Loud And Quiet 135 – Fontaines D.C.

Injury Reserve, Tierra Whack, Dry Cleaning, DJ Kampire, Maxine Peake, The Saxophone resurgence, A guide to End of The Road

issue 135

Fontaines D.C. Back to the better land

STREAM HAND-PICKED CINEMA

The Graduate (1984) Director, Mike Nicholls | Cinematography, Robert Surtees

Contents Contact info@loudandquiet.com advertise@loudandquiet.com Loud And Quiet Ltd PO Box 67915 London NW1W 8TH Founding Editor: Stuart Stubbs Art Direction: B.A.M. Digital Director: Greg Cochrane Sub Editor: Alexandra Wilshire Book Editor: Lee Bullman Contributing writers Abi Crawford, Alex Francis, Alexander Smail, Colin Gannon, Colin Groundswater, Daniel Dylan-Wray, Dominic Haley, Fergal Kinney, Gemma Samways, Guia Cortassa, Hayley Scott, Ian Roebuck, Jamie Haworth, Joe Goggins, Katie Beswick, Katie Cutforth, Liam Konemann, Luke Cartledge, Max Pilley, Megan Wallace, Ollie Rankine, Rosie Ramsden, Reef Younis, Susan Darlington, Sam Walton, Tom Critten, Tristan Gatward, Woody Delaney.

Contributing photographers Charlotte Patmore, Colin Medley, David Cortes, Dan Kendall, Dustin Condren, Gabriel Green, Gem Harris, Heather Mccutcheon, Jenna Foxton, Jody Evans, Jonangelo Molinari, Levi Mandel, Matilda Hill-Jenkins, Nathanael Turner, Nathaniel Wood, Phil Sharp, Sonny McCartney, Sophie Barloc, Timothy Cochrane, Tom Porter.

With special thanks to Aimi Matlock-Lewis, Anna Mears, Ben Harris, James Parrish, Kate Prior, Marta Pallares, Maisie Lawrence, Stephanie Duncan-Bosu, Will Vincent.

The views expressed in Loud And Quiet are those of the respective contributors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the magazine or its staff. All rights reserved 2019 Loud And Quiet Ltd.

ISSN 2049-9892 Printed by Gemini Print Distributed by Loud And Quiet Ltd. & Forte

Issue 135

Not to show you how the sausage is made but here’s how we decide who’s going to be on the cover of Loud And Quiet each month: we think, what do we love that hasn’t been written about much yet, or in as much detail as we think it deserves, which will offer variety to our readers from our previous cover stories, which will offer representation amongst our previous issues, which we’ve got at least a twenty percent chance of making happen?

Or, to put it more simply, we think, what feels like the most exciting thing going on right now, which we’ve got at least a twenty percent chance of making happen? Something like that.

The most natural point for us to fixate on is the not-toodistant future. We write about new music because it excites us the most, which comes with the added upshot of those artists having generally not been written about as much. So we consider what’s coming down the release pipe – what we really like, and when would us speaking with the artist/s involved work best for them and their plans. It’s starting to sound like there are more moving parts than we first thought. Occasionally though – and this may seem increasingly unlikely in an age where momentum is gained quickly or not at all, like an algorithm that only acknowledges the existence of instantly ‘engaged with’ content and bins off everything else – the point to fixate on is behind us.

We’re halfway through the year, and if there’s one band running away with 2019 it’s Fontaines D.C., whose five-starsonly debut in April felt justified but unexpected for a punk band from Ireland. And then Nadine Shah is tweeting “Still have this on repeat” with a picture if Dogrel’s sleeve in May, and Fontaines are touring American and Mexico, and I’m waking up to an Instagram feed that has them performing on Jimmy Fallon last night.

So instead of thinking about what’s coming down the release pipe, this month we thought, what the fuck must it be like to be in Fontaines D.C. right now? And what are the chances of us flying to Dublin – their city and muse – as they finally return home from tour to play a show in a 17th-century former hospital?

Twenty percent, at least. Here’s the sausage.

Stuart Stubbs

A Guide to End of the Road . . . . 10 Dry Cleaning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Injury Reserve . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 DJ Kampire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Reviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Fontaines D.C. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 Sax Music . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 Tierra Whack . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 Maxine Peake . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 03

END OF THE ROAD 29 Aug - 1 Sept

Larmer Tree Gardens Dorset

“A truly special musical celebration” ★★★★★ The Guardian

BEIRUT / METRONOMY / MICHAEL KIWANUKA / SPIRITUALIZED SPIRITUALIZED //

COURTNEY BARNETT / JARVIS COCKER ( ) / )/ SLEAFORD MODS / LOW / DEERHUNTER / INTRODUCING JARV IS

PARQUET COURTS / MITSKI / CATE LE BON / BAXTER DURY / DANIEL AVERY / WIRE / CASS MCCOMBS / BEAK> / GOAT GIRL / SERPENTWITHFEET / NUBYA GARCIA / LET’S EAT GRANDMA / JESSICA PRATT / ATA K AK / Y VES TUMOR / STEVE GUNN / KIK AGAKU MOYO / BC CAMPLIGHT / MOSES BOYD / BL ACK MIDI / KELLY LEE OWENS / KERO KERO BONITO / FONTAINES D.C. / GEORGIA / TUNNG / BCUC / KOKOKO! / T YLER CHILDERS / LONNIE HOLLEY / WILLIAM T YLER / NÉRIJA / STELL A DONNELLY / JADE BIRD / THE BETHS / & MANY MORE

Secret shows, art, comedy, cinema, literature, karaoke, late night dance floors, family friendly activities, award-winning food and real ale.

endoftheroadfestival.com

Literature

Our Band Could Be Your Life Written by Michael Azerrad and Published in 2001, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991 remains the definitive book to chronicle the start and evolution of hardcore and DIY punk culture in the US. In it, Azerrad dedicates each of his thirteen chapters to a seminal band who did their anti-establishment bit through the decade, from Black Flag and Minutemen to Hüsker Dü and Fugazi.

Last month the book was released in audiobook form, with contemporary indie artists reading a chapter each: Sharon Van Etten narrates the story of Dinosaur Jr., Phil Elverum recites Mudhoney and Slipknot’s Corey Taylor reads Big Black.

Minor Threat landed with Against Me!’s Laura Jane Grace, so I spoke with her about what the band and this book have meant to her.

Laura Jane Grace: I was in the eighth grade when I first bought a Minor Threat record. It was that Discography record, so like the one with everything on it. I can remember that I’d had a dentist appointment and afterwards my mom had taken me to the record shop. I was allowed to pick one record, and that was the record. So if there’s one thing you can say about Minor Threat straight off the bat it’s that they’re a great antidote to toothache.

In the mid-90s, they were one of those bands that formed part of everyone’s journey into punk. You started out with The Clash, listened to the Misfits, got into Minor Threat and then discovered Operation Ivy. I devoured Discography though. I’d just started playing bass in a band and I scoured that thing for basslines. I’d just sit there and attempt to digest everything on it. They were such an interesting band; not only because of the way they played, but also who they would switch you on to. I can certainly remember finding Fugazi quite soon after buying that record and going to see them when they played in Gainesville.

They were fucking incredible.

Florida felt like a pretty isolated place. There wasn’t really very much going on there at all, so we had to invent our own version of what punk was. I’m not sure how much Gainesville had in common with ’80s DC, but I do know that a lot of what we did was modelled on what Minor Threat and those Dischord [the legendary hardcore label founded by singer Ian MacKaye] bands did. They are just this really great example of making the most of where you are. Then, as it is now, everyone tells you that if you want to make it you need to move out to LA or New York, but those guys just stuck to where they were. Ian MacKaye has never moved – he’s still in the Dischord house, still making records and still has people showing up to his mom’s house by mistake. I think that message is so important – you have to recognise where you are and try and effect change there.

In a way, that’s one of the reasons why Our Band Could Be Your Life is so compelling for me. You have stories about these

words by dominic haley. illustration by kate prior

bands who all existed in a pre-internet world where just the idea of being in a band was a complete mystery to most people. It’s crazy to think just how young they were. Look at any of the chapters in the book and you’ll find a bunch of people straight out of high school who did something really iconic at a very early age.

They have had to live with this thing as it grew and changed – in both good and bad ways.

In Minor Threat’s case, that is undoubtedly true. Take the straight-edge thing. It started out being something closely akin to the actual definition of the terminology – ‘I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I got my edge,’ – but somewhere along the way, it became pedantic. Minor Threat and Earth Crisis are both ‘straight edge’ bands, but they’re definitely not coming from the same place. It’s a similar thing I felt with the DIY scene as time went by. It should have been about being an individual, doing things for yourself and involving other people, but it as time passed by it became more of a top-down structure if you know what I mean.

The other thing a book like this does is gives you an ability to look behind the curtains and see how the magic worked. You have to give credit to Ian MacKaye because the uncompromising parts of him definitely made it work; he just had this incredible passion and vision that he wouldn’t deviate from. It’s something I can relate to as the reasons I still do what I do are exactly the same. It’s like some itch that you have to scratch, which is why you’re over-productive, why you’re over-focused and why you wake up each morning and recommit. There’s just something intrinsic to it. It’s hard to explain.

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Geography

New Weird Britain

“It’s my belief that weird times inculcate weird culture,” says writer and Quietus co-founder John Doran. In his new BBC Radio 4 series, broadcast throughout June and now available on iPlayer), Doran makes the case for the disparate network of experimental musicians and artists operating across the UK that he terms ‘New Weird Britain’. Starting out as a VICE article, then a monthly column by Noel Gardner, New Weird Britain is concerned with what these artists have in common, and the socioeconomic factors producing these commonalities. For anyone interested in the British underground and our present moment, the series is essential.

So what is ‘New Weird Britain’? According to Doran, it’s “much more likely to be cross-disciplinary, a lot less likely to be pinned down by genre”. It takes place in warehouses, barns, arts spaces and church halls, as well as crucial venues like North London’s New River Studios and Salford’s infamous White Hotel.

It includes artists like Gazelle Twin, Richard Dawson and the performance artist Lone Taxidermist. What isn’t ‘New Weird Britain’? A genre itself – more a spirit of a time, a way of starting a conversation about something happening in this country (though plenty of genre tags are, it’s worth adding, pretty spurious: “What are the things that bind Cabaret Voltaire, Bauhaus and Gang of Four?” Doran argues, “there aren’t any really, but they’re all post-punk.”)

“It started out as a suspicion that things are getting weird in this country, culturally speaking,” Doran explains, pointing to the rise of Black Midi (who are not ‘New Weird Britain’, but another symptom all the same), Mary-Anne Hobbs’ promotion to daytime 6Music, and the fact that Oxfordshire experimental music festival Supernormal Festival sold out in an hour this year – “if you’d

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have said that about four years ago I would have laughed at you”.

Supernormal is crucial to Doran’s own understanding of ‘New Weird Britain’; it was at the 2017 festival that he had an epiphany watching UKAEA performing what Doran describes as “a weird kind of gabba ritual in a barn”. This epiphany was followed by something of a depression. “I was thinking, I could write about all of this stuff, this really once-in-a-lifetime stuff that everyone should be shouting from the rooftops about, and no one will read about it.” Rather than despondency, this forced him to re-assess how he was making the case for the music his job is to champion.

Though any ‘London is dead’ narrative remains too binary – too reductive – the series does tell a fascinating story about the balance of power in British music. For the first time, Doran points out, “there are probably more artists and musicians leaving London than there are moving to London; I’m guessing at that, but I’m embedded in this culture and that’s how it feels to me.”

For myself, one of the most poignant aspects of the series is the questions it asks about how profound economic uncertainty changes ambitions. This is echoed in a fascinating point made by the electronic producer Loft in the series, who points to her own experimental music as a reaction to her formative years being amidst the one-two punch of the financial crash and the exodus of money from the music industry. How could these things not be transformative to how artists operate in this country? Doran agrees that this point is central to what is happening in Britain. “I really feel the same way about things in my own life. It can be very depressing and distressing in life to face up to how little control you have in your own life; also when this is happening against a backdrop of things getting worse socially, financially and politically. But. Once you fully accept the way things are going, it can be liberation. It can be a silver lining to a very big, dark cloud.”

Doran does not think that it’s a good idea that artists can no longer make money, but does want to ask “as a pragmatist, once you’re in that position what’s the best thing you can make of it?

And I think that the best thing you can make of it is that you no longer have to compromise on any level.”

Now I have to underline this – I do not think it’s a good thing that the majority of musicians can no longer earn a living from making music. I don’t think that’s good, I don’t celebrate that. However it is a bold statement of fact, and as a pragmatist I will always turn around and say once you’re in that position, what’s the best thing you can make of it? And I think that the best thing you can make of it is that you no longer have to compromise on any level.

In the series, Urocerus Gigas from Guttersnipe says that you can “find the five weirdos in every town now, you know what I mean? Everyone is online, and you can contact them, no matter where you are. You can find your own little weirdo community where you make the craziest noise or the craziest music.”

Be not afeard; this isle is full of new weird noises.

words by fergal kinney. illustration by kate prior

NEW RELEASES OUT NOW

ROSE CITY BAND ‘Rose City Band’

KANDODO 3 ‘k3 ‘

CARWYN ELLIS & RIO ’18 – Joia!’

DAVID ALLRED ‘The Cell’

PRETTIEST EYES ‘Volume 3’

New project from Ripley Johnson (Wooden Shjips/Moon Duo). Born of the back roads, rivers, and quiet city streets of Oregon, the music captures the feeling of living and loving, riding and crashing and being, in the Pacific Northwest, circa 2019.

Brand new studio full length from Bristol based sike-onauts, orbiting in The Heads’ realm and led by The Heads’ Simon Price. RIYL: Popul Vuh, Parson Sound, Amon Duul, Neu!, The Heads, Spacemen 3, Harmonia, Moon Duo, Carlton Melton, Fripp & Eno.

Carwyn Ellis (Colorama) takes the plunge to record his most colourful record to date in Rio de Janeiro with distinguished crazy local artists Domenico Lancellotti & Kassin with help from Shawn Lee. Cumbia, Bossa Nova, Samba, Tropicalism, Latin Funk and Pop sung in Welsh, whose phonetics and sound matches surprisingly well with tropical music. **** “In a word: lovely” – MOJO

Following on from last year's acclaimed debut with Erased Tapes The Transition — named #17 album of the year by The Sunday Times — Californian singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist David Allred returns with mini album The Cell.

Volume 3 bursts at the seams with chrome-dipped timbres and surprise sharp edges, alien klaxon-calls and wailing dissonance offsetting the ziplock’d grease of their insistent drum and bass grooves.

Jean Sandwich Records LP

J. MACFARLANE REALITY GUEST ‘Ta Da’

Rooster 2LP / CD

Banana & Louie LP / CD

BIG STICK ‘LP’

Night School LP / CD

Drag Racing Underground LP / CD

“Ta Da” is the debut full length from J. McFarlane Reality Guest, the collective name for the trio headed by the eponymous McFarlane. As a member of the group Twerps, McFarlane has traversed guitar-centric, melodic pop music for some years while honing a highly unique, personal musical language.

It's been fifteen years since Big Stick's last proper record release.

That's an even longer period of time than some winged cicada bugs take to rise from the deep depths of earth and sing us their noisy repertoire of songs. Big Stick's dynamic duo of John Gill and Yanna Trance are pleased to finally have a new LP's worth of material to share.

THE OH SEES ‘Grave Blockers (Reissue) ’ Castle Face LP / CD Ltd Edition Colored Vinyl

Reissued extremely limited, long out-of-print EP from long-running garage rock bands early formative period in San Francisco

Erased Tapes 12” / CD

VA - JOBCENTRE REJECTS: Ultra Rare NWOBHM ‘78-‘82 On The Dole LP / CD

Twelve tracks licensed from rare and hard to find New Wave Of British Heavy Metal-singles originally released in England 1978-1982. Kind of a Nuggets, Pebbles or Killed By Death for NWOBHM

Castle Face LP / CD

BIKINI KILL ‘Pussy Whipped’ Bikini Kill LP / CD

The debut full-length from BIKINI KILL originally released in 1993 on Kill Rock Stars. Includes the track "Rebel Girl," listed # 27 on Rolling Stone's "Most Excellent Songs of Every Year Since 1967" list. Also available on LP/CD: “Reject All American”

info@fortedistribution.co.uk

BLACK PEACHES Fire In The Hole Hanging Moon Records LP/CD

TOUR DATES: 30 June - Glastonbury Festival 31 July - Star Inn, Guildford 01 August - 10 Feet Tall, Cardiff 02 August - Mr Wolf's, Bristol 07 August - Sebright Arms, London “…excellent rock juggernaut... explosive riffs... winning concoction of soaring guitars...” - 8/10 Uncut Magazine “Black Peaches stand out as one of a handful of acts unafraid of staying away from the mainstream... a genre-busting album filled with pop hooks..” - 5/5 NARC. Magazine “… sheer joy emanates throughout…” - 4/5 Q Magazine

Brand new album out now!

“Absolutely brilliant“ - Stuart Maconie BBC 6 Music “…ridiculously infectious slice of pop...“ - Clash Magazine

Ageing

Sweet 16: Adam Green and his overachieving high school band

I was in what is really the suburbs of New York City, in a town called Mount Kisco, about a 45-minute drive north. We had two record stores, one which was a particularly great used record store called Exile on Main Street, after the Stones album. And Kimya [Dawson], my Moldy Peaches partner, worked there. The first time I met her there was an arts centre in the town and there was an open mic – this is probably when I was around 13 years old – and I went there when they were having a poetry open mic with my guitar, and Kimya was there reading her poetry. When I then went into the store and she was working there, she was like, ‘oh, aren’t you that kid from the open mic?’, and I’d take my guitar to the store and we’d try to write songs.

What’s funny about me at 16 is that the Moldy Peaches is my high school band, which I’m guessing is different to other people when they do their reminiscing. I swear, I’m a particularly unchanging person: I’ve always been this guy – always worn the same clothes, I never change my mind about what I like and don’t like; it’s horrible.

I was an outgoing kid with an impulse to be curious, but I was definitely not always confident, and I was inexperienced and awkward. Fortunately, I had someone like Kimya as a guide, but unfortunately at that point Kimya was a raging alcoholic. She’s been sober since the late ’90s, but the Kimya that I grew up with was a bit reckless, so my memories of her are like, ‘oh wow, she was really, really wasted’. Like, 16 was when I lost my virginity, and I have a memory of Kimya pounding on my bedroom door when I’m in there with my girlfriend, and I’m completely not confident in what I’m doing, and I’m freaked out, and Kimya is pounding on the door calling my girlfriend a slut. I have all these

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memories of Kimya behaving like a dysfunctional parent – passed out in the car – but also these great memories of making all this music with her in my basement, because I had a little 4-track studio down there, and a drum kit set up, and this little shrangri la of instruments.

When Kimya came to town – which was only ever really in the summers – everything was different. Everything was exciting and we did the Moldy Peaches, and she had a car so we’d drive around and do all this stuff. And then she’d go away and be in Washington State or somewhere and I’d just wait for a call from her. That was ok because I had other things going on. Like, at that time, I was really getting into smoking a lot of weed. And taking other psychedelics like mushrooms and LSD, but mostly a lot of weed. And that drug reacts with me very powerfully – I can’t really talk to anyone while I’m on it; I go into another dimension.

But I started a noise band called Neep with two of my friends, and we’d smoke weed and go into this coat closet without any windows, and we’d make a noise album in the dark. I sounded like a bunch of little kids having a wank, but it was cool.

By the time I was 16 I’d weathered the storm of bullies, who’d call me a faggot and push me down the stairs, and I was allowed to be myself. I was dying to get out of the school and I graduated early, but one of the projects I did do in high school was I self-published the first Moldy Peaches 7-inch. Some of the songs on the Moldy Peaches album are on that first 7-inch, like ‘Little Bunny Foo Foo’ and ‘On Top’. There’s probably under a hundred copies in existence – a lot got flooded in my aunt’s basement. The truth is that more than half of the Moldy Peaches album is already recorded by the time I’m 16.

as told to stuart stubbs

THE STROPPIES THURS 18 JUL THE LEXINGTON HAND HABITS MON 19 AUG CHATS PALACE SAM EVIAN TUES 27 AUG THE LEXINGTON BEDOUINE SAT 7 SEPT QUEEN ELIZABETH HALL STEVE GUNN TUES 17 SEPT OMEARA NATALIE EVANS THURS 19 SEPT THE ISLINGTON ELSA HEWITT TUES 24 SEPT RYE WAX BABII THURS 26 SEPT SET DALSTON

PLASTIC MERMAIDS THURS 3 OCT SCALA BESS ATWELL THURS 10 OCT OMEARA ROZI PLAIN TUES 15 OCT VILLAGE UNDERGROUND SKINNY PELEMBE WED 16 OCT MOTH CLUB EGYPTIAN BLUE WED 23 OCT SERVANT JAZZ QUARTERS ROSIE LOWE WED 23 OCT VILLAGE UNDERGROUND

PALACE SAT 9 NOV ROUNDHOUSE SHURA THURS 14 NOV ROUNDHOUSE EZRA FURMAN THURS 14 NOV O2 FORUM KENTISH TOWN KATHRYN JOSEPH MON 18 NOV EARTH HACKNEY KEDR LIVANSKIY THURS 21 NOV BLOC SIR WAS WED 27 NOV SCALA

LISA MORGENSTERN THURS 24 OCT SERVANT JAZZ QUARTERS

BC CAMPLIGHT THURS 28 NOV ISLINGTON ASSEMBLY HALL

GEORGIA TUES 5 NOV SCALA

IDER WED 5 FEB 2020 ELECTRIC BRIXTON

GIRL BAND TUES 5 NOV ELECTRIC BALLROOM

PARALLELLINESPROMOTIONS.COM

Choose Your Own Adventure Viable routes around Larmer Tree Gardens, 29 Aug – 1 Sept

A Practical Guide to Day 1* Lucy-Anne Holmes Library Stage 10:00 – 10:45 Food!

Woods field from 8:00 You’ve just remembered that sleeping in a tent means waking up at 5am on fire. Only 7 hours until the music starts! You’ve probably got time to find the Big Red Bus breakfast café.

Lucy-Anne Holmes successfully campaigned against Page 3 and has since written a book about female sexual discovery. She’s one of many authors speaking each morning on the Library stage. There will be seats (logs).

