The Stool Pigeon Music Newspaper Issue 021 by The Stool Pigeon

The Stool Pigeon No. 021

May 2009

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DEPECHE MODE GRIZZLY BEAR PATRICK WOLF PET SHOP BOYS DOOM LADY SOVEREIGN CAMERA OBSCURA GENGE SUNN O))) BAT FOR LASHES MIKE BONES ASHER ROTH NEWHAM GENERALS DAF ART BRUT MAYER HAWTHORNE

YEAH YEAH YEAHS STRIKE WITH A BOLT OF DISCO BOP

N N DO

N E Z T I L B D N U A

Joel Stoker Luke Crowther THE RIFLES

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May 2009 The Stool Pigeon

Home news JOE GIDEON & THE SHARK BASKING IN GLORY THANKS TO SNAP OF FATE’S JAWS NIALL O’KEEFFE

My baby will inspire me to boom, declares queen of disco Chesca Words DANNA HAWLEY Photograph ROB LOW

Hailing

from a small village in southern Italy, with DJ beginnings in Rome and a 4-year musical awakening in LA, east London-based Chesca is a musical hat-trick: impassioned promoter (co-running the eclectic Nuts To Soup), coast-hopping DJ and supremely fresh producer adored by the likes of Dãm-Funk and Flying Lotus. “It’s hard when people ask me, because I make music but I don’t like calling myself a producer,” she explains. “I don’t consider myself a DJ but I love collecting records. I just consider myself really passionate about music, and I think my passion is so deep. I love music so much that when I actually do something with it, good things come out.”

Indeed, an audible buzz has hummed around Chesca since she initially put her heart to a beat. She won the Diesel-U-Music comp’s electronic category with her very first production and her debut release, ‘Hymn’, landed on Ricci Rucker’s ever-dope Epitome Of Fresh label shortly after. “For me, it was really fast,” she says. “I started making beats and people started buying my records. Now I have to sit back and figure out what I really want to express through my music. Communicating through beats and samples is a very different process to using lyrics, which are more direct.” While other girls in the game are frantically trying to grasp fame, Chesca primarily concerns herself with crate digging (she works at Soho’s Sounds Of The Universe to help feed the habit) and discovering new sounds. Her music addiction

translates into immaculate productions, which range from deep beat explorations to vintage-inspired cuts and bright pop disco. But how would she describe her sound? “That’s the hardest question in the world! I work in a record shop, so I’m always thinking, ‘Where would I put my own records?’ My first release would definitely go into electronica. In the past two years, I’ve totally been into disco so I’ve made a lot of edits. I love taking old records and chopping them up.” As she lines up projects with interesting artists worldwide, she’s most enthused about one in particular. “Here’s my biggest project,” she gushes, pointing to her belly. “I’m actually four-months pregnant! People told me I needed to think about my career, but I’m really happy about it. It makes me even more inspired. I just want to do more.”

Archie Bronson Outfit had a bigger tour bus, Joe Gideon & The Shark wouldn’t exist. There was once a band called Bikini Atoll - a quartet. The Archies wanted Bikini Atoll as their support band, but only had space for two on their bus, so singing guitarist Joe Gideon and his sister Viva joined the tour as a bluespunk duo. They haven’t looked back, despite Joe’s early misgivings. “Viva couldn’t play the drums!” he remembers during a pre-show chat at The Free Butt in Brighton. “She was trying to tell me that she could - just give her six weeks! So that’s exactly what we did.” Viva’s versatility is well proven. In 1992, she competed in the Barcelona Olympics as a rhythmic gymnast. Subsequently she worked as a professional dancer, before joining Bikini Atoll as pianist. Now, as The Shark, she alternates frantically between vocals, keyboards and drums, making heavy use of loops. Joe, meanwhile, writes lyrics of great warmth, spiced with wicked satirical humour. He names Kurt Vonnegut and Tom Waits as inspirations. Another man plainly had a big influence on Joe and on Viva too: their dad. In the seventies and eighties, Alan Seifert managed Elkie Brooks, Toyah Wilcox and Marianne Faithfull. To his son, he bequeathed a love of Talking Heads. With his daughter he would watch musicals: Singing In The Rain, Cover Girl. “That’s my real musical influence,” she says today. “That and Faust,” corrects Joe. Everything’s been falling into place for the duo. A deal with Bronzerat Records led to sessions with PJ Harvey producer Head and an excellent debut album, Harum Scarum. They’ve meanwhile honed an hypnotic live show that flits from wit to wisdom, tenderness to ferocity, melody to noise. Success is their destiny. Consider this: Roy Scheider, star of shark movie Jaws, appeared in 1979 musical All That Jazz as a drunken choreographer named... Joe Gideon. It’s almost too perfect. Plainly, Archie Bronson Outfit will have to find a new support act. They’re going to need a bigger bus.

INSIDE XXI, May, 2009

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HOME NEWS INTERNATIONAL NEWS THE WRATH OF KHAN CAST IRON CLEAN BREAK POUND A BEAT A QUESTION OF TIME DONNA UND BLITZEN GRIZZLY BEAR CALLING CLASS PULLING FOCUS CALL OF THE WILD LOCAL ANAESTHETIC TRAVEL PRINT MOVING IMAGES COMICS ARTS THE STOOL PIGEON INTERVIEW COMMENT & ANALYSIS COURT CIRCULAR CERTIFICATES FUNNIES THE STOOL PIGEON REVIEW CLASSIFIEDS BUSINESS NEWS HORRORSCOPES SUBSRCIPTION OFFER SPORTS

Editor: Phil Hebblethwaite (editor@thestoolpigeon.co.uk) Creative Director: Mickey Gibbons (artdept@thestoolpigeon.co.uk) Advertising/marketing: Melissa Bohlsen (melissa@thestoolpigeon.co.uk) Thanks to: Hazel Sheffield, Clara Ingram, Mike Edmondstone, Jeremy Allen, and The Quietus Three Published by: Junko Partners Publishing Address: The Stool Pigeon, 21a Maury Road, London, N16 7BP www.thestoolpigeon.co.uk www.myspace.com/thestoolpigeon

YEAH YEAH YEAHS shot by DERRICK SANTINI

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The Stool Pigeon May 2009

LONDON’S CHEW LIPS BLOSSOMING DESPITE ONLY SOWING SEEDS OF THEIR SUCCESS LAST SPRING Words CLARA INGRAM Photograph ESME DEYN

hew Lips have landed a single on French label Kitsuné, been championed by Steve Lamacq, recorded a session for Radio 1, and played their 15th gig at the BBC’s Electric Proms: not bad seeing as they’ve only been channelling their brand of minimalist electronica for a year. The London trio originally got together with the mutual desire to “do

something new”, frontwoman Tigs says. “As soon as we got into the studio there was an outpouring of pent-up emotion; we wrote 10 songs on day one and then the same the next day.” Despite a year of prolific songwriting, tracks that the band wrote that first weekend remain in their live shows and on the shortlist for the album. “I think it says that they are of a standard that we’re happy with,” explains Tigs. “We’ve written so many songs since then, but [the earliest songs] retained our favour.” Chew Lips have toured with

CRIPPLED BLACK PHOENIX RISING FROM THE ASHES OF ILL FORTUNE Words ASH DOSANJH

Life’s

been taxing for Justin Greaves of late. On top of trying to move house and repairing a busted car, he’s having album issues. “If I had my way it would have been done differently. It’s been a bit stressful,” says the former Electric Wizard drummer and current Crippled Black Phoenix frontman about his band’s second LP, forebodingly entitled 200 Tons Of Bad Luck. It seems that two-record’s-worth of material and the wider public’s lack of patience have forced the Geoff Barrow run label Invada to officially release 200 Tons. Meanwhile, another two albums, The Resurrectionists and Night Raider, that better reflect the way Greaves and bandmates Joe Volk, Kostas Panagiotou, Charlotte Nichols and Dominic Aitchison intended their efforts to be listened to, will be released as a boxset later. “I stand by the songs I wrote on [200 Tons], but as for track listings and the flow of the album, it just doesn’t make sense to me. I hate to sound negative about it.” In fact, as a follow-up to 2007’s A

Lonely expat Arch M hoping curve ball music will help him be normal

Love Of Shared Disasters - an ambitious debut that examined fettered love, loss and redemption coupled with bombastic, folk-tinged post-rock - 200 Tons is a masterful collection of songs, sonically heavier and more concise than its predecessor. “I was probably more focussed on what songs I wanted to do,” says Greaves. “I think there’s a lot of personal feelings left over from the first album, which was written at a time when I’d experienced personal loss and fucking really harsh things.” Despite this, there are elements of warmth to be found among 200 Tons’s aggressively dark undertones, as exemplified on tracks such as “Time Of Ye Life”, which narrates a talk given by Evel Knieval to some kids. “Evel Knievel was a real sinner and a rogue - he spent time in jail for spousal battery,” Greaves explains. “At the end of his life he found god. If you listen to the words you can hear him trying to find redemption. If someone like that can preach a message that’s so positive, especially to a bunch of kids, then there might be hope for all of us.”

Words KEV KHARAS

few nights every month for the past couple of years I have experienced a condition known as sleep paralysis. Upon waking, sufferers are conscious but unable to move any part of the body other than the eyes and in some rare cases the jaw. It occurs when waking is too sudden - the brain thinks it’s still dreaming and so keeps the body shut down, as it is to prevent physical injury during vivid REM sleep. Thirty per cent of the population

Howling Bells and are currently performing alongside The Virgins before a host of festival appearances across Europe this summer. Their live shows have garnered rave reviews for Tigs’s soulful vocals and the impassioned live performances of bandmates and beat-masters Will Sanderson and James Watkins. Tigs rankles with those who compare her to Karen O, though. She stresses that the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ singer is a “fantastic frontwoman”, but the constant comparison is wearing thin. “I think I only get annoyed by it

because I don’t see boys being compared to one another and that’s such a double standard.” Though they are yet to start recording their debut album, Chew Lips have high expectations of what they can produce. “I want it to be a classic pop album,” says Tigs, “something with classic sounds that people will sample in 20 years.” If first single ‘Solo’, with its sparse, DIY production and addictive pop hooks, is anything to go by, Chew Lips have every reason to be optimistic.

THE BILLY CHILDISH

POETRY COLUMN

I Will Remain 3

my big bother will become 54 i will remain 3 my mother will die i will remain 3 my father beat up his new wife half his age i will remain 3 ex girlfriends grow rich and ugly i will remain 3 the whale will die i will remain 3 the poets fester i will reman 3 the famous be forgotton i will remain 3 cheats and liers prosper i will remain 3 the sun grow brighter i will remain 3 my son go rite past me i will remain 3

The MINAH Bird. Throbbing Gristle’s PETER CHRISTOPHERSON on Music’s Meaning “In the last 10 years or so the music business and, to a lesser extent, the music press has tried to turn music into a soundbite. Industrial music seems to be defined now as a kind of metal sound. We want to remind people that what we were about, and are about, is nothing to do with the sound of a meat grinder or a metal grinder or any kind of grinder, but much more about the way we make music and the way we look at the world around us in an unbiased, non-rose-coloured glasses way. Contemporary music doesn’t really deal with anything that means anything to anybody, and that’s why the record companies are not selling so many records anymore. People need music to move them and make their lives richer and that’s not been happening recently.”

As told toPhil Hebblethwaite

have experienced or will experience sleep paralysis. It is often accompanied by visitations from dead relatives and a feeling of crushing weight upon the chest. Arch M is Corey Reid and his music sounds recorded while trapped between states of consciousness. Tracks like ‘Cat Grave’ and ‘21st Union’ - with their fleeting narratives of guitar treble, their sedated bass lopes and static like leaking gas articulate the captured, blissful panic of sleep paralysis with such eloquence it’s unsettling. Corey doesn’t say whether he has ever woken up asleep.

His music is “all just nostalgia”, though. Nostalgia is everything to Arch M. After moving to London from San Francisco four years ago, Corey started working alone as Arch M due to “a lack of people to play music with”. Of all the emerging bedroom producers in London he’s the most interesting; seven-song sampler ‘Mountain Tan Commercials’ (released last year through Cavern) is similar in its moon-eyed sensitivity to the work of auteurs like Phil Spector and Joe Meek. Those are stratospherically lofty comparisons to make,

obviously, and there’s nothing specific he shares with those two - a taste for reverb perhaps, and the sense of innocence evaporating into the air. It’s more about detachment. Weirdo pop made by someone who, as he puts it himself, is “trying to be normal”. Being normal involves having peers, though, and there aren’t many making music you’d align with Arch M, whose Moon-Tan full-length is due later this year. It’s my job to explain, though. Is there anything outside of music that’s been an influence? “My parents grounded me on prom night. I was meant to go with Katherine Clary.”

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May 2009 The Stool Pigeon ARTERY

The

IPL EY’ PRINCESS

UE ROSES BL

EMOTION IN

bloom for the EDUCATED

PIG

of The

PA P

STO O

Jarvis Cocker has been responsible for many wonderful things: rescuing Glastonbury in 1995; some of the best pop of the 1990s; waving his arse at Michael Jackson; and bringing about the return of Artery, one of the great lost bands of the post punk era, who he asked to play a surprise show to close his Meltdown festival in 2007. Cocker says that it was Artery who, when he first saw them play in August 1980, inspired him to make music. “Without their inspiration, a lot of what took place in the intervening years probably wouldn’t have happened. Sometimes you see something and it opens a door somewhere in your head.” “We wouldn’t have got back together without Jarvis,” says Artery singer Mark Gouldthorpe down the phone from the Sheffield hair salon he now runs. “It’s strange how things happen in life.” I first encountered Artery in some deranged live footage included on the Made In Sheffield documentary that charted the history of the city’s earlyeighties music scene. They stood out as a band who eschewed their hometown’s electronic tradition in favour of abrasive yet psychedelic post punk and visceral performance. This once saw the police called after Gouldthorpe left the stage to hang out of a window above Sheffield city

COCKER APPROVED

Re-formed Sheffield post punkers in a rich vein of form

E O N N EW

centre. I was bewitched by their mysterious songs about crashing fighter jets (to see what it felt like), weathermen’s clothing, dark sexual goings-on in a garden, and surreal afternoon hot air balloon rides. Much as the unexpected revival of these songs was thrilling at that Meltdown performance, Gouldthorpe says that Artery are back and here to stay: “We wouldn’t have got back together for the sake of nostalgia, we

voice is friendly; a soft Tyke accent belonging to singersongwriter Laura Groves, the young lady behind the nom de plume Blue Roses. She’s talking to me from her parents’ house in Shipley, West Yorkshire; a town, she says, that she’s lived in her entire 21 years. “Are you still happy there?” I ask. “I am,” she replies, “but I don’t intend to stay here my whole life. It’s been a means to an end.” Surely there must be something to keep you there, other than the convenience? “I don’t like being cooped up in big cities. Shipley’s part of Bradford, but if you drive 10 minutes away you’re on the moors, and I’m near the sea, which has also had a big impact on me.” Laura, like the flowers of her stage name, has strange a relationship with modernity. Blue roses don’t grow naturally - they’re produced, by dyeing petals with synthetic pigment. Indeed, when talking about her hometown (where she also chose to record her debut LP last year), Groves describes it in terms of being both “really ugly” and “really nice”. Conversely, while her music sounds folky, lyrically, her words are shot through with innercity anguish. So... how much of Laura Groves’s character has saturated this project? “I think most of the lyrics are autobiographical,” she says, “but I do tend to embellish things. Most of the

did it because of the freaky situation. It was like turning a light switch back on. We’re writing new material all the time, and have only scrapped one song since we got back together.” Funnily enough, unlike many reformed groups who won’t get out of bed unless the cheque is inked and fine wine is on the rider, Artery come across like a group of teenagers still doing things the DIY way. They’ve uploaded their back catalogue onto the

songs are based on things that actually happened.” Such as? “There’s a song called ‘Coast’. I remember reading about ships caught in storms that start to inexplicably glow while I was browsing through a second-hand bookshop. I just thought that was such a romantic image.” Do you feel like you’re drawn to rougher waters? “Getting to where I am now has been a struggle,” she sighs. “I don’t really go out with the intention of making life difficult, but it’s often ends up like that. And I prefer to write sad songs too. They evoke more emotion.” She tells me about her troubled teenage years, and how she worried about whether or not to go to university. Her normally bright dialect tightens up and sentences go unfinished, but she feels like she’s made the right choices. “For a couple of years I didn’t really see any other alternative than going to university,” Groves explains. “My school teachers were pushing me into it, but I’d started to write songs, so I thought I might as well give it a go.” And has going it alone been as much of an education? “Definitely,” Laura says as we finish up. “Putting out the record is too good to be true. I do still want to learn about things, but I suppose I can do that anytime.” Huw Nesbitt

internet, but are more interested in releasing a new album than joining the physical reissues bandwagon. The video for their new track ‘Who’s Afraid Of David Lynch’, Gouldthorpe says, “was recorded in the staff room of my hair salon. If you look at the hand prints, that’s my girls. They were messing around with some old tint that we were throwing away.” The band’s new material still encompasses that same dark subject

185x130.5MM

matter - stalkers, troubled filmmakers, relationships gone awry - yet perhaps that should be expected, because for Artery, nothing has changed. “We’ve reformed and we have a history,” says Gouldthorpe. “But we’re enjoying it and itching to get it out there. It’s like being 19 again, it seriously is. I love music and I love being up on stage. The hunger is there - the hunger to write - and that’s what you need.” Luke Turner

CHANCER LTD EDITION COLOURED 7” & DOWNLOAD OUT 05.04.09 Part 3 of a 5 piece ltd edition collectable vinyl box featuring previous single No Zeros. “One of 2009's most exciting and intriguing bands.” ARTROCKER www.gloriacycles.co.uk www.myspace.com/gloriacycles

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SONGBIRDS READ INK SEVENOAKS, Kent. Indie band GoodBooks were once famous for being snapped up minutes after their demo arrived at major label Columbia. They then became famous for being dropped just as quickly after the release of their debut album. Unfortunately, they were so confident of their success that bassist Christopher Porter got the date of their record deal signing tattooed onto his back. Songbirds were not present the day they got dropped, but imagine a new inking might have read “Bother”.

DUKE SPIRIT THE PALACE, London. Prince Philip is really good at slagging off people in the music biz. In 1969 he asked Tom Jones whether he gargled with pebbles and he once said he thought Adam Faith’s singing was like “bath water going down a plug hole”. Apparently, big Phil also called Simon Cowell a “sponger” at a 2007 Royal Variety show. Cowell went public with the dis on a TV show recently, leading the Palace to kill off the pop mogul for good with this gem: “He [the Duke] does not know enough about Mr Cowell to make any sort of comment about him.”

HELLO KITTY MARLBOROUGH, Wiltshire. As Pete Doherty slides further into irrelevance, it seems we only get to hear from him when he does something really grim, like release a solo album, or dispose of a cat in a pond. Like all freaks who used to have friends, he surrounds himself with feline creatures these days. In his head, though, he thinks they’re sailors: “The cat got run over so I thought I’d give it a burial at sea well, the pond. But it didn’t sink, it floated and then froze over. So there was this dead cat under the ice looking up at me. It was terrible.”

MUCK RAKING HACKNEY, London. One of the great surprises while putting this issue together was to discover that not only were East London prang punkers The Rakes still around, but someone is still bothering to release their music. I promise! What’s more they seem to have suddenly got a bit of fire in their bellies. About piggy new pop princess Lady GaGa, frontman Alan Donohoe told The Daily Star: “I can’t stand her. She is basically selling crap to kids. I think she’s terrible and really ugly.” Pot. Kettle. Black. Etc.

SPUNK HUBBLE BRAINTREE, Essex. We’ve got a killer tale about The Prodigy and what it takes to get them high these days, but seeing as we’re banned from telling you, here’s a nasty story about sperm instead. Keith Flint recently revealed that the rave survivors were asked to provide music for a 1999 porn film called The Uranus Experiment. Said Keith: “You know the planes they use to train astronauts? They take them up to the curvature of the Earth, then plummet really fast, and it gives the astronauts zero gravity for about three minutes. They filmed it in that. When the man climaxes, it all floats around in the air.”

ONCE BITTEN CAMERA OBSCURA NOT TWICE SHY Words

Labels

ALEX DENNEY Photograph JONNY WRIGHT

. There’s a weird mix of caustic selfdeprecation and wounded pride among the six members of Glasgow’s Camera Obscura, and one begins to suppose much of it has to do with labels. Like the one imposed by the British press around the time of 2006’s breakthrough LP Let’s Get Out Of This Country, about the band staking its claim as the new Belle & Sebastian. Singer Tracyanne Campbell plunges an imaginary knife into her eye. “That’s so... dull,” she complains, scarcely mustering the contempt required to finish her sentence. Keyboardist Carey Lander takes up the baton: “We were being made to feel grateful for a magazine reviewing an album even though the reviews were generally a pile of pish.” Such aggressive self-pity looks unbecoming on paper, but perhaps Camera Obscura can feel justifiably aggrieved. Forming as a quartet in 1996, the band has ploughed an increasingly distinguished furrow in ravishing, Motown-inspired pop from shaky, Pastels-shaded origins. But they remained a largely overlooked proposition in spite of early acclaim from John Peel and had yet to ink a deal with a UK imprint until 4AD agreed to release new album My Maudlin Career, a record originally earmarked for selfrelease. All of which is where the

other label gripe comes in... “We financed the record ourselves because we were out of contract and felt like taking control of what we do more,” says Campbell. “It was about having the confidence to secure ourselves the best future possible - we knew we could make a good record so we thought we’d let people hear it. When 4AD approached us I felt vindicated. We’d been on a Spanish label and I think everybody was a wee bit mystified as to why we’d never been on a British one. It was like, ‘What’s their fucking problem?’” And what of the press’s reticence? Is there only so much room for literate, Scottish indie within the Londonbased media’s ignoramus ranks? “I think it’s more that we’re too fat and ugly for them,” says Lander with a conspiratorial grin. “We’re five paranoid, fat, ugly munters. That’s the headline there!” Fearing my embarrassed silence will be taken for tacit agreement, we move on to the good news. Namely, that while Let’s Get Out Of This Country did much to establish the band’s credentials as an accomplished entity in its own right, the new one should melt hearts even further. From jaunty opener ‘French Navy’ on, it’s the sound of a band increasingly comfortable in its own skin, mixing all the usual elements of orchestral pop, soul and country into a seamless, perfectly nuanced blend. And with

Campbell’s sweetly unaffected vocals centre-stage, it is at times an astonishingly professional-sounding record, albeit one with a lovelorn personality all its own. Campbell explains: “If we’re ever shambolic then we certainly don’t mean to be. I hate this thing some bands have of, ‘Oh, they made a mistake, that’s so cute.’ We don’t want to make mistakes. We practise hard and if we’re not perfect it bothers us, and it bloody well should.” The band seem pleased that the new

album was recorded largely in live takes, expressing admiration for the Motown work ethic in its ability to crank out the hits. “They were incredibly brave records,” says Campbell. “They went in and recorded live and ended up with these perfect pop songs. A session would get booked and whatever came out of it, that’s the record.” “And that’s how we do it,” she adds, with the quiet sort of pride that suggests there’s plenty in a label for this most talented of bands.

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May 2009 The Stool Pigeon

TRAILER TRASH TRACYS HOPING TO PULL AWAY FROM THE HEAP Written by

HUW NESBITT

SUZANNE and Jimmy from London’s white noise up-and-comers Trailer Trash Tracys are sat at a bar table nursing two half-full glasses. This is their first ever interview - “an exclusive,” Suzanne says, who’s using her lunch break from her job in a nearby Carnaby Street store to make the band’s media debut. Jimmy’s not currently employed. Or he is, sort of. “I’m not really working at the moment,” he says. “I kind of do freelance graphic design, but mainly I’m concentrating on the band.” It’s a familiar story. Stars are rarely born. Most of us have to break a sweat, unless our parents happen to be celebrities. But what sets the Tracys apart? “I’d like to think that even Britney Spears could cover one of our songs and you’d still be able to see its melody shining through,” Jimmy says. “Yeah, that’s right,” agrees

Suzanne. “You could reproduce our songs in a number of different ways, and they’d still sound great.” They look like an old couple. When I ask one of them a question, the other watches their response, poised to qualify or amend their partner’s statement. According to Jimmy, the songwriting process revolves around him writing a couple of chords and Suzanne creating a melody. Suzanne isn’t having any of it. She can’t play guitar very well and doesn’t have the bedroom recording know-how that’s provided them with the means of getting their music to the masses. Confused, I mistakenly suggest that Jimmy’s wearing the trousers in this partnership. Massive fail. “Uh... no!” the lank haired axeman exclaims. “Suzanne’s the singer, and I think she might have something to say about that.” “There’s a balance,” explains Suzanne. “Obviously because James can record and play guitar he has more of a say over that, but I tell him what I like. It’s give and take.” You don’t find this sort of va-vavoom anywhere. For Trailer Trash Tracys, it’s borne out of a close working relationship. Four years ago Jimmy and Suzanne found themselves recording lo-fi songs on the sly while playing in someone else’s nameless pop project. When that fell apart, the sparse Cocteau Twins-sounding tracks they’d put

down became the basis for their current endeavour. Times change, but with a full-time drumming slot still vacant, are they more of a boudoir concept act than a band? “Everything will be sorted soon,” Suzanne says. “All we want to do is write a great album,” shoots Jimmy. “If someone could help us then great, but that’s not really the purpose of this band.”

Anonymity a calling card for Dave I.D.

Written by

SAM LEWIS

AVE I.D. makes music rich in crosscultural textures and tones, touching on Aphex Twin’s dark hyperactivity, dubstep’s thick basslines and indie rock’s earnest, wailing vocals. “My music is a lot of different things,” he explains. “It changes and moves forward. I’m interested in starting with nothing and creating something I’ve never heard before.”

As for the discordant, almost abrasive nature of his music, he enthuses: “I like the dirt and harshness to be there.” So how did he get started? “About five years ago I got some music software off a friend’s uncle. I liked the idea of being a beatmaker at first, but I’d say that was more of a phase. The image of being a beatmaker appealed to me then - early Timbaland and other American hip hop producers. But I had no one to make beats for. That’s when it became more about making music and sounds that didn’t cater to anything - creating my idea of what music can be.” Dave I.D. undoubtedly has a singular sound and vision, his moniker and music full of 21st century innercity dread. Indeed, he’s very much a product of the modern metropolis the dense concrete high streets and anonymous suburban houses of London’s fringe districts. “I’m from a town called Downham in South East London,” he says. “It’s a bit of a grey zone, a bit of a forgotten town.” Anonymity seems to have some importance to Dave I.D., with recent press making much of a Burial-like dearth of personal information. Dave, however, insists it’s not intentional: “People I know have said that about me as a person generally, but it’s nothing I’ve tried to convey or play on. I quite like it in some way - being

out of people’s reach.” All of which makes Dave I.D. very much a modern musician - working from home, blending genres, hidden behind the strange anonymity of the internet. How does he think making music differs in today’s world? “The word musician means a lot more these days due to the different ways music can be made. It’s not a members-only thing - there’s less fear and less honesty in the word musician now.” Fear and honesty are attributes that could both be used to describe Dave’s music: it’s at once ambitiously grand and claustrophobically personal. “I can be inspired by the smallest of things,” he explains. “The small things seem to create the biggest reactions.”

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Not much chance of ART BRUT giving up the demon drink

JEREMY ALLEN

Photographed by Emily Graham.

The last time I interviewed Eddie Argos there were repercussions. While drinking in the darkened surrounds of Glastonbury’s Lost Vagueness with a tape recorder rolling, we were loose-lipped about Kele Okereke of Bloc Party and our comments cut him deeply when he vainly Googled himself. At first we were grandiloquent and brave, but bravery turned to boorishness, wit to wantonness. Eddie and I said things we both later regretted. Naturally I wrote them all down and published them. A beef ensued which culminated in dukes! THWACK! Okereke attempts a flying kick at Argos’s head in a Shoreditch bar! CRUNK! The story becomes a tabloid sensation! DOOF! That’s enough onomatopoeia for now... “That fight got in the Daily Star,” says Argos. “They said he was a frontman and I was a singer, which I thought was quite funny: ‘The frontman from Bloc Party has a fight with the singer from Art Brut.’” Art Brut are spoiling for a fight when I meet them this time too, but not with any mere mortal: this time they’re taking on an entire entity. No longer content with merely upsetting

The Stool Pigeon May 2009

the Prince of Angsty-indie-pop, they’re about to take on the Prince of Darkness. Behold new album, Art Brut vs. Satan. Eddie has brought guitarist Jasper Future with him this time and the pair are sat in a bar in King’s Cross on a crisp spring morning not looking especially prepared for the Battle of Evermore. Jasper is dapper and studious-looking, Eddie dons a brown suit. It’s not a proper whistle as it turns out. On closer examination, the trousers could have been left out in the sun while the singer indulged in some hilarious sped-up Robin Askwith-style sex caper. “Two different charity shops,” he explains. “It looks the same though, doesn’t it? That’s from Chicago and that’s from Camden.” And as for Satan, Beelzebub as they see him represents the insidious malaise of our modern culture, and more pertinently the people out there buying shit records. It’s an interesting development in the relationship Art Brut have with the record buying public. “You think that song ‘Demons Out’ [which features the ‘Art Brut vs. Satan’ lyric] is

about pop music but it’s not it’s about bad music,” says Eddie. “I like Girls Aloud; I understand the formula of Girls Aloud. On the other hand, I hate the Kooks.” “It’s about terrible music masquerading as indie music,” adds Jasper. “Ah you know, you’re either

for us or against us by now,” says Eddie. Jasper wants to clarify: “It’s about morons really. The idiots that bought Kooks records are the same idiots that elected Boris Johnson Mayor of London and buy Q magazine. It’s those idiots. I’m against that regime.” Speaking of regimes, the band went over to America to record their album in one week with labelmate and bona fide living-legend Black Francis. Or Frank Black if you’d prefer. Or Charles, if you’re chums. “We call him Charles,” says Eddie. “We had a bet who was going to be the first idiot to call him Frank Black and it was me.” In some circles Charles has garnered something of a reputation for being a grump; yours truly was once pushed to the floor by the man-mountain after little provocation at a Pixies aftershow. “He’s really nice,” qualifies

Jasper, standing his corner. “I thought I’d be intimidated.” “He’s so friendly and gentle. He lent us his car! It’s a black BMW,” Eddie agrees. “He’s fine talking about the Pixies. He was alright, he wasn’t weird. He likes doing stuff in one take. It’s how he did it with us.” The lead single from the album ‘Alcoholics Unanimous’ is, unsurprisingly, a lighthearted look at drinking too much, with the hungover refrain ‘BRING ME TEA!’ Funny title, very serious subject, I say self-righteously. “I’ve got a friend in LA who goes to Alcoholics Anonymous,” says Eddie. “The courts made him go because he was a bit silly. He was watching Desperate Housewives going ‘I was in AA with her!’ It’s meant to be a secret, isn’t it? I couldn’t give up. Though John Moore did for a bit.” John Moore plays in Black Box Recorder with Luke Haines, and the pair formed The Dark Arts for a Christmas single with Eddie and his flatmate, Keith Top Of The Pops. “It’s amazing,” says Eddie. “John gets really pissed off if you talk about it, though. ‘You’re talking like I’m an

alcoholic, like I’m going to go home and drink a pint of meths or something!’ Are you? John? There’s a fine line. It’s not a problem unless you admit it’s a problem. That’s my theory.” Art Brut are so famous outside of the UK now that they get recognised on trains in Germany, and they’re the subject of some pretty weird internet fan fiction as well. “Yeah, someone wrote some gay stuff about us,” Eddie laughs. “Was it me and Jasper having a bit of a bone? I think it was me, Jasper and Mike having a threesome. I was kind of aroused by it. There’s also this comic character I love, Booster Gold. Someone ages ago made me a Booster Gold costume in America and sent it to me. I wear it around the house now. I might start fighting crime actually. Get Keith TOTP a Blue Beetle costume.” BLAM! POW! SPLAT!

May 2009 The Stool Pigeon

International news Instant Vintage million dollar VOICE MAYER HAWTHORNE

SOULMAN

Danna Hawley reports on a hip hop head from Detroit who is gonna work it out as a soul singer

“I’m not formally trained and I never had any plans to become a soul singer,” declares golden-voiced doo wop/soul phenomenon Mayer Hawthorne, the newest member of the Stones Throw family/label in Los Angeles. “I was primarily a hip hop artist and I was doing a lot of DJing at the time. Soul records have always been my favourite to dig for and listen to and, growing up in Detroit, Motown was a huge influence on me. One day I was just kinda joking around and recorded a couple songs for fun - for my friends and family to laugh at. They ended up in the hands of Peanut Butter Wolf [Stone’s Throw boss], and he really freaked out. He asked me to make a whole album as Mayer Hawthorne.” Fittingly, Peanut Butter Wolf released Mayer’s honeyed and emotive debut single, ‘Just Ain’t Gonna Work Out’, on red heart-shaped vinyl. It became an instant cult sensation, and a source of genuine intrigue. Sceptical ears were forced to take a second listen, unsure

whether it was a new track or an undiscovered gem from sixties Motown, and Hawthorne’s tender singing left everyone dumbfounded that he wasn’t vocally trained with the likes of Smokey Robinson and Curtis Mayfield. As the barren sounds of Amy Winehouse, Duffy and Mark Ronson incessantly blast mainstream radios, it’s clear that a soul throwback has taken over. Mayer is different, and hits deeper, because there’s an organic sincerity to him that comes from his songs, the way they’re created, his personality and his involvement with Stones Throw. “I played all of the instruments but the guitar on ‘Just Ain’t Gonna Work Out’,” he explains. “I try to play as much of it myself as possible, because I enjoy the challenge. I just do it as good as I can and it’s not necessarily perfect.” Indeed, there’s a rare charm to his music’s realness, beautiful flaws and all. And of the current retro soul explosion going on in the charts, Mayer shrugs: “Everyone thinks I’m going to be upset about being categorised with those people, but all it does is open the door for me, so I love it. It’s creating the perfect environment for me to shine.” Mayer Hawthorne, aka 28year-old Drew Mayer Cohen,

grew up in a suburb west of Detroit, a complex city with a long legacy of expressive music. His family are musical and his father still plays bass in a band. Cohen’s deep love affair with hip hop as a teenager led him to form the dazzling soulled crew Now On with two buddies in college. To date, they’ve released three superhyped albums and shared stages with icons like Mos Def, The Roots, and De La Soul. They’re still very much on the rise and moved from Detroit to Los Angeles three years ago to fly higher. “It’s very different from anything you’ve ever heard,” he says correctly of Now On. “We just try to keep everything really creative and really move the music forward.” Suddenly a soul sensation, and in-between his Now On projects, Cohen is prepping a Mayer Hawthorne album to be released this summer. It seems inspiration isn’t hard to come by. “I don’t ever sit down and try to write a song - they just come to me at the most random times,” he explains. “Most of the time with this Mayer Hawthorne stuff, I feel like I’m not even writing it - it’s like the songs get beamed down from the sky.” And they keep beaming down, from the horn-driven groove of the upbeat ‘Maybe So, Maybe No’ to the dreamy

croon of ‘When I Said Goodbye’. These are songs destined for the popular market, just at the moment when the popular market is tuned into soul. But is mainstream acceptance Cohen’s end goal? He takes a deep breath. “Mayer Hawthorne is for the people, so I’m trying to reach as many of them as humanly possible through my music, for sure. I’m definitely not interested in staying underground, and I don’t consider Stones Throw an underground label.” Cohen’s just at the beginning of the race, tying laces on shoes that look pretty big for his feet and hoping he can take it all in stride. So far his attitude foretells that he’ll keep up just fine. “You know, I never really had any plans for this, so I’ve definitely had to quickly figure out who the hell Mayer Hawthorne is and suddenly develop the sound,” he says. “It’s still very much in development and even now I don’t have a full grasp of what Mayer Hawthorne could become.” Isn’t that the beauty of it for everyone, including you? He nods enthusiastically. “This project shot out of nowhere, so people don’t really have any expectations for it. I can pretty much get away with anything I want at this stage. I’m just trying to have fun with it and hopefully it’ll all work out.”

International news

The Stool Pigeon May 2009

DEAD SERIOUS

S D R I B G N O S SW SPECIAL!

SLEEPY SUN

BURNING

DEAD MEAT

WITH DESIRE TO KEEP SANTA CRUZ WEIRD Words

barnaby smith

Sleepy

Sun singer a n d guitarist Bret Constantino is thinking globally. “I’ve been all over the world,” he says. “I’ve been to Thailand, French Polynesia, all over Europe, Indonesia... and I find that the Pacific coast is one of the most beautiful places in the world and a big influence on what we do.” Sleepy Sun met at college in Santa Cruz but now all live together in San Francisco. Like many bands from that region, they are uniquely beholden to their landscape and translate that into an appropriate sonic statement. Unlike most of those bands, however, they ventured up to Vancouver to record their debut album with Colin Stewart, he who fixed the Cave Singers album and early Black Mountain. The result of is Embrace, an album of quite breathtaking scope, and a big US tour, followed by Europe, that is beyond what Constantino and his four bandmates envisaged when they started poking around with sounds in Santa Cruz. It would be too easy to lump Sleepy Sun in with the heavy psychedelic monoliths of these times like Wooden Shjips or Dead Meadow. The first song on their album ‘New Age’ is along those lines, but the second, with its melodic piano lines and wistful tone, is not. They also have a very soulful female singer in Rachel Williams. “It seems there are a slew of bands that fit into that category,” says Constantino of his droney contemporaries, “but I think there always has been. There’s a huge growing collection of bands and we’re happy to be bracketed with them, but we’re not making the music because it’s popular.” The band formed three years ago, and have gone through several lineup changes to get to where they are now, which is signed to ATP. They lost Hubert the bass player (whose leaving was “emotionally difficult”) but gained Williams and her intelligent and subtle vocal contributions. And they owe it all to their alma mater. “Santa Cruz is full of young artists and anyone who seeks happiness and growth,” says Constantino. “I found I grew a lot as a person there - we all did. It encourages progressive thought. You see ‘Keep Santa Cruz Weird’ bumper stickers all the time.”

PLENTY OF LIFE IN THE OBITS GUITARIST Rick Froberg of Brooklyn’s Obits (pronounced oh-bits, as in obituaries, not like the JRR Tolkien munchkins) has two phone numbers. The first one’s engaged. When he picks up the second, he’s still talking on the other line. Rick’s a busy guy - a veritable superhero - and one of those troubled types who could either save the world or teach it a lesson and blast it to hell. Tonight he’s preparing for a stint as his alter ego, Froberg Esq., the designer and illustrator behind his band’s artwork.

places we play. You can keep doing it as long as you pace yourself. Remember what you can and can’t do, that sort of thing.” Like Iggy Pop quitting doing that thing where he bends over backwards? “Most of us can’t do that anyway,” Rick shrugs. “It’s less can’t but won’t - all-night drives, stuff like that.” Journeys to the end of the night might be off the cards, but taking Obits’ brand of proto-punk rock’n’roll to god-knows-how-many shows at this year’s SXSW

MOST PEOPLE, HOWEVER, WILL BE FAMILIAR WITH RICK FROM THE EARNEST PUNK DELIVERY of his earlier post-hardcore groups, Hot Snakes and Drive Like Jehu; bands he formed with long time collaborator John Reis, he of the quiff and Rocket From The Crypt fame. Those acts are long since passed now, plus Rick’s pushing 41. Nonetheless, from the enthusiasm with which he talks about his latest band, you’d swear he was still trading Germs’ burns. So doesn’t he ever feel too old for this? “Apparently not. No!” That was a rude question. “No, no, no, no!” he rapidly dismisses. “No offence taken. There are plenty of older guys playing the same

wasn’t, and for that matter, Rick hasn’t completely abandoned the mohican-toting fatalism of his younger self either. Obits debut LP, I Blame You, has a “deadbeat title”, he says, that reminds him of noir movies, and “the way things are right now, and all the problems everyone has”. Like a lack of choice? “In some ways, yes,” he replies. “But it’s more a of a vibe than a direct message.” But you’re 41, have two careers, your umpteenth long player under your belt... what’s the problem? “I think things are pretty...” He pauses. “I enjoy all

Austin, TEXAS. Rumours are rife that this year’s SXSW festival was nothing more than a sausage party. No, that doesn’t mean that indie boy bands are back in fashion, simply that with most record labels so shit broke, there was no point in them being there other than for the occasional free sausage on a rooftop barbeque. “Most people were actually there to drop bands, not sign them,” joked one industry source. “I’m just glad I’m not a vegan.”

