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Issue 0014 > April 2009 > RS 100 rollingstone-india.com

Rebirth of

Grunge Pioneers Launch New ‘Ten’ Package

PLUS

MICHAEL JACKSON LACUNA COIL BILLY JOEL /

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BLINK 182 /

PRASANNA

PAUL GILBERT

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OPETH

LADY GAGA

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“All the News that Fits”

STILL ALIVE Pearl Jam in 2008

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PEARL JAM

In the run-up to their 20th anniversary next year, Pearl Jam are re-releasing their monster debut, Ten. Here, they reminisce about how the band got together and came up with that album.

By Robin Eggar

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GUITAR PRASANNA

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SUMMER’ 09 MUSIC PREVIEW

FEATURES

One of the best guitarists t come out of India, R Prasanna speaks to us about the state of non-film music today, having written the score for the Oscar-winning docu Smile Pinki, which went by unnoticed in light of the Slumdog phenomenon. By Bharadwaj Rangan

We bring you a sneak peek into this summer’s biggest releases, featuring old acts (Neil Young, Bob Dylan, and Heaven and Hell) and new (Silversun, The Dead Weather, Zee Avi).

LEONARD COHEN The profilic singer-songwriter speaks about his new track and the tour that saw him perform in America for the first time in 15 years.By Neil Strauss

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BHASKAR MENON

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METAL SPECIAL

As the first Chairman and CEO of EMI Music Worldwide, Bhaskar Menon was one of the most successful music executives in the Sixties. We speak to the man about his 35-yearold affair with music in this ROLLING STONE exclusive.By Neha Sharma

Headbangers rejoice!Swedish prog metallers Opeth, Italian gothic metal band Lacuna Coil, Finnish Viking metal band Ensiferum and American guitar virtuoso Paul Gilbert, all find a place in this metal special.

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R&R

MICHAEL JACKSON Embroiled in court cases and accusations, the original King of Pop has been down under for a while, but he is now gearing up for a comeback. His 50-date schedule at London’s O2 Arena could gross $400 million. By Steve Knopper

BOB DYLAN After decades of writing music, he still has more up his sleeve. Following up on his last studio album, Modern Times, and his more recent collection, Tell Tale Signs, Dylan surprises with a new album, Together Through Life, releasing this month. By Brian Hyatt DANNY CLINCH

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COVER STORY

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SACHAL VASANDANI

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DIATRIBE

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BLINK-182

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SLAIN

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New York-based jazz vocalist of Indian origin, Sachal Vasandani is fast gaining recognition. We caught up with him as he dropped by for a quick performance in Mumbai last month. By Sunil Sampath

One of the most promising metal acts from Shillong- they were runners-up at last year’s Hornbill Fest - Diatribe are looking to record an album this year. By Lalitha Suhasini

Pop-punk superstars, Blink-182, who broke up in 2005, are all set to reunite for a summer tour and a brand new album. By Nicole Frehsee

With a sound that melds power metal with glam metal, and after a spate of victories on the college circuit, Bengaluru band Slain are on our lists of artists to watch. By Deepti Unni

AMIT CHAUDUHRI

As the author-musician previews his upcoming album Found-Music - releasing this May- at the London Jazz Festival, he takes us through the inspirations and observations he has translated on record. By Rahul Verma

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REVIEWS

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MUSIC REVIEWS

Kelly Clarkson chooses to pass off with consistent effort with All I Ever Wanted; jazz fusion supergroup CAB make a great record in Theatre de Marionnettes; Lacuna Coil choose commercial success over musicality on Shallow Life; Advaita makes a fare case for itself with its debut and Napalm Death nails a n almost-perfect score with Time Waita For No Slave.

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PRO GEAR

Musician Loy Mendonsa, of Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy fame, tells us why the Yamaha XS8 is his most reliable and compatible companion on sound. By Sahil Makhija

PLUS: Neko Case, Junkyard Groove, Yeah Yeah Yeah’s, Another Vertigo Rush.

EXTRA

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GRAPHIC NOVELS

Kazu Kibuishi’s The Stone Keeper is a fun, sensitive, character-driven fairytale with stunning visual appeal; Straczynki’s Thor HC is a wasted effort while Osamu Tezuka’s Black Jack Volume 1 scores with its ability to talk directly to the reader. By Satyajit Chetri.

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Letters...........................4

Pro Gear............................108

Music Reviews...........95

Gig Calendar....................113

Movies........................102

Charts...............................114

“ I’M DRIVEN BY THE IDEA OF WRITING A SONG THAT’S GONNA GET EVERYBODY SINGING.”

