Korn in porn, Metallica on trial and more
While the music of Korn has never struck us as, shall we say, suitable for setting a romantic mood, frontman Jonathan Davis seems to think he's got the knack for turning out aural Viagra, as evidenced by his decision to score an as-yet-untitled porn flick he's working on with his wife. Deven Davis, who's starred in such critically acclaimed celluloid classics as Maximum Cock, figures to be prominently placed in front of the camera as well, and -- we shudder at the prospect -- her hubby intends to deliver a brief nude cameo as well. On the bright side, Fred Durst has yet to find a way to get the lens cap off a camcorder, so full-frontal Limpness is still a ways off . . .
Since we've never really been all that keen on the idea of doling out the death penalty -- other than to some of the land's more brain-cell deficient skinheads -- we're pleased to note that a man who claims Metallica drove him to commit murder has had his sentence commuted for the time being. Troy Kunkle, who was convicted of shooting a robbery victim to death back in 1984 -- while belting out the chorus of Metallica's "No Remorse" -- claimed that James Hetfield's lyrics (and not the desire to snag thirteen bucks for a quick dose of crack) were the catalyst for his deeds. The U.S. Supreme Court, perhaps moved by testimony that -- and we are not making this up -- Kunkle played air guitar along with the song when it was played at his original trial, issued an indefinite stay of execution. With that out of the way, perhaps we'll finally get the Supremes to lend an ear to our pleas about getting Scott Stapp out of circulation . . .
What's a band to do when it wants desperately to follow in the footsteps of Fountains of Wayne, but lacks the budget to hire Rachel Hunter for a long weekend of fun and frolic. Well, if you ask Hoobastank, the answer is to settle for the next best thing -- once you remove the 173 or so discarded exes of aging rock stars -- on the list. After a bit of editing, the Stank boys came to the conclusion that Joan Jett would be the ideal choice to play a "hot mom" in the video for "Same Direction." While that's a disturbing choice for any number of reasons, we suppose we can be thankful that Hooba and company didn't take the risk of launching a full-fledged Lita Ford revival . . .
Since R. Kelly was, for some reason, unavailable for the job, it naturally followed that James Brown would climb atop a soapbox to advise the world's youth that he'd make an ideal role model. The Godfather of Soul, who's on tour in Europe between arrests, told the Irish Examiner that should anyone ask, he's always available to offer lessons on "discipline, politeness and manners." Brown also focused in on the younger generation's pervasive lack of style, which he says he finds utterly disheartening -- and, judging by the amount of work he puts into his look for each and every mug shot, he's not only talking the talk when it comes to fashion.
DAVID SPRAGUE
(Posted Jul 09, 2004)
samedi, juillet 10, 2004
vendredi, juillet 09, 2004
Linda Thompson
Back in the bright lights
The three classic LPs that Linda Thompson made with her then-husband Richard are out again. Tim Cumming meets the singer
09 July 2004
"That's so lovely," exclaims Linda Thompson, sitting in the front room of her elegant house in Chelsea. I've just told her how a friend of mine described his first encounter with the music of Richard and Linda Thompson, back in the Seventies. He was driving on the motorway when "Withered and Died", written by Richard and sung by Linda, came on the radio. Before the song had ended, he had pulled over, unable to see to drive through his tears.
Linda Thompson has one of the most beautiful voices ever to grace a rock album. Ranging from a declamatory ring to aching passion, it is a voice that makes the voices inside go quiet, an instrument of great tenderness and warmth, yet with an undertow of pain and heartache. Her reputation rests largely on the albums she made with her then husband, Richard Thompson, beginning with 1973's I Want to See The Bright Lights Tonight and concluding with 1982's Shoot Out the Lights.
With their first three albums now remastered for CD for the first time, and released with extra live tracks, the dark theatricality of Bright Lights, the music-hall jauntiness of Hokey Pokey, and the stark, unflinching Pour Down Like Silver, the couple's last album before their conversion to Sufism in 1975 are a stunning reminder of just what the word "classic" means.
Born Linda Pettifer and brought up in Glasgow, Thompson came to study in London in the Sixties, but abandoned college for folk clubs such as the Troubadour, where she began singing professionally - mixing Bob Dylan numbers with traditional Scottish and English tunes. "I grew up with people singing around the house," she says. "They were all good singers in my family. But I was one of the best."
She met Richard via her friendship with Sandy Denny, then the singer with the band Fairport Convention.
"Richard was still with Fairport but becoming disenchanted with that and wanting to leave and do folk clubs, and I said: 'You're mad, it's a nightmare, you're not going to like it.' But that's what he wanted to do and he did it. And he actually did like it."
So for the best part of two years the couple toured the folk clubs as an acoustic duo, playing the songs that would later appear on Bright Lights, and which have since entered the lexicon of British folk-rock. They added an eclectic repertoire of covers in the spirit of doing whatever took their fancy.
Bright Lights was recorded for Island in three days on a tiny budget and with friends such as the accordionist John Kirkpatrick, and members of Fairport and the band Fother-ingay, to expand the textures of Richard's powerful, bleak and haunting new songs. The resulting album has entered many a top 100, yet, at the time, sales were minimal. "We had a pretty loose way in the studio," recalls Linda. "You'd just point to someone for a solo and then the chorus would come back in. It was more like a singalong."
Yet being in possession of such a powerful voice came with a price, and, as Linda put down the classic tracks on Bright Lights, she first suffered the debilitating problem with her voice that would plague her throughout her career, even bringing it to an apparent end in the mid-Eighties (she finally broke the silence with 2001's acclaimed Fashionably Late).
The problem, dysphonia, made it physically impossible to sing a note. "Whether it was some subliminal thing I don't know. The doctors now tell me I was breathing the wrong way when I was pregnant, and it went from a physical thing to become a psychological thing."
The only time she was free of vocal problems was when her marriage ended, shortly before a US tour to promote their final album, in 1982. "By the time we got to do Shoot Out the Lights, it was really bad, but when we split up and did the US tour I didn't have it at all. A broken heart takes precedence. I didn't worry about my throat." And the music was astonishing, with "Dimming of the Day" and "A Heart Needs a Home" receiving the definitive treatment. "Musically, that was a very good tour. It was horrible personally, but it freed me. I'd had lots of health problems and they vanished."
None of these performances has had an official release. Instead, the re-releases come with a selection of contemporaneous cuts, including a superlative version of "Dark End of the Street", with only Richard's guitar as accompaniment. "I don't feel I'm this great singer," says Linda, "so what I do is try and put myself into a song, and that's hard." She certainly does inhabit it , making it one of the most beautiful performances they ever put on tape.
"I got really scared of microphones," she says, recalling the sessions for Bright Lights. "I still don't like them. They get in the way, coming between me and the audience." Even the thought of recording constrains her. "I like the ephemeral thing of, 'you had to be there'." It's the philosophy of an artist not given to musing on post- erity. "Immortality is a very male thing: 'How am I going to be remembered?' - Who would be arrogant enough to think like that?"
'I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight', 'Hokey Pokey' and 'Pour Down Like Silver' are out now on Island/Universal
The three classic LPs that Linda Thompson made with her then-husband Richard are out again. Tim Cumming meets the singer
09 July 2004
"That's so lovely," exclaims Linda Thompson, sitting in the front room of her elegant house in Chelsea. I've just told her how a friend of mine described his first encounter with the music of Richard and Linda Thompson, back in the Seventies. He was driving on the motorway when "Withered and Died", written by Richard and sung by Linda, came on the radio. Before the song had ended, he had pulled over, unable to see to drive through his tears.
Linda Thompson has one of the most beautiful voices ever to grace a rock album. Ranging from a declamatory ring to aching passion, it is a voice that makes the voices inside go quiet, an instrument of great tenderness and warmth, yet with an undertow of pain and heartache. Her reputation rests largely on the albums she made with her then husband, Richard Thompson, beginning with 1973's I Want to See The Bright Lights Tonight and concluding with 1982's Shoot Out the Lights.
With their first three albums now remastered for CD for the first time, and released with extra live tracks, the dark theatricality of Bright Lights, the music-hall jauntiness of Hokey Pokey, and the stark, unflinching Pour Down Like Silver, the couple's last album before their conversion to Sufism in 1975 are a stunning reminder of just what the word "classic" means.
Born Linda Pettifer and brought up in Glasgow, Thompson came to study in London in the Sixties, but abandoned college for folk clubs such as the Troubadour, where she began singing professionally - mixing Bob Dylan numbers with traditional Scottish and English tunes. "I grew up with people singing around the house," she says. "They were all good singers in my family. But I was one of the best."
She met Richard via her friendship with Sandy Denny, then the singer with the band Fairport Convention.
"Richard was still with Fairport but becoming disenchanted with that and wanting to leave and do folk clubs, and I said: 'You're mad, it's a nightmare, you're not going to like it.' But that's what he wanted to do and he did it. And he actually did like it."
So for the best part of two years the couple toured the folk clubs as an acoustic duo, playing the songs that would later appear on Bright Lights, and which have since entered the lexicon of British folk-rock. They added an eclectic repertoire of covers in the spirit of doing whatever took their fancy.
Bright Lights was recorded for Island in three days on a tiny budget and with friends such as the accordionist John Kirkpatrick, and members of Fairport and the band Fother-ingay, to expand the textures of Richard's powerful, bleak and haunting new songs. The resulting album has entered many a top 100, yet, at the time, sales were minimal. "We had a pretty loose way in the studio," recalls Linda. "You'd just point to someone for a solo and then the chorus would come back in. It was more like a singalong."
Yet being in possession of such a powerful voice came with a price, and, as Linda put down the classic tracks on Bright Lights, she first suffered the debilitating problem with her voice that would plague her throughout her career, even bringing it to an apparent end in the mid-Eighties (she finally broke the silence with 2001's acclaimed Fashionably Late).
The problem, dysphonia, made it physically impossible to sing a note. "Whether it was some subliminal thing I don't know. The doctors now tell me I was breathing the wrong way when I was pregnant, and it went from a physical thing to become a psychological thing."
The only time she was free of vocal problems was when her marriage ended, shortly before a US tour to promote their final album, in 1982. "By the time we got to do Shoot Out the Lights, it was really bad, but when we split up and did the US tour I didn't have it at all. A broken heart takes precedence. I didn't worry about my throat." And the music was astonishing, with "Dimming of the Day" and "A Heart Needs a Home" receiving the definitive treatment. "Musically, that was a very good tour. It was horrible personally, but it freed me. I'd had lots of health problems and they vanished."
None of these performances has had an official release. Instead, the re-releases come with a selection of contemporaneous cuts, including a superlative version of "Dark End of the Street", with only Richard's guitar as accompaniment. "I don't feel I'm this great singer," says Linda, "so what I do is try and put myself into a song, and that's hard." She certainly does inhabit it , making it one of the most beautiful performances they ever put on tape.
"I got really scared of microphones," she says, recalling the sessions for Bright Lights. "I still don't like them. They get in the way, coming between me and the audience." Even the thought of recording constrains her. "I like the ephemeral thing of, 'you had to be there'." It's the philosophy of an artist not given to musing on post- erity. "Immortality is a very male thing: 'How am I going to be remembered?' - Who would be arrogant enough to think like that?"
