Loud and Quiet 50

ZERO POUNDS / VOLUME 03 / ISSUE 50 / THE ALTERNATIVE MUSIC TABLOI D
LYNCH
DAVI D
Fuck Buttons
Richard Hell
No Age
San Fermin
Melt Yourself Down
Fair Ohs
Scout Niblett
MONEY
dreaming big
WE REACHED 50 - READ THE OTHER 49 EDITIONS AT WWW.LOUDANDQUIET.COM
WWW.LOUDANDQUIET.COM 04
Contents
July 2013
COVER PHOTOGRAPHY
NATHANAEL TURNER
SCARLETT FEVER: IAN ROEBUCK ON THREE
UPCOMING MOVIES AND ONE MOVIE STAR
4 4
CONTACT
INFO@LOUDANDQUIET.COM
LOUD AND QUIET
PO BOX 67915
LONDON
NW1W 8TH
EDITOR - STUART STUBBS
ART DIRECTOR - LEE BELCHER
SUB EDITOR - ALEX WILSHIRE
FILM EDITOR - IAN ROEBUCK
ADVERTISING
ADVERTISE@LOUDANDQUIET.COM
CONTRIBUTORS
BART PETTMAN, CARL PARTRIDGE,
CHAL RAVENS, CHRIS WATKEYS,
COCHI ESSE, DANIEL DYLAN WRAY,
DANNY CANTER, DAVID SUTHERAN,
DK GOLDSTIEN, ELINOR JONES,
ELLIOT KENNEDY, EDGAR SMITH,
FRANKIE NAZARDO, GARETH
ARROWSMITH, JANINE BULLMAN,
LEE BULLMAN, KATE PARKIN,
KELDA HOLE, GABRIEL GREEN,
GEMMA HARRIS, LEON DIAPER,
LUKE WINKIE, MANDY DRAKE,
MATTHIAS SCHERER, NATHAN
WESTLEY, OWEN RICHARDS, OLLY
PARKER, PAVLA KOPECNA, POLLY
RAPPAPORT, PHIL DIXON, PHIL
SHARP, REEF YOUNIS, SAMUEL
BALLARD, SAM WALTON, SONIA
MELOT, SONNY MCCARTNEY, TIM
COCHRANE, TOM PINNOCK, TOM
WARNER
THIS MONTH L&Q LOVES
CAZ BEASHEL, BEN WINBOLT-
LEWIS, DUNCAN JORDAN, KEONG
WOO, NITA KEELER, IVANO
MAGGIULLI, RICHARD HELL, SEAN
NEWSHAM, WILL LAWRENCE,
THE VIEWS EXPRESSED IN LOUD AND QUIET
ARE THOSE OF THE RESPECTIVE CONTRIBUTORS
AND DO NOT NECESSARI LY REFLECT THE
OPINI ONS OF THE MAGAZINE OR ITS STAFF.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 2013 LOUD AND QUIET.
ISSN 2049-9892
PRINTED BY SHARMAN & COMPANY LTD.
FOURTH ALBUM AN OBJECT HAS THE LA DUO
TRYING NEW THINGS AND FUCKING WITH THE DRUMS
A V E R Y N A U G H T Y B O Y
THE CHURCH OF LIAM GALLAGHER IS MINUS
MANDY DRAKE BUT FULL NONETHELESS
ON THE EVE OF THEIR UK TOUR FINALE, FAIR OH DISCUSS
WHAT NEW ALBUM JUNGLE CATS HAS TAUGHT THEM
PETER WAREHAM HAS COME UP WITH A NAME FOR HIS
PROGRESSIVE JAZZ, BECAUSE NO ONE ELSE COULD
F A I R O H S . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
M E LT Y O U R S E L F D O W N . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
EMMA LOUISE SCOUT NIBLETT ON ASTROLOGY, HER COMPULSION
TO CREATE AND MOVING TO AMERICA TO SURVIVE IN MUSIC
2 MONTHS AFTER RELEASE HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY, RICHARD HELL
DISCUSSES WALKING OUT ON THE MUSIC INDUSTRY 30 YEARS AGO
S C O U T N I B L E T T . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
R I C H A R D H E L L . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
IRONIC IN NAME AND ADVERSE TO INTERVIEWS, MANCHESTERS
MONEY ARENT CHASING A BIG PAY DAY, BUT ITS COMING
M O N E Y . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
N O A G E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
0 9 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1 4
1 8
1 9
1 6
2 0
2 2
FUCK BUTTONS DISCUSS NEW ALBUM SLOW FOCUS
AND HOW THE OLYMPICS CHANGED NOTHING
F U C K B U T T O N S . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 4
ASSISTANT TO NICO MUHLY, YALE GRADUATE ELLISE LUDWIG-LEONE
IS A YOUNG COMPOSER WITH GRAND AMBITIONS
S A N F E R M I N . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 6
G E T T I N G T O K N O W Y O U
WITH DAVID LYNCH ON THE FRONT COVER, 9 ARTISTS
SHARE THEIR FAVOURITE MOVING PICTURES OF ALL TIME
1 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
THE CULT MOVIE DIRECTOR GETS TO TALK MUSIC FOR ONCE,
AN OFTEN OVERLOOKED BUT HUGE PART OF HIS LIFE AND WORK
D A V I D LY N C H . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 8
IDIOT TENNIS, THOUGHT SPORT, CRUSH HOUR,
RUMOUR PIE AND THE UNFORTUNATE WORLD OF IAN BEALE
P A R T Y W O L F . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 0
ALUNAGEORGE, FUCK BUTTONS, POND, WAVVES
WASHED OUT, CFCF, SOFT METALS AND MORE
A L B U M S
PISSED JEANS, THESE NEW PURITANS, GOAT,
JON HOPKINS, THE NATIONAL AND MORE
L I V E
3 6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
4 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
F I L M S . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
OUR OBSESSION WITH NUMBERS NEVER
SEEMS TO WANE. IF ANYTHING IT
INTENSIFIES, BUT ROUND NUMBERS ARE
ALWAYS - ALWAYS - BEST.
FOR MY 10TH BIRTHDAY, I RECEIVED
MY OWN TELEVISION IN MY BEDROOM
AN EXTRA SPECIAL GIFT FOR AN EXTRA
SPECIAL AGE, AS IF FOR A CHILD TO
HIT DOUBLE FIGURES IN 1992 WAS
UNHEARD OF. IN HINDSIGHT, 10 IS A
ONE-OFF IN THE ROUND BIRTHDAYS
SERIES ITS THE ONLY ONE THAT
YOU CELEBRATE RATHER THAN
COMMISERATE, SAVE FOR 100, WHICH
IS SO ROUND IT CAUSES THE QUEEN TO
GET INVOLVED.
THIS IS THE 50TH NEWSPRINT EDITION
OF LOUD AND QUIET; A FACT THAT
WED LARGELY FORGOTTEN OR IGNORED
WHILE PUTTING IT TOGETHER, YET
COULD CLAIM OTHERWISE, DUE TO THE
KUDOS OF THIS MONTHS COVER STAR.
THERES SOMETHING SPECIAL ABOUT
DAVID LYNCH. ROUND NUMBERS
SPECIAL. TO CONVERT THE 67-YEAR-
OLD AUTEURS CAREER INTO FIGURES
AT A GLANCE, LYNCH HAS WRITTEN AND
DIRECTED 10 FEATURE FILMS, 23
SHORTS, 8 MUSIC VIDEOS AND 1
DEFINITIVE TELEVISION SERIES. OVER
SUCH PROJECTS HES CHALLENGED
EVERY CONVENTION OF FILMMAKING,
PARTICULARLY NARRATIVE STRUCTURE,
AND CONTINUALLY SUBVERTED THE
HOLLYWOOD NORM AS HIS MOVIES HAVE
JOURNEYED THROUGH MURKY
NETHERWORLDS WITH ALL THE FRACTURE
OF YOUR STRANGEST DREAMS. BUT
LYNCH IS A MUSICIAN, TOO, A POINT
THAT IS OFTEN OVERLOOKED, EVEN
THOUGH SOUND DESIGN IS SO INTEGRAL
TO THE SINISTER SUBURBIA HES SO
ADEPT AT PORTRAYING AND SIFTING
THROUGH IN HIS MOVIES. MORE
NUMBERS: LYNCH HAS BEEN INVOLVED
IN 8 RECORDS TO DATE, INCLUDING
HIS 2011 DEBUT SOLO ALBUM, CRAZY
CLOWN TIME, AND NEW LP THE BIG
DREAM, RELEASED TWO DAYS AFTER
THIS LOUD AND QUIET ARRIVED IN
STORES.
LYNCH, IM SURE NO ONE WILL BE
SURPRISED TO HEAR, LIKES TO DREAM,
AND IN LIVING THE DREAM,
BEGINNING ON PAGE 28 AND PUTTING
MUSIC AT THE CENTRE OF THE
CONVERSATION, HE DISCUSSES WITH
DANIEL DYLAN WRAY HIS MUSICAL
INFLUENCES, HIS LOVE OF THE OPEN
ROAD, THE IMPORTANCE OF CREATIVE
FREEDOM AND HIS NEW, LESS-ODD-BUT-
STILL-LYNCHIAN RECORD.
OUR TIME TOGETHER WAS BRIEF, BUT
AT HIS LOS ANGELES HOME ON
MULHOLLAND DRIVE, NO LESS, A
STREET IMMORTALISED IN HIS 2001
PICTURE OF THE SAME NAME. MEETING
DAVID LYNCH, IN HIS HOME OR
ANYWHERE ELSE, IS NOT SOMETHING WE
ENVISAGED 50 ISSUES AGO, BUT BACK
THEN WE WERE JUST AFTER A TV IN
OUR ROOM.

STUART STUBBS
W E L C O M E
I a former, obsessive Oasis fan had planned on calling
this article That Joke Isnt Funny Anymore. Then it was going
to be The Messiah Complex.
As Beady Eye released their second album last month,
Liam Gallagher did what he does dubbed new record Be
fucking mega (its not), damned the state of modern
rocknroll (fair point, Liam), played ignorant to anything thats
not within his immediate social sphere, had a dig at brother
Noel, sang out of his chin, waddled around, kept Wrigleys
gum in business for another decade and shat on every swear
box in the country. Death, taxes and Liam Gallagher: lifes
three great certainties. Hed take that as a compliment, no
doubt.
Ive always thought it must be a drain, to be so constantly
in character. Maybe Liam takes time off in the shower, or on
the toilet. Maybe he takes off his sunglasses then.
Liams commitment to the role of deluded rock star has in
the past been as entertaining as it is today strangely
admirable. He still believes, even if I dont. Ive no doubt that
it is an act, perhaps not overtly so, more like how you hold
your Fs and Us around your partners parents, only for Liam
he doubles them, ramped up to a predictable caricature. It
feels like a tired stand-up routine full of all the jokes youve
already heard. Liam Gallagher doesnt give a fuck? Yeah, I
know.
Hes the only one doing it too, ardently refusing to mellow
or even allow himself to have a good time. For all his talk of
Oasis was what it was, but its over and now Im doing this
and its fucking mega, he seems incapable of moving on, or
even attempting a new haircut. How could someone so
obsessed with John Lennon be so stagnant? The answer to
that isnt just in Liams limited musicality, no matter what
Shake my tree / Wheres the apple for me suggests.
As a new Noisey documentary proved in late June, the
Cult of Liam Gallagher is in rude health. The lm, entitled
Start Anew: On the Campaign Trail with Beady Eye,
shadowed Liam and band in the days and weeks leading up
to Bes release. Theres plenty of what youd expect from
the man himself, inated truth nuggets like, I hope people
like [the album], but if they dont like it they can go fuck
themselves, lots of shifty looks over the shoulder while
answering questions, lots of chewing, that kind of thing. But
if theres one thing thats matched Liams consistency since
1994, its the admiration of his worshipers. At 14 I was one
myself, before, to put it simply, the posturing became better
THE CHURCH OF LIAM GALLAGHER IS MINUS
MANDY DRAKE BUT REMAINS FULL TO BURSTING
A VERY NAUGHTY BOY
The Beginning
July 2013
than the music, and then boring. To devout Liam followers,
some of whom feature in the Noisey lm with feather cuts at
varying degrees of recession, I couldnt have been a true fan
turning your back on a Gallagher is like denouncing Christ,
even if Christ, in this instance, hasnt pulled anything close to
a miracle out of his arse in a good 15 years.
But Id paid my dues to the cult, alright. Id bought and
defended Heathen Chemistry. Id given a crusty Moss Side
tout 150 quid to see Oasis play the Manchester leg of their
intimate venue tour, 10 Years Of Noise And Confusion. Id
ITS THE BLIND
FOLLOWERS THAT
KEEP LIAM IN
CLARKS AND VICE
VERSA
taken a pint of piss in the face at Finsbury Park. Course I did
Oasis were the only band out there fucking having it.
Thats what Liam had said, his very own turn the other
cheek... because the other ones covered in piss. But where
Ive tapped out, got clean, wised up, there are plenty still
enthralled by the legacy of Oasis and those heady 4 years
in the mid 90s. To many, Liams (not to mention Noels) net
good, as it were, ensures that his fans arent going
anywhere, and so in turn the Liam Gallagher we know all too
well isnt about to change tack for something more humble
and gracious, even if hed like to. The act is still working
beautifully.
Its the blind followers that keep Liam in Clarks desert
boots and vice versa. As the group of lads on Start Anew
put it when the cameraman notices that all four of them are
decked out in Pretty Green clobber: You gotta have the
gear. No gear, no gig. No gear, no mad for it, no gig. Its a
line of complete dog shit English delivered so stoically as to
initially come across like a direct quote from their hero
himself. Maybe thats Pretty Greens motto.
Its the fans that turn me off most of all, not for daring to
like Beady Eyes drab pub rock, but for failing to see any
humour whatsoever in Liams pantomime shtick. The fact is
that everyone likes the guy. My mum wont miss Chatty Man
if hes on. But theres a difference between thinking Liam
Gallagher is a laugh a bit of fun and genuinely
considering him an absolute fucking legend, a term that
seems to follow him around like a generous smell. And yet,
of course, these people have found something more
substantial than opinion, sense or proof, even; theyve found
faith. Trying to get a fan of Liam Gallagher to admit hes a bit
of a silly bugger is like asking Tom Cruise to contemplate
the possibility that Scientology could be a scam aimed at
rich idiots. In other words, were stuck with the guy. Death,
taxes, The Pope and Liam Gallagher.
A
l
l

s
i
n
g
l
e

r
e
v
i
e
w
s

b
y

S
t
u
a
r
t

S
t
u
b
b
s
B
l
o
w
b
a
c
k

b
y

L
e
e

B
u
l
l
m
a
n

a
n
d

M
i
c
h
a
e
l

F
o
r
w
e
l
l

p
u
b
l
i
s
h
e
d

b
y

P
a
n

M
a
c
m
i
l
l
a
n

a
v
a
i
l
a
b
l
e

n
o
w
Stockholm musician Simon
Stlharmrhe is a serial bottler, rst
sabotaging his childhood sporting
glories as they became too serious,
and then repeating the trick as
countless bands of his were about
to cash in on their buzz and play a
show. This debut EP sees him
nally getting up the nerve to share
his rural, old country folk, which will
make you think that he, like Small
Feet bandmate Jacob Snavely, is in
fact an American. Stlharmrhe
sings like Jeremy Earl of Woods
and Kermit the frogs little cousin,
while these 5 acoustic tracks
become more buoyant over time.
This second single from The
Proper Ornaments (James Hoare
of Veronica Falls and Max Claps,
whom Hoare met as Claps girlfriend
was nicking boots from the
secondhand store he was working
in) was released on Summer
Solstice, and by no coincidence.
Waiting For The Summer is a
proud pastiche of 60s hippy pop
that slowly lopes to a rudimentary
drum machine, feeling strange
and sounding like how The Velvet
Underground would if they were
English druids rather than elegantly
fucked New Yorkers.
The video to Platoon, one
half of Jungles debut release, is
simply incredible one xed
camera of a totally gangster 6-year-
old girl breakdancing her way to a
headspin that looks like shes on a
wire. Due to her unbelievable age
(at 6, I was having trouble walking
in a straight line), the 3-minute
short pulls focus from the tracks
TV On The Radio-esque neo soul
vocals, and smoothest of mid-
tempo grooves. The accompanying
Drops is less funky, and more like
a sexy demo that Sampha would
drop, or Jai Paul, perhaps. The kid
in Adidas has to be seen, but
Jungles soundtrack has a lot, too.
LIAR BEHIND
THE SUN EP
BY SMALL FEET
(KNING DISK)
RELEASED NOW
-----
WAITING FOR
THE SUMMER
BY THE PROPER
ORNAMENTS
(LO)
RELEASED NOW
-----
PLATOON/DROPS
BY JUNGLE
(CHESS CLUB)
RELEASED JULY 15
-----

Kevin Martin sure has got
the title of his new EP right. This
latest 4-tracker from The Bug
features ultra dirty dancehall vocals
from Daddy Freddy (Kill Them),
grimly British rhymes from Roll
Deeps Danow (Dirty, Louder)
and, skankiest of them all, Detroit
vagrant rapper Danny Brown. Its
Browns Freakshow that steals
the show here, his nasal squeal,
the tracks heavy trap bass and Kiki
Hitomis respite backing vocals
covering the fact that the drums on
this entire EP feel weak and blunt.
Thats no doubt Martins intention,
but its Browns new LP you
anticipate here over The Bugs.
Ask anyone who grew up in
the 90s if they were Nintendo or
Sega, and theyll always be one or
the other, never both. Chances are
Toby Gale was Sega 15 Love,
the opening track on this debut EP,
is the giveaway. Its the Alex The Kid
loading screen where Crystal
Castles debut album was thrash-
met al -meets-At ari -and-SNES;
wholesome and pure, gentle and
comforting. Over the next two
tracks, Cool Car and You & I, Gale
has Sonic The Hedgehog powering
up and snatching gold rings with
more force, as he also steps back to
the 80s and Madonna inspired
globular production.
Goodbye/See you later/
You are a/Fucking waster!. Liam
Gallagher couldnt have put it
better himself, which is strange,
because it seems like hes singing
on the debut single from
Trampolene, a band who shun
Facebook, Twitter and Soundcloud,
no doubt because the other
Gallagher has slagged them off in
NME before. This is the band youll
see supporting Kasabian next year,
should you be unlucky enough to
lose a bet, where theyll deliver
other unforgettable lyrics like: You
are paper chaser/When you wanna
be a Shaker Maker. Awful.
STARFRUIT EP
BY TOBY GALE
(TAPE CLUB)
RELEASED JULY 29
-----
FILTHY EP
BY THE BUG
(NINJA TUNE)
RELEASED AUGUST 12
-----
YOU DO NOTHING
FOR ME
BY TRAMPOLENE
(MI7)
RELEASED AUGUST 12
-----
The Beginning
Singles & Books
BY LEE & JANINE BULLMAN
THE COMPL E TE LYRI CS
1978-2006
BY NI CK CAVE
(PENGUIN)
Jon savage is the man responsible for
Englands Dreaming, still by far the best book
written on punk rock, and here he continues
his punk preoccupation with a collection of
visually stunning and graphically ground-
breaking single covers that look as fresh and
challenging today as they did almost forty
years ago. The classics are well represented
of course (Jamie Reids Jubilee Queen
created for the Sex Pistols and complete with
safety pin through the nose is here) but so are
many covers (and bands) that have languished
in obscurity for far too long. Theres interviews
with the artists and designers who created
this iconic imagery, too. Savage knows his
subject inside out and curates a collection of
rock n roll art that does exactly what it should
it makes you want to hear the music.
PUNK 45 : ORI GI NAL PUNK
ROCK SI NGL ES COVER ART
BY JON SAVAGE
(SCHIRMER/MOSEL)
Somehow, over the time period covered
within this collection, Nick Cave underwent
the transition from poster boy for the scary
goth/junky Elvis aesthetic to one of the most
talented, original and hardworking
songwriters around. Cave has always been a
prolic songwriter, but what becomes clear
here is that the quality is there too. If Nick
Cave has ever written a shit song lyric, then
he kept it to himself. The Complete Lyrics is
testament to a maverick talent refusing to
compromise no matter which way the winds
of fashion blow. Nick Cave is the man who
began a song with the line I dont believe in
an interventionist God and followed it with a
love song of heart-breaking tenderness and
humility whilst rocking killer Cuban heels and
golng pants.
I
l
l
u
s
t
r
a
t
i
o
n