CAPTURING SOUL ANDREW BIRD LIVE IN AMSTERDAM

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Andrew Bird’s High flying Folk T HE VIRT UO SO VIO L INIST (AND WH ISTLER ) MAK ES HIS M O S T ACCESSIBLE CD YET -By Christian Hoard

BEFORE GIGS, ANDREW BIRD paces. His head

twitches slightly. He gets superstitious, too : On past tours, Bird felt he had to drink an espresso exactly 90 minutes before showtime and misspell certain song titles in a blocky script when he wrote out a set list.

“For a while I spelled the song ‘Measuring Cups’ as ‘Measurink Kups’ ” he says. “I told myself, ‘If I dont do these things, I’ll have a bad show.’ ”Bird’s peculiarities extend to his music.

The 35-year-old Chicago native is a classicaltrained violinist who writes lyrics that refer to arcane subjects like mitosis and cypriots; likes to whistle both onstage and on record; and can compose nearly complete songs in his head, often while driving.

On his newest and prettiest album, Noble Beast, Bird leans heavily on his handsome croon and the meticulously arranged string parts. The songs range from simple folk to chamber music to wonkier stuffincluding ‘Not a robot, just a Ghost,’ which sounds like a jazz quintet doing a Radiohead impression. The sound isn’t a huge departure from his earlier, ornate albums, but the material is less dense and more pastoral; he sounds less afraid of gorgeous, slow-moving melodies. The result is Bird’s most tuneful and accessible album yet - and one that could significanlt increase his fan base.Noble Beast, his sixth solo album, is getting roughly twicw the marketing push his last one got. His label even worked out a deal to sell the album at target.

Bird cut Noble Beast mostly in Nashville but also at the Chicago loft owned by his hometown buddies in Wilco. Bird broke up with a longtime girlfriend while working on Beast and put in marathon recording sessions he calls “ four-day-benders.”

“This album feels airy and full of space, which I like,” says Bird’s buddy Jim James of My morning jacket, with whom Bird toured in the earlier part of this decade. “Andrew’s a complex motherfucker ,and no one else sounds like him.”

In person, Bird is usually softspoken and ruminative. Although he can be wrily funny, he allows that he’s “a pretty classic introvert.” During lunch he mentions that James - at whose New York apartment Bird is currently crashing - gave him some advice about dealing with demanding people on tour: “ ‘Just remember the windshiels wipers.’ ”says Bird, quoting James and waving his middle fingers back and forth.

“Know when to say, ‘Fuck everybody.’ ” Then, as if realising he could never pull off that kind of behaviour, Bird chuckles and adds, “I guess that’s not my style.

Bird’s rise has been slow and not exactly steady.The son of an artist and art-therapist mother and a father who worked in finance, Bird grew up in a Chicago suburb, a few blocks from Lake Michigan. He was a loud kid who sang for strangers he met in elevators untill age five, when he suddenly became very quiet.

His shyness landed him in special education. “I was put in super remedial classes with troubled kids, even though i was reading at a high level,” Bird says. Music was an outlet. He studied violin and ended up with a music scholarship to Northwestern University.

Bird took on random gigs after graduating. he played with the retro-swing band Squirrel Nut Zippers at the time of their 1997 hit single ‘Hell’ and took a job as a knave fiddle player at a Wisconsin renaissance fair, where he dressed in a floppy hat and blousy shirt and played jigs and reels for Dungeons & Dragons fans waiting to use the bathroom.

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ANDREW BIRD Bird made three jazz-influenced albums with Bowl of Fire , but by 2002 the band was playing to dwindling crowds. Bird responded by breaking up the group and adopting what he calls “guerrilla tactics” - acting as a one-man touring operation. He did solo gigs and My Morning Jacket, Ani DiFranco and loads of other artists.

After the shows he would run his own merchandise booth.

The shows highlighted Bird’s uniqueness: He would often begin a set by filling his lungs with air and holding a long whistled note untill the crowd stopped talking and paid attention. Once they did, they saw a guy singing strangely pretty folk tunes while handling a violin, a guitar, a glokenspeil and a looping machine. Still the solo tours were a grind: Bird would pull hairs out of his legs to stay awake. “One time I fell on my ass at a pub in NewCastle,” says Bird, who nowadays performs both solo and backed by two bandmates. “I was just too tired to stand.”