'I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight', 'Hokey Pokey' and 'Pour Down Like Silver' are out now on Island/Universal
Dogs Die in Hot Cars
Leaders of the pack and loving it
Dogs Die in Hot Cars are in their element playing music that puts a smile on people's faces, they tell Kevin Harley
09 July 2004
"It's like, 'Hmmm, thinking man's pop band'," says Craig Macintosh, the lead singer of Dogs Die in Hot Cars, with a healthy degree of suspicion and a voice hoarse from a recent 54-date, profile-building UK tour. He's talking about what he thinks of his band being dubbed "clever", and the tendency to rank them among the kind of art-pop, ranging from Scissor Sisters to Franz Ferdinand, that seems to have blossomed following the post-Britpop plod-rock period's doldrums (see Travis, Coldplay) and the ferocious dumbings-down of the Pop Idol set. "As far as clever pop goes," he adds, "for me, musically, Missy Elliott and Outkast are the ones that have it all. They've got the humour and the wit, and their production sounds are, like, ahead of ahead. They're my kind of thinking man's music in the pop world."
"We just write pop records about things that interest us," says Lee Worrall, Dogs' affable bassist. "People characterise it as an early 1980s thing, what's happening right now, but maybe that's just about trying to get your head around it. Where is it all coming from? I don't know. The humour we have and the music we write, we've been doing it like that for 10 years. It's just kind of getting popular now."
It's easy to see why some people have lumped Dogs in with a sort of smart-pop revival. They're quick, clever and, well, Scottish enough to foment hopes of a Franz Ferdinand-sized splash. In their brightly inventive debut album, Please Describe Yourself, they've made a classically sized 10-song record of classically sized, fabulously catchy three-and-a-half-minute pop songs that nail the art of the socially observational British pop song just as early 1980s bands such as XTC and Madness did. Throw in the requisite Talking Heads-ish angularity, and a Dexy's Midnight Runners vibe courtesy of Macintosh's exuberant neo-yodel and production by the near-legendary Clive Langer/Alan Winstanley team, and the point seems to have been made: the early 1980s are back, again, and this time, it's clever.
But Dogs have it in them to be more than mere pack animals. They're no Johnny- come-latelies on a revivalist bandwagon, for starters. All in their mid-twenties, Worrall, Macintosh, Gary Smith (guitars) and Laurence Davey (drums) have been playing together since they were teenagers, when Macintosh invited himself to Davey's house after a game of rugby. (Keyboardist Ruth Quigley joined a little later.) "I was watching them play," Macintosh says, "and I got this little microphone and started squealing into it. Poor Laurence's parents were probably trying to have |a relaxing weekend, listening to Radio 4, and we were making all this noise!" He looks sheepish: "Then they heard it every week for the next 10 years."
Alongside a couple of their own tunes ("Two-chord wonders," Worrall says), their first gigs boasted covers of "Foxy Lady", Cypress Hill's "I Ain't Goin' Out Like That" and Nirvana's "Rape Me". All good, teenage mischief, but what about the XTC, Orange Juice, Dexy's and Madness comparisons? "Obviously we were aware of Madness," Worrall muses, "and my dad probably had a Madness record. But I never owned or heard much Dexy's, and that goes for all of us. As for XTC, we did a gig in London about three years ago and the billing said, 'In the mode of XTC.' We'd only heard 'Making Plans for Nigel', so we had to buy loads of XTC records."
As for the Winstanley and Langer contribution, their presence behind the album doesn't stem from an encyclopaedic knowledge of early 1980s pop on Dogs' part. "It does sort of fuel that impression, I know," says Worrall. "But we just met a whole bunch of producers. When Alan came in he had this tiny wee scrap of paper and he said, 'I've got these ideas for the songs.' He had all these tiny little notes next to each song! And we were like," he adds, without a hint of reverence, "'What the fuck?' But he'd obviously sat down and given it all a lot of thought, and he was basically just along the same wavelength as us."
"I think the bands we were influenced by were more aware of what was coming out of that period than us," Macintosh adds. "The Red Hot Chili Peppers were influenced by Talking Heads and Blur by XTC. Blur's Leisure album was originally going to be produced by Andy Partridge of XTC. Two bands that I miss being mentioned from that impressionable period are the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy and a band called Firehose, from LA. They had that kind of Calypso guitar sound, really nice and creamy, really rhythmic. They were doing similar funky stuff to the Chilis but with a real jive to it. That was an influence on us. We didn't want to have distortion, we wanted to have rhythm and make things a bit lighter."
If much decent pop music stems from an enthusiastic desire to flush out all the irritants that have gone before them, Dogs are no exception. There's something almost cleansing about their sound, making it no surprise that they stumbled on it themselves on the basis of what they didn't want to hear as much as what they did.
"A lot of what shapes us as a band is things that frustrate us," Macintosh says. "We got frustrated with songs that went on too long, where you get to the point after the end of the second chorus and want to skip to the end. We wanted to write tunes where the song would reach its conclusion and you might even want to play it again."
"Songs where when you get to the chorus you don't need to hit the distortion pedal to make it big," Worrall adds, "because they are big already. And which don't stop three-quarters of the way through to make room for the guitar solo."
"Which has now been replaced," Macintosh says, leaning forward excitably and not a little conspiratorially, "in a lot of manufactured pop by 'the rap'. That's the new guitar solo! It's about things we thought were unnecessary. We wanted to take them out and make short, precise pop songs, which was born out of a frustration with hearing too much of the opposite. Also, there's been a lot of bands over the past few years that have had no rhythm. It's just been, like, 'dum tch-tch, dum tch-tch'. We wanted to put in a few offbeats."
"We used to spend ages doing 'funky jams'," Worrall adds, clearly relishing the phrase, "to make it music you can dance to with a smile on your face."
Dogs' current single, "I Love You 'Cause I Have To", fulfils that remit with spadesful of indie-ska exuberance. "Godhopping", too, is a jauntily piano-driven slip of white funk, which got them to a respectable No. 24 in the charts, while "Apples & Oranges" and "Lounger" - the latter of which is becoming their signature tune live - have all the vim and zip of early Talking Heads. David Byrne-ish wiggle, then, or Madness-styled, knees-first manoeuvre? Either way, you can't accuse Dogs of not trying to have something for all.
And things to say, too. Macintosh labours over his lyrics, and the mix of Dogs' sound with his top-of-the-range bawl is designed to lend a clarity to them. He confesses a little sheepishly, and with a little coaxing, to overdoing it with a few "cool/ school" rhymes on Please Describe Yourself, but much of the album stands up well in a tradition of throwing a spotlight on to contemporary British life, via a look at the options people are confronted with.
"It's not about wrestling with options," Macintosh says, "so much as welcoming that there are options. It frustrated me when lyricists preached, like they were answering things and saying there was one specific way of thinking. I don't believe that and I try to argue with myself in lyrics. I'll make up a point of view, like in 'Lounger', which is about the benefits of being ignorant and lazy. I want to write lyrics that start a conversation and keep it open."
You can hear it in the way he makes light of issues-laden pop. On "Celebrity Sanctum", a fixation on unattainable stars is satirised next to a startlingly yearning, Pulp-ish chorus that begs to be heard as a single.
"Well, we're contemporary, we're of the moment," Macintosh says. "We're inspired by what's happening now. Celebrity's everywhere, in the media, in the clubs we go to, too, everybody's mimicking the moves. As soon as that Beyoncé song comes on, everyone's doing a Beyoncé!" After a creditable impression of someone doing a not-so-creditable Beyoncé impression, he adds: "Celebrity's been around for ever, but it just seems to be getting a bit sordid now."
As for whether Dogs are about to join the ranks of the famous, it's not entirely impossible. They may not sport Franz Ferdinand's desperate trousers, but they've got the songs, the approachability and a singer with a real voice. "Godhopping" was decently near enough to a proper hit, too, and it's probably among the least of the potential singles on their album. "We really wanted to get into the Top 40 to make a mark with that one," says Worrall. "It was 17 midweek, so we were like, 'Wow, we could be on Top of the Pops!' But obviously, later on in the week all the kids get their pocket money and go out and buy Britney Spears or whatever. So 24 was great. See if we can better it with the next one."
Whether they have the name seems to be the only moot point so far: for some critics, it's the worst band name in pop history, while for others, it's one of the best. Memorably, one feature even categorised them as "emo" (as in the kind of "emotional punk" that, despite being fractious, is, like, totally sensitive beneath); a misstep surely based less on listening to the band than on "die" being in their name (emo kids are deep, see). Were they a little worried that somebody expected them to sound like goateed, short-wearing, suburban American kids with skateboards and an angst-strop on?
"I think that means it's working, though," says Macintosh. "It's the perfect name for us because we're a band who get a kick out of surprising people and not feeling that we can be pinned down just like that. Besides, nobody says to me, 'Craig's a rubbish name.' Well, aside from Lee. Lee thinks that if there was a name for a bird stool it would be a Craig. Y'know, like, 'A pigeon's just done a Craig on you.'" And he adds, emphatically: "I'm not going to change my name to Rollo or anything, though."
Clearly, a whiff of success isn't about to get the better of anyone who's been told their name has an excremental factor to it. It's the kind of banter that comes from the band having known each other for years. They even shared a house in Glasgow for the last few of these, and despite going their separate ways two weeks back, in readiness for the weeks of touring to come, it's prepared them for long-term intimacy and other band pressures. "Well, we're ready for anything, really," says Worrall.
"I think we're happy with the slow build, though," Macintosh adds. "It's been happening a bit in the right way, through gigs and making records and more gigs. And because we've lived together, it's not overwhelming. I think if we continue like that, there won't be any problems in terms of how we deal with things. Maybe that's naive, but who knows? I think because we've known each other since we were kids, it keeps everyone grounded. It's not like having loads of yes people around you. If things really kick off, we are all here for each other."
Pack animals, then? Maybe, but it's a pack of their own.
'Please Describe Yourself' (V2) is released on Monday; Dogs Die in Hot Cars play T in the Park, Kinross, Scotland, 10 July; Oxegen Festival, Punchestown, Ireland, 11 July; Summer Sundae, Leicester, 14 August; Reading Festival, 27 August; Leeds Festival, 29 August
Album: Dogs Die in Hot Cars
Please Describe Yourself, V2
By Andy Gill
16 July 2004
And while we're considering old new-wave pastiches, the question must be asked: is there room enough in the world for a second XTC, when there doesn't appear to have been enough to keep the original one fully operational over the last decade? Because Dogs Die In Hot Cars are to XTC what Gene were to The Smiths: a copy so closely modelled on the original that it should send shivers down the spines of Swindon's finest. It's really quite creepy, something like the musical equivalent of stalking: lots of nimble rhythm guitars and tricksy keyboard fills and lyrics which hint at deep themes, but which turn out to have hidden shallows. The farthest DDIHC stray from this template is when they adopt a brittle Talking Heads manner on tracks such as "Apples & Oranges" and "Pastimes & Lifestyles", which is hardly worth the bother at all, really. There's lots of name-dropping in songs such as "Paul Newman's Eyes" and "Celebrity Sanctum" - basically a list of film starlets the singer fancies - while further student approval is guaranteed by "Lounger", a song about an overeducated, lazy bohemian: "I get up when I want/ Don't have to eat my greens/ Or keep my bedroom tidy." An oddly hollow experience.
Dogs Die in Hot Cars are in their element playing music that puts a smile on people's faces, they tell Kevin Harley
09 July 2004
"It's like, 'Hmmm, thinking man's pop band'," says Craig Macintosh, the lead singer of Dogs Die in Hot Cars, with a healthy degree of suspicion and a voice hoarse from a recent 54-date, profile-building UK tour. He's talking about what he thinks of his band being dubbed "clever", and the tendency to rank them among the kind of art-pop, ranging from Scissor Sisters to Franz Ferdinand, that seems to have blossomed following the post-Britpop plod-rock period's doldrums (see Travis, Coldplay) and the ferocious dumbings-down of the Pop Idol set. "As far as clever pop goes," he adds, "for me, musically, Missy Elliott and Outkast are the ones that have it all. They've got the humour and the wit, and their production sounds are, like, ahead of ahead. They're my kind of thinking man's music in the pop world."
