Brag#717 by The Brag Magazine

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TAKE A PHOTO OF THIS COVER TO WIN FESTIVAL TICKETS! DETAILS P5

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THE AMITY AFFLICTION

THE MAKING OF A SPRINGTIME SPECTACLE ALSO INSIDE: YOU AM I, THE EVOLUTION OF HARRY STYLES, RIDE, DRAGONFORCE, ROBERT MACFARLANE, AUSTRALIAN MUSIC WEEK AND MORE!

This Could Be Heartbreak out now through Roadrunner/Warner. Playing the Hordern Pavilion on Thursday June 22.

THE AMITY

in this issue what you’ll find inside…

The Frontline

4-5

Back To Business

6-7

Yours & Owls Festival: The Making Of A Springtime Spectacle

The Amity Affliction felt the The Beatles when they met their South American fan base

18-20 24 Artists Who Have Been Forced To Change Their Names 21

Album reviews, First Drafts

The Author Who Went Viral: A History Of Robert Macfarlane

Dragonforce

Ride

Australian Music Week: Meet Matt Johnston, The Man Behind The Gum Ball

Churchill and The Mummy reviewed, Sydney Film Festival Opening Night gallery

Relive Your Childhood With The Australian Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book

Out & About, Off The Record

12-13 You Am I’s Tim Rogers shares his most memorable stories from a life on the road 14-17 What Does It Mean To ‘Know’ A Pop Star? In Search Of The Real Harry Styles

“We’re definitely not getting Ja Rule to come forward as a consultant, we’ll put it that way.” (6-7)

14-17

“We left a pretty great first impression on Jebediah. Andy and I actually had a fist fight in front of them the very first night that we met.” (12-13)

26-28 Live reviews, Holy Holy, Mammals 29

Test your knowledge: how many artists can you name?

Gig guide

the frontline with Chris Martin and Nathan Jolly ISSUE 717: Wednesday June 14, 2017 PRINT & DIGITAL EDITOR: Chris Martin chris.martin@seventhstreet.media SUB-EDITOR: David Molloy STAFF WRITERS: Joseph Earp, Nathan Jolly, Adam Norris NEWS: Nathan Jolly, Tyler Jenke, Brandon John ART DIRECTOR: Sarah Bryant PHOTOGRAPHER: Ashley Mar ADVERTISING: Josh Burrows - 0411 025 674 josh.burrows@seventhstreet.media PUBLISHER: Seventh Street Media CEO, SEVENTH STREET MEDIA: Luke Girgis - luke.girgis@seventhstreet.media MANAGING EDITOR: Poppy Reid poppy.reid@seventhstreet.media THE GODFATHER: BnJ GIG GUIDE COORDINATOR: Anna Wilson gigguide@seventhstreet.media REGULAR CONTRIBUTORS: Nat Amat, Arca Bayburt, Lars Brandle, Tanja Brinks Toubro, Chelsea Deeley, Matthew Galea, Emily Gibb, Jennifer Hoddinett, Emily Meller, David Molloy, Annie Murney, Adam Norris, George Nott, Daniel Prior, Natalie Rogers, Erin Rooney, Anna Rose, Spencer Scott, Natalie Salvo, Leonardo Silvestrini, Jade Smith, Aaron Streatfeild, Augustus Welby, Jessica Westcott, Zanda Wilson, Stephanie Yip, David James Young Please send mail NOT ACCOUNTS direct to this NEW address Level 2, 9-13 Bibby St, Chiswick NSW 2046 EDITORIAL POLICY: The views and opinions expressed in this publication are not necessarily those of the publisher, editors or staff of the BRAG. ACCOUNTS RECEIVABLE: Carrie Huang - accounts@seventhstreet.vc (02) 9713 9269 Level 2, 9-13 Bibby St, Chiswick NSW 2046 DEADLINES: Editorial: Friday 12pm (no extensions) Ad bookings: Friday 5pm (no extensions) Fishished art: No later than 2pm Monday Ad cancellations: Friday 4pm Deadlines are strictly adhered to. Published by Seventh Street Media Pty Ltd All content copyrighted to Seventh Street Media 2017 DISTRIBUTION: Wanna get the BRAG? Email george@seventhstreet.vc PRINTED BY SPOTPRESS: spotpress.com.au 24 – 26 Lilian Fowler Place, Marrickville NSW 2204

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CAVE RECORDS SHOWCASE The local music lovers at Cave Records are back for another showcase event, curated and headlined by Sydney noise punks Zeahorse. Joining them on the all-star bill are Coffin, Suiixx, W.I.P and Cold/Heat. Get out and support great Sydney music at The Gaelic Club on Saturday June 17.

Lorde

SKATEBOARDING IS NOT A CRIME After noise complaints shut down their first-ever headlining gig before 9:30pm, Birdman Or The Unexpected Virtue Of A Tony Hawk Pro Skater Cover Band – a local act that plays high-energy covers of songs from the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater soundtracks – have rescheduled their show. KeepSydneyTonyHawkin Pt 2: Return of the Kickflip! will take place Saturday June 17 at Waywards in Newtown. Doors are 8pm, entry is free, skateboarding is not a crime.

UP LATE AT THE BURDEKIN Oxford Street’s club and party venue the Burdekin Hotel has been granted a 30-minute exemption from the Sydney lockout laws. The venue made the announcement in a press release last week, following the New South Wales State Government’s invitation for eligible venues to apply for a half an hour reprieve from the 1:30am lockout and 3am last drinks regulations. The Burdekin, which hosts regular techno and house events as well as the monthly emo party AM//PM, will now be able to grant entries until 2am and serve alcohol until 3:30am. So, it’s only an extra half an hour, but it’s a start. The venue joins a host of other Sydney CBD and Darlinghurst businesses in securing the extension, including Oxford Art Factory, The World Bar, The Basement and Chinese Laundry.

IT’S A BONDI FEAST The two-week-long Bondi Feast is back this winter with 40 shows and 158 artists performing across five stages. Bondi Pavilion will host the best of comedy, theatre, music, visual arts and food from all over Sydney and Australia, covering everything from stand-up comedy to improvised musicals, Alanis Morissette sing-alongs, an aerobics dance party and more. Comedy highlights include Demi Lardner, Becky Lucas, Cameron James and other talent from across the country. The program news follows the recent announcement of Bondi Feast’s gala night on Tuesday July 18, featuring an hour of comedy, beat-boxing,

GOOD LORDE, IT’S THE OPERA HOUSE New Zealand pop wunderkind Lorde will become the youngest ever artist to headline the Forecourt of the Sydney Opera House during her Australian tour this November. Ella Yelich-O’Connor has undoubtedly gone from strength to strength since the 2013 release of her debut album Pure Heroine and its all-conquering single ‘Royals’, and she’s taken the requisite time to produce what will no doubt be a hugely received album, Melodrama, out this Friday June 16. Lorde’s 11-date tour of Australia and NZ sees her playing some of her biggest venues yet – Bennelong Point is a long way from the sweaty basement of Goodgod Small Club, after all – and you can see her at the sails on Tuesday November 21. General public tickets go on sale 12pm Monday June 19.

bingo and everything else they can think of. This year’s Bondi Feast program is now available in full at bondifeast.com.au, with the festival continuing until Saturday July 29.

WELCOME BACK LANSDOWNE The renovated Lansdowne Hotel is about to reopen its doors under new management. Jake Smyth and Kenny Graham, owners of Mary’s Newtown and The Unicorn in Paddington, started renovations on the venue earlier this year, hiring Matt and Dan Rule of The Music and Booze Co to handle bookings in the new-look upstairs band room. Now one of the starring acts for the venue’s reopening month has been locked in: The Delta Riggs, who will appear at the new Lansdowne on Friday June 23. Other artists booked for the Lansdowne’s first few weeks include punk legends Hard-Ons, The Meanies, soul revivalists Saskwatch, Joe Pug, Gold Class and The Babe Rainbow.

HUGOS RETURNS WITH A MIAMI FLAVOUR Two years after shutting down, Kings Cross nightclub Hugos will reopen later this year as Flamingo Lounge: an ’80s-inspired, Miami-themed bar which will host three club nights a week. The bar will be operated by the management team who previously ran Double Bay’s Casablanca Bar, which was forced to closed due to development reasons. The new bar will be more cocktail-centric, with extended opening hours, and a dark nightclub section balanced by a classy terrace bar. “If the main club is downtown Miami, then the terrace bar is South Beach,” designer Josh Clapp told Concrete Playground. “The lighting will also have a bit of Las Vegas and Caribbean fl are, but we’re moving away from that ‘New York speakeasy’ vibe you see everywhere.” Flamingo Lounge will open in September. BRAG :: 717 :: 14:06:17 :: 3

Back To Business Music Industry News powered by The Industry Observer

breaking biz As Amazon prepares for its local launch, the multinational e-commerce company is also readying its music strategy with the posting of four Sydney-based jobs in the last few days. According to job listings on Amazon Jobs, Amazon is seeking a music curator, a senior music curator, a senior marketing manager, and a head of digital music. Amazon has been beefing up its Australian team for some time; it officially confirmed earlier this year it has more than 1,000 Australian employees.

APPLE HOMEPOD A WATERSHED FOR ARTISTS? During its Developers Conference (WWDC) in California, Apple announced HomePod, its voice-activated loudspeaker powered by virtual assistant Siri. Set to cost around AU$465, you’d be forgiven for thinking HomePod is just a glorified (and rather expensive) Bluetooth speaker. But you’d be wrong. HomePod is similar to Amazon Echo and Google Home, but with its music player focus and deep integration with the Apple Music, it does contrast the approach of the aforementioned, which have been pitched as day-to-day-assistants. In fact, the launch of HomePod in December is great news for lower-to-middle-tier artists who currently aren’t living off their music. Let’s break it down: although an exact figure on how much money per play is given to artists hasn’t been released (as rates vary from country to country, and streaming service to streaming service), we are told by artist managers that the average return for an artist is $5,000 per million plays, give or take a few hundred dollars. And according to The Trichordist, steaming services currently pay “thousands of dollars” per million plays. With the introduction of a high-quality smart speaker, Apple is going to tear down barriers for non-streaming service users – HomePod’s voice activation focus means even grandmas and grandpas will conceivably be streaming music within the next 12 months.

Whatever Soundwave may or may not have contributed to the Adelaide economy, it certainly resulted in a net loss for many high-profile bands who were owed millions, folding after its final run in 2015 with a debt of over $25 million.

Yungblud

A SIGN OF THE TIMES The success of Harry Styles’ debut single ‘Sign Of The Times’ on sales charts and top 40 radio was an inevitability given his 1D past, but the UK solo artist made a very important move last week – he debuted on Billboard’s Adult Alternative Songs airplay chart, two months after the release of the single. Billboard credits rock and classic radio programmers’ open-mindedness with the song’s inclusion in the list, highlighting KGSR Austin, Texas – a rock station which played the track 32 times in the week ending June 4. The station’s program director said, “The word that permeated so many conversations about the track consistently was ‘surprise’.”

SPOTIFY INTRODUCES SECRET GENIUS The launch of Spotify’s songwriter-focused initiative Secret Genius is set to celebrate the behind-the-scenes rights holders who it has largely been at war with in recent months. It comprises an Ambassador Program, where 13 songwriters from around the world will host workshops to collaboratively create music. Titled Songshop, the program received a pilot in

NIGHT HIGH MAKES ITS MOVE Just over a year since Sydney music media entrepreneur Nic Kelly launched Night High Records in collaboration with EMI Music Australia, the label has made its first international signing. Night High has added UK artist Yungblud, AKA 19-year-old Dominic Harrison, to its roster. Keeping to the label’s single-focused strategy, Night High released Yungblud’s debut single ‘King Charles’ last Friday in Australia and New Zealand. Kelly said he discovered Yungblud while in London: “Heading to a pub on my last night in London earlier this year was a good call – it introduced me to one of the most charismatic, energetic and important young voices in the world.” London this year, and is similar to APRA AMCOS’ annual SongHubs initiative. Australia’s own Alex Hope is participating in the inaugural Secret Genius program. The songwriter behind tracks from Troye Sivan, Tina Arena and Guy Sebastian will be joined

HAMISH & ANDY IN HOT WATER As you may have noticed during the constant barrage of commercials and 60 Minutes promos running on Channel 9 right now, Australia’s radio and comedy success story Hamish Blake and Andy Lee have a new TV show. Named True Story With Hamish & Andy, the show sees the duo meet other media personalities in order to hear an incredible story from their life, before attempting to recreate the events of the story themselves. But if fellow radio host David ‘Luttsy’ Lutteral is to be believed, the inspiration for the show was lifted from a meet-up he’d had with the pair himself. As reported by news.com.au, the Nova presenter chimed in ahead of the show’s premiere to claim that the concept had been lifted “word for word” from an idea he’d mentioned to them three years ago, which he’d named Cracking Yarns. If Lutsy is to be believed, it could be a case of ‘you snooze, you lose’ on his part, although Channel 9 has since shot the claims down, claiming that the format was devised in partnership with Radio Karate over a year before he met with the duo. Hamish & Andy

APRA AMCOS’ HANDS ACROSS THE PACIFIC Downtown, the global publisher with catalogues from John Lennon, Hans Zimmer, Ryan Tedder and One Direction on its roster, has just inked a Pan-Asian deal with APRA AMCOS. Covering digital and online rights licensing and administration, Downtown marks the sixth global publisher to work with APRA AMCOS in such a capacity. Since launching the initiative in July 2013, APRA AMCOS has also signed deals with Universal Music Publishing, Peermusic, Imagem, Hillsong Music and ORiGiN to cover the Asian region including India and China. Under the new agreement, APRA AMCOS will represent Downtown’s catalogue in the Pan-Asian region, as well as copyrights managed through its global technology platform, Songtrust, which is used by over 100,000 songwriters.

GHOST SHIP OPERATORS FACE CHARGES

ADELAIDE VS AJ, ROUND TWO While Adelaide ratepayers will be left to foot a hefty $75k bill owed to its council by collapsed music festival Soundwave, the festival’s former operator AJ Maddah has lashed out at the council, accusing it of charging his company exorbitant fees and profiting off its success – a claim the council has fiercely denied. The City of Adelaide told Music Feeds: “Soundwave paid normal rates to use the space as per our rates schedule, plus standard remediation costs which are charged to all event organisers who use the Park Lands and Squares to ensure they are returned to their pre-event state.”

