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F E AT UR E S
The Future Is Now Odette, Press Club, Stella Donnelly, This is the Kit and POW! Negro are just some of the new acts to check out .......................... 44
Living Legend: Lindy Morrison The former drummer with the Go-Betweens doesn’t want to talk about it anymore. But she does anyway. By Barry Divol a ..... 52
The Boys Are Back In Town On the road with Midnight Oil as The Great Circle tour winds its way back home. By David Fricke ............................................. 54
The Salvation of Brian Wilson At 75, the Beach Boy has beat back depression, ramped up his touring and learned to “kick ass at life”. By Jason Fine ........................................................................................ 62
Alex Lahey’s Big Future
STEAMED Midnight Oil Page 54
The singer-songwriter has a firm idea of what she wants from her career. By Michael Dw yer .............................................................................. 66
The Madness of Donald Trump The pressures of the Presidency have pushed Trump to the edge, but is he crazy enough to be removed from office? By Matt Taibbi ..................................................................................68
RO CK & ROL L
Spring Album Preview
success it literally made her sick............................................16
U2’s near-death experience, Taylor Swift’s dark turn, Sam Smith’s emotional return, and 12 more of the season’s hottest releases. ................................... 11
Q&A: Robert Plant
St Vincent Annie Clark had so much
On his new LP ....................... 22
Eric Wareheim He built a comedy empire. Why shouldn’t he throw wild parties and eat cod sperm? .34
DEPA R T MEN TS
ROB DRAPER
OODLES OF NOODLES Stella Donnelly is one of 10 new artists we shine a light on. Page 44
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Letters ..................................... 4 Random Notes ....................... 8
Records ..................................77 The Last Page.......................90
ON THE COVER Midnight Oil, photographed on their US tour by John Tsiavis.
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Correspondence portant thing is to not let that stop you going to a show. When that happens the terrorists have won. Petra Whittington Artarmon, NSW
The Life of Lucas
Choose Life i wa s t ouc h e d b y dav e Grohl’s words about Chris Cornell and Chester Bennington in last month’s cover story. The wounds of Kurt’s suicide are still clearly visible, and I can’t imagine the emotions Chris’s passing in particular caused for Grohl. Clarence Harvey Avalon, NSW
Security Concerns interesting story on the future of concert security [RS 791]. While happy that our security is clearly a big concern, I do long for the days when you could go to a gig without having to worry about where the exits are and what you’d do if some kind of tragedy should unfold. But then such is the world we live in. I guess the most im-
i n e v er thought i’d see Steve Lucas given such a feature in Rolling Stone [RS 791]. Hats off to you for recognising one of Australian rock & roll’s unsung heroes. Now, everyone go out and buy an X album or two, and hear why Lucas is held in such high regard! He’s a true survivor. Jimmy Ballard Carlton, Vic
History Lesson i fir st subscr ibed to Rolling Stone back in the Nineties and enjoyed articles on the likes of Nirvana and REM. I subscribed again this year and I love your anniversary and flash back articles. I loved your flash back article on John Lennon and his relationship with the magazine. The naked two virgins cover in 1968 and the heartbreaking Annie Leibovitz cover shot taken just hours before John was shot dead in 1980 . . . It brought back fond and sad memories and reminded me again why John was and still is my favourite Beatle. Nev Hoare Perth, W.A.
Write to us and win! Every letter published will win a money-can’tbuy Rolling Stone t-shirt. Write to us and tell us your thoughts on the magazine or life in general. But please, keep it brief! letters@rollingstoneaus.com
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Love Letters & Advice
Not Forgotten l ast month’s issue really brought into focus how many artists we’ve lost this year. In that issue alone were tributes to Chester Bennington, Dr. G Yunupingu and Glen Campbell. And there we were hoping 2016 was just an anomaly. Seems like we’d better get used to losing our heroes. Chris Aaronsohn Abercrombie, NSW
No Means No a ndrew p. street’s article on gay marriage [RS 791] left out one salient point: while it may be “a fact” that Australia will have same sex marriage, that doesn’t make it right. I’m voting “no”, but that doesn’t make me hateful or prejudiced – it’s just against my moral beliefs. Which, the “yes” campaigners seem to forget, are just as valid as their beliefs. Tim Keslake Salisbury East, Qld
Sexism Slap Down t u t-t u t, rolli ng ston e. Flipping through the pages of your latest issue, I couldn’t help but notice that all the male artists were wearing their normal clothes, but then the feature on Gal Gadot has her posing like some adolescent teen’s fantasy, showing plenty of skin. Seems that sexism is as rife in your magazine as it is in general society. Please think twice about what you expect of women. Corinne Haskins, via e-mail
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Rolling Stone is published in Australia monthly by Paper Riot Pty Ltd, Suite 4, 5 Wilson St, Newtown, NSW 2042. ABN 9216 6626 526. Enquiries: (02) 8006 9663. Copyright © 2014 by ROLLING STONE LLC. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. The name ROLLING STONE and the logo thereof are registered trademarks of ROLLING STONE LLC, which trademarks have been licensed to Paper Riot Pty Ltd. For subscription inquiries visit www.magshop. com.au, email magshop@magshop.com.au or telephone 136 116 between 8am and 6pm (EST) Monday to Friday. Alternatively, post requests to Magshop, GPO Box 5252, Sydney, NSW 2000. Printed by PMP Limited, 8 Priddle Street, Warwick farm NSW 2170, Distributed in Australia by Gordon & Gotch Australia Pty Ltd. Distributed in New Zealand by Gordon & Gotch (NZ) Ltd, 2 Carr Road, Mt Roskill, Auckland. Phone (09) 625 3000. Rolling Stone does not assume responsibility for unsolicited materials and will return only those accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. ISSN 1320-0615 RALPH J. GLEASON 1917-1975 HUNTER S. THOMPSON 1937-2005
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TV
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From a new Star Trek series to David Fincher’s serial-killer procedural Mindhunter, we run through our picks for the most exciting shows hitting the small screen this season.
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RandomNotes RIRI RIDER Rihanna rode onto the runway at her own fashion show: “I feel like the coolest bitch on the block now!”
Stones Rip Europe
The Stones returned to the road after a yearlong hiatus, delivering a surprising set list in Hamburg, Germany, including “Under My Thumb”, “Play With Fire” and, for the first time in over 40 years, 1973’s stoner jam “Dancing With Mr. D”. “Back on the job!” said Keith Richards. The band is also working on a new LP.
CHIEF KEEF “Look out, Hamburg,” Richards said, wearing a shirt championing Dartford, England, his hometown.
Fashion Week Rocks Kanye may not have hosted a Yeezy show at New York Fashion Week, but musicians took over, with surprise gigs by Future, St. Vincent, Solange and more. “I wish some people from the hood would be able to attend fashion shows,” Cardi B has said.
YACHT PARTY Lil Yachty and Diplo caught the Helmut Lang show. “Very cool to see top models in action,” Diplo said.
OUTLAWS AND ANGELS Margo Price visited Willie Nelson’s bus to listen to their duet off her new album, All American Made. “We [also] smoked weed and told jokes,” she says.
In what might be the harshest blow to the US presidency so far, the Mother Of All Rallies, a show of support for President Trump, was dwarfed by a Washington protest by Juggalos, fans of clown-core group Insane Clown Posse, who have recently been classed as gang members by the FBI.
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Q&A ROBERT PLANT
P. 22
| INSPIRATION INSIDE WAR ON DRUGS’ NEW LP
P. 27
Rock&Roll Rock Rock& Roll SPRING ALBUWM PREVIE
U2’s New Fire How a personal crisis inspired their intense new album BY A NDY GRE E N E
ROSS STEWART
U2 Songs of Experience December 1st The past three years have tested U2 in different ways, from the fierce backlash they received for gifting 2014’s Songs of Innocence to every iTunes user to Bono’s devastating bicycle accident, which left him with several fractured bones and a shattered left arm. But those setbacks didn’t compare to another crisis Bono faced last year. “He had a brush with mortality,” says the Edge, choosing his words carefully (the band won’t go into detail on the matter). “He definitely had a serious moment, which caused him to reflect on a lot of things.” [Cont. on 12]
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BEAUTIFUL DAY “I wanted the people around me that I loved to know exactly how I felt,” Bono says.
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11
R&R
[Cont. from 11] The episode caused the band to rethink Songs of Experience, a companion to Songs of Innocence that they had already been working on for more than two years. The resulting LP features less of the slick production that defined Innocence, in favour of a more classic formula: propulsive guitar rockers and ballads that look inward. Says the Edge, “In the back of his mind he was thinking, ‘If I’m not around, what would I like to leave behind?’ ” Adds Bono, “I wanted the people around me that I loved to know exactly how I felt. So a lot of the songs are kind of letters – letters to [my wife] Ali, letters to my sons and daughters.” Bono cites another reason why the album was delayed: politics. “For the first time in many years, maybe in our lifetime, the moral arc of the universe, as Dr. King used to call it, was not bending in the direction of fairness, equality and justice for all,” he says. After Trump’s election in November, some songs needed to be reworked. The song “The Blackout” went from what Bono calls a tale of “personal apocalypse . . . to po-
Already sent I WILL FOLLOW The Edge onstage in New Jersey this year.
litical dystopia”. (“A big mouth says the people, they don’t want to be free for free,” he howls.) Bono wrote the haunting “Summer of Love”, meanwhile, after watching a CNN report about a man in Aleppo, Syria, who maintained his garden in the middle of brutal war. “Bono was really inspired by his defiance,” says the Edge. While the group has avoided overt political statements in recent years, Bono says things
have changed: “I’ve always believed in working across the aisle as an anti-poverty activist, but this isn’t a matter of right or left. There’s a bully on the bully pulpit, and silence is not an option.” U2 worked with a rotating crew of producers during the three-year-plus process, including Jacknife Lee, Andy Barlow, Ryan Tedder, Jolyon Thomas and Steve Lillywhite. Each one was brought in for
Taylor Swift Reputation November 10th Spring’s most tightly guarded secret, Reputation, is described by a source as “lyrically sharper and more emotionally complex than 1989”. Its first singles are in the 1989 mode of moody electro-pop, with the Jack Antonoff-produced blare of “Look What You Made Me Do” and the peppier hip-hop jam “. . . Ready for It?” The artwork – Swift in a Flashdance-style sweatshirt, gazing through headlines of her name –suggest she’s again pondering the time-old mystery of, as she once sang, why “people throw rocks at things that shine”.
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a specific purpose, says the Edge, from Lillywhite’s feel for navigating the band’s arrangements to Lee’s “fascination with hip-hop production”. While the huge team may suggest overkill, the band was actually trying its best to capture the straightforward energy of its live shows. Bono remembers a key moment when U2 took a break from recording and gathered at their rehearsal space and played the songs live. “We were able to strip them down to their bare essentials without any studio trickery to see what we really had,” he says. “ We learned so much about the songs, and that helped with cohesiveness.” Walking the line between vintage U2 and modern rock music was a big challenge. “We need to make sure that we are part of a current conversation in music culture in terms of production and songwriting, melodic structure,” says the Edge. Sometimes, the group would record vintage and modern versions of the same song before making a decision. “We don’t want to be perceived as – and we don’t want to sound like – a veteran act out of touch with where the culture is,” says the Edge. “It’s a balance.”
Liam Gallagher As You Were October 6th
“I’m not saying my songs are better than Oasis songs,” says the band’s former frontman, who steps out as a songwriter – usually his estranged brother Noel’s gig – with impressive results on his solo debut. “But they’re definitely as loud as them!” Crafted with co-writers like the ubiquitous Greg Kurstin, the LP taps into the Oasis vein: tight rock tunes spiked with psychedelia, and mammoth choruses from one of rock’s most casually charismatic voices. “I prefer straight outand-out rock & roll numbers,” says Gallagher. “There’s no one doing it. And I certainly don’t wanna make a prog record.”
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U2
SPRING ALBUM PREVIEW
Beck
A R C H I VA L S E T S
Colors October 13th
Beck was working on Colors even before he released 2014’s stripped-down Morning Phase. “I suppose the record could’ve come out a year or two ago,” he says. “But I wanted to take the time to crystallise and distil everything.” Produced by Greg Kurstin – who was Beck’s touring keyboardist before he went on to produce hits for Adele and others – the result is relentlessly upbeat, full of glossy anthems like “Seventh Heaven” and the falsetto-steeped “Square One”, where Beck sings about heartbreak as a chance to reset. “The best songs make you glad to be alive,” he says.
Billy Corgan Ogilala October 13th
Corgan was midway through recording a new Smashing Pumpkins LP when he decided to abandon the project and dramatically rethink his career. “My interest in working under the name Smashing Pumpkins is not as interesting to me without the original people involved,” he says, possibly teasing a reunion. Instead, he wrote a series of stark songs and recorded them with producer Rick Rubin, using mostly guitar, piano and strings. Corgan says, “Rick Rubin has a special, almost spectral-like quality of getting to the heart of a song in a way that’s really unique.”
Bob Dylan Trouble No More: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 13, 1979-1981 November 3rd Dylan’s Christian period (1979-81) remains one of his most controversial and debated chapters. What’s often lost in those arguments is that it produced some of his greatest concerts. Trouble No More, an eight-CD set, proves that point, with live highlights from that time, when Dylan’s band included legendary session players like organist Spooner Oldham and drummer Jim Keltner. The set is full
Niall Horan
GETTY
Flicker October 20th
The blond heartthrob was the folkie of One Direction, with a subtle delivery and a penchant for playing acoustic guitar live. His solo debut will build on that identity, inspired by Seventies California rock (he’s called mentor Don Henley “Dad”). So far it’s working: The guitar-heavy single “Slow Hands” is a pop hit. Horan spent six months writing with a crew that had previously crafted 1D hits. “I wanted this album to be completely personal,” Horan says, “therefore, the best way
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Metallica Master of Puppets [Remastered Deluxe Box Set] November 10th
With thrashers like “Battery” and “Disposable Heroes”, Metallica’s 1986 classic broke them out of the underground
of revelations: There are six vastly different versions of “Slow Train”, plus 14 unreleased songs, such as “Making a Liar Out of Me”, which has escaped bootleggers for more than 30 years. A one-hour film features footage from 1980 and a deeply moving version of “Pressing On”. Says Dylan scholar Clinton Heylin, “Like the mid-1960s, he was at the absolute peak of his powers.” and paved the way for stadium superstardom. They revisited Master of Puppets for a set that includes 10 CDs, a coffee-table book and even a live cassette. There are rare covers – like a furious version of Fang’s hardcore classic “The Money Will Roll Right In” – and demos that reveal how the songs were written; “Master of Puppets” goes from a James Hetfield guitar riff to a 12-minute epic. The band also decided to include a tape of bassist Cliff Burton’s final concert before a fatal tour-bus accident, and a disc featuring replacement Jason Newsted’s first gig two months later. “There’s been some additional emotion with this reissue,” says drummer Lars Ulrich. “You pause and think of all the craziness, but also how fortunate we are to still be out here doing it.”
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SPRING ALBUM PREVIEW
Camila Cabello The Hurting. The Healing. The Loving Release date TBD Cabello was the breakout star of Fifth Harmony before she quit the group last year, in part because she didn’t like their creative process: “A&R would play you the songs you’re going to cut that day, and then a vocal producer will tell you what you’re going to sing,” she says. “It’s just not for me.” Cabello insisted on co-writing the songs on her debut, which she says combines mainstream pop with her Latin roots. She drew heavily on relationship drama, from a crushing breakup more than a year ago to an encounter with “a famous boy I met at an after-Grammys party”. She adds, “I was using writing as therapy. The music went through a hell of a ride, because I did, too.”
Weezer
recommends turning off the news entirely.
Morrissey
Mavis Staples
Low in High School Nov. 17th
Pacific Daydream Oct. 27th
Rivers Cuomo has always had an obsessive streak. But he took it to another level on Weezer’s 11th album, creating a software script that sifted through his backlog of musical ideas and paired them based on key and tempo. “Then I can see which ideas most likely fit with each other,” says Cuomo. “It’s like collaborating with myself.” Cuomo and producer Butch Walker crafted a series of songs far more modern-sounding than 2016’s White Album. “There’s a lot more atmospheric guitar and effects on my vocals,” says Cuomo. “I’d never done that before. It’s very trippy.”
Kelsea Ballerini Unapologetically Nov. 3rd
Ballerini’s debut scored a Number One country hit (“Peter Pan”) and got Nashville wondering if she was the countrypop heir to Taylor Swift. She’s trying not to get swept up in the hype; though Ballerini, 24, says she was pitched “undeniable hits” for her follow-up, she was intent on co-writing everything. She singles out “High School”, a ballad she wrote after returning home to Knoxville, Tennessee, after leaving at 15. “It made me realise how much
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I had changed,” she says. “That song is my baby of the record.”
“The people and politicians everywhere are in a state of mutual contempt,” says Morrissey, describing the heavy emotions behind his 11th solo LP. “Translate all of this into great music and life becomes hopeful.” He aims for optimism on “All the Young People Must Fall in Love”, about seizing life’s small thrills during the Trump era, and “Spent the Day in Bed”
If All I Was Was Black November 17th
Staples says Trump’s “race-baiting rhetoric” got her thinking about how little has changed since she travelled the country singing at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches. “It seems that there’s suddenly been a rebirth of bigotry and hate – it’s like I’m reliving the Sixties,” she says, before bringing up Charlottesville: “The only
Noel Gallagher Title and release date TBD “It’s unashamedly a fuckin’ pop album,” says Gallagher of his third LP with the High Flying Birds. Producer David Holmes, a Northern Irish electronic musician, pushed Gallagher to put down his acoustic and build tracks pulling generously from his favourite songs; “If Love Is the Law” samples Brian Eno, and “Holy Mountain” borrows a hook from Sixties bubblegum group Ice Cream. “It’s all about beautiful women, getting high, everything the fuckin’ terrorists hate,” Gallagher says. “I reckon if I went to Syria and played it for ISIS, it’d all be fuckin’ over. I reckon it’d even turn Trump around.”
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difference that I saw between back in the day and those men marching with torches was that they showed their faces. . . . No sheets.” Her third LP with Jeff Tweedy producing includes “We Go High”, which quotes Michelle Obama’s 2016 DNC speech, while the funky throwback “Build a Bridge” proposes a hopeful alternative to Trump’s border wall.
Sam Smith Title and release date TBD
Smith had a tough time after 2014’s Grammy-winning In the Lonely Hour, which sold more than 10 million copies worldwide. “I became very distant to my family and friends,” he said recently. After a year off to regroup, he’s back with a gospelsteeped LP that reunites him with producer Jimmy Napes (who co-wrote his megahit “Stay With Me”), and recruits new collaborators Timba land and R&B hitmakers Stargate. The single “Too Good at Goodbyes” is about a recent failed relationship. “This album is a selection of short stories from the last two years of my life,” he says. “I’ve poured every ounce of my heart into every song. Fucking hope people like it.” reporting by Patrick Doyle, Andy Greene, Kory Grow, Brian Hiatt, Dan Hyman, Maura Johnston, Brittany Spanos, Christopher R. Weingarten
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for me to get what I wanted out of the songs was to write them with friends.”
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Son Little
Soul troubadour’s Australian odyssey
1
A stew of styles It’s a testament to Son Little’s eclectic, genre-splicing fusion of Philadelphia soul, hard rock and East Coast 1960s folk that Rolling Stone finds him recovering from playing Brooklyn’s Afropunk festival whilst also preparing to perform at a bluegrass event in Massachusetts – all in support of his sophisticated, mature second album, New Magic. “It’s not a stretch for me to have a harder sound, but I also grew up listening to Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie,” says the singer.
2
Take it as gospel The Californian-born artist, real name Aaron Livingston, grew up the son of a preacher. “I regularly heard a certain type of harmony being sung around me, and I came to understand music as something that lots of people do together. A congregation coming together is very fundamental to me.”
3
Top End inspiration New Magic has its roots in a Darwin hotel room. After a show in the city in 2016, Livingston borrowed a guitar owned by
none other than the late Dr. G. Yunupingu and promptly wrote five songs with it. “I felt I had a bit of magic from his guitar. I also found the landscape very strange, like something you’d read in a book or see on a cartoon – it sparked my imagination.”
4
Back to basics His Darwin experience inspired him to take a more fundamental approach to writing and recording. “Anything is possible with machines and software, but I wanted to unplug and face the sometimes excruciating prospect of writing a song where you have to be patient. I’m nostalgic for when I first started writing.”
5
Are the times changin’? Livingston says he feels no compulsion to sing about the splintered socio-political climate in the US, although his 2015 track “Cross My Heart”, about Trayvon Martin, is an impassioned protest song. He remains unfazed by Trump. “I don’t necessarily think the past year has seen rapid change. A lot of what we’re seeing is just a more open expression of things that were already at work.” GARETH HIPWELL
WATCHING THE SON COME UP Son Little: “A congregation coming together is very fundamental to me.”
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The Trials of St. Vincent Annie Clark had so much success it literally made her sick. But she turned that anxiety into her best music yet BY KORY GROW
I
n 2014, a n n ie cl a r k’s c a r eer could not have been going better. After years of carving out her place as a cult hero, the singer-guitarist – who records as St. Vincent – found a surprising level of success with her fourth LP, St. Vincent, which reached Number 12 on the U.S. album charts. Clark toured the world, fronted Nirvana at their live reunion at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony and turned in one of the more memo-
Photograph by LeA n n Mueller
rable Saturday Night Live performances in recent years, playing inside a giant box and doing strange choreography between fuzzguitar outbursts. But if you ask Clark, that period wasn’t a lot of fun. “I was going out of my mind,” she says. “I was on the road constantly and just trying to keep up with the pace. It was go-go-go, and I didn’t have incredibly well-developed coping mechanisms. I was just trying to keep my sanity.” Clark
started taking medication for anxiety and depression. Today, she credits pharmaceuticals with helping her move on to the next phase of her career. In fact, they even influenced her excellent new album, Masseduction (out October 13th); one of the first songs she wrote for the LP was “Pills”, a jittery guitar-scraper with a childlike melody. Masseduction is Clark’s most intriguingly complex album to date. She recorded with producer Jack Antonoff (Taylor Swift, Lorde), working up a set of songs about sex, drugs and sadness. The music she came up with straddles New Wave, ambient rock and straight-ahead pop, and features appearances by jazz virtuoso and Kendrick Lamar sideman Kamasi Washington, Jenny Lewis, and producer and Dr. Dre bassist Mike Elizondo. Model and actress Cara Delevingne (whom Clark dated before they split last year) guests on backup vocals. “What sold me on working with Annie was how much she was willing to expose and how ready she was to rip it all apart and go all in,” Antonoff says. “It’s exactly in line with how I like COME AS to make records right now.” YOU ARE Clark, 34, has spent most Clark, a.k.a. of the past two years out St. Vincent, of the public eye. But that in Los doesn’t mean she hasn’t been Angeles. busy. “I don’t take time off,” she says. “I tweeted this the other day, but it’s true: ‘Work is more fun for me than fun.’ ” Since St. Vincent, she’s directed a short horror film for XX, an anthology spotlighting female directors, and announced plans to direct a film that would reimagine The Picture of Dorian Gray with a female lead. She also designed a custom electric guitar for Ernie Ball instruments and built a recording studio in Los Angeles. After she turned in the completed Masseduction, Clark made an alternate, stripped-down version of the LP with pianist Thomas Bartlett (a release date for which has not been announced). While recording in New York and L.A., she would hold herself to epic studio binges, a process she calls “monastic fantastic”. Says Clark, “I’m just totally burrowed and celibate and 100 per cent dedicated. I took a nap earlier, which was great. But I don’t really do anything but make things.” The songs she has written can deal with anything from sexual role-playing to suicide. One of Masseduction’s highlights is the sorrowful “Happy Birthday, Johnny”, in which she sings about losing touch with a friend who is bogged down by drugs and depression. “That’s a banger,” she says sarcastically. Some artists might worry about being so revealing on record, but Clark doesn’t mind inviting people in. “It’s just my life,” she says. “Besides, you can’t factcheck a record.”
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FROM THE VAULT
Josh Pyke’s Archives As the singer-songwriter prepares to go on hiatus, he takes us on a trip down memory lane I N T E R V I E W B Y R OD YAT E S
1. ‘The Million’ Demo CD, 2003 BEFORE HE WAS JOSH PYKE, HE WAS THE MILLION
come a professional musician and get some headway for almost nine years at that point, so it just felt like something finally going my way. And it really motivated me to continue to do everything by myself. It felt great to finally be in a position where I knew that whatever happened, if it didn’t go well it was completely on me, and if it did go well it was completely on me. I was ready to throw my hat in the ring and get it happening.”
“I wanted a collective name [for my solo work], so I thought of the Million. My band An Empty Flight was disintegrating, and I went and recorded 10 or 11 songs I’d been writing that never fit the band. When I finished I was like, this is really good! So I sent it out to loads and loads of people and got rejected by absolutely everyone! I’ve got rejection letters from Sony, who I’m now signed with. I mocked this up myself and cut all the CD slicks and glued them together. There’s a couple of songs on here that got released a couple of times, like ‘Vibrations in Air’.”
4. Book of Lyrics COMPUTERS ARE OVERRATED
“These lyrics are for a song called ‘Silver’, and that was on [Night Hour’s] Current Works. That’s one of the very earliest songs I wrote in this vein. I’d been writing punk songs [up to this point] and then I was going into this style of really reflective, personal songs. It was the first part of that transition, I guess. I didn’t think people would dig it but it immediately got a good response. I’ve just gone back to writing in notebooks. I was on the computer for ages, but in the last two years I’ve gone back to notebooks and I find it way more creative.”
3. Josh’s Big Week Out, 2004 NIGHT HOUR HITS THE ROAD FOR THE FIRST TIME
2. First Time in the Charts, 2004 GOODBYE TO THE MILLION, HELLO NIGHT HOUR
“When I got management, I changed my name to Night Hour, which was also just confusing [laughs]. Charting was very exciting. I’d been trying really hard to be-
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“I’d put a band together, and we didn’t know what we were doing. We’d just write ourselves off every night! We were staying in caravan parks, it was really fun. But there was always a sense of fear for me, ’cause by that time I was 26 or something, and all my friends had finished their degrees at uni. I was like, OK, this has just started and I know this is going to take another five years to [turn] into a proper career, but I was absolutely compelled to do it. I didn’t have anything to fall back on, and I knew what I was doing was a big risk.”
5. The Breakthrough, 2005 ‘MIDDLE OF THE HILL’ SEVEN-INCH SINGLE
“I got signed to Ivy League Records and they were like, ‘You need to [Cont. on 20]
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I’ve got rejection letters from Sony, who I’m now signed with.
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R&R change your name to Josh Pyke and be yourself’. ‘Middle of the Hill’ I wrote when I had no money and had moved back home, and I was staying in the same bedroom I grew up in. And I felt on one hand like things were progressing, and on the other like a massive loser for having to move back home. Writing this was like this nostalgic reflection on my childhood. [This version] was from the mini-album Feeding the Wolves.. It made the Hottest 100, and I played the Sydney Big Day Out that year. I thought 100 people would show up, but the amphitheater was packed. At the same time I signed to Island Records [in the UK and Europe] and was being flown back and forth to the UK to start touring over there, and everything was full-on all of a sudden. That’s when I started writing [debut album] Memories & Dust as well.”
9. ‘Bug Eyed Beauty’ Score, 2015 IN WHICH JOSH TEAMS UP WITH THE SYDNEY SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA, SELLS OUT THE OPERA HOUSE
8. ‘Only Sparrows’ Tour Laminate, 2011 ON THE ROAD AGAIN
“Only Sparrows was a funny one for me, ’cause it was a lot darker of a record. Things had been so intense for five or six years at that point, going from literally working in a record store to being a full time touring musician, going back and forth overseas, also starting a relationship with the woman who became my wife. It was super exciting, but it was taking a toll on
6. What’s in a Name? THERE’S NOTHING LIKE A GOOD PUN
“Have I seen a lot of puns like this? Not as many as I thought I would. That was one of the main reasons I didn’t use my name [at the start], ’cause I was like, everyone’s going to call me a Pyker or whatever. But there haven’t been many, which is great, ’cause I wasn’t looking forward to a career being teased about my name!”
7. SXSW, 2007 NOT A BAD BILL TO BE ON
“I’d signed to Island and was doing solo [UK] tours with acts like Ben Kweller and the Walkmen. I went over to South By Southwest which was so great. Amy Winehouse never showed up though, I don’t know what happened to her.”
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“It was a bucket list thing I’d wanted to do for a long time. We had two rehearsals before the show at the Opera House, and it was the day before and the day of the show. Backstage I was kind of freaking out a bit. I remember saying to myself, this is one of those moments where you’re going to sink or swim, you’re just going to have to rise to the occasion. It was really emotional. There were certain songs, ‘Bug Eyed Beauty’ and ‘Order Has Abandoned Us’, that have these really cathartic crescendo moments in there. I was choking up for some of it, it was very intense.”