b
y

F
r
a
s
e
r

D
a
v
i
d
s
o
n

w
w
w
.
f
r
a
s
e
r
d
a
v
i
d
s
o
n
.
c
o
.
u
k
The Beginning
Getting To Know You
lm performance along with the fabulous Terri Garr and Peter
Boyle Gene Hackman even makes a brief cameo.
Beautifully shot in black and white on the set of the original
1930s Hollywood Frankenstein lm, its just the right side of
ridiculous something Mel Brookes has struggled to do
since. Its a spoof that is actually better than the original.
Camille Bennet of Throwing Up
Labyrinth
I cried during Labyrinth the other day thats got to be a
strong contender for my favourite lm. Its denitely been
amongst my favourites for the longest. I remember one of the
reasons I liked [bandmate] Clare when we rst met was that
she told me I looked like Sarah, Jennifer Connellys character.
Theres lots of surreal beautiful imagery. I think I even based
my nal project at art school on the masked ball scene. David
Bowie has the tightest trousers, the songs are great and it
was directed by the genius Jim Henson, plus prince of the
land of stench is a great phrase that I need to start using
more often.
Washed Out
Dazed And Confused
My favourite movie of all time is probably Richard Linklaters
Dazed and Confused, and I really love how its appeal has
changed over the years as Ive gotten older. I saw the lm for
the rst time when I was probably 14 or 15 years old, right
around the time I was starting high school and it was totally
THE fantasy of how I imagined high school-life to be
mainly a lot of parties, girls and drugs. As Ive gotten older I
see it more how I imagine Linklater viewing the project
glorifying the feeling of being young and how simple life is at
that age. Also, the 70s wardrobe and soundtrack are both
amazing.
9 ARTISTS ON THEIR
FAVOURITE FILMS
A MOVIE
KIND OF LOVE
Stephen McRobbie of The Pastels
Masculin Fminin
What do you want to know about Masculin Fminin? It
looks and sounds incredible; its Godard; its Paris. 1966.
You want to be there. At its core are two compelling
protagonists, Paul (Jean-Pierre Laud) and Madeleine
(Chantal Goya), a somewhat mis-matched couple
endeavouring to play out their own total lm; she a ye-ye
popstar girl and hipster, he a serious-minded music fan
(Bach) and anti-American Communist. Ideas and images
ow fast and suddenly in this new kind of cinema, which
Godard made in a dizzying run of 13 lms in eight years.
Maybe you could say that for him its a smaller work, but its
a smaller work with everything. Godard then, and Godard
forever.
Baths
Primer
Primer is the only movie Ive seen that I chose to watch
again immediately after my rst viewing. I was obsessed. I
kept wanting to take it apart further and further I ended up
seeing it around 8 times or something. Shane
Carruth directed, starred, wrote, and scored the entire
lm on his own such an inspiring thing to hear. That
fact had a profound effect on my workow. Im so excited
to see his new lm, Upstream Color, just havent found the
time yet!
Cullen Omori of Smith Westerns
The Prestige
Magic. Michael Cane. David Bowie. Smashed corset titties.
I saw this lm when it came out, but my true love of it didnt
occur until it began being constantly replayed on FX. I dont
want to reveal too much of the plot but basically Christian
Bale and Hugh Jackman are both magicians who want to
outdo the other one with magic tricks. Along the way there is
a bunch of pseudo science and dumb melodrama but in
general its super entertaining. The best part of the movie is
the nal scene, where Michael Cane does a magic trick for a
little girl. Its a great movie; thrilling on the rst watch and
hilarious on every subsequent one.
Lois of PINS
If...
If is a lm about revolution and youthful rebellion. A
British Film directed by Lindsay Anderson, set in a 1960s
boarding school for boys. Id describe it as Dead Poets
Society on a date with A Clockwork Orange. Its one you
can watch over and over and see something new every
time. The black and white scenes remain a mystery was it
conceptual, a lighting issue from the churchs large
windows, or simply that the production was low on funding?
Who cares, its great. Favourite scene: Mick (Malcolm
McDowell) romances The Girl (Christine Noonan) in the
caf. The two circle each other like tigers, clawing away in
playful lust.
Charlie Hilton of Blouse
Cinema Paradiso
My favourite movie is Cinema Paradiso because its full of
cute Italians and kissing and extreme doses of melancholy.
When I watch it, I feel like Im in an attic reading an old book
with a gold emblem on it, like the kid in The
NeverEnding Story (my childhood favourite, by the way). I
love how self-reexive it is, that its a lm about lm. I like
that it feels like an old classic, even though it was made
1988. I love the character Alfredo I wish I had an Alfredo.
To me, his friendship with Salvatore seems like the true love
story in the lm. The only thing I dont like about Cinema
Paradiso is the extended cut. Ill just pretend it never
happened.
James Holden
24 Hour Party People
Im not sure I believe in the concept of favourites, but a lm
I hold very dear is 24 Hour Party People, the Winterbottom/
Coogan lm about Tony Wilson and Factory Records. It
seems that whenever the music industry drops some sort of
drama on us Film4 decide to reshow it, and every time a
different part of the lm speaks personally to me and my
particular problems. Tony Wilson was a wise man his Manc
zen has something to teach everyone but the whole lm
shows something more: that no matter how terrible things
get in all the shit surrounding music, the magic at the core of
it still holds and what looks like failure or a mistake doesnt
matter in the bigger picture.
Simon Tong of The Magnetic North
Young Frankenstein
Young Frankenstein was the rst lm I ever bought, aged 11.
It cost 15 on VHS from HMV in Liverpool and I had to go
for 3 weeks without school dinners to be able to afford it, but
it was worth the starvation. Gene Wilder and Mel Brooks are
at the very peak of their game, Marty Feldman gives his nest
FAI R
OHS
ON
K N O WI N G Y O U R L I MI T S
Eddy: Were aware that the way the record industry is
were not going to make a shit load of fucking money.
Were just not. Were not The xx. Yknow, were not going
to be able to tour a shit load, we just physically cant.
Matt: I wouldnt want to make this my full time job.
Joe Ryan [drums]: I would.
Eddy: I probably would, but its so removed, its not a
real question. Thats not us being pessimistic it simply
wont happen. Independent bands with a bunch of dudes
who arent that hot, its like we have nothing going for
us. And also, we wont do what anyone tells us. From the
very start, whenever theres been an opportunity for
someone to give us direction, weve just gone, nope!.
So its an unreal question. We will never, ever, ever
be able to do anything on anyones level. We wont be
able to conform to anybodys idea of what a band should
do, and thats why its enjoyable and why weve done it
for so long.
Matt: Youve known us from the beginning and look
how much weve changed and done what we wanted.
And you cant always make those decisions if youre
basing that on if its going to pay your rent. Your artistic
decisions are either based on money or what the fuck
you want to do.
Eddy: Look at all that hype that happened in London
when we started, and there was Male Bonding and
Grafti Island and all that stuff the band that did the
best was Male Bonding and they dont live off it. Were
nowhere near Male Bonding size. Its so far beyond the
realms of possibility the only thing we can do is continue
to create and enjoy the process.
J U N G L E C AT S
Eddy: We wanted this record to be more considered.
The rst record is verse chorus, verse chorus. But we are
really good musicians we can own our instruments.
The rst record was built on this ultra joyful, youthful,
holy fuck! Lets play loads of shit! Thats a song! Done!.
This time we were thinking about the bands we liked
and we didnt want to do verse/chorus 2-minute songs;
we wanted to see what happens if we let it unfold a bit
more naturally. Ya Mustafa is probably the best example
of that, because its expansive and weird and jammy.
Matt: Jamming is a really good word to describe
where weve got to from before, and I think Eddys
vocals have gotten so much better. It kind of freaked me
out. When you listen to the album, therere some things
that are more subtle and some that are in your face, but
his vocals are amazing, and his lyrics. Yeah, yeah, yeah, his
heads getting bigger hes going to be an arsehole
tonight but Ill say this once and once only: his vocals
got so good that I was blown away when he was doing
his vocal takes and laying down all these different levels.
It was awesome to hear.
N OT F I G HT I N G
Eddy: You hear about bands ghting, and I get how
bands could, but I think were very, very lucky that
theres a lot of mutual respect, and we know that were
not going to be able to tour for four months of the year,
because its not possible. Were never going to be able to
do massive things, so touring is such a nice atmosphere,
and youre with your closest buddies, and it becomes
hard to let go of, because its like, shit, Ive just been
having a really good time with my gang of friends.
Matt: Weve never had a ght because I think we know
each others biting points, and when we get to that we
try to push them a little bit further and then we back off.
But we all know what annoys each other. Like, I know I
have two lines that at a drop of a hat will wind Eddy up;
he knows how to wind me up something to do with
my passport and being lost but we know that we do it
in jest. Were like brothers. You take the piss out of your
brothers, but weve never had an argument or got to the
point where anyone has tried to hit each other or cried,
or walked out.
Joe: Hang on. You two have had a grapple, Ive hit Eddy,
but it was all accidental, pissed nonsense.
Matt: Eddy was wasted and couldnt even see straight,
and he was like, Cmon!, and I pinned him to the oor.
T H E H U S T L E
Matt Flag [bass]: Sometimes sleeping on peoples
oors is fun. Its nice when you want to go and party and
the people youre staying with are like, lets go out and
get wild. But sometimes people are like that and all you
want to do is sleep.
Eddy Frankel [guitar and vocals]: The alternative is
being in a Travelodge, and I think the times when
touring is hardest is when youre forced into introspection,
when youre like, fuck, Im in a fucking Travelodge on a
motorway near Glasgow, and everyones snoring and I
fucking hate them! Whatever you can do to avoid that
The sleeping on peoples oors thing is fun, because you
get to meet people. If you play to 12 people in Glasgow,
or something, and youre staying in a Travelodge, youve
not seen anyone else, just each other, and thats like, this
is a disappointing thing to do.
MA K I N G P E O P L E C RY
Eddy: My on stage banter has not gone down well on
this tour. People do take genuine offence to it. For the
most part, no one reacts, so its just me saying shit into a
microphone.
Matt: We played Birmingham and no one said anything,
and then we played Bristol and there was some girl
shouting at Eddy, and after I came off stage she was like,
I hope you dont mind me shouting? and its like, no, it
adds to it, because she got involved. Some people feel
they can get involved and can take it, some people dont
take it, some people look visibly not excited by it. But I
know that some of our friends like to come to our show
because of Eddys banter it is a part of our show; we
dont look at our feet and play, because that would be
boring. I would be more exited to see Fair Ohs with
him screaming and shouting at people, and I wish I had
the condence to do that, but I need to be really drunk,
and then I only shout at him, and then he puts me down
and calls me Pugsley. I like it, we all take the piss out of
ourselves rst before anyone else. Its offensive to us, and
then everybody else.
Eddy: In Birmingham, yknow those things that hold 4
cans of beer, those plastic things, I was like, these kill
dolphins, but fuck dolphins, and everyone was like,
whys he saying fuck dolphins. Because fuck dolphins,
thats why. The girl I made cry had just graduated, and I
said, welcome to a world of fucking unemployment.
Then I told her that she was stupid because she didnt
even get a First.
T H E F A I R O H S C U R S E
Matt: Im going to put this out there, I love my life
this is Eddys curse.
Eddy: Im quite negative, and I believe that Fair Ohs
are cursed.
Sam Ayres [Saxophone]: Good things come out of it,
right?
Eddy: What?! No! The curse leads to sadness. This tour:
one bass amp, destroyed beyond repair; one guitar amp,
just dead; one guitar, wood shattered; sampler, dead;
sneer skin, died. Things just arent easy with Fair Ohs. I
was going to write a tour diary, but after the rst three
shows, which were so abysmal, I thought, Im just not
doing this, I dont want people to know how bad touring
can be, but then it got really good.
SINCE THEIR 2011 DEBUT ALBUM, EVERYTHING IS DANCING,
LONDON AFRO-PUNKS FAIR OHS HAVE GROWN PHYSICALLY IN
SIZE, ADDING SAXOPHONIST SAM AYRES, AND MOST NOTABLY
IN SOUND AND SCOPE. NEW ALBUM JUNGLE CATS IS LESS
A COLLECTION OF BREEZY TROPICAL POP SINGLES, MORE A
SHOWBOAT IN HOW WELL THE BAND CAN ACTUALLY PLAY, AS
EACH TRACK PROGRESSIVELY BREAKS DOWN AND JAMS OUT.
AND YET ON THE EVE OF THEIR UK TOUR FINALE, THEIR MOST
ENDURING QUALITIES REMAIN HOW LITTLE THEY EXPECT,
AND HOW CLOSE THEY ARE. AS SINGER EDDY FRANKEL PUTS
IT: WHEN YOU TOUR AT OUR LEVEL ITS A REALLY PERSONAL
THING, BECAUSE YOURE NOT NECESSARILY PLAYING TO BIG
CROWDS. ITS NOT ABOUT THE AUDIENCE; ITS ABOUT THE
GROUP YOURE WITH. YOU CAN PLAY TO 30 PEOPLE AND AS
LONG AS THE FOUR OF YOU ARE HAPPY, YOURE GOOD.
PHOTOGRAPHER - OWEN RICHARDS WRITER - STUART STUBBS
B I R MI N G H A M
Matt: Birmingham was a weird high point for us. We
went to a place that served 1 pound drinks to 18 to 20
year old kids and us.
Eddy: Matt stood in the smoking area smoking cigars
around a load of 20 year olds. It was a club called Snobs,
full of 20 year olds listening to The Killers. Sam poured
a beer on himself because he could, because it was a
pound.
Sam: In my defence I had another pound in my
pocket.
Joe: Then we went to this chicken shop that Matts
cousin recommended, and shes like, its fucking shit,
and this is it [gets phone out for photographic evidence]
food, hygiene and safety: 4; structural compliance: 4;
condence in management: little.
MU S I C I A N S H I P
Joe: Touring this record were all like, fuck, this is really
hard to play. Because weve let the musicality come out
a lot more, whether its obvious or not, we know that
were really playing our arses off and really concentrating
for 40 minutes. Its quite a cool thing to not care about
musicianship, but we care.
Eddy: Yeah, its cool to be shit at your instrument. Like,
oh, this little song? I just shat it out. Fuck you! We
worked our fucking arses off to make an incredible
record and you cant play it, because only we can all of
our parts are so uniquely us.
F E E L I N G O L D
Eddy: Theres an emotional side to Jungle Cats that
Everything Is Dancing didnt have, and thats really
important to me. The lyrics have continuity from start
to nish. Its a very personal thing that maybe isnt
shared, but for me I wanted it to have a purpose and
meaning. Jungle Cats is about feeling old. Before this
album was written and recorded, I lost my house, I lost
my job and I lost my girlfriend of ve years. So those
things left my life, and a lot of people go through those
mid-to-late twenties malaise, where youve just lost shit
and youre like, what the fuck am I doing?!. Id lost my
job and had a year on benets, and its a really emotional
thing to go through, and I was like, fuck, Im 26 and I
dont know who the fuck I am and its all just disappearing
those 26 years have fucking gone and Im no different
to how I was when I was 18, and thats just fucked up!.
Its a hard thing to go through.
Matt: One of the funny things is that he was writing
these lyrics about feeling old, but Im the oldest member
of the band, and I had a bit of meltdown when I hit 30,
and theres one song where the lyrics were so relevant to
what I was going through, I thought it was about me.
Eddy: Every songs is about the process of realising,
fuck it, Im not 25! and trying to gure out who the
fuck you are. Im glad that theres that emotional aspect
to it, and its quite sad that literally no reviewer has
picked up on it. Everyones like, this is such a party
record!. Well, fuck you!
G A N G S
Eddy: Its not easy doing what were doing; its not easy
releasing records, and were doing it completely by
ourselves every step of this process has been us, and
weve pushed through it because we really like each
other. Its not like I need to speak to Joe or Matt or Sam
every single day, but this is what we want to do and we
like being around each other. Its this gang mentality of
lets just fucking do this because no one else is going to
be as good as us. Were convinced were better than
anyone else, and thats what you need. Its important to
be like, fuck you! Were going to do this because no one
else is going to make music as intricate or as difcult or
as passionate as were going to make. Or as real!
WE WO N T BE A BL E TO
CO N F O RM TO A NYBO DY S
I D E A O F WHAT A BA N D
S H O U L D D O
SU PE R T R AMP
After roles in seminal groups like Television,
The Heartbreakers and Richard Hell and the Voidoids,
Richard Hell quit music in 1984 and in doing so also
ditched a drug habit hed been carrying around for
years. He returned to his literary roots and was never to
return to music again, apart from a brief outing in the
1990s with a Sonic Youth off-shoot project called Dim
Stars and a brief post-Talking Heads outt collaboration,
The Heads. After several novels and other literary
ventures, Hell has just released the riveting I Dreamed I
Was a Very Clean Tramp, an autobiography that captures a
profoundly auspicious, dangerous and fabled period in
New York Citys musical culture.
Hells tale is imbued with the stereotypical cocktail of
sex, drugs and rocknroll but thankfully his approach
and re-telling is atypical. This isnt a score-settling,
vilifying, embittered rant against those who crossed him,
not a vehement, bile-spewing attack on an industry he
left (although each are denitely touched upon), but
more an honest, seemingly accurate albeit subjective
reection and depiction of his life and the immensely
rich musical period he was a part of. Hells prose ows
and glides. Two decades spent as a novelist and writing
being his main love before he even got involved with
music means that while we are dragged through the
grubby, crime-ridden streets of being young, broke and
angry in 1970s NYC, Hell takes us there in an executed,
eloquent manner.
As he speaks from his New York apartment one he
has remained in for decades Hell is a slightly croaky,
very slow speaking man. His voice emits a lifetimes
worth of 5am wine drinking and endless chain-smoking.
He puts his responses together in very slow, occasionally
painfully, separated junctures. Of the hour we speak,
possibly twenty minutes are a prolonged, grizzly drone
that is Richard Hell either stumbling for words, or
thinking via an elongated mmmmmmm. For someone
who has just spent ve years writing his life story, it is
somewhat understandable that taking his time to nd
the words to use to talk about it, is of great importance.
I didnt take a stance about it, he tells me, looking
back on his nished work. I didnt worry about it. I
think my approach to writing, it was: I didnt hold back.
I was talking the way I would to a friend who I really
trusted, I didnt worry about the way I would look, or at
least as little as possible.
The book has been a success, but in regards to the
response, Hell tells me hes ODd on it.
Its kind of redundant, he says. Its had way more
coverage than anything else Ive ever written. Its now
hard to nd anything new written about it. The main
thing that strikes me is the range of reactions youll
read one writer write about one sentence and call it
brilliant and another will write about the same sentence
and call it pathetic. I offer my favourite line from the
book in the hope we can discuss its symbolism. Does it
refer to, erm, sexual parts? Hell gingerly enquires,
(there is a lot of sex in the book. Hells quench for coital-
relations often matches his quench for drugs). No, I tell
him. Then go ahead, he responds.
The line itself is a reference to Hells love for MAD
magazine as a youth but operates on a further, ultimately
deeper level in the context of his artistic career: Human
works that dont hide the crudity of the approximate nature of
their representation are the best.
A husky laugh trickles down the phone-line from
New York. Nobody has remarked on that line yet, he
says. Im glad you grabbed that one because my editor
wanted me to take that one out.
I agree with you, actually; you remind me of when
I speak about Lester Bangs in the book and he
characterises my work in a way that he means to be kind
TWO MONTHS AFTER THE RELEASE OF HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY,
RICHARD HELL TALKS TO DANIEL DYLAN WRAY ABOUT
WALKING OUT ON THE MUSIC INDUSTRY 30 YEARS AGO
never even thought about it but it was kind of a sore
point, you know, I didnt even wanna hear his record. Its
like an old love affair, youre totally over it but you dont
want it brought back up in your head.
At this stage its difcult to work out if Richard is
attempting to be particularly explicit in respect to his
relationship with Tom as a means to off-set decades
worth of gossip and untruths about the pair of them and
the perceived viewpoint of Hell towards Verlaine, or if
Hell is somehow justifying or dismissing the signicance
of Verlaine in his life as a means to continue to block-out
an underlying, irrefragable pain that still resides since
their friendship fell apart. Hell concludes, however:
Anything in this book could have been written a
different way. It was always there, the affection and the
respect was there in the same way the resentment and
the hatred was.
The book cuts off in 1984 when Hell quit music and
drugs, but in the preceding decade Hell had lived more
wildly and voraciously than many would in a lifetime.
Yet unearthing these tales and having to resurrect the
lives and stories of many dead friends and acquaintances
hasnt made him look back dismissively. I dont believe
in regrets, he says. It doesnt have any meaning to have
regrets unless its a matter of regretting something you
did to someone and youre trying to make up for it.
Personally I just describe my experience, I dont judge it.
I dont have regrets or pride, Its just what happened.
In the book Hell also avoids the usual moral high
ground many ex-drug users take in their later life. Did, I
enquire, drugs make his life more interesting, for a time?
Well yeah, he says, just like a new food does or a new
girlfriend, its new and has some kind of sensory appeal.
It was interesting, sure. That doesnt mean its not
dangerous or poisonous, but yeah, it was interesting.
At this stage the phone goes dead and after a few
minutes we reconnect. Sensing Hells reluctance to
discuss drug-use, I nervously ham-st a somewhat
convoluted question about drugs and their cultural
signicance during this period. What is it? he asks,
unable to unravel my question.
Drugs! I reply.
Youre still asking me about drugs?! he res in a
tone riddled with impatience. Im not happy he
stops, no doubt just before he was about to nish with
talking about this, but he continues. Okay, youre
going to have to repeat the question. I do, rephrasing it
slightly less clumsily, to which he says: I covered that in
the book, I was very clear about that.
Despite Hells complete frankness in the book,
throughout our conversation he seems intently reticent
to discuss many subjects dissected in its pages, but
perhaps that was the point of writing such a book, to
evade people like me probing into his life. He concedes
and kindly continues. Now Im talking about narcotics
here, opiates, thats it, because every drug is different but
the one that brought me down was narcotics, that was
my problem. At the beginning its just bliss because thats
what it is, its a painkiller; you never imagine youre
going to get a habit, you never feel like it will be a
challenge to avoid taking it everyday. It takes a good
couple of weeks before you can get any kind of habit so
you just dont worry about it; it gives you this euphoric
blissful feeling and depending on your own personality
type and your own proclivities it can be something that
is especially appealing to you. Like dreaming, it makes
you dream in this literal way, youre asleep but youre not
actually asleep, youre nodding. It takes away pain, it
takes away anxiety, it makes your whole body feel good
inside. In a lot of ways its similar to sex, it gives you that
feeling after youve just had sex, it gives you that sleepy,
blissful drifting state so there is a lot thats appealing
about it. You dont know about the dangers until youve
succumbed, until youve gone far enough that youve
got a habit and then it just becomes a fucking bore and
not only does it eat up your whole life but it prevents
you from doing your best at anything. Thats the main
way that it affects you as a human being, you are unable
to apply yourself, you just dont demand as much of
yourself for anything if you have a drug habit.
I begin to move on but Hell interjects and continues,
a wind picking up in his sails.
And its torture because you fucking realise all
those things and your whole life has been turned into a
search for drugs and the effort to get free from them is so
painful, its like the pain and suffering is at least equal,
probably greater, than any of the pleasure you had at the
beginning. Im talking specically about physical pain
and the psychological pain is even harder Does that
answer your question? Hell says, with an exerted laugh.
We then wrap things up and Hell growls goodbye as he
returns to his book-lled New York apartment and a life
happily away from a music business that he helped change.
of critical but I agree with. The Bangs-written line in
question, Hell refers to as his aesthetic ideal. Bangs
once wrote after an interview: Look, I started out saying
how much I respected this guys mind and perceptions. I still do
in a curious way Its just that he paints half the picture of
reality with consummate brilliance and the other half is Crayola
slashes across a eld of Silly Putty and Green Slime.
Hell continues to explain his fondness for the
aesthetically jagged. I like architecture, like the
Pompidou Centre in Paris where you see all the tubing
and vents and apparatus instead of it just being this
smooth design like there was some kind of purity to it
but instead its full of these bulging intestines and wires.
Seeing as though Hell has brought up Lester Bangs, it
seems like a good place to challenge his belief that music
journalism hasnt come from the heart since 1976. I
dont really read much music criticism these days, he
confesses. There was a time in the 1970s when my
whole world was what bands were doing and what
records were being made and what inuence they were
having. Lester was always extraordinary that way. There
was a period between the mid 60s and early 70s when
music was thought of as being a life and death thing
where people stake their whole conception of
themselves and their entire relationship to music was the
world, and Lester was always the epitome of that and
that period is denitely over.
You look at periods like the 80s and everybody
became so self conscious and things like irony came in.
The whole conception of rocknroll as being any kind
