Loud And Quiet 54 – Katy B

Zero pounds / Volume 03 / Issue 54 / the alternative music tabloid

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Cliff Martinez Shopping

Lee Ranaldo

C o u r t n e y B a r n e tt T.R.A.S.E

Teeth of The Sea

k at y b The return mission

contents No v e m b e r 2013

0 9 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . P e r f e c t ly I n c o n s i s t e n t Daniel Dylan Wray on the bloody, brilliant mind of Lou Reed that insisted we take the rough with the smooth

10 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Songs & Books The latests singles, EPs and Page-turner, from ofei, loom, morrissey and more

cover photography Phil Sharp

12 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . G etti ng to kno w you We asked a bunch of recording artists to share their biggest pet hates

le e ranaldo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 My Place: We went to the sonic youth founder’s new york apartment where huricane sandy inspire his new record

t. r . a . s . e . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 6 Retold: The story of Andy Popplewell and T.R.A.S.E, a lost electronic project and a continual quest for answers

Loud And Quiet PO Box 67915 London NW1W 8TH Editor - Stuart Stubbs Art Director - Lee Belcher Sub Editor - Alex Wilshire film editor - Ian roebuck Advertising advertise@loudandquiet.com

te eth of th e sea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Jimmy Martin of post-everything rock band Teeth Of The Sea discusses what’s very wrong with modern Doctor Who scores

cou rtn ey barn ett . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Australia’s Courtney Barnett turns her diary posts into deadpan slacker pop reminiscent of Modern Lovers

s h o ppi n g . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 4 Combining dance floor indie with proudly DIY funk punk, London trio Shopping want to make you lose control of yourself

cli ff marti n ez . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 the soundtrack for drive put cliff martinez on the map but it’s the 10-year-old solaris that’s his masterpiece

K at y b . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 8 Kathleen Anne Brien faces a decision: just how big does she want to be?

Contact info@loudandquiet.com

Contributors Amy Pettifer, Chris Watkeys, Daniel Dylan Wray, Danny Canter, David Zammitt, Elinor Jones, elliot kennedy, Edgar Smith, Frankie Nazardo, Gareth Arrowsmith, Hayley Scott, Janine Bullman, James West, Josh sunth, Joe Goggins, LEE BULLMAN, Kate Parkin, Kelda Hole, Gabriel Green, Gemma Harris, Leon Diaper, Mandy Drake, Matthias Scherer, Nathan Westley, Owen Richards, Phil Sharp, Reef Younis, Roy J Baron, Samuel ballard, Sam Cornforth, Sam Walton, Sonia Melot, sonny McCartney, Tim Cochrane, yoyo This Month L&Q Loves jane third, johnny brocklehurst, leah ellis, marcus scott natasha parker, sinead mills The views expressed in Loud And Quiet are those of the respective contributors and do not necessari ly reflect the opini ons of the magazine or its staff.

All rights reserved 2013 Loud And Quiet.

ISSN 2049-9892 Printed by Sharman & Company LTD.

36 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . albums films . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 Wooden Shjips, MIA, blood orange, cate le bon, swearin’, mazes and more

Ian roebuck reviews nosferatu and runs down our top 10 recluses from cinema history

44 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . li v e party w olf . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 warpaint, connan mockasin, pil, daughter, oliver wilde and neil halstead

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Idiot Tennis, Thought sport, Crush hour, Celebrity twitter and The unfortunate world of ian beale

welcome Katy B is that rarest of things in 2013 - a mainstream pop star that the British public didn’t choose from reality TV. We’ve not seen her journey; we’ve not seen her come into her own during movie week. She wasn’t manufactured in the back room, either, the good old fashion way, like Britney, Kylie and Bieber. No. Katy B, while perfectly placed with a Brit School education, was largely minding her own business when her debut album, ‘On A Mission’, blew up in 2011 - raving nightly and anonymously providing vocals for aspiring producers in the fold of Rinse FM, the epitome of homegrown, urban cool.

Today, she’s the reason we’ve got pop acts like Disclosure, AlunaGeorge and Jessie Ware, which most would agree is nothing but a good thing for UK chart music, even if British club music (RnB

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and dubstep, especially) has since been co-opted by the mainstream to repeatedly dire, EDM effect. But where Katy got the ball rolling a couple of years ago, with crossover tracks so reminiscent of Ms Dynamite that one even featured her, today she faces a choice of whether she wants to act on the foundations she built in 2011.

This month Sam Walton met her ahead of her second album’s release, originally due earlier this year and now penned for unveiling in February 2014. It’s called ‘Little Red’, and there’s little doubt that it’s capable of being as widely successful as its author desires. Thing is, Katy’s heart still belongs to the dance floor, and she’s spent this last year realising that pop stars can’t really go raving until 5am all that often. “Staying in is one of the sacrifices,” she says.

London DIY trio Shopping like a bit of a dance too, but their hybrid of NYC punk-funk and British indie pop aside, this month’s issue is otherwise made up of studious, contemplative characters – film fans (Teeth of The Sea, Drive and Solaris composer Cliff Martinez), an avid collector of books and art (Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo gave us a tour of his house on page 14) and one studio techy who has suddenly found acclaim with a lost, experimental sci-fi record that he made 30 years ago at the age of 16. “I’m a middle aged bloke, mate!” Andy Popplewell yelled at me this month. He almost couldn’t believe his newfound appreciation as much as Katy B.

Stuart Stubbs

beginning no v e m b e r 2013

Perfec tly inconsistent Daniel Dylan Wray on the bloody, brilliant mind of Lou Reed that insisted we take the rough with the smooth

“Lou’s been there all along, from the start” was a text message I got from a close friend when we were in touch the night Lou Reed died. It wasn’t until I really began to dissect that statement that I realised how true it was. I’ve just turned 28 years old and I can’t recall a period in my adult life in which Lou Reed hasn’t factored. When you lose a musical connection that’s entrenched within you, something that’s in your dreams, in your blood and dances throughout some of your greatest living memories, it’s losing more than a person you never met. Such is the stone-faced, misanthropic picture often painted of Lou Reed that any outcry of physical emotion in his leaving this planet almost seems irreverent to such a character. Yet, upon hearing the news, it hit me like a hammer, a short burst of tears and sobbing came from a place I couldn’t explain. But then again, the idea that Reed was a constantly miserable, phlegmatic person throughout his whole life is one that, despite never meeting him, I refuse to buy. My records tell me otherwise, anyway.

I once read a review of Bonnie Prince Billy that attributed his inconsistency as being one of his greatest, most consistent assets. I initially thought it was something of a prosaic cop-out, a miserable excuse to justify an inability to hammer something that probably needed a good booting, but it’s a theory that’s stuck with me over the years, I must admit. I often think it can be applied to Lou Reed. Not because his bad work should necessarily be forgotten or forgiven but because the results of his bad work came from exactly the same place as those that changed the world and split minds open with all the force and shrieking cacophony of ‘Sister Ray’ loaded with an arm full of whizz.

Lou Reed was bloody-minded and hell-bent on his own vision to such a degree that you kind of had to stick with the results. In many ways, if you buckled at the knees when faced with hearing the gut-wrenching beauty of ‘Pale Blue Eyes’, or

felt like putting your face clean through the nearest window when exposed to the grinding, antagonistic force of ‘Metal Machine Music’, then you had to trust the judgment that put you in those most polarising of emotional states when subjected to the lacklustre drivel of ‘Original Wrapper’ or ‘Hookywooky’ or yet another rigid, dead-eyed live rendition of ‘Sweet Jane’ sapped of any vivacity. Simply put: you had to do things on Lou’s terms. Incredibly, few artists can boast such a consistency to their approach and dedication to ‘rock as art’, let alone stand behind a body of work so incredibly

Lou Reed was bloody-minded and hell-bent on his own vision

powerful – for my money, there has never been an artist that could expel a more perfect blend of pop and experimentation than the Velvets did, and nobody could make three chords sound like a symphony quite like Lou Reed.

“There are certain records that are so patently offensive that one wishes to take some kind of physical vengeance on the artists that perpetrate them” is the much quoted 1973 Rolling Stone machete attack on Lou’s glorious ‘Berlin’ LP, but so often this is rolled out as the ultimate insult. In actual fact, it’s the ultimate compliment! The bile, irony-coated pill infinitely sweetened by RS’s (pretty characteristic) back-foot,

by subsequently naming it the 344th best album of ALL TIME in a list of 500. On several occasions, with time, Lou Reed’s stubbornness proved to vindicate him. It’s thus utterly bizarre that people would still then criticise him for taking the same approach on future projects.

I felt reinvigorated with Reed this year, not because I had felt overly enamoured with his most recent recordings, nor got heavily back into a Lou/Velvets phase, but through his radio show with Hal Willner, ‘New York Shuffle’. It was a show that paid equal homage and disregard to the format of radio – a fitting emblem for Reed’s relationship to rock’n’roll, too, perhaps. It owed a debt to old-time radio of the past, the kind that was eclectic and programmed by the presenter, but it shunned elements of modern day radio. Most notably – and refreshingly – they fundamentally ignored the listener. It was two old timers rambling away to each other, occasionally incoherently, as they picked through each other’s record collections, unearthing a truly heterogeneous selection of music. Aside from the exposure to a dynamic and eclectic playlist, listening to these shows was a great little window into the warm, funny, idiosyncratic side of Reed. He was still occasionally brusque and stubborn but he seemed to have his guard down when removed from the position of discussing his own music (usually the public’s only exposure to him). His voice was a slow, raspy drawl that sounded like rocks being cracked, every bit matching the glorious splintered rivers that ran through his aged face. (I always envisioned Lou getting more and more into W.H Auden territory as he got older).

I perhaps mistook my own reinvigoration in Reed as his own though. Such was my – and perhaps collective ‘our’ – faith in the rigidness of his character that I didn’t bat an eyelid to learn he had had a liver transplant. What, after all, could bring Lou Reed down?

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beginning EPs & books 01

by L ee & Ja nin e B u l l m a n

(one little indian) Out nov 25

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A u t obiogr a p h y

BY Mor r is s e y ( Penguin Classics )

There was a point in the not too distant past when it looked as though Morrissey’s muchtouted and keenly anticipated memoir may not make it onto the shelves. Eventually though, Autobiography is here and it doesn’t disappoint. In its pages, Morrissey manages to perform the neat trick of deconstructing his own myth while at the same time adding to it. Old scores are settled and anyone who ever crossed the singer is neatly decapitated herein by withering, barbed prose. Autobiography is the man in his own words and, Morrissey being Morrissey, this means that we are presented with an account that is real and fantastic, unapologetically romantic and brutally honest.

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a u t ob a hn a u t ob a hn 1

l oom l ic e e p

(tough love) Out now

(hate hate hate) Out Dec 2

C r e at ion s t or ie s : R io t s r av e s a nd r unning a l a be l

BY A l a n Mc ge e

This millennium, Interpol were the first band to channel the taught, wire-tight energy of Joy Division into something that (at the time) felt pretty new. Then along came a load of bands who aped Interpol, and eventually that quintessential Joy Division-ness diluted, refracted and disappeared into the void. Until now – revived, as it has been, so faithfully by Leeds-based German transport infrastructure fans Autobahn. This is an impressive debut EP; a slap round the face from a band who sound like they really mean it, even if they’re not quite sure what ‘it’ is. ‘Force Fed’ in particular resonates with that stilted, vocalsshouted-down-a-dimly-lit-underpass feel, lead track ‘Seizure’ sees the raw-throated singer shouting into a hurricane, while ‘Lost Tongue’ pivots pointedly around squally guitars before dropping into a chasm occupied by the gaping jaws of several speed-addled members of PiL. It’s a viciously raw climax to a trio of songs that betray true promise.

Anybody out there hankering for a reboot of the sound of Metallica’s early days, when metalheads were bona-fide denim-n-patches metalheads, and James Hetfield still looked something like a hard version of the Cowardly Lion, wielding a flying V and growling territorially at anybody who tried to polish up the band’s sound? Then welcome Loom, who with ‘Lice’ have taken that thrashy sound and raw-edged production and… well, what have they done with it? Not a great deal if we’re being honest, but within that ancient template the songs on this EP carry enough punch and power to make you sit up and listen anyway. The two-minute lead track speeds out of the speakers with a vicious, fizzing energy, frontman Tarik Badwan (sibling to the Horrors’ Faris) shredding his vocal cords in a heavily pleasing manner. The other four songs all crunch together hookily and punkily enough to suggest this four-piece will be a hell of a lot of fun live.

At times over its long and illustrious career, rock’n’roll has been driven forward by people other than merely the musicians or fans.

Sometimes it is the DJs, label runners, club promoters and band managers who have propelled the art-form forward. In a career spanning decades, Alan McGee has been all of these things and more. Creation Stories follows McGee from relatively humble Scottish roots to cultural omniscience via Creation Records impressive mix of bust-ups, breakthroughs and meltdowns, and tells the story of a man behind the scenes prepared to live a life every bit as out-of-control as the famously consumptive bands on his roster.

McGee’s pedigree is impressive. From the Jesus and Mary Chain to Oasis via Primal Scream, The Libertines and a host of others, Creation Stories is an account of enthusiasm and true belief in an industry more used to loveless weary cynicism and bottom-line accounting.

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(Sidgwick and Jackson)

Single reviews by Chris Watkeys Blowback by Lee Bullman and Michael Forwell published by Pan Macmillan available now

of e i l ond on e p

Every now and then a new artist arrives who is clearly trying to produce something truly different; something unfettered by contemporary mores; something where the hackneyed old “I make music for myself and if anyone else likes it it’s a bonus” seems as if it might actually be true. Ofei’s PR people are doing their best to shroud this guy with a sense of ineffable mystery, but behind the spin lies the curious substance of this ‘London’ EP, a strange mixture of soul, pop, and the occasional weird, boy band-ish vocal effect. You can almost see this guy pounding his feet, spinning on his heels and whipping the mic stand from one hand to the other, such is the force of personality that explodes from these five tracks. ‘Fate’ sees him bring out the big soul vocals, ‘Poem’ is a spoken-word vignette, which feels like a Massive Attack intro, but the highlight here is ‘Tomorrow’, a piano-based, languorous effort; around a rhythm that somehow feels both smooth and awkward. The closest comparison here can be drawn with a twisted Antony & The Johnsons backing track, fronted by a singer really on a mission to bare every last little crumb of his soul. The track ends with a little bit of birdsong, perhaps heralding what deserves to be a bright dawn for Ofei.

beginning G etti ng to kno w you

same tired and clichéd conversation about the Love/Hate relationship balance one has with The Big Crapple or any big city.”

Cate Le Bon

“When trying to describe Vectors to us, our A-level Physics teacher started erratically bang the insides of his wrists together over and over again. I had never seen anyone do this before. I suppose there really is no reason to but Mr Ian Bach loved to do it, right up in my grill sometimes. It’s hard to pin point what it is about it that makes me feel so extremely nauseous, but maybe the pulse on pulse feels too much like crossing the beams and that combined with the dull thumping sounds is my personal recipe for repulsion.”

Kevin Faulkner of The Men

“Fuck cats!”

Anna von Hausswolff

“My pet hate is a person with nailpolished, manicured, very long fingernails eating a hamburger. Squeezy juices, flesh and bread, unseen by the very eye, finds a good cosy place between the fingertip and the nail. Warm and cosy.

Enjoying the history of this beautifully polished fingernail and human flesh: Going from scratching the scalp dandruff, maybe the asshole, worst case scenario, a little bit of soap, breakfast, cuddle a dog, 10 doorknobs during a day, and dealing with coins. That can sum up the deep hidden treasures under the very long nailpolished fingernail. Now, lunchtime – time for a juicy, big burger. A little bit difficult for the long fingernails to manage but with a little bit of bread cramping, one will receive the nutrients of the day. Unable to clean it all away, he or she will continue the build up of the soil between flesh and nail.”

“People who spend time at gas stations for fun. People who let their kids run around with boogers on their cheeks.

People who say ‘F-Bomb!’ People who play Frisbee more than once a month. People who fish for complements.

People who lie about meeting Bruce Willis. People who don’t like dogs. People who have irrational phobias but don’t tell you before hanging out. People who overuse artificial light. People who are hypocrites. People who give advice without being asked, and every time they have no idea what they’re talking about. People who have never worked in food service. People who literally smell like poop, yet you don’t want to be the one to tell them to clean themselves because you think people who give advice without being asked are turds. People who act like they’re invincible, and you are still waiting for something bad to happen to them. People who have a Bob Marley poster in their ‘bong room’.”

Courtney Barnett

“Tall poppies, thongs, people who leave the fridge door open, queue-cutters and short shorts.”

Ripley Johnson of Wooden Shjips

“I guess I get annoyed by all the usual things: people talking loudly on cell phones on the gondola, bum acid tabs that never kick in (or kick in really late), dogs in tiny people clothes. But I can only think of one thing that counts as a proper pet peeve and that is the sound of someone eating when I’m not. I have no idea why this is, and I try to use it for exercises in equanimity, but I usually have to give up and walk away or put on ‘Metal Machine Music’. That helps.