Around that time, Bird moved from Chicago to his family’s farm in rural Illinois. There, while taking time off from touring, he recorded two solo albums. “I read about all these artists in Paris getting their little country studio,” says Bird. “I didn’t want to be just another urbandwelling twenty-something.” By the time he made 2003’s Weather Systems, he had stumbled onto his signature sound - orchestral folk spiked with touches of Latin swing ans other left-field elements. “I hear glimpses of tango, Debussy and Radiohead in Andrew’s music,” says Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche. “But he’s got his own voice.”

By 2005, the size of the crowd at Bird’s shows had mushroomed. Last summer he played for 13,000 in Chicago’s Millenium Park. The massive hometown show went well, thanks in part to Oprah. “She had done a special about the Olympics that day and left these huge TV screens up in the park,” Bird says. “We got to use them for our show.”

Today, Bird has the flu. After lunch, he treats it with a hot toddy, followed y a glass of Maker’s Mark. He fears his rigorous schedule - which includes gigs at Carnegie Hall and on Letter Man , and a tour that runs through April - will somehow land him in the hospital. He fears he’ll play shows in which nothing special happens, nothing to differentiate one night from the last.

Of course, he also fears not being in front of the CHAD BATKA/CORBIS

crowds. “I’m afraid of downtime, honestly,” he says. “The fact that people come out of their houses and are coming together in a communal way for me... that’s pretty cool.”

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linch

C Danny

In the run-up to their 20th anniversary next year; Pearl Jam while working on their next studio album - are also re-releasing their monster debut, Ten. Here they reminisce about how the band got together and what they came up with what has still been acknowledged as one of the most important albums of our times.

PEARL JAM Eddie Vedder, Matt Cameron, Jeff Ament, Stone Gossard, and Mike McCready

Seattle has always been out of the mainstream American rock circuit. So how did thw scene develop in the 1980’s?

Stone Gossard: Everyone just got in bands. There wasn’t a lot of trying to do anything other than that nobody was getting signed. A lot of us couldn’t play!

Whatever we had, we tried to bring to the table and that made some weird combinations of people playing together, so everybody was going for broke in the sense of ‘What have you got to lose?’

Matt Cameron: Seattle was isolate, so a lot of national known big-time rock acts wouldn’t necessarily come up to Seattle and Portland. That forced the North West music scene to look inward and create stuff on our own turf, play our own clubs. At the time, the Eighties underground in the US was definitely getting a lot more organized with bands like Black Flag and Husker Du, Minor Threat, Butthole Surfers - they were able to create a circuit that had nothing to do with major labels and the known music industry at the time. What our music scene really plugged into was that do it yourself spirit.

APRIL 2009 ROLLING STONE

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PEARL JAM You will be celebrating your 20th anniversary in 2010. Do you see yourself going on indefinitely?

Stone: It would be thrilling if it happened - if we all looked at eachother 10-20 years from now and went, ‘How did we do this?’ We’d have to play a crotchety ‘Evenflow’ and disco brushes.

[Laughs] Our fans are gonna be so old they’re not going to be able to hear us anyway, so maybe we can be video transformed to look 30 years younger.

Jeff: It’s pretty insane that we’ve lasted 20 years. At the start I guessed we might make 3 or 4 records, have a little bit of success and we would have gotten to play with some of our heroes.

Propably the biggest fringe benefit is that we’ve ahared stages with Iggy Pop. Henry Rollins, REM, Neil Young, The Rolling Stones and Frank Black... the list goes on and on. That’s the little kid dream come true - being able to play with all those incredible bands and artists that we grew up loving and we still love.

The reason why we’ve lasted do long is we write music, we get very intense, we go away from eachother, do our own thing and then we get back together. We give each other space.

Jeff: That’s the biggest reason wht we’re still around. There was a point about ‘93 or ‘94 where we sort of disbanded for 6 months, did’nt really talk to one another. did’nt really know where each other was at and went off to live life and refuel. It gave us a lot of energy creatively to get away from the bubble. Right around that time everybody started doing side projects, started working on their own music and that’s been really important and satisfying individually. Its great.

Eddie: It’s always been about protecting the aility to play music and to do it with these guys in this band. Whatever we’ve gone through relating to each other; it’s always been small potatoes compared to the bigger picture of this band doing something worthwhile and achieving good things for others on the planet while we’re

What is the secret of your longitivity?

