Loud And Quiet 89 – Protomartyr

Zero pounds / Volume 03 / Issue 89 / the alternative music tabloid

Protomartyr Detroit: it’s complicated

contents

welcome

studio 54 – 12 Denzel himself – 14 duds – 16 sons of raphael – 18 circuit des yeux – 20 protomartyr – 24 pussy riot – 30

Zero pounds / Volume 03 / Issue 89 / the alternatIVe musIc tabloId

Protomartyr

Co ntact

Contr ib u tor s

Ad ve r tising

i n fo@ loudandq u ie t.com

ale x wisg ar d, Chr is Wa tke ys, dav id cor te s, d av id za m m itt, Danie l Dylan- Wr ay, dan ke n d a l l , De r e k Rob e r tson, dominic ha l e y , du stin condr e n, Gab r i e l G r e e n, Ge m har r is, Ge mma Samwa ys, G uia cor tassa, hayle y scott , he a the r mccu tche on, IAN ROEBUCK , J a nine Bu llman, j e nna f oxton , j o e go ggins, josie somme r , j ang e lo m o l ina r i, katie beswick, lee bullman, matilda hill- je nkins, Nathan W e stl e y , nathanie l wood, Phil S ha r p , r a che l r edf e r n, r osie r amsden, R e e f You nis, sonny mccar tne y , susa n dar ling ton, Sam Walto n.

ad ve r tise @l o u d a nd quie t.co m

Detroit: it’s complicated

Lo u d And Qu ieT PO Box 67915 Lo ndon NW1W 8 TH

c o v er p h o t o g raphy D av id c o r t es

At the end of August I flew to Detroit to spend a weekend with one of my favourite punk bands in a city I’ve been fascinated with since 2010 and Julian Temple’s documentary Requiem For Detroit?.

Without wanting to cry about it, it was the kind of weekend that I know I’ll always remember, which is all down to the four members of Protomartyr who I clocked-up more face-to-face hours with in three days than I have with anyone else since I shared a room with my brother.

When any band starts making music they’re never told about the interviews they’ll have to do, never mind the times that they’ll have to entertain enthusiastic writers for days at a time; driving them around town, planning where they’ll eat, fielding their incessant questions that stopped being endearingly constant at around the age of four. As it happens, I reckon I’m pretty good company (others have said this too), but still Protomartyr went above and beyond, taking me with them to band rehearsal (which essentially resulted in me getting a private show for one as they ran through their new album) when they easily could have said, “Ok, Steve… maybe we’ll catch you in a bit, yeah?”

Detroit is a place with a traumatic past and a single, tough image. If you have any impression of it at all, it’s probably of a bankrupt city that looks dystopian and deserted. For Protomartyr to show me around a town that they and all other locals have become understandably so defensive of is even more decent of them.

“I automatically give everything 20% more props if it’s from Detroit,” the band’s Greg Ahee told me at one point. He was kinda joking, but not really, and it was a pride I saw everywhere we went.

When I asked the Uber driver who took me back to the airport if he liked Detroit, he spoke about how pleasant it was to live there as a Muslim in America. “I went to New York,” he said. “It was way too crowded. Why would you live there instead of here?”

Stuart Stubbs

fo unde r & Editor - Stu ar t S tu b b s Art Dir e ction - B.A.M. D IGITAL DIRECTOR - GREG COCHRANE Sub Editor - A le xandr a Wilshir e fi lm e ditor - Andr e w ande r son Bo ok Editor s - L e e & Janine Bu llman

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T his M o nth L &Q L o ve s A l e x l e o na r d , a o ife kitt, gr e g a he e , isa be l bl a ke , J o e ca se y , l a ur e n ba r l e y , m itche l l ste ve ns, na ta l ie que sne l , se a n ha r w o o d , S co tt Davi d so n.

The views expresse d in Lou d And Quiet are those of the respective contributors and do not necessari ly reflect the opinions of the magazine or its staff.

All rights reserve d 2017 Loud A nd Quiet LT D. ISSN 2049-9892 Printe d by S harman & C ompany LTD. Distribute d by loud and quiet LTD. & forte

Sweet 16

the beginning

While the other kids were at school, GARY NUMAN was looking at planes and practising his moves in the mirror

G

ary Numan:This photo was taken on a family holiday in Cyprus. My Dad used to work for British Airways and we got 10% tickets. Then he left that job so we lost those cheap flights and started going to Weymouth instead. That’s my brother John on the right. He’s seven years younger.

Back home, we lived not far from Heathrow in a house on the London Road. Living near the airport probably fostered my love for aviation but I’ll never know for sure. I went to grammar school to begin with and got expelled for bad behaviour. Then I went to Stanwell Secondary School. By 16 I was going to Brooklands Technical College in Weybridge – a last-ditch attempt to get a few O Levels. That failed dismally because I got thrown out of there, too. So I came out of school with no qualifications whatsoever.

I’d already decided that music was for me.

School offers you nothing for that. What you’re learning seems totally irrelevant to where you want your life to be going. On top of that I had Asperger’s [syndrome]. I had a problem with what I saw as the stupidity of certain levels of authority, so I rebelled against that. Just generally, puberty had kicked in, too. It created in me this desire to not engage with school – I just wanted out. I saw no point to it.

Luckily, my mum and dad were very forgiving and still supported me fantastically and enabled me to get underway with music. They paid for my recording sessions which got me my first demo.

As told to gr eg coch ran e They were amazing. Without them I would never have got the record deal that started me on my way. I did let them down very badly, and they must have been incredibly disappointed. It’s all very well to be sitting at home talking about wanting to be a rock star but in truth how often does it happen? It’s like winning the lottery, isn’t it?

Many years later I found out that they’d sunk their entire life savings into getting me the equipment I needed to start off. They bought me a little Transit van, a P.A. system and a really beautiful guitar. When I got my deal with Beggars Banquet, the only reason they could sign me was because they didn’t need any money for me. I already had my own gear. Without my mum and dad being that involved, it would never have happened.

At 16, my music was becoming a slightly more genuine attempt at songs rather than three chords and some ridiculous Marc Bolan influenced stuff over the top of it. I was a massive T. Rex fan, so I was writing songs about unicorns and flowers for a while. At this point, I was getting towards the end of my Marc Bolan period, but hadn’t yet moved into my David Bowie period.

I had my own electric guitar by then. I’d spend hours upstairs. Small ego... [laughs] I had an entire wall of my room mirrored so I could practice my moves. I’d be miming to every record I loved. A few little flashing lights in the corner. Every night I’d be up there pretending I was doing gigs. Little

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microphone in front of me on a stand. If my mum came in I would go berserk! Sometimes I’d have friends come round and we’d all do it. We must have looked ridiculous, but I loved it.

My two interests were music and aeroplanes. I was quite a loner as well. I did spend an awful lot of time at home on my own. I was writing constantly – little stories, song lyrics, poetry. That’s what I did. Very much a weird little home kid. Not many friends. A few, but not many. I didn’t really go out much. And if I did go out I would cycle down the end of the street where we lived to the airport. I’d hang out there for hours.

I just lay there with my bike, watching the planes come in and out dreaming about what I was going to do with my life. I spent a huge amount of time doing that. I don’t know if it annoyed my mum and dad or if it worried them. I was endlessly writing little notes, ideas and theories about what needed to be done so that when my time came I would put it all into place.

I was incredibly focussed on what I wanted out of life and where I was going. I don’t think I would change any of that, really. I don’t even think I’d suggest to myself that I tried harder at school.

What I did, either by luck or by judgement, worked out. I had no career to fall back on, I had no qualifications that could have taken me in a different direction. I went into music so wholeheartedly because I had absolutely nothing else.

books + ANYONE CAN PLAY GUITAR

Chris Jericho Reef Younis catalogues the curious music careers of mega celebrities. Illustrated by Josie Sommer. / N’ Roses, Fozzy set about fulfilling every sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll cliché that’s ever been played out.

Take ‘Do You Wanna Start a War’ (minus the question mark, obviously) with Irvine half rapping, half singing hard-hitting lyrics like “Throw your hands in the air / Now’s the time to not care” in a box room bathed in red light before Playboy’s Miss January 2001, Irina Voronina, leads a latex-clad troupe of dominatrix flight attendants in a synchronized salute. Or on the awful ‘Sandpaper’ where Irvine nails a killer impression of Jack Black impersonating Axl Rose as Avenged Sevenfold’s M. Shadows appears on a black and white TV in the background.

Sure, the obvious tropes make Fozzy sound like the bloated, indulgent vanity project of a showman that couldn’t quite let go, but Irvine clearly doesn’t care because he’s too busy ticking off every overblown ‘November Rain’-inspired excess he can think of, and Fozzy’s most recent single, ‘Judas’ (with a video featuring skanking clowns, confusedlooking men on fire and scampering Blues Brothers midgets) has clocked almost 9 million Youtube views in the last few months.

The most pertinent question here isn’t how shit are Irvine’s band; it’s are you not entertained?

Some of us (of a certain age, at least) would have spent many a weekend descending on your friendwith-the-Sky-dish’s house to get an essential, weekly fix of WWE Raw. Here, amongst takeaway pizza and menthol cigarettes, we’d watch, inexplicably, giant, steroid-addled men in trunks play out a uniquely athletic, dramatic and regularly ridiculous soap opera that made Hollyoaks’ storylines seem halfway plausible. Amidst household names like The Undertaker and StoneCold Steve Austin, Christopher Keith Irvine was a big deal. Better known by his ring name, Chris Jericho was a six-time World Champion, a record nine-time Intercontinental Champion and the first undisputed WWF Champion after beating both The Rock and Stone-Cold in the same night.

Now, much of that probably means very little to you, but when you form your covers band after a wrestling show and decide to call it Fozzy Osbourne, you have my attention.

After dropping the Osbourne handle to simply become the not-much-better Fozzy, Irvine’s pivot from wrestling showman to hard rock frontman involved slightly more clothing but marginally less shouting. Evolving from the covers style on their first two albums into a full-blown homage to Guns

by j anine & L ee bull man

2023: a trilogy

by The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu

Folk song in England By steve roud

Love That Burns: Fleetwood Mac, 1967 – 74. by mick fleetwood

faber and faber

Faber and Faber

Twenty-three years ago last week, the KLF torched a million pounds on the island where Gorge Orwell wrote 1984. Prior to this currency bonfire, the conceptual cowboys had made a name for themselves as purveyors of knowing, subversive pop music who laid a sacrificial sheep at the feet of the music establishment and waved machine guns in their faces.The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu are back with a new book, and they’ve brought George Orwell with them. Of course, 2023 is unlike any novel you’ve ever read. The authors provide the latest telling of an age-old story, here presented as a wonderfully confounding, exhilarating and slightly bonkers utopian costume drama.

genesis

Steve Roud’s stunning new tome is a serious and in-depth investigation into our sceptred isle’s folk music history; a history filled with mystery, gaps and a million lost songs. Painstakingly researched and handsomely presented, Folk Song in England not only tells the story of the folk music tradition but provides context for the wider social history that provided the backdrop to its development.The book traces the music from the 16th Century to the 1950’s, when folk got big for a while before being eclipsed by the initial white-hot flash of early rock ‘n’ roll. Folklorist Roud clearly knows his stuff and loves his subject, and has cast his net wide in order to provide this definitive history.

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Volume One of Mick Fleetwood’s biography is a lavish and beautifully bound limited edition print that includes never-before seen photos, posters and cuttings, as well as interviews with Fleetwood’s band members past and present. Copies of ‘Rumours’, Fleetwood Mac’s breezy psycho-sexual soap opera, still sell like hotcakes but tell only a part of the story of one of the biggest bands ever.

Year by year, Love That Burns follows the group from scruffy blues band to scruffy pioneers of stadium rock, cocaine excess and searingly confessional songwriting. Given its hefty price tag, it’s probably one for the hardcore collectors only, but it’s a wonderful thing nonetheless.

getting to know you

Nadine Shah Inspired by her brother’s work as a documentary maker, Nadine Shah’s new album, ‘Holiday Des-tination’, takes on the Calais refugee crisis, the Syrian civil war and the rise of nationalism, as well as topics of mental health, which she’s always given a voice to. She also hates tapping and yoga, and refuses to die – literally, she’s not up for it. /

The best piece of advice you’ve been given I met Nancy Sinatra at a radio show I was doing once; she gave me some life changing advice. I can’t remember what it was.

The worst present you’ve received A minion cuddly toy (the little one not even one of the big ones that dance) from an ex boyfriend for my 30th birthday. We broke up a few hours later.

Your favourite word ‘Precipitation’.

The characteristic you most like about yourself I’m pretty generous I think.

Your pet-hate People that tap. Not tap dancing – I like that.

If you could only eat one food forever, it would be...

Steamed dumplings.

The worst job you’ve had Makeup counter. They made me wear their makeup brand and insisted on putting the makeup on me. I looked like a pantomime dame.

The film you can quote the most of Withnail and I. Favourite place in the world Istanbul. It is (well, was but is sadly changing) the perfect balance of east meets west.

Your style icon Patti Smith.

The one song you wished you’d written ‘Into my arms’ by Nick Cave.

The most famous person you’ve met John Cale. I played a show with him earlier this year and he was just as cool as you’d hope him to be.

The thing you’d rescue from a burning building My doll, Katrin.

Your guilty pleasure Musicals.

Your hidden talent Rapping.

Your favourite item of clothing Presently it’s this blue shirt/jacket thing. It’s got loads of secret pockets.

Your biggest disappointment Not being able to do cartwheels.

The celebrity that pisses you off the most even though you’ve never met them Peter Kay. Your biggest fear Dying. I’m not up for it.

The best book in the world The Brother Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

People’s biggest misconception about you That I’m lazy.

Who would play you in a film of your life?

My brother Ricky Shah. He’s an actor and looks a lot like me but is about a foot taller and a bit hairier… and a bloke.

How would you choose to die I’m not dying.

What is the most overrated thing in the world?

Yoga.

What, if anything, would you change about your physical appearance?

Your first big extravagance I’d like to have a bigger arse.

I love cooking and bought a knife for nearly £200.

What’s your biggest turn-off?

Small hands.

What is success to you?

Knowing I stuck to my guns and not having Your best piece of advice for others? regrets.

If you think you may have a mental illness then What talent do you wish you had? don’t be ashamed to talk about it. People are a lot To do cartwheels. kinder and more understanding than you think.

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The Man In The Moon The story of the most famous club in the world, remembered by the man who just had to buy Studio 54 writer: d aniel dylan wray / illustration: Cynthia Kittler

1977 was a pinnacle year for music in New York. Forty years on, we see the anniversary celebrations and reappraisals of seminal debut works released from the likes of Suicide, Television, Blondie, Richard Hell & the Voidoids and Talking Heads – all bands that are synonymous with the CBGB’s scene, a conduit hub for music that flirted with both pop and experimental sensibilities under the umbrella of punk. The area that CBGB’s was in, The Bowery, was, at that time, essentially a skid row. It was lined with flophouses for the vast number of local homeless people, street corners would be lit at night by burning trash cans and cab drivers would avoid pick-ups and drop-offs in the area, it being a known hotspot for drugs, crime and prostitution. Blondie’s

Jimmy Destri once described CBGB’s as, “a place for ugly white kids to go.

It wasn’t the beautiful people; it was the dirty people.”

Three miles north at 254 West 54th Street was where the non-Debbie Harry-looking, clean and beautiful people did go, to another place experiencing the peak of its cultural activities: Studio 54. Once they became more successful, the music of Blondie – songs such as ‘Heart of Glass’ – would more likely be heard in Studio 54 than CBGB’s, but during 1977 there was a clear divide in the music, aesthetic and status of the people attending such venerated clubs. The $20 entrance fee to enter Studio 54 would be more than a band of four or five people would likely make to split

between them from a gig at CBGB’s.

Prior to being a nightclub, Studio 54 was a CBS television and radio studio. When the club opened on April 26th 1977, it was under the dualownership of Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell, who made use of the extensive lighting options and remaining sets left from the studio and built the club with them in place, meaning they could have moveable theatrical sets that would allow the club to be transformed night after night for various themes and events. It also favoured a lighting rig that illuminated the dance floor brightly, which, combined with the extensive mirrors on the walls and the glitter of the outfits fashionable at the time, often meant the room would literally sparkle.

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Over the years, Studio 54 has become shorthand for glamour, glitz, drugs, celebrities and a vapid yet rabid level of consumption and excess that would go on to embody the sort of culture that would permeate through and come to define much of 1980s New York culture, perhaps most famously summarised by Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street, as he proudly boasted, “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.” However, the tales of Bianca Jagger riding in on a white horse for her 30th birthday, and other outlandish and egotistical tales, often outweigh the cultural legacy that the club had beyond the celebrity adventures. Not only was it a pioneering place for the disco movement – hosting live performances by the like of Grace Jones, Donna Summer, Gloria Gaynor and Sylvester – but it also created an anything goes, judgment-free space that would become crucial to various underrepresented communities, most notably being a haven for the gay community. That said, people had to get in first.

Studio 54’s door policy was known for being brutal. Guestlist and celebrities were allowed in a separate entrance through the back door but the general public lined the streets in the hope to be given the chance to pay to enter the club. “When Steve was running the club he would be very difficult with people on the front door,” Mark Fleischman, previous Studio 54 owner and author of the recently released Inside Studio 54 book, tells me. “He’d say, ‘you can’t come in, I don’t like your shirt, get out.’ People would wait for hours and not be let in.” One regular visitor was Andy Warhol, who summed up such a dichotomy of intense judgment on the outside of the club but with an unbridled sense of liberation on the inside by saying, “it was a dictatorship on the door but a democracy on the dance floor.” Rubell would say it was like “making a salad” or “casting a play” when it came to his high standards on the door.

The door policy would lead to many situations over the years, some which ended positively and others that became a sickening tragedy. One New Year’s Eve, Chic’s Nile Rogers was turned away and so he and writing partner Bernard Edwards went back to their studio instead and wrote an angry and embittered song called ‘Fuck Off’ aimed at the club and its mean door policy. The song’s title was changed and soon turned into ‘Le Freak’. After the millions of singles that sold, they didn’t have to worry about gaining entrance anymore and would be welcomed around

retold

the back and guided straight to the complimentary champagne and cocaine. At other times, the desperation of people wishing to get in would end horribly. One young man died getting stuck in an air vent as he tried to enter the building illegally. He was found dead in the vents – wearing black tie – after a smell was reported.

This policy made the club a lot of enemies, as Fleischman tells me, taking me back to a night that he describes as the strangest he ever encountered at Studio 54. “We got a phone call from the New York Post about a month or two into my opening and they said that a bomb is going to go off at 1am. The police came and there were bombsniffing dogs. These two German shepherds were moving up and down the balcony sniffing and they didn’t find anything but the police said that, maybe to be on the safe side, I might want to evacuate the club. I thought about it and I even had an ex-FBI bodyguard at the time that chickened out and left. I then decided that we weren’t evacuating and then at 1am I stood in the middle of the dance floor, as I figured if they are going to blow the club up then I want to go with it. I was a naval officer and naval officers go down with the ship.”

