FEATURES

DIE ANTWOORD

Thu, 13 May 2010 12:18:04 +0100

CAPE TOWN,
MARCH 30TH, 2010

Today, their 56th day since becoming celebrities, Die Antwoord rappers NINJA and Yo-Landi Vi$$er have come to Golden Acre, a run down shopping centre in Cape Town, to talk about world domination over a Wimpy milkshake.

Since BoingBoing.net blogged about them on February 3rd 2010, the rap rave crew’s “Enter the Ninja” and “Zef Side” music videos have racked up over five million views on YouTube and sparked off a debate about authenticity, class and race. Hipster girls across the world have been heard asking their hairdressers for “the Yo-Landi”, and the biggest players in the recording industry flew them over to LA and New York, desperate to find out the secret of their success. Somewhere along the line, they even squeezed in a coffee with David Lynch and inked a deal with District 9’s director Neill Blomkamp to shoot their next promo.

Sliding into the booth, NINJA, a lanky man with the kind of flat top haircut that hasn’t been rocked by a white rapper since Vanilla Ice’s heyday, flashes a smile punctuated by gold caps. “It’s like an acid trip that just won’t end,” he says soon after arriving wearing a, err, Vanilla Ice t-shirt and the infamous Dark Side of the Moon boxer shorts he sexually assaulted in the “Zef Side” clip. Yo-Landi, his petite partner in rhyme, an attractive peroxide blonde some YouTubers have crudely dubbed as jailbait, sits next to him and orders a bubblegum shake. NINJA goes for strawberry. Ross Garrett, the photographer, plumps for chocolate. I go for vanilla. “It’s like South Africa right here,” NINJA laughs. “The fucking rainbow nation!”

In person, NINJA’s harsh barnet, heavy brow, and ‘Pretty Wise’ neck tattoo should be an intimidating blend. But he turns out to be surprisingly polite, as does Yo-Landi, who has one of the most mischievous Afrikaans accents you’re likely to come across. This morning there’s none of the stylized agro wigger attitude that has propelled them from starving artists to the flag-bearers of South African pop music. If anything, they’re still coming to terms with the fact that anyone gives a shit about them. After spending more than a year trawling around the country’s darkest nightclubs, their flash fame has grown so large that a new Cape Town guidebook name checks them alongside Table Mountain and Nelson Mandela. They laugh when hearing this.

“That’s crazy! That’s fucking weird,” says NINJA, genuinely taken aback. “I mean we’ve only been famous for a few weeks! They can make statues of us next to Mandela. Tourists can go and take photos of us with pigeon cack on our heads.”

Unsurprisingly, the guidebook’s author decided not to run an excerpt of NINJA’s infamous “Whatever Man” monologue from the “Enter the Ninja” video, in which he sneers: “I represent South African culture. In this place you get a lot of different things, Blacks, Whites, Colours, English, Afrikaans, Xhosa, Zulu, watookal. I’m like all these different things, all these different people, fucked into one person…” In a country still coming to terms with the apartheid era, NINJA seems unrepentant about broadcasting such a provocative socio-political statement.

“It’s just our style. People think too much,” the 35-year-old rapper says between slurps of frothy pink milk. “We don’t really think that much about what we do, it’s just fun. The country’s run by black people and all kinds of different people live here – it’s like a fucked up cultural fruit salad. We’re really not a perfect rainbow nation. The racism is fucking old school, but in America it’s worse because it’s hidden, whereas here it’s out in the open. Here it was this massive philosophy, this fucking huge wound – it was revealed and people poured medicine on it and it kind of got turned around. It’s boring to me ‘cos everything’s fucking fine. I’m not a racist.”

“I am Afrikaans,” Yo-Landi continues, hugging her legs. “It wasn’t ever something that I thought about. Lots of people speak Afrikaans. It’s not a statement; it’s just a language that we use to communicate. It has its own flavour, it’s got its own slang. People laugh. People like it. They like us being open.”

One of the main reasons why Die Antwoord have blown up so quickly is because their videos play up to social stereotypes and walk a thin line between farce and performance art. In “Enter the Ninja” deformed progeria sufferer Leon Botha lip-syncs and pulls various B-boy poses, Yo-Landi strips out of a schoolgirl uniform and sings about being a butterfly, while NINJA raps infront of a Keith Haring-esque backdrop at a pace that would make the Blackout Crew shout for a rewind. In “Zef Side” they present a tongue-in-cheek vision of the “zef” redneck lifestyle – a poor white township full of gap-toothed drunks, pimped out motorbikes, and most memorably, NINJA dancing in slow mo while Yo-Landi gazes adoringly at his man-junk flapping about in those Pink Floyd boxers. In short, most people don’t know if Die Antwoord is just one big joke.

“He wears those things like every fucking day,” Yo-Landi laughs, looking at the prog rock pants. “They scare me those underpants. When I bought them I had no idea that they’d become famous! He says he washes them, but I’m not sure.”

“I do wash them!” NINJA interjects. “I get scared when I think about losing them. They make me feel safe!” he chuckles before adopting a more sombre tone. “I’m serious about everything. I’m fucking serious about my hairstyle. We’re pop art fused with high art. We’re also full on into performing as a rap group and making films. We get criticism for doing that and it’s retarded. We’re fucking serious about our art and what we do, but we also have a sense of humour. I think it’s because people can’t understand our style so they think it’s a joke. Our music isn’t intellectual; we make music for the common man. What’s really the joke is the state of pop music over the last ten years. But don’t worry ‘cos this is the future. Die Antwoord is here. I’ve drawn a line before, so let’s move forward now.”

NINJA has drawn lines and moved forward many times before. To many people in South Africa, his trailer trash Samurai persona is simply the latest in a long of alter egos for Waddy Jones; the frontman for groups like Evergreen, The Constructus Corporaton, and, along with Yo-Landi, Max Normal. As MC Totally Rad, who Dazed featured in our 2004 South African issue, he released a less polished version of “Beat Boy”, the Bronski Beat-inspired track that eventually found fame in Die Antwoord’s “Zef Side” clip. So why did Waddy decide to become a NINJA?

“We’ve been working for a long time, but I finally worked out my E=MC2 of entertainment. That’s why we called it The Answer (English translation of Die Antwoord), because it was either going to save our asses or we would be fucked. It’s on that level for me. The other stuff was more experimental and this is more of a signature. I wasn’t unhappy; I wanted to dispose of everything, because everything else that we did was disposable. Plus ninjas are just fucking cool.”

There is another side to NINJA that has much more serious connotations than merely changing his rap name or his haircut – inked onto his torso are contradicting gang tattoos from each of Cape Town’s ‘numbers’ gangs: the 26s, 27s and 28s. He has one of Richie Rich, which symbolises the 26’s – the money lovers. On his chest he has the 27’s tattoo of a ghostly hand gripping a knife, which symbolize the murderers – they keep the peace between the 26s and the 28s. And on his arm is a tattoo of Casper the friendly ghost with a massive erection, which represents the 28s – a prison rape gang that has ‘legalised’ homosexual prison sex. Tattoos are the outward symbols of rank and status and affiliations, yet NINJA has never belonged to any of them. Isn’t he scared that it’s a step too far?

“It’s like a peace gesture,” he smiles, gold glinting in the sun. “I didn’t even know that the Richie Rich one was a gang signs. A lot of people have said that I’m not allowed it, but I just saw it on the back of a taxi! I’m sorry! I won’t do it again! I don’t know… we’re all in the same gang, we’re not scared of anything. I mustn’t be scared. People don’t understand white people saying those things.”

After the milkshakes we drive over to Woodstock to their friend Dragon’s house to take some photos. I say house, but crack shack is probably more suitable. DJ Hi-Tek, the chubby bassline genius behind the zef rap rave sound is still nowhere to be seen. NINJA informs me that the bedroom producer “is fuckin’ anti-social and doesn’t tour with us either,” so we leave it at that. Yo-Landi sits on a tatty sofa and plays with her rats, Ying and Yang.

Dragon, a huge ripped black guy from the Congo stands in the corner of the crumbling den smoking some seriously stanky weed and shouting “NINJA! Louis Vuitton!” every few minutes. Legend has it that Dragon once woke up in the middle of the night with a knife at his throat and five men pointing guns at his head. He killed them all with his bare hands. Luckily he’s less hectic when stoned, but is a bit pissed off that Die Antwoord didn’t bring him back any LVMH from the States. Or a work visa. He mumbles something about “making people disappear,” and then goes into the next room. “Orinco Ninja Flow” – yes, a Die Antwoord remix of Enya – pumps out of a laptop. NINJA rubs his shirt into the dirty floor.

After shouting the ‘Sail away mothafokkaz!’ chorus, Yo-Landi slips into a pair of short shorts and half cut top that shows off a page three frame. Earlier the pair admitted that they once “accidentally had a kid,” but weren’t together any more. “We’re just friends and we make music. We’re down with each other, but everything’s behind and this is at the front.” Watching their playful interaction as the flashgun goes off, I’m not sure if I entirely believe the platonic assertions, but it’s not really any of my business so I show Dragon some video footage of him blowing ganja smoke into a shaft of sunlight. He approves. Thank God.

Before the shoot wraps, Die Antwoord ask if I want to meet their friend Isaac Mutant, the pioneer of Afrikaans rap. He lives over in Mitchell’s Plain, one of the most hardcore townships in Cape Town. They need to drop off some swag from their recent American trip.

Three hours later, we’re hurtling towards the Cape Flats with six pizzas and a couple of cases of beer in the boot. There’s a full moon and in the distance people are climbing Lions Head by torchlight. “There was a full moon on the third of February,” NINJA says, recalling the night their lives changed and website servers crashed. “After looking at the interweb I looked up at it. Have you ever had 5,000 new emails in your inbox? It’s fucking insane. It means you don’t look at your email anymore. It’s like a wall of sound. Now I don’t sleep at night. I just lie there and look at the roof. And then I get up and walk fucking far in the night.”

“I saw him one morning and I asked what he had been doing,” Yo-Landi chuckles. “He just said, ‘I’m walking.’ I was like, ‘you look mental.’ It was eight in the morning and he had this really mental look in his eyes.”

As the small hatchback speeds down the quiet N2 motorway, the hyper duo talk excitedly about their love of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Yo-Landi’s age (“It’s confidential”), being photographed by Roger Ballen for the cover of their debut album $O$, and how they think their music is perceived across South Africa.

“In some magazines we’re billed as a national embarrassment because we’re the biggest South African group ever to make it overseas,” NINJA says. “People are like, ‘Die Antwoord are fucking up the country’s image.’ People hate us, like death threat hate.”

“It’s because we swear so much in Afrikaans,” Yo-Landi continues, talking about their song “Jou Ma Se Poes In ‘N Fishpaste Jar” (“Your Mother’s Cunt In a Fishpaste Jar”). “We say the worst Afrikaans swear words you can possibly think of. We sing them repetitively in our lyrics and to them it’s too much.”

“But young kids,” NINJA says wide-eyed, turning away from the road, “They loooove us. It’s only the old white Afrikaans people who don’t.”

Outside, there are hardly any cars left on the motorway. Yo-Landi cracks open a bottle of cider and gazes out at the low level township houses covering both sides of the road.

“We’re heading into the dark side now. Don’t worry,” says NINJA as he points out the Mitchell’s Plain sign. “It’s better to come here at night, because it’s dark. A lot of hijackings happen here during the day. If you look in the other cars there’s no whities. But I’m not going to put up my hood because it would ruin my perfect hairstyle. That’s why most people in the Cape Flats have tinted windows so you can’t see who’s in the cars. It’s a safety thing and also a gangsta thing. Yo-Landi failed her driving test because her windows were too black.”

NINJA parks in a quiet close in the Rocklands township and we walk into a one-storey concrete flat – Isaac Mutant’s house. Inside, Isaac and a few members of his band are watching a football match while his small daughter runs around shouting. His wife Kim, her sister, and her mother greet the homecoming heroes. After various neon baseball caps and shirts have been shared out, Isaac kicks a few freestyles with a swagger that puts most American rappers to shame. NINJA laps it up, acting as a hype man. The old friends then talk about starting a group called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to teach teenagers how to rap. As they discuss the gangsta lexicon that powers Afrikaans slang, a ten-strong gang walks past the house and peer through the open door at the scene. They look confused, wondering what a group of white people wielding fluro t-shirts and video cameras are doing in their hood. I ask Isaac what he thinks of NINJA’s gang tattoos.

“They’re dangerous. I don’t know anybody who would have those tats. You need balls to have them. That’s like a sneak preview into this cat’s character. In the Cape Flats it’s seen as an honour to have tats like that. They could save your life but they could also get you killed. The first time my brother saw his tats he didn’t know what to think. You definitely have to have balls to have them. I guess sometimes when you’re young you think you’re immortal.”

NINJA changes the subject by giving Isaac a camera to film him rapping a new acapella about a groupie called Miranda. He has the whole place in stitches. Yo-Landi and the girls meanwhile are giggling in the kitchen about a friend called Garlic who nearly died from swallowing his false teeth. It’s a lekker vibe, with Isaac and family hyped up by tales of Die Antwoord’s recent transatlantic adventures with Jimmy Iovine and David Lynch.

Finishing the beers and pizza, Yo-Landi and NINJA carry out one of Kim’s artworks – a porno mag montage – to the car, say goodbye and take the deserted road back to Zef town. As they drop me off, NINJA gets out and gives me a man hug. “Tell the people from the UK it was real, man. Or if not, say that we’re funky holograms designed by Neill Blomkamp.”

A fortnight later Die Antwoord fly back out to LA to appear at Coachella, and to finalise a major record deal. Even though they only play for 20 minutes, their set draws over 30,000 people and they’re heralded as one of the highlights of the festival, alongside Jay-Z, Thom Yorke, Gorillaz and Faith No More. The next day I get an email from NINJA:

“Fuckin fuck
the crowd looked like fuckin CGI
ive never seen so many people looking at me like 30 000+!!!!
they loved us like crazy!
it was wild out of control nice!”

Say what you will about Die Antwoord, they make an impact wherever they go, whether that’s making people laugh, squirm or dance. But will their polarizing image, potty slang and gangland provocations come back to haunt them as South African race relations threaten to boil over following the death of Eugene Terre’Blanche? Will they become just another quirky footnote in YouTube history? Or will they become the biggest party rap crew the world’s ever seen? Considering what they’ve achieved in the past few weeks, it’s impossible to predict what will come next. Except chaos. You can expect plenty of that.

Text © TIM NOAKES 2010
Photography © ROSS GARRETT 

ZWELETHU MTHETHWA

Sun, 9 May 2010 12:14:06 +0100

After receiving his BFA from Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Fine Art while it was still a white’s-only University, Zwelethu Mthethwa made a conscious decision to shoot South African black rural and township society in vibrant colour. While his contemporaries focused on gritty, often polarising black and white reportage, his Interiors series (1995-2005) broke down boundaries by depicting the disenfranchised victims of apartheid in their colourful homes, a dignified approach that humanised his sitters and brought the true nature of their living conditions to a global audience.

“It’s unfair to say that apartheid is gone. If you go to some areas where they don’t have real houses or real jobs, nothing has changed for them. I’d say that the major problem that faces us as South Africans is that we were never given space to talk about apartheid. And I think that because of that we are going to have to live with it for a very long time. There are a lot of people who don’t know about apartheid and how it affected other people. We haven’t been given the chance to talk and debate it. As an artist it’s my responsibility to bring it into focus.
I started photography in the 90s and at the time South Africa was only documented in black and white. I would knock on people’s doors and ask if they wanted their photographs taken in their homes. And they would say, ‘Why? Our house doesn’t look nice.’ But I wanted to know why they thought that – their house looked good! I explained that I was trying to record a new history and then people would let me take the photographs. I would then go back and give them the photographs so they could see that as a document and also see themselves as a part of history. I was trying to confirm that they are real people. I was trying to bring humanity to them by saying that they’ve got a choice.
In this photograph the red light comes from the plastic that’s on the roof. There’s no concrete roof, and it’s probably made of plastic because she ran out of corrugated iron. On the walls there’s corrugated cardboard that she’s put up to make it look much better. There’s no wardrobe space, so she uses the walls as a wardrobe. Her home is in better condition because there is electricity – but it’s illegal electricity that she has stolen from the main street lights. Everybody does it. It’s actually becoming very difficult for the government to imprison all those people, because they have a right to have electricity.
In houses without electricity they use paraffin and candles. If one house catches fire then so will the next and then the next and so on. In the time frame of an hour they will all be alight. That happens all the time. In the summer without fail hundreds and hundreds of houses catch fire and burn down.
People here deserve better homes and better jobs. I wanted to show what people on the periphery are going through, that’s why I took these photographs. Most of the time we don’t know what’s going on. To take what they’re going through and put it in the public domain and make something that people can engage with, that’s my agenda.”

© TIM NOAKES 2010

GONJASUFI & THE GASLAMP KILLER

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 22:26:34 +0000

For someone widely known as THE MOTHERFUCKING GASLAMP KILLER, Willie Bensussen sure makes a mellow cup of ginger and honey tea. Standing in his Mount Washington hillside kitchen looking out at the toxic yellow cloud drowning LA’s skyscrapers, “the neurotic Scorpio Jew” barks jokes and opinions at a speed and intensity that would fry Larry David’s marrow. On his fridge door hangs a picture of a caveman. “He looks like me and my friends, so we keep him up there,” quips the DJ from under a mound of hair that hasn’t been cut in three years. “He keeps us grounded.” Next to the Neanderthal, a white board bearing the names Tittney Spheres, Harrison Fart, Sigourney Beaver, Hillary Skank, Molly Ringworm and Clit Eastwood shines in the mid-afternoon sunlight. Willie reads the list out, grins manically at the louche frat boy humour, stirs his tea and bounds up to his bedroom.   Upstairs on the balcony, Sumach, the brooding dreadlocked psyche sorcerer also known as Gonjasufi, takes in the view. He’s just flown in from Vegas for a reunion with his old sparring partner and to drop off the test pressing of A Sufi And A Killer, an album that has been in the pipeline for over four years. The pair recorded it by swapping samples and sounds over email and haven’t physically seen each other in a year. With Willie becoming one of the world’s most in-demand club DJs and Sumach holding down a yoga studio and supporting his wife and three kids out in Nevada, there hasn’t been much time to hang out. Circumstances and maturing world views may have forced them to grow apart, but like many hometown friends, after a few minutes in each other’s company the pair are trading banter like it’s a daily occurrence.   “Bro, you should be growing some dope up here,” Sumach announces in his Wyld Stallyons surf-slacker tone. “This spot is tiiiight, son!”   Taking the comment as a hint, Willie produces a double pack of choc-chip hash cookies with a label on the front that states “Strictly For   Medical Use Only”. Every member of the close-knit Low End Theory/ Brainfeeder beat scene (including Flying Lotus, Ras G, Samiyam and Daddy Kev) gets weed on demand – legally. It’s all the rage in La La Land, with everyone from Dave Sitek to Snoop getting high on their doctor’s supply. Stoners just walk into a surgery, say they can’t sleep, shake a little, and walk out 20 minutes later with a licence to get as much sticky icky icky as they want. There are even a few skunk vending machines dotted around the city.   “Yo, I don’t know why but I could eat all of this and it wouldn’t affect me,” Willie says, putting on a pair of sunglasses over his prescription specs. “I get them from the craziest clinics on earth and they don’t affect me. For some reason, eating doesn’t work. Smoking does. But I’ve been abstaining. I haven’t had a smoke or a drink in a week and a half.”   “I haven’t smoked in three months. Almost,” Sumach counters, flexing his biceps and shouting ‘Woooo’ at the sky like it’s the second coming of Ric Flair. Willie puts the cookies down. “Good for you dude. Lotus made it so hard for me. I got back from Asia and said ‘I’m not smoking’, and he said, ‘I’m proud of you,’ and then smoked up this big blunt in front of me. I was like, ‘Aarrrgh shit…’ Oh wow, Sumach look at that cloud. That’s a fucking amazing cloud right there. Clooouuuuuuds…’” Sumach smiles at his wiry friend’s subtle reference to one of their tracks, “Klowds”, a psychedelic song about alienation, mind-control and religion. In it the Sin City prophet quotes chunks from the Bible while an old Indian string sample flutters delicately in the background. It’s the type of song David Koresh would have got a kick out of.

The duo then raid the wardrobe to find some clothes for the Dazed photo shoot. Willie pulls out a poncho and a wicker fan, Sumach gets a kimono and a possum hat.   After fellow producer Samiyam turns up, they all saunter up the street to a clearing that overlooks the entire city. Also admiring the view is John, a lanky white dread whom Willie knows. He’s spending this sunny Tuesday afternoon getting high and blasting Boy Better Know and some digi-dancehall out of the boot of his SUV. John has just got out of prison. He also happens to have a huge machete on him, and a pair of bolt cutters. Sumach takes an instant liking to the jungle blade. With his furry hat, tribal smock, thick locks, black bushy beard, and massive jagged knife, he looks like he’s just stepped off the set of a Roger Corman remake of GenghisKhan.   “If that wasn’t my son’s I’d give that to you right now, man,” John says as Sumach massacres the breeze.   “How old is your son, John?” Willie asks. “Nine, bro. He’s amazing. I just let him fire off some shots on my .38 special the other day.”   “Gee, what a lucky kid… Yo, Sumach, take it out of the scabbard…” “The scab-what?” “The sheath!” “My hat?” “No, the cover for the machete dude. You’re a rapper, aren’t you supposed to know words and stuff ?”   “Yeah, okay, bro.” A few minutes later Sumach gets his own back by lifting his 27-year old beatmaker into the air like a sacrificial bearded baby. John and Samiyam laugh in the background as bass booms out across the hillside.   What makes the odd couple’s tomfoolery so interesting to watch is that their Bill & Ted bromance is so removed from the darkness that resonates throughout A Sufi And A Killer. Unleashed this month on Warp Records, the album is one of the most original and brilliant, often disturbing pieces of music to appear on the label since Aphex Twin’s Come To Daddy EP. Sumach may know how to rap from years spent battling back in San Diego, but his debut sounds nothing like a hip hop album. It’s more like a hallucinogenic desert showdown between Turkish psyche-pop legend Selda, Devendra Banhart, Madlib, Bad Brains, and Walter Carlos.   And apart from the sheer diversity of samples contained within its 19 tracks, A Sufi And A Killer bears little resemblance to the bass heavy, glitchy “LA beat scene” with which Willie is so synonymous. In truth, it bears little resemblance to anything, apart from a paranoid acid meltdown or a stretch in solitary confinement with El Topo on loop in the corner. New York blog Electrodrone recently tweeted that it’s like “being skull fucked by rabid visions of a manic depressive in the Mojave Desert”, while Warp’s biographer held their hands up and stated “nothing written here will sufficiently communicate the extraordinary depth and strangeness of Gonjasufi’s music”. In other words, it’s a trip. But if you can handle it, you’ll discover that, along with producers Flying Lotus and Mainframe, they’ve created a modern, shadowy classic.   After returning the machete and bidding John adieu, Willie and Sumach discuss the impending global apocalypse of 2012 over a fat veggie burrito. Sumach plans on stockpiling water when he gets back to Las Vegas. Willie just says, “I’m ready” and leaves it at that. They then walk back to the hillside lookout, grab a seat in the backyard and talk jointly on record, for the first time, about their troubled minds, mysterious alter egos, and how A Sufi And A Killer came cackling into this world. 
Sumach, what was your first impression of Willie?  Sumach (GONJASUFI): We met in about 2000 and I didn’t like him at first. I was real aggressive during that time in my life, I was like ‘don’t even come over here with that shit. I don’t even wanna know bro.’ I didn’t really like too many people at the time but I knew he was talented. He then helped me get a record into a store and I felt the love. Then in 2002 he played me some of his stuff and I really liked it. Both of us had the same type of ear.

