NOVEMBER 2015
New Radio
MUSICAL INTERVIEW EXPRESS
THE PASSION OF NICKI MINAJ YEAH YEAH YEAHS MEET ROCK’S NEW QUEEN OF COOL THE PASSION OF NICKI MINAJ
Miley Cyrus
AND HER DEAD PETZ A THILLINGLY WEIRD SURPRISE ALBUM
MAROOM 5 Poppy Album ‘Overexposed
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Adam Levine, Maroon 5 Bandmates Explain Poppy Album ‘Overexposed’,Massive Fights in New Interview Before ‘V’ Release Date
MILEY CYRUS Miley Cyrus And Her Dead Petz
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Former Disney star enlists The Flaming Lips and Ariel Pink on a thrillingly weird surprise album
14 JESSIE J “I Was Too Soft On My Last Album” The girl power collaboration with Ariana Grande and Nicki Minaj has been a global hit, giving Jessie her third chart-topper in the UK 02 NEW RADIO / November 2015
36 TOP ALBUM Best Albums Of 2015 So Far Including classic, pop, rock, punk, folk, Jazz music
Ed Sheeran His Music Being A Turnoff For His Family
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The British sensation talks fame, music, goals, tattoos, dating and more
CONTENTS 20 NICKI MINAJ The Passion Of Nicki Minaj One step beyond with pop’s pink lady
24 P!NK The Two Side Of P!nk P!nk was always going to do things her way
32 SAM SMITH The Man With The Golden Lungs With his Bond theme the first to top the UK charts, we meets a man pondering how to move on from instant mega-stardom.
50 JUSTIN BIEBER Actually Kinda Cool
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BLUR Blur Are Back They come back with their recorded album “The Magic Whip“
About the car crash kid and if he’s redeemed himself through the power of pop bangers.
55 COLDPLAY Coldplay Announce New Date Coldplay have rescheduled a gig they pulled when news of the Paris attacks broke.
YEAH YEAH YEAHS Meet Rock’s New Queen Of Cool They’ve spent 13 years fighting the critics, depression and each other. Yet somehow Yeah Yeah Yeahs are still together and doing their best to wrong-foot their fans NEW RADIO / November 2015 03
Nicki Minaj, a American Hiphop singer
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I K C I N THE PASSION OF
J A IN M ONE STEP BEYOND WITH POP’S PINK LADY By VANESSA GRIGORIADIS
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“IT’S BIGGER THAN WORK TO ME. IT’S HAVING A PURPOSE OUTSIDE ANY MAN.” pop music is dominated almost exclusively by the female star, like Beyoncé, Rihanna, Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga and, as always, Madonna. Engaging in a frantic, complex game, crossing over many genres to keep up with the current caldron of hip-hop, electronic music and R&B; signing sponsorship deals to make up for the lack of album sales; performing live everywhere from sheikhs’ parties to worldwide arenas, these women are the pop business now, and they’re not feeling particularly shy about telling us that. Their primary message has become one of being the woman you actually have to be behind the scenes to succeed today: powerful, outspoken and in control. Nicki Minaj is the world’s biggest female hip-hop star, a top pop star and the first woman to achieve success in both genres. Like Beyoncé, who performed recently in Central Park with the words ‘‘boss’’ and ‘‘hustler’’ flashing on screens behind her, along with a grainy video in which she smashed a vacuum and a sewing machine, Minaj has become expert at modeling the ways that women can 22 NEW RADIO / November 2015
wield power in the industry. But she has also drawn attention to the she first recreated herself as a pornified star who wore gold ways in which power can be embodied by a woman standing up for herself and speaking her own mind. Minaj’s behavior isn’t exclusive to her tracks; she also exhibits it in the national telenovela that she, like the rest of these women, to a greater or lesser degree, is running about herself, feeding the public information about her paramours, ex-paramours, peccadilloes and beefs, all of it delivered in social media’s short, sharp bursts. Perhaps you recall the three-act revenge drama that played out on various screens last month, as Minaj faced off against two major powers: Swift, the 25-year-old golden girl who may be the richest woman in music, and who spends time wholesomely baking cookies at her TriBeCa spread with a rotating cast of B.F.F.s; and Cyrus, the ex-Disney star who, more than five years ago, was extolling the virtues of purity rings but is now America’s pre-eminent ‘‘bad girl.’’ One of Minaj’s most fascinating stylistic tricks as a performer has