R.I.P. Lou Reed.”

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PET HATES We asked 9 recording artists to share with us the things that, quite simply, piss them off JB of Crystal Stilts

“Just getting back from a full US tour last night, I’m noticing how odd New York City is and yet I know I’m fully adapted to the place. It seems veteran New Yorkers develop an assortment of neuroses – an urban thousand-inch stare.

I totally understand why. There’s a spatial overcompensation from people in New York. Especially those from here who have been sardined their whole lives in schools and trains and tiny apartments. They’ll plough right into you on the sidewalk, as if they’re all alone. Stress. Folks that look like they’ve really had a rough go of it, talking to themselves, priorities obliterated. Brains towed away from 6 to 10, Tuesday to Thursday. Old, young, mutant, super rich, squalid poor, angels and demons at play all in one place. Maybe it’s the whole world that’s packed in here?

Whatever, man. It is what it is. Right now I’m realising that I’m in that balance limbo and I need to rediscover the things here that I’ve come to ignore. No big deal. Unlearn a little.

You do have to zoom out sometimes to appreciate everything. Love a little more than hate I suppose. It’s that

Martin Noble of British Sea Power

“People who drop litter. Why can’t people just hold on to it and put it in the next bin they see? It’s mostly kids who drop litter, and when adults do it it’s even worse for me. Litter droppers don’t give a shit about anything apart from themselves. It’s fine to throw any old shit out of your car window or fly tip in a beauty spot, leave your old TV in the street or throw a Mcdonald’s wrapper on the floor 1 metre from a bin. I recently watched the film Sightseers, with Alice Lowe and Steve Oram. It’s a black comedy involving a couple who go caravanning and end up murdering people who annoy them. Early on in the film they run someone over with their caravan for dropping litter.

Good on ‘em i say!”

Ryan Oblivion of Cults

“What are we writing about here? Pet peeves? Pet Hates?

Is this a jumper vs. sweater situation? I don’t really know what to say. I rarely get angry with people. I’ve found that ignoring the small things you don’t like is the best way to save your own sanity and indifference is the best revenge against people who are trying to piss you off. Who wants to spend their days getting riled about little bullshit things people do? Just walk away. Traveling as much as we do, I think I’d really lose it if I tried to control other people’s behaviour. I think that’s actually one of the most defining aspects of my personality, and for better or for worse I’m a goddamn pro at ignoring things. It triggers pet peeves in all our band mates because I’ll often start zoning out in the middle of their stories, or almost kill myself walking out into a crowded street. I’ve actually been hit by three cars in the last three years. Maybe I need to get some pet peeves?”

Illustration by Lizz E

Youth Lagoon

my p l a c e

At Hom e with Lee Ranaldo Lee Ranaldo, once of Glen Branca’s electric guitar orchestra before he formed Sonic Youth with Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon in 1981, “came to NYC to be an artist but happened to end up with an electric guitar rather than a paint brush.” The journey from his hometown of Oyster Bay took him just 1 hour, but 1979 Manhattan felt like another world compared to docile Long Island, with its blue blood yacht clubs and Presidential holiday homes. Ranaldo hasn’t left the island since, and currently lives in a Tribeca loft apartment spread over two floors, with his wife, Leah, their two children and two cats. He tells me he’s been here since 1995, which means he’s lived on top of, rather than through, two landmark disasters in New York City’s history.

The site of the World Trade Centre is on Ranaldo’s doorstep.When the towers came down in 2001 he was at home.“A very intense day,” he says.“We had a two-month old baby and a two-year-old, and the day before school started and it was the most perfect, normal day, and the next day was absolute insanity.

“After everything happened they zoned off the city by different degrees, and the inner most zone, the hardest hit zone, where the World Trade Centre was, that was the red zone, and we are the north east corner building of that zone, so we were really close to the whole thing.We had to evacuate for a few weeks and the afternoon of that day we finally left here in the middle of the afternoon and we went up to Thurston and Kim’s apartment about 20 blocks north of here.Then, right before they closed all the tunnels and bridges for weeks, we hopped in our old car and got out of the city.”

In October of last year Hurricane Sandy brought a different kind of destruction and terror to New York, although this time Ranaldo, like thousands of other New Yorkers, stuck around, a majority without electricity, heating and hot water. “We were lucky, because ours was only out for 6 or 7 days,” he says. “Some people lived without it for weeks and even months.You’d spend your day as a refugee, walking twenty blocks to somebody’s house that has power, sitting there for an hour to charge up your phone or laptop.” He says it was an eerie reminder of 911, “like an apocalyptic science fiction movie. The streets were deserted and there were no lights, not from streetlights or coming out of buildings.You’d walk up to a shop window and the line of where the water was inside would be above your head.”

With nothing else to do, Ranaldo spent this time writing songs on an acoustic guitar, an instrument he’s even fonder of than the electric that’s become synonymous with his name. Last month the resulting tracks were released on a new solo album with backing band The Dust, aptly titled ‘Last Night On Earth’ and featuring tracks ‘The Rising Tide’ and ‘Blackt Out’.Artist, musician and writer, Lee’s interests are reflected in his vast collection of books, his furniture and the items he’s picked up on the road and posted home to himself as the tour goes on.

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01. I n d i a n R at Trap “On tour in India recently, we were walking in the old part of Deli, in these tiny, tiny, crowded streets, full of markets and people with 5 bags of rice on their heads, and there was one street full of shops selling kitchenware.

It’s always fun to buy strange items for the kitchen here and there, and they were selling these little wire boxes in all different sizes, which I thought were just beautiful. I wasn’t sure what they were but they’re actually rat traps.

They had ones that were five times as big as this one. I mean, I’m not sure what kind of rats they get over there, or if I’d really want to pick one up with an angry rat in it.Who knows, maybe they chuck them in the river?”

02. A R aym o n d P e t ti b o n “This is from his early-to-mid-80s period. He’s become a friend and he’s recently moved to New York from LA, and he lives in my neighbourhood, so we see each other socially now and then. But back in the early ’80s when we started going to California to deal with SST, and later with Geffen, I got to know him a little bit and we started exchanging stuff. We’ve talked about a collaboration over the year, and we’ve never done it fully, but back then I sent him some stuff I was writing at the time, and he pulled some phrases and excerpts out of that and used it on some of his pictures, and he sent this one back to me. I love his work a lot, and to have one or two that I contributed to is really cool. He’s a really interesting cat.”

Books “We get a lot of books coming into the house – either books people have sent us or art catalogues. We’re constantly filling boxes with them to give away, but books are an amazing thing. And this bookcase is a copy of a [Modernist designer/architect] Charles Eames bookcase that we saw when we went to visit his ‘Case Study House’ in California, where he lived and worked.

When we came back and moved in here we found a photograph of it and I built it with a buddy of mine.

“I’ve read pretty much all of these books. I mean, a lot of them are art books so they’re mainly pictures, but there’s a shelf or two that are just jammed with Dylan books, and another that is all Beatles. There’s a cinema stack and I’m sure there’s a shelf of guitar books and punk rock.And then we have a shelf that’s for our friends, like Raymond [Petttibon] and Mike Kelly and Chrisitan Marclay and other people we’ve been associated with.”

P a i nti n g “These are a couple of paintings by my 12-year-old son.

He’s an aspiring artist and he’s pretty good. The one on the left is a copy of a Lucian Freud painting, the other one is a little still life in black and white. In fact, before we just played the East Coast, was when we were invited to play in India, so we were there in September, playing shows in clubs in Mumbai and Deli, and then we played at a crazy, fledgling rock festival in what is the most remote place on Earth that I have ever been to. We landed in this town and had to drive for 16 hours through the jungle to the foothills of the Himalayas to the Ziro Valleys.We were the only Western band there… and… why did I start talking about this? Oh yeah, I used a drawing that my son had done for our tour T-shirt, so yeah, he’s talented in a lot of ways. He’s a real musician – he’s a wonderful pianist and he plays the clarinet as well.”

La m p “I got this on Sonic Youth’s first trip to Australia of all places, in 1989. It’s a lamp from the 60s or 70s and I found out that it’s actually designed by a well known designer, although I can’t remember who it was. I liked the look of that, so I boxed it up and sent it home. When you’re on tour you don’t want to have too much stuff to carry.”

K ay G u itar “This is the guitar that I wrote ‘The Rising Tide’ on, which for me is one of the centrepiece songs on the new record. It’s an old ’50s Kay, is what it’s called. It’s a really beautiful guitar, although at the time it was made it was really cheap. Last summer, when we were touring ‘Between The Times and The Tides’, we were doing an acoustic record store show in Bloomington, Indiana, but we weren’t carrying acoustic guitars so the store got us a bunch to use and this was one of them. The guy whose guitar it was was there and I bought off him for 400 dollars and almost immediately wrote this song ‘The Rising Tide’. It’s always funny getting a guitar, because they always have songs in them somehow.

“I have stacks and stacks of guitars, but a lot of them are shared guitars of SonicYouth’s – we paid for gear as a band and shared everything. I don’t really know how many I have, but I’m pretty big on acoustic guitars. I’ve usually got 3 or 4 sitting around the house in different tunings.”

Tu m b l e w e e d “This is a real life tumbleweed. We took a trip to the Midwest three years ago and we were fascinated by it.

There were always these tumbleweeds blowing across the highway and they were so cool, and so classic.We got out of the car and chased a couple down, grabbed them and drove to the local post office and mailed them home to ourselves.”

P o rtr a it S c u l p tu r e “I don’t know if you can tell but this is a portrait of someone, with the nose pointing over to the left. It’s a silhouette sculpture that I made of a woman that I knew a lot better in the ’80s. It’s made of wood and sits on this little stand, but at the time I thought of it as something that would be made 20 feet high out in a field somewhere.”

03. G O “This is a little painting I made in the early ’80s. I was playing around with putting paint through a screen to get this dot-like texture, like Roy Lichtenstein. I liked that one because it was a positive thing, y’know, like ‘Yes’.”

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0 4. P i e c e o f T h e B e r l i n W a l l “We were in Germany when the Berlin wall came down. We weren’t in Berlin, we were in Hamburg, I think, but that day or two when it was coming down, the whole country was so excited that it was coming down.We met a car full of American GIs and they were screaming and dancing because they’d been a part of it in Berlin, and they had a trunkful of pieces of the Berlin wall, so one of them gave me a piece. It’s just a funny little rock composite, but we spent a lot of time in Berlin – Sonics played in Berlin a lot in the ’80s, when you had to go through the East German DBR to get there, and it was always a really intense trip, but it was always a very special city. I went there for the first time with Glen Branca in 1980 and support on the bill at this legendary club called SL36, playing either their first or second ever show, was Einstürzende Neubauten. So I met Blixa Bargeld and those guys, and we’ve remained friends ever since, and they of course went on to be a really important band. Berlin used to be very akin to Manhattan. It felt like an isolated island back in the ’80s.”

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Cool for

The story of Andy Popplewell and T.R.A.S.E: an extension of physics and

In 1981, Andy Popplewell was a 16-year-old spod studying O Levels in Government Economics and Commerce. He was the kid that would stay late – the one that seemed to enjoy learning a little too much.

Today, he’s pushing 50 and is a respected audiotape engineer and archivist. He lives in the northwest that raised him, where he’s spent pretty much his whole life.

School has become the Internet, and Andy has taken full advantage of its 24-hour access. “I love the Internet, mate,” he says in an inescapable Mancunian blast, manic and familiar, like Terry Christian preaching on The Word.

“It’s the best data resource ever invented. I’ve learned more in the last 8 years than I have done in my entire life about how the world works.”

Talking from his home in Stalybridge, Greater Manchester, Andy tells me: “I’m doing a project at the moment on how the world works. I’m back engineering reality at the moment.” He slips it into conversation and then it is the conversation. But before we get into what “back engineering reality”entails,a little aboutAndy Popplewell’s hidden musical past, and the reason we are here.

In 1981, Popplewell was not staying late at school to

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swat up on Government Economics and Commerce.

That would come much later. He was educating himself in the production of electronic music, then in its infancy.

In 2013, if you know where to look, you can find an electronic piano on the end of a tie; in the early ’80s you had to build this futuristic equipment yourself, and for that you needed to know something about physics and general wood and metal work.

Andy’s teachers supported his new enthusiasm for their chosen fields fully, allowing him full use of their classrooms as he wished.“I was into The Human League and John Foxx and Gary Numan and Giorgio Moroder, ‘I Feel Love’, and all of that. I just loved it,” he says with what becomes a recurring, mad laugh.

It took 12 months of soldering and saving for Andy to buy the parts and build his first piece of kit – a 6-track audio mixer, as published in a 1979 issue of Practical Electronics magazine. Elektor – a similar publication that implored Britain’s nerds to take scalpels to circuit boards and bring science into the home – then gave Andy his next project: the Chorosynth, which would become his primary instrument. He bought a Clef Master Rhythm

drum machine, too, but again in kit form, which needed piecing together in the science and woodwork labs of Paars Wood High School.

Finally, he was ready to emulate Foxx, Numan and Moroder under the chosen name of T.R.A.S.E, meaning Tape Recorder And Synthesiser Enable, as that’s how early electronic acts were performing live – singing to a backing track. Kids name things all the time. Usually it’s half the fun. Yet it’s something of a mystery as to why Andy Poppleman bothered. After recording an album worth of material over a three week period in 1982 (also named – ‘Electronic Rock’), followed by a few additional songs later in the year and a fleeting visit to a professional studio in 1983, Andy boxed up his tapes and T.R.A.S.E was over. Only the master copy of ‘Electronic Rock’ was made and it had been played to hardly anyone, 10, 15 people in the proceeding 30 years, by Andy’s estimation.

There were no attempts to play the songs live.

“I was never going to release the album because I was never happy with it, because it was never finished,” says Andy. “It was always a work in progress, especially the stuff from 1982 – I mean, that was done in my bedroom

O ver: T he master and only copy of t.r.a.s.e’s ‘electronic rock’ album here: A ndy popplewell’s school photo from 1982

School

woodwork classes, a lost electronic project and a continual quest for answers writer - stuart stubbs

with homemade equipment. It was just a teenage kid letting go and just doing it.”

In 1984, Andy chose the BBC over his project. He moved to London for three years to train as an engineer at Bush House.“Training at the BBC was like a degree,” he says. And so T.R.A.S.E has been his secret juvenile folly ever since, although it’s telling that a man who has made a career out of fixing recording studios and restoring tapes spent more time in his youth building the equipment that he would eventually play.

Popplewell met Andy Votel whilst working his day job.Votel is one of two founders of independent archive label Finders Keepers. This month the label released T.R.A.S.E’s debut eponymous album, a dusty time capsule for fans of experimental, embryonic electronic music.‘T.R.A.S.E’ is an extraordinary collection of sci-fi b-movie soundscapes, half ideas from outer space, nods to Kraftwerk and drone rock, one Gary Numan b-side (‘We Are So Fragile’) and the occasional austere postpunk track complete with Popplewell’s dead-eyed vocals, a source of embarrassment for him that played its part in him keeping T.R.A.S.E to himself all these years.

Andy Votel was impressed though. Says Popplewell: “[Votel] was just a client and he asked me if I’d done any music in my life. I’d just archived off my cassettes, and I said,‘Here you are mate, have a laugh at this! It’s just stuff I did as a kid’, and he was gob smacked! So I gave him all the tracks and said, ‘do what you like with them, no big deal’.

“I’d also kept a record of everything I’d done – I had scrap books of all the circuit diagrams, all the equipment, and I’ve even got the Chorosynth. But I just gave him everything, and was like, ‘here you are, mate, that’s the whole lot, everything from that project, from 1981 to 1983.’ I gave them free reign – ‘do what you want with it’ – and they’ve done a brilliant job.”

A majority of Popplewell’s scrapbook makes up the album’s inner booklet, original photographs by his mum and extensive, candid sleeve notes by himself. He tells me that his mother burst into tears when she recently heard his music for the very first time, and more than once he voices his disbelief at a T.R.A.S.E album finally being released. “I never expected this, ever!” he says.

“I’ve worked for pop stars and bands, but I’m a back

room guy, a techy, with the unsung heroes of the industry. And to be offered this, I am utterly gobsmacked.

“To be honest with you, it’s been a really crap couple of years and this is the one shining light in it. I’m just flattered. I’m still reeling from this. I’M A MIDDLE AGED BLOKE, MATE!” he yells and laughs.

‘T

.R.A.S.E’ is a romantically lo-fi record, but, much like its unpretentious naivety, its melancholic gloom and suspended sense of loss was not lost as it fizzed through Popplewell’s rudimentary homemade mixer in 1982. At 10 years old, Andy unexpectedly lost his father; an experience he now feels affected his music.

“One day he was there the next he wasn’t, he was dead, and that was it. And if you’re a mother and you have to tell your kids their dad’s gone, that’s brutal. If you haven’t lived it you don’t know it. I’m not asking for sympathy on this – it was a long time ago and it happens

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r e to l d

C l o c kwise from right: t h e co v e r to andy’s original l y r ic b o ok; andy’s homemade ch o r o synth; the issue of p r a ct i cal ele c troni c s from 1 9 7 9 ; a n dy and his brother, p h otographed by their m o t h e r, now the cover of d e b u t album ‘t.r.a.s.e’

everyday – but for me being a geek teenager that was an outsider, [T.R.A.S.E] was me expressing how I felt.

