Music Interviews with Bands, Musicians, Djs and Solo Artists

Marty Rev Interview

ClashMusic — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:50:56 +0000

When Alan Vega delivers Suicide’s urban nightmare bulletins and damaged love calls as crowd-baiting provocateur and crooner-from-hell, Martin Rev is the mysterious, huge-shaded figure to his side, extracting anything from tumultuous cacophony to doowop lilt from his battery of synths and drum machines.

After nearly four decades of dogged struggle against often hostile opposition, Suicide now find themselves in a position of feted reverence as both proto-punks and innovators laying the blueprints for synthesised music as we know it.

For most of the 21st century, it’s seemed as if the world has caught up while, paradoxically, the duo have spent more time exercising their solo projects, returning occasionally to reap credit for their immeasurable contribution to today’s musical landscape.

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This is an excerpt from an article that appears in the January issue of Clash Magazine. Pick it up in stores from December 3rd.

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Both Vega and Rev started their solo careers in 1980, the former initially indulging his rockabilly fixation to somehow end up with the terrifying onslaught of 2007’s ‘Station’. Meanwhile Rev has charted a similarly-unique and highly-personal furrow, his eight albums often worlds apart from the coruscating backdrops he constructed around his comrade’s vocals, although closer examination reveals a common thread and commitment to moving forward while reflecting his emotions of the time.

‘Stigmata’ is unlike anything Rev has done before, and beyond anything else released this year, as he harnesses his panoramic electronic visions to modern classical forms. Using his synthesised orchestra, Rev has created an immensely-powerful and often beautiful 21st century masterpiece, resonating with soaring melodic flights and delicately ethereal textures enhanced with intricate electronic micro-surgery, while his own voice adds a sepulchral, haunting quality.

With this church-like element and titles like ‘Sanctus’ and ‘Te Deum’, the album has a notably religious theme: a concept established before the tragic passing of Rev’s wife Mari during the final stages of its creation, which gives the high emotional content of the music another poignant, spiritual dimension. Like everything else the two Suicide members seem to do, it may take years for the album’s fearless innovations and eternal emotional resonance to be fully recognised but, as the decade draws to a close, rest assured it will.

Rev’s ever-questing methods of presenting the human voice against his synthesised backdrops have taken an ethereal turn on ‘Stigmata’, adding a haunting dimension to his intricately-arranged synthesised orchestra. Although it may denote a calmer, even more mature direction, the album’s creation spanned what Rev now calls “the most tumultuous time of my life” after his wife, muse and soul mate Mari passed away around eighteen months ago.

Rev can now talk about Mari with simple affection and unreserved admiration, although it was months before he even confided in Alan Vega [“Thankfully, nature provides some clarity”]. The pair met before Suicide formed early in the ’70s then Mari would design flyers and album sleeves, often providing Marty with his inspiration, like the Vivaldi music she recorded off the radio which provided a launch-pad for ‘Stigmata‘.

“It was just the right time. Sometimes you hear something that hits you and you go, ‘That’s exactly where I am now and I should really take off on that’. It was just right at that time. I just started from there listening to other things that related to that kind of search. She was with me most of the time when I recorded the album.

Each album is really starting from scratch again each time. You have an idea of maybe what you’d like to try. You throw it down on the canvas, but it’s not necessarily working right away, so you keep trying and arranging things in different places. It’s like, ‘Okay, this works’ and then you realise about yourself; where you are, where you’re going, what you want at that time. We change our focus and values in periods of months or weeks, certainly years. You realise it in the work, in the process.”

Like everything else Rev has been involved in, ‘Stigmata’ goes against the grain and expectations, a remarkable work which lingers long after it’s over and Spiritualized’s Jason Pierce rightly describes as ‘genius’.

To celebrate its release, Rev played London’s Corsica Studios on November 27th while Neu Galleries will be showing a collection of his ‘abstract instinctive scores’, documenting his music from 1975. Next May, following the success of September’s All Tomorrow’s Parties event in New York where Suicide played their first album (described as the most extreme act out of many participating), they repeat the exercise opening for The Stooges at Hammersmith Apollo.

Suicide will always lurk in the shadows while both Rev and Vega pursue their solo careers. He says the pair recording together again is “always a possibility” but, for the time being, has his remarkable new album to promote and cherish in his own heart.

Words by Kris Needs

Ones To Watch: Little Red

ClashMusic — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 10:54:20 +0000

Songs that burst out the stereo like Little Red’s do can’t help but sound fresh - even when they take ’50s rock and roll and doo wop as their main inspiration.

“Fuck electro” exclaims drummer Taka, pronouncing judgement on the 2009 music scene. “All electro bands suck.” It’s not that surprising to hear, given the Melbourne five-piece’s harmony-laden songs about drinking Coca Cola and taking girls out in their car.

But, having toured with Vampire Weekend and claiming fellow Aussies The Temper Trap as mates, they’re not as out of step with the contemporary pop world as they might seem. Recent single, ‘Waiting’, could have been written by The Beach Boys but, with its foot-stomping bass line and razor-sharp guitar licks, it sounds more like a cover by Franz Ferdinand. They’ve even given up wearing matching suits.

“We don’t just do the retro thing,” says keyboardist Tom, who assumes songwriting duties along with guitarist Dom and bassist Quang. Names like Neil Young, Nirvana and Nick Cave crop up, and Tom swears that his love of Michael Jackson hasn’t just developed since the singer’s death. “When I was sixteen I did a home stay in Japan with this woman who thought she was MJ. She wore the glove and everything.”

Not following trends is key point for Little Red. “We never try to sound like this band or that band; we just try to make something individual,” says Taka. “The worst thing is bands who pick a new group and say ‘I wanna sound like that’,” adds guitarist Adrian.

If the band have found the time to develop their own sound from its stylised beginnings, it’s due to a relentless two-year touring schedule, which even helped them win a place at Australia’s V Festival. “Richard Branson said we were the best band in Australia,” says Tom. “I don’t think he’d ever heard us though.”

It’s only just seen a UK release, but Little Red’s debut album ‘Listen To Little Red’ has been out in Australia for over a year, and the group are already getting ready to record a follow up. Veteran producer Stephen Street (Blur, Morrissey) has even expressed interest, and could probably help ease the transition to a more indie-influenced style of writing.

“We couldn’t make the same album again,” explains Dom. “We were already in a state of change when we recorded the first album. We want to go deeper lyrically and we’re not in such a rush to get through each song.” But fans needn’t worry about Little Red losing their signature harmonies (all of the band sing except for Taka). “We just love singing,” says Dom. “This is an exclusive,” announces Tom. “We’re keeping all the harmonies.”

Words by Steve Harris

Fact box
Where: Melbourne
What: Indie doo wop
Unique Fact: They once appeared on an episode of Neighbours as part of the show’s attempt to modernise
Get 3 songs: ‘It’s Alright’, ‘Witchdoctor’, ‘Coca-Cola’

The Northwestern

Robin Murray — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:31:47 +0000

Hope Of The States lived fast, recorded young and left an almost immaculate back catalogue.

Limiting themselves to just two albums, a few singles and some incendiary live performances the group suddenly split three years ago leaving a sizeable hole in the heart of British music.

Since then, lead singer Sam Herlihy has occupied himself with The Northwestern. Always the perfectionist, the frontman has already jettisoned one album's worth of material in an effort to discover a new songwriting voice.

Where Hope Of The States were emotionally linked to the musicians involved, The Northwestern are deliberately more vague, more mysterious. Crafting a veil around the group, Sam Herlihy agreed to sit down with ClashMusic recently and talk about exactly what he's been up to...

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What happened at the end of Hope Of The States?
Well things didn’t really go wrong. We were sat on the bus on the way up to Leeds festival and somebody – although no one recalls who it was – just said “can we not do this anymore?” Everyone agreed, and we felt that was the right time to stop. It didn’t tail off it just came up that day and it seemed like the right thing to do.

Was it important to go out on a high?
I think that we all wanted to do different things by then, work with different people, and get on with our lives in different directions. It was nice, we were playing with one of our favourite bands – Broken Social Scene went on after us – and we’ve always loved Reading and Leeds. It felt like the right time to stop really. There’s no ill will, we just all wanted to do different things.

How intimidating was it to step outside Hope Of The States?
It was exciting. We took a long time writing songs, I mean we recorded a whole album with The Northwestern which we put in a drawer somewhere. By the time it was finished we had written a whole lot more songs that we liked better. It was scary, I suppose, starting again but that was kind of what we wanted. To live without that name, working with a new name and a different type of music for us.

What lead to that initial material being dropped?
The stuff that we did was probably a lot closer to Hope Of The States. It wasn’t the third Hope Of The States record because obviously there was a load of different people on it. It was closer to the first Hope Of The States record, perhaps, than the second. But again different in feel. It just took a long time, it took a long time to do. I actually took it out the other days and listened to it for the first time in a long time, and I really enjoyed listening to a lot of the songs on it. But it didn’t feel right to be playing that sort of stuff. We do still play a few of the songs live but in a very different way, not the way that we recorded them.

Will this material be released at all in any way?
I think we would have to re-record it again. The songs are really good but at the moment it just doesn’t feel right to be recording it and putting it out there. Hopefully it will come out at some stage as the songs are really good.

The Northwestern seem a lot more immediate and streamlined than Hope Of The States – was this an intentional move?
Yeah I think so. I think ‘Left’ was pretty direct. But I think these kinds of songs are direct, more melodic and more up-sounding. The last thing I wanted to do was record a load of songs that were so intense and miserable sounding, or angry sounding because that’s not really the way I feel anymore. It’s not the kind of music I want to do and it’s not the words I was writing.

Was simplicity an important factor in songwriting sessions?
In some ways it’s more complicated for me than Hope Of The States was because I write more of it now. Before, I would write stuff and then put it out there for everybody to put their ten pence in. Now I have to work out everything on a song and then hand it over to people to have their standing point. In some ways the songs sound simpler but they are actually more complicated.

Have your influences shifted at all? What music inspired The Northwestern?
I think I stopped listening to a lot of the stuff I listened to when I was in Hope Of The States. I didn’t find it exciting anymore. I started listening to a lot of the records I liked a longer while ago. Really great guitar pop records like The Strokes. I don’t think I could make a record which is as straight as The Strokes – they are so well crafted and I don’t have that sort of craft. But some of those repetitive guitar parts and stuff are really exciting, compared to big epic tracks. So the minute we get into the studio we just put everything on it and it always sounds pretty big anyway. I’ll never quite be able to wean myself off having lots of instruments and tracks.

The new has been described as your reaction to leaving Hope Of The States – is that something you’d agree with?
It’s a bit more like early 90s college rock than it is Hope Of The States. The Northwestern stuff is a lot more vague and a lot more scattered than Hope Of The States. Especially on the last record we were writing about specific circumstances and it seemed like it was too much for people. After that I didn’t want people to have assumptions like that about us personally. I wanted to keep things vague.

Did that connection take a lot out of you?
I mean it was what I wanted to write about at the time. All I could write at the time was lyrics like that. The new songs are a reaction to that I suppose, but if you played guitar then I hope you’d play guitar differently three years on from now. I think it’s the same with words.

Who produced the single?
We did. With James Godfrey who was engineer on ‘Left’ and did work on ‘The Lost Riots’ as well, but he’s a friend. We thought we’d do it with him, together.

The Northwestern - Telephones

How did things go in the studio?
We still managed to make rods for our backs. The EP was really good. All The Northwestern stuff we’d previously done in a studio in London and when we did the EP we wanted to do four tracks, so we got out of London. So we went to a place in Wales, which was nice as I hadn’t done that thing in a while. We just got set up in a big room, then hung out and drank too much. We worked through the songs until they were all finished. It always turned out different to what you expected – sometimes in a good way, other times in a really painful, awful way. But we’re pretty pleased with it.

How are you going to avoid The Northwestern becoming too complicated?
I don’t know. I think we particularly had a plan in Hope Of The States, other than what type of record we wanted to make. So we don’t think about the type of music we want to make, we just.. I don’t know write songs and hopefully do good things. Shows, tours, records or artwork. I just think it’s difficult to plan ahead as everything can change so quickly, especially in a band. You get different records that inspire you and that changes how you view music. We’re definitely in a more relaxed phase right now.

