Loud And Quiet 69 – Tame Impala

Zero pounds / Volume 03 / Issue 69 / the alternative music tabloid

Ta me Impa la Solitude is bliss

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Gwenno 50 Cent Alden Penner The Big Moon Let’s Wrestle Mbongwana Star Slime

contents

welcome

Let’s Wrestle – 12 Gwenno – 14 50 Cent – 18 Slime – 22 Alden penner – 23 The Big Moon – 24 Mbongwana star – 26 Tame Impala – 28

Zero pounds / Volume 03 / Issue 69 / the alternatIVe musIc tabloId

Ta me Impa la

Co ntact

Contr ib u tor s

A dve r tising

i n fo@lou dandq u ie t.com

Amy Pe ttif e r , au stin l a ike , Chr is Watke ys, daisy j o ne s, dav id zammitt, Danie l D y l a n-W r a y, dan ke ndall, Danny Cante r , Elinor Jone s, Edg ar Sm ith, Fr ankie Nazar do, jack do he r ty , JAMES f . Thomp son, jame s we st, Janine Bu llman, je nna fo x to n, joe g og g ins, josh su nth, le e b u llman, Gab r ie l G r e e n, Ge m har r is, Mandy Dr a ke , Nathan We stle y, Owe n Richa r ds, Phil Shar p , Re e f Y ou nis, Sam cor nf or th, samu el ba l l a r d, Sam Walton, T im Cochr a ne , thomas may, tom f e nw ick

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Solitude is bliss

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Gwenno 50 Cent Alden Penner The Big Moon Let’s Wrestle Mbongwana Star Slime

c o v er ph o t o g r aph y G a b r i el G r een

I remember when I first heard ‘In Da Club’ by 50 Cent. I thought it was no good and that the rest of my university was wrong. A friend told me, “Wait until you hear it a thousand times – you’ll love it.” I went to a university that played the same songs every night of the week. I did hear ‘In Da Club’ a thousand times, and I did love it.

‘Get Rich or DieTryin’’ now holds fond memories for me, although that wouldn’t be enough for me to still listen to it as much as I tend to. As an album of blockbuster hip-hop, it remains unparalleled by today’s standards. There’s a reason it’s sold 13 million copies, and while 50 Cent admits in this issue that of course its success wasn’t all down to the music, give it another a listen today and you’ll probably be surprised by its unpretentious appeal.

So when we receive and email out of the blue asking if we’d like to talk with 50 Cent, we said yes, quickly. I told some people I know about this and they all looked at me as if they were trying to work out if I was joking or not. I couldn’t believe that 50 Cent wanted to talk to us – my friends couldn’t believe I wanted us to talk to him.

The resulting interview conducted by James F. Thompson proved me right – not that Curtis Jackson is more than a mere rapper (we’ve known than ever since he became an actor (of sorts), a fashion brand, a vodka distiller and so on), but that he remains a rapper. As he explained to James in an open and eloquent exchange, he’s made his fortune from the opportunities allowed to him by hip-hop, but he still believes in “the magic of music”, which is why he’s bothering to release his sixth album later this year, even though you’re probably not aware of the fact that he released one last June. It’s a simplistic belief, perhaps, especially from a man worth 150 million dollars, but a refreshing one nonetheless. Rappers rap about money as a benchmark for success. It’s easy to lose sight of the music fan piling cash into his Lamborghini.

Stuart Stubbs

Lo ud And Qu ie T PO Box 67915 Lo ndon NW 1W 8TH Ed itor - Stu ar t S tu b b s Art Dir e ctor - Le e Be lche r Sub Editor - Ale x Wilshir e fi l m e ditor - Andr ew ande r son Bo ok Editor s - Le e & Janine Bu llman

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T his M o nth L &Q L o ve s D unca n j o r da n, j o n l aW r e nce , K a te p r ice , L ucy hur st, m iche l l e duffy , r a che l he ndr y, sa m wil l ia m s, W il l L a ur e nce .

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

All rights reserved 2015 Loud And Quiet LTD. ISSN 2049-9892 Printed by S harman & Company LTD .

Distributed by loud and quiet LTD. & forte

10 Years of Loud And Quiet

Did I Love 2005?

In 2005, Edward Leeson became obsessed with guitar music and formed a band.

Just two years later, Larrikin Love was over, at a time when it all seemed to be going so well. Here, he remembers the fast and loose journey of a coming-of-age indie folk gang A s to l d to s t u a rt s t ub b s

The whole thing happened very very very quickly – from meeting [the band], getting signed, making an album and splitting up, it was a couple of years.

Thinking about it now, it was a really funny, wild time, because I hadn’t listened to guitar music, ever. My whole childhood, I was into garage and drum’n’bass and jungle, and then when I was 14 I was really obsessed with grime, and that was all I would listen to.

Everything happened in six months, for me. I went to college, and I get very obsessed about certain things – within a day I can find something and be so obsessed with it that I have to be involved in it immediately, but then it passes very quickly also. After two months, I met Alice [Ed’s now wife] and she introduced me to all these classics that I’d never paid attention to, like The Clash and Jeff Buckley, Tracy Chapman – shit you should know but I didn’t. I got a job in OddBins and moved into a flat near Twickenham. It was so disgusting – the windows kept falling out, and I got trench foot in my sleep – but it was a very romantic time, and I just had to find some people to be in a band with, so I went out with the sole purpose of that. I didn’t want any niceties; I just wanted to know if they’d be in this band with me. Alfie wasn’t our bassist at first; he was our manager. But I met them and had four really rubbish songs. We played two or three gigs and then these girls [Young & Lost Club Records] contacted us and asked if we wanted to put out a release. Really quickly after that four or five labels wanted to sign us, but nobody saw it through apart from Warner Brothers. We were really young – Cozzy had to get his mum and dad to sign the deal

because he was just 15 or something.

The best thing about those guys was that they were so open-minded, whereas I maybe wasn’t, because I had this weird tunnel vision. But as soon as I got hooked on guitar music, I was soon over it as well, and I don’t mean that in any disrespect to the others, because I know they really enjoyed it, and I really enjoyed it, to an extent, but I definitely didn’t enjoy touring – we were partying way to hard and certain events happened and it was getting out of control. I don’t know what happened, but I left the last tour for a bit because I was shitting blood. My liver was fucked up. I wasn’t equipped for that lifestyle. Tensions grew and it separated a bit. And it’s no-one’s fault – and it’s least of all their fault, it’s more my fault – but it became me and them. After the show they’d go off and party and I’d just sit on the bus drinking until I fell asleep. It was just quite lonely, and a bit awkward.

Certain things happened. On stage once someone hit me with a bottle during our first song.

I walked off the stage, and they all came off and were like, ‘Ed, don’t be such a diva, get back on there’. I went back on stage and I remember being really wound up, and I had a drumstick and I was hitting Cozzy’s drums out of time, really sabotaging shit, and then another bottle got thrown, and that was the beginning of the end – I did this awful thing where I stormed off stage and I went upstairs and destroyed all of this electrical equipment in our dressing room. I was crying and going mad, and they came in and it transpired it was our tour manager’s printer and hi-fi, and everyone was so fucking angry with me.

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A tension had snapped. We went to Japan after that, and had a great time, but after a fortnight of partying I flew home on my own, on a completely empty plane where Arctic Monkeys were in first class, and I thought fuck this. When I got home and called our mangers they were like, ‘Is it over?’.They knew it was coming.

I think there might have been some bad blood because [the band] were really happy doing what we were doing. They were such sweet people – completely unpretentious, genuine people – who loved playing music, way more than I did. Playing guitars and drums had been part of their childhood, and it hadn’t been part of mine. And so for me to chuck it away so quickly I think really offended them. I think for a long time after they despised me, because I ended it all, and in a way I wish they’d carried on without me, because I didn’t want to be responsible for ending this great fun time. I do feel regret for that.

I remember when I told them, I drank two bottles of wine to muster up the courage, and they were all really lovely. They cared for me more than I had realised. I was explaining to them why I wasn’t able to do it anymore, and they understood and any ego went to one side.

I’ve finally learned that although I might be embarrassed about my past, or whatever, as most people are about things they did when they were young, for some people we were a coming of age band, just because we came out at the right time for them, and it’s pretty arrogant and unfair to dismiss it and the pleasure that other people got out of it, or still do.

books + second life

Rock Cod Reef Younis investigates what rock stars do next No.11: Roger Daltrey / with its August 2005 issue gushing: “A visual assault on the senses. There can be no prettier fishery in this land. Spikes of bright yellow flag decorate the banks which are thick with beds of rose bay willow herb, bee-haunted foxgloves and spotted orchid. A place where wild browns & rainbows live side by side.”

Built around 30 years ago in East Sussex, Daltrey considers the four-lake, 20-acre trout fishery to be the proudest achievement of his life... presuming he discounts “keeping the Who together, because I always believed in it” and “getting the teen cancer thing going,” that is.

Admittedly, it was Jacobean country pile Holmshurst Manor that Daltrey was first interested in in 1970, but since installing a recording studio and other rock star musts, he’s been all about the fishing. “I like the day out and if I don’t catch fish, it doesn’t bother me at all. 50% of fishing is nothing to do with catching fish; it’s the environment and meditation by the water,” he’s said. But when a neighbouring farm leaked liquid fertiliser into the Iwerne Springs Fish Farm in Dorset in 1986, and caused the deaths of around 500,000 fish at his own trout farm, that’s (probably) where those other half dozen joints came in handy.

As the charismatic frontman for The Who, Roger Daltrey sold over 100 million records, moonlighted as the lead actor inTommy (The Who-inspired rock opera of the same name), appeared on an oddly diverse mix of TV series that included That 70s Show, The Bill, The New Adventures of Superman, and The Mighty Boosh, and also collected a CBE for ‘services to music, the entertainment industry and charity’ along the way.

His place in the annals of rock’n’roll fame has long been confirmed – officially it happened in 1990 with an induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame – and he added that to his Lifetime AchievementAward from the British Phonographic Industry, another one from the Grammy Foundation, and a UK Music Hall of Fame award that followed in 2005.

But, despite all of that success and recognition, designing and building Lakedown Fishery stands as one of Roger Daltrey’s biggest achievements.

Documented in the (presumably seminal) Underwater World of Trout, Vol. 1, a (probably) giddy Daltrey said: “When I go fishing, I come away feeling like I’ve smoked half a dozen joints.”

Confirmation also came from the UK’s No.1 still-water fly fishing magazine, Trout Fisherman,

by jan i n e & Lee bull man

What Else Is in the Teaches of Peaches

by Peaches & Holger Talinski

Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck

by Brett Morgan with Richard Bienstock

Akashic Books

Omnibus

When HolgerTalinski approached Peaches in order to collaborate on some photographs, the singer thought they would get together and see how it went. Six years later the relationship is still going strong and Talinski’s pictures of the Canadian electro assassin offer an insight into the fun, chaos, hard work, theatre and artistry that goes into presenting Peaches to the world. What Else is in the Teaches of Peaches reveals an artist with a vision and a photographer with full access. The dazzling images collected in the book range from the intimate to the epic and are accompanied by written pieces by collaborators and admirers ranging from Michael Stipe to Yoko Ono.

Montage of Heck accompanies the recent film documentary of the same name and attempts to shed some light on the man behind the eyes that still stare out at the world from a million Nirvana t-shirts. Kurt Cobain began life as a smiling kid in a formal portrait from Anytown USA and ended up as heir to Leadbelly’s throne, a true, deep bluesman who could play out his feelings for you. Many of the photographs, film stills, artworks and writings included here are never before seen and, combined with the interviews with those who knew and loved him, offer a glimpse of the background and influences that formed Cobain and contributed to his eventual frantic rise and tragic fall.

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SICK ON YOU

by Andrew Matheson Ebury Press

Sick On You: : The Disastrous Story of Britain’s Great Lost Punk Band is a brutally funny and searingly honest memoir in which Matheson recounts the story of his journey to mid ’70s London in order to search out the sequins and satin of rock and roll. On his arrival however, he found that at that time in that town, rock and roll still meant Elvis Presley and Teddy Boys. Operating in the cultural wasteland of pre-punk, Matheson had something far more fucked up, frilly and flared in mind, and so formed the almost legendary Hollywood Brats – part band/part car crash – who looked and sounded like a proto NewYork Dolls and went on to influence many of the faces who would go on to provide punk rock’s first wave.

getting to know you

Ducktails Real Estate guitarist Matt Mondanile releases his fifth solo album as Ducktails this month, which raises the question if it can still be considered a side project. ‘St. Catherine’ is also the LA-based musician’s most solid record under this moniker, inspired by love but also religion and his childhood as an alter boy /

The best piece of advice you’ve been given?

Don’t take shit from anyone

People’s biggest misconception about you That I am very successful with women.

The best book in the world The Man In the Ceiling by Shel Silverstein

The worst date you’ve been on I went on a date with this girl and I don’t even remember anything about it other than after dinner we both parted ways and said we might meet up later but we both knew that wasn’t going to happen.

What is success to you?

Being completely satisfied.

The worst present you’ve received Books about Indie Rock.

What talent do you wish you had?

Classical pianist, and music theory.

Your first big extravagance A studio apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Your guilty pleasure Polly O String Cheese.

Your favourite word Green.

Your pet-hate Cats.

If you had to eat one food forever, it would be...

Pasta.

The worst job you’ve had I worked as a cashier at a grocery store and I had to stand up all day long.

The film you can quote the most of Wayne’s World.

Your favourite item of clothing My Superga shoes.

Your biggest disappointment Not getting critically praised.

The most famous person you’ve met Courtney Love in Montauk, NY at the Surf Lodge.

She was very similar to the way she is portrayed.

Getting fat

The celebrity that most pissed you off, even though you’ve never met them Bradley Cooper.

Your hidden talent I have the ability to remember the most insignificant thing about a band or the members’ names of some tiny band.

What is the most overrated thing in the world? iPads and lunch wraps.

The characteristic you most like about yourself Laughing at other people’s jokes.

Favourite place in the world Ridgewood, New Jersey... It’s where I am from and where my mother lives.

Your style icon Bill Murray.

Your biggest fear?

The one song you wish you’d written?

‘Only love can break your heart’ - neil young

The thing you’d rescue from a burning building My laptop and hard drive.

What would you change about your physical appearance?

Nothing at all.

What would you tell your 15-year-old-self?

Don’t worry about doing poorly in school, just focus on yourself.

What’s your biggest turn-off?

Extravagant jewellery.

Your best piece of advice for others Stop worrying about what others think.

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T e l l M e A b o u t I t : O b it u a r y E d iti o n

Death of an Indie Pop Band By the time you read this, London DIY band Let’s Wrestle will be dead. From beyond the grave, then, singer Wesley Patrick Gonzalez tells all P ho tography: jenna fox ton / wri t er: edgar smi t h

Last month, the inboxes of the music press got a gracefully worded goodbye from Let’s Wrestle. Wesley Gonzalez, Louis Scase and Mike Hankin were splitting up after ten years. The beloved North London band, if you missed the farewell show at the 100 Club last Friday, are out of your life forever.

Early singles and a debut EP were devoured by a Libertines-primed public’s craven lust for young male guitarists. They signed to Merge still barely shaving. In that context, flights of wild abandon and monstrous creative egos were forgivable and, clothed in a precociously developed sense of ironic distance, they fueled extensive US tours, three albums and a blog called ‘Let’s Wrestle Explains it All.’ Before Wesley Patrick Gonzalez, the DIY group’s singer, songwriter and leader, now twenty-four, leaves to become a serious grown up artist in his own right, I have juiced him for these extremely candid reflections on a decade doing the indie rock trip.

“The thought of Let’s Wrestle is just the taste of Lynx in my mouth.”

I remember Louis [Let’s Wrestle’s drummer who also went by the name Darkus Bishop] buying three cans of Special Brew before his first GCSE exam, to see if he could smuggle it in.

I think it was music, because we both got so pissed before we did the music exam. We were so cocky, like, ‘We’ve got this down! We’ve released a single.’

We used to go and see bands like Part Chimp and Hunting Lodge at the Barfly when we were at school. My main memory is being at Mike Hankin’s house [aka Mike Lightning – bass], at about fourteen, drinking

three litres of White Ace and realising you could get high from huffing aerosols. The thought of Let’s Wrestle is just the taste of Lynx in my mouth. It was fun but it was horrible.

It wasn’t until we went to see Dinosaur Jr. at one of those ATP shows – we had been doing stupid, fucking folky songs that were bollocks. We decided, ‘Oh, fuck it – we’ll try and do it like that.’ The only thing I ever wanted to do was to release one seveninch. Then we did that and just carried on. I sort of expected I’d go to university but I never did.

“This is a fucking psychopath thing to do…”

Of everybody I know who’s a musician, Let’s Wrestle is the only band I know that got kicked off a tour, really properly. It was this tour with Bromheads Jacket. We were fucking everything up. We would go and drive to the venue early. This is a fucking psychopath thing to do: everybody knew that we were there but we wouldn’t leave the car until five minutes before going on stage. We’d pull up, and we had a TV taped to the dashboard, and we’d watch TV, drink and drink and watch TV until somebody came out from the venue and went, ‘you need to play.’ We’d load all the stuff in, in five minutes, then play, load it all out, and fuck off.

They didn’t like us either. We all realised it was a really big mistake and, I can’t remember what it was, but Bromheads Jacket phoned up and went: ‘They’re dropped from the tour; we’re not doing anything more with them; they’re complete fucking nutcases.’

Because I was always in charge I had to keep some scope of it but my view of things was very askew. I let

stuff happen where it really shouldn’t have done, like the time Mike Hankin stole two-hundred-and-eighty-eight beers from Sainsbury’s in Camden. It’s ludicrous, the shit we fucking did.

There’s one thing that I can’t say – I genuinely can’t, because they’ve already got in contact with me, and it’s like a criminal investigation – Hahahahaha! They’ve already got in contact and I managed to fob my way out of it, but I can’t bring it up again.

I think that was the only time I genuinely ever thought it’s gone too far, and that we needed to calm down.

That was just before the first record, so the first record is really well done. After that it was always more serious, but it was also still fucking very poorly run – I was in charge for such a long time!

“America is so weird’

Mike Holsworth [the Secretly Canadian and former Matador UK bigwig] got involved and helped us out when we signed to Merge – did all the contract stuff and got us a lawyer and stuff like that. He got involved because I was being uncontrollable and I was trying to do it while also being off my nut.

Then, yeah, we toured shit loads in America – it was fucking horrible. Fun but also fucking weird. You know how everybody in England does American accents, like in every conversation, everyone does an American accent at one point, it’s just a given thing. And nobody ever says, when you’re at a party, ‘Can you do an Irish accent?’.

But at American parties they’re always, like, ‘Can you do an American accent?

Can you do my accent? Because I’ve never even bothered trying your accent, because you’re tiny and who gives a shit?’ But: ‘Wow, you can do an American accent?! You should just speak like this all the time!’ Like, what

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the fuck? It’s mental. America is so weird.