Willie (THE GASLAMP KILLER): We were moving around so we were moving around, so it was all done via email. He just told me to do anything that I thought sounded like he would be good on it. I started hearing my record collection in a new way. Instead of trying to loop up the records with the big drums and the big beats, I started thinking, ‘Oh man I could use the mellow, beautiful, voltaic, ambient, Indian, traditional music and he would sound great over it’. He opened up my view of sampling. So I started sampling everything, countless records. There’s still many things that I’ve sent him that he either has or hasn’t sang on or rapped over that I haven’t even heard.

The album is full of paranoia and heart break, where was your head at while writing it?

Sumach: During that time 9/11 had just hit and I was living in San Diego going through the Gaslamp (area of the city) and I was dealing with a lot of Marines who were just calling me Bin Laden every single day. That shit was pissing me of, you know. I was dealing with a lot of ignorance and having to use self control. I remember walking down the street and they go ‘Bin Laden’ and I’d turn around ready to take all 15 of those cats on. But I couldn’t, so I’d end up having to deal with a lot of that bad energy. That was the hardest part man, but I’m so grateful for that, because without that, I wouldn’t have all this.

That damaged aspect of your personality comes through your voice, which is fragile but also quite scary.

Willie: He’s like a Wizard, he can make his voice sound like whatever he wants at that moment. It’s a vocal style of a Wizard, the vocal style of a Sorcerer. Some sort of fricken’ half bird, half man. He can mimic the calls of any bird. He can just sound like many people, he always has this Gonjasufi grin; even if it’s soft and serene it’s still damaged. There’s still a lot of emotion in his voice, he doesn’t tried to sound, he’s just very emotional.

How does he kind of compare to other people you’ve worked with?

Willie: There really is no comparison. It’s totally different. Sumach has his own aura and energy. His beats are demented and he doesn’t sound like anyone. It’s like Thom York has his own thing, nobody can sound like Thom York. You can tell it’s not a classically trained voice and that he’s probably damaging his vocal cords, but that’s just part of the magic. It’s pain and it’s real and it’s not and it doesn’t come from anywhere. He never wrote down any lyrics for that record. I don’t think he’s ever written down any lyrics. He just takes his feelings and translates it into words and it becomes songs, it’s crazy, it makes no sense.

Sumach: That’s it. That’s what I grew up around. And for years I was quiet and didn’t say anything because I was scared of shit. On my first raps, I wrote a lot, when I heard Jay-Z what he was talking about, I stopped writing my raps down and started putting them in my head more. If you hear my singing, then you hear the raps then you could say ‘Well how can he be singing then be rapping about this?’ It’s a balance; the singing is more of a worship, a prayer. With rap it’s like ‘nah, sorry bro.’

Willie: No forgiveness.

Sumach: That’s it.

Willie: No remorse.

Sumach: Buried in the ground and it’s you or me. And it’s not me, bro.

Did it take a long time to kind of to be open with yourself to actually become this singer?

Sumach: Yeah, it did. It took yoga for me. Some of those songs on that album I sound soft as soft, bro. Even when I was mixing it down I was like I don’t know if I want to put this out bro, but then I realised that this is my hardest stuff. Cause most people won’t get into that soft spot.

So, how do Gaslamp Killer and Gonjasufi differ to Willie and Sumach?

Willie: They differ by stage presence; sometimes we’re as crazy as we are on stage, as we are in person but we don’t have to be. I’ll speak for myself, I’m just a normal person, I just wanna be relaxed and mellow and happy. I try to enjoy my life but on stage it’s much more of a release of aggression of the pain and the passion and the frustration. And it’s just the persona is, much more alive on stage. It’s being poked and prodded by the audience and when I’m just relaxed with my friends I’m not being poked or prodded. I’m just having fun and just having fun and relaxing,

Sumach: It’s complicated man. Gonjasufi is, I would say, the higher self role. Sumach is who I am and who I’ve got to deal with it.

Some of the songs are over 4 years old. Do you still like them?

Willie: After we made them, we never really listened to them again really. I stopped listening to the songs a long time ago, until he sent me the mixes and the first draft of the master. It got me super excited because it brought me back to those times and got me very, very hyped for all this to be happening. All of my friends that have been asking my to hear it, forgot. They kept asking me but I just kept saying ‘no’. I never gave it to anyone. It was just between him and I and nobody knew about it, nobody heard it, everybody just kind of swept it up with the rug and now it’s about to flip, flip the rug over and show it’s teeth. It’s exciting.

Sumach: The music can speak for itself, I don’t want people to be kind to me; it’s not about me. I want people to be lead back to themselves if they haven’t found themselves yet.

It seems you have quite a tempestuous relationship, does that help the music and the artistry to come out?

Sumach: We deal with emotions differently. When I’m up, he’s down and when I’m down, he’s up. We both counter balance each other,. I’m just honoured and fortunate to have him still by my side because I’ve put him through a lot. I’m not an easy cat to deal with, I’m very aggressive; but when I’m around him I’m very passive. He teaches me to chill, because he’s aggressive too as everybody knows.

Willie: There’s never been a better time for this, as we both needed to work through whatever we’re doing on our own and together. Now were both in a good place, balanced, a more balanced zone.

It’s quite a psychedelic record isn’t it?

Sumach: Yeah, we were on it man. I would tell him, I don’t care, just send it.

Willie: I definitely do but this other worldly, channelling thing he does is other worldly. He’s a savage and I think the psychedelic aspect, California definitely has a lot to do with, who we are musically. I think it’s much broader than that. Lord knows I like some good old California psychedelic music.

Did drugs have a lot to do with it?

Sumach: From the past, yeah. But during the recording of it I was sober, I hadn’t a smoke, I hadn’t had any magic mushrooms. If you can’t do it without the drugs then your not a musician, man. But stoners will like it, yeah. And anybody who isn’t a stoner.

Willie: I think it’s too crazy to listen to on drugs, I don’t think it’s safe for someone who’s in a vulnerable position. What he’s saying brings too much personal colour to your mind. It’s scary, sometimes even if you don’t know some of the stories behind the music. I know some of the stories about it and I wouldn’t want to hear them on psychedelics. We’ve both had our experiences like many people in California and we’re all stimulated by each other and the culture and drugs are a part of that. Southern Californian vibes for sure, go to the beach, go the ocean. Feel connected with mother earth, in ways you can only find either at serious meditation or psychedelics. I’ve never hit that serious mediation, but I definitely know what it’s like to take a hand full of Acid and I know what it’s like to take a hand full of shrooms.

Sumach: I’ve never done Acid. I’ve never done a handful of shrooms but I’ve hit a meditative state which felt like some psychedelic state.

How do you think your different environments have affected you musically?

Willie: This guy put batteries in his recorder and recorded some of these songs in the middle of the desert, in his Jeep. Then he recorded in the middle of the desert on to tape.

Sumach: It was like the desert crying out for the Ocean. That’s what all that was; all I wanted was to get back into the Ocean man. Every time I would come to California I would get gallons of Ocean water and drive it back to Vegas and pour it on the ground and just wonder when was the last time salt water from the Ocean pacific, touched this ground.

Do you think this album surprise and confuse a lot of people?

Sumach: It should. It better.

Willie: I’m not worried about whether it surprises people or not, but I think there is going to be a lot of haters coming at me. The whole point of the record was that there were no rules. Sumach has a story to tell and he has a message of how he wishes the world would be, how he wishes everyone to think and what he wants. It’s a beautiful thing, you know. We are not that concerned about what that does for people. I just think it needs to be heard and his message needs to be spread.

© TIM NOAKES 2010

FLYING LOTUS

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 22:12:53 +0000

Four years ago Flying Lotus was an intern at Stones Throw Records, taking out the trash and recording his debut album 1983 at his grandmother’s house in the middle of the night. These days, life is a little different. After re-routing the direction of modern electronica with his 2008 magnum opus Los Angeles, the Californian beat champion is now widely regarded as one of the world’s most innovative producers. Mary Anne Hobbs recently went as far as to liken him to the second coming of Jimi Hendrix, while Thom Yorke felt moved enough to make a cameo on the talented basshead’s killer forthcoming album, Cosmogramma.   His success has enabled FlyLo to create the ultimate bachelor pad in Echo Park. The house is most men’s idea of gadget heaven, and full of enough skunk to keep Snoop comatose for months.   However, even with all the sold-out world tours, critical plaudits and boys’ toys, the 26-year-old seems subdued. Maybe it’s the nerves of following up such a massive album when everyone seems intent on jacking his sound.   “Ha!” he says after inhaling a lungful of Cali’s finest green. “Well, it’s true that a lot of stuff I’m hearing is a lot of bullshit motherfuckers biting, trying to run the sound into the ground. But I’m doing some other shit now. I’m not trying to be cocky, but being a fan of beat music, you can hear it. That’s cool, I did my little thing, fuck it. But now I am doing this thing, so whatever.”   After playing the entirety of Cosmogramma – a genre sprawling 17-track “space opera” – FlyLo reveals the true source of his blues. “For me, this album was cathartic, man. I needed it, if I didn’t have this record, I would have lost my mind. A year ago my mum passed away. It’s weird not to have my parents around any more. I’m now in a situation where I’m put out in front of people, but you always need that person you can go to. When my mum passed away, I thought about a lot of things, and I confronted a lot of things from my past. I explored my ideas of spirituality and what I understand this life to be.”   Part of his self-exploration involved experimenting with DMT. Books on entering the fifth dimension are littered around the house. And, although he’s fascinated with its ability to open up “spiritual realms”, Cosmogramma is not a bloated druggy sob story. If anything it’s his sketchbook of the memorable times he and his family shared, both good and bad. Starting with the heart-pounding Amon Tobinesque “Clock Catcher”, the producer also indulges his love of P-funk (“Do The Astral Plane”), jazzy glitch-hop (“Nose Art”), and, with Yorke, melancholic techno-soul (“And The World Laughs With You”).   “I’ve got so many voices in my head that tell me to do all types of shit – telling me to be scared, to be happy, to be confident – but at the end of the day, I think people just want me to have fun making my shit, and if I forget to do that then you’ll be able to tell. Things in my life have been so chaotic and crazy. I lost everything. But here I am, you know? I feel like I’m growing, and I hope the music says so too. I just want to try and turn all this into the craziest dream that I can.”  
© TIM NOAKES 2010

PLAN B

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 21:13:10 +0000

Three and a half years since his incendiary debut Who Needs Actions When You’ve Got Words brought the brutal complexities of London street life to the fore, Ben Drew is back with The Defamation Of Strickland Banks, a second installment of grittiness from the Plan B school of hard knocks. But this time around he’s left the knife-wielding ASBO kids behind and produced a hard-hitting conceptual soul LP.   “The Defamation… revolves around a famous singer who is wrongly convicted of a crime he didn’t commit, and how life in the judicial system changes him,” explains its 26-year-old creator. “This is a story about injustice and how statistics can shape politics to the point that someone needs to be made an example of – and what better way to do that than with a popular celebrity. Obviously, it’s a drastic change for me, but you can’t slag off the power of Motown songs. I thought if I did a concept album about a fictional character it would be the best way for me to be creative with a sound that I love, and also stay authentic to who I am.”   Drawing inspiration from Smokey Robinson, Amy Winehouse, and Pilooski’s remix of Frankie Valli’s “Beggin”, The Defamation of Strickland Banks confirms what his debut LP hinted at – that Drew is one of Britain’s most talented young soul singers. With help from producer Paul Epworth, he recently repeated the Top 10 success of “End Credits”, his collaboration with drum’n’bass duo Chase & Status, with “Stay Too Long”, the first single off the album. And, while his rap verses are still as frenzied as ever, Drew is worried that some fans won’t get his new soulful direction.   “There’s a lot less of me rapping on this album. I can only do what my heart’s telling me to do and people are going to hear that. There may be some Plan B purists who will say, ‘Oh, he’s changed too much,’ but if they actually sit down and listen to songs like ‘Hard Times’ and ‘Stay Too Long’, they can’t fucking deny it. This is a side of me that’s been there since I was 15; it’s just that I am letting the public see it for the first time. I’m not jumping on a pop bandwagon, I sang like this before I could rap. But one thing I do know is that motherfuckers will have their jaws on the floor when they hear that this album is by Plan B!”   It appears that the Forest Gate kid who shocked the public back in 2006 with the line “I’ll stab you in the eye, yo / With a fucking biro / The same fucking biro you just used to sign your giro / You fucking wino” has learnt a new way to channel his fury.   “I’ve realised what my issues are. I’ve had anger management for a year because I kept on getting arrested. Some people still think I’m an angry little estate kid who wants to get people’s attention by saying really nasty horrible things, but I’m not that and I want people to know that I’m not that. I don’t want to be like Guy Ritchie who makes the same thing twice. I’m a director but I’m choosing to do my films through music – a film for the blind. Just close your eyes and listen to the story.”   Amped up by his recent film roles in Harry Brown and Adulthood, Drew intends on making the Strickland Banks story into a movie. But until sufficient funding comes along, he’s concentrating on creating a fully immersive live experience. He must be serious – he’s ditched his beloved hoodie in favour of a three-piece suit.   “Strickland Banks is obsessed with the 60s and dresses like he’s a Motown star. If I came on stage wearing a hood it would confuse people, so I am going to get suited and booted. Every motherfucker in my band is going to be wearing trilbies. This is a film, man. It’s all entertainment. It’s allowing me to have some fun. Don’t get me wrong, I’m going to rap for as long as I can rap. I’m going to rap until someone goes, ‘Oi! Mate, give it a rest, you look like a cunt, stop it.’ But singing soul just feels the right thing to do now. This is who I am.”
 The Defamation of Strickland Banks is out in March.

© TIM NOAKES 2010

CASS BIRD

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 18:08:59 +0000

Few American artists this decade have split critical opinion or created as much controversy as the triumvirate of Dan Colen, Ryan McGinley and the late Dash Snow, who died in July. Gaining inspiration by submerging themselves in the darkest corners of New York’s party scene, Snow’s semen-covered photo montages, Colen’s faux-realist paintings and McGinley’s washed-out images have come to define the slacker edge of the late noughties art scene. Here, photographer Cass Bird talks about her intimate early morning shoot with the hell-raising trio.  “I shot this picture at the end of 2006. It seems like a long time ago now. The only person I was familiar with prior to this shoot was Dash. I had met him over at Deitch Projects when I was installing a show and he asked if we could trade prints, which was really sweet. We just hung out in front of the gallery, smoked cigarettes and chatted. A few months after that, I got assigned to do a story on him, Ryan and Dan for New York magazine.   It’s funny, because the very first time that Ryan took me over to Dash’s house, he wouldn’t let me in! I guess he had forgotten meeting me. So I literally opened the door and peeked in. He recognised me, gave me a hug and was really sweet after that. People talk about how damaged he was, but he didn’t come across like that to me, he came off as really delicate and sincere. That’s how I felt about him.   The morning I photographed this picture, Ryan stole Dash’s keys so we could get in after they had all gone out. They weren’t going to leave it to Dash to open up the door at four in the morning. I don’t remember how I got in, but it was really early, like six am. I had to set up in virtual darkness with my assistant, trying to be super quiet. I literally got a ladder, climbed on top of Dash’s wardrobe and wedged myself against his wall in a foot and a half of space. I had my Kino, a hot light and a little tiny flash, because there was no light in his actual place – he had blacked out all the windows. All natural light was shunned. It was pretty funny.   I think Dash was completely sleeping in this shot and Dan and Ryan were pretty close to being out. I would ask them to turn over and there would be no response. They were in and out of consciousness.   It is really cute seeing them like this, they are so comfortable with one another. Later on, I woke them up and they all sat in bed facing the camera smoking cigarettes, which is the image that got published. But this image was from the beginning of the first roll.   Dash’s home was full of his work, from wall to wall. He was completely surrounded by his projects. It was the same with Ryan and Dan – they lived to work. I only spent about an hour with them that morning, but I spent four days with them in the end. It was kind of tense at times, but all in all they were really cooperative.   I didn’t hear or see Dash again after this. I was so sad when he died – it was so horrifying and tragic. Dash has his fans and he has his critics, but I think that’s just par for the course for any artist that puts themselves out there. Creating work and calling it art, you invite a lot of opinions. But, to me, he was a very sincere, gracious sweetheart. Unfortunately, he isn’t around to see what a major impact his work is having. I think what he did in his life was pretty extraordinary.” cassbird.com  
© TIM NOAKES 2009