Guns N’ Roses

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by Canada’s Boi1da (Rihanna, Drake), Sweden’s Noonie Bao (Zedd, Alessia Cara) and US writer Starrah (Halsey, Nicki Minaj).

CHART GEEK Guns N’ Roses notched up an impressive record last week, with their Greatest Hits collection’s latest appearance on the Billboard 200 albums chart being the record’s 400th non-consecutive week on the chart. The album has racked up 5.93 million sales in the US, peaking at number three upon its April 10, 2004 debut, and spending 138 consecutive weeks in the 200 before falling out in November 2006. The record then charted again on December 12, 2009 – and has bounced in and out ever since. The Gunners’ collection is only the seventh record to break the 400 mark, the others being Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon (927), Johnny Mathis’ Johnny’s Greatest Hits (490), the My Fair Lady OCR (480), Bob Marley and The Wailers’ Legend (471), Journey’s Greatest Hits (462) and Metallica’s Metallica (432).

Two warehouse party operators are facing up to 39 years in prison for their role in the deaths of 36 people who became trapped in a blaze at Oakland’s Ghost Ship in late 2016. As CNN reports, Derick Almena and Max Harris have been charged with 36 counts of involuntary manslaughter over the deaths, as the former owned the warehouse and was illegally subletting it when the incident took place, while the latter was the “creative director” of the warehouse party that cost its attendees their lives. The Alameda County district attorney Nancy O’Malley has stated that the two men “knowingly created a fire trap with inadequate means of escape. They then filled that area with human beings and are now facing the consequences of their action.”

SO YOU THINK YOU CAN TEACH? ARIA is introducing a new award at this year’s event, and it’s one that even Flume won’t win – the ARIA Music Teacher of the Year Award. It’s a little left-of-centre, but it makes sense. According to ARIA, the award has been introduced “to celebrate our music teachers for their passion and hard work in educating Australian children to play and love music”. The award is open to any teacher working in a school, kindergarten, early childhood centre, youth centre or private tuition music school running a music program. Anyone can nominate a teacher for the award. “This inaugural ARIA Music Teacher of the Year Award highlights our commitment to music education,” said Dan Rosen, chief executive of ARIA. Jay Laga’aia, Jessica Mauboy, Katie Noonan and Missy Higgins will come on board as ambassadors for the award.

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free stuff ENTER: thebrag.com/freeshit

YOURS & OWLS FESTIVAL Yours & Owls Festival 2017 is coming to the east coast with an epic lineup of international stars and local talent, including At The Drive In, AJJ, Montaigne, Holy Holy, The Preatures, The Presets and many more.

win

win THE AMITY AFFLICTION Australia’s masters of metalcore The Amity Affliction are hitting the road, and we want to see you at the show. Their headline tour alongside Pvris, Beartooth and Make Them Suffer is a celebration lap in honour of This Could Be Heartbreak, Amity’s number one ARIA album released last year. The record marked their third consecutive release to debut at the top of the charts, making Amity only the fifth Australian band to achieve the milestone. The Amity Affliction and friends play the Hordern Pavilion on Thursday June 22, and we’ve got a double pass to give away. To enter the draw, visit thebrag.com/freeshit.

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The fest takes over Wollongong’s Stuart Park on Saturday September 30 and Sunday October 1, and we’re giving away a double pass for you and a friend to attend. To enter: 1. Take a photo of this week’s BRAG with Yours & Owls on the cover 2. Post it to Instagram 3. Tag and follow @thebragmag to find out if you’ve won!

BRAG :: 717 :: 14:06:17 :: 5

COVER STORY

How To Succeed In A Difficult Festival Market BY JOSEPH EARP

“If I wanted to book a lineup based on bands that just I wanted to see … maybe 20 people would turn up.” 6 :: BRAG :: 717 :: 14:06:17

“We’re definitely “There’s been not getting people with us Ja Rule to come since the start forward as a who have always consultant, we’ll been a part of put it that way.” the family.” thebrag.com

COVER STORY

“You start second-guessing yourself: ‘Why did I book that band? Oh God, this will be a mistake.’”

ll things considered, Ben Tillman thinks of himself as a pretty chill bloke. And he sounds like one too – the Yours & Owls co-founder and music industry veteran speaks in an affable drawl, his voice full of the softness and warmth that makes you think he’d be good in an emergency; like he’s the kind of guy who could casually take control while everyone else is losing their heads. But even Tillman admits that in the weeks before the 2017 Yours & Owls Festival lineup was announced, that casual facade withered away, revealing a mildly terrifi ed man in charge of an unstoppable, multi-part machine. “I thought I maintained [my composure],” Tillman laughs. “I thought that was the case even when I was getting no sleep in the weeks before tickets went on sale. And then the day that they did, I just felt so much lighter. I was like, ‘Oh God, this feels so good – I must have been stressed.’”

“You spend all this time booking a lineup,” Tillman says. “It’s kind of a personal process. It reflects your personal taste, and obviously, in doing that, you’re hoping that people respond positively to it because you’re putting a bit of yourself in there. And then you go through the process and book [the lineup], and stuff starts locking in, and then there’s this period of a week or so before it gets announced and after the whole thing has been confirmed and you’re just sitting with the lineup for a few weeks. “You can’t really tell anyone, so you just send yourself a little bit mad, overanalysing it. You’re going, ‘Are people even going to like this any more?’ Then you start secondguessing yourself: ‘Why did I book that band? Oh God, this will be a mistake.’ But it was such a relief when the lineup did get such a good reaction, and people started buying tickets. That’s the ultimate encouragement.” For Tillman, booking a great lineup is a kind of art: one that requires a careful navigation between commercial concerns and real musical artistry. In other words, he’s never going to book a lineup just so he can make ends meet, or in order to satisfy some kind of nebulous critical consensus.

If you book entirely based on the idea of statistical analysis and what’s getting played on the radio right now, then I think that’s a pretty soulless venture. That doesn’t really interest me. If you wanted to get into music to earn money, go work in a fucking bank. “There’s stuff that you know isn’t going to turn many heads, but it’s stuff you want people to see. And you know it’s going to be good on the day and people are going to enjoy it when they’re there – but you also need those acts that you know people are going to go for. “That’s not saying those things are mutually exclusive either, because there’s obviously those bands that will sell tickets but are also fantastic, and of whom I’m a big fan, and you know are going to put on a good show … But we’re not going to book anything that we don’t like at all. It’s about showing people what you’re actually into.” Tillman talks with a fair bit of confidence these days, but surely it wasn’t always this way. In the early days of Yours & Owls, the festival was beset by a range of self-imposed problems, and as it has grown, so too has the skill of those in charge. But that’s exactly the thing: because Tillman and his team have evolved with the event, they have managed to sidestep most of the terrifying pitfalls that lay waiting for them.

Not that Tillman necessarily needed to worry – the 2017 iteration of the all-ages powerhouse is bolstered by one doozy of a lineup. Boasting an array of acclaimed international names – including At The Drive In, AJJ and The Orwells – as well as a carefully curated host of local superstars – Montaigne, Bec Sandridge, Cash Savage and more – the festival bill received almost unanimous praise when it was announced, and was taken as a sign that this proudly DIY event is becoming bolder each year.

That’s why Yours & Owls 2017 features a lo-fi folk punk band (AJJ), a fiery rap duo (A.B. Original), a nascent bunch of art rockers (The Orwells) and the math rock world’s chief undie enthusiasts (Totally Unicorn) – Tillman doesn’t want his festival to be pigeonholed as one specific thing, and wants the brand to be an everevolving catch-all.

“It’s been such an organic thing. We’re real dudes and we’ve just grown into doing this. We started out as a coffee shop, then evolved into a venue, then started putting shows on at other venues, and I guess there’s been people with us since the start who have always been a part of the family.

But who would have thought that a Wollongong-hosted event founded by the one-time owners of a coffee shop might one day transform into a beloved staple of the festival scene?

“If I wanted to book a lineup based on bands that just I wanted to see, that I booked for entirely selfish reasons, maybe 20 people would turn up,” he laughs. “It’s definitely a balancing act.

“I think that translates well – we still try to consider all those people in what we do. We’re not just doing this for money – we’re doing it because it’s a lifestyle. It’s a celebration that happens once a year

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of people coming together and putting our heads together to produce [a] cool, unique festival with a good vibe.” That’s not to say that Tillman doesn’t shudder when he recalls the first iteration of the festival. That training wheels attempt at putting on a massive event makes his usually laid-back tone tighten, and he sounds a little like someone being forced to recount some awful first date. “The first festival was a fucking shambles,” he laughs, a little nervously. “It was ridiculous. But people still had fun. I guess what made it OK is that we’re honest. We don’t pretend to be Splendour In The Grass or some professional festival. We were just like, ‘Fuck it, we’ll see how this goes.’ And it was a shambles, but it was still really fun, and people definitely enjoyed themselves, and it was cheap, so people couldn’t get angry … We made mistakes and we’ve gotten better and better over the last three or four of these things. Now we’re a semiprofessional outfit.” That, in some ways, could be the Yours & Owls mission statement: to never, ever pretend to be something they’re not. Those in charge don’t seek to offer their punters the chance to bump shoulders with Instagram influencers, or restaurant-quality food, or anything other than good music, delivered honestly, and with an emphasis on punter happiness. Tillman puts it best: “We’re definitely not getting Ja Rule to come forward as a consultant, we’ll put it that way.” What: Yours & Owls Festival 2017 With: At The Drive In, Allday, Dune Rats, AJJ, Holy Holy, Montaigne, Illy and many more Where: Stuart Park, Wollongong When: Saturday September 30 – Sunday October 1

BRAG :: 717 :: 14:06:17 :: 7

FEATURE

“There were people waiting outside our hotel room and waiting outside the venue … we felt like The Beatles.”

The Amity Affliction Livin’ La Vida Loca By Natalie Rogers

espite soaking up the sun in São Paulo last month, The Amity Affliction’s Ahren Stringer admits he has been a little under the weather lately. “I got sick on our last tour so now we’re back home – my immune system is working wonders for me,” he jokes, as he clears his throat. As the only original member of the band that cut its teeth putting on shows during lunchtime at Gympie High School, 170 kilometres north of Brisbane, the affable bass player and vocalist has grown up fronting The Amity Affliction, alongside his long-time bandmate and best friend Joel Birch. And he is just as downto-earth in person as he appears onstage. Stringer sounds genuinely happy to be back in Melbourne with his girlfriend Casey, AKA rapper Lady KC, and their cat, but he says the band’s recent trip away was full of memorable moments. “It was the first time we’d been to South America and the shows were crazy! There were people waiting outside our hotel room and waiting outside the venue, and grabbing at us as we were going in and out. It’s just something we’ve never really experienced at home before. The people are so starved for live music over there – we felt like The Beatles,” he laughs. “It was absolutely nuts, in a good way.” It’s no secret that The Amity Affliction’s highly emotional and at

times deeply personal lyrics – often focusing on battling inner demons, loss and heartbreak – have touched the hearts of listeners all around the world, and their fan base here and abroad continues to grow. “The biggest shows we’ve ever headlined have been here at home,” Stringer says, reminiscing about 2015’s Big Ass Tour of Australia and New Zealand with Florida’s A Day To Remember. The tour saw them pack out Sydney’s Qantas Credit Union Arena, selling some 12,000 tickets in the process. The Amity Affliction’s most recent regional Australian tour in support of their fifth album This Could Be Heartbreak sold out in record time, while the record marked their third consecutive debut at the top of the ARIA charts, making them only the fifth Australian band to achieve such a milestone. “It’s unbelievably cool to play in front of so many people and the hometown crowds are always very welcoming,” says Stringer. “I feel like they know us better than anyone anywhere else.” This month, The Amity Affliction will be back out on the road, playing one night in every capital city on the east coast. They’re bringing some new friends along for the ride: Beartooth, a hardcore punk band from Columbus, Ohio; Pvris, a band to watch from Lowell, Massachusetts; and Australia’s own Make Them Suffer.

“We don’t want to reinvent the wheel. We wanna stay loyal to the fans.” 8 :: BRAG :: 717 :: 14:06:17

“We played the Vans Warped Tour with Beartooth and Pvris, so it will be really good to see them again, and Make Them Suffer are an awesome Aussie band. There will be lots of camaraderie on this tour,” Stringer says. In the past, The Amity Affliction built up a reputation for raising hell on the road. Stories of drinking the venue dry after the show, and even swapping band merchandise for drugs, were not uncommon – but these days the now-sober Birch, along with the rest of the band, understand that the music and fans should always come first. “We don’t really have a lot of time nowadays – between the press, navigating a new city and a new venue every night – and we don’t have time to write on tour either, to be honest,” says Stringer. “We only just started writing new music when we got back [from South America. Dan [Brown, lead guitar] sent me a couple of banging songs. We’ve found that writing while on the road is really hard because you are not in a good headspace. You just try to take each day as it comes and just get through the tour. We definitely write better when we’re at home and chilled out. “Joel writes the lyrics but he doesn’t really have anything to do with the actual music, and Ryan [Burt] is all about the drums, which we really respect, and he always puts his own flavour on everything. So Dan and I compose, and we work really well together. We rarely disagree on anything – it’s really good. We’re really excited because we’re are all on the same page trying some new things, and it’s going exactly the way we want it to go thus far – but it’s still very, very early days.”

“It’s unbelievably cool to play in front of so many people and the hometown crowds are always very welcoming.” Historically The Amity Affliction have released an LP every two years since 2008, so it’s unlikely we’ll see an album this year, but Stringer confirms that this time around they won’t be working with their go-to producer Will Putney. “It’s not to say we’ve overdone it, but we’ve just done it enough that I think we need to find something new. I think a new producer is definitely something that will help us. Not to reinvent ourselves, but just to take a different step in a new direction. “At the same time, we don’t want to reinvent the wheel. We wanna stay loyal to the fans who have been there the entire ride, and we also want to do what we do best, and that’s doing us. So it’s going to be fresh but it’s still going to be Amity.” What: This Could Be Heartbreak out now through Roadrunner/Warner With: Pvris, Beartooth, Make Them Suffer Where: Hordern Pavilion When: Thursday June 22

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Dragonforce Methodically Metal By Anna Rose

“I eat, sleep and play: that was the only three things I did.”

FEATURE

hen I last spoke with power metal master Herman Li, guitarist for the mighty Dragonforce, the Brits were on the verge of unleashing their epic new album Reaching Into Infi nity. Now that LP has landed, and Li takes a spare moment to reflect on the reception thus far.

