Loud And Quiet 66 – Father John Misty

Zero pounds / Volume 03 / Issue 66 / the alternative music tabloid

Father John Misty The day Josh Tillman came to town + Lightning Bolt Ian MacKaye LoneLady Heems Blanck Mass The Eccentronic Research Council

contents

welcome

Blanck Mass – 12 Lightning bolt – 14 Ian Mackaye – 18 The Eccentronic Research Council – 22 heems – 24 Lonelady – 26 Father John misty – 28

Zero pounds / Volume 03 / Issue 66 / the alternatIVe musIc tabloId

Father John Misty The day Josh Tillman came to town + Lightning Bolt Ian MacKaye LoneLady Heems Blanck Mass The Eccentronic Research Council

c o v er ph o t o g r aph y G em H a r r i s

We’ve been after Ian MacKaye for a long time. Of everyone we’ve ever interviewed, his influence has been in there, somewhere, perhaps more frequently than anyone else’s, perhaps without the interviewees even knowing it. That’s how it is with anything faintly resembling DIY – MacKaye was instrumental on putting it on the map, and even more so in keeping it there into adulthood. Maybe Solange wasn’t all that bothered, but who knows.

Safe to say he’s had an affect on our magazine, and I took it as a compliment that at first he said no to our repeated requests for an interview (or rather he said nothing at all). Our problem is that we don’t look very DIY anymore. I consider that progress, but MacKaye seemed concerned that we were in league with the corporate world that he has so carefully removed himself from. He told us to call him to explain ourselves, and then he’d decide on whether he’d do the interview. “Oh? So it’s not a magazine that’s got Red Bull plastered all over it?” he said to Daniel Dylan Wray. It is not, and so Ian MacKaye granted us a two-hour interview the following week.

As if to prove my point of MacKaye’s long-reach, I saw Father John Misty reference him at an instore show this month. “I never worked in a record store,” he said. “I failed. I failed the entrance interview. The question I got wrong was Ian MacKaye related… I still don’t know who that guy is.” Sarcasm is a big part of Josh Tillman and his FJM project, as you’ll know if you’ve heard either of his two albums under that name, and especially his recent LP ‘I Love You, Honeybear’. It really is a record as excellent as Rachel Redfern acclaimed in her 10-scoring review in February – a concept album for and about Tillman’s wife of one year, featuring all of loves true horrors and paranoia, wrapped up in an often breezy cloak of ’70s radio rock, folk, country and blues. As he told me for our cover feature, “It’s very disruptive.”

Stuart Stubbs

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T his M o nth L &Q L o ve s D unca n J o r da n, J o e P a r r y, K e n L i, L a ur e n B a r l e y, L e a h E l l is, S te ve P hil l ip s, W il l L aw r e nce

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

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10 Years of Loud And Quiet

Did I Love 2005?

A decade ago Art Brut took on straight-faced indie rock, lead by a sarcastic frontman who couldn’t sing. Now living in Berlin, having written his memoir, I Formed A Band, EDDIE ARGOS remembers the first year his group refused to believe that they’d never amount to anything A s to l d to s t uar t s t ubbs

I moved to London to form a band. I’d been in bands before, in Bournemouth, but everyone in my bands kept going to university and giving up. I was like, ‘no, what are you doing? We need to keep going!’. In the end I moved to London with the last member of my band [The Art Goblins], and I was just going around parties constantly looking for people to be in a band with me. I’d been trying forever; it just came together in 2005.

We became part of that New Cross thing – down there Angular Records had started. We’ve been lumped in with loads of different scenes, but that really was a scene, and that’s my real memory of 2005. Everyone would go to everyone’s gigs, and everyone was starting bands and side projects. It was a really exciting time, especially down in New Cross and it was weird for me because I lived in Camden but was travelling to New Cross to see bands, which is the opposite to what you’d probably think. Being around people releasing records, that’s what I really remember – that sense of, ‘oh fuck, we can do this; it’s not a weird abstract notion, being in a band – anyone can do it.’

I’m one of those people who’d still be in a band now even if no one was turning up to the shows. I’m one of those guys. I knew I was always going to be in a band, but I probably thought I’d have more money than I do.

Art Brut were a funny old band. There were times when it was mad, like, we hired a plane once to fly somewhere, and we’d be travelling across America in big tour buses, but there was never a day where we didn’t go, ‘how the fuck did this happen?!’. All the bands I like don’t even get that – like Helen Love and

Animals That Swim and David Devant & His Spirit Wife and Baxendale – I thought we were going to be one of those types of bands, and we ended up going around the world. It was a surprise. I mean, I think we’re brilliant and that we deserve all of that – it was just a surprise that other people thought that too.

We took what we did seriously, but not ourselves seriously. That was sort of our mission statement, and I think that was our appeal. We were a weird mix of people. I saw a driver the other day who drove us back then and he said it was like driving The Raggy Dolls around.

We played our first show at The Verge in Kentish Town. I’d not been in a band for a while and in the The Art Goblins I used to hide behind a vacuum cleaner (you could change the sound from ‘hard floor’ to ‘curtains’ to ‘deep shag’ – I’d play a dustpan and brush at acoustic shows: that was the joke), but they wouldn’t let me do that in Art Brut, and I felt really naked, so I kept making sarcastic comments.

People would clap and I’d say: “Don’t be sarcastic.”

After four or five gigs of doing that and people not liking it, I saw a Jet tribute band.They were awful, but the singer was really confident, and I thought, ‘aahhh, that’s what people like!’.

We were always received pretty well, with sound men, in particular. They’d be like, ‘oh, you’re that Formed A Band band’. There weren’t lots of people at our shows, but the people there did like it. It got busier and busier, and went quite smoothly to be honest. And bands seemed to like us, maybe because they liked that we took the piss. It was me who was quite prickly back then. There had been all that stuff going on with The Libertines and Thee Unstrung and

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The Others, and I was worried we were going to get lumped in with all of that, and I hated that, so I might have been the dick to other bands more than the other way around.

I started to get recognised but it always happens when I’m doing something terrible. Like, Sainsbury’s value wine is quite nice, and back then I bought 8 bottles of it for the house and my bank card didn’t work properly so I went into the NatWest up the road and was shouting at the manager with all these bottles of cheap wine, and as I left the bank in the bad mood, clanking my bottles down the stairs, two kids went: “Top of The Pops!”.

Another time, when I was working in [local pub] The Camden Head, I was waiting outside to start my shift in the morning and these two German girls were like, “oh wow, Eddie Argos. Can you sign this and can we have a photo?” And I was like, “Yeah, cool.” And then they’re like, “what are you doing here? Why are you waiting outside this pub?” I thought, what’s more embarrassing – that I work in a pub now, or that I’m an alcoholic? So I said: “I’m just waiting for it to open because I’m really thirsty.”

It’s the same sort of time now as it was in 2005, isn’t it? When we first started, that’s why I was angry at everything, because it was all terrible. The music in the charts was bad, but there weren’t any guitar groups that I liked. I think if Art Brut started now we’d do alright. There’s a lot more stuff that I like now, like Parquet Courts and Fidlar – we’re not like them, but if I was in a new band now I’d like to play with them. I think we’d do just as well now. Art Brut: a band that could be reasonably successful at any time. I was quite drunk in 2005.

books + second life

Purl Yourself Together Reef Younis investigates what rock stars do next No.8: Kelley Deal’s different type of needle / a computer company, I had top-secret clearance for what I was doing, and I was turning up for work in the same clothes I had worn the day before, having stayed up all night on ecstasy.”

After coming through rehab, Deal took up a new vice to help her stay sober: knitting. Using her time on tour, she perfected the art of felting, blocking, simple crochet and embroidery, and her switch to needles of a cleaner kind began to pay off. It started with the sale of knitted handbags through her website, continued with appearances on the DIY Network show Knitty Gritty (what a name), and culminated in the release of her book, Bags That Rock: Knitting on the Road with Kelley Deal in 2008.

With her place in the – ahem – Knitterati confirmed, Deal’s shift from junk excess to knitted vests is an unorthodox story of rock redemption but is proof that, sometimes, two needles are better than one.

“I like to knit,” she admitted in a 2008 interview with St. Louis paper The River Front Times. “It’s so uncool but on the other hand I’m like, ‘fuck that, man.’ I’m not gonna be embarrassed by it, you know, I’m gonna let my freak flag fly. I like to knit, fuck everybody else.”

In 1992, Kelley Deal joined her sister (and former Pixies bassist) Kim, in alternative rockers The Breeders. Offered the chance to be the band’s new drummer, and probably preying on their sisterly bond, Kelley insisted on being lead guitarist despite the fact she couldn’t play guitar. Still, that didn’t stop her going all-out to learn the necessary parts that helped make ‘Last Splash’ (released at the close of summer 1993) a platinum-selling success, and cemented ‘Cannonball’ as an MTV2 anthem for years to come.

But three years after joining the band, and two years after the release of The Breeders’ hit record, Kelley was arrested for heroin possession.

Publically living out two-thirds of the ‘sex, drugs and rock’n’roll’ cliché, her indiscretion effectively put The Breeders on a six-year hiatus with a swift stint in rehab helping her avoid court and conviction.

As music stories go, it’s a familiar box-check of artistic excess but Deal has always maintained that the drugs came way before the music. “I hate the misconception that I joined a band and became a heroin addict,” she told The Guardian in 2002. “I started shooting up when I was a teenager. I was a practising alcoholic in my day job; I was working in

by janine & Lee bullman

Inside the Terrordome

by Tim Grierson

Inside the Dream Palace

by Sheryl Tippins

Different Every Time

by Marcus O’Dair & Jonathan Coe

Omnibus

Simon and schuster

Serpent’s Tail

There are bands that come along occasionally and seem to change everything – the way people dress, talk and, most importantly, think. Public Enemy put the politics of race, inequality and oppression front and centre against a screaming soundscape of sirens, beats and game-changing turntablism.

Their song titles entered the common vernacular and stayed there, and their message sounds every bit as urgent as necessary now as it did then.

Grierson’s excellent book traces the story of the band from their origins in the early eighties to the huge world-wide acclaim that followed. There are lows to match the highs and Inside the Terrordome explores both as it examines both the band and their wider cultural context. Believe the hype.

Ever since it opened its doors in 1884 the Chelsea Hotel has played an integral part in the gritty bohemia of the New York scene. Anybody who was anybody got laid there, scored dope there or killed their girlfriend there. Andy Warhol shot movies in the hotel, Jackson Pollock, Jim Carroll and Patti Smith all spent time there, as did a who’s who of the worlds of literature, music and the visual arts.

It’s all very different on West 23rd Street these days, of course, but Inside the Dream Palace investigates the magic of the building’s history and the artistic community that thrived there. The place is bought to life by Tippins’ eye for detail and love of the subject as she wonderfully captures a colourful, original and unique New York character.

Robert Wyatt initially emerged from the Cantebury scene – a rag-tag 60s crew of like-minded, longhaired individuals with proggy tastes and magic in their minds – and first found an audience as the drummer in Soft Machine. Since then, though, his musical wings have spread wide, taking in jazz, folk and even scoring the occasional big hit.

Different Every Time is a beautifully written biography of a musician who seems to have stuck to his musical and political guns throughout his career in a way that few manage. Even falling out of a third storey window in 1973 and spending the rest of his life confined to a wheelchair did nothing to dim this most singular and prodigious talent whose story is told so ably here.

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getting to know you

Tracey Thorn First a member of early 80s post-punk band Marine Girls, and then one half of Everything But The Girl, Tracey Thorn’s latest solo project is a soundtrack for Carol Morley’s debut feature film The Falling, in cinemas April 24. From her London home, she filled in our Getting To Know You questionnaire / The best piece of advice you’ve ever been given “Don’t be a big shot, take a jacket.”

People’s biggest misconception about yourself I’ve no idea.

Your favourite word Hellebore

The best book in the world is...

That’s impossible to choose.

Your pet hate Weather forecasters’ clichés – “spits and spots of rain”, “misty and murky”, “treacherous ice.”

The one song you wish you’d written “The Folks Who Live On The Hill’ by Peggy Lee”

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

Melanzane parmigiana.

The worst present you’ve received Poodle pyjama case.

Favourite place in the world London, because it’s home.

Your style icon Germaine Greer.

The most famous person you’ve met Maisie Williams, at the premiere of The Falling.

She was tiny and adorable.

The celebrity that pisses you off even though you’ve never met them Anyone who is pointlessly cruel and rude for a living. There seem to be several.

Your favourite item of clothing All my dresses (I have many).

Your biggest Fear The usual – kids being ill or in an accident.

Your biggest turn-off Sexism.

The most overrated thing in the world Wrinkle cream.

The thing you’d rescue from a burning building Photos.

What would you change about your physical appearance?

I wish I hadn’t plucked my eyebrows to near-extinction.

What talent do you wish you had?

I’d love to be able to ice skate.

The worst job you’ve had I’ve been too lucky; apart from teenage Saturday jobs all I’ve done is singing and writing.

Your hidden talent Getting all of a roast dinner on the table at the same time.

what youd you tell your 15-year-old self?

“Yes you will, don’t worry”

Your guilty pleasure Crisps.

The film you can quote the most of “spinal tap”

Your biggest disappointment Having stage fright.

What is success to you?

Achieving what you set out to, or coming somewhere close.

The characteristic you most like about yourself I’m a good listener.

Who would play you in a film of your life?

Gena Rowlands.

The worst date you’ve been on I’ve never been on a bad date.

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Your best piece of advice for others Be kind to yourself.

11

Tell Me About It

Blanck Mass Fuck Buttons member Benjamin John Power met David Zammitt, to do all the talking Photography: jannica honey / writer: david zammitt

Ben Power, aka Blanck Mass, aka 50% of Fuck Buttons, sits at his desk surrounded by wires, keys and dials.

He’s preparing to move out of the temporary Edinburgh apartment himself and his wife have only just begun to call home since relocating north of the border and I get the impression that he’ll be happy to finally be settled. In the background the latter seems to be either unpacking from London or packing for the next stop. An alarm goes off and Ben grows concerned that his agave-glazed parsnips might be burning (“It sounds so unglamorous. They’re amazing though!”) but he’s happy to talk all the same. Somewhere lurks Darwin the cat, the de facto third member of Fuck Buttons. “Well, there’s a fourth member now as Andy’s got a whippet named Polly.” Worcester’s answer to The Beatles, in a way.

Amid the chaos of his temporary lodgings, he’s trying to figure out what the live set for his upcoming gigs is going to look like. It’s no mean feat.

While he welcomes the challenge, he knows that translating his latest work to a live setting will be a difficult task; since his solo project’s self-titled debut arrived in 2011, Power’s sound has taken a gargantuan leap forward. Far from the ambience of that first Blanck Mass offering, his new LP,‘Dumb Flesh’, picks up where the more texturally complex ‘White Math/Polymorph’ EP left off and his armoury of hardware has grown in line with the scale of his soundscapes. There are beats, for a start, and it’s as dance floor-friendly as you’re likely to hear from himself or other Fuck Button Andy Hung, but he’s approaching it with enthusiasm and as he shows me his latest purchase he takes on the tone of a proud father.

“Have you seen an OP-1? They’re pretty interesting. It can be used as a synth or a midi controller or a sampler keyboard.

It’s pretty impressive.”

A labour of love – with a smattering of frustration – ‘Dumb Flesh’ was fully

re-recorded three times before Power signed off on the definitive version, but as he talks about the process he concentrates on what he has gained in terms of experience rather than dwelling on any time lost. It takes the shortcomings of the human body as its theme and with titles like ‘Dead Format’, ‘Atrophies’ and ‘Detritus,’ it won’t come as a surprise that the album brims with crunching electronic brutality. And speaking of crunching electronic brutality, Power hints that there will be more music from himself and his mate Hung at some point in the future, but we’ll just have to wait for more news on that.

“I’m making the live show bigger”

As this album is less textural and there’s a little bit more dynamic to it I am going to be bringing more stuff with me, which I think is pretty interesting.

I’m feeling confident and I think it’s going to translate pretty nicely. I’m looking forward to playing the new stuff live for the first time. A couple of tracks have been in the set for a while in various forms of completion but I’m looking forward to playing some of the bigger ones. And I don’t want to give away too much but there’s a visual element, which I’m going to need to practise beforehand. We shall see.

When I supported Jon Hopkins last year, I think he was after more of an ambient thing as I was warming up, so it was primarily first album stuff; a textural, scape-y thing. There were a couple of moments from the new album and there are a couple of moments that I’ve been out playing live but none of the more dance floorfriendly stuff. Not for that show anyway.

“The new record is a lot more dance floor friendly”

“A lot of stuff happened to me while I was writing this record”

Overall it’s a bit more varied. There’s more of a dynamic journey to this one, whereas the first one was largely ambient. There were no real percussive sounds on there whereas there are more on ‘Dumb Flesh’. The process of making this one actually doesn’t differ at all from the first album. It’s very similar to how I work in Fuck Buttons as well; it begins with experimenting until I come across a sound or a technique I maybe hadn’t thought about before and then it’s built up from that point onwards.

A heck of a lot of stuff. I got married, I relocated, I had very close friends pass away. So I think all of these things are going to have some sort of impact on the finished result, even if you like to think that they don’t. It’s also nice to be able to come back and look at the tracks on the album with a fresh set of eyes when something big happens. It’s definitely beneficial and it probably has shaped the sound as well. It was actually a really, really funny period. It was eventful, that’s for sure.

“I re-produced the album three times”

“The album’s theme is the human body’s frailty”

A lot of stuff happened. There are some tracks on there that have been through all kinds of mangling. Certain tracks that I thought were finished, then, with reflection, I realised that I didn’t want them to be that speed so then the speed was halved and then I tried to play on top of that. It all becomes a bit of a mess up until it doesn’t anymore, if that makes sense.

It’s something that has played on my mind for quite some time. There was actually one point during the process where I was living in London, in Hatch End – and I’m certainly not the first person to complain about back pains – but I was unable to walk for a good couple of weeks and that really solidified the idea for me; the hopeless form. I think it was triggered by ten years of doing this (hunches over his desk) over a table! It’s the kind of thing that you shrug off when somebody tells you and think, ‘Oh, well you and everyone else.’ It shone a bit of light on the subject matter, for me.

“Finally, I was at peace with it”

There are things that I would still probably change, but then again, try and find me a musician who doesn’t want to change something about every single of their releases – unfortunately that’s a human complex so I think you have to wave goodbye at some point.

And the beauty of it is that things, I anticipate, will change quite a bit when I take them out on the road. Live is always a very good test for these things. I didn’t really have an opportunity to do it that way around this time.

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“I can’t actually reveal who’s on the front cover, no”

But one thing that I will say is that it’s not me. That’s what you wanted to know, isn’t it? Well, it’s an unnamed subject!

Tell Me About It

with is essentially a brand new song with components from the original so it feels more like a collaboration than your average remix. And I can tell within the first ten seconds of listening to a track whether or not I’m going to be able to remix it. I know my practice better than anyone else and I know I’ll be trying to get blood from a stone if I work with some tracks. And it’s also a matter of time – I don’t want to do it half-arsed. And ultimately it needs to be something that I would enjoy listening to myself, otherwise it doesn’t feel right to share it.