During it’s first year, the club was a knockout success. Through its celebrity invites and hosting parties for the opening nights of movies it attracted a high calibre crowd keen to tuck into the free booze and drugs, and an eager press who wanted to keep the club and the celebrities in print on a daily basis, most frequently reported through the page six gossip section of the New York Post. The success was rapid but it very soon brought the club and its owners to their knees. In a December 1978 interview, Rubell was quoted as saying that, “only the mafia made more money” than they did in 1977, which he estimated at profits of around $7m.

It turned out that the IRS read the paper too and they soon realised that Studio 54 had not been paying anywhere near the taxes in relation to that income.

Soon federal agents swept through the club, confiscating financial records (including the uncooked books that were hidden in the ceilings) as well as stumbling across a healthy stash of cocaine in the process. Rubell and Schrager were charged for tax evasion due to personally skimming an estimated $2.5m from the club. A further raid took place in 1979 and by 1980 the pair were in prison, sentenced to three and a half years, a sentence that was allegedly lowered on the basis of testimony given in which they named other NYC club owners who undertook a similar skimming practise.

They soon sold the club to Fleischman who, in his 70s today, tells me in a deep, grizzly New York accent about visiting the pair in prison to negotiate the deal. A negotiation no doubt tougher than most because Rubell and Shrager’s attorney was Roy Cohn, one of America’s most notorious and toughest lawyers, who during his career represented the likes of Rupert Murdoch, Joseph McCarthy and Donald Trump. Shrager and Rubell survived in jail amongst the drug kingpins and hardened criminals by having access to excess cash and paying money to the wife of a murderer they met in there, which bought them protection during their stint.

Y

ou might think that seeing two club owners imprisoned and represented by Cohn was enough to rethink the whole deal but Fleischman had already undergone an incident a year earlier that would have sent most people fleeing for the mountains. It took place at the Virgin Isle Hotel that he owned in St Thomas. In 1979 the hotel was targeted in an arson attack, two dogs were poisoned to death and a security guard was decapitated with a machete – all part of an orchestrated attack. In regards to responsibility for such a horrific plot, some suggested local Rastafarians who were angered by the intrusion on their land and others suggested a disgruntled New York club owner who Fleischman had turned his back on in a previous deal. Regardless of such experiences, he still wanted to press on and desperately own what he considered the hottest club in the world. “I’m an adventurer and I seek adventures,” he tells me. “I’ve always taken on projects that were exhilarating and dangerous and risk-taking. Studio 54 was a risk because when I first signed the deal with Ian and Steve, who

were still in jail, it had been open a month already and it was as hot as a pistol; but I remembered how great it was and I wanted to make it great again, so I did.”

Things had to change operationally, however. The anything goes drug den that was the basement under Shrager and Rubell had to be no more. “I had to sign a waver with the Alcohol and Beverage Commission that I wasn’t going to take people into the basement but people still wanted what they wanted and people wanted to get high, so when celebrities started walking in I’d take them upstairs to my office – everyone from the Rolling Stones to Rod Stewart.” It would literally be someone’s job to chop out 40-50 neatly and perfectly presented lines of cocaine to start each night. People would then be given either a gold straw or a crisp, tightly rolled $100 bill upon entrance to hoover it up. More tales of drugs and sex fill Fleischman’s book, which is page-after-page of cocaine, quaaludes and angel dustfuelled tales, all of which really hit home the bordering on depraved nature of the partying that took place during those years, under the club’s moon that hanged over the dancefloor, snorting coke from a spoon.

In her 2016 memoir, Grace Jones recalls the sense of liberation that floated through the club.With everyone inebriated, high and giddy to be inside one of the most exclusive places in the world, it led to the creation of a space in which anything went. Jones wrote: “Up above the balcony there was the rubber room, with thick rubber walls that could be easily wiped down after all the powdery activity that went on.

There was even something above the rubber room, beyond secretive, up where the gods of the club could engage in their chosen vice high up above the relentless dancers. It was a place of secrets and secretions, the in-

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crowd and inhalations, sucking and snorting.”

Studio 54 continued to thrive in the early ’80s, despite the ‘Disco Sucks’ movement doing its best to derail it.

“Dance clubs weren’t dead, disco may have been dying but we were a dance club, a party place,” Fleischman says.

The club, under him, became a disco, R&B and motown hybrid – live guests would vary from Rick James to Marvin Gaye, to Michael Jackson, to Fats Domino, to Lou Reed. As hip-hop began to infiltrate the scene, Fleischman saw the innovation in this area and also booked groups like the Beastie Boys and the Sugarhill Gang to play.

However, the maintenance required to keep Fleischman going got the better of him after a few years.

Every night he’d require Valium to get to sleep and cocaine to wake up, and once angel dust was thrown into the mix, things became even messier.

Fleischman was part of a group known as the ‘Dawn Patrol’, a group of extreme partiers that once Studio 54 had wrapped up by 5am were still on the lookout for more action. With him, John Belushi, Jack Lemmon, Nick Nolte, Liza Minnelli, Tony Curtis and others would prowl the meatpacking district for illegal after hours clubs like Crisco Disco, sucking down ketamine, quaaludes, cocaine and more booze until they found a partner to go home with or burnt themselves out.

By 1983 Fleischman was losing it and, lost to drugs, his judgment became cloudy. He did things such as let the Hell’s Angels throw a party in the club, which led to a young busboy being thrown over the balcony. His time was up and he looked to sell. On top of this, AIDS soon hit and the nightlife scene was drastically impacted upon, because nobody knew what it was and the virus carried with it a rancid homophobic myth in the early days. “AIDS really popped in 1983 and by 1984; people were dying. In ’83 it didn’t have a name, people didn’t know what was happening. People were scared to go out.”

The club was sold and soon turned into the Ritz, a more traditional venue that ditched the expensive guest list, free drinks and celebrity culture and, alongside further changes in musical tastes, Studio 54 was soon dead and a distant memory; taking a lot of people with it along the way. A lot of key people involved with the club – or who simply went there – were lost to either AIDS or substance abuse. Sober today, Fleischman recalls with an air of sadness in his voice, “If you do enough drugs... you die.” It’s an impact that he describes as “the Studio 54 effect.”

Denzel Himself The invisible frequencies of experiential hardcore Photogra phy: sonny mccartney / writer: david zammitt

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interviews

Op p o s i t e: D en zel h i ms el f at t h e ma g i c r o u n d a b o u t , Old s t r eet , Lo n do n .

A

s he courteously orders his spiced chai latte, it’s hard for me to square the young man sitting in front of me with the Denzel Himself in the video for the 22-year-old’s latest single, ‘Bangin’’. In it, he staggers around a nameless, indistinct suburban green space under drab, grey skies, a single camera tracking him as he forms a mosh pit with himself as the sole occupant. Spitting and rasping, he stares, unblinking, down the lens as though challenging the viewer to disagree with his treatise. But while the visceral persona the former film school student has created for himself is mesmerising to watch, the gentle, thoughtful character with whom I chat is just as engaging, albeit for very different reasons. It’s my first encounter with the many dichotomies that come together to make Denzel Himself one of the most genuinely interesting young talents to emerge in the UK this year.

Boldly driven and yet decidedly humble, his self-assuredness is punctuated throughout with moments of shyness. Careful to make sure I will paint him accurately, at first he seems wary of revealing too much – he refuses to be drawn on where, exactly, he comes from, for example – and gives answers that seem considered but a little vague. He pauses frequently and corrects me on the difference between punk and hardcore punk, lest his influences are misrepresented. And as I ask about the inspirations and goals that form the basis of his music he tells me quietly but firmly that he doesn’t want to, “over-intellectualise things.” Instead, he says, his only modus operandi is to make his music sound cool. Whether bravado or selfdeprecation, I sense that there’s a plan at play here that is much more complex than a simple desire to sound cool, but, either way, he can safely tick that initial aim off his list.

Employing brutal grime electronics to ensure he has your full attention, Denzel Himself’s music reveals an awful lot more when it is given the time it deserves. Gravelly vocal refrains are offset by layers of bright jazz guitars and spindly saxophone lines, serving as a reminder that, without, of course, wishing to over-intellectualise things, we’re dealing with an artist who has his head screwed firmly on.

His songs are the product of a wideranging love for music that goes deeper than society’s expectations of what a young black British male should listen to. He’s spoken already about how it feels to be the only black person at a punk gig; now it’s his turn to help bring the spirit of that music to people of colour.

Rather than making straight-up punk, however, Denzel, just like his artistic touchstones Tyler, The Creator and Odd Future, blends that punk ethic to rap and electronics. “I always knew that I would make that kind of music,” he says, and yet the incorporation of punk elements isn’t simply something that appeals to him from a purely aesthetic perspective. Rather, the paredback, do-it-yourself tactics found on his debut EP, ‘Pleasure’, are often employed out of basic necessity. “In terms of me implementing stylistic approaches that I have studied and learned from hardcore punk, that’s both a factor of taste and resources.

I don’t just want to make outright hardcore punk,” he firmly states.

Denzel also doesn’t want to create in a way that he describes as “lateral”.

If his art – and he always refers to his work as his art – relies on mere replication, then it is, he says, for all intents and purposes invalid. “There are loads of hardcore punk bands and there are so many influences and inspirations that I have. I find it more interesting to flirt with certain ideas in one piece.” He pauses, as though unsure whether or not he should reveal a creative hand that he may want to play in the future.

“I have yet to hear a hardcore punk song in, like, a free-jazz time signature.

That would be the sort of thing that I would perhaps do, as opposed to just making that kind of record.”

Indeed, the breadth of his artistic vision is impressive not only for his relative youth but also the fact that absolutely every element of its vision is executed by Denzel, himself. In a notso-subtle reference to the creative control he wields, the credits that roll at the end of the video for his debut single, ‘Thrasher,’ read: “Directed by Denzel Himself / Written by Denzel Himself / Story by Denzel Himself / Screenplay by Denzel Himself.”

Entirely self-taught, he has relied on his senses to guide him since

downloading a copy of the Fruity Loops production suite in his teens.

“I don’t play any instruments, I just replay things by ear. So everything that I perform on my songs is just by ear,” he says happily. “Usually I can hear a chord progression in my head and I’m really good at cascading the notes.

I can see in my head that it’s this note, that note, this note, that note that make up the chord and from there I figure it out and play it. But I can’t read music or anything like that. Sonically, I can hear it,” he smiles. “It’s always been easy to me.”

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hose ears have taken Denzel quite some distance since his younger self gave up on laptop production out of sheer frustration before returning to give it another go when he was a much more mature 17. Blessed with what he describes as hyped-up senses, Denzel believes he is tuned into things that other people don’t always see, feel or hear, and it’s this heightened sensitivity to which he attributes the genesis of his art. “I have a very hyperactive and hyper-vigilant brain,” he says, and I ask him if it’s a blessing or a curse. He stops for a second to disentangle his feelings on his superpowers. “Both! It’s more a good thing but it does have its down sides. When creating – or living, in general – I’m quite passive about most things but I notice everything.” Again he reminds me of the contrasts in his personality and in his music. “With ‘Bangin’’, in particular, when I was playing the chords I guess I wanted it to have a sombre and a beautiful mood, but not too sweet. I’m not going to try to intellectualise it but I just thought it sounded cool and I knew it sounded a bit like jazz.”

But don’t get comfortable, he says, and don’t assume that this is a jazz record. Or a hardcore punk record. Or a rap record. “It’s jazz out of a typical jazz context, which is what I like to do.

That dichotomy is naturally within me,” he muses. “I’ve always been in to something appearing a certain way, but the actual content somewhat contradicting it. So if I’m making a song and it sounds beautiful to me, it could still sound beautiful to me but the drums could be really hard, or the

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arrangement of the drums could be disruptive or out of context for what would generally be considered smooth or easy listening,” he enthuses, before plunging things back down to earth with an ice-cold blast of selfdeprecation, his eyes looking to the ground with a shrug. “That’s just what I’m into.”

Having released videos accompanying nearly every track he’s created in his short career despite an abject lack of resources and budget, Denzel’s talents go deeper than music. Again arising out of necessity, taking on the roles of director, screenwriter and lead actor has allowed him to seize the reins in a way that more established artists cannot, ensuring that the end product is accomplished without deviating from his vision. “No representation is better than misrepresentation,” he declares. “In regards to my art, I know how I want it to come across and I know how I want it to make people feel. So if I can’t get it to be the way I want it in my head I’d much rather not do it.” Attending film school in his late teens was all part of the plan to retain 100% creative control. “I studied film because I knew that I wanted to have the ability to have 360 control over my artistic identity. I knew that no one would understand what’s in my head as good as me because I am the creator.”

Having re-released his 2015 ‘Pleasure’ EP earlier this year, breathing new life into the aforementioned singles, Denzel is keeping his cards close to his chest with regard to a debut full-length, except to say that ‘Pleasure’ draws a line under the body of work he has put together up until now, allowing him to put it in a box and move on. “That’s gone,” he says.

“I’m 23 soon – a lot of those tracks I made when I was 17, 18. In all senses I’ve grown so much from that point.”

He smiles. “I’m always working!”

Beyond that, the future, he says, is very much fluid for now. “The only thing I know is that I’m going to be someone who brings artistic integrity to a much wider audience,” he says, keeping his aims reassuringly lofty. “I just want to bring what I love and respect in art – I want to be a poster boy for that and spread it further.”

DUDS The first British band to ever sign to Castle Face sound like “a Slinky rolling down the stairs�

Ph otogra phy: timothy cochrane / writer: hayley scott

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op p o s i t e: (L - R ) E d wa r d C it t a n o va , Ma c i n t y r e L aw , Giu l i o Er a s m u s , R o b i n E d wa r d s , N i r va n a H ei r e and Tho m B elli n i .

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ver the past forty years, Manchester has become synonymous with ambition, with its perennially active music scene celebrated like no other in the UK, particularly during the punk and post-punk eras of the ’70s and ’80s. From Northern Soul’s teenage hub The Twisted Wheel through to congregations that gathered on dancefloors during the acid house explosion, it’s a reputation that refuses to go away – sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.

One label that epitomised the spirited gloom of famed Manchester post-punk was of course Factory Records, a label that, if it still existed today, would no doubt be the home of DUDS. Still, despite drawing from the Factory parentage, DUDS don’t exactly possess a sound that you’d call distinctly Mancunian. The brittleness of their music, their strong melodies and peculiar arrangements all recall qualities elicited in more danceorientated punk bands such as A Certain Ratio and Gang of Four, while their overall sound is much more in line with what was happening over in the States around the same time.The urgent stop/start arrangements on songs like ‘No Remark’, for example, brings to mind the likes of Devo and Pylon.

The detached darkness of the band’s music would have you think that they were a serious bunch. When I meet them, though, they seem in good spirits, even if there is a detectable sense of wariness in regards to being interviewed. DUDS’ history and the story behind their formation is typical of DIY music scenes everywhere: “We were all doing nothing at the same time, in the same area, in the same city, with a similar desire to write some music,” says singer/guitarist Giulio Erasmus.

I ask the band how they feel about their myriad post-punk comparisons, and what they would say best describes their sound. Without any disregard for the stylistic comparisons, Giulio jokes: “I would say it’s comparable to a Slinky rolling down the stairs.” Drummer Nirvana Heire thinks it’s simply, “An abruptly delivered cacophony of yelps and squeals.”

It’s meant as a joke, but the Slinky down the stairs pretty much perfectly describes DUDS. Out now, the band’s

debut album, ‘Of A Nature Or Degree’, is filled with nuances, veering from fast and fierce to soporific and sleazy, occasionally halting unexpectedly and typically followed by loud, sporadic bursts of noise. The comparatively languid ‘Reward Indifference’, for example, juxtaposes the general chaos of the rest of the album. Lyrically, it’s difficult to make out Giulio’s words due to the muffled quality, as well as them being cryptic and often surreal. “Ideas for songs tend to come about from absurdism and conversations overheard in supermarkets,” he tells me.

Speaking of their new album, they were recently signed to the renowned Castle Face Records – John Dwyer’s first-port-of-call garage label, home to his Oh Sees, as well as Ty Segall and White Fence. Needless to say, DUDS are delighted with the partnership. “The label has a few interesting acts, it’s nice to be their first UK act,” says Nirvana.

The band’s biggest champion, Marc Riley, who was one of the first to see DUDS’ potential, has enthusiastically revered them on his 6Music show for over a year now. “He’s helped us big time by playing us a lot on his show,” says a noticeably appreciative Giulio.

Colin Newman of Wire is also a fan.

It’s down to Riley, though, that the DUDS have their deal with an excellent DIY label in Castle Face. “Marc sent us a message when we were on a small tour in Sweden saying he’d sent some of our stuff to John Dwyer,” says Giulio. “John then contacted us showing interest in putting something out. We were put in touch with [Castle Face co-owner] Mr Matt Jones who has been a great help in getting this LP out into the public eye.”

I note that the band don’t have that much of an Iinternet presence beyond the usual Bandcamp and Facebook pages used to promote gigs and releases. “We have a Bandcamp to direct people to the music and Facebook to let people know of any events we’re part of, is there a need for more?” says Giulio. “It’s not necessarily a conscious decision but we are wary of it.”

It’s a refreshing attitude to have in an era when everyone has a tendency to use social media as a platform to be more vocal and opinionated and, essentially, over-share. In that sense, DUDS are still a bit of a mystery,

recalling the days when John Peel and music weeklies would be your only source of seeking out new and interesting music, alongside mixtapes and recommendations from friends.

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ive, DUDS are something else – tight and succinct to the point of precision, but not exactly note perfect, in that it’s their thing to incorporate intentional ‘mistakes’, or noises that at least sound like they aren’t supposed to be there.

Touring is a big part of what they do and they’re keen to tell me about shows they’ve played in the past. “My most memorable gig would be a show we played in Brighton at West Hill Hall,” says Giulio, “where we tried to do a special entrance that was executed in quite a sloppy fashion.” Giulio explains how they’d intended to stagger their arrival one member at a time, in a call and response sequence.

They hadn’t realised that the door to the stage was behind the drum kit, meaning that all six members of the group had to awkwardly contort their bodies on entry to avoid falling over.

“It looked and felt odd,” he says.

“We played in a Swedish city called Uppsala at a youth house once,” says Nirvana. “It was run by the youths for the youths, which made for a show with great energy. It was a pretty chaotic evening. We arrived at the venue to find there was a massive sound system but no sound engineer. Robin [Edwards – bass] had to sort it all out. The night culminated in Russell [Andrew Gray] aka Girl Sweat’s equipment failing after ten minutes. It was great.” “Örebro in Sweden was also great,” says Robin. “There’s quite a lot to go into from that night. It was a memorable Halloween and there was another destructive set from Girl Sweat that resulted in a broken PA and a pissed off promoter but we managed to sort everything out in the end.”

On the current vibrancy of Manchester’s music scene, Giulio enthuses over how much it’s informed them, saying: “Some of the bands around us have shaped our sound. It’s going through a little bit of a quiet period at the moment, but there’s a pretty strong community. A lot of the

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musicians play in each other’s groups and do all kinds of pretty diverse projects. It was interesting to observe and now to be a part of it.