Stella Donnelly Garden Stage 13:30 – 14:15 Kelly Moran Big Top 13:15 – 14:00 With an increasing experimental lineup, you start your EOTR musical odyssey right with Moran’s ambient drone take on neo-classical piano music... in a pitch black tent.

Food!

Everywhere, all day Don’t feel bad if EOTR is already feeling like a food festival interumpted by music.

It’s a powerful way to go.

Virginia Wing Tipi Stage 17:45 – 18:30 All routes lead to Virginia Wing at this point... or a third Goan Fish Curry.

Mitski Garden Stage 20:00 – 21:00 Mitski recently alluded to taking an extended break from music but she will play EOTR first and it will be something.

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Wherever you’ve just come from, sitting crossed legged on the floor listening to Donnelly sing about masturbation makes the most sense right now.

Georgia Big Top 15:45 – 16:30 No judgement, but you’ve spent a lot of time sitting down so far. How about trying to dance to the biggest pop set of the weekend?

Wake Up Singing Workshop Venue 4 10:00 – 11:00 Is it too early to make new friends by singing (actually singing) with strangers in the woods? It is, isn’t it? It’s always too early for that. Yeah, it’s a no... Obviously, you’re definitely going.

Yoga for Adults Workshop Venue 1 11:00 – 12:00 There’s very little else on right now and your almond milk latte is missing something. Fetch your spare mat from the car.

Tarot reading with Du Blonde New Pavilion from 14:30 Beth Jean Houghton is going to be giving tarot readings each afternoon in the New Pavillion.

You get the hooded skeleton and chuckle, “that doesn’t look good.” It really doesn’t.

BBC Radio 3 Late Junction Tipi Stage 19:00 – 23:45 Yves Tumor Big Top 18:45 – 19:45 It’s now time for EOTR’s flamboyant high: Yves Tumor new band show; a ’70s glam band’s take on Prince and Tina Turner.

Presenting for the third year, Radio 3’s flagship experimental show hosts Friday night in the Tipi, featuring BodyVice, a new project from visual electronic artist Lone Taxidermist.

Parquet Courts Garden Stage 21:45 – 23:00 The day needn’t end after Parquet Courts but Linda and Brian from Wake Up Singing have pulled whiteys and your card reading has given you four days to live. Call it.

Kelly Lee Owens Big Top 20:30 – 21:30 Yeah, it go weird in the Tipi, so you go back to the Big Top for KLO’s warm techno throb.

illustration by kate prior

Choose Your Own Adventure

End of The Road festival Wake Up Singing Workshop Venue 4 10:00 – 11:00

Day 2

Fair play, it was quite fun yesterday. Think I’m done on it though. Bit weird to go twice, aye? Yeah. I’ll leave it. Stop kidding yourself and go sing in the woods!

Shower!

Your campsite 24hr You thought you’d be totally fine with not showering for three days but you were sorely mistaken.

See you in 3 hours.

Luke Turner Library Stage 10:00 – 10:45 Another frank and excellent book about sexuality is Luke Turner’s Out of The Woods, discussed this morning by the author and Fiona Lensvelt.

Daniel Avery 00:30 – 02:00

Your friends have always said how hilarious you are; how you “should be on TV”.

Here’s your chance to prove them wrong.

Nérija Garden Stage 12:00 – 12:45

Cheat Lane Loud And Quiet present the Big Top 13:15 – 2:00 At any point in the day either retreat to the Loud And Quiet stage or why not duck into the Big Top at 13:15 and wait out the day? There’ll be plenty more daylight tomorrow and everything in here is the buisiness.

Improvised Comedy Workshop Workshop Venue 4 11:00 – 12:00

Rebuild your confidence with the smoothest jazz collective on site.

Jason Williamson Library Stage 12:30 – 13:15 William Tyler Garden Stage 13:30 – 14:15

Sleaford Mods’ Jason Williamson’s 2015 book was called Grammar Wanker. Hear the guy out, in conversation.

Keep things instrumental (and on the festival’s pretty centre point stage) with William Tyler’s Deep South, big-sky country tracks.

Sleaford Mods 23:15 – 00:15 Moses Boyd Exodus 20:30 – 21:30 Kero Kero Bonito 18:45 – 19:45 Gazelle Twin 17:00 – 18:00 Bilge Pump 15:45 – 16:30 Squid 14:30 – 15:15 TVAM 13:15 – 14:00

Black Midi Garden Stage 18:15 – 19:15 Looks like it’s time to find out if your claustrophobia has been cured.

Lonnie Holley Sculpture workshop Venue TBC At this point it feels like your purposefully dodging the music, but as well as playing his Garden Stage show, world renowned sculptor Lonnie Holley is giving a class where he’ll make a piece of ‘readymade’ art with you.

Black Country, New Road Tipi Stage 21:00 – 21:45

Porridge Radio Garden Stage 21:00 – 21:45

Double down on the crush as the whole festival (politely) claws to see the most exciting post-punk band around.

Feeling smart (and tired), you choose not to bum-rush the Tipi because you know that Porridge Radio’s new singles sound like The Cure.

Low Garden Stage 21:45 – 23:00 Before you head into the woods for afterhour discos and fun with friends, reconnect with your good old pal paranoia, who’s never sounded so colossal.

Beirut Woods Stage 21:30 – 23:00

Babak Gangei exhibition Cinema tent, daily Still on an art tip – and having forgotten that music even exists – you check out Babak Gangei’s ‘Film Ideas’ installation in the cinema tent and make a note for tomorrow that there is a cinema tent.

There is a point at every festival where music you didn’t think would make you cry makes you cry. At this festival, it’s all of Beirut’s sighing trumpets.

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Choose Your Own Adventure

Day 3

Wake Up Singing Workshop Venue 4 10:00 – 11:00 Was there life before you discovered Wake Up Singing?

That doesn’t sound right. As soon as you get back home you’ll search for a local group of strangers to sing with.

Is that mad? It doesn’t have to be, does it? Just in case it is, go ham today.

Crack Cloud Big Top 13:00 – 13:45 Sunday at EOTR is heavy on good punk this year, starting with Calgary’s mixed media art collective.

Loud And Quiet presents Midnight Chats live podcast recording Piano Stage 12:00 – 13:00 Viagra Boys Big Top 14:15 – 15:00

Time for that ticket to really make its money back, at a live episode recording of our podcast, with Cate Le Bon in conversation.

At the risk of losing another day of sunlight to the Big Top, you should stay put for Stockholm’s Viagra Boys. Then have a break.

Ata Kak Big Top 17:00 – 18:00 Promise me you did leave the tent before coming back in for cult Ghanaian rapper Ata Kak and his DIY dance loops – a last chance to dance.

Jessica Pratt Garden Stage 13:30 – 14:15 For all the noise this year, EOTR’s heart still belongs to beautiful folk music, so go see Jessica Pratt.

No offence to Deerhunter, but we keep forgetting they’re playing. And they’re a brilliant band. It’s because there’s so much on. But yeah, don’t forget Deerhunter.

... and now discover Gia Margret’s “sleep rock” – a mix of folk, slowcore and ambient electronica.

With one foot out the door, do not leave before Josiah Wise’s alt. RnB songs about deep spirituality and the gay black experience. He sings them from a thrown.

*Technically Day 1 is the night before, which looks only like this: Eat a Goan Fish Curry, watch Jockstrap at 20:30, Spiritualized at 21:15, and come to our L&Q opening party, the Time Hop Silent Disco, with music from 2019 on one channel and 1999 on the other. It’s in the Tipi Tent from 23:00.

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Woodland Puppet Show with Mr. Brown’s Pig Workshop Venue 3 12:00 – 13:00 In case your small child has insisted on coming to EOTR with you, this sounds like the show you’ll get something out of too.

Mr. Brown’s Pig has ignited a pychedelic sparkler in your brain – head straight to Sons of Raphael.

Gia Margaret Tipi Stage 17:15 – 18:00

Please note that timings may change. Visit endoftheroadfestival.com for more information, to buy tickets, and to see just how much music, art and comedy we’ve missed.

You tried to do something nice for your family and all they wanted to do was look at your phone. Drive home immediately!

Sons of Raphael Tipi Stage 13:30 – 14:15

serpentwithfeet Garden Stage 18:00 – 19:00 Deerhunter Woods Stage 19:15 – 20:30

HOME!

Jarvis Cocker curated cinema Cinema tent, all day The cinema has been running all weekend, already currated by director Ben Wheatley, and the Prince Charles Cinema. Today is Jarvis Cocker’s turn. God know what he’ll pick, but I want to say Carry On Camping.

Fontaines D.C. Big Top 18:45 – 19:45 It’s gonna be BIG.

JARV IS Woods Stage 21:30 – 23:00 Congratulations! You made it to the end of another music festival with only a Jarvis Cocker between you and a life of not waking up singing. Oh, and you now have 2 days to live.

Interview

Dry Cleaning Where YouTube comments and Meghan Markle become spoken word post-punk,

by Fergal Kinney Photography by Jody Evans

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Until last year, Flo had never been on a stage. Had never wanted to be on a stage. In fact, ask her and her natural instinct when presented with a stage would be to run a mile. This year, Dry Cleaning are struggling to keep on top of their many bookings; with that same Flo being widely tipped as one of British music’s most dynamic new voices and a compulsive stage presence.

What happened?

Though from South London and specialising in wiry, angular post-punk – with abrasive, sarcastic spoken word lyrics – it is worth pointing out that they’ve little to do with the similar South London scene centred around Brixton Windmill. Nick, Lewis and Tom – who make up the rest of Dry Cleaning – had been lugging away in various bands for over a decade and found themselves particularly jaded. They decided to strip things right back, and practice at Lewis’ parents garage with the express purpose that the results would – at most – turn into a good

Interview live band for their mates to enjoy at parties. Certainly not another band, or any ambition. “It was like being sixteen again,” says Nick over chips and pints in a Peckham pub, “jamming, recording it on the phone, Lewis’ mum cooking us pizzas.”

The band that wasn’t a band did have an absence for a singer, and various friends pitched themselves to Nick, Lewis and Tom for the vacancy. At some point – and it’s vague as to quite whose idea this was – the band’s artist friend Flo was mentioned as a prospective vocalist. Flo, sat with the rest of the band, visibly creases at the memory of being propositioned to join the band. Attending a friend’s art show with Flo, Tom blurted out the proposition virtually mid-sentence. “Immediately my reaction was terror,” remembers Flo, “as if I would ever do that, truly that was my first reaction. But then a tiny bit of, wouldn’t it be cool if I didn’t feel that way? Wouldn’t it be cool if I wasn’t really scared?”

Though all of the band knew that Flo had no prior experience in music they were aware that she’d used bits of her own text in her art. This also meant that when the first rehearsal came around, Flo had an arsenal of phrases, observations and found statements saved on her phone from which to draw on. “Because I make lots of things,” she explains, “I’ve always got this mentality of, it’s good to collect stuff if you’re creative as you’ll wind up using it. Overheard things, found things, my own thoughts if I was getting pissed off but wasn’t brave enough to shout at people.”

For the first rehearsal, Flo sat in the corner as the band played the handful of songs that they’d finalised at that point.

For the first half an hour she didn’t make a noise – natural shyness and a desire to observe quite what the band had put together. “I’m not saying I knew it would work, but then as soon as Flo started to sing, within seconds, it was like, that’s it!” Tom grins, “fully formed.”

Early shows were strange; the band recorded an EP before having performed live, and Flo was consumed by stress at what the onstage process could possibly involve. “I was absolutely, completely terrified. I’d obviously heard of soundchecks, because I’ve known people in bands really well, but that doesn’t mean you know what actually happens in one or what you have to do.” She shakes her head. “The first show I was really really scared, but I’d made a decision before I did it – and actually in the first practice – that I would just try and be myself as much as possible even if that meant looking really nervous.” Its these same nerves and an unfussy lack of bravado that have made Flo such an engaging live performer. Similarly, her vocal delivery is deadpan, slightly dour – it’s all delivered in such a way as to make you question how she really feels about the words coming out of her mouth. Much of this, Flo explains, is down to the writing techniques she uses, ideas of cut-up text and found words that you can put down to her artist background.

— Small things— Dry Cleaning’s debut EP, ‘Sweet Princess’, takes its title from a line in the opening track ‘Goodnight’, which begins with

a life trauma and the death of a cat in the first thirty seconds.

“That song,” Flo points out, “is based on a selection of YouTube comments that I found underneath songs. It’s people commenting underneath songs about what they make them feel like. Just ones that interested me, that I thought were poignant or touching. They’re written in quite an immediate way.” These found phrases run the gamut of human experience, from “the only thing that kept me going was Saw 2” to “have you ever spat cum onto the carpet of a Travelodge?”.

“Love is a kind of big thing,” David Byrne once said of his approach to lyric writing, “I try to write about small things.” Flo writes almost specifically about the small things, the minutae of human experience – jokes that fall flat, conversations that don’t work, social encounters that spill out into aggression. This clearly informs her everyday life too. “I didn’t know whether to hug or shake hands!” she beams when we meet.

“I’m quite an anxious person” she explains, “so things I worry about are things like socialising. Sometimes I plan what to say, as many people do; when you’re going to a party I’ll practice things I have to talk about. Not all the time, just if I feel nervous.

So I guess because I do that all the time in my head that kind of thing interests me. Also observing other people when they’re going through similar things. I like advertising speak; I think it’s interesting how that filters into normal people’s conversation, that’s interesting. Social media, people promoting themselves as a brand, that blurring between interpersonal conversation and copywriting for adverts, the way that merges I find really interesting. I’m not interested in critiquing that, just observing it.”

The standout track on the EP is ‘Magic of Meghan’, ostensibly a love-song to Meghan Markle. Or is it? “You’re just what England needs,” Flo states blankly, “you’re going to change us.” That track came from the breakdown of Flo’s last significant relationship. “I was really sad at the time,” she explains. “I was moving out of a flat. Harry and Meghan got engaged on the morning that I was packing up most of my stuff with my mum and one of my best friends. I just got really into it and found it moving how sincere their relationship comes across... getting really involved in their story helped me to feel better. And that’s basically what it’s about.”

Would you have ever expected to find yourself really interested in a Royal Couple?

A pause.

“It is a bit of a long standing interest of mine... I’m not a royalist but I’m... endlessly interested in them.”

The band certainly share commonalities with other acts that use spoken word and surrealism, like audiobooks or Sleaford Mods, but they wince at the comparison. “All of the sudden people are talking in songs now? There have always been people talking over music,” dismisses Nick. “People say it’s like the Fall – now the Fall weren’t the first band to talk over music.”

Dead cats, Royal weddings, phone scams, anxiety, YouTube comments, art gallery bores – all the devils of rubbish modern Britain are here.

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Interview

Injury Reserve

16

Interview The forward motion of an experimental rap group,

by Jamie Haworth. Photography by Matilda Hill-Jenkins

With a couple of days to go before the release of their self-titled album, Arizona rap trio Injury Reserve aren’t too sure how excited they should feel. “The jury’s still out,” producer Parker Corey tells me, admitting to some nerves about how the group’s debut effort on Loma Vista will be received. Their avid online fanbase has embraced the three singles shared from it so far, but the experimental group are conscious that these tracks represent only part of the wider story told by Injury Reserve. Corey likes the idea that they have kept listeners guessing, though: “It seems that the draw so far for people who have really liked the singles,” he says, “has been less, ‘Oh, I love this song,’ and more, ‘What is this album about to be?’”

It’s a sunny afternoon and we’re sitting in a room at their label’s London offices – me, Corey and rappers Stepa J. Groggs and Nathaniel Ritchie (known as Ritchie With a T). The trio are in town to complete promotional duties for the record, which will culminate on the eve of its release with a sold-out show at The Victoria in Dalston. They are in good spirits, looking back at the hard work that went into realising their debut and allowing themselves a sense of achievement.

Some of those heading to the upcoming London gig will claim to have followed Injury Reserve since their first mixtape, 2015’s Live From the Dentist Office. That project, recorded after hours in an actual dental practice, showcased Corey’s crisp production skills and introduced Groggs and Ritchie as a potent vocal duo. The Phoenix trio followed it up with the arrestingly experimental Floss LP in 2016, which boasted big name features like Vic Mensa and moved them away from their early jazz rap sound. They continued to push themselves the following year, adapting to minimalist beats on the ominously moody Drive It Like It’s Stolen EP. True to form, the self-titled album sees the group constantly on the move, refusing to linger in any potential comfort zone. After revelling in the chaos of a ferocious opening act, Ritchie and Groggs successfully keep up with each of Corey’s instrumental left-turns. The pair are sensitive when the album turns inward, delivering bars on tracks like ‘What a Year It’s Been’ and ‘Best Spot in the House’ that engage with themes of depression, alcoholism, and self-doubt. They also display impeccable comedic timing, rapping with a self-awareness that humanises the record’s heavier moments.

Consciously rejecting a coherent sound, Injury Reserve instead draws its conceptual form from the drive that Ritchie, Groggs and Corey brought to each track. “When people were asking if the album sounded like (lead single) ‘Jawbreaker’ we told them, ‘it doesn’t sound like this, but the album’s approach is like this,’” says Ritchie. “We don’t like making the same song

17

Interview

“We don’t like making the same song twice, that’s what is really gluing it all together”

twice, but you can tell that whatever mindset we were in making those songs, that’s what is really gluing it all together.”

“There’s a sense of antagonism throughout the album,” Corey expands, pinning down the essence of the group’s approach. This often manifests itself lyrically – Groggs uses the album’s first track to voice Injury Reserve’s frustration that they “don’t get enough shine” from mainstream music publications – but the trio are keen to stress its musical implications too. “It’s not just what we’re speaking about, it’s also what we want to sound like,” Ritchie tells me. “A lot of the changes on this album lie in arrangement. I think that’s where we’ve improved a lot – things are less predictable.”

— Taking the doors off — For Corey, this meant being less formulaic with structure and “taking the doors off ” songs. “A lot of this album is about just keeping it pushing,” he says. “There’s very little room for repetition.” The producer sacrificed closing hooks for the greater good of momentum on tracks like ‘New Hawaii’, and looked for more dynamic ways to bring closure to passages. On ‘GTFU’, a suffocating industrial soundscape appears to give way to a haven of calm, before that too grows overwhelming; an unnerving full circle that never feels safe.

Thoughtfully placed guest features add dynamism too, helping to reinvigorate the album’s narrative as it unfolds. Some standout verses were planned from the start: Corey knew, for instance, that New York rapper Rico Nasty would bring a “fresh perspective” to ‘Jawbreaker’ – one that sharpened the song’s unapologetic critique of the fashion industry by opening fire on its treatment of black women. The group also had faith that Cakes da Killa would deliver for ‘GTFU’, given the Brooklyn rapper’s searing performance on 2016 Floss track ‘What’s Goodie’.

Other collaborations arose from inviting artists to the studio and finding out what intrigued them. Portland rapper Aminé (a close friend of the trio’s) wanted to be on ‘Jailbreak the Tesla’ as soon as he heard a demo of it. His verse on the finished version, complete with lines like “Your engine go ‘Vroom’, my engine go –” reads ridiculously on a lyric sheet but adds to the track’s pulsating sense of fun. “It makes a big difference when someone really wants to be on a song,” says Ritchie. “You feel the passion that they put into it.”

The group spent time integrating these guest features into the album, and it’s a sign of their attention to detail that the

18

finished body of work feels so seamless. The processes involved in achieving this were often headache-inducing: Corey remembers having to fully rearrange the beat of mid-album track ‘Wax On’ in order to house a gripping Freddie Gibbs verse. “I think what we do well is make the features feel a lot less cut and pasted,” the producer proposes modestly.

“We wanted to make it feel more fluid and interactive,” Ritchie elaborates. “That’s the luxury of having a producer in the group. We can approach mixes and ask, ‘how do we make this feel natural?’”

—Phoenix file sharing— It’s worth taking a moment to ponder what would feel “natural” to Injury Reserve. The trio grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, far away from any discernible hip-hop scene that they could adopt as their default setting. The record acknowledges this, teeming instead with references to the mid-2000s internet culture that they tapped into. An interlude that samples fellow Arizona rapper Lil QWERTY’s ‘Kodi Fire Stick’ pays respect to the fourth grade “BearShare bandits” who always knew where to find new releases for free, while Ritchie raps on ‘Jailbreak the Tesla’ that a jailbroken iPod Touch gave you “Limewire on crack”. Groggs calls the virus-ridden app a “hassle” when we reminisce, still pained by all the unwanted mixtapes mistakenly downloaded.

Corey, who is the youngest of the trio at 23, has stronger memories of the slightly later YouTube to MP3 converting era. He adds that this came with its own set of hazards: “I remember I did YouTubeMP3s of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and I didn›t know that ‘Devil in a New Dress’ existed for six months. You know, maybe the best song on the album,” he confesses with a smile. He comes in for warranted ridicule from Ritchie and Groggs – the group have previously cited Kanye West’s 2010 record as a key inspiration behind the whole Injury Reserve project.

— Big diggers — They’ve long since uninstalled The Pirate Bay from their computers. They do, however, reject the data-derived streaming culture that has guided many people’s musical discoveries in more recent years. “That’s the way algorithms work: ‘sound like this, sound like that,’” says Corey, as he pretends to pinch

Interview

19

Interview

“Finding out what people are and aren’t doing lets us find a pocket that isn’t being touched”

separate atoms of music from the air before grouping them together. His group pride themselves on channelling both experimental and accessible forms of music, searching for the kind of nuance that Spotifycore ignores. “It doesn’t push anyone at all,” says Groggs.

“The only playlists I dive into are the ones that we make for each other now, which are super album-based,” says Ritchie. “We’re big diggers, and we are always looking for cool shit that’s bringing a new perspective.” They mention, for instance, their intrigue in London-based bands Jockstrap and Black Midi. “Finding out what people are and aren’t doing lets us find a pocket that isn’t being touched. It’s a little bit different being album-based artists in a playlist era, but we’re going to keep doing our thing because we know that albums are what stays and lasts.”

By gearing their music towards an album-length experience, the group felt they could engage with a broader range of human emotions. As Ritchie puts it, “We can’t get our full mindset out in two minutes and forty-three seconds.” Injury Reserve is therefore defined as much by its sincerity as its humour. In one particularly moving moment, Groggs discusses ghosting loved ones and coming to terms with a lack of selfcontrol on ‘What A Year It’s Been’.