“‘Middle of the Hill’ I wrote when I had no money and I had moved back home, and I was staying in the same bedroom I grew up in.” me. Then having a kid, I was living this very domestic situation and I’d taken four months off the road just to be at home, which was amazing. But then I needed to get stuck into finishing these songs. It was a funny period. It was this quite dark album for me where I was trying to work out a lot of stuff about my place in the world and what kind of person I wanted to be as a man and a father. And then going out on the road and playing it, that was the first tour being away from my family as well. It was a massively transitional period.”
10. The Future COMING TO A RECORD NEAR YOU . . . SOMETIME
“These are songs I’ve been working onand-off on for a year. I really love all these songs, but I just don’t feel compelled to record them yet. Usually by now I would have demos of them, but I don’t want to do that. I feel like I want to get to know all of these songs, playing them live and at home, really refining them. That’s partly why I want to take some time off. I just don’t feel compelled to release these songs yet.”
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R&R
‘H
old on a minute, the little doggy’s about to run away,” Robert Plant says as he puts the phone down at his home in England, on the Welsh border. After a vacation in Morocco, Plant sounds antsy as he prepares to release his new album, Carry Fire. He recorded it with a group of musicians under the name the Sensational Space Shifters, many of whom he first worked with in 2002, and returned to in 2014 after projects with Alison Krauss and the Band of Joy and, of course, a oneoff Led Zeppelin reunion in 2007. Featuring a diverse crew of world musicians, the band blends Middle Eastern, American and Celtic roots music. “It’s a little wild, a little bit crazy in concept,” says Plant, 69, who plans to tour the world with the Space Shifters in 2018. “We’ve got a kind of communal drift, which has stayed with us no matter what other projects we do. It’s like a brotherhood, really.”
Plenty of your Sixties contemporaries are still on the road, but most aren’t regularly releasing new music. Anyone who gets tangled up in music and performance wants to keep it going. But by which means do you do it? Cramming the stuff into the suitcase again and playing live? Or is it creativity, another adventure, and trying to impress people who often want to hear how it was rather than how it is? That’s what I’ve been trying to do. After we lost John [Bonham] in 1980, I waited two albums before I went on tour, and when I did, I didn’t play any Zeppelin stuff. How did it feel touring without Zeppelin for the first time? Like my world had collapsed. But what happened in the first place when you didn’t have a game? You had to go out and make one. So I’ve shifted around over the years. That way, I keep interested and excited in what I do. One new song repeats the line “a wall and not a fence”, a direct quote from Trump. When he first said that, I thought, “Oh, fancy that, where have we heard that before?” Everyone with a certain neurosis has said [“build a wall”], from the first caveman with a stick to the Great Wall of China and on and on. He was only the most recent character to go to the same place. How do you view Trump? I got to a point where I could no longer watch. The media makes it such a garish feast. I just decided that there’s a process that will sort itself out and rectify itself in due course. Which it
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Q&A
Robert Plant The frontman on his relationships with his Led Zeppelin bandmates and his new musical ‘brotherhood’ BY PAT R ICK D OY L E
will. I keep my head down and dissolve into books. You lived in Austin before returning to the U.K. three years ago. What was that time like? Wonderful. I was embraced by the community there and exposed to so many great musicians and played a lot of great gigs. Patty Griffin and I started a band called Crown Vic. I bought an old cop car and we drove to play a festival in Marfa, Texas, listening to all the appropriate music. But maybe I was a bit too old to make the move. It was with a very heavy heart I had to come back to Wales. It felt like a major defeat. So why did you leave? I missed my family, and I wanted some peace. Without being too cheesy, I missed the misty mountains – the wet Welsh climate. I like weather people run away from. What’s your life like in Wales? I’ve got great friends and a really good dog. I play tennis. I play soccer every Wednesday at 7 p.m. I play till someone says, “Go in goal – it looks like you’re gonna die.” Then somebody brings the defibrillator quick. Last year, you spent two weeks with your old bandmates to fight for the writing credits of “Stairway to Heaven”. Did it feel like old times? [Laughs] Um, well, what was once a steady date becomes a cup of coffee. That’s basically how it turned out, a cup of coffee from time to time. But nothing intimate. We’re coming up on the 10-year anniversary of Zeppelin’s Celebration Day. How do you look back on that night? It was magnificent. We hit a home run that night, which is something that we were really fearful of. There was probably more riding on that than we would care to believe. Our performance was crucial, but we could reproduce sound in a much more reliable way, so we could be kickass, and sound kickass. Some of those horrific gigs way back were lacking in quality. Gene Simmons recently said that rock is dead. Do you agree? I haven’t any idea of where rock begins and ends. Did it begin with Link Wray? Did it begin with Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88”? Did it end with Black Flag? I think it’s still here, it’s just morphing. And long may it morph. Almost every other rock star but you has written a memoir. Would you? Never. What I know between my ears here is priceless. It’s magnificent, sometimes tearful, but mostly cheerful. There have been highs and lows and a lot of adventure, and I keep it hid.
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R&R METAL BEAK BRUTALITY Matt ‘Youngy’ Young, second from right
King Parrot’s ‘Ugly’ Noise The Melbourne quintet are taking their extreme metal to the world, one gig at a time
‘I
think metal has become a little bit more accepted by the wider music community these days,” declares Matt ‘Youngy’ Young, frontman of hard-touring, heavy-hitting Melbourne extremists King Parrot. “A lot of people still turn their noses up at it, but I think the great thing about King Parrot is that we’ve been able to knock down a few doors in terms of our appeal.” His words are far from empty. 2015’s Dead Set, overseen by Pantera’s Phil Anselmo in New Orleans, was nominated for an ARIA Award, and their notoriously wild, high-energy shows are almost always full. Anticipation has been high for follow-up album Ugly Produce (out now), recorded with Jason Fuller of Blood Duster (who helmed 2012’s Bite Your Head Off ). “Going back to working with Jason on this album felt really organic,” the singer says. “He’s a good friend and he understands our band and where we’re coming from.” 24 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |
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King Parrot’s sound is a ferocious cocktail of thrash metal and grindcore with liberal doses of hardcore punk and bottom-feeding sludge. Laced with Youngy’s rabid roar-and-screech vocal attack, Ugly Produce is the most complete encapsulation of their street-level larrikin punkmetal to date. “I think the band is in the healthiest position it’s ever been in,” says Youngy, who also doubles as the band’s manager. As a self-confessed control freak, it’s a role he enjoys because “if anything goes wrong, I’ve got no-one to blame but myself”. “The myth around King Parrot has been steadily building,” he continues, “but with this new album we’ve been able to capture the live intensity and the growing chemistry within the band and achieved things in the recording that we haven’t previously.” Much of their success stems from a gruelling live regimen. Their upcoming U.S. tour with Anselmo’s band Superjoint will
be their ninth to that country, and there’s also been “three or four” visits to Europe and countless journeys around Australia. “For the last three or four years we’ve been touring around the world non-stop, really trying to forge our name in the international metal scene and that can be really taxing on the band and the individuals in it,” Youngy says. “We feel that we’ve established ourselves as a band that people know about now, and those people know what they can expect from us when they come to our show.” Despite their rising profile, King Parrot still tour as cheaply as they can. Not only does it suit the band’s knockabout, extreme metal ethic, but Youngy is keenly aware of how expensive it all is. “We always budget,” he says. “The toughest thing about being an Australian band is how much money it costs to get yourself off the ground. Just to get overseas you’re already behind the eight ball.”
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ZO DAMAGE
BY B R I A N GI F F I N
Dylan’s New Drama A London musical imagines his songs set in his hometown during the Great Depression – and it works
‘I
’d always liked the stage and known (“Like a Rolling Stone”, “I Want even more so, the theater,” Bob You”) and obscure (“License to Kill”, “True Dylan wrote in his memoir, Chron- Love Tends to Forget”). “I never wanted a icles. “It seemed like the most su- standard musical,” says McPherson. “It’s a preme craft of all craft.” But for nearly five Bob musical. Once you say that, all bets are decades, the idea of a Dylan musical has been as elusive as the songwriter himself. In the late Sixties, poet and playwright Archibald MacLeish tried to recruit Dylan to write songs for a theatrical show called Scratch (“After hearing a few lines from the script, I didn’t see how our destinies could be intermixed,” wrote Dylan). In 2006, choreographer Twyla Tharp directed The Times They Are A-Changin’. Set at a travelling circus, it closed after three weeks. Girl From the North Country, which opened in July at London’s Old Vic Theatre, STAGE FRIGHT seems to have finally cracked Girl From the the code. Set during the DeNorth Country pression in Dylan’s birthopened in July. place of Duluth, Minnesota, the show is a surreal, Coenbrothers-style portrait of the old, weird off.” The show opened to positive reviews, America Dylan has long channelled. Writ- and plans are in the works to take it to the ten by Irish playwright Conor McPherson U.S., possibly Broadway. Work on the show began in 2013, when (whose Broadway thriller Shining City was nominated for two Tonys in 2006), the Dylan’s management and his label, Sony, play centres on a dysfunctional family (the jointly agreed to take a shot at a musical. mother, the title character, has dementia) “We didn’t want something that dealt with and its boardinghouse, which becomes a Bob’s life,” says a source close to the Dylan way station for a boxer, a sleazy preacher camp. “If you want to see Bob, you can see and others who pass through. With accom- him live or watch No Direction Home. We paniment by a small band, they express were hoping for something more creative.” their thoughts by way of songs both well- After seeing several proposals, the produc-
ers were most intrigued by McPherson’s heartland concept. “By setting it before Bob was born, we could cut it loose from all associations with him and the Sixties,” says McPherson. “This gives it a feeling of the Nativity: that when Bob entered the world, everything changed.” Dylan eventually gave the final go-ahead. When he played London in 2013, McPherson’s two-page pitch was read to him backstage. The producers got approval that night. “The proposal had the texture and a great feel,” says the Dylan source. McPherson owned only “about five” Dylan albums when he started writing. He was sent most of Dylan’s catalogue and told he could use any song. “I began to get into Infidels, so I stuck in three songs from that album,” McPherson says. “It was a magical journey exploring the music.” He often sent drafts to Dylan’s camp, but received minimal feedback. “I said, ‘Does Bob want to hear a tape or see a rehearsal or something?’ ” McPherson says. “I was told, ‘If Bob is there, you’re going to feel pressure. What if he says he doesn’t like a song? It’s better you keep doing what you’re doing.’ ” The one mystery that remains is Dylan’s reaction. “To the best of my knowledge, Bob has not seen it,” says the source. McPherson is fine with that: “Seeing the way the audience reacts every night, you know it works. Once we do that, my job is done.” DAVID BROWNE
The Rock-Musical Gold Rush After the success of Beautiful: The Carole King Musical and Hamilton, a slew of productions are bringing the radio to the stage
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Grateful Dead Set to debut off-Broadway in October, Red Roses, Green Gold is described as a “comedic tale” of a family looking to con its way to fortune in 1920s Maryland. The Dead’s music is sung by characters with names like the Candy Man and Bertha. Dead & Company keyboardist Jeff Chimenti serves as musical director.
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Alanis Morissette
Jerry Garcia
“Let It Go” singer Idina Menzel is in talks to take the lead in Jagged Little Pill, named after Morissette’s 1995 album. It debuts next spring in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a likely New York run to follow; producers describe it as a story of a “modern, multigenerational family”.
Jimmy Buffett Escape to Margaritaville, about a singer-bartender who falls for a tourist, is expected to open on Broadway in March, featuring Buffett classics and new songs. Buffett says having his own show is like “having a great margarita with a tequila floater”.
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R&R BREAKING
Gordi’s Balancing Act Final year exams aren’t slowing Sophie Payten down
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ophie payten, aka gordi, can barely remember a time when music wasn’t in her life. With a piano teacher mum, growing up as part of a close-knit family on a farm in the central NSW town of Canowindra provided plenty of time to put on Von Trapp-like concerts for relatives. “That was part and parcel of growing up for me,” she explains. “I really was performing since I could stand on my own two feet.” But it wasn’t until Payten heard Missy Higgins’ The Sound of White at age 12 that she picked up a guitar. “I had never heard an album that was so diary entry, and honest . . . it really stayed with me.” Honing her confessional approach to lyricism during a sometimes isolating stay at boarding school, she graduated from Higgins’ songbook to crafting her own intricate electro-folk arrangements. In 2014 she uploaded one of them to triple j Unearthed and has been on a dream trajectory ever since. Over the past three years Payten has signed to US indie Jagjaguwar, recorded an EP, and performed with label-mate Bon Iver on The Tonight Show, all while studying medicine. It’s no surprise, then, that the 24-year-old sounds as exhausted as she is excited about her debut album, Reservoir. “I have this whiteboard in my bedroom,” she laughs, “and I’ve written on it in permanent marker: ‘You’re nearly there!’” Payten knew her music would be best served working with multiple producers, which led to recording sessions in Wisconsin, Reykjavik, Los Angeles, New York and Sydney. There is something undeniably visceral about the result, a space and texture the singer attributes to her time
THE PEEP TEMPEL’S LAST TOUR... FOR NOW After nine years, three albums, two early singles and one EP, the Melbourne trio’s current national tour will be the last for a while as the band step away. “We aren’t really sure [what hiatus means] to tell you the truth,” says frontman Blake Scott. “We wanted to make sure people had the opportunity to see us but we didn’t want to say we’re breaking up because we just
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spent on the family farm, and the sessions with Alex Somers (Sigur Rós) in Iceland: “The landscape there is so intangible, but it influenced the way the music was made so much.” The album’s sprawling folk-pop achieves cohesion through Payten’s evocative, layered vocals and sprinkles of “digital fairy dust” applied post-production by engi-
don’t know.” The “endless grind” of lives with full-time jobs (Scott and drummer Steven Carter are carpenters, bass player Stewart Rayner works in a fashion warehouse) as well as full-time musical careers, coupled with the fact the band hadn’t written anything for a while, led to some soul searching. Deciding to have the break “released a lot of that tension” and “everyone was happy to step back”, a move which allowed them to enjoy the year’s highlights such as Meredith Festival without pressure. “We probably have been
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neer Zach Hanson. With touring commitments and final year exams to sit, Payten’s life isn’t slowing down anytime soon, but she wouldn’t have it any other way. “This is the big climax of life,” she says emphatically, “and it definitely takes a toll on me physically and emotionally, but I’m so close!”
more reflecting on what we’ve done as a band and the great shows that we got to do. It just feels like a natural point at the moment to step away for a while,” Scott says. “In three months we might say let’s start writing again [but] it could be three years, it could be never. We just thought there’s no point trying to force it; just embrace it.” Rayner and Carter have a project called Shepparton Airplane, Scott intends to keep playing and
SARAH SMITH
writing, possibly short stories or novels. Beyond that? We’ll see. “For now, it’s all about the creativity of the band, and that’s what needs to be nurtured.” BERNARD ZUEL
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INFLUENCES
Secrets of the War on Drugs The War on Drugs’ new album, A Deeper Understanding, is being hailed as one of the best rock LPs of the year. It’s a surprise hit for the band, which spent years as indie-rock heroes before signing with Atlantic in 2015. Here, frontman Adam Granduciel shares the sounds behind his psych-rock opus. KORY GROW
Warren Zevon
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
In late 2015, Granduciel moved from Philly to L.A., where he rediscovered the music of local legend Warren Zevon. On long drives to the studio, Granduciel constantly played 1978’s “Accidentally Like a Martyr”, a diary of post-relationship loneliness. He cites Zevon’s simple but profound lines, like “The hurt gets worse and the heart gets harder”, as “something that I’ll try to achieve forever”. Granduciel had that song in mind while writing “You Don’t Have to Go”, also about heartbreak. “I just had to sing and not be too worried about it being too revealing. It felt naked.”
Granduciel calls the Bad Seeds’ latest album, Skeleton Tree, a “work of art”. “It sounded like they arrived at sounds a lot easier, maybe in a more communal way,” he says. “It reminded me that Cave music can be intense and personal, but it can also be just fun.” The album pushed Granduciel to layer sounds differently, like adding vibraphones behind heavy guitars on the album opener, “Up All Night”. “It’s fun to throw a bunch of sounds down and sift through it and make something really beautiful.”
Talk Talk
Wilco
Before hitting the studio, “My favourite modern-day Granduciel read Phill Brown’s band,” Granduciel says. He Are We Still Rollc r e d it s W i lc o’s ing? which breaks 2002 documentdown the tireless ary, I Am Trying to Zevon sessions for BritBreak Your Heart, ish New Wavers with inspiring him Talk Talk’s clasto be a musician. Bruce Springsteen sics, 1988’s Spirit On A Deeper UnMark Hollis derstanding, the Granduciel calls Springsteen a of Eden and 1991’s of Talk Talk frontman specifbig influence, from his lyrics to Laughing Stock. ically wanted to his work ethic. Last year, Gran- That group’s trialand-error methods in channel Jeff Tweedy’s disduciel went through a the studio encour- sonant guitar solos, which Ghost of Tom Joad aged Gra nduciel added new dimensions to phase, falling in to take risks like otherwise quiet songs love with narraplay i ng a h a r - like 2004’s “Hell Is tives like “Highway monica through Chrome”. “I like 29”, about an afa Leslie speaker. that there aren’t fair that turns vi“We were follow- necessarily any olent. “It feels like ing the spirit of wrong notes,” he spent forever a band like that, says Granducon every song,” he which had made a iel. “You just find that one says. “He’s working name for themselves note and if you hold it long on telling stories. It with their obsessive enough, it’ll actually end up just made me want to Springsteen kind of perfection.” being the right note.” keep pushing.”
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Sonic Youth The guitarist is a big fan of 1986’s EVOL, the album that merged Sonic Youth’s arty tendencies with more commercial melodies. Granduciel points to “Shadow of a Doubt”, which includes percussive, atonal twinguitar interplay between Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo. “You can do anything with the electric guitar,” he says. “It can be a beautiful synth wash, it can be melodic or it can be angry. ‘Shadow of a Doubt’ does all those things for me.”
Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon
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FROM TOP, LEFT TO RIGHT; SHAWN BRACKBILL; SCOTT KOWALCHYK/CBS/GETTY IMAGES
Granduciel in April
R&R
VOICE OF AMERICA Newman in 1975
MY LIFE IN 12 SONGS
Randy Newman Lovely melodies, brutal ironies and cartoon heroes – here’s how a comic genius built one of American music’s greatest catalogues BY DAV ID F R ICK E
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Born in Los Angeles and raised for a time in New Orleans, Newman – who has just released Dark Matter, his first studio album in nine years – was fated to go into his family’s business. His uncles Alfred, Lionel and Emil Newman were famous Hollywood composers – two of them won Oscars. “As a kid, studying music,” Newman says, “that’s where I hoped I was headed.” He took the long road, starting in the early Sixties as a songwriter for other singers. Many of his early classic songs were recorded by artists such as Gene Pitney, Dusty Springfield and Three Dog Night. Newman’s only major hit under his own name was the jaunty 1977 satire of bigotry, “Short People”. But his six Grammys and his 2013 induction into the Rock and Roll
Hall of Fame reflect the greater enduring impact of Newman’s slippery storytelling, pointed social observations and rapturous melodies, delivered in a singular, deadpan Everyman voice. Newman’s only problem as he looked back through this list: He couldn’t always remember when he wrote what, if it was “1967 rather than ’65 or ’66. Lenny [Waronker, Newman’s longtime producer] would know. I should have asked him before I did this.”
I Think It’s Going to Rain Today RANDY NEWMAN 1968
This might have been 1964 or ’63. I may have had the first two chords of the tune, where the voice starts. I have always loved
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‘I
t ’ s a l mo s t a lwa y s s om e thing I play on the piano,” singersongwriter Randy Newman says of the genesis moment in his craft, the first step he takes into a new tune and story. “It inspires a code of some kind – maybe dummy lyrics, something I can get rid of. But after a couple of lines, it will become what it’s going to become. “It’s always been a job,” says Newman, 73, one of American pop’s greatest and most acclaimed songwriters for more than a half-century and an Academy Awardwinning composer for animated films. “I go to the piano, and I’m supposed to think of something. It’s always been that way – maybe because of the way I grew up.”
those vanilla kind of chords, straightahead Stephen Foster. And once I had a style, I crystallised it: The music is emotive – even beautiful – and the lyrics are not. The honest truth is the song bothered me because of the darkness – it felt sophomoric, too maudlin. But Judy Collins did a great version [in 1966]. UB40’s [1980 cover] was interesting. And I played piano for Barbra Streisand when she recorded it [in 1971]. Boy, it’s real good. She has a hell of a voice.
Davy the Fat Boy RANDY NEWMAN 1968
It’s sung by a con man who is telling these parents that he is going to take care of their son, who is a freak – in the carnival sense of the word. There might be something to do with my own self-worth, but I didn’t think there was when I wrote it. The narrator – it’s hard to have any sympathy for him. Most of my narrators have more to like about ’em. But not this one – he is not a good guy. I made mistakes with the orchestra, arranging it too slow. Then I had to record the vocals, and it was like building a mountain you can’t climb. It was brutal.
Have You Seen My Baby?
know they’re bad. They think they’re fine. I didn’t just want to say, “Slavery is awful.” It’s too easy. I wasn’t doing Roots. I knew Bobby Darin pretty well. He covered this [in 1972], but he was such a musical guy that he missed the point. He was like, “Little one, come to America.” Etta James did it, and I guarantee she knew what it was about, absolutely.
Lonely at the Top SAIL AWAY 1972
I wrote it for Frank Sinatra. There was a massive drive at Warner Bros. Records to get Frank a hit. I thought – maybe stupidly – that he would be ready to make fun of that leaning-against-the-lamppost shit: “Oh, I’m so lonely and miserable and the biggest singer in the world.” I never bought that part of him. I thought he’d appreciate that. I played it for him, at his office on the Warner Bros. lot. His reaction? Nothing.
“Once I had a style, I crystallised it: The music is emotive – even beautiful – and the lyrics are not.”
12 SONGS 1970
I arranged the horns for Fats Domino when he recorded this [in 1969.] I wrote it for me. But when he did it, it was like him imitating me imitating him. He’s one of my top-five artists of all time. Maybe the reason I love Fats so much is because I heard people talk that way in New Orleans.
Mama Told Me Not to Come
He said, “Next.” I also played “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today”. He said, “I like that one.” But he couldn’t hide his bitterness at young people’s music.
Louisiana 1927 GOOD OLD BOYS 1974
Eric Burdon [of the Animals] recorded this in 1966. It’s a guy going to a party, and he’s a little scared. The first line [“Will you have whiskey with your water/Or sugar with your tea?”] was a vague connection to acid. The piano lick is what kicked it off. Three Dog Night made the song a hit [in 1970], but I didn’t make a lot of money. Maybe I was behind [on publishing advances]. I remember getting a cheque for $6,000. I said, “Where’s the rest?” They said, “Well, you know . . .”
I remember my aunt talking about that flood [the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927]. She worked for [Governor] Huey Long at some point, in New Orleans. Good Old Boys was meant to be a concept record. I wrote “Rednecks” [sung in the voice of a proudly racist Southerner], then felt I had to do more for the guy, explain him with “Birmingham”, “Rollin’ ” and “Louisiana 1927”. The chorus [“They’re tryin’ to wash us away”] – that’s the North. It’s the feeling that the rest of the country would like them to disappear. It’s this frontier, don’t-treadon-me kind of thing.
Sail Away
Short People
SAIL AWAY 1972
LITTLE CRIMINALS 1977
There was a producer, the husband of [actor] Leslie Caron. He wanted to make a movie where he would give 10 minutes to these artists – people like Van Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, me – to do anything we wanted. [It never got made.] But I had this idea of a slave ship and a sea chantey – this guy [a slave trader] standing in a clearing, singing [to sell slavery] to a crowd of natives. These people in my songs don’t
I needed an “up” song, and that just popped out: “Short people got no reason. . . .” I was bouncing off that [hums the piano line]. I was surprised by the reaction. Because it was a hit [peaking at Number Two], the song reached people who aren’t looking for irony. For them, the words mean exactly what they say. I can imagine being a short kid in junior high school. I thought about it before I let the record get out. But
12 SONGS 1970
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I thought, “What the hell?” I know what I meant – the guy in that song is crazy. He was not to be believed.
I Love L.A. TROUBLE IN PARADISE 1983
I wrote “I Love L.A.” because Don Henley said to me, “Everybody’s writing L.A. songs, people not from here. You’re from here. Why don’t you write one?” There is an aggressive ignorance to the song – ignorant and proud of it. There’s nothing wrong with the Beach Boys and open-top cars. But the guy talks about a bum and is still shouting, “We love it!” My cousin Tim Newman did the video [a tour of L.A. beaches and hot spots with Randy driving a Buick convertible]. He did the ones for . . . what the hell’s the name of those blues guys with the long beards? [Long pause] ZZ Top! This was a cheerful shoot. Those people [singing the chorus] are pretty happy.
You’ve Got a Friend in Me TOY STORY SOUNDTRACK 1995
Toy Story was my first big animated movie. The song is about the friendship of Woody and the boy, Andy. I asked for adjectives; they gave me “friendly”, “comforting”. I took them seriously. Cartoon figures have adult emotions, just like a character in Dunkirk. I have definitely found a place in animation. But I got typecast. I don’t get offered things like Out of Africa. I’d do them. They’re easier.
Putin DARK MATTER 2017
I started it two and a half years ago. It was seeing Vladimir Putin in those pictures with his shirt off. Like, what the hell does he want? He’s the most powerful man in the world – and he wants to be Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt. The song is less critical than I thought it would be, although the tone gets menacing at the end. If it’s just a joke, it’s worth something to me, but it’s worth more if there’s something else. But I can’t tell people what to get from a song. When I’m doing “Rednecks” for a crowd and they’re like, “We’re rednecks, yeah!” that bothers me. It’s closer to home.
She Chose Me DARK MATTER 2017
I wrote it a long time ago for a TV show, Cop Rock [a bizarre 1990 hybrid of police drama and musical], about a guy who was relatively ugly and had a beautiful wife. One of the best things I do is assignments. I do it easily, and I do it well. People say, “Isn’t it a sellout?” No, it’s who I am. If you want me to write a song about an Albanian gardener who moves to Bulgaria, I’ll do it. I’m a professional songwriter. And that’s fine with me.