Only looking back after 30 years gives you that insight.

Some of it’s quite raw, and there are some tracks that I’m going to release next year that are directly about my dad.

I don’t know if I’m meant to tell you that yet or not, but there’s going to be another album next year, and there’s a track on there called ‘Memento’...”

Andy mentions his father’s death at the start of his sleeve notes, and towards the end, after enthused lists of obsolete tech (Tandberg 3000X, Sony TC-FX2, TEAC 3440), the passing of a boss and mentor in 1991, which he says raked up old, unwanted memories. He freely goes on to discuss what followed in ’92:“struggling with the psychological scars of grief and asking questions regarding the nature of reality and why the world was/ is the way it is, and why I have never fitted in the mainstream.” To me, he calls himself an outsider. “I’m a bit of a geek,” he says. “I was a geek at school, and if you look into the autistic spectrum and Asperger’s spectrum, I’m right in there.” It’s a thought echoed from the sleeve notes, and it’s round about there that he also writes about engineering reality.

I ask Andy exactly what that means, having a guess at searching for the meaning of life. “Yes,” he says. “Well, that’s one of the questions.The other is why is our world run by insane people. John Lennon actually said that in the late ’70s and he was absolutely right. It’s the usual suspects – it’s the power brokers, the bankers, not the politicians, who are just puppets doing what they are told…

“But I’m beyond the pettiness of human existence now. I’m looking into esoterics, the nature of reality – I mean, are we meat popsicles with consciousness embedded in us? Is there life after death? What is the nature of the universe? How does it work? Why is it the

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way it is?

“I’m an engineer mate. The first thing an engineer thinks is,‘how does that work?’ I’ve got a lot of questions and I need answers to them. It seems to me that the powers that be don’t want people capable of critical thinking. They want sheep who do what they’re told and don’t ask awkward questions.

“I’ve been looking into law and how that works,” he continues. “I’m especially interested in strawman legal fiction, which is the corporate entity that everyone of us has. You can Google this – it’ll mash your head, mate.

I’m two years into it and I think a grand deception has been perpetrated on every man, woman and child on this planet, but I can’t prove it yet – it’s just a hunch. It’s all about birth certificates. Everyone has a birth certificate, but actually what it is, is a corporate entity – it turns that child into the property of the state, so you don’t own your own children, and it’s done under duress, because if you don’t sign a birth certificate you get fined or sent to jail, but by signing it, you unwittingly turn that child into a slave.”

Andy whips through 8 years of self-imposed research in 30 minutes, barely pausing for a breath. One theory triggers another, which digresses into three more – Admiral Law (it turns out us Brits are still ruled by the law of the sea), spirituality, conspiracies, the New World Order, the registered business of Washington DC, who’s buying the gold, why I should (and can) refuse to pay car insurance, the banking crisis and racketeering, to name a few. Eight years is a long time, but still I wonder how he finds time to sleep.

“A mortgage is actually a death bond,” he says.“That’s why it’s called a mort gage. But when I was a kid I said, ‘hang on, you’re borrowing a hundred grand to buy a house and you’re paying back two hundred grand?

That’s racketeering!

“If you want to make the world a better place, get rid of charging interest. There’s loads of advanced technology,which is being suppressed by the government because they don’t want people getting their hands on these free energy devices. You can go and Google this.

We don’t need a national grid, we don’t need nuclear power and we don’t need to burn fossil fuel. Go and have a look,” he says, “make your own decisions on that – I’m not here to tell the people how to think.

“The banks are all insolvent. The banks are going down. I don’t know when, but the western banking system is finished. If you want to work out who’s going to run the planet, find out who’s buying the gold!”

On reading that sodium fluoride was used by the Nazis in concentration camps to sedate the inmates, Andy stopped buying toothpaste that contains the chemicalcompound(“orsodiummonofluorophosphate,” he notes). He’s knocked soft drinks containing aspartame on the head too, “because it’s a neurotoxin – it dumbs you down and lowers your IQ.” “It’s all a bit out there,” admits Andy, the barer of bad news, here to tell us all we’re fucked. But, then, a majority of us already knew that it’s not looking good. I’m not sure I believe in all of the grand deceptions that Popplewell does (my toothpaste contains fluoride and if anything I wish I got more of a buzz from it), but when he signs off with, “It’s got to be fixed. I’m a repairman; I repair things and my next job is to fix the planet,” I like the naivety of that, just as I like the naivety that went into T.R.A.S.E – a project for the sake of it, which may be more enigmatic and magical for having fallen down the back of the sofa for 30 years, but would remain an eerie feat of adolescent DIY drone pop had it been made yesterday with modern plugins. God knows plenty of others have tried to remake this record in the last five years, even if they didn’t know it yet.

wide open

Jimmy Martin of post-everything rock band Teeth Of The Sea discusses epiphanies, open influences and what’s very wrong with modern Doctor Who scores p h o t og r a p h e r - s o n n y m c c a r t n e y

A bunch of friends go to a Wolf Eyes show, have their minds blown to crumbling matter and form a collective musical pact that night. Some five years ago, this is how Teeth of the Sea got started and it is still a story that Jimmy Martin recalls with both passion and glee.“It was like an epiphany in a weird way,” he beams. “You don’t get many of those. We all had eyeballs like saucers, swaying back and forth, just being deafened by this incredible racket. The thing that really got us about it was that it was really hedonistic but really Avant-Garde at the same time – I think that was a central principle.”

It’s a principle that has spearheaded the groups’ own incredible racket over the years.

The moment when ‘Reaper’ erupts on Teeth of the Sea’s latest LP ‘Master’ has to be one of the most earthshifting, seismic sonic moments of the year. It is something that tears and ignites beneath you, leaving a vision of a wrecked, scorched earth, nothing but desolate, barren wasteland left in the trail of the unexplainable force that has passed through it.

‘Master’ is as intense as it is immersive. It marvels in creating both euphoria and paranoia – on ‘The Servant’ the brass is refrained so tactfully and with such wonderful malevolence that gone is the warm embrace of the familiar-sounding trumpet. Instead it is used to create an atmosphere that replicates both the sound and sensation of being locked within a seething swarm of insects.

Over the space of three albums and one EP, the band have wriggled and squirmed like a genre-evading snake.

Just when you feel they have settled into a place long enough to catch a grip of them, they embark again on an unpredictable, volatile and mysterious journey, while seemingly hell-bent on destroying any tracks they have left in their path. I speak with Jimmy as the band land home fresh off a Quietus-sponsored tour with Esben & the Witch and Thought Forms. Speaking with him in 2013 however, the drug-charged epiphany that led to the band’s cementing and proper formation is not something that carries them through collectively today.

“We’re not a very druggy band to be honest,” he says. “I mean none of us are young men anymore. We’re definitely a psychedelic band and I would love it if people had taken drugs and had those kind of experiences at our shows – that would be amazing! It is about altered states, I suppose, that’s what we do – to try and transcend reality to some degree, but I’d never put it as pretentiously as that.

“To be honest, in terms of taking drugs to make music to take drugs to – we’ve always been more into

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w r i t e r - d a n iel dylan wray

taking Kronenbourg 1664 to make music to take drugs to!”

Teeth of the Sea are, by Jimmy’s own description, a “strange band”.

“I know most bands don’t like to be categorised but it’s really hard to lump us in with other people,” he says.

“We’ve always been hammering away outside of any clique or genre, really. So to have people just get it when we’re throwing everything we can into this sort of demented crucible that we’ve got, be it Slayer or [Throbbing] Gristle or disco stuff, and for people to understand it at the end of the day, is incredibly gratifying.”

‘Master’ has brought the band a critical lavishing they never expected and Jimmy also reflects on the change in audience that has come with their ever-shifting musical output and increased popularity.“It’s changed quite a bit – I mean we’re always grateful to have an audience at all – but initially it was just drug casualties and wasters, and

aging Hawkwind fans and blokes that compared us to Santana and stuff.” He laughs. “Now it’s changed a bit, we’ve still got the drug casualties and wasters but we’ve also got a lot more younger people now, a few more girls too.”

But what hasn’t changed is the band’s self-sufficiency.

“We’ve never had a producer, for example. Nobody has ever told us how to put our records together; I can’t even really imagine what it’s like to have a producer or what a producer does.” And it would appear there is not even a dream producer out there either. “I was thinking about this,” Jimmy Recalls. “I did think of someone the other day but I can’t for the life of me remember who. I mean, there’s not really anyone, no. I think it would just cause more arguments. You’d get somebody else who wouldn’t have a clue what was going on.We’re a strange, tight-knit bunch; we don’t really have many arguments.

We’re all quite pig-headed in our own way but we know when to back off from each other to let someone get

‘w e’v e a lw ays b e e n m o r e i nto ta k i n g K r o n e n b o u r g 16 64 to m a k e m u s i c to ta k e d r u g s to’

their own way, all for the sake of keeping the wheels in motion. So I think if you introduced somebody else into that scenario it would be catastrophic.”

While Teeth of The Sea seem impossible to categorise, influences are something the group not only speak openly about but fervently so. They’re not about to say that they’ve never heard of Throbbing Gristle or this or that post rock group. “Unfortunately, if you try and make out that your music is like some snowflake that has fallen down from heaven and you haven’t got any influences at all then people are just going to give you reviews that say it sounds like Mogwai or Hawkwind or something like that.To be honest, being in a position of seeing it from both angles (Jimmy works as a journalist too and also wrote the band’s press release) I just think ‘what have you got to hide, really?’ I’m sick to death of bands making up some false mystique about what they do, like as if they gave away any of their secrets then it would somehow disempower them from whatever

strange mountain they’re trying to create. I just think it’s a load of nonsense.

“Also, speaking from experience as someone who has discovered a lot of bands through other bands – I mean I was one of the kids who during the ’90s got into Krautrock via Stereolab and things like that – I think being open about your influences can only be a positive thing”. It helps when they are informed, impassioned and genuine influences too. Jimmy crams so many music and film references into our conversation, it’s clear the group are not only unabashed in their love for other people’s work, but also in a position to stand behind them with authority.

One word banded around when describing Teeth of the Sea is ‘cinematic’. Aside from the grandiose-meetseerie ambience of their work leading to such a description, they’ve also been involved in live score work, or, more accurately, reimagining and reworking sound to accompany film. This includes a performance that supplemented Neil Marshall’s 2008 Sci-Fi thriller Doomsday, and a forthcoming performance to live remix Ben Wheatley’s 2013 historical thriller A Field in England. Of the latter, Jimmy says: “When we got the email, we were just like, there is no way we’re not going to do this. This is such our home turf. It’s going to be a challenge, but I think it will be really rewarding. I’m generally very disappointed by a lot of scores these days if I’m being completely honest.The 21st Century Doctor Who is a classic example – there’s this sub-Hans Zimmerlike score where everything has to have thundering strings to signify tension. Just these orchestral scores being ladled over everything to try and signpost things for the viewer, which I always find really frustrating, especially when you compare it to what Doctor Who was like in the ’60s and ’70s when it was some of the most innovative and experimental music being made at the time. I’ve always personally felt the need to readdress the balance as much as possible, really, even if that sounds a bit cocky. There’s a kind of fire in your belly to do

something to show people up, for doing weak scores for good movies [not meaning the existing A Field in England music].”

The intensity of absorbing yourself into a subject to excruciating degrees is something that Jimmy and the group have come to relish. “I mean, I’ve done that with most of my favourite films anyway,” he reasons. “I was watching Performance again the other night for about the 460th time. We’re doing a book about Performance that took it to pieces and detailed all the history of it.

I’ve done the same with the Wicker Man and I listen to that soundtrack and I pick that to bits, and to an extent the film was also an influence on A Field in England, too, so I don’t think it spoils it at all really. I don’t like to nerd out too much, but again, speaking as a Doctor Who fan, the degrees to which people will go to nerd out over those things, I don’t think it ever really affects your enjoyment of it.”

Teeth of the Sea can also be seen leading the rather tasty looking Rocket Recordings (their label) 15th anniversary compilation. Featuring a wealth of intrigue and talent from the likes of Goat, GNOD, $hit & $hine, Blood Sport and Vision Fortune. “I’m really pleased with that track [‘Red Run’]. I did sort of question Rocket’s sanity by deciding to open the album with it but at the same time it’s very sweet. It’s a great compilation and it’s very forward looking too.”

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“H

ow do I do that? I’ve never used Skype.”

Courtney Barnett is struggling with the camera on her laptop. I can hear her but unfortunately I can’t see anything other than a static avatar of her smiling face and checked shirt. I’m tired and hungover and so I concede that video might not be the best idea anyway. Plus, I admit, I’d rather not be subjected to the backdrop of the sunny Melbourne evening she describes as the rain teems down in London. Besides, given that the self-portrait she puts forward on Slacker mea culpa ‘Are You Looking AfterYourself?’ isn’t exactly one that embraces technology (“My TV, it stopped working when we got here / It’s been four years”), I choose to see the fact that we’re having this conversation at all as somewhat of a triumph.

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Though I can’t see her face, Courtney seems to speak with a perpetual crease at the corner of her lips. It’s no exaggeration to say that I can, quite audibly, hear her smile as she chats about her new life as a rising star.“I got back from overseas like three days ago and I’ve just been catching up on work. After this I’m going to a party. I’ve got a friend sitting out in my garden. It’s my birthday tomorrow. So I’m just ready to – you know – have some fun.”

Having dismissed the idea of a record deal early on, Barnett took things into her own hands by creating Milk! Records. “I didn’t really think about it, to be honest, when I started it. I had no idea of the music industry and I just assumed that getting a record deal, in

inverted commas, was quite a far-out concept, so I didn’t even consider it.” By distilling the notion down to its simplest form, it became clear that she could take on a lot of the work herself. “I was like, ‘Well, what is a record label?’ A record label is just a middle man to get your music to people.” Not only that, but she feels that if the music is reaching the people who care the most then her job is a successful one. “I was playing a shitload of gigs at the time and I prefer my music to go to people who are nice and enjoy the music, who come to the shows and tell me that they’re interested and they want to buy the CDs. I’d prefer for those people to buy the records than a hundred other random people who probably don’t give a shit. I was kind of going for quality over quantity

Avant Gardener’s World Australia’s Courtney Barnett makes the everyday magical by turning her diary posts into deadpan slacker pop reminiscent of Modern Lovers and vintage Beck photographer - gem harris

and I figured I could just do that myself. It just kind of grew from there. I thought,‘I can just do this. I can do my own artwork and post CDs out to people.’”

While she admittedly stumbled into the business, the 25-year-old isn’t content with releasing only her own music through the imprint.“We’ve got a few other bands at the moment and I reckon we’re gonna branch out and get a distribution deal or something.Which is something that I never even knew about before. We’re gonna keep the same general idea in progress.” She’s pretty confident in her roster and one of Barnett’s lyrics goes, “My friends play in bands / they are better than everything on radio.” I have to ask: are they? “Yeah, I reckon! I’ve got heaps of friends who play music and they’re great. It’s a very broad statement, but there’s lots of shit on the radio and there’s lots of bands who get famous because they have a lot of money.There’s also a lot of really great bands on the radio so whatever. But it’s a bit of a tongue in cheek comment saying that my friends make cool music as well.”

The commercial side of things nicely covered, then, we move on to the music itself.The first thing that strikes me about Barnett’s work is how she approaches its words.

Meticulous in her depth of detail, she zeros in on the finer facets of scenes to create a kitchen sink surrealism that’s astoundingly vivid and punctuated with beguiling candour.“I reckon that’s what makes songs interesting. It means that they’re realistic. Otherwise you’re just singing the same song that everyone else sings.”

A beautiful example of this is ‘Avant Gardener’, a song that has been garnering significant online buzz in recent weeks, helping to drag Barnett into the heavily European and US-curated indie discourse. It’s a wonderfully woven tragicomedy that reflects on how a well-intentioned idea to do some gardening on a scorching Victorian summer’s day resulted in hospitalisation. Told as a stream-ofconsciousness, list-like chronology, Barnett’s almostmonotone passivity and matter of fact recounting of what is, in truth, a shocking tale means that its punch lines (“They call up triple o”) become all the more surprising. I’m interested to learn that only a splash of poetic licence was employed. “Aw that song’s maybe 99% truth,” she says.“The only untrue bit is the adrenaline to the heart… I got it to the thigh. Adrenaline to the heart was because in Pulp Fiction she overdoses and she gets it to the heart.” It sounds like a bad day. “It was a terrible day. I thought I was dying.” But it’s the way in which Barnett plays with words themselves that is so striking. Lines are sprinkled with half rhymes so that seemingly straightforward lyrics reveal themselves as deliberately ornate structures when you look at them written down: “Halfway down the street, Andy looks ambivalent / He’s probably wondering what I’m doing getting in an ambulance.” Barnett has a way with the mundane like Jonathan Richman.