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“There was a certain point where, up until some rappers, there wasn’t room for some of the things we talk about,” says Ritchie. The group have often spoken of their admiration for groups like A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul in facilitating this change; they also credit the candidness of Kanye West and Little Brother’s seminal records. “Danny Brown has been big for that too,” Corey adds, turning to more recent examples. “Often some of his darkest shit was on the biggest party tracks.”

“Even thinking about Drake being the biggest rapper in the world right now. Drake is as soft as I am,” says Ritchie, meaning this as no negative comment. “It’s very encouraging to just be yourself. That’s what’s special about being in hip-hop, especially in 2019 – there is room for artists like us.”

The BesT New Music

ROse eLiNOR DOuGALL DANieL O’suLLiVAN A New iLLusiON FOLLY

V/A DRAhLA FLOATiNG POiNTs: LATe useLess cOORDiNATes Captured Tracks NiGhT TALes

Jesse MAc cORMAcK NOw

Jesse Mac cormack’s astonishing debut album ‘Now’ arrives unhurried: a work of ardent, kaleidoscopic artrock that is at once a dazzling premiere and the culmination of a meticulous five-year evolution.

Vermilion

O Genesis

The title track from Dougall’s third album sees her question the fragility of the constructed worlds we all make for ourselves, whether through relationships, love affairs, work or political beliefs through the prism of the chaotic world around her.

A noticeable shift in dynamic, ‘A New Illusion’ uses a different sonic palette to her previous LP, with soaring strings, propulsive pianos and impressionistic guitars, a modern classic with a gentle “fuck it” attitude.

‘Folly’ deftly illustrates O’sullivan’s ascent as a unique and multidimensional songwriter, moving from the familiar pantheon of experimental music and arriving upon a universal narrative probing the human condition from the inside out. Both lyrically and within the intricate lattice of arrangements, traditional forms are reshaped into transcendent pop symphonies.

Floating Points’ personal collection of global soul, ambient, jazz and folk treasures form the latest in the warmly revered Late Night Tales series.

eDwYN cOLLiNs BADBeA

sTuART sTAPLes MADONNATRON Music FOR cLAiRe MusicA ALLA DeNis’ hiGh LiFe (O.s.T) PuTTANescA

Late Night Tales

This Late Night Tales excursion into the depths of the evening reflects his broad tastes. The globally-travelled producer has collected untold treasures on his travels from dusty stores in Brazil to market stalls near his hometown.

Leeds-formed Drahla have defined their own vital subset of art-rock with ‘useless coordinates’ , a debut album that’s as fearless as it is enthralling An uncompromising but deeply rewarding debut where the internal and external, cerebral and visceral coalesce to quite startling effect.

Secret City

Don’t miss his show at The waiting Room, London on May 22 in London, uK.

“….a shimmering showcase for one of the most alluring and arresting female voices at work today” 8/10 - uncut

FLAMiNGODs LeViTATiON Moshi Moshi

international psych explorers Flamingods are back with brand new album ‘Levitation’, via Moshi Moshi Records. inspired by the disco, funk and psychedelic sounds of the Middle east and south Asia in the ‘70s, the album channels these influences through a vision soaked in mysticism, positivity and sun-drenched imagery.

Available on limited coloured vinyl at all good independent record stores.

AED Records

City Slang

“Fantastic ninth album sees Orange Juice frontman recalling past glories. Collins’ first album since 2013 sees the singer in pleasingly superb form.” 9/10 - uncut “The man’s a marvel” aaaa - Mojo “A record of a very fine sort” -Q

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Trashmouth

claire Denis’ highly anticipated first English language film ‘high Life’ will be released in the spring of 2019.

having moved forwards emotionally from the wilds of dystopian stalking and associated hobbies, Madonnatron, on their second album, have instead been found The soundtrack to the film frolicking through the green was created by stuart A. pastures of gangsta pimps, staples of tindersticks, and hindu God wars, cyber Men includes willow, performed by tindersticks and featuring guest invasion, loveless nightclub hook-ups, and revered screen vocals from Robert Pattinson, goddess elizabeth Taylor. Think which was written for the final of them as post-punk lab rats in scene of the film. the secrets of Nimh, feasting Available on limited vinyl and cD dubiously on back-dated episodes of Top of the Pops. via city slang.

Support Your Local Independent Retailer Check www.republicofmusic.com

V/A NiGeRiA 70: NO wAhALA: hiGhLiFe, AFRO-FuNK & JuJu 1973-1987 Strut

The first new volume of the seminal ‘Nigeria 70’ series in over 6 years collects together more essential 1970s dancefloor highlife, Afro-funk and juju.

Artists include sir Victor uwaifo, Rex williams and sina Bakare, and all tracks are receiving their first ever international release.

Interview Creating safe spaces for women and the LGBTQIA community in Uganda and beyond, by Daniel Dylan Wray Photography by Levi Mandel

DJ Kampire 22

Interview Usually finding yourself admitted to a Brooklyn hospital in the middle of the night would be a grim way to finish your Saturday night out. Although, being put there because you danced so hard at a DJ set that you dislocated your own knee puts a different spin to it. Thankfully my insurance-less self was not the person in question who ended up with a busted knee being cracked back into place in the early hours of Sunday morning but the person in question who sent the other travelling Brit there was DJ Kampire.

“I like it when it’s sweaty and people are into it,” she had told me a few hours earlier, before her set in a basement Brooklyn venue as part of the Red Bull Music Festival in New York (the inaugural UK festival event takes place throughout August and September). She got her wish as the air hung thick and sticky and the dance floor remained ever-shifting as she played a set of thumping pan-African sounds, spanning traditional Congolese rumba to African pop underpinned by a bass-heavy electronic stomp. DJ Kampire is from Kampala in Uganda and is a key part of the music collective cum music festival cum record label Nyege Nyege. The collective are proudly promoting the sounds stemming from east Africa, combining spinning polyrhythmic rhythms often blended with western techno beats and house grooves.

Music and dancing became an early and inherent part of Kampire’s life. “I grew up in Zambia for a while but my parents are Ugandan so we’d have these east African expat parties,” she recalls. “With lots of TPOK jazz, Franco and Kanda Bongo Man playing. The adults would get drunk and call the kids to come and dance for their entertainment. They would then pay us money to whoever won. I don’t think I overtly considered myself musical necessarily but there was plenty of appreciation for music in my household.”

Years later as a young woman Kampire found herself slipping into the world of DJing by accident. Roped in to help out organisationally at the first ever Nyege Nyege festival, she was suddenly asked to play out. “I began DJing by mistake entirely,” she says. “I was DJing off my laptop and I couldn’t really mix, so it was just one song after the other, but I knew that I wanted to play these bass sounds that are great to dance to but I wasn’t hearing in Kampala at the time; to play a lot of older African music. People responded so well to that set that I’ve been doing it ever since.”

Kampire’s sets have not only taken her across the world and landed her the title of one of Mixmag’s breakout DJs of 2018; her music comes with a form of political activism in tow.

As a queer woman herself, Kampire and several other DJs have been going out of their way to throw a variety of parties back in Uganda that act as safe spaces for women and LGBTQIA people, as well as encouraging more women to DJ, which is still a relatively new occurrence there. “It’s a very diverse group of people that come,” she tells me. “It’s about creating spaces where people of different classes can get together – it’s also a city of refugees so you have real diversity of culture, as well as gender.

It’s an open space where any type of person can come and party.”

Whilst in the west this may seem like a fairly standard and comparatively easy task to undertake, in Uganda homosexual-

ity is still illegal and until a technicality annulled the Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Act in 2014, it was punishable by death – a law that was nicknamed the “Kill the Gays bill”. As a result, the LGBTQIA community still face serious danger and prejudice in the country and throwing a party that acts as a safe space for such people is a radical move. On top of this, violence against women in the country is also on the rise, and during 2017 and 2018 there was a spate of women who were murdered, many of whom were kidnapped from the street and sexually assaulted before being killed.

“When we throw queer parties which are outside of the Nyege Nyege festival, we definitely have to be more careful,” she tells me. “We can’t necessarily label them as queer parties because you might draw the attention of the wrong sort of people. Even when we are doing parties just for women – like the Pussy Party’s we throw – we are making sure that women are safe and looked after, so no straight male shenanigans are taking place. But if you advertise it that way then to an extent you create a backlash and attract those people who just want to come and fuck it up.”

It’s a juggling act for Kampire and her collective; creating a welcoming and inclusive space but also making sure it doesn’t encourage those who could wish harm to those in attendance. “We have different levels of parties,” she says. “So you might have an intimate house party where you have to be on the guestlist to come and there’s a password and you have to know what the party is there for. You want to make sure it’s a safe space for minorities but you also want make it more open to people, so keeping that balance has definitely been very challenging.”

— Kampala — Whilst the success of the Nyege Nyege festival, collective and record label has seen Kampire DJ cross the world spreading the word and rhythm of east African music, from Sonar in Barcelona to warehouse parties in Sheffield, her hometown of Kampala is still far from resembling an industry hub and having a network in place. “Nobody is in it for the money because nobody is making any money,” she says. “So you can at least be sure that’s not what is motivating people. I can appreciate the purity that comes from such a grassroots movement but in the West there’s this not wanting to be corrupted by corporate or profit interests, whereas in Uganda, because the market is so small and there’s no money, we actually want to prove that this is a commercially viable project to book underground acts.” It seems to be working. For the 2019 edition of the festival, which takes place in September, the line-up boasts a mix of local and international acts with genre-twisting underground artists such as Jlin, Rian Treanor, Errorsmith and Giant Swan all featuring on the bill.

Kampire is also hoping that throwing such parties and events will not only legitimise underground and eclectic music in Uganda but also help dispel some myths and negative assumptions associated with the place she proudly calls home. She tells

23

Interview

— The government wade in —

me: “Whilst Uganda has this very conservative reputation both outside and inside the country, it’s also very liberal. The liberal side just doesn’t have the same PR. Ugandans are a very liberal people and Kampala is known as the party capital of east Africa.

People come there because there are no rules to an extent – you can party very late, there are no noise regulations, so we’ve always had that outlet of entertainment that isn’t as politicised.

There’s a huge conversation for Africans about being misrepresented and we have felt so misrepresented previously that we don’t want to paint this picture of Africa as a dark continent.”

At the same time, there are some truths that are unshakable and Kampire is more than honest about some of the negative aspects they have to face there at the moment. “Women’s safety is a massive issue all around the world but in Kampala I think it’s actually getting more dangerous,” she tells me. “I never want to say this to outsiders because we already have a terrible reputation but I’m seeing an increase in criminality and violence in line with the rise of equality. Women’s increased freedom leads to a backlash. We have a serial killer in Uganda who is killing women and the government is more concerned about squashing political opposition than protecting people.” She also mentions the imprisonment of musician and activist Bobi Wine, and the artist regulations they are trying to enforce that would severely restrict musicians being able to perform, as well as the recent social media tax in which the Government are charging people to use social media sites in a bid to censor people – or curb gossip, according to them.

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Last year Kampire and the Nyege Nyege collective were on the receiving end of some malicious gossip themselves. “A couple of days before the festival our Minister of Ethics and Integrity decided that it shouldn’t go on,” she says. “There was this Whatsapp message that got forwarded saying that the festival is full of gays, that it’s coming to corrupt our children, there’s drugs everywhere, people are having sex with animals – it was super dramatic and not attributed to anybody. Days later the Minister comes out and does a government press conference saying the festival is cancelled and that it’s not happening. But other government people we worked with insisted we could go ahead; even people who ordinarily might not support something like gay rights issues were like, ‘no you’re not going to take this party away from us’, and so they found themselves on the same side as us.”

As the conversation goes on I become very aware that I’m probably yet another white westerner asking an African person about the problems in a place that I have never visited nor know very much about. Does this lead to a degree of discomfort, being appointed something of a de facto spokesperson often for an entire country when conducting interviews? Is Kampire comfortable with the political tag that comes with being a DJ from Uganda? “No, not really,” she says. “Firstly it was this kind of girl power DJ thing – like ‘Kampire a woman DJ’ – which was interesting at first. I felt like the conversation was stopping there but now that I’m having more in depth conversations I’m also worried about what the implications for me might be. It is worrying. I don’t want to be too overt about what I’m saying and put people at risk, so it’s hard for me to make sure that we are having a proper in-depth and representative conversation about what is happening in Uganda today, but also to not paint a picture of it as being a worse place than anywhere else in the world. I don’t want to increase the backlash against the festival and my own career as a result of these conversations. We just wanted to throw some parties and listen to music on some big speakers. We didn’t expect it would become this political thing necessarily, but it’s where we’ve ended up.”

Opting to finish on a positive note, we speak about the impact of being able to play this music around the world and to have sounds from Africa pummelling out of some of the best club sound systems in the world. “It’s hugely rewarding,” she says. “I don’t make my own music at this point, so for me to represent east African artists has been amazing, and to see people respond to it in a really primal and emotional way has been a massive privilege. I hope it happens for more African artists rather than me being held up as a representative or the expert or the only woman DJ coming out of Africa. I hope it opens doors for other people.”

Lanzarote

07/08/19 MOTH Club Valette St London E8

lanzaroteworks.com

Programming

Friday 5 July

HANDS OFF GRETEL

#lanzaroteworks

Wednesday 17 July

DIDIRRI

mothclub.co.uk Monday 8 July Tuesday 2 July

STEAL SHIT DO DRUGS

Wednesday 24 July

JAPANESE TELEVISION

XYLOURIS WHITE Thursday 11 July Wednesday 3 July

LEVITATION ROOM

EARTH TONGUE Saturday 13 July

Thursday 4 July

DONNY BENÉT

GHUM Tuesday 16 July

Monday 8 July

GIRLPOOL Tuesday 9 July

CLOUD NOTHINGS Wednesday 10 July

SHOW ME THE BODY Thursday 25 July

POST ANIMAL Saturday 27 July

HELICON Thursday 22 August

YEASAYER Thursday 29 August

TACOCAT

RAYS Friday 2 August

ZAMILSKA Thursday 29 August

ECHO LADIES Thursday 5 September

PARTNER Friday 6 September

THE HOLYDRUG COUPLE Sunday 15 September

RAINBOW GRAVE

The Waiting Room 175 Stoke Newington High St N16

Friday 16 August

MINAMI DEUTSCH Wednesday 28 August

HARRISON WHITFORD Thursday 5 September

JOHN EATHERLY Thursday 19 September

GUS HARVEY Saturday 21 September

BEN SHEMIE

Studio 9294 92 Wallis Rd E9 5LN @lanzaroteworks

Thursday 8 August

CHANCHA VIA CIRCUITO Tuesday 27 August

WAND Wednesday 28 August

KIKAGAKU MOYO

waitingroomn16.com Wednesday 4 September

FRANKIE & THE WITCH FINGERS

Saturday 7 September Tuesday 2 July

ZOONI

Shacklewell Arms 71 Shacklewell Lane London E8 shacklewellarms.com

CRACK CLOUD Thursday 12 September

Wednesday 3 July

FROTH

BECOMING REAL Friday 20 September

Monday 1 July

LAVINIA BLACKWALL

Thursday 4 July

CAITLYN SCARLETT

SLEEP EATERS

UK TOUR DECEMBER 2.12 4.12 6.12 7.12 8.12

BRIGHTON KOMEDIA NEWCASTLE RIVERSIDE NOTTINGHAM RESCUE ROOMS SOUTHAMPTON ENGINE ROOMS LONDON O2 SHEPHERDS BUSH EMPIRE

Goldenvoice.co.uk / AXS.com / dice.fm A GOLDENVOICE AND FRIENDS PRESENTATION BY ARRANGEMENT WITH CODA

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

Reviews Albums

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Albums

Black Midi — Schlagenheim (rough trade) For the past few months, a combination of their enigmatic online presence, unusual backstory and a clutch of songs with giddy disregard for genre boundaries has conspired to make them the year’s most talked-about band, even as the quartet haven’t been doing a great deal of talking themselves. They haven’t done much to draw back the curtain in the interviews that they have given, and what they have revealed suggests four frustratingly normal nineteen-to-twenty year olds who’d rather argue about FIFA or Mortal Kombat than bicker over their musical influences. Even that, though, has bolstered the sense of fascination with them; it brings to mind of the Spiderland rehearsal footage from the Slint documentary Breadcrumb Trail, which was remarkable in that it revealed that one of the darkest and most inscrutable albums of the nineties was written and recorded by four kids who looked as if they’d just escaped from their high school chess club.

Unlike Slint, though, nothing about the rollout of this first Black Midi album appears to be happening by accident; Rough Trade clearly have a keen handle on the value of the shroud of mystery surrounding the group and are actively encouraging it, even going far enough to request that those with advance copies of Schlagenheim keep the track listing to themselves, as if the public at large finding out that there’s songs by the names of ‘Western’, ‘Years Ago’ and ‘Ducter’ could somehow bring the fourpiece’s carefully cultivated closed-book air crashing down around them. Admittedly, neither the album’s title nor the name of the band itself feel like non-sequiturs; the former translates from German as “hit home” and the latter is taken from the invented online genre that involves creating impossibly dense remixes out of

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piling thousands of MIDI tracks on top of each other.

Schlagenheim does nothing if not hit home, in fairness, and it does so precisely because of the persistent sense that any given member of the group is about to run away with themselves on any given track. There aren’t too many obvious throughlines tying the album together; even the vocals are subject to change, with frontman Geordie Greep belligerent on ‘Reggae’, guitarist Matt Kelvin frenzied on ‘Near DT, MI’, and bassist Cameron Picton simultaneously monotone and menacing on ‘Speedway’. There’s little consistency to Kelvin’s guitar playing, too, both in terms of the tone (spiky) and the cadence (staccato one minute, furious shredding the next). Behind the kit, meanwhile, Morgan Simpson is alternately measured and thunderous, depending on what the moment calls for.

It all adds up to suggest that Black Midi do not appear to be operating within any kind of self-drawn parameters. Superficially, you could try to pick apart the songs by focusing on what they put you in mind of; Greep’s laconic drawl is often worthy of Mark E. Smith, the manner in which the time signatures oscillate wildly from strict to loose sounds like a band trying to subvert math rock, and there are bound to be suggestions that they’re a prog outfit thrown around when every one of the nine tracks here features at least one dramatic landscape change.

To take that approach, though, would be to do Black Midi a disservice, because as much as everything about their image (or lack thereof) appears to have been carefully managed, Schlagenheim possesses a genuine sense of experimentalism – just for the wonderment of creating something that feels new, rather than simply for the sake of it.

The fact that all four members are recent graduates of the BRIT School has been a key part of their confounding background, seeming as it does about as congruous as David Lynch having been to the same film school as Michael Bay, but it’s important to realise that their education is more than just an interestingly

leftfield tidbit for the album bio; Schlagenheim is scored through with a virtuosity that, if nothing else, puts to bed any argument that Black Midi are punks, because anybody should be capable of picking up a guitar and starting a punk band and Black Midi’s music instead seems defined by the technical ability of its players and their willingness to wander off in different stylistic directions to each other in order to see what happens.

That sense of adventure is responsible for all of Schlagenheim’s most thrilling moments. It’s why we get, in the form of ‘Reggae’, a track that begins with the rhythm section leaning towards that genre and ends with noisy urgency, Greep snarling frantically over Kelvin’s juddering riffs. It means that there’s an epic eight-minute centrepiece, ‘Western’, which paradoxically might be the most restrained song on the record, only allowing itself a collapse into a freewheeling guitar cacophony relatively briefly, at the midpoint – it’s bookended by long, melodic, almost ambient stretches that nod to the group’s beginnings. It’s when you see that kind of diversion sitting alongside, for example, early single ‘bmbmbm’, an exercise in future krautrock, that you realise that maybe the obvious points of reference for Black Midi aren’t the most accurate; spiritually, they feel closer to a band like Deerhoof in their insatiable appetite for constant shape-shifting.

There’s a real sense of self-assurance running through Schlagenheim for such a young band; it’s not just that they already seem to have real confidence in the sonic niche that they’ve carved out, but really that they’ve carved it out at all, given how much risk-taking it’s involved.

In that sense, plenty of credit is also due to Dan Carey, the Speedy Wunderground man who’s handled production duties. It seems particularly serendipitous that he only ended up taking the position because he and the band move in the same circles around their de facto headquarters, The Windmill in Brixton; his particular skill set seems tailor-made for this particular band. All of his best work behind the desk in recent years has involved

Albums him encouraging artists to pursue their weirder impulses: the sorely underrated collaboration between Toy and Bat for Lashes, Sexwitch, springs to mind, as do the last couple of Kate Tempest albums.

He’s done that here, too, but in enough of a no-nonsense style (the entire record was cut in five days) to prevent Black Midi from wandering too far off the beaten track, and from being consumed by their ambition.

The press release for Schlagenheim talks, this early, of what Black Midi are likely to sound like in a few years’ time – nothing like this, apparently. Therein lies perhaps the biggest obstacle standing in their way, though: for such an unapologetically weird band, their unorthodox way of marketing themselves already seems to have drawn a bigger audience to them than you’d expect there to be for this kind of music. In that respect, they conjure memories of WU LYF, or maybe even Late of the Pier, and the thing that those two bands have in common is that they only got to make one album. For everybody’s sake, we should hope they instead go down the road taken by Rolo Tomassi, who have creatively thrived in relative obscurity and who share with Black Midi an unrelenting desire to outdo themselves at every turn.

Schlagenheim isn’t the sound of a band here to save guitar music; just four guys with tons of potential doing things entirely on their own terms. 8/10 Joe Goggins

Baltra — Ted (96 and forever) It’s always interesting what the PR material for a new record tries to sneak past the reader, like the release for Baltra’s debut album. In the producer’s own words it’s described as a “time capsule of expression” – that is, there’s no real idea underpinning it greater than “here’s some new tunes”.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that there’s no throughline to the material here, even if the death of Baltra’s father (Ted, after whom he’s named the record) gave the project a little more focus in its completion, at least. A straight listen-through of Ted runs 72 minutes, and it often feels like 3 more cohesive EPs blended and shaken together. For example, the fragmentary, drifting Burial-alike ‘Study of You’ and the heartfelt ‘Ted’s Interlude’, sampling a song by Baltra’s late father, are impressive studies of introversion which could hold together a shorter release. It doesn’t make sense for them to jostle shoulders with ‘Opal Drip’’s huge ’80s drums and sugary Animal Crossing chirps.

Equally, none of these tracks share much with the borderline vaportrap of ‘In The Mist of Lovers Past’ or drill-andbass throwback ‘How Does It Work’. This makes more sense considering the outline of Baltra’s career, as his breakout tune ‘Fade Away’ originally got hot through YouTube. That’s why this album’s flow is a mess – because it’s not an album, not really. It’s an armful of tracks to be shaken out loose into Boiler Room sets and the YouTube algorithm.

