Wilco : A Ghost Is Born
Originally released: 2004. Nonesuch Records
Hey, what happened to the funny noises? That's bound to be any fan's first reaction to Wilco's latest metamorphosis, yet another sharp turn, in sound and mood, for a band that seems compelled to change with every album. And in its own way, it's as eerie as anything Wilco have recorded yet.
Last time around, Wilco were dropped by Reprise Records because songwriter Jeff Tweedy and mixer Jim O'Rourke baked all sorts of buzzes and creaks into the songs on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Wilco put the songs online, and a more sympathetic label, Nonesuch, picked up the album, which debuted at Number Thirteen.
Though O'Rourke returns as co-producer, A Ghost Is Born is no sequel. Where Yankee Hotel Foxtrot sounded dense and surreal, the bulk of Ghost is spare and earthy, with streaks of Crazy Horse, the Band, the Beatles and the Replacements. Where YHF tried to assess America's soul, Ghost looks inward.
For most of the album, Wilco use guitars, bass, drums and keyboards, recorded with distinct realism and often played together live in the studio. Many tunes are slow and desolate, pausing occasionally as if unsure how to go on. While they ruminate, odd things sprout from within: spiraling electric-guitar jams, sustained feedback howls and, in "Less Than You Think," a meditative twelve-minute electronic coda that begins as quietly as an air-conditioner hum and opens out into a forest of sounds. "Spiders" starts out as metronomic one-chord kraut rock, launches Tweedy into spiky, scrabbling electric-guitar leads and, four minutes in, riffs its way into cantankerous rock.
Ghost's lyrics intertwine thoughts about a romance breaking up and a business relationship breaking down. "Company in My Back" could be talking about the record-label follies, but "Wishful Thinking" is more ominous: "The pressure devices/Hell in a nutshell/Is any song worth singing if it doesn't help?"
Yes. Instead of grand solutions, Tweedy offers illuminating curiosity about what can happen in a song. It's not experiment for experiment's sake. There's a sense that every note and sound on Ghost, even the spontaneous ones, have been selected for private but rigorous reasons. A drum tap here, a glimmering hammer dulcimer there, a jab of distorted guitar, an echo suddenly opening new spaces -- on Ghost, they say what words cannot.
JOHN PARELES. (Posted Jul 08, 2004)
List of Tracks
1 At Least That's What You Said
2 Hell Is Chrome
3 Spiders (Kidsmoke)
4 Muzzle Of Bees
5 Hummingbird
6 Handshake Drugs
7 Wishful Thinking
8 Company In My Back
9 I'm A Wheel
10 Theologians
11 Less Than You Think
12 The Late Greats
mardi, juillet 06, 2004
samedi, juillet 03, 2004
The Cure: Album by Album
Robert Smith recounts his band's many wild mood swings
By BILL CRANDALL
Before the release of Bloodflowers, fresh off a photo shoot and all made up in his trademark teased hair and lipstick, Robert Smith sat in a New York City hotel bar in front of a stack of Cure CDs. He picked up each one and recounted the story of its recording . . . sometimes with a laugh, sometimes with a grimace.
Smith was convinced -- as he's often been -- that his band's latest opus would be its last. As always, he was wrong, and we've updated the piece with Rolling Stone's recent interview about The Cure, Smith and his band's new -- and certainly not final -- album.
Three Imaginary Boys/Boys Don't Cry
1979/1980
After nearly every major label rejected their demo tape, three schoolmates from the London suburb of Crawley signed with Polydor imprint Fiction Records. Under the tutelage of label owner and producer Chris Parry, who landed the Jam and Siouxsie and the Banshees for Polydor, the Cure recorded their debut album, Three Imaginary Boys, at London's Morgan Studios in just three nights. The next year, Fiction repackaged most of the album with some early singles as the Boys Don't Cry album.
I was writing songs for the first album for a period of about two or three years. I wrote "10:15 Saturday Night" and "Killing an Arab" when I was about sixteen, and we recorded the album when I was eighteen, so I wasn't really still convinced by some of the songs. The pop songs like "Boys Don't Cry" are naive to the point of insanity [laughs]. But considering the age I was and the fact that I had done nothing apart from go to school -- no real life experience, everything was taken from books -- some of them are pretty good.
The Jam were recording their album during the day and we used to sneak in at night and use their equipment -- we knew the bloke who was looking after it -- to record our album. We just borrowed tape and stuff.
The first one is my least favorite Cure album. Obviously, they are my songs, and I was singing, but I had no control over any other aspect of it: the production, the choices of the songs, the running order, the artwork. It was all kind of done by Parry without my blessing. And even at that young age I was very pissed off. I had dreamed of making an album, and suddenly we were making it and my input was being disregarded. I decided from that day on we would always pay for ourselves and therefore retain total control.
Seventeen Seconds
1980
On the Cure's U.K. tour opening for Siouxsie and the Banshees, Smith began playing in both bands after the headlining band's guitarist defected. Smith wore the same drab clothing on stage for each set, prompting an NME scribe to write that the Cure had "no image, no style." When it was time to return to Morgan Studios, bassist Michael Dempsey voiced distaste for Smith's new atmospheric songs, and Smith replaced him with Simon Gallup. Enthralled with the new synthesizers coming out at the time, Smith also added keyboardist Matthieu Hartley.
With the money we got from Three Imaginary Boys I bought ten days of studio time. We only used eight, so I got my money back for the last two, which was lucky 'cause we spent far more than I thought we would on beer. We did all the photos the day we finished recording at about eight o'clock in the morning. I said to the bloke, "Could you do some that are out of focus." And they're the ones we used, because the ones in focus looked so hideous.
During Seventeen Seconds, we honestly felt that we were creating something no one else had done. From this point on, I thought that every album was going to be the last Cure album, so I always tried to make it something that would be kind of a milestone. I feel Seventeen Seconds is one of few albums that genuinely achieved that.
With "A Forest" I wanted to do something that was really atmospheric, and it has a fantastic sound. Chris Parry said, "If you make this sound radio friendly, you've got a big hit on your hands." I said, "But this is how it sounds. It's the sound I've got in my head. It doesn't matter about whether it's radio friendly." He sometimes thinks that I'm willfully kind of stopping this from having more success, but I'm not. One of the reasons people like the band is because they're never quite sure what's gonna happen next. If we were predictable, we wouldn't have really lasted this long.
Faith
1981
By Smith's own admission, Faith is the Cure's "difficult third album." Recorded over a month in a handful of different studios, the somber Faith was born of death, isolation drugs and alcohol.
The whole band had a family member die, and that really colored Faith. The initial demos that we did in my mom and dad's dining room are really quite upbeat. Then, within about two weeks, the whole mood of the band had completely changed. I wrote "The Funeral Party" and "All Cats Are Grey" in one night, and that really set the tone for the album.
When we toured on the back of this album, the mood was so somber. It wasn't a particularly healthy thing to do because we were reliving a really bad time, night after night, and it got incredibly depressing. And so I kind of have mixed feelings about Faith.
A lot of people around the band began reacting badly to the fact that we were becoming successful, on a very limited scale. There was a lot of jealousy and sour grapes and people saying, "You've changed!" We had changed because we weren't going to the same pubs all the time, because we were touring Europe. So we lost a lot friends, and we became much more insular. We would just drink ourselves into oblivion, and play these songs.
Pornography
1982
The Cure's fourth album, beginning with the lyric, "It doesn't matter if we all die," was even darker, prompting British rag Rip It Up to write, "Ian Curtis, by comparison, was a bundle of laughs." Smith began spraying his hair in all directions and wearing lipstick, and lack of an image would never again be a problem for the Cure.
During Pornography, the band was falling apart, because of the drinking and drugs. I was pretty seriously strung out a lot of the time, so I'm not sure if my recollection is right.
I know for a fact that we recorded some of the songs in the toilets to get a really horrible feeling, because the toilets were dirty and grim. Simon doesn't remember any of that, but I have a photo of me sitting on a toilet, in my clothes, trying to patch up of some of the lyrics. It's a tragic photo.
We immersed ourselves in the more sordid side of life, and it did have a very detrimental effect on everyone in the group. We got ahold of some very disturbing films and imagery to kind of put us in the mood. Afterwards, I thought, "Was it really worth it?" We were only in our really early twenties, and it shocked us more than I realized -- how base people could be, how evil people could be.
There is a certain type of Cure fan who would hold Pornography in greater esteem than anything else we've ever done, but, at the time, most people hated it. They're the only songs we've ever played where people would walk out or throw things. But then we probably were not that good on stage [laughs].
I don't have particularly fond memories of Pornography, but I think it's one of the best things we've ever done, and it would have never got made if we hadn't taken things to excess. People have often said, "Nothing you've done has had the same kind of intensity or passion." But I don't think you can make too many albums like that, because you wouldn't be alive.
Japanese Whispers
1983
Looking to shed his "gloomy cult figure image" and leave behind the squalid world of Pornography, Smith abandoned his dismal London flat and returned home to live with his parents. The Cure, now Smith, Tolhurst and a revolving cast of characters, put together an EP full of downright chipper singles.
It took me a few weeks to recuperate in the bedroom I had grown up in, because I was like totally gone. And I decided to be a pop star [laughs].
When I took "Lets Go to Bed" to Fiction and played it to them, it was like silence. They looked at me, like, "This is it. He's really lost it." They said, "You can't be serious. Your fans are gonna hate it." I understood that, but I wanted to get rid of all that. I didn't want that side of life anymore; I wanted to do something that's really kind of cheerful. I thought, "This isn't going to work. No one's ever gonna buy into this. It's so ludicrous that I'm gonna go from goth idol to pop star in three easy lessons."
Suddenly, "Let's Go to Bed" was turning into a big hit, on the West Coast particularly, and we had a young, predominately female, teenage audience. It went from intense, menacing, psychotic goths to people with perfect white teeth. It was a very weird transition, but I enjoyed it. I thought it was really funny.
We followed it up with "The Walk" and "Love Cats," and I just felt totally liberated. With "Love Cats," I suggested that we were going to do something that's kind of like a Disney take on jazz, based around the Aristocats. And suddenly everything we did started to sell.
The Top
1984
From '82 to '84, Smith sporadically reprised his role in the Siouxsie and the Banshees. Playing guitar in someone else's band gave Smith a live outlet without all the responsibility. Smith also formed the British Invasion-inspired side project the Glove with Banshees bassist Steve Severin, and they released their lone album, Blue Sunshine, in 1983. In 1984, when Smith returned to the studio to work on The Top, he was without a band, and almost out of ideas.
I was kind of cajoled back into making a Cure album by Fiction, who had me under contract and could have stopped me from playing with the Banshees.
The Top was the closest I've ever come to making a solo album. I didn't really have a very coherent idea of what the album was, and I think it shows. It's probably the patchiest Cure album.
I suppose the Banshees and the Glove worked to my disadvantage, because rather than putting the best ideas into a Cure album I was spread a bit thin. There are a couple of Glove songs, "Sex Eye Makeup" and "Blues in Drag," that I wanted on The Top. "Dressing Up" was actually done as a Glove song, and then I didn't play it to [Severin] because I thought, "I like this one too much" [laughs].
I played all the instruments, except drums. When I listen back to the album, I have a strange image of me sitting in the middle of the studio floor surrounded by little bongos and spoons and things. I would just sit there and make things up with an acoustic guitar. [Producer] Dave Allen and I would play, and I edited it down a couple weeks later. I don't think any of the songs were actually played as songs; they were kind of created later.
It was a bit sad, because it was very badly reviewed and it dented my confidence in that way of working, and I put a stop to it.
The Head on the Door
1985
Craving the power of a real band again, Smith expanded the Cure to a five-piece. A 180 from The Top, The Head on the Door was recorded as live takes. The MTV hit "Close to Me" cemented Smith's hair and lipstick image, which prompted him to get a crewcut on the ensuing U.S. tour.
During the demos of The Head on the Door, I knew that this was the band. The album's got a real fantastic freshness to it, and it was a really pleasant environment. All the girlfriends got on well, and the band became much more like a family. That old gang mentality was growing a little bit stale. By this time I was twenty-five and realized I should grow up a bit.
I bought a good metal six-string acoustic, and as soon as I picked it up I started playing the chords to "In Between Days." I'd never really bothered playing one, because I'd never owned a good one.
Porl [Thompson] has always been a great guitarist, and Boris [Williams] is an extraordinary drummer. We could never have attempted "Six Different Ways" before, because we never had a drummer who could play 6/8 time. It was a great feeling to be in a band that played well. I thought, "God, we could jam -- should we so desire."
A lot of the lyrics came out of really weird conversations that we were having in the studio. We had this fatuous argument about how many ways there were to skin a cat. The inanity was staggering [laughs]. And someone said, "There are definitely six different ways." And it just seemed like a nice title because of the 6/8 time.
MTV was running hourly news bulletins, like, "Yes, it's true; he's cut his hair off." I said, "Are they serious, or are they being funny?" Although I don't like what I look like at the best of times, I think I look particularly hideous with cropped hair. I did it on that tour because I was getting so fed with [press about] "hair and lipstick, hair and lipstick."
Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me
1987
For the recording of Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, the Cure retreated to a vineyard in the South of France. Songwriting-wise, the album was the band's first group effort, and, according to Smith, it became a double album simply because they were having so much fun that they didn't want to stop. "Just Like Heaven" would crack the U.S. Top Forty, a Cure first.
The dinners were really pleasant occasions. Again, the girls were there, so the conversation was kind of elevated above what it usually is when it's just a bunch of blokes.
After we'd finish recording for the day, I would go and sit down in the woods and write another song. And they were done so fast. We didn't fuck about with production; there's a quite touchingly naive sound on some of the songs.
We use to have this thing called "the panel," and all the girls would sit on the sofa in the back of the control room and give the songs marks out of ten -- so there was a really big female input. They wouldn't like "Fight," which was really not a girly song. But the more male members of the band were like, "This is rock! This is what we should be doing, not this other wussy stuff." "Shiver and Shake" was my male kind of song. "The Perfect Girl" was a very female song. I think that's probably why the album had such a huge appeal, and why it did so well.
I remember on the Kiss Me tour we were in Los Angeles, and there were girls taking their clothes off and lying down in front of the bus to stop us from driving away. And I remember thinking, "This isn't really what I imagined I would be doing with this band."