“It’s a lot easier to go vegan than you would think”

And it’s a lot easier than the supermarkets would have you believe.

It’s actually quite a nice thing being a vegan on tour. Obviously if you’re in Spain or something it’s a little bit more difficult because it’s something that’s not really understood, but the day before I’ll just Google ‘vegan restaurant in such and such an area’ and it means I get to explore the cities instead of being stuck backstage eating hummus.

That’s the staple, isn’t it?

“Moving to Sacred Bones was not anything to do with Rock Action”

“You don’t need lessons”

It [making ‘Dumb Flesh’] didn’t become stressful. I can’t complain, and I wouldn’t change my position for the world, but there were some times where it did become a little frustrating.

The album is harder hitting than the first one. The ambient stuff I can kind of do all day long, but there were some sounds on the new record that I had never really worked with in a production sense before, so it was a massive learning curve, actually. There were a couple of times where I was

frustrated that I couldn’t actualise the thing in the workspace that I had going on in my head. But it’s just down to perseverance. If you know what you want to achieve early on then you have enough time to find that place. Plus I don’t have to work to a deadline so I could really get inside it. But I’m glad that it got re-made so many times because I learnt a lot about myself and about studio techniques that I had no idea about before. And it’s all selftaught. I’ve always said that if somebody’s learning the guitar or something, you always find that the more interesting people tend to not go

for lessons and just figure it out for themselves. The same goes for synthesisers; don’t read the manual and you’ll come to your own place.

“I think I approach remixes differently to a lot of people”

I enjoy it. I prefer to see them as a collaborative thing. So I’ll be using stems from the original and I’ll try to work them into my aesthetic, not the other way around, which is the way a lot of people work. So what I end up

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I love those guys and they’re very good friends of mine. I just think that Sacred Bones was maybe a better home for it this time around. Obviously I hope I can work with Mogwai again on something, one day. But I’m very good friends with Caleb [Braaten, Sacred Bones founder] and I couldn’t be happier with the way things have gone so far. It feels like a good team to be part of.

“Fuck Buttons will be back, I just don’t know when”

We’ll have to wait and see. The thing about Andy and I is that we’re best friends and we still love to make music together. We wanted to focus on our own things this year, because I think it’s a healthy thing to do. We’ll be back, don’t worry about that.

Ritual Development Rhode Island noise duo Lightning Bolt discuss their first album of new material in six years, embracing their differences and learning to live with playing on stage rather than in the middle of the floor Photography: Natalja Kent / writer: james f. thompson

When Brian Chippendale and Brian Gibson got together to form Lightning Bolt, the music they began recording was like nothing else around them. It still is. For more than 20 years, the two Providence, Rhode Island, natives have produced what I described in a recent review as a bone-shatteringly intense composite of Boredoms-influenced noise, thrash metal and stoner rock that’s all but impossible to properly articulate in prose or even capture on record.

Indeed, the pair have put much currency into the primacy of the live experience. Lightning Bolt shows are not so much about simply absorbing music but actually experiencing it viscerally and physically. For most of their career, Gibson and Chippendale have performed gigs stationed on the ground, slap-bang in the middle of the crowd. Audience members form part of an almost orgiastic mass of heaving bodies encircling both players; a kind of ritualistic sonic circle jerk. The music seems to beget violence as performance art. Witnessed on video, a Lightning Bolt performance is beautiful and terrifying in equal measure.

Given such ostensibly lofty conceptual ideals, the band’s artsy origin makes sense. The duo met at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design before playing their first show in December 1994. The next couple of years saw some line-up changes as the twosome were temporarily augmented by a Japanese singer and a guitarist, before ultimately settling on a twoman combo of Chippendale on drums and Gibson on bass. Chippendale also handles vocal duties via a telephone receiver microphone strapped into a helmet, which he then runs through an assortment of effects pedals to produce incomprehensible warbling and wailing.

The pair were recording constantly almost immediately but it wasn’t until 1997 that the band started touring and two years later that their first, selftitled record arrived. Since then a further five full-length releases have followed, the most recent of which –

2012’s ‘Oblivion Hunter’ – was actually a composite of old, cleaned up material. It’s a leisurely but unerringly consistent pace, one that I’ll later find out dovetails well with a whole host of extracurricular interests ranging from making video games to producing illustrations and comics, not to mention a level-headed approach to the vagaries of making a career out of a rock band. On a personal level, it’s also a relief to know that Gibson and Chippendale aren’t perpetually immersed in the impossible intensity and freneticism of Lightning Bolt’s music, or else I’d worry for their sanity.

In arranging this interview, the two Brians have asked to speak to me on the phone consecutively on the same evening but separately; they’re apparently reluctant to get involved in a joint interview remotely. Though the arrangement is mildly irritating, it’s also completely understandable; if I shared my first name with my only other band mate, I’d probably soon get sick and tired of conference calls too.

Besides, I should count myself lucky to get them both on the line at all, given that Gibson in particular has never been the biggest fan of press duties.

“I’m an artist. I was hoping to make art when I grew up, not… blab,” he says soon after we begin chatting. It sounds high-handed but I soon find out this is more a reflection of a considered, slightly reserved nature on Gibson’s part. The 39 year-old is just happiest playing music rather than talking about it. “I’m just not as skilful at that and it’s not something I feel that I have to do well,” he concedes. “I’ve definitely always had this opinion – like I was kind of stubborn about this – that if you do good stuff, you shouldn’t have to explain it to people.

But then, like, I’m realising that it actually is important; you kind of have to talk about what you’re doing.”

In any case, Gibson has vested interests in loosening up a bit today. As well as fulfilling Lightning Bolt duties, he works as a lead artist for Harmonix – the people behind Guitar Hero and Rock Band – and has channelled that experience into producing ‘Thumper,’

another music game that Gibson likes to describe as “rhythm violence.”

Other people have called it a surreally disturbing crossover between ‘Audiosurf’ and ‘F-Zero’ while videos online just make it look like a nightmarish acid trip. Either way, Gibson wants to get the word out, which I suspect is one of the reasons we’re speaking.

For Chippendale’s part, when I call him he’s also preoccupied with other artistic endeavours. It turns out he’s finishing up a comic book before Lightning Bolt head off on tour in a few weeks. “It kind of zips around this fancy town and it goes from being, I don’t know, science fiction weirdness into straight-up satire of current events,” the 41 year-old says animatedly of what will be his fourth book.

Chippendale has the higher voice of the two and something of a gregarious, happy-go-lucky persona in comparison to the more muted Gibson. It’s easy to figure out why the pair click. “Right now I’ve got this weird ISIS dude meeting some lady from the Tea Party movement and they’re exchanging numbers because they’re really into each other,” he continues. “They’ve got similar talking points, you know, like, God is great; religion mixing into law, all that stuff.

It’s different levels of extremism.” I say it sounds like a sort of warped dating website checklist.

Chippendale chuckles: “Well, the title of the episode is ‘Match Made in Heaven,’ so…”

Against a backdrop of many other creative indulgences, perhaps it’s no great surprise that we’ve been waiting six long years now for new Lightning Bolt material, ever since 2009’s ‘Earthly Delights.’ The twosome began recording ‘Fantasy Empire’, their new record out now on Thrill Jockey, in earnest around three years ago, finishing up in October last year.

Throughout that time the album was recorded, scrapped and re-recorded at least a couple of times. Long-time sound engineer Dave Auchenbach was jettisoned throughout the process as the band ultimately adopted an entirely new recording approach, working at a

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recording studio in nearby Pawtucket – Machines with Magnets – instead of their usual practice space.

It sounds potentially like the making of a disastrously disjointed salvage-job of an album. So the real surprise is actually how well ‘Fantasy Empire’ hangs together, melding Lightning Bolt’s punishingly aggressive sound with a new sense of fidelity. In my own review of the record last month, I scored the record 9/10 and wrote: “Chippendale’s drums now punch the chest with enough force to cause an aneurysm and Gibson’s squealing, dive-bombing riffs on album highlight ‘Runaway Train’ could melt any railway track. Approach with giddy trepidation.” Other critics have been equally effusive in their praise.

Having listened to the LP plenty since then, I’m even more inclined to stand by my words. It’s breathtakingly intense. The basic formula remains the same: Chippendale’s schizophrenic drumming the centrepiece of each

‘I’ve definitely always had this opinion that if you do good stuff, you shouldn’t have to explain it to people’

song, with Gibson’s contortions on his modified bass providing the sludgy melody. Vocals, as ever, are something of an afterthought, distorted beyond all recognition and ran through a Line6 delay pedal for yet another layer of obfuscation. This time though, there’s depth and weight to each track that was never there before. There are layers of overdubs but there’s also a greater sense of space. There’s sheen and fidelity without compromise. Oh, and there’s volume. Plenty of it.

In short, the record is a triumph, so I’m curious why the band didn’t produce their output via the studio much sooner. “It actually was a conscious thing,” Chippendale admits.

“We recorded our first album, ‘Bright Sky’, in a small studio here in Providence that isn’t around anymore.

Then we recorded ‘Wonderful Rainbow’ in a few different studios outside of LA but I just personally didn’t like it.You’d play for a little while then you’d just sit around all day while

people worked on stuff. I’d just be kind of bored. Then on top of that, I never really thought it sounded that good.

People would say, ‘What’s important is what comes out the other end’ but for me what was important was the sound there and then so we could play really well! But that wasn’t there.”

So for the next few records, the band had Auchenbach haul his equipment to their Rhode Island practice space instead. The engineer would record the pair playing through some dry wall layers with minimal separation, hoping to capture the buzz of a live Lightning Bolt performance.

The results are certainly direct, with 2005’s ‘Hypermagic Mountain’ and ‘Earthly Delights’ from 2009 both sounding like they’d been taken straight from the soundboards at particularly intense shows on the road.

On the flip side, they also come across slightly thin; Chippendale’s snare drums sounding like they belong in a marching band. Ironically, the records

also function as less of an approximation of the live Lightning Bolt sound than the new LP. “It worked for a few records,” Chippendale argues. “It was a really raw way of recording and you’d think that would be great for a super immediate-sounding thing, right?”

Perhaps. But after trying the same approach for the new album, Gibson and Chippendale realised it was time for change. The two dispensed with Auchenbach’s services and headed into a studio with a Pro Tools setup.

Where does this leave the relationship with their old sound engineer, I wonder?

“It’s not the most comfortable situation. Dave is an amazing guy and we wish it worked [again],” Chippendale responds.

“He understands that you just have to try new stuff. Previously it had been the same recording process, the same equipment and with Dave again, so I think [the new album] was just one

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record too far to go down that road. It was really hard to figure that out though. We’ve worked with Dave for so long and it was just hard to stop and abandon ship.”

There have been other big changes over the past few years too. Thanks to the duo’s surging popularity, their favoured live approach of playing on the floor of venues amidst the crowd has become an increasingly rare phenomenon. Previously this was a pivotal part of their appeal to the hardcore element of their fan base; ironically yet perhaps inevitably, Lightning Bolt’s nascent notoriety has made the band inaccessible to the very people who made them notorious in the first place.

Now that the band find themselves playing the stages of multi-thousandcapacity venues, a couple of questions spring to mind. One: how does this feel as a performer, having before been at the very centre of the maelstrom but now finding oneself towering above

band mate on stage for fear of feeling alone. Meanwhile, Chippendale sounds like he’s acclimatised to the new dynamic of Lightning Bolt performances like a duck to water (“Even if you put me 40 feet in the air I would still just be having fun,” he says).

If live performances are just one of the ways the pair’s different personalities manifest themselves – Gibson the quieter of the two and Chippendale the clear extrovert – it’s hard not to wonder how Lightning Bolt have managed to make it into their third decade as an on-going concern. After all, the two Brians aren’t just band mates; they’re friends too.

The idea of maintaining a working relationship for 20-odd years is alien enough, let alone one predicated on a potentially combustible friendship between apparent opposites.

Ironically, Chippendale says it was the early years that were the rockiest. “I feel like when we began, in the first 15 years our temperaments should have killed us,” he jokes. “I would get wound up about stuff though and be stubborn, and we would get into fights.The fights between us would be me exploding and him just shutting down. I would at least feel good because I’d exploded but he’d be feeling shit because I’d basically passed it on to him. For years I feel like that was our dynamic and yeah, it would get kind of bad

N

owadays the band have a good sense of how to keep things ticking over. Tours tend to be short, around four weeks or less. Dinners and downtime aren’t necessarily spent together. There are a few other broader factors underpinning the band’s longevity too. Both members still live and work in Providence, Rhode Island, which means practice sessions are regular and any bust-ups can be handled face-to-face. Neither of the two have any kids yet, although partners are on the scene.

Finally and probably most importantly, Gibson and Chippendale have each got artistic lives beyond the band. Aside from his videogame work, Gibson plays with doom metal

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outfit Megasus, while Chippendale supplements his illustration and comic books with a number of solo projects.

He also designs Lightning Bolt’s record sleeves. “When you’re in a band, you’ve kind of got to be on the same page in that way,” Chippendale says.

“You can’t have a band where it’s like 200% of one person’s life but like 50% of another’s because then you’re in trouble. For me there have been times when I’ve wanted more out of it but then I started doing solo stuff [side project Black Pus]. You know, if Brian’s not going to come over tonight or this month, to practise, well I’ll just do my own thing. Then when he’s ready to go, I’m ready to go.”

Go they shall. In mid-April, Lightning Bolt are heading out on an American tour, before coming across the water later in the year. There are some nerves about how the new songs will work live. Some, like ‘Horsepower’ and ‘Snow White’ have been gestating for years but others, such as ‘Mythmaster’ and its complex time signatures, and the experimental dirge of ‘King of my World,’ represent more of a challenge. They were more or less put together purely for the album.

Gibson and Chippendale are both confident of making them work though and soon enough fans will know either way.

More concerning – at least to me anyway – is how on earth Lightning Bolt maintain this level of intensity indefinitely. It’s hard to imagine Chippendale punching through his drums into his sixties and beyond, I say. Gibson starts laughing. “If Brian couldn’t physically play drums, he’d just come up with some other way of expressing himself musically that he could keep doing and was just as crazy,” he eventually replies. “John Coltrane’s drummer – I can’t remember his name [Elvin Jones] – that guy was playing crazy drums until the end.”

Chippendale is just as bullish about what lies ahead for the band. “Twenty years ago I didn’t project ahead more than a week and I kind of still don’t,” he says when I ask him the same thing.

“Obviously the gap between 20 and 40 is different to 40 and 60, like physically.

But I try to practise every day and I definitely feel like a lot of the time I play, I get to these places where I still feel like a really wild person. It’s always been there and it hasn’t gone away; I’m continually able to tap into it. So I think I’ll be pretty ferocious for a while longer. No doubt something will change at some point – I guess it has to – but not this year. Not this decade.”

L iv e ph ot og raph y by Ed w ina H ay

the crowd; has there been a dissipation of energy? Two: what does this loss of accessibility and proximity mean for those hardcore fans; is it still worth buying tickets for a Lightning Bolt show?

On the first of these, Gibson is refreshingly candid. “It’s a big change.

It seems like some people don’t mind but it’s hard to create, like, the magic,” he says. “When we’re on the floor, the sound from my speakers literally bounces off the people in the front row and comes back to me. It’s like the sound is mixed with the audience, people are bumping into me, it’s all very direct and sometimes it’s even frustrating to play, like with all that going on. At the same time though, I prefer it to there being a separation between us and the audience; it doesn’t make as much sense to me. [On stage] I still feel like we can do this enjoyable spectacle for people but it becomes just that – a spectacle – instead of, like, a ritual.” He lets out a laugh. “I’m trying to learn to get something out of it.”

Chippendale is more sanguine, even if he does recognise the magnitude of the change. “I was talking to Greg [Saunier] from Deerhoof a while ago, and he was saying like, ‘Man, if you guys ever play on stage it’s going to be like when KISS took off their make-up!’” He’s now laughing as well. “I think there’s been some surprise when we’ve played on stage though and people have been able to see us and hear us, instead of it just being total craziness,” he adds.

“People have been like, ‘Whoah these guys can actually play!’ Plus, I like people being able to see me play drums. I’m doing a lot work up there so it’s nice to think more than like 12 people can see me now!”

There’s a bit of an ideological divergence here within the band.

Gibson tells me that he’s ill at ease with the notion of the modern rock star, peacocking in front of thousands of people and lapping up their adoration (“It seems like a flawed take on what music is all about,” he tells me). He also speaks of performance anxiety at big festivals and trying to connect with his

sometimes. I feel like I’m a little wiser about that now though; understanding how things affect Brian and stuff. Brian also understands me. We just get each other better now.”

Besides, Gibson suggests it’s a mistake to see the pair’s differences as hindrances to the band’s success. In fact, he says, the opposite is true. “Over the years we’ve both learned and acknowledged that Lightning Bolt is what it is because of the differences between us as much as it is because we have a similar vision,” he says. “Some bands come and go I think because they agree too much. They get together and know exactly what they want to do, they do it, they release it then after that they don’t know what else to do. They knew what their goals were and they achieved them. Whereas with us, we never agreed those goals; it’s a constant struggle and evolution that may go on forever.” He pauses a moment to reflect.

“It’s kind of cool actually, to be involved in that kind of collaboration.”

Man At Work Ian MacKaye’s influence on the world of underground music cannot be overstated, from the small but perfect cannon of Minor Threat and the possibilities of a self-reliant DIY community, to the inspiration of clean living and the rejection of corporate mediocrity.

He spoke to Daniel Dylan Wray about his life in music.

Photography: Pat Graham / writer: daniel dylan wray

Ian MacKaye is known for a lot of things, his bands: Minor Threat, Fugazi, The Evens, Teen Idles; founding and running the uber indie/alternative Dischord Records; being the inadvertent creator and leader for the Straight Edge movement; someone with fierce, occasionally outspoken, political beliefs and a passion and dedication for all things independent that he’s seen as some sort of DIY mogul for many that have followed in his footsteps.

Now approaching 53 years of age he may be less active musically (The Evens is his only currently active band) but he’s no less busy.Taking time out of his hectic Dischord schedule, he gives me a couple of hours to talk through his life and career and offer his insights from the point of view of someone who has maintained ethics and principles staunchly throughout a 30year period that has seen the greatest and most significant changes and fluctuations in music’s history. He is just waving off someone from an old DC punk band called The Penetrators who had popped in to his office.

Does he get a lot of pop-ins, I enquire.

“No, I wish I did. I like fucking pop-ins. You don’t get a lot of that; most people just don’t think it’s done. I’ve noticed this thing when people come to visit and they’ll call and say: ‘I’m on my way out’, and then they’ll call and say: ‘I’m out front’. Well, knock on the fucking door! God damn!”

It’s an animated start to our conversation and emblematic of Ian’s general approach: clear, to the point, honest and he loves to throw in a good “fucking” here and there to hit home a point with hammer-like force.