HOLLY MIRANDA

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:05:33 +0000

Holly Miranda’s songs of heartbreak and alienation will stop you dead in your tracks. I hit the road with her to find out how she escaped a strict religious upbringing to become one of America’s most exciting indie singers   As the steel canyons of Manhattan fade from the rear view mirror of her Fanta-coloured rent-a-car, indie rock chanteuse Holly Miranda coyly nibbles at a small slice of gruyere cheese and a clump of raw caulifl ower. “Timmy,” she says, peeking over the black rims of her glasses, “does gruyere turn you on?” Her guitarist Timmy Mislock inhales deeply as she wafts the wedge around. “Ooh yeah,” he laughs. “That’s sooo hot.” Kate Bush’s “Cloudbusting” reverberates off the stack of amps crowding the back seat. “I thought so,” Holly sniggers as they turn on to the freeway. “Now let’s get the fuck outta Dodge!” It’s 10am on Sunday morning and the two old friends are en route to Chicago for the first date of a whistle-stop tour that will take them from north-east America to Canada, and then across Europe in support of The Antlers and The XX. Their set-up is the epitome of DIY simplicity – no drums, no bass, no synth, no roadies, no tour manager; just two guitars, two amps, Holly, Timmy and an enchanting collection of songs that make up her forthcoming album, The Magician’s Private Library. The stripped-down approach is partly due to financial constraints – the album doesn’t come out until January 2010, and Holly’s decided to be prudent by saving the record label’s money for a bigger tour nearer its release. It’s also because her close friend, fellow Brooklyn troubadour Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson, has taken the rest of her band on the road.   “I’ve known Miles forever,” Holly says as the car plunges into a flooded underpass on the outskirts of New Jersey. “It’s basically our band, just without us. Which is fine as long as Miles remembers that it’s my band and not his! We’ve been talking about going on tour together and sharing them, so maybe we can work that out. It’s not a problem. Well, not yet…”   Until then, it’s just her and Timmy. They’re used to that set-up, sharing an apartment in Wiliamsburg and performing with each other for the last few years. They are so close that people around their neighbourhood think that Timmy is Holly’s little brother. She often introduces him as such. Tellingly, he’s volunteered for the fi rst stint behind the wheel for the long drive to Chicago. It’s the equivalent of driving from London to Glasgow and back again.  
“I like driving,” says her 24-year-old BFF. “You get used to it. It’s not like sitting in your room listening to music, which can get fucking depressing. Driving gives me time to reflect and to listen to music. Plus, I’m actually driving to Chicago to play a show. I’ve spent years playing guitar unnoticed in the corner of parties, but now people are actually paying to hear Holly and me play.”   “I like to have someone with me,” Holly echoes, turning down the Dirty Projectors. “I can’t really deal with driving for more than three or four hours on my own. It gets lonely, especially being away from Lola.”   Holly clicks off the GPS map on her Blackberry and gazes at the home screen as the car zooms through the verdant green mountains of Bald Eagle State Forest. Smiling out from behind the glass is her girlfriend Lola, a stunning young model with cropped bleach blonde hair.   “The first song I sang to her was Barry Manilow’s ‘Copacabana’,” she recalls with a giggle, before breaking out into the first verse. “I already miss her. We just went to a Greek orthodox wedding and danced so much that I tore both my calf muscles. But that wasn’t the worst thing – Lola’s sister told a whole room of people how much she hated me. She was wasted, so it didn’t make much sense. But it hurt. I had missed my grandad’s funeral to go to the wedding and all day I kept on getting updates from my mum telling me things like what colour his casket was. It was really hard for me to deal with, especially on top of being screamed at for no reason. It was quite a wedding to remember.”   The car rattles past DuBois as Karen Dalton emotes fragilely from the stereo. A few miles to the south lies Punxsutawney, the town immortalised in Groundhog Day. It seems fitting for the pair to be so close to a place that will forever be associated with inescapable repetition. After all, for the next four weeks they will both be stuck in the same cycle – driving, unpacking their gear, playing a show, repacking their gear, partying, sleeping in a motel and driving to the next venue. Bill Murray would surely empathise.   Tomorrow’s gig in Chi-Town also happens to fall on Holly’s 27th birthday, the infamous rock’n’roll age that Kurt, Jimi and Janis failed to live beyond. If she’s anxious about reaching such an ominous musical milestone, she’s not letting it show, preferring instead to spend the next few hours flicking through The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky and writing filthy Madlibs about Rosie O’Donell’s vagina, dwarves and toffee. Yet, on record, her easy-going manner and sense of humour are replaced with darker introspection, and recurring themes of heartbreak and alienation.   “I worry that my songs are too sad,” she says. “But I don’t want to bring people down. I just want to share and uplift. It’s hard sometimes when people come to see a loud band and I come out with a quiet set. Even though it could be loud, it wouldn’t be portraying the songs in right way. Thinking about how people are going to react is intense. But I just have to do what I do. It’s terrifying putting yourself out there sometimes, but also unbelievably exciting.”   Six hours later they enter Ohio, home of the Wright Brothers, Devo, and Ernest Angley’s Cathedral Buffet. However, Holly isn’t in the mood for stopping for some Jesus burritos at the preacher’s food hall.   “My childhood was spent driving to Florida going to these huge televangelist churches that hold 10,000 people,” she explains. “I’m all Jesus’d out. When I was a kid I went back and forth about my belief. I was constantly trying to accept the Holy Spirit but never feeling it in the way I was supposed to. I thought there was something wrong with me. It was a mind fuck; kids shouldn’t have to think about heaven and hell. We literally had prayer meetings on Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night, Friday night and some home meetings in between them. When I was 14 I told my parents that I didn’t believe in their God and they told me they were failures as parents. I came out to them a year later. It was the same kind of reaction. When I was 16 I expressed an interest in moving to New York. I was really excited and went downstairs to tell my mum and all she said was, ‘I think this soup needs more salt.’ So I packed my stuff and left.”   Holly hasn’t looked back since. In 2001 she made High Above The City, a DIY album that she sold at solo acoustic shows. Even back then her voice, a bluesy fusion of Cat Power and Marissa Nadler, hinted at something very special. Over the intervening eight years her voice fell “three octaves”, and she edged away from the twee side of folk, thanks to a long stint as vocalist/guitarist in NYC hipster rock group The Jealous Girlfriends. And, while she has matured as a songwriter, The Magician’s Private Library essentially shines a spotlight into the same dark recesses of her soul as it did on High Above The City. New songs like “Joints” vocalise her internal battle with fibromyalgia, a muscular condition that makes it painful to sit still or carry heavy objects, while the outstanding “Slow Burn Treason” with Kyp Malone addresses the pain of a doomed love affair.   “I think with a lot of the songs I’m just talking to myself,” she says. “It’s my way of getting it all out. I have a hard time talking sometimes. Singing is much easier. ‘Slow Burn Treason’ is about letting something burn out that you know is going to burn out eventually, or just ending it and being alone. When I wrote that I was in some shitty relationship, but it was more about how humans have a tendency to stick with something bad because it’s too scary to be alone.”   Dave Sitek from TV On The Radio felt such a kinship with Holly’s voice and subject matter that he offered to produce the whole record, with help from Katrina Ford of Celebration. His claustrophobic beats and ethereal textures give The Magician’s Private Library an undeniably cinematic feel.   “At one point, Dave said to me, ‘I’m putting my finger prints all over this record’, and I said, ‘I know, I love it.’ That’s why you hire a producer. I knew what I was doing by making a record with Dave. I can’t worry about what other people are going to think. I think it’s hard being a female, especially in the indie rock fi eld. People expect a very certain thing from me. Some people think it’s just my voice and Dave’s music, which is totally preposterous, but it’s going to happen. Me worrying about it isn’t going to change anything.”   As dusk descends, Holly looks out of her window at the scenery rushing past. Tractors spray golden yellow corn fields with insecticide, Tootsie Roll trucks cruise into rest areas, and picture-perfect red barns soak up the last of the autumn sun. “We just passed a road called Fang Boner,” she chortles. “You couldn’t make that up. I didn’t know Ohio had many horny vampires?”   “I’m tempted to go into the corn fields and shuck my husk,” Timmy retorts as he pulls off the I-80 freeway. Chicago is still 200 miles away, but they’re both tired and eager to celebrate Holly’s last night as a 26-year-old. Unfortunately, Ohioan supermarkets don’t serve liquor on Sundays, so they end up in a bar called, imaginatively, The Bar, in a strange little village called Montpelier. Its main claim to fame is a 15-foot waterslide.   “Do you think we should pull the guitars in here and play a show?” Holly asks Timmy. They look around The Bar. A woman stumbles out of the toilet and wipes her hands on the next woman going in. She then slurs something and starts nodding along to “Chop Suey” by System Of A Down. On the wall behind her a sign proclaims Hard Times Call For Hard Liquor. The out-of-towners decide to stay inconspicuous by ordering a meat pizza and a few cans of Bud. They leave the mullets to shout obscenities at the Dallas Cowboys. After discussing the merits of Tool, Holly lifts up the round plastic pizza divider. “I used to use this as a table in my old My Little Pony doll’s house,” she grins tipsily. “I would make GI Joe and Barbie porn. Boy, they were some romps. Didn’t you?” Timmy shakes his head and buys a six-pack, to go.   Two hours later and the pair have set up their amps in a Holiday Inn room and are belting out loud covers of Pink Floyd and Etta James. It’s 12.30am and this is their fi rst tour rehearsal. “I can’t believe no one has actually complained about us yet!” Holly exclaims. Timmy takes her to the bathroom and teaches her how to shotgun a beer can by spearing it with the car keys. She gurgles it back and goes out for a smoke in the cornfields. After calling Lola, they crawl into a double bed and pass out.   Holly’s 27th year begins with breakfast at the Coffee Basket, a quaint little diner that greets you with a souvenir guide to 9/11. Inside there’s a group of eight women with the same middle-age haircut looking at Holly and Timmy strangely. Maybe it’s because they’re both dressed in black, rapping about panties and Holly’s necking back painkillers. “You are not missing out on this,” she winces, pointing to her stomach. “It’s like there’s a grumpy janitor in my uterus poking at me with a spork. I hate playing shows with my period, although it usually makes the performance more emotive! And then I go off stage and collapse.” After breakfast and a quick hit of weed in the car park, they get back on the road.   Joan Jett and Beastie Boys soundtrack their mid-afternoon entrance to Chicago as Holly attempts to explain a dream she had last night about holding hands with Emily Haines from Metric. In the distance the monolithic Sears Tower looks like a huge taser gun threatening to electrify the ominous grey clouds.   Later, at the Subterranean club, eager students chat excitedly while waiting for Holly and The Antlers to emerge. Even some of Lola’s family have travelled to see her play. Backstage, she has a couple of whiskeys to dampen her first night nerves and tells the headliners that her biggest fear of performing is being sick on stage. Luckily, when she steps into the spotlight that doesn’t happen. Instead, the crowd stand transfixed as Holly serves up her heart on a plate for half an hour. Timmy’s frenzied guitar stabs push her musical fervour into the red, with the stripped down electro-acoustic versions of “Slow Burn Treason”, “Forest Green Oh Forest Green” and “Waves” wrenching every emotion out of her tiny body. It’s a stirring performance.   Afterwards, Holly goes outside for a sneaky spliff while Timmy packs up their gear. Tomorrow they drive to Detroit, where her parents are coming to watch the show. Slightly drunk she breaks into “The Tracks of My Tears” by Smokey Robinson. Knowing that she’s going back home to perform in a city that holds so many confusing memories, it’s hard to ignore the poignancy of Smokey’s lyrics as they reverberate down the quiet back alley, but Holly just laughs as she reaches the song’s crescendo. She throws the roach away and walks towards the car.   “My Dad always said to me, ‘Opinions are like arseholes, everyone has one – and they usually stink’,” she says. “It’s true. I’m my harshest critic. But I’m trying to learn to go easy on myself. If I can truly express myself, and give an ounce of that to somebody then it has all been worth it. That’s evolution, baby.”   The Magician’s Private Library is out in January 2010 on XL Recordings. hollymiranda.com

DANIEL GORDON

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:01:40 +0000

Brooklyn–based artist Daniel Gordon refuses to let a small thing like gravity ground his playful flights of fantasy. “I wanted to see if there was a way I could use the medium of photography to do something that’s impossible,” says the 29-year-old. Inspired by Edward Muybridge’s motion study of human flight, in 2001 Gordon began to turn his body into a lean, mean flying machine.   After months of yoga, Pilates and step aerobics, he climbed into a snug pair of white tights and flung himself off a hill in Northern California. One hundred and twenty fifths of a second later he crashed back to terra firma in a crumpled heap. As maiden flights go, there have been more impressive. But, crucially, a friend captured his outstretched airborne body at its apex, and the Flying Pictures series was born.   Gordon’s fusion of landscape photography and performance art awakens nascent superhero fantasies that have long been crushed by the constraints of reality. And he does it all without the help of Photoshop. “When I started making these pictures, Photoshop was really blossoming in the photo community,” he recalls. “I was interested in pursuing a project that would showcase traditional methods of manipulation within straight photography. I can fly, just not very well.”   Although his work has been exhibited in MoMa and won acclaim from Stephen Shore and Gregory Crewdson, some critics feel that it is too comedic. “Bah, hambug!” he laughs. “A lot of artists whose work I find really funny is often dark. People like Olaf Breuning, William Wegman, and Fischli & Weiss. There are many examples of artists who might not be overtly comedic, but have a sharp wit that comes out as humorous.”   So, what deep psychological human emotions does he hope to uncover with his athletic leaps of faith? “I want them to feel excitement, wonder, hope, and doom. I want people to pause for thought.”
 Prepare For Take-Of: A flying lesson with Daniel Gordon
1) Don’t
2) Bother
3) It
4) Is
5) Painful

© TIM NOAKES 2009 

Flying Pictures is published by Powerhouse powerhousebooks.com

GOLD PANDA

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 12:09:25 +0100

His off-kilter remixes for Telepathe, Little Boots and Bloc Party have got hipsters pulling strange shapes on sweaty dancefloors around the world, but trying to pin down Gold Panda’s metamorphic electronica to one scene is a futile task. One minute it’s 160bpm K-hole techno, the next it’s glitchy sitar-powered hip hop.   “I want everything to have one sound, but it’s all over the place,” the Essex-raised producer smirks while sipping a beer in an Old Street pub. “It’s because I have too many ideas and too many influences. A lot of my music tends to be quite happy, which is really weird because I do it to counter my anxiety and depression. At the same time, I don’t want to just make banging dark tunes. Although that’s probably due to a severe lack of drugs. Maybe I should do some…”   When he’s not watching Pokemon or planning Chelmsford donk festivals, Panda can be found toiling away into the twilight hours in his east London bedroom with his trusty old Atari and hacked Gameboy. He’s used to the night shift – his last job was working behind the counter in a Soho porn shop.   “As soon as the remixes came along I gave up working in the sex shop,” Panda recalls, his eyes glazing over at the memory. “You don’t see a lot of daylight, you just see a lot of freaks. And a lot of crackheads and Chinese men. They all congregate around the big plasma screen with their hands in their pockets. There was a lot of pocket billiards going on. I had to deal with crackheads stealing fake pussies and stuff. I obviously wanted to go on to bigger and better things.”   With an album in the works for 2010 and two killer EPs doing the rounds (Gold Panda and Back Home), it looks like the days of filth are well and truly over for this mischievous young producer.   “I was lined up to work on Jacko’s new album but Pharrell Williams got in there first,” he says with another troublesome grin. “I turned down the tribute show too. I was DJing at a warehouse party instead.” 
© TIM NOAKES 2009

MAPEI

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 08:39:29 +0100

More at home performing for trannies in dank NYC electro clubs than popping Cristal corks at Diddy’s house, Mapei merges together Neneh Cherry’s bolshy fashion sense, Lauryn Hill’s social commentary, and Lil’ Kim’s rawness into a fierce style that is about to tear the rap world a new asshole.   “I haven’t had a lot of long-term boyfriends because I scare them,” Mapei says in a throaty drawl a few days after breaking up with her other half. “My mum worked all her life wiping people’s butts. I don’t want anyone to be in charge of me. That’s the way it’s been my whole life. I’m a strong personality, I want to be free.”   This month the self-proclaimed “product of Wu Tang and American Idol” releases her DJ Mehdi-produced debut EP, Cocoa Butter Diaries. Featuring four tracks that span the divide between booty bass, French electro and East Coast hip hop, Mapei’s rap manifesto draws together experiences from her tumultuous childhood and uncomfortable, yet morbidly entertaining, observations about crackhead children and date rape.   “Comedy meets tragedy is the story of my life, so that’s what I do with my songs,” says the striking 25-year-old. “My mum couldn’t take care of me as a kid so I grew up in a home. I moved from Rhode Island to Stockholm and lived in all these different places. Now I’ve become totally schizophrenic and just don’t care any more. I have let it all go. But along the way I’ve learned how to make a bad situation into something that can be both honest and funny.”   Like Marshall Mathers at his best, Mapei’s rap confessionals sail dangerously close to the wind, but her willingness to publicly exorcise her demons and satirise society’s ills has already won her fans in Spank Rock, Ghostface, Diplo and Justice, who are in the middle of producing her debut album.   “I’m just trying to bring together different worlds and combine them into one… plus I like fucking with people,” she laughs. “In my video for ‘Video Vixens’ I have a beautiful white chick shaking her butt and a tranny rapping in the bath. I want homophobic hip hop heads to watch it and be like, ‘She’s really beautiful, but that’s disgusting… should we be watching this?!”

© TIM NOAKES 2009

GRACE CODDINGTON

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 09:40:27 +0100

“My childhood was very remote, I lived in my parents’ hotel way off the edge of Wales. I had one older sister, but she took off and got married very young, so I was somewhat on my own. I couldn’t chat to anyone because there was no one there.   People would come over in the summer, but summer only lasted about three weeks, so I had to make my own entertainment. I retreated into a dream world. That was fun, just sitting on the rocks, watching the ocean and imagining new things. I dreamed about adventures, love, growing up and having a family, doing things that I thought were unattainable, but that would maybe one day happen to me. I wasn’t really daydreaming about fashion, although I could make a pretty dress. I used to make my own clothes from Vogue patterns because that was the only way to get anything that looked remotely like the Paris fashions in Anglesey – although it was quite difficult to get material! But fashion was just one of many things I wanted to do. I wanted to be a singer, but unfortunately I’m tone-deaf. I also wanted to do theatrical design. I saw myself doing lots of things; fashion was really only one small thing that, in the end, just happened. But I’m very grateful.   All birds jump out of the nest eventually and I ended up in London. Someone said to me, ‘Why don’t you model?’ so I did a modelling course, but it didn’t get me very far. They didn’t think I was very good, because I wasn’t blonde and classic, which was the requirement at that time. Then, while I was working in a coffee bar, someone came in and said I should enter a Vogue model competition and they asked for some pictures. I had some pictures of me in a leotard and they sent them off. I ended up winning the Vogue model competition of 1959(1). It was pretty fun, but I can’t say that I got work every day. I carried on in the coffee bar and slowly started getting more work. Then I started meeting all these cool young people like Vidal Sassoon(2), David Bailey(3) and Norman Parkinson(4) and it grew from there. I hung around the King’s Road, which was the place to hang out then. I would walk around barefoot in the street like the Chelsea girls you see in the black and white movies. I was one of them, with a beehive.   I wasn’t a big model but I had good hair. If you ask the general public, ‘Who’s Twiggy?’ I think anyone could tell you who Twiggy(5) is, but if you ask them who Grace Coddington is they wouldn’t have a clue. I wasn’t worldwide big; I was just in London during the 1960s, which was a fun time to be a model, particularly in England, when all these new designers were emerging at the same time as The Beatles and The Stones. It was a cool time to be around that group of people. I enjoyed my life so much, and I brought that into the pictures when I joined British Vogue(6) because I wanted to help show everyone what fun it was.   I joined Vogue after I had a bad car crash. It’s hard for a girl to be smashed in the face, but if that is your career then it’s very difficult to deal with. I covered up my scars with make-up. Somehow I managed – I had very supportive friends. I got on with life. The people at Vogue offered me a job and I kept putting it off, but then one year, I finally said yes.

It was a big shock to be on the other side. A lot more goes into being a fashion editor than just turning up with a load of clothes. When I actually had to put something together, I realised it wasn’t so easy. Then it became intriguing and fun, and I worked with a broad range of people. Every shoot is different. I still love that.   Beatrix(7) basically taught me everything about working with photographers – that was a big learning curve for me. You’re very lucky if you get someone who allows you to experiment as a young editor. It can’t happen so much these days because there is so much money involved. Today, every minute costs money, but back then people worked for free. It’s very difficult for young stylists to break into the big time of styling – it’s very cliquey. Fortunately, I have stayed on the right side.   When Beatrix retired, I briefly left Vogue and moved to Calvin Klein. I moved to NYC for various reasons, I had a boyfriend who lived there and so on. It’s always attributed to the fact that I hated Anna(8) but that wasn’t true. While I adored Calvin, I missed working on a magazine. When I heard that Anna had moved to American Vogue(9) I called her up to see if she had an opening for me and she said, “Yeah, I start on Monday, why don’t you start with me?” so I said, “Okay!” It was amazing and exciting to be at the rebirth of a magazine. I was happy to be part of the whole new regime.   Anna’s reputation is intimidating, but I have known her for a very long time, so I’m not intimidated. In the movie(10) you see me shouting, but she respects me, and I really respect her. She does what she thinks is right for the magazine. I say I don’t thrive off the tension between us, but I probably do. If you have to fight to get something through, it’s probably stronger than if it just goes through anyway, and if it doesn’t survive, it probably means it wasn’t meant to be. It’s very hard to stay detached. I’m not detached at all. I will fight for as   long as I can. I don’t lose every time, and the great thing about Anna is she will sometimes reconsider. She may come back with the same answer of, ‘No, it’s no good,’ but at least she will reconsider and that’s one of the reasons why I respect her. She allowed me to go in my own direction and has always encouraged me.   Some people criticise the perfect images the fashion industry creates, but I think you have to look beyond the picture. I’m still not comfortable with the amount of Photoshop that gets used – it goes against the grain. I guess you have to move with the times, but what you see and what you get are two different things now. Photoshop is a lie, they carve away a waist or a breast, and I think it’s sad – you miss the happy accident. It’s a shame that everything has to be so perfect, just because it can be. Maybe it’s because I’m not a blonde beauty that I like people who are a little bit different, I don’t mind if they have a scar or are a little bit fat. People don’t come in the same mould and I find that interesting.   I think I’ve survived for so long in this industry because I genuinely love what I do. When people call me the most influential stylist in the world, I think it’s bullshit. I’m not. I have a good time and am really privileged to do all the things I do – I wouldn’t still be doing it if I thought any differently. I’m way past retiring anyway. I’m a Vogue girl, and once you’re a Vogue girl, you’re always a Vogue girl.” Interview © Tim Noakes 2009

BOILERPLATE

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 08:49:06 +0100

Achivist Paul Guinan Explains how Victorian Robot Boilerplate Helped to Win the First World War

“Boilerplate was invented by Professor Archibald Campion in 1893. Some of Campion’s family members had been killed in combat, so he built this mechanical soldier in an attempt to save other people’s lives.   Lots of people thought that it was a hoax because there was no television, so most of the general public never had a chance to see Boilerplate in person – they just read accounts of his adventures in the newspapers. There was an initial celebrity to Boilerplate at the time but people regarded it as a kind of sideshow thing. Campion took him around the world to demonstrate his practicality and how it could be applied, but people didn’t take it seriously, and in many cases they thought there was a fellow inside who was operating him.   However, Campion convinced President Roosevelt to try out Boilerplate on the field and he joined the Spanish-American war. He subsequently showed up in a few international conflicts but didn’t join the frontline until WWI, where he participated in infantry charges.   Initially, the soldiers regarded him as a mascot character who broke up the monotony of trench life and amused the troops. He was almost regarded as a kind of second-class citizen, amusing, practical, but ultimately unnecessary. But once they saw that he was capable of fighting with them in battle, they began to respect him. He could be described as the first Terminator – nothing could penetrate him. Bullets would bounce off him and he would continue to come at you.   The irony is that despite his little burst of popularity, today people have forgotten about him. For a lot of people, the other great technologies that were happening at the time were more impressive – creating a machine that can sail a man through the air is certainly more dramatic than creating an anthropomorphic creature that can fire a gun. It was one of the first technologies to replace a human, and that caused a lot of anxieties. After the war they dismissed him completely.   The claim that Campion created a hoax could very well be true. However, certain photographs like this one from the Battle of the Marne show Boilerplate in independent action, you don’t see a wire or a log attached to somebody else. And if there were some kind of midget inside his torso operating him, that man deserves a raise! The attitude photographs don’t lie is becoming less and less valid, but there are enough photographs of Boilerplate to show that some kind of construct was built. As far as his abilities go, that’s a different subject. History may never resolve it. It may be one of those great enigmas that will be kept a mystery.”   © Tim Noakes 2009  Boilerplate: History’s Mechanical Marvel by Paul Guinan and Anina Bennett is published by Abrams in October

DEVO

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 15:07:07 +0100

As art rock antagonists DEVO hit the studio to record their first album in nearly 20 years, Tim Noakes talks to co-founders Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale about their impact on pop culture

It seems like growing old gracefully is out of the question for art punk antagonists Devo. Since 1973, Mark Mothersbaugh, Gerald Casale, and their brothers Bob 1 and Bob 2, have preached the gospel of de-evolution to disaffected spuds across the planet, arguing that mankind isn’t progressing – it’s regressing. Looking at the sad state of the modern world, it’s easy to see why they’ve been pissed off for over three decades. The idiots are still winning.
Angered by the massacre of four fellow students at an anti-Vietnam protest at Ohio’s Kent University in 1970, Devo set out to satirise American popular culture and politics in a way that had never been done before. Dressed in industrial yellow radiation suits and red flower pot hats (which they christened “energy domes”), the band blended together punk riffs and robotic synth pop with warped art concepts and anarchic lyrics that ripped apart the sheep mentality of the masses.
In their bible belt hometown of Akron, audiences attacked them and promoters paid them not to play. Unbowed, Devo left Ohio and rapidly became the toast of America’s New Wave underground thanks to genre defining songs like “Jocko Homo”, “Gut Feeling” and “Mongoloid”. Turning their exaggerated vision of modern life into warped music videos, in 1980 they broke de-evolution into the mainstream with their single “Whip It!” selling over a million copies.
Even though the likes of David Bowie and Neil Young regarded them as geniuses, as the 80s drew to a close Devo found themselves being written off as an unfunny art school in-joke. Releasing their last album in 1990, Gerald concentrated on directing adverts and music videos, whilst Mark took the two Bobs and formed production house Mutato Muzika, writing TV and film scores for Pee Wee Herman, The Rug Rats, and, most notably, Wes Anderson.
However, as a new generation of outsiders and bedroom musicians feel the economic fallout of America’s obsession with materialism, Devo have once again found themselves as role models to a young global audience who are sympathetic to the ways of de-evolution. Returning to the studio on the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s The Origin of the Species to record the first Devo album of the new millennium, Tim Noakes digs deep into Akron folkore with co-founders Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale, and talks to this generation’s hottest new bands about Devo’s trailblazing music and style.
Devo have always antagonized corporate society, why?