of transcendental experience it was almost religious
for a while thats just gone. Its like entertainment now.
Theres an innocence gone and a level of commitment
that has just gone.
There is a sub-text apparent in Hells book. Perhaps
initially an inadvertent one but by the end it becomes an
underlying but inescapable theme. It is, in many senses,
a love story, between author and once best friend and
Television band-mate Tom Verlaine. The opening half:
their ourishing romance, their honeymoon period and
then: the collapse, the break-up, the going wild on drink,
drugs and sex in the wake of the fall-out. Although it
isnt until the epilogue (when Hell stumbles across
Verlaine in the street) that the word love is used to
describe this relationship. When I mention the word
love a hearty, growly chuckle comes down the line and
Hell offers a different spin on this element. Yeah, but
there are a couple of caveats or angles on that that I
might mention. Number one, that epilogue was written
after I had nished the book, the book was nished in
2011, and I started it in 2006. I knew the book ended
abruptly, so I felt the need for something more, some
way to trail off a little more gracefully, but I didnt know
what to do. There was a month or two where I was just
percolating I needed to soften the cut-off. Then I had
that experience when I ran into Tom in the street but I
feel like I have a small fear that I jumped on that as a
writer. I wonder if I hadnt have been writing a book, if
Id have just kept on walking. So I wonder if its a tiny bit
manufactured. But as is the nature of non-ction, you
are deciding what to bring to peoples attention. How
much did I create that moment because I needed it for
the book? Thats one angle; the other is that there is this
kind of reversal. For so long Ive been dismissive and
angry, but Ive also been entirely removed, it wasnt
anything I dwelled on. The problems Id had with
Verlaine back in the 70s were not things that had ever
concerned me, I went on and had a life. The way we
went off, going in different directions, was inevitable. I
had no bad feelings about it; we were just like oil and
water. It was a little bit shocking at the time after wed
been such good friends for a long time but it was
inevitable and natural, even the part about the band, in
the way he forced me out of the band. Very quickly
within the next year I played his role. After a year in the
Heartbreakers I realised I needed a band in which I
could get out what I wanted and that I needed a band
that I could lead unequivocally. Anyway what Im
getting at is that its true our friendship in our late teens
and early twenties meant a lot and that gets captured in
the book, but those years are also kind of the most rich
and fruitful for many, many people; they are the years
that you are forming who you really are so they have
extra signicance. It wasnt like it was anything that
preoccupied me; it was just something from my past. I
PHOTOGRAPHER - GUY EPPEL WRITER - DANIEL DYLAN WRAY
TH E CO N CE PT O F
RO CK N RO L L BE I N G A
TRA NS CE N D E NTA L
E X PE RI E N CE, THAT S
J UST G O N E
WWW.LOUDANDQUIET.COM 18 PHOTOGRAPHER - DAN KENDALL WRITER - NATHAN WESTLEY
Categorisation the sorting of stuff into its rightful
place. Its something we all do in order to make sense of
our messy little worlds. No one wants to be sorted
themselves, of course, and for some, no matter how hard
the rest of us try, they just wont sit comfortably anywhere.
Pete Wareham, the animated Saxophonist and
bandleader of progressive World Music collective Melt
Yourself Down, has rst-hand experience of not tting
in. A veteran of Acoustic Ladyland and Polar Bear, his
new group is an energised collision of inuences that
spans both continents and time, a mix that has left critics
dumbfounded as they attempt to hurriedly coin it jazz or
one of its million hybrids.
I really like taking a bit of this and a bit of that.
Inventing a new cocktail is what I want to do and what I
like doing, Wareham informs me on a bench positioned
in the heart of Brightons Laines. I just think of
inuences that I want to blend in a certain way, he says,
later admitting that the ideas can sometimes land on him
at unexpected times.
It was at one of these moments, in fact, that led to the
formation of Melt Yourself Down. I was looking for an
Omar Souleymann track at the time, say Wareham. It
was around eighteen months ago. Randomly, I found
this Ali Hassan Kuban track called Habibi. When I
found it, I listened to it about a hundred times; I couldnt
stop listening to it. I became obsessed with it. I had
always listened a lot to Algerian music and other things, I
always had this idea to do a North African hip-hop band,
but it never kind of materialised. Anyway, I was DJing
one night and thought Ill play it, so I played it. It was
probably a year after I had found it, maybe longer, maybe
two years. The whole dance oor went crazy and I
thought, right, I def want to do this. I never had the
thought of doing something that sounds like that track
before, with the same sort of instrumentation. It was at
my birthday party actually, the next day I just phoned up
a lot of people, the people who became the band, asked
them if they were up for it, started writing music and a
few weeks later we had a rehearsal.
The people enticed in were Shabaka Hutchings (The
Heliocentrics), Tom Skinner (Sons of Kemet), Ruth
Goller (Acoustic Ladyland), Kushal Gaya (Zun Zun
Egui) and Satin Singh (Transglobal Underground): a
grouping of people who were no strangers to working
on things that sat outside of the mainstream. The
rehearsals would soon turn into forming the basis of
what would become the groups self-titled album. Says
Wareham: We did ve rehearsals before we recorded
the rst half and another ve before we did the
second half.
It was a bit weird, he says. Normally we are more
live players than we are studio players. And so, normally
we would have gigged the hell out of it before
recording it, but we cant do that with brand new bands.
No one is going to give you a gig without a recording; a
recording isnt going to be at its best unless you play live,
so I just had to edit the tunes really hard, so that they
stood up on their own they couldnt rely on jamming
to get through the writing had to be really solid.
All the rehearsals were recorded and then I chopped
up the recordings of the rehearsals and then arranged the
tunes and wrote them that way. I made my own demos
of each one, I took the demos to the rehearsal and we
recorded the rehearsal and chopped up the rehearsals.
Simply put: it was an exercise to get the arrangements
right and to calibrate the tunes, but it was also one
that had a divine effect on how the album later sounded.
All of the songs were really distorted. They were done
through a laptop microphone, so when we started giving
the demos to the producer, everyone was like, we wanted
to keep that really distorted rough sound that we had in
rehearsals because it sounded like it was out in the street.
The end product of these recording sessions with
producer Leafcutter John is an album that has excited as
much as it has confused the populous. People asked us
what genre of music it was. We pre-empted this, we
knew it was going to be a question, so we decided to call
it People Music. Not that weve ever had to call it
anything, but thats what it is about, its about people. Its
about energy really and colour.
Its an album that bubbles with boisterous energy and
the spirit of punk, jazz, dance and North African rhythms
with vocals woven in such a way that they at times feel
like one. Thats one of the great things about Kush, he
makes up his own language. Hes Mauritian, so he sings
in a Mauritian-French but theres a bit of Creole in there
as well and some English, plus some of his own made up
language. Its nice, because a lot of the music that I listen
to, obviously I dont understand Nubian, and one of the
big things that Ali Hassan Kuban band tried to do was
preserve the culture of the Nubian. As they got
completely wiped out, there was a lot of effort to preserve
the culture through music.
I listen to a lot of Algerian music, but I dont speak
Arabic. I like the sound of the words, theres something
about the sound that I like and this reects that. You can
put your own words on it and also youre not dictating
how people should feel; youre keeping it open. Feel
something but were not going to tell you what.
Wareham is keen to stub out the idea that Melt
Yourself Down is just a temporary irtation, too, an
opinion that its easy to have when listening to the bands
novel, brassy carnival tracks. Were working on new
material at the moment he condes.
Were in a situation where we can gig now, so I want
to try and do it, so that weve played the next albums
material live before we record it. Its going to be the big
difference between the two albums and were in that
position where we can, so I want to take advantage of
that, writing on the road and rehearsing in sound checks,
trying to keep it going. So yeah, were all very dedicated;
were really doing our best to make it as good as it can
be.
MELT YOURSELF DOWNS PETE WAREHAM HAS COME UP
WITH A NAME FOR THE MUSIC HIS NEW PROGRESSIVE
JAZZ-FUNK BAND PLAY, BECAUSE NO ONE ELSE COULD
PE OPL E MUSI C
We rst met three years go, sheltering from the rain
after a show, her tired eyes barely registering mine. Scout
Niblett had just played a blistering set at the Brudenell
Social Club, Leeds, and was in no mood for talking. Like
many others, Id discovered her when song Kidnapped
By Neptune featured on a Stella McCartney perfume ad
in 2005, the offbeat drumming and angry howls rattling
round my head on countless long journeys.
Three years later, the Scout that greets me is childlike, but
with an intensity that can easily catch you off guard, a
sudden ash of re appearing behind her dark brown
eyes. Theres a huge plaster on her leg and a rip in her
tights from where she fell over drunk last night that makes
her look adorably clumsy.
Quickly banishing her band from the room she begins
softy. When I was 9, I started playing piano and I started
making up my own songs right away. When I was little I
would just record them on a tape recorder
Moving to America 12 years ago, Emma Louise Scout
Niblett now bases herself in Portland, Oregon, taking her
stage name from Jean Louise Scout Finch, a character in
Harper Lees 1960 novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, a tomboy,
with whom she shares the same shy tenacity. She shrugs
forwards, scrunched up into her chair. The underground
music culture in America is big enough so that you can
make a living from it without being super famous. The
mainstream culture of music here is so different, because its
all based on selling things. That sounds silly... [She gestures
with her hands as if grasping for the right words]... its based
on making it big, right? In America you dont have to enter
into that, you can still survive. You dont have to be in the
industry there and you do here, so I had to leave.
Scout released her debut album Sweet Heart Fever in
2001, latest album, Its Up to Emma is her sixth, and this
time she got stuck into the production, making every
decision on how it was going to sound. Partnered up
with legendary producer Steve Albini, they met in 2003
SCOUT NIBLETT DISCUSSES
ASTROLOGY, HER COMPULSION
TO CREATE AND HOW TO
SURVIVE IN THE MUSIC
BUSINESS YOU SHOULD MOVE
TO AMERICA
while working with Jason Molinas Songs: Ohia project
and have worked together ever since. She smiles. The
main thing I like is that Steve tries to do everything as live
as possible, it keeps that energy of spirit. I think thats
something I really value about how he works, having a
limit of were going to do this is in three takes or were
not doing it.
After six albums Im curious what keeps her coming
back for more, and suddenly her eyes harden and her soft
voice becomes forceful. Because I dont want to do
anything else. Its not really a choice, this is what Im
supposed to do and thats it. The shutters fall and not for
the rst time it seems the conversation might come an
abrupt end.
Aside from keeping interviewers on edge, Scout never
shies from baring her soul on record. Its Up to Emma,
deals with a recent break-up in gut wrenching detail,
charting its course from the blood spattered rage of Gun
to the hollow sadness of What Can I do, where she
howls over driving strings until her voice cracks. Scout
has a unique way of processing her feelings, turning to
Astrology and the alignment of the Planets to explain
their meaning. Suddenly becoming more animated, she
explains, My dad bought me a book about Astrology
when I was about seven and I literally havent stopped
studying it since. The reason that album was called
Kidnapped by Neptune was because Neptune was what
they call transiting my ascendant at the time and it
literally did feel like I didnt know who I was. The energies
of Neptune are dissolving your ego and it really kind of
shakes you up. Right now Pluto, but also Uranus are
equally battling, challenging my Sun.
Scout laughs, clearly used to people looking slightly
bewildered. Thats all to do with transformation, radical
transformation in my sense of self, especially in terms of
partnerships and its teaching me to be self reliant and not
depend on anyone.
Self-reliance is important to Scout, who still gets
annoyed when reviews focus on female artists looks
rather than their music. She scowls and then sighs, I nd
it very narrow.
Despite her intensity she still likes to play around,
covering TLCs No Scrubs on her recent album and
dressing up as Snow White to go to a fair downtown in
the video for Gun. She sings songs about cheerleaders
and dinosaur eggs and putting on costumes to drive out
to the desert. Shes not afraid to rock out, to growl, to cry.
She is in short, kind of fearless, a person who can walk
around the streets of Paris, guitar in hand, singing at the
top of her lungs (in a 2008 video for La Blogothque). Yet
on this new record, Scout had ickerings of doubt. I
think with this one there was a point where I was a little
bit self conscious about it, she says. This is way more
direct than before, but I really like that about other
peoples music and I realised it just had to be what it was.
Im singing it for myself, always, she laughs gently, but
its obviously about one person. Its my version of what
happened, its therapy for me.
Scout is headed out for an extensive tour of Europe and
America that leads right through until winter, and theres
nowhere else shed rather be. She says: When Im out
there I feel like this is really my job. Its on stage where
Scout Niblett lights up, trading jibes with the audience
while stamping a path around the stage. Theres still
sadness beneath the determined scowl, but she seems to
be nally ridding herself of her long burden, whispering
softly, Ive fooled myself for too long.
We gravitate back to Astrology and her obsession with
gems, decked out in an array of multi-coloured crystals.
Scout smiles, looking every inch the Earth Mother. Its
funny because to me its all the same thing, she says. Its
all about vibrations. Astrology is about vibration of the
planets affecting us here and the stones are vibrating,
affecting us. Its all about the same thing energy moving.
STAR
WOMAN
PHOTOGRAPHER - GABRIEL GREEN WRITER - KATE PARKIN PHOTOGRAPHER - DAN KENDALL WRITER - NATHAN WESTLEY
As I begin to write I am full of contrite promises, a sense
of repent that will soon be broken. A scandalous hour
spent in the company of Jamie Lee, one that shattered
the spell around his near fabled Manchester band
MONEY, and one that questioned why you are in fact
reading this very music paper, made everything teeter
on the edge, ready to hurtle south. Now that the cloak
and daggers are gone, the band must be covered, just as
their music demands to be heard.
Bile leaves Jamie and enters me, albeit with an easy
charm. It must be frustrating interviewing other
people, not just people but egotistical, self-involved
people, he says. What is it you want to get out of
someone, is it just about the music or is it about who
they are? We sit opposite each other and share nervous
grins. This is a near rst for the Londoner turned
spiritual Mancunian interviews have been few and far
between. Im frankly terried, he condes with a
wicked smile. Me too.
This strange apprehension, this feeling of betrayal is
because MONEY are on the brink of something
extraordinary. Unspoilt and otherworldly, the band have
reimagined Manchester as their very own paradise and
now they leave it in their wake. Theyre ready to y the nest.
I meet Jamie having returned from The Best Kept
Secret festival in Holland. Sweet-natured and boiling
and bubbling with a dangerous charisma, hes dangling
on the precipice of adulthood, the follies of youth never
too far from dragging him back under. I dont actually
think I enjoy festivals, do you? he asks. I could be
cynical and say that theyre everything thats wrong with
the music industry, the mainstream ones, anyway. There
is this impatient attitude and people just make a fucking
mess. Jamie lets out the rst of many contagious belly
laughs and sits back, a roguish young man with a
Macbeth haircut.
MONEY are about to leave their comfort zone, if
you can call an abandoned factory in the shadows of
Strangeways Prison a comfort zone. This forcible space
has a name; The Bunker is where the magic happened
and happens for Jamie and his three friends, Charlie
Cocksedge, Billy Byron and Scott Beaman. Its where
like-minded vagabonds and strays unite in wild
celebration and where the band reacted to their
newfound habitat in fervent performance and rude
heath. Esoteric and bizarre, The Bunker brought
together bands like MONEY and others in their
underground milieu, such as Kult Country, G R E A T
W A V E S and Bernard and Edith, to bear their souls
inside a wooden cage of musical ceremony, the audience
outside this enclosure watching on bewildered.
Now theyre on tour, MONEY are playing to a
IRONIC IN NAME AND ADVERSE TO INTERVIEWS,
MANCHESTER BAND MONEY ARENT CHASING A BIG
PAYDAY, BUT IT COULD BE COMING NONETHELESS
different breed and its been praying on Jamies million-
miles-an-hour mind. I was thinking just that this
morning actually, I wonder what kind of people are
going to start coming to see us. I dont want to appeal to
one group of people. If youre going to say something in
your music youd like to think it would appeal to a wider
demographic than 18 to 35 white males and their
girlfriends.
This begs the question who they were playing to before?
I remember the rst show at The Bunker, and it
sounds pathetic when Im saying it now, but people
were walking around naked and just behaving badly. Its
nothing new or different or particularly enlightening,
its just kind of reckless and fun. Manchester is a
mythological, magical place, its not a beach and it has
aws but that is its very charm.
Together with their rst label, the self-proclaimed
cultural regenerators Sways Records, the band set about
harnessing Manchesters poetic strength. Both as
MONEY and in the guise of Books, Youth and Meke
Mente, they sabotaged the Manchester music scene
leaving it spellbound. We wanted to create somewhere
that was a completely free space where people could
express themselves however they wanted, within reason!
Of course our thresholds to reason are perhaps less than
others. For me Im glad that The Bunker is there. The
guys that run it show a force of will that is so strong.
Jamie has certainly learnt how to lose his inhibitions.
A recent and rare London gig saw him begin at the back
of the room, barking out a song called Paradise Is Hell
in beautiful spoken word before dancing and kissing his
way to front of stage. Its about making a well-rounded
performance, he says, showing your interests and your
passions at every moment and not just playing songs on
stage. As a result of being open and genuine people start
to believe in what I am singing, at least I hope they do.
We can transport that attitude we had at The Bunker
and keep that vivacity. Anyway who have been your
favourite interviews with? What makes a good
interviewee? He smiles that wicked smile once more
and we digress. Clearly most at comfort asking questions
than answering, time passes freely by and much later
than deemed appropriate for these situations we return
to the reason were sat here, MONEYs moving debut
album, The Shadow of Heaven, released next month.
First I tell him its good. Thanks! I think we could
have done it so much better but you know we recorded
it in Hackney and it was a relief to get out of Manchester
because it would have taken us two years up there;
theres too much going on and it would have been a
distraction. We were very slow anyway and if we had the
opportunity it would have taken us even longer.
Then I ask him if he believes in God. No, not in a
conventional sense. We cant be the zenith of
consciousness; we cant be the nished product. There
must be something that is incomprehensible to us that is
more powerful or potent than us.
In Jamies words, The Shadow of Heaven strives to
look at the world in macro terms, imbuing the modern
world in biblical proportions, so it seemed pertinent to
ask that question and now that hes answered to pry
even further. I dont really think that people have a
right to say what they think about religion, he says. I
dont actually believe atheists are able to say there is no
God; I dont think they have the right to question the
universe that way. Unfortunately there is a strand of
arrogance, especially amongst modern society I hate
that word, society where people are given the
opportunity to make these statements and ideological
interpretations which I think are beyond us. At once
Jamie is reasonable but passionate, and I sense that a
nerve has been struck.
At the core of the album lies Hold Me Forever, an
absorbing, majestic song (since made into a music video
by Hollywoods very own Cillian Murphy) that states
Paradise could turn to Hell if there is someone in
control. So is that MONEY questioning religion?
I didnt set out to actively challenge it. I wanted to
present these ideas and do it properly so I did it in a
song. Jamie stops and were treated to that wonderful
laugh again. If thats a proper way of doing it! Its
ludicrous to put these thoughts into a 3 minute pop
CASH I N
T H E ANT I CS
PHOTOGRAPHER - ELINOR JONES WRITER - IAN ROEBUCK
song, isnt it, with a verse and a chorus and yeah, lets
make it catchy too. Theres a nice nexus there though
between what hymns do, which is essentially to educate
and to be catchy so people can remember the melody
and the message. Pop music does exactly the same thing
to me. It says something about our age, maybe a lot of
shallow things. I really enjoyed singing hymns
unashamedly when I was younger and I was quite
moved by it, maybe I think all of us have done it and felt
this way too.
That sense of confession and isolation imbues each
and every track on the bands debut, and from barren
ballads to surging ambitious pop songs, The Shadow of
Heaven is an addictive record that warmly suffocates
you in its fanatical lyrical approach. Jamie has a love hate
relationship with it, saying: Well, I stopped listening to
the album a long time ago. Theres so much more to
listen to! Its done now and theres nothing I can do
about it. Id love to be able to record it again knowing
what I know now. It would be a different sounding
record... anyway. A slump. A long pause. This is what
weve been afraid of all along. Its just so boring talking
about music because... Im not saying its a boring
conversation your questions are good I just dont
want to get to a stage where Im enjoying talking about
this. I think this is me slowly realising that I have to talk
about our music in some regards. Its difcult talking
about yourself, isnt it? Some people revel in it and really
love it, but I cant say I enjoy it.
Brightness nally falls upon Jamie when we mention
Bella Union, the label that journeyed to Manchester,
entered MONEYs realm and will now present them to
the world. They just completely let us get on with it.
After hearing horror stories from other bands signing to
majors where A&Rs would be in the studio everyday
listening to all the songs, thats just horrible pressure, not
just to make something but also to succeed under
someone elses requirements and watchful eye. All the
creative stuff with Bella Union, the actual making of the
record, was left completely open, which was a very
different attitude to have for a label that size.
Its nearly time to end, but one last question is
ventured. Goodnight London, the rst song I heard of
MONEYs some time ago, is one that haunts every
listen of the album, since it strikes me as being different,
untamed perhaps. Its about when you meet someone
and you say, yeah Im ne even though you might be
suicidal or depressed, says Jamie. Things like that tend
to be very private, so I like the idea that when someone
who writes, paints, or makes music, it is a very private act
and whether thats masturbatory or communicative on a
human level I like that confessional or private thing, and
night-time seems to be the perfect metaphysical space
to have these conversations because you are essentially
alone. Its a song about isolation, fascination with the
city at large and its kind of a homosexual lullaby as
well, he spurts out with loud laughter one nal time. I
also feel like Im not doing my job properly if people
have to ask. But they will, I tell him, and deep down
Jamie knows this.
I T S O U N DS PATH ETI C
WH E N I M S AYI N G I T
N OW, BUT PE O PL E WE RE
WA L KI N G A RO U N D NA KE D
A N D J UST BE HAV I N G
BA D LY
hen I pick up the phone to call
No Age, my information is hazy. Im not 100% sure as to
where they are or who will pick up the bands shared
mobile. As it turns out, I nd Dean Allen Spunt on what
might just be the Champs-lyses, given the constant
buzz of trafc and background conversation as he relaxes
after the Paris leg of No Ages mammoth 2013 tour. As
he discusses the struggle to keep live shows interesting,
the evolution of No Ages sound and a difcult
relationship with the music press, he gushes about his
band with an effusive energy thats almost aggressive and
always articulate.
We just played last night, he buzzes. It was in this
little club called Espace B, behind a caf. Its like 200
capacity, real small. Real sweaty and fun. The ceiling was
sweating; it was nice. His excitement about playing to a
live audience is infectious and I ask him if hes looking
forward to a tour that stretches all the way to November,
taking in over 50 dates that will see them traverse the
US before heading back to Europe. It comes in waves.
Im ready for it. Denitely, after not touring for a little
bit, its something that can get exciting. We got creative
with the record and the packaging, and the whole time
making that I was thinking, OK, we have to tour. If you
think of it as this experience you get to go have and
share with people and get to complete the cycle of art
we made something and were going to share it.
Theyre determined, it seems, to share it with as many
as people as they possibly can, and a quick look down
their upcoming itinerary throws up some interesting
stop-offs. As an Irishman, my attention is drawn to
Limerick and when I ask if theyve been there before it
sets off an insight into a touring policy that goes much
deeper than most bands stock slaloms through major
cities. Weve never been. We try to mix it up. I think, as
a band, its boring to play big cities all the time. In places
like Limerick or small towns in the States, even an hour
outside a big city, it seems to have such a different vibe