Dragonforce are meticulous with their planning and presentation. “The new songs are mid-tempo songs and it’s about fitting them in the right place and introducing them at the right time in the setlist,” Li says. “But for Australia, the set changes again. We’re learning about the sounds, but it is about timing.”

“The album came out early in Japan and it did great – it was in the top ten and we thought, ‘Wow, that’s cool!’ The feedback everywhere else has been great – now we’re going to see if the fans can put their money where their mouth is.”

As Li suggests, the time for Reaching Into Infi nity is now – but that’s not to say that five years down the track, Dragonforce’s latest work will have disappeared into obscurity. “Our set consists of songs from pretty much every single album, not just singles but songs without videos,” the guitarist says. “As it goes further down, we play what gets the best reception from the crowd.”

Pallbearer photo by Diana Lee Zadlo

He means that literally, too. With the availability of bonus material and meet and greet opportunities for Dragonforce’s upcoming Australian tour, there’s a lot of excitement surrounding the record. The world tour is already under way, but only the first two singles have premiered on the live stage – and as Australia is an early stop, Li says some of the new material will be given its debut outing Down Under. “The reception around those two songs has been great,” he says of ‘Judgement Day’ and ‘Ashes Of The Dawn’. “We made sure people had a chance to hear the songs before we played them. [There are] some new songs that we’ll play on the one tour and the next tour, we won’t play them. If you like the new album, this is the time to hear most of the songs.” There’s always an element of the unknown when a band brings fresh tracks to the live arena, but

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They’re a live band first and foremost, then, and Li agrees that he takes the stage with the express intention of melting people’s faces with his sublime guitar work and bold persona. “Of course we’re going to melt their faces, what else are we going to do?” he laughs. “We always try and work out ways to improve the show, and it’s good we had those first two singles done to figure more things out as we go along in the new set – there’s new equipment, lights and everything that goes along with a new show.

“I don’t want to give the game away – these days the internet is a spoiler alert everywhere.” Truer words were never spoken, but with such a jumbo package of goodies to go with this month’s Dragonforce experience, Li admits that spreading the message is important. “I think the music speaks for itself. But we need all the promotion we can get without concentrating on one thing. These days, the more we do it, the more we become perfectionists in more categories of things – from the light show, the video screens or the way the stage is set up – it just never stops. There’s always something going down.” There’s no questioning his work ethic, but Li for one seems happier with his axe in hand than dealing with all the behind-the-scenes stuff. “Every day I feel like there’s not enough hours to do all the things I want to do. It’s a good way to live – you’ve always got something to look forward to, you’re not bored. “I literally can’t get away from the computer to the guitar, which can be a good thing. I don’t want to get stressed about not getting something done. We just don’t stop. Today I wanted to practise and learn new

“If you like the new album, this is the time to hear most of the songs.” songs, and guess what happened? I didn’t have a chance to touch the guitar from about nine in the morning until after six in the evening – just no time. “I think time management is probably the most difficult thing for Dragonforce – I do still want to have fun in my life, play my guitar. But that’s life… for now. At the beginning of this tour, I literally played a show and slept. I eat, sleep and play: that was the only three things I did.” Hopefully, Li and co. will be able to squeeze in a bit more fun when they come to Australia. Li cheerfully agrees: “You’re getting us fresh, you’re getting all the energy, all the head-banging and all the moshpits!” What: Reaching Into Infi nity out now through Earmusic/Sony With: Lord Where: Manning Bar When: Saturday June 24

“The feedback everywhere else has been great – now we’re going to see if the fans can put their money where their mouth is.” BRAG :: 717 :: 14:06:17 :: 9

FEATURE

“Shoegaze became a fully fledged genre that had exciting strands to it.”

Ride The Prodigal Sons Of Shoegaze By Michael Hartt

ad you told someone in 1997 that in 20 years’ time, both Ride and Slowdive would be releasing brand new albums of original material, they most likely would have laughed at you, labelled you crazy and asked you not to bother them again while you both waited in line to buy a copy of Oasis’ Be Here Now. Yet, here we are in 2017 and two of the brightest lights of the early ’90s shoegaze scene have returned with their first new albums in over two decades, with Slowdive – who reformed in 2014 – releasing their self-titled fourth album in May, and Ride – who played their first shows in more than 20 years in early 2015 – releasing their comeback fi fth album, Weather Diaries, this week.

While the reformation of the former Creation Records labelmates within a year of one another was pure coincidence, Ride drummer Loz Colbert explains that seeing Slowdive’s resurrection gave the Oxford four-piece a good idea of what to expect when they made their own return. “They were coming to the end of their massive year, having played all around the world. I went to one of their shows in London towards the end of that and it was like, ‘What’s it like?’ I was dying to know what their experiences had been because I had obviously not yet played with Ride, so I was really curious about what it was like for them and how it had gone.”

After four studio albums and some classic EPs, internal conflicts saw Ride split in 1996 to a shrug of indifference from a music scene swept up in all things Britpop. In the intervening years, lead guitarist Andy Bell went on to join Oasis and Beady Eye, rhythm guitarist Mark Gardener performed as a solo act, bassist Steve Queralt effectively retired from music and Colbert played drums for Gaz Coombes and the reformed Jesus and Mary Chain. Though their split was acrimonious, all four members soon resolved their differences and have appeared together in different configurations through the years, often fuelling rumours of a proper reunion. Colbert says timing was the key to Ride finally reactivating. “The offer to us to reunite had come around a number of times but one or more of us weren’t able to do it for various reasons,” he says. “It just wasn’t quite right.” While Ride were happy to initially play sets of their best-loved tracks, it was always the group’s intention to record new music. Weather Diaries came out of three one-week stints in the studio with producer Erol Alkan. “Personally, it’s a large part of the reason why I got back into this,” says Colbert. “I was interested in the idea of getting back with everyone and playing live – that sounded like fun, but I have to say that what really was pushing behind the drive to get back together was the idea that maybe we

would actually do something new. Luckily, brilliantly, the rest of the band was actually really up for that as well. “We were doing a track a day or sometimes two tracks a day. It was wonderfully creative and liberating to be in that kind of environment with these four people who were very forthcoming and wanted to work together, be creative, write together and make music.” Two decades on from Ride’s last recordings, Colbert says improvements in equipment, as well as the quartet’s level of musicianship, meant their time creating was markedly different. “We certainly didn’t want to recreate the past in terms of, we certainly couldn’t recreate the Nowhere sound or the Going Blank Again sound. What we did find was that some of the songs that came out really did seem to almost be ghosts from that era, but the way that they sounded in the studio and the way they sound now is completely different, and therefore, it felt very valid and quite beautiful. It’s almost like you got the echo of the past but you’re doing something new with it.” In time since Ride’s split, the once-derided shoegaze genre has experienced a rehabilitation, with several generations of bands embracing its aesthetics and its quest to push sonic boundaries. Returning into this environment, Ride have found themselves greeted as heroes.

“The offer to us to reunite had come around a number of times … It just wasn’t quite right.” 10 :: BRAG :: 717 :: 14:06:17

“Some of the songs that came out really did seem to almost be ghosts from that era.” “Ride kind of disappeared without a bang with the shoegaze label hanging over us,” says Colbert. “Then all these new bands came along and were using it as a badge of honour and they were holding our band in high esteem, and it made you feel that actually, we did something that inspired people and it’s a good thing. So going out on the road again, it felt different. “Over that period of 2014-2016, I heard of more and more bands who were actually trying to create that sound and do interesting things with it, and we felt like we were part of a bigger puzzle. Shoegaze became a fully fledged genre that had exciting strands to it.” Australia is somewhere the debt of influence to shoegaze and Ride is particularly prevalent. Having toured here several times in the ’90s, the band is yet to return this time around, though Colbert hopes that will change soon. “We’d really like to come. It feels like a big unopened present that we can’t wait get to and open.” What: Weather Diaries out Friday June 16 through Wichita/Inertia

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FEATURE

Australian Music Week 2017: Meet Matt Johnston, The Man Behind The Gum Ball By Joseph Earp

att Johnston is giving himself the time and the space to get a little nostalgic. When the BRAG gives the legendary industry figure behind The Gum Ball, Dashville Skyline and Pigsty In July a bell, he is mired in memory.

“We start working on Dashville Skyline pretty early. I mean, this is meant to be a downtime – although we usually do Pigsty In July around this time, I decided not to do it this year because we’ve had a bit of growth around the summer period.

“I’ve been watching some footage from the tenth annual Gum Ball,” he says in his relaxed Aussie drawl. “That was only three or four years ago, and so much has happened since then. It’s crazy. So much has happened to the site, and to the people working there. It’s all good, but it’s scary too.”

“There’s just too much going on, so we thought we’d have a break from the site for a couple of months. But I mean, there’s so much to be done that it means there’s never really a quiet time. That’s just life, I guess. You just have to keep pumping away and see how it goes. Although, I’ve definitely been doing this long enough to know when I’ve got too much happening. Back in the day, I’d just put the blinkers on and there’d be a deadline to work towards and that’d be it. But these days, I have learnt how that’s affected me and everyone around me.

The Gum Ball photo by Renae Saxby

Not that he can spend too long reminiscing. Although Johnston is meant to be enjoying a well-earned rest, he still has a lot on his plate, from the just-beginning-to-gestate Dashville Skyline lineup to his appearance at Australian Music Week 2017, a Cronulla-hosted celebration of the music industry in this country.

“That’s why AMW is so important. I know it’s only been going for three years, but similar events in other countries have been going on for 40 years.” thebrag.com

“You have to manage it, because it becomes too much like a hated job if you work too hard at it.” He laughs. “I’m fortunate I don’t have children. Fuck, I can’t even imagine how it would be doing all this with a family to worry about too.” Not that Johnston is complaining. After all, idle hands are the devil’s work, and Johnston finds it immensely satisfying to build up the Dashville brand by spreading the word at industry occasions like AMW. Indeed, these days, he doesn’t just have his reputation as the mastermind behind a series of increasingly successful festivals – he’s the manager of an inclusive venue, a musician, and a valued source of advice and support for a range of burgeoning music acts. “The venue’s the venue – it’s pretty popular in terms of people wanting to host their weddings there, or having their parties, or just having a camp. It’s all cool, man; it’s fun to work on. And I play music as well, so I sometimes set myself a goal to work

on my music more too, but it just gets forgotten with everything else and the deadline comes around and I go, ‘Oh fuck, I haven’t even done that yet.’ “But I’ve met a lot of great people, been to a lot of great parties, and in terms of Dashville itself, more people are being aware, and more things are starting to pop up. People are starting to recognise us because we’ve been around long enough. We’re enjoying where we are at right now.” For the very immediate future, Johnston is going to turn his attention to preparing for AMW – something he’s awaiting with bated breath. As far as he’s concerned, the three-day-long celebration of the local industry is exactly the kind of event Australia needs more of, and he feels it represents a welcome chance for players to look out for one another – something that happens far too infrequently in this country. “Lots of other countries develop their artists with government grants and stuff. Like, Canada are amazing and really forward-thinking in terms of how they respect their arts and culture. That was part of my experience being over there – I was like, ‘Wow, we are so far behind.’ So whatever we can do to increase the success of Australian artists is a good thing, I reckon. “I mean, I can list even a bunch of artists here locally who are exceptional, but without that fostering and that development, who knows where they’ll get to within their career? … That’s why AMW is so important. I know it’s only been going for three years, but similar events in other countries have been going on for 40 years, you know?” For Johnston, the key will be intra-organisation communication: something that AMW is explicitly

“There’s so much to be done that it means there’s never really a quiet time.” designed to bolster. The conference is more than just an opportunity for a bunch of bigwigs to chinwag and undercut each other in order to foster relationships with the next big thing. It’s about the industry growing as one cohesive, interconnected unit. “Everyone’s got to work together,” Johnston says. “It’s great to be in a position where we have the ability to ring people up and see how we can help and see how we can work together with other organisations. It takes time, but I would love to see some more of it. I think we should all be developing relationships in that way. There’s a lot of big agencies out there, but there’s a lot of industry that’s below the radar, and that’s what makes the industry special.”

“Whatever we can do to increase the success of Australian artists is a good thing, I reckon.” What: Australian Music Week 2017 Where: Cronulla Beach When: Wednesday November 1 – Friday November 3 More: australianmusicweek.com

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FEATURE

YOU AM I

BY DAVID JAMES YOUNG

he phone rings about five or six times before it’s answered. There’s a pause, before a groggy yet unmistakable voice comes through on the other end. “Hello?” it asks. You know it’s him, but you’ve got to be sure. “Hi, is that Tim?”

Tim Rogers – acclaimed singer, songwriter, guitarist, playwright, actor, rock star, bon vivant and the driving force behind You Am I – answers the question in the most Tim Rogers way possible: “Fuck, I hope so.”

Rogers is currently in the middle of a solo tour in support of his most recent release, the charming and quasiconceptual An Actor Repairs. It won’t be long, however, before he’s ditching the acoustic guitar and strapping on the Crockenbacker as You Am I take to stages across Australia with fellow Aussie rock icons the Hoodoo Gurus, Jebediah and Adalita of Magic Dirt for the Fist Full Of Rock Tour. Rogers is incredibly vocal in his love for the Gurus in particular, counting them as both one of his band’s biggest influences and some of his dearest friends. “The Gurus probably do it better than anyone out there,” Rogers says. “They’ve always managed to maintain their sense of the absurd while still remaining an incredibly powerful rock’n’roll band. We played with them for the first time in years just a couple of weeks ago, and we were reminded of that again very quickly.

