The Red Bulletin May 2014 - NZ

may 2014 $4.95

beyond the ordinary

now

$4.95

SPEED DEMONS

IN THE PIT LANE OF V8 SUPERCARS

SHEEP DOG & WOLF

NZ’S NEXT POP PRODIGY

THE WORLD’S FIERCEST BIG WAVES

swell

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just

may 2014

surf or die

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THE WORLD OF RED BULL

46

riders of the storms

The big-wave surfers risking their lives to find and conquer the largest waves in the world

Welcome

04

“ I live for being on stage. The exchange with the audience”

Andrew Chisholm (cover), aaron feaver

The Red Bulletin celebrates the best in sport, adventure, music and culture, but what is the link between a kid with a computer making amazing beats, a climber finding a route up an unconquered rock face and a team of engineers making a race vehicle for a worldclass driver? They all want to succeed, and to do that, they look at ways to reach the next level: higher, faster, better, more innovative.

This month, we’ve got Roland Dane chasing glory on the racetrack with his dominant Red Bull Racing V8 supercar team. Then we have the surfers riding the world’s biggest waves, reaching new heights one foot at a time. Plus, Marc Marquez, the reigning MotoGP world champ who practises in a vineyard (nb: he’s 21).

All this, and more: we hope you enjoy the issue.

chrysta bell, page 38

the red bulletin

may 2014

at a glance Bullevard 08 look and listen This month’s edition of The Red Bulletin starts on the right note with a 14-page musical interlude

24

Features 24 Inside track

World champ at 20: is Marc Marquez rewriting the rules of MotoGP?

Marc Marquez

The world MotoGP champion takes The Red Bulletin for a spin around his private practice track

38 Femme fatale

Hypnotic music muse Chrysta Bell

72

44 Sam Smith

Debuting his melancholic dance pop

46 Big-wave riders

Taking on the world’s highest waves

58 The odd couple

Seth Rogen and Zac Efron fight for the right to party in their new film

60 Sheep, Dog & Wolf

jim krantz, lukas maeder, Jeff Curley, Simon Davidson, christoph meissner

87

A Kiwi pop prodigy with a DIY ethic

62 V8 Supercars

row like a pro

World-class oarsmen Mario Gyr and Simon Schürch outline a winning formula by revealing their training secrets

Up to speed with the best V8 racers

a Higher calling

Jeremy Jones changed the world of big-mountain snowboarding. Now he wants to change the world

62

king of the pit lane

the red bulletin

Changing the world one slope at a time

80 Drum major

Meet the Picasso of percussion

Action

80 Trackside at the Adelaide 500 with Roland Dane, the full-on, fearsome owner of the best team in V8 supercars

72 Jeremy Jones

the beat master

He plays concerts almost five hours long: Martin Grubinger is the greatest drummer in the world

86 87 88 90 91 92 94 95 96 98

travel Truck racing in Colorado training Get fit like a rower get the gear Two-wheeled tech party The best club in Sweden My city What a DJ loves in Bern enter now Wings For Life World Run music Foster The People’s top tunes new games Wolfenstein roars back save the Date Unmissable events magic moment Out-skating gravity

05

Contributors who’s on board this issue The Red Bulletin New Zealand, ISSN 2079-4274

The Red Bulletin is published by Red Bull Media House GmbH General Manager Wolfgang Winter Publisher Franz Renkin Editors-in-Chief Alexander Macheck, Robert Sperl Editor Paul Wilson Creative Director Erik Turek Art Directors Kasimir Reimann, Miles English Photo Director Fritz Schuster Production Editor Marion Wildmann Managing Editor Daniel Kudernatsch

christoph meissner

jim Krantz Shooting the 21-year-old MotoGP world champion Marc Marquez, was a labour of love for the award-winning photographer, as he is a passionate motorcyclist.

From the beginning of the shoot, at the Spanish vineyard where Marquez has a practice track, the chemistry between the two was evident. By the end of the day, each man would say of the other: “This guy is crazy.” Krantz was so inspired that he went online and booked superbike lessons back home in the US. His Marquez portfolio begins on page 24.

In order to capture still images of the incredible high-speed drummer Martin Grubinger (40 beats per second is his record), Austrian lensman Meissner prepared a set of drumsticks embedded with LEDs. “We only had 10 minutes,” says Meissner. “Luckily Grubinger is a pro. He played until both the sticks broke, but I had all the pictures I needed.” See page 80.

Born on this side of the Ditch and now resident on the other, Davidson and his cameras are a common sight at vintage motorsport events. “I’m passionate about old cars and motorcycles.

What a great day at the office when you get to photograph what you love.” We dragged him into the 21st century to shoot the V8 Supercars in Adelaide. It’s a breed of car of which he has firsthand experience: “I drive a 1964 Ford Falcon coupe powered by a sweet 289 V8.” See what he made of the pro V8s on page 62.

06

Assistant Editors Robert Tighe, Ulrich Corazza, Werner Jessner, Ruth Morgan, Florian Obkircher, Arek Pia˛tek, Andreas Rottenschlager Contributing Editor Stefan Wagner Bullevard Georg Eckelsberger, Raffael Fritz, Sophie Haslinger, Marianne Minar, Boro Petric, Holger Potye, Martina Powell, Mara Simperler, Clemens Stachel, Manon Steiner, Lukas Wagner Design Martina de Carvalho-Hutter, Silvia Druml, Kevin Goll, Carita Najewitz, Esther Straganz Photo Editors Susie Forman (Creative Photo Director), Rudi Übelhör (Deputy Photo Director), Marion Batty, Eva Kerschbaum Repro Managers Clemens Ragotzky (manager), Karsten Lehmann, Josef Mühlbacher Head of Production Michael Bergmeister Production Wolfgang Stecher (manager), Walter O Sádaba, Matthias Zimmermann (app) Advertising Enquiries Brad Morgan, brad.morgan@nz.redbull.com Printed by PMP Print, 30 Birmingham Drive, Riccarton, 8024 Christchurch Finance Siegmar Hofstetter, Simone Mihalits

Megan Michelson simon davidson

Chief Sub-Editor Nancy James Deputy Chief Sub-Editor Joe Curran

The freeskiing editor for ESPN.com and a freelance writer (Powder, Outside, Men’s Journal and more) based in Tahoe City, California, Michelson met with big-mountain snowboarder Jeremy Jones for her latest The Red Bulletin assignment (page 72). She has suffered for her art. “Once, on a backpacking trip the Capitol Reef National Park in Utah, I had to wade through a waist-deep puddle in a narrow slot canyon in my underwear, holding my backpack high over my head.”

“ The guy is a pro.

He played the drums until both sticks broke” Christoph meissner

Marketing & Country Management Stefan Ebner (manager), Elisabeth Salcher, Lukas Scharmbacher, Sara Varming Distribution Klaus Pleninger, Peter Schiffer subscription price: 45 NZD, 12 issues, www.getredbulletin.com, subs@nz.redbulletin.com Marketing Design Julia Schweikhardt, Peter Knethl Advertising Placement Sabrina Schneider O∞ce Management Kristina Krizmanic

The Red Bulletin is published in Austria, Brazil, France, Germany, Ireland, Kuwait, Mexico, New Zealand, South Africa, Switzerland, UK and USA Website www.redbulletin.com Head Office Red Bull Media House GmbH, Oberst-Lepperdinger-Strasse 11-15, A-5071 Wals bei Salzburg, FN 297115i, Landesgericht Salzburg, ATU63611700 New Zealand Office 27 Mackelvie Street, Grey Lynn, Auckland 1021 +64 (0) 9 551 6180 Austria Office Heinrich-Collin-Strasse 1, A-1140 Vienna, +43 (1) 90221 28800 Write to us: letters@redbulletin.com

the red bulletin

Let’s Twist and shout

K a n y e, ! go h o m e c h a n c e t h e r a p p e r

The new rhyme minister

08

jess baumung

Acid Rap, released last year, showed Chance The Rapper to be full of soul.

He raps about missing his mom’s comfort food and high-school kids getting shot with equal zeal. He has brains, a great vocal range and a subtle sense of humour. His first mixtape was called 10 Day, after the length of his suspension from school: don’t be surprised if he eventually releases My Month Off After Headlining Coachella. He turns 21 on April 16.

johannes lang

A mixtape turned Chicago’s Chancelor Bennett from promising young performer into new hip-hop hope

p o p q u i z

Who said that?

These words will go down in history, but which musical megastars spoke them?

e Rit a , y to lov n It ’s e a s e is a f a e ve r yo n t o n t u b

The Kosovan-born Londoner is involved with what the press loves to call a ‘feud’ with Rihanna. Ri snubbed Rita at Grammy afterparties earlier this year. We would be delighted to broker peace

Music’s Secrets Out Ondrea Barbe/Corbis Outline

Big names answer the music business’s big questions in a new behind-the-scenes film What motivates sound visionary Brian Eno? How does James Murphy, ex of LCD Soundsystem, run his record label? Why does disco legend Giorgio Moroder suffer from stage fright?

These questions and more are answered in full and from the horses’ mouths in a new feature-length documentary, What Difference Does It Make?

Filmmaker Ralf Schmerberg lurked with camera when the Red Bull Music Academy pitched up in New York last year, bringing together young musicians and huge names from the industry.

His film is a study in talent, a reveal of musical secrets and, above all, a passion project. Watch the film in full at rbma15.com

“I’ve always been famous, it’s just no one knew it.”

lady gaga

Rihanna

Beyoncé Knowles

2 “I am a god.

Now what?”

Kanye West

Robin Thicke

David Guetta

3 “I believe in free love and that’s just how I feel.”

LANA Del REY

Miley Cyrus

Grimes

ANSWERS: 1. Lady Gaga 2. Kanye West, 3. Lana del Rey

ER ’ RE O OR A : A D

corbis, getty images(2), Universal Music, Steven Taylor, Alix Malek, Nicole Nodland, sony music, Chad Wadsworth/Red Bull Content Pool(2)

1

Celebrating 15 years of Red Bull Music Academy, the film had a sametime, differentplace premiere in more than 60 cinemas globally

GUANTANAMO | + | METALLICA The US’s ‘torture playlist’ at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp included Enter Sandman by Metallica and American Pie by Don McLean.

Supermarket | + | 50 cent Music encourages purchases, but retailers advise against playing hip-hop because the gangster image rubs off on consumers and shoplifting increases.

Editor

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BULLEVARD

Illustrator

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Editor

Burgers | + | Pavarotti An Australian burger joint banishes lurking teens by playing opera and classical music.

The strategy works, but the neighbours aren’t too happy about it.

Kim Jong-Un | + | Modern Talking North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un is said to have loved German synth-pop duo Modern Talking when he was a boy. His favourite song was Brother Louie.

young jong song

11

BULLEVARD

4 /4 T I M E T R AV E L

REMEMBER THESE?

Partying like it’s 1989, cringing at 1999 and not quite believing the music of 2009 is already half a decade old

5

25 YEARS

Depeche Mode, Personal Jesus You aren’t doing much wrong if you get covered by Johnny Cash.

Nirvana, Bleach The Seattle grungesters’ album was a critical hit, but it didn’t achieve chart success until after their follow-up, Nevermind, was released.

Miles Davis, Aura A concept album from music’s Mr Cool.

The title track only uses 10 notes.

Music for your mind, not your body.

YEARS Eiffel 65, blue At least the band happily admits that the colour was chosen just as randomly as the rest of the lyrics. Da ba dee.

Lou bega, mambo no 5 How did he manage to talk Monica, Erica, Rita, Tina, Sandra, Mary and Jessica into anything with this trashy tune?

Christina aguilera, genie in a bottle Another Britney wannabe with a decent tune. She’ll fade away like the rest of them. Hindsight, eh?

lady gaga, bad romance Oh oh oh oh ohhh oh oh-oh ohhh oh-oh it’s apparently your best, but we prefer Poker Face – and the meat dress.

Susan boyle, i dreamed a dream Shy spinster + talent show + YouTube = rare recipe for success.

Kraftwerk, the catalogue Deluxe box set rerelease of eight seminal electronica albums. It’s the music of the past, but it still sounds like the future.

15 YEARS

KO M A*

Lucky DJ

dietmar kainrath

Our resident artist Kainrath pays honour to Daft Punk and Avicii

*KOMA: KAINRATH’S OEUVRES OF MODERN ART

12

the red bulletin

B U LLE V AR D

sister act

What of Bey’s little sister, Solange? Her last record was the 2012 EP True. Since then, her sense of style has eclipsed her music (two appearances in Vogue’s Best Dressed list) and this year the 27-year-old became Art Director and Creative Consultant for Puma

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14

getty images, picturedesk.com

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y e b e h t e b l l ’ t a

B U L L E V AR D

W h a t L y r i c s R e a ll y M e a n

Double standards

getty images(2), Corbis, klar archiv

david kellner

What musicians say and what we hear them say aren’t always one and the same thing

Born in the Usa

Fight for your right

bruce springsteen The unofficial American national anthem. But have you actually listened to the lyrics other than the chorus? The song tells the story of a Vietnam War veteran who can’t find a job.

Doesn’t sound quite so patriotic now, does it?

beastie boys The Beastie Boys intended that their song (You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party) would poke fun at party anthems like I Wanna Rock by Twisted Sister… but they accidentally wrote the mother of all party songs instead. What a drag.

the red bulletin

Big In Japan

Nikita

Alphaville Not an anthem to the overseas success of the German synthpop band, but the tale of lovers in despair. The worst of the pair’s problems arises when one suggests getting the money for drugs by entering the oldest profession in the world.

elton john If this song makes you think of a deadly but gorgeous female assassin on TV or in two films (French and remake), you should know that despite Elton John wooing a female Russian soldier in the track’s video, Nikita is a male Russian name.

it whatmeans now?

15

BULLEVARD

P o l i t p o p

Power ballads

What do world leaders listen to before they send armies into battle?

Or when they’re pretending to listen to a translated speech through headphones?

Work it harder, make it better. Do it faster, makes us stronger.

Yes, you can.

She’s standing right in front of me. Speakin­g words of wisdom.

Let it be me!

Oh Nikita Khrushchev I don’t love you so!

Angela Merkel HAS A LOT OF TIME FOR The Beatles

Vladimir Putin LOVES Elton John

Barack Obama LISTENS TO Kanye West

The Chancellor of Germany listens to classical music when she’s cooking. But Merkel was a Beatles fan back in her wild days. She bought her first Fab Four record in Moscow. The only thing she still has in common with the band now is her haircut.

The Russian president wanted to make it clear just how open-minded he was when it came to music before the Olympics. “Elton John is a wonderful musician. Millions of us love him, regardless of his, um, sexual orientation.”