Disintegration
1989
Bliss turned to anguish in 1989, when Smith turned thirty and began taking stock of his life. He wanted to again make an "important" album, and talked of disbanding the Cure upon its completion.
It sounds really big-headed, but everyone wanted a piece of me. I was fighting against being a pop star, being expected to be larger than life all the time, and it really did my head in.
I got really depressed, and I started doing drugs again -- hallucinogenic drugs. When we were gonna make the album I decided I would be monk-like and not talk to anyone. It was a bit pretentious really, looking back, but I actually wanted an environment that was slightly unpleasant.
Everyone expected me to be writing songs that were gonna follow-up "Just Like Heaven." They thought that we were gonna keep things light and bouncy with an occasional bit of gloom, but we did the opposite.
I wrote "Love Song" for Mary, my wife, as a wedding present, and I put it on the album to be kind of romantic. I thought it was the weakest song on there, and suddenly it went to Number Two in America. It was kept off the top by, like, Janet Jackson. I thought, "Of all the songs I'd written, this is the one that kind that cracks through." It was quite disappointing.
I realized at this time that, despite my best efforts, we had actually become everything that I didn't want us to become: a stadium rock band [laughs]. Most of the relationships within the band and outside of the band fell apart. Calling it Disintegration was kind of tempting fate, and fate retaliated. The family idea of the group really fell apart too after Disintegration. It was the end of the golden period.
Wish
1992
During the three years since Disintegration's release, "alternative" music had become mainstream, and the Cure returned to an ever-expanding new audience. On the strength of singles "Friday I'm in Love" and "High," the Cure continued playing stadiums, culminating in the concert film Show and accompanying live albums Show and Paris.
On the Wish album I felt much more isolated, like I was making the album on my own, and the others were just playing. Some days it would be really, really great, and other days it would be really, really horrible.
After Bloodflowers, Wish is actually my favorite Cure album, but I felt we weren't really doing anything different with it; I just felt we were making an album. I suppose that's what was wrong with it. It was almost like consolidating where we were. We were gonna go back out and we were gonna get more fans and we were gonna play bigger places, and somehow I lost my enthusiasm. There were elements lyrically and the way I was singing that I was almost going through the motions.
The Show concert in Detroit was the band at the peak of its powers. We had been together at that point for eight years, and it was so tight, but I set up the film because I knew that after the Wish tour the band would fall apart.
Porl left and then Boris left soon after. And then Simon left. Perry [Bamonte, guitar] and I were sitting in a room talking about doing demos for a new album, and we just both burst out laughing because we realized that we didn't have a band anymore.
Wild Mood Swings
1996
Drained from maintaining the business entity the Cure had become, and the extensive touring, Smith took his time reforming the band. Although, by his own admission, Smith constructed many of the songs with radio play in mind, the Cure's extended break cost the band dearly in public profile, setting up Wild Mood Swings for commercial failure.
When we came back to do Wild Mood Swings, I got that sense of fun back. And it shows in the album; there are some pretty demented songs on there. But it was a shame, because it got slagged when it came out. Fans hated it as well. It's the only time I've been hugely disappointed.
I suppose it was because "The 13th" -- with this sort of crackpot salsa feel -- was the first thing that they'd heard from the band in years, and I don't think they gave it a chance after that. Every album up to that point had sold more than the last one, and suddenly the record company was confronted with this horrifying drop in sales, and they didn't have a fuckin' clue as to why we'd ever sold records in the first place. That sort of stymied any attempts at a promotion campaign, because they didn't really know what they were promoting or who to.
The album suffers from being too long. And it's disjointed. I was trying to write in different styles, and wanted us to sound like different bands, almost going after the Kiss Me idea. But, because we'd lost Boris, and before Jason [Cooper] settled in, we had a different drummer every week. I would often forget the name of the person who was drumming.
Bloodflowers
2000
Finished in May of 1999, but delayed because, according to Smith, the record company wanted to release it "post millennial fever," Bloodflowers is a clear departure from Wild Mood Swings. In fact, like Faith, Pornography and most of Disintegration, the album is one epic mood piece, wherein the atmospheric collective whole reigns over the individual songs.
Before we did Blooflowers I actually wanted it to be short album, because I find that seventy minutes of one artist is, almost without exception, too much. So I set a target of forty-five minutes, but, even cutting it down to nine songs, we we're still over an hour. I realize, in hindsight, that it's the songs themselves that probably need trimming back, but I think that they benefit from their length. I've done an edit of "Watching Me Fall" at home, and I got it down to under six minutes [from eleven minutes, thirteen seconds], but it's just not the same song.
I edited the first track, "Out of This World," down from 6:30 to 4:45, but I was told that the introduction was still too long for radio. But I like that slow development, and I didn't want to impose the three-and-a-half-minute structure on anything I was writing, because it just felt stupid. We did a couple of what we'd consider to be pop songs at the demo stage and they just sounded so shallow.
But recording Bloodflowers was the best experience I've had since doing the Kiss Me album. I achieved my goals, which were to make an album, enjoy making it, and end up with something that has real intense, emotional content. And I didn't kill myself in the process.
The Cure
2004
This past winter, the Cure -- enjoying a renaissance thanks to the rise of disciples like Interpol, the Rapture and Thursday, who will all open for the Cure on this summer's Curiosa tour -- headed into a London studio with aggressive-minded producer Ross Robinson (Korn, Slipknot) to record The Cure. The result, not surprisingly, is heavy.
I was on the point of making the album I had been waiting to make for about fifteen years. We [Robinson and Smith] met at the end of Coachella. I knew after the first day of sitting and talking to him that I wanted to work with him.
I started writing really heavy songs, because, when you're working with Ross, he's bound to want dark and moody. What became very apparent is that he liked all kinds of things we did. He's really into the melodic side of the band and the pop side of the band. We ended up with thirty-seven demos and we all sat down and gave everything marks up to twenty. We didn't really leave the studio for the last couple of months. We had no visitors. No one was allowed in. It was quite a surreal experience.
It was treated as almost a long live event. Everyday it was a different song. We'd be facing the control booth so we could see Ross and we would figure out the technical stuff. He put us in a very confined space, right on top of each other, with eye-to-eye contact. At night, we'd face the other way, light the candles and suddenly it became very real. I would stand up and away we would go.
Everything we'd done before was going to culminate on this record -- that was the mind set that we had when we were in the studio. And I would say that more passion went into the making of this record than all the others combined.
By BILL CRANDALL
Before the release of Bloodflowers, fresh off a photo shoot and all made up in his trademark teased hair and lipstick, Robert Smith sat in a New York City hotel bar in front of a stack of Cure CDs. He picked up each one and recounted the story of its recording . . . sometimes with a laugh, sometimes with a grimace.
Smith was convinced -- as he's often been -- that his band's latest opus would be its last. As always, he was wrong, and we've updated the piece with Rolling Stone's recent interview about The Cure, Smith and his band's new -- and certainly not final -- album.
Three Imaginary Boys/Boys Don't Cry
1979/1980
After nearly every major label rejected their demo tape, three schoolmates from the London suburb of Crawley signed with Polydor imprint Fiction Records. Under the tutelage of label owner and producer Chris Parry, who landed the Jam and Siouxsie and the Banshees for Polydor, the Cure recorded their debut album, Three Imaginary Boys, at London's Morgan Studios in just three nights. The next year, Fiction repackaged most of the album with some early singles as the Boys Don't Cry album.
I was writing songs for the first album for a period of about two or three years. I wrote "10:15 Saturday Night" and "Killing an Arab" when I was about sixteen, and we recorded the album when I was eighteen, so I wasn't really still convinced by some of the songs. The pop songs like "Boys Don't Cry" are naive to the point of insanity [laughs]. But considering the age I was and the fact that I had done nothing apart from go to school -- no real life experience, everything was taken from books -- some of them are pretty good.
The Jam were recording their album during the day and we used to sneak in at night and use their equipment -- we knew the bloke who was looking after it -- to record our album. We just borrowed tape and stuff.
The first one is my least favorite Cure album. Obviously, they are my songs, and I was singing, but I had no control over any other aspect of it: the production, the choices of the songs, the running order, the artwork. It was all kind of done by Parry without my blessing. And even at that young age I was very pissed off. I had dreamed of making an album, and suddenly we were making it and my input was being disregarded. I decided from that day on we would always pay for ourselves and therefore retain total control.
Seventeen Seconds
1980
On the Cure's U.K. tour opening for Siouxsie and the Banshees, Smith began playing in both bands after the headlining band's guitarist defected. Smith wore the same drab clothing on stage for each set, prompting an NME scribe to write that the Cure had "no image, no style." When it was time to return to Morgan Studios, bassist Michael Dempsey voiced distaste for Smith's new atmospheric songs, and Smith replaced him with Simon Gallup. Enthralled with the new synthesizers coming out at the time, Smith also added keyboardist Matthieu Hartley.
With the money we got from Three Imaginary Boys I bought ten days of studio time. We only used eight, so I got my money back for the last two, which was lucky 'cause we spent far more than I thought we would on beer. We did all the photos the day we finished recording at about eight o'clock in the morning. I said to the bloke, "Could you do some that are out of focus." And they're the ones we used, because the ones in focus looked so hideous.
During Seventeen Seconds, we honestly felt that we were creating something no one else had done. From this point on, I thought that every album was going to be the last Cure album, so I always tried to make it something that would be kind of a milestone. I feel Seventeen Seconds is one of few albums that genuinely achieved that.
With "A Forest" I wanted to do something that was really atmospheric, and it has a fantastic sound. Chris Parry said, "If you make this sound radio friendly, you've got a big hit on your hands." I said, "But this is how it sounds. It's the sound I've got in my head. It doesn't matter about whether it's radio friendly." He sometimes thinks that I'm willfully kind of stopping this from having more success, but I'm not. One of the reasons people like the band is because they're never quite sure what's gonna happen next. If we were predictable, we wouldn't have really lasted this long.
Faith
1981
By Smith's own admission, Faith is the Cure's "difficult third album." Recorded over a month in a handful of different studios, the somber Faith was born of death, isolation drugs and alcohol.
The whole band had a family member die, and that really colored Faith. The initial demos that we did in my mom and dad's dining room are really quite upbeat. Then, within about two weeks, the whole mood of the band had completely changed. I wrote "The Funeral Party" and "All Cats Are Grey" in one night, and that really set the tone for the album.
When we toured on the back of this album, the mood was so somber. It wasn't a particularly healthy thing to do because we were reliving a really bad time, night after night, and it got incredibly depressing. And so I kind of have mixed feelings about Faith.
A lot of people around the band began reacting badly to the fact that we were becoming successful, on a very limited scale. There was a lot of jealousy and sour grapes and people saying, "You've changed!" We had changed because we weren't going to the same pubs all the time, because we were touring Europe. So we lost a lot friends, and we became much more insular. We would just drink ourselves into oblivion, and play these songs.
Pornography
1982
The Cure's fourth album, beginning with the lyric, "It doesn't matter if we all die," was even darker, prompting British rag Rip It Up to write, "Ian Curtis, by comparison, was a bundle of laughs." Smith began spraying his hair in all directions and wearing lipstick, and lack of an image would never again be a problem for the Cure.
During Pornography, the band was falling apart, because of the drinking and drugs. I was pretty seriously strung out a lot of the time, so I'm not sure if my recollection is right.
I know for a fact that we recorded some of the songs in the toilets to get a really horrible feeling, because the toilets were dirty and grim. Simon doesn't remember any of that, but I have a photo of me sitting on a toilet, in my clothes, trying to patch up of some of the lyrics. It's a tragic photo.
We immersed ourselves in the more sordid side of life, and it did have a very detrimental effect on everyone in the group. We got ahold of some very disturbing films and imagery to kind of put us in the mood. Afterwards, I thought, "Was it really worth it?" We were only in our really early twenties, and it shocked us more than I realized -- how base people could be, how evil people could be.
There is a certain type of Cure fan who would hold Pornography in greater esteem than anything else we've ever done, but, at the time, most people hated it. They're the only songs we've ever played where people would walk out or throw things. But then we probably were not that good on stage [laughs].
I don't have particularly fond memories of Pornography, but I think it's one of the best things we've ever done, and it would have never got made if we hadn't taken things to excess. People have often said, "Nothing you've done has had the same kind of intensity or passion." But I don't think you can make too many albums like that, because you wouldn't be alive.
Japanese Whispers
1983
Looking to shed his "gloomy cult figure image" and leave behind the squalid world of Pornography, Smith abandoned his dismal London flat and returned home to live with his parents. The Cure, now Smith, Tolhurst and a revolving cast of characters, put together an EP full of downright chipper singles.
It took me a few weeks to recuperate in the bedroom I had grown up in, because I was like totally gone. And I decided to be a pop star [laughs].
When I took "Lets Go to Bed" to Fiction and played it to them, it was like silence. They looked at me, like, "This is it. He's really lost it." They said, "You can't be serious. Your fans are gonna hate it." I understood that, but I wanted to get rid of all that. I didn't want that side of life anymore; I wanted to do something that's really kind of cheerful. I thought, "This isn't going to work. No one's ever gonna buy into this. It's so ludicrous that I'm gonna go from goth idol to pop star in three easy lessons."
Suddenly, "Let's Go to Bed" was turning into a big hit, on the West Coast particularly, and we had a young, predominately female, teenage audience. It went from intense, menacing, psychotic goths to people with perfect white teeth. It was a very weird transition, but I enjoyed it. I thought it was really funny.
We followed it up with "The Walk" and "Love Cats," and I just felt totally liberated. With "Love Cats," I suggested that we were going to do something that's kind of like a Disney take on jazz, based around the Aristocats. And suddenly everything we did started to sell.
The Top
1984
From '82 to '84, Smith sporadically reprised his role in the Siouxsie and the Banshees. Playing guitar in someone else's band gave Smith a live outlet without all the responsibility. Smith also formed the British Invasion-inspired side project the Glove with Banshees bassist Steve Severin, and they released their lone album, Blue Sunshine, in 1983. In 1984, when Smith returned to the studio to work on The Top, he was without a band, and almost out of ideas.