"We just write pop records about things that interest us," says Lee Worrall, Dogs' affable bassist. "People characterise it as an early 1980s thing, what's happening right now, but maybe that's just about trying to get your head around it. Where is it all coming from? I don't know. The humour we have and the music we write, we've been doing it like that for 10 years. It's just kind of getting popular now."
It's easy to see why some people have lumped Dogs in with a sort of smart-pop revival. They're quick, clever and, well, Scottish enough to foment hopes of a Franz Ferdinand-sized splash. In their brightly inventive debut album, Please Describe Yourself, they've made a classically sized 10-song record of classically sized, fabulously catchy three-and-a-half-minute pop songs that nail the art of the socially observational British pop song just as early 1980s bands such as XTC and Madness did. Throw in the requisite Talking Heads-ish angularity, and a Dexy's Midnight Runners vibe courtesy of Macintosh's exuberant neo-yodel and production by the near-legendary Clive Langer/Alan Winstanley team, and the point seems to have been made: the early 1980s are back, again, and this time, it's clever.
But Dogs have it in them to be more than mere pack animals. They're no Johnny- come-latelies on a revivalist bandwagon, for starters. All in their mid-twenties, Worrall, Macintosh, Gary Smith (guitars) and Laurence Davey (drums) have been playing together since they were teenagers, when Macintosh invited himself to Davey's house after a game of rugby. (Keyboardist Ruth Quigley joined a little later.) "I was watching them play," Macintosh says, "and I got this little microphone and started squealing into it. Poor Laurence's parents were probably trying to have |a relaxing weekend, listening to Radio 4, and we were making all this noise!" He looks sheepish: "Then they heard it every week for the next 10 years."
Alongside a couple of their own tunes ("Two-chord wonders," Worrall says), their first gigs boasted covers of "Foxy Lady", Cypress Hill's "I Ain't Goin' Out Like That" and Nirvana's "Rape Me". All good, teenage mischief, but what about the XTC, Orange Juice, Dexy's and Madness comparisons? "Obviously we were aware of Madness," Worrall muses, "and my dad probably had a Madness record. But I never owned or heard much Dexy's, and that goes for all of us. As for XTC, we did a gig in London about three years ago and the billing said, 'In the mode of XTC.' We'd only heard 'Making Plans for Nigel', so we had to buy loads of XTC records."
As for the Winstanley and Langer contribution, their presence behind the album doesn't stem from an encyclopaedic knowledge of early 1980s pop on Dogs' part. "It does sort of fuel that impression, I know," says Worrall. "But we just met a whole bunch of producers. When Alan came in he had this tiny wee scrap of paper and he said, 'I've got these ideas for the songs.' He had all these tiny little notes next to each song! And we were like," he adds, without a hint of reverence, "'What the fuck?' But he'd obviously sat down and given it all a lot of thought, and he was basically just along the same wavelength as us."
"I think the bands we were influenced by were more aware of what was coming out of that period than us," Macintosh adds. "The Red Hot Chili Peppers were influenced by Talking Heads and Blur by XTC. Blur's Leisure album was originally going to be produced by Andy Partridge of XTC. Two bands that I miss being mentioned from that impressionable period are the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy and a band called Firehose, from LA. They had that kind of Calypso guitar sound, really nice and creamy, really rhythmic. They were doing similar funky stuff to the Chilis but with a real jive to it. That was an influence on us. We didn't want to have distortion, we wanted to have rhythm and make things a bit lighter."
If much decent pop music stems from an enthusiastic desire to flush out all the irritants that have gone before them, Dogs are no exception. There's something almost cleansing about their sound, making it no surprise that they stumbled on it themselves on the basis of what they didn't want to hear as much as what they did.
"A lot of what shapes us as a band is things that frustrate us," Macintosh says. "We got frustrated with songs that went on too long, where you get to the point after the end of the second chorus and want to skip to the end. We wanted to write tunes where the song would reach its conclusion and you might even want to play it again."
"Songs where when you get to the chorus you don't need to hit the distortion pedal to make it big," Worrall adds, "because they are big already. And which don't stop three-quarters of the way through to make room for the guitar solo."
"Which has now been replaced," Macintosh says, leaning forward excitably and not a little conspiratorially, "in a lot of manufactured pop by 'the rap'. That's the new guitar solo! It's about things we thought were unnecessary. We wanted to take them out and make short, precise pop songs, which was born out of a frustration with hearing too much of the opposite. Also, there's been a lot of bands over the past few years that have had no rhythm. It's just been, like, 'dum tch-tch, dum tch-tch'. We wanted to put in a few offbeats."
"We used to spend ages doing 'funky jams'," Worrall adds, clearly relishing the phrase, "to make it music you can dance to with a smile on your face."
Dogs' current single, "I Love You 'Cause I Have To", fulfils that remit with spadesful of indie-ska exuberance. "Godhopping", too, is a jauntily piano-driven slip of white funk, which got them to a respectable No. 24 in the charts, while "Apples & Oranges" and "Lounger" - the latter of which is becoming their signature tune live - have all the vim and zip of early Talking Heads. David Byrne-ish wiggle, then, or Madness-styled, knees-first manoeuvre? Either way, you can't accuse Dogs of not trying to have something for all.
And things to say, too. Macintosh labours over his lyrics, and the mix of Dogs' sound with his top-of-the-range bawl is designed to lend a clarity to them. He confesses a little sheepishly, and with a little coaxing, to overdoing it with a few "cool/ school" rhymes on Please Describe Yourself, but much of the album stands up well in a tradition of throwing a spotlight on to contemporary British life, via a look at the options people are confronted with.
"It's not about wrestling with options," Macintosh says, "so much as welcoming that there are options. It frustrated me when lyricists preached, like they were answering things and saying there was one specific way of thinking. I don't believe that and I try to argue with myself in lyrics. I'll make up a point of view, like in 'Lounger', which is about the benefits of being ignorant and lazy. I want to write lyrics that start a conversation and keep it open."
You can hear it in the way he makes light of issues-laden pop. On "Celebrity Sanctum", a fixation on unattainable stars is satirised next to a startlingly yearning, Pulp-ish chorus that begs to be heard as a single.
"Well, we're contemporary, we're of the moment," Macintosh says. "We're inspired by what's happening now. Celebrity's everywhere, in the media, in the clubs we go to, too, everybody's mimicking the moves. As soon as that Beyoncé song comes on, everyone's doing a Beyoncé!" After a creditable impression of someone doing a not-so-creditable Beyoncé impression, he adds: "Celebrity's been around for ever, but it just seems to be getting a bit sordid now."
As for whether Dogs are about to join the ranks of the famous, it's not entirely impossible. They may not sport Franz Ferdinand's desperate trousers, but they've got the songs, the approachability and a singer with a real voice. "Godhopping" was decently near enough to a proper hit, too, and it's probably among the least of the potential singles on their album. "We really wanted to get into the Top 40 to make a mark with that one," says Worrall. "It was 17 midweek, so we were like, 'Wow, we could be on Top of the Pops!' But obviously, later on in the week all the kids get their pocket money and go out and buy Britney Spears or whatever. So 24 was great. See if we can better it with the next one."
Whether they have the name seems to be the only moot point so far: for some critics, it's the worst band name in pop history, while for others, it's one of the best. Memorably, one feature even categorised them as "emo" (as in the kind of "emotional punk" that, despite being fractious, is, like, totally sensitive beneath); a misstep surely based less on listening to the band than on "die" being in their name (emo kids are deep, see). Were they a little worried that somebody expected them to sound like goateed, short-wearing, suburban American kids with skateboards and an angst-strop on?
"I think that means it's working, though," says Macintosh. "It's the perfect name for us because we're a band who get a kick out of surprising people and not feeling that we can be pinned down just like that. Besides, nobody says to me, 'Craig's a rubbish name.' Well, aside from Lee. Lee thinks that if there was a name for a bird stool it would be a Craig. Y'know, like, 'A pigeon's just done a Craig on you.'" And he adds, emphatically: "I'm not going to change my name to Rollo or anything, though."
Clearly, a whiff of success isn't about to get the better of anyone who's been told their name has an excremental factor to it. It's the kind of banter that comes from the band having known each other for years. They even shared a house in Glasgow for the last few of these, and despite going their separate ways two weeks back, in readiness for the weeks of touring to come, it's prepared them for long-term intimacy and other band pressures. "Well, we're ready for anything, really," says Worrall.
"I think we're happy with the slow build, though," Macintosh adds. "It's been happening a bit in the right way, through gigs and making records and more gigs. And because we've lived together, it's not overwhelming. I think if we continue like that, there won't be any problems in terms of how we deal with things. Maybe that's naive, but who knows? I think because we've known each other since we were kids, it keeps everyone grounded. It's not like having loads of yes people around you. If things really kick off, we are all here for each other."
Pack animals, then? Maybe, but it's a pack of their own.
'Please Describe Yourself' (V2) is released on Monday; Dogs Die in Hot Cars play T in the Park, Kinross, Scotland, 10 July; Oxegen Festival, Punchestown, Ireland, 11 July; Summer Sundae, Leicester, 14 August; Reading Festival, 27 August; Leeds Festival, 29 August
Album: Dogs Die in Hot Cars
Please Describe Yourself, V2
By Andy Gill
16 July 2004
And while we're considering old new-wave pastiches, the question must be asked: is there room enough in the world for a second XTC, when there doesn't appear to have been enough to keep the original one fully operational over the last decade? Because Dogs Die In Hot Cars are to XTC what Gene were to The Smiths: a copy so closely modelled on the original that it should send shivers down the spines of Swindon's finest. It's really quite creepy, something like the musical equivalent of stalking: lots of nimble rhythm guitars and tricksy keyboard fills and lyrics which hint at deep themes, but which turn out to have hidden shallows. The farthest DDIHC stray from this template is when they adopt a brittle Talking Heads manner on tracks such as "Apples & Oranges" and "Pastimes & Lifestyles", which is hardly worth the bother at all, really. There's lots of name-dropping in songs such as "Paul Newman's Eyes" and "Celebrity Sanctum" - basically a list of film starlets the singer fancies - while further student approval is guaranteed by "Lounger", a song about an overeducated, lazy bohemian: "I get up when I want/ Don't have to eat my greens/ Or keep my bedroom tidy." An oddly hollow experience.
jeudi, juillet 08, 2004
Patti Scialfa
Patti Scialfa. 23rd Street Lullaby
Originally released: 2004. Sony Music Entertainment Inc.
Patti Scialfa's 1993 debut, Rumble Doll, defied listeners' expectations so outrageously that it ended up being unjustly ignored. On that record, far from coming on like Mrs. Bruce, Scialfa sounded like Ronnie Spector performing songs written by Sylvia Plath. Among other subjects, Scialfa struggled with her role as the tabloid-lashed other woman in Springsteen's first marriage, torn between the urgency of her love and the hard reality of "that ring around your finger."
Those tough choices are deep in the past on 23rd Street Lullaby, a sweeter, more confident effort. Scialfa is again examining her past, but now from the vantage of a woman who has gotten much of what she wanted and wonders if all of life's intensity is behind her. To answer those questions, she revisits Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood, where, just out of college, she got her start as a singer-songwriter. "Now there's a river of faces," she sings. "In the tide of rise and fall/Do they wonder where we've gone?/Do they think of us at all?" The song's title, "You Can't Go Back," provides the unsentimental answer.