We went to SXSW and met up with the people from Merge, just after we signed with them. The first day I got sunstroke, instantly, as soon as I walked out of the fucking plane. I spent the rest of the week in the hotel. Texas at ten in the morning, they were showing Anchorman and, not like it’s my favourite film ever, but when you could go out and get more sunstroke or you could sit in bed… That’s where that song ‘I’m So Lazy’ came about. They were all going out and I had to stay in the hotel the whole time. They’d come back and there would be piles and piles of shit around me, while I was just watching TV doing fuck all.

“I got up and tried to push him off a roof”

Fucked Up had their own stage at SXSW and we’d been on tour with them, so we went and saw this covers band that Thurston Moore did with J Mascis, Jonah from Fucked Up and a few other, like, punk celebrities. There

Wesl ey p a rt r ick g o n z a l ez . p ho t o g ra p hed a t his ho me in br ix t o n , l o n d o n .

“Rain Ruins Revolution”

was this concrete floor. Mike was getting a drink or something and me and Louis were really going for it, and somebody knocked me and broke my glasses. I smacked my head against the floor and Mike, on his way back from the bar, had gotten into a conversation with Bill Murray – taking photos with him, drinking margaritas, trying to get Bill Murray to phone his Dad. I was really fucking out of it, really drunk but also concussed, and I went up and was like, ‘Can I have a photo with you, Bill Murray?’ and he’s like, ‘NO. You can have the rest of my Tequila, Bye!’ like that, and fucked off.

I think me and Mike, by this point, were on a knife edge; could go either way, be the best friends or fucking hate each other. We were driving through somewhere in Oregon where the tour manager’s parents lived. I was vegetarian at the time, and they cooked this big beef stew and I was like, ‘can’t eat it’, and it was instantly awkward, and they were talking to Mike. They wouldn’t stop saying he sounded like Alan Rickman, and Mike was going, ‘Oh, you can’t understand how much this means to me, you saying I sound

like Alan Rickman, this is amazing,’ to which I was like, ‘Oh fuck off, you cunt.’

We played the Bowery Ballroom in New York and he got off with this girl, and then insisted that we all go back to a party at her house and we went onto the roof. Me and Mike were having such a bad time and I heard him talking about someone I knew to somebody and it pissed me off, and I got up and tried to push him off a roof.

The tour manager grabbed me and put me in a cab and took me to this apartment we were staying in and I was so full of adrenaline I read three books in one night, avidly trying to get off my mind off of what had just happened, that I’d just nearly pushed one of my best friends off a roof.

Obviously, Mike ended up leaving around that sort of same time, like just after we finished the record.

“I’m fucking Brian Wilson, you will do what I say!”

The third [eponymous] record was weird because I had decided I needed

to make some sort of mature music or something. I suppose it started me thinking that I need to do my own stuff, but I didn’t realise it then. The third record is the most my own. I could control everything else but Louis was his own thing. I’d go ‘Can you play with towels on the drums?’ and he’d go, ‘Can you shut the fuck up, you cunt?’

I came in with a Sound Map, was what I was calling it. This A2 piece of brown paper where I had done every song: what I wanted on it, what I wanted it to sound like, references that I had. Everybody, when they’d played their part or sang, had to tick it off afterwards. Shit like that, it was really regimented. It was insane.You do your part, you tick it off, done! It’s done.

Incredibly sort of particular about everything, which I’m sure had a lot to do with me getting really into coke at that time. I was like: ‘That’s done, that’s done, that’s done – you do what I say. I know what I’m doing. I’m fucking Brian Wilson, you will do what I say!’

I really like that record but it doesn’t sound like a Let’s Wrestle record I don’t think.

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I think I sort of knew the whole time I wasn’t going to do another record after it. On the new [solo] stuff, I’ve stopped playing guitar completely and I just play piano and synthesizer and it’s got loads of saxophones on it – like fucking Todd Rundgren pop music, like fucking full on. I want the genre of my new music to be – The Tory’s Second Term. That’s what I want it to be called, I’ll be playing my music and they’ll be like, ‘Oh, he’s playing Tory second term music’ I wrote ‘Rain Ruins Revolutions’ after the riots, when they kicked off in Tottenham and Brixton and Hackney. I was staying at my Mum’s for a few days, and me and my stepdad were talking, going, ‘If it rained, this would just stop, they would stop and be like, ‘Oh, it’s raining. Oh no!’’

They’re going around looting the place, thinking they’re the bee’s knees.

The thing is both those riots, one by a bunch of middle class cunts and one by a bunch of working class cunts, they’re both shit – they are both completely shit. Both of them completely achieved nothing and both sets of them, if it started raining, would’ve gone, ‘I need to go home.’

That’s the generation we live in. It’s a moribund state of affairs. ‘Oh yeah, big shot! I’m gonna go and fucking smash up JD sports!’ or ‘Big shot! I’m gonna go and knick all my books from the library.’ The knob heads.

Every option is shit, and there seems like nothing I can do, in any way, to express my opinion on this stuff. I would go on a protest if I thought I could physically do anything to fucking change it. I’ve just decided to not give a fuck about anything. Part of me is like, ‘oh it was a lot better when Labour were in,’ and I know that, but it wasn’t ideal. I don’t understand how I could help it in any way. I’ve got no idea, because I’m one of the people who’s like, ‘Oh no! This is fucking terrible! This is terrible!’ and I don’t know what the fuck to do but I’m just so fucking furious all the time. There’s nothing more I can say than that.

my place | fy lle

Hometown Revolution Gwenno Saunders walked us around her hometown of Cardiff – a City instrumental to her political Welsh language LP, ‘Y Dydd Olaf’ P hoto gr a ph y: P h il sh a rp / w r ite r : s tua r t stubb s

Hometowns are like family members – you can slag off your own, but nobody else’s, not even in agreement.

To say: “Yeah, maybe you’re right, it does feel a little rundown around here,” you might as well have said: “The only thing that smells worse than your mum’s cooking is your dad.”

That’s not on.

Gwenno Saunders has a love/hate relationship with Cardiff that is familiar to all of us, that ultimately stems from frustration at unfulfilled potential. The council keeps flattening buildings, having fully embraced a

new-is-always-better approach to city planning, and Saunders worries about that a lot. When she meets me direct from my train to Cardiff Central, she voices her concern as soon as we’ve said hello to one another. She gestures towards the bus shelters in front of the grand station. “They’ve never really known what to do with this area, and now they’re going to build a BBC headquarters here. I’m worried it’s going to look like a government outpost building, or something.”

Gwenno has offered to give me a rough tour of Cardiff – a city I’d never

been to, and one that has greatly influenced her debut solo album, ‘Y Dydd Olaf’, released for a second time this month, following a limited pressing at the end of 2014. As you can probably guess, it’s a very Welsh record – only one track isn’t sang in Saunders’ mother tongue, and that track (the closing ‘Amser’, written as a poem by her father some years ago) plumps for Cornish over English. Sounds like it might be an album of trad-folk performed on upturned barrels, but ‘Y Dydd Olaf’ (which translates as ‘The Last Day’) takes its musical cues from

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the breezy side of 1970s krautrock, Broadcast’s tempered neo-psych and Welsh electronic artists like Malcolm Neon, Geraint Ffrancon and R. Seilog.

“I was wanting to find an industrial element in Welsh culture,” Saunders tells me, “because what frustrated me in the past was that I don’t play the acoustic guitar; I don’t sing nicely these conventional songs.

“I liked that krautrock was European,” she says. “I loved that, because we’re so bombarded by American culture. And rhythmically, not being a huge rock fan, it was the

my place | fy lle Le ft : Gw e nn o S aund e r s in the ce nt r e o f c ar d if f .

Be low : on th e pl atf or m of Qu e e n Stre e t s tatio n

motorik beat that got me.”

We walk down Cardiff High Street to the city’s castle and a statue of NHS founder Aneurin Bevan (“The pointy man”), as Gwenno references Welsh literary and historic figures that I pretend I’ve heard of. She’s well read on architecture, too, and is eager to show me the brutalist St. David’s Hall – a concert hall that “should book more interesting things than it does.”

If ‘Y Dydd Olaf’ was a building, it would look like St. David’s Hall – a retro-futurist vision of a practical, modern world.

‘Y Dydd Olaf’ takes its name – and a fair share of inspiration ¬– from a 1976 science fiction novel by Welsh nuclear scientist Owain Owain. His Y Dydd Olaf is a dystopian tale of robots taking over the planet and turning humans into a race of clones. Like George Orwell before him, and, more similarly in plot, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the accuracy of Owain’s imagined future society is alarming as we drift through what is essentially a faceless city centre. Owain wrote his book in diary form, in Welsh – a language the robots are unable to decipher. “It’s a truly inspired way of expressing the power and importance of cultural diversity in an increasingly

globalised world,” notes Saunders.

She’s spoken Welsh all her life, which puts her in the 20% of the country who know and speak their own language. I’d be proud of that, too, and Cardiff, she tells me, has been slow to celebrate its national identity through language. “It has really grown, though,” she assures me. “You hear Welsh in the street now. I remember when we used to walk around when I was little, my mum would be like, ‘shhhh, listen… someone’s speaking Welsh’, and it would be a really exciting thing.

“More than one language is great for you anyway,” she says, “regardless of what you think the value of that language is. It is of value because it’s part of your identity and where you’re from.”

Inside St. David’s Hall we’re asked if we’re here for the gypsy and traveller convention. We’re not, but Gwenno asks if we can go upstairs to have a look. She grew up surrounded by Celtic culture, in a household that played traditional Irish music, as well as Welsh protest songs and Cornish and Breton artists. Gwenno’s mother has sung in the Socialist Street Choir for 30 years, and she would teach her daughter anti-apartheid songs as a

child; her father is a Cornish poet and linguist, which has furthered her respect for endangered languages and cultures. (Just 200 people now speak Cornish – Gwenno and her father are 2 of them). She has one younger sister, and says that her childhood in the inner-city area of Riverside “was almost like being brought up in a cult.”

“I wasn’t brought up on any English music at all,” she says, “and I didn’t really like pop music when I was little. I remember when everyone got into Kylie and I was like, ‘urgh, it’s horrible!’ And then, as I got older, all the posh people in school listened to Brit Pop, and I thought I’m not going to listen to that, because it’s really white and really boring and I can’t see any sex it in. I was 14 – where was the sex? So I got into really bad slow jams, like Jodeci. Cardiff is a bit of a slow jam city, even now. On the radio station we’re on [Gwenno hosts an experimental music show on Cardiff Radio with her husband Rhys Edwards, who also produced ‘Y Dydd Olaf’ and released it the first time around on his label Peski Records] all they play is slow jams – R Kelley, Brandy, Mary J Blige. It might as well be 1992.”

She half jokes that she was always mad at her mum as she had to play catch-up in her teens. “People at school were saying Oasis are just copying The Beatles, and I didn’t know who that was. It would have helped my credibility if I had known who David Bowie was at the right time.”

A rebellious student who hated school, by the time she was 16, Gwenno was itching to leave Cardiff and got the opportunity to do so in an Irish dance show. You’ve probably heard of it – it’s called Lord of The Dance.

She saw it as nothing more than a way out, and moved to Las Vegas. She had a good time, for a time, and found sanctuary in electronic music when she wasn’t feeling so great about the world’s strangest city.

“I’d go to this club called Utopia,” she tells me, “off the strip. It was where all the people who worked in the hotels went. It was probably quite terrible music – euphoric house and trance, and all of these terrible things that were happening in America at the time – but from then I always wanted to make electronic music, and it was the things that I related to the most.

“It was when a lot of the Welsh bands came through that I thought, they’re from Wales! We’re part of the

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world as well! We’re not this ‘other’, which, culturally, Wales was. ‘This desert business is getting a bit boring now – I need to come back.’”

G

wenno didn’t move back to Cardiff for long, and I can see how she ended up joining conceptual pop band The Pipettes, and relocating once again to Brighton. The polka-dot dress-up; the ’60s doo-wop homage; the saccharine pop melodies and choreographed dance moves – they’re a far cry from a sci-fi krautrock project performed almost entirely in Welsh, but a much shorter walk from Michael Flatley’s touring behemoth. “I thought, yeah, I know how to do that,” she says, “put a costume on and get on stage.

“It was a really good education,” she says of the group, which she left in 2010. “It was one that I really needed, because I wasn’t particularly confident in myself or as a musician when I joined. I was exposed to a lot of different music, but it was very restricting, and it was impossible to manoeuvre within it. You did have to play a role and a character, and I’m not an actor, and I wasn’t very good at that – I don’t think I was very convincing. I didn’t even change my name [others did, to things like Monster Bobby and RiotBecki].

“The friendships were important, but there was a lot of frustration as well. It was very restricting – I mean, you’re wearing the same dress every night. It’s weird… but great. I don’t think any of us are the same people we were.

“The album that I’ve made is what I am really,” she says – a socialist, a feminist, a person engaged in local and global political debate, an artist deeply concerned by media manipulation, government surveillance and the institutionalised deconstruction of communities and their historic cultures. ‘Y Dydd Olaf’, while dreamy in sound and soft on the ears, is a cry for resistance, and its lyrics sheet (whether in Welsh or English translation) makes for bleak and inspiring reading. ‘Don’t, don’t forget that your heart is in the revolution,’ goes the opening ‘Chwyldro’ (‘Revolution’), while the following ‘Patriarchaeth’ (‘Patriarchy’) forebodes: ‘The sack is heavy, the road is steep /Your humanity is still up for sale.’ “The more information that’s

my place | fy lle G w en n o a n d t h e “ p o in ty Ma n ” st a tu e o f n h s f o u n d er A n eu r i n B e va n

available to you via new technology, the more aware you become of the startling inequality between the sexes,” says Gwenno. “I would go as far as to say too that as a minority culture, Wales can at times fall into an even more conservative and narrow view of gender roles in public life, which is as much to do with the size of the population as it is to do with opportunity, of course. With ‘Patriarchaeth’ I’m trying to express what sexism feels like for a woman living in a patriarchal society.”

“The Internet highlights it,” she says, “because obviously porn has become such a big part of culture and peoples’ lives, it really puts women’s issues at the forefront, really. There have been periods where woman have been like, ‘well, if I’m selling my body and I’m making the money from it, I’m winning’. And I think woman are beginning to turn around on that idea and realise just how exploitative it is, unfortunately.”

Elsewhere, Gwenno celebrates Cardiff’s marginalised visual arts community on ‘Golau Arall’ (‘Another Light’) – “A song to remind you that in the darkest times it’s important not

to lose faith in art,” she says, a view not vocalised enough by musicians as the Arts face five more years of aggressive Tory cuts – and laments the city’s biggest community casualty at the hands of developers on ‘Sisial y Môr’ (‘The Whispering of the Sea’).

We travel to this area down by the docks on a single carriage train. It’s called Butetown and is also referred to as Tiger Bay – a place name famed for being the birthplace of Shirley Bassey.

Bassey’s story is the ultimate tale of local-girl-done-good, made all the more inspiring by the fact that she grew up in this part of town, as the daughter of Nigerian and English migrants. What Butetown always lacked in affluence it more than made up for in multi-culturalism, and at one time over 50 different nationalities lived in these streets that are now largely derelict.

Gwenno takes me past one disused tavern after the next, around the corner to a mighty period building that looks like it could have once been a grand hotel, and could even become that again. It’s actually the dock’s old Coal Exchange, but the point remains – a building as great as this shouldn’t be a

boarded up ruin.

Gwenno constantly expresses her disappointment in Butetown’s neglect and unfulfilled potential, even before we catch the train there. Walking around the ghostly streets it makes you realise that there’s a place for gentrification – at least then some of these historic buildings would be in some use. Or, better still, perhaps Cardiff council shouldn’t have relocated its immigrant community to the outskirts of the city, seemingly to allow a large neighbourhood to fall into disrepair until it’s able to sell it off to developers. That’s what Gwenno is convinced has happened here, and in Butetown we arrive at her greatest frustration at the town that made her.

She sticks her head into the doorway of a Polish florists and café to say hello to the owners (they’ve recently moved premises), and we go for lunch at a Portuguese café she recommends, but there’s little else going on around here. “I just think that would make a really nice art space or little theatre,” she says more than once as we walk, and it’s true of all the buildings it’s applied to.

“Other parts of Wales have really strong identity,” Gwenno tells me in the café, “and I’ve always envied people from small towns in the valleys who are from this place, and they’ve stuck to it, and they’re of it. Because Cardiff has changed so much, it’s a little more wishy-washy.

“Cardiff has this delusion of grandeur, and you’ve got to admire that ambition – ‘Good for you, you want to be a big American city!’ but it hasn’t celebrated its multiculturalism enough, or preserved its own, historic identity. I’m constantly searching for the true nature of Cardiff – I’m constantly trying to find a root to it, to find an ownership.” “[With the track ‘Sisial y Môr’] I am trying to express my disappointment with the lack of vision that Cardiff City Council has with regards to town planning on the whole.”

T

ouring the world with the dance group in her teens and with The Pipettes through her twenties, Gwenno returned to Cardiff in 2011 in a relatively unique position – as a Welsh language musician with world experiences and influences.

Living in England, it had felt

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strange to make music with Welsh lyrics, having spent the whole day communicating in English, but now that she was home in Wales, the opposite was true. She made ‘Ymbelydredd’ (‘Radiation’) an EP about murdered prostitutes, collapsing ceilings, 50p dance lessons and using soap as a toothpaste substitute – life growing up in ’80s Cardiff, in other words.

After five years of ‘pulling shapes’ in a melodic pop group on the peripheries of the mainstream, Gwenno Saunders was now eliminating all expectation by proceeding to make music in her own minority language. “And that was brilliant,” she says. “‘Let’s make a record in Welsh and Cornish, because there’s no expectation there at all!’ It’s the biggest freedom you can find.

There are other ways to do it, other than linguistically, with really challenging music – music that’s far more challenging than what we’ve made – but that was so exciting. It wasn’t aimed at anybody.Welsh records don’t sell. They generally get made so that they exist. That’s the aim.”

Before we walk back to Cardiff Central Station I ask Gwenno if she’d ever consider running for the city council. I half expect her say yes – as the concerned, proud local girl full of proactive passion for change and frustration towards a familiar, unsympathetic government body; as the gung-ho spirit who moved to Vegas at the age of 16, joined a pop band on a whim, appeared in a Welsh soap opera and who currently co-hosts a weekly experimental music radio show that earlier this year promoted its first visual art and music festival, Cam ’15. The answer she actually gives me highlights the common thread in all of those varied ventures. Gwenno Saunders, I’m reminded, is a creative, not a bureaucrat.

“Y’know what,” she says, “I think there’s a lot to be said for being really interested in the way things are ran, and then just making art. I’m really into that idea, because art and culture is the last outpost of freedom of some kind in this globalised, capitalised world.”

Magic

over

You probably don’t even think of Curtis Jackson as a rapper these days, but as he explains to James F. Thompson, it’s music that’s facilitated the brand and fortune of 50 CENT, and he still believes in the magic of hip-hop Photography: Victoria Will / writer: James F. Thompson

“First I want to say that it’s a pleasure to be speaking to somebody who actually knows who I am. Not some journalist who’s Googled me for 30 minutes before getting on the phone.”

A few short years ago, the idea that anyone would need to Google 50 Cent would be laughable. The multiplatinum albums, the beefs, the nine bullets – from the February 2003 release of ‘Get Rich or Die Tryin’’ through just about the remainder of the decade, Curtis Jackson was all but imperious at the summit of not just hip-hop but popular music, his ragsto-riches story indelibly imprinted on contemporary youth culture and beyond.