been incorporating alter egos, not only the Barbie doll (which she calls Harajuku Barbie) but Roman, an outspoken gay boy who lives inside of her. These alter egos, which have extensively detailed identities, seem exemplary of the way that women are forced to assume different personae to get through the day. But when I asked why she hadn’t called on them much on her last album, she gave me a vague answer about how they were only ‘‘funny’’ and were still around somewhere. Early in her career, she also adopted Lady Gaga’s method of saturating the media with outrageous costumes, but now, when I asked if Gaga influenced her, she shot back, ‘‘I don’t even want to discuss that. That’s so old to me.’’ Minaj is known to be particularly tough with the press, ‘‘You have to be like a beast, and that’s the only way they respect you,’’ she said, in a soft-focus MTV documentary on her life, explaining that she walks out of photo shoots when there’s ‘‘a $50 clothes budget and some sliced pickles.’’ She’s also guarded about her past, and much of her present.
THIS PAGE Nicki Minaj, an American Hip hop singer OPPOSITE PAGE Nicki Minaj
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K N ! P
The Two Sides of
BY HELENA DE BERTODANO
The singer has changed the sound of modern pop music irrevocably. Music critic Ann Powers credits Pink’s eclectic mix of rebellion, raw emotions, infectious beats, and humor with paving the path for many of today’s most popular modern female artists, including Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, and Rihanna. She’s even been credited as inspiring a British multi-Grammy winner to become a performer, after a then-teenage Adele caught Pink in concert at London’s famed Brixton Academy. “That’s so huge for me,” she says of Adele. “I’m a fellow outcast, and for somebody to say that they were at my party once is like, Really? That’s so cool, they were there. Fuck, she was 13, and how old does that make me? If I had to influence anybody, I’m so grateful it’s her.” To date, Pink has had a dozen Top 10 hits in the U.S., and only Rihanna and Beyoncé have had more since 2000. In 2009, Billboard crowned Pink the top pop artist of the millennium’s first decade, and after selling 40 million albums and 70 million singles globally she is indisputably one of the best-selling musical artists of all time. So whether she’s comfortable acknowledging it or not, Pink has some extraordinary music industry muscle, though when she’s skipping through the Malibu Farmers Market without shoes (as she did while pregnant) or riding bikes with Hart on Venice Beach, she seems like a modern American everywoman that minus those shoes. On this night she’s just an ordinary working mom taking a brief respite from her intense every two hours breast 24 November 2015 / NEW RADIO
“I’m Just Living My Life. I Don’t Want to be Your Kind of Good” “feeding schedule The next day she’ll take a helicopter to MTV’s Video Music Awards in Los Angeles, where she’ll wirl above the crowd in her signature Cirque du Soleil–style acrobatics while performing “Blow Me”. We’re just going to be a gypsy family traveling the road. The best thing is that all my band and most of my dancers and everybody, we’ve all been together for so long that I look at them now as my future babysitters.” Pink says that tour time is like group therapy. Being a good public citizen is part of Pink’s modus operandi, and it’s reflected in her rousing new anthem, “Are We All We Are,” written with her longtime collaborator Butch Walker. It’s a rebel yell inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement, with We are the 99% sentiment echoed in the song’s lyric “We are the people that you’ll never get the best of. The loyal love she gets from lesbian fans is due in part to her iconography as well. Queer women identify with Pink, her strength, her persona, her mouthines and her dykey look. She’s one of the few female perfor-mers even now to sport short hair, tattoos, and a butchy attitude.
