Loud And Quiet 37 – PiL

LOUD AND QUIET

PiL

ZERO POUNDS / VOLUME 03 / ISSUE 37 / THE ALTERNATIVE MUSIC TABLOID

John Lydon on everything

+ POLIÇA – XIU XIU – SIMIAN MOBILE DISCO – VIRALS – 2:54 – DISAPPEARS

CONTENTS M AY 2 0 1 2

09 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . P UT A SOCK I N IT THE VOICE MAKES X FACTOR AND THE REST SEEM NOBLE BY COMPARISON, SAYS AUSTIN LAIKE

10 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . SI NG LES & BOOKS THIS MONTH’S SINGLES, EPS AND PAGE-TURNERS, FROM KWES, MAFIA LIGHTS AND MORE

COVER PHOTOGRAPHY PHIL SHARP

13 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . LIG HT READI NG: BOSS LO V E DANNY CANTER FLICKS THROUGH HIS FIRST SPRINGZINE AND RATHER ENJOYS IT

14 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . DI RTY B I NGO RECORDS THE DEDICATED HOME OF WOMAN’S HOUR, NOVELLA, SHINIES AND CLOUT!

CONTACT INFO@LOUDANDQUIET.COM LOUD AND QUIET PO BOX 67915 LONDON NW1W 8TH

XI U XI U . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 THE ALWAYS CONFESSIONAL JAMIE STEWART LOVES WATERMELONS SO MUCH HE WEARS THEM ON HIS FEET

EDITOR - STUART STUBBS ART DIRECTOR - LEE BELCHER SUB EDITOR - ALEX WILSHIRE FILM EDITOR - IAN ROEBUCK

P OLICA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

ADVERTISING ADVERTISE@LOUDANDQUIET.COM

CHANNY LEANEAGH ISN’T REALLY CUT OUT FOR THIS LIFE, BUT HER DEBUT ALBUM IS CHANGING MODERN RNB

CONTRIBUTORS BART PETTMAN, CARL PARTRIDGE, CHAL RAVENS, CHRIS WATKEYS, COCHI ESSE, DANIEL DYLAN WRAY, DANNY CANTER, DK GOLDSTIEN, ELINOR JONES, ELLIOT KENNEDY, EDGAR SMITH, FRANKIE NAZARDO, GARETH ARROWSMITH, JANINE BULLMAN, LEE BULLMAN, KATE PARKIN, KELDA HOLE, GABRIEL GREEN, GEMMA HARRIS, LEON DIAPER, LUKE WINKIE, MANDY DRAKE, MATTHIAS SCHERER, NATHAN WESTLEY, OWEN RICHARDS, OLLY PARKER, PAVLA KOPECNA, POLLY RAPPAPORT, PHIL DIXON, PHIL SHARP, REEF YOUNIS, SAM LITTLE, SAM WALTON, SONIA MELOT, TIM COCHRANE, TOM GOODWYN, TOM PINNOCK

2:54 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 THE CURLOW SISTERS DON’T SAY MUCH, BUT WHEN THEY DO IT’S AS FREAKISHLY SYNCRONISED AS THEIR MUSIC

V I RAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 HOW EX-LOVVERS SINGER SHAUN HENCHER WENT HOME AND LEARNED TO LOVE THE SOUND OF HIS OWN VOICE

DISAP P EARS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 IF YOU WANT TO MAKE YOUR ALREADY GOOD DRONE ROCK BAND BETTER, SIMPLY EMPLOY A MEMBER OF SONIC YOUTH

SI M IAN MOB I LE DISCO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 PROUD TO KNOW WHAT THE HELL THEY ARE DOING

P U B L I C I M A G E LT D . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 8 JOHN LYDON DEFIES OUR EXPECTATIONS AS HE DISCUSSES THE RETURN OF PIL AND FAR MORE BESIDES

THIS MONTH L&Q LOVES ADAM COTTON, ANNA MEARS, DUNCAN JORDAN, KEONG WOO, LAUREN BARLEY,BSTEPHEN ROSE THE VIEWS EXPRESSED IN LOUD AND QUIET ARE THOSE OF THE RESPECTIVE CONTRIBUTORS AND DO NOT NECESSARI LY REFLECT THE OPINI ONS OF THE MAGAZINE OR ITS STAFF. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 2012 LOUD AND QUIET. ISSN 2049-9892 PRINTED BY SHARMAN & COMPANY LTD.

36 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ALBUMS FILMS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 DAMON ALBARN, BEACH HOUSE, BEST COAST, GARBAGE AND ALL THE MONTH’S KEY RELEASES

IAN ROEBUCK DAMNS LAZY SEQUELS AND PRAISES THE FAMILIARITY OF THE GREAT WES ANDERSON

42 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . LI V E PARTY W OLF . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 THE SHINS, PRINZHORN DANCE SCHOOL, ALEX WINSTON, KINDNESS, SHINES & MORE

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THE INAPPROPRIATE WORLD OF IAN BEALE / CROSS WORDS / GET THE LOOK / IDIOT PARADE

WELCOME M AY 2 0 1 2

Everyone has a preconception of John Lydon – the posterboy of anti-establishment who now sells butter. We certainly did. Lydon, we expected, would live up to the cartoon persona he’s created over the last 35 years – the angry not-so-young man with a perma-sneer who thinks everything is rubbish. We could probably write his answers before asking our questions, we thought. But it turns out, at 56 and with Public Image Ltd. due to release their first original material in 20 years, John Lydon is far from predictable.

CONTRI B UTOR

What he is, as Daniel Dylan Wray found out, is extremely open and even more optimistic. He’s a man who “absolutely loves life”, to the point of never wanting to die, and here he discusses everything from racism and X Factor to Ghandi and (yes) butter. Sometimes he says what you probably expect, a lot of the time he doesn’t.

Phil has shot loads of bands for us since photographing London garage trio Not Cool for Issue 8 in 2009. This month he took pictures of John Lydon. It went like this: “John was watching Chelsea vs Spurs when I arrived on a beautiful spring lunchtime at a Knightsbridge apartment. ‘Who do you think will win?’ I asked in an effort to get some conversation going. “I want them both to lose,” came his response. “Perhaps we can go outside to shoot, it’s an amazing day,” I said. “No!” he snapped. This is going to be tough, I thought, but as things turned out, he was a gent and we quickly moved on to matters such the best local pubs in the area (The Imperial College Union as it turns out).

I’m probably looking forward to reading Dan’s interview with him more than any other feature I have ever contributed to. He was a facinating guy.

As for the rest of this month’s interviewees, they’ve all been influenced by Lydon in some way or another. Most of the bands we’ve ever interviewed have. Sister duo 2:54 are inspired by The Melvins, for example, and tracing grunge back to punk and The Sex Pistols involves a simple straight line. It’s even easier to join the dots between the DIY times of ’77 and Virals, the new project of ex-Lovvers frontman Shaun Hencher, who now makes doo-wop above a pub in his hometown of Worcester. And then there’s us – a music paper that began as a fanzine, because fanzines had boomed around the first whining snarl of ‘God Save The Queen’, it turns out, fuelled to keep going until they reached another generation.

John Lydon’s role in popular culture and underground music is huge. It’s probably enough to forgive those butter adverts, which he’ll explain on page 28.

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P HIL S H A R P PHOTOGRAPHER

COVER SHOOT: JOHN LYDON. KENSINGTON, LONDON

BY PHIL SHARP 24 MARCH 2012

BEGINNING M AY 2 0 1 2

AMERICAN BOY / TALES FROM THE OTHER SIDE

BY LUKE WINKIE: OUR MAN IN BAR ACK ’S BACK YARD

PUT A SOCK IN IT THE VOICE MAKES X FACTOR AND THE REST SEEM NOBLE BY COMPARISON, SAYS AUSTIN LAIKE

BELIEVE IT OR NOT, YOU DON’T HAVE TO CHOOSE BETWEEN SPORTS AND MUSIC

It almost goes without saying – that the BBC’s X Factor antidote, The Voice, has turned out to be as effective as cleaning a sewage pipe with a bucket of diarrhoea. Nobody could have expected it to be quite this chronically flawed, though. The prime time talent show blueprint remains one that fans of underground music will forever long to kindle with its architect Simon Cowell and light. It’s an easy target, so much so that you’re now considered a snob and a bad sport if you don’t get on board the juggernaut and ride it all the way to the top of the Billboard Chart with One Direction. Their phenomenal success certainly is a feather in the cap of “finding real talent” via these kinds of shows, or at least accomplishing hysterical success that has belonged in popular music since The Beatles at JFK. So well done them, and fair play X Factor – you’re clearly not going anywhere; we’ve accepted that now. But The Voice? Come on – this is Britain’s Got Talent with spinning chairs.

“It’s all about the voice!” That’s my problem. Leading up to its launch, you couldn’t change the channel for someone involved with the show plugging how, “it’s not about anything but the voice, no sob stories, not what they look like, just how they sing”. It’s a USP (Unique Selling Point, in business speak) that’s regurgitated in The Voice’s opening credits each week.

The thing is, it’s complete bollocks.

Week one, contestant one: a young lady tells in her short intro film of how she’s bullied at school and music is her escape. Next: a slightly older woman has suffered from alopecia from an early age. Then: this guy used to be in boy band 5ive. All genuinely sad in their own way, yes, but it’s already not all about the voice. On top of this, we, the public, have now seen these people, so the looks thing is out of the window too, and I’m guessing if The Voice is to make any money at all it’s going to be us who vote for the winner. Even for the judges (sorry, ‘coaches’ – another revolutionary USP), they only don’t look at the contestants for one song. Put simply, The Voice’s big gimmick lasts 120 seconds. Then it’s another singing contest that looks a hell of a lot like the one it’s taken the moral high ground against.

Simon Cowell is no saint, but the idea that the first round of The X Factor is the hardest unless you look like the finished article is absurd – if anything, they love a fixer-upper. This man gave us Susan Boyle.

Script singer Danny O’Donoghue inadvertently damned the concept of The Voice most brilliantly on its first broadcast, though. None of the coaches had spun around for a particularly attractive female singer. When he saw her, he banged his fist. “Damn! I knew I should have pressed my button!”

There was a time in my life when I pretended to hate sports, because I didn’t want to look like a brain-dead jock in front of all my hip indie-rock friends. I guess I thought I was the only person on the planet who liked baseball and Pavement. I remember asking a high-school crush if I could go over to her house during a San Diego Charger football game like I was unleashing some act of emasculating heroism, something to prove I was so clearly not like all the other boys. She didn’t sleep with me; a lose-lose scenario all round. My love of sports was like an ineluctable destiny, it only felt that way because I let it make me feel guilty. A traitor to the cause; a phony; a jock draped in shaggy hair and tight jeans – the masquerade of my teenaged years.

This was all deeply, deeply silly, of course. Stephen Malkmus was actually a giant baseball fan all along. Dorky indie-rock and dorky sports obsession actually has a long, fruitful history. Ira Kaplan named Yo La Tengo after a convoluted bit of New York Mets folklore; The Black Keys have talked at length about the tragic history of Ohio sports; throwback uniforms and ball caps have become just as ubiquitous as the band shirts. Hell, Ben Gibbard, practically the marquee champion of the scrawny, turned-in, athleticresistant geek sang ‘Take Me Out To The Ballgame’ at a Seattle Mariners game last year. Sports, at least American sports, and especially baseball, are very, very nerdy. It took me 18 years to come to terms with that.

I’d like to think that this is a new development, but I’m not sure. I will say the propagation of the fantasy-sports scene has done a lot for empowerment of the uber-geeks, numbers and names flinging back and forth with the same torque as even the most bubblegum of music blogs – there’s just endless potential for shit talk. My college radio station is currently home to a fantasy baseball league, the constant compounding of sports/music memes makes my heart sing. I like to think of us all growing up through the existential strife of being the indie kid who watches ball games every day, finally united with our own crowd – never athletic enough to make a significant dent in actual play, but wide-eyed and clear-hearted enough to embrace ourselves. Underground music used to flow through so many checkpoints, barriers, and in-crowds, but that simply doesn’t exist anymore in the Internet age.

I live in a big country, arguably big enough to spread its culture concentration a little thin. That means someone might be growing up right now with a deep love for the Utah Jazz and The Velvet Underground. I’m here to say you can keep both and prosper. The 21st century is a wonderful place.

Illustration by Jade Spranklen - www.spranklen.com

SIMON COWELL IS NO SAINT, BUT IF ANYTHING HE LOVES A FIXER-UPPER

WWW.LOUDANDQUIET.COM

09

BEGINNING SINGLES & EPS / BOOKS 01

BY JA NIN E & L EE B U L L M A N

(LUVLUVLUV) OUT NOW

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02

03

KWES ME A N T IME E P

PEACE F OL L O W B A B Y

(WARP) OUT APR 30

(DEADLY) OUT APR 23

Kwes’s debut 4-track EP for Warp creeks and twinkles into life in a manner that suggests his self-coined ‘free pop’ is more than a neat turn of phrase. Kwes isn’t like other electronic artists making music at home – he seems to have gleefully ignored trends, becoming lawless in the process.

Everything is for the twisting, from dub to ambient soundbeds to prog to soul and so on. ‘Meantime’, then, should sound a complete mess, but as the instrumental ‘Klee’ collapses in on itself to make way for broom-sweeping percussion (‘Bashful’), love-drunk synths (‘Honey’) and dancing typewriter keys (‘LGOYH’), all the found sounds and many layers of playful sonics have been meticulously placed around Kwes’ reluctant, deadpan vocals that are far stronger than he’d like to admit. Kwes is a poster boy for taking your time in doing whatever you want, and ‘Meantime’ is definitely his best work yet.

Have Kasabian heard this? Because they’re going to be pissed. Peace – a quartet from Birmingham – have basically stolen the sound of Serge and Tom’s next album. That is to say that they sound a lot like Kasabian, but have packaged themselves to look everso-slightly like grandchildren of the rave generation. This is baggy pop music to stick your chin out to while burying your hands in your Barbour. It’s laddy with just enough falsetto backing vocals to scoop up those lost Klaxons fans and reach an extra two hundred T-shirt buyers. It’s definitely going to be a hit, and not just because certain corners of the music press have hungrily munched down the graffiti-ready name and lunchbox logo. Over the grungey intro you half expect Tom Meighan to pop up and shout “oooph”.

The tragedy is that he never does and it looks like Peace are going to reignite macho rock’n’roll once more. Most annoying though is how it’s so catchy I might actually like it.

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A C OMP L IC AT E D WAY OF BE ING IGNOR E D B Y MIC H A E L S T E WA R T (GRIST)

A Complicated Way of Being Ignored is an anthology of some of the most engaging and surprising poetry around right now. The collection features work by 36 poets ranging from established names such as Char March and emerging talent like Nicky Summerson.

Highlights of the collection include March’s poem ‘Grayson Perry’, inspired by our frockwearing, pot-throwing national treasure, and Becky Cherriman’s ‘Every Bone’, a genuinely moving insight into a mother watching her son grow into a man and struggling to adapt to speaking to him like an adult. For anyone wary of poetry this is a great introduction.

The poetry contained within is funny, heart warming and, unusually for modern poetry, unpretentious and accessible.

K ING C R O W B Y MIC H A E L S T E WA R T (BLUEMOOSE)

In Michael Stewart’s debut novel, the book’s teenage narrator, Paul Cooper, seeks and finds refuge from the chaotic and frightening incoherence of his home and school life by escaping into a psychological hinterland populated by birds. No matter how scary, prophetic, happy or sad the incident, Paul’s beloved birds are always on hand, or on high, to make sense and find order in a world where it may otherwise be missing. And Paul needs all the help he can get. A quiet, unassuming boy growing up in Salford, he soon attracts the attention of local bully Ashley and finds himself thrown into a dark world of drug dealers, finger torture and stolen cars. Stewart’s writing is engaging and surprising, refusing to be tied down by notions of genre, in a novel that is visually sophisticated and at times genuinely thrilling.

Single reviews by John Ford Blowback by Lee Bullman and Michael Forwell published by Pan Macmillan available now. www.leebullman.com

M A F I A L IGH T S S P IR I T ING / W E S T

Last year, Surrey-based trio Mafia Lights released their very first EP on cumbersome, obsolete VHS tape. It was only a matter of time before some dreamy synth band did it, and Mafia Lights make a video to accompany every song they write. The visual content of that tape wasn’t far from utter nonsense (never ending films of night time skateboarding by a smoking panda), but the stoned electronics had us wanting to talk to them. When we did, they told us how they’re obsessed with the sun and that they feel their music is “quite orange-y”. A year has passed and not much has changed on that front. ‘Spiriting’ is as suited to 8pm in July as any trippy bedroom electronica you’ve ever come across, to be played when the sun is low enough to stare directly at. Against the odds, the vocals are righteously up front while Casio tones squeal and pitch-bend underneath, like something from Brooklyn’s Small Black. AA side ‘West’ then seems to be more inspired by local friends Disclosure (the only other band for miles, and one schooled in crackling 2-step rather than coastal ambience). Musically, yes, we’ve got us a chillwave single here, but vocally Mafia Lights manage to drag their tracks somewhere a little more original.