“Every time we go to cities like Leeds or Glasgow it seems to pale in comparison,” he says. “Maybe that’s just because I’m looking at it from the outside.”

The band brass player, Mac Law, intervenes: “For a long time our friend Edwin [Stevens, who records under the name Irma Vep] was organising particularly great shows and herding many of the local bands together – a lot is owed to him.”

Duds are still a relatively new group, so naturally they’re still developing their sound. On the subject of the possibility of experimenting and exploring other avenues musically, they all agree that stylistic progression is an innate part of making music, especially so early on in their work. “I think it’s natural to explore all avenues,” says Giulio. “The newest material we’re currently demo-ing (newer than ‘Of A Nature Or Degree’) is quite different.

I think it’s perfectly natural to keep experimenting; it’s all part of the fun of being in a band.”

As I leave the band, DUDS seem keen to get on with their agendas for the evening. After all, they’re a busy lot, all working part time jobs and doing what they can to make being in a band efficient. What strikes me most about them is their equally intense but unassuming nature in person – charismatic but also quiet, friendly but not to be messed with. As Colin Newman put it when writing about the band for The Quietus, they’re “selfeffacing in the way only the British can be.” Most accurately, Newman went on to write: “There’s an element to it that doesn’t quite qualify as music (in all the right ways) – a bit atonal, in some rhythm that’s not 4/4 but is somehow kind of pop from another dimension.”

He’s completely right. As easy as it is to draw tepid comparisons, DUDS have their own sound that’s hard to pinpoint. The influences are all there, but they’re manifested in a way that makes them sound very much like they belong to now, or even in some distant future, when, typically, so much modern post-punk is known for clinging to the past.

Sons of Raphael Finally – a new band interview that’s interrupted by an irate bookie collecting the group’s debts Photogra phy: jenna foxton / writer: ian roebuck

Above : B r ot h e r s Lor a l ( le ft) and Ro nne l in t he ir u ncle ’s r e s taur ant.

Hampst e ad, Lond o n.

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very now and then a band comes along with such panache and with such a magisterial supporting cast in tow that you have to wonder if the band are real at all. Sons of Raphael could be that band. Rich in mythology and heaped with praise after just a whistle of online activity, are they really as authentic as they promise? When brothers Loral and Ronnel take a seat at my table in the smallest Japanese restaurant in Hampstead the cynicism fades away, at least for a short while.

“Our parents, they used to be involved in scientology in the 1980s but they don’t really tell us much about it,” says Ronnel, all dressed in black and playing with his glasses as he flicks his thick head of hair to hear Loral.

“They weren’t practicing scientology, more in a research kind of way, but they were certainly admirers of L. Ron Hubbard and that’s actually Ronnel’s name,” he says.

Ronnel smiles. “They reversed the initials. We are sons of the Raphael family, so the band name makes sense at least.”

An eccentric but warm welcome, Loral and Ronnel are wise guys with sharp vocabs and a curious way for such a young age. Despite hailing from around the corner, conversation seems to flow like an early Noah Baumbach script, helped by accents picked up from an international school upbringing. So they’ve got the backstory to match the image, I ponder, as a soup versus sake discussion ensues.

“I had Sake yesterday,” Ronnel shrugs, prompting Loral to order soup all round. Just as celebrated oddball artists Gilbert and George eat five times a week at their local kebab house, it doesn’t take much to imagine Sons of Raphael dining here every other night.

“I once got lost in Disneyland when I was a kid and that was a really scary experience, let me tell you,” Ronnel exclaims on the subject of family holidays, “although we weren’t able to get the full experience when we were there because there was a rapist and all the parents were very panicked. Fortunately, we never met him.” This seems something of a Raphael specialty, taking an everyday subject and adding a concrete slab of darkness. Loral twists the knife: “But maybe we did and he was dressed as

Mickey Mouse.” Humour to the brothers’ armory.

Set to release their debut single in November, the duo are relishing dripfeeding content to the public.Their raw, instinctive rock and roll is a guttural call to arms, with teaser tracks ‘Eating People’ and ‘Rio’ utilizing distortion as a third band member and brevity as a fourth. Think of them as a bubblegum Suicide, for now. Both frighteningly short tracks are accompanied by an arresting quote from the bible: “Their throat is an open grave; they use their tongues to deceive.”

When I mention this it seems to get Ronnel pretty fired up. “As a matter of fact that’s a quote originally from Psalms,” he says. “As far as we are concerned it marks this beginning of a lawless escapade, if you know what I mean. I find religions fascinating and that particular quote is about men involved in evil doing. I figured out what we are about to do is eccentric and quite out there.”

All part of their higher plan perhaps, Ronnel and Loral have meticulously set out every step of this first release, provocation be damned.

“I certainly like to provoke people but I don’t like to provoke for no reason,” says Ronnel. “It makes me feel satisfied when I know I am not just quoting something because it sounds good but when there is a meaning behind it. It goes with the stuff we shot at my boarding school.” He’s talking about the Loral-directed video for ‘Eating People’ (on film, of course) shot in their school chapel. “We were very lucky to do the video there – that was mission impossible. The Priest was very nice,” Loral recalls, “the Chaplin and the Headmaster gave it the thumbs up but then we shot it on a Saturday morning when they usually sing Abba songs so obviously the kids were quite shocked. The Deputy Head left 5 seconds in, she was really angry, then the music teacher left. Then they cut us off; they shut down the PA system.”

Loral aimed to shoot 25 minutes of a film – he got to 9 before Sons of Raphael were cut off. “The idea was to play two songs,” he says. “We just wanted to document how we do it live.” The Chaplin, the Deputy Head, the music teacher were all characters in the band’s portmanteau piece.

“Boarding school was the ideal place to shoot that as that’s where I started experimenting when I turned my room into a music studio,” says Ronnel. “I found lots of old cassette tape recorders and drum machines so that’s how it came along. We had this janitor at school called Marv.”

“Marvin – such a nice guy,” says Loral.

“Marv, as far as I am concerned,” says Ronnel.

“I guess his full name is Marvin.”

“OK, but I call him Marv. He had this fantastic old reel-to-reel tape and he wanted a 100 quid and I said, ‘Marv, I will give you a tenner,’ and he said, ‘you know, Ronnel, you are a real smooth talker.’”

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wept up in Ronnel’s story I only just notice Loral talking with some volume on his phone: “I am so sorry, no we are five doors down at a restaurant. It’s a Japanese place, we are sitting by the window – I will give it to you.” Ronnel is gesturing madly about Marv. Loral is stood up leaning over.

Things are getting weird.

“Sorry about this, sorry, sorry,” repeats Loral as a door crashes open somewhere behind me. I turn to catch a fleeting glimpse of bright blue velour, chains and a seemingly angry man. “I have been chasing and chasing for this. Is it all here?” He yells at Loral, holding up an envelope.

“Are you doubting me? Come on, everything is there. You’re not going to count it now are you?” Everybody’s voices get louder – a waitress is cowering. Ronnel finally joins his brother. “Listen, you’re a real low life, you have no style – we do business with you but you have no style coming here right now.” I remain seated and turn to see the man frown. “Call me later,” he shouts and departs, but not before Loral’s parting shot: “Cocksucker!”

Then there is silence. Either an elaborate set up has taken place or the Raphaels hold a deeper secret. I waver between the two as Loral explains, “that was a bit… err… sorry. I hate when people question me or doubt me, it’s just someone we owe money to. That was our bookie, actually. Just don’t mention his name. We like to bet

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on some sports and I was supposed to meet him at 5.30 outside our flat but I totally forgot and I have had so many missed calls.”

“OK,” I reply, happy to hop on board for the ride. Ronnel tries to clear the air in his own way. “We bet on NBA games – you know, basketball. Let me tell you about us, it’s actually a quote from John, but anyone who claims to have a fellowship with us but then walks in darkness… he’s not a man that we can trust. That’s all I can say.” They do seem genuinely put out. Loral’s soup goes cold on the table. “What a cocksucker. Honestly.

What was that about!? Counting the money out. I mean for two years I have been working with this guy. He doesn’t trust me. I mean, my handshake means business.”

We’re back admiring the restaurant ambience within seconds, Ronnel a big fan of the muzak emanating from the speaker above. I ask about ‘Eating People’ again, grasping for a touch of reality. “I wrote it about this religious ceremony, in fact entitled ‘Eating People’ by a guy called John Fenton, I don’t know if you are familiar?”

(I later find out that Fenton is a priest and scholar of the New Testament.)

“It’s about the last supper of Jesus. It’s quite a controversial idea about how at the last supper one of the disciples consumed Jesus to actually take responsibility for his death. So I wrote this song and I felt quite happy to do it in chapel because I felt there wasn’t a place that was more appropriate.”

But people left when you filmed the video – did they find it blasphemous?

“The fact that the people that left were intimidated by loud guitars and drum machines is just proof that people have a very narrow vision of the world because if they were to listen to the actual content then they would see that it’s very much influenced by the last supper of Jesus and things that are related to the chapel, which they hear all the time. As a matter of fact, I always tell Loral that Jesus was the first rock and roll star.” Loral nods. “He was a rebel,” he says completely straight faced. I turn to Ronnel. “Yes, Jesus was an outlaw, a rebel, he challenged authority.” I find it hard to disagree with the brothers, whether I believe Jesus is real or not.

Circuit des Yeux A night spent convulsing on the floor is the best thing that’s ever happened to Haley Fohr Photogra phy: david kasnic / writer: daniel dylan wray

There’s a strange hum floating through the air in Berlin. Walking into the courtyard of the Kulturbrauerei old brewery the sound grows louder and more intense. The hum soon turns into a growling drone that appears to weave up and down; moving, shaking and quivering in tone, as you get ever closer to the whirr. The source of these strange sounds comes through two speakers stood next to a solitary giant black box. Inside the box, an anechoic chamber (a space without any echo), is Circuit des Yeux (Haley Fohr) who is performing in it three times a night as part of the city’s Pop-Kultur festival.

Her shoes and phone sit neatly outside the box on the grass and inside she

works in darkness and isolated silence, experimenting with her voice. The sounds brewed up reveal themselves in prolonged explorations, intertwining between controlled shrieks and quiet murmurs. Over the course of the 15-minute performance, layers are often added through effects pedals creating a trippy, indistinguishable sound that, once removed from the visual context of the performer, you begin to lose yourself in, forgetting who or where this all comes from.

“The idea came to me and two other girlfriends when we were tripping on LSD,” Fohr tells me the next day as we’re sat in the open courtyard of her hotel complex on a

sunny August day. “I’m a little tired, so I’m going to wear these,” she says, as she puts on a pair of aviator sunglasses, leaving just enough of her eyes poking through to occasionally get a glimpse of her eye-liner, which is applied in short little dashes under her eyes, resembling a ‘cut here’ instruction from a food packet. “I read this interview with [American avant garde composer] Diamanda Galas about going to school and she mentioned the anechoic chambers they had there and how she would take LSD and go into these chambers and practise for hours and find her inner voice.”

Fohr, 28, has been writing, performing and searching for her own

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inner voice as Circuit des Yeux for a decade now. Originally from Indiana and now based in Chicago, she’s recently signed with Drag City after previously releasing records through Thrill Jockey and De Stijl. When not busy tripping on LSD and thinking up conceptual anechoic chamber projects to be built for festivals in Berlin, she also makes utterly singular music.

The music is driven by her distinctive voice – one that sits somewhere between peak Patti Smith and experimental-period Scott Walker – and she creates music that blends esoteric folk, avant garde compositions, post-rock, ambient pop and contemporary minimalism. Her 2015 album,

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op p o s i t e & B el o w : H a l ey f o h r a t h er h o me in t h e L o w er w es t s i d e of c h i c a g o , IL .

‘In Plain Speech’, was a staggering achievement and in 2016 she gave herself a rest from the incredibly intense and personal project that Circuit des Yeux is and created the fictional character, Jackie Lynn, to live in for a brief while. She released a record under the name, creating a fictitious backdrop story about a cocaine-dealing cowgirl on the run.

The album was fun, almost breezy and light compared to the stark intensity of Circuit des Yeux, and it played with a tone that resembled Suicide making an experimental and contemporary country record. It was done in a brief amount of time, just days, and was always intended to fade into obscurity.The success of the album was not anticipated. Rave reviews were written and Fohr found herself on the front cover of Wire magazine even though she never even planned to do a single interview for the project. It should have never been anything more than a bit of fun, a diversion tactic to give her space to write songs for her upcoming album, ‘Reaching for Indigo’. “I’ve been developing these new songs over a couple of years and I wanted to take extra time with this record. I did Jackie Lynn to buy me more time but that broke off into a new world,” she says, looking back over the project, again dipping her sunglasses enough for her eyes to creep through and meet mine. “With Jackie Lynn I was just trying something out – I didn’t want to be the focal point of what I was doing. The traction was more than I expected – I wanted it to be one of these weird one-offs you’d find when digging through the back catalogue of an artist.”

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he difference between Jackie Lynn and Circuit des Yeux as creative outlets for Fohr is clear-cut and she seems somewhat disheartened that her fun, throwaway project recorded in a flash captured people’s imaginations as much as it did. “Circuit Des Yeux is one hundred percent me. Jackie Lyne was an experiment in entertainment...

Circuit Des Yeux is one hundred percent artistry. When people would say, ‘I like Circuit des Yeux but I love Jackie Lynn,’ it’s hard not to be taken back by that… like, damn!”

What Jackie Lynn did do in Fohr’s favour was create breathing room for the songs included on ‘Reaching For

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Indigo’ to be created and fully realised.

The end result is something that she is beaming about. “This album is my magnum opus, it’s been a long time coming, I’m pretty proud,” she says.

Fohr isn’t reserved in coming forward about the pride in her own accomplishments and it’s refreshing to see such self-assuredness and conviction coming from an artist who may usually be reserved a spot in the pile marked ‘weirdo underground experimental stuff’. Far from the stereotypical, shoegazing personalities that are often presumed behind such music, she has an air of confidence about her work that suggests she’s becoming exactly aware of how good she is. “Not to toot my own horn,” she says at one point when we are discussing an upcoming gig she is playing covering all of Nico’s ‘Chelsea Girl’, “but I’m a singular woman who is finding her voice and doing things like that is a way to celebrate that.”

She should be proud. ‘Reaching for Indigo’ is an album of remarkable beauty, craft and scope. It’s a record that feels dense and experimental but fluid and easily penetrable, leaving gaps of flowing electronics to get lost in and intricate and complex song craft to be stunned by. All of which, of course, is underpinned by Fohr’s voice, which feels utterly seamless in its goose bump-inducing ability. The production of the record hums with a warmth and sparkles with crystal clarity, always sounding infinitely more expensive than the DIY home studio set-up that made it. This decision was intentional, Fohr tells me. “In my career, my struggles have largely been financial and through those situations I’ve burrowed my way through in a DIY-style, which has been pretty freeing and has helped me develop my own style. I was offered multiple budgets and advances and large producers for this record but I took a step back and said, ‘this is not how I’ve done things.’ So I made a decision to do it entirely at home with Cooper Crain, who I’ve long worked with.” It’s so far removed from resembling what one might attribute to home recording quality that it’s almost unbelievable and Fohr is aware of the job that’s been done on it. “I think the sounds are incredibly sophisticated.”

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he gap that Jackie Lynn forced in the making of this record also allowed for something else to happen to Fohr on a much more personal level.

A moment that has changed Fohr’s life and shaped this record irreversibly. “It

was the night of January 22nd, 2016…” she begins to tell me as though winding up the beginning of a children’s story.

“It came from intuition; it’s hard to describe. For whatever reason, in my life, great change has come through challenge – a tangible challenge, to overcome something. This time there was nothing pulling or pushing me, it came from within me.”

Fohr continues to plunge into this very unusual evening and moment with further muddy detail. “My life wasn’t terrible by any means but something really dark came down upon me and this new step happened in the process where things got so dark they combusted into this bright white light and I had this knowingness wash over me. I found this answer that I didn’t know I’d been searching for until I found it.” If this sounds confusingly vague, it’s because it’s something that cannot really be pinpointed or accurately described. It was something that happened both

within and beyond Fohr; something switched, an eruptive moment of self realisation, a non-religious spiritual awakening; something happened to her body and mind. “It was both an internal and a physical thing. It was mostly internal but I was going through something spiritual. I was convulsing and vomiting and crying, it was really intense, it came out of nowhere, it was like somebody did this to me. It was really frightening.”

Despite the fear that drenched that moment as she laid writhing and convulsing on the floor. The end outcome is one of intense positivity.

“I think in life there are a lot of pivotal moments from 18-28 and for me they have come in really challenging, dark ways and this is the first one in which I had no sense of foresight. It was so uplifting and positive and I don’t know if another moment like that will come again, I really don’t. It’s changed who I am in a really profound way. Going dark in times of struggle is the easy

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way, for me anyway, but in pushing through and knowing that there could be something amazing that could happen at any moment, I’ll hold onto that forever.”

This period called for a bit of time away to reflect, which is exactly what Fohr did. “Right after that I moved out of my house and lived about an hour away in the north side of Chicago and spent a couple of months there and sort of just stared at a wall. It was really quiet and I just waited. After that a lot of things coalesced in this really beautiful way. Things in my personal and professional life, it was like I was riding this wave; it was effortless, it was beyond me. I also had this element of a heightened sense of colour for about eight months, reds and blues were really intense to see, I noticed the patterns on everything.” It was during this period that the album was primarily constructed, riding high upon a wave of the unexplainable.

For Fohr, Circuit des Yeux has been an ongoing sense of self-discovery, way beyond 2016’s episode. She and the project are so intrinsically linked to one another they share DNA and Fohr has, in many ways, found herself through this project. It has become an outlet for the true Haley Fohr to filter through, something that most potently manifests itself when she is playing live. “When I’m on stage performing, I feel like that’s the only time in my life in which I’m one hundred percent me,” she says. “It took me a while to get to this stage and it’s such a vessel of freedom, I feel so empowered.”

The question that of course leads to is why? Or, perhaps more importantly, why doesn’t Fohr feel like she is herself unless she’s funnelling herself through the vessel that is Circuit des Yeux?

“For whatever reason, in the stage that I am in my life, there isn’t that much room for my narrative,” she says.

“People have never really listened to me; I’m a quiet person, I sat in back of the class in school. I have a lot of ideas and thoughts but it takes a lot of energy trying to get them across to people.”

This is something Fohr feels is amplified given her age and gender.

“Ageism is something that I really struggle with. I think young people have the most brilliant ideas in the world and people don’t honour them. I just remember those things and experiences really vividly and I still struggle today being a woman in a male dominated industry.” However, all of this has led to a period of overpowering self-belief and realisation of the infinite possibilities that exist when on stage.

“All of that coalesces into a feeling of, ‘here I am up here on stage... nobody can fuck with me.’”

We’re The world thinks it’s got Detroit all figured out – Protomartyr know that is hasn’t Photography: david cortes / writer: stuart stubbs

In 2010, documentary filmmaker Julien Temple made Requiem For Detroit?, informing my image of the Motor City.