Mike: Pearl Jam has survived this long by luck and because over the years the five of us have confronted each other on issues. We have open lines of communication and we’d call somebody on their shit if there’s a problem.

at it. There have been a couple of times in my personal life where I’ve felt ready to self-destruct and it was the band that helped me through. If I’m having a bad day [laughs] and it does happen [more laughing] - all i have to do is remind myself that I’m in a band with Matt Cameron and I feel a lot better.

Pearl Jam’s Favs on TEN

“ We thought that selling millions of records was a curse.” Jeff Amnet Has Pearl Jam always been a democracy at all times?

Jeff: I don’t know if it’s ever been a directorship. We started the band with the idea that it was gonna be a democracy but there’s been times in the last 15 years where Ed has had to take the reins because we were about to go off a cliff. At those times where we were’nt sure what we were doing, he’s been great at being able to steer the ship right. He has no problem telling any of us that he needs help. Now we’re pretty good at calling one another and saying things like ‘How do you feel about this? I’d really like to take the reins on this project and work it through.’ It makes everyone feel a geniune part of the band. Pearl Jam is a real band.

Stone: I’m the luckiest guy in the world ‘cos I get to be in a abnd and write songs in a band with 5 songwriters. I get to learn from everybody’s process of how a song structures change and how different people hear different rhythms and different melodies and different sequences.

Ed can relate to all these sorts of different things, he always steps outside and keeps exploring new places. I get to play with Matt Cameron, I get to play with Eddie Vedder, come on! And I get to strum along. heating the chorus for ‘Even-flow’ and thinking that’s HUGE. So hooky, it’s got a really rad Zeppelin huge rock feel to it. Although we’ve played it a couple of thousand times since I’ve been in the group I think that’s the quintessential Pearl Jam song.”

Mike: “I really like ‘Alive’ a lot - I look at it as

Eddie: “ ‘Alive’ has changed for me. A healing

LANCE MERCER

happend and now i think about it more from how other people are approaching the lyrics (though once in a while I’ll still go dark with it).

I always thought that chorus was a burden but others have it as an affirmation... so I’m going the affirmation route now too.

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what I get excited about songwriting. What I love about music is aesthetic chords; the simpler the better and then another set that does something to those original chords. It’s a really simple arrangement.”

Matt: “When I was in Soundgarden and we were making Bafmotorfinger, Eddie brought up the mixes to Ten and I distinctly remember

a live song that we’ve done over the years and that people respond to very well and have an emotional attachment to. And I get to do a fun solo on it.”

Jeff: “At the time it was ‘Oceans’ and it’s still my favourite track. When we recorded it I thought we were pushing the envelope and that there was a lot of other places that we could take the music that we made.

EBUZZ

Visionary Undergound The Ghetto Groove looks to stir minds while keeping those feet tapping and it second record Fired Up By Neha Sharma

B

R I T I S H OUTFIT VISIONARY Underground is not a band that is well-known in the country, but it should be considering its heavy Indian influences. Their sound is an explosive mix of DnB, breakbeat, meteoric time signatures, old school reggae-rap, searing harmonies, warped synth lines and sporadic Eastern drifts. The band,

collaborative appearances on albums and tracks with well known Asian musicians like Nitin Sawhney, ADF and Ghetto Priest. Their second album Fired Up released in Novenmer 2008, however, kept collaborations to a bare minimum featuring only bass virtuoso Dr Das of Asian Dub Foundation fame (he is also Coco’s older brother) as the outside musician.

reflecting the escalating problems in an urban both musically and lyrically, reflecting the escalating problems in an urban environment.”

The band is currently working on their third album which is expected to be out later this year.

The first single from it, ‘Get the beers,’ in fact, is now up on YouTube and MySpace and will be available for digital download soon. The music,

made up of Paul Edwards aka DJ Feel Free (DJ/ producer), Coco Edwards (visual/VJ), Damien Mulrain (vocals), and Duane Christie aka Duane Flames (rapper), gets its Indian influence largely from Coco, a Brit-Asian who is married to Edwards. Her roots are in Kolkata, but she hasn’t been to India in a long time. “But I have always kept in touch with my culture. We are, of course, around a lotof Asians and Indians, so in a way I get those influences a lot,” she says.