Pink, an American singer and songwriter
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Blur band. From left to right: Alex James Damon Albarn Graham Coxon Dave Rowntree
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BLUR are back
BACK IN HONG KONG, WHERE THEY RECORDED THEIR ALBUM THE MAGIC WHIP, DAMON, GRAHAM, ALEX AND DAVE TALK ABOUT FALLING OUT AND MAKING UP, THE STATE OF BRITISH POP MUSIC AND WHY 90S BRITPOP WAS A WASTED OPPORTUNITY. By MARK BEAUMONT
The global Blur journey continues. From their corner of Colchester they’ve hit London’s Primrose Hill for 1993’s ‘For Tomorrow’, the vomit rivers of Greek island Mykonos on ‘Girls And Boys’, engaged with the sounds of Seattle grunge on ‘Blur’ and outer space for ‘13’, then taken to a Moroccan cypress grove to write the lyrics for 2003’s ‘Think Tank’. Now it brings us to Hong Kong, a layover on their way to ever more exotic locales. ‘The Magic Whip’ reads a flick book of postcards gathered along the way, and a few as yet unwritten. A hint of ‘Popscene’, a squelch of ‘Crazy Beat’, a swirl of ‘This Is A Low’. As alien as it initially sounds, smothered in the stark global synthetics Damon Albarn introduced on ‘Think Tank’ and carried through to last year’s solo album ‘The Magic Whip’ is peppered with notes of familiarity. So what slowly strikes you about Blur’s long-awaited eighth album, is how reassuringly Blur it feels; advancing the formula but warmly accessible. And complete too; it was, we’re told, thrown down in just five spare days in Hong Kong and later pieced together by Graham Coxon and Stephen Street from extended jams lingering on Damon’s laptop, yet it sounds like the work of slavish months spent recapturing the magic and whipping it into fresh flavours. Clearly the old chemistry came easy. Parklifers are thrown the bone of opener ‘Lonesome Street’. With its Britpop swagger and talk of catching “the 5.14 to East Grinstead”, it’s a pleasing self-pastiche, a welcoming beckon inside. Other tracks hark back to their history, the grinding ‘Go Out’ could sit on ‘13’ with its coruscating guitar squalls, and catchy knees-up ‘Ong Ong’ will be the new song lapped up at Hyde Park this summer, resembling a beery Ziggy Stardust. But a crowd-pleasing recreation of past glories a la Suede’s 2013 comeback ‘Bloodsports’ just wouldn’t be Blur. The fascination
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of ‘The Magic Whip’ is in how a reanimated Blur imagine they’d have developed by 2015, and how the Hong Kong environment fed into that. ‘I Broadcast’ comes on like a Far Eastern arcade machine playing ‘Popscene’. ‘New World Towers’ is a full-band sister-piece to Damon’s ‘Everyday Robots’, Alex’s bass and Graham’s acoustic set to hazy electronics, sonorous thuds and laptop textures. ‘Ice Cream Man’ washes a classic Blur character study with the bleeps, clicks and whirrs of the modern age trying to sound like 1995’s idea of 2015. Damon’s current obsession with technological dislocation combines with the clinical confusion of Hong Kong to give stretches of the album a lingering, sombre tone where Blur albums of old might have thrown in a wild-assed ‘Bugman’ or ‘Song 2’. The military strings of ‘There Are Too Many Of Us’ reflect the brooding threat of the population explosion that struck Damon in China and post-apocalyptic images of
Blur band. From left to right: Graham Coxon Damon Albarn Alex James Dave Rowntree
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desert engulfing Hyde Park on death-ray doom tune‘Thought I Was A Spaceman’ speak of a soul-sapped humankind sleepwalking into oblivion. Blur have always striven to make their albums era-defining snapshots of life and culture, and ‘The Magic Whip’’s portrait, in contrast with its garish artwork, is often a mournful monochrome. I cite Kanye West as an example of a mainstream musician doing interesting things, which proves to be a mistake. “People aren’t interested in learning instruments and putting effort and time into it. They want it immediately. But all I hear is a loop starting, some bloke starts to sing or rap, and the loop finishes. There’s no shape to this stuff. And the lyrics just seem to be idiotic.”Whether or not you agree with his assesment, Blur’s shared musicality, forged through years of playing together, is what makes them such a unique proposition. Despite their diverging characters, it’s the one trait they all share.