Before then, Detroit to me was Motown and Iggy & The Stooges. I knew that it was once the centre of the automobile industry but I didn’t care much about that. In terms of modernday Detroit, I hadn’t given it a second thought. It turned out that neither had anyone else – not even a United States that had prospered so much from its capital boom and cultural legacy; not even the suburbs of the city just a few miles away.

Temple’s film is an excellent one, and more respectful than others have been in ghoulishly recounting Detroit’s traumatic last century and decline. It’s important that the question mark in its title is noted, and the documentary ends on hopeful footage of residents farming crops on the city’s countless empty lots. And yet, Requiem For Detroit? is incapable of not stoking the singular image of the city. It can’t help but stick to a script that’s been copied and recopied by every newspaper article about Detroit in the last 15 years, probably because the story is so good, by which I mean it’s unbelievable.

It always starts with Henry Ford’s first mass production line in 1913 and the genie that it let out of the bottle; the birth of consumerism and common aspiration and how the motorcar built Detroit quickly and crushed it slowly. Along the way the city experienced mass migration from the South, bringing with it poisonous racial prejudice that’s never gone away, ‘white flight’, the Great Depression,

two fuel crises that put paid to the city’s cash cow of American-made cars, spiralling poverty and the crack epidemic of the 1980s that destroyed so many inner-city black neighbourhoods across the United States. Even the good times (the rapid expansion of Ford, General Motors and Chrysler into the 1920s; the lucrative illegal liquor that flooded the city from Canada in the 1930s prohibition era – 75% of the entire country’s supply) would serve to torment Detroit, building it up to knock it down.

But most important is how the story of Detroit always ends – with a city abandoned. With hundreds of homes burnt out and bulldozed. With one house in every three derelict. With nature reclaiming the sidewalks of entire blocks unoccupied for decades.

We’ve become gleefully fascinated by this image of Detroit; morbidly pleased that a place like this should exist in our lifetimes – a real life movie set of a post-apocalyptic, post-capitalist America. One look at the dramatic shape of Detroit and it’s easy to see how the rigidly desolate image of the city has become king, however insensitive it encourages us to be towards it and the thousands of people still living there.

It would be dishonest to say that the intensity of abandonment is overstated; the shock of it not so great; the prairie hum of the cicadas and crickets in the expanses of misplaced long grass not out of context and strange. And yet, of course, Detroit as a ruin is only part of its reality. �

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L eft : (L -R) Jo e ca sey, a lex leo n ard , sco t t d av id so n & g reg a hee. Det r o it , Mi.

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lso in 2010, Protomartyr played their first ever show, at the Lager House on Michigan Avenue, where we meet for lunch on our final day together. Having never been in a band before, and nervous to be singing in front of people for the very first time, Joe Casey preoccupied himself that night with planning his entrance. First he’d get drunk, then he’d remain sat at the bar in the next room whilst guitarist Greg Ahee and drummer Alex Leonard started to play without him.

Once it finally felt like there was nothing else for it, and out of time to scull another drink, he pushed through the crowd and onto the stage. It must have looked pretty good because Scott Davidson was in the room that night

and later became the band’s bassist.

Casey has remained a nervous performer ever since. He says that he doesn’t need to get as drunk as he used to but that he still removes his glasses so that he can’t see the audience so well. His awkward style (eyes down or closed as he walks in circles clasping a beer and muttering to himself) has become a huge part of Protomartyr’s identity – a group that are constantly told by the music press that they don’t look like a band. “People say I look so nonchalant, like I don’t care,” he says.

“I wouldn’t get up on stage if I didn’t care, y’know? If I didn’t care I’d have a lawn chair out there.” He tells me about the most captivating performance he’s seen, from a band that’s so clearly

informed his vocal style and certain dry elements of Protomartyr’s music.

The last time The Fall came to the States, Mark E. Smith had broken his hip. “The whole show he was sitting on stage with a table up there, and he was just folding and unfolding this bar napkin.

Just folding and unfolding. To me, it was so riveting.”

Today, the Lager House has been touched but not yet spoilt by gentrification. It’s a nice, two-room venue with a couple of fake guitars stuck to the walls in the bar and gig posters as wallpaper in the live room, which makes it sound inaccurately like Hard Rock Cafe. The band still like it enough but if there’s such a thing as the Protomartyr clubhouse it’s Jumbo’s in a

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neighbourhood in Midtown where I imagine gentrification may never reach.

I arrange to first meet the band there on Friday night, so photographer David Cortes and I take a look at Google Maps, guess at it being around a 30-minute walk from our apartment and choose to ignore the many hysterical Trip Advisor comments we’ve read about how dangerous it is to walk around Detroit. A few blocks in, I’m aware that we’re the only two people on the street in any given direction. It’s 6:45pm and a beautiful late summer evening in what was once the fourth largest city in America – such isolation in a built up area feels alien and sketchy as we witness Detroit’s ghostly nature for the first time. As we get closer to the bar and approach groups of people hanging out in small pockets on the street it’s hard to know whether to feel more or less safe for the company – only clumsily like the outsiders we obviously are.

Flanked by two empty plots of land, we reach the giant shoebox building of Jumbo’s, note the bricked-up windows and blink our way into the long, thin, black room where the band are sat at the bar. When I tell Casey that we’d walked from Corktown, he says: “Oooh – walking is not very Detroit.”

We spend the night drinking in Jumbo’s small, grassy side garden. I instantly like the band, who are selfdeprecating, very funny, laugh a lot and are clearly best friends, and the bar that they describe as “distinctively average, like us.” They played early shows here, too, in what was once a speakeasy and later the meeting point for Detroit’s boozy transvestites. The doorman comes over and shakes all of our hands one by one, saying, “how are my young people, doing?” which makes us all feel good. Jumbo’s owner, Cindy, comes out too, to unroll and show me a poster of the band’s first single launch party, which she’s kept since 2011. It means a lot to a band who named a song on their debut album ‘Jumbo’s’.

Outside, the band riff on a movie pitch called AlienVs Nark (as sci-fi buddy movies set in a high school go, I reckon it’s got a chance of being the best), plan what and where we’ll eat over the weekend and oblige in giving me a brief history of Detroit, from the handful of billionaires who’ve started to buy up swathes of town and needlessly displacing residents in a city were space is in abundance, to the prevalent racism that has seen the introduction of the Qline – a streetcar that runs from suburbs to city, the band say, so that white business people don’t have to get on the buses that

black people ride (a truth that I am shocked by, perhaps naively so, and one that we’ll discuss over the next couple of days).

“Detroit is really changing,” says Leonard before we leave. “If you had walked here from where you’re staying five years ago, there’s a good chance that you would have been murdered.”

We get an Uber home.

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rotomartyr are Detroit lifers, although they’d never call themselves that. In New York you can be from Brooklyn or the Bronx or far away in Rockaway Beach and still simply be from New York; Detroit is built differently. The cultural divide is so strong here – the distribution of wealth so extreme – that it’s split into city and suburbs. You’re from one or the other and broadly speaking which comes down to the colour of your skin, with the most notorious demarcation point being 8 Mile in the north.

The members of Protomartyr all live in the city and attended the same all-boys high school just inside the city limits on 7 Mile. Still, out of respect for the hardship forever endured here they’ve always made a point of specifying their upbringings in the affluent suburbs. “We want to downplay when people talk about us being gritty,” Casey tells me at one point. “Some people think we’re working in the factory all day and at night we rock and roll.”

On Saturday morning Leonard and Ahee pick me up in Leonard’s grandmother’s car and we drive to Dearborn on the western border of Detroit for lunch at the band’s favourite Lebanese meat market. Leonard jokes about the dents in the car and over food the band tell me a few stories of car crime they’ve experienced – a prevalent problem in the city. They’ve all returned to vehicles to find the windows smashed so these days they often leave the doors unlocked to allow thieves to snoop around their empty cars without causing the damage. A friend adopted this approach, too, to find that someone had taken a shit on his seat. Casey’s mother once had her car stolen in front of her by a man who first helped her load her shopping into her boot.

Leonard reasons that living in Detroit is so cheap in so many other ways – “you can buy groceries for nothing” – that people are happy to factor in the extortionate car insurance as a cost of living. On Sunday we stand around Casey’s Ford Saturn and he shows us a bullet hole in its side – he doesn’t know when or where it happened.

Dearborn is Henry Ford country: where he was born, buried and would build his company headquarters. A city with a large Lebanese, Iraqi and Syrian population, it also once typified intolerance as Ford developed Dearborn for his ballooning car manufacturing plant in the early 1900s. Offering double the standard wage, Ford attracted more than his fair share of

workers during the Great Migration from the rural South from 1916 onwards. Only those that were white would live in Dearborn (with black families consigned to Inkster, further west), bringing to Detroit an early incarnation of segregation that’s never really gone away. The KKK rose; 1943 brought with it the city’s first race riot; and a second during the Civil Right’s Movement in 1967.

When Casey talks about the Detroit of his graduation year (1995) he talks about how vastly different it is to the city of today. Beyond some of the abandoned sky scrapers downtown

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having trees growing out of the top of them, kids from schools two blocks from his wouldn’t be allowed to visit because it was one street the wrong side of 8 Mile. “By then, Detroit had been abandoned by the outside world.”

“There were parts of Detroit that were dangerous,” he says, “but it comes down to racism. Detroit is now probably 80% – 85% black and then it was probably 90%.”

“There’s still absolutely racism between the suburbs and the city,” says Ahee, who tells me of a planned subway system that was voted down by the suburbs on account of it greater connecting it and the city and its residence, “it’s just shifted a little bit because it’s not Detroit as a whole that they’re afraid of now. Now it’s like, ‘Downtown is incredible; there’re all these restaurants!’ But the places these people are going to, a vast majority of the people in them are white. 95% I’d say, in a city that, as Joe says, is 85% black. So you notice that the places they are going are the places that all the white people are going to, and that’s not a coincidence.” He says how, along with the Qline streetcar, the recent restructuring of downtown has been to aid people from the suburbs who want to see a ballgame or watch the Detroit Lions without having to unnecessarily be on the street. So there are tunnels and the strange, dystopian monorail that glides from office to office, called The People Mover.

“The population of the city is still going down,” says Casey (a popular statistic in the decline of Detroit is how it’s a city made for 2 million people and is currently inhabited by under 700,000). “White flight pretty much happened right after World War II. After the riots a lot of people turned their backs on the city, thinking that the lunatics had taken over the asylum.

And then when we had our first black mayor [Coleman Young, elected in 1973], that was the final straw. They still hate Coleman and think he caused all these problems. People say, ‘oh, he

�

was so corrupt.’ Well, every mayor before him was just as corrupt – but they were white guys.”

“I can see people in the suburbs becoming less afraid to come into Detroit,” says Ahee, “not because they’re less racist, because there are more white people there.”

“When people say, ‘Oh I thought we were passed racism,’ it’s like, ‘What?!’” says Davidson. “‘You must live some place where you can have that thought, but you can’t have that thought in Detroit.’”

Along with the introduction of cheap, fuel-efficient, foreign-made cars, which arrived off the back of the 1973 fuel crisis and crippled Detroit’s world-defining automobile industry, the bleak reality of white flight and racism does little to challenge the reputation of a city that is tense and tough to live in. But that’s not really a narrative that the people here deny or are sick of being told back to them.

What they’re really sick of – Protomartyr included – is the misguided notion of being ‘saved’ by a slow-moving tide of gentrification, or forgotten altogether.

After all, so striking is this image of a city abandoned that it’s easy to forget that 700,000 people do still live here – no small number to be overlooked for the wonder of an empty street or a decaying, grand theatre repurposed as a car park.

“It’s really frustrating,” Ahee sighs.

“There are dozens of reasons why the city has had the issues it’s had. It’s a complicated litany of reasons. People always want to narrow it down to a corrupt mayor or the collapse of the auto industry. It’s the same thing with the state of the city now, where people want to project their own narrative on something that is far more complicated than a pull quote. Detroiters – and specifically not myself but people who grew up in the city and have dealt with struggles I’ve never dealt with – have every right to be defensive of an outsider coming in and saying, ‘this is your problem,’ or, ‘this is your life,’ when they don’t know them at all.

And to varying degrees I’m sure everyone deals with that, but here it’s always felt that there’s more of a spotlight and more of a desire for outsiders to project.”

“We’re happy for people to move into the city – everyone likes a nice restaurant,” says Casey. “But what’s happening is that these people are coming in and their narrative is,‘Detroit is a clean slate – you can come here and do whatever you want.’ They think the city is wide open, and that’s all wrong.

They’re negating the people who’ve lived here who’ve been through all of this. There’s a lot of saviour complexes that people have – ‘I made a difference.

I opened up my fancy coffee shop and I saved the city.’ It’s not that obvious but that tone is there and that frustrates people. That’s going to become an issue over the next couple of years – this tension is building.”

The band say that ‘ruin porn’ has become more and more popular over the last 15 years, something that I’m guilty of myself when I take a few photos of the vast, collapsing Packard Plant one morning, unable to resist its frightening size and complete desertion.

At Ahee’s house he hastens to state that marvelling at the destruction of Detroit is not the same as visiting the Coliseum. “It feels especially gross,” he says, “because people are coming in and viewing parts of the city like it’s ancient Rome, when, really, people are still dealing with the consequences of these places being burnt down and abandoned. People can feel like they’re in a zoo or part of an exhibit in a museum. You have tours coming in either to just feel sorry for you or think that they can help you, and that’s not good for anyone.”

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hen people graduate school and college in Detroit the next thing they do is leave town. Or at least that’s how it was when Casey finished his education as a film graduate. But Casey didn’t leave and felt like a failure because of it, regardless of family obligations that affected his decision not to follow classmates to Chicago, which included caring for his mother suffering from Alzheimer’s.

By the time Ahee and Leonard left the same school nine years later (with Davidson one more year behind them), attitudes had changed. The financial crash was upon us – why bother moving to a more expensive

city to be unemployed when you can do that in Detroit?

Casey was 32 when he first considered being in a band, a fact that is more inspiring than it’s given credit for. He met Ahee working another in a long line of shitty jobs – as a doorman at the Gem Theatre downtown. “‘The Rat Pack Comes Back’ was one of the better shows,” he says, describing the coach-loads of pensioners that would file pass him for dinner and a crap play each night. He half jokes that it’s when he started wearing suits, which people seem fixated by along with his age.

The truth is that Casey, whose soft speaking voice and likeably, mellow temperament somehow makes way for the dishevelled man barking on stage, doesn’t look nine years older than the rest of the band. He does, however, have a problem with grown men, as he sees it, dressing like children.

He convinced Ahee and Leonard to allow him to sing a couple of songs with their band, Butt Babies, although under a different name to ensure that the booking counted as two separate acts, meaning double the amount of free beer tokens. Essentially, Casey would jump on stage at the end of a Butt Babies show to shout his way through a track or two, but he was starting to see how a band could be an outlet for his love of writing and, in the case of designing gig posters and artwork (something he still does today), his passion for art, too.

With Davidson, Protomartyr developed a wiry post-punk sound more inline with 1980s Manchester than anything that’s come from the Motor City before. Casey specifically

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wanted the band to sound like an early incarnation of The Fall, and at times they do. Ahee is a Smiths fan and his guitar sounds more and more like it.

Perhaps it’s just context, but Davidson’s basslines often recall those of Peter Hook or The Cure when they weren’t writing a happy-sad hit single. When Protomartyr have sounded like an American band it’s been the decidedly European-sounding Pere Ubu. And yet they’re typically described as “the sound of abandoned buildings,” or a group that could have only come from Detroit.

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n Saturday afternoon we drive to band practice at Protomartyr’s relatively new rehearsal space, back past a building that’s come to symbolise the decline of Detroit – the imposing Michigan Central train station that went out of business in 1988. A shortcut to inaccurately define the city, the people of Detroit have come to despise this impressive structure, owned now by unpopular billionaire Manuel ‘Matty’ Moroun, whose association with the building has connected it to greed, for many.

Previously, the band would practice in Davidson’s basement; before that, a shady warehouse that they were pretty sure was a brothel, and an earlier spot that was so cold in the brutal winters of Michigan that it shaped the band’s early short songs, so they could practice them and leave as quickly as possible.

This new space – which they’ve made homely with framed watercolours, Soviet propaganda posters and a

Right: P roto m a r ty r and the de troit princ e s s r iverboat . B e low: th e band in the ir re h e ar s al s p ac e .

Nintendo 64 – used to be an optician’s, which explains the picture on the wall of Kate Moss in Gucci glasses.

The band fly through new, fourth album ‘Relatives In Decent’, maybe feeling awkward that I’m enjoying it so much. It’s a brilliant record – Protomartyr’s best.

They’ve never been a band of one stringent pace, but on ‘Relatives In Decent’ they explore the dynamics of post-punk more than ever and often within any given song. ‘A Private Understanding’, for example, trudges through oil and explodes on a chorus that becomes an unlikely instrumental coda. ‘Here Is The Thing’ incessantly jabbers (a slack-jawed Casey in full Mark E. Smith mode) and sounds almost out of time when it’s not locked into Ahee’s carving lead guitar.

‘Windsor Hum’ is the complete opposite – a slow-building doomy chug that features two strange, ringing notes and eventually reaches the point where an irate Casey is goaded into yelling: “Want, want, want, want, want what you’re given / Need, need, need, need, need what you’ll never have!” Perhaps even more uncharacteristic for the band is almostballad ‘Night-Blooming Cereus’, which sounds like a slow Horrors song and might or might not be directly inspired by the landscape of Detroit and hope in desolate places. There’s also a point where they get kinda groovy in a Libertines way, on a track called ‘Caitriona’.

Ahee explains how the record’s droning bee-swarm elements are inspired by Mica Levi’s score for Under The Skin, and the band note that ‘Relatives In Decent’’s less claustrophobic feel is a direct result of making the album in LA in the relatively luxurious timeframe of two weeks (they recorded their debut album in four hours).

For Casey’s part, he still sloshes and slurs his abstract lyrics in a way that makes his words rhyme even when they don’t. They remain difficult to decipher, and even when you’ve got them written down in front of you they welcome listener interpretation.

That said, the theme of resignation – a recurring one in Protomartyr songs – is still to be clearly heard. As subject matters in popular music go, giving up is a pretty unique one. “Music is usually about ‘you are great,’ or, ‘you’ve got a ten-inch dick,’” says Casey. “I can’t relate to that stuff – I’ve got to write about the stuff I know.”

People are likely to hear ‘Relatives In Decent’ and label it a record for our time, but you could easily say that of any of Protomartyr’s previous albums in relation to where we find ourselves

“The people of Detroit can feel like they’re in a zoo or part of an exhibit in a museum” today. It feels more like the world has caught up with the band. As they put it, the records before were warning of the times that were coming and now they’re here – it caused Casey to abort his original plan to write a fictional album and see what type of emotional heft it had. Knowing that he chooses to not write overtly political songs, though, I ask if he’s finding its more difficult to do, particularly regarding the boring omnipresence of Trump.