“Being on tour with someone is a fast-track to a very intimate friendship.” 12 :: BRAG :: 717 :: 14:06:17

“The relationship is still the same too – as soon as the four of us met up with the four of them, we all paired off into corners and just went for it. We just talked records for an hour or so, and then they went onstage and completely slaughtered us. We’re still learning from them.” Rogers traces his connection with the Gurus right back to the early days of You Am I, who formed in Sydney in the late ’80s and cut their teeth playing around the various pubs and bars the city had to offer. Along with the aforementioned Gurus, Rogers also points to Beasts Of Bourbon as a significant band in You Am I’s early days – particularly their vocalist, Tex Perkins, who would go on to be one of Rogers’ long-time friends and a musical collaborator on the project T’N’T. “It was all very naughty,” Rogers recalls. “That Beasts Of Bourbon tour [in 1993] was particularly wild. It was a bit of an eye-opener – a real education in how to have so much fun and push yourself to the brink of life and death, but always make it to the show. They were very intense people, but they were so funny as well. We were almost treated like little nephews or something, getting shown the world with arms around us. “It was the same with bands like Box The Jesuit and the Hard-Ons getting us on shows really early on. It was remarkable to us that there was no chest-out intimidation or any bullshit like that. The only time that we came across that was with bands that were on our level, who treated the whole thing like some sort of competition.” By the mid-’90s, You Am I hit an enviable streak of releasing classic after classic – 1995’s Hi Fi Way, 1996’s Hourly, Daily and 1998’s #4 Record, all of which went gold in Australia and topped the album charts. “We did all the usual bullshit of a band on the rise,” Rogers says. “We looked out a window in Adelaide at this old synagogue, looking at the line of people around the block waiting to get in. We did the same thing in Brisbane – it’d be me and Rusty [Hopkinson, drums] sitting there, smoking a bowl and counting heads. I won’t deny it – it was really exciting to us. Our manager at the time, Kate [Stewart], had us on

$20 a day. She’d always remind us that we were having a good month, but we’d still have to go out there and put on good shows.” On the back of their classic albums, You Am I became a headlining act in their own right, and took it upon themselves to show other artists the same kind of support that the Beasts and the Gurus had given them. “We played a lot of shows with Snout, and a lot of shows with Even as well,” says Rogers. “We got to bring some bands out from the States, as well, like Man Or AstroMan? That was a big one for us – it was a band that we all loved. It was always a pleasure to play with Hoss, as well – anything that Joel [Silbersher] is a part of, I want to be a part of too.” It was around this time You Am I first encountered the acts that complete the Fist Full Of Rock lineup, too – evergreen Perth punks Jebediah and erstwhile Magic Dirt singer Adalita Srsen. “We left a pretty great first impression on Jebediah,” Rogers says with a knowing laugh. “Andy [Kent, You Am I bassist] and I actually had a fist fight in front of them the very first night that we met. Kevin [Mitchell, Jebediah frontman] has talked to me about it – I don’t remember all the details about the fight, but he assured me it was quite something.

Andy and I

“We were playing in Margaret River, and we asked them then and there to tour with us. They had something about them that was very American

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FEATURE

Tim Rogers’ Wildest Memories “It was a bit of an eye-opener – a real education in how to have so much fun and push yourself to the brink of life and death, but always make it to the show.” collegiate – they were this little gang of oiks, and I loved that mentality.”

talk of records, romance, songwriting… the whole gamut.”

Rogers and co. met Srsen under less volatile circumstances. “It was 1993, and she was doing lights at the Barwon Club in Geelong,” says Rogers. “I believe she’d originally been hired just to do lights for Tumbleweed, but she agreed to do us as well. Just before we played, the toilets exploded at the venue – so as we were playing, we were playing under a couple of inches of dunny water. Adalita, God bless her, was in the same predicament – but she kept doing her job.

Rogers has made a lot of great friends through his decades of experience traversing the roads, highways, bars, pubs, clubs and theatres of this country and several others. It’s something he sees as a truly unique bond.

“I’ve been a mate of hers for almost 25 years now, and it’s very special to have a friendship that runs that deep. We only see each other a few times a year, but every time that we do it’s quite affectionate. We

What: A Fist Full Of Rock Tour With: Hoodoo Gurus, Jebediah, Adalita Where: Enmore Theatre When: Thursday August 31

“Being on tour with someone is a fast-track to a very intimate friendship,” he says. “You see each other at your best and at your worst – and you accept that. We’re in this together. You can go into shorthand. You speak the same vernacular.”

“We left a pretty great first impression on Jebediah. actually had a fist fight in front of them the very first night that we met.”

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WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO

‘KNOW’ A POP STAR?

s le ty S y rr a H l a e R e h T f O h rc In Sea

BY JOSEPH EARP The Spectacle Of Pop:

One Direction Up Close And Not Very Personal

few years ago, I was in the secondto-front row at the Hordern Pavilion, waiting to see the British boy band One Direction. I was there in my official capacity as a reviewer, and to be honest, feeling more than a little awkward. Concerned mothers kept shooting me strange looks; glances that seemed to say, “Why are you, an unshaven, sweaty, 20-something-year-old man here at a gig that is clearly designed for pre-teens? And why are you holding a notepad and pen? Are you some kind of pervert?” 14 :: BRAG :: 717 :: 14:06:17

Feeling embarrassed, I tried to shoot back my own complicated facial correspondence: my eyebrows shot up, indicating warm surprise (“What am I doing here? That’s a good question that I’m afraid I can’t really answer myself!”); my lips twisted into a faltering, self-aware smile (designed to convey a very specific kind of happiness – the happiness of someone who is gently amused to find themselves in an odd situation rather than the happiness of a person who is pleased to be surrounded by pre-teens); and my eyelids squinted a little (to make my expression sillier, a method of indicating to the concerned mothers that I was aware that all the things my face was currently doing were y’know, a little odd.) I must have looked like I was having a stroke. The mothers, for their part, were either utterly unable to translate my facial Morse code or were simply unimpressed by its message. They looked away, bringing their daughters in a little closer. I didn’t really understand what the problem was – the pre-teens themselves never seemed particularly bothered by me, especially not when night fell and the evening’s entertainment began.

The proceedings kicked off with a bizarre dance ritual. The onstage jumbo screens came to life, a haphazardly selected playlist of classic ’80s and ’90s hits began to blare from a nearby speaker system, and the crowd, eerily starting to resemble a German propaganda film from the ’30s, rose to its feet in one coordinated gesture and began to dance. The ‘Macarena’ blurred into ‘Barbie Girl’. A six-yearold, dressed from head to toe in One Direction merch, began to cry, put off by the sheer ungodly volume Aqua’s kitsch classic was being blasted at. And the mothers, grinning broadly, started swinging their arms, while the fathers sprinkled around the crowd ogled the sight appreciatively, dusty old sneakers tapping into the floor. It was a weird trip – one that only got weirder when The Boys themselves took to the stage a little later. Firstly, the members of One Direction didn’t really seem like boys, although that was what the crowd excitedly called them in the lead-up to the show. They were men, many of them heavily tattooed, all of them lean and muscular in that way that seems committeethebrag.com

FEATURE

“The members of One Direction didn’t really seem like boys … They were men, many of them heavily tattooed, all of them lean and muscular.”

designed to attract everyone and intimidate no-one; lean in a way that encouraged d the single dads to think to themselves, “Yeah, I could take that lot on,” while also privately admitting that it was true The Boys looked pretty damn good in their tigh ht tees. In that way, they exuded that weird force that is seemingly becoming more an nd more popular these days: sex appeal presented as a coy authenticity. We were meant to desire One Direction n – to find their smouldering gazes and carefully selected outfits attractive, not to mention their enthusiastic dan nce moves and that weird thing Niall Horan did to his miic stand – but for their part, The Boys went to great length hs to appear unaware of our gaze. They outsourced th he lust to us. It was on us as an audience if we found them m attractive. Like the most demure of romantic objects, they merely smiled at our drooling, and fluttered their ga azes down to the floor.

“Who were these pop propagandists, and what did they want from me?”

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And thirdly, perhaps most pertinently, I couldn’t shake off the eeriness of the spectacle; couldn’t comprehend the unrelenting bigness of it all. After all, you don’t need to have studied much history to be a little bit afraid of aesthetics. Our understanding of dictators and fascistic, state-organised mind control is deeply tied up in images of mass demonstrations and towering, blown-up visions of human faces. ‘Nuremberg’ was the word that kept flashing through my head, and although I tried to shove it down, it kept bopping right back up. I couldn’t really comprehend what I was being sold either, which only made the experience that much more unnerving. Who were these pop propagandists, and what did they want from me? They didn’t seem to have any of the divine blandness that defined vaguely Christian acts like The Jonas Brothers and pre-weed Miley Cyrus, so I wasn’t worried they were trying to fill us all up with the word of the Lord. But they were far from forces of corruption either – despite their outsourcing of attraction (or perhaps

broke out in a cold sweat. I always freak out when I feel like something big and expensive is trying to get my attention – I can’t shake the feeling that I am being sold to, or that someone I have never met is clandestinely trying to convince me to do something that will probably bring me into harm’s way. And when the bad thing does happen, it will be my fault: I will have walked into the trouble willingly, eyes wide open. I wiped away a whole slick palmful of sweat. A concerned mother was looking at me, even more horrified than she had been before the gig started. By this stage, having totally abandoned my attempts at facial Morse code, I just stared at her, eyes wide, screaming rather than speaking. What the fuck is going on? my eyes said. What the fuck are we actually watching? I glanced back over to the stage and sat for the remaining few hours in stunned, horrified silence. One Direction never once seemed human to me. Not when they descended down the long walkway that stretched the length of the Hordern and began to shake their rear-ends for the gasping ecstasy of the audience. Not when Harry Styles, the long-haired Lothario who had always been my favourite, almost tripped over – thrown off by an excessive bout of boogieing – and his face flushed with a concoction of surprise and embarrassment. And certainly not when The Boys returned for their second encore, pyrotechnics lighting up the stage behind them, and thanked the audience for always being by their side. There was not an ounce of sincerity in a second of it, I thought. I might as well have sat there and watched a cast of dancing mechanical marionettes. eedless to say, the pre-teens around me had an entirely different experience. By the time the concert wrapped up, many of the audience members were literally speechless. A strange silence descended over the place. Even those who were talking did so quietly, shaking their heads as though they had just been present for some kind of holy moment, which as far as they were concerned, they totally had.

▲

“I just stared at her, eyes wide, screaming rather than speaking. What the fuck is going on?”

Secondly, the screaming really was something else. It didn’t stop for the duration of the concert, and was one of the loudest things I ha ave ever heard. It really awakens something primal in n you, to be surrounded by that many people howling. Although you logically understand that everyone is just j screaming in passionate tribute to The Boys, your inner survival mechanism kicks in and you become unnervingly convinced that there is a predator nearby – that all the screaming and carrying on means some giant fanged beast is going to hop out from behind that merchandise stall over there and tear you asunder.

because of it?), they seemed about as malicious as a litter of newborn kittens. If they weren’t selling God and they weren’t selling the devil, what the hell was happening?

BRAG :: 717 :: 14:06:17 :: 15

“I’m a real artist now, Zayn said. Which only made it all the more confusing when he released his debut solo record, Mind Of Mine.”

sum total of their being to an action, but the product of their labour can never be seen as the sum total of them. So even if Katy Perry or Lady Gaga or Robert Plant or whoever throws every single element of their personhood at a song – if they drench it with their hopes and dreams and fears – it can never be read as a complete translation of their being. It is of them. It’s not them. Even in the parallel universe where Katy Perry just wrote and released a 48-hour long a cappella dirge in which she listed every single one of the joys and concerns rattling through her, we would still be no closer to knowing Katy Perry. Some part of a person is always lost in the act of making music. And as nice as it might be to imagine that songs are some kind of conduit, the contact only goes one way – and even then, it does so messily, losing traction the further that it has to travel. Of course, something additional is ruined by the act of listening too. Audiences misinterpret and appropriate, migrating ever further away from the flesh-and-blood musicians who kick the whole process off. There is a reason that some of the most famous bands in contemporary musical history have felt misunderstood by their audiences.

“How can we ever love a musician when we don’t even know them? That is the paradigm of pop.” ▲

“I think that was the best night of my life,” said a girl in a One Direction T-shirt to her mother, her voice hushed with reverie. A younger girl nearby overheard the comment, tugged the stranger in the tee and nodded solemnly. “Me too,” said the younger girl. That was all to be expected, right? They were only kids – surely they had been won over by the lights and the spectacle and the noise of it all rather than any perceived sense that they had personally connected with The Boys. Surely they were responding to the gig’s very surface layer; not the weirdness that lay below? But no. They felt – each of them felt – that they had somehow communicated with their idols. They said as much, all of them convinced that Harry or Liam or Niall had looked right at them; that The Boys had singled them out, and were performing just for them. “I can’t believe I was so close to them,” one 13-yearold said, breathily. “They were right there – they were actually looking at me.” It freaked me out that I could have seen something so wholly different to the rest of the crowd. Where they had seen intimacy, I had seen an extravagant display of depersonalisation. Where they had seen connection, I had seen coldness. And where they had seen the fl esh-and-blood ciphers of their dreams, I had seen a bunch of overworked and overstretched 20-somethings, all looking out at their audience with glazed eyes.

Kurt Cobain so hated the jocks who thought his music was a good soundtrack for fucking and fighting that he called them out on the acerbic ‘In Bloom’. Randy Newman’s satire-soaked ‘Rednecks’ was adopted by the very crowd it aimed to make fun of. And ‘Born In The USA’, a tune long championed by flag-waving conservatives as an unabashed blast of patriotism, was openly described by Bruce Springsteen as anti-war in message.