Coco and Paul founded VU in 2001 and their debut album Keep the Grime On which came out in 2005 was packed with big name guest artists like Dr Das (Asian Dub Foundation), MC Navigator, Aref Durvesh (tabla maestro), Sonia Mehta (Indian vocalist), Chandru (Bollywood Strings), and Pandit Dinesh amongst others. This was followed by several singles and remixes as well as

VU’s music stands out for its angry, cause-driven songwriting. Intrusive governments, police high-handedness, eroding public privacy, civil rights, the environment...everything its way into the tracks. “How free are we really, with CCTVs monitoring our every move and the government keeping extensive records on us?” Mulrain asks.

The current economic crisis, according to him, and the social problems that it has engendered has lent us urgency to what they have to say on the album. Says Flames, “In East London the kids usually emulate a lot of what they see, like on MTV. I am trying to stay away from that. I know the kids look up to what we do, their minds are still developing with that kind of fragile information, so I want to ensure we have a constructive influence.” Adds Coco, “This is an altogether more urgent affair, both musically and lyrically,

like those from their previous albums, has a lot in common with Asian Dub Foundation, both in terms of sound and songwriting. The band members, though, refuse to acknowledge these parallels. It is, of course very obvious that like the dozens of other bands which came into prominence over the last decade, VU owes a great deal to the pioneering work done by the likes of Sawhney and ADF in creating Britain’s Asian underground in the 1990s. As Edwards says, “There is a lot of Asian breakbeat and drum and bass out there now, but it is all fast becoming the stuff of mainstream.”

Visionary Underground’s RIG

DJ Feel Free

Mackbook Pro running Logic Pro 8 EXS. 24 sampler, KORG D-1600MKII Multitrack, Mackie CFX 12 MKII Mixing Desk, MicroKORG synthesizer, MOTU audio interface, Shure SM58 microphone

VJ Coco Mackbook Pro running Modul8 and Motion Dive VJ software, Roland V5 Video Mixer, Sony DCR-PC1103 Mini DV cameras for live feed and filming 14” flatscreen TVs preview monitors, Infocus LP790 projector.

Damien Mulrain and Duan Flames Sennheiser 100 series cordless microphones

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BHASKAR MENON The Rolling Stone Interview

I

N THE SIXTIES, around the time that Pandit Ravishankar was popularising Indian music internattionally, another Indian was making waves on the industry side of things, famously opening up the American music market for British bands like Pink Floyd, The Beatles, Queen and the Rolling Stones.

Bhaskar Menon. a Doon School and an Oxford graduate started out life working for EMI in London. before moving back o India as the Chairman and Managing Director of the company’s Indian Subsidiary in 1964. Despie being stationed in he Indian wilderness, Menon was a quick learner and by he end of he decade had risen to become he president and CEO of the Los Angeles-based EMI subsidiary Capitol Records. the marquee record label that had ushered the Beatles era in he world’s biggest music market, and had on it’s roster legendary bands like the Band, the Beach Boys, Grand Funk Railroad and the Steve Miller Band. Menon first came in as head of Capitol in December 1971, with the release of the Concert for Bangladesh album, the live recording of the legendary concert that featured the likes of George Harrison, Ravi Shankar and Bob Dylan. The album was launched within five months of the concert, which was acknowledged to be a legal feat considering the large number of artists involved and the different record labels they were contracted to.

Even bigger name and fame awaited him in 1973, when he took the bold decision to heavily promote and market Pink Floyd’s revolutionary album The Dark Side of the Moon in America.

The album went on to become a worldwide phenomenon, selling more than 40 million copies and staying on the Billboard 200 charts for over 14 years. Drummer Nick Mason acknowledged

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Menon’s contribution to Pink Floyd’s success in the 2003 documentary, The Making of the Dark Side of the Moon: “The story in America was a disaster, in that we really hadn’t sold records...

And so they brought in a man called Bhaskar Menon who was absolutely terrific. He decided he was going to make this work, and make the American company sell [Dark Side].

And he did.”

Capitol under Menon went on to sign the likes of Sheena Easton, Blondie, David Bowie, Rosanne Cash, Natalie Cole, Sammy Hagar, Heart, Diana Ross. Bob Seger and George Thorogood in the Seventies. In 1978, he engineered the worldwide merger of all EMI operations to create the global music giant EMI Music Worldwide, of which he became the chairman and CEO. Menon was by then the most powerful man in the music business prompting the British music bible New Musical Express to term

Bhaskar Menon with (3)Linda and Paul McCartney (4)Kenny Rogers

Bhaskar menon with (1)Diana Ross (2)George Harrison and Linda McCartney Richard Marx, Duran Duran, Grace Jones, Pet Shop Boys, Queen, Roxette, Spandau Ballet, and others. His influence extended into the several new sub-genres of rock & roll that were gaining popularity in the Eighties. He signed on punk and hard rock groups such as Butthole Surfers, Concrete Blonde, Billy Idol, and The Red Hot Chili Peppers; heavy metal bands like Poison, Megadeth and Iron Maiden; thrash metal bands like Exodus and Rigor Mortis, and pioneering rap groups like Beastie Boys and Mantronix.