MEX UP Austin, TEXAS. Meanwhile Drowned in Sound editor and occasional Times columnist Sean Adams made a small error when he publicised his anti-Austin party at the Texas Embassy, without making it clear that the Texas Embassy is a restaurant in central London. As the heavily ironic event got underway at the Tex Mex theme bar, reports came in of decidedly confused and irony-free business types tapping frantically into Blackberry phones in the centre of Austin, desperately looking for entry into the secret party at Government HQ.

BOXED IN

the things I do, but this album also reflects the way I feel things are. I don’t think it’s unique to feel like that. There’s a certain amount of dread about the future.” Obits formed in 2005 or 2006, he goes onto explain, shortly after Hot Snakes disbanded. Hot Snakes just imploded, inexplicably, as indeed did Drive Like Jehu. Gone, in an instant. Isn’t he worried Obits might go the same way? “That’s a question for the future,” Rick ponders. “I guess if there’s no one to put out our records, we’ll put them out ourselves. And if we get sick of the band, we’ll break up. Who knows?” Huw Nesbitt

Printed by Morton ’s

Prince Zimboo providing a royal road to learning with track about fish making splish splish phil hebblethwaite

Ever

wondered why the sea’s salty? It’s because the octopus is getting naughty. So says Prince Zimboo on his brilliant signature track, ‘To The Rescue’. He doesn’t drink water because fish have sex in it and he’s always grinning. Sound unusual? You should see him at a funeral. He’s already saved Bobby from Whitney and now he’s going to save you. If you ignore the message in his song, you are like “masturbating fish”. Heh.

‘To The Rescue’ (sometimes called ‘Say Heh’), cut on the sparse ‘Pop Champagne’ beat, is fast becoming a cult smash on the internet. International beat hunter Diplo posted it on his blog and it started to spread. He has many other genius songs too. ‘I Love J.A.’ begins with a lyric about how a woman who doesn’t want to be his thousandth wife is lying to herself... Hold on there, Zimboo! You have 999 wives? “Yes yes, 500 in Africa,

the rest worldwide, this is true. I love them and they love me too.” Prince Zimboo says he’s the son of The Most Grinnerable King Agindiboop and Queen Amimil Abakunamabooba of Dbush in Africa. Um, Dbush? “Where North Africa meets South Africa, there is a thin layer of impenetrable rainforest called Dbush. It is a magical sacred region which does not appear on any map - is true, this no crap.” He ended up in Jamaica via England. “It was always a dream of mine to prove myself in the region where the music originated,” he says. “So, heh, to Jamaica I reach! Many DJ in Jamaica Prince Zimboo teach... HEH!” Now he’s determined to go global, and Diplo is helping: “He voted it as one of the best tracks of last year, which is amazing since it’s not even released till this year.” But what of water? Do you really never drink it? “I drank water recently,” he confesses, “but it was straight from the mouth of the spring at the mountain, not from a fountain. In it no fish to make splish splish!”

Austin, TEXAS. Erykah Badu was late for her set before Explosions In The Sky because a stalker had found out where she was staying and had chosen to sit outside her house for an hour. When the neo-soul diva did arrive, she lost no time. One witness in the backstage area watched as she headed straight to the stage, barking the word “Hat!” to her assistant with an outstretched palm. The headpiece, boxed and new, was admittedly lovely, but at two songs, with a ratio of 12 entourage members to each song, the set was a little lacking.

NUT CASE Austin, TEXAS. British folkies Mumford And Sons were also late to the festival, after a particularly ignorant internal flight service refused to accommodate keyboardist Ben’s peanut allergy. Even traces of peanuts recycled through in-flight air conditioning can be deadly to people with this allergy, and most airlines will serve a different snack as a matter of procedure. The band were forced to re-schedule their flight and missed their warm-up show with Laura Marling. Presumably, the knowledge that nobody eats those little bags of peanuts was of no comfort.

MOUTHING OFF Austin, TEXAS. And pity the British A&R man who, after joking that Peter Bjorn and John’s music was so easy to write he could have written most of it using only his “mouth as an instrument”, turned around to find himself in the company of not only Peter and Bjorn but also John. It got worse later when, recounting the story at a different location, he turned to find them there again. “They’ll probably put a hit on me,” said the culprit, “but then a Swedish hit is not so bad, if you like Robyn.”

International news

May 2009 The Stool Pigeon

Papercuts man no good at taking a shredding Hazel Sheffield

South Africa’s boundary bending BLK JKS thinking outside the box Label them psych rock, or dub metal, or afro punk, but if there’s one thing you can’t call Johannesburg’s BLK JKS, it’s artless. And people need to already move on from thinking their recent Brandon Curtisproduced debut EP, ‘Mystery’, sounds like a South African version of TV On The Radio. They’re also not the ‘next big thing Diplo discovered’, just because he’s the link to their manager. BLK JKS are simply boundary shattering; anything but a fashion-based fad. “It’s strange to see how our music is perceived,” says guitarist Mpumi Mcata. “Some people think it’s abstract and some are like, ‘Let’s put it in the Top 40!’ Creating music is a very introverted thing for the four of us - we try to open ourselves up to be honest about where we’re

drawing the music from within ourselves. We know our songs were created in a special place and time, and we don’t mind how people talk about them because they are pure. They can’t be tainted if people say, ‘They sound like that band,’ or, ‘They sound terrible!’” With seven years experience behind them already, BLK JKS are driven creatively by a desire to represent their background.

“I suppose we come from a punk vibe,” continues Mcata. “We felt that kids in South Africa were like ghosts in terms of the rest of the world. We needed to stand up somehow and be counted.” These days, kids in their home country, and across Europe and America, are singing along to their profound, experimental songs at kinetic shows. It seems they’re on the right path. The majors came knocking, but it was indie Secretly Canadian that secured their debut album, out this summer. “For the first time, everything fit,” says Mcata. “The label has a great soul to it - very humble.” Rather like the band itself. Danna Hawley

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“You can have what you want,” Papercuts’ Jason Quever sings on the title track of his third album. Only what he means is, you can’t. “You grow up hearing that you can have whatever you want, but there are so few people who are actually at peace,” the San Franciscan explains over his morning coffee. “I think it’s just the limitations of humanity: why happiness is so elusive, when it seems so simple.” Papercuts’ album is drenched in this discernable longing. “I like dreamy pop music - I like the mystery,” he adds. “Anybody can buy a computer and make a pristine recording, but it’s just not as exciting as leaving in these strange artefacts in which give it character and definition.” Recorded onto tape, each shimmering three-minute gasp of pop on his new album is immersed in layers of extra noise - reverb, distortion, drums, and organs with weird frequencies. Obscured melodies and hidden meanings speak volumes of Quever’s personal humility. Though his last album, 2007’s Can’t Go Back, was critically praised, Quever himself immediately reviled the

album for the way people picked up on its more retro elements. “I honestly wish the last record didn’t exist,” he says quietly, that soft vocal falsetto audible in each word. “I used to have to get really drunk to play the last record live - a lot of the old songs were only recording tricks, that band doesn’t exist.” This time Quever is trying a new approach. He’s currently recording Port O’Brien at his home studio, and says of the band: “They were reading the comments on their YouTube video and laughing about them. That would have had me in bed with a bottle of whiskey! But I try and learn how not to get hurt by things, because some people have thick skin, so I should just, uh, be more like them - the people that don’t care, you know?” Maybe that’s what Quever wants. But his music, saturated in a humanistic frustration and fear of the unknown, could never come from someone that doesn’t care. On some level, he’s aware of that, and better prepared for it, too: “At least if people don’t like this record I can think ‘fuck you, I know this is good’.” And he’ll be right.

International news

FEELING

The Stool Pigeon May 2009

ICELAND’S STÓRSVEIT NIX NOLTES GO ALL THE WAY TO 11

PECKISH

CALEXICO’ S PASTA CONVERTINO Serves

JOHN ROGERS

Stórsveit

INGREDIENTS.---1 head of broccoli, cut Handful of asparagus Pasta for six, linguini recommended Garlic cloves, to taste Fresh basil Red chilli peppers or cayenne pepper, to taste Parmesan or Romano cheese

PREPARATION.---- Cut several broccoli crowns and a handful of asparagus. Boil water for pasta, add pasta to boiling water. When pasta is halfway done, add the broccoli and asparagus to boiling water. Drain water when pasta and vegetables are cooked, tender but not too soft. Sauté a healthy clump garlic in olive oil and then add pasta and cooked veggies. Add chopped fresh basil and red chilli peppers or cayenne pepper. Stir and serve. Add freshly grated Parmesan or Romano cheese. From Lost In The Supermarket, Soft Skull Press.

The MINAH Bird. Kraftwerk’s KARL BARTOS on Black America “I grew up with the funky beats of James Brown and I brought them in more and more - not during Autobahn or Radioactivity, but during the late-seventies. We took some black beats into our music and this was very attractive to the black musicians and the black audiences in the States. In a way, it reminds me of what The Beatles did: they took some Chuck Berry tunes and they transferred it to our European culture before taking it back to America, and everyone understood that. That was probably what we did with black rhythm’n’blues. But, of course, we mixed it with our own identity of the electronic music approach and European melodies. And this was good enough to succeed in America.” As told to John Doran

ABOVE .---Jeremy Jay of Los Angeles. A fan of the erection section of your typical night out. Photo: Dan Wilton

AYTALKING

True Romance AND A

Slow Dance

Jeremy Jay is a love machine, despite that coy and foppish look of his

Jeremy

Jay may look as though butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, but under that suave vintage greatcoat lies a heart that beats fast at thoughts of long walks in moonlight and hot chocolate on snowy nights. Slow Dance, his new, “winter-themed” LP, is pure new wave-romantic-futurist fantasy, mapping out a moody landscape of ice-skating couples, glittering disco balls and long, lonely glances across the dancefloor. It was recorded “mainly live” over just three sessions at famed K Records hideout Dub Narcotic in Olympia, Washington, although its warm, reverb-heavy sound suggests otherwise. “We did a few overdubs but very little post-anything,” says Jay, a Californian. “We’re a live band - a touring, working band - so it translates from the studio to the stage and back.” Jay sings, whispers and croons like a poutier Grant McLennan, and lays down the occasional glam guitar lick. Derek James’s super-simple, super-tight funk basslines are the album’s melodic backbone, while lush, sweeping synths from Ilya Malinsky blanket almost every song like freshly fallen snow. Calvin Johnson, who recorded Slow Dance, plays muted percussion on ‘Will You Dance With Me?’, which floats Jay’s wistful vocals over whirring castanets, doo-wop piano and that bouncy, chewy bass. Elsewhere, there are snapped fingers, brushed snares and the occasional four-to-the-floor kick drum from Nick Pahl. If Jay had been making music in 1984 - if he was even born then - he would have fronted the house band at every high-school dance Molly Ringwald ever attended.

By the time he met Johnson a few years ago, he already had an enviable musical career behind him. As a teenager, Jay swapped his jazz trumpet for a bright-red Fender Stratocaster after his nun aunt (one of four - all his father’s sisters have been bound to the Lord) surprised him with the sheet music to ‘La Bamba’. By high school, he and his band were local rock’n’roll heroes. “We played one event in the auditorium,” he says. “I think we just played one song. But we played around town. Actually, we were quite popular.” They drew crowds of 300 when they played the idyllic Californian coastal communities of Santa Barbara and Monterey. At home, Jay spoke only French to his impossibly elegant Swiss mother, who gifted him with a lifelong respect for Françoise Hardy, French new wave cinema and impeccable table manners. He recently enjoyed an extended holiday in Paris and agrees that his slightly slushy vision resonates more strongly there than in the States, sighing, “A lot of people in America don’t have this true-romance type of sensibility in the way that Europeans have.” Still, he adores Jacqueline Susann, favourite of diazepam-crunching American housewives of a certain age. “You need to read Valley Of The Dolls,” he giggles. “Or Once Is Not Enough. Or The Love Machine.” Jeremy Jay, who sings wistfully about sitting “by the fireplace, blankets, hot chocolate” as if all he’s ever dreamt of is first base, pushing a book called The Love Machine? “She’s one of my favourite writers!” he says, wide-eyed. He’s clearly a man of hidden depths and mysterious motivations.

Witnessed by Emily Moore, London.

N i x Noltes is an elusive, rare and multi-faceted creature. The band currently boasts 11 members but, as mainstay Olafur Olafsson says, “If you asked me again next week, it would be different.” They met at Reykjavik’s Academy of the Arts in 2004, where all but one were student of music composition, and they’re all involved in other bands or solo projects. Their line-up features members of Múm, Mice Parade, Sigur Ros, Pan Sonic and countless other ongoing concerns. “When we started it was all very innocent,” says Olafsson. “There was not much commitment because everyone had their own band to concentrate on. It still works on that basis, but we play more shows than we did at the beginning and we release albums. We meet to play and record and tour, and it takes a lot of effort to make it happen.” Indeed, recording their new album Royal Family - Divorce was quite an undertaking. “It took a very long time to make it work as an album,” continues Olafsson. “It was recorded live over a few days and it was a delicate process - how to mix the album so it would sound like us. We released it 2007 on our own label in Iceland, then soon after Fat Cat got involved.” Adam Pierce of Fat Cat US saw the band play at a new year’s house party in Reykjavik and signed to his own label, Bubble Core. Later, he brought the band onto Fat Cat, who are releasing their new LP in the UK. The sound of Stórsveit Nix Noltes [Nick Nolte Big Band - they named themselves after a famous mugshot of the actor] stands out, even against the kaleidoscopic backdrop of Reykjavik’s scene. Balkan folk rhythms are shot through with electric fuzz; passages of weird jazz sit alongside proto-metal; mournful accordion melodies mingle with drone and lyrical, wandering string harmonies. “I don’t know where that sound first came from, it was just music we were all really into at the time,” explains Olafsson. “We were handing around CD-Rs and started doing transcriptions of the songs and our own arrangements, and thinking if we played on this or that instrument it would work.” But the band’s approach has more in common with the folk roots of their sound than their academic roots suggest. “It was very social from the beginning - lots of people came to our shows to dance,” says Olafsson. “We try to make it all about the music and not too much about obligation. We try to keep it special. It’s extremely traditional music wedding and funeral music - for when people need to come together. This is the very source of that music.”

International news

The Stool Pigeon May 2009

U.S. Girls covers the stars in bid to earn her own stripes

Good odds on Strange Boys now their home city of Austin has grown to love them

charles ubaghs

Patriotism

was not on Meghan Remy’s mind when she came up with the name U.S. Girls for her one-woman noise pop band. “The name is purely a joke,” explains the Chicago native, “I came up with it while walking down the street with somebody.” U.S. Girls debut LP, the vinyl-only Introducing, may never be used as the soundtrack to an American high school cheerleading routine, but its mix of analogue tape hiss, primitive rhythms and haunting vocal melodies boldly stands out from the hordes of DIY noise mongers currently roaming the internet. First-time listeners may not file U.S. Girls under pop, but Remy insists it’s what drives her music. “I’m really influenced by pop and I’m trying to make pop music when I make my songs,” she says. Phil Spector, sixties girl groups and The Animals all come up in conversation, but it’s Introducing’s two covers, Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Prove It All Night’ and The Kinks’ ‘Days’, that serve to highlight Remy’s love of hooks and harmonies. “I covered ‘Days’ pretty much because I can’t listen to it anymore. I had to do my own version so I could hear that song again. The Kinks’ version hurts me so much that I’m not okay for days after hearing it.” Remy’s plans for the future include more touring, more recording and possibly even a few more band members. For now, though, she’s content in the knowledge that she’s doing what’s essential to her: “It’s come to that point where I can’t live with myself if I’m not [making music]. It’s the only way I can say what I’m trying to say. Even talking to you or talking to friends, I don’t feel like I’m ever saying anything. But when I’m playing, I can sing forever because I’m finally really talking.”

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SEXISM IN ROCK WILL NEVER MAKE US JACKET IN, SAY PARTY GIRLS THE COATHANGERS Words LUKE TURNER Photograph JASMINE TEOH

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Coathangers are hungover, cold and tired in a tour van somewhere en route to Gainesville, Florida. According to singer and guitarist Julia Kugel, speaking down a crackling telephone line that keeps getting intercepted by the mutterings of deranged truckers, “Florida is a weird place, a lot of crystal meth.” She laughs, “We’re just bangin’ that shit.” Hailing from the same fertile Atlanta scene that spawned Black Lips and Deerhunter, The Coathangers were bent into shape when Kugel, who goes under the band alias Crook Kid Coathanger, Minnie Coathanger (bass, vocals) and Bebe Coathanger (keys, vocals) all went to Washington for an anti-Bush rally. Drummer Rusty Coathanger was recruited later, but “was there in spirit” from the outset. Their eponymous debut was cut in two days, drawing attention for its

snappy, aggressive ditties like ‘Don’t Touch My Shit’ and ‘Nestle In My Boobies’, which pokes fun at the male fascination with their mammary fixtures. Their follow-up, ‘Scramble’ (out shortly on Suicide Squeeze), was put together at a more leisurely pace in their practise space, which is “set up with lots of knickknacks. We kind of collect trash, stuff that makes us feel happy”. The Coathangers want to make you feel happy, too - at their hometown gigs, they’re known for making biscuits for their audience, lurid stage props and the liberal distribution of confetti around each venue. This trashy, playful aesthetic is equally present in their music. Though their songwriting demonstrates a garage rock sense of fun, lo-fi scratchiness, Kathleen Hannah-esque vocals and bite reminiscent of The Slits, the latter isn’t a specific influence. Kugel says that although they all listen to The

Slits and Riot Grrrl groups, “we never associate ourselves with it. It’s great to know that these women were badass enough to make music and say ‘fuck you’ when the environment was really hostile to women who wanted to do that. Bands like Bikini Kill were political, and overtly and rightly so because it needed to happen, but we never really thought of ourselves as a continuation of that movement at all.” They still encounter the age-old male-rock prejudices, though. “We get a lot of shit. The other night we had a guy saying ‘you can’t be here unless you’re with the band,’” says Kugel. “People think we’re just fucking the dudes. We’re used to taking shit, but we can give the shit right back.” Even so, they don’t really see themselves as a political band: “We have opinions, and if we hate something we’ll say it. In terms of being independent-minded women we’re political, but we try not to preach... except for to say PAARTTTYYYY. We run on the party platform.”

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March, The Strange Boys had the singular experience of the whole world descending on their hometown. The Austin band played a string of shows at SXSW and by all accounts went down a storm. They have, some would say, broken through, and it didn’t even mean venturing beyond their own zip code. “It’s crazy and crowded but we get to see a lot of friends,” says Ryan Sambol of one of the music industry’s showpiece celebrations of itself, “it’s like going on tour but with the option to sleep in your own bed.” Frontman Sambol and his band have played SXSW for the last four years, but only this year have they had an album to plug. The Strange Boys And Girls Club is out on In The Red and is primal garage drawn from adolescent belligerence. It’s a worthy addition to the blistering rock tradition in the Texas capital, such as the recent glut of psychedelia headed up by The Black Angels, who The Strange Boys have toured with. This quartet, however, could never be scarred with that label. “One word descriptions are often problematic,” says Sambol. “We don’t take psychedelic drugs when we perform and we don’t have a light or projection show, so I don’t think we could be called a psychedelic band.” The band, who despite everything aren’t able yet to be full-time musicians, are more brattish than anything else. The diabolical Cheshire cat grins on their album cover is evidence of that, as is Sambol’s magnificent voice, a snide youthful snarl that chimes with songs such as ‘Heard You Wanna Beat Me Up’ and ‘Should Have Shot Paul’. In their attractive unpleasantness, they are everything we hoped the Black Lips would be, but aren’t quite. “All the songs were written within the last two years or so,” says Sambol, whose brother Philip is on bass. “Some were written on the day we recorded it and some we had been playing live for months.” The band has actually been around since 2003, and has been recording all this time, but it wasn’t until 2007 that their ‘Nothing’ EP came out. It’s been a case of plugging away. “I just kept writing songs and we kept recording them, and the first record label that asked us to do a record for them that we liked was Dusty Medical Records [who put out the EP], so we just gave them the newest songs we had. The same thing happened with In The Red.” A slow-burning process for a band powered by some raucous hustle.

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May 2009 The Stool Pigeon

Features The Wrath OF KHAN. Words BEN GRAHAM Photograph SAM CHRISTMAS

atasha Khan, aka Bat for Lashes, is on a mission to save pop music, redeem the radio and usher in a new golden age where melody and mystery, experimentation and accessibility are united as one. “A lot of my favourite artists straddled that strange place between innovation and eccentricity, weirdness and unusual sounds, and using them within an amazing songwriting structure and being good storytellers,” she says. “That’s my ultimate challenge to myself: to be a good songwriter, but not in a clinical or pre-disposed way. I want to write songs that as a kid I would have sung in front of the mirror.” Two Suns, Bat for Lashes’ second album, is a bold step towards mainstream acceptance, while retaining much of its predecessor’s beguiling strangeness and intimacy. Appropriately, given the album’s central theme of duality and the reconciliation of opposites, it’s as well suited to private listening in your bedroom, soundtracking your deepest doubts and desires, as it is to blasting out of daytime radio. “When I was growing up, Talk Talk were on the radio, or Talking Heads, and just weird, inventive pop music like The Cure or something,” Natasha continues. “Now it’s so generic and awful most of the time that I really lost interest, whereas when I was younger I’d make mixtapes off the radio for hours and there was such a vast array of songs. These days, it’s been so devalued and pop as an artistic endeavour is kind of laughed at. “I think that’s such a shame, because your average Joe driving in a car is smart, and I think they can take it. I think we’ve underestimated people by feeding them this bland porridge of... I don’t know what it is, just gloop. You know, you want people to feel alive. Car driving, when I was growing up, was one of the most exciting things. If my mum took us out on a trip, we’d get the radio on and just sing our hearts out, and now it’s just, ‘Oh, put a CD on,’ because it’s just shit, you know.” Two Suns is certainly influenced by arty eighties pop like The Cure, Kate Bush and even Stevie Nicks, but without any of the self-conscious

There’s no winging it with BAT FOR LASHES. She’s on a one-woman mission to whip bad radio pop into shape. irony lesser bands use when referring back to that decade. Instead, Natasha takes the music on its own terms, reaching in for what’s worthwhile and re-fashioning it into something new and unique. “When I was discussing what kind of synths I wanted to hire in for the recording process I referenced The Cure and things like that, because it’s just the most natural electronic language that I can relate to,” she admits. ‘I’ll go through a modular synth, turning the dial, and suddenly I’ll stick on something and be like, that’s the one I want, and I’ll realise that it’s on a Prince record or something, and it’s just because it sounds good to me - it’s familiar and it feels like home. And that’s over my judgement; it’s just something that resonates and sits well in me, not because I’m sat there thinking, ‘Oh, let’s try and emulate that sound.’ It’s just that if I hear something and my ears prickle, it’s usually something that feels familiar or nice, that gives me that sense of excitement or something.

“But then a song like ‘Daniel’ is about my teenage years, harking back to the film The Karate Kid, and those innocent times,” she continues. “I love all of those films- E.T., Flight Of The Navigator, Neverending Story, Labyrinth - all those soundtracks are so cheesy and those were the sounds that I instinctively chose, because they remind me of that time, and it makes me really happy. So it is kind of nostalgic in a way. But I hope that’s offset by something that’s a little bit more inventive, or perhaps more from my world.” The duality at the heart of Two Suns is further dramatised by the character of Pearl, Natasha’s blondewigged, coquettish, self-destructive New York party girl alter-ego, inspired by the work of artists like David Lynch, Andy Warhol, Diane Arbus and Cindy Sherman. “It was very silly and unplanned, really,” Natasha says now. “She’s definitely an element of me, but not in a pretentious way. It was all quite playful and I do worry sometimes that she gets misconstrued. It was

kind of a private thing, mine and my boyfriend’s, like playing a game, really. But when I dressed up as Pearl in his house, the men reacted in an interesting way to my being blonde... it was quite uncomfortable.” It has been widely documented that Two Suns deals in large part with the break-up of Natasha and New York musician Will Lemon, of the band Moon and Moon, and it feels strange to be sitting opposite this girl I’ve known for all of 20 minutes, asking quite intimate questions based on my advance knowledge, from the music press and her own publicity, of her (non) private life. As her success increases it must be increasingly uncomfortable for Natasha too, and I wonder if at this stage she regrets being so open and personal in her songwriting. “I really wish that I could detach myself more, because I think I’d be less hurt by things or less vulnerable,” she agrees. “But I’m worried that if I do then I’ll somehow be cynical or jaded or something. And I don’t want to lose that level of sensitivity because

I think that’s really integral to the music. But it also means I have quite a struggle sometimes.” Drawing on personal experience can make art more powerful, but ultimately a song should stand alone with universal resonance: it’s shouldn’t just be the soundtrack to knowing specific gossip about the musician’s own life. “Exactly. I didn’t want to lie about it, because everybody goes through relationship break-ups, or losing their sense of home, or losing themselves, and I think the job of an artist is to be brave enough to say, ‘I feel that, too, and this is my representation of it.’ I think that creates connections and community, and people can identify with it. When I was a teenager listening to Nirvana, and just in love with Kurt Cobain so much, or listening to The Bends by Radiohead, I was like, that’s why I feel like I feel. There are other people out there. I’m not crazy or weird, or over-emotional, or too tough, or maybe I am, but there’s other people who are, too. And I’m not alone.”

CAST IRON. Written by Cyrus Shahrad Photographed by Kristina Hill The most cult of all rappers is called DOOM now, not MF Doom, and despite his reputation, he does sometimes let that mask slip.

DOO

Any bona fide celebrity worth his or her salt tends to have at least one red button subject guaranteed to bring interviews to a less than amicable end. Jennifer Aniston, for example, refuses to talk about the fact that she’s a solitary waif who sacrificed motherhood for eternally youthful hair and nails; Mariah Carey apparently storms out on anyone who dares mention Glitter, the trashy biopic that sped on her equally unsuccessful suicide attempt. Hip hop writers tend to have an easier time when it comes to treading on eggshells; until last week my only exception was an interview with Kool Keith in which I was under strict instruction not to mention his muchmythologised spell in a New York mental hospital. Yet it came as no surprise to learn from his people that DOOM may be less than happy elaborating on the wilderness years that constitute the most formative and fascinating period of his career. To be honest, I was kind of expecting it. Daniel ‘DOOM’ Dumile and ‘Kool’ Keith Thornton actually have a lot in common. Both were founding members of successful eighties and early nineties New York hip hop outfits (KMD and Ultramagnetic MCs respectively); both dealt with the eventual commercial failure of their crews by beginning solo careers in the late nineties under surreal comic book pseudonyms (MF Doom and Dr Octagon), which over time fractured into whole strings of separate super-villainous identities (including Viktor Vaughan and King Geedorah for Dumile, and Matthew, Mr Nogatco and, wait for it, Dr Dooom for Thornton). On top of that, both are known for rapping in streams of nonsensical abstract imagery littered with sexual and scatological humour, something that has left many interviewers keen to play psychiatrist to the voices in their heads. As promised, Kool Keith hung up from his New York hotel room when I raised the subject of his legendary Bellevue pit stop. Yet madness per se isn’t the issue most likely to rile DOOM (I’m told the capitals are also mandatory on the track names and title of his latest album, BORN LIKE THIS., which also demands a full stop at the end). Instead, he’s apparently loathe to discuss the period immediately following the death of his younger

brother, the prodigiously talented DJ Subroc, who produced KMD’s debut LP Mr Hood, released on Elektra in 1991, and the lion’s share of their follow-up, Black Bastards, before being fatally hit by a car while trying to cross the Long Island Expressway in 1993. There then followed a blow of insult to injury that most soap writers would struggle to dream up. DOOM, working under the name Zev Love X at the time, had found inspiration for dealing with his brother’s death through his idol KRS-One - who refused to fold following the fatal shooting of Boogie

Down Productions’ DJ Scott La Rock in 1987, coming through with the seminal By All Means Necessary the following year - and so forged ahead with Black Bastards against all odds, eventually submitting a finished version of the album to Elektra in early 1994. That April, just one month before its scheduled release, a Billboard columnist named Terri Rossi picked up a promo copy and wrote a shockingly illinformed piece about the cover - a deliberately jarring sketch, drawn by Dumile himself, of a stereotypical ‘sambo’ being lynched, a deranged grin

frozen on his face. Rossi denounced as racist an image that was, even to a halfwit, completely the opposite; Black Bastards was a more polemic and political record than its summery predecessor, and in hanging a stereotypical sambo KMD were invoking the death of the stereotype itself. The damage, however, had been done. Keen to avoid a repeat of the media-feeding frenzy surrounding the release of Ice T and Body Count’s ‘Cop Killer’ in 1992 (which had led to vocal condemnation from then president George Bush Senior, among others),

Elektra shelved the record and released KMD from their contract. We’re now well into the period that DOOM officially prefers not to talk about. Which is a shame, because the following years - in which a broke and basically homeless Dumile wandered the streets of New York - created a hip hop superhero (or villain, depending on your perspective) with all the literary gravity of the radioactive accidents that gave birth to the likes of Dr Manhattan or the Hulk. And when DOOM finally returned to the world of men, like the comic book legends that preceded him,

the limelight. Rumours abounded that he had been facially disfigured, or that it was a cunning ploy that allowed him to sit at home watching cartoons while an army of DOOMalikes filled in at live shows, video shoots or in-store record signings. For most, however, it was simply a painfully acute metaphor; the years following Subroc’s death and the split with Elektra had left DOOM emotionally rather than physically scarred. As one commentator succinctly put it: “Swearing vengeance on the industry that disfigured him, DOOM became one of hip hop’s most colourful folk heroes.” DOOM’s voice, when finally I get him on the phone, is surprisingly bright and breezy, light years from that of his alter ego, which seems gruffer and more aggressive with each passing release. BORN LIKE THIS. is no different; DOOM spits and fumes, he rants and rambles, yet at the heart of the record is a fiercely poetic sensibility. By way of example, the track ‘Cellz’ samples an apocalyptic-sounding Charles Bukowski, whose paranoid inventory of a fearful future also gives the album its title. “I definitely have a lot of affection for literary work,” says DOOM, “especially Bukowski. I like the way he speaks through his characters, the way he roots his stories in reality but puts a fictional spin on them. I think that allows the writer and the reader to step outside the human experience, because there’s only so much that a person can experience as a human. Speaking in character allows us to put a supernatural or otherworldly twist on things. I always write from an imaginary point of view, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t rooted in reality. It just allows me to take things to another level.” His conduit for the creative process is, not surprisingly, the mask from the stocking that first shielded his face at his open mic homecoming in 1997, to the heavyweight metal replica of Maximus’s mask from the film Gladiator, which has over the last eight years become as commonly associated with the 21st Century’s most innovative rapper as Russell Crowe’s ancient Roman freedom fighter. He now has two - one in chrome, one in stainless steel - and both are heavy, forcing him to keep his head up and regulate his breathing in a way that he compares to an athlete training with arm and leg weights. But the advantages, when it comes to getting in character, are far heavier. “I’m not one of those method actors that keeps accidentally slipping into character at the dinner table. Once I take the mask off, it’s off. But at the same time, when I put it on, it’s on, you know what I’m saying? At that point it’s showtime, and sometimes even I don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s like my whole identity shifts, like a king putting his crown on. It’s a symbolic item as much as a physical one.” He says he occasionally puts the

OM he found it largely unprepared for the uncanny powers he had taken on in exile. The story goes that these were first displayed during an open mic night at New York’s Nuyorican Poets Café in 1997, when Dumile took to the stage with a stocking on his head to mask his face, stunning the crowd and savaging contenders with his abstract rhymes and intellectual, unconventional flow. Thus was born DOOM (then MF or ‘Metal Face’ Doom), who quickly attracted the attention of critics and label bosses alike, cornering the underground hip hop scene in what felt

like a heartbeat and in 1997 unleashing Operation Doomsday, an album now widely regarded as a hip hop classic (the original 3,000 copies are collectors’ items). There then followed experimental and much-admired collaborations with producers Madlib (Madvillain’s Madvillainy, 2004) and Danger Mouse (DangerDoom’s The Mouse And The Mask, 2005). And all the while DOOM refused to appear without a metal mask to hide his face - something that only added to the mounting interest and internetfuelled debate surrounding his return to

mask on at home and chases his kids around the living room - needless to say they love it - but for most the mask is as much symbolic a barrier to the ‘real’ DOOM as it is a gateway for Dumile. Few of those snapping up more recent albums are old enough to remember KMD, let alone Zev Love X; for most, the only face they have to put to tracks like DangerDoom’s ‘El Chupa Nibre’, or Madvillain’s mighty ‘All Caps’, isn’t really a face at all. Perhaps fuelled by bitterness that DOOM refuses to let them get closer, lapsed fans air their grievances in online forums: DOOM uses the mask because he lip synchs on stage, some say; others complain that the person they saw perform wasn’t really DOOM at all. Both are issues that blew up following a string of disastrous shows in the summer of 2007, which saw the performer (assuming it was actually him) the subject of boos and thrown bottles. DOOM isn’t oblivious to his critics, and he’s aware that coming up and shaking the hand of a man in a metal mask takes real conviction something he says he’s always quick to reward. “I’ve got a lot of love for the crowd, and I’ll always play to whoever is there - whether they’ve been following my stuff from the KMD days or know me only by my last album. And the vibe is friendly, no matter what people say: it sometimes feels like the venue is filled with more family than fans.” YouTube footage of the alleged deceptions continues to divide audiences and inspire no end of DOOM-bashing, but it’s hard to imagine the man on the other end of the line capable of such tactics. Affable, articulate and perpetually self-effacing, DOOM is a million miles away from the charmless, self-obsessed rap superstar as embodied by Kool Keith (who hung up on me at the first hint of a question he found compromising; DOOM, by comparison, phones me back apologetically after his mobile runs out of batteries). He’s also humble, casually brushing off suggestions that he’s found lasting success and a core credibility that most rappers would kill for. “As far as I’m concerned I’m still on the outside looking in. Maybe that will change with this record - maybe it’ll give people something to put my name to and remember me by. Maybe not. I just try to stay positive: my focus isn’t really on commercial success or acceptance. Right now, each new record feels like the first one sometimes I think I won’t be happy until I’ve made so many that I can’t count them anymore. Either way, I certainly don’t think I’ve reached my goal yet. I’m not sure I’ll even know how to recognise it when I do.” For all that, DOOM clearly believes in his formula. The arena in which he finds himself is as fraught with peril as the one that imprisoned his masked gladiatorial predecessor, and DOOM has no intention of giving the

music industry that burned him a chance to disfigure him for a second time. “The key is to stay true to yourself: that way you know that whatever you put out will make sense and sound unique. The longer you stay on that path, the sooner people realise that you’re forging something new, and the sooner they understand that something important is happening. My rule is to stick to the music side of things and let the suits and ties worry about the numbers. Because any rapper who gets too tied up in the financial side of music making ends up being little more than a poster boy.” And hip hop, says DOOM, has more than enough poster boys. It’s an understandable statement from one of modern music’s most stubborn nonconformists; any artist enigmatic enough to have been remixed by the likes of Four Tet, Kode9 and Thom Yorke - the latter an ardent fan who was originally scheduled to write this article - is clearly going to rail against what he himself calls “the shit my kids listen to on MTV”. More surprising, perhaps, is to hear him reflect fondly on the low ride bicycles, block parties and bubblegum summers of 1980s New York - and in particular the soulful, blissfully innocent hip hop that first inspired him and his brother to pick up microphones. “I remember the pair of us, aged maybe 10 or 11, staying up until 2am to record the late night radio shows and see how the beats were rocking. There wasn’t even much in the way of rhyming back then - shit was mostly breakbeats with the occasional lyric on top - but we learned so much because everything was so raw and the music was developing so rapidly. Every time the show would finish we’d be sat there stunned, wondering what could possibly come next. After a while, forming KMD became the obvious way to answer that question for ourselves.” Music, he says, is memory, and his audio scrapbook of those days is more vivid than any photograph album. “I listen to those records we made and everything comes flooding in, as though I’ve been transported straight back to those days. And sometimes that’s not the easiest thing, because of course there were tough times along the way. But it’s all part of becoming who you are, and it all makes sense when the curtain comes down. The title of the record is BORN LIKE THIS.: no matter what you do, you were born to do it. Every atom in or out of existence is either in or out of existence for a reason, and once you accept that, you see that everything happening has already happened. I just follow the path: ups and downs, rocky roads and all. Because what else can I do?” There’s a pause on the other end of the line, as though DOOM is directing this last question more to himself than anyone else. And in that moment, it feels as though I’ve finally caught a glimpse of his true face.

Clean Break After years of getting out of his skull and playing in other people’s bands, New York’s MIKE BONES is getting hip to the task of making it as a solo artist.

headline on Mike Bones’ MySpace page is a massive acronym - R.I.D.N.O.U.D.T.K.L.A.M.F. It’s two separate things combined. R.I.D.N.O.U. is the saying that used to be on Nation Of Ulysses records: “Respect is due Nation Of Ulysses.” The second half is from Johnny Thunders and The Heartbreakers: “Down to kill like a mother-fucker.”

The

both great groups: the former a shortlived Washington DC post-hardcore band who put two albums out on Ian MacKaye of Fugazi’s Dischord label in the early nineties, and the latter a punk trainwreck led by a former New York Doll and featuring Richard Hell from Television.

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peruse of the six songs in the player opposite the acronym, however, reveals something very different to both the Nation of Ulysses and Johnny Thunders. They’re what you might very generally call ‘singersongwriter’ tracks - thoughtful, literary pieces, perhaps a bit Leonard Cohenlike.

much you gather: Mike Bones is a man with a past.

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are many things about Mike Bones that are easy to find out. He’s 28, from New Jersey, although he’s lived in New York City for years, and he’s signed to The Social Registry out there and Vice here. Vice releasing his recent album, A Fool For Everyone, seriously bumped up his profile in the UK. For a while earlier this year, it was almost like he’d moved here - with mixed results. “It was a bit of a disaster, I think,” he says. “We had to cancel shows, because I got sick, and then there was snow and I guess you guys don’t get much snow there - you don’t seem very used to it. Shows got cancelled because of that. But the shows that we did play were really great.”

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seemed like a new artist, but he was leaving clues. In his touring band was Matt Sweeney, highly respected guitarist and frequent collaborator with Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. Mike knows him from New York, as indeed he knows nearly everyone in New York doing interesting music. For years, he’s been the wingman - the guitar master in Cass McCombs’s band for a while and a member of Soldiers Of Fortune, a noisy-as-fuck underground supergroup. He emerged as a solo artist with his 2007, US-only debut, The Sky Behind The Sea.