Hearing But Not Knowing:

The Problem Of Pop’s Personhood “What blessed justice it would be if …. it became common for audiences to regularly fling pies in the faces of performers whom they thought were coming on with a load of bullshit. Because the top rockers have a mythic aura around them and that’s a basically unhealthy state of things … that infests ‘our’ culture from popstars to politics.” – LESTER BANGS, OF POP

AND PIES AND FUN

ow can we ever love a musician when we don’t even know them? That is the paradigm of pop. How can we ever pretend that listening to a Taylor Swift song – particularly one that has been actively designed to appeal to the largest number of consumers as possible – somehow teaches us anything about Taylor Swift herself? There is an old philosophical conundrum called the problem of the person. It goes as follows: a human can give the

Musical messages only survive when they are co-opted. You can’t intimately know what Prince’s exact intention was when he wrote ‘Purple Rain’ any more than you can track every single one of your lover’s thoughts – any more than you can anyone with anything resembling certainty, least of all a stranger. So, to make the music work for you, you reshape it – pull it and prod it until it means something; until it speaks to the private thoughts you don’t share with another soul – and then you say you understand. You say, Kurt Cobain speaks to me. You say, Daniel Johnston, a man I’ve never met, somehow knows exactly what I felt after my last break-up. You say, Harry Styles was singing that song just for me.

one of this is a bad thing – not at all. Indeed, it is the great beauty of music that messages can be co-opted and redefined in the first place; that there is something that makes people similar, underneath all the things that set them apart. But it just means that even after years of obsessing over your favourite artist – after years of studying their every lyric and collecting their records – you know them no better than the mailman who once got them to sign for a parcel. That’s why we read interviews. We like to actively look to see if a musician’s singing voice is different from the one they use to speak: whether Leonard Cohen was as saintly as his songs, or if Glenn Danzig is as terrifying as his records. And we love the stories that imply there is a connection – tales about tattoo-saturated Danzig poring over his extensive collection of books on the occult, tales about Cohen writing beautiful, soul-searching letters to a lover about to pass away – while we are thrown by those that imply that it is all some kind of weird, capitalistic act. A few years ago, for example, I got the chance to

“There is a reason that some of the most famous bands in contemporary 16 :: BRAG :: 717 :: 14:06:17

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FEATURE

“This was the Harry that I had been looking for but couldn’t find all those years ago in the Hordern Pavilion.” “That unknowability doesn’t make Styles more alien. It makes him more human.” arry Styles sings about masturbation on his new solo album. He sings about drugs, too – equating his lover to a hit of something illicit on ‘Meet Me In The Hallway’, a the album opener. And he generally does the swaggering, sultry thing that Zayn also did when freed from the One Direction beast, in that he suddenly abandons that ‘sexiness as wholesomeness’ thing and comes running at the listener, shirt buttons undone to his navel and his hand already beginning to undo his belt.

interview one of my heroes – a musical legend from the mid-’60s whose every work had altered and enhanced my being. I felt, rightly or wrongly, that he was responsible for the person that I was – that the viciousness of his music had nurtured my taste for the weird and the off-centre, and that the twinkling, obsidian black humour of his songwriting had given me my joyous cynicism about the world. And then I spoke to him, and he was a dick. He did not care for my analysis of his work; he was not interested in anything that I had to say about it. He seemed bored by me – or worse, like he actively disliked me. And what had I done but tell him how much I loved what he had done for me? What had I done but try to build on that connection I felt his work had already established? It was a good year or so before I could listen to his music again, and even then things were still weird. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had married the love of my life, only to a few years later discover I had accidentally married their identical twin instead. The music still sounded the same, but it was different, and it would never go back to the way it had been before. All the things I loved about the artist suddenly seemed like a false face designed to trick me into shelling out my cash. Music is always for sale. Art is a trade-off, and musicians give us their work so we can give them praise and affection. And then when we discover the artificiality of all that – when we see that musicians are not who their art says they are, and that there is some kind of transaction going on – part of the illusion is forever sullied.

Altering Personhood:

How Harry Styles Found His ‘True’ Voice “I would stand like an ant in an arena crowd just to witness his magnetism.” – MITSKI ON HARRY ST YLE S, TAL K H O USE

he cracks had been there for a while. You could see them in 2013’s This Is Us, an inside look at the One Direction machine directed by Morgan ‘Super Size Me’ Spurlock of all people. Sure, The Boys had tried their hardest to project a kind of unified, grinning, wholesome front. And Spurlock backed them up too, splicing in long scenes in which the band members all joke about backstage, gently

punching each other across the shoulders like the world’s oldest friends. But as single-minded as they pretended to be, it was clear they weren’t always on the same page. Zayn Malik, always the brooding outsider, seemed to be growing ever more surly. What with his Misfits T T-shirts and his sleeve tattoos, he was ‘the punk one’ in a band that had no room for punk. At one point in This Is Us, he spat out the words “boy band” as though they were bloodied teeth. So when the rift came, it was unsurprising that Malik was its instigator. He was the first to throw off the cowl of the boy band, and slunk away to give moody, maybe just everso-slightly whiny interviews with the media. He had never been allowed to grow a beard while in One Direction, he said. It wasn’t always easy for him to give his own creative input, he said. I’m a real artist now, he said. Which only made it all the more confusing when Malik released his debut solo record, Mind Of Mine. The way he had been speaking to the press, one would have assumed he had a fiery death metal record up his sleeve – something truly subversive; the kind of mettle-testing work of art that the pop world would have no room for. Why else would anyone throw away a meal-ticket that could have kept them occupied for the rest of their life but to do the kind of thing they could never have otherwise done? But Mind Of Mine, Malik’s 14-track collection of dreary EDM dribbles and undercooked pop choruses, was neither mettle-testing, nor fiery, nor even particularly challenging. The best songs followed the basic structure of One Direction’s most famous hits with the full-band pop experience swapped out for warbling electro. The worst sounded like an overambitious teenager trying to rip off The Weeknd.

Which, on at least first listen, convinced me that he was being true to himself. This, I felt, was authenticity. I loved Harry Styles, and I loved it because it seemed to be full of Styles saying things he had not been able to say for years. This was the Harry that I had been looking for but couldn’t find all those years ago in the Hordern Pavilion. But before long – perhaps on the third or fourth listen – I began to get that uneasy sense that Styles was trying to sucker me into something. Why was I leaping to the conclusion that it is inherently more honest to sing about sex and excess? What if some of these pop stars really do prefer innocent, wholesome prepubescent love over midnight trysts in a hotel room? What if Styles was more like the person he presented to the world when in One Direction – the quiet, unassuming, affable bloke – than this Caligula-esque peddler he now appeared to be? I was being tricked by the melodies, I felt. Styles’ new record pays homage to Fleetwood Mac, The Rolling Stones, Beck, Ryan Adams and even Sleater-Kinney: all bands I love. I thought he was trying to get into my crowd just as Zayn had tried to slip in with the EDM-lovers with Mind Of Mine; using the cosmetic elements of a genre to imply deep musical affinity with a scene. And yet I was wrong again. Or, if not wrong, then overly cynical. We will never know who Harry Styles is, so it stands to reason that we will never know if he was more comfortable being the teen heartthrob or the idol of the indie pop scene. It’s entirely possible that he never really wanted to be either, and is merely very good at using himself to sell a whole lot of records. And it’s also possible that he always wanted to do both, and has merely evolved and changed over the years – as we all do. But that unknowability doesn’t make Styles more alien. It makes him more human. He is an ever-shifting series of tastes, desires and motivating factors – and we are too. All that happens is that every once in a while, those two spinning wheels of wants and needs happen to come to rest on just about the same spot.

It was baffling, and it resulted in the most cynical listeners crying foul play. Malik’s new music wasn’t actually edgy or daring, they said; it was just pretending to be, adopting the mantle like a model donning a far-out designer brand to shift a few more units. It was alternative in name only. It used the phrase ‘alternative’ as though it were a marketing term.

A few years back, the wholesome Styles – however he may have been motivated – synced up with an audience of preteens looking for exactly what he offered them. And now the new sexed-up Styles – whether he is chasing a pay cheque or not – has found a fresh crowd of 20-somethings more than willing to accept him.

Which is the problem with pop music sometimes. Because it’s impossible for us to know our favourite artists in anything resembling an intimate manner, we can only ever guess how authentic they might be when they throw their creative left-turns.

So, who is Harry Styles? Harry Styles is not the Harry Styles who once dated Taylor Swift, or puked on the side of a highway. Harry Styles is not flesh and blood. Harry Styles is the electric thing that happens when his music comes in contact with the people listening to it.

When Miley Cyrus discards her shy country girl image in order to flower as a hip-hop-indebted, chemical-addled, offthe-wall banshee, how are we ever meant to know whether she is going for our wallets or if she is fulfilling some lifelong dream? When we don’t know who musicians are anyway, how are we meant to keep up with their authentic selves if they keep bloody changing?

And in that way, and for that reason, it doesn’t matter if he’s selling you something or not. What matters is the thing that happens when you press ‘play’ on a song written by a stranger and somehow encounter a little part of yourself, offered up, ready for you to take. ■ Harry Styles’ self-titled debut album is out now through Columbia/Sony.

musical history have felt misunderstood by their audiences.” thebrag.com

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FEATURE

KYUSS DEATH FROM ABOVE 1979 The Canadian dance-punk duo were originally known simply as Death From Above (as seen on their early Romantic Rights EP) but ran into some legal trouble with influential New York City label DFA Records. Well, more specifically, label co-founder James Murphy, who had pegged Death From Above as a working name for an LCD Soundsystem side project. In response, the arbitrary ‘1979’ was added as it was the year drummer Sebastien Grainger was born – and the same number tattooed onto his arm. Just last week, however, the ‘1979’ disappeared, with Death From Above reclaiming their birth name.

PEARL JAM According to legend, Pearl Jam once played music under the same name as NBA All-Star Mookie Blaylock, even naming their debut album Ten after his jersey number. But apparently the player, who was also technically a brand, couldn’t share the limelight with the young grunge upstarts, forcing them to take up a new moniker.

Former members of stoner rock band Kyuss got together in 2010 as Kyuss Lives! to promote co-founder John Garcia’s new solo ventures. At the beginning of 2012, they revealed the band would continue to tour indefinitely, exclusively playing Kyuss material and even beginning work on a new album. However, a court ruled against Garcia releasing any audio recordings under the new name after original member and Queens of the Stone Age linchpin Josh Homme filed a federal lawsuit. By Cassandra Savellis

Artists Who Have Been Forced To Change Their Names

As if choosing a cool band name wasn’t hard enough, many musicians have been forced to change their moniker over the years due to legal issues, other bands, or simply for creative reasons. But the question remains: does an artist by any other name still sound as sweet? We take a look at a small selection of those artists who, for one reason or another, are no longer known by the name they started with.

PRINCE When trying to get someone into the bedroom, it’s a bit of a tongue twister to say, “Oh, this track? It’s by The Artist Formerly Known As Prince”. But that’s indeed the name fans settled on after The Purple One attempted to break free from his contract with Warner, even changing his name to the unpronounceable love symbol and etching the word “slave” into his face. He did return to his better-known name though, and continued to use it until his untimely passing.

SUBLIME Sublime revolutionised the ’90s ska scene and had a strong future ahead of them before frontman Bradley Nowell’s death from a heroin overdose in 1996. Although we heard some new material under The Long Beach Dub Allstars banner, the Sublime name was held in respectful memory until remaining original members Bud Gaugh and Eric Wilson started collaborating with musician Rome Ramirez in 2009. They continued to play under that name until Nowell’s estate issued a legal challenge to the use of the trademarked name for a venture not including Nowell. As a result, the band became Sublime With Rome in January 2010, released a new album, Yours Truly, and completed a soldout tour of Australia.

RÜFÜS Ahead of embarking on a US tour and making their debut at SXSW 2014, this trio of electro-loving Melburnians decided to rebrand after “months of strongly worded letters and colourful internal debate regarding an existing US trademark on the name Rufus”. Their solution? Simply add a tail: they dubbed themselves RÜFÜS DU SOL, but only in North America; the rest of the world still gets to ignore the sunny suffix.

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Santogold created a bit of confusion for her fans when she changed a single vowel in her name to become Santigold. The musician was apparently sued by a jeweller, filmmaker and infomercialbased salesman who went by the name of Santo Gold. You may know him from his 1985 wrestling-themed science fiction film, Santo Gold’s Blood Circus. With Santigold’s actual name being Santi White, it seems to make a bit more sense anyhow.

THE RACONTEURS The Raconteurs once became The Saboteurs for the Australian market after a Queensland jazz band of the same name refused a monetary payment for the title. Instead, the Aussies demanded more money from the record label for the use of the name, reportedly “to see what would happen” – not knowing of Jack White’s involvement until after the label refused.

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Pearl Jam photo by Danny Clinch / Prince by Nandy McClean

SANTIGOLD

MOS DEF

CUB SPORT This clean-cut Brisbane indie quintet originally went by the name Cub Scouts, but after the real-life Scouts Australia took issue with the misrepresentation of its name, the band swapped out. Frontman Tim Nelson found the whole affair rather silly, at best. “Some of the band cracked up laughing when our manager told us about the letter but I was just in shock because I don’t think we are a particularly offensive band.”

Not many would call Mos Def by his birth name, Dante Terrell Smith, and even fewer now will know him as Mos, as the artist recently changed his name to Yasiin Bey in honour of his Muslim beliefs.

SNOOP Many artists mark a change in musical direction with a change in name. Enter Snoop Lion, the rebirth of Snoop Dogg for the release of his 2013 reggae album Reincarnated. Though the Doggfather seemed to be serious about the name change being permanent, he’s switched fluidly between both kinds of Snoop since. Seems you can’t teach an old dogg new tricks…

THE VERVE The Verve added ‘The’ to the front of their name after the legendary US jazz label Verve Records contacted them threatening legal action. It’s safe to say the adjustment didn’t hinder any of their success.

THE TEMPER TRAP The Temper Trap were going to be simply Temper Temper, but were forced to slightly alter their plans due to a US band of the same name.

“THE TEMPER TRAP WERE GOING TO BE SIMPLY TEMPER TEMPER, BUT WERE FORCED TO SLIGHTLY ALTER THEIR PLANS.” RADIOHEAD On A Friday famously changed their name to Radiohead after signing a record contract with Parlophone. Their original name was coined from their weekly rehearsal slot at school, while their new go-by came from the Talking Heads’ song ‘Radio Head’ in a lastminute decision.

ELTON JOHN

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The British piano man had no problems with the courts or other acts using his namesake, because who would want to be known as Reginald Dwight? Not Elton; and thus the change in musical moniker.

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FEATURE

THE CHEMICAL BROTHERS BLINK-182 Blink-182 added the trio of digits to the end of their original name to avoid any awkward bar brawls with the Irish pop/rock act that was already playing under that name. They’ve been making up ridiculous theories for what the number represents ever since.

The Chemical Brothers were once The Dust Brothers, named after US producers of the same name. When the British duo went on their first international tour in 1995, including a trip to America, the original Dust Brothers threatened legal action. They quickly settled on a new name, inspired by one of their breakout singles, ‘Chemical Beats’.

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“SHIHAD WERE ATTEMPTING TO BREAK INTO THE AMERICAN MUSIC MARKET WHEN SEPTEMBER 11 HAPPENED.” THE MORNING BENDERS US group The Morning Benders feared a backlash after learning that ‘bender’ held negative homosexual connotations in the UK. They subsequently lost a band member, relocated to the East Coast and became Pop Etc.

SHIHAD Shihad were attempting to break into the American music market when September 11 happened, forcing them to change their name to the rather weak Pacifier, named after their 2002 album, because their original name apparently sounded too much like ‘Jihad’. It was a decision that the Kiwis explained made them “feel like frauds”, but the similarity wasn’t a coincidence. “When we were 15 we were all into this sci-fi movie, Dune,” said drummer Tom Larkin. “Dune uses all these Arabic words throughout the movie and the end battle is a Jihad. We were stupid and thought it’d be a great name for a band.”