“I believe there’s always been politics in [the songs], but you should be careful with it,” he says.“Resignation is still there in this record, but I didn’t want to be too specific on the political stuff because there’s so much doom and gloom and it’s beyond our control.

“I won’t sugar coat it for you, but ‘Up The Tower’ [a track in which Casey repeatedly shouts ‘Knock it down!’ and ‘Throw him out!’] is definitely about Trump, but I don’t want to even say his name. I know that every interview will be, ‘what do you think about Trump?’

‘Well, he’s shit.’ It’s not like if we get rid of Trump tomorrow everything will be ok, though. A lot of bands are

feeling the pressure to say this is their anti-Trump record, but Trump is the result of something else. He’s only one aspect of this huge problem. The guy loves attention, so why ruin our lovely interview about our band talking about him?”

“Trump is irrelevant,” says Ahee.

“He’s a narcissistic lunatic who should have been shut down before he even had a reality show – the issue is what he has awoken in this country. How did he get in? The answer to that is what’s terrifying and it’s not going to go away when he does… It’s also fucked up that now saying that racism is wrong or that black lives matters is considered a political stance.”

What ‘Relatives In Decent’ chooses to explore, then, via Casey’s literary mind that he chooses to downplay for fear of seeming a sneering book snob, is the subject of truth in a time when we’re questioning its existence. Casey says that it’s not a concept album, although a number of the tracks have been almost subconsciously written in twos and paired up – two versions of the same story. He explains that

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opening song‘A Private Understanding’ is an abstract idea about truth (and how we can only be sure of what we perceive as factual), which is followed by ‘Here Is The Thing’ – the exact same story from a drunk’s point of view.

Tracks 3 and 4 (‘My Children’ and ‘Caitriona’) are about corrupting your own children and children letting their parents down; 5 & 6 (‘The Chuckler’ and ‘Windsor Hum’): respectively, tales of desperately trying to laugh in the face of a world falling apart and the message of denial that America transmits across the globe. The album ends on ‘Half Sister’, which trolls fake news (of a horse struck by lightning that begins to talk) and neatly calls back to ‘A Private Understanding’. “I hate movies where something magic happens and then all these animals start to talk,” says Casey. “I would think that if a horse started to talk it would be the most disturbing sound [he starts shrieking and retching, to the laughter of everyone]. So this horse gets struck by lightning and starts speaking in a foreign language. When they finally work out what it’s saying they realise it’s that people are evil.”

After practice and a few games of NFL Blitz on the N64, we spend an hour aboard The Detroit Princess, a 200 foot, 4 storey riverboat that the band have hired to launch their new album on September 22. Metz and Preoccupations from across the river in Canada will also play, as well as ADULT and Detroit’s very own Tyvek, who first inspired Casey to form a band when they took him to Europe in their road crew. Before the Princess sets sail on a Motown-themed cruise this evening, Protomartyr have a photo shoot for local paper the Detroit Metro Times. As we leave the boat a passer-by asks if they’re a band, and so do the barmaids in the first bar we drive to.

It’s quiet at the waterfront, despite more beautiful weather on a Saturday night. Casey tells me how his father spoke of the same desertion of downtown at weekends even in Detroit’s 1950s heyday.

At 9pm we realise that tonight is the Mayweather/McGregor fight and, despite none of us giving a shit about boxing, we collectively become completely obsessed with trying to watch it via a number of different illegal streams on our phones. For three hours we bounce between Youtube live links and Periscope profiles that typically drop off after 10 minutes or so. We think we find our man in some guy called ‘Fishman’, but eventually he gets shut down too. By midnight and the sound of the first bell we’re using a plant pot as a TV stand in the beer garden of Bumbo’s (not Jumbo’s), huddled with a group of strangers and couple of band friends, enjoying the sweet ecstasy of watching men punch each other in the face having not paid a penny of the pay-per-view fee. As much as anything, this, of course, is what Detroit is about.

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tell me about it

Le ft : Maria aly okh ina at the Barbican Conservatory, barb ican ce ntr e , L ond o n.

Maria Alyokhina The Pussy Riot founding member on the art of protest, the influence of Riot Grrrl and how a famous and unjust prison sentence hasn’t scared her into silence Photography: gem harris / writer: dominic haley

I’ve been writing about music for a while now, and I’ve met all sorts doing this job. From budding pop stars to rustic folk musicians, if there’s one thing that continues to amaze me that connects most of the people I talk to, it’s a sense of commitment. Contrary to the popular belief, musicians and artists aren’t a feckless bunch. It takes a lot of drive to do what they do and almost everyone I encounter has this ‘we’re going to do this, come hell or high water’ attitude.

Maria Alyokhina has taken this approach to a whole different level.

Although she doesn’t immediately look the part as she quietly munches her way through a salad in the Barbican Kitchen, she is one of the most driven people I’ve ever had the pleasure of talking to. A founding member of Pussy Riot, the Moscow-based protest art collective that the world has heard about by now, she is a leading voice in the fight for LGBT rights, women’s rights and opposition to Putin’s government using guerrilla performances and acts of defiance.

In 2012, one of these spontaneous, unauthorized performances inside Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour led to the group being at the centre of an international incident.

Held in the midst of the ‘Snow Revolution’ against electoral fraud in Russia, the six members smuggled a guitar into the church, donned dresses and balaclavas and climbed onto a platform next to the altar to jump around and punch the air.The plan was to use this footage as part of a video called ‘Punk Prayer: Mother of God Drive Putin Away’: a montage-like blending of punk attitude and spiritual music that called for the Virgin Mary to become a feminist.

You’d had to have been living under a rock to miss what happened next.

Following the concert, Aloykhina and her fellow group members Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Yekaterina

Samutsevic were arrested, charged and convicted of ‘hooliganism motivated by religious hatred’ and sentenced to two years in Russia’s notoriously brutal penal system. The trial attracted international condemnation with human rights groups like Amnesty International calling the women ‘prisoners of conscience’. Despite the pressure, the sentences against two of the women were upheld.Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina both served over a year in jail, eventually having their sentences reprieved by the Russian State Duma in December 2013.

If you think this experience, which included hunger strikes and periods of solitary confinement, has softened Aloykhina’s passion and feminist agenda, you’d be wrong. The period between 2014 and 2016 saw multiple Pussy Riot performances and actions. Alyokhina has appeared as a speaker at many international festivals, conferences and events. She has also retold the story of her protest, arrest and incarceration in a new book (published earlier this month by Penguin imprint Allen Lane) and live performance called Riot Days.

Following a successful tour of the US and two controversial Russian performances, The Barbican will be presenting Riot Days’ first UK performance at the Islington Assembly Hall on the 17th of November. Directed by leading Russian Theatre directorYury Muravitsky, and featuring Alyokhina, actor Kiryl Masheka, and Nastya and Max of the music duo AWOTT (Asian Women on The Telephone), this hybrid of spoken word, re-enactment, video and experimental punk conveys the story in a way that is both political and deeply personal.

I don’t know how to play an instrument....

And although I’d never call myself a musician, music has always been an important part of my life. My favourite

bands have always been Russian punk bands like Grazhdanskaya Oborona and Avtomaticheskie Udovletvoriteli.

Not only because they made great music, but also because they made incredible protest poetry. That’s how our country fought back against the repression of the Soviet Union. The ’80s really showed how you could fight a system with music and cinema and show people that they have a voice and can make some big changes.

While we share a lot of the same values as Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney, there has always been an interesting contrast between Russian punk and Western punk. Even though we live in the same era, the things we’re pushing back against are very different. For one thing, it feels a lot more difficult to discuss women’s rights in Russia. I mean, before we started Pussy Riot, there was almost no one who was really talking about feminism in this way.

I got a job in a video rental shop to make enough to feed my music habit...

That’s how film became a big part of my life. When I was 15, the only place you could really buy music was an underground market that sold pirate CDs. I didn’t seem to ever have enough money, though, so I got a job in a video rental shop. In the end, I didn’t ever make much money, but I did have access to all the films I could ever watch, and that’s how I fell in love with cinema. There were films from Tarantino, Stanley Kubrick, and all these European art house movies; they were all available in that shop.

In a way, that pirate market played a big part in the creation of Pussy Riot.

On the one hand, it’s not really that unique a story and I don’t feel like I should be making that big a deal about it, but on the other, this little market did start something that has gone out across the world.

We don’t have gender studies in Russia...

I was asking questions about the role of women in Russia long before the protest at Christ the Saviour Cathedral in Moscow. It started in school; all the stereotypes that inform your life come from there. They teach girls to cook and sew, and when I asked why I should be learning this stuff, they just said that it’s what I needed to know when I was running the family kitchen.

It’s like they didn’t have an answer, they were just saying, ‘shut up and obey the rules.’

It’s always bothered me that nobody is asking why these rules exist or why things must be a certain way.

This is a general problem. We don’t have gender studies at all in Russia.

Moscow State University is meant to be this world-leading institution, but when I looked on the syllabus, it wasn’t there. They all pretend that it doesn’t exist.

Riot Grrrl had a huge impact on me...

Both the music in general and the bands have been a huge influence. We don’t really have many feminist bands or collectives in Russia. It’s a cultural problem and it’s absurd to think that a country that was one of the first in the world to make a statement about women’s rights has ended up being one of the most repressive countries in the world.

The old boss is the same as the new boss...

The church is very strong in Russia and works in close collaboration with Putin. You have this strange monster made from the old Chekists who are pretending to be our country’s modern face. The Soviets banned Christianity.

They arrested or shot many of the priests, so it’s probably no wonder why people view this as a tragedy. When the old regime fell, Russia started to believe

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�

tell me about it

again, but the new government has coopted this belief and it shouldn’t be like that. When you take away people’s choices, you should give them something back, and they’ve decided to use the word of God to do just that.

They are trying to say that Putin is the strong leader we need, sent by God as a sign of how much he loves us.

Even though we’re meant to have had this big revolution, it’s like society has just copy/pasted the rules from the Soviet times and left it at that. To make real changes you must be able to deconstruct the system, but that’s not what’s happened. As we speak they are building new monuments to Stalin and Lenin and it feels like the people who were in charge then are the people who are in charge now.

Protests must be surprising...

We never expected to be arrested or be sent to prison for our protest at the Christ the Saviour Cathedral. It’s been a little over two and a half years since our release and it’s definitely changed the way I see protests. After all, if I can make a small revolution happen in there, then I can do it anywhere.

One of the main things I’ve learned is that protests need to be surprising and joyous. For example, in the book, I talk about this one incident at our penal colony. You always have some prisoners, normally the ones serving long-term sentences for guns or drugs or something like that, who are working in the interests of the prison guards. We had this one girl who was like the right hand of the main guard.

It’s one of the most privileged positions in the colony and her work was basically telling the guards what was going on with the prisoners. She was definitely not the person you’d normally expect to protest. But, when they put her girlfriend into solitary confinement she came and helped us carry this poster we’d drawn around the whole colony. People were totally freaking out, but we were laughing.

We were very happy in that moment.

That’s how all protests should be; sudden, joyous and surprising.

Pussy Riot Theatre: Riot Days is a punk manifesto – with a saxophone...

It was always the idea to combine the book with some new music; it’s a way

for us to give this book to the people. I wouldn’t say it was a proclamation or anything like that, it’s more like a manifesto, we want people to hear it and act. At its heart, it’s definitely a punk concert first and foremost. People don’t have roles and nobody has had to learn a script. It’s just our text, some music and a bit of video footage from our protests. Don’t worry, though it’s the short version.

We’ve already performed it twice in Russia. After the first one, the venue closed, and after the second one, well, let’s just say it’s very different from here.

We invited a lot of the people who opposed us in 2012, and while I couldn’t say that they liked it, they were surprisingly OK with it. I mean, there was no aggression or violence this time, so I suppose you could call that progress.

Pussy Riot isn’t a political program; we just fight injustice...

I don’t have any expectations at all.

Being in a penal colony, especially when you spend a lot of time in solitary confinement, the only person you have to fight is yourself and the decisions you make in there stay with

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you your whole life. I concluded that if you’re not fighting for the freedom which we all need, then the world loses all its sense. So that’s what I do; I spend each and every day doing what I can, as much as I can.

A lot of people are afraid to do something because they think they have something to lose, but the most dangerous thing you can lose is yourself. In Russia, if I worried all the time about the consequences then I wouldn’t do anything. Prison hasn’t changed that at all; the only thing that has changed is that more people now know about us, and that brings a greater responsibility. That’s the only difference prison has made.

Reviews / Albums

06/10

King Krule The Ooz XL By j oe g oggi n s . I n store s O ct 13

Archy Marshall is not an especially easy man to understand. His music transcends standard genre tags in a manner that suggests both a playful unwillingness to be painted into any particular corner and also a stylistic wanderlust and general restlessness that perhaps helps to shed some light on why it is that he’s released a hefty amount of music already at the age of 23, under a slew of different aliases – DJ JD Sports, Zoo Kid,The Return of Pimp Shrimp, Sub Luna City and Edgar the Beatmaker are all amongst them.

His voice, meanwhile, almost gutturally deep, with a languidness to it that tilts and turns at strange angles, is not what you’d expect on first impression from a guy who looks, as John Doran of The Quietus once so memorably put it, “like a kid sat in the back of a Prius in the car park of Barking Wetherspoon’s

forlornly eating crisps.”

He returns with his second record under the name he’s best known by, King Krule, after having apparently abandoned that pseudonym in favour of his birth name on his last project, ‘A New Place 2 Drown’ from 2015, the audio component of which was apparently supposed to be interpreted less as a ‘solo’ record and more as the soundtrack to a book of the same name that he put together with his older brother, Jack. That album didn’t necessarily boil down what he’d done as King Krule on debut album ‘6 Feet Beneath the Moon’ to its essentials, per se, but it did feel a little more focused than his last LP. It was a little less wilfully awkward, and with a sonic throughline that you could probably label as leaning towards hip hop, however broadly he then went on to play with that particular palette,

referencing Wu-Tang Clan one minute and then tipping his hat to grime the next.

With ‘The Ooz’, a sprawling, nineteen-track affair, Marshall is allowing his imagination to wander once again, but he’s retained the moody step forward towards emotional maturity that ‘A New Place 2 Drown’ hinted at. When these two lines intersect, the results can be spectacular. ‘Slush Puppy’, for example, unfolds over an initially laidback instrumental backdrop that is effectively a ’90s New York City hip hop beat of Marshall’s own makeshift design, woozy synths and scratchy guitar. His vocals grow more and more agitated, though, as he descends into howls of “nothing is working with me.” The hugely atmospheric, musically rudimentary ‘(A Slide in) New Drugs’ pulls a similar trick, even if it does sound

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like one of those nearly-there squat demos that Pete Doherty used to give away online.The lazy, trip-hoppy ‘Biscuit Town’ that opens the record meanwhile promises something more fully formed throughout Elsewhere, though, there’s evidence for ‘The Ooz’ being bloated and self-indulgent. ‘Lonely Blue’ is at least twice as long as it needs to be, and the subject matter (failed relationships and their connection to Marshall’s mental health), is covered more incisively elsewhere. The unbecoming aggression of ‘Vidual’, meanwhile, robs it of the sort of brooding menace that makes ‘The Locomotive’ one of the ‘The Ooz’’s triumphs.

It’s an album of contradictions, and there’s a profound statement in there somewhere. If not for a lack of quality control, this would’ve been something great.

Reviews 0 7/ 1 0

Broen I <3 Art Be lla U n i on

By Kati e Bes wi c k. In store s O ct 20

In the mid-twentieth century, experiments in art, science and philosophy that had been happening throughout Europe and North America since at least the end of WW1 exploded in the now-legendary avant garde scene of the 1960s and ’70s. Performance artists, writers, visual artists and musicians threw off the shackles of form and genre, creating works that were confusing, confrontational and conceptually complex. Think of the Serbian performer Marina Abramović, sat passively in a gallery, with objects including a gun, a bullet, a rose, a feather and a scalpel on a table nearby, inviting the audience to use them on her however they pleased.

Or writer Kathy Acker fellating poetartist Alan Sondheim in the controversial, confessional pornographic ‘BlueTapes’ video. Or women licking jam off a car for one of Allan Kaprow’s ‘happenings’. The point wasn’t whether what you made was any good; the point was that you made something.

It is this experimental spirit that Norwegian five-piece Broen channel in their joyful debut record ‘I Love Art’ – a baffling mash-up of sounds and influences that guitarist Lars Ove Stene describes as everything from Flying Lotus and Kendrick Lamar to Talking Heads and Paul Simon. Like those pioneering artists of the past, Broen are all about mixing

it up. “Interplay and making room for improvisation are really important parts of our writing and playing,” Lars Ove says.

The album is collage and infidelity undercut with an exuberant optimism. It deliberately breaks from the familiar bleakness of Norwegiannoir, in reference to philosopher Arne Næss’s argument that positivity is just as intellectually rigorous as negativity, despite the former’s reputation as frivolous and childish.

It is hard to tell whether ‘I Love Art’ is genius or folly. The record opens with the sound of running water, on ‘Waters Changing’ – an upbeat synth-heavy track that

sounds, at points, like the Clangers singing Christmas Carols in a flood.

There’s the sickly, glittery ‘Time’ with its indie rock melodies carried

by Marianna Røe’s smooth, ’80s soaked voice. By the pretentiously titled ‘<3’ (love) we are into spoken word territory: the distorted vocals give way to an extended instrumental on which one ‘instrument’ might well be a waiter dropping a tray of forks in the middle-distance. There’s the hiphop inflected ‘Serenade’, and ‘Pride’, in which they’re working with a genre I’m going to call folk-cum-RnB. I’ve given the album 7/10 it is a lot of fun. But don’t ask me whether ‘I Love Art’ is any good or not – I really couldn’t tell you.

There are moments when Julien Baker’s second album sounds like an externalisation of the negative voice in your head. ‘Nobody’s worried about me,’ she frets on ‘Sour Breath’. ‘I don’t need anybody’s help,’ she asserts on ‘Televangelist’.

The Memphis musician’s brutal honesty when addressing such themes as isolation and internal conflict is often placed centre-stage, with only a chiming guitar or piano used for backing. Similar in tone to Waxahatchee, tracks such as ‘Even’

and ‘Happy To Be Here’ are nonetheless given a more overemotive delivery.

It’s when she introduces moments of self-deception and musical texturing, however, that ‘Turn Out The Lights’ works best. Autumnal strings swell on ‘Claws In Your Back’, underpinning its lyrical determination, while on the title track the chorus bursts into epic pop that’s worthy of an ex-Mouseketeer Disney starlet.

These elements, that blend

solitariness with a wider acceptance of the human experience, culminate with ‘Appointments’. ‘Maybe it’s all gonna turn out alright,’ she sighs while a piano echoes in the background. ‘I know it’s not / But I have to believe it,’ she adds as an afterthought, a chorus of voices joining the last line to offer cheerleader reassurance.

It’s a glimmer of hope that offers salvation to both Baker and to the album, elevating it from depression towards the light.