Mike

think I was just waiting for the songs to get good,” he explains. “When I first started writing songs I was like, ‘No one can hear these ever.’ They were

“I

really precious. I had to stop thinking that and begin to understand that it was just another song. There are millions of songwriters and millions of songs. One of mine was just another one.” Mike to suggest he’s simply a good writer is something of an understatement. The songs he comes up with - by sitting at a computer, like it’s a day-job - are more like vignettes or short stories, with Mike casting himself as a character rather than a bleedingheart confessor. His real name is Mike Strallow. Mike Bones isn’t exactly an alter ego - he’s more like a hero from a John Fante or Knut Hamsum novel than a real person. The opening lyric on A Fool For Everyone is ‘Today the world is worthy of my loathing’. It’s black humour, Morrissey-style, and it’s just one of many subtly hilarious lines across the album.

For

is danger of cliché here, though. Using a pseudonym is an easy way to divert attention from what might actually be real and Mike says he uses the name Bones mostly out of necessity: “No song that I write is ever a 100 per cent true. I have to keep some kind of wall up, or put some kind of other angle on it. I’m sure it all comes from personal experience, but I take pieces from wherever I can get things. I don’t think of it as a cop-out. You could call it that, but I think I need to keep people at arm’s length. I need to make some kind of distinction, at least in my mind,

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between the kind of guy I really am and the face I present through songs.” then there’s his sound. An exemplary guitar player, he consciously chose to pull back the solos on his debut album. A Fool For Everyone is different - songs build into a barrage of shredding, viciously contrasting with his nasally, New York wise-guy singing voice. He doesn’t sound 28. He sounds world-weary, like a person who grew up too quickly and probably wanted to.

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come from New Jersey, just across the river from New York City,” he explains. “It a very industrial, polluted area. There’s nothing very nice about it. I can’t complain about my upbringing, but I didn’t like where I lived. New Jersey is a very parochial place. If you’re even the slightest bit interested in anything other than sports or television, you’re considered really strange. People tell you that the whole time. So from the age of 12 or 13 I was hanging out in New York City every day after school and I moved there as soon as I could.”

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pre-Rudy Giuliani New York City he landed in sounds fascinating. He lived in Williamsburg before the hipsters turned it into Brooklyn’s version of Shoreditch, and then moved to the Lower East Side in Manhattan, right when Jonathan Fire*Eater were emerging as patient zero for a new explosion of elegantly wasted rock’n’roll. But there were dangers, too, and he spent two years in his late-teens addicted to heroin. “If it’s really easy to get your hands on and you’re young, you’re going to get into it,” he says, nonchalantly. “If I’d grown up in the Midwest, I’d probably have started sniffing glue or whatever it is people do out there.”

The

a reader, Mike says he counts James Salter, Roberto Bolaño and Richard Yates among his favourite writers and they’re as much an influence on his songs as the attitude of Johnny Thunders or Nation of Ulysses. “I’m not trying to dumb it down,” he says. “You have to give the audience some credit. People are intelligent. What I do may not be somebody’s vibe, but I can’t consider that when I’m writing a song.”

Always Words by Phil Hebblethwaite Photo by Phil Knott

leave him with a thought from Pigeon writer John Doran; that it doesn’t matter how good your lyrics are, because no one listens to them other than teenage girls.

cool,” Mike responds, right of the bat. “He can think that, but I’ll be the one going home with teenage girls.”

“That’s

Pound A Beat Back in the UK after an aborted attempt to rule America, LADY SOVEREIGN is proof that there are two sides to every coin.

Words by Jeremy Allen Photo by Robin Turner “I just don’t think people get me here. I just don’t think I’ve really conquered the UK... at all. I’m Lady Sovereign and people know exactly who I am, but I haven’t really had chart success. It does disappoint me. It upsets me a bit because ay from everything. It was a mess. Def Jam aw you always want to be big where you’re from. But re losing their patience with me, and I was we h the whole scenario I just think my name is bigger than my records.” just getting the hump wit Lady Sovereign’s reputation precedes her, it’s ng paraded around promoting one song. bei d true. The fact she’s 30 minutes late for this s it was a bloody goo What pissed me off wa s wa h pus to d nte wa interview doesn’t surprise me, but her contrition um I made and all they alb does. To be fair, she was out on Soho’s tiles last ve Me Or Hate Me’. I was like, ‘Come on, ‘Lo night and she’s barely had two hours sleep, t did so well, so put something else out tha which is probably what somebody in her position re.’ They were just basing my whole career the should be doing at her age. Welcome to the g, and it was driving me in America on one son World of Sov, a world of hilarity, mishaps, crazy bloody mad. I feel respected and adventures and of course those sharp lyrics, that “I do like it over there. I feel comfortable. re. attitude and those tunes. There’s no attitude the out I’m confident when dfuck.” min today, however. Despite her fatigue, Sov is just a The reception I get is one involving k, bac charming, disarmingly honest and funny. red filte Strange stories nt doughnut gia a as “I just couldn’t go to sleep. I was laying there ssed her fighting a ‘fan’ dre ... I thought I was asleep but I wasn’t,” she says. sco nci Fra at a show in San o She looks remarkably well for it despite claiming . It was some bloke wh “Oh God, that was silly ught I said tho he to have the shakes, thanks to a nasty habit she’s e aus bec turned on me ng formed of devouring copious cylinders of Red him, but I was just bei something bad about urity, man. sec d Ba w. Bull, punctuating lulls with a hit of über-sugar and sho my ed cheeky. He picket w clandestine super-barbiturates purloined from the e I had to cancel my sho It pissed me off becaus around as e tim t firs devil’s asscrack. “I’ve got about 200 cans in my the in San Francisco mad house because Red Bull send them to me. It’s iff on stage. I was someone threw a spl and started up it ked like my petrol really.” pic I so pissed anyway, e I My dad always said that underneath every stop my show becaus smoking it. I had to and ed, dul ponytail there’s an arsehole. Thankfully, the thing. I resche couldn’t remember any Louise Harman sat before me is sans ponytail, in Doughnut comes and aga k bac nt we I when replaced by a really good haircut which makes silly, mixing booze and It’s w. pickets the sho her appear less fearsome, though she can still be t not a good idea.” [weed] together - it’s jus s she was drinking too fearsome if she wants to be. It suits her. Some our rum o There were als nd might have worried that, like Sampson, all her to cancel shows to atte much, and even had . this s ate power was contained in that taught, faceudi rep y ngl rehab. She stro just like a drink. Mainly stretching scrunchy, but new album Jigsaw is “I wasn’t recovering, I when you’re on tour it’s testament that it’ll take more than a visit to Toni & and ge, before I go on sta s Guy to curtail her talent. So why the change? d some things,” she say always there. Yeah, I rea “It’s ce. voi ting in her “I dunno,” she says. “One day I was just in the with resignation resona and I know what I do. am mirror brushing my hair and I thought it looked I o wh w kno I ... ver whate ings and I do have sw better down. Then moving onto the stage of od mo my e Yeah, I do hav sitive sometimes. sen leaving the house without my ponytail, I literally get my bad days, and I do e Google search littl a ing got on the doorstep, and I was thinking, ‘Right, hav p hel But then I can’t I’m going to walk down the road to my friend’s about myself.” ere Sovereign inspires house,’ and I then I thought, ‘No.’ I just couldn’t It’s not just in the US wh lly UK fans don’t norma do it! It was like a comfort thing. But now I refuse fanaticism. Though her ce pie a nt wa y appear to to have it tied up - I couldn’t do it again. The dress as doughnuts, the written about it on the ponytail had its day - it was epic, it was great, e’s Sh ss. ele eth non of her en too well. tak n but it’s tucked away now. I’m getting older. bee n’t album, and it has lly hardcore fans I rea Everyone has changes in the their life, you “Well, there’s about 10 w all by name and I kno know what I mean?” know of. I know them y the and al atic fan y’re Sov is 24. The fact she’s just sampled The The exactly who they are. ose exp y the my life, then Cure’s ‘Close To Me’ for single ‘So Human’ know everything about y’re always trying to add makes me feel ancient. I bought that record at the the and te, bsi we this it on add them because I n’t time. Was she concerned about relying so wo I ok. me on Facebo g sonal. And in that son heavily on one of indie pop’s sacred cows? really do keep that per e y’v the .. ok. “A lot of people are like, ‘You’re brave to do ntion Facebo (‘Guitar’) where I me me. at go l rea a had y that,’ but I don’t think so,” she says. “I really like the heard the lyrics and ’t g messages, and I can the song and I think I’ve done a good job of it. I’m They sent me really lon my into get y’ll the n the not worried about it.” even reply because to them, ‘Look, sorry, but She sighs concerning the 50 per cent slice profile. I just want to say ‘You taken by Bob Smith, but there’s a certain And then they’re like, it’s a personal thing.’ us,’ ate upd ’t us, you don ebullience about Harman concerning her whole don’t do anything for ums alb ke ma I e. tim the new album, in contrast to the spirit-sapping all and all this. I do press e experience the inevitable machinations of being at I mean? There are som for you guys, know wh I’m e.’ cas my off t ‘Ge , like on a major brought with them. For anyone who’s weird fans and it’s just, , but...” been living under a rock, Lady Sovereign was not trying to be ’orrible s, be careful what you signed by the big man himself, Jay-Z, to Def Jam As the old saying goe in 2006 in what then seemed like a fairytale. wish for... She’s banned any questions about Hova, and he might just be off her Christmas card list. Still, her enthusiasm for America - partly born of America’s enthusiasm for her - hasn’t diminished. “I just had time off,” she states. “I just walked

“I remember the future as if it were yesterday. But it didn’t look like yesterday, it looked like tomorrow. I remember the future. It died a generation ago... Faith in the future I mean.” Jonathan Meades, Remember The F u t u r e

think we used up all of our creativity on the album and we couldn’t come up with anything better for the codename.” When asked if the title reflects a new found maturity in the band Gahan cackles: “That’s nicely put! There was some tea and biscuits involved in the making of this album.” And then, referring to his own problems with drink, cocaine and heroin that nearly killed him in the mid-nineties, he adds impishly: “That was about as tough as it got during the making of this album as regards... r e f r e s h m e n t s ! ” He continues: “In the context of our output, it’s probably one of the most

you’re sitting with getting high, you’re a bit like, ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ But it came true at that point. The outcome was inevitable - I was going to die. I kind of resigned myself to that and it was okay, it didn’t really matter to me.” He looks sheepish: “Selfish, of course.” Gahan reveals that the track ‘Hole To Feed’ is an attempt to address his inner thirsts, his addictive personality and how he will never really be free of it. He says: “I think about [drink and drugs] all the time. I don’t think so much about getting high but everything that I do in my life has an addictive quality about it. If it makes me feel good then I want more of it and

Synth pop as we know it now is just settling into a comfortable middle age. By this we don’t mean electronic music, which is well over a century old, but the hybrid of pop, new wave and post punk that harnessed affordable store-bought synthesizers. If we take its (arbitrary) genesis as the recording of Autobahn by Kraftwerk in 1974, then the genre is currently in the process of swapping its Chelsea boots for slippers and black boiler suit for a comfy cardigan. While no one was looking it grew up. Of course the slightly melancholy and occasionally risible path well trodden by ageing rockers from the sixties is (thankfully) one synth pop cannot take. No one wants to hear Gary Numan playing the

disciplined records we’ve put out. Martin and I just turned up every day to work, both of us very focussed. It’s not something that we’ve sat round and talked about, but he’s written some fantastic songs and I’ve got a few on there myself. When we first got together at his place in Santa Barbara it was a no brainer that we were going to work with Ben [Hillier]. We had a great time recording Playing The Angel with him. Initially, I went out there and listened to about 15 demos that Martin had made, at least a dozen of which really stood out as great songs.” As for the future retro feel to some of the album, the singer puts this partially down to eBay: “Martin has this new fetish of buying

in the past that’s been to my detriment. But it’s never really going to be enough.” This search for narcotic relief - for warm transcendence and comfort - can certainly be felt on one of the new album’s outstanding tracks, ‘Come Back’, which has an overdriven shoegaze riff that recreates a rushing high. He agrees that it’s an attempt to recapture the feeling: “That’s always what I’m trying to do! I can recreate that there and that’s the kind of music that I love to listen to. I like to be taken on a little journey, on a little trip. Unfortunately a lot of bands don’t do that. But I did feel that with the MGMT record. What a great record from start to finish.” But Gahan’s courtship with oblivion

harmonica, and I would sooner go blind than see the Pet Shop Boys sitting on stools, bearded, strumming acoustics, moaning about coal mining. Likewise, OMD unplugged is a pointless notion. The world’s biggest synth pop band Depeche Mode are currently facing this problem themselves. Formed in Basildon, Essex in 1980, they have tackled the change of pace by embracing old technology. Creaking and (in relative terms) ancient Moogs and Steiner-Parker monophonic synthesizers, cumbersome and chaotic sequencers and monolithic drum machines lend a care-worn flavour to their 12th album, Sounds Of The Universe. But this isn’t

vintage gear on eBay. I mean, literally every day something new would show up - drum machines, synthesizers, sequencers. So there was some of the fun that there was in some of the early recordings in exploring a new piece of equipment and seeing what sound we could get out of it. There were a couple of pieces that were written on a Steiner-Parker synthesizer from about 1974. These pieces of old equipment can often be unpredictable and can often go off on their own and it will never be the same the second time you play it. I think that created a spontaneity.” In a way, The Depeche Mode trademark has always been about tackling life’s big issues lyrically with a progressive, futuristic

nostalgia, pure and simple. Among the old equipment they have been searching for new obstacles and problems to battle against; to find novel sounds in vintage gear. This is music made on equipment that was designed and built when musical vistas were vast - eternally wide, even. It’s equipment that was designed and built without the knowledge that its very progeny would bring musicians to a plateaux - a flatter terrain where limitless possibilities have often come to equal atrophied imagination. So the future, as they say, isn’t what it used to be. Looking backwards to look forwards, we meet the band. They are ensconced in a

and stern pop sound. Even though this time out the sound is partially made on retro gear, Gore is keen to point out that it doesn’t follow that the album is old sounding: “I don’t see it as sounding retro even though we did use a lot of old analogue equipment. We used those in conjunction with a lot of modern technology as well. So I think it’s a mixture of different eras, really.” In all seriousness, ‘Tea and Biscuits’ also refers to Gore’s changing attitude to drink and drugs. Dave Gahan’s addictions have been well documented and have perhaps overshadowed the fact that Gore was no slouch in the powders and potions department himself. Since the last album he has stopped

lovely and discrete members club in Mayfair, and all of them - Andy Fletcher looking slightly like a younger, ginger Alan Bennett, a vaguely bewildered but affable Martin Gore and an extremely suave and ever so geezerish Dave Gahan - are a pleasure to talk to. They seem relaxed and the spirit of dysfunction that surrounded the group for many years seems to have subsided quite a lot, if not evaporated altogether. This was not just fall-out from Gahan’s narcotically induced death wish, but his more recent jockeying with Gore, the main songwriter, for prominence. This new détente is trumpeted triumphantly by Mute who are only too happy to tell us the pair have written their first song together. (It later turns out that

drinking, however, and is very matter of fact when he says: “I gave up drinking about three years ago and it was just a decision I made. I didn’t go to AA or any of that stuff. I’ve found that I’ve got plenty of things to do with my t i m e . ” So, you’re not actually an alcoholic but you’ve had a drink problem in the past, then? “Hmmm. Yeah, I think. It was all part and parcel of being in a band. It’s almost encouraged for you to be drunk almost all the time if you’re in a band. People are disappointed if you’re not [laughs]. There’s always someone somewhere who wants to give you something.” Fletch adds soberly: “Martin was an alcoholic but there are different types of

‘together’ is perhaps stretching the term a little and the song ‘Toe Stub’, about a mishap occurring during a table football match, never made the final cut anyway.) Like many record labels, Mute, understandably, go to extremes to stop albums from leaking. This includes sending out advance copies of albums to journalists under false names to prevent mislaid copies from ending up on the net. During the release of their 2005 album, Playing The Angel, they were disguised under the suitably gothic name of Black Swarm, but this time out The Mode were known as... Tea and Biscuits. Tea and Biscuits!? Gore tilts his head back and laughs: “I

alcoholics and there are different treatments for alcoholism.” Perhaps he learned from observing his lead singer’s predicaments years earlier. Gahan’s tribulations were played out in the post-Cobain suicide watch of the press involving incidents that ranged from the daft (he was once warned that he was taking too many drugs by support bands Spiritualized and Primal Scream) to the distressing (he flatlined after shooting speed balls in his LA mansion). He agrees that he wasn’t interested in living anymore: “I think so, yeah. A lot of my friends - and I’m talking about using addicts were saying to me, ‘You’ve got to get clean.’ And when this comes from someone else who

hapened such a long time ago now - half their near 30-year-history ago. The band are more about health and vitality now. They are more about new life. This is a mirror image in some ways of the fresh-faced bunch of schoolleaving age teenagers who formed Depeche Mode in 1980, along with fourth member Vince Clarke. (All three of them deny industry rumours that they have been offered a substantial amount of money to play their debut album Speak and Spell live with Clark, to mark their three-decade anniversary. Fletch states matter of factly that their attention is focussed on the future not the past: “We’ve only got a finite amount of time left and we’ve

It’s all tea and biscuits for DEPECHE MODE these days, and a trip back to the future. Words byJohn DoranImage byDean Chalkley

still got a lot of new material we could be recording instead.”) They don’t seem to have any concern about marking the anniversary as such, but it sparks off a debate as to when they actually formed. Gore ignores protests from Fletch and states: “It’s some time in May 1980 when we first played as Depeche Mode. It was a school gig. But I reckon you could call the date of that first school gig the 30th anniversary.” Fletch remembers the gig and announces: “That’s when Martin was in both bands! There was another band playing on the bill called The French Look and he was in both of them so, between sets, he had to change his image [much laughter]. That was the first

time that Dave sang and he was really n e r v o u s . ” When asked if they were a hit with the local girls, Fletch gets mock annoyed: “Girls? We weren’t interested in girls!” Gore backs him up: “You have to remember this was Basildon, Essex. The main thing I remember about that night was that someone wanted to beat Vince up and one of our friends who was a good fighter had to step in for him and beat this other bloke up [laughs]. We were much more interested in getting home without having a fight than picking a girl up.” After signing to Mute and the unexpected success of their debut, Gore

wanted to take the band in a darker, more ‘serious’ direction, causing Clarke to leave and pursue his pop dreams with Yazoo and eventually Erasure. The band, who were joined by Alan Wilder for 13 years, went on to be one of the biggest groups in the world becoming especially huge in North and South America and continental Europe. Their size can’t be underestimated. They’ve sold over 100 million albums - twice as many as Oasis. Talking of the Gallaghers... surely it must rankle slightly to see the coverage that these porridge-faced interlopers in leisure wear get in the UK, compared to the Mode? Gahan is refreshingly un-coy at venting spleen on the subject and laughs: “It

really does piss me off to be honest! I certainly don’t think we’ve deserved the flack we’ve had in this country over the years. And having not lived in this country for ages, it’s like, ‘Come on man, haven’t we earned some respect? We’re a pretty good export aren’t we!? We’ve done better than New Labour, let’s face it! Oasis... the first couple of records were fucking great. Certainly everything about the first record - it was like the Pistols all over again just in its attitude. But now?” It’s clear that even though Depeche Mode have reached middle age, they’re still capable of losing bands half as young in their s l i p s t r e a m .

A Question of Time

one side and Zinner on the other. To judge from It’s Blitz!, Karen won. So did we: It’s Blitz! may be a very different record from its predecessors, but it’s no less brilliant.

Back in late 2004, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs put out a live DVD which, unusually, included unreleased songs that were actually good and not merely good but, in the case of ‘Cheated Hearts’, mind-blowing. Filmed at the Fillmore in San Francisco, that version of ‘Cheated Hearts’ lengthily extends the song’s now-familiar reverberating intro. As it unfolds, we see spell-binding frontwoman Karen O slowly reel in a microphone that’s been flung to the side of the stage, feeding the lead through a fingerless leather glove as drummer Brian Chase taps out a beat. When the mic eventually reaches her, she picks it up and, arm extended, starts to arc it slowly towards her lips, on which a wicked smirk is playing. Then she languidly intones the song’s opening couplet: “Cheated by the opposite of love / Held on high from up up up above.” Cue guitarist Nick Zinner to ignite a typically explosive riff - and your heart to leap into your mouth. Everything that so enriches the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ music is present in this clip: romance, theatre, melancholia, adrenalin, sexuality, poise. All had been present on Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ 2003 debut album Fever to Tell, a riot of trashy, punky rock’n’roll. All would be present on the intense, monolithic 2006 follow-up Show Your

Bones, of which ‘Cheated Hearts’ formed the centrepiece. And now, all are present on the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ third album, It’s Blitz! Sonically, however, It’s Blitz! opens a new chapter in the story. Synths are in the ascendant at the expense of guitars, and the influence of Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer is stronger than that of any rock bands past or present. The connection to classic disco is strengthened by the album’s mood, which is caught between brashly energetic and wrenchingly sad. It’s well known that a war broke out inside the Yeah Yeah Yeahs during the Show Your Bones era, with Karen O on

In a hotel suite on Old Park Lane, Karen Orzolek is choosing her words carefully as she explains the long gaps between Yeah Yeah Yeahs records. “The gaps probably have to do with just pacing ourselves: ‘Are we ready? Yeah, we’re ready now.’ But I think the problem is that once we do start we can get caught up in a vicious cycle of self-doubt - and then euphoria,” she offers, with a burst of laughter.

It’s tempting to read the history of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs as the story of Karen gaining in confidence and gradually assuming more control. Karen adds some context: in the early days, she says, it simply wasn’t necessary for someone to take things in hand. “We were just starting off and every song we made we were highly satisfied with - we could do no wrong, in the beginning,” she recalls. “It was after people started taking us seriously when we really had the identity crisis - that’s when this role had to be born. Also, because we don’t put out records every year, we saw some of our colleagues.... [It was] like watching a chess game, seeing what moves

Immaculately styled and beautiful, the offstage Karen is otherwise unrecognisable from the onstage one. Far from bolshy and extroverted, she’s demure and somewhat nervous - most of her clauses end with a reflexive ‘y’know?’ - but she’s cheerful and forthcoming too. After the troubles that flared within the band during the recording of Show Your Bones, Karen was determined to ring in the changes. “I personally felt the only way we could write a record was if we really had a different attitude about it and generally a feelgood attitude,” she says. “It was really different from last time, which is great because

they were making and which ones were falling and which ones were persevering, and I think it was really informative to see all that go down. So yeah, out of my own need, my lack of patience with doing the same thing, or lack of attention span, I always really wanted to push it somewhere new.” In this she had a natural ally in David Sitek, TV On The Radio guitarist, emerging super-producer and long-time Yeah Yeah Yeahs collaborator. On It’s Blitz!, Sitek shared production duties with Nick Launay (of PiL and Arcade Fire fame). Sitek’s philosophy has been memorably encapsulated by Foals frontman Yannis Philippakis as follows: “Why

writing studio records is so difficult, especially today when you have the option of putting maybe 500 tracks on something and taking them away, Chinese Democracy-style. You have to use a lot of self-restraint and know when to push yourself and when to pull it back. But generally it was far more pleasurable this time [laughs].” However, it’s plainly not all peace, love and harmony in the Yeah Yeah Yeahs camp, not just yet. When I ask if the interpersonal dynamic has improved, Karen says it has, but quickly adds, “I have the job of always shoving everyone out of their comfort zone. Nobody likes that person!”

Donna Und Blitzen The new Yeah Yeah Yeahs album is a lightning bolt of disco bop. It’s a triumph, unless you love the Zinner, hate the synth. Words by Niall O’Keeffe Photograph by Derrick Santini

Given their current lofty status, it’s hard to believe that the band started life as a playful experiment. Orzolek and Zinner, who lived together in Williamsburg, Brooklyn were dabbling in folk music under the name Unitard when they dreamed up a sleazy rock band called the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the name being a quick-fire New York phrase that Karen herself uses regularly in conversation. After a debut gig with The White Stripes in 2000, momentum was established quickly, and a

Prior to relocating to New York and meeting Zinner, Karen had befriended Chase at Oberlin, a liberal arts college in Ohio. A jazz fanatic, he played in several bands and Karen would come to watch. ‘Stage Karen’ did not, at this point, exist. That persona only started to emerge later, on the dancefloors of New York City, with the help of copious alcohol (though she reckons there might have been a flicker of it when, as a normally shy fifth-grader, she strapped on a pair of blindfold-dark sunglasses and lip-synched to ‘Twist And Shout’ at a variety show, shocking classmates and teachers). Chase joins Karen halfway through this

major label bidding war gave way to almost instant success, with Karen deified both as style icon - thanks in part to her designer friend Christian Joy - and as a force-of-nature frontwoman extraordinaire. Today, she repeats the point that the band were never meant to be taken seriously. “That spun us out - honestly, it was the last thing we were expecting. We were so innocent it was ridiculous. We were passing out flyers and getting really psyched that 200 people were showing up to our shows. We had no aspirations - I didn’t know what touring meant or anything like that... It’s definitely a lot to take in, especially in your turbulent twenties.”

interview. He answers questions politely and in rambling fashion, but when he’s not directly participating in a conversation, he zones right out, as if someone’s flicked his off switch. Still, he seems to share with Karen a genuine enthusiasm for the New York scene of the early 2000s, which is novel given that most bands tediously disavow membership of any scene or deny that scenes exist. Karen elected to desert New York for Los Angeles prior to the making of Show Your Bones. “I was grieving the dissipation of the scene,” she explains. “That was so exciting when it came up and when it started going away... I wanted to just get out

mess around when you can fuck around.” Yeah Yeah Yeahs took up the challenge.

and move onto the next thing. I didn’t want to stick around and just watch it go away. Me personally, I just felt almost too nostalgic for when everything really happened, because it was like a flash - the shelf life for those things these days is super-short. So it was hard for me to stick around and watch that specific scene die off.” Chase stayed and rode it out. “By the time 2004, 2005 rolled around, it was kind of at the end of a very bizarrely huge peak,” he remembers. “Freak peak,” suggests Karen. “To the max.” Chase “Everybody was just playing music, you know.”

and a shock of stylishly tousled, jet-black hair. On arrival he does what he always does when he arrives somewhere: he takes a photo. He then takes a seat next to Chase, and the atmosphere in the room suddenly changes. When Karen speaks, she seems more hesitant than before: she struggles to find a word she’s looking for and starts to say ‘y’know?’ with Caroline Kennedy-like frequency. The impression is less that she’s intimidated by Zinner, more that she’s wary of treading on his toes. She brings him up to speed on the conversation we’ve been having about the creative push and pull between them, and says: “Subconsciously, I think there are goals or directions that we all feel, y’know? And it kind of happens naturally even though there’s definitely... what is it? The id and the ego, there’s this battle going on, because once that change gets going I just want to run with it, y’know? But I think you want to put the brakes on a bit more.” “Yeah,” he says softly, in his infinitely assured manner. “Sometimes I may sort of stop and think about what I’m doing, and that when the danger of stepping back is - Karen’s great at encouraging...” He adds: “It’d be so boring if we all thought the same. If we all said, ‘Oh, we need to sound like this.’ ‘Yes, I agree.’

Karen “It was nuts! And good music! Everywhere!” Chase “Nobody asked for the attention but... everybody wanted to play music and they were very passionate about it, but then for it to become a huge international success out of something so innocent was very jarring. And that scene couldn’t really sustain itself in that environment, necessarily, so it needed... to crash.” With Show Your Bones, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs strode confidently from the wreckage, and with It’s Blitz they again show their capacity for survival through reinvention. Much has been made of the band’s

‘I agree.’ So dull.” We move on to discussion of the album leak, which compelled the band’s label to move forward the online release date. “I don’t really know how much difference it makes in the end, because I just don’t know if less people get to hear the music because of that or more people do,” shrugs Karen. “There’s no way of telling. You don’t have record sales to quantify how much people are listening to your music, so it’s just more abstract, which is hard to get used to, but not that hard.” Nick pipes up: “I guess we’ll know when we go on tour and start playing shows, and

supposed abandonment of the guitar, but in reality it’s still present on several of the album’s tracks, most prominently on the pulverising ‘Shame and Fortune’. However, there was “a strong focus on the keyboard”, admits Chase. “We were fascinated with the sounds and wanted to explore those options, but it was also a really effective tool and device to get out of old habits. And that’s important, too - to find yourself in a new context and a new setting, with different parameters.” At this point Karen addresses Chase directly. “I always count you as really supportive of just opening up more. You don’t have a resistance to change so much. I feel

just get a sense of how...” Karen interrupts: “What do you mean ‘go on tour’? I’m never going on tour again.” Mercifully, this turns out to be an exaggeration. The band will continue to tour, but only in “manageable bursts”. Inevitably, what puts her off about touring is the 23 hours of the day when the band aren’t onstage. “It’s the 23 hours that are just fucking draining, man, between the travel and terrible sleep cycle and general malnutrition,” she says. “It’s still a constant battle to keep your body on track and therefore your mind. It’s just that stuff really, because the shows are great. They’re really something to treasure. They bring us to places we’ve never been and, man, just the energy of them is so remarkable and kind of an exceptional experience to have. I think that’s the highlight. The rest of it? Not so much.”

Dates in London and Manchester at the end of April, and the Reading and Leeds festivals in August, will find Nick Zinner in a familiar role. “I’m pretty much playing guitar exclusively,” he says. “I’m doing a little bit of keyboards, maybe a little more loop-triggering and stuff, but for the most part I’m still playing guitar.” Have they nailed the new songs? “I felt like you’re just down to go with the flow. You don’t really stir up too much drama or anything like that. The drama’s just between Nick and I. But it’s really not that - especially on this record - not that dramatic.” There was more drama with the last one, I suggest. “Yeah! Right! I can’t play that down but that was pretty dramatic. But still probably less dramatic than most people make it out to be.”

Nick Zinner, whose ears must be burning, joins the interview 10 minutes from its end. He’s a short, delicate man with a ghostly pallor

like, in this last week of practice, I was getting to a point where I didn’t have to think about what I was doing, and that’s the ultimate goal.” Karen “The last six days out of the 10 days we were practising.” Zinner “Ten days? Two months!” It’s an intriguing flashpoint. Maybe the guys have started to rehearse without her. Maybe they’re plotting a coup ahead of their next record. Either way, you suspect there’ll still be romance, theatre, melancholia, adrenaline, sexuality, poise. You suspect there will still be brilliance. Nine years in and they’ve yet to let us down.

GRIZZLY BEAR are a band who can see the wood for the trees

Words by Alex Denney

“I think there’s this weird sense of authenticity with beards. People think you just emerged from the woods to lay down a record or something. We should’ve done that with the new one actually - grown beards and claimed to have survived on nothing but clams and oysters for six months.” Founded as the bedroom project of Droste in 2003 and expanded to a four-piece by the time 2006’s outstanding sophomore disc Yellow House rolled around to rave reviews, Grizzly Bear are quite simply smarter than your average ursine, revelling in stealthy, suite-like expositions that defy easy explanation but repay the patient listener in kind.

here’s a strange magic about Brooklyn’s Grizzly Bear that defies utterance, even more so than the tongue-twisting title of their latest LP. Critics have thus far tended to cast the Warp-signed quartet in neo- or freakfolk, psychedelic or chamber pop moulds, but none comes close to nailing the elemental forces at work in their best music.

Centred around soaring, chimerical harmony parts and Daniel Rossen’s reverbladen guitar, which paradoxically seems to root the band more firmly in silence, it’s a classically-attuned vision lent heft by drummer Chris Bear’s understated theatrics and bassist Chris Taylor’s uniquely textured production style.

After all, what mutant brand of folk could ever hope to encompass the changeling flutter of a song like ‘Easier’? And what chamber pop dives as deep as the outfit’s Crystals cover ‘He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)’ from 2007’s ‘Friend’ EP, a track so beautiful it twists the deluded passion of the original into a tour de force of disquieting eroticism straight out of a David Lynch film?

Rossen, alongside Droste one half of the band’s creative nucleus, elaborates: “I studied music when I was a teen and the stuff I obsessed over was heavy jazz and classical music. I’d say classical music is influential in terms of our chordal choices and movements. Maybe it’s an ADD thing, but I have a problem with repetition, whereas Ed has more of a modern pop sensibility - he’s really good at rounding out the songs and pacing them better.

On the phone from the annual SXSW festival in Texas, which officially declares networking season open in music industry circles, singer and founding member Ed Droste laughs the sort of laugh that’s not just been there, it’s already got the t-shirt. “We used to get the whole ‘freak-folk’ thing a lot, which I never liked,” he says.

“I don’t tend to think of the songs as difficult, but I feel all my favourite pop and rock records have this grasping, immediate quality that still bears out over repeated listens. I don’t even know that we’ve necessarily achieved that. Sometimes I think we either do accessible or not.”

Constructed over several months in three separate locations around the Eastern seaboard, Veckatimest (that’s veh-ka-timest, after the Native American for an island on Cape Cod discovered by the group during recording) definitely announces itself as a more dynamic affair than Yellow House’s slowly evolving mood piece. This fact springs in part from a newly relaxed approach to songwriting, band members bunching off at random to produce tracks, where its predecessor essentially offered re-workings of songs penned by Droste and Rossen respectively. “I’m really proud of this album,” says Droste. “I feel like it’s poppier than Yellow House. Songs like ‘Cheerleader’ and ‘Southern Point’ are more pop-oriented, whereas the last one was a really sepiatinted, dreamy album; this has a lot more angles. I mean, it’s not a fucking punk rock album or anything, but still. Everyone’s a lot less precious with their songs now, which maybe wasn’t the case in the past. We’ve matured a lot. We’ve gone through a lot of growing pains. It’s like being in a relationship - you’ve got to let people have their moments before you go shooting them down!” The results are uneven at times, but Veckatimest scales some truly majestic peaks, from the sublime pysch of ‘While You Wait For The Others’ to the bizarre, soft-rock chugging of ‘Ready/Able’, which morphs unexpectedly into a breathtaking pop coda of the most twinkle-toed variety. As with the last album, a retreat to the countryside figures prominently in Veckatimest’s genesis, with recording sessions taking place in upstate New York and Cape Cod, the latter in a house provided by Droste’s grandmother. It’s one of the oddities thrown up by Grizzly Bear’s music that they manage to raise the spectre of the pastoral without making

explicit reference to the ‘old, weird America’ either in their song structures or their lyrics. “Every space and environment produces different sounds,” says Droste. “We saw the area (Veckatimest) and got interested in the whole topography of the place. It’s difficult for me to imagine recording in the city - it’s important to be able to flush out ideas outside of town.” Rossen agrees: “Ed likes to have his little retreats. He’s not too comfortable writing in the city. I’m a little more compulsive. I like writing at home and on tour. But some of the more bombastic moments on Veckatimest wouldn’t have ended up that way if we hadn’t been recording in this big, cathedral-type space which we could use at any time. I would just be getting up at seven in the morning and making the most horrific noise.” The band has also gone on record acknowledging the role of the internet in their rise to prominence, a fact which sits somewhat weirdly with their complexity and the received wisdom that the web is fast eating away a generation’s collective attention span. Says Droste of their ‘blog indie’ status: “Knowing how hard it was to get people listening to our music now, I can’t imagine what it would have been like 10 or 15 years ago. [The web] has been such a huge boon to us really. I’ve just got this gut feeling it wouldn’t have happened without it.” As a purveyor of an epic musical sweep upholding the grand narrative tradition, the Grizzly Man’s conviction is our blessing. Maybe the internet does make you cleverer, after all.

WHETHER WUNDERKID RAPPER ASHER ROTH LIKES OR HATES HIS DEBUT SINGLE IS ALREADY ACADEMIC: IT’S MADE HIM A SENSATION IN THE US. Words by Phil Hebblethwaite Illustration by Justine Moss

There’s this really lovely clip on YouTube where skinny white MC Asher Roth meets fat black soul singer Cee-Lo Green. Both live in Atlanta and they’re in a room talking about Roth’s Greenhouse Effect, a mixtape released last summer that shot the 23-year-old to fame in America and now has him being touted globally as quite the most unlikely man to breathe new life into hip hop. Cee-Lo wants to hear the fabled CD, so they step outside and walk towards the Gnarls Barkley man’s blingin’ ride. Cut to the two of them sat in the cream leather front seats, music pounding, Roth hilariously over-nodding and miming to his own rhymes. Cee-Lo, a portrait of heavyweight coolness, can’t help but make puny Asher looked stupendously geeky, but he’s into it - he loves the mixtape. The clip finishes with Cee-Lo saying, “Let me keep this copy, man! I’m not gonna byte it... I like it a lot.” Cee-Lo Green digs Asher Roth? Hard to imagine, and he’s not the only big gun who’s been freely handing out major props to the young MC. Rap industry legend Scooter Braun manages him; Jay-Z got him to “spit” with a view to signing him; Akon is already a “good friend”; 50 Cent bigged him up; and Andre 3000 got in touch to say, “Let me know if there is a record you guys need me on...” Yet as little as two years ago Asher was an elementary education major at West Chester University in Pennsylvania. The kid is definitely not from the

’hood. Of course no one is leaving alone the Eminem comparisons, but they make no sense at all. If anything, he’s got more in common with Kayne West. Today, Asher is on the rooftop patio of Universal Records in London. It’s his first time in the UK and he’s enjoying himself. He comes across as being unbelievably... nice. And polite. And bright. And not a sucker at all. In fact, he seems to be suffering a case of the jitters. Back home, his debut single ‘I Love College’ is going bananas - a good thing, you’d imagine - but Asher is worried... The point about the Greenhouse Effect mixtape is that it announces a new talent. White, black, brown, pink, it doesn’t matter - the kid can rap. ‘I Love College’, however, is something far dumber - a frat boy anthem about getting fucked up and eating pizza. It’s more of a novelty pop song than a hip hop track and it’s perhaps not the best way to introduce yourself if you’re interested in longevity, as Asher is. Indeed, he thinks it’s the worst song on his forthcoming debut album. “I understand it, I think fans who understand who I am understand it, but I know that ‘I Love College’ is going to be the first thing that most people hear from me and that’s tough,” he says. “What’s going to be interesting is whether it will dig me a hole or not. I appreciate that first impressions are everything. Here I am leaving the house and ‘I Love College’ is what represents me. I’m, like, ‘Man!’ I wasn’t even in a frat, and I don’t drink like that.” There’s the smell of a rat floating across this

patio, forcing Asher to be alarmingly frank. “The record label wanted ‘I Love College’ 11 times,” he says, “and that’s just not what I wanted to bring to the table. But, at the same time, if you put your name on the dotted line, you have to understand the responsibility to sell records. Some artists don’t want to do that - they refuse to play the game - and that can be hard. ‘I Love College’ is pin-pointing my demographic it’s sort of a compromise and it’s too toned down for my tastes.” Excuse the pun, but this conversation is already academic. Whether Asher likes the song or not, he wrote the thing and it’s completely out of his hands now. When we met on February 27, he’d had 3m plays of ‘I Love College’ on his MySpace page. Today, April 5, he’s on a staggering 27m. Why? Of course a white rapper blowing up (he’s not Jewish, incidentally, contrary to the assertions of Wikipedia and The Guardian) is a source of intrigue and debate, but there’s more to it than that. Asher, who’s originally from the middle-class suburbs of Morrisville, Pennsylvania isn’t pulling a phoney gangsta pose or slaying hos in his tracks he’s just being Asher Roth and, luckily for him, there are millions upon millions of people who understand exactly what he represents. “I can’t make up some façade to help me fit into what people think hip hop is,” he says. “Instead I’m like, ‘This is who I am. I don’t want to feel uncomfortable - I don’t want to feel like I’m living a lie and I don’t want people to look at me like that.’ My main thing when I was

coming into this was, ‘I need to be honest with myself.’ I want to use this opportunity to not talk shit. I don’t understand why successful rappers rhyme about how much money they have. They push people down. I would much rather my listeners feel like they can relate to me on a levelplaying field.” It applies to his image too. He’s got rubbish hair and he dresses badly, but he says he won’t let anyone spruce him up for the magazine shoots: “When I was in college, life was easy and now there’s all this pressure to do things - sound like this, dress like that, wear your hair like this, shave so the 15-year-olds like you. Who the fuck cares? Our priorities are fucked up, man. Hip hop is so influential. I mean, look at me: I’m a corny white kid from the suburbs who was absolutely enthralled and inspired by hip hop, like numerous other people. There might be millions of rappers that are better than me, but there are some tangibles that go into it - how you carry yourself, how you perform... all that helps you speak to people.” And speaking to people, he’s decided, is priority number 1. Unashamedly destined for the mainstream, Asher thinks he can “Trojan Horse the joint” and get some better hip hop in the Top 40. “I don’t think success in the music industry is about making money - it’s in longevity and your message,” he says. “If I can stick around and people get to a point where they want to know what I’m going to say next, I’ll feel like I’m successful. But I’m scared to death. I don’t have a plan - I’m making it up as I go along.”