Growing up in Washington DC, Ian struggled to find a sense of identity during his teenage years. “When I was in high school, around thirteen or fourteen, kids were already talking about ‘got to move to New York, got to get out of here,’” he tells me.

“It’s not a good town for teenagers because there’s nothing to do, especially around then, it was a 70% black town and white kids were kind of invisible in a weird way. Nobody should feel sorry for them, of course, it was just this weird cultural void. I used to say that Washington DC has

two distinct cultures: the federal culture – big business, Hollywood movies, network television, major label music, anything the federal government are involved with; then there was true culture, which in a 70% black town was black culture.

What was the white culture? None of us had any clue.”

Skateboarding and punk music were his saviours.

“I started skating about 1975/76 and though I had met Henry Garfield who became Henry Rollins earlier on – I met him when I was 11 – we really bonded over skateboarding. We had this gang of kids and we decided to form a team so we just formed our own skateboard team even though we had no sponsor – it was like a street gang for us. It was a tribe thing. I think I deeply desired a tribe, and the skateboarding thing gave me really good practice on how to define the world around you... [then] what I got from punk was this sense of… a call for self-definition. That you can make your life what you want it to be, that you didn’t need somebody else’s approval and maybe even that you

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needed somebody’s disapproval.”

Ian saw the same potential in punk that he experienced growing up immersed in 1960s counter-culture as a child. “I was born in 1962 and I was here in Washington right through the civil rights stuff, the anti-war stuff, gay rights. My parents and I went to a church that was radical liberation – very, very left, it had a woman saying mass in 1972, gay marriage in 1974, the Black Panthers spoke there, rock bands played there – it was radical. I was raised in that environment so I thought that’s how society would be.

Then the ’70s came along and you had this period of people partying and disco music and such obsolescence, it was such a bummer and I felt so disconnected from it. I was like, ‘where’s the counter-culture?’ It seemed so real to me as a child but as a teenager it was gone.”

During this period, Ian realised the drugs and booze lifestyle he saw going on around him was not going to work for him. He tells me: “In high school, the only form of rebellion that seemed to be on the menu was self-destruction, in other words getting high or

fug a z i: Guy P iccio t t o (t o p l eft ), b ren d a n ca n t y (t o p rig ht ), Jo e l a l l y & Ia n Ma cka ye

drinking. That seemed to be a rather inert form of rebellion because you’re neutralising yourself. If rebellion is pushing back against a system then by neutralising yourself I don’t think you’re a danger to that system, it’s not offering up any options.”

A life-changing Cramps concert – a poster for which he has framed on the wall at Dischord’s office – came next, in February 1979. He says there were probably 800 people there, “so many freaks.”

“I thought, ‘I’m home,’” he says.

“Because in my life I wasn’t partaking in what everyone else was partaking in I felt different and I felt marginalised.

Then I found myself in a room full of people who, for varying reasons, where the same. Maybe they were junkies, maybe they were transgender, maybe they were politically anarchistic, who knows? Whatever it was they were in that room and they were full of ideas and that’s what I was looking for – ideas, people who were interested in kicking around some thoughts instead of letting things get blurry.”

Ian’s first band,The Teen Idles, were relatively short-lived. However, they

saved every penny from their gigs and this money led to them putting out their first ever record via the newly formed Dischord Records that Ian setup with band-mate Jeff Nelson. Even when he was barely out of his teenage years he had manage to fuse seething passion and intensity with astute pragmatism. “I assumed that was normal,” he tells me now.

“So many people have come to me over the years and said: ‘How do I start a label?’ and I just say: ‘Get a band. Get some music you want to document.’ I think so many people have been brought up around the idea that this is a career. Over the last decade there’s been all these advertisements on television that are like young people in indie-rock bands in their VW cars to carry their electric guitars or whatever and there is this weird emphasis of ‘we’re in a band now’ like it’s a career choice. I don’t think of it as a career, I think of it as something that just has to come out. I think of it as a form of communication that predates language. I don’t think Nina Simone was like, maybe I’ll be a doctor or maybe I’ll be a musician. I don’t think

that happened, it was just something that had to come out of her. Today I think that mentality exists – ‘ah, I’ll be a musician.’

“Music is becoming content,” he continues, focusing on some of the major shifts of focus in music in recent years. “You can see it with these streaming services. You just sign up and subscribe to the service and you get all this content. It’s not music, it’s content. They don’t care – they do not care – the people that run those businesses do not give a fuck about music. What they care about is content; they want the subscribers. I think even labels are moving in that direction too.

“It’s really depressing but that’s the way it goes. If you think about the relationship people had to music in 1850, imagine what music meant to people, how rich it was; what’s happening now is music has been degraded. But music is deep; it’s deeper than a lot of people truly understand. I understand there has been a marketplace built around music but that’s not music that’s just the marketplace, that’s just business. Music was here long before the music industry.”

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That includes music venues too – in their day, a key part of the DIY network built by the US hardcore scene in the early ’80s. In that early, disenfranchised world, fans would attend shows of groups they’d never heard of allowing bands a freedom that’s missing today.

“Venues, by and large, are bars and their economy is based on the sales of alcohol,” says Ian. “There’s no ethical or moral issue around alcohol, on my part, per se, but at the end of the day that is their economy so what they are interested in is selling alcohol and therefore they need clientele. A band’s audience is the clientele; the problem that you run into is that a new band with a new idea doesn’t have an audience yet, so if you’re a band who plays in a club, by and large, you’re already established. The economics of it discourages innovation, but what I loved about punk rock was that the audience was just there, almost by default – there was no profit; profit wasn’t part of the equation.

“I’m not a curmudgeon,” he insists.

“I’m an observer.”

A

fter The Teen Idles came Minor Threat, one of the most influential hardcore bands of all time, despite only releasing one album, ‘Out of Step’, in 1983.

Not wanting to change the habit of a lifetime, Fugazi (Ian’s longest standing group, operating from 1986 to 2003) inspired even more via a ferocious mix of experimental and noise rock that resurrected the lawlessness that has been dumbed down since hardcore’s beginnings.

Being involved in such truly seminal groups, it’s not long before talk turns to the reunion-heavy, playyour-classic-album period that music is currently immersed in. “I guess the bottom line, for me, lies in the answer to this question: would they have done it if there was no money involved?

Would they have played together if they weren’t being paid? And if the answer is no then I’m probably not interested. It’s not that interesting to me, but if the answer is yes then cool, why not. I mean I saw Nina Simone in 2000 and I would imagine there was a lot of people who knew her music and saw her in 1970 who would have probably thought that show was terrible, but for me it was kind of lifechanging – a hugely important gig. So I do see the value of these bands playing, they’re great bands. I mean, for you [at your age] a lot of the bands who are reforming and playing broke up before you were even born. So, that’s an opportunity to see them and one hopes that when you see them you get: ‘wow, these guys are not fucking around!’ When I saw [a reformed] Arthur Lee play I thought, ‘this guy is the real deal. He has to do this!’ For me, my favourite genre of music is made by people who have no choice in the matter.”

It must be an offer you get a lot, to reform one or some of your old bands?

“Well I think it’s pretty much on the record by this point. I mean, Fugazi never broke up; we may or may not play again, we don’t know. We get an awful lot of requests for Fugazi but it doesn’t matter because we will play if and when we choose to. If we decide to get together again we will do so and if we decide to do that publically we will do that and if we decide not to, we won’t. We’re very clear about that.

Minor Threat, I used to get people writing to me once in a while, usually from Indonesia, but it’s not even possible. Minor Threat broke up at a time when we were not getting along and agreeing on what the band should do; there was a split in the decision of if we should split or keep going. All four of us agreed that it’s just better to stop instead of perverting the name.

The twenty or so songs we did, it was kind of a perfect cannon. Anything we did now would be a disservice to that.”

Min o r t hrea t (l -R): Jeff Nel so n , B ria n ba ker, ia n ma cka ye & l yl e p resl a r

While Ian is a straight talking kind of guy, there’s often been some retrospective misunderstanding and misconceptions about him and his bands. He says he feels he was “misunderstood in the beginning, misunderstood in the middle and misunderstood in the end.”

“One of the things about the Fugazi stuff,” he says, “if you listen to the early ’90s live stuff [Ian has painstakingly been documenting and uploading hundreds of live shows to the online Fugazi archive for the last five years] we have such combative fights with the audience and I think when people today listen to that they think, ‘what?!

What’s up with this guy yelling at the audience?’. But people don’t have any real idea of how fucked up those shows were – guys were beating the shit out of each other, it wasn’t that they were laughing and jumping around, they were fighting. It was gangs of skinheads and we stepped to them.

“I’ve read things with people saying, ‘oh he just heckles the audience the whole time.’They don’t understand that it was a reaction to the environment. I think when people go to punk shows today they don’t have any idea what those shows were like.”

Similarly, Ian’s desire to live his life a certain way also resulted in people attributing what became an entire movement to him. He was never happy being the figurehead of Straight Edge, although in retrospect he feels it is not the worst of responsibilities to be burdened with. “The whole idea of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll… or the

idea of alcohol, who do you think really supports that notion? Who really supports the idea of alcohol being a huge part of music? The alcohol industry,” he says.

“When we grew up in America in the 1960s and ’70s I genuinely believed that milk was akin to air and water and that you would die if you didn’t drink milk. My parents didn’t tell me that, the fucking dairy lobby told me that. If you were in school you were taught to drink milk, it was insane, it’s bullshit, I haven’t had a glass of milk in 30 years and I’m still here. It’s so obvious to me that it’s a put on, that you have to be drunk, a fuck up, use drugs, I mean why? Music for me is sacred; it’s bigger than that. I don’t buy it, I don’t agree with it that those are some kind of prerequisites.

So, when you have some band going: ‘oh, we were out of it, we didn’t care,’ well I fucking cared. That’s on you. I met a guy that was like: ‘oh, I didn’t really keep track of any of our stuff,’ and I was like: ‘okay, you didn’t. I did.’

There are some people that kind of thought it was cool to not keep track of things, that wasn’t what punk was.

For me punk was construction, I’m a construction worker.”

I mention a friend of mine who used to stay up late on amphetamines listening to Minor Threat records in his room, and ask if this bothers someone who essentially wrote music opposed to such behaviour?

“All I can do is transmit,” he says.

“I’m pretty sure Lightnin’ Hopkins never envisioned people driving

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around in a car, screaming along to his songs. Once music is out there it’s out there. However, because I’m opposed to ugliness and war and violence I am not happy about the idea that my music would ever be used, or to soundtrack, hurting someone. I don’t like that, I find that problematic but I can’t control it. There was a period of time when a white power group used one of my lyrics from Minor Threat on their website but what can I do? Your friend who was taking amphetamines and listening to Minor Threat, he was just coming from a different place.

That’s what they needed. I think music is just part of that equation. I mean, I’ve thought about this a lot, as I’ve been someone who coined the term straight edge and sort of promote – although I didn’t feel like I was promoting anything – people not to drink or use drugs... well, good! Better that than singing about the joys of heroin, especially after seeing the amount of carnage that comes out of that drug. Or like the gang-banger gangster rap guys – they weren’t all gunslingers, those people; a lot of them were art school guys who went along with what was selling. I mean, I would feel terrible if I wrote a song that actually helped people kill each other. Like deliberately, like, ‘I’m going to take out my gun and blow your fucking head-off’, and someone went, ‘yeah, I’ll do that’.

“People have often asked me what it’s like to be a big influence or have people follow you and follow your model, and it’s like, well better than if I were singing about something really destructive.”

With having such a clear head for his entire musical career, an accurately kept archive and extensive diaries, I wonder if we can ever expect a memoir of sorts? Is it not an offer as recurring as those for more Fugazi shows?

“Yeah, people have talked to me about memoirs for years. I’m not sure I like the idea. I’ve read books by many, many people that I have found inspiring but I’ve also read books by people who are just really mean and desperate.

Here’s what I think: the world is filled with trash and I’m interested in not adding to that pile. I feel like a record you don’t listen to is a piece of trash, a book you’ve not read is a piece of trash, so if I make something I want to make sure it’s something that adds value.

“My instinctual approach to the past has been that I didn’t feel like I had a choice, that I had to write a song, so I assume that should I do it I would have to really be compelled to write.

Then maybe I’ll think about a book but if I just sit down and do a book then I’m just filling in the blanks.”

Ian then has to dash to “go for tea” at his Dad’s house. He’ll then go back to being a construction worker.

It’s Good To Stalk With the help of The Fat White Family, Sheffield trio The Eccentronic Research Council have produced a new concept record about a fictional band and their obsessive superfan Photography: gabriel green / writer: ian roebuck

After maneuvering her way onto our red leather booth, Maxine Peake is saying sorry to Dean Honer and Adrian Flanagan. Not for her dramatic late entrance or for her frighteningly efficient breakfast order of boiled egg and soldiers, but in apology for calling her two band mates “her freaks” in a national newspaper. Flanagan, who had read the article in The Telegraph two days ago, is the first to react. “We can’t

walk the streets in Sheffield now because of you!”

“I took it as a compliment,” says Honer. Peake settles in with a lungbusting cackle.

Not so long ago Maxine Peake the actress was yet to meet Flanagan and Honer the musicians, and their daringly original Eccentronic Research Council were yet to play one note.

They came together – these three

freaks – via a Chrome Hoof gig in Manchester.

“Back in the day I was on Facebook and one evening I had been to see a gig and I put on how fantastic it was,” explains Peake. “Well, I got a message back from Adrian saying if you like Chrome Hoof you will like my band and that’s sort of where it started really.” She dips her first soldier.

Flanagan’s band, The Chanteuse

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and the Crippled Claw, were an electronic duo from Sheffield and they needed an actress.

“I said: ‘Would you dress as a bunny rabbit and have a water pistol fight with me,’” he says. “I offered her a Thunderbird and a pickled egg and she still hasn’t got them. She emails me twice a week saying where is this Thunderbird?”

“And then I got paid in a rockabilly

LP and a signed Pat Phoenix picture, which was OK by me.

“The band evolved from there,” continues Peake. “We found we both had a mutual interest in the Pendle witches [a historic witch trial from Lancashire, 1612], so we decided to have a field trip to Pendle in my little car to sort of find witches. We didn’t find any although we saw lots of strange people. We came away from that and said we’d write something.

Within a week Adrian called me and said I’ve done it, so that became our first album. Then we went to Dean’s studio to record it.”

What came out of Dean’s studio was ‘1612 Underture’, a witch’s haven of analogue sounds and the band’s first concept album, it’s propulsive synth groove reminiscent of Radiophonic Workshop or Bruce Haack. Flanagan provided a rocktronica-tinged influence from his time with Kings Have Long Arms, and Honer brought with him production expertise harking back to All Seeing I, a diverse late ’90s dance act responsible for pop hits ‘The Beat Goes On’ and ‘Walk Like A Panther’.

“I write all the dialogue and Dean does all the production. Maxine just comes in and raps. She’s pretty good at reading!” says Flanagan with some comedic authority.

“There isn’t much input needed with me,” she says.

“No, you’re right, it’s all about the output.”

Used to seeing Peake in BBC dramas like Silk and The Village, now the actress was fronting it out as a musician.

“I couldn’t believe it,” she says. “I had only gone round my friends to do a bit of voice on a record. Oh my god, those first gigs were chaotic. My partner joked: ‘I bet this was what it was like watching the first Velvet Underground shows.’ If something goes wrong on stage [when acting] you know it’s a disaster, but I didn’t realise a gig doesn’t always work like that. Adrian was screaming at the sound guy and it was all going a bit mental.”

Last soldier finished and more tea ordered, we discuss how weird it must be, going from promoting something like Hamlet at Manchester’s Royal Exchange to ERC’s forthcoming album, released May 18. “It is a bit strange, but the pressure is off and it’s nice to let Adrian and Dean have a say – they’re more interesting anyway. Some journalists want to ask you about how you researched your character but sometimes, very rarely mind, I think I didn’t research at all; I just turned up and read my lines!’

From witchcraft to stalking, ERC’s new act is perhaps their boldest vision yet. ‘Johnny Rocket, Narcissist & Music Machine… I’m Your Biggest Fan’ is the year’s first and last album about a fictional band called Moonlandingz,

their frontman Johnny Rocket and his unnamed stalker, played in convincing spoken word by Peake. It’s set in a place called Valhalla Dale based on, well, Flanagan’s life, really. “I thought of me when I thought of Johnny Rocket,” he says. “Valhalla Dale is Abbeydale in Sheffield, very clever isn’t it.”

So everything is real, down to the very last detail?

“I was writing a story about being stalked and having that claustrophobia of someone watching what you do and following you around and it’s all from personal experience. When you’re at a certain level, playing to a massive amount of people then maybe there will be twenty odd fans who are quite obsessive. When you get that on a smaller scale and it is just one person then yeah it is frightening.” Flanagan is deadly serious.

“This is the Adrian Flanagan memorial album.” Peake laughs her fantastic laugh to lighten the mood.

Heard on face value, ‘Johnny Rocket…’ is a startling album, almost a radio play, shot through with black humour, striking melodies and towards the climax even political satire.Yet with Adrian’s admission that everything is grounded in reality, it becomes a remarkable piece of art. “Pretty much word for word it’s true,” he says. “I

Saoudi. With their help the Moonlandingz have made an EP.They’re even being played on the radio. “We like to make an effort,” Flanagan rationalises with a smile.

“The band didn’t exist but the idea existed so we thought why not ask Lias and Saul to get involved,” says Honer.

“They were really up for it and that kind of made it more of a thing really, rather than me and Adrian tinkering away with it. We just gave it more depth.”

As if on queue Lias saunters up to our table, offering up a wave and generous smile, his shirt untucked, his hair awry. “Breakfast is it,” he says as the table gets up to greet him.

“We’ve had two boiled egg and soldiers.”

“The soldiers have nothing to do with breakfast,” manages Flanagan.

The bond is immediate, not least because ‘Johnny Rocket…’ will be released via Fat White Family’s own label, Without Consent.

He settles down to await his sausage sandwich and tells me about their unlikely relationship. “Yeah it was a very easy decision,” he days. “I really like what they do so it was a no brainer for us. It took practically no persuasion to be in the Moonlandingz too.You got us on the train instead of a Megabus; that was about all it required. A train

‘We grew up as Thatcher’s children and we have strong views on things’ think if you give too much away on social networks people can gauge where you live, people can gauge where you hang out, they can ingratiate themselves with your friends all that kind of stuff, you know. It is very easy to do – it’s shocking but it’s happening.”

I ask if Flanagan used to wear tin foil like the character Johnny Rocket and if his stalker ever wrote to him commending him on his jumper, a memorable line delivered so well by Peake. “Yep, right to the detail pretty much, even to the tin foil. I used to wrap my head in tin foil before my gigs, just walk on stage covered in tin foil. I did a gig at the Manchester Deaf Institute, the email just said, you were amazing tonight, I really loved your jumper. It was a shit jumper, but a nice shade of blue.”