And that’s fine, I suppose – but the album’s disjointed feel harms Baltra, a clearly versatile producer with a great career ahead of him. Dip in and out for some fun, but if you want a definitive statement of intent you’ll have to wait.

6/10 Alex Francis

Ada Lea — What We Say in Private (saddle creek) The title of Ada Lea’s debut album hints at late night confessions and intimacies. What We Say in Private does have these moments, especially on the solo blues of ‘Yanking The Pearls Off Around My Neck’. Yet

initially conceived as a concept record of two distinct sides, it’s also infused with breezy colour.

The one-woman project of Montreal-based Ali Levy, its duality is part borne of the jazz graduate playing indie. This brings unexpected details and structural twists to the material. ‘Wild Heart’ is a case in point. Essentially an intimate folk-pop number, on which her fingers can be heard sliding on the fret board and her voice softly brushing against the listener’s ear, it slides into oddness with a mix that occasionally turns up the clattering percussion.

‘For Real Now (Not Pretend)’ – one of three tracks that have been re-recorded from 2017’s demo release Bored – also skews generic indie with slightly out of synch spoken word lines and increasing distortion. This makes it sound like a finger has been smudged across the tape, which continues to rough up the intentionally loose playing on ‘What Makes Me Sad’.

These deeply human details are deepened by the sound of the outside world seeping into the recordings. ‘The Party’ ends with traffic noise and ‘Just One, Please’ opens with bird song and pitch-shifted dialogue, creating tracks that are simultaneously private in their loss and outward looking in their optimism of love. 7/10 Susan Darlington

BANKS — III (harvest) As BANKS, California native Jillian Banks released a series of slow-burn alt pop hits like ‘Beggin’ For Thread’ and ‘Gemini Feed’ from 2013 to 2017. Then, abruptly, the music stopped. Now, after two years of soul-searching, the singer-songwriter is back with her aptly titled third album, III. So, how has BANKS updated her sound for 2019? Most notice-

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Albums ably, the sparse, mid-tempo tracks of albums Goddess and The Altar have been abandoned in favour of danceable, layered production. With the help of producers like BJ Burton (Lizzo, Bon Iver) and Hudson Mohawke (Kanye West) she’s been able to breathe some life into the moody RnB that sometimes bordered on the morose.

Lead track ‘Gimme’ is a clear stand-out. As the plaintive chorus calls to “gimme, gimme what I want” BANKS demonstrates the devil-may-care attitude of a woman who knows her own mind. Clearly, it’s intended as some kind of mission statement for the next chapter of her career, but is the rest of III as well developed? Maybe not. In what feels like a pointed response to detractors who described BANKS’s earlier work as lifeless and bland, III is stuffed to the hilt with distortion, throbbing beats and unexpected details, and sometimes it makes for tough listening.

Yet she consolidates her reputation as a vocal tone master, flitting between wistfully soft one minute to iron-clad and resolute the next. It’s great to hear her voice given room to breathe on ‘Sawzall’, a pared-back track about heartbreak, whilst songs like ‘Stroke’ – where her voice gets lost amongst a sea of crackling, manipulated sounds – feel like missed opportunities. Similarly, the chorus on ‘Look What You’re Doing To Me’ is a bit overblown, forcing BANKS’s voice to stretch itself to be heard over the crescendo of competing sounds.

Album-closer ‘What About Love’ delivers a much-needed dose of introspection as the singer ruminates over a lost relationship and self-growth.

However, the use of sickly sweet samples of a child’s voice (reputedly BANKS’s 4-year-old niece) saying “I love you” reduces the song’s emotional tenor to trite simplicity.

Whilst there are golden moments like the touching ‘Made of Water’ or the catchy ‘Alaska’, III underperforms overall. Managing to be both half-baked and overdone, it’s an album that tries to do too much only to fail to deliver on its potential. 5/10 Megan Wallace

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Africa Express — Egoli (africa express records) Egoli is the Xhosa name for Johannesburg, literally translated as ‘City of Gold’. The city’s song mines have remained largely unquarried

by Western ears thus far, but this latest instalment in the Africa Express series of musicological excavations might just pave the way for a new frontier rush.

Over a seven-week period at the start of 2018, the Damon Albarn-founded project decamped to South Africa, ushered together over a dozen artists representing multiple generations of Johannesburg musical heritage and put together an 18-track album that is bursting with fresh ideas for where to go next.

Following on from previous endeavours in Mali and Syria, the album opens with the finger-plucked maskandi guitar of Phuzekhemisi, a South African musical institution for fifty years. The track is ‘Welcome’, a nod to the past before we embark on this journey into the Afrofuture. For this is an album that faces in many directions, but nearly all of them forwards; take, for example, ‘Africa to the World’, a showcase for Infamous Boiz and Dominowe, masters of the raw, kwaito/hip-hop hybrid known as Gqom, a hypnotic, nodding track that opens up over time, completed by the desert guitar licks of Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Nick Zinner. Or indeed ‘City in Lights’, a pristine example of acholitronix, the ’80s house-inspired wedding dance music here performed by Otim Alpha, with vocals from Mahotella Queens and London’s Georgia.

So many of the artists enlisted on Egoli will be discoveries, each one bringing their own histories and traditions, their own visions of the endless possibilities that their new flavours can add to the global mix. As the Shangaan Electro boom proved earlier this decade, the untapped talent is just in need of a break-

through; one surge and the levees will break. This album is teeming with potential surges.

One breakout star could be Moonchild Sanelly, South Africa’s ghetto-funk answer to Lizzo. Her bars on the stoner jam ‘Where Will This Lead Us To?’ are characteristically forthright, and even more so on ‘Morals’, featuring boom bap drums which pound a hazy rap track through the smoke. Producer Sibot catches the ear on more than one occasion too: the electro-jazz vibes of ‘Johannesburg’ compliment the unmistakably louche vocals of Gruff Rhys in a loving paean to the sprawling city that bears its name, but one track later Sibot is cutting an altogether different outline, the sort of nu-disco that you might associate with Todd Terje, skilfully manipulating an Albarn vocal sample to build momentum.

Grime superstar Ghetts lends his vocals to ‘No Games’, trading bars with Sho Madjozi as well as Sanelly, over a track that takes a UK Afrobeat production back to its source heritage. Soweto band BCUC contribute their ritual chants to ‘Bittersweet Escape’, a pulsing, creeping number that seeps surreptitiously underneath the membrane of your consciousness thanks to the sultry vocals of Nonki Phiri. ‘Absolutely Everything is Pointing Towards the Light’ is a duet between Rhys and Zolani Mahola, a beautiful study in melancholy with a lead melody that could come from any century and would survive many yet to come, given the chance.

Most poignant of all is the contribution of DJ Spoko, who passed away a few months after recording his track.

Spoko had been the pioneer of what became known as Bacardi house, so how appropriate that ‘The Return of Bacardi’ is one of the album’s highlights; a jumping, minimalist Shangaan dance track that shuffles and circles back on itself, a micro-melodic house tune that should ensure the continuation of Spoko’s legacy beyond his lifespan.

The Albarn melodic signature that is so familiar is withheld until the closing two tracks, the latter, ‘See the World’, evoking a communal sunrise experience. Along with ‘Welcome’, it

Albums bookends the record beautifully, but it is what lies between the two that is the album’s raison d’être. The myriad strains of South African electro and acoustic music that are touched upon are too many to mention, and in many cases individual artists demonstrate their ability with multiple styles. The sense of diverse possibility is what endures most of all throughout Egoli, and indeed everything that Africa Express touches. In an oversaturated world, genuine enthusiasm for something fresh is hard to come by. Egoli has it to spare. 8/10 Max Pilley

Big Supermarket — 1800 (tough love) Who are Big Supermarket? Short answer: we don’t really know. The long answer is pretty much the same. They are definitely Australian, working out of Victoria, and they definitely have guitars.

Once upon a time their album 1800 was only available via Bandcamp in Australia, and is now coming out in a limited run from Tough Love Records. That’s it. That’s the backstory. 1800 is a record almost entirely without context.

Lo-fi and undeniably DIY, 1800 crackles and pops like worn out vinyl. In their anonymity, Big Supermarket have declared that they believe some things are better left unsaid. On 1800 even what they do say can be hard to make out, with vocals buried deep beneath the instruments and production hiss. Lyrics fans had better be prepared to work for them – at points the vocals come as if the singer is standing in the next room from the microphone. Still, this record serves up little vacations from the real world, like ‘The Kisser’ (less than one minute of sunny, ’70s Haight-Ashbury style instrumentals) and the similarly short ‘Feel the Warm Breeze’, with its woozy heatsoaked rhythm.

Elsewhere, the album skews towards alt-rock, as on ‘Personal Pronouns’, whose riff falls under the same family tree as Reef ’s ‘Place Your Hands’ and is cut with a cascading synth.

A less standoffish vocal could have turned the track into something sparkling. Here, true to form, Big Supermarket hold the audience arm’s length.

6/10 Liam Konemann

Daughter of Swords — Dawnbreaker (bella union) On the first few listens it doesn’t sound like Alexandra SauserMonnig has made a breakup album, but that’s precisely what Dawnbreaker is.

It’s not edged with acrimony or rancor or regret, but even if it was, you’d still struggle to hear it beyond her delicate, disarming voice.

Inspired by the thought of an impending breakup, Dawnbreaker captures that introspective calm before the change; those moments where you explain and justify it to yourself before you clear your head and empty your heart. Initially imagined as barebones folk ballads, these quiet reflections are prettily filled out with fingerpicked guitar and subtle synth weaving around Sauser-Monnig’s contemplative, confessional themes.

Tracks such as ‘Shining Woman’ and ‘Fields’ hit the melodic, almost melancholic, notes Chutes Too Narrowera The Shins mastered in ways that not so much tugged on the heartstrings as they caressed them, whereas ‘Rising Sun’ dials up a more traditional country influence with slide guitar and a flash of harmonica.

It all makes for an endearing, uplifting debut where each track feels like it’s been softly-spoken into the world and blown away with the breeze. Joy meets reflection, freedom meets intro-

spection and loneliness meets acceptance in a hopeful haze that makes this breakup sound kind of beautiful.

6/10 Reef Younis

Hot Chip — A Bath Full of Ecstasy (domino) Somehow, throughout the past 15 years or so of blinding poptimism and rap as the musical zeitgeist, synthpop band and eternal humanists Hot Chip have persisted. The quintet’s fan base has grown with them, unmoved by their fealty to a particularly luminous strand of disco- and house-imbued electronica: thoughtful and hair-raising quasi-club music made for the people standing statically at the bar as much as those sloshing it out by the DJ booth.

Inside their seventh album, A Bath Full of Ecstasy, whose winking title reads like a one-sentence review of their most blissful moments (‘Flutes’ obviously), the irresistible, mind-balming machine funk survives. Since their inception at the turn of the century, the band have chosen to keep everything in-house. Here, for the first time, collaboration – producers Philippe Zdar (Phoenix) and Rodaidh McDonald (The xx, Sampha) – reins their songwriting curios in by inches, but it still shepherds them along a recognisable path: fluttering drums, slithering bass, sci-fi synths and arpeggio keys that slide elegantly as skimmed stones on water.

Hot Chip’s main vocalist, the unmistakable pop falsetto of Alexis Taylor, writes and coos as though he is the poet laureate of some dimension occupied exclusively by Mixmag subscription-holders and people who say Vampire Weekend are the voice of a generation.

Sung passionately as ever, his musings are at once abysmally hopeful and hopefully abysmal. “You remind me of a world I’ve never known/ Deep inside me there’s

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Albums a momentary glow,” he belts out dolefully on the lucid ‘Echo’, where a sense of mystery, a feeling of existential yearning, ghosts beneath the swinging disco rhythm and svelte keys. Here and elsewhere his lightly processed vocals drizzle over the music, an amalgam of Chicago house, disco-funk, synth-pop and R&B, like melted butter.

Few other artists outside of hip-hop have the guts, wherewithal or intuition to mine a sound that feels as hedonistic as it does reflective. After a sluggish start, ‘Hungry Child’ arrives around the mid-way point, an unapologetic slice of sun-lit house, finding at joyous crescendo while Taylor ruminates longingly about the fleeting nature of everything: life, love, desires. It’s the album’s most gravity-defying whack of soulful house.

The best Hot Chip songs are set aglow by old genre fascinations so much as devotional craftspersonship. For all the obvious beauty on the album, not much of the glowing magic of their past work is reignited. ‘Clear Blue Skies’ is nondescript outside of solid writing, while curtain-closer ‘No God’ is placid tropical-house. Peel back some of the glowing layers of glossy coating, though, and you’ll find a beating heart; one that is ageing, resistant, religiously steady; a recipe for inertia. It’s just all a shade too familiar. 7/10 Colin Gannon

BABii — HiiDE (deathwaltz originals) BABii’s seemingly kawaii-inflected aesthetic – showcased, for example, via the cutesy cartoons on her album artwork – might prove uncomfortable to some, particularly as it could be construed as a white woman lifting from Japanese culture.

Yet despite the preconceptions, it’s hard not to like ghostly debut album HiiDE once you give it a chance.

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The album’s structure will be familiar to anyone that’s dealt with their share of heartbreak, delivering different perspectives in the aftermaths of a failed relationship; ranging from the wistful ‘SYMETRii’ to the more combative ‘VOLCANO’. If there’s any criticism to be made, it feels like the album – propelled by icy electronic drum snaps – is just slightly too polished to reach beyond its beautiful artifice and into emotional catharsis.

BABii’s talent shines strongest in the more introspective moments, like when her fragile vocals beautifully meld with chilly electro on ‘CARNiiVORE’; a lover’s lament where the singer confesses “I fell in love with a carnivore”. There’s also a poetry to these lyrics; one of BABii’s particular strong suits, with the use of metaphor casting an emotionally vampiric ex-boyfriend as a predator of both the animal kingdom and the heart. 7/10 Megan Wallace

Drab Majesty — Modern Mirror (dais) Drab Majesty are Deb Demure and Mona D., the androgynous, mannequin-esque alter egos of multi-instrumentalist Andrew Clinco and collaborator Alex Nicolaou. With their chalk-white painted faces and massive black shades, they’re a Patrick Nagel print come to life. Together, they make dark, ghostly new wave replete with gated snares, moody synth pads and reverb-washed guitars.

Citing the Greek figure Narcissus – who wasted away after becoming obsessed with his own reflection – Modern Mirror is a cautionary tale warning of the perils of self-obsession in the age of Tinder. “Two modern minds won’t say what they want to/ To push a button in real time,” Demure sings on ‘Ellipsis’. On ‘Long Division’ he laments “long-distance silence”, as the breathy vocals of No Joy frontwoman

Jasamine White-Gluz linger like a spectre.

Modernising the story of Narcissus to underscore its relevance today is a pretty novel concept, although the negative impact technology is having on our ability to form meaningful connections is well-trodden ground, and the album doesn’t offer much new insight on that front. Still, while Modern Mirror’s social commentary lacks bite, it remains a world away from the empty ’80s nostalgia in vogue – Drab Majesty’s neon-soaked soundscapes do at least feel fully realised and lived in. 7/10 Alexander Smail

Dude York — Falling (hardly art) Some bright spark once crossed capitalism with the DIY punk scene and dreamed up these day-festival boat trips, where you could set sail around the Devon and Cornwall coast (what else is there to do?) while some great socialist-centric sounds hit you with the salt air. Bands would frantically play at you as their drum kits slide from one side of the hull to the other; the bassist becomes seasick; the guitarist stands on one leg mid-pedal maneuver and goes overboard. And then there was one.

Left to their own devices, the vocalist picks up a guitar and panics. The boat is turning 360 and all expectations of entertainment until we reach shore rests on them. It goes like this: they play the one riff they can remember from guitar lessons when they were eight – that was ‘Brimful of Asha’, but it ends up sounding a bit like a Wheatus d-side. Breaking into a sweat, it’s vocal-heavy Jimmy Eat World covers all the way home.

I’m not saying Dude York’s Falling sounds like this, but it’s not far off. There are so few female fronted pop-punk bands that the mission statement of opening up the gates of nostalgia and re-writing the sound of the 2000s is a good one.

Albums But more than half of the tracks are still fronted by guitarist Peter Richards; the rest are called things like ‘I’m The 1 4 U’, and would barely make it to the end credits of a Mary-Kate and Ashley film. 3/10 Tristan Gatward

Horse Jumper of Love — So Divine (run for cover) There are a number of things that can catch the attention of a music journalist. A good story, a big reputation, long and persistent press campaigns, can all lead to the surrender of precious editorial space. Other times, all it requires is a name. And with a name deriving from a Latin phrase that is a few steps down the line of mistranslation, Horse Jumper of Love is most certainly one that demands consideration. Grabbing attention, however, is merely the first step, and sometimes proves detrimental if the content contained does not match the promise of the outer shell. Thankfully, this Boston based three-piece, formed in 2013 by lead singer Dimitri Giannopoulos, have been steadily amassing a reputation for an engaging dual personality sound; one that simultaneously oversees unhurried and saccharine rock songs, whilst embracing a darker, altogether more staunch edge.

A second album proper, So Devine shows a band refine their previously lackadaisical indie-rock vibe and add a harder hitting edge whilst not completely overhauling an appealing aesthetic.

‘Poision’ carefully advances with melodic guitar work, drenched in sticky musical overtones, while ‘Airport’ thrashes to a cathartic close, following a drawn-out and emotive examination in Giannopoulos’ lyrics.

It’s a record full of undoubtedly deeply reflective songs, detailing seemingly conventional events. This, taken

with Giannaopoulous’ mainly hushed vocal approach, means the newfound forthright instrumental work provides contrast, and offers significant emotional bolt, anchoring the record’s impact with an impassioned insistence. A record that lives up to the name… nearly. 6/10 Tom Critten

MNDSGN — Snaxx (stones throw) Although the music of Los Angeles beatmaker Ringgo Ancheta on his latest tape tends toward J Dilla wholesomeness, cresting careful, warm instrumentals into gloriously deft collages, the vignettes on Staxx are in dialogue with many a genre: funk, neosoul, jazz loops, psychedelic R&B, even some blown-out ripples of soothing ambient.

Staxx’’s genesis is MNDSGN’s generosity of spirit. Ringgo Ancheta, the man behind the moniker, wanted to release a pair of stopgap tapes to hold ravenous fans over until the next studio album: last year’s Snax – a deliriously groovy, bouncing tape of remixes sprinkled with clipped voices of Nas and Method Man – and now Snaxx, a more considered, immersive follow-up brimming with the types of atmospheric productions Ancheta favours spinning in live DJ sets.

‘Spreads’ is sensual, smokeshrouded R&B, slathered in jazzy chords and funk bass that drip like candle wax; ‘Hydration Station’ is a Flying Lotus reminiscent masterturn in omnidirectional drum pattering and weird, freaky synthesizers; ‘Unnecessary’ sounds like something Madlib concocted for the new Freddie Gibbs album; and ‘Deviled Eggs’, the slinky lead single, lurches with a moody Kaytranada bass, making the dancing keys and warm, static-laden drums curl into one another’s arms.

The conciseness of each cut (averaging about 2 minutes) can be mislead-

ing: the interplay between idiosyncratic samples, gleaming synths and grimeencrusted drums has enough audaciousness (and artful mixing and sequencing) to make the tape unfurl like one of those dreams you’d rather not wake from. On the more jazz-centric cuts, the iconoclasticism of Robert Glasper and the pretty experiments of friend and peer Knxwledge come to mind; during the spunkier moments there are echoes of Dam Funk’s sun-bleached, velvet-smooth modern funk. As intended, there’s enough cosmic soul here to luxuriate your mind right through until MNDSGN’s next full release. 7/10 Colin Gannon

IDER — Emotional Education (glassnote) “I can’t stop looking in the mirror/ Do I really make that face?” opines the opening lyric to this debut album from North London duo IDER. It hints at the arrival of a scrapingly self-examinatory new auteur in pop music. Alas, the rest of ‘Emotional Education’ fails to deliver on any such promise.

Megan Markwick and Lily Somerville sing as the two splits of one voice, echoing and interlocking each other so tightly that they would be telling only half a story if somehow untangled. It is their most compelling trait; a polycephalous synergy that lends their songs a sense of shared origins.

Unfortunately, these eleven songs ultimately share far too much. They become difficult to separate even after repeated listens, a uniform voice of empowerment and millennial confession that is channelled through the same squeaky clean EDM sheen throughout.

Tracks are arranged according to the tried-and-tested roadmap to mainstream airplay success and one or two may well make it to that destination, especially

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Albums the earwormy ‘Busy Being a Rockstar’. It does, though, mean that the album comes across as too calculated and risk-averse, the production too unfussy and onetracked, which in an age of FKA Twigs, Lorde or even Billie Eilish is a level of caution too great to overlook.

When tracks like ‘Invincible’ and ‘Brown Sugar’ descend into the dreaded “whoah-oh”s-of-doom, the desired lung-busting banger status is far out of reach; the hooks neither sharp nor sweet enough to make an impact, the listener’s imagination left with too much of a task to fill in the voids that IDER have left.

4/10 Max Pilley

Kaina — Next To The Sun (sooper) Chicago’s current ‘scene’ gets nowhere near enough shine on this side of the Atlantic. A rich world that has gifted some of the most thoughtful modern hip hop and neo-soul projects, it’s home to the likes of Saba, Noname and Ravyn Lenae. It’s also home to KAINA, a relative newcomer, at least as far as her solo project is concerned. Having worked with some of her home city’s best talents behind the scenes already, this summer she steps out with a debut album that’s as rich and multi-faceted as the musical community from which it has been born.

The record is named Next To The Sun, and that’s precisely where you’ll want to be when you listen to it for the first time. A lavish fusion of neo-soul and RnB with elements of her Latin heritage weaving it all together, at its best Next To The Sun is, to quote the city’s most famous musical talent, an unmistakably summertime Chi’ album.