An unswerving preoccupation with authenticity also pervades The Double EP, a collection that is,

w r i t e r - d a v i d zammitt

unsurprisingly, made up of two of Barnett’s extended plays welded together. Early single ‘Lance Jr’ is patently honest in its disclosure that the singer masturbated to songs written by the unnamed subject, while ‘History Eraser’ is so overwhelmingly open in its admiration of the person in question it’s nothing less than disarming.

“All my songs come from my journal,” she tells me. “I write everything down and then turn it into a song later.

The honesty thing is just my way of dealing with and communicating my thoughts, my worries, my whatevers with the people around me because I’m not very good at talking about things. I just turn it into a song and maybe make it a bit awkward. Sometimes it takes me ages to write a song, so my response to a conversation might come out a year later.You know how like if you have a fight with someone you write a letter – you don’t want to yell at them so you write it down and figure out what your problem is and what you’re actually feeling.”

The procedure functions as a sort of self-therapy for Barnett, allowing her to get to grips with her emotions and how they tie in with her relationships with others by shoehorning them into the perfect paradigm that a song structure provides.“You understand it and then once you understand it it makes it easier to communicate it to that person. That’s kind of what the process is for me, to understand what I’m thinking.”

Whilst romantic encounters and the ensuing farces provide a large chunk of the inspiration, even Barnett’s mother makes an appearance on ‘Are You Looking After Yourself?’.As the singer re-enacts a humdrum phone call between the two, we get a comical insight into their relationship, her mother’s worries (“Are you eating? You sound so thin.”) and her own relaxed framework for life.

Thankfully, however, it hasn’t put a strain on the filial bond.“She has shown great support for my music.When that first CD came out she actually brought up that song and she was like,‘I’ve never said that,’ and I was like,‘Well, you kinda did. But that’s ok.’ She’s cool. I don’t think she was offended, she kinda thought it was funny. I mean, I’m having a carrot with some cheese for dinner, so that answers your question.” She laughs and I am moved to come out in support of what sounds like a balanced diet of complex carbs and protein. “Yeah, I think it’s good,” she says.

Though it’s obvious Barnett doesn’t afford much importance to semantics, she is careful to make sure that The Double EP isn’t regarded as her first album. The product of two very separate eras in her life, she wants it to be viewed as such. “It’s not like it matters that much but essentially I wrote one EP a year ago and then wrote the other one after that. They’re totally different parts of my life but essentially the international interest came around the time of the second EP. So we just decided to put them together.” She laughs again and reveals the real motive behind the release. “I wanted to put them on vinyl together! We’re starting plans to record [a proper

debut album] ASAP, though,” she reveals.“This is the first time off I’ve had since forever, it feels like. We just got back from overseas and I’ve got to go back to work next week, but no more touring for a while. I’m just going to spend my time reading books and writing and playing guitar, all those things that I haven’t done. I feel like I’ve only been playing guitar when I’ve been playing shows. I haven’t been sitting down and writing a song or anything.” And although she loved the tour (“It was really great”), she lets out a sigh of relief for the opportunity to focus on her art.“I write on the plane and everywhere but it’s nice to have the time off and spend time with my people and go back to work.” She pauses. “…And live a real life.”

I ask her exactly what real life looks like. She asks me to guess what she has to do to earn a crust. She isn’t, sadly, a brain surgeon. “I just work at a pub. I have for years.

Lots of musicians work in pubs and I’ve worked in a pub since I was 18, but I’ve also had day jobs as well as night jobs. And day jobs are so much better for a musician.

Working in a pub is ridiculous because all of your rehearsals are at night and your shows are at night. So you end up asking for three nights off a week. I worked in an office from 8am to 4pm or something and then you’re sweet.You can make soundcheck and then do your gig.”

Sounds perfect, then. “Yeah, but it killed me inside. I couldn’t do the office job. I got depressed. It drains me.

But I do a lot of them. I get so bored easily so I get new jobs all the time. And you see people who’ve been there for 30 years.You know that person in the office who’s the know it all? You know that person, right? It’s so tense.”

And so I let Courtney Barnett get back to enjoying her pre-birthday celebrations, though she counters my seasonal jealousy with a characteristically droll riposte.

“Whatever people say about London, I prefer the rain and the miserableness to the heat. I hate it.”Well, where’s the fun in fitting in?

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open for business

Combining dance floor indie with proudly DIY funk punk, London trio Shopping want to make you lose control of yourself photographer - jenna foxton

“Need something / Want something / Buy something / Need something…” And so it goes, speeding this way, then that, around the table. Need something, want something. Oh a sausage, I want a sausage. This is the general theme when one is shopping, and it also happens to be the lyrics to Shopping the band’s theme. Andrew Milk, Billy Easter and Rachel Aggs are explaining the principle of commerce to me, the odd one out at the table; it’s Andrew who wants a sausage.

You may have wanted Shopping’s debut single, ‘In Other Words’, but you’d have struggled to get it – the seven-inch sold out in just ten days. “We only pressed ten, though,” snaps Billy, the band’s bassist. Got to keep up, I think. See, Andrew, Billy and Rachel are a gang; the kind of gang who both start and finish each other’s sentences, answer for each other and laugh at the most primitive part of a joke. Today sees them celebrate the release of their debut album, ‘Consumer Complaints’, and it feels like a privilege to enter their goofy castle, at least for a moment. “I bought 50,000 copies on iTunes to make sure we’d get in some kind of top ten immediately,” continues Andrew [drums].

“I feel proud,” says Billy. “I feel like I have just given birth. It’s a relief.”

“It’s taken much less than 9 months to make though,” says Rachel [guitar and vocals].

Like any decent commercial model, Shopping formed under a year ago with the aim to be as productive as possible. Their grand opening, then, is a wilfully DIY debut album that rattles and shakes with its own personality, and pulls in funk and punk a la Prinzhorn Dance School, London duo Plug and Aggs’ old band Trash Kit. So how can I write this without mentioning propulsive bass lines? “You could say ‘repulsive bass’

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writer - ian roebuck

lines,” Andrew deadpans, fast even for him.

I mention that it’s the first guitar album of 2013 that’s made me want to dance and everyone smiles. “That is our definite aim,” says Andrew, “for the music to make people dance and have fun, especially with the live shows. Maybe we’re not expecting people to dance, as such, but just lose control of themselves.”

“And they do,” confirms Rachel, speaking of the UK tour the band are currently halfway through. “It’s always surprising and people usually start off like statues and then by the end their funky moves are coming out.”

“The shows have been really good,” Andrew adds, “even in my London opinion of obscure towns… or do I mean very much established places where people live?

Sorry Halifax. Bedford was funny – it was pretty much an empty pub with some rugby fans in it. They bought a T-shirt before our gig started because they thought it was a laugh; they were like, ‘yeah I like Shopping’, and then before we played they were shouting, ‘play some Stranglers’, but you could see them change through us playing.We got them dancing.”

Rachel proudly walks me through the highlights of the tour with expressive hand gestures, her hushed chat at odds to the spirited yelps and shouts of her singing voice. It’s definitely an underground racket that Shopping make, yet while retaining its alternative roots, there is a lot about ‘Consumer Complaints’ that cries dance-floor indie-pop. Chain store fodder might be pushing it, but only slightly, and not if the store is Topshop.

“I don’t have anything against any of the terms used to describe us,” says Andrew, considering anti-pop, postpunk-funk, DIY disco and post-indie. “If you’re going to call it something then that’s fine. The entire thing is

‘It’s a l l f u n a n d j oy a n d i f th at d o e s n’t come across on th e r e c o r d th e n th e r e i s s o m eth i n g s e r i o u s ly w r o n g’

open to interpretation, especially once you put ‘post’ in front of it.Then it could mean any number of things.”

In truth, ‘Consumer Complaints’ is a record of light and shade – of popularist guitar hooks and rough edges; of aggravation and surprisingly sentimental respites like ‘For Your Money’ and the thoughtful ‘Hard As Nails’.

“That’s one of my faves,” says Andrews. “We play it live now.” And where might you have gotten those police sirens from at the end of the track, I ask Andrew.“Err the Internet. Google police sirens, probably.” Billy chuckles away at him. “I think it was that time you got arrested,” she says. We all look at him again. “Yes, funnily enough it was for copyright infringement.”

Shopping’s relentless wit translates on the record.

Again they grin. “I’m glad,” says Billy. “I feel like that would happen anyway… as we are such hilarious people.” She’s in full sarcastic flow now. “We couldn’t disguise the amount of fun we have in making the music, it’s just a really fun and funny time, practicing together and creating these songs.”

“We are like a family on happy days,” says Andrew.

“It’s all fun and joy and if that doesn’t come across on the record then there is something seriously wrong.”

Droll and intensely self aware, the band play for laughs, but the enthusiasm for each other’s company and happiness in what they are doing shines through most in ‘Consumer Complaints’. It’s an unapologetic record that’s honest in its humour. One track is even called ‘Hanover Cure’. “Oh yeah!” Andrew gives me a thumbs up, glad of the recognition.

“You had a bad hangover didn’t you?” Rachel says to him.“You were throwing up in a bag and we had to turn the music up so loud so we couldn’t hear you.”

The band wrote that song on their European tour

earlier this year, as the incredibly well connected Shopping hit the road of the continent before playing UK towns (like Halifax) outside of London. “I looked around to see where our friends had played before and contacted the venues, but most of them were with this one guy we knew in Berlin that’s in a band that’s London based,” explains Andrew.“He comes over and plays a few times and I’ve put his band on in the past. He’s called Boitel and plays in a band called The Hummusexuals.”

Andrew carefully maps out the punk family tree of Europe, and stuck firmly in its roots are Shopping.

To trace back this family tree, a good place to start is Shopping’s label, Milk Records. Started by Andrew himself in the heady days of MySpace, and since joined

by Billy, Milk is the essence of DIY, releasing only a couple of seven inches a year. Andrew knows what he likes and it’s led to releases with Divorce,Teeth,Trash Kit and more recently Skinny Girl Diet, to name a few. His time running the label has given him an enviable contact list and network of bands to call upon, and it seemed like the natural home for ‘Consumer Complaints’.“It’s good to have control over everything,” he says. “The release date, the artwork, the order of the tracks – these are the things that record labels might have more of a say in, but I don’t know, I’ve never released with a big label. If you want to be as productive as possible, relying on other peoples timeframes is not good – we just wanted to get it out there.” Andrew is pretty passionate about this, as is Billy. “We’re basically just control freaks,” she says, “and it suits us perfectly.”

In 9 short months, Shopping have become a vital cog in the Capital’s punk scene, playing shows, sure, but they’re also ambassadors, too. Having met and formed in Power Lunches Arts Café (both Andrew and Rachel

now work there), a venue that allows you to practice there as well as play shows in, the band are helping with the DIY Space for London campaign.“A group of us are trying to create a sustainable and long term, autonomous social centre space, venue and practice space used and run by musicians who are all involved in DIY activities in London at the minute,” explains Andrew, “so that is something that if anyone wants to get involved in then they should. We’re aiming to have ten grand by the end of this year.” Maybe this is my chance to join the gang; to penetrate the humour and in jokes and inner circle.

“Need any help with fundraising?” I actually say out loud. “Hopefully we will be just what a certain local authority is looking for,” say Andrew, “something that is going to improve the community in general.” He nods sagely as silence falls. Seconds later they’re back pulling faces again.

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Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Still Floating In Space It was the soundtrack to Drive that made the world truly wake up to Cliff Martinez, while his score to Solaris in 2002 – perhaps his greatest work to date – went unnoticed by the masses. As it’s lovingly rereleased this month on limited vinyl, Reef Younis talks with the composer about that minimal masterpiece, the power of music in film and ignoring the money, unless it really is a lot p h o to g r a p h e r - Ric a r d o De Ar a t a n h a

Most of us are fans of Cliff Martinez, we just didn’t realise it. A former Captain Beefheart and Red Hot Chilli Peppers drummer, and composer of rapidly increasing mainstream repute, Cliff ’s compositions have spanned 25 years across films such as Sex, Lies and Videotape, NARC, Traffic, Solaris, Drive, Spring Breakers and Only God Forgives. Drive, as he himself admits, marked a tipping point; the moment the man behind the music became almost as prominent as the directors and actors hitting the headlines. But it’s not Drive and its Gosling-fuelled frenzy we’re here to talk about; it’s the ambient masterpiece, Solaris.

Over a decade on from the original film and soundtrack release, the music is being given a loving, vinyl second life courtesy of Invada Records — the label run by resident Spotify hater and Portishead honcho, Geoff Barrow. Indulgently pressed in three different, limited edition vinyl versions, it’s a resurrection that has collectors on edge as we hurtle towards the end of the year.

See, where Steven Soderbergh’s cinematic take on Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 novel split opinion, the appreciation for the deep, cerebral score that complemented it so perfectly has endured. Characterised by the darkside of baritone steel drums and the natural warmth of orchestral ambience, in hindsight, Solaris should have been the score to raise Cliff ’s profile to a new level. That he’s had to wait a decade could have made him a little bitter; instead the growing, belated acclaim continues to come as a welcome surprise.

Reef Younis: It’s been over ten years since the original film and soundtrack; do you know what instigated the re-release? How involved were you with the process?

Cliff Martinez: I didn’t instigate the idea of re-releasing it but I’m glad somebody did.They stepped forward and volunteered to re-release it, which I embraced enthusiastically. That was the extent of my involvement, but I better get a copy [laughs].

RY: The steel drums are a big influence on the score and you seemed to find this dark side that’s the polar opposite to upbeat calypso rhythms.What made you even consider

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w r it e r - reef younis

using steel drums in that context?

CM: Sometimes you’re influenced by the film or input from the director but there were two things that influenced the overall sound.

One was the orchestra playing these slow moving, layered canons as harmonics and that came about because Steven [Soderbergh] used temporary music to cut the film to and I really fell in love with a piece called ‘Lontano’ by György Ligeti. That was kind of a role model reference that I thought was a beautiful example of ambient music played by an orchestra.

In the meantime, I’d always just had a fascination with steel drums and it peaked around the same time I was working on Solaris. I’d had too much Tequila to drink, I had a credit card in my hand, and I hit ‘buy now with one click’ for a company in Trinidad that made steel drums. A couple of days later the delivery service showed up with these huge wooden crates that had to be opened up with crowbars and hammers, and inside were the baritone steel drums.

I was just determined to shoe horn that sound into the film somehow, and it took a fair amount of exploration to make it work, but at that time, the baritone steel drums were just the coolest instrument I’d ever heard.

The whole idea of Ligeti’s was deliberately designed to avoid any sense of rhythm, so I was looking to subvert that formula. Oddly, when you have this bottom layer that’s completely free-floating and beatless, you can superimpose a rhythm over it very easily. It’s an interesting paradigm of ideas because if you steal one idea from one artist, that’s considered plagiarism, but if you take two different ideas and put them together you come up with something original. So calypso music and

I g u e s s I’m th e g o-to g uy f o r m u s i c th at’s 8 0s a n d g ay

the ambient orchestral music of Legetti: put them together, shake them up and you end up with something unique.

RY: I can vividly remember watching the Volkswagen ‘Night Drive’ advert with ‘Don’t Blow It’ playing in the background as Richard Burton read an excerpt from Dylan Thomas’ ‘Under Milk Wood’. It was a bit of a perfect storm for me…

CM: Yes! I remember that ad, what a surprise! There was also a Nike ad with Lebron that used ‘Don’t Blow It’ too so that track’s had a second life. You write this stuff in such complete isolation with a short feedback loop between you and your director, and the Solaris soundtrack seems to have had a life of its own, certainly in a few commercials. I do get beaten over the head with it in temp scores with other films [laughs].

I’m amazed at how versatile it was because it was designed with a very specific purpose as it was written for an esoteric, existential remake of a Russian science fiction art film.To see it in a Volkswagen commercial or a tennis shoe commercial, and a few other places, is a pleasant surprise. I guess it shows how universal music is, and how it speaks to a listener in one way. I thought it was strictly sci-fi music but clearly people appreciate it in a different way.

RY: You say you’re surprised by its broader appeal but have you ever heard your music in a context where it hasn’t felt right?

CM: I haven’t heard Solaris in a context that felt like it was incorrect to me but I’ve heard a lot of my other music, like music from Drive, that’s been used in rough cuts of other films. I guess I’ve got such a big head about my own music I just think “that’s great”. I’m very easily impressed with myself [laughs].

The other day I saw a film where they had used music from Spring Breakers in a very, very graphic, erotic homosexual love scene with five men [cracks up laughing] and I looked at it and I went,“I didn’t think of that.” But I’ve got to hand it to them, it worked beautifully, it’s perfect, so I guess I’m the go-to guy for music that’s 80s and gay [laughs again].

RY: You mentioned the isolation which must make

composing such a personal experience. Do you get overly attached to your music?

CM: Writing music for film, I compare it to raising children. I know nothing about that from experience but you’ve got to be dedicated and passionate and put your heart and soul into it, but when your daughter turns 20, and she wants to marry an abusive alcoholic hillbilly, you just got to say,“hey, I did my best, you’re on your own now”, and so it is with film music; you’ve got no control over whether it’ll be accepted, how it may be edited, how it will be used, or not used, and it’ll go through hands less sympathetic than your own. I don’t get beat up that often but it happens and there has to be a time where you feel dispassionate about it.