This rampant attention to detail is evident throughout ERC’s work.They’ve dealt with concept album’s before but this one takes aim far beyond their previous efforts, so much so that Johnny Rocket’s fictional band Moonlandingz are ably brought to life by The Fat White Family’s Saul Adamczewski and Lias

ticket, that was a deal breaker.”

Flanagan, as ever, has the last word.

“Luckily, Megabus do trains as well.”

Whilst Flanagan readily admits Johnny Rocket is a character based upon himself, it seems Lias has relished the chance to embody his creation.

“Well, once I get past Derby I am Johnny Rocket,” he tells me. “Right now, in London, I am Fat Whites – I shift. Usually, I am just shitting it myself with a Fat Whites gig. It’s always a bit nerve wracking but with Johnny Rocket I guess it would be fine. Some of the skills are transferable, that’s why I got asked to do the job… either that or my good looks I don’t know!”

Listening away through the breakfast debris is Flanagan. “You remind me of a younger version of myself,” he says. “The Fat Whites played in Sheffield a few weeks back and he walked on stage and declared, good evening I am Johnny Rocket.”

Lias, looking pretty pleased with himself, continues: “It’s difficult to be two people but I can deal with it. He’s not too far removed from my Fat White identity, he’s a little bit more

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dangerous, a little bit more sexy and a little bit more elusive.”

In a climate where politics is pushed under the table, a music industry taboo that’s more business than everyday life, both the Fat White Family and ERC are refreshingly open in their opinions.

“You can’t help but be political when you come from the north,” says Flanagan. “Growing up in Salford and living in Sheffield, witnessing the decimation of families and towns, it still exists, there are parts of Sheffield that are ghost towns. We’re coming up to the second year of Thatcher’s death and there is an election.”

Thatcher’s spectre hangs heavy on both bands’ work, and for Lias in particular Thatcher’s death marked a pivotal moment. “When we came out, and still now, there was so little of the music industry politicised or even talking about that kind of thing so we thought we needed to wave that flag.

When she did die we had that death party down in Brixton and we were in the paper the next day so it kind of became our break in a way. Thank god she bit the dust as it gave us a platform to express ourselves. For us it was a vehicle; you get asked about that kind of stuff all the time. I wouldn’t say we’re a really political band – we’re not Billy Bragg – but it’s just more of an unspoken thing between a lot of like-minded people.”

At this point Peake, who notably has been an active communist in the past, speaks up.

“I find a lot of younger bands find it hard to express an opinion and we grew up as Thatcher’s children and we have strong views on things. I was ten at the time and I grew up with communists so you look back to the ’80s and you see a movement.”There is a stir around the table as waiters buzz around, perhaps wanting to brush such vital discussion under our spotless white tablecloth. Adrian pointedly ends the debate, this time more emphatically than ever. “There might be more awareness with the Internet and social networking, but there is definitely more apathy too. You just click a button now and people who come on marches or usually make an effort can’t afford to come to London and march, it’s like a hundred and fucking thirty quid for a train ticket, do you know what I mean, unless they come down on the Megabus.”

Peake rises, there is a clatter of cutlery as she exclaims: “Bring on the Megabus revolution!”

Living In America Former member of alt-rap group Das Racist, Heems has just released his debut album, ‘Eat, Prey, Thug’ – a deeply personal and political record about the sorry regression of race relations in the US Photography: guy eppel / writer: daniel dylan wray

Since the mind-boggling brilliance of Kendrick Lamar’s ‘To Pimp a Butterfly’ landed in all our ears this month, along with the depressingly foul response to Kanye West’s Glastonbury headliner announcement, it’s likely that most of 2015’s discourse around the politics of hip-hop will be consumed by these two, contextually seismic, events.

However, in the same month a record was released that garnered much less worldwide media fanfare and drama – Heems’ ‘Eat, Prey, Thug’. In that record, however, we have perhaps one of the fiercest, most personal and political rap records of the year.

Heems is the solo project of Himanshu Suri, one-time member of the Queens-based alt-hip-hop group Das Racist. He has released some solo mixtapes, such as 2012’s ‘Nehru Jackets’, but this marks his first album release proper, and it weaves from the pop-leaning, Dev Hynes-featuring end of things, to the heavy melancholy that only too much self-analysis and a break-up can create. I spoke with him whilst he’s at SXSW, where not only is he playing shows but also featuring in a documentary and acting in a feature film that is screening there.

“It’s all fuelled by alcohol,” he tells me in a rare bit of downtime in Austin, whilst also taking in the hugely positive response to his album. “It’s amazing to actually see people buy the music because I’m used to putting it out for free.”

Within two minutes we are into the politics of the record, a political angle that comes from Suri’s position of being an Indian living in post-9/11 America. The attack on the World Trade Center is something that runs through the core of much of the record, or at least its on-going impact and detrimental fall-out on minority communities throughout the U.S. “It’s been a long time coming for a piece of work like this to come out,” he says.

“9/11 is like this dark cloud that hangs

over New York in the same way that, in certain communities of colour, things like mental health and alcoholism are just dark clouds that hang over families and they don’t talk about it.”

Despite this being an album that needed to come out, it was not without apprehension and anxiety on Suri’s part. “I mean, I’m not very confident at singing,” he says, “and some of the reviews – or one – did mention that.

But yeah, to put myself out there and be so vulnerable is definitely different.

As I’ve said in other interviews, I felt like I was hiding behind humour and samples [in Das Racist]... I always had trouble accepting that my story was important or that my voice was important and now I’ve come to a point where I have accepted that. Even if it is depressing, that’s the reality.”

Is it, I put to him, a case of it becoming increasingly impossible to have a sense of humour in regards to race relations and racism in the U.S right now?

“You know, honestly, I didn’t even think about that” he says, slightly taken aback, “but the thing that happened with Ferguson last year had a huge affect on me, personally. It was a personal thing; it really put a lot of weight on me. So, yeah, I think to a certain extent you can’t fucking jump around with these things anymore, you need to be straight forward and it’s exhausting sometimes trying to figure out the best way to approach these things and, like, educating the fucking white man on the experience of being a person of colour. It gets exhausting over the course of five years – it’s just, like, how can I get it out without beating around the bush?

“It’s not like a new thing,” he says of the palpable sense of tension in the air that’s followed Ferguson. “It’s like 9/11; it being this thing that happened 14 years ago but the fact that it resonates with people, that shows me that these are things that we see and

deal with everyday.”

Much of ‘Eat, Prey, Thugs’ was recorded in Bombay, an environment in which race took on a different perspective for Suri. “Being out there, I didn’t have to think about race,” he says. “It’s like if I’m in a room over there, it’s just people: a poet, an artist, a musician, whatever. We we’re all Indian people doing this. It is different, though – on the one hand they don’t know what it’s like to not be an artist in a capitalist environment but, on the other, also to be an artist in a capitalist environment where there is racial undertones.

“You’re aware that you are in this system that you’re fighting against to make your art that is also embedded in whiteness in America, whereas in India they are rebelling against people who look like them and sound like them.”

Suri tells me that despite his exposure to racial tension – and flatout racism – in the U.S it is not something that is universally shared in India. “They love it,” he says. “There’s this unfortunate lingering anglophilia from colonialism. The people that I encountered, typically, were either upper class or they were educated by college’s in America. Or they were my family who left India to go to America, not from poverty but the middle class.

Their views of the west is so positive, it’s almost too positive. I’m the one who is critical of the west and people look at me like, ‘what’s wrong with you’, and I’m critical of India too.

Most of the artwork that I’ve been making is about skin lightening creams and the hypocrisies and ideas of race in India.”

So in many senses the sort of American Dream mentality projected

by America at large has succeeded in shaping the views of people from outside the country?

“I don’t think America projects it, I think immigrants do. Only politicians

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and immigrants talk about the American Dream; American’s take it for granted – and what is the dream?

To just blindly be a capitalist? To have the boss that tells them what days to take off and when they can drop their kids off to school?

“I feel like American’s at this point don’t have any understanding of the American Dream because it’s normal to them. Immigrants are some of the most patriotic people there are, that’s the whole ironic thing. We’re – not we as in I, but my parents and my community – the ones who take the test and learn about American history and the way that congress works so that we can become a citizen and even then we’re not treated the same so what does citizenship mean?”

And does politicised rap music have an impact in India?

“Rap doesn’t really translate in India because rap is a working class medium, but the type of people who encounter music from the west in India are far from working class. So the ideals of punk and rap don’t resonate in India as much as I would like them to.”

Heems’ tracks, such as the superb ‘Flag Shopping’, manage – even in title alone – to hit home the deadly duo of patriotism and capitalism as a driving force for prosperity in a country. Says Suri: “It’s also about being a person of colour and how scary patriotism and capitalism are when you’re from a community that has consistently been exploited by those institutions.”

However, the pinnacle of the album is the devastating post-9/11 closer, ‘The Patriot Act’. In one verse Suri breaks down, in angered and exhausted detail, the effects of that piece of legislation in a post-September 11th world, and the impact it has had on communities of ethnic minorities across America.

And so we rushed to buy flags for our doors / Bright American flags that read “I am not Osama.” / And we ironed our polo shirts and we

combed our hair / And we proudly paid our taxes / And we immediately donated to a local white politician / And we yelled “I’m just like you” as quietly and calmly as we could / So as not to raise too much attention and be labelled a troublemaker and lose one’s job / Like when my name was too long to pronounce at work and raised too much attention / And I was labelled a troublemaker, so I changed it.

“I say on that song, ‘Got what we ask for, someone to listen’, and I say that tongue-in-cheek about our phone’s being tapped – about our

legislation that has reduced our privacy.

It’s beyond the racial implications, it’s an Orwellian thing.”

What ‘Eat, Prey, Thug’ boils down to is a search for identity, both in terms of discovery and definition. It’s something that’s at the heart of all rap, according to Suri, who tells me: “Identity is constantly changing and an album is a snapshot of where you are and that’s why this album is particularly dark compared to my other ones.”

Adding to the darkness – beyond the sorry state of race relations in modern America – is a recent romantic breakup. “The only way to experience the daily pain of being a person of colour in a country that constantly wants to put you down is what it’s like to have your heart broken in a real way,” says Suri. “So when I talk about socio-political heartbreak it’s romantic heartbreak because that’s almost the only way to explain how emotionally exhausting and how painful it is to fucking live as a person of colour [in the U.S.]. So in some way the break-up stuff isn’t that different from the political shit, it’s all one and the same.”

As ‘The Patriot Act’ fades out the album it is punctuated with a small, pithy and deeply sarcastic – yet also fatigued – laugh. It is a very brief state that allows Suri to laugh at the absurdity of such an unrelenting cyclical situation before that laughter resumes to resignation and the album dies, knowing that the cycle will continue. The laugh is essentially a cry.

Of course it is symbolic, and what hits home so poignantly and intensely about ‘Eat, Prey, Thug’ as a whole is, as Suri pointed out earlier about Ferguson, it’s not that these revelations are new to us; not that this record is exposing a rancid, deep-set prejudice that has spawned in modern-day society; but that this is still fucking going on in 2015.

community being infiltrated, someone listening in on the phone. Yet as a community all we wanted was for someone to listen to us. The Patriot Act is still relevant and on the flipside my medium is rap, a black medium, and if you watch The Wire one of my favourite things in that is one of the FBI guys saying, ‘oh, I can get you those phone taps. Thank God for the Patriot Act!’ It’s actively being used to not only keep down brown, Muslim men but also black American’s. It’s just wide-blanket

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Photography: phil sharp writer: sam walton

T

here’s a piece of received wisdom surrounding the making and selling of pop music that says musicians are generally happy to talk about that process, or at least about something – how they feel about the world, the human condition, pop culture, their life story – that might help potential listeners frame the music they’ve made, and so derive deeper enjoyment from it. On a simplistic level, Nicky Wire talking about Marxism might enrich interpretations of ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’; on a more diaphanous one, listening to Stuart Braithwaite discuss Scottish independence arguably influences how someone understands an album like ‘Come On Die Young’. But almost regardless of the sentiment and scale of discussion – from quiet Stipean epigrams to Kanye-sized rent-a-quotes – the theory goes that a bit of discussion helps everyone get along: the artist gets to explain their creation, the listener adds another dimension to their experience, and of course the bloodsucking journalist gets a sprinkling of stardust on their otherwise drab, miserable life.

Accordingly, therefore, there’s also a received wisdom when a musician won’t talk: that they’re haughty, holierthan-thou, too good for this shit or maybe just plain stupid. Indeed, so ingrained is the former assumption – that the musician will play ball – that another explanation surrounding the latter one is often overlooked: that the problem lies not in unwillingness, but in inability. Because while a lot of artists clearly create because it’s a satisfying expressive outlet, a smaller cohort also exist who do what they do not because they enjoy it, necessarily, but simply because they have to. They make their art as a coping strategy, as some hard-wired response to life, because if they didn’t they’d struggle to get by. For that sort of mind, the idea of having to converse with a nosy stranger about the very thing that keeps them afloat is understandably daunting – and then actually doing it, on the industrial scale demanded by the modern-day promotional juggernaut, on top of the already potentially uncomfortable act of actually making and publishing their material, is a step too far.

And with that sort of framing it’s probably a good juncture to introduce a musician like LoneLady – or Julie Campbell to her landlord – who regrets that her stage name has become “a selffulfilling prophecy”, who admits that she pays for the way she writes (alone and intensely) with damage to her own psychological well-being, and who has made her second, wonderfully engrossing album of organic, propulsive and techno-flecked postpunk by herself in a “quite oppressive” tower block, populated by recovering alcoholics and people with mental health problems. Because although ‘Hinterland’ is full of effortless hooks, skin-burrowing basslines and that sense of perpetual groove that oozes from the most moreish of dance music,

ripe for low-ceilinged rooms with masses of people, it also works as solitary music for walking through deserted building sites at yellow-skyed dusk, past graffitied skips and flytipped sofas.

There’s an accompanying desperation to the album, particularly in Campbell’s singing voice: uncertain and fragile, it yelps and yearns through tracks, paradoxically stoic but needy, and when certain lines jump from their moorings of cowbells and chiming guitars, the dislocation is striking: “To function, I had to build a room to contain all the panic,” she repeats in one song. In another, she asks: “How did I become so pared, typing SOS in an empty square?” The latter, she explains, is about “reaching an extreme,

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and not a pleasant one.” For Campbell, this artistic process is something darker than a fun form of expression, and consequently, understandably, not the most comfortable topic for discussion.

When we meet in her dressing room just before the soundcheck for her first London show for five years, Campbell is friendly, and her soft Mancunian burr is welcoming and warm. But she’s also mouse-like – nervous about the coming gig and clearly uncomfortable: she answers each question succinctly and then waits for the next, reluctant to volunteer unrequested information and seldom feeling able to turn what is, admittedly, a charade of human interaction into a full-blown conversation.

Self-fulfilling prophecy When Julie Campbell named her solo project LoneLady, she couldn’t have known just how apt that title would become. The making of her new album, ‘Hinterland’, was an isolating, painful experience, at the top of a tower block in Manchester

Sam Walton: It’s been five years since ‘Nerve Up’ [Campbell’s debut], and ‘Hinterland’ is a lot more expansive – was the long wait a result of breaking free of the previous enclosed, bedroom aesthetic?

Julie Campbell: Actually ‘Hinterland’ was even more intensively a solo and bedroom endeavour than ‘Nerve Up’. I didn’t have a rehearsal space, just a home studio set up in the same room as my bed, so I basically spent a great deal of time there, alone, making this record, writing all the parts, playing all the parts. It sounds like there are more voices on this one, sure, but a big part of that is because I had the drummachine beat just doing its thing, forming a core groove. That made all the songs longer, and allowed a bit of space for me to be quite playful, and take twists and turns. So there are more voices, but not more people: it’s still just me, writing and playing alone.

And despite the gap, it certainly wasn’t five years in the making – I’d say closer to 18 months really. After ‘Nerve Up’ I did various bits and pieces, but it got to a point where I had to just pull the shutters down and turn inwards.

motorway on the outskirts of the city centre, just being surrounded by concrete… I just had to be resourceful – you know, write about what you know – so I would write about a blank wall, projecting imaginary scenes onto it, or write about concrete because there’s so much of it around me.

SW: It sounds like your day-to-day situation can get quite bleak. Is it difficult to stay resilient?

JC: Well I think it’s tipped over now actually and is starting to be something that’s negatively impacting on me after quite a few years. I find it quite oppressive at the moment, my surroundings. It’s paradoxical because I’m compelled to retreat into it and into writing – and part of me almost likes that. But you do also pay for it with your mental well-being – all the connections to the outside world kind of become severed.

SW: Is that how you work best – quite intensively, with tunnel vision?

JC: Yeah, I can’t do two things at once.

I’m not a multi-tasker in any way and I have to shut everything off completely.

SW:That sounds quite lonely – do you live by yourself too?

JC: Yeah. Well, I don’t really have a choice. And I know a lot of artists go through that immersive experience, but I definitely felt like I was in a cell when it was happening to me. But then again it did feed the creative process, and helped inform the sounds I’m attracted to.

SW: Do you have a day job or anything, to make ends meet?

JC: No. I manage to eek out a living – the place I live is very, very cheap, in a tower block in Manchester. It’s a sort of halfway house for people who are sort of mentally ill and alcoholic – all the dregs of society rock up in this place.

SW: It sounds like there’s a real conflict between you trying to pursue your artistic visions and being driven mad by that very pursuit. Do you ever have moments where you just long to live somewhere comfortable, and relaxing, maybe, among some friends?

JC: Oh yeah, I’d like those things, sure.

But it’s not to be.

SW: Oh right… so how did you end up there then?

JC: Oh I’ve just been in there for years really – it’s the first place I lived when I moved out of my parents’ house. But because it is – was – social housing, that’s where we all end up. Those are my neighbours.

SW: Really?

JC: Well, not seemingly, no. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend being a solo artist, but I’m doing it now, and I don’t know how to do it in any other way.

SW: Those surroundings must inform your writing…

JC: Well, I don’t tend to write about people at all – I write very much about place – so definitely living in a tower block has massively impacted on me.

This sense of being compressed into a concrete cube has affected me, and not in a good way. Living next to the

SW: I suppose you do style yourself as LoneLady though, so there must be an element of intentionality to it somewhere?

JC: Oh I chose that name when I was young and foolish, and it’s now become a self-fulfilling prophecy – I think you should beware what you name yourself; now, I just don’t know how else to be. I’ve spent a great deal of my adult life in cold, damp mill spaces and I sort of now feel uncomfortable or unhappy in places

that aren’t like that. It’s become a comfort zone: I’ve made these places work for me and can be myself in them. It is a sort of rejection of the shiny city centre, which doesn’t have anything for me, I think.

makes them dance around their kitchen or whatever, and that’s good.

It’s joyful, the record, but there are also haunted moments on it too, and I like that too. But that’s that record – I’m thinking about the next one now.

SW: So you prefer to loiter around the outskirts of cities?

JC: I do, yeah, like a semi-vagrant.

SW: Do you think you’ll do things differently next time? Will you seek to avoid the kind of uncomfortable headspace that you encountered while recording ‘Hinterland’?