That’s not to say it’s all relentless optimism. The melancholic introspection and personal details that form opening tracks ‘House’ and ‘Ghost’ are a vital part

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of the immersion KAINA builds throughout. Even the album’s title track has a dark undertone with fuzzy guitar lines galloping under KAINA’s gothic vocals. As the album progresses, however, these clouds pass, and by the time it reaches its towering conclusion on ‘Green’, a track blessed with perfectly mixed horns, beautiful percussion and all manner of vocal goodness from KAINA, the sun is shining once more, maybe forever. 8/10 Mike Vinti

MOLLY — All That Ever Could Have Been (sonic cathedral / daliance) For an album inspired by the transcendent prestige of the natural world – the Alps looming large over Austrian duo MOLLY’s homeland – it’s hard to pin down precisely what’s so pedestrian about All That Ever Could Have Been.

Predictability has something to do with it. It sounds vast in all the ways post-rock is still yet to unlearn – by overegging tremolo guitars with enough reverb to mask a lack of imagination – and following the unjustly long opener ‘Coming of Age’, the rest of the album becomes much too familiar to contain anything remotely surprising (unless you really didn’t see some pensive piano coming from a mile away). MOLLY’s musical choices seem so thoroughly foreseeable that singer/guitarist Lars Andersson’s lyrical pondering over the inevitability of ageing appear momentarily novel, if increasingly generic over the course of the album’s preposterous one-hour length. If they set out to create something that almost literally ages the listener, then mission accomplished.

Andersson cites German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe “and generations before him” with regards to their artistic responses to the Alps, which typi-

fied the terrain as beautiful, yet fraught with volatility. To that extent, MOLLY may have at least one success: All That Ever Could Have Been is so stereotypically “pretty” as to be achingly dull. 3/10 Dafydd Jenkins

Trash Kit — Horizon (upset the rhythm) When Sylvan Esso’s Amelia Meath sang about being a “slave to the radio” her satirical track clocking in at three minutes thirty seconds (“three point three oh”) at least pandered to dance music’s tropes where, at its core with parodies aside, it was just another great pop tune. Trash Kit’s third album – their first in half a decade – looks like a normal album, too. Ten tracks range from two to four minutes long, and an eleventh is an open-wounded centerpiece at 7:16.

The many worlds of the band’s two Rachels – Aggs (vocals, guitar) and Horwood (vocals, drums) – alongside bassist Gill Partington, cross over to form the hearts of some forward-thinking projects in Bas Jan, Bamboo, Shopping, Rozi Plain and Sacred Paws, each of whom have undertaken their own sonic safaris of late. Horizon’s is primarily concerned with guitar music from Zimbabwe.

Coasting’ starts with Mbira rhythms melding into a full drum kit. It sounds like the Brazilian Batucada on slow-motion psychedelics. A makeshift gospel choir underscores ‘Sunset’, when joyful cyclical motifs collide with expeditious sing-speak vocals from Electrelaneera Aggs, in an altogether more forceful dialogue of marginalised rhythms from two very different worlds.

Through the course of the album, melodies that could have been dreamt up on a West African thumb piano weave into Trash Kit’s expansive soundscapes and duly stop at three minutes. It’s the seven-

Albums minute ‘Disco’ where the album comes alive though: tooting mantras in the vast expanse; lamellaphone beats build with a wonky saxophone; a cool guitar lick, restrained at first, billows into an explosion. It’s teasing just how good this album could be. 7/10 Tristan Gatward

Jesca Hoop — Stonechild (memphis industries) “We go look for dark” goes the mantra on ‘Free of the Falling’, the desert-folk fingerpicking opening track of Jesca Hoop’s fifth album proper, and the statement of intent could not be clearer: while previous Hoop outings haven’t exactly been cartwheeling exercises in frothy pop, ‘Stonechild’ is the Californiaborn Mancunian’s most brooding yet – the title is inspired by a museum exhibit of a woman who carried around her unborn foetus for 30 years – and all the more striking for it, conjuring images of environmental decay, doomed romanticism and psychological disaster all set to slithering and insidious musical backdrops.

Broadly, the songs fall into two categories. One finds Hoop purr, drowsy and laconic, over atmospheric, meditative, almost pagan-sounding processionals, in which muffled drums and backing vocals rise through the track as if emerging from some dusty basement: lead single ‘Shoulder Charge’ offers a cathartic sense of togetherness, as Hoop insists “empathy’s contagious” with a hymnal serenity, and ‘Passages End’ is a slinking and deceptively heavy piece whose superficially simple melody is cast in pleasingly disarming timbral and harmonic surroundings.

The other adopts a more bucolic tone, full of sinister fairytale storytelling, proverbs and prophecies, Hoop’s singing becoming more songbird than forest creature, and her playing more serene: the disconcertingly pretty interweav-

ing voices and production simplicity of ‘Outside of Eden’ evoke the purity of some bygone-era travelling family folk troupe, and stand-out ‘All Time Low’, with its elliptical construction, seesawing chords, and the sort of ardent, spirited singing reminiscent of Joanna Newsom, takes an instantly familiar form and renders it satisfyingly skewed.

Both song types suffer missteps – the former occasionally over-reliant on chug in the absence of anything more substantial (‘Red White and Black’); the latter at times too diaphanous and billowy to truly engage (‘Old Fear of Father’) – but none are fatal to ‘Stonechild’’s wonderfully engrossing overall fug. Indeed, when the two forms combine on closing track ‘Time Capsule’, with Hoop’s hush propelled by the simplest of basslines, the effect is quietly electrifying; an expert summation of this richly drawn, strongwilled record full of light and dark, sweetness and dryness, and gracefully broad multisensory intrigue. 8/10 Sam Walton

Outer Spaces — Gazing Globe (western vinyl) Cara Beth Satalino is an artist used to isolation. Raised in a rural New York town with a population of less than five hundred, she taught herself to play guitar by ear; a self-described “poor collaborator”, she formed Outer Spaces as a vehicle for solo expression.

Finding herself alone again during a break from a long-term relationship, Satalino’s sophomore record, Gazing Globe, sits in this solitude, serving as a journey of selfreflection and self-discovery.

Despite the turmoil that inspired its conception the record is upbeat and assured, and jam-packed with glistening guitar riffs and snug drum beats.

These are delicate, lovely indie-pop songs imbued with an inexplicable fortitude.

Satalino’s voice is controlled yet sensitive; her lyrics dance between confessional and deeply figurative. The charming ‘Truck Song’ is a love letter to the tour vehicles that have carried her, finding wisdom and instruction in their breaking down: “Get on your feet/ You’re on your own”.

Looking at the world in a gazing globe, what you see is reality, but distorted, augmented; and the record is as iridescent as images conjured by its namesake. “I saw your reflection in the gazing globe,” asserts Satalino on the title track, perhaps addressing herself.

7/10 Katie Cutforth

Zamilska — Uncovered (untuned) Natalia Zamilska found attention on these shores through her association with the Polish underground, but where many of those groups are (brilliantly) messy, psychedelic and expansive, Zamilska is concise, uncluttered and sharp.

Zamilska bristles at the labelling of her music as techno; this is understandable, Uncovered may use the same building blocks as much techno but pivots sharply from that genre’s most mainstream iterations. The third album in a trilogy, Uncovered is less heavy than on her previous records – instead, Zamilska replaces that sonic oppression with a clawing anxiety, synth lines wailing with dread across industrial 4/4 beats.

‘Dolls’, aired early in the record, is the biggest pivot from her previous work – breathy, special and transcendent. Field recordings are utilised here and at other points on the record too, where Zamilska has utilised the internet for found sounds, creating an uneasy collage of modern life’s disparate sonic detritus.

She’s been regularly compared to Bjork, and at points here she carries much of that artist’s vocal abstraction and

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Albums drama. It’s most notable on ‘Hospital’: “Hate, mud, fear, sleep, walk, kill,” she intones gravely. An accumulated weight of images line up alongside the propulsive, repetitive electro. It’s terrifying, and starkly powerful. ‘Alive’ sounds like mid-80s Chris & Cosey; ostensibly pretty top lines are punctuated by gnawing bass stabs. The effect, as across the record, is one of mounting stress and unrelenting panic. 7/10 Fergal Kinney

The Flaming Lips — King’s Mouth (bella union) If The Flaming Lips weren’t going to release an album best listened to inside an immersive art installation of a giant metal head – complete with LED lightshow inside its foam mouth – I’m not sure who else would’ve assumed that oddball responsibility.

Initially released as a limitededition, vinyl-only release for Record Store Day, King’s Mouth is alive with all of the psychedelic irreverence, scuzzy beats and melodious pop that’s become The Flaming Lips hallmark over the years.

Opener ‘We Don’t Know How and We Don’t Know Why’ has The Clash’s Mick Jones narrating in a dreamy, Ringoesque, Thomas the Tank Engine kind of way, there’s the Casio x Fisher Price beats of ‘How Many Times’ and the curiouslytitled ‘Feedaloodum Beetle Dot’ with Mick popping up again over clattering percussion and a lo-fi, bassline-heavy groove.

And with Jones’ narration prominent throughout, it’s strange to feel that Wayne Coyne is conspicuous in his absence beyond the album’s opening tracks. When he is at the forefront, though, he rises to the occasion in that dream-like way; that vocal straining ever so slightly from the back of the throat on the wistful ‘The Sparrow’ and the downbeat ‘Giant Baby’.

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None of it makes much sense but set against the album’s likeably languid pacing, there’s little time to dwell before you’re thrust into the operatic drama of ‘Funeral Parade’, drift into yet more Jones-narrated story time on ‘Dipped In Steel’ or thrown into the apocalyptic, interstellar noise of ‘Electric Fire’. Business as unusual, then. 6/10 Reef Younis

Titus Andronicus — An Obelisk (merge) Much has been made of Titus Andronicus’ sixth studio album being a back-to-basics job, in which the New Jersey group rediscover their punk roots and early-days raucous shows after ballooning into a band that make doubleLP rock operas and concept albums about the American Civil War. Accordingly, Bob Mould of Hüsker Dü produces, and a no-flab, four-dudes-in-a-room aesthetic is enforced that should, in theory, play to the strengths of a band once legendary for their viscerality.

Of course, the perennial danger of the stripped-back approach is that if you don’t look good naked, it’s going to show pretty quickly. And so it is with ‘An Obelisk’ – a group of songs competently recorded to sound as if being played in a satisfyingly noisy bar, but irreversibly tainted by crass mid-tempo chug (‘My Body and Me’), the sort of boilerplate boogie-woogie blues bollocks that embarrassed the late Oasis albums (‘Hey Ma’, graced with – why? – a punk-rock celtic jig coda) and, worst of all, ‘I Blame Society’, all cod-righteous pub-bore makes-you-think lyrics underpinned with corny rock-chops clichés.

Things improve slightly with the pleasingly pithy ‘Beneath the Boot’ (88 seconds long) and ‘Too Many Police’ (even better at just 69), where a little urgency is injected into the tedium, but

elsewhere it’s the same old route-one dinosaur rock. Apparently, “‘An Obelisk’ is built for the stage”; based on the studio version, you have to hope, for their sake, that Titus Andronicus are still good live.

3/10 Sam Walton

Normil Hawaiins — What’s Going On? (upset the rhythm) Following the 2017 reissue of Normil Hawaiins debut, the double album More Wealth Than Money, Upset the Rhythm continue their excavation into the group’s back catalogue with 1984’s What’s Going On?. If you want to know why Upset the Rhythm, not generally a reissue label, are quite so taken with one of post-punk’s best kept secrets, this album goes some way towards explaining that.

Normil Hawainns contained members who were accomplished musicians and members who had little natural talent – a combination of skill and naivety that’s produced some of our best radical music. Their structures were built from heavy improv – notable here on the storming ‘Ignorance is Strength’.

Aesthetically, their closest sisters were frenetic, idiosyncratic, post-Beefheart groups like Swell Maps or the Pop Group – a collage approach with an idea from jazz here, a bit of dub there, rip the whole thing up halfway through. They were early adopters too to the influence of Krautrock (check out the soaring, tribal utopia of ‘Big Lies’). This is radical collage sound music; it contains a 10-minute exploration on Hindu modes of existence. It contains a gorgeous, chiming tribute to the Paris Commune thinker Louise Michel.

Unfortunately, the Hawainns were victims of a changing London; Canary Wharf came up and the squat scene around which the band oscillated came

Albums down. As a consequence of this, parts of the album were recorded in rural Wales, giving the record an expanse that’s absent on its predecessor. Where next? We didn’t find out; this would be their last release proper. Thank heavens, then, for this killer reissue. 8/10 Fergal Kinney

Freddie Gibbs & Madlib — Bandana (columbia) “Odd couple” was a phrase circling Piñata five years ago. The team-up of mythical beatmaker Madlib and blunt thug rapper Freddie Gibbs left some (mostly white indie rap nerds) clutching their pearls and turntables before release. Madlib was an acclaimed crossover figure. His beats were mindopening, original and obviously excellent.

But they were often attached to playful and often-cartoony rap verses from artists like Kanye West and MF Doom, that softened the grit and edge lurking within them. Freddie Gibbs, on the other hand, did not give a fuck about softening his life story. The skit halfway through their new album says as much: “If you are not feeding me, fucking me or financing me, I do not give a shit.”

The gangster realism might have been new territory for Madlib at the time, but the two bring magic out of each other.

“Shit’s so real, I gotta use fake names/ Every time I sleep dead faces occupy my brain” says Gibbs on the long-awaited follow-up, Bandana. The focus on consequence in his bars matches the hidden depths of the instrumentals. The production is woozier and more off-kilter than used to be typical for Gibbs, soaking each verse in a layer of grime to match his coked-out aggression. He thrives, finding pockets of rhythm to ride over that few rappers could.

The duo’s styles twist around each other powerfully. ‘Half Manne Half

Cocaine’ opens with a hard-nosed and noticeably contemporary beat – unusual for a musician who often looks for dustiest samples to bring back to life. Halfway through they pivot into wild, loose, new territory, jazz breaks bending around Gibb’s snarled words. It’s goosebump worthy. For all the giddy, unruly energy, each song on Bandana flows together to make a poetic, poignant body of work.

From the masters-advice verses from Pusha T and Killer Mike on ‘Palmolive’, to the tender ‘Soul Right’, the pacing, detail and craft are overwhelming.

While most tracks feel like pieces adding to a whole, ‘Education’ featuring Yasiin Bey and Black Thought lives as a focused statement on injustice. Madlib lays down a weary piano and haunting soul vocal to set the tone. All three men deliver their best. “I may not be here, I’m feeling like I might just leave” they all warn in their verses, echoing each other’s words despite their perceived artistic differences. Whether “conscious” rappers, or gangster rappers, or indie darlings, they’re facing the same struggle. It’s the beauty of MadGibb captured in brief.

The uncomfortable misogyny and embarrassing moments of truthism from Gibbs (he’s an anti-vaxxer. Ugh.) are the only missteps, clashing with the album’s effort to elevate all black voices and reflect painful reality. But of course Gibbs doesn’t give a shit. If you can stomach that bluster, you’ll find another instant classic with nuance that’ll keep it there for decades. 9/10 Stephen Butchard

Mega Bog — Dolphine (paradise of bachelors) Erin Elizabeth Birgy has spent ten years under the guise of the intriguingly ambiguous moniker Mega Bog, which raises almost as many ques-

tions as her music. On her fifth record, titled Dolphine, Birgy navigates personal and anthropological trauma on a soundscape that is musically luscious, disruptive, and superbly unsettling.

Dolphine takes us to a strange and watery place. The title was inspired by the myth which suggests that when humans evolved from sea creatures some remained behind to live dolphin-like below the sea, ‘Dolphine’ acting as an imagined name for this hybrid civilisation. It is a story that, through Birgy’s compelling narration, feels simultaneously mythological and perfectly real.

On lead single ‘Diary of a Rose’ the opening melody is worked through somewhat chaotically before the steamy beat slips in to take control, creating an effect that is oddly reminiscent of Big Thief ’s irresistible ‘Shark Smile’. The musical composition is alive with mystic energy; it flows and weaves, reluctant to commit to a single theme, mood or even genre.

There is a feeling of floating, directionless, through a vast and unconquerable ocean, finding there all sorts of wonders – sometimes magical, sometimes frightening, altogether quite bizarre. Birgy’s vocals are sweet and a little manic, seemingly inseparable from the wild images conjured by her lyrics, where trolls, wizards and horses walk freely.

The credits of Dolphine are as expansive as its sonic variety – the record enjoyed collaboration with such industry figures as Meg Duffy aka Hand Habits and Big Thief ’s James Krivchenia, who recorded and mixed the album. Its also showcases a raw, breezy folk song called ‘Spit in the Eye of the Fire King’, its traditional structure and down-to-earth lyrics offering brief respite from the record’s volatility. The song was written and performed by Ash Rickli, whose sudden and premature death is felt tragically in his lyrics: “I’ll die in the light with a tear in my mouth / To extinguish the spark that put light by itself ”.

Although Dolphine is near impossible to pin down, Birgy surmises the record well on ‘Truth in the Wild’: “Energised by uncertainty, confusion, disruption/ This song’s for me.” 7/10 Katie Cutforth

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Albums Live The next natural step is not even a TV show but a meme that Malkmus might well have found on the Metro here, of Hulk Hogan playing rock guitar spliced with boomerang’d clips of Barak Obama dancing with Ellen Degeneres. To that one he says, “That was intense,” by which time he is at least being purposefully dry.

Bringing it home, his final clip isn’t even a clip; it’s the audio from an old porno (“Pretty sexy stuff ”). Twice he says to the room, “We’ve all got things to do today,” and yet I would definitely see this again.

Primavera’s bill featured a 50/50 gender split Primavera Sound Parc del Fòrum, Barcelona 30 May – 1 June 2019

We started by watching Stephen Malkmus give the weirdest talk of all time

The dates are way off here. Primavera hasn’t only run for three hot nights for years. It starts earlier in the week, earlier in the month, earlier in the year, with fringe events and shows (that especially support local acts) covering increasing distance across the city of Barcelona. Or it definitely starts the night before, with a lineup that is free to all; the festival’s gift to the people of Barcelona for embracing this world event over the last 19 years, this year featuring a well-worth-yourno-money set from Justin Vernon’s and Aaron Dessner’s Big Red Machine.

And it doesn’t finish on the Saturday anymore either – there’re closing parties the following day, and probably closing closing parties after that. Primavera Sound has become huge and welcomingly endless, which applies to its 3 key nights too, because making the complete run from 5pm to 5am each day makes you something of a worry to your friends.

So how do you write about all that without it becoming unwelcomingly endless? This year we’ve decided to break the long weekend down into the instinctive headlines as we found them, from the seemingly trivial to the moment FKA Twigs did the splits upside down 10 feet up a pole at 3am.

Primavera Pro is the festival’s day conference, situated in the CCCB in the centre of town near the university. It can be an effort to get to when you’ve been up all night, but that’s not us yet and Stephen Malkmus is this year’s ‘10 Favs’ guest, showing his favourite 10 clips from cinema that utilise music. Should be fun.

And it is fun. And weird.

Malkmus has both reinterpreted his brief and is completely underprepared for it. I suspect this because after his first clip plays (the intro to a totally groovy ’60s film called Mickey One) he turns to his film professor co-host and says, “What do you want me to say about that?”. It’s a sentiment that he echoes after almost every clip that he has chosen, and you should imagine him doing this in a turbo-charged Malkmus fashion, which is to say slack enough to constantly slump back into his chair and, at one point, yawn mid-sentence and completely ignore it.

At one point he says, “I just chose this clip because I like the film.” Others don’t feature music.

Things become particularly hilarious (and more for the right reasons) as he slowly veers from the type of cult cinema that most of us were expecting into moralistic made-for-TV movies from the 1980s about teenagers shoplifting.

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As well aware of this as music fans are, it’s worth not just repeating time and again but mentioning how successful ‘The New Normal’ was in practice. Of course it was.

For all those Primavera fans who baulk at the notion and refused to buy a ticket this year, I don’t believe that many of them were bothered by woman being equally represented as much as they were by the music that some of those women make.

Not only does such rockist snobbery fail to appreciate what a festival as big as Primavera is attempting to do here for gender equality, it falls down on considering the logistics of booking a festival of this size, which in itself plays to the favour of a rock fan. That is to say that with guitar music still predominantly being made by men, Primavera were brave enough to book outside of their usual stable to dedicate half of this year’s bill to female artists, including some of the biggest stars on the planet. But as the bill is so big, anyone who was truly offended but Solange, Robyn or Christine and the Queens could have easily given them a wide birth for Primal Scream, Interpol and Stereolab. If doubters were more worried about the fans that such pop acts would attract (presumably young, ‘non-serious’ music almost-lovers – I’m aware I’m judging/projecting here) they couldn’t have been more wrong. For a festival that has always cultivated an accepting non-aggy audience, Primavera 2019 felt ultra relaxed and inclusive in the field, primarily because so many of the big sets were so joyous.

photography by sergio albert

Albums Live ‘Nobody is Normal’ information points were set up around the site offering trained advice on identity and harassment, and a message of love was the most direct and common from stage too, spoken most beautifully by Janelle Monae and Christine and The Queens.

Plus, when Cardi B dropped off the bill a few months ago, it was Primavera’s chance to lose their nerve and appease their faithful, if not with the Pixies with someone like Patti Smith or St Vincent.

Instead they booked Miley Cyrus, and you’ve got to respect a move like that.

FKA Twigs did the splits upside down 10 feet up a pole at 3am This isn’t really the headline from Twigs’s performance – the rest of her performance is. In fact, the moment when she re-entered the stage in a bejeweled two-piece and recreated the acrobatic pole-dance from her ‘Two Weeks’ video to ‘Lights On’ – as incredible as it was, forcing a lot of the gobby crowd to finally shut the fuck up – was a little incongruous with much of what went before: Twigs, as often alone as she was with contemporary dancers in matching Les Miserables peasant blouses, mechanically juddering and occasionally locking in synch while her pin sharp voice sang arias about fucking. There are costumes and ‘scene changes’ and a solo dance piece with a samurai sword that cues a curtain drop to reveal a band on scaffolding borrowed

from Stomp’s West End run. And it’s all overwhelming and so purposefully conceived, and a little pretentious here and there, but in the middle of it is Twigs’s singing – the way that that pulls you toward the stage at three in the morning is the real headline.

There’s fake grass at the main stages now If you’ve not been to Primavera yet one thing you’ve missed is a main stage arena being in a rock quarry. There’s a lot of loose concrete at that end of the site (where the two biggest stages face each other) and I heard a rumour that last year there were a reported 21 Converse All Star fatalities because of it. Dominic Hayley, who was part of our writing team, even brought his Doc Martens shoes with him this year, and he’s a guy who likes to wear shorts. The point is, they’ve astroturf ’d it for our comfort, and for Dom’s embarrassment.