With co-producer Steve Jordan (Keith Richards, Jon Spencer), Scialfa assembles a smart group of players, including guitarists Nils Lofgren and Marc Ribot, cellist Jane Scarpantoni and violinist-singer Soozie Tyrell, with Jordan on drums and Springsteen "here and there." The result is sophisticated pop that frames Scialfa as a jaunty, East Coast version of Rickie Lee Jones or Bonnie Raitt. In its cleareyed joyfulness and unpretentious appeal, 23rd Street Lullaby evokes a woman not haunted by her past but enriched by it. "And a light fell from heaven with a promise/That all lost things are someday found," she sings in "State of Grace." Even in a world where nothing comes without a price, it's possible to get everything you paid for, and more.
ANTHONY DECURTIS
(Posted jul 08, 2004)
List of Tracks
1 23rd Street Lullaby
2 You Can't Go Back
3 Rose
4 City Boys
5 Love (Stand Up)
6 Yesterday's Child
7 Stumbling To Bethlehem
8 Each Other's Medicine
9 Romeo
10 State Of Grace
11 Chelsea Avenue
12 Young In The City
Originally released: 2004. Sony Music Entertainment Inc.
Patti Scialfa's 1993 debut, Rumble Doll, defied listeners' expectations so outrageously that it ended up being unjustly ignored. On that record, far from coming on like Mrs. Bruce, Scialfa sounded like Ronnie Spector performing songs written by Sylvia Plath. Among other subjects, Scialfa struggled with her role as the tabloid-lashed other woman in Springsteen's first marriage, torn between the urgency of her love and the hard reality of "that ring around your finger."
Those tough choices are deep in the past on 23rd Street Lullaby, a sweeter, more confident effort. Scialfa is again examining her past, but now from the vantage of a woman who has gotten much of what she wanted and wonders if all of life's intensity is behind her. To answer those questions, she revisits Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood, where, just out of college, she got her start as a singer-songwriter. "Now there's a river of faces," she sings. "In the tide of rise and fall/Do they wonder where we've gone?/Do they think of us at all?" The song's title, "You Can't Go Back," provides the unsentimental answer.
With co-producer Steve Jordan (Keith Richards, Jon Spencer), Scialfa assembles a smart group of players, including guitarists Nils Lofgren and Marc Ribot, cellist Jane Scarpantoni and violinist-singer Soozie Tyrell, with Jordan on drums and Springsteen "here and there." The result is sophisticated pop that frames Scialfa as a jaunty, East Coast version of Rickie Lee Jones or Bonnie Raitt. In its cleareyed joyfulness and unpretentious appeal, 23rd Street Lullaby evokes a woman not haunted by her past but enriched by it. "And a light fell from heaven with a promise/That all lost things are someday found," she sings in "State of Grace." Even in a world where nothing comes without a price, it's possible to get everything you paid for, and more.
ANTHONY DECURTIS
(Posted jul 08, 2004)
List of Tracks
1 23rd Street Lullaby
2 You Can't Go Back
3 Rose
4 City Boys
5 Love (Stand Up)
6 Yesterday's Child
7 Stumbling To Bethlehem
8 Each Other's Medicine
9 Romeo
10 State Of Grace
11 Chelsea Avenue
12 Young In The City
Phair, Grohl Sing for Dems
Rockers raise money for Kerry in Hollywood
"I've never done an acoustic set by myself," Dave Grohl announced as he took the stage of Hollywood's Henry Fonda Theater last night for a show to benefit the campaign of Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry. "The rest of my band is at the Hollywood Bowl seeing Rush," he joked and then played a snippet of Rush's "Fly by Night" before adding, "I don't know that song."
Grohl, like Tenacious D and Liz Phair, who both also performed, was in fine spirits at the $150-per-ticket fundraiser (there was also a $500 a head VIP ticket), which turned into a celebration of the announcement earlier that day that Kerry had picked North Carolina Senator John Edwards as his running mate.
"Awesome," Jack Black said before the show of the choice. "I love that. It gives us the best chance to win."
An estimated 1,000 attendees, including such celebrities as David Spade, Eliza Dushku, Jason Biggs, Lance Bass, William H. Macy, Colin Hanks, Jessica Biel and Lisa Loeb, raised $200,000 for the campaign. For their efforts, they were treated to a trio of impressive performances.
Liz Phair led off with a thirty-minute set that included such recent fare as "Extraordinary," "Why Can't I?" and "Rock Me," as well as older tunes like "Polyester Bride" and "Supernova." Though Phair worried that she was the only "not funny one" on the bill, she drew laughter with her impersonation of Britney Spears in Fahrenheit 9/11.
After a question and answer session with the Kerry daughters, Alex and Vanessa, hosted by Mr. Show's Bob Odenkirk, Grohl came out for his thirty-minute set. Following a strong version of "Out of the Black," he introduced "Tired of You" by saying, "This song is a total fucking bummer, but most acoustic songs are." He proved that not to be the case though with crowd-pleasing renditions of "Learn to Fly" and "My Hero," before closing with a particularly raucous "Times Like These."
Before the show, Black promised that Tenacious D would "bring it" for the audience, even if it was a presidential fundraiser, and he didn't lie. Black and Kyle Gass opened their hour-long set with a cover of Led Zeppelin's "Good Times, Bad Times" and later played a snippet of Dio's "Holy Diver." The duo mixed in a break-dancing assistant, a live vignette in which a Sasquatch and Spider-Man took on Bush and Cheney with Michael Moore filming (impersonators all). Grohl -- or "Dr. G," as they dubbed him -- took over on drums to join the growing ensemble, which also included a string quartet. Tenacious D closed the set with "Tribute," their self-proclaimed "greatest song in the world," vowing to help rid the country of George W. Bush, or as Black described him, "the worst fucking president in the history of time."
STEVE BALTIN. Rolling Stone (Posted Jul 07, 2004)
"I've never done an acoustic set by myself," Dave Grohl announced as he took the stage of Hollywood's Henry Fonda Theater last night for a show to benefit the campaign of Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry. "The rest of my band is at the Hollywood Bowl seeing Rush," he joked and then played a snippet of Rush's "Fly by Night" before adding, "I don't know that song."
Grohl, like Tenacious D and Liz Phair, who both also performed, was in fine spirits at the $150-per-ticket fundraiser (there was also a $500 a head VIP ticket), which turned into a celebration of the announcement earlier that day that Kerry had picked North Carolina Senator John Edwards as his running mate.
"Awesome," Jack Black said before the show of the choice. "I love that. It gives us the best chance to win."
An estimated 1,000 attendees, including such celebrities as David Spade, Eliza Dushku, Jason Biggs, Lance Bass, William H. Macy, Colin Hanks, Jessica Biel and Lisa Loeb, raised $200,000 for the campaign. For their efforts, they were treated to a trio of impressive performances.
Liz Phair led off with a thirty-minute set that included such recent fare as "Extraordinary," "Why Can't I?" and "Rock Me," as well as older tunes like "Polyester Bride" and "Supernova." Though Phair worried that she was the only "not funny one" on the bill, she drew laughter with her impersonation of Britney Spears in Fahrenheit 9/11.
After a question and answer session with the Kerry daughters, Alex and Vanessa, hosted by Mr. Show's Bob Odenkirk, Grohl came out for his thirty-minute set. Following a strong version of "Out of the Black," he introduced "Tired of You" by saying, "This song is a total fucking bummer, but most acoustic songs are." He proved that not to be the case though with crowd-pleasing renditions of "Learn to Fly" and "My Hero," before closing with a particularly raucous "Times Like These."
Before the show, Black promised that Tenacious D would "bring it" for the audience, even if it was a presidential fundraiser, and he didn't lie. Black and Kyle Gass opened their hour-long set with a cover of Led Zeppelin's "Good Times, Bad Times" and later played a snippet of Dio's "Holy Diver." The duo mixed in a break-dancing assistant, a live vignette in which a Sasquatch and Spider-Man took on Bush and Cheney with Michael Moore filming (impersonators all). Grohl -- or "Dr. G," as they dubbed him -- took over on drums to join the growing ensemble, which also included a string quartet. Tenacious D closed the set with "Tribute," their self-proclaimed "greatest song in the world," vowing to help rid the country of George W. Bush, or as Black described him, "the worst fucking president in the history of time."
STEVE BALTIN. Rolling Stone (Posted Jul 07, 2004)
mercredi, juillet 07, 2004
The Blue Nile
Four albums in 25 years? It must be the return of The Blue Nile
By Anthony Barnes, Arts and Media Correspondent
27 June 2004
They may be one of the world's most reclusive - and least prolific - bands, but their influence has touched many of the biggest names in music. Now The Blue Nile, whose songs have been recorded by everyone from Tom Jones to Isaac Hayes and Rod Stewart to Annie Lennox, are to release their first album for almost a decade.
The release of High will be one of the most eagerly anticipated music events of the year. With just four albums in a quarter of a century - each has been hugely acclaimed - The Blue Nile line up alongside the ranks of The Stone Roses and John Lennon for tantalising their followers with their colossal absences.
The Stone Roses took five years to follow up their self-titled debut, which is widely considered one of the finest British albums ever released, while Lennon took nearly six between Rock 'N' Roll and his final album Double Fantasy.
Paul Buchanan, the singer and songwriter with the Glaswegian trio The Blue Nile, said: "We're not in this for the money. We're in this because the songs come when they come and we don't put anything out unless it deserves to go out."
While many artists' extended quiet spells are due to splits, the demands of solo careers, going off the rails or scaling down their activities after a fertile early career, The Blue Nile have continued as a unit throughout, and their lack of output is simply down to a painfully slow work-rate.
The band emerged in 1984 with A Walk Across the Rooftops, an accomplished album which was released through a small label and was given only limited radio exposure. But word of mouth helped them to become one of the hippest names to drop at the time. The follow-up, 1989's Hats, is widely viewed as their masterpiece and led to recording sessions with Rickie Lee Jones and The Band's Robbie Robertson.
They returned again in 1996 with Peace at Last, which led Q magazine to ask: "What do The Blue Nile do all day? And what do we care as long as roughly every two World Cups they bring us something this special?"
But aside from live dates, the band largely retreated between each release, choosing instead to perfect their recordings and live their lives.
Bass player Robert Bell said: "We work and then we do things that everyone does - walk up and down the street, meet friends, drink beer and play Scrabble. We try to get it right and we don't issue it until we are 1,000 per cent happy with it. About three years ago we had finished a whole album but we scrapped it all apart from two songs. But it's best to be happy with your work."
Buchanan said: "The thing is, I write a lot of bad songs, hundreds of them, but because we have such a high quality control, they never see the light of day."
BBC Radio 2 presenter Stuart Maconie, said: "I'm a huge fan, but I do think there is something to be said for making more records. The Beatles were in the studio all the time; that's why they progressed so quickly between "She Loves You" and the White Album. The Blue Nile's records seem to be about ordinary things and ordinary people - the pathos and beauty of an ordinary life. They are enigmatic, sketchy invocations of city life. They take ordinary situations and make them glorious."
The band, which formed in the late 1970s after the members graduated from Glasgow University, have also been plagued by contractual problems and record company difficulties as their labels were absorbed by other firms. They have now signed with the giant Sanctuary group.
Bell said: "I think in terms of what we're trying to achieve we've been very successful. I don't think we were ever trying to be huge. When we started we would have been happy to sell 2,000 copies, so we've obviously done better than that."