I was kind of cajoled back into making a Cure album by Fiction, who had me under contract and could have stopped me from playing with the Banshees.
The Top was the closest I've ever come to making a solo album. I didn't really have a very coherent idea of what the album was, and I think it shows. It's probably the patchiest Cure album.
I suppose the Banshees and the Glove worked to my disadvantage, because rather than putting the best ideas into a Cure album I was spread a bit thin. There are a couple of Glove songs, "Sex Eye Makeup" and "Blues in Drag," that I wanted on The Top. "Dressing Up" was actually done as a Glove song, and then I didn't play it to [Severin] because I thought, "I like this one too much" [laughs].
I played all the instruments, except drums. When I listen back to the album, I have a strange image of me sitting in the middle of the studio floor surrounded by little bongos and spoons and things. I would just sit there and make things up with an acoustic guitar. [Producer] Dave Allen and I would play, and I edited it down a couple weeks later. I don't think any of the songs were actually played as songs; they were kind of created later.
It was a bit sad, because it was very badly reviewed and it dented my confidence in that way of working, and I put a stop to it.
The Head on the Door
1985
Craving the power of a real band again, Smith expanded the Cure to a five-piece. A 180 from The Top, The Head on the Door was recorded as live takes. The MTV hit "Close to Me" cemented Smith's hair and lipstick image, which prompted him to get a crewcut on the ensuing U.S. tour.
During the demos of The Head on the Door, I knew that this was the band. The album's got a real fantastic freshness to it, and it was a really pleasant environment. All the girlfriends got on well, and the band became much more like a family. That old gang mentality was growing a little bit stale. By this time I was twenty-five and realized I should grow up a bit.
I bought a good metal six-string acoustic, and as soon as I picked it up I started playing the chords to "In Between Days." I'd never really bothered playing one, because I'd never owned a good one.
Porl [Thompson] has always been a great guitarist, and Boris [Williams] is an extraordinary drummer. We could never have attempted "Six Different Ways" before, because we never had a drummer who could play 6/8 time. It was a great feeling to be in a band that played well. I thought, "God, we could jam -- should we so desire."
A lot of the lyrics came out of really weird conversations that we were having in the studio. We had this fatuous argument about how many ways there were to skin a cat. The inanity was staggering [laughs]. And someone said, "There are definitely six different ways." And it just seemed like a nice title because of the 6/8 time.
MTV was running hourly news bulletins, like, "Yes, it's true; he's cut his hair off." I said, "Are they serious, or are they being funny?" Although I don't like what I look like at the best of times, I think I look particularly hideous with cropped hair. I did it on that tour because I was getting so fed with [press about] "hair and lipstick, hair and lipstick."
Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me
1987
For the recording of Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, the Cure retreated to a vineyard in the South of France. Songwriting-wise, the album was the band's first group effort, and, according to Smith, it became a double album simply because they were having so much fun that they didn't want to stop. "Just Like Heaven" would crack the U.S. Top Forty, a Cure first.
The dinners were really pleasant occasions. Again, the girls were there, so the conversation was kind of elevated above what it usually is when it's just a bunch of blokes.
After we'd finish recording for the day, I would go and sit down in the woods and write another song. And they were done so fast. We didn't fuck about with production; there's a quite touchingly naive sound on some of the songs.
We use to have this thing called "the panel," and all the girls would sit on the sofa in the back of the control room and give the songs marks out of ten -- so there was a really big female input. They wouldn't like "Fight," which was really not a girly song. But the more male members of the band were like, "This is rock! This is what we should be doing, not this other wussy stuff." "Shiver and Shake" was my male kind of song. "The Perfect Girl" was a very female song. I think that's probably why the album had such a huge appeal, and why it did so well.
I remember on the Kiss Me tour we were in Los Angeles, and there were girls taking their clothes off and lying down in front of the bus to stop us from driving away. And I remember thinking, "This isn't really what I imagined I would be doing with this band."
Disintegration
1989
Bliss turned to anguish in 1989, when Smith turned thirty and began taking stock of his life. He wanted to again make an "important" album, and talked of disbanding the Cure upon its completion.
It sounds really big-headed, but everyone wanted a piece of me. I was fighting against being a pop star, being expected to be larger than life all the time, and it really did my head in.
I got really depressed, and I started doing drugs again -- hallucinogenic drugs. When we were gonna make the album I decided I would be monk-like and not talk to anyone. It was a bit pretentious really, looking back, but I actually wanted an environment that was slightly unpleasant.
Everyone expected me to be writing songs that were gonna follow-up "Just Like Heaven." They thought that we were gonna keep things light and bouncy with an occasional bit of gloom, but we did the opposite.
I wrote "Love Song" for Mary, my wife, as a wedding present, and I put it on the album to be kind of romantic. I thought it was the weakest song on there, and suddenly it went to Number Two in America. It was kept off the top by, like, Janet Jackson. I thought, "Of all the songs I'd written, this is the one that kind that cracks through." It was quite disappointing.
I realized at this time that, despite my best efforts, we had actually become everything that I didn't want us to become: a stadium rock band [laughs]. Most of the relationships within the band and outside of the band fell apart. Calling it Disintegration was kind of tempting fate, and fate retaliated. The family idea of the group really fell apart too after Disintegration. It was the end of the golden period.
Wish
1992
During the three years since Disintegration's release, "alternative" music had become mainstream, and the Cure returned to an ever-expanding new audience. On the strength of singles "Friday I'm in Love" and "High," the Cure continued playing stadiums, culminating in the concert film Show and accompanying live albums Show and Paris.
On the Wish album I felt much more isolated, like I was making the album on my own, and the others were just playing. Some days it would be really, really great, and other days it would be really, really horrible.
After Bloodflowers, Wish is actually my favorite Cure album, but I felt we weren't really doing anything different with it; I just felt we were making an album. I suppose that's what was wrong with it. It was almost like consolidating where we were. We were gonna go back out and we were gonna get more fans and we were gonna play bigger places, and somehow I lost my enthusiasm. There were elements lyrically and the way I was singing that I was almost going through the motions.
The Show concert in Detroit was the band at the peak of its powers. We had been together at that point for eight years, and it was so tight, but I set up the film because I knew that after the Wish tour the band would fall apart.
Porl left and then Boris left soon after. And then Simon left. Perry [Bamonte, guitar] and I were sitting in a room talking about doing demos for a new album, and we just both burst out laughing because we realized that we didn't have a band anymore.
Wild Mood Swings
1996
Drained from maintaining the business entity the Cure had become, and the extensive touring, Smith took his time reforming the band. Although, by his own admission, Smith constructed many of the songs with radio play in mind, the Cure's extended break cost the band dearly in public profile, setting up Wild Mood Swings for commercial failure.
When we came back to do Wild Mood Swings, I got that sense of fun back. And it shows in the album; there are some pretty demented songs on there. But it was a shame, because it got slagged when it came out. Fans hated it as well. It's the only time I've been hugely disappointed.
I suppose it was because "The 13th" -- with this sort of crackpot salsa feel -- was the first thing that they'd heard from the band in years, and I don't think they gave it a chance after that. Every album up to that point had sold more than the last one, and suddenly the record company was confronted with this horrifying drop in sales, and they didn't have a fuckin' clue as to why we'd ever sold records in the first place. That sort of stymied any attempts at a promotion campaign, because they didn't really know what they were promoting or who to.
The album suffers from being too long. And it's disjointed. I was trying to write in different styles, and wanted us to sound like different bands, almost going after the Kiss Me idea. But, because we'd lost Boris, and before Jason [Cooper] settled in, we had a different drummer every week. I would often forget the name of the person who was drumming.
Bloodflowers
2000
Finished in May of 1999, but delayed because, according to Smith, the record company wanted to release it "post millennial fever," Bloodflowers is a clear departure from Wild Mood Swings. In fact, like Faith, Pornography and most of Disintegration, the album is one epic mood piece, wherein the atmospheric collective whole reigns over the individual songs.
Before we did Blooflowers I actually wanted it to be short album, because I find that seventy minutes of one artist is, almost without exception, too much. So I set a target of forty-five minutes, but, even cutting it down to nine songs, we we're still over an hour. I realize, in hindsight, that it's the songs themselves that probably need trimming back, but I think that they benefit from their length. I've done an edit of "Watching Me Fall" at home, and I got it down to under six minutes [from eleven minutes, thirteen seconds], but it's just not the same song.
I edited the first track, "Out of This World," down from 6:30 to 4:45, but I was told that the introduction was still too long for radio. But I like that slow development, and I didn't want to impose the three-and-a-half-minute structure on anything I was writing, because it just felt stupid. We did a couple of what we'd consider to be pop songs at the demo stage and they just sounded so shallow.
But recording Bloodflowers was the best experience I've had since doing the Kiss Me album. I achieved my goals, which were to make an album, enjoy making it, and end up with something that has real intense, emotional content. And I didn't kill myself in the process.
The Cure
2004
This past winter, the Cure -- enjoying a renaissance thanks to the rise of disciples like Interpol, the Rapture and Thursday, who will all open for the Cure on this summer's Curiosa tour -- headed into a London studio with aggressive-minded producer Ross Robinson (Korn, Slipknot) to record The Cure. The result, not surprisingly, is heavy.
I was on the point of making the album I had been waiting to make for about fifteen years. We [Robinson and Smith] met at the end of Coachella. I knew after the first day of sitting and talking to him that I wanted to work with him.
I started writing really heavy songs, because, when you're working with Ross, he's bound to want dark and moody. What became very apparent is that he liked all kinds of things we did. He's really into the melodic side of the band and the pop side of the band. We ended up with thirty-seven demos and we all sat down and gave everything marks up to twenty. We didn't really leave the studio for the last couple of months. We had no visitors. No one was allowed in. It was quite a surreal experience.
It was treated as almost a long live event. Everyday it was a different song. We'd be facing the control booth so we could see Ross and we would figure out the technical stuff. He put us in a very confined space, right on top of each other, with eye-to-eye contact. At night, we'd face the other way, light the candles and suddenly it became very real. I would stand up and away we would go.
Everything we'd done before was going to culminate on this record -- that was the mind set that we had when we were in the studio. And I would say that more passion went into the making of this record than all the others combined.
Phil Manzanera: Dance away the heartache
The death of a friend has driven Phil Manzanera to make his best solo album. Andy Gill talks to the Roxy Music guitarist
02 July 2004
Several floors up a converted warehouse block in a tiny mews in north-west London, Phil Manzanera lounges in the pristine calm of his home studio. Every 10 minutes or so a train rattles by below. "When you're setting up a studio, there are two things you should never do," he says. "One is to build it at the top of a house; the other is to situate it next to a railway line." He chuckles wryly. "So here it is."
The Roxy Music guitarist has lived here since divorce forced his relocation from Surrey. He seems quite settled, but he's used to moving on. He spent most of his childhood abroad, most memorably in Cuba, where he remembers his mother pressing his face to the floor as bullets pinged around them during the revolution: the family home in Havana was directly opposite that of the dictator, Fulgencio Batista.
For a while, Manzanera became obsessed with Latin American music and took to producing Spanish-language artists like Sergio Dias, Tania Libertad, Moncada and Heroes del Silencio. He even made his own stab at fusing South American music with rock on 1990's Southern Cross album. "It didn't work, obviously," he says. But the recent success of bands like Mexico's Cafe Tacuba and Kinky have revived Manzanera's interest, and he is set to produce Kinky's next album.
Manzanera became interested in music as a child in Cuba, where he first acquired a guitar. His next significant musical influence came later, as a teenager in Venezuela, where a life-changing brush with the music of The Beatles led to him asking if he could go to school in England. Packed off to boarding school in Dulwich, he found himself plunged into swinging-Sixties London. This was to be the defining period of his life. His schoolmate (and later bandmate) Bill MacCormick had an older brother, Ian, who worked in a record shop, and at night the three of them would spend long hours investigating the the shop's stock.
"Ian and Bill were so clued-in - the antennae were up all the time for all this stuff from America," remembers Manzanera, fondly, "like the first Velvet Underground album with the peel-off banana. We had our own little musical university; we could check out Varèse, Mingus, the library records, all this stuff. And their parents knew Robert Wyatt's parents, so they knew Robert when he was in Soft Machine. His house was halfway between school and Bill and Ian's house. He was the first pop star we knew - and in those days he did look like a pop star, with the yellow clothes and the Brian Jones haircut. At every Soft Machine gig, even the tiniest ones, we were there. We soaked up all the things that were happening in London, all the events, International Times, Oz, Sgt Pepper, the films that came out then, everything - they were mad, mad times!"
All these memories came flooding back last year when Manzanera learned of Ian MacCormick's death. He had long since changed his name to Ian MacDonald and become one of the country's most eminent music journalists, the highly respected author of books such as The New Shostakovich and the acclaimed analysis of The Beatles' recordings, Revolution in the Head. He had just published an anthology of essays, The People's Music, when he committed suicide last summer.
"It really got to me," says Manzanera. "I'd known him for such a long time, and he'd been so supportive all through my career." He was so enthusiastic about music, and so funny - ask him a casual question, and a six-page e-mail would arrive in return. You'd say you didn't know what classical music to listen to, and he'd send this enormous list, almost a book! When I was setting this studio up, he called and said, 'I've got this great idea what you should be doing: an instrumental combining "Telstar" with "Wonderful Life" - what are you doing next week, I'm coming round!' Another time, he'd got a whole load of new Brazilian music, and he said, 'Drop everything you're doing and get a plane to Sao Paulo, that's where it's happening!'. He could be very serious, but he'd always sign off, after six pages of highbrow stuff, with something like 'What a load of bollocks!'. That was his saving grace. But he was so right about so many things."
When Manzanera heard of MacDonald's death, he was setting off on a sailing holiday with his daughters, and couldn't attend the funeral. But as he strummed away on the boat, he formed the idea of a lasting tribute to his friend.
"I had written a note with the flowers I sent, saying 'Wish You Well', and making some joke - because he was a very funny guy - about being 'off with Saint Serene', which was a lyric he wrote for a track called 'Flight 19'," Manzanera explains. "When I got back, I suggested to his brother Bill it might be nice to do a song as a tribute to Ian, and just have people who knew him playing on it. I asked Chrissie Hynde, to whom he gave her first break when he was Assistant Editor at the NME - ironically, it was an interview with Eno! - if she'd like to play harmonica on it. Paul Thompson, from Roxy, was on drums, and my engineer Jamie Johnson was on bass. And I persuaded Bill to play a bass solo, which a medical condition has prevented him from doing for 25 years: to me, I can hear so many emotions - anger, love, everything - in that solo."