If we’re all honest, we liked Carly Rae Jepsen the most For all the talk of ‘pop’ being the thing at Primavera, the two artists who remain the most true to that increasingly vague term – in the sense that they’re not trying to be ‘cool’ pop – are Miley Cyrus and Carly Rae Jepsen. Miley’s show was a bit like watching Bon Jovi, and she boldly opened with ‘Nothing Breaks Like a Heart’ which

completely nullified her cover of ‘Joline’, by which time we were already making a b-line to see Low soundtrack the unravelling of the world in typical understated hysteria.

Nothing would have pulled us away from Carly Rae Jepsen though, who zipped through the best bits of her Emotion LP (I know, they’re all the best bits) with such momentum to propel us all through the new album cuts that she slipped in here and there. Just as you realised, ‘hang on, that song wasn’t on Emotion’, she’d play ‘Call Me Maybe’ or set off a confetti cannon, which I finally understand the appeal of. The trick is to stay up the night before, stand directly underneath it and cry.

We liked Janelle Monae the most too Directly after Jeppo on the facing stage Janelle Monae performed Dirty Computer live, with everything except for a confetti cannon.

She entered to the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey, rapped from a throne on ‘Django Jane’, had her backing dancers spray the crowd with Super Soakers on ‘Screwed’ and changed into her labia trousers for ‘Pynk’. There are other costume chances too, revolving around a monochrome and red colour scheme, while on ‘I Got The Juice’ three fans are pulled up to perform solo dance breaks which only encourages the rest of us to lose what little inhibitions we have left.

Late on, Monae takes the chance to speak openly about her sexuality and remind us that Donald Trump and his rhetoric is no more hers as an American as it is ours as Europeans living through our own conflicted time.

I was meant to go and see Suede an hour ago.

There was this new thing with the cups Because plastic is the planet’s cancer Primavera introduced a new initiative this year that seemed annoying at first but, yeah, fair enough, we all stopped being babies about it.

For such a simple idea it took us all

photography by timothy cochrane

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Albums Live a surprisingly long time to get our heads round the idea that all drinks cost an extra euro if you weren’t returning or refilling your cup. So your first drink is 6€, say, and every one after that is 5€, providing you bring the cup back and either refill the same one or swap it for a fresh cup.

The down side to all of this saving the planet is that you had to keep your empty cup with you when you weren’t drinking (so not very often then); and the up side was that there was hardly any litter on the floor, proved by the fact that if you could find 20 cups you were given a free beer, which, despite Dom trying all weekend, proved completely impossible.

Maybe if UK festivals adopted this system fewer of us would have been hit in the head by pints of piss, although maybe you can’t put a price on that type of fun.

Jarvis Cocker threw ‘a pack of badgers’ at his audience Introducing his new solo project JARV IS, Cocker seemed particularly excited to be back on stage at Primavera, following Pulp’s first reunion show here in 2011.

The new songs – including the increasingly manic new single ‘Must I Evolve’ – are all really quite good; performed as a blur of kitchy-yet-spacey show tunes about things like the joys of house music and other more typical Jarvisism, most true to form when he breaks

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from a brilliantly warped version of Pulp’s ‘His N Hers’ to talk about how his biggest fear is that bit of fluff that refuses to go up the hoover. He takes this conversation to the front row to vox pop their great fear to predictably hilarious effect when his deadpan Northern wit is met with bemused faces.

Before this and the rather beautiful closing swell of ‘Running The World’ from his debut 2006 solo album, Jarvis was tossing sweets into the crowd including “a pack of badgers”, which he was surprised to find in his pocket.

“Share those around,” he said, “you get five in a packet.”

There were two great new stages Primavera are great refiners of their site.

As a returning festival goer it means that sometimes an element you loved that was new last year has vanished again, but also that that part you couldn’t stand has probably become better too.

The Hidden Stage (it’s never been really hidden at all) has bounced around a fair bit but this year found its best manifestation yet as it took on the shape of a wood paneled circular saloon, like you’d find in the middle of a theme park, with booths around its edge. Other than the Barbican-sized permanent auditorium that is sparingly used for more orchestral acts throughout the festival,

the Hidden Stage is the only indoor space, which was perfect for Comet is Coming to deliver their cosmic prog jazz in at 2am on Friday morning.

Over in Primavera Bits (where much of the electronic music lives, and the lower bill hip-hop – Rico Nasty and her overzealous hype-man is particularly fun on the Adidas basketball court) an even better new stage has been build on the sand of the beach for the first time, looking directly out to sea. It’s here where Marie Davidson and Yaeji turn in brilliant sets with similar stage craft. The former plays increasingly hard techno compared to Yaeji’s easygoing house, but both split their time between mixing behind their decks and stepping out front to dance and, in Davidson’s case, get existential on us.

We ended as we started, with Malkmus To be fair to Malkmus, he was much more engaged by his show on the same day that he made us watch a meme of Hulk Hogan and Barak Obama. And to his credit he’d flown across the world to do that.

On the final night more people were talking about Malkmus as it was announced across the stage jumbotrons that Pavement would reform to headline next year’s festival. For some, that might happily suggest that normal service will resume in 2020. And indeed it might.

After all, how can any festival continue to book a bill like this year’s? It was absolutely massive, in size and stature. The ideology, you sense, is going to stick with Primavera. Some will no doubt be quick to point out if next year’s lineup falls short of a 50/50 gender split, punishing Primavera for at least doing it once more than any other major festival. The fact that it’s going to be so difficult is symptomatic of both societal and industry failings though, rather than it being one festival’s responsibly to keep making work or ignore it in the first place. What Primavera have ensured the press and their audience, though, is that they will continue to try. Some years that might mean 50/50, others 60/40, others countless fractions, but they are at least a huge festival with it at the front of their minds from now on.

photography by timothy cochrane

Albums Live Institute DIY Space for London, Peckham 8 June 2019

It takes the crowd a couple of seconds to realise that Institute have ghosted onto the stage. In a blue shirt aggressively stuffed into stone-washed blue jeans, lead singer Moses Brown looks kind of like an off-duty IT manager as he picks up the microphone from the stage floor. There’s not even time for a quick hello – the band just launch into it.

The standouts from a surprisingly artistic wave of post-punk acts coming out of Texas, Institute are something of a subversive force in hardcore. Rather than pummelling their audiences with wall-of-sound guitars, their particular brand of intensity stems from a uniquely twitchy, nervous approach to threechord punk. Political, always unexpected and constantly urgent, the group have recently become split between their native Austin and New York City, which has added a frustrated, existential tinge to their already nerve-shredded sound.

Tonight, the bulk of the set has been taken from new album Readjusting the Locks. Delivered with the intensity of factory workers rushing to meet a deadline, as soon as one song is finished another is racked up in its place. We receive a relentless conveyor belt of anxious, tightly wound punk that manages to notch up in energy as each song flies by. The crowd reacts in kind, going from a sea of gently nodding heads to a frantic yet well-natured jumble of flying limbs by the end.

Dialling up the dread has seen Institute dial back their more experimental influences. Tonight, Moses fronts the band with the energy of Germs singer Darby Crash crossed with a union organiser. Flailing around the stage and periodically launching into the crowd, his barked out lyrics take aim at neo-liberalism, dehumanising capitalism and modern-day fascism, and are offered without comment or explanation. On a blistering version of ‘Roll Music’ he even ponders the pointlessness of protest

photography by jamie macmillan

songs in his typical, frustrated yelp.

Just as the whirlwind of squalling noise appears to hit peak fury, the show comes in for a crashing end. As the band begin to shuffle off stage, the crowd start chanting something that I can’t quite make out; although I swear it sounds like ‘what the fuck?’. Giving a collective shrug, Institute gamely saunters back across the stage and launch into ‘Perpetual Ebb’, reigniting the circle pit.

They might in a bit of a weird place right now, but it makes for a hell of a show. Dominic Haley JOHN The Lexington, London 7 June 2019

The Crystal Palace two-piece on stage tonight is tentatively titled JOHN, a name they landed on in an ode to themselves. “I’m John, he’s John, we’re JOHN,” says one of the Johns. This isn’t the first time they’ve opened with this stroke, but they’re not going to leave it out of their biggest headline show.

The Lexington is sold out to launch new single ‘Future Thinker’. It’s taken from an album coming out this October, written about life on the fringes of a city.

This track in particular focuses on “the difficulties of negotiating an imagined view of the future” – it’s a feverish one to

follow-up their European tour in support of IDLES. A video showing only the escalator handrails of the London underground somehow possesses all the pent-up anger of working life. John Newton’s piercingly serrated vocals offset an aggressively smooth picture – it’s an uneasy watch as inner screams are softened by an unhurried trip down to the Northern line.

A banner hangs behind JOHN with a paraphrase of a Pitbull quote (“…we might not make tomorrow”). In the variegated lists of drummers that double up as frontmen, Newton does it with a little less melody than Hüsker Dü’s Grant Hart and a little less style than Squid’s Ollie Judge, but with more authentically agitated fury than the both of them. Johnny Healey on guitar barely moves for relentless strumming; industrial feedback dowses any need for a low-end bass. The new songs are full: ‘Western Wilds’ sees the room lift off, while intermissions from God Speed In The National Limit are introduced with fair warning as dance tracks.

The same crowd that was riotously banding around Girls In Synthesis’s support set – a thrashing mix of twotone and punk rock played for the most part within the crowd – has their attention fixed in something deeper when JOHN play. ‘Future Thinker’ was played a whole three songs in to the hour-long set of unreleased material; you don’t need to know the music to be occupied in its persuasion. Tristan Gatward

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Albums Film

Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love (dir. nick broomfield) A lot has been written about Leonard Cohen and Marianne Ihlen’s love story, but its genesis in the minds of most seems to be a shaky iPhone video of Marianne’s son reading a letter that Leonard sent to her on her deathbed. “Well, Marianne, it’s come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon. Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine.” Marianne passed away shortly after, followed by Cohen four months later.

Words of Love is a tender new portrait of the relationship that defined Cohen’s career, from start to end. They first met on Hydra in 1960; it was Cohen’s first personal commitment to a place, swapping the wellto-do Westmount Hills of his family home in Montreal for the remote mountainside in the Saronic Islands of Greece. He bought a house that contained little more than kerosene lamps and cold water, as he waited for civilization to catch up with him. He met Marianne, who was married to an erratically violent Norwegian writer, and they slowly fell in love with each other.

“I wrote this for Marianne. I hope she’s here, maybe she’s here. I hope she’s here. Marianne.” The words that opened his famous performance at the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970 echo through the start of the film. What’s striking about it isn’t the choice of footage that Nick Broomfield (a brief lover of Marianne’s himself) has collated into this makeshift quilt: Murray Lerner’s documentary of the Festival released a decade ago was a more insightful piece about what organisers call “the last great event”. Elsewhere, there’s a wedge of not-particularly-rare television footage taken from the Julie Felix Show of Cohen’s tears during a performance of ‘Stranger

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Song’, clips of his severe stage fright performing ‘Suzanne’ with Judy Collins, the negative press towards his confessional novel Beautiful Losers – “the most revolting book ever written in Canada” – and the acapella performance of ‘Memories’ on his tour bus; the one song from the Spector-era recordings that he didn’t disown.

These clips are as readily available as they come for anyone with even a brief archival interest in the work of Leonard Cohen. Their framing, however, is the most candid portrayal of the artist to date. It’s an honest report of his dependency on his mentor, Irving Layton, and Layton’s dependency on him. It picks at the dark recesses of his love affair with narcotics, the lustful side to the life of a lady’s man, and the breakdown of responsibility for his old life on Hydra, where fame and Marianne could not coexist. It shows the madness that Hydra instilled in many that tried to make a life there, but how for Marianne and Leonard the island unlocked a true equality between poet and muse that lasted a lifetime. Tristan Gatward

The Framing of John Delorean (dir. don argott, sheena m. joyce) People have been trying to make a biopic on John DeLorean for years. He’s the maverick auto engineer who quickly rose to the top of General Motors in the 1960s, only for his “Technicolor” lifestyle (DeLorean would fly from Detroit to L.A. at weekends to shag and playboy his way around Hollywood) to land him the sack in 1970. GM’s board were a fusty lot, and DeLorean would have his revenge by launching his own car company: the DeLorean Motor Company, responsible only for the DMC-12, known to us today thanks to Back to the Future.

Why those biopic attempts have always folded, I don’t know, but I suspect

it’s got something to do with their makers willing DeLorean’s story to be more dramatic than it actually is. That’s not to say that this tale of a visionary-turned-crook isn’t without its highs and lows, but to called it “Shakespearian”, as it is at the beginning of The Framing of John DeLorean, is something or an overstatement.

The biopic still doesn’t exist, but we do now have this strange documentary/ feature film hybrid, largely made up of archive footage, talking heads from those involved, and – quite inexplicably – behindthe-curtain scenes of Alec Baldwin playing the part of DeLorean for re-enactment scenes shot for this very film. So while we do get to see Baldwin as DeLorean (briefly), we more often get Baldwin in makeup explaining his ‘process’ and pontificating what drove his subject to becoming the man framed by the F.B.I. in a massive coke deal.

Unfortunately, the answer to that is both clear and unremarkable, and Baldwin – who appears to have been deeply invested in John DeLorean’s story for years – is simply over analysing.

Perhaps Baldwin’s involvement was the thing that got this movie over the line where so many others failed. The problem is that he’s both underused and in the way.

Or he would be if the arc of DeLorean’s life really was as complex and mysteriously motivated as is continually insisted.

The ‘but-things-were-about-to-getreally-crazy’ cliff hangers that propel The Framing of John DeLorean is an increasingly frustrating hook to be on, as it turns out that things were about to get mildly out of the ordinary, or perhaps shows like Making a Murder have skewed my idea of the sensational. To avoid this being a cliff hanger, look away now to avoid this spoiler: John DeLorean set up his car plant in Belfast in order to manipulate a subsidising deal with the Labour government; his cars were beautiful but shit; egotistical and desperate to stay in business he gave a big coke deal a go, but it was a pretty botched FBI sting operation, landing him on trial. Some embezzlement also went on.

The Framing of John Derlorean attempts to make this story of a rich businessman corrupted by greed seem more rarified than it is. Stuart Stubbs

Support Loud And Quiet from £4 per month and we’ll send you our next 9 issues

2019 marks the 14th year of printing Loud And Quiet as an independent magazine that we’ve always given away for free.

As all of us are constantly reminded, it’s getting harder for publishers (physical and digital, and especially independent ones) to stay in business, which applies to Loud And Quiet more now than ever since we got carried away with printing on expensive papers, and since Facebook and Google aggressively cornered the world of targeted marketing. So, yeah, it’s our own fault as much as it is Mark Zuckerberg’s, even if we have always wanted to print the best magazine we possibly can.

At the end of last year, though, we needed to start to really think about how to support the cost of what we do. The options were hardly plentiful, especially once we counted out certain things that would make our magazine miserable. One though, we hope our readers agree, made the most sense.

We are going to keep Loud And Quiet free, but to those who really enjoy what we do, we’d like to ask you to subscribe to our next 9 issues over the next 12 months. The cheapest we can afford to do this for is £4 per month for UK subscribers. If you really start to hate what we do you can cancel at any time.

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Interview

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Interview

Home and rain at last

Fontaines D.C. return to Dublin – their muse – as the success story of early 2019, with tales of Jimmy Fallon and a need to reassess,

by Tristan Gatward. Photography by Tom Porter 45

Interview My flight to Dublin that morning was delayed so that the Queen could have breakfast with Donald Trump. His chopper landed as we were about to fly to the emerald isle, coffee and soggy tomato breakfast sandwich in hand. A fourteen-year-old kid in the queue in front of me was wearing a t-shirt that read, “I’m feeling like a style icon”, with a smaller line of text underneath: “sorry, but everything you like I liked four years ago”. It’s an arbitrary length of time for smugness to settle in. You can’t help but feel that the world is changing in an immeasurable way. Baby blimps and nine-foot high Presidential potty dolls line the streets of London, while ten-year-olds listen to as-yet-unwritten Irish punk songs.

Fontaines D.C.’s guitarist Carlos O’Connell lives a fiveminute walk from the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the gallery at The Royal Hospital Kilmainham which we head straight to upon my arrival. He’s walking around the courtyard clapping his hands together, smiling to himself as the sound reverberates off the stone walls and bounces back inwards. Pinned on his bright peach jacket beneath his tinted sunglasses is a flagrantly big white badge, the kind that looks from afar like something from an above-your-paygrade Woolworths birthday card. “ABORTION IS NORMAL,” it says, in striking block capitals.

The resolute political sentiment complements the grey skies above us, with Carlos’s flowing surf-rock hair adding only a little sunny L.A. souvenirism. Bassist Conor “Deego” Deegan, too, wears stickers on his jacket decorated with coat hangers and Amnesty’s #NOWforNI decriminalisation campaign. The quintet’s social riptide against Ireland’s politicians exists far beyond their debut album. “You’ve got more than enough opinions with these guys to need me with you too,” laughs drummer Tom Coll as he runs off to set his kit up for later. Singer Grian Chatten will join us later.

We continue walking through the gardens at Kilmainham, past neat box hedges and topiary, and through a formal space that was once used as a physic garden for the Hospital, with variegated medicinal herbs and apple trees. At the foot of the gardens is a colossal statue of a rabbit beating a Bodhrán, while the obelisk monument The Wellington Testimonial – amid all its historical significance thought also to be the giant’s penis in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake – looms overhead. We run into Carlos’s housemate, who went to an installation inside the IMMA recently that was meant to provoke anxiety and unease; it was just a few desks and chairs sitting with as much artistic acuity as an office block at the end of a working day. The giant’s penis did it for me.

In a particularly arched corridor, two gothic mahogany benches line either wall and give us a place to sit. We pull them together – a lot heavier than anticipated.

“I’m fucked,” says Conor Curley. The other guitarist in the band has a cooler look about him, chiseled face and gravelly voice with big sunglasses and a cigarette poking out from between his lips. “We shouldn’t have done that festival.” This specific festival was in France, following a month-long tour across America and Mexico. “It was a good festival,” Deego

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says, “but it was just too much. We’d landed in Dublin for one day then off to France at 7am. We did Mexico City, Jimmy Fallon and then four weeks on the road with IDLES. Driving twice a day for a total of ten or twelve hours, getting five hours sleep if we were lucky. Not to be overly negative or anything but it was dragging.”

—Chat show hosts are wax moulds with perfect hair — Curley and Carlos exchange a brief smile, still letting their American television debut from late last month settle in. “It was pretty easy like, it wasn’t actually as taxing mentally as I thought it was going to be,” says Curley. Their last-minute booking on Jimmy Fallon isn’t on YouTube anymore, but it went well. “I mean it was kind of strange. We were just sitting backstage, no one really came up to us or talked to us, we were all just in our own zone. Deego got a really good haircut.”

“Yeah, Grian gave me a haircut. It was really long and scraggly and I was like, ‘fuck do I really wanna go on looking like this?’ Grian said, ‘look I’ll give you a haircut man’, and found some scissors. But like, those big kitchen scissors. It turned out alright, not completely level. I was on the phone to my mam and she kept saying, ‘your hair looks very uneven.’ Like, fuck you mum. Say that to Grian!”

“It did eat into our three-day holiday that we were meant to have in Mexico,” Carlos says with a mock sigh. “So, you know, we turned down the holiday for Fallon. We never had that holiday.”

They didn’t get to meet him, either. “Only that second at the end of the video where he shakes our hands,” Curley says.

“I was just like… This man has literally just come out of a TV. He is in front of me right now. He was so pristine. I have never seen someone who looks so pristine.” He still has the Madame Tussauds look about him? “Yeah, that’s the exact way to describe it. I mean his hair, even at the back, like. It was perfect.

It formed this perfect dome.” The scariest thing was just playing next to his 12-piece house band, The Roots: “These guys are wizards. And I’m here playing, like, three chords.”

“The studio is smaller than you’d think it is,” says Deego.

“For me, when we went on stage that was the most surreal thing we’ve done so far. I didn’t think it’d be like that after doing the soundcheck. When you’re actually in that show that you’ve been watching on the TV green room whilst they’re shooting it.

You know, it looks like a TV show. TV world. And then you’re inside it.”

Curley continues as Deego picks a small mosquito off his glasses. “For me I am really comfortable playing to that size of crowd. But like, you have ideas of the performance going beyond that back wall, into people’s fucking homes, on their fucking couches.” As I ask if they were tempted to over-act for the spotlight, beer bottles on guitar frets and so on, they say the opposite: they had to trim off verses from ‘Boys in The Better Land’ in order to adhere to the timeslot they were given. “I mean, it made sense hypothetically, but we hadn’t rehearsed it whatsoever at all.”

Interview

“Boys in the better land is really just a sales pitch, trying to criticise the motivations of the people trying to sell you something�

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Interview — The IDLES effect — Fontaines D.C. appearance on one of America’s biggest talk shows only accentuates the rare, rapid and unquestionable success of their debut album, Dogrel – a record allergic to anything but five star reviews on its release in April. This sort of universal acclaim that recalibrates the very term does occasionally happen, but not to punk bands, except for last year, when IDLES reached similar heights, releasing via the same record label and touring with Fontaines, no less. “We met before we signed to Partisan on our first booking ever,” recalls Carlos.

“It was a show with Metz and this band called IDLES. We were excited to be playing with Metz and then, you know, then we saw this other band. It was the first proper booking we had. We even had to lie about having a booking agent because they wouldn’t book us without one. Oh no, yeah we do have one, he’s just out of office at the moment.” Carlos’s agent accent is still uncanny; it comes across as a slightly weathered joke, with enough relief to see it’s been a well-versed one. “Nice people you know, got on.

Bumped into them a couple of more times, signed to Partisan. It felt like we’d known each other for a while. But that’s what was good about this tour, to really get to know them.”

Post-punk is the new rock’n’roll, you know; it’s the kind of meaningless phrase that’s added to guitar music to say it’s good.

It’s been banded on Fontaines D.C., mostly because they’ve share the bill with last year’s big breakout success stories. But at times they’re a bit more like Flogging Molly than Protomartyr.

“I mean, the word punk is fine. It’s post-punk that’s weird.

It’s almost become so meaningless now that you’re just saying it’s music. It’s as descriptive as saying ‘guitar band’,” says Deego.

“The idea of punk is an ethos that we have: it has to be concise, useful, pragmatic, all parts have to have a reason for being there and have to make sense. It can’t be too indulgent.”