KEPT WAITING... AND WAITING
The album: The Stone Roses, The Second Coming (1994)
The wait: five years
The reason: legal wranglings, sluggishness and lack of direction.
The album: John Lennon, Double Fantasy (1980)
The wait: six years
The reason: after Yoko Ono became pregnant, Lennon opted for a life of domesticity.
The album: Massive Attack, 100th Window (2003)
The wait: five years
The reason: A tortuous recording process and bad vibes led to Andrew "Mushroom" Vowles quitting.
The album: Morrissey, You Are the Quarry (2004)
The wait: seven years
The reason: Lack of a record deal and general public indifference.
The album: George Harrison, Brainwashed (2002)
The wait: 12 years
The reason: Court battles, cancer and gardening kept him away from the recording studio.
By Anthony Barnes, Arts and Media Correspondent
27 June 2004
They may be one of the world's most reclusive - and least prolific - bands, but their influence has touched many of the biggest names in music. Now The Blue Nile, whose songs have been recorded by everyone from Tom Jones to Isaac Hayes and Rod Stewart to Annie Lennox, are to release their first album for almost a decade.
The release of High will be one of the most eagerly anticipated music events of the year. With just four albums in a quarter of a century - each has been hugely acclaimed - The Blue Nile line up alongside the ranks of The Stone Roses and John Lennon for tantalising their followers with their colossal absences.
The Stone Roses took five years to follow up their self-titled debut, which is widely considered one of the finest British albums ever released, while Lennon took nearly six between Rock 'N' Roll and his final album Double Fantasy.
Paul Buchanan, the singer and songwriter with the Glaswegian trio The Blue Nile, said: "We're not in this for the money. We're in this because the songs come when they come and we don't put anything out unless it deserves to go out."
While many artists' extended quiet spells are due to splits, the demands of solo careers, going off the rails or scaling down their activities after a fertile early career, The Blue Nile have continued as a unit throughout, and their lack of output is simply down to a painfully slow work-rate.
The band emerged in 1984 with A Walk Across the Rooftops, an accomplished album which was released through a small label and was given only limited radio exposure. But word of mouth helped them to become one of the hippest names to drop at the time. The follow-up, 1989's Hats, is widely viewed as their masterpiece and led to recording sessions with Rickie Lee Jones and The Band's Robbie Robertson.
They returned again in 1996 with Peace at Last, which led Q magazine to ask: "What do The Blue Nile do all day? And what do we care as long as roughly every two World Cups they bring us something this special?"
But aside from live dates, the band largely retreated between each release, choosing instead to perfect their recordings and live their lives.
Bass player Robert Bell said: "We work and then we do things that everyone does - walk up and down the street, meet friends, drink beer and play Scrabble. We try to get it right and we don't issue it until we are 1,000 per cent happy with it. About three years ago we had finished a whole album but we scrapped it all apart from two songs. But it's best to be happy with your work."
Buchanan said: "The thing is, I write a lot of bad songs, hundreds of them, but because we have such a high quality control, they never see the light of day."
BBC Radio 2 presenter Stuart Maconie, said: "I'm a huge fan, but I do think there is something to be said for making more records. The Beatles were in the studio all the time; that's why they progressed so quickly between "She Loves You" and the White Album. The Blue Nile's records seem to be about ordinary things and ordinary people - the pathos and beauty of an ordinary life. They are enigmatic, sketchy invocations of city life. They take ordinary situations and make them glorious."
The band, which formed in the late 1970s after the members graduated from Glasgow University, have also been plagued by contractual problems and record company difficulties as their labels were absorbed by other firms. They have now signed with the giant Sanctuary group.
Bell said: "I think in terms of what we're trying to achieve we've been very successful. I don't think we were ever trying to be huge. When we started we would have been happy to sell 2,000 copies, so we've obviously done better than that."
KEPT WAITING... AND WAITING
The album: The Stone Roses, The Second Coming (1994)
The wait: five years
The reason: legal wranglings, sluggishness and lack of direction.
The album: John Lennon, Double Fantasy (1980)
The wait: six years
The reason: after Yoko Ono became pregnant, Lennon opted for a life of domesticity.
The album: Massive Attack, 100th Window (2003)
The wait: five years
The reason: A tortuous recording process and bad vibes led to Andrew "Mushroom" Vowles quitting.
The album: Morrissey, You Are the Quarry (2004)
The wait: seven years
The reason: Lack of a record deal and general public indifference.
The album: George Harrison, Brainwashed (2002)
The wait: 12 years
The reason: Court battles, cancer and gardening kept him away from the recording studio.
The Secret Machines, ICA, London
By Kevin Harley
06 July 2004
Although they're denizens of New York (out of Dallas), this three-piece couldn't be more different from the garage-punk likes of The Strokes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Instead, on last year's mini-album, September 000, and on their recent debut album, Now Here is Nowhere, they've been following a kind of garage-prog route-map, where the American spacerock-cum-psychedelia of Mercury Rev and the Flaming Lips is traced back to its roots in the likes of Pink Floyd and Can. And if the mere mention of Floyd makes you wince, don't worry: even when the Machines' songs explore the lesser-charted terrain of the nine-minute point, they're tethered to laser-guided melodies and hinged on the kind of emotive epiphanies that occur when the rhythm kicks hard after a stealthy build-up.
Come to think of it, it's almost like 1997 again, when bands such as Mogwai, Six By Seven and Spiritualized were providing sprawling, drone-rock ripostes to Britpop's then-dwindling three and a half minutes of fame. Spiritualized's Jason Pierce picked the Machines as a support act last year, and the similarities in the way they approach playing live are striking. Like Pierce's sky-scraping mini-orchestra - and, more recently, the Texan instrumentalists Explosions in the Sky - the Machines don't bother with between-song chatter or gaps live. Instead, they treat the set like a mini symphony made up of movements, and full of elemental highs and lows, linking tracks with an echoing guitar that flickers in time with the lightbulbs dotting the stage rear.
The band look striking. Under-lit, and sporting slightly dusty suits and wayward hair, they could be the house band in a 1970s adaptation of HG Wells's The Time Machine. The effect is only enhanced as the opening songs see them grappling with technical gremlins. The vocals disappear at one point, while the mangled riff of their lolloping psych-blues single, "Sad and Lonely", gets even more hammered under Josh Garza's thundering drums, which he seems to play with his whole body. Some dynamics are lost as a result: most notably in "Pharaoh's Daughter", a spaced-out ballad whose lulling, high-pitched coo of "I wonder" recalls something from the Flaming Lips' Soft Bulletin album, but plods a little live.
What's lost in subtlety is made up for in impact, and when they find their feet towards the home stretch, it's as if a lever has been pulled and the machine has been bumped into emphatic gear. The stop-start rhythms of "First Wave Intact" prove mightily buffeting, and the thrillingly visceral, distortion-heavy segue into the heads-down, hold-tight krautrock of "Nowhere Again" drives the set to a suitably dislocating climax of feedback and strobe lights. It may take this New York three-piece longer than the Yeah Yeah Yeahs to make it, but with a noise like this, the secret will get out.
06 July 2004
Although they're denizens of New York (out of Dallas), this three-piece couldn't be more different from the garage-punk likes of The Strokes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Instead, on last year's mini-album, September 000, and on their recent debut album, Now Here is Nowhere, they've been following a kind of garage-prog route-map, where the American spacerock-cum-psychedelia of Mercury Rev and the Flaming Lips is traced back to its roots in the likes of Pink Floyd and Can. And if the mere mention of Floyd makes you wince, don't worry: even when the Machines' songs explore the lesser-charted terrain of the nine-minute point, they're tethered to laser-guided melodies and hinged on the kind of emotive epiphanies that occur when the rhythm kicks hard after a stealthy build-up.
Come to think of it, it's almost like 1997 again, when bands such as Mogwai, Six By Seven and Spiritualized were providing sprawling, drone-rock ripostes to Britpop's then-dwindling three and a half minutes of fame. Spiritualized's Jason Pierce picked the Machines as a support act last year, and the similarities in the way they approach playing live are striking. Like Pierce's sky-scraping mini-orchestra - and, more recently, the Texan instrumentalists Explosions in the Sky - the Machines don't bother with between-song chatter or gaps live. Instead, they treat the set like a mini symphony made up of movements, and full of elemental highs and lows, linking tracks with an echoing guitar that flickers in time with the lightbulbs dotting the stage rear.
The band look striking. Under-lit, and sporting slightly dusty suits and wayward hair, they could be the house band in a 1970s adaptation of HG Wells's The Time Machine. The effect is only enhanced as the opening songs see them grappling with technical gremlins. The vocals disappear at one point, while the mangled riff of their lolloping psych-blues single, "Sad and Lonely", gets even more hammered under Josh Garza's thundering drums, which he seems to play with his whole body. Some dynamics are lost as a result: most notably in "Pharaoh's Daughter", a spaced-out ballad whose lulling, high-pitched coo of "I wonder" recalls something from the Flaming Lips' Soft Bulletin album, but plods a little live.
What's lost in subtlety is made up for in impact, and when they find their feet towards the home stretch, it's as if a lever has been pulled and the machine has been bumped into emphatic gear. The stop-start rhythms of "First Wave Intact" prove mightily buffeting, and the thrillingly visceral, distortion-heavy segue into the heads-down, hold-tight krautrock of "Nowhere Again" drives the set to a suitably dislocating climax of feedback and strobe lights. It may take this New York three-piece longer than the Yeah Yeah Yeahs to make it, but with a noise like this, the secret will get out.
Joe Strummer's memorial
Bridgewater calling: Strummer's friends want concrete folly turned into memorial
By Louise Jury, Arts Correspondent
07 July 2004
He was renowned for provocation not preservation, for opposing the establishment, not conserving it. But now Joe Strummer, the iconoclastic Clash frontman known for songs such as "White Riot" and "Guns of Brixton", could posthumously save a crumbling example of Britain's architectural heritage.
Eighteen months years after Strummer died of a heart attack, the punk pioneer's celebrity friends are backing a bid to memorialise him in the unlikely guise of a heritage project in his adopted home town of Bridgwater, Somerset.
They plan to save Castle House, a derelict Victorian folly that was one of the world's first concrete buildings, and turn it into the international headquarters of a charity in Strummer's name. Adapting one of The Clash's most famous songs as their clarion call, fans are urging the public to "rock the concrete casbah" when the building is featured in the BBC2 series Restoration later this month.
If it can be saved at an estimated cost of less than £1m Castle House will be the base for Strummerville, a charity launched at the Glastonbury Festival this year. It aims to provide rehearsal space and business support for young people who would otherwise lack the funds to make music.
The Bridgwater HQ would include a cinema and a gallery that would be overseen by Damien Hirst. The artist said Strummer had been "a great friend" who lived about an hour from his house and they used to go on holidays together in Spain. Hirst said: "Lots of people have promised to help. We want to spend the money in Joe's memory and this was a building Joe loved."
The long-term aim is to set up workspaces in similar locations around the world, possibly calling on the support of Strummer's American fans such as Bruce Springsteen. Plans to launch the initiative include the actor Keith Allen leading Bridgwater in a karaoke version of "Rock the Casbah" on Saturday 17 July. Mick Jones, who played with Strummer in the band, and film maker Don Letts also plan to appear.
Strummer was seen by his fans as the archetypal angry musician who struck blows against what he saw as the complacency of the political and musical establishments. He and the band also put their money behind their political convictions, and in April 1978 they headlined a free Anti-Nazi League festival in London, organised by the pressure group Rock Against Racism.