Are album sessions set to begin next year?
Possibly. We have a few things that we need to do but hopefully. I still really love albums and would really like to make one. I know a lot of people say “oh the album’s dead” but I personally think you still get some songs that just work together really well as an album. However sometimes the songs just seem quite crap together and they’d work better as a series of EPs which you could maybe comp together at the end like The Beta Band did back in the day. I’d love to make a record, definitely, but I don’t have any concrete plans. Over the next year would be nice.

By the sounds of things you’re continually writing.
Oh yeah! We write together and we write apart, and I write some other things as well. I’m not very good at sitting still.

Any aspects of the tour you are particularly looking forward to?
I love all the ups and downs. I like being on tour, it’s really good fun. It’s nice to play places we haven’t played, even just to see people come out and pay money to see our show.

How do you think people will react to the new material?
I still think there’s emotion in our music, just not as nailed down as in the old band. The reaction to the music so far has been really positive. People seem to really like it and so all we really do is continue. The introspection about what we’re doing now as a reaction to what Hope Of The States did comes apart when you see us live – we make a bit more sense.

The Northwestern's new EP 'The Ghostrock' is out now.

How Nikki Sixx Survived The Music Business

ClashMusic — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:32:01 +0000

Nikki Sixx talks to Clash about near death experiences, giving something back and groupies getting younger to mark the release of his brutally honest memoirs and accompanying soundtrack, ‘The Heroin Diaries’.

MÖTLEY CRÜE WAS A TOUR DE FORCE
We were this little band in Hollywood, who used to drink, fight, rape and pillage! Then, all of a sudden, we became worldwide. To us, Hollywood was the same as Denmark, which was the same as England, which was the same as anywhere in the world. It was just another place to destroy. Mötley Crüe would walk into the arena and the fucking sea would part, we were like the Hell’s Angels. We’d get on stage and there was always this anticipation. Everyone would be like, "What’s going to happen? Is this the last time they’re gonna play together? Is someone gonna die tonight? Are there gonna be orgies in eight different rooms?" You never knew when it was going to blow up and that energy, that rub, created really cool music. The best thing about the band was also the worst.

DRUG ADDICTS OVERDOSE. IT’S WHAT WE DO, WE OVERDO IT
I’ve overdosed about half a dozen times. Someone usually snapped me out of it, but the last time I was pretty much gone. That was the turning point for me. I’ve been clean for 20 years now. My drug problem was a private hell. I feel bad for people like Lindsay Lohan and Nicole Richie - they’re probably not doing a tenth of what we did but because they’re in this ‘celebrity culture’, the eye’s on them and they get caught out. Mötley Crüe were more of an underbelly and we could get away with it.

HONESTY IS THE BEST POLICY
I think that makes me more rock ‘n’ roll, because I’m closer to the core feeling that drives the music. Let’s take all the crap away, what’s the core fucking issue? Right from the get go in Mötley Crüe, we’d say to interviewers, "We fucked 10 chicks last night and did an ounce of cocaine, sorry we’re two hours late." We’ve never pulled our punches and we’ve always told the truth. That’s what’s important to me about the book and the soundtrack – it’s so brutally honest. It doesn’t paint me beautifully, it’s not the memoir that says ‘Woe is me, I was a millionaire and I had a drug problem…’ The idea behind it was for me to say, ‘Here’s a time in my life, here’s a bunch of people that were in my life at the time and I’ll let them talk about it very honestly.’ You know, ‘Nikki was an asshole’, ‘He was a fucking dictator’, ‘He was a problem’. Or, ‘He was wonderful’, ‘He was a genius’. Whatever they want to say.

THE CHILD MAKETH THE MAN
1986-87 was the worst time of my life; I was in a downward spiral. What got me there was all the stuff that happened to me when I was a kid. Psychologically I can look back and say that caused me to feel unloved, unwanted, unrooted and then those feelings manifested into teenage angst. If I’d never had those early experiences, I never would’ve written albums like ‘Shout At The Devil’. The bitterness and the pissed off-ness mixed with my natural creativity, produced something that would never have been created otherwise. So in a way, it was a great thing.

THIS TOO SHALL PASS
That’s a great saying. People say it when something bad is happening, but I say it when something good is happening too. It makes you appreciate the good stuff at the time.

YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE RELIGIOUS TO BE SPIRITUAL
Anybody that tells me if I don’t go to a building I’m going to Hell makes me not want to go into that building. I look at Buddhism and say ‘I like that’, and there are parts of Judaism I like. You can do all this wonderful stuff in your life, you can still be crazy and you can still look wild and have style. It’s such a great time now - you can have it all.

LIFE IS AN ART PROJECT
I’m more of an artist than I am a rock star, I always have been. That’s what was exciting about creating the book and soundtrack together - it was this huge art project. The idea behind it was to share the experience and then move on, close that chapter. I’m also giving some of the profits to a charity for at risk children. It’s my way of saying music saved me, so let me do something and help somebody else out.

THE GROUPIE MENTALITY IS PRETTY INTERESTING
As I get older my eyesight’s going bad, I don’t know what I’m in for until they come backstage and they’re very large with missing teeth. You go to the bigger cities and you get the silicone breasts, the bleach blonde hair and the super skinny tight pants, which is attractive… until they talk. Now I’m single, I don’t understand why all the girls that are attracted to me are so young. It’s kinda cool though, I’m mkinda liking it!

YOU EVENTUALLY BECOME YOUR PARENTS
I have four kids. My 13-year old daughter came downstairs last week wearing something I don’t even want to describe… she looked 20. I said, "Where are you going?" and she said, "I’m going to meet a boy on the corner."And I said, "Not dressed like that you’re not!" I suddenly thought, ‘What the fuck just happened to me?!’ Lets just say karma’s a bitch! Did I let her go out? No!

IF YOU WANNA LIVE LIFE ON YOUR TERMS, YOU HAVE TO BE WILLING TO CRASH AND BURN
By that I mean whatever you want to do, you have to be prepared for the outcome not being the way you think it’s going to be. You’ve got to be willing to not achieve your goal, just let go of the expectation and go for it. My regrets are only the ones I haven’t been able to make amends for, where I haven’t been able to say, ‘I’m sorry I treated you like that’. I think everything you do makes you into who you are. Everybody makes mistakes; it’s an evolution. I got to wake up today in London, England and I was a kid in Idaho staring at Aerosmith posters and listening to Deep Purple on little speakers… I went from Ida-fucking-ho to doing interviews talking about my life 30 years later... it’s fucking crazy! I can’t wait to see what the next 40 years are going to bring.

Words by Rachael Wright

Brody Dalle Shares Her Highs And Lows

ClashMusic — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 10:52:31 +0000

The Spinnerette frontwoman and wife of Josh Homme boasts serious rock credentials, having fronted The Distillers and played with Eagles Of Death Metal. She tells Clash of her ups and downs, from Olympic swimming to sleeping in a skip.

My most painful injury
“I once broke my nose diving into a pool.”

My most memorable trip
“The first time I moved to America in 1997. I was moving to LA as my boyfriend at the time [Tim Armstrong from Rancid] lived there. At first I found the city pretty vulgar and alienating, for a long time I felt really unadjusted there. It was scary, but the trip itself was really exciting, it was life-changing shit.”

The worst song I ever wrote
“‘Oh Serena’.”

My most impressive sporting feat
“Coming first in the swimming championships in Melbourne. Freestyle was my stroke. I always came first - I was training to become an Olympic swimmer, but then I discovered pot.”

The most dislikable celebrity I ever met
“Rosanna Arquette. We had a disagreement…”

The hardest I ever laughed
“Is with my sister. It’s really rare to find those people where you get hysterical, not the kind of laughter where people laugh because they’re just being nice, but the ones where you just laugh really hard - gutteral, deep, mutual laughter. I don’t know what it is, we just have that thing.”

The worst lie I ever told
“That Paul ‘Crocodile Dundee’ Hogan is my father. It was when I was about eight, and the film had just come out. I got away with it for a year before I got caught out in front of my mum. That’s how much I loved Crocodile Dundee.”

Best childhood memory
“Seeing Cyndi Lauper play when I was seven-years old. My dad took me to see her. That was the first show I’d ever seen in my life. She was this tiny little speck with orange hair and a pale blue dress trouncing around the stage, singing with that voice, I was totally mesmerised.”

My most shameful moment
“When I was fifteen I bought these really expensive suede pumps from this vintage store, and I went to have wine at this Italian restaurant - my girlfriend and I thought we were pretty fancy. And we got so fucking hammered that I lost my brand new shoes, and the only place we could find to sleep cos it was three o’clock in the morning was a hotel laundry-bin dumpster. There was blood and cum all over the sheets, it was gross.”

Life hasn't gotten much better
“Than the moment that my daughter was born.”

The angriest I've ever been
“When I turned twelve.”

The most at peace I've ever felt
“Any time I hold my daughter, when I’m in my man’s arms.”

Nile Rodgers' Advice on Surviving The Music Industry

ClashMusic — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 09:10:52 +0000

The aspiring rock star’s indispensable guide to surviving a life in music, with advice from those who know best.

As the co-founder of Chic, Nile Rodgers is responsible for disco staples such as ‘Le Freak’ and ‘Good Times’, and production duties for Sister Sledge, Madonna, David Bowie and Duran Duran. The guy’s a legend and here are his Rock And Rules.

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Chic - Le Freak

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Bands have to work as a unit
The most important thing that I learnt at the Apollo Theatre is that a funk/groove band moves as a unit. The best way to describe it is like when you see a big flock of birds flying and they all turn at the same time - that’s the way a funk unit operates. At the Apollo it was really hardcore, you wouldn’t know if the artist would be drunk or just doing something different on a whim and you had to follow them. If you didn’t follow someone, your mistake would stick out, and believe me, you would not be sitting in that chair the next day. It was like a black coliseum: thumbs up and thumbs down. I can’t tell you the names of the stars - and they were big stars - who were insulted by the fans there. It was that hardcore.

Don’t get too messed up
No matter how high I got, there are certain things I would never do. It’s really hard for me to cross certain boundaries. I have a real old school musician’s discipline, because I know I have to keep things together to make it to the session the next day no matter what, even though I would get really messed up - although one night with Joey Ramone people literally had to carry us out of the house. We were on the floor. I probably might have missed the recording studio that day but you can count the days I did that on one hand.

Save all your stuff
We saved everything. We were really, really meticulous as record producers. It’s unbelievable, I’m now writing my life story at the moment and right now I have my original contract with David Bowie. And he signed it first! I didn’t believe it was happening so I made him sign it first. To have these things is just incredible.

Anonymity can be a great thing
When we were younger we used to follow KISS around as they played at a lot of the same places we were playing at. We idolised them, their shit was incredible to us. But the main thing about them that we loved was their anonymity. I can’t tell you the amount of times we would be hanging out with the guys and not one person would come up and talk to us. We loved that because we were back-up musicians. All of our lives we played behind stars. So Bernard [Edwards, Chic co-founder] and I started a band where we created stars that stood in front of us. We liked to just hide in the background because that’s what we were comfortable with.

Your songs can be much bigger than you’ll ever be
The songs have always been bigger than us. The very last night of Bernard’s life we were about to go on stage and I could see tears running down his cheek. He was the last guy to get emotional about a gig - to him it was just a job. He started crying and his exact words were, ‘Wow, man. We did it.” I asked him what he meant and he replied, ‘We did it. They didn’t come here to see us. They came here to see our songs. Our songs are bigger than we are.’ He got really philosophical and maybe he knew he was dying. He passed out that night during ‘Let’s Dance’ with Simon Le Bon on vocals. He was so musical he passed out during the second verse so there was no bass in it. I thought that it sounded cool and wished I’d tried that on the record, I had no idea that he had passed out behind me and was dying. They revived him and he came straight back in at exactly the right part. The doctors said he had to go to hospital because of his temperature, but he played the whole show and then when we were out after the show he carried on passing out. He was narcoleptic so it wasn’t that alarming to us. Even though the doctor told him to go to hospital we were old school musicians so we would just do the show, get through the show and deal with stuff tomorrow. But tomorrow never came.