Jerry Casale: Devo came about at a time when really no one was doing music that was also a spring board to a worldview, a manifesto, a visual aesthetic, and our own political ideas. We created a certain kind of cracked mythology on purpose that was an alternative to a straight worldview.
Mark Mothersbaugh: There's a pamphlet from the 30's called Jocko Homo (below), that was a prayer card from when I first met Jerry. One of the first things he did, was to make a prayer card with himself wearing this leather mask as a Patron Saint.
J.C: It's kind of like when you get a text book as a teenager, and they have these ludicrous picture of some idealistic propaganda and you have to correct them-if your an artist, start putting captions on them, and you know fixing the faces, it's the same idea. We citied our references and the visuals and the quack pamphlets like Jocko Homo, things that inspired us, the pieces that came together for this holistic cracked view of the world that actually turned out to be more true than we wanted it to be.

Did the band start off as an art project which turned into a band in order to subvert a bigger audience?

J.C: Yeah, that’s kind of true. Devo was an art movement first and then we thought, ‘How do we really show Devo to people, how can they hear Devo in reality?’
M.M: People had such a violent reaction to our music when we first started playing that we knew we were doing something right.
J.C: We really enjoyed pissing these people off because they were horrible people.
M.M: Well, yeah we were pretty angry at them.
Some people see you as a pop band but I’ve always regarded you as intelligent punks
J.C: It was very punk but not nihilistic punk, it was like smart punk. It wasn't anti-intellectual, its wasn't nihilistic, it was more informative than that. We were trying to brainwash people in a good way, wash their brains, you know like reprogram them to make them think differently. That was the atmosphere we were growing up in, there was that horrible arena rock that had become totally stale with people that were just completely egotistical and narcissistic, with meaningless topics, really tight spandex pants with socks stuffed in their cocks, platform shoes and big hair going 'look at me, look at me, look at me' and we just hated it all.

THE OATH OF DE-EVOLUTION

1) Be like your ancestors or be different. It doesn't matter.
2) Lay a million eggs or give birth to one.
3) Wear gaudy colors or avoid display. It's all the same.
4) The fittest shall survive yet the unfit may live.
5) We Must Repeat.How much of your anger was due to growing up in Akron, Ohio?

J.C: A lot of it.
M.M: Yeah, it left a heavy imprint.
J.C: The same thing that made it horrible to be there is probably what let Devo not get killed in its infancy. Even if there were guys living in New York City that wanted to do something like us, the press and the frenzy would have descended on them the first year that they were in the basement eaten it up, labeled it, dispensed with it, and they would have gone on to do nothing or something else. But nobody gave a shit about us except us. We would spend three years in basements and garages and build it up to were it really could survive on its own.

Did that get depressing trying to get your vision out there?

M.M: Yeah there was a certain amount of depression, but on the other hand when we finally did leave Ohio and went to New York and California we felt invincible. We went to these clubs where there were bands who were kind of wishy washy who had just started 2/3 months ago and we already had a vocabulary and a solid knowledge of what we were doing and why we were doing it. And I think it really struck people, I think we looked really different, we seemed really different and people picked up that it wasn't just a weekend prank or something that there was something substantial there.
J.C: Yeah it was intense. Being depressed in Akron fuelled the songs but once we sped them up there weren't depressing. We were reacting to the hideous culture around us.

Did religion play a big part in Devo’s music?

M.M: There were a number of things going on in that part of the country at that time including the fact that we had the two biggest televangelists in the world both broadcasting from Akron – Rex Humbard (left) and Ernest Angley (below). One of them invented instant replay of the miracles he would perform every week. He would talk to his dead wife by a telephone – she had a mausoleum out in the front yard with a phone line going into it. They had a direct line that was always open, he could run to his office, and have a conversation with her. He was pure theatre dressed in a three-piece polyester suit and fake-sprayed hair do.
J.C: He was really slick. We were more inspired by Angley in terms of performance and theatre.
M.M: So, there was that going on in Akron, we were interested in all things de-evolution because we had decided that was what we had seen going on around us and so once we locked on to de-evolution we found all these pieces of source material. Even things like Jehovah witnesses who were anti-evolution supplied us with lots of anti evolutionary stuff.
J.C: You know how it is once you’re interested in something you start finding it everywhere, and then it starts manifesting itself. We were never trying to be trendy, we were just trying to give it some kind of classical universal truth for young people to pick up on.

Why do you think your popularity has really exploded with young audiences the last few years?

J.C: Because de-evolution is real and kids know it because they live in that world. Imagine if somebody had shown you a crystal ball when you were a child of 2009 and said ‘here's the way its going to be’, would you have believed it?
M.M: In an abstract way, the energy that let Obama get voted in is kind of anti-stupidic, it’s kind of pro-devo in a way. People are saying it really is fucked up, lets see if we can try and do something to fix it. It is a time to be scared. I mean, we're never gonna be good looking and stupid, that’s our problem if we were we'd probably make a lot more money, so we’ve got to stay with what we got.

Why do young people still care about Devo?

J.C: Kids just wanna see old guys that can still act really intensely scary. I remember going to see Bluesmen when I was in college and see Howlin Wolf and John Lee Hooker and they were already like 50 and it was scary but great and you couldn't take your eyes off them cos they were so good at what they did.
M.M: Yeah, its like if nothing else, we see it as a lifetime being dedicated to an idea, which in our case is pro-information and anti-stupidity.

MARK MOTHERSBAUGH ON CIRCUIT BENDING SYNTHS

“We didn't call it circuit bending at the time, we were just creatively sabotaging company made music machines. We were just uninterested in what people were doing with electronic music, we were playing with broken things and breaking things. Jim Mothersbaugh, who was our first drummer, became so interested in electronics that he just went and did that and decided not to be our drummer anymore. Although he made sure that things that we had that we broken stayed broken just the right way.
I still use one keyboard from 71' in 'Smart Patrol' and 'Mr. DNA'. It's kind of like taking your Grandpa on tour with you. I don't think people were thinking about them lasting this long back when they were making them in the early 70's.”You played a big show last year for Obama back in Akron. How did you feel at that point in time, in terms of what you had achieved and what he was trying to achieve?

J.C: Well a lot more people liked us in Akron that night than ever liked us before. We were not exactly their favourite sons.
M.M: Yeah we didn't exactly leave town with any kind of fans there, nobody missed us. It interesting to go back there, because the actual location of the show was just a few miles away from where we wrote a good chunk of the songs that we played that night.
J.C: We were a mile away from where the first two songs were written. It made us glad that we were there on purpose and we were gonna leave again, that we weren't stuck there.
M.M: When we first played live in Akron we actually had people jump on stage and get in fights with us and pay us to leave. They would threaten us if we didn't stop playing. We were attacked on many occasions, in fact one of the most famous attacks came from Cheetah Chrome from The Dead Boys. He attacked us when we played The Crypt. He took Jocko Homo personally. He thought we were calling him a monkey. It was a science experiment. We had electrodes that we could put out there, and by the time we got to Jocko Homo that was kind of it for us.
J.C: It was definitely the litmus test. It was not so much a song as a manifesto and a rant that either you got off on it or you got pissed off, it was cut and dry polarizing.
M.M: We were obviously looking to get a rise out of people.
J.C: When they paid us to quit at this little bar, we took the money and went and had dinner. We had just the best night laughing, we were so proud of ourselves that we got paid to quit and had a nice dinner for our troubles.

Why has it taken this long to put out new material, is it because you’re not those angry young men anymore?

M.M: Life takes you on different paths, there was a point where it was really difficult to stay together, keep playing as a band, we had a drummer that said 'When I was a boy I was Devo now I'm a man I'm babushka, I'll see you later.' And then he went off and kept being babushka. You know, we had record companies that didn't understand what we were doing all along and then when they weren't hearing the new “Whip It” that they were looking for, they weren't interested

Did you get dissatisfied with the whole process of making music and art?

M.M: When cassettes came out I asked the president of Warner Bros, ‘If you say it’s cheaper to make a cassette than it is to make an album, why do you charge us more for the cost of making a cassette back to the band than making an album?’ And he just kind of smiled and said 'cos that’s the way it is.' The business was so corrupt and foul that it was really difficult to wanna keep making product and going up against it every time.
J.C: It was like very business except more crude and transparent, it had more of a Mafia feel to it. But it was fronted with a grin.
M.M: And also, just look at the last couple of decades – stupidity has been winning, and winning big.
DEVO ON MUSIC VIDEOS

JC: We made ourselves the butt of the joke just as much as the joke on anybody else. I mean look at “Whip It” (above), who's cool in that video? We're in shorts playing in a barnyard in hay bales, we look ridiculous, and we’ve got turtle necks up to out noses. You can't say that we didn't put ourselves in the middle of that.
MM: Jerry directed our videos, we went out and hunted for the props and I wrote down the storyboards for our films. To us it would not have seemed conceivable for us to hire some commercial agency to come up with a concept and what to do to make a flashy Devo video. That was all our art, we did it ourselves, and if we lacked anything it was an echo-structure of management, record companies, of people that work in these different areas, like agents that could have helped us and respected what we were doing instead of just thinking we were some oddity.
JC: We did 'Beautiful World' for $25,000 including all the payments for the archival pieces for licensing those to put them on there and people still love it today, even though it’s all DIY done with no budget.

Didn’t being signed to a major label fly in the face of your message?

M.M: What excited us was figuring out how to transmit the message, we wanted to get to a big public, we weren't trying to be obscure. We didn't feel like what made Devo great was that nobody understood or that nobody got to hear it. We talked about being Ohio's version of The Residents but we thought what we were doing was bigger and stronger than that, so we decided to give it the acid test, which is to put it out there in the public and see how far we could take it.
J.C: It’s easy to be artsy and obscure and tedious, and its easy to be gutless and poppy, but it’s very hard to have a valid aesthetic and be popular. We saw Bowie do it up through Diamond Dogs as well as Roxy Music and Kraftwerk. We respected those people because they had a great fine line between art and pop commerce. But you have to give a pound of flesh to Caesar, because if you can't find a stylistic mode that connects with people then you’re not in that game anymore.
M.M: We were trying to figure out what part of the Devo message people could embrace, because we knew it was there. We did as good as we could do. Our problem was we didn't have an infrastructure, it was all Devo. Jerry directed our videos, we went out and hunted for the props and I wrote down the storyboards for our films.

What do you think your legacy is?

J.C: I think we introduced a worldview, an aesthetic that had a kernel of validity in it, luckily. I don't know how other people will distill it down to some trivial sound bite but they will. Yeah, there's something beyond the funny outfits.
M.M: I mean, for us it was ironic that we could hold a press conference with 30 reporters sitting there in blue jeans asking us why we were sitting there wearing uniforms.
J.C: At least we thought about ours, we didn't just blindly go and do what you saw everybody else doing. But come on, its all for a bit of fun, we could dress like anchormen and come out on some cable news program, which would be really cool...

Do you ever feel self conscious getting dressed up in your yellow suits and energy domes?

J.C: No, you're going to work. And the plastic yellow suits were made for people spraying chemicals in warehouses and laboratories simply to protect them, and we feel when we go on stage that’s what we’re doing. When we first played England the punks would spit all over us, we'd have to play through a mesh screen between us and the audience, like we were in a cage, we just thought it was so fucking ominous and weird, and sure enough like freaky animals they would start thrusting at us and screaming at us and spitting on us as hard as they could, and we were so glad we had those suits on.
M.M: In our own little Akron, Ohio scrawny way it was kind of like our superman outfit too, we became superheroes.
J.C: Super nerds

Would you classify yourselves as nerds, as the kings of the nerds?

J.C: Yeah we were nerds.
M.M: But I don't think we were the popular nerds, we were just the nerds that were irritating. We were the smart-ass nerds.

Back to the question about your new stuff, do you still have that anger that you had back then? You don't seem that angry to me and on stage you seem more energetic than angry.

M.M: Well, we’re smarter now too, the one thing that being older brings you is definite knowledge, its like a lot of things we believed in have been proved but how that pays off is kind of ironic too, there's something to the aging process.
J.C: People are on our side now, because we’re not ahead, we’re not threatening them, we’re not far out, we’re with them.
M.M: If at one time, even our own record company thought of us as some sort of a carcinogen because they didn't understand what we were. Now they realise that we were trying to infect the whole planet with the idea of being anti-stupidity.

© TIM NOAKES 2009

TRUE DEVO-TION

PLUGS GET TURNED ON BY DEVO
“Along with about seven other bands DEVO have totally influenced my approach to songwriting. I stood next to Mark Mothersbaugh in the mens loos in japan one time, and I got stage fright to the worst degree. I told him I thought the soundtrack he did for the Life Aquatic was amazing and we struck up a conversation. I was so startled by this i didn't realize i'd done up my fly and walked out into the lobby with him. When we shook hands and said our goodbyes i had to go back into the loo and take the waz i was bustin' for.”

LISSY TRULLIE LOVES MONGOLOIDS
“My favourite Devo song is ‘Mongoloid’. Why? BECAUSE NO ONE KNEW. I love their herky jerky guitar, popcorn synths and go-go beats. Devo taught me to take what I do seriously, but not myself.”  MY TIGER MY TIMING DIG DEVO’S WEIRD VIBES “I think they flung the door open for huge amounts of art-school freaks. We Are Devo can be seen as a rallying cry not only for the band and their fans but ANYONE with the guts to do something even slightly off centre. Obviously there's a fine line between good-weird and bad-weird but anyone following Devo's blueprint of voracious individuality and good tunes can't go far wrong.”
DATAROCK ON DE-EVOLUTION “The way Devo passed on the idea that one can actually express alternative ideas using just the same means and methods as you arch enemy, the ways and strategies of the streamlined, mainstream can be adopted and played on by just abut anyone, regardless of what one wishes to present, and that the nature of pop culture is so much exterior that if you can package your product effectively you can probably sell just about any content to the consumer.”

DEVO MAKE THE BLACK KEYS BUY STUFF “Because of Devo I have spent thousands of dollars on synthesizers. They introduced me to the Moog and songs with Burger King references. On a musical level they helped bridge the gap between punk, pop, and electronic music. Unfortunately they are written off in some circles as one hit wonders, but honestly, even without “Whip It” they still defined early MTV culture. I think they demonstrated that you don't need to have a fucked up home and safety pins in your nose to play ‘punk’”  THE RUMBLE STRIPS BELIEVE IN DEVO’S MYTHOLOGY “The first DEVO record I owned was Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are DEVO! It was an amazing picture disk and had an image of the band looking a bit like crazed bank-robbers, pulling stockings or condoms over their faces. I liked that they had band members called Bob 1 and Bob 2. I'd also never come across a band that had a whole mythology attached - they were completely serious about being aliens and I was pretty convinced myself.” Henry Rumbles

THECOCKNBULLKID SEES DEVO IN 3-D
“I'm really fascinated with american culture, especially of the 80s and
90s. They're like a 3-D surreal parody of it. Their plastic Reagan wigs are cool. I love how they mix cartoon imagery with satire – their artwork and performance is always visual and brilliantly done. You hear bands today trying to write about modern society and consumerism and are almost always clumsy. Devo were sharp and darkly funny.”

DEVO NEVER LET METRONOMY DOWN
“Their use of costumes is so inspired. Quite often when you like a band they will at some point let you down, musically or otherwise. I can honestly say that DEVO have never done anything that has made me cringe, that is probably the most stylish thing I can think of. Their desire to make performances real performances. The way they embraced new technologies, their humour, their videos, their artwork. I see them as a group who have completely acheived the idea of presenting a complete 'package'. Everything from their music to their merchandise is perfect and ties in with everthing else.
 WHIP IT? YES PLEASE, SAY DOES IT OFFEND YOU, YEAH?  “On our last tour we used to do a cover version of Whip It as an encore, it used to get our older fans jumping up and down, and the younger fans would just think it was one of our tunes, so we had to start mentioning it was by DEVO whenever we played it.”
HOT CHIP ARE BOOJI BOYS FOR LIFE
Joe Godard: Alexis and I have side project called 'Booji Boy High'. We aspire to some of the strangeness that Devo so effortlessly achieved, in synthesizer sounds, rhythms, attitude, imagery. We fail generally.
Alexis Taylor: I have never tried to write any music like them, or base my appearance on them (although people might not believe that! - more about Cavafy myself) but I have been influenced by them in so much as I have wanted to make our live shows as exciting as theirs looked at the start of their career - with them lined up at the front of the stage, spilling over the edge almost, and barking out their deranged songs. I guess I want us to be as good as them, but not like them! They encourage you to BE STIFF. That's fair enough. They taught us that we are all Devo. But not everyone was listening.
Joe: They were freakish, warped, comic, colourful, and intensely cynical of capitalism's supposed fairness. They clearly felt like outsiders in the area in which they grew up, and as youngsters we could identify with that. You knew you would probably like the people that danced when Devo came on. I suppose their imagination is what is most exciting about them. The way they mixed classic American cultural references with unsettling images and their own outlandish style is copied constantly, but nobody has bettered it. It is ironic that they were disgusted by the final stages of capitalism but at the same time their 'brand' was incredibly strong.
Alexis: I like it when they had fake slicked back hair the most – and looked like figurines. I also like their fondness for yellow and Mark's choice of frames. I love their mixture of absurdity, wit and utter seriousness and aggression.”
 SANTIGOLD HAS ALWAYS BEEN INSPIRED BY DEVO
“I was a really young kid when I first saw Devo in the ‘Whip It’ video. They just looked so fun and amazing with those red hats, like they were cartoon characters. The video was really funny and random and their music is also so kid friendly and fun. It just drew me in. The melodies are very poppy and easy to sing along to, but the lyrics are always smart, funny, and a bit sarcastic. I try to do that with my songs, to create poppy melodies but with the lyrics taking you somewhere thoughtful and unexpected. Everything Devo created was quality art, from the music and videos, to the album covers. They are an inspiration to true artists.”

VIVIENNE WESTWOOD

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 15:00:13 +0100

“I read an interview with James Lovelock and he said that by the end of the next century there would be only one billion people left on earth due to climate change, natural disasters and mass-migration. There are six and a half billion people at the moment. So, I read his book The Revenge of Gaia and ever since I’ve been really traumatised, trying to think of what one person can do to help us change. I hope this interview with James Lovelock communicates to people the urgency of the situation. The human race has never faced anything like this before.   If young people don’t listen to him, they’re either stupid or just don’t care. Some people think that the next generation can deal with it, that it won’t happen to them. That won’t work. People need to inform themselves. If necessary, join a pressure group. Sign up to Prince Charles’s website about the rain forest. We’re all in it together. Politicians and businessmen will listen in the end.   I hijack my shows and my status as a fashion designer to talk about all the things that I think are really important, the importance of culture and human rights. What I actually do to be more environmentally friendly is to say to people, ‘Buy less clothes.’ But that’s actually quite self-serving because I also say, ‘Choose well!’ and I think you can’t choose better than Westwood! But don’t spend a lot of money, it’s better to buy nothing than to keep on buying rubbish. Everybody these days looks so depressed, such clones. The human race has never looked more terrible!   You get out what you put in. I’ve got people who come up to me as fans, all these little rich girls that run around town, but I don’t see them coming to my manifesto readings, even after I’ve told them about it. I don’t think they care.   My current position is that I intend to promote every idea of Lovelock’s that I can. I’ve decided to trust him. When he talks, it’s so consistent and he seems to talk such sense. I don’t mind what he made of me after this interview, it’s not important, but I’d like to talk to him again. I think he is the most important person on the planet, regarding where we are at right now. And even though he calls himself an optimist, he’s not optimistic in the short term.   The one real factor that’s not in this equation of automatic disaster is the ability of human beings to respond to a crisis. But, like Lovelock says, we always leave it to other people. We are these tribal carnivores who just follow our leaders and let them solve it, but we’ve all got to do something about it. Now.”

Interview © Tim Noakes

DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 12:57:53 +0100

Ever since the 16th century, “the dark night of the soul” has come to symbolise the depths of man’s loneliness and desolation. It’s a state of mind you want to avoid – ask Mark Linkous. While touring with Radiohead back in 1996, the frontman of Sparklehorse ingested a near-lethal cocktail of hard drugs and booze before blacking out in his hotel room, alone, slumped on top of his own legs. When he was pulled up over 14 hours later, his heart briefly stopped as a result of the built up potassium. He was lucky to ever walk again.   A decade and two acclaimed albums later, Linkous found himself in a musical rut, searching for inspiration. Oblivious to its content, he picked up The Grey Album by Danger Mouse, thinking it “was probably some band from North Carolina”. Hearing Jay-Z ripping up Beatles beats not only gave him a fresh perspective on music, but also led him to an unlikely collaborator – its creator, who had long been a fan of the Virginian songwriter’s surreal fables.   For the next three years, the pair would trade songs and instrumentals while Danger Mouse collected Grammys and number ones with Gnarls Barkley and Gorillaz. The project slowly became a concept album, with the likes of Iggy Pop, Julian Casablancas, Gruff Rhys, Vic Chesnutt and Wayne Coyne writing lyrics about twisted dreams, revenge and war, with no prior knowledge of anyone else’s stories.   Unable to ignore the Lynchian themes that coursed through each set of lyrics, Danger Mouse wrote to the cult director to see if he’d like to make a video for the album. The Twin Peaks legend wrote back saying that he’d actually prefer to shoot a series of photographs to illustrate each song – and also sing on a few tracks.   This month, the world gets to witness the results, with a gallery show in Los Angeles and a limited-edition run of Lynch’s pictures. In the book will be a blank CD – due to a dispute with EMI, Danger Mouse can’t release the album for fear of being sued, so, like The Grey Album, fans will have to rely on word of mouth to hear it. With so much mystery surrounding the project, Dazed stepped into the shadows with its creators to find out what inspired their cast of paranoid housewives, sinister schoolgirls, and hallucinating dinner party guests.