Just to be clear, Putin did not say this.

In 2009, the US president called the rapper an idiot because he interrupted the MTV VMAs as Taylor Swift was accepting a prize. But they’re back on good terms now. “Kanye West’s music is outstanding,” Obama gushed last year. “I’ve got a lot of his stuff on my iPad.”

15M SECONDS OF FAME 1. Five Canadians and one guitar for a cover of Somebody That I Used to Know, by Gotye. (156 million views) 2. Look up ‘cute’ in the dictionary and you see this: a five-year-old Japanese boy playing I’m Yours by Jason Mraz on the ukulele. (63 million) 3. You can hit big even if you don’t sing. A frustrated video editor in Taiwan resigns by dancing one night in the office to Kanye West’s I’m Gone. (17 million)

16

the red bulletin

Getty Images(3)

In YouTube’s global talent contest some amateur musical uploaders are more successful than others

RUNNING CAN'T FOR THOSE WHO CAN SIGN UP NOW! ONE DAY AT THE VERY SAME TIME ALL OVER THE WORLD

4TH MAY 2014 9:00 PM AUCKLAND NEW ZEALAND

WINGSFORLIFEWORLDRUN.COM

BULLEVARD

E u r o v i s i o n s o n g c o n t e s t

Continental divide Splitting 740 million people into lovers and haters, this year it’s in Copenhagen on May 10. Below: a roster of ‘legends’

super apps From marvellous melodic games to DJ decks for your mobile: five music apps to download right now

12 F IN L A

point

ND

s

Scratch on your touchscreen: DJAY 2 will make a real DJ out of you instead of you just putting on your old playlists.

With 100,000 radio stations and two million podcasts, TUNEIN makes sure you’ve always got new stuff to listen to.

Half game, half synth creates splendid electronica to soundtrack a sci-fi movie: this is MUSYC.

Hard rock Hallelujah

Lordi (Athens, 2006) They rocked to first place like Tolkien’s orcs in platforms. In March, they released a seventh album, To Beast Or Not To Beast. That is the question.

celine Dion

Ne partez pas sans moi (Dublin, 1988) She made quite the impact winning 28 years ago: as much for the size of her hair as the power of her voice. sweden, 10pts

Ukraine, 8pts

Waterloo (Brighton, 1974) Napoleon did surrender, as did the rest of Europe then the whole world to the best-selling pure pop band of all-time.

Dancing Lasha Tumbai (Helsinki, 2007) Very possibly a work of avant-garde art: Andriy Danylko performing as Verka Serduchka, a lady of a certain age in a futuristic astronaut outfit, who immediately earwormed her way into European hearts. Sieben, sieben, ein, zwei, tanzen!” How did it only come second?

Abba

18

Verka Serduchka

FIGURE is an easy-to-use music-maker thick with bass, synth and drums.

In five minutes, you can be the new Calvin Harris.

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picturedesk.com(3), interTOPICS

Get SONGKICK and never miss out on concert tickets again. It tells you about your favourite bands’ tour plans.

Switzerland, 4pts

B U L L E V ARD

Make music, not war Pedro Reyes takes guns decommissioned by the Mexican army and transforms them into musical installations with an anti-violence message. For that, he deserves a 21-gun salute, or a symphony, as he would call it.

y z a r c s d n u o s

pedro reyes, Courtesy Lisson Gallery, London(4), Alexander Koller, Anna Stoecher(2)

t ’s p lay orin g: le b e r a no e r at tle an d p ia o u r get t c e h Drums t d it ar s an gun-gu

playing the tuber The Vegetable Orchestra of Vienna makes instruments out of vegetables.

The downside is that their creations rot and new ones have to be made fresh for each performance, but at least there’s always soup after a concert.

the red bulletin

19

B U LLE V AR D

P e r s o n a l i t y t e s t

Which star are you?

Behind the music is a star with the same kind of likes and dislikes as the rest of us. Find out who you really are

Rainbow

N

Give peace a chance?

D o y o u l i ke

N

warrior?

Y

dictators?

Y

Friend of Jesus?

N

Y

Y

Drugs: just say yes?

L i ke k Kid Roc

Eminem

N

N

Manson

N

Y

Meat is

Marilyn

Fa c e b o o k ?

Y

Hate your veggies?

est Kanye W

murder?

Y

Y

N

hicks Dixie C

ga Lady Ga

Yes

Y

20

N

Justin

BONO

Timber

lake

Rihann

a

No the red bulletin

Universal Music(3), warner music, corbis, getty images(2), Tom Munro, A-way

N

BULLEVARD

FROM THE MAN WHO BROUGHT YOU SUCH SONGS AS

“WHO” — “WHAT” — “WHEN” — “WHERE”

dow LOAD n

“WHY”

Fleischli & Turbin Inc.

NOW COMES

new York &

Corbis

Los AngeLes

be like beck Beck’s Morning Phase, was kind of not his 12th album. After his 11th, 2008’s Modern Guilt, came Song Reader, 20 songs only available as downloadable sheet music. songreader.net the red bulletin

21

B U L L E V AR D

t h e n e x t s u p e r s ta r s

Sonically sci-fi

A combination of the oboe and a hologram, the holophonor will sadly only be available in the 31st century. At least if we’re to believe the makers of Futurama, that is.

Almost famous We’ll be hearing more from these up-and-comers in 2014, as they fight to enter the pop circus’s big top

Mø What do you get if you cross electro, indie pop, soul and street vibes?

The answer is summed up in two letters: MØ.

The Dane’s trademark is a braided plait, which she swings like a propeller. In our view, she’s about to take off.

Royal Blood So rock music’s over, is it? You won’t say that when you listen to Brits Benji Talent and Mike Kerr. Vocals, bass and drums: simple, but effective. The Arctic Monkeys agree and promptly snapped up the duo as a support act.

h i g h -t e c h s o u n d

Future music now

BOOM - BOOM - BOOM - BOOM - BOOM BOOM - BOOM - BOOM - BOOM - BOOM BOOM - BOOM - BOOM - BOOM - BOOM BOOM - BOOM - BOOM - BOOM - BOOM BOOM - BOOM - BOOM - THWACK

SEABOARD

rubber soul You bend and distort sounds on the Seaboard’s sensitive keyboard as it if were half-guitar, halfpiano, surfing through the octaves by swiping your fingers. The harder you press the rubber keys, the more intense the sound. roli.com

tenori-on

Light music A hand-held synthesizer that produces notes and melodies after you draw patterns on its grid of LEDs. Japanese artist Toshio Iwai, a video games developer, debuted the device in 2007; it’s now made by Yamaha. global.yamaha.com

eigenharp

electro blow Both a musical instrument and software controller, played somewhat bassoonlike via 18 keys and mouthpiece. It lives at the intersection of electronic music and jazz, and is so much better than that description. eigenlabs.com

dietmar kainrath, sascha bierl

What will the music of tomorrow sound like? That will depend what it’s being played on. We take a look into the instrument-making laboratory

James Marcus Haney

FKA Twigs She went up to London aged 17 to be a dancer.

Instead, she took steps as a singer, winning people over with her gentle voice, trip-hop beats and surreal videos. Now dancing has been set aside; we’re all the better for it.

From Metal Cats by Alexandra Crockett, published by powerHouse Books

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23

MARQU inside track The reigning world MotoGP champion sits atop his sport aged just 21. He took The Red Bulletin for a spin around his private practice grounds – hidden in a Spanish vineyard words: Werner Jessner photography: jim krantz

24

EZ

“MOTOCROSS TEACHES YOU TO BE CREATIVE,” SAYS MARC MARQUEZ. “THE COURSE CHANGES WITH EVERY LAP. YOU’VE GOT TO IMPROVISE CONSTANTLY. IT’S A SKILL THAT HELPS YOU WHEN YOU’RE ON THE CIRCUIT”

26

“I CAN’T REMEMBER MY FIRST TIME AT A RACETRACK. I WAS ONE. MY FATHER HAD ALREADY TAKEN ME ALONG TO A MOTOCROSS RACE”

28

30

“TRAINING IN A GROUP IS MORE FUN. THE CHALLENGE IS TO BE FASTER THAN EVERYONE ELSE – AND THEY WANT TO BEAT THE WORLD CHAMPION”

“WHAT’S MY DEFINITION OF THE PERFECT DAY? SOME MOTOCROSS IN THE MORNING, A DIRT TRACK AROUND LUNCHTIME, A BIT OF MOTOGP IN THE AFTERNOON AND DINNER WITH A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN”

T

T

hirty years ago, a young man burst onto the road-bike racing scene and smashed all records to smithereens.

He made his debut in the sport’s top flight, Grand Prix motorcycle racing, when he was 19 and was world champion by the age of 21. The experts were convinced that his records would never be broken. The whizzkid was called ‘Fast’ Freddie Spencer and the secret to his success was a youth spent honing his motor skills on US dirt tracks. Dirt-track bikes have no front brakes.

You steer by opening up the throttle and shifting your weight and you’re always drifting slightly sideways.

In 2013, another young man made his mark in MotoGP, as top-flight racing has been known since 2002.

He was so good that the usual route to the top was bypassed: rookies have to work their way up in satellite teams before they’re given a ride with the big factory teams. But Honda saw the future in Marc Marquez, the reigning champion of the lower Moto2 class. At just 20 years of age, he would ride alongside experienced fellow Spaniard Dani Pedrosa for Repsol Honda.

Marquez finished his first race on the podium.

Then he won his second race. Last November he became the youngest MotoGP world champion in history at 20 years and 266 days. Like Fast Freddie, dirt track was also the secret to his success.

The cradle of Marquez’s achievements is the vineyards surrounding his hometown of Lleida, about

the red bulletin

150km west of Barcelona. Hidden among the grapes that go to make the Costers del Segre wine is a welltended dirt track and a motocross course, with changing rooms and a small canteen. Not a typical spot to find a world champion, a man who now can’t go anywhere outside this place without being recognised. “The first photo you have taken with a fan tends to set off a chain reaction,” Marquez says. “I saw a banner in the stands in Spain once that said, ‘I’ll take my underwear off if you have your photo taken with me.’ Last year I autographed a woman’s breasts, a man’s backside, a baby and a €500 note. The person it belonged to presumably hoped it’s going to increase in value.”

Marquez, his younger brother Alex, a successful Moto3 rider, and Tito Rabat from Moto2, are all training here in Lleida. “They want to beat me,” says Marquez, “and I want to be half-a-second per lap quicker than them.” He says the competition here is as merciless as if it were a MotoGP race. “I love battling it out hard. I don’t get as much out of a race I’ve won by four or five seconds as one that gets the adrenalin pumping and is decided on the final turn. Like [in 2013] when Jorge Lorenzo edged me at Silverstone on the last turn, that didn’t annoy me. There’s a limit, but it depends on the situation. Everyone will try anything on the last corner.” As for his opponents: “Lorenzo’s strength is his consistency and [Valentino] 33

34

“I HAVE A REPUTATION FOR BEING RUTHLESS WHEN OVERTAKING. BUT THAT’S HOW IT SHOULD BE, AS FAR AS I’M CONCERNED. ANYONE WILL DO ANYTHING TO BE AHEAD AT THE LAST CORNER. THAT’S WHAT IT’S ALL ABOUT”

“THAT MOMENT WHEN YOU’RE JUST ABOUT TO CRASH LASTS ForEVER, ESPECIALLY IF IT’S LOOKING LIKE A BAD ONE. YOU FIGHT, FIGHT AND KEEP ON FIGHTING AND THEN BANG! EVERYTHING HAPPENS in A FLASH”

As the reigning MotoGP World Champion, Marquez has the right to race number 1, but decided to keep his favourite 93

Rossi is particularly strong on the last lap.” Marquez is aggressive; he drifts and often looks like he’s not in control. “I have to ride like that if I want to be quick.

A rounded, relaxed style doesn’t work for me.”

Though Marquez has won world champion titles in MotoGP, Moto2 and the 125cc categories, he still lives at home, and sleeps in his childhood bedroom, with posters of FC Barcelona and Valentino Rossi on the walls. “Rossi was my idol. Dani Pedrosa was my yardstick.” He has since left both in his wake and is now the main rider at the Repsol Honda team.

“Maybe it’ll be harder this year because everyone’s expecting great things of me. But I like pressure.”

He has also now adjusted to his employer’s Japanese way of doing things. “The Japanese love to evaluate and discuss things. I wanted to change the handlebar grips at the first test. That was nothing to do with how the bike itself was performing; it was purely a matter of my own personal taste. They had to have a meeting to get them changed. But that meticulousness is what makes Honda successful.”

Gold & Goose/Red Bull Content Pool

m

arquez, who loves “big-balls” tracks, like Phillip Island in Australia with its blind bends that he takes at full throttle, combines fearlessness with impressive serenity. “I sleep incredibly well the night before a race. Nine, sometimes 10 hours.”

His only concession on race day is “blue underwear when I’m practising and red when I’m racing.”

Just a few days after that relaxed afternoon in Lleida, Marquez becomes the trending topic in motorsport, after breaking his leg while riding on the dirt track. “It was a bit of a stupid crash,” he admits.

“A friend came off his bike in front of me; I managed to avoid him. That should have been that, but I turned round to check on him – which is when my foot got stuck on the edge of the track and I broke my right fibula.” He hopes to be fit to defend his title in the 2014 MotoGP season. Missing almost all of the preseason hasn’t given him too much cause for concern: he dominated the MotoGP test prior to the injury.

But does the break mean the end of Marquez’s dirt-track racing? “Hang on! That was the first time I’ve ever been injured on one.” And how does he plan to occupy his time until the start of the season? “Maybe I’ll finally apply for my motorbike licence.” The quickest man in the world on two wheels is permitted to drive a car on the road, but not a motorbike. motogp.com

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Lingerie designer: Dollhouse Bettie Robe designer: Oscar de la Renta Red Dress designer: Nima Shiraz

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Real FEMME

fatal e

Chrysta Bell is a n inte r n ationa l woma n of m yste ry. A hypnoti c presen c e wherever she goes, he r ghostly gigs ar e inh a bited by the wei r d king o f H ollywood Word s: Arn o Raff ein e r P h oto g rap hy: A ar o n Fe av er 39

C

hrysta Bell has hair the same ruby-red colour as freshly spilled blood. Her gaze is hypnotic. Everything about her seems mysterious. Her close collaborator is David Lynch, the American film director and musician who has always had a similar air of intrigue.

Lynch produces Bell’s music and a recording of his voice introduces her on stage: “Wow! She sings like a bird!

Isn’t she unbelievable?” A purple velvet curtain billows behind her, with blackand-white images projected onto it.