BEGINNING LIG HT READI NG

NOT MUSIC : JOHN FORD’S NON AUDIO FE ARS AND FANTASIES A L IF E L E S S L U X UR Y It’s been a month or so since Noel Fielding’s Luxury Comedy left our TV screens. It won’t be back – everybody hated it. It was fucking weird, even by Fielding’s standards. I think that’s what kept me watching against my better judgment.

Luxury Comedy was less a show of gags, more a half hour of self-indulgence on such a cosmic level that you had to applaud it where perhaps you should have been laughing. It took Fielding’s surreal kookiness that’s landed him on the cover of NME more times than most bands and mercilessly piled on the strange. It was as if someone at Channel 4 had told him he could do whatever he wanted and he had held that promise to their head like a pistol – a pistol of mash potato, probably, this being a man who can’t seem to finish a sentence without tossing in a word you were never expecting.

This thing is, with Noel Fielding having become the tabloid’s bit of rough’n’roll, we had come to learn exactly what to expect.

One series of The Mighty Boosh too many and a weekly nonsense-fest on Never Mind The Buzzcocks had made Fielding predictably unpredictable. It’s better than being John Bishop, but the novelty of bizarre similes had grown pretty tired.

Then along comes Luxury Comedy – Fielding’s master move on account of how completely bat shit it was. Having laughed at an average of twice per show, I can hardly defend the ‘jokes’ that went into this eagerly psychedelic Hatter’s tea party, but you couldn’t deny how utterly uncompromising it was. Many viewers tuned in for something far more comfortably odd, I’m sure – a Brian Eno Frisbee is fine, but one that doubles as a portable picnic plate for magnetic humus? No. In fact, it was never as mindless as it sounds. There were plenty of callbacks to previous weirdnesses, and many (peculiar) references to Fielding’s pop culture fandom.

But it was the show’s the-weirder-the-better way that made it worth watching at a time when most other TV is so keen to be far less fantastic, to the point of being all about us normal people. We wanted Noel Fielding to be strange and he’s always wanted to be a punk. For that, Luxury Comedy was a success.

BOSS LOVE DANNY CANTER FLICKS THROUGH HIS FIRST SPRINGZINE AND RATHER ENJOYS IT Sometimes a name is just too good. Like ‘Wannabe’ for a Spice Girls tribute act, or ‘Pleased To Meat You’ for your local (pervert) butchers. Calling a fanzine all about Bruce Springsteen a ‘Springzine’ is up there – the kind of name that sounds like it was thought up and then deemed too good to waste.

Matthias Scherer is a true Boss fan, though, and has been since he was 10 and living in Germany, where his dad would play his ‘Greatest Hits’ album too loudly for his mum. He’s not a guy who “loves Springsteen” but actually only loves

“IT’S SOMETHING TO SIT DOWN WITH RATHER THAN POST ON FACEBOOK”

‘Dancing In The Dark’; he’s not got into Bruce because H&M started selling ‘Born In The USA’ T-shirts, as Katie Malco writes here on page 25; he’s not riding a retro fad that’s due to be replaced by Lionel Richie any day now (people who “love Richie” but actually only like ‘Dancing On The Ceiling’).

Scherer is what he calls “a second generation fan” and Jungleland: A Springzine is an ode to The Boss: a “collection of essays, recollections, ramblings and short stories” from 10 or so fellow enthusiasts.

“The original aim was to find one or two things about

Bruce Springsteen that we all (i.e. fans that discovered him decades after he first became big) find equally fascinating,” says Scherer. “However, every contributor brought completely different ideas and approaches to the table, and that made me realise that someone with a body of work as rich as Springsteen’s will always mean different things to different people. So in the end, you could say that I didn’t actually achieve the goal I set out for us – but I think that makes Jungleland a more interesting read than if it was something more prescriptive and definite.”

Jungleland is Scherer’s first fanzine, pointedly made in this format rather than “another tumblr that posts cool pictures every hour”.

“I enjoy those blogs, too,” he says, “but I liked the idea of collecting good writing, putting it on paper, and sending it out to people. It’s something you can sit down with, leaf through and think about, rather than post on Facebook with a pithy comment.”

It’s an opinion that is on the up as a resurgence in physical fanzines sees a growing number stapled together to provide a screen-break from the dominant blogs and news feeds. But perhaps you’ve never cared much for The Boss. Truth is, neither have I, although Jungleland is more than a mindless love-in. It’s pro-Bruce, of course, and with plenty of inreferences for those who know their ‘Lucky Town’s from their ‘Born To Run’s, but articles like How I Learnt to Stop Worrying and Love The Boss (a look at Springsteen through the eyes of therapist) Order Manager (a poem by Sauna Youth’s Jennifer Calleja) and The Boss And His Girls (a dissection of the ladies in Springsteen’s songs) give sharp and funny insights that non-fans can just as easily enjoy. Hell, Nebraska: An Appreciation might even make you buy a record.

--Jungleland: A Springzeen is available at junglelandzine.bigcartel.com

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BEGINNING LABEL

DI RTY B I NGO RECORDS THE DEDICATED HOME OF WOMAN’S HOUR, NOVELLA, SHINIES AND CLOUT!

Dirty Bingo Records has been going for a year now.

So, how’s it been?

Ian: “It seems to be going really well, a year’s flown by and we’ve achieved everything we set out to do. We’ve just put out our fourth record and each release has been special in its own way, you fall in love with the music every time, so it’s quite a personal thing.”

Sacha: “The reaction from people ‘in the know’ has been very positive, and it’s still quite surprising when we contact some bands and they’ve heard about us and the roster we’ve built up. It gives us the confidence to know we are actually doing something of worth that’s working.”

You started off as a club night. How does releasing records compare?

Ian: “Less stressful and more rewarding. We reached the end of the road with the club night and it was time for a new challenge. Plus the whole band and DJ thing just got so tired and saturated around London. Who wants to see Electricity In Our Homes three times a week?”

Sacha: “When we first started out there weren’t that many nights going on and then all of a sudden something switched, more and more small venues were setting up for gigs, whether they were suitable or not, and the fees that some of these places were charging were astronomical. Now people will have our records in their collection/iTunes in amongst other bands that we love and that gives me more of a buzz than stressing about who’s going to bring the bass amp.”

Obviously, there are loads of record labels around now. What makes DB different?

Sacha: “We’re both dedicated to this 100% and that comes across when we work with the bands. That’s not to say we

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don’t like to have a laugh, but we know what needs to be done. I think what makes DB different is us as a team, and that’s not blowing our own trumpet, that’s just the belief we have in ourselves and each other. I think this gives the bands the confidence to do what they do best and that’s make music and for us to facilitate it for them.”

Ian: “You’re right, there’s loads of little labels out there but in my opinion there’s room for more. If it’s done right and you have everyone’s best interest at heart then it can only be a good thing.”

Didn’t you drive to Manchester from London to see your latest band, Shinies, play for 20 minutes, then drive straight back again?

Ian: “Yeah. If you’re going to do it, do it properly. I think if you start a label like ours you need to take it seriously and see it through. When you believe in a band and what you’re doing, stuff like that becomes second nature and all part of the enjoyment really. Plus Sacha was driving.”

Sacha: “I just like to get out, really. If it’s feasible we’ll travel anywhere to see an act that we’re keen on.”

Sacha, your tattoo is pretty dedicated. It seems pretty admirable, a.) for someone without loads of tattoos, and b.) for a label that’s been going for just a year.

Sacha: “I’m not sure admirable is the word – a love for tattoos and boredom on a snowy Saturday afternoon springs to mind. It’s subtle, I think, it’s not like it’s scrawled across my forehead or anything. I see the label becoming a full-time gig and I guess when Ian and I are sat in our retirement homes in 40 years time I’ll glance down at it on my wrinkly old arm and remember how we were bold and took the risk.”

When you work with bands, you also do videos with/ for them, and press shots, and sort studio time. Again, it seems above and beyond the call of duty for a small label?

Sacha: “The bands need to concentrate on the most important thing and that’s the music, so if we can alleviate

any unnecessary stress for them then that’s only going to benefit everyone. Plus, it’s nice to be involved in the whole process. If you run any kind of business, in my opinion it’s important to be involved at every stage and know exactly what’s going on.”

What if we wanted to start a label. What’s the golden rule?

Sacha: “Have a strategy and stick to it. Things change quickly, which you’ll need to react to, but always stick to your beliefs and remember why you’re doing this. Above all, enjoy it and keep smiling.”

Ian: “I think you’ve got to mean it. A good band should do and you need to match that ambition. A sense of humour helps too, take everything in your stride as this is meant to be fun, right?”

With so many other labels around, don’t you find it stressful getting onto bands first. That’s surely the biggest turn off - the tumor factor?

Ian: “That can be exciting too, but yeah it’s a pretty busy industry out there. We’re savvy enough to know our place and who to approach at the right time. It’s like there is an imaginary league out there and you keep within your range.

I’d like to think we’ve just been promoted to the Championship.”

Sacha: “It’s a challenge, but if we get knocked back by a band or management then it spurs us on to find something else.

What’s the Dirty Bingo motto?

Sacha: “Don’t forget to bring a towel.”

Ian: “Sacha’s going to get a tattoo of that.”

What’s the grand plan then?

Ian: “Apologise to Electricity In Our Homes, then concentrate on our next few releases.”

Sacha: “Never apologise and establish DB as a label of true magnitude.”

Interview by Stuart Stubbs / Photography by Elinor Jones Read our extended interview with Ian and Sacha at www.loudandquiet.com/tag/label-profile

Ian Roebuck and Sacha Shaikh used to promote shows until everyone started doing it. Now they release records instead, having worked with new bands Clout!, Woman’s Hour, Novella and Shinies within the last 12 months. Sacha’s just got the label’s logo tattooed on his bicep.

Xiu Xiu JAMIE STEWART TALKS WATERMELONS PHOTOGRAPHER -

As I approach Jamie Stewart, the madcap sonic scientist behind California’s Xiu Xiu, an excitable girl hands him a purple package, so he leads us both through a couple of winding corridors to a room where he can set it down and open it up. Never would we have guessed that as the paper is pulled back, inside is a handmade bear with watermelons for wings. It seems I’m the only one though, as the other two chatter away knowingly. This must be the norm for Stewart as he notes nonchalantly later that “people are incredibly nice to us. We don’t have a very big group of people who are into Xiu Xiu, but the people who are go way out of their way to be sweet to us. I’m very happy and touched by that.”

Settled on the floor of one of the many hallways, Stewart sits quite bulkily and talks rapidly in a low murmur. Having heard his various, dirgy takes on necking pills to numb pain (‘I Love the Valley, Oh’), suicide (‘Suha’) and the detriments of class structure (‘White Nerd’) over the past decade, I had expected a waif without hope, but Stewart looks muscly and radiant in his black denim jacket, matching jeans and New Era broad-peak cap. Not forgetting, of course, his watermelon-print shoes, which actually look like two slices of the fruit, the soles representing the green rind.

“For the last couple of years I’ve lived in this really shitty town in the south of the United States where everything sucks except for the watermelon,” he explains. “It’s actually unbelievable. One of the few things that has kept me from burning the entire town down is that this unfathomably great watermelon wouldn’t be available. I’m moving away from there this summer so hopefully I won’t need it as badly as I do now,” he laughs, glancing down at his trainers.

Since forming in 2002, Xiu Xiu has seen double the number of its current five members join and leave.

They’ve released eight studio LPs and two live albums.

Stewart has collaborated with a handful of the best in the cultish, dark wave scene, including Zola Jesus, Former Ghosts, Michael Gira from Swans and Italian group Larsen, who he’s heading out on tour with in the summer – “it’s called ‘XXL’, which is a terrible, terrible name for a band, the worst name,” Stewart gushes.

They’ve written songs solely on games consoles, vomited for three minutes straight to get a point across (in the video for ‘Dear God, I Hate Myself ’) and on their new album, ‘Always’, Stewart even tried his hand at some intoxicated experimentation. “So…,” he pauses, embarrassed, before describing the way he went about writing abrasive new track ‘I Love Abortion’.“I generally don’t do this, but for the vocals I got incredibly drunk.

Musically, it’s not all that melodic, it’s almost all A-tonal sounds. Coming up with a melody for it was a little bit difficult. I wasn’t really planning on recording the vocals, I just was incredibly drunk and I have a studio in my house, so it felt like the exact right moment to do it.

“I listened back to it a couple of weeks later and it seemed to put across the emotion I was hoping it would

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GABRIEL GREEN

WRITER -

DK GOLSTEIN

put across. I’m glad I didn’t listen to it that night, or I probably would have erased it,” he laughs.“In the United States, the right wing seems to be incredibly violent about the way that they protest abortion rights and the left tends to be really passive and squishy about it, which I find aggravating. So it was an attempt to be as aggressive as the right wing is. The left have a lot to learn in that way. Basically not kowtowing to people who scream in their face – they could do quite a bit of screaming back.”

Stewart’s never been one to shy away from expressing the way he feels, especially when it comes to politics.

Fourth album ‘La Foret’, for example, dealt brazenly with his distaste of former US president George W Bush. On the song ‘Saturn’ he eerily growls: “George, when it comes to bedtime/my sweetness will not go to waste/I will shoot this arrow right up your anus/and you’ll taste what we taste/what you make them taste”. Pair this with footage of the band in Alabama switching the letters of a Day’s Inn signboard to form ‘George W Bush is HIV to America’ and it’s clear that Stewart’s not putting on a tough-man front. He really believes strongly in everything he writes because it’s all based on something that’s happened to him or someone in the band or that they’re close to. “It’s really maudlin,” he admits, “but it’s life.”

Former member Sam Mickens wrote a track, ‘Chimney’s Afire (Mickensian Suicide)’, about his failed suicide attempt, which is surprisingly upbeat. Plinkyplonk piano, lilting strings and a triumphant drumbeat back dark, autobiographical lyrics, such as, “you had to dig hard to find the cult of arteries”. The addition of work by the rest of the band is something new to Xiu Xiu. Although Stewart is the lynchpin within the group, no matter who’s in the current line-up, they always work as a collective, but ‘Always’ marks the first LP on which Stewart has used entire tracks penned by the others.

“In the past I would get something as completed as I could and other people would finish it off,” he clarifies, “but this was just the first case where people brought in things from the beginning that we worked on from there. Angela wrote ‘Honeysuckle’, Zac [Pennington] wrote the lyrics for ‘Smear the Queen’, but not the music, and Sam, who’s one of the people who got the boot, wrote ‘Oldness’ and ‘Chimney’s Afire’.”

Ah, the controversial sacking of Mickens and Pennington, who was also asked to leave. They only joined the band in April 2011, so their departure after what Stewart claimed was the worst tour in his life caused a bit of a stir in the blogosphere. On the Xiu Xiu website he expressed “resentment bordering on hate” about it as he announced the news. “It was actually the worst,” he reiterates, defiantly.“The fake tour.The fakest.

The rottenest of the rotten. One of them, upon my posting of what actually happened, threw a little bit of a fit, so I have to be diplomatic as opposed to truthful,” he warns us. “In the politest of terms, I was unhappy

musically and unhappy personally, which you can translate however you like.”

Going back to the shared writing on ‘Always’, though, and it suddenly makes sense why there’s no overarching theme. Each song, Stewart tells me, is about an individual subject, documenting a time in someone’s life. However, the title holds a lot more weight behind it. “There are three aspects of it,” he says.“One is that halfway through the record my brother, who I’m really close to, started having a really traumatic experience in his own nuclear family and he mostly listens to incredibly dark and super violent hip hop, but he sent me this track by Erasure, ‘Always’, which is the opposite of that – it’s a very sweet, bubbly song, and I was very surprised that he liked it. So I was driving around buying watermelons and listening to that song, trying to sing along but finding myself breaking down into tears; relating it to my brother.”

He also mentions that the title is based on a spraypainting on the wall of his gym – something he skips over in such a blasé way, you’d think there were spraypaintings at every gym. “It’s a bible verse that essentially says.‘to God, love and hate are the same thing’, that good and evil are the same. It was really striking to see something like that and it seemed to express both the terrible and the reassuring.There was nothing else to do, so I went to the gym all the time and saw this everyday for a month before they painted it over so that idea really bore its way into my head.

“Also, it’s our tenth year so it’s a recommitment to music – a philosophical commitment, reinstating one’s vows to music, which is corny, but it’s important to my whole heart,” he chuckles. Stewart never thought he’d be able to put his all into the band, financially.“Somehow I’ve managed to not have a day job since 2004,” he utters with an air of amazement. “It was my initial goal and thankfully I’ve been able to keep that up, but I was incredibly surprised when I realised that it was possible.

I mean, I had always made an incredibly scant living before and I continue to make a scant living. I was a preschool teacher for a number of years and in the US the pay is abysmal and then we did a tour and I came home and thought ‘oh my God, this is quite a bit more than I make teaching pre-school’. So essentially, I’ve been able to continue to scrape by.” And as for the next ten years?

“I’ll hopefully still be doing this,” he laughs, “trying to make the best record we can make and on tour trying to play the best that we can play. If we can do that, I’ll continue to feel as incredibly lucky.”