RY: With that in mind, is it important to like the film you’re working on?

CM: It makes a difference. I don’t say no to many projects because I don’t like them, and I’m fortunate it seems that I attract films that seem to be well suited to my particular artistic personality. I don’t get many films

I don’t like but you inevitably do like some more than others, or feel more inspired by others, but I’m so selfabsorbed, and I like what I do, that once you get immersed in it, I’m inspired.

I find the process of putting music to picture an interesting thing because if you’re doing a good job, it usually transforms the film, for the better, so I get really excited by that process. Sometimes, when the smoke clears, and you get to see the film in theatres and it doesn’t get the response you hoped for, you realise it wasn’t that great a film [laughs].

I tend to get pumped up and enthusiastic about the films when I’m working on it but I’ve stopped making wagers on a film’s success anymore; all bets are off and I keep my mouth shut.

RY: So is there a set of criteria or filter of sorts you apply when choosing a film or project to work on?

CM: Yeah, the biggest filter comes into play when someone says, “We have no money but we can pay you in frozen shrimp” [laughs], when that happens, the filter

kicks in. It’s not an easy job but it’s a fun job that I enjoy.

At the short end, it can be five weeks but it can also be three months of your life, and a five day/seven days a week job, so I have to take that into consideration. In the past I never had that many job offers so I’d say yes to anything but since Drive, now I sometimes have to pick and choose from time to time.

I like to think I don’t do things for the money, unless it’s a lot of money [laughs]. I think the biggest thing is not how much you like the money, it’s how much you believe in it because you’re going to have to sit down and work out every molecule and watch every frame forwards and backwards every day, for the next two months.

RY: Having gone through that process and being able to look back, is there a piece of music that you think “yeah, that was the one”?

CM: I think Drive was the high watermark in terms of success because it was a small, low budget film that exceeded everyone’s expectations, so that was the biggest surprise I’ve had in terms of public acceptance and specifically the music getting singled out in a film.

That’s unusual because most people couldn’t care less about the film soundtracks, let alone the personalities that create them.

Artistically, I’d have to say Solaris. I wish I could roll out of bed every day and write music like Solaris… not only because it’s one of the only scores I can listen to and enjoy but because it seemed to have come from a place beyond that doesn’t even sound like me. Usually I’m so familiar with the music, it has no element of surprise but I still listen to it and think “wow, that’s really cool”. Before I worked on it, I was having a lot of selfdoubt about whether I was any good at film scoring but once I finished Solaris I felt like if I could do that again at some point in my life, I’d be a real composer.

RY: Do you feel like that now? Do you think the role your music plays has changed over your career?

CM: I think it varies from film to film. Sometimes the music plays a really important role in a film such as Only God Forgives where there’s so little dialogue and it’s very abstract. When you’ve got something like that, people really turn their attention to the music to be cued, and music assumes a very prominent role, like a leading role, like a character.

But then there are other films like Sex, Lies and Videotape where it’s very incidental and the music has a minor role. In terms of the function, I think that varies too. In Solaris, the music had a hand in helping explain the story so it was very obtuse and cerebral. Other times, in the case of Contagion, one of the very important functions was pacing, because even though Contagion was a big disaster-horror movie, it was also a talking heads movie with people sitting in their rooms just talking.

On a macro level, I think the purpose of music is to universalise a story, to take something that’s generally out of the ordinary that some people can’t experience, and turn it into something relatable. Spring Breakers to me wasn’t necessarily about teenage excess and drugs and bikinis and firearms, it was more about the time in anybody’s life when there are no rules and everything’s perfect but because there are no boundaries, it turns out to be hell.

I think when film music is really firing on all cylinders it’s explaining the part of the story that can’t be explained by the images or dialogue. I just try to look at the film and use the music to make some kind of theme or idea that everybody can relate to. Perhaps that’s the greatest thing that music does.

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To b or Not?

photographer - Ph i l S h a r p

writer - sam walton

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Since 2010, no artist has quite straddled the mainstream and underground quite like Katy B. Raised in the clubs and happy to be a faceless member of the Rinse FM family, it was ‘Katy B On A Mission’ that made its author into an expected chart star who could just as easily be found raving all night in a warehouse in Brixton.

As so now, with a delayed second album (almost) complete, Kathleen Anne Brien faces a decision: just how big does she want to go?

The entrance to the studios of Rinse FM, just off the courtyard of the now-defunct bar and venue 93 Feet East, is an unprepossessing affair. An unmarked door below an iron fire escape opens onto a flight of stairs, and the only giveaway that you’re somewhere with any cultural relevance is the occasional old poster for a club night or a compilation CD curated by the station, bluetacked to the wall. For all Rinse’s colossal musical influence in the past 15 years, and growing success since going legal in 2010, there isn’t even a sign above the door; as radio station record labels go – and not just ones that have played pivotal parts in steering the passage of British electronic music since grime crawled out of jungle in the late ’90s – it’s not one to show off.

At the top of the stairs is a non-descript room that feels more like the ever-changing council flats that the station used to call home than the beating heart of hipster East London. From a studio next door comes the muffled sound of a track being mixed: a low-level thump throbs along the floorboards, sporadically stopping and restarting; every now and then, the door cracks ajar just enough for the rest of the tune above it to jump out. It’s the only remarkable thing about the entire scene, and that detail makes Rinse’s message clear: like so many pioneering musical forces before them, their only concern is for the music, maaan – and the pop-star accoutrements of style and champagne, commercial adoration and Scrooge McDuck swimming pools can go hang.

All of which makes Rinse’s most successful charge,

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Kathleen Anne Brien – known to everyone but her mum as Katy B – such a curious prospect.Tonight, fresh from the adjacent session and dressed in jeans, printed sweater and some high-tops, she cuts a figure in keeping with her employers’ aesthetic. But alongside that, Brien is also a bona fide pop star, with top-ten singles, a face that gets stopped in the street and a performance CV that lists Radio 1’s Big Weekend and countless national TV slots. A pop svengali’s dream, she’s happy singing over other people’s songs, collaborating with behindthe-scenes songwriters, coming up with killer pop hooks and doing it all in front of screaming 14-yearolds. Not for Brien the noble struggle against the artistically corrupt mainstream, or desperate drive to make wilfully odd music: Katy B is the BRIT Schooleducated singer who cites Destiny’s Child more readily than Diplo, and makes no apology for it. “I listen to Radio 1, who like to play songs,” she says, emphasising the last word. “And I love songs. I’m not trying to make really serious, leftfield music – like I’ve said before, I’m a massive Justin Timberlake fan, and I love R’n’B. Pop music is a massive part of me anyway – it never wasn’t. It was always going to be half of my influences.”

But it’s the other half of Brien’s influences that intrigues: here’s a singer who began her performance life as a funky house hype girl, singing over tunes on pirate radio and in dark, underground clubs, a world away from the Mickey Mouse Club production line or the micromanagement of Simon Cowell. For all her

love of chart pop, you get the impression that if you cut Brien, she’d bleed dubstep, UK garage and house: she talks with breathless enthusiasm about her formative experiences in the London club scene over the last eight or so years, and comes across as both an authority and wit on everything dance music – from the splintering of genres to the dancing itself: “early dubstep was very sparse, very masculine... proper sausage dancing,” she observes with a nostalgic chuckle. “And all these girls at funky nights would be dressed up in these tiny little skirts and amazing heels and would be dancing – skanking! – hard!” From a certain angle, her pop chops seem like a distant pinprick.

T

hree years ago, this pop/pirate musical hybrid fashioned her debut album out of a series of tracks originally destined to be a showcase sampler for Rinse’s stable of rising producers. Brien’s initial role on the record was simply to sing anonymously over the top, like she had done so many times on the radio, but her vocals made it quickly apparent that the tracks deserved to be more than just a calling card for the likes of Geeneus, Benga and DJ Zinc. Accordingly,‘Katy B On A Mission’ was born, adding an approachable high-street gloss to dance music’s murky subcultures. While the Rinse logo on the back of the record made sure the street credibility endured, ‘On A Mission’ was also deeply indebted not

just to the slick American pop and Timbaland R’n’B that Brien loves, but also the ’90s commercial pophouse of Steve ‘Silk’ Hurley and Kim Syms. Almost by accident, Rinse FM had an unapologetically accessible mainstream dance record on their hands. Without batting an eyelid, their next release was an EP of minimal and sonically challenging UK bass; normal service was, for the label at least, resumed.

‘On A Mission’, though, turned out to be something of a landmark record: one only need look at the recent successes of Jessie Ware, AlunaGeorge and Disclosure, or even someone as environmentally different as Miley Cyrus, to see how well Brien’s original formula – pirateradio beats meets Capital Radio melodies – has been refined, to chart-topping effect. Not that Brien was expecting it: “I didn’t for a second think it would take off like it did,” she admits, looking back.“When it started happening I was on holiday with my friends, and I didn’t even turn my phone on – I came home and the single had had 50,000 views on YouTube, which was really strange.

“I remember at the time thinking that there wasn’t anyone else doing the same kind of thing, which is why I didn’t think it was going to do much,” she adds, with refreshing honesty. She has a point too: the biggest selling singles of 2010 ranged from the guile-free bubblegum of Katy Perry to joyless, po-faced Jason Derulo/Flo Rida jams, and pretty much anything featuring Rihanna. “I didn’t write it for me to make money off,” admits Brien. “I just wrote those tunes for

what I was doing at the time – singing my songs, living at home, going out clubbing every weekend with my mates and getting paid my fifty quid or whatever for a PA at a rave.”

But when ‘On A Mission’ got to number two in the charts, went gold and earned a Mercury Prize nomination, there were inevitable tuts about authenticity, despite Brien’s considerable clubbing experience.

Coinciding with Rinse FM becoming a legally regulated radio station and the opening flurries of the dubsteppilfering Americanised EDM in the charts, the argument from the purists was that ‘On A Mission’ was just another symptom of the whole scene coming above ground and, with that, losing its soul. Brien admits to being as unprepared for the backlash as she was for success: “When I was making the album, I thought maybe I could just have a flower or a cartoon character on the front cover, because all the other artists on Rinse were a bit more culty, a bit more anonymous,” she explains, making something of an understatement about a group of producers with names as transparent as Oneman, Roska and Royal-T. “And I’m not going to lie, I think I did find the whole thing with people knowing who I was quite difficult. I’d always dreamt of being a singer, but I’d never really thought about putting yourself out there on that level to let people have an opinion on you.

It was really quite daunting.”

Not for the last time, perhaps, Brien felt the opposing pulls of commercial success and underground credibility.

“People were talking about how it was selling out dubstep or whatever,” she remembers of the reaction to ‘On A Mission’. “But it’s not selling out anything, because I’ve been in them raves and that means something to me.That’s something that’s sacred to me. I wrote those songs for the rave. It’s something that I feel really passionately about, and I think that’s what, in everything I do, I try to keep. When you’re writing a club record, you want to smash the rave. You want to smash it, you want it to have the best feeling, you want to make people dance, you want it to stand out.”

O

f course, the only problem with “writing for the rave” is that to keep it fresh you’ve got to keep on being a raver, which, when you’re Katy B, is increasingly difficult.“You know when you have to go to bed or stay in because you’ve got something important the next day?” asks Brien, longingly, explaining her decreasing clubbing attendance in recent years. “Well, my life now is something important the next day, every day – a TV performance or photo shoot, or I’ve got to be up to record a vocal and I really want my voice to be on point.”There’s a resigned raise of the eyebrows with this, and while it would appear that her success doesn’t seem too compatible with her love of staying up all night, Brien’s remaining practical, at least outwardly: “To be a singer, and to be in this kind of environment, you have

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“early dubstep was very sparse, very masculine... proper sausage dancing”

to be very dedicated,” she says, although not sounding convinced of herself.“You have to work really hard,” she continues, almost bored of her own pragmatism.“There’s so much sacrifice that you have to make – and I guess staying in is part of it.”

But the joy of dancing until dawn also appears at odds with Brien’s ever-encroaching adulthood.Whether she likes it or not, she and her friends are beginning to settle down, cosy up and maybe prefer the more pedestrian side of being in your twenties: “I’ve moved out of my mum and dad’s house and have had to pay the bills!” she explains with mock exasperation of her recent life.“My friends have to go home at a sensible time on a Saturday night, and I have to go home too, because I’ve got a career now rather than a Saturday job.”

Crucially, however, these different flavours of new responsibility all add up to an enforced maturation that has affected Brien’s songwriting. While only 24 – certainly not an age at which one should be longing to be young again – her new material has undeniably darker themes than the frequently straight-up “wooo drunk” of her debut, which speaks perhaps of a newfound thoughtfulness and brooding. “As I’ve got older, after I’ve been raving with my friends, I’ve come home and felt a bit more alone,” she acknowledges, explaining her latest single ‘5am’, which vividly tells the story of a post-club comedown. “You know the hangover’s going to be worse in the morning, and you’re by yourself in your flat, and because you’ve been having such a nice time, you suddenly just feel a bit lonely, you know?” The single is by no means a comedown tune though: despite Brien’s clubber suffering from the horrible affliction of being wide awake while desperate to sleep, the song is set to disconcertingly peppy house beats and banging synths, and the result is something slightly queasy.

The same affect is writ even larger on the best of her new batch of songs, ‘Crying For No Reason’. Lest the title not be indicator enough, things aren’t exactly rosy for the song’s protagonist: “My friend called me up one evening crying,” explains Brien of the tune’s inspiration.

“She’d stopped at the traffic lights and just suddenly started balling her eyes out and didn’t know why.Thing is, she’d seemed fine for ages, but underneath she wasn’t.

She’d tried to tell herself for so long that she was okay, but then this day just came, and everything got on top of her, and I can really relate to that.”

It’s a brutally direct track, and in the context of the existing Katy B persona, with song after song about euphoric clubbing with your mates, an indirect acknowledgment of having serious waves of depression is quite startling. Thankfully though, Brien is candid about her vulnerability, and pleased to get it off her chest: “I’m glad that I got the opportunity to write something like that,” she says of ‘Crying For No Reason’, sounding shyly defiant, “because I think some people think I just write about raving with the lights on all the time and that my life is just this one big happy party. But really, for me, I mean, I have these crazy dreams at the moment that I can’t even talk to you about, so going out is what I do sometimes because it makes me happy – and because sometimes in my life, when I do feel a bit lonely or do feel a bit sad, going out is my escape.”

She trails off, suddenly sounding exposed, as if songs about loneliness and psychological pain aren’t very her.

Could it be that if ‘On A Mission’ was the fun of growing up, her new songs tackle the more real-life pressures of actually being grown up? “I’d say so – well, they try to,” she concedes, explaining the transformation. “I think with ‘On A Mission’, I was 18 to 21 and I was just on the cusp of being an adult. All your life, from when you’re born, you’re chasing to be an adult – you’re chasing to get into a club, you’re chasing to have your first boyfriend or to be in love, and I was experiencing all those things – my first boyfriend and real relationship, I was going out, I could do whatever I wanted to. My mum wasn’t saying that I had to be back in at a certain time, and there was a level of freedom on that record that spoke of being in love with life and the whole world. And I think that this new record...” She trails off again. “Well, I’ve had another relationship since then and that was very like...”

Another trail. “Basically, I had had a break-up where I probably felt similar issues [to my friend from ‘Crying For No Reason’].That person could’ve been the person that I spent the rest of my life with.”

The song itself, too, is refreshingly candid in its own way. Where a rock musician trying to convey psychological trauma has a long canon from which to draw inspiration, in Brien’s position as a pop-dance singer, the landscape for songs about mental breakdowns is slightly fuzzier, leaving her room to improvise. With that freedom she opts, rather unexpectedly, for something not unlike Robert Miles’ 1995 prog-house hit ‘Children’: a delicate piano opening gives over to hulking trance synths and tumbling, echo-slathered drums, leaving a track full of muscular melancholy destined to accompany footage of crestfallen sports stars suffering valiant defeat, or the tears of ousted X-Factor hopefuls. While functional, it’s not exactly the most forward-thinking production to come out of Rinse FM, and would be a decidedly cheesy mess were it not for Brien’s delivery, which not just saves the track but elevates it to something really rather compelling. Rising quickly from an initial whisper to a full-blown torchsinger howl, her vocal may be from the more direct school of performance, but it’s no less effective for it.

What’s most striking about ‘Crying For No Reason’ though is that it seems to symbolise Katy B’s evolution from hype girl to centre stage: the emphasis is now on her songs, which happen to have house and UK garage production, rather than the other way round. Perhaps most tellingly, while Brien has retained the services of long-standing producer Geeneus, she needn’t have.

