scrimshaw’ open the gates to an outright accessibly outré electronic record, capped off by the delicately beautiful ‘Something Helpful’ and the brittle synth-pop of album highlight ‘Dowager’. Half of ‘Varmints’ eschews vocals, but with odd exception Meredith manages to cloak highminded experimentalism in playful pop sensibility.
08/10
Anna Meredith Varmints moshi m oshi By jame s f . T hom pson. In store s ma r 4
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Albums 08/10
Rosie Lowe Control Wol f t on e By der ek r o ber tso n. I n sto re s feb 19
Glistening waves of soulful RnB, sparse beats, and silky smooth vocals toying with glitchy, late night keys – there was a lot of love in Rosie Lowe’s debut EP back in 2013, and it’s easy to understand why. Weaving elements of Burial, James Blake, and The xx into the fabric of her emotionally fraught lyrics put Lowe at the vanguard of upcoming artists operating in the realms of lo-fi PBR&B. But while peers such as FKA Twigs and Autre Ne Veut have since scaled the heights with critically acclaimed albums, Lowe has been working in the shadows, releasing only a couple of tracks over the last few years. It’s unfortunate that her debut
album has arrived just as interest in emotionally wrought, shiny synthsoul has started to wane, becoming as it has an omnipresent background wash to urban modernity. Dismissing such music as being the preserve of fashionable hipsters with nothing to say has become a common sport, but that’s certainly not true of ‘Control’. Friends who disappear in troubled times (‘Who’s That Girl?’), dealing with an insecure partner (‘Worry About Us’), a plea to leave a toxic relationship (‘Nicole’), and the state of feminism in 2016 (pretty much everything, and most blatantly on lead single ‘Woman’) are just some of the hefty topics Lowe wades into. Musically, it can be just as intense
at times. ‘Control’ is an enveloping listen through headphones, but the eleven tracks here also have a slick sheen, which give them an expansiveness when turned up properly loud. Lowe often fills the quietest moments with her harshest words, making them all the more powerful – some hit home like a dagger of ice straight to the heart – but the record doesn’t wallow in selfpity or introspection. You can take solace from these songs, letting your worries float off like flesh from your bones as you sink into their embrace. Through all the low-end warbles and skilful little flourishes, the one thing that’s lacking is the odd change
of pace or frisson of defiance. As brutal and difficult as love, relationships, and indeed just surviving can be, it helps to let in a little light now and again; as a songwriter, Lowe seems wedded to “atmospherically dense” by default. But her skills as a producer (and the production of job of Dave Okumu) shine through, and ‘Control’’s ability to be both spine-tingling and alluring set it apart from the bandwagonjumping coffee shop mush that’s now so ubiquitous. “Music wasn’t an option, it was a necessity,” she has said, and she has the talent to back that up. Listen to ‘Control’ and be glad Lowe gave herself only one path to follow.
Quilt’s third album mines the dark, shimmering side of sixties rock; a San Francisco soundtrack all the way from Boston. The ten tracks on ‘Plaza’ dabble in sunshine pop, freak-folk and hypnotic psychedelia, less psychically heavy than The Brian Jonestown Massacre and less twee than the Elephant 6 Collective, all crisply recorded by Woods’ jackof-all-trades Jarvis Taveniere. ‘Passersby’ kicks the record off with a circular guitar line and some gorgeous trills of strings and flutes,
as Anna Fox Rochinski gives a soft, breathy performance worthy of Vashti Bunyan. Co-writer Shane Butler comes to the fore on ‘Searching For’, with the brisk melodicism of The Monkees’ peerless ‘Pleasant Valley Sunday’, while the swooning ‘Eliot St.’ could have flown straight from the pen of Van Dyke Parks. Yet something keeps ‘Plaza’ from sounding decidedly retro. Maybe it’s the way they synthesise their influences, or the effortless interplay
between the two vocalists. Then again, perhaps it’s just the songs themselves – there’s no stand-out track, but everything here has an almost insidious catchiness, which stays with you long after the needle hits the runout groove. Paisley-shirted pop hasn’t been remotely fashionable for some time, and while Quilt aren’t likely to irk the purists with a radical take on a once-radical sound, it’s comforting to know that psychedelia is in safe hands.