and its a different experience for us. To them their towns
are awful. They have this small town guilt but in small
towns theres something real going on.
Watching a live show that is nothing short of
incendiary, its clear that there is a telepathy between
Spunt and guitarist Randy Randall, and he is beguilingly
enthusiastic as he waxes lyrical about their mutual
understanding. We communicate by a raise of an
eyebrow. You know what the other persons thinking. Its
funny, because even if we dont practise for a while or
dont play shows for a while, theres these kinetic
energetic things; muscle movements and muscle
memory. I more or less know what Randys gonna do
and if he doesnt do something then I more or less know
how to come out of it and shape around it. Or if he
messes up or if I mess up we know how to make it look
like we didnt. He laughs, but its more than just a case
of covering each others backs; its a crucial part of the
bands live experience. I tend to like when we mess up.
It changes it up. We can get pretty tight by the end of a
tour but we like to keep it loose.
For anyone who hasnt seen how the band work on
stage, Spunt takes on vocal duties from behind his drum
kit, while the other half of No Age, Randy Randall,
stands, head bowed, driving the melodies forward with
bruising, six-stringed abrasiveness. At least, thats been
the format until now. Upcoming album An Object
takes their razor sharp neo-punk and blurs the edges.
Drums are either treated, buried deep in the mix or
eschewed in favour of found objects. Rewarding for the
listener who affords the time it deserves, its a much
sludgier, more difcult record that makes the rst track
to surface, CMon Stimmung, sound like straightforward
indie pop. It feels a lot tighter and it feels heavier, with
the intent of the lyrics, says Spunt. Theres not that
many drums on the record. There are rhythms but
theyre not heavy; theyre kind of like a limp wrist
instead of a st. I think thats interesting. Theres these
really powerful, almost aggressive lyrics but then the
songs never really get to that point of macho-ness. To
me, drums can be very macho and as a drummer Ive
tried very hard to make them as simple and nimble and
as human as possible.
For a band who have steadily built a dedicated
following, its been interesting to gauge the reaction to
the new sounds. Spunt says: We have these soundscapey
songs and we try to play those live but people dont
really want to hear those. They want us to play the song
where Im pounding the drums so that they can jump
on top of their friends and stuff. And I like to play them
too, but this is a way to say, These songs that are moving
and aggressive, youre going to have to deal with not
having a big loud drum set and well see what you do.
No Age come to town and you want to jump around,
but were hitting you with this thing thats half of the
equation. Youre kind of left to ll in the void
Having contributed music as an accompaniment to
the 2012 essay book Collage Culture, there is an
earnestness when we discuss the physical production of
the new record itself, something which very much
turned into a labour of love for the LA pair. We
manufactured 10,000 LPs and CDs by hand. We
originally wanted to do an unlimited edition and
continue to do them by hand but Sub Pop werent really
into that because that would mean that they would sell
out when were on tour and theyd have to wait for us to
come home and make them. I suggest that that might
be fair enough, given the business that theyre in and
Spunt laughs. They reminded us that theyre running a
record label to sell records, not to have us critique the
way that records are sold. But these ideas helped me and
its kind of funny to see how far we can push it. Im
really proud of it. Its my favourite thing weve done.
By the time An Object sees the light of day in
August, it will be almost three years since they released
third album Everything In Between. I denitely
needed some time to be inspired to make music, says
Spunt, whos self-effacing when it comes to the manner
in which he contributes to No Ages sound. Making
music, for me, isnt as easy as it is for Randy. He can
write songs and he plays guitar so he can come up with
riffs. I play drums and I dont usually come up with
drumbeats on my own. If I do, I come up with loops and
samples and noise stuff but that usually doesnt ll a
whole song.
Indeed, it becomes obvious that the recording process
itself was a difcult one and was, in fact, aborted on at
least one occasion. We went to Texas in 2012 to try to
record a record and it didnt really work. We had two
songs that are on the record now but one of thems
Cmon Stimmung, which we recorded and that was
just the way it is, but when we recorded An Impression
it was just a totally different song. The time off, then,
allowed Spunt in particular to regroup and focus on
what it was that he wanted to create music about. I
need to be inspired and I need to take some time off to
write because Im not generally inspired by jamming. I
need to go out and relax and see things and look at art
and check in with friends. I need to take a look at the
outside world and see where I want to point my gun.
One thing that emerges is that Sub Pop have remained
a benevolent force in the birth of the new album,
affording time for the creative juices to ow. I ask if they
were as understanding back when they had just signed,
but Dean snaps back, asserting the self-conferred
freedom himself and Randy felt from day one. In the
beginning there wasnt any pressure. Thats why I believe
Weirdo Rippers and Nouns were super easy, because
there wasnt any pressure for us. It was kind of a joke.
Like, We made it on Sub Pop, thats a joke because our
band is weird. At that point we were a very odd band.
Spunts more bullish as he reects on the bands early
dealings with the industry, saying, That they cared and
wanted to give us money, or that other labels wanted to
give us money to make us money was completely serene.
There was no pressure because we were going to make
a record we liked and either way we would lock
ourselves in for three records.
The mention of those early days, however, also ignites
a rant at the music press and how the real burden,
particularly after 2008s critically acclaimed Nouns,
grew out of the hype that surrounded them and the
need to pigeonhole their work. Articles would just say
that you sound like this or you have this kind of thing,
that youre a lo- garage rock or noise rock or rock band
or whatever the fuck they were talking about and then
they would compare it to these other bands who would
have, maybe not a similar sound, but the vocals were
distorted or something. And then instantly people
would put stuff together. At the end of the day I dont
read reviews or anything like that so it doesnt really
matter.
I ask where No Age t in in todays musical landscape.
There are bands that I do feel aligned with, says
Spunt, but theyre usually bands from home. Weve
been friends with a band like Deerhunter for a long
time and I respect them musically. To be honest with
you, I didnt really care about that world. It was just odd
there were moments when Id wake up in a hotel at a
festival and be surrounded by similarly hyped bands and
be like, What the fuck am I doing?
Playing devils advocate, I ask how I should describe
No Age when I come to write this piece. Spunt sniggers.
On this record Ive been really accepting being a
rocknroll band, making rocknroll songs and touring.
And shaking my butt in front of the camera.
As our conversation draws to a close, I make sure to
congratulate Spunt on their anti-Walmart and anti-
Converse protests, the latter of which saw them take
part in a concert sponsored by the footwear brand in
order to execute what they described as a, Planned
Contradictory Action. Projecting moving images of
the conditions of Converse factories as their backdrop,
the most impressive part was that they managed to
persuade the engineer to let it play for almost 15
minutes. Yeah, well I was staring at the guy and yelling
at him not to turn it off. I looked very angry. They
played some of it. The kids in the audience were very
excited by it. I think they felt what was wrong with the
show. And then we didnt have to say anything we just
showed them and I think they understood why a shoe
company shouldnt be trying to sell back rebellion to a
bunch of kids.
W
FOURTH ALBUM AN OBJECT HAS LA DUO NO AGE TRYING
NEW THINGS AND FUCKING WITH THE DRUMS
YOU N G AT H E ART
PHOTOGRAPHER - PHIL SHARP WRITER - DAVID ZAMMITT
On a street corner by a building site just off the Kingsland
Road, Dalston, London, Ben Power and Andy Hung are
having their photo taken. Seated in the back of an open
lorry, the two early-thirties men who comprise Fuck
Buttons are chatting about school sports days, how
modern skateboarders are mindblowingly technical
compared to their 90s counterparts, and whatever else
springs to mind in a pleasingly uid, light-hearted
conversation that suits the balmy summer evening.
For a band whose music frequently prompts fevered
comparisons to a violent apocalypse and catastrophic
galactic events indeed, for a duo who decided that the
best way to express themselves musically was to name
themselves Fuck Buttons and then make a deafeningly
confrontational blend of white noise post-rock and
electronica using knackered kids keyboards they are a
surprisingly mild-mannered pair. Hungs biggest
concern today is that the Wikipedia page for his old
school, Kings Worcester, wont include him in the
famous alumni section because of a lack of citation;
Power, the quieter of the two, appears to know everyone
who walks past the lorry, giving each a long-lost-friend
bear hug and handshake, seemingly genuinely pleased to
see them all.
Hung, with the same infectious chortle that follows
most of his sentences, wonders aloud whether Burial has
a day-job, since he never gigs. Were only able to do this
for a living because we play live we wouldnt be able
to do this full-time just from the recordings, he explains,
while also acknowledging that loose talk like that just
fuels the amusing rumour currently circulating that
Burial is, in fact, Four Tet. Power, keen to generate some
dual-identity rumours of his own, pipes up: Like us and
Daft Punk, he mock reveals, to the chuckles of his
bandmate. Well, you never see us in the same room
together...
If it turned out, however, that he and Hung do run a
sideline as robot-headed disco throwback connoisseurs,
it would be among the greatest split personalities since
Dr Jekyll poured himself a glass of shapeshifting serum
Fuck Buttons will likely play the Moon before they
write something as approachable as Get Lucky. Equally,
it is unimaginable that anyone else, let alone Daft Punk,
would make Slow Focus, Fuck Buttons new record.
Indeed, as if to accentuate this distance from their
peers, Slow Focus actually represents something of a
departure even from themselves, with the pounding,
fuzzed out techno that characterised Fuck Buttons last
record, Tarot Sport, now broadly dismissed. A change
of direction, though, was apparently never in doubt,
explains Hung, now ensconced in a pub corner with his
bandmate, and, along with Power, far more deliberative
with his words when the dictaphone is on. I think if we
were repeating the music of Tarot Sport, we wouldve
FUCK BUTTONS DISCUSS THIRD ALBUM SLOW FOCUS, AND HOW EVEN
THE OLYMPIC GAMES COULDNT GET THEM TO REPEAT THEMSELVES
DON T LOOK BACK
decided to stop, he says. We didnt deliberately decide
to do something different when we began writing this
album but Id like to think that if wed started to make
any music that approached the aesthetic of Tarot Sport,
we wouldve gone...
He pauses, and Power offers the end of the sentence:
Wed have needed to have a drastic rethink. Hung
nods: We wouldve gone, Weve got to fuck things up.
And fuck things up, broadly, is what theyve done.
Where Tarot Sport hurtled through its running time
like some sort of possessed Duracell Bunny, all throbbing
ultra-bright major-key wonder and a grand, almost
god-like sense of scale, Slow Focus feels heavier and
more industrial, tightly coiled and narrow-eyed.
If Tarot Sport was occasionally heavenly, it feels as if
Slow Focus has its eyes on the underworld. Theres a
sentiment in the new record that we hadnt really played
around with before, offers Power in an attempt to
explain the shift in mood. Its a touch less friendly, I
think. This last suggestion is something of an
understatement: the entire record, and particularly its
central track, Sentients, feels like a modernised blast of
Bernard Hermanns classic score to Psycho, ltered
through rumbling, stalking-pace kick drums and
howling synth washes.
Its more jostling, too, adds Hung, trying to explain
the lurching, bumpy feel of the album. You need more
swing on slower BPM stuff. You need more denition.
Like, if you have anything over 120, pretty much
everything has a groove naturally, and you dont need to
do much to it. But anything below that needs to catch
you and throw you again, and catch you and throw you
again.
The idea that Fuck Buttons new album is a touch
scarier and slower is pretty obvious from rst listen, but
unfortunately this is about the best insight that Slow
Focus authors are willing to impart; Power in particular
seems genuinely confused as to why people might want
his opinion on his creations. Hung, eager to help, jumps
in when his bandmate offers another passively equivocal
nod to an observation about Slow Focus: The thing
is, he explains, the general aesthetic of the whole
album isnt intentional. Thats why we cant talk about it
in terms of we wanted it to be like this, or like that.
Frustrating as that may be, though, it also makes a
kind of sense. After all, Fuck Buttons music is so odd
that its not really the kind of thing one could imagine
sitting down and planning before playing, a fact borne
out of the way the duo write always improvised at rst
pass and always collaborative: If its not Andy and me
bashing heads in the rst instance then its not Fuck
Buttons, Power explains, more effusive again once the
topic of the new album is left behind. Thats part of
what makes things exciting being able to feed off each
other. We dont really discuss things weve been
together for almost ten years now making this music and
we kind of have our own language, so we dont need to
vocalise things. Its extensive jamming, its very playful
and explorative, the way we write, and that allows us to
surprise ourselves. Theres no leader or preconceived
ideas anything approaching that probably boils down
to who switches their things on rst.
Usually, adds Hung, both of us are playing
something, and one of us just goes hold on!
Ben nods again: Hold on is probably the most we
ever say to each other.
Hold on was also probably the startled reaction
of a certain kind of music fan at the stroke of 9 oclock
on 27 July last year, when the establishing sequence of
the London Olympic Opening Ceremony began: a
placecard reading Isles of Wonder, followed by a
high-speed voyage down the River Thames, was
soundtracked not by Elgar, or even ambient
scene-setting sound effects, but by the twinkling
sequencers and low-throbbing techno kick of Fuck
Buttons Surf Solar, the lead track from Tarot Sport.
Another Tarot Sport cut, Olympians, appeared later
in the ceremony, as did Sunriser, by Powers side
project Blanck Mass. One billion people worldwide
were watching, and listening.
For a certain mindset, exposure like that would be
the cue to down tools and consider how to make the
most of one sixth of all humans hearing your song. But
not Fuck Buttons. It was a real privilege and honour
to be involved, but those were tracks that had already
happened for us, says Power, so matter-of-factly as to
imply that any other outlook would be bizarre. We
had new tracks by then. Our concentration was on
something else. At the time, Power and Hung were in
the thick of committing Slow Focus to tape, having
spent the previous 18 months writing it. And we were
aware, adds Hung, blithely, that wed written new
tracks that sounded quite a bit different to the ones
wed been asked to contribute, yeah, sure.
Fuck Buttons appeared on the ofcial Opening
Ceremony soundtrack album (under the amusingly
Olympic-friendly alias of F-Buttons), but aside from
that, kept on keeping on. Their outlook and intent
stayed the same, and no particular effort was made to
pander to new fans who mightve heard their music for
the rst time that night: Its a difcult one, isnt it?
says Hung, when asked if anyone suggested to him that
this could be an opportunity to earn more followers. I
mean, we couldve shouted about it, but it just didnt
happen. We couldve though! he concedes, with
another of his hearty chuckles.
But in what way? interjects Power, clearly peeved
at the suggestion that a small independent-label band
might relish an opportunity like the one theyd been
given. I dont get it. It wasnt that we didnt want, or
didnt not want anything in particular, he continues,
somewhat opaquely. But ask him what he does want,
and things get more difcult. Christ, this sounds like a
pep talk! he exclaims, pouting uncharacteristically
when asked if hes content with their level of
popularity there does, after all, appear to be a certain
self-limiting aspect to the way Fuck Buttons operate,
from the name to the sound palette, which doesnt
perhaps chime perfectly with allowing your music to
be used in something as mainstream as the Olympics.
The thing is, you only get one fucking chance while
youre here, Power relents. I dont want to be lying
on my death bed thinking, I did that for the wrong
reasons and I feel like a bit of a dickhead for doing
that.
Hung, perhaps more conciliatory, chips in. We just
want people to give it a go. Artistically, we care about
people hearing it which is why the Olympics thing
was nice but we dont care about people liking it.
Theyre very separate things. If we cared about people
liking our music, wed have picked up a guitar ages ago
and started writing songs about how we broke up with
someone!
Its amazing that people take to it in the same way
that we do, adds Power, warming to his bandmates
theme, but it doesnt matter if we have ve fans or
5,000. I dont think thats ever our rst intention. I
know thats the age-old thing that people say we
only make music for ourselves, but it does ring true.
The were just making music for ourselves and if
anyone else likes it thats a bonus line is so frequently
spouted these days by careerist landll indie bands
playing riff-robbing, mega-populist, three-minute guitar
pop that its become virtually meaningless. By contrast,
when a band as outr as Fuck Buttons say it, youre
inclined to believe them; after all, their attitude and
approach to music the instinctive writing process
conceived from live performance and jamming rather
than studio trickery (its harder to translate a song to a
record than it is to the stage, because as soon as weve
played it, its done, explains Hung) and the emphasis on
being true to ones intentions at the expense of attracting
fans has so much kinship with the DIY indie
underground scene, which so often genuinely does only
make music for itself.
I mean, Im kind of an asshole for only listening to
things that Ive written, Power continues, but were
making the music that wed want to hear. Ill come
home and put a Fuck Buttons album on, sure, and to
other people that looks like an egotistical kind of thing,
but I have absolutely no problem with being proud
about what I do, whatsoever. We do this because we
want to hear this, and nobody else is making it for us to
hear.
Of course, by that logic, Hung and Power will happily
hang up their synths if a band that sounds just like Fuck
Buttons turns up and starts putting in all the hard graft
instead. Were working towards that actually, says
Hung with a smile on his face.
Really?
Yeah, he grins. Theyre called Daft Punk.
PHOTOGRAPHER - SONNY MCCARTNEY WRITER - SAM WALTON
I TH I N K I F WE WE RE RE PE ATI N G TH E MUS I C O F TA ROT S PO RT,
WE WO U L D V E D E CI D E D TO STO P
1997, aged 7, Ellis Ludwig-Leone accompanied his
father to the local library to be signed up to play some
sports. Old man in-line, he did what every other kid had
done that day he took a wander over to a nearby piano,
an instrument hed never seen before. Then he did
something that no other kid had done he played it. So
the answer to my question, have you always been
naturally gifted when it comes to music, is, yes, yes I
have!.
Ellis, now 23 and based in Brooklyn, where hes lived
for the last two years, is not the kind of guy to say that.
Instead, he hastens to ag: Im not sure how much of my
dads story is accurate, there, and I think those sorts of
stories become self-fullling prophesies. Like, if Mozart
hadnt become Mozart, no one would really care that he
was writing symphonies when he was 5. But yeah, he
concedes, I was always adept at the piano.
The son of two visual artists, Ellis Ludwig-Leone
grew up in Berkley, southern Massachusetts, a small, rural
town between Boston and Cape Cod. The family had
relocated there for their art, enabling the parents of the
household to convert a deserted dairy barn into their
own art studio. I used to be quite good at art, myself, say
Ellis, but theres something crucial about music, and
theres a centre of attention thing to it like, youre
making a sound, so people have to pay attention to you.
He says his rst musical memory is being really
amused by The Beatles, particularly Abbey Road and
all of its avant pop segues, erudite callbacks and eccentric-
but-studied orchestrations. It makes complete sense
when listening to Elliss own music, created under the
name San Fermin, recorded with the help of 22 musicians
(within them a string quartet, a brass quartet, saxophone,
guitar, drums, a few operatic sopranos, piano, keyboards,
vibraphone and harmonium) and scaled down to a cast
of 8 when on the road (Large enough to get that
expansive sound but small enough that its possible to y
places without selling all our worldly possessions).
What would eventually become this band began
some years ago at Ivy League University Yale, where Ellis
studied Music Composition and where his sister
currently follows in their parents footsteps studying Art.
The idea was simple to write concert music that had
inuences from different places, and was something that
people would actually want to come and see, rather than
the stiff, classical concerts that kids wouldnt go to. Ellis
and another edgling composer set about recruiting 12
instrumentalists to perform their modern pieces to
achieve the goal. The results werent mixed; they were
good. Good enough for the group to travel a little, and
for Ellis to realise that all he had learned studying Shubert
and Handel could be successfully injected into the world
of contemporary pop music.
In high school I was in rock bands, he says. I also
studied classical piano, so I had a bit of that going on, but
mainly I was in bands playing standard rock stuff, and
ASSISTANT TO NICO MUHLY, YALE GRADUATE ELLIS LUDWIG-LEONE
IS A YOUNG COMPOSER WITH GRAND AMBITIONS. CAMBER POP PROJECT
SAN FERMIN IS JUST ONE
then when I got to Yale I realised that there was a really
strong program in classical, whereas there really wasnt
much happening on the band scene. I really got immersed
in it and I felt like it would be good to learn a different
way to put music together. I wasnt particularly versed in
classical music going in; I actually felt like an outsider
going in, and really all the way through there were all
these conservatory kids that had done that from an early
age, and I hadnt. Ive come full circle I was a rock and
pop person looking in at the classical thing, and now that
Im out of school I feel like I have more of a classical
view point than my pop/rock contemporaries.
San Fermin is an audacious take on chamber pop,
released September via Downtown Records. Its long,
too (nearly an hour), and comes with a denite, literary
concept a conversation between a despondent man
(performed by singer Allen Tate) and a cynical woman
(Lucius singers Holly Laessig and Jess Wolfe). Tate burrs
his parts, which sombrely croon between the gothic,
anti-heroics of Patrick Wolf and the warm baroque pop
of Beirut. Theres a mob at the door / I hear them / Calling
for my head, Tate purrs matter-of-fact on the opening
Renaissance!, setting the unease early on, as a brassy
fanfare rises and spirals over his pleads of Please dont
wake me up / Im waiting for your love.
Our female lead, who more or less fronts every other
song on the record, is more cheery in her delivery if not
her message. Crueler Kind and lead single Sonsick do
what Dirty Projectors darent three years ago, further
exploring the chirruping RnB that Stillness Is The
Move so brilliantly hinted at. Both tracks are album
highlights. Crueler Kind overlaps lilywhite choral vocals
and parping trumpets, a la Minnie Ripertons Les Fleur;
Sonsick appears even more euphoric as the voices of
Laessig and Wolfe gleefully entwine. Yet beneath Elliss
triumphant, skillful arrangements, Girl X seems even
more doomed than her would-be mate, rst warning, I
wouldnt worry / Im not about to fall in love again, then,
Ill fall for you soon enough / I resolve to love / Now I know
its just another fuck / Cos Im old enough.
Ellis cultivated these difcult souls in the mountains
of Alberta, Canada, where he locked himself away to
write San Fermins debut album on graduating from Yale,
but they were born before hed arrived, dreamt up en
route, some 30,000 feet above North America. Cruising
on a vapour trail, Ellis mapped out the arc of the record
from his cabin seat; a map he says he stuck to, featuring
the number of male and female driven songs and
interludes hed originally planned for. I wanted to write
as much as possible, he says, so I wrote a song a day, and
however nished it was Id move on the following day. I
wanted the whole thing to sound like it was coming
from the same place, even if there were very different
sounds to the songs.
Hed been reading a lot, too, the works of 1920s
American novelists, like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Earnest
Hemingway. I used Hemingway as a starting point, he
says in reference to the authors 1926 novel The Sun Also
Rises, but Id denitely hesitate to say that it was
informative or that the record was inspired by it. It was
more that the female character in that book was
appropriately aloof for my own.
It was a big breakthrough for me, though realising
that I could write from the point of view of characters
that werent me but would channel certain things that I
care about. A lot of the songs have literary references, and
it allowed me write like they would talk, instead of
writing everything altogether from my point of view,
which would sound corny and awful.
Its a strange time, leaving university. You can do
anything you want, but what and how? Ellis ploughed
the thrill and the fright into San Fermin, and particularly
his male protagonist. The goal was to try to capture the
moment in my life that was real and important, he says,
this moment of being straight out of school, and what
do you do now? Theres a constant theme with the male
character of trying to nd meaning and what the
important things are.
Yale had been good to Ellis, in spite of or rather in
light of the colleges lack of indie rock. Luck had dealt
him a roommate that was the principle violinist of The
Philharmonia Orchestra. To hold such a position for the
next four years, as Elliss friend did, you need to practice
all day every day. To live with the guy, you have to listen
to it. Ellis still calls him for advice today when arranging