“People aren’t interested in learning instruments and putting effort into it. They want it immediately.”
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H A E Y
YEAH S H YEA
Yeah Yeah Yeahs. From left to right: Brian Chase Karen O Nick Zinner
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MEET ROCK’S NEW QUEEN OF COOL They’ve spent 13 years fighting the critics, depression and each other. Yet somehow Yeah Yeah Yeahs are still together and doing their best to wrong-foot their fans.
By TIM JONZE
Karen Orzolek has a giddy, machine-gun rattle of a laugh that’s ever so cute and endearing. But if you’re not careful she’ll use it to dangerous effect. Such as when she’s flustered by a question, or embarrassed about something, or just a little tongue-tied. Out it comes, The Laugh, and if you don’t stay on your toes, the conversation will have already moved on towards safer territory. It’s not what you expect from a woman who made a name for herself leaping across stages in ripped fishnets, shrieking lines like “As a fuck, son, you suck” and whose costumes could give Lady Gaga’s a run for their money. “The most outrageous of all was the pepperoni pizza dress,” the Yeah Yeah Yeahs singer grins over drinks in one of the band’s favourite hangouts, Great Jones Cafe, just off New York’s Bowery. “That was like a deconstructed prom dress. It was painted fluorescent, like if a baby puked up toxic vomit, with weird circles the colour of pepperoni all over the breastplate. Then it had these black-and-white-striped stuffed dildos coming off the shoulders. Carmen Miranda flowers growing down the sides of the legs. It’s just so…classy. OK, OK, my idea of classy. It’s so cool, it freaks me out, it’s just ...” She
“I’M DEFINITELY AN ADVOCATE
FOR LADIES NOT FEELING DISADVANTAGED FOR BEING A LADY, THOUGH. “
lets out a long, satisfied, “Ohhhhhh!” Thirteen years ago, Yeah Yeah Yeahs were a bunch of scratchy Lower East Side art punks. What the critics who dismissed them as a was that among the more riotous songs were startling moments of tender yearning, such as Maps That the band managed to get this delicate balance right was striking. That Karen O somehow managed to do it while dressed in, for example, a nun’s habit and gas mask is even more impressive. Before forming Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Karen O studied at Oberlin, the same liberal arts college in Ohio that Girls writer Lena Dunham attended. It was here that she met Chase. “There were a lot of arty kids there,” she says. “It was weird. I was used to being the outsider at school, but then I went from that to being just one of many. For the first time I was surrounded by people a lot like me.”Did that inspire her to go crazier? “Probably, yes. It’s so predictable, but I always want to go more extreme!” NEW RADIO / November 2015 31
My music is a diary and it’s a recap of my life. BY BERRY NICOLAS
Sam Smith sent an email to his agent, the subject line of which simply read “007.” That message was the beginning of his bid to write the theme song for the next James Bond film, a lifelong dream for the British singer that comes true today. To mark the release of “Writing’s on the Wall,” Smith’s theme for the upcoming Spectre, Smith spent a few minutes with Morning Edition breaking down the track. ”I tried to put myself in the shoes of Bond,” Smith explains. “My music is a diary and it’s a recap of my life, and I wanted to bring that kind of honesty. In the lyrics “How do I live, how do I breathe? When you’re not here I’m suffocating”,I wanted a touch of vulnerability from Bond, where you see into his heart a little bit.” Smith says the song came together in one whirlwind session. He and collaborator Jimmy Napes wrote it in under half an hour and quickly recorded a demo. When they listened back to that recording, they were so pleased with Smith’s vocal performance that they ended up using it on the final release—albeit with some added muscle in the arrangement.