Quilt Plaza mex i c an s u mmer By Al ex Wi s gar d. In sto re s feb 26
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p h o t og r a p h y : j en n a f o xt o n
0 7/ 1 0
Reviews / Live
Savages 100 Club, London 26/ 0 1/ 20 16 wr i ter : S am Walto n Ph otogr a ph er : Da niel Quesa da
Queues forming on Oxford Street at 8am tend to be reserved more for Playstation launches and maniac Black Friday pandemonium than for gigs – even less so gigs by frenetic, brooding, none-more-noir types like Savages. After all, convention dictates that their music is not for mornings: only a very specific kind of sociopath would set their daily alarm to, say, ‘Husbands’. Accordingly, the prospect of a Savages gig at dawn on a Tuesday in a grimy basement has an air of intrigue, both to the huddled hordes waiting outside the 100 Club and to Soho’s usual delivery men and media types offering quizzical side-eyes.
But this morning’s performance, it turns out, is neither a time nor place for convention. Savages make no attempt to recreate the feel of an evening show, performing with the lights up and Jehnny Beth saluting the crowd with a mug of coffee and cheery “good morning!” when she arrives on stage. Indeed, the whole experience inverts virtually every gig-going trope: nobody is drinking, let alone drunk, everyone has arrived on time, and there are more phones sending “in by 10am – sorry!” texts to the boss than there are taking photos of the band. “We’ve all agreed that this is the best reason to be late for work,” adds Beth, a few songs in.
“When your boss asks you where you were, tell them you were at a Savages gig. You will be the coolest person in the office!” She also offers to write letters of excuse for all of us. She makes a good point. For all that staying up late and sleeping in is routinely cooler than being up with the lark, Savages fill the 100 Club with an unshakeable straight-edge swagger that, so early, is initially bewildering and then rather magnificent: the set’s second half, in particular, is a devastating assault of grizzled bass, thundering drums, howling feedback and controlled screaming that would be impressive at any time of day and is weirdly life-
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affirming before breakfast. The band closes with the James-Bond-themein-waiting ‘Adore’, by which point the crowd is simply gawping in stunned silence, itself stunning: surely never has the 100 Club, normally host to distracted conversation and clinking bottles regardless of the performer, witnessed such utter hush. Beth tells us she adores life as the song squalls out and the band bow. Walking out into the bright wintry morning at 9:30am evokes the kind of poignant perplexion brought on by leaving a clubnight as the sun’s coming up – it’s a dizzying, energising start to a day.
Live
Jones ICA, Westminster, London
Novella Old Blue Last, Shoreditch
0 3 / 0 2/ 20 16
1 6 / 01 / 2 01 6
wr it er : Gr eg cochrane
w r i t er : J a m es F . T h o m p s o n P h o t og r a p h er : Ma x p h y t hia n
The five-year overnight success story continues for one of the biggest surprise packages of 2015. Having all but disappeared from view after an EP release back in 2013, last year this Brighton-bred fivesome released ‘Land’, a superlative first album of propulsive, flanged-out psych-rock and dreamy harmonies that ended up on Loud And Quiet’s best of 2015 list. Certainly they’ve earned the right to be headlining a DIY showcase tonight, romping through their debut record and besting the expectations of an almost comically archetypal East London audience. The band flex their performances to their songs: the dream pop melancholia of ‘Again You Try Your Luck’ and the pulsating motorik of ‘Follow’ are suitably tight and punchy but ‘60s-style stomper ‘Something Must Change’ is the right kind of ragged and ‘Skies Open’ is an extended, riff-heavy revelation.
Of late, London label 37 Adventures have been on something of a run. Salute’s delicious ‘Gold Rush’ EP and, more recently, Krrum’s ‘Evil Twin’ release have both helped establish their reputation as a factory for authentic pop. Jones’ sultry ‘Hoops’ was another of their 2015 discoveries. It’s clear, right now, that that song is the London singer’s big hook, saved tonight until the final track of the set. It’s the shining moment in a show that’s intriguing rather than enthralling. The theme of the rest of it seems to be casual cool. Jones nervously (this only her second headline show) introduces her songs on a stage that’s decorated like a graphic designer’s penthouse – stark white light, IKEA pot plants, her band wearing black roll-necks. Jones’ vocal is immaculate, but it’s her voice – her personality – which still needs to rise to the surface.