JC: I don’t know. I’ve certainly learned from the experience. After the first album, it was a hard transition from only making music for yourself and playing local gigs. I hadn’t travelled that much at that point, so to be suddenly pushed into this world, this machine, by yourself – I didn’t adapt to it well.

But I’ve got more experience now, and I’m handling things better these days, so this one will be okay I think.

She smiles with that last response, but as I try a few more questions, Campbell’s sighing pauses and frowns between sentences become more frequent. And these aren’t signs of irritation or boredom – instead, Campbell’s demeanour has more in common with a recently bereaved spouse having to fill in administrational forms with a council employee: there’s an acknowledgement of having to endure a necessary evil, even though the intrusion, here, now, is unwelcome. I attempt to examine a different side of her album instead.

SW: ‘Hinterland’ feels like a club record to me – it has that sense of collectivity and propulsion. In fact, it’s interesting that you wrote it in one concrete box as it could so easily be transferred into another…

JC: Ha, yeah. I’d like to visualise the music happening in a slightly subterranean club vibe – that would be cool.

SW: Do you ever go clubbing?

JC: In my mind, and in my music, yes, all the time. But actually, in real life?

No. I do think that’s something I should probably do, but I sort of don’t know where to find it.

SW: The one track on ‘Hinterland’ without any beats is ‘Flee’, and that aspect makes it sort of an album centrepiece.What were your thoughts behind producing it differently?

JC: Well that was just a landscape for me – a very interior landscape, mind – and I suppose it was just the most exposed one. I’d reached an extremity by that point with this kind of solitary writing process, and wanted to mark it. That’s what that song’s about: reaching an extreme – and not a pleasant one.

SW: It sounds like quite a painful experience…

JC: Yeah. It’s quite a desperate place. I think I’d had enough by that point.

SW: How do you feel about those experiences now that the album’s finished and you’ve got something to be proud of?

JC: Well, people are telling me how it

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SW: Does it help having more people around you, too, now you’re touring?

JC: Well yes, I now understand the importance of having a posse, and it’s not just some posturing thing – it’s actually really helpful and important, on a mental, psychological and practical level…

“Anyway, listen,” she cuts across herself, “I can hear rumblings from the other room. I think I’m going to have to go.” She’s right: the sound of warming amps and drums being tuned heralds her soundcheck, and barely 15 minutes after sitting down, Campbell escapes to a place where she clearly feels happier.

When she performs a few hours later, her diffidence and discomfort in the spotlight lingers, but she manages to batter that anxiety into a forceful, bloody-minded, almost combative shape when on stage. It’s a persuasive and punchy show, where Campbell’s decision not to acknowledge the crowd or give any sort of encore feels empowered and artistically deliberate, rather than something borne of selfdoubt or unease. One senses, though, that any sort of public interaction, musical or otherwise, doesn’t come easily to Campbell – her music is expression enough. It’s not that she doesn’t want to do all the other stuff that received wisdom says that she, as a jobbing musician, should; it’s just that she seems prevented from doing so by herself.

Love Is The Drug

or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Josh Tillman Photography: gem harris / writer: stuart stubbs

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Before he became Father John Misty, a miserable Josh Tillman spent seven years writing the kind of music he thought was expected of him.

Then he got high, fell in love and exorcised his demons via a new, sardonic album about the woman that saved his life “Have you done mushrooms before?”

I haven’t.

“Things that sound unbelievably pedantic now, like, ‘I’ll just be myself’, in that state of mind, on mushrooms, the adult mind that’s been taught to cooperate with culture and to hate oneself is silenced. So these sentiments like ‘be yourself’ become elevated to a place that they should be at, without the cynicism and self-editing.”

Drugs have worked for Josh Tillman, but whilst dropping hallucinogens in the desert directly inspired his Father John Misty project, it’s something else that makes his second album,‘I LoveYou, Honeybear’, such a winner.

Tillman’s eureka moment accompanies his every mention in the music press, but we can hardly be blamed for that. If only more artist origin stories took place halfway up a tree in Big Sur and featured a ton of fungi and the psychedelic Ayahuasca and a musician stark bollock naked.

Wonderfully, this episode isn’t the most interesting thing about Tillman.

It’s become quite passé, in fact, although yet to get quite as boring as the fact that Tillman drummed in US arena folk band Fleet Foxes from 2008 to 2012. As he keeps finding himself insisting, he was somewhat begrudgingly a gun for hire, as the boyfriend of band singer Robin Pecknold’s sister.

‘I Love You, Honeybear’ – released in February via Bella Union and Sub Pop – is a love letter from Tillman, not to Aja Pecknold but to (and about) his new bride, photographer and filmmaker Emma Garr.

Tillman is besotted, in that real way where people exclusively refer to their partner by Christian name only. Surely there’s no need to say “my wife, Emma”, when we’re talking about the most important person in the world? It has a neutralising affect, like when your own name is said back to you by someone you’ve only just met. When Tillman casually mentions Emma to me within the first few minutes of shaking hands, it feels like we’re all old friends. Later on, as I tee up a question about the personal content of ‘…

Honeybear’ and note that Garr is a huge part of the record, Tillman can’t help but correct me, saying: “… well, she’s a huge part of my life.” I ask if she ever asked him not to divulge certain parts of their relationship on the album. “No. She’s a freak,” he says.

“We just understand each other.”

‘I Love You, Honeybear’ features all the good bits of love, and all the horror too. The anxiety, the jealousy, the pettiness and, for Tillman’s part, his narcissism, regrets and failings with intimacy. It is not, then, eleven reimaginings of ‘Your Song’. It’s a record full of ugly fucking, drugs and tantrums, and how intoxicating it can be when you find someone you can ignore the rest of the world with.

Furthermore than its anti-Disney portrayal of relationships, it’s all true to Tillman (and a majority of it to Garr, also) who over-shares in the I narrative, about a misjudged threesome in ‘The Night Josh Tillman Came To Our Apt.’, the near-death of another, overdosed lover in ‘Strange Encounter’ and the insecurities of being on the road while your woman is back home doing God

knows what with God knows who on ‘Nothing Good Ever Happens At The Goddamn Thirsty Crow’. Incidentally, these are the three tracks that are not about Garr (with the threesome in question having happened the night before the couple met), while the album’s opening line came directly from her – ‘Mascara, blood, ash and cum, on the Rorschach sheets where we make love.’ As Tillman told The Guardian earlier this year: “I just wanted to write about love without bullshitting.”

The record has only been received positively. Love’s sour coating has played its monstrous part there, with Father John Misty’s sardonic wit filling in the gaps. It’s a frequently hilarious listen, full of double-take punch lines that you must have misheard over the sophisticated arrangements. ‘I wanna take you in the kitchen / Lift up your wedding dress someone was probably murdered in,’ from ‘Chateau Lobby #4 (in C for Two Virgins)’, is one; another, from ‘The Night Josh Tillman Came To Our Apt.’, is: ‘She says, ‘Like, literally music is the air she breathes / And the malaprops make me wanna fucking scream’ / I wonder if she even knows what that word means / Well, it’s ‘literally’ not that’.

Tillman’s humour is another of those topics that’s become impossible to omit from any article or conversation about him. In person he’s as dry and cool as his music and photographed image has you hoping. He’s a handsome devil, 6ft 4”. You can see how he’s amassed so much material about shagging around. It’s later that evening that I see his real charm offensive,

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though, at a solo in-store show at London’s Rough Trade East. Tillman’s inter-song quips appear to be almost as captivating as the songs themselves.

The following day he tells me that he felt as though he was putting the shop audience to sleep. At our photo shoot he’s on even better form, following a decent night’s sleep, and that evening I experience the full force of a Father John Misty live show – its razzamatazz, proficiency and all.

When we first meet he slides himself into the booth I’m sat at in a Mexican restaurant. When I ask how he’s doing, he starts to dictate how current interview features with him could all begin. At once it’s confirmation of Josh Tillman the knowing wise-cracker, and a reminder that the success of ‘I Love You, Honeybear’ has recently seen him become overfamiliar with the game of self-promotion and talking to people like me.

“Arrrrrgh… See, I don’t want your first line to be, like, ‘I sat down with the visibly frazzled Josh Tillman, aka former Fleet Foxes drummer Father John Misty, at a modern Mexican diner.

He’s done a lot of press and it’s starting to show on his age-worn face, haunted

by the ghost of his past. His evangelical childhood looms large at the beginning of the conversation…’” He plucks a knife out of the silver tumbler on the table and simulates slitting his wrists.

It’s ok, he insists, conversations with journalists have become his gauge for how well the album has been received.

He hasn’t read the reviews, noting that even the good ones can be “deeply disturbing” when they miss the point.

I ask him why he thinks this new album has been so successful.

“I get the impression that I’m articulating things much in the way that a comic would. A comedian’s bread and butter is their ability to articulate what people really think about something. Y’know, when a comic says something that feels so obvious it almost shocks you that you have never articulated that for yourself?

“It just means that my criteria is very different to the world’s, because right up until this thing came out I was convinced I was jumping the shark, and that no one was ready to hear this kind of shit from me. I’m the most tone-deaf guy in the room so I’m the least reliable source. If people hated it, I could tell you exactly why.”

He says: “It’s definitely not the

ground-breaking musical stylings that’s filling the seats,” although I don’t think that’s entirely true.

With the exception of ‘True Affection’ (miscast on an album that otherwise has no place for electro pop, but brilliant in isolation, all the same), ‘… Honeybear’ exists in a world similar to that of Father John Misty’s 2012 debut, ‘Fear Fun’. But where that album was so entrenched in the lightly stoned, country/folk sound of Laurel Canyon, this one also amplifies the blues and rock’n’roll elements of classic American songwriting, and throws in ’70s AOR, luxurious orchestrations and, on ‘Chateau Lobby #4 (in C for Two Virgins)’, Mariachi trumpets. It sounds like George Harrison’s guitar is playing on ‘When You’re Smiling and Astride Me’, and that Elton John is singing ‘… The Goddamn Thirsty Crow’. There’s more than one reason why Uncut described the record as Father John Misty’s own take on ‘Two Virgins’.

The point is that while the jokes about death and sex will get your attention, the song’s themselves – their arrangements and melodies, and Tillman’s often underappreciated vocal talents – will have you coming back

for more. The misanthropic humour never gets old, but it probably would if the tunes weren’t up to scratch.

“There are moments on the album where I employed bad lyrics,” he says.

“Like, ‘Bored in the USA’ is a terrible lyric, but the song is about ideology, and ideology is always very sophisticated and almost invisible, and in order to disrupt this song about that I threw in this canned laughter and corny lyrics. “‘When You’re Smiling And Astride Me’ – that whole first part of the tune, they’re very general sentiments (‘I would never try to change you’, ‘I love you as you are’, ‘I can’t believe I found you’). That song had a very long gestation period where I wrote those lyrics in the first year that I was with Emma, and prior to having really been tested in the relationship, where you can just go around saying whatever you want. But those lyrics didn’t inspire me to pursue the song. It wasn’t until our relationship grew and deepened, and we had this particular fight over this tendency that I had, or this unwillingness to relinquish control of the way in which I was being perceived by her, and in a lot of ways my narcissism refused to let me

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be seen for what I am, quote-unquote. It’s a horrible fear. Anyway, that fight lead me back to that song and I was like, ‘god, these lyrics are bullshit, and everything I’m doing in this relationship is making a mockery of these sentiments’, so there’s a conversation happening between the first three verses and the back half of the track – like, let’s say something fucking real. What if, in a song like this, that’s sort of engineered for big grand sentiments, what if you included sentiments about vulnerability and nakedness that are kind of in total conflict with the song itself?”

What starts as a traditional easylistening soul ballad nosedives into something else immediately after its middle eight. Stylistically, ‘When You’re Smiling And Astride Me’ unwavers, but all of a sudden Tillman is singing about kissing his brother in his dreams and “finding God knows in my jeans.” Next he moons: ‘You see me as I am, it’s true / The aimless, fake drifter and the horny man-child, Mamma’s boy to boot.’

He tells me how you can almost hear the confusion of the hired-in backing vocalists on the track. “It’s very disruptive,” he says. “You need

that counterbalance, and that’s what I’m trying to create: a very tenuous, albeit inhabitable space for these diametrically opposed sentiments.

“So anyway,” he suddenly says, “there certainly are moments that are a bit of a red herring. The album title itself is a total red herring. That song [the title track] is about these two defeated cynics who are in love [specifically Tillman and Garr].

Y’know, like, ‘I can’t believe I’m even saying this. Is this what two people in love even say? I love you, honeybear.’

“I’ve never had any problem wildly misrepresenting myself. I enjoy that, and that’s happening in this thing on an atomic level. I mean, the name – Father John Misty??!!”

O

ne day in Big Sur, California, having walked out of the most successful folk band of the last decade, Josh Tillman, high as you like, took off his clothes, climbed a tree and came back down as Father John Misty. It’s a stupid name that means nothing, and that’s what pleases Tillman the most – he gets a kick out of seeing it on posters and T-shirts and illuminated signs outside venues.

The natural assumption is that he’d created a fictional alter ego – his own Ziggy Stardust – and not simply because of the number of mushrooms he’d ingested. Father John Misty wasn’t just replacing Fleet Foxes, it was also killing off an 8-album solo career under the name J. Tillman. So which of the two projects were people going to presume was the more autobiographical?

The J. Tillman records were miserable affairs – albums of minimal acoustic guitar and whispered lyrics, seemingly tailored for the scenes at the end of The O.C., when news had just broken that a teenage student had drowned. Says Tillman: “There was one dimension to those J. Tillman records, and humour was obviously not on the menu.”

As one J.Tillman record moped into the next with little-to-no progression, it slowly dawned on their author that there was no longer much of his true self in them. He’d spend seven years (from 2003 to 2010) walking in the wrong direction, noting today that from the very beginning he’d been pursuing an unattainable archetype of what a singer-songwriter is. “That was when the problems started,” he says, “when I discovered this songwriter archetype. When I discovered this musician/songwriter thing, I was like,

‘oh, I want to be that’, which starts you on this path of misdirection. You’re deluding your own essence in favour of serving an archetype.

“I can’t tell you what the music I made in my twenties was about, other than trying to appease the archetype.

That’s not to say that all that music was fraudulent – or maybe it was – but my whole thing became,‘ok, this J.Tillman thing has become an alter ego; it’s become this person that is not me’.The disparity between me and him was becoming untenable.

It says a lot that when I ask Tillman what was the first music he loved as a child he says The Muppets. He’s not even referring to the songs from The Muppets, just the show itself.

Josh Tillman was not – and to some extent still is not – a music fan. He grew up on Jim Henson, cartoon strips Calvin & Hobbes and The Far Side, and Monty Python. “Things that appeal to my appetite for disruption and satire.”

He holds in high regard his 8-yearold self, and feels that from the moment he took his clothes off and climbed that tree he became the closest he’s ever been to returning to that version of himself: that best version, undistracted and happy to be defined

by The Muppets.

“I think that what I’m doing now is way more primal in influences,” he says. “I feel like at different phases in your life you get a portal to another time. I’m 33, but when I was 30 and starting doing this thing [Father John Misty], for some reason some sort of portal opened up to 8-year-old me, where I felt like I could bypass all of this misdirection and distortion that was going on in my twenties and reconnect with these fundamental aspects of myself.

“My relationship with music was distorted in my teens and twenties because I was basically listening to music thinking, ‘which of this am I going to be’, instead of just listening. I know that not all songwriters feel this way, but for me, my position as a songwriter disrupts my ability to enjoy music. Like I’m a cannibal.

“I hear something that I love and then I’m thinking how can I use that so no one can trace it back? A lot of the time silence is preferable to me.”

When I ask what he makes of his J. Tillman records now, it’s one of two times that he clams up. The other is when I attempt to discuss religion.

“I don’t have much to say about it [his early music],” he says bluntly. “Or my childhood or religion. I regret ever having talked about it to an interviewer, ever. I wanted to get as far away from it as I could. I moved 3,000 miles away from where I grew up and never went

back – y’know, I just don’t… y’know, it’s like… yeah…” Uncharacteristically, he trails off.

Tillman’s childhood in an evangelical household has been widely documented. In Rockville, Maryland – a suburb of Washington DC – he attended a Pentecostal Messianic Jewish day school, which is a lot more involved than singing ‘Morning Has Broken’ at your weekly assembly – a token gesture just in case there’s something in it. There was speaking in tongues and public ‘healings’. He recently told The Guardian of “kids laying convulsing on the floor, talking about seeing their dead grandparents.” At home, secular music was banned, which explains why he was unable to name the music he loved as a child. No wonder it’s not something he wants to rake up. It was, by all accounts, a deeply unhappy time.

Aged 21,Tillman denounced Christ and moved to Seattle to become a musician. Post-Fleet Foxes he moved again to Los Angeles, and since marrying Emma he’s recently relocated to New Orleans, where the pair only know one another. He’s never gone back to Rockville, and his relationship with his parents remains somewhat estranged.

“I rarely think about it [religion] now,” he tells me. “In my twenties I was unbelievably angry about it and dedicated a lot of time to debunking it to myself and others, but I just don’t care anymore. There are so many more urgent things. It’s just not for me. It’s like asking me how I feel about football or something.”

We move on, but later he returns to the subject and subsequently those J. Tillman albums.

“I had a pretty miserable go of it,” he says. “I hated my childhood and a primal scene occurred and I needed some catharsis, and that’s what a lot of that music was about: dealing with what I perceived to be the fundamental betrayal of my life. So if it [his J.Tillman career] served any function for me, I guess that was it, but I just became angrier and angrier and I almost engineered the music to be alienating, so people wouldn’t get it and the angrier I could be. But I don’t quite hate myself in the way that I once did… It’s all getting very touchy feely.”

He plucks the knife from the silver tumbler once again and bares his wrist.

Y

ou’ll have to take my word for it, because you can’t tell from this conversation, but I have a sense

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of humour that is a deep part of how I perceive the world and exist in the world.”

In the few past interviews I’ve read with Father John Misty, I’ve noticed this self-conscious assurance before, but you don’t have to look far to find Tillman’s mocking wit.

When I meet him the day after our interview at his sound check, the merch stall is undergoing a stockcheck. If the garish goalkeeper tops – predominantly pink, with a repeat pattern of ‘I Love You, Honeybear’’s artwork – aren’t the joke I suspect them to be, Father John Misty’s own woman’s fragrance certainly is. It’s called ‘Innocence by Misty’, and I’m told it smells like wheat.

A lot of effort goes into these pranks. There’s a gatefold version of ‘… Honeybear’ that pops up when you open it and plays the title track in shitty midi quality – the type you find in chintzy greeting cards.

Tillman’s bogus streaming platform, SAP, goes even further, as it imagines a world where all music sounds like that, as artists are happy to strip their songs of key components like vocals in an attempt to make music free for the creator as well as the listener. “Everything you love about discovering and sharing free music, minus the cost to anyone: artist or fan,” sarcastically closes the SAP statement of intent, which by then has explained what it is, in the bullshit rhetoric of the day – “A new signal-toaudio process by which popular albums are “sapped” of their performances, original vocal, atmosphere and other distracting affectations so the consumer can decide quickly and efficiently whether they like a musical composition, based strictly on its formal attributes, enough to spend money on it.”