string parts, and the pair of them go through ideas on the
phone, testing out what will and wont work with live
instruments. I think it helps to be around string players
all the time so you can then picture them doing what
youre asking them to play, says Ellis.
I came to that school with not much in the way of
formal training, and what I picked up there was that
there is lots of different ways to make a piece of music
everything can be questioned, and all of the decisions
you make about your music should be made on purpose.
Of course, if university teaches us anything, its to
hustle, and Yale was no different in that regard, or perhaps
Ellis Ludwig-Leone was simply more intuitive than his
classmates. In his sophomore year he interned at a small
record label, where he arranged to interview
A L L O F TH E D E CI S I O NS
YO U MA KE A BO UT YO U R
MUS I C S H O U L D BE MA D E
O N PU RPOS E
RUNNI NG MAN
contemporary classical composer Nico Muhly for the
companys podcast. Muhly, whom many consider the
natural heir to the throne of Philip Glass, is still just 31
and the man that all young composers aspire to be, so
who better to bug for a job.
First Ellis sent Muhly this terrifying piano piece,
which featured people whispering, entitled Secrets.
Muhlys response: I like the piece but the name sounds
like a lesbian strip club.
It was a snarky but pretty engaging thing to say, says
Ellis. We stayed in touch and I pestered him until he
gave me work to do.
Today, Ellis remains in Muhlys inner circle of 4 or 5,
where he intends to stay, assisting the composer for as
long as possible. Its a position worth a thousand diplomas,
and one that has no doubt informed a recent collaboration
with Sonic Youths Lee Ranaldo (the pair arranged a
Hurricane Sandy-inspired piece together for Berlin
Chamber Orchestra Solisenensemble Kaleidoskop), and
his own ballet for Ballet Collective, premiering this
month.
[Nico] is so schooled and so condent and so great
at every aspect of what he does that its always a pleasure
working for him, says Ellis. You should be as informed
and as condent and competent as possible in every facet
of the thing that youre doing. In the classical music
world theres certainly emphasis on the craft being done
the right way [which isnt always the case in indie or
pop]. It would be disingenuous for me to say that I
dashed [San Fermin] off.
Indeed, every aspect of Elliss debut album is
considered, from the Bars vocal nod to his dads old
copy of Abbey Road (and album track Because, in
particular), to recurring, forlorn phrases like I cant fall
asleep in your arms (Cassanova, The Count), and the
grandiosity that comes with 22 instruments colliding so
beautifully. Yet perhaps its the name of Elliss project
thats most deeply rooted of all.
San Fermin is the festival held in Pamplona, Spain,
more commonly known as The Running of The Bulls,
where locals are chased through the narrow streets of the
city by horned beasts for the sheer hell of it. It was little
known to the English-speaking world until Earnest
Hemmingway set one of his novels there yes, The Sun
Also Rises. At rst, Ellis named an interlude after the
event, then another, then his album, then his entire
project. Most of all, it seemed tting for what it is hes
trying to achieve with this ambitiously emotional record.
I thought that whats nice about [the festival] is that
people put themselves in this life and death position, just
to feel the thrill of it, says Ellis, and I think thats a really
attractive idea. In the record theres this feeling that if
youre going to live something you might as well live it
all the way up and try to feel it as much as possible.
PHOTOGRAPHER - TOM ONEAL WRITER - STUART STUBBS
Encounters with those artists you truly
admire are doomed to disappointment. After all,
its all in the work - the worker himself is
just an organic appendage
Will Self
Will Self s quote loomed ominously over me as I
prepared for this interview. What is there to extract from
the mind of David Lynch that hasnt already been
refracted through the multiple prisms of his art? His
reticence to discuss the meaning or fundamental essence
to much of his work, combined with his astute creative
intellectualism and consummate vision very much
being on another planet to mine or anybody elses,
rendered a feeling of redundancy before I had even
begun. But while Self proposed an inevitable, predestined
failure, I soon came to realise that that failure can only
really apply if one attempts to truly understand Lynch;
to gain a sense of closure and nality by meeting the
creator and placing your thoughts in his hands and
asking him to ll in the gaps. Like so much of his work,
the beauty of the interpretation is often in the ambiguity;
the lucid, hypnagogic half-conscious dream in which
reality, fantasy and nightmare are an indistinguishable
mesh. Failure becomes less of an anxiety if it is
approached with no expectations, which it soon
transpired, somewhat ironically, is a tting encapsulation
for both Lynchs work and for attempting to understand
him.
When David Lynch announced his 2011 album,
Crazy Clown Time, many treated it as a wild, off-road
steer into another art form. A new, drastic, perhaps even
detrimental move into the unknown, like the reversal of
the preordained disaster route of pop star to actor. Music,
however, has been as synonymous with David Lynch
both cinematically and singularly as coffee, cigarettes,
something Lynch has done throughout his cinematic
career, making cultural reections to historically
ingrained foundations and then re-writing that history
or cultural essence in hallucinatory often amorphous
ways, creating a mutation that, while often unrecognisable
in its nished Lynchian state, always has a shade of
American history and culture permanently graded into
it. In The Big Dream Lynch has taken the primitive
essence of one-instrument/one-voice music rooted in
American socio-historic turmoil and allowed it to
permeate in a new, askew lexicon.
As soon as David Lynch speaks his voice is
instantly familiar. It coaxes in a strange but alluring tone,
very precise and sharp, crisp and clean, like his tightly
buttoned-up white shirt. He speaks fervently with vigour
and warmth, a perhaps contrary image one might expect
for someone pushing 70 years of age.
Its just interviews but every day is exciting, he tells me
when I enquire if hes doing anything exciting today.
The Big Dream packs weight as a title, too. Its singular
but innite in its possibilities, and it is of course suitably
even perfectly Lynchian in its construct. Night time
dreams are not so important for feeling in my work, he
tells me, but I love dream logic and dream logic is
something that thrills me and I like to daydream. I like to
just sit in a chair and daydream. Lynch once elaborated:
The world is getting louder every year, but to sit and
dream is a beautiful thing.
The Big Dream charges simultaneously with
momentum and stillness; a chugging, propulsive force
the colour red, transcendental meditation, cherry pie or
Jack Nance. In fact, of all the evolutions and
phantasmagorical shifts throughout Lynchs cinematic
career, his exploration in music has been one of the few
consistencies in his artistic life; an anchored rock steadied
under the thrashing sea that it his visionary transit.
Lynchs ventures into sound and music are too great
to count, but he has composed music for many of his
own lms and projects, has a longstanding musical
partnership with Angelo Badalamenti, has written lyrics
and produced albums for Julee Cruise and Chrysta Bell,
been a member of rock band Bluebob, set up his own
record label, featured on Dark Night of the Soul, the
2010 Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse album, created
the exquisite and elegiac Polish Night Music with
Marek Zebrowski and he nally began singing in public
via inclusions of some of his songs in 2006s Inland
Empire. A strain of surrealism still reins supreme and
subversion characteristically takes place within these
musical leanings. Lynchs distorted, hidden vocals mirror
the backward, mangled ones so prominent in his lms
and when taking on one of the most ubiquitous
instruments in existence, he literally plays the guitar
upside down and back-to-front. Lynch, in many senses,
has a near forty-year career in music and sound
experimentation behind him, but rarely is it ever fully
explored or discussed.
The Big Dream is another collaboration with
producer and arranger Big Dean Hurley an album
less wild and uctuating than its predecessor and more
locked into a sonic coherence and tempo; one that on
occasion (the stirring Cold Wind Blowin and the
Lykke Lee featuring Im Waiting Here) drifts into
moments of sublime beauty. The album, according to
Lynch, is locked into the history and appeal of blues but
with the self-coined tag modern blues. This is
LI VE I N
THE
DREAM
AT HIS HOLLYWOOD HOME ON MULHOLLAND DRIVE,
CULT AUTEUR AND MASTER OF THE OTHERWORLD
DAVID LYNCH DISCUSSES CREATIVE FREEDOM, MUSICAL
INSPIRATION AND NEW ALBUM THE BIG DREAM
PHOTOGRAPHER - NATHANAEL TURNER WRITER - DANILE DYLAN WRAY
accelerates the album but engulng the drive is a
nocturnal, quiet calm. Like hurtling down a road in the
black of night, the speed and the silence blend into one. I
agree with you, he says. I think everybody loves moving
forward and especially driving music. As soon as you can
picture ying down a highway because of the music, its a
very good feeling and thats something that I really love. I
love highways, I love driving and the freedom of the open
road and moving from one place to another. I think it is a
thrilling thing for human beings. One only has to watch
the opening and closing scenes of Lynchs Lost Highway,
or take a winding trip up to the eerie ambiance of
Mulholland Drive (where we met and shot Lynch in his
home for this feature) to get a semblance of such a vision.
Lynch has now been at the helm of the industry
mechanics for lm, TV, art and music, but nds no
particular one more comfy or insidious. Theyre all super
comfortable, hes says gently. The people at Sunday Best
[Lynchs record label] are solid gold and Im mainly
working with the French in terms of cinema, and they
believe in the auteur thing and freedom and support and
enthusiasm, so Ive been very very lucky. You know, the
number one thing is the work. I always say you should
enjoy the doing of a thing and so all the mediums are very,
very beautiful to me and I love each one of them and I
love working in it.
Lynch offers some insights into the mentality of some
predatory behaviour in the music industry, saying: It
seems to me that everybody that does something should
have that freedom. Why would they do it if someone
could take it away or change it?... It seems like if a record
company is interested in a person its because theyve
heard them and they see promise for money and it seems
to me to be common sense to let that person do what
they do in freedom and not try to make it something that
will just make money. It seems like it would kill the
person. I think the rule should be: never turn down a
good idea but never take a bad idea. Lynch goes on to
joke: Now, your middle name is Dylan so you have to be
in the music business! Youve got your name Daniel and I
was writing this down: Daniel Lanois, Bob Dylan and
Ray Charles. A very musical name!
Or maybe Link Wray? I retort.
There you go, youve got it!
Getting over the bemusement that David Lynch has
been sat around his L.A home writing my name on bits
of paper, we move onto the subject of one of those names:
Bob Dylan, who Lynch has covered on his latest album.
Big Dean Hurley drew me to that song and he said,
you should think about doing this and we did it.
The song in question is the 1964 poverty and murder
folksong The Ballad of Hollis Brown. It was guided by
a Nina Simone version, Lynch informs me. I really like
the song, its a great story. A very sad, tragic story, but
unfortunately its really relevant today. Unable to take the
agonising pain of watching his family starve in front of his
eyes, the songs protagonist spends your last lone dollar on
seven shotgun shells, leading to the tragic outcome, Seven shots
ring out like the oceans pounding roar/Theres seven people dead
on a South Dakota farm.
In 2008 David Lynch said of the growing trend of
watching visual media on iPods and iPhones: Now if
youre playing a movie on a telephone, you will never in
a trillion years experience the lm. Youll think you have
experienced it but youll be cheated. It is such a sadness
that you think youve seen a lm on your fucking
telephone. Get real. It was a scornful yet sage point, but
is he more exible when it comes to music consumption?
No, he says, Im not really exible but Im also seeing
the reality of things today. All the tracks have to be mixed
and mastered in a way that they sound like at least
something on a computer. So its a heartache and it
would be beautiful if people saw cinema in a dark
theatre on a giant screen with perfect sound, and it
would be great if people heard the music on great big
speakers and they could just go into it deeper, but its not
really that kind of world right now.
The foundations of Lynchs artistic awakenings began
to rear their head in Philadelphia. This is quite a well
documented period, where Lynch has said: I had my rst
thrilling thought in Philadelphia... Philadelphia, more
than any lmmaker, inuenced me. Its the sickest, most
corrupt, decaying, fear-ridden city imaginable. I was very
poor and living in bad areas. I felt like I was constantly in
danger. But it was so fantastic at the same time.
I ask if the dread of the city assisted in building a
musical impetus too?
Oh denitely, he res. Even though I wasnt near
industry, Philadelphia to me sparked a giant love of the
smoke-stack industry and a dream of the smoke-stack
industry, factory neighbourhoods, factories, steel, re,
smoke, the sounds of buildings and the life of a factory
worker.
A rather morbid fascination grew in this period, too.
Lynch lived opposite a morgue and became riveted by
the body bags. As he told Time magazine in 1990: The
bags had a big zipper, and theyd open the zipper and
shoot water into the bags with big hoses. With the zipper
open and the bags sagging on the pegs, it looked like
these big smiles. I called them the smiling bags of death.
This lugubrious image could easily be linked to that
of the wrapped corpse of Twin Peaks victim Laura
Palmer, perhaps manifesting itself in Lynchs mind and
allowed to percolate some two decades earlier. The
streets of Philadelphia, however, had less of an impact on
Lynchs auditory senses, as he tells me: Where I was it
was busy in the daytime in one area. At night, because it
was a factory area, there was nobody there, so it was all
different kinds of moods and different phases and
different fears in the air. It was a mixture of heaven and
hell, Philadelphia. This mixture came to fruition in
Eraserhead, a lm Lynch worked on from 1972 until its
release in 1977. A visionary masterpiece, he and Alan
Splet also spent a year creating the movies audio and in
doing so set a precedent for sound design by creating
metamorphosing dark ambience; all imbued with
scratching, hissing, nightmarishly unnerving static.
Together, they created a musical genre before theyd
realised it. In Eraserhead Lynch reversed the accepted
industry convention that music in lm was somehow
only an add-on, a means to enhance and illuminate the
visuals, to carry narrative and stay rmly in place as a
subservient in the artistic hierarchy of cinema. Instead,
Lynch created a cinematic cosmos in which the music both
lived in and broke free from the visual, existing in inseparable
but fragmentary states, a roaming parallel universe.
On that lm was also the stirring and irrefragably
vital music of Fats Waller, and such is the grainy power
of Eraserhead, I enquire if Lynch ever views music in
terms of colour and black and white. He picks up and
gives me a brief tunnel-drive ash into his imagination.
When you just say Fats Waller, baptist church organ,
1936 I see that absolutely in black and white, very
grainy, the most beautiful, beautiful black and white, and
I see Fats Waller playing this music in a 1930s black and
white world that is so far gone now and its really
beautiful to think about it.
Lynch stretches the word beautiful (by far his
favourite word during our conversation) like a prolonged
note, almost as though he is savouring the moment and
preserving the image. He appears temporarily lost in
that dream space of his as he locks into this very specic
vision he is creating. A wild gesticulator, Lynchs right
hand is twitching, with his ngers sprinkling and
dancing in the air, as though he is plucking the strings of
a suspended harp. Once upon a time a trail of cigarette
smoke would have followed from between his two
ngertips, but Lynch has currently quit.
This fear and terror he felt so submerged in in his
formative years was clearly a lasting source of inspiration, but
he is quick to point out its not something he misses. No,
no, no. You dont miss fear. Its like you miss jabbing your knee
with an icepick!, he says atly, hammering home icepick
with a similar brusque, sharp force to the tool itself.
Environment has been key to the creation of Lynchs
work. He is frequently credited as painting scenes like
no other, bringing to life views of the absurd, the
horrifying and, one would think, the un-lmable milieu
of his unconsciousness. Despite all the images that no
doubt crawl and scurry through your mind like birthing
spiders when thinking about the man himself, David
Lynch is not a particularly weird person. He is not scary,
nor odd, nor crazy. He thrives on normality just as
gluttonously as he does the otherworldly. He is someone
graced with the gift of transmuting the normal into
something abnormal. By doing so, he has redened the
boundaries of what constitutes the abstract, the odd and
the different by basing so much of it in the normal, the
drab and the everyday fabric of American life that so
many people walk past daily without noting. David
Lynch is not from another planet, he just pays grave
fucking attention to the one we live on. As his most go-
to quote that hits home this point most robustly goes:
My childhood was picket fences, blue skies, red owers,
and cherry trees, but then I would see millions of little
ants swarming on the cherry tree, which had pitch
oozing out of it.
Likewise, Lynchs proclivity for routine, familiarity
and ordinariness are his creative triggers for the opposite:
the mind-meltingly surreal, the scattered, unfamiliar and
the bizarre. I like things to be orderly, he once said.
For seven years [every single day] I ate at Bobs Big Boy.
I would go at 2:30, after the lunch rush. I ate a chocolate
shake and four, ve, six, seven cups of coffee with lots of
sugar. Lynch perhaps most perspicaciously captures this
process. I like the idea that everything has a surface
which hides much more underneath. Someone can
look very well and have a whole bunch of diseases
cooking: there are all sorts of dark twisted things lurking
down there. I go down in that darkness and see whats
there. Coffee shops are nice safe places to think. I like
sitting in brightly lit places where I can drink coffee and
have some sugar. Then, before I know it, Im down
under the surface gliding along; if it becomes too heavy,
I can always pop back into the coffee shop.
A ll Lynch needs is one singular moment,
idea or even song in order to spark something gargantuan.
For 1986s Blue Velvet it was the Bobby Vinton version of
the song Blue Velvet itself, along with the image of an
ear lying in the grass, that sparked the impetus for the
whole lm. I mean, the lm is called Blue Velvet, he
says, but Bobby Vintons version, I didnt even like it
when I rst heard it but then later I listened to it and out
comes a lot of things. Music is magical and so important
and ideas can come out of it.
Oh man, theres many many many things, he says,
continuing to list other music catalysts that have shaped
his cinematic output. Ramstein for Lost Highway,
Dmitri Shostakovich in Blue Velvet, Chris Isaaks Wicked
Game for Wild at Heart. You know pretty much every
lm there is some kind of music that will marry to those
ideas and you just have to try and nd that. In Dreams,
Roy Orbison, you know?
Keen to capitalise on Lynchs surge of intensity
discussing his musical inspirations and creations, I bring
up Angelo Badalamenti and a video in circulation in
which Angelo recreates the moment played on the
exact same old Fender Rhodes keyboard that he and
David sat and created the music for Twin Peaks together.
Badalamenti plays the part of both himself and Lynch,
building the song from a murky shufe under Lynchs
instructions slowing it down to a doom-lled crawl, as
that unmistakable melody creeps forward like a killer
through the woods. It builds and Badalamenti takes on
the part of Lynch, building, rising, climaxing as it boils
over and trickles into the main melody. Its exquisitely
beautiful to witness. Angelo is a frustrated actor! quips
Lynch, who hasnt seen the clip. With Angelo its so
fantastic, you know I always say the same thing, Angelo
can play anything, Angelo is a great, great heart-felt
composer and I like to sit near Angelo and I talk to him
about mood and he plays my words. Lynch starts to
pick up pace and hes in that distanced but focused
dream place again. And if I dont like what comes out,
I change the words and then a new thing comes out, and
if thats not quite right I change the words, change the
words, change the words. He starts to bubble over,
spitting quickly and zealously. And then suddenly
something starts happening Angelo! Angelo! Angelo!
Angelo! Thats it! Thats it!. And Angelo catches it and
he starts going and he starts going and he starts going
and pretty soon out comes the most beautiful stuff.
Lynch explodes in a moment of apoplexy. Completely
unbeknown to him he has almost precisely mirrored
Angelos depiction of the collaboration. The escalating,
almost orgasmic urry of words and sounds match almost
perfectly. As he hammers out the words Angelo, he does
so in a way that is half cut out of a character possessed and
uncontrollable and half someone caught in a ashback,
screaming out and re-living that very moment.
There is a raw tension to Lynchs insight it feels
voyeuristic for a second, like being transported to an
incredibly intimate and foundation-shaking creative
birth-point. David got up and gave me a big hug and said
AngeloThats Twin Peaks, recalled Badalamenti.
Listening to Lynch re off like a rocket about this moment
instills a pleasure far too great to measure or describe.
As we say goodbye, I catch a last minute question. Is
Lynch still adamant that he will never play music live on
a stage? No I havent changed my mind, he says.
What about behind a curtain, I know you like
curtains David?
That might be the only way it happens!
Well, Id pay to see that, I offer.
Fantastic, Daniel!
And off he goes. Will Self was wrong.
THE WORLD I S
GETTI NG LOUDER
EVERY YEAR, BUT
TO SI T AND
DREAM I S A
BEAUTI FUL THI NG
LOUD
AND
QUIET
ALBUMS
LIVE
FILM
R
EVIEWS
ALBUMS
For better or worse, poptimism (the term to
describe pops rising cred amongst connoisseurs
and music writers in the early-2000s)
purportedly happened. A decade after,
AlunaGeorge along with this years slew of
UKG-indebted Londoners are reaping the
rewards, hailed as that rarest of things: truly
credible chart-dwellers. Fortunate enough to
earn both critical attery and Radio 1s Big
Weekend bookings in equal dose, you could
argue they were being allowed to have their
cake and eat it. Of course, such unease is
rendered redundant if the debut album they
then deliver is a fully-formed, modern age
humdinger, but sadly its not quite, eventually
teetering on the edge of the EDM landll that
it proudly professes to have swerved.
That said, there is enough to suggest that the
London duo (Aluna Francis and producer
George Reid) havent been swept up in the
wave, saluting plaudits of their slick futurism
undeservedly. Outlines is a smooth, slow jam
with tastefully minimal synths, setting a
seductive tone. Then early single, You Know
You Like It with its Super-Mario-coin-
collecting bleeps and writhing groove proves a
classy and compelling mass-pleaser that
far-transcends the plethora of inane alcopop-
ready oorllers out there. Next, the brilliantly
05/10
dgety Attracting Flies, with its well-calculated
assessment of bullshitters worth a doth of the
hat alone, before Your Drums proves to be
Body Musics beating heart, its timeless hook
and stylistic sheen disapproving the very notion
that a chart-desiring aesthetic cant be
intelligent.
Maybe in thirty years, even the breezy, future
pop of Kaleidoscope Love could soundtrack
then-middle-aged porkers, haloing their
handbags at hall-held birthday bashes. Im
crystallised, cos youre mine, gushes Francis
over its vibrant refrain; a call to arms for girls
whove cracked the whip and tamed
accordingly.
Alas, AlunaGeorges veil of contemporary
superiority then disintegrates, mainly due to
their slightly sickly formula being overworked
to gagging point. Superstars incessant,
whirring refrain could taunt in even the darkest
nightmare; Ill be his number one fan, Francis
buoyantly coos, like a pre-teen mimicking her
Essential R&B CD down one of those
colourful, toy shop echo mics. Just A Touch,
meanwhile, opens with a sound not unlike a
dawn chorus, if the songbird was gargling
poison; a lyrical hook interjects, but its hardly a
reprieve, clumsily providing a lobotomised Lily
Allen of a melody.
After the equally irritating Friends to
Lovers allows Body Music to nally kick back,
supine and grab some shut eye, it seems that this
particular noughties pastiche could become
draining very quickly.
Alunageorge
Body Music
(Island)
By James West. In stores July 29
Washed Out
Paracosm
(Weird World)
By David Zammitt. In stores Aug 12
The frail attempt by the music press
to shape the loose chillwave
umbrella into a movement was, we
can now condently declare, an
unsuccessful one. For a start, it only
ever really encompassed two artists,
Toro y Moi and Washed Out, aka
30 year-old Georgia native Ernest
Greene. In truth, while the pair
were writing out of a similar sonic
space after meeting at the University
of South Carolina, Chazwick
Bundick had gotten anything
resembling chillwave out of his
system well before Greene managed
to release his debut LP, 2011s dream
pop gem Within And Without. Far
from groping at the hem of his
fellow alumnus,Greene has hammered
out a distinctive sound by blending
shoegaze, ambient and synthpop
into an elegantly intoxicating
concoction that places memory and
melancholy at its core; always
seeming to exist at that ephemeral
moment just before fading away.
This time around, the production
retains its sumptuous, ambient
warmth but Paracosm is lightyears
ahead in the intricacy of its textures
and rhythmic layers. The rough
edges of Within And Without have
been rounded and smoothed and
yet it feels like it has more brawn.
Dont Give Up, for example, takes
disco, turns the RPM down a
notch, and manages to retain its
muscle, while All I Know is a
dazzling synth anthem thats just
waiting to blow up. Everything feels
deliberate and, even at 6.33, the title
track doesnt feel overwrought.
Indeed, it takes skill to stay within
the boundaries of taste when youre
playing with swirling harps but
Greene manages to pull it off. While
the overall sound hasnt changed
dramatically, this is a more than
worthy follow -up to an excellent
debut. As the Cocteau Twins jangle
of All Over Now fades out, you
feel that Paracosm will be the
lefteld soundtrack of the summer.
08/10
P
h
o
t
o
g
r
a
p
h
y