SPARKLEHORSE

In a traditional sense the Dark Night of the Soul is a metaphor for loneliness and desolation. Have you experienced that since becoming a performer?

I don't produce much material because I do have problems with the darkness in my head that can debilitate me, that's why I'm much more productive around other people. Everybody has their little devils, and maybe we all felt it was a chance to bring out some of the darker aspects of our lives and express them.

How did the lyrics come about – did you all trade bleak nightmares?

No one was given any direction whatsoever for the songs or the lyrical content. It was never discussed that it would be character or narrative driven, or that it would be about darkness and pain. I don't know why it came out like that (laughs). Recording was very pleasant. All I could think about was music. It just seemed like a happy time in my life. I didn't get into my brain too much because I didn't have time to like I usually do when I make music in solitary situations. If I had done it in my studio or even in the South it would have been a lot different.

Did you ever think David Lynch would get involved?

Brian didn't tell me because he knew how much of a fan I was and that I would have been bugging the shit out of him about it. He just called me one day and said that David Lynch was interested in being involved in the project, and then I freaked out.

What is it about Lynch that inspires you?

His stream of consciousness. There's this theory about music, that the quiet parts are just as important as the musical parts. I really applied that to my music and that came from David Lynch's films; some of the quiet parts would be foreboding but in another context they could be beautiful. Sometimes in his films, like Inland Empire, it's so grainy you can hardly see an image on the screen and then suddenly there's four beautiful girls dancing to “The Locomotion”.

Why do you think he’s drawn to dark projects?

He's not a guy who lives in a surreal world with flashing red lights, velvet curtains and midgets talking backwards all the time. He seems like a pretty active guy who just enjoys life. It was a good thing for all of us. I don't know if we all look to the darkness to stop our heads from exploding or what. I'm just glad I've been involved in this thing while I'm still here on earth.

What were you expecting from the photos?

Sometimes I really have a hard time writing lyrics literally and I was surprised that he was able to photograph and represent some of the songs fairly literally and not so surreally as I do in my songs, and for the songs that were a little more twisted he was able to go wild with. Overall I think he nailed it. He can do no wrong in my book anyway. I don't mind such an obvious minion!

Are you kindred spirits?

I don't think I could be so pretentious to compare myself to him. I don't understand every scene in his movies but I love everything he does, so I guess we're kindred spirits in that way.

Did you work closely together?

Yes. He has this specific vocal sound that he likes and it's very specific. He's got a studio of his own and he did some overdubs with the Laura Palmer synthesizer. When I heard that I was like, 'oh man', so we stripped back some parts to the title track to let the Laura Palmer part breathe. You cannot deny that synthesizer part; it's totally Twin Peaks. It may sound like a geeky thing to do but it sounded beautiful to me.

Is this a homage to Twin Peaks on some level?

No, it was just as far as mixing that sound into the song. When I say Laura Palmer it's just out of respect for an iconic thing that he created that has become part of the world out there. I certainly didn't ever envisage or want to use that as some kind of marketing tool. I just wanted people who were David Lynch fans to say, "oh I didn't even know he could sing" and then hear the third verse with all the other tracks taken out and just his music and that recognisable sound.

Some people think it's going to be called either Sparklemouse of Dangerhorse. Obviously it's not, but which do you prefer?

Dangerhorse. I hated Sparklemouse. Brian liked it but I didn't. I think he was just trying me nice. It sounds like a brightly lit British children's television show.

Would you advise people to listen to this album before they go to sleep or will it give them nightmares?

(laughs) Oh.... I think both really. I guess on the whole it's probably best absorbed late in the evening hours. Not that I wish to give people nightmares, but sometimes they can be good. Sometimes you wake up and you realise it was just a nightmare.

DANGER MOUSE

What came first, the music, the pictures or the lyrics?

The visions came later. There wasn’t a huge discussion about what each singer should write about. It was almost as if we took a story and gave each person a chapter to write, but they don’t know the chapter before or after that. It was very important to choose the right people.

Were you ever worried that the weight of the guest list would overshadow the concept?

No, not really, I’ve never been worried about it. I just wanted the cast to get involved with what we were doing, particularly the music. It was never gonna be some big commercial record.

Gnarls Barkley was your attempt at pop soul music, but this is soul music of a different, darker kind.

Let’s see how people digest it. I definitely have tried not to predict how people are going to think about it, so I am curious in that respect. I’m excited about people looking at it in a different way. I just need to create a lot. I’ve looked at other artists and I think about how much work they did. And I think, well, if I have the chance to do a lot of work I have to find the time. I’m fortunate to be able to create a lot.

Do you feel overwhelmed by darkness, surrounded by the other two, and putting out such a bleak record?

No, I guess I don’t look at the record as being bleak, but I can understand somebody else looking at it that way I guess. There’s a lot of different parts, like a movie in some way, there’s parts that are dark and there’s part that are not.

So this isn’t your melancholic period?

I don’t know, I look back and I personally think that all the music I’ve done has been somewhat dark. Maybe not The Grey Album so much, but most of the other things I see as being more dark. The records I work on with other people seem to have a dark feel to them. I just kinda get that way. I guess the last few years have put me in a more “lost” position, musically, you know, because there’s the slight addition of a little bit more people watching what I’m doing.

Why did you ask Lynch to collaborate?

Once I thought about him being involved visually I really couldn’t think of anybody else that it would work with. I felt like if it didn’t work with him I wouldn’t try it with anybody else. But I figured that if he did it then it would work, I really did.

What is it about his world-view that you vibe off?

I love that his films let you imagine what everything means. There’s a lot of dreamlike aspects to what he’s doing, and some things don’t always have to make total sense, or not so obviously. But you know that as an artist there’s a reason to it all even if that’s just in his head. He brought that to this project.

Do all the pictures work with specific songs as you work your way through the book and listen to the album?

They do. I think they do, that’s the way it was presented, but I don’t know, I’ve never asked David. They could all be tied together in some way as well, I don’t know. I like the idea that I don’t know. I’ve never asked him and I don’t wanna know. They are separated in groups of three to five pictures, depending on the song, but how they all interact with each other I don’t know. David was the only collaborator who was able to hear the whole record, so he definitely had an outlook on the whole thing that the other people involved didn’t, which I liked because he was doing the visuals. I like to think that they are all connected, but I don’t really wanna know. It’s a lot more fun in my head to make up how they’re connected with each other.

Would you advise people to listen to this record before they go to sleep or do you think it would scare them?

Scare them? I don’t think the record’s scary. There’s definitely changes of pace that might wake you up somewhere in the middle, but that would be the only thing I would say. I go to sleep with records on all the time, but I’ve never gone to sleep with this one, because it would probably wake me up somewhere. Once it gets to the Iggy Pop song I’d probably wake up. Some people can sleep through anything. Maybe I’ll try it tonight and see what happens.

DAVID LYNCH

Some people think that you're going to be rapping on the album

(laughs) No, I'm not rapping!

Have you ever tried to rap?

No I never tried it. I've tried talking on music, but it's not rap. I don't know if I could rap! I love the concept of it though. It's such an incredibly modern use of words and music.

You sing on that album though. Do you find that more enjoyable than directing or taking photos?

No, I never sang till recently, I was just totally embarrassed to sing.

Why?

I don't know. I'm sure there are others like me. I started singing, and I don't quite now how it happened, but Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse liked it, so I sang for them. The songs just came out of their music. They give a sense of freedom and that's the part of the concept that I like. They do the music and then they see what happens when they give it to person A, B and C. They share their music. I like that a lot.

How important is music to your creative process?

Every element of the cinema is important. I was always really interested in sound with pictures and of course music as well. I just love this world of music. So many times ideas come from music, ideas for so many things. It's just a magical, deep world. My favourite form of music right now is blues based music. I'm working on my own album inspired from blues. We're talking Chicago electric blues. I appreciate Delta southern blues, but it doesn’t do it for me. When they went electric, like John Lee Hooker, I just thought, 'man, there's some power in that music'.

A lot of bluesmen were real outsiders. Do you feel a kinship with those characters?

Yeah, I think so.

Did you start making films as a way of being accepted?

No, no, no, no. It wasn’t like that at all. I made films because I would get ideas and inspiration came with the ideas. I just translate ideas.

You travel the world talking about transcendental meditation but your work is often obsessed with darkness. Do you see your films and art as a form of therapy?

No. Artists traditionally think that anger and despair and depression or anxieties feed their work, and in a little bit of way that's true because they understand those things. But you can understand those things and not have to suffer from them. That's the key. You can get ideas that are dark, ideas that are light, ideas that hold both things, but the artist doesn't have to suffer to show suffering. Transcendental meditation lets you dive into the big ocean of creativity, of infinite energy, of infinite happiness. This stuff starts swelling up and you start to enjoy your work so much more, ideas flow more freely and the heavyweight of negativity lifting gives you freedom. You have to understand the world and the human condition to get deep into it, but you don't have to suffer those things to show it, you see what I mean?

Okay, but looking at your work you seem to have a real empathy with troubled characters

I love troubled characters, I love the human condition, I love stories that reflect those things, but I don't set out to do those certain things. I suddenly get ideas and then I go 'whoa, cinema can do a fantastic thing with that, or a song, or a painting' and then I go to work.

So the big pre-conception with David Lynch being drawn to the dark thoughts is rubbish?

No, it’s not exactly. Every human being is different, so when I fall in love with certain things, other people fall in love with different things. I like stories that involve absurdity and trouble, and characters that are involved in different things like that but I am so happy doing it I am not suffering doing it.

That's good to hear, I'm glad you're not suffering David!

(laughs) People generally say that I make dark films, but if you look at all of them, some of them are very light, and so each idea is different, it's just a question of which ones you fall in love with, and how want to translate that idea. I like stories that hold a concrete base along with abstractations, just like life. Music is one of the most abstract things, but cinema is a magical language, it holds music, but it can be as abstract as music.

You once said that "ideas are like fishing, you need to have patience, a good hook, and a bait, and if you want to catch a big fish you need to go deeper". Do you think you've caught a big fish with this project?

These are good fish. How deep, well I got the great honour to work with Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse on two songs and to do the photographs, so it was a very pleasurable experience. I'm really glad I got the opportunity to do it.

You usually stick to the same kind of aesthetic, you reference suburban life, what happens behind closed doors

Uh huh, there's some of that for sure, but again it came from the music and I think that Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse may say that it's about anger and revenge, but their music just holds something. When other people hear it something comes to life in their brains. And then the lyrics come and a way to sing them, a feeling but it all starts with the music.

It seems to me that this book further consolidates your view of society, how you like to subvert classic American characters...

Oh no, I'm not trying to, what was the word you used?

Subvert

Subvert. I'm not trying to subvert. A lot of people do that and a lot of people see art as a political thing. These things are ideas that came from the music and I am not trying to do anything other than translate those ideas that came to me. There's no other motive, this is what came out of the music.

Your work has been so widely referenced and plagirised, have you ever felt that your world view was in danger of becoming a cliche?

No. There's always new fresh ideas waiting. They do pass through the machine, and the machine is a certain way, but if ten directors made a film out of the same script there would be ten different films. We will never run out of ideas. I just don't know what the next thing will be in terms of cinema, but right now I'm interested in painting and music.

Do you approach painting and photography in the same way as you would creating a scene for one of your films?

Yeah, exactly. If an idea comes for furniture, you will see a table in your brain. You will see what it's made of and the shape of it, and if that idea is something you love, then you go into the wood shop and start making that table. If you get an idea for a painting and you're all fired up about it then you go right into the painting studio and start working on those. Making a film is just a longer process, but when you're in love you don't care how long it takes to make something.

Would you recommend that people listen to this album before going to sleep or will it give them nightmares?

I don't think it will give them nightmares. I think they can listen to pretty much at any time of day. Or night.

And when do you like to listen to it?

Well, I was listening to it mostly in the day (laughs)

© TIM NOAKES 2009

Dark Night of the Soul is out there, somewhere, now

HARRY BENSON

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 12:11:58 +0100

Harry Benson is one of those rare photographers whose archive leaves you speechless. His camera has captured some of the 20th Century’s most historic events, from Richard Nixon resigning the Presidency, to the chaotic aftermath of Robert Kennedy’s assassination. A recent recipient of a CBE, the gregarious New York-based Scot took time out to look back on a tumultuous night spent with Dr Martin Luther King in America’s deep south.   “This was taken in 1966. It was a very nasty night in Canton, Mississippi at the height of the civil rights protests. The marchers were told that they couldn’t pitch their tents on a black school playground but they did it anyway. As they were doing so, I looked behind me and saw rows of state troopers lined up, putting their teargas masks on. Within seconds the gas began to explode all around us and the troopers came in and started banging heads. As I ran away, a trooper bashed me on the arse. I staggered away and a poor black family took me into their house. They bathed me with water, because it was hot and tear-gas is very unpleasant.   From them I heard that Martin Luther King, who I was with in the crowd, but had become separated from, was going to give a speech in a church hall, which was a couple of hundred yards up the road. When I got to the church, I had never seen people so angry. They were all singing “We Shall Overcome”. What I’ve always noticed with tear-gas is that it clears the street, but my God do people come back angry.   That night, Martin Luther King was really angry. Mississippi was so racist. He would march right into police stations, but there was no kindness from them at all. People were living in these terrible dwellings and that created this huge uprising. They wouldn’t give the marchers any water, and it was dangerous for me too – they weren’t saying, ‘three cheers for the photographer’.   This march was traumatic. You didn’t know from one day to the next what the hell would happen. You would see young kids from all over America – this was where they spent their summer holidays. There was violence on every march, but the Meredith march was the biggest. It was the one that really began to galvanise the country.   Some of the black leaders would say, ‘Don’t go to work!’, but Martin Luther King would jump up and say, ‘Go! You’ve got to live!’ He was more interested in voting. He would say, ‘You’ve got to register to vote.’ This was very difficult because they were all working for white people who were saying, ‘We’ll fire you if you vote.’ So there were tremendous pressures, and that was the main problem with getting black people to vote.   Civil rights is the one thing I’m very pleased to have covered, and I covered it deep. I was marching every day with them, you could watch the cause grow. You could feel this surge – but I was a photojournalist, looking for a story. There would be something wrong with me if I was anything other than cynical. I wasn’t there to join the cause, I was there to photograph what happened.   If Martin Luther King was alive today he would be very proud. We’ve accomplished a lot. Now America has got a black president.”

Interview © Tim Noakes   Above: Martin Luther King Jr, Canton Mississippi, 1966, after being tear-gassed. Courtesy of Harry Benson

WHITE DENIM

Tue, 26 May 2009 23:21:37 +0100

As texan power trio White Denim prepare to release the follow-up to last year’s classic debut, Tim Noakes meets them at their remote trailer studio to find out how the hype machine has affected their music and friendship
 Unless you’re very lucky, being the next big thing one year can often mean that you’re struggling to find a job at McDonalds 12 months later. Last summer White Denim were hailed as one of the most exciting new bands in the world by everyone from Dazed and NME to the tabloid hacks at The Sun and The Mirror. Propelled along by Josh Block’s explosive drumming, Steve Terebecki’s frantic basswork and singer/ guitarist James Petralli’s feedback-drenched yelps, their debut album Workout Holiday captured a rare moment of critical and musical unity. Now, exactly a year later, the Texan power trio are hoping to do the same again with Fits, a record that addresses the paranoia, excitement and futility of trying to live up to such acclaim while also keeping their friendships and musical ambitions on track.   “What should I do? Should I get a brick?” Steve asks with a sardonic grin when a diehard fan muscles between him and his bandmates after their final show at this year’s SXSW festival. “I’m going to let it slide… for now. You know what? I’m kind of happy that was our last show because there’s been 2000 bands playing in my hometown and I’ve missed them all! I’ve just been playing shows and drinking beer.”   Josh breaks free from the fanboy bro-zone, lights a cigarette and takes a large sip from a supersized can of lager. James follows a few minutes later after obliging a video blogger with an impromptu acoustic performance in a dirty Austin alleyway.   “Man, I had a bunch of problems tonight with my kit,” he says in a chilled hippyish voice that’s a world away from the unhinged shrieks he lets loose on stage. “It wasn’t as tenacious as I would have liked. I’ve never heard my voice so loud on stage before, I actually had to ask them to turn it down. That’s the fi rst time I’ve had to do that since I’ve been in a band. It’s weird. I guess most singers ask to be turned up.”   “Yeah, I was so discombobulated at some of the tones that were coming out of my amp,” echoes the 24-year-old bassist, his glasses reflecting the glow from the streetlights. “Maybe that tent sucked out all the highs.”   The trio decide to unwind by watching UK thrash fusion group Rolo Tomassi incite a small but perfectly formed mosh pit out of the dregs of the vast White Denim crowd, who have largely disappeared into the heaving mass of dive bars on 6th Street.   At 11am the next day James opens the door to his house, still dressed in his pyjamas. “Oh, I thought we said 12?” he says, slightly groggily. “I’m still PJ’d up! It’s cool though, come in…”

He walks through the suburban timber bungalow he shares with his wife to a garden room where White Denim’s bearded manager is slowly waking up from a cramped night on the sofa. Smoking a cigarette and drinking coffee out of a Goofy mug, James jokes about wearing his pyjamas for the photo shoot.   “I once wore a dressing gown on stage but I got so hot that it ended up being too much work. We’re always thinking of gimmicks but we never really get round to it. I guess our name takes care of all the gimmicks really!”   A few minutes later, Steve turns up for a lift to Driftwood, a 45-minute drive out of Austin where Josh lives in a trailer that doubles up as White Denim’s recording studio. Dressed in a purple 80s muscle vest, white jeans, and his signature oversized glasses, Steve is undoubtedly the hipster of the group.   “No shit!” smirks James looking at his bassist’s wardrobe choice. “You actually wore white denim!”   “That’s how I roll,” Steve deadpans back in a laconic stoner drawl, rolling his eyes to emphasize the irony.   James quickly gets dressed, grabs a bottle of Bushmills, and we all hit the road. “You’re about to see the real Texas,” James announces. “Well, our Texas at least…”   Driving along the West 45 highway, the pair discuss everything from Seascape, Edward Albee’s whimsical lizard play, to their fears of going deaf (“I’ve started turning my amps away from people because it’s so loud. I’ve been feeling bad about people holding their ears”). As we pass a sign that says “Vote Brewster McCracken for Mayor”, James wonders if Josh actually made it home in one piece.   “He drives this big old rusty Ford truck that doesn’t have any power steering or power brakes… it just fl oats. On these type of roads it can be really dangerous.”   As the Texas Country Hill Trail cuts through vast swathes of dry farmland, people become noticeably absent. Plush new credit-crunched farmhouses lie uninhabited. Dead deers lie on the side of the road, their faces ravaged by crows and maggots.   Turning off onto a dusty gravel path, the pair talk about their love of tailgate parties – where a group of men grab their guns, fill a cool box with beer, jump in their trucks and go hunting for barbecue fodder. They pass a property where some fat old boys are sitting in the back of their pickups drinking in the sweltering midday sun. “You wouldn’t want to stop and talk to those people,” James states. “Folks move out here for a reason, mostly because they don’t want to be found or bothered... and if we’ve got guns, they’ve sure got guns.”   After driving through a nondescript opening in the woods and down an even bumpier path, they pull up next to Josh’s huge vintage Ford truck. It’s still in one piece. In front of it is a massive, and strangely beautiful, silver Airstream trailer. The drummer comes out to greet his mates. The day after the night before seems instantly more chilled. In comparison to the madness and intense media scrutiny of SXSW, White Denim’s country hideout is literally a breath of fresh air. All you can hear is the sound of birdsong and shotguns.   While Josh shows off his crib – which features a secret drum riser under the bed, a fully functioning recording studio and a tin bath that’s been shot to pieces with a bow and arrow – his friends admire a homemade fridge stalactite that has been formed between a water dispenser and a bottle of Bud. They then sit down on the porch and pour out a few glasses of whiskey.   “Steve and James are my only friends,” Josh says, with a heavy slice of sarcasm. “That’s why I was like, ‘If you want to do an interview, you have to come out here because they’re my only visitors.’ Seriously though, I love being out here. I can step out in my underwear and strip cedar posts in my boots if I want to. If I did that in town my neighbours would think I was weird, but if someone walked by and saw me doing that out here, it would be no big deal. This is just where I fit in. I like to make noise and weird out.”   The trio are obviously aware of the country boy stereotypes that some have thrown at them, but White Denim don’t choose to live and record in this environment to create an image or to build up their rock’n’roll mystique. They do it because, like their music, they don’t want to be chained to a scene or trend.   “This definitely started out as a friendship, rather than a labour of love,” James recalls. “We all wanted to make a record ourselves and we hoped people would hear it, but it wasn’t something we were thinking about while we were doing it. It was more like, ‘Let’s get together on Saturdays, drink beer and write some songs’.”
“And then we started drinking beer and throwing songs around from Monday to Friday as well,” continues Steve. “I just love the adrenaline we create. You can’t go on a jog and get that pumped up in such a short time. There’s just something about jamming that gets you going a lot harder, and that’s really cool, I really enjoy it. There are certain points when we’re playing that I feel like I’m holding on for dear life. And it feels awesome.”   White Denim are very comfortable with their individual roles. Each of them knows their craft inside out. When Steve plays the bass, he sometimes looks like he can’t believe how fast his fingers are moving. When Josh drums he lets out primordial screams because his limbs are trying to keep up with his brain. James jitters, shakes and twitches as if he’s undergoing an exorcism. When they talk, they actually listen to each other and respond rather than simply spouting a stream of hipster clichés. You can’t help but wonder if this tight musical and personal bond has come at a price.   “We’re closer than brothers usually are,” Josh admits. “But you normally have years to grow close to your family before you start resenting each other. We were thrown into that situation in one year, so we had to work through all the natural crap that happens. I think making this new record has been our therapy. I’m not going to make any references to bands and therapy but making this record has brought us closer together.”   “We were together 24 hours a day for something like 27 weeks,” James continues. “I think each of us threw a few fits last year and the new songs feel like that to us. A lot of the performances on the record feels like a pretty accurate reflection of the band life personally.”   Josh walks into the trailer and loads up “Radio Milk How Can You Stand It”, the first track from Fits. Out of the speakers comes 45 seconds of samples and feedback that suddenly give way to a demented drum beat and hyperactive bassline. When James’s guitar joins the party it shifts shape again, flipping into something completely different by the close. It’s brilliantly insane. And, like Workout Holiday, utterly unpredictable. The rest of the album continues to confound expectations, with no attempt to create a pop single to rival “Let’s Talk About It”. Instead the band throws in everything from Funkadelic vibes (“All Consolation”) to South American Santana-core (“Sex Prayer”), and country rock (“Paint Yourself”). It’s absorbing on every level.   As the album fades away, Josh loads a painting onto his desktop. It shows a dead girl slumped against a swamp tree with her legs hacked off and blood smeared on her face and torso. “This got rejected as the album cover,” he says with a naughty grin. “It’s pretty amazing, but I think in the back of our minds we were thinking no as well.”   After a bemused response from their press officer, he shuts down the computer and steps outside the trailer. As if on cue, a shotgun boom echoes through the woods. The guys talk about playing a game of horseshoes or petanque, but decide that eating barbecue and catching some new bands back in town is a better course of action.   “This time last year we were all really aware of the possibility of it all being a fl eeting thing,” James says before they all go on the hog run. “I think making it through the fi rst year has bolstered our confidence both individually and as a group. We were all weirded out by the whole hype thing but now we’re just chilling with it. After all, we get to make music six days a week now for a job instead of driving a truck for a living. That’s pretty cool.”