Duran Duran guitarist Andy Taylor, spoke for most bands in his 2008 autobiography, Wild Boy: My Life in Duran Duran, when he said, “We decided to go with EMI because we knew they had a global network and could launch bands across America. The company was headed by the legendary music industry figure, Bhaskar Menon, who’d presided over EMI during the rise of the Beatles.”

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Of Course Bhaskar’s power had its down. There were many who hated him for the fact that the music companies were now more powerful and richer than the musicians themselves. As George Harrison noted in 1987 interview with Creem magazine: “It’s disgusting, it’s immoral and if that’s how [music companies] treat people they’re supposed to be in business with, that must be how they treat everybody. It’s immoral, that’s all there is to it, and ultimately they’ll all get it. I don’t mean from us, now, but somewhere down the line, in this life or the next life...

And half of those people are going to reincarnate getting one cent out of every CD they sell and sell more records than everybody and not receive any of the money. Be treated like lice. If you put this in the interview, you can say I’m smiling about it, I’m not letting it depress me. But all this stuff that you read in the papers about Nike and Capitol, that’s what’s been going on for years.

They’ve all taken advantage of it because after the Beatles split up everybody was sort of not talking to eachother, so they all came in, grabbing and plundering as much as they could. But now this is going to be pursued to the end, and even if we all die in the process, our children and our children’s children will be after Bhaskar Menon and Capitol untill he realises he’s just being a dong.”

Menon retired from EMI and the music business in 1990. And in 1995 he set up his own company International Media Investments Incorporated. Based out of Beverly Hills, the company invests in media around the world including NDTV in India. He is on the board of NDTV and travels to the country quite often.

Which part of India do you originally come from?

I am originally from Kerala though I have lived in the North- mainly Delhi- and later in

THIS IS A BUSINESS OF UNPARALLELED ECSTACIES AND OCASSIONALLY OF HEARTBREAKS.

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Bhaskar Menon with (5)Itzhak Perlman (6)Tina Turner

Kolkata throughout my years in India. After graduating from St. Stephens college at Delhi University. I then went to Christ Church at Oxford University in England where i took my MA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics.

When did you join EMI? How long was your turn at EMI for?

I joined EMI in England immediately after graduating from Oxford as a management trainee. In 1956, propably before you were born! In those days, EMI annualy took in about 10 fresh graduates from Oxford and Cambridge and I was one of those. I stayed in the company untill I retired in 1990. I served as Chairman of EMI India, known then as the Gramophone Company, and in the Far East before returning to England in 1969 as Managing Director, and International and Divisional Director of the EMI group. I was then transferred in 1971 from London to Los Angeles as Chairman, President and CEO of Capitol EMI in Hollywood and was

Bhaskar Menon with (7)Nick Rhodes and Simon Le Bon (8)Natalie Cole

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Games Virtual Virtuosos So you always wanted to be a rock star? We show you the quick and easy way to the top - it’s almost as good as the real thing

Y

OU WAKE UP each morning, get through with the daily grind, flip through pages of a magazine like

this, glancing through new success stories and timeless legends and wonder to yourself, where have I wasted my time when I could’ve taken a few guitar lessons or spent more time flexing my vocal chords?

Well, you don’t have to let the guilt of unproductivity get to you because technology, like everything else that is awesome, gives you a second chance in the form of some truely unique ways to

let your inner artist loose. For our anniversary issue, we’er giving you the gift of music - we’re turing you into a rockstar (fame, drugs, alcohol, groupies and record contracts not included).

Here’s how.

Guitar Hero II and III ***1/2 RS 5299 (INCLUDING GUITAR) So you’re not exactly the singing type, but you’re pretty darn sure that given the time and the talent you’d make a great guitar player. Well, then Guitar Hero is right up your musical alley.

By Guitar Hero, I mean the games pre-Guitar Hero: World Tour, you know, the ones

with just the guitar controller no mics, no drums, just a solitary guitar, the game that started it all, spawned an epic franchise and then some.