06/10

Julien Baker Turn Out The Lights Ma tad or By s us an darli ng ton. In store s oct 27

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Albums 0 7/ 1 0

0 7/10

06 /10

08/ 10

Baxter Dury Prince of Tears

Darlene Shrugg Darlene Shrugg

Torres Three Futures

St Vincent Masseducation

H eaven l y

Ups e t th e r h yth m

4ad

caroline

By S tuar t Stubbs. In sto re s Oct 27

B y Li am K o ne mann. I n sto re s o ct 2 7

By h ayl e y s c ott . I n sto re s s e pt 2 9

B y s a m wa lt o n . In sto r es O c t 1 3

In 2017, Baxter Dury got dumped. He didn’t take it well. After either one week or one hundred he pulled himself off of his sofa with ‘Prince of Tears’ as his crutch – a break up album for all the Ray Winstones out there. Or at least that’s how it starts, with ‘Miami’ and Dury embodying a big fish wannabe gangster bowling through a shit club declaring himself nonsensical things like “The night chef”, “Mister Maserati” and “The urban goose.” Heartbreak can turn you into a delusional coke prick and Dury has fun with the role, bragging between a female voice of reason that’s as reminiscent of Metronomy as the track’s disco bass guitar.

Later, he doesn’t deflect his genuine hurt quite so much, with other dark and funky anti-pop songs about depression (‘Porcelain’) and obsession (the chippy ‘Almond Milk’ featuring Sleaford Mods’ Jason Williamson). Dury’s always been keen to play down his talents, aware of his privilege as the son of Ian Dury, but on his fifth album his composition skills are as insuppressible as his trademark humour. “The sausage man.”

Darlene Shrugg are a selective and secretive Toronto band consisting of local artists US Girls (Meg Remy), Slim Twig and duo Ice Cream. They do their best work when running riot across the stage set by the garage-rock revivalists of the early 2000s. Tracks like ‘Inherit the Wind’ and ‘First World Blues’ upset the props and ruffle The Strokes’ well-tousled mops with searing guitar work, while ‘Where’s Your Brother’ takes a pair of craft scissors to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ artpunk, splicing it together with something even more jagged. These raucous snapshots position the group as a great punk band with any number of prefixes: post-, dance-, art-. The record is theatrical and assertive in these moments, as on the fuzzed-out ‘Wah Wah’ and ‘National Security’. The only catch comes right at the centre of the album, with ‘Strawberry Milk’. This centrepiece is a disco deviation running just shy of five minutes, with glittering synths and dreamy vocals.

On its own two feet, the track would sparkle, but amongst the classic rock grit the change is jarring.

Making music that embraces the self is a bold move in a time when many musicians rely on denial to denote pessimism and evade reality.

Brooklyn-based Mackenzie Scott explores feelings of ecstasy, indulgence and desire to create a theme that focuses on the use of our bodies as a mechanism of joy. The results are something that’s rooted in optimism and self-assurance, yet, musically, it’s not the breezy, happygo-lucky pop you’d expect from such positive beginnings. ‘Three Futures’ relies on sophisticated electronics and negates traditional pop formulas as it delves into something much more interesting than usual solo synth-pop fare. Lyrically, themes are deep and emotive, and Mackenzie uses surrealism to portray sex and body positivity. This is refreshingly liberating, and one of the main reasons why ‘Three Futures’ for the most part triumphs. There are moments that will test your patience, like the more placid, contemplative tracks, but ‘Three Futures’ should be credited for its brave openness and willingness to explore subjects not often written about in music.

Annie Clark claims that her fifth album as St Vincent is her most personal to date. Be that as it may, it’s no more personable: while the lyrics here are unarguably more heart-on-sleeve than recent St Vincent records (“How could anyone have you and lose you and not lose their minds too?” asks ‘Los Ageless’; “Of course I blame me,” laments the gorgeous ‘Happy Birthday Johnny’), Clark’s trademark froideur remains as unthawed as ever, allowing only brief glimpses behind the steely, machined fuzz-funk that has become her calling card. That’s for the best, though: given the harsh tabloid scrutiny heaped upon Clark’s recent star-crossed love life, any rejection of her flinty persona would risk the emergence of an album of mawkishly sentimental self-pity. Instead, Clark channels Prince, G-funk and Giorgio Moroder electro-disco to express empowerment in the face of personal catastrophe. The result is a fierce, histrionic, riotous and deceptively beautiful record that, for the all the confessionalism, retains StVincent’s alluringly enigmatic presence. Long may the mystery endure.

As rudimentary an approach as it might seem to his impressively varied back catalogue, there remains a school of thought that, in the popular imagination, there are two Becks – Party Beck, and Sad Beck.

The latter released ‘Morning Phase’, the spiritual successor to his breakup masterpiece ‘Sea Change’, in 2014. The former was supposed to put out his own album soon afterwards, but never did, perhaps because ‘Morning Phase’ – initially viewed as likely to be the less

prominent of the two albums – took on a life of its own, meeting with a feverishly positive critical reception and scooping Album of the Year at the Grammys, much to Kanye West’s memorable and sure-asclockwork chagrin.

Anybody who caught one of his riotously fun live shows last year, though, wouldn’t have been in doubt as to Party Beck’s continued existence, and sure enough he resurfaces with a vengeance on ‘Colors’.

There’s a sense of purpose to this album that helps make up for lost time, the groovy piano jazz of ‘Dear Life’, the funk-flecked guitars of ‘No Distraction’ and racing percussion on ‘Seventh Heaven’ all helping to contribute to the sense of immediacy and infectiousness. ‘Square One’ is a particular highlight, channeling Phoenix at their best. Fans of Beck’s more experimental ventures might feel let down by ‘Colors’’s sheer poppiness, but for everybody else, it’s a very hard album to dislike.

0 7/ 1 0

Beck Colors Vi r gi n EM I By j oe goggin s. In sto res o ct 13

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Reviews 08/10

0 6/10

07 /10

08/ 10

Hogni The Trains

ORB Naturality

Weaves Wide Open

Dave Clarke The Desecration of Desire

Er a sed tape s

Ca stl e Fa c e

Me m ph i s I nd u s tr i e s

b m g / s k in t

By davi d za mm i tt. In sto re s oct 20

By j am es auto n . I n s to r e s o c t 6

B y Max pi l l e y. I n s to r e s o c t 6

B y da f y dd j en k in s . I n s t o r es o c t 2 7

Icelander Hogni, a founding member of indie rockers Hjaltalín and the electronic group GusGus, has taken a literal pair of locomotives as the source of inspiration on his debut solo album. The vehicles, two nowdefunct monuments to Iceland’s short-lived flirtation with rail travel during a period of hyperindustrialisation, however, came to represent something more metaphorical for the multiinstrumentalist as he crafted his tribute to the monolithic structures.

Ruminating on them during a difficult period in his own life, they began to take on another quality entirely, embodying his two different personas as he grappled for true self-identity. The result is a stirring tension between darkness and light, melancholy and joy, nostalgia and hope. Drawing on the Icelandic tradition of the men’s chorus, Hogni places choral arrangements side by side with fiercely distorted synths and metallic rhythms to arresting effect. Art pop in the vein of ANOHNI and Perfume Genius, it is a triumph of both style and substance that I sincerely hope will not go unnoticed.

Antipodeans ORB sound like they are made up of several members of Wolfmother, and yet they are purely basking in the stardust from the White Dwarf that withered and died moments after the blinding light.

That’s to say that they are a bit of an enigma. The furrow of prog rock is one well ploughed and they aren’t reinventing the riff here, but there is something strangely engaging about the 6-minute noodle of ‘Immortal Tortoise’. Immediately, singer Bob Fucknows is aping Tom Meighan of Kasabian during their most wig-out moments, while the syrupy psych guitars come on like QOTSA. At its best, ‘Naturality’ is everything that was great about Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd (‘Man in the Sand’ is a cousin of ‘See Emily Play’), and you can hear that ORB’s guitar pedal racks are as long and tangled as a mass of octopus’ tentacles. Considering the vast palette available, though, it comes across as a touch one dimensional, which is ironic when is sounds like the band are in another one entirely. It’s a fun, mutated monster but you can always see where it’s headed.

On the cover of Weaves’ second album, the Toronto band are dressed in bright primary colours. On closer inspection, they’re also covered in soot. It is the perfect representation of ‘Wide Open’. Weaves’ outlook appears sunnier than before, with Morgan Waters’ guitar parts janglier than ever, while Jasmyn Burke’s lyrics explore darker themes of insecurity and political alienation.

‘Scream’ features Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq’s wordless grunts whilst Burke deplores us to scream out our name. It is an arrhythmic manifestation of the mire of living in 2017 and it feels good. Elsewhere, from the glam-stomp of ‘Slicked’ to the open-road Cinerama of ‘Walkaway’, they’ve come a long way from their punk roots (only the 60-second ‘Motherfucker’ recalls their earliest days). The brilliant ‘Grass’ is indebted to the deadpan existentialism of Courtney Barnett, whilst on the title track, Burke sings: “I’m just a nomad on the land that don’t belong to any of us / The world is wide open to us.” It’s the credo of the album and a nice analogy for their musi-cal evolution too.

According to Dave Clarke, there isn’t much techno happening on his latest album. Far from being sick of what made his name in the ’90s, ‘The Desecration of Desire’ nevertheless sounds like a musical turning point: “I listen to many types of music ... and I felt free for the first time to implement this approach for my own project,” he says. True enough, his first record in 14 years buzzes with unexpected elements of harsh noise, heavy industrial, and grinding EBM. Standout tracks ‘Charcoal Eyes (Glass Tears)’ and ‘Monochrome Sun’ feature the whiskey-soaked baritone of ex-QOTSA member Mark Lanegan, while Gazelle Twin’s submerged vocal sparks and whips on ‘Cover Up My Eyes’. It all sounds like Clarke trading the club for a much darker place, even if the allure of a neat 4/4 beat proves hard for him to escape altogether.Yet, there’s a playfulness that belies the darkness for most of this record, as if Clarke is busy working out what comes next. We hear him speak through Lanegan: “I have fucked with the past / now it’s time to dance with the future.”

We last saw John Maus in 2011, when he released ‘We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves’, a frantic album that channelled the dark sides of new wave and synthpop. He’s been silence ever since, except for an interesting yet pleonastic collection of previously unreleased material surfacing in 2012. During these six years, the Minnesotan artist has pursued his academic career, earning a PhD in Political Philosophy, and worked on a new modular synthesiser, which

he’s meticulously assembled to match his own vision of what this instrument should sound like. With his new machine ready, Maus filled ‘Funny Farm’ – the ranch in rural Minnesota that he shares with his partner – with classic musicians and started working on ‘Screen Memories’, his fourth album.

It’s no news that Maus collaborated in the early days with CalArts schoolmate Ariel Pink, but, at this point in time, despite a possible resemblance to a superficial

ear, the two only share a love for synthesisers. With no postmodern interest in cut’n’paste, Maus’ songwriting is based on unity and harmony, greatly informed by his love for renaissance polyphony and cinema soundtracks from the 1980s – hence the greatly appropriate title.

The ghost of Ian Curtis still lingers in the vocals (on ‘Pets’ most of all), but the mood of the record goes in a different direction; less claustrophobic and more open, like a great, electric, gothic symphony.

08/10

John Maus Screen Memories R i bbon By gui a C o rt assa . I n stor e s o ct 27

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0 6/10

07 /10

07/ 10

Témé Tan Témé Tan

Marc Almond Shadows & Reflections

Circuit des Yeux Reaching For Indigo

Blue Hawaii Tenderness

PI AS

bmg

dr ag c i ty

Arb u t u s

By s t eph en bu t chard . In store s o ct 6

B y sam wal to n. I n s to r e s s e p t 2 2

By de r e k r o b e r ts o n. I n s t o r es o c t 2 0

B y s u s a n d a r l i n g t o n . In s t or es o c t 6

Témé Tan can’t shake his wanderlust, so life on tour must come in handy for quenching that thirst. The Congo-born, Belgiumbased musician wrote much of this, his debut album, on his travels; thoughts and melodies collected in Peru, Japan, Norway, Guinea, Spain, Brazil and where ever else he found himself. The result is a bombastic pop album with all the vitality and adventure you’d hope for. These eclectic indie dance songs mine from a wide pool of influences (Glass Animals and Tune-Yards must have been on his travel playlist at some point), while the songwriting stays focused and hook-oriented.

The Prince-indebted swagger of ‘Menteur’ and the cosmic shuffle of ‘Coups De Griffe’ hit particularly hard. Tan coils around his instrumentals with an impressive range of eccentric vocals, from a waif-like falsetto to a talk-sung swagger, to childish chants that could be lifted straight from the first Battles album. When a melody hits its sweet spot, he could be the poster boy for getting out the house more often.

Given that some of Marc Almond’s finest moments have been reimaginings of dusty pop (‘Tainted Love’; ‘Something’s Gotten Hold Of My Heart’), an album (un)covering sixties orchestral torch song nuggets is a promising prospect. However, ‘Shadows And Reflections’ cares less about reinventing its source material and more about simple recreation, leaving an album of admittedly bulletproof vintage pop but disappointingly little by way of the artsy subversion Almond does best. What’s more, the decision to play these songs with an entirely straight bat puts the pressure on Almond’s vocals in the manner of an X Factor audition, one which he only occasionally passes: ‘Blue On Blue’, ‘I Know You Love Me Not’ and ‘The Shadow Of Your Smile’ have an enticing theatricality, but elsewhere Almond’s intonation is discomforting and his delivery rather flat. These odd, lonely and often creepy songs should be dynamite for one of pop’s great shapeshifters, but ‘Shadows And Reflections’, while perfectly listenable, is little more than mistyeyed nostalgia.

Over four studio albums and numerous EPs, American vocalist, composer, producer and artist Haley Fohr has been exploring a meditative musical landscape, looking deep within and encouraging listeners to do the same. ‘Reaching For Indigo’ follows a similar path, but is an altogether darker, more dramatic beast. Mysterious too; the songs here supposedly reference “a moment that fell down in the life of Fohr on January 22, 2016”, although there are few clues as to exactly what occurred here. Whatever is was can’t have been good. A sickly unease hangs over all eight tracks, an unresolved tension rising and falling like a stormy sea. Droning synths and nervous strings smudge into each other while her voice, a worldweary, soulful sound that’s part Nico, part ANOHNI, has never been as haunted and affecting, the black hole that everything else swirls around. The melodrama may be uncomfortable, but Fohr wears the gloom well; her uniqueness remains compelling, even while swimming through the darkness, searching for the light.

It’s been four years since Blue Hawaii released their debut album.

In the interim the Canadian duo have used their time wisely, with Raphaelle ‘Ra’ Standell continuing to record with art rock project Braids and Alexander ‘Agor’ Kerby studying dance music production and DJing.

Agor’s distraction is especially evident on ‘Tenderness’, a concept album that addresses the challenges of handling relationships online.

Sequenced to resemble the emotional highs of a club night, it’s bookended by the smooth house of ‘Free At Last’ and the acoustic strum of ‘Far Away Soon’. Between the two extremes there are jazzy flutes, ’90s dance and touches of RnB, as the material traces the melancholy ‘Younger Heart’ and Grimes-esque ‘Searching For You’.

With tracks segueing into one another via short interludes (telephone messages, urban field recordings and guitar-based demos), the album has an intimacy that makes it worth hearing on headphones yet an extroversion that makes it one marketing push away from crossover dance success.

Coming from a bankrupt city as dramatic as Detroit, Protomartyr attract one prevailing, flimsy comment – how their dejectedsounding post-punk could only come from that deserted place. Iggy & The Stooges are thrown in to bolster the idea even though it pulls it apart when you consider how Protomatyr’s music is so wiry and dry and clearly more at home in 1970s Manchester.

Comparisons to The Fall (of which there are also a lot) ring far truer, and they never even went to Detroit.

Truth is a big theme on ‘Relatives In Decent’, joining the heavy sense of unexpected hope in resignation that’s filled the band’s previous three albums and is still present here in Joe Casey’s cryptic lyrics. Casey still mumbles and slurs to make lines rhyme even when they don’t. With his words in front of you it’s still difficult to decipher exactly what he means, which helps the album steer clear of being a tacky “fake news” concept piece. Protomartyr are smarter than that and Casey’s love for language

and James Joyce chatters through the half-cut yabber of ‘Here Is The Thing’ (a drunk’s version of the facts) and murmurs through the chug of ‘Half Sister’, which contains fictional news stories about talking horses.

A lot of the tracks come in pairs, eschewing which is true, if any.

Opener ‘A Private Understanding’ says it all, although unpicking Casey’s input is just one way to pore over a punk record as expertly played as this, from every slow build, dark groove and moment of hidden beauty.

10/10

Protomartyr Relatives In Decent Dom in o By dan n y c an ter. In sto re s sept 29

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0 5 /10

07 /10

09/ 10

Lina Tullgren Won

Belle Game Fear Nothing

c aptur e d t r ac k s

Art s + C ra f ts

Lindstrøm It’s Alright Between Us As It Is

Courtney Barnett & Kurt Vile Lotta Sea Lice

By katie bes wic k. In sto re s se p t 22

B y max pi l l e y. I n s to re s s e pt 2 9

S mal l to wn S upe rs o un d

Ma r a t h o n / M a t a d o r

By re ef yo uni s . I n s to re s o c t 6

B y d er e k r o b er t s o n . In s t o r es O c t 1 3

It has been four years since Belle Game’s debut album, always a risk for a young band. The Vancouver quartet return with an altogether glossier, more tightly-produced follow-up that loses some of the mystery that had established them as a band to take notice of. The ’80s ethereal touchstones of Cocteau Twins and Dead Can Dance are still detectable, but so too are their new age relatives. At its best, like on opener ‘Shine’, the production is crisp and focused, with lasersculpted claps of synthesiser that would be at home on a Jessy Lanza release and echoing drumbeats that are placed like feng shui, whilst Andrea Lo’s vocals are multi-tracked and delicious. But too often they succumb to chart-inspired pop electro, with high-end, trebly bursts that you can imagine Sia wailing over. ‘I Want Nothing’ is what Ellie Goulding might sound like when she pursues her ‘indie cred’ direction.

The best is saved for the end: the six and a half minute track ‘Spaces’ is the group’s most affecting, with Lo sighing, “Feels like I’m melting inside.” A final, believable moment.

Five albums in and Lindstrøm’s gossamer space disco continues to play out with cultured patience. So, where compatriot Todd Terje has made a glorious habit of breaking out tracks with a beaming, barely contained joy, Lindstrøm’s controlled take is much more clinical, but no less satisfying. Here, this set of nine tracks flow into the next with the balance and nuance of a live set as Lindstrøm builds the anticipation with a soft, ambient drone on ‘Under Trees’, lets ‘Drift’ float on (but not too far) with arpeggiated synths and mellow harp, and crafts the unabashed made-for-radio vocal hook of ‘Shinin’ into a slick electropop guilty pleasure. The hypnotic minimalism of ‘Bungl (Like A Ghost)’ – with its sparse simplicity and Jenny Hval’s detached vocals – briefly takes the album to the deliciously unsettling levels The Knife’s Karin Dreijer Andersson made a career out of but, for the most part, the glossy effortlessness of ‘It’s Alright Between Us As It Is’ makes it feel like the soundtrack to every afterparty you’ve wanted to get into.