© TIM NOAKES 2009

MILES BENJAMIN ANTHONY ROBINSON

Sat, 23 May 2009 23:08:44 +0100

It’s the day after a day of shows and Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson has been up all night drinking booze, taking mushrooms, and stealing towels from his friend’s fancy hotel gym.

“Drinking alcohol is kind of troublesome,” he declares before stabbing himself in the chest with a large syringe. “I’ve been a diabetic since I was twelve, and I’ve probably been drinking almost every day since I was seventeen. I recently studied what it does to me and I discovered that I’ve been poisoning myself every day for nearly a decade. Apparently.”
Spend any time with the intense singer/songwriter and you quickly realise that mixing beer and insulin is just the tip of a deep toxic iceberg. Since arriving in New York from Portland back in 2000, Miles has had to live two paces ahead of his demons, teetering between musical success and self-destruction. Fittingly, his eponymous debut album opens with “Buriedfed”, a surreal slow burner about his own funeral.

“If you’re going to make music that has some degree of darkness and angst like mine does, then you must have a sense of humour. Otherwise your music is terrible,” he says with an excitable machine gun patter. “That’s why I never liked Nine Inch Nails, they don’t have a fucking sense of humour. It’s like being beat over the head with someone’s awful diary.”

At just 24-years-old, Miles’s own diary is shaping up to be substantially more interesting than Mr Reznor’s. After winning and then dropping out of a NYU film scholarship, he fell in with The Strokes when they were just playing pubs, got engaged, became a drug runner/fiend, and made the benches of Coney Island his home for weeks at a time. A natural storyteller, he penned six albums worth of material on his acoustic guitar before finding musical salvation in the form of TVOTR’s Kyp Malone and Grizzly Bear’s Chris Taylor. Together they transferred his tumultuous life into a recorded set of folk fables, veering from anthems of defiance to ballads of vulnerability.
“I had a real chip on my shoulder for a long time,” he says, poking at a greasy chicken fried steak. “I moved to New York and it was a real struggle. I never had any support from my family but was surrounded by all this Manhattan wealth. I was just a really pissy kid who played in a bunch of arty punk bands who’d get in physical fights with club owners. I was constantly being approached to model, but I just thought that was the worst way to discredit my art, you know? Now I’m like, ‘you idiot!’ I could’ve had money to live off and make music! I always seem to do things the hard way.”
Having lived with the same ten songs for the past three years, Miles is excited about the direction of his next album (“all the titles are alliterated!”). But most importantly, he wants to become known for his songwriting more than his personal vices.

“I had to grow a lot this year, but I feel bad because I had to do a lot of it with people watching,” he says. “At my record release party I got very drunk and blacked out by the third song. I did a terrible job. My life was really falling apart and I said to my friend, ‘am I too late? Have I just fucked up? Could I maybe go to law school, marry a nice girl, start going to church and get a nice house?’ And then I realised, yeah, it’s too late for all that.”
Text Tim Noakes / Photography Paul Rodriguez

www.myspace.com/MilesBenjaminAnthonyRobinson

SHAWN MORTENSEN

Tue, 19 May 2009 23:03:40 +0100

Shawn Mortensen documented popular culture so others could vicariously experience his own journey through life, a journey that has sadly and unexpectedly come to an end at the age of 43.

“My art is the experience,” he told me two years ago after dropping in to the Dazed offices to talk about his book Out of Mind. “The photography is merely a souvenir of that experience. I’m making it everyday, every moment. The photographs I’m leaving are a historical reference of our time and I feel very strongly about that. I never wanted to be defined by the art establishment – I wanted to define myself.”

A painter, writer, skate fanzine innovator, MTV award winning video director, actor, and, of course, cult photographer, Shawn’s artistic talents knew no limits.

“People would get pissed off with me for walking away from what they perceived as ‘success’,” he said, dressed like a fashion shaman in a multi coloured Mongolian kaftan. “I acted in Robert Altman’s film Ready to Wear but it just wasn’t where the future was for me. Instead I went to go and live with the Zapatistas in Mexico because that was where my heart was.”

He was a contemporary of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, best man at Gwen Stefani’s wedding, roommate of Joe Strummer, and peer of Spike Jonze and Sofia Coppola. His thirst for documenting cutting edge cultural movements led him from the roughest Jamaican ghettos to the homes of Bjork, Ice Cube, 2Pac, and the Wu Tang Clan. He put Buzz Aldrin in a Helmut Lang space suit, shot Kate Moss on the catwalk, and told Timothy Leary that the aliens were coming to get him. He even asked a teenage Snoop Dogg to point a loaded glock into his camera lens.

“It’s not about me, it’s about the people in my pictures,” he said while looking at his portrait of Biggie Smalls, which was shot days before the rapper’s own death. “When you’re looking at my picture of Biggie you’re looking at me. I’m reflected in my art. That’s how I want people to see me.”

Shawn’s unorthodox style of photography and larger than life personality made him a regular and much loved contributor to Dazed, i-D, Spin, Rolling Stone, and many other global trend setting publications.

“I see my camera as an extension of my hand and my finger,” Shawn explained when I asked him about the secret of his success. “People laugh at me when I hold my camera feet away from my face and take photos, but after all these years I know what they will look like. I’ve shot with everything from a 8x3 camera down to a disposable camera. It ain’t the size of the wand – it’s the magic that it makes.”

It’s so sad to think that Shawn won’t ever shoot another picture or sweep through Dazed’s offices again in his kaftan brandishing his ever-present Polaroid camera. We’re just thankful he left the world such a thrilling archive of images. They will never grow old.

“I could have made a fortune, but I think I’ve had a really good life,” he said as we came to the end of our interview. “I decided when I was 18 that I really didn’t want to start showing my work until 20 years had passed. I didn’t want anyone to corrupt my aesthetic. I felt really strongly about keeping my work pure and honest and intimate. Whenever I try to make art, I make it as if it’s my last because you just never know in this life, you could be hit by a bus or something.”

Text Tim Noakes

RIP Shawn Mortensen (1966-2009)
shawnmortensen.org

CHRIS BLACKWELL

Sat, 18 Apr 2009 10:42:16 +0100

“I was born into one of Jamaica’s most prominent families; we owned the Wray and Nephew rum business. I was the eldest so I would have been the person that inherited the business, but when my grandfather passed away my two uncles took it over and fought over it. I got sent to school in England; by the time I came back the rum business was gone.

I enjoyed school very much but I do not think the school enjoyed me. The exact words my housemaster said to my mother was “Christopher might be happier elsewhere...” When I was 15 I used to leave school at night and go down into town and buy liquor and cigarettes. I ran a little shop out of my room at school. I have always been interested in doing things, hustling. I have never been a spectator.

When I came back to Jamaica I recorded this band that I really liked – I just wanted to record them. I enjoyed the process even though the record didn’t sell. They were a cocktail jazz band that played at this hotel where I was teaching water skiing. Around the same time I also got a job with EON Productions who were shooting Dr No on the island. I took the crew to locations, organised the transportation and accommodation – a proper job. I had no sense at all that it was going to be what it became and frankly nor did anybody else. When they left Jamaica they basically had a sort of B movie on their hands. The one element everybody was excited about was the image of Ursula Andress coming out of the water in her bathing suit. Unfortunately I didn’t see it being shot.

The producers offered me a job in England and I wasn’t sure what to do, so I went to see a very well known fortune-teller in Jamaica, who read my future with some tea leaves. I did not tell her anything other than I had a choice to make. What I gleaned from what she said was that I should pursue my music business rather than go to England.

Back then recording a song didn’t cost that much. All it cost was renting a van to drive the band into town and renting a studio for a day. The album was recorded in a day because everything was in mono so you mixed while you were recording. You balanced the sound and then just went with whatever was the best performance. The maximum we did was two or three takes, especially with a jazz act. I do not think any jazz records were made with more than two or three takes at the most.

I recorded the band and then decided I wanted to have a label to release it. I thought of Island because, it’s a little corny now, but it was influenced by this film that recently had come out based on this book called Island in the Sun. I thought I would put it on Island because it was music from an island in the sun. That is why the very first image of the label was an image of a sun. Then I did a second record for the same band and then I added Ernest Ranglin as a guest vocalist. I started making singles in Jamaica but I could not put those out on Island because I was trying to make American style R&B records and they did not quite come out like that, but that was what they were aimed at, so I called that label R&B records. Most of the records I released in Jamaica were on the R&B label which was just a label name owned by Island. The first three 45s each went number one in Jamaica. I think the main reason was that my records were the first records which were made in Jamaica attempting to emulate American R&B records. The Jamaicans were thrilled to hear their own artists singing.

The Jamaican music business was two different extremes, one was the sound systems, which had all the hard driving American R&B music and jazz stuff like Louis Jordan. Other than that was what was played on the radio, very middle of the road music. Those were manufactured by a couple of different pressing plants who would also write and manufacture them. The people who owned these pressing plants would record calypsos for the tourist market but they did not record anything from the Jamaican roots market because no Jamaican radio would play them on radio.

Jamaican music was so raw but my records were trying to be more slick. Soon, after three or four records the sound system guys, I presume, must have thought: ‘If this guy can have hits we sure can have hits’. So they started making records and those were the records that were really the start of Jamaican music, as we know it. They were the people who really started the whole Ska rhythm, people like Duke Reid, Prince Buster, Coxsone, King Edwards, those guys really made the music that appealed to the street people and that in turn came over to England. All the English immigrants, which was about three quarters of a million in the early 60s, started to buy them. They formed the base of who I sold to when I came over to England.

Being white didn’t matter. I had a natural affinity with people because I had been doing it for some time, and I knew everybody, I knew my way around and people knew me.

I left the island when it became independent. When a country becomes independent there’s an amplified sense of their own identity and, in view of my complexion, my image was suddenly more associated with yesterday than tomorrow as far as Jamaica was concerned at that time. Plus also, and most importantly, my records started to sell more in England so I thought I would go there and start releasing my competitor’s songs. I went to see all of them and pretty much all of them gave me the rights to release their records in England. I would take the record and give them a ten percent royalty, which was a top of the line royalty at that time.
It wasn’t an attempt to enter the pop market; I just went to fulfil the demand for pure Jamaican music. There was no sight of Island becoming what it became, I just went over initially to supply what I knew was in demand in England.

When I started it was just me and after a little bit I got an assistant. Then I brought over Jackie Edwards, one of my first acts in Jamaica, and he helped me a bit and I did some recordings with him. Then I employed somebody called David Betteridge who had been working at an independent distributor who I asked to distribute for me, but he turned me down because he was distributing the Bluebeat label which was releasing Jamaican music in England to such a degree that the music in England was actually called Bluebeat music. So he was not really interested in a little outside label. But I liked him very much, I liked the way he turned me down, you know what I mean, and I told him maybe one day I would come back. Eventually he joined me and he distributed to the North of London and I distributed to South of London. It was very much hands on, going around dealing with the shops, going to the pressing plant and picking up the records. What changed everything was when I brought Millie over and produced a record with her, which became a huge hit. That was My Boy Lollipop. It changed everything.

I could have probably retired if it was a whole record, but it was just a single. It opened up my world; suddenly I was in the pop business. I didn’t put Millie’s record on Island, I licensed it to Fontana because after I had finished the record I knew it was a big hit, much bigger than Island could handle, so I licensed it to Fontana. Fontana belonged to Philips Records which morphed into PolyGram and then ultimately Universal.

It’s hard to say but without “My Boy Lollipop”, Island Records may not have become what it did. Before that record I was never even vaguely interested in the pop business, I wasn’t a wannabe who wanted to be in it. I was making a little living, nothing great, but I was more than happy doing just what I was doing. If you are working with what you love then you are one of the one percent of the people in the world – that is pretty lucky. I wasn’t really seeking to be in the pop business, but when I was made the record I knew that it was going to be huge.

After that song I decided to diversify the roster. It was a very exciting time, a lot of music was emerging out of England of English bands playing R&B music or attempting to play R&B music; The Stones, The Beatles, everybody was playing that type of music. It was only a little bit later they started to write their own songs and develop their own sounds, but initially everybody was listening to that music.

I never really liked pop music per se, it was much more about great musicianship. I was very fortunate again when somebody introduced me to Steve Winwood. He was the absolute master of that genre and was such a key person in Island moving from purely Jamaican music into this emerging area of music which became rock. It started with Steve Winwood, the Spencer Davis Group, but during that time I was still working with Jamaican music, it was a little later when there started to be more acts – we were signing groups like Art which became Spookie Troops. All of these type of groups were sort of R&B’ish or emulating or influenced by black music so it was not so much a stretch for me.

During that time I also picked up an American label, an American R&B label which I put through in England under Sue records, which became a very hot label in England – they had Ike and Tina Turner, Jimmy McGriff, The Soul Sisters, all this kind of music I bought in and started that label.

Then in about 1969 I came across King Crimson. They were very much a departure for me, their music was so very different from a lot of stuff that had been happening before. It was great musicianship, very intelligent music. It was not really pop it was just great music so that’s why I signed them - I really liked them.

I didn’t consciously choose my acts because of a change in popular culture. If I had interest in anything it was purely because of who I saw and if I liked their music. If they influenced people I had no agenda in that regard, I don’t think I have that kind of ability. I was just able to identify a lot of talent and happened to be in London at that time with an independent label. My background was one where I was more than comfortable with dealing with musicians. It was a bit of a revolution in a sense because Island had that and all the majors were really stuffy so people really wanted to be on Island because I was somebody who understood musicians, liked musicians, wanted to be around musicians and was happy working with them. I think that is one of the reasons that Island went so well, people wanted to be there and there were not so many viable options at that time.

I learned the music business over time, bit by bit, from producing a record, mastering a record, pressing it, taking it around and selling it – it is the most basic way up. During that time I would deal with a lot of different record labels and I started to pick up on things. I decided to push the envelope with the deals because the majors hated giving out power and they had a lot of power. When I started Island Records in England, EMI had ninety five percent of the business and Phillips had another four percent and the little independents had one percent.

I think the moment I realised that my little independent had become something else was when people started asking me to buy the label. It was in 1969 and they offered me what I thought was an astronomical amount of money – I only remember it because The Dorchester Hotel had just sold for the same amount of money and I could not believe that they would value my little label to the same amount as The Dorchester Hotel! But I did not want to sell because I loved what I was doing and because I have always had quirky tastes – and quirky tastes do not work in a corporation, quirky tastes can only work when you are in charge of your own business really. I was often very short of cash and nearly went under but I still loved doing what I was doing. I felt that I was not employable as a human being, so I followed what I believed in – I would never have been able to sign Bob Marley if I worked for somebody. I would not have been allowed.

It was the same with Grace Jones. I pursued her after seeing a photograph of her – not after hearing her. After seeing this photograph I thought that I needed to find out who she was because people said she was a singer, so then I looked her up. She had just finished a record for a little label in Brooklyn – it was her version of La vie en rose by Edith Piaf and I thought that it was just incredible. It was not difficult for me to sign Grace at all, firstly I was Jamaican and she was Jamaican, secondly by that period in time, which was about 1976 or 75, Island was well known and I was somewhat known, so she was jumping from her little unknown Brooklyn label to someone who already artists on a label, people like Robert Palmer.

When we came to record Grace at Compass Point, I had a genius engineer and so I did not feel I needed to be in control. I would go into the studio and sort of conduct and enthuse the different musicians while we recorded live. We recorded her singing and all the band playing and then we would go and listen to it and then if we needed to add something to it I would take them all in again to play together because I wanted to catch that feel you get when live music is being played and somebody can bounce off something they’ve heard as they play. When something is overdubbed you do not get that same feel, you never get anything you do not expect. Personally I feel music should be more recorded live, it should be more of a live feel, I think that is when it is most exciting and that is when magic happens.

There were times I didn’t work in the studio for a long time and then there was a long time that I did work in the studio. It depended a lot on whether it was an artist or something I felt like I could really produce or whether it was somebody who was already produced or already had a production company or whatever. In that case my role was more in marketing or sales. I didn’t produce most of the Island records – I never produced Cat Stevens, Robert Palmer, or U2. I produced some of the early Jamaican records, Millie, the Spencer Davis Group, some of the Traffic records.

Before I met Bob Marley I had released records that he had done with Coxsone, infact I released his first record that he ever made, but I’d never met him. Then in 1971 or 1972 he was in London and a guy called Brent Clark phoned me and asked if I wanted to meet Bob because he was stranded in London. This was just after Jimmy Cliff had left Island and signed to EMI which I was very upset about. So I said, ‘yes, absolutely, it would be great to see Bob’. So he came in with Peter Tosh and Bunny Livingston into my office in London. I was really impressed with their charisma and I really liked them, so I thought the best way to work with them was to show them some trust myself. I asked them what they thought it would cost to make the record and drew them a cheque for £4,000 and said go make the record and I will come see you in a couple of months. Everybody said I was completely nuts, that they were complete crooks and I would never get the album! But I felt that it was best way to work with them – and it was! I just believed in them.

Bob’s success did not happen over night, though. I remember when he had just finished Catch A Fire, I thought it would sell over a million copies, which eventually it did, but in the first six months it sold about 6000 copies. That was pretty good for a reggae album but I thought Bob was somebody that was going to go all the way so I was disappointed. Reggae never really had any credibility as music, there could be reggae hits but they would always be novelty records. Whether it would be “Judge Dread” or “Longshot Kick the Bucket”, they were all great records, but they were novelty records, they were not artist records and I have always been in the artist business rather than in the record business so I have always wanted to built artists and I felt the way to do that with Bob was portray him and the band as a black rock act.

I knew Bob for ten years, from 1971 to 1981 when he died. Well, I think it was 71 but it might have been 72. I cannot remember. Sometimes I get my own information from something I read in the paper!

I said to Bob early on that we would never have taken any pictures together and we didn’t, apart from this one. It was taken on a stopover in St Martin in the Dutch Antilles. We had stopped on our way back from Brazil. We had been flown out to Brazil in this private plane for the opening of Areola records. They would not let Bob into Brazil because he was considered some kind of political fugitive, but Areola were able to get him a visa. But the interesting thing about this picture is that it was taken in March or April in 1980 by my girlfriend at the time, the French actor Nathalie Delon. She found an unexposed roll of film two or three years ago and sent it off to get developed and out came this picture (above). It is actually the only colour picture that exists of Bob and me.

This picture (left) is from another key day in my life. I had gone to see Bob play at Crystal Palace, and I had not yet seen U2. Rob Partridge was the person who had turned me onto U2, he knew I was going to be at Crystal Palace so we set it up that after the gig I would go down to a little club in Herne Hill and see the band. That is what I did and I was completely taken by their spirit and their energy – there was something about them, what they projected that I just fell in love with. I did not necessarily fall in love with their music, I fell for their energy so I very excitedly went ahead and signed them. What I said to the guys at Island was that we should definitely put our company behind them and support them. That was about all I did for U2, I never really had anything to do with them whatsoever other than giving them a platform in sense of Island records and support them when they needed help.

I never felt pressure to find the next big thing. That kind of pressure is what you have when your company has shares on Wall Street and you have to make this much money otherwise your shares go down and you get fired. That pressure lives in major label, but in an independent you have hard times but it is not that sort of pressure you describe, you just need to find a way to get by until the next record came out. It is much more hand to mouth.

When Bob died it was the beginning of the end for me and the label. I was very involved in orchestrating it all, he was a Jamaican artist and I am from Jamaica. It meant so much more than just the music industry. It had nothing to do with charts or sales figures; it was something so much bigger and because it was so exciting and rewarding I could not really get myself ramped up after he died.

I decided to sell Island when I did not love what I was doing as much anymore – it got be too big. I like a gang approach rather than a corporate approach, that structure just didn’t work for me, I didn’t like it at all. The trigger in my head was one day in America someone came up to me and said that they wanted to be the senior vice president instead of vice president. I just thought ‘what the fuck is that all about?’ It was not the same fun or the same feel. You cannot replace the feel of a small independent – it is just so exciting because everybody is involved from the receptionist to the guy running the company, everybody is involved and everybody’s opinion is valued. I would get into trouble in America because I would ask the receptionist for her opinion. The receptionist’s opinion is more important to me than the vice president because he doesn’t buy records, they are given to him – he does not live the general life whereas the receptionist does. So I would always be equally interested, I don’t say more necessarily, but definitely equally interested in the receptionist’s opinion as much as the opinion of the vice president, because I felt they were closer to the market we were trying to reach. I have just always been like that. I’m a bit of a misfit. I have always been sort of an outsider.