Get a partner you trust
The thing that I’ve always believed in is that you’ve gotta find someone else. You need to have a partner who can always be brutally honest with you, that’ll tell you that your shit sucks or that if you change something it will make it better, but they’re doing it not out of ego, but out of love. To have someone who can fill in the missing bits of your intellectual and artistic personality; that is an invaluable partnership. It doesn’t have to be a musician - it just has to be someone that you trust. In this business, and it’s harder nowadays, if you don’t have that person who can prop you up, you will get demoralised so easily.

Words by Josh Jones

Yo La Tengo Interview

ClashMusic — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 09:08:10 +0000

Ira Kaplan, Georgia Hubley and James McNew, otherwise known as Matador’s darlings of the alternative Yo La Tengo, occupy a unique place in rock history.

Few bands in memory dare to experiment quite so widely with such casual audacity. From screeching art-rock and jangling pop songs to electronic soundscapes and hushed lullabies, their output has explored the range of musical history without ever sounding less than modern, in a career that has spanned some twenty-five years and over sixteen albums. Put simply, if you’re looking for your new favourite band, dig into this back catalogue and you’ll find everything you need.

The story of Yo La Tengo began in 1984, when guitarist/keyboard player Kaplan and drummer Hubley started the band as a means to express their infatuation with music of all kinds. After a revolving door of bass players, the husband and wife duo recruited McNew full time in 1992, and continued to release material on a variety of small indie labels, before finally finding a home at Matador with the seminal ‘Painful’.

Their latest album, ‘Popular Songs’, was released in September, and once again sees them explore new sonic landscapes, while still sounding quintessentially like themselves, a blue print that has served them well for the past quarter of a century.

One of the stand-out tracks on the album is the opener, ‘Here To Fall’, a swirling psychedelic testament to the power of love held aloft by streams of crisp strings and atmospheric keyboard lines. It’s an introduction that could surprise those who may be familiar with their electric guitar-led freakouts.

“I don’t think we’re thinking too hard about potential listeners, we’re just trying to play for each other,” Kaplan says. “Additionally, I think particularly when a band has been together as long as long as we have, it’s not a bad idea to put something right at the beginning to indicate that there will be things on this record that you may not have heard from us before. You may think that you know everything that we do, but actually we’ve thought of a few new things over the past couple of years.” Another instant gratification comes in the form of the beautiful pop duet, ‘If It’s True’, which echoes the classic Motown duets of Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell. “Yeah, well, I don’t think that was unintentional,” laughs Kaplan.

When Clash asks if Motown was a big influence on their approach, Kaplan hesitates, mulling over his response, before replying: “I always stutter when people ask, ‘what is a big influence?’ If you’ve listened to music all your life, you’ve heard the Motown sound, so it’s something that is there. I think ‘influence’ is kind of a misused word. Everybody is influenced by everything. You can be influenced by things you hate as much as the things you love. You could take the noisiest atonal group in the world, and chances are they are being influenced by The Beatles and Motown by making the decision to go as far from that as possible, so it’s still an influence. So, of course Motown is an influence, because it would have to be to anyone who has listened to a lot of music.”

“Basically we started playing that song,” he continues, “and it kind of reminded us of Motown, and we just decided to follow that. I think in years past we might have said, okay, we have to make it sound a little more like us, and less like Motown. But in recent years, we’ve taken the attitude that if we’re playing it, then it’s us, so let’s make it sound however we want.”

The work of old school arranger Richard Evans, famed for his work on the Cadet label, Soulful Strings records and acts like Marlena Shaw and Terry Callier, is stamped all across the tracks, and this unique talent is something that Yo La Tengo were keen to tap into, as Kaplan outlines.

“That was something that came up during the recording process. We realised very quickly that what we were capable of arranging was just not interesting, or wasn’t what we had in mind. We didn’t really know what we had in mind, we just knew it wasn’t that,” he laughs. “So we just started thinking about options, and Richard Evans was the person we wanted. We didn’t even know what he was doing, or if he was still working. But James started looking around on the Internet and managed to find him teaching up in Boston, and wrote to him blindly, and he was interested.”

But hardcore fans shouldn’t be worried that Yo La Tengo have gone soul, because all the other musical staples that have earned them a wealth of critical success and a devoted fanbase over the years are all still there. The unashamed experimentation, the seamless drift between dark ambience and fragile optimism, the sprawling, hypnotic epics, and the inherent gift for melody are all abundant in tracks like ‘Avalon’ or ‘Someone Very Similar’, ‘Nothing To Hide’, ‘When It’s Dark’ and ‘More Stars Than There Are In Heaven’. What ‘Popular Songs’ shows is that, even after twenty-five years of making music together, Yo La Tengo have lost none of their power to surprise and delight, and we love them all the more for it.

“We just enjoy it, you know,” Kaplan reflects. “I think at this point we have a harder time not making music, being able to turn things down that we want to do because we need a little time to ourselves. We just don’t seem to be able to do that. I don’t know, there’s just so many things that are interesting and fun to do. It’s not hard.” Yo La Tengo’s ‘Popular Songs’ is out now on Matador.

Words by Mark Millar

How Black Sabbath Survived The Music Business

ClashMusic — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:07:18 +0000

The aspiring rock star’s indispensable guide to surviving a life in music, with advice from those who know best.

Bill Ward is the drummer in what many say is the biggest metal band in the world… the mighty Black Sabbath. A member from the band’s inception, he has dealt with enormous global success, and come through the other side of heavy alcohol and narcotic addictions. Bill’s experience should be heeded...

YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE COOL
For me I’ve learned that being cool will kill me. So I don’t walk around all fucking hip, slick and cool and all pop star-ish while holding all the pain in. I let all the pain out in the morning. It doesn’t matter what might be bothering me, I just let it all out. I try not to live in any ego - I live in the reality of where the fuck I am. By doing that, I’m able to transverse all of the twists and turns and daily conflicts and ups and downs. To distance yourself from all the distractions gives you a sense of self-worth.

YOU HAVE TO BE FIT
If I know I’m going on tour, I start to train at least two months before we start. I start playing more vigorously and then I do walks, I build them up to ten mile a day walks because I want to get a lot of endurance. I also do a lot of push-ups. The backstage exercises are about twenty minutes stretching arms and legs, getting anything that’s had a whack the night before fixed - I get a massage to fix anything that’s sore. It’s really, really important. As a drummer I totally recommend looking after your bones and muscles. Years ago, there was a university that wanted to stick a load of sensors all over me to check what I was doing during a set. It turns out I was doing the equivalent to running fifteen miles a night in a one and a half hour concert. These days, as long as I’m doing those ten-mile walks, then I can usually measure that I’m going to be fine for the show. I still play my ass off and need to be really fit. If you’re playing in a hard rock band - if you’re playing in Sabbath - then you need to be in good shape.

CHERISH YOUR BAND
I feel like I’m playing in the living room. I don’t feel like I’m at a gig, even though I know I am. It feels like I’m with my entire family and that I know everybody there. I can’t feel more at home. If I wanted to die, I would want to die on stage. I would be honoured to die on the stage. It makes more sense to me up there than it does when I’m in my actual house when I come off tour. Being on the stage is hard to describe but it feels really normal and really, really nice. I thoroughly enjoy it. For a long time the original band weren’t playing together, but it’s a fucking privilege to share a stage with them. When that’s going on, I cherish it because I don’t know if it’s ever going to happen again. They’re great memories and it’s very sad to think it might never happen again with that band.

READ YOUR CONTRACTS
I think one of the things a band needs to have, besides a good accountant, is to sign really good contracts. I’m a victim of wanting fame and fortune so badly that I paid the price for that. I can’t speak for the other members of Black Sabbath in this regard, but we were all part and parcel of things like that where we signed into not very good contracts. I think it’s very important that any band, no matter how humble they may be, they need to sing into good paperwork which allows them what they need to have: freedom and security. Then you need to have a fucking ass-kicking logo and then, above all, you have to have kick-ass songs.

POWER TO THE PEOPLE
The best thing that I can say is to let the audience do what it wants to do. Let the audience react; they have a right to applaud and they have a right to boo. Let the audience be and leave them alone. If you go down well then great, and if you don’t go down well, then you’ve got to go and do it again tomorrow. When you watch Ozzy [Osbourne], he’ll go onstage and say, ‘Come on, you miserable bastards.’ But that’s as far as he’ll go with it, he just says it to get people to join in. A lot of artists do that but they’ll have a point where they’ll let go of the audience’s reaction.

HAVE A LAUGH
One of the biggest things that you’ve got to do when you’re out playing on the road is you have to laugh. And most of all laugh at your fucking self. You have to have a good laugh every single day. You’re supposed to be having fun out there; it’s not supposed to be all serious - the music can be serious and the discussions can be serious but I have to find those silly, fucking stupid things that happen and really laugh. Otherwise there’s no point in being out there.

Words by Josh Jones

Dizzee Rascal Interview

ClashMusic — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 11:37:21 +0000

After a white-hot summer, Dizzee Rascal’s new pop-dance direction is about to be unveiled in full on fourth album ‘Tongue N’ Cheek’, the latest chapter in his unstoppable ascent…

Though the promised barbecue summer never shone through, it could scarcely have been more scorching for Dizzee Rascal, real name Dylan Mills. The grime-raised star smashed more festivals than space constraints permit us to list here and crashed the charts with number one singles ‘Bonkers’ and ‘Holiday’, following similar success last year with ‘Dance Wiv Me’. The ‘Boy In Da Corner’ has firmly become a man in the limelight. Still, it’s going to take a tricky balancing act to please rafts of new fans while appeasing long-term devotees. Can he pull it off? Dizzee, frankly, is enjoying the ride too much to worry. Just don’t mention his old mucker, the godfather of grime and fellow Top 10-troubler, Wiley…

If the sign of a real man is to stand on his own two feet, then few could argue that with ‘Tongue N’ Cheek’ Mills is striding into adulthood. He’s come a long, long way since formative days ripping up the pirate radio airwaves out of Bow, East London, to stand atop the UK charts seemingly whenever he fancies releasing a single. Days of teenaged petty crime and school expulsions sure seem a long way in the past. But not only is the new LP a turning point in terms of moving his musical goalposts toward bold, balls-out, pop-laced pastures new, unlike its three predecessors - incendiary debut ‘Boy In Da Corner’, darkly paranoid follow-up ‘Showtime’ and 2007’s transitional ‘Maths + English’ - long-time label home XL are no longer involved.

Released three days after his 24th birthday, ‘Tongue N’ Cheek’ is the sound of Mills going it alone, via his own Dirtee Stank imprint, and flicking all-comers the bird in the process. It’s the distillation of perhaps the craziest phase in his life so far, a period that has married greatest commercial success with surreal anomalies like royal wildchild Prince Harry claiming allegiance (and nearly getting punched on the nose by his hero after acting a touch over familiar at the Wireless Festival). Bursting with three Number One singles, only the stinking rich would bet against ‘Dirtee Cash’, the successor to ‘Holiday’, making it four in a row. To misappropriate the words of blog-pleasing US rappers Clipse, this shit sells itself. And as Mills himself puts it on album cut ‘Money Money Money’, “Can’t stop grinning / Because I can’t stop winning”.

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Dizzee Rascal - Dirtee Cash

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And winning here means a schedule busier than the average head of state: a brief initial meet at Dirtee Stank headquarters in South London also sees Mills dispense promotional t-shirts to Baltimore club producer Aaron LaCrate (who guest produces hard-edged album cut ‘Road Rage’) as ‘Tongue N’ Cheek’ thumps forth from serious studio speakers; we next speak en route to the airport heading to European tour dates. It’s safe to say his diary is - cue groans - pretty damn bonkers at the moment.