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R&R MOVIES
New Hope for Hollywood There are too many films (more than 120), so let’s cut the fat: 15 reasons why spring/summer won’t stink up the multiplex BY PE T E R T R AV E R S Justice League won’t suck
Nothing can beat the fun of Star Wars: The Last Jedi
Zack Snyder’s follow-up to Batman v Superman casts off the gloom by beefing up roles for Ezra Miller as the Flash, Jason Momoa as Aquaman and Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman, 2017’s box-office savior. (Nov. 16)
Remember Rey (Daisy Ridley) handing Luke (Mark Hamill) his lightsaber at the end of The Force Awakens? Want to see what’s next? Duh. Follow Luke, Rey and Finn (John Boyega), and see Leia (Carrie Fisher) take a final bow. (Dec. 14) You’ve never seen Jennifer Lawrence like this. Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! is a mind-bender about creation. You won’t know what hit you. (Out now)
Woody Allen’s Wonder Wheel is set in the fabled amusement park of his youth and features a tour-de-force performance from Kate Winslet as a married woman who falls for a lifeguard (Justin Timberlake). (Dec. 7)
STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI Boyega
Who needs 007 when we have Kingsman? Subtitled The Golden Circle, this hugely entertaining sequel to the 2015 hit reunites street-kid spy Eggsy (Taron Egerton) with Harry (Colin Firth), the Bondish mentor who only seemed to die last time. (Out now)
Del Toro’s deep dive
THOR: RAGNAROK Hemsworth
JUSTICE LEAGUE Momoa, Gadot
Blade Runner replicates
Franco courts disaster
Denis Villeneuve directs Blade Runner 2049, a sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1982 humans-vs.androids classic. Ryan Gosling joins Harrison Ford, who reprises his future-cop role. (Oct. 5)
James Franco assembles a killer comedic cast (brother Dave, Alison Brie, Seth Rogen) to tell the story of the making of one of the worst films ever: Tommy Wiseau’s The Room. Expect The Disaster Artist to deliver laughs and cringes. (Nov. 30)
Clooney tackles the burbs In Suburbicon, George Clooney directs and co-writes (with the Coen brothers) a stinging satire of 1950s America (Matt Damon plays Dad) with toxic values still alive in the Trump era. You’ll laugh till it hurts. (Oct. 26)
Thor strips for action Tired of the long hair and the damn hammer? Chris Hemsworth is shorn of both in Thor: Ragnarok, a spiky third instalment, featuring a villain played by Oscar winner Cate Blanchett. Classy. (Oct. 26)
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There’s a bear in there
Paddington turned out to be one of 2014’s biggest surprises. Director Paul King returns with a who’s who of Brit actors for the sequel, including Hugh Grant, Brendan Gleeson, Julie Walters and Ben Whishaw as the voice of Paddington. (Dec. 21)
OS C AR B U ZZ
‘Call Me by Your Name’ Expect Academy voters to lose their hearts to Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name, an emotionally naked tale of first love set in Italy in the summer of 1983, when even the air is perfumed with erotic possibility. An attraction grows between
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Elio (Timothée Chalamet, far left), 17, and his father’s intern, Oliver (Armie Hammer). What they discover in each other opens their eyes to the world and makes this love story a new classic and one of the year’s very best films. (Dec. 26)
Guillermo del Toro works visual miracles in The Shape of Water, about a janitor (Sally Hawkins) who falls for a creature in a government water tank. (Jan. 25)
The upside of Downsizing In Alexander Payne’s visionary masterwork, we have a choice to “get small” to save the Earth. Matt Damon and the sublime Hong Chau play lovers in this world in microcosm. (Dec. 26)
Spielberg sticks it to Trump
Steven Spielberg counters Trump’s rants with The Post, a timely telling of how Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep) and editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) defied the feds in 1971 to publish the Pentagon Papers. The Supreme Court ruled for a free press. Would that happen today? Scary thought. (Jan. ’18)
Oscar history for Day-Lewis? No one’s ever won four Oscars for Best Actor. Many are betting Daniel Day-Lewis can – he’s a 1950s London fashion designer in Paul Thomas Anderson’s untitled film. Why not? (Feb. ’18)
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Words of Wisdom
R&R
Mick Fleetwood The drummer on why we shouldn’t romanticise drugs and what Fleetwood Mac taught him about compromise
What’s the best advice you ever got? It came from my father. He was a pilot officer in the Royal Air Force. When I started to be what could be construed as famous-ish, he said, “Never forget you get up and go to the toilet in the morning, Michael.” Which means, just keep it in perspective and have a good sense of humour and remember that you are a human being, and keep it in line. If he had added, “And don’t take too many drugs”, that might have been helpful too. What’s the most indulgent purchase you ever made? I bought a thousand-acre farm in Australia in the early 1980s. It was this whimsical decision to start a whole new life. The property had about eight houses on it and a fishing lake. I cashed out about 3 million bucks and bought it. I actually immigrated to Australia and gave up my green card. I thought it was a great place for all my friends and family, but it was also a pipe dream that literally took me to the poorhouse. I went broke. It was beautiful, and I don’t bemoan the fact that I did it. I also don’t bemoan that I’m not sitting there right now getting eaten by toxic spiders. What have 50 years in Fleetwood Mac taught you about compromise? I don’t think it would have been possible without the wit of healthy compromise. My father was a fine officer and in charge of organising large groups of people. He said, “No matter what, as long as you get it done, you don’t need to take the credit.” Some people say, “You’ve had to suck eggs to keep some elements of your story going.” John [McVie] and I can say in good humour we’ve caused some pain, but it turned out pretty good. Your philosophy seems to be “No matter what, the band carries on.” That was true even when Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham left for a time. That’s the nature of being in a rhythm section. You need someone to play with. John and I can’t do this in our living room. Also, John and I sticking it out comes from abject fear. What the hell would we do if there was no band? For the most part, amazingly, it worked out, which is a form of alchemy and magic that I will never really truly understand. You raised teenage girls in the 1980s, and you’re raising teenage girls now. How is it different? They are frighteningly well-informed now, first of all. If I say something as a parent or a friend – I like to think of myself as both – it puts you on your mark because they can, in 40 seconds, see whether or not you’re full of shit. But Fleetwood’s new book, “Love That Burns: A Chronicle of Fleetwood Mac, Volume One 1967-1974”, is out now.
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I’m way better at being a dad now than I was with my first lovely two daughters. That’s because I’m not as crazy as I used to be, and hopefully not as selfish. What do you understand about drugs now that you didn’t understand when you started out? They end up being a nightmare. Maybe we would never have cut certain songs if we hadn’t been up for five days. But you think now, “Does that make it OK?” And it wasn’t OK. You shouldn’t romanticise those things. I’m lucky to be sitting here talking to you now. What do you wish someone had told you about the music business before you started? Look out for charlatans who will send you down the road. Yet actually, the real nuts and bolts is I am quite happy that I didn’t have that advice. I’d like to think I could have handled the warning, but if I had been warned, I might not have even signed anything. Stevie Nicks told me she has no interest in making another Fleetwood Mac album, since it takes too long and nobody would buy it. How do you feel about that? I’m not superkeen on getting into all of that. But what I do know is that the music of Fleetwood Mac, and the music from everyone that coexists in and outside of that band, is everyone’s prerogative. She is gonna be there next year when we begin a tour and spend the better part of 18 months wandering the planet. And this band has to be able to [allow] that and have no blame game at all. If you want me to say, “Hey, the utopian dream would be that before we hang it up, we all play [new] stuff [in the studio]…” but we play onstage! God knows we’ve sacrificed huge chunks of time for this strange animal known as Fleetwood Mac, so I’m OK with it. Christine McVie has hinted that the tour in 2018 might be a farewell. Is that true? No, everyone in the band has decided it’s not. Phil Collins called his tour I’m Not Dead Yet. Well, we’re not dead yet, but God forbid, we might be, so you could say, “I better go see them!” But you won’t see a poster calling this a farewell tour. You turned 70 this year. Does it feel different than you imagined it would? Yeah, it does. Physically, I think I’m healthier than I was at 50. [[Grabs chest, fakes a heart hysterically] attack before laughing hysterically You play nearly every Rumours song in the set. Ever think about just playing the album straight through? It would be fantastic. But we’d have to be like Bruce Springsteen, out there for seven hours. Then it could be the last tour. You’ll see wooden boxes onstage. Five of them. INTERVIEW BY ANDY GREENE
Illustration by Mark Summers
MY LIST
Matt Shultz
Five Songs That Inspired Me The Cage the Elephant frontman is in the midst of a tour during which the band will open for the Rolling Stones in France.
La Femme
“Antitaxi” Some French friends turned me on to this. It has some Kraftwerk elements to it. Somehow it feels classic, but very much in the future.
A Fan’s Notes
ILLUSTRATION BY MICHAEL WELDON
ROLLINS ON BEING RIPPED OFF – PART ONE
Serge Gainsbourg
i’m willing to bet there’s hardly a band kind of thing happened so often, you got used or performer who has been on the road or tan- to it. It simply came with the territory. Because gled with a record company, an agent, or man- they could, they did. Did you ever hear the legend of how Chuck agement, who didn’t have at least one or 50 bad experiences. Truly, the amount of dishon- Berry would get the entire night’s pay in cash beesty, betrayal, greed and flat out thievery is fore he went onstage, or how the great Lightnin’ staggering. I don’t know of any other industry Hopkins at least once got paid by the song in the that works this way on such a regular and de- studio, the bills placed on a stool next to him? These are not tall tales. I’m pendable basis. It happens on not going to name any names every level, from the bars to but there are some old school the spotless halls of the major “The amount of performers I know, eight to 10 labels. dishonesty, greed years my senior, who are nice Touring bands pretty much and thievery is guys but completely aggressive have to fight their way through when it comes to money. Too this part of their journey. They staggering.” many times getting burned. are in a bad spot where they For some reason, as many are big enough to draw an audience but too small to strike back against a rot- times as I’ve been scorched, it never angered me ten venue owner. As a touring musician, I was as much as made me a good judge of character. That being said, if things were as they should be, in that phase for years. Black Flag played a show in Philadelphia, sold there would be a lot of men who used to be in the out around 900 people. While we’re onstage, the music business missing fingers, hands and ears. Things changed for me when I got a solid promoter literally took a metal box that held the money from the show and left. We didn’t make a agent. He had some serious bands in his roster. dime and the guy was never seen again. On the You burn me, you don’t get those bands at your same tour, a few states away, post-show, the ju- venue. That solved the problem. I’ve illustrated examples of street level rip off. nior mafia club owner’s bouncer/thug produced a metal pipe and threatened to cave our guitar These were literally chump change compared player’s head in if we didn’t get out of the venue. to what I experienced in the corporate music We didn’t get paid. On a tour that was as broke- world. That was some six and seven figure graft. ass as that one, it’s the last thing we needed. This To be continued next month . . .
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“Lemon Incest” This song is superweird. The drum and synth sounds are very 1980s, and he’s singing it with his daughter. It’s really messed up.
Os Mutantes
“Ave Lucifer” This is somewhere between the Velvet Underground, the Beatles and moody Stones, but they sing in Portuguese, so it’s got a Latin flair.
Jorge Ben
“Ponta de Lança Africano” We listen to this on the tour bus to wake up. They play guitar like a drum, so it’s very rhythmic.
The Cramps
“Human Fly” I’m obsessed with this since you can play it in the same playlist as Kendrick Lamar’s “m.A.A.d City” and it works. It’s very punk, very raw.
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R&R
BROKE DAYS Vandal: “Being DIY is at the creative centre.”
Ecca Vandal’s DIY Ethic The Melbourne artist has put it all on the line with her debut album BY ROD YAT E S
I
n 2012, ecca va nda l was holidaying in the UK with her sister when they discovered Erykah Badu was playing at the Brixton Academy. Ticketless, they managed to sweet talk a security guard into letting them in, upon which they ran into Badu’s tour manager who – can you believe it? – offered them VIP passes, entitling them to a meet & greet with the American singer. At the end of the night, once hands had been shaken and pleasantries exchanged, Vandal started exiting the venue and decided to pose for a quick photo on the stage. “We got the photo and I was like, ‘I’d love to play here one day’,” she recalls today, sitting in the Sydney offices of her record label, Dew Process. In December, that wish will come true when she tours the UK for 34 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |
RollingStoneAus.com
the first time, as a guest of British punker Frank Carter, with the 5000-seater the venue for the London stop. The UK shows will cap an intense threeyear period for the singer, who first came to attention with 2014’s “White Flag”, and has since released a slew of well received singles such as “Battle Royal” and “End of Time”. When not touring with Queens of the Stone Age or appearing on festivals such as Splendour in the Grass, Vandal has spent the past year-and-a-half working on her debut self-titled album, the majority of which she co-produced and recorded in her Melbourne living room alongside collaborator Kidnot (Richie Buxton). Eschewing the notion of a plush studio was both a financial reality and in keeping with Vandal’s DIY approach to her career,
a value she’s fought hard to protect. “I had to maintain that, but by going through the process of finding a place to release your music, it can start to slip away,” she says. “Being DIY is at the creative centre, it really means a lot to me, and part of [my] development was going, ‘OK, what do I want to maintain, what can I let other people do with my music?’” It’s an ethos, she says, that’s led to “a lot of sleepless nights, a lot of all nighters” while overseeing everything from video clips to artwork. “Every part of this album is handmade when it comes to the creative side,” she says proudly. Recording sessions comprised “every waking hour” for about a year, much to the chagrin of her neighbours, who were no doubt puzzled by the screams emanating from Van-
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NEW ALBUM
dal’s apartment as she laid down vocals for the album’s first single, “Broke Days, Party Nights”. Those same screams landed her in trouble in New York several months later while in town on a writing expedition. Having decided the Big Apple was the perfect place to record a guerilla-style video, she shocked a taxi driver by cueing up that part of the track on her iPhone, leaning out the window and miming along as a friend in the front seat captured the action. Suffice to say they were rapidly ejected. “For some reason when you’re away you just feel like you can get away with it, right?” chuckles Vandal. “We got kicked out of grocery stores and people’s houses, but most of the time we were welcomed in.” It was on that same trip that Vandal met former Letlive. vocalist Jason Aalon Butler, who agreed to be a guest on “Price of Living” alongside Refused’s Dennis Lyxzén,
“Every part of this album is handmade when it comes to the creative side,” says Vandal proudly. whom Vandal met through her manager. The song essays the horrific conditions of offshore detention centres, a fierce political statement on an album that is otherwise intensely personal. “Cassettes, Lies and Videotapes”, for example, is a comment on living in the now that references her past experiences in the psychologist’s chair; “Out on the Inside” the temptation to feel you’re alone in your predicament, and that everyone else’s life is perfect. Also referenced is the “loneliness” Vandal says she felt during the album’s creation as she attempted to shut out the “voices” and the “noise” of an industry demanding a debut album yesterday, and a society expecting her to pursue a traditional career path. “It took a little bit of protecting myself from what was happening, that noise,” she says. Those societal expectations are addressed in “Broke Days, Party Nights” in the line, “Are you gonna live worthless/A stupid clown that is penniless/Just a joke but it seems you’re the only one that’s laughing”. “I think my parents may have wondered, are you ever going to earn a proper income? Are you always going to be living hand to mouth?” she reflects. “They don’t call me a stupid clown, but they say, ‘Wake up, you’ve got to be sensible.’ It was a massive commitment to go, no, I’m really going after this and giving it everything I can. And trusting that it will pay off one day and I’ll be able to support myself from a career of creativity. I couldn’t ignore that creative side.”
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The National (Berninger, centre)
In Their Own Words: The National Frontman Matt Berninger on new album ‘Sleep Well Beast’
I
n the four years following the release of 2013’s much-lauded Trouble Will Find Me, indie-rock mainstays the National incubated expansive seventh outing Sleep Well Beast. Boasting lyrics and melodies written by frontman Matt Berninger with extensive input from wife Carin Besser and largely recorded at multi-instrumentalist Aaron Dessner’s Long Pond Studio, it’s the band’s most diverse release yet, replete with wintry new electronic undulations. Here, Berninger offers some insights into the album ahead of the National’s four-date Australian tour in February next year. The biggest thing is that . . . “We didn’t make any kind of schedule or plan to make a new National record. Stuff just started collecting organically. Then it was a process of just figuring out how to cook it all together.” We used to have so much unhealthy tension . . . “We still have creative tension. But we’ve learned that we’ve got plenty of time – there’s no reason not to just waste a week going in the opposite direction, to see what you might find.”
We were all doing other projects . . . “We started recording stuff for this record before Aaron’s studio was finished – in L.A, Berlin, Paris, and upstate New York. So we brought all of our experiments and all of our different creatures that we caught out on our other explorations back to the studio, and we’d throw ‘em in the pot and see what it tasted like. There’s Grateful Dead stuff, there’s [Berninger’s side project] EL VY stuff, there’s all the stuff we did in Berlin. You can hear it all in this record.” I did a lot of the vocals in L.A. . . . “Carin would listen to all the demos and free associations and mumbly stuff. So she was right there ‘in the kitchen’ the whole time with me. She makes me work much harder. It’s still hard to collaborate on a creative thing with your life partner. But it works for us.” The songs are really fun to play . . . “This was a complicated record, but it’s really easy to play. And we’re actually changing the songs already. We’ve untied our process and allowed it to be a little hairier and more reckless.” GARETH HIPWELL
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R&R
Wareheim at home in L.A. in August
Sex, Drugs, Comedy Eric Wareheim built an empire. So why shouldn’t he throw ass-themed parties, eat cod sperm, and share it all on Instagram?
A
fe w y e a r s ag o, er ic Wareheim took a photo of his then-girlfriend’s naked ass and sent it to an ice sculptor. Wareheim likes to throw raucous house parties “based on different parts of anatomy”, he says. “I did one called Black Cock [black light and penisthemed]. Another one was Laser Boobs.” The sculptor took Wareheim’s photo and used it to carve an enormous ice butt, which became the centrepiece of an assfocused party called Snow Booty. The sculpture had a canal carved into it that served as a conduit for booze, with its lower opening at the butt hole. “My girlfriend made booty juice” – tequila and grapefruit – “and we all did shots out of her ice ass,” Wareheim says. The party also featured a snow machine and a white-apparel dress code, though the latter was rendered moot when people stripped down and jumped into his pool. Clothes have a habit of coming off at Wareheim’s parties: One time, he hired a male stripper, “and then these girls
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I know who strip started doing these hardcore moves and kind of freaked him out”. How crazy do the parties get? “There are limits,” Wareheim says. “People hook up, but it’s not, like, an orgy.” You might know Wareheim for portraying Aziz Ansari’s big buddy Arnold on Master of None – the inventive, eight-time Emmy-nominated Netflix comedy series, several episodes of which Wareheim also co-wrote and directed. But he first made his name as half of the brilliantly bizarre cult comedy duo Tim and Eric. After the success of the pair’s Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, Wareheim was able to form a mini comedy empire with his partner, Tim Heidecker, helping to foster idiosyncratic voices – their production company, Abso Lutely, is behind Comedy Bang! Bang! and the genius Nathan for You, among other series. Awesome Show also allowed Wareheim to carve out a sideline directing psychotic, hallucinatory music videos for cool acts (Major Lazer, Beach House) and devising commercials for prod-
ucts like Old Spice and Totino’s Pizza Rolls – brands hoping to aim some of Tim and Eric’s unhinged energies at a younger generation of irony- and Internet-addled customers. The duo’s newest series, a sort of Twilight Zone homage called Bedtime Stories, returned to Adult Swim in September. Whereas Heidecker is married with kids, Wareheim is a bachelor and bon vivant to a degree that he’s only ramped up in recent years. He hangs out not only with Ansari but also with a crew of twentysomething artists, visiting beautiful locales with them and posting about it on Instagram. “I’ll admit I’m sort of addicted to that socialmedia thing of ‘Look at me! I’m with hot babes on a yacht!’ ” Wareheim says. Like Ansari, he is a globe-trotting gourmand, willing to try anything once. “I’ve eaten cod sperm,” he says. “I’ve eaten horse.” He’s about to release Las Jaras, his own line of natural wines produced in collaboration with a Napa winemaker. At 41, in other words, Wareheim is more successful than ever – and enjoying the hell out of it.
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NETFLIX
BY JONA H W EIN ER
“Do you want a barrel-aged negroni?” he asks. It’s an early Friday evening and Wareheim is at his airy midcentury modern home, on an eastside Los Angeles hilltop. “I bought this house, like, nine years ago. It was a bit beyond my budget, but a producer told me, ‘That’ll just make you hustle more’, and he was right.” Wareheim’s wearing a white button-down and yellow corduroy short-shorts. An Instacart delivery woman is piling his foyer with bags of groceries. “I do a lot of late-night ordering,” he says, noting that when he made this particular order, “I was stoned and I went crazy – I ordered so many cookies.” He pours me the negroni, which has been sitting for the past 60 days in a squat oak vessel perched atop his kitchen island. “Aziz got this barrel for me after Season One – it’s from a bourbon distillery in Kentucky.” As Wareheim rubs an orange peel along the rim of my glass, I notice a vintage Rolex on his wrist: “Aziz got me this after Season Two,” he says. “It’s so nice, I’m almost afraid to wear it.” Wareheim starts tossing spoiled food from his fridge into an enormous garbage bag, making space. “I was a vegetarian for seven years,” he says. He tosses some boxes of frozen chicken nuggets into his freezer. “Being a pescetarian is my goal today. Factory-farmed meat is so . . . Trumpish. At this point I’ve travelled the world, eaten the best steaks in Italy. . . . Now I’m trying to get more woke about my consumption.” Tim and Eric – native Pennsylvanians who met as film students at Temple University – crafted a low-fi oddball universe inspired by the clammy, uncanny ambience of late-night public-access TV: Awesome Show’s hallmarks were violently bad sound editing, cheesy graphics, a cast that comprised both big-name guest comedians (Michael Cera, Zach Galifianakis) and transfixing nonprofessionals (ventriloquist David Liebe Hart), all of them sporting wardrobes, hairdos and makeup straight out of some ungodly ’00s-era J.C. Penney fever dream. Tim and Eric proved expert at mining the American grotesque for a new generation of comedy aficionados, scrambling the line between the absurd and the abject, the hilarious and the horrifying. “When people hang out with me for
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the first time, they’re like, ‘Why aren’t you insane?’ ” Wareheim says. Their influences include not only alt-comedy heroes like Bob Odenkirk and David Cross but also David Lynch, Stanley Kubrick and the scatological art star Paul McCarthy. “We stumbled into one of his gallery shows around the time we finished college,” says Wareheim. “It was all these animatronic people and pigs fucking each other. We were like, ‘You can get paid to do this?’ ” He takes me on a tour of his house. In the living room there are bright-coloured paintings, photographs and sculptures by young artists whom Wareheim has befriended, like Jen Stark, Samuel Borkson and Carly Mark. “Carly does these Haribogummi-bear butt plugs,” Wareheim says,
Wareheim attended a “spanking party”: Millennials “feel free. They’re into polyamory. It’s a really warm thing.” pointing to one nearby. He identifies Mark, 29, and Chloe Wise, 26, who is one of the more prominent members of what is often called the “post-Internet” art scene, as “my New York best friends. I hang out with them. I don’t hang out with comedians.” He says he’s finishing a screenplay for a feature film inspired by time he spent recently as a single man in New York. He emphasises that it is not a comedy: “It’s called Animals. It’s inspired by me going out on dates, doing stuff that’s not in my wheelhouse. I’ve dated all kinds of people. I don’t know what to tell you without getting too personal, but, like, Chloe and Carly intro-
duced me to a dominatrix friend of theirs, and we went to a spanking party. I’d be writing on the Lower East Side and Chloe would call me from Bushwick, like, ‘Some guy’s getting fisted – you’ve gotta get over here.’ ” He recounts all this in reverent tones, like he’s describing a quasi-religious awakening. Millennials “just feel free”, he says. “Like, they’re into polyamory: ‘Let’s hang out, but I have a partner.’ To see young people who are so free? It’s a really warm thing.” Wareheim leads me out to his pool and a small cabana beside it. “This is my Seventies gold den,” he says. There’s white carpeting and ample gold decor. On the adjoining patio, a bikini is slung across a chair. “The pool was my big splurge,” he says. We sit beside his hot tub, at a table hold i ng a l it t le jar of weed and a SAY CHEESE pla stic dr ink ing Ansari and straw shaped like Wareheim in a penis. “I grew Master of None. up with nothing,” Wareheim says. “I was a voyeur of culture, because there wasn’t much culture in Audubon, Pennsylvania. The first time I ate Thai food I was in college, and I decided I wanted to travel the world and eat food. I found a way to do it: through TV and stuff.” He sips his negroni. “Hanging out in Philly, I learned how to hustle. I used to photograph weddings to pay my rent. But I was into music and art. A lot of comedians, comedy is their only thing. Comedy wasn’t my dream till Tim and I showed people our shit and they laughed.” Wareheim grabs a pair of swim shorts; he’s going to Ansari’s house later, and “we’ll probably get into the pool”. First, we drive to an Echo Park vegetarian gem called the Elf Cafe, where the staff all know Wareheim. He orders two glasses of Txakolina: “It’s this light, salty, mildly effervescent white,” he says. I observe that his oenophilia might surprise fans of Awesome Show, which was ferociously unpretentious, and where, on those occasions when food appeared onscreen, it was in service of grossout laughs. “A lot of comedians are dark, fucked-up people,” Wareheim replies. “Tim and I are dark and fucked up too, but we balance it with light.” He sniffs the Txakolina and sighs with pleasure. “For me, comedy and wine are the same thing. My house parties, too. They’re all just different tools for bringing people joy.”
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R&R MY SOUNDTRACK
Justin Townes Earle The singer-songwriter on the link between the Replacements and the Berlin Wall BY ROD YAT E S The Song That Reminds Me of Growing Up The Replacements Can’t Hardly Wait, 1987
“My mum listened to that song a lot, so I heard it a lot growing up. I remember being in the kitchen at my mum’s house, this little kitchen, and she had this tiny black and white TV that sat on top of the refrigerator, and that song playing on the radio and the Berlin Wall coming down on the TV. I remember it very vividly.”
The Song You Wouldn’t Expect To Find On My iTunes Portishead Glory Box, 1994 “Every girl that I dated at that time was obsessed with this record. The sound of it got me from the start – it’s a very rich sounding record. Super intelligent, moody pop music. At that time I was listening to mainly really old country music and old blues. But I’ve never been able to pay attention to one genre of music too long without jumping to another.”
which is around 1970 through ’73, how far he had fallen from what he had been in 1966. And every time I hear that song now I think about that version, and it’s difficult for me to sit and listen to.”
The Song I’m Proudest Of Justin Townes Earle Mama’s Eyes, 2009
“It still seems to resonate with people and touch people, which is what we’re trying to do as artists, as songwriters and performers. I knew when I finished it and recorded it and heard it back that I’d written something that was not necessarily going to make people feel great – it was going to make them feel something strong, but it wasn’t necessarily going to be something good. I knew that as soon as I wrote it.”
The Song I Listen to Before Going Onstage Old Baseball Games
“It just has a very simple message. It says, ‘Rollin’, rollin’, ain’t gonna worry no more.’ And it’s kind of this, don’t be sad, I’m rollin’ now, I’m done. [Laughs]”
“I don’t listen to anything before I go onstage. I play old baseball games from the Sixties and Seventies on one of the iPads in my dressing room. The sounds of the game are just relaxing. There’s always that time when you’re waiting, there’s that dead time, and there’s this nervous energy, and I find if I put on [a game], what I do and the guys end up doing, is we end up standing there and [watching] and that nervous energy is at least focused into an old baseball game that doesn’t matter in any way.”
The Song I Find Hard To Listen To
The Song With the Greatest Lyrics
Townes Van Zandt Rex’s Blues, 1973
Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band Thunder Road, 1986
The Song I Want Played at My Funeral Randy Newman Rollin’, 1974
“His version of ‘Rex’s Blues’ on the Live at the Old Quarter record, there’s something about that record that’s sad to me. Especially the version of the song on that record. I guess that if you know Townes and his recordings and you know his catalogue, you will hear in that particular period,
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I was definitely into country and old time music, and most of my friends were, so I didn’t have a lot of friends who were that into Springsteen. But that was one of the songs that I ran across that was just like, all arguments that say that Springsteen is anything other than valuable are insane. The opening line, you know from that start, you’re in for some shit.”
“There’s a particular version that he did on the Live 1975-1985 box set, and it’s just him and a piano, and that lays it out to where he can really let the lyrics stand on their own, and an already amazing song just becomes a whole other thing. [When I first heard it]
The Song That Makes Me Think of Home Ronnie Milsap Smoky Mountain Rain, 1980
“‘Smoky Mountain Rain’ is like a super Eighties, slick Nashville country song, but it does remind me of home very much. It’s along the classic lines of a hillbilly-travelling-butalways-longing-for-home kind of song, and it’s got a pretty melody. It’s just a real kind of, nostalgia-for-the-place-that-you-comefrom kind of song.”
The Song I Listen To To Relax Centro-matic Atlanta, 2007
“I’m a very Southern man, you don’t gotta tell me to relax. I relax. [Laughs] This is one of those songs that when my [nineweek-old] daughter is upset and crying, I take my phone and I put that song on and I put it in my breast pocket, and I lay her over the top of it and it quiets her right down.”
The Song That Makes Me Drive Fast John Fogerty Almost Saturday Night, 1975
“That makes me drive fast, but not in a mean-driving kind of way, just kind of a sing-outloud, mash the pedal down and make a stupid face kind of drive fast. I find there’s this jaunty ‘fuck yeah!’ about a lot of his stuff, especially the Creedence stuff. It has this jaunty good time feeling to it.”
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I don’t listen to anything before I go onstage. I play old baseball games.
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CLASSIC SHOT
Stevie Nicks Gets Blown Away, 1981 Photographed by Neal Preston
‘A
t the time, Stevie was living on the top floor of a six-storey beachfront building in Venice, California,” recalls Neal Preston. “It was the first time I’d photographed her offstage, and I wanted the pictures to be more than just another set of pretty-girl photos. They had to be special, and they had to have personality. When we arrived, Stevie greeted us at the door and was very gracious. It seemed like she was looking forward to the shoot (trust me, not everyone does…). After a bit of small talk – the “hi, how you doing?” stuff – we started shooting. Within minutes I realised that she had a killer sense of humour and was as charismatic as anyone I’d ever met. I also realised she had a lot of clothes. A serious amount of clothes. The shoot had gone well and I was about to call “wrap” when she and I both had the same idea – to do one last shot on the rooftop as the sun went down. It was windy up there but it was certainly worth a try. We ran some equipment up while Stevie changed into a white dress with long billowing sleeves that would catch the wind beautifully. I positioned Stevie at the very edge of the rooftop for a quick Polaroid. So far so good. But as soon as I picked up my Nikon the wind suddenly doubled in intensity, and the sleeves were catching so much wind I was convinced she’d be blown over the side and literally fly away. So I made my assistant lay face down at her feet – out of frame – and hold her ankle. I said, ‘I don’t care if there’s a hurricane on the way – do NOT let go of her boot!’ And we both lived another day . . .”
Image taken from Neal Preston’s book Exhilarated and Exhausted published by Reel Art Press RRP $75. For further information and full list of stockists visit www.reelartpress.com
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The Future Is Now
We profile 10 of the hottest artists who are climbing the charts, breaking the Internet or just dominating our office stereos . . .