JOY DIVISION Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook’s band Warsaw wanted to distance themselves from another Brit outfit, punk band Warsaw Pakt, and thus came the newly christened Joy Division. They were named after the prostitution wing of a Nazi concentration camp mentioned in 1955 novel House Of Dolls. Fun times.

PANIC! AT THE DISCO

PVT The Sydney-sometimesLondon-based trio PVT were formerly simply Pivot, but dropped the vowels from their name in 2010 after an American band of the same title issued legal action. Although PVT is now the preferred spelling, they can still be known as Pivot everywhere outside of the USA.

In January 2008, punk-cabaret-turned-mellow-heads Panic! At The Disco unveiled a new logo that dared to drop the exclamation point from their name, which immediately caused outrage among the band’s immense fan base. On July 10, 2009, it was reported that the band had regained the exclamation point, putting a close to its days as simply Panic At The Disco. Punctuation purists everywhere still rue the day.

UNCHARTED SHORES Think One Direction are just another boy band? Nuh-uh, it’s actually the name of a punk band from the US that formed in 2009. They wanted to take Simon Cowell to court for a payout and to discuss royalties, but they’ve recently settled amicably. Let’s assume Uncharted Shores, the new name the American musicians have trumped for, are now a touch richer than they ever would be as the other One Direction.

THE POGUES The Irish misfits who mixed punk with Celtic music were always troublemakers. They were originally called Póg Mo Thóin (Gaelic for ‘kiss my arse’), until complaints received by the BBC DJ who was championing them. Radio shortened their name to simply The Pogues, which ended up sticking. 20 :: BRAG :: 717 :: 14:06:17

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Album Reviews What's been crossing our ears this week...

ALBUM OF THE WEEK LONDON GRAMMAR Truth Is A Beautiful Thing Dew Process/Universal London Grammar go straight for your spine in their second album, Truth Is A Beautiful Thing. The key players – Hannah Reid and her existentially blissful vocals, Dan Rothman and his other-worldly guitar, and Dot Major and his crisp, crackling beats and electronics – have created an album of sweeping, melodic tracks that explore the complexities of the things we try to hold close but cannot control. Across the album, London Grammar play to their strengths. Reid’s voice soars out; rich, ethereal and enveloping. She’s

anchored by simple, plaintive chords that achieve their heartstriking goals while being lightly coated in strings. Edgy beats scamper in, then fade away, and raw, tangy electric guitar riffs punctuate the space. It all eventuates in a very satisfying, layered journey of heart and ambiguity and soul. ‘Hell To The Liars’ is a standout track; gorgeous and full while remaining stark – “Here’s to the things you love,” sings Reid, at once a celebration and memorial.

“Edgy beats scamper in, then fade away, and raw, tangy electric guitar riffs punctuate the space.”

Truth Is A Beautiful Thing is an album that will ring right through your car as you make your way along the coast at sunrise. Amy Henderson

INDIE ALBUM OF THE WEEK JAMES NORBERT IVANYI

‘Terraform Diminution’ – along with an increase in rhythmic intensity and an accompanying climactic feel.

Denalavis Independent James Norbert Ivanyi has been producing mindbending progressive metal with his virtuosic mastery of the guitar since the release of his first EP in 2013. Now we have his fourth EP, Denalavis, a self-released record showcasing the young Sydney musician’s instrumental talent. The three tracks that make up Denalavis are definitively progressive metal, but there’s an emphasis on certain elements of musical progression above others. There’s a steady building of layers throughout each track – ‘Pray Darkly’, ‘Malignant Inhabitants’ and

Denalavis showcases Ivanyi’s shredding talent more than anything else. The execution of the other instruments – drums by David Horgan, bass and keyboard by Ivanyi – is precise and convincing, but the real reason you should be listening to this set is for Ivanyi’s incredible control over his instrument. Still, what a wonderful thing it is in 2017 for a young guitarist to be able to record a series of releases in his own home studio. Once upon a time, a solo artist seeking to record a prog album would be forced to hire an enormous studio space and impeccably talented session musicians. If what you’re after is soloing and riffwork executed with impeccable precision, you will love Denalavis. Samuel Gaffney

“There’s an emphasis on certain elements of musical progression above others.”

FIRST DRAFTS Unearthed demos and unfinished hits, as heard by Nathan Jolly R.E.M. – ‘Shiny Happy People’

‘S

hiny Happy People’ is the most divisive song in the R.E.M. catalogue, inspiring hate in heavy doses; most obviously due to the bright migraine of a clip and the cottoncandy lyrics, but mainly because it became one of the band’s most recognisable songs – and a fiercely unrepresentative one at that. I’m sure a few fans also just think it’s sappy, sucky rubbish. Many more people love it though, in that uncomplicated way you do many hit singles that hang around for

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In truth, it’s a fine pop song, although it’s as much a misnomer as another of the band’s mainstream hits, ‘Everybody Hurts’, which is as mopey as this is shiny and happy. R.E.M. usually fell in between: in the darker spaces, the weirder areas. They started their career with a series of hooky but impenetrable indie albums, spidery things that edged closer to conventional pop each time, until breaking through with their seventh album, 1991’s Out Of Time – a masterful record that topped the US charts, sold 18 million copies worldwide, and contained ‘Losing My Religion’ (best known for soundtracking Brenda and Dylan’s break-up on 90210) and ‘Shiny Happy People’. The demo of ‘Shiny Happy People’ shows how depressing a song it could have been without Kate Pierson from The B-52’s summery

vocals, and with a gentler, less buffed approach. Michael Stipe’s distant, ghostly vocal completely changes the tone of the song. He sounds lonesome and weary, certainly not ringleader of the shiny happy people bouncing around in the candy-coloured clip. Unfortunately, he only sings until the 90-second mark, checking off each main section then bailing, but the distant, dragged-out delivery, coupled with the absence of Pierson’s airy contributions, adds a darker tone (Pierson also duetted on ‘Candy’ by Iggy Pop in 1990, and had her own hits with ‘Love Shack’ in 1989 and ‘Roam’ in 1990 – a great run for her). Listening to the two minutes of instrumental that follows is interesting, despite steering very little from the finished version. After Stipe’s vocal fades, the waltz breakdown no longer sounds syrupy but desolate, an abandoned merry-go-round spinning in the wind.

As it stands, the song leaves a bad taste for many. It’s nice to see what it tastes like with less sugar in the recipe. Listen to the original demo of ‘Shiny Happy People’ at thebrag. com.

xxx

“It’s as much a misnomer as another of the band’s mainstream hits, ‘Everybody Hurts’, which is as mopey as this is shiny and happy.”

decades. R.E.M. themselves left it off their 2003 Best Of. They kinda had to.

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arts in focus FILM/LITERATURE

“We have forgotten 10,000 words for our landscapes, but we will make 10,000 more, given time.” – RO B E R T M ACFA R L A NE , L A NDM A R K S

The Author Who Went Viral: A Brief History Of Robert Macfarlane [FILM/LITERATURE] Down From The Mountains By Joseph Earp

ack in 2015, Robert Macfarlane went viral. A reworked version of the first chapter of his excellent book Landmarks got snagged in the Facebook shares machine, drumming up so much advanced press that upon its eventual release the book hit best-seller lists around the world. It was a fitting turn of events, really. Not only because Landmarks is bold, lyrical and beautiful, and deserved all the success that was afforded to it – but because of that word, ‘viral’. Landmarks is itself an examination of the places that language and nature overlap. Part travelogue, part linguistic history, part Ted Hughes-esque paean, the book sees Macfarlane attempt to collate and collect a “wordhoard” of obscure English phrases pertaining to nature. The result is a tome stuffed with shards of language stunning in their precision; words for a host of natural phenomena many of us are losing the need to call by name. There’s the Shetlandic word af’rug, meaning “the reflex of a wave after it has struck the shore”; zwer from Exmoor, which refers to “an onomatopoeic term for the sound made by a convey of partridges taking flight”; tafolog, a Welsh phrase for any place “abounding in dock leaves”; and kimmeridge, or “the light breeze which blows through your armpit hair when you are stretched out sunbathing”.

“His most stirring chapters are those that fully embrace the danger of our world.” 22 :: BRAG :: 717 :: 14:06:17

In this way, Landmarks is a profoundly textural book; almost linguistically sensual. Macfarlane unearths a host of phrases so sweet upon the tongue that one finds themselves muttering them under their breath once the book is done – words to be repeated, softly, as though rolling a marble around your mouth. Aquabob, a Kentian phrase, translates as “icicle”. Pirr, Shetlandic, means “a light breath of wind, such as will make a cat’s paw on the water”. The ironically beautiful crottle denotes small mounds of rabbit shit. But there is tragedy to Landmarks too – the kind of quiet melancholy that has been part of the Macfarlane experience since the publication of his first book, the Guardian award-winning Mountains Of The Mind. The loss of the language that describes the natural world is a mirror for the loss of that world itself, Macfarlane argues, writing in Landmarks that “there is no single mountain language but a range of mountain languages; no one coastal language but a fractal of coastal languages; no lone tree language, but a forest of tree languages. To celebrate the lexis of landscape is not nostalgic, but urgent.” Memorably, at one moment Macfarlane points out the gentle tragedy that has changed the meaning of the word ‘blackberry’ – for many children growing up in a tarmac-clad Britain, it now refers to a device, not a fruit. Yet one of the great miracles of Macfarlane’s writing is the way that he transforms and elevates tradition. He is no Luddite, and although a book like The Old Ways makes clear its agenda in its title, Macfarlane never aimlessly rages against the modern world. He does not believe in turning back time for the sake of it, and Mountains Of The Mind – his fierce, elegiac account of mankind’s almost ceaseless attempts to conquer mountains – celebrates as many contemporary climbers as it does elder statesmen of the sport. Nor is Macfarlane’s work fogged by nostalgia. Although he mourns the injustices levelled against both

nature and language, he never pretends that the wild world is some genteel tourist attraction to be picked over and poeticised. His most stirring chapters are those that fully embrace the danger of our world: passages about oceans in “ugly moods”; about the threat of death that hangs heavily over precipice-pocked mountainsides; about foolish men and women stumbling into landscapes they do not yet understand. And, most importantly of all, Macfarlane has hope – more hope than many. Language might be withering, the natural world might be rolling back, but as far as the author is concerned, there is something within us that will never allow either to die. “We have forgotten 10,000 words for our landscapes,” he writes in Landmarks, “but we will make 10,000 more, given time.” Macfarlane hasn’t written a full-length book since Landmarks, but that’s not to say he has kept quiet. After all, this dearth of language he set out to describe is widening like a sinkhole. Aside from his work teaching English to university students, the 40-year-old Nottinghamshire-born writer has authored a work on the joys of reading, penned liner notes for the band Grasscut and even jumped art forms: the next major Macfarlane work will be released not as a book, but as a film. Mountain, a collaboration between Macfarlane, director Jennifer Peedom (the mastermind behind Sherpa, an affecting look at the lives of those who lead tourists up the side of Everest), actor Willem Dafoe and cinematographer Renan Ozturk will make its debut here for Sydney Film Festival. Little is yet known about the work – it has been vaguely described as “a suitably uplifting, symphonic ode to high places”. But in any case, it certainly seems like a continuation for Macfarlane; the next instalment of a songline he has been following now for years. As the man himself put it in an interview with The Independent: “I seem to have spent 15 years coming down from the mountains.” What: Mountain as part of Sydney Film Festival 2017 Where: State Theatre / Hayden Orpheum Cremorne When: Saturday June 17 / Sunday June 18

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arts reviews

arts snaps

■ Film

Churchill Fights Them On The Beach, And Everyone Loses By Rylan Dawson

t’s World War II, and just days before Operation Overlord – now more commonly known as D-Day – Winston Churchill meets with some of the top executives for the Allied forces, including King George VI and Dwight Eisenhower, to discuss the plan of counter-attack to reclaim France. Churchill, still haunted by the tragic outcome of similar tactics used when he fought 30 years earlier in Gallipoli, strongly opposes the plan. When the King begs him to become a ‘yes man’ for Britain’s sake, Churchill is briefly torn between what he is told his duties are, and what he thinks they should be – and ultimately persists in his attempts to stay the mission. And that’s sort of it. Seriously. For the rest of the film. What follows is numerous (and frustrating) failures on Churchill’s part to try and convince the Allies not to risk sending thousands of young men to their death. One bizarrely Shakespearean scene involves him praying by his bedside that it’ll rain so the soldiers won’t have to go.

Spoiler alert: they still go. Knowing that D-Day was ultimately a huge victory for the Allies, it’s kind of exasperating and tedious watching Churchill’s efforts to undercut the mission. As his pleas fall on deaf ears, we get to watch the Prime Minister sulk around at home and take the stress out on his marriage and staff. It’s rare and uncomfortable when a film causes you to root against the protagonist – it’s a little satisfying watching Eisenhower take Churchill down a few pegs. Churchill manages to turn one of the most polarising figures of the 20th century

into a blubbering, sulking mess – it’s pretty draining watching the great man act so, dare I say, Trumpian. Brian Cox does well, but his performance feels too melodramatic. Coupled with Cox’s booming theatrical voice, the film is noticeably low-budget. Its ambitions would have been better realised on the West End. Far too often, Churchill himself feels like merely another body in the room, incapable of making important decisions or even getting a chance to influence anyone. There are only brief protestations about Churchill’s tactical navigation through the

previous two years of the war – where was that story in the screenplay? It also doesn’t help that the film is incredibly historically inaccurate. Churchill was against Operation Overlord between 1942 and 1943, before changing his tune in 1944 and becoming one of the prominent voices behind the successful campaign. If you have any high expectations going into this film, as you might be expected to, it’s hard to see how Churchill will live up to any of them.

Churchill is in cinemas from Thursday June 8.