“I was having a little party at my house,” Mills begins nonchalantly, as if setting the scene of a sneaky council estate knees-up while his mum’s out, as opposed to a bash at his current abode, a Home Counties mansion. “Snoop Dogg’s ‘Doggystyle’ album had been on about five times, over and over. I was like, ‘Fucking hell, I need to make an album like this. An album you can put on and actually have a party.’ I wanted to make music that would make people get up, move and jump about, instead of stand around and want to fucking kill each other. And that’s what I’ve done. ‘Tongue N’ Cheek’ is basically a cheeky album, naughty but nice. It’s still dealing with some naughty issues but it’s on a party vibe fully, all up-tempo, upbeat and quite happy.”

True to his word, if nothing else ‘Tongue N’ Cheek’ is an unashamed soundtrack to forget-tomorrow revelling, from the ubiquitous ‘Bonkers’ through to electro-house rave-leveller-in-waiting ‘Bad Behaviour’. As sonic bookends, both lay their cards confidently on the table, featuring respective production from Armand Van Helden and Tiësto, monstrous dance music names that need scant introduction to even those outside clubland. Men, it’s fair to say, who know a few things about detonating a dancefloor and selling a shedload of records into the bargain. Factor in a brace of contributions from eyebrow-arching Scottish nu-disco king Calvin Harris, one apiece for drum and bass don Shy FX (a second link after ‘Maths + English’ tune ‘Da Feelin’’) and the aforementioned LaCrate, plus liberal sampling of early ’90s hit-maker The Adventures Of Stevie V on ‘Dirtee Cash’, and it represents a cast covering bases from trance to crunk-ish filth. The crucial crux? Mills maintains that is his finely honed ear for a pop tune.

“I get pop music now. I get what a pop format is, to be up with there with the greats and the best. I don’t think I really knew how to do it when I started out because the environment that I was competing for was the underground pirate radio scene. It was more MC-based. And there ain’t been too many things UK-wise and MC-based that have been in the charts. So that was my only reference. But being in the music industry over a seven-year period, going to all the festivals, all these different events, I actually learnt how to do it along the way.”

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“I wanted to make music that would make people get up, move and jump about, instead of stand around and want to fucking kill each other.”

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Quite aside from various past Top 20 hits, it would be easy to forget Mills’ myriad brushes with mainstream music. After all, ‘Maths + English’ is almost certainly the only record in the history of sound waves to feature Alex Turner, Lily Allen and superlative, sadly since-defunct southern gangsta rappers UGK, even if the album as a whole didn’t quite coherently gel. Or indeed fail to acknowledge his willingness to mix genres, a propensity that stretches back as far as a young follower of various scenes and artists that at the time rarely crossed paths, from Nirvana to drum and bass and hip-hop. And those listening carefully would have noted that he has never been afraid to counter street-level spitting with moments of almost light-hearted fun ever since the musical-tastic ‘Dream’, a ray of cheer in the claustrophobic confines of ‘Showtime’.

“People think the whole pop thing is new to me,” Mills laments, frustration evident. “But I toured with Justin Timberlake when I was nineteen. I did a track with Basement Jaxx around the same time, as well as supporting Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jay-Z, Nas, Sean Paul. I’ve been exposed to a lot of the biggest things going. As well as [his producer and manager] Cage pushing me to try not to be afraid to go pop, in my own way. I feel like while I’m putting out music I might as well be at the top. I want to get the album out there to show how diverse I really am. There are big pop hits but there’s a full-bodied record to show people who are new to me that I’ve got a lot to offer.”

As already touched upon, however, XL, the label with whom he shared his rise to initial fame, weren’t so convinced. And Mills is in bullish mood pondering how hitting the singles chart summit on Dirtee Stank justifies his decision to take the totally independent route.

“XL didn’t decide not to take me up for this album,” he reveals. “I had an offer but it weren’t the offer I wanted. I did pretty much what I wanted on XL anyway, but it’s mad that when it came to me making a progression towards pop music, they didn’t get it. They were offered ‘Dance Wiv Me’, but they didn’t get it. I put it out myself and it went to Number One. It’s turned out that I’ve done my biggest records on my own label. Of course it proves a point. It proves a big point. And it was the first independent number one in fourteen years, so it was an even bigger point.” He pauses. “And then I did it again.”

Those hits have undeniably ramped what went before up several notches in the celebrity stakes, ‘Bonkers’ truly confirming him as a real major league player this summer. Indeed, as the tune of the festival season, one unnamed shindig even asked DJs to stop dropping it with such overkill frequency.

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Dizzee Rascal - Holiday

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In Mills’ mind, though, there isn’t a great margin between the varying divisions of fame. Despite a slightly fractious relationship with the press circa his Mercury Prize victory, he claims he would have dealt just as well had current meteoric success arrived earlier in his career, as a cocksure teenager.

“I’d have coped the same way. The Mercury award was worldwide fame. I still had paparazzi outside my house. How I dealt with it was by getting on with my work. I’m older [now]. I’m more tolerant to some things,” he chuckles. “Intolerant to some things as well. But I just appreciate life and what’s going on more. The things that mattered to me when I was eighteen don’t matter to me now. I get into a lot less trouble than when I was eighteen. I keep out of as much trouble as I can. I’m an adult now, man. It’s more and more about the music for me. Like, I didn’t really hang around festivals too tough but now I hang around and enjoy it. I’ll stand there, watch David Guetta or Fatboy Slim or something like that, and just enjoy it as much as I can.”

A-list pop star status doesn’t come without some cost, of course, and Mills admits since he literally can’t leave the house nowadays without reams of averages Joes and, err, Joannes clocking him.

“It’s been mad,” he marvels. “Being recognised by people in the street that you wouldn’t think would recognise you. A lot more people; like your everyday person. And to be fair, it’s mostly loads of love, man. All love. It’s nice that people are enjoying it. When I’m on Glastonbury main stage in front of ninety thousand people that’s when I stand there and thinkm ‘This is what it’s about, man’. Of course there are days when I just want to be left alone, when I want to have a day off. It’s tough, innit. But I accept it now. I walk down the street and think, ‘Fuck it, man, whatever’. It’s lovely. It’s nice to know that I can make music for all sorts of people. That was kind of my goal.”

The flipside, naturally, is the turncoats and haters, plenty of which are almost guaranteed to rear their collective heads in the coming months. Few artists have divided opinion - particularly in grime and hip-hop circles - as much as Mills since he broke out of the pirate radio movement. And going pop seems set to exasperate the situation.

“People say about my first album being raw and gritty but not everyone got it, so I was always trying to be open-minded and branch out,” he considers. “If we’re going to talk about hardcore grime and that, they’re all basing their whole careers on shit I started eight, nine years ago anyway, let’s be real. I ain’t taking orders. I don’t answer to none of them. It’s about making music, innit. That’s all it is.”

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Dizzee Rascal - Dance Wiv Me

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On the wrong day, there are few more humbling experiences than interviewing a top-level rapper. Cases in point for your present company: left dangling on the phone for a Snoop Dogg conversation that never materialised, nigh on blanked by Nas during a spectacularly stunted five-minute chat that rarely stretched beyond monosyllabic on the part of Kelis’ ex, and enduring more rescheduled times and cancellations than any given British railway station. But nobody in our experience, from G-Unit to Xzibit, has harboured bubbling-under levels of could-switch-at-any-moment menace equal to those displayed by Dizzee Rascal.

And controlled anger for haters pales into insignificance when talk turns to other original stars of the grime world enjoying latter-day chart success, specifically his former mentor/sometime Roll Deep crewmate Wiley. The original cause of their well-publicised beef may be lost somewhat in the mists of time - ‘Showtime’ track ‘Hype Talk’ hinted at the spat, reportedly instigated when his older friend bailed from Ayia Napa after Mills was stabbed there in 2003 - but six years on, the scars still run deep.

Have tensions eased in recent times, we enquire? Is there still beef?
The mood changes in an eye blink.

“What difference would it make to your life if there was or there wasn’t?” he shoots back, instant ire all too tangible.

Change tack. Does he ever see Wiley around?

Several seconds of blank, rather alarming silence is the only repost, permeated by telltale intakes of breath of a man about to lose their composure. It’s not something you like to talk about, then?

“What are you, fucking genius?” he explodes. At our end of the phone line the faint strains of a journalist quietly soiling himself are quite probably audible. “Of course I don’t fucking want to talk about it.”

And so we don’t. Although he theorises that the graduation of grime’s turn-of-the-millennium class into mainstream contenders - Tinchy Stryder emulating Mills’ multiple Number Ones and Wiley also scoring high with ‘Wearing My Rolex’ - are down to individual skills rather than any wider movement.

“I don’t think it’s about the grime scene,” he muses. “I think with certain artists, like the artists you’ve named, it’s about individuals who do the right thing, doing what they’re supposed to and making it.”

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“Would I ever put on one of my own tunes to romance a lady? Nah, that’s going a bit far for me!”

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For Mills, making it to that hallowed ‘next level’ has largely been engineered by for-the-jugular simplicity driving his bona fide huge hits. Despite such direct beauty primarily powering ‘Tongue N’ Cheek’, Mills does still manage to chuck a handful of curveballs into the mix among ambitious club slayers.

A soulful pre-R&B vibe permeates ‘Chillin’ Wiv Da Man Dem’, his laidback ode to maxing and relaxing with his friends, some herbal smokes and a videogame or two, arguing about the football as they go (soccer aside: “I’m from east, so I guess West Ham’s my team, but I don’t really follow it,” he concedes - although his childhood friends include Bolton Wanderers’ Nigerian international defender Danny Shittu).

“I’m a massive R&B fan. Massive. Jodeci, Keith Sweat; all that shit,” he enthuses. It’s also, he assures us, the patented Dizzee Rascal soundtrack to romancing lucky ladies. “When I was a kid I had my slow jams tapes, of course. Have it ready, man. Ha ha. Would I ever put on one of my own tunes? Nah, that’s going a bit far for me!”

At the opposite end of the subject matter scale, arguably the best-realised departure on ‘Tongue N’ Cheek’ is reggae-flavoured Shy FX collab ‘Can’t Tek No More’, which strips its central sample from ’80s black youth culture movie Babylon.

“I was at my cousin’s and we put that film on,” Mills remembers warmly. “I fell asleep, but something was rolling in my head and when I woke up they were chanting that actual part that’s in the chorus [sings the titular protest song-esque refrain]. A few weeks later Shy FX sent me that with a beat. It was a bit of an omen. It’s not just about my pressure. It tackles recession, the war that’s going on and everyday hardships. That’s my first attempt at a reggae track. This whole album’s got shit that people wouldn’t expect me to do and I’m loving it.”

While demonstrating the full range of his palette, moments on ‘Tongue N’ Cheek’ where Mills covers his most superficial inspiration source - cold hard cash - also ironically coincide with some of the record’s most socially aware lyrics. “I know that money ain’t everything,” he states with measured maturity. “I’m all right with it, you know. I could have been out on my ear a long time ago. This is probably the album where I’ve celebrated it most - the high life, living large and just party life in general - but there’s a lot more to me than that.”

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Dizzee Rascal & Armand Van Helden - Bonkers

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Proving his vision beyond the green stuff, amid the dosh chat of ‘Money Money Money’, Mills name-checks “Jeremy Paxman on the news”, a cheeky nod to his infamous Newsnight interview, circa Barack Obama’s election.

“It was lovely,” he chuckles at the memory of a tête-à-tête that featured surreal moments including Paxman addressing Mills as “Mr. Rascal”. “I went on there and got exactly what I wanted out of it. I think it went really well. I said everything that needed to be said. I said on there, ‘Yeah, Britain could have a black prime minister’,” he continues. “But is the question, ‘Is a black man capable of running the country?’ because sometimes it gets twisted what people really mean. There’s two ways of looking at it.”

Politicians don’t escape Mills’ lyrical viewfinder, either: the press gladly jumped upon mentions of MPs in ‘Dirtee Cash’ in the wake of the expenses scandal. “They hyped it up, but it weren’t about MPs at all,” he says. “They hadn’t even heard it so I don’t know what it’s about. I talk about the recession and the economic crisis.”