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WORDS BY JOHN DORAN IMAGES BY PHILIP MOUNT

he last release by metal’s most forwardlooking group, Sunn O))), was a live album called Domkirke, a Norse word meaning ‘cathedral’. It was notable for many reasons - the lavish J. M. Turner-inspired artwork, the always luxuriant Southern Lord packaging, the heavy coloured vinyl and, of course, the four sides of beautiful/dissonant guitar/organ drone, complemented by neo-Gregorian chanting, contained within. The foundation of noise was laid down by the group’s two core members of Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson, dressed as usual in ancient-looking monk’s cowls and playing Les Pauls plugged into a dizzying array of equipment and amplification. For this hour-long performance, they were joined by Hungarian throat singer Attila Csihar, electronics expert Lasse Marhaug, and Earth mainstay Steve Moore.

he concert itself was one of the most unusual of recent years because of the contrast between band and setting. It was recorded in Bergen Cathedral, Norway as part of the 2007 Borealis Festival and it nearly didn’t happen. Seemingly, the regular congregation and the cardinal of the huge 900-year-old, preReformation place of worship weren’t as bothered that their consecrated space was being used by hairy rockers dressed as monks as they were with the CV of the singer.

’ll explain. Just 10 minutes walk from Bergen Cathedral is the wooden framed, Fantoft stave church. Or rather the new Fantoft stave church is here. The old one got burned to the ground by Varg Vikernes of the notorious black metal group, Mayhem. In 1991, the bloody knife and gun suicide of original singer Per Ohlin (a distressing photo of which graces the album Dawn Of The Black Hearts) unleashed an infernal spate of one-upmanship in the insular scene. After destroying Fantoft - one of 50 churches lost in a series of arson attacks Vikernes, a neo-Nazi and Satanist, murdered Oystein Aarseth, fearing that he was being usurped as the most evil member of his group. As you have probably guessed, Vikernes had no reason to fret over his wickedness. As you also may have guessed, Attila Csihar’s day job is the frontman of Mayhem.

continues: “What they do doesn’t exist on an intellectual level or even a well-thought-out level. The thing with Mayhem is... they live up to their name.”

“

tephen O’Malley gives out a sinister laugh when asked about this ambiguity, but you only have to spend a few minutes with him to see that destroying churches, or even disrespecting them, is the last thing on Sunn O)))’s mind. More importantly, he is completely convincing when he says the same thing of Csihar: “The importance of a band like Mayhem, and that in itself would be a questionable statement to most people, is that they are helping several thousand teenagers think about themselves and figure out how to exist. They give them the will to question things and maybe they didn’t have that will before.”

s abhorrent as Vikernes is, Mayhem now is a broad church that is powered by violent contradictions (other members of the group are in direct opposition to church burning - and murder), but Csihar’s interest is art and spirituality, hence his bond with Sunn O))). O’Malley

e goes on to explain how the unlikely sounding concert even got off the starting blocks: “Norway is not a liberal society. I mean, it is in some ways socially but it’s actually very, very conservative. The fact that that show happened is due to the brilliant negotiation skills of the festival curator Lasse Marhaug who was in the choir of that church and is good friends with the choirmaster. The choirmaster is the only person who can over-rule the cardinal of the district, and he can only do so on one point - the music programme. He is also a master organist and a Messiaen [revered French composer] expert and super into new music. There was a massive conflict: the administration of the church wanted to have these big gala pop concerts and bring money in for the church. He was like, ‘That is fucking bullshit, it’s anti-spiritual. You’re disgracing the whole point of this space.’ We came in on a commission for the Borealis Festival and it worked. Of course there was some superficial discourse about Attila, but music is a great experience to go through and to realise that you just have to explain yourself properly. Of course we weren’t there to disgrace the holy church or anything like that - we were in there to use a massive stone resonator. We wanted to use the space for the reason it was designed. Attila was there for that as well. But it is was a bit tongue-in-cheek considering that 10 minutes away is Fantoft church, or a replica of Fantoft, which was burned down by Vikernes.”

reg Anderson, a big, ursine man who is, in some ways, the yin to O’Malley’s yang, laughs heartily in agreement: “There were a whole load of what you could call oxymorons colliding with each other in the concept of the event. In a lot of ways, the whole thing was really absurd. It came down to the vision of Lasse who had the idea of a modern group using Gregorian chants and doing it at this church. One of the outcomes of the show was that the organisation around the church were very, very excited because they said it was the most young people who’d attended Bergen Cathedral in 50 or 60 years. Whether that translates into people coming back to the church is another thing! But everyone was really positive about it. People rose to the occasion and put politics and drama to one side.”

unn O))), named after the make of valve amp of which they are fond of using, formed about 10 years ago in Seattle, where the pair played in local hardcore bands. They were both huge fans of the ultra slow, early Black Sabbath and doominspired group, Earth, so much so that they used to meet up in rehearsal rooms to plug in as much equipment and amplification as possible, drink red wine, smoke joints and basically be an Earth tribute act at extreme volumes. Or as O’Malley’s incantation explains it: “Sunn O))) revolves around Earth.” Both men admit that these infrequent meetings were a very personal, social experience, so it still seems odd now that they would choose to perform their ultra-contemplative pieces in front of an audience.

nderson agrees that it seems odd now, looking back. “It almost didn’t make it on stage,” he says. “Sunn O))) is a very personal thing. I’m always afraid of sounding pretentious

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he group is now pretty fucking big given the extreme nature of the music, and it may be because people watch them for a multitude of reasons. For some, the experience is entirely cathartic and centres around the deeply physical and psychological responses the band can provoke in an audience: disorientation, audio/visual hallucinations, trance inducement, time distortion etc. In the metal community, they are approaching the logical conclusion of doom/drone metal. And to fans of the avant-garde and neophiliacs, they provide the shock of the new.

one of the above, however, was always the case. Anderson sighs and says: “I really didn’t enjoy it when we first played live, because I was preoccupied with the audience’s reaction. I wasn’t able to get into the same space I was in when I was just sitting in a room with Stephen. So the first tour we did - playing these little pubs in the middle of nowhere in England - wasn’t comfortable. Basically, I would just hide behind the amp.”

hose performances have gone down in Sunn O))) folklore. A perplexed audience faced a

bank of speakers that let out hellishly slow chord progressions, and then one clenched fist would rise from behind the wall of amps 40 minutes later to signal that the gig had ended.

he band nearly split. “After that tour it was questionable whether we wanted to carry on playing shows,” continues Anderson. “We thought about making it a studio project. But then we realised that the volume and the physical presence of the band were potentially being lost if we didn’t play live. So we had to come up with a way of playing the music, and in a way that felt comfortable and appropriate. We knew we wanted to do something that was different and that’s how the robes and the dry ice came about. I now really enjoy playing live. If people like it, that’s great; if they don’t, I don’t really care. But I think that the audience are getting off on the whole physical presence of the sound and I know that if I wasn’t in Sunn O))) and I was going to see a band that had a massive amount of amplification, I would be very into it myself.”

’Malley adds: “We thought, ‘How are we going to do this?’ and, ‘Do we actually want to do this?’ We don’t want to stand facing a bunch of long hairs while we play a load of onemile-per-hour riffs. It’s boring - boring for them and for us. Plus it’s embarrassing - being put on a stage and not performing or being entertaining. It creates an awkward situation. So we decided to wear a costume - a disguise. It’s more about the audience being able to get their own interpretation of what’s going on.”

oting how successful their quasi-religious image has been in tempting people in to watch something a lot more extreme than they

would normally, Anderson adds: “I wouldn’t say it was happenstance, but I wouldn’t say it was completely planned either. The undercurrent of what we do is that there’s not a massive amount of analysis involved. The band, quite simply, is based on a lot of improvisation. If you do too much analysis of what’s going on, you can potentially ruin it. The thing with the stage show is that we’ve made a conscious decision to wear the robes and arrange the amplifiers, but a lot of it is also about living in the moment.”

Southern Lord, sees their peculiar sound effloresce into full colour. A seemingly disparate crew of musicians including Attila, Australian guitar virtuoso Oren Ambarchi, a Viennese women’s choir, a trio of double basses, a trio of trombones, conch shell players, Dylan Carlson from Earth, former John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock and Sun Ra collaborator Julian Priester, and string arranging savant Eyvind Kang have produced an album by which many other pieces of new music will be judged.

unn O))) exist in an epic tradition. Everyone who sees them live has a war story about the experience; about how the overwhelming duvet of noise rearranged their internal organs or changed the colour of their eyes. Such is the intensity of observing them, each of their events feels like it has the potential to be a lifechanging. With every sombre chord they play, it feels like a notional internal dial is being nudged ever nearer back towards zero. Nothing in modern life gives you such a visceral demonstration of how sound actually works, and how energy is transferred via waves. When The Stool Pigeon attended their ‘Grimm Robes’ show in south London the night before the interview, the sonic carnage caused the camera of the man who did the illustrations on this page to explode, and I fell over gibbering into a pile of rubbish on the way home, despite the fact I’m teetotal.

nd for the first time it looks as if their recorded output will match up to their phenomenal live shows. In the past, Sunn O)))’s albums have been vast but monochromatic in their textures and intensity (as the titles White1 and Black1 suggest). But their forthcoming LP, Monoliths & Dimensions, released in June on

he album is also part of a historical continuum. The tolling bell is an essential strand running through heavy metal from the opening seconds of Black Sabbath, spreading out via Iron Maiden and Metallica to any number of modern groups. But the tubular bells featured on the track ‘Big Church’ (itself a nod to Miles Davis) were first used by Ennio Morricone. The band exist as the latest facet cut into a large and dazzling diamond. O’Malley says: “There are some tubular bells on ‘Big Church’ that were recorded in Morricone’s studio and those were the same bells that were used on a lot of his soundtracks including The Good, The Bad And The Ugly. So that instrument has a pretty huge legacy.”

oincidentally, the day after the interview it is reported in the press that Varg Vikernes is soon to be released on parole after serving 19 years in jail. It is comforting to think that, in his absence, the vanguard of extreme metal is no longer connected to extremist politics, nihilism and hate-inspired violence. Instead, it rests safely in the hands of the open-minded and the vision of the far-sighted: those interested in music purely for art’s sake.

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Call of the Wild PATRICK WOLF on how a bit howl’s your father is helping him leap ahead of the pack again.

Words by Lauren Strain Photograph by Rebecca Miller ike most artists who do their growing up in public, there was a point when Patrick Wolf wanted out. By the middle of 2007, his third record, The Magic Position, had made him a celebrity; everyone knew who his girlfriend was, everyone knew they’d broken up, and everyone referenced The London Paper for status updates. His days were a pulp of flights and lens flare; the young outsider who’d written his first two albums as a teenage runaway had somehow ended up modelling for Burberry and stumbling around Elton John’s White Tie And Tiara Ball with Agyness Deyn. He helped flog a camera for Fujifilm, snapping his life into pieces and uploading them to Facebook. He fretted about the implications of his new record deal with Polydor offshoot Loog. It was all fun, but, while he cavorted around onstage in wizard capes and dinosaur suits, his flat back in London was flooding. It was pretty symbolic. So he stopped. In a post to his messageboard, he declared he’d probably never play live again, performing a ‘final’ retrospective concert at London’s Bloomsbury theatre in November 2007. Fans were heartbroken; it appeared the prodigious boy-wonder they’d followed since 2002’s 1000-copy ‘The Patrick Wolf’ EP through Lycanthropy (2003) and Wind In The Wires (2005) had burned out - something no one had expected of a musician who actually seemed to promise longevity; who romanticised isolation and the wilderness instead of clubland and city grime. But things had changed. His touring band was in meltdown; at New York club MisShapes, he fired his drummer for being too trollied to play and gave a sloshed interview to a random camera where his proclamations about love being “our religion” were so fuelled by sadness that they were almost painful to watch. But who was to blame - Wolf, or the people who made the video and watched the video and posted blogs mocking a guy who was clearly on the verge of breakdown, unable to cope with his own invention of himself? The web went ‘pervert alert’ nuts over photos of him with his hands down his pants at shows. Everyone in the world suddenly began playing a fucking ukulele. The media machine belched him out, a mangled mess of glitter, sobs and self-parody. “It was total tears of a clown,” he says today, sipping coffee. “You go out into the circus and you’ve got this huge face of make-up on and you’re all smiles, dancing. Then the curtain comes down, and you just crumble. It was shit. I used to be someone who was really obsessed with nature, and I would be travelling through these American landscapes that were, in hindsight, amazing. My whole band would be like, ‘Oh my god! Stop the bus!’ and they’d be out taking photographs of each other in front of these mountains. I’d just sit there staring: ‘Let’s. Just. Get. On. With. The. Fuck. Ing. Show.’ In the past I would have been saying, ‘Look how old this tree is!’ or, ‘Smell the fresh air here, it’s so different.’ I lost all of those senses. I wanted to create a private life again.” He continues, pulling a face: “I hadn’t indulged in any love-making... practices... for about two years. Well, it seemed so! I felt like a total dried-up old hag. I looked at the kitchen and there was all this rubbish mounting up. I forgot that you had to put rubbish in a bin bag and take the bag out into the street for a rubbish man. When I met my boyfriend - we’ve been together for about a year and a half now - I was like, ‘Oh my god, he wants us to come back to my house.’ I opened the door and there were two grubby mattresses on the floor and fruit flies everywhere and scratched Joni Mitchell and Kate Bush records and... it was like, ‘God, this is a representation of me,’ y’know?” He laughs, half-sadly. “It was an absolutely horrible mess. And actually, rather than make love for the first few days, he put things in bin bags for me. I thought, he must really like me!” Though he laughs at himself now, it was a harrowing time. “I knew I had to go to that point in order to come back out the other side,” he reasons. “Now I know how to cook, and that when there’s no fruit in the fridge you need to go and buy some. I’ve got a water filter! I never thought I would be out shopping for a couple of cereal bowls. I was the opposite of a domestic, functional human being. By the time I was 22, I had built such an extreme amount of barriers. I was fascinated by this whole ‘love’ idea, but it was still an idea. I’ve been really promiscuous since I was 12-years-old. I lost my virginity then, but I was just... [gives a theatrical sigh] searching for love in aaaall the wrong places. It wasn’t until I gave up on the idea of it that it came and smacked me in the face. I

needed that; someone to come in and ask me how I could have become such a closed-off person, so negative. And it came from everyone: ‘You’re in an absolute mess, sort yourself out, take a year off, anything to get you back to the person we think.” I did. I So, 2006.’ in knew Inevitably, he didn’t quit; the time off merely refreshed his ambition. “I broke my own rules and did a little Dylan Thomas poetry festival in Wales [the Laugharne Weekend] where I met Patti Smith. I got back to my hotel and felt like violin.” my up picking Severed from Loog, he set up his own label, Bloody Chamber Music - christened after the short story by his favourite author, Angela Carter - and entered a new, controversial era of record-making by signing up to bandstocks.com, an enterprise which encourages fans to buy ‘shares’ in the recording, production and release of an album. While panned by critics as a cynical way of extorting money from gullible fans - some have invested hundreds of pounds - it was a way for Wolf to reconnect with the reason he’d been so successful in the first place; that is, through building a two-way relationship with the listener, which was more than an entertainer/audience hierarchy. Now, he’s now poised to release The Bachelor, the first part of a double-album story the second instalment, The Conqueror, will follow in 2010. If the Bandstocks venture brought Wolf back into the limelight, the banned-until-midnight video for first single ‘Vulture’ - featuring a naked Patrick trussed up in bondage gear and chained at the neck - is fuelling the, um, exposure. “I worry that I’m losing a lot of my audience by doing an S&M video and dressing like a tranny biker the whole time,” he says, smiling knowingly and fiddling with his leathers (it’s a sunny morning, but knee-high goth-boots it is). He’s not playing shock tactics for fun, though, and insists that his exploration of power/submission imagery has a deeper subtext than him just being gratuitously risqué. “There’s a lot of the dominatrix on this album,” he explains, “because so much of The Magic Position was like, ‘Hey, let’s have a party!’ The Bachelor is more like me shouting, ‘You there, YOU THERE’ like a robot, trying to wake people up. There are lots of scary voices that sound like computers malfunctioning, trying to get people to do something.” He talks like an android to demonstrate. “When I discovered how young a lot of my audience is, I was stunned. I don’t mean to be patronising, but I think part of it is maybe made up of people who are drawn primarily to the fact that there’s a boy in platform shoes wearing glitter, y’know? It was as though I was Girls Aloud, with all these horns and bubbles; but I’d be singing ‘Tristan’ or ‘The Childcatcher’ [both songs allude to sexual abuse] and on the inside I’d be like, ‘YOU’RE NOT ’ . G N I N E T S I L “There is this big 12-16-year-old section of my audience - kids that are probably having the worst time in school. I was trying to work out how it is for them now, growing up on Facebook and MySpace and all these things. There’s less of a tactile community for them. It’s not supportive - it’s abstract, and so uninspiring. When I was young... [he laughs, immediately pulling himself up for sounding like a gentle aunt] I used to make and swap fanzines and go to garages where my friends were putting on bands. We’d have picnics on Primrose Hill and discuss things - really basic things, but at the time you think you’re taking over the world. I don’t know if that would happen now, with how consuming the internet is of people’s time. For that sort of heavy metal song, ‘Battle’, I went through hundreds of phrases; I wanted to choose very specific ones that might empower someone. When I was in school with my cassette player and compilations from Rough Trade, I would sit there on the toilet at breaktime listening for messages. There might be a line about respect, and it would help you get through the day. I wanted to do that for other people. When I was younger the only computer was the Nintendo Entertainment System. It was just like, ‘WHACK! WHIRR! CRUNK!’ It was so unreal that it didn’t take over your life - nothing like the killing sprees of right now. I sound like I’m 50-years-old, but it will only get worse. I hope there’s a lyric on this album that’s like, y’know, get off your Playstation, go out and learn how to shear a sheep or get with the politics of your town or rally against the BNP or stand up for the fat kid being beaten up. Just do anything.” something, If part of The Bachelor’s mission is to encourage others to fly in the face of cyber-reality, it also sees Patrick tackling

his own identity. Born Patrick Denis (Denny) Apps on June 30 1983, Wolf had a difficult time at school, switching numerous times due to severe bullying. He dropped out of college and ran away from home; busked for bread money in London, joined the mildly anarchic art collective Minty and - allegedly - assumed his pseudo-surname as a teenager after a meeting with a clairvoyant in Paris. But there’s a moment in life when you stop thinking of yourself as your own entity, no matter how distanced from your origins you’ve become. You suddenly sense that there’s a line of people who’ve come before you, and that you owe them something, if only recognition. While he’d been close to his parents until the age of 16 - his mother is artist Imelda Apps, his father, Derek, a jazz musician and his sister, Jo, a soprano singer and laptop auteur - Wolf and his family didn’t speak for a long time after he left home. “When we started speaking again, the whole Patrick Wolf thing was taking over, and I was travelling so much,” he explains. “I lost my grandparents about five years ago - my English ones and my Irish ones. It was a big loss. I felt a reconnection to my father, my mother, everybody. At the beginning of 2008, things were starting to really heat up again in terms of busyness. Then came the news that my father had prostate cancer. It was like, BANG - put the brakes on, go back to the country. And it was a big influence on the record. The love affair on the album is one of family love; of coming back to say I’m sorry for everything I’ve done. ‘Blackdown’ is the first song I’ve written to my father, and it’s where I realise I’m 25 and not 18 any more. I am my father’s son, and lyrically and musically I want to rediscover where we sit together. Oh, and you’ve got my mum playing spoons on that song as well!” The Bachelor is flush with Wolf’s Irish heritage. A tin whistle trills through ‘Thickets’ like a summons, plumes like smoke from the blaze of ‘Blackdown’. Whether it’s the sound of triumph or tragedy is never decided. “Irish music has a lot more sadness in its folk music than English folk music,” he agrees, “there’s more struggle documented in it. English folk music is very similar - the reels on the violin and pipes, and the instruments - but English people like to pretend their folk music doesn’t exist. “We recently had this huge family wedding in Spain which lasted about four days. They hired loads of Uilleann pipes and Irish drums, and played folk song after folk song. And my Irish cousin, Natalie O’Donovan - who was a godmother for me during that whole recovery period wanted me to teach her the fiddle. I would call her saying I was miserable and had to get out of London. She’d come all the way from the country and we’d play fiddle and annoy the neighbours. It sounded terrible but it reminded me of all the music that influenced me when I was younger. The whistle especially is so evocative. It’s a comfort. It’s that whole thing where you’re at a family function and it’s one in the morning, 20 bottles of wine down. Someone starts singing ‘Danny Boy’ and everyone starts crying.” It’s this sense of togetherness, through good or ill, that stands The Bachelor apart; where Wind In The Wires gaped with empty rooms, these songs teem with lush, glassy orchestration. The unfolding story is narrated by actress Tilda Swinton, her bodiless vocals at once motherly (“Just a little further up the hill, boy; you’ll be home, soon enough”), later military (“Have you come so far, for it to end like this? Get back up - what are you so afraid of?”). Above all, The Bachelor performs a kind of tribute to the weird feeling of just being here and the ongoing struggle of remaining here. It’s ostentatious, it’s sentimental, it’s almost tiring in its need to find answers. “And I smash my fist! Into the earth!” cries Wolf on ‘Damaris’. “Oh, rise up, rise up, rise up now from the earth,” responds a cast of lungs and bodhrans. “It isn’t an easy listen for me,” Wolf concludes, “so hopefully that means it’s challenging for others. It wasn’t out of duty that I did this; I did it because I loved it. When being Patrick Wolf becomes a chore, that’s when it has to stop - this isn’t a vocation, it’s a passion. There are always those times when it’s all gone too far and I’m at the airport in tears, and my mum will be like, ‘Well Patrick, you’re 25, you can still do that degree in marine biology you talked about when you were 11.’” He glances out of the window, thumbing the coffee cup. “And then I look in the mirror and think, ‘Am I really going to do that?’ But, y’know, there are always options.”

The NEWHAM GENERALS rave-inspired heart attack of a debut will have you rushing all the way to the hospital. Words CYRUS SHAHRAD

Image MARK APPLETON

he Newham Generals’ walking tour of their Forest Gate manor in east London begins, appropriately enough, with a bottlestrewn backstreet known as Dead Man’s Alley. “At least, that’s what people call it around here,” chuckles Footsie. “I wouldn’t bother typing it into Google Maps, or trying to find it on your TomTom.” Moments later Footsie and D Double E are looking moody in branded black caps and coats while the Stool Pigeon photographer takes pictures, the early spring sunshine lending the scene an oddly Californian air. “There’s another decent spot near Wanstead Park station,” says Footsie as our snapper shoulders his bag. “Dingy underpass, lots of graffiti. Bit of a cliché, but may be worth a shot.” We’re taking a shortcut through a squat concrete estate when a hefty man with plenty of metal in his mouth recognises the Generals across the court and swaggers over. There are huge smiles, complicated handshakes and much mumbling, and it’s only later, seated in the boys’ local greasy spoon - the infectiously cheerful Footsie slurping a strawberry milkshake; the skinnier, quieter Double stirring his banana version with measured seriousness - that they explain what happened. “That guy actually lives in south London,” says Footsie, “but he came over to let us know that his mates down there are all singing ‘Bell Dem Slags’ every Saturday night.” “It’s a tune about those times when you’re out drinking with your boys and you’re after some female company,” adds Double, “so you ring the group of girls you know will come running. It’s a harsh idea, but it’s normal around here - everyone can relate to it.” The same could be said of the rest of the album, Generally Speaking from the sad shrug of ‘Heard U Been Smoking’, an elegy on a close associate-turned-crackhead, to the rottweiler aggression of ‘Violence’ (“I was born and raised in the gutter / So I can be a nice dude or I can be a nutter / Put my knife to your neck like butter”). The latter is indicative of the record’s repeatedly savage brutality, something that seems to conflict with the warmth of its reception by the mainstream music press. Sure, its release on Dizzee Rascal’s Dirtee Stank Recordings offers genuine media

clout, but the Generals seem also to have tapped into a middle class fascination with the underworld in much the same way as the guys behind The Wire, the murky ghetto lifestyles of which are now water-cooler conversation fodder along the lines of Strictly Come Dancing. The key, says Footsie, is authenticity. “We’re not smooth-faced kids saying stuff to shock our mates’ mums: we’ve been surrounded by this shit our whole lives (both are 29), so we’re just writing about what we see everyday. I think for some people we represent a window into a world they might otherwise know nothing about, or a lifestyle that might otherwise exist only on the news. Sometimes it can be a scary thing to absorb, but that’s part of the excitement.” Footsie’s straw rattles around the bottom of his glass as he sucks up the last of his shake. “I mean, look out the window. This isn’t a neighbourhood filled with flash cars and luxury parking.” He’s right. The near-Biblical sunlight makes it hard to take seriously, but Forest Gate is a serious place - and Footsie and Double aren’t the only ones to have been ‘saved’ by their artful sidestep into music. The neighbourhood also fostered rappers Kano and Plan B, and served as a setting for the latter’s ‘Rakin’ The Dead’ (about his friend’s discovery of a body on nearby Wanstead Flats), which includes the line: “Forest Gate is a place without a forest or a gate / There probably used to be but nowadays there ain’t.” Were it not for the music, says Footsie, he’d like to think he’d be a professional footballer - he was once signed up for Charlton - while Double says he could well have ended up playing basketball. But both agree that they could just as easily have gone down that other road Footsie’s crooked nose and gold tooth seem to justify his claim that the ghetto life is “never more than a walk to the shop away”. Nor do either of them show the slightest bitterness when bringing up the subject of Munk, the erstwhile third Newham General now locally famous for handing out Christian literature at Forest Gate station. “He’s still producing music,” says Double respectfully, “although it’s on more of

a gospel than a grime tip.” “His MySpace site says ‘Doing it all for Jesus’,” says Footsie. “You can’t knock that kind of dedication. And maybe it was for the best: Munk was always a serious guy, and when it came to performing our material in front of crowds he was never that comfortable letting go.” Letting go is something Generally Speaking does musically as well as lyrically. Its scattershot beats, tearing basslines and retina-scalding synths are far more akin to rave music than the wobbly dubstep underpinning so much of today’s grime smashes. Lead single ‘Head Get Mangled’ (the video for which was shot in a derelict mental hospital in Epsom) could well have featured on The Prodigy’s The Fat Of The Land; the inspiring ‘Mind Is A Gun’ (the closest the Generals will ever get to a ‘be cool, stay in school’ number) wouldn’t have sounded out of place as a B-side to their predecessor’s early-nineties floor-filler Charly. “There’s so much heavyweight music out there that doesn’t make you want to move your feet,” says Footsie, “and we’re keen to remind people that grime is still ‘dance’ music with roots in rave and techno. Whatever the politics, whatever happens on the periphery of the scene, you’re still supposed to get down to it. Cage [who co-produced the album with Footsie] is a real raver at heart; so is Dizzee. That’s why the album turned out the way it did - a relentless, 45-minute heart attack of a record that would tear up a dancefloor the same as a DJ set.” Shakes finished, the boys start counting out coins on the Formica tabletop. It’s a million miles away from the image of bling championed by the lion’s share of rappers, one which the Generals say is an outdated and largely illusory version of reality. “All that crap about private yachts and personal jets doesn’t hold much sway these days: people are becoming more cynical, especially in the current financial climate. There’s a definite shift in perspectives over here: radio stations are being made to play more British tunes, and a lot of those tunes deal with issues that ordinary people can relate to. It’s up to us to take the lead. Because aspiring to follow other people’s imaginary lifestyles just isn’t enough anymore.”

The Stool Pigeon May 2009

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Yetu Ya Mtaani A TRIP INTO THE HEART OF GENGE, THE ORGANIC SOUND OF THE STREETS OF NAIROBI. WORDS BY PHIL HEBBLETHWAITE PHOTOGRAPHY BY GILES DULY

join us on a Sunday in a field adjacent to a Nairobian institution meat-feast restaurant, Carnivore. There’s a concert going on and, although I still don’t exactly understand what it is we’re here to find out about, I know that this sound - this Christian pop sound - is not what we’re looking for. Yesterday morning I was freezing my arse off in London. Now I’m outside at sunset drinking 6.8 per cent Kenyan-brewed Guinness and people watching. I’m amazed, but I begin to wonder how easy this is going to be. We go back to the hotel - a spectacularly pimp 1970s construction called the Panafric. I smoke a cigarette on the balcony of our fourth floor room and look out to the building opposite. It has a massive sign on it. This morning it said ‘INTEGRITY CENTRE’, but it’s dark and some of the lights in the letters are blown out. Now it reads: ‘I TEG ITY C TRE.’ Sometimes you get lucky. Sometimes someone you worked with a while back gets a job on a magazine owned by a wealthy Nigerian publisher and asks, with five days’ notice, whether you and a photographer called Giles can fly to Nairobi and bring back a story on genge music. Of course you say yes, even though you haven’t got a clue what genge is, and then you’re suddenly on a 747 burning over the endless Sahara trying to make sense of the few notes you scribbled down before you left. This much I’d worked out: genge is a distinctly Nairobian hip hopinfluenced street music, the essential characteristic of which is that its MCs rap and sing in broken Swahilian slang called Sheng, and, as of late, it’s breaking out of Kenya and going

international. The biggest star in genge, Jua Cali, was nominated for awards at 2007’s MOBOs in the UK and 2008’s inaugural MTV Africa Music Awards in Nigeria, at which he also performed. I knew we had to find Jua Cali and there seemed to be three others who were essential to the story... 1. Clement ‘Clemo’ Rapudo: co-founder with Jua Cali of genge’s most important label, Calif Records, and something of a Timbaland/Dr Dre production genius figure. 2. Nonini. An MC who split from Calif to go it alone, which he’s managed to do successfully. 3. DJ John. Radio/club DJ, entrepreneur and co-founder of Homeboyz, a onestop media shop and FM radio station. From the beginning, there was something old fashioned about this. Three emails I’d sent from England before I left remained unanswered, leaving our fortunes at the mercy of one phone number, kindly supplied by BBC 1Xtra’s DJ Edu, a Nairobian. It was for his old friend Pete who worked with DJ John at Homeboyz. Pete was a diamond from the off-set. We were in the rare position of being in a foreign country with someone else’s money to spend, so we asked if he could hook us up a driver. Nairobi’s reputation precedes itself. The guide books snigger and call it ‘Nairobbery’ and they’re only referring to downtown. To really find out about genge we were going to need to head out to Eastlands, birthplace of the music and the most populous and poorest of Nairobi’s four sections (1.6 million people live there - a third of

the city’s residents). We needed help. A 25-year-old man called Ben, who will become a great friend to us, pulls up at the hotel in a white Toyota. Monday morning now and Pete has just called to tell us that Clemo the production genius will be at the Homeboyz studios on the edge of downtown in an hour or so. Homeboyz is based on the Baricho Road. We walk up the stone steps to the reception room and it’s clear that this is a portrait of a new face of the Kenyan urban music industry. It’s vast, slick and it confounds expectation. It was established by DJ John and a friend almost a decade ago and now employs 60 people. I wonder why Clemo’s here. I’d read that his label, Calif Records, was in direct competition with Homeboyz and that there’d been some bad blood when Clemo’s childhood friend Nonini had started recording there after he split from Calif. Perhaps it’s the worst question to begin with, but it breaks the ice. Clemo, 30-odd-years-old and super friendly, smiles and says: “You need to understand that Homeboyz is not a record label like Calif. Of course you can’t help but have rivalries with your neighbours, but the industry is still young and we need all the support we can get - we need to come together and make it work.” It will take time to realise how true that is. For now, I need a hard definition. “First, I will tell you what genge means in Swahili,” explains Clemo. “It means ‘the masses’ - the people. When we started producing our music, our target was everyone the common man on the street. The language that is spoken on the streets is Sheng, so our lyrics are all in Sheng. With the music, there is an American

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May 2009 The Stool Pigeon

Left: MCs outside the Calif Records HQ, California Estate, Eastlands Right: Genge’s Godfather and King, Nonini and Jua Cali Over: The young gun, Mejja

influence because most of us listen to American songs a lot, but genge is definitely not just Americaninfluenced music. It is very hard to describe the beat. A bit of it has that American feeling but it is more Kenyan than you can find words for. Genge is experimental - you can use a weird instrument and make it part of a genge track. Of course you can find African instruments as well on a genge track, but there are no boundaries and no limits when it comes to producing the music.” Pete has already stressed how important Clemo is to genge. Jua Cali is the big star, but there’s something of the boss figure about Clemo. Astonishingly, every track on Calif is one of his productions and it was him, Jua Cali and Nonini that coined the word. (Later I find out that other studios and labels in Nairobi weren’t exactly impressed. The Ogopa Deejays from the South B Estate in Eastlands, for example, were already releasing their brand of Kenyan hip-hop/reggae under the name ‘boomba’ or ‘kapuka’, also with Sheng lyrics, and for some time genge simply meant music from Calif Records. Many still believe that, but I also learn that the word resonates deep in the Nairobian psyche and, propelled by the success of Jua Cali, it has come to mean something more; something bigger than Calif Records.) I ask Clemo how he runs his label, day-to-day. “We do everything - the music, videos and, of course, the manufacturing and distribution of the CDs because of the problems with piracy in Kenya,” he explains. “It becomes difficult to monitor our releases if you sub-contract. Fortunately blank CDs are quite cheap here, especially if you buy a lot, so we just do the production ourselves.”

It’s impressive and, of course, we want to visit Clemo’s studio. He tells us that he has two now, both out in Eastlands. The original one was established in 2000 in the California Estate, hence the name Calif, and it’s not just a studio - it’s his parents’ apartment. Even better, it’s no problem at all for us to go there this afternoon. He’ll call and tell his MCs we’re on our way over. Calif Records “Welcome to California,” says Ben sarcastically as we pull off the tarmaced road and slip deep into a massive pot-hole. These are streets that determine their own painfully slow speed limits, giving me ample opportunity to gorge on what’s going on around us. Small fires burn, a goat looks inquisitively at dusty kids kicking a ball around, and Muslim families walk resplendent in their holiday best and henna tattoos as the rich tone of a call-to-prayer wafts serenely across the neighbourhood. Today is the end of the Eid al-Adha festival, when the Hajj reaches Mecca, and there’s a sense of celebration in the air. We pass a hardpacked mud football pitch that Ben says was used in a well-known Guinness commercial, barber shops pumping out Snoop Dogg, a store selling tables and chairs called the God Is Gracious Furniture Shop, a shack bar that shows English Premiership games... This is California - California, Nairobi - a small, religiously mixed neighbourhood in a predominately Christian city. In 24 hours we’ve made it from watching a pop band in a field next to an expensive meat restaurant to here - the birthplace of genge. People in Kenya talk about ‘African Time’ -

how it takes ages for anything to happen - but it seems like we’re moving fast. Clemo has warned us that it may not be easy to track down Jua Cali, but in terms of actually getting a feel for genge, we’re already striking gold. We park in front of an off-white apartment block - a kind of Nairobian version of a British council estate - that has ‘Calif Records’ spray-painted on its side and climb four stories to the small apartment that doubles up at the headquarters of Calif Records. The sitting room is also the studio, the kitchen a production unit. Six days a week, from early morning till dusk, countless artists hang out here, sometimes kicking it on the roof smoking weed, but mostly working on tracks, burning CDs, cutting up artwork, and editing. There’s an innercircle feel - to be able to spend time here means you have something real to offer the label, and not just musically. Clemo’s parents still live in the apartment, meaning that late-night (all-night) recording sessions take place at Calif’s other, newer studio just off Forest Road, a couple of miles away. It’s this studio, though, that’s genge’s spiritual nerve centre and there’s a beautiful mix of the homely and professional: a portrait of Clemo graduating high school hangs above a mixing desk surrounded by sofas that, after the work day is done, Mr and Mrs Rapudo will sit on and watch TV. They’ll have to move the mic stand out of the way to do so, and shuffle to one side piles of CD-Rs to get to the cooker. They’re a long-suffering couple, but they’re proud of their son and when we meet them later in the week they welcome us with a gesture that suggests that this is an apartment for anyone and everyone.