There’s a lot of symbolism at play in releasing a rock record when you’re called Kurt & Courtney. Eschewing a new name for this project was presumably a deliberate decision, but such boldness makes sense – both artists have found success through singular visions, Barnett’s smart, small-town vignettes and Vile’s unhurried, spacious stonerrock. On ‘Lotta See Lice’ these forces are elegantly knitted together, the duo making prodigious use of their respective talents. Everything here sounds gorgeous, the seven original tracks (and two covers – they each tackle one of the other’s songs) bathed in a golden-hued dustiness.

Vile has always employed a raw, vintage Americana, and adding Barnett’s world-weary, dead-pan delivery is a masterstroke; the best moments come when she’s front and centre. Even over simple harmonies and finger-picked guitars there’s a richness to the songs, and for all the organic, candid, just-jammin’ vibes, it’s meticulously arranged. They sound like they’ve been doing this together for years.

Kamasi Washington is scaling down: after 2015’s ‘The EPIC’ comes simply the ‘EP’. That said, while the saxophonist and bandleader has trimmed length – the 32-minute-long ‘Harmony Of Difference’ EP runs significantly briefer than the three hours of Washington’s debut – he’s retained all other dimensions: this is still impressively broad big-band cosmic jazz, Coltranesque spiritual meditations peppered with fluttering soloing and earworm themes. The result is, as before, luxurious, grand

and just a touch prog, but this time more inviting: that one doesn’t need to set aside an entire evening to take in ‘Harmony Of Difference’ is definitely a draw.

Not that it’s necessarily more straightforward. Tracks here are each named after virtuous abstract nouns, although more often than not it’s difficult to trace a line from title to content. Quite how, for example, a snappy two-minute strut replete with the disc’s most virtuoso playing equates to ‘Humility’ is fairly opaque,

and it’s only in the reappearance of the ‘Desire’ theme during closing cut ‘Truth’ that one could infer anything reliable regarding Washington’s take on the human condition.

That doesn’t particularly matter, though. The appeal of Washington’s music lies in the rather elegant combination of approachability with serious technical chops.

‘Harmony Of Difference’ extends that appeal and adds the one thing ‘The Epic’ didn’t – leaving the listener wanting more.

Maine musician Lina Tullgren’s pretty debut is a collection of brief, apparently autobiographical stories that veer between darkness and light, narrating how it feels to be twenty-something and learning who you are for the first time (a theme she continues from her previous ‘Wishlist’ EP). On ‘Face Off’, for example, she evokes her absent parents (‘Mom’s on the island / Dad’s up north / Going insane’), working through the pain of searching for oneself, haunted by thoughts of the not-yet-distant past. ‘Red Dawn’ sees her searching for optimism and struggling to throw off the persona she’s created (‘I should stop believing in pain’), while on ‘Summer Sleeper’ she’s pondering what it means to ‘let go’. The lyrics veer, at times, into post-adolescent cliché – and the tracks are a little samey – but Tullgren’s raw, lyrical voice and the sonic composition cover these conceptual flaws. The record works as a perfect showcase for her raw, lyrical voice, culminating in a promising debut that suggests, once Tullgren’s finally decided who she is, there will be great things to come.

08/10

Kamasi Washington Harmony of Difference y oun g t ur ks By s am wal ton . In sto re s se p t 29

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Albums 05/10

0 6/10

08 /10

08/ 10

Liam Gallagher As You Were

Modern Studies Swell To Great

The Plan Nervous Energy

White Wine Killer Brilliance

war n er s

Fir e

So uthe nd R e co rds

A lt in V illa g e & M in e

By l i am k on emann. In store s oct 6

B y Jame s A ut o n. I n s to re s oct 2 7

By hayl e y scott. I n s to re s oc t 1 3

B y G r eg Coc h r a n e. I n s t o r es S ep t 2 9

This year, Liam Gallagher’s got back to what he does best – giving funny interviews. Because let’s face it, after two dogshit Beady Eye records, no one’s expecting this debut solo album to be any good. He’s calling ‘As You Were’ his “third coming” – something brash and defiant. Opener ‘Wall of Glass’ is that, but beyond that this is an unexpectedly vulnerable set of songs. ‘Bold’ and ‘Paper Crown’ are bruised rather than posturing, building up to the ultimate mea culpa ‘For What It’s Worth’. That track captures the album’s surprising sense of introspection and provides a genuinely sweet moment. Of course, the brazen rock’n’roll influences aren’t entirely absent – they’re most blatant on ‘You Better Run’; more Beatles than Stones (naturally).

That said, there are tracks even the staunchest Liam defender might struggle to get behind here, like ‘Greedy Soul’, ‘Chinatown’ and ‘Come Back to Me’. So no, this isn’t some triumphant rise from the ashes.

Some it’s alright, other bits are terrible, but it’ll be enough to keeping him talking. Business as usual.

There’s a reason why a lot of summery pop records don’t get made in the middle of Scotland. It’s beautiful, of course, but also has a reputation of invoking music that’s melancholy and self-reflection.

Brought together from each side of the border, Emily Scott and Rob St John used to play in each other’s bands before the unique sound of a Victorian pump organ prompted them to work on this folk-indebted soundscape.The result is something akin to She & Him, were they holed up in deepest Perthshire huddled around an antique harmonium, bracing Scottish winds chilling bones outside. This instrument is the focal point for this collection of songs – the album rotates around it.

Its sound is captured in detail – every squeak, every breath caught on tape, giving the whole thing a live feel. ‘Today’s Regret’ leans gently on ‘Kid A’-era Radiohead and there’s a comforting, lilting cadence to the likes of ‘Everybody’s Saying’.

But most admirably Modern Studies manage to avoid the obvious twee pitfalls, even if they do occasionally run out of ideas.

Ah, post-punk: that wiry, restless sound that’s as broad as it’s been overdone. Nowadays, the genre pertains to anything with angular rhythms and an overall foreboding temperament. Done well and you can sound like the best ’80s copyists with a few ideas of your own; executed badly and it can only sound contrived.

Southend’s The Plan (a new group made up of members of Wetdog, Vic Godard’s Subway Sect, Private Trousers and Ghost) adhere to a formula that’s faithful to post-punk’s origins: stop/start abrasiveness, melodic intensity, cryptic lyricism and occasional experimentation resulting in something that sounds like a forgotten obscurity from 1982.

Rooted in punk, the various styles at play here, from no wave and psych to garage rock, give the album satisfying variation. The best moments are during the subtle idiosyncrasies, such as the whirring synth on ‘Chambers’ and the sharp Raincoats-esque strings on ‘Arithmetic’; in Rebecca Gillieron’s defiant but soft vocals, too. ‘Nervous Energy’ is as faultless and authentic as contemporary post-punk gets.

If you’re the kind of artist who converts chaos into inspiration then the last couple of years have been an all-you-can-eat buffet. Joe Haege, former member of Tu Fawning and touring player with Menomena, and now leader of Leipzig duo White Wine, is exactly that guy. Their third LP doesn’t “poetically reframe” the madness of our times; it simply pours the fear into a dark, simmering caldron of experimental ideas. It’s thematically heavy, sure, (“we’re all killers in some way or another,” Haege outlines) but, musically, rarely foggy or distorted. In fact, the production on standout moments like ‘Broken Letter Hour’, ‘Hurry Home’ and ‘I’d Run’ is almost blindingly bright. It’s just the way the sounds (squawking bassoon, pummelling hi-hats, Transylvanian church organ) are meshed that is almost uncomfortably compelling. As a collection it feels like visiting a different room in a decaying House of Mirrors where each space contains a more unsettling reflection of humankind.

Put it on at your next dinner party straight after The xx.

For the last few years, the likes of Peter Broderick and Olafur Arnolds et al have been at the forefront of a slowly building but now boldly present genre. Call it neo-classical if you’re sniffy, or indie classical if you’re not.

Düsseldorf duo Grandbrothers would doubtless like to avoid that label, and it’s true that their music has its own idiosyncrasies.

Foremost amongst these is that despite the rich complexity of the sound they assemble, it’s all made

from a single instrument – the piano – and a host of effects from homemade kit that manipulate that single sound.

‘Open’, Erol Sarp’s and Lukas Vogel’s second album, uses their tested approach to superb effect.

The record opens with a nervous introduction, full of taut energy and gathering power, and the suspenseful tension of an imminent storm. Single ‘Bloodflow’, meanwhile, is stunningly on edge, coming at you in waves, beautifully and powerfully

nuanced. There’s a dichotomy between calmness and a relentless, ecstatic energy; it’s six minutes of purely visceral drama.

This is typical of ‘Open’, an album that sweeps from one movement to the next in much the same way that traditional classical music does. It’s poised, often very balanced, but also willfully falls into controlled chaos, beautiful pathos or sublime melody. Sit down with this record, embrace and absorb it; at its finest, it will really transport you.

08/10

Grandbrothers Open C i t y S l an g By ch r is wat key s. I n store s oc t 20

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07/ 10

Destroyer Ken

Kele Okereke Fatherland

Unqualified Nurse Band Trashland

Dea d Oc ean s

BMG

re c k l e s s

Matias Aguayo & The Desdemonas Sofarnopolis

By gu i a cor t as s a. I n store s O ct 20

B y ste phe n b utc har d . In s t o re s oc t 6

By ja m e s auto n. In s t ore s o c t 2 0

C r a mm ed Dis c s B y d a f y dd J en k in s . I n s t o r es o c t 2 0

How many people knew that Suede’s ‘The Wild Ones’ was first titled ‘Ken’? Dan Bejart did and has paid homage to the song’s discarded name by using it for his latest album.

This is Destroyer’s twelfth LP, but the first “not recorded as a band,” although, “everyone in the band does make an appearance,” which begs the question of why Bejart even mentioned it. Anyway, the Suede thing is key, because mentioning the origin of the chosen appellation is what really sets the tone of ‘Ken’.

The Canadian singer-songwriter’s fascination for all thing British is no big news, it’s just that where David Bowie informed much of his previous work, here it gets the early ’90s experience (via another band of Bowie nuts), with synth infused, metallic-sounding tracks, filled with nasal voices and tambourines, which reaches its apex in ‘Cover From the Sun’. The ballad ‘Saw You At the Hospital’ is a fortunate exception, echoed by the ‘80s taste of the closing ‘La Regle du Jeu’, completing the sound palette of this peculiar (and rather irresistible) Destroyer trip down the stream of music glory.

One thing you can say for sure about Kele Okereke is that he will never give you the same album twice.

Whether that means you scramble to hear more music or wince before hitting play depends on how much you connect with his style of songwriting. His new solo album goes full acoustic. Every vulnerability is on display. The risks are high on this admirably showy, soulful turn.

From the twee folk of ‘Streets Been Talkin’’ to the sleek Will Youngindebted (seriously, Will Young) balladry of ‘Grounds For Resentment’, Okereke isn’t scared to get a bit corny, as listeners of the second Bloc Party album will remember. It’s an endearing trait, but one sadly bogged down by clunky lyricism and sterilised production, here. The album’s main issue is that the singer’s rigid vocal can’t sell many of these tunes, something made clear when Corinne Bailey Rae shows up for a duet and completely outshines him. There are bright spots, like earthy, string-backed odyssey ‘Yemaya’. Okereke remains a gutsy songwriter, and that’ll keep many scrambling.

Barely a year has passed since Derby’s Unqualified Nurse Band debuted with a clash of genres, eras, heads, bodies and fluids on ‘Debasement Tapes’. In a blink of an eye, here’s LP number two.

‘Transplosion’ opens up the album with an insight into what it would have been like if Phil Spector had produced The Clash. ‘Trashland ’85’ is if The Who had actually been an ’80s new wave band with Johnny Marr on guitar and also channelling The Specials. ‘Nurse Life’ then comes on all Franz Ferdinand before becoming a doom rock behemoth and also a bit psychedelic. To say UNB are schizophrenic, though, would be to pay them a huge disservice. You get the feeling that it isn’t that they don’t know who they are, but that this is all well thought out. As eclectic as they were before, they’re now a little more accessible, which is no bad thing. ‘Trashland’ is energetic, rampant, exciting rock’n’roll, as UNB spend their second time around fusing ’60s girl groups, late ’70s punk, ’80s new wave and ’90s grunge into a multi-headed fantastic beast.

Backed by a strong band in The Desdemonas, DJ/producer Matias Aguayo nails the smooth transition from four-to-the-floor electronic music to disco-flavoured post-punk.

There are pockets of bedroom ambient with ‘6 am’ and ‘The Rabbit Hole’, but ‘Sofarnopolis’ is largely built on Can-ish grooves; the spirited galvanism of ‘Ege Bamyasi’ shot through with the crepuscular air of ‘Soon Over Babaluma’. Each track is skeletal and primitive, with few musical elements beyond a propulsive rhythm section and Aguayo’s full-Damo Suzuki vocal improvisation. “The record is the soundtrack of a series of fantasies around a fictional city called Sofarnopolis,” writes Aguayo.

There’s no discernible ‘story’ going on here, though – the only narrative of interest on ‘Sofarnopolis’ is purely stylistic. Aguayo and his band succeed by hitting on a sonic plane and boldly occupying it for over an hour. Everything sounds the same, and rightly so. Why do anything else when what you’ve got is this infectious?

It’s difficult to think of a couple who’ve been making music together for the best part of four decades, and even harder to think of any who, on their ninth studio album, are still attracting as much attention as Amadou and Mariam. The Malian duo have, over the years, been embraced by the likes of Damon Albarn (perhaps inevitably), but also a greater audience in the West as their huge profile has transcended their genre and geographical origins.

‘La Confusion’ serves as a

document to their exuberant, uncomplicated appeal. Songs like ‘Bofou Safou’ are joyously infectious – bright, rhythmic and colourful, with zero musical baggage. It’s funk of the most poppy, enjoyable and accessible variety, and there’s a genuinely unfettered happiness to be found in the ringing vocals, too.

At times the record feels like the soundtrack to Beverley Hills Cop after a long, life-changing stay on the African continent, while the title track is something like ‘Echo Beach’

washed in an azure ocean. There are some more reflective, considered moments, too, like ‘Mokou Mokou’, which amounts to a ballad. Brushed with an intangible sadness, its vocal inflections are lent weight by an unknown (to most listeners, at least) tongue.

Mostly though, ‘La Confusion’ is a blast of musical fresh air, accomplished with joy, exuberance and pure talent. Of course, you could also describe this as just another Amadou and Mariam record.

0 7/ 1 0

Amadou & Mariam La Confusion Bec aus e By c h r i s watl eys. In store s se p t 22

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Albums 08/10

Kelela Take Me Apart warp By d avi d zamm i tt. In store s o ct 6

I’ve voiced my confusion on these very pages before, and I’m still not sure I’ll ever fully understand the distinction between a mixtape and a proper album, but with Kelela Mizanekristos’s latest, I think I just might be starting to get it. On 2013’s ‘Cut 4 Me’, she took the punishing bass music palette of Night Slugs instrumentals and painted her magnificent vocals all over it to create the dark dance highlight. Four years later, however, we have Kelela’s first album proper.

And it’s true: as brilliant as the aforementioned record was, it is clear that ‘Take Me Apart’ is intended as a truer statement; a more focused declaration of intent. No longer is

Mizanekristos squeezing her voice into the gaps in tracks created by Kingdom and Bok Bok, et al. No, while the production here might come from the same reliable sources, this time their structures are built around her.

The result is a shape-shifting collection of 14 tracks that voyage through the full range of electronic pop, with several of the songs traversing the full spectrum on their own.The title track, for example, is at least four tracks in one. A journey that starts life as a sultry electronic soul ballad, it moves through a brief dalliance with out-and-out drum’n’bass and climaxes with a vocal pop coda – updating doo-wop

for a 2017 audience – before launching into brawny house music workout. If future life forms only unearth one track from 2017 a couple of hundred thousand years down the line, I hope it’s this.

‘Waitin’’, which lifts the refrain straight from her 2013 Kingdomproduced stand-out ‘Bank Head’ in a self-referential nod, is a further reminder of the long road Mizanekristos has travelled in the four years, while ‘Enough’, with its subaquatic synths and off-kilter layers of percussion builds tension with a newfound deftness, taking the maximalist production of the Night Slugs stable but applying more sleight of hand and restraint. But it is

perhaps the muted electronic lament on relationship breakdown ‘Jupiter’ that shows off Kelela’s fresh bent for refinement to best effect.

This is an album that plays with pop music in the way the greats do.

Michael Jackson, Prince, D’Angelo, Chaka Khan – even JustinTimberlake in recent years – have all propelled pop into a more interesting space by playing with conventional expectations and inverting them, creating seemingly familiar melodies before bending them just slightly out of shape, sprinkling weirdness on what might at first seem like a standard pop record. Kelela has the chance to join that pantheon. She is firmly on her way.

Cast aside any expectations you had about what Andrew Hung’s debut solo album might be like – and remove from memory his work as one half of Fuck Buttons’ coruscating electronic noise – and ‘Realisationship’ is still one of the most perplexing albums you’ll hear this year.

Much of that surprise is owed to the fact that Hung steps out from behind the boards to sing, admitting that “singing as an expression is very new to me – gaining the

confidence to do that was the hardest part.” It’s a commendable step but it’s also one that unfortunately defines the album.

It’s not that Hung’s vocal lacks power or that it noticeably falters and strains, it’s the odd switches in style – from the stilted ‘Elbow’ and snotty histrionics of ‘Animal’ to the flat ‘Whispers’ – that make the album sound like a highlight reel of bad X-Factor auditions.

Veering between lo-fi indie demo and late-night karaoke blasts,

‘Realisationship’ largely fails, but it’s also hard to begrudge it as an exercise in self-confidence and selfdevelopment.

There’s also salvation (optimism, even) when Hung reels in the dramatics and relaxes on stringladen closer ‘Open Your Eyes’. Here, he finds a tender sweet spot, and a vocal identity that would make any potential follow up a much less confused, much more inviting prospect – because everyone deserves a second chance.

0 4/ 1 0

Andrew Hung Realisationship L ex By reef y oun i s . In store s o ct 6

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Reviews

moments funny because, let’s face it, unless it’s Glastonbury, we don’t want British festivals to feel like 12th Century war anymore.

This year, EOTR retained all of its niceties while adding more electronic, noise and avant garde music to its bill, with the help of a new hook-up with BBC Radio 3’s The Late Junction. Mac DeMarco as headliner also brought an influx of hyper late-teens, none of which woke up for the early morning yoga class the following day.

From the brown notes of Blanck Mass to returning classes in spoon carving, End Of The Road just delivered its most exciting and varied year yet. It gave us moments like these…

End OfThe Road is held in aVictorian pleasure garden. Its woodland contains handmade, interactive art installations and games. The food stalls are healthy and often meatfree. The toilets are clean – always.