Just a month before his death on 22 December 2002, Strummer played a benefit gig for the striking Fire Brigades Union with his new band, the Mescaleros. He was also working on a track written with Bono and Dave Stewart for Aids Awareness in Africa.
Supporters claim Castle House is very much the underdog in a competition where its rivals include the Gothic castle Strawberry Hill at Twickenham, and a Palladian palace in Dorset. But they say Castle House is like Strummer unique. Julien Temple, director of The Great Rock and Roll Swindle, which featured the Sex Pistols, said the project would help kick-start the charity as well as regenerating an underprivileged and neglected town which Strummer loved for its "raw spirit and rebel traditions". He added: "The charity has been set up to help kids in underprivileged areas find a place to rehearse and perform in and create links with music business contacts. We are doing it in Bridgwater because it was Joe's favourite little town where he lived."
The Grade II* listed Castle House was built in a back street in 1851 by John Board, a successful local brick maker who was convinced of the revolutionary potential of concrete. It now stands on the brink of oblivion after seeing service as apartments, a guesthouse and crack den.
Castle House supporters are calling on the public to "vote concrete" when the building is shown on Restoration. The building that wins will be saved with the money raised by those using the telephone voting lines.
By Louise Jury, Arts Correspondent
07 July 2004
He was renowned for provocation not preservation, for opposing the establishment, not conserving it. But now Joe Strummer, the iconoclastic Clash frontman known for songs such as "White Riot" and "Guns of Brixton", could posthumously save a crumbling example of Britain's architectural heritage.
Eighteen months years after Strummer died of a heart attack, the punk pioneer's celebrity friends are backing a bid to memorialise him in the unlikely guise of a heritage project in his adopted home town of Bridgwater, Somerset.
They plan to save Castle House, a derelict Victorian folly that was one of the world's first concrete buildings, and turn it into the international headquarters of a charity in Strummer's name. Adapting one of The Clash's most famous songs as their clarion call, fans are urging the public to "rock the concrete casbah" when the building is featured in the BBC2 series Restoration later this month.
If it can be saved at an estimated cost of less than £1m Castle House will be the base for Strummerville, a charity launched at the Glastonbury Festival this year. It aims to provide rehearsal space and business support for young people who would otherwise lack the funds to make music.
The Bridgwater HQ would include a cinema and a gallery that would be overseen by Damien Hirst. The artist said Strummer had been "a great friend" who lived about an hour from his house and they used to go on holidays together in Spain. Hirst said: "Lots of people have promised to help. We want to spend the money in Joe's memory and this was a building Joe loved."
The long-term aim is to set up workspaces in similar locations around the world, possibly calling on the support of Strummer's American fans such as Bruce Springsteen. Plans to launch the initiative include the actor Keith Allen leading Bridgwater in a karaoke version of "Rock the Casbah" on Saturday 17 July. Mick Jones, who played with Strummer in the band, and film maker Don Letts also plan to appear.
Strummer was seen by his fans as the archetypal angry musician who struck blows against what he saw as the complacency of the political and musical establishments. He and the band also put their money behind their political convictions, and in April 1978 they headlined a free Anti-Nazi League festival in London, organised by the pressure group Rock Against Racism.
Just a month before his death on 22 December 2002, Strummer played a benefit gig for the striking Fire Brigades Union with his new band, the Mescaleros. He was also working on a track written with Bono and Dave Stewart for Aids Awareness in Africa.
Supporters claim Castle House is very much the underdog in a competition where its rivals include the Gothic castle Strawberry Hill at Twickenham, and a Palladian palace in Dorset. But they say Castle House is like Strummer unique. Julien Temple, director of The Great Rock and Roll Swindle, which featured the Sex Pistols, said the project would help kick-start the charity as well as regenerating an underprivileged and neglected town which Strummer loved for its "raw spirit and rebel traditions". He added: "The charity has been set up to help kids in underprivileged areas find a place to rehearse and perform in and create links with music business contacts. We are doing it in Bridgwater because it was Joe's favourite little town where he lived."
The Grade II* listed Castle House was built in a back street in 1851 by John Board, a successful local brick maker who was convinced of the revolutionary potential of concrete. It now stands on the brink of oblivion after seeing service as apartments, a guesthouse and crack den.
Castle House supporters are calling on the public to "vote concrete" when the building is shown on Restoration. The building that wins will be saved with the money raised by those using the telephone voting lines.
Obedientbone @ Dartmoor
Urban music looks to its future in ... Dartmoor
By Ian Burrell, Media Editor
07 July 2004
A band who rehearse in a barn in the middle of Dartmoor will be hailed tonight as the future of British urban music.
The four members of Obedientbone grew up in remote villages where the nearest thing to an inner-city tower block is the bleak exterior of Dartmoor jail. But they have taken the city phenomenon of drum 'n' bass to a new level and landed the title of best urban act in the 2004 Diesel-U-Music Awards.
Their manager, Simon Vieler, said the award was the result of many hours of hard work in the band's studio, a barn in the village of Whiddon Down.
He said: "They don't go out to clubs or listen to other people's music. They are truly rural and totally cut off but the music they make is their own sound."
Obedientbone were formed five years ago, inspired by the jungle and drum 'n' bass movements. They have released an album but their performance at the awards ceremony at Fabric in London tonight will be their first appearance in the capital.
But the band do have links to the wider world of dance music. Their programmer and keyboardist James Yardley has a brother in the dance group Stanton Warriors. Obedientbone also use a guest cellist, Caroline Lavelle, who has played with Massive Attack and Radiohead.
Their success strengthens Devon's reputation as a new hotbed of music. Coldplay's Chris Martin, Muse and the teenage soul singer Joss Stone all come from the county.
Mr Vieler said: "Obedientbone all live in tiny little hamlets in Dartmoor National Park. Yet they can come up with cutting-edge music that sounds like the future."
Obedientbone: Streetwise, they ain't
Obedientbone have just picked up an award for their urban music. Not bad for a band who have spent the last six years in a shed in Devon. Clare Dwyer Hogg meets them
14 July 2004
It's the morning after Richard, Tim, James and Demelza picked up the Urban Music prize at the Diesel-U-Music Awards for unsigned bands, and they're nursing celebratory hangovers. But rather than groaning, they're laughing - first, because they aren't sure what "urban music" means; second, because they come from Devon, the most un-urban place in England; and third, because the award sitting in front of them has the wrong inscription.
They are called obedientbone, which, their manager Simon Vieler painstakingly points out, is "all one word, lower case". Not Obedient Bone, as the award states. The point is, he says, that there are lots of words in the title you recognise - bed, bone and die, for example. It works aesthetically, he explains. And above all, he persists, it makes you smile.
The band sit listeningly to his explanation patiently. They are used to this kind of misunderstanding - which isn't really surprising, given that they won't even disclose the real origin of their name (or, by the way, their ages; they will only admit to being "20 to more-than-40").
What they're not used to is playing their music for other people - or, indeed, winning awards. And this accolade has made them delighted, surprised and excited. They are wondering if they have single-handedly changed the meaning of "urban". Does urban take into consideration the Dartmoor hills and country lanes and the occasional cow?
It does now. The band live in Whiddon Down, which they confirm without hesitation is in the middle of nowhere. "Richard lives a bit further away than the rest of us," James says. "How many houses in your village? Eight?" And their lives are much quieter and more cocooned than the award or their music would suggest.
Keith Flint of The Prodigy had been the first to charge on to the dance floor when the band played at the London club Fabric after receiving the award. Yet, of course, the music they recorded wasn't made amid the hum and buzz of urban life - nowhere near that. The studio where they work, in a 200-year-old building, is made of thick granite rock and was once a carpenter's studio. It would be an understatement to say that the outside world does not impinge much on their daily life.
"The studio is actually an outhouse on the side of my mum's house," James says. "Luckily it was already soundproof; we ripped out what was there and built it up with our own equipment." They don't have to share it with anyone else (apart from a few Devon mice) or pay any rent. In fact, if they didn't want to, they wouldn't have to come into contact with anyone at all - except for James's mum, maybe, who is happy to make tea on occasion.
"We just spend as much time there as we can," Richard says, "because we love it. We do other jobs to pay the rent at home, so we can get there. We've made an album we really like." Before their performance in Fabric, they hadn't played a gig before, so had no need to leave Devon; the plan was to immerse themselves in making music, and they fulfilled the brief for six years. They didn't spend that time thinking about what their peers were doing, either. To their manager's consternation, they haven't listened to anything "contemporary" he's sent them.
In fact, they don't have much to do with the tools you might imagine typical urban music makers might need. They don't have a computer between them. The lack of a computer is a major factor in their music-making process. Most bands find laptops invaluable for adjusting bass lines or manipulating vocals - doing anything, in fact. Not obedientbone. They're firm believers in the old-school approach: and, while it was necessary at the start because of financial considerations, they aren't going to change their habits. "We do it this way, not just because we can't afford one," Demelza says with a brief burst of intensity, "but because it's part of our technique, a way of writing, and it's important because it gives the music a different feel than if it were built on a computer. The whole groove of it is different, because of the way you have to build the tunes."
"But the fact that we don't have a computer means we get right into the nitty-gritty," adds Tim. "It's nice having limitations: it makes you have to think more and be creative." James nods. "Yes, we're organic," he says - a more than fitting term for the group.
Yet, while organic is indeed a good description of the group's processes, don't imagine that their music is a soundtrack to hug trees to. What began as a club-orientated drum'n'bass mix is now a heady concoction of dance, punk, jazz and wistful lyrics. And while they laid these tracks in the middle of nowhere, the middle of nowhere has had more boons than a city slicker might be happy to hear. As well as the rent-free studio and beautiful countryside, they have also had rather handily at their disposal one of the most advanced mastering studios around.
Owned by the remastering engineer Simon Heyworth, who runs his own top studio, the facility has become something of a mecca for recording artists: the head of Sony Europe was so impressed that he came to stay with Heyworth at Christmas to check it out. Pretty convenient for the band, who only have to walk across a few fields to get their hands on some of the best editing facilities available to contemporary musicians. They describe the experience as "fairy dust" sprinkled over their efforts. "Bands come for a month to do their album," Demelza says smugly. "But we live there."
They're more than happy with the surprises their home turf has yielded. While recording their debut album, they discovered that Caroline Lavelle - the cellist who played with Massive Attack - lives just down the road. She can be heard on the album, too.
So, obedientbone are in no rush to leave their rural roots. They're more than happy to keep doing what they've been doing. Support from a record label would be nice, but they're not about to move to London and start making music for urban dwellers. They can do that very happily from Devon, thank you very much.
See OBone
By Ian Burrell, Media Editor
07 July 2004
A band who rehearse in a barn in the middle of Dartmoor will be hailed tonight as the future of British urban music.
The four members of Obedientbone grew up in remote villages where the nearest thing to an inner-city tower block is the bleak exterior of Dartmoor jail. But they have taken the city phenomenon of drum 'n' bass to a new level and landed the title of best urban act in the 2004 Diesel-U-Music Awards.
Their manager, Simon Vieler, said the award was the result of many hours of hard work in the band's studio, a barn in the village of Whiddon Down.
He said: "They don't go out to clubs or listen to other people's music. They are truly rural and totally cut off but the music they make is their own sound."
Obedientbone were formed five years ago, inspired by the jungle and drum 'n' bass movements. They have released an album but their performance at the awards ceremony at Fabric in London tonight will be their first appearance in the capital.