For the improbably uninitiated, the scale of Jackson’s success bears some repeating. ‘Get Rich…’ shifted 900,000 copies in its first week, went on to sell over 13 million copies and Billboard magazine would later list it as the twelfth-best record of the decade. Second LP ‘The Massacre’ has sold 10 million copies to date and also boasted a staggering 1.1 million sales in its first week. Third album proper, ‘Curtis’, has moved about 3.5 million copies so far and even critical misstep ‘Before I Self-Destruct’ is past the million mark. That’s before we even get to G-Unit, his side project and record label.

Outside of music, Jackson has channelled his bona fide celebrity credentials into promoting business ventures ranging from movies (2003 biopic Get Rich or Die Tryin’; current comedy Spy) and television shows (American crime drama Power) through to vodka (Effen), headphones (SMS Audio), health drinks (Vitamin Water) and – er – self-help books. A very conservative estimate of Jackson’s worth earlier this year by Forbes placed it upwards of $150 million. Kanye West is said to be worth less than $130 million.

It’s true that Jackson’s music career since the turn of the decade has existed in something of a torpor. Last year’s ‘Animal Ambition’ hasn’t even cleared a quarter of a million sales – colossal in

terms of the sorts of artists Loud And Quiet usually interviews but practically a rounding error for a 50 Cent release.

Critical reception has been middling at best.

Yet Jackson already has another album in the works for this September, the optimistically-titled ‘Street King Immortal’. There’s also a forthcoming sold-out gig at the O2. So here we have 50 Cent – the $150 million man himself – on a transatlantic phone line for all of 40 minutes to hype his new release, in the midst of a promotional tour for his Effen vodka brand.

So let’s start with why. As a multifaceted businessman and extremely wealthy man, why even bother with music? Why concern yourself with album sales, and critics, and the promotional treadmill?

“I enjoy the business portion of it, I do, but I’m a music artist,” Jackson demurs. “It’s funny because I was on stage with Mark Wahlberg and I came out on the New Kids On The Block show [at Madison Square Garden last month] as a surprise and Mark Wahlberg was there. He has totally transitioned. Like, he’s an actor, not a music artist. I had to drag him out of the car on stage and he wants to be as far from being associated with music as possible. I’m almost the opposite.

I’m like, I still have a passion for music, I still like what it feels like when it takes you 30 or 40 minutes to come up with an idea and it feels like magic.”

Fair enough. Surely music is a bit of a distraction from far more lucrative pursuits though? The business ventures, the TV shows, the movies and the rest?

Jackson is creditably candid. “I’ve made more [money] away from music than from music,” he says. “But I wouldn’t have had the ability to be involved in those deals if it wasn’t for music. Music culture is so broad now – like hip-hop culture was underground, now it’s pop culture – and there’s no place in the world that you can’t find someone who’s not aware of hip-hop culture.

“If you span the globe, wherever you stop you’ll find someone who knows what rap music is. I’ve toured so many places and sold out events in different territories that it makes me feel like being associated with it and functioning within it gives you a presence around the world that you can’t get anywhere else. You can’t buy what a hit record does.”

Now we’re getting to the crux of it.

For somebody like 50 Cent, or Jay-Z, or Kanye West or the current crop of female megastars, a music career is an enabler. Nobody’s making much money out of music in isolation nowadays no matter how big they are.

Instead, they’re parlaying their star power into the creation of personal 360-degree brands. Record labels, clothing lines, fragrances, and anything else their coteries of advisors can figure out how to monetise.

It’s a brilliant model and one that Jackson has exploited to full effect.

Think of it like this. A record label spends eye-watering sums promoting your music, thereby rendering you a celebrity almost by default. A cookware company then writes you an enormous cheque asking you to promote its pans.

Your answer is…?

For Jackson, the answer is obvious.

“When I fell in love with hip-hop there was ‘Crossover’ by EPMD [the 1992 track criticising rappers moving into R&B and pop to sell more records].

To be associated with a major corporation was, ‘You’re a sell-out.’

Now, if you’re not associated with companies that have great marketing then I don’t think you’re going to sell anything. Especially when you previously had a two-year [album cycle] that conditioned the public to expect to see you in a big marketing campaign. For a new artist, they can have this online following and growth at the same time, have people start listening and liking it and [the artists] are fine with the numbers coming in like that. But when previously you sold 13 million records, it’s tough to think you’re going to do that forever.”

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Sure enough, in 2007, Jackson lost a much-hyped sales battle with Kanye West in what was seen in many quarters as the beginning of the end of his chart dominance. Prior to the faceoff, Jackson was so certain that he would prevail that he told all-comers that he would retire if he didn’t. West came out on top, with Jackson reduced to boasting about international sales to make up the numbers.

Thanks to some shrewd manoeuvring behind the scenes though, it really didn’t matter. By that point Jackson was well on his way to a spectacular windfall well beyond anything he could ever have hoped to achieve within the confines of selling records for a living. A spectacular cash influx, which would cast people like Kanye West permanently in the shade.

Around the time his first album was released, Jackson signed a fiveyear deal to market his own brand of trainers for Reebok. At the end of one of his TV commercials, the audience were treated to 50 Cent conspicuously glugging from a bottle of Vitamin Water, a nascent health brand that Jackson happened to like. His manager at the time, Chris Lighty, had arranged the plug as a way of securing a promotion deal with Gleceau, the company who owned the brand.

Lo and behold, Gleceau soon came calling. Jackson and his team were then able to broker an astonishing deal: a $5 million fee and – crucially – a 5% equity stake in the company. Four years later, the firm was sold for $4.1 billion in cash. The trade netted Jackson $200 million before taxes, or roughly $100 million after all deductions. The figure was ten times more than 50 Cent’s records had earned to that point.

Jackson has never looked back. “I think that my life is testimony to the possibilities of making the best of the situation you know, this kind of inspirational story,” he says of his rise to riches. “I think that my focus is on – for the most part I convey that everything that you’re actually after, you can achieve it.”

Money

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C

urtis James Jackson III was born 6 July 1975 in Queens, New York City. His mother, Sabrina, gave birth when she was just 15 years old. Eight years later and already a cocaine dealer, she was murdered in truly horrific circumstances. Jackson was forced to move in with his grandparents, along with eight aunties and uncles.

The young Jackson soon found his way on the street. He started boxing at the age of 11, eventually going on to compete in the Junior Olympics. A year later, he began dealing drugs at school. An arrest soon followed after the youngster brought a gun to class which was picked up by a metal detector. By all accounts, it was an inauspicious start to life. Jackson talks about getting into the drugs racket almost as though it was a career choice, the same way other kids might have thought about being a doctor or going to law school.

“My neighbourhood and that environment provided examples of financial freedom,” he says. “It showed you people who had expendable cash and could do whatever they wanted at that present moment. So it made me feel like it was a legitimate opportunity to go in that direction.”

Things got worse before they got better. In 1994, Jackson was arrested selling cocaine to an undercover police officer. Three weeks later, a police search of his home revealed heroin, more coke and a gun. Jackson was jailed for a minimum of three years, although he ended up serving six months in a boot camp, gaining a GED along the way. The 50 Cent moniker was inspired by a Brooklyn robber of the same name – Jackson took the nickname as a metaphor for change.

In 1996, Jackson – who was already rapping as 50 Cent – was introduced to Run-DMC legend Jam Master Jay by a friend. Jay schooled his protégé in the art of making records and writing hooks. By 1999, hit producers Trackmasters had signed 50 Cent to Columbia Records and a debut album was readied, with the team ultimately recording 36 songs in two weeks.

Two of these early tracks would forever alter Jackson’s career trajectory.

The first, ‘How to Rob’, has the rapper comically describing how best to steal from the biggest hip-hop stars of the day. Jay-Z, the Wu-Tang Clan and Wyclef Jean all responded to the track, while Nas offered up a supporting slot on his tour.

The second, ‘Ghetto Qu’ran’, heralded considerably worse tidings.

The song, in which Jackson somewhat foolhardily names 1980s drugs dealers from his local neighbourhood, resulted in a countrywide ban from the recording industry. ‘Ghetto Qu’ran’ also directly precipitated what is perhaps the most notorious chapter of

the 50 Cent story.

On 24 April 2000, Jackson was sat in the back seat of a friend’s car outside his grandmother’s house when another car pulled up nearby. An unknown assailant then stepped out of the car, walked across the road and peppered Jackson with nine shots from a 9mm handgun at close range before making his escape. Jackson took shots to his chest, both legs, arm, hand and cheek. He spent 13 days in hospital.

Spooked by the incident and the ongoing furore surrounding ‘Ghetto Qu’ran’, Columbia Recordings dropped Jackson almost immediately.

Blacklisted and with no record contract, Jackson poured his efforts into mixtapes, flooding the underground circuit across New York and beyond. A certain Marshall Mathers heard one of these, signed Jackson on a $1 million record deal and the rest, as they say, is history.

For Jackson, Eminem’s influence in hip-hop is vast. “Em is responsible for why a lot of people accepted the music in a different way. A person wasn’t comfortable…” He starts over. “Let’s say you’ve grown up with racism in your background, right? And even if you enjoy the music when it comes on, you say you don’t want to hear it.

Why? Because everyone participating in it is ‘other’ than yourself, or your kind. [These kinds of people] then had Eminem to go to.”

Jackson warms to his theme. “I particularly point out Eminem because he does black music better than black artists, you understand? He’s grown up within the culture and when you see his friends around him, they’re black. And now, it’s not that America has become tanned or blacker because of hip-hop culture, it’s that hip-hop is losing its colour. So it doesn’t matter what ethnicity the artist is, as long as the quality of the music is there I couldn’t care less.You could be purple.”

Some things about hip-hop never change though. Given the Hollywoodstyle story arc to Jackson’s life – the distance he’s travelled from the most unpromising of origins – the beefs and braggadocio inherent to Jackson’s most recent songs and his larger-thanlife lifestyle are perhaps no great surprise. One YouTube video sees

Jackson literally piling up hundreds of thousands of dollars in the trunk of one of his sports cars.

I gently suggest that some people resent all this focus on cash and ostentatiousness. “Well listen to what you just said,” Jackson fires back. “You said, ‘People say you talk about cash and you talk about success.’ Well, they whack me but they made me successful. Meanwhile, if I write about things that I missed – that I didn’t get a chance to write on my first two CDs – they’ll say ‘Aw, you ain’t living like that no more.’ So it’s saying, whichever way you go, you damned if you do and damned if you don’t.” True I suppose, although Paul McCartney seems to manage okay without singing about mad stacks and bitches galore.

“I couldn’t write ‘Get Rich or Die Tryin’’ now - publicly they wouldn’t react the same because they know me as a different person at this point,” Jackson continues. “I can [still] rap about [those themes] but from a different perspective, from where I’m at; it’s a different seat. You know back when I fell in love with rap music, keeping it real was the theme. Like now, there are people from so many different walks, they’re just writing music. It doesn’t matter what part of their life it’s about. It doesn’t coincide with anything in connection to their lifestyle at some point.”

We’ve already established that Jackson has no real need for record sales but the suspicion remains that ‘Street King Immortal’ is being positioned as something of a comeback record; the prototypical return-toform. Four years in the making, rumoured blockbuster collaborations include Kendrick Lamar, Lil Wayne and Chris Brown. The list of producers ranges from usual suspects Dr Dre and Eminem through to Alex da Kid and Jim Johnsin.

I wonder whether, in the face of diminishing returns over his last few releases, Jackson feels like he has something to prove. He goes on the defensive. “You know what, I always feel like I have to be able to perform on 5 0 c en t p i l i n g $ 2 m il l io n in c a s h i n t o t h e h o o d t run k o f h i s L a mb o r g h i n i M urciel a g o

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the highest level. But I’d be killing myself if I always made a direct comparison with the performance of my previous projects. That’s what the talent community – the artist community – does when someone has [my] kind of success. You know, ‘It’s great but it’s not ‘Get Rich or Die Tryin’.’

“It’s pretty tough for you to have a second chance at a first impression.

And when your first album is the largest debut hip-hop album [of all time] it’s tough to top it. I sold 13 million copies of my first CD, then 10 million on my second one. Trying to sustain that momentum is almost impossible. There’s no-one in the history of music who’s done that.

“Of course, the artist community itself wants to reject you after you’ve had a certain amount of success.

There’s a lot of, ‘Oh it’s cool but it’s not as good as ‘Get Rich or Die Tryin’.’

What they mean is: it doesn’t feel as current as that record and that was also connected to that person being new.

Even Eminem’s career has been – he’s completely a phenomenon with the things that have happened in his career – but he’s had low points.”

On the one hand, there’s a kernel of truth to what Jackson is saying. Today’s music listeners – especially millennials who’ve grown up with always-on access to unlimited new music – have ever-decreasing attention spans. Many of 50 Cent’s original fans will also simply have grown out of his music.

Their replacements – teenagers – are on the lookout for whatever else is new and fresh instead of an artist 15 years into his career, regardless of how good his product is.

On the other hand, there can be little doubt that the commercial decline of the 50 Cent oeuvre has happened broadly in tandem with a marked fall in quality, no matter what Jackson might say. Extracurricular matters beyond business interests may have taken their toll. Jackson has feuded with dozens of hip-hop artists and celebrities throughout his career – he’s currently engaged in a court trial with Rick Ross over a bizarre sex tape starring Ross’s ex – and though beefs are part and parcel of selling rap music, even by hip-hop standards Jackson has been overactive.

When it’s all said and done then, what would make ‘Street King Immortal’ a successful addition to the 50 Cent canon? Millions of sales and critical adoration, presumably? Jackson pauses for a moment. “Success just looks like people really enjoying themselves to my music,” he simply says. “To me, away from those other projects – I do like the process in television and film, like the storytelling is a lot longer – but music is magic, man.”

Time will tell whether 50 Cent still has his anything left of his magic touch. If not, rest assured that he’ll still be laughing all the way to the bank.

Company Policy Every summer needs a downbeat electronic album for the hot nights.

London producer SLIME’s was made by disguising instruments and avoiding samples Photogra p hy: n i ck p ome roy / wr it e r: j enn if er jon s on

Slime is a gob of phlegm expelled from the throat of an uncouth stranger onto the pavement. It is the coagulated mixture of leaves, moss and rainwater left in your gutters after winter is done.

The word ‘slime’ suggests something abject and amorphous, and producer Will Archer – whose debut album, ‘Company’, is due for release on August 14 via Weird World – wouldn’t have his pseudonym any other way.

“So many people are immediately put off by the name,” he admits via a Skype video chat from his hotel room in Singapore. “It challenges you right away and tells you to turn off.”

Archer is something of a slippery specimen himself – he crafts sensual and elusive electronic music that defies genre classification, but is well timed for downbeat, muggy summer nights.

There are shades of R&B and trip-hop littered across ‘Company’, but definitive influences are difficult to trace. He cites Miles Davis’ “progressive” attitude towards composition and collaboration as a standalone model for his own ethos, and, clichéd as it might sound, Archer appears indifferent to the concepts of mass appeal or chart success so long as he continues to develop as an artist. Of course, scads of musicians promise to keep their integrity intact, especially early in their careers, but it’s abundantly clear that Archer isn’t merely giving me lip service. Stagnation is the enemy and intrepid listeners won’t be deterred by his unsavoury nom de plume, nor the terse titles of his tracks.

A Slime fan will know how to tolerate ambiguity. In return, ‘Company’ promises to be a mercurial mixture of textures and rhythms unlike most bedroom electronica made in recent years. “One thing I hope that is a strength about the material is that it would almost be impossible for it to become a trend,” he says. He wants to be able to “take pride” in the record’s inimitable qualities. The highly personal nature of ‘Company’’s creation looks to be the stuff of electronic music legend and will undoubtedly provide insurance against mimicry.

Archer recorded approximately 400 tracks between 2012 and 2013 inside the confines of a windowless Hackney studio, only for a mere 10 of these songs to make it onto the album.

He reasons: “If you make 400 plus songs, not all of them are gonna be very good,” and says: “I would never go about making music the same way again.” That’s not down to shame or self-deprecation – more that Archer seems incapable of standing still. He’s something of musical jack-of-all trades – a multi-instrumentalist incapable of devoting too much time to a singular musical pursuit.

He began playing piano at his grandmother’s house when he was a small child and, by the age of ten, had picked up both the saxophone and drums. The latter held his attention throughout his teenage years, but once a friend had purchased a set of decks and started DJing he became infatuated

with the prospect of making electronic music. “I remember thinking to myself that there are just endless possibilities.

Zero limitations.”

Ultimately, Archer’s commitment to playing a particular musical instrument was trumped by his love of sound as a wider medium. Now, a degree in Sound Art and two EPs later, he uses tangible instruments to add colour to a song’s rhythmic backbone.

“Choosing a tempo, that’s the first thing,” he tells me, “and then just slowly filling in the gaps.”

These so-called gaps are where Slime’s music gets interesting and, sometimes, perplexing. Archer has amassed an impressive collection of instruments for the purpose of featuring them in his tracks, but he often distorts their signature sounds until they are wholly unrecognisable.

“I had a clarinet,” he tells me.

“There’s a lot of that in the record, but it’s pitched-down – you can never tell it’s a clarinet.

“Saxophone is in most of the songs, but it’s not obviously a sax.

There are many different things you can do to an instrument to get it to sound completely unlike it.”

Electronic music has proved liberating for Archer, allowing him to experiment with different instruments without having to reach a level of technical mastery. He recalls his excitement at buying an Ehru – a traditional Chinese string instrument – during his recent excursions in Singapore. It’s something he intends to

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feature on his new material, although, “it’ll probably end up sounding nothing like an Erhu,” he says. “But it’ll be in there somewhere.

“You don’t need to be able to play anything perfectly,” he says, as a strong believer that virtuosity is not a prerequisite for creativity. “You don’t need to have great technique, you just need to have ideas.”

The singles already taken from ‘Company’ (‘My Company’ and ‘Hot Dog’) are an indication that Archer has access to a wellspring of inspiration. As a general rule, he doesn’t use samples in his songs. “Every single thing you hear has been made by one person, in maybe two or three rooms over the course of two years,” he nods. He even makes two varied vocal cameos on ‘My Company’ and ‘Hot Dog’. The former contains elements that wouldn’t seem out of place in a contemporary downtempo EDM track, while the latter showcases some alluring blues phrasing. However, venturing a guess as to the precise sources of Archer’s sonic vocabulary on ‘Company’ seems audacious.

“That’s probably the biggest compliment I can receive,” he says, “for somebody to say, ‘I don’t really know how to describe this, but I like it.’”

Back in The Game Former Unicorns and Clues member Alden Penner is back on the road, traveling at his own speed Photogra phy: sonny mccartney / writer: N athan Westley

Life, sometimes, can send you in circles – Canadian musician Alden Penner knows this more than most.

After moving to Montreal as a sixteenyear-old and quickly forming no-fi indie pop band The Unicorns with Nicholas Thorburn, he embarked on his first real tour that saw the duo travel down the west coast of the States into California, which he describes as being “an entree into another level at around that time.”