b
y

P
h
il
S
h
a
r
p
Moderat
Moderat II
(Monkey Town)
By Josh Sunth. In stores Aug 5
Milk, the heart of Moderats
second LP, starts with a simple beat
and blooms outwards over ten
minutes of space into a tide of
ambient, Stumbleine-esque noise.
Though not necessarily indicative
of the shape of the album as a
whole, what Milk does is to
provide a sort of sonic map for the
rest of the tracks. Theres the
ever-so-slightly swinging percussion,
the washes of pastel noise, the
catchy bass all thats missing is
the vocals of Sascha Ring you can
nd swooning through tracks like
Bad Kingdom. II is not always as
coherent as youd hope, but
collaborations are often more
successful when based on artistic
disparity, rather than unity, and
what Apparat and Modeselektor
have produced here is a collection
of songs that work brilliantly as
standalones a collection of tracks
that, even as a messy album, are
well worth your time.
06/10
Ikonika
Aerotropolis
(Hyperdub)
By Sam Walton. In stores July 29
Dance musics current retromania
continues apace, the latest exhibit
being Ikonikas second LP which
could, variously, have come out on
Factory in 1983, Warp in 1991 or
indeed any independent British
dance label at any time between
those two dates. While this doesnt
make for a bad record per se, the
slavish devotion to all things 80s
Italo-disco, Commodore 64 sound
les, Planet Rock-style electro
makes for a queasy sense of
displacement. Then again, perhaps
thats the intent; after all, the album
is named after the theoretical idea
of a city within an airport, conjuring
plenty ideas of impermanence and
ux. However, theres no harm in
copying well, and Aerotropolis
does that expertly. Let A Smile Be
(Y)our Umbrellas ve-minute
long build of variations on a theme
has a condent restraint, and
Cryos pulsating four-to-the-oor
is all brooding warehouse goodness.
06/10
Fists
Phantasm
(Gringo/Hello Thor)
By Daniel Dylan Wray. In stores now
The Breeders have been something
of a recurring reference point for
Nottinghams Fists, it would appear.
Its not the sonic resemblance to the
band that could justify such a
comparison, though, more Fists
ability to create an album that
uctuates wildly between tone and
tempo and yet loses none of its
central core or sonic essence. Much
like The Breeders, or even Big Star
or Yo La Tengo (who both also
surreptitiously rear their inuential
head from time-to-time) Phantasm
icks switches between guitar-
heavy ignitions and delicate, sombre
refrains. Most pleasingly is that its
not a record that relies on either
side to carry the record Fists feel
just as comfortable in gentle
whisper mode as they do locked
into moments lled with screeching
and pounding. The ebb and ow
does dip into the odd forgettable
moment, but largely this debut has
beauty and grit in equal bounds.
07/10
Soft Metals
Lenses
(Captured Tracks)
By Hayley Scott. In stores July 29
Whilst similarly at home in its
synth-driven minimalism, Lenses is
more lyrically focused with a
production that is more embellished
than Soft Metals 2011 eponymous
debut. Honing in on their craft, the
LA duo maintain their afnity for
sparse, ghostly soundscapes, but
with a sound thats more in tune
with their primary inuences - 70s
synth innovators Chris Carter and
Klaus Schulze by purportedly
aiming to elicit the bygone sounds
of Berlin and Chicago. Here Soft
Metals abandon much of the
languid ephemeral hum of their
debut in favour of more orid
arrangements and a muscular,
beat-driven sound that steers more
towards the danceoor - palpable
from the arpeggiating synthesizers,
funkadelic basslines and pulsating
kick drums. Ultimately, though, its
the monotony of this slumberous
synth-pop synaesthesia that almost
fails it.
06/10
Wavves
Afraid of Heights
(Warner)
By Josh Sunth. In stores now
Everything is my fault, sings
Wavves vocalist Nathan Williams on
track ten of Afraid of Heights, and
you can almost feel self-loathing
pouring out into the music. With
songs called Beat Me Up,
Everything Is My Fault and I
Cant Dream there was always
going to be a risk of slipping into
self-indulgence and, though that
isnt necessarily the case, by the time
the last few tracks of the LP arrive
you cant help but nd yourself
wilfully resisting the self-hatred.
Wavves have, however, produced
some grimy-guitared, hook-laden
gems particularly heavier tracks
like opener Sail to the Sun, which
starts with a twinkle but soon
propels itself into the anthemic, or
the earworm refrain of Demon to
Lean On. The self-hatred can be
problematic at times, true, but the
craftsmanship beneath the feeling,
and throughout most of Afraid of
Heights, is as sound as ever.
08/10
Nadine Shah
Love Your Dum and Mad
(Apollo)
By Amy Pettifer. In stores July 22
The critical reverence that has followed Nadine Shah
in her career so far, feels like the token shoe-in of an
Oscar going to the actor that played the challenging
part. Just because someone writes dramatic songs and
can play piano AND SING at the same time doesnt
mean its any good. Evoking names like Nick Cave, PJ
Harvey, Nina Simone and Philip Larkin in reference to
her work, feels nothing short of sacrilegious at its
best this is a post Anna Calvi wail-fest of epic
proportions. The underlying narrative of Love Your
Dum and Mad Shahs debut album after a couple of
EPs evokes a brooding, Weimar-esque urbanity, but
lyrically its a shallow puddle, named perhaps
unwisely - Dreary Town. On the plus side the closing
tracks Filthy Game and Winter Reigns are more
nuanced and restrained, something colloquial and
interesting sneaking out through the timbre of her
vocal and the focus of her playing. Tantalising but
largely unlistenable.
04/10
ALBUMS
Barbarossa
Bloodlines
(Memphis Industries)
By Reef Younis. In stores Aug 5
A rm acoustic xture for both Jose
Gonzalez and Johnny Flyn, James
Maths transition from folk
troubadour to Casiotone Casanova
has been a brave one. After largely
dropping the six-string in favour of
keyboards, drum machines and
analogue synths, Bloodlines marks
the reinvention with mournful,
soul-affected electronica made for
deep, quarter-life crisis moments of
contemplation. Shades of Junior
Boys unrequited whisperings,
Trailer Trash Tracys reverb drench,
and Active Childs wrenching,
piano-laden emotion help make it
an album designed to pull at the
heart-strings, the sombre pop of
The Load and swimming melodies
of Buttery Prague doing so
beautifully. Elsewhere Pagliacco
comes alive with chunky !!! inspired
bass but quickly softens out, and
Turbine hits with Dirty Projectors
offbeat jerk. Gentle and pensive, this
is one for the sensitive souls.
07/10
Gauntlet Hair
Stills
(Dead Oceans)
By Joe Goggins. In stores July 15
On their self-titled debut, this
Colorado two-piece took their cues
from Animal Collective and
Yeasayer to produce a record that
took noise pop in a more eccentric
direction than contemporaries like
No Age and Japandroids. On
follow-up Stills theyre moving
down a slightly darker path; the
records thumping, distorted
percussion brings Nine Inch Nails
rmly to mind. Theres suddenly
greater emphasis on synths to create
stormier soundscapes than last time
round, too, but Andy Rauworths
thrillingly uid guitar playing
remains key. It underscores the
records diversity, from the
shimmering reverb of opener
Human Nature to the all-out
groove of Bowie-esque stomper
Heave. The delivery of Rauworths
vocals remains grippingly
unpredictable, ranging from
blissed-out (New to It) to
blistering (G.I.D., Waste Your Art).
08/10 07/10
Case Studies
This Is Another Life
(Sacred Bones)
By Hayley Scott. In stores now
The vigilant of musics percipients
will have noticed that everything
sounds a whole lot nicer lately. Case
Studies being our case in point here:
any outward abrasion is forgone for
a similar maudlin sensibility and
rustic rock sound that Fleet Foxes
elicit to revive folk pastiches. And
its not like theres nothing to be
angry about, either. But Jessie Lortz
knows this, because he is seemingly,
perpetually peeved. This Is Another
Life explores dark, sentimental
landscapes that inform the bulk of
his debut under the Case Studies
moniker. Indeed, this kind of
neo-folk reverence isnt averse to
portraying personal discord: themes
of suicide, heartbreak and regret
predominate under beautifully
ornate arrangements, but it basks in
its own melancholy, and after
repeated listens, its overt moroseness
verges on the inert, hindering its
potential to be as tastefully emotive
as it initially suggests.
08/10 08/10
Samaris
Samaris
(One Little Indian)
By Sophie Coletta. In stores May 27
The rst thing you should know
about Samaris is that its not
technically an album. Its actually a
merging of two EPs, yet it harnesses
the solidity and cohesiveness of a
long player so naturally, that you
probably wouldnt notice otherwise.
The Icelandic trios lefteld take on
electronica sees an amalgamation of
organic and synthetic sounds that
place their work into something of
a time vacuum, the melancholy
sentiment of slaug Rn
Magnsdttirs clarinet unpredictably
nding its place alongside the gloss
of rur Kri Steinrssons
desiccated production with much
ease. Third track in, Ga Tungl is a
denite highlight, boasting a
spectacular musky mid-song
breakdown that is worth billowing
through a decent pair of speakers
just to magnify its thunderous
elaboration. An excellent forward-
thinking record from three talented
musicians, not yet out of their teens.
Bass Drum of Death
Bass Drum of Death
(Innovative Leisure)
By Jack Doherty. In stores July 22
While Britain is getting all gooey
eyed over Britpop V.2, the US
continues to manufacture its garage
rock revolution. With bands like
Fidlar, Parquet Courts and a
returning Wavves all making
erm waves across the pond it
seems only natural that others
would follow suit. Mississippis
Nuggets loving princes Bass Drum
of Death are the latest group to try
and cure us of that B-Town curse.
Bass Drum of Death, the groups
second album, isnt going to get you
stroking your chin and thinking
about chord sequences; its going to
force you to get on your feet and
drink far too many beers. Its a
fuzzy, scuzzy summer delight for
people who just want to have a
good time, because when its sunny,
intellectualism just doesnt matter.
Itll never be a classic, but this album
proves one thing nostalgia
induced rock can work. Britpoppers
take note. It just has to be fun.
Matias Aguayo
The Visitor
(Cmeme)
By Sam Walton. In stores July 15
Until the Chilean-born, Cologne-raised Matais Aguayo
emerged in 2011 as Battles new de facto lead singer on
Ice Cream, he seemed content releasing low-key
techno and deep house records with a slight samba slink.
However, some of Battles playful deviancy and sense of
mischief has evidently rubbed off on Aguayo, making
his third album a slyly addictive, if slightly sprawling
affair. Opener Rrrrrs purring samples and loose
syncopation set the tone for an organic record that
bubbles with a beautifully human percussive feel. Its
understated but also stands pleasingly proud of its
idiosyncrasies: what appears to be delayed kazoo
ourishes pepper By The Graveyard for no better
reason than that it sounds a bit wrong, and Una Fiesta
Diferentes insistent, serpentine bassline knows how
much of an earworm it is and is happy to exploit that.
Aguayos slightly iffy English lyrics mean that the tunes
he tackles in Spanish are far more engaging and the
ones sung in only nonsense syllables better still.
07/10
P
h
o
t
o
g
r
a
p
h
y