As he worked on the track "Wish You Well", Manzanera found recollections of old times with Ian and Bill were prompting more and more songs. He realised he had enough for an album, loosely based around the hopes and dreams of that seminal era.
He called on old friends, including Roxy cohorts Andy Mackay and Brian Eno, Pink Floyd guitarist Dave Gilmour, and Robert Wyatt, whose recent Cuckooland album was the first project completed at Manzanera's new studio.
Dubbed 6PM - it's his sixth solo effort - the album is undoubtedly Manzanera's strongest, blessed with a natural grain and texture, his usual questing musical spirit, and a gentle lyricism illuminated by the belief that, however dark things may seem, there is always the possibility that they can be changed. Manzanera is even singing with a greater confidence and self-belief.
This new-found maturity is something he's also applying to his most famous musical outlet, Roxy Music, whose members currently seem to be more at ease with each other than at any time in the band's history.
"There was never any musical problem in Roxy," claims Manzanera. "It was everything else! The management, the politics, the financial aspect. I never felt there was any musical dispute; it wasn't 'I'm going to leave because I want to play the blues and you want to play freeform jazz'. We were always compatible, and when left to our own devices, we always got on. Once we got rid of the management, we got on better than we ever did before. By not having a manager any more, it meant we all had to talk to each other and sort things out for ourselves.
"This is what we should have been doing years ago, but you get trapped by the system. Now, all that side has gone out of it, and the fun side has come back. I want to keep working at it till we're all back in the studio together. I'm a half-full person, my attitude is: Why not? How difficult can it be? We've all matured; we started out as complete amateurs, and always wanted to be more professional, and I think we're getting there eventually, so let's do it quick - before we get knocked over by a bus!"
'6PM' is out on 19 July on Hannibal
Album: Phil Manzanera : 6pm, EXPRESSION
By Andy Gill
16 July 2004
The suicide of his close friend the rock journalist Ian MacDonald has inspired the Roxy Music guitarist Phil Manzanera to the most assured work of his solo career in 6PM, an album that looks fondly back to the late-Sixties ideals on which their friendship was built. Accordingly, the musical tone of the album draws heavily on that era, with an early Pink Floyd feel to tracks such as "Broken Dreams" and "Love Devotion", and old chums such as Robert Wyatt and Dave Gilmour appearing on the closing, 15-minute five-part suite "The Cissbury Ring". Eno's treatments, along with the presence of the drummer Paul Thompson and the reedsman Andy Mackay, lend a pronounced Roxy feel to parts of the album, too; the latter's plaintive oboe on "Love Devotion" is particularly evocative. The stand-out tracks are "Green Spikey Cactus", whose confident swagger and "come together right now" chorus embody the optimism of the Sixties, and "Wish You Well", Manzanera's send-off to MacDonald, in which 12-string guitar and harmonica (by Chrissie Hynde) carry the fond epitaph: "You found a way to make yourself be heard/ Seems like the time had come to leave The People's World."
02 July 2004
Several floors up a converted warehouse block in a tiny mews in north-west London, Phil Manzanera lounges in the pristine calm of his home studio. Every 10 minutes or so a train rattles by below. "When you're setting up a studio, there are two things you should never do," he says. "One is to build it at the top of a house; the other is to situate it next to a railway line." He chuckles wryly. "So here it is."
The Roxy Music guitarist has lived here since divorce forced his relocation from Surrey. He seems quite settled, but he's used to moving on. He spent most of his childhood abroad, most memorably in Cuba, where he remembers his mother pressing his face to the floor as bullets pinged around them during the revolution: the family home in Havana was directly opposite that of the dictator, Fulgencio Batista.
For a while, Manzanera became obsessed with Latin American music and took to producing Spanish-language artists like Sergio Dias, Tania Libertad, Moncada and Heroes del Silencio. He even made his own stab at fusing South American music with rock on 1990's Southern Cross album. "It didn't work, obviously," he says. But the recent success of bands like Mexico's Cafe Tacuba and Kinky have revived Manzanera's interest, and he is set to produce Kinky's next album.
Manzanera became interested in music as a child in Cuba, where he first acquired a guitar. His next significant musical influence came later, as a teenager in Venezuela, where a life-changing brush with the music of The Beatles led to him asking if he could go to school in England. Packed off to boarding school in Dulwich, he found himself plunged into swinging-Sixties London. This was to be the defining period of his life. His schoolmate (and later bandmate) Bill MacCormick had an older brother, Ian, who worked in a record shop, and at night the three of them would spend long hours investigating the the shop's stock.
"Ian and Bill were so clued-in - the antennae were up all the time for all this stuff from America," remembers Manzanera, fondly, "like the first Velvet Underground album with the peel-off banana. We had our own little musical university; we could check out Varèse, Mingus, the library records, all this stuff. And their parents knew Robert Wyatt's parents, so they knew Robert when he was in Soft Machine. His house was halfway between school and Bill and Ian's house. He was the first pop star we knew - and in those days he did look like a pop star, with the yellow clothes and the Brian Jones haircut. At every Soft Machine gig, even the tiniest ones, we were there. We soaked up all the things that were happening in London, all the events, International Times, Oz, Sgt Pepper, the films that came out then, everything - they were mad, mad times!"
All these memories came flooding back last year when Manzanera learned of Ian MacCormick's death. He had long since changed his name to Ian MacDonald and become one of the country's most eminent music journalists, the highly respected author of books such as The New Shostakovich and the acclaimed analysis of The Beatles' recordings, Revolution in the Head. He had just published an anthology of essays, The People's Music, when he committed suicide last summer.
"It really got to me," says Manzanera. "I'd known him for such a long time, and he'd been so supportive all through my career." He was so enthusiastic about music, and so funny - ask him a casual question, and a six-page e-mail would arrive in return. You'd say you didn't know what classical music to listen to, and he'd send this enormous list, almost a book! When I was setting this studio up, he called and said, 'I've got this great idea what you should be doing: an instrumental combining "Telstar" with "Wonderful Life" - what are you doing next week, I'm coming round!' Another time, he'd got a whole load of new Brazilian music, and he said, 'Drop everything you're doing and get a plane to Sao Paulo, that's where it's happening!'. He could be very serious, but he'd always sign off, after six pages of highbrow stuff, with something like 'What a load of bollocks!'. That was his saving grace. But he was so right about so many things."
When Manzanera heard of MacDonald's death, he was setting off on a sailing holiday with his daughters, and couldn't attend the funeral. But as he strummed away on the boat, he formed the idea of a lasting tribute to his friend.
"I had written a note with the flowers I sent, saying 'Wish You Well', and making some joke - because he was a very funny guy - about being 'off with Saint Serene', which was a lyric he wrote for a track called 'Flight 19'," Manzanera explains. "When I got back, I suggested to his brother Bill it might be nice to do a song as a tribute to Ian, and just have people who knew him playing on it. I asked Chrissie Hynde, to whom he gave her first break when he was Assistant Editor at the NME - ironically, it was an interview with Eno! - if she'd like to play harmonica on it. Paul Thompson, from Roxy, was on drums, and my engineer Jamie Johnson was on bass. And I persuaded Bill to play a bass solo, which a medical condition has prevented him from doing for 25 years: to me, I can hear so many emotions - anger, love, everything - in that solo."
As he worked on the track "Wish You Well", Manzanera found recollections of old times with Ian and Bill were prompting more and more songs. He realised he had enough for an album, loosely based around the hopes and dreams of that seminal era.
He called on old friends, including Roxy cohorts Andy Mackay and Brian Eno, Pink Floyd guitarist Dave Gilmour, and Robert Wyatt, whose recent Cuckooland album was the first project completed at Manzanera's new studio.
Dubbed 6PM - it's his sixth solo effort - the album is undoubtedly Manzanera's strongest, blessed with a natural grain and texture, his usual questing musical spirit, and a gentle lyricism illuminated by the belief that, however dark things may seem, there is always the possibility that they can be changed. Manzanera is even singing with a greater confidence and self-belief.
This new-found maturity is something he's also applying to his most famous musical outlet, Roxy Music, whose members currently seem to be more at ease with each other than at any time in the band's history.
"There was never any musical problem in Roxy," claims Manzanera. "It was everything else! The management, the politics, the financial aspect. I never felt there was any musical dispute; it wasn't 'I'm going to leave because I want to play the blues and you want to play freeform jazz'. We were always compatible, and when left to our own devices, we always got on. Once we got rid of the management, we got on better than we ever did before. By not having a manager any more, it meant we all had to talk to each other and sort things out for ourselves.
"This is what we should have been doing years ago, but you get trapped by the system. Now, all that side has gone out of it, and the fun side has come back. I want to keep working at it till we're all back in the studio together. I'm a half-full person, my attitude is: Why not? How difficult can it be? We've all matured; we started out as complete amateurs, and always wanted to be more professional, and I think we're getting there eventually, so let's do it quick - before we get knocked over by a bus!"
'6PM' is out on 19 July on Hannibal
Album: Phil Manzanera : 6pm, EXPRESSION
By Andy Gill
16 July 2004
The suicide of his close friend the rock journalist Ian MacDonald has inspired the Roxy Music guitarist Phil Manzanera to the most assured work of his solo career in 6PM, an album that looks fondly back to the late-Sixties ideals on which their friendship was built. Accordingly, the musical tone of the album draws heavily on that era, with an early Pink Floyd feel to tracks such as "Broken Dreams" and "Love Devotion", and old chums such as Robert Wyatt and Dave Gilmour appearing on the closing, 15-minute five-part suite "The Cissbury Ring". Eno's treatments, along with the presence of the drummer Paul Thompson and the reedsman Andy Mackay, lend a pronounced Roxy feel to parts of the album, too; the latter's plaintive oboe on "Love Devotion" is particularly evocative. The stand-out tracks are "Green Spikey Cactus", whose confident swagger and "come together right now" chorus embody the optimism of the Sixties, and "Wish You Well", Manzanera's send-off to MacDonald, in which 12-string guitar and harmonica (by Chrissie Hynde) carry the fond epitaph: "You found a way to make yourself be heard/ Seems like the time had come to leave The People's World."
Shaznay Lewis
Never Again
Three years after All Saints, Shaznay Lewis is returning to the limelight. But what did she learn from the bitter split of one of the decade's most successful girl groups? Fiona Sturges finds out.
03 July 2004
Shaznay Lewis knew from the start that she would always be the outsider in All Saints. Soon after the notoriously volatile band signed their first major label deal with London records, she discovered that the rest of the girls - Mel Blatt and the Canadian sisters Nicole and Natalie Appleton - had presented the label head with a tape of vocal recordings they'd made without her. As it turned out, it was their version of Shaznay's own song "Never Ever" that made him sit up and pay attention.
"He asked who had written it, so then they were forced to come back and get me," she recalls ruefully. "Looking back on it, that was pretty low. I think that's why the whole time I knew that if I didn't write I'd be out on my ear."
She's too polite to say it, of course, but Shaznay's had the last laugh. Having been the principal songwriter in the band, she now gets the lion's share of the royalties. She's also the only member of the group to have emerged with any artistic credibility. While her blonde counterparts were willing paparazzi fodder, with their relentless partying and roll-call of celebrity boyfriends, Shaznay remained in the background studiously churning out the hits. "I think that Nic and Nat saw that as a negative thing," she reflects despondently. "They used to make out it was the Shaznay show just because I was the only one that was allowed to write material. There were times when we tried to write songs together but we'd always end up fighting."
I find Shaznay sitting on the sun-dappled terrace of a country hotel outside Great Yarmouth feeding chips to some unfeasibly hungry ducks. The following day she is due to make her live début as a solo artist at the Channel 4-sponsored festival Pop Beach. With rehearsals over, she says she's making the most of the peace and quiet before the madness begins. The off-duty Shaznay is dressed in a black tracksuit with a baseball cap pulled low over her head. Beneath the sporting camouflage is an angelic face with big Bambi eyes and a girlish sprinkling of freckles across her cheeks. Her publicity shots always made her look pouty and serious but in person she is warm and giggly. Her conversation is punctuated with bawdy cackles that are so piercing they send the ducks running for cover.
All Saints eventually called it a day in 2001 after an argument over who was going to wear a particular jacket for a photo shoot. The Appletons have since dished the dirt in their autobiography Together. Shaznay says the fight was the last straw for a band, which was already split down the middle, with neither side talking to the other. "Towards the end it became quite clear to me and Mel the difference in the four of us," she explains. "Nic and Nat were very much into the lifestyle. To see two people not loving [the band] the way you do and not respecting it hurt a lot. That's why at the end there were no more conversations. You're bearing your soul about something you really love to someone who doesn't give a shit."
Does she see the Appletons now? "No, I've not seen them for years but I do hope they're all right. I didn't read their book though from what I hear they came across as if they'd been through hell in the group, but, from where I'm standing, I can't see it. I know we had dodgy times, but we had good times too."
Unlike the Appletons who've clung to their celebrity status like limpets to a rock, Shaznay's been off the radar for more than three years, save for a small role as the team captain in the hit film Bend It Like Beckham. A year ago she also appeared alongside Saffron Burrows and Emilia Fox in Hideous Man, a short film written and directed by John Malkovich, which was screened at the London Film Festival. How did she find Malkovich? "He was frighteningly intelligent though really quite shy," she replies. "He wrote me a really nice letter saying 'Thank you', which I've still got up on my kitchen wall. I'll be saving that to show my kids." Happily, Shaznay was spared the humiliation of Honest, Dave Stewart's gangster flick in which the other Saints hoped to launch their film careers. The £4.2m film, which featured the girls indulging in orgies and drug-taking, took just £500 at the box office on its opening weekend. "Yeah, but that was due to Dave Stewart's dodgy writing," Shaznay protests. "What a dirty old man! His motives for casting them were clear though they obviously didn't see it. I think they were misled and ended up taking the shit for his film."