– ““For the last couple of years I’ve lived in this really shitty town where everything sucks except for the watermelon” –

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Polica

THE FUTURISTIC RNB OF CHANNY LEANEAGH AND RYAN OLSON PHOTOGRAPHER -

Channy Leaneagh has been home for 24 hours. She’s been on the road, and the centre of attention since Jay-Z posted her band’s video on his Life + Times blog. Shortly after, at The Grammy’s, Justin Vernon announced that Poliça are the best band he’s ever heard. It’s hardly surprising that such weighty endorsements now precede this project of Channy’s and producer Ryan Olson’s, but even if Vernon has an invested interest (his Bon Iver partner Mike Noyce sings on a couple of Poliça tracks; he himself has been part of Olson’s other project, Gayngs)

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CAMERON WITTIG

WRITER -

STUART STUBBS

and Jigga doesn’t really write his own blog, Poliça are making future RnB well worth getting excited about.

‘Give You The Ghost’ – the band’s debut album – is a collection of robo love songs about the break up of a relationship. It teeters between being sad enough to make your dustbin cry and sexily defiant, like Aaliyah.

It’s never one thing or the other – it’s always both.

Channy likens it to the music she grew up on – American Roots music and classic folk singers. “With those types of music you have very upbeat tempos and melodies

with woman singing about their husbands who never came back from the war, never came back from sea, and yet it’s music that lightens your heart,” she says.“And the same thing, when I perform at night I feel very good. It’s like a load has been lifted off, because the overall message is, ‘this is not going to kill you’.The music is upbeat and uplifting and sexy at the same time. It’s an overall positive, hopeful vibe.

“I guess it’s sort of the style I do art in,” she continues.

“It is pretty personal so that it’s something I can pull out

every night. But also there’s a lot of the things that people don’t know. I write interweaving myself and a character that can elaborate on the truth. So I’m building a record of stories that are based on my experiences, but it’s much more dramatic than reality, and that way it can become a character that I build on, and I can reach into a dark place in the performance and then come out of it at the end.”

Home for Channy is Minneapolis, Minnesota. It’s where she’s always lived, bar a short period in Cambodia and college years in Dakota. She studied the violin and married a Bob Dylan fan. They busked to the point of becoming local celebrities. “People love the violin,” she says, “so we made good money, and then I started to do more of the singing.” Meanwhile, Ryan Olson – a local producer and member of punk band Building Better Bombs – was looking to form a new soft-rock collective he’d eventually call Gayngs. By the end he had pulled together close to 25 local musicians for the project, Channy being one of them. In between Gayngs tours, Ryan played Channy a load of beats and synth lines he’d originally made for another hip-hop group and another synth-lead RnB band. Once Channy put lyrics to them, Poliça was born.“There was that groove and dancebility that reminded me of the RnB that I loved,” remembers Channy, who might have studied the violin but grew up on a diet of Lauren Hill, The Roots, Aaliyah and Common. “I’d been singing folk and blues songs for 6 years – it was like going to school, but once I got to sing my own songs, RnB was the first thing I wanted to sing… and besides, I wasn’t a very good violin player.”

Today, Olson is something of silent partner in Poliça.

Channy insists that her producer and beats chemist is “still there in spirit”, but he’s not a member of the touring band. “I’ve stolen some of his dance moves,” she says, “but other than pressing ‘go’ on the laptop there really wouldn’t be that much for him to do.” It also lands on Channy, then, to take care of all press matters by herself, something that she seems destined to be at odds with.Where she is now – at home, painting her daughter’s fingernails – is where the softly spoken Channy Leaneagh seems to be most suited, not posing for photographs and talking herself up to journalists.

“It is hard,” she says, “because I’m pretty private, and I didn’t write these songs by myself – Ryan isn’t doing interviews so I want to represent the band well and I don’t want to take credit for everything. For someone who’s pretty introverted, it’s hard. And posing in front of the camera, yeah, that’s bizarre. But, y’know, it’s part of

the job,” she sighs.

Her coyness aside, there’s an impressive transparency to Poliça. Although embellished,‘Give You The Ghost’ is a highly personal and emotional album, whose lyrics are bled across the band’s website in scarlet red. Channy keeps a diary there too, posting her thoughts and fears from the back of the tour bus. It seems that the road has had her thinking a lot. In one post-SXSW entry she wrote, I’m learning and deciding about the sort of band I want POLIÇA to be.

“I think I’ve figured that out,” she says. “The amount of interviews I do have helped me figure a lot of things out that I tried not to think about before. Just like, do I want to be the leader of this band, or do I want to be a part of it? It’s natural for people to think of me as the front woman, but I really want it to be a team, and get the band to do interviews with me, and let people know that they’re an important part of the sound.

“The Road is hard,” she continues, “and different bands deal with the staff and the success differently. I’m not putting anybody down here, but I think we realised as a band to treat the staff and our team of people as well as we possibly can, and be grateful for them. There is something to be said about being too comfortable on the road – I’ve not experienced extreme comfort on the road yet, but it’s funny how the more successful you are the more free things you get, when we know all of our friends back home are struggling. You’re getting the attention right now, and it’s not unfair, but how do you deal with that in a humble way?”

With Olson producing and juggling many other projects back in Minneapolis, Poliça are, effectively, Channy, bassist Chris Bierdan and twin drummers Ben Ivascu and Drew Christopherson. Channy describes Drew as “a hip-hop drummer who can hold down a really nice groove”, while Ben – schooled in noise and hardcore but with a jazz history – boasts “a strong suit in flourishes and walls of sound”. Chris – who “absolutely loves The British accent, and not in a funny way” – provides improvisational melodies rather than rhythms.

And then there’s Channy, not so much a singer as a musician playing her voice, drenched in enough autotune to make T-Pain sounds like Morrissey. Poliça throb, sometimes to intergalactic synthesisers, the drums dance, and Channy’s vocals ride amongst the crescendos to a melody you never saw coming. Syllables frequently appear to hang in the air for twice as long as they normally would. Perhaps that’s why the lyrics of ‘Give

You The Ghost’ are so readily available – because otherwise you’d have no idea what Channy is singing. “[The autotune] was a part of the original process,” she explains. “I was in the middle of Gayngs tours, using the same pedal that I use for Poliça. It was a natural move for me, but we had no plans to be a band – it was just me and Ryan hanging out and experimenting, so it wasn’t like, ‘shall we use autotune on this or not?’. It surprises me that for some people it’s even an issue, because it was never a second guess for us – it was just part of the experiment.

“I’m not using it to correct my voice,” she continues.

“I actually have a harder time singing through the pedal than I do singing normally – it’s more work, and more athletic, almost, because if I don’t sing loud enough it won’t catch the effect, for example. So it’s more of a challenge, and it’s more exciting, and I guess what it does is for me is it puts my voice on drugs. I guess it’s not necessary, but I would really miss it in this project. It takes my mind to a different place. What autotune does is it catches your voice as you move through the melody, and you can play with it in very rhythmic ways.”

Like The Knife and Fever Ray, Channy sees this extreme use of voice-alteration as “creating a character and an alien.” She’s certainly not trying to trick anyone that this impish, high squeal is her natural voice, and underneath it all you can tell that she can carry a tune. A neat side effect is that historically placing Poliça is pretty much impossible. Channy says that she never knows who her influences are, and while ’90s RnB has definitely gone into ‘Dark Star’, old skool dub into ‘I See My Mother’ and Dummy-era Portishead elsewhere, Poliça’s android love jams seem to be of some post-digital age.

“I don’t hear a certain era in it, no,” she says. “It has a very future quality, and I don’t say that complimenting myself, but almost like, because of the effected vocals, they always have an alien, inhuman quality to me that’s hard to place in musical history. Do you know Pete Drake and his talking guitar, from the ’60s? Look it up – he built this contraption to sing though his steel guitar.

It’s very much like autotune, and I listened to that music and thought what did people think in the ’60s when they first heard this!? Like, oh my gosh!

“I wrote these songs about a particular time and point in my life,” she says, “but now that I’m releasing it to the public it’s sort of like giving the listener a ghost of that time, because it’s something that doesn’t really exist in me anymore. I’m ridding myself of it, and now it’s yours.”

– “I guess what autotune does for me is me is it puts my voice on drugs...

It’s more exciting” –

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here’s a moment in the Melvins track ‘A History of Bad Men’ when the white-hot riff-crunching collapses in a smoky haze of churning doom rock, like stones turning to molten lava. It’s at two minutes and fifty four seconds, to be precise, and it’s a fitting moment of conception for the elegant but ferocious music of sisters Colette and Hannah Thurlow. Though that origins story has been repeated many times since the day in 2010 when ‘Creeping’ popped up online and became an instant blog hit, it remains an auspicious genesis for the duo who call themselves 2:54.

Finding themselves with a whole lot of hype to capitalise on, they’ve spent every day since then honing their songs and shows, and on 28th May their self-titled debut will finally be delivered to the world through Fiction.

Younger sister Hannah is the quieter half of the duo, with hair like a gothic Elvis and usually found moulded over her guitar, wringing out plaintive melodies shimmering with reverb. Colette, older by two years and the more dominant conversationalist, is the de facto band leader given to scarlet lipstick. Their synergy isn’t obvious as first – they don’t look especially similar, even up close, and they don’t trade private jokes or bicker as siblings are prone to do. Instead, there seems to be a certain silent bond between the two – not that they have nothing to say to each other, but there is simply no need to say it.This quiet assurance is at the core of every 2:54 song, where poise and balance underpin the windswept emotional turbulence and lovelorn drama of tracks like ‘You’re Early’ and ‘Scarlet’. No surprise that they often draw comparisons with the brooding darkness of The xx and Warpaint.

But in contrast to the music, in person the girls are nothing but polite and warm, drifting into each other’s sentences and nervously tapping lighters and fidgeting in their seats. We meet in a flat on one of East London’s more salubrious streets, in which the dark furnishings and black piano provide a suitably moody backdrop for our photo shoot. They make for quiet sitters, amenable to the photographer’s directions but bristling at the possibility of a vintage stove creeping into the frame, keen to avoid situating themselves in a typically feminine domestic milieu.

With their monochrome grungy clothes and spooky videos to match the atmosphere of the music, it might seem they control their image pretty carefully. “Not at all!” they counter, speaking together. “My main thing is, it’s the last thing I want to think about, ever, but particularly with performing I just want to be able to move with my guitar – that’s my only thought after sitting in a van all day,” says Colette. But you know, two

sisters, two leather jackets, people are going to describe them as moody gothic types whether they like it or not – yet nothing could be further from the truth, surely?

They both laugh. Maybe the music is a conduit for a darker side of their personalities? “I think it’s totally part of us.”

“It’s completely us.”

Their reluctance to self-analyse chimes with their songs – their simplicity and clarity cuts through the stormy clouds of guitar and drums, again mirroring the clean-cut sheen of The xx, but moving the scene from urban streets to rustic badlands.“So much goes unspoken.

We don’t intellectualise what we do,” says Colette. But someone has to, so they’ll have to accept whatever words we throw at them. Another laugh. “Yeah, yeah. Sorry!”

The moody poise of 2:54 is a distinct development from the sisters’ previous musical project, a back-tobasics punk band by the name of Vulgarians.“I think the band we were in previously was sort of like a ‘my first band’ experience,” says Colette. “We played only 10 shows I think, and we didn’t really know what we were doing, which I guess had a kind of sweet innocence about it.The whole thing is sort of different to now, but the process has been very natural. I think it was pretty formative actually, having those first sort of tentative steps with a loud punk band,” she laughs.

“It was a very natural progression.We started writing different songs together and it just felt natural and kind of evolved, and kept evolving, into this,” adds Hannah.

The next step was to recruit the necessary engine room. “From when we made the first demos, we always wanted the band to have a proper rhythm section live.

We didn’t want to be a duo live at all,” Colette explains.

They struck lucky when they came across bassist Joel Porter and drummer Alex Robins, previously of Jack Peñate’s band. “We met them through a mutual friend.”

“Yeah, we still pinch ourselves that we managed to meet the boys - we clicked straight away,” they say.

With the familial ties at the core of the band, it could’ve been tricky to welcome two outsiders, but instead the Thurlows acquired a pair of brothers. “The boys have very sibling qualities, which makes it work really well, there’s definitely a family sort of feeling. But it’s just been really natural!”

Riding the wave of interest after ‘Creeping’, the sisters packed up their guitars and hit the road – and then kept hitting it for over a year. Now a hardened touring band, they’ve played gigs with stylistic cousins Warpaint and Melissa Auf Der Maur, indie big-timers The Maccabees and Wild Beasts, and most recently Cali-gloomstress Chelsea Wolfe and Welsh-gloomsters Deaf Club, who provided support on 2:54’s recent UK tour.“We’ve been fortunate enough for it to be a positive experience. It’s been educational really,” says Colette.

“We’ve always just felt privileged to be on these tours.

All those opportunities to play in front of people that might not like us, you know, it might be a static crowd – I think it’s just great experience. And most of it was really heartening, people were receptive...”

“Welcoming crowds,” adds Hannah.

In March they even braved the industry hype crucible of Austin’s SXSW festival, and lived to tell the tale.“I was expecting it to be a lot more intense and scary, but I think maybe the humidity mellowed everything out,”

notes Colette. “It was an amazing experience, we played four or five shows, stuck at the Thrasher stage a lot and listened to lots of metal bands. It was definitely worth it, they were great shows and a great response, but you hear horror stories of bands doing 18 shows a day or something - that sounds pretty brutal.” They’ve found their rhythm on the road, but has it had an impact on the music? “I certainly think the live show should be more visceral and ferocious,” says Colette,“’cos then the songs take on a life of their own, a different life.”

Picking up where they left off with last year’s ‘Scarlet’ EP, the band returned to the studio with Rob Ellis, the quintessential safe pair of hands when it comes to committing dramatic lady-lungs to tape, having worked with PJ Harvey, Anna Calvi and Marianne Faithfull.

Despite Ellis’ hall-of-fame credentials, the sisters were determined to do things their way. “We were really hands-on from the very beginning because we have really clear ideas of what we want,” says Colette. “When we demo stuff at home the songs are complete, so really all we’re doing is bringing them in to professionally record them. But it’s amazing, Rob’s heritage musically is incredible and he’s really inspiring to be around. He’s also the most incredible drummer, so we were learning loads of tricks about drum sounds, stuff we don’t know anything about – we were walking round with a snare...”

“Just capturing sounds in the room somehow.”

“And it was just really educational and interesting,” they say, chipping into each other’s sentences.

The album cover is a beautiful thing: a photograph that immediately captures the sense of wild danger lurking underneath the record. “It’s where we spent our childhood summers, in County Claire in the west of Ireland, and it was a really special place,” begins Hannah.

“We grew up and spent all of our childhood summers exploring the rocks, it’s wild...”

“It’s just this really turbulent landscape that feels embedded in our heads, the feelings of that place,” add Colette. “It was amazing to go back and see it. It’s just kind of craters and boulders and wild sea.”

Their sisterly status and shared love of music came together when Hannah picked up a guitar in her teens and they started playing together for fun, and since then they’ve never made music separately. They claim not to have been rock and roll teens, though. “Oh no, and I’m still a massive geek, I don’t think I’ve changed one bit,” laughs Colette. Geeky about what in particular? “Just... bookish,” she chuckles, while Hannah adds, “I’m definitely a gadgets and guitars and pedals kind of girl.”

The sound of 2:54 is what comes naturally to two people who’ve passed days, weeks and years together, who know each other inside out and barely need to verbalise their shared intentions. What sounds like a spontaneous, accidental writing process is not the kind of happy accident that could be recreated by a couple of musicians who lacked that silent undercurrent pulling them together. “I think, musically, there’s never any set plan of how a song is going to sound or how they’re all going to sound together – each song is just something that needs to come out,” explains Hannah, before adding in unintended accord: “With the album it felt like there were 10 songs that worked together as a family, with a thread running through them all, but each in their own little world.”

A FAMILY AFFAIR PHOTOGRAPHER -

GABRIEL GREEN

WRITER -

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Virals HOME SWEET HOME

PHOTOGRAPHER -

“It’s quite funny doing your own thing; you can’t really just stop, can you? With a band you can split up, fall out or come to the end of what you’re doing but when it’s just you, well, it’s just you.” Shaun Hencher is in a reflective mood; jocular but reflective as he’s enjoying life on his own. Like us, he looks back fondly on five years of nerve-shredding, ear-splintering punk in Lovvers, a group he fronted and one that lead and defined the DIY resurgence of recent years. “I seem to always be in bands that when they’re finished everyone looks back with rose-tinted glasses,” he ponders. “We probably would have stopped Lovvers a bit earlier but we kept being asked to do cool stuff. Five years is a long time living that lifestyle, though, not knowing where you’re going to sleep. If we continued we would have compromised our friendships and no good music would have come of it.”

Ozzy, America and a couple of shit jobs later and Shaun’s sat in front of us as Virals. It turns out he’s a multi-instrumentalist with an ear for an infectious melody and a love of woozy doo-wop guitar pop. “I went back to Worcester, working where I was from, listening to the same music that I was listening to when I was 16, like Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. I felt like I’d come full circle.Then I did a bit of travelling around America which was incredible.” And the shit jobs? “I made a new year’s resolution not to have any more of those, no more pot washing!”

Doing the dishes or not, Worcester re-energised Shaun’s love of music. An inspirational source of song writing in Lovvers, his craft never strayed too far away.