Odette
SOUNDS LIKE: A mature musical head on young shoulders FOR FANS OF: Meg Mac, Alicia Keys, Fiona Apple WHY YOU SHOULD PAY ATTENTION: The Sydney based 19-year-old has always had an active imagination. Her creativity was encouraged early on by her film industry parents (who met on the set of Titanic) – as a student Odette wrote plays for her class mates, and once brought a book of Keats’ poems to her Bring Your Favourite Book To School day. A future as a writer beckoned, until she started penning songs on piano and discovered music gave her a broader platform through which to express herself. As a 15-year-old Odette uploaded some of her first songs to Unearthed, and at 17 was signed to EMI. The first single from her upcoming debut album, “Watch Me Read You”, is a smooth, R&B inspired jam that pairs her rich, soulful vocals with a beat-poet-style lyricism. For the past two years she’s been working on her full-length (due early next year) with producers and songwriters such as Charlie Hugall (Florence + the Machine) and Jason Cox (Blur, Gorillaz), alongside Damian Taylor (Bjork, the Killers). SHE SAYS: Growing up, Odette’s South African mother and English father ensured their house was filled with music. “My mother always showed me Angelique Kidjo and Miriam Makeba, just rhythm and soul. It’s just joy. Dad would listen to punk rock and David Sylvian, and I would get this really eclectic palette of different artists. Jazz, soul, funk, hip-hop, punk, there was a lot of stuff.” HEAR FOR YOURSELF: The lyrically dense, engaging storytelling of latest single “Watch Me Read You”. ROD YATES
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Alexander Biggs SOUNDS LIKE: Slaved-over deep thoughts of a born loner, with the weight of the world on his shoulders and a flashing smirk on his face FOR FANS OF: Elliott Smith, Bright Eyes, Frightened Rabbit WHY YOU SHOULD PAY ATTENTION: The Mildura-raised 23-year-old was heading down a classical path before being hijacked by traditional teen angst (My Chemical Romance, Paramore) and transforming into a self-described “scene kid”. (“My first songs were pretty emo tunes, so I guess not too much has changed,” he now jokes.) Upon moving to
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Melbourne at 18, Biggs began “trying out this folk thing” when a friend burnt him a copy of Fionn Regan’s The End Of History, which, combined with his “first proper break-up”, provided the catalyst for him “having a crack” at some initial bedroom-recorded efforts using rudimentary student-licensed software. Fast forward a few years and Biggs’ first publicly shared songs – “Tidal Wave” and “Out in the Dark” – earned an impressive 1.5 million Spotify streams, alongside praise from BBC Radio 1, KCRW and Triple J, setting the platform for last month’s major label debut EP,
about death and wanting to Still You Sharpen Your Teeth. give up and songs about trying HE SAYS: “I’m definitely a conto find hopefulness. I think the trol freak. It took a lot for me EP has a struggle to relinquish that in there, and the control to [Still You “I’m definitely songs are the links Sharpen Your Teeth a control to that.” producer] John freak. It took HEAR FOR YOURCastle. It was a real a lot for me to SELF: struggle the first relinquish Optimistic, freeweek to go in there that control flowing “Figure It and let someone Out” is the perfect else take the (when entry-point, but reins,” Biggs says recording “New York” is Biggs of his first studio the EP).” at his best – flipexperience laying ping from humour down the tracks to morbidity, often across the he’d demoed for the EP. Of the space of just a few lines. final product he says, “It’s a varied snapshot. You’ve got songs JONNY NAIL
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THE FUTURE IS NOW
Jessie Reyez SOUNDS LIKE: Folk music conventions blown up, then vividly reassembled, with jazz and world beat glimmering through the cracks. FOR FANS OF: Courtney Barnett, Sylvan Esso, Sufjan Stevens WHY YOU SHOULD PAY ATTENTION: TITK’s fourth album, Moonshine Freeze, is the project’s first for Rough Trade. Here, experimental folk songs unlock truths occupying the space between dream states and waking life. “Things get said, things get don’t,” singer and primary songwriter Kate Stables declares in the slowly unfurling “Solid Grease”. “Sometimes a meaning is so much easier to transmit or absorb if you don’t use normal sentence structure,” the U.K.bred, Paris-based Stables says. “It’s almost like a magic spell or something.”
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Contributors to Moonshine Freeze include John Parish (PJ Harvey, Perfume Genius) and Aaron Dessner of the National. Each song teases out Stables’ poetic double meanings with arrangements that elevate brass, banjo and immersive harmonies at opportune moments. SHE SAYS: “This album came out of a time of lots of change and intense experiences,” says Stables. “You realise what you used to think isn’t the case anymore. The inevitable change that hits you in life. Sometimes it hits you and sometimes it creeps up on you. “I am always choosing. My approach is a bit of collaging different writings I have in a few different notebooks. I really like messing around with the English language. I can’t spell, I can’t do grammar. But I love playing with words and meanings and the sounds of the words.” HEAR FOR YOURSELF: Inspired by a child’s clapping game, the hypnotic “Moonshine Freeze” is a psychedelic meditation on evolving human behaviour. REED FISCHER
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MABDULLE
This Is the Kit
SOUNDS LIKE: Heart-on-sleeve ballads meets hip-hop and R&B-influenced Tarantinian pop FOR FANS OF: Kehlani, Amy Winehouse, Shutter Island WHY YOU SHOULD PAY ATTENTION: After working with the likes of Chance the Rapper and King Louie, the 27-yearold Toronto singer-songwriter released her debut EP, Kiddo, a collection of seven emotionally raw tracks. Armed with nothing but an acoustic guitar and her throaty voice, she’s performed on The Tonight Show and at the 2017 BET Awards. Other artists have taken notice of her talents too: The singer guests on chart-topping producer Calvin Harris’ Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 1 (“Hard to Love”) and bachata king Romeo Santos’ Golden (“Un Vuelo a La”). SHE SAYS: “We have a crazy hip-hop history that a lot of people don’t know about,” Reyez says of Toronto. “We have people in our city that were very influential. We’ve got fucking K-Os, we’ve got Kardi [Kardinal Offishall], we have some songs that are Toronto anthems. Drake’s putting on and bringing a lot of eyes to the city, but I feel like the seed and the flowers have always been here.” HEAR FOR YOURSELF: “Gatekeeper” confronts sexism and misogyny in the music industry. MAX MERTENS
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Declan McKenna SOUNDS LIKE: Glitter-covered rock trimmed with modular synths, vintage guitar pedals and shoot-to-kill populist lyrics aimed at Brexit-era fascists FOR FANS OF: Conor Oberst, Vampire Weekend, Tame Impala WHY YOU SHOULD PAY ATTENTION: Nearly three years ago, Declan McKenna’s missive decrying the World Cup leadership’s hypocrisy and greed emerged on Bandcamp and SoundCloud. A few months later, the U.K.-based McKenna won the Glastonbury Festival’s Emerging Talent Competition, and the song began an eventual climb to Number One on Sirius XM Radio’s Alt Nation. Penned when he was just 15, “Brazil” not only proved his poise as a musician, but his potent lyrical point of view. Now 18, McKenna has built an activist-centric body of work exploring religion, gender identity and other thorny political topics. “Music is a great platform for protest,” he says. “Whether that’s through lyrics, whether that’s through sound, whether that’s through a movement as a whole. Art alone can really change things.” While he highlights the disconnects between his teenage peers and the ruling class, his brash, experimental pop shows a bridge between the Bowie and Lorde generations. Following a label scuffle for his affections, he signed to Columbia Records and released his debut, What Do You Think About the Car?, in July. HE SAYS: “The album was created over a long period of time. From ‘Brazil’ and ‘Bethlehem’, which I wrote when I was 15 right up to ‘Humungous’, which I wrote at the back end of last year. Over that time, there was a lot of change in my life that I found hard to deal with or I didn’t really acknowledge. The album shows a certain level of confusion in being very busy and starting a career rather than being in school. I can’t help but hear that sort of thing. It was an album I made very much growing up at a quicker rate than I’ve ever had to in my entire life.” HEAR FOR YOURSELF: “Isombard” is McKenna’s urgent, catchy outcry against the xenophobia of TV punditry. R.F.
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THE FUTURE IS NOW
Tyler Childers
“and I was going to be POW! Negro and Rhys was SOUNDS LIKE: Dancing your way through a going to be Monster Zero, and it’d be like ‘The record store, cherrypicking albums from different Adventures of POW! Negro and Monster Zero’. It genres and putting them all in your basket probably will [happen].” FOR FANS OF: Fishbone, Saul Williams, Run the In 2016, the band won two West Australian Jewels Music Awards for Most Popular New Act and WHY YOU SHOULD PAY ATTENTION: POW! Most Popular Live Act as well as the Big Splash Negro’s debut EP, Jasmine & Licorice, is as vibrant band competition. Single “Money musically as its multi-coloured For Portraits” was mixed by David artwork suggests: a freewheel“I feel like I’ve Kennedy, who’s worked with A Tribe ing melange of genres ranging had a good show Called Quest, Mos Def and Mary J. from hip-hop to funk to electro to if I’ve really Blige. punk and myriad other points in connected with THEY SAY: POW! Negro have between. Born in late 2015 when the music,” says earned a reputation as one of W.A.’s vocalist Nelson Mondlane (picbest live bands. “I feel like I’ve had tured) was offered a solo gig at Mondlane. a good show if I’ve really connected Fremantle venue Mojos and drumwith the music, I want to say what mer Rhys Hussey convinced him I’m saying and I can connect with where I was to form a band instead, they take their name from when I wrote [each song],” says Mondlane. a cartoon character creation of Mondlane’s. “We HEAR FOR YOURSELF: The riffy, groovy “Hold My were going to draw this character, a superhero,” Tongue”. says the MC, who handles the sextet’s artwork, R.Y.
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DAVID MCCLISTER
POW! Negro
SOUNDS LIKE: A raw look at the darker regions of modern-day Appalachia, where bluegrass is in the soul, but cocaine is in the blood FOR FANS OF: Sturgill Simpson, Dave Rawlings, Jason Isbell – if he swapped the 400 Unit for Old Crow Medicine Show WHY YOU SHOULD PAY ATTENTION: Growing up in East Kentucky, Childers spent his youth and young adulthood learning the blue collar trades. But music – shaped from a childhood spent listening to both Drive-By Truckers and Southern gospel – held the strongest gravitational pull. Childers built a solid fan base in his home state for his songs that melded a forlorn, Appalachian howl with more modern folk diarists, driven by the stories that surrounded him. It was enough to lure Sturgill Simpson into producing his new LP, Purgatory, and the result is a stirring collection anchored by Childers’ one-of-a-kind voice that’s as crisp as a child’s but breaks with the pain and knowledge of a weathered man. HE SAYS: “It’s that bluegrass sound, but with a little bit more edge to it. It’s something I’d want to listen to, sound-wise, growing up in this area. The Appalachian culture and the way the people in this region talk, the sayings they have, it all lends itself to good songs. Everything they say is a song line.” HEAR FOR YOURSELF: On “Whitehouse Road”, Childers shoots a twangy groove deep in the pocket to tell a story about the hard life, where boredom is more dangerous than drugs and salvation’s in a kiss, not a church sacrament. MARISSA R. MOSS
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Press Club SOUNDS LIKE: A punk rock freight train soaked in sweat and carrying a ton of melody FOR FANS OF: Japandroids, the Replacements, Royal Headache WHY YOU SHOULD PAY ATTENTION: For a band that played their first gig in February, Brunswick four-piece Press Club have made a quick indent on the local scene. Supports with acts such as Japandroids, Joyce Manor and Ali Barter – not to mention two landmark performances at this year’s Bigsound – have helped build on the buzz of their debut single “Headwreck”, a sub-three minute attack of buzzsaw guitars, unforgettable hooks and Natalie Foster’s no-bullshit vocals. Their
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rise isn’t quite as overnight as it may sound – the members have all done time together and apart in various Melbourne bands of little note, but Press Club seems to have struck a chord. “The climate’s right for some guitars, I think,” says six-stringer Greg Rietwyk. “Electronic pop is cool but it’s a little played out, and people want to go to a show and get sweaty, they want to jump around. Maybe the landscape is right for it at the moment.” “Headwreck” is one of 11 songs the band recorded in a six-day stretch earlier this year, as a sweltering Melbourne summer sent the temperature soaring above the 40 degree mark – not
ideal given the studio didn’t have air conditioning. “It adds to the vibe though,” says Rietwyk, who produced the sessions, all of which were done live with minimal overdubs. “You can hear it on the recording. The music that we play, it sort of reaches its peak when everyone’s exhausted and at their end.” The 11 songs were just a portion of the 40 the quartet wrote upon forming in mid-2016, and the band are yet to determine what they’ll do with them and how they’ll be released. As for why “Headwreck” was the first to be unleashed? “It stood out to us because it represented who we were and
who we wanted to be,” says Foster. Adds Rietwyk: “That one’s very direct, it’s no bullshit, you just hear it and know exactly what the band is about.” THEY SAY: “It was an exercise in songwriting skills,” says Rietwyk of why they amassed such a collection of songs before playing live. “Like anything, if you practice 10 hours a day at something you’re going to get better at it. That was the thinking behind it. Write a bunch and there’ll be quality in there.” HEAR FOR YOURSELF: “Headwreck” melds pop melodies with a raw, sweaty, ferocious punk rock attack. It’s destined to be a festival fave this summer. R.Y.
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THE FUTURE IS NOW
Stella Donnelly SOUNDS LIKE: Gorgeous lo-fi songs with a lyrical bite that flaws FOR FANS OF: Courtney Barnett’s no-fuss storytelling, Julien Baker, Angel Olsen WHY YOU SHOULD PAY ATTENTION: When Perth singer-songwriter Stella Donnelly released her debut EP, Thrush Metal, earlier this year via Melbourne indie label Healthy Tapes, the expectation was that they’d sell 30 cassettes online and then, she says, “I could move on with my life and maybe write some more music”. Only it didn’t quite go that way – Thrush Metal has shifted more than 300
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tapes and counting. Then at this year’s Bigsound, where Donnelly performed two of the festival’s most talked-about sets, she was awarded the $25,000 Levi’s Music Prize. At 25, Donnelly is something of a veteran on the Perth scene, playing in bands such as Bells Rapids and BOAT SHOW, as well as with acts such as Angus Dawson and Teischa. For years, though, she’s quietly honed her solo set, inspired by the everyday lyricism of Billy Bragg, Courtney Barnett and Catatonia’s Cerys Matthews. Musically the five songs on her debut EP veer from
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the downbeat Nineties-esque “Mechanical Bull” to the sweet whimsical pop of “Mean To Me”. Linking it all together is Donnelly’s lo-fi approach, and her honest, sometimes devastating lyrics. While live her in-between song banter is such that Donnelly refers to her shows as “half-comedy”, in contrast a song such as “Boys Will Be Boys” addresses the sexual assault of a friend with such astonishing power that Donnelly precedes the song with a content warning. Its opening stanza, “My friend told me of a secret/Told me that she blames herself/You invaded her
magnificence/Put your hand over her mouth”, packs a breathtaking punch. Donnelly will record her debut album in November. SHE SAYS: “It was a hard process writing that song,” Donnelly says of “Boys Will Be Boys”. “And it’s still quite hard to sing. That shit’s hard to talk about, but it has to be spoken about. Dads and daughters and sons need to hear this stuff. There’s no excuse anymore.” HEAR FOR YOURSELF: “Boys Will Be Boys” showcases Donnelly’s lyrical and vocal power; “Mean To Me” her vocal dexterity. ROD YATES
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Fémina SOUNDS LIKE: A vibrant fandango in rural Latin America, doused with hip-hop swagger FOR FANS OF: Ana Tijoux, Ibeyi, nature and globetrotting WHY YOU SHOULD PAY ATTENTION: Fémina – whose plush poetic rhymes and ravishing harmonies glide over funk, boleros and chacarera rhythms ripe with rustic flair – grabbed Iggy Pop by the musical jugular, landing them on his radio show 6 Music twice this year. Sisters Sofia and Clara Trucco, along with childhood bestie Clara Miglioli, moved to Buenos Aires from the
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bucolic Andes of Patagonia. They unleashed their rap-folk enigma, which quickly became a name amongst the city’s colourful hip-hop milieu. The Argentine trio are currently working on their third album, due out later this year, which is being engineered by cumbia accordionist/producer Will Holland (Quantic, Ondatrópica) and will feature guest spots by Iggy Pop himself. THEY SAY: “Our home is magical,” says Clara Trucco. “There’s a lot of power in the environment, the landscape, the mountains, lakes, rivers, the animals. Being from [San Martín de los Andes] takes us to our centre.
It grounds us.” “We also feel inspired by the places we go to and the people we meet, the things that are going on in our country and in the world; in being human and how we exist; in dancing, movements and bodies,” says Sofia Trucco. “We don’t only think in terms of music, but we’re open to all these elements that feed our lyrics and melodies. That’s what’s rich about Fémina.” HEAR FOR YOURSELF: On the breezy, rootsy “Buen Viaje”, twinkling guitar arpeggios glimmer as the trio’s silken pipes shine against Afro-Latin percussion. ISABELA RAYGOZA
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END LIVING LEG
LINDY MORRISON
The former drummer with the Go-Betweens doesn’t want to talk about it anymore. But she does anyway, one more time, with feeling. ✦ By Barry Divola ✦ PHOTOGR A PH BY M AT T COY T E
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ight, tell me when your recorder is on so I know when to start censoring myself,” says Lindy Morrison, with a toothy smile and a glint in her eye. Spoiler alert: there will be no censoring. The outspoken drummer with the Go-Betweens hasn’t been idle since the band’s acrimonious 1989 break-up. For her longtime charity work within the music industry and her advocacy for musicians’ rights she’s been awarded an Order Of Australia Medal and the Ted Albert Award. In July, she and violinist/oboe player Amanda Brown performed the 16 Lovers Lane album in Brisbane with guest singers including Steve Kilbey, Katie Noonan, Sahara Beck and Kirin J. Callinan. They’ll do it again as part of the Sydney Festival at the State Theatre on January 18th next year. And The GoBetweens: Right Here, an emotional and insightful documentary by director Kriv Stenders, recently premiered in cinemas and is out on DVD December 6th. After the Go-Betweens ended you said “The only people who liked us were a fistful of wanky journalists and students.” Do you still feel that way? Well, I had a sense of humour about what I was saying, but I do think it was insightful. I’m amazed at how lovely and intelligent and faithful our fans are. I only joined Facebook a year ago and it’s been a revelation talking to fans and I love seeing what they post. And we had the most dedicated following of journalists, of which you were one. When I approached you about doing this, you initially said, “I’ve made a vow that I’m not going to talk anymore about the Go-Betweens after the documentary.” I made an exception for you, but I’m just so over it. I’m so bored with my story and I’m so bored with myself. So was the doco your line in the sand, where you felt you’d finally explained yourself? I cleansed myself of all my anger and all my nostalgia. It was intense. It was 16 hours of interviews – four lots of four hours. Kriv
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[Stenders] was relentless. He would go over the same situation time and time again until you just felt like screaming at him. [But] I wanted the opportunity to have my side of the story told, and I know Amanda felt the same way. What was your reaction when you first saw the film? Well, when I first saw the draft, I was watching with Amanda, and she was terribly upset. It induced a whole lot of feelings in her. Then seeing the finished version on the big screen at the Sydney Film Festival, I was seriously overwhelmed. There’s a sad and beautiful moment where you talk about seeing Robert again after an
Well, you wouldn’t say that, because it’s so tasteless. So it’s good I’m tasteless. Do you really think it’s true? I think it’s an element, yeah. Robert wouldn’t have written his book [Grant & I, published last year]. Kriv mightn’t have made the documentary. A few people in the film talk about the love/ hate relationship between you and Grant. Oh, I don’t think there was love . . . You know, there was one moment that might have been love. I am the biggest fan of Marilyn Monroe. And one day in around ’85 Grant invited me around to his apartment to watch The Misfits. He didn’t ask Robert. It was just the two of us. So that was the love moment. When you and Amanda performed 16 Lovers Lane in Brisbane in July, was that a case of you two reclaiming those songs because you felt you’d been marginalised from the story over the years? The motivation for me was just to play those songs again. My God, to play those songs was just incredible. Robert wrote us the most beautiful e-mail after the show. He said there were many highlights, but the biggest one for him was Amanda singing “The Devil’s Eye”. That was written to Amanda by Grant when she was travelling overseas and we never did that song live with the band. There were a lot of online haters after a review of that show went up on The Guardian website and it got me thinking that the Go-Betweens were one of those bands that people either adored or detested. There was no middle ground. You’re absolutely right. And the haters amuse me because they’re so vitriolic. Generally they hate the preciousness of Robert and Grant, and that infuriates me. I will defend Robert and Grant’s work till I die. I will not have anyone criticise the work of those men. OK, the men don’t approximate the artist, but what man ever did approximate his art?
I’M JUST OVER IT. I’M SO BORED WITH MY STORY AND I’M SO BORED WITH MYSELF.” absence and you just mention his corduroy shirt and then say, “He wasn’t there.” You seemed to be about to cry. That’s very insightful of you, because I was going to cry. I was trying not to express my feelings about how I really felt. Any time I think about that romance, and it was such a great romance, then I could tear up. We had so much fun. It was an incredible love affair. Are you and Robert friends now? Oh, no. We have to talk regularly about shit, but he’s not going to ring me up and ask me over for a barbecue. That’s all right. There’s too much water under the bridge. Of course, the one person who doesn’t get a contemporary interview is Grant McLennan (who died in 2006 at the age of 48). Yeah, but maybe that’s why there’s such an interest in the band now, because Grant’s dead. I wasn’t going to say that.
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The
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in
TOWN On the road with Midnight Oil as The Great Circle tour winds its way home BY DAVID FRICKE PHOTOGRAPH BY J O H N T S I AV I S
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Peter Garrett does not look like a man who has spent most of the past week flat on his back. Midnight Oil are just two songs into a May 14th show at New York’s Webster Hall, and the band’s bald vocal giant is already soaked from the entrance: the shotgun indictment of “Progress” from the 1985 EP Species Deceases, and the title grind of 1998’s Redneck Wonderland. Offstage, Garrett – who turned 64 in April – has been keeping to himself in hotel rooms, on an aggressive routine of rest, medication and doctors’ advice as he fights a viral infection that he picked up in Brazil during the opening leg of the Oils’ first world tour since 2002, a reunion marathon dubbed The Great Circle. But at Webster Hall – the second of two gigs here on a month-long run through North America – Garrett tears across the boards with his signature f lair: that avenging-Frankenstein march with arms out straight and hands spread wide, a hard rain of sweat flying from his gleaming dome. And when the singer stops to address the sold-out crowd, he is hardly short of breath or lost for opinion. “We learned a few, salient facts last night,” Garrett announces crisply, then rattles them off like rifle fire. “First fact: You guys have been faithful,” he says gratefully, acknowledging the 15 years since he, drummer Rob Hirst, guitarist-keyboard player Jim Moginie, guitarist Martin Rotsey and bassist Bones Hillman last played on U.S. soil. “The second fact: We believe in these songs and want to share them.” The crowd roars back with thanks. “The third fact” – Garrett shakes his head in disbelief – “a couple of you voted Republican, which blew our minds. I didn’t think there were any of them in New York.” He is referring to an exchange the previous night when Garrett – cutting right to the subject of America’s 45th president, Senior writer David Fricke talks to Randy Newman in this issue. 56 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |
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Donald Trump – saw a few hands go up at Webster Hall: Midnight Oil fans admitting they voted for the Twitter-mad archconservative in the 2016 election. “It’s called being on the wrong side of history,” Garrett warned before the Oils tore into an early anthem of resistance: “Don’t Wanna Be the One” from 1981’s Place Without a Postcard. On the 14th, Garrett mentions something else he saw the night before: a father holding up his young daughter on the floor. That girl “will have the shits”, Garrett promises, when she grows up and sees how her elders “have stuffed up the planet”. Then the Oils jump to the crunching urgency of “No Time for Games” from the 1980 EP Bird Noises. It’s the first time the Oils have played the song on this tour, and Garrett can’t help updating the lyrics for the occasion. “No time for fake facts,” he snaps in Trump’s direction, “no time for Number 45.” There is a brief pause, then an extra kissoff. “See you later, dude.”
songs, still the longest show the band has done this year) to the eve of The Great Circle’s Australian climax in October and November. “It’s going to be a very emotional time,” Rotsey says of the impending shows. “People have grown up with us. They’ve spent their lifetime with Midnight Oil.” Hirst noted this, too, at Selina’s: “the folks under 30” who were experiencing the pubhardened force, progressive songwriting ambition and social mission of the Oils for the first time. “Maybe they were harangued by their parents – ‘You gotta see the kind of bands we saw in the Eighties, like Midnight Oil.’ But from the stage,” the drummer says, “we could see their eyes light up” as the band roared through the whole of 1979’s Head Injuries. “They’d finally got it.” “History does repe at ,” Ga r ret t a ffirms brightly at Sirius XM, wearing a wide-brimmed bush hat and looking and sounding like he’s turned the corner on that virus. “I think it’s an extraordinary gift to find yourself at this stage in your career, to be in a band that’s got so much potency, where the onstage experience has got so much grunt.” Confessing his part in the hiatus, Garrett says, “I wanted to go off and do other things, and it was clear the band wasn’t going to be playing for a long time.” He spent a decade in the Labor Party as a representative in Parliament and Minister;
After the turmoil and treachery of Australian politics, Garrett “couldn’t wait to get on stage. ‘I’ll be the crazy man.’”
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h e n e x t mor n i ng, g a rrett is back on a microphone – with Moginie in the Manhattan studios of Sirius XM, the satellite-radio network. They are taping an interview for my program “The Writer’s Block”, one of a dozen conversations I eventually have with the Oils for this story: in New York and on the phone, from the morning of their epic April 13th club launch at Selina’s in Sydney (at 29
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ONLY THE STRONG (1) On February 17th, the band took to Sydney Harbour to announce their reunion and world tour. (2) Garrett being sworn in as education minister by Governor-General Quentin Bryce in September 2010. (3) Rotsey and Garrett live in 1985.
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published a memoir, Big Blue Sky, in 2015; released a 2016 solo album, A Version of Now, followed by an energising pub tour of Australia. There was always a feeling about the Oils, though, that the singer puts this way: “Not finished.” Garrett was “always very confident”, he says, “that if we came back into a room and enjoyed the business of playing together, then it was going to work.” After the turmoil and treachery of Australian politics, “I couldn’t wait to get on a stage. ‘I’ll be the crazy man! Let me at that.’” When reminded of the Oils’ concert history at Webster Hall, Garrett replies softly, “Wow.” They made their New York debut there, when it was called the Ritz, in April, 1984. The Oils – founded in 1976 in Sydney’s northern suburbs by Hirst, Moginie, Garrett and original bassist Andrew James (Rotsey, who went to school with Hirst, joined the next year) – had finally broken into the Top Ten at home with their fourth album, 1982’s 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, but were starting all over again in America as confrontational underdogs. The first song they played at the Ritz: “Knife’s Edge” from Bird Noises. “You point the ship somewhere, and you don’t know where it’s going to end,” Moginie recalls. “We would never have expected to have a song that was hugely popular in America”, alluding to the Top 20 peak of “Beds Are Burning” in 1987. “Who would have known that in 1978?” “The essence of making the best music you can,” Garrett says, “with the people you’re with, is to basically go for it at that point in time.” He remembers the first time he heard 1978’s Midnight Oil, the band’s first album, after the final mix. “I thought, ‘Great, we’ve made a record. I can play it to my gran. Now go and be a lawyer. Who knows what’s going to happen?” This is what happened, starting at Selina’s, this year: The Oils, all in or near their early 60s, are playing the longest shows of their career at a new, physically explosive peak, drawing on 170-180 songs – the complete studio canon between Midnight Oil and 2002’s Capricornia, plus B-sides and unreleased songs from the recent rarities anthology, Overflow Tank. No two set lists are alike; Garrett writes the first draft each night with everyone suggesting edits and substitutions right up to showtime. Some changes are made on stage; the results resound like breaking news. The Oils were at a venue outside Washington, D.C. on May 9th, the day Trump fired F.B.I. director James Comey, who was investigating Russian collusion in the realestate mogul’s election victory; the band opened with the first-ever U.S. performance of “Profiteers” from Head Injuries. Three months later, the Oils responded to the August 14th rioting of white supremaRollingStoneAus.com |
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MIDNIGHT OIL cists in Charlottesville, Virginia, including the death of a young woman run over by a car driven by a Nazi sympathiser, with volleys of shock and censure: “Redneck Wonderland”, “Put Down That Weapon” from 1987’s Diesel and Dust, the patriotism “going wrong” in “My Country” from 1993’s Earth and Sun and Moon. The band was half a world away that night, in Singapore playing for an audience largely made up of expatriate Australians. But, Garrett says, “You’re only a click away in the global village. You have to reach out for the thing that has the most punch and relevance and bring it on stage that night.” Moginie seconds that notion: “That’s what the band always did – echo and mirror what is happening in the world. The sad thing is the songs are the same ones.” Sometimes the Oils just play things for fun. In Chicago on May 18th, Moginie’s 61st birthday, his present was 10, 9, 8 . . . performed in its entirety. When the Oils returned to New York on August 21st, they marked what would have been the 65th birthday of an early inspiration, the late Joe Strummer of the Clash, with an impromptu blast of that band’s “London Calling”. And in Minneapolis, at Prince’s old haunt First Avenue, the Oils covered some homegrown pride, Warumpi Band’s “From the Bush”. “That’s the diligent side of the Oils,” Garrett points out. The Great Circle’s first Australian show is in Alice Springs, “Warumpi Band territory. We needed to play that song to see if we could get through it to the other end without falling apart.” For Hillman, the New Zealander who replaced bassist Peter Gifford in 1987, The Great Circle “has been more than a tour. It’s reconnecting with people.” After the Oils split, Hirst, Moginie and Rotsey kept playing together, forming the psychedelicsurf band the Break with Violent Femmes bassist Brian Ritchie. Hillman emigrated to the U.S., working as a session bassist in Nashville and going on the road as a sideman for folk and country artists. He says there were “a couple of e-mails every year” hinting at a full-scale reunion, beyond the charity appearances that dotted Garrett’s tenure in Parliament. “But I stopped thinking about it.” When the emails got serious and Hillman returned to Australia in late November, 2016, for the initial rehearsals, there wasn’t much playing at first. “We had dinner and drank beer,” he says fondly. “I concentrated on relationships, the dynamics we had as individuals. ‘Oh, I remember you. You’re a mate.’” The Great Circle continues to be “a heightened emotional experience” for the bassist. In Paris, his guest list included “the first love of my life – she came with her husband to the show. I’ve had friends die while I’m on this tour. When we were going full steam, before we stopped, I just felt like we 58 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |
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played gigs and moved on. I see it in a different light now. The band means so much more to people than the songs. It is a responsibility.” Hirst calls it “the pushback”. Brexit, the red alert of global warming, the rise of the alt-right in America, the xenophobia of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party in Australia: The Oils “seem to appear at these critical junctures in world history”, the drummer claims. “That obviously couldn’t be planned, but it worked in our favour. We feel a strong solidarity with our audiences, and we’re going to turn the world upside down, set it back on its proper course of kindness and compassion.” On the radio, Garrett sums up the Oils’ return with a naval metaphor, likening the band to an ongoing voyage of discovery. “To use an expression of a friend of Jim’s and mine, you strap yourself to the mast, and you head out into open seas. Away you go.”