“It’s rare and uncomfortable when a film causes you to root against the protagonist.” ■ Film

The Mummy Fails To Resurrect A Lifeless Franchise By David Molloy

niversal has spawned a new franchise baby, under the deeply concerning moniker Dark Universe. And if The Mummy is any indicator of what that franchise promises, it may be best to simply cancel the whole endeavour outright. Nick Morton (Tom Cruise) and Chris Vail (Jake Johnson) are soldiers of fortune, abandoning their military duties to sideline as tomb raiders. When Nick, in his greed, accidentally releases the spirit of Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella), a betrayed Egyptian princess contained beneath the sands, he must face a force unlike any the world has seen as she wreaks havoc on London.

xxx

While there are some clever throwaway lines and a couple of exciting, frantic action sequences, The Mummy is ultimately proof that marquee blockbuster filmmaking has actively gotten worse in the preceding decades. Stephen Sommers’ 1999 take on the legend was a memorable romp that deftly blended action, comedy and horror with the wonder of an Indiana Jones film (another franchise that succumbed to time). This iteration, boasting six screenwriters and a director (Alex Kurtzman) better known as a producer, is not only less even, but repellently gloomy. The atmosphere is surprisingly close to modernthebrag.com

“The only camp to be seen comes from the least likely of sources: Russell Crowe as Dr. Henry Jekyll.” day DC Films, mired in the same ashen palette of Batman V Superman or (bizarrely) The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Whoever lit this film must not have shown up on set. Overall, the design lacks reason or aesthetic appeal – what purpose do Ahmanet’s multiple pupils serve, exactly? The only camp to be seen comes from the least likely of sources: Russell Crowe as Dr. Henry Jekyll. Now who could he possibly be? Blatant saga-building exposition weighs down every potentially exciting moment, and every story beat can be spotted a mile away. Admittedly, blame can’t be really be levelled at protagonist Cruise, who has soared to the status of

a legend on his capacity to effortlessly carry an action film. He’s as functional and affable as ever here, if a different breed of scoundrel than Brendan Fraser’s Rick O’Connell – far less likeable, for one. His douchery makes his arc more traditionally dramatic, but adversely affects the film’s entertainment value. There are also zero stakes, from the word go. It’s quickly established that Nick is essentially unkillable – he becomes a human MacGuffin – and no amount of plot wrangling can bring back the sense of peril felt in the breathtaking plane crash sequence. None of the action has any sense of fun, and fails to excite on the primal level that rival effort Kong: Skull Island did.

At the premiere, the team was proud of showcasing Boutella as the first woman to ever don the bandages of the Mummy. But such a gesture, positive as it is, cannot simply be used to tar over a generic effort at franchise-booting. It’s also undercut by the events of the film itself. How ironic that The Mummy should be unveiled the week after Wonder Woman. This character used to be juicy, but 20 years and a disinterested creative team have pulled its brains out through its nose, making it drier than the sands from whence it came.

The Mummy is in cinemas now.

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Film Fest Opening Night

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FOOD + DRINK

The Best And Worst Of

FEATURE

[Part One]

The Australian Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book

BY JESSICA WESTCOT T

he Australian Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book, or the AWWCBCB (as absolutely no one is calling it) is a staple of the childhood of most Australian kids.

I’d venture to say that most of you reading would have a childhood picture next to one of these magnificent and (at the time) unprecedented cake creations. Since then, they have all but gained legendary status. Several years ago, the book made a resurgence, and another generation of small, confused children received a Women’s Weekly cake for their special day.

But these are polarising desserts. Each of the cakes in the book seems to fall into one of two categories: ‘obviously shit’ or ‘obviously brilliant’. Some debatable ingredient choices by the team at Women’s Weekly back in the ’80s see the savoury cross paths with the sweet, and mums venture deep into that part of the sweets section at Bi-Lo that nobody ever really returns from. In that spirit, I’ve decided to rate the best and the worst of the AWWCBCB cakes. I’ve not actually made any of these cakes myself, but I’ve tasted them all – my mother steadily churned through the entire book over ten years of family birthdays. I also would highly recommend a AWWCBCB party, as I’ve just decided it makes an incredible theme for costumes. You’re welcome. Alrighty then.

1. The Duck

Look. As underwhelming as it already is to have layers of sponge cake covered in a pasty yellow-dotted frosting, what makes this cake almost unpalatable is the beak, inexplicably made out of Smith’s Original Potato Chips. And the popcorn hair gives off a Monopoly man vibe. Also, the poor ducky just looks… sad. But if you like ducks, and quilts – then sure. Ducks for days.

2. The Koala

What. What is this cake? Not only does it really not resemble a koala, it is made of more shredded coconut than you can poke a lamington at.

3. The Piano

Now this is a fine cake. The difficulty level is not super high, but presumably you are giving this to a six-year-old who has recently achieved a B+ in their preliminary piano exam, or your grandpa who likes to “tinkle the old ivories”. Either way, your audience is easily impressed. I’m yet to see where exactly stocks those tiny candelabras, but they’d be online somewhere. Considering it’s the only real difficult element of this cake, why not splurge?

4. The Jack-In-The-Box

This guy gets points for difficulty, but there’s still an element of the creepy. Here we see one of the standard ingredients in this cookbook: an upside down ice cream cone.

“Several years ago, the book made a resurgence, and another generation of small, confused 5. The Zoo children received a Women’s Weekly cake for their special day.”

Remember when Mum always had ice cream cones in the pantry, and sometimes they were the coloured ones? No one has those any more. It was a simpler time. Plus, consider the assembly of the box, made out of wafer biscuits – and all covered in layers of coloured icing and musk sticks. This is not a ‘night before’ cake, but I’d be willing to bet that if this book existed at the same time as Pinterest Fails, there would be a lot of competition.

With a similar construction to the famous Pool Cake (see next week’s article; spoiler alert), the zoo cake is testament to a mother’s love. I was always fascinated with how the grass was made, but as a grown-up I recently learned that it is in fact, surprise surprise, shredded coconut with green food colouring. You always knew that this one was coming if your toy animals (of which I’m sure you had thousands) suddenly disappeared.

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out & about

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Off The Record

Queer(ish) matters with Arca Bayburt

Why Are Doctors Confused By Homosexuals?

e’re all lucky here in Australia – our healthcare system is alright. If you’re queer though, your mileage may vary. This doesn’t happen often, but sometimes I forget that I’m a minority. I’ll stroll into a doctor’s office and ask for an STI panel and be nonplussed by the flurry of questions that follow. The questioning can be, uh, awkward – not for me, but for the doctor asking them. I’ve heard it all. There’s almost always lots of squirming, euphemisms, metaphors and sometimes even blushing. The doctor I saw last week was grinning uncontrollably the entire time we were in consultation. I thought she was going to bust a gut at any moment. I only realised late into the appointment that this was a nervous response and she wasn’t just really, really fucking happy. This grinning doctor referred to penetrative sex as “sexual relations”. It took me ages to understand what she was trying to ask of me. She was trying to get me to tell her if I’d recently had heterosexual sex that involved some hot Slot A into Slot B action, but she couldn’t say it or ask it or assume it. She would occasionally giggle through a sentence and looked at me like I’d floated into her office through the wall. Kudos to the doc for being understanding about different expressions of sexuality. She didn’t want me to think she was being presumptuous, so she buried me underneath her million probing questions. She felt uncomfortable asking me things in a direct manner, and tried to coax explanations out of me instead. I was unaware of this while it was happening – I think I was in shock because I didn’t understand why she was acting like she’d drank 16 cups of coffee that morning. I went in that day for an uncomplicated procedure. Just take a couple of tubes of my blood and see if there’s anything nasty going on. The exchange between the doctor and myself was shambolic. It’s like we were speaking different languages.

On Thursday June 15, drop by The Shift Club for a classic showgirl extravaganza, Lay’d Girls, starring Annie Mation, Fran Gipanni and the fabulous Maxi Shield. DJ Kirby will hit the decks after the show with some camp tunes just for you. More details (and a surprise guest) to be announced. Plus, with the Sydney Film Festival now under

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For The Love Of Soundtracks

She asked, “Is pregnancy a possibility for you right now?” Blade Runner I said, “Um, yeah, maybe? I mean I don’t know the chances exactly. Probably?” “Well, do you think you are?” I laughed and said I’m definitely not pregnant, it would be miraculous – and at this, her eyebrows threatened to disappear into her hairline: “But you just said ‘probably’?!” I was still unaware of what she was really trying to ask me, which is, have I had sex recently that could have resulted in pregnancy? I thought she was asking me if I could get pregnant at all. We stared at each other for a second. “Oh,” I began, carefully, so as not to frighten her. “I thought you were asking if I could get pregnant. My bad.” We finally managed to get a decent dialogue going. She still had no idea how to talk to me about my sexual health without bumping up uncomfortably against a heterosexual framework, but we made it through OK. I still had to go to another doctor though, because I couldn’t get the advice I needed from her. She was wellmeaning, but just didn’t get it and was too discomfited by me to be able to help me enough. This isn’t a unique event for me. Most every single doctor I have seen, who hasn’t been queer themselves or who hasn’t dealt specifically with queer sexual health, has had no idea how to talk to me. The results of this are mildly annoying. I usually go get a second opinion or just put off seeing any doctor for a while (which is less than ideal and a bit irresponsible). I’m sure there are queer folks out there who have far more complicated relationships with health practitioners for a bunch of reasons, but wouldn’t everything be so much better if they could just start by talking to us without being massive weirdos?

“THIS GRINNING DOCTOR REFERRED TO PENETRATIVE SEX AS ‘SEXUAL RELATIONS’. IT TOOK ME AGES TO UNDERSTAND WHAT SHE WAS TRYING TO ASK OF ME.”

this week…

Dance and Electronica with Alex Chetverikov

way, here are two mustsee queer films on this year’s program: The Wound – “In this captivating look at African masculinity and sexuality, a young man is threatened when his deepest secret is discovered during a traditional male initiation ceremony.” Wednesday June 14 at Event Cinemas George Street. Call Me By Your Name – “It is the summer of

1983, and teenager Elio (Timothée Chalamet) is on holiday at his parents’ Italian villa. At first, when his professor father’s new American assistant Oliver (Armie Hammer) arrives, Elio is indifferent. As the days pass, the two spend more time together and grow irresistibly attracted to each other. This film is a sensual story of first love set in the Italian countryside.” Saturday June 17 at Hayden Orpheum Cremorne.

’m very partial to a stellar soundtrack. It can make or break a film or performance piece, and some of the very best stand on their own accord as collections of music, prompting more than a tickle of the sensorium. What would Risky Business be without Tangerine Dream’s twinkling ‘Love On A Real Train’? Would Ferris Bueller be as memorable sans Yello’s bombastic ‘Oh Yeah’? And what of the deranged Moog genius of Wendy Carlos, whose schizoid reworks of vaunted classical painted A Clockwork Orange ten shades madder? Hell, what about those steel drum workouts from Commando? Vangelis and Ennio Morricone were two of the first compositional maestros who taught me how powerful and striking music can be, especially in the context of a film’s moving pictures. We need little introduction to the building suspense of Blade Runner’s synth arpeggios, or the snake-rattle sweep of Morricone’s Spaghetti Western epics. For all their enrichment of atmosphere and attention to detail,

“THEY TURNED VERY GOOD SCENES INTO MAGICAL ONES, AND VERY GOOD FILMS INTO MEMORABLE ONES.” they turned very good scenes into magical ones, and very good films into memorable ones. Where a Hans Zimmer might pander to the bloat of melodrama and the pomp of purpose, here we might appreciate the space between sound; a character’s mannerisms afforded further weight, for example. Less is often more. Surrealist filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s collaborator Edward Artemiev was yet another master of mood, a Soviet progenitor of modern electronic music through his synth experiments and explorations. Dig a little deeper, and you start exposing the Alain Goraguers, Piero Umilianis and François de Roubaixs. The former strung together a superb

collection of wistful jazzy vignettes, themes on mood(s), for the surreal psychedelic slight of sci-fi animation film La Planète Sauvage. The latter, De Roubaix, flavoured his nostalgic classical themes with the use of early synthesizers. His pastoral ‘Dernier Domicile Connu’ composition was but one of many inspirations for hip hop producers (Dusty Fingers Volumes for diggers – check ’em). As for Umiliani – his remarkable oeuvre aside, you’d do wrong to overlook the bossa/jazz/ library music rollover of the Svezia, Inferno E Paradiso score, a sweet and sultry aural companion to Luigi Scattini’s explorations of sexuality in his classic 1968 mondo-doco. And here we barely touch on Blaxploitation; the J.J. Johnsons, Johnny Pates and Melvin Van Peebleses. The gritty urban asphalt jungles and funk flavours; the jive turkeys, brothers, pimps, players, and the realness and soul of city streets. Nor the fantasy-cop thriller Italian themes or funky porno licks. Another time, then.

THIS WEEK’S PLAYLIST Piero Umiliani’s La Ragazza Fuoristrada. The French group Air had to be heavily inspired by the library music/lounge-jazz of this era. The similarity of mood and instrumentation, in the gentle dreamy synth lines and organ riffs, is paramount. And, because we don’t spend all of our time gathering dust with old records – something from 2017. Neo Image’s latest Untitled on Mood Hut emphasises the notion of building off a simple motif – bringing together ambient breaks, crunchy lo-fi house, reverb and dub in a gentle and ethereal simmer.

RECOMMENDED THURSDAY JUNE 15

Vivid Closing Party – feat: Roland Tings, Dro Carey, Kato The Imperial Hotel

A Night Of Jazz – feat: Athésia Knox Street Bar

SUNDAY JUNE 25

Waterfall Person and Thhomas Freda’s

SATURDAY JUNE 17

FRIDAY JUNE 30

Keep It Disco – feat: Adi Toohey Cake Wines

SATURDAY JULY 1

Keep Sydney Open: Classic Album Sundays: Meet Me In The Cross LCD Soundsystem – Various Kings Cross Sound Of Silver venues World Bar

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live reviews & snaps What we’ve been out to see...

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An Unplugged Sarah Blasko Went Back To Bare Essentials At Her Sydney Show By Chris Girdler It’s a chaotic hump day; a city caught in windy, wet weather, art, music and film festivals, and neon installations. In amongst the maelstrom, the City Recital Hall houses a tranquil evening of stripped-back compositions from Sarah Blasko. It’s dubbed a soloist tour, an ‘unplugged’ session that scales her songs back to their bare essentials. Blasko describes it best when she says it takes the songs right back to their embryonic demo form. In the past, she has done the odd song or two without accompaniment as a part of her sets, and Seeker Lover Keeper provided a scaled-back set-up with fellow musicians, but a whole evening of going solo takes the purist concept further, narrowing the focus further on the songwriting and vocals.