The game comes with a bundled guitar-shaped controller, which has a series os coloured buttons, a strum bar and a whammy, and you must hit notes as they scroll towards the bottom of the screen in time with music to maintain your performance level and to score points.These can include whammy dive-bombs, solos and even three-note chords that you strum on a bar which replaces strings on the guitar. While it seemingly sounds simple, it’s anything but, with an insane collection of rock tracks such as power metal band DragonForce’s ‘Through the Fire and the Flames’ and Megadeth’s ‘Hangar 18’.

From all of the music video games, Guitar Hero II and III ( the first game was not released here) have the best songs of the bunch. Guitar Hero II has considerably improved multiplayer gameplay and has upto 64 songs while Guitar Hero III features wireless guitars and Slash and Tom Morello as characters using motion capture to simulate their actual movements, so you don’t just play like them, you can BE them.

Does rock stardom get any easier than this?

IDEAL IF: You always thought.

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SingStar Series *** SONY/PS2/PS3 RS 499 ONWARDS IDEAL IF: You always thought if your bathroom singing skills are up to par (read skills that would leave people mildly deaf) then SingStar is the game for you. If you have like-minded friends, even better because this is a karaoke game that thrives on competition and rewards you on singing the selected track as close to the correct pitch and timbre as possible. It comes bundled with USB mics that you use to interface with the console while the music video of the song plays on the screen.

Rock Band II ***1/2 EA/PS2/PS3/XBOX/WII RS 15,000 (INCLUDING GUITARS, DRUMS AND A MIC) At some point in your life you’ve fantasised about being in a rock band, never mind that you can’t even hold a guitar, or that your drumming skills amount to some steering-wheel thumping while driving. Now you can thanks to the RockBand franchise. RockBand 2 picks up where RockBand left off, allowing players to perform in a virtual band with separate interfaces and instruments - gitar, drums, bass and vocals. Notes of the song you’ve chosen scroll on screen and

The game has a variety of play modes: You can sing solo or duet with a friend and there’s even a party mode which allows you upto eight participants in two teams.

Be it an attempt at massacring Himesh’s nasal twang with ‘Jhalak Dikhla Ja’ or trying your best New Kids on the Block impersonation, SingStar just seems a lot more fun with friends. With a host of titles to choose from - 24 at last count - ranging from the ubiquitous SingStar Bollywood (whose song list is in dire need of upgrade) to the seminal hits of SingStar 90’s there’s a lot packaged into the series.

IDEAL IF: Your parties could do with some livening up. gameplay involves hitting the right notes. Together as a band you can make tracks such as System of a Down’s ‘Chopsuey’ ot The Who’s ‘Pinball Wizard’ and hopefully not throw your contoller at the TV in despair.Like all bands, You’ll soon notice that there’s a member or two holding you back (also known as unable to cope with the game’s rhythm-based play as easy as the others) so rather than get embroiled in a war of egos, break up and have a reunion tour two decades later, you can just lower the difficulty settings for the less adept rockers of your troupe. Add a game mode that literally prevents you from failing and you have a virtual practice ground to hone your soon

Dance Dance Revolution Series **** KONAMI/XBOX 360 RS 4500 So you’ve hit a record high of bum notes on SingStar, bust out solos on Guitar Hero and disbanded twice in the course of a single Rock Band game, but you haven’t quite reached that pinnacle of ignominy till you’ve been caught in the midst of a Dance Dance Revolution routine, booty-shaking your way through ‘Kung Fu Fighting’.

For the uninitiated, DDR demands you move your feet to a set pattern.

You must step to the beat, matching it to the arrows presented on screen by steppirng on arrows on fun game in the bunch.

a dance by steppirng on arrows on a dance mat. A judgement is displayed for each step, depending on your timing, such as horrific boos or resounding cries of “perfect!”

There’s an assorted medly of dance music (most notably Daft Punk’s ‘Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger and the Chemical Brothers renditon of Kylie Minogue’s ‘Slow’) with exclusive tracks from Supergrass, The Hives, Basement Jaxx and The Prodigy. This is one of the most physically demanding games ever, guarenteed to make you shed pounds and any shred of self-respect you ever possessed, but that doesn’t stop DDR being the most fun game in the bunch.

IDEAL IF: You just missed the So You Think You Can Dance auditions.

to be legendary skills. Oh yes, all 84 tracks on RockBand 2 are master recordings unlike the first game where quite a few tracks were cover versions. So in terms of hardware, how is this different from the original Rockband? Well not much at all unless you think better made peripherals, wireless drums and improved caliberation are worth it.