The projection stops and thereafter the show is all about Bell: her voice, her theatrical hand movements, her tears.

There’s a splendidly eerie feeling in the room when she performs.

Bell’s album, This Train, is the result of working with Lynch for more than a decade. The journey takes in guitarcovered cloudscapes, reminders of a golden age of jazz divas, trip-hop and blues. Lynch’s musical direction sets the pace: slow motion, super-slow motion, emergency stop.

In Lynch’s studio in Los Angeles, as in all aspects of his work, transcendental meditation creates the vibe. He plays a song sketch, pulls a sheet of paper with words on it out of a black case and then asks Bell to come to the microphone.

He gives instructions, along the lines of: imagine you’re a sportscar!

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“I l i ve for being on stage.

The exchange with the Audience. the rush of not knowing i f you’re going to fall on your face or soar to the sk ies is very appeal ing”

On track: Bell’s album This Train is the result of a 10year collaboration with film director David Lynch

Bittersweet: Bell touches everything she does with a delicate hand of darkness

“I’m g o o d w i th death.

T ears fo r m e are not n ec essarily a sign of sad n ess. I beli eve i n reinca rn ati on .

I do bel iev e t hat t here are cycles”

“He would feed me, basically,” she says. “Whether it would be with anecdotes about other things that were completely separate, or by bringing associations like Elvis Presley or Elizabeth Taylor or a classic car or a certain way the night air felt – this would all be food for my process.”

When the first of these sessions took place, in 2000, Lynch was yet to out himself as a solo musician (after various collaborations, his first solo album Crazy Clown Time came out in 2011; a second, The Big Dream, followed in 2013).

Bell was the vocalist in a swing band that regularly played the Continental Club in Austin, Texas. As a child, she hung around her stepfather’s studio and became a session singer in her early teenage years. She worked as a model, then gave acting a try and played a small part in a Jet-Li kung-fu movie. In 1998, aged 20 and with her first record deal, her agent set up a meeting with Lynch so that he could hear her demos. The career she had always really wanted was underway.

“I live for being on stage,” she says.

“The exchange with the audience, the rush of not knowing if you’re going to fall on your face or soar to the skies, is all very appealing to me.”

S

he certainly has the personality to go with the looks and the voice, touching everything with an elegant hand of darkness. Her favourite drink is unfiltered sake, she named her 2010 debut album Bitter Pills & Delicacies and her record company, La Rose Noire, has a tear on its logo. What it is for her that makes the bitter so sweet?

“I’ve been with many people through the death process,” Bell explains, and that gaze of hers leaves no room for doubt. “I’m good with death. Tears for me are not necessarily a sign of sadness.

I believe in reincarnation. I do believe that there are cycles.”

Bell’s current cycle is one of touring.

She has performed in 27 countries during the last two years. What she’d most like to do is to give a weekly concert in the same location, ideally in Berlin.

It’s the perfect place for someone who so readily brings to mind images of that city in the wild 1920s, an era in which femmes were so much more fatale than any wrecking ball is today. chrystabell.com

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sam smith

The freshman

Music’s rising star on what comes from within, tiny flats and the melancholic dance-pop debut album that will make him a household name

the red bulletin: This year you went to the Grammys and have been all over Europe on a press tour. What did your life look like a year ago? sam smith: A year and a bit ago, I was so poor that I had to walk for an hour-anda-half to Waterloo station in London to exchange euros into pounds so I could get a train back home for Christmas day.

Wow. I was working in a bar as a barback: you clean all the glasses and the toilets. It was just horrible. People being sick, having to clean that up and then people smashing glasses into the sick. Those were my favourite moments.

Looking back, do you think that was an important life lesson?

I can’t tell you how important it is to work shit jobs. When I was coming home every night, I was knackered, but my mum would always say to me, “There is nothing wrong with working hard.” It’s true, because it means that when nice things happen, they mean more.

How did you get into songwriting?

I could never keep up writing a diary, but I always wanted to document my life.

To do that in the music is incredible, it’s like therapy for me. When I sing certain songs, it’s like looking back at a photo.

A diary is personal, but you share your songs with the whole world.

I struggle a bit singing them to everyone.

I’m not shy in general, but it takes it out of me emotionally. So every now and then I have a gig where I get really sad afterwards. I’m singing about things that have just happened a year ago.

Sadness is a big topic on In The Lonely Hour, your debut album.

I’ve never been in a relationship before, so I’ve always felt lonely to some extent.

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It was a moment on the phone to my mum, where I actually said for the first time, “I am really lonely.” And to me that was the bravest thing I could have ever done. So, for me to call the album In The Lonely Hour, it feels like a really brave title. That’s why I love it.

Some of the songs, like Money On My Mind, seem more like light-hearted pop hits than cries from the heart. Is that ambivalence intended?

That comes with production because I’m attracted to happy sounds. There’s this song on the album called Leave Your Lover, the lyric is “Leave your lover, leave him for me.” It’s about being in love with

“I never listened to male singers growing up. The voices just didn’t attract me” someone who is married. It’s a very sad song, but when you hear it, it sounds light, almost like a summery song, because it’s nice to juxtapose the two.

You have an impressive wide vocal range. Does it come naturally?

I had vocal trainers. But the main thing for me is that I never listened to male singers growing up. The voices just didn’t attract me and all I’ve ever listened to is female singers. I’ve mimicked them and I think my voice has quite a big range because I sang Whitney Houston too much [laughs]. Also, I did musical theatre. I was a backing singer for my jazz teacher. Lots of things.

In the theatre, you play one part among many. Was it a challenge to have all the attention on you?

I had to make this decision when I was 14. Do I carry on with musical theatre?

You’re given a character, you’re given a name, you’re given a script, you’re told where to move on stage. Being yourself on stage is a lot harder, but I love it.

You won two prestigious prizes this year: Critics’ Choice at the Brits and BBC Sound of 2014. Do you feel more pressure because of that?

It doesn’t put me under pressure, purely because I keep the focus on the music.

This is about my album; these awards just gave me the best platform possible to reach as many people as possible.

How does it feel at the very heart of the hype machine? Is it surreal?

There are moments like that every day.

The night I got home from the Grammys, I hadn’t seen my roommates in three weeks. That was a moment where we just paused and were like, ‘Wow, what is going on?’ But it’s great.

You still live in a shared flat? No penthouse overlooking the river?

Definitely not [laughs]. It’s a tiny little flat in south London.

As you’re blessed with a rather common name, did you ever think about an artist alias?

When I was 19, I went through four months of giving everyone I knew hell because I decided I needed to change my name.

I was getting everyone to come up with ideas. Some names were hilarious. But it was my dad in the end who said, why don’t you just call yourself Sam Smith. And now I love it. It’s so boring that it’s cool.

In The Lonely Hour is out May 26; samsmithworld.com the red bulletin

Universal Music

Words: Florian Obkircher

Born May 19, 1992, Bishop’s Stortford, England Great Whit At his parents’ dinner parties he would get on the table and do karaoke to Whitney Houston. Singing lessons began aged eight.

Key to Latch In October 2012, British neo-garage duo Disclosure released Latch, a track with Smith on vocals. It got to number 11 in the UK charts and earned a thumbs-ups from Taylor Swift and Adele.

Hey Judy Smith has adored Judy Garland since he saw The Wizard Of Oz as a kid, and became an even bigger fan reading a biography.

“It’s almost like she fell in love with her loneliness,” he says. “The tapes she recorded before she died are incredible. They had a big impact on my album.”

BIG RIDERS Wanted: surfers to conquer previously impossible waves. Essential: weather app, surfboard, 4x4 and unshakeable ability to stare death in the face words: Fernando Gueiros

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bruno lemos

Big Wave World Tour champion Grant ‘Twiggy’ Baker surfs Jaws, a swell near Pe’ahi, Hawaii

a long a 15km stretch of the Kamehameha Highway, on the North Shore of Oahu in Hawaii, you can find and understand the history of big-wave surfing. If you tell a Hawaiian you’re going to this place, they’ll say, “So you like big waves, right?” Here is where you’ll find the big-wave surf break called Waimea, and about 80km southwest, on the island of Maui, there is the Pe’ahi break, known as Jaws, which in the last 20 years has become a place where surfers can ride waves 60ft high.

Surfers like Carlos Burle, from Brazil, and Grant ‘Twiggy’ Baker, from South Africa, visit the Hawaiian Islands every December and January, ready to tackle the giant breaks. Burle, 46, is the former big-wave world record holder. In 2001, he rode a 68-footer on the surf break known as Mavericks, off the North Californian coast. His record was broken in 2008, then in 2012, the American Garrett McNamara set the current high watermark: a 78ft wave surfed at a recently discovered break at Praia do Norte, in Portugal.

(In February this year, English surfer Andrew Cotton surfed a huge wave in the Portuguese break; at the time of writing, officials were deciding if Cotton would be the new world-record holder.)

Burle, McNamara and Cotton surfed these monster walls of water using towin, a surfing technique first seen in 1992 in which a jet-ski – usually ridden by a fellow big-waver; McNamara was towing 48

carlos burle

The 46-year-old Brazilian is waiting for Guinness World Records to confirm if he or Englishman Andrew Cotton has surfed the world’s biggest wave – set in the same waters.

Burle pulled off his feat on the same day he saved a fellow surfer from drowning.

the red bulletin

picturedesk.com, brian bielmann

Wall of water: Carlos Burle rides the famous Nazare wave off the coast of Portugal

the red bulletin

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GREG LONG

At 30, Long is one of the youngest of the current wave of top surfers. The Californian came to prominence when he took victory in the notoriously challenging Eddie Aikau Invitational, a contest that only takes place in Waimea when the waves are at least 20ft high.

Cotton in February – pulls the surfer into the ocean so he can more easily catch fast-moving waves. Tow surfing changed the big-wave scene. “It’s the only option when the waves are too big to paddle,” says Burle. “Plus, the crowds want to see carnage, big drops, big wipeouts, ultimate rescues.”

Twiggy Baker, 40, has been a pro bigwave rider for more than a decade. He doesn’t use tow-in, preferring instead to paddle under his own steam. “Paddling is the true spirit of big-wave surfing,” says Baker. “It gives you a better sense of what you’re trying to achieve. More people are coming back to paddle surfing and tow surfing, unless it’s for the biggest wave in the world, has less meaning.” The current paddle surfing record is a 61ft wave, caught by an American surfer, Shawn Dollar, in Cortes Bank, 160km off the California coast. Baker believes it will be very hard, if not impossible, to go beyond this mark.

At 30, American Greg Long is but a youngster compared to Baker and Burle.

Born in California, he is the wonder boy of the big-surf community and a winner of the Eddie Aikau Invitational, a contest that only takes place in Waimea when the waves are at least 20ft high. He won it in 2009, the last time it was held and only the eighth time it has been staged in 31 years.

In 2012, Long was swallowed by a 40ft wave in Cortes Bank. “Since that session,

Hawaiian surfer Shane Dorian has been testing a pioneering new buoyancy suit that could save lives.

Below: The Mavericks Invitational is one of the world’s most keenly contested big-wave surf contests

where I basically drowned,” he says, “I’ve struggled to get my head back in the game of riding big waves.” He was found unconscious at the foam after a dramatic rescue operation. “After that, I felt like I wanted to ride a wave,” he says, “but at the same time, I didn’t. It was a year-long struggle to find perspective in my life and find what big waves meant to me, again, and why I was going to continue doing it.”

blowing, after a rainy morning. Out on the ocean, the waves are 6-8ft high – kids stuff for Baker, who just a few weeks earlier conquered waves 30-40ft high to win the Mavericks Invitational, a long-standing big-wave surf contest.

Mavericks was discovered, in the cold Californian waters of Half Moon Bay, in 1975. For 15 years, only one man surfed it, and when Jeff Clark shared his secret with some surfer friends, Mavericks became one of the main big-wave spots in the world. “Every place has its dangers,” says Baker, with a chicken teriyaki sandwich in his hands. “You need to stay calm: that’s the game.” At Mavericks, the danger is a big hole in the middle of the break that can suck you down and you can’t get back up. Two experienced surfers have drowned like this, and there have been many more non-fatal accidents.

“The greatest big-wave surfers in the world go to Mav’s to test their limits,” says Baker.

Big-wave surfers are always ready for that test. When storms appear on the radar, which doesn’t happen very often, they usually only have two or three days

Short Breath, Deep Breath Twiggy Baker parks his blue 4x4 outside Malama’s supermarket, in Haleiwa, a town on the North Shore and walks to the bakery next door. A fresh breeze is

“Every place has its dangers. You need to stay calm: that’s the game”

david stewart, todd glaser, billabong

history of modern big-wave surfing

Hawaiian kings went first in the 1700s; there was a tipping point nearly 60 years ago and the bar was raised again in the 1990s.

1956 American surfer Greg Noll, known as Da Bull, is photographed dropping a 15ft wave on a huge wooden longboard

in Waimea Bay, Oahu, Hawaii.

1963 Noll and Mike Stange surf the feared Third Reef Pipeline, with waves as big as those surfed in nearby Waimea by Noll.

1972 Surfers from Australia and America look for

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Australian surfer Laurie Towner is dwarfed by Shipsterns Bluff, a daunting big wave near Tasmania

“you need madness and safety. it’s calculated insanity”

to arrange the travel and assemble the gear and get to the beach in shape both physically and mentally. “Short breath, deep breath,” says Baker, describing his breathing pattern before he enters into the water. “This is for the oxygen levels. You stay calm this way.”

Most big riders stay relaxed and fit through similar habits. “One of the staple activities is yoga,” says Long. “From a physical standpoint, you’ve got the strength, flexibility and balance, and then you delve into the mental and spiritual philosophies behind it, and you get into world of trying to control your mind and your thoughts. It’s the panic in big waves in the ocean that is your biggest enemy – and what will kill you in the end.”

Besides yoga and breathing exercises, big riders spend time swimming, paddling, spear fishing, freediving, doing heavy cardio workouts and running on sand.

To Hell And Back Carlos Burle is grinning. He drops a 6ft wave on his longboard. He’s surfed waves more than 10 times higher than this one, but he paddles precisely on his way back to the outside of the break. His years of experience learning how to read the ocean make him a wise and consistent surfer. Alongside him now, his wife, Ligia, is benefiting from his advice about positioning. “There are times we’re far apart, like when I spent 20 days at Nazaré, for instance,” says Burle, of his marriage, “but when we’re together like now, I try to make up for that and stick real close.”