Keaton Henson The Roundhouse, Camden
Alex G Bleach, Brighton
0 4/ 0 2/ 20 16
02/02 / 2 0 1 6
wr it er : ch r is watke ys
wri te r: T o m f e nwick Photo g r a phe r: C a ro line q u inn
Very few venues can rival an In The Round gig at the Roundhouse for sheer class and intimacy of setting. Tonight, Keaton Henson bares his considerably tortured soul whilst seated at a grand piano and alongside a black-clad string section. While the likes of ‘You’ and ‘Teach Me’ are typically moving, his indie-classical instrumental pieces are really the soaring highlight of this show; exquisitely beautiful piano and string compositions that almost shimmer with an enveloping richness, an ancient and wordless transcendence of the everyday. During ‘You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are’ the stage fills with bloodred light, the pillars become a murdered skeleton, and Henson sings of the envy of a lost love’s new lover, before a final, powerful cover of ‘Halelujah’ prompts a standing ovation.
It appears to be Alex G cosplay night, but luckily the indie slacker who we’ve all come to see is holding a guitar, so you can just about tell him apart from the horde of ardent fanboys who surround the stage. The night gets off to a somewhat freewheeling start, with ‘Boy’ and ‘Sorry’ dragging their feet, while the subtly dark ‘Kute’ ends up feeling ramshackle. But incoherence soon dissipates into neatly bookended highlights like ‘Bug’/‘Salt’ and ‘Forever’/’Cards’. Beyond the songs, G’s stage patter veers between playful (a freestyle rap about his love of currywurst and Brighton) to antagonistic (shouting “Keep quiet you fuckers!”) in an attempt to get the boisterous crowd in-check. But it’s mostly done with a smile and, as he closes with an audience request, it’s hard not to get swept up in the collective affection for this millennial troubadour.
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Live
Beach Slang Barfly, Camden
Dua Lipa Oslo, Hackney
27/ 0 1/ 20 16
02 / 02 / 2 01 6
wr i t er : Al ex wisg ard
w r it er : S am wa lt o n P h o t o g raph er : T o m j ack so n
The fad for rising pop stars to play small venues on their way to headlining the O2 has surely reached peak piss-take now. Barely half an hour long (including encore), Dua Lipa’s performance at Oslo is so depressingly phoned-in that brevity is its only virtue. Much money has clearly been spent: the custom stage set is amusingly bombastic for a venue this size, her name spelt in neon behind her, and her band (and their accompanying backing track) are crisp and well-drilled, but Lipa’s charisma-free delivery is toxic. The undeniable pep of ‘Be The One’ raises the temperature a little, although it comes over as little more than karaoke as Lipa paces around stage, disengaged to the point of catatonia, with an expression that says, “Really? I’m missing Midsomer Murders to do this?”. The feeling’s mutual.
Philadelphia four-piece Beach Slang are the last of a dying breed of indie rock bands – a sloppy, unpolished bunch of Bukowski-andWesterberg worshipping misfits who still treat punk as a way of life. Who else would write a heart-onsleeve ballad called ‘Too Late to Die Young’, then lovingly massacre it (“meta-Replacements” style, quips frontman James Alex) by getting their rhythm section to trade places? What other band, in 2016, would not only cite Senseless Things as a formative influence, but cover one of their songs WITH a member of Senseless Things guesting on guitar? It’s not a question of cool, just honesty and connection, and now that they’re already booking venues three times the size of tonight’s sold-out Barfly, their reach is getting deservedly bigger. Beach Slang care. You should too.
Trust Fund Aatma, Manchester
John Cale Roundhouse, Camden
28/ 0 1/ 20 16
03/02 / 2 0 1 6
wr i t er : joe gogg in s
write r: S tu a rt s tubbs P hoto gr aph e r: Ma x phyt h i a n
Trust Fund remain a frustratingly well-kept secret, so perhaps it’s fitting that tonight’s venue has something in common; Aatma, on the site of Kraak Gallery, is hidden down the sketchiest of Northern Quarter back alleys, although, slightly reassuringly, a mere stone’s throw from the police station. Not that this Bristol outfit are ever likely to incite a riot, mind. Over the course of a short, fat-free set, the guitars might be brash and boisterous, but everything’s held together by Ellis Jones’ delicate, expressive vocals. Recent single ‘Football’ is the standout of a set that includes a healthy smattering from both LPs. Like their mentors and one-time tourmates Los Campesinos!, Trust Fund seem well on the way to bridging the gap between drama and silliness with razor-sharp wit as their primary weapon.