The Unicorns’ one and only studio album, ‘Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’ve Gone’, released at the tail end of 2003, brought widespread critical adulation, but this unexpected success turned out to be the beginning of the end. With the extensive tour schedule that followed, relations between Penner, Thornburn and third member Jamie Thompson soured, which culminated in the group dissolving little more than a year later.

Penner returned to concentrating on his own musical endeavours before forming the more polished indie rock group Clues with Arcade Fire member Brendan Reed, and they released their self-titled debut album in 2009. The same year, Penner delivered his most notable film score to date, for the independent rom-com Paper Heart.

As I meet the sensitive 32-year-old ahead of a solo show in Brighton, to promote new solo EP ‘Canada In Space’ (a 5-track collection of proggy glam and space pop that touches on Arcade Fire operatics and also features a track in French), he tells me that although much has changed in the past decade, much has also stayed the same.

“Touring is very much as it was,” he says, “and that was the last time [with The Unicorns] that I did a lot of touring. The last ten years have gone by very fast – we played some gigs last year as The Unicorns but that was in a very different context to what we had experienced before.

“I guess I’ve dabbled in a lot of different things in those ten years,” he says, “I guess that I was kind of very unhappy, searching for something else to do and things were not really working out with other projects, endeavours and relationships, and things like that... and musically, too.

Some of it worked and some of it didn’t, so I figured coming full circle, coming back to my own music, which is what I did before the Unicorns.

“I had lent my songs to the band, ones that had already existed, so I figured that [getting the band back together] was both the most reasonable and balanced thing to do.”

With the cyclical nature of Penner’s work in mind, he says that he hasn’t fully ruled out the idea that The Unicorns may play more shows. “I’m open to it,” he says.

“Those shows [with Arcade Fire] came up kind of randomly and we accepted them because of the significance of them, the year [10 years after their split] and the symbolism and all that. I don’t think we’ve necessarily sorted out a way of playing more shows that feels comfortable for everybody.

“Largely, those shows were not comfortable, they were just kind of interesting and kind of insane, playing

in stadiums after having not played together for ten years apart from one homecoming show in Montreal, which was fantastic and felt really good.

“It was starting to feel like the first time around, where we got pulled into this whirlwind worldwide tour that was an uncomfortable feeling at the time and something I don’t really want to repeat again.

“I don’t necessarily think I’m committed to playing in that band as it is indefinitely; I’m just waiting and seeing what comes up and taking things more slowly this time around.”

He notes how he’s spent the last year attempting to record and mix his own music, which has been “fulfilling and overwhelming at once.” His first solo album, ‘Exegesis’, was released via Bandcamp last year, followed by two EPs, ‘June 04’ and ‘Canada in Space’, with plans afoot to release an album in 2016.

“The last two [EPs] – were just recordings that had been started quite a while ago,” he says, “and once I had got into the process of working intensively on them they became something. I’m sort of in the same position now, where I’m unearthing some archived material and am layering over the top of it and seeing how that blends in with some of the more recent songs. It feels like its necessary to get that out of the way before moving on to newer stuff.

“I get a lot of ideas and I also think about making a techno album or something like that, but it’s all in due time.”

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Part of his recent reintroduction to making and releasing music has also seen Penner return to playing live.

Tonight is a stop on a short European tour accompanied by actor and musician Michael Cera, the star of Paper Heart and guest on new track ‘Mediate’, although he’s more recognized as the mousey all-American kid in Juno, Superbad and Arrested Development.

“I’ve done tours completely alone before and that was terrible, extremely lonely,” Penner says on the importance of having like-minded individuals and a community spirit around you when on the road. “Some people learn to cope with that in a way, but it’s at the cost of some sort of normalcy that might otherwise be had.

“I’ve not really toured much in the last ten years, so I don’t really have much to complain about. I guess I’m just more sensitive to it then some people perhaps – I prefer keeping it short and doing that more regularly, keeping it fun and light. You can develop this extreme commitment to the road, because, in a way, musicians are kind of forced to do that to make a living if they’re extremely committed to that lifestyle, or, alternatively, they have to get a job back at home.

“There’s an incredible freedom to just be going from city to city – you don’t think about time anymore, I don’t even know what time it is now and I’ve just looked at your watch. It’s just an abstract idea to me, I just know there’s other stuff to do later and I’ll get a little bit of sleep and it’ll be the same thing tomorrow, although slightly differently.”

Suck It Up The Big Moon are getting a younger generation excited about guitar music again Pho togra p hy: ge m harris / wri t er: ian roe buck

here is a Swiss restaurant in Soho that specialises in fondues. Beneath this sanctuary of cheese is where I first saw The Big Moon. I wasn’t expecting much, but as the clock ticked 9.15 (Swiss restaurants are precise, you see) my midweek foray to the St Moritz club got that bit more exciting… and I really, really like cheese. Down into its dungeon depths I went. Clink-like in size and smell, it’s a venue I’ve not experienced for quite a while, a damn sight longer than the heinously young clientele at the bijou bar. Everyone was ID’d going in, except me. I felt old, but I hadn’t seen this in a long time – a room full of young adults under the age of 20 visibly excited about guitar music played by their peers. Everyone seemed to know each other.

Exactly two weeks later I’m in a similar locale of budget booze and dubious toilets, but instead of four girls playing unpretentious and strangely inspiring indie rock in front of me, they’re sat quietly, eating hummus and being downright normal. I introduce myself to Jules Jackson, Celia Archer, Soph Nathan and Fern Ford with tempered enthusiasm, but my obvious excitement for the band is thinly veiled and warmly received. “Thank you!” they all smile, exclamation mark most definitely included.

“Can you blow up balloons?” asks Jules, the Big Moon’s singer and natural leader. “No? Oh man, nobody can blow up balloons anymore,” she chuckles. If balloons equal a party then we’re in for quite a big one, and somebody is in for quite a job, too – there are hundreds of packets strewn around backstage. We’re minutes away from doors at the Big Moon’s single launch and the four friends are struggling to contain their excitement.

“This morning actually felt like Christmas. We were like ahhhhh it’s time to go on stage and play these

songs in front of our friends,” shines Celia, bass player and last to join the band in October of last year, although you’d think the four of them had been friends for life. “We were all so excited this morning on our Whatsapp group,” she continues. “I freaked out and had to call Jules to shout down the phone, ‘I don’t know what I am going to wear!’”

I ask what their Whatsapp group is called.

“It’s ‘Catsuit Fruit’, a Kid Congo song, that reads out, along a garage bass line, all these different names of fruit, then he goes, ‘catsuit…fruit.’”

I’ve got to say, it wasn’t a reference I was expecting – an aging surf rock cult figure who played in The Cramps and with The Bad Seeds. Yet, while still just teenagers, the Big Moon write alarmingly mature pop songs, intricate in the sum of their parts but gloriously simple in delivery. ‘Sucker’, the debut single we’re celebrating tonight, is big, the kind of big you would find coming from Bends-era Radiohead, or any-era Elastica (who the group continuously get compared to). Full of solid riffs and heart-melting hooks it belongs to a band on their third or fourth album, not an outfit who were taking exams this very morning. “Yeah, it was a guitar exam as I do a music degree, so I had to do a solo guitar performance,” says Soph, who also plays guitar for promising Brighton shoegazers Our Girl. “If it was tomorrow it would suck, but it’s lucky it’s fallen today and the band all support me a lot. I said I would play one of our songs in the exam, but I didn’t in the end.”

For a band so complete sounding, it’s a surprise to hear they’ve only been together a year. “We try not to think about it,” says Jules, who constantly play’s down their achievements.

“I thought about it today for the first time,” butts in Soph. “I thought, wow, like, a year ago I knew a couple

of these guys but I didn’t know Celia and now we’ve sold out our single launch, that’s pretty cool.” Drummer Fern, who’s been quiet up to now, jumps in.

“Can I just say if we’re talking about how we met and where we’re from, we all live here but I am from South Wales, that’s very important, make sure you say that. My mother wants everyone to know I am Welsh.

You could quote her saying don’t forget your roots and all that shit, although she wouldn’t like the swearing. She sounds like a crazy nationalist but she’s not, she just likes me being Welsh.”

So naming the band, did anyone think of your Welsh heritage then, Fern?

“Oh I hated decisions like that,” she says. “There is so much gravity to it. You’re stuck with it aren’t you, by that point I really didn’t mind.”

“When we were settling on the Moon it took us a while to get used to it and be comfortable with it,” says Jules. “We never all agree on everything anyway. Once you name the band, the name of the band just becomes the name of the band. We didn’t all love The Moon did we?” “Well, there were so many moons in the universe we had to change our name to The Big Moon anyway,” finishes Fern in her pronounced Welsh accent.

Drinks are opened and phones are checked, party-time is creeping ever closer as support bands drift by and ice bucket contents diminish.

“We were all friends of friends and Jules really wanted a band and she just asked everyone she knew if they knew anyone who could play,” says Soph.

“I asked everyone, and I mean everyone. I probably asked you,” smiles Jules, as Celia continues: “Everyone said no and then eventually she settled for us lot! Didn’t you meet someone who played bass and they

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were really cool so you said no, you couldn’t work with her?” We all turn to Jules. “You’re intimidated,” she says.

“I don’t want to go to rehearsals worrying if I have odd socks on.”

I tell them that soon enough, they’ll be those girls.

“Well, someone wrote about us at our Leeds show recently, a girl, who said she felt intimidated by us, and we really don’t want anyone to feel like that,” says a sincere Celia.

“I suppose like any group of people who get on well and have something together, it must be difficult from the outside looking in,” says Soph. “Bands are cliquey and that’s kind of why I like being in one I think.”

Cool or not, the Big Moon is certainly a clique. They all finish each other’s sentences and roar with laughter at Fern’s Game of Thrones references. It’s infectious. Drunken stories of shooting their video for ‘Sucker’, high on bucks fizz and nervous energy, and Fern having to drum double time as it was being filmed in slow motion leave the four of them in pieces. These heady moments provide clarity for Jules and her

L-R: Fe r n f o r d , s o p h nathan, celia a r c h e r and jule s jac ks o n.

Phot ographe d in Ele p h ant & castle , Lond o n.

reasoning behind starting a band, but thinking back did they know what they were doing with the sound? “You can’t really start a band thinking I want to write songs like this,” says Jules.

“You can’t decide on how a song’s going to go. It just goes. One chord follows on from another chord and you’ve got no choice. Same with the sound, we had no choice.”

And how do you like being associated with the 90’s?

“It’s better than being called shit,” jokes Fern.

“I don’t mind being called grunge, but I don’t think we are that at all really,” adds Soph, who is quickly becoming the voice of reason. “I’d say we were pop rock. What’s the weirdest genre of music you have ever made up or seen someone write about?” she asks. This is another balloon moment.

Fern saves me. “I think people expect us to sound a lot cleaner, we can be quite loud and messy. We look like we are going to be cleaner.”

“It’s just the worst question isn’t it but everyone asks us to describe our sound,” Jules huffs before Celia interrupts. “When we were on tour

with Yak [another young British band that kids appear to be getting behind] I ran up to one of them after they played and said, ‘oh my god you guys are so good, you’re so heavy and driving and full of repetition and the same thing over and over again,’ and he was like, ‘yeah, your songs are so intricate and there are so many bits that rub in and out of each other.’ We obviously just wanted to be in each others bands!”

Jules has gathered her thoughts. “I love music that has… really good pop music has… sorry, I want to get this right… Whenever there is a gap in the singing there is always a melody or…

I can’t really explain it, you know. Say if you listen to ‘Toxic’ by Britney Spears, every single thing in that song is an amazing hook or an amazing melody, as soon as she stops singing there is some crazy string thing or that surf guitar.” It brings us nicely to the Madonna cover we heard a fortnight ago at St Moritz – the truly terrible ‘Beautiful Stranger’. Of all Madonna’s tracks, why that one?

“It’s like circus music!” exclaims Jules, and they all start humming and

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dancing the well-known refrain before creasing up.

Sound check over and doors open, there’s just time to discuss ambition, because the Big Moon and Jules seem to have it in droves. “Well, I was in bands for a really long time and then I broke up my last one amidst lots of sadness and distress and then renounced music and didn’t play any instruments for a year,” she says.

Recently, Jules has quoted Palma Violets and Fat White Family as heavy inspirations for The Big Moon but I just can’t see it, musically at least?

“You’re right,” she says. “Those two bands just happened to be the first two gigs that I went to and I was just ‘WOW! Live music! Oh my god!’ And just immediately wanted to write songs and be in a band. They both made me excited to be part of something again and to pick up an instrument after so long, and I wasn’t enjoying art school, which is what I was doing in my time away from music.”

With the girls tidying the table of hummus and bread, I try to get to the bottom of the sadness and distress – it doesn’t feel like the same Jules I’ve connected with this evening. “Because I tried to be a musician for such a long time and nothing happened, you know, which must happen to so many people. I was always in bands but not writing as I didn’t have much confidence and then my friends just gave up on our dreams; they just said I am done with this, as you end up playing to empty rooms and spending all your money on it and working in a bar and it’s very disheartening. I gave up and said, this doesn’t work, this isn’t a thing, I am going to be an artist now and commit myself to that and then obviously I have completely changed my mind.”

“And we’re so glad she did!” shout her three friends, almost in unison.

Beyond Words Congolese band MBONGWANA STAR have made a deeply progressive debut album that dispels the Western myth that African music is forever retrospective Photography: phil sharp / writer: dan iel dylan wray

Kinshasa is Africa’s third largest city, equal to London in size and home to almost ten million people. It is teeming with life, with noise and with bustling activity. It is also teeming with extreme poverty and with entire communities of people having spent their lives on the streets for generations. The Second Congo War (or Africa’s World War) started in 1998 and ended in 2003, claiming 5.4 million lives in the process. The fall-out of the war, followed on from the effects of the first, can still be felt in the city today as it attempts to regroup from the intense disorder; crimes ranging from petty theft to homicide all still being relatively high, whilst the extent of the poverty has meant that 80% of the population were reported to be living on less than $2 a day in 2010. The street children, or shegue as they are commonly referred to, are not just a small unfortunate section of an ostracised community but instead represent a significant proportion – they are a culture themselves.

Coco Ngambali and Théo Ntsituvuidi (both permanent wheelchair users after they contracted polio as children – a common occurrence amongst street children many years ago) were part of a group of street musicians (the majority of which were also disabled) called Staff Benda Bilili. They hand-crafted instruments from what was lying around in the streets – one particular instrument called a satongé was composed from a fish can, a piece of wood and one guitar string – and they were a relative hit amongst western audiences as a result of the documentary Benda Bilili and the subsequent world tour it sparked.

However, success caused friction and Theo and Coco left the band in 2013 and last year formed a new outfit Mbongwana Star – Mbongwana meaning ‘change’.

Whereas the sound of their previous outfit was deeply rooted in traditional Congolese Rhumba music, their new output, as perfectly captured on their recently released debut album ‘From Kinshasa’, is something altogether new. It’s a timeless, seamless amalgamation of styles, rhythms and approaches that takes the deeply rhythmic and dance-inducing grooves of African music and runs a sort of dub-influenced post-punk bass through it, complete with experimental

electronics and itchy guitar lines. It sounds frighteningly progressive and is a reminder of the fact that Afrobeat is not simply a retrospective stylistic touch applied by modern bands wanting to reference or capture it, but that it was once a driving force – the future – with Africa leading the way of musical progression in the world, and that’s exactly what Mbongwana Star currently embody through their radical music.

I attend their first ever UK show at Café Oto to meet with the group, who in total consist of Coco Yakala Ngambali, Théo Nsituvuidi Nzonza, Randy Makana Kalambayi, Jean Claude Kamina Mulodi aka R9, Matuzolele Rodrick and Doctor L. With only one of them speaking any English it proves to be pretty tough. They all sit around a long table drinking beer, eating some brought-in Jamaican food as the music blares in the background.The producer of the album, as well as member, is Doctor L.The Dublin via Paris musician and producer – a man who has a rainbow coloured swirl of piled up dreadlocks on top of his head – has gone AWOL and I shake the group’s hands apologising for my very primitive French as they smile enthusiastically but ultimately do not understand me. Their manager reluctantly steps into the role of translator but between his apathy and the answers coming from a variety of different people’s input, the answers are short and simplistic. “It is a nice city and we love it, we like to be there.

It’s our country,” is the condensed response I get when asking to gain some cultural insight into Kinshasa.

“We wake up everybody there [when making music] everyone was sleeping.

We mixed together everything we had in our heads and hearts, we just play music.”

Doctor L soon returns and the role of translator is passed onto him. I pass on my sincere congratulations about the record, which I dearly love, and as Doctor L translates it I pick up on him saying: “Deteste le disc” and “Merde”.

I’m no good at French, but I do know enough to realise he’s telling them I think the album is a piece of shit. It’s clearly a joke but I counter drastically: “No, no, no – C’est Super, C’est Super!” waving my arms wildly. The response is a round-the-table cheers with Theo shouting “good, good!” enthusiastically, whilst fiercely shaking

my hand, which he does a lot when I try and chat to him.

Doctor L soon stops translating most of the questions and just answers them himself. “Kinshasa is like 1980s New York,” he says. “The chaos, the freedom – and non-freedom – it’s not like world music, it’s different.”

The project is new, still unfolding, still developing and finding its collective groove. “What’s nice about this project is that it’s like an adventure,” he says. “We’re making it as we’re going along – it’s nice and exciting.”

It’s a little infuriating having the whole band there and being unable to communicate with them as they look on, and gradually they return to their beers and dinners as they realise they are being slowly phased out from the conversation. I try to bring it back around a couple of times but Doctor L seems keen on answering the questions I aim towards them himself, pointing out such issues as the general ignorance attached to Africa and African music by westerners. Which is fine, and I’m sure he’s acting out of practicality more than anything else, but I’d rather be told that by the group of African’s sat next to me than the white westerner speaking for them. Either way it makes little difference because the support band starts up and the interview is cut short after fourteen minutes.

The Mbongwana Star show that soon comes, however, is fantastic. It’s a little looser, rougher, and more traditionally focused than the album, but it’s riveting and joyous nonetheless, the endless tip-tap drums, hypnotic bass and snappy vocals that cut between chants and gospel hyena barks are all enough to send the room into a universal groove – Theo looks like he’s set to eject himself from his wheelchair at any moment, such is the vigour of his dancing movements.

I manage to catch up with Doctor L again with the hope of having a little more peace and quiet this time around although our phone connection (him in Kinshasa) is a bit of a nightmare, stalling us further. “There’s very little stuff here,” he says of the set-up used to get the band in action. “I brought some old mics up with an eight track and a sound card – it’s really simple, I can work with nothing sometimes.

When you’re recording it’s interesting to have bad equipment because it gives you new ways of listening to stuff. In this town I’d be running around

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recording from different parts of the room because everything is so loud, there might be a loud TV coming from one corner, there’s four churches that start their bells ringing at five in the morning everyday. The sound here is super loud and super distorted all the time, it’s amazing. You just listen to the sounds going on, there is never silence.” With almost perfect timing to illustrate his point, a series of dogs can all be heard barking wildly in the background, but he seems unaware of their comic timing, perhaps being used to their incessant howling.