Back home, in Waialua, after a long session of stretching and helping his youngest son, Reno, play a video game, Burle remembers the worst of those 20 days at Nazaré, the Portuguese coastal town from which big-wave surfers head out to the Praia do Norte break. It might also have been the worst day of his life.

big waves outside Hawaii. Breaks like Rincon, in California, and Petacalco in Mexico, were registered for the first time.

andrew chrisholm

1986

At the recently discovered Todos Santos shallow reef in Mexico, US surfers such as Tom Curren and Mike Parsons surf waves 18-20ft high.

1991 Laird Hamilton, Buzzy Kerbox and Darrick Doerner begin to surf big waves on smaller boards (enabling greater control), towed by motorboat.

1992 Pe’ahi, a break commonly known as Jaws, in Maui, Hawaii, is surfed

by Hamilton and Kerbox, with the

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TOP FIVE NEW SPOTS Recently discovered breaks point to a big future for big-wave surfing

Belharra, France Has everything that big-wave hunters are looking for: “It’s a safe place to surf even when it’s big. It’s not so risky and you can surf here even on the biggest days,” says Twiggy Baker. Close to Biarritz, in France, Belharra became big news in big surf after a monster paddle session in January this year.

Nazare, Portugal Garrett McNamara has studied the waves off Praia do Norte, near the town of Nazaré, for four years. The wave known as Nazaré Cannon is a new frontier of tow-in surfing. The wall of water is huge and, according to big rider Carlos Burle, who surfed Nazaré in October 2013, there’s no hope of paddle surfing here.

Punta Docas, Chile “The Chilean coastline will surely yield more breaks like this,” says Burle. “There are a lot of inhospitable places.” The latest find is Punta Docas, north-east of Santiago. The water is cold, but the waves can reach up to 60ft. Is this the first step in Chile becoming the world centre of big-wave surfing?

Shipsterns Bluff, Tasmania Perhaps the most jaw-dropping wave of all time, this nasty reef produces double- and triple-up waves (with two or three lips over the surfer’s head, as seen on the opening spread of this article). Surfers take their chances not only with a huge wave but also with the rocks on which the waves can crash.

Mullaghmore, Ireland The freezing waters off Ireland are bearable thanks to modern wetsuits. Less easy to take is some of the most intense wave activity in the world. You must be quick to enjoy it, though. “I’ve got there and seen perfect surf breaking over the rocks,” says Burle, “but, half an hour later, there were only rocks.”

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Burle was riding the jet-ski that towed Maya Gabeira, one of few female big-wave surfers, on the morning of October 28, 2013. The waves were 60-70ft and Gabeira, a 27-year-old from Brazil, got up on her board on the second one of the day. Her board bounced on the water three times, she lost control and was thrown down into the ocean. She was assaulted by three massive waves in a row and disappeared underwater for about four minutes.

After spotting her, Burle tried to reach her on his jet-ski, which was towing a rescue

board, but failed. “I saw her moving, which showed she was alive, but when I saw her again I realised she wasn’t reacting.”

After another wave series, Gabeira was floating and then was gone again.

Burle got to where he thought she would surface: “I knew she would come up.” He leapt off the jet-ski, spread his arms to grab her and attached himself to her life vest. “When the tide dragged us, I firmly locked both feet in the sand and held Maya. Then the wave came then I lost my footing and shook about,” he recalls. the red bulletin

Grant ‘TWIGgy’ baker

Grant ‘Twiggy’ Baker is South Africa’s most decorated big-wave surfer. He won Mavericks Invitational for the second time in January of this year, and is the 2013/2014 Big Wave World Tour champion.

alan van gysen, brian bielmann

“Paddling is the true spirit of big-wave surfing” He lost his footing twice more as he dragged Gabeira to the beach where he was joined by a lifeguard, who had been unable to attempt a rescue because he lacked the gear to do so in those conditions. Gabeira underwent CPR until an ambulance came. “It wasn’t the right way to rescue her, but everything turned out all right,” says Burle.

Gabeira was awake and safe when Burle went back into water later the same day. He surfed a 78-footer – a world record contender currently under review the red bulletin

help of jet-skis: 60ft waves now surfable.

1992 Jeff Clark reveals his surfing of Mavericks, in Half Moon Bay, California, for over 15 years. The secret is out, it becomes a big-wave touchstone.

1992 A feature in Surfer

magazine calls Mavericks the ‘Voodoo Wave’, cementing its reputation.

1998 The ISA Big Wave Championship is held in Todos Santos, Mexico, on waves of 25-35ft. Brazilian Carlos Burle is the champion.

with Andrew Cotton’s, in the same spot, four-and-a-half months later. “That day,” says Burle, “I went to hell and came back.”

Big Gets Bigger Twiggy Baker does approve of one aspect of tow-in surfing: it has taught the paddle surfers more about safety in big waves.

“The rescue gear used on tow surfing is very important for paddle surfers,” he says, referring to inflatable suits and the jet-ski support at rescuing.

“You need the madness, but you need 55

Paddle vs Tow-in It divides big-wave surfing in two: should surfers reach the heights under their own steam, or be pulled towards walls of water by jet-skis?

Tow-in surfing technique was established in 1992, when jet-skis were first used to pull surfers so that they could catch faster-moving waves. Before that, paddling was the only way to reach the big ones. The biggest ones, surfed from the 1950s to the early 1990s, were 20-25ft high. With the introduction of tow-in, waves of 40, 50 and 60ft were ridden. It was as if mountain climbers found higher peaks than Everest.

Tow-in became the centre of the big-wave community.

But paddle surfing is now experiencing a resurgence.

“I’m never going to be the one that agrees that something is impossible,” says Greg Long. “If someone 10 years ago would have told me you were going to

go paddle into 20ft Jaws, that would have seemed impossible.”

In 2011, Hawaiian surfer Shane Dorian took paddle surfing to another level, when he propelled himself into the Jaws break at Maui using only his hands and surfed a 57ft wave.

Some surfers think paddle surfing is finite. “One thing I’m sure of,” says Carlos Burle, “is that paddling with the arms is limited.

Giant Teahupoo, when it’s more than 25ft? Can’t be done paddling.

Nazaré, 78ft tall? Impossible.”

“If you are trying to put a number on it, I think anything over 60ft on the face you’re getting into the tow-in realm,” says Long. “But given the proper conditions, say if you find the perfectly glassy day at, say, Cortes Bank, you could try and paddle into a bigger wave, and you probably could.”

That tow-in has led to significant progress in big-wave riding is undeniable. Previously unreachable spots were surfed

to have fully considered all possible safety aspects. It’s calculated insanity.”

Carlos Burle believes that an essential part of being human is to push limits, and technology has played a part in big-wave surfers regularly doing just that. “Lighter and warmer wetsuits, inflatable suits, better boards, rescue teams, radios, gear that can let you go to inhospitable areas. It’s all good.”

The planning and preparation for a big-wave surfer is laborious. You can count on the fingers of two hands how many big-wave swells happen during one year. “It’s challenging getting to the right place, trying to drop some waves and getting back alive,” says Baker. “It’s a tough lifestyle, to keep it up and keep travelling. There is no money involved.

The great pleasure is simply being there.”

Surfing big waves, especially the ones yet to be discovered, requires nautical permits, local knowledge and organised 56

2000

and new records set. New technologies and gear entered the game, which surfers of all types now use. “Paddle and towin are two different sports that helped each other and they both progressed,” says Grant Baker, who, like Long, Burle and all other big-wave surfers, is excited about what is to come. “The future will see paddling even bigger and tow-in taking the action to places we never thought would be viable.”

Big-wave world records Paddle 2005: 55ft (Shawn Dollar, Mavericks, California,) 2011: 57ft (Shane Dorian, Jaws, Hawaii) 2012: 61ft (Shawn Dollar, Cortes Bank, California) Tow-in 1998: 68ft (Carlos Burle, Mavericks, California) 2008: 77ft (Mike Parsons, Cortes Bank, California) 2011: 78ft (Garret McNamara, Nazaré, Portugal)

A tow-in session with Laird Hamilton (below), in Teahupoo, Tahiti, becomes the world-famous ride – and accompanying pic – known as The Millennium Wave.

2009

The Big Wave World Tour is launched.

2011 Danilo Couto, Shane Dorian and Ian Walsh surf a huge Jaws swell with 55-60ft waves, with no tow-in: paddle surfing is back on the agenda.

2011 Shane Dorian invents an inflatable flotation vest, based on airline life jackets, that gives big-wave surfers an extra level of safety – and the freedom to go higher.

safety crews. You need 4x4s, jet-skis, plenty of surfboards 9-12ft long, wetsuits and safety equipment. During a big-wave competition, the logistical difficulties and costs are less thanks to the involvement of surfing associations and local communities.

The Eddie Aikau Invitational and Mavericks Invitational have been good for the sport of big-wave surfing. They are fixed points in an otherwise random universe, places where crowds can gather and media can report for big-wave surfing’s increasing global fanbase. For many years, they were the only regular competitions, but they were joined by events at big-wave spots Todos Santos (Mexico), Dungeons (South Africa) and Pico Alto (Peru). “It pushes us out of our comfort zones,” says Greg Long. “We’re all friends, but when prize money is involved, a competitive instinct naturally arises, with 45 minutes to catch a wave during a heat. Then, at the end of the day, when we get back to the pier or wherever, it’s all friendship and fun.”

After further big-wave spots emerged, during the last decade, a tournament was announced to take in the world’s big breaks.

Former surfer Gary Linden promoted the first Big Wave World Tour in 2009/10; Carlos Burle was the first winner.

“The BWWT got bigger and it’s still growing,” says Burle. “We all owe Gary for this. What he’s doing is awesome.”

From the 2014-15 season, which begins in August this year, the tour’s organisation is under the rule of sports marketing company ZoSea, which performs the same task for the ASP World Tours, regular surfing’s most prestigious series.

Changes made by ZoSea include better webcasts and media coverage, increased marketing and new rules, such as the wave coefficient, which means that a bigger wave face is worth more points.

“Previously, at Chile’s or Peru’s contests,” says Long, “if you weren’t there on the cliff you didn’t get to see any of it until a couple of weeks later, when the photos and video eventually came out. So the new regime is going to be a good thing, I’m sure.”

Back at Burle’s house in Waialua, Reno eats his popcorn and Ligia steps into the kitchen, where Burle is seated at the table with his laptop open. On the screen, twinkling red, yellow, and green colours indicate weather forecast radars monitoring storms around the globe. He studies the map, looking for a next move, shakes his head and complains about the winds. When the red spots move into the right places, then it’s time to move. bigwaveworldtour.com

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corbis(2)

MAN OR MACHINE?

TAJ BURROW

The

odd Couple Seth Rogen and Zac Efron fight for the right to party in their new film, Bad Neighbours Words: Ann Donahue

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Seth Rogen

Zac Efron

Jeff Vespa/Contour, picturedesk.com

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alk, bonk, sprawl.

Walk, bonk, sprawl.

Seth Rogen, the king of smart stoner comedy, is filming multiple takes of a scene on a quiet residential Los Angeles street. He’s walking across the front lawn of a tidy renovated Victorian house, minding his own business, when an oversized inflatable exercise ball slams into him and knocks him off his feet.

Walk, bonk, sprawl.

Rogen overexaggerates the impact for effect, launching onto a safety mat. A stuntman takes a few turns, pushing the pratfall even more. The crew laughs appreciatively when director Nick Stoller yells “Cut!” By contrast, the swarm of paparazzi across the street could not care less. All of their the red bulletin

telephoto lenses are trained not on Rogen’s repeated flailing, but on his co-star, Zac Efron, as he stands motionless in the background of the scene.

This is the set of Bad Neighbours, with the irresistible comic pairing of Disney-pretty-boy-turnedadult-pretty-boy Efron as a Machiavellian college fraternity boss and everyman Rogen as a sort-of upstanding family guy. The comedy, also starring Rose Byrne, is generating a lot of buzz with its Old School-meets-TheHangover trailers. Here, Rogen and Efron come clean about making a dirty comedy. the red bulletin: Are your characters essentially the generals in a war between a family and a fraternity? seth rogen: My character is a new father, and he and his

wife used to party together a lot and I think they’re having a hard time now that their lives are drastically changing. They just get their first house and then a fraternity moves in next door. At first, it raises all of our temptations, and then it turns into contempt.

Zac Efron: We’re a pretty rambunctious group of guys.

We actually burned down our other [fraternity] house.

My character is the president of the fraternity and he’s coming to grips with how quickly his adult future is coming and that he’s not going to get to be the king of the world anymore.

How does this compare to what you’re going through in real life?

SR: I definitely relate to it. Me and my wife don’t have any kids, and this is probably why we don’t have kids. We’re afraid that we won’t be able to do any of the fun shit that we like to do right now.

There’s some raunchy stuff in this movie: dildos, babies eating condoms, pornographic garden shrubbery, you name it.

Rose Byrne, who typically plays angelic characters, is in the middle of all of this [as Rogen’s wife].

What’s she like?

“Zac’s a lot tougher than I thought” Seth Rogen SR: She gets right in there.

I think she says some pretty dirty things herself. We really didn’t want it to be a story about the naggy wife stopping the husband from doing stupid fun shit.

ZE: Seems like a pretty perfect wife.

SR: You almost believe she would marry me.

“Seth puts himself out there.

He’s just a great guy” Zac Efron ZE: She’s so quick: she has fantastic timing. In the dancing scenes with the fraternity, she was so damn funny. She really went for it.

Was this a deliberate choice on everyone’s part to change up the kind of roles they’re known for?

ZE: I did a movie with Dennis Quaid [At Any Price], and I asked him ‘If you could go back to your younger self, what would you tell him?’

He said to just keep doing as many different types of movies and you can, and always change it up. I only wanted to be in a comedy if it was something I believed in. I believed in Seth and Nick Stoller [director of Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Get Him to The Greek].

SR: We won’t let you down, Zac. ZE: I don’t think you can.

SR: Oh, yes we can.

What made you laugh hardest during filming?

SR: The fraternity is always throwing these crazy, ridiculous themed parties.

They throw a De Niro-themed party where everyone dresses as a different character. Davey Franco’s De Niro impression is pretty staggering.

What have you learned about each other that you didn’t know before?

SR: Zac’s a lot tougher than I thought [laughs].

ZE: I think Seth put himself out there pretty well. I knew a lot about him. He’s just a great guy.

SR: I’m really racist. I keep that under wraps.

Bad Neighbours is out worldwide from May 8: neighbors-movie.com

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Sheep, Dog & Wolf

Master of all

A pop prodigy with a singular DIY ethic: everything on his amazing records is him, from bass to beats to… African thumb piano?