These days Shaznay doesn't much care for the showbiz merry-go-round of parties, awards ceremonies and visits to The Ivy. She lives with her boyfriend of six years, Christian, whom she is due to marry later this year, in a large house in the Hertfordshire countryside. She makes regular trips to the studio in London though wherever possible she'll stay at home, taking long walks with her chocolate labrador or just "slobbing around" indoors.
She continues to receive a steady flow of film offers, many of them for leading roles, though she's wary of getting out of her depth. "I'm no fool," she giggles. "I know I'm not ready for any large roles just yet. Music is something that I've always done, but with acting it's different. It would be great to do something completely new but at 28 learning something like that can be hard. Anyway, I'm not killing myself to make it as a film star."
Given Shaznay's reluctance to bask in the limelight, it's with more than a little trepidation that she's throwing herself back into the fray with her first solo album, Open, a sunny collection of funk, soul and reggae-inflected pop songs. She assumes, rather optimistically, that her comeback will be ignored by the paparazzi though she admits to feeling vulnerable at putting out an album under her own name - "It wasn't until recently that I thought to myself, 'Oh shit, people are actually going to hear it. What if they don't hear it the way I hear it?'"
Her former bandmates were considerably quicker off the mark to get their solo careers off the ground. Mel Blatt released her first single in the autumn of 2001 while the Appletons emerged with an album last year, to frosty critical reception. "They were a lot more up for it than I was to go back out there," Shaznay says. "I admired that in them actually. I always thought I was quite ballsy, but it made me think that they had a lot more balls than me."
In fact, it only took a month for Shaznay to get back in the studio after the band's split. She spent a year recording demos, though at the end she could hear nothing she was prepared to release. "I was frustrated that, for the first time in my life, I didn't have a musical direction. I thought it might be a sign that I shouldn't be doing it anymore, that I should be grateful for what I've already achieved and move aside for someone else to have that same dream. But then my friends just told me not to be so stupid and get on with it."
After two and a half years of indecision, Shaznay found her footing with the help of the producer Rick Nowells. "Once we had written [the first single] 'Never Felt Like This Before' I felt at ease with myself, it was as if I'd found the new me. I realised there was no structure or style I had to adhere to and that I was free to experiment. After that it was very easy to write the rest of the album."
Now, with the record finished and the single already playing on the radio, Shaznay must turn her attention to promotional duties. "I know it's part of the job and I'm prepared to do it," she sighs. "If there was a way I could just make the record, put it out and disappear, that would be heaven."
Shaznay was born and bred on a council estate off the Caledonian Road in north London at a time "when everyone could leave their doors open." Her parents worked long hours - her mother as a school dinner lady, her father as a bus driver - so she spent a lot of time at neighbours' houses and larking about in the playground across the road. For a while she thought she might become a dancer - she tried tap and ballet but it was a contemporary dance class that finally put her off. "I can't remember how old I was, but I got this leaflet for a class at the YMCA. I went down by myself and watched everyone contorting their bodies and crawling around the floor. My fascination with dance ended there and then. I was too shy."
When she was 14 her parents got divorced although Shaznay claims not to have been damaged by this. "My mum was a toughie and when she ended it I saw a change for the better in her. She was able to look after herself rather than be stuck behind an ironing board or slaving at the cooker. She would put a bit of lipstick on and go out shopping and get her hair done. This was stuff I'd never seen her do before. I was really happy for her." Instead of getting a job when she left school, Shaznay signed on the dole so she could pursue her dream as a songwriter. When she was 18 she met Mel Blatt at the All Saints studio in west London and the pair formed the pop duo All Saints 1975, the figures signifying the year they were born. They put out a single called "If You Wanna Party" on ZTT and toured the country playing to pissed-up clubbers at two in the morning. But the label proved resistant to their talents and they were dropped a year later. In 1995 Blatt got in contact with a former classmate at drama school called Nicole Appleton and asked if she'd like to join the group. "I was up for it," Shaznay remembers, "but there was no chance that Nic would have got away with being in a band without Nat. It was clear that there was a lot of rivalry there."
Nowadays Shaznay needn't worry about difficult bandmates. But watching her in action at Pop Beach the following day, going solo sure looks like a lonely job. For most of the day she retains a wide-eyed, disorientated look as she mingles backstage with ex-Spice Girls, Fame Academy graduates and assorted EastEnders. By now glammed up in a skirt, strappy heels, and pretty green eyeshadow, she valiantly grins her way through the endless photo calls and vox pops. It's only when she's asked to pose in front of a fake seaside scene holding a beach ball that the smile fades and she declines politely. Eventually, after a last-minute buffing from her stylist, the time comes for her to go on-stage. There, as the crowd scream themselves silly, she performs a faultless version of "Never Felt Like This Before". At last she is in her element, smiling broadly and touching hands with the fans at the front. Then, as quickly as it started, it's all over and it's time to go home.
With palpable relief Shaznay climbs into the back of the waiting car, waves through the window and disappears back to the sanctity of her house, her fiancé and her dog. Her work is done, for now at least.
The single 'Never Felt Like This Before' (London) is out on Monday. 'Open' is released on 19 July
Album: Shaznay Lewis : Open, LONDON
By Andy Gill
16 July 2004
Having resisted the temptation to rush into her post-All Saints career, Lewis finally gets around to her solo debut some four years after the group's dissolution. And it must be acknowledged that, compared with last year's bland, indecisive offering from the Appleton sisters, Open is a considered and assured work, even if there's not, ultimately, much greater depth to it. Lewis has opted for a sound more in keeping with the Motown and reggae she grew up on, with the limber funk-soul of tracks such as "Mr Weatherman" and the ballad stylings of "Never Felt Like This Before" interspersed with mild reggae grooves such as "Now You're Gone", "Heart Made Me a Fool" and "Mr Dawg", a flea in the ear of an unwelcome suitor.
The languid fusion stylings of "Don't Know What to Say" evoke the Motown sound on the cusp of its metamorphosis from Sixties soul to Seventies funk, while elsewhere "Butterflies" employs a frisky, updated Meters-style shuffle. But the most intriguing and individual cut here has to be the self-explanatory "Dance", whose perky groove is not R&B or garage or house or, strictly, funk, but some hugely infectious amalgam of all four, deserving of rather more attention than the few nanoseconds Biz Markie must have expended on devising the most perfunctory rap for it.
Three years after All Saints, Shaznay Lewis is returning to the limelight. But what did she learn from the bitter split of one of the decade's most successful girl groups? Fiona Sturges finds out.
03 July 2004
Shaznay Lewis knew from the start that she would always be the outsider in All Saints. Soon after the notoriously volatile band signed their first major label deal with London records, she discovered that the rest of the girls - Mel Blatt and the Canadian sisters Nicole and Natalie Appleton - had presented the label head with a tape of vocal recordings they'd made without her. As it turned out, it was their version of Shaznay's own song "Never Ever" that made him sit up and pay attention.
"He asked who had written it, so then they were forced to come back and get me," she recalls ruefully. "Looking back on it, that was pretty low. I think that's why the whole time I knew that if I didn't write I'd be out on my ear."
She's too polite to say it, of course, but Shaznay's had the last laugh. Having been the principal songwriter in the band, she now gets the lion's share of the royalties. She's also the only member of the group to have emerged with any artistic credibility. While her blonde counterparts were willing paparazzi fodder, with their relentless partying and roll-call of celebrity boyfriends, Shaznay remained in the background studiously churning out the hits. "I think that Nic and Nat saw that as a negative thing," she reflects despondently. "They used to make out it was the Shaznay show just because I was the only one that was allowed to write material. There were times when we tried to write songs together but we'd always end up fighting."
I find Shaznay sitting on the sun-dappled terrace of a country hotel outside Great Yarmouth feeding chips to some unfeasibly hungry ducks. The following day she is due to make her live début as a solo artist at the Channel 4-sponsored festival Pop Beach. With rehearsals over, she says she's making the most of the peace and quiet before the madness begins. The off-duty Shaznay is dressed in a black tracksuit with a baseball cap pulled low over her head. Beneath the sporting camouflage is an angelic face with big Bambi eyes and a girlish sprinkling of freckles across her cheeks. Her publicity shots always made her look pouty and serious but in person she is warm and giggly. Her conversation is punctuated with bawdy cackles that are so piercing they send the ducks running for cover.
All Saints eventually called it a day in 2001 after an argument over who was going to wear a particular jacket for a photo shoot. The Appletons have since dished the dirt in their autobiography Together. Shaznay says the fight was the last straw for a band, which was already split down the middle, with neither side talking to the other. "Towards the end it became quite clear to me and Mel the difference in the four of us," she explains. "Nic and Nat were very much into the lifestyle. To see two people not loving [the band] the way you do and not respecting it hurt a lot. That's why at the end there were no more conversations. You're bearing your soul about something you really love to someone who doesn't give a shit."
Does she see the Appletons now? "No, I've not seen them for years but I do hope they're all right. I didn't read their book though from what I hear they came across as if they'd been through hell in the group, but, from where I'm standing, I can't see it. I know we had dodgy times, but we had good times too."
Unlike the Appletons who've clung to their celebrity status like limpets to a rock, Shaznay's been off the radar for more than three years, save for a small role as the team captain in the hit film Bend It Like Beckham. A year ago she also appeared alongside Saffron Burrows and Emilia Fox in Hideous Man, a short film written and directed by John Malkovich, which was screened at the London Film Festival. How did she find Malkovich? "He was frighteningly intelligent though really quite shy," she replies. "He wrote me a really nice letter saying 'Thank you', which I've still got up on my kitchen wall. I'll be saving that to show my kids." Happily, Shaznay was spared the humiliation of Honest, Dave Stewart's gangster flick in which the other Saints hoped to launch their film careers. The £4.2m film, which featured the girls indulging in orgies and drug-taking, took just £500 at the box office on its opening weekend. "Yeah, but that was due to Dave Stewart's dodgy writing," Shaznay protests. "What a dirty old man! His motives for casting them were clear though they obviously didn't see it. I think they were misled and ended up taking the shit for his film."
These days Shaznay doesn't much care for the showbiz merry-go-round of parties, awards ceremonies and visits to The Ivy. She lives with her boyfriend of six years, Christian, whom she is due to marry later this year, in a large house in the Hertfordshire countryside. She makes regular trips to the studio in London though wherever possible she'll stay at home, taking long walks with her chocolate labrador or just "slobbing around" indoors.
She continues to receive a steady flow of film offers, many of them for leading roles, though she's wary of getting out of her depth. "I'm no fool," she giggles. "I know I'm not ready for any large roles just yet. Music is something that I've always done, but with acting it's different. It would be great to do something completely new but at 28 learning something like that can be hard. Anyway, I'm not killing myself to make it as a film star."
Given Shaznay's reluctance to bask in the limelight, it's with more than a little trepidation that she's throwing herself back into the fray with her first solo album, Open, a sunny collection of funk, soul and reggae-inflected pop songs. She assumes, rather optimistically, that her comeback will be ignored by the paparazzi though she admits to feeling vulnerable at putting out an album under her own name - "It wasn't until recently that I thought to myself, 'Oh shit, people are actually going to hear it. What if they don't hear it the way I hear it?'"
Her former bandmates were considerably quicker off the mark to get their solo careers off the ground. Mel Blatt released her first single in the autumn of 2001 while the Appletons emerged with an album last year, to frosty critical reception. "They were a lot more up for it than I was to go back out there," Shaznay says. "I admired that in them actually. I always thought I was quite ballsy, but it made me think that they had a lot more balls than me."
In fact, it only took a month for Shaznay to get back in the studio after the band's split. She spent a year recording demos, though at the end she could hear nothing she was prepared to release. "I was frustrated that, for the first time in my life, I didn't have a musical direction. I thought it might be a sign that I shouldn't be doing it anymore, that I should be grateful for what I've already achieved and move aside for someone else to have that same dream. But then my friends just told me not to be so stupid and get on with it."
After two and a half years of indecision, Shaznay found her footing with the help of the producer Rick Nowells. "Once we had written [the first single] 'Never Felt Like This Before' I felt at ease with myself, it was as if I'd found the new me. I realised there was no structure or style I had to adhere to and that I was free to experiment. After that it was very easy to write the rest of the album."
Now, with the record finished and the single already playing on the radio, Shaznay must turn her attention to promotional duties. "I know it's part of the job and I'm prepared to do it," she sighs. "If there was a way I could just make the record, put it out and disappear, that would be heaven."
Shaznay was born and bred on a council estate off the Caledonian Road in north London at a time "when everyone could leave their doors open." Her parents worked long hours - her mother as a school dinner lady, her father as a bus driver - so she spent a lot of time at neighbours' houses and larking about in the playground across the road. For a while she thought she might become a dancer - she tried tap and ballet but it was a contemporary dance class that finally put her off. "I can't remember how old I was, but I got this leaflet for a class at the YMCA. I went down by myself and watched everyone contorting their bodies and crawling around the floor. My fascination with dance ended there and then. I was too shy."
When she was 14 her parents got divorced although Shaznay claims not to have been damaged by this. "My mum was a toughie and when she ended it I saw a change for the better in her. She was able to look after herself rather than be stuck behind an ironing board or slaving at the cooker. She would put a bit of lipstick on and go out shopping and get her hair done. This was stuff I'd never seen her do before. I was really happy for her." Instead of getting a job when she left school, Shaznay signed on the dole so she could pursue her dream as a songwriter. When she was 18 she met Mel Blatt at the All Saints studio in west London and the pair formed the pop duo All Saints 1975, the figures signifying the year they were born. They put out a single called "If You Wanna Party" on ZTT and toured the country playing to pissed-up clubbers at two in the morning. But the label proved resistant to their talents and they were dropped a year later. In 1995 Blatt got in contact with a former classmate at drama school called Nicole Appleton and asked if she'd like to join the group. "I was up for it," Shaznay remembers, "but there was no chance that Nic would have got away with being in a band without Nat. It was clear that there was a lot of rivalry there."