“At home I could just play what I liked, be as silly as I wanted to be,” he explains. “Then, through time, I got more confidence and thought maybe people will want to hear the tracks. At first I thought people were just

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GEMMA HARRIS

WRITER -

IAN ROEBUCK

being nice, you know, they didn’t want to say, ‘Shaun, this isn’t my cup of tea.’”

His aligning-planets-moment came over a pint in his local pub, a place where Shaun used to promote shows and now records.“Yeah, it’s funny,” he says,“the landlord was my only real link to Worcester and he told me he had a studio after hearing my tracks. He said he’d do a better job so we went upstairs and just did it. From having a beer he’s offered me a studio and now a job so I basically spend all my time at the pub recording music or hanging out with people.”

The freedom Shaun has in his new habitat radiates through the peppy material of Virals, bouncy surf guitars and loose melodies all over debut AA single ‘Magic Happens’/’Comes The Night’ and his forthcoming EP. It’s a cliché, but he sounds like he’s having a ball.

“It is just fun really – just something for me to do in the week.‘Oh, tonight’s record music night and listen to records’, you know? It’s been going on since last year, so it’s only now stuff is happening.”

It’s Shaun Hencher as you’ve never heard before in more ways than one. In Lovvers Shaun’s vocals hung heavy in a dirty, dusky mix of fuzztone guitars; with Virals you can make him out every word. “I thought fuck it,” he says. “I’m just going to try and sing it, and so I did, but then deleted it straight away.Then I did it again and again and eventually I got over it and thought, you know, this isn’t too bad.” Once more it was the nostalgic move back to Worcester that cured his initial hesitance.

“When you’re 14, you listen to what’s in front of you, right,” he explains. “Popular culture is presented nicely so you could hear Robert Plant, Ozzy, Sting or whatever.

I just thought maybe that, what I’d listened to growing up and had started listening to again, would go well with the music.”

So just as Lovvers rode the vanguard, will Virals do the same - usher in a slew of pop-punk replicant’s behind as Shaun surfs the zeitgeist? He raises a wry smile. “I don’t really think other bands came in our wake with Lovvers, I just think we were doing something that got quite popular. A lot of American bands were doing the same thing and we had similar influences, we’d even get to play with those bands. I honestly don’t know much about what’s current and I’m really bad at listening to new music but I know what I like.”

Shaun’s easy going nature is rather at odds with his vision. He may be pretty reticent to display drive but Virals definitely contains ambition. His first release contained two glorious doo-wop tracks, laid to tape with Shaun playing all the instruments bar the drums.

He even created the artwork himself.

“I’ve always done most of the artwork when it comes to my music,” he says. “When I was doing my next release [a 12” EP via London label Tough Love, coming May 7th] I handed over four songs and the cover art they said don’t you need a few weeks or anything… I think they were shocked. I’m just a bit sad,” confesses Shaun.

“At home I’ve got 20 logos and 20 album covers.”

The EP is called ‘Coming Up With The Sun’, and promises to pick up where ‘Magic Happens’ left off.

“Yeah, I’ve got a good idea of what I want this to be. I’ve grown up in the last year or so, the type of music I listen to and like is never going to change so I’m trying to take that on board in my own way and hopefully people will be into it.” Shaun’s yet to play a show as Virals, but he’s rallied together a band that are ready to. “I’m very much one of those people who say, ‘right, we are going on tour! But where are we going to sleep and eat?” he asks himself, perhaps taking this one man band thing a bit far. “’I don’t know!’”

Disappears DRONE ROCK’S MOST PROLIFIC BAND PHOTOGRAPHER -

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DAN KENDALL

WRITER -

TOM PINNOCK

would rather have a band put something new out every couple of months than see them play like three times a year. I mean, that’s ultimately the deal, right?

People want to hear the music!”

Brian Case, frontman of Chicago drone-rockers Disappears, is sitting outside a South American bar on a dirty backstreet in south London’s Elephant And Castle, explaining the reasons behind his band’s phenomenal work rate.

“It was really important for us to keep our momentum going, so we wanted to keep making albums and keep doing shows, and just keep moving – because it just seems like if you stop doing this, there’s just too many bands, there’s too much stuff, so it’s easy to forget.

“So we figured the best way for us to stay present, relevant, is just to keep making music and keep doing shows, so we’ve been lucky that things have continued to improve.”

The four-piece certainly have stayed busy. After a series of self-released seven-inches in 2008, their debut album, ‘Lux’, came out on Kranky in 2010, followed by last year’s ‘Guider’. Their third album, ‘Pre Language’, came out earlier this year, and marked a distinct new phase for the band – not only is it their first recording with a new drummer (more on him later, in case you don’t already know), it is a distinct development from the steady evolution of their first two records, incorporating less krautrock and more raging riffs.

Tracks such as the opening ‘Replicate’ and ‘Fear Of Darkness’ are also their punchiest, catchiest songs so far.

There’s still plenty of echo here, on both guitars and vocals, but where the band once sounded like a host of other drone rockers – Suicide, Spacemen 3, Neu!, take your pick – they’re now beginning to sound more like themselves than their influences.

As well as keeping a steady stream of records flowing, the group have been touring regularly, and tonight are playing at south London’s Corsica Studios, their only UK date so far this year.

“The tour’s been great,” explains Brian. “It’s been about twelve days now, it’s been really good and, yeah, we’re coming back in the summer. We’re doing some festivals and some club dates too.”

While on the road, the group’s listening material has been more eclectic than you might imagine, stretching from African pop to British post-punk.

“We’ve been listening to the Lijadu Sisters,” says Brian. “They’re these two girls from Africa that made these records when they were teenagers, and they just got reissued – it’s really good, really crazy. We listen to a lot of those Nigerian reissues, some of the Afrobeat stuff and some of the weird jazz – that stuff is always good.

“They’re trying to play James Brown music and James Brown is trying to get to the heart of Africa, so it’s like, ‘What’s happening?!’ And I don’t know, the same stuff we always listen to, like Bauhaus and Wire, all the stuff that will be on the other pages of the magazine!”

Disappears’ eclectic taste could be down to the fact that they’re not exactly spring chickens.With Case (past 30) the youngest, the group have all been around in other US groups since the 1990s – their frontman notably in math-rockers 90 Day Men and The Ponys.

Despite not releasing a full album since 2007’s excellent ‘Turn The Lights Out’, and only an EP (2010’s ‘Deathbed +4’) since then, Case confirms he’s still a part of the band, and that they’re a going concern.

“Yes, if The Ponys do anything I will be in it,” he confirms. “The very first Disappears recordings, I thought they might just be demos for Ponys stuff actually,

they kind of grew separately from that so I kind of just explored that, and they coincided with this period when Ponys kept getting pushed back to work on stuff, and there were sort of personal things going on with some of the people, so I thought, ‘Oh, I guess I’m just gonna start this other band!’”

Sounds pretty easy.

“It kind of was, ha – I mean, it’s easy to start a band, but to keep it going…”

Guitarist Jonathan Van Herik and Damon Carruesco have also played in a host of other bands, but “nothing that’s gotten too far out of the city”, according to Case.

As for the group’s new permanent drummer, who replaced founder member Graeme Gibson, he’s been pretty active over the last three decades – Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley has been manning the sticks since the beginning of 2011.

“He’s been in a band or two!” laughs Brian.“Graeme was doing all the production, and he’s an awesome drummer, so yeah, [when he left] we were kind of unsure about what was going to happen. We’d gotten to know Steve so we were joking, like, ‘OK, let’s just ask Steve’, and then he said he wanted to do it, which was pretty surprising. It’s like, ‘Ah, this is really weird’…”

– “Our friend works for Sonic Youth. He brought Steve to see us play, and Steve liked it” – Far from just pulling off every Sonic Youth fanboy’s dream out of the blue, the two parties had history.

They even collaborated a couple of years before the drummer joined Disappears, on an experimental record that is set to see the light of day sometime in 2012 – a collaboration with Shelley and White Light.

“It’s probably going to be called Disappears In White Light,” reveals Brian. “It’s a noise record but it’s cool.

There’s some crazy stuff on it. It’s like an Eddie Hazel, Prince noise band!

“Our friend Jeremy works for Sonic Youth, he’s their monitor guy – so he brought Steve to see us play, and Steve liked it, and he was trying to get us on some shows with Sonic Youth, which didn’t end up happening, so kind of as a consolation prize Jeremy set up this session that was all of Disappears, his band White Light (which is a two-piece noise band) and Steve, so we got all set up in this room and just recorded music for two days, not really knowing what was gonna happen with it.This was in 2009.

“So that record actually just got finished! It’s gonna come out in the Fall. It’s superweird, I really like it, it’s very cool. It’s a great way to complete the circle, how we met, what brought us together in the first place. There was nothing pre-written. It was like seven people – lots of opinions, lots of ideas and lots of people to satisfy, but I couldn’t be happier with the way it turned out.”

Something we’re keen to ask Brian about is whether the band has a manifesto or a set of rules to go with their strict Protestant work ethic.From their sparse production, copious helpings of delay and even the aesthetic limitations of their first two records’ text-only artwork, there seems to be a set of self-invoked limitations Disappears are playing by.

“Not as much rules as just always being conscious of just keeping things at the essence, keeping it really simple, keeping it straightforward, going a lot of times with first instincts, and not getting bogged down,” reckons Brian.

“We always wanted to approach it in like a minimal way, so I think on the first two records it stuck out because they were very stark, production-wise, too.This new record was the first time we’ve worked with outside hands, so we had more time and somebody engineered it, and then we took a couple of weeks, we went to Texas and mixed it, so some other people got involved as well, which was I think necessary at this point.

“I mean, I love the first two records, but we wanted to keep going, you know, keep everything different. We definitely don’t need to make the first record again, or the second one. ‘Pre Language’ sounds different, but I feel like we’re still working with the same ideas that are important to us.”

While it’s impossible to know whether Disappears would have scaled the heights they’ve attained on ‘Pre Language’ if Shelley hadn’t joined the band, it’s pretty clear that his exemplary drumming, all whip-cracking snare and tom-tom thwack, has given the band a new muscle and power behind their sound.

From the way Case tells it, any change was more evolution than revolution, but spurred on by the members’ hometowns.

“At first we didn’t even talk about it, we just started rehearsing some older songs,” he says,“and then the first practice we had we started writing new songs too, so Steve could put his stamp on the old stuff, but also so he could feel like he was contributing something that was only his. I think it was kind of a good way to do it, so he was learning the old stuff, literally figuring out how to play it, and we were writing, so the same ideas were all in the air. Him and Graeme have really similar tastes in music, and we’re all coming from the basic same place, so there weren’t any weird moments.

“We spent a lot more time refining the music and talking about it. More time kind of developing the moods rather than letting the mood be whatever it was, so I think we just talked about it more. With before, Graeme lived in Chicago and we were playing two or three times a week, so things were just coming as they were, but Steve lives in New Jersey, so we have to kind of talk about it more, because we can’t just sit there and play it all the time. It was cool, you know, another way to look at music, another part of your brain to use to communicate some other idea or whatever. I think it helped a lot.”

Before Brian goes off to prepare for the band’s show next door, I put it to him that it must nearly be time for them to be thinking about writing another album, if they’re to keep up their work rate.

“Yeah – we’re playing one new song tonight and then we have a bunch of other stuff we’re working on. It sounds different but I don’t know how,” he explains.“It’s kind of quieter, but it’s weird, I don’t know. It’s going to be another record that sounds different, I think, initially, but may reveal itself as being something else. Hopefully by the end of this year it’ll be recorded.”

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Simian Mobile Disco PROUD TO KNOW W HAT THE HELL THEY ARE DOING PHOTOGRAPHER -

ELINOR JONES

There’s the sharp tang of cloudy, super-strength cider as the tantalising scent of grilled meat wafts through the air and happy families enjoy the surprising, balmy, summer delights of early August. On blankets and picnic hampers, exhausted by the day’s sunny excerptions, kids are slumped and sleeping, but the ones still fighting bedtime, they stare wide-eyed and open mouthed into the smoke and shadows as two hunched figures manically grapple with a machine that has a thousand red, angry eyes.

Back in 2008, Simian Mobile Disco played the everpleasant Summer Sundae festival armed with the dark, danceable live show that’s been their hallmark for the last four years. At that point James Ford and Jas Shaw were busy inducing robotic nightmares within the innocent festival youth and doing a noisy electronic line convincing indie kids that dance didn’t have to mean Creamfields or Ministry of Sound. But where the allconsuming ‘We Are You Friends’ grabbed mainstream imagination, it was the success of debut album ‘Attack Decay Sustain Release’ that marked the crystallisation of Simian Mobile Disco’s crossover acceptance.

“We were playing electronic stuff in indie clubs simply because we couldn’t get a gig in techno clubs,” explains Jas. “We were just being belligerent and then it all kicked off and it happened to fit with what we liked and were playing. It wasn’t us being smart, it was total luck.”

Music history is littered with the “right time, right place” anecdote, but where so many are happy to accept and exploit that as their only qualifying contribution, Simian Mobile Disco have never been prepared to stand still and wait for the circus to come their way. After splintering from their former band, Simian, Jas and James quickly built a formidable reputation as producers with SMD, another spoke in a seemingly endless cycle of touring, writing, recording, DJing and producing.

Thrown in with the electro class of 2007, they quickly hit the forefront of the crossover wave that the likes of Erol Alkan and 2ManyDJs et al. had been fostering since early 2000. Buoyed by the collective momentum of LCD Soundsystem, Hot Chip, Digitalism, Justice and MSTRKRFT, it was a period that changed the wider music landscape and one James looks back on with mixed emotions.

“I enjoyed that period of time but I don’t have any nostalgia for it at all. We did get lumped in with a lot of bands and some of it went on to be ok, but some, especially when it crossed over to America and they took those rock aspects and ran with it, the end result of

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WRITER -

REEF YOUNIS

that is Skrillex. In a way, we’ve spent these last few years trying to get as far away from that as possible. We don’t really play electro and haven’t done for years and it’s been a struggle for us to try and redefine ourselves against that. It was our kick-start but it’s not something we ever want to rehash.”

Determined not to take a backwards step, follow up album ‘Temporary Pleasures’ seemed to do just that with its vocal-heavy tracklisting neither appeasing the old fans or appealing to the new breed. Jas and James reaction was ‘Delicacies’ – their label and club night project providing a firm commitment to a year of no vocals and heavy, minimal techno. After the tribulations of the second album, ‘Delicacies’ took SMD back to the context of the club and allowed them to re-focus for new album ‘Unpatterns’ with a brutal honesty.

“We’ve changed pretty steadily and been led by what’s interested us,” says Jas. “It’s probably been bad for our popularity and steadily pissed off everybody who liked us at the start, but then all the people who didn’t like us at the start had written us off anyway. We made ‘Hustler’ and then we’d made all this mean, minimal techno music and people would still be like, ‘Na, they make pop music’.”

“I think we’ve dug our own hole in that respect,” says James. “We’re quite keen to not repeat ourselves, but on the flipside of that is that people often don’t know what they’re going to get. ‘Delicacies’ was a label for us to put out more techno stuff, but I suppose it was a reaction, in our heads, against the amount of vocals we used on ‘Temporary Pleasure’.”

“Before ‘Temporary Pleasure’ we met loads of people on the road and got loads of emails from people in bands we really liked,” Jas continues, “then we sent them instrumentals thinking no-one would get back to us but they all did. So we had all these good vocals in these song structures, because they were in bands, so we thought we’d put the vocals in the centre and rearrange the music we created around it, which was quite naive.

It would have been smarter, and probably the decision we would have made if we’d sat back on it for a few months, to mix up the instrumental balance on the album a bit more and put some vocal tracks on an EP.” It’s a lesson learned and one that fundamentally changed the way they approached the writing and recording process for ‘Unpatterns’. Cutting down on production commitments and scaling down the frequency of their DJ sets enabled them to make the time to record instead of trying to find it in a hectic

schedule.According to James, the decision was ultimately one of the best they’ve made.

“I feel the most confident and happy with it of all the albums we’ve done,” he enthuses. “I definitely feel it’s the most representative of what we are. We decided to just block out a good few months here and there, in chunks, so that we could properly concentrate on it.The way we work is to create a lot then pick the best bits.

Often that’s coloured by the excitement of just making something, but if you leave it and come back and still like it, then hopefully it’s a sign it’s probably alright,” he laughs.

“We probably could have made an entirely different record from the tracks we didn’t choose, but we try to choose tracks that work as a whole. I think we felt that on ‘Temporary Pleasure’ we made some mistakes in the tracks we chose for that. We were very careful this time to try and get that balance right.”

“We’re never really looking for perfection,” Jas picks up, “but for this record we spent longer on it largely because we felt we could have chosen different tracks on ‘Temporary Pleasure’ and we rushed it. We were doing production for loads of other bands and we’d spread ourselves quite thin and we had this idea we could fit SMD sessions in between everything else and we’d be fine. I think we both felt the record suffered for it.There’s definitely a danger you can spend too long on something and over-think it, but having a period to choose the

tracks, to finish everything off, it does give you a measure of objectivity. We make music very quickly and having that time to hold back is important.

I’m the most happy with this record than I’ve been with any but I’m already looking at it and eager to go forwards. Certainly we’ve learnt stuff on every album and if you can’t admit you were wrong, you’ve probably already done your best record.”

Their excitement around the new album is palpable.