b
y

G
a
b
r
ie
l
G
r
e
e
n
Walton
Beyond
(Hyperdub)
By Reef Younis. In stores now
After releasing a handful of select cuts on Hyperdub,
Beyond marks Sam Waltons arrival for real. Open-
minded and wired to cut through everything from
house and funk to grime and electro; its a debut
immersed in perfectly programmed future beats and a
healthy disrespect for dead space. See, Walton doesnt
want to waste your time so he lls tracks with punchy
percussion, fading vocals and busy glitches. Theres
conicts and contrasts, reference and deference
permeating the majority of these 13 tracks. Where
Frisbee and You and Me hit like mind-melts of
woodpecker percussion and ingenuity, Memories
brings the murk with low-jack beats and old rave
rhythms, Every Night wafts a warm blast of energetic
soul, busy bongo and off-beat rhythms, and Amazons
dark, atmospheric techno drives hard. Its precision stuff,
designed to get you moving. At times, Beyond isnt the
most accessible listen but when Walton gets the vibe just
right, you know youre looking into the future.
07/10
Pop. 1280
Imps of Perversion
(Sacred Bones)
By Daniel Dylan Wray. In stores Aug 5
Following on from 2012s The Horror, Pop. 1280
continue their rabid tearing through all things snarly and
grubby. Their sound is one still deeply rooted in the work
of David Yow and the usual afliated associates but at the
same time possesses enough terror and sneer of their
own to avoid the usual trappings of tired emulation and
genre restriction. Pop. 1280 manage to ooze a sordid
squalor in their music. Their debut album told us to Beg
Like a Human and here they delve into (album
highlight) Human Probe they clearly relish in
subversion. Imps of Perversion is teeming with wired
energy, feeling scrappy in its execution but charged in its
propulsion. It has menace and sneering bite to it, much
of which comes from the animalistic yelps and car-crash
impact guitars that screech Cramps-like throughout. And
yet as fun and rollicking a ride as Imps is, its difcult
to escape the weight of the bands inuence, not that that
alters how much you know their live shows playing these
songs are going to be mind-blowing.
07/10
Fuck Buttons
Slow Focus
(ATP)
By Stuart Stubbs. In stores July 22
Fuck Buttons previous two albums saw the noisegaze
duo in various states of intergalactic exploration. Street
Horrsing was a difcult launch in 2008, starting with a
twinkling, picture-book lullaby that soon descended
into static-riddled, no-turning-back-now panic. The
following Tarot Sport pinned by lead track Surf
Solar (the name said it all) was (a little) less terrifying
as Benjamin John Power and Andrew Hung took their
increasingly soaring metallic drones into deep space, and
so Slow Focus is the next logical step the sound of
Fuck Buttons hopping from one alien terrain to the
next. Disconcertion/shallow-sleep-terror is still at the
heart of this experimental sky trance, but for the rst
time the duo hit solid ground. Opener Brainfreeze (a
thundering combo of rough drums and phasers) and the
following, oscillating Year Of The Dog feel like one
long previous episode recap, and then theyre down
with a thump, landing rst on The Red Wing, which
impishly sways like The Beatles Pepperland on better
drugs and progressive hip-hop played old skool (a
notable development in FBs sound). Sentients is a
more paranoid, more overtly sci- kind of place, alive
on the adrenalin of survival; Princes Prize is skewed
fun at the fairground thats then demented as the
waltzer speeds up and refuses to let you off. Fuck
Buttons always make things go bad, which is good.
08/10
ALBUMS
Oliver Wilde
A Brief Introduction to Unnatural
Lightyears (Howling Owl)
By Amy Pettifer. In stores July 22
To contextualise the sound of the rst release by
Bristolian Oliver Wilde, the sonic spectres of Mark
Linkous, Elliott Smith and Daniel Johnston are
summoned to the reckoning. Into that pot Id throw
Steve Mason, a more insouciant Arab Strap and the
earliest (and best) Badly Drawn Boy EPs. Shared above
all is the sensation that what sounds deceptively simple
and laid back is probably the product of years of
bedroom noodling. Wilde has a rangy palette of noises
at his disposal and the record is less a collection of songs,
more a pervasive, beguiling atmosphere. His voice,
which sounds throughout like its playing off an antique
tape deck, sits at the back of acoustic wash, hazy ute
and perfectly used glitch and electronic stabs. Things
ramp up for the more upbeat Marleahs Cadence but
youre never pulled far from a holistic feeling of balmy
summer daze. Basically, its the perfect debut album;
pleasingly unpolished and leaving you totally curious to
know what hell do next.
07/10
Pond
Hobo Rocket
(Modular)
By Chris Watkeys. In stores Aug 5
This is the fth record in ve years from the quintet
formed around Tame Impala guitarist Nick Albrook
and drummer Jay Watson; a prolic output from a band
who in recent years have become much more than a
side project. The psychedelic vibe that pervades Hobo
Rocket is laid down in the very rst line: Whatever
happens when a million heads collide, a vocal that
oats hazily over a backdrop, which sounds like
MGMT covering Black Sabbath. Alone A Flame A
Flower is a sonic menagerie, a loosely-bound
confusion of brutally heavy riffage and bloodthirsty
solos, while Xan Man is a huge, massively catchy slice
of fuzzy rock joy; a glam stomp down a sunny sidewalk
wearing your favourite shades. This piece of chunky
pop is the records best track, and Pond struggle to
maintain the balance between this and the surfeit of
long, hairy wigouts, fade outs and fade back ins, and
sprawling, amorphous solos. By the fth track, the
records initial vice-like grip on your senses starts to
loosen, and everything begins to feel a little
overworked. The bands claims to be anything other
than retro really hold little water; Hobo Rocket is a
record that could easily have been buried in a time
capsule by a wide-eyed trio of David Bowie, Mark
Bolan and Ozzy Osbourne in 1974, then dug up last
week.
07/10
Grant Hart
The Argument
(Domino)
By Joe Goggins. In stores July 22
In the twenty-ve years since Hsker Ds split, singer
Bob Mould has produced a classic record in the form of
Sugars Copper Blue, penned an acclaimed
autobiography and toured with Foo Fighters. Plagued
by addiction, his former songwriting partner, Grant
Hart, has been considerably quieter, so the decision to
return with an LP as ambitious as The Argument serves
as a real statement of intent. A sprawling, twenty-track
concept record based around John Miltons Paradise
Lost, it makes only eeting reference to the melodic
hardcore of his old outt, with Glorious and Most
Disturbing Dream the cases in point. Instead, Hart
alternates between eerie, electric organ-heavy slow
burners like The Argument and Awake, Arise!, and
breezier, guitar-driven pop songs with more
conventional structures (Letting Me Out, Golden
Chain). Its an uneven, eccentric effort, but not without
ashes of the songwriting brilliance that dened Harts
time as part of an underground band so inuential.
06/10
Six By Seven
Love And Peace And
Sympathy (Borrowed Tune)
By Chris Watkeys. In stores now
Surely the indie band of the last
couple of decades to have suffered
the most glaring disparity between
critical acclaim (copious) and
commercial success (virtually
non-existent), Six By Seven return
after a six year absence, this time
with ex-Placebo drummer Steve
Hewitt bashing the skins. This
record is a formidable statement of
renewed intent, with imposing
frontman Chris Ollie infusing their
new songs with a noticeable zeal.
Opener Change is classic Six By
Seven: a brooding, slow-building
mini-epic, which when it kicks in is
as exhilarating as riding a hurricane.
The bands signature sound is
relentless and driving, with
Krautrock undertones and layered
Hammond organ; a sound typied
by the disorientating Truce. The
sad likelihood is that Six By Seven
will continue to go largely
unnoticed, but this stunning album
is another reason why they shouldnt.
08/10 08/10
The Mantles
Long Enought To Leave
(Slumberland)
By Sam Cornforth. In stores July 15
San Francisco quartet The Mantles
are still exploring the 60s garage
pop route, just as they did on their
self-titled debut album, but Long
Enough To Leave is a much more
gentle affair than their sometimes
gritty debut. Nonchalant guitar
melodies waltz by, with Michael
Olivares poetic lyrics
complementing them, as the
psychedelic tones nod out to The
Velvet Underground and The
Kinks. At times they draw upon
90s American collage rock to bring
these nostalgic sounds to life, and
similar to Real Estates Days they
offer plenty of space for the mind to
wonder within the music, like on
Raspberry Thighs, with its crisp
riffs full of autumnal colour. This
sophomore album may be at risk of
submerging under the thousands of
other homages to the golden
decade of pop music, but lasting
hooks and skilful song craft has
made it oat above the pack.
07/10 08/10
Minks
Tide Ends
(Captured Tracks)
By Jack Doherty. In stores May 6
Every so often a band comes along
wrapped in so much nostalgia that
they can no longer see the present
day. Minks are one of those bands.
Tides End, the second album by
the New York collective, couldnt
be more 1980s if it was wearing a
pastel suit with the sleeves rolled
up whilst playing Q*Bert down
the local arcade. Its crammed full
of enough silky synth pop waves
and antiseptic drum beats to make
even the most avid OMD fan feel
just a little bit queasy. While it is of
course perfectly acceptable to be
inuenced by the past, there is a
point where it just becomes a bit
too much, and with Tides End
MINKS pass the point and just
keep on going, heading off into the
sunset with only their treasured
New Order LPs to keep them
company, cooing lines like
Summers over/Shes leaving with
you. Sometimes the past is better
left alone.
04/10
CFCF
Music For Objects
(Dummy)
By Sam Cornforth. In stores now
Montreal electronic musician Michael Silver started
off as a creative remixer before taking up production
duties that have born a dynamic collection of releases.
His latest work under the CFCF moniker is Music
For Objects, a conceptual 8-track EP/mini album
where Silver has taken everyday objects and conveyed
them through a piece of music. Just like on last years
Exercises EP he has opted for a continuation of the
minimalist sound with stark piano chords, immersive
percussion and synth dronen the chosen instruments
to bring the pulse of this Canadians chosen objects to
audial life. Camera was the rst glimpse offered into
this release, and it is one of the dreamiest affairs here, as
it ickers by like the quality of an old Polaroids grainy
prints. Elsewhere, Ring has an irresistible quality to it
that emulates the serenity of its subject matter.
Contrary to the mundane objects that have served as
Michael Silvers inspiration, this uid and dynamic EP
is compelling and anything but boring.
08/10
Its been 18 years since the wheels
came off the unsteady dream pop
wagon that had spawned an album
a year since 1992. Having released a
remix collection that demonstrated
the regard they were once held in
by featuring contributions from
Robin Guthrie and Billy Corgan,
Medicine split after 1995s
decidedly average Her Highness.
2013, however, sees them join
perhaps their closest antecedent,
My Bloody Valentine, in a shoegaze
revival and, like MBV, To The
Happy Few is much more than a
paint by numbers coda. Unpeel its
layers of distortion pedals and
whispered vocals and it offers up a
suite of irresistible pop hooks.
Highlights include Its Not Enough,
with its pounding snares and
bruising, fuzz guitars, the psychedelic
duet The End Of The Line and the
syncopated grooves of Find Me
Always. To The Happy Few soars;
it just does so with subtlety.
Pinkunoizu
The Drop
(Full Time Hobby)
By Sophie Coletta. In stores Aug 12
Lingering is not a word you would
ever use to describe Danish
neo-psychedelic group Pinkunoizu.
Aside from their comprehensive
range of international ties the
pseudo-Japanese naming, the
Copenhagen-via-Berlin residences
their sound is something that
evokes strident spontaneity without
being overtly out of control. Its
frantic; never deliberating nor
pausing for breath and their second
album follows this conviction
unapologetically, quite literally
when you learn that it was only
recorded in a week. Its hazy allure
greets you like an old friend, yet
simultaneously its as if the tracks
themselves have no idea where they
are headed. They ooze cosmic sass,
but never hang around long enough
to repeat themselves, unless you
count the stuttering interlude of
The Swollen Map, or the bolshie,
convulsive riff on Tin Can Valley,
which I dont.
Medicine
To The Happy Few
(Captured Tracks)
By David Zammit. In stores July 15
LIVE
Tonight, Hookworms take to the stage with an
American ag draped across their keyboard
stands. Knowing the pitch-black humour and
convention-defying core of Pissed Jeans, its no
doubt more intended to accommodate their
Independence Day arrival with a healthy dollop
of irony than it is out of sincerity.
This is Hookworms rst show since they
announced signing to Domino offshoot Weird
World, and its one that justies that decision.
Opening with the now staple Away/Towards
the band ignite a trail that sparks furiously and
constantly until the dying all-encompassing,
cacophonic lth of Preservation. The
momentum is a continuous, propulsive and
engulng force. After the slower densities offered
on debut Pearl Mystic seem to be largely absent
from their post-album release shows (or at least
the few Ive seen), it seems Hookworms are
splitting their personality through this sonic
expansion, the group perhaps carving out an
ability to be two differing bands, creating both
separate studio and stage personas, all of which
points to huge intrigue in regards to where they
will go next.
For Pissed Jeans, this is their rst UK show in
some ve years, and the Philly band arrive in an
aura clouded equally in camp delight and
seething fury. Matt Kosloff uctuates between a
piss-take Jagger all hips and trotting minces
and a tearing, twisted GG Allin, a manic glint
in his eye that suggests a possible loose wire
could ignite any second. The combined results of
his stage actions bear much similarity to Les
Savy Favs Tim Harrington, yet feel decidedly
less antic-driven and more ingrained and
in-tune with the band themselves, as opposed to
him being a show all of his own.
The bands performance is a perpetual balance
between vicious, irony-drenched humour and
sobering, intestine-twisting snarl. A few songs in
comes the screams of more vocals, more vocals
oh yes, because I control the level of the
vocals from up here on this magic machine.
Beep, beep, beep, Kosloff deadpans, playing with
an amp.
The material from this years Honeys is
resolutely corporeal; from Bathroom Laughter
to Male Gaze, the success of the album has
injected a ferocity and intensity to their
renditions that perhaps supersedes their already
riotous existence on record. They drape
themselves in Hookworms USA ag, This one
is for the troops, Kosloff declares as he delves
into an acid-tongued assault on the earnest
sentimentality of the US, mimicking all the trite,
stereotypical phrasing no doubt circulating
around dinner tables and news stations back
home.
They rip their own country a new one at
perhaps preciously the same time when
thousands of people will be saluting the very ag
they are currently desecrating. Pissed Jeans are
the perfect American anti-heroes.
For the encore, the band break into Shallow cut
with Boring Girls, at which point the stage
slowly lls up with the crowd, most of whom
torpedo back into the audience, albeit for one
girl who takes on the role of dancer only too
soon for that dreaded moment when the
guitarist takes off their guitar and throws it over
her shoulder. Usually you can pinpoint that
moment to the complete loss of momentum and
peak of awkwardness to any show, but this young
lady kills it. They then all trundle off-stage bar
the topless drummer who after a pounding
drum-solo nale does a full crowd-surf round
the venue and then walks around like a sweating
lunatic hugging every single person he comes
into contact with. As the group themselves said
tonight, see you again in 2018.
PISSED JEANS &
HOOKWORMS
Brudenell Social Club, Leeds
04.07.2013
By Daniel Dylan Wray
Photography by Lee Goldup
For a band whose records are notoriously
impenetrable, there is a touching shift in perspective
that occurs during a These New Puritans live show.
What was vast and ethereal before gains a missing
tangibility and adds a whole new dimension onto a
sound that has already given the band huge plaudits.
Songwriter and front man Jack Barnett has brought his
band to Heaven on the back of the quartets third,
least-commercially minded album, Field of Reeds,
and complete with brass section, singer Elisa
Rodrigues and a magnetic resonator piano, the efforts
of the These New Puritans well-crafted songs are
brought into sharp focus. Tracks like new single
Fragment Two and Field of Reedss monk-chanting
title track both show the expanse upon which the
band operates. For different reasons, they both work:
the former for being a well crafted, poignant pop song
and the latter for the disparate elements that the
Southend-On-Sea collective are able to conceive in a
studio and reproduced in a live setting, almost
spiritually. The effect is spectacular. Despite seven
people being on stage, this is in many ways a far more
stripped back and uncomplicated group than we saw
touring previous album Hidden. Gone are the
six-foot Taiko drum, the childrens choir and the
orchestra, yet atmospherically little is lost in the
transition. Barnett is a master at lling space and the
arches under Charing Cross station offer an ideal
setting. These New Puritans are a band that willingly
occupy the edge of the indie spectrum and they make
it a far more interesting place as a result.
THESE NEW
PURITANS
Heaven, Embankment, London
19.06.2013
By Samuel Ballard
Photography by Richard Gray
A Scandinavian, pagan psych voodoo band who so
theatrically refuse to identify themselves in names as
well as faces, youd have to be pretty po-faced to not
consider Goat silly as well as excellent. The latter has
been conrmed by every fan of progressive funk rock
that has heard last years debut album, World Music,
and to see them jam it out in front of you to feel Let
It Bleed hump along the oor and up through your
trainers; to realise that all that joyous, black psychedelia
is void of samples and ttingly of the Earth is to fall
deeper in love with the cult, still. The groups clear
daftness, then, is at rst impossible to ignore, each
member of the band slowly entering the stage in
various horror show dress the hooded executioner
on bongos, the expressionless tin man/gnome on lead
guitar, the shrouded Elephant Man on bass, and so on.
For their part, Goats 6 instrumentalists have a touch of
Monty Python about them, largely static as they
noodle out the most incredible, wah-wah-heavy,
out-there psych erm out there. The groups two
singers storm the stage after an initial wig-out and
never stop moving a couple of hell-bent witch
priests rattling clusters of bells at the crowd as if
testicles yanked from our next sacricial virgins. They
wildly wave ribbons around, ceremoniously bash
tambourines and childishly run amuck, dancing like 6
year olds do, to a beat that only they can hear. Its part
1968 happening/part Dragnet: feathers and beads and
masks and magic. You get the impression that Goat
would play this hard and ail this much were they in a
room by themselves. Thankfully they do let us watch.
GOAT
Electric Ballroom, Camden, London
27.06.2013
By Staurt Stubbs
Photography by Roy J Baron
LIVE
THE NATIONAL
The Roundhouse, Camden, London
19.06.2013
By Chris Watkeys
For The National, the three

thousand-capacity Roundhouse
now counts as an intimate gig.
Theres been a lot of talk around
the release of the new album about
how self-assured this band now
are, and while theres a tangible
self-condence both in their songs
and in their stage presence this
evening, one of the most gratifying
things is that Matt Berningers stage
persona hasnt changed in the eight
years since they played the tiny
Bary down the road; he still
betrays his overarching nervousness
through those awkward, a-rhythmic
steps, head down, disjointedly moving
back and forth to the mic. He
comes across like a manic swan, a
strange contrast between graceful
poise and exposed vulnerability (or,
if youre being unkind, like Forrest
Gump on speed). In front of
wall-sized, fantastically sepia-toned
visuals, his band hit some genuinely
sublime peaks tonight. Drawing
heavily from Trouble Will Find
Me, the set barely dips in all of its
almost two hours; Swallow Victoria
descends into a brass-laden, urgent
climax, then segues into I Need
My Girl, which dissipates the
vicious anger of the previous song
into something fragile, calm and
beautiful. And these are no lazy,
note-by-note reproductions of the
studio versions; these live renditions
are crafted into something familiar
yet excitingly new. Its impossible to
leave the Roundhouse without a
tear in the eye, an elevated soul and
a gut- wrenching certainty that
music means something.
JON HOPKINS
Village Underground, Shoreditch
12.06.2013
By Stuart Stubbs
In the June edition of Loud And