Bearing in mind his oft-quoted line in ‘Boy In Da Corner’ standout ‘Hold Ya Mouf’ about representing “a problem for Anthony Blair”, does he see himself as a problem for Gordon Brown too?

“What do you think?” he half laughs back. His question is an open one; the conclusion less so: Mills might be making music for house parties rather than political parties, but it’s clear he still considers himself a voice of the street.

His slight incredulity at tabloid headline makers’ Dizzee updates continues when we list a few choice news tidbits from recent months. Did a busload of German swingers really turn up to the ‘Holiday’ video shoot in Ibiza under the impression they were visiting a porn shoot (For the record: “Fuck knows! I don’t know, I saw it in the paper like you did!”)? And while he doesn’t deny declaring interest in an EastEnders cameo - the best Albert Square gangster since Goldie? - acting is lower down his To Do list than that might intimate.

“Right now I’m happy to just channel it into my music videos,” he admits.

Mills’ latest grinning performance in the ‘Holiday’ promo video won’t win him any Oscars. It did, mercifully, allow him a whistle-stop break in Ibiza (we neglect to ask if he had time to road-test the track’s semi-genius why-didn’t-I-think-of-that pick-up line, “Are you really too busy for a suntan?”). Tragically, for a man providing a backing track to so many summer breaks, that has proved the closest thing to a getaway he has managed this year.

“It’d be nice to have a little holiday,” he sighs, a touch wearily. “But I’ve been to festivals, made people jump up and down, doing what I want to do, so it’s all good.”

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“I feel like while I’m putting out music I might as well be at the top.”

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If it seems like the hard work is done, though, in Mills’ eyes it has only just begun. Releases from Dirtee Stank artists Smurfie Syco and Newham Generals are set to follow ‘Tongue N’ Cheek’ out the blocks. His notional To Do list features working with OutKast’s eccentric hip-hop maestro Andre 3000 (“Because he’s broken so many boundaries, innit”) and a long-suggested recording summit with The Prodigy (“We bump into each other a lot, but it’s hectic right now for us”). Until then, is there anything really left to achieve?

“I still haven’t had a Number One album,” he shoots back immediately, steely determination lacing every word. “Platinum, maybe double platinum, Number One around the world consecutively. That’d be good.”

You suspect it’s a case of ‘when’ not ‘if’ that the ‘Boy In Da Corner’ will complete his mission to infiltrate every corner of the globe.

Words by Adam Anonymous
Photos by Chad Pickard & Paul Mclean

To watch an exclusive video interview with Dizzee plus behind the scenes footage of Clash’s photo shoot, head over now to our Video Channel HERE.

Johnny Foreigner Interview

Robin Murray — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:16:51 +0000

In these days of internet led viral sensations, it's more than a little heartening to hear of a band earning fans the old fashioned way.

With a multitude of single and EP releases to their name, Johnny Foreigner have toured the length and breadth of Britain. Hell, the Birmingham trio are so adept at navigating the motorways of this great nation that they probably have a Little Chef loyalty card.

Shipping out to Brooklyn to begin work on their second album, 'Grace And The Bigger Picture' arrives with Johnny Foreigner becoming a genuine cult phenomenon. With more and more tour dates selling out, the band have even begun to notice the growing trend for JoFo soundalikes - becoming an inspiration to young British musicians eager for something fun yet challenging, uplifting but not dumbed down.

With Johnny Foreigner feeling confident enough to even release a remix EP, ClashMusic caught up with singer Alexei Berrow to talk the talk...

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So you’ve just come off tour – how did it go?

Aw yeah it went amazing! It’s kind of the first time we’ve been able to sell out venues on the whole tour. It’s been made watching so many people sing along. It’s such a massive improvement on the last tour, in terms of more people coming along which has been great.

Word certainly seems to have spread about the band. What do you attribute this to?

Well it’s just through word of mouth. It’s not like we have much choice, we don’t have the same industry profile as when the first album came out. It’s just word of mouth. We done it in a proper, natural way in that we’ve played, and we’ve played well enough for people to want to come along next time. It’s nice. It’s very, very satisfying.

On a negative note you had a mic stolen in Leeds – any news on this?

Yeah. (Laughs). I think it’s long gone. Our label’s bought our sound man a new one. It wasn’t so much the money aspect of it, because they’re not that expensive, it’s just that it completely ruined the night. It meant a lot to our sound man, I think I was the least famous guy that he’s worked with!

You said in the statement that you’re going to come back to Leeds, has the show been confirmed yet?

I think it’s been booked. There’s so much stuff to do. As soon as we came off tour we had a few days where we had to do some real work, then we did a few shows so I haven’t really sat down with email. I think it’s been confirmed, but we don’t know about it yet. That’s how it usually happens!

I take it you won’t allow the incident to affect the way you perform.

No, no. Stuff goes wrong around us all the time – we just laugh at it now.

Johnny Foreigner - Feels Like Summer

You also released a remix EP recently, what made you do this?

We’ve wanted to do it for ages and ages. All our friends do stuff like that on the computer all the time, but none of us have done anything about it. We never really had access to all the parts before, the individual separate tracks for all the songs. We got all the parts of this specifically so we could do this. It was great fun – we’ve had a few more back now that we didn’t get back in time for the EP. I don’t know what’s going to happen with them but we’ll find some way of putting them out.

How did you go about choosing people to remix the songs?

Everyone we know seems to have some kind of laptop that they can do stuff like that on. They all sit on the tour bus and do things like that. So we just asked people we knew, really! All the bands on there are people we’ve grown up with, and we’ve all been friends for a while. It’s kind of nice to start working together!

You tour quite often, when did work on the new album begin?

We did it in February. We had, literally, a two and a half week gap between jumping off one tour and jumping on another. We kind of toured, did that and then jetted off with Hundred Reasons the day after, I think. That seems to be how it works. There’s either long periods where you’re sitting around being bored or there’s times when too much stuff happens and you struggle to fit it all in.

Is song writing a group effort with Johnny Foreigner then?

I sort of get a vague idea, a verse and a chorus, something like that. Then I take it everyone else and we flesh it out. We get a song from there.

Does the way you perform live influence how you write songs?

It’s a shame, we don’t really think about things like that it all happens very naturally. We tend to just sit down and write. It’s not like we discuss whether the chorus is prominent, or make sure one part is repeated. It seems to all fall into place very naturally, since we’ve been playing together for so long we can all agree on what it sounds like in our heads. The more we play together the more the idea becomes focussed. I know that sounds hideously pretentious but I hope that makes sense!

What led to recording the album in Brooklyn?

Well Alex Newport emailed us. Which we couldn’t believe. We knew who he was because of At The Drive In, and he also did one of the tracks on a Death Cab album that we really like. We got a mail from him saying “yeah we’d really like to record you!” and we were just shocked. We didn’t know much about his other stuff until we got out there. We YouTubed him one night when we were in the apartment and realised that he had done massive acts! We had no idea.

What does he add to the band in the studio?

Just like a proper punk approach. Like, if it sounds good then record it. Don’t think about anything too much.

I’d imagine that would suit you quite well.

Yeah I mean we spent a whole year having to think too much, possibly, so it suited us pretty well.

Did that allow you to experiment then?

Yeah. Well we had a far clearer idea of what we wanted to do than the last one. It wasn’t that we wanted to do other stuff. But I mean before we did the first album we thought “oh we want it to sound like so and so” but not really knowing how to describe it. Whereas with this one I think our musical vocabulary has expanded. It’s less experimentation and more just being ourselves.

Were the songs completed before you went into the studio?

All the songs were written in the gap between leaving one studio and going to the next. It was all written in hotel rooms, vans and places like that.

Did the praise lavished on your debut album take you by surprise?

Yeah I guess, to an extent. We were confident and we knew it was good, but we didn’t expect to get such a good reaction. I don’t know, we’re also cynical enough to know that the music business is more about advertising. We’ve never been that bothered about press, to be honest. It’s reassuring, and it gives us confidence and opens opportunities for us. But at the same time we were doing this for a while without record deals and without any of this. We always enjoyed it, so if it all fell apart tomorrow we would still find a way to do shows.

Didn’t you release a CD-R album years ago?

Yeah! That was mad. We released that ages ago, made about forty copies and then completely forgot about it. Then we looked on the internet and “oh shit, there’s that album!” We write so frequently it’s not that much of an effort to get it out there.

You’re well known for frequent singles, EPs etc – does the rise of the internet remove the need for a compilation of this material?

I’m not sure there’s much need for a compilation for a band at our level. Maybe when we split up, or if one of us dies in like a hideous car crash or something, it would be good to cash in. But at the moment we’re still working on new songs, so it’s more about getting those out. I think that’s the one good thing about the internet destroying everything is that it just makes everything so much easier for people to get into, and it makes it easier for us to get songs out there.

Could the extra remixes be released as a download, then?

I haven’t the foggiest. I really don’t know. I’ve only heard two of them, I think there’s another two that have been sent to our manager. But we’ll find some way of putting them out.

Is there something quite refreshing in the remix process?

Yeah completely. It’s amazing. You record the songs and when they’re done you just sort of switch off and move on to the next ones. It’s really good, we can listen to is and enjoy it. We’ve been listening to them and trying to work out what they’ve done with each bit.

You won’t be able to repay the favour I suppose.

No, we’re so inept. Junior is working on it though, the last remix on the EP is one that he did. He’s been remixing a few. But we’re not up to the same level as everyone else.

Johnny Foreigner - Criminals

Were you able to experience much of the Brooklyn music scene while you were out there recording?

No we didn’t get to go out at all. We spent the first day going into the machine shop where we made our first album to just go and say “hi” and grab a few bits and pieces that we left there. Then every other night we kind of woke up, went into the studio for twelve, stayed until twelve and then went home and slept. It was pretty intensive.

Are you finding that through touring you’ve encountered bands and people that you have quite a lot in common with?

Yeah completely! I was trying to think of some witty answer but basically we’ve made a lot of friends through this. A lot more than we would if we’d done some other job for a certain amount of time. It’s weird with other bands on tour you live in each other’s pockets for two or three weeks, and then you go off tour and you never see them again. But it just makes the re-union all the more emotional.

Have you noticed new groups who sound like Johnny Foreigner?

I still can’t get over it. There are bands who I listen to who’ve said “oh come check us out you’re a massive influence on us” and some of them are just awful and horrible. Some of them are absolutely brilliant and I don’t see any of us in them at all. It’s madly flattering. There’s a band called Mammoth Mammoth who I’ve been listening to and they completely blew me away, they’re amazing. They sound like Tubelord, So Many Dynamos – they’re just fucking incredible.

It must be quite flattering.

Completely. It’s amazing. I never, ever expected it. It makes you feel like part of a chain. We started off writing to our favourite bands saying “you’re awesome, can we please do a gig with you?”. Now we’re finding people doing the same to us.

Johnny Foreigner's new album 'Grace And The Bigger Picture' is out now.

Renaat Vandepapeliere Interview

ClashMusic — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:01:25 +0000

Belgium is responsible for more than mere waffles and chocolates. With a roster that includes Aphex Twin, CJ Bolland and Derrick May amongst others, the legendary R & S Records has been making an impact on dance music since 1984.

Clash was fortunate enough to spend a little time with label founder Renaat Vandepapeliere who, along with his partner of 27 years, Sabine Maes, also created the Apollo label as an outlet for more chilled releases. Renaat reactivated Apollo in 2009 with a superb compilation album that includes classic tracks and new cuts alike. Such is his attention to detail, Renaat spent a year compiling the tracklist for the release.

But why did the label disappear in the first place? "I've been away because I was totally bored with the business side of music. At that moment, I though the whole dance music scene was repeating. I was listening to the same records with the same sounds, so I said 'I've had enough. Bye, bye'. I could have been a very clever businessman and exploited it. I could have made much more money, but if I don't feel something in my life - I stop."

This may strike you as a somewhat unconventional view for a label manager, but this is simply part of an unusual history for the enthusiastic and engaging Renaat. "I'm a frustrated drummer!" he confesses. "That was my first ambition, but I didn't have it in me to be as talented as heroes like Gene Kruper, Billy Cobham or Tony Roster Jr."