Deego cameos a Velvet Underground tee in the video for ‘Too Real’; if lead singer Grian Chatten had a pound for every Ian Curtis reference that’s been made, he’d really be “about to make a lot of money”, as the song claims. “In terms of what people we see ourselves as, I think we’d like to see ourselves as a rock’n’roll band instead of a punk band,” Carlos tells me. “Just because of what that means to us. We’re more about Lou Reed and The Modern Lovers than we are about the Pistols.”

— For what died the sons of Roísín? Was it greed? — Dogrel’s release opened with some lines about the Gaol next door to where we currently sit – English owned and recognised for the detainment and murder of Irish revolutionaries.

Anglophobia is growing in Ireland, but within a skeptical and weathered portrait of Dublin Fontaines still painted a new sort of secularism on top of Irish national identity.

That evening in the Dublin rain, the crowd multiplies for Fontaines D.C.. It’s their first open air show and they look like homecoming heroes of sorts, a couple of confident minutes late to take up their pitch on stage. Walk-on music’s a funny game;

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some choose untested new music, others ‘The Eye of the Tiger’ (don’t watch those others). The literary allusions splattering Dogrel and its deep-seated partisan aggrieves find harmony in a few stentorian minutes and thick Dublin slurs that chime out with a recording of the Liffy Bard Luke Kelly’s poem ‘For what died the sons of Roísín?’.

“That was Deego’s idea,” says Grian as we talk after the set.

The Dubliners’ frontman wrote a few poems throughout his solo career; this apoplectic monologue calling out his city for selling to the highest bidder feels as apposite thirty years on. “He just

“Everywhere else is just Dublin with a twist” thought it was really relevant, really pertinent, the way that things are in Dublin at the moment with the housing crisis and the crush, and the fact that all the landlords are politicians and are pricing everyone out of our own city. Just fucking up the country you know, for profit, as leaders often do. The line is ‘For what died the sons of Roísín? Was it greed? You know. We’re massive Dubliners fans. So many of his lines, as a true craftsman of poetry, sound like they were unearthed from thousands of years ago. I want to be able to do that.”

Grian mentions the other literary minds that have made it into the record, admiring Brendan Behan’s wit – dogmatic in its principles – Yeats’ laconic attention on universal themes, and the themes of entrapment and inertia in Joyce’s collections of fifteen short stories, Dubliners. “In each one a character has an epiphany where they realise their circumstance and that it’s unlikely it’ll change,” says Grian. “There’s the pain of hope throughout the story, which subconsciously really influenced the album. Hope into entrapment into doom.”

The folk traditions really root themselves in the closing track to the album, ‘Dublin City Sky’. It sounds a little like a mournful New Years Eve sing-along, for the down-and-outs and outcasts. The review of the album that I wrote of Loud And Quiet likened it to a tune that felt excavated from the land it was written about; you could imagine a drunken Shane MacGowan disfiguring it down the Dublin backstreets, whiskey in hand, in place of ‘Rainy Night In Soho’; you could imagine him whistling it to himself as he makes his Sunday morning scrambled eggs.

“That song to me feels like the early hours, the small hours walk home,” says Grian. “Like, a super fatigued, inspired reflection on existence that comes after all the energy and romance.

That song is, as well as being an ode to Dublin, you know, a lamentation. It’s a death song about Dublin’s culture being threatened by gentrification and the growing materialism.”

Interview It’s a theme that runs through the heavier moments of their debut, too. Rent prices are allowed to grow as the majority of landlords are the same politicians that set the property laws.

‘Boys In The Better Land’ procures old advertising tags. Deego calls it a song about scrutinising the way people sell things and market things to you. “Refreshing the world of mind, body and spirit is an old Coca Cola slogan,” he says, “and boys in the better land is really just a sales pitch, trying to criticise the motivations of the people trying to sell you something, and the deception within advertising.”

“It’s a very general statement,” adds Grian, “just wanting a life that you can’t have. It’s about creating a sense of desire, people feeling unsatisfied and commodified. But I’ve always loved Dublin. Almost all the time that I lived in Dublin, I appreciated it. And I feel homesick when I’m away for a long time. I still love Dublin, you know. I don’t necessarily think the grass is greener. I see places as ‘Dublin but this’ and ‘Dublin but that’.

Everywhere else is just Dublin with a twist.”

—‘More than just an Irish band’ — The liberal nationalism and fondness that ties Fontaines D.C. together is still a marginalised pride; the music scene in Dublin falters from a lack of homegrown support and inner-validation. Local critics will come pouring to an Irish band, but only after they’ve had recognition from somewhere else. The responsibility sits from within for them; on their most recent tour around Ireland Fontaines brought along Just Mustard, another Irish group (albeit one that’s aligned more to a Mezzanine-era Massive Attack than The Fall-esque camaraderie of Fontaines).

Their debut album, Wednesday, then got nominated for RTE Choice Awards’ Album of the Year (an Irish and Northern Irish equivalent to the Mercury Prize).

“Yeah it got nominated. It would’ve only got genuine attention from Irish press and Irish awards though after it got attention in Britain. To be seen as successful in the Irish music industry you have to be successful somewhere else.” There’s not a lot of bitterness in the way Deego speaks of it, but with a fatigue indicative of a scene that’s not supported its own kind. “People don’t think you’re good based on your music; they think you’re good based on what you’ve done. It’s crazy. And they would deny this but we’ve been in bands for a long time over here, we’ve seen how it works.”

“It was the same with us as well,” says Curley, “until we got away. Until we got some attention from outside. No one thought anything of us for a long time. How long were we playing ‘Chequeless Reckless’ and ‘Hurricane Laughter’ and no one gave two shits? People are just very condescending to you. If you’re just lads in a band playing around Dublin, then that’s all people will see you as. They’ll never listen to the songs as being something affecting unless, like, ‘oh, they played in London, this must be music.’”

“I think the crowds are actually changing a bit,” Carlos says, substantiating now there’s a little more international attention on a couple of Irish bands. “I think the crowds are a

bit more open, and a bit more willing to go to gigs. There’s this resurgence of people going to gigs, which we didn’t have until we started getting attention from the UK. Now everything’s being taken more seriously, because now anyone could be ‘more than just an Irish band’. Before, no one was going to be ‘more than just an Irish band’.”

— The importance of googly eyes — “You forget what it’s like at home,” says Curley. “It’s not like we got a break from all that, mind. America had some of the most harrowing sights, especially around some of the venues we played. You see it a bit differently when you come back, though.

It breaks your heart a bit more.” He talks through how much more exaggerated the divide has become between rich and poor in Dublin, just in the six months they’ve been away. You can see it in the new venues and bars that have opened up; the creation of new spaces to put on the property market, many of which are literally little more than a small shed at the end of the garden.

“We have this perspective from the outside that America’s fucked,” says Deego. “It’s fucked politically and everyone is obese, you know. There are all these stereotypes that make you wonder why anyone would go to America. And then you’re there and you travel through it and find out things you can only

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Interview

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Interview see when you’re there. Some parts are amazing; the difference between New York City and Cleveland is amazing. You see the fucked up parts that you already know are fucked up, and they’re more fucked up than you were told they were. And then you see the parts that are great, that you didn’t hear about at all.”

The sociopolitical edge is a sharp side of Fontaines D.C.: ‘The Lotts’ is about a street no more than 50 meters long where you can’t walk for used syringes and ‘Big’ is a reclamation of nationalism, while ‘Chequeless Reckless’ redefines idiots, sellouts and dilettantes for the digital era. On the other hand, these are also songs you might have heard bedded behind compilations of John Barnes’s best goals, or the highlights of a nil-nil draw between Crystal Palace and Watford on Match of the Day. They recently made an appearance on Soccer AM, too: Carlos missed the ball when trying to hit a volley and Deego performed ‘Too Real’ in a Mayo GAA jersey. Gaelic football is not far off soccer, after all.

“Yeah, on the other hand it’s just a couple of lads trying to score a penalty,” says Curley.

“To be overly serious is to be completely ridiculous. Like a pretentious idiot.” Deego laughs. “That’s the reason Dogrel as an album name worked so well – we never wanted to be those people to take themselves so seriously. It’s a put down at the same time as trying to put ourselves into the history of Irish poetry. Even in the video for ‘Too Real’ where we have the video with the googly eyes on, that’s because – well, imagine if we didn’t have them on.”

We’ve already talked about the façade of advertising and the principles behind what the band is selling, but a sudden flash of realisation comes across Carlos and Deego that googly eyed merchandise was a real lost opportunity. “We could have made them smell like mint or something and you could hang them up in the car.” Later Deego enthusiastically tells a less-than-interested Grian that they should have bought white beach balls and drawn eyes on them, for the crowd to bounce around their heads as ‘Too Real’ played.

“There have actually been people throwing ping pong balls on stage with the eyes drawn on them,” Curley says. “It’s fucking hilarious. We’ll just be playing and then have a ping pong ball bouncing off your head. The lads that do that in the UK… I love those guys.”

One of the more poignant moments of Fontaines D.C.’s discography comes in the music video for ‘Roy’s Tune’, a heartfelt short film of a young Irish lad balancing the responsibilities of a newborn kid. “That video was just the idea of the guy that made it – Liam Papadachi – he just approached us with this idea and we thought it was really strong. And he did an amazing job on it.

I suppose the kind of emotions that he found for the video seem to really work for the track. Most of the videos we have a direct input,” Curley says, “that was just something we wanted to do as a sort of adventure. See what they change, what different angles are brought out of the song. What colours and tones. We were really happy with that. We just didn’t want to go down the route of doing a performance video. It was really nice to work with him.”

“It makes the song stand alone more,” says Deego. “Again, it clarifies what we’re actually selling – we’re not giving away our faces, you know. We’re actually just putting out songs.”

Before Dogrel’s release, seven of its eleven tracks had previous releases as double A Side singles in 2018. Most were re-recorded for the album, faster, rawer, more in line with how the live shows had evolved. It was less power in restraint, more urgency of argument. For all that Grian exudes the occasional air of a prowling Ian Curtis, there’s then the switch of power to desperation, shaking a little, like he’s just come out of a long day’s research.

“It wasn’t trying to take them out of the old space. It was nothing cynical,” Deego assures me. “We wanted to do a live record, and record everything live to tape, and to do that we had to re-record them. The version of ‘Boys In The Better Land’ that we first released was a completely different song to how we started to play it live. It was way more fun to speed it up, we think it sounds better this way. And we did different versions of ‘Chequeless Reckless’ and ‘Hurricane Laughter’ to give them a purpose as well, you know. They already existed in one particular space and had a purpose there, you know, but we wanted to change that purpose.”

“I think it’s difficult to reflect on it,” says Carlos. “I mean in any objective way. I think we’ve just heard too many opinions about it now to be able to reflect about it in our own ways.”

Carlos says that in his own way he tries not to analyse Dogrel at all anymore. “We thought about it loads when we were writing it, and loads when we made it, and now everyone else has formed their own opinions, but I think we’re all just thinking about the next record now. And how we can develop that in the same way that we made the first one. So in all that noise we’re getting time to reflect on something that no one else has heard.”

— Free like a rat is free — No new songs make their way onto the set list that evening; it’s everything the crowd knows and anticipates. As Grian yells “Dublin in the rain is mine”, the hundreds of ponchos and dead umbrellas wash the other spectators’ backs with a renewed animation.

Sitting down with Grian the next day, he looks a little exhausted. “I find a lot of it very hard currently, you know.

I don’t see myself as the kind of person who’s suited to being in the public eye, and it’s quite jarring because I believe that fundamentally I’m a purist when it comes to writing. I am doing it for writing’s sake, that’s all the reward I ever need. Everything else is a by-product of that. It’s unnecessary for me, you know, the intenseness of it all. I’m quite a shy person. It takes it out of me a bit.

“You know, it’s kind of nice to be back in the rain, though.”

He speaks with a soft laugh – aware that our small talk about the weather is actually leading to something a little bit bigger. “The weather yesterday was awful but when you’re away for so long – and I mean the weather was pretty good in America – you do

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Interview

“I don’t want to be the band that writes about Ireland for the rest of our lives” miss it. We’re being moved around so much at the moment we’re constantly busy, it’s not just something we really have a chance to think about. We can’t allow ourselves to imagine or dream about having peace and quiet because we’d go mad about the fact that we don’t have it.”

It’s the old John Lennon conundrum: when you’re rich and famous, can you write with candor about the stories of the streets? Granted, they’re not rich and famous yet, but the local celebrity that comes from their proud homegrown liberal nationalism is a world away from playing in Fontaines D.C. last year. Curley mused yesterday that writing another record about Dublin would “end up being a fucking Dropkick Murphys or Floggin Molly album”. Dogrel has been lauded for its working tableaus of life in Dublin; it might be a view of the city steeped in an outcast’s anonymity that they won’t have access to anymore.

“If I was trying to continue in the vein of writing about Ireland then it would be tough,” Grian admits. “It would feel wrong. In a sense it’s good that we were away from Ireland after writing such a quintessentially Irish record. It forces us to write about different things, you know. I don’t want to be the band that writes about Ireland for the rest of our lives. We don’t actually get to see that many things, you know – in most cities we see the venue, the van and the bar that’s around the corner. The world that we’re writing about for our next album is probably mostly the world that exists within oneself, because that’s what we’re dealing with. That’s good craic.

“When we got home from America, we had one day at home, jet-lagged. Apart from napping, I wrote a new tune. It’s nice to know that even after a six-week tour and not sleeping for two days, I got home and as soon as I closed the door behind me all I wanted to do was write. That was nice to still have that.”

That level of freedom they found in their anonymity is still there, Grian says, even if it’s now being fueled by a lack of caring instead of their relative status. “I’ll say this; we feel as free to do whatever we want as we felt before the first one. Before the first song. Before the first piece of press. We still feel that spontaneity that comes from no one having heard your music before, which is a beautiful thing. It means we’ve made it through all the publicity with our creative minds unscathed by it. There isn’t one iota of anxiety about what other people will think or expect. Because

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of that I think it’s liable to be different. I wouldn’t even say that’s a brave thing. We’re going to make this album because we love making music and we’re going to make it because we have to.

“We haven’t really been in Dublin since our profile’s picked up. Like, fuck all. I’m aware of the fact that the Dublin we were writing about on Dogrel was a Dublin seen through the eyes of people who had absolutely fuck all, and were the scum of the fucking earth. We had rent that we couldn’t afford, full time jobs on minimum wage. You know, I had a boss who clicked his fingers at me instead of calling my name. We’d just kind of write and drink and ramble around the place. We were very much free, in the sense that a rat is free. That’s the Dublin that we saw, and we don’t have to do that anymore.

“We’re luckier and we’re better off in the sense that we’re doing what we love to do. But there isn’t that desperation that lends itself to creativity and gives you a lot of energy as well. It makes you hungry for everything.” The rain comes down again, we’re soaked. This doesn’t feel like a portrait of a happy band, necessarily, but a band that’s started to recognise the value of home, for its muse and its familiarity. “Once we spend some time in Dublin I think we’ll see it differently,” he says. “I think that’s a sad thing in a way. I think I will miss having that freedom that comes from being a rat.”

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Essay

Break the loop

Daniel Dylan Wray looks into the resurgence of the saxophone, from the rise of new jazz to the guitar groups sick of the stale band setup

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not been limited to just the rebirth of jazz though: more often its sounds can be heard coursing through records by bands and artists in the rock, indie, alternative and electronic fields.

Listen to recent releases that span multiple alternative genres, from the likes of Fat White Family, Cate Le Bon, Aldous Harding, Viagra Boys, Drahla, Crack Cloud, Jenny Hval, Black Country, New Road, US Girls, Squid (although technically they use a cornet, but same point), and they are all connected by one thing. Clearly the sax is having something of a moment in the world of alternative music, but why and where did it come from?

— Gainful employment — “Up until maybe 2014 I hadn’t been asked to do any sax work outside of where you’d probably expect to hear it: jazz big bands, ensemble bands, quartets etc,” says Christopher Duffin, whose sax work can be heard on records by Drahla, Virginia Wing, Xam Duo and Hookworms, as well as on stage with James Holden. “I kind of had a double life of playing the kind of gigs you don’t really tell too many people about whilst playing keyboards in bands. It wasn’t until Matt Benn [Xam Duo, Hookworms]

Photo by Yu Igarashi

Over the last few years there have been some big shifts in contemporary music. Grime has reached such popularity and omnipotence that one of its leading voices can now headline Glastonbury, whereas ten years ago such music was being banned from London venues; pop has grown to become more eclectic, experimental and dominating than ever; Americans discovered rave music in the way only America could and turned it into a multi-billion dollar industry; earnest young men with acoustic guitars grew beards and turned mediocre open mic night outpourings into a plague; the conversation about the death/relevance of guitar music continued to rage with incessant banality; and jazz came back with a bang.

Perhaps of all these shifts and trends the one people saw coming least of all was the resurgence of jazz – especially amongst younger listeners. Blasts of saxophones were no longer confined to wonky buskers honking out ‘Baker Street’ or the connotations attached to the saccharine easy listening of Kenny G. Instead, kids in bedrooms and practise rooms everywhere began incorporating various styles, from super smooth grooves to Alice Coltrane-inspired cosmic mantras, into lively brassled cross-genre eruptions. The upsurge of the saxophone has

Essay got in touch to see if I fancied doing something that I got busier with the saxophone. That was an eye-opening period; I was kind of shocked yet pleasantly surprised that people would stand and watch us improvise for 30 minutes. People seemed really into the saxophone and from there I got a bunch of offers to play with people.”

When William Doyle f.k.a. East India Youth returned in 2018 with new track ‘Millersdale’ – expanding on his previous palate of electronic-leaning experimental pop music – it came loaded with a riotous sax solo. His forthcoming new single also features the instrument. “I started my new album so long ago now and at the time it felt radical to include sax but now it looks like I am the biggest bandwagon-hopper,” he says of the instrument’s sharp rise in recent years. “I think what’s happened is that on both sides of the Atlantic there’s been a bit of a boom for a number of reasons. Post-To Pimp A Butterfly, everyone suddenly finds out about Kamasi Washington. I remember getting The Epic around the time it came out and it was great.

There was a similar grandiosity to it that I was also trying to work into my own music at the time, and the saxophone felt like a great instrument for conveying the kind of feeling I was going for; expressive and dynamic – almost vocal in its delivery. It’s an instrument that can both cut through and introduce chaos simultaneously. Not many instruments can do that.

“That Kamasi Washington record was very well received and it felt like that was the start of a new epoch for that instrument, and people’s regard for contemporary jazz in general.

Then, of course, London was becoming a hotbed for all manner of great players: Shabaka Hutchings, Nubya Garcia, Cassie Kinoshi, Binker Golding, Chelsea Carmichael… the list goes on.

All these brilliant young players who were part of this network of musicians. It felt like the most exciting new scene to happen in the capital for years. That felt a little cemented to me when the We Out Here compilation came out on Brownswood. It felt like there was a real document then.”

Using sax in a guitar-led/non jazz context is of course not a revolutionary new act – it’s existed for decades. From Roxy Music to The Stooges, from James Chance to A Certain Ratio, it’s played a role whether as a means to lift melody in graceful accompaniment or to explode in itchy bursts to emphasise the pounce of anti-rhythms. But the feeling of it having real momentum at the moment feels inescapable. Lewis Evans of Black Country, New Road (easily one of the most exciting new bands in the country that are capitulating genre convention) sees this too. “I think this is a bit of a boom period,” he says. “I think it’s becoming much more present as we’re all trying to move away from the conventional and boring guitar band setup. Having an instrument like the sax in your band is an easy way to break that loop.”

Dan Leavers plays keys in Comet is Coming, one of the most pivotal bands at the forefront of placing sax front and centre in music again, but he too is a sax player and features heavily on the latest Trash Kit album. He thinks the image makeover the instrument has had is maybe also to do with the general cyclical nature of music. “In environmental science we are taught that

populations of animals control themselves,” he begins. “If there is a rise in rabbits then the foxes gorge themselves and grow in number, only to make food more scarce in a self-organised regulatory system. Maybe it’s a bit like that – when something gets too naff nature steps in and now we can have another go.”

Whilst Trash Kit’s upcoming (and greatest) album, Horizon, is their most sax-heavy to date it’s an instrument that the band have been playing with for their entire existence. “I think it is trendy currently but I have no idea why,” says Rachel Aggs. “I’ve always loved sax, especially within the context of guitar music. I think it’s just such a winning formula. Bands like Essential Logic and X Ray Spex have always been a big inspiration for Trash Kit so I think we’ve been blissfully unaware of any new trends and have just carried on doing what we want.”

Although she does feels attitudes towards the instrument have changed somewhat. “We had saxophone on our first ever record in 2010 and we got a couple of funny reviews – writers were like, ‘is this ska? I think it’s ska,’ in a negative sort of way, like they were trying to out us as secretly uncool. I love a bit of ska and two tone and I actually think the UK should celebrate that era of music more as a time when things were really a lot less segregated in terms of black and brown people in punk than they have been recently. I guess things come in waves though; perhaps sax got a bit overused in the ’80s in a lot of pop music and its taken the cool people a while to come round to it again. The rest of us have just been carrying on though.”

— The US indie effect — Whilst sax in some of the UK bands leans more towards the lineage of post-punk music, it’s also been just as present in more polished and indie-leaning music in the US. Duffin points out Arcade Fire utilising Colin Stetson as perhaps being a key moment over there. “If that guy can’t change people’s minds on the saxophone I don’t know who can,” he says. Matt Douglas is now a permanent member of the Mountain Goats but has also played sax for the likes of Superchunk, Bon Iver and Hiss Golden Messenger, and he agrees this early-to-mid 2010s era saw a

Above: The We Out Here compilation from Brownswood. The Epic by Kamasi Washington.

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Essay

Top to bottom: Drahla, Shabaka Hutchings, Trash Kit, Dan Leavers and Comet is Coming.

shift in the States too. Perhaps most notable was Destroyer’s album Kaputt, but he also cites “albums by Spoon, Gayngs, Arcade Fire, War On Drugs and Bon Iver – they were pretty dense records; there was some pretty thick instrumentation and I feel like that production trend lent itself more towards including sax and woodwinds. Tune Yards also put out Whokill and it has amazing use of saxophone on it. I feel like the integration of the sax into rock and pop music is what people seem to want more of now.”