Doctor L worked on Tony Allen’s (the Nigerian musician – primarily drummer – who helped shape the Afrobeat sound: “Without Tony Allen, there would be no Afrobeat,” said Fela Kuti) ‘Black Voices’ album and, supposedly, Theo and Coco loved the sound captured on that record so much that it drove them into collaboration, although apparently not so according to Doctor L. “That’s incorrect,” he says. “I think, to make it simple, because this question comes up quite a lot, this record is like a project and it’s like if a movie maker went somewhere to choose his artists to become actors of the movie, these guys are actors of the movie, Mbongwana Star. If you’re doing music, you’re doing art, you’re doing film, it’s all the same shit.

“Do you think in Congo they know what a producer is?” he continues.

“They’ve got no idea about the answers to half of the questions people are asking me. I think people don’t realise that the way of thinking in these other places aren’t based at all on the same references from the places people are asking them. Sometimes I wonder if people travel. They [people in Congo] don’t have any idea of what the music business is; they don’t have any experience of having a record produced. They don’t know what we’re talking about, it doesn’t exist here. How could they be thinking about producers if they don’t know what it is? Music here is spontaneous – they do music live, they don’t do recordings. That’s what’s interesting because they meet a guy like me, then we get together and do something.

Now they understand more about what’s involved, and producing stuff. ” L tells me this with a slight degree of frustration in his voice.

As an active musician who has

worked in Africa for a prolonged period of time I’ve no question that his knowledge outweighs mine on the subject and geography but something sits a little uneasy about the amount of voices he seems to be speaking on behalf of here so I try and touch upon it. “There’s all this ‘black and white’ – fuck this black and white thing,” he says. “I think Africa needs lots of mixed bands because it builds bridges; it gets other people interested – they relate to something. The idea is to relate – you can have everything: punk, hardcore, gay, whatever the fuck here.That would be more the idea anyway, a bit of freedom… you know what’s missing from Africa? That white folks don’t come here enough. There’s thousands of Africans in Europe but there’s no white people here, man. That’s what’s missing. Music isn’t just about the ancestors of your village, we’re in 2015 – let’s be there. We’re not saying anything is bad or good, we just need different statements, different ideas – the more you’ve got in the diversity of music the more you have in freedom and expression – it makes culture for

L- R: D o c t o r L , T h eo , R a n d y , S ag e (k n eel i n g ), C o c o a nd R 9 . P h o t o gr a p h ed i n D als t o n , L o n d o n .

people and culture is life.”

Musically, ‘From Kinshasa’ is a record that transcends; it transcends time, genre and convention and Doctor L’s bridges that he intended to construct appear to have worked in that respect, as the album continues to clock up rave reviews from traditionally genre-specific publications to 5* reviews in the broadsheets. “That’s the idea, that’s what’s interesting – you can be a guy who likes African music, a guy who likes techno, a guy who likes rock. That’s the idea, I don’t know if different styles really exist anymore – it’s time we just made something that relates to people or even music

that doesn’t relate to people and people have to get involved to then relate to it.

Sometimes the effort has to come from both sides. We’re trying to bring energy and sometimes energy scares people, you know?”

I’m not entirely sure I do know, to be honest. Doctor L – despite his impressive musical credentials and involvement with this truly amazing band – has something of the demeanour and conversational tone of a 5am Glastonbury conversation with someone at the stone circle, full of enthusiasm and sincerity but occasionally clouded by a condescending and generalised delivery. This reaches a peak when he explains to me that I have to be aware that producers and DJs are not the same thing. “If there’s one thing you’ve got to be careful of today [it’s that] people think producers are fucking DJs. Most of the producers these days are DJs, making music for clubs; these are not at all the same thing. This is a band, this is an identity of a band who are looking for something. I’m not a DJ producer, it’s more like a movie, a

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band situation is a story, something you get involved with – it’s not just taking snaps and going to the club, you know?” Again, I’m not sure I do.

However, that’s fine. This is a band that eclipse words or the need for explanation – they are a band whose lyrics I don’t understand and I was unable to even have a basic conversation with but they have still made one of the greatest album’s of the year because they embody all the things in art that language or words are not required for: invention, progress, change, innovation and experimentation.

There is an image of an astronaut on the front cover of their album for a reason, this is a group grown from history and tradition – something learned – but spurred on by a desire for exploration into realms previously unexplored.

Everything is Changing / Kevin Parker sees his new, third album as Tame Impala as a fork in the road Photography: GA BRIEL GREEN / writer: DAVID ZAMMITT

As he ambles over and sits groggily down at our table in the lobby of the plush Renaissance Hotel in St Pancras, Kevin Parker looks a bit dazed. To his credit, he is immaculately turned out – trademark scarf and denim jacket sit perfectly in place despite the sticky London summer edging the mercury northward – but when I ask how he’s feeling he’s not so sure. “Yeah, not too bad.” He winces and peers back through a single, painful red eye. “But not too good.” It turns out he’s a little worse for wear, having just crawled out of bed after less than four hours of sleep. “We kind of just celebrated being in this really fancy hotel last night. We were just making use of the room, I guess. And I’m… paying the price!” He rolls his eyes downward and smirks like a teenager who knows he shouldn’t have. “That was a stupid idea.” I offer the consolation that at

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least he’s only got two full days of interviews and a Glastonbury appearance to get through. He doesn’t appreciate the reminder.

As we settle down, his manager comes over to offer a coffee and the choice seems too much for the 29-year-old psych rock saviour, staring off into the distance as though searching for inspiration. “Ammm…”

Eventually she makes the decision for him but as the simple binary of flat white versus latte seems to prove too much I’m not sure if I’m going to get the chirpy, effusive character I’d seen in previous interviews. I needn’t have worried. For when you talk to Kevin Parker about music he is transformed.

As the detail-driven nature of his work under the Tame Impala moniker suggests, he revels in the minutiae of his art and obsesses over its quality control to the point where the final process of tweaking and mastering each album has seen him spiral into a self-inflicted psychosis.

Growing up in Perth, Australia, in the early 2000s, Parker played with grunge, classic rock, hip hop and the sunny ’60s pop sounds of his father, Jerry’s, extensive record collection as he tried to find his true musical voice.

As his son got deeper and deeper into his craft and schoolwork started to become less of a priority, Jerry warned him that even if making music for a living was enough to pay the bills, it would still ruin the magic that first drew him in. A massive rock and roll fan and diehard Hank Marvin aficionado, he would play the Shadows guitarist’s lead riffs while a young Kevin practised his rhythm guitar.

Jerry died while Parker was writing his 2010 debut album, ‘Innerspeaker’, and Parker Jr. takes a moment to consider whether or not his father’s hypothesis was correct. When his appraisal comes, it’s respectful but firm. “In the end, no.

He was wrong.” His lips crease with a smile. “But I still don’t know if he was making up the excuse that it’ll lose its magic as a way of secretly saying that I won’t make any money. I think he genuinely meant it. But he didn’t really experience music the same way I did.

It wasn’t a creative thing for him; he played covers and stuff. So maybe he had a slightly more one-dimensional way of looking at life as a musician. He said it’d kill the mystery of it, but for me, as soon as you conquer one mystery and it’s not a mystery anymore, more mysteries open up.” As he affirms his thesis Parker’s eyes grow wider, emphasising that this is more than just a job, and much more than mere pastime. “It’s this infinitely unknown thing, creating music. I’ve never once felt that music isn’t as wondrous as it once was. Never. In fact, it’s the opposite.”

Jerry Parker lived to see Tame Impala sign to Sydney-based EMI offshoot Modular Recordings, proving that the project would at least put some food on the table – and guarantee

Ke v i n p a r k er o n t h e s ta i r c a s e o f s t . p a n c r a s r e n a i s s a n c e l o n d o n h o t el .

his son’s happiness – in the short term.

“It was when we were starting to get talked about and it was looking promising, so he lived just long enough to get to eat his words!” He laughs fondly and I ask if he was a fan.

“Yeah! Because the first stuff we released was ’60s-inclined psych pop, so it was right up his alley.”

Both of Parker’s parents were born in Southern Africa – his father was Zimbabwean and his mother South African – and the image of the impala comes from a chance flick through the books that were lying around when he was younger. “As part of the coffee table book pile, there was one on

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African animals and it was just them; these amazing, majestic pictures of different Sahara Desert animals and that kind of stuff. I remember seeing pictures of the impala and them being really graceful and almost flying through the air.” It’s a fitting metaphor for music that has always seemed to come from somewhere beyond human touch, untethered by the force of gravity. It certainly describes the music better than the Dee Dee Dums, Parker’s previous nom de plum. But are there any lingering regrets about that name change? “No! Oh God.” He crumples up with laughter. “That was terrible.

Thank God the record label called up

after I changed the name. No one would’ve wanted to listen to a band called Dee Dee Dums.”

When he speaks about his teenage years and coming of age in Western Australia, his fondness is immediately clear (“I’m flying the flag for Perth!”), and it’s a refreshing counterpoint to the lines of musicians who queue up just to slag off the places from which they come. “It’s easy to do. There’s a big thing about people who live in Perth and who know about the rest of the world. There’s a big cultural cringe in Perth and it’s a cool thing to say that Perth’s so backward and, ‘Man, life in Berlin is so much more forwardthinking.’ But I kind of front the resistance to that.” And while he doesn’t like to think that the music he makes would be any different had he been born on the other side of the world, he acknowledges that the socalled ‘City of Light’ (Loud And Quiet trivia: Perth residents lit their house lights in 1962 to celebrate astronaut John Glenn’s orbit around the earth) has influenced him both as a person and a songwriter, even if just by virtue of climate and town planning. “Perth has its own effect on you,” he says.

“The weather’s pretty good. It’s like a miniature L.A. and there are little things, like everyone drives a car because the city is so spread out and I learnt to sing because I could roll the window down and just belt my lungs out to my favourite songs. That’s how I found my voice. I didn’t sing before then because I was so shy.”

So there you have it: Kevin Parker didn’t even know he was in possession of that steely, Lennon-like baritone until the age of seventeen. “Yeah! I sang quietly but I didn’t have a voice voice,” he nods. “And some of my most profound and memorable experiences of music were up at a hundred decibels with shitty saucersize speakers rattling out of their sockets. I’m pretty sure I sustained more hearing loss coming out of my little speakers in my car than all my years of being a touring musician.” As incidental as it may at first seem, anecdotes like this show just how in tune Parker is with his environment.

Everything is thought out, and it’s this same heightened awareness and painstaking meticulousness that shines through in every pour – every hi-hat and delay pedal – of Tame Impala’s music.

B

etween making his initial forays into songwriting at the tender age of 12 and the arrival of his first eight-track when he was just 16, Parker would make music by recording himself over and over again, scientifically working out how melody functioned by layering himself over and over. By working solo, he was able to construct a world that was all his

own, giving birth to the inwardlooking fixation suggested by titles like ‘Innerspeaker,’ ‘Solitude Is Bliss’ and ‘Lonerism’.

From an early age, he found that engaging with the world at large didn’t seem to be as fruitful for him as it was for others and he valued his own company and that of close friends high and above a room full of other humans.

Since starting to tour the world, though, he’s had to develop a more pragmatic approach. “It definitely beckons the closed off part of me out of myself, if that makes sense. It makes it harder to be that closed off person, especially as it’s been so long that I’ve been doing this. Your brain kind of works out how to deal with it,” he explains. “The first few years I was doing it, it was so confusing for me.

Even the outside world – and other people – talking to people all the time, it was too much for me. That was kind of how [album number two] ‘Lonerism’ happened; it was just me kind of expressing the frustration of being in this world with lots of people and I just can’t cope with it. That’s what the album is about. It’s not about being physically alone,” he says, keen to avoid misunderstanding. “It’s about being alone in a room full of people.”

It has, thankfully, become gradually easier to deal with the realities of his current life. “I started to realise that staying that closed off, and walking

“I’ve never once felt that music isn’t as wondrous as it once was. Never.

In fact, it’s the opposite”

around with my fingers in my ears and my hands over my eyes…” he says, trailing off. “It became more energyconsuming to block out the world rather than allow it to come into me and to allow myself to be a part of it. To remain detached was more draining.”

That tunnel vision meant that early attempts to translate his recordings to a live setting proved challenging. For all intents and purposes this is Parker’s solo project, despite the fact that he repeatedly refers to Tame Impala as ‘we’. Although bassist and long-time collaborator Dom Simper contributed to ‘Innerspeaker’ and Jay Watson played drums on that album and keyboards on a smattering of ‘Lonerism’’s tracks, Parker has written virtually every note,

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played around 99% of them and produced everything. He says: “We’ve got the conversion path down now but in the beginning it was confusing. I was confused about what the live show was meant to be.” There was a central contradiction, he admits, in what he was trying to do. “I wanted it to be a band. I’ve always loved the idea of being in a band. But at the same time I wanted the songs to have the same vibe, the same feeling as the recordings, which to me, I thought meant that all the players would just mimic my style.

I told Jay to just play drums like me, you know?” Parker is able to see the funny side now, and relations have improved, but it didn’t always look like it would turn out that way. “That caused a lot of tension,” he says. “He’d do a drum fill and I’d be like, ‘Maybe just do the drum fills on the album.’ So we had a lot of arguments in the early days because we were just confused about what it was meant to be. But now I kind of know. Now I realise that it’s a completely different thing to the album. It’s so much more to focus the energy on setting up the song so that it doesn’t really matter how you play it, it’ll still sound cool.” As he reflects on a thankfully more sanguine working relationship it’s clear that he’s spent a lot of painful hours into getting his head around the concept. “Me on the album is just me multi-tracked a hundred times but playing live is just five guys playing all at once, that’s all we’ve got. So knowing that I’m a lot more at peace with it. I’ve embraced it.”

It’s exactly that self-reflexive bent and the underlying tension between the private animal and its social counterpart that has given Tame Impala’s work its uniquely ultrapersonal, self-contained feel. Whether writing love letters to the space within his own mind (‘Solitude Is Bliss’), wrestling with the chore of existing in a world full of people (‘Why Won’t They Talk To Me?’, ‘Let It Happen’), or zooming in on the glorious details of the world’s tiniest objects with imagistic focus (‘Half Full Glass of Wine’, ‘41 Mosquitoes Flying in Formation’), the themes that Parker draws on and the almost claustrophobic perspective from which he writes evokes the Romantic poetry of Wordsworth and the transcendentalism of Whitman for its obsession with the self versus the outside world. “It’s

something that my music has always pointed towards. The music and the lyrics I write are always self-explorative – if that’s a word,” he says, hesitating.

“I’m not even sure why. Maybe it’s because the music that comes out of me seems to beckon that kind of message. But at the same time music, for me, has always been a very important part of self-questioning and working out who you are. For me making music is kind of a therapy. It’s the equivalent of lying down on a sofa and talking to a psychologist.” It’s nice, I suggest, that we as listeners get to reap the benefits of his selfadministered psychiatry. “When I put it like that it sounds quite selfish,” he smiles. “Just publishing the results of my therapy.”

But what results they have been.

Since his eponymous EP landed in 2008, Parker’s oeuvre as Tame Impala has been a revelation, gradually evolving from classic blues-rock through psychedelia and baroque, towards the slick, electronics-driven future-pop of recent singles. While early tracks wore the influence of Clapton and Hendrix on their loose, floral sleeve, all fag smoke and drum solos, those ’60s rock indulgences quickly gave way to a distinctly tighter and more measured offering in ‘Innerspeaker’. But Parker really began to come into his own when writing and recording 2012’s ‘Lonerism’. That gift for melodic pop began to shine through all the more clearly as he chipped away at his sound, and while the youthful chutzpah which made early Tame Impala tracks so alluring

was still present, he was able to dispense with the bravado and excess instrumentation of that debut LP with ruthlessness. The riffs were there (you sense the riffs will always be there) and ‘Elephant’’s infinite catchiness shifted a couple of BlackBerry Z10s and popped up in both Girls and Entourage, but Parker had the confidence to let the songs do the talking without the need for ornamentation. ‘Apocalypse Dreams,’ ‘Be Above It’ and ‘Mind Mischief’ saw Parker strip his songs back, ever closer to that magical threeminute mark, with an economy that served to foreground the genius that had been hinted at previously.

Where before it seemed he needed to reinforce an idea through repetition or bombast, on ‘Lonerism’ his sheer belief in the songs allowed him to hold back.

Forthcoming album ‘Currents’ (released this month via a new deal with Fiction Records), predictably, doesn’t stand still. Taking on that sonic development, it takes Tame Impala into uncharted pop territory. The production is closer to ’90s RnB and trip hop than the sunny, George Martin-esque haze of yore, while sparse, rhythmic interplay and sassy bass lines replace the layers of guitars.

Finger clicks (yes), synths and drum machines vie for centre stage as Parker experiments with his own take on what pop music should sound like in 2015. There’s an exactitude to this latest work, a newfound precision that gives the songs more clarity and an almost geometric quality.

If ‘Innerspeaker’ and ‘Lonerism’ were

made up of blurred edges then ‘Currents’ is constructed out of deliberate, straight lines.

There’s also a sense that Parker’s new album was approached as a larger piece of art as opposed to a mere collection of songs pushed together by chance. Tracks like ‘Nangs,’ ‘Gossip’ and ‘Disciples’ all clock in under 2 minutes, functioning as intervals between the longer pieces, meaning that the album ebbs and flows beautifully, with breathing space between its bigger statements. “I only started getting into the idea of the journey of an album when I got signed, when putting out albums was a medium for me to release music. Up until then I just made songs. I’ve always loved interlude sections, where it’s not its own song, it’s kind of like a connector from one song to another, almost like an intermission in a film or something.” He pauses. “It makes it more of a journey.”

It’s that idea which informs much of ‘Currents’, and even individual tracks feel like journeys. Lead single ‘Let It Happen’, a ballsy 8-minute snapshot of the album that never once feels its length, morphs and evolves by marrying sinister, looping electronica with krautrock and Air-like vocoder motifs, all the while underpinned by pounding, motorik snare hits. ‘The Less I Know the Better,’ a track jokingly discarded by Parker as, “white discofunk,” has a groove that would have Quincy Jones on the floor, although my comparison to Kylie and Jason’s 1989 Stock, Aitken and Watermanpenned smash ‘Especially For You’,

T a me i mp a l a d i s a p p ea rs down one of the r en a i s s a n c e h o t el ’ s en d l es s c o r r i d o r s

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with its xlyophones and love sickness, unfortunately draws a blank from their compatriate: “I can’t believe I don’t know that track – I love Kylie!”

A

s well as its sonic shift, ‘Currents’ sees Parker realigning his subject matter and the audience for his words. Thematically, while he used ‘Innerspeaker’ and ‘Lonerism’ to discuss his independence and his fractured connection with outside forces, on ‘Currents’ those walls come down as he finds himself dealing with the breakdown of a relationship and the realities of human frailty. It places at its centre the universal truth that, regardless of what you might do to combat it, you can end up becoming something you never intended to be.

“It’s about the uncontrollable forces within you, that take you in different directions as a person, that transform you, not against your will but unconsciously. There are decisions we make about who we are and what we do but in the end it’s uncontrollable who we end up becoming and deep down the person who we are.”