But the band do have links to the wider world of dance music. Their programmer and keyboardist James Yardley has a brother in the dance group Stanton Warriors. Obedientbone also use a guest cellist, Caroline Lavelle, who has played with Massive Attack and Radiohead.
Their success strengthens Devon's reputation as a new hotbed of music. Coldplay's Chris Martin, Muse and the teenage soul singer Joss Stone all come from the county.
Mr Vieler said: "Obedientbone all live in tiny little hamlets in Dartmoor National Park. Yet they can come up with cutting-edge music that sounds like the future."
Obedientbone: Streetwise, they ain't
Obedientbone have just picked up an award for their urban music. Not bad for a band who have spent the last six years in a shed in Devon. Clare Dwyer Hogg meets them
14 July 2004
It's the morning after Richard, Tim, James and Demelza picked up the Urban Music prize at the Diesel-U-Music Awards for unsigned bands, and they're nursing celebratory hangovers. But rather than groaning, they're laughing - first, because they aren't sure what "urban music" means; second, because they come from Devon, the most un-urban place in England; and third, because the award sitting in front of them has the wrong inscription.
They are called obedientbone, which, their manager Simon Vieler painstakingly points out, is "all one word, lower case". Not Obedient Bone, as the award states. The point is, he says, that there are lots of words in the title you recognise - bed, bone and die, for example. It works aesthetically, he explains. And above all, he persists, it makes you smile.
The band sit listeningly to his explanation patiently. They are used to this kind of misunderstanding - which isn't really surprising, given that they won't even disclose the real origin of their name (or, by the way, their ages; they will only admit to being "20 to more-than-40").
What they're not used to is playing their music for other people - or, indeed, winning awards. And this accolade has made them delighted, surprised and excited. They are wondering if they have single-handedly changed the meaning of "urban". Does urban take into consideration the Dartmoor hills and country lanes and the occasional cow?
It does now. The band live in Whiddon Down, which they confirm without hesitation is in the middle of nowhere. "Richard lives a bit further away than the rest of us," James says. "How many houses in your village? Eight?" And their lives are much quieter and more cocooned than the award or their music would suggest.
Keith Flint of The Prodigy had been the first to charge on to the dance floor when the band played at the London club Fabric after receiving the award. Yet, of course, the music they recorded wasn't made amid the hum and buzz of urban life - nowhere near that. The studio where they work, in a 200-year-old building, is made of thick granite rock and was once a carpenter's studio. It would be an understatement to say that the outside world does not impinge much on their daily life.
"The studio is actually an outhouse on the side of my mum's house," James says. "Luckily it was already soundproof; we ripped out what was there and built it up with our own equipment." They don't have to share it with anyone else (apart from a few Devon mice) or pay any rent. In fact, if they didn't want to, they wouldn't have to come into contact with anyone at all - except for James's mum, maybe, who is happy to make tea on occasion.
"We just spend as much time there as we can," Richard says, "because we love it. We do other jobs to pay the rent at home, so we can get there. We've made an album we really like." Before their performance in Fabric, they hadn't played a gig before, so had no need to leave Devon; the plan was to immerse themselves in making music, and they fulfilled the brief for six years. They didn't spend that time thinking about what their peers were doing, either. To their manager's consternation, they haven't listened to anything "contemporary" he's sent them.
In fact, they don't have much to do with the tools you might imagine typical urban music makers might need. They don't have a computer between them. The lack of a computer is a major factor in their music-making process. Most bands find laptops invaluable for adjusting bass lines or manipulating vocals - doing anything, in fact. Not obedientbone. They're firm believers in the old-school approach: and, while it was necessary at the start because of financial considerations, they aren't going to change their habits. "We do it this way, not just because we can't afford one," Demelza says with a brief burst of intensity, "but because it's part of our technique, a way of writing, and it's important because it gives the music a different feel than if it were built on a computer. The whole groove of it is different, because of the way you have to build the tunes."
"But the fact that we don't have a computer means we get right into the nitty-gritty," adds Tim. "It's nice having limitations: it makes you have to think more and be creative." James nods. "Yes, we're organic," he says - a more than fitting term for the group.
Yet, while organic is indeed a good description of the group's processes, don't imagine that their music is a soundtrack to hug trees to. What began as a club-orientated drum'n'bass mix is now a heady concoction of dance, punk, jazz and wistful lyrics. And while they laid these tracks in the middle of nowhere, the middle of nowhere has had more boons than a city slicker might be happy to hear. As well as the rent-free studio and beautiful countryside, they have also had rather handily at their disposal one of the most advanced mastering studios around.
Owned by the remastering engineer Simon Heyworth, who runs his own top studio, the facility has become something of a mecca for recording artists: the head of Sony Europe was so impressed that he came to stay with Heyworth at Christmas to check it out. Pretty convenient for the band, who only have to walk across a few fields to get their hands on some of the best editing facilities available to contemporary musicians. They describe the experience as "fairy dust" sprinkled over their efforts. "Bands come for a month to do their album," Demelza says smugly. "But we live there."
They're more than happy with the surprises their home turf has yielded. While recording their debut album, they discovered that Caroline Lavelle - the cellist who played with Massive Attack - lives just down the road. She can be heard on the album, too.
So, obedientbone are in no rush to leave their rural roots. They're more than happy to keep doing what they've been doing. Support from a record label would be nice, but they're not about to move to London and start making music for urban dwellers. They can do that very happily from Devon, thank you very much.
See OBone
Marc Almond
Growing old disgracefully
Rather than slip quietly into middle age, Eighties pop star Marc Almond chose for his new book to revisit the seedy locales of his hell-raising heyday. Sholto Byrnes finds the singer almost shocked by what he saw
06 July 2004
Of all the candidates for a midlife crisis, few are more unlikely than Marc Almond. The prince of the torch song, the painted troubadour of the 1980s, forever associated with "Tainted Love", the number one hit that brought him fame and perpetual irritation (because he receives no songwriting royalties for it), Almond seemed destined never to grow up. That long face, dominated by the nose and pouting lips, is fixed in the collective imagination as belonging to a Peter Pan figure, albeit one characterised by a priapic desire for both sexes and indulgence in drugs of which JM Barrie would not have dreamt.
And yet here Almond is, sitting opposite me at the Charlotte Street Hotel, confessing that when he started writing his new book, In Search of the Pleasure Palace, he was worried he was in danger of becoming a "Ken Barlow figure who wants to go around in a cardigan and slippers". Shifting his heavily tattooed frame, he explains in his faintly hysterical manner, "I was doing all these things that people do in midlife crises: writing lists, getting angry about things, buying compilation CDs, eyeing up younger people."
The realisation that he had reached a breaking point came when he appeared on a daytime TV show. After taking his seat on the sofa of the set, which was arranged to look like a suburban home, he ended up performing a song "in the kitchen, just stage left of the tumble dryer". In his book, Almond, 47, describes the feeling as finding "the door to a sunny, bright day locked, the only one open leading to old age. I reluctantly push the door slightly and peer in - posters advertising Saga magazine, walk-in baths and the merits of denture adhesive. Suddenly Dora Bryan waves, and Thora Hird beckons from a Stannah stairlift. I pull the door closed and panic sets in."
Some of his contemporaries have found solace in an Eighties revival tour or a new lease of life onreality TV shows (he turned down Hell's Kitchen). Almond decided, however, that if he was going to revisit the past, his would have to be a journey that promised something more than recycling old hits and old stories. So, after undergoing a nose job, he embarked on the "disreputable travels" around Europe and America that make up his book.
In returning to places that once inspired him, Almond hoped to find some new inspiration. By the end, it's not clear that he did. On the way, however, he was unfailing in his quest to explore the nethermost regions of the locations he visited. Dutifully he records experiences of eye-popping extremity - I'm afraid you'll have to turn to the book for the full story of the Amsterdam woman, the eel and the frying pan - and delightfully observed mundanity. The heart attack that killed Elvis Presley, he tells us, was brought on by the king straining on his throne, his habitual diet of fried banana and peanut butter sandwiches having tested his digestive system to the limit. "I know this is likely to be true," writes Almond sympathetically, "because after visiting Graceland and sampling one of these gourmet delectations I, too, was severely constipated for several days."
In Los Angeles he visits the public loo where George Michael was arrested for attempting to pick up an undercover police officer. Finding it small and rather homely, he ponders Michael's "calamitous crash" and sagely quotes an American proverb: "Little strokes fell mighty oaks." Earlier, the drag queen Chi Chi La Rue invites him to help out on his new porn movie. Almond declares himself "appalled" that Chi Chi should have thought he would like to spend his time keeping up the interest of the film's male stars. No sooner does he put the phone down, though, than another porn director calls him up.
He does seem to have a knack for uncovering the seedier side of life, I say. What draws him to scenes of which the ordinary visitor may not even be aware? "I was very much a loner as a kid and a teenager," he replies. "I was the outsider at school. So I gravitated to other people who were outcasts. I've always been magnetically drawn to the peripheries of life."
Almond grew up in a middle-class part of Southport, where he lived with his grandparents and mother. His father was an abusive alcoholic whom his mother later divorced; Almond has had no contact with him since his teens. While studying art at Leeds polytechnic he met the keyboardist Dave Ball, with whom he formed Soft Cell. In 1981 their cover of an old soul song, "Tainted Love", hit number one, and the strange creature with heavy eyeliner and studded collar emerged onto the nation's television screens, a freeze-frame that he acknowledges will always define his image.
He chronicled the years of sexual and chemical excess that followed in his autobiography, Tainted Life, published five years ago. His singing career has waned, but he has continued to record and perform, taking an interest in French chanson and Russian music; but it is the fact that he was the first that will always mark him out. Before Boy George or Marilyn there was Marc Almond, the New Romantic whose homosexuality (he came out to a Melody Maker reporter with the words "have it your way then, I am a raving faggot") seemed a public affront to the harsh moral certainties of the newly conservative Britain of the 1980s.
But having attacked Boy George in Tainted Life for proclaiming he'd rather have a cup of tea than sex, it seems that Almond's libido is not what it was. In his travels, I notice, he visits brothels, sex clubs and cruising haunts, and several times seems on the verge of striking up a meaningful, if temporary, acquaintance, but never actually does so. "Yes, I make my excuses and leave, of course!" he says. But why, I ask. "Whether the me of 20 years ago would have made my excuses and left I don't know," he continues. "But I'm different now, I'm not as sexually orientated as I was. It doesn't really interest me that much, to be honest." For someone not very interested in sex, I say, it must have been rather tiresome entering so many establishments where one might say the clients were at it like rabbits. "I did find myself getting very jaded writing this book, very tired," he says. "My publisher said to me, 'I want you to go to all the seedy places, the underworld places, the places that Marc Almond would go to.' So I said I'll give that a go, but I didn't really want to do that, and I found that quite boring. After you've gone to the same old brothels or underwear parties it becomes really tedious. Maybe I have changed."
So what does he want from his life now? "I just want something beautiful in my life, I don't want ugliness and decay. What I want from sex is something different now; it's not my whole raison d'être to be a sexual being. Then, basically, I was a sex addict." In 1994 he checked into the Promis Treatment Centre in Kent. Was that for sex addiction as well as his other habits? "I was cross-addicted to all sorts of things," he says. "I was dragged kicking and screaming in there, but when I looked at my life I knew it was what I had to do. I had reached rock bottom. I went through most of the time I was supposed to be there, but I was eventually driven out by the Sun, which was camped outside with a telephoto lens."