Like most children growing up, music was always around, and Renaat often found himself listening to the radio. His father, perhaps sensing his son was paying more attention to pirate radio stations than to his studies, took the radio away, smashing it in front of him. Nevertheless, that exposure to the diverse nature of radio undoubtedly set Renaat on his path to embracing a variety of music.

"I have a soul background, I have a jazz background - I listen to various kinds of music. You can't put me in one category. Yeah, I love dance music as a DJ, but I can go from Metallica to Kraftwerk to Vangelis to classical music. For me, music has a time and place. Sometimes I can't listen to dance music and sometimes, I can't listen to rock. It has to fit with the right atmosphere and the right people: you have to capture a moment."

This desire to craft moods becomes more apparent when Renaat graduated from DJing to the development of R&S Records. "I worked in a record shop, but as a DJ I was getting very frustrated with the Belgian scene. The clubs were so commercial and American music just wasn't accepted. The guys that were importing records here, they went straight into the studio and created a bad cover of it. I didn't like that. I said 'Respect the artist. License it in, and let's have the original track'. That's where the idea to start the label started, and it was New Beat that gave me the chance."

The New Beat genre was borne when Ghent's Marc Grouls and Antwerp's 'Fat' Ronnie Harmsen began playing 12" techno records at 33rpm instead of the prescribed 45rpm. New Beat's influence spread to the UK, with the NME devoting a front cover to this emerging form that would come to influence electronic artists such as The Prodigy, KLF and Autechre.

Never one to pander solely to fans, Renaat sought to expand the label's catalogue by releasing incresingly eclectic electronic diversions. "When you create a label, and you're trying to do different stuff, your core fans don't accept it. This was part of my frustration." Releasing Aphex Twin's seminal 'Selected Ambient Works 85-92' seemed to typify this. "It was very strange during that time: people thought I was crazy. Everybody said 'Why are you putting Aphex Twin out?' I remember the first year we sold twenty copies. But this is the sort of record that goes from hand-to-hand, and builds on word-of-mouth."

The ability to tap into the musical zeitgeist was something that R&S became apt at, and Renaat himself is unable to recall how many releases from the label triggered scenes within the burgeoning dance explosion. The inexplicable intuition and diversification of R&S and Apollo's output accounts for much of this ability. "Apollo was an escape for me, it's balance. Dance music is something serious. I can have fun, I can drive home, but then I would put on an Apollo CD."

Of course, you don't need to have been out on a bender to listen to an Apollo CD, but the times have changed since Renaat's been away. Drugs are different, cheaper and more accessible and though the intention of dance music has remained the same, its method of delivery has noticeably shifted with cultural and technological changes. So how does Renaat feel to be back in the game again? "Now I feel vibrant again, I feel great again. I was preparing for a return anyway because I want to build a hi-tech club that travels the world. If you took ecstasy at that party - you'd die. It'd be too much!"

I asked Renaat why he felt the need for this travelling 'superclub'. "When I go out, it's not the same vibe any more. Maybe it's me, because I'm so spoilt, but don't get me wrong - I don't want to live in the past, I'm not nostalgic. For me, I see the kids and I think they're missing something. Now you get a list of very expensive DJs, big lights, and a big soundsystem, but when you walk in - you can smell the money. There was a certain passion and love put into the old parties. When those guys put something on, they were ready to be slaughtered: their hearts were in there!"

Looking to the future, Renaat continues to develop new artists, "I don't care what it is, so long as it's done from the heart - not a McDonald's product! I can smell that a mile off."
In running from that hideous, ubiquitous, corporate smell, Renaat has stumbled across Irish quartet, The Plea and has now started his own indie label. "Hopefully, I can do R&S jazz!" he laughs. His enthusiasm for music and risk-taking is deeply infectious. But what of the result?
"Let the consumer decide - let the people decide. Not me! Who am I? Who the fuck am I? Nobody! I'm just Mr Nobody. I like music, and that's it."

History is sure to judge this specific loss to percussion a significant cultural gain.

Words by Ash Akhtar

'Apollo - Past, Present, Future' is out now on Apollo Records.

Carl Craig and Innerzone Orchestra

ClashMusic — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 09:26:39 +0000

“I’m always busy,” laughs Carl Craig when I ask if he’s been working hard recently.

Looking back, it was a foolish question to ask someone whose ongoing duties and interests include record label boss (his own Planet E Records), remixer, multi-instrumentalist and occasional vocalist. Oh, and one of the most highly regarded and innovative techno producers to step out of Detroit (or anywhere else for that matter) - recording under a staggering host of musical aliases over the years.

But even for a man with as many pie-stained digits as this, Craig has been especially busy of late, organising and rehearsing for a one-off reformation performance of his seminal Innerzone Orchestra project, to take place at this summer’s Get Loaded In The Park festival. With Craig himself on programming duties, he will hold together a full live band and ten-piece string orchestra, displaying Innerzone’s enticing mix of electronica, jazz, twisted soul and freeform improvisation. This promises to be a truly unique live show.

Having created probably the most coherent and original fusion of electronics and jazz in modern times with their only recorded album, ‘Programmed’, Innerzone Orchestra came to be regarded as the ultimate example of what a dance orchestra could achieve. Then again, calling Innerzone a dance orchestra is to simplify things to a horrific degree. What made the group so innovative and influential to countless musicians was the scope of musical bases they covered, all in a single album. The final track of ‘Programmed’ - ‘Bug In The Bassbin’ - also has a bit of a story to tell. Produced by Craig in 1992, and featuring some of the musicians who would later make up Innerzone, ‘Bug In The Bassbin’ effectively signalled the beginning of the Orchestra (though their album wouldn’t be recorded until 1999, seven years later), and is now recognised as having helped to kick-start and nurture the beginnings of the breakbeat and drum and bass scenes.

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“I wanted to present something that would be different, musically. I wanted to do something that came from my heart.”

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A bold claim for a single track, but give it a spin and you’ll see why. Full of deep bass grooves, shifting synth melodies and a drum break that would inspire/get robbed by countless beat-heads, it sounds like a fresh answer to all the jazzy d‘n’b/instrumental breaks efforts produced over the last decade, and was created years before most of them were even dreamt up.

Even at the time, Craig knew he was making something special: “I had a clue that something was going on, because I wanted to go down that path - when I was making ‘Bug In The Bassbin’, I wanted to present something that would be different, musically. I wanted to do something that came from my heart.” Though its impact was initially confined to the underground upon release, ‘Bug In The Bassbin’ was eventually - inevitably - picked up by DJs, including the likes of 4hero, Goldie and J Majik, all aware of the potential of speeding up the track’s already fascinating syncopated beats - a technique that would be used more than once in the coming years of drum and bass.

A little later still, and the track was picked up by James Lavelle, who would become a key player in various incarnations of the breaks and beats scenes. Lavelle reissued ‘Bug In The Bassbin’ on his Mo’ Wax label - a respected source of trip-hop and hip-hop, with a big audience. The track’s status as a classic - for everyone from beat-hedonists to beard-stroking jazz obsessives - was cemented. And although Craig may have known that he was tapping into something when he created the track, even he didn’t know quite what was to come.

“When I first heard a DJ playing ‘Bug In The Bassbin’, I knew they were playing it faster than normal, but I didn’t really have the concept of how it would inspire people. I knew that I wanted to inspire, but I didn’t have any idea of how it would be an integral part of inspiring guys to make breakbeat or drum and bass or whatever. I mean, breakbeat itself was something that was going on at the time when I made ‘Bug…’, with Shut Up And Dance [UK pioneers of old skool breaks and rave], that kind of stuff. But when people were inspired by ‘Bug…’ to make early drum and bass, I had no clue that would be the case.”

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Innerzone Orchestra - Bug In A Bassbin

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And it’s not just drum and bass that wears that mark of Innerzone on its sleeve. As well as hearing its influence in various electronic/instrumental crossovers such as Tom Jenkinson’s Squarepusher and the various dance orchestras undertaken by the likes of Matthew Herbert and Jeff Mills, Innerzone effectively paved the way for most of the ‘nu-jazz’ outfits like The Cinematic Orchestra (who owe more than a passing nod to some of the tracks on ‘Programmed’) and Jaga Jazzist.

Though the project has seen a number of musicians pass through its ranks (including minimal techno stalwart Richie Hawtin and Detroit bass-playing legend Paul Randolph, who both contributed to tracks on ‘Programmed’), Innerzone’s appearance at the Get Loaded festival will feature - as well as Craig himself - several original members of the project, including Craig’s long-time collaborator, experimental pianist Francesco Tristano, and Wendell Harrison, both of whom receive the highest praise from Craig.

“Francisco is an original member and integral piece of the puzzle. Wendell Harrison; I call him the snake charmer because he plays that sax and that clarinet in a way that is still so entrancing, and his solos… They’re events in their own right. Their solos are very important to the reaction of the people and that’s how it’s a lot different to what I do as a DJ. As a DJ you can play a song, and the song will work and the improvisation that you’ll do will be based around filtering and looping, or the way the next song is mixed in - things like that - in order to get the crowd to respond. But it’s a different way, and maybe not as entrancing as what happens with a pro soloing, like Wendall Harrison.”

And if you think that soloing clarinets have no place locking horns with electronica, well, you’re wrong. Part of Innerzone’s beauty comes from its wide range of styles and the musicians’ ability to blend together these conflicting elements, creating something intricate yet accessible - be it Craig’s Detroit techno roots, to hip-hop to percussive world rhythms to future funk to a strong jazz element that characterises the whole album - everything here is crafted by the finest names in the modern business. Fittingly, listening to ‘Programmed’ also brings to mind some of the great names in modern jazz, particularly the pioneers of improv-based free jazz: ‘Bitches Brew’-era Miles Davis, the later years of John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock (whose sublime ‘Sextant’ album is particularly reminiscent during parts of ‘Programmed’), and the mighty Sun Ra, with his untouchable, other-worldy ‘Arkestra’ and penchant for improvised electronics. Fittingly, one of Innerzone’s original line-up, percussionist Francisco Mora, played in the late, great Sun Ra’s band of eccentric geniuses.

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“Innerzone was an avenue for making music that is avant-garde.”

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By now, it seems clear that despite frequent glitchy electronics, Innerzone is a very different machine to the techno background with which many will associate Carl Craig. But then again, Craig has always been an innovator in whatever musical direction he pursues. Much of the reason he became so highly regarded was his willingness to explore other musical dimensions through his electronic work, refusing to stick to the traditional techno parameters, embracing the range of musical influences that being of Detroit’s ‘second generation’ offered. It seems that Innerzone was the perfect channel to fully explore these elements: “Innerzone, for me, was an avenue for making music that is avant-garde; a way of dealing with my inspirations from jazz. It’s an opportunity to play music that’s different to what I do as a DJ. When I’m playing on my own as a DJ, it’s focused on what I do and how I get people to respond, based on the music I play, whereas with Innerzone, it’s a collective, and people’s responses are based on the musicians and how they play.”

With credentials for Craig and Innerzone overflowing from every conceivable direction, I’m curious as to whether it may be a tad strange to perform at Get Loaded In The Park, surrounded by artists whose musical careers may have been kick-started by both his solo work and Innerzone’s album: “Nah, it’s never strange, man; we just do what we do. I’ve been as influenced as much by them as they have might been influenced by me.” Doubtful, Carl, but it’s good of you to say so.

But one thing about the upcoming live show is certain: a horrific amount of preparation is required to perform something as intricate as ‘Programmed’ (as well as some of Craig’s solo tracks), with as many musicians as will be on stage. In particular, the ten-piece string orchestra that will accompany Innerzone - though doubtlessly fantastic on the night - will provide more than enough to keep Craig as busy as ever in the run-up to the festival: “Yeah, the string arrangements are probably the most difficult part because they have to be written without the string players themselves, and then everything that needs to be fixed has to be fixed on the spot. I can’t say it’s going to be an easy thing to do, but we’ll work on perfection during rehearsal, and I’m sure the performance will be wonderful.”

To be honest, it could hardly be anything else.