If only real rock bands had it this easy. This also means however that you you don’t get enough groupies but then again, on the bright side, you won’t get brickbats and bottles either.

IDEAL IF: You want a band without the incumbent heartache.

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Movies Watchmen **1/2 Billy Crudup, Jackie Earlie Haley, Patric Wilson Directed by Zack Snyder

BY PETER TRAVERS

Freaks for Geeks It’a awesome! It’s aweful! It’s both!

Listen up, ‘WATCHMEN’ virgins. I don’t care if you know squat about the orgasmically received 1987 graphic novel written be Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbsons: It’s time to bust your cherry. As for you Watchmen junkies, enough with tearing down the movie before you even see it. Moore, soured by the Hollywood mangling of From Hell, The League of Extaordinary Gentlemen and V for Vendetta, has removed his good name from the credits. In the process, he has inadvertantly inspired a band of rapid loyalists ready to shoot Snyder on sight. Caught between the rock of fanboy adulation and the hard place of newbie indifference, the R-rated, nearlythree-hour movie version of Watchmen is a cinematic pinata getting whacked from every side. Snyder, a director of TV ads (yikes!) who made his feature debut with a rockin’ 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead, took an ass-kicking from comic purists for getting too computerflashy with his 2007 smash, 300, from Frank Miller’s graphic novel about the 480 BC Battle of Thermopylae. Snyder goes easier on the computer this time and strains to stay faithful to what’s on the page. As the story moves from New York to Mars, the time is still 1985, Cold War tensions simmer, and Nixon- in his fifth term as president- hovers over a Doomsday Clock that ticks ever closer to atomic midnight. Snyder sums it up in a yowsa opening that merges Vietnam, moonwalks, you name it, into a visionary time capsule.

Plot point coming: Since 1977, masked heroes have been banned from doing their thing. Except for Dr Manhattan, rendered ubermensch in a lab accident, they have no superpowers, just a jones to fight in drag. The feds have drafted Dr Manhattan to take on the Soviets, but the rest of the Watchmen

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have been outlawed.

Second plot point coming: The Comedian, aka Edward Blake, played by Jeffery Dean Morgan, has been tossed from a window of his high-rise. “Somebody knows why,” writes Rorschach, aka Walter Kovacs, in his journal.

He thinks it’s the start of a conspiracy to kill the “Masks,” as the crime fighters were called.

So he starts rooting out the second generation to fight back.

He begins with Nite Owl II (Patrick Wilson). aka Dan Dreiberg, who’s gone to pudge since putting away his Batman-like costume. Wilson (Angels in America) gained a few pounds but otherwise suggests nothing less than an Adonis in a role that cried out for, say Phillip Seymour Hoffman.

Nonetheless, humdrum Dan is roused to action. He’s still limp-dick with Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman), aka Laurie Jupiter, untill cracking heads makes him rock hard. Laurie ha been getting it on with Dr Manhattan, aka Jon Osterman, but his interests had turned to physics and mars despite his giant blue penis.

What’s a girl to do? For Laurie, it’s out with the Doc and in with the hottie spandex (hello, Killer Barbie), just the thingie to put new hoot into Nite Owl II. The junior versions of Nite Owl and Silk Spectre are the weakest and silliest part of the movie. The fights with this un-dynamic dua, sporting powers they’re not supposed to have, are shockingly subpar. These doodles are helpless against Ozymandias (Matthew Goode), aka Adrian veidt, a mad genius who made a killing selling masked action figures to the gullible public.

No wonder the film loses its power and point. Luckily, Crudup (Almost Famous) has the acting chops to take us inside the moral

battles raging in Dr Manhattan’s blue skull.

And Haley penetrates the heart if Watchmen’s darkness. His origin story, involving child abuse and butchery, dovetails into a revenge drama that pulsates with the emotional intensity and artery-spurting violence that indelibly marked the graphic novel.

At its best, Snyder’s movie gets at the symbolism of that smile button splashed with blood on the first Watchmen cover.Viewers who worry about the Giant Squid, the Black Freighter and other Watchmen elements missing from the movie are missing the point.

There are worse things than a movie that bites off more than it can chew. And if you have to go back to the comic to learn that the freaks in Watchmen are not only for geeks, maybe that’s not so bad. Just sayin’.

RollingStone THE REBIRTH OF PEARL JAM / RS 0014 / APRIL 2009