Tillman says he was poking the bear rather than making any staunch comment on the issues of digital music. “The whole conversation on the streaming thing is just so joyless,” he says. “I don’t have a dog in the fight and I’m too much of an anarchist to care, but it just saturates the conversation. For me, that kind of satire is just about autonomy.”

Before the making of ‘Fear Fun’ in 2011 – itself a deeply sarcastic and funny record, featuring the immortal line ‘I’m writing a novel because it’s never been done before’ – it had never occurred to Tillman to write the way he speaks.

“Who else sounds like me or over talks like me?” he asks. “There’s no president for it, so it’s been a case of getting to a place spiritually where I could realise that, and a lot of that has

had to do with intimacy and psychedelics and the subconscious and trying to shed these layers of distortion and vanity and ego and whatever else. To do something that has no presidence, when I was young I just wasn’t able to do that yet. You don’t presume that how you are naturally has any creative merit.

“Even humour is such a broad term. There are things that people laugh at during the set that I find disturbing. I’m not writing this shit like it’s a knee-slapper. Lines like, ‘you came, I think’, it’s funny in context because I’m a guy in a room full of people divulging the sexual insecurity, but that line wasn’t written as a joke – it’s a one-for-one description of something.”

He describes Father John Misty as a “thought experiment”, telling me: “I’m seeing if people can handle this ambivalence; seeing if they can handle the fact that the music is so obviously and explicitly about me and my experiences, and if they can handle that it’s got this ridiculous name.

“The only thing that gets under my skin is when people say, ‘Josh Tillman’s imaginary character/alter ego/ persona…’ Those terms imply a lack of transparency and truth, and I don’t think you could listen to much of this

music if it was about a made up person.

But I think that most people are in on the joke.”

Knowing just how autobiographical ‘I LoveYou, Honeybear’ is has a curious affect. It makes you like the jerk at the centre of it all. As a purely fictional character he’s without redeeming qualities, just a dick who treats woman badly and takes too many drugs. The point is also missed that he’s not always singing about his “honeybear”, but also past relationships and one-night stands that essentially point to his own self-loathing. Once you’re made aware of the fact that this narcissistic misanthrope is JoshTillman, everything changes. He’s a fallible man so desperate for redemption he’s written a record that’s about his ills just as much as it is about the relationship that has saved him. Suddenly he’s not so bad after all. I mean, we all fuck up.

When I tell Tillman this, I’m not initially aware of what a backhanded compliment it is. I liken it to the opposite of a watching a tragic film only to learn that it was all based on true events, adding a new depth to your depression. Listening to ‘I Love You, Honeybear’ initially made me think, ‘I don’t think I like this guy – he’s a bit of a shit’; once I realised that that shit was Josh Tillman/Father John

Misty, I didn’t dislike him more, I lightened up.

“Yeah,” says Tillman, “because why would this guy want to assassinate his own character?

“I had no small degree of anxiety going into releasing this record because I realised in order to include everything about this intimacy thing, I had to include shit about me that’s not pleasant. And you were asking me if my religious background has had an influence on me, and I’m sure that his album is some subconscious attempt at me atoning what I’ve done and who I’ve been.

“Just look at the album artwork [a pastel illustration that depicts Tillman as a baby on the tit of (possibly) the Virgin Mary, surrounded by an executioner, a wolf eating a snake and the devil’s arse] – that’s not the image of me that I want to portray to the world, but it’s the version of me that is real in the face of intimacy, and it’s my pettiness and jealousy and neediness and turning into a fucking baby. It’s the affect that intimacy had on me. It’s brutally embarrassing but it’s real.

“And when you say that this guy is an asshole – that’s just how insecure people talk and posture; that’s how people who are lonely behave. It’s the male psyche. There’s a lot of male psyche running wild on this album.

‘Nothing Good Ever Happens At The Goddamn Thirsty Crow’ was this song written in the moment with this macho bully thing, combined with self-righteousness or something. Just horrible. But when I play it now, I have the realisation of its impotent rage.

“How do you get redemption without being an asshole.”

W

aiting for Father John Misty to arrive onstage I overhear a couple of strangers who’ve only just met one another debating Tillman’s authenticity. It’s a one sided conversation, really – small talk between fans in the scrum that one party was no doubt expecting would go one way: down the ‘isn’t this guy a genius’ route. The other guy isn’t convinced.Yet. He’s here to give Father John Misty a second chance, having walked out of the last show he saw of his. As he tells his neighbour, he found Tillman’s posturing overblown and fake. He says he couldn’t get on board with his “Jarvis Cocker impression”.

When Tillman enters and wastes no time dropping to his knees, twitching his hips like Jim Morrison, thumping the stage with his mic stand

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and howling at the ceiling, like a majority of the room, his realness is never in doubt for me. Then again, I had recently met the guy, and I can see where doubt might creep in for others.

It’s a fun, melodramatic show, and like the humour that’s so front-and-centre on ‘I Love You, Honeybear’, those are not traits that sit comfortably in the earnest world of rock’n’roll. Of course, that’s Josh Tillman’s point – to disrupt and dismantle the archetype, for fear of playing a part that isn’t himself – but he also told me how he enjoys misrepresenting himself, and there’s a levelling line in new track ‘Holy Shit’ that appears to be Father John Misty’s ultimate red herring: ‘Nobody knows the real you.’

Tillman, I suspect, would probably embrace the pessimistic notion that a Father John Misty backlash could be on the way, as it so often is when albums like his are received with extreme praise. Considering ‘I Love You, Honeybear’ is essentially a record about self-acceptance via the love of another, and finally learning to live with intimacy and admiration, I except him to be disturbed by the current good will towards him.

“I’m just too busy,” he says. “On some level it’s exciting, like, what type of capital do I have now that I can blow on the next record? But there’s something about getting acclaim for… there’s so much of my humanity in this stuff that it would be a cruel irony to perceive myself as some kind of… I mean, I can’t sing these songs and feel like…” He pauses. “Maybe if I was projecting a false image of myself and I was getting a lot of acclaim for that, maybe I could believe that I was this great person that people might now think I am, but because I’m presenting this version of myself that is so flawed and familiar it neutralises that kind of thing.

“My ambition is to weather it with grace and humour, and not to downplay it with false modesty and to not view it with any degree of sentimentality.”

He pulls a knife from the silver tumbler...

Reviews / Albums

08/10

Waxahatchee Ivy Tripp wi c h ita

By Joe Goggin s . In sto re s Ap ril 6

Waxahatchee’s ‘Cerulean Salt’ was comfortably one of the best records of 2013 – and one that I still go back to on a monthly basis, at the very least – and yet it’s a little tricky, in technical terms, to pin down precisely what it was that made it such an endearing listen. It certainly didn’t struggle for intimacy when it shot for it (Katie Crutchfield is a startlingly forthright songwriter, and has an obvious knack for knowing when and how to strip things back for emotive effect) and, having been recorded in Crutchfield’s house, it carried with it both the charms and the frustrations of what was effectively a bedroom recording.

Ultimately, though, ‘Cerulean Salt’ made us all sit up and listen because it was quite evidently the work of a prodigiously talented young musician with a keenly crafted identity of her own.

Heading into ‘Ivy Tripp’, then, it’s

difficult to know quite what to expect.

You know these songs must have been written on the road (Crutchfield’s barely been off of it since the summer of 2012) and laid down pretty sharpish, too, again at her home in Long Island, New York.

Atmospherically, it’s a very different beast to ‘Cerulean Salt’; it’s evident that Crutchfield wasn’t overly concerned with the idea of producing something totally cohesive, and instead this feels like it’s probably the best thirteen of innumerable songs that had their genesis in the back of a van.

Accordingly, there’s plenty of room for stylistic experimentation; opener ‘Breathless’ is spacey, woozy, the vocal underpinned minimally by a growling, distorted guitar line, whilst ‘Less Than’ is similarly pared-down – just a sluggish, grungy riff and sparse drums offering Crutchfield

backing. Elsewhere, though, there’s no shortage of evidence that she’s also indulged her pop sensibilities.

‘Under a Rock’ is this record’s ‘Coast to Coast’, screaming out with the pop-punk influences that have been blatantly obvious ever since her ‘American Weekend’ debut in 2010.

‘La Loose’, with its sequenced drum track, is possibly the album’s sharpest left turn, whilst ‘Grey Hair’ and ‘The Dirt’ serve as impressive testament to Crutchfield’s ear for a good melody.

Perhaps the enduring image of Waxahatchee to date, though, is the one that portrays Crutchfield as the confessional songwriter, as is welldocumented. She has the cover art from Rilo Kiley’s ‘The Execution of AllThings’ tattooed on her right arm, and it’s always been clear that she brings a touch of Jenny Lewis’ penchant for witty, poised lyricism to

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the table. Of the straightforward acoustic efforts on ‘Ivy Tripp’, ‘Summer of Love’ encapsulates her fondness for irresistible simplicity nicely, although more arresting is seeing her turn to the piano on the beautiful ‘Half Moon’. ‘Stale by Noon’, meanwhile, with its sampled xylophone loops, plays like a lullaby for those prone to existential crises – think a sharper take on Eels’ ‘I Need Some Sleep’.

‘Air’ was the first song made public from ‘Ivy Tripp’, and in many ways encapsulates it best; it’s eccentric and uneven, sure, but it’s difficult to shake the feeling that you’re listening to the work of one of the finest young songwriters in America. This is certainly a collection of songs, as opposed to an intricately crafted, close-knit album, but when the individual songs are this good, that’s really not a problem.

Reviews 10/10

Sufjan Stevens Carrie & Lowell As t h mat i c Ki tt y By s am walton . In sto re s ma rch 30

Sufjan Stevens’ last record, 2010’s ‘Age of Adz’, was a 75-minute space opera about love and death, full of apparitions and trilling flutes. The one before that was his flawless paean to the state of Illinois, produced with microscopic detail and unbridled imagination. Throw into the mix his pair of five-disc Christmas albums and certain things start being expected of a Sufjan Stevens long player: high-concept, obsessively researched music with an overachieving sense of hugeness and polish, meticulously produced with dazzling precision.

With that expectation in mind, then, it’s something of an eyebrowraiser that ‘Carrie & Lowell’ is none

of the above. Written in response to the death of Stevens’ estranged mother, Carrie, in 2012, ‘Carrie & Lowell’ is a stately, brief (by Stevens’ standards) and intensely intimate album whose instrumentation is confined almost entirely to keyboards and plucked strings. The songs are inward-looking, stripped bare of any fantasy or escapism. On one level, it couldn’t be further from the traditional Stevens aesthetic. But on another, ‘Carrie & Lowell’ is just as compelling as Stevens’ previous work, simply with different tools employed for the same effect: where once stood giant gleaming musical totems, Stevens has now carved an exquisitely delicate, ghostly diorama

whose scale is just as mesmerising.

Equally, Stevens’ knack for creating entire parallel universes within albums returns, but instead of history books, the source material is his own psyche, resulting in a set of poetically misremembered childhood experiences, fragile confessions and posthumous apologies that invite natural empathy; when he sings “I forgive you mother, I long to be near you, but every road leads to an end,” the candid regret, coming from an artist who so often writes from the psychologically safe distance of a documentarian, is incredibly powerful.

But the real genius of ‘Carrie & Lowell’ is that, despite its subject matter, it feels neither like

unvarnished exhibitionism nor miserablist emotion-dump, but merely a story of simple sadness, told with affection, sincerity and even notes of humour that release pressure. Although you’re seldom allowed to forget that you’re listening to a record about death, sorrow and familial mess, that honesty is also what makes ‘Carrie & Lowell’ great: for the first time in his career, Stevens has lifted the high-concept safety curtains around his work and dealt, straight, with his own life in all its unflinching ugliness. That he’s managed it with such poise, hope, quiet prettiness and affecting grace is a musical and emotionally cathartic triumph.

Flying Lotus’ ear isn’t easily turned and so when he adds an artist to his Brainfeeder imprint, you sit up and listen.

Luckily, Essex native Stuart Howard hasn’t disappointed, as he continues to shape his brand of smart, sassy future-R&B, gradually stretching the definition of pop, syncopated beat by syncopated beat.

Since his 2011 debut, the ‘Many Faces Out of Focus’ EP, Howard has specialised in creating music that is at once infectious and unsettling.

Positioned just off the dance floor, these are the sounds that might have been made had R Kelly signed to Skam back in 1990. Indeed, you get the sense that this is a man who could knock out a chart single if he had the desire; if linear structures could hold the Lapalux attention span for long enough. Instead, like 2013’s ‘Nostalchic’, ‘Lustmore’ obsesses over texture and stuttering rhythms, employing attack and decay masterfully.

Working with vocalists Andreya

Triana and Szjerdene, Howard has created some dazzling choruses, with single ‘Closure’ the jewel in ‘Lustmore’’s crown; a heartachingly gorgeous end-of-the-night anthem.

However, the real highlights are in the largely instrumental ‘We Lost’, ‘Don’t Mean A Thing’, and ’Funny Games’, where he sets ambience to aggression with the dexterity of a young Tom Jenkinson (there must be something in that Essex water).

Stick your charts – this is the outer reaches of pop and it sounds superb.

08/10

Lapalux Lustmore Br ai n f eeder

By Davi d zammi tt. In sto re s a p ril 6

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Shlohmo Dark Red

American Wrestlers American Wrestlers

Villagers Darling Arithmetic

Fairhorns Fuckup Rush

T ru e Pan th er S ound

Fa t p o ss um

d o mi no

K in d a r a d

By T om f en wi c h . In sto re s a pril 7

B y C hr i s wat k e ys . I n sto r e s Apr i l 2 7

By t o m fe nw i c k . I n sto r e s Apr il 1 3

B y r eef y o u n is . I n sto r es m a r c h 3 0

It was 2011 when ‘Bad Vibes’ introduced us to the intriguing grayscale world of L.A. based producer Shlohmo (aka Wedidit founder Henry Laufer). And what we got back then was a rewarding slice of percussive, downtempo electronica, which fell somewhere between the shadowy genius of Burial and the minimalist glitches of Gold Panda. ‘Dark Red’ isn’t a huge leap forward, but it sees the rough edges of his debut smoothed out in favour of a more refined and superior album, Laufer drawing on elements of drum and bass (’Slow Descent’) flourishes of ambiance (‘Remains’) and dense hip-hop beats (‘Emerge From The Smoke’) to craft an opulent eclectic tapestry. Shlohmo isn’t leaping for the mainstream, but he is trading-in some of the more abrasive, omnipresent static that coated his last album. What remains is an intense leftfield shimmer, similar to his previous work, but with a deeper sense of clarity. It allows us to once again peer into Shlohmo’s deftly constructed, mesmeric gloom, while greater appreciating the subtleties.

Nobody knows who American Wrestlers is, and all his PR people give away is that he’s a Scotsman with a previous musical life who was drawn to Missouri (from whence this debut album springs) by the love of a good woman. Occasional parts of this record certainly do have a widescreen, American feel, despite the whole thing being recorded on an eight-track. ‘There’s No One Crying Over Me’ has a brightness and a lazy melody to it (and a slightly incongruously-placed, oldfashioned guitar solo that rolls into a pleasingly repetitive refrain), while ‘Holy’ features vocals strongly reminiscent of Sparklehorse sitting alongside some bizarrely Dire Straits-esque guitar chops. The record’s undisputed high point then comes in the lengthy ‘Cheapshot’, where a distinctly Pixies-esque, bass-led verse segues into the kind of chorus you’d expect from My Bloody Valentine. It’s an odd mix that neither feels new nor old, yet somehow this disjointed confluence of styles and vibes sits together perfectly to form a coherent, engaging, exciting whole.

If you write, produce and play every instrument on an album, I assume you’d be comfortable enough to drop the pretence that your ‘band’ was anything other than a solo project.

But not Conor O’Brien, who has been recording charming folk under the collective name of Villagers since 2010. This latest foray sees him turn back the clock; stripping his sound to its bare bones, coupling simple acoustics to driving percussion, vocal murmurations and thoughtful lyrics. O’Brien’s greatest triumph is his genuine talent, so it’s very hard to find fault in his work, from the beautiful, faltering vocals of ‘Courage’ and the recursive mellifluousness of ‘Dawning On Me’, to the unsettling atmospherics of ‘The Soul Serene’. His lyrics are the star, but if there is a problem, it’s the repetitive folksy nature of his music which – whilst very nice in isolation – begins to feel derivative when viewed as an entire album. It’s true O’Brien may not need friends in the studio (an existing fans, continue as you were), but sometimes a little collaboration can add up to a richer experience.

If Fairhorns’ debut LP, ‘Doki Doki Run’ was “autistic blues – music for angry nerds who like to groove stoically and immobile”, ‘Fuckup Rush’ is that motionless fury unleashed. The caffeine-hazed mind-melt of Beak> multiinstrumentalist Matt Loveridge, this time he’s intent on delivering fury, fragility and clattering electronic body blows. From the first bludgeoning bars of ‘Like Fire’ through to the reverb-drenched punch of ‘234inadumbcodebecuzgo odmorning’, ‘Fuckup Rush’ is a pulsing, desperate scramble of brutal, unsettling digital punk that only finds peace in the distorted intensity of its premature end. Where ‘Dysphoric Thrumm’ builds to an intense humming of evil, ‘jpeg made me cry’ warps into a dark disco of black contrasts, industrial rave, and vinyl purposefully played backwards; while ‘The Perils of Snakeblasting’ falls into slow skewed rhythms and unsettling, monastic psychedelics, the marching motorik beat and searing electricity of ‘Culture is Plague’ restlessly takes hold. Let this one pummel.

Decidedly lo-fi debut records are by no means a novelty in this day and age, especially when anybody can throw something down onto GarageBand and then post it to Soundcloud on a whim – but this first proper effort from O.D. Davey does, in fairness, stand out from the crowd.

In a fashion that’s either inspired or thumpingly contrived and very much old hat, depending on your outlook – as you might already have surmised, I’m in the latter camp – Davey is an enigmatic figure, but we do know that

he’s part of the duo KLAAR and was apparently raised between Aberdeenshire and Essex, with an accent suggesting the former throughout ‘Catgut Tape’.

Here’s the modus operandi: rough, whispered vocals over scuzzy samples, endearingly pretty guitar work and no end of smartly designed synth loops. Then, there’s the lyrics; they veer between frustratingly nonsensical (see ‘Sniff Snuff’ or ‘Help the Bombardier!’) and genuinely affecting – on ‘Rabbit Fur

Coat’ Davey croons: “Who said true love will conquer all? / They did not fall so pitifully, I suspect,” with a stoicism that belies the profundity of his words. This lack of consistency and spikes of truth are no doubt symptomatic of Davey’s late teens.

‘Catgut Tape’ is a strange piece of work, but there’s no shortage of evidence that Davey has real ability as a songwriter; he just needs to figure out how to harness it in a more controlled and focused manner than he has here.