Clemo’s assistant is working on a beat when we arrive - laying down a synth line over programmed drums and we’re getting in the way. We leave for a guided tour of the neighbourhood, led by two MCs from the label. They point out the apartments that Jua Cali and Nonini grew up in and tell us that the California Estate is not the most violent in Eastlands. They complain of being unjustly hassled by corrupt policemen if they’re walking alone at night, but they’re not directly scarred by the drug-related crime that makes nearby estates like Komarock no-go areas. It’s been quite a day. Ben takes us back to the hotel and I call Pete. He says he’s tracked down Nonini and he’s expecting our call. Perfect. Nonini, The Godfather I’m in the lobby of the hotel waiting for Nonini, self-styled Godfather of Genge, and he’s already three hours late. A man my age making a delivery asks me what I’m doing in Kenya. I tell him and he says, “If you were waiting for Jua Cali, he would have been here on time.” Ouch. Nonini already seems like the playa and we haven’t even met him yet. He’s easy to spot when he does eventually turn up. He’s slightly tubby, immaculately dressed, sporting a blingin’ watch and he uses the word ‘deadly’ a lot. Right off the bat, I like him. We order drinks and grab a table in the shade. “To me, genge is a way of life,” he says. “If you listen to our music, it’s about stuff that happens every day - things that people can relate to. It’s hip hop, but hip hop from the African/Kenyan scene. The beat has a kind of benga feel. Benga used to be a

general music here from way back our mothers and fathers used to listen to it. We borrowed a couple of things from benga, combined it with hip hop and it all blended into our style. It’s sound together with the lyrics - the beat and the words. And to me, anyone doing genge has to have some kind of background with Calif Records.” He brought it up, so I ask him: why did you split? He laughs. “Basically, I left because, business-wise, it wasn’t working for me. I saw an avenue where I could start my own studio and control my own content and I took it. I didn’t sleep with anyone’s wife or anything like that [laughs], it was just a business decision. We didn’t understand each other.” Nonini now runs an artist management agency and video production studio called Pro Habo. As a musician he’s essentially a freelancer, although he nearly always works with ex-Homeboyz producer Musyoka. In a city suspicious of anything or anyone bling, Nonini gets up plenty of people’s noses, but as he often says, “Entrepreneurship has always been in my blood.” No one was going to hold him back and he’s become a massive figure in genge by setting up on his own. His two albums to date both produced national hits and he’s successfully launched the careers of his protégés, P Unit, and, more recently, his relation Lady B - a strong and new voice in a music scene that genuinely wants more involvement from women. Nonini is a pleasure to hang out with, but he has to go. We make plans to take photos of him, the P Unit and Lady B later in the week at his studio in a safe and wealthy part of Nairobi called Lavington, not far from where President Kibaki lives. He sticks to them, but before he leaves us today, he

Travel

tells us how important it is for us to meet Jua Cali. I tell him we’re trying and I’m reminded of what Clemo had said - that in genge, everyone is coming together to try and make it work. Jua Cali, The King In a scene that is small, it was inevitable that Jua Cali would find out we were looking for him and, two days later, we’re sat outside Calif Records’ other studio on the Forest Road awaiting his arrival. He pulls up in a white Toyota (Clemo drives ones too) and steps out with an ear-to-ear grin. Jua Cali is the biggest star in contemporary homegrown Kenyan music - not just genge - yet he remains a resolutely down-to-earth character who has never lost sight of himself and his background. Ask an ordinary Kenyan what they take from a Jua Cali song and they’ll mention his vocal style and skill, but mostly they’ll cite the substance in his lyrics; his ability to empathise with the day-to-day life of the everyman. His name translates as ‘Know California’ and now people do, across Kenya and internationally. “I tour Europe and the States every year and the crowds are growing,” he says. “Last time - in November [2008] - they were the biggest on record, and in the crowd there were Jamaicans enjoying the music, guys from Congo, Zimbabwe...” I ask what the word ‘genge’ means to him: “In 2000, when we set up Calif, our music - our Kenyan music would be called ‘local’ by presenters on the radio. ‘Here’s another LOCAL music song!’ We were mad! We had to have a cause, so we called our music genge. Our first songs were more into hip-hop, but after the name genge came, Clemo changed and we went back to our roots and started making those banging beats which you can dance to in the club. It just grew - it’s

The Stool Pigeon May 2009

that African feel.” Jua Cali was originally meant to be a producer and talent scout for Calif Records, but was persuaded to step up to the mic after meeting an initial lack of belief in the label from local MCs. He debuted with the single ‘Ruka’ in 2001 and followed it with ‘Nipe Asali’ the year after. Both were hits, but it wasn’t until he made videos for the songs in 2003 that he truly exploded as a national phenomenon. The video has been crucial in helping genge reach a mainstream audience, not least because no Kenyan artists made videos for songs before genge. “The advantage of doing videos is that you get the visual and audio at the same time, so TV is more powerful than radio,” he says. “When we started taking our songs to the radio, guys were listening but they didn’t put a face to Jua Cali. But right after doing the first video, when guys saw me, they were like, ‘Yeaaaah!’ So now we have a branch run by Clemo’s little brother, Luch Productions, to shoot videos.” Calif have other industrious ways of getting their music out to the people, including making up label samplers to give to the matatu (mini bus) drivers. There’s something so Nairobian about that. Matatus are a deep part of the culture of the city. A song can hit or bomb depending on its popularity on the matatus and they’re often beautifully spray-painted with images of the current hottest local and international stars. See your face on the side of a matatu and you’ve near-as-damn-it made it. Jua Cali may say, “If guys are fighting, I touch on that; if guys are happy, I touch on that; unemployment... anything,” but it’s hard to get him to speak at any length on politics. Compared to many African countries, Kenya is reasonably stable, but they’ve had serious problems with terrorism in the past (the American Embassy was

bombed in 1998, bringing al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden to international attention for the first time) and, more recently, appalling tribal violence broke out after a highly suspicious delay in announcing the result of the December 2007 general election. As many as 1000 people were reported killed and an estimated 300,000 displaced in the ensuing carnage, and it left Kenya with a government locked into a powersharing deal, the strength of which has yet to be fully proven. The suggestion from Clemo, who joins us at the Forest Road studio, is that it may not be a good thing for Kenyan artists to over-criticise the political class, not without effective legislation protecting the freedom of speech, and in December the newspapers were reporting further clamp-downs on the media’s right to challenge the government. You suspect that if it gets any worse, musicians might be forced into becoming more political, but not for now. If you want fire from genge artists in conversation, mention pirating. It’s a massive problem and to counter the threat, Calif Records are selling an official copy of Jua Cali’s new album at a similar price to a pirated one (about US$2). “We are trying to bring in a culture where guys will buy original CDs,” explains Jua Cali, “then after two or three years when we release another new album people will be used it.” Dj John and Homeboyz We need to go back to Homeboyz and find out more about their operation. Jua Cali, Clemo and Nonini had all mentioned how crucial Homeboyz has become, so we’ve booked an appointment to meet DJ John, cofounder and a genge celebrity himself. “We are the outlet to the consumer - to the fans of the music,” he says. “The music has it roots in the streets

and the ’hoods, so they don’t have huge marketing budgets to get the artists out there. That’s the role we play through some of the different arms of the company. We are deeply entrenched in the media and, through the DJing side, we take the music to the clubs, events and parties.” Homeboyz do not do artist management and they’re not a record label (yet), but they run audio and TV/video studios, an animation department, a soundsystem hiring unit, a school that teaches media presenting and DJing techniques, a shop selling speaker stacks and musical instruments, and, about a year ago, they launched Homeboyz Radio on the FM frequency and internet. “We are the only station that came out and said we are going to play Kenyan music and, as the programme director, my policy is that 33 per cent of every hour is local songs,” continues John. “It’s helped to elevate the status and perception of Kenyan music. Genge has now been around for long enough to have found a sound. It’s quality music, so three out of every five genge songs make the playlist.” It many ways, Homeboyz has brought solidity and unity to Kenyan urban music and, of course, that’s why Clemo’s laughed when I suggested they were rivals. “For some time there was a decline in production, because there was no airplay,” he had said on the day we met him. “Homeboyz haven’t been broadcasting for long, but you can already see the work they have done.” Mejja, The Future I felt like we’d done it; that we’d found out almost as much as we could about genge in one week. There was one name, though, that kept cropping up: Mejja. A couple of days before we leave, I ask Clemo if we can meet him. He looks surprised. We have met him,

I’m told, and he reminds us what he looks like. Nonchalant, brooding and just 21-years-old, Mejja already has an air about him. He’s perhaps the most naturally gifted MC in the game and the first genge rapper to achieve proper recognition from outside Nairobi. He’s from Nyeri in central Kenya, although he lives in the city now. We had spoken for a bit at Calif Records and he’d stressed that Calif is different; that the MCs there will never rap about chicks and fancy cars. In him, Jua Cali says, the music is safe. “One day I am going to leave it to Mejja, because Mejja is going to take genge to the next level. When I retire, I will hand things over to him.” Ben, The Tailor It was an unbelievable trip and I’ve only told you a fraction about it. We also hit the streets of downtown Nairobi photographing and interviewing locals about what they thought about Barack Obama, whose father was Kenyan, being elected president. The answers were inspirational. And on our last day we went out to our driver Ben’s neighbourhood to eat goat and meet his girlfriend. He had a surprise. He drives for the money, but his real passion is for tailoring. All that time we’d been sleeping, he’d been on his Singer making snapper Giles and myself a suit each. Incredible. We pull out of the hotel for the last time. I look up at the crazy building with the massive sign: ‘Integrity Centre.’ “Ben, what is that place?” I ask. “That is the most corrupt institution in Kenya,” he replies, matter-of-factly. Cleary, the integrity lies with the ordinary people in Nairobi - the musicians, tolerant parents and tailordrivers like Ben.

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The Stool Pigeon May 2009

Print IN VERSE

As a gift to you, Ryan Adams has transformed himself into a poet RYAN ADAMS Infinity Blues

Akashic Books

By Barnaby Smith

JOY When you say a thing that I write too much I dream myself a thousand-plus more books I wrote myself and imagine them in a swinging stack fainting and collapsing onto you as they crush your bones in the name of art in the name of american idealism in the name of the future because fuck you and your sleeping wordless criticism and that path before me is lit with possibility and lore and my cup is not full because it is not a cup it is a life it is a heart and me I am trying to show you something about yourself not me that a person can do anything and that is what hope is so, with all due respect, fuck you if you dismiss this because it is a process and I accept if you discount what it has to say but if I draw a line and say what have you done today be prepared because while you are sleeping and the life and joy joy will rise in the names

retty much everything Ryan Adams releases is an exercise in selfmythology. The announcement of his first book of poetry coincided with the dubious online proclamation that he was quitting music to devote himself to writing, itself an attention-grabbing example of his apparent ‘fiery passion’. Then you have the foreword to Infinity Blues, which states: “Once in a life, if a person chooses to go through these things, then maybe the act of writing them down could be a gift,” while the photo on the back shows him hunched over a typewriter. So far, so Bukowski-Kerouac-Rimbaud blah blah blah... and that is, as his lyric sheets attest, what he is really really wants to be. He calls himself an ‘author’ first these days, and although academics would tear Infinity Blues a new asshole, there are some riveting moments contained within. The book is split into five chapters, and does hit intriguing heights - from the mildly oedipal ‘For My Father, The Drunk’ to the absorbing ‘Spit Hits My Face’ and, of course, the regular lovelorn Ryan of ‘Your Side Now’. Loneliness and vindictiveness are running themes, while televisions, magazines and newspapers are recurring images. TV news on as a background noise to

some romantic trauma (in a hotel room) is a scene Adams has a habit of repeating. The problem is that while Adams does deal in sincere heartache and angst, such emotions are best portrayed when the author is remote to the reader. We can only imagine the ordeals of the Byrons and Chattertons of this world, but what Ryan Adams has been up to in recent years has been in our face - drug abuse, countless relationships and earning the wrath of Courtney Love over apparently stealing her money (she wrote him an hilarious open letter - check it out) - and his farcical, melodramatic tale often doesn’t seem worthy of the hellish depths he plumbs. In short, his conspicuousness detracts from his mystery. Maybe that’s harsh - there’s material here that goes back to his childhood, and who the hell knows what goes on in his head anyway. As with his songs, he does have a way with words that evokes a spooky, rose-tinted Steinbeck-esque mood of Americana. I was always told to read poems out loud, because they were written to be spoke. To do that with Infinity Blues is to turn the air blue: the obscenities seem forced and clunky sat next to all Ryan’s pining. It’s a double-edged sword, as most things with him are. This was a brave move from someone who will always polarise opinion, even if he won’t gain - or lose, I might add - any fans.

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The Stool Pigeon May 2009

Moving Images

N O I T O M N I S INOR

oys a Junior B

anadian C f o e v o l in their d e t a m i n

m short fil

KATRINA FILM PROVES THAT THERE CAN BE A BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED WATER DADDY BONES

By CHARLES UBAGHS

usic and animation have been bosom buddies ever since Mickey Mouse whistled a tune in 1928’s Steamboat Willie. Since then we’ve seen everything from cartoon bears singing about the necessities of life in classic Disney musicals to Daft Punk’s animated space adventure, Interstella 5555. Begone Dull Care, the latest LP by Canadian electronic pop duo the Junior Boys, may not soundtrack a galactic space epic anytime soon, but it does take its name from the title of a 1949 short film by Canadian animator and all around innovator, Norman McLaren. The film is an abstract animated short, set to music by the Oscar Peterson Trio and featuring a series of images hand-painted onto the film stock by McLaren and his co-director,

Evelyn Lambart. It may not be typical source material for a melancholic collection of electronic pop songs, but Junior Boys frontman Jeremy Greenspan cites McLaren’s work as a key influence. “I wanted to make this album about work and about creativity,” explains Greenspan. “I became more and more interested in Norman McLaren because I loved his movies and also because the more I learned about him and his methods and his ideas, the more kinship I felt with him.” The appeal for Greenspan lies in the animator’s love of technology and laborious working methods. “He’s very technologically driven,” adds Greenspan. “His idea was to try and create an art that was not highly edited but that interfaced between the most immediate path you had and the technology itself. It was incredibly laborious. Similarly with

us, we tried to get this feeling of rawness, of the joy of creativity, the immediacy of the machines, but this album was also incredibly labour intensive.” McLaren’s work may sound heavy and dense, but Greenspan insists the animator’s bold ideas and progressive methods have an appeal that extends beyond the realm of bookish chin-strokers. “He was very experimental, but it’s what I like to think of as a sort of Canadian experimentalism,” argues the singer. “He has a politeness about his avant-garde tendencies. It’s not alienating - it doesn’t have the sort of American and European futurist ideas of confrontation and alienating your audience. I’d always recommend people to watch him just because I can’t imagine anyone seeing his films and not liking them. It seems unthinkable.”

RESIDING IN THE UK, WHERE the greatest meteorological threat to society is six inches of snow, it’s hard to conceive of the catastrophic effects that floods have long wreaked upon the American South. Last year’s arresting documentary, Trouble the Water - a Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner - is just out on DVD, focusing on the 24-year-old Kimberly Rivers Roberts, a rapping ex-hustler from New Orleans’ poor 9th Ward, as she and her husband hole up in their attic to endure Hurricane Katrina. With no means to flee the city, they and hundreds of thousands of fellow citizens bravely witness their neighbourhoods disappear beneath the breach-waters. It’s a moving account, initially watched through Kim’s video camera. Over three years on, the sights, sounds and stories recounted still shock: a weather anchorman blown flat on his face; an elderly woman’s helpless call to 911; local prison convicts, trapped like animals, forced to eat paper to survive. The ensuing destitution is appalling and the irony of a cut to George Bush’s characteristically inept emergency broadcast is telling: “When the storm passes, the federal government has got assets and resources that we’ll be deploying to help you. In the meantime, American (sic) will pray.” Few crammed beneath roofs could see any TV - or any resources thereafter. The dearth of relief effort still depresses; on her return home following the flood’s subsidence, Kim and her friends holler after a National Guard truck idling away up her silted street: “There could be dead people in these houses!” They’re left to discover the corpse of a neighbour themselves. The movie’s thrust, however, is ever upward. Kim’s unshakable belief in her god is palpable and uplifting, and the tale hits a particularly redemptive note as the cohorts escape to a cousin’s place further north and the guy rolls up booming her Black Kold Madina CD from his car. Kim is revitalised; it’s the only surviving copy. After launching on-camera into a track, the autobiographical ‘Amazing’, spitting defiantly and passionately, festival premiere audiences were moved to their feet. It’s invigorating to sense such power of community and simple human faith in the face of adversity (both natural and politically-sanctioned). Kim’s story is a restorative, spiritual experience recommended to all.

Winnebagos Terribles Joke It has been revealed that the video for the new PJ Harvey and John Parish single ‘Black Hearted Love’ was directed by Brit Art ‘enfants terribles’ Jake and Dinos Chapman, after Polly and John discovered that the prefixed French epithet didn’t mean they were hiring shit painters in short trousers who’d be distracted from the task in hand by Segas and too much fizzy pop. Given the artists involved, the promo is suitably spooky, featuring “a collision between an ominous forest and a garish bouncy castle”, say the Chapmans.

Ice Pic Björk is a something of a deity in her beleaguered home country of Iceland where she is throwing her considerable clout behind her own campaign, Náttúra. Náttúra was created to promote environmentally friendly solutions to the chaos Iceland finds itself in, instead of the detrimental, expedient temp-measures currently employed by myopic bounty hunters in suits that will rut the beautiful landscape so that it resembles a giant, arid swimming pool crater that Iceland’s children won’t be able to swim in. A documentary about the project, Náttúra-Summer 2008, is available via iTunes.

Leave It Serial music-biopic slag Julien Temple is apparently making a film about those irrepressible Madness chaps. Low-rent media slag Suggs says the project will feature the band “acting” and hanging around a river, interspersed with concert footage from The Nutty Boys’ recent three nights at the Hackney Empire. It is being touted as a sequel to the band’s 1981 movie Madness: Take It Or Leave It, though as hotly anticipated sequels go this is hardly The Phantom Menace. Or Basic Instinct II. Or Freddie Got Fingered Again.

Taylor Made A John Lennon movie directed by the untested artist Sam Taylor-Wood is being put out in the US, Latin America and Germany by the Weinstein company. The film about the acerbic wife-beating Scouser is called Nowhere Boy, a rancid title if ever there was one, though the fact it was written by Matt Greenhalgh who adapted the screenplay for Control from Touching From A Distance might just salvage it. Time will tell if Taylor-Wood should stick to taking mucky photos of Kate Moss masquerading as art.

May 2009

The Stool Pigeon

Comics

The Stool Pigeon May 2009

May 2009 The Stool Pigeon

Comics

The Stool Pigeon May 2009

Arts

TOTAL TRASH

The Sensational Fix exhibition should be enough to keep you Sonic Youth junkies happy for a bit.

Sonic Youth etc.: Sensational Fix Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and KIT (Germany) until May 10 Malmö Konsthal (Sweden) May 29 to September 20 www.sonicyouth.com

n a career that has spanned nearly three decades, Sonic Youth have rooted themselves in a ruthless artistic idiosyncrasy that includes poetry, design, art and, of course, music. Initially, their reputation was conceived and established underground in a preinternet era, through tours and the micro-distribution of independents. Most bands today wouldn’t stand a chance under like conditions. If in the eighties they lurched between genres, labels and line-ups, 1990’s Goo, their first on a major, and subsequent tour with Nirvana, raised the bar in terms of the band’s aspirations. It was at this point that Sonic Youth were almost alone in ushering in a new era of alternative rock, when the supremacy of American hip hop threatened to suffocate guitar-based noise entirely. Then in 1994 Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star became their highest charting US release. Since, Sonic Youth have eschewed both limelight and categorisation through a process of constant sonic shapeshifting and artistic diversifica-

tion that has continued to this day, a feat celebrated in Sonic Youth etc.: Sensational Fix. The exhibition features artwork by influential and directly connected New York artists including Dan Graham, Vito Acconci, and Tony Oursler, displayed alongside the creative work of their west coast contemporaries, from Mike Kelley to Todd Haynes. The Beat poets feature, as does seminal photography by James Welling, Sofia Coppola, and Richard Kern, among others. Finally, in a pavilion especially designed for the exhibition by Dan Graham, Sonic Youth’s complete audio output, including rare videos and live shows, are presented. Sensational Fix takes place in Düsseldorf, Germany, until May 10, before moving to Malmö, Sweden, where it stays until September. Those unable to make the crosscontinental trek can now purchase a condensed, published version, edited by Roland Groenenboom, which features interviews, catalogue texts and archival material for a bedroom fix of the Sonic Youth phenomenon. Hazel Sheffield

Arts

May 2009 The Stool Pigeon

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ANIMAL INSTINCT The Stool Pigeon Interview by Luke Turner Photographs by Alasdair McLellan

Pet Shops Boys done good these last three decades, and they’re still playing cat and mouse with expectation. Today’s postmodern retro-obsessed culture is packed full of groups getting back together for one last ill-advised hurrah. But as their contemporaries disappeared, only to emerge whitened in tooth, perma-tanned and crammed into shiny suits 20 years later, the Pet Shop Boys remained a thriving, creative constant. As being awarded a lifetime achievement gong at this year’s Brits suggests, they’re both an inspiration to, and forebear of, the current crop of massively hyped pop acts feted for fame right at the moment when the nation makes a welcome step away from landfill indie. Yet it’s hard to see any of this new generation having the same legacy, lasting commercial success or artistic shelf life as that enjoyed by Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe. In a lesson to musically aspirational journalists anywhere, the Pet Shop Boys’ debut single ‘West End Girls’ came about when Smash Hits writer Tennant met record producer Bobby O on a trip to New York to interview The Police and gave him a tape of demos he’d been writing with Blackpoolborn architect Chris Lowe. An impressed Bobby O agreed to produce and release ‘West End Girls’, and although it took a while for the track to become a success, it eventually sold over 1.5 million copies and remains one of the duo’s most popular songs. Many other hits followed: over the 28 years since they formed, the Pet Shop Boys have released 56 singles (of which 39 have gone into the top 30) and 10 studio albums, which have sold an estimated 50 million copies worldwide. Yet the Pet Shop Boys have always been more than a mere singles’ machine with a knack for turning in a terrific cover version, collaboration or remix. They’ve always had a keen eye on aesthetics and performance, and in fact eschewed touring until they had the resources to present themselves in the way they wanted. That may have resulted in some fairly preposterous stage outfits, but they can’t be faulted for trying. The Pet Shops Boys have worked with Derek Jarman, Barbara Windsor in a feature film called It Couldn’t Happen Here, Liza Minnelli, Rufus Wainwright, the architect Zaha Hadid, David Bowie, Johnny Marr and Bernard Sumner’s Electronic, Tina Turner, Dusty Springfield, Sam Taylor-Wood, Elton John, Robbie Williams, Kylie Minogue... the list goes on. They also set up a label to release the Crying Game soundtrack and remixed Blur’s ‘Girls & Boys’ into a Europe-smashing club banger. Then there’s their own musical, Closer To Heaven, while one of their most successful and well-realised projects in recent years has been their superlative score to Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. They’re now working on a ballet based on a story by Hans Christian Andersen, to be performed at the Sadler’s Wells theatre in London. You wouldn’t have got all that from Wham! or Kajagoogoo, who formed in the same year. In fact, which other English groups have been so ambitious and broadminded, crossing with ease the boundaries between music, art, film, fashion, and theatre? In many ways, the Pet Shop Boys and their body of work can be seen more as a legacy of the post punk era than the eighties pop milieu. What’s obvious is that, since their inception, Tennant and Lowe have continually attempted to explore intellectual ideals born in the radicalism of the late 1970s, and sought to embrace new technology and ideas in art to keep moving forward. New album Yes sees them hooking up with Barry Higgins of unstoppable pop production house Xenomania. Higgins has taken the Pet Shop Boys’ sound and given it a glossy, high-end sheen that does nothing to detract from the impact of the songs, which are among the finest they’ve written in years. Yet, as we discover when we sit down with the erudite, amusing and avuncular pair in a central London private members’ club, not everyone has been entirely thrilled... Neil Tennant: Please and Actually got really slagged off. And Behaviour, now regarded as the masterpiece, was terribly slagged off by the NME. They didn’t like it because it wasn’t a dance album. Well yeah, it’s not a dance album. Chris Lowe: People have an idea of what they want our new albums to sound like, and when we haven’t done that, they think they’ve failed. They try to set the agenda.

Stool Pigeon: With Yes, do you feel that you’ve taken control of the agenda? NT: Just to give you a negative spin on the new album, there are people who’ve said, ‘Oh, I was expecting it to be like ‘Call The Shots’ by Girls Aloud meets ‘Delusions Of Grandeur’ by the Pet Shop Boys’. They said that about the new single. And I said, ‘Well, we didn’t think that.’ We didn’t think, ‘Oh, what’s our favourite record by Xenomania and what’s our favourite Pet Shop Boys record? Let’s try and cram them together.’ Maybe we should think that! CL: Somebody told me they thought it would be ‘West End Girls’ with ‘Push The Button’... NT: ...which would be awful. Stool Pigeon: That would be a terrible record... NT: But every time you make a record, you always have to face people’s expectations. Stool Pigeon: When you started Yes, was the idea to collaborate with Xenomania right from the start, or was that discussed later? NT: It came at the end CL: There had been an idea to work with them on the last album. NT: It didn’t happen for two reasons. Firstly, we heard that New Order, who we know, were working with them and we thought, ‘God, Bernard’s got in there first.’ It’s always been a strange thing with the Pet Shop Boys and New Order, and especially Bernard Sumner, in that we’ve had similar record collections and liked the same things like ‘Dirty Talk’ by Klein & MBO. When I first met Bernard, I actually gave him their album because he was so fascinated by them. There were other records from the early-eighties that we both listened to. ‘It’s A Sin’ and ‘Bizarre Love Triangle’ are both inspired by the same German record, though I can’t remember which one now. That’s the first reason. When it came to Fundamental [2006 Pet Shops Boys’ LP], we’d already made the track ‘Numb’ with Trevor Horn, and we could just imagine him doing a really amazing job, so we went with him for the whole album. With Yes we wrote loads of songs, and a lot of them were really upbeat pop songs. We were going to work with Trentemøller, you know. We were going to make a dark electronic album with him, but wrote a lot of songs that weren’t dark or electronic. CL: There was no point in writing those songs and then going to Trentemøller. We needed to go and write those songs with him. So we haven’t ruled out the idea of working with him. NT: And then we met Brian Higgins, and thought he was great. Stool Pigeon: What’s it like working in the Xenomania hit factory? CL: It’s great being part of that whole pop experience, with Girls Aloud hanging around. You’d go into the sitting room and they’d all be there with their laptops. We had lunch with Alicia Dixon... NT: She’s very nice... CL: And loads of new bands. There’s a really good atmosphere there. NT: It was a bit like when Tom Watkins managed us in the eighties. He was always after having a stable of artists, and he did manage Bros at the end of his time with us. So we’d go into the office and there’d be all these Bros fans outside. Bros were the biggest teen sensation in Britain, and that was fun. Their limo would be outside and we’d arrive on foot. Stool Pigeon: Was working with Xenomania the first time since then that you’ve had that experience? NT: You don’t get that sort of camaraderie these days. CL: We’ve always liked being part of that, doing Top Of The Pops and so on. We used to really enjoy taking off on the same plane with all these people... NT: We once flew back from an Italian pop festival and on the plane was The Smiths, The Style Council with Paul Weller, Depeche Mode and Spandau Ballet. Dave Gahan was making jokes about the plane crashing. People used to meet each other all the time, partly because of Top Of The Pops. And because pop music was so international, you’d be on the same German TV show, like Peter’s Pop Show, or the San Remo pop festival. Stool Pigeon: So Top Of The Pops was like a social club for eighties popstars, then? NT: Well, you’d all always be on it. CL: And in those days, the Limelight had opened, do you remember? Everyone was always in the VIP bar. George Michael, Gary Kemp, Patsy Kensit... The last time that happened was with Britpop and the

Groucho, and Camden. Also in the earlyeighties there was the Star Bar at the Camden Palace. Everyone was there. NT: I was there once and George Michael came up to me and asked, ‘Do you know Jerry Wexler?’ I said, ‘Yeah, he produced Dusty In Memphis, he’s amazing.’ He said, ‘I’ve got this song ‘Careless Whisper’, do you think I should do it with him?’ I said ‘Of course!’ Anyway, he goes and records it, and he comes back and says, ‘It didn’t work out, so I’ve produced it myself.’ I thought, ‘Oh God.’ But, of course, George’s version is better than Wexler’s version, which he released on a b-side. So anyway, that was the early-eighties. Stool Pigeon: What about later on? CL: The Hacienda was a big scene. There was one area under the balcony, and everyone was there. NT: Mani from the Stone Roses, Johnny, Bernard, Bez... It’s true actually - we were there for that. That was luck - we’d been up working with Electronic just as that was getting big. Stool Pigeon: It’s interesting you’ve been something of a constant in all these different movements. CL: We’re like Andy Warhol, aren’t we? NT: [Laughing] We just like music. In the mid-nineties, you’d be having a chat with Damon Albarn in the Groucho. It’s always interesting when new people come along... Stool Pigeon: Speaking of which, how did the collaboration with string arranger Owen Pallett come along? Where did you hear about him? NT: From the work he did with The Last Shadow Puppets. It’s interesting, because there are people like him and Nico Muhly, and he knows Owen too, and Owen knows Rufus [Wainwright]. I see him as a boundary crosser and I like how his arrangements are really quite percussive, like our track ‘Beautiful People’ - he made a great percussive thing at the beginning and it was really perfect. Stool Pigeon: Then again, on the other hand you recently did a cover mount CD with the Mail On Sunday, who seemed like strange bedfellows for the Pet Shop Boys. I believe you referred to that as a ‘Trojan horse’? NT: Most of the collaborations we’ve done, we didn’t initiate them. Dusty Springfield we did, Liza Minnelli we didn’t, David Bowie we didn’t, and the Mail On Sunday approached EMI about having a Pet Shop Boys CD. Our initial feeling was negative, because we’re not Mail On Sunday readers. But then we thought about it, and they’ve got an audience of two million people. We said we had to put the album together ourselves. It had to be an overview of our career - it wasn’t going to be just the 7” mixes, and we had to do the artwork. They agreed to everything. On the back of the Brits, which reawakened a certain amount of interest in people who’d lost interest in the Pet Shop Boys, we felt it was a good idea to do this compilation, It’s actually really great; it’s got ‘Home And Dry’ on it, which I think is a very underrated record by us. I was rather pleased with the album. Stool Pigeon: Have you had good feedback about it from people in the shires who perhaps haven’t encountered you before? NT: Well, I haven’t been in the Shires since then, but I know that the Mail On Sunday were very pleased with the reaction to it. I think it’s quite good to do something that’s totally against your rules. One of the unusual things about the Pet Shop Boys is that we have an ideology of our own, and then we change it. And people get annoyed with us. ‘That’s against the rules! You’re meant to hate guitars and now you’ve made a guitar album!’ I think we make our own rules and we break them, just to see what happens. Stool Pigeon: Did you break any rules for Yes? NT: One of the things people like about Yes is that it seems to have a very Pet Shop Boys quality. And there is a rule broken on it, because there are live drums on one of the tracks. Stool Pigeon: How about lyrically? Fundamental felt like the most overtly political record you’ve done, dealing with the War on Terror. Some of the tracks on Yes - ‘Beautiful People’ say, or ‘Love Etc.’, seem to be more a critique of celebrity culture. NT: We’ve always commented. One of the things that could be regarded as rule breaking is that I’ve always criticised people who write directly political songs. I think that there’s only ever been one directly successful political

song and that was ‘Free Nelson Mandela’ by The Special AKA, which actually made Nelson Mandela famous and really helped that cause. What I like to do with my lyrics is comment on what’s happening in the world around me, and society. That’s always inspiring to write about. Our society has changed a lot in the last 10 years, you know, and also the War on Terror really accelerated that, with this drive towards surveillance and database creation. On Fundamental, we wanted to write an album that wasn’t just about that, but was partly inspired by it. So the song ‘Integral’, right at the end, which is probably the most directly political song, is sort of ironic, because I sing from the role of the Home Secretary, and it’s not called ‘No To ID’ - it’s putting the case for ID cards. But we did that on the first album. ‘I’ve got brains, you’ve got the looks, let’s make lots of money’ [from the song ‘Opportunities’], that’s about Thatcherism. I think pop music works as a commentary to society, and to attitudes, and that’s the Pet Shop Boys. We wrote a song called ‘Shameless’ for the b-side of ‘Go West’, which was about celebrity culture. We thought then had reached its zenith, but it had barely started. That was 16 years ago. I like doing that - I like writing songs with an element of humour about them as well. There’s a whole strand of Pet Shop Boys that’s social/political commentary. Stool Pigeon: How about ‘Building A Wall’ on the new album? I really like the line ‘There’s nowhere left to defect to’. What shaped that song? CL: You could go to North Korea... NT: That’s the only place left! But I don’t know if they’d let you in. I was walking down the street one day and sang it into my telephone. There was also a lot of debate when the Berlin Wall came down. People were saying that they really missed the fact that there weren’t two political systems anymore, but the other political system - communism - wasn’t a political system as such because it was enforced. The moment you took the enforcement away, it collapsed. So it wasn’t really a genuine political system in that respect, which is why it went wrong. The world just isn’t the same. I was thinking about the homogenisation of everything - all our towns have all the same shops and so on. I sometimes find Britain stifling because of that there’s this mono-culture everywhere. One of the things that’s great about being in a foreign country is that, because you don’t speak the language, you can’t hear their bullshit. It’s very relaxing. At the same time, we participate in this culture, through Twitter and things like that. That was the inspiration. And then I was looking back at my childhood. Sometimes you have an idea for a song but don’t know what the song’s about. I didn’t write the verse until way on in the album. I just thought about the Cold War, and other walls, like the Roman walls, and I built the lyric. Sometimes I think it’s good to bring together allusions and references and not really have a clear linear meaning. Again, we’ve had songs like that here and there through our career, and they’re the ones I tend to like. I don’t always like obvious meanings. At the same time, it’s very satisfying when you take something and see it through to the bitter end. My favourite poem has always been ‘The Wasteland’ by TS Eliot - all these different voices and allusions. Even a song like ‘West End Girls’ was supposed to be like ‘The Wasteland’ because it’s got different voices in it. Stool Pigeon:: Let’s talk a bit more about this idea of the homogenisation of British culture... NT: I’m hoping with the recession... I’ve noticed it’s clearing out the crap. CL: I tell you what, it’s not just the shops. Have you noticed how all towns now have those horrible bricks on the floor? Who decided it was a good idea to have orange bricks on every pedestrianised town centre in the country? That’s one of the reasons they all look the same - it’s not just the shops, it’s the actual physicality of the streets; those horrible benches, they all look the same. Yellow bricks, cigarettes get caught between them, it’s horrible. What was wrong with a bit of York stone? NT: There speaks the former architect. Stool Pigeon: Have you felt this has had an impact on gay culture? NT: Is there such a thing as gay culture? Perhaps in the seventies, because gay people had been persecuted,

and still were being persecuted. After homosexuality was legalised in 1967, there were still more prosecutions for cottaging and all that sort of thing. So the gay scene had a radical element. But you know what? Everything had a radical element in the 1970s, and well into the 1980s. During the miners’ strike, they used to have gay nights collecting money for miners’ wives. There was this amazing combination of the gays and the miners both helping each other. Everything became less radical in the 1990s, when life became retro and sentimental. It’s also a genius of capitalism - it sees a market. It looks at gays, having thrown them in jail at one time, and thinks, ‘Well, let’s sell them things.’ It’s like the cartoon I saw in 1990 in an American newspaper: the German army are invading Russia and one officer says to another, ‘I’ve got a better idea, let’s buy it.’ I don’t know if that era is coming to an end now, but I think people have an idea of gay culture... well, straight people have an idea of gay culture and that idea doesn’t interest me in the slightest. I’ve always fought against the idea that sexuality means a series of inevitable cultural decisions. I don’t think it does. I think, as a society, we will always be, in the back of our heads, a bit homophobic, until we realise that sexuality isn’t really worthy of comment. I do think that behind a lot of gay friendliness there’s a sort of coded homophobia that people don’t even realise. Stool Pigeon: On TV you do tend to get

the safe gay characters, with the message that gay people are unthreatening and acceptable if they behave a certain way. NT: It’s funny because we’ve become superficially gay-friendly, but a lot of the gay characters in things are John Inman in Are You Being Served? Stool Pigeon: I’ve been thinking about Pet Shop Boys, and how you’ve kept this strong identity and kept going over the years, and I can’t help but be reminded of what John Peel said about The Fall: ‘Always different; they are always the same.’ Do you think that could be applied to the Pet Shop Boys? NT: One hundred percent. We’re always trying to do something different, but it’s always going to be a bit the same because it’s the two of us. In The Fall you’re stuck with Mark E Smith it’s never going to be that different because you’ve still got him! He’d have to throw himself out of the group for it to be different, and so would we. Stool Pigeon: What is it about your generation of musicians and the desire to keep things fresh rather than sinking into cosy complacency? Is it a post punk attitude? NT: It is a post punk thing, you’re absolutely right. I think most people don’t realise this. Punk was great, but it was a bit limiting. When you took a punk ideology and applied it without any fear of market or of fashion... that’s where interesting things happen, and that’s where the Pet Shop Boys come from, and I’m sure where Mark E Smith has come from. In a way, it’s even where

Annie Lennox has come from, but it’s not where Take That have come from. That’s why there’s an ideological division between modern pop of that kind, and other pop. The Killers have a relationship to punk music. I have always judged music on its relationship to punk because I think to have music with integrity, you’ve got to think about the meaning of it. I think anyone who thinks about the meaning of their music has a relationship to punk, because punk was essentially about meaning over form, ability and technique. To this day I have a suspicion of music that’s about technique, even though I totally respect it when you get a great musician in. But when you do, to put it crudely, they play too many notes. The thing punk didn’t do is play too many notes there’s a wonderful economy to it. It’s interesting because very few people have pointed this out. I thought for the younger generation, where punk is very much just a style... it’s possible to look at Green Day, for instance, because they’ve got the style of punk but there’s nothing remotely punk about them. Stool Pigeon: What about the difference between the many strands of punk and post punk? I went to a Simon Reynolds talk recently and there was a noticeable ideological divide in the panel, between Tom Morley of Scritti Politti and Viv Albertine from The Slits on one hand, and Colin Newman from Wire on the other. The first two sounded like hippies. It was quite a shock. NT: What you want to do is ask yourself where they’re from. They’re

Notting Hill Gate. You’re talking West London. Now, West London has a pop culture which, as someone from Newcastle, I’ve always regarded with the deepest suspicion. Whereas your man from Wire was from Watford, which is practically the North of England. Coming from Watford is a very different thing from hanging out on Portobello Road at that time. It’s interesting, Lily Allen’s first album, which I didn’t particularly like, is pure West London, lighting one spliff after another. Lily Allen’s second album, I was saying to EMI, will be big in Scotland, because it’s all electro. Stool Pigeon: The Clash and the West London punk groups hold sway culturally. They’ve become canonical. NT: Like I said, I’ve always had this deepest suspicion because I think it gets away with murder, and a lot of it is posing. And also, I was around in the hippy period, and although I was an Incredible String Band fan, I had very ambivalent feelings about hippies, because I thought it was very complacent. Sitting in repulsive squats, smoking joints. I like the fact that punk attacked it, but it was interesting because very quickly a punk and hippy dialectic developed, hence punks with dreadlocks. I think people of our generation - the post punk generation still have their roots in loving David Bowie when they were teenagers, and being inspired by punk even if they didn’t make punk records. There’s also the thing of saying no, and not always being agreeable.