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tralian Prime Minister.” The result was A Version of Now – “the solo record that was never expected to be made”, Garrett says now. He describes the album’s strippeddown fortitude as “folk music with electric guitars” and his lyrical stand in songs like “I’d Do It Again”, “No Placebo” and “Great White Shark” (descended from an old, unused Oils demo) as “a gut-driven reaction to having spent 10 years in government, some of it under an extremely capricious and difficult person”: former Prime Minister and Labor leader Kevin Rudd. “I had my nose close to the wall before,” Garrett says of his legal background, the Oils’ sustained activism and his 1984 run for a Senate seat under the Nuclear Disarmament Party banner. And he recognised that as a former rock star, he entered politics with a huge target on his back. “I knew that half the country wouldn’t look at me in the same way anymore. You get put in the stocks, everybody gets to throw stuff at you. I was determined to get on with it, to leave on my own terms with some things done that I’m proud of. I think I was able to do that.” Hirst remembers a moment during Garrett’s time in Canberra, when the Oils played two warm-up shows there before their 2009 reunion at the Sound Relief benefit in Melbourne. “This shows how the music is deeply embedded in all of us,” he says. “Pete literally walked across the front lawn of Parliament House in his suit, shedding his coat and tie in the process, pulled on a Tshirt and went straight to the mic” in the Canberra Theater. “He started singing. And it was exactly like it always was.” A Version of Now “set me up for making music again”, Garrett admits. Rotsey, who played on the album and tour, saw the evidence at those shows, a family affair that included Garrett’s three daughters on backing vocals. “I’d watch his leg and foot,” the guitarist says, “that involuntary movement when Pete gets on stage. He was getting into it, letting go. It was wonderful to see.” The album also forced Garrett to resolve his future with the Oils. John Watson – the Silverchair and Cold Chisel manager who started working with the Oils after their longtime “sixth member” Gary Mor-
Hirst notes that “I never actually said ‘yes’ to this reunion. At some point I must have stopped saying ‘no’.”
he long road to The G r e at C i r c le b e g a n , for Moginie, in a hotel corridor somewhere on Midnight Oil’s 2002 tour, supporting their 11th studio album, Capr ic or nia . “I wa s walking down the hallway with a guitar,” Moginie says, “thinking, ‘I’m 45 years old. And I’m still doing this?’ “There was a slight grimness toward the end,” the guitarist confesses. “We were trying to recreate the success of Diesel” – the Oils’ biggest album outside Australia, going Top 20 in the U.S. – “and feeling like our luck was running out.” Moginie could see “the political thing” growing in Garrett too. In December, 2002, the singer announced that he was leaving Midnight Oil. “I had plenty of mixed emotions,” he wrote in Big Blue Sky, “but relief was the strongest; I just had to let it go.” Hirst reveals that there was “a call among some band members” at the time to do an official farewell, one more “turn around the country” with Garrett. “My view was that people had 25 years to see us. It would seem cynical to do a run ’round the traps to top off the bank accounts.” Earlier this year, in the British magazine Record Collector, Garrett was asked, “What’s the oddest circumstance that’s inspired a song?” “Getting knifed in the back,” he replied, “in 2010 by the then-Aus-
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POWER AND PASSION
FROM TOP: DANA DISTORTION; JIM MOGINIE; BEN LYONS
(1) Garrett, Rotsey and Hillman at New York’s Webster Hall on May 13th. (2) The Oils’ July 4th set list. Garrett prepares the list every night before the rest of the band suggest changes. No two set lists on The Great Circle tour have been alike. (3) Garrett commanding the crowd at the Colours of Ostrava Festival in the Czech Republic.
ris moved on in 2013 – recalls a conversation with Garrett while the latter was still “talking about doing a solo record. I said, ‘It’s important that there is some clarity about the band’s plans – or if there are no plans. Because when you go out with your first musical thing, post-politics, the first question you will be asked is, ‘What about the Oils?’ [A Version of Now] brought that to a deadline that might otherwise have passed.” Back in April, a couple of days after the Selina’s show, Hirst is frank over the phone about his initial resistance to starting again. The “fi rst serious discussion” was “an invitation to Martin’s place for lunch. I said to everyone, ‘To be honest, it’s not something I really want to do.’ I felt No v e m b e r , 2 017
that for a quarter-century, the band had been our lives. We’d sweated blood here and around the world.” Anything less than that again, Hirst felt, tarnished the legacy. There was another problem. “There is only one way of playing Midnight Oil music,” the drummer says. “And that is flat-out. You can’t play these songs of sturm und drang except with the same intensity with which they were written. I wondered whether we were physically capable of playing a couple of hours of music at that level.” Four months of rehearsal, including whole albums played in sequence, settled that issue – although Hirst notes that he “never actually said ‘yes’ to this reformation. At some point, I must have just stopped saying ‘no’.”
During our interview, Rotsey reminds me of the day in early 1990 when I caught an Oils practice session while on assignment for Rolling Stone in America. They were preparing for a world tour on behalf of Blue Sky Mining. And they were loud. “I always feel sorry for you,” the guitarist says, laughing, “when I think of you in that small rehearsal room in Sydney. We must have pinned your ears to the wall – ours as well. We play as hard in rehearsal as we do on stage.” Hillman first heard that magnum force in 1979. The Oils were in Wellington, New Zealand for a gig, about to release Head Injuries. “I was staying in the same hotel with my band at the time,” the bassist says. “They checked in, and Peter was in the car RollingStoneAus.com |
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MIDNIGHT OIL eties, the citizens of the day. And exercising that power, in a responsible way with a view to the future, is what current politics doesn’t deliver for us. I saw that close at hand.”
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t’s been an extr aordinary time, to be out playing again,” Hirst says over the phone from Minneapolis, a couple of hours before his flight home to Sydney for a break after the second U.S. leg of The Great Circle. “None of this tour and the great houses we’ve had have been taken for granted by the band. We didn’t know how it would go, how well the band would be remembered. It has been incredibly heartwarming.” The drummer’s only regret: “With the way the songs have reflected the times, we don’t have a new bunch of songs to take that history and bring it right up to date.” This may be one reason why. Early in the planning for The Great Circle, the Oils held what Watson calls “the first proper band meeting. We talked about what we could do with this, do with that. This meeting went on for four hours. I’ve never had a four-hour band meeting in my life.” Watson’s conferences with Silverchair, in comparison, could be over in four minutes: “That’s cool. That’s cool. That sucks.” That evening, Watson went to a benefit event in Sydney where Garrett and Rotsey performed a few songs. “Pete said to me, ‘We had a good meeting today. It just wasn’t long enough.’ I laughed. I thought he was being ironic.” It was “one of those moments in life”, the manager says, “when you laugh at someone’s joke, and then you go, ‘Oh, shit, he’s serious.’ “They’re all really bright,” Watson adds of the Oils. “And they all have strong points of view. They often disagree about things. They work them out in a mature way that is highly unusual for a rock band. But it takes time.” Each of the Oils, in separate conversations, expresses hope for life together beyond The Great Circle. No one makes any promises. Because there have been “no discussions in depth yet”, according to Hillman. “The whole thing was to devote 2017 to this tour and see how it went,” Hirst says. “We just didn’t know.” The drummer
“What the Oils will do – I don’t think anyone knows,” says Jim Moginie of the band’s future together.
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1 has already lined up 2018 shows with the Backsliders, his blues band, and the Break will be “kicking along”, according to Moginie, who will return to his orchestral work as well. Hillman, who still has belongings in storage in Nashville (and a car stashed in Wisconsin), may return to the States – “rent a place for a year”, he says, “somewhere in California, and just sit and breathe. If there is a unanimous decision to do more playing in 2018, fantastic. If they want to talk about a record, I’m up for it. If we just walk away, if that’s the end of The Great Circle, that’s fantastic as well.” “What the Oils will do – I don’t think anyone knows,” Moginie says. “Maybe that’s the tension we need to keep it going.” One thing that is different about The Great Circle from previous Midnight Oil tours: There has been no songwriting on the road. “We used to use soundchecks to work up bits and pieces,” Hirst says. But as the band adds “wild-card songs” to the shows – such as the previously unreleased Nineties demos “21st Century Human” and “Heart Is Nowhere” that made live debuts in August – “we have to soundcheck them to make sure we can get from A to B.” No v e m b e r , 2 017
FROM TOP: BOB KING; LESLEY HOLLAND; GETTY
park, kicking a soccer ball. We dribbled the ball around and talked about music.” That night, the Oils literally “parted the audience like the Red Sea”, Hillman says. “They were the loudest thing I’d ever heard. The crowd just dispersed left and right.” “We weren’t a punk band, but we picked up on the energy of punk,” Hirst says of the late-Seventies Oils. “Seeing Radio Birdman and the Saints completely turned our band around. It turned us into this weird, schizophrenic unit” – a group of exploratory songwriters forged in the incandescent mayhem of the Australian pub circuit, making vividly argumentative records with a passion for pictorial, studio detail and a constant fear of repetition. “We were always reacting to the record before,” Moginie concedes, a syndrome that cut into the Oils’ commercial momentum after Diesel and Dust and Blue Sky Mining – the tempered, organic charge of 1993’s Earth and Sun and Moon; the heavy-folk understatement on 1996’s Breathe; Redneck Wonderland’s seething tension of loops and distortion. But those choices, “even though they were wrong, were made for the right reasons”, Hirst argues. “It was a band consistent in thought and principle.” For G a r r e t t , t he breadth of The Great Circle set lists (the Oils played 39 d if ferent songs over the two May nights at Webster Hall, including “Whoah” from Diesel for the first time since 1994) affirms “the strong, narrative skeleton that holds everything that’s Midnight Oil together. It’s not just about saying ‘This president’s a lying jerk.’ That’s a little bit obvious. It’s much more about the deeper things that are at play – humanity’s journey, how we respond, how we work with one another and enjoy music together. The set tries to encapsulate that.” Asked if he has learned anything about the power of song after returning to music from power itself, Garrett responds with battle-scarred certainty: “I think I understand power better than most people now, to be honest. It might sound vain, but I’ve experienced it in all sorts of ways. “Music empowers us,” he goes on. “Power is the making of decisions, the execution of those decisions. Music’s great role is to feed people, enthuse them, save them. The exercise of power is a matter for the civil soci-
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THE LONG ROAD (1) Midnight Oil playing in Parramatta, 1977 (original bassist Andrew James in the background). (2) Garrett leading Midnight Oil through their famous set at the Exxon Building in New York in 1990. (3) Hirst doing some writing in Cologne on June 21st.
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“I think there’s probably some stuff going on in the back room,” Rotsey suggests hopefully. “Every time Midnight Oil has immersed itself in an experience, something’s come out of it. When we went to the desert [for 1986’s Blackfella/Whitefella Tour], Diesel and Dust came out. When we were locked in London [in 1982], with all of the politics happening then, 10, 9, 8 . . . came out of it. Playing to this audience, getting out to the world this year – we’ll see.” Garrett insists that he “hasn’t thought much” about Midnight Oil’s future beyond the Great Circle’s final date, November 17th at the Domain in Sydney. “My creative juices are flowing,” he says, and he will “certainly produce more music at some stage”. Whether it is with the Oils or other members “in different combinations, if we all pursue other ideas then come back as a band to do the things we believe in – I’m sure some hours will be spent figuring that out.” For the singer, his band’s return has been “essentially a confirmation of character. This is the way we play, this is how we work. This is the sweat we shed, and we’re still alive to shed it. We’re just doing that great Australian thing of having a go.” RollingStoneAus.com |
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The Salvation of Brian Wilson At 75, the Beach Boy has beat back depression, ramped up his touring and learned to ‘kick ass at life’ By Jason Fine
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n the long, tedious hours between soundcheck and showtime, Brian Wilson likes to park himself at the side of the stage, hidden behind the curtains, in an oversize black chair. The chair has travelled with him from Tokyo to Tel Aviv and back home to the Pantages Theater in Holly-
wood tonight. Dressed in a lavender button-down, sweatpants and white Nikes, Wilson sits impassively atop his faux-leather throne, munching sushi rolls as the preshow noise and bustle swirl around him. ¶ When a concert promoter or VIP guest wanders over to say hi,
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Wilson often shuts his eyes and pretends he’s asleep. After 56 years as a Beach Boy, he admits the buildup to a concert can still be “a total mindfuck”, filled with worry and self-doubt. So he likes to disappear into what he calls “the Zone”, where he can meditate, beat back the nerves and maybe pray a little. “I feel things out, catch vibrations from my band and the crew,” he says. “I get real nervous, then I tell myself, ‘Not nervous, Wilson! Confident!’ ” At 75, Wilson is in the middle of a highly improbable, wildly successful late-career roll. Since launching this tour in 2016 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Beach Boys’ landmark Pet Sounds album, Wilson has performed 165 shows in 24 countries, with more dates being added into 2018. It’s a gruelling, time-zone-shattering run that would punish the most disciplined perNo v e m b e r , 2 017
ENDLESS SUMMER Wilson at home in Beverly Hills
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Brian Wilson former, let alone a reclusive senior citizen suffering from a serious psychiatric disorder and back pain, not to mention a careerlong aversion to performing. And it might have never happened. Before this tour, Wilson’s stellar, devoted touring band had lost a key member, ticket sales had diminished, and Wilson told me he was worn out and that retirement wasn’t far off. But then something changed. The 2015 biopic Love & Mercy sparked new interest in rock’s tormented genius, and sometime in the winter of 2016 Wilson noticed that his usual post-holiday depression had vanished. “The clouds lifted,” he says. “It was a blessing.” Wilson also worries about how long his voice and his body can hold up on the road, and he may be motivated by fear to keep going while he can. Joined by original Beach Boy Al Jardine and Jardine’s son, Matt (who nails the high parts Wilson sang in the Sixties, and takes the lead on “Don’t Worry Baby”, among other songs), along with the great Blondie Chaplin on guitar and vocals, Wilson and his band have found a looser, harder edge onstage. At two epic concerts at the Pantages in May, Wilson led the 10-piece ensemble through a live version of Pet Sounds, plus 25 Beach Boys hits and songs Wilson picked from the lesser-known corners of his catalogue. Wilson’s singing was rough at times, but he drove the band with emotion and an eccentric sense of humour – he looked like he was actually having fun up there. “I honestly don’t know w h a t h app ene d ,” W i lson says in his dressing room, with a shrug and a soft smile. “I thought I was gonna hang it up. But then I changed my mind. I said, ‘What am I gonna do? Sit around and watch TV? No way!’ Nothin’ was really happening back in L.A., so I figured I might as well go tour. I just said, ‘Well, fuck it, I might as well get off my ass and tour.’ So I got off my ass and toured.” As we talk, Wilson eats sushi piled onto a plastic takeout lid resting on his lap. He pops the last piece of tuna and flips the lid across the room, missing the garbage can by several feet. “I’m old!” he half-shouts. “I’m an old man, and I have to think to myself, ‘What the fuck am I gonna do about this?’ Nothing you can do about getting old. When I look in the mirror, I don’t like what I see. But then I think about it, and I
think about Paul touring, Mick and Keith are still touring, so are [fellow Beach Boys] Mike and Bruce. You know, I’m getting older but I don’t give a goddamn. I can still sing my ass off. I’m only 74. [He turned 75 a month later, on June 20th.] Which is a fucked age, but I don’t mind it. When I sing onstage, I ain’t 74. I sound like a 30-year-old! That feels good. I get a little break from being 74. “I look old, but I sing young,” he continues. “Who would have thought? I’ll tell you who: nobody.”
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wo hours befor e showtime, the backstage area is crowded with family, including six of Wilson’s seven multigenerational kids, old friends and music-biz acquaintances. Brian is in a garrulous if offbeat mood. When an old buddy, Peter Leinheiser, approaches, Wilson blurts, “How’s your sex life, man?” Leinheiser sputters, “I ride a bicycle – it’s hard to pick up women on a bike.” “Oh,” Wilson says, adding, “Well, you look good. If you were a chick – I don’t know what I’d do!” “I haven’t written a song in five years,” Wilson says, then lets out two Donald Duck-like quacks. “All outta tunes. But I think I’m getting ready to write.” A l Ja rdine, the only other original Beach Boy in the band, pulls up a chair to check in with the boss. “Hey, it’s Al Hard-On,” Wilson says, deadpan, a joke he’s probably been making since the two were kids growing up in Hawthorne, California. Jardine, whose radiant tenor is nearly as strong today as when he sang lead on “Help Me, Rhonda” in 1965, is a gentle, generous presence on tour – it’s easy to tell Wilson enjoys being around him. “How ya holdin’ up, Alan?” Wilson asks. “Well, I’m tired, but I’m happy,” Jardine says, in his white wide-lapel suit, the same style he’s worn onstage since the Seventies. “You know how we do it, grind it till you get through it.” Wilson nods, and says that phrase reminds him of a song – “It’s O.K.”, from the Beach Boys’ 1976 album 15 Big Ones. “Oh, right,” says Jardine. “Remind me of that one?” Wilson starts to sing the chorus, and Jardine chimes in: Gotta go to it Gonna go through it Gotta get with it
“I don’t have peaks or valleys anymore. I don’t get too high or low. Mostly I’m just pleasantly depressed.”
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When Wilson and his cousin Mike Love wrote that song, it was a rallying cry for the Beach Boys’ comeback, a decade after their last big hit, at a time when Wilson was wrestling with drug addiction and the band was mired in dysfunction. “I still believe in that message – working hard is the way to go,” Wilson says tonight. “I live by it.” “Yeah, I guess me too,” says Jardine. “Alan, I’m so proud of you,” Wilson says. “Your voice is a natural wonder. We’ve been through a lot, and look at us, we’re still here and we’re still kicking ass. I love you, man.” “Well, thank you, Brian, it’s all because of you. I love you too.”
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he afternoon before his second L.A. show, Wilson sits in a corner booth at his favourite Beverly Hills deli, with a Cobb salad and a vanilla malt. “I miss this place,” he says. “There’s nowhere like home. But for me, there’s nowhere like the road. Retire? No way. Hell, no. Fuck, no. Not a chance! Gotta keep going. I love my band, I love my bus, I love my life. I miss the deli, but I can deal with it.” Wilson looks relaxed, in a pink polo with his sandy-silver hair slicked back. He complains that it’s hard to keep on a diet on tour, and that he’s not exercising enough. He asks what I do for exercise, and I tell him I play tennis and lift (very light) weights. “Really?” he asks. “Like your pectoralis? Are you building up your tits? “I’ll give you some advice,” he goes on. “If you want to add a little definition to your chest, lay on a bench and” – mimicking a bench-press motion – “lift the barbell, from here to here, it really works. Start building up, you can see the difference when you look in the mirror, like, ‘Hey! I got my pectoralis working!’ That’s what I did! In 1990, I was in really good shape.” By the time this story is published, he’ll have released a retrospective of his solo work, with two new songs, and he’s already planning his next moves: He wants to tour China for the first time; record an album of his favourite rock & roll covers; and says he’d love to host his own radio show, dedicated to the music of Phil Spector. “To succeed in life, you have to put a little muscle into it – mind muscle,” he says. “Not sure where that comes from, but I’ve got it. I’m success-oriented. You have to program yourself to be successful. Kick ass at life.” It’s a month before his 75th birthday, and he seems awed by the milestone. “Goddamn, 75,” he says. “Motherfuckin’ 75. I can’t believe it.” He says this not with dread but a kind of wonder, like a child who one day woke up an old man. In the past, a big birthday might have thrown him into a tailspin, he admits, but “I don’t have valleys or peaks anymore. I don’t get too high or too No v e m b e r , 2 017
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Gotta Go to It (1) Onstage in August. (2) With (from left) daughter Daria, son Dash, wife Melinda. (3) With Mike Love, 1966. The cousins founded the Beach Boys together but have had a troubled relationship. They have not spoken since a Beach Boys reunion tour in 2012.
FROM TOP: GETTY; JASON FINE; © CAPITOL PHOTO ARCHIVE
3 low. It’s been a long time since I’ve had serious depression, or elation. Mostly I’m just pleasantly depressed.” He recalls an afternoon a year ago, the day after his 74th birthday, when he and I drove through New York’s Central Park to visit a building where George Gershwin once lived. “I’ll be goddamned if we didn’t get to see where Gershwin lived!” Wilson says. “The vibes were fantastic. I felt his presence. Shit, yes, I did, absolutely. “For me, Gershwin is huge,” Wilson says. “My first music hero. I listened to his goddamn music when I was three years old! ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ blew my three-year-old mind! He was 26 when he wrote it. It was like nothing that came before. “There’s no joking around when it comes to Gershwin,” he continues. “His music No v e m b e r , 2 017
is too great. It makes me feel wonderful, warm, spiritual, the feeling of love – all those great trips are where it takes me.” I mention that Wilson was 23 when he started Pet Sounds – three years younger than Gershwin when he wrote “Rhapsody”. “What can you say about Pet Sounds?” he says with a slight, embarrassed laugh. “It’s a great album, I know, but there are
more rock & roll albums than Pet Sounds. Pet Sounds is more of a – uh, what would you call it? It’s kind of an introspective, kind of spiritual record.” Wilson has a complicated relationship with his masterwork – he’s self-conscious about the young man’s anguish in his lyrics, and his falsetto singing. And even though Pet Sounds has become one of the most celebrated albums in rock history (No. 2 among Rolling Stone’s Greatest Albums of All Time), in 1966 it was a commercial dud that exposed an irreparable rift between Wilson and his band. While Love wanted to keep cranking out pop songs about girls and the beach, Wilson was heading into more turbulent terrain. The group never quite recovered from that schism, even when its surviving members reunited for a 50th-anniversary tour in 2012. That tour ended when Love opted to continue on the road with his own band rather than extend the reunion with his cousin beyond the 75 dates, causing Wilson to write an L.A. Times op-ed headlined it kinda feels like getting fired. The two haven’t spoken in the past five years. Asked if he can imagine the original group reuniting again, Wilson said, “The Beach Boys might get together again – but not with me.” “[Pet Sounds] brings back a lot of memories, mostly good,” Wilson says, “but it throws me off balance. I miss my brothers, I miss hearing Carl sing, and I miss my dad so much, even though he died in 1973. It takes me back to those places, and it’s very emotional.” Wilson says he has trouble relating to his younger self. “I feel like the same guy, but I’m not the same guy,” he says. “I have the same love in my heart as when I was a kid, but I’m older, been through a lot. I’ll sit there and be like, ‘I’m a man! I’m a man!’ It’s a heavy trip to try and get into my 23-year-old brain.” Wilson’s musical director, Paul Von Mertens, says that during the Pet Sounds set Wilson will often mess around with vocal phrases. “He doesn’t want to be that 75-year-old in board shorts and flip-flops,” Von Mertens says. “He wants to sing the songs how he feels them now.” At the Pantages, Pet Sounds did not appear to be Wilson’s favourite part of the show. He seemed distracted at times, rushing through passages and chopping vocal lines in jarring ways. Both nights, he bolted from the stage a minute before the end of the last song, “Caroline, No”, so that by the time Pet Sounds came to its majestic finale, with the recorded sound of a train whistle and Wilson’s own barking dogs, the maestro was back in his chair, chugging a Diet Dr Pepper. I remind Wilson that Pet Sounds means as much to generations [Cont. on 88] RollingStoneAus.com |
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CLOSE-UP
ALEX LAHEY’S BIG FUTURE
The singer-guitarist has a new album and a firm idea of what she wants from her career BY M I C H A E L DW Y E R
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hatever happens from ways unapologetically real. “They were very here, there’s one vision Alex wordy back then. I had to learn the power of Lahey will cherish forever. being concise,” she laughs, “but they were alIt was backstage at Kings ways about things that I knew. I wasn’t one Park, Perth, on her last night opening for of those [songwriters] who made up fake boyfriends so I could write a love song.” Blondie and Cyndi Lauper in April. B-Grade University, Lahey’s first EP of “I was hovering around catering,” she remembers over poached eggs in her favou- last year, laid out vivid snapshots of sharerite Melbourne cafe. “Debbie Harry’s dress- house relationships and arts studies filtered ing room was adjacent and the door slightly with as much humour as frustration. She’s acutely aware of the good fortune of her upajar so I could see her inside. “There’s nobody else around and she’s just bringing, and the worldly influence – musistanding there, totally in her own world, cal and otherwise – of her immigrant parand there’s a mannequin’s head in front of ents’ Greek-Egyptian and British heritage. her and she’s combing her wig. She’s, like, “You don’t like sports and I don’t like dresses/Luckily for us our parents got the mes72, and she’s just combing this blonde wig. “I thought, ‘If that’s the one thing that I sage,” she sings on the title track of I Love have that no one else has, I’m totally fine You Like a Brother. “I’ve always been into rock music, but with that.’ It was a beautiful moment.” Lahey may have just begun, but the no- there was all kinds in our house: Greek, tion of legacy isn’t lost on the 25-year-old French, world music, lots of Motown . . . I ended up studying jazz because of singer-songwriter from Albert the school system. It’s either clasPark. Between her jazz-infused sical or jazz and I went the more past with Animaux and her raw, “I wasn’t one contemporary route. In hindpop-rock solo album, I Love You of those sight I’m glad, but you don’t need Like a Brother, she’s already cov- songwriters to study music to be a musician.” ered enough ground to know who made up fake boyfriends Animaux taught her plenty where she stands. about the realities of a working “The big change for women in so I could write musician’s life, though the cremusic is that one, there’s multiple. a love song.” ative democracy began to feel a During Blondie or Cyndi Lauper’s time, from what I could gather, there was little stifling, she says, as her own path came only room for one and if that meant climb- into sharper focus. “The more conscious I ing, you fucking climbed. Now there’s room. became of my own songwriting, the less I It’s more like ‘Let’s do this together.’ Girls to wanted to compromise. I’m no lone wolf. I the front. We want representation. That’s love collaborating. But you’ve got to be realwhere the discussion has shifted, which is ly sure about what the project is, and articulate that directly and fairly.” awesome.” In the last year, Lahey has led her band It hasn’t stopped overseas media, particularly, from facile Courtney Barnett com- to the US and UK, the latter as support to parisons. Lahey rolls her eyes, but she gets Tegan and Sara, another experience she’ll it. The absence of wigs and makeup is an remember for as long as that fleeting enunforced metaphor for how they approach counter with Debbie Harry and her wig. “One thing Sara said to me is that if you their craft: no image, no pretence, no compromise. “We like to be comfortable, we’re act the way you believe the norm should be, both gay, and it’s awesome that that’s not then the norm will follow. If I was to conreally a part of our narrative,” she says. “We tribute to a legacy, sure, gender representation is one thing; gig safety awareness… but write songs and we let that do the talking.” Even as a young teenager, one ear on being socially conscious generally, and being Missy Higgins’ Melbourne suburban con- yourself and not feel you have to censor yourfessionals and one on the shiny imported self for the purpose of being pigeonholed . . . pop-rock of the Killers, her songs were al- that’s what I’d like to be part of.” 66 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |
RollingStoneAus.com
THE TIONAL
MADNESS INTERNA
RS AFFAI
OF
DONALD TRUMP The pressures of the presidency have pushed Trump to the edge, but is he crazy enough to be removed from office?