John Cale; in the round; sitting compulsory; silence encouraged and upheld – there’s a reason why the guy three seats down shouts ‘Bravo!’ after just the third song (Cale’s crushingly sad, hymnal reworking of ‘If You Were Still Around’, from last month’s ‘M:Fans’ LP). In the comfort stakes, tonight feels more like a night at the opera. In the art and importance of Cale’s career-spanning set, it feels like that too. You’d expect the twisted ‘M:Fans’ to get a proper run out, but an extra barbed version of ‘Close Watch’ – made up of heavy sound collages and industrial electronics – is just one of three new songs among sixteen tracks that, sat side by side, remind us of how diverse Cale has been, when he wants and how he wants, from the daft giddy rock of ‘Perfect’ to his mangled take on ‘Ship of Fools’ and loose-jam closer ‘Gun/ Pablo Picasso.’
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Singing Pictures
W r i te r : A n d re w A n d er s on
If God were to create the perfect musician to star in a film they’d probably look a lot like Prince. Flamboyant to a fantastic degree, self-mythologising like a motherfucker and with charisma coming out of the love symbol, playing Prince in a film is quite literally the role Prince was born to play. And I’m not alone in thinking this: Purple Rain, his only serious feature film*, made huge money for the minuscule Minnesota man, garnering $80 million and a good deal of critical acclaim. Add on the chart–topping album of the same name and you’ve got Prince in the middle of a serious purple patch... a Purple Rain patch, if you will (sorry). This terrible punning leads me to the content of the film. If you were to guess what would be in a Prince film I bet your top three would look something like this: 1) Prince acting like a man with the biggest case of blue balls in history 2) Great tunes 3) Weird shit Well, you’d be right. Prince spends about 100 minutes of this 111 minute film writhing around, shagging things/people, making big puppy eyes, pouting, thrusting, licking stuff and generally being a pubey pile of pure sexuality (the film’s closing shot – the very last thing you see – is prince wanking his guitar neck off so that it shoots thick ropes of jizz onto his eager audience). And yes, it’s packed with tunes. ‘When Doves Cry’, ‘I Would Die 4 U’
and of course the titular track ‘Purple Rain’ are all present, but even the lesser known numbers are soulful, stompin’ and so silly you can’t help but smile. I mentioned punning before – and that’s where the weirdness comes in. Although this is a serious film that deals with domestic abuse, difficult relationships and artistic self-doubt, the script also contains a number of jokes that could have come from the pen of Barry and Paul Chuckle.There is, for example, an interminable scene where two members of Prince’s rival band, The Time, fail to understand one another. “The password is what,” says one. “The password is what?” says the other. “Yes, what.” “What?” “WHAT.” And so on, until you find yourself shouting ‘WHY IS THIS IN THE FILM, WHAT THE HELL HAS THIS GOT TO DO WITH ANYTHING???’ But you know the answer: it’s here because Prince is weird, that’s why. Deal with it. Okay, so let’s take a look at the plot. Prince plays ‘The Kid’ who is essentially Prince by another name. His band, The Revolution, has a residency at a nightclub in St Paul, Minnesota, alongside two other rival bands (including the aforementioned TheTime).The Kid lives at home with his mum and dad, the latter a failed musician who beats the crap out of his wife and Prince on a fairly regular basis. Why Prince – who is in his mid twenties and has tons of cash to spend on flash motorbikes and guitars – is living at home is not satisfactorily explained.
Anyway, Prince is a bit of a nob and treats his band mates badly (especially the female ones), refusing to listen to the songs they have written and generally acting like a massively spoilt 12 year old. The owner of the nightclub threatens to terminate his contract because “Your music makes sense to no one but yourself!” He also develops a love interest (Apollonia Kotero) who he jerks around and ends up punching when she dares to dream of having her own singing career. Essentially, Prince is acting just like his Dad... but his Dad then shoots himself so Prince realises he had better stop being a bell end or else he’ll end up doing the same thing one day. Cue a triumphant return to the stage where Prince finally plays a song written by his female band members to show he now respects them (though of course he takes all the credit for it, typical man), wins over the nightclub owner (who finally recognises that Prince is a great entertainer), and shoots jizz from his guitar all over everyone (because who wouldn’t want to be jizzed on by Prince?). What surprised me most about Purple Rain is how flawed Prince shows himself to be. His childish behaviour, jealous rages and manipulative actions do not put him in a sympathetic light. Yet it works, because it feels honest. Yes he is a weird diva, but he is admitting it and, at the end of the film, shows that he is willing to change. Of course that
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change gets celebrated in a scene that only the maddest egomaniac could dream up… but no one’s perfect. That is not to say Purple Rain isn’t without problems. The way women are treated in the film is, frankly, appalling. The premise too – that all these amazing bands play in the same venue every single night to the same audience – is a bit daft. And the acting… well, that’s not much better. Apollonia Kotero’s delivery is so wooden it would make a termite drool, while Prince’s performance could draw valid comparisons with a Viagra–fuelled Furby. However, it does work. Prince is a songwriter and performer so compelling that even when he is at his most self-indulgent and ridiculous he’s still good. You want to laugh at him – and if you watch this film you will – but it won’t be a derisive laugh. It will be one of merriment, as you think to yourself, ‘Oh Prince, what are you like!’ As it turned out, ‘Purple Rain’ proved to be the zenith of Prince’s considerable powers. He managed to match it for a good few years with records like ‘Sign o’ the Times’ and ‘Batman’, but ‘Purple Rain’ was never bettered. These days he’s best known for doing weird shit like asking Questlove to DJ a party and then pulling the plug so he can watch Finding Nemo, or building his own private hair salon inside his bedroom. And that’s a shame – because Prince, for all his flaws, is pretty amazing.