Quiet, Jon Hopkins told us how he
hopes people will fall asleep to his
music. Tonight he thumps out a set
of IDM heavy enough to wake a
corpse. Hopkins briey irts with
his ambient side, allowing
Immunitys serene title track to
trickle out early on, minimal piano
notes hanging in the air. Its a
respite before one is needed.
Everything else pounds brutally.
Out front, Hopkins dishes all of
this out at an alarming rate, and
with a noted sense of glee, building
dense techno by physically
triggering as much as possible and
head banging to the gnarled drops
of his more glitch-heavy highlights,
Insides and Vessel, both of which
are far more unforgiving than they
are on record. The same could be
said for the closing, endlessly rising
Wire, too, and everything else, in
fact, thats hitched up by sub bass
and exaggerated BPM. The closest
thing resembling a lull comes
halfway through, as Hopkins, after
a moment of battering of old
school house, and another of
shattering boulder sounds, settles
into a section of thrumming new
songs, including the usually
startling Collider. Out the other
side, the crowd eventually dance,
rather than bob, to the euphoria of
Light Through Veins, usually
heard at Coldplay concerts, and all
the time Hopkins ies by the seat
of his pants, aware, as are we, that
all this could all blow up in his
face. Its what makes this dance
show so thrilling.
WAXAHATCHEE
Shacklewell Arms, Dalston, London
13.06.2013
By Stuart Stubbs
As Waxahatchee, Philadelphia
resident Katie Crutcheld makes
music that makes you feel young
again, not via a carefree, saccharine
rush, but rather through a brand of
lo- indie folk-grunge thats
earnest and clear. Crutchelds
vocals vulnerable, nave and,
above all, hurt are key, so this
evening it initially seems like we
might have been better off sticking
with new album Cerulean Salt at
home. Waxahatchees opening
numbers are not good especially
should-be-highlight Coast To
Coast, which Crutcheld sings
uncharacteristically out of tune
and with extra at woo hoo ah
hoos. Perhaps its because, as she
tells us, this crowd (a full room, if
modest in size) is better than 90%
of the shows the trio plays to back
home. And with that appreciative
hello, Crutchelds vocal demons
vanish. Everything that follows
and especially the tracks that she
sings unaccompanied by her band
is crystalline to the point that
nobody dare speak even between
songs, as the singer occasionally
peers up through glassy eyes on the
brink of tears. True emotion, it
seems, is the last trump card of
music so simple in its parts, and for
an hour we happily watch
Waxahatchee repeat the same
routine of marrying classic
anti-folk melodies and bruised
sentiments. And for those of us that
have been through adolescence
and young adulthood, all that
heartache and eternal pain, its
briey missed.
WAMPIRE
Shacklewell Arms, Dalston, London
18.06.2013
By James West
If you recall when The Horrors rst

turned up circa-2005, all black
lacquered mops and ghoulish
garage rock, then the creepy
caricature schtick of Wampire may
feel a tad reminiscent. After all, the
soft focus snaps of duo Rocky
Tinder and Eric Phipps, showing
off the latters blue movie handlebar
and shirt-protruding chest wig,
would even put the willies up Ariel
Pinks most staunch admirer. But
unlike the hot pink-topped oddball,
their creepy facade doesnt seem
entirely tangible tonight, perhaps
down to a red-eye, cross-Atlantic
ight. Luckily, they still deliver
mock-eerie highlights from their
May-dropped debut Curiosity
with just enough vim to impress. In
fact, The Hearses hooky spook
pop rattles around the sweaty
Dalston back room with such
vigour it feels like being trapped
aboard a malfunctioning ghost train.
They also show their woozy side,
with pleasingly trippy jaunts
through Orchards and Spirit
Forest, before wearing their surreal
inuences on their sullied sleeves
with a freaky cover of Kraftwerks
The Model. On closer Giants
(Marc Bolan if his management had
thrust a mad organist and a bag of
LSD on him) you can actually see
gleaming condensation on Phippss
guitar before theyre forcibly shaken
off during a cacophony of
mind-warping feedback. It might
have a certain, niche thrill-seeker
swooning through kaleidoscopic
specs, but really Wampires fangs
arent quite fully formed just yet.
HEALTH
Birthdays, Dalston, London
02.06.2013
By Philippa Burt
Last time we saw HEALTH, they

looked like a band in the middle of
a divorce, each member assigned to
a different corner of Manchesters
Ruby Lounge at In The City 2010.
It was a great show, that night
vicious, like enviable make-up sex.
HEALTH clearly worked through
their differences, either that night
or whilst making the soundtrack to
vigilante game Max Payne 3 last
year, or some time since. Theyve a
new, third album ready to go,
although we can only be sure of
that because ve new tracks are
aired tonight. Its largely why so
many people are at this unexpected
stop on this unforeseen European
mini tour. Between the moshy
pang of Crimewave, the ravey We
Are Water, the creaking,
malfunctioning Death+ and the
futuro terror of Tabloid Sores, the
band dont point out the new
tracks, or speak at all, for that
matter. Theyre not easily spotted,
either, for the complete lack of
cohesion between them. One
sounds like Depeche Mode, and is
perhaps the noise bands most
accessible track yet, more so than
the disco grind of Die Slow (also
brilliant tonight). Another remains
in the darkwave pop camp, with
choruses indebted to Placebo, but
another still sounds like it could
have been on the bands
uncompromising debut, all
thrash-stop-thrash-noise and
half-second pauses before the next
bludgeoning. So fuck knows what
HEALTHs new album sounds like,
were just happy theyre still here.
01
The National
Photographer: Roy J Baron
02
Mark E Smith
Photographer: Joel Rowbottom
03
The Fall
04
That Fucking Tank
01
02 01 02
Wakeeld certainly struggles with its reputation
as a city, perhaps even more so when becoming a
cultural hub. On Long Division festivals website
it even lists reasons, or justications, for coming
to the city for the event, entitled The line-up
looks good but well its Wakeeld isnt it?, and
going on to list ve practical reasons to come
along. Truthfully, they shouldnt be so hard on
Wakeeld; it has plenty reason to be proud of its
role in Long Divisions setup.
While it may lack the huge name draws of
the Camden Crawl, feel somewhat dwarfed by
the size of Shefelds Tramlines, or struggle to
keep up with the wealth of new and overseas
talent that Dot-to-Dot or Live at Leeds offers, it
is, as an inner-city festival, pretty ideal for those
wishing to escape the drag of many outdoor
events: mainly trundling around all day and
evading the unpredictability of the weather. In
fact, all the venues here are within stumbling
distance and range in aesthetics greatly, from the
beautiful Theatre Royal to the idiosyncratic and
rather strange but bizarrely fun and
mischievous-feeling environment of watching
bands play in an old library. While some
inner-city festivals keep you glued to one,
darkness ensconced building all day, Wakeeld
actually offers a refreshing variety and thus gives
it a sense of originality that being in a University
building all day gravely lacks.
Blacklisters are one of the many bands to be
playing on the JD Roots stage (the festivals main
sponsor), upstairs in the Hop, showcasing
homegrown, or geographically proximate artists.
Their mid-afternoon set is a blast of guitar growl
and dog-bark screams; like Jesus Lizard but with
any touch of the blues completely removed and
replaced with unrelenting, post-hardcore sneer.
As singer Billy Mason-Wood wraps the
microphone cable around his neck and stares
vacantly into the crowd, his eyes look as though
his brain is being deprived of oxygen and hes
beginning a complete sensory shutdown, all
before he ignites back to life and tears through
the crowd. Thankfully, inadvertently seeing The
Coopers as the rst band of the day is rendered
nothing but a bad dream by this lots
cacophonous racket.
Lets Wrestle have been ghting something
of a losing battle ever since their 2009 debut
album, In The Court of Wrestling Lets. As
much as they seemingly want to shake off the
foundations of that record and their earlier
material, the truth is that they havent really
come close to creating anything that will allow
them to. Its symptomatic in the audience too;
the difference in reactions to material from
albums number one and two is hugely audible.
There is a worry, then, that a lot of the appeal to
Lets Wrestle was in actual fact grounded in
reckless youth and rambunctious, ramshackle
naivety, not so much the fully formed, weighted-
out balance of their newer, more mature songs.
Sky Larkin return too, and theirs is a most
welcome one. While their rather date-stamped
take on guitar-pop-rock may have fallen
somewhat out of favour and avour in their
absence (lead singer Katie Harkin has been a
touring member of Wild Beasts), in their
performance tonight they re-instil a sense of
excitement that goes beyond the welcoming
back of an old friend for a friendly but safe
reminisce, and instead offers a thrilling glimpse
of what is to come from their upcoming album.
That Fucking Tank, despite doing their
thing for 10 years, are still one of the most
pulverising two-pieces in circulation. They have
all the free-spiralling, post-rock-tinged,
occasionally Germanic-imbued space in the
world to play with (and sometimes they do) but
when they bring it home, they do it with all the
taut, erce precision of snare-tight, explosive
Fugazi. It is simultaneously wild and unhinged
yet astutely accurate and ab-free. Still as
exciting as the rst time I saw them god knows
how many years ago.
By the time The Fall are due on in
Warehouse 23, the place has become a certied
sweatbox; clawing through to the front of the
stage is like trekking through an Amazonian
jungle, the humidity thick and engulng, a
stagnant blanket of sweat clings like a face mask.
As Mark E. Smith takes to the stage, hes looking
trim and characteristically sharp, but also
somewhat shrivelled and frail. Smiths worn,
contorted face always looked decades more
haggard than he actually was, but in 2013, at the
age of 56, it would appear it has all caught up
with him. Thankfully, this all becomes pretty
irrelevant as soon as the band kick in. While
years of amphetamines, whiskey and Pils
(Holsten that is) may have had their way with
the surface of Mark E. Smith, they cant touch
the unrelenting snarl of his vocals and the
mighty power of his band.
Recent single Wray bursts into life with
Smiths gargled, indecipherable repeated chugs
of sound a run up before taking off as the
guitars crash in and the band lift off together.
Strychnine does its job and still sounds as
scrappy and amateur as ever. Theme for Sparta
F.C only proves to cement itself amidst the
groups rich history as perhaps not only one of
their nest, but also one of the bands favourites
as it continues to get what is close to a decade-
long outing. 30 albums down the line and there
is still nobody like them. Wakeelds not bad either.
LONG DIVISION
FESTIVAL
Wakeeld, Yorkshire
07-09.06.2013
By Daniel Dylan Wray
03 02
04
FILM CINEMA
REVIEW
By IAN ROEBUCK
THE ACT OF KILLING
Director: Joshua Oppenheimer
Producer: Signe Byrge Srensen
As the credits roll on this vivid,
potent documentary, the word
Anonymous peppers the screen.
These faceless people arent the
perpetrators of the mid-60s
Indonesian mass genocide that the
lm covers so strikingly, but a
nameless team of local crew
members (co-directors, makeup
artists, technical support) that
couldnt be fully credited due to
the movies delicate subject matter.
The perpetrators have no such
issue in The Act of Killing they are
given prominent billing.
Joshua Oppenheimers
extraordinary work seeks out the
so called gangsters who
undertook this bloody anti-
communist cull, who have not
only escaped prosecution all these
years but are heralded as heroes in
their home country. And in doing
so, Indonesias wretched political
system is somewhat exposed. In
unprecedented and remarkable
style, Oppenheimer doesnt just
interview the killers, he asks them
to stage dramatic reconstructions
of their acts, which they eagerly
relish.
Lavish set design, recreated
dream sequences and lengthy
costume discussions (I wouldnt
have been killing in white
trousers) play out in surreal
fashion as were dragged back in
time by protagonist Anwar and his
reminiscing friends. Were asked to
enter their death squad psyche and
its chilling to the bone.
The lm has come under some
criticism for leaving out the wider
political picture of these atrocities,
but this is a human story, a form of
purgatory that goes deep, deep
down, beyond the base level of
injustice to places unexplored by
lm. Your initial abbergasted
mind gradually yearns for some
kind of epiphany, some realisation
that what they did is wrong and
the documentarys true power is
revealed when this process begins.
Whilst night shing, Anwar
ruminates on karma and God, the
sea swilling around him as thunder
claps and lightning strikes; it is a
sequence that sent shivers
throughout the theatre. The nal
ve minutes pushes the extremity
of cinema and it is frankly
terrifying, a hollow shell of a
human is laid bare before your
very eyes.
09/10
The monthly cinematic preview is something of a
conundrum. What to discuss, dictated by a lengthy
listings sprawl here, a healthy dose of background
reading there; the process an engrossing one thats
more joy than sombre. What we should be asking
ourselves, though, is why? Why are some lms more
enticing than others? What mysterious criteria are we
bound by? Well, there is no simple answer and more
often than not a movie makes this column because it
compels me to write about it: it would be churlish of
me not to. This month sees three such delights jump
out, equally unavoidable if unrelated.
Ever since 2010s deeply underrated Im Still Here,
Joaquin Phoenix has enthralled. A fascinating actor
who makes charming choices, The Master marked
Phoenixs arrival as a heavyweight modern movie icon
and his next few projects were always going to catch
the eye. Scheduled for US release in November is the
most spine tingling of these, Her.
Helmed by Spike Jonze, a Director famed for total
immersion, Her looks to be his most personal and
arduous project yet. Penned without Charlie Kaufman,
the feature sees Jonze throw himself at an insightful
and bittersweet concept; a lm that exemplies his
true metier.
Set in the slight future of L.A, Joaquin Phoenixs
character buys the worlds rst articially intelligent
operating system. Sounding disarmingly similar to
Charlie Brookers Black Mirror, a human gradually
emerges through his computer and the relationship
evolves into outlandish romance. So far so Spike. But
this well-trodden path of articial intelligence gone
rogue should shine under Jonzes spell. Joining
Phoenix are Amy Adams, Rooney Mara and Scarlett
Johansson as the humanoid love interest. Its an
astounding line up of female talent that puts Her at the
very top of this years must-see lms.
Johanssons hot property in 2013, in fact, picking
up wildly different roles, including a stint in Under the
Skin, Jonathan Glazers highly anticipated
interpretation of Michel Fabers mind-bending novel.
Johansson stars as an extra-terrestrial sent to Earth by a
rich corporation on her planet to pick up unwary
hitchhikers.
Plenty of excitement surrounds Glazers
comeback, 8 years since the intriguing Nicole Kidman
starring Birth. Itll be thrilling to see how he deals with
Fabers macabre text and even more exciting to see
Johansson let rip as another fascinating character. Her
role in Don Jon is no abby walk-on, either its
perhaps her stand out lm of 2013, in fact.
A feature underpinned by the porn industry, not
in a Boogie Nights kind of way, but rather in a nuts and
bolts fashion thats managed to be both sincere and
comical, Don Jon is Joseph Gordon-Levitts debut in
the Directors chair that also sees him pursue Johansson
as Don Jon himself. Its a tale of addiction and true
love, which might sound like an appallingly bad idea
and a waste of talent, but a sharp looking trailer
combining shrewd humour with an intimacy you
wouldnt associate with the sex industry makes this a
popcorn prospect well worth waiting for.
Thats 2013, while 2014 sees Johansson star in Luc
Bessons Lucy alongside Morgan Freeman, and Jon
Favreaus Chef besides Robert Downey Jr, and I
havent even mentioned Captain America and The
Avengers 2. Johanssons good choices make my preview
choice that much easier.
SCARLETT FEVER
This months preview theme: One movie star whose work ethic is going through the roof
Scarlett Johansson and Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Don Jon
02
Impress your friends by listening to
the Loud And Quiet issue 50 mixtape
only at www.loudandquiet.com
Featuring this months featured artists
:
www.loudandquiet.com
news / songs / past issues
D
i
s
c
l
a
i
m
e
r
:

T
h
e

r
e
p
r
e
s
e
n
t
a
t
i
o
n
s

o
f

t
h
e

p
e
r
s
o
n
s

h
e
r
e
i
n

a
r
e

p
u
r
e
l
y

f
c
t
i
t
i
o
u
s
.

PARTY WOLF
IDIOT TENNIS Game. Set. Twat.
PHOTO CASEBOOK The unfortunate world of Ian Beale
CRUSH HOUR Hooking up starers on the commute
1. Well, this was a mistake.
2. Chloe has such fat arms. Bless.
3. Millies so brave wearing a patterned maxi at her size.
4. Do I still love this man?
5. Blending in nicely, John. Happy face.
Its Ian, for you.
Somthing about that
sign you made him for
his new stationary
shop
Danny Dyer
A Rodney sized
plonker
Any old iron
Anything thats
convincing
Dyer did once tell
a NUTS reader to
cut his exs face
IDIOT
FAME
MOST LIKELY
TO SAY
LEAST LIKELY
TO SAY
IDIOT
POWER PLAY
GAME, SET & MATCH
Jason Statham
A real tom tit
Get the facking
shooters, dopy
bollocks!
Anything in a
convincing
American accent
Check out
Stathams
IMDB page
Nice one bruvver!
THOUGHT SPORT In the heads of tennis fans
To the girl I accidently headbutted on the tube
at Warren Street drink?
Balding man with cut head
To the man of my dreams on the 07:48 from
Didcot Parkway, I wash because of you!
Girl with the pink hip ask
To the guy in the suit on the train in the
morning. You read your paper while I led my
nails, but Im sure we both felt a spark, please.
Single girl
To the sexpot on the 76 bus with large
breasts and a perfect face, mum and I are
having a BBQ at the weekend.
Guy with the Tesco bag
RUMOUR PIE Big mouthfuls of gossip
1
2
Billy, you little prick!
I wanted Ians Pen
Island!!!
3
4
5
Judy Murray is to host a new tennis
based TV quiz called The Weakest
Serve. The show, devised by Simon
Fuller, will see celebrity
contestants like Caroline
Flack hit different sized
objects over a giant net for
cash prizes
It is said that friends are concerned for
Harry Styles health since its been
discovered that the singer is 62% hair
Rumour has it that after two years
on The Voice, Tom Jones still has no
ideas who 4th judge Danny ODonoghue
is. Jones was heard saying on set: Ive
sussed the bald girl and the little man,
but then Im struggling

Richard Hammond is said to be fuming
after a proposed Top Gear stunt that
had him locked in a human sized
hamster wheel and racing James May in
a Renault Clio

Rubber faced funny man
Rowan Atkinson is rumoured
to be mad about Tony
Robinsons knighthood,
simply tweeting TimeBALLS

Loud and Quiet 50

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Loud and Quiet 50

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

ZERO POUNDS / VOLUME 03 / ISSUE 50 / THE ALTERNATIVE MUSIC TABLOI D

For The National, the three

In the June edition of Loud And

If you recall when The Horrors rst

Last time we saw HEALTH, they

You might also like