To say that I am glad that I got out of the music industry would be to say that I do not wish I was still involved and that is not the case! I love music, there is nothing more exciting than to see some talent and help that talent to find their way. That is how I have always viewed it and I love that. Nowadays is an incredibly exciting time. If I was not the age I am I would embrace it completely because I think in a few years time it is going to be extraordinary again, now is just a period of transition. The majors in general have been in a difficult position in how to deal with the whole digital revolution, and I don’t think they have handled it that well. I think we are in a valley at the moment but it will come out very well soon because people still want music and they will always want music and people will still make music. There is a tremendous amount of music being made now and a lot of it is really good. It’s exciting as ever. If I were the same age as I was when I started Island I would be absolutely into it right now and I would start pretty much the same way as Island – very small and personal.

I always put money back into records. I never took any money out of Island records, of course I was making a living but I never took any chunks of money or anything like that. I was always resigning and marketing new artists and new recordings. Sometimes I got a bit ahead of myself and almost ran out of cash and then I just had to duck and dive and figure out a way to get through.

I do not think the days of making a label profitable are gone at all. It depends on what your motivation is. For me the most important thing is to do what you love. It is difficult if you cannot pay your rent and cannot feed yourself, but once you can feed yourself and pay rent and you do what you want to do I feel that you are in the one percent of the people of the world who are truly happy. It does not matter how much money you make, it matters that you are excited about getting up in the morning and are excited about doing what you are doing. I never started Island Records because I wanted to make a lot of money, it was something I felt I could do and I loved doing. So if anybody has a similar sort of approach and a reason to go into the music business now is an incredible time, but you need to have patience. You can do it in your own time and with your own funds – but it takes time. I was very patient; most of the artists we signed on Island had at least three albums. I would never sign somebody and then drop them right away if it did not happen, that is how the major record system works now – they have to work like that because they have to make a profit on a regular basis. If you are an independent and you want to work with somebody the road might be long but if you are enjoying what you are doing then it is worth the effort. It is always fun attacking, but descending is not much fun.

Island Records has given me so many proud moments; I have been so fortunate to have lots of them. I was incredibly proud when I heard Cat Stevens’s Tea for the Tillerman, that was one of the high points of my life. Hearing The Wailers’ Catch A Fire that they recorded for me in Jamaica after I had given them the money and everybody said that I would never see them again, that was also one of the high points. Hearing U2’s The Joshua Three was an incredible high point – there are just so many of them over the years.

It is a funny thing the record business, you have to remember that it is the artist that makes it. Once Island got known and respected then artists would want to come and sign with the company. Certainly when one looks back I am proud this point, but at the time when you were doing it, it was just what you were doing that day and nothing more. But looking back I am definitely very proud of Island records, even some of the artists who were not big at the time have built a name and have hardcore fans to this day – whether it is John Martyn, who just passed away, or Nick Drake, people who at the time did not sell a lot but are still recognised as being important. At the time I was just doing what I was doing that day. The time Bob and the Wailers came to see me in London I felt excited about it because I felt like I knew what to do and the direction to go, but it was just a good day and it was exciting, but that meeting probably took an hour and a half and then you just went back to what you were doing that day, working around a round table with everyone else. I have spent all my life working and when I look back I am definitely proud of it but it is only until very recently I have started to recognise that it was something special.

I love Jamaica. I really love Jamaica. My soul is here, but I also love England. There was nowhere in the world that was as exciting in the 60s and I was very fortunate to be there at that time. But I must say that most of my life has been random luck; I happened to be in England at the time when the music scene exploded and I happened to be there with a little label that was kind of cool and different. It was a great time!

My life has come full circle. I think I am the same. In fact my favourite thing today is doing jet skiing, which is the modern version of water skiing, so yeah I’m still the same!”

INTERVIEW © TIM NOAKES 2009

EMPIRE OF THE SUN

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 20:03:23 +0000

EMPIRE OF THE SUN are a synth-pop dream team on a mission to take over the music world. TIM NOAKES dons a psychedelic poncho and takes a trip inside their minds to find out more…

Illustrations by Debaser

Some people think that Empire of the Sun is a novel by J.G.Ballard. Others think that it is a slightly ropey film by Steven Spielberg. And then there are those who think it is a musical spaceship piloted by two odd looking Australians on a mission to save planet pop. In truth, Empire of the Sun is all of these things, but only one of them is capable of making three and half million people dance around their laptops (hint: it’s not Ballard’s audio-book).

What began in 2007 as a musical side project between Luke Steele of The Sleepy Jackson and Nick Littlemore of Pnau, has since transformed into an internet monster thanks to their insanely contagious debut single “Walking on a Dream”, which finally gets released this month across Europe and America. They are convinced the album of the same name will live up to the blog buzz and take over the world. However, some disgruntled YouTubers think that these two blissed out synth popsters are just another MGMT clone with an unhealthy obsession for Fleetwood Mac and prog rock oil paintings. So, what’s the deal? Are they simply glammed up charlatans with their eyes on the filthy lucre?

“Well, we are much more likely to reference Francis Bacon than Rumours,” Littlemore explains from underneath an epic mop of curly brown hair and feathers. “We don’t really listen to records when we are making music. Of course we grew up with it, but we would never try to plagirise Fleetwood Mac. We are making something completely different. This is not a joke. Our heart is in it one hundred percent. This is the birth of a civilisation, the start of everything. We’re giving back everything that is good and taking away everything that is evil. We’ve traveled to Mexico, Shanghai, Iceland, and Africa to learn from their cultures. It’s a continuing evolution for us both spiritually and intellectually. We want to give knowledge back to our audience.”

“What we’ve been doing up until this point has been like an apprenticeship,” continues Steele, peering out from behind a thick white line of eye make-up. “Now we’ve built up our confidence. We’re still battling the heathens, but finally we’ve found the empire. We are very serious about this.”

Such grandiose, slightly preposterous statements are thrown out every minute in EOTS land. And to make matters even more surreal, the dreamy duo are explaining their masterplan infront of a huge green screen in a dingy film studio in dreary Hendon. The closest they’re going to get to another planet today is by popping into Comet on the other side of Edgware Road.

“I got my clothes from a guy called Magic Abdul from Afghanistan,” Littlemore says after selecting a poncho for me to wear for the duration of the interview. “Next time you’re in Kabul we’ll hook you up.”

Outlandish fashion is a key part of their revolutionary plans. Today Mr Steele is rocking a blue kimono and ornate headdress from the Chinese Opera, while Mr Littlemore sports an Arabic tunic and a massive pair of false eyelashes that would make Beyonce green with envy. Contrary to how it may appear in real life and in these specially commissioned paintings for Dazed, Empire of the Sun haven’t spent the day knocking back LSD sugar cubes thinking of elaborate ways to make themselves appear more cosmic. They’ve actually been shooting scenes for a film that will accompany the album – a different a video for each of its 10 tracks. They began by shooting the promo for “Walking on a Dream” in Shanghai (also the setting for Spielberg’s film), with Steele walking along the city streets, releasing doves amidst confused Chinese pedestrians, while Littlemore prayed and pulled at his hair as confetti rained down from the heavens. They then flew to a desert in Mexico to film a piece for their next equally addictive single, “We Are the People”. They chose the location because it was where abstract film director Alejandro Jodorowsky filmed his legendary tale of cowboy dwarf love, El Topo.
“It was nothing but deserts and mountains,” Littlemore recalls. “You know what they say, in the distant mountains is where you find the best peyote…”
“Yeah, but it was a bit freaky,” Steele continues with a frozen look of fear across his face. “We had to get into a ditch. It was where the animals go to die. It was ten feet down with softened edges, so once you’re in you can’t get out. There were these tunnels bearing off where the cougars and coyotes go. It was horrible. If we get into another situation like that we’re are going to have to say something to the director.”

Luckily, today’s shoot only involved CGI animals. They’re particularly proud of a scene where they flew across the sky on the back of a giant eagle.

“I suppose we do owe Spielberg something because he’s a dreamer like us,” Littlemore says, fluttering his fake eyelashes like a peacock who’s been up raving for three days. “I think magic really went away for a while. Up until recently dreams seemed very pedestrian and I don’t think dreams are really like that. It is time to celebrate the world, colour, life, and liberty. I don’t know if you can directly relate that to LSD experiments, as we’re not coming from there, we just want to be free and have a good time. We want to change the world…”

“There’s been a suffocation of imagination,” Steele says. “What was that Hendrix quote… ‘Music doesn’t lie. If there is something to be changed in this world, then it can only happen through music.’”

It’s quite intense talking to two people dressed like outcasts from a Star Wars convention who quote Hendrix and are hell bent on world domination. When asked if they think Empire of the Sun could ever be mistaken for an MOR band stuck in a K-hole, Steele responds by quoting a long verse from Matthew 16. He explains that he wants to keep his treasures in heaven, not on earth. Quite. But when pushed about the depths of his religious reverie, the bleach blonde singer looks slightly bewildered.

“Religion’s a bad word to us,” he drawls laconically. “We never went to church. Religion is like jail gates. It’s not really about us, we’re just vessels. We are just the ones bringing the cult...”

What, like David Koresh and Jim Jones?

“Jeeeez Louise! We’re not like them!” yelps Littlemore. “Cult leaders have such a bad rep. I really don’t know if we want to be one of those people. However, something much bigger is being channeled through us. We want to bring good things to the world. This isn’t about a corruption of the spirit. We’re not asking people to all commit suicide on some special night wearing Nike trainers. We are not a cult. We are an army of colour. We’ve surrendered to this. We are not holding back. We’re coming together with open arms and putting our egos aside in order to make something that’s greater than the sum of its parts.”

After so many years playing in Pnau and The Sleepy Jackson with moderate success, you can’t help but wonder how the people in their other bands feel about their close-knit partnership and unshakable self-belief in Empire of the Sun.

“Pnau is a band, so that’s cool,” Littlemore says quietly. “I just go and jump around on stage and yell into the mic, whereas Empire of the Sun is a different kettle of fish. We don’t know how epic this can be, but we already know it is starting out to be a big affair. Luke sings melodies like no-one I’ve ever heard or met – there is so much colour. We’ve both reached a point where we wanted to make something better. Before, other members of the band secretly wanted to be the star. This isn’t really like that; it’s much more about creating something much bigger than us. There’s no competition between us.”

“This changes everything. Our other projects are going to have to get better,” Steele says with conviction. “With the past there’s been a lot of negativity. We’ve had to be the leaders of bands and had to be the ministers who keep everyone’s bank accounts happy and all their problems in order. Now I don’t have to worry about that. It clears a lot of space for the art. It’s great to work with some I mutually respect. Nick is like a modern day Kerouac. It’s almost like when your wife makes you a toasted sandwich – it’s always better than when you make it. Unless your wife can’t cook that is…”

Their assistant comes in and tells them that a cab is waiting outside. Taking off his headdress and exposing a platinum hedgehog barnet, Steele picks up his matching white acoustic guitar and runs off some blues riffs while the make-up artist takes off Littlemore’s eyelashes. Squinting into the studio light, he looks completely different, normal perhaps. Tomorrow he will start a UK tour with Pnau, while Steele flies back to Perth to see his wife and daughter Tiger, for whom he wrote the penultimate song on Walking on a Dream, “Tiger By My Side”.

“There’s a great line in that song that says ‘I’m healing scars with my guitar,’” Steele says with the most natural smile of the day. “My daughter is a big fan of ours; although she’s quite subtle with her appreciative dance moves. She’s only four weeks old after all...”
“I don’t know where this is all going to end,” Littlemore says as he swaps his Magic Abdul clobber for some Pnau-friendly jeans and scuffed up white high tops. “You can’t prophesize how things are going to turn out, you just have to go with it. It’s been such a wonderful trip so far and it’s only really just begun.”

©TIM NOAKES 2009

Here’s a video I made of the interview...

RYE RYE

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 20:51:40 +0000

“My life has changed a lot. When I first started rapping I just did it for fun. I originally wanted to be a dancer, but when I saw people’s reaction to my raps, it encouraged me to write more songs. Everything that’s happened since has been like a miracle.

Going back to Baltimore from Hollywood is crazy because none of my friends get to experience what I experience. When I go to a club at home, people point at me. That’s uncomfortable because I like to feel normal when I come home. It’s funny, my friends are all like, ‘Why don’t you take me on tour with you? Why won’t you let me meet M.I.A?’. The vibe ain’t the same no more.

My aunt thinks I’ve turned into a diva, but I haven’t. I just need to rest because I travel so much. I guess I have changed a bit. I used to be this mouthy little girl that always talked trash, but now I’m more mature. I thank M.I.A for that, as she gave me the opportunity of a lifetime. But when I’m around her I still feel like a teenager – sometimes I can even bring the teenager out in her! She’s like a mother and a sister to me. It’s cool.”

Raised in Baltimore’s Chapel Hill projects, 18-year-old rapper Rye Rye has come a long way since first picking up the mic in 2006. After gaining underground recognition for her energetic appearance on DJ Blaqstarr’s Bmore club anthem “Shake It To The Ground”, she was signed to a major record deal by M.I.A, who also took the fun-loving MC on tour with her throughout 2008. Currently mixing her debut album, Rye Rye is hoping to cross over to the mainstream in a big way this year.

© TIM NOAKES 2009 c/o ANOTHER MAGAZINE

ISOBEL CAMPBELL

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 20:47:23 +0000

“I’m late for everything. I was even late when I was born. My Mum thinks that says a lot about me.

I guess I’ve always been away with the fairies. It’s comfortable. The first day of rehearsals Mark and I had for our tour, I didn’t turn up at all. I turned up the next day. He was a bit shocked by that. It’s a running theme – the first show we played together, I literally had to run on stage because I couldn’t get a taxi.

But being late can be expensive. My ex-boyfriend lived up North and I once missed the bus to go and see him, so I decided to get a taxi all the way. It cost about £300. That was insane. I could have gone on a reasonable holiday for that much money. I don’t think I ever told him how much it cost. Actually, that was when he started calling me a space cadet. But he also said that he loved me.”

Following a six-year stint in Belle & Sebastian, cult singer Isobel Campbell launched her solo career with 2003’s Amorino. Although the album received critical praise, it wasn’t until she hooked up with former Screaming Trees frontman Mark Lanegan for 2006’s desert folk odyssey Ballad of the Broken Seas that her song writing became widely recognised, with the album getting nominated for the Mercury Music Prize. Last year’s Sunday at Devil Dirt consolidated the duo’s reputation as the Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood of their generation, with Isobel’s harmonies providing a dreamy counter balance to Lanegan’s grizzled tones. Ms Campbell plans on collaborating with the Cold War Kids later this year. If she remembers to turn up for the recording sessions that is...

© TIM NOAKES 2009 c/o ANOTHER MAGAZINE

GRACE JONES

Sat, 18 Oct 2008 14:09:36 +0100

Straddling the cutting edge of fashion, art and music for more than 30 years,GRACE JONES has made a career out of tearing up the rulebook. As she releases her first new albumin nearly two decades, the tempestuous star bares her soul to me,,,

KEN ADAM

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 22:22:10 +0100

Introducing Ken Adam, Kubrick’s confidante, 007’s creative mastermind, and possibly the biggest movie star you’ve never heard of...

Next month, James Bond will swagger into our lives for the 22nd time in Quantum of Solace. This time around, old blue eyes will be pitched against an eco-warrior gone bad; a man hell bent on controlling Bolivia’s water supply at any cost. Audiences, it seems, have become too clued up to believe in the Bond villains of yore, those cat-stroking loons who, instead of just going to a desert to launch a nuclear warhead, felt the need to hollow out entire volcanoes and ocean lagoons. But for all the people wrapped up in Daniel Craig’s CGI enhanced short shorts, there are millions who would secretly prefer a return to the halcyon days of jet packs, ejector seats, suitcase helicopters and underwater sports cars. One of them is Sir Kenneth Adam, the iconic production designer who single-handedly created the visual aesthetic for seven Bond films, two Kubrick masterpieces and over 75 movies, from the Ipcress Files to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

“Personally, I don’t think there was anything wrong with the volcano,” the real life “Q” says with a laugh. “We tried to use special effects but CGI didn’t exist back then. These days anything is possible, but we were trying to cheat the audience as little as possible. So we built things for real. Bond’s Lotus could actually drive underwater. The ejector seat in his Aston Martin actually worked. His jet pack was a real jet pack, which would cut out after a few minutes and send the stuntman crashing down to the ground if he wasn’t lucky.”

Holding court in the study of his palatial Knightsbridge town house, Ken, as he prefers to be called, has lived a life most people can only dreamof.

“That was the plane I flew in the war,” he says, pointing to a model plane sitting in the corner of the room. “A Hawker Typhoon. But that was long before your time.”

Situated just a few feet away from his OBE, a couple of honorary doctorships and two Oscars, the tiny toy symbolises the start of one of Hollywood’s most amazing, yet comparatively underreported, journeys.

Born Klaus Hugo Adam in Berlin in 1921, Ken had an early affinity with model making and design, spending hours sketching sports cars, planes, and buildings. After his Jewish family fled Nazi persecution in 1934, Ken went to school in Edinburgh and London, eventually studying architecture at UCL’s prestigious Bartlett School.

“As a teenager I was never quite sure whether I wanted to be a theatrical designer or a film designer,” he states with a still noticeable German twang to his English accent. “I always knew I wanted to be one of them, particularly after watching The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. That film was so imaginative. It made me want to incoporate theatrics in actual film design.”

However, before he got his first movie job, he signed up as a pilot in the RAF, earning the distinction of being the only German national to fight for the allied forces. Some critics have pointed to his war years as being the inspiration for some of Bond’s darkest death traps - concentration camps manifested as stylised tropical subterranean lairs run by crackpot tyrants. Ken, however, is ambivalent about the comparison.

“My work on Bond had nothing to do with my past, in relation to Germany and the Second World War. I always did things tongue and cheek. I never took it very seriously and I think that was very important, certainly on the Bond films.”

His first 007 assignment came in 1962 with the film adaptation of Dr No. In the years leading up to it he had cut his teeth as a draughtsman at Riverside Studios, and later worked alongside Gone With the Wind production designer William Cameron Menzies who encouraged Ken to use bold colours and stylised sets, in the vein of Metropolis. After completing work on films such as Sodom & Gomorrah, Around the World in 80 Days, and The Trials of Oscar Wilde, he was offered the Bond gig. On set in Kingston, Jamaica he encountered a young boy who was also destined to shape the course of popular culture, although through music, not film.

“I had a 19 year old assistant called Chris Blackwell,” Ken recalls, folding his arms onto his belly. “We used to water ski a lot in Kingston harbour, which was foolish in those days because it was full of sharks. One lunchtime we had been drinking quite a lot and I decided to go waterskiing. And would you believe it, the towrope snapped! I had seen a white shark a few minutes before it happened and now I was just floating there! Chris circled around and picked me up before I cold get eaten, thankfully. He really wanted to be in film, but I said ‘Chris, you are so musical, you know every jazz group on the island, follow that.’ We were great friends but we drifted apart after he set up Island Records. But, you know, it’s understandable, he became a billionaire.”

After his shark experience, Ken flew back to London and filled up three sound stages with a nuclear reactor, a tarantula room and Dr No’s sleek apartment, which was offset by artwork from the Old Masters. He then waited nervously for producers Cubby Broccoli and Terence Young to come back from Jamaica and pass judgement. They loved his futuristic vision and two years later asked him to re-create Fort Knox for Goldfinger. In typical grandiose style he created a monument to gold, reasoning that bank vaults were too boring for an audience to look at.

“I sketched something that resembled a prison. It was 40 foot high and full of grills with the gold situated behind them. None of the producers liked it, but I convinced them that the audience wanted to be in the position of Bond – looking at this gold from outside the bars. They finally agreed. That was the last time, certainly on a Bond film, that I had a problem convincing anyone of my ideas because they became less and less about the books, and more and more about the visual look.”

In-between Dr No and Goldfinger, Ken was hired by Stanley Kubrick to work on his cold war satire, Dr Strangelove. It was the start of an intense working relationship that would eventually win Ken an Oscar, but also set in motion events that would lead to a nervous breakdown.

“Kubrick had seen Dr. No and loved it,” Ken says, tugging back a lungful of cigar smoke. “He asked if I would be interested in doing a picture for him. I went to see him and he had a lot of charm and curiosity, but I felt he was also very naïve. Little did I know that there was this gigantic computer like brain functioning all the time!”

He sketched out an idea for the film’s centrepiece – a split-level war room. Kubrick liked it at first but scrapped it after wondering what he would do with the second level. Ken then drew an imposing triangular design, with the director standing behind him commenting on every stroke.

“We were too close. It was like a marriage. He was unbelievably possessive and very difficult to work with because he knew every other part of filmmaking, but not design. He was suspicious and I had to intellectually justify every line I drew. That can be so destroying to deal with day after day.”

Eventually they came to an understanding, and Ken constructed the iconic set at Shepperton studios. Angular, dark, imposing and highly stylised, the War Room’s only source of light was a gigantic suspended ring of light above a huge conference table.

“Years later President Reagan asked his chief of staff to show him the War Room that he had seen in Dr Strangelove,” Ken chuckles. “He actually thought it was a real place!”

Even though the film was shot in black and white, the table was covered with green poker table felt, so the actors would feel like they were bluffing for the future of humanity. The mind games carried on behind the camera.

“I put a chess set on the War Room set because Kubrick said to me, ‘I’ve got to beat George C Scott every day so he’ll eat out of my hands’. He loved being in control. I used to drive him to the set and back again every day, at a top speed of 30mph because he was scared to go any faster. He was fascinated with my war experience and we talked about doing a film about fighter pilots in the First World War. We got to know each other pretty well and compared to most people I found him quite easy to take because I could argue my point. That changed eventually.”

In the months and years after Dr Strangelove, Ken made sets for The Ipcress File, Sleuth and fused together a Royles Royce and a Bugatti chassis to create Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’s famous flying hovercraft car – or as Ken now refers to it, “That bloody car!” But all of these were small potatoes compared to his massive nuclear missile volcano set for You Only Live Twice.