Perhaps it’s a symptom of the sound of her debut being so much more ubiquitous two years on, or perhaps it’s just Brien herself moving on organically, but if the rest of her new material follows in the same vein as ‘Crying For No Reason’ – only five new tracks have been made available to the press, all of them in “demo” form – then Brien could be embarking on a journey that would take her far away from her natural habitat, something about which she’s in two minds: “I’m happy to be part of the Rinse family,” she says unthinkingly, but then softens: “But I guess there will come a time one day when I have to be on my own. The only thing is that I’m used to making music with people who I get on with. I think you have to have a social connection with someone when you’re making music, and when I make music with new people, I feel quite shy. Meeting a new producer is like meeting your boyfriend’s parents for the first time!”

“Then again,” she adds, glancing around the homely Rinse studios she knows so well, “with this lot I’m completely in my comfort zone, and I think it’s good to step out of your comfort zone, so I’m cool to do that.

I’m up for that some day.”

Quite when that day might be, though, is open for conjecture. ‘Little Red’, Brien’s follow-up to ‘On A Mission’, was originally due out in Spring 2013 but as of November remains unfinished and is now slated for a release next February. “I don’t know what’s going on with it,” says Brien, apologetically, when quizzed about the year of delays. “The songs are finished, and we have an album, but it’s just being tweaked. It’s all about the politics of what’s going to be the single, and what’s going to do this that or the other, apparently.

“It’s frustrating when you have songs and you want people to hear them, definitely, but it’ll be out soon – and I’m patient,” she insists, “I’m fine.”Then she realises how bad a liar she is:“Not really actually. I’m not patient at all! It’s a skill I’m having to learn!”

I

n terms of acquiring new skills, Brien has done a lot in the past two years to deal with her own growing pains and increased public exposure, and it’s a tribute to her individuality that she retains a maverick streak. “My managers tell me off because I’ll be in Brixton McDonald’s at four in the morning and they’ll be like ‘what are you doing?!’” she says of her attempts to continue living a normal life. “But I’m quite small, so I just put my hood up and I’m fine.” Equally, where many singers in Brien’s position would be all too keen to knock out an ‘On A Mission Volume 2’, her interest in tackling her own demons makes for absorbing listening.

But for all the maturity, it’s nonetheless easy to see Katy B as being at a slight crossroads.As a member of the post-everything generation, for whom access to the darkest recesses of club culture are just as many clicks away as Beyoncé, and for whom the very idea of genre purity is a nonsense, her affinity for Rinse and all things underground makes as much sense as her fondness for earth-conquering pop. But what is perhaps a more difficult circle to square is that the prolonged carefree adolescence that indirectly made Brien so successful has been replaced, albeit perfectly naturally, by a youngadult introspection. “When I was working on my funky house or whatever,” she says, earnestly, “I was thinking ‘what will make the girls really sing along to this passionately, like really connect to it’.” Her new subject matter, though, is more pensive, and although selfreflection has proved a rich seam to mine for everyone from Madonna to Blur, it makes for a curious and not always comfortable fit with the forward-thinking club music to which she clings so fondly.

Currently, the fact that she does cling to it makes Katy B a fascinating artist, full of contradictions and paradoxes, and a writer of terrifically addictive songs that on closer inspection are pleasingly odd. It’s clear however that she would also make a brilliant pop singer – something of which she’s perfectly aware: “I definitely feel like I have to embrace being a pop star somehow,” she says, reluctantly. “If you’re going to do something, you have to crack on with it properly.” Of course, it’s another matter entirely whether or not she will.

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Loud AND quiet ALBUMS LIVE FILM REviews

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Al bums 09/10

Blood Orange Cupid Deluxe (Domino)

By James West. In stores Nov 18

Wooden Shjips Back To Land (Thrill Jockey)

By Hayley Scott. In stores now

08/10

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The press release for ‘Back To Land’ indicates a renouncement of sorts – one that abandons the band’s fundamental appeal. It talks of their rise to prominence from the psychedelic underground to the “rock and roll overground”, the “increased brightness” of the new songs with the inclusion of more “earthly, grounded tones”. Fortunately, this is mere hyperbole; the Shjips’ driving, immersive psychedelia never sounded so perceptive, with their trademark distortion-laden progressions and elongated guitar lines all present and correct.

There’s been a palpable resurgence of psych in contemporary music in the last couple of years, but Wooden Shjips’ practice of the lysergic is perhaps more convincing than most. It reveres the use of repetition– it’s iterative without sounding derivative: despite their hitherto short existence, a cursory listen to any of their previous three LPs would have you believe that they’ve been peddling their ominous walls of space-drone since circa 1973.Their predilection has typically been for lengthy jams akin to that extolled by Hawkwind, underpinned by vocals that seep deep into the background, with an overall negligence of the importance of words.

This time around, though, the lengthy freak-outs of yore are lightly forgone and ‘Back

To Land’ inclines towards comparative brevity, with an average song coming in at around five minutes.There’s also more emphasis on Ripley’s vocals, warmer and more confident within arrangements that fully support them, yet still evasive and right back in the mix.The band’s cosmic chug is still there, however, albeit distilled, and in turn the songs appear more structured than on previous ventures.

There’s a distinct shift in the general feel of the music on ‘Back To Land’, and this ostensibly pertains to the album’s title and is no doubt partly down to a change in geography – Wooden Shjips are no longer a San Francisco based gang of dropouts, but a group homed in the “lush climates” of Oregon. It’s made their jams less celestial, warped and meandering, not that they ever lose sight of their minimalist psych core, the opening title track’s echo and fuzz instilling everything that follows it. From the expansive urgency of ‘In The Roses’ to the soporific languidness of ‘These Shadows’, each song here retains a sense of purpose, none too short, and none too prolonged to outstay its welcome.

Wooden Shjips’ scope has obviously expanded, but these are only subtle sonic changes and fans of the band’s first three records won’t be disappointed here.The feedback, the fuzz, the perpetual grooves that defined the band – it’s all still there. More nuanced, more varied, and melodically robust, ‘Back To Land’ metamorphoses the nervy urgency of predecessor ‘West’ into a more confident, rounded, and focussed vision.

There are few 80s-born artists who can claim to have consistently outlived outskirt-indie trends and maintained relevance, but Devonté “Dev” Hynes is one of them. It’s been a tumultuous ride in which – even ignoring his more recent escapades as a producer for Solange and Sky Ferreira – he’s been at the forefront of daft Day-Glo punk (Test Icicles) and reinvented himself as an ushanka-wearing folky (Lightspeed Champion).While his first album under the Blood Orange moniker was ultimately a little cold to be considered a 2011 favourite, it was another intriguing evolution; one that saw icy guitar lines cut through absorbingly skinny arrangements.This sophomore is a tangible next step after ‘Coastal Grooves’, but an altogether different beast that sees his rather odd path result in something far more spectacular. As Hynes’ critics had hoped, the sensitive sentiment of ‘Falling off the Lavender Bridge’ is coupled with the confidence and experimentalism of ‘Coastal Grooves’ to create a blissfully sleek world that’s both emotive and surprising. Hynes has also enlisted some rather exceptional help here, from David Longstreth and Chairlift’s Caroline Polachek to Clams Casino and Kindess.World beats, hot sax and the alluring coo of Polachek decorate first single ‘Chamakay’ – the blueprint for ‘Cupid Deluxe’ – but Hynes somehow manages to match its heady heights consistently thereafter, in a way that he’s struggled to previously. ‘You’re Not Good Enough’’s smooth R’n’B puts Haim’s debut in perspective, ‘Uncle Ace’ echoes Nile Rodgers and ‘Always Let U Down’ sounds how Sean Nicholas Savage might if he developed a penchant for the vinyl scratch. Off kilter and totally sexy, this is Dev’s most daring and distinguished work yet.

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Diane Coffee

The Limiñanas

New War

imp

Minor Alps

My Friend Fish

Costa Blanca

New War

Moon Coastal Maine

Get There

(Western Vinyl)

By Jack Doherty. In stores Nov 18

(Trouble In Mind)

By Josh Sunth. In stores Nov 25

(ATP)

By Sam Walton. In stores Dec 1

(Philophobia)

By Sam Cornforth. In stores Nov 25

(Ye Olde Records)

By Daniel Dylan Wray. In stores now

We’ve been told time and time again by cliché driven sports reporters that football is a “game of two halves”, but what about albums? ‘My Friend Fish’, the debut LP by Foxygen tub-thumper Shaun Fleming, aka Diane Coffee, is just that.The first five songs here recreate all that was good about the ’60s (the swirls, twirls and cosmic pearls), whilst the second half highlights all that was bad about the supposedly acid fuelled decade. By slowing it all down to walking pace the music gains a sickly sort of sincerity, and no one wants a sincere acid trip. It’s a shame really – in this digital age most bands have forgotten how to make proper albums, with two distinct sides and all that, so whilst it’s certainly a patchy listen, maybe ‘My Friend Fish’ should be applauded for having a go. Just make sure both sides are decent next time, Shaun.

Finding yourself confronted with the linguistic barrier that is ‘Costa Blanca’ track-list can be extremely off-putting. French composer Ensemble’s 2011 tour de force, ‘Excerpts’, for example, suffered heavily at the hands of its own complexity because it seemed to take the combination of languages a little too seriously. ‘Costa Blanca’ may well be a similar linguistic snake pit (at least for the ignorant of us), but one listen to ‘Rosas’’s improv-imitating layers of funk, or the snake-charming interlude of ‘Barrio Chino’, and you know this is an album that doesn’t suffer from seriousness.Time and time again, The Limiñanas’ desire to get in your head – most often in the form of some perilously catchy bass lines – works to neutralise the duo’s alienating preoccupation with fusing languages and conflicting musical influences by, simply, making them sound fun.

In our modern times of globally synchronised release dates, it’s pleasingly anachronistic that this, New War’s debut, has actually been out in their native Australia for over a year.The band’s schedule is not their only endearingly old-school trait either: ‘New War’ is indebted to molasses-thick, 70s-doused heavy rock records, all Satanic riffs and snarling harmonics, with lyrics that implore you to “sacrifice your head” and song after song starting with tumbling drums that recall John Bonham’s precision chaos.

Indeed, Steve Masterson’s drumming here is the star turn – slithering, muscular and, on nine-minute/one-chord album highlight ‘Ghostwalking’, plain intimidating, it creates an impressive glue that binds the album. Moments break from the retro mould, but the band are at their most impressive with heads down, rocking out – a thankfully timeless delight.

Apparently, Leeds quartet imp have written over 250 songs. Being prolific isn’t everything though.

The fifteen songs that feature on their debut album make for a very confusing listen – a relentless spin on a roundabout that disorientates and dazes. ‘Moon Coastal Maine’ frantically rotates between bombastic spacey rock songs with choruses that evoke horrid memories of pop punk bands (‘Don’t Melt’ and ‘Soul Destroyer’), unoriginal synth pop tracks (‘Salad Days’) and daft instrumentals.The title track, however, shows that imp aren’t a complete lost cause, as it waltzes along pleasantly sounding like a stripped back MGMT nugget. Judging by ‘Moon Coastal Maine’, someone needs to acquaint imp with the old ‘quality over quantity’ adage, because this disjointed and rushed album, for all of its good natured ideas, is surprisingly bland.

This collaboration between Juliana Hatfield and Nada Surf ’s Matthew Caws sounds exactly as one might expect it to: crammed with understated melody, tied together with a refrained approach and softly delivered vocals that create a cocoon of warmth via some lushly delivered production. However, it’s also largely lifeless. It floats and drifts on by – albeit harmoniously and pleasantly – in a fleeting, almost forgetful manner, becoming a hazy blur of soft, dissipating indie-rockpop. It’s not without its moments, but they are brief. Ultimately, there is a bulging gap left via a distinct lack of, well, songs, and there are moments that are uncomfortably dull and so ordinary it just becomes tiresome. Perhaps most frustrating is that neither artist here seems to feel the need to challenge what they themselves expected to create when making such a collaborative album.

The Space Lady Greatest Hits (Night School)

By Stuart Stubbs. In stores Nov 25

07/10

It’s not just irony that has The Space Lady calling her debut album proper ‘Greatest Hits’, and 14 years after she retired from a life of music and busking on the streets of Boston and San Francisco.These are greatest hits, they’re just not entirely her own. ‘Humdinger’ and ‘Synthesize Me’ seem to be, but then it’s all ‘Fly Like An Eagle’, ‘Born To Be Wild’ and ‘Ballroom Blitz’, performed with drunken weightlessness on a bumbling Casio keyboard, with bossa nova demo loops and perma-flange vocals. If Nouvelle Vague made songs you know sound button cute,The Space Lady makes them high, a little senile, and, well, pretty button cute. It results in something quite improbable, before you find out that she was born in Roswell and lived in a cave, even – a covers album that definitely has a gimmick, but one that appears to have been born out of necessity (The Space Lady’s limited resources and giddy joy of radio hits) rather than a natty hook, like asking Arctic Monkeys to give One Direction a go.

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Al bums 07/10

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Sumie

Debukas

Vex Ruffin

Sumie

Le Femme

The KVB

I Am Machinery

Vex Ruffin

Psycho Tropical Berlin

Minus One

(Bella Union)

By Josh Sunth. In stores Dec 2

(2020 Vision)

By Joe Goggins. In stores Nov 25

(Stones Throw)

By Jack Doherty. In stores Dec 3

(Disque Pointu)

By James West. In stores now

(A Recordings)

By Reef Younis. In stores Dec 2

Unlike her sister, busy fronting electro-pop outfit Little Dragon or cooing over SBTRKT production, Sandra Sumie Nagano creates spare music.Tender and over-enunciated, Nagano’s vocal lines often seem to fill out these tracks with their presence, swallowing up the lightweight fingerpicking favoured by the Swedish songstress. However, this is an album whose main strength lies in that it glows like only the newest creations can – thanks, in part, to the production of composer Dustin O’Halloran, which is deft and enchanting. At times ‘Sumie’’s textures can become all too familiar, and its relentless austerity too idealistic, but on tracks like lead single ‘Never Wanted to Be’ or ‘Later Flights’, where sheer artistic focus is bolstered with Sumie’s own brand of unassuming profundity, this is an album that can also be terribly (and beautifully) disarming.

Pitchfork’s description of Debukas – or John Clark, when he’s at home – as a ‘Glaswegian upstart’ suggests some kind of rogue quality to his sound; in truth, there’s nothing particularly revolutionary about the poppy blend of house and techno that’s characterised the three EPs he’s released to date. There’s flashes of excellence on this debut full-length (‘Shake’’s layering of sampled vocals over interlocking synths, the choppy, downtempo ‘South’ and the shimmering slow burner of closer ‘Tape Symphony’) but little in the way of fresh ideas.

Clark seems to be playing with a fairly limited sonic palette; some of the record’s beats are monotonous in their similarity, as evidenced by the meandering ‘Rings’, as well as the strangely subdued title track. In an already overcrowded scene, ‘I Am Machinery’ simply isn’t forward thinking enough to warrant serious attention.

It’s come around again, that special time of year, that magical period full of joy and oh so much excitement. I’m talking about flu season of course. Fever dreaming the nights away, believing that Noel Edmonds is sat in your living room and that the shadow in the corner is looking at you a bit funny. There’s nothing better than it. Filipino-Amerinca solo artist Vex Ruffin transforms fever dreams into music. Scratch that – Filipino-Amerinca solo artist Vex Ruffin is a fever dream. His debut LP takes you through the dark and dingy pits of funk and post punk, creating a sometimes hard to understand cocktail of illness. It’s not always great fun, but it is always 100% fucked up, which is better than being boring, right? So next time, kids, don’t take your Calpol, let Vex Ruffin take you on a fever dream adventure. I mean, it is the season for it.

This debut album from French surfpop connoisseurs Le Femme is an out-of-control waltzer of zany ideas that wouldn’t sound out of place reverberating around Buffalo Bill’s bone-chilling “skin suit” dungeon.

Although that’s not to say that a Silence of the Lambs remake is the only place for the band’s occasionally creepy breed of psychedelic retro-futurism, because, as early single ‘Sur La Planche’ shows, they have an enviable knack for a playful and joyous melody.The chic, 60s-influenced ‘Antitaxi’ could be Portland’s Wampire if they spent their summer on Biarritz beach listening to The Ventures, while ‘It’s Time To Wake Up (2023)’ nods to the Velvet Underground & Nico by way of hedonistic Parisians The Teenagers. Elsewhere they can be cold and hypnotic, but really this odd collective are most appealing when making you do “The Swim” around your bedroom.

It doesn’t seem particularly sunny in The KVB’s world.The gloomy brainchild of one Klaus Von Barrel that has since evolved to include Kat Day, their debut is a 32 minute hit of lip-curling apathy and gloriously bleak, reverb-drenched shoegaze. Fans of similarly intense doom-mongers will find much to mordantly love (see inevitable Joy Division and Echo and the Bunnymen mentions) but that doesn’t stop ‘Minus One’ wearing its black heart on its sleeve.There’s a brilliant basement quality to opener ‘Again and Again’, its, raw, vacuous production and chunky bass-lines hinting at the duo’s wilfully subterranean sound whilst ‘Something Inside’ lets Klaus’ atonal vocal swim in the space and minimalism; his lyrics elongated into groans of aching disinterest.

Beneath the indifference, there’s something very promising lurking amongst The KVB’s murk.