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Sam Smith, an England pop singer Sam Smith’s signature
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“When it goes into the chorus, it’s massive and then I wanted
Sam was a Daniel Craig modernist: “He was my favourite
it to sound like all the air was being sucked out of the song really quickly as it goes into ‘How do I live, how do I
initially, because I’m 23 years old. I hadn’t seen all the old
breathe?’ And then, it slowly raises again in that last moment to the final explosion, leaving it to the orchestra to then take it away,” he says. Though he’s longed for years to be the voice crooning over one of those iconic title sequences, Smith says someone else in his life might be even more excited: His uncle Terry, who was diagnosed with brain damage at birth, is also a James Bond superfan. “He’s got every single poster, every single figurine,” Smith says.“I just thought, how incredible that would be for him, and for the family and stuff, to do that theme song. It would be amazing. I’m not sure he even knows yet that I’m properly doing it. But I’m gonna bring him to the premiere.” You can tell a lot about a person from their favourite Bond. Are you a Connery classicist or a Lazenby hipster? Do you go for the arched-eyebrow absurdity of Moore, or Dalton’s grittier, more grounded entries? Until recently,
movies, and I loved how modern his take on Bond was,” he says over the phone from Raleigh, North Carolina, where he’s playing the penultimate date of his current US tour. “But when I went back and watched them all, I realised that it’s Connery and Moore who I love the most. I love how classy and cleancut they are. I think I’d like the next Bond to be more of a return to that.”
“When I write sad songs, I feel like I’m sewing u p a scar in me, and t he
outcome alwa y s feels so much better than when I write happ y ones.” As a pop star who extols the virtues of doing things the old-fashioned way “standing onstage in a suit and singing”, as he puts it, Smith’s preference for the elegant, urbane 007s of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s isn’t surprising; indeed, the sweeping, John Barryesque strings and dramatic delivery of ‘Writing’s On The Wall’, the theme song he’s written for Spectre, feel like a deliberate throwback to that era. Not for nothing was Smith always the bookies’ favourite to land the gig.“In my first meeting with Sam and Barbara, my pitch was that I wanted to create something genuinely timeless and classy,” he explains of the track, which made history this month by being the first Bond theme to go to Number One. “Sam was talking about how a lot of Bond songs are love songs, and how love is an underlying theme in all the films. I write love songs that’s all I do!, and I felt that was something which could play to my strengths. So that’s what I set out to create, an epic love song.” Becoming the first British male solo artist in 50 years to front a Bond theme caps a remarkable couple of years for Smith, in which he’s gone from guest-spots with Disclosure and Naughty Boy to being a pop phenomenon in his own right. ‘In The Lonely Hour’ has sold 8.5m copies worldwide spawning four Number One singles, four Grammys and three Brit awards. Bond, however, “has been a whole different monster. “I genuinely believe, especially in England, that people are just waiting to give me bad ones,” he says, but while critical consensus has been divided, “The general response to the song has been amazing, andto get to Number One was just incredible. You’re never going to please everyone and not everyone’s going to love it, but I’m so happy with it. I feel like I’ve done a good job.”
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IN THE LONELY HOUR PREVIOUS PAGE Sam Smith THIS PAGE Right: Album cover of In the lonely hour Left from up to down: Cover of Make it to me Cover of Stay with me Cover of I’m not the only one Cover of Money on my mind Cover of Lay me down
In the Lonely Hour is the debut studio album by English recording artist Sam Smith. It was released in the United Kingdom on 26 May 2014 via Capitol Records and Method Records. In the United States, it was released on 17 June 2014. The album includes the hit singles “Money on My Mind” and “Stay with Me”, both of which were number one in the UK; the latter become a hit worldwide, peaking in the top ten in over 20 countries, including reaching number two in the US. The album’s third hit single, “I’m Not the Only One”, reached number three in the UK and number five in the US. A deluxe edition of the album contains five bonus tracks, including a solo acoustic version of Disclosure’s single “Latch” and Naughty Boy’s number one single “La La La”, on both of which Smith provided guest vocals. When In the Lonely Hour was released, it received mostly lukewarm reviews from critics, many of whom praised Smith’s singing but were critical of the songwriting. The album was a commercial success worldwide, and it becomes a number one chart hit in Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. It was the second best-selling album of 2014 in the UK, and the third best-selling in the United States that year.
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