Back from the brink.
Friday January 12, 2007
The Guardian
Martin Slattery and Antony Genn of the Hours.
Photograph: Martin Godwin
In 1995, the audience at Glastonbury were treated to an unexpected performance. Halfway through Elastica's set, the Britpop quartet were joined on stage by a naked man who proceeded to wave his arms - and other things besides - like a giant, freshly plucked bird.
Almost 12 years later, the "Elastica Glastonbury" incident is immortalised on YouTube and the streaker, who curiously enough later played keyboards with Elastica, is seated - clothed - in a London pub. "I'd been up for three days," sighs Antony Genn, before describing how he came to be naked in front of 100,000 people.
In the intervening years, Genn lost his teeth and almost his life to drug addiction, so he's the last person you'd expect to find fronting one of 2007's most compelling bands. The Hours somehow combine the edgy intensity of the Only Ones with Echo and the Bunnymen's capacity for the uplifting and majestic. Their songs rollercoast along on jagged guitars and whipcracking snare drums, or beautiful, shimmering pianos. But their most arresting quality is a sense - not least in Genn's soul-baring lyrics - of musicians who have taken the knocks but are now putting every last emotion and sinew into a death-or-glory assault on pop's heavyweight title.
The first people to respond were their musician peers, who perhaps understand that a band this emotionally driven doesn't come along too often. In December, Bono sang the Hours' praises on Radio 1. Jarvis Cocker - who has known Genn since he was in an early Pulp incarnation aged 16 - says the Hours "understand what music is for, for human beings to communicate with other human beings".
Shortly before Christmas, the Hours' limited edition 7in single Ali in the Jungle - which uses the 1974 "Rumble in the Jungle" between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman as a metaphor for Genn's return from the brink - started getting played on Radio 1. Zane Lowe and Jo Whiley both made the track their single of the week. The band have appeared on Later With Jools Holland. However, Genn insists their increasing profile is the result of the music, not the PR machine. "I know who the Klaxons are," he says, pointing out that other bands get it the wrong way round, "but I couldn't hum a song. The hype arrives before the music. We wanted it the other way round."
Initially, the only fanfare around Ali in the Jungle came from the band themselves. They used their MySpace site to craft exuberant, passionate manifestos ("We mean what we say. Every note. Every syllable.") that recall Kevin Rowland's Dexys Midnight Runners at their most intense. Genn is a Dexys fan, though he remains disturbed by Rowland's notorious 1999 Reading performance, when Genn and Cocker stood stageside watching the singer writhing in a dress. "I might end up wearing dresses," says Genn. "I have smoked a lot of crack, as has Kevin Rowland, so you never know."
Genn and his bandmate Martin Slattery were formerly in Joe Strummer's Mescaleros, before Genn went from being a "functioning drug addict" to a "degenerate" one, shooting up in toilets when he should have been on stage. At another point, he shared a flat with Robbie Williams after running out of friends who'd take him in and attempt to get him off narcotics. "He certainly didn't take me in to get me off drugs," he says of Williams, adding, "We had a laugh, for a while."
One of the Hours' most bittersweet songs, Icarus, in which Genn sings hauntingly about someone who had "a misanthrope for a dad, who crushed any hope he might have had, when he was just a boy", was written with Pete Doherty in mind. When he hit rock-bottom in 2001, Genn fled in tears to see an old friend at the Rough Trade label, Jeanette Lee, who got him into Narcotics Anonymous. A therapist told him he was between three and six months from death. In 2003, when Doherty - then on Rough Trade - hit similar trouble, Lee thought of Genn.
"She said, 'I think Peter's going to die,'" he remembers. "'He reminds me of you at the end. Can you talk to him?'" Genn spent an hour with Doherty, talking through the issues behind his addiction and convinced him to enter rehab, but it was fruitless. "He'll either be 35 and clean like me, or dead," says Genn. "Jimi Hendrix dead, Iggy Pop clean. There comes a point where the day has to become more important than the night."
Genn's speech reflects years of therapy, but he insists the all-consuming, excessive character traits that fuelled his drug abuse now fire his music. When the Hours wanted a disco beat on one song for their forthcoming album, for example, they sent for James Gadson, who played on Gloria Gaynor's I Will Survive. They recruited Jack Ashford, who played on all the classic Motown singles and had them howling with tales of how "'Little Stevie Wonder wus always bumpin' into shit!'"
That all costs money. It turns out that the Hours' album was funded by Damien Hirst before they got a record contract - the completed album convinced Polydor to sign them and reactivate the dormant A&M imprint for them.
Genn first met the artist - whose own dalliance with drugs has been well-documented - at the same Glastonbury he streaked at; he was also introduced at the festival to Joe Strummer, whose autograph he had got as a 10-year-old outside Sheffield Top Rank. On impulse (and on drugs), Genn took it upon himself to get the then-retired Clash singer back on stage.
"I just said, 'You're Joe Strummer. Get that Telecaster back round your neck and get off your arse!'" Genn ended up producing Strummer's solo album before finding himself in the Mescaleros with Slattery, a multi-instrumentalist he first met at a recording session for Robbie Williams. The pair are polar opposites, though Slattery - a dry, taciturn Mancunian - is well-versed in dealing with music's more unconstrained characters. One of his first jobs was in Shaun Ryder's Black Grape. Slattery had never so much as smoked a joint but soon found "the guys, with the lights down, doing heroin or whatever". But he wasn't fazed, having the legacy of teenage years playing working men's clubs with his "jazzer" father and getting "tongued by old grannies". After Black Grape, Slattery became a committed stoner, and it took "personal strength" to haul himself out of that rut 18 months ago, but he points out there's a world of difference between "not getting out of bed a few mornings and almost dying".
Only a year after cleaning up, Genn had to face up to Strummer's death in 2002. "We were devastated. We had the wake in this very pub." He grew more determined to form a band with Slattery. They kicked around ideas until, Genn says, Hirst grew tired and told them: "Look, you cunts, I'll put you in the studio."
Progress was slow until Genn attended a Patti Smith gig, which made him decide his lyrics were rubbish in comparison. He wrote Ali in the Jungle, there and then, on his mobile phone. The rest followed.
The music reflects Genn's character: exuberance, tempered by a darker side. The essence of that divide, he says, is "the same as everybody else's: your parents fuck you up".
His father was a failed musician turned butcher - "a lovely bloke but an irresponsible parent" - who was kicked out by his mother when Genn was nine. But mention of his mother provokes an unsettling tirade: "Cunt. Violent, jealous, bitter, twisted." He says she beat him and threw him out of the family home when he was 14. According to Genn, his siblings have suffered addictions, and one had mental-health, problems and spent time in an institution. It's no surprise that some songs, such as the new single Back When You Were Good (a gigantic anthem that could fill stadiums with its anger - Genn will only say it refers to "a number of people") are unsparing in their vitriol.
Shortly before Genn formed the Hours, his father died in his arms. "He was an emaciated five-stone cancer victim, shitting and spewing blood all over me," he says. "It dawned on me then that that - or something like that - is going to happen to all of us. Taking heroin or just drifting is the avoidance of real life. There's no more time to waste. I want to rock till I fuckin' drop."
Back When You Were Good is released by A&M on January 22.
Useful links
The Hours website
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