06/10

OD Davey Catgut Tape Toml ab

By Al ex Wi sgard. In sto re s April 13

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Pale Blue The Past We Leave Behind

Doldrums The Air Conditioned Nightmare

White Hills Walks For Motorists

Only Real Jerk at The End of The Line

T hri l l Jo c k e y

v ir g in

By j am e s w e s t. I n s to re s a p r il 1 3

B y h en r y w ilk in so n . I n s t o r es m a r c h 3 0

The second album from DIY synth warriors Doldrums takes its name from Henry Miller and its eclectic electronic sensibilities from fellow Montrealer Grimes. Otherwise, they’re out on their own. Main Doldrummer Airick Woodhead’s irreverence keeps the record interesting; opener ‘HOTFOOT’ is a jarring sensory assault, but keeps its focus with a savvy vocal melody, while the strident ‘Blow Away’ takes its unique lyrical cue from the moment domestic bliss becomes boredom (“You are the one I wanna watch TV with…”). The robovoiced dialogue in computer love glitchfest ‘My Friend Sinjen’, though? Maybe a goof too far. Still, it’s the more lowkey moments that really stand out – both side-closers (‘Video Hostage’ and ‘Closer 2 U’) may dabble in Fieldesque looped microsamples, but Woodhead’s gorgeous way with a tune melts the electro-chill into hauntingly human puddles. It doesn’t all quite hang together as well as it could, but you can hear the workings of a band who know pop music well enough to tear it to pieces at will.

Riffs. NYC’s White Hills have got ‘em aplenty on their stripped-down new album, and void of their trademark psych squall, the fretwork stands out more than ever; big bold snarling hooks meant to rattle around your cranium like flipper-struck pinballs.

The problem is that away from the Hawkwindian psych tendencies that have cemented them as prolific genre-leaders since their 2005 inception, White Hills sound kind of average. On current form, they could take a cue or two from some far newer propositions. Toy’s motorik rhythms drive harder than ‘No Will’, The Amazing Snakeheads make a freakier racket than White Hills do on ‘LeadThe Way’ and the underlying pop sensibility of Nuggets-era acid rock seems to be sadly missing from ‘Life Is Upon You’. On ‘We Are What You Are’ they sound like Leicester meat rockers Kasabian at their most edgy. No mean feat, if that’s your bag, but White Hills’ legendary status warrants more. At the title track’s peak things get tamer still, which is not a choice of words you’d expect to use when describing a band who’ve been likened to Iggy andThe Stooges.

Niall Galvin aka Only Real’s cocksure blend of surf, shoegaze, hip-hop, brit-pop and you name it-rock, has had people talking for a while now, on account of its eclecticism. Of course, it makes perfect sense, really – it’s not that his tastes are more sprawling than most, it’s just that most artists don’t bother trying to reconcile their entire iTunes library in their first album. Only Real isn’t fussed though, and his long awaited debut sees him determined to have the best of all possible worlds. ‘Jerk at the End of the Line’ is an instahazed nostalgia trip for the modern retro enthusiast who is probably too young to even remember Keenan and Kel. ‘Yesterday’ serves up a blissful slice of B-town summer, playing like an ill-advised collaboration between Jaws and Scroobius Pip, while the guitar work in ‘Daisychained’ would fit perfectly on a Lotus Plaza album.

Despite half the tracks sounding like they’ve been left out in the sun too long, and once you’ve made it passed the extremely annoying chipmunking opener, there’s an exuberance throughout that makes it hard not to want to tag along.

Speedy Ortiz have a lot more time on their hands these days. Having given up their day jobs to record a follow up to 2013’s acclaimed ‘Major Arcana’, they found themselves with the luxury of three weeks in the studio as opposed to the 4 days it took to finish their debut. The result of all this free time is ‘Foil Deer’, an record conceived while wondering through museums and galleries, reading highbrow literature and generally bumming around. It shows in the music, too, as the stroppy indie jams

are replaced by more composed and breathy post-rock influences and a lethargic, sedate type of grunge.

Here, singer and founder Sadie Dupuis finds herself amongst French-club dropouts, law-school rejects, wasters, alcoholics and slackers, ambling through her observations with Stephen Malkmus-esque whimsy. Tracks like ‘The Graduates’ and ‘Puffer’ are meticulously composed and layered (with the opening ‘RaiseThe Skate’ a standout of strange Elastica guitar

shapes), and despite a persistent penchant for screeching, distorted lead, no note goes awry.

Unfortunately though, some of the instinctive live energy of previous releases is lost amidst the precision and tracks could do with being rougher around the edges. On ‘Zig’ Dupuis asks “how many laps does it take to decide you’re back at the start?” and you can’t help but think that for all the record’s added complexity, bashing it out in 4 days might have sounded better.

2Mr / Captur ed tra cks By james f. Th omp so n. In store s a p ril 13

sub po p B y A l e x wi s gard . I n s to re s A pri l 6

There’s a pervasive sense of otherworldliness to Mike Simonetti’s debut album that reaches beyond the name of his new synthpop outlet, which references ‘Pale Blue Dot,’ the name of an iconic photograph of Earth taken by the Voyager 1 space probe in 1990. The veteran producer, DJ and record label impresario has recently moved on from Italians Do It Better, the revered synth-punk-cumItalo-disco label he started with Johnny Jewel, to launch 2MR – or 2 Mikes Records – with Captured Tracks head honcho Mike Sniper.

Just as the Voyager probe blasted off from our planet and hurtled towards the outer reaches of the galaxy, so too does Simonetti leave behind the Los Angeles night-time street scenes that inspired much of his old label’s output as he looks to the stars for inspiration here. Teaming up with Silver Hands vocalist Elizabeth Wight, Simonetti delivers thirteen tracks of sparse rhythms, densely layered pads and vintage synth arpeggios that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Philip K. Dick movie soundtrack.

Oh, and they’re absolutely great.

06/10

Speedy Ortiz Foil Deer c ar par k By h en r y wi l ki nso n. In store s a p ril 20

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San Fermin Jackrabbit

Toro Y Moi What For?

Follakzoid III

Errors Lease of Life

Down town

Ca rpark

S ac re d b o ne s

r o c k A c t io n

By r eef y ou n i s. In sto re s a p ril 27

B y Sam C o rnf o rt h. I n sto re s apri l 6

By d e re k ro b e rtso n. I n st o r es M a r c h 3 0

B y R eef y o u n is . I n sto r es n o w

A few years ago, Ellis Ludwig-Leone followed a Bon Iver-esque path and squirrelled himself away from the world to write an album. The young Yale graduate emerged from his Canadian isolation with ‘San Fermin’, a self-titled debut that would blossom into a mini-orchestra of 22 musicians, and lay the foundation for the dramatic, baroque pop that characterises record number two. Down to a relatively nimble eight members, ‘Jackrabbit’ is an album of similar ambition. Equal parts morose and admiringly grandiose, like its predecessor, it owes much to classical, orchestral flourishes but its pop sensibility, brassy power and ragged sax chops give tracks like ‘The Woods’ genuine bite, ‘Woman in Red’ a theatrical drive and ‘Reckoning’ its mournful, period drama beauty. Fifteen tracks can feel a little overblown but that tendency also gives ‘Two Scenes’ its curtain-raising bluster. A rousing number of vociferous choruses, Charlene Kaye’s spiralling vocal, and Allen Tate’s weary baritone, it embodies the skill and spirit that makes this album a fine listen indeed.

‘Buffalo’ – a funky, timeless offering that possesses Chaz Bundick’s trademark clever melodies – was apparently the song that snapped him out of writer’s block and paved the way for his new album, ‘What For?’. Recently, the prolific musician has started his own label, released an LP under the electronic moniker Les Sins and created a collaborative bit torrent album, so you could forgive him for having a little brain freeze from time to time. ‘What For?’ sees the chameleonic creator explore new ground and transform into a different shade of colour yet again, with his characteristic electronics less prevalent in favour of gorgeous instrumentation. ‘Run Baby Run’ is the album’s most prevailing moment and triumphantly shows Bundick capturing his ’70s throwback atheistic, the funky ballad-esque sound evokes the starry eyed quality of Big Star and Teenage Fanclub. If Toro Y Moi’s previous output was the cool breeze on a warm day then his rich fourth album is the final glowing warm embers of a glistening sun. It’s quite the advert for writer’s block?

The cover of Föllakzoid’s last album said it all; the psychedelic, krautrockloving trio from Santiago, Chile, had set their sights on the cosmos and spent most of ‘II’ soaring through space. It was a wild trip, literally and figuratively, with their pulsating, motoric grooves blasting the music to transcendental, other-worldly heights. But their follow-up, ‘III’, finds them back on terra firma and mining their own continent’s history for inspiration. “Our music has to do with very ancient Armonic and rhythm patterns,” explained guitarist Domingo Garcia-Huidobro recently, and the four tracks here all have an earthly, tribal quality; the sinister, pounding rhythm of ‘Electric’, the crashing cymbals of ‘Earth’, or the searing, tremolo solos of ‘Piure’ that sound like a Mayan Ennio Morricone score.They build slowly but defiantly, and if there’s a criticism to be made, it’s that they slink away rather than exploding into euphoria. But that’s a minor quibble. Whether exploring the heavens or marching with us mere mortals, Föllakzoid have the power to carve out their own sonic territory, conquering one world at a time.

Errors’ willful shift from rumbling beats to casual, electro-pop connoisseurs has made them a model of brilliant consistency over the last five years, but they still endeavor to scrub up with every release. Last album, ‘Have Some Faith In Magic’, confirmed their definitive step from the guitar-heavy bruisers of earlier, gloomier work, but here it’s as if that album’s opus, ‘Pleasure Palaces’, has been pulled apart to reveal a brave, neon world of big, shoulder-padded production and night drives with Johnny Jewel through Nicholas Winding Refn’s magnesium dreams.

There’s widescreen patience to the sublime ‘Slow Rotor’, ‘Putman Caraibe’ is a few bars from accelerating into The Raccoons’ ‘Run with Us’, and ‘Genuflection’ is all ’80s chintz and disco glitz with rigid synth claps and squalling sax. It lacks pulsating immediacy and jagged hooks, but gains Cecilia Stamp’s guest vocals , which add sweetness to the gilded-pop ambience usually found on Italians Do It Better. ‘Lease of Life’ is the sound of Errors in full electronic bloom.

This third Soft Moon album is designed to reflect the profound inner torment of its writer, Luis Vasquez, partly in response to his band’s rising fortunes. Recorded in Venice at the aptly named Hate Studios, as a self-loathing mission statement, it’s up there with The Cure’s ‘Pornography’.

Unfortunately, ‘Deeper’ is armed with petulant, monosyllabic songtitles, like ‘Inward’ and ‘Black’. Its stark lyrics are almost clichéd in their quest for darkness, like

disaffected tweets into the ether; “the end is on my mind” runs the refrain of ‘Try’; “I feel so empty inside, why am I alive?” wonders ‘Feel’. Even less fortunately, Vasquez has claimed that on this album he has “finally felt the urge to express [himself] more verbally.” Eesh.

He seems to take his only joy in cribbing from the playbooks of postpunk masters; the title track reaps PiL’s ‘The Flowers of Romance’, while the lazer-gun synths and skittering percussion of ‘Wrong’

would pass for a decent Throbbing Gristle album track. Its best moments – particularly the eerie, industrial horror-pop of closing track ‘Being’ – recall criminally-overlooked Saddle Creek blank-waversThe Faint.

As a purgative exercise for its maker, ‘Deeper’ was clearly a necessary creative step. As a listening experience, Vasquez’s influences, like the cries for help from his tortured heart, are too transparently on show to take seriously.

03/10

The Soft Moon Deeper c aptur ed tr ac ks By al ex wi sgar d. In sto re s ma rch 30

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Hannah Cohen Pleasure Boy

Bill Wells & Aidan Moffat The Most Important Place In the World

Stealing Sheep Not Real

Portico Living Fields

h e ave nl y

N in j a t u n es

By h ayl e y s c o tt. I n s to re s a p r il 1 3

B y C h r is wa t k ey s . I n s t o r es a p r il 6

The slightly unlikely pairing of multiinstrumental jazz player Bill Wells with Arab Strap’s king of filth Aidan Moffatt proved to be most fruitful on their 2011 debut ‘Everything’s Getting Older’. Getting older suits Moffatt; his keen lyrical eye can find beauty and despair in the routine existence that fatherhood pushes you into, and Wells has found a sonic tone that accompanies – and often drives – this seamlessly. Although still largely piano-led, their second album pushes more sonic boundaries, blasts of avant-garde jazz couple the more, almost lounge bar (in a good way) jazz tones, moments of minimal electronica flutter subtly and there’s even a move into lullaby-anthem on the Spiritualized-like ‘Street Paster Colloquy’. There’s a triumphant quality to this record. It feels assured in abilities and ambitions and the sonic trajectories seem to be shooting for the skies more than they are to be found crumpled on the floor under a bar stool. Most exciting however, is the feeling of endless possibilities that this record, and collaboration, throws up.

As someone with a predilection for flawed, DIY basement recordings, bemoaning that something sounds “a bit too Lo-Fi” seems inconceivable to me, but if you thought Stealing Sheep’s debut LP, ‘Into the Diamond Sun’, was a bit on the unrefined side, then you’re in luck here. Less focused on their psych tendencies and more informed by ’50s exotica, electronica and ’80s pop, the Liverpool trio’s second album is a polished counterpart, but most of what prevailed from their initial defining aesthetic remains intact: the distinct, ‘medieval-kraut-folk’ ambience, breezy pop melodies and unified vocal harmonies sill loom large.

Though self-produced, the eschewing of organic recording techniques in favour of something more processed and embellished is what lets the album down somewhat, as programmed beats and trigger samples replace the previously rough recordings that gave their songs character. The result is an interesting hybrid of accessible but surreal, metronomic pop, while the band’s choral vocal harmonies are sounding better than ever.

The three remaining members of Portico Quartet live on, and in ‘Living Fields’ there has been not quite a revolution but certainly a progression in their sound. Thus the opener and title track is a SOHN-esque wash of, let’s call it, falsetto electronica. It’s an enticing start. Three guest vocalists feature separately on this record, most notably alt-J’s distinctly recognisable Joe Newman, whose laconic and idiosyncratic drawl fits particularly well on the anxious and intangible ‘101’. Meanwhile, Jono McCleery’s vocals on the single ‘Bright Luck’ really soar, lending a very human and emotional reality to the music, which can feel spacey and abstract. Yes, this does feel like music made to a distinct and vogueish template – floating synths and detached-feeling, melancholytinged vocals – but in tracks like ‘Living Fields’ and the monkish ‘Brittle’, it’s superbly executed. This is an album equally suited to experiencing in an enveloping, engaging live environment – where its muted euphoria will feel heightened and elevated – as on a melancholy Sunday night at home.

With ‘Fading Love’, George FitzGerald joins that tradition of bigroom DJs who discover too late that producing an album of original material requires an entirely different set of musical sensibilities to the ones needed for banging out a hands-in-the-air set at Berghain.

It’s not that FitzGerald lacks production chops – much here sounds exquisite, with warmth, depth and a carefully assembled propulsion throughout. Instead, the problem lies in the songs – that most

basic requirement of albums – and the fact that for a 10-track album, ‘Fading Love’ is about nine short: with the exception of the treacly, moreish ‘Full Circle’ – all sleepysultry vocals and deep house lushness – nothing captures the imagination. Pallid instrumentals meander with the inventiveness of a one-fingered teenager who’s just opened GarageBand, while elsewhere shots at Underworld’s deliciously airless sleaze miss drearily, sounding no more libidinous

than someone muttering in the queue for the night bus.

FitzGerald clearly omitted early bangers ‘Child’ and ‘Feel Like’ here for fear that their two-step callbacks would unbalance the surrounding seriousness – and in that respect at least ‘Fading Love’ has a consistent mood. But in stripping out all its attendant joy, FitzGerald has robbed himself of his most deadly weapon, leaving ‘Fading Love’ like an over-heavy gun that’s firing blanks.

Bel l a U n i on

By James wes t. In sto re s ma rch 30

che mi k al u nd e rgro u nd B y dani e l d yl an wray. I n s to re s march 30

Tear duct-tickling moments were scattered all over Hannah Cohen’s first record, ‘Child Bride’, so the promise of a woe-fuelled sophomore from the Frisco-born songstress and model seems an ominous prospect indeed – how can her sleepy, shiverinducing songcraft get any more heart-rending? The answer, of course, is that it cannot. Her bruised soul takes a deviation on ‘Pleasure Boy’, which is a witchier, ghostlier and more intricate work than its comparatively humble predecessor.

Heartbreak in technicolour, if you will. ‘Keepsake’ sets the tone, with Cohen’s rather more twee, folkleanings replaced by a decidedly more modern, labyrinthine sound, leading the way for a series of cathartic soundscapes that are expertly engineered by Thomas Bartlett (The National, Antony and the Johnsons). Above the piercing atmosphere, Cohen wavers between Lana-like cool and Kate Bush at her vulnerable best; she’s at times defiant in the face of adversity and at others wilting under the weight of her heavy heart. Either way, she’s always hypnotic.

0 4/ 1 0

George Fitzgerald Fading Love Doubl e s i x By s am wal ton . In sto re s a pril 27

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Albums 08/10

Young Fathers White Me Are Black Men Too Big dada By david zammitt. In sto res a p ril 6

Loud and Quiet readers, of course, are not dilettantes. They are savvy, well-informed and culturally astute.

The more casual listener, though, might be wondering how on earth Young Fathers have managed to put together a second album in the four months since they scooped that Mercury Prize for their full-length debut, ‘Dead’. But while that record made its belated entrance into the mainstream consciousness – and the UK album chart – in November of 2014, it had already taken up a special place in the hearts and minds of its converts for the best part of a year.

So although it would have been understandable if the group’s triumphant set at Edinburgh’s

Hogmanay Street Party signalled the beginning of a creative hiatus off the back of a gruelling year, there was no such temptation. In fact, it turns out that the award and its accompanying buzz was a mere ellipsis in the sessions that spawned this, the Scottish trio’s second album proper.

Upon announcing the new LP, Alloysious Massaquoi stated that it would be the group’s, “interpretation of what a pop album should be,” and the first thing to note is that, for all the discord – and Young Fathers love nothing more than bending a note just out of tune – this is an incredibly catchy collection. In turns caustic and celebratory, they are always careful to build their off-kilter hip

hop, neo soul and R&B around a backbone of indelible, multi-coloured hooks so that ‘White Men…’ is closer to the psychedelic pop of Animal Collective or Dan Deacon than any hip hop contemporaries. And that’s exactly it: this is so much more than a hip hop album.

But the real skill here is how deftly they balance darkness and light. The lo-fi motorik beats and tinny keyboards of the album’s duskier moments (‘Shame’, ‘Feasting’), for example, evoke the claustrophobic synthpunk of Suicide and Pere Ubu, but they are melded into warm, uplifting dub (‘27’, ‘Nest’) with ease.