Words: Sam Wicks Photography: Tobias Kraus

palette of sounds by borrowing new While a stream of office workers surveys instruments and then scrambling to lunch options in Wellington’s Midland acquire the skills necessary to realise Park, Daniel McBride describes what he the avant-pop sound evolving in his mind. uses to compose and conduct one-man He taught himself how to play cello pocket symphonies in his bedroom. and euphonium simply because he “I have my drum kit, an electric and felt the tracks needed an acoustic guitar, a bass guitar,” he says, them. If he felt the EP as the suited-and-booted divide their needed another layer attention between takeout and phones. then he would be the “There’s my saxophone, my clarinet, one to provide it. a Balinese dragon flute. I’ve got a little “I didn’t go into the African thumb piano that makes some recording of those songs great noises, various percussive stuff, thinking, ‘I want to have recorders. There’s a flute I’m borrowing, seven instruments a French horn. I used to have a euphonium, playing at once’; I did it because it felt but I had to give it back to the person right,” says McBride. “I built on what I felt I borrowed it from. And I’m actually they needed and went from there. I don’t about to buy a piano from Trade Me.” have any grand plans. This is just how A multi-instrumentalist always my brain wants to make music. looking for new sounds to add to his “I definitely wasn’t going into the songs, McBride has somehow channelled recording like, ‘I want to make something an overflow of instrumentation into a complex and difficult to listen to.’ I dabble complex mix of jazz, folk and indie rock. in lots of different instruments, and so The 20-year-old has been compared with making it complex was just a natural chamber pop proponent Sufjan Stevens thing for me to do. I enjoyed

by The Guardian and dubbed how all those different a “rare pearl” by Italian instruments sound and how Vogue. Last November, he The line-up they meshed together.” won the prestigious Critics’ Daniel McBride – vocals, The multitasking that Choice Prize at the New guitar, bass, drums, went into Ablutophobia came Zealand Music Awards. saxophone, piano, Balinese dragon flute, etc, etc with an occupational hazard: McBride first appeared a few months after its as Sheep, Dog & Wolf – a nod Discography Egospect (album, 2013) release, McBride developed to a video game of the same Ablutophobia (EP, 2011) RSI and used his enforced name – on a five-track EP, Teenage sticks downtime from Sheep, Dog Albutophobia, that he wrote, & Wolf to study composition recorded and produced at his He is a true musical multitasker as Sheep, at Wellington’s New Zealand family home in Auckland.

Dog & Wolf, but Daniel School of Music. Once his (He now lives in Wellington.)

McBride got his start in RSI was under control, work During the EP’s nine-month music drumming in teen pop-punk trio Bandicoot. on the debut album began gestation, he added to his

in earnest, with McBride retreating to his parents’ house to develop a blueprint for the long-player, Egospect.

“I spent a lot of time there by myself in the basement – it was very conducive to self-reflection,” he says. “I spent all of that time introspecting, so the lyrics that found their way onto Egospect are like me having a conversation with myself because I wasn’t talking to anyone else really. It was a journey of self-inspection on that album.”

If Ablutophobia announced McBride’s singular musical talent, Egospect confirms him as one to watch. Its 10 songs have found an audience beyond these shores.

A mention on The Guardian’s music website piqued the interest of a European promoter who organised a run of northern hemisphere shows. A second European tour is planned for later this year, and McBride is considering bringing other musicians in to swell the scope of the shows. But when it comes to recording new tracks for his next album, he’s adamant that the three beasts of Sheep, Dog & Wolf will stay a one-man band.

“I do have to be aware that I can be indulgent, just because I have dabbled in so many instruments and I do everything myself,” he admits. “I worry that it might come across as if I’m trying to impress you, like, ‘Look at all the stuff I can play.’

But really, I just want to do music in a way where I don’t feel restricted. I’m determined to live in this fantasy world where I feel like I can do anything.”

“ This is just how my brain wants me to make music”

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sheepdogandwolf.com the red bulletin

king

of The

Pit Lane Tr a c k s i in t h e de at t h e Ad b e Ro l a n d u s i n e s s a n d l a i d e 5 0 0 w it t Dan e: ‘ I ’m o n h e i r f e a r s o m h t h e b e s t V Wo r d s : 8 Sup e ly inte e , full Ph otog Rob e r t Tigh r o e n s t t e e raphy: e am ow rc ars te am d in wi Simon nning’ n e r, Davids on

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a

sk 100 people involved in V8 Supercars about Roland Dane and you’ll get 100 different answers. Fans of rival teams have labelled the Red Bull Racing team boss as ‘arrogant’, ‘unsportsmanlike’, a ‘whinging Pom’ (he’s irish) and worse.

Red Bull Racing fans will tell you he’s a masterful tactician who has what it takes 64

to win races. According to Neil Crompton, an Australian motorsport commentator, he’s great theatre. “Roland is gruff and tough and says it like it is,” says Crompton.

“He’s loved and hated, respected and feared.” Rival team owner Brad Jones sits with Dane on the board of the V8 Supercars racing series, and has been impressed by his business acumen and work ethic. “I don’t want to sound like his love-child,” says Jones, “but he does an incredible amount of work for the sport.”

Born in Belfast in 1956, Dane started racing motorbikes as a teenager, before turning to race cars in his mid-20s.

“I wasn’t brave enough to make it as a driver,” he says. “I enjoyed it, but I wasn’t hell-bent on winning because I didn’t want to kill myself. When it comes to business, I’m only interested in winning.”

David Hadfield (back to camera) fills the fuel tank in Craig Lowndes’s car as the rest of the Red Bull Racing crew work on the tyres. Below: Craig Lowndes waits on the grid before the start of Race 1

Roland Dane The 57-year-old motorsport obsessive hasn’t looked back since moving from England to Australia in 2003, where he set about applying his “only interested in winning” business mantra to V8 Supercars.

He has guided his Red Bull Racing team to six championship titles.

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“ H e ’ s h a r d b u t fa i r – t h at ’ s t h e s c r i p t h e g av e u s t o s ay ”

thrills and spills Above: the team look on as Scott McLaughlin drops a bottle of champagne on the podium Left: Craig Lowndes is briefly airborne as he races through the chicane Top: the Red Bull Racing pit crew await the arrival of Jamie Whincup into the pits

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“He’s instilled a winning m e n ta l i t y into each member of the team”

The 57-year-old says he was an academic failure who thrived in his first job, as an apprentice at UK sportscar manufacturer Panther Westwind. He rose to run the company then left to set up a luxury car dealership. In 1996, he formed Triple Eight Race Engineering (UK), which has gone on to become one of the most successful teams in British motorsport.

In 2003, Dane moved Down Under to take over Briggs Motor Sport, a V8 Supercars team based in Queensland (his father’s family is from Australia).

The team was renamed Triple Eight Race Engineering (Australia) and Dane set about replicating the success he had in England. The team won its first race in 2005 and first drivers’ championship in 2008. More drivers’ titles followed in 2009, 2011 and 2012: all four wins for Jamie Whincup. Red Bull took over as the naming rights sponsor last year and the team continued its dominance in the 2013 championship, with Whincup winning a fifth title, and his teammate Craig Lowndes finishing second.

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 28, CLIPSAL 500, ADELAIDE STREET CIRCUIT QUALIFYING It’s the season opener of the 2014 V8 Supercars Championship and Red Bull Racing is dominating qualifying. Whincup earns pole for Race 1, and Lowndes pole for Race 2, the 39-lap, 125km races run with about an hour’s gap between them on Saturday. Whincup also qualifies second in Race 2, but Lowndes is third on the grid for Race 1. Both men drive a Holden VF Commodore, as do nine other men in the field of 25. “It could have been better,” says Graeme Reilly, a gofer in the Red Bull garage. “We could have finished first and second in both sessions.”

The 69-year-old was at Triple Eight before Dane took over. “He made it clear that if we wanted to win races then some days we might have to work 15 hours and some weeks we might work seven days straight,” says Reilly. “Some people weren’t happy with the changes, but Roland replaced those that didn’t want to work for him with people who fit the mould.”

Triple Eight’s first full season under Dane, in 2004, was a struggle. Engines blew up, cars crashed and the drivers were unhappy. The signing of Craig Lowndes for the 2005 season changed the game. The 39-year-old Australian was, and still is, one of the most popular drivers in

all together now The Red Bull Racing crew prides itself on its good team work ethic, in evidence here as its members stop for a last-minute pit stop huddle

69

the series. He delivered the results Dane needed to build a successful team, winning the Sandown 500 and finishing second in the 2005 drivers’ championship.

“The team was so excited after we won our first race, but Roland was quite reserved,” says Reilly. “He gave us a pat on the back, but made it clear that it was only one win and one win was not a season. He instilled that winning mentality into each member of the team.”

Winning has become such a habit in the Triple Eight garage, after 105 race wins and five drivers’ championships since Lowndes’ Sandown 500 victory nine years ago, that the pit crew offer polite applause for the two poles and get back to work.

Dane’s straight-talking will to win has seen him offend people. In 2012, he called driver Mark Winterbottom as “popular as a turd in a swimming pool” and last year he accused his former team manager Adrian Burgess of being a “motor racing mercenary” after he quit Red Bull Racing mid-season. Burgess’ departure saw Dane take on the team manager job on a temporary basis before promoting Mark Dutton to the role for the 2014 season.

Dutton, 36, was Whincup’s engineer for 73 of his 75 race wins. Today’s qualifying session is his first day at the head of the ‘prat perch’, the nickname for the position at the front of the garage where the team manager and the two engineers study the data and decide on team strategy.

Dane takes a seat at the back of the garage in front of a wall of seven monitors that deliver more data. He studies the screens intently, scribbles notes in his notepad and listens to other teams over the race radio. After 10 years, on and off, calling the shots as team manager he admits it’s tough to let Dutton do the job. “It’s hard because I like being in control,” says Dane. “At the moment, I miss not having my finger on the trigger.”

SATURDAY, MARCH 1 RACE 1 & RACE 2 It was after midnight when the mechanics left the garage last night. They had to replace the clutch in Whincup’s car.

Craig Lowndes leads Jamie Whincup in Race 2. Below left: Jamie Whincup faces the media after Race 1

“We do a 45-hour week over a three-day race weekend,” says Ty Freele, a 34-yearold who is one of three mechanics who work on Whincup’s car. You’ve got to absolutely love this sport to do it.”

Dane has a 36ft racing yacht and sails in regattas when time allows. He likes wine, too, but motorsport is his obsession and he puts in the most hours. He consumes motorsport books, magazines and documentaries, and as many races as he can watch, with a view to finding an edge.

“He lives for it,” says Dutton. “I get grief from him for not living it enough.

If I come in on Monday and haven’t watched Formula One that weekend, he’s like, ‘Why weren’t you watching the race?’ He’s a hard taskmaster.”

‘Hard but fair’ is the response from the crew in the Red Bull garage when asked what Dane is like to work for.

“That’s the script he gave us this weekend,” says David Cauchi, Lowndes’ engineer. “That’s all we’re allowed to say.”

“He scares us,” says Lowndes. “He always wants and demands the best. I’ve underdelivered at some races and he hasn’t talked to me for three days. When you succeed, he’s quick to say, ‘Well done’ but at the same time he’s like, ‘Now we know you can win, go and do it again.’”

Whincup delivers in Race 1, leading Lowndes home for a Red Bull Racing onetwo. During the last lap, Dane takes off his headset and joins the rest of his team leaning over the barriers on the pit lane to cheer the drivers across the finish line.

Minutes later, all signs of emotion are gone and he’s back on message. “We’re happy with first and second, but we’ve still got two more races this weekend,” he says.

Even with a short turnaround between races, the atmosphere in the garage is remarkably calm. The team goes about its tasks with controlled urgency. Dane insists that they must never stop working.

“There’s a DNF [did not finish] somewhere in that car,” he says to his mechanics. “It’s your job to find it.”

In the second race, Lowndes leads from start to finish, but a botched pit stop costs Whincup valuable seconds and he finishes third. The boss isn’t happy.

“That pit stop compromised Jamie’s race,” Dane says. “I’m happy we got two wins, but that shouldn’t have happened.”

SUNDAY, MARCH 2 RACE 3 On a workbench beside each car is an open laptop and on the screen is a 50-point checklist. “You’ve effectively got the

“ H e a lway s wa n t s a n d d e m a n d s t h e b e s t. I f y o u u n d e r - d e l i v e r at a r a c e , h e m i g h t n o t ta l k t o y o u f o r t h r e e d ay s ” 70

the red bulletin

driver’s life in your hands, so everything is checked and double-checked and triple-checked,” says Matt Cook, a 37-year-old mechanic on Lowndes’ car.

It’s just after 3pm, and 25,000 fans roars their approval when the cars line up on the grid for the main event of the weekend, 78 laps and 250km around the Adelaide street circuit. Inside the garage it’s almost tranquil. Engineers talk to their drivers via the radio but nearly everybody else in the garage is silent. “We can’t do much once the car leaves the garage.

We bless it and send it,” says Cook.

Whincup, starting from second after the qualifying session three hours earlier, gets the perfect start to lead into the first corner. Lowndes is seventh on the grid, but an early pit stop means he has empty track ahead of him and, as the other drivers come in to pit, he works his way into second place behind Whincup.

On lap 49, Whincup comes in for a final pit stop. He exits the pits with a five-second lead over Lowndes and looks set for an easy ride to the finish. On the screens in the garage showing the TV coverage of the race, the pit stop is shown again, and again. For the first time all

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weekend there’s an air of panic in the garage. Dutton is talking to a race official, who explains that the car controller – the man with the unenviable job of holding the stop lollipop while standing in front of a rapidly decelerating race car – touched the car during the pit stop, earning Whincup a drive-through penalty.

Dane is shouting into the microphone on his headset: “Dutto, tell them to reinvestigate. Re-investigate!” Dutton comes to the rear of the garage to explain to Dane, face-to-face: “The stewards have said he’s touched the car, which means he’s worked on the car, which is in breach of the rules.” One of the pit crew shouts, “That’s f–––ing bull––.” This is the first time all weekend voices have been raised.

“You’ve got to take the penalty now, or he’s out of the race,” advises Dane, who knows the rulebook inside out.

As Whincup pulls into the pits to take the penalty, Dane gets in the face of the official to tell him what he thinks of the decision. A few laps later, Lowndes finishes in second place, to take an overall lead in the championship. It would be a great weekend for most teams, but 10 minutes after the race, with Whincup’s

penalty causing him to finish in 15th place, Dane is analytical but still quietly fuming. “Our car controller was pointing out damage to the car, so the notion he was working on it is a narrow interpretation of the rules. We’ve still got positives to take from the weekend. Our cars are fast, Craig is leading the championship and there are still 35 races left.”