By Matt Taibbi
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That makeover was undone just as quickly as it was done, leaving the Donald with the same old tie-on-bulgingduodenum look from the campaign. He even sounds the same now, kicking off the event with a go-to favourite: “What a crowd!” he shouts. (A week from now, he will shout, “What a crowd, what a turnout!” from atop a truck in Corpus Christi, Texas, on the occasion of a deadly hurricane.) But the embattled president who takes the stage tonight is a different man from the barnstorming revolutionary who ripped through the American political process a year ago. That Donald Trump enjoyed himself, to an obscene degree. Watching Trump lean over a podium on the road to the presidency was like watching a stud boar hump a hole in the wall. ¶ He said monstrous
v e n i ng , augus t 22 n d, 2017, a convention centre in Phoenix. It’s Donald Trump’s true coming-out party as an insane person. It looks like the same old Trump up there on the stage: same boxy blue suit, same obligatory f lag pin and tangerine combover, same too-long reddish power tie swinging below his belt line like a locker-room abomination. Earlier this year there were efforts to make Trump stop wearing his suit jackets open – designer Joseph Abboud said buttoning up was a “very visible way of showing he knows how serious the job is” – but Donald Trump doesn’t take advice, not even the gently benign kind. ¶
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things and lied with stunning disinhibition, and when the civilised world recoiled in horror, he seemed to take sadistic pleasure in every minute – win or lose, the run was pure glory for him, a Sherman’s March of taboo politics and testosterone fury that would leave a mark on America forever. There was one more thing. Candidate Trump may have been crazy, but it was craziness that on some level was working. Even at his lowest and most irrational moments – like his lunatic assault on the family of fallen soldier Humayun Khan, in which he raved to the grieving Gold Star parents about how it was he, Trump, who had “made a lot of sacrifices” – you could argue, if you squinted really hard, that it was strategy, a kick to the base. Or even if he wasn’t doing these things on purpose, he must have been able to feel their impact, as the revolutionary force of his campaign demolished the 160-yearold Republican Party and barrelled toward the gates of Barack Obama’s White House. Now, it’s different. Now, he just seems crazy. And it’s his own administration that is crumbling, not any system. After a disastrous and terrifying August, which among other things saw him defend the “very fine people” among neo-Nazi protesters in a Charlottesville, Virginia, march, it’s Trump’s mental state – not his alleged Russia ties, nor his failure to staff the government or pass any major legislation – that has become the central problem of his presidency. Is this man losing his mind? And if so, what can be done about it? There have been some real zeros in the White House before, but never a chief executive who barked at the moon or saw ghosts – at least, not one who was so public about it. In Phoenix, which is technically a campaign event, the idea seems to be to surround the chief with an enthusiastic audience to boost his spirits after the fiasco of Charlottesville. Put him on the stump in the heart of MAGA country, let him feel that boar-with-a-boner high again. It doesn’t work. The crowd is big and boisterous enough, maybe 10,000 Sheriff Joe-lovin’, Mexico-hatin’ ’Muricans, but Trump looks miserable. He’s not the insurgent rebel anymore but a Caesar surrounded by knives. He’s got a special prosecutor crawling up his backside, and there are numerous prominent politicians, including at least two in his own party, who are questioning his sanity in public amid growing whispers of constitutional
mutiny. Moreover, after shrugging off a Trump goes on, raging against “very disthousand other scandals, Trump seems honest media” and trying to rekindle the paralysed by the Nazi thing. He can’t let it spirit of the campaign. He self-plagiarises AL Nazis, andAit’sIRSa little, reviving the “little Marco” dig for IONabout ATthing go.TSay one Nnice ER IN AFF like people can’t get over it. Unfair! “little George” Stephanopoulos. He plunges into a 77-minute rant on The audience seems into it for a while. this subject, listing each offending news But it goes on too long. During the camoutlet by name. In a nicely Freudian twist, paign, Trump was expert at keeping a hall he starts with The New York Times, which buzzed with resentment for an hour or so. incidentally is the same paper that nearly But he hits weird notes now. He goes off on a century ago identified “Fred Trump of a tangent about his enemies, it’s not clear 175-24 Devonshire Road” – the president’s which ones. “They’re elite?” he says. “I went late father – as a detainee from a 1927 Ku to better schools than they did. I was a betKlux Klan rally in Queens. Back then, ter student than they were. I live in a bigger, “native-born American Protestants” were more beautiful apartment, and I live in the railing against “Roman Catholic police” – White House, too, which is really great.” essentially the dirty-immigrant Irish, last Polite applause. century’s Mexicans. Not much changes “You know what?” he goes on. “I think in America. Maybe the father of the 2072 we’re the elites. They’re not the elites.” Republican nominee is here tonight in a No one is counting fingers, but you can MAGA hat. tell people are having trouble making the That old family shame might be why math work. We’re elite because you have a the president, who’s always denied Fred nice apartment? Campaign Trump bragged endlessly about his wealth – “I have a Gucci store that’s worth more than Romney” was a classic line – but back then he was selling a vicarious fantasy. Trump’s Ferrari-underpants lifestyle was the silent-majority vision of how they would all live once the winning started. But candidate Trump was never dumb enough to try to tell debt-ridden, angry crowds they were already living the dream. At one point, Trump ends up standing with a piece of paper in hand, haranguing all with transcripts of his own remarks on Charlottesville. To prove that he’s Trump was a Klansman (“Never hap- been misquoted or misunderstood, he goes pened”), is having such a hard time with through the whole story, from the beginCharlottesville and race. He rails against ning. It gets quiet in the hall. It’s an agonising parody of late-stage the “Times, which is, like, so bad”, moves on to the “Washington Post, which I call a Lenny Bruce. The great Sixties comedian’s lobbying tool for Amazon” and winds up act degenerated into tendentious solilowith “CNN, which is so bad and pathetic, quies about his legal situation (he had been charged with obscenity). Bruce too stood and their ratings are going down”. CNN’s ratings aren’t down. The net- onstage in his last years for interminable work’s second-quarter prime-time viewers periods, court papers in hand, quoting just cracked a 1 million average, its most- himself to audiences bored to insanity by watched second quarter ever, largely due to the spectacle. This is exactly Trump. Even his followthe blimp wreck of the Trump presidency. It’s the one incontrovertible achievement ers are starting to look sideways at one of this administration. The network tweets another. In a sight rarely seen last year, a as much shortly after Trump says the line. trickle of supporters heads for the exits. The Phoenix audience doesn’t care. “CNN Then Trump cracks. “The only people giving a platform to sucks!” they chant. “CNN sucks!” I was late to the event and actually these hate groups is the media itself, and standing outside the press pen, so when the fake news,” he says, to tepid applause. He stops and points in accusing fashion the crowd turns to scream and hiss at the media, I’m on the angry-zombie side of the at the press riser. “Oh, that’s so funny,” he says. “Look back line. A man taps my shoulder. there, the live red lights. They’re turning “Fuck those people!” he shouts. I smile, zip up my jacket to hide my those suckers off fast out there. They’re lanyard, then turn around to give him a turning those lights off fast.” We reporters had seen this act before. thumbs up. The crowd escalates: On October 10th of last year, in Wilkes“Tell the truth! Tell the truth!”
Trump seems paralysed by the Nazi thing. He can’t let it go. Say one nice thing about Nazis, and it’s like people can’t get over it. Unfair!
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Barre, Pennsylvania, at one of the most massive rallies of the campaign, Trump accused CNN of shutting down the feed because he was criticising their debate coverage. In that case, a camera light really did f licker, but CNN was actually turning the live feed on, not off. That was possibly an honest mistake. Possibly also it was Trump just pulling the media’s tail, tweaking us with a line of bull, as he had with countless other provocations. The general consensus of attendant journalists that night was that Trump was messing with us. Phoenix is different. Trump seems to believe what he’s saying. He really thinks that not just CNN, but all of the networks are shutting down their feeds, overwhelmed by the power of his words. “Boy, those cameras are going off,” he says, coming back to the subject. “Oh, wow. Why don’t you just fold them up and take them home? Oh, those cameras are going off. Wow. That’s the one thing, they’re very nervous to have me on live television. . . .” The president of the United States is seeing things. He might as well be shooing imaginary ants off his suit. His followers still love him, but even they’re starting to notice. They come for the old standards, but this new Trump material gets mixed reviews. Outside, a fan gives the speech a halfhearted thumbs up. “I liked ‘Lock her up’,” the man says with a shrug. “They did that for a little while.” No v e m b e r , 2 017
leaves victims half-alive and crawling over deserts and jungles, while we sit stuffing ourselves on couches and blathering about our “American exceptionalism”. We dumped 20 million gallons of toxic herbicide on Vietnam from the air, just to make the shooting easier without all those trees, an insane plan to win “hearts and minds” that has left about a million still disabled from defects and disease – including about 100,000 children, even decades later, little kids with misshapen heads, webbed hands and fused eyelids writhing on cots, our real American legacy, well out of view, of course. Nowadays we use flying robots and missiles to kill so many civilians and women and children in places like Mosul and Raqqa and Damadola, Pakistan, in our countless ongoing undeclared wars that the incidents scarcely make the news anymore. Our next innovation is “automation”, AI-powered drones that can identify and shoot targets, so human beings don’t have to pull triggers and feel bad anymore. If you want to look in our rearview, it’s lynchings and race war and genocide all the way back, from Hispaniola to Jolo Island in the Philippines Hate Speech to Mendocino County, California, In August, an where we nearly wiped out the embattled Trump Yuki people once upon a time. gave a rambling This is who we’ve always been, speech at a rally in a nation of madmen and socio“[He’s saying] ‘I don’t Phoenix that sent paths, for whom murder is a line promote racism, that’s the crowd to the item, kept hidden via a long list just the media trying to exits early. of semantic self-deceptions, from fuck with me’,” says Rich “manifest destiny” to “collateral Yukon, a biker from a Tempe-based club called the Metalheads. damage”. We’re used to presidents being “But he gets a little out of hand here and the soul of probity, kind Dads and struggling Atlases, humbled by the terrible rethere, he says some shit.” After the event, Trump tweets, “Beauti- sponsibility, proof to ourselves of our goodful turnout of 15,000 in Phoenix tonight!” ness. Now, the mask of respectability is Later, he reportedly fires the organiser gone, and we feel sorry for ourselves, beof that same “beautiful” event, longtime cause the sickness is showing. So much of the Trump phenomenon is aide and RNC contractor George Gigicos, apparently for not delivering a ter- about history. Fuelling the divide between rifyingly massive enough crowd. Sources pro- and anti-Trump camps is exactly the told Bloomberg that Trump saw open floor fact that we’ve never had a real reckoning space in TV shots before he took the stage, with either our terrible past or our simiand this put him in a “foul mood” from larly bloody present. The Trump movement culturally represents an absolute denial of which he never recovered. Trump has never had much use for facts, our sins from slavery on – hence the intense or decorum, or empathy, or sexual discre- reaction to the removal of Confederate stattion, or any of the hundred other markers ues, the bizarre paranoia about the Washwe normally look at to gauge mental well- ington Monument being next, and so on. ness. But he’s never been like this. This guy But #resistance is also a denial mechanism. is lost, and as he flails for a clue, he keeps It makes Trump the root of all evil, and is struggling violently against the conven- powered by an intense desire to not have to tions of his own office. The presidency has look at the ugliness, to go back to the way things were. We see this hideous clown in become a straitjacket. the White House and feel our dignity oute d e s e r v e t r u m p , raged, but when you really think about it, though. God, do we de- what should America’s president look like? Trump is no malfunction. He’s a perfect serve him. We Americans have some good qualities, representation of who, as a country, we too, don’t get me wrong. But we’re also a are and always have been: an insane monbloodthirsty Mr. Hyde nation that sub- ster. Frankly, we’re lucky he’s not walking sists on massacres and slave labour and around using a child’s femur as a toothpick.
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week in trump time is like a century, and the week after the Phoenix fiasco felt like a thousand years. First, he slipped in a prime-time pardon of Sheriff Joe Arpaio – Trump’s Ghost of Christmas Future, an envelope-pushing birther and demented prairie fascist who looked destined to spend his eighties in jail. Then, Trump held a joint press conference with Finnish President Sauli Niinistö. The diminutive Scandinavian stood trying not to reach for his cyanide pill as Trump proudly explained to the press that he’d timed the Arpaio pardon with coverage of Hurricane Harvey for maximum ratings impact. The poor Euro looked like a Belgian nun forced to bunk up with Honey Boo Boo. Trump spent much of the week expressing morbid excitement about Harvey, as though the sheer size of the storm somehow reflected upon him personally. “HISTORIC rainfall,” he gushed. Then, he went to Texas and said a slew of inappropriate things, celebrating crowd turnout and continually popping wood over the killer storm’s “epic” dimensions – “nobody’s ever seen this much water”, he raved. He repeatedly forgot to express empathy for victims, but doled out a major attaboy to FEMA administrator Brock Long, who “really became famous on television the past few days”. Then, Trump went somewhere, fell asleep, woke up and decided first thing to take a Twitter leak on nuclear belligerent Kim Jong-Un, who just days before had shot missiles over northern Japan. “The U.S. has been talking to North Korea, and paying them extortion money, for 25 years,” Trump wrote. “Talking is not the answer!” After enough weeks and months of behaviour like this, it’s become axiomatic in many circles that Trump simply must go, for whatever reason. Our desperation as a nation to get back to “normal” – that is to say, back to being able to pretend we’re a civilised people with justified hegemonic authority – has hit such a fever pitch that there is now real energy behind a pair of long-shot efforts to remove our mad king from the throne ahead of schedule. The problem is that Trump might just live in an awful sweet spot – a raving, dangerous embarrassment, about the worst imaginable, but safe under the law absent new information. Depending on whom you ask, we may have to break democratic rules to be rid of him – something we’ve never had a problem doing, of course, but this is no desert sideshow, this would be centre stage with the whole world watching. Impeachment, now favoured by upwards of 43 per cent of voters, is one track. 72 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |
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Out of Touch After Hurricane Harvey, Trump flew to a decimated Corpus Christi, Texas, and gave an awkward speech: “What a crowd! What a turnout!” Trump boasted. Facing criticism for not expressing enough empathy, he returned to the area, but his efforts at offering aid were forced.
Many thought Trump was impeachable from Day One thanks to ethical conflicts and other issues. But successful impeachment would not only require significant defections from a Republican-controlled Congress, but proof of high crimes and misdemeanours, so far elusive. There’s a widespread misconception that impeachment is a purely political matter, that it can and should happen the instant a two-thirds majority of the Senate deems it necessary. Some of this has been fuelled by social-media discussions quoting figures like Gerald Ford, who as a minority congressman once said, “An impeachable offence is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be.” But many legal experts disagree. “That was the worst thing that Ford could have said,” says Jonathan Turley, law professor at George Washington University. While, superficially, impeachment is a political decision, to get all the way to the finish line the effort “has to meet the legal standard of high crimes and misdemeanours”. Merely being an inappropriate, racist, unethical, sociopathic embarrassment, even on the Trump level, doesn’t necessarily rate as an impeachable offence. The president must be caught committing a crime, and it must be serious.
Impeachment is going to be tough political sledding in almost any case. Part of Trump’s purpose in going to Arizona was to start digging the grave of Republican senator and open Trump antagonist Jeff Flake, who is up for re-election in 2018. Flake is polling far behind a Trumpbacked primary challenger, Dr. Kelli Ward, thrilling the mad regent. “WEAK on borders, crime, and a non-factor in the Senate,” Trump tweeted of Flake. “He’s toxic!” In the wake of Charlottesville, Trump surrogates like longtime friend Roger Stone argued that the president shouldn’t back down at all to global outcries, but instead run back on offence by going after a “scalp” in his own party. By helping to blow up Flake, whose approval rating among voters in his own state, according to one poll, is down to 18 per cent, Trump can demonstrate he still wields life-or-death power over most GOP elected officials. This will surely chill any effort to try to shorten Trump’s term. Still, five different investigations into Trump’s relationship with Russia are currently underway, and there’s little question that the undisguisedly sweeping nature of the inquiry is freaking Trump out. It was not difficult to notice that a predawn FBI raid on the home of former Trump No v e m b e r , 2 017
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When it’s not trembling in terror, the rest of the world must be laughing its ass off. America, land of the mad pig president. Shove that up your exceptionalism.
campaign manager Paul Manafort took place just before Trump’s disastrous response to the Charlottesville tragedy. If you think special counsel Robert Mueller is in Trump’s head, he probably is. Mueller, who is wielding the biggest pitchfork in this thing, is roaming promiscuously into all sorts of areas of inquiry, from Manafort’s finances to the dismissal of former FBI chief James Comey to God knows what else. Mueller is exactly the kind of person Trump doesn’t need sniffing his sheets: a greying, hatchet-faced moralist who, while Trump was spending decades romping with models and partying with TV stars, was quietly building – on a government salary – a reputation for being “incorruptible” and having “extraordinary integrity”. As a former FBI chief, he is a veteran of massive undertakings, having led one of the biggest investigations in the bureau’s history after 9/11. He can be expected to have grand juries sprouting across the country like mushrooms, and if there’s evidence Trump so much as farted across state lines once, it will be in Mueller’s report. And likely none of it would have happened had Trump had enough self-control to let Comey’s probably far narrower probe run its course. It was remarkable to hear recently deposed Trump adviser Steve Bannon say this out loud. The alt-right guru told Charlie Rose that firing Comey was the biggest mistake in “modern political history”, and “we would not have the Mueller investigation and the breadth that clearly Mr. Mueller is going for”. But Mueller’s investigation would almost certainly have to be a direct hit to Trump to result in removal from office. And there have been ominous signs for those who have hopes on this front. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, ranking member on the Judiciary Committee and senior member on Intelligence, as plugged-in a politician as there is on the Democratic side, stunned a San Francisco audience at the end of August by saying that Trump “is going to be president most likely for the rest of this term”. She suggested – to cries of “No!” – that Trump “can be a good president”.
tion of “inability to discharge duties” under Section 4 of the 25th Amendment. This is a form of legalised mutiny that could theoretically take place if enough people in Trump’s orbit were to conclude he were mentally unfit. (There is a congressional removal scenario under this provision, too, but it’s complex and even more of a long shot.) There’s buzz about this couplike scenario in both parties. Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin has introduced a bill to set up an independent commission to gauge Trump’s fitness. Twenty-eight Democrats have since signed the resolution. In the Senate, Tennessee’s glad-handing, six-faced, wanna-be Napoleon, wheelerdealer Republican Bob Corker, who as recently as June was seen golfing with Trump and Peyton Manning, questioned Trump’s “stability” and “competence” in a statement that was widely interpreted as a reference to the 25th Amendment. This came after
A letter to Congress from this crew would begin a process that would put Pence in the Oval Office as the acting president. Under the 25th Amendment, incidentally, the president is never removed, but merely sidelined. Imagine still-technically-President Trump’s serene, imperturbable behaviour as he watches his “temporary” replacement Pence in the White House. A two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress would eventually be needed to secure the play. As with impeachment, there is a misconception that a Section 4 declaration can be a purely political gambit. In fact, the procedure specifically can’t be about politics. John Feerick, a Fordham law professor who helped work on the original bill with senators such as Indiana’s Birch Bayh and authored a book titled The 25th Amendment, goes out of his way to point out the many things that do not qualify as “inability” under this law. The list reads like Trump’s résumé. The debates in Congress about the amendment, Feerick writes, make clear that “inability” does not cover “policy and political differences, unpopularity, poor judgment, incompetence, laziness or impeachable conduct”. When asked about the possibility of invoking the amendment today, Feerick is wary. “It’s a very high bar that has to be satisfied,” he says. “You’re dealing with a president elected for four years.” “It has to be very serious,” agrees Turley, who adds that an inability effort would probably require “sworn statements from psychiatric professionals”. The president, again, cannot be merely a disordered, inappropriate, incompetent, destructive embarrassment. He has to be genuinely “unable” to work. For Trump to be impeachable, he probably has to be responsible for crimes. To be declared unfit, he probably has to be demonstrably insane. He probably can’t be both. Is he either? Unless the Russia investigation pans out, the question of whether Trump survives to 2020 – Vegas betting houses started putting the odds below 50 per cent after Charlottesville – hangs on a single question: Is Donald Trump insane? It’s actually not easy to answer, even conversationally. Is he crazy? On one level, of course he is, hell yes. Trump has been mad as a sack of bees since he launched his campaign. Put simply, Trump believes things that aren’t there. He made it to the White House in a delusional bubble of his own creation, and his brain is clearly a denuded mush of paranoid, self-aggrandising fictions he probably couldn’t part with even if some brave confederate were to force him to try.
Trump’s brain is a denuded mush of paranoid, selfaggrandising fictions he couldn’t part with even if someone forced him to try.
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ru mp’s c ata st rophic august, which saw his approval ratings drop to a preposterous 35 per cent, was marked by two devastating unforced errors: his Phoenix speech and the similarly id-exposing Trump Tower presser about those “very fine people” among the Nazis. The press narrative since those incidents has been focused far less on impeachability than on the other road to early removal: a declara-
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Democratic Sen. Jack Reed was captured on a hot mic saying to Republican Sen. Susan Collins, “I think he’s crazy.” Collins replied, “I’m worried.” Even some of the president’s chief foes on the Russia front, including “deep state” types like former director of national intelligence James Clapper, have pivoted to the unfitness theme. The day after Phoenix, Clapper told CNN that Trump’s speech was the most “disturbing” thing he’d ever seen from a president. But the 25th Amendment process, adopted in 1967, offers faint hope to antiTrumpers. “It’s the new Hail Mary,” says the law professor Turley. It can be instigated in a few ways, none simple. The most likely would involve Veep Mike Pence (rumoured to be preparing a 2020 run) and the bulk of Trump’s Cabinet writing a letter to Congress asserting that Trump is unable to perform his duties. Presumably such an effort would also include the coterie of missile-lobbing uniform fetishists surrounding Trump, people like John Kelly, H.R. McMaster and James Mattis. These half-bright military men, upon whom so much of Washington has pinned hopes as the “axis of adults” in Trump’s loony-bin administration, would likely have to defy their commander in chief.
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kopf, Coretta Scott King, Gloria Steinem, found a way around both problems. The Pope Francis and, apparently, Cory Book- Goldwater Rule he just ignores, because, he argues, the graveness of the Trump er’s mother, Carolyn. NAL grandiosity The president’s RSthreat renders it quaint. Lots of his colNATIOludicrous I ER A T F IN F was a running joke throughoutA the cam- leagues seem to agree, as Gartner has paign season, but having a personality managed to gather more than 62,000 sigdisorder is not a disqualifying feature in natures from self-described mental-health a president. Even his most vocal critics professionals attesting that Trump “maniin the mental-health community concede fests a serious mental illness that renders that being a narcissist, even a very sick one, him psychologically incapable of competently discharging the duties of president does not make him unfit for office. “As someone who’s studied Trump, as of the United States”. Gartner’s argument is relatively simple. someone who’s met Trump, who’s interacted with him socially, I can say with abso- Add paranoia, sadism and antisocial belute confidence that he suffers from severe haviour to narcissistic personality disorpersonality disorders, perhaps a cluster der and you have a new diagnosis: “maof disorders,” says Ben Michaelis, a New lignant narcissism”. Trump, he says, is no paranoid schizophrenic who walks the streets claiming to be the Son of God – no one “so grossly ill” could be elected. However, the president’s increasing tendency to obsess over persecution theories – and not just parrot meaningless stupidities like the inauguralcrowd story but seemingly believe them – shows that he’s crossing a meaningful diagnostic line into psychotic delusions, common among malignant narcissists. “We’re not talking about a gross psychotic disorder,” Gartner says. “We’re talking about a way in which people with severe personality disorders can regress to what they call transient psychotic states.” He adds, “It’s a more subtle kind of psychosis, but it goes over the boundary into psychosis.” The term malignant narcissist is said to have been invented by Holocaust survivor Erich Fromm, who used it to explain Hitler. It’s now become a catchword on the Internet to describe Trump, and almost inevitably – in much the same way that language from the Steele TWEETER IN CHIEF dossier bled from the Internet to pop culTrump doesn’t read, and gets most of his news from the Internet and TV, a habit that ture to the rhetoric of elected officials – can cause cognitive decline. it has begun to be circulated within the Democratic Party. California Rep. Jackie York-based psychologist who has run into Speier actually used the term to describe Trump over the years. “But to get a sense Trump after Charlottesville, in an interof outright psychotic behaviour . . . there’s view in which she also called him “unsome possibility, but you really need to ex- hinged” and “unfit”. But this all has the feel of a duel between amine him in a clinical setting.” This holdup – that merely being disor- court experts. If the argument comes down dered isn’t enough to justify removal, partic- to whether Trump is a garden-variety narularly when so many people endorsed these cissist or a malignant narcissist, the fromcharacteristics with a vote – has been one afar diagnosis may not cut it as an excuse logistical problem stopping the “unfitness” to sideline an elected president. Nor should it, says Turley, who believes Hail Mary. Another has been the American Psychiatric Association’s so-called Trump’s opponents are playing with fire. Goldwater Rule, an ethical dictum that He particularly points the finger at Demodiscourages mental-health professionals crats, whom he calls “constitutional shortsellers”. During the eight years of Obama, from diagnosing public figures from afar. John Gartner, a psychologist who Turley says, Democrats continually boosttrained residents at Johns Hopkins, has ed executive power, only to regret it once No v e m b e r , 2 017
ILLUSTRATION BY VICTOR JUHASZ
People pay the most attention to Trump’s political deceptions: that 3 million “illegal” voters lost him the popular vote, that Hillary Clinton wants to “release the violent criminals from jail”, that Ted Cruz’s father was linked to the JFK assassination, and so on. “We are the highest-taxed nation in the world” was a notable recent whopper. But those lies may be strategic, and Trump probably isn’t married to them anyway, given that he doesn’t appear to have real beliefs. Trump picks his political positions like ties: whatever’s on the rack. Under duress, and with no way to escape, he will sometimes cop to being full of it, like the time he finally admitted, “Obama was born in the United States”, after five years of bleating the opposite. But sit him in front of a doctor and see what happens when you ask: Who had the larger inaugural crowd, him or Obama? Or: Would he ever admit the Boy Scouts never called to tell him his speech was the “greatest ever”? Trump might struggle here. It’s the countless little fairy tales he tells himself about his power and infallibility to which he clings like a dope fiend to a $10 bill. Everyone with half a brain and a recent copy of the DSM (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, used by shrinks everywhere) knew the diagnosis on Trump the instant he joined the race. Trump fits the clinical definition of a narcissistic personality so completely that it will be a shock if future psychiatrists don’t rename the disorder after him. Grandiosity, a tendency to exaggerate achievements, a preoccupation with “fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty or ideal love”, a belief in one’s specialness (which can only be understood by other special people), a need for excessive admiration and a sense of entitlement – sound like anyone you know? Trump’s rapidly expanding list of things at which he’s either a supreme expert or the Earth’s best living practitioner would shame even great historical blowhards like Stalin or Mobutu Sese Seko. As the “world’s greatest person” at restricting immigration, who is “good at war” and “knows more about ISIS than the generals”, and who is the “least racist person” with “the best temperament” who knows “more about renewables than any human being on Earth”, insists “nobody reads the Bible more than me”, and even knows more about New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker “than [Booker] knows himself”, Trump by his own description is not a splenetic rightwing basket case at all, but just a cleverly disguised cross of God, Norman Schwarz-
Trump was elected. Now, he says, toying with scenarios like a 25th Amendment ploy could come back to bite them. “They’re doing this without thinking of the long-term implications,” he says. “It could be their president the next time.”