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May 2009 The Stool Pigeon

Comment & Analysis They never learn, but the savages must be taught a lesson

SON OF DAVE THAT evening on my adman phone, I’d managed to complete a contract with Hugo Boss and Davidoff cigars and I was celebrating, you know? We’re opening a theme park on one of the lesser-known Chanel Islands, directly above the Channel Tunnel. An elevator shaft is being dug to bring lucky contest winners up from the tunnel and pop them out right by the Stooge ’o Whirl ride! And upon producing a smoking hot improvised branding iron made from coat hangers and a Burberry umbrella, the room froze and the heavies shut the door and surrounded me. Maybe I’d taken the gag too far. The darlings of the Australian Big Day Out Festival after-parties this year were The Flaming Bitch Puffers. They were swarthy veterans with mean looking roadies, and completely tattooed from head to toe. Everyone wanted a photograph snapped with them. I was pushed into position near them once but there were magazine clippings on my face and marker pens up my nose and I wasn’t really on top of what was happening. In the performers’ hotel in Adelaide, I think it was, the Puffers dimmed the lights in the super presidential puffer suite and put the heavies on the door. All the Chardonnay was in their control. They locked in all the best young women so the party downstairs was scant. I was

just gonna give up on the evening because nobody wanted to talk about my Chanel Island when I found myself bum-steered into the lion’s den. Now most festivals are dull, dull, dull. The music is only part of the problem. Burlesque and cabaret have returned and actually provide some real entertainment, but that’s still not enough to excuse hundreds and thousands of drunk young genital heads in a field. The Lilyworld stage at the Big Day Out festival in Australia tries to help. The festival runs six shows in three weeks, with many Big Days Off for the rock stars to play with each other. The gang of crazies who run Lilyworld were hired 17 years ago as an “ambience team” to help make the festival a more interesting experience. Very difficult work. I was hired to perform in Lilyworld and help out. I was led into a sea of black t-shirted rock bands, drunken V-chested surfers, Barbie girls on ecstasy, daily temperatures of 28-42 degrees, and I struggled to stay amused. Now, rock’n’roll is supposed to be a bit unpredictable and on the road dramatic tales occur when things go wrong, but not too wrong, or it’s not funny. I feared someone would now lose an eye. The heavies are advancing. “This is my brand,” I said. “It’s the Son of Dave branding iron. I won’t use it as a weapon so please don’t be alarmed. But I wanted to offer the chance of a lifetime to some lucky contestant to be the first to have this fantastic brand put onto their skin. I’ve just been on the phone with my manager and it looks like we’ve just got the new single into a Rack Daniel’s advert. I’m celebrating. Anyone want to be branded? It only takes a second and I have some antiseptic.” I held up the blue bubble bath. How had I progressed to this dangerously weird gag from relative sanity? Two weeks earlier, DJ Christo handed me a tall cool Trance

Juice as the sun went down in Byron Bay on another day off. “Last month we started a wave in Goa?” he said. “Pure trance. We lined up the bass bins at sunset, pointed them east. The wave is gonna be here in an hour. It’s a sundown mix. It’s gonna wash all the dishes for us.” Christo and I laughed late into the night until the Malcolm Ecstasy gag, then turned in. The next morning he hands me trance wear catalogues that he’s mysteriously sourced over night. I am firm with him. “Christo, my room was full of Japanese business men last night all singing jazz remix versions of every Christmas carol we could remember. We finished the contract. The ad is done. It’s a jazz remix day for sure.” “What? You can’t do that! I’ve taken an anti-gag changing pill. Trance will never die!” “The future’s in ads and brand name remixes of Chardonnay and Pat Metheny, Christo, it’s gonna be a blue mix!” The others are looking at us in wonder. Duckpond is happy as usual and drawing on his shoes. Larry slaps me on the back and takes me aside: “Ah buddy, you went far out with Christo last night, didn’t you? But we need you on gag duty on the airplane, you know?” I eat another half a goof cake but don’t tell him about the equestrian pictures I intend to fill the airplane WC with. He’s happy today too. Wearing a nice blue sunrise moo moo, his handsome face not too cracked to charm any stewardess. “Blue mix,” I mutter and they put me on the plane. I confuse and irritate the younglooking Arctic Monkey chap sitting next to me. He’s trying to read Catcher In The Rye and relax. Seems very shy. Says he likes The Stool Pigeon though, so he’s highly intelligent. Ting Tings on the radio. Pendulous, Bullet For My Firestarter and a hundred other weary rock stars

stare, mildly amused as Heavy Gee steals the cheese platter and wine from business class and hands them around. Endurance, gags, and idiotspeak at full volume. The suggestion of strange drugs and mystical knowledge is complete. They can tell we have the best party. Some of the rock stars will make it to the Lilyworld Stage by the end in Perth. But most won’t. They’ll wonder why they had such a boring tour. Rock’n’roll’s a bit safe and predictable. Another tattoo won’t make things more interesting. There’s no room beside the Celtic knot and flaming pin-up girl. It’s all paved over. Sydney show. What a crowd! Pilled and boozed-up loogans everywhere. V-chested arsonists. The heatwave doesn’t let up and the hyperactive music fans the flames. An assembly line of black t-shirts, rack and beer behind the main stage. A heavy presence of sniffer dogs keep the herb smoking grown-ups away. The BDO is struggling to stay cool. More concrete and fire on the horizon. In the oasis of Lilyworld, the Barbies in cheap sunnies crowd around to have bunnies drawn on their boobs by Duckpond, who has headphones made of airplane buns, black marker pen eyebrows, and a gin in his hand in the blazing afternoon sun. We hose them down for their own safety and they squeal and rub their chests against each other. Australia is filthy. Brits on a permanent holiday. Larry Chronic Junior shouts at them to line up for the sheep dip, they shout filth back, then jump in. It is spectacularly vulgar. Everybody dances for hours to the pimpy beats and lunacy of Gee and Christo and Miles Cleret. Resenga the professional African Bushman is charming the mic and scaring the photographer with his elephant trunk. We will electrocute ourselves unless Benjy, the stage manager, separates the watering cans from the

power cables. Long live these freaks who keep this stage going in the hope that at least one of the young men will learn how to enjoy good music, Bill and Ben costumes, and go-go girls without throwing up on themselves. So there I was, weeks of weird gags and crazy trips, holding up a homemade Burberry branding iron at the hotel party, flicking a Zippo and thinking it’s funny. But predictably, no one grabbed the opportunity to have the thing thrust onto his already completely tattooed calf. I became very depressed. I took a swig of blue juice and blew a bubble. The guitarist told me to leave, while rewarding all the girls with champagne. Larry talked me down and smoothed things as usual. Thanks big brother. I sloshed back to my room to do some handwashing, accustomed to this sort of anti-climax. A last lunch in Perth with Duckpond. For 17 years he’s been an unlikely leader of the only comic relief from main-stooge noise, not ever telling anyone what to do, exactly, just having a happy irresponsible time with some very stupid ideas that just might work. “Son of Dave, we’ve all been talking about you. You’ve been on 24-hour adman gag duty and been a fun part of the team. It would be great if you come back for Stoogefest 2010.” Christo puts down his coffee, lights an action-man cigarette and suggests, “We can recycle some jazz gags and make a fucked-ankle ad? Done before, but it always works.” Hmmm. I ask, “Is it worth it? The V-chests are winning. They’re starting fires. The girls are terribly confused and getting dumber. Will it always be so difficult to have fun?” “Probably, buddy, but you seem to enjoy the challenge. And we enjoyed watching you stooge.” “Okay Duckpond, I’m in. The savages must be taught a lesson, even if they never learn.” “Ahhh, buddyyyy!”

St Austell is the new Seattle, Lostwithiel the new Liverpool

DENZIL OBBYOSS IT’S time for a new revolution in rock, and it’s coming from the unlikeliest of sources, from the heart of the West Country. Hey people, what’s that sound, everybody look what’s going down: it’s Trelawny’s black and gold musical army singing in one accord while marching on to the Big Smoke to take what is rightfully theirs. The Welsh have had their time with groups like the Manic Street Preachers, Stereophonics and Duffy, while the Scots hit the dizzying heights with Runrig, Texas, and Big Country. Now it’s the turn of those forgotten Celts in the west to make a splash in

the hit parade. Lest you forget, there have been hugely successful Cornish artists before, but after those Godfathers of West Country rock The Worzels broke through in the seventies there was a terrible lull. When Alex Parks won Fame Academy I expected a torrent of talent to flood over the Tamar and seize the day, but life in Cornwall continued to be more about carp than Carpe Diem. Other luminaries include Britpop kings The Bluetones, who once lived in the county, and comedian Jethro enjoyed pop star status when he became a national sensation on the Des O’Connor show, even though he was a comedian, not a singer. Then there was Haven of course, who made a ripple in the charts, though they relocated to Manchester, got feathercuts and starting walking like monkeys, speaking like those repulsive Gallagher brothers. The sound of good Cornish boys cursing, using words like ‘fook’, would undoubtedly have Sir Humphrey Davy, inventor of the miner’s lamp, turning in his grave, and if they ever set foot in this neck of the woods again then they’ll have the Mebyon Kernow militant splinter-group the

Oor Arr Aye to answer to. Then there’s dance music of course. Aphex Twin and Luke Vibert have made a lot of noise, but they’re not the sort of thing we want representing the South West really, as their music, if you can call it that, is the preserve of druggy heathens dancing in the fields with their henna tattoos and their trepanned heads, giddy with the evils of ecstasy and GBH. Does the sound of electronic bleeps, bass and drum and SKREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE EEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!! really sum up what it is to be a Cornishman in today’s world? I’m not sure it does. As the showbiz editor on the Redruth Sunday Herald for nearly 30 years, I have pulled my hair out with exasperation wondering where Kernow’s pirate Radiohead would come from; it’s no wonder I’ve got no bleddy hair left. I’m nearly 47 now, and thought a true star from these parts would never happen in my lifetime. And then, one sunny morning while parking up to buy a pasty in Helston, I was brought to tears when I heard Jo Wiley playing the most beautiful sounds I think I’ve ever heard. His name... Newton Faulkner. I’d heard the name before,

but I thought Newton Faulkner was a brewery up Padstow way. Imagine my surprise when she said he was a Cornish boy! I phoned my dear mother from the phone box (I can’t get mobile reception in Helston) and she nearly died of a heart attack when I told her about him. I nearly died of a heart-attack myself when I heard he had dreadlocks, but when I saw a picture of him I was alright again; he was white and ginger like a proper Celt should be. All those years of suffering were finally over: Cornwall had an artist it could be proud of, and all of a sudden Rootjoose were just a bad dream about a particularly frightening episode of Rentaghost. At last, Devon were welcome to Reef. I thought this was enough glee for a lifetime, but no, I was to be bowled over yet again, this time by a Newquay lad. If Newton Faulkner was Cornwall’s answer to John The Baptist then we were about to meet its Jesus. Words cannot express the pride I feel when I hear the songs of James Morrison, so heartfelt and easy to listen to, his voice like a soul legend (like Mick Hucknall or somebody). Some would argue that he’s an emmit having been born in Rugby, but those clowns will feel the

full weight of my right welly if they come that nonsense with me. You only have to see him performing at the Concert For Diana, or win a Brit, or sing a song with Nelly Fatturdo to know he’s Cornish through and through. Thanks to the sterling work of these two modern day icons, other artists from down this way believe they can make an impact and get their songs played on Chris Moyles and in the charts. The opportunities are there for the taking, and scenes are starting to spring up all over. In 2010, St Austell will be the new Seattle, Lostwithiel the new Liverpool and Mousehole the new Madchester. They may not be household names now, but you mark my words, The Dave Prowse Five, Narrow Footpath, Two Foot Giant, Roseland, The Hallemaning Brothers, Brenda Wooton’s Ghost Inhabits My Loft and many more will be saying a big ‘yew boy!’ to the consciousness of the wider public. The financial crisis may be occupying people’s minds in that London, but down here everyone’s always bleddy skint. Because of this, Trelawny’s Army are tooled-up and ready. Be warned, the Cornish are coming.

Comment & Analysis

NO NO HOW MANY TIMES.

The Stool Pigeon May 2009

I WANT ANOTHER CONSONANT. YEAH?

THE WRITING ADAMS

TV should be a ballot box

I’d let that porker Corden have a go on my foofoo

MISS PRUDENCE TROG FEBRUARY 18 This year I decided to watch the Brits from the comfort of my bed with some Ben & Jerry’s and cake. Now, though, I wish I was there. Horne and Corden are the two funniest guys in the whole of the UK at the moment, if not the world, proving the Brits bigwigs do get it right sometimes. You never see or hear of any comedians from France or Germany, do you? And even the Americans have to get Ricky Gervais over to write all their shows for them. Britannia rules the waves where comedy is concerned, period. A really good British comedian would hear I said the word ‘period’ in that last sentence and probably riff off it for ages, whereas a German ‘funnyman’ would just walk out in disgust. You would have thought a nation that has over 1,000 different varieties of sausage would be funny, but no, Germans just laugh at child poverty

and torture. I don’t know what I’d do if I lived in a country where they didn’t have shows like My Family or The Green Green Grass. James Corden might be as fat as a country house, but he proves that if you’re hilarious you can be sexy. He makes jokes about the fact he’s fat which is incredibly brave of him, even if he’s crying inside. I’d give him more than just a shoulder to cry on, that’s for sure, and if he suddenly wanted to eat I’d be more than happy to thrust his blubbery face in the direction of my foofoo. I can’t wait to see Lesbian Vampire Killers, which looks like they’ve taken Sean Of The Dead and made a slightly different movie. Geniuses! Oh my Christ, will you just look at all those stars I’m missing out on. The Pet Shop Boys are really gay and weird, but what I wouldn’t give to be backstage hanging with Duffy. Imagine if me and Duffy accidentally walked into Tom Jones’s dressing room just as he was pulling his leather trousers over those meaty, naked Welsh buttocks. Oh my Christ, imagine what might happen! Me, Tom and Duffy would all look at each other coyly, Duffy would come over all embarrassed and bite the nail of her little finger seductively, then I’d get onto the table legs akimbo as Tom grabbed Duffy, firmly thrusting her onto the dressing table face first as I slid my wet finger into Tom’s... SHIT! I’ve got gateaux all over the bed sheets! Ah no! It’s all over the fucking computer. I’m going to have to find the cloth now. And will Girl’s Aloud please put some clothes on. The skinny bitches.

MARCH 2 Oh my God, U2’s new album is just brilliant! How on earth does Bono find the time? It’s supernatural, I’m telling you. He has the blood of Jesus coursing through his veins, that one. If he didn’t make albums just think of all the other good work he could do. The world would be an infinitely better place, but then we wouldn’t have U2’s music. It’s a tough one. MARCH 5 Would you believe it, Michael Jackson has only gone and announced he’ll be doing 45 shows at the O2 Arena! My favourite arena! I like Wembley too, but it’s a bit far on the train. Apparently these shows are called Final Curtain Call, which suggests they might be his last shows. But if he’s doing 45 how is the first, or the second, or the 29th or the 44th going to be the final curtain call? Surely only the last one will be the final curtain call? There are a lot of stupid people working in the music industry. I’m not sure Michael, who must be about 63 now, will be able to pull off all those spins and kicks. I mean, what if he tries to moonwalk and his nose drops off midway through ‘Librarian Girl’? Being industry, I’ll probably be sat at the front, so you never know, I might catch his nose. I’ll have that plastic little fucker on eBay quicker than you can say ‘shamone’. And there’s always that question of did he or didn’t he interfere with those kids? I always say there’s no smoke without fire.

But if you look at it another way, I would have been quite happy to have sex with Michael Jackson when I was 10, especially if he bought me a monkey or a flying Rolls Royce and a trip around Neverland whenever the mood took me. He could have had it on tap, in what I’d consider a more than fair exchange. Jordi Chandler got to have sex with Michael Jackson and then demanded $15 million from him, the greedy bastard. In a perverse way I think the real victim here was Michael. MARCH 22 So farewell Jade, you will be missed by most. There’s a lesson in your death that we all must learn: cancer is not prejudiced - it kills black men, white men, Jews, gays, old people, kids and celebrities. MARCH 27 Oh, so Madonna has adopted another Malawian child, has she? If she wasn’t rich social services would be knocking on her door. For a start there’ll be no father around the house. And what happens when the child accidentally stumbles across her book Sex and sees mummy being fucked by a horse? Or when it innocently puts a tape in the video and sees mummy having candle wax dripped on her naked tits by William Defoe in Body Of Evidence. The poor thing will be traumatised and will probably become gay as a result. Maybe that’s what she secretly wants, the sick bitch.

I’M coming out of the TV wilderness after six long, mostly happy years of being one of those smug bastards who says, “Oh, is that on telly? I don’t really watch telly.” A combination of laziness and forgetting what the fourth argument was in ‘Four Arguments For The Elimination Of Television’ mean that I now occasionally find myself switching on and sucking casually on The Glass Teat. It’s changed a lot, and mostly it’s worse. The fame-crazed sex people and orange-faced dancing celebrities are a pandemic, but obviously television still has the power to enthral. It’s Saturday night, I’ve stayed home, enthral me O Mighty Teat. I’m flicking through the channels and chance upon the tantalising announcement that the BBC will shortly be airing a special one-off Top Of The Pops, apparently shown the previous night as part of Comic Relief. Top Of The Fucking Pops! There’s very little music programming on terrestrial TV anymore as far as I can tell, apart from Later..., an arrogant bully of a show, equally comfortable replacing a truant Pete Doherty with a compliant James Blunt from the studio next door as it is with allowing Jools Holland to play piano on TV. But TOTP - that was something else entirely. Before the BBC started tampering with the format, before the scheduling changes, before Fearne Cotton... Top Of The Pops showed people how much fun democracy could be. You voted with your pences, and the singers who got the most votes appeared on telly. TOTP declined, popular wisdom tells us, because the charts were no longer relevant, but it was up to us to make them relevant. We didn’t care what multi-media platform people were accessing their entertainment strands through, we wanted something that the whole family could sit around and argue about on a Thursday night. Like every good TOTP, this show had its highlights: Flow Rider was a revelation - a shouty pillock behaving like a nightclub date-rapist singing a crap version of an eighties pop song with the words all wrong. U2 were desperate, inadequate, irrelevant, and enjoyably embarrassing. Franz Ferdinand performed with dignity, panache and the bloke off Doctor Who miming along. The obligatory Comic Relief novelty song was carried off by two people from Gavin And Stacey, arse-burgling ‘Islands In The Stream’ complete with an appearance from the disgusting Tom Jones. Christ. Despite these quibbles, it’s clear to me that the world was a better place before 1996, when TOTP was on a Thursday night, and the Teat was still worth a weekly suck.

Comment & Analysis

May 2009 The Stool Pigeon

letters to the editor The Stool Pigeon LADY DAYANA actor demonstrating the benefits of swiftcover.com.” An actor!? I’m not sure why little stories like that make me so insanely happy, or indeed why someone as spectacularly offensive as Miss Universe can have me charging around the room in a spasm of pure joy. Venezuelan beauty queen Dayana Mendoza is my other new hero. Very strangely, she was invited to visit the US prison camp Guantanamo Bay recently and it seems she had a lovely old time. Shortly after, Mendoza posted a blog saying the trip was “a loooot of fun!” She got a proper tour, too: “We visited the detainees camps and we saw the jails, where they shower, how they recreate themselves with movies,

classes of art, books. It was very interesting.” And she found the bay itself to be “soooo beautiful!” “I didn’t want to leave,” she concluded. “It was such a relaxing place, so calm and beautiful.” I’m not making this up! Of course the blog post was ripped down quick sharp, but not before Mendoza had made herself 1000 times more famous than she already was. “I do love a bit of a sparkly character,” Björk told this newspaper way back in issue three. “People who are famous for being famous? I think that’s fantastic!” I totally agree. Dayana Mendoza is one of the most moronic people ever to have been permitted to breathe, but I love her deeply. I really do.

SOCIAL RETARDS There’s a reason why they call it Twitter Full Fat Flyer Pack wants to keep up with me on Twitter. In the words of Cypress Hill, Full Fat Flyer Pack can fuck off and go to hell. And if anyone else emails in and asks whether some guy in Manchester with a ‘Stool Pigeon’ Twitter profile is us, I’m coming round with an axe. Do you work in the music biz? Ever wondered why everyone who doesn’t thinks you’re a wanker? It’s because each time an internet service is made popular by 13-year-old girls, you can’t help yourself - you jump on it because something wrong inside your head tells you that you have to. Think. Ask yourself simple questions: does anyone care what I’m doing right now? Is there any value in telling people that,

WTF!, Polly JUST sent me an email? I know that laughing at NME editor Conor McNicholas is like laughing at a fat kid eating cake, but give that guy a spade and he’ll oblige. Oh look! He’s watching Glasvegas: “You know what I love, right, that this band are just so fucking *real*.” Right. “White light! EEE-PPP-III-CCC. My ears hurt.” Good. “I’m now going to go to the afterparty and get very drunk. If I tweet anything else from here in, ignore it.” Okay, dude! LOL! I can’t help myself too - I can’t resist checking in and being astonished by the sheer mind-numbing banality of Conor’s ‘tweets’. Latest one: “There is a fog in London tonight. I like that. It feels appropriately

Dickensien. Mayfair looks lovely. I may purchase a top hat.” Chump. During the G20 protests, Twitter was elevated to something approaching importance - a mechanism for breaking news - but, sod that, I’m with Simon Cowell on this one: “It’s like phoning someone randomly whose number you don’t have.” My go. April 6, 4.47am. “Hey! I’m in the Pigeon office, agreeing with Square Head and slagging off spotty Conor! I know, I should try harder!” 4.52am: “OMG! I just can’t help myself. I think this stuff actually winds me up. I think I care that these idiots think people care about them.” Jesus Christ, I need to grow up too. I’m dying here. I’m really dying.

DOG TIRED Only 350 words to go before they push the red button We left everything a bit late with this issue. Monday April 6, 6am print, and our man Derrick Santini only got his chance to shoot the Yeahs Yeahs Yeahs on Friday night. If you don’t know Dez, you definitely know his dog. She’s like the ‘Where’s Wally?’ of pop and fashion photography. Somehow he manages to squeeze that little pup into a glorious cross-section of images you may well have seen, including the cover of Lily Allen’s debut album. Niall’s interview took place on the evening before the shoot. Stressful situation. Beforehand, he emailed in and said: “One of them’s cripplingly shy, the other two are cunts, and they clearly aren’t interested in doing the interview. What could go wrong?”

Nice. All three of them turned out to be most forthcoming, of course. Fascinating piece too, Niall. And, in fact, we were spoilt for choice this time round - just about anyone could have made the cover. This isn’t interesting at all. Sorry. I hate writing these columns and that’s why I always leave them till the very last moment - right when the delirium sets in and the printer starts barking that we’re about to miss our slot. Eeek. Okay, for all you people who keep moaning that there’s too much in an issue of The Stool Pigeon - that’s it’s too “overwhelming” - I have a surprise: an extra eight pages! Love us for it and, honestly, if you must have a pop,

SIR, is it true you gave English poet Norris Necante a blow job in those public toilets at Covent Garden? Bobby Chorlton, London

Guantanamo Bay is such a calm and beautiful place Hero of the last issue was the brilliant Dr David Leslie of Sense About Science who went public to tell us that the title of Mariah Carey’s 2008 album actually equated to “Emancipation equals Mariah Carey Carey.” Genius. This issue I have two new heroes. The first one is Tina Shortle, marketing director of Swift Cover, the car insurance company that employed Iggy Pop to front their new campaign, much to the annoyance of nearly everyone. But, as you can read about on page 72, it seems that they don’t actually underwrite musicians. Cue some spectacular hole digging from our Tina who claimed they greased Iggy’s wrinkly palm “because he loves life, not because he is a musician. He is an

The Stool Pigeon, 21a Maury Road, London, N16 7BP editor@thestoolpigeon.co.uk

which we enjoy, sling over a bigger stone than that. Onwards. My favourite thing pulled from the stories within this 21st issue: hearing that the camera of Pigeon illustrator/snapper Philip Mount exploded when he was watching Sunn O))) recently. Classic scenes, and there’s a band you absolutely have to see if you haven’t yet. Heavy. Got your tickets to see Andrea Bocelli’s O2 shows in September and November yet? Hurry! Forget Jacko, AC/DC and U2... the fastest-selling gigs of the year so far have been for a blind Italian opera singer. I shit ye not. It says so on this press release. Now piss off and leave me alone. Back with more rubbish in June.

SIR, I just took a lunchtime walk off the industrial estate to get some fags, a short trip I’d normally make by car. In under a mile, I spotted among the usual path-side detritus: * a rain-soaked page torn from a contact magazine * a crumpled pair of ladies’ tights * two empty vodka miniatures * a plastic milk bottle full of piss * a portion of fried rice floating in stagnant water * a large, bulging rubbish sack sat on a bus-stop seat. To ice this particularly British cake, there is a goods vehicle parked outside the factory round the corner whose dirty rear shutters bear the legends WASH ME NOW and BRODARSE, beneath drawings of a fat stick-man (sub-headed “LOFTY”) and a cock-and-balls sporting a semi-realistic bell end. It was like a boyhood birthday and Christmas all at once. God, I love this country. Peter Ness, Nottingham SIR, a friend of mine used to manage the Amsterdam branch of Fat Beats Records. As the chain is a retail offshoot of an actual US hip hop label, he often received hopeful CD demos from hopeless young rappers, all looking for their big break. One of such was accompanied by this charmingly misspelled letter: “My boyfriend is top MC in all Poland. His is best Warsaw raper and when he get on stage and start raping, everybody go crazy.” Why doesn’t The Stool Pigeon get letters as good as that? All you seem to get is bloody poems. Sincerely, Marc Netherlands SIR, Morrissey Fruit... Nothing rhymes with oranges it’s a lonely word So much for your promises it’s a lonely world Derek Dalmon, Via email SIR, fuck G20 ‘anarchists’. The real thing that’s been pissing on my cornf lakes of late is the reemergence of a social demographic last seen when in 1999 called The Doritos Gang. Back then they were everywhere. Bland-looking boys and girls dressed

in Gap shirts, aged 18-35, usually found frolicking in the park by day and having really weak sex with each other’s partners underneath whatever Ikea rock they lived under by night. Me and my mates used to call them The Doritos Gang because they looked like the stooges in crisp adverts of the same name that used to shamelessly rip off the group dynamics of the twits in Friends. “Oh Look! Freddy’s spilt some salsa! Ha ha ha! Here, can someone fumble my clit?” that sort of thing. Admittedly, these people were just harmless idiots trapped in some godawful vision of Yankee coffee stained cosmopolitan paradise. And fair play to them. There wasn’t much to do in the late-nineties other than listen Judge Jools and take smacky E tabs at £5 a pop. However, when 2001 came about and bands started dressing like rubbish mods and throwing Arthur Rimbaud references into the mix, it looked like we’d seen the back of them. Oh no, they’re back, and this time they’re jobless. Just yesterday I noticed a whole bunch of them. I was sat in the pub, minding my own, when a crowd dressed in tatty-looking pastel colours came in, ordered a flock of half pints, moaned about their job agencies, spilt my G&T and tried to apologise by introducing me to their girlfriends. Not on. Piss off. You ain’t in Central Perk no more, dickheads. Yours, Rod Spewart, London SIR, I’m writing to protest the adjective ‘rad’ and the nouns ‘man’ and ‘dude’ and, more specifically, their current resuscitation by the lax tongue that lounges idly in the collective mouth of your nation’s youth. Regardless of the amount of cash you’ve frittered away on Wavves 7-inches in the last three months, there is nothing ‘radical’ about your friend’s decision to start a Wipers-inspired positive lo-fi band or to clad himself in fading flannel fatigues. Lumberjack? Lumberjacked more like! Nowadays the good old boys can’t leave for the logs without being tailed by a mob of baying, Doritosstrewn bloggers and 17-year-old photography students. They were particularly bemused by the needling of one London hack, who asked them to explain the dichotomous relationship between noise and pop in their ‘jams’ before pressing them on their ties to the vegan movement and insisting that they “come over to play an Upset The Rhythm show”. I thought you guys invented the dictionary. Who do these limey fags think they are? Officer Rivieri, Baltimore USA

The Stool Pigeon May 2009

Court Circular Twit Courtney Love bags herself libel By Lionel Cake

WITTER, the booming social networking phenomenon, has carried its fair share of childish sleights among its celebrated habitués recently. Potty-mouthed Alan ‘I’ve not hit a bull’s ass with a banjo since 1994’ McGee, who currently stands as the 332nd worst vulgarian on earth according to Twitter spin-off site Cursebird.com, has caused much offence within the online community,

calling [a possibly fake] Brian Eno a “cock-sucker” and claiming Manic’s biographer Simon Price is “fat and wears a dress”. He also fired a vitriolic tweet at England’s greatest living gentleman, the estimable, avuncular and occasionally irritating Stephen Fry, who while frenziedly tweeting from La Paz in Mexico, was upended by McGee telling him to “fuck off and get kidnapped you fucking little ninny”. While McGee’s inability to employ his inner monologue has thus far only

caused agitation, another rock relic who ceased to be relevant after the nineties, Courtney Love, appears to have sparked Twitter’s first libel suit. Love’s outbursts are legendary, and according to fashion designer Dawn Simorangkir, her ability to shock and denigrate has not withered with the passage of time. The former Hole singer has allegedly accused Simorangkir of being a “nasty, lying, hosebag thief”, of having “a history of dealing cocaine” and having lost

“custody of her child”. Simorangkir’s crime? Apparently getting upset when Love failed to cough up for $4,000 for clobber. “Whether caused by drug-induced psychosis, a warped understanding of reality, or the belief that money and fame allow her to disregard the law, Love has embarked on what is nothing short of an obsessive and delusional crusade to destroy Simorangkir’s reputation and her livelihood,” say court papers.

NOTICE. The public are informed that..

Axl Rose has decided to

SUE. disappointing F ollowing sales of Chinese Democracy, the much talked about Guns N’ Roses album that took over a decade to surface, power-crazed metal despot Axl Rose is taking his frustration out on a minnow who leaked the album onto the internet weeks prior to release. The interest the record garnered is now legendary, as was the phenomenal cost, but the finished product was always likely to disappoint with such a protracted build up. Rose’s crack team of cold-blooded and reassuringly expensive barristers maintain that the leak had a woefully detrimental impact on first week sales of the album.

JUDGE THROWS OWN STONE IN JAY CAR CASE JEREMIAH DOGERTY

Why

do bad things always seem to happen to serial twat Jay Kay? The behatted mover from Jamiroquai seemingly can’t manoeuvre from one nauseating nightclub to another without provoking the ire of knucklescraping photo pigs or surly security men. Nor can the Stretford-born funker go for a quiet drink in a rural town without unwanted attention, and especially not when he rolls up in his Ferrari Enzo and stick dances down the street. Take a recent trip to Aldeburgh in Suffolk, where the bad Stevie Wonder impersonator stopped off just down the coast from the

easterly two-pier town of Lowestoft and began socialising with hotel staff. Enter 21-year-old Aaron Billington, more than a bit pissed and a little starstruck. What took place next is unclear, though Billington maintains he became upset by “deeply offensive” remarks made by the singer, who clearly wasn’t enjoying the company of the inebriated youngster. The fact Billington had drunk a bottle of vodka before going out may have exacerbated the situation, and the young scamp set about seeking revenge. Seeing a £1m Ferrari parked in the street, he put two and two together and decided to teach Kay a lesson by throwing stones at it,

Lowestoft Magistrates Court heard. One stone was tossed with such rage that it penetrated the windscreen of Mr Kay’s vehicle and continued in perpetual motion taking out the driver’s side, before ricocheting into the night and hurtling through space and time. Billington accepted he’d behaved “totally inappropriately”, and has since been released on bail by the judge, having caused £30,000 worth of damage to the vehicle. Sentencing will take place at Ipswich Crown Court at a later date. “It says something about the British psyche,” sneered the stinking-rich, self-righteous penis Jay Kay.

While not stillborn, 261,000 was a deeply disappointing return for Guns N’ Roses, and for a record rock fans awaited like the Apostles awaited the Second Coming. Tragically for the former, Axl finally ejaculated a thimble full, leaving Christ Almighty to look like the frat-boy who has to eat the sticky cracker. I’m going to hell. And while Axl will be disappointed to learn he’s not allowed to nail the perpetrator to a cross, he will be heartened to discover he could quite seriously ruin the hapless little monkey’s life. “Making a pre-release work available to the worldwide public over the internet where it can be copied without limit is arguably one of the more insidious forms of copyright infringement,’ said Craig Missakian, prosecuting. Kevin Coghill, who carried out the most heinous of dastardly deeds, could face up to six months in prison and be fined $371,622. Legal experts are doubtful Coghill will receive a custodial sentence, and reports suggest the Recording Industry Association of America are unlikely to sting him for the full amount. But to get off scotfree, Coghill will be praying Slash is the judge. Jeremy Allen

Up Before The Beak IRON ROD If you’re surprised to learn Lily Allen’s dad is a grumpy tosspot or Coco Sumner’s father is a plum, then this news is going to knock you out: Rod Stewart’s son has called him old man “very cheap”. It seems Sean is a chip off the old block too, having ended up before the beak for not paying his personal trainer an outstanding $2,500. Young Stewart failed to pay one time before, so multi-millionaire Rod settled the bill only to make Sean pay back every penny in instalments.

TI-ED DOWN US badboy rapper TI is about to spend a whole year in chokey after pleading guilty to three charges of possessing weapons. The hip hop superstar was attempting to buy unregistered guns before headlining the BET Hip Hop Awards in Atlanta, but was nicked by some vigilant smokeys. TI, real name Clifford Harris, is not allowed to own firearms because of a drug conviction he picked up in 1998. His initial plea of not guilty could have carried 10 years. Pillock.

ALRIGHT STILLS The paparazzi have been persona non grata with Lily Allen for some time, but now she’s got the law on her side to ensure a number of them don’t come within 100 metres of her or her friends. Lily has been protected under the Protection From Harassment Act, after a stupid pap collided with her car, then kept taking photos. “We could have had another Lady Diana on our hands,” said a stupid man in the street, probably.

MUGSHOT Maurice Young, aka Trick Daddy, came to blows with bouncers at a strip joint in Miami, Florida called Tootsie’s Cabaret in September 2007. Mr Daddy became very drunk throughout the night and was eventually asked to leave after he starting swearing at bar staff. He refused to go and the cops were called. Then, when they arrived, all hell broke loose resulting in a fight when they tried to handcuff him. Trick started windmilling his arms in an effort to avoid arrest but, as with many hip hop stars, still ended up in the back of the black Mariah with a bloody nose.

The Stool Pigeon May 2009

Certificates Deaths

Announcements Please email us your announcements editor@thestoolpigeon.co.uk

Forthcoming Engagements MR BRIAN MCFADDEN & MS DELTA GOODREM. The engagement is announced between Brian, former Westlife singer, Delta, Australian singer. MR DANNY MASTERSON & MS BIJOU PHILIPS. The engagement is announced between Danny, actor, and Bijou, singer, actress and model.

Kelly Groucutt, bassist b. 08.09.45, d. 10.02.2009 Estelle Bennett, Ronette b. 22.07.41, d. 11.02.2009 Louie Bellson Jr, drummer b. 06.07.24, d. 14.02.2009 Joe Cuba, bandleader b. 22.04.31, d. 15.02.2009 Fird (Snooks) Eaglin, singer and guitarist b. 21.01.36, d. 18.02.2009 Antoinette K-Doe, nightclub owner b.1943, d. 24.02.2009 Randy Bewley, Pylon guitarist, b. 25.07.55, d. 25.02.2009 Ian Carr, trumpeter b. 21.04.33, d. 25.02.2009 Rob Williams, co-founder of Dolphin Music b. 11.09.1979, d. 02.03.2009 John Cephas, guitarist b. 04.09.1930, d. 04.03.2009 Willie King, bluesman/guitarist b. 08.03.1943 d. 08.03.2009 Anne Brown, soprano b. 09.08.1912, d. 13.03.2009 Alan Livingston, president Capitol Records b. 15.10.1917, d. 13.03.2009

Alain Bashung, singer b. 01.12.47, d. 14.03.2009 Richard Shulberg, musician and radio presenter b. 20.11.1947, d. 14.03.2009 Edmund Hockridge, singer b. 09.08.1919, d. 15.03.2009 Jack Lawrence, songwriter b. 07.04.1912, d. 15.03.2009 Mel Brown, guitarist b. 07.10.1939, d. 20.03.2009 Uriel Jones, drummer b. 13.06.1934, d. 23.03.2009 Ian Newtion, one-hit wonderman b. 14.01.1964, d. 22.03.2009 Dan Seals, singer b. 08.02.1948, d. 25.03.2009 Arne Bendiken, singer/record producer b. 19.10.1926, d. 26.03.2009

A M AU R I C E J A R R E

late starter, Maurice Jarre first earned critical acclaim in 1962 with the score for Lawrence Of Arabia, for which he won an Oscar. In a career that spanned four decades and over 150 film compositions, he went on to write two further Oscar-winning scores for Doctor Zhivago (1967) and A Passage To India (1984). Born in Lyon in 1924, Jarre’s work eventually brought him to California in the sixties, where he scored the films of some of

the industry’s biggest names, including Hitchcock, David Lean and Luscino Visconti. In the eighties he became a pioneer in the use of synths in scores, transforming traditional orchestral arrangements through blending acoustic and electronic techniques in Witness (1985), The Year Of Living Dangerously (1990) and Fatal Attraction (1987). His firstborn, Jean Michel, followed in his father’s footsteps and took electronic music to the stadiums. Maurice is also survived by his four ex-wives and two other progeny, Stephanie and Kevin. The recipient of numerous accolades, including two Baftas, four Golden Globes and a Grammy, Jarre was awarded a lifetime achievement award at the Berlin International Film Festival in February, one of his last public appearances. His last composition was for the 2001 TV movie, Uprising. He died in Los Angeles at the age of 84, following a battle with cancer. HS

MAURICE JARRE, pioneering composer b. 13.9.1924, d. 29.3.2009

S E L E C TA D I S C

electadisc, one of the world’s great and truly independent record shops has finally shut up shop. The Midlands’ pre-

eminent music vendor was never just a great place to hang out - though with a legendary cast of staff and regular punters alike, it was always that - but a regular pioneer and lifelong torchbearer for selfdetermination, far beyond its purpose as a music retailer. It began as a Nottingham market stall in 1966, soon abetting the Northern Soul scene as the UK’s first regular importer of US vinyl, and also minting its own label to reissue popular sides (the store later enjoyed similar recognition at the forefront of the eighties house/garage movement). Bands that have performed in-store include The Clash, and a visit to the Market Street shop was a must for any touring act worth its salt. An irrevocable decline in music sales and competition from the boom-and-bust Fopp chain withered the business’s turnover, and as the satellite Selectadisc store in London (immortalised on Oasis’s second album sleeve) was recently purchased by Sister Ray, the shrinking HQ was left to battle on alone. The pandemic download disease has now claimed most of the UK’s indies, yet nobody ever thought the weathered Notts champ would fall. A sad day. DB SELECTADISC, record shop b. 1966, d. 29.03.2009

Marriages

ADAMS - MOORE. On Tuesday March 10, in Georgia, Ryan, singer and writer, to Mandy, singer and actress. ROBINSON - BEDINGFIELD. On Saturday March 21, in Malibu, Matt, documentary filmmaker, to Natasha, singer.

Births

JONES - ELLIS-BEXTER. On Saturday February 7, to Sophie and Richard, a beautiful son, Kit Valentine. BRONFMAN - ARULPRAGASAM. On Wednesday February 11, to Maya (M.I.A.) and Ben, a lovely boy Ikhyd Edgar Arular Bronfman, or maybe it’s Ickitt. STARR - CHISHOLM. On Sunday February 22, to Melanie and Thomas, a bouncing baby girl, Scarlet.

Divorces The divorce is announced between PEACHES GELDOF, socialite twat, and MAX DRUMMEY, musician. The divorce is announced between RACHEL ROY, fashion designer, and DAMON DASH, Roc-a-fella co-founder.