An evening flight back home to Brisbane means there’s no chance for Dane to let his hair down, something else he’s notoriously good at. “When he’s not working he’s the funniest, most lovable guy you could imagine,” says Derek Warwick, the former Formula One driver, a long-time friend and business partner of Dane’s. “He gets drunk with the mechanics, he’s a great storyteller and he gets up to all sorts of stupidity. He’s a Jekyll & Hyde character in many ways.”

Says Whincup: “It’s not two different personalities, but if you’re switched on as hard as he is, you need to have an off button, otherwise you’d explode. He’s not young, but he drinks like a teenager.”

But not tonight. Dane’s parting words are all business: “There’s still work to do.” v8supercars.com.au

HIGHER

scott serfas

calli 72

ng J e r e m y J o n es c h a n g e d th e w o r ld o f b i g - m o u nta i n snowboarding. Now he wa nts to c h a n g e th e w o r ld Words: Megan Michelson

but when Jeremy Jones saw a photo of it – a sharp, angular ridge flanked by an array of steep, snow-covered spines – he knew it was the one.

Last summer, Jones was looking for his next remote mission, a summit to climb for his new snowboarding film, Higher, which debuts this autumn. In mid-July, one of his cinematographers, Chris Figenshau, texted Jones a photo of an unnamed peak in Nepal from a library book on Himalayan culture.

All Jones could text in response was, “Holy crap. Will call tomorrow.”

After extensive online research and speaking with climbers who’d spent time in the area, Jones and Figenshau pieced together the details. The peak, which lay in the shadows of the popular climbing route Ama Dablam, faced north and stood at an elevation of around 6,400m. Autumn would be their best chance of getting decent snow on the face, which meant the crew had only two months to plan the trip.

In September, Jones and Figenshau, plus two cameramen, a photographer and another snowboarder, flew to Kathmandu and took a small propeller plane to Lukla, the launching point for the trek to Everest base camp.

For 12 days they hiked on foot to reach the snowline. They set up base camp at 5,000m and began to orient themselves after seeing the mountain for the first time.

“It was one of the most beautiful peaks I’ve ever seen,” says Jones.

They spent the next five weeks attempting to climb and snowboard the unnamed peak. Locals who heard of their plan told them that they were crazy and that both of their goals were impossible. However, Jones didn’t listen to them and he eventually stood on the summit ridge, overlooking some of the highest mountains in the world.

Time seemed to stand still for him at that moment. The journey to this point, he thought to himself, had been 74

the biggest reward. Then he stepped into his snowboard and dropped over the edge, descending into the unknown.

-----One week later, Jones is wearing a button-up shirt in a stuffy conference room in San Francisco.

He’s been invited to speak on a panel at an event called Mountain Meltdown, hosted by Climate One, a public-affairs forum that brings together innovators and leaders to discuss climate change and the planet’s future.

Jones, 39, has the dishevelled, shaggy-haired look of a guy who just crawled out of a tent. At the front of the room, he appears out of place alongside a clean-cut, New York-based writer and a respected scientist, both of whom are advocates for climate-change policy.

Turns out, he’s not as out of place as he seems.

In recent years, Jones, a 10-time Snowboarder magazine Big Mountain Rider of the Year, has become his sport’s most outspoken – and unlikeliest – environmentalist. To Jones, the logic was quite simple: to keep snowboarding for the rest of his life, he’d got to figure out a way to save winter first.

“Growing up in Cape Cod, I was studying the Pilgrims and their harsh winters and I remember asking my teacher, ‘Why don’t we have harsh winters anymore?’ ” Jones says in front of the event audience. “I wanted to be able to snowboard in my backyard.

I was way ahead of Al Gore on that one.”

In 2007, he founded a nonprofit organisation called Protect Our Winters, with the goal of mobilising the wintersports community to fight against climate change. “I realised the mountains were changing and I knew that I needed to reach skiers and snowboarders around the world,” says Jones. “I felt like we needed to come together.”

Jones, a lone athlete alongside academics and activists, is at the forefront of a controversial and critical fight to protect the one thing he loves to do the most. Because of snowboarding, he’s made four trips to Washington, DC, to meet with lawmakers over climatechange policy and to talk about the economic impact of warming winters on the NZ$12.2 billion US winter tourism industry. Last spring, President Obama named Jones a Champion of Change for his environmental advocacy.

But like the mountains he scales, it’s an uphill battle. “I’d love to say we’re helping to try to pass climate legislation,

Jones views his political activism as a necessary by-product of his first love: backcountry snowboarding. Below, a recently conquered peak in Nepal

Todd Jones, Jeff Hawe

T h e m o u n ta i n h a d p r o b a b ly never been c l i m b e d, let alone snowboarded,

Jones’s climatechange campaign charity, Protect Our Winters, has recently picked up more support from the snow industry

IN A DECADE of s n o w b o a r din g , H e s aw d r a m at ica l ly s h r in k in g g l acie r s

but we’re just trying to have that conversation and focus on the rights to regulate emissions,” he says.

Surprisingly, the biggest fight Jones is waging is within his own industry.

Many ski resorts are slow to acknowledge and adapt to warming winters and, according to Jones, less than two per cent of the ski and snowboard industry are involved in POW’s efforts.

But that is shifting. The CEOs of three major North American ski resorts – Whistler, Aspen, and Jackson Hole – are also present in San Francisco to talk about climate change and what their resorts are doing to combat it, ranging from political activism to building hydroelectric plants. “We want companies to use their power and their voice to say, ‘Climate change is real. So let’s do something about it,’ ” he says.

------

Dan Milner, Jeff Curley(2)

Jones moved from competitive snowboarding to backcountry adventures and started work on a highly acclaimed trilogy of action sports films

When snowboarding was born, Jones was ready and waiting.

At nine years old, he got his first snowboard at a general store in Vermont. That was the mid-1980s, and snowboarding wasn’t even allowed at ski resorts yet. So he’d climb uphill carrying his snowboard near his grandfather’s house in Stowe. Later, he became the first snowboarder to get registered, once Stowe permitted one-plankers to ride the lifts in 1987.

Most of his late teens and 20s were spent following the pro snowboard circuit in America’s West, sleeping on couches to chase contests. He followed his two older brothers, Todd and Steve, to Jackson, Wyoming, where, in 1996, they had started Teton Gravity Research,

an action sports film production company. There, Jones discovered the lure and adventure of big-mountain and backcountry terrain.

Eventually, he made his way to Lake Tahoe and gave up competing in order to dedicate himself to filming and exploring steep, snow-covered lines everywhere from Alaska to Greenland.

When he couldn’t find the perfect snowboard for climbing mountains, he launched his own company, Jones Snowboards, which makes some of the industry’s most respected splitboards and big-mountain snowboards.

In 2008, tired of the usual helicoptercentric shred movies he’d been filming for years – at the cost of a heavy carbon footprint – he partnered with TGR and set out to make a trilogy of humanpowered, backcountry snowboard films.

His first two films, Deeper and Further, debuted in 2010 and 2012, respectively. When Deeper premiered at an amphitheatre in Truckee, California, Jones hoped that 200 people would show up to fill the seats. Instead, the place sold out all 1,700 tickets. The film went on to become a selection at the Banff Mountain Film Festival and Jones won athlete of the year at the X-Dance Film Festival. Higher will be the third and final film in the series.

“Jeremy has always been pretty conscientious,” says older brother and TGR co-founder Steve Jones. “A great deal of thought goes into everything he does. His idea for the trilogy was to inspire people to embrace adventure and wild places. Without saying so directly, it makes the environment an emotional part of someone’s DNA.” -----In Jones’ travels, he discovered places like Chamonix, France, where, in over a decade of snowboarding, he noticed drastically shrinking glaciers. He visited low-elevation resorts in British Columbia that held snow 30 years ago but are now shuttered, deserted mounds of grass and dirt, even in February.

Soon, science started to back up his observations.

“Today, around 30-50 per cent of ski areas are experiencing warmerthan-normal winters,” says Anne Nolin, a professor of geosciences and hydroclimatology at Oregon State University. “That number will get pushed up to 70-80 per cent of ski areas in 50-100 years. We’ll see an increased frequency of warmer winters, a decline 77

“ I n e v e r i n t e n d e d to get into politics. b u t t h at ’s w h e r e real change h a p p ENS ”

Greg Von Doersten, Jeff Curley(2)

of annual snowfall, and our winter seasons will get shorter and shorter.”

Recent projections estimate that the global temperature is expected to rise by more than 2°C by 2020 and double that by 2050. A study by the University of Waterloo found that by 2039, only half of the ski areas in America’s north-east will be able to maintain 100-day-long ski seasons, a cutback that would ultimately result in a revenue loss of $3.2 billion (NZ$3.8 billion) for the country’s northeast ski and snowboard industry alone.

If those temperature projections are accurate, obviously the planet will have much bigger issues than whether or not humans can still ski and snowboard. But

Jones figures that if he can rally skiers and snowboarders, then perhaps they can help save the planet. “It’s not this far-off deal,” he says. “And people now seem to be accepting that we have an issue. If we can reach that point as a country, then I think we can make changes.”

-----A few days after the San Francisco event, Jones is back home.

Perched at his kitchen counter at his house in Truckee, where he lives with his wife, Tiffany, and their two young children, he has his laptop open and is catching up

Jones is taken seriously in both corporate boardrooms and on the slopes – but he’s much more at ease in the great wide open the red bulletin

on emails after weeks of being off the grid in Nepal.

Ask him about snowboarding and his face lights up. He’ll ignore his emails and talk in a breathless stream about the aesthetic nature of a desolate mountain peak and the innate joy he gets from pushing into deeper, undiscovered terrain.

“I never intended to get into politics,” he admits. “If you’d told me when I started Protect Our Winters that I’d be going to Washington to meet with lawmakers, I would have said, ‘There’s no way this foundation is getting political.’ But that’s where real change needs to happen.”

In October, the group sent 17 pro athletes, including snowboarders John Jackson and Gretchen Bleiler and skiers Angel Collinson and Chris Davenport, to Washington DC to talk to lawmakers about their support of the US Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed Carbon Pollution Standard.

Industry stalwarts like Burton, K2 and Black Diamond are also joining forces with POW in a variety of programmes, including one that sends pro athletes into schools to talk to students about climate change. In 2013, more than 20 US ski resorts signed the National Ski Areas Association’s Climate Challenge initiative, which helps resorts set goals for carbon reduction.

“POW started because of Jeremy’s drive to make a real difference,” says Chris Steinkamp, the organisation’s executive director. “I think he’s an environmentalist because he knows exactly what there is to lose – he spends his life in the mountains and this experience drives his need to protect it.”

Ask Jones if he even considers himself an environmentalist and he’ll just shrug.

“I’ve always been passionate about protecting the outdoors, but I kind of reluctantly became an environmentalist,” he says. “In the sense of this hardcore lobbying and public battling, that’s the part I would love to not be involved in.

To be honest,” he says, reflecting, “I’d much rather be snowboarding.”

When Jones dropped into his line in Nepal, the snow was softer than he anticipated, a thin layer of powder covering a nearly vertical sheet of rock and ice.

With his mind focused on the highconsequence task at hand, he arced fast, fluid turns down 450m pointed crest, which was shaped like the mountain’s backbone. At the bottom, he raised his fist in the air, relief, joy and wonder filling his mind. It was the biggest spine he’d ever ridden. protectourwinters.org

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the

beat master He eclipses Keith Moon for frantic drumming and plays concerts nearly five hours long: Martin Grubinger is the greatest percussionist in the world

Words: Andreas Rottenschlager Photography: Christoph Meissner

here are nights when Martin Grubinger collapses from exhaustion behind two soundproofed doors in his rehearsal room. Sleep gets the better of him after he spends anything up to 14 hours at his percussion instruments.

“I’ve been known to drop off at my marimba,” he says, “and one time I just lay down on the floor next to my drum kit. You play until you are completely exhausted. Eventually your upper body just keels forward. And then you wake up again a few hours later.”

Grubinger, 30, is sitting in the small kitchen on the ground floor of his house in the small town of Neukirchen an der Vockla in Austria. The walls are painted white and there’s the smell of coffee.

Grubinger comes across as remarkably fit for someone who spends the night in a music rehearsal room. He has a boyish face, smooth skin and ruddy cheeks.

Plump veins throb on his lower arms.

Martin Grubinger is the world’s most radical percussionist. He can play several percussion instruments at virtuoso level.

He is one of the best in the world at interpreting the marimba, the XXL version of the xylophone. The New York Times called him a “master of the high-speed chase” for his ability to make 40 beats a second on the head of a snare drum.

Grubinger is the only kind of musician who plays marathon percussion concerts with classical orchestras that last for hours. His heart pounds away at a rate of up to 195 beats per minute and his weight can drop by up to 2kg during a show. Last year, he performed 68 concerts on three continents.

His playing has left its mark on a whole section of instruments. Before Grubinger came along, percussionists played in the back row of the orchestra.

Now composers are writing pieces just for him. Some of them are so complicated that only he can play them.

“What appeals to me is taking things to the limit,” he explains. “I want to know what I can get out of my body and the instrument. As the soloist, you’re playing with 70 musicians in the orchestra. You have to get every single note just right over a period of several hours. You need to be as fit as an endurance athlete, otherwise there’ll be too much acid in your muscles and you won’t have the strength for minutes of frantic activity at a time.

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“But at the same time, you also have to be able to play with feeling, to convey phrasing and volume. You’ve got to be able to do it all, from playing the cymbals almost inaudibly to going mad on the pipe snare – 140 decibels is as loud as a jet fighter taking off.”

Grubinger grew up in the Austrian town of Thalgau, near Salzburg, the son of a professor of percussion. As a boy, he heard his father’s pupils practising in the family home. He says that he learnt music in the way other children learn to speak.

Aged 12, he passed the entrance exam for a private university of music in Linz.

That meant regular school lessons in the mornings and undergraduate courses in the afternoons. He left school as soon as he could, aged 15, without graduating and the register showing that he had missed 680 hours’ of lessons. He then spent most of the next six years either in the university’s rehearsal rooms or his bed, so that by the age of 21, he was a virtuoso percussionist, playing internationally in competitions and with orchestras.

But this wasn’t enough, so he devised a challenge for himself: play six concerts in a single evening, including three premieres, at the Golden Hall of Viennese Music Association, the most famous concert hall in the world. In all, that would be four-and-a-half hours of extremely complex music – 600,000 notes in a single evening, no sheet music. Grubinger would learn the concert by heart.

“I’d like to give the drums a new identity,” he said.

“You’ll kill yourself,” said one of his former professors.

At 6pm on November 17, 2006, Grubinger took to the stage of the Golden Hall and positioned himself in the middle of a semi-circle made up of 200 percussion instruments: conga drums, bongos, kettledrums, cymbals.