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rump wasn’t always crazy. He wasn’t even always obnoxious. Many Americans don’t remember, but the Donald Trump who appeared on TV regularly in the Eighties and Nineties was often engaging, self-deprecating, spoke in complete sentences and (verbally, anyway) usually lived up to his expensive schooling. He’d say things like, “These are the only casinos in the United States that are so rated”, and use words and phrases like “a somewhat impersonal life” and “money isn’t a totally essential ingredient”. The difference today is striking. Trump has not only completely lost his sense of humour, particularly about himself, but he’s a lingual mess. In his current dread of polysyllables – his favourite words include “I”, “Trump”, “very”, “money” and “China” – he makes George W. Bush sound like Vladimir Nabokov. On the page, transcripts of his speaking appearances often look like complete gibberish. “When I did this now I said, I probably, maybe will confuse people, maybe I’ll expand that,” he said to Lester Holt in May, “you know, I’ll lengthen the time because it should be over with, in my opinion.” The difference even since last year is hard to miss, and why not? The presidency severely ages and stresses even healthy people. From Obama to Bush to Jimmy Carter, presidents on their last day of office often look like med-school cadavers. President Trump already looks older, has a lower frustration threshold and seems only to have two moods, rage and sullen resignation (a.k.a. pre-rage). He also can barely speak anymore, but without a close-up examination it’s impossible to say if this is a neurological problem or just being typically American. As the psychologist Michaelis puts it, one major cause for loss of cognitive function is giving up reading in favour of TV or the Internet, which is basically most people in the United States these days. “In someone of his economic background and age, [the decline] is somewhat uncommon,” he says. “Then again, it’s a trend. People of my generation got more information from TV than books, and people of the next generation get more information from the Internet, and that exercises less of your cognitive reserve.”
This is a huge part of the problem of trying to gauge whether or not Trump is mentally unfit for office. It isn’t just that 63 million people specifically endorsed his nuttiest behaviours with a vote. It’s also that maintaining modern American media habits can make most anyone seem like a victim of organic brain damage. In a kind of awful satire of the current American experience, part of what got Trump elected is the camaraderie he shared with other reality-averse Americans who similarly chose to live in castles of self-aggrandisement, denial and blameshifting, a journalistic product we offer to just about everyone these days. Trump is almost certainly worse than most of his voters. He’s likely more grandiose, less empathetic and less capable of handling criticism. But his phobias about science or history or inconvenient facts, along with his countless conspiratorial ha-
and ill-fitting jeans. If there are protesters anywhere in the area, they’re likely very far away, probably surrounded by .30-caliber machine guns. Every Trump event is must-see TV now, because no one ever knows when he’s going to go on one of his unscripted ape-rants. It doesn’t happen today. Today we get Clonazepam Trump, Prozac Trump. He stands in front of a big flag, perches between his two teleprompters and reads prepared remarks virtually from beginning to end – a relative rarity for this president, who hates scripts as much as he hates buttoned suit jackets. Trump reading a speech always looks like a hostage. In stark contrast to the vibrant rage of Phoenix, in Missouri he slowly spits out each lifeless cliché like it’s a dead bird. “In difficult times such as these,” he says, “we see the true character of the American people: their strength, their love and their resolve. We see friend helping friend, neighbour helping neighbour, and stranger helping stranger. . . .” “Jeez,” moans a reporter in the press section, smacking a forehead. Trump goes on to insinuate to the crowd that the state’s Democratic senator is holding back much-needed tax reform. “And your senator, Claire McCaskill, she must do this for you,” he says robotically. “And if she doesn’t do it for you, you have to vote her out of office.” Muted cheers. After the event, the crowd files out in a patriotic mumble. A mustachioed man who identifies himself only as “Chuck Chuck” says the lifeless speech doesn’t bother him. “He told us about Claire McCaskill, that was good enough,” he says. A week or so later, Trump will strike a deal to raise the debt ceiling with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer that leaves members of both parties stunned. His would-be enemies in The New York Times publish the breathless analysis they never gave to Bernie Sanders: bound to no party, trump upends 150 years of two-party rule. This is the paradox of Trump. He is damaged, unwell and delusional, but at critical moments he’s able to approximate a functioning human being just long enough to survive. He is the worst-case scenario: embarrassing, mentally disorganised and completely inappropriate, but perhaps not all the way insane. Maybe crimes will soon be discovered and he’ll be impeached, or maybe he’ll run naked down Pennsylvania Avenue, or nuke someone, and be declared unfit. Until then, he’s just the president we deserve, dragging our name down where it belongs. He is miserable, so are we, and we’re stuck with each other. Karma really is a bitch.
Part of what got Trump elected is the camaraderie he shared with Americans who chose to live in castles of self-aggrandisement, denial and blame-shifting.
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treds and prejudices, are things he shares with millions of people. They voted for this, which creates as confounding and ridiculous a conundrum as has ever been observed in an industrial democracy. Can a country be declared unfit?
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u e sday, august 30 t h, Springfield, Missouri. Fresh off his “no more talking” tweet about North Korea that again puts the world on nuke alert, Trump flies to this sleepy little Ozark hub for a bit of image rehab. The play is transparent: Unspool plans for a monster corporate tax giveaway to pull nervous rank-and-file Republicans back toward the rubber room of Trump’s presidency, and grope a prominent piece of Americana – the birthplace of Route 66 – for the benefit of a voter base that may have been confused by the previous week’s Howard Beale act. The speech is to be delivered at the Loren Cook Company, a maker of many things, including “laboratory exhaust systems”, which seems ominous somehow. The giant warehouse slowly fills with the usual crowd of elderly f lag-wavers and squirrelly white dudes with bad facial hair
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There’s always been something contentious about the borders of country music, borders that Shania Twain and Miley Cyrus have spent their very different careers exploring. In the Nineties “is this country or is it disco?” culture wars, Twain scandalised Nashville with her glam-rock flash and mirror-ball glitz, just a few years after Cyrus’ dad, Billy Ray Cyrus, came out of nowhere with the ass-wiggling dance-craze blockbuster “Achy Breaky Heart”. Cyrus, of course, grew up playing Hannah Montana, before turning into America’s favourite shockpop diva. On their new records, both Cyrus and Twain aim to get back to their roots, however unrootsy these roots might be. The New Improved Miley of 2017 is as far from “We Can’t Stop” and Bangerz as that Miley Illustration by Yuta Onoda
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Reviews was from Hannah Montana. Younger Now plays down her whimsical and outrageous quirks for a sincerity-intensive move into the country-pop maturity of “Malibu”. Still only 24, she’s out to rebrand herself as a twerk-free Nashville adult. Cyrus’ ace in the hole has always been the dusky downhome ache in her voice, which she’s carried with her through all her incarnations. All over Younger Now, she revives her Southern accent, demonstrating her country bona fides by including a voicemail from her godmum, Dolly Parton, to cue their Monkees-esque duet, “Rainbowland”. The songs are short on personality compared with her other albums. But the attention-getter is the fi nale, “Inspired”, where she writes a folksy ballad to express some of her fears about climate change: “I’m writing down my dreams/ All I’d like to see/Starting with the bees.” In this context, it’s refreshing to hear from the Old Weird Miley again. Now is Twain’s first album in 15 years. Since her 2002 Up!, she’s endured a high-profile divorce from her producer, Mutt Lange, a two-year Las Vegas residency and a sorely underrated reality show on the Oprah Winfrey Network, Why Not? With Shania Twain. From the opening seconds of “Swingin’ With My Eyes Closed”, it’s clear Twain’s up to her old genretrashing tricks – the quasimetal guitar twang and “We Will Rock You” stomp of “Any Man of Mine” meet a reggae skank, and for good measure she urges us all to throw our fists in the air like we just don’t care. As you’d expect, Now is full of midlife personal statements, along the lines of “Poor Me” and “Roll Me on the River”, with an emphasis on post-divorce piano ballads. (As she sings on “Life’s About to Get Good”, “I wasn’t just broken, I was shattered. . . ./I couldn’t move on, and I think you were flattered.”) But like Cyrus, Twain is taking inspiration from the expansively chaotic sound of contemporary country – a sound she helped shape in the first place.
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Custard
The Common Touch ABC Music
★★★
Indie pop classicists mine a melancholy streak
Beck’s Summer Soundtrack
David McCormack is feeling the distance on the second LP of Custard’s second life. The defeated conclusion of “In the Grand Scheme of Things (None of This Really Matters)” gives a melancholy hue to the Brisbane band’s tragicomedy. Missing persons and old memories haunt his empty house from “Halley’s Comet” to “Dr Huxley Creeper”. The modern male panic of “2000 Woman” is lighter, but even the wry political twist of Glenn Thompson’s “Police Cars” has an air of lament. The quartet’s minimalist pop is sound enough for another lap, though their best new tune, the pedal steel farewell of “Take It From Here”, is also their saddest. M.D.
Lucky 13th album is all of Beck’s feelgood summers at once Beck Colors Capitol
★★★★
Since Midnite Vultures followed Mutations followed Odelay, the radical mood swing from string-soaked acoustic introspection to beat bustin’ party central has been a key premise of Beck’s discography. Accordingly, after the ravishing autumnal down of 2014’s Morning Phase, Colors is a whole new summer high. “I’m So Free” might be his most irresistible mash of experimental sonics, rubber-lipped rap and classic grunge guitar chorus hook ever. That’s the third killer track on the trot on an album that almost hyperventilates in pursuit of the ultimate endorphin kick. Mad genius pop producer Greg Kurstin (Sia, the Shins, Tegan and Sara) brings an extra sugar rush to the table, retro-tastic in the flagrant Beatles pastiche of “Dear Life”, punching a hole in the mirror ball of “Dreams” then floating into the futuristic ether of “Wow”. Subject wise, the hedonistic gist of “Seventh Heaven” and “Up All Night” sums up the best part of Beck’s headspace, but there’s enough intrigue in his lyrics to keep the brain in gear even as blood rushes to the dancing organs. In the closing track, “Fix Me”, he finally exhales in the album’s sole slow track, an oceanic ebb designed to segue, perhaps, into his next morning phase. For the rest of this cycle, though, get ready to party like it’s 2019. MICHAEL DW YER
Protomartyr
Relatives in Descent Domino
★★★
Powerful post-punk whose message gets muddled
Protomartyr open their fourth LP with a fiery mission statement railing against our “age of blasting trumpets”. It showcases Joe Casey’s brooding vocals and barbed lyrics as much as the Detroit post-punk quartet’s gripping dynamic shifts, but the band soon surrender some of their impact. Despite highlights in the synth-warmed meditation “Night-Blooming Cereus” and the pointed commentary of “Male Plague”, Protomartyr’s message often gets muddled. Casey lapses into Hold Steadystyle talk-singing, while other tracks are blunted by so much blustering distortion. It’s reliably intense, but at the expense of articulation. DOUG WALLEN
★★★★★ Classic | ★★★★ Excellent | ★★★ Good | ★★ Fair | ★ Poor Ratings are supervised by the editors of ROLLING STONE .
Propagandhi
Macklemore
Fanny Lumsden
Vegan-punk stayers fight on with first album in five years
★★★
Red Dirt Road Records
The thrift-shopping, deepthinking MC has a good time
Second album from emerging darling of Oz country
Macklemore’s fi rst post-fame LP minus longtime partner Ryan Lewis fi nds the Seattle MC unburdened by stardom or the social concern that turns his woke anthems into online firestorms – “I’m a motherfuckin’ icon/Boots made of python,” he raps on “Willy Wonka”, a creeping track with Offset of Migos. Partying tunes like the funky “Firebreather” sometimes feel like not much more than a rich white guy bragging. But Macklemore’s trademark awkward humanity comes through on “Good Old Days”, a reflection on aging (with Kesha), and “Church”, a thank-you letter to making it that’s warm, vivid, earnest and earned. JON DOLAN
Fanny Lumsden’s take on country music is free of the formulaic drabness that infects many Australians in the genre. Instead, her tragicomic songs are wittily self-deprecating and imaginatively evocative of the minutiae of regional Australian existence – she sings of Bunnings and Target on the title track. Production and arrangements are also attractively eclectic: “Elastic Waistband” verges on indiefolk while “Here to Hear” closes the record on an unexpectedly poignant note. It could lose a couple of tracks and the lyrical glibness occasionally misfires, but Lumsden is an idiosyncratic and welcome addition to the world of Australian country. B.S.
Victory Lap Epitaph ★★½
Lambasting meat, bigotry, neocolonialism and more with palpable verve from the seminal Less Talk, More Rock (1996) onward, Manitoba’s premier anti-fascist firebrands have long delivered on the promise that “[they] stand for something more than a faded sticker on a skateboard”. But since the monochromatic Potemkin City Limits (2005), their penchant for impenetrable hardcore drubbings a la Sick Of It All has tended to obscure the message. Victory Lap boasts ample thrash-like riffage and heaving anarcho-punk heaviness, but weak lyrics (“In Flagrante Delicto”) and some incongruous pelvic thrusting (“Tartuffle”) dampen the fire. GARETH HIPWELL
Gemini Bendo
Real Class Act
Torres
Three Futures 4AD ★★★
★★★½
Bold new direction for muchloved indie songstress
Following fl irts with electroexperimentalism on 2015’s Sprinter, Mackenzie Scott shifts further from her raw folkrock foundation with the introduction of an abrasive minimal palette on third full-length. Her consistently strong lyricism flourishes, and although theatrically overindulging – bordering on cabaret – at times, the white space suits her impactful mix of poignancy (“I’m only a skim of what has already been”), humour (“I’m more of an ass man”) and quirky fables (“Helen in the Woods”). A few pop hooks short of being immediately captivating, Three Futures is the sound of a first step, rather than a completed journey. JONNY NAIL
P!nk Revisits Her Past The Darkness Pinewood Smile Cooking Vinyl
★★★
Has Adam Sandler become a lyric writer for the Darkness?
The Darkness have never been a band for serious lyrical sentiment, but their transition into full-blown Carry On territory is complete with their fifth album. Musically it’s all top notch glam rock fare, the AC/DC swagger of “Solid Gold” butting up against the pop-rock mastery of “Happiness” and steaming riffing of “Japanese Prisoner of Love”, but Justin Hawkins’ lyrics push so far into joke territory that the album may as well be filed under “comedy” – witness the opening line of ballad “Stampede of Love”: “You walked in and the ground shook/Can’t believe how much food you took”. ROD YATES
No v e m b e r , 2 017
Pop powerhouse makes a solid if unexciting return with album seven P!nk Beautiful Trauma Sony
★★★
Whatever else you think of Alecia Moore, better known as P!nk, you have to give her credit – she’s been a consistent chart-topper for the past 17 years, and after drawing a line in the sand between her label-influenced R&B debut in 2000 and the punk-pop signature sound she’s developed since, she’s never come across as anything other than herself. Problem is, seven albums in, she’s revisiting well-covered terrain here: relationship issues; maturity and aging; and feisty, expletive-laden, unapologetic sexuality. It’s all typically impeccably produced (Max Martin, Greg Kurstin, Jack Antonoff ) and Moore’s voice is, as always, flawless. But the songs are hit and miss. The promising opening of “I Am Here” devolves into a kneeslapping country choir affair recalling Avicii’s “Hey Brother”. “Barbies” aims for nostalgic poignancy – and achieves it musically with a spare acoustic arrangement and a beautifully stilt-
ed vocal delivery – but there’s something on the nose about a Mattel doll as motif for more innocent times. “Revenge” tries to make cute of vengeful lovers but misfires badly with the male cameo rap chorus: “You’re a whore, you’re a whore, this is war.” Much of the rest is perfectly palatable pop that would have slotted easily onto Moore’s last album; thankfully closer “You Get My Love” reminds us of her underrated might as a balladeer, accompanied only by piano. ANNABEL ROSS
RollingStoneAus.com
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Reviews
Kamasi Washington
British India
Harmony of Difference Young Turks/Remote Control
Forgetting the Future
★★★
Liberation
★★★★
Cosmic jazz sojourn inches forward for Kendrick’s sax guy
Melbourne rock stalwarts get imaginative on sixth album
“Desire”. “Humility”. “Knowledge”. “Perspective”. “Integrity”. “Truth”. Its six tracks are a trifle compared to 2015’s tripledisc The Epic, but you can see Washington is a man of clear intention on this 30-minute follow-up. The various virtues flow like shifting light from the sultry boudoir glow of “Desire” to the frantic time signatures of “Humility”. Horns unite in slow swinging certainty against the percussive madness of “Knowledge” then flirt with upmarket cheese in the Californian strut of “Perspective”. The thread is a barely contained exuberance that runs from Seventies fusion bedrock to the newfound miracle of a cosmic jazz future. M.D.
There’s an adventurous complexity to British India’s latest that’s an exploration of their creative nature, helped by enlisting Holy Holy’s Oscar Dawson on production. It means unconventionally memorable rock & roll whirlwinds adorned with keys, effects and plenty of feels, as frontman Declan Melia spits lines about false gods in “Midnight Homie (My Best Friends)” and heady dissatisfaction in “Precious”. It’s the breathingroom ruminations (“My Love”), however, that balance the frenzied rock maelstrom, breathing life into a rich lyrical world detailing our crushing quests for meaning and relevance in an uncaring world. JAYMZ CLEMENTS
Robert Plant’s Torch Songs In sound and vision, the greying golden god is still on fire Robert Plant Carry Fire
Kele Okereke
Fatherland BMG/Warner ★★ Bloc Party frontman’s transition to earnest singer-songwriter
Well, this is unexpected. Trickling acoustic guitars, parping woodwinds and sighing strings are not what you’d associate with Okereke. Unfortunately the transition to earnest singer-songwriter on his third solo album is an awkward one. For starters, his voice is more suited to impassioned yelping in front of post-punk or electronica, and it shrinks when spotlit in crooner mode. His attempts at gloomy folk (“Streets Been Talkin”), polite soul-pop (“Do U Right”) and a song for his kid (“Savannah”) sound stretched, and the whimsical vamping of “Capers” is illadvised. Lyrically, things you can get away with when yammering over a racket don’t pass muster in quiet mode. B.D. 80 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |
Warner
★★★★
We carry a flame for lost love. We carry fire to vouchsafe humanity, with all its accumulated wisdom and empathy, through dark days. Robert Plant has a bet each way here, shifting between intense romantic longing (“Season’s Song”, “Dance With You Tonight”) and calling out inhumanity in the savage “New World…” He referenced the image once before, on the stunning musical watershed of Mighty ReArranger in 2005. But these days are far darker and his mission more urgent at the crossroads of east and west, and at “the dimming of my life” he references wistfully in the dusty swirl of “The May Queen”. That title carries a cheeky glimmer of his past, of course. But his last few albums with the Strange Sensation/Sensational Space Shifters are about kaleidoscopic consolidation, not dry nostalgia: Bron-Yr-Aur and Appalachia, Mali and Morocco fuse seamlessly in this bonfire to incredibly potent effect. This world spans the rich, slow strings of “A Way With Words” and the title track’s mystical twang of djembe and bendir; the terse historical polemic of “Carving Up the World Again… a wall and not a fence” and a majestic duet with Chrissie Hynde on a mellowed rockabilly tune, “Bluebirds Over the Mountain”. Few troubadours alive have this much to carry, let alone do it so lightly. Fifty years since his first album, Plant remains essential. MICHAEL DW YER
RollingStoneAus.com
Neil Finn Out of Silence EMI ★★★½ You watched it being recorded, now listen to the results
Workshopped in front of an online audience every Friday for a month, recorded in a night (also streamed live over the net) and released a week later, Out of Silence has a back story worth noting, but not worth lingering over. More usefully, it’s a solo album – Finn’s first since 2014’s Dizzy Heights – full of group sounds, from a full band and strings to massed backing vocals, and a duet with brother Tim. Which makes it even starker how lyrically and tonally it’s an album of isolation, with characters lost on the edges of relationships even as they’re cushioned by harmonies, and wondering if love can ever be known while carried on another typically attractive Finn melody. BERNARD ZUEL
No v e m b e r , 2 017
Yumi Zouma
Willowbank Cascine Records
★★★
Kiwis return with more woozy synth-pop
Yumi Zouma opted to decamp to their native Christchurch to knuckle down on their second record, the result sparkling with the same shiny, polished electronic sheen that defined their much-admired debut Yoncalla. This is disco-influenced dreampop at its most wistful, strongly in the vein of early Empire of the Sun, but ultimately the album, while pleasant and breezy, feels a little one-paced, unobtrusive and samey. Highpoints come when Christie Simpson’s understated and distant vocals transcend the hazy production (“In Blue”), otherwise the LP can be regarded as one of considerable skill, but little penetration. B.S.
Confessions of a Saint St. Vincent writes her most together album about falling apart St. Vincent Masseduction Caroline ★★★★ Annie Clark’s last album in 2014 was both critically lauded and her most commercially successful. And yet the 35-year-old who makes music as St. Vincent was barely holding things together physically, spiritually and emotionally. While Clark is pretty much the opposite of a confessional songwriter, Masseduction is uncharacteristically open and a rare thing – a together album about falling apart. “I spent a year suspended in air,” she sings over the herky-jerky, almost hysterical feel of “Pills”, before detailing all the meds she had to take to keep functioning. “New York”, on the other hand, is a bewitching piano-based ballad about a city not being what it was now that a significant other has gone. Yet it’s not sentimental. How could it be with the killer line “You’re the only motherfucker in the city who can han-
Lawrence Rothman
Gretta Ziller
★★★
Social Family
The Book of Law Interscope Sprightly but vanilla electro-pop from arty LA talent
Given Lawrence Rothman’s ongoing experimentation with dazzling and often disturbing video clips and a shape-shifting Bowie-like approach to his own look and style, the Californian’s debut LP is surprisingly conventional sonically and musically – a series of upbeat synth-based tracks with roots in 1990s R&B (How To Dress Well, who references the same period more successfully, appears on the so-so “Wolves Still Cry”). In moving away from the adventure of darkly excellent 2013 single “Montauk Fling”, Rothman is playing it safe, but his deep, sensuous baritone remains a striking point of difference. BARNABY SMITH
No v e m b e r , 2 017
Queen of Boomtown
★★★★
dle me”? It’s enough to make even the late Lou Reed crack a smile. Jack Antonoff (Lorde) co-produces and his maximalist pop tendencies are targeted rather than overwhelming – the title track’s Princemeets-Janelle Monae freak-funk; the helicoptering keyboards and shuddering beat of “Sugarboy”. Whether she’s sweating out a slinky kink-fest (“Savior”) or creating a beautiful ode to a difficult relationship with a junkie (“Happy Birthday, Johnny”), Clark hits the head, heart and hips simultaneously. BARRY DIVOLA
Amadou & Mariam
Jess Locke
Universe Pool House ★★★★
La Confusion Warner ★★★★½
American-style blues gets the Australian touch
World-beating Malian duo go discothèque on eighth studio LP
The “Americana” palette is fraught with dangers for Australian artists: there’s usually a forced Southern drawl and too many mentions of Nashville. But when it’s mixed with rock & roll guitars (“Let It Go”), hardhitting narratives (“Slaughterhouse Blues”) and a dose of Aussie self-deprecation (“Whiskey Shivers”), Ziller takes ownership of the style. A traditional blues album at heart, her debut LP draws on the requisite subject matter: whiskey, unemployment, depression, domestic violence. But even when she’s on the floor of “the bathroom of regret”, Ziller offers a poeticism that lifts the album into the realms of soulful reflection. JESSIE CUNNIFFE
Beginning with Dimanche à Bamako (2005), husband-andwife duo A&M have steadily expanded their multi-lingual Afrobeat-, blues- and- jazz-informed sound with so much cosmic Afropop fusion. The pair’s radically fluidic bent shines across this electro-pop adventure. Drawing on some Air-like new sounds (“Ta Promesse”), the album’s electronic accoutrements are boldest on the hard-hitting “Yiki Yassa”. Lyrics swing from Bambara to French as the funk bounce-and-slink of Amadou’s guitar and the unruffled, soulful cool of Mariam’s vocal tie proceedings to past glories even as the pair carry the magic forward. GARETH HIPWELL
Songwriter proves ready for her spotlight moment
While an eight-year veteran of the bedroom-to-Bandcamp scene, Universe marks Jess Locke’s second coming, as the singer-songwriter’s honest, TMI-bordering diary scribbles are beaten into bite-size slogans by a full-band backing. As expected, the fidelity boost comes at the sacrifice of some of Locke’s heart-wrenching fragility, but not her poetic punches, which hit hard whether taking on self-worth, the pros of self-medication or unflinching self-analysis. Sense a common thread? Thankfully, despite sharing the spotlight, Locke remains the centre of her own universe, the perfect place for her blunt vulnerability to thrive. JONNY NAIL
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Reviews
Caligula’s Horse In Contact
Inside Out
William Patrick Corgan Ogilala BMG ★★★
★★★★
Prog rockers get deep on expansive look at art
Smashing Pumpkins head honcho strips back with pleasant results
The latest album from these Brisbane progressive prodigies is a sprawling, labyrinthine opus exploring the very nature of artistic endeavour. Using the thematic device of four unrelated but conceptually similar stories, the band veer from sweeping epics like “Graves” to spoken word rants, melodic rock, wistful acoustics and driving metal tracks with stunning alacrity, displaying a dynamic range and genuine emotion that other prog rock bands can lose in their quest for virtuosity. Following 2015’s excellent Bloom might have seemed tough, but In Contact is a further example of the group’s growing creative power, deep, multi-layered and idiosyncratically cerebral. BRIAN GIFFIN
Billy Corgan is no stranger to self-indulgence – remember that eight-hour live set inspired by Siddhartha? – so seeing him use his full name on this solo offering sets off the ‘pretentious warning’ alert. The truth couldn’t be more different – this is the most straight forward, stripped-back album of Corgan’s career. Accompanied by piano and/or acoustic guitar, the Rick Rubin-helmed Ogilala suffers only from being perfectly pleasant, nothing more, nothing less. “Aeronaut” and “Archer” contain melodies so wistful and beautiful they weaken the knees, but elsewhere Ogilala is notable mainly for hearing Corgan in such raw surroundings, as opposed to its songs. R.Y.
Match Made in Heaven? Indie-rock leaders fail to uncover common ground on collaborative LP Courtney Barnett & Kurt Vile Lotta Sea Lice Remote Control
Wolf Alice
Visions of a Life Liberator Music
★★★★
Talented British youngsters turn it up on album number two
There’s little to fault with Visions of a Life, a rock/punk/ indie hybrid that glides between genres with the conviction and skill of a much older band. Singer-songwriter Ellie Rowsell is the stunning centrepiece, sometimes spewing hot rage, as in “Yuk Foo”, or whispering spoken word poetry over gauzy, celestial synths in “Don’t Delete the Kisses”, a millennial love song if ever there was one: “And I’m typing you a message/that I know I’ll never send/rewriting old excuses/delete the kisses at the end.” Producer Justin Meldal-Johnsen’s (M83) spectral presence is felt throughout, but the band’s effortless “Formidable Cool” is entirely their own. ANNABEL ROSS 82 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |
★★½
Her: a master of the mundane, building global recognition on recalled tales of gardening-induced faints and sulky fist-shakes at the depressingly exorbitant state of the Melbourne housing market. Him: less fussed, by everything, nowhere to be but strumming on some stoop in Philadelphia, stoog between fingers. World’s apart, quite literally, and while this merger between two of the best modern indie-rock conversationalists might be a marketing wet dream, Lotta Sea Lice lands closer to compromise than collaboration. In lieu of uncovering commonality across the album’s nine tracks, the pair end up sticking to a to-and-fro chat, covering general catch-up topics – from sleep routines (“Let It Go”) to social faux pas (“Blue Cheese”) to creative approaches (“Over Everything”). Side-by-side the glaring differences of their individual styles emerge – and are ruthlessly diluted. Vile’s obfuscated, laconic drawl is exposed in often-cringeworthy clarity, while Barnett’s anxious energy and linguistic playfulness are levelled out with a stoned metronomy. The ill-fitting partnership works better on the pair of previously released solo tracks (“Outta the Woodwork” and “Peepin’ Tom”) which, despite being performed by the other party, sound distinctly less forced. Rare flashes of comfort on a release that’s less the sum of its parts but rather two halves awkwardly moulded together. JONNY NAIL
RollingStoneAus.com
Cub Sport
Bats Ind./MGM ★★★★ Brisbane indie-pop kids come of age with sophomore release
Rhythmically strong and filled with gorgeous synth production and guitar, Bats is the perfect successor to 2016’s This is Our Vice. Tim Nelson’s songwriting has become a dynamic leading force – over 13 tracks, he wears his heart on his sleeve more than ever before. Aching gospel influences (“O Lord”) turn to delicate moments of sweetness (“Give It To Me”), while fully embracing technicolour vibrancy fusing synth-pop and house (“Look After Me”). An album inspecting self-worth, self-discovery, love and longing, Bats is an accomplished effort; demonstrative of the band’s musical maturation and their confident steps into a beautifully complicated pop arena. SOSE FUAMOLI
No v e m b e r , 2 017
Lo!
Vestigial Nerve Gas ★★★½
Sydney metallers push the sonic extremes
On their third full-length Sydney metallers Lo! draw heavily on the Lamb of God and Meshuggah playbooks, vocalist Sam Dillon summoning the guttural roar of LOG’s Randy Blythe over a corrosive collection of thrash riffing and timesignature-bending rhythms. It’s undeniably powerful stuff, crippled only by the feeling we’ve heard this before. The atmospheric, spoken-word “Bombardier” provides welcome, moody respite from the aural battering around it, f lowing nicely into the more sludgey “A Tiger Moth’s Shadow”. “Judas Steer”, too, demonstrates an ability to inject dynamics into its blastbeat insanity, a formidable example of what Lo! can do. R.Y.