Energised by the timescale and hardened by previous mistakes, there’s a confidence and conviction around ‘Unpatterns’. It leads us onto whether the modified approach to creating the album extended beyond

– “The word nerd or geek contains the idea that knowing about s�ething is bad... It’s shit” –

tweaking a few schedules.

“Weirdly, the instruments we’ve been using have been pretty much the same throughout,” James explains.

“On the first album we ended up getting a live show together and that ended up forming the basis of the way we write. Generally, it’s pretty much all old machinery ticking along at the same time, but we’ll record onto a computer or onto a tape. We’re not analogue snobs; it’s just the way we’ve got used to doing it. Loads of brilliant records are made on laptops, but it’s the process and something about being limited by a particular machine and only being able to do certain things and program certain ways. That physicality and that limitation are helpful because I think you can get lost in a blizzard of choice.”

The clean, brutal hallmark of SMD’s tech-heavy output often belies the trial and error approach in the studio.Advocates of both analogue and digital recording, James and Jas aren’t afraid to invest and investigate to get what they need.

“The process for us is we plug in machines and make them talk to each other and fuck around with them for a while until something interesting happens,” James laughs, “so yeah, there’s plenty of soldering irons and half-built bits floating around…lots of old effects pedals and eBay nonsense.We’re actually trying to scale it down a little bit really, because there’s only so much stuff you really need. Some people can get so obsessed with the

gear that they actually stop making music.”

“People have referred to us as nerds and for a while I was really touchy about it,” Jas adds. “The word nerd or geek contains in it the idea that knowing about something is bad. If you actually know what you’re doing, it’s a bad thing. I think it’s a really dangerous idea in culture, a really stupid idea in culture that the sense of caring about something enough to learn more about it can be negative. A lot of the synth stuff we do, you need to learn about it.That idea that you vilify someone who dares to learn something more than other people just seems intrinsically shit. Broadly speaking, we aren’t cool guys and don’t mug up for the camera, so in that sense, it’s absolutely true.”

Finding the balance between analogue and digital is a battle for any DJ to shed the perception that they’re only as good as their laptop or elaborate Guetta-esque mouse click. Committed to keeping a live connection between studio and set, Jas and James aren’t afraid to keep challenging themselves.

“We wanted a live show that represented how we made the music, so it didn’t make sense to go out with a choir and a live drummer,” James explains. “We wanted it to be a live, live show that could evolve and change and things could go wrong.That’s what makes it human.

I don’t like the ‘press spacebar, hands in the air’ shows and this is what one of the challenges with ‘Unpatterns’ is going to be. It’s going to be a lot harder for us to make it translate as a live show.”

“It totally wins my respect,” Jas affirms.“All you want from a live show is for it to be a unique thing that you’ve participated in. There’s something a bit wrong about pre-programming that and I think you can get bored of it quite quickly because those are the moments you strive for and the ones you work towards making happen.

“We’re asked quite a lot whether we miss playing in Simian. It’s weird because it sounds like nonsense but our current live set up is more live than the band set up was. Watching a great live performance is a wonderful thing but there’s a rigidity to it.The variation you get in a DJ set to have to adapt to your surroundings is really appealing and the sense that some nights you’re going to have no idea what songs you’re going to play.”

Whether they’re DJs with a producer’s nous, a band with a DJ’s free spirit or producers with the conviction to command their vision through, however you spin Simian Mobile Disco’s sensibility, they’re a victory for trial and error. The honesty and modesty is a welcome bonus.

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NOT SO ROTTEN As PiL release their first original material in 20 years, Daniel Dylan Wray finds John Lydon to be not quite what he expected, as they discuss Ghandi, racism, X Factor, life and those butter adverts 28

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PHOTOGRAPHY BY

PHIL SHARP

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my years as a music writer I have interviewed and encountered all kinds of bands and artists, from freshfaced teenagers catapulted to fame and worldwide touring by the instantaneous times we live in, to lifelong musical heroes who have had forty-plus-year careers and have been responsible for changing the history of modern music. However, for all the varying sense of excitement, trepidation and inquisitiveness I have felt prior to these meetings, I have never gone into an interview with such a feeling of the unknown as I have today. Will I encounter the insightful, witty and sincere John Lydon as seen during his most open and frank interview on the ‘PiL Special’ Culture Show when interviewed by Andrew Graham-Dixon? Or will I encounter the snotty, petulant and sneering John Lydon that displays nothing but boredom and disdain towards his interviewers, like he did towards Bill Grundy or Tom Snyder many years ago? The odds don’t look good.

‘Metal Box’ – Public Image Ltd’s second album; their 1979 masterpiece – somehow sounds ahead of its time even today. Screeching, twisting guitars howl; thick, heavy and pulverising bass lines grumble and roll with machine-like fluidity; unpredictable, manic drums and cadences spark with intense fury. And then there’s the vocals – a warped, raging embodiment of the avant-garde.

The beauty and indeed the oddity of John Lydon’s voice lie in his ability to simultaneously exist at conflicting ends of human emotion. On one hand he sounds deranged and manic, a human being on the edge, almost brittle, something so close to snapping, exploding or melting that the pressure and friction is tangible throughout his wired screams and yowls – so much so that they don’t so much affect as haunt you. On the other, he transcends all of this, at times, by simply sounding not human at all. He’s otherworldly and animalistic, like an undiscovered, unfathomable creature found in the basement of an abandoned laboratory, next to a puddle of sickly green ooze.

Listening to ‘Metal Box’, it dawns on me that in order to try and prepare a coherent and linear approach to this man, listening to one of the most unexplainable and inventive records he (or anybody else) has ever made is perhaps not the way to go about it – the feeling of the unexpected only tends to intensify with ‘Metal Box’.

Oh well, sink or swim, I guess…

I

n glorious Kensington, West London, I’m escorted into the flat of John’s manager, Rambo. He has a deepset London accent and is sporting a PiL t-shirt and a pink stripe in his hair. John hovers in the background watching television. As our photographer Phil gets set up, he politely enquires about going outside for some photos, which is met with a rather direct “No”. For a moment, I have a terrible feeling that this is going to go

sour. As it transpires, I couldn’t be more wrong. I sit down with John, who is so polite he would rather let his lunch get cold than accept my offer to come back in half an hour, once he’s eaten.

He sits down, legs spread far apart, hunched over and leaning in toward me, a cigarette burning in his finger tips. The pale, scrawny Johnny Rotten of years ago is a far removed sight from this guy. John, now 56, is a staunch, bulky gentleman, his rather huge, protruding shoulders some kind of symbolic mutation and result of the sheer weight, pressure and expectation he has carried upon them over the years.The wild eyes still remain and that devilish laugh is ever-present throughout our time together.And the reason we’re here, mainly, is because of PiL’s new material, their first in two decades.

April 21st sees a vinyl-only Record Store Day release of a new EP called ‘One Drop’. It’ll be followed by ‘This Is PiL’, the band’s ninth album, on May 28th. Both will be released by the band’s own label (PiL Official Ltd) for the first time, creating a complete circular realisation of the original idea and concept of PiL being a company.

The newly found independence for John has been a liberating experience.

“It’s a world of difference. It’s been fantastically rewarding,” he beams enthusiastically. “You cannot imagine how punishingly gruelling it is to have a record company come down and be like,‘yeah, well it all sounds very different but have you got any hit records on it?’

I’ve always kind of been in advance of what a record company considers a hit record, because I’ve made hit records constantly but [I’ve done it] by not being involved in that ridiculously mundane process.”

John’s frustration with his old labels is well known, and he continues to tell me “it was very, very upsetting to me when Virgin and EMI would make things really hard for what we were trying to achieve. But then they’d sign bands up within a year or two that wanted to be like PiL and then they’d put a lot of time and money into that and leave us roasting,” he says. “That’s happened over and over again, and it was just time to say,‘no thank you, bye bye’.”

Twenty years since the last new material from PiL, John has been more than aware of the potential dangers of creating a new album with the band.

“I’ve very much enjoyed the risk factor that this could all go horribly wrong,” he admits. “There was such a gap between the last PiL record and this, we didn’t know if we’d be able to stay true to ourselves or end up parodying ourselves, which is always a possibility everybody faces. But that didn’t happen – good things happened.” John later tells me of his ability to reflect rather objectively on his work, which may have led to these good things. “I don’t know whether or not it’s to do with the horrible childhood illnesses and comas I had [John spent a year in hospital at the age of seven after contracting spinal meningitis, he has since said that he had to learn everything from scratch again, even down to remembering and accepting who his parents were],

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but I often have a feeling of semi-detachment, being able to look at myself and the work I do from an outside perspective.”

Touring and performing live since their reformation in 2009, this time spent closely with the band (consisting of Lu Edmonds, Bruce Smith and Scott Firth) has built a bond, camaraderie and family unit that John describes as “heaven”, although he admits that “unfortunately, it’s taken me thirty plus years to get to this situation.” But the live shows have been a resounding success. “To my mind, we’re the best live band there is,” he reckons, devilishly adding, “I know there are other bands that would disagree with that, but they’re wrong and I’m right.”

You’d think that PiL would have surely attracted a second generation of fans from these tours, and while they most probably have, it’s not quite as simple as replacing their old audience with new, young punks.

“There’s always been variation in audiences with PiL, and the Sex Pistols, actually, I think because of the intrigue element. There’s never been a mass block of uniformity and I like to see the different cultural aspects of an audience – I thrive on that, it shows that we’re doing something really relevant.Walking out and seeing the first thirty rows of people identical to you is no achievement at all.”

A self-started company and record label doesn’t fund and release records itself, though. It’s been John’s infamous butter adverts that have funded the whole PiL reformation and subsequent album. “Every single penny,” he nods proudly. “No personal gain.

“PiL has always been a labour of love and it always will be,” he continues.“I mean, it’s not a huge amount of money [from the Country Life adverts] but it’s enough to have got us kick started.”

Interestingly, it capsizes the conventional and largely accepted notion of musicians in advertising; one often presuming a state of desperation is in play, or perhaps an addiction needs fulfilling – an insatiable hunger for fame or indeed a much more real obsession (see John Cooper Clarke hawking Sugar Puffs in the ’80s to feed his heroin habit), but John is perhaps the sole example of someone using it to directly fund their art. It arguably reshapes the supposed fundamentals of the ‘sell-out’ debate, if indeed you care at all. John Lydon, the poster boy of punk, selling butter – many of us were appalled. Initially, it was a situation he felt forced into. “[The record labels] kept me bankrupt for years and years and years and made it impossible for me to function as an artist,” he explains, “which drove me into TV land, more or less.

“When I first started, the TV cameras would make me absolutely terrified and very self-conscious and push me into a role I didn’t want to play,” he tells me. “But as

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the years moved on, I felt more confident in myself, knowing that I had a body of work behind me that could back up anything I had to say or do. So I didn’t feel the need to prove, or over-prove myself. Now, with the camera on or off, it’s the same amount of tension.

Oddly enough, things like I’m A Celebrity… helped because there is really no time to be vain.Vanity will lead to a very uncomfortable existence in that kind of world.

That’s why I liked it. And oddly enough, people seemed to like me because I was just myself.”

I

n the two decades that PiL have been absent for our stereos and stages, the music industry has perhaps seen more developments than any other. For John Lydon, most have been unwelcome. In reaction to X Factor and the like, for example, he frustratingly states,“those talent shows, really what they are presenting is mimics! Singing other people’s songs, using other people’s ideas, it’s karaoke. Then they throw it back at you and…” John claps his hands like a sea lion. “…arf, arf!

“That’s not the future,” he insists.“In fact, it’s a review show; it’s the past without the original entertainers. It takes a lot to write a song, it’s a very serious, deeply emotional journey – even a lousy song requires a lot of effort. It’s not nice to see someone come along and hop on top of that and murder it in that show-bizzy way. I think it’s cold and indifferent, almost vindictive and resentful to creativity. Simon Cowell has a lot to answer for; he’s a very bad person.”

Perhaps we need ‘This Is PiL’ more than ever.

Thankfully, it’s an album that very much feels like a natural evolution for the group. Unsurprisingly, it continues to take in a collection of sounds, textures and influences spanning an array of other cultures and races, much like PiL’s entire back catalogue. “That’s because I see all music as coming from the same place – the heart,” says John, earnestly.

Growing up in the hugely multi-racial Finsbury Park area, even in the early Sex Pistols days dub and reggae music had a big impact on John and punk culture as a whole, most commonly accredited to Don Letts’ involvement as a DJ at The Roxy club. So when some groups of misguided punks went down the more narrow-minded, racist route that some sadly did, it proved difficult for John.

“It was disgusting and amazingly frustrating for me,” he says with a sigh.“They were immediately ghettoising and limiting themselves. Ghandi is a great political hero of mine, he managed to get the British Empire out of India, but look what that quickly turned into: civil war.

And that was similar to the way the punk movement went. I don’t want to sound too conceited here, because I’m not putting myself forward as Ghandi – I wouldn’t dream of such a thing, he is beyond belief to me, one of the ultimate human beings that this planet has ever created – but I can see the link.You start out with all the right motivations and you want the seed to germinate, and instead the germs get in and poison the roots. It’s a shame, but you have to go forth, I can’t be held responsible for everyone’s bad moves, or even the good ones.”

Was it something of a personal let down?

“No, you know what, God bless them all, because I don’t come into this world having the audacity of expectation from others. This is what I do, you can like it or you can lump it, but it would be nice if you understood it.”

It leads me to tentatively question: the allegations made by Kele Okereke of Bloc Party, that in 2008 John and members of his entourage undertook a physical and verbal racial attack on him, which, on paper, is a complete contradiction to everything John seems to stand for.

“He was trying to sell a record off my back,” John says.“People get used to this world of The Sun, The Daily Mirror and the Murdoch empire nonsense and they fall into it without even realising it.They knew they couldn’t pursue any such nonsense because it was ungrounded, pointless and trivial, and they kind of humiliated themselves. They did it without fully understanding my own family and my own background and my own social status. They must have presumed I was some kind of whatever and that was that.” John stops and pauses before sadly and sombrely stating:“They hurt a lot of my family, very much. My Jamaican grandkids were horrified at reading that, it upset them deeply. I mean it’s my family, we’re multi-racial, same as my friends, always has been, always will be.You can bandy the racism slant around so easily these days and you don’t have to justify it, and I’d like to see a payback on that. If you put up a false accusation you should also put up the price that comes with it. But I hold no animosity, life’s too short, I’m not in this world to perpetuate enemies.”

A recurring theme during our conversation is that of misrepresentation.We thought John Lydon was a brat. A cliché. We thought we’d be able to predict his answers before asking the questions.That’s how he’s always been seen, in the public (or press’) eye.

“It has been bugging me for years,” he says, “people writing nonsense about me thinking they know who I am and what I stand for.” It’s a reason for his very stark, open and resoundingly positive lyrics on the new album, he says. “For too many years I’ve been labelled as nihilistic or negative and I really am not. I’m not going to sit back and go, ‘oh everything’s awful, why bother?’, because that’s never really been my mentality.

– “There’s none of that ‘I hope I die before I get old’ with me. I don’t want to die. I love life” –

“Squabbling with financial fraudulence has been overwhelming, but it hasn’t turned me into a sour puss.”

But you have played the character, though.

“Well, yes, it’s partly my own fault. I’ve got a great sense of fun in me and I play up to it sometimes and I don’t mind saying so. I do expect people to get the humour of it all, though. It would be so wrong to think The Sex Pistols was a dour, vicious, hateful thing – it wasn’t, it was very fun for us. A great sense of innocence and hope for the world, but the media manipulated it to make it whatever they wanted it to be. I think the audience knew better, so it really didn’t matter what the press was saying, but it’s a bit silly when still to this day I get people who ‘filthy and fury’ us. When we reformed in ’96, we used that exact title, ‘the filth and the fury’,

just to sling it back. It’s a game, it’s a laugh, but the songs actually mean something and they are about change and improving our lives, not making them worse. I don’t want to riot for no reason.

“In the back of No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs [John’s autobiography] I think I explained the Sex Pistols very well,” he continues, “which is that we’re funsters. We’re not tricksters and there is a very big difference. It was not a business sham that the likes of poor old Malcolm would want to believe, because he wasn’t an ideas person.

So he really had to live and exist in other people’s ideas and then make a career for himself inside that frame.”

This is something John has felt from many others along the years too.

“It didn’t have to be that way,” he says, “it shouldn’t

be that way, but however many duffers you come across in life there is an equal number of really brilliant people and that’s what keeps you going.

“Although there are times when I do take it kind of personally when people let me down so bitterly, when I can’t fathom the reason behind it, the resentment is so unnecessary. I’ve helped so many people start music careers that they really should be somewhat grateful. To me, it’s like they’re my babies and then they grow up and they move away from Daddy. I feel sad for them being silly, but they can always come back and be forgiven.”

We talk our way through a winding road of topics, and as our conversation draws to an end, John becomes slightly philosophical and perhaps reflects a little further on the rather antiquated notion of him being someone he’s not. Many people seem to forget that the vitriolic, anarchistic swagger of Johnny Rotten was the living embodiment of a frustrated youth – he was a kid, and what other profession on this entire planet uses your behaviour as a teenager to judge, represent or paint you as the person you are today, even when in your midfifties? John ultimately cements the refutation of the idea of him being a solipsistic, nihilistic human being.