Cate Le Bon Mugmuseum (Turnstile)

By Hayley Scott. In stores now

09/10

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Attributed to Cate Le Bon’s shift in locale,‘Mug Museum’’s sunny disposition is a welcomed juncture.

Recorded in the temperate climates of California as opposed to her native Wales, Le Bon’s third full-length exhibits a general shift in tone for the singer, surprisingly informed by a period of taking stock after a bereavement following the death of her grandma.There are the murkier moments to counteract its initial ebullience, evinced in the introspection of Cate’s vocal delivery, the moody lyrics and the sporadic gloom on tracks like ‘Sisters’ and ‘Wild’. Some might revile the record’s messiness or the reluctance to stick to one single direction here, but it’s this range of tone – from being a low-key, lo-fi offering deeply rooted in folk to an outright psychedelic affair – that’s all part of the album’s intriguing, unexpected appeal.What remains constant, however, is the sheer potency of Le Bon’s distinct ethereal lilt, containing the same sonorous fragility of Nico’s in her Velvet Underground days.

08/10

MIA Matangi (Virgin EMI)

By Amy Pettifer. In stores now As it’s nearly two years since material from ‘Matangi’ started ricocheting around the Internet and Maya Arulpragasam herself remains hell bent on retaining guerrilla control over the distribution of her music, the fanfare surrounding a ‘new album’ (her fourth) seems slightly daft.This is more like a leggy mix-tape anyway, an unedited zip-file of everything that’s occupying the motley orbit of her brain; collaborations with The Weeknd and Hit Boy, the louche, palpitating anthem ‘Bad Girls’, lyric ideas courtesy of Julian Assange and a reworking of Shampoo’s ’90s nonsense hit ‘Trouble’.

While the track list remains as mercurial and baffling as her public persona, you can count on it being instantaneously and unmistakably MIA.That voice; the globalised, sonic head-fuckery; the taunting, snarling, girl-gang manifestos. It’s all there, totally assured and self-possessing, right down to the title, which references Arulpragasam’s Hindu goddess namesake. It’s not easy to keep a handle on over 15 songs, but the front end of the album is packed with belters, the title track listing country names like an unforgettable playground mnemonic and ‘Warriors’ flitting between lyrical salvo and Bhangra bliss out. It’s not all gold but, on form, both she and it are infinitely more vibrant, hook-heavy, idea-crammed and ferally danceable than anything else you’ve heard, well, probably in the last two years.

07/10

Mazes

Cliff Martinez

Better Ghosts

Solaris OST

(Fat Cat)

By Joe Goggins. In stores now

(Invada)

By Reef Younis. In stores Nov 18

Following the lead of their one-time tourmates Best Coast in releasing a ‘mini-album’ – longer than an EP, but shorter than a full record, apparently – Mazes’ work ethic certainly isn’t in question; their second LP, ‘Ores and Minerals’, only arrived this past February.The markedly unpolished sound that’s characterised their output to date is preserved on ‘Better Ghosts’, as are the obvious influences; if it weren’t for Jack Cooper’s vocals being considerably more nasal than Lou Barlow’s, ‘Higgs Boson’ could very well be a Sebadoh song, while ‘Notes from F&E’ and ‘Donovan’ are scored through with the lo-fi stylings of Guided by Voices.This being a stopgap release seems to have opened the band up to some experimentation, too; the skittish ‘Cicada’ and sixtyeight second drone of ‘Ephemera’ both represent an exploration of new territory. In terms of quality control, ‘Better Ghosts’ doesn’t scale the heights of either of Mazes full-lengths, but it does hint at exciting new possibilities for album number three.

Before Drive helped catapult Cliff Martinez to wider, Gosling-fuelled recognition, the former Captain Beefheart and Red Hot Chilli Peppers drummer had already done a pretty brilliant line of cinematic soundtracks, including Traffic and NARC. A decade on, Solaris remains his masterpiece; a haunting, space odyssey that weaves its way amongst the psychodrama and synthetic memories of Chris Kelvin. Using a symphonic orchestra to help blow out the nebula panorama, it’s a dynamic that gives ‘Can I Sit Next To You’ its Apollo-eqsue gravitas, but the real beauty lies in the steel drums that permeate the score. Finding their darker side, Martinez plays on the minimal and understated, allowing ‘Don’t Blow It’ to bloom into low frequency life with a warmth and resonance that contrasts to the cold, black void of space. Elsewhere, the all-sensory ambience of ‘First Sleep’ and ‘Will She Come Back’ only serve to pull you further into a timeless soundtrack of fragmented introspection.Timeless.

08/10

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Al bums 03/10

bEEdEEgEE Sum/One (4AD)

By Sam Walton. In stores Dec 2 bEEdEEgEE is the mealy-mouthed, self-consciously arty stage name of Gang Gang Dance’s Brian De Graw, whose debut album’s appeal will likely vary with one’s tolerance of mealy-mouthed, self-consciously arty gestures. Even if, though, you can forgive the chinscratching-but-actually-nonsense track titles full of parentheses and haphazard capitalisation, there’s not a huge amount of musical nourishment here anyway.

Centrepiece ‘(F.U.T.D) Time Of Waste’ is the record’s highlight, operating on dual levels of pleasing looseness and deeply gridded house thud, with Alexis Taylor’s tuneful paean to staying in bed bubbling over the top.

Elsewhere, Lovefoxx does her best to sex-up a lifeless imitation of College’s ‘A Real Hero’ – and nearly succeeds – but the majority of ‘SUM/ONE’, peppered with samples from motivational speakers and hypnotherapy tapes that attempt at a deeper meaningfulness, is unremarkable: across its 45 minutes, it moves with neither light-footed confidence nor particular gravitas. Like a nervous panel-show comedian, ‘SUM/ONE’ is desperate to be taken seriously while simultaneously playing the fool.The result is an incoherent mess with neither substance nor wit: it shines in brief moments, but its ultimate legacy is a lesson in the folly of self-important silly names, with the music underneath, unfortunately, bland and broadly forgettable.

07/10

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Bryce Hackford

Shopping

Fair

Consumer Complaints

(Prah)

By Amy Pettifer. In stores Dec 9

(Milk)

By Stuart Stubbs. In stores now

Piecing together the facts, Bryce Hackford is a 29-year-old, NYC-dwelling upstart with a creative writing degree and an impressive list of collaborations to his name. As well as being a visual artist and DJ, Hackford has carved out the time to make ‘Fair’, his debut release of experimental recordings that form a kind of love letter to Detroit house, warehouse parties and the artistic run-ins that have shaped the past six years of his life.The first four tracks are snappier, messier Bushwick crackcident soundscapes; ‘Another Fantasy’ is 9 minutes of mono-slab-smashing repetition while ‘I Want More’ bubbles with organ arpeggios and metallic incantations.The best parts, however, are when Hackford braves languorous duration, creating space in which your mind can slow down and become totally enveloped in a fawning, throbbing, almost noise that dips, rises and crumbles around you. ‘Modern Propeller Music’ and ‘Run-on Cirrus’ both exceed 20 minutes and are exhilarating, whether you’re at that kind of party or not.

As Rachel Aggs barks,“Want something / Need something / BUY!” on ‘Consumer Complaints’’ taunting, closing ‘Theme’, the pang of utter shame obliterates any you’ve felt when being called a sinner, not a winner, at Oxford Circus. It’s like your dad finding your fags and making you smoke the pack in front of him.TOUGH love! Aggs is a direct preacher, blurting a flat honk square in your face that’s angry to be heard, completely.This kind of Prinzhorn Dance School approach is paired with baggy, post-punk guitars that make Aggs’ decidedly unimpressed yelp dance about the place, like Radio 4 hopping across the desperate east London landscape with The Raincoats. At times the riffs are even effective enough to eclipse the scissors-n-glue aesthetic of this anti-pop band, on tracks like ‘For Your Money’ and ‘In Other Words’; stark, bouncy post-punk that serves as a reminder that before NYC punk-funk was co-opted shortly after ‘Take Me Out’ charted, it really was the most thrilling of underdogs.

08/10

02/10

07/10

Merz No Compass Will Find Home (Drum & Vocal Renditions) (Accidental)

By James West. In stores Nov 18 Despite his ambitious fourth album as Merz being greeted with a mixed response, there was no doubt that Conrad Lambert’s collaboration with Matthew Herbert was a fascinatingly eclectic affair. His relocation to the Swiss Alps inspired his most defiant work to date, with minstrel-like nylon-string guitars set to harsh electronica. For its naysayers, however,‘No Compass Will Find Home’’s only redeeming feature was its interesting use of a plethora of instruments and the worldly textures created by them.

With that in mind, it’s perplexing that this alternate experience strips away all of that, with Lambert’s deranged whimper having only Julian Sartorius’s percussion for support.The result is rather joyless – like eavesdropping on the wails of a mentally unsound music teacher as his class practice for a parentsonly production of Stomp.

06/10

08/10

02/10

Toy

Pick A Piper

Join The Dots

Pick A Piper

White Manna

(Heavenly)

By Joe Goggins. In stores Dec 9

(City Slang)

By Chris Watkeys. In stores now

With their self-titled debut only a year old,Toy have wasted precious little time in recording a follow-up.

They’ve supported The Horrors extensively over the past couple of years, and with their first record owing much to that band’s ‘Skying’ you wonder how much of the impetus to make ‘Join the Dots’ so soon afterwards was born of a desire to begin a gradual move away from that sound and towards exploration of more esoteric influences.This is an album drenched in nods to krautrock and psych; opener ‘Conductor’ has walls of feedback over squelching beats, and the eight-minute title track, which collapses into a bass solo at its midpoint, sounds like the soundtrack for a descent to hell. Attempts elsewhere at lighter textures – the dreampop of ‘Too Far Gone to Know’ – are largely misguided, but when ‘Join the Dots’ gets it right, it’s a deliciously dark affair.

Best known as Caribou’s drummer, Brad Weber is also a producer and musician of considerable note, and this debut record is the culmination of a project that has been running for five years. It’s a record of expansive beats and layered sound; opener ‘Lucid in Fjords’ is urgent yet submerged, upbeat yet tinged with vocal sadness, the soundtrack to a fast-forwarded city crowd scene. But while this whole album has an accomplished and skilful feel, there is little particularly groundbreaking about the focal beats, as exquisitely constructed as they are. ‘Pick a Piper’ this feels like a very clean record; not sterile, but slick and pure. ‘All Her Colours’ has echoes of Hot chip, ‘Once Were Leaves’ channels Warpaint, but ultimately it never really engages with you fully. Instead we’re left floating on its surface, conscious of but not absorbed in its layered musical tapestry.

Dune Worship (Holy Mountain)

By Josh Sunth. In stores now In 2012 White Manna released their debut album to much praise, quashing all inklings of the selfparody hinted at by song titles like ‘Acid Head’ with the sheer potency of their music.The Californian five-piece have always created the sort of music that – in a similar vein to the stuff of label mates Wooden Shjips – abuses its power, but second shot ‘Dune Worship’ effectively takes the formula that made their self-titled so effective – the heavy attack of guitars, copious amounts of flange, a sort of one part listless/two parts visceral approach to making music – and hones it to an even keener edge.

These tracks can be gruelling and psychedelic – especially the longer dense sections of instrumentation – but it’s also when vocals are left by the wayside that White Manna can really get to grips with the sheer velocity that makes tracks like ‘I’m Comin Home’ reek of excitement.

Secret Boyfriend This Is Always Where You’ve Lived (Blackest Ever Black)

By John Ford. In stores Dec 9 Secret Boyfriend is the solo project of North Carolina’s Ryan Martin, who is also one half of Boyzone, but not that Boyzone. I’d say!

Martin intently sabotages his almost melodies on this debut that mixes mope-folk and dark electronics with a heavy-handed use of radio static, busy, shit drum machines and a murmur that is fleetingly audible on ‘Glint And Glow’ and ‘Have You Heard About This House?’ and yet is strangely more alluring when practically unlistenable once these tangible ‘songs’ finally show up. ‘This Is Always Where You’ve Lived’ is clearly a noise experiment more than anything else, and yet even within that difficult sphere it lacks any sense of structure, best shown between ‘Silvering The Wing’ (a lost Radio Dept. demo) and ‘Deleted Hill’ (an 8 minute tussle between a piano and dripping tap).

Swearin Surfing Strange (Wichita)

By Chris Watkeys. In stores now

06/10

From some angles, guitar music in the twenty-first century is an endless loop of appropriation and regurgitation, with only the rarest deviation into something genuinely new. Swearin’ do not represent that deviation, but despite this, ‘Surfing Strange’ is a fun walk into the plaid-shirted riff forest of the early nineties. It’s music for a sunshine summer; a band to fall in love to. ‘Watered Down’ has a bassline Kim Deal might have stitched together while sitting stoned on a Boston couch in 1989, while on ‘Echo Locate’ Kyle Gilbride manages to sound more like Billy Corgan than the man himself. For the most part this record is an avalanche of cascading guitars, fuzzed-up melodies and brutally heavy riffage, but there are one or two moments of otherness in the softly reflective ‘Loretta’s Flowers’ and the hazily stoned ‘Melanoma’. But it’s the facsimile factor that holds ‘Surfing Strange’ back from being a great album, because this really is a sound born of contrivance rather than of searing creativity.

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Live

Warpaint Manchester Academy, Manchester 28. 10.2013 Words by Joe Goggins Photography by Elinor Jones

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Warpaint’s first appearance in Manchester – at the Deaf Institute on the eve of the release of their first record – was a show I spent weeks, if not months, droning on about to anybody who showed even the slightest interest in hearing about just how good it was.There was just an intoxicating, engrossing quality to the performance that I still haven’t entirely managed to put my finger on. Listening to ‘The Fool’ the following day turned out to be a mildly disappointing experience; it’s a good record (if a little front-loaded), but it didn’t quite capture the genuine magic I’d been witness to when the band were onstage. It seemed to lack a little of the warmth.

Somebody on Warpaint’s side certainly made a good call when they decided to keep proceedings devoid of a Y chromosome and asked PINS to provide the support tonight; they’re playing in front of their biggest hometown crowd to date and they look very much at home. Offerings from September’s ‘Girls Like Us’ are faster, rawer and rougher than on record, and delightfully so.They’re certainly far more aggressive than tonight’s headliners, and they share an understanding of rhythm and groove that sets them apart from so many other bands that draw upon the same influences.

Warpaint didn’t quite manage to take a

total break from touring during their downtime, and as a result have been playing new songs since last year.Tonight’s opener, ‘Keep It Healthy’, has been floating around on YouTube for quite some time. It’s probably closest to ‘Warpaint’ when compared to ‘The Fool’; Jenny Lee Lindberg’s casually hypnotic bass is underpinned by an energetic turn by drummer Stella Mozgawa, and the musical chemistry between the two rhythm players is perhaps the key component of the band’s sound, a juxtaposition of slow, trudging basslines against lively drums.

There’s always been this degree of instrumental fluidity to Warpaint’s live show, and tonight Theresa Wayman moves between guitar and floor tom, at one point sitting behind the main kit while Mozgawa hops on guitar.The role of lead singer has until now been a more established post, but where Emily Kokal once held that position, it seems that Waymam is set to dominate the band’s new LP, or at least on the synth-driven, almost glitchy ‘Hi’, lead single ‘Love Is to Die’ and the haunting ‘No Way Out’. As a performer who also has a handful of acting credits to her name also, she’s certainly convincing in her delivery of the latter song’s evocative refrain of “Can’t find my way”.

There are older cuts too, of course, and they’re timely in their arrival.With a barrage

of new material threatening to cause a mid-set lull amongst increasingly restless pockets of the crowd, the one-two of ‘Undertow’ and ‘Billie Holiday’ is a stirring tonic.The latter remains the masterpiece in Warpaint’s burgeoning catalogue.With lyrics lifted straight from Mary Wells’ ‘My Guy’, gorgeous group harmonies are laid over a sparse instrumental backdrop to arresting effect, so much so that feedback-related technical difficulties are mitigated into insignificance.

The obligatory encore sees Kokal step back to centre stage, with a solo acoustic rendition of ‘The Fool’’s ‘Baby’, a track that would be one of that album’s standouts, if it wasn’t at least a minute too long. Early single ‘Elephants’ closes out the performance strongly, one of the most potent weapons in the band’s live arsenal, tonight with the sudden changes in tempo that characterise the outro given an extended airing.

I’m not sure how I’ll feel about new album ‘Warpaint’ when I do get to hear it in a couple of months. It won’t be the day after seeing the band live, but, like ‘The Fool’, it could easily struggle to do the band’s performances justice. As long as Warpaint continue to tour, though, I’m not convinced I’ll care.Theirs remains a show of genuine alchemy.