“I could have built a model,” he ponders. “But then we couldn’t have flown a real helicopter into it or had 200 stuntmen abseil from the roof. It took three months to build, stood 120 feet tall and used 700 tonnes of steel. I did feel sorry for the men who had to hang up there in the middle of the night and make the fibreglass roof though. One night I drove out to Pinewood at midnight and gave them two bottles of brandy to keep them happy. They didn’t really mind, because something like that had never been done before.”

By the early 70s, Ken’s imagination had made him Hollywood’s most celebrated production designer, and in 1975 he got another call from Mr Kubrick who was preparing to come out of hiding after the fallout from Clockwork Orange. He wanted re-tell Barry Lyndon, Thackeray’s candle lit ode to the regency period. Ken reluctantly agreed. He had happily passed on the opportunity to work on 2001: A Space Odyssey.

“Stanley had got very nasty menacing letters from people threatening his life, so when we were preparing for Barry he wouldn’t move out of his house for 5 or 6 months. I said ‘how can you make a film on location when you don’t go out?’ So he employed an army of young photographers to take pictures of stately homes. But you couldn’t say anything about his paranoia to anyone otherwise he would be on the phone the next day. He controlled everything you said in the press and on set.”

Physically exhausted, Ken had a nervous breakdown, and Kubrick fired everyone on set for six weeks to re-think the film’s strategy.

“It wasn’t normal pressure, I can cope with normal pressure,” he says, with a gutsy laugh. “I had to go into a clinic. Stanley was more worried than I was, but I was beyond worrying really. He rang everyday but wasn’t able to talk to me because my psychiatrist wanted to cut this umbilical chord between us. Which he never managed to do actually. When I finally came back to this house, he rang up and asked me if I wanted to direct a scene over in Germany. The moment I heard that I was back in the clinic. Crazy.”

`The ironic thing was that Barry Lyndon, the first film Ken had not sketched out any designs for, won him an Oscar.

“It was ironic,” he says seriously. “But nothing is worth that recognition if you lose your life. It was that serious.”

After Barry Lyndon, Ken went on to work on two more huge Bonds – Moonraker, and The Spy Who Loved Me, for which he designed the world’s biggest movie set – a nuclear submarine-docking bay. It was such a big national achievement the set was officially opened by the Prime Minister (“I have no idea why!” Ken splutters).

In 1993 he designed a gothic mansion for Addams Family Values, and a year later won his second Oscar for The Madness of King George. The film’s aesthetic was based on his pre-Kubrick ideas for Barry Lyndon.

Now 87 years old, Ken fills his days sketching new ideas, swimming, chuffing back big cigars, and driving around town in the gleaming crème Royles Royce he’s owned since 1969. In a few weeks he’ll fly back to Berlin to pick up a lifetime achievement by the Raymond Loewy Foundation, and the 50,000 that comes along with it. It may not be as prestigious as the OBE he collected from the Queen in 2001, but it seems fitting that Sir Ken is finally getting formally recognised in the place where his extraordinary journey all began.

“I recently found this interesting letter from Stanley,” he says, before reading a piece of paper sat next to his model warplane. “Ken, The fact that you have become a ‘star’ should not cause you to act like one. That was nothing! You should read the rest of it!”

Ken Adams Designs the Movies is published by Thames & Hudson. Thamesandhudson.co.uk

© TIM NOAKES 2008

BETH LESSER

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 21:34:28 +0100

The photographer talks about discovering Jamaican dancehall in early 1980s

“My husband and I were always interested in a lot of different forms of music, but it was reggae that really caught our attention. In the ‘70s we listened to a lot of dub, especially Augustus Pablo. We decided to go to Jamaica and try to interview talk to him about his music and his Rocker’s International label. So we flew down from Toronto and the trip resulted in our small fanzine called Live Good Today.

But when we were down there we found the dance hall scene - you couldn’t get away from it, it was just so overpowering, it was everywhere. It wasn’t really something that was really exported much and there was no major label involvement like there was in a lot of the roots artists.

It was a real surprise to go down there and find it, but it was so interesting we just got drawn in. The music was great, it was lively and fun. It’s remarkable, there just live for the moment.

We were just young and crazy at the time. I hate to sound like your typical old fogie and say ‘oh it was better then, modern music is terrible and the youth has just gone to hell’, but I don’t like the music now - to me it sound really angry. You hear the DJs now and they sound like they’re just yelling at you like they’re mad. ack then it was fun, it was silly, it was silly things that had silly lyrics.

This photo was taken in 1986 at the singer Sugar Minott’s house. He had a promotion organization where young talented artists would come and he would work with them and they would perform on the sound system and once they had enough exposure and training and experience he would record them.

Singers and DJs and artists sometimes very young kids would come and hang out and they could practice with the sound and get lessons from some of the older artists. One of Sugar’s many relatives would always be cooking a pot of stew and there would be some older artists like Lloyd Hemmings who would teach harmony, chords, and how to write music notation by writing on the wall. So it was quite an interesting place

I can’t remember who this guy is. There were always so many people around. Funnily enough my husband and I got married there in the yard, and we signed the papers in that room. We got married at a youth promotion dance. We signed the papers then we went outside and they had the sound system set up.”

© TIM NOAKES

RATATAT

Mon, 8 Sep 2008 22:23:53 +0100

The Brooklyn guitar buddies talk me through their ten favourite instrumental pop records

LEE SCRATCH PERRY

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 21:43:35 +0100

Responsible for the birth of reggae and dub music, Lee “Scratch” Perry has achieved many things in his life, but making a video isn’t one of them. At the age of 72 The Upsetter returns to Kingston on a search for the city’s finest pum pum…

Most outsiders who come to the heart of Trench Town are usually looking for stories about Kingston’s most famous son, Bob Marley. So it comes as a surprise to Kai, the custodian of Culture Yard, a mini Marley museum in the heart of the ghetto, when instead of asking about Bob, I ask him about his infamous producer, Mr Lee “Scratch” Perry.

“You wanna know a story about Scratch? Oh sure, I’ll tell you a little story about Lee Perry. But just a little one,” he says as kids ride past shouting, “Welcome to Jamrock!” at me. “Years ago Scratch used to live over in Rose Town. When I used to go to school I had to walk past his yard everyday. I was scared to walk past, much less to actually see him. It looked like pure voooodooooo man. Scratch was so spoooooky. He would have things banging together all the time, like bells n’ ting. He’s a genius though. He wrote for Bob Marley, but you know that right?”

Kai is not alone in being spooked out by the mythical musical madman widely credited as the inventor of reggae and dub music. Tina Blackwell, wife of Island Records founder Chris Blackwell, was once awoken by a hurricane at their iconic Compass Point Studios in Nassau. She looked out of the window and saw Scratch standing in the middle of the lightning storm, wrapping a tree trunk with wire and taking Polaroids of himself. He then stuck the photos to the tree. They later found chicken's blood splattered over the studio walls.

Since 1979 he’s also encouraged the rumour that he burnt down his legendary Black Ark studio to banish all the evil “vampires” who were sucking away his money and talent. Investigators found out that the fire was actually caused by an electrical fault.

Before I arrived in Jamaica to report on his first ever music video, I had only encountered him on wax and from afar. In 1998 I saw him support the Beastie Boys and The Prodigy at Reading. Squashed in a punk schlock sandwich between Rancid and Echo & the Bunnymen, Scratch spent most of his set hopping around on one leg shouting, “Jesus was a guppy! Jesus was a Rastafari”. It was amazing. A decade later, Dazed Digital ran an interview with him to promote his Fabric live show. Our phone conversation ended with him saying, “I will tell my shit it stinks, even though it fed me when I was hungry.”

So it was with no small amount of anticipation/trepidation to actually fly over to his birthplace and meet the man. Would it be possible to separate the myths from the facts? Was he really insane? Why the hell was he shooting a video at this stage of his life?

Knocking on room 1114 of the Kingston Hilton, a hotel teeming with its fair share of reggae ghosts, I suddenly wonder who to ask for. After all this is a man with more pseudonyms than Ghostface. Jah Lion? Pipecock Jakxon? Super Ape? The Upsetter? Lee? Answering the door, his Swiss wife Mireille saves me the hassle and walks through to his bedroom. Standing by a laptop, in some natty Union Jack socks, is Scratch.

Much smaller in person than I’d imagined, the creator from the equator rubs his purple beard and agrees to sit down for a quick tête-à-tête before tomorrow’s shoot.

“Welcome to Jamaica,” the 72-year-old says in a thick patois accent. “Some people spell it wrong, but I spell it right. Jah Mek Ya! Jah Mek Ya! Jah made me. It’s good to be back. It’s good to be home.”

Scratch, when were you last in Jamaica?

I was back about a year ago. There’s an old saying: curse where you’re going but don’t curse where you’re coming from. This is one of the richest countries in the world; they have everything here – magic, science and miracles. We have powers with words. The artists here didn’t go to school. They learn what they learn from oppression. I would never say any ting bad about my country. My country has never done anything wrong, it’s just the people who have done wrong. The people have been suffering and they’ll do anything to get money. Politicians give them guns. I blame them.

You’ve lived in Zurich since 1989. What do you miss about Kingston?

I don’t miss the beggars and killers. I didn’t really have to run away but if I tell people what it’s all about they think I’m crazy, that I’m a sicko. If I arrive at Kingston airport I’ll see maybe 100 or more beggars out there, and they all know me. I have to spend at least £500 to support the resident’s income in Trench Town. People in Kingston know me as the emancipator. ‘Who is that man? It’s the man you’ve seen on TV, Lee Scratch Perry!’ I moved country so people couldn’t beg me; I don’t have anything to give.

Some people think you moved away because you went mad.

People think I am complicated because they don’t understand who I am or how to deal with me. I am something like nature sir. I put nature together to make music happen. People say that I took coke or something like that. But it’s just their imagination. The only thing I did was smoke too much herb. I drank too much rum and wine. I have never taken cocaine yet. Never.

Do you still smoke sensimilla?

I’ve stopped smoking. I had enough. If you overdo your lungs, you pick up other diseases. Bob smoked too many cigarettes. I stopped smoking maybe 10 years ago. I stopped drinking alcohol. Red wine was my favourite. I put them all away. I just asked myself, ‘Do you have to smoke and drink? Because if you have to drink and smoke, it won’t be you singing, it will be the drink and smoke singing.’ It wasn’t those things that made me a star. I repented. After you repent you have eternal life. And you don’t grow any older or any colder. You won’t even feel any pain after you repent.

During the Black Ark era, how many joints were you smoking?

Not less than 50 spliff a day. From the morning until the night. Very large spliffs.

Did your music get better when you smoked more?

Well, when me make music, me go into the studio at 5 o’clock in the morning and put the tracks together for the artist who’s coming in. By the time the artist come in and do the work me don’t stop till five o’clock the next night. Sometime me don’t even eat anything. I had my white rum, my red and white wine, and my machine. That’s why people think that I was crazy, but I wasn’t crazy I was just smoking too much and paying less attention to myself.

Do you still think about Bob Marley a lot?

Bob? Well, Bob was very much a great guy. And he was a simple person until Bunny Wailers inject him with some bad vibrations. Bunny Wailers had a terrible grudge. His expectation was to be a star and he thought he could be a star over Bob, but it didn’t work. Somebody told Bob that I was ripping him off, but me were not ripping him off. I just told him he had to pay to promote himself in America. There was no MTV back then. Then he started to change a little, but Bob himself was a good spirit.

Is that what caused the breakdown in your relationship?

That caused a little change between him and me. In the studio if you tell Bob ‘This is it’, he didn’t go into the can and do anything different. He do exactly what you say. And because he believes in the ting that you say he sees it makes sense. He was, to me, a good honest decent boy. My mother loved him like her own son. He was something special.

Okay, so tell me about the video shoot tomorrow, what’s the song about?

It’s for my song “Pum Pum”. When you find a girl and you’re getting a good vibration when it comes to sex, most men will say ‘Jesus Christ’. If the girl doesn’t say ‘Jesus Christ’ then you can’t cum. It’s all about having a nice time. I don’t blaspheme, my dick is named Jesus Christ. Every time my dick go into the pum pum she has to say ‘Jesus Christ’. If she doesn’t say it then she must say ‘Jesus Christ’ when she cums.

Wow. Is that your personal rule?

It’s a reality.

Every time you make love?

Ya. When she’s cumming she must say ‘Jesus Christ’. The steam go like a bom exploshaaan. Ka Boom! Bom energy. On my cocky. On her titty. But it’s not all about a sexual point of view. It’s also about music and culture. When you play the cymbal it goes titty titty titty titty titty titty titty titty. When you play the bass it goes pum pum pum. When you put it together you get titty titty pum pum, titty titty pum pum, titty titty pum pum…

How many children have got Scratch?

Five. Maybe six.

After telling me about the pitfalls of eating meat (“you’ll end up as dead meat”), UFOs (“The sun is a spaceship, the moon is a spaceship from the earth, and the stars be the mothership”), and flapping his arms up and down to prove that he’s an angel (“these are my wings), Scratch poses for some pictures - sitting on his toilet seat with a flyer for his new album gripped between his teeth.

An hour later, I meet the extraterrestrial vegetarian, his wife, PR and the Germans in the hotel lobby and take them to Caribbean Fashion Week. Within minutes of walking into the sports arena, he’s mobbed by locals wanting to get a snap with him. Even Lady Saw and Eve jostle up for a hug. Noticing the ruckus, a voice announces his entrance and Scratch strides onto the catwalk arms raised above his head, waving at a crowd who are sniggering as much as they are whooping. After watching a few designer collections, the Perrys go outside for some air.

Walking up to a nearby palm tree, Scratch wraps himself in its leaves. At least there’s no lightning involved this time. In the background his wife digs through her handbag, which is stuffed full of pre-rolled reefers. “I hate hash! Where are the other ones? That’s the trouble with not rolling them yourself, I never know what I’m smoking…”

The next day Scratch turns up at the video’s first location - Platinum, one of Kingston’s duttiest go go clubs. There are signs on the walls asking people not to have sex with strippers in the private rooms. It may only be 2pm but there’s pum pum wherever you look. Sitting down in the middle of a room full of bootay queens, Scratch’s PR lights a joss stick for him. He shoves it deep into his afro. Behind him, stylists apply make up to faces and oil to thighs. Scratch’s eyes dart around the room, taking in the view. Most men his age would have a heart attack. Instead £$P asks the stylist if he can have a go.

Minutes later he’s called to a private booth upstairs. Director Jay Will pulls in a dancer with considerable jelly in the trunk to do a dutty wine infront of him. Scratch tried his best to lip synch the lyrics, but his mind appears to be somewhere else …

“…Going to a nightclub in New York City / Going to a nightclub in New York City / To find some Pum Pum, find my titty / To find some Pum Pum, find my titty / Pum Pum come and Pum Pum go but Jesus Christ remains…”

After nailing it (the shot), about 20 girls in bustiers, high heels and hot pants trot in and take up positions by their pole of choice. The Andrew WK produced track comes on again and the girls shake their stuff while Scratch walks up and down surveying them, while being led by a white girl in 5 inch patent boots and a black Zorro mask. He sits down on a sofa and each one gives him a private dance. It’s probably not his classiest moment, but it could well be his happiest.

Twenty-four hours later and the action has moved onto a street dance in the centre of Kingston. The diminutive local legend walks towards the dancefloor through bewildered gangs of roughnecks and dancehall queens who are more used to shaking their asses to the likes of Mavado and Bounty Killer. As “Pum Pum” comes on for the final time, Scratch raps along while heavily tattooed dancers touch their toes infront of him. He looks tired and slightly confused, as do the girls, who have been dancing for the better part of two days. It’s doubtful that the video will reach the same artistic heights as the rest of his boundary breaking 40-year career, but at this stage of his life, that seems a moot point.

As we get back to the hotel, a mischievous glint comes across The Upsetter’s old, but lively eyes. He says goodbye and strides off the elevator back towards room 1114. An hour later, as I take one last look at Kingston from my balcony, I hear someone shouting a few floors beneath me. It sounds like a woman screaming “Jesus Christ!” at the top of her lungs. Or maybe that’s just another myth in the making.

Text & Photography © Tim Noakes 2008

DONNA SUMMER

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 15:40:49 +0100

The disco diva looks back at the events that led to her and Giorgio Moroder making musical history together

“I remember the moment I knew I was going to become a famous singer. I was eight years old and singing in church. I looked out to the congregation and saw that everybody was crying, including my father. It scared me. All of a sudden I heard a voice in my head saying, “You’re gonna be famous. This is power and you’re never going to misuse it.” I believed that it was the voice of God speaking to me. From that day onwards I told everybody, “God said I was going to be famous.”

Knowing my fate was already pre-determined made me a little bit lax, because I thought I didn’t have to work that hard. I could get credit in a couple of neighbourhood stores based on the fact I was going to be famous one day. Little did I know that the hard work was coming.

I had very low self-esteem as a child (1). I was very insecure about the way I looked. I used to be very skinny, and had very long legs. Then Twiggy came out. All of a sudden I was in. I had the right body. I had started performing in the Broadway musical Hair, which went overseas to Germany (2). When I was in Europe, I had a lot of modelling jobs. It built my self-esteem and really helped my singing.

I loved being in Europe. I lived in Munich, London, Switzerland, Austria, Italy. I got to experience a lot of the diversity and fell in love with a gorgeous man. We got married. It was all part of the moment I was living in. (3)

While I was in Europe I met Giorgio Moroder (4). He was the charm. I was doing background vocal sessions in a studio and the very first day I came in he said “I want you to sing some other stuff for me.” So I did a jingle for him. He called me back and said: “I want you to sing some of my tracks for me.” I did some tracks and he liked them. One day I had an idea for a track and I said: “Giorgio, I have this idea called “Love to love you” and he said, “Mmm, I like that!” He started rubbing his fingers together - you could almost hear his brain working. He almost didn’t speak to us after I gave him the title. He walked out of the office and wasn’t again seen for several days. His girlfriend showed up at my flat in Munich banging on the door: “You’ve got to come to the studio, Giorgio needs you right now.” So I got my stuff together I went over to the studio and we recorded “Love to Love You Baby.”

I don’t think at the time that I had found the sound that would give me notoriety. I didn’t intend for it to be raunchy or any of that. They told me to go in and sing but I could not get in the mood with four guys on one side of the window. I’m looking at them while I’m trying to sing this sexy song and I’m like “I can’t do this, can you guys turn the lights off, give me a candle, look the other way or do something with yourself.” I managed to ooh and ahh my way through, although the oohs and ahhs were only there because I couldn’t think of a lyric at that time (5). I was actually goofing off pretending to be Marilyn Monroe.

When I was recording I didn’t have a record contract (6). I was expecting another girl to sing it, I had no intention of singing that song, I was just laying down a backing track. They had to squeeze me into the role because I was used to performing in comical theatre and suddenly I had to be a sexy person. That made me laugh.

Giorgio is very intelligent. He’s very savvy, he’s brilliantly talented. Much more than people even know how talented he is. When I met him he opened a cabinet, and from one end of the wall to the other were all backing tracks that he had written. I just thought to myself, ‘man have you just been doing this since the day that you were born?’

Giorgio didn’t write English lyrics that well, he had a partner named Pete Bellotte (7). When the three of us got together we created this combustible musical space. Between the Italian, Black Indian native American and Englishman emerged this completely other sound.

I was mortified by the success of the track because I was raised in church. I remembered God had told me to never misuse my gift. Now I’m singing “Oooohhh love to love you baby.” I just thought, “How can I keep my parents from hearing this?” When I found out it had come out in America and they were playing the radio I was beside myself. The thing was, it didn’t sound like me, so my parents kept going “That’s not my daughter, that’s not Donna.” When they finally accepted that it was me they weren’t thrilled about the song - but they were thrilled about the money it made. By the time I got back to America I was a force to reckon with, I was ready.

When Giorgio came up with “I Feel Love”, it was just off of the charts (8). I think most people listening to “I Feel Love” and those songs thought I really couldn’t sing at all. It was good for me in the sense that it made people’s expectations for me quite low. And so when I began to sing and use my voice, people were caught off guard and they were like: “Did you hear this girl?” When Giorgio’s available, I want us to do a whole new album together.

Different singers come out and they dominate the moment. Time moves on. I think that a lot of kids have grown up hearing my music in the background of their lives, so when they go out and hear a song, they freak out. I’m so happy my songs have held up. It’s a great legacy for me.

It’s been said that I’ve sold 130 million records. I wish I had the money, that’s all I know. I’d have a whole lot more shoes.” INTERVIEW TIM NOAKES

FOOTNOTES ON DONNA SUMMER

1 – Donna Summer was born LaDonna Adrian Gaines in Boston on December 31st 1948

2 – Left home at 18 to join the Hair cast. The rock musical became a benchmark of mainstream hippie counter culture thanks to its depiction of drug use, nudity, and anti-Vietnam War messages.

3 - Married Austrian actor Helmuth Sommer in 1972. “Summer” is an Anglicised version of his surname.

4 – The Italian producer is seen as a major influence on the development of modern electronica thanks to his use of synthesizers. He also scored many films including Flashdance, Midnight Express and Scarface.

5 – At the time, “Love to Love You Baby” contained the most simulated orgasms ever committed to vinyl, with Time magazine counting 22 moans and groans.

6 - After being sent the demo of “Love to Love You Baby”, Casablanca Records president Neil Bogart signed Summer and asked her and Moroder to record a longer version. In November 1975 they released a 17-minute disco mix which hit number two on the U.S. singles chart, and also made the UK Top five, despite the BBC's refusal to promote it. In the years since everyone from Samantha Fox to No Doubt have covered it.

7 - Pete Bellotte has produced and written for Janet Jackson, Elton John, Cliff Richard, Shalamar and Melba Moore. He also co-wrote “Hot Stuff” which sold over two million copies and won Summer a Grammy for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance.

8 – Taken from her 1977 concept album I Remember Yesterday, “I Feel Love” saw Summer, Moroder and Belotte replace the traditional disco studio orchestra with synths. It irreversibly changed the direction of modern pop music. In a 1989 interview with Kurt Loder, David Bowie recalled the moment he first heard it. “Brian Eno came running in and said, 'I have heard the sound of the future.' He puts on 'I Feel Love', by Donna Summer … He said, 'This is it, look no further. This single is going to change the sound of club music for the next fifteen years.' Which was more or less right.”

DONNA SUMMER

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 15:40:49 +0100