“There’s none of that ‘I hope I die before I get old’ with me, I don’t want to die. I don’t know where that goes. I mean, I’ll take it when it comes, you have to, but I love life, in every single way,” he bubbles with rabid enthusiasm before pausing.A fly buzzes and lands on the chair in front of him. He looks deeply and intently at it with his pulsing eyes for a moment. “I mean, I don’t know what makes that fly buzz about, but I love its nature, that little electrical pulse that makes its heart tick, what a great thing that is. I can see the need for religion when we weren’t quite so civilised, but the time for religion is gone and we must start viewing the world in a much more sensible way. Everything that lives is interconnected, it all has that pulse of life and if you just go around with fly spray and exterminate them because they annoy you, that’ll come back to haunt you one way or another. You’re literally killing something that is connected to yourself and that to me is a slow form of suicide, using murder as the tool.” He again pauses and looks at me gravely before his face cracks into a big, wide smirk. “But I draw the line at mosquitos!”

We both cackle with laughter.And right there, in that inadvertent metaphor he has stumbled across, is perhaps the most perfect and elegant way to describe John Lydon’s demeanour and indeed career – a moment of deep, inventive, introspective thought that operates on a multi-faceted and philosophical level, suddenly sucker punched by a moment of the unexpected, somewhat contradictory deep, loveable humour. Unsurprisingly, the person best able to sum up the madcap brilliance of John Lydon is the man himself.

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LOUD AND QUIET ALBUMS LIVE FILM REVIEWS

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AL BUMS 09/10

Jack White Blunderbuss (XL)

By Sam Walton. In stores Apr 23

Damon Albarn Dr Dee (Parlophone)

By Stuart Stubbs. In stores May 7

03/10

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Only Damon Albarn. Only he could create an album as self-interesting and openly obscure as one about Dr John Dee – an Elizabethan mathematician, polymath and advisor to the Queen, born 1527. Only Albarn could make it into an operatic production (his second) and present it to the English National Opera for this summer’s Cultural Olympiad. Only Albarn could get an 18-track record of choral singing, medieval instruments and a whole load of “hey nonny nonny” released by a major record label.

Only Damon Albarn, because, like it or not, with his eclectic (often) genius and prolific output has come total carte blanche. Great for him, not so great for us.

‘Dr Dee’ is almost too fractured to pass judgment on. It’s certainly too self-indulgent. It plays like the passion project it clearly is, and more like a modern operatic soundtrack than anything else – choirs chop up the acts, classically trained vocalists enter stage left and exist stage right, Albarn himself plays a narrator, of sorts, popping up for sweet, minimal interludes all over the place. It’s impossible to get a grip on any real sense of direction. For ‘A

Man of England’ a cartoonish bass singer booms to dreaded cellos; on ‘Edward Kelley’ the falsetto is even more comical, sounding like the credits of Blackadder II. Neither return, like many of the acoustic instruments (the flute, the harpsichord, the bassoon) that Albarn picks up only to quickly put back down again. He even chucks in an obligatory bit of African music into a record that is otherwise completely Elizabethan in sound, and of Dr Dee’s time, although you’ve long forgotten the concept behind this album by ‘9 Point Star’.

Albarn himself refers to this music as “strange pastoral folk”, which is at least accurate, English hills and dales materialised for the rise and fall of Dee, as the album begins and eventually ends with crystalline field recordings of birds nattering. Dee died in poverty, by the way, having mucked about with séances and wife-swapping. Like the continual references to religion (Dee, like all Elizabethan’s, was never far from matters of God), it’s all here, I’m sure.

Although to really be aware of that you’ll need to not constantly be questioning what on earth to make of Albarn’s latest anti-popular record.

On one hand, his defiance to create anything other than what he wants at this stage in his career is as valiant as it is daft; on the other, sparse and splintered, you can’t be sure that ‘Dr Dee’ makes for good opera either.

There were, broadly, two ways of assessing Meg White when she was in The White Stripes.The more romantic view was that, despite her clearly limited technical abilities, there was something uniquely energising and primal to her playing that completed The White Stripes, and without that they were just another boring blues band.The more practical view had her arriving on the drum stool by accident of relationship, with mastermind Jack keeping her there to look cool and aloof at the cost of having to water down his extraordinary guitar skills with frankly abject drumming. If the former is true, then ‘Blunderbuss’ should be a husk of a record, proficient but dry. If it’s the latter, then to hell with the Meg myth.

Unfortunately for Ms White, ‘Blunderbuss’ is a stormer.

Unexpectedly, though, it leaves a lot of the White Stripes’ influences behind; here,White is seldom the guitar hero of old – far more of the record recalls the swing and shuffle of his newly adopted hometown of Nashville than it does the grit and dirt of Detroit. Indeed, several of the album’s highlights – the dangerously intense ‘Love Interruption’, the lilting country waltz title track and ‘Hip (Eponymous) Poor Boy’, with its twinkling banjos and bar-room pianos – could’ve come straight from the Country Music Hall of Fame.

That’s not to say White has totally abandoned his love of shredding: his spiky, tangy soloing is all over ‘Bluderbuss’, but in more restrained, concentrated bursts, nowhere more effective than on closing track ‘Take Me With You’, which begins as a doe-eyed piano stroll before evoking Jimmy Page over some (ironically) magnificent drumming.The combination is a successful one, and is repeated again and again across the record, leaving ‘Blunderbuss’ among the best records to carry White’s name.

06/10

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Lower Dens

DZ Deathrays

Tu Fawning

Dead Mellotron

Toro Y Moi

Nootropics

Bloodstreams

A Monument

Glitter

June 2009

(Ribbon)

By Luke Winkie. In stores Apr 30

(Hassle)

By Chal Ravens. In stores May 7

(City Slang)

By Kate Parkin. In stores May 7

(Sonic Cathedral)

By Chris Watkeys. In stores May 21

(Carpark)

By Matthias Scherer. In stores Apr 30

I think Lower Dens take themselves pretty seriously, or at least as serious as you have to take yourself when still concerned with the obsessively sculpted, meticulously detailed, slow-paced, kraut-flexed, spaced-out art-rock in a world where Twitter updates get beamed to jean pockets.

‘Nootropics’ is a listening experience in all capital letters, elliptical songs dropping out in watery textures and foggy perspectives. Sometimes it crystallizes in wonderfully beatific pulses (‘Lion in Winter Pt. 2’) sometimes it drops right off the radar. Lower Dens are making music to be digested, but the lightweight bluster can fade from the edge. ‘Nootropics’ can certainly surround us, but it rarely moves inward – we’re forced to appreciate from a distance. It’s the sound of a band that has its aesthetic nailed, but a little short on all the bliss.

Brisbane’s DZ Deathrays are releasing their debut on Hassle Records, home to Cancer Bats, Turbowolf and Trash Talk.While that bodes very well indeed, it also tells you most of what you need to know here.This band are a sweatdrenched, super-heavy, power-pop duo in the vein of DFA 1979 and MSTRKRFT, combining the searing sandblaster punk of the former with the beat-driven snappiness of the latter. It’s unfortunate, really, that the comparison can be so neatly drawn to those brotherly Toronto bands, not only because it risks diminishing the undeniable rockhard awesomeness of tracks like ‘Gebbie Street’ and ‘Dinomight’, but also because that electro-rock and hi-hats combo sounds badly dated. But listen close and you’ll hear flashes of Sabbath, Anthrax, Blood Brothers and all manner of doom-thrash-heaviness.

On paper,Tu Fawning are a band I’d probably cross the street to avoid – their image too ‘arty’, their expressions too knowing. In reality, they are about as collaborative as it gets, taking time out from other projects to create this third LP. Like Visions of Trees with the rasping edges of PJ Harvey, ‘Blood Stains’s’ jarring oscillations awake their animal urges, while ‘Wager’ batters you over the head with a drumstick shouting ‘you want me!’.Their quieter moments bubble over into jarring pseudo-prog territory, so the heart-rending swoon of ‘Skin and Bone’ provides welcome relief.

And mixing a capella loops with juddering electro beats and an orchestral backbone, things are rounded off by uplifting, surf-rock rock finale ‘Bones’.Tu Fawning are a curious lot, strangely obsessed with blood and skeletons. In time, they could become a band you find it hard to live without.

After two little-known, selfreleased albums, Sonic Cathedral picked up this Baltimore threepiece, and this seven-track, halfhour mini-album of fuzzy, shoegaze-ey, underwater US indie is the first fruit of that collaboration.

‘Glitter’’s seven tracks aren’t selfcontained, but linked by passages of droney noise or delicate pianobased vignettes.The whole record has a far away, formless feel, as if it’s been played to you from the bottom of a disused lift shaft filled with gloopy gel. Meanwhile, the vocals are an indistinct, almost wordless afterthought; in fact you almost wish main man Josh Frazier had taken the risky step of dispensing with them altogether, all the better to allow the dense layers of fuzzy guitar to breathe, as the album’s high point – the engaging and urgent ‘Oohahh’ – is entirely instrumental and all the better for it.

A full CD-R release of a two-anda-half-year-old chillwave tour? Go on, then. Can’t be more irritating than that Portlandia theme tune.

Oh, he’s singing about summer and missing his girlfriend. How orig…hang on, is that a disco beat in ‘Take the L to Leave’? Shit, it’s gone again. But those guitars – lofi but lush, like a bunch of crooked wind chimes falling down a tree.

And this Chaz Bundick guy sounds a bit like that Ariel Pink dude, but with none of the kooky nonsense and all of the warmth and vulnerability. Not bad at all. I do sometimes feel like I’m listening to the aural equivalent of a Hipstamatic Facebook photo album, but I’m kind of hooked – hooked because of the melodies.

And this is the guy who made ‘Underneath the Pine’? Might have to go back and listen to that a bit more – this record’s way too short.

Beach House Bloom (Bella Union)

By Olly Parker. In stores May 14

05/10

Who remembers Blog Rock; the short-lived genre from the mid-noughties that was brought about by a thriving community of bloggers who posted MP3s from a seemingly never-ending pool of safe, middleclass indie music? For influences, look to early Arcade Fire, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and The Spinto Band.

For the slightly weirder side of things look towards Deerhunter. I’m not knocking it. I was a huge fan. I couldn’t get enough of it for a while. Unfortunately, by the time Beach House’s debut record rolled around, much of the indie blogger loving brigade had moved on and this follow-up provides more of the same with straight song writing and atmospheric arrangements that never really leave a mark. However, if there is one thing I remember from my Blog Rock days it’s that every record had one killer tune and this album is no different. Reach for ‘Other People’, a nicely paced summer tune with a killer chorus. Send the rest back to the blogosphere.

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AL BUMS 05/10

08/10

08/10

05/10

07/10

Zulu Winter

Electric Guest

Anywhere

Allo Darlin

Fostercare

Language

Mondo

Anywhere

Europe

Altered Creature

(Play It Again Sam)

By Nathan Westley. In stores May 14

(Because)

By Reef Younis. In stores Apr 23

(ATP)

By Austin Laike. In stores May 14

(Fortuna Pop)

By Olly Parker. In stores May 7

(Robot Elephant)

By Stuart Stubbs. In stores Apr 30

If we’re to talk language, Zulu Winter speak one that is saturated with familiar nuances that will instantly strike a chord with many a mainstream radio listener.

Atmospherically decorated, this debut album fizzles and bubbles with the influence of that multimillion-selling, modern day “rock” band commonly known as Coldplay.Though songs such as ‘We Should Be Swimming’ and ‘Silver Tongue’ have the same melodically grandoise swirls of the aforementioned’s recent output, the uncanny similarities extend to singer Will Daunt’s vocals, which share similar inflections to those of Chris Martin’s. It ultimately makes for a pleasant album, but one of a band failing to reach out and make their own identifiable mark, certifying it as one that may temporarily quell a hunger, but will have the tummy rumbling for something more substantial soon.

There’s a heatwave and damn!, it’s hot in the city.The power’s out, the air con’s working overtime and hordes of young urbanites are sweltering in the heat, down to their whites, glistening (not sweating, beautiful people don’t sweat). Somewhere a radio’s playing and Electric Guest is spilling out the speakers like the Dangermouse-produced silk it is.

Smooth, polished and soulful, ‘Mondo’ is an album made to be sun-kissed. Infused with RnBinspired vocals, effortless pop harmonies and soothing, meditative flow, it’s an album that has radio-ready appeal written all over it. Rich with Provider-esque bass, ‘Control’ is the track NERD could have made, and although this is very much an album that’s a sum of its parts, when it’s compiled as sumptuously as this, you’re willing to even contemplate that Fearne Cotton could become tolerable.

In his prolific career, At The DriveIn/Mars Volta singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala has been involved in more projects than perhaps he should have. His inability to say no has landed us with plenty of pointless records, but not this one – the brainchild of Christian Eric Beaulieu, aka Liquid Indian. As well as Cedric, Beaulieu managed to get Mike Watt to play bass on ‘Anywhere’, and ex-Sleepy Sun vocalist Rachel Fannan to contribute to a couple of tracks.

The result is seven long tracks heavily influenced by Eastern acoustic music, which are as accomplished as they are typically ‘out there’ for a Bay Area project. A couple of the tracks are instrumental, but the highlight pull in contemporary sounds too, ‘Rosa Rugosa’ sounding like Fleetwood Mac doing Kula Shaker; ‘Anywhere’ more Radiohead via Led Zeplin. Good call, Cedric.

I have a love-hate relationship with indie-pop. Nothing walks the middle ground. I either fall in love or curse the day it existed.Trips to indie-pop nights are a roller coaster ride of emotional up and downs, ending with either the greatest nights of my life or a trip to the hospital. London quartet Allo Darlin’, I’m sorry to say, have nearly always fallen on the wrong side of the tracks. Sure ‘Henry Rollins Don’t Dance’ and ‘Dreaming’ are decent enough tunes, and although the more polished and professional version of Allo Darlin’ presented on new album ‘Europe’ may win them some more fans, they leave me a little cold.The usual palate of indie-pop influences are on show – a bit of Belle and Sebastian here, a bit of Herman Dune there – but nothing to lift it above the plethora of identikit bands that exist in the genre.

There’s a shop in Camden, London, called Cyberdog. If you’ve been there you already know what a portion of ‘Altered Creature’ sounds like; if you haven’t, it’s basically Quasar with clothes – the kind of place where kitsch ’90s trance music is pumped out; where you might be chatted up by someone in a gasmask; where terror, fetish and euphoria live side by side. On tracks like ‘Sleepless’ and ‘Welcome World’ – which sounds a lot like ‘Experience’ era Prodigy – Minneapolis’s Fostercare certainly treads where other techno-heads have already set foot, but elsewhere on this debut album proper he seems to have invented (yep) post-witch-house, keeping the possessed, slo-mo vocals on ‘Daedalus’ but doing away with the RnB drum clack, and repeating the trick on the melodramatic ‘City of Gods’, with Zool from Ghostbusters doing the singing.

Flats Better Living (Sweat Shop)

By Danny Canter. In stores Apr 30

04/10

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Amongst a landslide of sludge riffs and Napalm Death references, you can just about make out Daniel Devine’s cries of “fuckin” throughout Flat’s debut album.There seem to be other lyrics too, sneered with very English (and very Crass) contempt, but God knows what they are. Flats began as a mod-bashing British hardcore band – now they’re an everythingbashing, doomy metal group.The reason it doesn’t work quite as well as their earliest EP is because for all the rage and paddy-throwing, Devine is surprisingly forgettable, then annoying, then forgettable again.

‘Better Living’ thrashes on, proudly touting its underground hard rock influences, quickly mushing into one long slew of indecipherable bar chords rampages, all the while Devine making little sense.

Most of the tracks are named after ballroom dances (‘Foxtrot, ‘Tango’, ‘Shuffle’), which is pretty funny, but you have to ask, if Flats really are this angry, why aren’t we allowed to hear the lyrics?

06/10

Richard Hawley Standing At The Sky’s Edge (Parlophone)

By Chris Watkeys. In stores May 7 Richard Hawley’s music, ‘til now, seems always to have borne the stamp of an alternative crooner; an indie Nat King Cole, even. Listening to his songs has been like being wrapped up in a warm blanket while a storm rages outside the window; he’s possessed of a richness of voice and a surfeit of songwriting ability, talents he’s hitherto combined to produce music with a classic, old world feel ripe for Hovis bread adverts and a forgotten Northern England. So it comes as something of a surprise to drop the needle on his seventh record and be greeted with ‘She Brings The Sunlight’, a sprawling, seven-and-a-half-minute rock epic, part driving drone-rock, part Soulsavers-esque soaring majesty, awash with fiery solos and pervaded with a vaguely hypnotic heaviness. Hawley’s intelligent lyricism is here too – the title track itself has the feel of a cowboy song, but tells a tale of gritty city misery. But as the album wears on, the shock fades, the excitement dissipates, and the crooner returns for three or four over-long, slightly ponderous songs; songs where smothering self-indulgence seems to get the better of the man.Which is a shame, because for the first half of this record, he’d turned up the volume, plugged in the pedals, and found himself a nicely jagged edge; Hawley had brought the storm inside. Sadly, he soon opened the door and let it out again.