Words by Tristan Parker

Dave Navarro's Last Day On Earth

ClashMusic — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 09:20:39 +0000

If you were to die tomorrow, how would you spend your final day on Earth? Getting in touch with his inner reaper this month is Jane’s Addiction’s guitar supremo, Dave Navarro.

Where would you wake up?
Probably on another planet that was having its first day.

Who do you wake up next to?
I think that Megan Fox and I would have a real good shot at reigniting some kind of human species.

What would there be left to achieve on your last day?
To be honest, if it was my last day on Earth doing any type of work would probably be the last thing on my mind. So I don’t think there would be any professional endeavours on the last day on Earth. But, I’ve been to the North Pole so you might as well throw in the South Pole. Gotta check out the South Pole.

Who do you invite for your final dinner?
When my last day on Earth comes around I’m not sitting down for any kind of a meal! But if I were to eat, what would be on the menu would be any combination of carbs, cheese, fat and sugar. Absolute self-indulgence.

What would be your greatest regret?
You’re talking to a pretty unapologetic guy who doesn’t regret much. You know, in all sincerity on that one, probably that I haven’t spent more time with family, close family.

What would be the last album you’d listen to?
It would be either ‘The Fragile’ by Nine Inch Nails or Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’

Who is the last person you would kiss?
I think I’m going to have to go back to my original Megan Fox answer.

"You're talking to a pretty unapologetic guy who doesn't regret much."

How would you like to snuff it?
Well there are a number of different ways in which it would be nice to die: one would be to pass quietly and safely in my sleep, one would be to over-experiment with opiates, and one would be to have a cardiac arrest while in the process of making love to Megan Fox. I think I’ll go with that one.

What would your final words be?
“That was fucking amazing.” That includes the band, that includes Megan, and that includes life.

What song would you play at your funeral?
I’ve always wanted inappropriate music at my funeral, something that wouldn’t make anyone else unhappy. So maybe something by The Sugarcubes.

What would it say on your grave stone?
The funny thing is I’ve thought about this a million times and I’ve got a million great answers, but not on the spot, I don’t have it. So, just: ‘Here lies Dave Navarro. He did the best he could.’

Which dead star would welcome you at the Pearly Gates and why?
Probably my mother because I haven’t seen her in thirty years. She’d show me where all the strip clubs are.

If you were resurrected the day after tomorrow, who or what would you come back as?
Sincerely? Guitar player for Jane’s Addiction. I couldn’t be happier. I really would do it all over again. I think the way it’s gone is the way it’s supposed to go and I would do it exactly like that.

The xx Interview

ClashMusic — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 09:04:45 +0000

"A lot of the songs were written at night. We would play our instruments really quietly because we didn’t want to wake anyone in my house up.”

Emerging from the same London comprehensive that spawned Four Tet, Hot Chip and countless others The xx are something of a mystery. Amid a British guitar scene dominated by braggadocio the group aim to reside in the shadows, bound by both shyness and a sense of mystery. Formed at school, The xx seem to recall something of the romance of the adolescent in their adoption of symbols such as the sun and the moon as their own. “I think I find those symbols quite romantic, and quite peaceful,” says singer Romy Madley Croft. “I like that poetic style of imagery. I prefer to sing about those things, rather than a relationship or whatever.”

Yet the band have a clear pop touch. Live, The xx throw in covers by Aaaliyah and old school R&B merchants Womack & Womack alongside their own material, though strangely The xx seem to be both hampered and fuelled by their introversion. The band’s twin vocalists [Romy sings with bassist Oliver Sim] often vie for attention, yet never seem to trip on each other’s toes. “Neither of us thought when we were children that we were going to be singers - we’re not natural performers,” Romy admits. “We’ve had to work hard to be singers. When we made the first single we were so polite, like ‘You first, no you first’.”

Style-wise, The xx seem almost communal in their addiction to noir. “I’ve always worn black. I suppose people in my family have worn dark colours, and that’s maybe rubbed off. We’re aware that it’s good to look like a collective, that we need to look like a band. But we’ve never sat down and discussed it, it’s almost subconscious - a group understanding of what looks good.”

The xx’s debut album, ‘xx’, is out now.

Words by Robin Murray

Read ClashMusic's Ones To Watch feature on the band HERE.

Classic Album: The Stooges 'The Stooges'

ClashMusic — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:55:23 +0000

"Here’s a track from a new album coming soon on Elektra,” announced John Peel’s dulcet tones one Sunday afternoon in August 1969. Expecting the new Incredible String Band album, it came as some shock when the slavering wah-wah intro of ‘Little Doll’ heralded the first time that The Stooges were heard in the UK.

They immediately stood out like the sorest of thumbs. If Led Zeppelin’s debut album of the same year laid the musical blueprint for the first half of the ’70s, The Stooges forged another template for the decade’s latter years, although few would have believed it at the time. But it’s too simplistic to hail the monumental contents of ‘The Stooges’ as punk rock’s prototype, despite the obvious influence it had on the Sex Pistols (even down to covering ‘No Fun’). The Stooges didn’t set out to start a revolution; it took signing a record deal and being booked into a studio to get them off their arses to forge songs out of the chaotic stage act which had prompted Elektra’s Danny Fields to sign them at the same time as fellow Detroit-based ‘big brother’ band the MC5.

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The Stooges - I Wanna Be Your Dog

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They were just doing what came naturally, Iggy letting the dirty dog out a the same time as dumping on rock ‘n’ roll’s previously set-in-stone inhibitions, while guitarist Ron Asheton channelled his love for The Who’s raw aggression into his uniquely-relentless behemoth churn. Harnessed in the studio, The Stooges boiled rock ‘n’ roll down to its wired primal essence, Iggy’s lyrics written while he observed the ‘social patterns’ of school kids in a local burger bar, reflecting teenage lust and terminal boredom: the original blank generation manifesto.

Danny Fields’ choice of John Cale for producer was inspired. Although the Velvet Underground founder had just sculpted the icy, freeform backdrops for Nico’s ground-breaking ‘Marble Index’ album, this was Cale’s first assignment as Elektra’s new staff producer. Impressed by The Stooges’ live chaos, he took to the project with gusto and diligence, but also recognised the unbridled avant garde sensibilities which gave them extra untamed edge.

Before recording commenced and having just rehearsed structured songs for the first time, The Stooges hit New York, mixing with Cale’s hip chums, including Nico, who embarked on a fling with Iggy. Recording started on April Fool’s Day, 1969, at New York’s Hit Factory, off Times Square. While Iggy climbed around the speakers and Asheton fought for maximum volume, the pot-smoking Stooges initially laid into the five songs they’d worked up: ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’, ‘No Fun’, ‘1969’, ‘Ann’ and ‘We Will Fall’. Elektra supremo Jac Holzman said they needed more so they returned to their Chelsea Hotel domicile and knocked up ‘Real Cool Time’, ‘Not Right’ and ‘Littl Doll’ overnight. Within a week they had an album.

Forty years on, ‘The Stooges’ still sounds untouchable, its cathartic bludgeoning and dum dum worldview still sounding timeless. “Another year for me and you / Another year with nothing to do”, spit-pouts Iggy on the opening ‘1969’, written after The Stooges had been booed off by punters waiting for Cream.

Ron Asheton built his monolithic riffs on anything from the Yusef Lateef blues which inspired ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ [effectively bolstered by Cale’s one-note piano] to a bassline snippet from Pharoah Sanders’ ‘Upper And Lower Egypt’ for ‘Little Doll’. ‘No Fun’ was constructed around a brief two-note riff from ‘Tribal Gathering’ on The Byrds’ ‘Notorious Byrd Brothers’ album (which he heard after taking LSD for the first time and losing his virginity at Iggy’s twenty-first birthday party). ‘Ann’ is widely considered to be named after Ron’s ever supportive mum.

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The Stooges - No Fun

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With the album’s seven rockers totalling around twenty-four minutes, respectable length was attained with ten minutes of dense mantra-drone ‘We Will Fall’, based on a chant by Indian guru Swami Ramdas, whose biography Dave Alexander was reading. After all, The Stooges had started out as an experimental band, which is also evident in the unconventional way that the rumbling beast of a rhythm section pusues and embellishes riffs and vocals rather than straight timekeeping. With Joel Brodsky’s suitably snotty cover staring like a punk version of The Doors’ debut, the album was unleashed to positive reviews in the underground press but some befuddlement in the mainstream, making 106 in the US charts.

Writing in Fusion magazine, future Patti Smith guitarist Lenny Kaye declared, “1969 may well be the year of The Stooges”, while Detroit’s ever-supportive Creem ventured, “This is probably the guitar style of the future.” How right they were. Released in the same week as the Woodstock festival, ‘The Stooges’ was out of time and ahead of the whole world.

Words by Kris Needs

Ones to Watch: Le Corps Mince de Francoise

ClashMusic — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:16:53 +0000

Full of vivid, vital, flicking-the-V vigour, this all-Finnish, all-female Nineties beats and 10/10 fashion scores.

Their name, which means ‘The skinny body of Francoise’, was only picked by lead singer Emma Kemppianen because “it sounded cool”. This was back in 2006 when she was throwing some demos up on MySpace. When the demos gained Emma some Helsinki hometown gigs she recruited the help of her sister (Mia) and her best mate (Malin Nyqvist).

Their first UK single, the insanely catchy shout-pop kicks of ‘Bitch Of The Bitches’ (Stimulus) attacked our senses back in April. It had hipster underground tongues slavering in adoration, comparing the trio’s noisemaking with CSS, but now that LCMdF can namedrop Kaiku Studios Berlin and MIA-collaborator Switch as on “twisted pop” production duty, they’re set firmly ahead of the pack.

For the forthcoming album ‘Love & Nature’ the fun Fin lasses have ripped the shoulder pads and ra-ra out of their Eighties-electro-meets-grrl-garage-punk in favour of a slicker, more Nineties feel. LCMdF are really excited about the change: “We’ve been working on the album for maybe one year and now it’s recorded and ready for mixing. Switch is test-mixing a song at the minute, and he really loves the record, so big things are happening for a small Finnish band.”

“All the stuff currently on MySpace is really electro-clashy,” says Emma. “We’re slowing things down and trying to move away from being lumped together under the feminist band tag just because we are a band of musicians who all happen to be female. The new tracks will be much more epic and progressive and more focused on pop music rather than electronic and hipster music. It is going to be crazy, it is going to something that no one has heard in ten years.”

The new single ‘Something Golden’ is set for release on November 2nd on Kitsune. It features remixes from Crystal Fighters, Anglo-Argentinean future disco dancers Heartbreak, and Renaissance Man. The girls may only just be hitting their twenties but the refrain of the track - “The mistakes that I made will create something golden” - suggests that they are already tired of late nights. Emma agrees: “It is so different from everything people thought we are but it still has the same sort of attitude of our previous stuff. It’s saying that we are kind of tired of partying and we kind of got too drunk and said too much stuff and regretted it.”

The trio have spent more money on their video for ‘Something Golden’ than on the production: “We shot the video in LA, it sees us just biking around, and is also a little bit against global warming and for peace and love, that kind of thing.” Quite different from ‘Bitch Of The Bitches’, but in my eyes different is all good.

Words by Susie Wild

Kristen Schaal Interview

ClashMusic — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 09:04:47 +0000

Best known as Mel, the biggest fan of New Zealand’s fourth most popular folk parody duo Flight Of The Conchords, actress and stand-up Kristen Schaal chats about the new series as well as her work outside of the show

On the new series of Flight Of The Conchords:
“I think the storylines are really fun. This season, since they didn't have to stick to their canon of songs, they got to create storylines about anything. So it’s a little more unpredictable with where the stories are going and I find this season really surreal, really colourful. And funny! I like this season a lot.”

On Mel’s contribution and her first song:
“She continues to be devoted to the guys and she’s going to explore new ways to showcase her devotion. She grows onyou as her beauty just grows and grows… The singing makes me nervous, it’s not really my forte. But you know, everybody loves to sing!”