Coming out of that break-up, a quick glance down the album’s tracklisting (‘Love/Paranoia’, ‘Cause I’m A Man’) gives a sense of the emotional state of its creator. Was it harder, then, addressing someone else directly as opposed to looking inward?

“Yes it was tough but no, it wasn’t that much tougher than before. Because each step of the way of me making albums, I’ve kind of been breaking off more and more of myself and exposing more of myself. In the early days my lyrics would just be about nonsensical metaphors. And then I discovered the fulfilment of really exposing myself and being vulnerable in my lyrics.”

I’m conscious of the raw emotion that underpins the album but as he speaks Parker seems remarkably calm – philosophical about what he’s learned in the process.

“With each album I’ve got more and more confident, to be honest. In the past I wouldn’t have wanted to be that honest because that would’ve seemed like I was, I dunno… seeming overly emotional.”

For longtime Tame Impala fans, the album’s lyrical content may come as a bit of a surprise. Drawing on standard love song aphorisms, songs like Eventually (‘I know I will be happier / and I know you will too’) and ‘Less I Know The Better’ (‘I was doing fine without ya’) flirt with kitsch as Parker tries to purge the hurt of the loss. Ultimately, however, it’s that honesty which shines through and gives the album a humanity, which isn’t often found.

On the subject of lyrics, Parker is keen to set the record straight on the words of recent single ‘Cause I’m A Man.’ Through tender falsetto, the song sees him play with gender

stereotyping but it’s brought hasty cries of sexism. “It’s meant to be with a large sense of irony,” he says. “When I was thinking of the song, the more I found that message of the song ridiculous. So in the end the synopsis is that it’s the worst excuse in the world. It’s a pathetic excuse; an absurd thing to say but presented in this delicate, fragile, honourable casing.

But, for me, I maintain that only on the surface is it about gender. It’s really about being human and how we as humans are vulnerable to our own urges or whatever.” While he never names the act that caused the woe, it’s

another hint at the infidelity suggested in the song’s lines. “If you take out the chorus reference to being a man, all the rest of the lyrics have nothing to do with gender. I suddenly realised that all the lyrics about being a bad person, basically, could quite as easily be a reference to being a human.”

With those allegations of chauvinism put neatly to bed, I remind Parker that he’ll pass into the unknown of his thirties in January, unintentionally reprising the misery of his hangover in the process. “Aw God, thanks,” he laughs. “Well, I heard your thirties are the best years of your life!” What I’m

really asking him is to reflect on whether or not his twenties have been a success thus far. I assume that the rhetorical nature of my question is obvious – wall-to-wall critical acclaim, a couple of gold and platinum albums, and a Grammy nomination seems like a decent return – but he is thoughtful in his response, demonstrating that, despite the fact that approval may come from every angle, he doesn’t take anything for granted.

“Ammmmm. I guess so,” he says.

“I guess there was only a small part of my twenties were I actually felt like I was in my twenties. Until I was 25 I

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still felt like a teenager – until we started touring. And then my hopelessness with life and being an adult was fuelled. Being a touring musician is the best excuse to not grow up. It’s the ultimate excuse to not get good at life. So I only realised I was becoming an adult recently.” Skilfully and modestly dodging the question about success, he prefers to tell me how he hasn’t improved when it comes to life’s daily practicalities. “I’m still useless at life. I bought a house recently and I was a complete amateur.

I was laughably shit at it. I didn’t even do the whole thing of making an offer that was heaps lower. I saw it on the website and it was this amount of money so I was like, ‘Alright, I’ll take it,’ and my stepmom was like, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ It was an absolute joke.”

While ‘real’ adulthood – whatever that actually means – might be a while off, with such a seismic leap in sound and subject it’s difficult to know what the next musical move will be for Parker. Where next for this one member band? Understandably careful to choose his words, one thing is clear: it will involve a significant change. It might not even come under the Tame Impala banner. “Well, that’s what’s on my mind at the moment,” he says.

“This album feels like more of a fork in the road than any other album I’ve done. I just wanted to experiment on this album and for me experimenting isn’t necessarily being experimental,” he emphasises the word, suggesting he’s sick of hearing it – “in the clichéd or known sense of the word. I wanted to try things that in the past I wouldn’t have had the courage or audacity to try.

One thing I know for sure is that I didn’t want what I did on this album to be an indicator of what was to come.

I wanted to leave it open-ended. I wanted it to be shaking the snow globe, doing something that would make what immediately follows it unknown. Because I knew that if I did the same thing again,” he says, selfeffacingly ignoring the leaps he’s made with every album, “or if I took the path that was laid out in front of me, I would’ve known exactly how it would play out – who would like it, who would dislike it, which radio stations would play it, how successful it would be – and I didn’t like the idea that I knew what was going to happen. For me, part of the excitement about making music is the unwritten future.”

He sighs and takes a sip of his coffee, relaxed and confident as he stares into the unknown. He sits back in his chair and grins. “I don’t know what I’m going to do in the future.”

Reviews / Albums

0 7/ 1 0

DRINKS Hermits on Holiday H eave nl y

By Al ex W isgard. In store s Aug 21

DRINKS is the work of two cult heroes, both of whom have just released their most successful, poppiest records to date. The pairing of Cate Le Bon with White Fence’s Tim Presley actually makes sense on paper; Presley has long been the connoisseur’s West Coast psychedelicist of choice, and the Carmarthenshire-born, Californiabased Le Bon’s last LP, 2013’s wonderful ‘Mug Museum’ featured White Fence’s Nick Murray on drums. A melting of warped minds, their debut album isn’t going to be a career maker, nor is it exactly career suicide. Much like ‘Hair’, Presley’s 2012 collaboration with Ty Segall, ‘Hermits on Holiday’ is the sound of two musicians at the top of their game doing whatever the hell they want, just to amuse themselves. If anyone else likes it… ah, you know the drill.

Spanning nine foggy, acid-dipped trips through two playful minds, the writing on ‘Hermits’ is endearingly sketchy. Opener ‘Laying Down the Rock’ peppers its campfire strum with a nagging, neverending threenote riff, its retro tendencies tempered only by a fleeting mention of “MapQuest.” The title track foregrounds Le Bon, as she demurs itinerary-like lyrics (“Six past the eight: copulate”) in her best little girl lost voice. Interminably chiming guitars wend their way up and down the fretboard, before a skittering Jaki Liebezeit beat rolls the song to a halt.

There are forays into krautrock, pastoral psychedelia and trashy garage rawk, but never quite as you’d expect them. Half the time, the musicians have an almost Beefheartian disregard for what anyone else is playing; the rest of the

time, it could almost pass for a second, slightly-more-competent Shaggs record. When Presley yelps “Rock and roll!” on ‘She Walks So Fast’, possibly anticipating a bitchin’ solo, the song stumbles to a temporary halt. Meanwhile, the cutand-paste-punk ‘Focus on the Street’ (“I’m older than your mother and I’m racing horses!”) pitches itself somewhere between Presley’s former paymasters The Fall, and McLusky on ludes.

The more composed parts of the record are swiftly forgotten by the time the album’s centrepiece rolls around.

Arguably DRINKS’s strangest moment, ‘Tim, Do I Like That Dog’ barely counts as a song, but does manage to double up as a psychotic children’s game show theme, as composed by Joe Meek.

For six and a half minutes, a decidedly unhinged guitar noodles away over

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rumbling drums, and faltering bass drifting in and out of the mix. “Tim?” Le Bon asks, before pausing. “Do I like that dog?” Somewhere in the distance, Presley offers the occasional answer – sometimes yes, sometimes no, sometimes unsure.

Not since Syd Barrett’s ‘Vegetable Man’ has unbridled whimsy ever sounded as demented.

DRINKS aren’t a band who care to be easily understood, and ‘Hermits on Holiday’ demands that you meet it on its own level. “What’s going on?” someone mutters two tracks into the record. He never gets an answer, and as the closing incantation ‘Time Between’ drones its way to a close seven songs later, neither do we.

Confusion is rife on ‘Hermits on Holiday’, but it’s strangely intoxicating. Whatever Cate Le Bon and Tim Presley are drinking, it’s spiked with something.

Reviews 09/10

HEALTH Death Magic F i cti on

By James F . Th om pso n. I n sto res A ug 7

In one telling exchange from last month’s Loud And Quiet cover feature, HEALTH talked about the emasculating experience of having released two records of visceral, artdamaged experimental rock, only to find that on record at least – thanks to high-end production values – chart music still sounds more ballsy than their own. As bassist John Famiglietti put it: “Some pop star chick’s song is kicking our ass!”

Couched within this context, ‘Death Magic’ – the first proper release from the cultish Los Angeles foursome since 2009’s ‘Get Color’ – doesn’t so much represent an abandonment of the group’s hitherto Boredoms-influenced noise

aesthetic so much as it does a burning desire to craft a confrontational pop album; a sonic Trojan horse and a giant “fuck you” to radio-friendly major label acts. Of course, HEALTH first started down this path with ‘Die Slow’, a synth banger jarring conspicuously with the rest of ‘Get Color’ and its abrasive skronk. Yet where that track was something of a red herring back then, six years later the band have finally followed up on its promise.

Nine of the twelve tracks on ‘Death Magic’ can be triangulated between Depeche Mode, Nine Inch Nails and some variation of contemporary European dance music, the precise coordinates

depending on the song. Throughout each, Jake Duzsik sings with a breathy, disarmingly sweet voice not dissimilar to Neil Tennant.

Trap-aping lead single ‘New Coke’ is a danceable racket – all serrated-edge guitar and electronics – but closing ballad couplet ‘Hurt Yourself’ and ‘Drugs Exist’ are smooth enough to slot right into the Skins soundtrack. Look beneath the surface though and for all their shimmer, songs like ‘Dark Enough’ (“Doesn’t make a difference if it’s real / As long as I still say I love you”) and ‘LA. Looks’ (“It’s not love but I still want you”) betray the kind of emotional self-conflict that goes well beyond teenage angst.

There are three stylistic holdovers from HEALTH’s less melodious days, each one impaling like a broken bottle on the dancefloor.

‘Men Today’ and ‘Courtship II’ recall the cathartic, noisy abandon of old, while ‘Salvia’ springs into life with a frenzied machine gun drumroll before collapsing into a mush of ambient pads. Having seen the band live, the sense is these work better as spectacles on stage, rather than incongruously slotted into an album otherwise so focused on song craft.

So what are HEALTH nowadays, then? Noisy pop band? Danceable noise outfit? No idea. They don’t need to worry about taking an asskicking any more, though.

Slime, aka Newcastle producer and multi-instrumentalist Will Archer, reckons he’s collected over 400 finished tracks in the years leading up to the release of this, his debut LP. As is customary, he is made to look all serious and sulky in the photos attached to the album’s press release. Yet there is a playfulness in his sound.

‘Company’ is tactile and it grooves; it’s the sound of transient memories of blurry nights out and hot summer days. Undoubted

standouts are the album’s twin lead singles, ‘Hot Dog’ – a gorgeous, Cocteau Twins-meets-Lapalux fusion – and the bass-driven, future pop of ‘My Company’, but the real joy of this album comes when you begin to fully appreciate Archer’s more abstract works. ‘TheWay of Asprilla’, for example, is a tribute to former Toon Army playmaker Faustino that rises and falls with the mercurialness of its muse, while ‘Symptoms’ and ‘Down And Tell’ showcase Slime’s ability to conjure life from inanimate

objects, building tiny, melancholy worlds without the need for words.

Indeed, the biggest compliment I can pay Archer is that he is a producer who possesses that rare quality of knowing the exact distance, in millimetres, to place a mic from a snare drum in order to elicit maximum effect. His album is one of this year’s low-key releases, arriving on Domino’s Weird World arm without much fanfare, but on this evidence, much bigger names will be queuing up to enlist Archer’s services.

08/10

Slime Company Wei r d Wor l d By davi d Zammi tt. In sto re s A ug 14

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Albums 08/10

0 9/10

07 /10

06/ 10

Samantha Crain Under Branch and Torn and Tree

Gwenno Y Dydd Olaf

Little Wings Explains

Ratatat Magnifique

Fu l l t i me h o bb y

He ave nl y

wo o ds ist

B e c a us e

B y JA me s f . t ho mp s o n. I n sto re s ju l y 2 4

By R ac he l re df e rn. I n sto r e s j uly 1 0

B y Der ek r ob er tso n . I n sto r es July 1 7

The metamorphosis of Gwenno Saunders from frontwoman of the polka-dotted Pipettes into mononymous upstart is as welcome as it is baffling. Where her former outfit took their cues from the cutesy girl groups of the 1960s, Saunders, the solo artist, exists along a continuum of retro-futuristic electropop and sings feminist-hued songs about robot totalitarianism virtually entirely in Welsh. ‘Y Dydd Olaf’ (‘The Last Day’) partially lifts its narrative from an obscure ’70s sci-fi novel by Welsh writer Owain Owain and wrestles with everything from government propaganda and patriarchy to technological disempowerment and – of course – the threat to minority languages. If the themes – and language – are subversively impenetrable, the tunes throughout are unambiguously gorgeous. Saunders sounds like a more mellifluousTrish Keenan on the Broadcast-cum-Stereolab stomp of ‘Patriarchaeth’ and the dreamy title track, while the decaying, blissedout coda to ‘Sisial Y Môr’ disguises some ominous portents. Dystopia has never sounded so alluring.

Is being Kyle Field the best or the absolute worst? It’s impossible to know from his tried-and-tested (and tried and tried again – this is his eleventh album) mumbled folk songs.

On one hand, ‘Explains’ conjures a forest man, contently drifting through life unshaven, although not because that’s what’s cool now.

Little Wings sounds at peace with doing just enough to get by, because, hey, nature makes you feel small, man, so why make the music any less drowsy and ‘organic’. But Field also sounds downtrodden on a lot of the tracks here, which are made up of acoustic guitar and piano, and underpinned by brushed drum skins – U.S. folk for back porches, not too far from Woods’ less wigged out moments. Perhaps Fields is now lamenting the passing of time where once he embraced its untameable nature. Is Field enviably relaxed or tragically depressed? That question – and the fact that his amateur vocals are better than he probably knows – will keep you returning to ‘Explains’; a record that is as poignant as any he’s recorded, complexed at heart, if not in technique.

After the party, the after-party? Evan Mast and Mike Stroud seem intent on riding their heavily-layered, infectious feel-good loops and hooks as long as they can – this is album number five, not counting numerous singles and remix compilations. And so far, it’s been an enjoyable, if somewhat repetitive, ride. But ‘Magnifique’ marks the point where one expects more diversity from the Brooklyn based multi-instrumentalists, and it’s disappointing that very little is forthcoming. That’s not to say there’s nothing to admire here.

There’s a deep sense of escapism and joyous abandon embedded in all 14 tracks, and Stroud’s guitar work remains as spry and agile as ever.

When they hit the highs, such as the woozy tropicalia of the title track, or ‘Nightclub Amnesia’’s bright, fizzing one-two punch of hair metal guitar and bouncing electro-pop, it’s easy to be seduced. But too much seems wedded to the past – both ‘Abrasive’ and ‘Rome’ sound like long lost, hyperactive Strokes demos – a fault that drags ‘Magnifique’ towards the level of 2am, last-ordersat-the-bar revelry.

“They sound like fucking Brown Bottle in Viz,” was Noel Gallagher’s verdict on Sleaford Mods when they accused him of having “blood on his hands” in terms of the perceived lack of ‘working class rage’ in current British music. The Nottingham duo had a point, but then, so did Gallagher; Jason Williamson does, at times, rival the comic’s drunken superhero for incoherence, and Andrew Fearns’ instrumentation, the sole backing for Williamson’s stream-of-consciousness style of

frequently political lyrics, are consistently erratic, and almost always feel on the verge of collapse.

And, yet, Sleaford Mods do have something important to say. It’s just that it’s often difficult to figure out quite what.

That remains the case on ‘Key Markets’, which is at its most successful when Fearns brings a sense of menace to proceedings – ‘Bronx in a Six’, for instance, on which Williamson delivers a broadside at... hipsters? The music

industry?

Misogyny?

He’s breathlessly unfocused, as usual, just as he is on ‘Arabia’, over ominous bass, and ‘In Quiet Streets’, which is overtly political – “Miliband got hit with the ugly stick, not that it matters /The chirping cunt wants the country in tatters, they all do”. The overall theme seems to be one of equal parts disgust with and incomprehension of modern life and society. Existing fans will be sated, but if you didn’t get it last time, you won’t get it this time, either.

By T om fen wick. I n sto re s july 17

If you’re already familiar with her work, then Samantha Crain’s fourth album doesn’t offer up many surprises. Instead it doubles down on the groundwork laid on her third effort, ‘Kid Face’, refining that sound into even more delicate slices of folk and Americana. An often maudlin affair, it’s testament to her abilities that ‘Under Branch & Thorn & Tree’ rarely feels dour, despite the minor chords and inherent sadness of her subject matter. The shimmer of strings, restrained percussion and heavy fretting of acoustic guitars swaddle her vocal in richly subtle production, allowing the simplicity of her lyrics to shine. Crain offers up distant glimmers of hope through the gloom, whether she’s lamenting death (‘You Or The Mystery’), lost love (‘When You Come Back’) or the ephemeral nature of life (on the utterly entrancing ‘Elk City’). It’s the singer from Oklahoma’s best release to date and makes you thankful for heartache and despair, because if we didn’t have as much, she might not produce quite so many beautiful songs.

06/10

Sleaford Mods Key Markets Har b i n g er S o u n d By joe g ogg i ns. I n sto res july 10

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0 8/10

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08/ 10

Mas Ysa Seraph

Carlton Melton Out to Sea

Georgia Georgia

Deaf Wish Pain

D o wn t own

Ag i tate d

D om i n o

S u b pop

By h en r y wi l ki nso n. I n store s Aug 7

B y D ani e l D yl an wray. I n s to re s J ul y 1 0

By S a m wal to n. I n s to re s a u g 7

B y L ia m Ko n em a n n . I n s t o r es A u g 7

Thomas Arsenault has all the ingredients in place to make some pretty out-there music. A visual artist who has housed exhibitions across Brooklyn, shared a studio with the likes of Laurel Halo and EMA and toured with Purity Ring and Deerhunter, he’s certainly received a good musical education. Debut full length ‘Seraph’, however, fails to meet such high standards. Sure a happy hinterland between Postal Service and Son Lux, combining the intimate emotionally charged ambience of the former with the spliced up hip-hop influences of the latter, sounds great, but in practice it’s a surprisingly featureless plateau. Arsenault’s mawkish and melodramatic vocal veers between hushed whispers and straining vibrato (see ‘Garden’ and ‘Gun’ for particularly grating examples) as he tries to inject some character into the undeviating electronic backdrops. There are a few welcome tropicalia influences but it’s hard to get on board with an album that feels like it should be played with an accompanying installation or, worse, in the gallery’s gift shop .