06/10

Mystery Jets

Poliça

Radlands

Give You The Ghost

(Rough Trade)

By Chris Watkeys. In stores Apr 30

(Memphis Industries)

By Daniel Dylan Wray. In stores Apr 23

Mystery Jets have determinedly ploughed the indiepop furrow for many years now, consistently churning out above-average tunes, resolutely unbuffeted by stylistic and generic developments elsewhere. Phrases like ‘well-crafted’ and ‘accomplished songwriting’ float around the band’s music, yet they’ve never really engaged any other emotion than transient happiness born of good fun – you’d dance to them at a festival but the music would languish unplayed at home.This fourth album was recorded in Texas, but musically it’s very close to home.Title track ‘Radlands’ briefly suggests otherwise – quiet, considered and far away, this isn’t the Mystery Jets we know. But then: a key change, a burst of bright indie-melody, a hooky vocal, and it’s business as usual. ‘Had Me At Hello’ follows up with some stomping glam-rock, and barring briefly intriguing departures for ‘Roses’ and the earlyRadiohead stylings of ‘Lost In Austin’, it’s more of the same from Mystery Jets.

Autotune really has taken over pop music. It’s pretty much omnipresent, whether you like it or not.

Normally, I tend to stand on the side of the latter; however, there are instances in which it can be used creatively and in a restrained manner as a means of intricate manipulation, in many senses treating the voice as it should be – an instrument. ‘Give You The Ghost’ is a perfect example of this: the wonky, slightly dub-infused electronica somehow merges perfectly with the glistening, warped and deeply effected vocals.

Rhythmically, this debut album is riddled with spark, the twin drums and percussion often bringing the album to life, which when sat alongside the pulsing electronics creates a glorious concoction. It’s discordant RnB in many senses, taking the fundamentals of the genre and twisting and inverting them until its original form is barely audible.The results are innovative, stimulating and gratifying, in personal album that plays like a cyborg’s confessions.

08/10

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A L BUMS 07/10

Garbage Not Your Kind of People (Stunvolume)

By Reef Younis. In stores May 7 Exasperated and exhausted by their record label, Garbage unceremoniously called it a day way back in 2005.The obligatory greatest hits followed not too long after but as far as everyone was concerned, the band was dead and gone. Seven years and a firmly worded message later, Garbage are scratching an itch.

The vision of Shirley Manson stalking and stamping on MTV or barking down your earhole in her 90s pomp is a pretty memorable one, but this is a new chapter. Reformed and armed with their own label, new album ‘Not Your Kind of People’ isn’t subtle about the subject or inspiration behind the band’s ire.

Seven years is a long time to try and forget. Or stew.

Garbage will no doubt insist they’re doing it for themselves but it feels like a revenge album and it’s an anger and vitriol that suits them.They certainly sound like a band re-invigorated, because ‘Not Your Kind of People’ is bullish in its energy. Fired by an angry, barracking industrial beat, ‘I Hate Love’ powers on, ‘Control’ is big and brash, and ‘Sugar’ offers up the coquettish Manson, her vocals carrying the steely menace to contrast the backdrop of dreamy atmospherics. Finishing with the jagged guitar riffs and power vocals of ‘Man on a Wire’, if this album is to be a swansong, at least Garbage have done it once more with feeling.

06/10

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Santigold

The Magnetic North

Master of Make Believe

Orkney: Symphony of The Magnetic North

(Atlantic)

By Olly Parker. In stores Apr 23

(Full Time Hobby)

By Danny Canter. In stores May 6

Tony Blair once said that David Cameron was a cushion that “bears the imprint of the last person who sat on him”.While listening to this album and its mega-list of producers (TV on the Radio’s Dave Sitek, Yeah Yeah Yeah’s Nick Zinner, Switch, Diplo) I couldn’t get this quote out of my head as, even without checking the credits, it’s obvious which tracks were produced by who.That said, there are some great moments. ‘Go!’ (where Switch, Diplo, Nick Zinner and even Karen O collaborate) kicks things off in style, and recent single ‘Disparate Youth’ (a bit of a grower that warrants repeat listens) follows up well. After that however we have an album where the artist struggles to move from behind the long shadow cast by a talented set of producers. Some strong moments sit alongside filler without ever really coming together and feeling like a coherent piece of work, while the gaps are filled by Santigold’s continual insistence to mimic MIA.

There are two types of scare – the sudden heartstopping fright that comes with a slasher movie and the still eeriness of something far more real: the supernatural.This debut album by The Magnetic North is the second type, and more lasting for it; unsettlingly and beautifully calm at the same time. It’s hardly surprising for a band that only exist because a ghost told them to, visiting Erland Cooper of Erland & the Carnival in a dream to tell him to return to his homeland of Orkney and make a record. She (Betty Corrigall, a local in the 1770s until she killed herself) even gave him a list of track names.With Carnival bandmate Simon Tong and orchestral arranger Hannah Peel, the three headed far north to create what feels like a folk score to a forgotten Hitchcock film, set in the middle of nowhere, complete with fingers rapping on the windowpane (on ‘The Black Craig’) and Wickerman devilish chants (‘Orphir’). It’s frightening, oddly seductive and often quite brilliant.

08/10

07/10

06/10

07/10

03/10

07/10

Geoff Barrow / Ben Salisbury

Here We Go Magic

Holy State

I Like Trains

Devin

A Different Ship

Electric Picture Palace

The Shallows

Romancing

(Secretly Canadian)

By Nathan Westley. In stores May 7

(Brew)

By Daniel Dylan Wray. In stores Apr 30

(ILR)

By Kate Parkin. In stores May 7

(No Evil)

By Chal Raven. In stores Apr 30

DROKK: Music Inspired by Mega-City One

Search hard enough and you will find an aged voice that says, “Music was never quite so bad in my day”; hollow words that have become a modern day diatribe against the present.With ‘A Different Ship’, Brooklyn’s Here We Go Magic have landed at a well-trodden shoreline, but one that is ultimately awash with colourful new age ideas, which may appease postmillennial doubters.Whether it be the Devandra Banhart-aping folk of ‘Hard To Be Close’ – a Sixtiesindebted psychedelic stroll through pleasantness – the swirling rhythmical melodies of ‘Make Up Your Mind’ or the Super Furry Animals at their most chemicallyinduced extremes (‘I believe In Action’), HWGM gleefully grab the past and tweak it so that it appears externally fresh bodied. A different ship for a familiar cargo, this record sails a safe path that doesn’t end up near any rocks.

Crunching guitars and rapid-fire drums blast off from this record from the start – a style that you think would drench it, but it’s not all smash and grab guitars, screeching vocals and pounding drums.There’s often a much richer focus on melodic undertones to Holy State’s debut album, more so than some similar bands prove able to display, and you’ll even hear some brass (an initially bizarre but most welcome addition to the sonic palate, giving an admirable sense of variation and flow to ‘Electric Picture Palace’. However, while Holy State do what they do well, the debt owed to previous artists is pretty inescapable – very little new ground is being broken here, or even trodden on.

Subsequently, there is little to instil a real genuine sense of exhilaration or surge of electricity when listening to this record.You get the feeling Holy State work best live.

For their third album, Leeds’ I Like Trains have moved from the epic soundscapes of old towards a more modern sound.Touches of Richard Formby’s previous Wild Beasts productions are writ large in the stark flutterings of ‘Mnemosyne’, while title track ‘The Shallows’ could easily pass for a forgotten version of ‘Two Dancers’.Though singer Dave Martin’s distinctive timbre echoes through the record, it takes time for I Like Trains to connect the dots. Drifting ever softer, ‘The Turning of the Bones’ sees their usual trembling energy reduced to a fractious mutter. By toning down the bombast for a sharper tack, though, you find yourself waiting for a big finish that never comes. Factor in the the teasing, Autobahn keyboards of ‘In Tongues’, and, standing alone, this is a remarkable album, but reflected against the shadows of things past, it seems a pale ghost in comparison.

No doubt it’s simply bad timing, but whacking a song called ‘Born To Cry’ on an album released just two months after LDR’s complicated birth is portentous in the extreme for this risible basket of focus-grouped, cod-60s, hamgarage, pseudo-soul flimflam, which boils down to one-word: ‘product’.With a voice processed into a compromise between garage-era Van Morrison and Julian Casablancas, NYC’s Devin is trying very hard to pass himself off as an insouciant rock and roll bad boy, quiff dishevelled just so as he channels the dead and decaying heroes of yore. It’s all pretty dreadful stuff, but closing track ‘White Leather’ is the nadir – a token slowy with the priceless line: “Let’s get all trashed up on a Friday night, my baby’s all in white leather.”

Where are you off to, love? The annual adult Erotica show at the ExCel centre? Supermarket rock.

(Invada)

By Chal Ravens. In stores May 7 The revival in interest in early electronic music produces an awkward paradox. From Veronica Vasicka’s ‘Minimal Waves’ series to the forgotten proto-house classics loved by the UK bass scene and the legacy of industrial revived by Carter Tutti Void, it’s an eternal summer of early ’80s retromania.

Geoff Barrow and BBC composer Ben Salisbury encapsulate that paradox with this imagined soundtrack for the 2000AD comic.

A vintage Oberheim Two Voice synthesiser dominates while semiautomatic drums warp over rasping metal, making for a fairly literal take on the dystopian grid-eyed world of Judge Dredd.The fantasy action is firmly in the realm of scifi hauntology and though the revival is partly a fan fetish, ‘Drokk’ has an authentic commitment that can’t be knocked.

Best Coast The Only Place (Wichita)

By Matthias Scherer. In stores May 14

05/10

What’s eating Bethany Consentino? The author of the irresistible surf pop songs on ‘Crazy For You’, this second album sees her dealing with loneliness and overwhelming external pressure. Best Coast’s early lofi, shoegaze-tinged tracks carried some melancholic undertones, but ‘The Only Place’ is more upfront about its sadness – “I wake up to the morning sun/when did my life stop being so fun,” Consentino sings in ‘Do You Love Me Like You Used To’, and in the miserable ‘Last Year’ she shrugs: “I just keep spending my money/ One day it will run out/And then I’ll have to write another song”.While her honesty is commendable, it’s a shame that, apart from the glorious title track – a rollicking homage to life on the West coast that’s part Shop Assistants, part Gun Club and part Pistol Annies – and a re-working of the the yearning 7” track ‘Up All Night’, the songs are weirdly flat and unmemorable.

They invoke 60s girl groups and Consentino’s beloved Fleetwood Mac, but can’t emulate either’s verve.

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LIVE

THE SHINS Kentish Town Forum, London 23.03.2012

By Reef Younis Photography by Sonny McCartney

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The Shins’ long-awaited return to UK shores has, oddly, felt a little uneasy. After ‘Wincing the Night Away’ pleased and polarised, the membermerry-go-round of last year seems to have clouded the general excitement around the recent release of ‘Port of Morrow’, with the grumbles of the die-hards stubbornly muttering that this isn’t “the real Shins” matching the wider anticipation of a record that’s been almost five years in the making.

It’s a compelling case, with longstanding members Martin Crandall, Dave Hernandez and Jesse Sandoval all leaving (or getting fired, according to the latter) after helping craft and contribute to The Shins’ cult sound – but also marks Mercer’s initial project coming full circle.

Mercer wouldn’t strike anyone as the brutalkind, especially not the sort to drastically parachute an entirely new line-up in following the last album, but for the lyrical deftness and sentimentality at work in the music, it’s clearly a decision executed with design. And, besides, at

what point over the last decade has The Shins not been about James Mercer?

The answer lies in a sold out stint at the HMV Forum and the kind of familial love-in that only The Shins could generate.Tonight is both a confirmation and a vindication for Mercer – that they still carry the ‘Chutes Too Narrow’ cult appeal but also enough intrigue to keep the momentum going.Their status as a band that can find a soft spot with the accuracy of a (pink) bullet has always rung true and after carrying a back catalogue that’s soundtracked countless moments of indie-film contemplation, they’re a band we’ve reached for in both happiness and heartbreak.

Unbowed and largely unbothered by the fresh faces, tonight’s set flows effortlessly and easily, the old and new inspiring a lively atmosphere characterised by wide, drunken grins and jigs of genuine contentment.

Opening with ‘Kissing the Lipless’ it’s an easy win and way in after five years away, and an

opener that creates an atmosphere of a warm, adopted homecoming from the outset.You can feel the positivity warming the Forum, everyone sending their own little heat wave of positivity stagewards, ready for it to be bounced back and giddily reclaimed. It’s a sense of feel-good that’s only slightly diminished by the incompetence of the venue’s sound desk that plagues the first 10 minutes, but it doesn’t take the band long to settle into a rhythm and ease into new material from ‘Port of Morrow’.

The jiving, jangling ‘Bait and Switch’ and the moody perfection of album opener ‘Rifles Spiral’ are fresh injections of melody that, in time, should stand alongside the already cherished tracks. A stripped back ‘New Slang’ is another invitation for the audience to launch into an inclusive intro, the forum now bathed in “oohs” and gabbling chatter that fills the quieter moments.

It’s another lovely reminder how much we should value The Shins and a demonstration that some just can’t wait to tell each other.

PRINZHORN DANCE SCHOOL Pavillion Theatre, Brighton 11.04.2012

By Nathan Westley Photography by Mike Burnell

Despite their name, it’s unlikely that the music of Prinzhorn Dance School will have aired in dance academies.The short, sharp bursts of tonal noise that the Brighton-based duo of Tobin Prinz and Suzi Horn craft do not lend themselves to being the mere sonical backdrop for a Rumba, the Charleston or even Eighties style Vogueing. Instead, the headstrong Prinzhorn Dance School are the quintessential marmite band who comfortably position themselves outside of the mainstream and its idea of conformity by removing the dressed up excess and relying on the bare essentials of repetitively simple rhythms, postpunk basslines that have the swerve of Delta 5 and inventive, singular note guitar lines. Joined by an additional musician on drums, tonight’s finely tuned set allows songs like ‘Up! Up! Up!’ – from their 2007 self-titled debut – and the more melodically conventional love song ‘I Want You’ (from this year’s ‘Clay Class’) to sit comfortably beside each other, leaving it hard to fathom that this is a band that has been known to divide opinions so viciously.

VIOLET Power Lunches, Dalston, London 13.04.2012

By Austin Laike Photography by Elinor Jones

Violet is a solo project masquerading as a band, understandably so considering the cynicism that would meet the suggestion of going to see Pixie Geldof sing in a Dalston basement. For anyone in it for the car crash, though (and considering the audience seems to be made up largely of Geldof ’s friends, there really aren’t many), are sorely disappointed. Geldof can certainly sing – better, even, than you’d expect the young a-criticism-magnet to. She begins with new single ‘Y.O.U.’, a sweetly lolloping love song that sounds like a Lily Allen desert session track.Then, another one. And another. And, yeah...The rest of Violet – all boys – sit on their amps and try and succeed to not pull focus from their singer in her Shirley Manson leopard print.They’re sitting ultimately because of the lack of space down here, but it suits this kind of building road music, made for upturned barrels and out houses. Like their singer, they sound faultless.The songs, however, don’t. Far from bad, they just all sound remarkably similar – like Howling Bells slow tracks. It all sounds a bit ‘bought in’. It all sounds a bit masquerading.

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01

LIVE 01 Kindness Photographer:Tom Warner 02 Breton Photographer: Elinor Jones 03 The Futureheads Photographer: Mike Burnell

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LOW

FEMALE BAND

SLOW CLUB

KINDNESS

DISAPPEARS

Royal Festival Hall, London 03.04.2012

By Sam Walton

The Sebright Arms, Hackney 12.04.2012

By Mandy Drake

Village Underground, Shoreditch 27.03.2012

By Chal Ravens

XOYO, Old Street, London 21.03.2012

By Stuart Stubbs

Corsica Studios, Elephant & Castle 28.03.2012

By Tom Pinnock

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Low visit the Royal Festival Hall tonight free of any promotional shackles.Their latest album, the great-in-parts ‘C’mon’, is now a year old, and instead the band are giving a one-off performance to show off their arty new visuals, conceived in collaboration with artist Peter Liversidge. Not that the liberation from the standard tour drudge seems to have made much difference to the band – the first half hour draws exclusively and rather listlessly from ‘C’mon’, feeling only as sporadically beautiful as the album: while the harmonies are as crisp as ever, and the arrangements as crystalline and ravaged, each passing song feels stilted in both performance and passion.The much-vaunted visuals, too, are equally unengaged: grainy vintage footage of biplanes and parachutists, evocative but overfamiliar, with no apparent connection to the music being perfor med. And it seems tonight’s visual accoutrements are as much a distraction to the band as they are to the audience. Low, after all, are famous for their narrowness of scope, and thrive on simplicity; these slowly shimmering skyscapes and, most bizarrely, slow-motion shots of an empty Royal Festival Hall itself, are gratuitous.Thankfully, they become easier to ignore as the music increases in intensity and charisma – and when ten glitterballs speckle the auditorium in silver stars for ‘Murderer’ we’re reminded of what can make a Low show such a magical experience.

Brooklyn duo Female Band might be brilliant. It’s hard to tell because this kind of experimental, sonic mush really needs to be played jet engine loud, and tonight it’s low enough to hear the chatter of the bar… and there’s plenty of chatter.