‘Check The Bucket’ man Eddie Bo kicks it The

world has lost another much-adored musical genius in the New Orleans vocalist-pianist Eddie Bo. From 1955 until his passing, he played, produced and performed tirelessly (almost daily up until the 1970s) and is associated with many of the city’s great names. One of the brightest lights in a place already so rich in talent, he was taught piano at home and college-schooled in arrangement and composition. His first recording - piano backing on an Al Collins R&B number so sleazy that the radio refused to air it - serendipitously appeared as the debut release of the majestic Ace label (one of America’s finest ever independents). Impressed, Ace’s second release

proudly bore ‘Little Bo’ as the artist. Throughout the 1950s Eddie cut everything from ferocious rock’n’roll to blues ballads to teen pop. An early 1960s novelty hit, ‘Check Mr Popeye’, spawning a national ‘Popeye’ dance craze, kept Bo’s bank manager humming for many years and by the late sixties, after a myriad of productions for locals great and small, Eddie’s groove had become a thing quite his own. Developing the rugged, syncopated ‘junker’ sound peculiar to his hometown, he rattled out a string of unique funk classics including ‘Hook And Sling’, ‘Check Your Bucket’, ‘The Thang’ and ‘Can You Handle It’, plus countless others under pseudonyms and as productions for

other local stars, many of which are regarded as the finest of the oeuvre. Musicians featured on the sessions, particularly the drummers Smokey Johnson and James Black, whose incredible staccato hammering shaped the N.O. Funk sound, have also gone on to adoration and acclaim. Despite not cutting an album until the third decade of his career, Eddie was arguably New Orleans’s most prolific artist; singles bearing his touch saw release on almost 50 record labels, and as testament to this and the city’s odd insularity (some of these records struggled for distribution beyond Louisiana and are now almost impossible to locate), a complete discography of his work has yet to emerge. If not a household

name outside of the Big Easy - where May 22nd has been ‘Eddie Bo Day’ for some years - his artistry and vitality is more often recognised in the music bearing his influence, not least in the form of samples. After James Brown, he’s one of the most ‘lifted’ artists in hip hop. He spent much of his later life livening festivals and holding court at the nightspots he ran. Eddie Bo died of heart failure just a summer shy of his 80th birthday. As fitting testament to his infectious spirit, his funeral request was to forgo a formal ceremony for a lively tribute, in true N’Awlins style. Daddy Bones EDWIN JOSEPH BOCAGE, funk vocalist-pianist b. 20.09.1929, d. 18.03.2009

The Stool Pigeon May 2009

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May 2009 The Stool Pigeon

D I C K

HILBURN

A STOOL PIGEON CELEBRATION

“ T H E Q UA RT E R M A N ”

Dick Hilburn was born in North Carolina on January 15, 1918 with only a single arm and no legs. He got around on a custom-made skateboard using his one arm to propel and steer himself, which resulted in tremendous upper body strength. His disability didn’t stop him from becoming a well-known commercial sign artist, and he painted banners, trucks and shop fronts including his very own tattoo parlour. Natural business acumen led him to invest his money and become the owner and runner of his own side-show in which he exhibited himself and other acts. He made enough money to support all his acts generously and in the off season he even ran a local diner. Hilburn’s success was not limited to business: he was also a successful lover and married a woman who had all of her limbs. He ran his shows until his sudden death in 1971, at which point his widow took over the businesses.

SMOOTH CRIMINALS

HIS FREAKSHOW is worth the entrance fee just to ponder at these two bizarre and spiky examples of our species again for a few minutes. Both are captured here looking pretty slick in tailored work wear. One gets paid to get people off and the other hasn’t been paid for much

except talking about getting himself off in any way he can. We’re only months away from this ghoulish cut and paste job sitting atop an elephant and walking, Henry Mancini-style, into the ring again. That’s enough to bring a smile to even the stiffest of gaits.

ONE HIT WONDERS

WORDSEARCH HEY SHUDDUPA YA FACE! THIS LOT ONLY HAD ONE CHANCE BUT IN SOME CASES THEY JUST WON’T GO AWAY. WHISTLE THEM WHILE YOU FIND THE CAPITAL LETTERS ONLY. Carl DOUGLAS NENA AFROMAN MARRS Jilted JOHN Bobby MCFERRIN Dee LITE Arthur BROWN FALCO The Weather GIRLS Vanessa PARADIS Lou BEGA Richard HARRIS Toni BASIL Flying LIZARDS Bobby PICKETT The KNACK MILLIE RENEE & RENATO Joe DOLCE Babylon ZOO Ben E KING Chesney HAWKES The BUGGLES Baha MEN

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The Stool Pigeon May 2009

Sound & Vision Box Shot

DVD Choice JENNIE LIVINGSTON Paris Is Burning Second Sight Dorian Corey sits relaxed in a dim lit room, pasting foundation into the cracks in his face. Green boas hang draped from walls and a stuffed owl perches moodily with its back to the camera as Corey discusses preparations for tonight’s drag ball. “They’re very intense affairs but I guess that’s what makes them fun,” purrs the veteran drag queen, applying make-up in a shaving mirror. “Like a good movie... if there’s no emotion you don’t enjoy it.” Extending Corey’s logic, Paris Is Burning is a fantastic movie. A besotted exploration of the black and Latino drag subculture of late-eighties New York, the film harnesses all its emotion behind a lacquer of artifice maintained by the ironic pedantry that surrounds each ball. For Harlem’s gay ‘children’ it’s all about perfecting a look that fits within one of the balls’ apparently endless sub-categories - ‘Luscious Body’, ‘Executive Realness’, ‘Winter Sportswear’, ‘Butch Queen First Time In Drags At A Ball’. The aim in many of the categories is to appear as ‘real’ as you can while on parade. If the panel of judges think you could blend in with real-life executives, even though you’re sleeping under Harlem Pier and shoplifted your outfit from a department store uptown, you’ve a chance at hauling off a farcically proportioned trophy. It’s not all about mimicking The Norms, though. The subculture has an argot all its own - each ‘child’ is inducted into a ‘house’. Described variously as a “family” and a “gay street gang”, some of the 1990 film’s best footage follows the various houses mincing about the streets of Manhattan, confident of their family’s protection. That sense of protection seeps into the scene’s slang and rituals. When brushing up against taunting straights, each queen is equipped with a rehearsed ‘reading’, a bitchy patter designed to outwit or win over street hecklers depending on the intensity of their distaste. As explained, though, ‘readings’ are fairly ineffectual when it’s queen vs. queen; everyone’s black and everyone’s queer, so insults are often reflected. The solution is ‘vogueing’, its derisory, superior poses the one element of the demimonde that went overground courtesy of the Madonna single. The end of the film documents the rise of vogueing and its hero Willi Ninja while the scene’s foundation begins to smear in the face of AIDS.

Queens of British Pop: Episode 1

BBC1

pat on the back for Auntie for commissioning this enlightening and entertaining documentary series, especially when most music coverage on television at the moment is vapid, cashing in on an obsession with seeing lacklustre bands inadvertently promoting rubbish beer and mobile phones. The question goes begging, why so long? Historical music documentaries are almost bound by default to include the usual suspects - The Who, Stones, Hendrix, Beatles - and while two of that list are unavoidably mentioned in passing here, this one-hour film refreshingly focuses on seminal artists of the fairer sex. the introduction, narrator Liza Tarbuck asserts that, in recent times, men have lost their voice as the charts have become invaded by innovative and alluring filles. She almost suggests that the pop world has always been an exclusively male domain. Sure, the boys have dominated, but the idea that women have not been able to flourish in chart music is something of a myth, and revisionist in the extreme. Admittedly the road to success may have been strewn with more obstacles, but true geniuses like Dusty Springfield and Kate Bush inevitably surface to the top and always have done. Justifying a series because Amy Winehouse and Girls Aloud have recently sold a lot of records seems a weak excuse for the late arrival of such a celebration, but it’s here now, which is enough vindication in itself, and I’ll say no more about it. prefer not to be churlish about the choices made in Episode 1, because on the whole I thought they were excellent, though it did seem a shame that Siouxsie Sioux and Marianne Faithfull, whose stories are remarkable and interesting, were allotted the same space as Suzi Quatro. A token American adopted by a British svengali, Quatro was certainly big in the 1970s, but does the fact she was more than adequate playing Fonzie’s girlfriend in //Happy Days// equate the same significance as Kate Bush inventing ambient pop? Each story was told well, if fleetingly, and hopefully the artists will have a cataclysmic effect on the uninitiated watching, who can then seek out the music they were most turned onto. contributions made by talking heads were also hit and miss. Lulu tearfully remembering Dustyseemed gratuitous given that there was little context offered other than the fact Springfield was tortured. Mark Radcliffe came across like a slightly out of touch man who may have spent more hours masturbating over Sandie Shaw than listening to her. John Lydon’s childlike wonder when he talked about Kate Bush was unexpectedly delightful, however, and Kate’s brother John Carder Bush, a kind of Nordic overlord from another dimension, did little to enlighten, only amplifying her enigmatic character further. Which is exactly the sort of thing you want. certainly be interesting to see how this series progresses and who will be featured, and whether or not today’s artists will stand up to the extraordinary standards set by the innovators in this first slice of a well-made, insightful piece. Jeremy Allen

During

I’d

The

It’ll

Also out now... STEVE BAREN Electric Dreams Second Sight

CARLA GARAPEDIAN Screamers SonyBMG

KEN RUSSELL Lisztomania Digital Classics

JOEL SILBERG Breakdance 1 & 2 MGM

“Miles (Lenny Von Dohlen) is helpless, hopeless and about to blow the fuse.” But the lucky thankless bastard gets a hottie moving next door (Virginia Madsen). She steals my heart at first glance. I wanna steal a piece of that innocent freshness and put some guilt in those shiny eyes. The star of the show is Miles and his computer, Edgar, which decides to mess up his life, and the awesome eighties soundtrack - Culture Club, Heaven 17, Jeff Lynne, Giorgio Moroder and goddamn Phil Oakley and his leather jacket. After the movie I’m feeling THAT song while cycling to work and wanting the neighbour’s girl to be mine. This movie is awesome and stupid. Definite feel-good food for your eyes and ears alike.

In an effort to raise the profile of the largely overlooked Armenian genocide, polemical metallers System Of A Down join with director Carla Garapedian for Screamers, 90 minutes of recorded live shows interspersed with hard-hitting documentary-style footage. Using their Armenian heritage as a starting point, SOD present the case against genocide from Rwanda to the Holocaust, with graphic images and first-hand accounts. Nonetheless, Screamers is limited in appeal to existing fans of the band no one else could sit through their messianic performances. And while their cause is no doubt a worthy one, SOD’s attitude is unhelpfully extremist at times, especially when an irate Serj announces “it’s time to make the Turkish government pay for their fucking crime!”

This preposterous 1975 costume drama sees Roger Daltrey hooking up with Ken Russell again in the title role with Paul Nicholas as Franz Liszt’s rival Richard Wagner. Ringo Starr makes an appearance as The Pope who forbids Liszt to marry a beautiful Princess and even Rick Wakeman gets a look in as Odin God Thor. It is beautifully shot, looks like it was a hoot to make, and it’s worth watching for the crazy accents alone. Liszt really is the superstar complete with sex and rock’n’roll stage invasions, and Daltrey pulls out all the stops for a riotous performance. Mention must go to Ken’s wife at the time, Shirley Russell, for the most wonderful costume design. Well worth a look on a wet and windy Sunday.

Sitting comfortably? In lilac tights? And turquoise legwarmers? Girls too? Then let us revisit the two campest phenomena ever to be associated with hip hop culture, as Turbo and Ozone (“They’re our street names!”) and their earnest, classically trained ‘dahnce’ protégé, Kelly, battle rival toughs, ignorant authorities and evil property developers with the power of (wait for it) breakdancing. Because breakin’ is where it’s at. Twenty-five years on, these films’ claims to have busted the breakin’ phenomenon worldwide still stand, and though it’s all sunny kids’ stuff, scripted by apes, acted by fencepost and fruitier than Carmen Miranda’s headgear, you will be poppin’ by the end of either flick - plus, the Ollie & Jerry theme was perhaps the catchiest song of the eighties.

Reviews

May 2009 The Stool Pigeon

Long Players THE HORRORS Primary Colours XL In retrospect we should have seen it coming. After all, the advent of Spider And The Flies - a side project pursued by Tomethy Furse and Rhys Webb - served notice that The Horrors’ inspirations stretched far beyond sixties novelty garage rock records. Yet nothing could fully prepare you for Primary Colours and the sonic overhaul that comes with it. The Horrors are still a ‘record collection rock’ band who wear their influences on their perfectly cut sleeves, but this second album draws on very different eras than did their debut, Strange House. Plainly, there has been an embrace of krautrock - particularly Neu!, who cast a long shadow over pulsing eight-minute comeback single ‘Sea Within A Sea’. A more esoteric genre, namely Swiss post punk, is tapped within ‘Scarlet Fields’, which seems a straightforward rewrite of Grauzone’s hypnotic 1981 single ‘Eisbaer’. Equally surprising references pitch up elsewhere. ‘I Can’t Control Myself ’ is a close cousin of Spiritualized ’s ‘Come Together’, while the vocal running through the fearsome ‘New Ice Age’ evokes The

A-TRAK Fabric Live Fabric A scratch champ, Kid Sister’s beau and Kayne’s touring DJ, but this mix for Fabric’s Live series is a blatant attempt to prove that it’s not all hip hop and f-f-f-f-fresh cuts with the Canadian wunderkid. Throbbing Chicago house, wobbly electro, Bmore and disco all get a look in and, as you’d expect from a master, he’s knitted his sweater together with proppa skill. The lad’s put a donk on his usual shtick and it works.

THE BLACK DOG Further Vexations Soma They may have formed as a spinoff from Warp act Plaid, but The Black Dog easily outstripped them as a techno act that worked with equal efficiency on the home stereo or as an addition to the discerning DJs’ record bag. Here, the strange edges of yore that famously had them knocked back for a remix by Mr Fingers for being “too weird” have been sanded away. It nods to the sleek lines of the Belleville Three, but is the absolute opposite of boring.

BRAKES Touchdown Fat Cat Three albums in and Brakes mainman Eamon Hamilton has buggered off across the Atlantic with a new bride. But while conjugal bliss is written all over this deeply romantic record, Brakes have upped the sonic ante with a record of blisteringly feisty tracks that sets their formerly rustic hayrick ablaze. This is Brakes’ best record to date, but here’s hoping geographical distance doesn’t mean Touchdown is the final time they score.

THE BROKEN FAMILY BAND

Please And Thank You Cooking Vinyl The Broken Family Band’s foray into rock continues unabated, and their Pavement influence has never been so overt. This is a return to consistency after the giddying, impassioned but patchy Hello Love; the songs are dexterously melodious while Steve Adam’s trademark wit is at its mischievous and nasty best. Please And Thank You is gratefully received, and a welcome addition to a canon that blows most of their bigger contemporaries away.

Fall’s ‘Psycho Mafia’. Yet the most striking sonic shift comes courtesy of guitarist Joshua Third, who appears to have raided My Bloody Valentine’s stash of effects pedals. The shoe-gazing likes of ‘Mirror’s Image’ and ‘Three Decades’ are awash with reverberation and backward tracking. Beyond an expansion of The Horrors’ musical range - guided by characteristically excellent taste - this album brings with it a dramatic shift in tone. Where The Horrors once made music of intentional trashiness, they now sound epic and questing, while there’s a new strain of romanticism running through Faris Badwan’s lyrics (particularly in ‘Do You Remember’ and ‘I Only Think Of You’). A new fearlessness is at work, too: Badwan’s words are no longer muffled and fantastical, but emotional and distinct. Clearly, Third is not the only member who’s upped his game: the suddenly confident Badwan actually sings many of the songs here, rather than merely bellowing them. When Loog/Universal dropped The Horrors two years ago, ill-deserved obscurity seemed to loom. The band ’s response, we now learn, was to simply improve. We should have seen it coming, but it’s still worth celebrating.

GRAHAM COXON The Spinning Top Transgressive The Spinning Top was born out a desire to make acoustic music that isn’t bland. Coxon gets it half right, ably emulating the adroit skills of celebrated dead troubadours like John Martyn and Nick Drake. Unfortunately his vocals always bring to mind an eight-year-old boy scared of monsters. There are pretty moments, but you feel that he’ll be back in his rightful place this summer with a proper singer and songwriter at the helm.

DOVES Kingdom Of Rust Heavenly Four years between albums but it’s immediately apparent on hearing this career best that Doves have spent the time well. ‘Jetstream’ is based round a pulsing postKraftwerk, minimal techno 16beat and ‘Winter Hill’ is a thing of splendour - John Leckie brings out all the psychedelic possibilities of acid house played on guitars with overtones of Spiritualized and Philip Glass. Proves conclusively that they’re miles ahead of dullards like Keane.

Reviews by Staff Pigeons, Jeremy Allen, Daddy Bones, John Doran, Kev Kharas, Alex Marshall, Niall O’Keeffe, Hazel Sheffield, Barnaby Smith, and Luke Turner.

Albums

The Stool Pigeon May 2009

ESSER Braveface Transgressive “Baby, I’m leaving town,” Esser announces at the opening of 30 minutes of schizophrenically organised pap. Sorry, pop. With no apparent destination, Braveface consists of high-energy cockney vocals swilling round a Guitar Hero backing track in ‘This Time Around’, piano and handclaps in ‘Satisfied’ and jittery electro-chaos in ‘Headlock’. Much like Esser’s ‘eclectic’ personal styling, it reeks of overkill. A shame, as the more cohesive ‘Bones’ hints at potential.

GOLDEN SILVERS True Romance XL Eschewing indie guitars for moogschmaltz and ivory-tinkling, Golden Silvers’ debut is drenched in both, and about four tracks too long to stomach in one sitting. Talking Heads’ basslines proliferate, and vocal harmonies sound irritatingly nineties. What’s worse, Gwilym Gold’s voice invokes the ghost of Luke Pritchard singing Take That. Single ‘Arrows Of Eros’ is the timeliest piece of the lot: for the rest Golden Silvers are nostalgic musical magpies.

KID CONGO & THE PINK MONKEY BIRDS

KLEERUP Kleerup Positiva Kleerup is a superstar in Sweden and that explains why all the local pop strumpets are queuing up to bosh a vocal out on his productions. Robyn, with whom he had a UK number 1, Lykke Li, and Marit Bergman all feature here and they do their best to try and save what amounts to a really boring record. There often seems to be something missing at the heart of Swedish music. That hole is gaping with this fella, but I bet he gets laid a lot.

MR LIF I Heard It Today Bloodbot Tactical Enterprises The Bostonian near-death crash survivor is one of rap’s greatest working polemicists in the tradition of Chuck D and Dead Prez, his tongue ever sharper with each release as he delves deeper into American social mire. It’s bold, often challenging stuff and always lyrically absorbing (he certainly ain’t buying into Obamania), but messages in music are generally better digested with a less queasy, paranoid musical score than this circus of dissonance.

MAXÏMO PARK Quicken The Heart Warp Never very interesting, always a bit patronising, but capable of penetrating mainstream radio with a decent song. Previously, anyway. They’ve lost their bite and reverted to formula on this third album; it’s competent but ordinary and, as new Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Horrors LPs prove, reinvention is imperative for survival. “I don’t mind losing self-respect,” Smiffy sings on poor lead single, ‘The Kids Are Sick Again’. Lucky, that.

MOCKY Saskamodie Crammed Discs Get over the initial crushing disappointment that this new album by the Berlin-based Canadian doesn’t have any slinky faux-R’n’B tracks on it like his previous, brilliant Navy Brown Blues and it reveals itself to be quite a peach. It’s very jazzy, as you’d expect, but there are also sweet touches of classic French pop and, of course, soul. He seems to have played every instrument himself, too. A show-off? Nah, Mocky got talent.

WILLIE NELSON Stripped Sony This gorgeous album sees legendary stoner Willie return to the original master tapes of 17 songs he recorded 40-odd years ago and re-master them without the saccharine strings and gloopy backing vocals that the Nashville producers of the day added. The suggestion is that this is how they were meant to sound and to prove the point he’s photographed starkers in the bath on the inlay card. But you can’t see his cock.

PINK MOUNTAINTOPS Outside Love Jagjaguwar Stephen McBean, hirsute Black Mountaineer, claims his side project is like “a Danielle Steele novel”. We’ve never read any, so we’ll have to take his word for it. When this third album works (and it does more than it doesn’t), it sounds like a big-hearted mix of Magnetic Fields’ Distortion, Jesus And Mary Chain, Raveonettes and, of course, Phil Spector. When it doesn’t, it sounds like Christian rock. But that’s what your skip button is for.

MILES BENJAMIN ANTHONY ROBINSON Transgressive Miles Benjamin Whatever has lately been turning music mags into personal auditions for The Jeremy Kyle Show - spouting tales of being a homeless addict in New York who ate out of bins and was saved by music. Severely doubt he bangs on about it in real life, and hopefully the clichés won’t put you off this cracker of a debut. It’s a bit Grizzly Bear at times, a bit Springsteen at others, and filled with great promise.

SOAP & SKIN Lovetune For Vacuum PIAS There are no bangers on the debut album from Anja Plaschg, who grew up on an Austrian pig farm before heading to the city to set the darker reaches of her soul to piano, violin, and industrialinfluenced electronics. This is the sound of Marble Index-era Nico and Cat Power before she dropped the bottle, and while Lovetune For Vacuum hoovers up these influences well, Plaschg’s best work will come when she reaches beyond them.

ST. VINCENT Actor 4AD Despite the fact ‘articulate’ and ‘literate’ are regularly used to describe Annie Clark, she is essentially a pop artist with catchy tunes and a few skittish production nuances. Her second LP is not nearly as immediately arresting as her debut, although it does contain some glittering moments in the title track and the excellent ‘Marrow’. Overall, a much more challenging work from the young lady and not always in a good way.

THUNDERHEIST Thunderheist Big Dada This is a high calorie content, finger-licking, mammy-ramming belter. Canadian rapper Isis comes on like a Balti-flavoured female Jay-Z with sordid but detached tales of strippers, ice, clubs, cheap sex and drugs. Her baleful eye sees young girls getting swallowed up by clubbing and spat-out before they’re even out of their teens (‘Sweet 16’) and a forensic look at exactly what is expected of the modern gangsta’s moll. A subtly subversive treat.

TODDLA T Skanky Skanky 1965 Every Toddla T single so far has boomed and all the best productions on the last Roots Manuva album were his. No shock, then, that he’s turned in a jaffa of a debut that fits tight through the round and bouncy window. With a nod to his hometown of Sheffield he simply calls it electronic music, but there’s real bashment/dancehall flavour here that comes from his love of Jamaican vocals. Properly buff. Deserves to be massive this summer.

TWO FINGERS Two Fingers Big Dada Amon Tobin and Doubleclick produce, rope in others to chatter. The most prominent guest is London rapper Sway who, while not strictly a grime artist, has always maintained a close proximity to the scene. Here, that proximity pays dividends, highlights (‘Straw Men’ / the title track) coming when Sway’s grime-y, rapid-fire tongue gets to explore the trip hop, jungle and IDM Two Fingers thrust before him. It’s a healthy arrangement and the thing fidgets along nicely.

VARIOUS ARTISTS Cathedral Classics Vol. 1 Sonic Cathedral Sonic Cathedral is one of those labour-of-love labels/clubnights that works tirelessly to find talent so that people with more money don’t have to. Okay, not really, but one-man shoegaze machine Nat Cramp, Mr. SC, did lose School Of Seven Bells after releasing their debut single. This lovely record is a comp of all the singles on the label so far and it’s... whooshy. Kyte, Tamborines, Maps, M83 feature, and the Bells end up on here too.

THE WAVE PICTURES If You Leave It Alone Moshi Moshi While the steady flow of Wave Pictures releases has seen more remarkable moments, this introvert and downbeat record is still a beautiful thing. Decorated with loose group vocals and the occasional brass section, and with Dave Tattersall’s songs missing their trademark acid, it has the feel of something devised in a short period of time and committed instantly to record. Guaranteed to be picked up and smiled over again and again.

WOODEN SHJIPS Dos Holy Mountain They say change is the only constant in life. San Francisco’s Wooden Shjips spit on your saying. This second album offers little deviation from their Vol.1: the key ingredient is repetition and, once again, you can count the chord changes on one hand. One song equals one riff, in all its reverb-saturated glory, while Ripley Johnson’s faded vocals drifting in and out like an afterthought. An intentional one-trick pony, this is minimalist rock par excellence.

Dracula Boots In The Red With fanspastic recent releases from The Hunches, Vivian Girls and Strange Boys, In The Red are on fire at the moment. All those bands, though, should bow down before Kid Congo, former member of three of the greatest groups ever: The Cramps, Gun Club and Bad Seeds. Here the guitar ‘stylist’ and his Pink Monkey Birds get down hard for a second time. This is dirty-ass, rumbling voodoo funk of the most primal order.

Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson

CD/180 gram LP out 27 April

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CD/180 gram LP out now www.hotpanda.ca

MINT RECORDS

distributed by Shellshock in the UK www.shellshock.co.uk

"...jaunty pop rockers with genuine personality to their music, a sense of fun throughout the record and an infectiously upbeat way of looking at things." - Terrorizor UK "...joyful racket" - All Music www.mintrecs.com

The Stool Pigeon May 2009

Demos REVIEWED BY KEV KHARAS CHAPTER XXI. EVERYONE’S TRYING TO MAKE SOME GREEN SINGING THE BLUES.

at The Pigeon have been deflecting the people’s flak of late. There is a green anger simmering within our public. Within some of you. You say we do not care about unsigned bands. What you really mean, of course, is that we do not care about your unsigned band, because we have not been able to listen to your demo for long enough to form anything approaching a considered opinion. So, in an effort to compromise, to redress your balance, to balance out your grievances, Messrs, this month we’ll be reviewing every demo we’ve been sent in the space of 1,000 words, hacking and spluttering by the end no doubt, begging that our ears be cut from their sorry lagging stems.

pushing themselves to be seen and heard by more people”. Furthermore, they “achieved alot [sic] in 2008, frequently gigging, songwriting, recording and generally making the effort to be noticed.” MYSPACE.COM/THELIGHTDIVIDED Generally speaking, you’d hope that post-rock would go unexplored by adventurous dubstep, but London duo NEDRY manage to sidestep so many potential pitfalls by doing what they do well, eyeing post-rock’s rainswept soundscapes from afar while ensuring the bass and the beat are kept running. Ambient electronica is also ogled obsessively on the EP’s four tracks and if opener ‘Apples & Pears’ rolled more smoothly it could find a home at Mala’s Deep Medi stables, but it doesn’t and it won’t find a home. It’s homeless music. An aural flickbook making you queasily aware of the gaps between moments.

MYSPACE.COM/NEDRYMAKESMUSIC I listen to BRITISH BROKEN CLASS’s new demo while watching London’s G20 riots on a 24-hour streaming news channel. With their demo sleeve clad in credit crunch agit-prop cut’n’paste from the papers, never, I think to myself, has a band so accurately captured the mood of a nation. Behind the headlines, the BBC are a gang of whimpering men whose sole reason for being angry is that they don’t know what it is they are angry about. A figure flickers into view upon my television screen. He appears delirious. He wants the police to let him protest. They are letting you protest, the reporter tells him. Yet still he froths at the mouth. Revolt for the camera, peasant! Protest is now a spectator sport!

MYSPACE.COM/BRITISHBROKENCLASS Our apologies to Edward Said, but there is something inherently creepy about middle-eastern electro cabaret. Still, INIT are satisfied to describe themselves thus, their five-track EP wiggling around upon an electric blanket of bleeps, vocalist Guy Harries sounding like a man you’d be able to reach if you dialled your way through British Gas’s automated customer service system using your phone’s keypad upside down. iNiT: the fridge that dared to belly-dance. And burst immediately into flames.

MYSPACE.COM/INITMUSIC

THE VOID: Velcro chorded post-proto emo chutzpah. Avoid.

MYSPACE.COM/THEVOIDBAND THE MOMERATHS make the kind of music that makes me think they like to dress up as babies during sex. Do you know what I mean?

MYSPACE.COM/WHERETHEMOMERATHSGO I quite like ILLNESS. They haven’t worked out how to do very much yet. It is just starchy guitars and kiss-chase drums forever. But at least there’s a thread there. An accidental aesthetic to cling to, like a rag of clothing torn and found hanging onto a piece of barbed wire out in the countryside, a few hundred miles from anywhere. They’re the sort of duo you imagine will keep playing even after you turn the record off.

MYSPACE.COM/ILLNESSBAND The first thing I’d like KARMA JUNKIE to do is change their name, because it’s abysmal. The second thing involves asking them to either write music that’s interesting enough to hold my attention in the city or take me out for a weekend in the country. I think that’d be really nice.

MYSPACE.COM/KARMAJUNKIEMUSIC KESHCO’s demo comes on a 3” CD. I am not sure why they decided to do this. Financial motives perhaps. Perhaps not. Keshco wear tartan trousers and describe their music as “quirky synthpop with folky, comedic and psychedelic bits”. Four of those words are acceptable. Four aren’t. Their gigs “are brightened with props and silly dancing”. I have heard enough. MYSPACE.COM/KESHCO MARK WYNN: lickspittle Dylan hokum. MYSPACE.COM/MARKWYNN The one thing I like about N.E.T. is that the press release their manager wrote seems to cut rock history off at about 1999. Hearing this, most would have it dead sooner. They are optimists, then. Sadly, with their professions of love for Placebo, Muse and John Frusciante, N.E.T. find themselves on the wrong side of the dividing line. They also have a terrible name and are the sort of band that should not be allowed on MySpace.

MYSPACE.COM/NETMU

HAUNTED STEREO do folk a lot better. They know how to use discord and tension, singer Lewis Ford stretching his syllables out across the top of an insistent, caramel junket of string, guitar and bass that juts out at odd angles. Chewy.

MYSPACE.COM/HAUNTEDSTEREOMUSIC If SIR YES SIR were my friends I’d still write about their band. Nothing revelatory here for you, no - an admitted love of Sebadoh, Dinosaur Jr., Pavement etc. meeting, or perhaps resulting in, something that sounds like The Cribs still learning how to love pop music. But at least there’s sincerity and a lack of lacquer. No gloss, no gloss. Keep flapping that epiglottis, please.

MYSPACE.COM/SIRYESSIRYESSIR LASSE BRAWN - try-hards, no die-hards! Blowhards blow!

MYSPACE.COM/LASSEBRAWN MANTIS AND THE PRAYER are alright by me.

MYSPACE.COM/MANTISANDTHEPRAYER I was always told that the first song on a demo should make an immediate impression - burst from the traps dripping with the bloody essence of whatever was previously dormant in your gut. NO FLASH don’t so much burst from the traps as topple hilariously backwards, guitars and drums stumbling into each other before shooting confused glares back and forth. It should be the Benny Hill theme. It is the premature emotional wisdom of a gassy Mancunian heart.

MYSPACE.COM/NOFLASHTHEBAND There is a particular type of white-boy funk that never seems to make it past the demo ‘stage’. I’m pretty sure ONE TRUE DOG are Britain’s foremost proponents of such a genre. A genre I’m going to christen ‘demo-funk’. Yes. One True Dog have it all. A loose notion of song structure. Mundane, staccato bursts of vocal. A vague relationship to The Human League and Gang Of Four. A canine moniker.

MYSPACE.COM/ONETRUEDOG Southampton’s THE LIGHT DIVIDED, their press release claims, “do their own design and promotion, and are always

They say that when you first meet someone and you want to take them to bed it’s because your brain has worked out the angles and can see your bumps inside their bumps, working synapses to find a romantic match of flaws and contours. I think the same is true of bands, but with the apt musical equivalents. After a few seconds of first track ‘Soul In A Souless City’ I want to take MILOPHOBIA back to mine with some cans and listen to Fall records. By the second track, though, they’re singing about love and suddenly your brain’s morphed them into the sort of dullards who’d put on The Doors at a house party. Fickle perhaps. It’s not my fault. It’s the brains. The synapses will not abide The Doors.

MYSPACE.COM/MILOPHOBIA Our pick for the fat advance: It’s hard. The good here is overwhelmed by the dreadful, like beautiful swimwear models swept up and away upon a tsunami belched capriciously toward the beach by a gigantor, seasalt gnarled Darryn Lyons. The two survivors, Nedry and Illness, can duke it out on the sand for the wedge.

Send your work of genius in through one ear of The Stool Pigeon and straight out the other. Address at front. Please mark the envelope ‘Demo’.

The Stool Pigeon May 2009

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SURVIVAL STUDIOS Acton Business Centre School Road North Acton London NW10 6TD T. 02089611977 TERMINAL STUDIOS 4-10 Lamb Walk London Bridge London SE1 3TT T. 02074033050 WWW.terminal.co.uk

ROYALTY EXPERTS

288 Kensington High Street London W14 8NZ T. 02076032016

PIANO TUNERS

STRONGROOM 120-124 Curtain Road London EC2A 3SQ T. 02074265100 WWW. strongroom.com.

REHEARSAL SPACES THE BOOM BOOM ROOMS Beehive Mill Jersey Street Manchester M4 6JG T. 01619504250 FRONTLINE STUDIOS 18 Cave Street Bristol BS2 8RU T. 01179248252

PERSONALS

3-5 Frogmoor High Wycombe Bucks HP13 5DG T. 01494515050 WWW.special-events.co.uk

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BULLOCKS LTD 142 New Cavendish Street London W1W 6YF T. 02073232417 MBA LICENSING SERVICES LTD 4 South Street Epsom Surrey KT18 7PF T. 01372840280

MATT SNOWBALL HIRE Unit 2 3-9 Brewery Road London N7 9QJ T. 02077006555 WWW.mattsnowball.com

STARCRAFT EXECUTIVE TRAVEL Fleet Hampshire T. 01252812328 WWW.starcraft.co.uk TUITION BASS GUITAR TUITION Beginners to intermediate. £20 per hour. Based in East London. Musician Institute graduate Pro musician. Call Andy T. 07904227751

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The Stool Pigeon May 2009

Business news SWIFT IN COVER-UP OVER CLAIM THEY DON’T UNDERWRITE MUSICIANS

Live music biz on top but record industry not yet dead in the water

JEREMY ALLEN

Seeing

g r i z z l e d ‘Godfather of Punk’ Iggy Pop whoring himself for a car insurance advert may have been heartbreaking enough, but now it has come to light that Swiftcover, the insurers that hired the aging Stooge for those garish epilepsy-inducing commercials, don’t actually cover musicians or those who work in the entertainment industry. Their reason? Should a musician have an accident, their future earnings claim might be too high. The artiste who discovered the anomaly - a bass player called Tim Soong from a band of no-hopers called Roguetime would probably disagree with this clause if he were being completely honest with himself. The Advertising Standards Authority haven’t exactly been inundated with complaints, but a small number of guitar-twangers and trombonists have written to the agency demanding an explanation. “We have received 12 complaints and we are formally investigating those complaints,” said the ASA. “They have challenged whether it is misleading to suggest Iggy Pop has insurance with Swiftcover because its website states that those who work in entertainment cannot take out a car insurance policy with that insurer.” Presumably these same 12 wrote to Iggy complaining that while they’d love him to be their dog, he’s not actually a canine, even though he’s probably pissed up enough trees and sniffed enough assholes in his time. According to Tina Shortle, marketing director of swiftcover.com, Iggy Pop wasn’t chosen because he’s a musician. No, they chose him “because he loves life, not because he is a musician”. He’s also a thespian according to Tina, who’s obviously never seen his wooden turn in Coffee And Cigarettes alongside Tom Waits. “He is an actor,” asserts Tina, “demonstrating the benefits of swiftcover.com.” Right.

by RUFUS KANINE

Times

Terra Firma boss washes Hands of EMI S

tool Pigeon favourite Guy Hands, the head of the private equity giant that owns EMI, has finally seen sense and stepped down as CEO of Terra Firma, leaving all issues regarding the record company in the capable hands of Elio Leoni-Sceti, a man who spent 16 years at Reckitt Benckiser pushing Cobra Brilliant Shiner, Lewis Red Devil and other household cleaning products. Hands will still be hands on, as it were, taking up a new role as Group Chairman and Chief Investment Officer, while Terra’s legal man Tim Pryce will become its Chief Executive. On leaving, the private equity mogul released a statement saying: “Terra Firma has grown significantly since its creation in 2002. Over this period, staff numbers have increased approximately 60 to 110 people and assets under management have grown from €2b euros to €11b.” Such attempts to placate shareholders are obviously too little too late. “It is a positive development,” said the managing director of Barbadian private bank Dancap Bank Inc., Andrew Alleyne,

to the Wall Street Journal. “EMI Music has not done very well for them, and he was instrumental in investing in EMI.” Mr Alleyne, whose bank invested in Hands’s company, also questioned its latest acquisition, saying it was “a bit unusual”. Terra Firma has just snapped up Australian beef producer Consolidated Pastoral Co., a large owner of cattle and land in northern Australia, for £205m. They’ll have to smite a lot of cows if they are to recoup any of the £2.4b paid for the British music company in 2007, or indeed any of the €1.37b write-down on its investments Terra Firma revealed in its annual report to shareholders. More chaos is afoot at EMI, according to reports. Fox News shitspreader Roger Friedman claims that Hands’s grand gesture could be symbolic of the company’s loss of patience with regards to EMI, and the departure of Douglas Merrill from EMI digital after less than a year adds to the disorder. The much-trumpeted Beatles back catalogue digital issuing via legit music services has hit a wall, and the debacle is indicative of EMI’s steady decline, according to Friedman. Lionel Cake

may be tough, but hedonism still rules OK. The kids are not buying as many records, but they’re moshing in ever increasing numbers. That was the assessment of Will Page from PRS, though he may have used less hip speak. Page was chairing a chirpily titled panel called ‘The Recession Session’, where he revealed live music is now worth more than the recording industry. Quoth he: “We’ve been doing some maths back at the office. We have all the data on live music at the PRS because we license all the live performances that go around the country...” Yes yes, get on with it. “So we’re actually able to put a number on how much live music is worth...” Shall I just tell you? For the record, in 2008 it was estimated that live music recouped around £904m, while according to the BPI the trade value of the record industry was £896m. Stand back in amazement. However, the live industry need not look so smug. Phil Bowdery from Live Nation sounded caution: “The bigger acts seem to be getting stronger and are selling tickets. But the acts that used to mid-level are the ones suffering now.” To be fair to the old gramophone industry, it did not have the clout of TV and an endless stream of insidious beer marketeers making it look sexy and zeitgeisty. Considering how much music is now free or being tea-leafed, the archaic recorded format held up surprisingly well. Volume wise, record sales fell by 1.9 per cent in the last quarter of 2008, while they were down 6.9 per cent in terms of value. The Entertainment Retailers Association told CMU: “After years of bad news about music sales, these figures give hope that the downward trend is beginning to flatten out. The collapse of Woolworths was potentially disastrous, but retailers worked around the clock to secure alternative supplies”.

Business news

May 2009 The Stool Pigeon

Morsels

TOP 10 FUNERAL SONGS For deaths of people aged 20 - 44

White Elephant In 1972 Michael Jackson sung a song about being friends with a rat called Ben and everyone thought it was cute. In 2009 Michael Jackson intends to ride on stage nightly on the back of an elephant at the O2 Arena. You helped create this monster! Animal rights types PETA have been as quick as ever to express their disdain for such a stunt, which will also involve three monkeys, 100 Masai warriors and a panther. “These exotic animals belong in Africa, not the O2 Arena among screaming fans,” they stated.

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

JEFF BUCKLEY - Last Goodbye REM - Everybody Hurts THE VERVE - Bittersweet Symphony SINEAD O’CONNOR - Nothing Compares To U ROBBIE WILLIAMS - Angels U2 - With Or Without You WESTLIFE - You Raise Me Up JOY DIVISION - Love Will Tear Us Apart CROWDED HOUSE - Don’t Dream It’s Over GARY JULES - Mad World

Source: The Bereavement Register

Spin Off Blender magazine is no more. Insert your own pun here about the rag being liquidized etc. The American organ’s publisher Alpha Media Group, who had only recently acquired the title, has gone down the shitter, blaming the demise on the financial crisis. Be original, blame it on the fact it had lost its soul. Alpha CEO Stephen Duggan said: “Since 2001, Blender has provided unmatched music coverage and entertainment news.” Spin, spin, spin...