Nowadays Shaznay needn't worry about difficult bandmates. But watching her in action at Pop Beach the following day, going solo sure looks like a lonely job. For most of the day she retains a wide-eyed, disorientated look as she mingles backstage with ex-Spice Girls, Fame Academy graduates and assorted EastEnders. By now glammed up in a skirt, strappy heels, and pretty green eyeshadow, she valiantly grins her way through the endless photo calls and vox pops. It's only when she's asked to pose in front of a fake seaside scene holding a beach ball that the smile fades and she declines politely. Eventually, after a last-minute buffing from her stylist, the time comes for her to go on-stage. There, as the crowd scream themselves silly, she performs a faultless version of "Never Felt Like This Before". At last she is in her element, smiling broadly and touching hands with the fans at the front. Then, as quickly as it started, it's all over and it's time to go home.
With palpable relief Shaznay climbs into the back of the waiting car, waves through the window and disappears back to the sanctity of her house, her fiancé and her dog. Her work is done, for now at least.
The single 'Never Felt Like This Before' (London) is out on Monday. 'Open' is released on 19 July
Album: Shaznay Lewis : Open, LONDON
By Andy Gill
16 July 2004
Having resisted the temptation to rush into her post-All Saints career, Lewis finally gets around to her solo debut some four years after the group's dissolution. And it must be acknowledged that, compared with last year's bland, indecisive offering from the Appleton sisters, Open is a considered and assured work, even if there's not, ultimately, much greater depth to it. Lewis has opted for a sound more in keeping with the Motown and reggae she grew up on, with the limber funk-soul of tracks such as "Mr Weatherman" and the ballad stylings of "Never Felt Like This Before" interspersed with mild reggae grooves such as "Now You're Gone", "Heart Made Me a Fool" and "Mr Dawg", a flea in the ear of an unwelcome suitor.
The languid fusion stylings of "Don't Know What to Say" evoke the Motown sound on the cusp of its metamorphosis from Sixties soul to Seventies funk, while elsewhere "Butterflies" employs a frisky, updated Meters-style shuffle. But the most intriguing and individual cut here has to be the self-explanatory "Dance", whose perky groove is not R&B or garage or house or, strictly, funk, but some hugely infectious amalgam of all four, deserving of rather more attention than the few nanoseconds Biz Markie must have expended on devising the most perfunctory rap for it.
The Ten Best Psychedelic British Songs
By Will 'SGT Fuzz' Sergeant
02 July 2004
1 ARNOLD LAYNE Pink Floyd (1967)
Here, we catch Pink Floyd in unexplored territory, dipping into the subject of transvestism and upsetting the BBC into the bargain. Three years later, I was able to hitch a ride by the power of a Fidelity stereo and some Alba headphones: my cold, damp bedroom became a 10ft square Tardis of swinging London - in my mind, at least.
2 I MUST BE MAD The Craig (1966)
The intro to this gem is an insane pounding guitar riff with more than a taste of Townshend. Ultra-violent crash chords burst into the verse "I can't explain the way I feel about you"; the stunning drumming is courtesy of Emerson Lake and Palmer's Carl P.
3 MY WHITE BICYCLE Tomorrow (1967)
Geoff Emerick, George Martin's Beatles sidekick, used all the tricks in his psychedelic toolbox for this one. A pre-Yes Steve Howe's brilliant backwards guitar kept us warm and fuzzy on many a long trip. Twink on the skins gets almost as loud as his trousers. Keith West sings about the white bicycles of 1960s Amsterdam.
4 MICHAEL ANGELO The 23rd Turnoff (1967)
The 23rd turn-off was the exit from the M6 motorway to Liverpool. I found this beauty at a car-boot sale: 20p later, I had a mint copy. Classic musical ambrosia to be gulped down by greedy gods.
5 KITES Simon Dupree and the Big Sound (1967)
I just love a mystic blend of the East and West. Drift along opium-soaked strings and twitch your little finger to the rhythm, just to let us know you will be coming back to reality some time soon.
6 FATHER'S NAME WAS DAD Fire (1968)
You know that fab guitar intro to "Last Train to Clarkesville" by The Monkees? This one's better. Top-hole lyrics here: "My father's name was Dad/ My mother's name was Mum. How can I take the blame/ For every thing I've done?"
7 THE L S BUMBLE BEE Peter Cook and Dudley Moore (1967)
Pete and Dud get trippy with the little insects. This is rumoured to have the odd Beatle involved (Lennon) - and, let's face it, Peter Cook in little square shades in Bedazzled is the coolest Sixties psych image there is.
8 THE DAYS OF PEARLY SPENCER David McWilliams (1967)
The story of a man stupefied by the world and drifting into the twilight existence of a tramp. A string-heavy wash sets the scene, and an almost countrified bass-and-drum chug keeps you going. The hook is delivered by a distorted disembodied voice piping up every chorus.
9 MY FRIEND JACK The Smoke (1967)
I can remember getting some sort of inoculation on a sugar lump at school. The Smoke's friend Jack eats sugar lumps to inoculate himself against the effects of the real world: a spoonful of LSD helps the sugar lump go down. Great tremolo guitar vibrates you down the track and on to never-never-forever-land.
10 VACUUM CLEANER Tintern Abbey (1967)
From the outset, this is a jewel of a track. The guitar solo sweeps in on a wave of phaze and settles on an elongated feedback wall. "Fix me up with your sweet dose/ now I'm feeling like a ghost," proclaims the singer David McTavish. Superb.
02 July 2004
1 ARNOLD LAYNE Pink Floyd (1967)
Here, we catch Pink Floyd in unexplored territory, dipping into the subject of transvestism and upsetting the BBC into the bargain. Three years later, I was able to hitch a ride by the power of a Fidelity stereo and some Alba headphones: my cold, damp bedroom became a 10ft square Tardis of swinging London - in my mind, at least.
2 I MUST BE MAD The Craig (1966)
The intro to this gem is an insane pounding guitar riff with more than a taste of Townshend. Ultra-violent crash chords burst into the verse "I can't explain the way I feel about you"; the stunning drumming is courtesy of Emerson Lake and Palmer's Carl P.
3 MY WHITE BICYCLE Tomorrow (1967)
Geoff Emerick, George Martin's Beatles sidekick, used all the tricks in his psychedelic toolbox for this one. A pre-Yes Steve Howe's brilliant backwards guitar kept us warm and fuzzy on many a long trip. Twink on the skins gets almost as loud as his trousers. Keith West sings about the white bicycles of 1960s Amsterdam.
4 MICHAEL ANGELO The 23rd Turnoff (1967)
The 23rd turn-off was the exit from the M6 motorway to Liverpool. I found this beauty at a car-boot sale: 20p later, I had a mint copy. Classic musical ambrosia to be gulped down by greedy gods.
5 KITES Simon Dupree and the Big Sound (1967)
I just love a mystic blend of the East and West. Drift along opium-soaked strings and twitch your little finger to the rhythm, just to let us know you will be coming back to reality some time soon.
6 FATHER'S NAME WAS DAD Fire (1968)
You know that fab guitar intro to "Last Train to Clarkesville" by The Monkees? This one's better. Top-hole lyrics here: "My father's name was Dad/ My mother's name was Mum. How can I take the blame/ For every thing I've done?"
7 THE L S BUMBLE BEE Peter Cook and Dudley Moore (1967)
Pete and Dud get trippy with the little insects. This is rumoured to have the odd Beatle involved (Lennon) - and, let's face it, Peter Cook in little square shades in Bedazzled is the coolest Sixties psych image there is.
8 THE DAYS OF PEARLY SPENCER David McWilliams (1967)
The story of a man stupefied by the world and drifting into the twilight existence of a tramp. A string-heavy wash sets the scene, and an almost countrified bass-and-drum chug keeps you going. The hook is delivered by a distorted disembodied voice piping up every chorus.
9 MY FRIEND JACK The Smoke (1967)
I can remember getting some sort of inoculation on a sugar lump at school. The Smoke's friend Jack eats sugar lumps to inoculate himself against the effects of the real world: a spoonful of LSD helps the sugar lump go down. Great tremolo guitar vibrates you down the track and on to never-never-forever-land.
10 VACUUM CLEANER Tintern Abbey (1967)
From the outset, this is a jewel of a track. The guitar solo sweeps in on a wave of phaze and settles on an elongated feedback wall. "Fix me up with your sweet dose/ now I'm feeling like a ghost," proclaims the singer David McTavish. Superb.
Tony Joe White, Borderline, London
By Alasdair Lees
02 July 2004
A man who has lugged a swamp box and a whomper stomper from the Bouef River Bayou of Louisiana to the backstreets of W1 doesn't want his amplifier to sound as if it has just been dragged out of a levee. Further still, if this is the man who wrote hits for Mr Elvis A Presley and can still crank out a songs such as "Do You Wear a Garter Belt?" - with a top lip that looks like it's being yanked upwards on the end of a fishing line - he don't want his amplifier being fixed by no chick.
"Ain't it nice have a girl come fix yo' equipment," quips Tony Joe White, the 61-year-old, part-Cherokee purveyor of what the French first termed "swamp rock", a dark Dixie gumbo of blues, soul, rock and country which emerged from the stable of songwriters at Nashville's Combine Music in the early 1970s - which included fellow Confederates Kris Kristofferson and Georgia's Larry Jon Wilson - and the music of artists such as Jerry Reed, Joe South, John Fogerty and Mac (Dr John) Rebennack of New Orleans. It would go on to inspire everyone from an Abbey Road-era Beatles to The Rolling Stones of Let It Bleed and Exile On Main Street.
Ink-black sunglasses in place and Stratocaster in his lap, White - bear-like, and the former Gram Parsons-like good looks now doughy - opens with the slow, breathy baritone of "Rich Woman Blues", before being joined by his drummer onstage and ploughing into a piledrivingly funky "Undercover Agent for the Blues", covered by Tina Turner. Thereafter, a reverential, mostly male crowd requested - and received - the likes of the inter-racial-marriage meditation "Willy Mae and Laura Jones" - covered by Dusty Springfield on Dusty in Memphis - the Cajun Gothic of "They Caught the Devil and Put Him in Jail in Eudora, Arkansas" and the corn-pone raunch of "Stud Spider", all punctuated with blasts of harmonica, and an edgy wah-wah that justified the manly sobriquets "swamp box" and "whomper stomper".
Then, the hits: "Rainy Night in Georgia", a smash for Brook Benton and covered by Ray Charles; then, Elvis's favourite ode to family dysfunction, "Polk Salad Annie". The former - the high point of the show - stood out in a machismo-heavy set like an early-morning rainbow. But it was nearly upstaged by the anti-vegan polemic of "The Organic Shuffle", taken from White's latest album, Snakey: "He was on aisle five, looking for sprouts/ When all of a sudden he just let it out.../ the Organic Shuffle." In the high chapel of the Swamp Fox, as his French fans call him, there ain't no call for sprouts - or chicks who can fix amplifiers.
02 July 2004
A man who has lugged a swamp box and a whomper stomper from the Bouef River Bayou of Louisiana to the backstreets of W1 doesn't want his amplifier to sound as if it has just been dragged out of a levee. Further still, if this is the man who wrote hits for Mr Elvis A Presley and can still crank out a songs such as "Do You Wear a Garter Belt?" - with a top lip that looks like it's being yanked upwards on the end of a fishing line - he don't want his amplifier being fixed by no chick.
"Ain't it nice have a girl come fix yo' equipment," quips Tony Joe White, the 61-year-old, part-Cherokee purveyor of what the French first termed "swamp rock", a dark Dixie gumbo of blues, soul, rock and country which emerged from the stable of songwriters at Nashville's Combine Music in the early 1970s - which included fellow Confederates Kris Kristofferson and Georgia's Larry Jon Wilson - and the music of artists such as Jerry Reed, Joe South, John Fogerty and Mac (Dr John) Rebennack of New Orleans. It would go on to inspire everyone from an Abbey Road-era Beatles to The Rolling Stones of Let It Bleed and Exile On Main Street.
Ink-black sunglasses in place and Stratocaster in his lap, White - bear-like, and the former Gram Parsons-like good looks now doughy - opens with the slow, breathy baritone of "Rich Woman Blues", before being joined by his drummer onstage and ploughing into a piledrivingly funky "Undercover Agent for the Blues", covered by Tina Turner. Thereafter, a reverential, mostly male crowd requested - and received - the likes of the inter-racial-marriage meditation "Willy Mae and Laura Jones" - covered by Dusty Springfield on Dusty in Memphis - the Cajun Gothic of "They Caught the Devil and Put Him in Jail in Eudora, Arkansas" and the corn-pone raunch of "Stud Spider", all punctuated with blasts of harmonica, and an edgy wah-wah that justified the manly sobriquets "swamp box" and "whomper stomper".
Then, the hits: "Rainy Night in Georgia", a smash for Brook Benton and covered by Ray Charles; then, Elvis's favourite ode to family dysfunction, "Polk Salad Annie". The former - the high point of the show - stood out in a machismo-heavy set like an early-morning rainbow. But it was nearly upstaged by the anti-vegan polemic of "The Organic Shuffle", taken from White's latest album, Snakey: "He was on aisle five, looking for sprouts/ When all of a sudden he just let it out.../ the Organic Shuffle." In the high chapel of the Swamp Fox, as his French fans call him, there ain't no call for sprouts - or chicks who can fix amplifiers.
Album: The Kingsbury Manx
Aztec Discipline, COOKING VINYL
By Andy Gill
02 July 2004
If only the The Kingsbury Manx's third album, matched its title more accurately; but Aztec Discipline is a bloodless affair, lacking the bite implied. Rather more appropriate would have been its predecessor, Let You Down. At least it puts its heart into the start: "Pelz Komet" opens matters like a condensed primer on contemporary US indie-rock, with the gentle thrumming of acoustic guitars marshalled by excitable drums, reluctantly developing a certain muscularity through the gradual addition of lead-guitar lines, before re-emerging in a more urgent direction. "Your time is all your own when you go it alone/ And there's no one there to tell you to go home," they sing, in a sort of epiphany of heartbreak, but there's no hint of the wild abandon implied; instead, they embark on a set of polite, methodical exercises with all the daring of a cup of cocoa.
There's an ingenuous charm to their twinkly arpeggios and harmony vocals, which, when underscored by Paul Finn's organ on songs such as "Hunting Trips" and "Dinner Bell", resemble the Pink Floyd of "Cirrus Minor" or "Grantchester Meadows"; but that's more a nice spot for a picnic than the setting for a blood sacrifice. Too complacent by half.