Still, it doesn’t stop them showing us that, against the odds, being influenced by both The xx and My Bloody Valentine is a real, rather inventive possibility.They play two guitars and nothing else, sampling fret scratches to create a bed of noise that is a wash of twisted atmospherics. Sometimes they add a rudimentary beat (also made by a ping-ponging guitar twang). On top of this (and here’s the xx bit), they pick out very delicate guitar lines and speak softy, rather than belt it out. Unfortunately, we can’t hear that too well either.The point is that we want to. Shoegaze this unprocessed and sharp-cornered is nowhere near ready for home listening – it might never be ready for that, even – but turned up to envelope a room, it could make for a powerful sonic experience. It could be brilliant.

Indie pin-up duo Slow Club are at Village Underground for a night run by Attitude Is Everything, a group that works to improve access to live music for people with disabilities. Other than flipping the venue’s orientation to allow access from the main road rather than the usual scummy back alley, the room is little altered, although the beer and cider seem better than usual and clusters of balloons float hopefully towards the vaulted ceiling. One thing is out of the ordinary, though, and that’s seeing Slow Club lyrics translated into sign language on the fly by a brave man standing stage right.Whether the signing makes ‘If We’re Still Alive’ more or less profound is debatable (“I think that next summer, if we’re all still alive, we should try to jump into some water and focus on getting high”), but some text subtitles would also be useful given the sound quality in this useless cavern of a venue.

After Rebecca and Charles matured into bigger themes on their second album, ‘Paradise’, leaving behind the saccharine folk rock of debut ‘Yeah So’, it seems Rebecca’s voice has grown up too, as she eases into the spotlight as the dominant half of the duo. Lacking artifice but oozing honesty, they’re a Sheffield band without a doubt – a point underlined by their closing cover of ‘Disco 2000’.

The Second Coming of Kindness really is the first. In 2009, comfortably lo-fi and with one limited seven-inch to his name, Adam Bainbridge hardly registered outside of a small buzz bubble. His handful of shows back then, he admits, were a bit of mess, and his recorded demos towed a similar, homemade line. In 2012, things couldn’t be more different; proudly hi-fi, slick and accomplished on his debut album, ‘World,You Need a Change of Mind’. It’s a progression that’s even more incredible in the club. Playing his future ’80s funk hits to a predictably sold out room, the 6ft 5” Bainbridge snakes about the stage like a French exchange student that will forever be cooler than you or I, doing a Jarvis Cocker stint, if Cocker thought sex was sexy, rather than mucky.

His band – which comes with two female backing singers – are possibly even better. ‘Gee Up’ segues into Womack & Womack’s ‘Teardrops’, and then into ‘Sweet Love’ by Anita Baker, Bainbridge plays hide and seek with the spot line through ‘Bombastic’, and the bass keeps slapping on like it’s 1985 in a New York disco. In the age of the amateur, it’s a show – part cabaret, part erotic, but consistently, unquestionably professional, while remaining just loose enough to not be stuck up or contrived. Even if you hate Prince, Grace Jones, and that whole ’80s club sound, you’ll love a Kindness party.

This evening, in a warehouse under a train track that is forever too hot, Chicago’s drone force Disappears put in a synapsemeltingly intense show, playing every track from this year’s ‘Pre Language’ and a selection of the highlights from previous, less riffheavy records ‘Lux’ and ‘Guider’.

Frontman Brian Case is a formidable presence onstage, saying practically nothing between songs but hyperactively barking out proclamations and thrashing his Jazzmaster.The interplay between him and his four band members is impressive, Jonathan Van Herik’s stuttering, effectsladen guitar meshing menacingly with the Case’s drier sound. As on the last album, ‘Replicate’ is a standout, its muscular riff and beat echoing both krautrock and Magazine. A disappointment lies in the fact that there’s no room for an airing of ‘Guider’’s epic 15 minuteplus ode to repetition, ‘Revisiting’, but Steve Shelley’s (this is what he does when he’s not on Sonic Youth duties) always-thundering drums and economical fills make up for it.

Right now Disappears are the best they’ve ever been, and ‘Pre Language’ is a great leap forward.

You get the impression it’s just a stepping stone to even finer albums, though, live and on record.

Luckily, knowing their prolific work rate, there won’t be long to wait.

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02

03

THE FUTUREHEADS

ALEX WINSTON

BRETON

KAP BAMBINO

SAVAGES

Komedia, Brighton 02.04.2012

By Nathan Westley

XOYO, Old Street, London 04.04.2012

By Danny Canter

Corsica Studios, Elephant & Castle 28.03.2012

By Samuel Ballard

The Macbeth, Hoxton, London 28.03.2012

By Stuart Stubbs

White Heat, Soho, London 03.04.2012

By Chal Ravens

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Once held as one of the brightest hopes in mid-noughties angular indie rock,The Futureheads became known for writing threeminute-long, sprightly stop-start guitar tunes with weaving vocal harmonies. Back then, it seemed near unimaginable that if they reached a fifth album they would put down their instruments and fully utilise those vocal harmonies, yet for recent record ‘Rant’ they did just that.Transposing these a capella interpretations into a live performance is no easy task, though.Tonight’s performance is the very first time these songs will be performed in front of a public audience, and so it is understandable that the evening should have a very jovial feel.

Whether breathing new life into old songs such as ‘Man Ray’ and ‘Robot’, turning their vocal chords to traditional folk songs or offering a new take on modern day pop songs (Kelis’ ‘Acapella’,The Black Eyed Peas’ ‘Meet Me Halfway’), which Barry informs is done with no irony (a brave move by a band that is still mostly known for an un-ironic cover of Kate Bush’s ‘Hounds of Love’), these songs are interestingly twisted variations that are occasionally fleshed out with the use of a Banjo, Mandolin or various other acoustic instruments.

And yet tonight never has The Futureheads looking like a cheesy barbershop quartet or a comedy pastiche of themselves. For that, they fully deserve an affectionate pat on the back.

Brooklyn-based Alex Winston brings a lot of people to her show.

The audience (made up not of ‘cool’ kids, but rather a mish-mash of people who’ve heard ‘Choice Notes’ on a TK Maxx advert) is pretty honourable in size, but it’s her band, I mean.There are backing singers, bass, drums, keyboard, acoustic guitar, even a mandolin player, all surrounding the button-cute Winston, who wails more on stage than her pixie recorded voice has you believe.

This is Winston’s second swipe at stardom. She used to tour the States opening for Chuck Berry and classic rock behemoth Ted Nugent, also from her hometown of Detroit. She’s still only 24. It’s hard to imagine her singing any music other than this kind of super-produced pop, though.

Halfway through a set that starts a little bit wobbly, she dismisses her band and sits down with an acoustic guitar.The her-and-it track proves she can strum too, but also that she’s best when fronting this army of proficient musicians, dancing around and whipping her hair.Winston seems frustrated, though (perhaps at the not-soldout crowd, that is at least appreciative enough to dance along… a bit), and falling off the stage during her hit (‘Choice Notes’) doesn’t improve her mood.With this kind of female-fronted pop, though, success is linked directly to timing.

Winston has the songs and the voice, for sure.Thing is, so do a couple of others right now.

After releasing one of the albums of the year so far, Breton have certainly deserved the hype that is building around them, and this, their first hometown show since the release of ‘Other People’s Problems’, is both triumphant celebration and a transition to a broader consciousness. After kicking off a frenetic 40-minute set with ‘Ordnance Survey’, ‘Pacemaker’ and ‘Edward the Confessor’, the band are clearly enjoying themselves, frontman Roman Rappak freely charming a crowd hanging off his every word and passing a bottle of Jameson’s around. And why wouldn’t they be? Selling out Corsica Studio days after a debut album release is no small feat and the – at times shambolic – set is a testament to both the way in which Breton have conducted themselves and their loyal fanbase. For all the buzz, there is something genuinely intriguing about their approach – more collective than band, the five-piece incorporate a visual narrative into the performance, which has gained plaudits from all sorts of music royalty. And tonight they deliver. It’s as simple as that.

Things go wrong – the bassist needs to have his instrument gaffered to his body and the smoke machine seemed a bit temperamental – but tonight Breton stated their intentions.

Kap Bambino singer Caroline Martial enters like a Nancy Spungeon super fan at a punk ’79 vigil, hair in a peroxide bob, lit candles in both hands, leather biker jacket on and black tears of inverted crucifixes on both cheeks.

There’s not so much a calm moment of reflection as she stands in silence, more a sense of impending glitch metal doom, as her partner, Orion Bouvier, holds down sickening synth chords.

Candles out, things instantly get as wild as they infamously do at the French duo’s shows – Martial attempts to shake her face off to the pounding black techno and most onlookers do the same.

Bouvier fuels his singer from a static position at the back of the stage, largely tossing her tracks from this year’s ‘Devotion’ LP. Martial continues to try to detach her nose, lips and eyes, furiously shaking her head like a dog that’s been in a pond. Down to a babydoll shirt and yapping beneath the kind of thrash electronics that Crystal Castles have cashed in on, she’s oddly cute as well as unhinged, which is perhaps how Kap Bambino have kept this going since 2001. It’s certainly not down to variation, but if you can keep up, it’s still the wildest show on the underground.

When a band can count the number of gigs they’ve played on two hands and still have room to click their fingers in time, you can usually expect a jumbled jigsaw of their intended sound – the right pieces in the wrong places; wonky edges mashed together haphazardly.

But to discover Savages in their primitive state is to gaze on a 1,000-piece jigsaw of a monochrome cityscape, not only completed but glued and framed in the knowledge that this right here is already a work of art. Hyperbole indeed, but warranted when you’re standing in front of four thoroughbred rock stars in the making, angular and louche, delivering us from the apathetic navel-gazing of chillwave with their brittle minimalism cooked up from scraps of Jim Jarmusch, Lydia Lunch, Kobo Abe, Gun Club, vacant stares, yelps of rage and splattered, smudged guitars layered over taut and solid rhythms.What it is not – though some will no doubt try to draw the link – is the coquettish prankster punk of The Slits, nor the mannered goth of Siouxsie. All is cool, fleshless and sharp, with volume and dissonance on the offence as singer Jehnny Beth repeats words boiled down to their unpleasant essence: “She will, she will, she will,” “Husbands, husbands, husbands,” “Hit me, hit me.” No strangers to the music industry, they’re playing by their rules this time, so no downloads for you. Catch Savages in their natural state instead – alive.

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FILM

CINEMA REVIEW

By IAN ROEBUCK

ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA Starring: Muhammet Uzuner Yilmaz Erdogan, Taner Birsel Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan

09/10

David Lynch’s Crazy Clown Time

Music Television When movie directors make music videos, everyone’s a winner Despite being hidden behind a fencing mask, you can sense the glee on Jake Gyllenhaal’s face as he dices a couple to death. First the tension as he sucks a cigarette, their slurred up slow dance feeding him ammunition and purpose, then the rampage. All American Psycho, a touch of Kubrik and a slow burn intensity that flashes through every slasher film you’ve ever seen,The Shoes’ music video for their track ‘Time to Dance’ is a cinematic odyssey. Daniel Wolfe’s eight minute epic challenges you to remember the reference – every time you view it another filmic nod appears.

The real joy, though, is Hollywood holding hands with the music industry, a tradition that’s seen the best of both worlds and provided plenty. ‘Time to Dance’ is Gyllenhaal’s second video, he also played tennis for Vampire Weekend’s ‘Giving up the Gun’, but it’s normally from behind the camera where the magic happens. A creative bed, just look what it did for Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry’s careers. Both could be floundering if it wasn’t for co-directing jobs on Sonic Youth’s ‘100%’ or Bjork’s eye for talent after seeing Gondry’s debut video for his own band Oui Oui. Sideway auteurs are ushered in from the leftfield but even the biggest studio blunderbusses have touched base with a musical background. Michael Bay’s currently throttling the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle legacy, but it wasn’t so long ago he made Meatloaf an alien.Yes, Bay directed ‘I Would Do Anything for Love’, and when you watch it back it shows.

Cynicism aside, culturally this relationship has produced the goods. Recently, The American, The Social Network and Never Let Me Go have been produced by Anton Corbijn, David Fincher and Mark Romanek, all schooled in the music promo world, and one of this

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summer’s biggest blockbusters comes from Marc Webb, a man who brought us videos from Good Charlotte, Green Day and Backstreet Boys. The Amazing SpiderMan though has a cerebral feel, and his previous film, 500 Days of Summer, arrived with a musically driven backbone that permeated the love story and added clout to an otherwise shaky-in-parts rom-com.

Stylistically the entire film read like a music video, in this case a good thing as it’s bustling with quirks and ideas. Plus the man (or his music advisor) is clearly into The Smiths, so we can look past his flirtation with Maroon 5 and Miley Cyrus.

Of course, it slides both ways. Directors often race back to the relative confines of a 3-minute window, the freedom to express a visual intent regardless of narrative. Like Daniel Wolfe’s epic, David Lynch recently returned with a seven-minute freewheeling clip dragged from the Lynchian well of inertia, the man’s vision uninterrupted through time. As if ‘Crazy Clown Time’ wasn’t barking enough on record, the wonderfully straight forward (well, they’re just doing as Lynch sings) imagery adds yet another anarchic layer to his experimental music. So Suzie who tore her shirt off does so in explicit fashion in front of us, as an American footballer frantically runs for the touchdown that will never be. Lynch has described it as barbecue with beers and sure they look like they’re hunting a good time until one punk sets fire to his Mohican and our percussionists, and bare breasted ladies start lapping the fire.This is the Eraserhead director at his unsettling best and the first time he’s exposed himself on the mainstream since Inland Empire. One hopes we’ll see more music videos from Lynch and his peers over time as it’s clearly a thrill that bonds both industries.

You’ll find more drama, pathos and cinematic grace in just the weather throughout this astonishing film than in the entirety of all other springtime releases. A sometimes exasperating, often challenging three-hour police procedural film, it’s certainly not for everybody, but Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s sixth feature is a beguiling modern fable with a hypnotic draw like no other.We spend an entire night in the Turkish countryside with three vehicles full of local policemen, the state prosecutor, shovel wielding skivvies and two prisoners who it soon transpires are murder suspects, and the search is on for a missing corpse. Night has fallen and much of the film is lit in extraordinary fashion by cinematographer Gokhan Tiryaki, either by the moon or from car headlights. Long scenes of immersive dialogue trade screen time with mother nature as Ceylan builds atmosphere with the sights and sounds of this wild terrain.We are hauled in through a heavy fog, the director’s inert style purposeful and majestic.

The details of the murder are never revealed but it seems to be a crime of passion, although lacking in screen time are the women who are central to the movie’s theme. At one point the police chief says at the centre of every mystery is a woman and this is certainly the case with Ceylan, each of his most masculine of characters are driven by a feminine figure off centre stage.This simple construct rings true in the bewildering 20 minutes that sit at the heart of the film.The group stop at the mayor’s house for something to eat and a much needed rest, as the host’s daughter provides comfort to the men their raw emotions are laid open for all to see. An incredible turn that joins both Ceylan’s Distant and Climates in the ranks of the classics, this is cinema at its most noble.

11.05.12 / 8PM TIL 2AM

LIVE:

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PARTY WOLF COMPETITION Just that

WIN TICKETS TO FIELD DAY AND THE APPLE CART FESTIVAL Seeing as my crossword puzzle is a lot of bloody hard work – to make and then for anyone to make any kind of sense of – I’ve got a straightup, old-fashioned competition for you this month. And yes, it is also because we’ve got a prize that’s even better than the usual yearly subscription to Loud And Quiet. (I know).

London’s Field Day Festival (Victoria Park, Hackney, June 2nd) brags a particular tasty lineup this year, featuring a bill of Grimes, Metronomy, Sleigh Bells, Beirut, Hudson Mohawke, Liars, Gold Panda and Franz Ferdinand. It lacks magic, art, cabaret, comedy and Adam Ant, but, then, the affiliated Apple Cart Festival the following day has all of that, also in Hackney’s Victoria Park.

We’ve got a pair of tickets to give away that will get you into both.To be in with a chance of winning them, email the correct answer to the below question to info@loudandquiet.com by May 18th.We’ll then pick a winner out of a hat or a tub.

Franz Ferdinand will headline this year’s Field Day, but who closed the festival’s main stage in 2011? a.) Wild Beasts b.) The Horrors c.) The Coral d.) The Vaccines

And last month’s Crosswords answer: Angelina Jolie stole the husband of another woman. No amount of leg will ever change that.

GET THE LOOK Dress like someone famous

IDIOT PARADE

My day job means that I spend a lot of time on the phone.There’s still no excuse to dress badly, though.

I remember when Chris Evans presented the Radio 1 Breakfast Show and they showed it on TV. Christ!

He looked like pig in glasses, because he’d thought, I’m on the radio, no need to dress well. Even when Tony Blackburn was in the Mr Blobby suit I made sure he was dressed well! For this particular look, I’ve had a bit of fun.Yep, the hair is inspired by Robin Smith from The Cure (a personal hero).The beard is totally Jack Sparrow, because pirates are going to be very in this year; Noel Gallagher eyebrows (his new album is excellent!!!); classic paisley shirt that always looks good; Gaga shoulder pa... Shit, that’s the phone. I really should take this...

Joliver has started selling fish fingers. Isn’t that a bit like Germaine Greer editing Nuts?

Definitely going to have to wipe this seat down later

50

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Disclaimer: The representations of the persons herein are purely fictitious.

PHOTO CASEBOOK “The inappropriate world of Ian Beale”