Children are welcome and are oddly well behaved. The bulk of the lineup has always come from cultish indie and folk stars, from Sufjan Stephens and Cat Power to Joanna Newsom and Fleet Foxes. It’s why people habitually call the festival ‘nice’ or ‘the nicest one.’

Occasionally, an artist on the bill will snark at End Of The Road’s woolly reputation, like when Father John Misty announces that he’ll be giving a lecture on alpaca sheering later. A few of us find these awkward

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All photography by Timothy Cochrane

The Headlines from End Of The Road 2017

Live

the odd Tudor building. At any other festival, a band like Timber Timbre probably wouldn’t be appreciated enough to play such a scenic spot, but at EOTR there is a sense that all artists are equal. Taylor Kirk’s band proved the point and earned their booking with a performance of ‘Sincerely, Future Pollution’ that was almost suspiciously crisp.

The Moonlandingz asked us all for drugs as soon as we all arrived Johnny Rocket (Lias Saoudi) spent a chunk of his Thursday evening set asking the crowd for ketamine, perhaps forgetting where he was and that the festival site had only been open for around two hours and most people were still on their first drink of the weekend. Perhaps it explains why Saoudi wasn’t in full Johnny Rocket get-up: disappointingly, he wore jeans and T-shirt civvies rather than his trademark bread jewellery, cape and sequin codpiece.

Mac DeMarco’s fart finally hit a wall

Deerhoof were the unexpected highlight of the entire weekend In the eleventh hour of the festival, after a Sunday of Biblical rain, Deerhoof were virtuoso in their experimental punk, played with the force of early US hardcore, the joy of J-Pop and the chops of jazz pros.

They’ve done this since 1994 (!) yet it’s easy to forget how good they are until you remind yourself of what Greg Saunier can do on a 2-piece kit consisting of a bass drum, snare and ride cymbal.

The dancing started halfway through Kelly Lee Owens’ set There were more opportunities to properly dance than ever at this year’s festival. It ended with Afroblues duo Amadou & Mariam in the rain, while Romare added a welcome bit of doof on a middle day heavy on guitars. It was Kelly Lee Owens who got the mirror ball rolling though, with a Friday afternoon set that featured her airy, vocal-led ambient tracks in its first half before slipping beautifully into the minimal techno thrumb of ‘Arthur’ and ‘Bird’.

One of our own writers actually booed a band That band was HMLTD. The Big Top started off full enough but didn’t end that way after an hour or so of the art group’s camp spaghetti western glam-pop and Rocky Horror Show dress-up. At the bro-step EDM drop of closing track ‘Stained’ Sam Walton – a Loud And Quiet writer – actually booed. He stood there and shouted, “Boooo!” I’ve literally never seen that happen before. It made me like them even more.

Someone brought a car seat headrest to Car Seat Headrest

There was a disproportionate number of proud parents at Honey Hahs

Even in the post-banter netherworld that is every British festival, every now and then someone will turn up with a gag so superbly daft, so expertly executed, so unquestionably droll, that intuitively the only thing you can be mad about is that you didn’t think of it first. Like holding aloft your Peugeot 206 headrest at Car Seat Headrest’s standout show of goodtime grunge anthems. The good cheer toward this comic genius was no doubt informed by Will Toledo’s endless sing-along moments that made the 30-somethings relive the excitement of first seeing The Strokes – something it seems we’ll never get over.

Honey Hahs – three sisters aged 10, 12 and 14 who’ve just signed to Rough Trade – opened the Tipi stage on Sunday. Scrutinising their game attempt at Byrdsian folkrock too closely is obviously unfair; the creepy tentful of grown adults rapturously applauding the trio’s every move, on the other hand, should have a word with themselves.

I mean, you wouldn’t go to a school play at a school your own kid doesn’t go to, would you?

Kids at End Of The Road get mad too

Timber Timbre captured what’s so unique about End Of The Road’s programming There are no ugly stages at EOTR, but the real peach is the Garden Stage, surrounded on all sides by trees and

The children at EOTR are, it must be said, impeccably behaved. Still, we all get tired and in the most End Of The Road moment of all time we did see a small child lose his shit over the non-availability of the quinoa dhal at the vegan curry stand.

The big moment when a lot of us wandered off to the bar came during Mac DeMarco’s headline set, which felt overloaded on irony (even for him) and pretty exhausting.

Overhearing someone in the queue for the showers the next day talk about DeMarco making fart noises with his guitar was enough to convince me that I’d made the right choice in leaving after his 8-minute cover of Vanessa Carlton’s ‘A Thousand Miles’, which was funny for one minute and not for seven.

Father John Misty won the big stage When EOTR booked Father John Misty’s first festival headlining set they probably didn’t expect him to release an album as slow and misanthropic (if condescending) as ‘Pure Comedy’. To Josh Tillman’s credit, he didn’t shirk his responsibility as the big draw, sticking to the more digestible moments of his new album and getting right down to the big songs from breakthrough record ‘I Love You, Honeybear’. What’s more, he curbed the histrionics that so many people like to throw back at him.

He still dropped to his knees from time to time, but he also seemed genuinely humbled to be topping the bill. Seriously, guys – Josh is ok.

Right at the end we saw a strange sight that could only ever happen at EOTR As iconic to End Of The Road as the roaming peacocks is the on-site postal team, who run around passing your notes to whoever you like, be it artist, mate or your crush at the David Lynch themed cinema area.

We saw one of these hard workers at about 4am on Sunday morning, deep into the forest and looking quite well-refreshed, saying, “I bet you’ve never seen a postie in a tree before, have you?”

The look of the festival was the white trouser suit Rosa from Let’s Eat Grandma, Baxter Dury, Aldous Harding and King Khan all wore them. Fine, until we got to Sunday and it absolutely shat it down. King Khan unfortunately sensed this and changed into an arse-less leotard halfway through his set.

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Reviews

Pop-Kultur Kulturbrauerei, Berlin

Chastity Belt Star & Garter Manchester

23 - 25/ 0 8/ 20 17 wr i ter : Dan i el D yla n Wra y

06 / 09/ 2 01 7

ph otogr a ph y : ta sh brig ht

w r it er : j o e g o g g in s

Given that the latest Chastity Belt record is a paean to millennial angst, there’s a touch of irony to the fact that the Seattle four-piece play their first sell-out show in Manchester not in a new, hip spot, but a decidedly unglamourous old pub. Despite the newfound intricacies of ‘I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone’, there remains a rawness to tonight’s performance, as some of their latest LP’s prettier moments are imbued with the sonic roughness of 2015’s breakthrough album ‘Time to Go Home’. ‘What the Hell’, for example, takes on an extra bitterness, whilst the guitars on ‘This Time of Night’, which are pure ‘Hot Rock’-era Sleater-Kinney, come with the sort of bite that Carrie Brownstein would be proud of. Chastity Belt have found an equilibrium between playfulness and sincerity. It’s a balancing act that suits them well.

An air of controversy and conflict hung over the opening of the third Pop-Kultur, a three-day Berlin festival that moves location each year as a showcase to the seemingly infinite wonders of the city it operates in. After accepting €500 euros from the Israeli Embassy for travel costs for an Israeli artist, acts began to drop out in protest, including Young Fathers, Thurston Moore and Islam Chipsy. However, what looked like a rapid domino effect taking shape on day one that could wipe out a hearty chunk of the line-up soon stabilised and things went on as planned.

Taking place in the huge old brewery and multi-venue site of Kulturbrauerei, the festival is an eclectic mix of live music, films, exhibitions, DJ sets and talks, with an equal gender split across the bill being a mandatory component of the curation.

The glitchy 3D visual element of ABRA’s unique commissioned performance adds a lucid charm to her trap-tinged R&B that melds nicely into the Bruce Springsteen meets Ariel Pink lure of Alex Cameron, who pulls off sleazy

electro and earnest soft rock with immense likability and dynamism.

When Lady Leshurr (pictured) stops messing around filming things for her social media accounts and covering other people’s songs (from Blackstreet to Kendrick), her own unique version of Brummy grime is a visceral and exhilarating one, too, although nothing quite matches IDLES for brute force all weekend, who play a frenzied set that, despite being explosive and breakneck from the off, never seems to lose momentum; the charge, grit and venom of it seems to gain a further sense of bite as the show goes on.

Wedding dress-clad Liars then play a pummelling set, heavy on the throbbing electronic side of their output, and the building screech of ‘Scissor’ and clattering thunder of ‘Plaster Casts of Everything’ sound as vital and punchy as they ever have done, almost as if the intensity of their live show has gone into overdrive since the release of the notably more reserved and textural ‘TFCF’. Similar in raw power are the final moments of Anna Meredith as she plays ‘Nautilus’ and it erupts into a collision of sliding and tooting

brass, hammering drums and sputtering electronics that meet to form a heady concoction.

The final evening of the festival belongs to Arab Strap, whose boozy, woozy, sexy and sordid tales seem to touch a nerve way beyond places that sell Buckfast.The warmth and stark intimacy of the band on record gives way to a much fuller, louder and intricate sound on stage. There are touches of post rock eruptions, hammering ’90s electronics and gliding strings, and percussion that dips in and out of it all. The inevitable close of ‘The First Big Weekend’ just goes to show the legacy of the song - a piece of music that still feels thrilling. As euphoric as it is tender, it’s enthralling to hear it unwind.The set ends perfectly with an encore of ‘Packs of Three’ as a drunk, sweaty crowd quietly sing along about “the biggest cock you’d ever seen.”

Pop-Kultur seem hell-bent on curating some of the most genuinely eclectic and diverse musical acts they can find, which makes it a festival that is in equal parts broad, challenging and riddled with surprises.

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Vince Staples Kentish Town Forum London 3 0/ 08 / 2 01 7 w r it er : G em m a S a m wa y s

“Move your body if you came here to party,” Vince Staples orders over skeletal production and staccato beats.The capacity audience doesn’t need the prompt: they’ve been bouncing since the moment the Long Beach rapper was revealed, silhouetted against the stage-wide orange screen during the opening bars of ‘Party People’. “How I’m supposed to have a good time when death and destruction’s all I see?”

The mood is celebratory in spite of the gritty lyrical context, but, then, issue-driven bangers are Staples’ forte. He himself cuts a low key presence during his 70 minutes on stage, switching between prowling the stage and cooly surveying the audience’s adoration during ‘BagBak’, and remaining static at the mic stand, head bowed, throughout the instrumental breaks of ‘Birds and Bees’. There’s no DJ, no hype man, just Staples rapping over a thunderously loud mix of his tracks.

Singing Pictures andrew anderson unpicks the video evolution of OASIS

Like the Falklands War, the 1966 World Cup win and that time we saw up Keith Chegwin’s arse on Channel 5, Oasis are seared into the English national identity, as inseparable as marmite from toast or Liam Gallagher from cocaine. While Blur and Pulp might have been the better bands, it is Oasis that the media prefer to lavish prosaic praise on, perpetuating the myth that they somehow stood for something, someone or somewhere. Even their truly awful albums receive recognition: BBC Radio 6 recently devoted a day to talking about how ‘Be Here Now’ isn’t quite as shit as people think it is.

Why is this? Firstly, Oasis are a direct derivation of past UK music products, which makes them easy to understand – their best tracks sound like a mash up of ‘I Am The Walrus’ and ‘Pretty Vacant’, only not so hot.

Noel’s lyrics in particular are easy to grasp, since they borrow images and rhyming schemes from The Village With Three Corners series of kids’ books. It’s catchy stuff, no doubt.

Secondly, Oasis are unbeatable myth makers. There’s an expression in journalism ‘if it bleeds it leads’ i.e. the most gory story wins. In band terms, Oasis are the goriest of tales; from on stage fights, smug-as-fuck interviews and innumerable break ups, when it came to getting a journo’s juices jumping there is/was no band better.

One of the most important parts of a band’s myth making process is the music video. So let us now take a look back through the Oasis’ archive and see what more we can learn about the band they call the busker’s best friend.

Alright, so my main gripe with Oasis is that they insist on dressing up pub rock up as high art. Oasis videos should show people playing air hockey in a shopping centre, kicking a football around or getting mortal on a Friday night, but instead we get a bunch of René Magritte shit – swinging saws, a big plastic cowboy, a fucking clown. You’re Pukka Pies, not foie gras – don’t forget it. Come to think of it, the Oasis logo looks rather a lot like the Pukka Pies one. Food for thought.

Some regular Oasis motifs return too, like the fact that it is shot in black and white but with one colour remaining in high contrast. Oh, and Liam is up a ladder – again.

I guess what I am trying to say here is that as the praise was piled on Oasis made the mistake of believing they were great – something Noel has since admitted to in a number of interviews. That’s why this video, and almost everything Oasis did from ‘What’s The Story…’ onwards, seems particularly stupid.

01

02

3. THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING IDLE (2005) Hey, what’s this, a good Oasis song?

Where the hell did this come from?

Well, it came from the Kinks – ‘Sunny Afternoon’ and ‘Dead End Street’ in particular. But only Oasis would have the gall to steal the music video as well; for those that haven’t seen it, watch the Kinks’ video for ‘Dead End Street’, where the band dress up as undertakers.

Anyway, with ‘The importance of Being Idle’ Oasis finally solve the problem of how boring they are on screen by having someone else appear in their place. Rhys Ifans gives a strong performance, and the outside shots look great (this being an Oasis video it is, of course, in black and white). It doesn’t feel like it’s trying too hard to be clever or ‘arty’. It’s a good video, maybe their best, even though it is a rip off. For a band who made their careers out of re-writing the ballads of The Beatles, it feels appropriate.

03

1. LIVE FOREVER (1994) I actually like ‘Live Forever’. It’s got all the ridiculous Noel rhymes, but with just enough meaning to feel epic.

As for the video, director Carlos Grasso had a tough job on his hands because although everyone in 1994 shit their pants over how exciting Oasis, the truth is that they’re very boring to look at. Normally a guitar is a potent, majestic thing, but the sight of Bonehead playing one brings to mind a grandma tentatively stroking an old cat. It’s not quite as bad as watching paint dry, but not far off.

So, how to make them look exciting: stick Liam up on a chair nailed to the wall (a Freudian ego image if ever there was one). Let’s have some dogs walking backwards.

And why not pour water over

Bonehead while we’re at it. All done.

The most telling part of the video comes when the band buries drummer Tony McCarroll alive. As recent documentary Supersonic revealed, Noel was bullying McCarroll mercilessly at this point and about to kick him out of the band.

Nice of him to symbolically bury him just to drive the message home.

2. Wonderwall

(1995)

For regular readers of this column, you’ll be pleased to hear that ‘Wonderwall’ heralds the return of Nigel Dick, cinematographer to the stars. We’ve previously enjoyed Dick’s work with Nickelback, but here he is doing his bit for Oasis and their mega anthem.

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Conclusion Like Christmas getting earlier every year, the legacy of Oasis is incredibly annoying but irreversible. So I suppose we should just get used to it, and hope people don’t go on about the new Liam Gallagher album, or the fact that Noel Gallagher is a ‘comedy genius’, too often.

Party wolf

FanFIction: The Very British Bake Up

Paul was in a grumpy mood. And not his TV grumpy mood; his actual grumpy mood. He should have been watching the rugby, not walking into the 58th annual Horsham Country Fate to judge a baking competition, all because he’d once dressed as a Nazi and the stupid fucking papers had found out.

“We really need this positive PR,” his assistant reminded him as they walked past the tombola, the Bat The Rat and the guess-howmany-sweets-are-in-this-jar game to save the local dentist’s from being turned into a Bill’s.

Paul looked at how shit the dog show was – all sausage dogs, the small handbag ones and a big, droopy fella that he instantly recognised as perfect cover for any big backfires

that might arise in the day. He knew that his black labs could easily eat half the dogs here. Ha! He really needed that.

“There’s that winning PH smile that we love,” he assistant quietly cheered.

“Don’t do that,” said Paul. “You know I was going to an ‘Allo ‘Allo themed fancy dress party that night, right? When I dressed up as a Nazi.”

“Oh. Yeah.Totally. We just need to get everyone else back on board with ‘brand PH’, don’t we, big man?”

“Right. Well, where’s this baking contest, then?”

A big crowd of 60 had gathered in the main marquee to cheer Paul’s arrival, who dutifully waved and smiled and traced the edge of his little white

beard that he knows so many people like. He had his extra blue contacts in and boy were they working – he lost count of how many people he saw actually licking their lips in his direction. Not even the hand-drawn sign that read Horsham’s Very British Bake Up was enough to ruin this moment of true admiration.

He enjoyed himself when he was handed the microphone to announce the Very British Bake Up open, too, achieving a very respectable – if a little condescending – level of laughter for his I’m-sure-you-won’tknead-my-help joke, and knocking them for six with an improvised line about how the beautiful weather should ensure that there are no soggy bottoms all day long. One clever prick did shout “Good moaning!” from the back of the tent, but was quickly ejected from the entire fate.

No, Paul was having a good time.

Until he had to taste and judge the contestants’ bakes. He’d forgotten about this part of the deal, and although he’d previously presumed that some of the cakes and pastries might not be up to his usual standards, he could never have been prepared for just how utterly dog shit they were.

To the first boy (a 9-year-old called Joshua who presented a Victoria sponge) Paul said: “There’s just no flavor there, for me. None at all. It’s under proofed as well. How long did you proof it for?” Joshua look over to his mum by the side who manically smiled and nodded and put both of her thumbs up at them.

Clearly she wasn’t listening; just looking at Paul’s tight, cool, boot-

cut jeans.

“Be nice,” Paul’s assistant whispered to him at the next child’s table.

He picked up one of her flapjacks – a cake he even hates when it come in a mini bucket from M&S – and bit into it. “Mmmm,” he lied. “So… interesting. Tell me, I can taste the Haribo in there, but what’s that other yummy ingredient?” In his heart of hearts he knew very well that it was hair.

The next boy asked for a handshake, under the instruction of his mother. “Mum said it’d really make her day if she saw you give me a handshake,” he said. “She’s your number one fan. She’s always kissing her calendar of you.”

“Oh, yeah?” smiled Paul. “And which one’s your mum, then?”

“That one,” he said, pointing across the tent.

Paul looked up, made a decision quickly, said, “Nah,” and even managed to get away without trying the boy’s ‘Yule log’ (it was August) that smelt like cream cheese.

This fresh hell went on, with the kids seemingly in a contest of stupidity rather than baking. One child hadn’t allowed their shoe pastry to rest long enough, making it tough and rubbery; another little idiot had taken her tarts out of the oven 5 minutes too early. At least the boy who turned in a bowl of Rice Krispies (just the Krispies, not in the form of Rice Krispies cakes) hadn’t shat on his ingredients. Paul made him the winner to teach the others a lesson. His own had been to not dress as a Nazi/character from ‘Allo ‘Allo ever again.

] Please don’t pick up, please don’t pick up...

Oh, my darling.

You need to ring the person who did this to you and stand up to this bully!

I’m here for you, sweetheart Hello?

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Disclaimer: The representations of the persons herein are purely fictitious

Photo casebook: The unfortunate world of Ian Beale

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