By Andy Gill
02 July 2004
If only the The Kingsbury Manx's third album, matched its title more accurately; but Aztec Discipline is a bloodless affair, lacking the bite implied. Rather more appropriate would have been its predecessor, Let You Down. At least it puts its heart into the start: "Pelz Komet" opens matters like a condensed primer on contemporary US indie-rock, with the gentle thrumming of acoustic guitars marshalled by excitable drums, reluctantly developing a certain muscularity through the gradual addition of lead-guitar lines, before re-emerging in a more urgent direction. "Your time is all your own when you go it alone/ And there's no one there to tell you to go home," they sing, in a sort of epiphany of heartbreak, but there's no hint of the wild abandon implied; instead, they embark on a set of polite, methodical exercises with all the daring of a cup of cocoa.
There's an ingenuous charm to their twinkly arpeggios and harmony vocals, which, when underscored by Paul Finn's organ on songs such as "Hunting Trips" and "Dinner Bell", resemble the Pink Floyd of "Cirrus Minor" or "Grantchester Meadows"; but that's more a nice spot for a picnic than the setting for a blood sacrifice. Too complacent by half.
Album: Richie Havens
Grace of the Sun, EVANGELINE
By Andy Gill
02 July 2004
After the collaborations with Groove Armada, which tried to reposition Richie Havens as a kind of cabaret soul-jazz artist in the vein of Terry Callier, Grace of the Sun finds him reverting to his true status as a more unique exponent of folksy soulfulness. Tracks such as "Way Down Deep" and "By the Grace of the Sun" feature the familiar hustle of Havens' hyper-rhythmic acoustic strumming and peppery hand percussion - a gentle fervour that offers his own distinctive adaptation of gospel exhortation. It's a method especially effective on a suitably feverish version of "All along the Watchtower", which adapts so well to his urgent guitar style and smokey baritone that it's hard to believe he didn't cover it years ago.
The album maintains Havens' position as a liberation preacher, often returning to his signature theme of "freedom", the rousing chant with which he ignited many a festival gathering. "When" offers a wistful reflection on the erosion of American hopes and liberties and the concluding "Pulling up the Stone" likewise evokes the Sisyphean nature of liberation struggle. Havens' rhythmic guitar bed is embroidered with a range of subtle embellishments which finds its apogee in the instrumental "Dusk", whose guittarone, Turkish violin and bouzouki offer a symbolically global tour of the extended string family.
By Andy Gill
02 July 2004
After the collaborations with Groove Armada, which tried to reposition Richie Havens as a kind of cabaret soul-jazz artist in the vein of Terry Callier, Grace of the Sun finds him reverting to his true status as a more unique exponent of folksy soulfulness. Tracks such as "Way Down Deep" and "By the Grace of the Sun" feature the familiar hustle of Havens' hyper-rhythmic acoustic strumming and peppery hand percussion - a gentle fervour that offers his own distinctive adaptation of gospel exhortation. It's a method especially effective on a suitably feverish version of "All along the Watchtower", which adapts so well to his urgent guitar style and smokey baritone that it's hard to believe he didn't cover it years ago.
The album maintains Havens' position as a liberation preacher, often returning to his signature theme of "freedom", the rousing chant with which he ignited many a festival gathering. "When" offers a wistful reflection on the erosion of American hopes and liberties and the concluding "Pulling up the Stone" likewise evokes the Sisyphean nature of liberation struggle. Havens' rhythmic guitar bed is embroidered with a range of subtle embellishments which finds its apogee in the instrumental "Dusk", whose guittarone, Turkish violin and bouzouki offer a symbolically global tour of the extended string family.
Album: The Ordinary Boys
Over the Counter Culture, B-UNIQUE
By Andy Gill
02 July 2004
Their decision to perform in obscure British backwaters, rather than at the usual big-city sheds, shows that, like their labelmates Mull Historical Society, The Ordinary Boys favour the small-scale over the corporate, which is to their credit. Sadly, the comparisons end there, as the group attack the daily grind afflicting proletarian Britain in a form of lumpen pop-punk riffing that combines the spiky assertiveness of The Jam with the dismissive snobbery of Morrissey: a quintessentially English sound for a typically English attitude.
There is, however, a sharp intelligence behind the lyrics: withering jibes at consumerismand the brain-deadening impact of tabloid culture are elegantly crafted in songs such as "Maybe Someday" and "Talk Talk Talk". But the band shoot themselves in the foot with "The List Goes on", whose introductory couplet - "Radio-play just depresses me today/ Why is it so throwaway?" - indulges the kind of self-reflexive, navel-gazing diatribe on the music scene that helped to corral the exuberance of indie-rock in the first place. And what about that massive beam in their own eye, reflected in the grim predictability of their meat-and-spuds rock riffs? The grim irony of their singing, "Originality is so passé," over such old-hat backing seems to have escaped them completely.
By Andy Gill
02 July 2004
Their decision to perform in obscure British backwaters, rather than at the usual big-city sheds, shows that, like their labelmates Mull Historical Society, The Ordinary Boys favour the small-scale over the corporate, which is to their credit. Sadly, the comparisons end there, as the group attack the daily grind afflicting proletarian Britain in a form of lumpen pop-punk riffing that combines the spiky assertiveness of The Jam with the dismissive snobbery of Morrissey: a quintessentially English sound for a typically English attitude.
There is, however, a sharp intelligence behind the lyrics: withering jibes at consumerismand the brain-deadening impact of tabloid culture are elegantly crafted in songs such as "Maybe Someday" and "Talk Talk Talk". But the band shoot themselves in the foot with "The List Goes on", whose introductory couplet - "Radio-play just depresses me today/ Why is it so throwaway?" - indulges the kind of self-reflexive, navel-gazing diatribe on the music scene that helped to corral the exuberance of indie-rock in the first place. And what about that massive beam in their own eye, reflected in the grim predictability of their meat-and-spuds rock riffs? The grim irony of their singing, "Originality is so passé," over such old-hat backing seems to have escaped them completely.
Alex James & Glasto
A festival of home comforts
The music may be great, but what about the camp site? Blur's bassist Alex James reveals how you can do Glastonbury without tears
03 July 2004
Day 1 - Travels in my camper van
The football was on, so all was eerie and still in Cirencester when we stopped to buy groceries. If truth be told, I was a lot more excited about going to Waitrose than Glastonbury. Waitrose is currently the most glamorous supermarket, and we only have a Tesco in Stow-on-the-Wold. I was looking forward to a double trolley binge, while the rest of the country was watching telly.
The car park was almost empty. My wife, Claire, parked our gleaming new motor home right across six disabled parking spaces next to the door. I felt this was in bad taste, and we were still arguing about who was a pussy and who was an arsehole when we realised the supermarket was shut anyway. We ended up in Tesco as usual. We filled a trolley and trawled on through the night. The roads were empty. It was a good feeling to know we had everything we needed with us.
What do we look for in a festival I wondered, as we drove on towards Somerset. Good weather? Good chance of a shag? Goodbye life for the weekend? Maybe we just have to express some primal locust-swarming instinct. Maybe it's just a laugh. But one thing's for sure: the festival phenomenon is an ancient and global licence to print money.
It suits the record companies and the agents and the media and the promoters to put everything together into a huge package. Probably, in fairness, it suits the punters as well, but the word "festival" is often cunningly used to inject some hip retro-chic into what are basically stadium rock concerts. If you called it a stadium gig, nobody would want to go, but if you call it a festival and put some balloons up... bingo.
We were whacked by the time we arrived at our camp site at the rather cheeky Winding Lake Farm, the next-door farm to Glastonbury. The owners don't have any problem with everything being sponsored: you get a free rain mac from O2 and a free lift in a Toyota. There were a lot of festival types and a lot of Sony people staying in very large Winnebagoes. I don't understand why you'd want one of those big ones, unless you want to go on holiday with your neighbours. Ours is nice and compact, easy to manoeuvre, but big enough to fit our family and a trolley-load of shopping.
I'm a farmer, and I got to thinking about the profits at Glastonbury. I manage to net about £50 an acre a year for my land. If you've got the next-door farm to Glastonbury - and a drinks licence and room for a few hundred caravans - well, do the maths. Put some nice toilets in. Get some sponsorship. They're queuing up.
Anyway, it was the ideal place for our gaff. We got wired up with electricity and hit the hay. Our four-month-old son was in a little nest in the galley; we were up in the roof. Just perfect.
Day 2 - A night under canvas
We had a pretty good night's sleep in the camper van. Not too moist. Moisture is the camper's foe, and draughts. Not too draughty, either, in our van. A motor home does give you a kind of freedom you can't achieve with hotels and aeroplanes. As soon as you climb in, you're on holiday. And it's very much your holiday. We took off around Europe in one when I was 10 years old. I'd decided to buy one by lunchtime.
Where the motor homes can't compete with the hotels is in the bathroom department. But it was only Friday morning, the first day of Glastonbury, and the Winding Hill toilet facilities are already legendary in the music industry. People leave the backstage compound and walk for 20 minutes to use these loos. You would be looking at trading a BBC catering pass for a Winding Hill Farm pass by Sunday. I was dismayed to find a small speck of urine on the black seat in my chosen cubicle. I don't go for those plastic hygiene covers - go French when in doubt, I say. It was a shame, though. Otherwise spotless. I don't know what the Michelin system would make of a small splash like that. Maybe that's why they have those other kind of toilets on French camp sites.
The shower made me feel very good. The sun was shining and Claire was ensconced in her magazines as I erected a half-tent thing and attached it to the end of the motor home. I felt like my dad. The half-tent was big enough for the pram and other stuff we weren't using. Kind of a shed. It was going very well. There was a rumble of various musics in the distance, and back here there were blankets and cushions and little things to do.
We'd persuaded my parents to come - they're up for everything. When they arrived, I left my son Geronimo with them and headed off for work. Glastonbury is harder to get into than America: you need a passport, ticket, visa, wristband, reason for visit, duration of stay and all the rest of it. By the end of the weekend I needed four different wristbands to carry out my business. I wandered down the hill facing the Pyramid Stage to the majesty of Elbow. They sounded immense and the hairs on the back of my neck prickled.
My wristband that gets me into the backstage bit is number 6512. Everybody in the music business is here - every magazine editor, press officer, video commissioner, product manager, record company chief and his PA. It's a field day - and why not? I have a new supergroup myself and I'm keen to see what's on the market.
I'm working for the BBC World Service and I have a roving brief. The Beeb have their own compound backstage, and the food in BBC catering is rather better than the stuff you get when you perform. There is a good atmosphere in the canteen, a lot of people who love music. It's refreshing to see things from this side of the fence.
Goldfrapp were awesome, a big success. My mum wanted to see Oasis so we all had a look. She didn't think they were as good as they used to be.
Part of the deal with my parents was that they got the camper van. It was a hard bargain, but fair enough in exchange for childcare. It was dark and there was a tent to put up. Camping technology has advanced since I last spent the night under canvas. The Union tent from Millets looked totally brilliant; you could wear it to Wimbledon, and it is a good piece of engineering, too. To use the technical term, it is a "flysheet superstructure suspension tent". We had it up in only two goes. The best thing was the auto-inflating mattress. Four of the big round batteries and away you go. Blows itself up in two minutes. We tried zipping the sleeping bags together, but they're wearing them tight this season. Still, all the torches and lamps you can get are brilliant. There is a head torch and a collapsible lantern, which everyone should own.
I fell asleep reading with the head torch on and woke up to the sound of rain on canvas. I'd forgotten how cosy it is in a tent when it's raining.
Day 3 - A country house retreat
My mum, Kelly, made bacon sarnies. The smell of bacon frying on a camp site is one of the great features of the universe. Claire's gang of friends turned up, soaking, to use the facilities. There was no question it was Barbour jacket time. The Barbour jacket is without doubt the finest piece of clothing I have ever owned. It's up there with the smell of bacon frying.
I must admit I've never been a particular fan of Glastonbury. As a performer, there are festivals in Europe with better facilities, better systems for coping with rainfall, that pay better. The punters love Glastonbury, though, and that's quite infectious. I wandered around with a microphone and a producer for a bit, on the trail of the unusual on behalf of the BBC.
There was a giant scorpion sculpture that you couldn't miss - as big as a bus, suspended from a frame carved out of larch. For sale. We tracked down its designer, and he was cool - cooler than the main stage headliner Paul McCartney, even.
There was a kind of Sergeant Pepper vibe about the band playing in the croissant-shaped tent [Croissant Neuf], the Biggles Wartime Band, singing about their auntie, with big moustaches and tubas. There's just loads of far-out stuff going on - it's exciting. You feel you could meet lots of good people here. Everyone is talking about chai tea, so we tried some. The chai tea guy is a born salesman/performer. He loves it. Cinnamon, cardamom, nutmeg and cloves - he's selling a dream of fresh organic love and will probably be bigger than Starbucks in five years' time. Good luck to him. The best thing we found was the sound massage tent. A softly spoken luminary called Martin bonged a gong and adjusted my subtler energies as I wallowed in sound. It was well worth the money, which, true to the spirit of the place, was whatever you felt was appropriate.
We slopped back through the mud to the main cultural highways. Claire's gang were dressing up as gorillas and going on stage with Basement Jaxx for a number. They were a man short and it's hot inside a gorilla suit. Still in showbiz, though.
Hearing McCartney play all the Beatles songs was a bit like a girl taking her clothes off and showing you everything. It spoiled the mystery a bit. It was all jaunty and matey. Mum and dad liked it, though.
It was the end of our second full day at Glastonbury and we were feeling the strain. It was time to try out a different, more luxurious way to spend the night at a music festival. At this point, Claire and I were whisked off to Babington House by one of their drivers. There was a warm blanket and a picnic basket full of booze in the car. Babington House is part of the ultra-chic Soho House empire and it's only 25 minutes away from site. Loads of the stars book in here and travel up to the festival during the day.
After the last couple of days, it felt indescribably good to be at Babington. We ordered everything on the menu and passed out. Crisp sheets and a bathroom and newspapers. It was heaven. They really look after the ladies at Babington, too; the bathroom products and bottles of water hit the she-spot. You'd be much more likely to pull here than at the festival. It's a pretty sexy environment all round. You get beans with breakfast and all the gossip with your massage. Reluctant as we were to leave Babington's brilliant Cowshed spa it was time to head back to the fields of mud.