Elsewhere, ‘Old Rock’n’Roll’’s avant-garde take on

Southern gospel, an acerbic deconstruction of racial prejudice, contrasts with ‘Liberated,’ a wonderfully warped take on the Stones’ classic, stomping R&B sound that passes its choirs through lines of delay pedals and back again.

And so the timing of that Mercury, coming towards the end of the album’s creation, might just have been perfect. Follow-ups often suffer from having one eye on the wants of a new audience but ‘White Men…’ doesn’t compromise. It’s trippy and disorientating and yet always maddeningly catchy; a faded photograph of a pop album. But in any case, I don’t suppose they ever needed our validation anyway.

Last year’s Mercury nod might have seen his name splashed across the tabloids and beyond but for William Doyle, electronic music has always been about the man behind the machine. While producers like SBTRKT have forged careers out of wilful anonymity and obfuscation, on his first release Doyle did the diametric opposite: setting out his stall as an honest-to-goodness songwriter with thoughts and feelings beyond the tribulations of finding the pitch-perfect synth patch

in the bowels of Ableton Live.

One year on and Doyle has again plonked himself front-and-centre.

Another portrait of the Londonbased 23 year-old graces the cover of ‘Culture of Volume’ – named after a snippet of verse from contemporary poet Rick Holland – and songs have names like ‘Don’t Look Backwards’ and ‘Hearts That Never’. The thing is, Doyle’s music (now a little more accessible) has never been especially intimate or personal and there’s no change here either; his

soaring, lovelorn couplets invariably find themselves juxtaposed against slightly naff, festival-ready beats. In fact, the irony is Doyle actually sounds far more arresting when he’s emancipated from the strictures of rhythm and vocals, as on bookending tracks ‘The Juddering’ and ‘Montage Resolution’ with their undulating sheets of crystalline synth, and throughout the towering coda to ‘Carousel’ as it collapses in on itself.

It’ll be interesting to hear how he squares the circle next time.

0 7/ 1 0

East India Youth Culture of Volume XL

By James f . Th omp so n. In sto res a p ril 6

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Reviews / Live

Kraftwerk DR Koncerthus Copenhagen, Denmark 26/ 0 2/ 20 14 wri ter: Dan i el D yla n Wra y Ph otograph er: P e te r B OETTCHER

There’s a juxtaposition at play during ‘Autobahn’ tonight: the chugging, propulsive roar of Kraftwerk’s driving-into-the-future anthem is a hurtling sonic force, but it’s offset by four static men stood nonchalantly behind podiums. The focus is readjusted and aimed towards a giant screen that we look at through 3D glasses, and a giant MercedesBenz (based on the group’s own from the ’70s) drives out towards us. The whole set-up is emblematic of this group’s entire career ¬– let the music drive the band and utilise artistic manipulation to deviate as much attention away from the humans creating the sound as possible.

The DR concert hall has some of the best acoustics in the world and the pristine sound bounces around its hodgepodge shape exquisitely.

The purity of it is characteristic of a

clarity that Kraftwerk have always striven to achieve. The material played from ‘Autobahn’ and ‘Radioactivity’ is now forty years old and was created in a period in which Kraftwerk’s strive for sonic spotlessness was road-blocked by the primitive technology of the day – now the analogue hiss and crackle of static found on ‘Radioactivity’ is replaced with pristine digital audio, yet the body and atmosphere of the record’s title song is not lost in its new form. Instead, the material feels symbolic of the evolution the group themselves have taken – they have chopped and primed their output, simmering and reducing their music to as little physical appendage as possible. The bass thud on ‘Radioactivity’ rattles the chairs and creeps up your spine. With every anticipatory beat that is processed it

slinks inside you further and further and the musical force of Kraftwerk rattles around your innards, becoming, a vital organ.

What Kraftwerk have done in these catalogue performances is create an aesthetic template and musical consistency that exists in a sort of timeless period. The digital purity of ‘Tour De France’ now slots alongside ‘Trans Europe Express’ and ‘Neon Lights’ – all songs run through the current Kraftwerk machine come out feeling as though they are modern day versions.They’re still pure and true to the original compositions, but tuned and pruned to make one unable to distinguish between which was made in 1974 and which in 2003.

The 3D visuals are the closest thing there is to a date stamp. Those are simplistic and usually

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representative of the period in which they were made. It’s Kraftwerk’s only real admission to the idea of the antiquated being beautiful.

After they have performed both albums ‘Autobahn’ and ‘Radioactivity’ in their entirety, they run through a hit-laden set that takes in songs from all other albums.

Running through thirty years’ worth of music, it all seems so commonplace and familiar now – combined with the sound being so pure and seamless – that it’s almost easy to forget the innovation that went into them initially, and this current live set-up almost disguises the hard work of the group. Then the lush waves of a track like ‘Computer Love’ wash over you like ecstasy-induced euphoria and you question how you could have forgotten, even for one second.

Live

Bad Guys The Lexington Angel, London

Sleater Kinney The Roundhouse, Camden 2 3 / 03 / 2 01 5 w r it er : C h r is Wat k ey s

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P h o t o g r a p h er : Da n iel Qu esada

wr i ter : Man dy Drake

There are comebacks and there are comebacks, and Sleater-Kinney have made the best kind. Their new material, after a ten year hiatus, is right up there with the best of their back catalogue, and it’s one of the reasons that makes tonight’s performance a thrilling ride rather than a tired nostalgia swamp. In a set drawing pretty much equally from ‘No Cities To Love’ and historic highlights, the trio are sharp, energised and visibly zealous; it’s a performance of verve, rawly energetic and impressively polished. As viciously melodic as ever, the vocal interplay between Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein is infused with acerbic punk energy, over a hookladen sonic backdrop, which is both sharp and at times bludgeoningly heavy. It’s telling that the sold-out crowd cheer the new stuff as enthusiastically as the old.

Bad Guys are a London-based, heavy rock band so indebted to the original wave of ’70s and ’80s metal that their guitarists both play those preposterous twin-necked guitars in cut-off tour tees. They fly through Motorhead riffs and Nigel Tufnel solos to encouraged (seemingly non-ironic) devil horns and fists that clutch the air in front of their knowing (and often brilliantly funny) songs about childhood shoplifting (‘Crime’ is about stealing a Tonker truck) and more grubby vices (‘Prostitutes (are making love in my garden)’ is about precisely that). Clichéd though it is, plenty of people can’t get enough of it, their biggest fan telling her friend “It’s so shit I love it!” before arcing her back for the next, inevitable slew of two-pronged bar chords. It’s a fitting critique in terms of humour, but Bad Guys are actually a lot better than that.

Glass Animals Shepherd’s Bush Empire London 10 / 0 3 / 20 15 wr i ter : james we st

At times it feels like we’re watching aerobics on mute tonight. In front of a glorious Rainforest Café backdrop, Glass Animals frontman Dave Bayley flails his limbs, throws shapes and mouths ‘ZABA’’s intricately intertwining lyrics at the mic, but alas his distinctive husk can barely be heard. It’s a shame, because aside from patchy sound, Glass Animals threaten to bring the party this evening – their set includes nostrilitching sub-bass that makes the Empire ceiling quiver (‘WallaWalla’), hypnotic synths that sound like dripping taps (‘Black Mambo’), earworming guitar licks (‘Intruxx’) and hip-shaking rhythms (‘Hazey’).

These moments are topped by Bayley’s in-crowd exploits during a triumphant ‘Gooey’, before closing highlight ‘Pools’ adds a layer of gloss to the whole thing thanks to its moreish refrain.

Fawn Spots Birthdays, Dalston, London 10/0 3/ 2 0 1 5 wri t e r: j ame s f . t ho m ps o n Phot o g ra phe r: Danny pa yne

Fawn Spots might well have gained themselves a reputation as one of the country’s fiercest live acts but surely that can’t have emanated from nights like this. The York-based hardcore and post-punk three-piece have all the stage presence of deer caught in headlights as they plough through new album ‘From Safer Place’ in front of a small and unwaveringly sedentary crowd. Burly front man Jonathan Meager monotonously growls his way through the band’s repertoire in between dispensing meek blandishments but it’s only Mission of Burma cover ‘That’s How I Escaped My Certain Fate’ that especially piques anybody’s interest.

Proud fans of ’80s indie icons like Hüsker Dü, tonight’s exertions do little to suggest the Yorkshiremen will be joining Bob Mould in the pantheon any time soon.

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Live Matthew E. White probably wasn’t even trying, but he’s found his home in every aspect of tonight. A one-man show, promoted by the Barbican, held in a seated, modernised church, home to the London Symphony Orchestra – it’s pretty damn classy; befitting of White’s honeyed soul music for shoppers at Habitat and readers ofThe Guardian.There’s a lot to like in this polite, warm world: the red wine and especially the unnerving realisation that nobody’s got their phone out. Talking, we’ve collectively decided, is forbidden. We are a perfect (bourgeois) audience and White – playing for the first time tracks from his new album, in their embryonic states – is grateful, and sincerely so. He’s grateful after he reins in the opening ‘Take Care My Baby’, tempering his cry and reminding himself to whisper his vocal, when he explains how the success of his previous album in the UK changed his life; and he’s grateful after we’ve encouraged him to bluff his way through a set mostly devised for guitar but adapted to piano on the fly, thanks to a busted amp. Sounds like a dry night out, but White is humorous, genuine and damn classy.

Matthew E. White LSO St. Luke’s, Clerkenwell 10 / 0 3 / 20 15 wr i ter : S tuar t Stub b s Photogr aph er : Danie l Q ue sad a

Vision Fortune Ace Hotel Shoreditch, London

Zun Zun Egui The Harley Sheffield

Hookworms Sound Control Manchester

Astral Pattern The Lock Tavern Camden, London

10 / 0 3 / 20 15

05/0 3/ 2 0 1 5

0 1 / 0 3/ 2 0 1 5

1 3 / 03 / 2 01 5

wr i ter : Edgar smith

wri te r: d a ni e l D ylan W ra y

wri te r: Pa d d y K i ns e lla

w r it er : J a m es f . Th o m pso n

Before and after fifty minutes of continuous synth-punk dirge, Vision Fortune pipe in lonesome country music, as per the title of their second LP. Ironists this thorough are usually murdered by their parents in infancy but the London duo survive, switching to wave samples that crush the soft chatter of this hotel’s downstairs gig simulator. The record’s ominous throb translates well. It’s stalker-ish music, full of pursuant push-backs and false detours. You are dragged into soundscapes bled so dry that your ears cravenly hang on scraps of atonal cymbal or piss-digital steel drum in the (misplaced) hope of resolution. Who was it that programmed this band (who play in darkness so total they need little torches) in a hotel that epitomises the terminal blowjob vibe of western culture? Probably chose it themselves.

Zun Zun Egui take a little momentum to get moving this evening, some of the more riff-based, classic-rockesque numbers lacking the drive and vivacious flurry of their more rhythmic, and notably more continent-spanning, work. However, they offset the sluggish introduction and by the end of the set they have a truly energised and grooving crowd who are sucked into their fiery ball of vigour. They leave the stage in a frenzied, African-tinged flurry, and quickly return. Lead singer Kushal Gaya enters the crowd armed only with a hand drum for a traditional song from his home country of Mauritius. The track, which requires little else than accompanying handclaps from the rest of us, has the audience singing in lullaby-like unison and within minutes this has gone from an unhinged dance party to a last orders sing-a-long.

Sweat drips from the bassist’s head, ringleader MJ screams into his microphone as he presides over an organ, trembling from his band’s distorting fuzz.This is Hookworms, a band whose music demands to be seen live… still. Every song ends with the release of a torrential storm of noise, but this never gets boring, purely because they are so practiced in the art. MJ remains a man who is not dissimilar to an evangelistic preacher, screaming and pointing at the sinners in the audience as fierce as always.The band give their all and produce what is a truly memorable performance, and then they all run downstairs to staff their own merch stand as soon as they’re done.

They’re a dedicated bunch, Hookworms, deserving of all the praise that comes their way, and somehow more tightly self-sufficient in their growing success.

Anybody who happens to have already heard Astral Pattern’s debut EP tends to bear a deep sense of frustration with the band. Since releasing the seriously promising 5-track ‘Light Poems’ EP back in June 2013, the London-based dream pop threesome have released precisely nought, as though that initial flourish was little more than a coquettish tease. In one sense, then, it’s ironic that tonight’s set is promoted by Lanzarote; an outfit known more for being at music’s bleeding edge than trading on former glories. In another, it’s entirely apt. Melissa Rigby’s soft, heavilytreated cooing still weaves its way around billowing keys and synthetic beats, but the tempo has kicked up a notch and the kosmischeinfluenced analogue electronica on offer sounds modishly futuristic in the main.

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Singing Pictures

Write r: And re w A nd e rson

The Monkees, Head (1968)

We live in an age obsessed with manufactured music. The Christmas number one is a Simon Cowellcontrolled fort, pouring the boiling oil of X-Factor into our ears every year. Weekend TV is dominated by talent searches that excel only in their ability to unearth excrement.

The last time anything good got played on Radio One was probably about eleven years ago before the death of John Peel. But what if a manufactured band actually turned out to be talented? What if the joke got serious?

There’s no what if about it – it already happened, almost 50 years ago when The Monkees took control in a Planet of the Apes-style turnaround. Starting out as a TV show for kids in which the band of actor-musicians (Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones, Peter Tork and Michael Nesmith) spent twenty minutes each week being silly, it ended up with them writing and recording albums of their own music and even releasing an arthouse film: Head.

For those unfamiliar with The Monkees, the TV show followed a fairly chaotic formula in which each week they attempted to become a successful band like The Beatles only for something to go wrong. The humour might best be described as screwball, the tone cheerful. Clued

up people like Frank Zappa appeared on a fairly regular basis, indicating that while The Monkees were fake, they were fake like the best kinds of fast food: trash that still tasted good.

The problem for the band was that they started writing and performing the songs themselves and were hoping for some degree of artistic recognition. These efforts were met with derision, leaving them frustrated and looking to find a way to free themselves.

Enter Head, their 1968 film. You might be expecting something akin to A Hard Days Night, where the band go on a musical adventure that showcases their pop and personalities. Or maybe you’re thinking more along the lines of Help!

– less plot, more stoner montage scenes that let the kids know they’re cool.

Instead, Head is a non-narrative mash up of weird ideas, strange scenes and self-flagellation. From the opening you know something is different – that this isn’t the happygo-lucky Monkees of TV – when they recite this self-mocking nursery rhyme: Hey, hey, we are The Monkees / You know we love to please / A manufactured image / With no philosophies.

This is followed by footage of someone being shot in the head

(seriously) and a lot of crazy feedback, flashing lights and jump cuts. Given that their fan-base was made up mostly of children this choice can either be seen as a brave artistic statement or incredible negligence. I imagine there were quite a few walkouts during the film’s original release, with angry parents demanding their money back and the odd child requiring post-traumatic stress counselling.

How did this happen?Well, for one thing the band got Jack Nicholson (really) to help them write the screenplay. Nicholson, not quite satisfied with the result, re-ordered and re-wrote the script under the influence of LSD, squeezing any last semblance of sense from it. He appears in the film briefly, wandering about in a rather fetching hat and jumper combo that makes him look like he just came off a golf course.

As a result, the film doesn’t have a plot, but highlights include the entire band turning into dandruff and being vacuumed off someone’s head, and then later being chased through a desert while being shot at by a tank.

Much of Head comes across as a vivisection of the whole concept of The Monkees, satirising their fakeness. However, it never gets too heavy, always remaining on the side of weird rather than ‘woe is me.’

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I’ve managed to get this far without mentioning the music, which the band wrote about half of.The film is actually pretty music-light, an odd decision for a movie starring a pop band, although given the rest of the film I suppose it makes perfect sense. Of the music that is there, the best track is Nesmith’s roaring ‘Circle Sky’, while the chilled out folk-psyche of Tork’s ‘Can You Dig It’ is also worth repeated plays.

The Monkee’s have since denied that Head was an intentional suicide effort. Whether that’s true or not, the fact is that they wanted to be taken seriously and were fed up of having all the drawbacks of fame (people bothering them) without any of the upsides (critical recognition), and Head should sort out at least one of those problems.

Unfortunately the result was that existing fans didn’t get it, and the people who might have liked it never saw it. The Monkees TV show had already been cancelled, andTork quit the group shortly after the film’s release. They finally finished as an ongoing act in 1970.

The Monkees may have started out as a fake, but they ended up making great pop music and, in Head, a film that is a banquet of the bizarre, proving that manufactured doesn’t always equal awful.

Party wolf TABLOID tennis The comment boards on Clarkson

celebrity auction Famous people’s old crap Classic Dolce & Gabbana white tee (98% official) Seller information Elton_Rocketman (17 H) 42.8% Positive Feedback

The Guardian

The Daily Mail

“Is it just me, or are most men called Jeremy complete tossers?” from xtrapnel

“Clarksons biggest problem is he is English and speaks his mind” from you know it

“I liked Top Gear’s previous incarnation, when it was called Last of the Summer Wine.” from ampshire OK. Look. How about this?

We have a ‘special edition’ of Top Gear. Broadcast live. A 5-minute episode. The only ‘item’ on the show being that the guy Clarkson took a swing at (allegedly) gets to come on the stage and kick him in the balls. What do we think to that? from StinkEye71 “It’s just a bit of banter. Like the time a bloke I worked with punched another guy in the pub and killed him.” from clmbie Come on BBC, give Clarkson another series! from Herr Absurd A Chelsea fan, from Doncaster.

An extreme case of ‘Public School Wanker Syndrome’ if ever there was one. from Marsman72 Personally I’d sack the lot of them and replace them with, and this is my own choice, Jodie Kidd, Suzy Perry and fuck it Sara Cox. from BigChap

“Come in from a hard days work and all the BBC can lay on is a salad?! The guy deserved a cuff in his lefty chops!” from UTA “Prince Phillip has said worse.

He gets away with it.

Why to Jezza.All he did was abuse an underling.” from crewza “It really is time to dismantle the BBC. All these overpaid leftie luvvies, who are otherwise unemployable, will be down the JobCentre.” from bobajob

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“On a general scale, this country will never be worth living in until it is out of the clutches of the far left. We need a right wing government to straighten things out. Quickly.” from jonas

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Jeremy Clarkson @JezGB_42 Back at the Harvester. Totally having the steak!

“Jeremy who?” from Mr Underhill Or maybe the BBC should sort themselves put [sic]. I don’t blame him for smacking people given that he has to deal with their left wing feminist twaddle. from Oliver of England

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Wonder how long it would take an imigrant taxi driver to earn what I do in a day, literally for driving cars around. lol : Reply

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Jeremy Clarkson @JezGB_42 Long day with @TopGearHampster & @Jamez_May. Hungry : Reply

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Disclaimer: The representations of the persons herein are purely fictitious

Photo casebook “The inappropriate world of Ian Beale”

You’re joking?

Someone else has come as Willy Wonka!

{ Oi! Dickhead!

I’m Willy Wonka!!

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