Chad VanGaalen
Light Information Inertia ★★★½
Leon Russell
King Parrot
★★★★
Melbourne grinders unleash pure insanity on third album
On a Distant Shore Palmetto
Garage rock and sci-fi synths collide on weird, wonderful LP
The soul-rock singer’s powerful posthumous goodbye
Canadian Chad VanGaalen has spent the past 12-plus years creating a body of work preoccupied with mortality and trippy sci-fi concepts, and Light Information stays on course. There are songs about holidaying in other people’s bodies (“Mind Hijacker’s Curse”), shapeshifters and parasitic demons, VanGaalen’s catchy blend of ramshackle garage rock and spacey synths occasionally coming in to land to explore more earthly concerns (the sobering “Broken Bell”). The freaky world VanGaalen has lovingly created may scare off casual tourists, but those willing to take the dive may find it’s a place they never want to leave. JAMES JENNINGS
On the growing list of farewell albums by dying rockers, Leon Russell’s contribution – recorded months before his passing in November last year – may be the most unflinching yet. “Sounds like a funeral for some person here/And I might be the one,” he bemoans; elsewhere he dwells on loneliness and lost lovers. Paradoxically, though, the soul-rock icon hasn’t sounded so alive in years. From the swampy choogle of “Love This Way” to the supper-club orchestration of “On the Waterfront” to the Cotton Club jazz of “Easy to Love”, he poignantly circles his musical bases one last time. DAVID BROWNE
Ugly Produce EVP ★★★★
Ugly by name, ugly by nature, King Parrot have truly upped their game in all levels of extremity while simultaneously lowering the bar in depravity. Album number three is a sordid, nasty grindfest of crazed riffing, inhuman time-keeping and ridiculous yob anthems about binge drinking, low standards and being a straight-up dickhead, delivered with a schizophrenic vocal roar/shriek that teeters on the brink of insanity. Smashing blazing hardcore into furious thrash metal with the impact of a high-speed collision, Ugly Produce is a visceral ball of fury wrapped in sarcasm and grime that’s both terrifying and hilarious at the same time. B.G.
Ecca Vandal Arrives In Style Moses Sumney
Aromanticism Jagjaguwar ★★★½ Avant-garde R&B singer’s spaced-out make-out jams
Moses Sumney’s avant-soul falsetto is a striking instrument – raw, sumptuous, airy and cutting all at once. The L.A.-based Sumney writes minimal, spacey songs that can suggest Al Green via Nick Drake or Joni Mitchell. “My wings are made of plastic,” he sings against languid jazz guitar and late-summer strings on “Plastic”, summing up his music’s fragile sensuality. Even when his voice tilts at ecstasy, cuts like “Make Out in My Car” and “Stoicism” are more about the thrill of waiting than the ease of release, perfect for a guy who sucks you in with a tune called “Indulge Me”. JON DOLAN
No v e m b e r , 2 017
Melbourne artist realises her potential on debut album Ecca Vandal Ecca Vandal Dew Process
★★★★½
When Ecca Vandal emerged in 2014 with “White Flag”, she appeared to be an artist fully formed. A brash electro-punk anthem complete with striking DIY film clip, it wasn’t a question of how good it was, but more where did she come from? Putting out singles is, of course, a different exercise to releasing a debut album, something not lost on the singer given that she spent a year-and-a-half constructing Ecca Vandal. That the record contains only one previously released song (“End of Time”) suggests she resisted the urge to rely on past glories, and a good thing too, for this is a vibrant, dazzling collection of new tunes. Vandal made it clear early on that she wouldn’t be boxed in to a certain sound, but the real art here is her ability to fuse multiple genres coherently into each song, as
opposed to having the “electro one”, the “punk one” and so on. Melody, too, is a going concern, meaning hooks fly thick and fast, be it in the electronic thump of “Future Heroine”, the punk guitar rave of “Broke Days, Party Nights” or the stuttering beats of ballad “Cold of the World”. Vandal is an astute lyricist, “Price of Living” taking aim at Australia’s offshore detention centres (“Back there I was a lawyer and a mother/Now I’m stuck behind barbed wire”). Only the Garbage-esque rock of “Out on the Inside” feels superfluous to needs – a minor blight on a stunning debut album. ROD YATES
RollingStoneAus.com
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Reviews
Cut Copy
Two Steps on the Water
Indie-dance luminaries return with a more mindful trip
Fraught punk narratives from productive Aussie collective
Cut Copy’s fourth LP was called Free Your Mind, but some argued the band had lost theirs with the unashamed Summer Of Love throwback that offered little new. Haiku From Zero reverts to the broader palette of 2011’s Zonoscope; from cowbell-helmed highlight “Standing In the Middle of the Field” to “Airborne”, a mildly annoying jam until it lives up to its name around the four-minute mark. Characteristically pat lyrics are hitched to music sophisticated enough to impart profundity, from the E-rush of “Stars Last Me a Lifetime” to the polymorphic, David Byrne-indebted “Memories We Share”. It’s not vintage Cut Copy, but it’s a return to form. A.R.
These Melbourne musicians declare themselves an “emotion punk” band, and anyone who has heard their early EPs or seen them live will understand why. Led by disarming vocalist June Jones, Two Steps on the Water’s scrappy, folk-infused compositions conjure feelings of embarrassment and intense self-doubt via spasmodic loud/soft dynamics and blunt first-person lyrics. Their second album is more sophisticated than its predecessor, but the uniform aesthetic – acoustic guitar, rough vocals, a dry violin – can be challenging. It’s a pleasant surprise when keyboardist Ellah Blake takes the lead on “Hold Me”, hinting at more diverse possibilities for Two Steps. DAN F.STAPLETON
Haiku From Zero EMI ★★★½
Batmanglij Explores ArtPop Wizardry The Vampire Weekend auteur channels his worldly vision into an excellent debut LP Rostam Half-Light Nonesuch ★★★★
Caiti Baker
Zinc Perambulator ★★★★ Darwin soul singer charts new heights in cool on debut
An A.B. Original collaborator and one half of electro-soul duo Sietta, Caiti Baker draws a heady through-line from Bettye Swann to contemporary peers including Ngaiire and Son Little, remaking soul music in her own image. Zinc harnesses brassy mid-century big band and R&B cool (“I Won’t Sleep”) to filigreed neo-soul texture (“Dreamers”). The album’s most intoxicating tracks sample roughcast recordings of Baker’s bluesman father laying down guitar licks on a smartphone; Baker and producers Michael Hohnen and James Mangohig welding the dawn of popular song to engrossing contemporary production. Each piece is unique, each uniquely wonderful. GARETH HIPWELL 84 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |
Sword Songs Ind. ★★★½
After putting in work on Frank Ocean’s Blonde (“Seigfried,” “Ivy”), Solange Knowles’ A Seat at the Table (“F.U.B.U.”) and various collaborative projects, ex-Vampire Weekend MVP Rostam Batmanglij has finally gotten around to releasing a proper solo LP of his own. And, admirably, he’s refused to choose between his former group’s Ivy League-aesthete indie rock and modern vernacular electropop, opting instead to cherry-pick the best of both worlds. The resulting 15 tracks are, fittingly, all over the place. “Bike Dream” is sexy voice-boxed art pop; “Thatch Snow” is chamber music with a multitracked choir; “Wood” is a widescreen Bollywood daydream, complete with layered hand drums and orchestral strings; “Hold You” is a hungry robo-soul slow-jam with ex-Dirty Projectors vocalistbassist Angel Deradoorian as an earthy diva. Batmanglij has a boyish, intimate tenor, charming when not overdoing the breathy, verge-of-a-giggle delivery. Ultimately, though, it’s the gorgeously inventive tracks that steal the show. Maybe the most telling is “Don’t Let It Get to You”, built around a machine-gunning sample of the samba-drum battery from Paul Simon’s curveball 1990 banger “The Obvious Child” – a modern equivalent to Patti Smith repurposing Velvet Underground tunes. Here’s to the bright future of another New York whiz kid. WILL HERMES
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Alex Lahey
I Love You Like a Brother Caroline ★★★½ Compelling first album from Melbourne up-and-comer
Your early 20s are about making mistakes. Lahey spends much of her debut LP untangling bad decisions and battling ennui. She does so in such a tricky fashion, it’s easy to mistake these wry observations for love songs. “You make double-vision bad decisions/but that’s OK with me,” Lahey tells a noxious lover on “Backpack”, effervescent synths transforming her over-driven guitar pop into something more anthemic. The title track packs a tighter punch, Lahey’s lyrics delivered Ramones-like over a simple garage riff, while “There’s No Money” sprawls itself out over dreamy layers of guitar. It’s these new shades that make Lahey’s debut compelling. SARAH SMITH
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Van Keeps Rolling
Noire
Some Kind of Blue Spunk! ★★★½ Solid statement from local duo with impeccable influences
Jessica Mincher and Billy James took their time crafting a followup to 2015’s striking EP, Baby Blue. This debut album feels carefully plotted, with plenty of nuance amid the reverb-soaked late-night atmospherics. The best tracks feel both of-the-moment and nostalgic: “Real Cool” recalls peak-period Air, “Don’t Know Where I’m Going” takes its cues from Mazzy Star. What’s missing is an element that’s uniquely Noire’s – the music is so referential it’s hard to figure out what sort of people Mincher and James might be outside the recording studio. Still, with foundations as sturdy as these, the duo’s future is bright. D.F.S.
Slum Sociable Slum Sociable Liberation
★★★★½
Mesmerising, genre-defying debut from chill Melbourne duo
For a debut to have such poise and confidence is remarkable. In crafting an immersive futuristic chillscape, the Melbourne duo harness a cornucopia of warmly dense beats, elegant, dreamy synths and combine textural features from jazz, hip-hop and electronica. Across the striking acid-soul of “Castle”; spiky astro-funk jabs of “14 Days”; Lamar-isms of “Hand It Over”; Gallic-swagger of “Keep Up With It”; and the sly “A Hearing”, Miller Upchurch’s falsetto knifes in and out with brutal effectiveness, and combines perfectly with Ed Quinn’s exquisitely produced synth collages to offer up neo-noir electro of the highest order. JAYMZ CLEMENTS
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That retro comeback album without having to go away first Van Morrison
Roll With the Punches Caroline
★★★½ Rather than wait out a decade and then call Joe Henry or Jeff Tweedy to produce the rootsy comeback, Van Morrison does it himself now. Roll With the Punches – five originals and some favourite blues and soul – is an unfussy, old-withoutsounding-tired collection that could have been phoned in and still sounded OK, but works at a better than average level. If that sounds equivocal it’s not, because of the songs, including works by Bo Didley, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Doc Pomus. Didley’s “I Can Tell” – which could have been done by Them, Morrison’s route out of Northern Ireland in the mid-Sixties – and Tharpe’s “How Far From God” both pack some solid swing, and Morrison’s “Too Much Trouble” adds some
Nat King Cole jazz to that swing. Nor is it the guests, who include the likes of Jeff Beck, John Paul Jones and Chris Farlowe. The slightly cosmic classic Van style of “Transformation” is lifted by Farlowe on just-rough-enough vocals and Beck on fluid guitar. If there is some hesitation it could be put down to the comfortable nature of a record which, while never being less than enjoyable, does cry out for some of the spiritual/joyful reawakening which marked the “returns” of veterans such as Solomon Burke and Mavis Staples. But then, Morrison’s never gone away, has he? BERNARD ZUEL
Touch Sensitive
The Weather Station
Sydney producer brings fun retro club vibes on party-ready debut
Spunk!/Caroline
Visions Future Classic ★★★½
Visions’ gaudy neon cover art – featuring Michael ‘Touch Sensitive’ Di Francesco in a turtleneck, gold chain and manicured mo’ – is the perfect distillation of his debut LP. “First Slice – Intro” (which samples his 2013 hit “Pizza Guy”) sets the Eighties-cocaine-dealer-pulling-up-to-the-nightclub-ina-Ferrarai vibe, kicking off an album of ebullient house (“Lay Down”), Nineties R’n’B (“Veronica”) and Italo disco-influenced club bangers. Arriving in the spring, Visions plays like the perfect warm weather party soundtrack, whether you’re drinking champagne spritzers on a yacht or hitting the local discotheque in your finest pair of slacks. JAMES JENNINGS
The Weather Station
★★★★
Toronto folk singer expands her sound on compelling fourth LP
With its ragged, sometimes strangled electrified guitars (“Complicit”) and bustling drums (“Kept it All to Myself”), Tamara Lindeman’s selfdescribed ‘rock & roll record’ builds on the delicate trad-folk that has long soundtracked her poetic profundities. Less like fellow Canadians Jennifer Castle and Joni Mitchell – nudging, instead, early Fairport Convention – the rawer textures underscore the gutsiness of Lindeman’s insightful meditations on the shifting sands of selfhood and relationships (“Thirty”). It’s all carried by her spellbinding vocals – which hint that she has even more to say than time allows. GARETH HIPWELL
Nick Mulvey
Wake Up Now Caroline ★★★
A spirited release from London based Mercury Prize nominee
Nick Mulvey’s sophomore release positions the songwriter at potentially his most comfortable; the lyrical use of metaphor highlights Mulvey’s developed writing ability (“Myela”), while the sprawling nature of the soundscapes encapsulates the strength of the musicians Mulvey surrounded himself with. Mulvey’s lyrical scope takes a look at the world currently turning off its axis; in a time of uncertainty, music can serve as an emotional anchor, an anchor Mulvey aims to deliver. His writing is evocative without preaching. Balancing rhythmic eccentricities with irrepressible groove and electronic production throughout, Wake Up Now serves its title well. SOSE FUAMOLI
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Reviews
ORB
Ibeyi
More decade-defying muscle from the Victorian trio
XL/Remote Control
Naturality Flightless ★★★★
Surprise, surprise: ORB’s second album is another affectionate riff fest. But while the thunderous theme song “O.R.B.” won’t discourage those pesky Sabbath comparisons, the Geelong-bred power trio throw themselves just as bodily into chugging psych-pop and crusty funk. In fact, once you’ve settled into Naturality’s groggy, grotty depths, you’ll catch more whimsy and variation by the minute, including a rubbery motorik groove on lead single “You Are Right”. Especially telling is the acid-fried “Immortal Tortoise”, which punctuates its fuzz-soaked lurch with enough slippery pivots and tangents to keep our heads spinning. DOUG WALLEN
Winston Surfshirt Sponge Cake
Sweat It Out
★★
Sydney party time favourites faking it til they make it
Sponge Cake canvasses styles galore, from lightweight psychedelia and sun-kissed electro to old school disco and smiley hip-hop, from pop and blunttoasted rapping to pale reggae and lazy soul. Winston Surfshirt lope and slouch, slip on some brass and kick up the beats like they picked up Sly and the Family Stone via an Arrested Development cover band. You can see crowds jumping up and down. What’s not to like? Except this is Pond and Electric Guest with edges rubbed off, Fight Facilities and Chromeo without killer tunes. Actually, it’s Sticky Fingers with irony instead of blokey bonhomie, the same calculation and good time festival feel masking emptiness. B.Z. 86 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |
Ash
★★★★
French/Cuban sisters resist but rejoice in the age of Trump
Gregg Allman’s Easygoing Final Statement The Southern rock icon’s farewell album is vividly steeped in his own history Gregg Allman Southern Blood Rounder ★★★½
The final album by Gregg Allman, who died in May, is a moving farewell statement à la twilight masterworks by Leonard Cohen and David Bowie. “I know I’m not a young man, and it’s time to settle down,” Allman sings on the roadhouse blues “Love Like Kerosene”, his full-moon growl strikingly undiminished. Yet while Southern Blood is rich with intimations of mortality, it’s easygoing too, with a laid-back generosity that recalls Allman’s kindest Seventies work – see his warm take on Lowell George’s Southern-rock salvo “Willin’”. Allman steeped the album in his own history, recording with producer Don Was in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, where Allman and his brother Duane recorded in the late Sixties. And while the LP is almost entirely covers, they spool by as one vivid benediction, from Allman’s gorgeously soulful reading of Bob Dylan’s “Going, Going, Gone”, to his gently swaying version of the Grateful Dead’s meditation on aging “Black Muddy River”, to tender folk reckonings by his friends Tim Buckley and Jackson Browne. Allman opens with an original, the searching blues “My Only True Friend”, sung as a conversation with Duane. “It feels like home is just around the bend,” he sings, the elegiac sound of gracefully moving on. JON DOLAN
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Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi Diaz pull off a rare balancing act here as Ash takes in resistance and defiance, carrying a lament for what we are doing to each other but offering a strong note of optimism. No upbeat pop vehicle, it is measured and spaced, like crooning Bat For Lashes and meditative Bjork given their run of African and South American percussion and sliding basslines. But it feels on an upswing, even in a song such as “Numb”, a slow unfurling where the narrator is “Numb, I ache for home/Protect me”, but comfort comes in something spiritual as much as physical where “I feel you walking by my side/Take my hand/I’ll save myself”. BERNARD ZUEL
The Front Bottoms Going Grey
Warner
★★★½
Wordy New Jersey DIY punks deliver storytelling good times
One of the surprise success stories of wordy, beardy-man-feels punk, the Front Bottoms’ easygoing nature belies just how smart, insightful and genuinely moving their ouvre can be. Brian Sella remains strikingly relatable as the everyman with the reedy storytelling voice coughing up sneaky-deep narrative gems like the travelling doubt of “Raining”. The plaintive “Trampoline” and charming “Don’t Fill Up On Chips” are terrific, but the perky synths on “You Used To Say (Holy Fuck)” and the ponderous “Grand Finale” land awkwardly. But for communal drunken singalongs (“Ocean”, “Everyone But You”) and bud hugs, few do it better. JAYMZ CLEMENTS
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Movies By Peter Travers
Kyle Mooney gives Brigsby Bear – the film and character – a soul.
Quirk-Com’s Manchild With a Soul Brigsby Bear Kyle Mooney, Mark Hamill, Jane Adams Directed by Dave McCary
★★★★
on a scale of one to adam Sa nd ler scre a m i ng, Kyle Mooney would rate a solid six on the comic manchild-o-meter. Watch the YouTube videos he shot with his old sketch group GoodNeighbor or his Saturday Night Live shorts, and you’ll see how he’s carved out a tiny corner in the beta-male niche. The comedian can do delusional, full-frontal dude-ity, but his sweet spot is a shuffling, stammering awkwardness held over from early adolescence – the shy, just-south-of-geeky guy whose development isn’t arrested so much as incarcerated in solitary confinement. Mooney is the main reason to see Brigsby Bear, the sort of
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indie dramedy that wears its on-the-spectrum quirk on its sleeve. Which, in this case, is attached not to some tight-fitting hipster jacket but a cartoonish bear suit – specifically, the costume of a fuzzy-wuzzy TV character named Brigsby, who fights off a goateed Méliès-ish moon named Sun-Stealer. Imagine a cheesy 1980s kids’ show set in a candy-coloured postapocalyptic setting, one where the hero ends each instalment by intoning, “Prophecy is meaningless, only trust your family unit!” Something seems more than a little off with this lo-fi sci-fi saga, but the oddball aspects don’t bother James (Mooney). The twentysomething gentleman is . . . well, obsessed is too mild a word for how he feels about this serial. Mum (Jane Adams) and Dad (a jedi-bearded Mark Hamill) encourage their boy’s fixation, just so long as he doesn’t go out into what he’s told is a polluted,
ravaged world. Then one day, the cops bust down the door, and James’ folks are hauled away. It seems they aren’t his actual parents – the couple abducted him when he was a baby, and have raised James as their own, in complete isolation, ever since. Even worse, in the young man’s eyes, is that there is no real television program called Brigsby Bear – it was simply something that Pops filmed in a nearby warehouse solely for his ward’s own entertainment and edification, a cult series with a rabid audience of one. Reunited with his birth parents (Matt Walsh and Michaela Watkins), assigned a therapist (Claire Danes) and forced to reintegrate into society, James is lost without his heroic intergalactic grizzly to guide him. There’s only one thing left to do, he decides: bring his furry idol’s final, winner-take-all adventure to life himself.
★★★★★ Classic | ★★★★ Excellent | ★★★ Good | ★★ Fair | ★ Poor
What follows is a sort of typical freaks-and-geeks free-forall laced with pathos, as our hero recruits a motley crew of friends, family members and the Fed (Greg Kinnear) investigating his case to help him film a big-screen Brigsby Bear blockbuster. A s the f ilm’s co-w riter, Mooney’s partially responsible for the story’s slouch toward familiarity. But he’s also the one who keeps Brigsby Bear from feeling solely like an over-extended SNL digital short or simply an eccentric goof. Watch how the comedian commits to this grown-up kid who’s seen his world come crashing around him, and then takes solace in the belief that you can’t spell catharsis without “art”. There’s an investment here on his part that almost makes up for the story’s stock beats. Mooney is the one that gives Brigsby Bear – and Brigsby Bear – a soul.
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Music Tech By Matt Coyte
ATH-DSR7BT Headphones
iQbuds Nuheara
Audio-Technica
RRP $399
RRP $599 upping the wireless audio game, Audio-Technica’s Pure Digital Drive system does away with the need for D/A conversion that typically degrades sound quality. As Bluetooth technology improves, the sound quality and range of wireless headphones has improved significantly. You don’t have to keep your phone in your breast pocket to keep it in range with these babies, as they have a maximum reach of up to 10 metres. They will also remember the last eight devices that they were paired with, which makes quick connection a breeze (easier than Tinder). But now for the sound. The
45mm True Motion drivers deliver a sound that is compatible with High Definition audio (when connected to a computer or HD media player by USB) so you know that they’re capable of delivering more definition than most smartphones are capable of serving up. The mic and volume controls are built into the ear cup for easy access, and the in-built rechargeable battery provides up to 15 hours of continuous play (1000 hours on standby). The DSR7BTs aren’t reinventing the wheel, they’re just taking the earlier promise of wireless headphones and actually delivering on it.
BRIAN WILSON [Cont. from 65] of Beach Boys fans as “Rhapsody in Blue” means to him: “I feel the love, some of it. But, you know, I wonder if people really like me or not – if they like me as a performer. I don’t know who the hell likes me and who doesn’t. I want to believe my music helps people on a spiritual level, helps them with their troubles, eases their minds, makes them feel love. But in the end, how can I know?”
T
he next afternoon, we are rolling north on Highway 101 in Wilson’s sleek new blacked-out tour bus, headed for Santa Barbara. His three youngest kids – Dylan, 13, Dash, 8, and seven-year-old Dakota – are along for the ride, eating Oreos and playing with their fidget-spinners in the front lounge as the bus moves through the kind of California landscape Wilson has mythologised in so
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there’s no denying the damaging effect of loud music on our hearing, but for many of us, the damage has already been done. Savvy startup company Nuheara has developed some life-changing tech for those who don’t have bad enough hearing to warrant a hearing aid, but could do with some aural enhancement in the shape of small in-ear gadgets called iQbuds. iQbuds are earbuds that cancel sound from the outside world and then allow you to dial in what you choose to hear via a smartphone app. Say you’re at a concert and all you can hear is bass. The app allows you to dial down the bass frequencies and
many songs – rugged mountains dipping into the blue Pacific, wind-sculpted beaches, surfers and a school of dolphins bobbing in the chop. If Wilson notices any of this, he doesn’t let on. He’s sitting next to the driver, his white Nikes propped on the dash and his eyes closed for most of the ride. He says he’s tired from four shows in seven days, looking forward to two weeks off before heading to Hawaii, then Europe. “I miss my family,” he admits. “Any good family time you can get, you should take it. It’s worth all the pain and confusion and bullshit you go through, just to get those moments. But I don’t want to sit around longer than I have to – I want to be out there.” He admits the old vise grip of depression can still get him. “I got through a pretty rough night. I had a hell of a time,” he says. “I was scared of dying and going through all kinds of shit, and a song got me through it. You know Danny Hutton’s [Three Dog
up the treble, making for a more balanced live sound. You can adjust the background sound in a busy bar and boost the level of those talking directly to you, or even mix the sound of music playing through the buds so you can hear more or less of the world outside (great for cyclists). The app takes a bit of tweaking until you can get the ideal sound, but once you have your settings, you can save them and switch between different settings with the tap of a finger. The iQbud software regularly gets updates and we can see these getting even better with time. The Nuheara iQbuds are a game-changer.
Night] song ‘Black & White’? If you ever get in a pinch, boot up ‘Black & White’ on your cellphone. You’ll feel better right away. “It’s like, Elton John had that song ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight’, and that’s exactly what happened to me. Someone saved my life. I thought I was dying. But nothing was going on, I just got into a mental thing. But I got through it!” At the Santa Barbara Bowl, set into a lush hillside overlooking the ocean, a lavish barbecue is set up for the band backstage. Wilson seems pensive, and prefers to eat on his own, in his chair by the side of the stage with his kids gathered around him. We sit in silence for a while, and I sense it’s time to give him space to get into the Zone before the show. As I say goodbye, Wilson holds onto my hand for several seconds, then leans over and kisses it. “I hope I give a good show tonight,” he says quietly. “And I hope I go to heaven.”
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Declan Melia
British India’s frontman on his Instagram addiction, meeting Thurston Moore and constantly worrying The last time I did something for the first time saw Parquet Courts at Melbourne Uni at the start of the year and I went to one of those flotation [tank] things, the sensory de- got caught up in the drinks and the music so I went and bought privation float tanks. And I was like, I’ll unlock my creativity and [their record] on vinyl. It’s probably still in its plastic to be quite get to the bottom of things, but I just remember lying there and honest. going through the whole Christmas special of The Office [in my The last time I got drunk before a show head]. I went through scene by A really long time ago. We scene, and I was laughing to myself were doing a battle of the bands and repeating some of the lines, and it seemed like the most imand then the lights turned on and portant thing. I showed up and the hour was over. I didn’t work I could barely talk, and I was out anything. All I worked out was slumped there with my shoulI should watch less of The Office. ders down and I just remember The last time I was worried the guys looking at me with the I’m always worried. I can’t stop biggest look of disappointment. worrying. The way I view the It meant so much to them. I was world is, we’ve just got this survivlike, yep, I’m never doing that al instinct or something that means again, and true enough, it’s been people have always got to be wormore manageable since. ried about something. Last year I The last time I ate something I was worried about my ex-girlfriend regretted and this year I was worried about I’m aiming for vegetarianism. the record. I wake up worried. Given the choice I will order the The last time I checked Instagram vegetarian thing, but every so Minutes ago. I feel my hand often you’re like, I’ll give myself going for the phone like a guy a treat, and you eat some burggoing for a cigarette. And you’re er or kebab. But when you’re like, fuck, I was here five seconds full you don’t care what you ate. ago, nothing has changed. What You’re like, if I’d gone the fuckdo you think, your friends are ing falafel instead of the burger posting all these photos? Man, it’s I’d still feel the same way I feel sad. I’m also cerebrally not particnow, so I regret that instantly. ularly interested in what people The last book I read are doing, but there’s something Ursula Le Guin, The Disposabout scrolling, just infinite consessed. I’d read a few reviews tent. It’s the addiction of our age. and this guy was like, “Why is The last time I asked someone for this not an American classic?” their autograph And the only reason I can think Thurston Moore came into a is that it’s vaguely sci-fi. But it’s cafe I was in in Brunswick. Faabout capitalism and consumervourite band, favourite fucking ism and nature. It’s probably one singer, I couldn’t let this go. So I of those books that’s more fun to had to walk over like a plonker think about than actually read, and say, “Sorry, man, can I get a but I got a lot out of it. “My last meal? I’d go all out with the photo? Can you write on this for The last time I had to explain to lobster. If I’m going down, tax payers me?” And the look on his face . . . someone what I do for a living And then you see the photo and I don’t, I just lie. I say I’m a are going to feel it in their pocket.” he’s kind of taken aback and looks student. If a friend of a friend fucked and I look weird. The last asks what do you do and I say time I got an autograph and a photo with someone famous is the I’m in a band, they’re like, to what extent are you in a band? They last time I’ll do it. say, “Is that the only thing you do?” And I say yes, and I just see in The last record I bought their eyes they don’t believe me. And I just feel like a wanker preI always get sucked in to buying vinyl at shows, although I usu- tending I’m in a band. It’s so bizarre but that’s the way I feel. Typally regret it cos like most people my age who live in Melbourne ically I lie. and have vinyl collections you never actually listen to the vinyl. I My last meal would be I think I’d go all out with the lobster. I don’t know if I like lobster all that much, but something a bit decadent. If I’m going down, tax British India’s new album, Forgetting the Future, is out now. payers are going to fucking feel it in their pocket. They’re currently on a national tour. ROD YATES
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