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Neil Halstead Cecil Sharp House, Camden 24.10.2013

By Edgar Smith Photography by Jason Williamson

Despite these days looking, in a bobble hat and corduroy jacket, like he’s for sale in a Devonshire shop (next to the Tea Pigs, my lover), you get the impression that Neil Halstead is on a hushed war path, ratcheting up to the recognition he’s long been denied and so plainly doesn’t care about.Tonight’s the first time in a decade that he’s joined by childhood friend and fellow Slowdive founder Rachel Goswell. Before she appears he strums, assisted by upright bass, piano and violin, songs from last year’s ‘Palindrome Hunches’.This muted snapshot of Nick Drake and Fairport Convention-ward country-folk, a kind of neo-Canterbury sound with a heavy streak of Americana, is a perfect match for Cecil Sharp House, where the crowd sits in polite silence and pensioners square dance next door. After hitting a (albeit bummed out) high note with ‘Bad Drugs and Minor Chords’, Goswell is called up.The addition of her beautifully punctured vocal, while Halstead toys periodically with his delay pedal, resurrects something of the syrupy, meditative plane so crucial to Slowdive’s recordings; those dreamscapes that compress the emotional impact of 1000 years’ rainfall into every four minutes.With Dylan Carlson of Earth playing the evening before, it seems a good moment to reflect and give thanks for the death of all that quirky, jaunty acoustic music that was inescapable for ages. Now safely contained in its nightmarish, Mumford’s Brand commercial afterlife, the ground is clear for this kind of opiated, no-kind-of-hurry folk that comes without redundant extra percussion and some arsehole in a crash helmet.The encore is ‘40 days’ and ‘Alison’ from the mighty ‘Souvlaki’… here’s hoping.

Daughter Shepherd’s Bush Empire, London 29. 10.2013 Words by Sam Walton Photography by Roy J Baron

With a wonderful debut album and a tour of venues several times the capacity they were playing this time last year, there’s no denying that Daughter have had a successful 2013.There’s a hint from tonight’s performance, though, that the band might be finding their success a little daunting. “We never dreamed we’d be playing rooms of this size,” admits guitarist Igor Haefeli twice tonight, and while the band’s swell of soaring melancholy amply fills the theatre, they initially play within themselves and feel ragged – it’s not until album-opener ‘Winter’, five songs in, that the band finally relax into the performance. From there on, the band hit their stride, creating wave upon wave of shimmering, melodic chime that, while occasionally samey, does their impressive recorded output justice.

An obedient crowd help: it keeps its silence through the arctic quiet of ‘Tomorrow’, and dutifully mumbles along to a surprisingly moving rendition of ‘Youth’.

But for all the eventual triumph, there are reminders that Daughter are still a young band: with only one LP to their name, they resort to digging into early b-sides to fill out of the hour-long set, and Elena Tonra’s icy poise is somewhat undermined by clumsy inter-song chat.Their limp-wristed cover of ‘Get Lucky’, too, played tonight as an apologetic encore after Haefeli confesses to having “run out of ammo” is woeful – what would’ve felt opportunistic at best in the summer now just feels lazy. It’s an unfortunate whimper with which to end a show, but not fatal; indeed, it only serves to accentuate the strength of Daughter’s own songs and their sense of recent accomplishment.

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Live

Public Image Ltd O2 Academy, Leeds 17.10.2013

By Hayley Scott Photography by Neil Kitson

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There was a time when punks would gob, grapple and get ejected at a Public Image Ltd gig, but the only person doing the spitting tonight is John Lydon. He’s as indignant as ever, swigging liquor between songs and intermittently gargling before spluttering it back into a bucket provided for that very purpose. “I’ve always been a sick cunt, me,” he proclaims with his distinct declamatory bark. Of course, Lydon’s celebrated vitriol remains unchanged, but there’s a palpable sense of apathy in tonight’s crowd and in habitual Lydon spirit, he has no intention of letting it pass quietly. “Liverpool pissed all over you lot,” he notes sharply after an initial timid response to band’s set. “I’m just saying, other cities have a bit more gusto.” It’s a shame because, like their front-man, the band are on particularly good form tonight, but it’s pretty clear that Lydon feels unappreciated here. Opening with ‘Deeper Water’, from last year’s ‘This Is PiL’, the band’s distinctly dark, perpetual groove is unmistakeable. ‘One Drop’ and ‘Out Of The Woods’ then manifests Lydon’s reluctance to recreate the glory days of yore, but it’s not until particularly potent renditions of ‘Metal Box’’s ‘Albatross’ and ‘Death Disco’ that the show reaches full intensity.

Scott Firth’s protruding bass pounds and reverberates, while Lydon howls his way through ‘Low Life’ with defiant conviction but even a bold new arrangement of ‘This Is Not A Love Song’ fails to ignite outright disorder. Returning for the encore with decided reluctance, the crowd’s reaction is much warmer and much more responsive. “Yeah, we work hard for this you know!” sneers Lydon, and after the prevalent ‘Public Image’ and ‘Rise’, the band end on a high of the bass-heavy ‘Open Up’. It was a long hard slog, but we got there in the end.

Oliver Wilde The Prince Albert, Brighton 28.10.2013

By Nathan Westley Photography by Mike Burnell

As the announcement of another delayed train breaks free from the nearby station on this cold, wet evening, firmly reminding those taking the last couple of drags from a nearly spent cigarette outside the Albert that the after effects of storm St. Jude still rumble on, upstairs from the closed sash window leaks the muted beginnings of earnest young troubadour Oliver Wilde’s set, his colourful pop peppering the night in a different and more pleasing way. Contained within those four walls, above a bustling pub, is a singer songwriter who has the capability to temporarily transfer the gig goer outside of their reality with a cavalcade of woozy kaleidoscopic pop songs that bustle with undeniable character.With songs such as ‘Curve’ and ‘Perretts Brock’, the Bristolian leads a quartet of supporting musicians perched alongside him on a narrow stage that struggles to hold them, through a musical path that wanders around the outskirts of Sparklehorse and Deerhunter’s sonic territory, whilst the occasional implementation of hazily atmospheric, electronic soundscapes occasionally meld with the weaving sounds of a violin leads to it having a slight slowgaze feel.That he sometimes looks as if he is not wholly comfortable with being the centre of attention is a reminder that what separates Oliver Wilde from many of his contemporaries – he hasn’t been carefully moulded to meet the expectations of a certain demographic, nor have his imperfections been firmly ironed out. Instead, what is presented is genuine and has character. Oliver Wilde’s realness is grounded and endearing, and it defies imitation. And while he could definitely benefit from some lessons in stagecraft and inter-song flannel, he remains a sage reminder that pop music should always start and end with the songs.

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Connan Mockasin The King’s Head, Dalston, London 04.11.2013

By Stuart Stubbs Photography by Phil Sharp

Last month we interviewed and photographed Connan Mockasin for the cover feature of Loud And Quiet 53. But that’s not all.We did so at member’s club The King’s Head in Dalston, London, in the hope that we might be able to also host a small album launch show there for Mockasin’s second record, ‘Caramel’, on the day of its release.The King’s Head – in a bad way on the outside and all velvet booths and outrageous taxidermy on the inside – kindly obliged us. But that’s not all, either. Mockasin – an eccentric, mercurial spirit, 30 years old and from smalltown New Zealand – has, since ‘Forever Dolphin Love’, his 2010 debut album of acid-washed pop, developed an appreciation for stand up comedy. And so this evening’s support act is not a band that you dutifully applaud and loathe to hear announce, “thanks for listening, we’ve got just a few more for you guys”, but a guy telling jokes – Norwegian comic Daniel Simonsen.

Despite being a civilized drinking den that comes with a yearly fee, the basement of The King’s Head appears to be welcoming of visitors. It has, after all, been converted into a vaguely burlesque cabaret theatre, with a corner stage and two rows of raked seating around three of its four sides. Simonsen, either naturally awkward or doing a good job of appearing that way for the sake of his microphone time, speaks in strong Scandinavian English and nervously paces in front of the 50 or so people here.You won’t see this guy on Mock The Week, not if his parodies of observational comedy are anything to go by.There’s also a very good

chance he’s making it up as he goes along, which makes him even more of a perfect warm up for Mockasin who decides early on that the planned set lists taped by the feet of his bandmates no longer apply.

Inspired by Simonsen and his warm reception, Mockasin follows a nervous hello – in which he quietly explains that with ‘Caramel’ released today the band are playing some of these songs for the first time tonight, “so please don’t judge us too much” – with a nervous joke of his own. It involves a monkey and a sexual act, and it really won’t be funny now. But then, before a song is played, this crude pub gag brings the house down, not least because of Mockasin’s telling of it – a slow, slow approach with more dead air than words and a childlike ability to never corpse with laughter. He then thinks aloud about what to do next (for the first but not last time tonight), decides on new track ‘It’s Your Body 1’ and tentatively casts off into a marshmallow sea of delicate space soul. Never mind about judging Mockasin and his band too much – the maiden voyage of ‘It’s Your Body 1’ is a smooth success, flanged strings bending and melting beneath Mockasin’s feather-light whisper. It doesn’t feel like false modesty that had him preparing us for the worst, but when it comes to the music, Connan Mockasin and his unrehearsed band know exactly what they’re doing, aided by the loose, jammy, easy listening nature of ‘Caramel’’s tracks – a collection of gliding funk inspired purely by the onomatopoeic quality of the album’s title. It’s deeply sexy stuff, especially new single ‘I Am

The Man,That Will Find You’, so much so that Mockasin must know it, even if he remains humble and coy between songs.

He appears to be enjoying himself in this tiny room that could so easily be a performer’s executioner, and seems most excited when, after performing ‘Caramel’ and giving us the option of “new song, old song or comedy”, we unanimously choose comedy. “Seriously?” he beams, “Oh wow, okay.” He then stands silently for a minute, perhaps five, reminding himself of another dirty joke not fit for consumption here.

He delivers it, eventually, to hollers and applause of encouragemant, the kind you might award a child had they got up there and done the same.

It’s Mockasin’s magnetism that allows this to happen.When your close friend dithers you want to shake them, to make them spit it the fuck out; when Mockasin does it, you’re on the edge of your seat, although ‘dithers’ implies an awkwardness and lack of confidence, both of which are alien to Mockasin who won’t be rushed and is perfectly comfortable in silence.

It’s a trait that spills into his live renditions, which slowly blossom into life, a tinkered flange guitar and vocal whimper slowly building into a psychedelic wig out on an extended version of ‘Forever Dolphin Love’.

Last month Mockasin told us how he’d become obsessed with Jimi Hendrix as a child and spent two years trying to play like him. It shows. And as he leaves to one last gag, someone else there puts the evening far more poetically than I ever could – “I feel like someone stroked my soul.”

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film

C I NE M A REVIEW

By Ian Roebuck

Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror

09/10

me, myself and i Max Schreck ’ s magni f i cent portrayal of the s ini s ter reclu s e Count Orlok in N osf e ratu i s j us t one of Cine m a’s many great hermits. he r e’s our top 10

1. Sunset Boulevard’s Norma Desmond Demented, delusional and with a jealous streak like no other, Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond is a crackpot alright. An ex -queen of the silent-screen that’s terrified of the doorbell. Small time screenplay writer Joe Gillis, played with smart restraint by William Holden, gets dragged into Norma’s world. Poor chap.

2. Joseph merrick The only thing sinister about this recluse is the points and stares our Joseph gets from society. Rescued from the local circus as a side show freak by Anthony Hopkins, John Hurt’s The Elephant Man is revealed as a human being.

3. The american’s Jack Jack is a man who prefers the company of a cold gun. A night in with his tools or a quiet cup of coffee down the local café whilst looking frantically over his shoulder seem to get him going. His best friend is the local priest and his phone manner is diabolical, yet he still gets the girls.Well, he is George Clooney.

4.Willy Wonka There’s only so many years a guy can remain locked up in his own chocolate factory before opening its doors in the hope that fat boy will drown in your chocolate river.

5 . Bruce wayne Bruce Wayne enjoys the company of others, whether it is Alfred Pennyworth, Robin the boy wonder or Selina Kyle and her feline ways. However,

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we all know that he’s really happiest when prowling Gotham City or watching CCTV imagery alone with his feet up.

6. The Man Without a Face’s , Justin Mcleod Mel Gibson’s directorial debut is part Karate Kid, part Scent of a Woman and all Gibson as he gurns his way through this clunky story following former teacher Justin Mcleod and the aftermath of his life changing car crash..

7.The aviator’s howard hughes Martin Scorsese’s big bastard of a biopic traces Howard Hughes from the late 1920s to the mid-1940s, from ambitious movie sets to pilot seat. By far the best bit though is when Leo DiCaprio’s cantankerous Hughes holes himself up in a suite and doesn’t answer the door.

8.Citizen Kane’s Charles l Foster Kane A megalomaniac perhaps, but by the end of Orson Welles marvellous picture Charles Foster Kane, the focus of this spiralling biopic, is living in solitude estranged from his friends and family. Still, he gets to live in Xandau, a gigantic gothic chateau in Florida so it can’t be all bad.

9. M i ss H a v i s h a m

Various actresses have taken on the role of this ultimate spinster, most recently Gillian Anderson and Helena Bonham Carter. Scientists even coined the term ‘the Miss Havisham effect’ for people pining over lost loved ones. Charles Dickens has a lot to answer for.

10.Taxi driver’s travis lp bickle OK,Travis Bickle did occasionally leave the house but those moments prized away from the mirror were often spent alone, ghosting the streets he so desperately wanted to cleanse.

Director: F.W. Murnau Starring: Max Schreck, Greta Schröder, Gustav von Wangenheim Watching the new restoration of F.W Murnau’s 1922 gothic classic, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, you’re struck at just how terrifying it is. Decades of crippling horror have conditioned our minds – day after day our homes are invaded by terror on the telly and yet still this monument of German expressionism sends a shiver. It’s a treat to pore over this first ever screen adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, not least for the format, as the cacophonous soundtrack and emotional punch delivered by a silent movie at the cinema is hard to beat.

After the staggering fear, the next thing to strike you is just how graceful this film looks. The Lübeck Salzspeicher, such a fitting location for the famous denouement, and the High Tatras in Northern Slovakia translate effortlessly as Transylvania’s craggy peaks.

Nosferatu follows the ambitious exploits of businessman Thomas Hutter, keen to secure a realestate deal to seal his fortune and keep his young love secure.

Hutter’s intrepid travels lead him to the Carpathian Mountains and his encounter with the magnificent Count Orlok, played with such poise by Max Schreck.

First impressions for Hutter are the same for the audience – gripping curiosity and legitimate trauma. God knows how viewers felt in 1922. When Hutter cuts his thumb on the first night at the dinner table with ‘the bird of death’ we all know what’s coming next but it’s a joy to watch the poor guy’s utter repulsion at Orlok’s thirst for blood.

From then on in we’re on a joyride akin to Hutter’s maniacal Transylvanian coach trip and slowly but surely the dread seeps in. By the time we’re watching Nosferatu’s renowned silhouette clambering up the stairs we’re enraptured. Suddenly the cracks of light begin to show and our twist on Dracula disappears in a puff of smoke. It’s a poetic finale no matter the age or notoriety.

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Read every past issue of Loud And Quiet at loudandquiet.com

Impress your friends by listening to the Loud And Quiet issue 54 mixtape only at www.loudandquiet.com Featuring this month’s featured artists

: www.loudandquiet.com news / songs / past issues

party wolf idiot tennis Game. Set. Twat.

thought sport In the heads of baseball fans 2

Lady Gaga

IDIOT

Lady Mary

Kinda the original Mylie Cyrus

FAME

Kinda the original Binky

“Can’t read my poker face”

MOST LIKELY TO SAY

“Matthew liked poker”

“Enough about me...”

LEAST LIKELY TO SAY

“Enough about Matthew...”

It’s all lies. She’s not even a lady

IDIOT POWER PLAY

I’m pretty sure she bonked a man to death at one point

Carson! A fraud!

GAME, SET & MATCH

crush hour Finding love in a hopeless place To the girl who sat on my hand at Baker Street, that was totes an accident. And the wiggling fingers. And the hard-on

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1

3

1. Beeennnnd... and SNAP! 2. Come to momma 3. God save us all 3. Buttery biscuit base

Celebrity twitter SpencerMatthewsOfficial@SpennyBoi

21m

@ProudLock Whole Foods is closed. Slum it at Waitrose?

Shy guy with Kindle To the girl who took a selfie on the Warren Street escalator, your looks could break that camera... in a good way

SpencerMatthewsOfficial@SpennyBoi

22m

#BollyOnIce

Tall guy in navy blue Toms To the man who tutted and looked around the carriage when a delay was announced a Acton Central, I was annoyed too. Drink?

Girl who waved at you To the cute girl I gave up my seat for, it was like that when I sat down

Nervous Traveller

SpencerMatthewsOfficial@SpennyBoi

25m

Just seen last week’s #MIC. The ex shouting at me is too funny!!!

SpencerMatthewsOfficial@SpennyBoi People who say I don’t repect woman are ridiculous.

Why would I fuck them then?

27m

( I thought we were doing Wham this week and Wonga puppets next time?

50

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) We are!

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Photo casebook “The unfortunate world of Ian Beale”

READERS’ POLL 2013 Be part of the very first Loud And Quiet ReADERS’ POLL BY EMAILING YOUR TOP 3 ALBUMS AND SONGs of the year TO INFO@LOUdandquiet.com We’ll then publish the results side by side with our contributors’ list in next monht’s issue In stores 16/12/13