When Californian pysch band Carlton Melton have taken you hurtling into outer space on previous records, such has been the forceful trajectory of their gargantuan riffing cosmic psych, you do wonder where is left for them to go. However, on this double LP (clocking in at 76mins) it’s clear they still have a lot of gas left in the tank. Chunky, gritty riffs blast and growl throughout but the group are also masters of control, too. They feel just as exploratory and progressive during their meditative and deeply prolonged ambient drones as they do unleashing their clenched-teeth, fireball guitar assaults. There’s a stripping down of some of the guitar work on this record, almost toying with more classic-rock stylistic tendencies on the more aggressive songs, replacing the all out frenzied acid rock approach. Variety is key, though, and whilst ‘Out to Sea’ maintains a glorious sonic consistency and immersive tonality throughout, its real success lies in just how many places you feel you’ve been taken to along its vast, landscapeshifting journey.

Much has been made of Georgia Barnes’ musical education, both as a music graduate from SOAS and as a clerk at Rough Trade, which account for the sprawling diversity of her debut album’s influences, the sheer variety of which could fill entire degree courses or record shops.

However, for all the hipster dilettantism on display here – nods towards Daniel Lopatin’s technicolour abstract expressionism on ‘GMTL’, distorted schoolyard chants of MIA on ‘Move Systems’ and even Bon Iver’s wounded detachment on ‘Heart Wrecking Animals’ – what really cuts through the genre-splat is Barnes’ ear for more traditionally engineered pop: engaging, idiosyncratic melodies and microscopically detailed hooks abound in virtually every song, and Barnes’ wilful insistence on catchiness, whatever the production style, is clear. And that thrust is a relief: while the stylistic restlessness makes ‘Georgia’ feel more like a mixtape than an album, and while it might not be the smoothest musical experience, its bumps separate it pleasingly from the pack.

Scratchy Melbourne punk band Deaf Wish never planned to stick around. At their inception, the band revolved around an ‘it is what it is’ philosophy. They thought they’d do two shows, maybe. Then there was a third, and a fourth, and a trail of releases. The, ‘Pain’ (their fourth LP), bristles with a nervous energy that at times tumbles into an all-out breakdown. The twitchy neurosis of tracks like ‘Eyes Closed’ and ‘Pain’ bring to mind a lit fuse, or a guitar string about to snap. The feedback and frenzy push against one another, until they come to such screeching halts they must give the drummer whiplash. The fuzzed-out relative calm of ‘Sunset’s Fool’, then, is a welcome counterpoint. Likewise the controlled buzz of ‘They Know’.

‘Pain’ is a collection of dissonant elements that spark against one another, somehow managing to form a whole. Deaf Wish’s sense of immediacy drives the record, with the band doing their best not to over complicate things. At its strongest, ‘Pain’ is simple, straightforward punk. Deaf Wish know they’re not dead yet.

Dan Bejar recently admitted that his last album, 2011’s critically adored ‘Kaputt’ “happened to line up with a certain zeitgeist.” His most sprawling work in a decade, followup ‘Poison Season’ (Bejar’s eleventh LP) takes great pains to avoid any further lucky breaks.

The most propulsive thing here, lead single ‘Dream Lover’, is a fiery curveball – beginning in the heavens, it simply doesn’t know where to go from there. The brooding cop-showtheme funk of ‘Midnight Meet the

Rain’ fares far better, as does a revised take on ‘Archer on the Beach’, suggesting that if Bejar had come out with ‘Kaputt 2.0’, it would have been incredible, if not entirely satisfying.

‘Poison Season’’s biggest development is Bejar’s newfound ability to write full-on torch songs – aside from a heartbreaking lyric about the pitfalls of fame (“It sucks when there’s nothing but gold in those hills…”), ‘Girl in a Sling’ lets its gorgeous spare string

arrangement do the talking. Likewise, there’s no chance a song like ‘Hell’ – which, in three minutes, morphs from an ‘Eleanor Rigby’-style dirge to bouncing Bacharachian pop – will ever find itself on trend.

Compared with other Destroyer LPs, ‘Poison Season’ is a disjointed listen, surprisingly lacking the band’s usual brazen theatrics. Still, Dan Bejar remains indie rock’s last great shapeshifter, and it’s hard not to hear this as a stepping stone to another masterpiece.

0 7/ 1 0

Destroyer Poison Season Dea d Oc ean s

By Al ex wi sgard. In store s Aug 18

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0 7/10

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07/ 10

Night Beds Ivywild

Strange Wilds Subjective Concepts

The Classical Diptych

Amason Sky City

d ea d o cean s

Su b Po p

T i me s e n si ti ve mate ri al s

F a ir f a x

By r eef y ou n is. I n sto res a ug 7

B y re e f yo uni s . I n s to re s J ul y 2 4

By j o e go ggi n s . I n sto re s J u ly 3 1

B y lia m K o n em a n n . I n s t o r es a u g 1 4

Night Beds’ debut album, ‘Country Sleep’, had many excitedly comparing Winston Yellen to Jeff Buckley and Ryan Adams, but despite plumbing similarly maudlin depths of world-weariness, despair and heartbreak, he was never really about those silver-tongued comparisons.

“When ‘Country Sleep’ came out, I had never made songs like that before,” he admitted, and subsequently shifted his focus from contemplative alt. country simplicity to this – one-paced RnB melancholy. Inspired by the breakup of a long term relationship, and selfdescribed as an album of “sad sex jams”, tracks like ‘Sway(ve)’, ‘Lay Your Hands’ and ‘Love Streams’ bump towards that remit with open white-shirt indulgence, but Yellen’s take on a sensual confessional runs too parallel over 16 schmaltzy tracks.

Barring the stripped back acoustic wail of ‘All in Good Time (I Get You Wrong Interlude)’, the Bieber offal of ‘[9-6] slack-jaw’ and over-exposed Auto-Tune echoes of ‘Finished’ only succeed in making Owl City Trapped in the Closet with R Kelly a palpably terrifying reality.

Strange Wilds and Sub Pop are the equivalent of a grunge speed date: one, a label steeped in hardcore history; the other, a burgeoning band just down the road in Olympia. Some things are just meant to be.The result is a debut inspired by a proud, tenacious dose of Pacific tradition.

Loud, sneering, and heavy-set, ‘Subjective Concepts’ could come wrapped in a rain-soaked plaid shirt.

Opener ‘Pronoia’ is a pugnacious blast of the Northwest doom-andgloom Nine Black Alps strived for, ‘Lost and Found’ – with its phlegmladen wail, tom-tom-heavy beat and punchy power chords – rolls and lurches with authority, and ‘Starved For’ is a happy reminder of sluggish, younger days sprawled in front of MTV2. But although there’s a huge sense of deference, this isn’t an album chained to straight revivalism.

Sure, the influence of some of Seattle’s heaviest hitters surface on tracks like the crawling ‘Don’t Have To’, but the bratty hardcore blast of ‘Disdain’, and the hefty lurch of closer ‘Outercourse’, makes this more than just another exclamation point on a gritty golden age.

This record by The Classical – a shadowy duo comprised of singersongwriter Juliet E. Gordon and free jazz drummer Britt Ciampa – has been available since last year via Bandcamp. Now, they’re giving it a physical release, which is odd considering that pretty much nothing about them suggests they do things conventionally. Gordon claims to be a “disavowed stage actor”, and you can tell; she has the sort of theatrical voice you come to expect from musicals – expressive and nuanced.

The nine tracks on ‘Diptych’ play like one, long, freeform mood piece; the backing’s minimal, Ciampa’s unintrusive work complemented by consistently strange synths and the odd flash of strings. The overall result is something that sounds like it could comfortably have soundtracked Twin Peaks, especially when Gordon segues into smoky jazz mode. Elsewhere, though, the erratic likes of ‘Shovel & Bevel’ and ‘Sicily: Catacombs’ feel contrived, as if they’re striving too hard for weirdness. That aside, there’s still plenty of promise on a deeply unusual debut LP.

Amason are named, after a fashion, for the female warriors of Greek mythology. Despite this, musically the band holds more in common with their ‘by way of’ namesake; the Volvo Amason. This is in no way an insult to neither band nor car. However, it is clear that this debut album is comforting and secure rather than antagonistic and confrontational.

Music hall lullaby ‘The Moon As A Kite’ is typically sweet, and nostalgic without being cloying.

Indeed, this can be said for ‘Sky City’ as a whole. This is a debut that takes few risks yet does not seem stale. The inclusion of tracks in the band’s native Swedish is perhaps the element most likely to surprise some listeners, especially as ‘Sky City’ relies heavily on vocal talent.

Singer Amanda Bergman’s rich voice is particularly impressive on ‘Yellow Moon’, where her range is given the attention it deserves.

The instruments are secondary here, a vehicle for the vocals, and with ‘Sky City’ Amason have assembled a charming record. It remains to be seen how they will grow from here.

For anyone coming to Ducktails off the back of Matthew Mondanile’s better known work with indie suburbanites Real Estate, this is not some radical, experimental side project. Sure, some of his project’s earlier releases focused more on hazy, meandering jams and floating guitar lines than the bright, neatly constructed vignettes the five-piece have become acclaimed for, but they share plenty of DNA; mostly, a deep affinity for tropical, sun-dappled guitar pop and sweet, wistful

melodies that hang in the air. On ‘St. Catherine’, Mondanile’s fifth LP, he’s zeroed in on those elements and lopped off all the zen pedal-gazing; the result is Ducktails’ smoothest, most enveloping album yet.

The presence of über-producer Rob Scnapf is no doubt responsible for some of the crispness and punch sprinkled throughout the eleven tracks, but the album really shines when Mondanile pushes himself outside his woozy, summertime-atdusk instrumentation. Both ‘Church’

and ‘Heaven’s Room’ employ sweeping strings and intricate harmonies to great effect, while the soaring ‘Into The Sky’ is his most grandiose statement to date. Even the record’s title, homage to the patron saint of knowledge and virtue, is indicative of an artist daring to think big and test his limits. His signature “vibe” is still very much present and correct, but the added substance proves he has the chops to flourish beyond mere slacker comfort music.

0 7/ 1 0

Ducktails St. Catherine d omi n o By der ek r o ber tso n. In sto res july 24

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Reviews 0 4/ 1 0

0 6/10

04 /10

07/ 10

Vinyl Williams Into

Christian Rich FW14

Simon Love It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

White Poppy Natural Phenomena

C ompan y

By C h ris Wat keys. In sto re s July 20

Lu c k y num b e r B y d avi d z ammi tt. I n s to re s A ug 2 1

not not fun B y C h ri s wa t k ey s . In s t o r es J u ly 1 0

Fo rtuna P o p By to m f e n wick . I n s to re s A u g 7

LA resident Lionel Williams is from distinguished musical stock – son of Mark Towner Williams of Crosby, Stills and Nash, and grandson of film composer John Williams, as the press release tells us repeatedly. So you can’t blame him for trying to forge a unique musical identity, down which path he takes another step with ‘Into’, a collection of strange, floaty vignettes, perhaps best described as ambient. The term ‘soundscapes’ is overused but it certainly applies here; these compositions are wide, watery and hazily colourful. But as the record progresses it becomes more and more obvious that this is probably the perfect album to soothe a wired insomniac at 3am. Music this detached can only ever be incidental.

It creates a non-feeling, a blank void in the mind of the listener. Or, perhaps that’s not true – a quick glance at the track listing reveals that the final mini-opus is a dreadinducing ten minutes long. ‘Into’ is highly musically accomplished, and admirably inventive, but at best it’s interesting, and at worst, simply irritating.

Nigerian brothersTaiwo and Kehinde Hassan have an impressive collective curriculum vitae. From polished mainstream RnB to gritty rap, J. Cole, Drake, and Earl Sweatshirt have all benefited from the touch of the production duo in the studio. ‘FW14’ is their first album as Christian Rich. Supposedly taking the future as its muse, the album, they say, is influenced by the work of Phillip K Dick and Christopher Nolan. But while there are moments where the pair draw on the aural maximalism of Rustie, Hudson Mohawke and Lunice (‘Forever Ever’, and the Vince Staples-featuring ‘High’, for example) the collection generally doffs its cap to the ’70s funk and disco of Quincy Jones. You can almost see the glint of the glitter balls as ‘Real Love’, ‘Better To’, and ‘What More’, with their slick, upstroke guitars appropriate Off The Wall-era Jacko with passable results. However, while ‘FW14’ showcases the Hassans’ indubitable production qualities, the album exists as a perfunctory shop window rather than an opportunity to break any particularly new ground.

Simon Love – ex-lead singer of The Loves – returns from the wilderness with a confounding solo debut. The graceful production shows just how well honed his aesthetic has become over the years. Brimming with nostalgia and indebted to midSixties pop, Love’s music perfectly reflecting the influence ofThe Kinks, The Small Faces and Lennon/ McCartney post-Beatles. Sadly, he undercuts his own fine tunes with lyrical transgressions, which attempt shrewdness, but seem closer to the scribblings of a sniggering schoolboy. “Love is a two-balled crack-whored assbumming cock-sucking motherfucking dirty word,” he sings on opener ‘**** (Is A Dirty Word)’.

Love’s desire to jolt the listener with piquant lyricism should shock, but really it’s all rather boring. And it yanks down an album that could soar. Whether he’s singing about castration (‘My Dick’) or people who beat you down (‘Motherfuckers’), Love strives for wit but constantly falls wide of the mark.

White Poppy is the moniker of the superbly named Crystal Dorvan, a Vancouver-based musician, artist and writer about whom, it seems, very little is known. It’s refreshing to come across an artist who, by design or otherwise, truly lets their music speak for them. Thus ‘Natural Phenomena’, her second album, kicks off with the fuzzy, hazy and absorbing ‘Confusion’, and segues into the instrumental ‘Wild Mind’, which slides layers of sound around a tribal beat. Dorvan is breaking no musical moulds here, but what she does, she does superbly – this record is like a warm bath, or a morphineassisted float down a jungle river.

‘Midnight Sun’ is a particular highlight, like My Bloody Valentine stripped of the noise, buried in an astringent yet melodic guitar line. On ‘Aurora’, synth and organ weave superbly around a cyclical riff (very much at home on the Not Not Fun label), while ‘Telepathic Love’ feels like Moon Duo on tranquilisers. The flow of this album is all in one direction and there are few surprises, but it’s viscerally engaging and highly immersive stuff.

Upon first inspection, Autobahn may seem like another pissed-off band making doomy post-punk. Granted, they have graduated from the same grimy stages as fellow Leeds group Eagulls and have released a couple of gritty EPs that have showcased an unhinged powerful racket, but it’s not all doom and gloom with this fivepiece.

The clattering noise and scolding opening of ‘Missing In Action’ may suggest otherwise, with singer Craig Johnson unfurling a menacing

bellow to compete with the chaotic instrumentation. Elsewhere, though, their music is denser and more intriguing than their early recordings – ‘Immaterial Man’ sounds like a Factory Records single during the lofty heights of post-punk, whilst ‘Impressionist’ and ‘Society’ break loose from their motorik pulses to reach thrilling climaxes.

On ‘Beautiful Place To Die’, Johnson sings: “There was snow on the ground, sun shining and I thought to myself, if I were to crash and die

here, at least it would be a really beautiful place to die.” Not quite ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’, but it is nonetheless this strange sense of romanticism in the poetic lyrics that is the main appeal of this appropriately named debut album. Amongst the darkness Autobahn have managed to conjure glimmers of mysterious light that makes ‘Dissemble’ standout and a more compelling proposition than the millions of other bands making short bursts of angry noise.

08/10

Autobahn Dissemble Tou gh l o v e

By Sam C or n for th. In sto re s Aug 21

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Albums 08/10

Titus Andronicus Most Lamentable Tragedy Mer ger

By Patr i c k gl e n. In sto res a ug 7

‘The Most Lamentable Tragedy’ is a vaguely magical realist concept album. It’s conceptually rich but Patrick Stickles writes lyrics that can seem superficially blunt and uncomfortably self-pitying.

It encompasses varied textures of dissonance and harmony and multiple genres, yet somehow it manages to resolve these potentially awkward connections, from its posthardcore bombast filtered through classic rock to sketches of Celtic folk and Neutral Milk Hotel-like harmony. In this double album Titus Andronicus’ rich combination of styles grips you in a unique way.They are political, honest and brave enough to articulate desires and

failings. You might baulk at moments of earnestness, both musically and lyrically.

The double album is a five-act rock opera that entertains and provokes. It includes covers of the Pogues, Daniel Johnston and, perhaps incongruously, ‘Auld Lang Syne’. The melancholic main character meets his exact physical double; they talk and reflect on his life in a way that reveals uncomfortable insights.

This conversation touches on the selfdestructiveness that characterise the troughs in manic depression, which are followed by rushes of action and focus.

It begins with a droning electronic

organ sound and four incredible opening tracks that indulge Stickles’ classic rock influences. ‘No Future Part VI,’ stripped of modern punk singalong vocal style, would not be out of place on one of The Who’s albums. The next few songs run us through aspects of his record collection – Creedence, Stiff Little Fingers and the New York Dolls. It’s a brave and rousing start, while ‘Stranded (On My Own)’ is the real highlight.

The next act ups the tempo while establishing the protagonist’s encounter with his doppelganger.

The songs are short and fast with buzzsaw guitars. ‘I Lost My Mind,’ the Johnston cover, far departed

from the original, is an interesting, worthwhile interpretation. This poppunk interlude is followed by some more classic song writing, which draws on some Springsteen-like dynamics. ‘Mr E. Mann,’ despite the corny pun, revises ‘Badlands’, for examples.

The last two acts include more short drones, revived from the introduction. The songs are more esoteric as the album draws towards the end, however, it’s worth sticking with it for ‘No Future Part V’ and ‘Stable Boy’, which highlight Stickles’ diverse talents. The latter sounds like Jeff Mangum but is as off kilter asThe Fugs. It is a fitting end to such a studiously conceived album.

There’s fine form in eccentric musicians claiming to be from outer space instead of, say, Bromley, and their work benefitting from the ensuing theatricality and grandeur.

Unfortunately, such delights are entirely absent on the debut from Seven Davis Jr, one such selfproclaimed intergalactic pop alien, who’s actually from Houston, Texas, and who grew up in the only slightly more interesting area of Northern California. ‘Universes’ is a decidedly earthly, loveless slab of electro funk

dressed up as a live concert performed by Davis from the bridge of his intergalactic spacecraft to the people of Earth, and peppered with tortuous conversational interludes between Davis and his ship’s computer. Indeed, so tedious is ‘Universes’ that even his robot loses interest by track 9, pleading with Davis to shut up and fly them home while the singer, like an overtired toddler up past his bedtime, insists on a couple more songs – and then throws in a pointless ‘secret track’ as

if to assert his authority.

It all makes Davis appear less from another galaxy and more from that moment in the early-’90s when it was assumed the way to make house music better was by injecting it with dubious cod-hippie mysticism. Then again, perhaps the joke’s on us: after being subjected to 40 minutes of stodgy house-by-numbers and complete bollocks manifesting itself as transcendental philosophy, the most natural response is to ask what planet this joker is actually from.