Accompanying him was the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra. He began drumming. The veins in his neck began to bulge and sweat dripped from his face onto the heads of the drums. During the

On the beat: “Learning marathon concerts is like learning choreography”

breaks, he dipped his hands in ice-cold water. Afterwards, he was unable to remember large parts of the evening – “I’d got into the flow. I was watching myself drumming. My hands knew by themselves where they had to go” – but he had pulled off this tour de force. His hands were shaking as he took his bow.

One review likened his performance to climbing Mount Everest without extra oxygen. The percussion marathon had made Martin Grubinger famous.

It’s dusk in Austria and Grubinger is looking out of a window at coniferous trees and gentle hills in the rock-star house he had built last year. The living area on the first floor is made up of three glass cubes. On the ground floor, the rehearsal room measures 200m2. Lead doors keep the music in check and the windows are triple-glazed. Visiting musicians can practise here round the clock. Grubinger had a bedroom built for them. A delivery ramp leads straight to the rehearsal room. “I need that to survive,” he explains. He takes six tonnes of equipment with him when he’s on the road with an orchestra. “You’d go mad if you had to drag stuff up to the first floor.”

With a packed 2014 concert schedule, Grubinger has to practice, so at about 9pm, he heads for his rehearsal room.

There’s just one point to clear up: how do you learn 600,000 notes by heart?

“You break the concert down into movements. You break the movements down into units of four bars each. You

THE CONCERT THAT MADE HIM FAMOUS LASTED FOUR-AND-A-HALF HOURS, DURING WHICH He PLAYED 600,000 NOTES 82

then practise those four bars, for weeks if necessary, at the lowest level you can set on the metronome: 35bpm. You practise those four bars until they become second nature. Then you practise the next four.

Learning marathon concerts by heart is the same as learning choreography.”

Grubinger doesn’t use music stands.

“I don’t like them. They get between me and the audience. Music stands block off my power.”

If you want to understand what Grubinger means by his power, type the words “planet rudiment” into YouTube and click on the top result. Rudiments are technical exercises as practised by percussion pupils during lessons. Planet Rudiment is a piece Grubinger wrote that ramps the technique up to the extreme.

At his concerts, he usually saves it for last.

In the video, Grubinger stands in front of a black pipe snare. He takes a deep breath and then starts to rap his drumsticks on the taut drumhead. The tempo rises until his sticks disappear in a blur. He also twirls the sticks in his hands time and again; he does tricks so quickly that your eye can barely keep up. In the middle of this frantic activity, Grubinger kneels down by the drum, rolls the left drumstick out of his hand and onto his left forearm and drums that against the drumhead using the right drumstick.

Grubinger stands up again, never missing a beat. He builds to his finale, pectoral muscles twitching, face contorted into a grimace. He is now drumming for all he’s worth and it sounds like machinegun fire. He ends the piece with a single, resounding thwack on the drum’s metal edge, then gasps for air.

In four minutes, everything you need to know about him and his 10-year concert career: speed, precision and virtuosity, all pepped up with a hint of crazy. martingrubinger.com the red bulletin

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Where to go and what to do

ac t i o n !

T r a v e l / G e a r / T r a i n i n g / N i g h t l i f e / M U S I C / p a r t i e s / c i t i e s / c l u b s / E v e n ts Truck non-stop: spend a day in the desert in an off-road vehicle

Sand storm

It might look beachy, but this is no place to sunbathe. the colorado desert provides the ultimate driving test

drivenexperiences.com

TRAVEL, page 86

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Action!

travel

Desert dessert What to do after the truck driving

sail away Swap the dusty roar of the track for the crashing rapids of the Dolores River. The Gateway Resort’s Adventure Centre offers wet and wild rafting, kayaking and tubing. gatewaycanyons.com

DESERT TRUCKS Driving does not come more extreme than careering around the dusty Colorado canyons in a physics-defying truck Deserts can be relentlessly quiet, but not when you’re strapped into a 6.2-litre, V8-powered Pro-Baja truck, flying off sandy ramps at 140kph and catching air time in Colorado’s canyon country. Driven Experiences provides expert tuition at their Emerald Desert Training Facility in Mesa County, on how to handle their customised trucks around an off-road track.

“Driving at high-speeds on the constantly changing dirt is a real challenge, as the longer you’re out there, the more holes start appearing,” says Travis Nailor, one satisfied and exhilarated customer. “It’s a battle to find the right line and hit the speed, but when you do, man, what a buzz. It’s a very addictive experience.”

A range of driving packages is available, and you can even hire out the whole place, depending on your requirements and budget. Most people stay at the nearby Gateway Canyons Resort (rooms from US$450 per night) because, frankly, this is deep in the desert and there’s nothing else for miles.

“Even experienced road racers can’t quite believe what these trucks can do,” says Andrew Hendricks, a Driven Experiences instructor.

Prices range from “One described it to me as like US$600 for an driving a Transformer on the eight-lap ride for moon. But it’s like night and day. two passengers, to $2,600 for a full day. Most rookies are scared at first, More info at: driven but at the end of the day you have experiences.com to drag them out of the vehicle.”

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Pimped-up ride: get your thrills on custom trucks in Colorado

Fly high Fancy a change of perspective?

See the aweinspiring Colorado landscape from a helicopter or Cessna plane ride over gaping canyons and soaring mountainous terrain. gatewaycanyons.com

Advice from the inside flying lesson “When you approach a ramp, you think you don’t know what’s going to happen, but keep very calm, it’s going to be OK, just keep the gas on,” says off-road racing legend Chuck Dempsey. “You’ll hit the ramp and fly what feels like 40ft in the air. When you land you’ll feel like there’s nothing that you can’t do or jump, you feel indestructible in this crazy-ass beast of a machine.”

Drive Hard

“Our trucks place a real physical demand on the driver,” says Driven Experiences’s Andrew Hendricks.

“If someone is serious about getting all they can out of driving here, I suggest they should work-out hard the week before coming, just to train their body to sweat.”

zip along They’re about 320km away down Highway 50, but the zip lines at Salida are worth the drive: the 695ft-long Leap of Faith line and the superfast Gun Barrel span a 200ft valley. captainzipline.com

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drivenexperiences.com(2), shutterstock

Off off-road

Action!

workout

Row for it: Mario Gyr (left) and Simon Schürch

“We need max strength”

High and dry: about a third of their training is in the gym

IN THE BALANCE A simple way to build quad muscles and balance. Beginners may want stop after step 2 a few times, get used to the movements, and only then progress to step 3

1

2

lukas maeder(3), shutterstock

Heri Irawan

rowing A world-class duo on how to win as one. Plus: train like they do “Rowers are different from other endurance sportsmen and women,” says Switzerland’s Mario Gyr, who, alongside compatriot Simon Schürch, won the silver medal in lightweight double sculls at the 2013 World Rowing Championships in South Korea.

“We always need maximum strength for every stroke. About 60 per cent of what we do to improve our endurance we do in the water, and 40 per cent in the weights room.”

Schürch knows that he and Gyr must match each other exactly if they are to succeed.

“We work on our technique to improve our stroke synchronisation, because the more synchronised our strokes are, the more stable the boat is and that means we’re quicker. Your legs are the most important thing in rowing: they generate the most power. As well as up to three hours a day in the water, we’ll work our quads in the gym on the leg-press machine and do squats with a 105kg barbell on our shoulders.” the red bulletin

Stand on one leg, lift the other off the ground and get your balance

3

Bend your standing leg at the knee, put your other leg out in front and bend at the waist

E AT TH I S !

A PRO PROTEIN TIP

SOLID SHAKE

Squat down low, then stand up again. Do five reps on each leg

Rowers have to be large and lean, and thus are among pro sport’s leading guzzlers of protein shakes. If you’re sick of shakes, get a fork and whisk a shot-glass of water with the suggested measure of powder until it goes mousse-like and you can eat it.

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Action!

get the gear

stay alive what you need when the going gets rough

Stop that High-tech brakes mean stopping exactly when required: a necessity on rugged terrain In the frame The chrome steel alloy of the KTM 300 is its strength, but it’s also light, making the bike easy to handle

LS2 helmet “It’s strong and lightweight. I put in long hours on the bike: if my helmet was too heavy it would trash my neck and shoulders.” ls2helmets.co.nz

Leatt neck brace “I’ve had some big crashes and broken a couple of braces, but I’m still walking and talking, so this is doing its job.

Power plant “I can fix anything on this bike,” says Birch. “I carry a tube of Pratley Steel Quickset Epoxy, so if I put a hole in the engine I can glue it back together again”

leatt.com

Essentials of extreme e nduro The kit you need to thrive in the toughest two-wheeled environments on Earth Tough guy: Chris Birch competes in the Hard Enduro series

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Reliability, a smooth ride and the ability to overcome obstacles. These are the qualities Chris Birch needs in a bike. The 33-year-old from New Zealand has been riding KTM bikes since 2003. “You can overheat them, throw them down waterfalls or drive them up cliff faces and they keep coming back for more,” he says.

The new KTM Freeride 350 XC-F is his go-to bike for shorter, sprintdistance races, but for multi-day events like Red Bull Romaniacs or The Roof of Africa, he pulls out his old faithful, a KTM 300 two-stroke (above). “It’s my safety blanket,” he says. “It’s a bike I know very well.” chrisbirch.co.nz

Alpinestars boots “If I’m doing lots of jumps, I’ll wear the Tech 10s. I use these lighter, more flexible Tech 8s when I have to push my bike up a lot of hills.” alpinestars.com

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available at selected astores nationwide WWW.amAzonsurf.co.nz

Action!

party

Töp Tünes Music-making girls of Gothenburg

Yukimi Nagano The vocalist from synth soul band Little Dragon counts Damon Albarn among her admirers. Her group’s fourth album, Nabuma Rubberband, is out on May 13.

No warm beer

Five floors of fun: first-class night out in Sweden’s second city

At the turn of the 20th century, one of the finest residences on Gothenburg’s main drag was a five-storey townhouse occupied by a nobleman and his family.

Ten years into the 21st century, it was turned into a club, Yaki-Da. Today, it’s the home of the city’s best night out. Yaki-Da still has links to its glorious past: DJs play in spaces stuffed with antique furniture; bands perform in front of velvet curtains.

“There used to be two types of parties in Gothenburg: ones with underground music and warm beer, and the others with good service and mainstream music,” says Sebastian Kapocs, Yaki-Da’s owner. “We want to bring the best of both worlds together.” That means live music outside on the terrace as well as in, and cuttingedge house DJs, such Spanish spinner John Talabot, performing in the ‘living room’ while hip-hop and soul play in the café bar. And you can get a steak at 2am.

It’s all in keeping with the club’s name: also the name of a former Gothenburg club, and the Welsh for cheers. Iechyd da!

Yaki-da Storgatan 47 411 38 Göteborg, Sweden www.yaki-da.se

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GREEN FAIRY TALES From Yaki-da’s absinthe bar: combine ingredients; enjoy

the Strindberg Margarita 30ml absinthe (preferably La Fée) 10ml Cointreau 20ml sugar syrup squirt of lime juice splash of soda water the Dario Espiga 25ml absinthe 15ml apple liqueur 20ml sugar syrup squirt of lime juice splash of apple juice pinch of finely grated ginger

Anna von Hausswolff Her gigs feel like midnight masses: the church organ is her prime instrument. She calls her music funeral pop. Don’t be put off by this: try new album Ceremony.

Scout Klas This Red Bull Music Academy graduate finds inspiration in Italian horror films. Her sound exists in the space between stuttering hip-hop and subtle electronica.

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yaki-da.se(5), Anders_Nydam

GOTHENBURG The best club in Sweden grew out of frustration with all the bad ones

Action!

City Guide

Sch

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this is what you do there

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Bern, switzerland Sp

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GURTEN DOWNHILL TRAIL A downhill biking track close to the city, 2km long and with jumps up to 10m high. There’s a bike wash thrown in for free at the end. How nice. gurtenpark.ch

e

Top five city highlights

carol fernandez (3), club bonsoir, adriano‘s

Johannes Lang, albert Exergian, Sascha Bierl

Swiss congeniality: Carol Fernandez

“It’s where I get my tattoos” Bern A first-rate second-hand drinking den and the only place to eat pizza before sunrise in the most laid-back capital city As a child, Carol Fernandez took piano lessons at the Bern Conservatory and now, she says, “I pep up my sets with keyboard sections.” As a teenager, she DJd in her dad’s record shop: “I ruined all the record-player styluses. He would get so angry.” It was good practice for her first proper night on the decks, aged 22. “It was a small club. I was so nervous that I screwed up 10 of 15 songs. Today, she is sought-after DJ. “I perform 90 times a year, all over Switzerland and Europe, but I always like coming back to my hometown, Bern.

It’s so easy-going. You don’t see harried faces on the street; you get a relaxed feeling. What other capital city can offer you that in this day and age?” Quite.

Here Fernandez picks her city’s must-seek spots. djcarol-fernandez.com

the red bulletin

1 Club Bonsoir Aarbergergasse 33/35 “This used to be Dad’s record shop! Now it’s a club where underground stars and new talent play. It’s fitted out with second-hand furniture and the drinks aren’t expensive at all.”

basement venue isn’t exactly a secret, but you’ve got to see their giant wine cask – it holds 38,000 litres. And, if I’m not performing, the gallery bar is a cosy place for a cocktail.”

4 Adriano’s Bar & Café Theaterplatz 2 “This place has the best coffee in town; it’s roasted on site, but there’s nowhere to sit and it’s always jam-packed. A lot of Bernese come here, especially after dinner for a macchiato.”

3 Kornhauskeller Kornhausplatz 18 “OK, so this 18th-century

Plunge into streaming water where the River Aar flows through Bern. All abilities welcome, from beginners to would-be instructors. tauchsport-kaeser.ch

STOCKHORN BUNGEE JUMP

2 pronto Restaurant

Aarbergergasse 26 “Even during the daytime, Bern can be pretty quiet. By 2am, it’s completely dead. The one exception is Pronto. It serves great pizza, pita and kebabs.”

DIVING IN THE AAR RIVER

5 Blacksheep tattoo

Gerechtigkeitsgasse 5 “The people at this tattoo parlour are true body artists.

They draw the design you want on a pad first and won’t stress you out. I got my latest tattoo here: a clef on piano keys.”