Clothing Whine Liam Gallagher’s new clothing line should ring alarm bells within his adoring fanbase, except it’s more likely ring cash registers, as his legion of monkeys rush out to purchase the So Nineties street clobber. Named ‘Pretty Green’ after The Jam track, our Liam says he’s motivated to do it “’cos there’s a lack of stuff out there of the things I would wear”. Obviously that means there can’t be any Chav Sports stores in the vicinity of his Hampstead mansion.

Chinese Burn Oasis have been forced to pull shows in China after sharply dressed officials discovered Liam Gallagher is bringing out his own crap clothing range. They were also informed guitarist Noel Gallagher performed at a Free Tibet show in 1997, and despite Oasis initially being granted visas, they were then revoked. However, promoters Beijing All Culture Communication Co. Ltd., claim the cancellations came about as a result of cash flow problems. Oasis said they did not want to “dignify this nonsense with a response”, in a response to the NME.

Tap Out Ever vocal U2 singer Bono has chipped in his two-penneth worth regarding filesharing, saying someone should “call the cops”. In a rare moment of self-awareness and clarity, Bono admitted that he probably has enough money, but the big-hearted, big-headed Robin Williams doppelganger is sticking up for all the little guys out there. “Music has become tap water, a utility, where for me it’s a sacred thing, so I’m a little offended,” he told USA Today.

World’s End As if World Music wasn’t in enough trouble what with Andy Kershaw turning into a stalker, it now appears the BBC is to axe its Radio 3 Awards for this vast and amorphous genre term. World Music Awards have been handed out arbitrarily since 2002 to wildly disparate artists such as Ry Cooder, Nitin Sawnhey and Baaba Maal. The corporation is looking to make £400m worth of budget cuts over the next three years, refusing to kill either Jonathan Ross or Jeremy Clarkson.

ALBUM PRICE COMPARISON CHART Artist

Album

HMV

Play.com

Tesco

Amazon

1 RONAN KEATING

Songs For My Mother

£8.99

£8.95

£8.06

£8.98

2 KINGS OF LEON

Only By The Night

£8.99

£8.95

£8.93

£8.98

3 LADY GAGA

The Fame

£7.99

£8.95

£8.93

£8.98

4 PET SHOP BOYS

Yes

£8.99

£8.95

£8.93

£8.98

5 ANNIE LENNOX

The Collection

£8.99

£8.95

£8.93

£8.98

HOUSEHOLD DIGITAL USE 2006-2008 CHART Broadband & Music

2006

2007

2008

Broadband households

13.11m

15.92m

17.53m

Broadband household penetration

51%

61%

68%

Single track download sales per household

4.1

4.9

6.3

Total MP3 player annual shipments (units)

10.05m

10.32m

8.77m

Total MP3 player installed based (units)

13.84m

17.43m

19.23m

Single-track download sales per MP3 player

3.8

4.5

5.7

MP3 PlAYERS

Source:ERA/Futuresource Consulting

Horrorscopes VIRGO AUG 24 - SEPT 23

Your Stars With Mental Marvin

You are invited to dinner possibly by a lord or duke where you are engaged in a battle of wits about the occult. You will only triumph by a sudden and outrageous display of puppetry of the penis (or something of the kind). So get that yellow pages open and start looking for something new to master - no one will ever suspect! This will be an invaluable aid through the coming turbulent years.

GEMINI MAY 22 - JUNE 21 It’s all good, but you feel slight pressure. After a coffee, you realise you need to wash your socks, because the weekend is coming up.

Life’s damn good for you old pal because you’re a VIRGO. You straighten your tie or something in the mirror - looking good! head out on the town searching for adventure, ’cause that’s the kind of guy you are: a Virgo guy! Yeah. Meet a beautiful splendid bitch in a bar. She invites you back to her penthouse at the top of Centre Point, yeah... ’cause you’re a Virgo, this happens... Sweet, turns out she’s a bit kinky, gets some chains out. Wanna try something new, Virgo boy? Hell, why not, because you’re a Virgo, that’s how you roll. Hey, it’s good tied up. She undresses - hell, this is great! - it’s actually happening, because you’re a Virgo, baby. Suddenly she whistles and two dwarves in red PVC scarper on command into the room, greasing their fists at the ready. You’re now going to get a jolly good fist fuck up the arse, because you’re a fucking Virgo cunt, mate.

CANCER JUNE 22 - JULY 23

CAPRICORN DECEMBER 23 - JANUARY 20

AQUARIUS JANUARY 21 - FEBRUARY 19

LEO JULY 24 - AUGUST 23

ARIES MARCH 21 - APRIL 20

PISCES FEB 20 - MAR 20

The stars are aligned in the delta of Venus and the great nature spirit yawns and stretches his huge vine-d arms. As he awakens from the slumber of winter, he brings life to the trees and meadows, which bloom with his every spring breath. He is the Green Man, Hearn The Hunter, Merlin The Forest Spirit, call him what you will. He is the intelligence of the vegetable world and he is your master. So this week submit to his calling and take a man-, woman- or beast-friend to his realm and free yourself, just for a moment, in his blossoming arms.

If you drive a Capri and eat lots of corn, then you’re probably a Capricorn: predictable and bizarre in equal measure, an alluring combination to the fairer sex, a seedy mystery to the other. But recently you have lost contact with your ruler, Pan, the hardest of the old gods to track down, for he lives through the minds of men and man is fickle, you forget! Tonight, wrap your legs in swathes of cotton wool, drink a bottle of Greek red and dance round the local park. Your power will be restored.

Uranus clashed with Saturn on February 5 and will again in mid-October, ushering in changes about you, including your thoughts. What once seemed ideal will and may not come to fruition. Also, this is a lengthy cycle of reform, including decisions, as your ruler Uranus makes one more turn. Christ, I need to get this crystal ball fixed, this is fucked up!

The most regal of star signs, every noble action you do is governed over by your ruler, Leo Sayer. Rest assured, your wonderful destiny is being guided by his cosmic army of hard working Piero clowns, slowly crying over our lost souls as they waltz into the blackness beyond space... yeah, baby.

And in time the rat people came and drove the humans out by force to the mountains and forests, where they gathered their weapons from trees and stones and all sorts of shit. When ready for battle, the humans lay vast arrays of cheeses over the passes, which, under human control were once trade routes, enabling human culture to flourish. The damn rat hoards had put a stop to all this, and... read the next exciting instalment of Ratworld in the next month’s issue, folks!

At least once a day you suffer from a boner, because plans fall apart or something didn’t go as you intended. Worrying achieves little. But still, make an effort, and when all’s said and done, you’ll turn your attention to the people and past-times in your heart. Mercury ascending helps you discover new and intimate ways to enjoy your workplace.

“I DON’T KNOW WHAT ORDER THEY COME IN, I JUST FEEL THIS SHIT”

LIBRA SEPTEMBER 24 - OCTOBER 23 Pour the wine, pour the wine, pour, pour, my boy. Ooh, your nipples tingle with great expectation, wonderful things, the pigmy hippo farts and oinks as it writhes in the fountain next to your bed. A distant bell chimes, a text from Bart’s STD clinic wakes you up. Luckily, you’re alright this time. You trip over something on the floor next to your bed. The hippo, no! Well, the beer goggles and your overfertile Libra imagination have done it again. Back to Bart’s for you, mate...

SCORPIO OCTOBER 24 - NOVEMBER 22

SAGITTARIUS NOVEMBER 23 - DECEMBER 22

Why why why can’t you just watch five minutes of Triloquist, because there’s sod all else on and really you can learn a lot from trash. Unluckily, your Taurus fucking bossy girlfriend walks in on one of the best scenes, where the Triloquist auditions for a strip bar by giving the boss a blow job with her satanically possessed puppet, which then of course bites his wanger off. The TV is switched off immediately and you are severely berated. Just give it a try Taurus! You might spiritually grow.

When the Green Knight entered a dissolute and crumbling Camelot, furious, demanding a knight chop off his head on the condition that his slayer must lose his head in return a year later from that day, Sir Gwain obliged, only to watch the Green Knight put his head back and ride wildly from the castle. The Green Knight is the Green Man of nature, come to shake the knights from their torpor of Christian ideals and remind them of their true heart, not to be found in the desert lands of Jerusalem, but in the mossy clefts, hills, woods and streams of the magic isle. So forget the round-the-world trip this summer and, with a loved one, rediscover your own forgotten arcadia.

TAURUS APRIL 21 - MAY 21

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do something different Tue 14 Apr 7.30pm

Orquesta Típica Fernández Fierro + Pascal Comelade UK debut of Buenos Aires 12-piece tango band. Support from Franco-Catalan composer Pascal Comelade. Tue 28 Apr 7.30pm

Tropical Tribute to The Clash Featuring some of the hottest Latin artists on the planet including Alejandro Escovedo, Ruben Albarran, Moyenei, Amparo Sanchez, and band members from Plastilina Mosh, Sergent Garcia, and King Chango. Produced by the Barbican in association with Como No! Sat 30 May 7.30pm

The Viking of 6th Ave – The Music of Moondog The world of iconic blind American composer is brought to life by guests including Britten Sinfonia with Andi Thoma (Mouse On Mars), London Saxophonic with pianist Liam Noble and percussionist Paul Clarvis, Lightspeed Champion, Max de Wardener & more. Plus a special Moondog recital at midnight with US organist Paul Jordan and Stefan Lakatos. Produced by the Barbican in association with Eat Your Own Ears. Sat 6 Jun 7.30pm

Rodriguez + support Legendary Detroit singer/songwriter in rare visit Produced by the Barbican in association with Big Chill

Tickets from £10 Book now 0845 120 7541 www.barbican.org.uk/contemporary

The Barbican is provided by the City of London Corporation

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6th−9th August 2009 Eastnor Castle Deer Park Malvern Hills, Herefordshire

www.bigchill.net

DAVID BYRNE ORBITAL / BASEMENT JAXX SPIRITUALIZED / CALEXICO / LAMB PHAROAH SANDERS / LUDOVICO EINAUDI FRIENDLY FIRES / MR SCRUFF’S TEA PARTY ALICE RUSSELL / HORSE MEAT DISCO / SLAM RUSSELL HOWARD / NORMAN JAY / DYLAN MORAN DUB SYNDICATE / WONKY POP / TOM MIDDLETON SUBCULTURE / SKA CUBANO / ZOMBIE ZOMBIE TO ROCOCO ROT / JOHN HEGLEY / GONG / THE GIST DAN BLACK / MARINA AND THE DIAMONDS / OPTIMO TODDLA T / DJ SANDRINHO / GABLÉ / MAGISTRATES BRITISH SEA POWER ‘MAN OF ARAN’ LIVE SCORE NOFITSTATE CIRCUS & CABARET / SEAN HUGHES FAVELA CHIC / BRIAN PATTEN / JOSIE LONG ADRIAN SHERWOOD’S SUMMER OF DUB FUTURECOP! / THE ART CAR BOOT FETE HENRY KROKATSIS 'HELTER-SKELTERLIGHTHOUSE' .... AND MANY MANY MORE! Adult £145 Adult & Coach Travel £165 Student/jsa £110 Adult Sunday £70 Teen £60 Kids £4

‘As nutty as a fruitcake’ Adam Foster (Big Chiller 2 years)

Illustration Joe Crocker

‘15 X 15’ A COMPILATION CELEBRATING 15 YEARS OF THE BIG CHILL. OUT NOW ON THE BIG CHILL LABEL THE BIG CHILL GUIDE TO SUMMER LIVING More than just a festival guide...Out May 2009 guardianbooks.co.uk

- FRIDAY -

THE STREETS - SATURDAY -

THE CHARLATANS SAINT ETIENNE NOISETTES - SUNDAY -

THE ZUTONS BON IVER

The Acorn Plus Special Guests

MAY

2 3

4 7 9 10

11 12

OHBIJOU * * london only

LEEDS WEST YORKS PLAYHOUSE FUSE FESTIVAL 0113 213 7700 / www.fuseleeds.com MANCHESTER THE RUBY LOUNGE 0871 2200260 / www.ruby-lounge.co.uk BRISTOL THE COOLER 08713 100 000 / www.clubcooler.com GLASGOW STEREO 0844 477 1000 / www.synergyconcerts.com ALL TOMORROWS PARTY THE FANS STRIKE BACK www.atpfestival.com EXETER PHOENIX 01392 667080 / www.exeterphoenix.org.uk BIRMINGHAM GLEE CLUB 0871 472 0400 / www.glee.co.uk LONDON SCALA 0870 907 0999 / www.scala-london.co.uk

65 DAYS OF STATIC BADDIES BEARDYMAN DAN BLACK FIRST AID KIT FRANK TURNER IMELDA MAY JAMES YUILL JIM JONES REVUE THE JOY FORMIDABLE THE KABEEDIES KARIMA FRANCIS MICACHU AND THE SHAPES OI VA VOI QEMISTS TEITUR WOODPIGEON AND MORE ‘AN UNFAILINGLY HIP FESTIVAL’ THE INDEPENDENT

Buy online at Livenation.co.uk Credit Cards Tel: 0844 576 5483 (24hrs) www.myspace.com/theacorn A Live Nation presentation in association with CODA

14-15-16 AUGUST 2009

DE MONTFORT HALL & GARDENS, LEICESTER TICKETS 0116 233 3111 OR SUMMERSUNDAE.COM

The Stool Pigeon May 2009

Sports UNTAMED SWEDISH DUO STILL FLYING HIGH

DIBBLER A S

DELLE TRIPE JOURNALIST

Issue Twenty SPRING,2009

LONDON

One

TYPESETTER M.GIBBONS.

CLUMSY BIRDS WILL ALWAYS BE IN NEED OF EARLY FLIGHT IF THEY ENCOUNTER ME

A live performance by...

OMAR RODRÍGUEZ-LÓPEZ / AT

DINGWALLS, LONDON

On Monday March 11, 2009 The Mars Volta man, formerly of At The Drive-In, gives CAMDEN a proper cosmic seeing to.

OMAR

GOD! A Review of the Performance

Does Omar Rodríguez-López dream of electric sheep? Were At The Drive-In one of the most exciting bands of the last decade? Are the Mars Volta one of the best bands of this decade? Was Cedric’s Jools Holland appearance of ‘One Armed Scissor’ one of the last truly great TV performances? In any case, tonight’s show at Dingwalls is rammed. There are UFO lights on the stage, and Omar is playing tracks from his new LP Old Money. The audience is mainly men, but the few women here are all dancing. Tonight Omar has even made me dance - unenhanced. I’m Carmen Miranda wigging out to his kraut-drone acid free-jazz renditions of ‘Jacob Van Lennepkade’. You can hear the hard Chicano sound in his playing, fused with strobes and screams and vertigo inducing rhythms. I want Omar to play with drummer Seb Rochford and blow my brain to pieces once and for all. Perhaps one of the most productive men in music (with a whopping 10 solo albums in the last five years and another three in 2009) Rodríguez-López’s progressive approach to music seems to suck up every genre he’s dabbled in - dub, jazz, hardcore, avant-garde, Latin funk and spit it out at the crowd like a million paintballs of thought in one breath. It’s a magnificent exploration of human capability. And while his cosmic ragas create a road trip in musical form, the Sun Ra-esque stream-of-consciousness playing never once betrays its punk rock roots. Rodríguez-López pulls off the impossible. And on tonight’s performance at least, he still burns brightly as one of the most radical guitarists of his generation.

WILDBIRDS AND PEACEDRUMS / THE SOCIAL, LONDON Words BARNABY SMITH Photo RACHEL LIPSITZ

Wildbirds

A n d Peace drums are such an engrossing phenomenon partly because this handsome, happily married Swedish couple sound like they’ve never listened to any music before in their lives, while at the same time having absorbed and been influenced by everything. Generally, this is not an act based on melody (at least, not up until the quite beautiful ‘Chain Of Steel’ from new album The Snake), which is one of the reasons their debut, Heartcore, was a slightly

frustrating listen for some. “See them live, you’ll see,” I was told, and I did, at the Concrete and Glass Festival in Shoreditch last year. It was among the most breathtaking pieces of live performance I’ve ever experienced. Tonight, however, isn’t exactly the right setting in which to encounter Wildbirds And Peacedrums - the blur of hair and loose clothing that is Mariam Wallentin is something that needs to be seen to be believed, and a packed Social is not visibility’s friend. While Mariam didn’t lose herself to the degree that she might do on other more intense nights, she thrashed away on steel drum and glockenspiel and impressed with a wild, passionate and un-self-conscious stage presence.

Andreas Werliin, on the other hand, assumed a more staid role. You could call him the duo’s metronome, except the rhythms and patterns he drew from his kit were anything but metronomic, shot through instead with afro-beat phrasing and avantgarde jazz. The most interesting thing about them at this point in their still-budding career is that Wildbirds And Peacedrums are able to transpose the same feeling of raw abandon that they achieve live which seems infused with a distinctly child-like energy - on to record. The vocal style of Mariam, meanwhile, proves that there is something extremely bluesy about the band, to the extent that an

odious comparison could be made with Jeff Buckley’s Live At Sin-Ä album. A tenuous link perhaps, but such is the musical curiosity shown by these two that they surely wouldn’t mind that much. This brief show was meant to showcase songs from The Snake, and according to the set-list that’s what the band did. But what with the lengthy improvisation and gleeful spontaneity that Wildbirds And Peacedrums inject into every unique performance, it’s doubtful whether they actually rendered the set-list entirely faithfully. Management must be tearing their hair out with rage, but this duo’s fans tear their hair out with ecstasy.

WHAT HO, READERSHIP. May I initiate proceedings by apologising for last issue’s Grammy Awards’ tip? It was a veritable turd of a tip and I hope you ignored it, as I did. I have just passed a rather melancholy evening at the Brits in Earl’s Court. My dolorous state is due not to squandering more funds at the event but to the venue itself: I was escorted there by Mrs Dibblers 1 and 3 for the Ideal Home Exhibitions of 1955 and 1968. As the announcer enjoined the audience to welcome Duffy, I recalled how Mrs D 1 had insisted upon an open plan kitchen for our Fitzrovia love nest. “Tender Tips,” I had said, “you know very well that I spunked the apartment cash at the races.” Her reply of “sqwark sqwark sqwark” was unconstructive. Well, she had to go. And indeed she did, tripping over a vacuum wire and landing face down in a plate of rat poison. Mrs D 3, by contrast, was a creature of few words. As Duffy shrieked, I recalled her doleful silences and her pitying looks, which chilled me to the marrow. And then one morning I awoke to find she had slipped on the floor of our spanking new bathroom and impaled her face on the towel rail. Was I cursed or was I in some obscure way to blame for these tragedies? More to the point, was there any evidence? “NO!” I thundered triumphantly and 30 waiters called Bruno leapt in the air. And then, more quietly: “No, I’ve always had a fondness for the, ahem, clumsier woman... that’s no crime.” Up piped a dear little thing to my right. “You like clumsy women?” she asked glassily. “Indeed I do,” quoth I, noting the swell of her bosom. As the girl and I ventured to the dancefloor, the announcer enjoined us to welcome some spacky new songster. I ignored him, absorbed as I was in the questions of my fifth wife’s clumsiness, and the attainability of an ideal home.

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May 2009 The Stool Pigeon

WAVVES WASHED UP AS WOMEN GO WITH THE TIDE WOMEN, WAVVES / THE LEXINGTON, LONDON Alex Denney

ganja leaf scrawled on a promo single first drew me to the music of Wavves. Rudely announcing itself in fat marker pen, it seemed somewhere between a puerile ‘fuck you’ and the utterly inane likeness of a cherished item, presumably settled upon after a coin toss ruled out cheese string sandwiches. The slip case’s contents repaid curiosity, A-side ‘So Bored’ a paradoxically ferocious shoulder shrug that sprinkles drugs on its breakfast and goes straight back to bed with Pixies on full-whack. Listening to it, you might suppose Wavves would be to grunge what Times New Viking are to eighties lo-fi. The reality’s more like middling Sebadoh. Essentially the project of San Francisco-based Nathan Williams, parts of tonight’s set sound shambling and not nearly nasty enough, although the aforementioned ode to ennui and ‘No Hope Kids’ offer compelling evidence of one well-schooled in the art of power-chord pop. A little of Wavves’ bad-resin fumes permeate Canadian headliners Women’s outlook, but their vision is tempered by compositional flair and musicianship somewhat in advance of Señor Williams’ inchoate mumbling. Their recent, self-titled debut lingered in many a critic’s memory for its ambitious collage of art rock, noise and lush sixties pop, so expectations are understandably high tonight. Despite the listless air of shuffling collegiate sorts we’ve become accustomed to in North American bands of late (is it possible to slope on to a stage?), the five young menfolk of Women snap into focus as they tear into material both new and old with dexterity, suggesting tracks like the Beach Boys-ish ‘Black Rice’ were no accident. In spite of surface scuff the band performs with a restless, metronomic rigour. To this end ‘Group Transport Hall’ is transformed into a cryptic, slow grind from its rather perkier acoustic-based guise on the record, and even ‘Shaking Hand’’s giddily rushing coda seems premised on certain mathematical certainties. The fairer sex may be nowhere to be seen among the band’s ranks, but Women are most definitely in the house.

HOWLING BELLS / 02 ACADEMY, LIVERPOOL

Howling Bells fail to ring the

Gold dust girl Alela Diane a near religious experience in London church Alela Diane / St. Giles Church, London

igs

By HAZEL SHEFFIELD

in churches are strange creatures, far removed from their bar-dwelling cousins. At times, live secular music in such an antiquated, unfamiliar setting can seem wilfully sacrilegious - at others, overly reverent.

This evening, Californian Alela Diane creeps onto the stage in St Giles so softly that it is only when she begins singing that the audience realises that she’s started, and a palpable hush descends immediately as her voice reverberates around the vaults. To say the acoustics in a place like this are unforgiving is an understatement: every minute mistuning and finger-stumble on the picked acoustic pierces the air, and no one talks in a church gig, so there is no disguising mistakes. Alela’s voice takes a little while to warm up, though she shows no physical signs of nervousness. Her father, Tom Menig, joins her for ‘Age Old Blue’, and together they turn a simple double acoustic sound into something utterly spellbinding. Alela’s vocals verge on yodelling, both plaintive and oddly powerful. During her folkier moments that arresting voice could be the howling of a wolf, but in the delicate country twang of ‘Lady Divine’ or ‘To Be Still’ she sounds like the bluest whistle of a steam-train on a damp morning. So much of Alela’s music is cinematic, conjuring landscapes of

pre-colonial America, when people lived in the valleys and trees. She looks almost like a Native American, too, and there’s no doubt that this otherworldliness goes some way to explaining her popularity in grimy central London at a time like this. But of course it’s that voice that really steals the show, over and above her propensity for escapist musings. The set is organised crescendo-like, with a female vocalist, bassist and drummer joining her onstage for the bulk of it, and then disappearing off to let her close alone. ‘White As Diamonds’, the big single, comes off perhaps the weakest of the whole set - both hurried and clumsily executed, it bears the hallmarks of overplaying. Meanwhile a cover of Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Gold Dust Woman’ really works, and provides welcome respite in an hour-long performance that consists mostly of very similar folk and country arrangements. Some material from her first album, The Pirate Gospel, is included. ‘Tired Feet’ seems especially appropriate this evening, Alela tells us, because it was written in Europe’s churches on her solitary travels. She also tells us that hers is the last gig to take place in St Giles. It seems like a fitting valedictory gesture for live music here, if that is the case. Both inadvertently jubilant and respectfully hymnal, Alela Diane’s music complements these majestic surroundings perfectly.

changes by

MIKE HAYDOCK

Howling Bells are in a state of flux, stepping out from the warm sounds of their debut and into bleaker terrain. Does it translate live? Yes, and not always in ways the band would like. First up, while credit is due for taking The Joy Formidable on tour with them, the support band’s buzzing energy and upward trajectory sets an uncomfortable precedent for Howling Bells to follow at a time when they’re only getting subtler. The Joy Formidable slap you about the face; Howling Bells have always been about coaxing you into another world. That world just got darker and more complex with Radio Wars. Finding a path through it is the first challenge, learning to love it is the second. Can both of these be achieved in a busy venue when there’s some lanky bastard standing in front of you and the band appear apathetic? No, not really. Howling Bells go heavy on the new material, and while ‘Treasure Hunt’’s pulsating verse easily captures attention, the wearier, warped drones of ‘Let’s Be Kids’ and ‘Ms Bell’s Song’ shunt the audience out into the cold. By not talking to us and failing to be convivial guides, Howling Bells don’t carry us along for the ride. Such is the risk with artistic endeavour and experimentation. There is a brief juncture when Juanita Stein is forced to buy time by talking. “We recorded our first album in Liverpool,” she says, “so coming here feels like coming home.” And briefly, it helps - we’re connected. But it’s all too brief, and save for a moment in ‘Golden Web’ when she steps across the divide and stands high above the crowd, teasing us with spidery arm movements and feline vocals, this is a splintered set that reluctantly rewards patient listeners with golden moments from the band’s debut. When they unleash ‘Setting Sun’ in all its blinding brilliance, you can’t help but mourn the past and hope that Howling Bells come back towards the light.

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By Kev Kharas, A P R O C L A M A T I O N. For recalling the events of a messy, bass-y weekender simply called...

BLOC. ne of the most telling aspects of this year’s Bloc Weekender is that despite surrendering vast swathes of memory, money and self-control to all manner of night-time medicines everyone there seemed to be having a cracking time. To spurn sentience itself and come out smiling is no mean feat, though all were aided in their pursuits by a line-up that paired fledgling beat genius with sets from those who’ve been topping club bills for years. Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Aphex Twin, Carl Craig and Afrika Bambaataa all fall firmly into the latter camp and time spent with them was healthy/harmful/blurry/wasted respectively, but more alluring was the chance to catch up with some of modern bassland’s most promising; a pack gathered together under the perilously loose and possibly non-existent dubstep-notdubstep banner. While skronking, bleeping and booming in wildly disparate fashions, the likes of Rustie, Pinch, 2562, Joker, Martyn and Kode9 all cling on to established dubstep traits - be it the ominous sub-bass swells, the lurch and crack of drums, or whatever - with one hand, while fumbling for the future with the other. Thankfully, that future tends to make people dance. Confident enough now to ditch the ‘Frankie Solaar’ party set pseudonym, London bass leader Kode9 casually throws four funky house tracks out into the evening before reverting to jungle type. Meanwhile, Bristol’s Joker continues to meld the low-end weight of dubstep, grime-y electro tack and G-funk sleaze to emerge with something so ambiguous that people have only been able to agree upon the fact that “it sounds purple”. With Rustie propping Warp bleep atop cockeyed drum loops, Pinch filling out his bass-ic depth-charges with percussive, mid-range scrabble and 2562 and Martyn crashing along somewhere between techno, drum’n’bass and dubstep, this new motley crew acts as a junction between most of the artists who’ll appear on one of Bloc’s four stages over the course of the weekend. The concise, gut-goading tech/house of the anonymous Redshape impresses greatly after a brainbattering set from Aphex Twin, all worn Velcro synths and deep Chicago strings (check his recent contribution to Marco Bernardi’s ‘Mystery of Nazarus’ 12”) while Egyptian Lover is the most entertaining act of the weekend, engaging the crowd at Butlin’s like the best Redcoat of all time, despite his inexorable passion for self-veneration. A weekend well spent, all-in-all. Sentience is returning in dribs and drabs and the list of regrets stands at just two: Metro Area’s cancellation, and I’m gutted that I never got to try out one of the Butlin’s water flumes.

God save the Purple Sound Minehead, Somerset. Printed by Morton’s, Printer to the Queen’s most Excellent Majesty.

The Stool Pigeon May 2009

Glasgow’s Phantom Band put on quite a spectrecal in London

Time slips by as local lady Mary Hampton and friends hold court in Brighton Words BEN GRAHAM Photo RO CEMM

THE PHANTOM BAND HOXTON SQ BAR & KITCHEN, LONDON

longer the best kept secret in Scotland, The Phantom Band are all set to ascend to the dizzy heights of the big-time this year. About time, too: this Glaswegian sixpiece have been six years in the making, apparently spending their time between rehearsals working on the most convincing display of ginger facial hair since Family Ness. Recently, though, they’ve been collecting acolytes with enviable rapidity, and tonight they play with the perceptible swagger of a band no longer content to sit on the sidelines. Their music is made to be heard in a live environment it swells and bulges through a sticky back room in Hoxton, transporting all those present far from their sweaty confines and into the mistiest, most magnificent depths of the Scottish Highlands. Led into the mountains by the pied-piper call of the melodica (bagpipes for times of economic hardship?) in ‘Crocodile’, we are lulled with the sparse sea-shanty hymnal of ‘Island’, before being punched in the gut by the wrenching, distorted riff of ‘Halfhound’. All those years masterminding their plan for world domination have endowed The Phantom Band with an obviously refined sonic vision that seems to entail more instruments than your average orchestra, and new ways of playing them, too - although at one point pedal-man Greg Yale looks particularly lost on a banjo, as though he might never have seen one before. Frontman Rick Anthony extends his arms out over the audience in a weird conjuring motion throughout, while most of the rest of the band sport screwed up faces of concentration. Well they might concentrate, too, as The Phantom Band specialise in distended, proggy Scot-rock that tends not so much to surpass as to shit all over the three-minute mark. With time constraints disregarded, atmospherics and attention to detail are paramount, though they indulge in wonderfully lighthearted touches, including an unexpected barbershop chorus in the anthemic ‘Throwing Bones’. If only one band is predestined to dominate the smaller stages during the coming festival season, The Phantom Band are it.

BLACK BOX RECORDER

MARY HAMPTON / THE ALBERT, BRIGHTON

Hazel Sheffield

HERE COMES

Boy

-girl indie-folk duo Sleeping Dog, come from Leeds and Belgium respectively. This is only their second show, but they’re not bad; she’s an appealing vocalist, and he plays some nicely restrained space-echo guitar, although I keep secretly hoping he’ll lose the restraint and break into a screaming Ben Chasny solo. No such luck. Jane Bartholomew has been a local talent to watch for a couple of years now and she’s reaching the stage where she deserves wider recognition. With her sweet and innocent shtick honed to a David Lynchian level of creepiness, prim and proper in blond bouffant, cream blouse and a plaid skirt, her voice is spookily childlike and detached, her lyrics deceptively dark and her songs minimal like a nursery music box. With timings going askew over the course of the night, Mary Hampton’s set is barely half the length intended. Accompanied by violinist Jo Burke, she mixes original songs from last year’s wonderful My Mother’s Children album with traditional folk ballads like a capella opener ‘I Drew My Ship Into The Harbour’. On ‘Island’, we provide percussion by jangling keys and tapping pint glasses, but it’s Mary’s striking voice that holds our attention throughout; haunted, high and keening, intimate and evocative, as though something ancient and unearthly were speaking via the medium of this pale young woman. Centuries-old poems become as up-to-date as your latest Twitter posting, and all the fripperies of the modern world fall away to reveal the essentials as unchanged and implacable as ever. Though time ran out on us tonight, Mary Hampton’s music belongs to the eternal.

t the back of the Luminaire stage hangs a Union Flag emblazoned with the legend “Rock’n’roll Not Dole”. In the hands of lesser musical troupes it might seem like an honest, if desperation-tinged, reason for their reunion. Not so with Black Box Recorder. This trio are perhaps the last unusual, intelligent and satirically observational pop band England has produced, finding peculiar things in suburban bins, and dark domestic secrets behind chocolate box windows. Literate and arch, they were the withering antidote to latenineties post-Oasis, post-Diana, post- Loaded , Blairite British culture. Tonight, at the second of three reunion gigs, Nixey, Haines and Moore emphasise their continuing relevance. Sarah Nixey, the fulcrum of the group, wears a slinky red number and welcomes us “to the bosom of Black Box Recorder”. She introduces ‘The Art Of Driving’ saying, “This song was written prior to our Fleetwood Mac phase,” and her former partner John Moore grimaces. Luke Haines has a chuckle at his expense. It’s rough and ready, playful yet knowing. Interestingly, the same goes musically. Black Box Recorder have perhaps by necessity dispensed with the glossy sheen of their records. Instead, wreckage cutter guitar fizzes around ‘English Motorway System’, and ‘British Racing Green’ has a lumbering menace offset by a xylophone effect. Moore’s hints of slide guitar on ‘Swi n g i n g ’ a r e h i s o n l y concession to his bootlace tie, which makes him resemble an East Anglian barn dance caller. On ‘The New Diana’, Nixey sings, “From one English rose to another...” with a nursery rhyme lilt, but the demeanour of a governess. Two new songs, ‘Do You Believe In God’ and ‘Keep It In The Family’, promise mu ch. If Private Eye could sing, it might well resemble Black Box Recorder. For in recent years we’ve suffered a slew of artless and parochial guitar groups (The Enemy, Hard-Fi, Reverend And The Makers, Doherty) supposedly capturing the ‘state of the nation’. As economic gloom deepens, Jade Goody tribute books waste as many trees as those for Princess Diana, and your post still gets lost between Ely and Sevenoaks, it’s clear that England needs Black Box Recorder now, more than ever.

By Luke Turner, from London’s Luminaire.

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May 2009 The Stool Pigeon

LEX M ARSHALL A MEIN HERZ MACHT BUM JOURNALIST

DAF

TURN 30

Q&A Düsseldorf’s DAF are celebrating 30 years of playing with each other. A few questions, Robert Görl, before we witness the show...

Issue Twenty SPRING,2009

BRIXTON

One

TYPESETTER M.GIBBONS.

A live performance by...

DAF

I S L I N G T O N A CA D E M Y

On Saturday March 28, 2009

Dance the Mussolini! And now the Adolf Hitler! Thirty years, you say? It bloody well showed, but not in a good way.

HEIL &

PACE

A Review of the Performance

You were both punks. How did you end up becoming electro-industrial pioneers? “Our idea was always to create something very new, very simple, very strong and very provocative. We had this ritual - if we wrote a song and it reminded us of another band, we’d just throw it out like rubbish. This minimal music just seemed to be what we were left with.” Did you always want to be a cult act or pop stars? “To tell you the truth, we always wanted to have both sides. As much as we wanted to be new and cool, we knew our style would cause discussions in the media and we wanted that. We were always interested in reaching as many people as we could. What’s the point of creating something you think is special if you play it to just 50 people? That’s also why we left Daniel Miller [founder of Mute Records] and went to Virgin. People hated us for it. They kept saying, ‘They’re selling out,’ and Daniel... he hated us for a couple of years. I was really happy that he got success with Depeche Mode because that kind of calmed him down. But we didn’t leave him for any cheap reason. Virgin gave us possibilities we could only dream about.” How popular did you become? “Sometimes I wonder! A lot of things happened that made me think we were massive. One time we heard customs had stopped a truck full of black market DAF records coming from Italy. We thought, ‘Fuck, we’re big. There are hundreds and thousands of our records going around and they’re not even legal.’ But then we never got a gold record! Okay, it was much harder in those days. You needed to sell 500,000 copies. But did we not sell that? I’m sure we did.” You didn’t make any money? “No, I came from the street and I am still on it. Our record companies certainly did. Look at how Virgin grew. Richard Branson just flies around the world in a balloon now, and I saw him when he was carrying boxes, schlepping, in his little Portobello shop. I had to hold the door open for him. I’m not a business guy.” What was life like in Germany at the time? “Just big! Everybody in Germany knew DAF. Everybody from the kids to the old parents. If we went out in the street people followed us. I would sit in coffee shops and people on the next table would whisper about us. We must have been very commercial, right?” I’m surprised you got such a positive reaction. You wrote all those political songs and the music must have seemed shockingly new. “DAF was always like this classical saying - people either loved us or hated us. A lot of people adored us - we used to get cartons of fan mail. But there were also people who hated us. But that was mainly the media. They wanted to destroy us at one point. They told us to our faces, ‘You play too much with fire.’ They thought we were too political and they got annoyed with our style. They said we were too military, too fascist, because we wore leather and had short hair. They were always asking us, ‘Are you Nazis?’ It was like we were not allowed to do what we wanted or look how we wanted. Do you know what our reaction was? We said, ‘Let’s do more. Let’s really make them angry.’” That’s funny they thought you looked like fascists. I always thought you looked gay. “Some of the media said the same thing - that Gabi and I were complete gay men. They were sure we were lovers. So we did this song, ‘The Lover And The Prince’, a homoerotic story. We had a lot of fun like that. We saw the problems of the media - that they put people in boxes - and played with them.” Alex Marshall

YOU’VE GOT TO BE A PISS-ARTIST to peak too early at a gig. All you’ve got to do is pace a set well, save the hits till last and everyone leaves happy. So congratulations to DAF - Germany’s legendary twoman sex machine, Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft - who manage it after just 10 minutes tonight. The duo - now both 50-odd - are playing ‘Der Mussolini’, their biggest hit, one of the first electro-punk songs and a belter at that. Drummer Robert Görl’s playing so hard he’s already covered in sweat, while singer Gabi Delgado-Lopez is marching across the stage, black shirt unbuttoned, shouting instructions at the crowd. “Get up, move your arse,” he barks in German. “Dance the Mussolini. And now the Adolf Hitler.” He then starts throwing Nazi salutes in time to the music. It’s hilarious and brilliantly stagemanaged and brings an end to a run of great tunes - all menacing, loud, fast. DAF’s reputation as electro pioneers is based on three short albums released in 1981 and 1982, but they have so many tunes like this they could keep the pace going for the whole hour. Unfortunately, 10 minutes seems to be about all Gabi can take these days. He looks spent. It’s no surprise the next song’s a slower one. If only the next 10 weren’t as well. On record, these songs - ‘Rote Lippen’, ‘Mein Herz Macht Bum’ - are great pop come-ons, all heavy breathing and pulsing synth loops. The duo used to pose topless and sweaty for magazine shoots and it’s these songs that explain why. But when sung by a 50-year-old whose voice isn’t as strong as in his youth? Well, let’s just say they lose something. People start talking, then head to the bar. The worst thing is everyone knows the band can’t suddenly up the pace. The synth loops are on CD, and Robert made a ridiculous show of putting the CD in and pressing play when they took the stage. You can imagine the relief when the segment finally ends. When the stabbing keyboards of ‘Sato-Sato’ come in, Robert starts smacking his drums again and Gabi’s off with renewed purpose, marching, shouting things like “sweat, my children” and “press your body against mine, hard as you can”. The next 15 minutes aren’t as great as the opening, but they’re pretty faultless nonetheless - almost enough to forgive the lull.

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The Stool Pigeon May 2009

Inside 1

A proper mental

Quite a spectrecal

Goose-stepping with...

BLOC FESTIVAL

THE PHANTOM BAND

DAF

Crossword ACROSS

DOWN

1 6 7 8 11 13 14 15 16

1 2 3 4 5 7 9 10 12

Troubled 1960's folk singer who wrote Blues Run the Game (7, 1, 5) Knife, Japanese female garage punks (6) _____ Rights, Peter Tosh's seminal anti-apartheid album (5) Pete, Buzzcocks frontman (7) Dave Gedge's kind of present (7) Backing band for Prince Far I (5) _____ Girls, female duo from the 80's Athens, Georgia scene (6) Label for Clinic, Max Tundra and Quasi (6) Lovers (Jonathan Richman) or Secondary (Darren Hayman) (6)

Recently ressurected Chicago noise-rockers (5, 6) Final album by Joy Division (6) Epic Soundtracks and Nikki Sudden's Birmingham post-punk band (5, 4) Son of _ ___ (The La's or The Vaselines) (1, 3) Single from Echo and the Bunnymen's Ocean Rain album (7, 4) Lemonheads frontman (4, 5) David, vocalist in 1 down (3) Neil Hannon's kind of comedy (6) Here Come the ____ Jets (Brian Eno) (4)

Crossword No.VII compiled by Ed Mugford

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