Far from being upset by this intrusion, he says he was flattered. "I felt like going outside and posing for photographs! But instead I thought I'd make a drama out of it all, and I was whisked away on the floor of a limousine." How did the experience change him? "It did give me a completely new outlook on life. I can't say I was totally clean and serene afterwards, but I was on the long road towards repairing all the damage that I'd done over 15 years."
The downside to not taking drugs and binge-drinking is that Almond isn't sure what's left. "This book was about 'have I become a boring person?'" Boring he's not, but he doesn't seem to have found a way out of his midlife crisis. He claims to have had an "epiphany" at the top of a pyramid in Mexico. In the book, this comes only a couple of pages after Almond has once again made his excuses and left, this time turning down the chance to experience "shock and awe" with a muscular Mexican in a gay sauna. "Yes, I felt like there was going to be another day," he writes. "That was it, my midlife crisis and those middle-aged blues drifted out across the desert."
He admits that the moment was not quite as dramatic as he describes it in the book, but I'm not convinced that it really happened at all. His take on life is ambiguous, to say the least. "I just realised that nothing's important, that you've got to learn to take yourself less seriously," he says. "I'm not going to worry so much if people think badly of me. If things get on top of me, I'm going to surrender to it. Not in a passive way, just giving yourself over to it." He then follows this Zen-like comment with a darker one. "If I can trawl it out, I've got another 10 years of my career left. Ten years of slow death. So what does it matter? I've begun the long winter of my death. I've got to accept it and surrender to it."
He seems trapped by his younger self, disdaining to take part in the memory-fests that litter the airwaves, but knowing he has to play the part of the old Marc Almond to earn a living. Even so, there are limits. "I try to avoid anything that's got '80s', 'celebrity' or 'gay' in the title or theme," he says. "I was asked to take part in a programme where gays would go off to a farm. They'd have to clean out pigs and we'd all have a laugh at their chiffon outfits. I could have sorted out every credit card, every tax bill, but that would have been going along with the idea that gays are the new clowns. These are programmes devised by straight people for straight people to laugh at gays. I don't think that's got anything to do with my life."
Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to be very clear what is of relevance to his life. He talks of recording new albums, but asks: "Is there a lot of point? You sort of wonder, who cares, really?" Perhaps he should make a travel series based on the new book, I suggest. "The publishers would love that," he shrieks. Although it's unlikely, such a series would be very funny, as Almond's observations are richly comical, even when perhaps he doesn't intend them to be. In the prologue he writes, Forrest Gump-like, of his book: "I like to think of it as a box of chocolates left on the coffee table - occasionally you may delight in finding a strawberry fondue, a caramel cream or a cherry liqueur... but you might want to leave the praline or nougat." Self-obsessed and slightly ridiculous Almond may seem, but one can't help feeling a little sorry for him. His problem is that he's not sure if there's anything in the box that he wants at all.
Rather than slip quietly into middle age, Eighties pop star Marc Almond chose for his new book to revisit the seedy locales of his hell-raising heyday. Sholto Byrnes finds the singer almost shocked by what he saw
06 July 2004
Of all the candidates for a midlife crisis, few are more unlikely than Marc Almond. The prince of the torch song, the painted troubadour of the 1980s, forever associated with "Tainted Love", the number one hit that brought him fame and perpetual irritation (because he receives no songwriting royalties for it), Almond seemed destined never to grow up. That long face, dominated by the nose and pouting lips, is fixed in the collective imagination as belonging to a Peter Pan figure, albeit one characterised by a priapic desire for both sexes and indulgence in drugs of which JM Barrie would not have dreamt.
And yet here Almond is, sitting opposite me at the Charlotte Street Hotel, confessing that when he started writing his new book, In Search of the Pleasure Palace, he was worried he was in danger of becoming a "Ken Barlow figure who wants to go around in a cardigan and slippers". Shifting his heavily tattooed frame, he explains in his faintly hysterical manner, "I was doing all these things that people do in midlife crises: writing lists, getting angry about things, buying compilation CDs, eyeing up younger people."
The realisation that he had reached a breaking point came when he appeared on a daytime TV show. After taking his seat on the sofa of the set, which was arranged to look like a suburban home, he ended up performing a song "in the kitchen, just stage left of the tumble dryer". In his book, Almond, 47, describes the feeling as finding "the door to a sunny, bright day locked, the only one open leading to old age. I reluctantly push the door slightly and peer in - posters advertising Saga magazine, walk-in baths and the merits of denture adhesive. Suddenly Dora Bryan waves, and Thora Hird beckons from a Stannah stairlift. I pull the door closed and panic sets in."
Some of his contemporaries have found solace in an Eighties revival tour or a new lease of life onreality TV shows (he turned down Hell's Kitchen). Almond decided, however, that if he was going to revisit the past, his would have to be a journey that promised something more than recycling old hits and old stories. So, after undergoing a nose job, he embarked on the "disreputable travels" around Europe and America that make up his book.
In returning to places that once inspired him, Almond hoped to find some new inspiration. By the end, it's not clear that he did. On the way, however, he was unfailing in his quest to explore the nethermost regions of the locations he visited. Dutifully he records experiences of eye-popping extremity - I'm afraid you'll have to turn to the book for the full story of the Amsterdam woman, the eel and the frying pan - and delightfully observed mundanity. The heart attack that killed Elvis Presley, he tells us, was brought on by the king straining on his throne, his habitual diet of fried banana and peanut butter sandwiches having tested his digestive system to the limit. "I know this is likely to be true," writes Almond sympathetically, "because after visiting Graceland and sampling one of these gourmet delectations I, too, was severely constipated for several days."
In Los Angeles he visits the public loo where George Michael was arrested for attempting to pick up an undercover police officer. Finding it small and rather homely, he ponders Michael's "calamitous crash" and sagely quotes an American proverb: "Little strokes fell mighty oaks." Earlier, the drag queen Chi Chi La Rue invites him to help out on his new porn movie. Almond declares himself "appalled" that Chi Chi should have thought he would like to spend his time keeping up the interest of the film's male stars. No sooner does he put the phone down, though, than another porn director calls him up.
He does seem to have a knack for uncovering the seedier side of life, I say. What draws him to scenes of which the ordinary visitor may not even be aware? "I was very much a loner as a kid and a teenager," he replies. "I was the outsider at school. So I gravitated to other people who were outcasts. I've always been magnetically drawn to the peripheries of life."
Almond grew up in a middle-class part of Southport, where he lived with his grandparents and mother. His father was an abusive alcoholic whom his mother later divorced; Almond has had no contact with him since his teens. While studying art at Leeds polytechnic he met the keyboardist Dave Ball, with whom he formed Soft Cell. In 1981 their cover of an old soul song, "Tainted Love", hit number one, and the strange creature with heavy eyeliner and studded collar emerged onto the nation's television screens, a freeze-frame that he acknowledges will always define his image.
He chronicled the years of sexual and chemical excess that followed in his autobiography, Tainted Life, published five years ago. His singing career has waned, but he has continued to record and perform, taking an interest in French chanson and Russian music; but it is the fact that he was the first that will always mark him out. Before Boy George or Marilyn there was Marc Almond, the New Romantic whose homosexuality (he came out to a Melody Maker reporter with the words "have it your way then, I am a raving faggot") seemed a public affront to the harsh moral certainties of the newly conservative Britain of the 1980s.
But having attacked Boy George in Tainted Life for proclaiming he'd rather have a cup of tea than sex, it seems that Almond's libido is not what it was. In his travels, I notice, he visits brothels, sex clubs and cruising haunts, and several times seems on the verge of striking up a meaningful, if temporary, acquaintance, but never actually does so. "Yes, I make my excuses and leave, of course!" he says. But why, I ask. "Whether the me of 20 years ago would have made my excuses and left I don't know," he continues. "But I'm different now, I'm not as sexually orientated as I was. It doesn't really interest me that much, to be honest." For someone not very interested in sex, I say, it must have been rather tiresome entering so many establishments where one might say the clients were at it like rabbits. "I did find myself getting very jaded writing this book, very tired," he says. "My publisher said to me, 'I want you to go to all the seedy places, the underworld places, the places that Marc Almond would go to.' So I said I'll give that a go, but I didn't really want to do that, and I found that quite boring. After you've gone to the same old brothels or underwear parties it becomes really tedious. Maybe I have changed."
So what does he want from his life now? "I just want something beautiful in my life, I don't want ugliness and decay. What I want from sex is something different now; it's not my whole raison d'être to be a sexual being. Then, basically, I was a sex addict." In 1994 he checked into the Promis Treatment Centre in Kent. Was that for sex addiction as well as his other habits? "I was cross-addicted to all sorts of things," he says. "I was dragged kicking and screaming in there, but when I looked at my life I knew it was what I had to do. I had reached rock bottom. I went through most of the time I was supposed to be there, but I was eventually driven out by the Sun, which was camped outside with a telephoto lens."
Far from being upset by this intrusion, he says he was flattered. "I felt like going outside and posing for photographs! But instead I thought I'd make a drama out of it all, and I was whisked away on the floor of a limousine." How did the experience change him? "It did give me a completely new outlook on life. I can't say I was totally clean and serene afterwards, but I was on the long road towards repairing all the damage that I'd done over 15 years."
The downside to not taking drugs and binge-drinking is that Almond isn't sure what's left. "This book was about 'have I become a boring person?'" Boring he's not, but he doesn't seem to have found a way out of his midlife crisis. He claims to have had an "epiphany" at the top of a pyramid in Mexico. In the book, this comes only a couple of pages after Almond has once again made his excuses and left, this time turning down the chance to experience "shock and awe" with a muscular Mexican in a gay sauna. "Yes, I felt like there was going to be another day," he writes. "That was it, my midlife crisis and those middle-aged blues drifted out across the desert."
He admits that the moment was not quite as dramatic as he describes it in the book, but I'm not convinced that it really happened at all. His take on life is ambiguous, to say the least. "I just realised that nothing's important, that you've got to learn to take yourself less seriously," he says. "I'm not going to worry so much if people think badly of me. If things get on top of me, I'm going to surrender to it. Not in a passive way, just giving yourself over to it." He then follows this Zen-like comment with a darker one. "If I can trawl it out, I've got another 10 years of my career left. Ten years of slow death. So what does it matter? I've begun the long winter of my death. I've got to accept it and surrender to it."
He seems trapped by his younger self, disdaining to take part in the memory-fests that litter the airwaves, but knowing he has to play the part of the old Marc Almond to earn a living. Even so, there are limits. "I try to avoid anything that's got '80s', 'celebrity' or 'gay' in the title or theme," he says. "I was asked to take part in a programme where gays would go off to a farm. They'd have to clean out pigs and we'd all have a laugh at their chiffon outfits. I could have sorted out every credit card, every tax bill, but that would have been going along with the idea that gays are the new clowns. These are programmes devised by straight people for straight people to laugh at gays. I don't think that's got anything to do with my life."
Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to be very clear what is of relevance to his life. He talks of recording new albums, but asks: "Is there a lot of point? You sort of wonder, who cares, really?" Perhaps he should make a travel series based on the new book, I suggest. "The publishers would love that," he shrieks. Although it's unlikely, such a series would be very funny, as Almond's observations are richly comical, even when perhaps he doesn't intend them to be. In the prologue he writes, Forrest Gump-like, of his book: "I like to think of it as a box of chocolates left on the coffee table - occasionally you may delight in finding a strawberry fondue, a caramel cream or a cherry liqueur... but you might want to leave the praline or nougat." Self-obsessed and slightly ridiculous Almond may seem, but one can't help feeling a little sorry for him. His problem is that he's not sure if there's anything in the box that he wants at all.
Inscription à :
Articles (Atom)