Deep breath, and then step off a rig 134m above a mountain lake. For many, the location of the world’s most breathtaking bungee jump. stockhorn.ch

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Action!

world run

Greatest running myths debunked

IS RUNNING ON TARMAC BAD? IS STRETCHING GOOD AFTER A SESSION? TO MARK THE WINGS FOR LIFE WORLD RUN, SPORTS SCIENTIST DR MARTIN APOLIN BANISHES RUNNING’S MOST PERSISTENT MYTHS

“Running on tarmac is bad for your joints” The truth

“Always run with a heart-rate monitor ” The truth

Myth

“Stretching eases aches and pains” The truth

No scientific study has ever confirmed this. Furthermore, people who run regularly build up thicker cartilage protection, regardless of the surface they train on. Tarmac also lowers the risk of twisting your ankle.

There is no argument against objectively gauging your performance, but your body isn’t a machine. Performance depends on your state of mind, how well you’ve slept and your form on the day. So, think before you react to a monitor’s readings.

Aches and pains after running are often tears in muscle tissue, which will only by made larger by stretching.

What actually would help more is sitting in a sauna (drink plenty of water) or going for a gentle warm-down run.

Myth

Myth

Myth

“Endurance training makes you a slower runner” The truth

‘Quick’ muscle fibres only turn into ‘slow’ ones if you exclusively stick to long runs over a period of years. Occasional sprint training specifically for speed will prevent that happening.

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Myth

“You won’t burn any fat if you run for less than 30 minutes” The truth

We burn fat, even during sleep. But we burn it more efficiently after 30 minutes, as then your body is likely to have run out of carbohydrates. That said, to lose weight, you should eat less calories than you burn.

“You should hardly run at all for the last week before a race” The truth

If you reduce your training too much just before a race, your endurance can take a hit. The best thing to do is reduce your training by 50 per cent and rest for the last two days before race day.

the red bulletin

craig Kolesky/Red Bull Content Pool, Christophe Launay/Red Bull Content Pool, Alessandro Dealberto/Red Bull Content Pool, Balasz Gardi/Red Bull Content Pool sascha bierl

Myth

World runners

enter

YOU CAN RACE WORLD-CLASS SPORTS STARS IN THE WINGS FOR LIFE WORLD RUN. HERE’S A FRONT-RUNNING FIVE

an d get training

n ow

“Eating up those kilometres as long as I can” Surf legend Robby Naish has set himself a race target

“Trai­ning three times a week – and that includes cross-country skiing” Luc Alphand, former skiing star and racing driver, on his prep

“My target is to run 80 kilo­metres and win” The goal of ultramarathon runner Giorgio Calcaterra

Global gathering W ings For Life World Run A starter’s gun on six continents: The first worldwide running race in sporting history gets under way on may 4. Anyone who wants to race against the rest of the world can take part. Here are the details 1. THE WAY IT WORKS

4. THE RESULT

In 33 countries, 35 races will all begin at 10am UTC (Co-ordinated Universal Time; 10am GMT) on May 4, 2014. ‘Catcher Cars’ will start reeling in the participants 30 minutes later. The last person in the world to be caught wins.

The last man and last woman running will be crowned global champions and win a special roundthe-world trip. Each country will also record its national winners. All runners will be able to check online to see how they did. “Who in the world ran further than I did?”

2. THE CHASERS

“To send a signal, even though I’m not a runner” Running for those who can’t is important to David Coulthard, former F1 great

“It’s uplifting that thousands of people are running for us” Wheelchair triathlete Marc Herremans on the race boosting spinal injury research

the red bulletin

The ‘Catcher Cars’ will gradually increase their speed at predetermined intervals. Once a runner is caught, or passed by a car, he or she must drop out of the race and the distance run at that point is automatically recorded.

5. THE PARTICIPANTS

3. THE COURSES

6. THE MISSION

They fall into five categories around the world: coastal runs, river runs, city runs, nature runs and runs with a view. The event’s homepage (wingsforlife worldrun.com) gives you the latest weather reports, detailed course information, training plans and a distance-time calculator.

The Wings for Life World Run motto is: Running For Those Who Can’t.

All of the money earned will go to the Wings For Life Foundation, which supports worldwide scientific research programmes looking for a cure for spinal cord injury.

You can find more information at wingsforlife.com.

Beginners, hobby runners, top athletes and stars, such as former Formula One ace David Coulthard. The aim is to cover as much of the course as you can to help cure paraplegia.

Compete against the rest of the world in the Wings For Life World Run. You can register online until April 20 at wingsforlifeworldrun.com

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Action!

Music

COVER VERSIONS Mark Foster was 18 when he moved to Los Angeles to launch a music career. It was a long time coming.

For years, he worked in bars and wrote commercial jingles. Then, in 2010, he and his band Foster the People put their song Pumped Up Kicks online.

He says now that they weren’t expecting anything much, but that breezy indie pop tune broke through.

Spotify’s most-streamed song of 2011, it reached No 3 in the US charts and has since sold over five million copies. Torches, their debut album of the same year, earned two Grammy nominations. The just-out follow-up, Supermodel, adds multilayered synths and space rock to the indie pop mix.

Foster, now 29, let The Red Bulletin in on the songs that shaped him.

Playlist The Beatles took Mark Foster down the rabbit hole, but the Foster the People frontman is a creature of many influences

fosterthepeople.com

1 Beach Boys

2 The Beatles

3 Jeff Buckley

“The first time I heard this song, on the radio when I was a kid, it was unlike anything I’d ever heard.

Especially the vocal harmonies. Looking back, it was a significant moment for me. When I was seven years old, the Beach Boys were my first concert. So to be on stage with my favourite band at the Grammys in 2012 was the greatest moment of my life.”

“It’s just one of the greatest songs ever, so simple but so profound. The experimental bridge in that song, when it takes that big orchestral left turn, is incredible.

Hearing all these elements coming together, it takes you on a journey.

Which is funny, as the song is actually about a trip. I love that, when the lyrics and the story match the music.”

“I remember the first time I heard this song. I was 19, I kept pressing the replay button, the lyrics started to pop out on me and I started to weep, because to me the song is about him predicting his own death. I sang along to it so often, I feel it really stretched my voice. I would even say Jeff Buckley taught me how to sing.”

4 Radiohead

5 The Beatles

“The video for this was on MTV when I was a kid and I’d never seen anything like it. I was so intrigued by this band; they just had a feeling to them no other band had. This song is like a classical piece split into three parts. It’s one of those songs that when I hear it, it makes me just want to quit. Radiohead touched the foot of God with this song.”

“I love to listen to this on headphones.

It’s the only way to hear all the different textures and the bending, psychedelic effect on the bass guitar – an amazing sound I’ve been chasing around forever.

Listening to I Am The Walrus really makes you feel like you’re a giant egg man on LSD bumbling down the street John Lennon was singing about.”

God Only Knows

Paranoid Android

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A Day In The Life

I Am The Walrus

Playgroup

DJ-Kicks “I don’t like to be on my records, but this was a good idea. All the names of the artists in the mix are written on the wall and then I stood in front of it.”

Grace

S’Express

Theme From ...

“One of the first sleeves I did. I remember hearing Mark Moore [of S’Express] playing the promo in a club. I went up to him and said, ‘I love it, can I do the cover?’ The train represents a penis.”

lo u d vi b r ations LITTLE BIG BASS

THE WOOJER A mobile subwoofer that succeeds where others have failed, by converting sound waves into vibrations that oontz-oontz directly into your body.

Connect the matchbox-sized device to your MP3 player and headphones, clip it onto your T-shirt and give your chest a bass massage.

Icarus

UL-6 “Icarus made very interesting fractured electronic music.

So we messed up every sleeve by hand, reassembled them, then printed the name on a plastic bag.

Every single one was different.”

the red bulletin

florian obkircher

‘ I hear it and I want to quit’

getty images

People person: Mark Foster

Musician and designer Trevor Jackson of Playgroup picks three sleeves what he made

Action!

games

A world reimagined: Wolfenstein: The New Order

It’s wolf time W olfenstein the classic game gets a next-gen makeover In February 1949, the winners of World War II are blowing the faces off Mount Rushmore.

In 1960, a tiny crack appears in the evil machine of Teutonic world government.

In Wolfenstein: The New Order, you are the leader of a resistance movement, trying to force that crack wide open and remove the jackboot from the free world’s neck. For those who came of age when gaming came of age, there’s not a lot more exciting than that.

The first-person shooter, one of the world’s favourite game genres, would not be where it is today without Wolfenstein 3D, a 1992 PC title which broke ground in terms of its

speedy action and intense gameplay. The following year, the company that made it raised the stakes with Doom, a landmark of technical and gameplay excellence.

Without these two, there’d be no Half-Life, Halo, Battlefield or Call Of Duty.

In Wolfenstein: The New Order you will find retro-steampunk war machines, a scarfaced, sadistic chief baddie called General Deathshead and the kind of highvelocity yet claustrophobic run-and-gun action pioneered by its predecessors of a generation ago. What’s not to love?

Out in the third week of May for Xbox One, Xbox 360, Windows, PS3 and PS4. wolfenstein.com

o u t n ow

Love U Too Can Bayonetta 2 save Wii?

It’s more like Nintendoh!: planning to sell nine million Wii U consoles this financial year, the games firm says it’ll be closer to three million. Nintendo-exclusive titles will help turn gameheads away from Xbox and PlayStation: out soon is Bayonetta 2, a stunning fantasy action game.

It proves Nintendo means more than Mario, but would you buy a Wii U to play it? platinumgames.com

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Double the fun

Two screens better than one As your deep-space salvage team scours spaceships for bounty, fending off similar crews and alien creatures, a large screen shows what your men see and a small screen has overviews, ships’ blueprints, stats and info. This is Salvaged, an immersive real-time strategy game that needs a PC and an Android or Apple device. Watch for more dual-screen games. Out in November.

salvagedgame.com

Ti e-I n Try Again Games of movies coming soon (and 35 years old)

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 The open-world adventure based on the previous movie was good; the same team is making this one.

Out April 29. theamazingspidermangame.com

Alien: Isolation Survival horror based on the original 1979 Alien movie – an influence you’ll find in most survival horror games.

Available late 2014. alienisolation.com

Transformers: Rise Of The Dark Spark To go with this summer’s fourth big-robot film, starring Mark Wahlberg, a third-person shooter of man versus machine. transformersgame.com

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Action!

save the date

Swans vs St Kilda: it’s Anzac Day again April 25

Saints alive Wellington is bracing for an Australian invasion when the St Kilda Saints return to Westpac Stadium for the annual Anzac Day Aussie Rules game. Last year, over 22,000 footy fans watched the Sydney Swans defeat the Saints. This year, the Brisbane Lions take on the Melbourne club. afl.com.au

to August 17

April 18

Enduro epic Raced over five stages on the spectacular downhill trails of Coronet Peak, the Coronet Peak Enduro is one of the highlights of the Queenstown Bike Festival. queenstownbikefestival.com

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The latest exhibition at Te Papa is a celebration of the World Of Wearable Art show.

The WOW Factor: 25 Years In The Making features many of the creations from the show, which began in Nelson in 1987 and is held annually in Wellington. It also tells the story of how a fundraiser for a small art gallery became an internationally recognised event. tepapa.govt.nz

May 4

Myst try harder Auckland’s Northern Mystics, the perennial underachievers of netball’s ANZ Championship, won just one of 13 games last year and finished bottom of the ladder. They will be looking to their star recruit, Silver Ferns great Laura Langman, to lead the way in their Round 10 clash against the Southern Steel at The Trusts Arena in Waitakere. northernmystics.co.nz

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Peter Bush, getty images(2), Euan Camero

Be WOWed

April 25

April 11-13

Blue heaven

Rally good

Approaching the halfway point of the Super Rugby season, Blues fans will have made the call on league recruit Benji Marshall: is he the real deal or a gamble gone wrong? See if he lives up to his reputation for the Auckland outfit’s Round 9 clash against the Waratahs at Eden Park. theblues.co.nz

The Far North’s fast, flowing gravel roads make the International Rally of Whangarei a driverfavourite on the Asia-Pacific Rally Championship schedule. This year, the revised route includes a visit to the William Fraser Memorial Park on Pohe Island – at night. Event regular and three-time winner Hayden Paddon is focusing on the World Rally Championship this year and won’t be taking part; Finn Esapekka Lappi won the rally in 2013. rallywhangarei.co.nz

April 18-20

Air raising The skies over Wanaka come alive over Easter Weekend with the return of the Warbirds Over Wanaka air show. The bi-annual event was first held in 1986 and this year’s highlights include a performance by world aerobatic champion Jurgis Kairys of Lithuania, and a high-speed jet race featuring former astronaut and five-time Reno Jet Air Race champion Colonel Curtis Brown. warbirdsoverwanaka.com

don’t miss more dates for the diary

30 april

Head spinning Dylan Mills, aka Dizzee Rascal, returns to New Zealand for his first stadium tour.

The influential UK rapper plays Auckland’s Vector Arena on April 30 and Wellington’s TSB Arena on May 1. dizzeerascal.co.uk

2 may

May 18

Waikato Warriors The Vodafone Warriors will be hoping for better luck when they take on the Canterbury Bulldogs in their second visit to Waikato Stadium in Hamilton this year. Matt Elliott’s men were beaten 46-22 by English side Wigan in a preseason game at Mooloo HQ earlier in February.

With several Kiwi internationals likely to start, the Bulldogs pose an equally tough test. facebook.com/vodafonewarriors

Foot tapping Still the coolest rock band on the planet, Arctic Monkeys visit Vector Arena on the back of widespread critical acclaim for their fifth album AM, released late last year. arcticmonkeys.com

3 may

April 26-27

Down and dirty Ice-cold water, fire pits and mud crawls under electrified cables: these will be among the course obstacles at New Zealand’s first Tough Mudder, at Hampton Downs Motorsport Park. Entry fee for the endurance race of 10-12 miles includes a beer at the finish line. The truly hardcore get 50 per cent off Sunday’s race fee if they also compete on Saturday. Tough Mudder events have been springing up around the world since 2010, when the first one took place at a ski resort in Pennsylvania, USA. toughmudder.com

the red bulletin

Leg sapping Just 16 runners took part in the first Rotorua Marathon in 1965.

Since then, over 86,000 people have raced around the lake and a record turnout is expected for the 50th anniversary race. rotoruamarathon. co.nz

97

Magic Moment

Tallin, Estonia, February 22, 2014

“ You’d think that only Superman could do this trick, but not if the world’s upside down” Jaanus Ree/Red Bull Content Pool

Simon Stricker’s dream of defying gravity became real thanks to the reflected glory of a team of backroom boys.

“A camera crew worked for two days to create a mirrorinverted set in an old industrial building,” says the 22-year-old Swiss skater. “This is not just a photo, it’s a work of art.”

Simon Stricker, skateboarder

The next issue of the Red Bulletin is out on May 13 98

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