Day 4 - Back on the road
Fair weather: cumulus and bright sunshine all the way back to the carnage. A lot of people missing in action. I'd picked up a sexy little barbecue at Tesco for £1.97. Did some chicken. Nice. In fact, the food at Glastonbury is pretty bloody good actually - much better than at Wimbledon, where it's just a rip-off. Our night in the hotel had really given us new zip. I felt content again and happy to do nothing. Kelly and Jason, the grandparents, went off to look for dragons and fairies, and by the time I got down to the action James Brown was on stage. Tightest band I've ever heard. Twenty-one of them. Very accurate, lots of space, smoking! It was pretty yucky everywhere, sloppy and wet, but everybody was smiling - even Morrissey. Dot Cotton [June Brown of EastEnders] drew a cheer every time she went to the bar.
We were on our way before midnight, thundering back the way we came, sad that we would have to hand our new motor home back in the morning, but happy with our memories of camping and Babington. I definitely saw the festival through new eyes. Glastonbury's much better fun dressed as a gorilla. And the best way to do it is definitely all three: tent, mobile home and hotel.
TRAVELLER'S GUIDE
Alex James camped at the Glastonbury Festival in a Eurohike Union Jack Tent (£39.99), available from Millets - The Outdoor Store (0800 389 5861; www.millets.co.uk).
He took the following items, also available from Millets: Eurohike Adventurer 200 Sleeping Bags (£19.99 each); a Eurohike Electric Airmattress (£39.99); Air Land Sea Hollowfibre Pillows (£4.99 each); a Eurohike Collapsible Lantern (£9.99); a Cyba Lite Headlight (£19.99); a Eurohike Low Chair (£9.99); a Eurohike Beach Shelter (£9.99); a Tefal Seven-Piece Cookset (£39.99); a folding Toaster (£4.99) and a Sungas Uno Stove (£19.99).
Alex James also stayed at Babington House (01373 812266; www.babingtonhouse.co.uk). A large double room costs £250 between Sunday and Thursday for members, £285 for non-members. These rates rise to £275 per night for members on Fridays and Saturdays (two night minimum stay) and £315 for non-members. He travelled to Glastonbury in a Pilote Galaxy G40, supplied courtesy of the Motorhome Information Service (01444 458889: www.motorhomeinfo.co.uk). The retail price is £44,990. To hire the Galaxy will cost around £450 per week upwards through a car hire company.
The Motorhome Information Service [MIS] represents the motorhome industry in the UK, providing information about buying, hiring and using a motorhome. There are two main motorhome types, the Conversion and the Coachbuilt. The Conversion has a "high-top" or elevating roof to give standing room. All equipment for living, sleeping and eating are incorporated inside and Conversions are very popular for everyday as well as leisure use.
Coachbuilts are larger vehicles, constructed on the chassis cab of the base vehicle. With greater space, more internal equipment can be added and up to seven people can be accommodated.
The music may be great, but what about the camp site? Blur's bassist Alex James reveals how you can do Glastonbury without tears
03 July 2004
Day 1 - Travels in my camper van
The football was on, so all was eerie and still in Cirencester when we stopped to buy groceries. If truth be told, I was a lot more excited about going to Waitrose than Glastonbury. Waitrose is currently the most glamorous supermarket, and we only have a Tesco in Stow-on-the-Wold. I was looking forward to a double trolley binge, while the rest of the country was watching telly.
The car park was almost empty. My wife, Claire, parked our gleaming new motor home right across six disabled parking spaces next to the door. I felt this was in bad taste, and we were still arguing about who was a pussy and who was an arsehole when we realised the supermarket was shut anyway. We ended up in Tesco as usual. We filled a trolley and trawled on through the night. The roads were empty. It was a good feeling to know we had everything we needed with us.
What do we look for in a festival I wondered, as we drove on towards Somerset. Good weather? Good chance of a shag? Goodbye life for the weekend? Maybe we just have to express some primal locust-swarming instinct. Maybe it's just a laugh. But one thing's for sure: the festival phenomenon is an ancient and global licence to print money.
It suits the record companies and the agents and the media and the promoters to put everything together into a huge package. Probably, in fairness, it suits the punters as well, but the word "festival" is often cunningly used to inject some hip retro-chic into what are basically stadium rock concerts. If you called it a stadium gig, nobody would want to go, but if you call it a festival and put some balloons up... bingo.
We were whacked by the time we arrived at our camp site at the rather cheeky Winding Lake Farm, the next-door farm to Glastonbury. The owners don't have any problem with everything being sponsored: you get a free rain mac from O2 and a free lift in a Toyota. There were a lot of festival types and a lot of Sony people staying in very large Winnebagoes. I don't understand why you'd want one of those big ones, unless you want to go on holiday with your neighbours. Ours is nice and compact, easy to manoeuvre, but big enough to fit our family and a trolley-load of shopping.
I'm a farmer, and I got to thinking about the profits at Glastonbury. I manage to net about £50 an acre a year for my land. If you've got the next-door farm to Glastonbury - and a drinks licence and room for a few hundred caravans - well, do the maths. Put some nice toilets in. Get some sponsorship. They're queuing up.
Anyway, it was the ideal place for our gaff. We got wired up with electricity and hit the hay. Our four-month-old son was in a little nest in the galley; we were up in the roof. Just perfect.
Day 2 - A night under canvas
We had a pretty good night's sleep in the camper van. Not too moist. Moisture is the camper's foe, and draughts. Not too draughty, either, in our van. A motor home does give you a kind of freedom you can't achieve with hotels and aeroplanes. As soon as you climb in, you're on holiday. And it's very much your holiday. We took off around Europe in one when I was 10 years old. I'd decided to buy one by lunchtime.
Where the motor homes can't compete with the hotels is in the bathroom department. But it was only Friday morning, the first day of Glastonbury, and the Winding Hill toilet facilities are already legendary in the music industry. People leave the backstage compound and walk for 20 minutes to use these loos. You would be looking at trading a BBC catering pass for a Winding Hill Farm pass by Sunday. I was dismayed to find a small speck of urine on the black seat in my chosen cubicle. I don't go for those plastic hygiene covers - go French when in doubt, I say. It was a shame, though. Otherwise spotless. I don't know what the Michelin system would make of a small splash like that. Maybe that's why they have those other kind of toilets on French camp sites.
The shower made me feel very good. The sun was shining and Claire was ensconced in her magazines as I erected a half-tent thing and attached it to the end of the motor home. I felt like my dad. The half-tent was big enough for the pram and other stuff we weren't using. Kind of a shed. It was going very well. There was a rumble of various musics in the distance, and back here there were blankets and cushions and little things to do.
We'd persuaded my parents to come - they're up for everything. When they arrived, I left my son Geronimo with them and headed off for work. Glastonbury is harder to get into than America: you need a passport, ticket, visa, wristband, reason for visit, duration of stay and all the rest of it. By the end of the weekend I needed four different wristbands to carry out my business. I wandered down the hill facing the Pyramid Stage to the majesty of Elbow. They sounded immense and the hairs on the back of my neck prickled.
My wristband that gets me into the backstage bit is number 6512. Everybody in the music business is here - every magazine editor, press officer, video commissioner, product manager, record company chief and his PA. It's a field day - and why not? I have a new supergroup myself and I'm keen to see what's on the market.
I'm working for the BBC World Service and I have a roving brief. The Beeb have their own compound backstage, and the food in BBC catering is rather better than the stuff you get when you perform. There is a good atmosphere in the canteen, a lot of people who love music. It's refreshing to see things from this side of the fence.
Goldfrapp were awesome, a big success. My mum wanted to see Oasis so we all had a look. She didn't think they were as good as they used to be.
Part of the deal with my parents was that they got the camper van. It was a hard bargain, but fair enough in exchange for childcare. It was dark and there was a tent to put up. Camping technology has advanced since I last spent the night under canvas. The Union tent from Millets looked totally brilliant; you could wear it to Wimbledon, and it is a good piece of engineering, too. To use the technical term, it is a "flysheet superstructure suspension tent". We had it up in only two goes. The best thing was the auto-inflating mattress. Four of the big round batteries and away you go. Blows itself up in two minutes. We tried zipping the sleeping bags together, but they're wearing them tight this season. Still, all the torches and lamps you can get are brilliant. There is a head torch and a collapsible lantern, which everyone should own.
I fell asleep reading with the head torch on and woke up to the sound of rain on canvas. I'd forgotten how cosy it is in a tent when it's raining.
Day 3 - A country house retreat
My mum, Kelly, made bacon sarnies. The smell of bacon frying on a camp site is one of the great features of the universe. Claire's gang of friends turned up, soaking, to use the facilities. There was no question it was Barbour jacket time. The Barbour jacket is without doubt the finest piece of clothing I have ever owned. It's up there with the smell of bacon frying.
I must admit I've never been a particular fan of Glastonbury. As a performer, there are festivals in Europe with better facilities, better systems for coping with rainfall, that pay better. The punters love Glastonbury, though, and that's quite infectious. I wandered around with a microphone and a producer for a bit, on the trail of the unusual on behalf of the BBC.
There was a giant scorpion sculpture that you couldn't miss - as big as a bus, suspended from a frame carved out of larch. For sale. We tracked down its designer, and he was cool - cooler than the main stage headliner Paul McCartney, even.
There was a kind of Sergeant Pepper vibe about the band playing in the croissant-shaped tent [Croissant Neuf], the Biggles Wartime Band, singing about their auntie, with big moustaches and tubas. There's just loads of far-out stuff going on - it's exciting. You feel you could meet lots of good people here. Everyone is talking about chai tea, so we tried some. The chai tea guy is a born salesman/performer. He loves it. Cinnamon, cardamom, nutmeg and cloves - he's selling a dream of fresh organic love and will probably be bigger than Starbucks in five years' time. Good luck to him. The best thing we found was the sound massage tent. A softly spoken luminary called Martin bonged a gong and adjusted my subtler energies as I wallowed in sound. It was well worth the money, which, true to the spirit of the place, was whatever you felt was appropriate.
We slopped back through the mud to the main cultural highways. Claire's gang were dressing up as gorillas and going on stage with Basement Jaxx for a number. They were a man short and it's hot inside a gorilla suit. Still in showbiz, though.
Hearing McCartney play all the Beatles songs was a bit like a girl taking her clothes off and showing you everything. It spoiled the mystery a bit. It was all jaunty and matey. Mum and dad liked it, though.
It was the end of our second full day at Glastonbury and we were feeling the strain. It was time to try out a different, more luxurious way to spend the night at a music festival. At this point, Claire and I were whisked off to Babington House by one of their drivers. There was a warm blanket and a picnic basket full of booze in the car. Babington House is part of the ultra-chic Soho House empire and it's only 25 minutes away from site. Loads of the stars book in here and travel up to the festival during the day.
After the last couple of days, it felt indescribably good to be at Babington. We ordered everything on the menu and passed out. Crisp sheets and a bathroom and newspapers. It was heaven. They really look after the ladies at Babington, too; the bathroom products and bottles of water hit the she-spot. You'd be much more likely to pull here than at the festival. It's a pretty sexy environment all round. You get beans with breakfast and all the gossip with your massage. Reluctant as we were to leave Babington's brilliant Cowshed spa it was time to head back to the fields of mud.
Day 4 - Back on the road
Fair weather: cumulus and bright sunshine all the way back to the carnage. A lot of people missing in action. I'd picked up a sexy little barbecue at Tesco for £1.97. Did some chicken. Nice. In fact, the food at Glastonbury is pretty bloody good actually - much better than at Wimbledon, where it's just a rip-off. Our night in the hotel had really given us new zip. I felt content again and happy to do nothing. Kelly and Jason, the grandparents, went off to look for dragons and fairies, and by the time I got down to the action James Brown was on stage. Tightest band I've ever heard. Twenty-one of them. Very accurate, lots of space, smoking! It was pretty yucky everywhere, sloppy and wet, but everybody was smiling - even Morrissey. Dot Cotton [June Brown of EastEnders] drew a cheer every time she went to the bar.
We were on our way before midnight, thundering back the way we came, sad that we would have to hand our new motor home back in the morning, but happy with our memories of camping and Babington. I definitely saw the festival through new eyes. Glastonbury's much better fun dressed as a gorilla. And the best way to do it is definitely all three: tent, mobile home and hotel.
TRAVELLER'S GUIDE
Alex James camped at the Glastonbury Festival in a Eurohike Union Jack Tent (£39.99), available from Millets - The Outdoor Store (0800 389 5861; www.millets.co.uk).
He took the following items, also available from Millets: Eurohike Adventurer 200 Sleeping Bags (£19.99 each); a Eurohike Electric Airmattress (£39.99); Air Land Sea Hollowfibre Pillows (£4.99 each); a Eurohike Collapsible Lantern (£9.99); a Cyba Lite Headlight (£19.99); a Eurohike Low Chair (£9.99); a Eurohike Beach Shelter (£9.99); a Tefal Seven-Piece Cookset (£39.99); a folding Toaster (£4.99) and a Sungas Uno Stove (£19.99).
Alex James also stayed at Babington House (01373 812266; www.babingtonhouse.co.uk). A large double room costs £250 between Sunday and Thursday for members, £285 for non-members. These rates rise to £275 per night for members on Fridays and Saturdays (two night minimum stay) and £315 for non-members. He travelled to Glastonbury in a Pilote Galaxy G40, supplied courtesy of the Motorhome Information Service (01444 458889: www.motorhomeinfo.co.uk). The retail price is £44,990. To hire the Galaxy will cost around £450 per week upwards through a car hire company.
The Motorhome Information Service [MIS] represents the motorhome industry in the UK, providing information about buying, hiring and using a motorhome. There are two main motorhome types, the Conversion and the Coachbuilt. The Conversion has a "high-top" or elevating roof to give standing room. All equipment for living, sleeping and eating are incorporated inside and Conversions are very popular for everyday as well as leisure use.
Coachbuilts are larger vehicles, constructed on the chassis cab of the base vehicle. With greater space, more internal equipment can be added and up to seven people can be accommodated.
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