02/10

Seven Davis Jr. Universes

N i nj a t un e s By sam wal to n. In sto res July 24

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Reviews / Live

Jenny Hval Cafe Oto, Dalston London 14/ 0 6/ 20 14 wr i ter : S tuar t Stub bs Pho to gr aph er : K ell y Sm ith

Norwegian artist Jenny Hval has spent nine years and five albums challenging gender identity with an alarming brand of Scandinavian anti-pop most recently made up of soft tones, sound collages and whispering vocals that aren’t about to apologise for their bad language and forthright approach to the realities of sex and sexism. It’s on her recent album, ‘Apocalypse, girl’, that she’s first made autobiographical her experiences of feminism, however, which gives us one more thing (and there are already plenty) to ponder as Hval performs a majority of tonight’s show in a long, pale pink wig that covers her blonde, pokerstraight, boyish bowl-cut.

On-stage performers Annie Bielski and Zia Anger wear similar hairpieces also, and begin by heavily applying lipstick and posing for selfies taken by a MacBook that is

projected onto the back wall. The three of them swig bottled beer and pout for the screen, eventually to a few titters from the audience who tentatively check that it is ok to laugh – that this is meant to be funny.

That’s often the problem with a performance like this – that is as much art as it is music – that amongst all the sage nodding and ensuring you’re ‘getting it’ you miss the intended humour, of which Hval has a fair bit, although none as blatant as the moment that Bielskiv and Anger perform an out-of-time, out-of-tune karaoke rendition of Toni Braxton’s ‘Un-break My Heart’. It comes late in the set, after plenty of tense soundscapes, assembled by banks of synthesizers on either side of the stage; after plenty of tense, bare-tothe-bone words from Hval, some intimately spoken as if to only you, some beautifully and powerfully

sung; after plenty of tense, uncomfortable projected films and stills, like the movie of Bielskiv on her knees with her mouth open and head back, receiving an oversized chain down her throat in slow motion, followed by yellow slime oozing from her lips and down her chin. After all that, and following the beat-driven ‘Sabbath’ on an evening of very few hooks, a four-second video with sound shows Bielskiv prodding a banana to phone tones and excitedly looking down the camera. “He responded!” she yells on an excited in breath.Then, ‘Un-break My Heart’.

It’s funny for how Bielskiv and Anger (until now active but silent) sing it (badly and disinterested) but also for everything that’s gone before and everything we know about Hval and her pursuit to dismantle gender stereotypes. Forty minutes ago she was sarcastically cooing, “I give you

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this cunt,” through ‘Take Care of Yourself’ (a song that ticks off supposed, dependent goals that apply to all women); now, unintentionally ironic lyrics like “Unbreak my heart / Say you’ll love me again” are highlighted one word at a time across the back wall of the room.

That projection continues as the karaoke track dips and Hval performs ‘That Battle Is Over’ on top of Braxton’s archaic words. As Hval sings, “Statistics and newspapers tell me I am unhappy and dying, that I need a man and child to fulfil me,” her point is more than made, and we even got to enjoy it with a smile, because, of course, while the discussion of sexism and inequality remains a serious one, by the very nature of the fact that we still need to have it, it is also wholly preposterous.

Jenny Hval knows this and invites us to think but also laugh at the absurdity.

Reviews

Perfume Genius Royal Festival Hall London

Dan Deacon Oval Space, Hackney 1 6 / 06 / 2 01 5 w r it er : P a tr i c k Gl en

10 / 0 6/ 20 15

P hotogr a ph e r : Soph ie B a rloc

wri ter: C hr i s wa tke ys

Deacon is like an intellectual George Costanza – his own observation – but with great music, superior dance moves and the ability to make people comfortable enough to dance to the avant-garde. With a live drummer and effects-laden vocals and electronics, he creates physically powerful and dense tracks, working through parts of new album ‘Glass Riffer’, old favourites, like ‘Wham City,’ and climaxing in the sublime end to his penultimate album ‘America’. I could see ‘America’ as one of those albums that end up in the Smithsonian. Live, with an ecstatic crowd, it is something else.

Deacon sympathetically intervenes, in a way that implied his nefarious intelligence, to remove inhibitions in a way that makes people dance like no one was looking and smile at strangers. Wume, a Baltimore Kosmiche band, supported – they are worth your attention too.

Following his most instant and greatest record yet (last year’s stand out ‘Too Bright’), Mike Hadreas is now three albums in to a career in which, from the outset, it’s been clear that he’s anything but just another tortured solo artist. On the expansive stage of the Royal Festival Hall, this unusual and engaging character is deeply in his element.

There’s something very theatrical in both his appearance (tonight, he models a sharp suit cut off below the knee, fishnets and oversize lady’s shoes) and his movements – that idiosyncratic, flamboyant stage persona is in full effect; at times he’s a strange, writhing creature, at others he displays a remarkable stillness. Musically, this is a masterclass of poise and drama, by turns heartbreaking, unsettling and chaotic. It’s his biggest show to date, and he’s nailed it.

Amon Düül II Village Underground Shoreditch, London 12/ 0 6/ 20 15 wri ter: e dga r smit h

When the vocals on their records rev up to fully psycho, people often find Amon Düül II disturbing. In that obliviously irresponsible hippy trademark, the kosmiche commune troop play tonight at deafening volume. By ‘Kanaan,’ from ‘Phallus Dei’, the crowd divides along a stark line of those who came down because they thought it was cool and genuine freaks, with an overlapping segment of those on acid. A slightly overbearing sense of arousal – and wiggling, spiritual hands – mingle in the air. In a moment of either mordant German humour or psychic burn out, singer Renatta complains to the boiling room about the ‘hum’ and ‘blowing’ from the ‘air conditioning,’ while a guy called Merlin, who saw them in Cambridge at the corn exchange in ’71, tells me it’s great the younger generation are getting into this stuff.

Weyes Blood Lock Tavern, Camden, London 16/06 / 2 0 1 4 wri te r : Rach e l Re df er n P ho togr aph e r : C hr i s toph e r J e s s e Ju ar e z

When Natalie Mering hums it sounds like synthesised strings. It’s just one of the ways that the Pennsylvanian singer sounds like she is without a time or place – her psychedelic folk songs, which combine acoustic guitar with self-harmonising vocals and spooky sound collages, are neither completely earthy, like the old country, nor HD enough to be 100% post GarageBand. This evening she plays to a small crowd, uncharacteristically alone, with a MacBook, an oversized guitar and a loop pedal. It’s a muggy night and there is audible chatter from the veranda the other side of open French doors, while inside Mering (in beautiful rangy voice and plaited hair headband) connects the dots between Laurel Canyon hippy folk and the doomed modernity of Nico. She jokes in a laidback drawl, mostly about Billy Joel, and is far less awkward with the intimacy than the rest of us.

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Live

Best Kept Secret Hilvarenbeek, Netherlands 19 - 21/ 0 6/ 20 15 wr i ter s: Dani el D ylan Wra y Photogr a ph er : C hri s Stess e ns

Walking onto the site at Best Kept Secret on the afternoon of the first day, the faint sound of Drenge can be heard ringing through the air as the festival stirs to life and the crowds begin to flock in. Wandering around the site, it’s immediately clear what an ideally sized festival it is: five stages, one of which is large and outdoors on sand next to a lake (which you can swim in), with the other four all under tents, either similarly located on sand near the water or tucked away more into the forest-y pockets of the site. Between the stages BKS succeeds in avoiding tacky stalls. It’s vibrant but functionary and the focus is instead placed on a series of varied and excellent food and drink stands.

There’s a small vintage market tucked into the woods but beyond that the focus is music, food and drink. There’s a log cabin on the lake selling craft beer, and a wine bar, too. Oh, and the whole site is also located within parts of the grounds of a Safari Park. Some accommodation options include the possibility of staying on the animal occupied grounds for the adventurous or insane.

Yak are another psychedelictinged new buzz band but on Friday afternoon they thankfully avoid the dullard trappings so many lightweight ‘psych’ groups seem to be diving head first into these days, and instead their assault is a much more visceral and charged one.

There’s a grubby, heavy tone and propulsion to their output that even recalls 80’s Matchbox or the grossly underrated XX Teens in parts, albeit clouded under a haze of psychedelic swirl.They still feel like they’re trying to fully realise what they’re doing – and what they want to do – and the full set doesn’t feel quite complete or sonically coherent as yet, but watching them assemble it along the way is pleasing enough.

Eagulls’ new material is sounding promising – the three new ones they roll out alongside the clattering juggernauts of old, are much more restrained and melodic.

There’s a druggy melancholy to the songs: the amphetamine charge of their debut replaced with a slowed down, groggy barbiturate-like state.

The songs feel incredibly Smithsindebted with tonal nods to Robin

Guthrie’s guitar work in the Cocteau Twins and even the sparse but fierce approach of the last Iceage record.

Earl Sweatshirt feels a little stale in comparison, the singular voice and one laptop output not being enough to energise the early evening crowd, and aside from a throbbing pulse of sub-bass, sonically the whole thing feels flat and rarely gets off the ground.

Spanish teenagers Mourn are a joyous start to the Saturday and a weekend highlight. Full of youthful vigour, intensity and fun, they hammer out intoxicating pop-coated, guitar heavy numbers with frenzied speed, just in time for Temples to knock out a rather turgid set – one that despite being so clearly reliant on the influence of the deeply songstructured, pop-heavy heyday of 1960s/70s rock and pop, feels so lacking in actual songs. The whole thing breezes by in a forgettable and uninspiring whimper.

Follakzoid’s entire output then ostensibly revolves around the same looping groove, but if that is the case, they know how to get some miles out of it. For an hour they play deeply hypnotic, droning psych that weaves between exploding bursts of sound, dance-inducing grooves and teasingly restrained melodies locked into place for what feels like an eternity. The whole thing works brilliantly and it’s like being lost in an

orbit and once you’re ejected from its spin you almost feel disoriented and woozy, just in time for Hookworms who hit home another beauty of a show, the heavy, deathly fuzz of their intense proto-punk mania wailing around the inside of the tent. A crowd surfing-related injury kills a bit of the vibe but the band are more concerned for the fan’s wellbeing than they are about any lost momentum (which is soon regained once they get going again).

Ride’s output feels like it’s struggling to find a place in 2015. For people such as myself who were too young for them first time around, and who for seeing them now is not simply an exercise in nostalgia but an altogether new experience, they just seem a little lacking. Whilst there are momentous of equally noisy and melodic expulsions that are unquestionably engrossing, it’s hard to see what the group are offering in the way of something new or relevant by working through this material again – but perhaps that’s not the point.

The sun hits down hard on the last day and Future Islands’ sundrenched set is a perfect late afternoon accompaniment to the glorious weather. The merging of disco-flavoured, pop-smattered melodies with Samuel T. Herring’s intensity, sincerity and one-of-a-kind voice have always been an odd but

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endearing match and they continue to be so today, wonderfully, before they disappear to write a new record.

Walking up to see Ariel Pink is like arriving at the scene of a car crash, the stage filled with bodies wandering aimlessly, a sort of noise and mania ever-present. It’s a horrendous mess and I consider leaving after one song but what goes from an incoherent racket turns into one of the best shows of the weekend.

Inconsistency is certainly a common trait for Pink’s extensive output but once his seven-piece band hit their stride they lock into a grubby groove that’s deeply engulfing, their rendition of ‘Baby’ being the most perfect culmination of their combined forces.

The sheer variety and volume of European music festivals in 2015 can be head-spinning, and therefore the competition for your hard earned cash is fierce. However, despite its relative infancy (just three years old) and some of the larger headline acts needing a bit of a tweak in a more interesting direction (The Libertines, Noel Gallagher, Royal Blood) BKS is emerging as one of the stronger festivals out there. The site is wonderful and very pretty. It’s relaxing but also vibrant and energetic (without being too depraved or drug-riddled) and overall it’s one of the most efficiently run festivals I’ve attended.

Singing Pictures

W r i te r : A n d re w A n d er s on

Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park (1997)

Kiss are one of those things – like guns, crack cocaine and incest – that are massive in America but have never quite caught on in the UK .This is because Kiss engage in that most American practice of taking themselves seriously, an especially stupid mistake given that they are, in essence, a comedy band: they wear makeup that makes them look like prats, do a ridiculous tonguewiggling thing and have nicknames like ‘Starchild’ and ‘The Demon’ for Christ’s sake.

But for all that, Kiss actually have some good songs. Early material is of the heavy rock pump-your-fistsand-chant-a-bit variety, which they do extremely well (has there ever been a better call to arms than “I wanna rock and roll all night and party every day”?). Later on they brought in some pop-disco elements and, as with the Rolling Stones ‘Miss You,’ it actually worked – check out ‘I Was Made For Loving You’ if you don’t believe me. Unsurprisingly, they weren’t averse to getting all schmaltzy and earnest either, but yet again they pulled it off with numbers like ‘Beth’ and ‘Mr Make Believe.’

That said, Kiss’ music was really just a pathogen (which I am going to christen Kissitis), burrowing into listeners’ brains and infecting them with a sick urge to buy Kiss-related crap. Their cartoonish qualities made them perfect for merchandising, and at the epidemic’s zenith you could get Kiss coins, comics, condoms, collectable cards, computer games, credit cards and

even a coffin – and that’s just the stuff beginning with C. This mix of music and merchandising made them the perfect band to make a movie, which they duly did, with 1978’s Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park.

So why haven’t you heard of it?

You might assume it is because Kiss aren’t well known in the UK, or perhaps because of some sort of distribution-rights issue thing, but you’d be wrong: it is actually because the film is utterly crap. Like Clapton’s racist rant or Robbie Williams ‘Rudebox,’ it has simply been written out of history by the band and, so the legend goes, anyone working with Kiss is banned from even mentioning it in their presence.

The question is this: how did Kiss manage to take such delicious musical and marketing ingredients and, instead of making a tasty cake, make such a pile of terrible turd pie?

We’ll get to that, but first let me explain why Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park is so awful.

The film opens with a rendition of ‘Rock and Roll All Nite’, and already it is apparent that something is seriously wrong. The film stock looks like it was taken from a super 8 camera, run through an airport security check scanner several times and then stored in the leaky basement of a magnet warehouse.This is partly to do with the fact the film has never been re-mastered, but largely it is because Kiss spent zero money on making it in the first place and, as a result, it looks like shit.

As far as plot goes, the idea is that Kiss are playing three sold-out gigs in a California amusement park called Magic Mountain. The park owner has booked them because ‘They’re the biggest band in the world!’ of which we’re repeatedly reminded. However, the guy that designs the rides – a chap called Abner Devereaux – thinks this is selling out.

Long story short, it turns out Devereaux is actually a total nutcase, and his real plan is to implant computer chips in people so they become his bionic army.The first guy he abducts is called ‘Chopper,’ a tough guy who wears a biker jacket and says things like ‘What’s your beef?’ to authority figures.

Devereaux also enslaves one of his own employees who looks a bit like Fred from Scooby Doo. His girlfriend comes looking for him, and accidentally discovers his evil intentions. She alerts Kiss, but it turns out that Devereaux has made bionic copies of Kiss and so in a final scene Kiss must do battle with themselves. After they have won the fight (using lasers that shoot from their eyes, of course), Paul Stanley grabs the microphone and screams ‘Does everybody feel GOOD?’ The band then play one final version of ‘Rock and Roll All Nite’ as the credits roll.

Speaking of Scooby Doo, the film was actually written and produced by the Hanna-Barbera team, which explains the idiotic premise and terrible script. The dialogue is

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remarkably crap, with loads of “cool” 70s slang like ‘can you dig it’ and ‘far out’ crowbarred in at various inappropriate moments. Every event has to be punctuated by a crappy pun, like ‘so much for staying cool!’ when a child catches fire, or ‘that’s using your head!’ when a person’s skull is stoved in with a shovel (these things may not have actually happened in the film as I tuned out for large parts to save my brain from melting, but you get the idea).

What the film does show is a very different ’70s from that seen in Slade in Flame, which I reviewed a couple of issues ago. In Slade’s UK ’70s things were dark, sinister and felt real, whereas in Kiss’ American ’70s everyone looks obnoxiously healthy, the scenery is disturbingly verdant and double denim is de rigueur. It is a brash, sun bleached and mindlessly optimistic vision of the world, one that America would retreat further into once Ronald Reagan became president.

To answer my earlier question, this film is bad because Kiss simply didn’t care enough. When it comes to making heavy rock music and crappy merchandise you can get away with being cheap – sometimes that even improves the results – but unfortunately with filmmaking that isn’t the case; if you don’t put in the effort you’re not going to get a good film. As a result the film is terrible, and while you can laugh at it you can’t really enjoy it without the assistance of alcohol, marijuana or heavy tranquillisers.

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Party wolf STEREOTYPES: Bikes are all over the bloody place, usually ridden by these people

The Courier

The Boris Biker

The Brompton

The Amateur Pro

Helmet: A tiny cap is all the protection I need out there, brah. Catch me later!

Helmet: That was never going to happen, was it? THINK, Boris!

Helmet: Good God yes!You’re basically going to die on this thing.

Helmet: You can pick up a pretty decent one for as little as £200.

Bag: Imagine a duffle bag made from a bin bag and you’re there. Dude’s gotta keep his flatbread dry whatever the weather.

Bag: No need. There’s a rubber band around a scoopy up piece of metal at the front.

Bag: Casual briefcase clipped to the front.

It’s actually pretty trendy, for a dressdown Friday feeling all week long.

The Look: Whatever you happen to have on when you stumble across a bank of these things. It can be literally anything. A suit, a summer dress, a Mr Blobby costume. Fill your boots on London’s most lawless tourist death trap.

The Look: Be seen, be safe. And trouser clips are a must. You don’t want to turn up to an important meeting with mucky trousers – you’re shirt’s already transparent with sweat.

Bag: Most cycling shirts have elasticated pockets on the lower back, for your energy gels. If you need to carry anything else, you’re not taking this seriously enough.

The Look: Shorts and Vans are still in, but cycling jerseys are the stuff of the Amateur Pros now. Those guys are the worst.

Red Light Policy: Run em! All. Day. Long. You’ve got the cap on, right?

The Gist: You’ve got to wonder why anybody would bother with gears these days. I mean, I just see steep hills as roads born that way. I guess some people are more uptight.

And Another Thing: If you have a single/fixed gear bike, shops won’t even sell you the bracket to attach your D lock to the frame.

Red Light Policy: Accidently run by confused tourists; purposefully run by stag dos for bantz.

The Gist: An incredible feat of engineering that challenges the idea that the wheel is man’s greatest invention.

And Another Thing: A Boris Bike weighs the same as a Fiat 500. The large version.

The Look: All the gear. ALL of it. Those shoes that click in the pedals, they’ll pay for themselves in less than two years.

Red Light Policy: Trust me, once you’ve ridden more than 100 metres on a bike with 5-inch wheels, you’ll be preying for a break.

Red Light Policy: You really shouldn’t, but everyone else is doing it, so ask yourself this – what would Lance do?

The Gist: Britain is full of thieves. If I could store my house next to my desk in the day I fucking would.

The Gist: If you can’t spunk your way though a midlife crisis on a bike that weighs less than a ham sandwich, what are we doing here, guys?

And Another Thing: If you’re on any other style of bike (save for a Boris) and one of these passes you, you should always pull over and shoot yourself in the head.

And Another Thing: The other people in your office, who don’t ride, they’re laughing at you when you change in the toilets at 5pm.

Finished!

Thank you, Ian! I never knew you went to beauty school

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Disclaimer: The representations of the persons herein are purely fictitious

Photo casebook: The unfortunate world of Ian Beale