Her first impressions of Brett and Jemaine:
“I thought they were really sweet and kind of shy. But mainly I was so stressed out at understanding their accents because I’d never re ally been around a New Zealand accented person before. It was hard. I was so nervous at asking them to keep repeating what they were saying, but I had to…”

The inspiration behind Mel:
“They did a really good job of constructing her as an amalgamation of all of their fans. So I had a lot of rich situations to pull from, so that was easy. People always ask, “If you could stalk anyone, who would it be?” But I’ve never found anyone in my life that I’ve found interesting enough to stalk. And why would anyone stalk anyone anyway? It didn’t come from any real life situations, I just used my imagination about what that person would be like.”

Her stand-up show:
“It’s pretty surreal - it’s very surreal. It’s a journey into my imagination! The classic prop I use is chocolate cake, that’s a good one. But recently I’ve been experimenting with a mattress.”

On her upcoming book written with boyfriend Rich Blomquist:
“It’s basically a collection of stories that fuse the trashy romance novel with the humorous short story within the structure of a sex manual. So it’s going to explore everything about sex. We’ve written a little bit of it and it should be out in the fall of 2010. We’re also doing a pilot for Channel 4 called Penelope Princess Of Pets and it will air even if they don’t pick it up. It’s about a girl who can talk to animals and they tell her that the world is going to end. You can’t trust animals. Or can you?"

Words by Ben Hopkins

Diego Luna Interview

ClashMusic — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 09:35:49 +0000

2001’s Y Tu Mamá También heralded a growth in Mexican cinema that continues to the current. The nation’s three most prominent directors - Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro González Iñárritu - have since broken into mainstream filmmaking with an eclectic range of works including Harry Potter and Hellboy franchises.

Y Tu Mamá También in particular introduced the talents of Cuarón and his screenwriter brother Carlos, but it was the film’s lead actors Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna that became the famous faces of the emerging scene. Now the four are reunited with the new film Rudo & Cursi. This time around, Carlos is in the director’s chair with Alfonso part of a production triumvirate that also consists of del Toro and González Iñárritu. Best of all, García Bernal and Luna are back together as the film’s two lead characters: Luna as the eccentric, easily addicted goalkeeper Rudi and García Bernal as the glamour hungry star striker and wannabe pop star Cursi.

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Recent years have seen Luna work predominantly in English language films with prominent roles in Mister Lonely, Milk and The Terminal. So how was it to back in Mexico and reunited with his old brethren?

“It was beautiful,” he beams, his long hair and not quite imposing stature making him look more rock star than ’keeper. “It’s not like we’ve been far from each other. We kind of belong to the same family. Everything I do I show to them and talk to them about it. I hear their opinions and they’re important to me. I love the feeling of belonging to a bigger thing. It was cool to do another project together and to celebrate Carlos as a director. Acting with Gael is really special too. When you know who’s in front of you you’re able to do lots of stuff that perhaps you wouldn’t even normally try.”

He believes that the main strength of working alongside García Bernal is a “special communication - you don’t have to spend a few months breaking the ice, you start with what needs to be said. As actors, you know that the guy in front of you is going to care about you and is there to protect you, so the confidence is special and you got for it.” By way of an example, he offers how far the duo pushed their roles into the realm of fantasy. Sure they’re believable, but their comfort allowed them to push the boundaries of their characters right to the very edge of caricature. As a result, Rudo and Cursi are both convincing, but certainly have enough of a comic edge to fulfil the story’s lighter angles.

Not that Luna really thinks that Rudo & Cursi is a football film at all. As he explains: “You never really get to see the game - whenever there’s a game you’re looking at the reaction of the characters watching and it’s not about who wins. It’s a film about love, brotherhood and sibling rivalry. That’s what makes the story work. Football films have never worked and they never will.”

Any attempts to draw parallels between Rudo and Cursi’s brotherly battles and the real relationship between Luna and García Bernal are speedily dismissed. “When we play we always fight,” he laughs. But it would be stupid to spend our time arguing because we’re friends and we choose to be friends. It’s not like brotherhood when you don’t choose and it’s imposed on you. Your brother could be sitting next to you everyday in your life and probably there are times when you’d rather be with someone else. But with a friend you don’t have to be there, you’re there because you want to be.”

Luna’s next step will be moving into the director’s chair for his first fictional film after he previously helmed a documentary about Mexican boxing legend J.C. Chavez. Luna is coy about details of the new film, titled Abel, beyond the basics: “It’s the story of a little boy and the absence of his father.”

Words by Ben Hopkins

Optimum release Rudo & Cursi on DVD on October 19th.

How Slayer Survived The Music Business

ClashMusic — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 09:18:17 +0000

How do you stay at the top of the metal game as one of the biggest bands on the planet? Slayer’s Tom Araya gives us his learned wisdom…

Don’t pressure yourself
The pressure in any band is the pressure you put upon yourself. As a band, the only pressure we’ve ever experienced is on this record as we needed some more material for this album. That’s the first time in our careers where we’ve thought, “Fuck! We’d better come up with some more ideas, because we’re in the studio and we’re recording here.’ You should never be pressured by anybody. You should take your time and there should be no rush. If you find yourself rushing, then you’ve set yourself the wrong dates. You should have deadlines, but don’t set them in stone. Life goes on. When it’s done, it’s done.

Get away from it all
You know how I deal with all the fame we have in Slayer? I sit on the bus, I sit in the dressing room, and I sit in my hotel room and I look out of the window. That’s how I deal with it. I look out of the window and I think, ‘God, I don’t wanna go out there.’ We all have choices - you can either deal with it or not. I’m not much of a narcissist, so any light that I can turn off and focus in another direction, I will. I live out in the country so I get away from everything there. I like my privacy - if I’m in a hotel room, or a dressing room or on a bus. To get away from all that my choice would be to be at home. Then I’m away from everything and then nothing around me gives a hint as to what I do for a living.

Stick to what you do best
There’s a variety in how we record and write songs, but it’s still metal. We stick to what we do best. That’s the best advice you could offer anybody. Do what you do best, and do what comes naturally. Don’t let anyone tell you any different. Songs shouldn’t be forced; it’s like trying to take a dump you know? You’ve gotta really work at it you know? And then you get your reward.

Don’t be controversial to get attention
We don’t go out to say something controversial on purpose. Everything we do, we do because we like it. It just seems that what we do for some reason causes some controversy. I guess you can set out to purposefully cause controversy, but as a band we just go out and do what we think is cool, if later we find out that what we did was controversial then I’m sorry, but we really don’t care. Everything we do is because we like it and we think it’s great, it’s never because we think it’s gonna piss people off. You can do that I guess to make yourself famous and to be all, ‘Look at me!’ But we’ve spent most of our careers going, ‘Don’t look at us!’

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“Songs shouldn’t be forced; it’s like trying to take a dump, you’ve gotta really work at it.”

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Homesick
You do get homesick when you’re out on the road. You miss it like anybody else. But by missing it when you’re away, it’s a much better place when you’re there. When you go out on the road for the first week it’s great and exciting, the second week you’re like, ‘Fuck!’ Then by the third week you want to know how much longer it is to go. That’s not a slight on the fans, it’s just you do find yourself going away for a long time. People always say, ‘You’re so lucky, you’re getting to see the world.’ And we’re a bit like, ‘Yeah, we’ve seen the fucking world for the last twenty-five years.’ I know where I’m at now when I walk into a city. Everywhere you go is like a second home. It can be a little overwhelming sometimes. It can be really taxing.

You will get told what to do. It’s your choice how to deal with it
It has always been one, but I don’t like to think of being in Slayer as a job. But in reality we have people telling us what we should be doing and where we’re going and where we should be. Then you realise people start dictating, but that’s part of the gig. When you start out, you’re not prepared for that. That’s what makes or breaks you I guess, when people start telling you what to do. You have to put the brakes on and decide to call the shots and say how things are going to be done. It gets to a point when people are going to tell you what to do because they’ve got money invested in you.

Enjoy your time on stage
The hour and a half on stage is the pay-off for everything else. Everything’s great on that stage. Before you get on and when you get off, it sucks. That will always be the pay-off, no matter how fucked up the day went, how many planes and trains you missed. When you get on the stage, all that melts away. You’re mad and you’re angry and you’re full of hate, and then when you get off you realise that you really needed that. You do some of your best gigs when you’re angry and frustrated with the way the day went. It’s a bit like therapy.

Words by Josh Jones

Slayer release their new album, 'World Painted Blood', on American Recordings/Sony Music on 2nd November.

The Writing of 'In The Loop'

ClashMusic — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:08:40 +0000

If you see a decent British comedy on TV then the chances are that Peep Show co-creator and The Thick Of It co-writer Jesse Armstrong had a creative input. He provided Clash with a detailed overview of the writing process behind hit comedy In The Loop

Four days into filming the sixth series of cult sitcom Peep Show and Jesse Armstrong is keeping his cards close to his chest. “With a long-running show you come back to writing with a fear that the well could be dry,” he admits. A promise of some “quite big story arc events” is all that he can offer. Similarly, he’s adamant that he’d rather leave details about his work on Chris Morris’ eagerly anticipated Four Lions to the man himself.

Happily he’s more revealing on the topic of the Armando Iannucci directed In The Loop. Wannabe sitcom scriptwriters take heed…

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'In The Loop' Trailer

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It seems that the challenge of this film would be to keep The Thick Of It audience happy while also doing something different for the big screen. How do you reconcile those differences?
It was Armando’s job to try to accommodate that leap from a show loved by a small number of people into something that would work as a film. From the writing point of view it had a bigger canvas and a bigger subject matter. Although we were writing at times for an American cast, the writing process was actually pretty similar.

TV comedies adapted for film often lose the spirit of what made them special in the first place. How do you avoid that scenario?
Why it’s been such a happy exception to the rule is that Armando saw that it was the right way to go to have it allied with Peter Capaldi’s character continuing, but to have a slightly different world. It’s not the same characters, it’s not the same show, you’re not just putting the same thing on the big screen. Often when sitcoms try to find a big enough subject for a film, they can’t. Most sitcoms are domestic in character so they overreach - the cliché is obviously going abroad, as if that gives you the bigger canvas you need for a movie. We were fortunate that the world of politics has a bigger story that’s very natural. Also Armando wanted to do something not specifically about the Iraq War, but the feeling generated around the war.

You’re part of a team of writers on In The Loop. How does that work in practice?
It’s exactly the same format as used in The Thick Of It. Armando holds it together in the middle. Simon Blackwell, Tony Roche and I meet him then come up with the story line. Us three go away and do the storyline then send it to Armando to be okayed and do the initial drafts. Then Ian Martin does additional material and rewrites as well. So it’s a five-man team but all broken down into different compartments. It never feels unwieldy.

So what do you personally bring to the writing?
Once we had the storyline mapped out with Armando, each of us took an act each, if you think of it as a three-act movie. I had the first crack at the first act, Simon at the second and Tony at the third. We looked at them all, Armando gave us notes and we did another rewrite and passed them around. It’s not like one person does the plot, one does the jokes and one does the politics, but we all have our different strengths.

I think a lot of the film’s strength seems to be in the balance of the humour; obviously it’s primarily satirical but there’s also more accessible humour such as the creativity of the swearing and Steve Coogan’s side character.
Again, credit to Armando. The script was so huge and in the edit it was obvious that he had a great eye for mixing up the tone. We wrote that stuff but it was Armando who made the crucial edits to ensure that the tone had variation but also remained consistent.

How about the research behind the film? Did you look back on your time as an MP’s researcher for example?
My experiences in politics now form just a sense that I have of what it’s like to be around politicians. It doesn’t really inform the film in a very specific way but it helps me to feel my way in writing. The film itself was informed by a lot of detailed research as well as the Woodward book [Bob Woodward’s Plan Of Attack] and the No Plan, No Peace documentary. They went on a research visit to Washington to get information on what the people are like as well as anecdotes and stories from bloggers, diplomats and politicians. Hopefully the research isn’t worn heavily in the movie, but it’s there so we felt confident in the world that we were writing about.

Words by Ben Hopkins
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Optimum release In The Loop on DVD and Blu-ray on August 24th.