*Prince did write, star in and direct a sequel called Graffiti Bridge which, as with quite a lot of his later output, it’s best to pretend never happened.
Purple Rain (1984)
Party wolf NEED A HOLIDAY: The four vacations open to you this lifetime
The DISneylander
18-30
The city Break
death cruise
AGE RANGE: 5 - 15. The prime of your life.
AGE RANGE: Ignore what it says on your complimentary Fruit of The Loom vest – anyone over 20 is a pervert.
AGE RANGE: 25 - 50. Enough of this fun, let’s visit some museums, aye?
AGE RANGE: 65 - death. Stranger things have happened at sea.
HOT SPOTS: Ibiza is still pulling them in, but you can double your dollar in Kavos.
HOT SPOTS: The worst kept secret in the world – New York City. Oh really, you could totally live there? No shit. (Me too.)
HOT SPOTS: Err, duh!? On a cruise your transport is your hot spot. All the docking can in fact fuck with your nap time.
THINGS TO DO: It’s a Land of Dinsey and you’re a child. You can do pretty much whatever the hell you want. Punch a giant mouse, dress as a princess, tell mum you hate her when she asks, “Poppet, please don’t kick Goofy.” Nothing but green lights.
things to do: Invest foolishly in a booze cruise sold by a bigger boy; get burnt; get drunk; hover around the oposite sex without talking to them; discover and love Bob Marley at sunset; eat 5 pizzas a day. In other words, do everything and nothing.
things to do: The reason you and your partner are on a city break is because you’ve run out of things to say to one another. What, you’re going to go on a beach holiday and shag the whole time? Come off it – it’s been 3 years! Keep busy or things could get awkward.
things to do: Well, there’s a latenight show on in the evening. That starts at 7. Until then, best keep yourself to yourself in case you bump into John and June from last night. She likes the sound of her own voice and he smells of eggs.
DRUG OF CHOICE: Pure love... and bottomless Coke.
DRUG OF CHOICE: House spirit and Coke, 6 for 5 Euros.
DRUG OF CHOICE: Coke.
DRUG OF CHOICE: “It’s not a choice anymore, sweety.”
not so great: Orlando, Florida, is kinda like Basildon but the people are eerily happy to be there. It’s off-putting.
not so great: We had this score system of points for snogs and shags, but I somehow managed to come home on minus 10.
memories for a lifetime: Disneyland hit rate is so high, it’s the flops that’ll stick with you – namely the StarTours ride. It’s worth a queue time of 10 minutes, max.
memories for a lifetime: The official line is: “If you can remember it, you’ve done something wrong.” But everyone remembers the last time they pissed themselves.
not so great: Put simply, no lie-ins. It’s just not on when you’re in an exciting new city. At least when you get back to work you can hit them with: “I need a holiday to get over my holiday.” Arf.
not so great: Cruises are fundamentally flawed by the fact that you’ll hit every port at it’s buisiest time, because a million people have just gotten off a massive fucking boat.
memories for a lifetime: The time you found that little place away from all the tourists.
memories for a lifetime: “Oh, it was so long ago now. I remember the sea... No, it’s gone.”
hot spots: Well, it needs to be somewhere with a Disneyland, but let’s face it, if it’s not Florida your mum basically doesn’t love you very much.
Disclaimer: The representations of the persons herein are purely fictitious
Photo casebook: The unfortunate world of Ian Beale
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