“She drifts from piano, to acoustic guitar, to ukulele, but always the anchor – that voice.” Blasko and her support act (LA-based Cameron Avery) have never been ones to lean on their backing bands, but there’s an appealing vulnerability to seeing them both tackle a full setlist without any support. Avery’s early pianoled songs are LA Conventional, but he soon warms up the crowd with his magnetic charm and is clearly enjoying ploughing through what he self-effacingly calls his ‘hits’ on home soil. His Hollywood musings really take flight when some Americana grit is filtered into his classical crooning, as on highlights ‘Wasted On Fidelity’, ‘Watch Me Take It Away’ and a classy cover of Alexandra Savior’s ‘Girlie’. When a predictably frilled Blasko takes to the stage, she immediately commands with her voice and no additional instrumentation for opener ‘Down On Love’. From here she drifts from piano, to acoustic guitar, to ukulele (“The instruments are getting smaller,” she remarks), but always the anchor – that voice. There are nods to the electronic backbone of her most recent album Eternal Return on ‘Beyond’ and a new song that’s possibly called ‘Heartbeat’, though it’s the spare and simple album tracks like ‘An Arrow’ and ‘Is My Baby Yours?’ that really soar. We go full circle for the encore with a couple of tracks from her debut album The Overture & The Underscore. A preview of new material bodes extremely well and an aching ‘I Awake’ is quick to banish images of careening Fords. It all points towards (yet another) reawakening for this consistently excellent performer. Sarah Blasko played the City Recital Hall on Wednesday June 8. PHOTOGRAPHER :: ASHLEY MAR

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five things WITH

Growing Up I was always a music lover and performed in operas, musicals, theatre, TV commercials – you name it! Fully had a stage mum! I had some amazing experiences and met some very talented people that mentored me to be the musician I am today.

Inspirations The first album I ever bought was on a hot date after the movies with some lucky babe in year fi ve or six. I hit up Nelly Furtado’s ‘I’m Like A Bird’ (#noregrets)! Creatively, the penny dropped when I started listening to Bon Iver, Jeff Buckley and Radiohead. That’s around the same time I started writing and producing at home, and started working in a recording studio. I was going through some tough times and music really was my outlet to express that. At the moment, I’m digging Jon Hopkins, Kendrick’s new album (on repeat), Tycho, Cactus Channel, and Mac DeMarco 4 lyf!

Your Band Mammals is the vibe that I’ve recorded and produced over the last four or more years. I usually start writing in the studio which is now at my place down in Mollymook. I mixed the first EP Animalia with the help from my former

GUY BROWN FROM MAMMALS

bandmate Nat Joyce. The most recent track ‘Chase Your Bliss’ was mixed by the wizard Matt Redlich and mastered by King Willy. Having your music mixed by someone else takes it to the next level. I would strongly recommend! The live set-up we play with are absolute legends: Henry Wells (Asian Jimmy Hendrix), Steve De Wilde (amazing facial hair), Charlie White (sexy Jesus) and myself (annoying drunk surfer bogan).

The Music You Make When I’m writing and producing, I’m always searching for that lush, beautiful atmosphere. It’s the total vibe right there, in a synth or chord. That’s where the whole song builds from. Mollymook is the most beautiful place in the world! I am so inspired by the ocean and the coastline. I usually go for a surf and work on lyrics in the water, hit up some recording and repeat. Some of my top lines and lyrics on certain songs are also collaborations, which is so much fun to jam with good friends.

Music, Right Here, Right Now We just fi nished up a tour with Vera Blue and Pilgrims, which was amazing. It was interesting

to see the different crowds and music scenes all around Australia. Like all other Sydney musicians, I feel we are deprived

of culture and nightlife, which takes a huge toll on the music scene. So many good venues have closed and if you look like

you’re having fun, you don’t get let in, or you get kicked out. Let’s be real here: getting loose is the sickest!

What: Chase Your Bliss out now independently Where: The Chippo Hotel When: Saturday June 17

songwriters’ secrets WITH

TIMOTHY CARROLL FROM HOLY HOLY stars shine so bright / But they are drowning in the city lights”: that was the chorus of the first song I wrote.

The Last Song I Released We’re just releasing a new single. It’s called ‘True Lovers’ and it’s the poppiest thing I’ve ever been a part of. It was fun to really lean into that “In a different time, a different place, we could have been / Two lovers”.

The First Song I Wrote I picked up the guitar at 16. I learnt ‘Blister In The Sun’ by the Violent

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Femmes, ‘Everybody Hurts’ by R.E.M. and ‘Come As You Are’ by Nirvana. Then I started writing my own songs. They were terrible

to start and they got worse before they got better. My parents had an answering machine and it was the only thing I could record

on. I’d take it into the bathroom (for reverb) and use it to make demos. It used to distort [in] the most satisfying way. “Shooting

Songwriting Secrets Make time to write. Set aside hours to just play. Set up some nice mics in a nice space, make coffee and just play. Writing will happen. Another tip is to write your lyrics out in a computer document. Seeing the lyrics written out will help illuminate weaknesses and you can also copy and paste and try moving things around and having multiple versions side by side. Finally – catch ideas. If you have an idea for a melody or lyric stop what you’re doing, open your phone, hit the memo app and record it. Ideas are like birds.

The Song That Makes Me Proud I’m proud of our track ‘Send My Regards’ off [second album] Paint. I feel like it has its own sound. It’s a strange song. Our first and only foray into prog. The vocal melody a shouty chant more than anything. The guitars, synths and drums all busy and interwoven. We wrote it in the studio and I remember that moment clearly. There was a feeling in the room. That feeling of being a part of something.

The Song That Changed My Life My preschool teacher had a guitar. I loved her for it. We used to sing old war songs like ‘It’s A Long Way To Tipperary’ and ‘(Put Another Nickel In) Music, Music, Music’. You know, I can’t remember her face but I still know all those melodies. What: Paint out now through Wonderlick/Sony With: The Money War, Machine Age Where: Factory Theatre When: Friday June 23

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What we’ve been out to see...

Killing Heidi Made Us Feel Like We Were 17 Again At Their Nostalgic Sydney Show By David Molloy This week, Sydney watched a group of washed-up has-beens take to the stage attempting to relive their glory days and refill their emptied coffers. And not one of them was a member of Killing Heidi, who eschewed the spectacle of the Qudos Bank Arena in favour of a good ol’ fashioned Metro gig on Thursday. Being any kind of music historian/ enthusiast/whatever, one of the great joys of live music is seeing a headline

“Hooper has lost none of her rock-chick glory, merely tempering it with a daggy mum energy that makes her incredibly endearing.”

act’s DNA embedded in their supports. It’s fair to say that Eliza and The Delusionals probably would not exist without the influence of Killing Heidi, given their shared genre roots and the frontwoman’s eye-catching style. Eliza Klatt is the band’s heart and soul, a fiery singer whose developing stage presence is completely compensated for by her powerful pop-rock pipes. Her band, The Delusionals, were exceptionally tight, with the lead guitarist bringing some real attitude to their set and covering a pulled lead heroically. Iluka, on the other hand, seemed a strange tonal match to the headliners. Certainly they shared elements of country and folk – and a love for Fleetwood Mac, evident in Iluka’s headto-toe Stevie Nicks get-up. But outside of the singer’s raw vocals, they had little in common. Iluka has an incredible capacity to sling gravelly, heartfelt vocals with little physical affectation, but her body remains resolutely still. Failing to name her band members struck as ungenerous, as well, despite their function as support to her songwriting efforts. The crowd had remained still for most of the evening, but when Ella Hooper leapt out onto the Metro stage, they lifted the ceiling with their cheers. Hooper has

lost none of her rock-chick glory, merely tempering it with a daggy mum energy that makes her incredibly endearing. She put the dag aside as the band slammed into ‘I Am’, and we all returned to adolescence.

Alone’ and ‘Superman/Supergirl’. For a moment in time, we had returned to the early 2000s, and our nostalgia did not feel tainted by desperation. We were living like we were 17 again – the band included.

Amazingly, Hooper was able to poke gentle fun at the pretensions of her teenage self, without jeopardising the powerful emotional link her audience (or she, as a performer) had to the material. The years have only strengthened her relationship with brother and co-composer Jesse Hooper, who may have lost the dreads but hasn’t lost a shred of his musicianship.

Killing Heidi played the Metro Theatre on Thursday June 8.

While other bands have stuck to playing ‘the hits’, begrudgingly fulfilling the requirements of a reunion set, Killing Heidi were more enthusiastic in their track selection. A few excellent tracks from their post-Heidi days slipped in (The Verses’ ‘Want Everything’ and Ella’s fantastic ‘Monkey Mind’), but had they not been announced, a less knowledgable fan would consider them indistinguishable from the band’s old repertoire. Of course, the night ended with ‘Mascara’ and ‘Weir’, but they gave Sydney some cheeky extras in the form of ‘Leave Me

PHOTOGRAPHER :: ASHLEY MAR

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name the artists How many musical legends can you identify from these fashion clues?

Share your answers at facebook.com/thebragsydney.

ART BY KEIREN JOLLY

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g g guide gig g send your listings to : gigguide@seventhstreet.media

For our full gig and club listings, head to thebrag.com/gigs.

pick of the week Horrorshow

Skegss

Skegss Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst. Thursday June 15 – Friday June 16. 8pm. $23.10; Sunday June 18 (Under 18s only). 2pm. $39.90 Fresh to Dune Rats’ Ratbag Records label, everyone’s favourite ratty skateboard punks serve up three doses of fun, including an Under 18s only Spaghetti Fest gig on Sunday.

SATURDAY JUNE 17

All Our Exes Live In Texas

D.D Dumbo

Enmore Theatre

Horrorshow + David Dallas + Turquoise Prince 8pm. $49.90. WEDNESDAY JUNE 14 Eush + Grace Turner + Ahlia Rain Gasoline Pony, Marrickville. 7pm. $7 The Green Mohair Suits Leadbelly, Newtown. 6pm. $20 The Spooky Men’s Chorale Camelot Lounge, Marrickville. 7pm. $25

THURSDAY JUNE 15 107 Presents: Electrofringe (#Vivid) 107 Projects, Redfern. 7pm. $10

Phil Slater Quintet Venue 505, Surry Hills. 8pm. $25 Soul Messengers The Cuban Place, Sydney. 7pm. FREE The Spooky Men’s Chorale Camelot Lounge, Marrickville. 7pm. $25 Terza Madre Golden Age Cinema, Surry Hills. 9pm. FREE Tim Walker Harbourview Hotel, The Rocks. 8pm. FREE

FRIDAY JUNE 16

The Bean Project + Josh Deeble Gasoline Pony, Marrickville. 7pm. $7

107 Presents: Ears Have Ears (#Vivid) 107 Projects, Redfern. 7pm. $10

Dave Warner: Suburban Boy Camelot Lounge, Marrickville. 7pm. $25

CumbiaMuffin Venue 505, Surry Hills. 8pm. $20

Lewis Watson Factory Theatre, Marrickville. 7pm. $44

Djebali & Lamache Burdekin Hotel, Darlinghurst. 9pm. $15 Elements Of Tech And Bass

presents Night Of Drum’n’Bass/Jungle Valve Bar, Ultimo. 9pm. $10 Equa Hey + Samba Choro Quartet Gasoline Pony, Marrickville. 7pm. $7 Freeform Only feat. Count & Won + Ross Fader + Sc@r + TelepathyT Valve Bar, Ultimo. 10pm. $10 Lloyd Spiegel + Wes Pudsey Camelot Lounge, Marrickville. 7pm. $12 Moonshoe & O.T.I.S. + Mic Mills Freda’s, Chippendale. 6pm. FREE Radio Birdman + Died Pretty Enmore Theatre, Newtown. 6:30pm. $88 Taasha Coates Leadbelly, Newtown. 6pm. $35 Thandi Phoenix & DJ Samrai Sydney Tower Eye, Sydney. 8:30pm. $49

All Our Exes Live In Texas Brass Monkey, Cronulla. Friday June 16. 7pm. $25 Having toured internationally alongside Midnight Oil, this folk supergroup are at the peak of their game and playing a (soon-to-be) rarely intimate evening.

SATURDAY JUNE 17 107 Presents: Bare Necessities feat. Klue + Sam Z + more (#Vivid) 107 Projects, Redfern. 5pm. $10 Benjamin Carey + Composers’ Ensemble + Spiral (#Vivid) Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Sydney. 8pm. $25 Big Scary + Cub Sport + CC: Disco Metro Theatre, Sydney. 8pm. $41.10 Cave Records Show feat. Coffin + Zeahorse + Cold/ Heat + Suixx + W.I.P. The Gaelic Club, Surry Hills. 7:30pm. $10 Dynamic Hepnotics Factory Theatre, Marrickville. 8pm. $37.50 Jack Colwell Golden Age Cinema, Surry Hills. 9pm. FREE

D.D Dumbo Metro Theatre, Sydney. Friday June 16. 8pm. $38 The boy from Castlemaine welcomes a full band for the first time to bring his infectious electronica to the Metro. Get on your dancing shoes.

Metal Matriarchy feat. Temtris + Web City Limits + Dawn + The Dirty Earth Valve Bar, Ultimo. 8pm. $10 The Pinheads The Lair @ Metro Theatre, Sydney. 4pm. $16 Pony Folk Festival feat. The Button Collective + Queen Porter Stomp + Toot! Gasoline Pony, Marrickville. 10am. $25 Rave Of Origin feat. Breadmaker & Royals + DJ S3RL & Dave PSI + many more Valve Bar, Ultimo. 10pm. $10 Slumberhaze + Pirra + WAWAWOW + Slow Turismo Lazybones Lounge, Marrickville. 8pm. FREE The Stranger + Anubis + Chillaum + High View Brighton Up Bar, Darlinghurst. 8pm. $10

Women In Electronic Music Showcase II feat. Alta + Annie Bass + KU KA + Okenyo + many more Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst. 8pm. $15

SUNDAY JUNE 18 The El-Dorados 4 Pines Brewing Company, Manly. 6pm. FREE Grim Rhythm Frankie’s Pizza, Sydney. 7pm. FREE Live Teacher’s Showcase feat. Bonnie Kay and the Bonafides + many more Lazybones Lounge, Marrickville. 1pm. $10

Matt Jones Duo Bull & Bush Hotel, Baulkham Hills. 3pm. FREE Winter Sound feat. Rogue Company + Righful Loners + Swine Fever Valve Bar, Ultimo. 5pm. $10

MONDAY JUNE 19 The Monday Jam The Basement, Circular Quay. 8:30pm. $6

TUESDAY JUNE 20 Acoustique Lounge L1 feat. Bri Green + Broken Cloud King + more Lazybones Lounge, Marrickville. 7pm. $15 xxx

30 :: BRAG :: 717 :: 14:06:17

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