Bon Iver’s creative decisions – from his debut album onwards – continues to have huge reverberations in the indie world and beyond, and his 2016 album 22, A Million was no exception. “It was a huge honour to get to be a small part of that record,” Douglas says. “Playing these beautiful arrangements with a dozen sax players in a room was pretty life changing. As far as it being an important record, I think that had less to do with the saxophone specifically and more to do with the fact that Justin made the creative choice to invest in a week of recording a huge ensemble of the same instrument and wanting that to be sort of a centrepiece for the album.” The sax ensemble Douglas was a part of for the album was called the Sad Sax of Shit.

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William Doyle also points out Deerhunter from this decade as being a key artist to swing the image of the sax. “In terms of how the sax has been used in this more indie and guitar context you could trace that recent development back to ‘Coronado’ on Deerhunter’s amazing Halcyon Digest [2010]. I remember Bradford Cox at the time, in true Bradford fashion, saying that after that song all of the bands would have saxophone on their albums. It took a little while, but was he right? Obviously they weren’t the first to use it in this context, but I think it was the first time in a while that a great band who make, for want of a better term, serious music were able to use it in such an effective and nonironic way. The sound of the recording of the sax on that song is especially good too.” During this same period of the instrument gaining momentum, it was also heavily utilised by PJ Harvey on Let England Shake and the Hope Six Demolition Project, which between them scooped up on array of award nominations and wins.

We’re now entering a period in which a younger generation have embraced the instrument in a wholehearted way. Doyle thinks the generation shift is key. “For a long time I think the sax has generally been regarded with suspicion. My song ‘Millersdale’ was reviewed on Roundtable on BBC 6 Music, and the bass player from James was a judge. He really didn’t like the saxophone part.

But then, he used the term ‘saxamaphone’ too, and I think that may point to a kind of generational suspicion to this instrument, especially from people in the guitar band world. Luckily, the kids don’t care now. They are in a post-genre world, and any music can and should mix with any other kind of music. The saxophone is a brilliant instrument, connotations be damned.”

The risk is, now that we’ve entered a period where more and more bands jump on the sax train, is there a danger of it becoming too much of a trend and peak sax being reached, throwing it back into the world of naff once again? Duffin thinks we’re moving past the point of being sniffy and fickle about such things. “At the moment I get way more saxophone work than I do keyboard or compositional work, so I hope not – it’s my job! It does seem strange though as at least half of the reviews I get will start with, ‘I’m usually not into saxophone,’ or, ‘despite previous sax crimes’ – both direct quotes – and then they go on to say really nice things. I get it live too, the same phrases. I find it funny though; I like being the thing that could potentially ruin somebody’s evening. Imagine if you had to mention all of the previous crimes against the guitar before you said you liked someone’s playing – you’d be there all day.

“I think the saxophone has loads of time left, as it’s capable of anything and when it’s treated right it’s just part of the furniture in a band. Maybe it will be less popular as these things ebb and flow, but I don’t think it’ll totally go away. We’re through the looking glass now and maybe it’ll be totally exonerated of its previous crimes sometime soon.”

Lewis Evans doesn’t really care whether it remains a hip instrument to be playing or not. “Good music doesn’t rely on being fashionable,” he says. “If I was playing the sax as a fashion statement then I’d have a lot of questions to be asking myself.”

Tell me about it

Tierra Whack Confidence in poetry and releasing an audio visual album of one-minute rap songs, by Gemma Samways Photography by Timothy Cochrane 58

Tell me about it Time with Tierra Whack is tight. It’s not just that she’s in demand, though the Philly and Atlanta-raised rapper’s profile has steadily rocketed ever since the release of her audiovisual debut Whack World in May 2018. No, it’s because she’s set to follow Lizzo’s on the Lotus Stage in less than an hour, making our backstage encounter at Primavera Sound a brief but enjoyable blur, the sense of disorientation further exacerbated by the multiple vodka Red Bulls I’ve unwisely imbibed in the lead-up.

Still, if anyone knows how to make every second count it’s Whack. Rendering complex ideas with impressive economy, Whack World featured 15 tracks all clocking in at the one-minute mark, meaning that ideas were often terminated mid-flow to arresting affect. Offering a vivid joyride through the 22-yearold’s surreal universe, songs about self-care (‘Fruit Salad’) were given equal credence to odes to dead dogs (‘Pet Cemetery’), and her versatile vocals ranged from bars rapped at blistering speed (‘Bugs Life’) to sung verses impersonating Southern hicks (‘Fuck Off ’). A year on, it remains a startling introduction to a singular talent.

That’s not to say Whack’s been idle in the interim, you understand. There’s been studio time with Flying Lotus, Meek Mill and Childish Gambino, plus a string of tour dates supporting Lauryn Hill and 6LACK, not to mention the five excellent new singles she unveiled at a rate of one a week from mid-February, under the banner of ‘Whack History Month’. It’s little surprise, then, that she can now count many of her musical heroes amongst her rapidly-expanding fanbase, including Erykah Badu, Solange, Vince Staples and Andre 3000.

Playing at the far end of the festival site to the two main stages, tonight Whack will draw a huge crowd as keen to sway to the woozy, organ-led croon of ‘Wasteland’ as they are to bounce to the elastic trap of ‘Clones’. But before all that, she gives over

whatever pre-show prep time she might have had to promo, first delivering a comprehensive photo shoot in under three minutes, followed by her life story in less than 20.

Sat in her dressing room/portacabin, dressed like a cross between a Beano character and Dr Seuss’ Cat In The Hat, Whack makes for vivacious and quick-witted company, despite all the ensuing protestations of shyness. Words tumble out of her mouth at a dizzying rate as she rushes to recall her roots, or reflect on forthcoming projects, though her guard never drops for long enough to reveal anything specific about future material (“Are there any more collaborations? I can’t tell you! You just met me! It’s our first date!”). Happily, she proves a lot more forthcoming on a range of other subjects.

Philadelphia was a tough place to grow up Wherever you grow up, you feel like your experiences are normal; it’s when you start to travel that you start to notice differences. So I started off in a predominantly black community, in the Projects, which is the not so good part of Philly. I grew up surrounded by a lot of family, and we stuck together, but there was a lot of gun violence and regular violence [around]. See, I’m saying regular, but it’s actually not regular. I was in the hood, but it was ok to me because that’s what I was used to. As I got older, my mom just kept moving me, my brother and sister to better neighbourhoods. And now I’m finally able to take control, I can move her to the nicest neighbourhoods.

I’ve always loved music videos I always gravitated towards them when I was younger. I used to stand so close to the TV my mom was like, “Back away from the TV! You’re gonna go blind!”. But the colours and looks just clicked and stuck with me. I remember watching Busta Rhymes

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Tell me about it “My mom was like, ‘Back away from the TV! You’re gonna go blind!’”

and Missy Elliott and Lauryn Hill, Kelis, Pharrell, N*E*R*D*...

All these cool people doing cool things on the TV. And I was like, “Yo, how do I do what they do? How do I get to where they are?”

Poetry gave me confidence I remember loving the Dr Seuss books: the colours, the rhyming words. And I always knew I could write really good, but I didn’t take it seriously. Then, I forget which grade, but I had a reading class that I took and we had a unit we had to write different types of poem. One particular assignment was to write a freestyle, spoken-word poem, basically to write anything you want, however you want, saying what you want and how you feel. And I loved that, because you usually associate poetry with having a lot of restrictions. So the assignment was to write and get up and present the poem, and I was so shy I was like, “I don’t wanna do this. Everyone’s gonna laugh at me, and it’s gonna be weird.” But I wrote the rhyme, presented it to the class, and they loved it. I had them all laughing, and I was the only person that memorised my poem.

I owe my mom everything Because I was shy growing up, I would just stick to all the hobbies I had and keep to myself. But my mom was always watching me closely, like, “She likes this, she like this.” Once I got all that attention from the spoken-word poetry assignment I went home and told my mom, “Yo, I gotta do this.” So she went out and got me three composition books, and she was like, “Alright, if you’re really gonna do this then I want to see these pages filled.” After that I was just writing every day after school. It almost started being like a job, and my friends would be like, “Yo what you got?

What’d you write? I wanna hear your new poem!” Eventually, I was like, “You know what, I’m gonna put this poem to a beat.”

And that’s how it became rap.

I’m a very visual person...

I used to draw a lot, and I was going to study Fine Art, but then I stopped because I gave all my attention to rap and singing and songwriting. I still have a really hard time articulating myself.

Like, I can show you better than I can tell you, you know what I mean? Even to this day, I still see tweets that say, “Yo I just listened to Whack World and I didn’t understand it until I saw the visuals.” And I knew that was gonna happen so that’s why I put [the visuals] together. Because if you just listen to [the album] you might think it’s like a demo or something, but when you watch the whole movie together you’re like “Ohhhh!” ... but my style is instinctive People think that I’m so into fashion but I just get lucky. I don’t

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talk about fashion, I just pick out nice things, like, “Let’s find something cool and fun.” Like, this outfit has my favourite colours in it, so I wore it. I love green, yellow and orange.

I wrote short songs to keep people’s attention I had so many ideas but it didn’t make any sense to give people 30 full-length songs for my debut. Like, if you heard of a girl called Tierra Whack and you tapped her project and it was 30 songs and they were all 4 or 5 minutes long, you wouldn’t listen to it. Even right now it’s really hard for me to focus because so much is going on. Like, I want to go out there [gestures in the direction of the stage] and give Lizzo a hug, but I know I have to do this. It’s really hard for me to focus, and I don’t even do any drugs or anything! Our generation is just crazy, so crazy.

I’m happiest in my own company I only want attention when I’m onstage, but beside that nobody has to talk to me and I’ll be fine. That’s the type of Leo I am.

Seriously, it’s really hard to get me to come out. I’m like an old lady. Like, I’m the most fun but boring person. Everybody will be talking and having fun and I’ll be in the corner just playing with a trash can, having fun by myself. And then people will involve me, and I’ll be like, “No don’t involve me!” I’m a loner. I can turn it on as Tierra Whack and be the people’s person, but I only want attention when I want attention.

I’m still getting used to hanging out with my heroes I could hear Erykah Badu’s set from the hotel yesterday and I was like, “Wow, that’s really good. I’m so mad I didn’t see her.”

I mean, I’ve paid to see her plenty of times, before she knew who I was or whatever. But then I remembered, like, “Wait! I have her number! I can text her and say, you sound really good.” And that’s what I did. And then she FaceTimed me.

Erykah Badu is exactly as you’d expect She’s really crazy, but crazy in a good way – just how I expected her to be. She’s magical. Like, she doesn’t seem real. I haven’t personally met her but she DMs me a lot and we talk text all the time, and I just learn. And every time she calls me she’s singing a song from Whack World. With things like that I have to pinch myself, like, “Woah, I’m really going somewhere. I’m somebody!” Because I always forget.

In Conversation

Maxine Peake A long talk with the British actor about becoming Nico, by Max Pilley

The seventh edition of the biennial Manchester International Festival begins on 4 July and runs for eighteen days, taking in newly commissioned work from artists ranging from Yoko Ono to David Lynch, Philip Glass to Skepta. One of the most eyecatching new pieces is ‘The Nico Project’; a theatrical re-telling of Nico’s 1968 masterpiece The Marble Index, written by playwright EV Crowe, directed by former Royal Exchange artistic director Sarah Frankcom and starring Maxine Peake; just three members of an all-female creative team. It marks the latest in a series of collaborations between Peake and the MIF and I took the opportunity to speak to her about the project’s inception and how Nico’s story tells us something about what it means to be a female artist.

The early information I’ve seen about The Nico Project keeps things fairly enigmatic. What can you say about the form that it’s going to take?

Well, one thing it’s not, it’s not a bio at all. This isn’t going to chart the rise and fall of Nico through her career. It’s a group of female collaborators that got together to talk about what it means to be a woman and a female artist. And Nico actually struggled sometimes with her femininity: she felt that like many women it held her back. In one interview she was asked if she had any regrets and she said, “That I wasn’t a man”. She was someone who was idolised for her beauty for the majority of her modelling and acting career and I think it was something that she resented.

So we just started to talk about what it means to be a woman and be an artist and the transference between an actor on stage and the character you’re creating. It’s a performance piece, it’s not a play. We’ve got an orchestra, we’ve got Anna Clyne – the composer – she’s British-born but based in New York. She has re-imagined The Marble Index and we have an orchestra of I think between eight and twelve young women from the Royal Northern College of Music who will be playing alongside me.

I will have a harmonium – I’m having harmonium lessons and there will be some singing involved. But if people think they’re coming to see a Nico bio, they’ll be disappointed because that’s not it. We’re using Nico as our basis for the creation, but we don’t go too much into her personal life story.

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It’s interesting that it’s based around The Marble Index in particular. That was her second album, but it was the first one that she wrote herself, and it was a massive shift for her.

Yeah, and it’s the album she seemed proudest of – it’s what she wanted. I think with Chelsea Girl and others she felt she’d been slightly pushed in one direction and the production wasn’t what she was wanting. This felt closer, from what I can gather, to her expression.

And it was less of the beauty cliché that the first album was, with less of the softly softly vocals.

Well, that’s it. I’ve just been watching Nico Icon again, the documentary, and somebody was saying when she dyed her hair from blonde to dark, someone asked her, “Why have you done that, you look ugly,” and she said, “Good!” I think everyone thinks it must be some blessing to have that kind of beauty but at the same time it can be a double-edged sword, to be so objectified.

And you can only imagine what she might have gone through in the modelling and film industry at that time, you know what I mean, with everything that’s come to light today, the more you think about it, the more you think gosh, she must have had some battles on her hands. You wonder whether that had a big influence on her turning her back on all that. And obviously, the bohemian life seemed to have a big pull for her.

It’s telling that that album was pretty much ignored when it came out as well. The world just wasn’t interested in hearing such an expression from somebody like her.

Well, from a woman as well. I know Scott Walker’s stuff became progressively more avant-garde as time went on, but I think I would put those two – they’re different – but there’s something very similar between them. But Scott was lauded and as you say, she was sort of ignored.

How much of you playing Nico is you having to figure out how she speaks, how she moves – are you trying to capture her, or is it more abstract than that?

I think there is an element of catching her and then there’s an element of transition from actor to character and how that

In Conversation

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In Conversation works. But yeah, I’ve been studying her and obviously I’ve been a fan for a long time, but even if you’re a fan of somebody, you don’t necessarily look at them as a character study. So there will be some Nico-isms, and I will be trying to portray her on stage or conjure up some of her personality.

You say you’ve been a fan of hers for a long time. Do you remember your first experience of her?

It was through The Velvet Underground, to be honest, through being a fan of theirs. And then hearing Nico and somebody telling me that she did some solo stuff, then I got into her through that. It’s just interesting her relationship with Lou Reed and that band. Again, she was given to them by Warhol wasn’t she – he was like the avant-garde Stock Aitken Waterman! It was that sort of, “We think this is what you need for your image, this is what you will do”.

Pete Waterman will be delighted with that, I’m sure.

Yeah, I’m sure he would. Thank god Andy Warhol is no longer with us! I could be in trouble.

So when did you become aware of this fabled period when Nico was living in Manchester?

I think it was when I read James Young’s book [Songs They Never Play on the Radio]. I’m friends with Carol Morley, the filmmaker, I’ve worked with Carol a few times and we’re good pals. Carol used to clean for her and Anton Corbijn at one point. I mean, I think that’s quite interesting! It was just one of those, I’d sort of always heard that she’d ended up in Manchester and there

were always those stories – you’d see Mick Hucknall on his bike and you’d see Nico on her bike. Again, I’m not comparing those two people!

I’m hearing names that I wasn’t expecting to hear in this interview.

Haha, I know. I’ve given you Pete Waterman and Mick Hucknall!

I just remember being a teenager and people would say they’d seen her going up and down on her bike. It was probably my late teens and early twenties. You can’t quite compute it; it’s such an extraordinary story. When you look at the early images of her in the late ’50s, early ’60s, modelling pillbox hats and full dresses, to then this complete transformation. I don’t know anybody really who’s been on that complete journey from one end of the spectrum to the other. And then I read James Young’s book and that’s one of my favourite books – especially one of my favourite rock bios – it’s a fantastic piece of writing. And in some ways it’s not really about Nico, it’s about James’ experiences at that time and it’s about Manchester and that romantic view we still have of the late ’70s, but very dank and grey, that sort of bohemian Manchester and lots of drugs.

It probably did remind her a bit of Berlin when she was a kid.

Exactly. Well I think that’s it. And there’s always been that link between Manchester and Berlin and the industrial Germany, when you look at Joy Division and all those kind of bands. In a funny way, the Second World War is the link. I suppose the generation of parents of the people in those bands would have experienced the war and it’s something that just hung over Manchester, and all over the country, nationwide. It was still very much in the atmosphere. And there are a lot of similarities between the Northern industrial towns and those towns in Germany too.

Does the Manchester part of her life play into The Nico Project?

I mean, because it’s not such straightforward storytelling, it’s not like we say, “And then she lived in Manchester.” I think that’s what we wanted to get away from at [Manchester International Festival]. There are a lot – and it’s great – of men of a certain age who have a monopoly on Manchester’s musical history, and they keep the myth alive, so we didn’t want to go down the obvious track with it. And obviously she’s not from Manchester, but she played an important role in Manchester’s musical history, and it played an important part in her development. So we’ve tried to keep it slightly more abstract.

Above: The Marble Index.

Opposite: Nico in 1985.

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Has it helped being able to speak to people who would have spent time with her?

Yeah, I collaborated with Johnny Marr and he was telling me about going to the Hacienda and she’d just sort of be sat there and he’d sit there and she was pleasant enough but there was something very closed off about her, very intriguing. But obviously they were big Velvets fans thinking. “Wow, that’s Nico!” So yeah, Johnny, Carol as I said, and Adrian Flanagan (The Moonlandingz, International Teachers of Pop), who I’m going off with

In Conversation “When Nico dyed her hair from blonde to dark someone asked her, ‘Why have you done that, you look ugly,’ and she said, ‘Good!’”

to record our next album as The Eccentronic Research Council, he used to see her down the pubs in Prestwich. Everyone’s been very forthcoming. I met up with James Young too – he came to speak with us about his experiences with her. It’s that Mark E. Smith thing – a lot of people didn’t seem to particularly like her, but she had this huge influence and impact on them and obviously left a mark. That’s what we’re intrigued with, when women are deemed not to be accessible – what does that mean anyway, I hate that. Men are seen as exotic and intellectual and exciting if they’re unlikeable, there’s something mysterious about them.

But with a woman it’s quite different.

Female director, female artist and writer, female choreographer, composer, sound, lighting design, all female.

As is often the case with artists as complex as Nico, do you worry about the things that perhaps aren’t to be celebrated about her?

Oh yeah, we’re not going, “Well, she was a great person.” If you scratch the surface with most artists, you will find something that’s not likeable. Again, it’s been slightly more highlighted because she’s a woman. Yes, she said some really contentious things and some very hateful things that we’re not making excuses for. But it’s that age-old question isn’t it, what do you do if you look at an artist, do we confine them to history because of that? She’s a complex woman.

The show is running for twelve nights, and then will that be it or will there be life for it beyond MIF? Well, we’re in discussions. We were talking about bringing it to London at one stage, but it’s always hard trying to find people to invest in projects. Yeah, we’ve got a few people we’re talking to. I suppose it depends how well it goes down. We did want to do it specifically for the festival. It’s like when Sarah and I make pieces for the [Royal Exchange] – we’re making it for Manchester, we haven’t got our eye on London or somewhere else. I mean, it would be lovely if somewhere else went, “We really like it, we’d like to produce it as well,” but it’s never in your game plan. But we’ll see, it’ll be great to go somewhere with it.

I know you’ve worked a lot with the director of The Nico Project, Sarah Frankcom, who just recently stepped down as the Artistic Director at the Royal Exchange, and this is an all-female creative team.

And is that by design?

Well it’s sort of just how it happened. We just decided we wanted to work with people that we wanted to work with, and it just turned out in a funny way that it became all female. It wasn’t conscious but it did just feel right at this point. When we started to look at people that we thought might be interested in the project and who would bring what we thought would be needed, we felt that this was the way to go.

It’s not like you’re busy or anything.

Ha, yeah, I would be struggling to fit it in.

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Interview

I want you to all know that I tried. I scoured the Internet for an upcoming release with an album cover worth showing you. You wouldn’t have liked any of them this month. I did try, ok?

It’s important that you know that I tried. But once you’ve seen this sleeve you can’t see anything else, perhaps ever again. Once I’d found it, it was as if every term I typed into Google on my search returned this image. When I checked my BBC weather app the forecast was this picture. Please, share the burden, just for a little while.

The title and artists responsible for this are a little faded, but while you have to lean in to read “Do You Know Jesus?” and Uncle Les & Aunt Nancy Wheeler Featuring Randy I feel like the true horror of this album from 1969 pops regardless. The year, by the way, is all the Internet has decided to share about this record, and with good reason – anyone who’s ever asked more about it has mysteriously died in a fire. I have my theories though, and while you now also have this image for life, let me assure you that, even within this short amount of time, we’re on exactly the same page.

The elephant in the room is the guy in the middle, so

let’s rip the Band-Aid on that – he’s a fucking puppet, isn’t he? I’m guessing he’s Randy, although I think it’s important to say that nothing is off the table with this sleeve. The other guy could be Randy. The woman could be Randy.

There’s a puppet with plaid trousers on who is considered a fundamental part of this project – anything is possible here.

Presuming we all agree that all puppets are terrifying, while Randy here has graduated top of his class at the School of Brown Trousers with honours in scaring people shitless, it’s his hands that I can’t get over. I do of course mean the one that’s around Aunt Nancy Wheeler’s neck, but that doesn’t have anything on his left hand, that is being so tenderly held by Uncle Les. Uncle Les, I’m starting to think, is a bad guy. I bet he’s just said, “You love your aunt Nancy, don’t you, Randy?” which would explain that look in Nancy Wheeler’s eyes; a look that is trying to blink morse code while remaining completely still that spells out: t h i s f u c k i n g n u t c a s e i s c o n v i n c e d thispuppetisoursonwhohedecapitatedi n a g a r d e n i n g a c c i d e n t. Either that or Nancy has played me, knowing what I’d assume from Uncle Les’ serial killer glasses. OR, hang on, maybe Randy is the victim, because... No, he’s a puppet isn’t he. That’s right. Sorry.

Randy is a puppet. I’m with you. I’m ok.

Drugs are officially cancelled

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illustration by kate prior